A parent summons a lift in the Barbican.
Miniature deltas
Walking along a Donegal beach at low tide we were struck by the way the combination of water, tides and sand enacts (or mimics) high-speed geological phenomena. A curving stream heading down the beach cuts out mini-cliffs, which it then undermines, precipitating massive collapses. At another point, as here, a slow-moving stream mimics the deltas of great rivers. I suspect that this is why so many people like living by the sea: things are always changing — through the day as well as through the year.
Larger size here.
Digital capitalism 101
This morning’s Observer column.
Need a crash course in digital capitalism? Easy: you just need to understand four concepts – margins, volume, inequality and employment. And if you need more detail, just add the following adjectives: thin, vast, huge and poor.First, margins. Once upon a time, there was a great company called Kodak…
LATER: It occurred to me that “Digital Capitalism” would make an interesting university course. One of the textbooks I would use is Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System
This recent seminar presentation gives a flavour of Dan in action:
Another essential text would be Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy
Quote of the Day: Non Potest Quae Non Manent
Clay Shirky, writing about Higher Ed’s reaction to MOOCs:
College mottos run the gamut from Bryn Mawr’s Veritatem Dilexi (I Delight In The Truth) to the Laboratory Institute of Merchandising’s Where Business Meets Fashion, but there’s a new one that now hangs over many of them: Non Potest Quae Non Manent. Things That Can’t Last Don’t. The cost of attending college is rising above inflation every year, while the premium for doing so shrinks. This obviously can’t last, but no one on the inside has any clear idea about how to change the way our institutions work while leaving our benefits and privileges intact.
In the academy, we lecture other people every day about learning from history. Now its our turn, and the risk is that we’ll be the last to know that the world has changed, because we can’t imagine—really cannot imagine—that story we tell ourselves about ourselves could start to fail. Even when it’s true. Especially when it’s true.
Driverless cars and intersections
Interesting simulation suggesting that autonomous vehicles might be more efficient at utilising traffic junctions.
Krugman: a technological optimist?
From Business Insider. The only problem: will these new technologies create jobs? My guess: probably not.
Seascape
From the site to the stream
This morning’s Observer column.
The communications theorist Marshall McLuhan observed that “we look at the present through a rear-view mirror”. And that “we march backwards into the future”. Amen. Remember the horseless carriage? Not to mention the fact that we still measure the oomph of a Porsche 911 in, er, brake horsepower.
But the car industry is a ferment of modernism compared with the computer business. When the bitmapped screen and the Wimp (windows, icons, menus, pointer) interface first surfaced in the early 1970s at Xerox Parc, its geeks searched for a metaphor that would make this new way of relating to computers intelligible to human beings. So they came up with the “desktop” on which were displayed little images (icons) of documents and document folders, just like you’d find on an actual desktop. Well, on the desktop of an efficient bureaucrat anyway…
I inadvertently added 100 years to John Locke’s life in the last line of the piece. The essay dates from 1696, not 1796. I should have spotted that: Locked died in 1704. What a difference a key makes.
LATER: Some commenters on the piece asserted that it was Apple who put the trash can on the desktop. Not true: Here’s the desktop of the Xerox 8010 with the trash clearly visible on the bottom.
Hiding in plain sight
The other day a colleague related an aphorism he had picked up in conversation with someone who had been in Tony Blair’s inner circle during his time in government:
“The best way to bury bad news is to publish it on the front page of the Guardian, because then the Daily Mail won’t touch it.”
It sounds like something from an Armando Iannucci script, but I’m sure it’s true. It’s also perceptive, as the phone-hacking story demonstrated: for over a year the story was doggedly pursued by the Guardian while the rest of the UK Fourth Estate determinedly looked the other way.
And then I remembered one of Marshall McLuhan’s aphorisms:
“Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.”
Which of course brought to mind the case of John Edwards’s extramarital affair, news of which was first brought to the world by the National Inquirer, a journal of, er, highly-blemished reputation which admits to paying for information and other breaches of Best Practice as taught by US journalism schools. Because the story was broken by the Inquirer, mainstream media wouldn’t touch it at first.
So maybe the best contemporary advice for Cameron & Co when they want to bury bad news is to by-pass the Guardian and go straight to the Daily Star.
How the Obama regime has made killing easy
The leaking of a secret US government White Paper setting out the supposed ‘legal’ justification for killing US citizens abroad using drones has lifted a corner of the veil that occludes the policy of the Obama Administration in this area. David Cole has thoughtful piece about this in The New York Review of Books. Sample:
On Monday, NBC published a leaked Justice Department “white paper” laying out the Obama administration’s case for when the president, or indeed any “informed, high-level official” of the federal government, can authorize the secret killing of a US citizen without charges, a hearing, or a trial. The paper, which appears to summarize a still-classified internal memorandum drafted by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to authorize the targeted killing in September 2011 of US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, provides more detail than has yet been made public about the administration’s controversial drone program.
Consistent with the positions taken in public speeches by former State Department Legal Advisor Harold Koh, Attorney General Eric Holder, and White House counterterrorism advisor and CIA director-nominee John Brennan, the sixteen-page white paper argues that killing a US citizen with a drone and without trial is legal under domestic and international law, even if the individual is far from any battlefield, not a member of al-Qaeda, and not engaged in planning an imminent attack on the United States. To date, much of the concern about the administration’s drone program has stemmed from its largely secret character; unfortunately, the more we learn, the greater those concerns become.
Drone warfare is the coming thing, and it’s already a much bigger deal than most people realise. It’s more serious, in a way, than cyberwarfare. And yet it receives very little attention.