Timely and fascinating paper by Carmen and Vincent Reinhart at the University of Maryland, which shows convincingly that major economic collapse is almost always preceded by an excessive easing of credit.
Today it’s much harder to borrow and everyone is trying to pay down debt (aka, de-leveraging). The Reinhart’s point out that periods of de-leveraging normally last almost as long as the boom years that preceded them. They show that this most recent period of over-leveraging started somewhere around 1997 and ended in 2007-8. If their thesis is correct, get ready for a protracted de-leveraging period lasting nearly the rest of this decade.
From TED’ster David Pogue at today’s New York Times, on Google’s new Gmail Voice Calling service. There will come a day, probably within two generations, when most global-interpersonal communication may be included as part of a common virtual access fee, like a water bill. Effectively, free.
What Voice Calls from Gmail does is open up another variation, one that strikes even closer to the “free calls from a phone, to a phone” ideal. Now it’s free calls “from a computer, to a phone.”
At the moment, you can’t use this new feature until you download and install a special plug-in for Mac or Windows. But you can’t help wondering: What if Google released an app like that for Android phones, or the iPhone?
Well, I’ll tell you what. At that point, you could, for the first time in history, make unlimited free phone-to-phone calls.
Sometime this year, I want to share with my two blog readers (hi Cynthia!) a strength training program I’ve been doing for about four months. The results are nothing short of remarkable. This is a discipline I can (and likely will) do for the rest of my life. The program is called High Intensity Training, also known as the Super Slow Workout. I became aware of the technique via a book called Body By Science, by Dr. Doug McGuff, an emergency room physician.
Doug blogs here. Normally, he writes about strength training and related topics. Today he wrote about something that really caught my attention, a physiological syndrome called text neck.
Here’s the scoop. Chin up!
“Later we met up with our friend at Moe’s Southwestern Grill near the Clemson University campus. After we got our food I noticed something unusual about the long line of college students who were waiting in the serving line. I was looking at about 10-12 students all standing in a row when I noticed something striking about their body habitus. All of their necks were protruding from their torso at a 45 degree angle. The neck itself was straight, but at the C7-T1 juncture there was just an abrupt forward flexion. This position was evident despite an otherwise upright posture, and it appeared to be a fixed deformity. This positioning did not appear to be well-adapted for anything physiologically useful. The only thing that this appeared to possibly helpful for was text-messaging, staring at a laptop, or playing hand-held video games, and this is what I suspect has resulted in this bizarre anthropologic adaptation. If you take some time to look about, I am sure you can see lots of strange postures that result from forcing our Fred Flintstone bodies into this George Jetson world. I was just shocked to see it so prominently displayed in people so young.”
The “Ground Zero mosque” presents moral dilemmas for both those who want to build the mosque and those who want to prevent it. Those who oppose the mosque undermine Constitutional liberties and reduce our law-based ideals to something not much different than any common brute-force, tyrannical state.
That said…. a largemajority of U.S. citizens oppose the mosque.
This reality poses a moral dilemma to the promoters of the Islamic center. What kind of insensitivity would ignore a large majority (63%) of their neighbors who have asked you to relocate your project to another part of the city?
Those who oppose the mosque are clearly out of step with the inalienable values of this country. Yet for the mosque developers to go ahead with their building plans near Ground Zero would only insult the vast majority of their neighbors, thus undermining any intentions of “good will” they claim to bring.
The mosque developers have a tremendous opportunity to capitulate with generosity and charity towards their neighbors by building in another part of that great city. In doing so, Muslim faith would be shown to the USA in a most transcendent manner. But to build in the face of overwhelming opposition (regardless of that opposition’s moral standing) would simply add fuel to the collective fire of religious fear and mistrust — something this world does not need.
If I were a Muslim proposing to build the community center, I would use this international media platform to show Islam as a religion of peace and reconciliation that makes every effort to love and get along with its neighbors, even when those neighbors can be real jerks.
“The single planetary civilization to which we all belong confronts us with global challenges. We stand helpless before them because our civilization has essentially globalized only the surface of our lives. But our inner self continues to have a life of its own. And the fewer answers the era of rational knowledge provides to the basic questions of human being, the more deeply it would seem that people, behind its back as it were, cling to the ancient certainties of their tribe… The abyss between the rational and the spiritual, the external and the internal, the objective and the subjective, the technical and the moral, the universal and the unique constantly grows deeper... Politicians at international forums may reiterate a thousand times that the basis of the new world order must be universal respect for human rights, but it will mean nothing as long as this imperative does not derive from the respect of the miracle of Being, the miracle of the universe, the miracle of nature, the miracle of our own existence.
It logically follows that, in today’s multicultural world, the truly reliable path to coexistence, to peaceful coexistence and creative cooperation, must start from what is at the root of all cultures and what lies infinitely deeper in human hearts and minds than political opinion, convictions, antipathies or sympathies: it must be rooted in self-transcendence.
Transcendence as a hand reached out to those close to us, to foreigners, to the human community, to all living creatures, to nature, to the universe; transcendence as a deeply and joyously experienced need to be in harmony even with what we ourselves are not, what we do not understand, what seems distant from us in time and space, but with which we are nevertheless mysteriously linked because, together with us, all this constitutes a single world. Transcendence as the only real alternative to extinction. The Declaration of Independence, adopted two hundred and eighteen years ago in this building, states that the Creator gave man the right to liberty. It seems man can realize that liberty only if he does not forget the One who endowed him with it.” – Vaclav Havel, July 4, 1994, Philadelphia, PA, USA accepting the Liberty Medal
Read the entire, probing, timely, deeply relevant speech
Whenever you are in doubt or when the self becomes too much with you, try the following expedient: recall the face of the poorest and most helpless man you have ever seen and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he be able to gain anything by it? Will it restore to him control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to…self-rule for the hungry and spiritually starved millions…? Then you will find your doubts and your self melting away.
This will take a little time to download, but it’s worth the wait. Toon from Stuart McMillen which highlights that Huxley, Orwell, and Postman were all right in some ways.
The tools that connect us are increasingly temporary. With each new technology, the distance between humanity shrinks or, in some cases, disappears. And not just physical distance, but all distances — time, feedback systems, meme spread, tribal and ideological identity … much of what defines us individually is accelerating collectively. Moore’s Law tells us that computers will continue to get more powerful, shrink in size, and converge to near-zero cost. Within generations, the “devices” we use to connect to this emerging network will become a generic and transparent part of life, integrated into clothing, furniture, walls, vehicles, and anything else we encounter throughout our day.
This evolution took another big step with India’s Ministry of Human Resources Development announcement of a $35 tablet in the works. Of course, this isn’t a full-featured computer, but rather a cloud device. As more and more heavy lifting is done in the cloud, tablets such as this become a common user-interface. Yet in a few generations, the idea of “tablet” will seem quaint, as connective technologies become an invisible part of everyday life, and perhaps even part of human biology.
The cloud, of course, is where virtual tools and all but the most sensitive information will eventually reside, with all people and cultures having equal and immediate access. The cloud includes communication protocols that will eventually offer a seamless language bridge for all data (text, speech, visual, etc.). It really won’t matter what language we write or speak — the intelligence of the cloud will make virtually all human symbolism understandable to everyone, at any time, in real-time. Anyone on the planet will connect with anyone else without the historical barriers of language, time, or border. This assumes, of course, that the Internet(s) remain free from overt government or commercial restrictions (see prior post, China, Iran, etc.).
The distance between us will continue to collapse (cost, size, ubiquity) until we literally become the interface, if we chose to.
Derek Turner has an important op-ed piece up today at cnet. I encourage you to read it and take action with your elected officials. I have.
“There are currently closed-door meetings taking place between phone and cable behemoths, and the biggest Internet companies, to craft a “compromise” deal that could carve up the Internet for them and leave consumers and smaller competitors behind. If the fix is in, it won’t be long before they launch a PR campaign presenting this scheme as some kind of middle ground far from the “radical fringe.” But buyer beware: This could be fake Net neutrality.
This fake Net neutrality will be a huge loss for consumers and online entrepreneurs, who will have to stand by and watch as these industry giants turn the vibrant marketplace that is the open Internet into something that looks more like cable TV, where consumers face high prices and few choices.
If policymakers don’t put in place safeguards to ensure robust development of the open Internet, we would be allowing the few companies that can afford it to buy admission access to a new fast lane, while newcomers to the online marketplace would be stuck within the constraints of the existing platform.
For those who care about preserving the Internet as a level playing field, this means establishing real Net neutrality–clear and unambiguous rules that keep the Internet free and open, not just for large companies with deep pockets able to pay for priority, but for consumers, innovators and entrepreneurs too.”
