In the video, Jared Diamond, author of Germs, Guns & Steel, describes his five point system for examining whether a society will collapse or not. The five conditions are:
1. Human impact on the environment: Inadvertently destroying the resource they depend upon
2. Climate change: Inability to cope with change
3. Relationships with friendly neighboring societies: How they help in times of crisis
4. Relationships with hostile societies: How they prevent perceiving other threats
5. Political, economic, social, and cultural factors in a society that enable the society to perceive and solve its problems.
In seems to me that this is very worthy of discussing. Can we apply these five factors to the US right now?
We are in a crisis right now that is economic, cultural, societal, political, demographic and environmental. If this is a topic you’d like to pursue, respond to this blog.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Why Societies Collapse
Why do societies fail? With lessons from the Norse of Iron Age Greenland, deforested Easter Island and present-day Montana, Jared Diamond talks about the signs that collapse is near, and how -- if we see it in time -- we can prevent it.
A globally renowned scholar and author, Jared Diamond finds answers to the massive "Why?"s in so-vast-you-don't-notice patterns in history. His bestselling and Pulitzer-winning book Guns, Germs and Steel looks at the reasons history turned out the way it did -- why European societies conquered the rest of the world instead of the other way around. His latest book, Collapse, asks nearly the opposite: Why do some civilizations fail?
An ecologist, evolutionary biologist and professor of geography and physiology at UCLA, Diamond takes an approach that goes beyond culture and into the impact it has on the environment. As Malcolm Gladwell observes, "Diamond's distinction between social and biological survival is a critical one, because too often we blur the two." Diamond's ability to tackle daunting questions (and pose unsettling answers) in a straightforward voice may be reason enough to share his optimism that recognizing a problem paves the way for solving it.
Educators' tip: The website for PBS's mini-series Guns, Germs and Steel offers many resources for further study.
"[Guns, Germs and Steel] is a brilliantly written, passionate, whirlwind tour through 13,000 years of history on all the continents -- a short history of everything about everybody."
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Where Is Democracy Headed?
Deliberative Democracy Consortium
During four years of work—meetings, conversations at a distance, collaborative projects, and publications—an international network of researchers and practitioners has strengthened our knowledge of public deliberation. Members of this network have investigated a growing body of practical experience with deliberation that
employs diverse methods and tools.
The use of deliberative methods, while still not enormously common, is clearly growing. Often, these methods have been found to have positive effects on the participants and on public policy. One of the most serious challenges remains attracting truly representative samples of people to deliberate. However, when citizens with unequal status, information, education, and communication skills come together, they can achieve reasonable
levels of equality.
Today’s cultural and political context is difficult for deliberation. We live at a time of polarization and often nasty politics. This difficult context, however, also offers opportunities to expand deliberation as an antidote to aspects of politics that many citizens and leaders strongly dislike.
An increasing supply of research is now derived from practical experiences in public deliberation. Useful bridges have been built between academics and practitioners, although further attention is needed. The research is increasingly open to alternative forms of communication: not just the giving of reasons, but also the sharing of personal experiences, planning for action, and artistic expressions like storytelling, music, and performance, in
relation to deliberation.
We have learned a great deal about how to “embed” deliberation in the life of communities. However, certain types of issues seem more ripe for deliberation than others; and people vary in their predisposition to deliberation.
As next steps, the 'eld must provide hard-nosed evaluations that will be proof-points for practitioners (if the results are positive) or provide an impetus to change our methods. There is some support for moving away from analyzing the differences among methods and instead focusing on how to institutionalize deliberation, expand its scale, and connect it to other democratic practices, such as advocacy and movement-building. Two critical sources of innovation are the Global South and the Internet.
Read the Report
During four years of work—meetings, conversations at a distance, collaborative projects, and publications—an international network of researchers and practitioners has strengthened our knowledge of public deliberation. Members of this network have investigated a growing body of practical experience with deliberation that
employs diverse methods and tools.
The use of deliberative methods, while still not enormously common, is clearly growing. Often, these methods have been found to have positive effects on the participants and on public policy. One of the most serious challenges remains attracting truly representative samples of people to deliberate. However, when citizens with unequal status, information, education, and communication skills come together, they can achieve reasonable
levels of equality.
Today’s cultural and political context is difficult for deliberation. We live at a time of polarization and often nasty politics. This difficult context, however, also offers opportunities to expand deliberation as an antidote to aspects of politics that many citizens and leaders strongly dislike.
An increasing supply of research is now derived from practical experiences in public deliberation. Useful bridges have been built between academics and practitioners, although further attention is needed. The research is increasingly open to alternative forms of communication: not just the giving of reasons, but also the sharing of personal experiences, planning for action, and artistic expressions like storytelling, music, and performance, in
relation to deliberation.
We have learned a great deal about how to “embed” deliberation in the life of communities. However, certain types of issues seem more ripe for deliberation than others; and people vary in their predisposition to deliberation.
As next steps, the 'eld must provide hard-nosed evaluations that will be proof-points for practitioners (if the results are positive) or provide an impetus to change our methods. There is some support for moving away from analyzing the differences among methods and instead focusing on how to institutionalize deliberation, expand its scale, and connect it to other democratic practices, such as advocacy and movement-building. Two critical sources of innovation are the Global South and the Internet.
Read the Report
Monday, October 27, 2008
Flow in Everyday Life
Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi asks, "What makes a life worth living?" Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of "flow."
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives. A leading researcher in positive psychology, he has devoted his life to studying what makes people truly happy: "When we are involved in [creativity], we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life." He is the architect of the notion of "flow" -- the creative moment when a person is completely involved in an activity for its own sake.
Csikszentmihalyi teaches psychology and management at Claremont Graduate University, focusing on human strengths such as optimism, motivation and responsibility. He's the director the the Quality of Life Research Center there. He has written numerous books and papers about the search for joy and fulfillment.
Friday, October 17, 2008
The Web and TV, a sibling rivalry
In this absorbing look at emerging media and tech history, Peter Hirshberg shares some crucial lessons from Silicon Valley and explains why the web is so much more than "better TV."
A Silicon Valley executive, entrepreneur and marketing specialist, Peter Hirshberg might just be the definitive voice on how new technology affects business and culture.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Emergence
Outside.in's Steven Johnson says the Web is like a city: built by many people, completely controlled by no one, intricately interconnected and yet functioning as many independent parts. While disaster strikes in one place, elsewhere, life goes on.
Steven Berlin Johnson is the best-selling author of six books on the intersection of science, technology and personal experience. His forthcoming book examines "Where Good Ideas Come From."
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google
Nicholas Carr, author of Does IT Matter?, has written a provocative and insightful book about the big switch that we are undergoing with respect to information technology infrastructure. He provides a persuasive historical analogy that computer utilities will replace in house computer facilities.
Carr sums up the basic premise in this way, “Why has computing progressed in such a seemingly dysfunctional way? Why has the personalization of computers been accompanied by such complexity and waste? The reason is fairly simple. It comes down to two laws. The first and most famous was formulated in 1965 by the brilliant Intel engineer Gordon Moore. Moore's Law says that the power of microprocessors doubles every year or two. The second was proposed in the 1990s by Moore's equally distinguished colleague Andy Grove. Grove's Law says that telecommunications bandwidth doubles only every century. Grove intended his "law" more as a criticism of what he considered a moribund telephone industry than as a statement of technological fact, but it nevertheless expresses a basic truth: throughout the history of computing, processing power has expanded far more rapidly than the capacity of communication networks. This discrepancy has meant that a company can only reap the benefits of advanced computers if it installs them in its own offices and hooks them into its own local network. As with electricity in the time of direct-current systems, there's been no practical way to transport computing power efficiently over great distances.”
“’The next sea change is upon us’ Those words appeared in an extraordinary memorandum that Bill Gates sent to Microsoft’s top managers and engineers on October 30, 2005. Bely its bland title, ‘Internet Software Services,’ the memo was intended to sound an alarm, to warn the company that the rise of utility computing threatened to destroy its traditional business.”
Microsoft has dominated the PC desktop. What was emerging was a totally different kind of business – software as a service. Something we now call SaaS. This new way to look at software will be very disruptive.
In 2005, Google began work on its Dalles, OR computing utility facility. “The town's remoteness would make it easier for Google to keep the facility secure-and harder for its employees to be lured away by competitors. More important, the town had ready access to the two resources most critical to the data center's efficient operation: cheap electricity and plentiful bandwidth. Google would be able to power its computers with the electricity produced by the many hydroelectric dams along the Columbia, particularly the nearby The Dalles dam with its 1.8-gigawatt generating station. It would also be able to temper its demand for electricity by tapping the river's icy waters to help cool its machines. As for bandwidth, the town had invested in building a large fiber-optic data network with a direct link to an international Internet hub in nearby Harbour Pointe, Washington. The network provided the rich connection to the Internet that Google needed to deliver its services to the world's Web surfers.” Carr speculates that in the future we may look back on this endeavor much as we now look back on Insull’s early electricity generating plants.
One of the first really successful implementations of SaaS was SalesForce, a CRM application. Marc Benioff, who left Oracle to found SalesForce, proclaimed the end of software as we know it. “As it turned out, the idea of software-as-a-service caught on even more quickly than Benioff expected. In 2002, the firm's sales hit $50 million. Just five years later, they had jumped tenfold, to $500 million. It wasn't just small companies that were buying its service, though they had constituted the bulk of the earliest subscribers. Big companies like SunTrust, Merrill Lynch, Dow Jones, and Perkin-Elmer had also begun to sign up, often abandoning their old in-house systems in the process. Benioff's audacious gamble, like Insull's a century earlier, had panned out. As for the once mighty Siebel Systems, it had gone out of business as a stand-alone company. After suffering a string of deep losses in the early years of the decade, it was bought up in early 2006 by Benioff's old company, Oracle.”
Amazon launched the first utility computing service in March, 2006. They allowed customers to store data on Amazon’s systems for a few cents per gigabyte per month.
One of the things that I really like the way Carr writes is that he mixes so many different perspectives and insights. “In the early decades of the twentieth century, as punch-card tabulators and other computing machines gained sophistication, mathematicians and businessmen began to realize that, in the words of one historian, ‘information is a commodity that can be processed by a machine.’ Although it now sounds obvious, it was a revolutionary insight, one that fueled the growth and set the course of the entire computer industry, particularly the software end of it, and that is now transforming many other industries and reshaping much of the world's economy. As the price of computing and bandwidth has plunged, it has become economical to transform more and more physical objects into purely digital goods, processing them with computers and transporting and trading them over networks.”
And, later, “Until recently, most information goods were also subject to diminishing returns because they had to be distributed in physical form. Words had to be printed on paper, moving pictures had to be captured on film, software code had to be etched onto disks. But because the Internet frees information goods from their physical form, turning them into entirely intangible strings of ones and zeroes, it also frees them from the law of diminishing returns. A digital good can be replicated endlessly for essentially no cost-its producer does not have to increase its purchases of inputs as its business expands. Moreover, through a phenomenon called the network effect, digital goods often become more valuable as more people use them. Every new member that signs up for Skype, puts an ad on Craigslist, or posts a profile on PlentyOfFish increases the value of the service to every other member. Returns keep growing as sales or use expands-without limit.”
One of the big factors that is contributing to the rising productivity of computers is social production (the social web and collaboration). “Whereas industrialization in general and electrification in particular created many new office jobs even as they made factories more efficient, computerization is not creating a broad new class of jobs to take the place of those it destroys. As Autor, Levy, and Murnane write, computerization ‘marks an important reversal. Previous generations of high technology capital sharply increased demand for human input of routine information-processing tasks, as seen in the rapid rise of the clerking occupation in the nineteenth century. Like these technologies, computerization augments demand for clerical and information-processing tasks. But in contrast to [its] predecessors, it permits these tasks to be automated.’ Computerization creates new work, but it's work that can be done by machines. People aren't necessary.
That doesn't mean that computers can take over all the jobs traditionally done by white-collar workers. As the scholars note, ‘Tasks demanding flexibility, creativity, generalized problem-solving and complex communications-what we call nonroutine cognitive tasks-do not (yet) lend themselves to computerization.’ That parenthetical ‘yet,’ though, should give us pause. As the power and usefulness of networked computers have advanced during the few years since they wrote their paper, we've seen not only the expansion of software's capabilities but the flowering of a new phenomenon that is further reducing companies' need for workers. Commonly termed ‘social production,’ the phenomenon is reshaping the economics of the media, entertainment, and software industries, among others. In essence, it allows many of those ‘nonroutine cognitive tasks’ that require ‘flexibility, creativity, generalized problem-solving and complex communications’ to be carried out for free-not by computers on the network but by people on the network.”
An example familiar to everyone is YouTube. All the users provide the content, catalogue and rate is value. Wikipedia is another example.
Why do people contribute? Carr lists several reasons:
* They contribute without knowing it (i.e. search engines)
* Self interest (i.e. tools they use to help them for free and results are shared like del.cio.us)
* Competitive or status seeking (i.e. Wikipedia)
* Enjoyment
And, I would add, altruism.
Ubiquitous inexpensive computing and communications with a constant flow of new software applications are fueling this phenomena. “In his book The Wealth of Networks, Yale law professor Yochai Benkler traces the recent explosion in social production to three technological advances. ‘First, the physical machinery necessary to participate in information and cultural production is almost universally distributed in the population of the advanced economies,’ he writes. ‘Second, the primary raw materials in the information economy, unlike the physical economy, are [freely available] public goods-existing information, knowledge, and culture.’ Finally, the Internet provides a platform for distributed, modular production that ‘allows many diversely motivated people to act for a wide range of reasons that, in combination, cohere into new useful information, knowledge, and cultural goods.’”
One of the reasons all of this works is the connection between people and the community it creates. “Richard Barbrook, of the University of Westminster in London, expressed this view well in his 1998 essay 'The Hi-Tech Gift Economy.' He wrote of Internet users:
‘Unrestricted by physical distance, they collaborate with each other without the direct mediation of money or politics. Unconcerned about copyright, they give and receive information without thought of payment. In the absence of states or markets to mediate social bonds, network communities are instead formed through the mutual obligations created by gifts of time and ideas.’"
This a book to be read and discussed.
The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google
Nicholas Carr
WW Norton & Company, NY, 2008, 278 pp
Carr sums up the basic premise in this way, “Why has computing progressed in such a seemingly dysfunctional way? Why has the personalization of computers been accompanied by such complexity and waste? The reason is fairly simple. It comes down to two laws. The first and most famous was formulated in 1965 by the brilliant Intel engineer Gordon Moore. Moore's Law says that the power of microprocessors doubles every year or two. The second was proposed in the 1990s by Moore's equally distinguished colleague Andy Grove. Grove's Law says that telecommunications bandwidth doubles only every century. Grove intended his "law" more as a criticism of what he considered a moribund telephone industry than as a statement of technological fact, but it nevertheless expresses a basic truth: throughout the history of computing, processing power has expanded far more rapidly than the capacity of communication networks. This discrepancy has meant that a company can only reap the benefits of advanced computers if it installs them in its own offices and hooks them into its own local network. As with electricity in the time of direct-current systems, there's been no practical way to transport computing power efficiently over great distances.”
“’The next sea change is upon us’ Those words appeared in an extraordinary memorandum that Bill Gates sent to Microsoft’s top managers and engineers on October 30, 2005. Bely its bland title, ‘Internet Software Services,’ the memo was intended to sound an alarm, to warn the company that the rise of utility computing threatened to destroy its traditional business.”
Microsoft has dominated the PC desktop. What was emerging was a totally different kind of business – software as a service. Something we now call SaaS. This new way to look at software will be very disruptive.
In 2005, Google began work on its Dalles, OR computing utility facility. “The town's remoteness would make it easier for Google to keep the facility secure-and harder for its employees to be lured away by competitors. More important, the town had ready access to the two resources most critical to the data center's efficient operation: cheap electricity and plentiful bandwidth. Google would be able to power its computers with the electricity produced by the many hydroelectric dams along the Columbia, particularly the nearby The Dalles dam with its 1.8-gigawatt generating station. It would also be able to temper its demand for electricity by tapping the river's icy waters to help cool its machines. As for bandwidth, the town had invested in building a large fiber-optic data network with a direct link to an international Internet hub in nearby Harbour Pointe, Washington. The network provided the rich connection to the Internet that Google needed to deliver its services to the world's Web surfers.” Carr speculates that in the future we may look back on this endeavor much as we now look back on Insull’s early electricity generating plants.
One of the first really successful implementations of SaaS was SalesForce, a CRM application. Marc Benioff, who left Oracle to found SalesForce, proclaimed the end of software as we know it. “As it turned out, the idea of software-as-a-service caught on even more quickly than Benioff expected. In 2002, the firm's sales hit $50 million. Just five years later, they had jumped tenfold, to $500 million. It wasn't just small companies that were buying its service, though they had constituted the bulk of the earliest subscribers. Big companies like SunTrust, Merrill Lynch, Dow Jones, and Perkin-Elmer had also begun to sign up, often abandoning their old in-house systems in the process. Benioff's audacious gamble, like Insull's a century earlier, had panned out. As for the once mighty Siebel Systems, it had gone out of business as a stand-alone company. After suffering a string of deep losses in the early years of the decade, it was bought up in early 2006 by Benioff's old company, Oracle.”
Amazon launched the first utility computing service in March, 2006. They allowed customers to store data on Amazon’s systems for a few cents per gigabyte per month.
One of the things that I really like the way Carr writes is that he mixes so many different perspectives and insights. “In the early decades of the twentieth century, as punch-card tabulators and other computing machines gained sophistication, mathematicians and businessmen began to realize that, in the words of one historian, ‘information is a commodity that can be processed by a machine.’ Although it now sounds obvious, it was a revolutionary insight, one that fueled the growth and set the course of the entire computer industry, particularly the software end of it, and that is now transforming many other industries and reshaping much of the world's economy. As the price of computing and bandwidth has plunged, it has become economical to transform more and more physical objects into purely digital goods, processing them with computers and transporting and trading them over networks.”
And, later, “Until recently, most information goods were also subject to diminishing returns because they had to be distributed in physical form. Words had to be printed on paper, moving pictures had to be captured on film, software code had to be etched onto disks. But because the Internet frees information goods from their physical form, turning them into entirely intangible strings of ones and zeroes, it also frees them from the law of diminishing returns. A digital good can be replicated endlessly for essentially no cost-its producer does not have to increase its purchases of inputs as its business expands. Moreover, through a phenomenon called the network effect, digital goods often become more valuable as more people use them. Every new member that signs up for Skype, puts an ad on Craigslist, or posts a profile on PlentyOfFish increases the value of the service to every other member. Returns keep growing as sales or use expands-without limit.”
One of the big factors that is contributing to the rising productivity of computers is social production (the social web and collaboration). “Whereas industrialization in general and electrification in particular created many new office jobs even as they made factories more efficient, computerization is not creating a broad new class of jobs to take the place of those it destroys. As Autor, Levy, and Murnane write, computerization ‘marks an important reversal. Previous generations of high technology capital sharply increased demand for human input of routine information-processing tasks, as seen in the rapid rise of the clerking occupation in the nineteenth century. Like these technologies, computerization augments demand for clerical and information-processing tasks. But in contrast to [its] predecessors, it permits these tasks to be automated.’ Computerization creates new work, but it's work that can be done by machines. People aren't necessary.
That doesn't mean that computers can take over all the jobs traditionally done by white-collar workers. As the scholars note, ‘Tasks demanding flexibility, creativity, generalized problem-solving and complex communications-what we call nonroutine cognitive tasks-do not (yet) lend themselves to computerization.’ That parenthetical ‘yet,’ though, should give us pause. As the power and usefulness of networked computers have advanced during the few years since they wrote their paper, we've seen not only the expansion of software's capabilities but the flowering of a new phenomenon that is further reducing companies' need for workers. Commonly termed ‘social production,’ the phenomenon is reshaping the economics of the media, entertainment, and software industries, among others. In essence, it allows many of those ‘nonroutine cognitive tasks’ that require ‘flexibility, creativity, generalized problem-solving and complex communications’ to be carried out for free-not by computers on the network but by people on the network.”
An example familiar to everyone is YouTube. All the users provide the content, catalogue and rate is value. Wikipedia is another example.
Why do people contribute? Carr lists several reasons:
* They contribute without knowing it (i.e. search engines)
* Self interest (i.e. tools they use to help them for free and results are shared like del.cio.us)
* Competitive or status seeking (i.e. Wikipedia)
* Enjoyment
And, I would add, altruism.
Ubiquitous inexpensive computing and communications with a constant flow of new software applications are fueling this phenomena. “In his book The Wealth of Networks, Yale law professor Yochai Benkler traces the recent explosion in social production to three technological advances. ‘First, the physical machinery necessary to participate in information and cultural production is almost universally distributed in the population of the advanced economies,’ he writes. ‘Second, the primary raw materials in the information economy, unlike the physical economy, are [freely available] public goods-existing information, knowledge, and culture.’ Finally, the Internet provides a platform for distributed, modular production that ‘allows many diversely motivated people to act for a wide range of reasons that, in combination, cohere into new useful information, knowledge, and cultural goods.’”
One of the reasons all of this works is the connection between people and the community it creates. “Richard Barbrook, of the University of Westminster in London, expressed this view well in his 1998 essay 'The Hi-Tech Gift Economy.' He wrote of Internet users:
‘Unrestricted by physical distance, they collaborate with each other without the direct mediation of money or politics. Unconcerned about copyright, they give and receive information without thought of payment. In the absence of states or markets to mediate social bonds, network communities are instead formed through the mutual obligations created by gifts of time and ideas.’"
This a book to be read and discussed.
The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google
Nicholas Carr
WW Norton & Company, NY, 2008, 278 pp
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