Meanwhile, Dot.con have been an interesting read. It’s an old book, no doubt. I believe reading about the Internet Bubble now seem rather weird given that it has happened a while back and don’t appear to have any immediate relation with what I’ve been working on. Still, I think that events like this have lessons to offer that are often missed out and I was looking to read something a little further back given that I’ve been updating myself with The Economist all the time. John Cassidy didn’t fail me, starting his story from the time when the technology was developing for the rise of modern Internet, describing the roles that the US military and government played in its conception, research funding and even implementation. He combines the events leading up to year 2000 with interesting comparisons of speculative manias of the past and talks about retrospective telltale signs of irrationality.
He introduced me to Charles Mackay and his writing, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I subsequently realised I had the sections of Charles Mackay’s book in my 4-inch tome, The Real Price of Everything by Michael Lewis. Those pieces have just been added into my reading queue.
Cory Johnson reveals that John Cassidy was a rare skeptical voice with regards to the Internet Boom, but failed to live up to the promise of the title of the book:
Indeed, he is unable to dismiss the most fundamental notion (a mantra among the true believers) that the Internet changes everything. Despite the stock market meltdown, almost any reading of the evolving business practice wrought by the Internet suggests that more dramatic changes are yet to come.
In a sense, the Internet is not quite exactly an illusion so to speak. But I don’t think that was what John Cassidy was driving at. His idea is that business fundamentals have been abandoned during the period and it shouldn’t have been. The numbers he cites about businesses losing money even as stock prices climb is startling. He might have been against the arguments of the New Economy though, and he could have supported his argument with the fact that falling prices (with economic expansion) isn’t entirely an internal affair of US but a result of the external forces as well.
I’ve enjoyed the little stories told by Dot.con surrounding the whole boom and crash of the Internet, especially those about individuals trapped in those industries contributing and taking part of the boom. Besides that, Dot.con serves as a good look at human behaviours during a speculative mania.
It is interesting how I have got a friend who once commented that all forms of market failure is a result of imperfect information. He says that people are consuming too much or too little of a product because they don’t have perfect information about the impact of the products, and so basically all the inability to analyse cost and benefit is a result of imperfect information. Likewise, to this friend of mine, technological advancement is basically slowly discovering information, truths that we previously know nothing of. Of course, that’s a little extreme and basically demanding perfect knowledge as well. For him, perfect knowledge would naturally be attained from having sufficient information.
The digital age ushered in lots of information; so much that we don’t have enough time to process them. In fact, even cataloguing them might be troublesome enough and the process generates meta-data, which in fact is information about information. They would prove useful though they actually add to the information heap. Say for example I give you a quote:
The setting sun, and music at the close,
As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last,
Writ in remembrance more than things long past:
If I don’t provide the source, it’s not particularly helpful unless you’re able to identify it from just the content. It’s from Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Richard the Second. But then that’s just a little bit of metadata; there’s more: it comes from Act II Scene I. And even more: it’s from Line 14-16. The ability to manipulate all these data themselves would create more information too. And they all might just prove to be way too much.
Economics have definitely become more complex thanks to the flood of information. Technology has allowed suppliers to maintain tighter inventory and reduce idle capacity but reality seem to drift further away from classical economics even as the economic agent are becoming more equipped with the information necessary to create a more perfect market. It appears, the next big assumption of Economics about the real world that needs toppling is in fact the idea of independence.
We read frequently in the news about the demise of Pax Americana or the rise of the post-American world. I am not about to discuss at length the decline of America, but I want to bring attention to what many people might have neglected as they watch America’s supposed decline: Europe’s concurrent decline. And Europe’s decline is also of its own making, though of a different nature compared to the Americans: the financial crisis and its aftermath triggered all these claims about America’s decline, but it is the EU (European Union) and the way it operates that will do Europe / the EU in as a global power.
In Time magazine this week, The Incredible Shrinking Europe discusses why EU is beginning to lose its shine as a global power of equal importance compared to America and China. The magazine recognises that it is not that Europe is becoming poorer or that the people in the EU are suffering (unlike in America right now), but rather how the EU administration does things.
I highlight some of the main problems I see with the EU.
Some problems with the EU that have affected its standing in the global arena:
1. EU is too huge. Managing 27 member nations that each want their own voice to be heard is a mess. Obviously there will be countries that dominate (large ones like France & Germany), but its actions seem to be confounded by the differences in opinion between many of the nations, which will hamper what it is trying to say and do. Germany wants to work closely with Russia but the Eastern European nations in the EU are terrified of getting closer to Russia due to fears of the Cold War / Soviet Union days. This makes EU decisions on issues regarding Russia difficult and contentious.
2. EU seeks too much consensus. It goes for the “least-bad options”, which may be useful in slowly amending the status-quo, but when it comes to crucial decisions necessary to reform, the EU might fail because it decides to go for the lowest common factor instead of what is really best even if it might hurt. The procedure and the eventual selection of the permanent President and Foreign Minister reflect this. Picking two affable and unoffending people, Belgian Prime Minister Herman van Rompuy and British Lady Catherine Asthon, may have achieved the purpose of happiness amongst all EU members, but it does not help EU if it really wants people who can “stop traffic” and portray images of leadership, decisiveness and power.
3. EU has too many underwhelming leaders. With regard to too many, it now has 4 leadership axes that will potentially create much conflict. There’s a permanent EU Council President and EU Foreign Minister, on top of the original leaders: the rotating presidency (amongst the EU nations) as well each country’s heads of government / state. This is a “complex mechanism” that makes it difficult for constructive work. It could encourage turf wars as well as make it difficult to show solidarity. Who is American President Obama supposed to call when he needs help from the EU? Chances are, he will probably end up calling French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown or / and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, because he will directly enlist their help rather than go through the EU before reaching these leaders who make the decisions. Especially given current conditions, chances are he’ll skip calling Europe and go straight to other nations (that are, not coincidentally, emerging powers) like China, as evident following the Copenhagen climate summit where EU was almost totally sidelined despite having hosted the key summit in Copenhagen, Denmark.
4. EU is not as democratic as it claims to be. The way the Lisbon treaty was rammed down the throats of governments was evidence of how the EU parliamentarians and decision-makers just wanted to get things done without getting sufficient support from the people for their actions. The French and Dutch in 2005 first rejected amendments to the European Constitution. Then with the Lisbon treaty, making Ireland go through another referendum to force it to ratify the treaty (making little and unexplained amendments in the treaty along the way) does indicate of some undemocratic tendencies.
The United Nations (UN), with close to 200 members, has even more members, but while the UN may often be described as inefficient, it is still serving a huge purpose as a gathering of world governments that can act together in times of crises. At very least, it still has the symbolism and serves a purpose in its existence. While the EU has created much benefit for the member nations, it often seems to undermine or contradict local government decisions, probably because there is an isolated European Parliament that is rather insular to the real, on-the-ground views of the EU citizens.
In addition to this article in Time magazine, Time magazine interviewed EU Foreign Minister Lady Catherine Ashton for her views about EU. She does a good job with the publicity, but we will wait and see how she manages to get her job done given the difficult conditions she’s been placed in.
In my opinion, the EU has a lot of potential to create a balance of powers between America and the East / ascending developing nations such as China, India & Brazil. Indeed if we talk about the decline of Pax Americana, Europe should by right be part of the decline as well because it is after all closely allied with America and part of the West that is seeing stagnation / decline in political and socioeconomic spheres in the global domain. The EU can still serve as a role model in terms of an economic model that generally promotes cooperation and creates wealth for its denizens (but less so after the Greek debt crisis) as well as a relatively peace-loving actor on the global stage that can serve as a reminder for cooler heads to prevail in dealing with touchy issues like Iran and North Korea.
It has been a long time since I wrote something about handling school work and such. I’ve been working on a couple of articles for some external parties and doing quite a lot of research and writing. The experience can be frustrating and tiring as I plow through loads of data, informative material and readings and then get lost in bits of thoughts here and there, never settling down to write. Such is research, you ask a few simple questions that you expect could be answered with a sentence or two but end up having loads of related answers and information that leads you to the fact that answers you’re looking for is way more complex. Then you realise you have got to put together evidence for each of your claims and explanations. People were asking me how I manage all that stuff, I told them that you’ve got to work out a plan somehow.
So in this article, I’d be discussing my method of planning writing and research. It’s by no means a definitive answer to managing your research or school projects but it might be an option you’d like to choose. I’m writing very generally about the kind of information research that leads to writing a paper/article; the sort that doesn’t require you to don on a lab coat and hold up test-tubes.
Ultimate Tool
I recommend that before you start using Google, lay out some fundamental questions your paper/article would answer or specific information it will provide. It can be as general as an overview to a topic, or as specific as the number of petrol kiosk in a particular town. After listing them out, mark out the more specific questions and then hunt for the data first. These are usually the data sets you are going to use to introduce a particular claim or to support your theories. If there’s no such data available then you can find other proxy indicators or try and switch the type of evidence. It is important that you start off checking for the availability of the data you need or whatever you’re going to write would be groundless anyways.
After gathering the data you need, hunt for general articles on the topic that you are working on. These are the articles that refer to other more specific sources for information, or sites like Answers.com and Wikipedia. They serve as a directory for the topic and also to alert you or anything about the issue/topic that you might have overlooked. Often, these can also be blog entries that link up articles of related topic, much like the ones on ERPZ. When you’re clear you have a general idea of the topic and know briefly the issues involved, start planning your writing, listing the arguments, the progression of arguments and the sequence you present information to make your case. Often, some information you will need to provide are things you are not necessarily aware of, perhaps the revenue of a particular firm, the market share in an industry, or the response of a CEO to a recent affair. These are the stuff you didn’t initially set out to include but subsequently find rather significant.
Armed with the plan, start searching specifically for the information you need and formulate/sharpen your arguments according to these information. Unknowingly, you have actually slashed down the amount of content that you’ve read. By using general articles as signposts for your planning, you have drawn up the parameters of your research, something difficult when you’ve not read up anything or done any research. This explains the preliminary research into key and essential data you need as well as the general articles to get you started. The rest of your writing would build around these anchors that you’ve found in the beginning.
Then, follow through your plan as you write. This works for any volume of research, those that takes days to weeks and possibly months. For the ones where data sets have to be built from scratch either through ripping apart official statistics or carrying out your own surveys, the process would be placed between preliminary research and the ultimate planning. So happy searching and re-searching!
Imagine you need a square meter of light, perhaps for a single ’tile’ on the ceiling that emits lights at your building. You’d probably get contractors to make a box with circuits inside that connects to a couple of fluorescent tubes (or if you’re quite rich, a couple of LEDs) and then cover the thing with a translucent white piece of acrylic. The entire structure is bulky and probably quite energy consuming. Now, scientists have found a way to make a ‘sheet’ of LED that would allow you to make that ‘lighted tile’ much more easily and is also much more compact. Essentially, the technology allows you to print a circuit that is wired in a way that acts as a diode, and one that emits light.
And since we’re at the issue of printing stuff; we mentioned previously about industrial prototyping machines that churns out 3D structures/models. I was quite intrigued by the idea of being able to print out a peg for your clothes or even design a shoe that fits you perfectly. But perhaps even more amazing would be the ability to print out cells, tissues and even organs as reported by The Economist.
The article mentioned about growing organs from scratch and raised the example of bladders being grown from original cells of patients. Essentially the patients are donating organs to themselves; the same applies for the printing of organs. The idea is appealing because there’s nothing artificial about them beside the involvement of doctors in the process of growing the cells and putting them together – ultimately the organ is still organic and from the patients. Perhaps then, Iran’s model for kidney donation won’t be so appealing anymore.
If you watched The Story of Stuff, which I introduced to this site several weeks back, it introduces several ideas that are perhaps unfamiliar to most laymen or locals for the matter. One such idea is planned obsolescence. Planned obsolescence can be defined as “the process of a product becoming obsolete and/or non-functional after a certain period or amount of use in a way that is planned or designed by the manufacturer”. In other words, when product engineers design your product, they purposely design it such that it will physically or psychologically become obsolete (i.e. useless) after a while.
This sounds like a very disturbing idea, but it makes sense to the producer of the good for the consumer to keep purchasing “updated and improved” goods from them as their old ones break down. Planned obsolescence may even be described as an art; it would take much ingenuity, in fact, to design a product such that it does not break down too obviously as a result of inferior quality but consumers still want to buy this product and its future “upgrades”.
If you wonder how planned obsolescence affects us, this article from The Daily Green is useful in highlighting some occurrences of planned obsolescence in products we use in our daily lives. So have you unintentionally succumbed to this phenomena?
Just recently, The Economist was tabulating the impacts of social networks and featured significant discussion on their impact on the business. The Big Money has a list of top 50 brand names (they call them ‘companies’) that has been doing well on Facebook as a social media vehicle for their brands. It appears that Facebook have become some sort of brand management tool that is carefully balanced with fans/consumer followings and interactions. As applications proliferate on these social networking platforms, there is a risk that all these commercial stuff are crowding out the actual social messages that are being sent over it. While
Just when people are lambasting financial institutions and entities like hedge funds, Jed Emerson who coined the concept of ‘Blended Value‘, suggests that these financial entities can play a positive social role. Fast Company had an interview with him about this in 60 seconds.
As reported on Economist Online, Jed thinks that hedge funds which focuses on fundamentals mirrors sustainably investing, meaning that they would act to move capital to places where they are used properly and for good of the society.
Trading according to rigorous fundamental research can often mirror sustainable investing, which seeks to profit by taking into account social and environmental factors, he says. Fundamental hedge funds are far more likely than other investors to try to identify a firm’s off-balance-sheet exposures, of which a growing proportion may be “environmental or social liabilities present in a market or company but not explicitly accounted for in traditional numeric valuation or mainstream investor analysis”.
He makes an important point about ‘Shorting’, which The Economist goes on to discuss. As a matter of fact, the market is kind of biased towards growth and that should be the case since the economy is usually growing but then if people are not rational enough to sell, then there has to be short-sellers who are rational enough to sell but don’t have the shares in the first place. This way, buying and selling would reflect a more fundamental value. This is of course, an ideal – prices hardly reflect any reality in moments. But at least we know that the bulls and the bears are almost right the same number of times (half of the time each; which reflects dynamism of the market). And so there’s no way we should have anything against them.
Economics have been a subject troubled with the idea of scarcity and thinking about means of distributing resources to produce what we call ‘wealth’. Scarcity is a clear-cut notion and ‘abundance’ represents the other end of the spectrum. The problem is that we are so familiar with scarcity we cannot be quite sure what really represents abundance (infinite, in short run or long run?) and thus, we actually have a problem quantifying wealth. What constitutes richness? Money? Gold? Having the most expensive resources? Having in abundance the most useful resource? Having the most diverse resources? Having human capital?
We’ve seen that most of the rich, developed world appears to be the same, with the similar institutions, rule of law and informal market rules; most of them produce certain complex niche products while importing a variety of inputs as well as many other consumer products. On the other hand, developing economies appears more diverse. This shows that the end state of riches can probably be attained through different pathways. The Economists’ latest Economic Focus discuss how recent research shows that sophistication in the economy signals at the potential of an economy.
The Product Space map that the researchers came up with shows that an economy producing at a more centrally located product zone where it is easy to diversify into many other products would fare better than one in an isolated region. However, the isolated products often yield greater profits because they are probably rarer and so competition amongst economies leads to evolutionary forces pushing certain economies into these corners of product space possibly at the expense of potential. In any case, versatility is treasured and flexibility in production will aid economic growth.
I stumbled upon Tineye, a ‘reverse image search engine’. It basically allows you to upload an image and then perform a search for pictures that are similar to the image. This is the beginning of answering a question my friend have posted me a couple of years back when he asked if the Internet can help us find out the name of a person from a photo of him/her. Alternatively, if you have a picture of a place, you might want to upload the image to search for where exactly it is. Alas, Tineye is not yet capable of all that, to quote from the Wiki article:
A user uploads an image to the Web application search engine or provides a URL for an image (or for a page containing the image). The search engine will look up other usage of the image in the internet including their time of appearance and including modified images based upon that image. Tineye does not recognise objects or persons in an image, it recognises the entire image, and some altered versions of that image. This includes differently sized versions of the image.
The search engine is provided by Idée, Inc., a Canadian firm that also produces other image-matching technology products, like PixID. A demonstration of the power of this product is shown in this video that follows:
It purportedly helps client tracks usage of their photographs or images online and print publications to manage image license and also to ‘uncover unauthorized image usage’, and it kind of reminds me how it makes patent trolls’ job easier, reflecting a worsened state of gridlock. In other words, while the software may help to raise the opportunity for transactions and thus contribute value to creators, it might potentially discourage mashups in the area of graphic designs. Of course, it has a potential for good as well; scanning through a film can help the production crew find out whether they have obtained permission for all the images or clips used and would thus know what to filter out if they are unable to identify the owners.
The potential of such technology always works both ways and eventually it will be up to Economics to resolve the issues.
