Sweet Je**s

Is it sign of recession?
Check out new IE8 advert


I still can't believe that was genuine marketing move.
Cheers.

Wolfram Alpha Just Started

Wolfram Alpha - The First Computational Knowledge Engine.
Quite limited at the moment but provides number of fascinating features for data mining and statistical analysis.
You can use it to check how Bulmers manufacturer is coping on London Stock Exchange.

Star of Tomorrow

In our changing world where nothing is cast in stone anymore even stars and celebrities are going to be replaced by... lets see...

Innovation as a Core Virtue

"The rich adopt novelties and become accustomed to their use. This sets a fashion which others imitate. Once the richer classes have adopted a certain way of living, producers have an incentive to improve the methods of manufacture so that soon it is possible for the poorer classes to follow suit. Thus luxury furthers progress. Innovation "is the whim of an elite before it becomes a need of the public. The luxury today is the necessity of tomorrow." Luxury is the roadmaker of progress: it develops latent needs and makes people discontented. In so far as they think consistently, moralists who condemn luxury must recommend the comparatively desireless existence of the wild life roaming in the woods as the ultimate ideal of civilized life." Ludwig von Mises

If technology does not emerge from the unfolding of a predetermined logic or a single determinant, then innovation is a 'garden of forking paths'. Different routes are available, potentially leading to different technological outcomes. Significantly, these choices could have differing implications for society and for particular social groups.

“Scholars interested in the relationship between cultural and media change invariably become embroiled in a debate that polarises into two camps: those accused of technological determinism, often linked with the work of McLuhan (1962; 1994); and advocates of the Social Shaping of Technology who emphasise that technologies are always invented and adapted by real people in particular socio-historical circumstances (MacKenzie & Wajcman, 1999). Socio-cultural theory provides an alternative way to think about the implications of media change that stems from the centrality of the idea of the dialectic in post-Vygotskian thought. Wertsch (1998, pp. 23-72; 1995a, pp. 65-68) develops this line of thinking using an analogy that makes reference to the history of pole-vaulting following the invention of fibreglass poles that young athletes exploited to gain an advantage in a competitive Olympic sport.

The technique allows vaulters to exploit the elastic properties of glass fibre to slingshot themselves over the bar. Historically, it allowed vaulters to surpass the records set by Cornelius Warmerdam in 1957 who used a rigid bamboo pole. Interesting, Wertsch tells us that, while young athletes around the world started to appropriate the elastic properties of glass fibre poles, old timers, whose technique depended on the relative rigidity of bamboo poles claimed that the rules of the game had fundamentally changed. Indeed, some claimed it wasn’t the same sport and retired.

This provides a model for thinking about the changing culture of university learning in the new media age. Significantly, the invention of new mediational means (i.e. glass fibre poles) didn’t cause change. Change was driven from the bottom up by young vaulters as they exploited its affordances to gain an edge in a competitive Olympic sport. Similarly, access to digital tools and resources does not cause change in itself; rather change is driven from the bottom-up as advanced learners start to appropriate, experiment and innovate new strategies that depend on the affordances [of] the available cultural tool-kit.” Moonbat Francis “The Predicament of the Learner in the New Media Age”

It looks like Thomas Jefferson was right. Every society develops it's own aristocracy. Natural aristocracy of virtues and talents. People who are driving force of innovation are natural part of it. It's interesting how little trust in people and their natural pursuit for innovation had people associated with theory of technological determinism.

"What counts alone is the innovator, the dissenter, the harbinger of things unheard of, the man who rejects the traditional standards and aims at substituting new values and ideas for old ones." Ludwig von Mises

One Laptop per Child

I was going to write couple hundred words what I think about OLPC initiative but let's reduce my carbon footprint. One picture is worth 1000s words so here it is.

I don't reckon that it'll hinder your health

“Little evidence of a link between video games and aggressive youth: Here's an interesting statistic: While the video game industry was exploding between 1994 and 2000, juvenile (ages 15-17) violent crime arrests dropped by 44% and young adult (ages 18-24) arrests dropped by 24% according to the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. While that does not necessarily rule out any relationship between video games and youth violence, it certainly should make policymakers pause before rushing to legislate.“

TV Block Console 10 of the Ugliest Game Consoles of All Time

It's interesting how quickly computer games became part of main steam media. Some may argue that time span between first video game console widely available to the public and state of the art Sony's Playstation 3 Home Entertainment hub is more than three decades. Computer games and game consoles are great example how technological advancements are adopted by society. It's double edge sword really. As long as video games consoles were expensive gizmos nobody pay any attention to it.
Now even hollywood is adopting best selling computer games into (B type at the most) movies. At least they can monetize game success again.

Computer games and game consoles are no longer associated with computer geeks and nerds but with home and family entertainment. Nintendo Wii had done something that was unimaginable up to now. They manage to attract 30+ female audience into computer games. Computer games industry crossed another barrier that decade ago was an paradigm.
Society finale recognized this type of entertainment as almost integral and fully legitimate way of socializing and spending time.

The most interesting thing is the way how the whole relationship between society and computer games evolved to it's current status.
There is one sentences that perfectly describes the whole process...

"First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.” Mohandas K. Gandhi

Long live the Entrepreneur

“Class Theory upholds that class structure is ultimately determined by the structure of the production process. An individual’s class position is then determined by his role in the production process, while his political and ideological consciousness is shaped by this structurally determined class position” Marx.

Florida argues that cities that attract gays, bohemians, and ethnic minorities are the new economic powerhouses because they are also the places where creative workers—the kind who start and staff innovative, fast-growing companies—want to live. To lure this workforce, Florida argues, cities must dispense with stuffy old theories of economic development—like the notion that low taxes are what draw in companies and workers—and instead must spend heavily on cultural amenities and pursue progressive social legislation.

Comic book guy - Another member of creative class?

Florida seems to be making Faux Pas in the field of logic. What's important he assumed that there was some causal connection linking all of his indexes with economic growth. Then he decided he could infer just what it was about these cities that helped power this growth. He concluded that in the new economic order, the engine of growth wasn’t individual companies but, rather, creative workers - creative class, who came to live in cities they admired and then started their own firms or attracted businesses seeking educated workers. What enticed these workers, the professor concluded with very little evidence, was that the cities were “tolerant, diverse and open to creativity.”

“In new analyses of nationally representative data from the United States, Sweden, Germany, and Japan, the authors show that (a) occupations are an important conduit for social reproduction, (b) the most extreme rigidities in the mobility regime are only revealed when analyses are carried out at the occupational level, and (c) much of what shows up as big‐class reproduction in conventional mobility analyses is in fact occupational reproduction in disguise.”

It’s a nifty article, and it’s essentially a series of cross tabulations and log-linear models showing that much of inter-generational mobility is better described as occupation-occupation mobility. They call it “disguised” - if you look at only big classes, you miss important stuff, but if you break it down by small categories of people (occupations) you see “pockets” of non-mobility that dominate big class analyses. A more quant jock way to say is “mixture model” - there seem to be multiple processes happening to different populations, a direct refutation of the classical Marxist view.
orgtheory.net class theory is dead: season 6, episode 4

But most important, to a generation of liberal urban policymakers and politicians who favor big government, Florida’s ideas offer a way to talk economic-development talk while walking the familiar big-spending walk. In the old rhetorical paradigm, left-wing politicians often paid little heed to what mainstream businesses—those that create the bulk of jobs—wanted or needed, except when individual firms threatened to leave town, at which point municipal officials might grudgingly offer tax incentives. The business community was otherwise a giant cash register to be tapped for public revenues—an approach that sparked a steady drain of businesses and jobs out of the big cities once technology freed them from the necessity of staying there.

“American capitalism is derided for its superficial banality, yet it has unleashed profound, convulsive social change. Condemned as mindless materialism, it has burst loose a flood tide of spiritual yearning. The civil rights movement and the sexual revolution, environmentalism and feminism, the fitness and health care boom and the opening of the gay closet, the withering of censorship and the rise of a “creative class” of “knowledge workers”—all are the progeny of widespread prosperity.
"How Prosperity Made Us More Libertarian" By Brink Lindsey

Now comes Florida with the equivalent of an eat-all-you-want-and-still-lose-weight diet. Yes, you can create needed revenue-generating jobs without having to take the unpalatable measures—shrinking government and cutting taxes—that appeal to old-economy businessmen, the kind with starched shirts and lodge pins in their lapels. You can bypass all that and go straight to the new economy, where the future is happening now. You can draw in Florida’s creative-class capitalists—ponytails, jeans, rock music, and all—by liberal, big-government means: diversity celebrations, “progressive” social legislation, and government spending on cultural amenities. Put another way, Florida’s ideas are breathing new life into an old argument: that taxes, incentives, and business-friendly policies are less important in attracting jobs than social legislation and government-provided amenities. After all, if New York can flourish with its high tax rates, and Austin can boom with its heavy regulatory environment and limits on development, any city can thrive in the new economy.

“In 2001, a National Commission on Entrepreneurship study entitled Mapping America’s Entrepreneurial Landscape ranked U.S. cities on how well they hatch high-growth companies. Unlike Florida, the commission developed a precise method of measuring high-growth centers: it calculated the percentage of companies in a local economy that grew by 15 percent a year for five consecutive years in the mid-1990s. Unlike Florida’s anecdotal observations of places where he assumes that plenty of entrepreneurial activity is taking place, the commission’s numbers-oriented approach precisely charts America’s entrepreneurial topography. Unexpectedly, the study concludes that “most fast-growing, entrepreneurial companies are not in high tech industries,” but rather “widely distributed across all industries.”
The Curse of the Creative Class by Steven Malanga

Even Florida himself seems to be quite ambiguous when it comes to aftereffects of his theory applied in the real life and everyday business environment. In one of his interviews he comes from quite interesting angle while describing future prospects as workforce as a whole. He recognizes constant need of change and up killing as driving force of market. Surprisingly he gives quite good insight into ow economy works and how complex it is. It quite contrary to his original approach to creative class idea. This time it's more "there's no simple solutions" approach.

“The task facing economic leaders of the 21st century is not simply how to spur technology and innovation, but how to recreate the large pool of high-paying but relatively low-skill jobs that were once the hallmark of our broad middle-class society.

Since not everyone can be a scientist, artist, or professional, and since a large number of manufacturing jobs simply will not be coming back, the best strategy may be to elevate the millions of new service-sector jobs our economy is generating into secure, respectable, high-paying jobs. When I asked a group of my students whether they would prefer to work in good, high-paying jobs in a machine tool factory or lower-paying temporary jobs in a hair salon, they overwhelmingly chose the latter, for its more psychologically rewarding, creative work. Indeed, while vocational training programs for machinists go begging for students, cosmetology classes are overfilled.

The point is not that hair-cutting jobs are somehow inherently better than factory jobs, but that our only choice for avoiding a two-class society is to make these sorts of service economy jobs better, higher-paying middle class jobs. And these personal service jobs—manicuring, landscaping, massaging, and so on—are the ones least likely to be vulnerable to outsourcing.”
RICHARD FLORIDA and his creative class website