Julian Darley

Alice In Shale Gas Wonderland

2009-10-16T20:47:00.007+01:00

This article was written as a Guest Commentary for The Oil Depletion Analysis Centre (ODAC) of which I am a trustee.

It is hard to know where to begin regarding Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's article entitled "Energy crisis is postponed as new gas rescues the world." But since the speculative world he invokes has more to do with Alice In Wonderland than the hard reality of engineering and science, let us begin - at the end.

Evans-Pritchard caps his evangelistic encomium with this: "I am not qualified to judge where gas excitement crosses into hyperbole. I pass on the story because the claims of BP and Statoil are so extraordinary that we may need to rewrite the geo-strategy textbooks for the next half century."

He admits his lack of gas qualifications but surely he is enough of a journalist - and an economist - to ask some basic fact-checking questions. If he had, he would have discovered that people like Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy, have been brazenly hyping shale gas - even employing well known gas expert Tommy Lee Jones to promote the stuff - in the hope of making a fortune. Given that Mr McClendon is reputed to have lost around $2bn in the recent financial debacle, his keenness is perhaps understandable (though he still managed to earn more than $100m last year).

As for BP saying anything earth shattering, according to geologist David Hughes, "(Chief Executive) Hayward said nothing that wasn't in the latest BP report, which wasn't much different from previous BP reports (ie. 60 year Reserves/Production where it has been in past BP reports)."

What none of the boosters want to talk about is the reality of shale gas. It is true that there is most likely a lot of shale gas around, especially in the United States, but after this, the story goes down a rabbit hole. Shale gas is not like the conventional gas finds that gave the US vast supplies of cheap methane. Shale gas is locked in until the rocks holding it are fractured in a process known as hydro-fracing. This requires a lot of work, a lot of wells, a lot of water (2 - 5 million gallons per well), and some rather unpleasant chemicals. Having made all this effort, the production decline rates look like the cliffs at Beachy Head. Within two years production has typcally dropped by 80%.

Not surprisingly therefore, these expensive wells have an average commercial life of less than eight years. Worse still, in August of this year, World Oil pointed out that total production of many wells was only a third of what operators had predicted. Furthermore, of the two dozen or so shale plays in the US, Barnett appears to have the best geological profile and is responsible for 80% of current shale gas. Many of the other plays have much lower gas content density, which would likely mean yet more wells and more fracing for less gas.

But you ask, unlike Evans-Pritchard, if these wells are expensive, what happens if either the price of gas falls or drilling declines precipitously (the former of course being a likely trigger for the latter)? Very good question, because US natural gas has now sunk to roughly half the price of the median break-even price of shale gas. In a nice moment of symmetry, gas drilling has also fallen by half. Of course, drilling can and will increase, but only when the economics justify it. For the moment, it looks like US gas production may decline by up to 14% this year (according to Bernstein Research), which would actually leave the US supply a few percent short, though it will be easy to fill the gap with gas in storage or imports.

There are least two key missing points which make the article so misleading. The first is that shale gas flow rates are always much lower than conventional gas, which in practical terms makes it an expensive and unlikely replacement either for conventional gas or for oil. The second and far more profound omission is that the geology of gas shale varies widely across both America and the world, so that to extrapolate from the best - Texas Barnett shale - to the world is like saying we should be able to grow bananas in Norway just because they grow in India.

Natural gas is a very useful energy source and it emits less carbon than any other fossil fuel. If large, new, easy-flowing sources of it were found, it could relieve some short-term energy worries and reduce geopolitical tensions. However, shale gas, though possibly a useful crutch, is not going to rescue the world, for the reasons outlined above. Alice was finally woken from her dreamworld and brought back to reality by a hot cup of tea. That may not be enough to get us to face the disappointing reality of shale gas.

My thanks to Dave Hughes for his recent presentation: 'Natural Gas in North America: A Panacea to Replace Imported Oil?'

Technical Trials: Recording Realtime Streaming Audio On A Mac

2009-07-14T18:40:00.002+01:00

Much as I love the BBC, like a certain other three-letter entity, it does tend to move in mysterious ways. Or more accurately, downright mystifying ways. Take for instance the unfathomable policies on (not) letting the listener hear programmes online after the initial broadcast time. Some programmes are podcast, some you can listen to for seven days afterwards, and some are just buried in the dark and backward abysm of time, also known as the BBC archive. How I wish that we, the licence-paying public, could have access to what must be the world's richest treasure chest of sound. Yes, I know the licence only comes from TV owners now, but in the good old days, wireless sets (the size of tea chests) were also included.

As it is frustrating to complain about something without offering some kind of solution, I have a small and partial suggestion: record the audio stream on your computer at the time of broadcast and put it in your own archive (for your own personal use only).

On a PC, capturing streamed audio is relatively easy, but on a Mac it is another matter. Things reached boiling point this morning when I badly wanted to listen to a programme about the number of UK politicians being paid for from the public purse, but helping my wife with her final day of preparation before the dreaded GMAT exam was more urgent. I just couldn't get my MacBook to record the audio stream and had to give up and get back to the high-priority task.

But the days of lost streams are over now, because later in the day I was able to take some time off and figure out the mystery of real-time audio capture and what is more, I'll share the secrets with you. First I sent out a desperate SOS Tweet asking for suggestions for audio capture software. Within minutes, five people came back with three suggestions, one free and two not, but having trial versions. I'll deal with the free one first.

Audacity (suggested by @UncompletedWork aka Merrel Davis)

Audacity is free but has two important blocking issues that can be fixed (for free) with some effort. 1) It won't save to MP3 format and 2) it can't capture the Mac internal sound, which is where streaming audio seems to live (commenters may tell me I am wrong).

1) can be fixed by downloading the LAME MP3 encoder library (there's nothing lame about the code - it stands for MPEG Audio Layer III (MP3) encoder). The easiest way to do this is by going to Preferences > Import/Export - MP3 Export Library and clicking the Download button. Otherwise you can download the file from here - the download link is about half way down the page. When that's done and installed (by clicking the Install icon of the downloaded package), click the Audacity Locate button (also in Preferences > Import/Export), which seems to default to the right place on the Mac hard drive, namely /usr/local/lib/audacity/libmp3lame.dylib. (This last step may not even be necessary.) If you think you might need the FFmpeg library for audio in video encoding presumably, you can download this library at the same time - the section for doing this is just to the right of MP3 section.

2) can be solved by downloading Soundflower. After it installs, you will need to set Audacity to use the Soundflower output and (I think) set the Mac audio output to Soundflower. I may have overdone the settings - the speaker seemed to stop working unless one was recording in Audacity - so if anyone has better ideas, let me know in the comments below or tweet me at @juliandarley.

With this done, I was able to able record a snatch of Beethoven's Ninth - in fact the Ode to Joy, believe it or not. Possibly rather grandiloquent for such a small achievement, but more appropriate than Tosca topping herself I suppose (much though I love the opera).

If you don't mind a bit of fiddling and tweaking, this free combination of Audacity, Lame and Soundflower seems to work.

Next I tried Audio Hijack Pro (suggested by @PaulTRussell)

Audio Hijack Pro comes from the slightly worryingly named Rogue Amoeba. However, my sense is that this software won't increase your chances of being infected by any roving pandemics or epidemics. I downloaded and installed the trial version, which apparently will add noise to your recording after ten minutes until you pay for a registered copy (US $32).

As far as I can tell, Audio Hijack also uses Soundflower to re-direct streaming audio to the recording input of this program (again, someone let me know if I have misunderstood this). The main difference from Audacity appears to be that Soundflower is included and installed with Audio Hijack Pro. The program is able to do a lot more than just capture audio streams, including adding all kinds of effects. However, I don't need any of this (I don't think). I liked the fact that if you go to Quick Record, you can select which application (eg Firefox) you want to record from. Audio Hijack Pro has a library area in which you can see your recordings, which could be useful (especially if, like me, you are not all that fond of Finder).

This program clearly does the job, but if all you want is to capture the odd raw radio stream from time to time, then paying $32 may seem like a stretch.

Finally, I tried out the two WireTap products from Ambrosia Software (suggested by @PhilipSheppard, @IrfanHabib and @byrnegreen aka Chris Byrne). The main difficulty here is the price of WireTap Studio ($69) relative to the single, simple task desired and understanding the relationship with its earlier cousin WireTap Pro. My understanding is the following: WireTap was once free, then it became WireTap Pro, which will work in free mode, but will only capture in the AIFF format (which is similar to WAV in size - ie. it's very large). If you want to save in MP3 (as I do) you have to get the licensed version for US $19 or listen to a lady with a very miserable voice telling you every 12 seconds that your recording was made with an unregistered version.

However, to complicate the picture further, Ambrosia no longer supports WireTap Pro, though it did release a last final version for OS 10.5. I managed to track down this official URL and downloaded a trial copy from here. But with the same insistence of their lady announcer, Ambrosia make it pretty clear that they would much rather you bought WireTap Studio. When you install WireTap Pro you get a message and link that says there is a new version - but there isn't. The link takes you to ... WireTap Studio. I think this kind of message is misleading, especially if you have bought the registered version (for $19).

For completeness and following the beseaching of the sad siren voice, I decided to download and install WireTap Studio. Whilst doing this, I noticed that WireTap also seems to use the LAME MP3 library, but it's included and installed without user intervention (which is easier than with Audacity).

I prefer the new interface of Studio to Pro, and it also offers the chance to organise your library of recordings. The trial version of Studio lasts for 30 days, but appears to be a full working version. I like the fact that you can select two inputs at once, though I am not sure you can change the volume of either. A really nice feature of both WireTap Pro and Studio is that you can set the software to record in advance and for a definite time, which could be extremely useful if you have to go out hours in advance of a much desired programme and don't want to record everything before that (which I suppose in the worst case could cause your computer to crash). You will still have to leave your computer on and streaming - I have not seen a sleep state that automatically wakes itself up at a certain time and fires up requisite programs and streams. Maybe it's out there - do let me know, if it is.

Whether the extra horsepower of WireTap Studio is necessary for you will be a personal decision.

To sum up: for just the most basic job of recording live audio streams, Audacity (with Soundflower and LAME MP3) seems perfectly adequate. If you want the extras provided by Audio Hijack or WireTap or don't want the slight hassle of installing Soundflower and LAME MP3, then parting with somewhere between $19 and $69 will be the way to go. I hope all this helps you to listen to what you want or need to when you want to or are able to. It has certainly helped me mitigate (to some extent) the mysterious (though often wonderful) ways of the BBC.

@juliandarley

Why Bother With Twitter?

2009-07-02T16:27:00.000+01:00

An old friend of mine from graduate school in Texas wrote to me today to let me know that he had finally become a tenured professor (in Colorado). He was now looking forward to writing another book and, as he put it, professin'. Leaving aside the issues of tenuredom and academic freedom, the question I wanted to ask him, especially given that his area covers communications, was, Why don't you use twitter? He sends out daily emails of broad interest to a large number of people he knows, so why not share the love more widely? His answer was: give me some reasons to bother with twitter and maybe I'll try (again). This is my attempt to justify his bothering with twitter.

Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, twitter offers what is sometimes called ambient awareness. It's more like the sensation one has of being in a village or other community, and say bumping into someone on the street and having a three sentence conversation, or chatting to someone in a shopping queue or seeing someone in the park or seeing another parent when meeting your children from school. In Italy and Spain these kinds of events can happen in the piazza as well as elsewhere. In Britain we still have some pubs (public houses) remaining, which are actually designed to create accidental and one might hope felicitous rendezvous.

The kinds of conversations and interactions that are engendered by meeting accidentally are, I believe, actually of profound importance however they happen. It seems as if there is a part of the brain that actually needs and attaches special value to aleatoric (throw of the dice) or serendipitous meetings and messages. These events serve to reinforce existing message streams or introduce new ones and sometimes, perhaps surprisingly often, act as the capstone to action. That is, they are the final trigger that causes you to read that book, go to that cafe, ring that old friend etc. Even without the capstone tendency, any single tweet on its own is unlikely to be of overwhelming significance, but in context they start to add up and reinforce the virtual, physical and ideational worlds.

One of the reasons why twitter acts to build up social resonance is the act of retweeting, in which you rebroadcast a message to your circle of 'followers' that you have seen in a message from somebody else, either that you are following or that you have discovered by a search or seen in a hashtag web page (see below for more on hashtags). Even if the person you are 'retweeting' is not following you, they will see just that message and therefore will know that you are favouring their message. Sometimes that may cause that person to start following you, which is always pleasant.

I find that twitter works particularly well in concert with physical meetings. In fact, i would say that a lot of the meetings and events I now attend are the direct result of information and recommendations that come to me via twitter. In addition, because many people are happy to reveal their locations, via their iPhones (or similar) you can tell when someone you know is coming to town. Even if they don't enable that feature or don't tweet from a mobile (or cell) phone, many people announce that they are in a certain place or visiting something well known, such as the Louvre. If you are nearby and you spot this, you may be able to arrange a meeting.

Another vital feature of twitter allows you easily to find new interesting people and then see whom they find interesting, or at least whom they have decided to follow. Because you don't have to have permission to follow someone, it's a very fluid and effortless way of building an affinity circle. Thus it becomes an extraordinary way of finding ideas, books, thoughts, events that there is almost no chance of discovering on your own, especially as one may increasingly follow writers and doers of increasing eminence and also see the conversations they have (the ones they have on twitter, at least). Twitter also has the potential to make it easier for people with talent to get the attention of the world.

With twitter, it is much easier to help groups of like-minded people get together, either occasionally to create 'tweetups', or more regularly, such as the #Tuttle gathering in London, which meets every Friday to discuss in small ad hoc groups social media and anything else that catches the breeze.

Another interesting matter is that the twitter demographic is apparently mostly over 35 years old. If you are generally interested in serious discussions, especially about democracy, politics and philosophy, then given that research tends to show that in English-speaking cultures at the moment, people tend to become more engagé in the second half of their lives, then twitter is likely to be an increasingly happy hunting ground. Reinforcing this, it would also appear that twitter users are more likely to be progressive, which is likely to match the profile of many academics, including the one I am trying to persuade with this epistle.

Yet another way of finding information and people to follow is by looking at #hashtags web pages. These allow you to see messages from anyone who uses that hashtag, whether you are following them or not. For instance #reith2009 (http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23reith2009) collects all the comments of those who are listening to this year's Reith lectures by American political philosopher Michael Sandel. Most of the comments are careful and thoughtful; some are even profound.

As further evidence against the case that twitter is merely trivial, it played a seminal role in the recent Iranian election and has surely proven the significance of microblogging. Twitter may not have actually changed the final outcome in Iran, but my goodness, it has got the attention of those in or around power all round the world, including, for instance, @GideonRachman, the Financial Times chief foreign affairs commentator, former Economist writer, and not an easy nut to crack.

In these ways and more, twitter has created access to an extraordinary and interactive body of people and knowledge. So I have asked my professor friend give twitter another try. To him I would say try letting your followers know what you are writing or reading, and if possible, say why (in my opinion, you can use more than one tweet for this kind of thing - there are no rules against chain tweeting).

My friend is a Dewey scholar and pragmatist, and I would like to think that pragmatists will appreciate twitter's practical value. Be that as it may, my twitter moniker is @juliandarley and I become further convinced of twitter's value with each passing day. I am also convinced that the sooner the academic world embraces the twitterverse and shares its wisdom more widely and easily, the better the state of knowledge of will be.

How To Survive Whilst Waiting To Thrive? [for GreenBiz.com]

2009-02-10T21:44:00.000Z

Guest blog for GreenBiz.com:

The New Sustainability: Surviving While Waiting To Thrive
"Not many months ago it was not good form to make serious comparisons between the current global economic recession and the Great Depression. Now it is becoming almost fashionable."

How are green companies and green strategies going to survive the economic crisis? Read more...

Delivering The New Green Economy

2009-02-10T04:45:00.000Z

There is much talk in and on the air about whether the various economic stimulus plans being discussed and deployed around the world will work. Many of the plans have some sections devoted to greening the economy, for instance promoting more energy efficiency, less waste, and the generation of more renewable energy.

It has been pointed out that to a considerable extent policymakers and economists are flying blind in what a British minister - a close ally of the prime minister - has recently called the worst recession in more than a century, surpassing even the Great Depression. It certainly feels very hard to know what, if anything, will successfully get a nation or the world out of this self-induced catastrophe.

What all of the stimulus plans have in common is that they all desperately want to create jobs. Undoubtedly, if enough money is spent in the right ways then jobs will be created. Whether they will be enduring jobs is another and very important matter, but it is not the point of this piece. In the short run, then, we'll be able to measure the success of job creation quite simply by following the statistics on employment issued by nations. What is much harder to measure is how effective any of the 'green' measures will have been.

The problem comes in at least three parts: despite years of effort, it has proven difficult both to develop and to deliver green programs and policies and to measure their outcomes. If social scientists like Tim Jackson and Doug McKenzie-Mohr are right, there is something quite simple that we can start doing about this suite of problems, and if we don't, it is quite likely that we'll get the same dismal results that many others have had when they have tried to green the economy or even just small parts of it.

There is a lot of literature from social psychologists going back more than thirty years about how individuals and groups react to different methods of 'green' persuasion. Some techniques are quite effective and other techniques are so ineffective that they make a bad situation worse. For instance, just giving people more information, which is the most common strategy employed by both government and many green groups, very often falls into the latter category.

To illustrate this, researchers in Canada took two groups of householders and gave one group information about the benefits and financial savings to their community of watering their lawns less while the other group were much more actively coached and helped in how to reduce their water usage. The second group cut their lawn water usage by more than half. The first group actually increased their lawn watering.

This reaction is not an anomaly - there is increasing evidence that citizens and consumers become confused when bombarded with too much information, and their confusion may easily lead them to turn away from engagement in annoyance or become paralysed into gloomy inaction.

In another unfortunate example, a California energy utility spent more money on advertising the virtues of energy efficiency than it would have taken to have simply insulated the houses whose owners were being targeted. More widely, utilities spend billions of dollars on information programs which may well be a near complete waste of money.

Research shows that human actions, especially habitual ones, are very complex in their causes and pathways, and are very difficult to change. But there are some known techniques which work much better than others - the Canadian example given is not an isolated one-off. The real problem is that policy-makers, program planners and business leaders seem not to know about this important body of work.

With trillions of dollars about to be spent globally, at least in part aimed at developing a sustainable future, the research work on what policies deliver results and which tend to fail needs to be discovered and taken notice of urgently. If not, this possibly unique opportunity to deliver a more sustainable economy, may be still born.

China Enters A New And 'Interesting' Phase

2009-02-03T04:18:00.001Z

Making observations about geopolitics is often hazardous even for the seasoned analyst - events have a way of intervening in the most embarrassing ways. As we have seen with the economic crisis, a small number of economists did accurately warn about the coming meltdown and were roundly ignored by those in power, who universally said that there was no chance of a recession until the economy was already capsizing.

This is not to blame anyone for this state of affairs. Hindsight is a splendid thing, and when trying to operate in real time, one has to deal with human systems which are (too) complex and inter-dependent, wherein any move is usually met by a quick and often unexpected counter-move or a gambit to exploit an inadvertent opening. Natural eco-systems are not very different most of the time.

The above preamble is a kind of disclaimer. Despite the likelihood of being wrong in prognosis, there are some big picture items that we just have to try to diagnose and discuss even if we don't have the complete picture or anywhere near. One of these is the situation in China. There are several nations that have a disproportionate effect on the world, and China has become one of them. China has been a famous enigma for a few thousand years and it doesn't look as if that will be changing any time soon.

Until recently, it has become the done thing to say that the Chinese economic miracle will carry it through to being the largest economy in the world, and that along with the rising India and a possibly resurgent Japan, the centre of the world will keep shifting towards the East and South Asia. It is possible that this is what will play out, but it might happen in unexpected ways or not all.

The economic crash has taken China by surprise, as it has every other country. The reduction in economic activity is causing a huge increase in unemployment, which is not easy to cope with in any country (neither for those without jobs nor those trying to govern), but in China the situation is rather more tricky, because every year it has to absorb six to eight million new migrant rural workers into the eastern industrial and heavily urbanised part of China.

It is said that every percentage point of Chinese growth (per year) creates about a million jobs. One can readily see why it is necessary for China to grow at a rate in excess of 8% per year. Anything less risks social destabilisation. However, China's growth is showing signs of falling below this number (leaving aside the question of whether the growth figure may be exaggerated).

Signalling that all is definitely not well with the Chinese industrial machine, some 20 million of the roughly 130 million migrant workers are now reported unemployed. This number does not show up in official unemployment statistics because migrant workers are not counted. There is little question that such a huge number of displaced unemployed people showing up in the poverty-stricken villages of China has the potential to cause trouble.

The Chinese leadership is only too painfully aware of the situation and is trying to introduce policies to stabilize and reverse the economic decline. They are doing this for a number of reasons including the fact that they don't want to see social order break down (which government does?) and they also see signs that the economic miracle has promoted the regions too much leading to an age-old problem of local and potentially uncontrollable power bases developing.

It is therefore imperative that the Chinese economic stimulus, now underway for two months, work quickly and effectively. Specifically in response to the rural migrant worker problem, the measures include subsidies and training programmes, and encouraging the formation of new small businesses, though there is little optimism that the latter will have much traction in the poorest, most cash-starved areas, at least in the short term.

Rural health care systems are being proposed, and much more boldly, China has just announced that it will spend $123 billion to provide universal health care within two years instead of eleven. This in itself could relieve a lot of potential social and economic tension (as it might in America, were it ever to be tried).

The economic stimulus package is also going to spend massively on constructing new inter-city rail lines - $88 billion is proposed, with $44 billion having already been spent last year. If China were able to power these trains with renewable electricity instead of coal or imported diesel, it would have moved a long way to having a sustainable transport system. Given Chinese expansion in wind and solar PV, such an idea cannot be ruled out.

The Chinese leadership knows there is plenty of trouble with the country, but they are certainly taking vigorous action. There are signs of incoherence and conflicting policy aims, but China has weathered these before. With the petroleum price now fallen so far from last year, however temporarily, and waning industrial activity, China is importing less oil even as it builds its own new strategic petroleum reserves.

There are many other problems besides those mentioned here and the stimulus and other policies may not all work as intended. But for the world, the consequences of China's new path may be easier to grasp, however unwelcome in some quarters, because whether China succeeds or not, it looks like it will start pulling back from the heavy emphasis on global export trade as it concentrates on domestic development. It should be noted that it is unlikely to pull back from its need to import oil, especially if the domestic stimulus works.

A withdrawing China would have some interesting effects to put it mildly, and one of the most interesting would be if China starts liquidating its holdings of US treasuries just when America needs China - and anyone else - to start buying even more. China has withdrawn from the world before, but this does not appear to be what China is planning now, rather a refocusing on domestic issues and infrastructure, not least because it does not wish to emulate the kinds of collapse that the economies of Japan or the Asian Tigers underwent after growing too fast.

It is a trite and now cliched saying, but China really does look as if it is heading into 'interesting times', with both danger and opportunity in its own future and in its relations with the rest of the world. As a broad brush stroke, that much at least is not too hazardous an observation. The unfolding details may be another matter.

Sources: NYT, WSJ, Reuters, FT, Stratfor: Baker Friedman, CIA, P&C

A Cheer For Critical Thinking [O'Reilly blog]

2009-01-27T05:39:00.000Z

Even in hard times we should still apply critical thinking to the strategy and products of science and technology, rather than being tempted to cheer uncritically. Read the full article on my O'Reilly blog page: 'Cheering For Green Tech - Critically'

Some Observations On Social Media

2009-01-23T07:00:00.001Z

One of the advantages of living in San Francisco is that you can meet people who are in the thick of all things online and web 2.0. Over the last couple of days I have been to three different events with a social media or social networking focus. I shall be writing about these matters in more detail in the future, but for now, a few things seem clear(er):

1) Although there is a torrent of information about social media both online and offline and there are even ways of making money from it (indirectly) if you are good at SEO (search engine optimization) and SMO (social media optimization), the key for most people will be to stick to what you love - blog, talk or tweet about what you are really interested in and like doing. Be natural, don't try to fake it and don't try to sell anything too overtly - think about giving rather than taking. Blunt selling messages don't work, unless perhaps you are trying to sell your old sofa for five bucks (3.85 euros). Even then, CraigsList would probably be better.

2) The world of social media has not yet been professionalized and the worlds of marketing and advertising are still feeling their way. Somehow some of the services like twitter, Zannel etc are going to have to be seriously monetized, because as we saw in the first dot.com era and will see now even more, given the credit crunch and worse, if the tools that make social media possible don't make any money, ultimately they will go away. Advertising is not an easy sell in the social media context for many reasons, but maybe the confluence of many strands, including audio and video and various forms of interactivity, will make it possible for enough money to be made to keep the social media superstructure in development and maintenance.

3) Despite the missing business model and despite the grim times, the world of social media is fantastically vibrant and upbeat, especially here in San Francisco, where many of these services have started. Even so, I think everyone realises that at some stage the champagne has to be augmented with some meat and potatoes. From what I can see, the people at the forefront of social media were strongly involved in web 1.0 and many have quite fresh and hair-raising stories - and wounds - to prove it when things went wrong in 2001. Making social media financiall sustainable is a real and insistent question.

4) Audio and video recognition and search tools don't work very well yet, which may hold back audio-video from becoming a really integral part of social media. There is a lot of work being done on this and there should be no underestimating how difficult these kinds of pattern recognition problems are. The predictions of the 60s and 70s regarding voice and video recognition, not to mention Artificial Intelligence, have been hopelessly even ruinously optimistic. Even so, it would be great to see a lot of progress in this area (maybe some of the TARP money could be directed into this?).

5) At sfAMA Charlene Li talked about the need to tie different elements of social media together, including, for instance, single sign-on and cross-application information mining leading to applications being much more integrated. There are signs that this is happening with OpenId and ways in which Facebook and other similar apps can receive feeds from other streams. There are of course security and privacy issues that may be very knotty and should not be underplayed.

6) There is no substitute for real life. Believe it or not. But that can be a huge advantage of social media - it helps bring people together in real life, for talking, laughing, dancing, eating, you name it, and it keeps you connected in between. You don't have to join a mailing list, and you see (parts of) all kinds of conversations that can keep you in the loop, keep you feeling connected and belonging, and very often inform you of an event you had not heard of. In some ways, it's like being in an old fashioned pub - you hear a snatch of conversation and go over and listen or you see someone you were not expecting and are able to connect. People seem very friendly about this and non-cliquish, thank goodness.

In sum, there is a refreshing air of conviviality and inclusiveness about social media, especially twitter, which is so lightweight and inviting without being burdensome. Social media is about joining and belonging, and more than ever, in our fractured contractarian societies facing great economic hardship, anything that helps people connect in diverse yet guilt-free ways can help increase life chances and work chances.

I am willing to bet that through social media trust, social capital and mutual reciprocity are all being augmented, along with an increased awareness of common pool resources, but I don't have the data to prove it (yet), but I can say that social media are fun and an extraordinary resource and definitely increase levels of serotonin and oxytocin by somewhere between one and 100%. Or maybe more.

The Great And Most Fortunate

2009-01-20T01:54:00.000Z

The Great And Most Fortunate - not to mention Invincible - Spanish Armada set sail late in May in 1588 from the occupied port of Lisbon. Philip II was not pleased with Elizabeth I and was determined to put a stop to her activities by invading and conquering England. This would also disrupt some Dutch operations which were harming Spanish interests and prevent the British from attacking Spanish ships laden with gold and silver plundered from South America.

The slight problem was that the mission was an abysmal failure and helped to bankrupt Spain. Again. Yet Philip II later assembled more armadas which also failed. And his policies caused Spain to suffer more bankruptcies. Spain once had the largest empire on the planet, but it was based on flimsy economic foundations and poor policies and once decline set in Spain never really recovered.

Is Spain unique? No. Military adventures and associated expenditures have bankrupted or ruined country after country, and in even the more successful empires, the gains whilst impressive-seeming from some points of view, are always temporary.

It is possible that if someone is going to attack you, you might conclude that you had better attack them first rather than be slaughtered. This unfortunate and destabilizing behaviour seems to be inherited from some of our primate ancestors. However, it is not an iron law and it surely doesn't explain all modern military aggression, and even if it did, I think that rational leaders would look at the long-term costs and should conclude that wars don't pay.

In particular, the wars started by America since the end of World War II, seem to have been very bad value for money, even if to an increasing extent it was someone else's money. Looking at the fascinating and not much studied Bretton Woods money system, it is surely reasonable to conclude that whatever flaws it had (plenty), from America's point of view it was a very useful system and that it was brought down principally by the costs incurred by the Vietnam War.

It is possible to argue that the ending (officially in 1973) of the Bretton Woods agreement was one of the factors that allowed the recent, and now clearly disastrous, economic bubbles to form. However, it can also be argued that some of the seeds were planted by the agreement itself, in particular that Bretton Woods allowed the US to live beyond its means, a habit which once cemented in by the unique operation of the dollar, continues to this day.

In particular, America has used its special relationship with the world monetary system to build up a staggering and frightening military machine that it is all too willing to use overtly or covertly (by arms sales for instance). Few people think this is good for the world, and only a minority of Americans now appear to think it is good for America.

Why have such a huge and expensive military capacity? Which nation is going to attack the US mainland directly? The British tried it a couple of hundred years ago, but they seem to have been quite friendly lately. Mexico or Canada? Not very likely, since each nation is massively dependent on exporting goods and resources to the US, particularly energy resources.

Therein lies a clue. America's dependence on foreign oil imports is one of the reasons why it could argue that it needs a huge military. Interesting then to consider that the cost of running that military, not including the extra amount required for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (not to mention the war on terror and the war on drugs) is about the same as the amount that America pays for all its imported oil - very roughly half a trillion dollars.

The good news is that if the Fed's printing presses ever run out of ink or the Chinese stop buying US treasuries, Washington could always put the military on unpaid leave for a decade or two and use the money to pay the oil import bill. Any pennies left over could be used to buy some wind turbines and solar panels, thus delivering both fiscal prudence and energy security, which should please politicians and public of every stripe and help America avoid the fate of nations that fight too many wars.

'Terroir': Creating A Sense Of Place

2009-01-18T18:54:00.001Z

"Tell me where is fancy bred, or in the heart or in the head? How begot, how nourished?" Shakespeare asks. And replies "It is engender'd in the eyes, with gazing fed."

Looking at the picturesque town of Epoisses in France I at least can easily agree with Shakespeare, and making a sort of bad pun for which the bard had a weakness, one might add it is fed by grazing too, since Epoisse is famous for its cheeses.

The picture shows the cheese-making enterprise of Jean Berthaut. Making this cheese is a complicated art, involving washing (the cheese) with salty water, then by a month in a humid cellar, followed by more washing, now with a mix of rainwater and a rather lethally strong alcoholic spirit called Marc de Bourgogne - not just once, but two to three times a week.

Much of this process is dedicated to the matter of ripening the cheese, called affinage. Quite reasonably enough it is carried out by an affineur, who also rotates and nudges the cheeses (a little like the remueur who twist the champagne bottles - a process known in English as riddling).

I tasted some of the rich and delicious Berthaut Epoisses cheese today (in San Francisco, not France) in the presence of the master cheese-maker himself, which is what prompted me to find out more.

French cheese is an ancient tradition, and like wine, terroir is a central concept. Terroir means land, but the real essence of the word does not translate into English very easily, but a key element is a sense of place, of being rooted somewhere. Terroir points to the unique aspects of soil, climate, situation and farming methods used to produce certain kinds of food like cheese and wine (though it can also apply to tea and coffee).

The quality of being 'rooted' is becoming increasingly rare for many of us, but the story of many of the old cheeses (and wines like champagne) is actually also one of serendipitous experimentation, which serves as a reminder that a sense of place and of traditions which in turn give people a sense of belonging all have to be invented by people trying different things out.

Many people will be trying new things out today, whether they want to or not, but one of the fruits may be new senses of terroir and belonging, as well as a renewed sense of the importance of local food whilst having the chance to learn from other places, directly and indirectly.

Getting To The 'Deeper Why'

2009-01-16T04:48:00.000Z

A friend of mine said to me today that if Wall Street bankers were surgeons he wouldn't want any of them to operate on him. Yet almost no-one has been seriously taken to task and the banking system and the bankers who helped create the disaster look like they are about to get another 350 billion dollars - apparently with slightly more oversight this time.

I find all this quite mind-boggling. The amounts of money are staggering and the amount of planning and oversight seems to be absolutely minimal. I don't have any special access to Wall Street or Washington DC but I do know from former lives that what you read in the media is the acceptable face of some of the truth. The blogosphere helps, and things leak out onto the web that can shed more light on what is going on. But the thing that is missing - and which is so vital - is that so often we don't know really know why something is happening.

The 'deeper why' is hard to get at for all kinds of reasons. One might take the example of the Russia-Ukraine natural gas dispute. I am not favouring one side or the other, but on the one hand, the Ukraine has been paying a really low price for the gas that it takes - or rather, it has not even been paying a low price, because it is badly in debt to Russia for what it has used. On the other hand, why did Russia wait till a viciously cold winter period to shut off gas, since the debt had been building up for a long time.

The matter is not just about natural gas and being a bad payer. Although Ukraine has few energy resources compared to its huge neighbour, it has one thing that Russia really needs - well located ice-free access to the sea. The Ukraine is also an important transit route from Russia to Europe for many things besides energy. Russia is therefore very alarmed by Ukraine's moves into western arms - if such a move were completed, it would have serious security implications for Russia, not least because the home port of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is at Sevastopol on Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.

The above analysis is all gleaned from public sources. I hope it gives a slightly better and more balanced picture than some media reports, but the 'deeper why', the real motivations and machinations will likely be hidden for decades or eternity. And so it goes for almost every other important issue in every nation on the planet.

Does not knowing the deeper why matter? For the serious historian, the answer is surely yes, but if one asks the question in a different way, I think the answer would be yes for all of us, at least in the future: does all of this covert manoeuvring lead to an efficient use of resources - especially money and energy - and good macro planning?

Surely the answer is no. What we need is a lot more transparency and the ability to ask more and deeper why questions. The next question is how to do this in such a complex society with so much at stake, and thus so much to hide. It would be so much easier if the surgeons of Wall Street were genuinely interested in the wider economy and society and would use their diagnostic skills to help the body politic. Since that is not the case, we need some new surgeons and some new approaches to anatomy that actually treat the body as precious instead of disposable.

Take A Bike On The Wild Side: Making City Cycling Safer And More Convenient

2009-01-13T06:50:00.001Z

I had already decided to change my homeward route to something both safer and with luck having fewer steep hills (going up that is). One of the advantages and disadvantages of riding a bicycle is that you get to learn the topology in a very intimate way - every downhill beckons like an old friend into a warm pub, while the uphills, though good for anaerobic stimulation, cause a sinking filling in that part of the brain set aside by nature for mapping bicycle excursions (unless you are a competition cyclist).

You also get to see the social ups and downs of a place, and something had told me that returning at 10pm via the road I had come along at 7pm would be a bad idea. It wasn't a good idea at 7pm, but I had no idea until I was actually going along it that I had picked a worrying street, and once on it, I didn't want to risk getting lost or potentially going into an even more alarming district.

So it just as well that I had worked out a quite different return route, because as I was leaving my meeting-which-turned-out-to-be-a-big party (put on by SXSW in San Francisco) a distraught young fellow asked me which way I was cycling home. He had a skateboard under his arm, so I spent a moment trying to do mental somersaults - did he want me to give him a tow home? Perhaps he needed directions, in which case I am about the last person on the planet to ask, unless I have a GPS device in my hand.

I told him I had arrived by the street behind us but was contemplating a different route. Then he blurted out that someone had just pulled a gun on him on that street, and he had fallen off his skateboard, smashing half his watch and catching some grazes. Mainly however he was scared - which seemed like a very sensible reaction.

I took his advice and mine, and went home in a completely different direction - which happily also avoided most of the hills. I was very wary all the way - always a good idea on a bicycle, though one is not normally, I hope, watching out for people with guns. But maybe city cyclists need a couple of extra markings on the cycling maps, beyond which streets have less cars on them: how about something to show the gradients of hills in flashing neon (there are a couple of maps with gradients marked, but the markings are too tame) and something to show which areas are not so safe at night. Both of these could be interactive, as long as the printout came out well.

Utilitarian cycling will just have to become much more popular for many reasons and it will be much easier to promote it if people, especially women, feel fairly safe whilst doing it, which in turn will make it easier to enjoy one of the great benefits of travelling without being sheathed in a metal box, namely that you can start to get to know your locale in a much more intimate and detailed way.

Significant Sorcerers, But Still Apprentices: How Nature Can Dispel Our Ocean Dead Zones

2009-01-12T06:14:00.000Z

In pursuit of covering significant science stories I was going to write something about the perennial problem of excess nitrogen on the land, which I shall mention briefly, but the story led me to a reminder of a deeper principle, that should encourage us to analyse as much as possible before taking actions at scale.

Some scientists have been conducting a research program for more than decade to see whether nitrogen fertiliser might be useful in the struggle against climate change by aiding carbon sequestration in forests. It's in an interesting and potential important story, but the scientists caution that the systems they are dealing with are very complex, and that they couldn't be sure that their experiment would be net positive in terms of atmospheric carbon reduction.

A wise caveat, since unintended consequences have been a rising and unfortunate fact for us and our world ever since we started trying to control our environment and food supply, which appears to be at least sixty thousand years ago. However, sometimes what we might view as a negative event in nature has a useful unintended consequence, which is something that our scientific and policy analysis should also be watching for.

One of the problems of using a lot of nitrogen to fertilise anything, be it for forests in the research mentioned above, or for crops for humans, is that much of the nitrogen won't stay on the land, but runs off into the water system. As far as I know, absolutely nobody wants this to happen, certainly not the farmers, who have to pay a lot of money for something which mostly ends up in coastal oceans or inland seas. Whereupon, it often forms algal blooms which in turn take all the oxygen at the bottom of the water and thus kill off all the other life forms that live there, which then causes all the creatures which depend on them to die off. Technically this oxygen shortage is called hypoxia (a 'low oxygen event'), but in common parlance it's a dead zone.

Worldwide, these dead zones have increased from 49 in the 1960s to 405 now. Scientific American gives one graphic example of why dead zones are bad news:

A single low-oxygen event off the coasts of New York State and New Jersey in 1976 covering a mere 385 square miles (1,000 square kilometers) of seabed ended up costing commercial and recreational fisheries in the region more than $500 million. As it stands, roughly 83,000 tons (75,000 metric tons) of fish and other ocean life are lost to the Chesapeake Bay dead zone each year—enough to feed half the commercial crab catch for a year.

Various schemes are being put forward to reduce the amount of nitrogen being applied to the land (though the forest experiment I mentioned first would ironically add to the problem), but the article continues:

[efforts at nitrogen reduction] still might not solve the dead zone problem. So much nitrogen is now reaching...coastal waters that much of it ends up buried in sediment [and] even when new nitrogen sources are removed those sediments release that nitrogen over time, perpetuating the cycle.

That inability to recover is driven not only by the nitrogen buried in the sediment but also by water layers that don't mix with one another, despite the massive flow of rivers like the Mississippi. Instead, warmer, fresher water on the surface sits on top of cooler, denser, saltier water...

So what does it take to make that mixing take place?

...it takes the energy of multiple powerful hurricanes to blend the two.

And there's the paradox and complexity. Very few humans want hurricanes, but it seems that because hurricanes exist, time and co-evolving ecosystems have found a way of using this natural force:

For example, as Hurricane Katrina bore down on the Louisiana coast with its powerful winds blowing faster than 130 miles (210 kilometers) per hour, the monstrous tropical storm delivered a benefit: it mixed the warm, oxygen-rich surface waters with the colder, almost oxygen-free waters beneath, dispelling the largest dead zone in the U.S. for a time. Hurricane Rita followed and finished the work, ending early the seasonal dead zone that forms each year at the mouth of the Mississippi [at the top of the Gulf of Mexico].

That dead zone—which last year stretched over roughly 8,500 square miles or 22,000 square kilometres, an area the size of New Jersey, and is predicted to grow even more extensive in 2008, thanks to the early summer floods—forms because of the rich load of nitrogen and phosphorus the Mississippi carries down from the farm fields of the U.S. Midwest.

The dead zone in question is more than twenty times bigger than the 1976 event which cost half a billion dollars. The Scientific American article was written before the busy 2008 hurricane season really got blowing, so maybe the dead zone was dispelled early again in 2008.

The main point is that despite the extraordinary advances we have made in scientific understanding we keep finding out that everything in nature is more complex than we thought - it's like an endless Russian doll. That doesn't mean we should not keep trying to understand more, far from it, but rather that we should try to remember that large natural events that we find very negative will very likely have positive features seen from a larger systems perspective and that when we start interfering with those systems at scale, we are bound to be interfering with many dynamic systems we don't understand very well.

Thus, even at this late stage, beset with ever more urgent problems - a bit like the Sorcerer's Apprentice - we need to mix caution with innovation. That is not an easy task, though in a sense, all living things in every ecosystem are doing this, albeit unconsciously. We have the advantage and disadvantage of being able to analyse and plan. What we almost certainly don't have is a master magician waiting to bail us out, as it were, so the more we can find out about how things work and work with nature rather than against it the better.

The Seeds Of Trust

2009-01-11T06:23:00.000Z

Do you ever have that feeling that we're missing something? I don't just mean the troubling fact that not many in power seem to understand that the 21st century is not going to be a re-run of the 20th, that what the Club of Rome was saying is coming true and that the threat of oil decline is as real as climate change. I mean something deeper than that, something that we must have understood - and had - in order to produce what we call civilisation or indeed any sense of security at all. It's something we don't have much of now - at least not the right kind, though we do mention it from time to time. That something is trust.

In one sense we have never had so much trust - our whole industrialised system requires a kind of unexamined trust at every level: you have to trust that the food you are eating is safe (though in fact it is generally not), that it will be in the supermarket tomorrow (it generally is), that water will be in the taps, that there will gasoline or petrol in the filling station when you need it, that your home heating system will work as the temperature sinks below zero, that the cash dispenser will spit out nice crisp dollars or euros when you need them (working until recently), that the phone system will work, that the Internet will work, that the health care system will work when you get ill or have an accident. Well, Ok, in America the last one is a stretch if you are poor or unemployed, but the other items most people in the rich world take more or less for granted.

However there are many other areas in which trust is also vital where we have become less willing to suspend our disbelief, and none more so perhaps, than that of trusting government, especially, though not exclusively, in America. According to the literature, there was a high point of trust in government around 1960 then a major slide from the late 60s with a few blips of recovery since then.

It is tempting to jump to conclusions when trying to explain the decline in trust - a fall which is widespread across all sectors of society and in regard to all levels of government (and other institutions), and can also be seen in the European Union (especially after the EU Constitution debacle). Trust, however, is one of the most complex and fragile of human relations. Some scholars, such as Adam Seligman, suggest that in pre-civilisation groups it wasn't so much trust but group sanctions that held society, such as it was, together.

On that reading, trust is a relatively new development, and if so, then from an evolutionary point of view, it is hardly surprising we have trouble with it. Be that as it may, we plainly need trust now in places where it is eroded. Unfortunately, it has been discovered that one way to increase trust is to scare people with the possibility of an external attack, real or imagined. This may be part of the explanation of all the recent upticks in trust in government in the last half century, including around the early 1960s, when Cold War tensions were heightened by the Bay of Pigs and Gulf of Tonkin incidents.

It has long been known that a population scared by an external threat tends to rally together, which means that those in power are bound to be tempted to use devices to achieve this end, since it is easier to control a population when it trusts those at the top. It may also be that trust has been manipulated for political purposes in the opposite direction, producing a short-term gain for one faction, but paradoxically causing harm to the greater body politic in the longer run, affecting anyone's ability to rule reasonably sensibly.

Why on Earth would those in power want to reduce popular trust in government? It seems that amplifying or attenuating political trust - or at least trying to - can be used by both parties in America to further their different aims. However, if certain political scientists are right, in aggregate, reduced trust favours those on the right. The reason may be that contrary to conventional wisdom, a more trusting attitude to government can be a cause of a person espousing more liberal or progressive policy views, rather than the other way around.

Since politicians have been trying by almost any means, fair or foul, to influence the people in their favour since the dawn of democracy, and indeed before, any talk of conspiracy theories is quite misplaced. It is rather a complex matter of group and social psychology, and whether it bubbles or ballots, manipulating humans is the name of the game.

This is unfortunate, but in any organised system there will be channels of control, and in any human system, trust will be a vital part of just about anything we do. In the end it is self-defeating to produce a cynical and untrusting populous, since eventually it produces general misery and affects economic activity, possibly to the point of ruination.

Whilst it may well be possible to produce both a gullible and cynical society, I think that all leaders would be well served by trying all honest means to increase the level of trust in society for its own sake. There are after all some countries in which conservatives are the ones who trust government more. Furthermore distrust is a dangerous seed to sow, since you never know quite know where it is going to pop up next and what unpleasant surprises it will bring. In hard times with the body politic in a state of high fever, trust is a vital restorative medicine that should not be used as a mere tool of political expedience.

Tolerating The Crooked Timbers Of Humanity

2009-01-09T05:33:00.000Z

High up in the old library of the Pontifical Gregorian University, founded in 1551 by the first monk of the Catholic Jesuit order, Ignacio Loyola, lurk thousands of tomes in Chinese and Russian. They are not works of theology or literature, but books on political economy. Communist political economy to be precise.

Except in some places in South America, Catholics have not smiled on communism, to put it mildly. Indeed, in the past the Vatican has tended to lean in the other direction and Catholicism is not noted for being a radical religion. So why all the books on a system in this most Catholic of universities, teeming with hundreds of seminarians, monks and nuns?

The answer I was given was something that Sun Tzu or Machiavelli would have understood, namely that it is necessary to study the enemy, or at least those that hold very different beliefs. Now, fifteen years later, I am not sure whether those books are still in the library, but I have never forgotten the idea.

So it is that very often when I find a book, web page or online comment that I find rather unfair or based on false assumptions or even downright obnoxious, I often force myself to read at least some of it. For example, I recently looked at a book on population that blamed those who were worried about the planet's overstressed resources for failed population policies. I have also long been fascinated by texts which chart and praise the rise of the current world economic system - a system which it has suddenly become acceptable to harangue after a long period in which to offer even mild criticism was seen as indicating some kind of incurable mental ailment.

I often think that economic views and religious faith can have quite a lot in common. For instance, it is generally not possible to argue someone out of either. Keynes famously said "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?", but this is rare, and Keynes though apparently referring to monetary policy didn't actually become a monetarist (as far as I know). The quality of being unwilling to change one's mind on core principles can certainly be beneficial, but in the matter of economics it can lead to some great unpleasantness, like this:

"The sub prime degenerate scumbuckets of America caused more damage and have cost more than the terrorist attacks and subsequent war on terror"

This is a quote from a blog, an American one I believe, written by someone who claims to be an economist - he or she doesn't give a name in the blog, but it can be deduced by other means. It makes me wonder if the author had never done anything silly which they had later regretted or been gulled by good or not so laudable emotions into doing something which seemed a bit risky at the time, but which many others were doing and wasn't illegal (indeed in this case was being highly encouraged from the president and Fed chief on down).

Many of the people who bought houses they couldn't really afford were surely just trying to provide a good home for their families and were following a dream which is drilled into people from childhood up - own your own home. It may or may not be a good idea in the greater scheme of things, but most humans need roofs over their heads, by some means or other.

The deeper question for me is one of tolerance and how will the lack of it that is too apparent in increasing areas of life play out in the coming age of severe resource shortages. A whole nation was founded on the idea of tolerance - namely America, and some centuries ago philosophers in Europe, particularly in Britain, worked hard to develop systems of thought that had both structure and flexibility. No system was perfect, but then as Kant said, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made”.

Reading the works of those one disagrees with, as I saw in the Jesuit Gregorian university, and trying to understand the preoccupations and assumptions of others can lead to all kinds of new insights - maybe one will change one's mind as Keynes said he sometimes did - and maybe not, but it could make it easier to cope with the fact that we are an awkward species with a lot of contradictions, and we're now in a tight spot where more understanding and tolerance of very different views and beliefs would go a long way.

Two Steps Towards Being Slightly More Sustainable

2009-01-06T05:55:00.000Z

In order to cheer myself up from the unbroken stream of bad news arriving through the air waves - from more killing in the Middle East to economic carnage just about everywhere and a meltdown of the very media bringing us all the other bad news, I decided to pursue two strategies towards making life a bit more sustainable.

Firstly I went round (by bicycle) to the local cafe to read and listen to the ukulele class. And very charming it was too, and pretty much free of greenhouse gas emissions, as far as I could tell. It turned out that they were rehearsing for a concert, and the teacher was determined that they would play all the songs one after the other without a break so that he could time the whole thing in advance. No-one broke ranks, even to go to the loo. I fancied that Frederick Taylor would have been impressed.

Some of the songs were in Hawaiian and some were in English. After making myself a cup of non-Hawaiian Earl Grey tea (using fresh boiling water from the coffee contraption), I listened to the gentle strumming and singing for about an hour, while learning from my book that buttons made from the tagua nut tend to explode if washed and dried in the wrong way.

Another chapter in the book - Strategies for the Green Economy by Joel Makower - talked about sustainable consumption. It's quite true that the rest of nature must have been sustainably consuming for about the last 3.5 billion years, but obviously not at the rate we homo sapiens are doing it. Also I think there are some differences in the way we are doing it too. The fossil record does not support the thesis that dinosaurs drove Hummers or built large coal-fired power stations.

One of the most intriguing things that the author mentions is that, paradoxically, the more one owns, the less one wants to share or lend things. In fact, it seems that coveting other people's things actually appears to increase when you have lots of stuff already, leading of course to owning even more stuff. It would seem that some circuits in the human brain get bootstrapped into unfortunate positive feedback loops when it comes to increasing ownership. There is undoubtedly more to it than this, but it's an interesting notion.

So I came up with a potential remedy that is both simple and free (at least at the point of use), which I immediately put the test. I pedalled off to the library (located conveniently nearby) and firmly set about borrowing some books, music, films and even a couple of talking books - one by Adam Smith (some ancient history about the wealth of nations - not actually read by him of course) and Stephen Pinker talking about how the brain works, appropriately enough.

And voila! It worked. I had no desire to go and consume anything else and there is no point in covetting most things in a library, since you can borrow them anyway. Well that was the experiment, now all I have to do is come up with a hypothesis. Yes, I know this is the wrong way round and we have no idea whether I was going to consume or covet beforehand, but all that Hawaiian music had put me in a rather mellow and less rigorous frame of mind.

So my conclusion is that the way to avoid the drumbeats of news gloom and covetous consumption and be at least slightly more sustainable is to play the ukulele and go to the library. Not sure about how sustainable Earl Grey tea is, but it tasted jolly nice.

Separate Tables: Why Don't We Know More About Friendship?

2009-01-05T05:10:00.000Z

According to many people friendship is one of the most vital elements needed for a happy life. And happiness, as the American Declaration of Independence helpfully points out, is one of the big items that inhabitants of the United States are supposed to be pursuing. I half remember a whisper that the word happiness was a late substitution for the word 'property' in 1776, but this is what it actually says:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Some years ago when I was quite vigorously pursuing what I hoped would be an academic career, I looked into scholarly work on friendship (and happiness), and it seemed to be very thin on the ground (for both). On looking again, the situation does not appear to have improved much.

One sociologist who has studied friendship starts a paper published in 2002 entitled 'Towards a more significant sociology of friendship' by lamenting the way in which the language of social psychology has influenced sociological studies of friendship into seeing friendship as ﬂoating "freely from any connection with the broader social structure". Maybe that mirrors to a great extent the way in which late modern life is so rootless, but it doesn't help one understand positively what friendship is nor how to create it.

I think we are going to need a lot of friendship as we enter these new hard times, as we try, I hope, to share more, cooperate more, and compete just a bit less. As I believe the Russians say, if you don't have a hundred rubles, you need a hundred friends. Otherwise life will be lonely and indigent indeed.

What prompted me again to think about friendship in a more scientific way was seeing the film of Separate Tables. The film, released in 1958, stars David Niven, Burt Lancaster and Rita Hayworth amongst a stellar cast and was written by British playwright Terence Rattigan. Rattigan often deals with loneliness in his works, but in Separate Tables just about every character is suffering from terrible lack of friendship.

The director of the film, Delbert Mann, said that Rattigan based the main characters on stories from real life at the very retirement home in Bournemouth where his mother lived and that he often visited. Learning that fact added an extra layer of poignancy to a film that leaves one thinking hard about friendship and what the point of life is if you don't have it, especially when you are getting on in life.

The few studies I found in the academic literature about friendship almost invariably looked at children and adolescents. There is very little about adult friendship and nothing that I could see for people over fifty. But friendship counts at every stage in life, and whilst it is important in the heyday of one's working years, in some ways it is even more important in older years and, as we are starting to see now, when working life gets interrupted by an economic meltdown.

There is interesting parallel work in the area of social capital and social networks, but I think the lack of a major body of serious work on friendship in adults is unfortunate. We are after all reputed to be social beings, but too much of the time we seem to behave in rather unfriendly and anti-social ways. Maybe the rise of social media will trigger some new effort in both helping us gain a better understanding of this essential trait of being human and in how to make more and better friendships.

(There is a three minute video version of Chris De Burgh's song Separate Tables that uses some of the wonderful Burt Lancaster-Rita Hayworth scenes, but you might want to see the whole film first, lest it spoil the end for you.)

Music In The Raw

2009-01-04T04:35:00.000Z

If you have never sat at the keyboard console and pedals of a large pipe organ and felt the beast let rip with its 64 foot bass notes and myriad cascading pipes and voices, then there is something missing in your life. In this perhaps now passing era of extreme sports it cannot quite compare with bungee jumping I suppose, but it's pretty close. In the finale of Widor's Organ Symphony Number Five for instance, you can imagine yourself not merely standing near the Niagara Falls, such is the power of the work, but actually becoming the rushing water itself.

Now the wonderful thing about this experience is that you don't necessarily have to spend twenty years learning to play this complicated instrument, you just have to sit next to someone who can. This was the shortcut method I employed when I sat next to a friend from university as he played an instrument in one of the Oxford colleges. It is true that it made me really wish I could play the organ properly, but given that my inadequate keyboard skills almost cost me my music degree, I was grateful enough for this vicarious pleasure.

The composer of the piece I mentioned, Charles-Marie Widor, born in France in 1844, was a boy prodigy of the sort one seldom hears of today. His father and grandfather were both organ builders and players, and by whatever splendid mix of nature and nurture that took place, Widor was so good that by the age of 11 he was organist at the lycee in Lyons. He then went to study composition in Brussels and became the organist at the imposing if oddly asymmetrical church of St Sulpice in Paris. He remained there for 64 years.

Today, it's relatively easy to get a recording of Widor's work, especially the fifth and most famous of his ten organ symphonies, and that is certainly a fine thing to do. But to understand the full majesty of a large organ and this piece in particular, one really has to be close to the pipes and sense the jets of roaring air being transformed into music and at times raw vibration that shakes the walls. And it's a lot safer than bungee jumping over Niagara Falls.

Getting To Paradise On A Low-Carbon Budget

2009-01-02T04:50:00.000Z

Yesterday I went with my small son to visit the wreckage of the first model aeroplane I had flown in more than thirty years. It wasn't a pilgrimage and to be honest these days with most model planes being made out of polystyrene instead of balsa wood and tissue, unless you achieve a really first class prang, the bounce factor is quite extraordinary.

In reality, this little 40" electric-motor powered model is mostly intact, but I don't have a workshop, so I have left it with Dennis, who runs his busy hobby shop with love and vigour. He will patch the plane up (again) and then test fly it to try to determine whether the problem is battery failure or pilot failure. I suspect the latter personally, and that admission led me to discovering an excellent remedy not just for my cack-handed aeronautical efforts but something rather more significant.

I realised today that we (or maybe 'they') could create an extension of my model 'remedy' that would have an immense benefit not just for the bruised wings of my hobby plane but for the whole global climate. Quite a sweeping claim, if I say so myself.

What can this miraculous cure be? One word: simulation! The answer to my pilot woes is a simulator - I tried one out in the hobby shop and it was quite remarkably realistic, even making a good graunching noise and shattering the propeller when I inevitably ploughed into a nice grassy field upside down. I pressed the red reset button, and was magically made whole again, and shot off into the ether for another attempt at safe flight.

So just think about it for a minute. The idea of a flight simulator is to help someone learn to fly without killing themselves or anyone else. And without damaging an expensive machine. But it also uses no jet fuel or kerosene or aviation gas. No fossil fuel at all. Just a tiny amount of electricity to run the computer - which when compared to a full-size aircraft would be infinitesimal.

Imagine then if we could simulate not just a flight but a whole holiday? At first when I had the idea, several hours ago, I thought it was amusing, and would make a quick and easy blog after my long labours developing ideas about deception, deflation and trying to find the bright side of the economic crash. But there is more to this simulation idea than at first I had thought. Tourism and other discretionary flights make up about 70% of all passenger flights, and flying is one of the fastest growing contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.

With the downturn threatening to become a Depression, people are going to want something to be cheerful about but both the planet and our pocketbooks are finding the burden of our continually jetting off to paradise less and less sustainable. However, business executives are reporting that some of the new video immersion systems are staggeringly realistic and are beginning to allow people to feel more genuinely as if they are in the same room as someone, even if they are on the other side of the planet.

I am not pretending that there can ever be a total substitute for 'being there', but as oil production goes into long-term decline and carbon taxes inevitably get imposed, like it or lump it, we are going to be travelling less. Many of us know this is a good thing, but like St Augustine, we'd like to put off being 'good' for just a little longer. With this little bit of technology we could welcome being good: simulated holidays could become virtual vacations with the added virtue of minimizing the damage to the environment and your wallet.

In fact, with these lightweight escapes, we could take short holidays of say two days or even two hours. Just imagine - no packing, no flight delays, and no security frisking. Unless of course you buy a masochist's virtual vacation that includes those things, perhaps along the lines of the famous Monty Python five-minute argument sessions. Anyway, in this new Alice-in-Cyberland you could go anywhere and do anything (as long as it was legal).

In the meantime, I plan to get an inexpensive model flight simulator and start learning how to stay in the air instead of digging furrows. And by the time I am ready to pilot a full-size virtual plane (as it were), the virtual vacation business should be in full swing and I can make flying myself and intrepid family to Pixel Paradise all part of the excursion. If anything goes wrong, I can just press the reset button, which, by the way, also refills your martini glass.

Sunrise Boulevard: Growing Up In Hollywood

2008-12-31T05:30:00.000Z

If people ever ask me where I grew up, I often say Hollywood. Now wait a minute, I am British, I was born in London, spent my adolescence in a village halfway between London and Oxford, and never even set foot in Los Angeles till 1987, at the not so tender age of 29, so how do I come by the wisecrack about growing up in Hollywood?

But it really is true. I arrived in Hollywood as a script doctor at the start of 1989 and lived there just over a year. It really did feel like the sun had been switched on for the first time and I loved it. I couldn't believe the warmth in the air and the warmth of life in general. So different from the cold and miserable 60s that passed for my fragmented Dickensian childhood and the endless recession that Britain always seemed to be in.

Some plants need a lot of water and some need a lot of sun. It turned out that I was of the latter variety. I had a wonderful time in Hollywood, found friends, was helped out when I needed it, and had a lot of fun even without a lot of money. I couldn't understand why people complained about it - everybody knew what Hollywood was like, so if that wasn't your cup of tea, don't go there, I couldn't help thinking. After all, there's always Paris or Budapest or Ulan Batur, if you can get the visas.

At least one of the friends that I made there went on to become a major producer, though it took him a fair while. I left on my own terms when I felt that it really would not be possible to make the kinds of films that I like to see - intelligent films for adults, with charm, a lot of irony, some sophisticated humour and no violence. Fitting into this non-genre at the time I could see only Woody Allen and a few French directors (including Truffaut, whom I once nearly met, but was already dying of cancer), but that was about it. It has been a long time since Hollywood made these kinds of films, and I was aware that a lot of what it had come to produce was problematic and not very helpful to the world.

For me, the real golden era of film making was from about 1930 to 1960, especially the films of Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks, though there are many others. Not too heavy on the gritty realism - for me that belongs better in the news, current affairs and geo-political analysis, which I like to devour. Judging by Sullivan's Travels, Sturges would agree - in hard times, we all need to find an excuse to smile.

I keep hoping that one day there will be a revival of films like the ones I love - and just maybe the Internet will make this possible. I think it would be nice to think of an old-fashioned Cinema Paradiso on every corner, but that is a bigger stretch to imagine, at least for now. Unfortunately I suppose it all comes back to the little matter of economics. Films usually take a lot of money to make (though they didn't always) and somehow they have to get distributed and somehow money has to flow back to the producers.

With the problems besetting the rest of the media world - newspapers closing down, publishing companies freezing new acquisitions - this looks like a bad time to do anything except batten down the hatches and hope that the storm passes before you run out of corned beef and rum. There may be some parallels between the way the arrival of television affected film in the 1950s and some of the effects of the Internet now - the web is paradoxically in some ways killing traditional media even as it greatly expands the audience for its content.

However, the upending of the old sneering line "If you don't like the views of this newspaper, go and start one yourself - it's a free country" has also genuinely been accomplished by the Web. The Huffington Post is one of the most extraordinary examples, but if you get the tone and message right, it is amazing what can be done and who you can reach.

Could this come true for films (and perhaps by extension television drama and sitcoms), funny or otherwise? Could we have a new wave of sophisticated, excellent cinematic story-telling? Of course making movies will still take money, and writers, actors and crew will need to get paid, and we still seem to be a long way from finding any reliable way of converting pixellated eyeballs into dollars, euros or renminbi.

As I have mentioned when talking about the decline of the print media, there may be some hope for a virtual complementary currency and maybe the principles of micro-blogging can be metamorphosed into micro-finance so that we can easily and safely pay small amounts for certain pages or pieces of media. There are also possible analogues with recorded music and royalties, though that is a pretty complex operation. However it is done, the economics would have to be carefully worked out, and things could go wrong, but that remains true for every medium and just about every product.

I caution myself that I remember talking a bit like this in the mid-1990s when I was studying journalism in Texas and getting really excited about the web and thinking that real high speed Internet connexions were just around the corner and high quality film could be delivered through fibre-optic cable. The dot bomb helped scupper that idea, but I can see now that my exuberance was premature. Maybe the timing is still not right just yet, but the technical jigsaw does finally seem to be slotting into place for some wonderful new possibilities in the moving picture department.

And if these wonders do come to pass and we have a new golden age of film making, I hope it happens where you are, just in case the experience does for you what Hollywood did for me - switched on the sunshine and showed me people at their kindest, offering an altruism that still warms me to this day.

Trying To Be A Hopeful Green Realist

2008-12-30T04:57:00.000Z

As is often the way, whilst researching one topic - social evolution, I re-discovered another topic - self-deception, that I had long wanted to spend some more time investigating. That will be the topic of yesterday's blog. I know that sounds a bit strange, but the explanation - self-deception - also explains a more serious problem - why it has been so hard to write a couple of articles for some important publications, when there is so much to write about in these clearly troubled and historical times.

The self-deception in the cases in point is mainly that of being too hopeful or optimistic. It's a mild form of self-deception, a kind of illusion, and there is plenty of academic evidence to suggest that it can be quite beneficial when not carried to extremes. In the case of trying to write a useful but brief introduction to self-deception using some primary sources (and not just cribbing off Wikipedia, which in this case wouldn't get me very far, since the entry is very short), I underestimated how long it would take to track down sources and then to read them studiously then distill something out of the copious fruit.

I sort of knew it would take longer than I was telling myself, but the subject is really important (as I hope to show yesterday), and if one is too honest about how much time things really take, many good things would not get done. Hence my attempt to be a hopeful realist, which in this case will mean the triumph of realism over hope - I'll finish today's piece before yesterday's. It reminds me of Samuel Johnson's famous quip about second marriages - the triumph of hope over experience.

The second example of self-deception also has a dimension of illusion to it and concerns my efforts to write something reasonably cheerful or at least helpful about how the coming decline of global petroleum production will help green business and clean technology - hence the green hopeful realist.

It's relatively easy to write about how the decline of oil will affect the world if you stay vague and keep the timeline indeterminate. What is not so easy is to offer specific areas of opportunity and generative strategies within a short-to-medium timeframe and take account of the global economic crash that is so far making life very uncomfortable for just everybody except the repo man. I suppose you could say that repossession was a form of recycling, but it's a pretty ghastly way to do it.

So I have struggled for more than two weeks now to find something positive to say about the near-term future for the kinds of businesses we shall certainly need. Every time I thought I had something promising, the realist in me would point out that for such and such an opportunity to come true it would require either that the US government realise how dire the energy, climate and environment situation really is and change policy dramatically or else we would need to order up a fairly major miracle along the lines of the Red Sea being turned into wine. Or oil. Or vinegar, more likely. Maybe I have my miracles mixed up, but the scale is right.

Most likely we need both policy change and miracles. Some might say that the former will be a form of the latter. However, even if all kinds of wonderful policy changes start on Day 1 of the Obama epoch, major things like the electricity grid and the broken US railway system are not going to change quickly nor will the new US president have much of a free hand to wave a green magic wand, much as he might like to.

One of the articles I was about to write was how California could once again lead America into a renewable energy renaissance that would banish fossil fuels to the dark and backward abysm of time (to slightly misquote Shakespeare) and send a signal to the world that America meant business when it came to going green. I still intend to write this piece and I hope this does happen (the article and the greening of America), because without full-scale American involvement, it will be hard for the world to scale up to the realities we face. However, this definitely can't be done without sweeping help from the government at federal and state levels.

In the meantime, I think I have finally come up with two themes that offer opportunities for those that want to make a living from sustainable business (which will ultimately be most of us) and won't require miracles or even huge policy changes to make them come true. If wonderful things happen in high places, then so much better, but, if you will pardon the grim pun, I am not banking on it.

Mind you, I said that I think I have got something green and realistic ready for the virtual printing press, but then of course I may be deceiving myself.

Is Obama The Green Wave's Last Chance To Count?

2008-12-28T04:24:00.000Z

There seem to be all kinds of waves and cycles in life, everything from the watery ones that King Canute wanted to prove he couldn't control through Kondratieff economic waves to really important cycles like the rise and fall in fashionable hemlines.

Now that the wheels appear to be coming off the world economic wagon in quite a serious way, it is easier to ask whether some grand cycles and waves are coming to major inflexion points, in particular the ascendant new green business wave and the old, but undoubtedly, effective fossil-fuel wave that has been mainly rising for hundreds of years.

Economic waves, such as Kondratieff waves, are still being argued over after nearly a hundred years and they involve quite a lot of assumptions and some complex notions, which necessitate a fair amount of detailed study in order to gain some literacy in their operation.

However, I am not going to attempt a disquisition on economic cycles, a subject I am currently exquisitely poorly positioned to talk about in depth, but rather I want to pose the following simpler but possibly rather more significant questions.

Firstly, if we grant that the world economy is going through a major downward dislocation and further that green movements, both citizen and business, tend to lose steam when money is scarce or energy prices drop, does the current upswing in matters of sustainable living and renewable energy have enough momentum to keep going through what could be a prolonged contraction, or must it be helped somehow?

I admit that this is a rhetorical question, because based on the evidence, I don't think there is as yet anywhere near enough real green business momentum to ride out what may be a very difficult period. So that brings me to even more important question number two. Is there enough political momentum to carry through the kinds of changes we need?

Much of the environmentally aware and energy savvy world is waiting with baited breath to see what future US president Obama is going to do to try to revive the American - and perhaps the world - economy, while hoping that he does this in large part by unleashing a tidal wave of green-collar jobs and energy saving, green energy and clean tech initiatives.

If Obama does this, then we might not have to run the experiment of seeing whether fledgling new green business strategies can make it through very hard economic times - an experiment that Thomas Friedman would surely say will come to a sticky end (again). The question will then be how best to make a new green wave part of the answer given the current state of tight money, imperfect public knowledge, and notoriously fickle voter and political will.

Friedman's point is that now is the moment for bringing in fuel taxes and widespread carbon taxes - it has to be done when there is political capital in the bank. The trouble is there is not much else in the bank, though since the US government seems willing to engage in financing by the printing press and national debt, there could be money for just about everything that green strategists could wish for.

Climate activists have been saying for some time now that we have only a few years in which to act to save the climate (peak oil analysts perhaps put the figure in negative decades), but if Friedman and activist-analysts are collectively right, then America may genuinely have just a few months to get on the right course, because if Obama's political capital starts to wane, all hope of bold strategic and infrastructural moves may be foreclosed. If scientists are right, and this really is our last chance to avoid runaway climate change, then this will be our final opportunity for a green wave that can actually get us on track for a very different - and better - 21st century.

Do We Need Beauty More Than We Think?

2008-12-27T06:18:00.000Z

I have been aware of the importance of beauty in both the natural and the man-made world for about as long as I can remember. Born though mainly not raised in London, whenever I am there I spend a lot of time looking up at the wonderful architecture of Wren, Vanbrugh, Nash and Jones, to name but four. Growing up in the countryside of south Bucks, half way between London and Oxford, I loved the cherry trees, with their oozing bark, and the kind of daily dawn chorus that it seems you can now only hear in Ravel's Daphnis and Chloé.

It was living in Rome and Paris, however, that made the beauty of buildings most real for me, with Rome having the extra delight of so many fountains and groves of trees interleaved with buildings and alleyways that consuls and emperors had passed by. There were also birds by the thousand. I remember many times feeling an extraordinary sense of connexion with the past as I walked past Trajan's column, along the edge of the Forum or down the Appian Way, and could almost hear the voices of Horace and Martial, two such warm and human poets that the ink seems to be barely dry on their writing.

What really intrigues me is what effect beautiful and harmonious architecture combined with nature, particularly trees, has on the mind and heart of both the individual, the city, society and the culture. It is easy to get too lyrical and romantic about this - Martial complains of the tiny 'cell' he inhabits in Rome, and Italian films from the Fifties illustrate grinding poverty, but making our surroundings beautiful must have had value, because over at least the last two and a half thousand years in the West, we have spent fortunes on trying to create environments that go way beyond the simple need to keep the rain off.

It may be that studies with Positron Emission Tomography and other advanced techniques of neuroscience will help explain why beauty really is important to civilisation, and perhaps why, at least for some, there are elements of classical architecture and landscape that are peculiarly satisfying. In the meantime, cycling through Golden Gate Park in San Francisco with trees like the umbrella trees of Rome and stopping at the children's playground with its classically inspired rotunda (containing a carousel) and a small art school loosely cast in Romanesque style, I felt a certain sense of belonging, even though we have been here less than a month.

Part of the charm - both as pleasure and magic - is engendered by the trees in a place, and though we may soon be wondering how to find the wherewithal to rebuild our misbegotten modern ugly - and grossly inefficient - cities, planting trees is an inexpensive step towards harmonious urban form and maybe even some greater civic sense. Trees can also help give the rest of nature a toehold or two, while beautifully removing some of the excess carbon we have seen fit to put in our air. I can't help dreaming that if we could grow enough trees, we might one day be able to put the songs back in our silent springs.

A Bibliophile's Happy Hunting Ground

2008-12-25T18:01:00.000Z

One of the many benefits of living in a larger city is the possibility of having access to a considerable public library system, further interconnected into many other library and information systems.

In my case, the San Francisco Public Library offers many bons bons, from DVDs of classic films from the early golden era of film-making to several shelves full of new non-fiction books, which can offer kinds of tempting surprises. But it is the inter-library loan system that is so captivatingly powerful.

Almost every book that sounds interesting can found in seconds through the catalogue browser, and then requested either from the public library or from any of the participating libraries, which include the local universities. All of this is accomplished through the same web interface.

I can also check on the status of the many books I have requested, and because they tell me how many other people have requested the same book and what number I am in the queue, I can guess how soon I am might expect to get a particular book. I can then decide whether I should wait and try before buying or if the book is sufficiently enticing or necessary, I should head to a book shop or online and buy it sooner.

It is another example of content and context, in this case, knowing where I am in the system allows me to make timely and better informed decisions, and better plan my research and writing, instead of endless hunting, waiting and wondering.

Money For Answers And An Answer To Money?

2008-12-23T07:33:00.000Z

Mahalo Answers combines at least two things that have fascinated me for a long time: a Question & Answer system powered by humans and a virtual community currency. I am not part of the scheme and have not tried it (though I would like to), but just reading the page about how Jason Calacanis launched the operation prompted the following brief comment about the currency matter:

Over the last few years, I have written about and made some fledgling steps towards starting a renewable energy-backed currency, but I think an online currency will be easier to get started and maintain. Currency is a complex entity - it is a bit like blood - it's literally vital, but as soon as you remove it from its host body and all the complex organs it's connected to, it coagulates and dies. Money is a bit like that - it has to be flowing inside the system to work and stay alive. Most new community or local currencies never get into the body politic and so remain marginal or shrivel.

Creating a new currency is difficult for many reasons, but I applaud Mahalo for trying and I hope their scheme works for at least two reasons. The more dramatic reason is that if the Chinese ever stop buying billions of treasuries, the US dollar could find itself in real trouble, with the potential to pop the lid off the whole money bubble that has built up and protected America since Bretton Woods. If the US dollar really did head south speedily, other forms of currency might turn out to be very useful.

The more immediate reason is that like many others I am concerned about the state of serious, analytical media and particularly how writers, journalists and their host newspapers, journals, websites are going to stay financially afloat as powerful forces devour many existing business models. Only yesterday I suggested that an online currency would be worth exploring to help struggling media outlets and before that I have called for stronger and properly funded public service broadcasting, especially for the coverage of current affairs.

In the meantime, over the years, everything from Green Shield stamps to airmiles have been popular and had their uses, and many large shopping emporia will grovel to get your customer loyalty and give you in-store points or coupons. In the end, many of these schemes are similar to local or community currencies, so we should not be afraid of them nor dismiss them as unworkable. They can also be a way of direlcty rewarding the kinds of activities you want to see happen (local jobs?) and increasing local economic security. It will be enlightening to see how Mahalo fares.

Finding Silver And Gold Linings In The Media Meltdown

2008-12-22T07:02:00.000Z

As new arrivals to San Francisco, we were advised to look in the pink section of the San Francisco Chronicle for some interesting local things to do, especially things that we could do with our nearly four year old son. Instead of heading straight for the web version, I decided to find a physical copy of the paper and buy it. In the end I just couldn't do it, but I had a few interesting thoughts on the way.

There were several reasons for this noble acquisition plan, including knowing that the newspaper business is in a pretty awful state for various reasons, including most obviously the current economic disaster, but also partly because lifelong avid newspaper readers like me do nearly all their avid reading online which nets the newspaper no cover charge, and maybe not much advertising either, since like many others, I use Firefox to block the ads. At least, until recenctly that is.

However, partly because I really do think that (serious) newspapers are important (see my earlier blog on the npr job cuts) and I do want to see them survive and indeed offer more and better serious reporting and analysis, I switched adblocking off, and now deliberately try to look at some ads which I think might be interesting.

Usually, I confess, I do this because some of the better ads stimulate a thought about something I might want to write about, but also I do it because if ads are about the only way that thoughtful online media are going to survive, I had better try to help.

Nor is this idle or idealistic altruism: this very blog is powered by Google Adwords. I am guessing that the revenue I generate thereby gives new meaning to the concept micro-finance, but never mind, I am a professional writer and professionals also need to get paid, at least in theory.

Are online ads the future of financing for serious newspapers and serious authors? On the one hand it seems trivial and demoralising to think that fine thought shall be subsidised by base advertising (I hope saying this doesn't contravene the terms of the Google Adwords legal tome I signed). On the other hand, how else shall writing get paid for?

There aren't many options: if you sell enough books and have a decent royalty agreement you may be able to live off it, but writers able to do this are few and far between, and you had better keep churning those hits out, unless you happen by chance to be the author of Harry Potter, in which case you are probably off the hook unless you were investing in Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme.

If you write for a newspaper, magazine or trade journal, you may be on staff (or just terminated) or you may get paid by the word, which is alright at anything close to a dollar a word, but pity one writer who recently dropped from a steady $2 a word to ten cents. Either way, because of the wider revenue problem, in part due to online viewing and economic shinkage, there is surely less periodical money available to pay writers.

Historically the other options that evolved were begging, patronage and subscriptions (there may be others, but this is what springs to mind). The painter Hogarth finally began to prosper with subscriptions, but he was still ultimately selling molecules. I have not heard many stories of the web being a happy hunting ground for subscriptions for anything that is virtual, with the exception of specialist publications which will help you directly make or save money - Energy Intelligence springs to mind, and there are quite a lot of financial offerings in this realm. As for patronage, a cursory study of classical music and fine art will show you that that path is littered with pettiness, misery and wasted lives.

So where does that leave us? Subscriptions sound like a good idea, but mostly don't work on the Internet (or do they? If you know, do tell.) Advertising works for Google and Yahoo and some others - if it works for the famous newspapers, why are they firing so many well known writers? It surely cannot be compensating for the downturn in hard copy sales.

We can all see that the business script is getting into a rather blue if not downright noir phase, and it is not clear what will emerge from this turbid scene. However, for those of a greenish hue there is at least a kind of silver lining to all this.

One of the curious things about serious newspapers is that the more serious they are the fatter they are. This is not because they are full of exegetical wisdom and weighty accretions of sagacious curiosity - though they might be - but rather because they are stuffed with advertising. The Times of London or New York, especially on Sundays, is a massive tome that would have made Dostoyevsky or Solzhenitsyn shrink back in awe, but how it could it only cost a dollar or a pound (or thereabouts)? In fact, only with the gutter press does the cover price really cover much of the cost of producing the epistle.

So the irony is that it has long been the case that serious newspapers have relied on indirectly persuading their readers to engage in buying as much stuff as possible, much of which helps to wreck the very planet that more and more serious readers worry about, or at least say they worry about. The dramatic reduction in newspaper sales that is certainly apparent in the United States is directly saving a lot of trees, energy and water from being consumed and a lot of toxins from being generated at the point of manufacture and a lot of waste paper that won't need to be recycled, landfilled or burnt.

That's why I could not bring myself to buy the three inch slab of the San Francisco Chronicle, just to get to the pink sliver of local events. I felt bad about it, and in some ways even worse when I discovered the contents online.

So yes, it will be a good thing if newspapers go on a diet and go back to being lissom creatures of less than a hundred pages, but what will the economics look like? Pretty awful unless something dramatic changes.

The only golden lining (inside the Golden Fleece?) that I can think of is something I have been wondering about for well over a decade: the idea of online micro-payments. We have micro-lending now, from Surinam to San Francisco, we have burgeoning social media instruments and a lot of online transactions, can it finally be possible to have micro-payments?

And here is a twist, that may make it one day more interesting and perhaps easier to enact: create the online micro-finance system as its own local non-dollar based currency. That may sound nutty, but one day the dollar may take a real tumble, and having some alternatives to it, just like having some alternatives to fossil fuels, may turn out to have been a really good idea. In the interim, it may make it is easier and safer to build such system and get it accepted. It could also be tied into online ads, carbon credits or offsets (maybe), and many other green and beneficial ideas. Who knows, it could even help solve some of America's staggering debt and California's budget deficit. Oh yes, and pay a few hard-pressed writers.

A New Kind Of Hybrid

2008-12-18T07:08:00.000Z

As the oil spigot sputters, we leave the era of Great Games and enter the murky epoch of grand paradoxes. It is hard not to sound a trifle glum when considering the possibility that a large part of western infrastructure, which has literally cost the earth, is going to be at best useless and at worst utterly counter-productive in the great economic and energy contraction that we are now entering.

Some will say that it is doom-mongering even to utter such thoughts, but it may in fact be the only hopeful pathway - to recognise the full depths of the nightmare, and try as quickly as possible to remake the parts that can be useful and transform those that can't while looking for new and sensibly sustainable ways of conducting human life. All of that will certainly create much pain and many a paradox, but it will also either spawn the pathways that lead to a long-lasting future for humans or we'll witness a long and not very pretty sunset.

One of the biggest problems, if not actually a paradox, may be that the economic systems that helped so mightily to create so much growth, may be ill-suited to a long contraction. To be specific, it seems increasingly likely that straight market systems will increasingly appear to be what they are - blind watchmakers, or perhaps bomb-makers. A blazing example is the way in which two auto makers, GM & Toyota, are delaying factories to make some of the most advanced road-ready hybrid electric vehicles - the Volt & the Prius. The reason is the current collapse in car sales, in part due to recent high gasoline prices. Yes, fuel prices in America have fallen astonishingly since July, but what happens when they shoot up again? Suddenly there will be immense demand for the partly electric Volt and Prius, and lo and behold there won't be the factories to make the vehicles.

I admit to mixed feelings in writing the last few lines, because cars are really part of the problem. But since I am a proponent of avoiding chaos and trying to keep life civilised and as decent as possible, what we'll need is phased change away from cars, given that few places have good enough public transport systems to deal with the sudden disappearance of the car, and there is surely nowhere outside of tropical rainforest tribes that would last long without deliveries by trucks and lorries.

There is a parallel with our wider socio-economic systems. We are still in the old paradigm, still talking of how to return to growth and get the economy back on track again. And for good reason - it's ghastly to be out of work, and in many places, downright dangerous for your health. Thus I am not surprised that I do not yet see any signs of the realisation that we'll have to develop some different systems to manage overall decline and contraction. Like the cars that may one day get us away from cars, the kinds of systems we'll need will almost certainly be a new kind of hybrid - we'll need to keep some aspects of the way markets work whilst developing systems that can help predict and plan for a world that will require new kinds of innovation as we are forced to shorten our supply chains and work out how to manage on a great deal less than many have been used to. For some this challenge is exciting, but for now, the task remains one of trying bring reality into focus.

Today's Tweets & Facebook messages

2008-12-17T07:05:00.000Z

I thought I would collect together my various messages on social networks uttered today (slightly edited, reordered & concatenated):

Facebook: (first time actually posting to FB)
I am working on how to combine conversations in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn & other social networking tools, partly in pursuit of green opinion surveying idea.

Twitter:

At last some good news: Dubai Plans to Refrigerate Beach Sand Associated swimming pool will be cooled too. That's a relief.

New Chinese plugin hybrid car is more electric than most. Manufacturer started as a battery maker. Buffet has 10% ($230m) stake.

Wondering if any green tech startup in Silicon Valley is working on a telephathy API? Have to be open source of course & Ajax friendly.

RT @johnbattelle: do you trust Google? See: http://battellemedia.com/archives/004757.php jd: Trust is a really tough parameter to gauge. Many have written about trust, especially recently. Seligman's The Problem of Trust (1997) remains very perceptive.

Fear as political factor is a problem. Jacobs, in The Politics of the Real World says: Fear is often accompanied by a feeling of impotence.
..

Concerned politicians worry that giving public too strong dose of reality induces impotence. Eg BBC report on Arctic warming.
..
RT @lehacarpenter: if we are impotent, shouldn't we feel impotent? jd: I was struck that a political writer like Jacobs made this remark. Impotence is implicated in depression. However, facing economic & energy crises we must act whether we feel impotent or fearful. It would be even a little reassuring if there were some rocks on which we could base our responses. Reality?

Comparing attitudes to the future from the 1990s & now. So far, looking at UK data. Mid 90s: >60% thought children's future would be worse.

I will very gingerly express something that has been a growing concern for me for some weeks now & I have not seen anyone else mention (maybe no-one has mentioned it, because it is not valid!) I worry that Obama will become like Tony Blair. TB arrived with so much hope & very quickly reneged on just about every green commitment he had made, much to the dismay of environmentalists who had supported him.
..

RT @energy4america: "I don't think Obama will Blair out. Blair might have done better if he hadn't been Bushed." jd: hoping Obama is sincere.

RT @bbcscitech: Scientists say they now have unambiguous evidence that the warming in the Arctic is accelerating. http://tinyurl.com/6fsvno

Listening to Poulenc's delightful Sextet for piano & wind (1932-9). As the composer says "Très vite et importé." Poulenc seems quite comfortable with wind & piano, but he had a stormy relationship with solo strings - he destroyed 2 violin sonatas, and consigned a string quartet to the Paris sewers (in 1947). Had it been Vienna, the work may have turned up in 'The Third Man.' Poulenc's 2 sources of inspiration were summed up by Claude Rostand: ‘In Poulenc there is something of the monk and something of the rascal.’

An Unhealthy Stew

2008-12-16T06:10:00.000Z

In the last few days I have heard news reports about 800,000 children having no health care, and former foodbank donors lining up at the soup kitchens. Stories from the Great Depression? Bangladesh? No. They are tales from that well known third world country, California.

If it were a nation, California would be in the top ten by GDP; and it is the largest farming state in America. It may sound like a rhetorical question to ask how such a rich place can allow such poverty. But until the question is seriously addressed, it is not obvious that America will be able to find a sustainable path through the economic and energy situation now unravelling.

But perhaps it can only be addressed as one of series of interconnected issues, all of which are systemic issues. The history of civilizations getting into trouble suggests that it is difficult to know when decline is really setting in, or instead when a new upward cycle is about to begin. But when a complex system finds its inputs (eg energy), outputs (emissions) and entire modus operandi (economics) constrained and compromised, if it cannot comprehend this and change, possibly rather quickly, it will take either great luck or a miracle to save it.

To compound matters, it may be that as the effects of decline start to bite, they may be misdiagnosed. This looks to be the case at the moment from a number of angles. In the meantime, a lot of poor children - and adults - will go on being hungry and unhealthy, unless sensible ways can be found to address the complex crisis we are entering in such a way that large numbers of people can survive and prosper even as extraordinary transformation takes place.

The Judgment Of Solomon

2008-12-15T05:16:00.000Z

Or how to pick winners in a hurry. The winners in question are likely to include everything from new economic systems which are genuinely sustainable through high and low technologies to all kinds of societal and individual behaviour change.

We know that large changes are going to arrive because sooner or later we are going to have to power civilization on straight sunlight as the stored sunlight of fossil fuels runs out. Are we reaching the beginning of that transformation now as the energy realists believe, or do we have all kinds of unconventional fossil fuels that we shall be able to tap for another few decades?

The smart money, what's left of it, is starting to lean towards energy realism, for a whole host reasons including economic and geological. As that happens, the question of which civilizational techniques and technologies to back really becomes critical. The next question will be: how on earth shall we judge what will work and what will fail? Who should be helped to produce what innovations in industry, society, governance? It is quite clear that help will be needed, and as luck would have it, getting help from the government is suddenly all the rage. Humans became homo technicus (I apologise for the neologism) a long time back - perhaps 35,000 years ago - and now we rely on technology for almost every aspect of daily survival.

Here in California, one of the world centres of solar and green technology, the question is particularly pointed: how to help many kinds of green and clean technologies, experiments and, one must hope, potential solutions. Venture capital is suddenly very shy and both consumers and credit are squeezed like a Victorian girdle. As with so many other things in this brave new world of the last five minutes, all eyes are on government as the last hope. It does seem rather like a death-bed conversion, but if the economic crash can re-introduce the idea that government is necessary for civilisation - good government that is - then that may help us judge not only what technologies to help, but also what paths society should try to follow as it deals with limits to growth arriving earlier than even the soothsayers of the Club of Rome envisaged.

A Smile May Be All That Is Left

2008-12-14T06:36:00.000Z

Just watched Preston Sturges' thought-provoking 1942 film 'Sullivan's Travels'. Interesting juxtaposition of comedy and the dark side of life, of abundance and scarcity. The film shows legions of homeless people living in awful conditions, and some jail conditions not so far from Guantanamo Bay. The take-home message is that no matter how ghastly or miserable life gets, it is still possible to laugh, and that may be all that some people have left.

Liquid Gold

2008-12-12T22:17:00.000Z

Tim O'Reilly (@timoreilly) retweeted a message via @judell from Saul Griffith: "Best case, you can look at bio-fuels as a 1%-efficient solar cell." After a few years of various small scale, more or less controlled experiments with feedstocks to make biofuels, and some attempts actually to produce liquid bio-fuels I would have to agree with Saul. Not only that, in order to get the feestock, one frequently has to work very hard, which calls into question whether even 1% efficiency can be claimed. I think we should regard liquid fossil fuels as a form of gold - so precious we should price it exorbitantly and treat as if it were very rare. One day it liquid fossil fuels will be very rare, and I suspect future humans will wish their forebears had been more careful.

Having said all this, what are we to do now? Should we abandon liquid biofuels? From a food and environment point of view, the easy answer would be yes, but in the real world we cannot do without liquid fuels, especially not with a planet so over-populatated. At the very least, it would be helpful to have an enlightened debate both amongst politicians and the public. How to get there, though, that is yet another knotty problem.

Healthcare article & comments

2008-12-12T07:07:00.000Z

I have just posted the following comment on an npr story "With Daschle, Obama Signals Health Will Be Priority."

Several years ago I had a meeting with an aide to Tom Daschle, in which we discussed the coming impact of Peak Oil and oil decline. The links between energy and healthcare may not be obvious, so I have written an article, entitled 'A Healthcare Renaissance: Could Peak Oil Inspire America To Create A National Health Service?' (http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2008/12/a-healthcare-renaissance-could.html) offering some possible reasons why we should give some careful thought to peak oil and healthcare.

On my O'Reilly blog site, I posted a reply to someone who commented negatively on my blog mentioned above:

I wanted to take a moment to thank Mike Perry for his comments, even though he takes issue with what I have written.
For the record, just under half of all US electricity is produced with coal. Almost no oil is now used to produce electricity, except in emergencies. However, during emergencies it is not the price of diesel which matters, it is the availability. Indeed I made no mention of the price, though in ordinary times, price certainly matters a lot.
Regarding my brief stay in a London hospital a couple of years ago, I valued it very highly indeed. For one thing, I had no idea what was wrong - it turned out not be life threatening, but it was very frightening at the time. Furthermore my mother gave the whole of her adult life to nursing, much of it in the UK National Health Service. I grew up on nursing stories, starting in the Second World War, through which my mother trained as a nurse, even during the blitz. Words can hardly express how highly I value those who practice health care.
I have not experienced private health care, but I have experienced national health care in France, England & Canada, and it has been kind, timely and good in every place. And free at the time I needed it. I accept that others may have had different experiences.
There are certainly problems with national health care systems, and poorer areas of a nation may well get a poorer service, but that is not always so.
CAT & MRI scans are an important issue, and it is certainly easier to get a scan done quickly if you are rich. However, having worked on the first CAT scanners (invented in Britain) and made films about MRI scanners in the national health service, my research suggested that scans were available in a reasonably timely manner in most places.
One of the reasons why I wrote this piece is that politics, healthcare and technology are going to be intertwined, in part because of the unfolding changes to the energy system. These changes will require a shortening of the supply chain system (which means more domestic manufacturing) and much greater energy and scientific literacy. It will be so much easier for people to consider the long training required to change career and reskill if they don't have to worry about exorbitant health insurance payments or worse still, being denied coverage on a whim from an insurance company. The whole of society becomes a safer and calmer place when people know that healthcare is available without fear.
Regarding my voting in the United States, sadly as a non-citizen, I am not allowed for vote for anything. I can say that I hope very much that Barack Obama can inspire the American people to deliver change for the better - he certainly cannot do it on his own, even with all the kryptonite in the universe.
PS. For better or for worse, I have a Y chromosome or two lurking in my system, which puts me in the male camp of homo sapiens.

NPR Cuts: US Democracy Needs More Public Broadcasting Not Less

2008-12-11T04:02:00.000Z

US National Public Radio has just announced that it is cutting two programmes and many jobs. Free market adherents will not lament this (partly because they are now too busy lamenting other things), but a national public broadcasting system is more vital to a nation's democracy than may be apparent, especially when print journalism is not all that strong, and there is no national newspaper of record, and none of the nation's chief ministers are elected.

At this time of anguish and questioning, NPR should be broadened, deepened and strengthened. This may sound absurd as the economy buckles under multiple strains, but it is clearly possible, especially given that billions, and most likely trillions, of dollars are going to be injected into the U.S. economy.

Barack Obama has spoken of spending money on infrastructure projects - this should include public broadcasting, especially more and better coverage of current affairs and world affairs. We are entering a global crisis, and it is not just an economic crisis, but also an energy crisis, an environmental crisis, a population crisis, and a civilisational crisis. We are surely now seeing that after moving into overshoot some time ago, we are entering a phase of limits to growth - especially as we pass peak oil and global warming worsens.
A crisis of this depth and scale will require more of the right kind of information and analysis not less. European countries have a variety of ways of funding their national broadcasting systems, with the BBC licence fee being one way of providing at least some insulation from government interference.

Though the Internet has become a vital source of news and current affairs, it is notoriously hard to fund a pure Internet broadcasting or media operation (having founded Global Public Media in 2001, I have some firsthand experience)* and because of the way that the Internet is received, it is not likely to become a full substitute for terrestrial broadcasting. For a host of reasons, every nation should maintain a good network of land-based transmitters operating both AM and FM.

Regarding NPR's financial situation, it does seem absurd and unwise that a national broadcasting system should depend so heavily on funding from just one human being (in this case $225 million in 2004 from the late Joan Kroc, wife of MacDonald's CEO), no matter how generous and public-spirited.

So many problems come back to the way things are funded. Reforming the way American politics is funded is surely at the top of this kind of list, but a well funded and independent national broadcasting system should also be considered as vital to the functioning of democratic government.

* Though there are reports that YouTube is starting to earn its posters money.

San Francisco Diary 9 xii 2008

2008-12-10T03:46:00.000Z

First day of new life in San Francisco
From 5am we finish unloading the moving truck and Celine returns it to east side of Francisco, where she enjoys listening to local electrical workers in cafe where she waits for rental place to open.
As kitchen is submerged in boxes and we no longer have chickens, we try out local pie shop for breakfast. Delicious and very pleasant.
After unpacking some boxes and minds, it is late in the afternoon. Kitchen is still buried.
We meet Boris, who runs local Russian deli and has extraordinary stories from Soviet Union - tale of violin as he emigrates & selling VCR; Chris from Newcastle who local bike shop and recommends Park Chow, where we go to have quick dinner with Raphael. Raphael practices introducing himself to people.
As Raphael has been very helpful he gets a lime & lemon pie back in local pie shop.

2008-12-09

Using cell phones with GPS to understand traffic flow could be greatly extended to help drivers get out of their cars.
Silicon Alley Insider: Expect Yahoo-Microsoft Search Deal Soon - unless it doesnt happen.
Interesting video of global air traffic . Makes it obvious who flies the most.
Practicing one form of individual planning. In this case for emergencies.