The Long View

Idiot with a Tripod - a short film

Film made by Jamie Stuart during the New York Blizzard earlier this week. Written, shot, edited, produced within 24 hours. Who said great stuff takes a lot of time? Best wishes, and instant inspiration, for 2011.

‘Here you have’ e-mail worm spreads quickly

 Security experts warned Thursday of a fast-spreading e-mail worm, the first large outbreak of this type in nearly a decade.

The worm appears in e-mail messages with the subject “Here you have,” and contains what seems to be a link to an Adobe PDF file. In fact the link takes the victim to a Web page hosted on the members.multimania.co.uk domain that then tries to download a screensaver (.scr) file. If the user agrees to installing that file, he is then infected by the worm, which mails itself to his e-mail contacts.    

Found on: KurzweilAI » News • Image by Zeb.

Asia rising

Major demographic, economic and cultural changes are afoot. We all know it.

But few have a more compelling way of presenting past and projected future evolutions than Hans Rosling. Here his prediction that Asia will overtake the West in 2048. On 27 July, to be exact.

The all exciting Global Last Minute approach

Does it ever happen to you to leave things to the last minute? Regularly? What does this do for you?

This is not necessarily about procrastination. For some it's an adrenaline rush, others become more focused and effective in what they have to deliver.

The pressure of the deadline. The curious joy of being on the brink of collapse. The art of Just-in-Time.

I am coming to think that as humans, this is how we advance (and, on occasions, kill) our civilisations.

Forever on the verge of collapse. Empires rising and falling on the whim of a battle. Alesia (ask the French about that one). Trafalgar. Waterloo. (and yes, Agincourt, as well). The Cuban Missile Crisis. The Cold War...

In many cases decisive action (or, in some, inaction) came as last minute or ad hoc decision.

Recently, we have taken the art of the brink a step further, and started successfully applying it to aspects of human civilisation as a whole. We have become so much more sophisticated on the edge.

A few random examples:

• Acid Rain in the 80s: when we almost lost most of the pine trees in Central Europe.
• Deforestation: well that is a great one - how late can we leave this one?
• Animal protection: Once the numbers start hovering below the self-renewal stocks, they become protected and a huge and costly battle engages with poachers.
• Fish depletion: The Times of London announced in a Tube advertisement that we had 41 years of fish stock left.
• Oil: We know it's going to disappear. We will probably come up with viable alternatives (market forces or regulation will likely adjust price levels to appropriate levels) - just-in-time.

And of course, Global Warming. We have known about it for about a generation, and now the prospect of the December Copenhagen Conference is beginning to wake up nations. (Indonesia, for example, will announce a major Geothermal initiative.)

Of course, whatever the Copenhagen outcome, it will not be enough. There will be resolutions and powerful statements, large scale initiatives for sure - but binding agreements?

The prospect of new technologies and the pious wish that the next generation will be creative and innovative enough to come up with the right answers will do enough to allow everyone a sense of relief and reprieve.

In 2009, it is still not sufficiently last minute, and clearly, still not hot enough around the collar. On a global scale, we may or may not ……… (fill in the missing verb as you see fit from the following choices: wake up, invent, act, react, survive)

In short: the dreaded deadline is Monday, but let's enjoy the weekend barbecue first.

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.

The Global Water Challenge

The Economist this week publishes a long article on the global water situation. It becomes quite clear quite quickly that water management will be the next big thing after CO2 trading.

I have extracted the main figures from the article, just to give us a sense of perspective. The table is drawn from the Economist article.

Water resources:

• Worldwide water available in the hydrological cycle, yearly: 43,659 km3/year (1km3= 1 trillion of litres)
• Worldwide water usage: 3,829 km3/year (8.8% of total flowing through the hydrological cycle)
• Maximum possible usage to sustain life on planet: probably less than 20% 

Global consumption:

• Agriculture 70-80%,
• Industry less than 20%
• Households: the rest 

Water and world population:

• Over the past 50 years wolrd population rose from 3 billion to 6.5 billion
• Water use trebled in the same period 
• Future population rise: by a further 2 billion by 2025 and by 3 billion by 2050

• Demand for water will rise by 60% just for agriculture (1,500 km3) 

Food:

• To grow a kilogram of wheat requires around 1,000 litres. 
• As much as 15,000 litres of water to produce a kilo of beef. 
• Americans and Europeans require around 5,000 litres of water a day for their meat based diet. 
• The vegetarian diets of Africa and Asia use about 2,000 litres a day 
• In 1985 Chinese people ate, on average, 20kg of meat; in 2009, they will eat around 50kg This difference translates into 390km³ (almost as much as total water use in Europe)   

Biofuels:

• Today about 2% of irrigated water is used to grow crops for energy, or 44km³. 
• Implementation of current plans and policies to increase biofuels would require an extra 180km³ of water.

Changing irrigation practices alone could improve water usage efficiencies by 30%, improved industrial practices by 20%.

For some more illustrated figures, refer back to my earlier post this month: Earth is not drying up. At all.

The race is on. Right now it's raining, in any event.

The long road to Twitter paradise (1)

I thought that after about two months of tweeting (my first tweet was on 14 February to be precise), it would be good to give a brief update on how this social networking beginner is doing.

Now my first remark is that already I seem to be in a very different place from two months ago: once you have spent some time in the twittersphere it seems uncanny that still not everyone knows what Twitter is exactly. (it even seems there are some people who have never heard of it all).

So for the untwittered among you: Twitter is a social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time with what is happening in any of the areas you want to be connected to. Twitter aims to help you kill two birds with one stone: building a social network and keeping you informed about the topics you are interested in. It is instant information 24 hours a day. (Unless you turn it off, a bit like email, really just at multiple times the volume). 

Unlike Facebook, you can only send and receive short messages of up to 140 characters (including any URL links you want to include.

Some even say that Tweeting can be bad for you, but so can many other things…

So, how has it been going for me? In a nutshell: well, but slow. 

I have not been the most assiduous of tweeters (about 100 updates since the beginning), and after two months have now reached the 200-followers mark - some assiduous twitters count in the hundreds of thousands, just ot give you an idea. (Experienced twitterers will by now have detected my beginner’s language and naive mindset - but hey, we are all learning, not?)

Here are some of the things I really like bout Twitter as well as some that I intensely dislike.

Likes:

1. Ease of set up and use and the instant communication it provides to people and areas on the net
2. Discovery of entirely new industries, interests and mindsets
3. Ability to connect to a wide range of people, without prejudice or discrimination; to relate directly to people you did not know that existed 3 minutes ago
4. The general respect and politeness of the exchanges
5. Real-time updates on what is happening out there. While it may not always be the truth necessarily, it can come quite close to it on occasions
6. Creation of my own personal newsfeed in realtime
7. Ease of following and unfollowing - unlike facebook, there is no sense of ego loss. Easy come, easy go
8. The sense of expansion that comes with the growing network - it has already had an impact on my blog traffic, as well
9. Some good iPhone interface applications help keep up when on the move Twteety, Twitterphone (both on the Apple iTunes store) to keep you abreast
10. A new toy to play with. This should never be underestimated.

Dislikes

1. Cumbersome interface despite the apparent simplicity
2. Site can be quite slow and unreactive
3. To become really powerful, you need to master additional tools (more time, energy, learning - surely all for a good cause)
4. The amount of self-proclaimed social media gurus and twitter specialists that in reality are not much into sharing - except for their share of your wallet
5. Time required. Don’t get me wrong  - i enjoy spending time, and even think it is worthwhile - but on a busy day, I find it difficult to switch to Twitter and tend to turn it off
6. A vague sense of frustration about all that great stuff that you miss out on when you are not watching
7. Not sure today that the time invested is really beneficial - although this hesitation alone seems to tell me otherwise.  

So these are some first impressions. Overall, a good start. I am now celebrating my 200th follower (@N3W_Media), so the mass twitterers may still deride my early efforts. However, Twittergrader puts me at 92/100 this morning, up from 24 a few weeks ago.

Twitter paradise cannot be that far  away. Thank you to all those that follow me: @jeanmarcrommes.

(To be continued)

What on earth does ARRA look like?

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) provides $787bn.

This illustration found on one of my favourite blogs highlights neatly how the funds are divided up:

A picture is more than a 1000,000,000 dollars.

Factual perspectives on how life is changing - fast

Each of these figures worth learning by heart and putting into your own context:

Found on Twitter: @mashable.

The absolute size of one trillion dollars

Talk of making something rather abstract like "one trillion dollars" become very concrete… 

Jon Lyles has created a compelling visual of what a trillion dollars looks like in volume.