Spotted in the mountains today. Larger size better.
Fintra beach: end of the day
We’re in Donegal, where the upper slopes of the mountains look as though they’ve been dusted with icing sugar. We had a lovely walk on Fintra beach towards the end of the day, during which we were drenched by driving sleet. And yet it was beautiful – especially when it stopped and I was able to take the camera out from under my parka.
Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: a seminar presentation
I gave a talk at LSE yesterday about the thinking that lay behind my new book. It’s long, but it does explain the background and the book.
Why Congress is so attentive to the needs of the content industries
How nice to see it expressed so directly.
Reinforcing the fact that Chris Dodd really does not get what’s happening, and showing just how disgustingly corrupt the MPAA relationship is with politicians, Chris Dodd went on Fox News to explicitly threaten politicians who accept MPAA campaign donations that they’d better pass Hollywood’s favorite legislation… or else:
“Those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake,”
This certainly follows what many people assumed was happening, and fits with the anonymous comments from studio execs that they will stop contributing to Obama, but to be so blatant about this kind of corruption and money-for-laws politics in the face of an extremely angry public is a really, really, really tone deaf response from Dodd.
It shows, yet again, that he just doesn’t get it.
From Techdirt
Where good ideas come from
I’m reading Steven Johnson’s new book
The dark underbelly of the iEconomy
Apple has just reported quarterly profits that are bigger than Google’s revenues for the same period. Today’s New York Times has a big report on the human costs of that commercial success. In one way, of course, this is an old story (and it’s not just about Apple, either — dozens of other successful Western technology companies are also exploiters of Chinese labour), but the NYT investigation is more extensive than I’ve seen before, and therefore more troubling.
In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers — as well as dozens of other American industries — have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history.
However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.
Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.
It’s a long report. Worth reading in full.
Complexity theory for regulators
In the last few weeks I’ve been involved in three workshops/symposia which, in different ways, were all about a single topic: evidence-based policy and decision-making. (The subjects were: evidence-based policy in learning technology; the future of research-intensive universities; and understanding social networking.) One thought that has surfaced in all three events is that they were at least partly about making decisions in very complex social systems — which of course leads to an obvious question: can complexity science (or what one might call “social physics”) be of any use in this context?
I did some initial speculation about this in Chapter 5 of my new book
This morning I came on a fascinating article by two German physists, Tiago Peixoto and Stefan Bornholdt, who have modelled pricing behaviour in certain kinds of distributed markets — e.g. that for petrol at the pump. The most intriguing outcome of their work is the idea that cartel-like behaviour can be an emergent property of these markets.
Why is this interesting? Well, to date, our instinctive regulatory responses to situations where a large number of suppliers magically agree on a price is to assume the existence of a cartel. No smoke without fire, and all that. But if Peixoto and Bornholdt are right, then that may not always be true.
The dynamics undergoes [sic] a transition at a specific value of the strategy update rate, above which an emergent cartel organization is observed, where individuals have similar values of below optimal trustworthiness. This cartel organization is not due to an explicit collusion among agents; instead it arises spontaneously from the maximization of the individual payoffs. This dynamics is marked by large fluctuations and a high degree of unpredictability for most of the parameter space, and serves as a plausible qualitative explanation for observed elevated levels and fluctuations of certain commodity prices.
Fascinating stuff. Interesting also that the authors don’t see “dynamics” as a plural noun. Perhaps they regard it as the same as ‘economics’ or ‘mathematics’?
Apple: the new Microsoft
Those who are salivating about Apple’s new tools for creating iTextbooks ought to first of all have a read of this.
For nearly two years, Apple has wooed digital book publishers and authors with its unconditional support of an open, industry-leading standard. (The EPUB standard is managed by the International Digital Publishing Forum [IDPF], of which Apple Inc. is a member.)
With last week’s changes, Apple is deliberately sabotaging this format. The new iBooks 2.0 format adds CSS extensions that are not documented as part of the W3C standard. It uses a closed, proprietary Apple XML namespace. The experts I’ve consulted think it deliberately breaks the open standard.
I’m inclined to agree. Like Mr Bott, I see this as a variant of Microsoft’s old strategy of “embrace, extend and extinguish”.
The SOPA Opera Q&A
Small comment piece I did for today’s Observer.
Nicely complimented by a Monday Note by Frederic Filloux on how illicit copying is an intrinsic part of the digital ecosystem. That suggests, he maintains, that we need to start being more imaginative in the way we combat ‘piracy’.
The tyranny of hindsight
This morning’s Observer column about Kodak’s demise.
A good way of inoculating yourself from the wisdom of hindsight is to read Clayton Christensen’s seminal book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, which is the best explanation we have of why and how successful firms can be undermined by disruptive innovations – even when they appear to be doing everything right: listening to their customers, watching the marketplace, and investing in research and development.The really sobering thought to emerge from Christensen’s book is that good decisions by great managers can still lead to corporate disaster. The reason is that while big companies are often good at fostering “sustaining” innovations – ones that enhance their positions in established markets – they are generally hopeless at dealing with innovations that completely disrupt those markets.So the question that Kodak’s demise raises in my mind is this: would any of us have done any better in 1976 after our R&D guys had come up with an idea that would cannibalise our core business and reduce our margins to near zero?