Category Archives: Blog

Blog

Welcome to the Dropout Economy

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American pride?This one’s doing the rounds everywhere at the moment (I spotted it thanks to Chairman Bruce and John Robb), and with good reason: it’s a provocative piece, especially coming from Time Magazine. Welcome to the Favela Chic future, American style:

Middle-class kids are taught from an early age that they should work hard and finish school. Yet 3 out of 10 students dropped out of high school as recently as 2006, and less than a third of young people have finished college. Many economists attribute the sluggish wage growth in the U.S. to educational stagnation, which is one reason politicians of every stripe call for doubling or tripling the number of college graduates.

But what if the millions of so-called dropouts are onto something? As conventional high schools and colleges prepare the next generation for jobs that won’t exist, we’re on the cusp of a dropout revolution, one that will spark an era of experimentation in new ways to learn and new ways to live.

Go read the whole thing, and see Reihan Salam predict the rise of roll-your-own web-based homeschooling, resilient sub-communities based on the exchange of labour rather than money, backyard farming and permaculture, mend-and-make-do and hardware hacker attitudes, and a complete volte-face away from institutional politics.

Exaggerated for controversy and effect? Almost certainly… but grown from more than a single grain of truth, I think, and just as likely to happen over here in the Eurobloc, though maybe not so soon or so hard. [image by emseearr]

Blog

Orbital Legislation 101

Via BoingBoing, The Guardian highlights a new module available to law students at Sunderland University on “law and the legal system beyond Earth’s atmosphere”:

Topics already arising in the field include gaps in health and safety for potential space tourists, and damage to satellites from other objects orbiting the Earth. Looking further ahead, some lawyers have raised questions about land titles on the moon or other planets.

Chris Newman, one of the lecturers who will be teaching the module, said: “It is a growing area which has relevance across commercial, company, property, environmental, intellectual property and IT practice sectors. We think that our qualification will offer valuable knowledge in a fascinating area.”

[…]

The syllabus is likely to draw on earlier attempts to extend legislation into uncharted areas, such as the arguments between nations over huge sections of Antarctica. There are no plans as yet to test students on how they would make a case for Earth law against that of other civilisations, should any be discovered.

It’s easy to scoff and file this among the mass of pointless degree topics available to UK undergraduates, but with commercial space operations coming up close behind the nation-state space programs, it’s not going to be all “territory held in mutual trust for the good of all mankind” up there for long. Mix this module with a few more covring squatter’s rights, the successful defense of minerals claim-jumping and some basic tort law, and your new-frontier legal practice is ready for business…

Blog

From King’s Cross to Beijing by rail

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I love to travel by train, me. Though a habit born of necessity in my case (I never took my driving test), there’s so much to recommend it over cars or flying. Especially flying. [image by Let Ideas Compete]

Well, the far edges of my potential-destinations sphere is going to grow considerably in the next ten years or so. Did you know China are the world leaders in high speed train technology? Well, apparently they are, and they’re involved in serious talks with neighbouring nation-states aimed at linking the Chinese rail system to the European one and extending it down onto South East Asia, with China footing the infrastructure bills. Once it’s all done, you could ride from London to Beijing without once needing to take a car, boat or plane… and that’s a journey I’d love to do*.

Interestingly enough (though not surprisingly) there’s more to China’s plans than some sort of idealistic Victorian-era notion of rail travel as symbolic of progress and industrialisation. Indeed, it’s something far more blunt: in exchange for adding considerable value to its partners’ rail networks, China is cutting preferential deals with them on raw materials that it can’t source locally. Remarkably capitalistic thinking for a nominally Communist nation, eh? Talk about moving with the times… might as well make hay while the sun shines, especially if everyone else is waiting out the rain.

[ * – Seriously, if any publishers out there are willing to make a promise to buy the resulting work for a large four-figure sum plus research expenses, there’s a great book to be written once that network is complete, and I’m definitely the guy for the job. Market me as the new (and scruffier) Paul Theroux, perhaps – hell, I’ve got all the cynicism about human nature you’d need to fill his shoes. I might need to work on amping up my condescension toward other cultures, though… ]

Blog

Page-views as metric of journalistic quality

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GalleyCat quotes a speech at the Copyright Clearance Centre’s copyright conference by Gaby Darbyshire, Gawker Media’s COO of finance, legal, operations & business development, in which she discussed the recent change in pay structure wherein Gawker writers are remunerated in proportion to the page-views garnered by the articles they authored:

“When we started paying our writers by the page-view (bonuses based on page-views), everybody started talking about how there would be a race to the bottom–how we’d be writing about nothing except Paris Hilton sex tapes. The absolute opposite has occurred, because at the end of the day, you don’t get a sustained growth in audience [and] in the success of your content, without producing quality.”

She concluded: “What our writers discovered–even though they were scared to start with (they were like, ‘oh my god, we have to find big scoop-y stories)–was that the diligently researched feature type good stuff that’s original and new; that’s what works. That’s what they are incentivized to produce, and we can measure exactly what is successful and what is not–which newspapers, by the way, never could, because you don’t know who is throwing away what section of the paper.”

It’s evidently safe to say that the policy hasn’t done Gawker’s traffic stats any harm… but the issue here is one’s definition of quality*. If quality writing is simply ‘writing that ever-greater numbers of people want to read’, then I guess Gawker has found the secret recipe for success.

I suppose it marks me as some sort of intellectual elitist, but I’m inclined to think that quality and popularity are not correlative in that particular way… which sits awkwardly at odds with my general belief in market forces. If there had never been a market for quality journalism, then we’d never notice having less of it; on the other hand, if we can recognise (or at least worry about) a decline in the amount of quality journalism available, that implies there’s still a demand for it, albeit in smaller volume than the demand for titillating tabloid gossip. It’s all very well chasing “scoop-y” stories, but a scoop about Paris Hilton isn’t of the same worth as a scoop about, say, government corruption, corporate misdeeds and so on. Not in my world, anyway.

An therein lies the rub. It’s different strokes for different folks, in other words; if all you want is page-views and the ad revenue they bring, then by all means write for page-views, because the readers are hungry. Personally, that editorial approach turns me right off (the only Gawker property I follow is Lifehacker, and even that’s been in something of a decline since Gina Trapani stepped away from the steering-wheel), so the question is whether the simple page-views model will work for ‘quality’ journalism… and if it won’t (as seems to be the case), how should it compete with populist sensationalism?

Surely, if web publishing has such superior feedback and analysis data by comparison to print as Darbyshire suggests, there must be a way to make it pay and scale… unless the cynics are right, and proper investigative journalism really has always been subsidised by celebrity gossip and scaremongering.

[ * Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, anyone? ]

Blog

Cleaning up for Street View

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Google Street View camera arrayThe city of Windsor in Ontario, Canada has apparently requested Google reshoot some of its Street View footage in order to remove a murder scene (complete with Do Not Cross police tape barriers and bloody bandages) from the public record, prompting Mike Masnick of TechDirt to wonder…

[… whether] towns and cities are going to start to “prepare” for Google Street View cars coming through and make sure that everyone is on their best behavior…

Seems pretty likely, doesn’t it? [image by sfmine79]

The threat of being seen without one’s “make-up” on has always been around. For instance, I can still remember the way every school I ever attended spent a week gussying the place up and drilling the students in advance of the government inspectors, which was probably one of my earliest cognitive dissonance awakenings – what was the point of inspections if they only occurred after a metaphorical wash’n’brush-up? Why not just, y’know, improve things generally rather than making a last-minute effort once a year*?

This feeds into the idealistic notion that ubiquitous transparency is a good thing, I suppose: if every city (or school, or whatever) knew it could be inspected (or Street View’d) at any time without warning, then perhaps they’d be more likely to fix problems at the root cause instead of sweeping the problems under the rug before the visitors arrive.

Of course, that’s a massive oversimplification of a very complex issue, but the Windsor story is a harbinger of institutional panics yet to come; much as technology could enable nation-states to turn themselves into panopticons, the spotlight can also be pointed in the other direction. The next few decades will be all about the struggle between individuals and corporate or geo-political entities to filter and control their realities as presented to the rest of the world… which is why I’m fairly convinced that augmented reality will be the multi-planar battlefield of manifold and fractal ideological struggles between citizens, states and corporations.

[ * The answer is very obvious now, of course, with the benefit of experience (and the cynicism toward institutions and bureaucracy that it engenders), but for a naive and nerdy seven year old, it was a baffling condundrum. Pity my poor parents attempting to explain these moral grey areas and fundamental societal flaws to a child with no better an instinctive or empathetic grasp of human nature than the Borg… ]