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263. States in the Whole

In “State Budget Troubles Worsen,”   we learn that 44 out of the 50 states will run sizable deficits in their budgets in the current or upcoming fiscal years, the situation having grown considerably worse over the last 6 months. Still in surplus are Texas, North Dakota, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, and West Virginia.  The cumulative deficits of all states—already very substantial—are projected to double in fiscal 2010 and 2011.  Those investing in municipal securities or sundry state obligations should look carefully at states where deficits as a percentage of the general fund are particularly high such as California, Arizona, Georgia, and Utah where double digit figures are contemplated. Additionally double digit budget gaps will beset a large number of states in 2010, these also meriting special scrutiny. (05-20-09)

262. Self Cleaning Walls and Trains

“Self- Cleaning Walls and Windows: Photocatylsts Used on Buildings and Trains,” Trends in Japan, January 2009. “The key to these self-cleaning surfaces are photocatalysts, substances that mediate chemical reactions and are activated by light energy. When organic matter comes into contact with a photocatalyst, it is oxidized at an increased rate and decomposes into water and carbon dioxide.” “TOTO Ltd., a major manufacturer of toilets, baths, and other sanitary ceramics, was the first company to commercialize photocatalytic paint for outside walls when it released Hydrotect Color Coat ECO-700 on to the market in 2002. Then in 2007 it put on sale ECO-EX, which boasts even greater cleaning power.” “Toto estimates that more than 13 million square meters of building walls have been coated with products in the Hydrotect Color Coat series nationwide, producing a total cleaning effect equivalent to that of 710,000 poplar trees.” (04-15-09)

261. Selling Ideas:  Do As I Say Not As I Do

McKinsey is an incredibly ponderous consulting organization whose big selling point is that it puts lots of grey haired, nice looking executives on a client’s account.  Years ago our surveys revealed that you go elsewhere if you want to get something done.  So, naturally, it has done an unwieldy article on communication with a top-heavy title based on an interview with a Stanford professor who started out as an engineer but drifted into psychology.  It’s called Crafting a Message that Sticks:  An Interview with Chip Heath, McKinsey Quarterly, November 2007.  If translated, it comes down to the idea that a good message ultimately has to be poetry.  Here is sort of what brother Chip thinks will get you a big audience, as lifted from the article, with some of the wordiness eliminated:

1. Simplicity. Messages are most memorable if they are short and deep.  Glib sound bits are short, but they don’t last.  Proverbs such as the golden rule are short but also deep enough to guide the behavior of people over generations.
2. Unexpectedness.  Something that sounds like common sense won’t stick.  Look for the parts of your message that are uncommon sense.  Such messages generate interest and curiosity.
3. Concreteness.  Abstract language and ideas don’t leave sensory impressions; concrete images do. 
4. Credibility.  Will the audience buy the message?
5. Emotions.  Case studies that move people also involve them.
6. Stories.  Heath writes.  “Stories act as a kind of mental flight simulator….”

We should caution you, however, that these prompts will mostly help you with tactical communication.  They’re not the way to get across big, long-term, strategic ideas.  One is compelled to think more deeply about communication than this article suggests if you want to communicate about substantial matters.

The rules of communication are not immutable but change quite a bit in changing environments.  So many messages are now thrown at us daily that you have to style your thoughts to get through the chaff.  Moreover, each of us is a victim of an environment that makes us shallow, and turns us into email freaks all too ready to send out instant messages that lack weight and substance.  Because a plethora of words and digital daggers surround us, we must resort to pictures in expressing ourselves, but pictures that embrace more than the eyeballs.  To this end, take a peek at “In Photography, What Puzzles the Eye May Please the Mind,” New York Times, January 1, 2008, p.C5.  “ “Another paradoxical strategy for captivating viewers is to show them something they can’t immediately understand.”  This was the subject of a show at the Yale Art Gallery entitled “First Doubt: Optical Confusion in Modern Photography.”  “It was drawn mostly from the collection of Allan Chasanoff, who focused on acquiring confusing pictures….”   It is arguable that communications—where pictures or words—that are too accessible cannot access the deepest recesses of an audience’s mind or soul.  Some pictures from  “First Doubt” can be seen here. (04-01-09)

260. Standing Pat

“What’s the best way to stop a penalty kick?  Do nothing:  just stand in the center of the goal and don’t move….” That is the surprising conclusion of “Action Bias Among Elite Soccer Goalkeepers:  The Case of Penalty Kicks,” a paper published by a team of Israeli scientists in Journal of Economic Psychology.”  This idea has much wider implications.  There are a whole host of circumstances where those who master inaction carry the day.  Senator Pat Moynihan counseled benign neglect for certain social problems, quite certain government could only make things worse, and that time was the best healer. Elizabeth I, always pressed by her advisors to go to war and take precipitate action, dallied fruitfully, making her one of England’s greatest rulers. It is almost a certainty that outside powers who take up the cudgels in the Middle East will live to regret it:  far better to let the squabbling tribes there savage away at one another.  Investors who do let money burn a hole in their pockets often suffer less acute losses than the gun slingers. New York Times Magazine, December 14, 2008, p.57. (04-01-09)

259. Fighting Recessions with Innovations

258. Cell Phone—Locked in our Cells

The Global Province has frequently cited the ills imposed on us by the cell phone industry.  Basically we are suffering from all the problems and  none of the virtues of monopoly---something Judge Greene tried to remedy for ordinary phones when he broke up AT&T years ago.  What we have today throughout telecommunications is a re-concentration of all aspects of the industry without the fairly benign regulatory umbrella that once provided Americans from Coast to Coast with universal, rather reliable, inexpensive phone service.  Nowhere is this seen more clearly that in cell phones or mobile phones where we are paying very high prices for unreliable cell phones, networks with poor U.S. coverage that frequently drop calls, bills that arrive in the mail with incomplete information, the distinct possibility that the phones as provided are unsafe causing brain damage or cancer, and tedious marketing tactics that border on dishonesty.  It can be further argued that the industry has become a drag on the economy since we depend on a cheap, reliable, transparent infrastructure to make commerce flourish and to enhance the spread of ideas that lies at the basis of productive capitalism.  A host of information about cell phone practices and about its social impact can be found on the Global Province.

In this vein, consumers should consult “What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting” New York Times, December 28, 2008,  p.BU 3.  There is it is revealed that carriers have hiked their charges to lofty levels even as they have experienced a surge in volume. “All four of the major carriers decided during the last three years to increase the pay-per-use price for messages to 20 cents from 10 cents.”  “20 class-action lawsuits have been filed around the country against AT&T and the others carriers, alleging price-fixing for text messaging services.”  Professor Srinivasan Keshav of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, “whose academic research received financial support from one of the four major American carriers, discovered just how secretive the carriers are,” having been turned down by his sponsor when he asked for data on its network operations.  (02-04-09)

257. Space Satellite Energy

“Let the Sun Shine In,” The Economist Technology Quarterly, December 6, 2008, pp.16-18.  When we talk about solar power, we usually are thinking about how we capture the sun’s rays on earth to generate energy.  For years the notion of “satellites that beam solar power” to earth has fluttered around the councils of dreamy government scientists, but little has come of it.  Now far- out thinkers speculate that, under the right circumstances, the cost of space power could get down to 8 to 10 cents, which puts it within hailing distance of commercial power. Current scenarios, however, put SSF power cost at about 50 cents per kilowatt hour.  Defense planners also realize that space power could look very cheap when stacked against the immense expenditures we put forward for electric power in unfriendly landscapes such as Iraq. For this reason the Defense Department has done a serious evaluation of the possibilities of SSF power. “The concept of beaming gigawatts of solar power down from space was first put on a sound scientific footing by Peter Glaser of Arthur D. Little…in 1968.”  Little, by the way, was once America’s best technology consultant., making it and Bell Labs America’s two biggest losses technologically. 

With the vast increase in efficiency of solar cells and solid-state amplifiers, such a power source seems less pie in the sky.  The major big impediment to such systems is the cost of lifting satellites into orbit.  Launches are very expensive.  “According to the FAA there are about 18 companies involved in developing low-cost launchers.”

Meanwhile, other types of entrepreneurs are flirting with far-out power, if not quite so far.  “Ottawa-based Magenn Power is building an airship to generate energy from high-altitude wind.” Fortune Small Business, December 2008, pp. 68 & 70.  “CEO Pierre Rivard’s helium-filled rotating blimps will hover at up to 1,000 feet---conventional turbines remain suspended at 300 feet—and use fabric sails that transmit energy to the ground via high-voltage cable tethers.” Wind currents stay constant at such heights, unlike wind on the ground. 

Other high altitude wind startups are in the works.  In the Research Triangle, “WindLife Kite Engine Co. will unveil a smaller kite system to help off-grid communities in India power water pumps.”  “Similarly, Italian company Kite Gen Research aims to build 100-megawatt electric plants that use software and onboard avionic sensors to automatically pilot multiple generator kites in half-mile-diameter paths. And Google invested $15 million in Makani Power, a secretive wind-energy company in Alameda, Calif.”  “Then there’s Sky Windpower in Murrieta, Calif., which wants to use a tethered 100-kilowatt rotorcraft to draw wind power at an altitude of up to 30,000 feet.”  “The Drachen Foundation, a nonprofit Seattle kite-power education group” is trying to stimulate broad interest in altitude wind power. (01-21-09)

256. The Awkening of Brazil
Previously, we have commented that Brazil, at last, is reaching out for its destiny.  Sure, it still has a surfeit of grinding poverty and conspicuous crime.  But with Petrobras’s energetic exploration and ambitions, it now has become the 3rd largest company in the Americas. Embraer, the big guy in regional aircraft, has become a aeronautics force to reckon with. In a “Strong Economy Propels Brazil to World Stage,” New York Times, July 21, 2008, pp. A1 and A12, we learn that our national media are finally catching up with the colossus to the South, which has cast Argentina, which at the beginning of the 20th century was still South America’s best hope, deep into the shadows.  The income disparity between its wealthiest and its poorest is modestly narrowing, and the economy grew 5.4 percent last year.

“The number of Brazilians with liquid fortunes exceeding $1 million grew by 19 percent last year, third behind China and India….”  Billionaires are on the way, to include exotic chaps such as Joao Carlos Cavalcanti.  (See New York Times, August 2, 2008, p. A8.)  “A geologist by training, Mr. Cavalcanti—who goes by J.C.—applied his knowledge and considerable gumption to discovering huge reserves of iron ore and other minerals.  Today he pegs his net worth at $1.2 billion, placing him among the 20 richest men in Brazil.”  Others newly minted billionaires include Eike Batista , an oil entrepreneur, who is reputed to be worth $6.6 billion.  Antonio Ermirio de Moraes, chairman of the diverse Votorantim Group, is thought to be worth $10 billion, ostensibly making him the richest man in South America. Despite all his wealth and his boundless collection of cars, Cavalcanti and his wife are deeply interested in spiritual matters.  They have established a foundation that is caring for a vast number of abandoned animals.  (11/19/08)

Update: Big Banco Itau

Brazil has put together a mega bank, and, at least for now, its banking system is relatively stable. Banc Itau, “fresh from its merger with Unibanco, the Sao-Paulo-based bank has emerged as the biggest bank south of the Mexican border.”  New York Times, March 5, 2009, p. B2. “The market value of its parent, at just around $28 billion, is nearly equal to the combined worth of Citigroup and Bank of America.”  It has branches already in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile.  The Spanish banks, which have made strides in Latin America, are not much of a force in Brazil.  Citicorp bought Grupo Financiero Banamex in 2001, but Citi is short on capital. (06-03-09)

255. Deep-Sea Oil Drilling
More than half of petroleum activity is now offshore.  The most spectacular find in recent times is the Tupi Field uncovered by Petrobras off of Brazil, and it tells us where the world’s remaining big oil finds are going to come.  We should understand, of course, that over the last century or so we used up half the world’s oil, and we will consume the other half by perhaps 2050, since we are consuming at a faster rate.  Global oil consumption will jump 35% by 2030 according to the International Energy Agency.  As Boone Pickens has said, we cannot drill out way—even offshore—out of our energy crisis.

In fact, the smart money is very much betting that oil is on its last legs.  Everybody with half a brain has bought into Mr. Hubbert’s peak oil notion.  Investment banker Matthew Simmons not only has bought into peak oil, but he believes reserves are declining faster than the oil majors are admitting.  In 2002, sifting through all the data, he concluded, for instance, that all the major Saudi fields had seen their best days, all of which he later summed up in Twilight in the Desert: the Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy.  He points out as well that there are several impediments that are slowing down exploration and development at any rate—lack of drilling rigs, a shrinking pool of geologists due to retirements, old-hat technology that dates back to the 1970s.  “Mr. Simmons … holds out great hope for wave energy, and he believes that at least one of the many different species of seaweed found along Maine’s coast will yield oil that can be turned into biofuel.”  See The Economist, July 12, 2008, p. 77.  He might add that 14 of the top 20 oil producers are now state-owned giants, many of which are not inclined to use up their reserves in a hurry, leaving Western companies in control of 10 percent of the world’s oil and gas reserves.  A digest of Simmons speeches can be found on his website.

The U.S. goliath Exxon, while focusing on cash flow above all else for years and trying to build reserves through acquisitions, is now ramping up exploration.  It will increase spending by about $1 billion a year to explore in politically stable countries such as Germany, New Zealand, and Greenland for oil and gas.  It announced a capital budget increase of 25% per year (Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2008, pp. B1-2), up from the 20% it had slated a year ago.  While Exxon has done a pretty good job for its shareholders, it is far from clear that it has done much for the U.S. economy or U.S. society, since it clearly has not been investing its cash reserves in the sundry technologies that might smooth the path to a different energy mix.  (10/8/08)

Update:  Deep Sea Exploration

We have called this entry “Deep Sea Oil Drilling,” but it really should cover the whole field of exploration—scientific and commercial.  Indeed, we are probing the deep---not just for oil—but to reveal its several mysteries and to set the stage for harvesting other valuables including minerals. In that vein, we should read Willam Broad’s delightful “Mapping the Sea and Its Mysteries,” New York Times, January 12, 2009. It hints at some of the things subsea scientists are doing and discovering.  “Today, Dr. Earle notes that … Prochlorococcus, so small that millions can fit in a drop of water — has achieved fame as perhaps the most abundant photosynthetic organism on the planet. It daily releases countless tons of oxygen into the atmosphere.” Dr. Earle is co-author of the recently published Ocean: An Illustrated Atlas.  “In the 1980s, she helped found two companies to make innovative vehicles that could open the sea’s dark recesses to human exploration, and ever since has sought to illuminate the abyss.” Wikipedia has a more expansive description of her exploits:  “In 1985 she founded Deep Ocean Engineering along with her husband, engineer and submersible designer Graham Hawkes, to design, operate, support, and consult on piloted and robotic sub sea systems. In 1987 The Deep Ocean Engineering team designed and built the Deep Rover research submarine, which operates down to 1000 meters.” “In 1992 she founded Deep Ocean Exploration and Research to further advance marine engineering.”  “Earle has led more than 400 expeditions worldwide involving in excess of 7000 hours underwater in connection with her research.”   See her website for interviews and reviews. (03-18-09)

Update: Graham Hawkes
Hawkes,  Dr. Earle’s husband, is fascinating in his own right, and surely has as much to do with stoking our interest in the depths as the good doctor. See, for instance, John Sedgwick’s “Sub Prime,” Forbes, April 21, 2008.  “The world's most advanced personal submersible sits on the floor of Hawkes Ocean Technologies' spacious workshop adjacent to the yacht-filled harbor of Point Richmond on San Francisco Bay.” “The grand eminence in his field--perhaps the only eminence--Hawkes has personally designed and built three quarters of all the personal manned submersibles ever made, totaling more than 60 craft. But the Falcon is by far the most ambitious.”  Piloting a Hawkes vessel is turning out to be the new sport of millionaires, yet a bit more exciting than going up in a space capsule.  TED had done a video with Hawkes that provides a demonstration of his doings.  While you finish looking at Hawkes, also take a trip through the depths with Robert Ballard:  he’s into robotic exploration. (05-06-09)

254. Safe Pesticides—Japan
In recent years, both consumers and farmers have increasingly turned against the use of chemical pesticides out of awareness and concern about their safety and environmental impact.  To address these concerns, Japanese researchers recently developed the world's first pesticides that use lactobacillus bacteria instead of harmful chemicals.  This follows previous successes in developing pesticides that use microorganisms like Bacillus natto and soft rot bacteria.

How Lactobacillus Pesticide Works
The lactobacillus used in the pesticides is selected from among the various types of lactobacillus that can be extracted and collected from yogurt, pickles, and other fermented foods, with specific varieties being chosen to protect crops from specific diseases.  For example, spinach wilt is an infectious soil-borne disease caused by Fusarium fungi.  Previously, the only effective means of dealing with it was considered to be disinfecting the soil with chemical pesticides.  Now, though, the bacteria Pediococcus pentosaceus KMC05 can be utilized to contain an outbreak.  KMC05 can also be used against Phyophthora capsici, a soil-borne infection caused by Phytophthora pathogens.

Lactobacillus plantarum WB10, meanwhile, is even more effective than commercial pesticides in eradicating pythium, the cause of mizuna soil rot, outbreaks of which are believed to have increased as a result of repeated cropping and year-round cultivation in greenhouses.

As for other soil-borne infections, SOK04, another type of lactobacillus, can be used to combat soft rot in Chinese cabbage.  These lactobacillus pesticides are as effective or even slightly more effective than Biokeeper water-dispersable powder, a previously developed microorganism-based pesticide, and these results have been confirmed in infected fields in five prefectures around Japan.  Tests have proved that these pesticides are effective in eradication of diseases either when sprayed or when seeds are soaked in them.  (From Trends in Japan) (9/24/08)

253. The HurriQuake Nail—Best of 2006
Clemson graduate Ed Sutt ginned up the best innovation of 2006 according to Popular Science, and it has been added to Bostitch’s bag of tricks. Bostitch is now part of the old and famed Stanley Works.  It’s a nail that won’t come out when winds and quakes start shaking the building.  “The HurriQuake features angled rings to help the nail resist pulling out in wind gusts up to 170 mph.  The top of the nail shank is twisted, which helps reduce wobbling by boards, and the nail head is about 25 percent larger than the typical sheathing nail.”  (See the Charlotte Observer, December 30, 2006, p. H1.)  Sutt was mentored by his teacher Scott Schiff at Clemson who works in the in the Clemson Wind Load Test Facility.  “After Hurricanes Hugo and Andrew, Clemson developed the Wind Load Test Facility to work toward more hurricane-resistant wood frame homes.” (7/30/08)

252. Dunking the Drinking Age
There has long been a terrible contradiction to an American society that says 18-year olds are mature enough to lose their lives in war—and many do—but are not old enough to drink or, sometimes, to vote.  Nor can they even rent a car.  We inveigh against sexism and racism, but not age-ism—a condition where both young adults and very old adults are treated like infants.  “In the early 1980s more than half the states had drinking ages lower than 21.  Some let the boozing start at 18; some allowed 19-year-olds to buy beer and wine.  Spurred by Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), the Reagan administration in 1984 to raise the drinking age to 21 or lose 10% of their federal highway funds.  The states buckled under….,” falling victim yet again to an unconstitutional invasion of states’ rights by the Feds.  Naturally drinking problems have only gotten worse, with huge binge drinking on campus that only expands each year. “John McCardle, the former president of Middlebury College in Vermont, is leading a national effort to lower the drinking age to 18” (The Economist, April 19 2008, p. 43).  His group is called Choose Responsibility.  Similarly, efforts are underway in Missouri, Wisconsin, and South Carolina to overturn the misguided regulations.  MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, continues to lead the charge for the age limit of 21, though some of its statistics to support its attitude are rather suspect.  Prohibitionists, trying to eradicate several entrenched habits, continue to seek bad public policy that creates more problems than it solves.  (7/16/08)

Update: More Fur Is Flying
While it seems that putting up the legal age to 21 has cut motor vehicles deaths, it has hardly helped the drinking problem. A considerable number of college presidents and policy experts think it has exacerbated binge drinking at colleges and even high schools.  In a “Bid to Reconsider Drinking Age Taps Unlikely Supporters,” Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2008, p. A3, we learn that “more than 100 (123 we believe) college presidents, including leaders at Dartmouth, Duke and Middlebury, have joined the month-old Amethyst Initiative, which argues that ‘the 21-year-old-drinking age is not working” and “has created a culture of dangerous binge drinking.”  They are arrayed against a huge block of forces that want the 21 age limit, whatever the consequences.  This prohibition dates back to 1984 when Congress voted to hold back 10% of the highway funds of any state with a drinking age lower than 21.  Even with the higher drinking age, some 800,000 16-20 year olds have lost their lives each year due to drunk driving both in the 1990s and in this century.  While a revision in the laws is unlikely now, the college presidents have stirred up a hornet’s nest.  Scout Archives reviewed the current debate:

For the past two decades, there hasn’t been a great deal of discussion regarding the drinking age in the United States. In 1984, The National Minimum Drinking Age Act effectively established a nationwide limit by removing 10% of the annual federal highway funding from states that chose to set their drinking age below the age of 21. In recent weeks, a rather unusual group has come together to spark a new debate about this rather tempestuous topic: college presidents. This summer, the Amethyst Initiative released a statement signed by over 100 college presidents stating that “the 21 year-old drinking age is not working, and, specifically, that it has created a culture of dangerous binge drinking on their campuses.” The Initiative is not in favor of advocating for a particular policy change or modification, but rather asking for “informed and unimpeded debate” on the subject. A number of organizations were quick to respond to the document, including Chuck Hurley, the chief executive of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), who noted that he was “profoundly disappointed” in the initiative.

The first link will take visitors to a piece from this Wednesday’s Baltimore Sun which discusses various reactions to the signed statement from the Amethyst Initiative. The second link leads to a news article from the Wednesday edition of the Los Angeles Times about those college presidents in California who offered their signatures to this statement. Moving on, the third link leads to an extended investigative piece from ABC News which talks to university officials, parents, students, and policy makers about this subject. The fourth link will lead visitors to a press release from MADD that offers expert testimony from scientists and others regarding the effectiveness of the 21 year-old minimum drinking age in saving lives. The fifth link leads to the homepage of the Amethyst Initiative. Here visitors can view a complete list of college presidents who have signed the statement thus far, and also learn more about their work. The sixth link leads to a summary of The National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 written by Dr. David J. Hanson. Dr. Hanson’s entire site is worth a look, as he provides information about a wide range of alcohol issues. Finally, the last link leads to the homepage of the Harvard School of Public Health’s College Alcohol Study. Here visitors can read some about some of their latest findings and also look over additional resources.  (12/17/08)

251. 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.”

“Not surprisingly, used-robot vendors cluster in Rustbelt states such as Ohio and Michigan.  ‘Factories close, they’re looking to sell their equipment, and they come to us,’ says Wanner, head of RobotWorx.  One of his competitors, Rebotics, has even managed to go global.  ‘We’ve found customers in Mexico, Canada, India,’ says owner Bob Lieblang.  Rebotics robots operate in industries such as parts assembly, packaging, and food processing, where they perform jobs ranging from welding and painting to materials handling.”  (1/2/08)

Update: Robots Galore
“In October 2008 a Japanese company will become the first in the world to begin mass-producing a robot that assists humans in moving their limbs.  A research team led by University of Tsukuba Professor Sankai Yoshiyuki has developed the device, which is called Robot Suit HAL (Hybrid Assistive Limb) TM.  Sankai is the CEO of Cyberdyne Inc., the company that plans to begin making this robot suit available for rental through sales outlets.”

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