American mapmaking’s most prestigious honor is the “Best of Show” award at the annual competition of the Cartography and Geographic Information Society. The five most recent winners were all maps designed by large, well-known institutions: National Geographic (three times), the Central Intelligence Agency Cartography Center, and the U.S. Census Bureau. But earlier this year, the 38th annual Best of Show award went to a map created by Imus Geographics—which is basically one dude named David Imus working in a farmhouse outside Eugene, Ore.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Creative Writing (Fiction)
The first story Maya wrote was about a world in which people split themselves in two instead of reproducing. In that world, every person could, at any given moment, turn into two beings, each one half his/her age. Some chose to do this when they were young; for instance, an eighteen-year-old might split into two nine-year-olds. Others would wait until they’d established themselves professionally and financially and go for it only in middle age. The heroine of Maya’s story was splitless. She had reached the age of eighty and, despite constant social pressure, insisted on not splitting. At the end of the story, she died.
It was a good story, except for the ending. There was something depressing about that part, Aviad thought. Depressing and predictable. But Maya, in the writing workshop she had signed up for, actually got a lot of compliments on the ending. The instructor, who was supposed to be this well-known writer, even though Aviad had never heard of him, told her that there was something soul-piercing about the banality of the ending, or some other piece of crap. Aviad saw how happy that compliment made Maya. She was very excited when she told him about it. She recited what the writer had said to her the way people recite a verse from the Bible. And Aviad, who had originally tried to suggest a different ending, backpedalled and said that it was all a matter of taste and that he really didn’t understand much about it.
It had been her mother’s idea that she should go to a creative-writing workshop. She’d said that a friend’s daughter had attended one and enjoyed it very much. Aviad also thought that it would be good for Maya to get out more, to do something with herself. He could always bury himself in work, but, since the miscarriage, she never left the house. Whenever he came home, he found her in the living room, sitting up straight on the couch. Not reading, not watching TV, not even crying. When Maya hesitated about the course, Aviad knew how to persuade her. “Go once, give it a try,” he said, “the way a kid goes to day camp.” Later, he realized that it had been a little insensitive of him to use a child as an example, after what they’d been through two months before. But Maya actually smiled and said that day camp might be just what she needed.
The second story she wrote was about a world in which you could see only the people you loved. The protagonist was a married man in love with his wife. One day, his wife walked right into him in the hallway and the glass he was holding fell and shattered on the floor. A few days later, she sat down on him as he was dozing in an armchair. Both times, she wriggled out of it with an excuse: she’d had something else on her mind; she hadn’t been looking when she sat down. But the husband started to suspect that she didn’t love him anymore. To test his theory, he decided to do something drastic: he shaved off the left side of his mustache. He came home with half a mustache, clutching a bouquet of anemones. His wife thanked him for the flowers and smiled. He could sense her groping the air as she tried to give him a kiss. Maya called the story “Half a Mustache,” and told Aviad that when she’d read it aloud in the workshop some people had cried. Aviad said, “Wow,” and kissed her on the forehead. That night, they fought about some stupid little thing. She’d forgotten to pass on a message or something like that, and he yelled at her. He was to blame, and in the end he apologized. “I had a hellish day at work,” he said and stroked her leg, trying to make up for his outburst. “Do you forgive me?” She forgave him.
by Etgar Keret, The New Yorker | Read more:
PHOTOGRAPH: QUENTIN BERTOUX/AGENCE VU/AURORA
It was a good story, except for the ending. There was something depressing about that part, Aviad thought. Depressing and predictable. But Maya, in the writing workshop she had signed up for, actually got a lot of compliments on the ending. The instructor, who was supposed to be this well-known writer, even though Aviad had never heard of him, told her that there was something soul-piercing about the banality of the ending, or some other piece of crap. Aviad saw how happy that compliment made Maya. She was very excited when she told him about it. She recited what the writer had said to her the way people recite a verse from the Bible. And Aviad, who had originally tried to suggest a different ending, backpedalled and said that it was all a matter of taste and that he really didn’t understand much about it.It had been her mother’s idea that she should go to a creative-writing workshop. She’d said that a friend’s daughter had attended one and enjoyed it very much. Aviad also thought that it would be good for Maya to get out more, to do something with herself. He could always bury himself in work, but, since the miscarriage, she never left the house. Whenever he came home, he found her in the living room, sitting up straight on the couch. Not reading, not watching TV, not even crying. When Maya hesitated about the course, Aviad knew how to persuade her. “Go once, give it a try,” he said, “the way a kid goes to day camp.” Later, he realized that it had been a little insensitive of him to use a child as an example, after what they’d been through two months before. But Maya actually smiled and said that day camp might be just what she needed.
The second story she wrote was about a world in which you could see only the people you loved. The protagonist was a married man in love with his wife. One day, his wife walked right into him in the hallway and the glass he was holding fell and shattered on the floor. A few days later, she sat down on him as he was dozing in an armchair. Both times, she wriggled out of it with an excuse: she’d had something else on her mind; she hadn’t been looking when she sat down. But the husband started to suspect that she didn’t love him anymore. To test his theory, he decided to do something drastic: he shaved off the left side of his mustache. He came home with half a mustache, clutching a bouquet of anemones. His wife thanked him for the flowers and smiled. He could sense her groping the air as she tried to give him a kiss. Maya called the story “Half a Mustache,” and told Aviad that when she’d read it aloud in the workshop some people had cried. Aviad said, “Wow,” and kissed her on the forehead. That night, they fought about some stupid little thing. She’d forgotten to pass on a message or something like that, and he yelled at her. He was to blame, and in the end he apologized. “I had a hellish day at work,” he said and stroked her leg, trying to make up for his outburst. “Do you forgive me?” She forgave him.
by Etgar Keret, The New Yorker | Read more:
PHOTOGRAPH: QUENTIN BERTOUX/AGENCE VU/AURORA
The Evolved Self-Management System
NICHOLAS HUMPHREY: I was asked to write an essay recently for "Current Biology" on the evolution of human health. It's not really my subject, I should say, but it certainly got me thinking. One of the more provocative thoughts I had is about the role of medicine. If human health has changed for the better in the late stages of evolution, this has surely had a lot to do with the possibility of consulting doctors, and the use of drugs. But the surprising thing is that, until less than 100 years ago, there was hardly anything a doctor could do that would be effective in any physiological medicinal way—and still the doctor's ministrations often "worked". That's to say, under the influence of what we would today call placebo medicine people came to feel less pain, to experience less fever, their inflammations receded, and so on.
Now, when people are cured by placebo medicine, they are in reality curing themselves. But why should this have become an available option late in human evolution, when it wasn't in the past.
I realized it must be the result of a trick that has been played by human culture. The trick isto persuade sick people that they have a "license" to get better, because they'rein the hands of supposed specialists who know what's best for them and can offer practical help and reinforcements. And the reason this works is that it reassures people—subconsciously —that the costs of self-cure will be affordable and that it's safe to let down their guard. So health has improved because of a cultural subterfuge. It's been a pretty remarkable development.
I'm now thinking about a larger issue still. If placebo medicine can induce people to release hidden healing resources, are there other ways in which the cultural environment can "give permission" to people to come out of their shells and to do things they wouldn't have done in the past? Can cultural signals encourage people to reveal sides of their personality or faculties that they wouldn't have dared to reveal in the past? Or for that matter can culture block them? There's good reason to think this is in fact our history.
Go back 10 or 20,000 years ago. Eccentricity would not have been tolerated. Unusual intelligence would not have been tolerated. Even behaving "out of character" would not have been tolerated. People were expected to conform, and they did conform, because they picked up the cues from their environment about the right and proper—the adaptive—way to behave. In response to cultural signals people were in effect policing their own personality.
And they still are. In fact we now have plenty of experimental evidence about the operation of "sub-conscious primes", how signals from the local environment get to people without their knowing it and, by changing their character and attitudes, regulate the face they present to the world. It can be a change for the worse (at least as we'd see it today). But so too it can be a change for the better. People become, let's say, more pro-social, more generous.
by Nicholas Humphrey, Edge | Read more:
A Postmodern Elks Club Serving Some of the World's Best Beer
Or, how a mini-mart in a Seattle neighborhood came to pour some of the most sought-after brews around--and changed the community.
From the parking lot the convenience store looks like any other 7-Eleven knock-off: A freezer that reads I-C-E hums out front. A lottery sign in the window flashes this week's Powerball pipe dream. Open the door: See the racks crammed with Twinkies and Cheetos and lip balm and aspirin and fishing magazines and single rolls of toilet paper. Behind the register are Swisher Sweets and Camels, and the Korean shop owner who will ring it all up for you.
It takes a minute for your eyes to adjust and see that something odd and wonderful is afoot inside Super Deli Mart in West Seattle. First you notice the jeroboam of Stone Brewing's praised 15th Anniversary Escondidian Imperial Black IPA behind the counter -- and its $130 sticker. And why is that dude standing by the Hostess Cherry Fruit Pies drinking a pint of -- is it Port Brewing's Angel's Share? -- a barley wine that was given 100 out of 100 points by RateBeer.com. Now a young dad enters juggling a child and two growlers and queues to fill the jugs from taps pouring beers like Stone's new Vertical Epic Ale, a limited-release brew rich with Anaheim chiles and cinnamon.
This convenience store may be the oddest place in North America to enjoy some of the best beers around -- a quirky testament to Seattle's redoubled passion for the frothy stuff. Long a good microbrew town, the city that birthed Redhook in 1981 has undergone a craft-beer Renaissance in the last few years. Today some 30 breweries call the Greater Seattle area home, and with a raft of newer taprooms pouring the best stuff from here and around the world, residents of the Emerald City are drowning in great draughts.
This trend is hardly limited to the vanguard Pacific Northwest: More breweries now exist nationwide than at any time since the late 1800s, according to the Brewers Association; nearly 25 percent more craft breweries opened in just the last decade. While overall beer sales have been falling, the amount of beer made by the nation's craft brewers has increased nearly 90 percent since 2001. (Craft beer is still just five percent of the market, though its market share nearly doubled in the last decade.)
Min Chung saw this new revolution coming and jumped aboard. Chung, 38, is a son of Korean immigrants with a business degree, a nose for marketing, and a mouth that loves to talk and drink good beer. He can usually be found wearing his preferred uniform of cargo shorts and running shoes, a sport vest stretched a little taut across a midsection that hasn't been denied the occasional pint. Chung bought the tired convenience store in early 2009 with the vision of sprucing it up and, among the Slim Jims and Red Bull, selling bottles of high-end brew to the Amazon workers and Boeing engineers who live near Puget Sound. Soon he thought, Why not pour beer so people could taste first? "Would people pay 11, 12 bucks a bottle if they didn't know what it is?" he asks. After much back-and-forth with the nonplussed Liquor Control Board, Chung got licensed as a restaurant (the "deli" in Super Deli Mart) and started pouring beer that August -- a first in the state for a mini-mart, as far as he knows.
What Chung didn't predict is what happened next. By last summer Super Deli Mart was burning though up to 25 kegs per week as people came to the store not just to pick up a six-pack of Dale's Pale Ale and a Snickers, but just to quaff pints and hang out.
by Christopher Soloman, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Russian River Brewing Company.
From the parking lot the convenience store looks like any other 7-Eleven knock-off: A freezer that reads I-C-E hums out front. A lottery sign in the window flashes this week's Powerball pipe dream. Open the door: See the racks crammed with Twinkies and Cheetos and lip balm and aspirin and fishing magazines and single rolls of toilet paper. Behind the register are Swisher Sweets and Camels, and the Korean shop owner who will ring it all up for you.
It takes a minute for your eyes to adjust and see that something odd and wonderful is afoot inside Super Deli Mart in West Seattle. First you notice the jeroboam of Stone Brewing's praised 15th Anniversary Escondidian Imperial Black IPA behind the counter -- and its $130 sticker. And why is that dude standing by the Hostess Cherry Fruit Pies drinking a pint of -- is it Port Brewing's Angel's Share? -- a barley wine that was given 100 out of 100 points by RateBeer.com. Now a young dad enters juggling a child and two growlers and queues to fill the jugs from taps pouring beers like Stone's new Vertical Epic Ale, a limited-release brew rich with Anaheim chiles and cinnamon.
This convenience store may be the oddest place in North America to enjoy some of the best beers around -- a quirky testament to Seattle's redoubled passion for the frothy stuff. Long a good microbrew town, the city that birthed Redhook in 1981 has undergone a craft-beer Renaissance in the last few years. Today some 30 breweries call the Greater Seattle area home, and with a raft of newer taprooms pouring the best stuff from here and around the world, residents of the Emerald City are drowning in great draughts.
This trend is hardly limited to the vanguard Pacific Northwest: More breweries now exist nationwide than at any time since the late 1800s, according to the Brewers Association; nearly 25 percent more craft breweries opened in just the last decade. While overall beer sales have been falling, the amount of beer made by the nation's craft brewers has increased nearly 90 percent since 2001. (Craft beer is still just five percent of the market, though its market share nearly doubled in the last decade.)
Min Chung saw this new revolution coming and jumped aboard. Chung, 38, is a son of Korean immigrants with a business degree, a nose for marketing, and a mouth that loves to talk and drink good beer. He can usually be found wearing his preferred uniform of cargo shorts and running shoes, a sport vest stretched a little taut across a midsection that hasn't been denied the occasional pint. Chung bought the tired convenience store in early 2009 with the vision of sprucing it up and, among the Slim Jims and Red Bull, selling bottles of high-end brew to the Amazon workers and Boeing engineers who live near Puget Sound. Soon he thought, Why not pour beer so people could taste first? "Would people pay 11, 12 bucks a bottle if they didn't know what it is?" he asks. After much back-and-forth with the nonplussed Liquor Control Board, Chung got licensed as a restaurant (the "deli" in Super Deli Mart) and started pouring beer that August -- a first in the state for a mini-mart, as far as he knows.
What Chung didn't predict is what happened next. By last summer Super Deli Mart was burning though up to 25 kegs per week as people came to the store not just to pick up a six-pack of Dale's Pale Ale and a Snickers, but just to quaff pints and hang out.
by Christopher Soloman, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Russian River Brewing Company.
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Land of the Banana Pancake Eaters
At first, the sheer ease of travelling in Southeast Asia came as a pleasant shock. After flying in from Calcutta, Bangkok’s budget hotels seemed exceptionally clean, and were as affordable as their Indian equivalents. We didn’t need to trek halfway across the city to buy bus tickets from dingy ticket offices filled with aggressive queue jumpers; they were sold by agents for the same price. We spent our first month between Bangkok and an idyllic island in the Gulf of Thailand, without any of the familiar hassles and challenges of travel, and when our Thai visas expired, we continued into Laos. My thoughts often turned to India and the twelve months I’d spent travelling there, testing and tormenting myself on long sweaty journeys to vast, polluted cities where a concrete box with a creaky overhead fan was often all I could get for my money. Had all the hassles and challenges been worth it?
The day I arrived in Vang Vieng the answer slapped me in the face. Or, rather, a few dozen pairs of barely-bikinied breasts slapped me in the face, closely pursued by as many pairs of luminous shorts, emblazoned with Vang Vieng, In the Tubing.
Vang Vieng is famous – in Australia. To most eighteen year old backpackers – and like-minded twenty-somethings – Vang Vieng is the highlight of any coming-of-age jaunt around Southeast Asia. To other travellers, it is a small town in northern Laos where people hire rubber tubes and float down the Nam Song River, stopping at ramshackle bars along the riverbank to drink buckets of whiskey and coke, or truly test their endurance with opium-laced cocktails or a bucket of magic mushrooms blended with fruit juice, hoping to god they won’t need to swim. Several travellers die every year, most from drowning or cracking their skulls on a rock. There are several tragic stories of people swimming after runaway tubes, only to disappear in the current – for the sake of a seven dollar deposit. Some float their way to the end of the tubing course in the dark, having lost track of time, and are robbed by groups of teenage locals who pretend to be helping them ashore.Everything we’d heard about Vang Vieng warned us to steer clear – and we’d had every intention of doing so, but a few days before leaving Laos’ capital, Vientiane, Iain and I saw a postcard labelled Blue Lagoon, Vang Vieng. It was an image of an immodestly blue body of water, glassy and clear beneath knotted trees, and fringed with bushes, leaves and more trees of assorted greens. Three lengths of rope hung temptingly into the water from a branch above, each with a wooden swing-seat at the end. Vientiane was scorching; the sun was hot enough to burn my skin during a fifteen minute walk to lunch. The thought of submerging ourselves in that pool of cool water was, quite simply, irresistible.
Claire van den Heever, Old World Wandering | Read more:
The Red Giant
One of the biggest market events of the coming year will undoubtedly be the Facebook IPO. You will read seven million articles about it in the next three months (sorry about that). It will likely come public as one of the largest IPOs in history, with a starting valuation somewhere in the vicinity of $100 billion. It is a tech giant to be sure, one of the most important companies in world right now.
But there is a major difference between Facebook and the other tech giants of the past and present like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Oracle, IBM, Yahoo, Netscape and Cisco. The difference is that Facebook will be the first tech giant to have come public after its growth rate peaks. it will be the first almost-mature tech giant to IPO at the end of it's biggest growth phase rather than in the early stages. The others offered public investors the chance to invest ahead of the Golden Age - but in this new era, the lion's share of valuation growth has been awarded to a relatively small handful of early stage investors and people need to accept that.
Facebook is a Red Giant, a star larger than the sun - but a dying star nonetheless. Red Giants are mid-sized stellar bodies that have already exhausted the hydrogen within their cores. They begin to live off the hydrogen surrounding them, burning it in a lower-intensity process called thermonuclear fusion. Similarly, Facebook is likely peaking right now in terms of new users, page views per user, engagement and so on - it will burn brightly off of the massive scale it's already built and that's pretty much it going forward.
This does not mean that the company won't become wildly profitable as they turn on the engines and monetize what's already there (which is obviously a huge amount of web real estate and mindshare at the moment). What it does mean is that, like the Red Giant, Facebook already is what it is. It is highly doubtful that the company's web presence and engagement can get any bigger or better.
In fact, it is more likely that:
Something new comes along - It is laughable how seamlessly, completely and quickly Facebook supplanted MySpace - let's not act like anything on the web is permanently dominant forever. Facebook is picking up major steam in countries like Indonesia and Brazil right now, the rate of new users signing up is breathtaking. But consider that they are pulling people from Google-owned network Orkut and that one day someone else will do the same to them. (...)
Kids rebel against a social network that includes their dorky parents - Can you imagine being 15 years old and being involved in any kind of socializing that involved your parents and aunts and uncles and Sunday school teachers and god knows who else from the dark side? There is a Facebook hipness hourglass somewhere and it has already been turned over...it is only a matter of time before the grains of sand slipping from the top to the bottom become noticeable and the tide turns. The kids will be first, the advertisers will follow. In the end, Facebook will be comprised of dormant and inactive profiles with a majority of its "engagement" coming from people in their forties stalking their exes from high school in the late 80's. For the younger generation, talking about Facebook at all will become painfully lame. Every generation mocks the one that came before. This moment rapidly approaches, the emptying of that hipness hourglass is inexorable.
by Joshua M. Brown, The Reformed Broker | Read more:
But there is a major difference between Facebook and the other tech giants of the past and present like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Oracle, IBM, Yahoo, Netscape and Cisco. The difference is that Facebook will be the first tech giant to have come public after its growth rate peaks. it will be the first almost-mature tech giant to IPO at the end of it's biggest growth phase rather than in the early stages. The others offered public investors the chance to invest ahead of the Golden Age - but in this new era, the lion's share of valuation growth has been awarded to a relatively small handful of early stage investors and people need to accept that.
Facebook is a Red Giant, a star larger than the sun - but a dying star nonetheless. Red Giants are mid-sized stellar bodies that have already exhausted the hydrogen within their cores. They begin to live off the hydrogen surrounding them, burning it in a lower-intensity process called thermonuclear fusion. Similarly, Facebook is likely peaking right now in terms of new users, page views per user, engagement and so on - it will burn brightly off of the massive scale it's already built and that's pretty much it going forward.
This does not mean that the company won't become wildly profitable as they turn on the engines and monetize what's already there (which is obviously a huge amount of web real estate and mindshare at the moment). What it does mean is that, like the Red Giant, Facebook already is what it is. It is highly doubtful that the company's web presence and engagement can get any bigger or better.
In fact, it is more likely that:
Something new comes along - It is laughable how seamlessly, completely and quickly Facebook supplanted MySpace - let's not act like anything on the web is permanently dominant forever. Facebook is picking up major steam in countries like Indonesia and Brazil right now, the rate of new users signing up is breathtaking. But consider that they are pulling people from Google-owned network Orkut and that one day someone else will do the same to them. (...)
Kids rebel against a social network that includes their dorky parents - Can you imagine being 15 years old and being involved in any kind of socializing that involved your parents and aunts and uncles and Sunday school teachers and god knows who else from the dark side? There is a Facebook hipness hourglass somewhere and it has already been turned over...it is only a matter of time before the grains of sand slipping from the top to the bottom become noticeable and the tide turns. The kids will be first, the advertisers will follow. In the end, Facebook will be comprised of dormant and inactive profiles with a majority of its "engagement" coming from people in their forties stalking their exes from high school in the late 80's. For the younger generation, talking about Facebook at all will become painfully lame. Every generation mocks the one that came before. This moment rapidly approaches, the emptying of that hipness hourglass is inexorable.
by Joshua M. Brown, The Reformed Broker | Read more:
Give Pods a Chance
Pods – also known as self-directed work teams – have been around for more than 20 years. Pods are 30% to 50% more effective than their traditional counterparts. A survey of senior line managers offers some of the benefits derived from implementing self-directed teams:
Podular design is a concept that focuses on modularizing work: making units more independent, adaptive, linkable, and swappable. But the environment that surrounds the pods is equally critical to the success or failure of a podular system. Modular components are a critical element of a connected company. But to take advantage of pods you also need a business that is designed to support them.
Architectural vs component innovation
Most innovation involves small, incremental improvements to the parts of a system. A better spark plug, a better kind of tire, a better bar of soap, and so on. This is because these kinds of innovations are easier to inject into an existing system.
But some kinds of innovations – often called disruptive innovations – involve changes to the system itself. The PC revolution is an example of disruptive innovation, because the entire system of work computing had to change to accommodate it. This required a whole host of component innovations beyond the PC itself, such as the office scanner, printer, networking, and so on. System innovation like this requires changes to the fundamental architecture – known as architectural innovation.
Component innovation swaps out one node for another, which usually results in an incremental improvement. Architectural innovation changes the links. Changing the relationships between nodes is a sweeping change that usually transforms the way that the entire system works. Apple’s iTunes/iPhone ecosystem was an architectural innovation that changed the music industry forever.
Perhaps one of the reasons more companies haven’t organized around small, empowered teams is that their business architectures don’t allow it. It’s not easy to plug modules into a platform that isn’t designed for it.
What kinds of companies have been successful with a podular approach?
Xerox, Procter and Gamble, AT& T and many other companies have credited self-directed teams with marked impact on their operations, including improvements in customer service, manufacturing, inventory management, and other productivity gains. In this post I’d like to highlight three highly effective podular systems: one old-school company, one new-school company, and one old-school industry that’s reinventing itself.
by Dave Gray | Read more:
- Improved quality, productivity and service. Greater flexibility. Reduced operating costs. Faster response to technological change. Fewer, simpler job classifications. Better response to workers’ values. Increased employee commitment to the organization. Ability to attract and retain the best people.
Podular design is a concept that focuses on modularizing work: making units more independent, adaptive, linkable, and swappable. But the environment that surrounds the pods is equally critical to the success or failure of a podular system. Modular components are a critical element of a connected company. But to take advantage of pods you also need a business that is designed to support them.
Architectural vs component innovation
Most innovation involves small, incremental improvements to the parts of a system. A better spark plug, a better kind of tire, a better bar of soap, and so on. This is because these kinds of innovations are easier to inject into an existing system.
But some kinds of innovations – often called disruptive innovations – involve changes to the system itself. The PC revolution is an example of disruptive innovation, because the entire system of work computing had to change to accommodate it. This required a whole host of component innovations beyond the PC itself, such as the office scanner, printer, networking, and so on. System innovation like this requires changes to the fundamental architecture – known as architectural innovation.
Component innovation swaps out one node for another, which usually results in an incremental improvement. Architectural innovation changes the links. Changing the relationships between nodes is a sweeping change that usually transforms the way that the entire system works. Apple’s iTunes/iPhone ecosystem was an architectural innovation that changed the music industry forever.
Perhaps one of the reasons more companies haven’t organized around small, empowered teams is that their business architectures don’t allow it. It’s not easy to plug modules into a platform that isn’t designed for it.
What kinds of companies have been successful with a podular approach?
Xerox, Procter and Gamble, AT& T and many other companies have credited self-directed teams with marked impact on their operations, including improvements in customer service, manufacturing, inventory management, and other productivity gains. In this post I’d like to highlight three highly effective podular systems: one old-school company, one new-school company, and one old-school industry that’s reinventing itself.
by Dave Gray | Read more:
Friday, January 6, 2012
Streaming Dreams
On a rainy night in late November, Robert Kyncl was in Google’s New York City offices, on Ninth Avenue, whiteboarding the future of TV. Kyncl holds a senior position at YouTube, which Google owns. He is the architect of the single largest cultural transformation in YouTube’s seven-year history. Wielding a black Magic Marker, he charted the big bang of channel expansion and audience fragmentation that has propelled television history so far, from the age of the three networks, each with a mass audience, to the hundreds of cable channels, each serving a niche audience—twenty-four-hour news, food, sports, weather, music—and on to the dawning age of Internet video, bringing channels by the tens of thousands. “People went from broad to narrow,” he said, “and we think they will continue to go that way—spend more and more time in the niches—because now the distribution landscape allows for more narrowness.”Kyncl puts his whole body into his whiteboard performances, and you can almost see the champion skier he used to be. As a teen-ager in Czechoslovakia, he was sent to a state-run boarding school where talented young skiers trained for the Olympics. At eighteen, “I realized then that all I knew was skiing,” he told me. After the Velvet Revolution of 1989, he applied to a program that placed Eastern Europeans in American summer camps as counsellors, and spent the summer in Charlottesville, Virginia. The following year, Kyncl went to SUNY, in New Paltz, where he majored in international relations.
People prefer niches because “the experience is more immersive,” Kyncl went on. “For example, there’s no horseback-riding channel on cable. Plenty of people love horseback riding, and there’s plenty of advertisers who would like to market to them, but there’s no channel for it, because of the costs. You have to program a 24/7 loop, and you need a transponder to get your signal up on the satellite. With the Internet, everything is on demand, so you don’t have to program 24/7—a few hours is all you need.”
For the past sixty years, TV executives have been making the decisions about what we watch in our living rooms. Kyncl would like to change that. Therefore YouTube, the home of grainy cell-phone videos and skateboarding dogs, is going pro. Kyncl has recruited producers, publishers, programmers, and performers from traditional media to create more than a hundred channels, most of which will début in the next six months—a sort of YouTV. Streaming video, delivered over the Internet, is about to engage traditional TV in a skirmish in the looming war for screen time.
Kyncl attacked the two-dimensional plane with his marker, schussing the media moguls, racing over and around them to the future. He drew a vertiginously plunging double-diamond run representing the dissolution of mass TV audiences as cable channels began to proliferate. Then he drew the bunny slope of Web-based channels that will further fragment audiences. According to Forrester Research, by 2016 half of all households will have Wi-Fi-enabled devices on their televisions, which will bring all those new channels into the living room, tempting people to cancel their pricey cable subscriptions. The only way for the networks and the cable companies to grow will be to buy Web-based channels.
Isn’t that more or less what happened thirty years ago? I asked. The networks, which had originally disparaged the new cable channels as cheap-looking and too narrowly focussed, ended up buying them when cable took off.
“Absolutely that’s what happened,” Kyncl said, with a slight Czech accent. “And it will happen again.”
He set the marker down on the conference-room table, and smiled. YouTube had won the gold.
by John Seabrook, New Yorker | Read more:
Illustration: Anders Wenngren
Center of the Universe
On the first day, God created the heavens and the earth.
“Let there be light,” He said, and there was light. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening—the first night.
On the second day, God separated the oceans from the sky. “Let there be a horizon,” He said. And lo: a horizon appeared and God saw that it was good. And there was evening—the second night.
On the third day, God’s girlfriend came over and said that He’d been acting distant lately.
“I’m sorry,” God said. “Things have been crazy this week at work.”
He smiled at her, but she did not smile back. And God saw that it was not good.
“I never see you,” she said.
“That’s not true,” God said. “We went to the movies just last week.”
And she said, “Lo. That was last month.”
And there was evening—a tense night.
On the fourth day, God created stars, to divide the light from the darkness. He was almost finished when He looked at His cell phone and realized that it was almost nine-thirty.
“Fuck,” He said. “Kate’s going to kill me.”
He finished the star He was working on and cabbed it back to the apartment.
“Sorry I’m late!” He said.
And lo: she did not even respond.
“Are you hungry?” He asked. “Let there be yogurt!” And there was that weird lo-cal yogurt that she liked.
“That’s not going to work this time,” she said.
by Simon Rich, New Yorker | Read more:
Illustration Maximilian Bode
“Let there be light,” He said, and there was light. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening—the first night.
On the second day, God separated the oceans from the sky. “Let there be a horizon,” He said. And lo: a horizon appeared and God saw that it was good. And there was evening—the second night.On the third day, God’s girlfriend came over and said that He’d been acting distant lately.
“I’m sorry,” God said. “Things have been crazy this week at work.”
He smiled at her, but she did not smile back. And God saw that it was not good.
“I never see you,” she said.
“That’s not true,” God said. “We went to the movies just last week.”
And she said, “Lo. That was last month.”
And there was evening—a tense night.
On the fourth day, God created stars, to divide the light from the darkness. He was almost finished when He looked at His cell phone and realized that it was almost nine-thirty.
“Fuck,” He said. “Kate’s going to kill me.”
He finished the star He was working on and cabbed it back to the apartment.
“Sorry I’m late!” He said.
And lo: she did not even respond.
“Are you hungry?” He asked. “Let there be yogurt!” And there was that weird lo-cal yogurt that she liked.
“That’s not going to work this time,” she said.
by Simon Rich, New Yorker | Read more:
Illustration Maximilian Bode
The Fat Trap
For 15 years, Joseph Proietto has been helping people lose weight. When these obese patients arrive at his weight-loss clinic in Australia, they are determined to slim down. And most of the time, he says, they do just that, sticking to the clinic’s program and dropping excess pounds. But then, almost without exception, the weight begins to creep back. In a matter of months or years, the entire effort has come undone, and the patient is fat again. “It has always seemed strange to me,” says Proietto, who is a physician at the University of Melbourne. “These are people who are very motivated to lose weight, who achieve weight loss most of the time without too much trouble and yet, inevitably, gradually, they regain the weight.”
Anyone who has ever dieted knows that lost pounds often return, and most of us assume the reason is a lack of discipline or a failure of willpower. But Proietto suspected that there was more to it, and he decided to take a closer look at the biological state of the body after weight loss.
Beginning in 2009, he and his team recruited 50 obese men and women. The men weighed an average of 233 pounds; the women weighed about 200 pounds. Although some people dropped out of the study, most of the patients stuck with the extreme low-calorie diet, which consisted of special shakes called Optifast and two cups of low-starch vegetables, totaling just 500 to 550 calories a day for eight weeks. Ten weeks in, the dieters lost an average of 30 pounds.
At that point, the 34 patients who remained stopped dieting and began working to maintain the new lower weight. Nutritionists counseled them in person and by phone, promoting regular exercise and urging them to eat more vegetables and less fat. But despite the effort, they slowly began to put on weight. After a year, the patients already had regained an average of 11 of the pounds they struggled so hard to lose. They also reported feeling far more hungry and preoccupied with food than before they lost the weight.
While researchers have known for decades that the body undergoes various metabolic and hormonal changes while it’s losing weight, the Australian team detected something new. A full year after significant weight loss, these men and women remained in what could be described as a biologically altered state. Their still-plump bodies were acting as if they were starving and were working overtime to regain the pounds they lost. For instance, a gastric hormone called ghrelin, often dubbed the “hunger hormone,” was about 20 percent higher than at the start of the study. Another hormone associated with suppressing hunger, peptide YY, was also abnormally low. Levels of leptin, a hormone that suppresses hunger and increases metabolism, also remained lower than expected. A cocktail of other hormones associated with hunger and metabolism all remained significantly changed compared to pre-dieting levels. It was almost as if weight loss had put their bodies into a unique metabolic state, a sort of post-dieting syndrome that set them apart from people who hadn’t tried to lose weight in the first place.
“What we see here is a coordinated defense mechanism with multiple components all directed toward making us put on weight,” Proietto says. “This, I think, explains the high failure rate in obesity treatment.”
by Tara Parker Pope, NY Times | Read more:
Anyone who has ever dieted knows that lost pounds often return, and most of us assume the reason is a lack of discipline or a failure of willpower. But Proietto suspected that there was more to it, and he decided to take a closer look at the biological state of the body after weight loss. Beginning in 2009, he and his team recruited 50 obese men and women. The men weighed an average of 233 pounds; the women weighed about 200 pounds. Although some people dropped out of the study, most of the patients stuck with the extreme low-calorie diet, which consisted of special shakes called Optifast and two cups of low-starch vegetables, totaling just 500 to 550 calories a day for eight weeks. Ten weeks in, the dieters lost an average of 30 pounds.
At that point, the 34 patients who remained stopped dieting and began working to maintain the new lower weight. Nutritionists counseled them in person and by phone, promoting regular exercise and urging them to eat more vegetables and less fat. But despite the effort, they slowly began to put on weight. After a year, the patients already had regained an average of 11 of the pounds they struggled so hard to lose. They also reported feeling far more hungry and preoccupied with food than before they lost the weight.
While researchers have known for decades that the body undergoes various metabolic and hormonal changes while it’s losing weight, the Australian team detected something new. A full year after significant weight loss, these men and women remained in what could be described as a biologically altered state. Their still-plump bodies were acting as if they were starving and were working overtime to regain the pounds they lost. For instance, a gastric hormone called ghrelin, often dubbed the “hunger hormone,” was about 20 percent higher than at the start of the study. Another hormone associated with suppressing hunger, peptide YY, was also abnormally low. Levels of leptin, a hormone that suppresses hunger and increases metabolism, also remained lower than expected. A cocktail of other hormones associated with hunger and metabolism all remained significantly changed compared to pre-dieting levels. It was almost as if weight loss had put their bodies into a unique metabolic state, a sort of post-dieting syndrome that set them apart from people who hadn’t tried to lose weight in the first place.
“What we see here is a coordinated defense mechanism with multiple components all directed toward making us put on weight,” Proietto says. “This, I think, explains the high failure rate in obesity treatment.”
by Tara Parker Pope, NY Times | Read more:
Reversal of Fortune
One day last February, a judge in Lago Agrio, presiding over a spare, concrete courtroom in a shopping mall on the edge of town, issued an opinion that reverberated far beyond the Amazon. Since 1993, a group of Ecuadorans had been pursuing an apparently fruitless legal struggle to hold Texaco responsible for environmental destruction in the Oriente. During the decades when Texaco operated there, the lawsuit maintained, it dumped eighteen billion gallons of toxic waste. When the company ceased operations in Ecuador, in 1992, it allegedly left behind hundreds of open pits full of malignant black sludge. The harm done by Texaco, the plaintiffs contended, could be measured in cancer deaths, miscarriages, birth defects, dead livestock, sick fish, and the near-extinction of several tribes; Texaco’s legacy in the region amounted to a “rain-forest Chernobyl.”
By the time the judge, Nicolás Zambrano, issued his decision, the case had been going on for eighteen years. It had outlasted jurists on two continents. Zambrano was the sixth judge to preside in Ecuador; one federal judge in New York had died before he could rule on the case. The litigation even outlasted Texaco: in 2001, the company was subsumed by Chevron, which inherited the lawsuit. The dispute is now considered one of the nastiest legal contests in memory, a spectacle almost as ugly as the pollution that prompted it.
Chevron, which operates in more than a hundred countries, is America’s third-largest corporation. Its annual revenue, which often tops two hundred billion dollars, is nearly four times as much as Ecuador’s economic output. The plaintiffs, who named themselves the afectados—the affected ones—included indigenous people and uneducated settlers in the Oriente; some of them initially signed documents in the case with a fingerprint. They were represented by a fractious coalition of American and Ecuadoran lawyers, most of whom were working for contingency fees. An environmental lawsuit against a major corporation can resemble a war of attrition, and in 1993 few observers would have predicted that the plaintiffs could endure as long as they did. But, on February 14, 2011, their persistence was rewarded. Judge Zambrano ruled that Chevron was responsible for vast contamination, and ordered it to pay eighteen billion dollars in damages—the largest judgment ever awarded in an environmental lawsuit.
by Patrick Radden Keefe, New Yorker | Read more:
Photograph by Remi Benali.
Consider the Oyster Farm
The bug to farm oysters bites on beautiful summer days, when other bugs – greenflies, no-see-ums – aren’t in evidence. The water is calm, the sun is shining, and there are neat lines of oystering gear emerging from the water as the tide flows out. For miles, there’s nothing but harbor, spotted with eelgrass islands and bordered by a pristine barrier beach. Bucolic, only with boats.
It bit my husband Kevin, hard. His urge to farm dates back to the fourth grade, when Sister Cora asked the class what they wanted to be when they grew up. She thought Kevin was being a wiseass when he said farmer, and made him kneel on grains of rice for his insolence. But four decades later, when he met Les Hemmila, a veteran oysterman who took him out to see the Cape Cod oyster flats, it was all over but the backbreaking labor, uncertain income, and inevitable ruin by disease or mismanagement.
“How hard can it be?” I thought when Kevin brought it up. Farming oysters seemed easier than farming things with roots or legs. They eat what floats by. They’re impervious to bad weather. They can’t run away. And I sure wasn’t going to waste one of my three lifetime marital vetoes to stop him (ask him why he doesn’t have a motorcycle). We happened to be in the right place at the right time to get an oyster grant – a lease on a little section of seabed – and we were off and running. Ahead of the game, even, because we already had a boat.But really, picking a crop because you think it’s going to be low-maintenance is a good indication that you shouldn’t be farming in the first place. First, our boat. Boats, it turns out, are as specialized as farm equipment, and you can’t farm oysters with your 19-foot fishing boat any more than you can bale hay with your cotton gin.
Ideally, you want oyster flats to be in water shallow enough to go dry for a few hours at low tide, so you can get at your oysters more easily and let the sun kill the various aquatic life forms that foul the gear. But to get to those shallow spots, you need a flat-bottomed boat with a draft in inches. There went our already-have-a-boat advantage. We bought another boat, only to discover that it was too small to carry all the equipment. So, even though our driveway was getting crowded, we bought another, bigger one.Hey, if oyster farming doesn’t work out, we can always invade Britain.
by Tamar Haspel, Taste | Read more:
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Sand Painting
Kseniya Simonova is a Ukrainian artist who just won Ukraine's version of "America's Got Talent." She uses a giant light box, dramatic music, imagination and "sand painting" skills to interpret Germany's invasion and occupation of Ukraine during WWII.
via:
Iowa: The Meaningless Sideshow Begins
The 2012 presidential race officially begins today with the caucuses in Iowa, and we all know what that means …
Nothing.
The race for the White House is normally an event suffused with drama, sucking eyeballs to the page all over the globe. Just as even the non-British were at least temporarily engaged by last year’s royal wedding, people all over the world are normally fascinated by the presidential race: both dramas arouse the popular imagination as real-life versions of universal children’s fairy tales.
Instead of a tale about which maiden gets to marry the handsome prince, the campaign is an epic story, complete with a gleaming white castle at the end, about the battle to succeed to the king’s throne. Since the presidency is the most powerful office in the world, the tale has appeal for people all over the planet, from jungles to Siberian villages.
It takes an awful lot to rob the presidential race of this elemental appeal. But this year’s race has lost that buzz. In fact, this 2012 race may be the most meaningless national election campaign we’ve ever had. If the presidential race normally captivates the public as a dramatic and angry ideological battle pitting one impassioned half of society against the other, this year’s race feels like something else entirely.
In the wake of the Tea Party, the Occupy movement, and a dozen or more episodes of real rebellion on the streets, in the legislatures of cities and towns, and in state and federal courthouses, this presidential race now feels like a banal bureaucratic sideshow to the real event – the real event being a looming confrontation between huge masses of disaffected citizens on both sides of the aisle, and a corrupt and increasingly ideologically bankrupt political establishment, represented in large part by the two parties dominating this race.
by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Nothing. The race for the White House is normally an event suffused with drama, sucking eyeballs to the page all over the globe. Just as even the non-British were at least temporarily engaged by last year’s royal wedding, people all over the world are normally fascinated by the presidential race: both dramas arouse the popular imagination as real-life versions of universal children’s fairy tales.
Instead of a tale about which maiden gets to marry the handsome prince, the campaign is an epic story, complete with a gleaming white castle at the end, about the battle to succeed to the king’s throne. Since the presidency is the most powerful office in the world, the tale has appeal for people all over the planet, from jungles to Siberian villages.
It takes an awful lot to rob the presidential race of this elemental appeal. But this year’s race has lost that buzz. In fact, this 2012 race may be the most meaningless national election campaign we’ve ever had. If the presidential race normally captivates the public as a dramatic and angry ideological battle pitting one impassioned half of society against the other, this year’s race feels like something else entirely.
In the wake of the Tea Party, the Occupy movement, and a dozen or more episodes of real rebellion on the streets, in the legislatures of cities and towns, and in state and federal courthouses, this presidential race now feels like a banal bureaucratic sideshow to the real event – the real event being a looming confrontation between huge masses of disaffected citizens on both sides of the aisle, and a corrupt and increasingly ideologically bankrupt political establishment, represented in large part by the two parties dominating this race.
by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone | Read more:
The Best American Wall Map
At first glance, Imus’ “The Essential Geography of the United States of America” may look like any other U.S. wall map. It’s about 4 feet by 3 feet. It uses a standard, two-dimensional conic projection. It has place names. Political boundaries. Lakes, rivers, highways.
So what makes this map different from the Rand McNally version you can buy at a bookstore? Or from the dusty National Geographic pull-down mounted in your child’s elementary school classroom? Can one paper wall map really outshine all others—so definitively that it becomes award-worthy?
I’m here to tell you it can. This is a masterful map. And the secret is in its careful attention to design.
by Seth Stevenson, Slate | Read more:
by Seth Stevenson, Slate | Read more:
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