The Third Man… neurological defect or a glitch in The Matrix?

With only 22 hours to spare I just finished our next tome on the existence of the Third Man. Author John Geiger distills the phenomenon of sensing the presence of another being with us during times of stress or panic as not a guardian angel or religious savior but as a neurological defect that enables us to triumph over our immediate appalling situation. He further suggests that we should learn to master this feature of the brain. While interesting, I am not sure I am sold on the “science” behind the idea but I do have a few tangential ideas…

1) Check out the TED video presentation by Oliver Sacks (the neuropsychiatrist who wrote Awakenings) as he describes the lucid hallucinations of visually impaired people and the discovery of the areas of the brain the recognize teeth, facial features and cartoons. Maybe this is just biological brain stimulation and nothing more?

2) What of Will Ferrell’s character in the movie “Stranger Than Fiction” who is an IRS auditor suddenly finds himself the subject of narration only he can hear: narration that begins to affect his entire life, from his work, to his love-interest, to his death.  Maybe we are all just characters in our own book?

3) Perhaps there is a much simpler story… Maybe we are all captives of The Matrix and much like Deja Vu is an example of the The Matrix re-writing code to fix a glitch or bug… the experience of The Third Man is an example of our minds transcending The Matrix to see that we are actually part of “the system?”

Recession Holding Back Education Too…

Great… not only is the recession hurting my income today but it is likely to have a much larger economic impact on education (and thus earning potential) of future generations.  It a NY Times article last week titled “Facing Deficits, Some States Cut Summer School” many schools are cutting back or closing their summer school programs to save money.  This is being done in spite of $100 billion in stimulus money being pumped into education and the Secretary of Education urging states and districts to keep their summer school programs open.

Summer school you say?  Who really really cares about summer school… unless of course you are talking about the classic 1987 movie Summer School with Marc Harmon and Kristy Alley.  The reality is that summer school can be critically important to those kids coming from low-income households.  In our most recent bout, Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell we learned that the knowledge gap between the kids from the poorest families to the richest families is almost exclusively attributed to what knowledge is gained or lost during the summer (not technology in the classroom or classroom size).  As the Times article points out, children of working parents will be at the mall or in front of the TV instead of in the classroom preparing them for the next grade level.

If Gladwell’s analysis is correct, why is it that state governments or school districts would make such a short sighted decision?  Perhaps his research hasn’t made it back to the education establishment?

Close Enough to Free to Round Down

Malcolm Gladwell, a Broken Spines favorite, provides a nice counterpoint to the digital age mantra of “build it and they will come” as articulated in Chris Anderson’s new book: “Free: the Future of a Radical Price.“ 

Anderson describes an experiment conducted by the M.I.T. behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of “Predictably Irrational.” Ariely offered a group of subjects a choice between two kinds of chocolate—Hershey’s Kisses, for one cent, and Lindt truffles, for fifteen cents. Three-quarters of the subjects chose the truffles. Then he redid the experiment, reducing the price of both chocolates by one cent. The Kisses were now free. What happened? The order of preference was reversed. Sixty-nine per cent of the subjects chose the Kisses. The price difference between the two chocolates was exactly the same, but that magic word “free” has the power to create a consumer stampede.

But, Gladwell turns Anderson’s YouTube example around and points out how Free isn’t really working out for YouTube and its parent Google.  

YouTube lets anyone post a video to its site free, and lets anyone watch a video on its site free, and it doesn’t have to pass judgment on the quality of the videos it archives. “Nobody is deciding whether a video is good enough to justify the scarce channel space it takes, because there is no scarce channel space,” he writes, and goes on:

Distribution is now close enough to free to round down. Today, it costs about $0.25 to stream one hour of video to one person. Next year, it will be $0.15. A year later it will be less than a dime. Which is why YouTube’s founders decided to give it away. . . . The result is both messy and runs counter to every instinct of a television professional, but this is what abundance both requires and demands. 

But, according to Credit Suisse, Google is spending $500 million to support YouTube and it has yet to make a profit.  Advertisers don’t want their ads associated with stupid pet tricks.  And, with the video capabilities of new cell phones, YouTube videos have jumped 1700% in the last 6 months.  That’s a lot of inane video.

10,000 Hours of Deliberate, Strenuous and Boring Practice

The next Broken Spines bout is on “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell.  Basically Gladwell debunks the myth that great people are innately smarter or more capable than the rest of us.  He references research that shows that 10,000 hours of practice are necessary before mastering anything.

David Brooks writes in his column this morning that this research has been conducted by people like K. Anders Ericsson, the late Benjamin Bloom and others. And he recommends two new books: “The Talent Code” by Daniel Coyle; and “Talent Is Overrated” by Geoff Colvin.  Brooks writes:

Coyle and Colvin describe dozens of experiments fleshing out this process. This research takes some of the magic out of great achievement. But it underlines a fact that is often neglected. Public discussion is smitten by genetics and what we’re “hard-wired” to do. And it’s true that genes place a leash on our capacities. But the brain is also phenomenally plastic. We construct ourselves through behavior. As Coyle observes, it’s not who you are, it’s what you do.

Incidentally, David Brooks is speaking at the Minneapolis Orchestra Hall next Tuesday.

Opus Distinguished Speaker Program: The Age of Obama, featuring David Brooks

Clean Coal Unrealistic?

Now I know there are some with a vested in clean coal, but this is a pretty scathing article from the Economist.  True?

“Despite all this enthusiasm, however, there is not a single big power plant using CCS (carbon capture and storage) anywhere in the world.”

…

“CCS particularly appeals to politicians reluctant to limit the use of coal. Coal is the dirtiest of fossil fuels…Yet burning coal is one of the cheapest ways to generate power. In America, Australia, China, Germany and India coal provides half or more of the power supply and lots of jobs. Rejecting cheap, indigenous fuel for job cuts and international energy markets is seen, naturally enough, as political suicide. CCS offers a way out of this impasse.”

…

“The problem with CCS is the cost. The chemical steps in the capture consume energy, as do the compression and transport of the carbon dioxide. That will use up a quarter or more of the output of a power station fitted with CCS, according to most estimates.”

Jon Stewart goes “mad” on Jim Cramer?

For those who missed The Daily Show last night it was awesome… Jon Stewart took it to Jim Cramer and CNBC on the lack of “financial reporting” on their supposed “financial news” cable network.  Not to be a spoiler… but there are some great video clips of Cramer off air.  Take 20 minutes of your day and watch this episode!

Where’s Amazon’s Spine? Don’t give up on Kindle-Talk!

According to the WSJ, Amazon is conceding audio rights with the Kindle II.  They are going to allow authors and publishers the ability to opt-out of the text-to-speech future.   I am very close to buying the Kindle and this was a compelling feature!  I get that the publishers are worried about the premium that they get from the audio version of the book… but what about the customer?  Amazon insists that the feature is legal because “no copy is made, no derivative work is created” where’s Lawrence Lessig when you need him?

Death Knell for Print News

There is a lot of hand wringing about the decline and fall of print newspapers.  I canceled my subscription to the Minneapolis Star Tribune over a year ago because good writers and local content were harder and harder to find (not to mention the dearth of international news).  But instead of giving up on print entirely, I subscribed to the NYTimes whose $660 annual subscription is feeling a bit too luxurious in these times.  

Meanwhile, I spend way too much time reading news online.  I love to get local news from MinnPost (where most of the good writers from the Strib went anyhow), the NYTimes online edition (nicely formatted on my iPhone for reading on the train), Slate, the Economist, Time, and myriad other blogs whose RSS feeds crowd my Google home page (not to mention podcasts).  Is $660 really worth the tactile joy of opening the paper over a cup of coffee, when I’m overwhelmed with up to the minute news at my desk?

It’s no wonder people are writing the obituary of print news (to read it you’ll have to go to www.legacy.com).  Craigslist and Monster took away the want ads, advertisers are less and less interested in the demographic that still subscribes to papers, and worst of all good writing is hard to find.

As Jack Shafer points out in Slate, they did see it coming but tried to create walled gardens of content which required subscriptions.  Alas, this too has failed.  The last bastion of hope is the sports section. Mark Cuban writes in his blog that pro sports teams should come to the rescue of local papers.  Even though the Internet has infinite shelf space, the quality of local sports coverage is poor.  Maybe the Star Tribune and St. Paul Pioneer Press should ask the Vikings, Twins, Wild, Timberwolves, and Gophers for a little help. 

Potential Fight Club selection: Pablo J. Boczkowski’s 2004 book, Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers.  Also, check out this interview with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google “Eric Schmidt wishes Google could save newspapers“.

Jan 13 update: Interesting chart from eMarketer on where people get their news:

Why We Will Perish

Eduardo Velasquez’s “Consumer’s Guide to the Apocolypse” investigates the culture wars with improbable evidence from angst ridden pop songs from Cold Play and Tori Amos and the writings of Tom Wolfe and Chuck Palahniuk.

“we discover that the antagonisms that fuel the current cultural wars stem from the same source. Enthusiastic religions and dogmatic science, the flourishing of scientific reason and the fascination with mystical darkness, cultural triumphalists and multicultural ideologues are all sustained by the same thing: a willful commitment to the basic tenets of the Enlightenment.”

“we need a new genesis to go with our contemporary apocalypse”

Wishing on a Tsar

Fight Club’s upcoming bout is on “Time for a Model Change” by Graeme Maxton and John Wormald, two car industry veterans and writers for the Economist.  So, I thought it was fitting that this morning’s Business View in the Economist was an entertaining review of current status of Detroit bail out.

The automakers are arguing that unlike the airlines, bankruptcy would be devastating for two reasons: 1) airline tickets are short term commitments 2) the car industry has a long supply chain with 3 million workers.  And, as Jon Stewart deftly pointed out with a Hot Wheels version of the AMC Gremlin he drove in high school, that unlike the Financial Services bail out, at least the automakers produce something useful (even though they lose $2K/car they sell).

So, all this has led to the need for a Car Tsar.  The Economist (link above) gives us a little background on the various Tsars [or Czar (derived from Caesar) originally meaning Emperor in the European medieval sense] we’ve had since 1982:

 

The first such tsar is believed to have been America’s Drug Tsar, first described thus in 1982, who had a mandate to oversee America’s war on drugs, which included activities by several government departments. Since then, the term has been used on many occasions to describe officials with grand cross-departmental responsibilities. Even the Bush administration has had a war tsar, a bird flu tsar, and a bank bailout tsar, while Al Gore reportedly declined Mr Obama’s offer to make him the climate tsar.

The word “tsar” is used because its sounds powerful, though government tsars often find the opposite is true in practice. For one thing, they tend to be appointed during a crisis, and are often invested with unrealistic expectations. Also, having responsibility for activities in several government departments often turns out to mean no power over any of them.

Still, if there is car tsar he will have a huge advantage over other tsars: namely the threat of handing the whole mess over to someone with real power—a Chapter 11 bankruptcy judge, and nobody wants to face the sayonara tsar.