“It is clear that the need for innovation has never been greater,” my old Economist colleague (and friend) Vijay Vaitheeswaran writes in his new book Need, Speed, and Greed. It may be clear to Vijay, but it’s not at all to me: The need for innovation in World War II, or the Irish potato famine, or in ending slavery, or at pretty much any randomly selected point in time in the past strikes me as about the same as its necessity today. Vijay’s case rests on the argument that we live in conspicuously heady times, an argument that is made by assertion. He goes on to say that “new ideas move to market faster than ever before.”But can we meaningfully measure the speed with which new ideas move to market? Alexander Graham Bell filed his patent for the telephone in February 1876. By April 1877, the first commercial telephone lines were being installed. Of course you can cherry-pick examples to show greater or slower speeds.
As Anil Dash pointed out this weekend, arguments about the ethics and functionality of save-for-later apps like Instapaper and Readability have reached the same fever pitch as Blogger-vs.-WordPress-vs.-Tumblr had a few years ago. It’s a matter of passion and honor (and name-calling) for industry leaders, but users just go on using the apps they like.That’s as it should be, but there’s definitely something worth arguing about for people who publish on the Web. Read-later apps are competition for noisy, ad-ridden websites. They represent a simple fact: Users hate our sites.
Run of Play: The Vermaelen Problem
Run of Play: The Vermaelen Problem
Thomas Vermaelen seems to think that he’s a basketball player. His constant dream is to steal the ball from an opposing attacker, dribble the length of the court/pitch, and score at the other end. Early in Saturday’s match against QPR, he got excited when Adel Taarabt received possession…
The fact is that the real world is much weirder than parody these days. Compare Google’s driverless NASCAR to some of the news items we have seen over the past year (think: GOP primaries). Stuff routinely occurs that one could not have predicted in a million years. Stuff that makes even the craziest April Fool’s stunts look sedate. And now think of this: if Google in 2003 announced that it had developed self-driving cars, everyone would have taken this as a crazy joke. But only a few years later, it’s totally real.Absurdists have good reason to “feel lucky.” The real world shocks us every day. But there are no surprises when Google — and just about every other tech website in the world — feels compelled to come up with hoaxes on the one day when people expect to see hoaxes. And that’s why April 1 is the dullest day of the year.
Drawings by Bill Traylor April 1, 1854 – October 23, 1949
Researchers at Wellesley College and the University of Kansas investigated friendships at that 25,000-student institution and at four smaller colleges in the state. “People would expect in bigger and more diverse places you’d come into contact with a bigger and more diverse set of people,” says lead researcher Angela Bahns, a social psychologist at Wellesley. “But you find the exact opposite.”
The researchers gave pairs of friends separate questionnaires on their lifestyles (how often they drank, exercised, etc.) and opinions (on topics such as abortion) and found that the bigger the school, the more similar friends were to one another. In follow-up research, not yet published, Ms. Bahns and her team found similar results comparing big cities like New York and Chicago to smaller ones like Iowa City and Lawrence, Kan.
How can more people and more diversity lead to less diverse friendships? It’s simple, really: We like people who are like us. Social scientists call it the “similarity-attraction effect,” and it influences everything from whom we date and hire to where we choose to live. The bigger the pond, the more likely we are—consciously or not—to swim around until we find a group of like and like-minded people.
[vimeo 38681202 w=250 h=141] bookshelfporn:
Birth of a BookBeautiful video of traditional pre-press, offset print to produce hand-bound books.
Glen Milner produced this book-binding vignette at Smith-Settle Printers in Leeds, England as the binders bound Suzanne St Albans’ Mango and Mimosa.
Sri Lanka - Polonnaruva (capitale du Royaume Singhalais au XIKIè siècle): entrée de la salle du Conseil de Parakrambahu. 1991.
I’m going to tell you something that my Republican friends are loath to admit out loud: climate change is real. I am a moderate Republican, fiscally conservative; a fan of small government, accountability, self-empowerment, and sound science. I am not a climate scientist. I’m a meteorologist, and the weather maps I’m staring at are making me uncomfortable. No, you’re not imagining it: we’ve clicked into a new and almost foreign weather pattern. To complicate matters, I’m in a small, frustrated and endangered minority: a Republican deeply concerned about the environmental sacrifices some are asking us to make to keep our economy powered-up, long-term. It’s ironic. The root of the word conservative is “conserve.” A staunch Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, set aside vast swaths of America for our National Parks System, the envy of the world. Another Republican, Richard Nixon, launched the EPA. Now some in my party believe the EPA and all those silly “global warming alarmists” are going to get in the way of drilling and mining our way to prosperity. Well, we have good reason to be alarmed.
On Thursday, the flood of bad reports continued, with the independent Fair Labor Association releasing the results of its probe of Foxconn, outlining the expected litany of abuses. But for once, this was not bad news for Apple. The company had sanctioned the FLA’s report, and its response was a masterstroke: Apple immediately announced a deal with Foxconn to hire tens of thousands of new workers, tighten safety and overtime rules, and build better employee dormitories. Instead of headlines blaring the Fair Labor Association’s findings, Friday morning brought news stories focused on Apple’s determination to change how it does business with its suppliers—indeed, to set a new standard for China’s entire technology manufacturing sector.In one deft move, Apple has pivoted from villain to crusading hero. But wait—won’t all those changes cost a lot of money? Yes. And that will benefit Apple even more.
Foxconn is by far the world’s largest electronics manufacturer. It’s best known for building iPhones and iPads, but it’s also a major supplier for Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Amazon, Sony, and many others. Any improvements it makes at Apple’s behest should spill over to its work for those companies as well. And any progress Foxconn demands from its own suppliers—some of which are believed to be even less scrupulous in their labor practices—will compound the effect. Some analysts believe Foxconn is so large and influential that higher wages, tighter regulations, and better working conditions there will ripple across all of China.