artdiamondblog.com – Page 467 – Art Diamond's web log

Technology as an Enabler of Free Speech

“Volunteers have built a wireless Internet around Jalalabad, Afghanistan, from off-the-shelf electronics and ordinary materials.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

The main point of the passages quoted below is to illustrate how, with the right technology, we can dance around tyrants in order to enable human freedom.
(But as a minor aside, note in the large, top-of-front-page photo above, that Apple once again is visibly the instrument of human betterment—somewhere, before turning to his next challenge, one imagines a fleeting smile on the face of entrepreneur Steve Jobs.)

(p. 1) The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”
Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.

For the full story, see:
JAMES GLANZ and JOHN MARKOFF. “U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., June 12, 2011): 1 & 8.

Source of graphic: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Medieval Pollution

(p. 58) One thing that did not escape notice in medieval times was that nearly all the space above head height was unusable because it was so generally filled with smoke. An open hearth had certain clear advantages–it radiated heat in all directions and allowed people to sit around it on all four sides–but it was also like having a permanent bonfire in the middle of one’s living room. Smoke went wherever passing drafts directed it–and with many people coming and going, and all the windows glassless, every passing gust must have brought somebody a faceful of smoke–or otherwise rose up to the ceiling and hung thickly until it leaked out a hole in the roof.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

Bricks-and-Mortar Restaurants Use Police (Instead of Better Food) to Beat Food Trucks

“Kim Ima and Kenny Lao parked their food trucks on Front Street in Dumbo.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D4) FOOD trucks, those rolling symbols of New York City’s infatuation with haute casual food, are suddenly being chased from Midtown Manhattan. In the last 10 days, the Treats Truck, which has sold cookies and brownies for four years during lunchtime at West 45th Street near Avenue of the Americas, has been told by police officers that it is no longer welcome there, nor at its late-afternoon 38th Street and Fifth Avenue location. The Rickshaw Dumpling truck, a presence for three years at West 45th Street near the Treats Truck, has been shooed away as well.

The police “have told us they no longer want food trucks in Midtown,” said Kim Ima, the owner of the Treats Truck, a pioneer of the city’s new-wave food-truck movement, who began cultivating customers on West 45th Street in 2007.
. . .
Mr. Lao and other food-truck operators said they suspect that the police are responding to complaints by brick-and-mortar businesses that resent competition. Such was the case last year, when store merchants on the Upper East Side complained about Patty’s Taco Truck, which sold tortas, tacos de lengua and cemitas on Lexington Avenue. The truck was towed several times and the operator arrested, prompting the Street Vendor Project, an advocate for vendors based at the Urban Justice Center, to file the lawsuit that resulted in Judge Wright’s ruling, which said food is merchandise that can be regulated.

For the full story, see:
GLENN COLLINS. “Food Trucks Shooed From Midtown.” The New York Times (Weds., June 29, 2011): D4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated June 28, 2011.)

$130,000 Federal Stimulus Used by Omaha Public Schools for Manual Attacking American Institutions

(p. 1A) The Omaha Public Schools used more than $130,000 in federal stimulus dollars to buy each teacher, administrator and staff member a manual on how to become more culturally sensitive.
The book by Virginia education consultants could raise some eyebrows with its viewpoints.
The authors assert that American government and institutions create advantages that “channel wealth and power to white people,” that color-blindness will not end racism and that educators should “take action for social justice.”
The book says that teachers should acknowledge historical systemic oppression in schools, including racism, sexism, homophobia and “ableism,” defined by the authors as discrimination or prejudice against people with disabilities.
The authors argue that public school teachers must raise their cultural awareness to better serve minority students and improve academic achievement.

For the full story, see:
Joe Dejka. “OPS Says It Won’t Go totally by the Book.” Omaha World-Herald (Sunday, July 10, 2011): 1A & 2A.
(Note: the online version of the article has the title “OPS buys 8,000 diversity manuals.”)

Entrepreneurs Stanley and Wood Apply Econometrics to Business Data Analysis

“Grant Stanley, left, and Tadd Wood founded Contemporary Analysis, which uses data to solve sales, marketing, customer retention, employee management and planning problems.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the Omaha World-Herald article quoted and cited below.

The entrepreneurs celebrated in the article quoted below are former students of mine. Grant Stanley was in my Economics of Entrepreneurship and Economics of Technology seminars and Tadd Wood was in my Honors Colloquium on Creative Destruction. I wish them well.

(p. 1D) A half-dozen 20-something math, economics and neuroscience whizzes form Contemporary Analysis, an Omaha-based firm that is making predictive analytics available to a wider array of firms faster and for less money.

The team, which has a penchant for roaming around its Old Market office shoeless, is led by Grant Stanley, 23, the company’s chief executive. He founded the firm in March 2008 with Tadd Wood, 23, who is now a senior analyst.
For nearly three years, Contemporary Analysis has built a customer base mostly of companies and businesses with lean budgets, meaning they didn’t have a lot of cash to spend on analytics products. Traditionally, analytics firms lock clients into expensive, long-term contracts.
Not Contemporary Analysis.
Their products are designed to yield results in about a month, and average contracts are about $5,000, Stanley said. The company’s analytics tools use data to solve sales, marketing, customer retention, employee management and planning problems.
. . .
(p. 2D) A . . . report from the IBM Institute for Business Value found that top-performing organizations use analytics five times more than lower performers.
Of the 3,000 executives, managers and analysts polled for the IBM report, those who came from high-performing companies said they used analytics to guide future strategies 45 percent of the time and day-to-day operations 53 percent of the time. By comparison, lower-performing firms used analytics 20 percent when addressing future business matters and 27 percent on a daily basis.

For the full story, see:
Ross Boettcher. “Omaha Whizzes Bring Analytics to More Companies.” Omaha World-Herald (Thursday, July 14, 2011): 1D & 2D.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the title “Making analytics affordable.”)

“People Condemned to Short Lives and Chronic Hardship Are Perhaps Unlikely to Worry Overmuch about Decor”

If “necessity is the mother of invention,” then why did it take so long for someone to invent the louvered slats mentioned at the end of this passage?

(p. 55) In even the best homes comfort was in short supply. It really is extraordinary how long it took people to achieve even the most elemental levels of comfort. There was one good reason for it: life was tough. Throughout the Middle Ages, a good deal of every life was devoted simply to surviving. Famine was common. The medieval world was a world without reserves; when harvests were poor, as they were about one year in four on average, hunger was immediate. When crops failed altogether, starvation inevitably followed. England suffered especially catastrophic harvests in 1272, 1277, 1283, 1292, and 1311, and then an unrelievedly murderous stretch from 1315 to 1319. And this was of course on top of plagues and other illnesses that swept away millions. People condemned to short lives and chronic hardship are perhaps unlikely to worry overmuch about decor. But even allowing for all that, there was just a great, strange slowness to strive for even modest levels of comfort. Roof holes, for instance, let smoke escape, but they also let in rain and drafts until somebody finally, belatedly invented a lantern structure with louvered slats that allowed smoke to escape but kept out rain, birds, and wind. It was a marvelous invention, but by the time it (p. 56) was thought of, in the fourteenth century, chimneys were already coming in and louvered caps were not needed.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

Zuckerberg: ”Filmmakers Can’t Get Their Head around the Idea that Someone Might Build Something because They Like Building Things”

Marc Andreessen. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 13) After hearing a story about Foursquare’s co-founder, Dennis Crowley, walking into a press event in athletic wear and eating a banana, I developed a theory that bubbles might be predicted by fashion: when tech founders can’t be bothered to appear businesslike, the power has shifted too much in their favor.

Believe it or not, this goes deep into the interior mentality of the engineer, which is very truth-oriented. When you’re dealing with machines or anything that you build, it either works or it doesn’t, no matter how good of a salesman you are. So engineers not only don’t care about the surface appearance, but they view attempts to kind of be fake on the surface as fundamentally dishonest.

That reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg’s criticism of ”The Social Network.” He said that ”filmmakers can’t get their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.”

Aaron Sorkin was completely unable to understand the actual psychology of Mark or of Facebook. He can’t conceive of a world where social status or getting laid or, for that matter, doing drugs, is not the most important thing.

For the full interview, see:
ANDREW GOLDMAN. “TALK; Bubble? What Bubble? Marc Andreessen, one of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture capitalists, has no fear.” The New York Times Magazine (Sun., July 10, 2011): 13.
(Note: bold in original, indicating comments/questions by interviewer Andrew Goldman.)
(Note: the online version of the interview is dated July 7, 2011 (sic).)

Feds Protect Us from “Older Tasty Tomato Varieties”

(p. C3) Historically, when a farmer has learned to grow a tasty variety, that farmer has actually been scorned and prevented from shipping it.

“Regulations actually prohibit growers in the southern part of Florida from exporting many of the older tasty tomato varieties because their coloration and shape don’t conform to what the all-powerful Florida Tomato Committee says a tomato should look like,” Mr. Estabrook writes.

For the full review, see:
DWIGHT GARNER. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; That Perfect Florida Tomato, Cultivated for Bland Uniformity.” The New York Times (Weds., July 6, 2011): C3.
(Note: the online version of the review is dated July 5, 2011.)

The web site of the Florida Tomato Committee describes its Federal mandate:

The Florida Tomato Committee is a Federal Marketing Order that was established pursuant to Federal Marketing Agreement and Order No. 966 as amended regulating the handling of tomatoes and has authority over the tomatoes grown in Florida’s production area comprising the counties of Pinellas, Hillsborough, Polk, Osceola, Brevard and all counties situated south. It affects tomatoes that are shipped outside the regulated area, which includes that portion of the state of Florida situated east of the Suwanee River and south of the Georgia border.

The Committee funds research and development projects and marketing promotions that focus on maximizing Florida tomato movement, including consumer and marketing research and customized marketing programs.

Florida Tomatoes … quality you can trust. Each Florida field-grown tomato shipped out of Florida is regulated by a Federal Marketing Order that controls grade, size, quality and maturity. The standards are the toughest in the world and ensure that Florida tomatoes are the best you can buy.

Source:
http://www.floridatomatoes.org/AboutUs.aspx
(Note: ellipsis in original.)

The book under review is:
Estabrook, Barry. Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit. Kansas City, Missouri: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2011.

“If We Can’t Win on Quality, We Shouldn’t Win at All”

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) At the tail end of the 1990s dot-com boom, Douglas Edwards took a gamble: He left his marketing job at an old-media company, taking a $25,000 salary cut to start work at a small, little-known Internet concern in its second year of operation. That his new employer was losing money and burning through venture capital went without saying. But unlike the footloose 20-somethings who usually populated Silicon Valley start-ups, Mr. Edwards had little margin to bet wrong; he was 41, with a mortgage, three children and a worried wife. He hoped he could get his old job back if the company ran out of money.

. . .
Mr. Edwards came to his job as a subscriber to the conventional wisdom. In an early presentation to cofounder Larry Page and others, Mr. Edwards unwisely declared that only marketing, not technology, could set Google apart. “In a world where all search engines are equal,” he asserted, “we’ll need to rely on branding to differentiate us from our competitors.”
The room became quiet. Then Mr. Page spoke up. “If we can’t win on quality,” he said, “we shouldn’t win at all.”

For the full review, see:
DAVID A. PRICE. “BOOKSHELF; How Google Got Going; Branding, shmanding, a marketer was told. ‘If we can’t win on quality,’ Larry Page said, ‘we shouldn’t win at all.'” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., July 12, 2011): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Book being reviewed:
Edwards, Douglas. I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co., 2011.

Medieval Halls of the Rich Incubated Plague in a Nest of “Filth Unmentionable”

(p. 51) In even the best houses, floors were generally just bare earth strewn with rushes, harboring “spittle and vomit and urine of dogs and men, beer that hath been cast forth and remnants of fishes and other filth unmentionable,” as the Dutch theologian and traveler Desiderius Erasmus rather crisply summarized in 1524. New layers of rushes were laid down twice a year normally, but the old accretions were seldom removed, so that, Erasmus added glumly, “the substratum may be unmolested for twenty years.” The floors were in effect a very large nest, much appreciated by insects and furtive rodents, and a perfect incubator for plague. Yet a deep pile of flooring was generally a sign of prestige. It was common among the French to say of a rich man that he was “waist deep in straw.”

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

Castro’s Communist Goons Impound Cuba Libre

“Her writing, said Yoani Sánchez, above in her Havana apartment, describes “the sentiments of one person but sums up the reality of many people.”” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. C1) Like any other first-time author, Yoani Sánchez was looking forward to receiving copies of her book, “Cuba Libre,” after it was published last year. But when the package sent from Buenos Aires by her publisher arrived in Havana, the Cuban customs service impounded the parcel and, after she complained, sent her a notice explaining its action.

“The content of the book entitled ‘Free Cuba’ transgresses against the general interests of the nation, in that it argues that certain political and economic changes are necessary in Cuba in order for its citizens to enjoy greater material well-being and attain personal fulfillment,” stated the document, which Ms. Sánchez posted on her Web site. Such positions “are extremes totally contrary to the principles of our society.”

Outside her homeland, though, Ms. Sánchez’s writing is free of such censorship, and she has emerged as an important new voice, both literary and political. Published in the United States in May under the title “Havana Real” (Melville House), her book draws on the same collection of sketches of daily life in Cuba — a dreary, enervating routine of food shortages, transportation troubles and narrowed opportunity — that she has been posting on her Web site, Generation Y (desdecuba.com/generationy), since 2007.
. . .
(p. C6) Recently Ms. Sánchez completed a second book, a manual whose title translates as “WordPress: A Blog for Speaking to the World.” A new fiber-optic cable connecting Cuba with South America has just been laid, and when it begins fully operating later this summer, it is likely to increase opportunities not just for her, but for other dissident bloggers and writers, many of whom have attended the seminars she conducted that led to the writing of the second book.
“It’s interesting that we’re talking not about a bearded 80-year-old man, but a sharp, fearless, skinny 35-year-old mother,” said Ted Henken, an expert on Cuba and the Internet who teaches at the City University of New York and visited Ms. Sánchez in April. “That’s new, and in some ways, by spreading the virus of blogging and tweeting to others, she has displaced Che and Fidel among young, progressive people.”

For the full story, see:
LARRY ROHTER. “In Cuba, the Voice of a Blog Generation.” The New York Times (Weds., July 6, 2011): C1 & C6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated July 5, 2011.)