Friday's material:
An intersection of brainpower and business: Silicon Valley.
* Larry page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google.
* Google, the corporation.
* Stanford University, the brain incubator.
* California, state of Hollywood & Barbie, also is the home to Apple, Intel, H-P and many other innovators.
See wikipedia.org: The Information Age.
Thursday, August 10, 2006
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
中国 Map: China's Income Disparity / first class day notes
Ni Hau!
That's the Mandarin Chinese phrase that means "Hello." It's the most oft-uttered Hello on the globe.
World population: 6.5 billion plus (estimates vary), acc to Census.gov
US pop: 296 million, acc to prb.org
Chinese population: 1.3 billion, acc to cia.gov
How do the Chinese and Americans intersect at the gasoline pump? Growing Chinese demand for gasoline (more autos being sold in China than ever due to a rapidly growing economy) is one of the several factors that affect petroleum costs.
Demographics: the study of populations of people. Greek: demos: people, and graphy: writing. Examples of usage in demography: ethnicity, gender, age.
example: middle schools represented by students in my classes (nearly all first-years):
St Marks 1
Turner 1
Ridgewood 6
Caddo Career & Technical Middle (formerly Hollywood) 3
First Baptist 5
Southfield 11
Caddo Middle Magnet 61
Youree 16
Walnut Hill 6
Keithville 4
Bickham 2
Herndon 9
Broadmoor 5
Other high school transfers 5
Interpreting the numbers is the key to being an effective thinker. Some 60% of my students come from 13 middle schools. They all need new friends. Therefore the tone of CMHS is that the majority of students in your classes are building a new network of friends. That factor makes Magnet friendly and open.
Just In Time retailing: retailers can compete more effectively when they carry a small inventory. To offset the down side of limited quantity, they must re-order quickly to keep customer satisfaction. Example: Barnes & Noble will not have 300 copies of the RMQRWA. They will restock quickly when they run out, however.
Princicpal themes of our class: questioning and communication.
Recommended resources:
Jumpcut.com: explore this for video storage and editing.
Coming Friday, Aug 18, 1:30 - 2:15: Brown Bag Lunches in C4. Parents who'd like to meet with me in the classroom to get acquainted, please consider visiting me at school. Email me if you want to visit; that's trudeau@earthlink.net
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Welcome to Geography / Trudeau at CMHS; here are the basics . . .
Robert Trudeau / CMHS / mondotrudeau.blogspot.com
The chief academic skill areas and the evaluations thereupon in Robert Trudeau’s geography classes:
a) Comparison essays. See the blue Guidelines handout. Carefully follow the guidelines. Late work will earn a 20 % penalty.
b) Projects that demonstrate research, clear communication and colorful imagination.
c) Multiple-choice tests that are based on class notes and the web site material.
d) Map quizzes. Misspellings lose a half point. Those with weak spelling skills will enjoy our in-class mnemonic building.
e) Build your point total by taking on independent assignments. The best way to earn these bonus points is by writing comparison essays.
You may also earn points through other projects. Ex: serve appropriate ethnic dishes - accompanied by an essay - for points. Please check with me before you begin any special project.
Materials
1) Purchase a copy of the Rand McNally Quick Reference World Atlas (about $6.00) from any bookstore. Call the store to check on availability of the RMQRWA before you go. Please do NOT substitute. I require that you have this book in class every day. It will not cost you more to order it from Amazon.com, btw.
2) Notebook: please use one with perforated page edges - so that papers handed to me will have a smooth edge. Additionally, make sure you can safely and neatly keep your handouts. Everyday there will be questions, notes and sketches to record. Handouts are presented on a regular basis. They must be kept at the ready for use any day.
4) Map pencils (or crayons, pastel markers, or watercolors) & scissors. To me these are very important items. Art projects make a vivid learning experience and enliven a class.
Mondotrudeau.blogspot.com
* Visit this class site every Sunday after noon to view and plan the next week's activities and requirements. Parents and students should then create a coordinated agenda for the week.
* Access this site by using computers in your school library or neighborhood library if you have problems with your computer, modem or ISP.
* Email me with any and all questions, complaints (remember to be diplomatic) and compliments. I'm an email-oriented person; I check it often and send out several messages each day.
trudeau@earthlink.net
Additionally, you may phone me at home: 861-6809. Students and parents are my priority.
Parents may also call cmhs, 221-2501, and leave a message for me.
Classroom guidelines ~
* When the bell rings I expect you to immediately open your notebook (without my reminder!) and attack the material which you'll find on the board. Frequently CMHS bells do not ring. You'll be expected to go to your tasks at the appropriate time regardless of the bell. Get your money's worth from Magnet!
* Water and water bottles are no problem. If there is a sort-of emergency, you may have a snack. Handle it super-quietly and realize that it will be a rare moment. If you must chew gum, please do so inconspicuously. Before addressing the class always expel gum ("Expeliarmus!"), please.
* Bring all necessary materials to class Each day:
* RMQRWA (Rand McNally Quick Reference World Atlas)
* notebook * handouts * pens * colors * scissors.
* Following directions efficiently is one of your biggest challenges. You must take responsibility for knowing the guidelines.
* Warmth! Generosity! Hugs!
** Our golden words are "please," "thank you," "pardon me," and "Is it possible that ...?"
* Dress smartly. I believe that you can help yourself get more out of class if you don a sort of student/business attire. This is, after all, your job for the next four years. High school is a job and it pays off with scholarships and competence in college.
* Compliment your fellow students (and teachers) every day.
Comparison essays
1) Snappy title and explanatory subtitle (2 points)
Because we live in a world described as an Information Blizzard, it is important to bring attention to your work through catchy titles. Techniques for writing snappy titles: alliteration, tweaking a pop song or movie title, brief quote, fresh phrases.
2) Colorful opening (5 pts.)
Use a quote, a question or a brief description to open your essay. Banish boring writing! Follow examples you'll see in magazines such as Time and Newsweek.
3) Informal documentation (3 pts.)
Example: use "..., according to Encarta Online." Give your primary source this way. Please do not add the attribution at the end of the paper. Drop in your first "..., according to..." at the end of the first paragraph.
4) Use examples to back up each general point that you offer.
Example: China has a communist, authoritarian government. Their most famous totalitarian edict has been "One family, one child."
Your points will be earned by the use of a generality combined with an example. (5 pts.)
5) In a comparison essay, you must blend Both topics in
Each paragraph.
You may not simply devote paragraph one to one topic,
para. two to the other topic, and briefly blend them in para. three.
A simple formula: para. one for colorful description,
para. two for similarities, para. three for differences. (5 pts.)
6) Save all papers on your computer hard drive,
compact disk or flash drive. Save all work until semester's
end. Growth in the skill of record keeping is a goal of social
studies class.
Geography / Trudeau / CMHS
Classroom guidelines ~
* When the bell rings I expect you to immediately open your notebook (without my reminder!) and attack the material which you'll find on the board. Frequently CMHS bells do not ring. You'll be expected to go to your tasks at the appropriate time regardless of the bell. Get your money's worth from Magnet!
* Water and water bottles are no problem. If there is a sort-of emergency, you may have a snack. Handle it super-quietly and realize that it will be a rare moment. If you must chew gum, please do so inconspicuously. Before addressing the class always expel gum ("Expeliarmus!"), please.
* Bring all necessary materials to class Each day:
* RMQRWA (Rand McNally Quick Reference World Atlas)
* notebook * handouts * pens * colors * scissors.
* Following directions efficiently is one of your biggest challenges. You must take responsibility for knowing the guidelines.
* Warmth! Generosity! Hugs!
** Our golden words are "please," "thank you," "pardon me," and "Is it possible that ...?"
* Dress smartly. I believe that you can help yourself get more out of class if you don a sort of student/business attire. This is, after all, your job for the next four years. High school is a job and it pays off with scholarships and competence in college.
* Compliment your fellow students (and teachers) every day.
Comparison essays
1) Snappy title and explanatory subtitle (2 points)
Because we live in a world described as an Information Blizzard, it is important to bring attention to your work through catchy titles. Techniques for writing snappy titles: alliteration, tweaking a pop song or movie title, brief quote, fresh phrases.
2) Colorful opening (5 pts.)
Use a quote, a question or a brief description to open your essay. Banish boring writing! Follow examples you'll see in magazines such as Time and Newsweek.
3) Informal documentation (3 pts.)
Example: use "..., according to Encarta Online." Give your primary source this way. Please do not add the attribution at the end of the paper. Drop in your first "..., according to..." at the end of the first paragraph.
4) Use examples to back up each general point that you offer.
Example: China has a communist, authoritarian government. Their most famous totalitarian edict has been "One family, one child."
Your points will be earned by the use of a generality combined with an example. (5 pts.)
5) In a comparison essay, you must blend Both topics in
Each paragraph.
You may not simply devote paragraph one to one topic,
para. two to the other topic, and briefly blend them in para. three.
A simple formula: para. one for colorful description,
para. two for similarities, para. three for differences. (5 pts.)
6) Save all papers on your computer hard drive,
compact disk or flash drive. Save all work until semester's
end. Growth in the skill of record keeping is a goal of social
studies class.
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
WalMart's adventures and misadventures in international expansion / NY Times story
August 2, 2006
Wal-Mart Finds That Its Formula Doesn’t Fit Every Culture
By MARK LANDLER and MICHAEL BARBARO / NY Times
WIESBADEN, Germany, July 31 — Three days after Wal-Mart Stores announced that it would pull out of Germany, Roland Kögel was wandering through the aisles of a somewhat threadbare Wal-Mart in a strip mall in this western German city.
“Why are they giving up now?” he asked. “They have good prices and a good variety of products.”
Yet Mr. Kögel, 54, confessed that he never bought groceries at Wal-Mart. Food is cheaper at German discount chains. He also does not visit this store often, because it is on the edge of town and he does not own a car. His one purchase for the day was tucked under his arm: a neck pillow.
Shoppers like Roland Kögel help explain why Wal-Mart raised the white flag in Germany, the site of the company’s first foray into Europe.
After nearly a decade of trying, Wal-Mart never cracked the country — failing to become the all-in-one shopping destination for Germans that it is for so many millions of Americans. Wal-Mart’s problems are not limited to Germany. The retail giant has struggled in countries like South Korea and Japan as it discovered that its formula for success — low prices, zealous inventory control and a large array of merchandise — did not translate to markets with their own discount chains and shoppers with different habits.
Over all, Wal-Mart is still expanding outside the United States, particularly in markets where it entered by acquiring a strong retailer. Still, given Wal-Mart’s formidable record at home, the company’s recent setbacks have exposed a rare vulnerability overseas.
Some of Wal-Mart’s problems stem from hubris, a uniquely powerful American enterprise trying to impose its values around the world. At Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., however, the message from these missteps is now registering loud and clear.
In particular, Wal-Mart’s experience in Germany, where it lost hundreds of millions of dollars since 1998, has become a sort of template for how not to expand into a country.
“It is a good, important lesson, a turning point,” an international spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, Beth Keck, said. “Germany was a good example of that naïvete.” She added, “We literally bought the two chains and said, ‘Hey, we are in Germany, isn’t this great?’ ”
Among other things, she said, Wal-Mart now cares less whether its foreign stores carry the name derived from its founder, Sam Walton, as the German Wal-Marts do. Seventy percent of Wal-Mart’s international sales come from outlets with names like Asda in Britain, Seiyu in Japan or Bompreço in Brazil.
Wal-Mart is also trying to integrate acquisitions with more sensitivity — a process that involves issues like deciding whether to consolidate multiple foreign headquarters and how aggressively to impose Wal-Mart’s corporate culture on non-American employees.
In Germany, Wal-Mart stopped requiring sales clerks to smile at customers — a practice that some male shoppers interpreted as flirting — and scrapped the morning Wal-Mart chant by staff members.
“People found these things strange; Germans just don’t behave that way,” said Hans-Martin Poschmann, the secretary of the Verdi union, which represents 5,000 Wal-Mart employees here.
Wal-Mart’s changes came too late for Germany, but they could help it crack other markets, like China, where it already has 60 stores and 30,000 employees. Far from being chastened by its setbacks, Wal-Mart is forging ahead with an aggressive program of foreign acquisitions.
In a single week last fall, Wal-Mart completed the purchase of the Sonae chain in Brazil, bought a controlling stake in Seiyu of Japan, and became a partner in the Carcho chain in Central America. The deals added 545 stores and 50,000 employees to Wal-Mart’s overseas empire.
“I’m hard pressed to name a U.S.-based general merchandise retailer that is doing better than Wal-Mart International,” said Bill Dreher, who follows Wal-Mart for Deutsche Bank in New York.
Starting from scratch 14 years ago, Wal-Mart International has grown into a $63 billion business. It is the fastest-growing part of Wal-Mart, with nearly 30 percent sales growth in June, compared with the same month last year. Even subtracting one-time gains from acquisitions, it grew at nearly 12 percent, about double the rate of Wal-Mart’s American stores.
Sustaining that pace is critical for Wal-Mart, because high fuel prices have helped sap the buying power of Americans. In June, store traffic in its home market declined. Wal-Mart estimated that its sales in the United States in stores open at least one year would increase only 1 percent to 3 percent in July.
Wal-Mart Germany, with 85 stores and $2.5 billion in sales, is almost a footnote for a company focused on Asia and Latin America. But the problems it encountered here have echoes elsewhere. For example, it never established comfortable relations with its German labor unions.
“They didn’t understand that in Germany, companies and unions are closely connected,” Mr. Poschmann said. “Bentonville didn’t want to have anything to do with unions. They thought we were communists.”
Ms. Keck said Wal-Mart did cultivate good relations with the leaders of the works’ council, which represents the unionized work force, and changed policies in response to employee concerns.
Wal-Mart will soon get another chance to deal with organized labor, albeit of a less independent sort. In China, the state-controlled All-China Federation of Trade Unions is organizing workers in Wal-Mart’s stores.
Germany also provides a lesson in the perils of buying existing chains. Wal-Mart’s purchase of Wertkauf and Interspar saddled it with stores in undesirable locations. The Wiesbaden outlet is worlds away from a squeaky-clean American Wal-Mart: nearby are a couple of sex shops.
“These were some of the least attractive of the big-box retailers out there,” said James Bacos, director of the retail and consumer goods practice at Mercer Management Consulting in Munich.
Compounding the problem, Wal-Mart shut down the headquarters of one of the chains, infuriating employees who opted to quit rather than move. Such a decision would have been routine in the United States, where Ms. Keck said, “moving is a big part of the Wal-Mart culture.” In Germany, she said, it prompted an exodus of talented executives.
In South Korea, Wal-Mart had only 16 stores — a small presence that contributed to its decision in May to sell out to a Korean discount chain. Many Koreans have never heard of Wal-Mart. In Seoul, a sprawling area of 10 million, there is only a single store.
This lack of scale causes another problem that has afflicted Wal-Mart in several countries: its inability to compete with established discounters, like the Aldi chain in Germany and E-Mart in Korea.
The obvious lesson is to try to bulk up. In Brazil, Wal-Mart opened only 25 stores in its first decade there and struggled to compete against bigger local rivals. Then, in 2004, it bought Bompreço, giving it a presence in the country’s poor, but fast-growing, northeast.
Wal-Mart did not change the names of the stores, which range from neighborhood grocers to large American-style hypermarkets. But with 295 stores in Brazil, Wal-Mart now ranks third in the market, after Carrefour of France and the market leader, Companhia Brasileira de Distribução.
Size has given Wal-Mart increased leverage with suppliers there, though analysts say the company needs even more stores to be in a position to undercut local discounters on the prices it offers customers.
At a Wal-Mart store in suburban Rio de Janeiro the other day, Ana Paula Cunha de Almeida, a 26-year-old housewife, had loaded her shopping cart with rice, beans and flour. But she was also carrying a bag from a smaller grocery store, where she had bought meat, cheese and cold cuts.
“These are always cheaper somewhere else,” she said.
The grocery business has proven the most difficult for Wal-Mart to crack. Aldi, with 4,100 stores in Germany, undercuts Wal-Mart on price, while still offering high-quality food.
Even in Canada, where Wal-Mart steamrolled local department store chains when it entered the country as a nonfood retailer in 1994, the grocery trade looms as a challenge. Wal-Mart recently announced plans to build supercenters that will also sell groceries. But analysts predicted Wal-Mart would face stiff competition from Canada’s largest chain, Loblaw.
Bernie Skelding, a vacationer shopping at a Wal-Mart in Huntsville, Ontario, north of Toronto, said he liked going to the store when he had a varied shopping list. But he added, “If I’m looking for food, I go to Loblaw’s.”
Wal-Mart’s most successful markets, like Mexico, are those in which it started big. There, the company bought the country’s largest and best-run retail chain, Cifra, and has never looked back. This year, Wal-Mart is spending more than $1 billion in Mexico to open 120 new stores.
Taking over Cifra “gave them a critical mass to build from,” said Tufic Salem, an analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston in Mexico City. “The management stayed, and they knew the market very well.”
Perhaps the most striking example of a Wal-Mart success is Asda, which was Britain’s No. 1 discount chain when Wal-Mart acquired it in 1999. With sales of $26.8 billion, Asda now accounts for 43 percent of Wal-Mart’s international revenue.
Wal-Mart’s German experience also taught it to use local management. The company initially installed American executives, who had little feel for what German consumers wanted.
“They tried to sell packaged meat when Germans like to buy meat from the butcher,” Mr. Poschmann said.
Some of Wal-Mart’s missteps — selling golf clubs in Brazil, where the game is unfamiliar, or ice skates in Mexico — are so frequently mentioned, they have become the stuff of urban legend. But even more subtle differences in shopping habits have tripped up the company.
In Korea, Wal-Mart’s stores originally had taller racks than those of local rivals, forcing shoppers to use ladders or stretch for items on high shelves. Wal-Mart’s utilitarian design — ceilings with exposed pipes — put off shoppers used to the decorated ceilings in E-Mart stores.
Beyond the ambience, Wal-Mart’s shoes-to-sausage product line does not suit the shopping habits of many non-American shoppers. They prefer daily outings to a variety of local stores that specialize in groceries, drugs or household goods, rather than shopping once a week at Wal-Mart.
“They have stacks of goods in boxes,” said Lee Jin Sook, 46, a housewife sitting on a subway in Seoul. “That may be good for some American housewives who drive out in their own cars.” But Koreans, she said, prefer smaller packages: “Why would you buy a box of shampoo bottles?”
“I heard Wal-Mart later tried to change their style,” Ms. Lee added, “but I guess it was too late.”
Mark Landler reported from Wiesbaden, Germany, for this article, and Michael Barbaro from Portland, Ore. Reporting was contributed by Choe Sang-Hun from Seoul, South Korea;Heather Timmons from London; Elisabeth Malkin from Mexico City; Ian Austen from Huntsville, Ontario; and Paulo Prada from Rio de Janeiro.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Recharging America: think globally, think kindly, think outside the schoolroom / Newsweek
15 Ideas to Recharge America
How to keep pace in changing times.
Newsweek
June 12, 2006 issue - Can the United States remain competitive in the changing global environment? NEWSWEEK asked 15 leaders in the fields of science, technology, education and business to assess the challenges we face and to offer some solutions.
Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists from Silicon Valley addressed the issue of how immigration policies help—and hurt—our competitiveness; educators from the East spoke of the need to beef up basic skills like math and science in our schools, and to re-create the scope of investment in university research that triggered the technology boom after World War II.
Should the Internet remain "free"? Has the erosion of core values—like the rewards of hard work and the postponement of short-term gratification in favor of long-term gains—weakened our future? Should we be frightened by the explosive growth of countries such as China and India, or see it as an opportunity to expand our own horizons?
Some voiced frustration at the federal government, while others pointed fingers at big business. But all agreed there is a lot of work to be done. Excerpts:
REED HASTINGS
CEO, NETFLIX
We Need to Fix Our Schools
The key to long-term success is to cut down government regulation.
We have declared three big crises in education over the last 60 years. One was after the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957. We thought that we might lose the cold war, and we blamed our public schools for not producing enough scientists. The second declared crisis was in 1983, with the publishing of "A Nation at Risk," when we were worried about losing the economic battle against Germany and Japan. And now in the last five years, with the rise of job outsourcing and globalization, education is again perceived as being in crisis. In other words, we project our current fear on the public-school system.
Sure, there are major problems in education. But they are not new. K-12 education is the last big government monopoly in America. School boards struggle with growing state and federal regulation. When a government monopoly is underperforming, politicians just add more state and federal rules, which only makes the monopoly less performance-focused.
The solution is to free our school districts, and to make it easier for educators to form more charter public schools to provide healthy competition and increased innovation. When we have monopolies, we need plentiful regulation. But if we embrace charter schools as competition, we can eliminate most of the government regulations that are strangling school districts today.
SUSAN HOCKFIELD
PRESIDENT, MIT
Spend More on Research
Half of our growth since World War II is thanks to technology.
The 21st-century economy is fueled by competition that is innovation-based rather than resource-based. Keeping our innovation system strong will be key to the United States' remaining competitive. To do that, we must invest in talent and research. First, that means investing in education—especially core science, math and engineering. Second, we must invest in university research. After World War II the U.S. government pioneered such investments in order to capture, in peacetime, the technological gains that had been made while the nation was at war. This led to astonishingly productive growth in research and industry. By the mid-1960s the United States was investing, in terms of federal dollars, about 2 percent of GDP in research. This year, it's about 0.8 percent. Today other countries are ramping up their investments in research. Robert Solow, an MIT faculty member and Nobel laureate in economics, did a study that estimated that 50 percent of this nation's economic growth since World War II can be attributed directly to technology. That's a big fraction. We shouldn't back off investments that fuel that kind of economic growth.
ESTHER DYSON
EDITOR OF RELEASE 1.0
Change the Culture
It's time to emphasize creativity in technology and science.
We don't revere scientists and engineers anymore. We revere movie stars. We're at the point of too much tolerance of laziness and bad behavior. It's not that we should all be uptight, but let's acknowledge that it's a good thing to be studious, to be hardworking. We need to celebrate and encourage creativity that's not just artistic but also functional.
Politicians and the media pander. They rarely inspire or challenge, and we need people to start feeling the satisfaction of rising to a challenge, rather than being given self-esteem because they tried. Yes, it's good to try, and failure is not dishonorable. But actually achieving something is worth celebrating.
One model to accomplish this is organizing competitions, like the X Prize for private spaceflight, or the FIRST competition, sponsored by inventor Dean Kamen, where high schoolers compete to make the best robots. The goal is to help change our culture by celebrating people who are creative technically. When I say creative, you think about artists and dancers and musicians, but you can be very creative in designing things that work. There is an art to technology that I think is under-revered, in part because of the image of the wonky scientist. It's an unfortunate caricature, because as our economy develops, it's the ability to innovate and be creative and build new things that will help us compete.
TIM DRAPER
FOUNDER, DRAPER FISHER JURVETSON
View Rivals as Partners
Competitors can present opportunities rather than threats.
It's pretty clear to me that in somewhere between 10 and 20 years, the Chinese economy will eclipse that of the United States, and it will go even faster if our currencies come into balance. Historically, when one country passed another, the result was war. Now we are so interconnected with China and Europe and India and all different parts of the world that the idea of attacking someone is like attacking yourself. I think we have a fabulous opportunity to recognize that we are, in fact, helping each other. We should view the Chinese as business partners. Every country benefits from the strength of the others. If Mexico were a much, much stronger country both economically and politically, crossing the border would go both ways and no one would think about putting up a bunch of walls. We need to recognize that geographic barriers are crumbling and people are going to be more mobile, so geographic boundaries are less important. Businesses are going to be global. That will force governments to compete. They will have to adopt policies that attract capital and great minds to their countries. That will force them all to become better and more efficient. If people like the Chinese government more, they'll move to China. If they like the U.S. government more, they'll come here.
MARK WARNER
FORMER GOVERNOR OF VIRGINIA
Look Beyond Political Labels
We have to draw on ideas all across the spectrum.
We live in a world moving at Internet speed, where India and China aren't playing for second place. Confronting this challenge will require a national competitiveness strategy that connects the dots between education, our human capital, our intellectual capital, our inadequate infrastructure, the world's most expensive health-care system, fair-trade policies, the fiscal meltdown in Washington and an energy strategy that decreases our reliance on foreign oil, addresses global warming and increases American jobs.
A comprehensive approach requires the real engagement of government, the business world and educators. And a recognition that the change needed in many areas will be transformational—not incremental.
Fundamental to this challenge will be the requirement that America produces the most educated, innovative and entrepreneurial work force in the world.
This strategy must also allow America (which has fallen to 16th in the world in broadband deployment) to have a 21st-century infrastructure, so we don't leave behind wide swaths of our country, particularly our rural communities.
To get this right, we're going to have to draw on ideas all across the spectrum—and not worry about whether they come with party labels or D's and R's attached. These challenges demand that we move beyond left versus right and liberal versus conservative. It's got to be future versus past.
PAUL SAFFO
DIRECTOR, INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE
Focus on the New Age of Creators
Web sites like Flickr and Second Life depend on their users for content.
We are entering an age in which the most important economic actors are neither producers nor consumers, but creators. Blogs are the most obvious indicator of this creator trend, but other examples proliferate. Selling on eBay is creation, loading photos on Flickr or videos on YouTube is creation, as is adding an entry to Wikipedia. Or consider the massively popular online environment Second Life, where members can hang out, socialize, buy and sell things, and also create their own virtual spaces.
Just as the time clock symbolized the worker-centric economy and the credit card represented consumers, the computer mouse is the symbol of the new creators. Personal media are very different from television, with its one-way message: shut up, watch and then go buy what you see. On the Web one must always be clicking, selecting and browsing. Personal media don't just allow two-way interaction—they demand it, and this is the cornerstone of the new age of the creator. This is truly a revolution without bystanders.
RODNEY BROOKS
DIRECTOR, MIT COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LABORATORY
Bring Back Those Offshore Jobs
We need to increase our factory workers' productivity.
It's impossible these days to not think globally. If you're a high-tech company, your market is the world, and you have to think about it as soon as you start writing a business plan. Even companies with one or two people on staff are now turning to China for quick, small-scale, custom manufacturing. In the next decade, our outsourcing is going to bolster these countries' economies—and eventually the cost of sending work there will rise. That will give us an opportunity to bring more craft-based, specialized manufacturing back to our shores. But we can't do it unless we use technology—robotics in particular—to increase our factory workers' productivity. Not just the giant robotic arms of big factories but also easy-to-program smaller robots that could help with more delicate tasks. If we stop funding the basic science that underlies this kind of innovation, it's a recipe for long-term disaster.
ROB GLASER
CEO, REAL NETWORKS
Cut Out the Bullying
Customer good will is a key aspect to building global success.
One underappreciated aspect of American competitiveness is how we are perceived in the world. Depending on the perception, it can have a real impact on Americans who are trying to do business globally. On the positive side, I still see a pretty deep reservoir of good will toward American entrepreneurship. When you meet business people in China or in Europe or in Latin America, you find that their conceptual model is the American entrepreneur. On the other hand, after the second beer they inevitably raise the question: "If America is such a great country, why is it such a polarizing force in the world?" It's a sign that geopolitical antipathy might have an impact on our economic competitiveness.
It doesn't affect us at Real Networks too much, because we're not a giant and we make popular software. But the bigger companies, the Wal-Marts, the Microsofts, have a problem when they try to do business internationally, because there's a natural fear of their size. That fear can wind up connected to the burgeoning feeling that America is politically and militarily unilateralist or a bully. I'm guessing that the greatest damage in this regard is probably in the Middle East and in the Arab world.
Smart companies can deal with this. Starbucks, which was a big target several years ago, has done a brilliant job of humanizing the actual values and ethics of the company. They partner with people like Conservation International to help the environment, they help indigenous suppliers—and they let people know about that. Customer good will is a key aspect of what causes consumers to habituate to one product or service versus another and to feel good about one brand versus another.
And, of course, it would also help if our foreign policies change and we go back to more multilateral policies.
DAVID SAMPSON
DEPUTY SECRETARY OF COMMERCE
Let's Extend the R&D Tax Cut More
Spending on R&D increases our competitiveness.
If properly nurtured, research and technology will respond to the biomedical, energy and environmental imperatives that we face in the 21st century. Not only will this solve problems and improve quality of life, but it will also bring about economic opportunities that we can barely imagine today. The goal of the president's American Competitiveness Initiative, announced in January, is to create the right conditions, the right nurturing environment, in which a new golden era of U.S. innovation can flourish.
First of all, that means making the research-and-development tax credit permanent. This credit allows businesses to deduct part of their R&D spending from their taxes—and it has expired in the past. Two thirds of R&D spending in America today takes place in the private sector—that's $200 billion each year. Private-sector companies need to have a high degree of reassurance about what the tax treatment of R&D spending is going to be.
The second component is increasing federal support for vital basic research in the core physical sciences. President George W. Bush is proposing doubling the government's commitment over the course of the next 10 years. With this increase, the federal lab that we run, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, will be focusing on three areas: nanotechnology, quantum computing and the hydrogen economy.
The third component is improving math and science education for America's students to make sure that we've got a full pipeline of kids today who are going to be the scientists, mathematicians and engineers of the future.
CRAIG NEWMARK
FOUNDER OF CRAIGSLIST
Don't Let the Big Guys Take Over
Why letting the telecoms control the Internet is a bad idea.
We need to preserve Internet neutrality, which is key to American innovation. The Net is a two-way medium of mass communication with essentially no cost of entry, making it the perfect tool for re-distributing power from a relatively small group of very powerful people to much larger groups of people with small amounts of power. Hence, more opportunity for innovation. The American people are fully capable of competing and making things happen—I've seen it at Craigslist. But now the telecoms are threatening to throttle innovation for their own profit. The folks in charge are saying, "If you want fair treatment, you have to pay to play." And the new innovators—like us, like YouTube, like Flickr—simply don't start out with that kind of cash. Meanwhile, the big guys, who may not be innovating anymore, can say, "Hey, big telecom, here's some extra money." In exchange, they get the extra privileges—and ensure that we don't get a fair shake. You can bet that a system like that will, among other things, force a lot of development offshore. It will mean that the next innovation in, say, video will happen in Bollywood instead of Hollywood. Net neutrality is the embodiment of American values: play fair, work hard and get ahead. We need to protect that vision.
FRANCINE BERMAN
DIRECTOR, SAN DIEGO SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER
Get a Handle on All That Data
We need information before we can expect innovation.
Imagine that all the records of your life—photos, diaries, tax documents—were shoved haphazardly into a pile. Now imagine that on a national scale. From presidential libraries to protein databanks, this country is being deluged with data, and it's so disorganized that we can't even access all of it, much less search it easily. It may sound geeky, but we need a national data-management plan. We have to decide what information to keep, and how. Scientists, business leaders and governments rely on this wealth of data to innovate—and students need it to learn. With better data management, we could teach our kids to think creatively about real-world problems, with real numbers, rather than teaching them how to take standardized tests by rote. That will make them better innovators in the future. We've always had top-tier brains in this country; let's give them a data-rich environment where they can flourish.
ARATI PRABHAKAR
U.S. VENTURE PARTNERS
See Immigration as a Strength
Having workers from all over the world gives us an advantage.
We don't really think in terms of geographic boundaries. At the end of the day, what's exciting for people like me is how you turn technology and ideas into value. I think it's modern alchemy. You start with smart people, an idea, some basic technology, and out of that grow companies, jobs and value for shareholders. You don't want to be in a protective crouch—you want to be out there in the world and thinking, "What are the things that are good for America?" That means being completely engaged in the flow of people, capital and goods around the world. At virtually every one of my companies, if you look around at a management or board meeting, you'll find people born in India, China, South Korea, Turkey, the United States—all over the world. The founder of one of my companies is a Korean who got his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Stanford, went to work in Japan, then home to Korea to work at Samsung, and then he started his own company. His next key executive is a Korean who got his Ph.D. at Berkeley and stayed in the United States. This is a company that is headquartered in the States, designs its chips in Korea, outsources manufacturing to Taiwan and has a sales office in Hong Kong. These people can go back to India, China and Korea and create those links to American suppliers and customers. It is such an important part of how the global economy is growing. The immigrant-rich society has a definite advantage.
PETE PETERSON
THE BLACKSTONE GROUP
Face Up to Fiscal Realities
Our current short-sighted spending habits threaten our future.
Increasing globalization of the economy brings with it ever more cries for improving U.S. competitiveness. Given the increasingly technological state of things, it is only natural that high on the competitiveness agenda is more investment in research and development, particularly at the federal level. After all, federal researchers helped make possible such breakthroughs as the Internet, microwave ovens, lasers and atomic clocks, and advances that led to Global Positioning Satellites, which guide so many cars on the road today.
But the awkward and unasked question is: where do we get the money to pay for this? Before we get too distracted by the "richest nation on earth" rhetoric, let's look at some sobering fiscal realities: federal investment in nondefense R&D is getting crowded out by the ballooning cost of health care and retirement programs. Four decades ago these R&D expenditures were nearly 6 percent of the federal budget. Today they are less than 2 percent. During that period, spending on health-care programs like Medicare and Medicaid increased by more than 12 times as a percentage of GDP, whereas non-defense R&D spending fell by 60 percent. These benefits for seniors—largely Social Security and Medicare—threaten to devour the entire federal budget. And these programs, focusing on us older fogeys, are, alas, about the past and not the future.
So let's face reality. We must get rid of our aggravated case of short-termitis, the mentality of "I want it all," "I want it now" and "I don't want to give up anything." If we don't fundamentally reform our gargantuan entitlement programs and at the same time our gluttonous energy and consumption habits and meager savings levels, we simply won't have the resources for these desperately needed R&D investments.
WENDY KOPP
PRESIDENT AND FOUNDER OF TEACH FOR AMERICA
Give All Children a Good Education
Turning out kids who can't read at a basic level holds us back.
We will maximize our contributions to the global economy if we as a nation realize our ideals. Today we are far from actually being the place of equal opportunity we aspire so admirably to be.
Half of the 13 million kids growing up in poverty in our country will not finish high school, and those who do graduate will be where eighth graders are in privileged communities. We are turning out so many kids who can't even read at a basic level, and that holds us back as much as a deficit in math and science education.
Yet in urban and rural communities across the country, we at Teach for America have seen firsthand that kids growing up in poverty excel when given the educational opportunities they deserve. This should fuel our sense of responsibility and our sense of urgency as a nation to do more to ensure that all of our nation's kids, regardless of where they are born, fulfill their true potential and have a chance at the American Dream. To me, this is a matter of fairness. But it is also the most promising strategy for unleashing the full potential of our country. Not only will we discover new human resources, but we will develop some of our most promising leaders and innovators—because kids who overcome the challenges of poverty and attain an excellent education are likely to have the grit and the leadership skills to take our society to a whole new place.
Globalization gobbles old jobs; CMHS helps you dream & create the new ones
MSNBC.com
How to Embrace Change
The new world economy is disorienting, but full of opportunities for us to seize.
By Gordon Brown
Newsweek
June 12, 2006 issue - In the last year 1 million jobs have been lost from America, Europe and Japan—and one quarter of a million service jobs gone offshore. For the first time Asia is out producing Europe. And driven not just by political uncertainty but by the rising needs of Asia, oil and commodity prices have been rising fast.
Unsurprisingly, we are seeing not just the ever-faster advance of globalization but of globalization's discontents too. Protectionist forces are on the rise again: "economic patriotism" in Europe, populism in Latin America, anti-immigrant feeling and sullen resistance to change on just about every continent. Take one example. The European single market aspires to be what it says it is—an open market with the free movement of goods, people and capital. But in the last few months, Europe has seen France seek to block Italian utility takeovers, Italy threaten Dutch banking acquisitions, Spain stall German energy bids and Poland resist Italian financial-service mergers. Today an ambitious world-trade deal seems more elusive than ever, with rich-country protectionism criticized for standing in the way of poor countries' development.
The paradox of today's globalization is that even its winners feel themselves to be losers. Globalization is cutting the price of consumer goods, from clothes to electronics—putting what were once luxury goods into the hands of millions of ordinary households. Sadly, however, the citizens of the richest countries are more likely to think of globalization as the loss of jobs offshore.
This ignores the fact that cheaper products and sometimes services from newly emerging countries create the competition that spurs us on to greater productivity and innovation. And emerging markets are, in fact, expanding markets for us just as we are for them: U.S. and European company brands are emblems all over the world, and their global penetration, as much as homegrown entrepreneurship, is the key to our future success.
Isolationism, partial retreat and protectionism—attempts to stop the clock, freeze-frame and postpone the inevitable—are self-defeating options. By attempting to shelter ourselves we will only fall behind, risk competitiveness and pay a higher price for long-run adjustment. Indeed, the success of the American economic experience teaches us that the lifeblood of a market economy is the continuous injection of new competition.
It has been the hard work and enterprise of the American people, responding to the new opportunities brought by each successive wave of global economic change, that have been the foundation of American economic progress. And it is when America has shown that same commitment to leading the opening of markets in the rest of the world, such as the dismantling of trade barriers following the second world war, that the conditions are put in place for rising growth and prosperity in the global economy to the benefit of all.
It is clear that we need a global conversation about both the risks of protectionism and the benefits of globalization. The starting point—the most powerful anti-protectionist signal we can send—is breaking the world-trade deadlock. The prize is a 50 percent increase in world trade. And the key that will unlock that door is Europe and America offering progress by reducing protectionism in agriculture, and India and Brazil being willing to respond with liberalization of services and greater market access.
A globalization that works will mean not only open markets, free trade and flexible labor conditions but higher investment in innovation and education. For Europe this also means escalating the pace of economic reform. For Britain in particular, it means an emphasis on productivity—convincing people that while we may not be able to stop them from losing the last job, we can do a great deal to help them be equipped for the next jobs. And it also means looking at new sources of jobs at home—not least from the environment. In Britain alone we believe we can create more than 100,000 jobs from energy conservation to micro generation.
If nations leave dislocated workers to feel hopeless and forgotten with only the offer of dead-end jobs, they will be increasing the chances that their citizens will fuel the fires of backlash and protectionism. But if we expand the opportunities for new skills and then new jobs, make that work pay and invest in strengthening communities, then citizens will be far more likely to see the larger benefits of globalization. Throughout industrialization, we have been right to say that if people work hard, play by the rules and acquire skills, they will do well and the next generation can aspire to do even better than the last. It is now our task to demonstrate to those who lose jobs to the global economy not only that we are on their side, but that new and good opportunities will be available.
The Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown is the United Kingdom's chancellor of the Exchequer.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13121948/site/newsweek/
© 2006 MSNBC.com
How to Embrace Change
The new world economy is disorienting, but full of opportunities for us to seize.
By Gordon Brown
Newsweek
June 12, 2006 issue - In the last year 1 million jobs have been lost from America, Europe and Japan—and one quarter of a million service jobs gone offshore. For the first time Asia is out producing Europe. And driven not just by political uncertainty but by the rising needs of Asia, oil and commodity prices have been rising fast.
Unsurprisingly, we are seeing not just the ever-faster advance of globalization but of globalization's discontents too. Protectionist forces are on the rise again: "economic patriotism" in Europe, populism in Latin America, anti-immigrant feeling and sullen resistance to change on just about every continent. Take one example. The European single market aspires to be what it says it is—an open market with the free movement of goods, people and capital. But in the last few months, Europe has seen France seek to block Italian utility takeovers, Italy threaten Dutch banking acquisitions, Spain stall German energy bids and Poland resist Italian financial-service mergers. Today an ambitious world-trade deal seems more elusive than ever, with rich-country protectionism criticized for standing in the way of poor countries' development.
The paradox of today's globalization is that even its winners feel themselves to be losers. Globalization is cutting the price of consumer goods, from clothes to electronics—putting what were once luxury goods into the hands of millions of ordinary households. Sadly, however, the citizens of the richest countries are more likely to think of globalization as the loss of jobs offshore.
This ignores the fact that cheaper products and sometimes services from newly emerging countries create the competition that spurs us on to greater productivity and innovation. And emerging markets are, in fact, expanding markets for us just as we are for them: U.S. and European company brands are emblems all over the world, and their global penetration, as much as homegrown entrepreneurship, is the key to our future success.
Isolationism, partial retreat and protectionism—attempts to stop the clock, freeze-frame and postpone the inevitable—are self-defeating options. By attempting to shelter ourselves we will only fall behind, risk competitiveness and pay a higher price for long-run adjustment. Indeed, the success of the American economic experience teaches us that the lifeblood of a market economy is the continuous injection of new competition.
It has been the hard work and enterprise of the American people, responding to the new opportunities brought by each successive wave of global economic change, that have been the foundation of American economic progress. And it is when America has shown that same commitment to leading the opening of markets in the rest of the world, such as the dismantling of trade barriers following the second world war, that the conditions are put in place for rising growth and prosperity in the global economy to the benefit of all.
It is clear that we need a global conversation about both the risks of protectionism and the benefits of globalization. The starting point—the most powerful anti-protectionist signal we can send—is breaking the world-trade deadlock. The prize is a 50 percent increase in world trade. And the key that will unlock that door is Europe and America offering progress by reducing protectionism in agriculture, and India and Brazil being willing to respond with liberalization of services and greater market access.
A globalization that works will mean not only open markets, free trade and flexible labor conditions but higher investment in innovation and education. For Europe this also means escalating the pace of economic reform. For Britain in particular, it means an emphasis on productivity—convincing people that while we may not be able to stop them from losing the last job, we can do a great deal to help them be equipped for the next jobs. And it also means looking at new sources of jobs at home—not least from the environment. In Britain alone we believe we can create more than 100,000 jobs from energy conservation to micro generation.
If nations leave dislocated workers to feel hopeless and forgotten with only the offer of dead-end jobs, they will be increasing the chances that their citizens will fuel the fires of backlash and protectionism. But if we expand the opportunities for new skills and then new jobs, make that work pay and invest in strengthening communities, then citizens will be far more likely to see the larger benefits of globalization. Throughout industrialization, we have been right to say that if people work hard, play by the rules and acquire skills, they will do well and the next generation can aspire to do even better than the last. It is now our task to demonstrate to those who lose jobs to the global economy not only that we are on their side, but that new and good opportunities will be available.
The Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown is the United Kingdom's chancellor of the Exchequer.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13121948/site/newsweek/
© 2006 MSNBC.com
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Consider the pleasure & importance of sketching, even as a non-gifted amateur
July 19, 2006
An Exhibition About Drawing Conjures a Time When Amateurs Roamed the Earth
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
“Playing the Piano for Pleasure” is a minor classic of self-help by Charles Cooke promoting musical amateurism, published in 1941 in the upbeat style of Dale Carnegie. It lays out a strict regime of practice and discipline, the musical equivalent to a better body in 30 days. “We will worm our way, expending considerable effort, into the small end of the cornucopia,” he promises, “in order that we may later emerge, expending less effort and having the time of our life, out of the large end.”
I was reminded of Cooke while visiting the Grolier Club, where a show called “Teaching America to Draw” provides a refresher course in pencil-pushing and other sorts of sketching as a collective pastime. It’s about that golden era, from the time of the founding fathers nearly to Cooke’s day, when educated Americans drew as a matter of course.
Drawing was a civilized thing to do, like reading and writing. It was taught in elementary schools. It was democratic. It was a boon to happiness.
From 1820 to 1860, more than 145,000 drawing manuals circulated, now souvenirs of our bygone cultural aspirations. Not many of these manuals are still intact because they were so heavily used, worn down like church relics, which supplicants rubbed smooth from caressing.
We’re addicted to convenience today. Cellphone cameras are handy, but they’re also the equivalent of fast-food meals. Their ubiquity has multiplied our distance from drawing as a measure of self-worth and a practical tool. Before box cameras became universal a century or so ago, people drew for pleasure but also because it was the best way to preserve a cherished sight, a memory, just as people played an instrument or sang if they wanted to hear music at home because there were no record players or radios. Amateurism was a virtue, and the time and effort entailed in learning to draw, as with playing the piano, enhanced its desirability.
Drawing promoted meditation and stillness. “A sustained act of will is essential to drawing,” Paul Valéry put it. “Nothing could be more opposed to reverie, since the requisite concentration must be continually diverting the natural course of physical movements, on its guard against any seductive curve asserting itself.”
A century ago it was possible for a Philadelphia educator named J. Liberty Tadd to instruct young women to stand in pigsties to learn to draw animals directly from nature. There’s an illustration in the show from Tadd’s “New Methods of Education” of a girl in a long, improbably immaculate dress sketching pigs on a blackboard.
The exhibition is full of such exhortatory books, many of them discomfiting today because they presume a degree of skill among ordinary citizens — even children — that would now be regarded as noteworthy in the art world. There are exceptions, like a popular manual from the 1840’s by Benjamin Coe, one of Frederic Church’s teachers, who, to judge from his illustration of a maiden in a glen, needed a little brushing-up on perspective.
On the other hand, there’s J. T. Bowen’s “United States Drawing Book,” from 1839, with its moody view of a crumbling cathedral in a landscape, and P. Fishe Reed’s “Little Corporal’s Drawing Book,” a progressive manual from 1869 with bird drawings that Audubon might have been proud to make, conjuring an America in which 10-year-olds are absorbed not by Game Boys and iPods but by the finer points of mastering realism.
Clearly these manuals were aspirational no less than educational or recreational. It’s hard to imagine that most American schoolchildren during the 1870’s could duplicate the leaves and bugs and complicated curlicue patterns that Herman Krusi Jr. drew in his manuals for classroom instruction. But Americans wanted their children to: that’s the point.
Something happened between then and now, and it wasn’t just the invention of gadgets that eliminated the need to draw.
There was also a philosophical change, away from drawing as a practical endeavor and toward art appreciation. From dexterity and discipline to feelings and self-esteem: the shift in values is implied by some of the later books in the show. Consciously or not, they parallel changes in modern art, which threw out the rule books of draftsmanship and proposed a new, free-thinking attitude.
As for expending effort to become skilled at drawing, the post-Cooke postwar generation introduced Paint by Numbers, and the situation has gone downhill from there.
“Drawing in America is as much a basic human activity today as it has always been, even if it is not perceived to be as necessary to economic and cultural progress,” Albert A. Anderson Jr. writes in the slim pamphlet accompanying the show.
I don’t think so. Drawing and doodling are not the same. With the arts, American adults have acquiesced to playing the passive role of receivers.
In a new memoir, “Let Me Finish,” Roger Angell recalls trips to the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium in the 1930’s with his father, who also liked to join pickup games when middle-age American men still did that. Today baseball is like the arts, with grown-ups mostly preferring not to break a sweat. “We know everything about the game now, thanks to instant replay and computerized stats, and what we seem to have concluded is that almost none of us are good enough to play it,” Mr. Angell writes.
So it is with classical music, painting and drawing, professional renditions of which are now so widely available that most people probably can’t or don’t imagine there’s any point in bothering to do these things themselves. Communities of amateurs still thrive, but they are self-selecting groups. A vast majority of society seems to presume that culture is something specialists produce.
Rembrandt Peale published one of the drawing manuals in the Grolier Club show. Besides being an artist, Peale became Pennsylvania’s first high school art teacher in the 1830’s, hired by Alexander Dallas Bache, a grandson of Benjamin Franklin. People, Franklin pointed out, can often “express ideas more clearly with a lead pencil or a bit of chalk” than with words. “Drawing is a kind of universal language, understood by all nations,” he reminded Americans.
We have given it up, at a cost that, as Franklin might have put it, is beyond words. Mr. Angell goes on in his book to say that television and sports journalism have taught us all about the skills and salaries and private lives of professional ballplayers, on whom we now focus, instead of playing the game ourselves.
As a consequence, he writes, “we don’t like them as much as we once did, and we don’t like ourselves much, either.”
You can draw the analogy.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
An Exhibition About Drawing Conjures a Time When Amateurs Roamed the Earth
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
“Playing the Piano for Pleasure” is a minor classic of self-help by Charles Cooke promoting musical amateurism, published in 1941 in the upbeat style of Dale Carnegie. It lays out a strict regime of practice and discipline, the musical equivalent to a better body in 30 days. “We will worm our way, expending considerable effort, into the small end of the cornucopia,” he promises, “in order that we may later emerge, expending less effort and having the time of our life, out of the large end.”
I was reminded of Cooke while visiting the Grolier Club, where a show called “Teaching America to Draw” provides a refresher course in pencil-pushing and other sorts of sketching as a collective pastime. It’s about that golden era, from the time of the founding fathers nearly to Cooke’s day, when educated Americans drew as a matter of course.
Drawing was a civilized thing to do, like reading and writing. It was taught in elementary schools. It was democratic. It was a boon to happiness.
From 1820 to 1860, more than 145,000 drawing manuals circulated, now souvenirs of our bygone cultural aspirations. Not many of these manuals are still intact because they were so heavily used, worn down like church relics, which supplicants rubbed smooth from caressing.
We’re addicted to convenience today. Cellphone cameras are handy, but they’re also the equivalent of fast-food meals. Their ubiquity has multiplied our distance from drawing as a measure of self-worth and a practical tool. Before box cameras became universal a century or so ago, people drew for pleasure but also because it was the best way to preserve a cherished sight, a memory, just as people played an instrument or sang if they wanted to hear music at home because there were no record players or radios. Amateurism was a virtue, and the time and effort entailed in learning to draw, as with playing the piano, enhanced its desirability.
Drawing promoted meditation and stillness. “A sustained act of will is essential to drawing,” Paul Valéry put it. “Nothing could be more opposed to reverie, since the requisite concentration must be continually diverting the natural course of physical movements, on its guard against any seductive curve asserting itself.”
A century ago it was possible for a Philadelphia educator named J. Liberty Tadd to instruct young women to stand in pigsties to learn to draw animals directly from nature. There’s an illustration in the show from Tadd’s “New Methods of Education” of a girl in a long, improbably immaculate dress sketching pigs on a blackboard.
The exhibition is full of such exhortatory books, many of them discomfiting today because they presume a degree of skill among ordinary citizens — even children — that would now be regarded as noteworthy in the art world. There are exceptions, like a popular manual from the 1840’s by Benjamin Coe, one of Frederic Church’s teachers, who, to judge from his illustration of a maiden in a glen, needed a little brushing-up on perspective.
On the other hand, there’s J. T. Bowen’s “United States Drawing Book,” from 1839, with its moody view of a crumbling cathedral in a landscape, and P. Fishe Reed’s “Little Corporal’s Drawing Book,” a progressive manual from 1869 with bird drawings that Audubon might have been proud to make, conjuring an America in which 10-year-olds are absorbed not by Game Boys and iPods but by the finer points of mastering realism.
Clearly these manuals were aspirational no less than educational or recreational. It’s hard to imagine that most American schoolchildren during the 1870’s could duplicate the leaves and bugs and complicated curlicue patterns that Herman Krusi Jr. drew in his manuals for classroom instruction. But Americans wanted their children to: that’s the point.
Something happened between then and now, and it wasn’t just the invention of gadgets that eliminated the need to draw.
There was also a philosophical change, away from drawing as a practical endeavor and toward art appreciation. From dexterity and discipline to feelings and self-esteem: the shift in values is implied by some of the later books in the show. Consciously or not, they parallel changes in modern art, which threw out the rule books of draftsmanship and proposed a new, free-thinking attitude.
As for expending effort to become skilled at drawing, the post-Cooke postwar generation introduced Paint by Numbers, and the situation has gone downhill from there.
“Drawing in America is as much a basic human activity today as it has always been, even if it is not perceived to be as necessary to economic and cultural progress,” Albert A. Anderson Jr. writes in the slim pamphlet accompanying the show.
I don’t think so. Drawing and doodling are not the same. With the arts, American adults have acquiesced to playing the passive role of receivers.
In a new memoir, “Let Me Finish,” Roger Angell recalls trips to the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium in the 1930’s with his father, who also liked to join pickup games when middle-age American men still did that. Today baseball is like the arts, with grown-ups mostly preferring not to break a sweat. “We know everything about the game now, thanks to instant replay and computerized stats, and what we seem to have concluded is that almost none of us are good enough to play it,” Mr. Angell writes.
So it is with classical music, painting and drawing, professional renditions of which are now so widely available that most people probably can’t or don’t imagine there’s any point in bothering to do these things themselves. Communities of amateurs still thrive, but they are self-selecting groups. A vast majority of society seems to presume that culture is something specialists produce.
Rembrandt Peale published one of the drawing manuals in the Grolier Club show. Besides being an artist, Peale became Pennsylvania’s first high school art teacher in the 1830’s, hired by Alexander Dallas Bache, a grandson of Benjamin Franklin. People, Franklin pointed out, can often “express ideas more clearly with a lead pencil or a bit of chalk” than with words. “Drawing is a kind of universal language, understood by all nations,” he reminded Americans.
We have given it up, at a cost that, as Franklin might have put it, is beyond words. Mr. Angell goes on in his book to say that television and sports journalism have taught us all about the skills and salaries and private lives of professional ballplayers, on whom we now focus, instead of playing the game ourselves.
As a consequence, he writes, “we don’t like them as much as we once did, and we don’t like ourselves much, either.”
You can draw the analogy.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
On teachers: NY Times writer Michael Winerip
Teachers, and a Law That Distrusts Them
By MICHAEL WINERIP / NYTimes
July 12, 2006
THIS is my last education column after four years. What I will miss most is the free ticket it gave me into classrooms all over the country, where I watched and learned from teachers.
I got to be there at 7:15 a.m. on the first day of this school year with Irene Ray, a terrific high school English teacher in Huntington, W. Va. Ms. Ray had intended to leave small-town Appalachia long ago for the big city, but there she was again, for her 23rd first day, sipping a Diet Coke, nibbling an Atkins breakfast bar, more excited and jittery than her students, wanting to know how their summer reading went, whether they’d enjoyed “The Scarlet Letter” or, like Ms. Ray, preferred “The Poisonwood Bible.”
Ms. Ray spent a week readying her room for the first day, including adding to the favorite quotations that line her walls. Bored students distracted by iPods and the Internet? “She’s got new quotes,” whispered a girl, who was reading Ms. Ray’s walls.
I also got to be there at 3:15 p.m. on the final day of school this year, in Dahlonega, Ga., at Lumpkin County Middle School, when Pat New, a science teacher, taught her last lesson, after 29 years. Ms. New, 62, had fought to the end for her right to teach evolution, winning out against a group of parents and students and an administration that preferred not to make waves.
The columns about teachers generated the most mail, but lots of others were fun to write. Chronicling the mess-ups with New York State’s standardized exams — in math, English, English as a second language, physics, reading — was always great sport.
But the people who took me to the heart of education? Laurin MacLeish, kindergarten teacher in Orlando, Fla.; Roger Cline, diesel engine teacher in Canton, Ohio; Jeff Kaufman, G.E.D. teacher at the Rikers jail in New York City; Liza Levine, English teacher in South Central Los Angeles.
Principals? A little bit. Superintendents? Chancellors? State education commissioners? You can probably still name your kindergarten teacher (that would be Miss Goddard, Beechwood Knoll School, 1957). But how about the secretary of education during any of your 13 years in school?
The education press spends so much time writing about people far removed from the classroom that it’s easy to lose sight of those individuals’ real purpose — to help teachers do their jobs well, the best hope for student success.
As readers know, I’m not a fan of No Child Left Behind, the 2002 federal law aimed at raising education quality. Instead of helping teachers, for me it’s a law created by politicians who distrust teachers. Because teachers’ judgment and standards are supposedly not reliable, the law substitutes a battery of state tests that are supposed to tell the real truth about children’s academic progress.
The question is: How successful can an education law be that makes teachers the enemy?
Even No Child’s strongest supporters acknowledge that one of the law’s most important provisions — to guarantee a highly qualified teacher in every classroom — has been the most poorly carried out to date.
So, to improve classroom teaching and make teachers more enthusiastic about the law, I have three departing suggestions for when the legislation is expected to come up for reauthorization next year.
First, why not add a provision rewarding states and districts that mandate small class size? It’s an idea that enjoys great support among parents and teachers and is easily carried out on a national scale.
Why small class size? Deborah Meier, the teacher, principal, author and MacArthur Award winner who has created successful public schools in New York and Boston, says the best chance for educating poor children well is surrounding them with as many talented adults as possible. The same premise drives one of the most hopeful efforts in urban education today, the Gates Foundation’s small schools movement.
Joe Gipson, a black public school parent in California, which has had a mandatory cap of 20 in grades K to three for a decade, told me small class size is the best thing that’s happened to his children’s education, giving them what rich private school pupils have. While small class size is no guarantee that teachers will be good, he said, with just 20, you can tell faster if teachers are performing well, and get rid of them if they’re not.
Gov. Jeb Bush is very popular in Florida, and in 2002, he opposed a constitutional amendment to cap class sizes, including a maximum of 18 for grades K to three. He said it would be too costly. And yet voters in Florida, hardly a tax-and-spend state, voted for it. Every year since, the Republican governor has tried overturning the class size amendment, and every year he has lost, most recently last spring, when the Republican-controlled State Senate defeated his efforts.
“It’s a moral issue,” said Senator J. Alex Villalobos, a Republican whose wife is a public school teacher. “Class size is the great equalizer. Anybody who has children understands this. We have a moral responsibility to take care of our children.”
In 2003, 115,000 New York City residents signed petitions aimed at setting class size limits, and in 2005, 100,000 did. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has said the city cannot afford to do more now, and has successfully stalled advocates’ efforts in court, but at a price to children. A recent state audit shows that 26 percent of New York City children in grades K to three are in classes of 25 or more.
The intent of the No Child law could not be more important — to narrow the achievement gap between white and minority children. But what angers public educators is that under the law, schools get all the blame if students fail, when they see many other variables at play, including the crippling effects of poverty on families. Studies show that the economic status of a child’s family has a major impact on a child’s performance on standardized tests. On the SAT, for example, for every $10,000 increase in family income, a child’s SAT scores rise about 10 points.
Which leads to my second proposal. We need a No Family Left Behind Law. This would measure economic growth of families and punish politicians in charge of states with poor economic growth for minority families.
FOR example, in Ohio, black families earn only 62 percent of white household income, one of the biggest disparities nationally. So every year, under No Family Left Behind, Ohio would be expected to close that income gap. If it failed to make adequate yearly progress for black families’ wealth, the governor and legislators would be judged failing, and after five years, could be removed from office. This way public schools wouldn’t be the only institutions singled out for failing poor children.
And if states succeeded in closing the economic gap, test scores would be expected to rise, giving politicians and teachers a chance to celebrate together.
A final concern with the federal law is that it is so driven by state testing that there’s too much time devoted to test prep, too much time spent drilling facts for survey courses, and not enough emphasis on finding something children will fall in love with for a lifetime — the Civil War, repairing engines, science research, playing the trumpet.
Fortunately, the remedy can be found on Ms. Ray’s walls in Huntington, W. Va., a quotation from William Butler Yeats: “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” I recommend that as the official motto for a new, revitalized No Child Left Behind law.
E-mail: edmike@nytimes.com
By MICHAEL WINERIP / NYTimes
July 12, 2006
THIS is my last education column after four years. What I will miss most is the free ticket it gave me into classrooms all over the country, where I watched and learned from teachers.
I got to be there at 7:15 a.m. on the first day of this school year with Irene Ray, a terrific high school English teacher in Huntington, W. Va. Ms. Ray had intended to leave small-town Appalachia long ago for the big city, but there she was again, for her 23rd first day, sipping a Diet Coke, nibbling an Atkins breakfast bar, more excited and jittery than her students, wanting to know how their summer reading went, whether they’d enjoyed “The Scarlet Letter” or, like Ms. Ray, preferred “The Poisonwood Bible.”
Ms. Ray spent a week readying her room for the first day, including adding to the favorite quotations that line her walls. Bored students distracted by iPods and the Internet? “She’s got new quotes,” whispered a girl, who was reading Ms. Ray’s walls.
I also got to be there at 3:15 p.m. on the final day of school this year, in Dahlonega, Ga., at Lumpkin County Middle School, when Pat New, a science teacher, taught her last lesson, after 29 years. Ms. New, 62, had fought to the end for her right to teach evolution, winning out against a group of parents and students and an administration that preferred not to make waves.
The columns about teachers generated the most mail, but lots of others were fun to write. Chronicling the mess-ups with New York State’s standardized exams — in math, English, English as a second language, physics, reading — was always great sport.
But the people who took me to the heart of education? Laurin MacLeish, kindergarten teacher in Orlando, Fla.; Roger Cline, diesel engine teacher in Canton, Ohio; Jeff Kaufman, G.E.D. teacher at the Rikers jail in New York City; Liza Levine, English teacher in South Central Los Angeles.
Principals? A little bit. Superintendents? Chancellors? State education commissioners? You can probably still name your kindergarten teacher (that would be Miss Goddard, Beechwood Knoll School, 1957). But how about the secretary of education during any of your 13 years in school?
The education press spends so much time writing about people far removed from the classroom that it’s easy to lose sight of those individuals’ real purpose — to help teachers do their jobs well, the best hope for student success.
As readers know, I’m not a fan of No Child Left Behind, the 2002 federal law aimed at raising education quality. Instead of helping teachers, for me it’s a law created by politicians who distrust teachers. Because teachers’ judgment and standards are supposedly not reliable, the law substitutes a battery of state tests that are supposed to tell the real truth about children’s academic progress.
The question is: How successful can an education law be that makes teachers the enemy?
Even No Child’s strongest supporters acknowledge that one of the law’s most important provisions — to guarantee a highly qualified teacher in every classroom — has been the most poorly carried out to date.
So, to improve classroom teaching and make teachers more enthusiastic about the law, I have three departing suggestions for when the legislation is expected to come up for reauthorization next year.
First, why not add a provision rewarding states and districts that mandate small class size? It’s an idea that enjoys great support among parents and teachers and is easily carried out on a national scale.
Why small class size? Deborah Meier, the teacher, principal, author and MacArthur Award winner who has created successful public schools in New York and Boston, says the best chance for educating poor children well is surrounding them with as many talented adults as possible. The same premise drives one of the most hopeful efforts in urban education today, the Gates Foundation’s small schools movement.
Joe Gipson, a black public school parent in California, which has had a mandatory cap of 20 in grades K to three for a decade, told me small class size is the best thing that’s happened to his children’s education, giving them what rich private school pupils have. While small class size is no guarantee that teachers will be good, he said, with just 20, you can tell faster if teachers are performing well, and get rid of them if they’re not.
Gov. Jeb Bush is very popular in Florida, and in 2002, he opposed a constitutional amendment to cap class sizes, including a maximum of 18 for grades K to three. He said it would be too costly. And yet voters in Florida, hardly a tax-and-spend state, voted for it. Every year since, the Republican governor has tried overturning the class size amendment, and every year he has lost, most recently last spring, when the Republican-controlled State Senate defeated his efforts.
“It’s a moral issue,” said Senator J. Alex Villalobos, a Republican whose wife is a public school teacher. “Class size is the great equalizer. Anybody who has children understands this. We have a moral responsibility to take care of our children.”
In 2003, 115,000 New York City residents signed petitions aimed at setting class size limits, and in 2005, 100,000 did. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has said the city cannot afford to do more now, and has successfully stalled advocates’ efforts in court, but at a price to children. A recent state audit shows that 26 percent of New York City children in grades K to three are in classes of 25 or more.
The intent of the No Child law could not be more important — to narrow the achievement gap between white and minority children. But what angers public educators is that under the law, schools get all the blame if students fail, when they see many other variables at play, including the crippling effects of poverty on families. Studies show that the economic status of a child’s family has a major impact on a child’s performance on standardized tests. On the SAT, for example, for every $10,000 increase in family income, a child’s SAT scores rise about 10 points.
Which leads to my second proposal. We need a No Family Left Behind Law. This would measure economic growth of families and punish politicians in charge of states with poor economic growth for minority families.
FOR example, in Ohio, black families earn only 62 percent of white household income, one of the biggest disparities nationally. So every year, under No Family Left Behind, Ohio would be expected to close that income gap. If it failed to make adequate yearly progress for black families’ wealth, the governor and legislators would be judged failing, and after five years, could be removed from office. This way public schools wouldn’t be the only institutions singled out for failing poor children.
And if states succeeded in closing the economic gap, test scores would be expected to rise, giving politicians and teachers a chance to celebrate together.
A final concern with the federal law is that it is so driven by state testing that there’s too much time devoted to test prep, too much time spent drilling facts for survey courses, and not enough emphasis on finding something children will fall in love with for a lifetime — the Civil War, repairing engines, science research, playing the trumpet.
Fortunately, the remedy can be found on Ms. Ray’s walls in Huntington, W. Va., a quotation from William Butler Yeats: “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” I recommend that as the official motto for a new, revitalized No Child Left Behind law.
E-mail: edmike@nytimes.com
Sunday, June 18, 2006
The public participates in running the company; is this what you call a buyocracy?
June 18, 2006
Under New Management
To Charge Up Customers, Put Customers in Charge
By WILLIAM C. TAYLOR / NY Times
FOR more than three decades, the designer John Fluevog has been selling colorful and distinctive shoes that win raves among rock stars and fashion models, have adorned an Absolut Vodka ad and attract legions of loyal customers that his company calls "Fluevogers."
Over the last few years, though, Mr. Fluevog hasn't just been presenting ideas about shoes and style to customers; he has also been soliciting ideas from them — encouraging brand enthusiasts to submit their own sketches for leather boots, high-heeled dress shoes, even sneakers with flair. He posts the submissions on his company's Web site (fluevog.com/files_2/os-1.html), invites visitors to vote for their favorites and manufactures and sells the most promising designs. He calls it all "open source footwear."
"Customers want to express themselves, to be involved with the brand," Mr. Fluevog said in an interview at the John Fluevog Shoes boutique on Newbury Street in Boston. (His company, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, has shops in nine major cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Melbourne, Australia.) "For so long, people would hand me a drawing of their personal design for a shoe or ask if I had considered an idea they liked. This program is a natural outgrowth of that desire for connection."
To date, the company has chosen nearly 300 finalists from the flow of sketches into Vancouver — and introduced 10 shoes based on customer designs. On the day Mr. Fluevog visited Boston, the Newbury Street store was selling five of the most popular customer-inspired models, including the Urban Angel Traffic, a walking shoe (retail price, $179) designed by a customer in Moscow, and the Fellowship Hi Merrilee, a vintage-style pump ($189) designed by a customer in Provo, Utah.
"Some of the ideas from customers are striking, but impossible to make," Mr. Fluevog said. What tends to work best, he explained, are intriguing twists on design themes that he and his colleagues are already exploring. "But even submissions we can't make add to the stimulation," he added. "Our customers get more involved, and we get insights into who they are and what they're doing. It's better for both of us."
Eric von Hippel, head of the innovation and entrepreneurship group at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calls this bottom-up phenomenon "lead-user innovation," and has studied its effects in industries from extreme-sports gear to medical equipment.
In a time of ever more talented technology enthusiasts, hobbyists and do-it-yourselfers, all connected by Internet-enabled communication, he says, the most intensely engaged users of a product often find new ways to enhance it long before its manufacturer does. Thus, he argues, companies that aspire to stand out in fast-moving markets would be wise to invite their smartest users into the product design process.
"It's getting cheaper and cheaper for users to innovate on their own," Professor von Hippel said. "This is not traditional market research — asking customers what they want. This is identifying what your most advanced users are already doing and understanding what their innovations mean for the future of your business."
Peter van Stolk, the founder and chief executive of Jones Soda, a fast-growing soft-drink company based in Seattle, doesn't expect his customers to invent new drinks or to reinvent any of his existing line of organic teas, energy drinks and carbonated beverages in offbeat flavors like Blue Bubblegum, Fufu Berry and Lemon Drop. But he does rely on customers to infuse his company's brand image and retail presence, and to exercise their voice in shaping a message to the marketplace.
"We started this company with the philosophy that the world does not need another soda," he said. "That forced us to look at things differently: How could we create a new kind of connection with customers, let them play with the brand, let them take ownership of it? Everything at this company is about sharing ownership of the brand with our customers. This is not my brand. This is not our soda. It belongs to our customers."
Mr. van Stolk makes his products more memorable by making their marketing more social. A key to the company's identity — what separates it from giants like Coke and Pepsi and keeps the buzz going among its 12- to 24-year-old consumer demographic — is its packaging on store shelves. Jones Soda comes in 12-ounce glass bottles with labels as distinctive as the flavors are exotic. The labels are designed around striking photography — mainly black and white, but some in color — of landscapes, children, cars, street scenes and so on.
The labels change regularly, and many customers eagerly await the debut of each new batch of photographs. Why? Because the photos come from customers. Over the years, Jones has received millions of photos from its customers. Its Web site, jonessoda.com, displays a selection of images that have been sent by mail or e-mail to Seattle.
Visitors to the site vote on which pictures should go on the labels. When a photo is selected, the label includes the name and hometown of the person who submitted it.
It's a clever grass-roots branding technique. Customers also vote on music posted to the Jones site by independent bands, and photos of popular bands go on labels. Customers can even order a 12-pack featuring their own photographs — a form of Internet-enabled personalization that is the company's highest-margin business. The personalized 12-pack costs $34.95.
"So what is Jones?" Mr. van Stolk asked rhetorically. "Are we a soda company? Are we an Internet company? Are we a social networking company? We're all of that. Our goal is to keep creating more ways for customers to exercise ownership of the brand."
Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart, co-founders of Threadless.com, based in Chicago, are developing an even more radical model of shared ownership with customers. Threadless, which has become something of an Internet sensation, is in a decidedly old-fashioned business: selling T-shirts. But the designs in its huge online catalog all come from the company's customers, who submit their artwork to the site.
Visitors rate submissions on a one-to-five scale. The company selects five to seven designs a week and sells them for $15 apiece. Winners of the design competition receive $1,500 in cash and $500 worth of merchandise. Other customers earn points — good for store credit — for referring new buyers and for submitting photos of themselves wearing Threadless shirts.
All of this online participation has built a group of deeply engaged users who design, select, market and buy products — an enterprise whose customers are, in effect, the company. Threadless has 300,000 registered users and adds 20,000 a month. It receives as many as 150 new design submissions a day and sells up to 80,000 shirts a month.
WE'VE got four rules we follow," Mr. DeHart said. "We let the community create the content. We let the community build itself — no advertising. We let the community help with the business; we add features based on user feedback. And we reward members of the community for participating."
It's a low-cost, high-involvement formula with plenty of room for growth. Indeed, Mr. DeHart and Mr. Nickell have started several related lines, from one for customer-designed T-shirts for children (which made its debut Monday on Threadless) to another for customer-designed fabrics for neckties. (The ties are available at a companion site, www.nakedandangry.com.)
"Most of the energy comes from how fast the product line is changing," Mr. Nickell said. "There's something for users to do every day — see which new designs are out, score the latest submissions, post a blog entry. It's just a very active community."
Under New Management
To Charge Up Customers, Put Customers in Charge
By WILLIAM C. TAYLOR / NY Times
FOR more than three decades, the designer John Fluevog has been selling colorful and distinctive shoes that win raves among rock stars and fashion models, have adorned an Absolut Vodka ad and attract legions of loyal customers that his company calls "Fluevogers."
Over the last few years, though, Mr. Fluevog hasn't just been presenting ideas about shoes and style to customers; he has also been soliciting ideas from them — encouraging brand enthusiasts to submit their own sketches for leather boots, high-heeled dress shoes, even sneakers with flair. He posts the submissions on his company's Web site (fluevog.com/files_2/os-1.html), invites visitors to vote for their favorites and manufactures and sells the most promising designs. He calls it all "open source footwear."
"Customers want to express themselves, to be involved with the brand," Mr. Fluevog said in an interview at the John Fluevog Shoes boutique on Newbury Street in Boston. (His company, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, has shops in nine major cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Melbourne, Australia.) "For so long, people would hand me a drawing of their personal design for a shoe or ask if I had considered an idea they liked. This program is a natural outgrowth of that desire for connection."
To date, the company has chosen nearly 300 finalists from the flow of sketches into Vancouver — and introduced 10 shoes based on customer designs. On the day Mr. Fluevog visited Boston, the Newbury Street store was selling five of the most popular customer-inspired models, including the Urban Angel Traffic, a walking shoe (retail price, $179) designed by a customer in Moscow, and the Fellowship Hi Merrilee, a vintage-style pump ($189) designed by a customer in Provo, Utah.
"Some of the ideas from customers are striking, but impossible to make," Mr. Fluevog said. What tends to work best, he explained, are intriguing twists on design themes that he and his colleagues are already exploring. "But even submissions we can't make add to the stimulation," he added. "Our customers get more involved, and we get insights into who they are and what they're doing. It's better for both of us."
Eric von Hippel, head of the innovation and entrepreneurship group at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calls this bottom-up phenomenon "lead-user innovation," and has studied its effects in industries from extreme-sports gear to medical equipment.
In a time of ever more talented technology enthusiasts, hobbyists and do-it-yourselfers, all connected by Internet-enabled communication, he says, the most intensely engaged users of a product often find new ways to enhance it long before its manufacturer does. Thus, he argues, companies that aspire to stand out in fast-moving markets would be wise to invite their smartest users into the product design process.
"It's getting cheaper and cheaper for users to innovate on their own," Professor von Hippel said. "This is not traditional market research — asking customers what they want. This is identifying what your most advanced users are already doing and understanding what their innovations mean for the future of your business."
Peter van Stolk, the founder and chief executive of Jones Soda, a fast-growing soft-drink company based in Seattle, doesn't expect his customers to invent new drinks or to reinvent any of his existing line of organic teas, energy drinks and carbonated beverages in offbeat flavors like Blue Bubblegum, Fufu Berry and Lemon Drop. But he does rely on customers to infuse his company's brand image and retail presence, and to exercise their voice in shaping a message to the marketplace.
"We started this company with the philosophy that the world does not need another soda," he said. "That forced us to look at things differently: How could we create a new kind of connection with customers, let them play with the brand, let them take ownership of it? Everything at this company is about sharing ownership of the brand with our customers. This is not my brand. This is not our soda. It belongs to our customers."
Mr. van Stolk makes his products more memorable by making their marketing more social. A key to the company's identity — what separates it from giants like Coke and Pepsi and keeps the buzz going among its 12- to 24-year-old consumer demographic — is its packaging on store shelves. Jones Soda comes in 12-ounce glass bottles with labels as distinctive as the flavors are exotic. The labels are designed around striking photography — mainly black and white, but some in color — of landscapes, children, cars, street scenes and so on.
The labels change regularly, and many customers eagerly await the debut of each new batch of photographs. Why? Because the photos come from customers. Over the years, Jones has received millions of photos from its customers. Its Web site, jonessoda.com, displays a selection of images that have been sent by mail or e-mail to Seattle.
Visitors to the site vote on which pictures should go on the labels. When a photo is selected, the label includes the name and hometown of the person who submitted it.
It's a clever grass-roots branding technique. Customers also vote on music posted to the Jones site by independent bands, and photos of popular bands go on labels. Customers can even order a 12-pack featuring their own photographs — a form of Internet-enabled personalization that is the company's highest-margin business. The personalized 12-pack costs $34.95.
"So what is Jones?" Mr. van Stolk asked rhetorically. "Are we a soda company? Are we an Internet company? Are we a social networking company? We're all of that. Our goal is to keep creating more ways for customers to exercise ownership of the brand."
Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart, co-founders of Threadless.com, based in Chicago, are developing an even more radical model of shared ownership with customers. Threadless, which has become something of an Internet sensation, is in a decidedly old-fashioned business: selling T-shirts. But the designs in its huge online catalog all come from the company's customers, who submit their artwork to the site.
Visitors rate submissions on a one-to-five scale. The company selects five to seven designs a week and sells them for $15 apiece. Winners of the design competition receive $1,500 in cash and $500 worth of merchandise. Other customers earn points — good for store credit — for referring new buyers and for submitting photos of themselves wearing Threadless shirts.
All of this online participation has built a group of deeply engaged users who design, select, market and buy products — an enterprise whose customers are, in effect, the company. Threadless has 300,000 registered users and adds 20,000 a month. It receives as many as 150 new design submissions a day and sells up to 80,000 shirts a month.
WE'VE got four rules we follow," Mr. DeHart said. "We let the community create the content. We let the community build itself — no advertising. We let the community help with the business; we add features based on user feedback. And we reward members of the community for participating."
It's a low-cost, high-involvement formula with plenty of room for growth. Indeed, Mr. DeHart and Mr. Nickell have started several related lines, from one for customer-designed T-shirts for children (which made its debut Monday on Threadless) to another for customer-designed fabrics for neckties. (The ties are available at a companion site, www.nakedandangry.com.)
"Most of the energy comes from how fast the product line is changing," Mr. Nickell said. "There's something for users to do every day — see which new designs are out, score the latest submissions, post a blog entry. It's just a very active community."
Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia: how the open encyclopedia is surviving
June 17, 2006
Growing Wikipedia Revises Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy / NY Times
By KATIE HAFNER
Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia that "anyone can edit." Unless you want to edit the entries on Albert Einstein, human rights in China or Christina Aguilera.
Wikipedia's come-one, come-all invitation to write and edit articles, and the surprisingly successful results, have captured the public imagination. But it is not the experiment in freewheeling collective creativity it might seem to be, because maintaining so much openness inevitably involves some tradeoffs.
At its core, Wikipedia is not just a reference work but also an online community that has built itself a bureaucracy of sorts — one that, in response to well-publicized problems with some entries, has recently grown more elaborate. It has a clear power structure that gives volunteer administrators the authority to exercise editorial control, delete unsuitable articles and protect those that are vulnerable to vandalism.
Those measures can put some entries outside of the "anyone can edit" realm. The list changes rapidly, but as of yesterday, the entries for Einstein and Ms. Aguilera were among 82 that administrators had "protected" from all editing, mostly because of repeated vandalism or disputes over what should be said. Another 179 entries — including those for George W. Bush, Islam and Adolf Hitler — were "semi-protected," open to editing only by people who had been registered at the site for at least four days. (See a List of Protected Entries)
While these measures may appear to undermine the site's democratic principles, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, notes that protection is usually temporary and affects a tiny fraction of the 1.2 million entries on the English-language site.
"Protection is a tool for quality control, but it hardly defines Wikipedia," Mr. Wales said. "What does define Wikipedia is the volunteer community and the open participation."
From the start, Mr. Wales gave the site a clear mission: to offer free knowledge to everybody on the planet. At the same time, he put in place a set of rules and policies that he continues to promote, like the need to present information with a neutral point of view.
The system seems to be working. Wikipedia is now the Web's third-most-popular news and information source, beating the sites of CNN and Yahoo News, according to Nielsen NetRatings.
The bulk of the writing and editing on Wikipedia is done by a geographically diffuse group of 1,000 or so regulars, many of whom are administrators on the site.
"A lot of people think of Wikipedia as being 10 million people, each adding one sentence," Mr. Wales said. "But really the vast majority of work is done by this small core community."
The administrators are all volunteers, most of them in their 20's. They are in constant communication — in real-time online chats, on "talk" pages connected to each entry and via Internet mailing lists. The volunteers share the job of watching for vandalism, or what Mr. Wales called "drive-by nonsense." Customized software — written by volunteers — also monitors changes to articles.
Mr. Wales calls vandalism to the encyclopedia "a minimal problem, a dull roar in the background." Yet early this year, amid heightened publicity about false information on the site, the community decided to introduce semi-protection of some articles. The four-day waiting period is meant to function something like the one imposed on gun buyers.
Once the assaults have died down, the semi-protected page is often reset to "anyone can edit" mode. An entry on Bill Gates was semi-protected for just a few days in January, but some entries, like the article on President Bush, stay that way indefinitely. Other semi-protected subjects as of yesterday were Opus Dei, Tony Blair and sex.
To some critics, protection policies make a mockery of the "anyone can edit" notion.
"As Wikipedia has tried to improve its quality, it's beginning to look more and more like an editorial structure," said Nicholas Carr, a technology writer who recently criticized Wikipedia on his blog. "To say that great work can be created by an army of amateurs with very little control is a distortion of what Wikipedia really is."
But Mr. Wales dismissed such criticism, saying there had always been protections and filters on the site.
Wikipedia's defenders say it usually takes just a few days for all but the most determined vandals to retreat.
"A cooling-off period is a wonderful mediative technique," said Ross Mayfield, chief executive of a company called Socialtext that is based on the same editing technology that Wikipedia uses.
Full protection often results from a "revert war," in which users madly change the wording back and forth. In such cases, an administrator usually steps in and freezes the page until the warring parties can settle their differences in another venue, usually the talk page for the entry. The Christina Aguilera entry was frozen this week after after fans of the singer fought back against one user's efforts to streamline it.
Much discussion of Wikipedia has focused on its accuracy. Last year, an article in the journal Nature concluded that the incidence of errors in Wikipedia was only slightly higher than in Encyclopaedia Britannica. Officials at Britannica angrily disputed the findings.
"To be able to do an encyclopedia without having the ability to differentiate between experts and the general public is very, very difficult," said Jorge Cauz, the president of Britannica, whose subscription-based online version receives a small fraction of the traffic that Wikipedia gets.
Intentional mischief can go undetected for long periods. In the article about John Seigenthaler Sr., who served in the Kennedy administration, a suggestion that he was involved in the assassinations of both John F. and Robert Kennedy was on the site for more than four months before Mr. Seigenthaler discovered it. He wrote an op-ed article in USA Today about the incident, calling Wikipedia "a flawed and irresponsible research tool."
Yet Wikipedians say that in general the accuracy of an article grows organically. At first, said Wayne Saewyc, a Wikipedia volunteer in Vancouver, British Columbia, "everything is edited mercilessly by idiots who do stupid and weird things to it." But as the article grows, and citations slowly accumulate, Mr. Saewyc said, the article becomes increasingly accurate.
Wikipedians often speak of how powerfully liberating their first contribution felt. Kathleen Walsh, 23, a recent college graduate who majored in music, recalled the first time she added to an article on the contrabassoon.
"I wrote a paragraph of text and there it was," recalled Ms. Walsh. "You write all these pages for college and no one ever sees it, and you write for Wikipedia and the whole world sees it, instantly."
Ms. Walsh is an administrator, a post that others nominated her for in recognition of her contributions to the site. She monitors a list of newly created pages, half of which, she said, end up being good candidates for deletion. Many are "nonsense pages created by kids, like 'Michael is a big dork,' " she said.
Ms. Walsh also serves on the 14-member arbitration committee, which she describes as "the last resort" for disputes on Wikipedia.
Like so many Web-based successes, Wikipedia started more or less by accident.
Six years ago, Mr. Wales, who built up a comfortable nest egg in a brief career as an options trader, started an online encyclopedia called Nupedia.com, with content to be written by experts. But after attracting only a few dozen articles, Mr. Wales started Wikipedia on the side. It grew exponentially.
For the first year or so, Mr. Wales paid the expenses out of his own pocket. Now the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia, is financed primarily through donations, most in the $50 to $100 range.
As the donations have risen, so have the costs. The foundation's annual budget doubled in the last year, to $1.5 million, and traffic has grown sharply. Search engines like Google, which often turn up Wikipedia entries at the top of their results, are a big contributor to the site's traffic, but it is increasingly a first stop for knowledge seekers.
Mr. Wales shares the work of running Wikipedia with the administrators and four paid employees of the foundation. Although many decisions are made by consensus within the community, Mr. Wales steps in when an issue is especially contentious. "It's not always obvious when something becomes policy," he said. "One way is when I say it is."
Mr. Wales is a true believer in the power of wiki page-editing technology, which predates Wikipedia. In late 2004, Mr. Wales started Wikia, a commercial start-up financed by venture capital that lets people build Web sites based around a community of interest. Wiki 24, for instance, is an unofficial encyclopedia for the television show "24." Unlike Wikipedia, the site carries advertising.
Mr. Wales, 39, lives with his wife and daughter in St. Petersburg, Fla., where the foundation is based. But Mr. Wales's main habitat these days, he said, is the inside of airplanes. He travels constantly, giving speeches to reverential audiences and visiting Wikipedians around the world.
Wikipedia has inspired its share of imitators. A group of scientists has started the peer-reviewed Encyclopedia of Earth, and Congresspedia is a new encyclopedia with an article about each member of Congress.
But beyond the world of reference works, Wikipedia has become a symbol of the potential of the Web.
"It can tell us a lot about the future of knowledge creation, which will depend much less on individual heroism and more on collaboration," said Mitchell Kapor, a computer industry pioneer who is president of the Open Source Applications Foundation.
Zephyr Teachout, a lawyer in Burlington, Vt., who is involved with Congresspedia, said Wikipedia was reminiscent of old-fashioned civic groups like the Grange, whose members took individual responsibility for the organization's livelihood.
"It blows open what's possible," said Ms. Teachout. "What I hope is that these kinds of things lead to thousands of other experiments like this encyclopedia, which we never imagined could be produced in this way."
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
Growing Wikipedia Revises Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy / NY Times
By KATIE HAFNER
Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia that "anyone can edit." Unless you want to edit the entries on Albert Einstein, human rights in China or Christina Aguilera.
Wikipedia's come-one, come-all invitation to write and edit articles, and the surprisingly successful results, have captured the public imagination. But it is not the experiment in freewheeling collective creativity it might seem to be, because maintaining so much openness inevitably involves some tradeoffs.
At its core, Wikipedia is not just a reference work but also an online community that has built itself a bureaucracy of sorts — one that, in response to well-publicized problems with some entries, has recently grown more elaborate. It has a clear power structure that gives volunteer administrators the authority to exercise editorial control, delete unsuitable articles and protect those that are vulnerable to vandalism.
Those measures can put some entries outside of the "anyone can edit" realm. The list changes rapidly, but as of yesterday, the entries for Einstein and Ms. Aguilera were among 82 that administrators had "protected" from all editing, mostly because of repeated vandalism or disputes over what should be said. Another 179 entries — including those for George W. Bush, Islam and Adolf Hitler — were "semi-protected," open to editing only by people who had been registered at the site for at least four days. (See a List of Protected Entries)
While these measures may appear to undermine the site's democratic principles, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, notes that protection is usually temporary and affects a tiny fraction of the 1.2 million entries on the English-language site.
"Protection is a tool for quality control, but it hardly defines Wikipedia," Mr. Wales said. "What does define Wikipedia is the volunteer community and the open participation."
From the start, Mr. Wales gave the site a clear mission: to offer free knowledge to everybody on the planet. At the same time, he put in place a set of rules and policies that he continues to promote, like the need to present information with a neutral point of view.
The system seems to be working. Wikipedia is now the Web's third-most-popular news and information source, beating the sites of CNN and Yahoo News, according to Nielsen NetRatings.
The bulk of the writing and editing on Wikipedia is done by a geographically diffuse group of 1,000 or so regulars, many of whom are administrators on the site.
"A lot of people think of Wikipedia as being 10 million people, each adding one sentence," Mr. Wales said. "But really the vast majority of work is done by this small core community."
The administrators are all volunteers, most of them in their 20's. They are in constant communication — in real-time online chats, on "talk" pages connected to each entry and via Internet mailing lists. The volunteers share the job of watching for vandalism, or what Mr. Wales called "drive-by nonsense." Customized software — written by volunteers — also monitors changes to articles.
Mr. Wales calls vandalism to the encyclopedia "a minimal problem, a dull roar in the background." Yet early this year, amid heightened publicity about false information on the site, the community decided to introduce semi-protection of some articles. The four-day waiting period is meant to function something like the one imposed on gun buyers.
Once the assaults have died down, the semi-protected page is often reset to "anyone can edit" mode. An entry on Bill Gates was semi-protected for just a few days in January, but some entries, like the article on President Bush, stay that way indefinitely. Other semi-protected subjects as of yesterday were Opus Dei, Tony Blair and sex.
To some critics, protection policies make a mockery of the "anyone can edit" notion.
"As Wikipedia has tried to improve its quality, it's beginning to look more and more like an editorial structure," said Nicholas Carr, a technology writer who recently criticized Wikipedia on his blog. "To say that great work can be created by an army of amateurs with very little control is a distortion of what Wikipedia really is."
But Mr. Wales dismissed such criticism, saying there had always been protections and filters on the site.
Wikipedia's defenders say it usually takes just a few days for all but the most determined vandals to retreat.
"A cooling-off period is a wonderful mediative technique," said Ross Mayfield, chief executive of a company called Socialtext that is based on the same editing technology that Wikipedia uses.
Full protection often results from a "revert war," in which users madly change the wording back and forth. In such cases, an administrator usually steps in and freezes the page until the warring parties can settle their differences in another venue, usually the talk page for the entry. The Christina Aguilera entry was frozen this week after after fans of the singer fought back against one user's efforts to streamline it.
Much discussion of Wikipedia has focused on its accuracy. Last year, an article in the journal Nature concluded that the incidence of errors in Wikipedia was only slightly higher than in Encyclopaedia Britannica. Officials at Britannica angrily disputed the findings.
"To be able to do an encyclopedia without having the ability to differentiate between experts and the general public is very, very difficult," said Jorge Cauz, the president of Britannica, whose subscription-based online version receives a small fraction of the traffic that Wikipedia gets.
Intentional mischief can go undetected for long periods. In the article about John Seigenthaler Sr., who served in the Kennedy administration, a suggestion that he was involved in the assassinations of both John F. and Robert Kennedy was on the site for more than four months before Mr. Seigenthaler discovered it. He wrote an op-ed article in USA Today about the incident, calling Wikipedia "a flawed and irresponsible research tool."
Yet Wikipedians say that in general the accuracy of an article grows organically. At first, said Wayne Saewyc, a Wikipedia volunteer in Vancouver, British Columbia, "everything is edited mercilessly by idiots who do stupid and weird things to it." But as the article grows, and citations slowly accumulate, Mr. Saewyc said, the article becomes increasingly accurate.
Wikipedians often speak of how powerfully liberating their first contribution felt. Kathleen Walsh, 23, a recent college graduate who majored in music, recalled the first time she added to an article on the contrabassoon.
"I wrote a paragraph of text and there it was," recalled Ms. Walsh. "You write all these pages for college and no one ever sees it, and you write for Wikipedia and the whole world sees it, instantly."
Ms. Walsh is an administrator, a post that others nominated her for in recognition of her contributions to the site. She monitors a list of newly created pages, half of which, she said, end up being good candidates for deletion. Many are "nonsense pages created by kids, like 'Michael is a big dork,' " she said.
Ms. Walsh also serves on the 14-member arbitration committee, which she describes as "the last resort" for disputes on Wikipedia.
Like so many Web-based successes, Wikipedia started more or less by accident.
Six years ago, Mr. Wales, who built up a comfortable nest egg in a brief career as an options trader, started an online encyclopedia called Nupedia.com, with content to be written by experts. But after attracting only a few dozen articles, Mr. Wales started Wikipedia on the side. It grew exponentially.
For the first year or so, Mr. Wales paid the expenses out of his own pocket. Now the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia, is financed primarily through donations, most in the $50 to $100 range.
As the donations have risen, so have the costs. The foundation's annual budget doubled in the last year, to $1.5 million, and traffic has grown sharply. Search engines like Google, which often turn up Wikipedia entries at the top of their results, are a big contributor to the site's traffic, but it is increasingly a first stop for knowledge seekers.
Mr. Wales shares the work of running Wikipedia with the administrators and four paid employees of the foundation. Although many decisions are made by consensus within the community, Mr. Wales steps in when an issue is especially contentious. "It's not always obvious when something becomes policy," he said. "One way is when I say it is."
Mr. Wales is a true believer in the power of wiki page-editing technology, which predates Wikipedia. In late 2004, Mr. Wales started Wikia, a commercial start-up financed by venture capital that lets people build Web sites based around a community of interest. Wiki 24, for instance, is an unofficial encyclopedia for the television show "24." Unlike Wikipedia, the site carries advertising.
Mr. Wales, 39, lives with his wife and daughter in St. Petersburg, Fla., where the foundation is based. But Mr. Wales's main habitat these days, he said, is the inside of airplanes. He travels constantly, giving speeches to reverential audiences and visiting Wikipedians around the world.
Wikipedia has inspired its share of imitators. A group of scientists has started the peer-reviewed Encyclopedia of Earth, and Congresspedia is a new encyclopedia with an article about each member of Congress.
But beyond the world of reference works, Wikipedia has become a symbol of the potential of the Web.
"It can tell us a lot about the future of knowledge creation, which will depend much less on individual heroism and more on collaboration," said Mitchell Kapor, a computer industry pioneer who is president of the Open Source Applications Foundation.
Zephyr Teachout, a lawyer in Burlington, Vt., who is involved with Congresspedia, said Wikipedia was reminiscent of old-fashioned civic groups like the Grange, whose members took individual responsibility for the organization's livelihood.
"It blows open what's possible," said Ms. Teachout. "What I hope is that these kinds of things lead to thousands of other experiments like this encyclopedia, which we never imagined could be produced in this way."
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
Thursday, June 15, 2006
Edit your videos online: reduce cost and complexity?
June 15, 2006 NY Times
Camera. Action. Edit. Now, Await Reviews.
By SCOTT KIRSNER
The music video for the surreal folk song "I Got a Bunny," written and performed by Juanito Moore, is not something you will see on VH1.
But the video, shot on a rainy sidewalk in front of Mr. Moore's home in Grand Rapids, Mich., has another distinction: it was assembled, not in a traditional cutting room or with PC-based editing software, but entirely on the Web, using an online service called Jumpcut.
The minute-and-a-half video was shot with a digital still camera, which Mr. Moore occasionally swings around by its tripod as he lists the bizarre animals in his imaginary menagerie.
While sites like YouTube and Veoh have lately become popular for allowing users to share their self-produced videos, Jumpcut (www.jumpcut.com) is part of a new class of sites that also offer simple tools for stringing together video clips and then adding soundtracks, titles, transitions and unusual visual effects.
All of the sites, which include Jumpcut, Eyespot, Grouper and VideoEgg, have been introduced within the last year. This summer, they will be joined by another site, Motionbox, based in New York.
Their shared objective, the founders of the sites say, is to reduce the complexity of video editing and to reduce the cost to zero.
"We wanted to make video editing over the Internet faster than desktop editing," said Jim Kaskade, co-founder and chief executive of Eyespot, based in San Diego. "We think it will broaden the base of people who are creative, but may not have thought they were, by creating this tool kit for them. Editing video is eventually going to be as simple as sending e-mail."
See the remainder of the article at the NYTimes.
Camera. Action. Edit. Now, Await Reviews.
By SCOTT KIRSNER
The music video for the surreal folk song "I Got a Bunny," written and performed by Juanito Moore, is not something you will see on VH1.
But the video, shot on a rainy sidewalk in front of Mr. Moore's home in Grand Rapids, Mich., has another distinction: it was assembled, not in a traditional cutting room or with PC-based editing software, but entirely on the Web, using an online service called Jumpcut.
The minute-and-a-half video was shot with a digital still camera, which Mr. Moore occasionally swings around by its tripod as he lists the bizarre animals in his imaginary menagerie.
While sites like YouTube and Veoh have lately become popular for allowing users to share their self-produced videos, Jumpcut (www.jumpcut.com) is part of a new class of sites that also offer simple tools for stringing together video clips and then adding soundtracks, titles, transitions and unusual visual effects.
All of the sites, which include Jumpcut, Eyespot, Grouper and VideoEgg, have been introduced within the last year. This summer, they will be joined by another site, Motionbox, based in New York.
Their shared objective, the founders of the sites say, is to reduce the complexity of video editing and to reduce the cost to zero.
"We wanted to make video editing over the Internet faster than desktop editing," said Jim Kaskade, co-founder and chief executive of Eyespot, based in San Diego. "We think it will broaden the base of people who are creative, but may not have thought they were, by creating this tool kit for them. Editing video is eventually going to be as simple as sending e-mail."
See the remainder of the article at the NYTimes.
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Bruce Allen in London: the Tower bridge, not the London bridge
The Tower of London is a castle on the Thames where the royal family resided centuries ago. Today it's an artifact filled with stories. Nearby is this bridge, the Tower Bridge.
Bruce Allen is an artist and art prof at Centenary College.
Bruce Allen is an artist and art prof at Centenary College.
Bruce Allen in London: the British Museum
Allen is head of the art dept. at Centenary College. This is a shot of one of the world's most famous displays: the Elgin Marbles. When the British Empire was at its peak the British purloined a lot of neat stuff. From wikipedia:
The Parthenon Marbles, often called the Elgin Marbles, is a large collection of marble sculptures brought to Britain in 1806 by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1799-1803. Taking advantange of Ottoman suzerainty over what is now Greece, he obtained a firman for their removal from the Parthenon from the Ottoman Sultan. The sculptures were deposited in the British Museum, London in 1816.
Today the Greeks want all of it back, understandably.
The Parthenon Marbles, often called the Elgin Marbles, is a large collection of marble sculptures brought to Britain in 1806 by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1799-1803. Taking advantange of Ottoman suzerainty over what is now Greece, he obtained a firman for their removal from the Parthenon from the Ottoman Sultan. The sculptures were deposited in the British Museum, London in 1816.
Today the Greeks want all of it back, understandably.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Figs: man's most ancient domesticated fruit
In West Bank, a First Hint of Agriculture: Figs
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
In the ruins of a prehistoric village near Jericho, in the West Bank, scientists have found remains of figs that they say appear to be the earliest known cultivated fruit crop, perhaps the first evidence anywhere of domesticated food production at the dawn of agriculture. The figs were grown some 11,400 years ago.
Presumably that was well after Adam and Eve tried on the new look in fig leaves, in which case the fig must have grown wild in Eden.
Two botanists and an archaeologist, who describe the discovery in today's issue of the journal Science, said the figs came from cultivated trees that grew about 1,000 years before such staples as wheat, barley and chickpeas were widely domesticated in the Middle East. These grain and legume crops had been considered the first steps in agriculture.
The researchers uncovered nine small figs in the ruins of a burned building. The fire left the figs charred, preserving them in a condition for detailed analysis. The researchers established the age of the cache by dating the fire's remains.
A comparison with modern wild and domesticated varieties, the scientists said, led them to conclude that the ancient figs had undergone a mutation in the wild that produced a sweet fruit but no fertile seeds.
Because these trees were a reproductive dead end, the botanists reasoned, they could have been propagated only by people planting shoots of the variant strain again and again. A piece of stem stuck in the ground will sprout roots and grow into a tree, which could explain why figs were domesticated much earlier than grapes, olives and other fruit plants.
The archaeobotanists who conducted the study were Mordechai Kislev and Anat Hartman of Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Their co-author of the journal report was Ofer Bar-Yosef, an archaeologist at the Peabody Museum of Harvard.
In an interview by telephone from Israel, Dr. Bar-Yosef said that he was "confident about the identification of the figs as being of a domesticated variety" and that they were probably the earliest known domesticated crop. The cultivation technique, he said, seemed to be well enough advanced to suggest that people had thus been intervening in nature for several centuries.
NY Times June 2, 06
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
In the ruins of a prehistoric village near Jericho, in the West Bank, scientists have found remains of figs that they say appear to be the earliest known cultivated fruit crop, perhaps the first evidence anywhere of domesticated food production at the dawn of agriculture. The figs were grown some 11,400 years ago.
Presumably that was well after Adam and Eve tried on the new look in fig leaves, in which case the fig must have grown wild in Eden.
Two botanists and an archaeologist, who describe the discovery in today's issue of the journal Science, said the figs came from cultivated trees that grew about 1,000 years before such staples as wheat, barley and chickpeas were widely domesticated in the Middle East. These grain and legume crops had been considered the first steps in agriculture.
The researchers uncovered nine small figs in the ruins of a burned building. The fire left the figs charred, preserving them in a condition for detailed analysis. The researchers established the age of the cache by dating the fire's remains.
A comparison with modern wild and domesticated varieties, the scientists said, led them to conclude that the ancient figs had undergone a mutation in the wild that produced a sweet fruit but no fertile seeds.
Because these trees were a reproductive dead end, the botanists reasoned, they could have been propagated only by people planting shoots of the variant strain again and again. A piece of stem stuck in the ground will sprout roots and grow into a tree, which could explain why figs were domesticated much earlier than grapes, olives and other fruit plants.
The archaeobotanists who conducted the study were Mordechai Kislev and Anat Hartman of Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Their co-author of the journal report was Ofer Bar-Yosef, an archaeologist at the Peabody Museum of Harvard.
In an interview by telephone from Israel, Dr. Bar-Yosef said that he was "confident about the identification of the figs as being of a domesticated variety" and that they were probably the earliest known domesticated crop. The cultivation technique, he said, seemed to be well enough advanced to suggest that people had thus been intervening in nature for several centuries.
NY Times June 2, 06
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Scholars: top scorers on the geography semester exam
Exams represent only one of the ways we measure intelligence and ability to learn. But testing is endemic to modern society. It is a skill to be cultivated.
Here are the top scorers - those past the 90% mark - in the open notes, multiple-choice section of the geography exam (everyone did well on the hand-sketched map of Western Europe, which was used as the source of points for a curved scale:
1st hr: Anuj Chaniyara
3rd hr: Latisha Williams, Blake Holloway, Ahmad Nawabi.
5th hr: Christina Howard, Jenny Owen, Joshua Atkins, India Davis, Adam West, Kendall Belcher, Michael Harb and the highest scorer overall: Charles Madden.
2nd hr: RJ Bowman, Rebecca Ebarb, James Hall and Craig Smith.
6th hr: Michelle Cardone, Colton Cowley and John Michael Provenza.
Congrats!
Here are the top scorers - those past the 90% mark - in the open notes, multiple-choice section of the geography exam (everyone did well on the hand-sketched map of Western Europe, which was used as the source of points for a curved scale:
1st hr: Anuj Chaniyara
3rd hr: Latisha Williams, Blake Holloway, Ahmad Nawabi.
5th hr: Christina Howard, Jenny Owen, Joshua Atkins, India Davis, Adam West, Kendall Belcher, Michael Harb and the highest scorer overall: Charles Madden.
2nd hr: RJ Bowman, Rebecca Ebarb, James Hall and Craig Smith.
6th hr: Michelle Cardone, Colton Cowley and John Michael Provenza.
Congrats!
Monday, May 22, 2006
Semester exam: hand-sketched map & open notes, mult.-choice questions
Semester exam -
1. Hand-drawn map of Western Europe, 20 items. Your choice of nations, cities, bodies of water, mtns. and other sites studied in class.
2. Open notes section: you will have a Scantron sheet and 100 multiple-choice questions. Use a pencil, of course.
* You may use a web site print-out or the usual classroom resources - textbook, dictionaries, encyclopedia, etc. You may not use a computer.
* Questions will be drawn from each of the units we've had since January.
* All questions are from tests we've covered this semester.
* No communication of any sort during the exam! 20 pt. penalty for violating the guidelines. Quietly check with me on any and all concerns.
Portfolios are still being graded - it's a 15 pt assignment - and still being accepted. Submitting a late project is far better than ignoring it.
* Extra credit work period ended May 18.
Questions? trudeau@earthlink.net
1. Hand-drawn map of Western Europe, 20 items. Your choice of nations, cities, bodies of water, mtns. and other sites studied in class.
2. Open notes section: you will have a Scantron sheet and 100 multiple-choice questions. Use a pencil, of course.
* You may use a web site print-out or the usual classroom resources - textbook, dictionaries, encyclopedia, etc. You may not use a computer.
* Questions will be drawn from each of the units we've had since January.
* All questions are from tests we've covered this semester.
* No communication of any sort during the exam! 20 pt. penalty for violating the guidelines. Quietly check with me on any and all concerns.
Portfolios are still being graded - it's a 15 pt assignment - and still being accepted. Submitting a late project is far better than ignoring it.
* Extra credit work period ended May 18.
Questions? trudeau@earthlink.net
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