The movie everyone should have been waiting to see….on your computer before at the cinemas.
In an unusual move Freakonomics the Movie is coming to iTunes first on September 3rd and then to a theater on October 1.
Since I read this book (review)
Tags: SUPERFreakonomics, Stephen Dubner, Steven Levitt, Economics, datasets, innovation, energy, population, poverty, technology, Sudir Venkatesh, terrorist, trends
Regrettably the Vancouver Olympics interrupted my reading pattern and its been a slow recovery. I blogged about this book as soon as I learned it was in production back in August. Yikes!
I have been following Larry Lessig‘s work on copyright and our digital culture for some time, reading his positions online, previous books and keynote addresses at TED, Wired and last week to Italy’s Parliament among others. His work on Creative Commons is a direct action from the creative limitations of copyright.
His latest book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy is a very easy read for anyone who has also known his work. He tells an important story about how new technology is clashing with old money.
Lessig illustrates how copyright’s old money (the big media empires) are clashing with today’s society and technology. Old money is winning financial amounts here and there, but ultimately they are cutting their own throat as they can no longer control content. Their motto: since we cannot have it our way anymore (due to the easy distribution of digital content) we are going to sue as many people as we can and take outrageous amounts of money along the way.
Lessig simply points out the two different camps: Read-only versus Read-Write. Look at popular consumer phones and computers. Today anyone can create a short video and post it to YouTube. And by today’s “standard” in social networking — your somewhat expected to post multimedia content on Facebook and YouTube for example.
But post a 29 second video of a baby dancing to Prince’s Lets Go Crazy and Universal Music (they own Prince and his music) files a lawsuit claiming copyright violations. Its old money trying to control society and Lessig points out it clearly no longer works.
Blaise Aguera y Arcas is an architect at Microsoft Live Labs, architect of Seadragon and the co-creator of Photosynth, a monumental piece of software capable of assembling static photos into a synergy of zoomable, navigatable spaces. Check out how this technology will change our approach to imaging.
Tags: Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Seadragon, Photosynth, design, TED, Virtual Reality, imaging, trends
Tags: Visualization, information, Chart Wars, politics, trends
I’m not sure why it took so long to read Malcolm Gladwell‘s latest book Outliers: The Story of Success but I’m sure glad its just as enjoyable as his books The Tipping Point and Blink. As defined scientifically Outliers is an observation that is numerically distant from the rest of the data. Gladwell not only shares compelling stories regarding outliers, but shines in conveying the impact of globalization for math students, airline pilots and more importantly control tower operators in NYC.
Gladwell shares that “The Story of Success” is really interesting when you dig deep into statistics. Gladwell addresses this with hockey players. Yes, hockey players. There is something amazing about playing a game on ice. Hockey requires speed and grace. The fact that its not played on grass, sand or wood makes you wonder if there is “one talent” shared by the best hockey players in the world.
Researchers found that great players actually all fall within birth dates ranging from January to April for hockey and even for most soccer teams. And as Gladwell points out the best hockey players like Gordie Howe, Bobby Orr, Wayne Gretsky, Steve Yzerman, Mario Lemiux and Dominik Hasek all have birth dates that allowed them to play against kids a year younger than them — and to no surprise they were handpicked (at some early stage) to further develop their skills.
Gladwell has taken an interesting angle regarding “success” in what some might even call perfection. Gladwell tells the story of Bill Joy who not only happened to be at the University of Michigan at the right time (to study computing) but more importantly, took the time to spend countless hours learning and programming when he received access to the mainframe at school. Actually Gladwell adds up those hours in his chapter called “The 10,000 hour rule” and points out that ‘talent’ can be achieved in 5 years when you practice 5.5 hours everyday. Once you cross that measurement you have positioned yourself for success. Joy invented BSD Unix and Java.
The same 10,000 hour rule even applied to The Beatles who “had to play for 8 hours” in a strip club in Germany before crossing the Atlantic and ultimately rock n roll fame. Can you imaging some chap telling his wife he saw them play for hours and hours…funny, but true. Wonder what the impact would have been in America if word had gotten out about how they perfected their music?