Wednesday, April 1, 2015
Slow Love
An American man and a French woman meet on a train in Eastern Europe. They live on different continents. But before the sun comes up, they have spent the night together. What happens next?
You’d expect the answer to be, nothing. It’s just a one-night stand in a faraway place. But in director Richard Linklater’s trilogy, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight, their romance blooms into commitment and kids.
While some might dismiss this as Hollywood romanticism, it is actually a common experience. For the past five years, my colleagues at Match.com and I have conducted an annual national study called Singles in America, and in each year, a majority of survey respondents have reported having a one-night stand. And 27 percent of our 2014 respondents reported having had a one-night stand turn into a long-term, committed partnership.1
We humans are a romantic tribe. Over 54 percent of American singles (which make up over half of the adult population) believe in love at first sight; 56 percent believe laws should make it easier to wed; 89 percent believe you can stay married to the same person forever. And, remarkably, 33 percent of American singles believe it’s ok to leave a “satisfactory marriage” if you are no longer passionately in love. In America, as in much of the post-industrial world, romantic love is in full bloom.
Yet between 43 and 50 percent of American marriages will fail, and some 67 percent of American cohabiting couples report that they are terrified of the social, legal, emotional, and economic consequences of divorce.2 Divorce, men and women wanly joke, is in the drinking water.
So I have come to believe that—motivated by romance and afraid of what sociologist Andrew Cherlin calls the marriage-go-round—today’s singles are ushering a long pre-commitment stage into the courtship process. Fast sex is part of the package. Couples want to get to know everything about a potential life partner before they tie the knot. Welcome to the age of slow love.
Singles in America is not a poll of the Match.com population. Instead, it probes an annual representative sample of over 5,000 Americans, based on the U.S. census. To date we have queried over 25,000 men and women—to my knowledge, the largest national representative study of singles. And what we have found is an abundance of caution.
Take hooking-up—an uncommitted sexual encounter between two people who are not currently in a romantic relationship with one another. Hooking up appears reckless. Certainly those who engage in one-night stands are risking sexually transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancy, and emotional trauma. Nevertheless, in the 2014 Singles in America study, 66 percent of single men and 50 percent of single women reported that they had engaged in a one-night stand—and these numbers have varied little over the past five years. Why do we hop into the sack with someone we hardly know?
Perhaps because you learn a lot about a person between the sheets. You might even kick-start a real relationship: Any stimulation of the genitals promotes dopamine activity, which can potentially push you over the threshold into falling in love. At orgasm, oxytocin and vasopressin—neurochemicals linked with feelings of attachment—spike. With just one night of casual sex, risky as it is, you may win life’s greatest prize: a devoted mating partner.
Nevertheless, few race to the altar after a night in bed together. Instead, many take the next cautious step, a friends with benefits relationship—commitment-lite. In this sexual arrangement, a pair has coitus when convenient, but they don’t appear in public as a couple. In 2013, 58 percent of men and 50 percent of women in our Singles in America study reported that they’d had a friends with benefits relationship, including one in three people in their 70s. And 28 percent of our 2014 participants had had a friends with benefits relationship turn into a long-term partnership.
Next, many couples move in together—another cautious step toward permanent pairing, which first entered the public discourse with a famous 1966 article by anthropologist Margaret Mead. Mead suggested that a young couple with no immediate plans to reproduce should first make an “individual marriage,” a legal tie that excluded bearing children, did not imply a life-long commitment, and had no economic consequences should the couple part. A “parental marriage” could come later if they so decided.
“Living together,” a version of the first step of this two-step marriage, emerged in the 1970s; and today what had been scandalous has become routine. In 2012, 58 percent of those in our Singles in America study reported that they have lived with one to five partners outside of wedlock. And as the Pew Research Center notes, some 64 percent of Americans believe this living arrangement is a step toward wedding.3
But discretion still reigns after partners have agreed to marry. In 2014, 36 percent of singles in our Singles in America study said they wanted a pre-nuptial agreement.
Even marriage is becoming provisional. Civil partnerships in England, civil unions in the U.S., and de facto partnerships in Australia enable a couple to start and end a partnership relatively easily. France’s pacte civil de solidarite, or PACS, is particularly intriguing. Enacted in 1999 primarily to enable gays and lesbians to obtain a legal means of attachment without conventional matrimony, it immediately became popular among heterosexuals. All you do is go to a federal office with your partner and sign some papers to initiate a legal relationship. If you want to end it? Send in a form.
One-night stands; hooking-up; friends with benefits; living together; pre-nups; civil unions. These all spell caution. But they also spell logic—because our brain is soft-wired to attach slowly to a partner.
by Helen Fisher, Nautilus | Read more:
Image: Hulton Archive
[ed. When Love Takes Over (feat. Kelly Rowland).]
You’d expect the answer to be, nothing. It’s just a one-night stand in a faraway place. But in director Richard Linklater’s trilogy, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight, their romance blooms into commitment and kids.
While some might dismiss this as Hollywood romanticism, it is actually a common experience. For the past five years, my colleagues at Match.com and I have conducted an annual national study called Singles in America, and in each year, a majority of survey respondents have reported having a one-night stand. And 27 percent of our 2014 respondents reported having had a one-night stand turn into a long-term, committed partnership.1We humans are a romantic tribe. Over 54 percent of American singles (which make up over half of the adult population) believe in love at first sight; 56 percent believe laws should make it easier to wed; 89 percent believe you can stay married to the same person forever. And, remarkably, 33 percent of American singles believe it’s ok to leave a “satisfactory marriage” if you are no longer passionately in love. In America, as in much of the post-industrial world, romantic love is in full bloom.
Yet between 43 and 50 percent of American marriages will fail, and some 67 percent of American cohabiting couples report that they are terrified of the social, legal, emotional, and economic consequences of divorce.2 Divorce, men and women wanly joke, is in the drinking water.
So I have come to believe that—motivated by romance and afraid of what sociologist Andrew Cherlin calls the marriage-go-round—today’s singles are ushering a long pre-commitment stage into the courtship process. Fast sex is part of the package. Couples want to get to know everything about a potential life partner before they tie the knot. Welcome to the age of slow love.
Singles in America is not a poll of the Match.com population. Instead, it probes an annual representative sample of over 5,000 Americans, based on the U.S. census. To date we have queried over 25,000 men and women—to my knowledge, the largest national representative study of singles. And what we have found is an abundance of caution.
Take hooking-up—an uncommitted sexual encounter between two people who are not currently in a romantic relationship with one another. Hooking up appears reckless. Certainly those who engage in one-night stands are risking sexually transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancy, and emotional trauma. Nevertheless, in the 2014 Singles in America study, 66 percent of single men and 50 percent of single women reported that they had engaged in a one-night stand—and these numbers have varied little over the past five years. Why do we hop into the sack with someone we hardly know?
Perhaps because you learn a lot about a person between the sheets. You might even kick-start a real relationship: Any stimulation of the genitals promotes dopamine activity, which can potentially push you over the threshold into falling in love. At orgasm, oxytocin and vasopressin—neurochemicals linked with feelings of attachment—spike. With just one night of casual sex, risky as it is, you may win life’s greatest prize: a devoted mating partner.
Nevertheless, few race to the altar after a night in bed together. Instead, many take the next cautious step, a friends with benefits relationship—commitment-lite. In this sexual arrangement, a pair has coitus when convenient, but they don’t appear in public as a couple. In 2013, 58 percent of men and 50 percent of women in our Singles in America study reported that they’d had a friends with benefits relationship, including one in three people in their 70s. And 28 percent of our 2014 participants had had a friends with benefits relationship turn into a long-term partnership.
Next, many couples move in together—another cautious step toward permanent pairing, which first entered the public discourse with a famous 1966 article by anthropologist Margaret Mead. Mead suggested that a young couple with no immediate plans to reproduce should first make an “individual marriage,” a legal tie that excluded bearing children, did not imply a life-long commitment, and had no economic consequences should the couple part. A “parental marriage” could come later if they so decided.
“Living together,” a version of the first step of this two-step marriage, emerged in the 1970s; and today what had been scandalous has become routine. In 2012, 58 percent of those in our Singles in America study reported that they have lived with one to five partners outside of wedlock. And as the Pew Research Center notes, some 64 percent of Americans believe this living arrangement is a step toward wedding.3
But discretion still reigns after partners have agreed to marry. In 2014, 36 percent of singles in our Singles in America study said they wanted a pre-nuptial agreement.
Even marriage is becoming provisional. Civil partnerships in England, civil unions in the U.S., and de facto partnerships in Australia enable a couple to start and end a partnership relatively easily. France’s pacte civil de solidarite, or PACS, is particularly intriguing. Enacted in 1999 primarily to enable gays and lesbians to obtain a legal means of attachment without conventional matrimony, it immediately became popular among heterosexuals. All you do is go to a federal office with your partner and sign some papers to initiate a legal relationship. If you want to end it? Send in a form.
One-night stands; hooking-up; friends with benefits; living together; pre-nups; civil unions. These all spell caution. But they also spell logic—because our brain is soft-wired to attach slowly to a partner.
by Helen Fisher, Nautilus | Read more:
[ed. When Love Takes Over (feat. Kelly Rowland).]
It’s Raining Sideways in Juneau, Yo
Rainy Sunday, wake up at the ass crack o’ dawn
Call up a dozen moms cuz I can’t be alone
Hello?
What up, moms?
Sistah wife! What’s crackin’?
You thinkin' what I’m thinkin?
TWIN LAKES
Yeah, it’s happenin'!
But first we gotta make our kids put on their gear
We rock the Hellys and the Xtra-Tuffs all DAY up in here!
They got the triple insulation with the steel toe built in
The slip-resistant outsole that flex like Paris Hilton
No doubt those boots got all da bomb rubbah
I needsta have those kicks like an orca needs blubbah!
One, no two, no three WARM LAYAHS
I ain’t tryin’ to hear my kids bitchin,’ playahs!
Yo, who’s got the snacks?
Oh shit, not me!
Better hit Freds or better yet the I.G.
I got some Annie’s bunnies and maybe some M&Ms
Rainbow Foods shook me down for like all of my Benjamins.
Egan Drive let’s go
Step on it, sucka.
What you wanna do, moms?
COFFEE MOTHER FUCKER.
It’s raining sideways in Juneau, yo
I said it’s raining sideways in Juneau, yo
I said it’s raining sideways in Juneau, yo
Yeah you heard me, this shit is BLEAK.
by Libby Bakalar, One Hot Mess | Read more:
Image: Geoff Kirsch, Story via:AK Dispatch
Call up a dozen moms cuz I can’t be alone
Hello?What up, moms?
Sistah wife! What’s crackin’?
You thinkin' what I’m thinkin?
TWIN LAKES
Yeah, it’s happenin'!
But first we gotta make our kids put on their gear
We rock the Hellys and the Xtra-Tuffs all DAY up in here!
They got the triple insulation with the steel toe built in
The slip-resistant outsole that flex like Paris Hilton
No doubt those boots got all da bomb rubbah
I needsta have those kicks like an orca needs blubbah!
One, no two, no three WARM LAYAHS
I ain’t tryin’ to hear my kids bitchin,’ playahs!
Yo, who’s got the snacks?
Oh shit, not me!
Better hit Freds or better yet the I.G.
I got some Annie’s bunnies and maybe some M&Ms
Rainbow Foods shook me down for like all of my Benjamins.
Egan Drive let’s go
Step on it, sucka.
What you wanna do, moms?
COFFEE MOTHER FUCKER.
It’s raining sideways in Juneau, yo
I said it’s raining sideways in Juneau, yo
I said it’s raining sideways in Juneau, yo
Yeah you heard me, this shit is BLEAK.
by Libby Bakalar, One Hot Mess | Read more:
Image: Geoff Kirsch, Story via:AK Dispatch
Land-based Food Won't Sustain Polar Bears in a Low-Ice Arctic
As summer and autumn sea ice diminishes in the Arctic Sea, polar bears spending more time on shore have been spotted eating eggs, hunting down the nesting birds that lay them, hunting other land animals and even chewing on edible plants growing onshore.
But is that enough to sustain them in an ice-scarce Arctic?
No, says a new study by scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, Washington State University and Polar Bears International.
The study analyzes food needs of polar bears, including their genetic metabolic characteristics, and the characteristics of the onshore ecosystems and the foods in them.
The verdict? Terrestrial foods are, for the most part, the wrong kind for fat-dependent polar bears, and there is too little of it. What bear food does exist on land is already being used by Arctic grizzly bears, which -- appropriately -- are the smallest and most spread out of all the world’s brown bears, said the study’s lead author, USGS research biologist Karyn Rode.
The study, published Wednesday in the journal Frontiers of Ecology and the Environment, find that even though polar bears are spending more time ashore and are affecting terrestrial ecosystems, “evidence suggests that the nutritional contribution of terrestrial foods to polar bear diets will probably remain negligible.”
As the world’s biggest bears, and as denizens of the cold Arctic climate, polar bears need large amounts of fat in their diet to survive, said co-author Steve Amstrup, a former Alaska-based USGS biologist who is now chief scientist at Polar Bears International.
“All bears are not created equal, and if you’re a really big bear, like a polar bear, you need to have a rich food source to sustain you,” Amstrup said.
Ringed seals, the primary prey for polar bears, are precisely that rich food source, with fat accounting for up to half their body weight, Amstrup said. The food sources on land cannot compare in quality or quantity, he said.
Consumption of bird eggs, birds, shore plants and even seaweed is not necessarily widespread, Rode and Amstrup said. Only a small portion of any of the world’s polar bear populations have been observed doing such foraging, Rode said. And an important indicator that it is not doing much to help overall polar bear survival is that in the places where such behavior has been most frequently documented, polar bears have declined in population and in body condition, she said.
In some cases, polar bears have gone to extraordinary lengths to get at their alternate food sources. The study includes a photograph from Svalbard showing a bear perched precariously on a ledge in Svalbard and trying to get at murre nests lodged in the steep rocky cliff there.
But is that enough to sustain them in an ice-scarce Arctic?
No, says a new study by scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, Washington State University and Polar Bears International.
The study analyzes food needs of polar bears, including their genetic metabolic characteristics, and the characteristics of the onshore ecosystems and the foods in them.The verdict? Terrestrial foods are, for the most part, the wrong kind for fat-dependent polar bears, and there is too little of it. What bear food does exist on land is already being used by Arctic grizzly bears, which -- appropriately -- are the smallest and most spread out of all the world’s brown bears, said the study’s lead author, USGS research biologist Karyn Rode.
The study, published Wednesday in the journal Frontiers of Ecology and the Environment, find that even though polar bears are spending more time ashore and are affecting terrestrial ecosystems, “evidence suggests that the nutritional contribution of terrestrial foods to polar bear diets will probably remain negligible.”
As the world’s biggest bears, and as denizens of the cold Arctic climate, polar bears need large amounts of fat in their diet to survive, said co-author Steve Amstrup, a former Alaska-based USGS biologist who is now chief scientist at Polar Bears International.
“All bears are not created equal, and if you’re a really big bear, like a polar bear, you need to have a rich food source to sustain you,” Amstrup said.
Ringed seals, the primary prey for polar bears, are precisely that rich food source, with fat accounting for up to half their body weight, Amstrup said. The food sources on land cannot compare in quality or quantity, he said.
Consumption of bird eggs, birds, shore plants and even seaweed is not necessarily widespread, Rode and Amstrup said. Only a small portion of any of the world’s polar bear populations have been observed doing such foraging, Rode said. And an important indicator that it is not doing much to help overall polar bear survival is that in the places where such behavior has been most frequently documented, polar bears have declined in population and in body condition, she said.
In some cases, polar bears have gone to extraordinary lengths to get at their alternate food sources. The study includes a photograph from Svalbard showing a bear perched precariously on a ledge in Svalbard and trying to get at murre nests lodged in the steep rocky cliff there.
That might be a sign of desperation, Amstrup said. “Foraging on the high cliff is very, very high-risk and the bears have to be really hungry before they take on that risk,” he said.
by Yereth Rosen, Alaska Dispatch | Read more:
Image: Loren Holmes
Monday, March 30, 2015
Dropbox Versus The World
"What’s preventing Google from disrupting your success?"
Drew Houston’s company may be valued at $10 billion, but here in GSB Faculty West 104 on the Stanford University campus he’s being grilled like a newbie on Shark Tank. The three dozen students in this class, called "Disruptive Innovation", are relentless, even though he’s been invited as a guest. Another pupil brings up what he believes is another giant threat: "Amazon [Web Services] was this huge competitive advantage for you when you were first starting," he says. "But now they have this competing Cloud Drive."
Houston is the epitome of Northern California cool. With his full beard, hair sticking straight up, and a silver hoop piercing the middle of his left earlobe, he leans back in his chair and placidly fields the queries, no matter how snippy. "Pretty much any big company, for any sufficient market, is gonna have some chips on the table," Houston says, explaining why he thinks Amazon and Google now have services that compete with Dropbox. "That doesn’t mean it’s gonna work."
Houston, 32, finds himself in the dead center of one of the tech industry’s most fearsome turf wars. Dropbox has the distinction of being the only cloud service—and perhaps the only startup—ever to compete simultaneously against Apple ($748 billion market cap), Google ($369 billion), Microsoft ($357 billion), Amazon ($173 billion), and Tencent ($160 billion).
The stakes are clear: whomever controls your stuff may control the digital future. Over the last few years, storing and sharing data in the cloud has become an almost ubiquitous habit. Conventional wisdom had been that cloud-based storage was a commodity business, a digital file cabinet. But a better metaphor for the potential of cloud-based storage might be a portable office. "Your whole computing environment ought to follow you around," explains Houston. "Your financial records, your health information, your music playlist . . . anything that’s ‘mine.’ It’s a pretty long list." Better yet, you should eventually be able to interact seamlessly with everything in that portable office: work on documents with colleagues, send email, chronicle inventory. About storage, he says, "that’s kind of the easy part. The more interesting part is, What can you do with it?"
Unlike his amply financed competitors, which were all founded during the desktop computing era, Houston has been embedded in the cloud for eight years, ever since launching Dropbox in 2007. He’s not building smartphones, holographic lenses, or self-driving cars: his sole focus is solving the annoyances created by the invisible networked quilt that is modern computing. The cloud makes it possible to work from anywhere, anytime, but keeping everything safe and in sync is a massive software challenge. Our economy’s workforce is increasingly independent, mobile, and flexible, and the line between work and home continues to blur. The traditional design of business computing was not built for how we work today. "[Employees] are basically saying, ‘I need to get my job done,’" says Maureen Fleming, a VP at the analyst firm IDC. Those employees will gravitate to whichever service makes it easiest for them to do so.
No one yet dominates the new global network, but Dropbox just may be the most adroit cloud company in the world, the one that has solved more problems for its users than any other. That’s why Dropbox is not just surviving its onslaught of competition, but is thriving. The company says it has more than 300 million users and 4 million companies using the service. According to IDC, Dropbox owns 27% of the consumer market for file-syncing and sharing documents, more than Microsoft and Apple. It is also the most popular file-syncing and sharing service used by businesses. More than 100,000 organizations, including Hyatt, Under Armour, and Spotify, pay $15 per employee per month for Dropbox for Business, while a tiny fraction of its consumers pay $99 per year for the Pro service. Our conservative estimate of all those paying customers (assuming five employees in each business and 1% of consumers) puts Dropbox’s revenue at approximately $450 million annually, which is why the company is rumored to be going public before too long.
A potential IPO is just one of the many reasons 2015 is a critical year for Dropbox. Houston is already rolling out new features that enhance Dropbox’s utility, letting users do things such as save any file within an iPhone app to Dropbox with two taps, and edit Office documents without having to save them to a computer. These new additions will be a test: of Houston’s bet that Dropbox is a business and not merely a feature; of Dropbox’s ability to stay rigorously focused on solving customer problems at a time when it is growing madly; and of Houston’s ability to fend off his rivals’ cloud initiatives.
Toward the end of the Stanford class, another future disrupter named Jordan bluntly asks Houston, "What made you the right person to start Dropbox in the first place?" In the jargon of Silicon Valley, he’s asking about what’s called founder-market fit. Why, Jordan wants to know, does Houston have more than a puncher’s chance against Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and the rest?
by J.J. McCorvey, Fast Company | Read more:
Image: Dropbox
Drew Houston’s company may be valued at $10 billion, but here in GSB Faculty West 104 on the Stanford University campus he’s being grilled like a newbie on Shark Tank. The three dozen students in this class, called "Disruptive Innovation", are relentless, even though he’s been invited as a guest. Another pupil brings up what he believes is another giant threat: "Amazon [Web Services] was this huge competitive advantage for you when you were first starting," he says. "But now they have this competing Cloud Drive."
Houston is the epitome of Northern California cool. With his full beard, hair sticking straight up, and a silver hoop piercing the middle of his left earlobe, he leans back in his chair and placidly fields the queries, no matter how snippy. "Pretty much any big company, for any sufficient market, is gonna have some chips on the table," Houston says, explaining why he thinks Amazon and Google now have services that compete with Dropbox. "That doesn’t mean it’s gonna work."Houston, 32, finds himself in the dead center of one of the tech industry’s most fearsome turf wars. Dropbox has the distinction of being the only cloud service—and perhaps the only startup—ever to compete simultaneously against Apple ($748 billion market cap), Google ($369 billion), Microsoft ($357 billion), Amazon ($173 billion), and Tencent ($160 billion).
The stakes are clear: whomever controls your stuff may control the digital future. Over the last few years, storing and sharing data in the cloud has become an almost ubiquitous habit. Conventional wisdom had been that cloud-based storage was a commodity business, a digital file cabinet. But a better metaphor for the potential of cloud-based storage might be a portable office. "Your whole computing environment ought to follow you around," explains Houston. "Your financial records, your health information, your music playlist . . . anything that’s ‘mine.’ It’s a pretty long list." Better yet, you should eventually be able to interact seamlessly with everything in that portable office: work on documents with colleagues, send email, chronicle inventory. About storage, he says, "that’s kind of the easy part. The more interesting part is, What can you do with it?"
Unlike his amply financed competitors, which were all founded during the desktop computing era, Houston has been embedded in the cloud for eight years, ever since launching Dropbox in 2007. He’s not building smartphones, holographic lenses, or self-driving cars: his sole focus is solving the annoyances created by the invisible networked quilt that is modern computing. The cloud makes it possible to work from anywhere, anytime, but keeping everything safe and in sync is a massive software challenge. Our economy’s workforce is increasingly independent, mobile, and flexible, and the line between work and home continues to blur. The traditional design of business computing was not built for how we work today. "[Employees] are basically saying, ‘I need to get my job done,’" says Maureen Fleming, a VP at the analyst firm IDC. Those employees will gravitate to whichever service makes it easiest for them to do so.
No one yet dominates the new global network, but Dropbox just may be the most adroit cloud company in the world, the one that has solved more problems for its users than any other. That’s why Dropbox is not just surviving its onslaught of competition, but is thriving. The company says it has more than 300 million users and 4 million companies using the service. According to IDC, Dropbox owns 27% of the consumer market for file-syncing and sharing documents, more than Microsoft and Apple. It is also the most popular file-syncing and sharing service used by businesses. More than 100,000 organizations, including Hyatt, Under Armour, and Spotify, pay $15 per employee per month for Dropbox for Business, while a tiny fraction of its consumers pay $99 per year for the Pro service. Our conservative estimate of all those paying customers (assuming five employees in each business and 1% of consumers) puts Dropbox’s revenue at approximately $450 million annually, which is why the company is rumored to be going public before too long.
A potential IPO is just one of the many reasons 2015 is a critical year for Dropbox. Houston is already rolling out new features that enhance Dropbox’s utility, letting users do things such as save any file within an iPhone app to Dropbox with two taps, and edit Office documents without having to save them to a computer. These new additions will be a test: of Houston’s bet that Dropbox is a business and not merely a feature; of Dropbox’s ability to stay rigorously focused on solving customer problems at a time when it is growing madly; and of Houston’s ability to fend off his rivals’ cloud initiatives.
Toward the end of the Stanford class, another future disrupter named Jordan bluntly asks Houston, "What made you the right person to start Dropbox in the first place?" In the jargon of Silicon Valley, he’s asking about what’s called founder-market fit. Why, Jordan wants to know, does Houston have more than a puncher’s chance against Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and the rest?
by J.J. McCorvey, Fast Company | Read more:
Image: Dropbox
What’s an Industry?
Once upon a time, those delineations established a fairly clear-cut world. Car companies made cars, and they were in the automotive industry. Phone companies ensured that we could speak to one another over great distances, and they were in the telecommunications sector. Broadcasting companies made television shows, and they were in the media sector.
Everything was neat and orderly. Analysts could easily categorize companies and tell the markets what they were worth, boards could oversee firms with a view to shareholders’ happiness, and all was right in the world. Until it wasn’t.That world – in which clearly defined sectors enable easy classification of what a company does – is disappearing before our eyes. Is Apple a technology company or a luxury watchmaker? Is Google a search-engine firm or an up-and-coming car company manufacturing driverless vehicles?
But, for every Apple or Google, there are companies that seemed innovative but became obsolete or fell behind. Kodak and Nokia, for example, provide a cautionary tale for companies that began life as innovators.
Nokia, in particular, was long held up as a case study in corporate reinvention – the very epitome of constant, top-to-bottom change. Here was a company that entered and exited sectors as needed: paper, tires, rubber boots, and telecoms. And yet it has lost its way; with the sale of its mobile-phone business to Microsoft, many doubt that it can recover and reinvent itself yet again. (Of course, even if Nokia has run out of road, its loss may be Finland’s long-term gain, as startups begin to blossom from the minds of the company’s highly skilled ex-workers.)
Many traditional companies, too, have fallen behind because they hewed too closely to their traditional definitions. Like Kodak, other storied brands have not innovated: Polaroid, Radio Shack, Borders, Aquascutum, Blockbuster, and the list goes on. Their managers thought they were doing the right thing: not losing sight of the “core business.” Their board members knew the industry and had all the right credentials to oversee the managers.
But both managers and board members were wearing blinders. They did not make room around the table for those who could see that the company’s destiny did not lie only straight ahead, but also off to the side.
by Lucy P. Marcus, Project Syndicate | Read more:
Image: via:
Wi-Fi Barbie
Ever since Siri appeared as a regular feature on the iPhone, certain young children — and, let’s face it, some of their parents — have spent hours chatting up the virtual assistant, curious about the details of her humanoid back story.
Siri, where do you live? Siri, do you have a boyfriend? Siri, how old are you?
At a time when grown-ups can use voice commands to find restaurants, change channels on their TVs or get directions, it seems logical that children would now expect devices to understand their speech and respond in kind.
“To converse with a mobile device is an assumed truth if you are 10 years old today,” Oren Jacob, the chief executive of ToyTalk, a company that creates conversational characters for children, told me recently at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. “That is not true of high school students.”
Founded in 2011, ToyTalk already produces popular animated conversational apps — among them the Winston Show and SpeakaZoo — that encourage young children to engage in complex dialogue with a menagerie of make-believe characters. Now the company’s technology, originally designed for two-dimensional characters on-screen, is poised to power tangible playthings that children hold in their hands.
This fall, Mattel plans to introduce Hello Barbie, a Wi-Fi enabled version of the iconic doll, which uses ToyTalk’s system to analyze a child’s speech and produce relevant responses.
“She’s a huge character with an enormous back story,” Mr. Jacob says of Barbie. “We hope that when she’s ready, she will have thousands and thousands of things to say and you can speak to her for hours and hours.”
It was probably inevitable that the so-called Internet of Things — those Web-connected thermostats and bathroom scales and coffee makers and whatnot — would beget the Internet of Toys. And just like Web-connected consumer gizmos that can amass details about their owners and transmit that data for remote analysis, Internet-connected toys hold out the tantalizing promise of personalized services and the risk of privacy perils.
“Is this going to be some creepy doll that records what is going on in your home without you knowing it?” asks Nicole A. Ozer, the director of technology and civil liberties at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. “What is being recorded? How long is it being stored? Who is it being shared with?”
The advent of connected toys that can record and talk back to children is likely to deepen this debate over the Internet of Things because of the potential for these intelligent toys to powerfully affect children’s imagination, learning and social development.
Siri, where do you live? Siri, do you have a boyfriend? Siri, how old are you?At a time when grown-ups can use voice commands to find restaurants, change channels on their TVs or get directions, it seems logical that children would now expect devices to understand their speech and respond in kind.
“To converse with a mobile device is an assumed truth if you are 10 years old today,” Oren Jacob, the chief executive of ToyTalk, a company that creates conversational characters for children, told me recently at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. “That is not true of high school students.”
Founded in 2011, ToyTalk already produces popular animated conversational apps — among them the Winston Show and SpeakaZoo — that encourage young children to engage in complex dialogue with a menagerie of make-believe characters. Now the company’s technology, originally designed for two-dimensional characters on-screen, is poised to power tangible playthings that children hold in their hands.
This fall, Mattel plans to introduce Hello Barbie, a Wi-Fi enabled version of the iconic doll, which uses ToyTalk’s system to analyze a child’s speech and produce relevant responses.
“She’s a huge character with an enormous back story,” Mr. Jacob says of Barbie. “We hope that when she’s ready, she will have thousands and thousands of things to say and you can speak to her for hours and hours.”
It was probably inevitable that the so-called Internet of Things — those Web-connected thermostats and bathroom scales and coffee makers and whatnot — would beget the Internet of Toys. And just like Web-connected consumer gizmos that can amass details about their owners and transmit that data for remote analysis, Internet-connected toys hold out the tantalizing promise of personalized services and the risk of privacy perils.
“Is this going to be some creepy doll that records what is going on in your home without you knowing it?” asks Nicole A. Ozer, the director of technology and civil liberties at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. “What is being recorded? How long is it being stored? Who is it being shared with?”
The advent of connected toys that can record and talk back to children is likely to deepen this debate over the Internet of Things because of the potential for these intelligent toys to powerfully affect children’s imagination, learning and social development.
by Natasha Singer, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Christopher Stark
Sunday, March 29, 2015
Asia’s City-Statesman
[ed. See also: Lee Kuan Yew and the Myth of Asian Capitalism and The Curse of Lee Kuan Yew]
There was no vainglory in the title of the first volume of Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs: “The Singapore Story”. Few leaders have so embodied and dominated their countries: Fidel Castro, perhaps, and Kim Il Sung, in their day. But both of those signally failed to match Mr Lee’s achievement in propelling Singapore “From Third World to First” (as the second volume is called). Moreover, he managed it against far worse odds: no space, beyond a crowded little island; no natural resources; and, as an island of polyglot immigrants, not much shared history. The search for a common heritage may have been why, in the 1990s, Mr Lee’s Singapore championed “Asian values”. By then, Singapore was the most Westernised place in Asia.
Mr Lee himself, whose anglophile grandfather had added “Harry” to his Chinese name, was once called by George Brown, a British foreign secretary, “the best bloody Englishman east of Suez”. He was proud of his success in colonial society. He was a star student in pre-war Singapore, and, after an interlude during the Japanese occupation of 1942-45, again at the London School of Economics (LSE) and Cambridge. He and his wife, Kwa Geok Choo, both got firsts in law.
When Geok Choo first appears in “The Singapore Story” it is as a student who, horror of horrors, beats young Harry in economics and English exams. Mr Lee always excelled at co-option as well as coercion. When he returned to Singapore in 1950, he was confident in the knowledge that she “could be a sole breadwinner and bring up the children”, giving him an “insurance policy” that would let him enter politics. He remained devoted to her. Before her death, when she lay bedridden and mute for two years, he maintained a spreadsheet listing the books he read to her: Lewis Carroll, Jane Austen, Shakespeare’s sonnets.
In his political life he gave few hints of such inner tenderness. Influenced by Harold Laski, a British academic whom he had met at the LSE, he was in the anti-colonial movement of the 1950s, and in Britain had campaigned for the Labour Party. But for him ideology always took second place to a pragmatic appreciation of how power works. He also boasted of his streetfighting prowess: “Nobody doubts that if you take me on, I will put on knuckle-dusters and catch you in a cul-de-sac.” He was a ruthless operator, manoeuvring himself into a position at the head of the People’s Action Party (PAP) to become Singapore’s first prime minister when self-governance arrived in 1959. He remained so for 31 years.
Just once in that time the steely mask slipped. Having led Singapore into a federation with Malaysia in 1963, Mr Lee led it out again when it was expelled in August 1965, with Malaysia’s prime minister accusing him of leading a state government “that showed no measure of loyalty to its central government”. For his part, he had become convinced that Chinese-majority Singapore would always be at a disadvantage in a Malay-dominated polity. Still he had believed in and worked for the merger all his life. Announcing its dissolution, he wept.
In compensation, he turned Singapore into a hugely admired economic success story. As he and his government would often note, this seemed far from the likeliest outcome in the dark days of the 1960s. Among the many resources that Singapore lacked was an adequate water supply, which left it alarmingly dependent on a pipeline from peninsular Malaysia, from which it had just divorced. It was beholden to America’s goodwill and the crumbling might of the former colonial power, Britain, for its defence. The regional giant, Indonesia, had been engaged in a policy of Konfrontasi—hostility to the Malaysian federation just short of open warfare—to stress that it was only an accident of colonial history that had left British-ruled Malaya and its offshoots separate from the Dutch-ruled East Indies, which became Indonesia.
Singapore as a country did not exist. “How were we to create a nation out of a polyglot collection of migrants from China, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and several other parts of Asia?” asked Mr Lee in retrospect. Race riots in the 1960s, in Singapore itself as well as in Malaysia, coloured Mr Lee’s thinking for the rest of his life. Even when Singapore appeared to outsiders a peaceful, harmonious, indeed rather boringly stable place, its government often behaved as if it were dancing on the edge of an abyss of ethnic animosity. Public housing, one of the government’s greatest successes, remains subject to ethnic quotas to prevent the minority Malays and Indians from coalescing into ghettoes.
That sense of external weakness and internal fragility was central to Mr Lee’s policies for the young country. Abandoned by Britain in 1971 when it withdrew from “east of Suez”, Singapore has always made national defence a high priority, although direct threats to its security have eased. Relations with Malaysia have frequently been fraught, but never to the point when a military conflict seemed likely. And Indonesia ended Konfrontasi in the mid-1960s. The formation in 1967 of the Association of South-East Asian Nations, with Mr Lee as one of the founding fathers, helped unite the region. Yet Singaporean men still perform nearly two years of national service in the armed forces. Defence spending, in a country of 5.3m, is more than in Indonesia, with nearly 250m; in 2014 it soaked up over one-fifth of the budget.
Singapore’s vulnerability also justified, for Mr Lee, some curtailment of democratic freedoms. In the early days this involved strong-arm methods—locking up suspected communists, for example. But it became more subtle: a combination of economic success, gerrymandering, stifling press controls and the legal hounding of opposition politicians and critics, including the foreign press. Singapore has had regular, free and fair elections. Indeed, voting is compulsory, though Mr Lee said in 1994 that he was “not intellectually convinced that one-man, one-vote is the best”. He said Singapore practised it because the British had left it behind. So he designed a system where clean elections are held, but it has also been almost inconceivable for the PAP to lose power.
The biggest reason for that has been its economic success: growth has averaged nearly 7% a year for four decades. But Mr Lee’s party has left nothing to chance. The traditional media are toothless; opposition politicians have been hounded into bankruptcy by defamation laws inherited from Britain; voters have faced the threat that, if they elect opposition candidates, their constituencies will get less money; constituency boundaries have been manipulated by the government. The advantage of Mr Lee’s system, proponents say, is that it introduced just enough electoral competition to keep the government honest, but not so much that it risks losing power. So it can look round corners on behalf of its people, plan for the long term and resist the temptation to pander to populist pressures.
Mr Lee was a firm believer in “meritocracy”, or government by the most able, defined in large part by scholastic success. “We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think,” as he put it in 1987. His government’s ministers were the world’s best-paid, to attract talent from the private sector and curb corruption. Corruption did indeed become rare in Singapore. Like other crime, it was deterred in part by harsh punishments, ranging from brutal caning for vandalism to hanging for murder or drug-smuggling. As Mr Lee also said: “Between being loved and feared, I have always believed Machiavelli was right. If nobody is afraid of me, I’m meaningless.” As a police state, however, Singapore is such a success that you rarely see a cop.
There was no vainglory in the title of the first volume of Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs: “The Singapore Story”. Few leaders have so embodied and dominated their countries: Fidel Castro, perhaps, and Kim Il Sung, in their day. But both of those signally failed to match Mr Lee’s achievement in propelling Singapore “From Third World to First” (as the second volume is called). Moreover, he managed it against far worse odds: no space, beyond a crowded little island; no natural resources; and, as an island of polyglot immigrants, not much shared history. The search for a common heritage may have been why, in the 1990s, Mr Lee’s Singapore championed “Asian values”. By then, Singapore was the most Westernised place in Asia.
Mr Lee himself, whose anglophile grandfather had added “Harry” to his Chinese name, was once called by George Brown, a British foreign secretary, “the best bloody Englishman east of Suez”. He was proud of his success in colonial society. He was a star student in pre-war Singapore, and, after an interlude during the Japanese occupation of 1942-45, again at the London School of Economics (LSE) and Cambridge. He and his wife, Kwa Geok Choo, both got firsts in law.When Geok Choo first appears in “The Singapore Story” it is as a student who, horror of horrors, beats young Harry in economics and English exams. Mr Lee always excelled at co-option as well as coercion. When he returned to Singapore in 1950, he was confident in the knowledge that she “could be a sole breadwinner and bring up the children”, giving him an “insurance policy” that would let him enter politics. He remained devoted to her. Before her death, when she lay bedridden and mute for two years, he maintained a spreadsheet listing the books he read to her: Lewis Carroll, Jane Austen, Shakespeare’s sonnets.
In his political life he gave few hints of such inner tenderness. Influenced by Harold Laski, a British academic whom he had met at the LSE, he was in the anti-colonial movement of the 1950s, and in Britain had campaigned for the Labour Party. But for him ideology always took second place to a pragmatic appreciation of how power works. He also boasted of his streetfighting prowess: “Nobody doubts that if you take me on, I will put on knuckle-dusters and catch you in a cul-de-sac.” He was a ruthless operator, manoeuvring himself into a position at the head of the People’s Action Party (PAP) to become Singapore’s first prime minister when self-governance arrived in 1959. He remained so for 31 years.
Just once in that time the steely mask slipped. Having led Singapore into a federation with Malaysia in 1963, Mr Lee led it out again when it was expelled in August 1965, with Malaysia’s prime minister accusing him of leading a state government “that showed no measure of loyalty to its central government”. For his part, he had become convinced that Chinese-majority Singapore would always be at a disadvantage in a Malay-dominated polity. Still he had believed in and worked for the merger all his life. Announcing its dissolution, he wept.
In compensation, he turned Singapore into a hugely admired economic success story. As he and his government would often note, this seemed far from the likeliest outcome in the dark days of the 1960s. Among the many resources that Singapore lacked was an adequate water supply, which left it alarmingly dependent on a pipeline from peninsular Malaysia, from which it had just divorced. It was beholden to America’s goodwill and the crumbling might of the former colonial power, Britain, for its defence. The regional giant, Indonesia, had been engaged in a policy of Konfrontasi—hostility to the Malaysian federation just short of open warfare—to stress that it was only an accident of colonial history that had left British-ruled Malaya and its offshoots separate from the Dutch-ruled East Indies, which became Indonesia.
Singapore as a country did not exist. “How were we to create a nation out of a polyglot collection of migrants from China, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and several other parts of Asia?” asked Mr Lee in retrospect. Race riots in the 1960s, in Singapore itself as well as in Malaysia, coloured Mr Lee’s thinking for the rest of his life. Even when Singapore appeared to outsiders a peaceful, harmonious, indeed rather boringly stable place, its government often behaved as if it were dancing on the edge of an abyss of ethnic animosity. Public housing, one of the government’s greatest successes, remains subject to ethnic quotas to prevent the minority Malays and Indians from coalescing into ghettoes.
That sense of external weakness and internal fragility was central to Mr Lee’s policies for the young country. Abandoned by Britain in 1971 when it withdrew from “east of Suez”, Singapore has always made national defence a high priority, although direct threats to its security have eased. Relations with Malaysia have frequently been fraught, but never to the point when a military conflict seemed likely. And Indonesia ended Konfrontasi in the mid-1960s. The formation in 1967 of the Association of South-East Asian Nations, with Mr Lee as one of the founding fathers, helped unite the region. Yet Singaporean men still perform nearly two years of national service in the armed forces. Defence spending, in a country of 5.3m, is more than in Indonesia, with nearly 250m; in 2014 it soaked up over one-fifth of the budget.
Singapore’s vulnerability also justified, for Mr Lee, some curtailment of democratic freedoms. In the early days this involved strong-arm methods—locking up suspected communists, for example. But it became more subtle: a combination of economic success, gerrymandering, stifling press controls and the legal hounding of opposition politicians and critics, including the foreign press. Singapore has had regular, free and fair elections. Indeed, voting is compulsory, though Mr Lee said in 1994 that he was “not intellectually convinced that one-man, one-vote is the best”. He said Singapore practised it because the British had left it behind. So he designed a system where clean elections are held, but it has also been almost inconceivable for the PAP to lose power.
The biggest reason for that has been its economic success: growth has averaged nearly 7% a year for four decades. But Mr Lee’s party has left nothing to chance. The traditional media are toothless; opposition politicians have been hounded into bankruptcy by defamation laws inherited from Britain; voters have faced the threat that, if they elect opposition candidates, their constituencies will get less money; constituency boundaries have been manipulated by the government. The advantage of Mr Lee’s system, proponents say, is that it introduced just enough electoral competition to keep the government honest, but not so much that it risks losing power. So it can look round corners on behalf of its people, plan for the long term and resist the temptation to pander to populist pressures.
Mr Lee was a firm believer in “meritocracy”, or government by the most able, defined in large part by scholastic success. “We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think,” as he put it in 1987. His government’s ministers were the world’s best-paid, to attract talent from the private sector and curb corruption. Corruption did indeed become rare in Singapore. Like other crime, it was deterred in part by harsh punishments, ranging from brutal caning for vandalism to hanging for murder or drug-smuggling. As Mr Lee also said: “Between being loved and feared, I have always believed Machiavelli was right. If nobody is afraid of me, I’m meaningless.” As a police state, however, Singapore is such a success that you rarely see a cop.
by Editors, The Economist | Read more:
Image: Getty
Friday, March 27, 2015
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