by Ben Atlas on 04.30.2009.11:24pm · 1 comment
Enter a word or a phrase into the Google Trends and see a geographic distribution for a search. The trends show searches/population. There are some interesting results. For example you can see who is worried about loosing their retirement savings 401K (Charlotte, NC, the bank capital of USA on top). Note the spike of the retirement worries there during the October 08 crash. You can also find out who is looking into suicide methods (things are not right in Richardson, TX!). Or who is searching for some Swine Flu:
- Waterloo, Canada
- San Antonio, TX, USA
- San Diego, CA, USA
San Antonio and San Diego are border towns with Mexico, but what’s up with Waterloo, Canada? You get the idea. Similarly Social Media trends yield the following results (the 1st place probably distorted by the SXSW):
- Austin, TX, USA
- San Francisco, CA, USA
- Boston, MA, USA
- Washington, DC, USA
- New York, NY, USA
- Mumbai, India
- Pleasanton, CA, USA
- Singapore, Singapore
- Chicago, IL, USA
- Vancouver, Canada
Take a look at the curious country distribution there. I can understand Singapore at the first place, but India in second place? Considering that the trends calculate searches/population this would require a high degree of computer literacy and distribution amongst the population, hard to believe.
It is only a matter of time before Universities will radically change like the print or automobile industry today. It is inevitable. An article in the New York Times by Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia, proposes to End the University as We Know It:
“If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin with six major steps:
- Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs.
- Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs.
- Increase collaboration among institutions. All institutions do not need to do all things and technology makes it possible for schools to form partnerships to share students and faculty.
- Transform the traditional dissertation.
- Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained.
- Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure”
Dave Pollard writes about the new book by PS Pirro – 101 Reasons Why Im Unschooler:
“PS presents 50 reasons why schooling is, in every imaginable way, bad for us and our society, and then 50 reasons why unschooling, which she defines as “learning without formal curriculum, timelines, grades or coercion; learning in freedom” is the natural way to learn. She argues that we are indoctrinated from the age of five to cede our time, our freedoms, and what we pay attention to, to the will of the State, so that we are ‘prepared’ for a work world of wage slavery and obedience to authority. We are deliberately not taught anything that would allow us to be self-sufficient in society. And in the factory environment of the school, where teachers need to ‘manage’ thirty students or more, ethics and the politics of power is left up, from our earliest and most vulnerable years, to the bullies and other young damaged psychopaths among our peers, to teach us in their grotesquely warped way. As PS explains, it is in every way a prison system.”
And here is a memorable quote from the book:
“The world of the classroom is so unlike anything the real world has to offer – with the exception of other classrooms – that kids can excel at school only to find themselves utterly lost in the real world. Some people think this is the result of failed schooling, but a few of us suspect otherwise. We suspect that this sense of displacement and confusion is actually the result of schooling that succeeds in its most basic unwritten objective: to keep you dependent, timid, worried, nervous, compliant, and afraid of the World. To keep you waiting. To keep you manageable. To keep you helpless. To keep you small.
Educated, confident, creative people are dangerous to the status quo, dangerous to a centralized economy, dangerous to a centralized system of command and control. Those in power don’t want you educated. They want you schooled.
It is not up to teachers or school administrators to figure out what you should be or do. It’s not up to the State, it’s not up to your guidance counselors. It’s not up to your parents. What you do with your life ought to be up to you. What you learn ought to be up to you. How you navigate the world and create your place in it ought to be your decision. Your life belongs to you. School does its best to disabuse you of this notion. Unschooling celebrates it. Unschooling puts the responsibility for creating a satisfying life squarely where it belongs: in the hands of the one living it.”
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MARTINI SIMONE, Meditation (detail), 1312-17 Fresco, 390 x 200 cm, Cappella di San Martino, Lower Church, San Francesco, Assisi
Humans like to vilify past, especially the preceding management, generation, political class, parents, an era, etc. Douglas Rushkoof maintains that the so called “Dark Ages” were not that dark after all, but were deliberately branded “dark” during the Renaissance – In Defense of the Dark Ages:
“First off, the Dark Ages were not dark. The Late Middle Ages, in particular, were extremely prosperous. Population and wealth went up, work hours went down. Height and health went up, death and taxes went down. This is when the cathedrals were built, with local profits generated by local economies.
The notion of a “dark ages” is really Renaissance disinformation. It’s an effort to make Renaissance innovations to banking, manufacturing, and corporate law look like modernity instead of the extraction of wealth by the few. It was only after the invention of monopoly centralized currency that the economy in Europe began to tank, common lands were fenced in, farming and grazing became impossible for peasants, sustainable land became speculative property, food supplies diminished, jobs required going to workshops in the city, health deteriorated and, you guessed it, the plague began.
That’s right: the plague didn’t happen during the Middle Ages – it was the direct result of centralized monetary and business policy in Europe at the beginning of the Renaissance. Once the plague killed off more than half of Europe, people got healthier and wealthier again, because the crippled, centralized economy could support that few.”
Some photography to kick start the new design of this blog. On Friday morning I walked to the Central Park and kept on walking, drunk with the energy of the greatest city in the world. [click to enlarge]
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by Ben Atlas on 04.21.2009.11:33pm · 1 comment
Arnold Baskin’s 1979 short film.
Ben Chorin penned a masterpiece:
“The Jew-hatred festival in Geneva is wonderfully symbolic not only for convening on Yom Hashoah. It brings together self-styled potentates from loser countries and snobs trading on the past glories of fallen empires. They both hate the Jews for essentially the same reason.
Jews are upwardly mobile.
This simple fact violates the vital lie by which each of these groups lives. The losers would like to believe that their fate is determined by forces outside their control. The heirs to privilege would like to believe that such privilege is pre-ordained and non-contingent. The notion of pulling yourself up, as exemplified by Jews, is threatening.
(And that’s why nations that still believe in merit [USA] or have recently discovered the idea [some of the Eastern European countries that are making progress] are now our friends.)”
I was not aware that Rembrandt lived through the pivotal financial collapse in Holland, at the turning point from a superpower to history. The change caused his financial ruin that nevertheless didn’t dim his art. New York times article – In the Gloom, Seeing Rembrandt With New Eyes describes this period:
“In the 17th century the Netherlands was the most prosperous country in Europe. Then at midpoint of the century, partly because of a draining war, the bubble burst. The Dutch art market, at its zenith, collapsed. People thought, “Oh, it’s just a phase.” It wasn’t. The golden age of Dutch art was over. [...]The economy tanked; the art market vanished. He was forced into bankruptcy; a court sold his house and possessions, including his art collection. The only bright light was [his lover] Stoffels’s steady presence and his art, which he kept making because it was all he knew how to do.”
This might be his last self-portrait by Rembrandt. 1668-69, Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne
I wonder about the silhouette in the upper left corner?
Everything in this world is struggle for scalability, if something scales it can grant powers and riches. Every marketer knows that discovery is easy, scalability is hard.
Oil scales when one core can power thousands of cars driving to the corners of the world. Control of this scalable resource grants concentrated power and riches.
Religion scales and even when it conquers half of the world it still seeks messianic world domination.
Sports scale providing escape and tribal identity in the process.
Internet scales. A search algorithm by Google compels millions of people to create content that drives power and riches to a chosen few. A company in Seattle powers 80%(?) of all business tabulations in the world.
The flip side is that there is always a tension between have and have nots or people who control scalable resources and ideas and people who are being scaled. Communist revolutions sought a disruption in the inequality between people who controlled scalable resources, the scalability process accelerated by the industrial revolution and the scaled peasants and proletariat. Instead the ones who have been working for the feudal lords and factory owners have been slaughtered and firmly enslaved to the absolute power of the dictatorships.
During the same decade when the utopian revolutionary Thomas Friedman was proclaiming the flatness of the earth, power and unlimited credit flowed to the oligarchy, creating a financial inequality not seen in history.
Will the internet follow the same path? Is the talk about self empowerment, the speed and freedom of publishing is just a smoke screen for the drivers of the scalable platforms cruising the power of the collected creative energy?
Isn’t it strange that the same two guys who coded Blogger before it was sold to Google are now controlling the next scalable distribution platform Twitter? Is the Internet the most undemocratic tool the humanity ever known? Will it enslave people not only physically but intellectually?
[And now this - BoingBoing: Google Book Search settlement gives Google a virtual monopoly over literature]
Interesting post by Sarah Lacy on TechcCrunch – Venture Capital Down 50%. It’s Not Just the Recession, Folks. Highlights:
- Venture funding fell by 50% nationally from the first quarter in 2008 to the first quarter of 2009.
- Information technology investments fell 53% year-over-year.
- Clean tech investment fell by 74% to a paltry $117 million.
- Boston regains the No. 2 Venture spot after Silicon Valley from NY and Southern California:
Sarah writes:
“most Boston VCs never really got the consumer Web. Much of their expertise has remained in areas like telecom and healthcare, and many of their investors have morphed into more financial engineers than company builders. This meant that New England fell from the no. 2 region for venture investment for the first time in 2008, as Southern California and New York ascended. It’s now solidly back at no. 2 and investments fell a comparatively tiny 16% in the first quarter, according to Dow Jones.”
These are very interesting stats, the only issue I have is that the post attempts to extrapolate the future based on the recent history and statistics an we if really learned anything in the past 20 years is that future is a complete black box and unpredictable. One unforeseen discovery or an event can dramatically change everything.
gapingvoid: 