Sudhir will be on Larry King tonight. Did you catch Sudhir’s appearance on The Colbert Report? The Freakonomics chapter Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live With Their Moms?
Sudhir published his book Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets and has been on the PR circuit.
Tags: Gang Leader for a Day, Sudhir Venkatesh, sociology, Freakonomics, Chicago, trends
I watched a TED video of Barry Schwartz and was interested to learn more about his book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less and learn the downside (and unhappiness) of abundance. Have you noticed as of late that almost everything is available…in too many overwhelming choices?
As Schwartz points out consider the types of choice in your local grocery store: 285 cookie options, 85 types of crackers, 95 types of chips, 75 iced teas, 29 chicken soups, 175 salad dressings and 275 boxes of cereal. Welcome to The Paradox of Choice. Try shopping for a new pair of jeans as he described in his TED presentation and the introduction to this book.
In my childhood things seemed simple. There were just three television channels…plus a PBS station. When the new school started I would receive two or three pairs of stiff denim jeans. Every kid in my school would wear the same dark blue demin and would not feel comfortable until the third week of school. By then our clothes were finally broken in via the wash cycle.
Don’t consider this book the opposite of Chris Anderson‘s The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. It would be more accurate to describe the book as what happens to individuals overwhelmed by choice.
Tom Friedman’s The World Is Flat addressed how Globalization flattens the world. By “Flat” he does not imply equal. Many would agree as American companies have moved jobs and production facilities overseas. But to show the true flattening effect, BMW has announced they are moving vehicle production from Germany to South Carolina. Yes, a major international company moving major production and jobs to the US.
This announcement includes BMW building a 1.2 million square foot facility to their existing production facility in Greenville while eliminating 5,000 jobs in Germany. Auto analysts contribute a weak US Dollar as a contributing factor to this commitment. NPR audio
UPDATE: Wired’s: Can Americans still build Cars?
Tags: BMW, Globalization, Greenville, South Carolina, trends
Verizon’s Business unit joined Internet2 last year and has been working on upgrading their network services unit by scaling their 40GB network to a full 100GB. Scheduled for 2009, their first hops will be in Chicago, New York and Washington DC. Verizon is also converting their rings to optical mesh technology.
Finally just in time for the Olympic games in China (149 days until the opening ceremonies) Verizon’s $500 million terabit cable to China should be fully operational.
Tags: Internet2, Verizon, optical network, olympics, globalization, network, China, trends
Internet2’s EDIT consortium and Educause have been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation for the ongoing development work on middleware technologies. Today more and more organizations need to verify and manage user identity and access. Middleware solutions that automate changing access rights will become even more important.
The goal is to empower IT administrators, faculty and other campus leaders with the ability to make group membership and resource privilege changes using one consolidated tool, rather than updating each individual application. This improves security and reduces the time needed to manage project groups, both on and off campus.
Collaborators want tools such as shared calendaring, videoconferencing, and wikis that integrate their teaching and research lives and their institutional and inter-institutional worlds
Ken Klingenstein,
Internet2 Sr. Director of Middleware and Security
The grant will enable further development and research on both identity and access management. Internet2 has been developing Shibboleth Single Sign-on. Shibboleth is standards-based, open source middleware software which provides Web Single SignOn across or within organizational boundaries. It allows sites to make informed authorization decisions for individual access of protected online resources in a privacy-preserving manner.
Tags: Internet2, Educause, National Science Foundation, Middleware, network, trends