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Trust: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order |
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| Topic: Society |
11:40 am EDT, Sep 29, 2003 |
Fukuyama examines the impact of culture on economic life, society, and success in the new global economy. He argues that the most pervasive cultural characteristic influencing a nation's prosperity and ability to compete is the level of trust or cooperative behavior based upon shared norms. In comparison with low-trust societies (China, France, Italy, Korea), which need to negotiate and often litigate rules and regulations, high-trust societies like those in Germany and Japan are able to develop innovative organizations and hold down the cost of doing business. Fukuyama argues that the United States, like Japan and Germany, has been a high-trust society historically but that this status has eroded in recent years. This well-researched book provides a fresh, new perspective on how economic prosperity is grounded in social life. Trust: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order |
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| Topic: Society |
8:35 am EDT, Sep 28, 2003 |
From an article in Forbes magazine, circa January 1994: Entertainment is becoming as mobile as money. In the 1950s, Hollywood moguls established hegemony by monopolizing U.S. movie theaters. Antitrust litigators forced a divestiture. Hollywood has since reinvested in theaters, but today's antitrust police just yawn, because theaters now account for barely 20% of movie revenues. Television deals generate just under 40%. The biggest single earner is tapes for videocassette recorders, those pernicious Japanese gadgets that Hollywood worked so hard to kill a decade ago. The VCR, it turned out, was a superhighway in a box -- just what Hollywood needed to double its profits. More recently, a Beatles movie was transmitted in highly compressed form over the Internet. Within a few years it will be as easy to download compressed movies by telephone as it is to unload the family fortune. ... Nobody has any clear idea what will be the dominant distribution medium for entertainment or wealth at the end of the decade. You can be pretty sure, however, that it won't be whatever culture police choose to guard most closely. The New Maginot Line |
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The New Foreign Correspondence |
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| Topic: Society |
8:55 am EDT, Sep 21, 2003 |
From news services to "blogs," the Internet has revolutionized the international news market -- opening it up to a broader and more active audience. Such technological innovations are rapidly changing the way people produce and consume news, making the traditional model of foreign correspondence obsolete. This article appears in the September/October 2003 issue of Foreign Affairs. You can read a free preview online. The New Foreign Correspondence |
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New Encyclopedia Gives Cool-Hunters a Road Map for Ads |
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| Topic: Society |
1:37 pm EDT, Jul 19, 2003 |
Within the last 150 years, for the first time in human history, it became widely possible to produce more than was demanded and to offer more than was needed. Advertising was a response to surplus. Mass consumption inspired "more social egalitarianism, more democratic participation and more political freedom." But there were still rampant social inequalities, and the increasing interest in selling products to "segmented" markets -- markets divided by age, income, race and interest -- eventually led to a segmented citizenry. We live in the fractured and privatized society that was a result. ... In 1897 the promise of an Oldsmobile ad was hardly reassuring: "Practically noiseless and impossible to explode." ... Advertisements are a form of communication, not mere manipulation: they help make sense of the world. ... Discerning knowledge amid the claims and images makes us all cool-hunters in training. New Encyclopedia Gives Cool-Hunters a Road Map for Ads |
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Where Have All the Lisas Gone? |
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| Topic: Society |
11:55 am EDT, Jul 11, 2003 |
It seems perched at a precarious point from which it could, without warning, rocket into overuse. I am not so smug as to think myself immune to first-name zeitgeist. Girls' names are both more interesting to track and more vulnerable to sounding passe. Even pros are occasionally blindsided by a name, as when Trinity leapfrogged to 74 after the release of "The Matrix." A closer look finds that Trinity was already on the upswing, from 951 in 1993 to 555 five years later. Madison? No. 2? How in the name of good taste did that happen? The next big trend will be word names. Colors, for example. The tipping point came when Christie Brinkley named her daughter Sailor. Where Have All the Lisas Gone? |
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The Philosopher of Islamic Terror |
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| Topic: Society |
10:31 am EST, Mar 28, 2003 |
Paul Berman writes for the New York Times Magazine on Sayyid Qutb. This is an absolute must read. The Philosopher of Islamic Terror |
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Email as Spectroscopy [PDF] |
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| Topic: Society |
3:33 pm EST, Mar 16, 2003 |
We describe a methodology for the automatic identification of communities of practice from email logs within an organization. We use a betweeness centrality algorithm that can rapidly find communities within a graph representing information flows. We apply this algorithm to an email corpus of nearly one million messages collected over a two-month span, and show that the method is effective at identifying true communities, both formal and informal, within these scale-free graphs. This approach also enables the identification of leadership roles within the communities. Email as Spectroscopy [PDF] |
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Peking Duct Tape, and Web Logs as Weapons |
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| Topic: Society |
4:57 pm EST, Feb 17, 2003 |
There has always been a World of Disorder, but what makes it more dangerous today is that in a networked universe, with widely diffused technologies, open borders and a highly integrated global financial and Internet system, very small groups of people can amass huge amounts of power to disrupt the World of Order. Individuals can become super-empowered. Maybe Google was thinking, "Let's buy now -- we may soon find web logs added to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) list!" Peking Duct Tape, and Web Logs as Weapons |
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The Inner Ring, by C.S. Lewis |
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| Topic: Society |
6:25 pm EST, Jan 5, 2003 |
It is not, in fact, very likely that any of you will be able, in the next ten years, to make any direct contribution to the peace or prosperity of Europe. You will be busy finding jobs, getting married, acquiring facts. I am going to do something more old-fashioned than you perhaps expected. I am going to give advice. I am going to issue warnings. Advice and warnings about things which are so perennial that no one calls them "current affairs." In 1944, C.S. Lewis addressed the students of King's College, University of London with the annual Memorial Lecture. ... It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons: but to have them free because you don't matter, that is much worse. [ Po Bronson mentions this in _What Should I Do With My Life?_ ] The Inner Ring, by C.S. Lewis |
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Edwin Land, on the path to success |
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| Topic: Society |
12:03 pm EST, Jan 4, 2003 |
"If you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it and don't think anything of personalities, or emotional conflicts, or of money, or of family distractions; if you just think of, detail by detail, what you have to do next, it is a wonderful dream even though the end is a long way off, for there are about five thousand steps to be taken before we realize it; and start taking the first ten, and stay making twenty after, it is amazing how quickly you get through those five thousand steps. Rather, I should say, through the four thousand nine hundred and ninety. The last ten steps you never seem to work out. But you keep on coming nearer to giving the world something well worth having." -- Edwin H. Land to Polaroid employees, 23 December 1942 Edwin Land, on the path to success |
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