Category Archives: reviews

The Fascinating Phenomenon that is Andrew Keen

Small piece from small pieces

After being side tracked by the final Harry Potter book (which was excellent), weddings (congrats to Irfhan and Gen) and work (Chicago is a good a place as any to find oneself)… I’m finally back to reading David Weinberger’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined and it is fantastic.

Favourite line so far:

It is no accident that the web is distracting. It is the Web’s hyperlinked nature to pull our attention here and there. But it is not at all clear that a new distractedness represents a weakening of our culture’s intellectual powers, a lack of focus, a diversion from the important work that needs to be done, a disruption of our very important schedule. Distraction may instead represent our interests finally finding the type of time that suits it best. Maybe when set free in a field of abundance, our hunger moves us from three meals a day to day-long grazing. Our experience of time on the Web, its ungluing and re-gluing of threads, may be less an artifact of the Web than the Web’s enabling our interest to find its own rhythm. Perhaps the Web isn’t shortening our attention span. Perhaps the world is just getting more interesting.

Amen.

Check out Weinberger’s blogs: Everything is Miscellaneous and Joho the Blog

Speaking of hyperlinked… Harley Y., a frequent reader and a fellow open-source affectionado noticed in Monday’s post that I was in Chicago. Being in town himself by chance he dropped me and email and we met up for dinner. Good times and conversation ensued… welcome to the world of the web, it’s not just online anymore.

The iphone review redux

4 Replies

So I’m down in Chicago for the week (at The Drake!) for work and my colleague has an iphone. Some of you may remember my negative predictions when the iphone was first announced.

I have to admit that the iphone is one sexy beast. The screen is stunning and many of the features – such as surfing that web and looking at photos are amazingly clear and fluid. Possibly the coolest feature is how, as you rotate the phone, the image/screen always rotates with you so it remains in the upright position. That’s some clever work with the gyroscopes…

However, the one of the main concerns I flagged back in January was not assuaged. This being that the keyboard, because it is simply part of the screen, is not easy to use. Simply put, your thumb often presses the wrong key making one feel like the fat Homer Simpson in the episode where he needs the special “fat phone” because his fingers are too big to use a normal push button phone. Typing out email on the iphone will likely be too cumbersome and frustrating a process for the regular or business user to do regularly. More importantly, it pales in comparison to the Blackberry keyboard.

But my criticism pale in comparison to this increadibly thoughtful critique delivered by Peter S. Magnusson on Yahoo! (and sent to me by Rikia S.). Sadly, Magnusson’s comments are no longer available on Yahoo! so I’ve reposted them below. I wish I’d been half this clever:

I don’t think the iPhone fundamentally innovates over and above the existing offerings, in the manner that the iPod, the Macintosh, and the Apple II all did in their day. To the contrary, I find that the iPhone reveals that Mr. Jobs, and thus Apple, does not (yet) understand a paradigm of 21st-century computer usage.

At its heart, the iPhone is a projection of the original vision of bringing clunky desktop applications such as e-mail, contact databases, to-do lists, telephones, note taking, and Web browsing to the palm of your hand. Because that is essentially Jobs’s generation – transitioning from the mainframe office environment to the PC-based office – he can’t quite get rid of the notion that a mobile device is nothing but a really small personal computer.

Here’s my theory: Apple can only create really interesting products if Jobs understands the end-user. And Jobs does not understand the 21st-century user. In this century, people don’t send memos to each other.

Today, people chat; they blog; they share multimedia such as pictures, video, and audio; they debate (“flame”) each other on forums; they link with each other in intricate webs; they switch effortlessly between different electronic personae and avatars; they listen to Internet radio; they battle over reputation; they podcast; they do mash-ups; they vote on this, that, and the other; they argue on wiki discussion groups.

With the exception of a minimalist widget for text messaging, the iPhone does not have direct support for any of that. No support for sharing photos, no recording of podcasts, no text communities, no location awareness.

Without going through a computer with a cable, the iPhone doesn’t really communicate very much with anything.

In fact, when you want to communicate with somebody, the method (application) comes before the person. You first have to choose how to communicate (SMS, phone call, e-mail, Web service). Only then can you choose whom you want to talk to. That is a classical “code-centric” view of the world. Apple completely misses the opportunity to present text messaging, visual voice mail, and multimedia e-mails in a coherent view.

This is not a simple lack of features. This is not a “one-dot-oh” effect inherent in a brand-new product category. This is a fundamental lack of understanding of social networking.

What made the iPod a breakthrough product was that Jobs really knows music. He’s an artsy guy. He’s even known to have a really good musical ear. That’s why the iPod was awesome.

Social networking and Web 2.0 are apparently another matter. It’s a generational thing, I guess. Jobs is even older than I am, and I’m having a really hard time keeping up with the times. Plus he’s busier than I am.

What the iPhone should have done was put the social network front and center. It would happily invite the “play” aspect of modern computing, which is increasingly interacting with “work” – personal blogs morph to full-time jobs; YouTube postings lead to advertising agency job offers; entrepreneurial musings lead to investor contacts; and so forth. Chatting and sharing media should have direct support.

But Apple has a unique asset that may yet save the day: the sheer moral support it can draw from the tech community. This past weekend, for example, an entire impromptu developer conference was assembled with the sole purpose of “making the Web a better place for [the iPhone].” So, ironically, social networking technologists are busy arranging themselves such that Apple will, yes, recognize their significance and treat them as first-class citizens. It’s not too late.

I hope Apple listens.

canadian history – long live the long tail?

8 Replies

So I’ve just started Chris Anderson’s audiobook version of The Long Tail and am loving it. No surprise here since I’ve already heard him lecture on it and so knew what I was getting into. But what has really peaked my interest is how Canadian history – that subject that everyone thinks the public has little to no appetite for, may be a perfect long tail example.

For those not familiar with The Long Tail thesis, Wikipedia describes it as follows:

“…products that have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters. Anderson cites earlier research on the relationship between Amazon sales and Amazon sales ranking and found a large proportion of Amazon.com’s book sales come from obscure books that are not available in brick-and-mortar stores.”

In other words, although most large publishing houses only look to publish the book that will make the top 10 best seller list (the green part of the graph), there is a huge market for those books that will only sell one or two copies every three months (the yellow part of the graph), but will do so over and over again over for a long period of time. All that is necessary to make this viable is a cheap distribution channel.

The point here is that there is still demand for lots of old goods, it is just that the relative demand – compared to the current blockbusters – is so tiny that no one notices it. Which brings me to books on Canadian history.

Peter C. Newman is a national treasure. When was the last time you looked at that man’s astounding catalog of books? (This is not even a full list!) But did you realize that 90% of his books are no longer in print? And yet, many are just as relevant, and well researched today as when they were published 20 or even 35 years ago. The good news is that the Long Tail suggests Peter Newman’s work is still in demand. Indeed Canadian history more generally may not be a best seller but a constant churning demand is out there. One that, if fed, could fuel still greater interest.

The bad news is that most of Newman’s works are not publicized, or even published, anymore. This is what Lessig calls orphaned works: pieces still under copyright, but not in print and essential unavailable. This means that the potentially enourmous, but slow moving demand of The Long Tail, is not being met.

While discussing this problem over scotch in the wee hours of this morning we agreed that it would be great if Canadians, in complete violation of copyright opted to dictate the oldest of Newman’s works into their computers and publish the voice recordings online as free audiobook versions of his work? This would certainly create a cheap distribution channel for his works.

Would this make them bestsellers? No, but it would make them cheap and easy to disseminate. It would definitely open up his work to a whole new audience: the ipod generation. Maybe Peter C. Newman would even give us his blessing…

Thoughts on Azzi’s Biography of Walter Gordon

4 Replies

Frankly, no one reads enough Canadian history… so I’m trying to do my part. I just hope Rudyard takes note.

For those who’ve never heard of Walter Gordon, he was Lester Pearson‘s first Finance Minister. Of course, he was also much, much more. For Liberals, Gordon was the man who organized the party back into fighting form while it served in opposition to Diefenbaker and, in doing so, won the Liberals the 1963 election. Perhaps more importantly however, Gordon was one Canada’s first nationalists who, among other things, founded the Committee for an Independent Canada the predecessor (or inspiration of least) for the Council of Canadians.

What makes Gordon such an interesting study are not only his accomplishments, but the numerous, and often contradictory threads that made up his life. Here is a man who founded several firms, including one of the most successful private sector consulting firms in the history of Canada. As a consultant, he was thus able to keep one foot in the world of public policy and government – advising ministers and deputy ministers – while keeping other foot in the private sector, advising presidents and CEO’s. As head of these firms that he also helped broker the sale of large Canadian firms to American buyers. And yet, here is a man who was a strong Canadian nationalist, who sought to introduce structural limitations on foreign ownership in Canadian industry. He was also, on the one hand, a man with incredible organizational skills and yet, when given strategic control, had a modus operendi that was often problematic. According to Azzi he seemed to always identify problems, solve them hastily, and then apologize for the shortcomings — however dramatic — of his already implemented plan.

Azzi’s biography of Gordon was also illuminating in how it reminds one of the old adage “plus ca change…”

For example, Gordon’s first major postwar appointment was as chair of the Royal Commission on Administrative Classifications in the Public Service. In other words, Public Service Sector Reform. Needless to say this issue is once again a hot topic (one I happen to take great interest in and write on occasionally). Interestingly, this report had negligible impact – a fact Azzi attributes to poor research and analysis – but nonetheless hinting at the fact that public service sector reform may have been as difficult in 1947 as it is in 2007.

Ironically, Gordon inability to effectively draft and garner support for his Royal Commission Report may have contributed to some of the frustration he later experienced as Finance Minister. His frustration with the public service seems straight out of an episode “Yes Minister” or possibly the diary of our current Prime Minister. This passage sums it up beautifully:

When Gordon’s private secretary, Nancy Burpee, ordered a red typewriter, a high official in the treasury Board sent a long memorandum explaining why government issue typewriters had to be grey. Douglas Land summarized Gordon’s attitude: “If you can’t get a damn typewriter, how can you draft a municipal loan fund in a month?” Incidents like this led Gordon to doubt whether the bureaucracy could draft a bold budget… Despite these problems, he still wished to move swiftly to carry out his plans. After a few days in Ottawa, Gordon described the situation to Douglas Land: “I thought I was back at the Royal Commission with everybody explaining why no idea could work and why everything would take ten years to do. I have ordered some dynamite and hope to stir things up.”

The real focus of the book however – mirroring Walter Gordon’s life – is the rise of Canadian nationalism or, more specifically, Canadian economic nationalism. In many ways Gordon is the grandfather of the various forces that in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s would first oppose free trade and then, globalization. It was this topic that both ended Gordon’s political career – after his disastrous 1963 budget – but that also made him a folk hero among particularly left-wing nationalists. Interestingly, based on Azzi’s assessment, it is hard not to feel that Gordon was less of a nationalist then simply anti-American. Today we can see how these roots of Canadian nationalism have shape the tree’s growth. Even 30 and 40 years later many ardent nationalists on both the left and right cannot separate out anti-Americanism from their Canadian nationalism.

Azzi never passes judgment on Walter Gordon the man. However, he is clearly deeply uncomfortable with his essentially protectionist and nationalistic economic policies. And for good reason. Gordon’s construction of the problem was, at best, less than scientific. As he himself stated, his views “cannot be analyzed scientifically or proved absolutely. But the fact that judgment or belief is arrived at in part intuitively or through personal experience does not necessarily make it any less true.” It’s a somewhat shocking statement, analogous to saying “he felt it in his gut,” exactly the type of thing the Left would justly mock President Bush about today.

Azzi spends some time talking about some of Gordon’s true accomplishments, specifically helping transform the Liberal Party into a progressive, thinking institution. Sadly, he spends very little time talking about Gordon’s contribution in the ultimate implemention of this agenda, largely set out in the Kingston conference of 1960. The policies implemented by, or initiated by Pearson and Gordon, such as the Canada Pension Plan, Medicare, Canada Assistance Plan, regional-development programs, unemployment insurance and a government student loan program, along with the foundation Gordon later created, are probably his real accomplishment. Indeed, many these institutions embody, in part, what it means to be Canadian. This alone should prompt one to overlook the book’s dry style and encourage you to get acquainted with a major influencer of Canadian history.

The Boomer Factor

1 Reply

I’m not sure what to make of The Boomer Factor. In some ways it’s a fascinating read, a snapshot of how Canadians view themselves at the beginning of the 21st century. But while reading it you can’t help but feel that all the author has done is list stat after stat and link them together with a few sentences. This assessment may be a little unfair, but it reads more like a play by play of the data than as a thought-provoking analysis. Maybe it’s just that there’s very little prose between the streams of stats that inundate the reader.

I should also warn you that I have no capacity to assess whether or not the methodology used to generate these steps is it all sound. If there are true statisticians reading this I’d love your thoughts. That said I did find some of the presentation of the statistics deeply troubling. A notable example is the graph to your right. It shows two bars – one more than twice as large as the other – suggesting an increase of 100 – 120%. And yet, a closer looks at the numbers indicate there’s only been a 12 point difference between the two data points. This visual representation is thus grossly misleading, visually suggesting the argument is much more dramatic than what the data supports.

But these problems aside the book’s author, Reginald Bibby, keys in on several trends that are of interest. Some chapters, like “From Deference to Discernment” have been well documented by others. Others however, such as “From Tomorrow to Today”, a chapter on our quest for more time and the rising expectations we have of one another, along with Chapter 6 “From Knowing too Little to Knowing too Much” on the implications of the Internet and are increasing access to knowledge, are interesting.

But what’s most intriguing about Bibby’s concluding thoughts in these chapters – and the book overall – is that it departs from the book’s title. Bibby seems sanguine about the baby boomers’ capacity to adapt to our changing world, but is exceedingly optimistic about post-boomers – Gen Y and Gen X. Indeed, he terms these emerging generations “Reflective Post-Boomers” and says this about them:

Perhaps to a greater extent than any previous Canadian generation, they (Post-Boomers) have been able to have the time to assess what kind of lives they want to live...

…As they have been assembling their lives, post-boomers have been able to take a good look at how their grandparents, and her parents, lived. They grew up in homes were dads and moms, frankly, were experimenting with how to combine education, careers, raising kids, and marriages. The Post-Boomers saw how things turned out.

Such a vantage point has provided the emerging adult generation a unique opportunity to learn from the pre-boomers and boomer cohorts and extract the best and delete the worst from both. The preliminary evidence suggests that many younger adults are doing just that. They, like the boomers, have moved away from the racist and sexist tendencies of many older Canadians, to an extent as readily exceeding that of boomers. They also have recovered and restored some valuable pre-boomer “files” the boomers had tended either to use infrequently or delete – what people want most, the importance of family life, stability, and religion.on a

They have drawn on the boomers strong emphasis on education, discernment, and information. But they are determined to do a better job of harmonizing such themes with their desire for relationships, time to focus on their children, social compassion, spiritual fulfillment, and the opportunity to simply enjoy life. And so far, at least, they are reporting levels of happiness and for film and that match those of pre-boomers and exceed those of boomers.

Promising developments indeed!

According to his research Bibby also reports that younger Canadians — post-boomers — are more likely to be politically active than their boomer parents. given all the talk about political apathy this conclusion was counterintuitive and interesting. Sadly there wasn’t much discussion before the next statistic was thrust before the reader and the text moved on.

The two places where I think Bibby falls down is in his assessment of how Canadians are associating with one another. He refers repeatedly to the notion of how we’ve shifted from a we to me, while at the same time many of his stats suggest that people are actually deeply interested and engaged in communities. I’m not sure there we’re shifting from a we to me in an absolute sense. What is true is that people are more selective and have more options about who they associate with. Does this mean that we are more “me” focused? Or is it that we can afford to be more “we” focused in ways that make us comfortable?

The other place where Bibby lost me was in his discussion about religion. He suggests that many baby boomers are returning to religion to fill a growing spiritual void in their lives. I confess I don’t know. But this chapter had more analysis and opinion than any other, and so it felt like the story didn’t flow and it was less clear the data supported his assertions. A religious man himself, and an expert on religious trends I couldn’t help but feel that Bibby was inflating this chapter out of personal and professional interest. This could be a gross misunderstanding on my part, but while the rest of the book resonated with my personal experience from what I’ve seen of the country this chapter felt out of place.

Is The Boomer Factor a must read? Not really. But it was nonetheless an enjoyable read. For those interested, it will give you some compelling statistics to reinforce a number of trends you observe, and live with, on a day-to-day basis.

Sicko – I laughed, I cried, but I didn't think

8 Replies

I saw Sicko on Sunday night. No doubt, Michael Moore makes a fun movie. Clearly the US health insurance system is broken. It is, in all honesty, an embarrassment – a fact Moore ruthlessly exploits to great effect. That said, I nonetheless left the theater vaguely unsatisfied. I think it is because there is virtually no analysis of why the US healthcare system is broken, beyond of course the old stand by of “corporations are evil.”

As the film repeatedly demonstrates, health insurance firms often behave appallingly. But it isn’t because they are staffed entirely by evil people. This is a structural problem. For some reason, these firms are incented to literally turn their clients into their enemies (which is never a sound business strategy).

The best explanation I’ve seen comes from 5 pages in The Undercover Economist (an excellent book) where the author – Tim Harford – talks about the problems created in markets where there are asymmetries in knowledge. It is so good, I’ve reprinted (in an edited and very condensed form) the relevant bits:

“Economists have known for a while that when one participant in a transaction has inside information, markets may not work. It makes intuitive sense. But it wasn’t until an economist named George Akerlof published a revolutionary paper in 1970 that economists realized quite how profound the problem might be.

Using the used car market as an example, Akerlof showed that even if the market is highly competitive, it simply cannot work if sellers know the quality of their cars and buyers do not. For example, let’s say that half the used cars on sale are “peaches,” and half are “lemons.” The peaches are worth more to prospective buyers than to sellers – otherwise the buyers wouldn’t be buyers – say, $5,000 to prospective buyers and $4000 to sellers. The lemons are worthless pieces of junk. Sellers know if the car they’re selling is a lemon or peach. Buyers have to guess.

A buyer who doesn’t mind taking a fair gamble might think that anything between $2000 and $2500 would be a reasonable price for a car that has a 50/50 chance of being a peach. The seller of course don’t have to gamble: they know for certain whether their car is a peach or lemon. The problem is that sellers with lemons would snatch up a $2500 offer while sellers with peaches would find it insulting. Wander around offering $2500 for a car and you’ll discover that only lemons are for sale at that price. Of course, if you offered $4001 you would also see the peaches on the market – but the lemons won’t go away, and $4001 is not an attractive price for a car that only has a 50% chance of running properly.

This isn’t just about a trivial problem around the fringes of the market. In this scenario there is no market. Sellers won’t sell a peach for less than $4000, but buyers won’t offer that much for a car that has a 50% chance of being a lemon. With buyers only offering $2500 the sellers won’t sell their peaches, so in the end the only cars that get traded are worthless lemons, which get passed around for next nothing. Less extreme assumptions about the problem lead to less extreme breakdowns of the market, but the conclusions are similar.

Now let’s look at health insurance in this lens:

Let’s say that people who are likely prone to sickness are “lemons”; people who are likely to stay healthy are “peaches.” If, I suspect myself to be a lemon, I’d be advised to buy all the medical insurance I can. If, on the other hand, you feel fine and all your ancestors lived to be a hundred, then you may only buy medical insurance if it is cheap. After all, you hardly expect to need it.

Thanks to Akerlof’s proof that markets whose players have asymmetrical information are doomed, we can see how the insurance market may disappear. You, whose body is a succulent peach, will not find a typical insurance package a good deal; while I, whose body is a bitter lemon, will embrace a typical insurance package with open arms. The result is that the insurance company only sells insurance to people who are confident they will use it. As a result, the insurer loses clients who are unlikely to make claims and acquires the clients who are likely to make costly claims. As a result the insurer has to cut back on benefits and raise premiums. People of middling health now find the insurance is too expensive and cancel it, eliminating even more marginal “peaches” from the insurance pool and forcing insurance coming to raise premiums even higher to stay in business. More and more people cancel their policies, and in the end only the most sickly of the lemons will buy insurance at a price that will be nearly impossible to afford.”

Admittedly, this hardly covers all the problems facing the US healthcare system, but it does give an assessment of why the market for health insurance creates firms who behave so poorly (and yes, criminally). It is, in my mind, the best explanation for why a single insurer system (like what we have here in Canada) can work more effectively. However, this a single insurer system also creates problematic incentives, but more on that later in the week… (is anyone left reading a post this long?)

Foundations for a Creative Economy

2 Replies

I just finished Max Wyman’s “The Defiant Imagination” and have reviewed it here.

The information age doesn’t give rise to an information economy… when we all have access to vast amounts of information it will be our capacity to use that information that will matter. Those who are creative, you can imagine something new and different, will prosper. Max Wyman articulated that when I met him and it struck me as critically important. His book explains how the arts, and particularly the arts in education, will be essential to equipping us with the skills of imagination we will need to prosper in the creative economy.

Everything Bad is good for me

1 Reply

So after reading Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You a few months ago I’ve been feeling less guilty about watching TV. Johnson, whose counterintuitive thesis argues that pop culture is making us smarter is a gem of a book – especially for those looking for some fun, but interesting, non-fiction summer reading. One example he uses in his chapter on Television is Lost, a show characterized by a complex network of relationships and an opaque narrative that dares viewers to try to guess the show’s premise by weaving together the nuggets of information it reveals to them. According to Johnson, the shows complexity makes it brain food.

Brain food or no, this is the first time I’ve found a television drama really engaging. Not bad for a medium getting its butt kicked by the internet… isn’t it great how competition creates better, and smarter, content.

Anyway, since we’re on the topic I can’t resist sharing some thoughts on the Lost Season Finale (spoilers included!)

I’m betting the boat Jack Shepard calls for a rescue via satellite phone is operated by the Dharma Initiative who’ve been busy scouring the ocean trying hard to locate island they lost contact with after Ben killed their team.
Colleen W. suggested that, after their rescue, the castaways start to die. This is why Ben yells at Jack to not “make the call and kill 40 people.” It also explains why Jack believes they weren’t supposed to leave the island, accounts for his suicidal behaviour and is an excuse for why no one attended the funeral.
People may note that Richard Alpert, one of Ben’s right hand men, has not aged a day since encountering the teenage Ben escaping from the Dharma Initiative camp. We’re all familiar with the island’s restorative powers, perhaps in addition to preventing illness it also stave’s off age? Also, in a move that would imply some nice kharmatic balance in the island universe, maybe if people can’t die they also can’t have babies? That would certainly eliminate any population problems an ageless island-bound might create.
As an aside, this season finale completely makes up for the show’s aimless and disastrous, mid-season.
More importantly, the deal struck by the producers with the network, to give the TV show a specific amount of time (3 years – 100 more episodes) with which to complete is story arc is a major turning point in North American television. As my friend Dawn R. noted, American television may finally be learning from British television, in which good stories are allowed to be told, but aren’t flogged to death or extended beyond the their natural narrative arc. An important part of a good story is knowing when to end it.

eaves.ca

if writing is a muscle, this is my gym