Your friendly local infosherpa

As I write this, Bruce Sterling is doing his 10th “State of the World” thing at The Well. The conversation is scheduled to last for two weeks, and is viewable by non-members.

It has just started, but looks promising.

http://budurl.com/sterlingworld

Update: Some selected quotes and comments on the ongoing conversation are accumulating on the FriendFeed entry associated with this post. Add your own!

Russian guy that predicted fall of the USSR predicts the fall of the USA. Wall Street Journal claims he “is not a fringe figure”, since he is “invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media”. Must be a true expert, if he appears in the media and is invited to the Kremlin.

Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces — with Alaska reverting to Russian control.

He also predicts that when the US falls apart, the West coast will become the Californian Republic, and will be either part of China or under Chinese influence.

For more of this, read the full article: As if Things Weren’t Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S. - WSJ.com

Some interesting words on enterpreneurship from Eduardo Manchón, one of the Panoramio founders. (If you prefer English to Spanish, skip to the end of this post for a link to an automatically translated version.)

También hay que considerar que los emprendedores nunca no son tan originales, se lanzan por imitación de lo que tienen cerca. Si la gente cerca de ti monta cosas para el turismo, tu montas cosas para el turismo, si se meten en el negocio inmobiliario, tu también. Si vives en Sillicon Valley, pues creas start-ups tecnológicas. Joaquín Cuenca y yo creamos Panoramio porque conocimos a Ubaldo Huerta que había creado Loquo, el a su vez había trabajado en Sillicon Valley muchos años. Es el famoso efecto semilla, a partir de una primera y única empresa que surge de manera espontánea, surgen una legión de ex-trabajadores de esa empresa que montan su propio proyecto e imitadores, que al final crean un centro de este tipo de proyectos.

¿Hablo de Sillicon Valley? No. Hablo de realidades tan cercanas a mi como las localidades mono-industriales alicantinas, cada una con una especialización y un nivel de emprendimiento brutal. A saber juguetes en Ibi, alfombras en Crevillente, calzado en Elche y Elda, marroquineria en Petrer, chocolates en Villajoyosa, turrones en Jjjona, textil en Alcoy, mármol en Aspe, especias en Novelda y redes de pesca en mi pueblo, Callosa de Segura. Podría seguir con muchos pueblos de la provincia cada uno con las industrias líderes a nivel nacional en cada sector. Lo mismo pasa en muchos otros lugares de España y debe parecer provinciano hacer ese recuento, pero creo que hay que parar de hablar de generalidades “españolas” vistas desde la distancia y conocer la realidad a ras de suelo.

Evidentemente, el emprendedor se hace, pero no se trata de lavarle el cerebro a los niños y meterles en la cabeza una mentalidad emprendedora al estilo del “gran sueño americano”, así no funciona.

Full article (in Spanish): Eduardo Manchón: “En España hay tantos emprendedores como en cualquier otro sitio”. Or read the google-translated English version.

Researchers replicate Milgram’s experiment and get the same results as Milgram got 50 years ago. A good thing to remember in these days of peace-wishing and all-round goodness: most humans need only a little prodding to commit atrocities.

“People learning about Milgram's work often wonder whether results would be any different today,” said Burger, a professor at Santa Clara University. “Many point to the lessons of the Holocaust and argue that there is greater societal awareness of the dangers of blind obedience. But what I found is the same situational factors that affected obedience in Milgram's experiments still operate today.”

Stanley Milgram was an assistant professor at Yale University in 1961 when he conducted the first in a series of experiments in which subjects – thinking they were testing the effect of punishment on learning – administered what they believed were increasingly powerful electric shocks to another person in a separate room. An authority figure conducting the experiment prodded the first person, who was assigned the role of “teacher” to continue shocking the other person, who was playing the role of “learner.” In reality, both the authority figure and the learner were in on the real intent of the experiment, and the imposing-looking shock generator machine was a fake.

Milgram found that, after hearing the learner's first cries of pain at 150 volts, 82.5 percent of participants continued administering shocks; of those, 79 percent continued to the shock generator's end, at 450 volts. In Burger's replication, 70 percent of the participants had to be stopped as they continued past 150 volts – a difference that was not statistically significant.

via Replicating Milgram: Researcher finds most will administer shocks when prodded by ‘authority figure’

The real threat of evil, I think, lies in the temptations of “international governance” — say, a sinister multilateral government body called the World Information Center. Nice as it sounds, the reality is likely to be ridden with bureaucracy, susceptible to control by the worst of the world’s governments rather than its best ones, and incapable of innovation. Take, for example, ICANN, the body that sets policy for the Domain Name System. I was its founding chairman, and I don’t think anyone considers it a success. Its saving grace is that it is widely considered illegitimate and therefore has little power.

Esther Dyson in the Taipei Times

An old piece of news, but still interesting: researchers measured the ‘pace of life’ in 32 cities around the globe, and concluded that the pace of life is now 10% faster than in the early 1990s; the biggest increases where in China’s Guangzhou and in Singapore.

Here is the list of the cities analyzed, from fastest to slowest:

Average time taken (in secs) to walk 60ft (note ed. 18 meters)

1. Singapore (Singapore); 10.55
2. Copenhagen (Denmark); 10.82
3. Madrid (Spain); 10.89
4. Guangzhou (China): 10.94
5. Dublin (Ireland); 11.03
6. Curitiba (Brazil); 11.13
7. Berlin (Germany); 11.16
8. New York (United States of America); 12.00
9. Utrecht (Netherlands); 12.04
10. Vienna (Austria); 12.06
11. Warsaw (Poland); 12.07
12. London (United Kingdom); 12.17
13. Zagreb (Croatia); 12.20
14. Prague (Czech Republic); 12.35
15. Wellington (New Zealand); 12.62
16. Paris (France); 12.65
17. Stockholm (Sweden); 12.75
18. Ljubljana (Slovenia); 12.76
19. Tokyo (Japan); 12.83
20. Ottawa (Canada); 13.72
21. Harare (Zimbabwe); 13.92
22. Sofia (Bulgaria); 13.96
23. Taipei (Taiwan): 14.00
24. Cairo (Egypt); 14.18
25. Sana’a (Yemen); 14.29
26. Bucharest (Romania); 14.36
27. Dubai (United Arab Emirates); 14.64
28. Damascus (Syria); 14.94
29. Amman (Jordan); 15.95
30. Bern (Switzerland); 17.37
31. Manama (Bahrain); 17.69
32. Blantyre (Malawi); 31.60

Pace of Life

(tip of the hat to Martin Landers, who brought this to my attention)

The present versions of ourselves are invariably the biggest idiots, and six months will make that clear

Only Collect « a historian’s craft (via kottke)

What if every product category, every business, is a bubble — and some just last longer?

Doc Searls Weblog · Unexpected but inevitable pops

I don’t doubt that an economy without Wal-Mart would mean higher prices for U.S. consumers. We can quibble about the $ amount, but they do get our attention with that provocative sign, which is the *only* flashy thing you’ll see when driving along Walton Blvd in Bentonville. Come to think of it, Bentonville is probably the best example of what Wal-Mart has done for the U.S. generally, especially small-town America. I’ve visited northwest Arkansas many times over the past 25+ years. The Bentonville-Rogers area has been transformed from a relatively unsophisticated place to enjoy the outdoors (with beautiful natural features, such as rivers, lakes, and limestone caves) to a reasonably cosmopolitan place with a few outstanding restaurants, access to good shopping, and things like a W “aLoft” hotel — in the span of only a few years. All because of… Wal-Mart.

Evidence Soup: Wal-Mart claims to be saving U.S. families $260B this year. Does the evidence support this claim?

1952: It's front-page news when George Jorgensen Jr. is reborn as Christine Jorgensen, gaining international celebrity and notoriety as the first widely known person to undergo a successful sex-change operation.

Jorgensen, who grew up in the Bronx, in her words, a "frail, tow-headed, introverted little boy who ran from fistfights and rough-and-tumble games," was drafted into the Army just after World War II. Military service only reinforced Jorgensen's belief that she was, in fact, a woman trapped inside a man's body.

Dec. 1, 1952: ‘Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty’

By the way, is "slippery slope" considered a thought? I mean do people still think of that as an argument: "once you start down, the only option is complete loss of balance until you hit the bottom?" To me that seems more like an escape from the necessity of having to think about something, but maybe shouting "slippery slope" at a problem still sounds like a thought to some folks. If so, it's kind of sad, no?

Jay Rosen in a FriendFeed comment on his own tweet I’m glad Dave Winer got to hear the Berkeley J-School crowd explain to him that listening too well to the users is unethical

It's a joke, but not really. We know our software sucks. But watch, we'll make it suck less.

Tech developers and users (Scripting News)

Pharyngula on Thanksgiving:

Again, for you non-Americans, this is a peculiarly American version of a fall harvest festival. We are supposedly celebrating an event in our history from the 17th century: the fellowship and cooperation between the Pilgrim immigrants and the native Americans that culminated in a shared feast. The truth is a little uglier and perhaps a bit more representative of our political reality. A gang of Puritan religious kooks who were too wacky and weird for their homeland emigrated optimistically to the new wilderness to the west, hoping to found a utopia for repressive fanaticism. They proved to be incompetent as well as crazy, and nearly died off completely in their first few years, but survived thanks to an affiliation with local tribes who were quite competent at successfully thriving in that environment, but were unfortunately strategically unwise in allowing these parvenu lunatics to persist in their midst.

Pharyngula: Happy Thanksgiving!

Or so Ted Dziuba says:

Google uses C++, which is sure to attract a top-notch engineer whose only way to express his masculinity is the speed with which he can ace an academic recursive programming problem and the condescending modesty he has while explaining the solution.

Jerry Yang - Slugworth to Google’s Willy Wonka • The Register

A thoughtful contribution to the personal vs professional blogging discussion:

The point is not to show up on a list, the point is to start a conversation that spreads, to share ideas and to chronicle your thinking. That's the work of an author, and I think rather than kissing author blogs goodbye, someone should just start a new list.

Seth’s Blog: Death of the personal blog?

Fascinating story of a link spreading through twitter, blogs, delicious and etcetera. Still unfolding.

royal bacon - The anatomy of a viral campaign

In the end, this is cultural.

The Internet is the greatest generation gap since rock and roll. We're now witnessing one aspect of that generation gap: the younger generation chats digitally, and the older generation treats those chats as written correspondence. Until our CEOs blog, our Congressmen Twitter, and our world leaders send each other LOLcats – until we have a Presidential election where both candidates have a complete history on social networking sites from before they were teenagers– we aren't fully an information age society.

When everyone leaves a public digital trail of their personal thoughts since birth, no one will think twice about it being there. Obama might be on the younger side of the generation gap, but the rules he's operating under were written by the older side. It will take another generation before society's tolerance for digital ephemera changes.

Schneier on Security: The Future of Ephemeral Conversation

And I mean that in the best possible way.

Unlike many Rube Goldberg machines, the goal wasn’t to turn on the lights or pour a glass of milk. Instead, Jon wanted to get people psyched about IDEO’s engineering capabilities and to broadcast the distributed contraption live for all to see. Of course, getting a hot dog in the Chicago office to dial a cell phone in Palo Alto for the sole purpose of pumping helium into a bucket of soap and water for a three-foot cylinder of bubbles did plenty to get people excited. When the Chicago team added flames to the mix, Jon didn’t flinch.

The Incredible IDEO Global Chain Reaction Experience

Pixels were the stuff of my first computer, which strained to show 137 of them in a square inch; my latest cellphone manages 32,562 in this same space, and has 65,000 colors to choose from, not eight. Its smooth anti-aliased type helps conceal the underlying matrix of pixels, which are nearly as invisible as the grains of silver halide on a piece of film. And its user interface reinforces this illusion using a trick borrowed from Hollywood: it keeps the type moving as much as possible.

Crisp cellphone screens aren’t the end of the story. There are already sharper displays on handheld remote controls and consumer-grade cameras, and monitors supporting the tremendous WQUXGA resolution of 3840×2400 are making their way from medical labs to living rooms. The pixel will never go away entirely, but its finite universe of digital watches and winking highway signs is contracting fast. It’s likely that the pixel’s final and most enduring role will be a shabby one, serving as an out-of-touch visual cliché to connote “the digital age.”

Ask H&FJ | Hoefler & Frere-Jones, via kottke

You don’t, or do you?

Some bosses don't want to hire people who have a vision, a personality and a shtick. That's okay. You don't want to work for them anyway.

Seth’s Blog: The You Show

The criteria for success early in a person’s career are always going to be more operational than strategic – if only because lower-level employees don’t get the opportunity to make large strategic decisions. Nonetheless, even if they are not primarily getting rewarded for having a vision of the future of the company or the ability to inspire people to buy into the vision and help make it a reality, they had better develop those skills along the way, because they will need them if and when they reach senior positions in their organization.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Re-inventing Management and Management Education

Jesús Díaz posted last Friday an article on Gizmodo that has been making the rounds on the TechMemes and Diggs of this world. In A Call for Revolution Against Beta Culture, Díaz writes:

I’m tired of this. This sense of permanent discomfort with the technology around me. The bugs. The compromises. The firmware upgrades. The “This will work in the next version.” The “It’s in our roadmap.” The “Buy now and upgrade later.” The patches. The new low development standards that make technology fail because it wasn’t tested enough before reaching our hands. The feeling now extends to hardware: Everything is built to end up in the trash a year later, still half-baked, to make room for the next hardware revision. I’m tired of this beta culture that has spread like metastatic cancer in the last few years, starting with software from Google and others and ending up in almost every gadget and computer system around. We need a change.

[...]

Clearly, the problem is the development process and the time to market, with product cycles shortened and corners cut to keep a continuous stream of cash flowing in. The rush to feed these cycles with increasingly more complex engineering seems to be at odds with shortened development and quality assurance processes, resulting in beta-state first-generation products. This beta culture, the same one that already plagues the web, breeds people who are willing to accept bugs in the name of cutting-edge gear.

Essentially, Díaz proposes that we shed any vestigial sense of responsibility, and blame it all on the greedy companies and the lazy engineers. Because all those (free) beta web apps twisted our fingers to use them. Because Steve Jobs chased us into Apple stores and forced us to buy his iPhones and iPods.

It sounds like Díaz would benefit from having a look at Bruce Sterling’s proposed ethos for the early adopter.

Depression 2.0 will at least be a major upgrade, Russell. I hear Depression 3.0 will be the first really usable version, though. I’m going to wait for that one. So what if I won’t have anything to flash around immediately after Christmas. Who cares. Everyone I know is planning to spend less on Christmas this year anyway. And it’s worth waiting, I think, to have a Depression with fewer crashes.

Comment by Michael Turner on End of the beginning? — Crooked Timber

I have a very different model of how innovation, at least in software, actually works. One of its premises can be expressed by what I shall now dub the Iron Law of Software R&D: If you are a programmer developing innovative software, the odds that you will be permitted to finish it and it will actually be deplayed are, other things being equal, inversely proportional to the product of your depth of innovation and your job security.

That is, the cushier your corporate sinecure is, the less likely it is that you will make a difference. The more innovative your software is, the less likely it is that you will actually be supported all the way to deployment.

The reason for this is dead simple. Corporations exist to mitigate investment risk. The large and more stable a corporation is, the more resistant it is to disruption in its practices and business model including the unavoidable short-term disruptions from what might be long-term innovative gain. Net-present-value accounting therefore almost always leads to the conclusion that innovation is a mistake.

esr - Open Source — Can It Innovate?

If you’re buying weird tech gizmos, you need to know what you are trying to prove by that. You also need to tell other people useful things about it. If you are truly experimenting, then you are doing something praiseworthy. You may be wasting some space and time, but you’ll be saving space and time for others less adventurous. Good.

Bruce Sterling - The Last Viridian Note

More from The Last Viridian Note:

• Glocally nomadic life
• A design education
• Encourage the best industrial design