books

28 Oct 09

"Now that optical recognition technology has come in, Google could take a book, put it on a scanner, and the computer turns it into a digital file that you can search. There's a frightening amount of information suddenly; in a year, kids will be scanning all my books, the menu of what they ate for lunch – all they'll have to do is point and click and it turns everything into a file, so the entire planet becomes searchable. I do think that is very spooky, and I don't like it at all." You see, I pounce again – the future is a terrible place!

22 Oct 09

The future of libraries, with or without books - CNN.com

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20 Oct 09

Internet Archive: A Future for Books -- BookServer

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17 Oct 09

What is Design Thinking Anyway? : Observatory: Design Observer

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Tim Brown of IDEO has written that design thinking is “a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.”
The design-thinking organization applies the designer’s most crucial tool to the problems of business. That tool is abductive reasoning.
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- Deductive logic — the logic of what must be — reasons from the general to the specific. If the general rule is that all crows are black, and I see a brown bird, I can declare deductively that this bird is not a crow.
- Inductive logic — the logic of what is operative — reasons from the specific to the general. If I study sales per square foot across a thousand stores and find a pattern that suggests stores in small towns generate significantly higher sales per square foot than stores in cities, I can inductively declare that small towns are my more valuable market.
- Yet a reasoning toolbox that holds only deduction and induction is incomplete. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, American philosophers such as William James and John Dewey began to explore the limits of formal declarative logic — that is, inductive and deductive reasoning. They were less interested in how one declares a statement true or false than in the process by which we come to know and understand. To them, the acquisition of knowledge was not an abstract, purely conceptual exercise, but one involving interaction with and inquiry into the world around them. Understanding did not entail progress toward an absolute truth but rather an evolving interaction with a context or environment.
- New ideas came into being, Peirce posited, by way of “logical leaps of the mind.” New ideas arose when a thinker observed data (or even a single data point) that didn’t fit with the existing model or models. The thinker sought to make sense of the observation by making what Peirce called an “inference to the best explanation.” The true first step of reasoning, he concluded, was not observation but wondering. Peirce named his form of reasoning abductive logic. It is not declarative reasoning; its goal is not to declare a conclusion to be true or false. It is modal reasoning; its goal is to posit what could possibly be true.
- Whether they realize it or not, designers live in Peirce’s world of abduction; they actively look for new data points, challenge accepted explanations, and infer possible new worlds. By doing so, they scare the hell out of a lot of businesspeople. For a middle manager forced to deal with flighty, exuberant “creative types,” who seem to regard prevailing wisdom as a mere trifle and deadlines as an inconvenience, the admonition to “be like a designer” is tantamount to saying “be less productive, less efficient, more subversive, and more flaky” — not an attractive proposition. And it is a fair critique that abduction can lead to poor results; unproved inferences might lead to success in time, but then again, they might not.
- Some abductive thinkers fail to heed Brown’s requirement that the design must be matched to what is technologically feasible, launching products that do not yet have supporting technology. Consider the software designers who inferred from the growth of the Internet that consumers would want to do all their shopping online, from pet supplies to toys to groceries. Online security and back-end infrastructure had not yet caught up to their ideas, dooming them to failure.
- Other abductive thinkers fail to address Brown’s second requirement: that the innovation must make business sense. Looking back on the dot-com crash, Michael Dell, founder of Dell, argues that little has changed. “Still today in our industry, if you go to a trade show, you walk around and you will find a lot of technology for which there is no problem that exists,” he says. “It’s like, ‘Hey, look at this, we’ve got a great solution and there is no problem to solve here.’ ” [2]
- Making Peirce’s logical leaps is not consistent or reliable; nor does it faithfully adhere to predetermined budgets. But the far greater risk is to maintain an environment hostile to abductive reasoning, the proverbial lifeblood of design thinkers and the design of business. Without the logic of what might be, a corporation can only refine its current heuristic or algorithm, leaving it at the mercy of competitors that look upstream to find a more powerful route out of the mystery or a clever new way to drive the prevailing heuristic to algorithm.

27 Sep 09

FT.com / Books / Non-Fiction - People Like Us

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After Cairo, Luyendijk moved to Lebanon and then to East Jerusalem to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for Dutch TV. Here he came across new distortions. The conflict was produced for TV, he argues. The stone-throwing, the suicide bombs, the 24 hours that Israel waits before responding to a Palestinian attack so that the world can reflect on Israel’s pain – all this exists chiefly so that TV news can cover it.
TV reporters are slaves to their images; they can tell only the story shown by the images, because images speak so much louder than words. TV can convey the horror of a suicide bomb but it is less effective at conveying the humiliation of daily life under occupation. In any case, the Palestinians are no good at producing those images for TV.
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- Israel excels at baking the bread. It knows just how to package a soundbite or image for TV, whereas Palestinian spokesmen drone on in incomprehensible language. In fact, the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat deliberately kept articulate Palestinians off air for fear that they would acquire their own power bases.
- Luyendijk acknowledges that a few serious publications, such as the New York Review of Books and a handful of others, carry accurate reporting on the Middle East. Unfortunately, hardly anyone reads them. TV, the dominant medium, distorts the
  picture and rarely explains how it gets “the story”

16 Sep 09

James Scott and Friedrich Hayek

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Heaven knows that I am no Austrian--I am a liberal Keynesian and a social democrat--but within economics even liberal Keynesian social democrats acknowledge that the Austrians won victory in their intellectual debate with the central planners long ago.
But on a second level, it is an act of displacement. Friedrich Hayek, after all, won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science for making many of Scott's key arguments: that the bureaucratic planner with a map does not know best, and can not move humans and their lives around the territory as if on a chessboard to create utopia; that the local, practical knowledge possessed by the person-on-the-spot is important; that the locus of decision-making must remain with those who have the craft to understand the situation; that any system that functions at all must create and maintain a space for those on the spot to use their local, practical knowledge (even if the hierarchs of the system pretend not to notice this flexibility). These key arguments are well known: they are the core of the Austrian economists' critique of central planning.
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- Scott draws heavily on the excellent work of Jane Jacobs to criticize this planned, surprise-free, every-apartment-building-looks-the-same high-modernist order of pre-planned Brasilia.
- Jacobs argued that rigid spatial segregation of functions made for visual regularity from the bird's-eye view of the architect but made the city damn hard to live in. By contrast, it is the mingling of residences with shopping areas and workplaces that makes an urban neighborhood interesting--and livable. And this urban diversity of uses cannot be planned by the high-modernist architect. At best it can be planned for--by the government providing a framework and infrastructure for urban development instead of specifying land use down to the last square centimeter.
- I should note that today almost every single economist--even those who (like me) are profoundly hostile to many of Hayek's arguments (that government regulation of the money supply lies at the root of the business cycle, that political attempts to reduce inequalities in the distribution of income are likely to lead to totalitarianism, that the Federal Reserve should be abolished, that the competitive market is the "natural spontaneous order" of human society)--agrees that Hayek and his company (including Scott) hit the particular nail that is Scott's central theme, the critique of high-modernist centrally-planned social-engineering, squarely on the head.
  
  Scott's Seeing Like a State's index contains no references to Ludwig von Mises. It does contain six references to Friedrich Hayek:
- The first two references I agree with. Hayek is right in criticizing the inflexibility of the command economy, and Scott is right in arguing that the market economy is not the "natural" form of human social order.
  
  The third, fourth, and fifth references seem to me to miss the point: no one reading Hayek should be surprised that he is skeptical about claims to useful theoretical knowledge, the unanimity between the left and right branches growing out of the anarchist tradition is not "curious" but a result of these two branches' common roots, and the late Foucault (even though correct, and at the time of his death a serious student of liberal political economy) is not the expert of choice on liberal political economy.
- The sixth reference may be the key. Scott cannot cite Edmund Burke in Seeing Like a State--and much of Scott's book consists of praise for the wisdom embodied in community practices in a Burkean vein--except as an "apologist... for... power, privilege, and property." And Scott cannot embrace Friedrich Hayek out of the fear that it will turn his book into a "case for politically-unfettered market coordination." Instead, he believes that his argument is as much a critique of "market-driven standardization" as of "bureaucratic homogeneity."

23 Jul 09

Bobbie Johnson on how Scribd made pages pay | Technology | The Guardian

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Shortly after its 2006 launch, Scribd.com stumbled across an easy way to explain what it did: it called itself "for documents". The phrase sounded snappy enough, and even if was a little confusing, at least it had the virtue of being easy to use in elevator pitches.
The site now ranks as one of the world's top 100 websites and, with more than 35bn words in its system, it is increasingly the place to go for documents of all sorts. It contains everything from academic papers and PowerPoint presentations to recipes and electronic books: all searchable and shareable for the site's estimated user base of 50 million. Adler may not like the analogies, but there is a truth in the comparison: what YouTube is for video, or Flickr is for photography, Scribd is fast becoming for the written word.
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- The site operates today by opening that concept up to the world. Users can scan in documents of any sort, before they are converted into a Flash-based reading format (they call it iPaper) or made available to download or share online.
- Adler thinks the reason why the site makes money is straightforward: it's got something people want. "The reason we make money is because we have a few different business models," he says. "One is ads: we get incredibly high click rates because most people on Scribd are searching the site for something, or they came from a search engine and they're looking for something specific."
  "Then," he adds with understatement, "we also have the Scribd store." The store has become the site's hottest feature, and the one that is getting attention with mainstream publishers, authors and the public. It's a simple idea: that anyone can charge a fee to get access to their documents online, giving a percentage to Scribd for hosting the service. It offers a range of options for content owners to choose what they are selling - and it's delivering results.
- With such interest, the move has proved instantly profitable. Scribd takes 20% of the cover price, and the remaining 80% goes to the publisher. That split remains the same across the board: even Simon & Schuster did not get a sweetheart deal to tempt them in, says Adler.
- Adler is keen to stress that professional content is just one aspect of what the site does - and that allowing people to share documents they have created themselves "democratises" publishing. The site also has plans to launch what it calls Project Social in the near future, which will let users follow their favourite authors and publishers to see what they put online.

30 Jun 09

Cambridge: Background reading list and syllabus outlines for prospective SAA students

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Oxofrd University Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology: Reading list

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29 Jun 09

David MacKay: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air: Contents

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16 Jun 09

Bobbie Johnson meets Douglas Rushkoff, who helped to shape the internet in the early 90s | Books | The Guardian

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he minted the concept of viral marketing, where the internet is infected with contagious advertising
Along the way he also coined the now-popular idea of "digital natives" - youngsters who gained a distinct advantage over their parents because they had grown up in a world of computers and electronics.
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- He tracks back our economic system to the Renaissance, when the first corporations were born. Initially created as an attempt by the aristocracy to control - and profit from - the actions of the merchant class, corporations slowly became more powerful, setting up new codes that encouraged people to stop producing things and start buying.
- "People exchanging value with one another directly is the thing that got outlawed 500 years ago and then, over the centuries, got turned into a weird, messy thing that we look down on rather than a wonderful thing that we should look up to." Over the course of history, he argues, the notion of local production and trade has been erased in favour of a centralised, globalised culture.
- "When push comes to shove and our corporations fail us we begin to look to our peers for support," he says. "We're going to have to start doing favours for each other, working with each other ... and then we'll start to see that it's more fun, more meaningful and cheaper."
- "The amount of value that Craigslist has allowed people to create for one another is pretty remarkable," he says. "I'm renting a little office near my house, and I've got to find someone with a truck. What else am I going to do? I go to Craigslist and find someone there. It makes me tremendously optimistic."
- An advocate of what he calls "fractal activism" - favouring a host of sprawling, disorganised, personal protests over organised campaigns - he says he's hoping the ideas in his book become common property so that, like a Wikipedia project on every street corner, many people can build something of value in their own lives by contributing their time.