Said Diffie, "The future will be a golden age for intelligence."

Whit Diffie at AT&T Cyber Security Conference

Bestselling author Nassim Nicholas Taleb continues his exploration of randomness in his fascinating new book, The Black Swan, in which he examines the influence of highly improbable and unpredictable events that have massive impact. Engaging and enlightening, The Black Swan is a book that may change the way you think about the world, a book that Chris Anderson calls, "a delightful romp through history, economics, and the frailties of human nature."

For an essay, see Learning to Expect the Unexpected:

A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations. Most people expect all swans to be white because that's what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are. Our minds are designed to retain, for efficient storage, past information that fits into a compressed narrative. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past.

For recent coverage in Wired, see Always Expect the Unexpected:

From Wall Street to Washington, we're constantly being told that the future can be forecast, that the world is knowable, and that risk can be measured and managed. Nassim Nicholas Taleb (shown) is having none of this. In his new book, The Black Swan, the finance guru and author of the surprise hit Fooled by Randomness argues that history is dominated not by the predictable but by the highly improbable — disruptive, unforeseeable events that Taleb calls Black Swans. The effects of wars, market crashes, and radical technological innovations are magnified precisely because they confound our expectations of the universe as an orderly place. In a world of Black Swans, the first step is understanding just how much we will never understand.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Media theorist and Internet activist Geert Lovink formulates a theory of weblogs that goes beyond the usual rhetoric of citizens' journalism. Blogs lead to decay, he writes. What's declining is the "Belief in the Message". Instead of presenting blog entries as mere self-promotion, we should interpret them as decadent artefacts that remotely dismantle the broadcast model.

Blogging, the nihilist impulse

Whether they use the term white trash or not, most Americans are unaware of its long and ugly history. If you had to guess, you’d probably say that the term arose in the Deep South, sometime in the middle of last century, as a term that whites coined to demean other whites less fortunate than themselves. Yet most of what we presuppose about the term is wrong.

The term white trash dates back not to the 1950s but to the 1820s. It arises not in Mississippi or Alabama, but in and around Baltimore, Maryland. And best guess is that it was invented not by whites, but by African Americans.

That Ain't White: The long and ugly history of 'trash' talk

Out of curiosity I looked up Newt’s last major speech, delivered to the Heritage Foundation, and found that it really wasn’t a speech at all. It was a collection of 238 GOPAC buzzwords, lightly connected by a few ordinary nontoxic words.

Did you read Janet Maslin's review of his new book?

Back to the story:

Our minds are clogged with the clichés, idioms, and rhythms of other people, and we have to work to avoid them. Paul Johnson says, “Most people when they write, including most professional writers, tend to slip into seeing events through the eyes of others because they inherit stale expressions and combinations of words, threadbare metaphors, clichés and literary conceits. This is particularly true of journalists.”

Ah, the simple pleasure of the inherited stale expression ...

The Office of Assertion

Perhaps the bizdev folks at IMI ought to talk to Hollywood.

The case file illustrates the economics of information in the place that values it most — a community devoted to the manufacture, control and perpetuation of image. And it explains why Mr. Pellicano, who trafficked in all manner of potentially damaging data, was so eagerly hired and his unmasking so direly feared.

The marketplace was filled with potential buyers, from the top of the town to the bottom of the D-list, in the movies, television, music, even the art and sports worlds. Stars might have had the most to lose if secrets were exposed. But entertainment executives — for whom job security is notoriously fleeting, and reputations as evanescent as last weekend’s box office — had ample reason to think others were plotting against them, or at least rooting for them to fail.

In Court Files, Hollywood’s Mr. Fix-It at Work

At The New York Times, our idea of living on the edge is a second trip to the afternoon coffee cart.

Page Six Covers Itself, a Bit Painfully

The ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, says he is giving $10bn to set up an educational foundation in the Middle East.

The money is meant to improve the standard of education and research in the region, and aims to stimulate job creation, Sheikh Mohammed said.

It is thought to be one of the largest charitable donations in history.

From Al Bawaba:

According to human development reports, literary and intellectual books published in the Arab world represent only 0.08% of the world's output, less than those published in Turkey alone. For every 100,000 books published in North America, there are 42,000 published in South America, and only 6,500 books published in the Arab world.

The thing is, most of those in North America are "Dummies" books, celebrity tell-all memoirs, fad diet HOWTOs, obscure academic treatises, etc.

The most alarming indicators are the 18% illiteracy in the under-15 age group and the 43% illiteracy among females in the region.

For something (but not much) beyond the press release and factoids, consider this op-ed from The Brunei Times:

Our first comment is this: "It's about time".

It goes beyond simply purchasing books for the research centres as shoving information down the throat of students does not a scholar make.

Instead, we wish to see that more people in the Middle East return to the tradition of knowledge rooted in the understanding that mankind is first and foremost a creation of God, and which makes no distinction between women and men in intellectual pursuit.

Dubai ruler in vast charity gift

Steven Levy ponders, what makes it sticky?

I had some bad news for Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, the founders of MySpace who now run the business for Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. They'd lost my son's high school.

DeWolfe and Anderson, who sold to News Corp. last year for $580 million, didn't ask why. Instead, they cited statistics that showed that their numbers were strong and opined that the exodus might have been a geographical anomaly; East Coasters seem to skew toward Facebook. Anyway, Anderson said, even if some teens did jump to Facebook for their main online socializing, they would still keep coming to MySpace because of its flexibility in design and all the media it offers.

It was an interesting window into where their hearts are.

"We're working on 10, 15 different things," said Anderson. But none of the ones we discussed seemed to address the problems that led my son and others to go to someone else's space for social networking, be it Facebook or Bebo or somewhere else.

The conversation turned to upcoming MySpace features like weather reports and a video service to counter YouTube. The defection of my son's school didn't come up again. I guess they'd forgotten about it.

If your site is not being mass-adopted in waves, it is probably not sticky. If your site has never been mass-abandoned in a wave, then it probably never was.

Is Facebook Catching Up With MySpace?

Vectors maps the multiple contours of daily life in an unevenly digital era, crystallizing around themes that highlight the social, political, and cultural stakes of our increasingly technologically-mediated existence. As such, the journal speaks both implicitly and explicitly to key debates across varied disciplines, including issues of globalization, mobility, power, and access. Operating at the intersection of culture, creativity, and technology, the journal focuses on the myriad ways technology shapes, transforms, reconfigures, and/or impedes social relations, both in the past and in the present.

Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular