Camil Stoenescu's blog

The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your “followers,” and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It’s not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, “If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal.”

The basic mechanics of Twitter are remarkably simple. Users publish tweets—those 140-character messages—from a computer or mobile device. As a social network, Twitter revolves around the principle of followers. When you choose to follow another Twitter user, that user’s tweets appear in reverse chronological order on your main Twitter page. If you follow 20 people, you’ll see a mix of tweets scrolling down the page: breakfast-cereal updates, interesting new links, music recommendations, even musings on the future of education. The mix creates a media experience quite unlike anything that has come before it, strangely intimate and at the same time celebrity-obsessed. You glance at your Twitter feed over that first cup of coffee, and in a few seconds you find out that your nephew got into med school and Shaquille O’Neal just finished a cardio workout in Phoenix.

But the key development with Twitter is how we’ve jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of. The most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it’s doing to us. It’s what we’re doing to it.

This is not just a matter of people finding a new use for a tool designed to do something else. In Twitter’s case, the users have been redesigning the tool itself. The convention of grouping a topic or event by the “hashtag”—#hackedu or #inauguration—was spontaneously invented by the Twitter user base (as was the convention of replying to another user with the @ symbol). The ability to search a live stream of tweets was developed by another start-up altogether, Summize, which Twitter purchased last year. Thanks to these innovations, following a live feed of tweets about an event—a political debate or a Lost episode— has become a central part of the Twitter experience. But as recently as 2008, that mode of interaction would have been technically impossible using Twitter. It’s like inventing a toaster oven and then looking around a year later and seeing that your customers have of their own accord turned it into a microwave.

One of the most telling facts about the Twitter platform is that the vast majority of its users interact with the service via software created by third parties. There are dozens of iPhone and BlackBerry applications—all created by enterprising amateur coders or small start-ups—that let you manage Twitter feeds. There are services that help you upload photos and link to them from your tweets and programs that map other Twitizens who are near you geographically.

As the tools have multiplied, we’re discovering extraordinary new things to do with them. In June 2009, when Iranians rose up to protest a rigged election, supporters around the world followed the demonstrations in real time on Twitter. Two months earlier, an anticommunist uprising in Moldova was organized via Twitter. Twitter has become so widely used among political activists in China that the government blocked access to it for a period, in an attempt to censor discussion of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

The rapid-fire innovation we’re seeing around Twitter is not new, of course. Facebook, whose audience is still several times as large as Twitter’s, went from being a way to scope out the most attractive college freshmen to the Social Operating System of the Internet, supporting a vast ecosystem of new applications created by major media companies, individual hackers, game creators, political groups, and charities. The Apple iPhone’s long-term competitive advantage may well prove to be the more than 15,000 new applications that have been developed for the device, expanding its functionality in countless ingenious ways.

The history of the Web followed a similar pattern. A platform originally designed to help scholars share academic documents, it now lets you watch television shows, play poker with strangers around the world, publish your own newspaper, rediscover your highschool girlfriend—and, yes, tell the world what you had for breakfast. The speed with which users have extended Twitter’s platform points to a larger truth about modern innovation. When we talk about innovation and global competitiveness, we tend to fall back on the easy metric of patents and Ph.D.’s. It turns out the US share of both has been in steady decline since peaking in the early 1970s. Since the mid1980s, a long progression of doomsayers have warned that our declining market share in the patents-and-Ph.D.’s business augurs dark times for American innovation.

But what actually happened to American innovation during that period? We came up with America Online, Netscape, Amazon, Google, Blogger, Wikipedia, Craigslist, TiVo, Netflix, eBay, the iPod and iPhone, Xbox, Facebook, and Twitter itself. Sure, we didn’t build the Prius or the Wii, but if you measure global innovation in terms of actual lifestyle-changing hit products and not just grad students, the US has been lapping the field for the past 20 years.

How could the forecasts have been so wrong? The answer is that we’ve been tracking only part of the innovation story, ignoring what Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Eric von Hippel calls “enduser innovation,” in which consumers actively modify a product to adapt it to their needs. In its short life, Twitter has been a hothouse of end-user innovation: the hashtag; searching; its 11,000 third-party applications; all those creative new uses of Twitter—some of them banal, some of them spam, and some of them sublime.

This is what I ultimately find most inspiring about the Twitter phenomenon. We are living through the worst economic crisis in generations, with apocalyptic headlines threatening the end of capitalism as we know it, and yet in the middle of this chaos, the engineers at Twitter headquarters are scrambling to keep the servers up, application developers are releasing their latest builds, and ordinary users are figuring out all the ingenious ways to put these tools to use. There’s a kind of resilience here that is worth savoring. The weather reports keep announcing that the sky is falling, but here we are—millions of us—sitting around trying to invent new ways to talk to one another.

                                                                                            Steven Johnson – Encyclopedia Britannica Almanac 2010

Conform unui sondaj Gallup, efectuat în 2009, cele mai sărace țări din lume sunt acelea în care sentimentul religios este foarte puternic:

Explicația alternativă la concluzia firească – religia ca indicator al sărăciei/înapoierii – ar fi aceea că, lipsiți de satisfacții concrete, materiale, oamenii se refugiază în religios pentru a evada din realitatea cotidiană.

Deloc surprinzător, Statele Unite sunt excepția de la regulă – un stat bogat în care majoritatea respondenților (65%) consideră că religia joacă un rol important în viața lor. Cu 84% răspunsuri afirmative, România se află în „top”, înaintea unor țări precum Irak, Turkmenistan sau Republica Moldova. Nici nu e de mirare, având în vedere că în orice cătun există câte o biserică; mai greu cu școlile și dispensarele, conform principiului „dacă tot nu-i putem educa sau vindeca, măcar îngropăciunea să fie după tot dichisul”.

Ideea unui american, Alec Brownstein pe nume, transpusă – cu doar șase dolari – în locul de muncă visat:

Meet Alec Brownstein, senior copywriter at creative advertising shop Young & Rubicam (Y&R) New York. Last summer, Alec was just another tired, 28-year-old copywriter at a large international ad agency who wanted nothing more than to work at “a really creative shop for really creative [creative directors].”

 

While Googling his favorite creative directors last summer, Brownstein noticed that there were no sponsored links attached to their names. Since Brownstein Googles himself “embarassingly frequently,” he assumed that the creative directors did so as well, and thus he decided to purchase their names on Google AdWords.

 

“Everybody Googles themselves,” Brownstein explained. “Even if they don’t admit it. I wanted to invade that secret, egotistical moment when [the creative directors I admired] were most vulnerable.”

 

Since Brownstein was the only person bidding on the names of the five creative directors he most admired, he was able to get the top search spots for a mere 15 cents per click. Whenever someone ran a search for one of the creative directors’ names, the following message appeared at the top of the page: “Hey, [creative director's name]: Goooogling [sic] yourself is a lot of fun. Hiring me is fun, too” with a link to Brownstein’s website.

 

Over the next couple of months, Brownstein received calls from all but one of the creative directors whose names he had purchased. And finally, at the end of the year, he received a job offer from two: Scott Virtrone and Ian Reichenthal of Y&R New York.

 

The whole campaign cost him $6.

Reportajul din New York Times mi-a atras atenția, dincolo de tematică și modalitatea de abordare, datorită prezenței unui nume neaoș românesc – Oana Marin – printre fumătorii ce fac obiectul articolului respectiv, într-o societate americană în care fumatul devine tot mai stigmatizat:

“I always thought it would have made me sick or made me cough,” Ms. Marian said as she recalled her first drag, at 16, at that summer camp in Romania. “But it was like I had always smoked.”

Her father was a journalist and her mother worked at the National Theater; both smoked. Her father’s position brought them privilege — a nice apartment in the center of Bucharest, the summer camp. Ms. Marian attended a government school that focused on physics.

She smoked off and on, mostly at a cafe over a cup of coffee. But it wasn’t until she moved to Haifa, Israel, with her mother, after her father died, that she bought her first pack. She was a student again, studying electromagnetic engineering at Technion, Haifa’s polytechnic university. Everyone smoked, so she smoked more.

She met her husband there. He was studying civil engineering. They began as friends in 1981 and romance seeped in. In 1986, they married. In time, she tossed engineering aside to help a friend with corporate accounts at a travel agency.

“I always liked to travel,” she said. “All these nice places. It spoke to me.”

Moving to the United States was a key goal. She settled into Jackson Heights, Queens, in 1990 with her husband and had a son, who graduated from Bronx High School of Sciencetwo years ago. He is 19 now, a sophomore at the State University at Stony Brook. She worked first as manager of an Israeli restaurant in Queens, then jumped to reservations at a travel agency, and now coordinates travel road shows for clients of HRG, a huge firm specializing in corporate travel.

She became a citizen in 2000 and, like many immigrants, is fiercely loyal and proud of her adopted country. “If anybody asks what I am, I say American,” she said.

But, like a parent with a gifted child who doesn’t live up to expectations, she has been occasionally disappointed. She expected a meritocracy, where hard work and intelligence rule the day, and found that whom you know and how you present yourself can best the best. The smoking rules, too, bring back a few memories of her childhood.

“Land of the free, I envisioned it that way,” she added. “I probably idealized it. Being born and raised in a Communist regime, I was looking for the exact opposite — capitalism, free market, individual freedoms.”

O „felie” dintr-o societate diferită, o lectură instructivă.

În prezent – cât și cum se produce energia electrică și care sunt principalii consumatori:

Și evoluția producției și consumului de energie, între 1949 și 2009:

La o primă vedere: consumul de energie – total și pe cap de locuitor – a cunoscut o creștere continuă în ultimii 60 de ani, iar în prezent înregistrează o ușoară scădere, după maximul atins la începutul anilor 2000. Strâns corelate cu indicatorul anterior, cheltuielile cu energia au crescut într-un ritm și mai spectaculos, în special după 1990. Totodată, lesne de observat, schimbările în producție nu sunt substanțiale – cărbunele și petrolul au continuat să fie principalele surse de energie, urmate de cea nucleară. Cu toată publicitatea făcută, sursele alternative/nepoluante de producere a energiei aduc un aport simbolic în tabloul de ansamblu. Dar, cel mai probabil, în viitor situația nu poate decât să se schimbe.

De aici.

PS  1 Quad = 1.055 × 10¹⁸ jouli.

„anul nou 1945.

Baza aeriana Hiro din Honshu-ul de Nord. Căpitanul Joshiro Tsubaki, comandantul bazei, tocmai convocase o adunare extraordinară.

Tăceam cu toții, nu se auzea decât plânsul ploii pe acoperiș. Căpitanul ne-a permis să ne așezăm, el însuși ședea cu mâinile încrucișate, împungându-ne pe rând, pe fiecare cu privirea. După o clipă, care nouă ni se păru o veșnicie, spuse:

- În sfârșit, a venit timpul. Ne aflăm în fața unor hotărâri capitale…

Dupa care tăcu. Eu însă simțeam cum mă cuprinde frica, o frică mai mare decât toate cele pe care le cunoscusem până atunci. Intrase moartea printre noi, pusese stăpânire pe fiecare. Iar cuvintele căpitanului sunaseră atât de ciudat…

- Niciunuia dintre voi, care nu-i în stare sășsi dea viața pentru marele imperiu japonez, nu-i voi cere s-o facă. Cel care însă nu-i capabil să onoreze această cinste, să ridice mâna.

Se făcu din nou liniște, moartea devenise aproape palpabilă. Apoi, ezitant, timid, unul ridica mâna. Al doilea…al treilea…al cincilea…Șase, în total. Trebuia sa mă hotărăsc, să aleg între viață și moarte. Sigur, da, categoric vreau să traiesc! Dar mâinile mele tremurătoare rămaseră încremenite. Voiam să le ridic, dar ele nu mă ascultau.

- Așa, spuse căpitanul privindu-i pe cei care ridicaseră mâna. Aici, continuă el arătându-i pe cei șase, toți cu fețe de cenușă, aici se află șase insi care și-au manifestat lipsa lor totală de patriotism și curaj. Ei bine, acești indivizi vor alcătui prima grupă de șoc a bazei noastre!

Asta ne-a tăiat respirația pe care și-așa ne-o auzeam de multă vreme. Șase oameni de la baza noastră fuseseră aleși pentru a muri primii…

Primele bombe umane de la baza Hiro."

Ryuji Nagatsuka -  "Am fost un kamikaze"

După cum prea-bine se știe, economia Republici Populare China a depășit-o pe cea a Japoniei, în cifre absolute (Produs Intern Brut), ajungând pe locul doi în lume, după cea a Statelor Unite. Nimic nou aici, este rezultatul a treizeci de ani de creștere economică neîntreruptă, stimulată de politici economice coerente. Ascensiunea economică din ultimele decenii a Indiei și Chinei nu face decât să le reașeze pe acestea pe poziția în care s-au aflat cea mai mare parte a istoriei, cu excepția secolelor XIX și XX, adică unele dintre principalele economii ale lumii.

Iar din punctul de vedere al populației un singur indicator contează cu adevărat – venitul mediu pe cap de locuitor. Din această perspectivă, China nu se află nici măcar în aceeași ligă cu statele pe care le-a depășit la volumul producției economice:

Cifrele sunt elocvente: cu 6600 de dolari pe an pe cap de locuitor, China se află (încă) sub media lumii (10 500 dolari) comparațiile cu Statele Unite (46 400) sau Uniunea Europeană (32 600 dolari) devenind absurde.

Datele provin de aici.

PS  16 din cele mai poluate 20 de orașe din lume se află în China.

Pentru a studia modul în care tehnologia modernă afectează creierul și comportamentul uman, cinci cercetători americani au petrecut o săptămână în Utah, izolați de lume și fără mijloace electronice de comunicație:

Mr. Braver, a psychology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, was one of five neuroscientists on an unusual journey. They spent a week in late May in this remote area of southern Utah, rafting the San Juan River, camping on the soft banks and hiking the tributary canyons.

It was a primitive trip with a sophisticated goal: to understand how heavy use of digital devices and other technology changes how we think and behave, and how a retreat into nature might reverse those effects.

Cellphones do not work here, e-mail is inaccessible and laptops have been left behind. It is a trip into the heart of silence — increasingly rare now that people can get online even in far-flung vacation spots.[…]

Scientists have long thought about how new forms of media affect attention — from the printing press to the television. But the modern study of attention emerged in the early 1980s with the spread of machines that allowed researchers to see changes in blood flow and electrical activity in the brain. Newer machines have let them pinpoint the parts of the brain that light up when people switch from one task to another, or when they are paying attention to music or a movie.

Concluzia? Bombardamentul la care suntem zilnic supuși de către informația digitală – în cea mai mare parte neimportantă cu adevărat – creează o falsă senzație de urgență, de a fi mereu conectat, dinamic și ocupat, iar capacitatea de concentrare și atenția pe termen lung au de suferit.

Personal, găsesc o plăcere subtilă în a închide telefonul pentru ceva timp și a nu verifica e-mailul câteva zile. Dar până la dezideratul „o lună fără Internet” mai este de lucrat.

PS O lectură interesantă cu privire la dependența de Internet poate fi găsită aici.

Trei activități își iau partea leului: rețelele sociale/cititul blogurilor, jocurile și mesageria electronică. De remarcat creșterea substanțială a timpului alocat rețelelor sociale, de la 15.8% la 22.7%, în decurs de doar un an. Facebook ajunge la 500 de milioane de utilizatori iar industria farmaceutică prosperă vânzând tot mai multe antidepresive.

De aici.

Pe 6 august 1945 a fost folosită pentru prima dată o bombă atomică împotriva unor ținte umane, la Hiroshima. Peste 3 zile avea să urmeze Nagasaki. Peste încă 6 zile, pe 15 august, Japonia capitula necondiționat.

În ceea ce privește decizia președintelui american Truman de a folosi noile tipuri de bombe, un link instructiv este acesta.

O galerie foto – aici.