The World, Filtered*

Two from the New York Times
 
A 50-Year Farm Bill
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/opinion/05berry.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
 
Industrial agricultural has made our food supply entirely dependent on
fossil fuels and, by substituting technological "solutions" for human work
and care, has virtually destroyed the cultures of husbandry (imperfect as
they may have been) once indigenous to family farms and farming
neighborhoods.
 
Clearly, our present ways of agriculture are not sustainable, and so our
food supply is not sustainable. We must restore ecological health to our
agricultural landscapes, as well as economic and cultural stability to our
rural communities.
 
For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have
money we will have food. That is a mistake. If we continue our offenses
against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will
decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of
our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing
hundreds of billons of dollars to the agribusiness corporations…"
 
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Fighting Off Depression
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/opinion/05krugman.html?ref=opinion
 
"If we don't act swiftly and boldly," declared President-elect Barack
Obama in his latest weekly address, "we could see a much deeper economic
downturn that could lead to double-digit unemployment." If you ask me, he
was understating the case.
 
The fact is that recent economic numbers have been terrifying, not just in
the United States but around the world. Manufacturing, in particular, is
plunging everywhere. Banks aren't lending; businesses and consumers aren't
spending. Let's not mince words: This looks an awful lot like the
beginning of a second Great Depression.
 
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The Top Ten Best (and Worst) Communicators of 2008
http://www.bertdecker.com/experience/2008/12/top-ten-best-and-worst-communicators-of-2008.html
 
This Annual List of Top Ten Communicators of 2008 highlights the best (and
worst) from business, politics (big this year), entertainment, sports and
the professions. Take a look to see how communication skills helped make
or break these notable individuals
 
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Mumbai: A Battle in the War for Pakistan
http://www.cfr.org/publication/17981/
 
"…Mumbai is not simply a story of weak Indian security institutions or a
replay of past Indo-Pak hostilities. We must now recognize that Mumbai
represents a dangerous escalation in what might best be described as the
"war for Pakistan": a civil conflict over whether nuclear-armed Pakistan
succumbs to extremist, Taliban-like ideologies or gropes its way toward a
more moderate, modern path. Even if Pakistan's moderates eventually
prevail, this war threatens to destabilize the region, especially
neighboring India and Afghanistan. If the war is lost, the consequences
will be far worse. Building and sustaining stability in Pakistan must be
at the top of the agenda for Obama's national security team….
 
…In the end, Mumbai serves as a timely reminder that Pakistan's terrorism
problem is not confined to the Pashtun badlands bordering Afghanistan.
Over decades, extremism and militancy has seeped into the institutions,
political culture, and society of the entire country, from its Punjabi
heartland to its coastal megacity of Karachi. Winning the war for Pakistan
will require an urgent, massive, and sustained effort by the United States
in coordination with other international partners and allies in Pakistan."

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Design by the Book video series
http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/bythebook/

The New York Public Library holds a wealth of unexpected sources of
inspiration for artists and designers, from vintage valentines and textile
patterns, to fabric samples and turn-of-the-century menus from around the
world. For this online-only miniseries, Design by the Book, the Library
partnered with the leading design blog Design*Sponge to invite five New
York City-based artists to sift through our collections in search of
inspiration. Stay tuned for future episodes as the artists, who range from
a glassblower to a letterpress printer, create unique works inspired by
what they found. Special guest Isaac Mizrahi will also join us to share
his sources of inspiration.

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Amazon CloudFront: Outlook for CDN Is Cloudy (and That's Good)
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/amazon_cloudfront_outlook_for.php

Two months ago, Amazon - which has taken to sharing some of its massive
computing power with mere mortals as a means of developing additional
revenue streams - announced that they were developing a content-delivery
network (CDN) to complement their existing Amazon Simple Storage Service
(S3) offering. Today, they unveiled the beta version of that service,
named Amazon CloudFront. Boasting a now-familiar, pay-as-you-go pricing
model, Amazon CloudFront promises to make CDN an affordable addition for
any site looking to gain more efficient content delivery.

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Storyboarding in IBM Rational Requirements Composer
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/08/1118_zhou/index.html?ca=drs-

A storyboard is a logical and conceptual description of system
functionality for a specific scenario, including the interaction required
between the system users and the system.

In IBM® Rational® Requirements Composer, a storyboard is represented as a
frame-by-frame depiction of a usage scenario, where each frame has a
description of the actions that lead to the next frame. It contains an
in-depth walkthrough of a linear story, represented as graphical frames on
a timeline with sample data. In essence, a storyboard is a sequence of
frames that elaborates the user experience. It includes a frame list,
timeline viewer, and frames. Frames are basically instances of sketches
within a storyboard.

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Barcode Your Clothes to Get Web Traffic
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/magazine/16-11/st_cuecat

Don't talk to strangers - scan them instead. That's the idea behind the
so-called ShotCodes on clothing by W-41, a Netherlands-based online
apparel company. If you spot one of these unique logos in the wild (bar,
club, methadone clinic, DMV), you surreptitiously snap a photo of it with
your phonecam and a tiny app directs you to the wearer's LinkedIn,
Facebook, or MySpace profile. You can then decide whether a "Hello" is in
order. To get in on the action, simply visit W-41.com, download a free
mobile app, select a ShotCode, and purchase gear from the online store
($50 to $57 a pop). Owners can connect their symbol to any Web site. Beats
having to dust off lines like "If you were a phaser, you'd be set on
'stunning.'"*

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A Decentralized, Distributed Social Web
http://threeminds.organic.com/2008/11/a_decentralized_distributed_so.html

With movements like Data Portability, the social web is moving to a more
open platform. The big networks are joining or building service offerings
to take content, user data, social graphs, and technology out to the wider
web. Facebook has Connect, MySpace and Ning are part of OpenSocial, and
smaller players like Twitter and Friendfeed were built on an open platform
from the start.

The walls of the garden are breaking down, and it begs the question: What
will this new social world look like? Where will we be socializing in the
future and how?

We are seeing the start of this next generation social web with the
emergence of social browsing applications. These projects range from
browser extensions like Headup and Glue to actual full-on browser
offerings like Flock. These tools help bring social conversation and
content directly into the browsing experience. While each offers its
unique flavor, not all of these start-ups will survive.

The ultimate winner will be the one that follows these two rules:
- reduce, don't create, social noise and
- leverage existing social data and connections

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A Computing Pioneer Has a New Idea
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/technology/businesscomputing/17machine.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

Steven J. Wallach is completing the soul of his newest machine.

Mr. Wallach had a new idea. He had long been fascinated with a chip
technology called Field Programmable Gate Arrays. These chips are widely
used to make prototype computer systems because they can be easily
reprogrammed and yet offer the pure speed of computer hardware. There have
been a number of start-ups and large supercomputer companies that have
already tried to design systems based on the chips, but Mr. Wallach
thought that he could do a better job.

The right way to use them, he decided, was to couple them so tightly to
the microprocessor chip that it would appear they were simply a small set
of additional instructions to give a programmer an easy way to turbocharge
a program. Everything had to look exactly like the standard programming
environment. In contrast, many supercomputers today require programmers to
be "heroic."

……The Convey computer will be based around Intel's microprocessors. It
will perform like a shape-shifter, reconfiguring with different hardware
"personalities" to compute problems for different industries, initially
aiming at bioinformatics, computer-aided design, financial services and
oil and gas exploration.

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Stay Focused, Citigroup Chief Tells Employees
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/stay-focused-citigroup-chief-tells-employees/

Amid all the slides, graphs and figures in Citigroup's "town hall"
meeting, the news of additional job cuts — more than 50,000 of them, many
through attrition and asset sales - was likely what employees were
dwelling on Monday.

In an e-mail sent to Citi workers after the presentation, Vikram Pandit,
Citi's chief executive, told workers that "all of you have done an
outstanding job in the last 11 months" and urged them to "maintain your
focus" on serving clients and customers. He also said, in various ways,
that banking giant is well positioned to navigate the ongoing financial
crisis, declaring that "we will be the long-term winner in the industry."

DealBook has the internal memo; read it after the jump.

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Why Canada's Banks Don't Need Help
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1855317,00.html

In the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression,
Canada has joined the ranks of governments that in recent weeks stepped up
to help banks cope with more fallout from bad U.S. subprime mortgages. In
Canada's case, however, the reason for the assistance is a little
different from some of its G-7 partners. Unlike banks in the U.S., Britain
and Germany, which needed to be bailed out with hundreds of billions of
dollars in new capital, Canada's major banks are solid and solvent. They
don't need any help to work through their subprime exposure.

So why did Ottawa agree to insure the money they routinely borrow from
other banks, a practice that keeps their credit operations liquid?
Ironically, the troubled non-Canadian institutions that received capital
injections and loan guarantees in other countries now carry a government
seal of approval that tilts the playing field in their favor when it comes
to borrowing. That leaves Canada's big banks, including Scotiabank, TD
Bank Financial Group, RBC Royal Bank and CIBC, at a competitive
disadvantage. So the government acted to level the field, not to aid
troubled banks.

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RED Monster Announcement: Modular Cameras, a DSLR, 3D and 28k
http://gizmodo.com/5085242/red-monster-announcement-modular-cameras-a-dslr-3d-and-28k

Rumors of a RED DSLR had been confirmed a long time ago, but what of the
Scarlet and EPIC übercamcorders? On the REDUser forums, RED CEO Jim
Jannard has explained it all: Scarlet and EPIC are the DSLR - all cameras
are "part of the same DSMC system", so each and every camera will be part
of a modular, build-your-own, still and video product line based on the
Scarlet and EPIC 'Brains'. To do this, RED has furnished an insanely
diverse new collection of components, with sensors ranging from the $2500
3k Scarlet to the $55,000, 28k EPIC 617 Mysterium Monstro.

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Entrepreneurs Who Rose From The Ashes
http://www.forbes.com/entrepreneurs/2008/11/10/recession-depression-entrepreneurs-ent-manage-cx_ml_1110upfromashes.html

A word of encouragement for all the entrepreneurs (and every other working
stiff, for that matter) scrapping it out in the latest downturn:
Recessions--for all the havoc they wreak--can also sow the seeds of
serious fortunes.

"At a basic level, there is an important job or problem that customers
can't do or solve for themselves," says Scott Anthony, president of
Innosight, a Watertown, Mass.-based innovation strategy consultancy. "The
best chance of creating something powerfully profitable is starting with
an important, unsatisfied problem."

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Using Design to Crack Society's Problems
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/130/mission-critical.html

…Participle isn't a conventional bunch of social workers or do-gooders.
It's a design team. Participle's interdisciplinary crew includes
anthropologists, economists, entrepreneurs, psychologists, social
scientists, and a military-logistics expert, but it is driven by design
techniques and headed by Cottam, 42, who also has used such strategies to
tackle the shortcomings of Britain's school and health systems. "Hilary's
-- and my -- favorite kind of design has to do with making people's lives
better, often taking account of their mundane daily concerns," says Paola
Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York. "Her projects not only work, they give people a
sense of hope and strength."

Cottam is one of a new wave of design evangelists who are trying to change
the world for the better. They believe that many of the institutions and
systems set up in the 20th century are failing and that design can help us
to build new ones better suited to the demands of this century. Some of
these innovators are helping poor people to help themselves by fostering
design in developing economies. Others see design as a tool to stave off
ecological catastrophe. Then there are the box-breaking thinkers like
Cottam, who disregard design's traditional bounds and apply it to social
and political problems. Her mission, she says, is "to crack the
intractable social issues of our time."

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Jane McGonigal's Brave New Worlds
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/nov2008/id20081110_453173.htm?campaign_id=rss_innovate

Major corporations, including Procter & Gamble (PG), Electronic Arts
(ERTS), and National Semiconductor (NSM), have given some of their
employees an unusual assignment: play a free online game.

Admittedly, it's not a typical entertainment video game, with
sophisticated 3D graphics, fantastical characters, or shoot-'em-up plots.
And the corporations aren't just allowing workers to have fun on the job.
Instead, the game, called Superstruct, asks players to imagine the world
in 2019.

They're asked to consider a series of future scenarios, including a
respiratory disease pandemic, a global food shortage, or a refugee crisis.
Then they write blog posts, upload videos, and enter discussions on social
networking sites such as Facebook to paint a picture of life in those
conditions. For the players, it's an exercise of the imagination. For the
supporting firms, it's an experiment with the idea of future-scenario
planning using the game as a collaboration tool.

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The Crisis Last Time
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/books/review/Parker-t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin

For writers who seek to influence public affairs, timing plays a paramount
role. And few writers have had better timing than Adolf Augustus Berle.

In the summer of 1932, with America trapped in the greatest financial
crisis in its history, Berle published "The Modern Corporation and Private
Property," a scholarly yet readable analysis of America's largest
companies and their managers. Berle is largely forgotten today, yet with
that book he succeeded in persuading Americans to see their economic
system in a new way - and helped set the stage for the most fundamental
realignment of power since abolition.

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