Fallujah Report
Just back from Iraq, Michael Fumento reports on rebuilding in Fallujah.
Dynamist Blog
What Does Your Ringtone Say About You?
David Ewalt of Forbes examines the meaning behind customized rings. Of course, as he notes, "most ringtones don't even sound like a real song. They sound like the computer-generated bleeps that they are."
Depending on who's calling or which alarm I'm using, my phone plays "California Dreamin'," "I'm Just a Girl," "London Calling," and "Rock Lobster." None of them sound much like the songs, but at least they don't sound like someone else's phone. And, lest I confuse the phone with the radio when I'm driving, it also vibrates.
Not a Moment Too Soon...
Patrick Ruffini has launched a site to track news of the 2008 presidential campaign. Sigh.
How to View Economics
"Economics appears unrealistic, excessively abstract, ahistorical, or simply implausible, occasionally verging on the insane," writes Tyler Cowen. But it isn't, as he explains.
One of my goals as an Economic Scene columnist has been to broaden readers' understanding of what questions economists ask (sometimes at the risk of reporting what seems obvious to the non-rigorous). Contrary to the way it's portrayed in most media, economics isn't mostly about interest rates and the stock market. I do, however, tend toward reporting empirical results, the better to avoid the problems Tyler discusses.
Media Bias Panel--Update
C-Span has moved the start of our UCSB panel on media bias (see item below) to sometime after 9:00 p.m. Eastern, to accommodate a replay of the presidential press conference.
Consumer Innovation
I've been reading Neil Gershenfeld's new book Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop--From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication. It's an interesting complement to Eric Von Hippel's Democratizing Innovation, which I wrote about in my April Times column. While Von Hippel looks at how and why users generate so many innovations, Gershenfeld explores the possibilities of low-cost, (relatively) easy-to-use fabrication technologies.
Gershenfeld's experience with students and workshops from Ghana to South Boston confirms von Hippel's central point: In many cases, people want things they can't currently get and, given the tools to make them, will create new inventions. "The killer app for personal fabrication is fulfilling individual desires rather than meeting mass-market needs," he writes. (For more info, see his website here.) I admire Gershenfeld's enthusiasm, but he overstates the case for making stuff yourself. I already have the equipment and (rusty) skills to fabricate my own skirts, and by making them myself I could get exactly the right fabric and fit. But I don't. Making stuff yourself can be fun and satisfying, but it can also be time-consuming and frustrating. The theoretical question is who has the scarce knowledge. User innovation taps unique or unarticulated desires, but specialization allows expertise and gains from trade.
After writing the column on Von Hippel's work, I found coverage of user innovation popping up everywhere. Fortune published this piece on the "do-it-yourself economy," leading with a stay-at-home dad who's inventing an MP3 player that looks like a Pez dispenser. The neologism-crazy trend spotters at Trendwatching.com posted a nice roundup of examples.
Meanwhile, O'Reilly has launched a fat new magazine called MAKE, devoted to the goal "that all of us can learn to become makers, just as we might learn to cook or use woodworking tools." MediaBistro featured a profile of the new magazine. An excerpt:
It goes without saying that nearly every review of MAKE references the long-cancelled ABC show, MacGyver, and the magazine/mook itself is unable to resist the impulse. (In Michael Rattner's review of Victorinox's Swiss Army Cybertool, he writes, "I've used it to open my PowerBook for a memory upgrade, gain access to a stubborn remote control's battery compartment, slice through an untold number of letters and packages, remove a tiny ingrown hair and to escape certain death by drowning using the can opener as a hook to unlock the door to a room that was being filled with water. [Oh wait, never mind, that was a MacGyver re-run.]) And it was precisely that appeal that made me buy the magazine last week while browsing the shelves at a Barnes & Noble. I'm not that technically oriented, but I had enough fun taking apart major appliances as a kid to appreciate the idea of doing it usefully and purposefully as an adult. (Besides, you never know when you'll be forced to evade a couple of guys with AK-47s using only a box of matches, a stick of gum, and some aluminium foil.)
But the beauty of MAKE isn't so much the practicality of it, but the way it translates what is nominally a subculture for a general audience, in much the same way Wired (wittingly or un-) did as it adapted. While many of the projects therein require a modicum of technical knowledge, culturally, MAKE is about everyday hacking — which is of increasingly greater interest to a general audience as consumers place higher premiums on customization. Music mash-ups, TiVo programming, made-to-order Nikes are symptoms of larger demand for a wide of consumer choices.
On a more radical note, The Speculist interviews Adrian Bowyer, whose working on a self-reproducing rapid-prototyping machine.
And for all you would-be inventors, Jeff Taylor points me to this contest, noting that "SOMEONE has to take $125K off of MS and ISDA........"
Carnival of Tomorrow
A new Carnival of Tomorrow is up, with lots of links to future-oriented material.
Media Bias Panel
Earlier this month, I co-moderated a panel in Santa Barbara on "media concentration and media bias," featuring Bill Keller of the NYT, Lionel Barber of the Financial Times, and Jacob Weisberg of Slate. The discussion was quite lively, and the participants were refreshingly honest (though Lionel did exaggerate his criticism of blogs for the sake of argument). C-SPAN will show the discussion at about 9:00 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday. You can also listen to KCRW's radio version here.
NOTE: The time above has been moved forward to accommodate President Bush's press conference.
Fighting Spyware
Glenn Reynolds has been complaining about all the time he has to spend removing adware from the InstaDaughter's computer. Now, via Good Morning Silicon Valley comes embarrassing, or perhaps strategic, advice from Intel CEO Paul Otellini, who spends an hour every weekend doing the same thing: "If you want to fix it tomorrow, maybe you should buy something else." In other words, a Mac.
The Register report is here and free. The WSJ report, from which all the others are derived, is here. (This link should work for a few days.)
Mr. Blevins, Please Stay Out of School
Surely only the most determined readers made it to the very end of the very last article in the NYT series on class. Fortunately, Professor Postrel was one of those rare readers.
The story is on college dropouts, focusing on a Virginia man named Andy Blevins, who makes a decent living, including good benefits, as a supermarket produce buyer but feels insecure about the future. If you make it to the end of the article, you discover that Blevins, who got C's and D's when he attended college and disliked class, has decided to go back to school and pursue a new career. And what might that career be?
In the weeks afterward, his daydreaming about college and his conversations about it with his sister Leanna turned into serious research. He requested his transcripts from Radford and from Virginia Highlands Community College and figured out that he had about a year's worth of credits. He also talked to Leanna about how he could become an elementary school teacher. [Emphasis added.--vp] He always felt that he could relate to children, he said. The job would take up 180 days, not 280. Teachers do not usually get laid off or lose their pensions or have to take a big pay cut to find new work.
So the decision was made. On May 31, Andy Blevins says, he will return to Virginia Highlands, taking classes at night; the Gospel Gentlemen are no longer booking performances. After a year, he plans to take classes by video and on the Web that are offered at the community college but run by Old Dominion, a Norfolk, Va., university with a big group of working-class students.
"I don't like classes, but I've gotten so motivated to go back to school," Mr. Blevins said. "I don't want to, but, then again, I do."
Blevins sounds like a fine man, the kind of person who makes communities--and supermarkets--work. Too bad the Times won't honor him for his real accomplishments, including finding a demanding career he's good at. (Most of his buyer colleagues have college degrees.) Instead, he's portrayed as a victim and the "happy ending" is that he's going back to college so he can get a job he's totally unsuited for. A guy who hates school this much doesn't belong anywhere near a classroom, least of all in front of one.
On a related note, here's a column I wrote on why the best female students no longer become teachers. Bottom line: "In hiring teachers, we get what we pay for: average quality at average wages."