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251. -new- Reviving Small Towns
“Just 17% of America’s population today lives outside metropolitan areas.”  “Some organisations are trying to help small towns along.  One of the most important is the National Trust Main Street Centre, which aims to revitalise central streets by preserving historic buildings.”  See The Economist, December 23, 2006, pp. 41-42.  For towns that cannot find fatcat buyers to revive them, art and sometimes alternate energy have provided a means of revival.  “The town of Nelsonville, in southern Ohio, has become an ‘artists’ Mecca’ in recent years, according to Will Lambe, a research associate at the University of North Carolina who is working on a book about small-town economic development.”  “Colquitt’s Swamp Gravy Institute now finds itself acting as a consultancy for towns as far away as Brasil….”  (4/2/08)

250. The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow
“The sun will come out, tomorrow / Bet your bottom dollar / That tomorrow, there’ll be sun/ Jus thinkin about, tomorrow / Clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow / til there’s none” - Annie.  To almost everyone everywhere the world seems a mess, beset by intractable problems ranging from global terrorism to outright war to global warming to starvation to AIDS.  But the Economist (January 27, 2008, pp. 27-29) “in a week of financial uncertainty … [looks] behind the headlines to a world that is unexpectedly prosperous and peaceful.”  China, a quarter of a century ago, had 2/3 of its population living on less than $1 a day: now the number is less than 180,000,000.  In the first part of the 21st century 135 million worldwide have escaped extreme poverty.  With the exception of Africa, better water and better public health systems are reaching considerable numbers of people.  Child mortality (children under five) has declined radically.  The population bomb is fizzling with declining birth rates.  “In East Asia and the Pacific, the rate was 5.4 in 1970.  Now it is 2.3.  In South Asia, the fertility rate halved (from 6.0 to 3.1).”  In the last 25 years the rate for the whole world has fallen from 4.8 to 2.6.  “Last year the global economy entered its fifth year of over 4% annual growth—the longest period of such strong expansion since the early 1970s.”  “Economic growth improves lives unobtrusively.  The more dramatic explanation for improved living standards is the decline in the number of wars, and in deaths from violence and genocide.”  “The number of conflicts (both international and civil) fell from over 50 at the start of the 1990s to just over 30 in 2005.  (2/27/08)

249. Barring the Best: Immigration
The secret of success for the United States has always been its immigrants who come to these shores and do amazingly big things.  For starters John Roebling, who built the Brooklyn Bridge, made his way over from Germany.  As well, one need only read Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes or see the bleak but inspiring movie based on it to understand just how much hope this country inspires for those escaping poverty, oppression, and an unfeeling society.  It’s the land of friendship and opportunity.

248. Manufacturing Is Dead: Long Live Manufacturing!
As we have suggested many times, much of our manufacturing has moved overseas, and we are becoming a service economy.  That is to say, our output is shifting to service, and service jobs are what people can get.  Nonetheless, in dollar volume, manufacturing is up, and skilled tradesmen are very much in demand.  That is, there is a living to be made by the worker, and by the businessman, who makes higher value, more complex products. Bill Steigerwald and Joel Kotkin have made this point on Town Hall, as our reader Charles Wheat recently pointed out to us.  “In fact, in parts of the South, the Great Plains and Pacific Northwest, high-skilled workers are fueling vibrant local economies and helping America make $1.6 trillion worth of industrial stuff—42 percent more than in 1982.”  “Everyone talks about how we’re becoming a society of low-end service workers and high-end information workers.  But here’s something in between—basically the logistics and manufacturing industry—and nobody seems to be focused on it.”  “What is going on in manufacturing is what happened to farming over the last 220 years—we’re producing more with fewer and fewer people.”  (12/5/07)

247. The Bovine Menace
“Forget SUVs and tractor-trailers—the world’s livestock play a larger role in global warming than all of our planes, trains, and automobiles combined," according to a report from the Livestock, Environment and Development Initiative (LEAD).  With deforestation, fossil fuels for fertilizer, and gases from manure, “livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide.”  See the Atlantic, March 2007, p. 30.  (10/31/07)

246. Suicide in Nippon
“Let’s Die Together,” The Atlantic, May 2007, pp. 92-98 deals with Japan’s penchant for group suicide, a category in which the world’s second largest economy is a clear leader.  The article is suggestive but ultimately unsatisfying, because it graphically lays out the phenomenon, but does not understand very well why it occurs.  Moreover, on a more philosophical plane, it does not think through whether Japan is simply more explicit than other nations about its suicidal intentions.  In the United States, eating oneself to death is suicidal, but we don’t call it that.  There are a raft of behaviors in nation after nation that could are implicitly suicidal.  And, of course, there are phenomena like global warming, etc. in which the whole world is bent on a suicidal path.

“From 2003 through 2005, 180 people died in 61 reported cases of Internet-assisted group suicide in Japan.”  “Japanese authorities have been slow to react with any notable alarm to a recent nationwide embrace of death that has caused the official suicide rate to increase by an average of 5 percent a year for the past decade.  More than 32,500 suicides were reported in 2005….”  “The only countries with higher official suicide rates are Sri Lanka, which is mired in an unending civil ware, and the former Soviet republics and their Eastern European satellites.”  This embrace of death occurs even as Japanese fertility rates plummet to new lows.

245. College Endowments Raided? 
During the last decade givers and their families have complained that their handsome gifts to universities have been diverted to kooky ideas never intended in the bequests.  More than one has sued for return of the gifts.  This theme was addressed in “Strings Attached: Givers and Colleges Clash on Spending,” New York Times, November 27, 2004.  Paul Glenn has taken USC to task over the use of his $1.4 million gift; Yale had to repay Lee Bass $20 million he had given to support traditional humanities; the heirs of Charles and Marie Robertson want $35 million back compounded (to $600 million or so), bothered that the gift has been used outside of the Woodrow Wilson School and that it has not avidly been used to promote service in the federal government.

These contests between benefactors and academia opens a whole can of worms.  With a lot of money to throw around, administrators have gotten a little footloose and fancy free with the bequests of others.  But, properly, some institutions have disputed the nature of the original gift: circumstances change, and dollars deeded with the best of intentions in one era often are attached to provisos that just don’t make sense in a new age.  We tend to think the Mellons have done a pretty good job with their money, but many a donation is not particularly astute.  As we will make clear elsewhere, some institutions have become nothing better than banks—with growth in endowment becoming more important than the original mission of the institution.  Vital activities in institution after institution are underfunded: there is hardly a college in the country with healthcare facilities equal to its needs—and both students and staff get shortchanged.  Finally, of course, we have yet to properly redefine the mission of the university in our age.  Society is probably getting a thin return on its dollar.

244. Battling Terrorism 
So far terrorism is winning the battle.  The administration’s various wars and unwieldy Homeland-Security policies are bankrupting us.  Further, the anti-risk mentality is blunting the core competitive strength of the U.S.—innovation, since it makes us think more about what not to do, then what new thing we are going to try.  It’s pretty clear that we will have think and act quite differently to win this game.  The U.S. will have to push aside its go-it-alone foreign policy and seek broad-based cooperation from governments all over the world.  Governments clearly would like to be on a more equal footing: we just have to begin to treat them like partners.  We will have to seize the moral high ground, by deed and by proclamation, to undermine the claims of our attackers.  And we will have to use a slew of new scientific tools and mathematical analytics, treating terrorism like a virus rather than a human enemy.  We think we are fighting wars rather than viruses.

Scientists, incidentally, occasionally show us they can devise tools that don’t cost a king’s ransom.  “While policy makers fret over the obstacles in developing biosensor technology, the best and cheapest biosensors are already distributed globally but generally ignored: They’re called animals.  The United States has spent millions of dollars to develop biosensors that would detect bioterrorism or other deadly agents.  But so far, the technology has not met expectations and questions have arisen as to whether additional spending is warranted for civilian applications” (“Animals: The World’s Best and Cheapest Biosensors,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Online, 14 March 2007).

“In January 2007, the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine held a ‘One Medicine’ colloquium to promote the link between human and animal health….  Such a concept was described and promoted in the landmark book Veterinary Medicine and Human Health in the 1980s by the late Calvin Schwabe….”  Now the College has announced plans to start a One Medicine Institute.

Update: Containing Terrorism 
The Bush administration, pre Iraq, rejected containment as a way to counter terrorism.  “But now we know that the containment regime worked: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was in position to threaten anyone….”  Comment by Ian Shapiro, political science professor at Yale, adapted from his book Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy against Global Terror.  “Terrorist groups might not always be feasible targets of containment, but enabling regimes certainly can be.”  “It is hard to imagine a terrorist group without territorial sanctuary continuing to present a serious threat to U.S. national security.”  (9/19/07)

243. French Fear and Loathing
“The French pop twice as many anti-cholesterol pills as the British do and three times as many antibiotics as the Germans” John Thornhill (“Les Miserables, the French are Filled with Fear and Frustration,” Financial Times, January 6-7, 2007, p. 7) found this in Francoscopie, a guide to everything about the French put out each year by Gerard Mermet, a French sociologist.  “In spite of the material well-being of the vast majority of its citizens, France is suffering from economic anaemia and social anomie….”  “Fear and and stress are omnipresent in daily life.”  Life expectancy is the highest in the European Union.  “Some 76 per cent think their country is in decline.  While a majority agree that globalization is good for the world, they tend to view it as bad for France.  Only 33 per cent of French people have a positive view of capitalism.”  But, a big but, the French have been dissatisfied for several years which you can discover by going back to Mermet’s compendiums for earlier years.  Probably he is only registering the French version of a general unease felt throughout the developed world where we find ourselves asset-rich and spiritually defunct.  (3/7/07)

242. Causing Profits
Since the Modern Age began, books have been written, plays performed, paintings besmeared, movies splashed out that are preachy and don’t make a thin dime.  The money might not matter, except for the fact that it usually means that the tract novel or bleeding-heart movie only reaches a few cult followers, never to affect the minds of the masses.  Of course, then there are the Michael Moores of the Left and Right who churn out cheap shot, distorted satires that do achieve unwarranted popularity on college campuses but lack enough depth to make a lasting mark on intelligent argument.  More interesting, we think, is “The Indie Movie Mogul,” Wired, February 2006, pp. 134-35.  Jeff Skoll, one-time president of E-Bay, has “established Oxford Skoll Center for Social Entrepreneurship, endowed three chairs at the University of Toronto,” etc.  More interestingly, he has set up Participant Productions that has backed a number of cause films that have excited the critics—and even occasionally have some merit.  They include Syriana; Good Night, and Good Luck (about Edward R. Murrow’s battle with Joe McCarthy which has both intellectual and artistic merit); North Country; An Inconvenient Truth, the Al Gore foray into global warming, and, next, Fast Food Nation. For more on Skoll, see “Moving Pictures,” Fast Forward, September 2006, pp.90-95.  Having put $600 million into his Foundation aimed at social entrepreneurship, he started Participant with $100 million.  All, except North Country, have made some money.  (2/21/07)

241. A Bulb Goes Off
Compact fluorescent bulbs promise to save consumers a parcel of money, take a big swipe out of energy consumption, and do more good for the environment that most of the complicated schemes now being hatched in ivory towers.  Read about the promise in “How Many Lightbulbs Does It Take to Change the World?” Fast Company, September 2006, pp. 74-83. “Compact fluorescents emit the same light as classic incandescents but use 75% or 80% less electricity.”  “Compact fluorescents, even in heavy use, last 5, 7, 10 years.”  “In the next twelve months … Wal-Mart wants to sell every one of its regular customers—100 million in all—one swirl bulb.”  (1/17/07)

240. Second Life
Second Life, a fast-growth, virtual playground for the imaginative, hit the million member mark in October 2006, having struck a responsive cord amongst the adventurous who want to play around in idyllic pastures.  You can read a bit more about it in our “Good Society.”  This is the creation of Phillip Rosedale, who came out of Real Networks.  As happens with technies, the site is over-engineered and even the pricing gimmicks are too complicated.  Complication is a substitute for simplicity and originality.  Nonetheless, this Brave New World has taken hold of the vox populi.  (1/10/07)

239. Competitive Disadvantage
In “Risk Pool,” New Yorker, August 8, 2006, Malcolm Gladwell discovers that the dividing line between the Asian Tigers (i.e, the high growth economies and companies of Asia) and the American and European sluggards is dependency costs.  In other words, Westerners, and particularly Americans, are laying out huge expenditures on a company by company basis for pensioners both for health and retirement.  Too high a dependency burden puts an unsupportable overhead cost burden on all companies, particularly those with overcapacity—such as the car companies:

The difference is that in most countries the government, or large groups of companies, provides pensions and health insurance.  The United States, by contrast, has over the past fifty years followed the lead of Charlie Wilson and the bosses of Toledo and made individual companies responsible for the care of their retirees.  It is this fact, as much as any other, that explains the current crisis.  In 1950, Charlie Wilson was wrong, and Walter Reuther was right.

Charlie Wilson was Engine Charlie Wilson, of course, the famed leader of GM who railed against pooled pension schemes, preferring to things on a company by company basis.  Walter Reuther was the auto union leader who understood that both workers, companies, and the countries would enjoy more stable growth if the burden was spread over a range of companies.

238. Run Robots, Run
We have been gathering material on robots, so much so that our cup runneth over, and we lack perspective on this whole topic.  The uses of robots are multiplying—every day.  Japan seems to have the lead, but there are plenty of robots all over the globe.  The New York Times captured some of this ferment in “Brainy Robots Start Stepping into Daily Life,” July 18, 2006, pp A1 and C4.  Of course, this article is rather limited, focusing really on Silicon Valley, where John Markoff, the key Times tech writer, is located.  “Today some scientists are beginning to use the term cognitive computing, to distinguish their research from an earlier generation of artificial intelligence work.  What sets the new researchers apart is a wealth of new biological data on how the human brain functions.”  Tellme in Mountain View has voice recognition services for both customer service and telephone directory applications: at first, it could only answer 37 percent of the inquiries, but now that has bounced up to 74 percent.  In mobile robotics, “the field has been dominated by Japan and South Korea, but the Stanford researchers have sketched out a three-year plan to bring the United States to parity.”  (9/6/06)

Update: Artificial Intelligence
We have long said that WGBH is Boston’s central cultural institution.  Most of you will plough ground at MIT to get your robot and artificial intelligence education.  But you can also refer to the WGBH Network, where you can find an Artifical Intelligence Lecture series that will set you to thinking.  Here you will find experiments using robots in music, vehicle guidance, etc.  The techies at WGBH have made these files unduly complicated to open, but that pain occurs with geeks everywhere.  (3/14/07)

Update: Tiny Robots
A Japanese toy company is set to come out with the world’s smallest humanoid robot on October 25,  2007.  Coming from Tomy, its name is i-SOBOT.  “i-SOBOT stands just 16.5 centimeters tall, and weighs only around 350 grams.  While the robot fits in the palm of your hand, it remains a fully outfitted bipedal machine, with 17 moving joints.  Used throughout the body are tiny, custom servomotors developed by Tomy.”  “In 2008 Tomy intends to extend sales to Europe as well.  To reach its global sales target of 300,000 units, the company is localizing i-SOBOT’s software in English and Chinese in addition to Japanese.”

As we said in “Why Experts Are Wrong,” U.S. interest in robots is mounting, even though Japan has long held the lead.  It’s not at all clear that the center for robotic thinking will be Silicon Valley.  Some think the New England Corridor has the skill sets and mindset to seize the leadership.  (11/28/07)

Update: Robots Recycled
Robots have so come of age that now they are even being recycled.  This ‘used’ market has permitted smaller companies that cannot afford the price tag of newly minted robots to put some robot workers on their shop floors.  Fortune Small Business, October 1, 2007, p. 58, brings this to light in  “Think You Can’t Afford Automation:  Think Again.”

“Two of the best workers at Blue Chip, a manufacturing shop in Columbus, don't take lunch breaks.  These model employees draw no salary, work unlimited shifts, and weld at lightning speed.  Their performance isn’t just superhuman—it isn’t human at all.  ‘My robots are wonderful,’ says Steve Tatman, vice president of engineering at Blue Chip.

‘Since adding them to the team, we’ve become more competitive and more efficient.’  Blue Chip grosses about $5 million a year machining spare parts for the U.S. military.  ‘I always thought robots were out of our league, pricewise,’ says Tatman, 47, who owns and operates the company in partnership with his wife, Tammy, Blue Chip s president.  ‘They were a mystery to me.’  But when Blue Chip landed a Pentagon contract to manufacture thousands of drift pins (L-shaped tools the military needed to change tank treads), he decided it was finally time to explore automation.  ‘It takes a human seven minutes to weld a drift pin,’ he says.  ‘It takes a machine 45 seconds.’”

“171,000 robots toil in North American factories, and sales jumped 39% in the first half of 2007, according to the Robotics Industries Association, a trade group.  As robot prices come down, more small manufacturers are investing in automation.  While robot orders from automotive companies dropped 30% in 2006, nonautomotive orders, many of them placed by small businesses, composed 44% of all purchases, up from 30% in 2005, says the RIA.”

237. Charity Vending Machines
“Appearing across Japan recently is something called the ‘charity vending machine,’ which allows users to donate their change to such good causes as environmental conservation and child welfare at the push of a button.  These machines have been well received by consumers, who enjoy being able to contribute to a cause that interests them when they buy a canned or bottled drink. 

Drinks maker Ito En has linked up with the Japanese Organization for International Cooperation in Family Planning (JOICFP) and last year began setting up vending machines that dispense drinks with White Ribbon stickers attached.  The machines are presently in use in eight locations, including in front of the building in Tokyo's Shinjuku district that houses JOICFP. 

A charity vending machine devised by the NPO Miyagi Heartful Vendor was installed in a student cafeteria at Tohoku Fukushi University in Sendai City this May.  There are two buttons above the coin slot marked ¥10 (9¢) and ¥100 (89¢), and a customer can donate one of these amounts from his or her change after purchasing a drink just by pressing the appropriate button. The buttons can be pressed as many times as the customer likes, with each press increasing the donation.  It is also possible to donate money without purchasing a drink.  Plans are afoot to install 200 of these machines in Miyagi Prefecture by March 2007 and to distribute the funds collected to social welfare organizations and disaster relief groups. 

236. B-Schools Put Luxury Brands on Academic Menu
As our society and our markets split in two—with low end commodity products and high end boutique extravaganzas—the business schools are catching on and putting a lot more “luxury” courses in their curriculums.  See The Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2006, p.B5. Harvard even has a Luxury Goods and Design Business Club.  European schools such as the University of Monaco, SDA Bocconi in Italy, and IESE Business School in Spain are also in the game.  (8/2/06)

235. Restaurants with Laboratory Food
“The genius at the heart of the lab is Grant Achatz (rhymes with rackets).  A veteran of famous kitchens, the 31-year-old chef opened Alinea on the north side of Chicago a year ago.”  “The kitchen—spotless, sparkling stainless steel—looks like a chemistry lab.  Dominating an entire counter, with a smooth steel top and an industrial frame, sits the antigriddle.  Built by lab supplier PolyScience, it can chill food to minus-30 degrees Farhrenheit in an instant.  Another station features an infuser, more often found in head shops and Amsterdam coffeehouses, which pumps mace-scented air into cotton pillows that cushion a duck-and-foie-gras dish.  And in the spice rack alongside the cinnamon and paprika are carrageenan and sodium alginate-chemicals used to thicken and stabilize foods.”  “Achataz isn’t the only chef melding science and haute cuisine—a mashup sometimes called molecular gastronomy.  Heston Blumenthal does it at the Fat Duck outside London, and the godfather of the movement is Ferran Adria, at El Bulli near Barcelona.  It’s a small group that faces one big criticism: The food is just too strange.”  See “My Compliments to the Lab,” Wired, May 2006, pp.112-118.  (7/12/06)

234. Online Communities
Online communities are becoming big business.  Rupert Murdoch, for instance, has recognized that traditional media revenues have crested, and that he must expand in the virtual world.  He has bought MySpace.com and is trying to turn it into a high-revenue source.  Here, kids and adults post their lives on the net, and try to exchange with others looking for company and recognition in virtual space.  This has led to some privacy problems and some exploitation of youngsters by the unscrupulous.  Better policed is Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, invented while he was a student at Harvard.  It tends to restrict access to a limited body of associates, say your classmates at a college.  Like Bill Gates, Zuckerberg eventually gave up Harvard for the lure of computer moguldom.  His enterprise is now headquartered in Palo Alto, and he is now backed with lots of venture money from VC that dream of making a killing someday.  See “Me Media,” New Yorker, May 15, 2006, pp.50-59.  Yet to be explored, we think, is how to nurture and construct better knowledge communities where sophisticated dialogue and collaboration takes place, free perhaps of the rambling and platitudes endemic in blogdom.  There’s yet much to be discovered at making global collaboration work.  (6/20/06)

233. University Arbitrage
“[D]ebt-raising is becoming more common, although the average bond issue is smaller” than $250 million worth of bonds recently raised by Cornell, or the hundred of millions brought in by Harvard and the University of Texas (“An Education in Finance,” The Economist, May 20, 2006, p. 79).  “Lehman Brothers reckons that the overall market for higher-education debt has tripled since 2000, to $33 billion….”  With a need to extend and renovate facilitates in a market where student applicants may have a chance to get more choosey, it pays to leverage assets with debt.  “Both public and not-for-profit universities often issue tax-exempt debt….  They can then invest the money they raise in the higher-yielding taxable market but, because of their non-profit status, avoid taxes.”  In effect, a university can borrow cheaply and earn a spread.  “Most universities borrow at variable rates … and then hedge their interest-rate risk through swaps.”  (6/7/06)

232. Terrorism and Science
A step at a time, we are fashioning analytical tools that will help us identify and control terrorist networks.  We have previously discussed “Syndromic Surveillance Networks” which show promise in dealing with everything from pollution to terrorists.  As well, “honeypot” theory, out of Israel, devised to deal with computer viruses, may be deployed against a variety of other threats.  We have, in fact, a greater need to look at Israeli thinking, particularly as relates to skyjacking, since that nation has been dealing with hit and run tactics since its founding. 

231. The Imperfect Art of Economic Development
Despite all the brainpower and money that has been put to the task of lifting developing nations out of poverty, we still don’t have a very good idea how to go about it.  In general the problem is that theorists from very developed nations want to impose their complex ideas on simple societies which need very basic improvements, such as Norman Borlaug’s high-yield, low-pesticide dwarf wheat, the Wendroff Cart, or a plastic bin to strain arsenic out of drinking water. 

Thoughtful people everywhere have grown cynical of government and NGO attempts to micromanage development.  Lord Peter Bauer thought the main duty of governments was to guarantee property rights, and to get out of the way of free markets and the free exchange of ideas.  The renowned Hernando de Soto of Peru thinks guaranteed property rights linked to microfinance can lift vast numbers of the poor out of poverty.  In effect, they are both saying that the role of government in development is to create a stable political climate and a reasonable legal framework. 

Update: More on Microfinance
Everybody from Bono to Bill Gates is taking a whack at world poverty, a field open to all comers since nobody has a good model for getting at the problem.  Pierre Omidyar, founder of eDay and co-founder of Omidyar Network, has gotten into the act by taking up the cudgels for microfinance.  He is funneling $100 million to microfinance institutions via The Omidyar-Tufts Microfinance Fund.  In fact, microfinance is very much the enthusiasm of this decade, which one can read about in The Economics of Microfinance and in the publication Microfinance Matters.  All this was set in motion by the Peruvian Herman de Soto. 

230. Bursting the Bubble
Ray DeVoe, probably the most perceptive and most literate devotee of the financial markets, has watched, partially in glee we think, as the various bubbles in the U.S. and in the world have gone poof and disappeared forever.  The worst bubble of all, of course, is the silly inflation in housing prices, propped up by easy money and giveaway interest rates.  It has held on for a while. But no more.  The default rate is up drastically, and a further tumble in prices is in the offing.  “RealtyTrac, the leading online marketplace for foreclosure properties, today released its 2006 Q1 U.S. Foreclosure Market Report, which showed that 323,102 properties nationwide entered some stage of foreclosure in the first quarter of 2006, a 38 percent increase from the previous quarter and a 72 percent year-over-year increase from the first quarter of 2005.”  Squire Firehock, who now has time to watch the Decline of the West, just forwarded this little tidbit to us.  (5/17/06) 

229. Upmarket Coffee
Not only manufacturers, but farmers as well, are finding that they have to go upmarket into niches in order to survive.  This is being seen in the world coffee business where prices richochet widely, now fortunately double the rock bottom levels of August 2002.  See The Economist, April 1, 2006, p. 33.  Some are decoupling from world prices, linking to Fairtrade in London which seeks to get farmers a reasonable price.  Others get certified as organic or “bird-friendly” to get a premium.  “Some niches can be large.  Only 6% of world output is of top quality, but in Costa Rica and Guatemala the figure rises to 60%.”  “Mexico lags behind its neighbors in extracting higher prices.  But 95% of the coffee in Mexico is arabica—the type of bean demanded by connoisseurs—rather than lower-grade robusta.  Almost all of it is grown at altitude, which also improves quality.  So Mexico, too, has the potential to compete on quality rather than price.”  Interestingly, Mexico also has high quality vanilla bean production, but here too it has had a hard time extracting a quality premium, and so its “exports of coffee are less than half of what they were six years ago.”  Hopefully better governance and efforts by trade associations.  Fernando Celis has been a leader in this effort and has a written about “New Forms of Association in Mexican Coffee Cultivation.”  Our sister site, www.spicelines.com, recently talks of a tour of the Veracruz region, which grows the finest coffee, vanilla beans, and other agricultural delicacies, but poor marketing nets the growers subpar prices.  (5/3/06)

228. Farmers' Markets
Farmers’ markets have grown like topsy—all to good effect.  Farmers, cutting out heavy-handed middlemen, get a better dollar for their product, offer fresher produce, often without chemicals, and, to boot, bring more variety to urban households and to gourmet restaurants.  “The Ripe Stuff,” by Mary-Powell Thomas in Audubon Magazine, March-April 2006, pp. 82-87 provides a very good review of the subject, although her representative selection of markets is a bit flawed, citing at least two markets around the country where the prices are too high and the fare too limited.  Accounting now for 2 percent of the fresh produce sold in the U.S., the number of markets has risen from 1,755 in 1994 to 3,706 in 2004.  They are the hope for the preservation of the family farm and the conservation of variety in species.  Interestingly, Ms. Thomas lives in Brooklyn, where one will find many of the hardcore advocates for an alternate society.  The markets are a good idea for another reason.  With the growing urbanization of America, the conservation movement has been losing its footing.  It is Balkanized and often pursues the petty at the expense of the important.  Farmers’ Markets provide the means for conservationists to connect with America.  If you can hit people where they eat, you stand a chance of winning against mindless, predatory development.  (4/26/06)

227. Zoning and Regulations Equal High Costs
We are just beginning to understand friction costs, the roadblocks to easy commerce such as government regulations, lawyer redtape, and so on, that make products and services more costly than they should be.  We have still not devised good official ways of lowering them. Edward L.Glaeser, a Harvard economist, has long wondered why housing costs so much more than it should, dramatically so in some urban areas.  To over-simplify, he finds that zoning bakes in high costs.  Jon Gertner’s “Home Economics,” New York Times Magazine, March 5, 2006, pp. 94-99 gives a quick tutorial on Glaeser’s thinking, which Chip Case, an economist in this sector at Wellesley, buys into, as we learned in our recent discussions with him. 

226. Prematurely Retired
Sooner or later, we will have to face up the fact that we, along with the other developed nations, are just getting plain old, and that our attitudes towards and treatment of oldsters have got to change—completely.  The sooner the better. 

As we said in “Breakdowns Don’t Work,” we more or less have to give up the concept of retirement, as it now exists.  First, the negative.  We can no longer afford the private and public pension systems as now constructed; instead, we will have to raise the retirement age, with a quick leap to 70, and with the further idea that even then we mean partial retirement, enabling people who are able to keep working.  Along with this, we have to turn the healthcare system on end.  Oldsters account for an unbelievable percentage of our out-of-control healthcare costs which are draining our purses dry and making our businesses globally uncompetitive.  That means dramatically improved preventive, public health care from childhood—something that does not really exist today.  In fact, America’s infant mortality rates make us look like a Third-World country.  And much of the senior chronic care has to be done outside hospitals with much lower paid healthcare coaches. 

Second, the positive.  It so happens we need these oldsters, many of whom have a better work ethic and a lot of practical education lacking in their children, and their children’s children.  So the good news is that we need them as much as they need to be employed. 

The Economist, February 18, 2006, pp. 65-67 takes some of this on in “Turning Boomers into Boomerangs.”  This deals with the aging of the workforce, acknowledging that there will not be enough knowledge workers to keep advanced economies humming. 

“Near the top of the AARP’s latest list (of good senior employers) comes Deere & Company, a no-nonsense industrial-equipment manufacturer based in Moline, Illinois.”  The Economist has a tough time talking simply: it’s a farm tractor maker that’s added on a bunch of other stuff.  “About 35% of Deere’s 46,000 employees are over 50 and a number of them are in their 70s.” Deere has devised flexible work rules and factory ergonomics that help seniors.  Toyota, BMW, and IBM also are working the senior route. 

But the companies that focus on developing senior work forces are few and far between.  Most managers are thinking too short term to be dealing with this looming problem.  Higher payscales for older, long-term employees often is a disincentive for cost-plagued companies.  And many government policies unintentionally discourage the employment of a grey force.  That said, a massive shift to elder employment will have to come because we need their skills and we can’t afford to pay them benefits to sit on their posteriors. 

This is, incidentally, a massive opportunity for higher education, which needs to be totally re-invented in any event.  Seniors, if you like, will have to be retreaded, and this must get done as they near their first semiretirement so that they can seamlessly move into their next jobs, which must be brain- rather than brawn-centered.  Donald R. Read writes about the “Seniors Market” in Community College Journal, April/May 2004, pp. 44-50.  He sees the senior re-education market as a major opportunity for higher education: 

Right now, there are about 35 million adults over age 65 in the United States.  In 2030, that number will have more than doubled, to about 71 million.  …  An example of the opportunity represented by this population is an experiment called Next Step … under the joint sponsorship of the Communication Workers of America, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and the Verizon Corporation.  …  The program has already put over 4,300 employees through a program leading to the A.A.S. degree in Telecommunications.  …  When the employees/students complete the five-year program, they have new degrees, new jobs, and a new view of the future. 

225. Chess Nuts 
We are finding passionate chessies in unlikely locations, and we don’t quite know what to make of it.  Is it an escape from the wasteland where they find themselves?  Is it connected to some secret and isolated pockets of intellectual activity? 

The kids are champs at Border Star Elementary out in Kansas City, Missouri.  In fact, chess has taken hold with numerous kids in the Kansas City area.  “Lombard, who coaches several other chess teams in the Kansas City School District, said the three-year old chess program at Border Star has one of the strongest participation rates.” 

Professional football stars, as well as athletes in other sports, have taken up chess to pass the time and to heighten their attention to strategy.  In “Pro Football: Dazzling Moves on Field and Chessboard,” New York Times, January 28, 2006, we learn that a surprising number of football greats are chess players as well: 

Jim Brown and Barry Sanders are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.  The Jets’ Curtis Martin will almost certainly be one day.  As Shaun Alexander prepares to lead the Seattle Seahawks into the Super Bowl, he shares more with these players than just being one of football’s best running backs. 

Like the others, he is also an avid chess player. 

“I just love what chess is all about,” Alexander said.  “To me, it is just a great strategy game.” 

Miami’s Dade College has joined the chess big leagues, knocking Ivy League teams on their fannies.  The players came from “chess-mad Cuba.”  See the Wall Street Journal, March 4-5, 1006, pp. A1 and A6.  The Cubans still revere their 1920s grandmaster Jose Raul Capablanca; Che Guevara played chess to relax.  “Fidel Castro made learning the game obligatory in Cuban schools.  He established Soviet-style boarding schools where gifted young players received four hours of daily training from chess masters.”  (4/5/06)

224. How Nations Design 
“One of the keenest observers of this renaissance has been Lee Kun Pyo, director of the Human-Centered Interaction Design Laboratory at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology.  BusinessWeek Asia Editor David Rocks and Seoul Bureau Chief Moon Ihlwan recently sat down with Lee in a Seoul Chinese restaurant to share plates of roasted eggplant, grilled shrimp, and fried tofu while discussing the changes sweeping Korean design” (“The Flavor of Korean Design,” Business Week, January 24, 2006). 

But Koreans traditionally don’t articulate what they’re doing beforehand.  They’re very contextual.  Of course they do customer research and product planning and user-centered design and so on.  But they quickly arrive at solutions, then look at the solution to find any further problems.  Some might say that’s unsystematic, but it’s really very dynamic.  And it works well for products with a short lifecycle, like mobile phones or MP3 players. 

It’s not only design—there’s a pattern of differences among the cultures.  In food, the Japanese keep things very simple, Korean food is very hot, Chinese is very greasy.  In colors, Japan is very monochrome.  Korea is a little bit red.  And China is red and gold.

In Japanese traditional music there’s almost no sound.  Korea’s is a little bit noisier, and Chinese opera is very loud.  The same goes for the communication mode.  In Japan, when people finish speaking there’s a little pause, then the other person replies.  In Korea, people are a little faster, and in China they all overlap.  All those things are visible in aesthetics.  Japanese products don’t violate the horizontal and vertical, but Korean design is a little bit more dynamic.  And in China, it’s very busy. 

Korea has 230 design schools—more than America.  But 80% of those schools still require a drawing examination for admission.  Of course there are some design problems that require drawing.  But interface design solutions can’t be drawn. It doesn't make any sense. 

And this explains to us why Japanese design leads to too much functionality in a product and a dashboard (i.e., switches) that is much too complicated to operate, designed for a nation of near-sighted people.  On a more serious note, this whole discussion probably leads us to think rather carefully about where to have a product designed.  

223. Will Oil Shale Pan Out? 
“The United States contains massive amounts of oil in mineral deposits, known as oil shale, in the border area of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.  The recoverable energy from these deposits might be more than the equivalent of 800 billion barrels of crude oil—more than triple the known reserves of Saudi Arabia.”  See “In Search of Energy Security,” Rand Review, Fall 2005, pp.18-23.  But, of course, the million-dollar question is whether we can mine them economically. 

With in-situ conversion, “electric heating elements are placed in bore holes, slowly heating the oil deposit.  The released liquids are gathered in wells specifically designed for that purpose.”  “While larger-scale tests are needed, Shell anticipates that this method may be competitive with crude oil priced below even $30 a barrel.”  Right now, oil has to be pegged at $70 a barrel, for shale extraction to be viable.  If shale extraction gets over price, technological, environmental, and legal hurdles, it could also mildly depress the price per barrel of traditional oil. 

222. NanoScience
We keep meaning to develop more sources and commentary around nanoscience and not getting it done.  Everybody has a piece of the action, so it’s hard to put together a comprehensive piece about this field.  Even Richard Feynmann, everybody’s favorite Nobel Prize winner, dipped his toes in nano-waters.  So we will just get started and keep adding to this article.  Of course, this item should be featured in a area called Little Ideas, instead of Big Ideas, but we will live with that contradiction. 

221. Fighting Computer Viruses with Honey Pots
Eran Shir and colleagues at Tel Aviv University think they can put a stop to computer viruses by hitting them before they get started.  In general they would propose to embed lures—a honey pot—in the network that would attract newly formed viruses.  Then data about the viruses could quickly be passed around to computers, and defenses erected.  An article detailing their theory called “Distributive immunization of networks against viruses using the ‘honey-pot’ architecture” appeared in the December 1, 2005 Nature Physics.  Some details about this work and Shir’s general activities appear on his personal homepage.

Something analogous to this, we think, will eventually become the process nations use to entrap terrorists.  That is, processes will be devised which snare activists, submit them to analysis, and broadcast safety protocols to likely target nations.  Present tactics that try to discover and destroy terrorist cells are both wasteful and rather ineffective.  (3/15/06)

220. La Patria Nostra
It’s all too easy to ignore Italy and neglect the disproportionate effect it has across the globe.  The butt of jokes, Westerners everywhere mock it, and it mocks itself.  So much of what goes on is hidden from view.  It is famous for an underground economy, a robust, secret trade which is taken to be more sizable than the larger economy, and certainly much more dynamic.  Italians made their living in the post-war world away from the prying eyes of the taxman and the prying hands of corrupt officials-in the not so hidden, invisible economy. 

All sorts of things make the country different, and far different than we think it is.  We hear than only 4% of the population can be classified as immigrant, rather apart from Germany or from the France that has been recently racked by riots of its segregated North Africans.  Greece, just across the sea, is actually being invigorated by the 10% who come from abroad.  Catholicism is dominant, but who would have thought that Jehovah Witnesses (an American import from Brooklyn, no less) would be the second largest Christian denomination? 

A good starting point on some of its dilemmas is The Economist, November 24, 2005.  It makes for dreary reading, and you will be fairly convinced that Italy is on the way to the junkheap, until your commonsense asserts itself.  Of course, journalists specialize in problems, not solutions.  To leaven the spirits, one should probably visit The Hague between March 11 and June 25, 2006 when the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis will be “Dreaming of Italy.”  Italy is what you make of it.  Analysts tear it apart, and creatives put it back together. 

219. The Spread of Sudoku
Sudoku has been spreading through America like wildfire, and yet most Americans have never heard of it.  “The movement continues to grow, and there is a mini industry springing up to sell sudoku in a variety of new forms.  A number of software makers are introducing versions for cellphones and personal digital assistants” (Wall Street Journal, February 9, 2006, pp.D1 and D5).  Electronic games are on the way, and board-game maker Briarpatch is coming out with a version.  “Web sites such as soduku.com are offering premium services where players order an unlimited number of puzzles to play online for $15.” 

“After first catching on in Japan in the 1980s (Its name is a Japanese word commonly translated as ‘single numbers only’), sudoku quickly hopscotched across the globe.  It was introduced in England a little more than a year ago.  The New York Post … brought the puzzle across the Atlantic last spring.  More than a hundred U.S. papers now carry the puzzle and suduko puzzle books are popping up on best-seller lists.” 

“Still, the puzzle is already facing competition from a cohort of new Japanese puzzles.like kakuro….”  Culturally it would be interesting to understand what obsessive aspect of Japanese character makes it the fountainhead for complex gaming—Sony Playstation, sodoku,  Nintendo, bishojo,  etc.  “The pachinko business in Japan is five times larger than the gambling industry in the entire United States and 10 times larger than Las Vegas gambling revenue.  There are some 17,000 pachinko parlors in Japan and 5 million pachinko or slot machines operating.”  All the games, which range from gambling to pornography to child’s play, would appear to be a permitted outlet in a society where the citizenry voluntarily exerts self repression over itself. 

218. Watanabe Sees the Light
Since the end of the Cold War, we have seen a burst of nationalism in country after country.  Our own thesis is that each country, in its own way, is reacting to overwhelming global forces. Such emotions have long been pent up and have now been released with the end of Big Power dominance.  Nobody quite knows how to deal with these global storms, so suspicious, virtually paranoid reaction mixed with false bravado becomes the kneejerk response of the day.  Islamic terrorism is just one of these global forces: it is stateless and is a virus that threatens the modern state, as jihadists try to pull us back into medieval times, in that age that preceded the rise of nations as we know them now. 

Remarkably, Tsuneo Watanabe, a conservative and Japan’s most powerful media baron, is now sticking his finger right in the eye of Japanese jingoism.  See “Shadow Shogun Steps Into Light, to Change Japan” (New York Times, February 11, 2006): 

Mr. Watanabe, now nearly 80 years old, has stepped into the light.  He has recently granted long, soul-baring interviews in which he has questioned the rising nationalism he has cultivated so assiduously in the pages of his newspaper, the conservative Yomiuri—the world's largest, with a circulation of 14 million.  Now, he talks about the need to acknowledge Japan's violent wartime history and reflects on his wife’s illness and his own, as well as the joys of playing with his new hamsters. 

His first move was to publish an editorial last June criticizing Mr. Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, the Shinto memorial where 14 Class A war criminals, including the wartime prime minister, Hideki Tojo, are deified.  It was an about-face for The Yomiuri, which had tended to react viscerally against foreign criticism of the Yasukuni visits. 

Mr. Koizumi worships at a shrine that glorifies militarism, said Mr. Watanabe, who equates Tojo with Hitler.  He added, “This person Koizumi doesn't know history or philosophy, doesn’t study, doesn’t have any culture.  That’s why he says stupid things, like, ‘What's wrong about worshiping at Yasukuni?’  Or, ‘China and Korea are the only countries that criticize Yasukuni.’  This stems from his ignorance.”  Like many of postwar Japan’s leaders with wartime experience, Mr. Watanabe is suspicious of the emotional appeals to nationalism used increasingly by those who never saw war.  (3/1/06)

217. Theories about the Leisure Class
The economists are telling us we are becoming more laid back every day.  Economists Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst tell us that over the last 40 years our leisure activity has increased 4-8 hours a week, depending on how you measure it (The Economist, “The Land of Leisure,” February 4, 2006, pp.28-29).  Several academics agree with their conclusions.  Also see Chicago Graduate School of Business report.)  Ostensibly these findings are based on time-use diaries where detailed journal entries show how a population spends its time.  Such a conclusion defies the evidence of our own senses where we find people working harder—outside of the workplace—and multitasking as never before.  This study, by the way, even takes into account some of the work outside the workplace—chores like going to the market, etc. 

216. Auto Perplex
In “The Thrill Is Gone,” we have said that the sun is setting on the automobile, even if the auto industry is bursting at the seams in China, Japan, and Korea, with other Asian nations coming along in their wake.  The auto was right for the 20th century, but is a millstone around the neck in the 21st.  Even so, it is far from boring, and there will no end of good stories to tell as it beats a strategic retreat from the planet Earth.  We will be following the industry here.

Real auto races, far from NASCAR foolishness, still can rock the most jaded observer.  We have mentioned The Cannonball and the Peking to Paris.  And we could easily go off to catch  La Carrera Panamericana, and Stephen Page has been kind enough to detail for us the 2005 iteration.  Appropriately, “the cars are pre-1954 sports and saloon cars with wickedly fast engines and six pot disc brakes that could stop a 747 on an aircraft carrier.”  It would not be Latin America if it did not hearken back to the 50s.  That was when we still dreamed that cars could soar, and we could do anything in such chariots.  In other words, that was back when the thrill was still there. 

It’s such races that take us away from the cares of the auto industry.  GM continues to dig a deeper hole for itself.  Often it makes all the right moves in the wrong direction.  Bloggist Douglas Smith out of McKinsey observes it in “Removing the Deck Chairs from the Titanic”: 

It still doesn’t “get it” when it comes to the value side of its products.  As previously noted, GM invested heavily in product design and manufacturing flexibility—that is, the capacity to move quicker to provide new products.  It can now bring 15 new products to market quicker than eve before. And, what are the deck chair managers doing with this flexibility.  13 of the new products will be re-designs of full size SUVS.

13 out of 15 are bets on the past.

Update: More Bankruptcies.  Every time we turn around, another bankrupt in the auto industry pops up on our screen.  The grapewine tells us that something like 8 out of 13 of the major auto parts suppliers have gone belly up.  The Detroit News (February 11, 2006), tells us that J.L. French has just gone belly up, but it’s just one of many: “Major suppliers such as Delphi Corp., Collins & Aikman Corp., Meridian Automotive Systems Inc., Tower Automotive Inc. and Amcast Industrial Corp. are all currently operating under bankruptcy protection.”  (3/8/06)

215. A Greener Military
The U.S. Army has moved from grudging compliance with environmental regulations to aggressive advocacy, paralleling a trend among some major multinationals.  At Fort Carson it “has invested in rain sensors for its irrigation systems which, it hopes, will save $80,000 a year; and it may save another $30,000 annually from cleaning and recycling much of it its hazardous paint-cleaning solvent….”  “Reducing the military’s ecological footprint makes it ‘stealthier’, claims Michael Cain, director of the army’s Environmental Policy Institute.”  “The air force is the largest federal purchaser of green power in the country: two of its bases are powered solely by renewable energy, mostly wind” (The Economist, November 24, 2005, p. 43).  AEPI dates back to 1990, and has bounced around a bit from Illinois to Georgia to Virginia.  It seems to be gaining stature, and, at a minimum, its existence suggests that all major institutions in our society are at least beginning to pay lip service to green initiatives.  (2/22/06)

214. The Tweel
Michelin has come up with a new tire that some auto buffs say is the biggest innovation to hit the industry in 30 years.  To wit, it does not use air.  “The heart of Tweel innovation is its deceptively simple looking hub and spoke design that replaces the need for air pressure while delivering performance previously only available from pneumatic tires.  The flexible spokes are fused with a flexible wheel that deforms to absorb shock and rebound with unimaginable ease.  Without the air needed by conventional tires, Tweel still delivers pneumatic-like performance in weight-carrying capacity, ride comfort, and the ability to ‘envelope’ road hazards.”

“Mounted on a car, the Tweel is a single unit, though it actually begins as an assembly of four pieces bonded together: the hub, a polyurethane spoke section, a ‘shear band’ surrounding the spokes, and the tread band—the rubber layer that wraps around the circumference and touches the pavement.”

213. Digital Electric Grids
We have commented extensively on the infrastructure deficit in this country, and even abroad, that will necessitate rebuilding in far different ways almost every aspect of the systems underlying our economy—education, electricity, telephone, railroad, government, whatever you can imagine.   Peter Huber, in “Why 99.5% is Not Good Enough,” in Ubiquity, tells us that we need ultra-reliable electric flows to keep our digital civilization clicking.  More about all this can be found in his Digital Power Report.  (1/25/06)

212. Algae Waste: Purification
William J. Oswald, a pioneer in the use of algae to remedy all sorts of problems, just passed away.  See the New York Times, December 21, 2005.  He studied ways to use algae that included “treating sewage, increasing food supplies, generating energy and facilitating voyages into deep space….”  “He developed a system of ponds in which algae eat and purify wastewater, and built more than 100 around the world.  The algae could then be harvested using his patented process as protein-rich food for animals or people able to ignore its provenance.  The leftover water, now cleaned, could be used for irrigation, as a coolant for engines and even, with more purification, for human consumption.”

Update: Smokestack Algae
Algae pioneer William Oswald would be delighted.  On top of MIT’s 20-megawatt power plant sits an algae factory.  “The algae are eating carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides from the plant’s emissions—40 percent of the former and 86 percent of the latter—and turning them into harmless oxygen and nitrogen.  Each day, an algae crop is harvested that could be dried and converted to solid fuel or processed into biodiesel or ethanol, transforming a pollution problem into a moneymaker.”  Chemical engineer Isaac Berzin now has started GreenFuel Technologies Corporation, and is trying the technology out at a power plant in the Southwest.  See Sierra, May/June 2006, p. 13.  (6/28/06)

211. Geothermal Pumps
With rising energy prices, geothermal pumps are beginning to enter the mainstream, according to “Heat from the Earth to Warm Your Hearth,” New York Times, January 1, 2006, p. BU6.  Heat to warm houses is pumped up from six feet underground through plastic piping.  The water circulating in the pipe captures enough heat, since the temperature remains consistently warm down deep, enough so to comfortably heat a house, saving perhaps 20 percent or more on energy bills.  “There are virtually no moving parts other than the pump,” and maintenance consists of cleaning a filter every few months.  In the summer, air can be cooled by simply reversing the process.

210. Branding and the Senses
Martin Lindstrom says branding is all about touch, taste, smell, sight, and sound.  In his Brand Sense: Build Powerful Brands through Touch, Taste, Smell, Sight, and Sound, this ad executive says we have to go beyond print and TV where we work through the eyes, capturing consumers by connecting with the 5 senses.  “Mr. Lindstrom suggests that brandbuilders can learn from organized religion, where sensory experiences (the small of incense, the cry of the muezzin or the taste of a sacramental wafer) have been blended for centuries to bind consumers closer to  the faith” (The Economist, April 23, 205, p. 80).  (1/4/06)

209. Why Sharing Works
“Technology increases the ability of people to share, but will they share more than just technology?” (The Economist, February 5, 2005, p. 72).  The Global Province has widely explored the subject of collaboration—why in the age of globalization and the Internet, it, rather than competition, produces economic value.  Very small economic units—be they small nations or small business units—working in free alliance with others give rise to superior results, while traditional largescale aggregations are themselves declining in value and are serving as a drag on the economic systems in which they emmeshed.

Further, we would claim that collaboration demands a different state of mind than that which arises in a traditional laisse- faire market environment.  In this regard, see our “The Uses of Prayer.”  Also look at “Investment Outlook: Infrastructure.”  The Economist notes that “[e]conomists have not always found it easy to explain why self-interested people would freely share scarce, privately owned resources.  Their understanding, though, is much clearer than it was 20 or 30 years ago: co-operation, especially when repeated, can breed reciprocity and trust, to the benefit of all.”  There are all sorts of reason for information sharing (which lies at the heart of the knowledge economy).  My use does not get in the way of your use: we both can use it at the same time.  Also the more people that use it the better—if everybody uses it, then communication amongst all is easier.  And, with the Internet, the costs of distribution are virtually non-existent.

Yochai Benkler, of Yale Law School, and others have further made clear that there is a premium for all in the sharing of certain goods such as computing power and bandwidth.  Indeed, such sharing may even extend further in so far as many goods are not in use a great deal of the time, and collective benefits can arise from collaborative use of downtime.

In effect, the contention here would be that economists now understand that people have come to understand that the network effects of sharing more than offset the advantages of going it alone.  We would hazard a guess that there is even a more important reason why people are sharing.  Traditional systems have become cumbersome and bureaucratic, often to such a degree that participants cannot achieve their goals, whatever their resources.  Out of frustration, they move to a “sharing” model. 

Sharing enables agile players.  That is underlined in a recent interview by our managing partner:

In a Ubiquity interview, management consultant and futurist William P. Dunk says: “Besides the brain in one’s head, there's also a brain in the gut that controls the digestive system and so forth.  It’s a fairly serious brain.  I suspect that we’re going to turn out to have more semi-brains, when we look at the body even more thoroughly, and we’re going to conclude that the human system is the right model for man-made systems, because of the human system’s qualities of durability, ruggedness, and resistance to attack.  What collaboration is about is distributed intelligence, and I think that systems and governments and companies are all in such a degree of gridlock now that we desperately need to have broad-based intelligence coming into play everywhere.”  (1/4/06)

208. Keeping Up on Japan
It’s hard enough to keep up on any society.  But a few—Japan, Singapore, and a few others—make a few of their interesting initiatives transparent for all to see, if we will only take a look.  We find delightful, for instance, Trends in Japan, sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.  This is unusually hip for a government website, and it takes you through everything from fashion to science to business and even arts and entertainment.  This is an intelligent way of bragging about one’s nation.  (12/28/05)

207. Nature's Flood Control
We depend too much on the levees built by the Army Corps of Engineers and even fancier works devised by engineers in Holland to restrain rivers, and lakes, and oceans—all of which becomes a bit more difficult if we are having a patch of global warming.  Better that we should let wetlands on our shores and in marshes return to health, because they’re part of Nature’s intelligent design to protect our Continents.  “In Britain alone, over $725 million a year is spent defending the most vulnerable communities from river and coastal flooding using embankments and other structures” (The Economist, October 23, 2005, p. 80).  Howard Wheater and colleagues at Imperial College in London have been working around the Severn River in Wales to see how effective vegetation is in cutting severe rain flows.  “In areas planted with young, broad-leafed trees—and with no livestock grazing—it was up to an impressive 80cm an hour when the trees were only seven years old.  Indeed, even two-year-old trees made a perceptible difference.”  Turning unused farmland back to woodland would help a lot.  Even more, provisions for foresting new building developments and the like would also help immensely.  (12/14/05)

206. Handy on Gurus and the Future of Work
English business guru Charles Handy—he now prefers to call himself a social philosopher—gives a guided tour of a slew of business gurus: some great, like Michael Porter and Peter Drucker, and some not so great, like Bill Gates and Tom Peters.  The short introductory material is a bit helpful, but the audios are a chore and only for the dedicated.  A better place, however, to look at gurus, leading thinkers, etc. is Aurora Online, which comes to you from Athabasca, Canada’s Open University.  The thinkers on Aurora are not, with a few exceptions, business gurus, but they are thinkers about society and hence more illuminating about the future issues with which major corporations are grappling today.  They’re less well known but better at articulating matters that will deeply affect corporate strategy.  In an Aurora interview, the provocative Handy says, “Statistics in Europe already show that not only are 10 per cent of people who want to work not able to get it, but another one third of the work force is working outside an organization.  That is, they are self-employed or working part time for temporary periods, selling their services or goods into an organization.”  “I mean that we are beginning to see the end of the employee society.”  Handy himself, a survivor of Shell Oil and academia, has become just such an outsider.  (12/7/05)

205. Profits of Doom
As much as anybody, Ernest Sandberg at the University at Buffalo has cornered the academic disaster market.  In planning, he is doing considerable work on terrorism and natural disasters.  He has also ploughed a lot of  other ground as evidenced by his book The Economy of Icons: How Business Manufactures Meaning in which he claims that image not information is the driving force of our economy.  We find it interesting to discover how image conscious Sternberg and his colleagues are: they positioned themselves well to attract notice from Hurricane Katrina, and the press took the bait. Probably more profound is Theodore Steinberg’s book Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America.  It documents how many natural disasters have been magnified through grave human error.  Hurricane Katrina was magnified by the huge loss of wetlands in the Gulf area.  Interestingly, we find the theoretical work on disasters and disaster recovery is really a bit thin.  (11/2/05)

204. Fighting Hurricanes
Moshe Alamaro of MIT proposes “the creation of small, man-made tropical cyclones to cool the ocean and rob big, natural hurricanes of their source of energy.”  He figures offshore barges with upward-facing jet engines can cause evaporation and cooling on the ocean’s surface. “Protecting Central America and the southern United States from hurricanes would cost less than $1 billion a year.”  See The Economist, June 11, 2005, p.8 (Technology Quarterly).  (10/12/05)

Update: Managing Hurricanes; Making Rain.
As it turns out, scientists are playing around with a number of schemes for managing the weather.  Ross N. Hoffmann, VP for research at Atmospheric and Environmental Research Inc. in Lexington, Mass, has done computer simulations showing that minor atmospheric adjustments could make a big difference in the weather.  A rise of 2 to 3 degrees can turn the weather around, though nobody has a clue as to how to pull that off outside the lab.  Hoffmann and others think this might be achieved by beaming energy down from satellites or by sprinkling rainmaking chemicals on the clouds near the hurricane’s eye.  Damian R. Wilson, in Britain’s weather service, has proposed coating the ocean with vegetable oil to prevent hurricanes from lapping up water.  See Business Week, October 24, 2005, pp.64-66. 

203. Shangri-La Diet
As you read sundry pieces on him, you discover Seth Roberts is more than a bit eccentric, so you must take all his words of wisdom with a stout serving of some ironic brew.  He has suddenly gotten a bit trendy because he appeared in a magazine column by a Chicago trendy, Steven Levitt, the father of Freakonomics, which lies by our bedside unread. Levitt is very fond of counter-intuitive insights (see “Quantum Thinking” and “Chicago Has Got It”) and Roberts provided him with some fodder.  In effect, Roberts theorizes that man has been imprinted with a strange appetite mechanism since hunter and gatherer times.  When his sensory mechanism feels there is a lot of food around, he gorges. Amidst plenty, the sin of gluttony becomes manifest.  Instead of stopping when we have had a delicate sufficiency of food, we keep stuffing ourselves to the gills, our instincts fearing that we shall not again encounter such plenty for many a day.  But if we feel things are scare, our appetite lessens, and we adjust to reality.  Tricking his own bodily mechanism, Roberts managed to lose 40 pounds to prove his theory.  He had struck out on everything else—a sushi diet , a tubular-pasta diet, a waterlog diet, etc.  While this article appeared in The New York Times Magazine, September 11, 2005, you can best read about this at www.gadsdentimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050911/ZNYT04/509110341/1011.  To get more into his stone-age theories, read http://calorielab.com/news/2005/09/12/lost-diet-secrets-of-the-stone-age-revealed.  The Levitt blog, meanwhile, captures a lot of back and forth on his diet, including more comments from Roberts (www.freakonomics.com/blog.php).  Roberts own summary of his hunches about our body’s stone-age chemistry can be found at http://psychology.berkeley.edu/directories/facultypages/robertsresearch.html.  Roberts has other fun thoughts, such as that sleeplessness may result from sitting around too much, and walking and standing can help make you sleep like a rock.  And that self experimentation is a particularly good way to produce new insights (http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/117). 

We asked Mr. Roberts why he called it the “Shangri-La.”  He replies: “Because it puts people at peace with food—like being in Shangri-La, a peaceful place.  Reduces or eliminates food compulsions, such as eating between meals and eating late at night.  It is also a kind of ideal diet, just as Shangri-La was a kind of ideal place.”  In other words, we avoid the frenzy of feeding in Shangri-La.  (10/12/05)

202. New Classes of Antibiotics
“Most of the commonly used antibiotics today are derived from soil-based order of germs known as Actinomycetales.  But their frequent use with human beings has led to resistant strains of bacteria.  Now microbiologists such as Norman Pace at the University of Colorado are plunging into caves to discover brand new organisms or extremophiles in caves, and he has devised new ways to reproduce them.”  Hazel Barton at Northern Kentucky University, a Pace protégé, “has identified 24 new microorganisms with antibiotic properties.”  “Extremophiles have shown some practical value in the past decade.  Diversa, a California biotech, has isolated an enzyme from a volcanic crater in Russia that is now being used to whiten paper….  A bacterium called Thermus aquaticcus, founded in a hot spring in Yellowstone National Park, has become the basis for polymerase chain reactions used in medical diagnosis and fingerprinting.”  Barton was featured in Journey into Amazing Caves, an Imax movie (www.amazingcaves.com).  (10/5/05)

201. Scholar Bloggers
In academia we used to say, “Publish or Perish.”  Alas, nobody will perish anymore because the Internet has provided anybody suffering from verbosity and a lack of writing discipline a playing field where she or he can go from digression to digression 24/7.  Going back a few years, you can read about the spread of academic blogging in the Chronicle of Higher Education at http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i39/39a01401.htm.   Even the best and brightest can get a bit tedious on their blogs: in this vein, read Judge Posner and Economist Becker at www.becker-posner-blog.com, which is sort of drawn out, though both fellows have first-rate minds and deserve a following.  By the way, almost all academic blogs need an easy search list of topics, so that we can separate the wheat from the considerable chaff.  Curiously, the University of Chicago seems to produce an outsized number of blogs, telling us that the academics there get a bit lonely and want to peddle their wares on both the coasts.  There are various scholarly blog indexes around, none of them great but at least it’s a way to find out about these outpourings.  Try http://farrell.blogspot.
com/2003_04_13_farrell_archive.html#92862389.  You will come away convinced that at its best academic writing is not very rigorous or disciplined.  Nonetheless, we find the idea of the scholarly blog tantalizing since we need better ways of rapidly getting knowledge from the lectern into the public marketplace.  (10/5/05)

200. Talking about Big Issues
In our over-digitized lives, where we are horribly subject to distraction and where we don’t take time to even read the daily newspaper, we have become difficult to talk to about deeply important matters.  It’s a task for those who care about long-term worldly issues to communicate about them with the vox populi.  But that just means that creative people are getting more imaginative.  Richard Curtis, writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, is out with yet another romantic comedy, The Girl in the Café.  Except in the background, this film deals with the plight of poor nations, helping revive the concept of massive debt relief, something the world had to do in the thirties (www.hbo.com/films/girlinthecafe/synopsis).  Ironically, of course, the U.S. has just tightened up its personal bankruptcy laws, something it will have to reverse, given its widening, dramatic gap in incomes between the rich and the poor. Well, we don’t know how the movie is, but we will give it a go.  We are hoping for pleasant propaganda and colorful people.  It is not only the politically correct who are out with art that pushes ideas: Michael Crichton’s State of Fear throws brickbats at the global warming polemicists.  (9/14/05)

199. Biomimetics
“Velcro is probably the most famous and certainly the most successful example of biological mimicry, or ‘biomimetics.’” (It came about because Swiss inventor George de Mestral saw the hook and loop system seeds use to cling to animals, and knew the idea could be duplicated by technologists).  Imitating fish, Nekton Research in Durham, North Carolina has developed a robot fish that uses fins instead of a propeller to get about.  All sorts of experimental robots are using principles gathered up from models in nature.  See The Economist, June 11, 2005, pp. 18-22.  (9/7/05)

198. Patching-up One’s Genes
Purdue University scientists have found plants that have “a corrected version of a defective gene inherited from both their parents, as if some handy backup copy with the right version” lurked in their heritage.  “If confirmed, it would represent an unprecedented exception to the laws of inheritance discovered by Gregor Mendel in the 19th century.  Equally surprising, the cryptic genome appears not to be made of DNA, the standard hereditary material.”   See “Genome-wide Non-Mendelian Inheritance of Extra-Genomic Information in Arabidopsis,” by Lolle, Victor, Young, and Pruitt in Nature (www.nature.
com/nature/journal/v434/n7032/abs/nature03380_fs.html).  “The finding poses a puzzle for evolutionary theory because it corrects mutations, which evolution depends on as generators of novelty” (New York Times, March 23, 2005). Clifford Weil has some details about this very remarkable development on his vita at www.agry.purdue.edu/
staffbio/weilbio.htm.  (8/31/05)

197. Shale