The Long View

Whole Earth Discipline

Stuart Brand has written a remarkabe book. 

Whole Earth Discipline, An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. Footnotes and excerpts on a special website.

It flies in the face of much conventional wisdom and deserves to be talked about at length.even better, read it, thnik about it, then read it again.

Here the main thrust:

Cities are green. By 2050, 80% of the world's population will live in cities. That is good news because cities typically carry a lower carbon footprint per inhabitant than rural areas. Also, rural space will be freed up for nature restoration projects.

Nuclear energy is green. Alternative energies will be incapable of ensuring the baseload energy requirements of the coming decades. And even if they did, it would come at a huge cost. Clean coal is anything but reality. Nuclear has the power to generate enough electricity for the electric transport society. Nuclear is safe. There has not been a single nuclear accident nearly 25 years (also compare to Chinese coal mines).

GM (or GE) food is green. Agriculture has been about genetic modification since Day One. GM crops simply increase the speed of evolution and are more selective and exceedingly precise about which traits of the crop are modified. GM crops allow to reduce the use of pesticides and other harmful agricultural methods.

Geoengineering may well become a major civilisation shaper of the coming years and, who knows, its potential saviour.

You may not agree. Initially, I was skeptical about the nuclear bit. It now looks a lot more enticing and I will do some research around this. 

Increasingly, though, it looks like the old Green Movement is fighting a bit of a rear guard battle in the face of climate change and our other little challenges.

Stuart Brand has written a remarkable book. I will read it again.

Your brain in your pocket: why an Apple Tablet could bring about media convergence

With a rather large library at home and the prospect of moving house has become quite daunting.

As has the chance of finding stuff.

Famous last question: Where did I read that again?, followed by an hour's search across dusty shelves.

This has, of course, its own inimitable charm. Invariably I come across thoughts, ideas, stories that either I had forgotten about or that I had just simply not connected with.

However, as soon as I leave the house (a very regular occurrence), that entire library becomes useless.

So what if?

So what if there were a technological frogleap that would allow me to have that library with me all the time, allowing me to roam through at leisure on the train or the plane?

What if I could access all sources of information and all media, perform instant searches and combine text, music and video into one knowledge mega-library?

A laptop, you say?

Nah, not a laptop. Laptops are still far too appliation-centric (as opposed to content focused) Nah, not a Kindle, either. Too static.

Something that combines the flexibility and the colour of a magazine, the reading comfort of a book (or 1000 books -- without the weight), the charms of a Kindle (or so I am told, not owning one, but I have my doubts) the advantages of a laptop (film, music, searchability) as well as the potential of the new forms of converging media (did you recently visit the New York Times site?).

Well, according to Gizmodo, Apple (yes, I know, them again…) may be about to launch such a device. Much has been written about the Apple Tablet, but what got me animated here, is not so much the prospect of a possible near launch (February 2010), but more the prospect of media convergence in one device with a touch screen.

One thing in particular struck me in the article: the idea of putting school textbooks onto iTunes.

That would be a total game changer - for kids (think about those heavy satchels), for teachers (up-to-date materials), for bookshops (whoops…sorry, no good news here) and also for publishers (a new definition of the marginal cost of text book publishing).

Publishers would also be encouraged to release the long tail, their huge catalogue of books that have been out of print for years.

But most of all, once multimedia content becomes standard fare, tablet content will be to books what television has been for many years to travelogues: wildly more vivid and engaging. Just imagine your standard economics book with interactive, automatically updated graphics.

Whether it is going to be Apple or someone else, is beside the point. We are fast approaching the convergence of media.

If you add the recent evolution of e-paper (flexible screen technology) into the mix… we might just be at the beginning of an(other) information revolution.

Remember the live newspapers in the Harry Potter movies? Well, I have come to think that they are but a frog's leap away.

A few Peter Drucker quotes

Here a few quotes that may seem familiar - all by Peter Drucker (and we might not know it):

About strategy:

• The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different..
• The best way to predict the future is to create it.
• The entrepreneur always searches for change,responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity. 

• Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes, but no plan. 
• Plans are only good intentions unless they degenerate into hard work.

About customers: 

• Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the customer gets out of it.

• The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits and sells itself.

About process:

• Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right thing.

About leadership:

• Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
• The successful person places more attention on doing the right thing rather than doing things right. 

• For it is character through which leadership is exercised; it is character that sets examples and is imitated.

• The most important thing in communication is to hear what is not being said.
• We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.

Seeing in four dimensions

An article in Science News describes a new way for mathematicians to visualise objects in four dimensions.

If this seems quite abstruse, trust me, it is. 

However, Etienne Ghys, of the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon (France) with his colleagues Jos Leys and Aurélien Alvarez has managed to create a dynamic representation of the four-dimensional systems he studies: “I live in dimension four,” he says.

He has created a series of short videos that take you through a brief history of mathematics and cartography (how do you project three dimensions onto a plane surface) to a place where we can start imagining four dimensions.

Ghys explains that there are many more than four dimensions, but makes the point that the fourth is the most beautiful, and required to understand the physics of relativity.

You can watch and download the videos here. A choice of languages is available. Even if it may be a little hard to understand (for me anyway), the imagery is fabulous and opens up all sorts of creative possibilities.

200 books in your pocket?

Those who know me may be vaguely aware that I am a bit of a technophile, to say the least. So they can imagine, that when I heard about Amazon's new electronic book reader, I got somewhat excited. After all, e-paper is the future, no kidding. There will just not be enough trees to hold all the information available very soon.

Here is why Kindle got my immediate attention (extracts from Amazon's website which also diplays a convincing demo video:

• E-paper finally taking off
• Simple to use, no PC, no cable, WiFi enabled, direct connection to Amazon
• Buy a book and it is auto-delivered in less than a minute
• Holds over 200 titles
• Top international newspapers, delivered daily
• Free access to Wikipedia - your dictionary everywhere
… and more - all in less than 300g (size of a paperback). My library on the go at last, a dream come true.… Really neat.

Well, until I started looking at the small print, that was. For me, this actually holds in 3 letters: DRM. Digital rights management means in this case:
• If Kindle fails, and it gets scrapped, you are left with another unusable toy (got enough of those already, thank you)
• Closed format - no possibility of archiving or stocking e-books you have read elsewhere (CD, PC etc.… )
• No PDF - the industry standard excluded - how can that be?

Makes me feel claustrophobic even before I hold the device in my hands.

No thank you. The technophile in me wants to take his library with him. The reader in me wants to cross-link his material with the rest of his library, not create another silo.

Don't get me wrong: e-books are the future and this device may well… re-kindle my attention in a later, better, colourfuller and opener version; but this is still early days.

For the moment, the consumer in me is voting with his feet.

Five Minds for the Future

It is what is sounds like: a challenge to our traditional linear modes of thinking. Howard Gardner highlights 5 mindsets to be cultivated in the era of globalisation.

These five minds for the future complement each other and are closely connected. Also, we can cultivate them - hence this becomes a message to all professional educators (parents and teachers alike):

The Disciplined Mind is about mastering the body of knowledge in your chosen area. Gardner reckons that it takes a person about 10 years to fully master any given discipline. Examples: medicine, law, mathematics, engineering, history, crafts… And, mastery comes with a sell-by date: if you don’t keep up to date with what is happening in your chosen field you will soon be “out-mastered”;

The Synthesising Mind - interdisciplinary knowledge and the ability to navigate between more than one discipline: this is about the integration and communication (thus translation) of the ideas of one area into other areas. Examples: translate IT requirements into language that less technically-minded people can relate to, adapt biological paradigms to IT, and, indeed create bio-computers… which takes us to:

The Creating Mind - the capacity to break out of the status quo, question conventional wisdom, adopt new approaches to old problems, recombine past insights in different ways that provide answers to new questions and issues;

The Respectful Mind: with instant worldwide communication, dilution of economic, cultural and personal identities, understanding and, before that, respecting those who are not like us becomes ever more important, particularly but not exclusively, in multicultural work environments;

The Ethical Mind: the civic responsibilities and the accountabilities we carry as workers and citizens. In the inter- and (some say) over-connected environment of the 21st century, knowing what we stand for and can accept of others helps us roam a fragmented universe, where cohesive centralised messages can be hard to come by.

Applied to the business environment, the five minds reflect and are reflected in some of today’s best business practices for successful future oriented organisations:
1. Hire for talent (and pay for it)
2. Develop and work with the strengths of each employee (in order to keep them)
3. Hear and listen to new ideas constructively (… and implement the best)
4. Build a work environment in which individuals of the most diverse origins and outlook can feel at ease (“They are not like us“ is an opportunity)
5. Generate a culture of shared accountability in all areas of the organisation (in a decentralised information based environment, each of our actions matters).

It all seems to fit and overlap and make sense.