conflux
Context Magazine
Location, Location, Location"The Digital Age, though, has weakened the urban magnet. People no longer have to live amid service providers to have access to their services; many services can be effectively summoned electronically. Telecommunications, moreover, is bringing work back into the home. People now may work in a wired spare bedroom or in a home office in an executive ghetto such as Aspen, Colo.
Does this mean the diaspora of urban professionals now will push beyond suburbs and exurbs to remote hideaways, mountaintops, or places such as Venice, selected merely for their beauty? "
"For planners and politicians, the dawning Digital Age creates an urgent need to find policies that will create an acceptable level of social equity. For architects and urban designers, the complementary task is to develop an urban fabric that provides opportunities for social groups to intersect and overlap—perhaps using a laptop at the piazza café instead of a personal computer inside the gated condo."
redux [01.10.01]
"I suspect that most of us have had similar encounters with technology, especially over the last decade -- moments when our media, for whatever reason, momentarily deliver us into some uncanny zone that lingers on the edge of the Real. Usually we sweep these experiences -- strange radio static, surreal computer shenanigans, the snafu synchronicities of the cell phone -- under the rug. But I don't think we should so readily dismiss the feelings that accompany these experiences, because they have their own truths to tell. For as media increasingly colonize social reality, they scramble the space-time boundaries of the self. And this always feels a little weird."
""Anyone who is now designing a public space needs to find ways to allow people to exist in both the physical world of the 'town square,' as well as the 'information space' accessed through mobile phones, PDAs, and whatever else Nokia and Palm can throw at us over the next decade," Townsend said.
He said much of the behavior and structure of the city at an aggregate level is based upon individual behavior.
"So the introduction of this cute little device (mobile phones) would slip under the radar of urbanists, even though it fundamentally changes the way individuals interact -- which consequently alters the behavior of the entire system," he said."
"While mobile telephones are sold as a technology that helps conquer constraints of location and geography, it is increasingly apparent that the time-management capabilities of this new tool are equally important.
As a result, the widespread use of these devices is quickening of the pace of urban life and at an aggregate level, resulting in a dramatic increase in the metabolism of urban systems. This quickening metabolism is directly tied to the widespread formation of new decentralized information networks facilitated by this new technology. As a result, new paradigms for understanding the city and city planning in a decentralized context are discussed."
8:18 PM 0 comments
Internet World
Nielsen on Usability: First-Mover Advantage Is Overrated "Most of the successful Internet companies were not anywhere near the first to market. There probably is some first-mover advantage, but it has been much overrated and used as a poor excuse for foisting poor-quality services on the public."
"I do not advocate delaying release until you have the perfect design, but I do think that history shows that it is not necessary to rush low-quality products to market as the only way to win. Higher quality that takes a little longer can often be a better strategy."
redux [11.07.00]
"Jennifer Brown, the executive vice president of e-business at Fidelity Investments, has a serious problem with innovation in her group. There's too much of it.
"We have more good ideas than we can handle," she confesses. "We have so many good ideas here--truly innovative ideas--that sometimes our people get a little frustrated that we can't act on most of them.""
"At times like this, a cold economic reality kicks in: The more innovations there are, the less valuable any given innovation is likely to be.
"Another thing that makes cashing in on innovation so difficult is that, as any good intellectual property lawyer will complain, the very digital technologies that make it faster, easier, and cheaper for innovators to innovate also make it faster, easier, and cheaper for imitators to imitate. In the e-world, today's innovation is tomorrow's imitation is next month's commodity. The Net is a fabulous medium for "fast followers"--firms such as Microsoft and AOL, which do a fabulous job of spotting an innovation trend and leveraging resources to make it their own."
"In fact, being first seldom proves to be a sustainable advantage and usually proves to be a liability. VisiCalc, for example, was the first major personal-computer spreadsheet. Where is VisiCalc today? Do you know anyone who uses it? And what of the company that pioneered it? Gone; it doesn't even exist. VisiCalc eventually lost out to Lotus 1-2-3, which itself lost out to Excel. Lotus then went into a tailspin and was saved only by selling out to IBM."
"The pattern of the second (or third or fourth) market entrant's prevailing over the early trailblazers shows up throughout the entire history of technological and economic change.
"We can already see the fundamental laws of management and commerce reasserting themselves. Consider America Online, clearly a new-economy star that got there by being better, not first. As Kara Swisher describes in her book aol.com, AOL lagged far behind CompuServe and Prodigy, and as late as 1992 had only 200,000 members compared with Prodigy's nearly 2 million. AOL beat out the early leaders not because it had the ultimate solution, but precisely because it knew that it didn't. So long as AOL continues the process of nonstop improvement and evolution -- step-by-step improvement in the eyes of the customer -- it will likely remain strong."
"This chapter summarizes the history of the disk drive industry in all its complexity. Some readers will be interested in it for the sake of history itself. But the value of understanding this history is that out of its complexity emerge a few stunningly simple and consistent factors that have repeatedly determined the success and failure of the industry's best firms. Simply put, when the best firms succeeded, they did so because they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers' next-generation needs. But, paradoxically, when the best firms subsequently failed, it was for the same reasons--they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers' next-generation needs. This is one of the innovator's dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.
The history of the disk drive industry provides a framework for understanding when "keeping close to your customers" is good advice--and when it is not."
7:32 PM 0 comments
SatireWire
STUDY FINDS YOU REALLY DON'T MAKE A DIFFERENCE"In an unprecedented study, British and American researchers have concluded that despite what you've been told at work, you really don't make a difference, and are not remotely integral to your company's success.
"In our research, we found that you've been encouraged to believe that your hard work and contributions are substantial, and that you are a significant member of the team. But what we discovered is that in your particular case, there's no way," said Neil Romsby of the London School of Economics."
9:45 PM 0 comments
The New York Times
Hype and Anti-Hype[requires 'free' registration]
"The Gartner Group consultants have developed a useful concept to describe the hype around new technologies, which they call the "hype cycle." As a new technology — like the Internet — is triggered, the hype curve soars upward until it reaches a peak of inflated expectations. Then it sinks almost straight down into a trough of disillusionment, as the less successful players drop out. And finally it climbs steadily upward again to a new stable plateau, as clear winners emerge and the new technology is absorbed, integrated and made profitable by people and industries that understand it."
"The wireless Web has arrived, making it possible to get vast quantities of Internet content over the tiniest portable devices, but most consumers do not seem too impressed, an international survey released Thursday showed.
For all the hype over the cutting-edge technology that provides "any time, anywhere" connections to the Internet, the survey found that adoption rates have been slow, even among the most wired people."
"Less than 1 percent of those surveyed were shopping online with their wireless devices, one of the biggest expected uses for the Web-enabled gadgets."
redux [06.17.00]
"Anyone planning to make a fortune in mobile e-commerce — the new-millennium version of last year's dot-com frenzy — should think twice about where to invest their money, according to a hype-busting report from Ovum Inc., a Boston-based consulting firm."
"The report discounts consumer interest in new mobile wireless services, warning wireless-wannabes to focus on business users and "genuinely unique" consumer services. Dennis Brown, co-author of the Ovum report, said that even business users "won't pay a premium for existing (wireless) services, which are easier and cheaper to access using their phone or PC . . . if suppliers are to survive and prosper in the long term, their early offerings will have to be very targeted and very compelling.""
"Stop and ask yourself: "Just because we're developing the capability of purchasing via mobile systems, does that really mean people are going to develop a sudden and inexplicable Pavlovian desire to buy all the time?" Do we really expect the world to be gripped by the same fever that drives the Home Shopping Network? My bank account just happens to be a few orders of magnitude smaller than Bill Gates', so I actually don't want to spend money all the time."
"M-commerce -- no, make that successful m-commerce -- will not be about purchases. M-commerce will be about providing information which facilitates a purchase. Don't think commerce, think communication. There's a Grand Canyon-sized gap between those two ideas. It's the difference between offering a gadget for sale via handheld and giving access to information about that gadget -- the reviews, who's put it on their Christmas list, etc. -- and the ability to make a note to one's self: "Check this out, I might want it.""
12:17 AM 0 comments
Feed
Gift for the Gab""INTELLIGENT AGENTS," that venerable CompSci concept, has long been something of an oxymoron. We've had a decade's worth of promises that an army of self-contained electronic processes would soon be scouring the network on our behalf, ferreting out information and finding the lowest price for everything from CDs to airline tickets. The reality, of course, is that agents have never yet found any practical application. Dr. Lee Giles and Dr. Kam-Chuen Jim, researchers at NEC, may have found the secret to transforming experimental agents into practical tools: talking helps."
redux [08.27.00]
"For a leading researcher at one of the United States' top universities, Pattie Maes is surprisingly uninterested in the technological underpinnings of her own work. That's not to say that her basic research in artificial intelligence (AI) isn't impressive. The 38-year-old associate professor at the Massachusetts engineered major breakthroughs in software agents, programs that are changing the face of Internet shopping and are on the verge of turning retailing on its head. But to Dr. Maes (pronounced "Mahs"), it's not the technology but its effect that is important. She is the prototype of the New Economy scholar/entrepreneur: a scientist in academia committed to seeing her ideas become commercial successes."
""I realized that computers could augment people," Dr. Maes says. "That's what all of my research is really about. Our lives are so busy and there are so many choices to make, so many opportunities to keep track of, and so much accessible information; we end up feeling overwhelmed. If we could make computers smarter and better serve people, we'd be on to something. I think of this as intelligence augmentation - IA rather than AI."The New York Times In Online Auctions of the Future, It'll Be Bot vs. Bot vs. Bot
[requires 'free' registration]
"THEY are called shopbots, buybots, pricebots or just plain bots -- the "bot" is short for robot. The name is playful, but the reality is all business because shopbots are meant to roam the Web all by themselves one day, efficiently buying and selling goods and services for people and companies."
"Right now, bots that simply go out and fetch price lists from the Web do not make intelligent decisions about matching a buyer's needs with a combination of offerings.
"That will change," Mr. Bryan said.
"And businesses need to be prepared.""
First Monday Intelligent Agents, Markets and Competition: Consumers' Interests and Functionality of Destination Sites
"Intelligent agents are first and foremost tools which can be applied in numerous and different ways. However, Intelligent agents, in the true sense of attributed functions such as autonomy and pro-activity, do not yet exist. There are agent-like applications like Web crawlers and search engines which sometimes include collaborative filtering; in spite of these advances a software entity that combines all of these functions into an intelligent agent has yet to be developed. Still, it is only a matter of time when intelligent agents will play a decisive role in the electronic marketplace and therefore in competition. This paper explores the boundaries of what might happen in markets when intelligent agents are introduced and used by market participants. It discusses existing commercial agent-like applications and treats models on how different functions of agents could affect different market stages. Two types of markets - travel and bookselling - are examined, focusing on consumers' interests and the functionality of destination sites."
"The vision of such intelligent agents is quite compelling and many people now believe they will be necessary if we are ever to tame the increasing complexities caused by the accelerating and virtually uncontrolled growth of the World Wide Web."
"The most basic need in interacting with an agent is a language in which to communicate. While it is possible to 'fake' these semantics (with the program reacting appropriately to keywords, for example), an agent that is truly useful must have a lot of knowledge about the problem being solved. If the travel agent doesn't know about geography (Where is the Caribbean?), transportation (What airlines go there?), lodging (Is that a good hotel?), economics (Can I afford to stay there?), etc. then we cannot easily communicate our needs. If the internet agent doesn't understand the area in which it must work (molecular biology, particle physics, etc.), it is not able to find appropriate resources any better than current keyword based approaches."
[note: this is an archived html version residing on the umbc agentweb server. the original zipped, postscript document can be found at BT Laboratories' Intelligent Systems Research (ISR) Group's publications page ]
"This paper sets out, ambitiously, to present a brief reappraisal of software agents research. Evidently, software agent technology has promised much. However some five years after the word ?agent? came into vogue in the popular computing press, it is perhaps time the efforts in this fledgling area are thoroughly evaluated with a view to refocusing future efforts. We do not pretend to have done this in this paper - but we hope we have sown the first seeds towards a thorough first 5-year report of the software agents area. The paper contains some strong views not necessarily widely accepted by the agent community."
10:12 PM 0 comments
BusinessWeek
AOL Time Warner: Newsstand or Publisher?"From the Web's beginning, in 1995, a debate has simmered over the ethics of online journalism. Most established media have maintained as clear a distinction online as they do in print between news and commerce. Pure dot-coms, by contrast -- and so-called portals, in particular -- have been willing, even eager, to pair editorial and sales in ways that aren't entirely transparent to readers.
"AOL's purchase of Time Warner and its Time Inc. publishing unit -- a prominent ASME member -- has, overnight, transformed the world's largest and most profitable dot-com company into the world's largest and most prestigious magazine publisher as well. It has thus moved the debate over the Web's journalistic ethics from the realm of the theoretical to the intensely practical. The issue is: Whose standards should prevail -- those of AOL Time Warner the publisher or those of AOL Time Warner the newsstand aggregator? "
redux [04.11.00]
"America Online's president sees home entertainment and communications as a collection of boxes. The TV set is the ''tell-me-a-story box.'' The personal computer - ''the manage-your-life box.'' The CD player? ''The give-me-a-mood box.''
The roles for those machines may be quickly evolving and the lines between them blurring. But Bob Pittman still sees plenty of room in American life for the newspaper out in the mailbox."
"In remarks that were part pep talk, part cautionary tale, he said practitioners of the written page can thrive in the new communications age if they are aggressive about getting their content online and don't defy a consumer-driven Internet culture that wants more and more at little or no cost."
redux [03.21.00]
"The choice of Sacks as primary attraction of a journalism seminar -- he's senior vice president and general manager of America Online -- was controversial enough to make one editor of Online Journalism stay home in protest. Yet it was strangely invigorating to hear this smug megacorporation executive lecture on his own importance, and how all journalists will play by AOL/Time-Warner's rules from now on, because, as Sacks said, "We're the biggest guys. We're big, and we're bad."
""If our goal was to publish bad magazines, by the way, we could have done that without a $120 billion merger." Before Sacks finished, he had happily proclaimed, "We do no original news," and described the new world of reporting as "an integrated consumer experience." Gives you an idea about how AOL might cover a famine."
“AOL has been ethically challenged throughout its existence,” wrote Mercury News technology columnist Dan Gillmor... “I hate to see Time Warner, which has had its own ethical troubles but generally shows high journalistic standards, fall into such hands."
"“[W]hen the biggest online company controls the biggest traditional media company, you'd be wise to turn to other sources for reliable information on, for example, e-commerce and its biggest players,” wrote Gillmor."
10:48 PM 0 comments
Online Journalism Review
Racing Past the Truth"Misinformation magnifies over time. This is a law of journalism.
For an example of how the law works, visit the sixth floor of the old Texas Book Depository building in Dallas. It's a tourist shrine now. You can gaze over Dealey Plaza, imagining a Lincoln Continental cruising past, presidential occupants waving. And when you do, just about every Kennedy conspiracy theory will vanish from your mind.
The road is so damn close and the view from the sixth floor so clear that Oswald could've hit President Kennedy with a baseball, if he'd had a half-decent arm. But a few reported misunderstandings about ballistics gave rise to the second gunman theory, which snowballed into a notion of Cuban/Mafia intrigue, which ultimately led us to a terrible Oliver Stone movie. Misinformation not only magnifies, it coarsens.
This week we may be seeing the beginnings of another misinformation explosion, again arising from a death in the South: Dale Earnhardt's, in Florida on Sunday during the Daytona 500."
9:08 PM 0 comments
The Third Culture
The Globalization Debate"Though the notion that we live in an era of unprecedented globalization is becoming increasingly evident, that change is more often than not attributed exclusively to the convergence of technology with the financial markets. But too often in these discussions, the larger point is missed: that we have a historic opportunity. As Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics, writes, "we have the chance to take over where the 20th century failed, and a key project for us is to drag the history of the 21st century away from that of the 20th."
According to Giddens, "the driving force of the new globalization is the communications revolution," and beyond its effects on the individual, this revolution is fundamentally altering the way public institutions interact."
redux [02.14.00]
""Knowledge and information are the common property of humanity as a whole: they cannot be transformed into merchandise" – this was one of the many slogans of the WSF, and one which, like the rest, was little examined for its practicality and its financial sustainability.
But it expressed an ideal: that corporations should not be allowed to monopolise the creation or ownership of the data on which public life depend. It was, for the first time, a drawing of the battle lines of the information age."
redux [10.10.00]
"When the Moscow television tower burst into flames at the end of August, the fire blacked out 10 million TV screens and made news all over the world. And so did President Vladimir Putin's sinister comment: The fire at the Ostankino tower is a metaphor for the state of the nation.
Metaphors, symbols and sayings are mighty mind-setters. They captivate our minds and focus our attention to one main point, effectively excluding others. Putin used the burning of the Ostankino television tower, once hailed as a symbol of Soviet supremacy, as a metaphor for the desperate economic need of Russia. The global media played along with this tune, once again showcasing images of Russia's decay. But there is another largely untold story to be extracted from Putin's metaphor: TV towers are more than symbols — indeed they are very concrete centers of mind control, distributing the flow of information and entertainment. "
"Who chose the crumbling Berlin Wall as the icon and metaphor for the breakdown of communism and the end of the Cold War? Wouldn't a TV tower in flames be more accurate? It wasn't about the free flow of capital. It was about the free flow of information."redux [03.24.00]
"Information science operates with a binary logic of reflection which results in multiple paths, but these paths are always circumscribed by laws of combination (Deleuze, & Guattari, 1987). In this manner the fragmented space and time of information flows is reordered and directed toward specific objectives. But the objectives of information processing within the capitalist dynamic are not end points-- they are aimed at an accumulation of knowledge that is always an impetus for further accumulation, for multiplying the flow, opening out into every horizon. But this flow is at the same time stored up in a central memory which traces the exact paths of this flow, connecting geographic spaces and matching up the temporal locations of dispersed market centers. This central memory system functions through command trees, centered systems and hierarchical structures that attempt to fix possible pathways of the network and thus to limit the possible variations immanent in the network. The definitions of information formulated within information science and information economics derive from and serve this modeling of the system. As we have seen, information defined as nonsemantic discrete bits flowing across space and then directed and stored substantiates information as the object of control. Thus, the enemy of the information scientists and economists is heterogeneity, disorganization, noise, chaos. They want an uninterrupted flow, but at the same time a destruction of the unnecessary. This encloses or territorializes information; it becomes a part of capitalism’s mapping of space and time. But what we have found is that information’s function is precisely to disorganize, interrupt, to remain itself and at the same time to disperse. Information may, in fact, be a keyword connecting the phenomenon we have examined, but not as an element, nor as a content, but as a heterogeneous remapping of space and time. If the information society is to be our society, let it be disorganized."
"A profound shift of geopolitical power lies ahead, one that will dominate the century to come--and it has hardly been noticed, let alone analyzed. This massive change will trigger turbulence around the globe, with a high potential for violence. To prevent or mitigate such effects, we need to understand the framework of geopolitical power as it takes shape in the 21st century. Think of it as a master conflict of supercivilizations.
A civilization is an entire, all-encompassing way of life; a supercivilization might be described as a way of life that is shared widely across cultures, languages, religions, ethnic groups, and states. And while many civilizations have risen and fallen throughout history, there have, so far, been only two supercivilizations.
Today a new supercivilization is pushing, elbowing, swaggering --some would say bullying--its way onto the world stage, threatening both the agrarian and industrial supercivilizations.
This third supercivilization will soon give billions of people the power to communicate with one another, whether to buy and sell goods, create art, organize political protests, invent new religions and ideologies, engage in terrorism, learn how to make biological or chemical weapons, or create or alter life-forms.
How should the fast-emerging knowledge-based supercivilization of tomorrow interface with the lifeways of yesterday? How might we minimize the conflicts that face us? This question, still largely unasked, will find its way onto the screen of every world leader--indeed, every alert human being--in the decades to come. The answer will determine just how much turbulence and bloodshed the world experiences in the century ahead as we make the transition from a bisected to a trisected geopolitical system on the planet."
9:34 PM 0 comments
The Economist
Lessons of a virtual timetable"Belief in e-learning, as it is often called, has so far weathered the downturn in the wider dotcom world. John Chambers, the influential CEO of Cisco, which supplies much of the Internet’s hardware, asserts that the scale of network traffic generated by e-learning will make today’s exchange of e-mail messages look like a rounding error. But his firm’s business depends on an ever-rising flood of electronic data passing over the connections which it makes for electronic networks. More disinterested voices caution against confusing the obvious need to learn computer-literacy skills with the less obvious need to learn everything else via a computer."
redux [12.04.00]
"NPR's Ina Jaffe reports that more and more students are turning to computers rather than campuses to earn their college degree. This may make a college education possible for a wider range of students, but some in academia are concerned that internet degree programs only in it for the money will influence course curriculum for everyone. (7:30)"redux [11.22.00]
"Growing demand among learners for improved accessibility and convenience, lower costs, and direct application of content to work settings is radically changing the environment for higher education in the United States and globally. In this rapidly changing environment, which is increasingly based within the context of a global, knowledge-based economy, traditional universities are attempting to adapt purposes, structures, and programs, and new organizations are emerging in response. Organizational changes and new developments are being fueled by accelerating advances in digital communications and learning technologies that are sweeping the world. Growing demand for learning combined with these technical advances is in fact a critical pressure point for challenging the dominant assumptions and characteristics of existing traditionally organized universities in the 21st century. This combination of demand, costs, application of content and new technologies is opening the door to emerging competitors and new organizations that will compete directly with traditional universities and with each other for students and learners.
This paper describes and analyzes seven models of higher education organization that are challenging the future preeminence of the traditional model of residential higher education. These models are emerging to meet the new conditions and to take advantage of the new environment that has created both opportunity and risk for all organizations, and which demands experimentation of structure, form, and process."
[requires 'free' registration]
"The internet will have a very different effect on the most prestigious institutions from the one it will have on those in the middle and lower echelons. The Harvards and the Williamses are in no danger of virtualization, because both their communal life and their intellectual life are integral to their natures. They will be the brand names coveted by students at the less grand institutions, not to mention by lifelong learners. And they will, if they wish, earn lots and lots of money, which in turn could permit them, as Herb Allen and Mark Taylor suggest, to lower tuition and thus reach out to a wider, or at least different, audience. Or perhaps all that money will encourage them to behave like the market actors they will have become. Once a university permits itself to be subsumed into its brand name, it becomes, as Charles Nesson puts it, "a production house for making knowledge products.""redux [09.20.00]
"Columbia is not alone in its Internet ambitions. The nation's elite universities, long secure in their centuries-old reputations, face a rapidly changing world in which any school, from the University of South Alabama to UC Berkeley, can put its courses online and court a global market for continuing education. Fearing that they will be left behind, Ivy League administrators are becoming dealmakers, and buzz phrases like "leveraging brands" and "tapping intellectual capital" echo from the Stanford Quad to Harvard Square.:
"Thanks in part to the Net's ability to distribute courses to students anywhere at any time, learning is becoming another commodity, part of the $740 billion "education industry" that has attracted keen interest on Wall Street."
[requires 'free' registration]
"When Fredric D. Price, the president of a nutritional-supplements company, sought a partner to create an online information company, NutritionU.com, he approached a Columbia University professor, Dr. Richard J. Deckelbaum.
He hit pay dirt.
Some academics might have run the other way, concerned about the motives and standards in the emerging commercial market for cyber education. But Dr. Deckelbaum, director of Columbia's Institute of Human Nutrition, viewed the Internet as a way to reach a wider population.
Columbia was interested, too. The venture fit neatly into its strategy to turn more of its intellectual capital -- the knowledge, research and teaching of its professors -- into financial capital."
redux [05.09.00]
"For decades, Stanford University has served as an intellectual incubator to students and faculty who have gone on to found such Silicon Valley icons as Hewlett-Packard (HWP) , Silicon Graphics (SGI) and Yahoo. Now Stanford has hatched a startup of its own."
"On Tuesday, the university launched its first for-profit venture, an Internet medical company called e-Skolar. The startup will market an online information service for physicians called Stanford Skolar, M.D."
""We've gotten some income from our associations [with Stanford-inspired companies] but it's minimal to the value created." Determined to profit from its intellectual property, Stanford formed e-Skolar, taking a majority ownership stake."redux [07.06.00]
"A growing consensus holds that new information technologies foretell the end of higher education as we have known it. I suspect this is true. Its truth, however, is not that the technologies are positively revolutionizing education. Rather, what we are watching is more like the end -- the final perfection and dead-end extreme -- of the old regime's shortcomings."
"All this worries a growing contingent of educators, who fear the corporation's "crushing solicitude". (The phrase is William F. Buckley's which he applied many years ago to the ministrations of centralized government.) I share this fear, but it seems to me that the more fundamental issue often goes unnoted: our changing notions about what education is make it inevitable that business and industry should step into the picture aggressively. If you want efficient delivery of effective facts and procedures, then business -- already attuned to such computationally rigorous training -- will far outperform the university.
In other words, having increasingly accepted their role as training grounds for business -- which is what the information-transfer model of education implies -- universities are now finding that business is better situated to train its own employees than schools are. At best the universities will simply hire themselves out to corporations.
"Technology in all forms, young and old or simple and complex, can be potent tools that engage learners in meta-cognitive reflection. These tools engage learners to rethink their old beliefs, knowledge, and understandings. These tools might allow learners to compare new ideas with other individuals to assess whether new concepts and ideas are plausible and fruitful. Technologies can be educators' tools in finding creative ways that encourage students to self-test, self-question, and self-regulate learning in helping them to create solutions to complex problems. Educators need to help students realize that understanding about knowledge and beliefs are essential to human growth and development. Technologies should not estrange us from our humanity or the noble profession of educating competent citizens. We should not become "high-tech, self-driven slaves to technology.
"Protecting the embodiment of quality education encompasses learning to think, learning to teach, and learning to lead creatively, not only within the classroom (virtual and traditional) but also throughout all institutions of higher education."
8:33 PM 0 comments
The Atlantic Online
The Reinvention of Privacy"The debate over these questions illustrates one irreducible truth: privacy is not so much a legal or technical concept as a social one. "The dominant feature of the current privacy debate," Fred Cate told me when I asked him to try to sum things up, "is its irrationality. The drivers are emotional." I think he's right. The crucial question about privacy today is the same it has always been—namely, whom should you trust?
A lot of people instinctively don't trust technology, especially in the hands of businesses, to protect privacy. But, as Robert Ellis Smith and others have pointed out, contemporary notions of privacy have in many cases evolved not despite new technology but because of it. "Privacy," the influential journalist and editor E. L. Godkin famously wrote, in Scribner's magazine in 1890, "is a distinctly modern product, one of the luxuries of civilization." Phil Agre made a related point to me, a bit more bluntly. "The idea that technology and privacy are intrinsically opposed," he said, "is false.""
redux [04.30.00]
[requires 'free' registration]
"A liberal state should respect the distinction between public and private speech because it recognizes that the ability to expose in some contexts aspects of our identity that we conceal in other contexts is indispensable to freedom, friendship, even love. Friendship and romantic love can't be achieved without intimacy, and intimacy, in turn, depends upon the selective and voluntary disclosure of personal information that we don't share with everyone else. Moreover...privacy is also necessary for the development of human individuality. Any writer will understand the importance of reflective solitude in refining arguments and making unexpected connections: in an odd but widely shared experience, many of us seem to have our best ideas when we are in the shower. Indeed, studies of creativity show that it's during periods of daydreaming and seclusion that the most creative thought takes place, as individuals allow ideas and impressions to run freely through their minds without fear that their untested thoughts will be exposed and taken out of context. "
"We are trained in this country to think of all concealment as a form of hypocrisy. But perhaps we are about to learn how much may be lost in a culture of transparency -- the capacity for creativity and eccentricity, for the development of self and soul, for understanding, friendship and even love. There is nothing inevitable about the erosion of privacy in cyberspace, just as there is nothing inevitable about its reconstruction. We have the ability to rebuild some of the private spaces we have lost. What we need now is the will."
"Neal Stephenson, a writer with a cultlike following among the technologically minded and author of the classic "Snowcrash," has given an over-long, hugely digressive -- and brilliant -- speech. After many, many turns and a deep stack of points and stories, Stephenson gets around to saying that the best defense for one's privacy and personal integrity turns out to be not cryptography but, what do you know, "social structures." He is not explicit about the exact nature of these structures, but from the slides that follow, we get a sense of every sort of social relationship from neighborly friendliness to political parties. The slides show drawings of small circles representing areas of social trust. The circles widen and merge, to create a field of autonomy, a trusted space.
Stephenson is making a point about code: Without a sociopolitical context, cryptography is not going to protect you. He singles out PGP for criticism, saying that relying on the encryption scheme is like trying to protect your house with a fence consisting of a single, very tall picket. A slide shows the lone picket rising into the sky, a bird considering it with bulging eyes."
10:21 PM 0 comments
The Standard Europe
Network of dissent""Knowledge and information are the common property of humanity as a whole: they cannot be transformed into merchandise" – this was one of the many slogans of the WSF, and one which, like the rest, was little examined for its practicality and its financial sustainability.
But it expressed an ideal: that corporations should not be allowed to monopolise the creation or ownership of the data on which public life depend. It was, for the first time, a drawing of the battle lines of the information age."
redux [10.10.00]
"When the Moscow television tower burst into flames at the end of August, the fire blacked out 10 million TV screens and made news all over the world. And so did President Vladimir Putin's sinister comment: The fire at the Ostankino tower is a metaphor for the state of the nation.
Metaphors, symbols and sayings are mighty mind-setters. They captivate our minds and focus our attention to one main point, effectively excluding others. Putin used the burning of the Ostankino television tower, once hailed as a symbol of Soviet supremacy, as a metaphor for the desperate economic need of Russia. The global media played along with this tune, once again showcasing images of Russia's decay. But there is another largely untold story to be extracted from Putin's metaphor: TV towers are more than symbols — indeed they are very concrete centers of mind control, distributing the flow of information and entertainment. "
"Who chose the crumbling Berlin Wall as the icon and metaphor for the breakdown of communism and the end of the Cold War? Wouldn't a TV tower in flames be more accurate? It wasn't about the free flow of capital. It was about the free flow of information."redux [03.24.00]
"Information science operates with a binary logic of reflection which results in multiple paths, but these paths are always circumscribed by laws of combination (Deleuze, & Guattari, 1987). In this manner the fragmented space and time of information flows is reordered and directed toward specific objectives. But the objectives of information processing within the capitalist dynamic are not end points-- they are aimed at an accumulation of knowledge that is always an impetus for further accumulation, for multiplying the flow, opening out into every horizon. But this flow is at the same time stored up in a central memory which traces the exact paths of this flow, connecting geographic spaces and matching up the temporal locations of dispersed market centers. This central memory system functions through command trees, centered systems and hierarchical structures that attempt to fix possible pathways of the network and thus to limit the possible variations immanent in the network. The definitions of information formulated within information science and information economics derive from and serve this modeling of the system. As we have seen, information defined as nonsemantic discrete bits flowing across space and then directed and stored substantiates information as the object of control. Thus, the enemy of the information scientists and economists is heterogeneity, disorganization, noise, chaos. They want an uninterrupted flow, but at the same time a destruction of the unnecessary. This encloses or territorializes information; it becomes a part of capitalism’s mapping of space and time. But what we have found is that information’s function is precisely to disorganize, interrupt, to remain itself and at the same time to disperse. Information may, in fact, be a keyword connecting the phenomenon we have examined, but not as an element, nor as a content, but as a heterogeneous remapping of space and time. If the information society is to be our society, let it be disorganized."
"A profound shift of geopolitical power lies ahead, one that will dominate the century to come--and it has hardly been noticed, let alone analyzed. This massive change will trigger turbulence around the globe, with a high potential for violence. To prevent or mitigate such effects, we need to understand the framework of geopolitical power as it takes shape in the 21st century. Think of it as a master conflict of supercivilizations.
A civilization is an entire, all-encompassing way of life; a supercivilization might be described as a way of life that is shared widely across cultures, languages, religions, ethnic groups, and states. And while many civilizations have risen and fallen throughout history, there have, so far, been only two supercivilizations.
Today a new supercivilization is pushing, elbowing, swaggering --some would say bullying--its way onto the world stage, threatening both the agrarian and industrial supercivilizations.
This third supercivilization will soon give billions of people the power to communicate with one another, whether to buy and sell goods, create art, organize political protests, invent new religions and ideologies, engage in terrorism, learn how to make biological or chemical weapons, or create or alter life-forms.
How should the fast-emerging knowledge-based supercivilization of tomorrow interface with the lifeways of yesterday? How might we minimize the conflicts that face us? This question, still largely unasked, will find its way onto the screen of every world leader--indeed, every alert human being--in the decades to come. The answer will determine just how much turbulence and bloodshed the world experiences in the century ahead as we make the transition from a bisected to a trisected geopolitical system on the planet."
8:43 PM 0 comments
SatireWire
COURT ORDERS NAPSTER TO STOP AS SOON AS JUDGES FINISH DOWNLOADING PINK FLOYD, RICKY MARTIN"In a 2-to-1 decision, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered song-swapping service Napster to stop trading copyrighted material as soon as the judges finish downloading their favorite Pink Floyd songs, which the judges have been unable to access due to heavy demand on Napster's servers."
""We also concur with the lower court that the defendant's usage harms the plaintiffs' market for copyrighted works such as Ricky Martin's She Bangs, which I would have loaded and ripped by now if everybody and their brother weren't downloading over the weekend and maxing out Napster's servers," added Judge Richard A. Paez."
1:47 AM 0 comments
EE Times
Startups: drain or wellspring of
innovation?""Large amounts of venture capital have lured researchers to leave large companies and universities to join startups," said panel moderator David Johns, a professor at the University of Toronto. "Are these startups doing innovative research or are they working on relatively short-term products to satisfy their investors?"
The answer, it seems, depends on the definition of innovation, panel members said."
"Priceline's Jay Walker got it first. He gave it to Idealab's Bill Gross, who passed it on to Divine InterVentures' Andrew Filipowski. Then it spread far and wide, and pretty much everyone caught it – Jim Clark, Jeff Arnold, the partners of the Internet Capital Group (ICGE) . Before you knew it, entrepreneurs and executives at in-house Internet ventures, consulting firms, private equity funds and incubators were all stricken.
What they have is the dreaded Second System Syndrome, a business ailment first diagnosed by Frederick P. Brooks Jr. in his classic 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month."
redux [11.28.00]
"A whiz kid might make a technological breakthrough and create a corporation to exploit it. But even a new-economy corporation can't last long without what old-economy corporations depended on: a reliable, skilled workforce, which takes time to assemble; effective distribution systems, which take trial and error to perfect; and customer loyalty, which is earned only gradually. It was this kind of environment that nurtured old-economy innovators.
One whiz kid's invention, followed by a second whiz kid's innovation, followed by a third, is merely a recipe for a stock bubble. Technological innovation will continue to come from youth, but for corporations to thrive, they need gradual innovations, not just revolutionary ones.
Take, for example, the case of Paul Cézanne."
redux [11.07.00]
"Jennifer Brown, the executive vice president of e-business at Fidelity Investments, has a serious problem with innovation in her group. There's too much of it.
"We have more good ideas than we can handle," she confesses. "We have so many good ideas here--truly innovative ideas--that sometimes our people get a little frustrated that we can't act on most of them.""
"At times like this, a cold economic reality kicks in: The more innovations there are, the less valuable any given innovation is likely to be.
"Another thing that makes cashing in on innovation so difficult is that, as any good intellectual property lawyer will complain, the very digital technologies that make it faster, easier, and cheaper for innovators to innovate also make it faster, easier, and cheaper for imitators to imitate. In the e-world, today's innovation is tomorrow's imitation is next month's commodity. The Net is a fabulous medium for "fast followers"--firms such as Microsoft and AOL, which do a fabulous job of spotting an innovation trend and leveraging resources to make it their own."
"In fact, being first seldom proves to be a sustainable advantage and usually proves to be a liability. VisiCalc, for example, was the first major personal-computer spreadsheet. Where is VisiCalc today? Do you know anyone who uses it? And what of the company that pioneered it? Gone; it doesn't even exist. VisiCalc eventually lost out to Lotus 1-2-3, which itself lost out to Excel. Lotus then went into a tailspin and was saved only by selling out to IBM."
"The pattern of the second (or third or fourth) market entrant's prevailing over the early trailblazers shows up throughout the entire history of technological and economic change.
"We can already see the fundamental laws of management and commerce reasserting themselves. Consider America Online, clearly a new-economy star that got there by being better, not first. As Kara Swisher describes in her book aol.com, AOL lagged far behind CompuServe and Prodigy, and as late as 1992 had only 200,000 members compared with Prodigy's nearly 2 million. AOL beat out the early leaders not because it had the ultimate solution, but precisely because it knew that it didn't. So long as AOL continues the process of nonstop improvement and evolution -- step-by-step improvement in the eyes of the customer -- it will likely remain strong."
"This chapter summarizes the history of the disk drive industry in all its complexity. Some readers will be interested in it for the sake of history itself. But the value of understanding this history is that out of its complexity emerge a few stunningly simple and consistent factors that have repeatedly determined the success and failure of the industry's best firms. Simply put, when the best firms succeeded, they did so because they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers' next-generation needs. But, paradoxically, when the best firms subsequently failed, it was for the same reasons--they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers' next-generation needs. This is one of the innovator's dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.
The history of the disk drive industry provides a framework for understanding when "keeping close to your customers" is good advice--and when it is not."
11:44 AM 0 comments
First Monday
Content is Not King"The Internet is widely regarded as primarily a content delivery system. Yet historically, connectivity has mattered much more than content. Even on the Internet, content is not as important as is often claimed, since it is e-mail that is still the true "killer app."
The primacy of connectivity over content explains phenomena that have baffled wireless industry observers, such as the enthusiastic embrace of SMS (Short Message System) and the tepid reception of WAP (Wireless Application Protocol). Combined with statistics showing low cell phone usage, this also suggests that the 3G systems that are about to be introduced will serve primarily to stimulate more voice usage, not to provide Internet access.
For the wired Internet, the secondary role of content will likely mean that the dangers of balkanization are smaller than is often feared. Further, symmetrical links to the house are likely to be in greater demand than is usually realized. The huge sums being invested by carriers in content are misdirected."
redux [01.15.01]
"Nicole Thompson's third-graders can tell you all about the penguins and killer whales that populate Antarctica. They know about the months of darkness that grip Iceland each year and the fine tea that grows in Darjeeling, India. The Greenbriar Academy children have learned those facts - and countless more about countries large and small - thanks to a simple e-mail message from Thompson that has raced around the globe and brought more than 20,000 responses in six weeks.
It's crazy, just crazy," Thompson said. "At most, I thought we'd get about 2,000 replies.""redux [02.04.00]
"Email will become the killerer app. It continued to work when all else failed. Communication - not consumer storefronts - is the core value provided by the net and email is the star. The best things on the net make things easier and faster. Seems simple, but many of the failed business propositions of the past year seemed to go in the opposite direction."
"Imagine the discussions that must have gone on around the invention of the telephone: a new medium for delivering content directly to households. Indeed, that was exactly how some people did use it. In Budapest you could pick up the telephone and listen to music and news until the first world war... It didn't turn out that way because people preferred listening to each other: they preferred "self-generated" content."
"Companies with a strategy that facilitates communication between people, a strategy that facilitates self-generated content, will prosper as the world becomes more interactive and broadcast becomes just one sector of a much richer media world."
8:27 AM 0 comments
The New York Times
Indian Company Offers to Supply AIDS Drugs at Low Cost in Africa[requires 'free' registration]
"In a move that could force big drug multinationals to cut the prices of their AIDS drugs in poor countries, an Indian company offered today to supply triple-therapy drug "cocktails" for $350 a year per patient to a doctors' group working in Africa."
"Cipla is offering to sell the agency as many doses as it is wants at $350 a year. Dr. Hamied said that his company would lose money at that price, but that he would supply "10,000 doses or 20,000 or 30,000, however many they want.""
redux [01.28.01]
[requires 'free' registration]
"Since 1997, virtually every AIDS patient in Brazil for whom it is medically indicated gets, free, the same triple cocktails that keep rich Americans healthy. (In Western Europe, no one who needs AIDS treatment is denied it because of cost. This is true in some American states, but not all.) Brazil has shredded all the excuses about why poor countries cannot treat AIDS. Health system too fragile? On the shaky foundation of its public health service, Brazil built a well-run network of AIDS clinics. Uneducated people can't stick to the complicated regime of pills? Brazilian AIDS patients have proved just as able to take their medicine on time as patients in the United States."
" Brazil is showing that no one who dies of AIDS dies of natural causes. Those who die have been failed -- by feckless leaders who see weapons as more alluring purchases than medicines, by wealthy countries (notably the United States) that have threatened the livelihood of poor nations who seek to manufacture cheap medicine and by the multinational drug companies who have kept the price of antiretroviral drugs needlessly out of reach of the vast majority of the world's population."
redux [08.09.00]
"Dre v Napster is the musical sideshow of the bigger war over ownership of intellectual property, ranging from ditties to DNA. In my last column, I described how the Clinton administration blocked South Africa's purchasing of low-cost drugs to stem the spread of Aids. To protect the right of Glaxo-Wellcome to embargo cross-border sales of AZT which don't meet the company's terms, Clinton threatened South Africa with trade sanctions under the World Trade Organisation's Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (Trips).
Today I can report that one nation has finally displayed the huevos to stand up to America's bully-boy enforcement of WTO dictat: the US."
"But then, hypocrisy is the oxygen of the new imperial order of thought ownership. Every genteel landlord of fenced-in intellectual real estate began life as a thief. Under WTO and US law today, how many products built on the ideas of others could never have made it to market? As Isaac Newton would say now: 'If I see further than others, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants too dumb to patent their discoveries'."
8:47 AM 0 comments
Wired News
Computers Are Green After All"A new study of the power consumed by office computers and Internet equipment by a group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has found that this equipment uses about 2 percent of the total electricity use in the United States."
"Beyond estimating the direct energy use of office and network equipment, Koomey's group is beginning to assess the indirect effects of the Internet on resource use in the U.S. economy. These effects include structural changes where new institutional arrangements and technological capabilities become possible because of the Internet and substitution effects where the new technologies substitute for established energy uses."
redux [01.17.01]
"That's right. There's a convenient new villain in the California energy crisis, and it's not the utility companies that can't meet demand, crying bankruptcy and begging for a bailout by the government. It's not the greedy oligopoly of power generators cashing in on the state's failed, half-baked deregulation scheme. It's not even the environmentalists, whose green-friendly regulations make building a power plant in California about as easy as trying to raise venture capital for an e-tailer in 2001. Nor is it the conservation-clueless customers who can't even be bothered to turn off the lights when they leave a room.
No, it's the Internet."redux [12.07.00]
"This paper is an attempt to evaluate the potential influence of the emerging "Internet economy" on the nation's forecasted energy use and related carbon emissions. Our analysis shows small but significant differences in projections from just three modest changes in assumptions about the Internet and/or information-based economy. Other changes that could be important include reduced inventory and warehousing, reduced building construction, changes in other materials utilization, a greater trend toward outsourcing of energy services, and greater improvements in energy efficiency made possible by the new economy. Although the scale of impact for these initially analyzed effects is small, expansion of the scope of inquiry, as suggested by other recent analyses, may open up new and fruitful areas of research."
"Now that we're fully in the throes of the ritualistic consumer frenzy that is the holiday shopping season, probably the last thing on most Net shoppers' minds is what impact all that clicking to buy has on the environment. The truth is, even policymakers, social scientists, environmentalists and engineers don't really know for sure. Researchers are only now beginning to study what e-commerce means for the Earth. The first major conference on the topic, the Joint Symposium on E-commerce and the Environment, in October in New York, brought together 100 researchers from the likes of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Ford Motor Co. to compare notes on everything from e-commerce and energy consumption to land use.
"Everyone is just starting to wake up and realize that e-commerce might have environmental effects that we aren't aware of," says H. Scott Matthews, a researcher with the Green Design Initiative, a faculty and student research group at Carnegie Mellon University that is conducting one of the few major studies of the issue."redux [09.12.00]
"Some of the major concerns of e-commerce systems are the electricity used for infrastructure and the energy and packing materials used for product delivery. Reductions in inventories and waste represent significant opportunities for environmental savings. This project is intended to assess the system-wide effects of the new economy and to analyze policy options for reducing environmental problems.
The project is analyzing specific case studies of logistics networks, inventory and manufactoring changes. In addition, we are estimating the overhead cost of the internet"
"The new-millennium energy crisis in the U.S. can be traced to the effects of deregulation, a lack of new generating capacity in recent years, and an antiquated distribution system – not to mention the unanticipated demands of the Internet Economy. An average office building with a computer on every desk but no significant network facility uses between 4 and 5 watts of electricity per square foot, according to Ed Quiroz, a regulatory analyst at California's Public Utilities Commission. If that building has a server farm and a network operations center, it sucks from 90 watts to 100 watts of energy a square foot or more. Or consider this: According to Mark Mills, an energy researcher with ties to the utilty industry, a Palm handheld device connected wirelessly to the Internet has the appetite of a refrigerator, consuming 1,000 kilowatt hours a year.
But estimates of the Net economy's power requirements vary. The fact is, no one knows for sure how much demand for energy will climb in coming years. Mills and colleague Peter Huber estimate that businesses that rely on digital equipment – personal computers, networking equipment, plants that produce high-tech gear and telecommunications networks – consume 13 percent of U.S. electric power. That figure will rise to between 30 percent and 50 percent of the nation's energy needs by 2020."
redux [08.24.00]
"The emerging new economy created by the Internet is producing more than just a business revolution -- it is also generating enormous environmental benefits. The Internet can turn buildings into websites, and replace warehouses with supply-chain software. It can turn paper and CDs into electrons, and replace trucks with fiberoptic cable. This means significant energy savings, and perhaps a very different type of economic growth than we have seen in the past."
"There's already evidence of a sudden shift in the American energy diet. While the nation's economy grew by more than 9 percent in 1997 and 1998, energy demand stayed almost flat in spite of very low energy prices, marking a major departure from recent historical patterns.
Part of this trend can be attributed to the growth of information technology and e-commerce. For example, for each book sold, the online retailer Amazon.com uses just one-sixteenth the energy to operate its buildings that a traditional bookseller uses. Internet shopping also uses less energy to get a package to your house. Shipping a 10-pound package by overnight air -- the most energy-intensive delivery mode -- uses 40 percent less fuel than the average roundtrip drive to the mall. Ground shipping by truck uses just one-tenth the energy of a trip by car to the store."