A Networked World

Joining the race to the bottom

Seth is one of my favourite thinkers, although I don't read him often enough and I'm catching up today. This one rang a bell.
Seth's Blog: It's no wonder they don't trust us

The digital world, even the high end brands, has become a sleazy carnival, complete with hawkers, barkers and a bearded lady.

Its more than that, much more. I knew the economy was in the can nearly a decade ago when I walked into my local Coles supermarket in Sydney and say adverts for a TV magazine on the little plastic bar that you use to separate the orders on the checkout conveyor.

I knew, for absolute certain, at that moment, that business was in trouble. I'm sure some bright spark was rewarded for "capturing the checkout bar marketing space" but the fact that they had to do that meant to me that there were no places left for companies to try and squeeze out a profit and that they were scraping the barrel.

That was the day, pretty much, that I started planning my urban homestead because when a big supermarket chains needs the few cents they would get for each checkout bar advert, and the TV mags need to spend it to prop up their sales, we had reached the end of the growth phase of business development and the thing that was about to change was the whole system.

Jim Kunstler asks the question

While he can go over the top a bit, Kunstler is definitely on my team when it comes to the reality-based life. And once again, in Self-jiving Nation he asks the question that nobody else seems to have thought of:

I'd like to know what folks imagine we are recovering to. To a renewed orgy of credit-card spending? To yet another round of suburban expansion, with the boys in the yellow hard-hats driving stakes out in the sagebrush for another new thousand-unit pop-up "community?" For a next generation of super-cars built to look like medieval war wagons? That's the "hope" that our officials seem to pretend to offer.

Exactly, the talking heads all talk about this recovery, but its always a recovery "from" the crash and never, ever, about what our lives and communities and economies will look like once we have "recovered".

It's completely inconsistent with any reality-based trend-lines, by the way.

When the Australian Government commissions a report that says nearly a million homes are in direct danger of rising sea levels and that it should consider compulsory acquiisition and demolition of some homes as an option, the destination of the recovery looks a lot less sunny than most of the discuission would have us assume.  Make evacuation plans

Urgent action to cope with the impact of rising sea levels needs to start now, including improving evacuation routes for coastal communities during extreme storms and flooding.

As well, a sweeping federal parliamentary report calls for an overhaul of the building code to make homes more resilient and for the legal liability for future property losses to be sorted out.

Warning that ''the time to act is now'', the bipartisan report brought down last night states that thousands of kilometres of coastline have been identified as at risk from the threat of rising sea levels and extreme weather events caused by climate change.

The only note of compulsory cynicism I can muster for this one is that, coincidentally, the coastline is disproportionately owned by the wealthiest members of society who would probably be handsomely bailed out by such legislation.

A few years ago they were squawking about their properties being protected and told they would have to suck it up and take the hit because the community could not afford to protect coastal landscape to that degree. Looks like they may have found a good fairy after all.

The mother of invention

Johnnie continues to look at how innovation happens and gently nudges necessity in a couple of quotes.
Johnnie Moore's Weblog: Innovation, disruption, control etc

Bob Geldof made a similar point at a NESTA bash a few months back, where he said innovation happens naturally in response to strong need, linking Ireland's dire poverty to its subsequent reputation for innovation.

In The Future Eaters, however, Tim Flannery finds the delta of that proposition.

"When the first reports of the Tasmanian Aborigines reached Europe they created intense interest. Europeans thought that their simple tool kit and lifestyle meant that they were a very primitive people. For a very long time after, it was widely believed that these apparently truly primitive people had survived in their remote corner of the world because they had not had to compete with more advanced races.

"The French savants of the Baudin Expedition, who observed the Tasmanians in 1802, were amazed that even though the Tasmanians lived in an often bitterly cold climate, they lacked clothing. Extraordinarily, they also lacked the ability to make fire. Mannalargenna, one of the last of the Tasmanian Aborigines to live a traditional life, told of what would happen if a group's fire was extinguished. He said that people had no alternative but to eat raw meat while they walked in search of another tribe. Significantly, one of the universal laws among the Tasmanians was that fire must be given whenever requested, even if the asker was a traditional enemy who would be fought after the gift had been given.

"The French were also struck by the fact that the Tasmanians did not eat fish, even though they were abundant in Tasmania's coastal waters. Francois Peron records that when members of the Baudin Expedition offered some fish which they had caught, the Tasmanians expressed amazement and horror. This was not an isolated instance, for earlier, in 1777, members of Cook's third expedition recorded that Tasmanians reacted with horror or ran away when fish were offered to them.

"There are some other quite extraordinary features of Tasmanian culture. The Tasmanians, for example, had no hafted implements (such as axes), no implements made of bone, no boomerangs or spear throwers, no dingos and no microlithic stone tools. Indeed, their entire tool kit seems to have consisted of about two dozen kinds of objects."

"It is easy to see how the limited material culture of the Tasmanians could seduce the savants of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into classifying the Tasmanians as the world's most primitive people. Not surprisingly, the anatomists of the day had an almost insatiable demand for corpses. Through dissection, they hoped to find additional evidence supporting the idea that the Tasmanians were primitive; maybe even a kind of living, missing link. Needless to say, these anatomical studies yielded no such evidence."

"Until very recently, many people found no reason to doubt the conclusions of nineteenth century science concerning the Tasmanians. But detailed archeological research, much undertaken only in the last few decades, has now shown conclusively that there was nothing primitive about the Tasmanians at all. They were, instead, a highly specialized offshoot of the Australian Aborigines, whose culture evolved under the extraordinary constraints that 10,000 years of solitude would place on any small band of humans.

"The most striking evidence concerning the evolution of the culture of the Tasmanians has come from the study of campsites occupied over the last 7,000 years. Deposits that date to 7,000 years ago or more are full of bone tools, including awls, reamers and needles. There seems to be little doubt that these implements were used for sewing, probably to make skin cloaks similar to those used by the Aborigines of southern Australia right up until the nineteenth century.

"The variety of bone tools found in Tasmanian middens dwindles with time, until eventually, about 3,500 years ago, the last of them disappear from the archaeological record. This suggests that stitched clothing was lost from the material culture of the Tasmanians at about this time.

"Interestingly, the older archaeological sites show that fish--although despised as a food in historic times--once formed an important part of the Tasmanians' diet. Evidence from some sites suggests that fish made up about 10 percent of their diet in the past. . . . Then suddenly, about 3,500 years ago, the remains of fish cease to appear in refuse dumps."

"The most plausible explanation [for the simplification of the material culture of the Tasmanians] seems to lie in the unique isolation and small population size of the Tasmanians. The theory goes something like this. A small group of people are less likely to come up with technological innovations than a larger group. If the group is completely isolated, then new ideas cannot reach it. Because of this, innovation in material culture is slowed. Because the population is small, activities and knowledge may be lost simple through the early death of skilled people before they can pass their skills to the next generation.

"Losses such as that of clothing and the ability to make fire may have resulted from rare, early deaths occurring over a long period of time. The 5,000 Tasmanians lived scattered in small groups. It may be that only one or two people in any one group had all the skills necessary to make bone needles and prepare skins. Over 12,000 years there is a high chance that the few such specialists in any one area would, at some stage, die before they could pass their skills on. Repeated chance events like this might have led to the loss of many skills that require specialized knowledge.

"If the population is small enough, there may be strong evolutionary pressure to dispense with high-risk activities. This is because risks that are acceptable for larger populations can threaten the very survival of smaller ones. The loss of fish from the Tasmanian diet may be an example of a high-risk activity that is strongly selected against and thus lost, in small populations."

"Eating fish can be a risky business, because occasionally a dinoflagellate bloom known as a 'red tide' can lead to mass poisonings. The simultaneous death of hundreds of people in a large human population is a great personal tragedy, but it poses no threat to the survival of that society because the statistical chance of losing all members of one age group or sex is tiny. Such a poisoning in a small population, however, can be a disaster for the entire group. This is because, through chance, it may kill a significant proportion of the women of child-bearing age, or all of the older and more knowledgeable individuals. In order to avoid such catastrophic events, extreme conservatism may be selected for in small societies. This is because in evolutionary terms it may be better to forego the benefit gained from eating such 'dangerous' food as fish, rather than risk an extremely rare but catastrophic poisoning event."

Innovation has a high risk of failure, failure is only acceptable when there is a comfortable distance between that failure and death by starvation. In other words, comfort and wealth are (up to a point) necessary to enable innovation. If I am confident in being able to eat tomorrow, and for the foreseeable future, and to deal with most minor medical issues that might arise, I will be prepared to try new foods, new crops, new recipes and to accept their failures as a learning.

If I live on the edge of survival, I will be MUCH less likely to try new things.

That will be compounded in a culture where personal, individual survival is the highest good. In those cultures where personal sacrifice may be occasionally necessary to ensure the survival of the community (and in some cases like Inuit and Australian Aboriginals or Tikopians where recognition of the end of your value to the community leads to your own death) more experimentation may be possible.

As a slave-owning culture we have been isolated from those kinds of necessities and very possibly lost our ability to recover them in time, but the payoff has been the freedom to innovate.

That our innovations are now choking us speaks volumes for the care we have taken to weed out those innovations that promote selection for failure.

BTW, I'm not being rhetorical about the slave-owning, I keep 60 horses under the bonnet of my car, dishwashing and clothes-washing slaves in my kitchen and laundry, carpentry slaves in my basement, food preservation slaves as well. Not to mention all the food growing, processing and haulage slaves that bring me goodies from round the world.

And what do I do with all this wealth and comfort? Build better iPods so I can listen to music or demand to watch movies on my mobile.

Those Aussies

They are SUCH kidders. Aussie firm sells Twitter followers

Australian media marketing firm uSocial is offering a new paid service allowing organisations to buy Twitter followers to aid their marketing campaigns.

According to the firm, a single Twitter follower could be worth $0.10 a month. It is selling followers in various packages, starting at 1,000 for $87, which is delivered in seven days, and going all the way up to 100,000 followers at a cost of $3,479, delivered over a year.

USocial says it profiles Twitter users to ensure a good fit with their clients, then suggests they follow the Twitter feed of that client – the user then decides whether to follow or not.

OR

These guys need to lay off the brainstorming and get back on the meds.

NZ gets almost serious about pandemic preparedness

At last, the kind of serious language that we need from people in responsible positions. Swine flu will hit NZ hard.

Even so, they are soft pedalling some of the points at issue.

Everyone is being urged to stock up on food and essential medicines to prepare for the disruption of normal life when swine flu hits New Zealand hard.

Good start, when it hits, it will be hard, even a mild form of the flu will be hard because of its ability to disrupt the systems on which we depend. The SARS epidemic was not especially infectious or fatal, yet it lead the health system to the verge of collapse. To quote the official report:

It caused untold suffering to its victims and their families, forced thousands into quarantine, brought the health system in the Greater Toronto Area and other parts of the province to its knees and seriously impacted health systems in other parts of the country

Swine flu has infected more than 17,000 people and killed 115 globally. So far in New Zealand, it has been confirmed in just 10 cases and has generally been a mild disease, but health authorities expect it will eventually infect more than half the population.

Good. Clear, no messing about. But some of those people will also die, either from the flu itself or complications that can't be treated because medical services will also be affected.

The NZ standard planning model assumes a pandemic wave in which 40% of the NZ population (1.6 million people ) becomes ill over an 8 week period. ... The peak incidence is over weeks 3-5 when about 1.3 million people – about one third of New Zealand's population – would be ill, convalescent or only just recovered.

The model assumes a total case fatality rate of 2% which would see a total of 33,000 deaths over the 8 week period, peaking at about 10,000 in week 4 (compared with around 550 death per week normally)

Even if we cut that in half, this is nasty. No mention is made in the planning documents about the expected effects on the funeral industry when it suffers a 40% absentee rate. An industry that deals with a mere 550 deaths a week stretched over a landscape the size of the United Kingdom. The probability that such an industry will collapse completely is not canvassed, the question of who will handle the dead, where they will be kept, how, and by whom, they will be buried, and who will investigate the possibility that some of those deaths will not be from flu, those questions are not asked, let alone answered.

"It is rapidly spreading internationally, especially in Australia," said Dr Julia Peters, clinical director of the Auckland Regional Public Health Service. "In Australia, the number of cases is doubling every two days. With the amount of transtasman travel, it's almost inevitable we are going to get it in the community in New Zealand.

Doubling every day, how many days till it has contacted the whole population of 20 million? Less than you think. Starting with the current 500 you reach 16 million in 17 days. And don't talk about Australia's huge distances, it is the most urbanised nation on earth. Urgent much?

Dr Peters said that based on modelling by the World Health Organisation, it was predicted that 60 per cent of people would become infected with the new virus, A (H1N1).

Which is worse than my figures above that were written 2 years ago.

"We are promoting getting prepared, not getting panicky."

All for it.

She said that with so many people sick - including workers - services or businesses such as schools, health clinics, banks and supermarkets might not be at full capacity.

What's with the MIGHT here? Bite the bullet, they wont. And it wont just be because of sickness itself, some will be because of fear, some will need to be quarantined because a member of the family is sick and needs care. Remember Toronto? A survey a few years ago among medical staff suggested that some 70% of staff would actively consider staying home rather than risk contracting the disease? That will go for any job working close to unknown people.

It was possible the Government would invoke special regulations to prevent the spread of the virus. This would allow officials to close schools, restaurants and other facilities, and to prevent other public gatherings like weddings, funerals and movie sessions.

Right there is the paradox. To slow the spread of the flu they will have to cripple the economy overnight. The option is to accept the spread and pour resources into powering down the econiomy under some kind of control. Do we have a plan for that?

Parents needed to plan how they would care for their children if schools or early childhood centres were closed. Businesses needed to decide which essential parts of their operations they wanted to keep running when many staff were at home sick.

They also need to think about whether their customers will be there at all. If there is a heightened chance of contact and an option about being there, think about closing up for the duration and keeping your staff safe.

The one thing you don't need to worry about is getting to the supermarket. It may be open but it will be empty.

In 2000, a fuel blockade in the UK emptied some supermarkets within 24 hours because in a just-in-time economy, the warehouse is the supply chain and that is all we have between us and starvation

Thousands of gas stations hung out "no petrol" signs days ago. But by Wednesday evening, the wider effects of the action were becoming evident in many areas. The national health service (NHS), the biggest employer in Europe, was placed on "red alert" for the first time in 11 years. Supermarket chains warned they would run out of essential food within days, and some began rationing bread and milk. 

Dr Peters urged people to stock up on three to five days of long-lasting food, and to ensure they had supplies of medicines they needed personally and fever control drugs like paracetamol.

Again, a start, but realistically, if everyone tried to stock up simultaneously (and a month at least is needed) the supply chains will break, we don't have that much stuff in the system. And what about those who can't afford to stock up? What exactly are they supposed to do?

People who developed flu-like symptoms should stay at home and call a doctor for advice rather than turning up unannounced at a clinic and risking infecting others.

Ngaire Buchanan, a member of the northern regional health emergency group, said that when transmission of the virus was widespread, people would be told of their nearest community-based assessment centre.

Too late, and how nice of her to tell us HOW we will be informed?

Staff at these facilities would check patients and treat them with Tamiflu.

Umm. too late. Tamiflu works best when you have the disease but are not seriously symptomatic, by the time you are symptomatic you are pretty much on your own.

Four sites for these centres have been confirmed in Auckland City, five in the Waitemata health district, three in Counties Manukau, and 14 in Northland. In the Auckland region, they will mainly be at accident and medical centres.

And what's the big secret? If you tell us now we will already know exactly when we need it. And 12 centres for a population of 1 million plus? That's 100,000 people each and allow for some clustering. That's 1000 people per day for 8 weeks (60% ofthe population). Mhmm. Not counting fights.

The Ministry of Health said it would start an awareness campaign on Saturday about swine flu, advising people what preparations to make and what arriving travellers should do if they had flu-like symptoms.

We could quarantine ourselves but the immediate cost would be a collapsed economy and we have a government that is philosophically opposed to taking control. In normal times a good thing, right now, maybe not.

Are we smarter than a microbe? Apparently not

When I was doing some work on pandemic response, practically everything I learned suggested that official actions would fail to prevent the spread of a pandemic and that successful responses would create almost as much damage as unsuccessful ones because the measures needed to contain an outbreak would disrupt our economies in near terminal ways.

Looks like the Aussies have chosen the first method. Swine flu outbreak on cruise puts authorities on full alert

ATTEMPTS to contain swine flu in Australia appear to be faltering. The number of people infected more than doubled yesterday to at least 50 and the federal Health Minister, Nicola Roxon, warned the virus was spreading fast.

With testing continuing at a frantic pace, NSW Health revealed late last night that another five cruise ship passengers had been struck down by the virus, taking the total to 14.

OK, so far, so normal, disease spreads exponentially. But you might think that after the fiasco with equine influenza a while back, the Aussies would have learned that you have exactly zero leewway for complacency. Nope.

But it defended its decision to allow more than 2000 of them, many ill, to go home.

Hundreds of passengers who complained on disembarking of influenza-like symptoms have either not been tracked down or have yet to have their test results confirmed.

Health officials assumed [no they didn't, they hoped and hope ain't a strategy] they had common seasonal influenza until laboratory results, which came in several hours after the Pacific Dawn docked in Sydney, confirmed two young boys, an adult and a crew member had human swine influenza A (H1N1).

That is exactly the reason I spent some time preparing for an emergency, especially a pandemic. When it comes to responding to an emergency like this, official fear of upsetting the applecart will leave them constantly running a step behind. Then 2 steps, then 4, then 8.

At the moment there seems to be a couple of variants, some that are very mild, but some that are lethal and, as the health people point out, the longer they are loose the more chances they have to evolve and we have no way to know which way that will go.

Buckle up, this ride is a long way from over.

Unauthorised use of the Registered Trade Mark "Yellow Pages"

I guess it had to happen sooner or later

I just had an email from one Sue Cremer, Personal Assistant at Piper Alderman which promotes itself as the "Best Professional Services Firm in South Australia 2007"

They claim that this posting last year Endangered Species - Australian Yellow Pages infringes their client's trademark by my "use" of their trademark and that the posting might mislead poor widdle you to believe that I have an association with their client, Yellow pages or Sensis.

Now it beats me how I am "using" their trademark beyond "quoting" it in a series of screen shots to demonstrate that their search tools are really not up to snuff. I am certainly not pretending to be a business directory or to provide phone numbers and other details to anyone who uses my site, and if I HAD a business relationship or "association" with the companies I would expect that it would damned quickly have been severed for publicly giving them a zinger.

But I'm always interested in learning something new so here's the challenge; what's their problem?

Oh, and at the end of their pdf attachment they invite me to signal my co-operation by writing the same on the letter and faxing them a copy back. Right, like I'll sign up to fix an unspecified example of an unspecified infringement to satisfy a company that already has more money than god and spends too little of it on putting together a decent web strategy.

Or could it be that they just don't like being criticised and are trying to use an irrelevant piece of law to shut me up? Nah, that would be unprincipled and stupid, I might blog about it, couldn't happen.

Update

This is what they sent

This is what they got back.

Please explain in what way I am infringing the use of the trademark. I am not conducting any business as a telephone book, telephone directory, business directory or any other kind of telephone number search tools, nor am I attempting to pass myself off as the "yellow pages" I do not offer search of the yellow pages or anything like it, nor do I attempt to sell advertising, listing or any other kind of service as yellow pages or anything of that kind.

The page to which you refer is a criticism of the efficacy and adequacy of the Yellow Pages search tools on the date specified and in doing so demonstrates the efficacy by quoting (via screen shot) the points that I wish to make. No reasonable person could possibly mistake my blog for the Yellow Pages and even if they did, could not possibly find any such service there.

Under fair use provisions I am entitled to "quote" from a source and identify that source correctly so that there is no doubt about the point, intention or organisation to which I refer. I do that, and no more.

Furthermore you suggest that my "use" of the trademark Yellow Pages or a mark which is substantially identical or deceptively similar to your clients registered trade marks, infringes your clients trade mark rights.

Can I ask you to be specific please? What "use" of the trademark itself am I making, or is the trademark I am using substantially similar or deceptively similar to your client's? Or perhaps it is all three. Then we come to the term "use". Please be good enough to specify the "use" to which I am putting this actual, or similar or deceptive trademark and whether said trademark is the actual one, or some similar or deceptive one.

Finally you suggest that such use is "likely to mislead members of the public into believing that there is an association between your organisation and our clients."

I would be fascinated to learn from you the nature of the "association" implied, expressed or entailed in the article to which you refer. Please specify both the kind of association and the specific language used to imply that that would be likely to lead people to that assumption.

Frankly, that is absurd on its face and indicates that you have not bothered to read the article that you refer to. At no point do I claim to have such an association (beyond that of interested user), nor do I hint, imply or invite the reader to assume such a relationship. However, if you can specify the precise language to which you refer I will be more than happy to reconsider.

I am, however, critical of the product/ service being offered by Yellow Pages as inadequate to the environment in which it is being offered. Could it be that your clients are not happy with that criticism and, rather than engage with me about it, or responding to the criticism as they are both entitled and enabled to do in the comments on the posting, they have resorted to using your offices and an irrelevant piece of law in an attempt to intimidate me into shutting up and going away?

Energetic Weather

Its been a strange few weeks weatherwise here. There seems to have been a pattern set up just off Sydney that is spawning serial low pressure systems that sit over the Tasman Sea and suck up huge quantities of water, pull in cold air from the southern latitudes and dump it all on about 200 km of Australian coastline, with Sydney in the bullseye.

And here comes another one. The latest from the Met Bureau:

Seeing Australia

Since coming to Australia in 1999 I've been involved in many conversations about the size of this country. Foreigners, halfwitted politicians and some econimists point to its vast area and its relatively small population and suggest that we can carry many more people.

My response has always been to say that you need to think of Australia as an archipelago of fairly small islands surrounded by oceans, some of them wet, some of them dry; exceptionally dry. Now, at last US geogapher Steven Young has obliged that scenario with an animation based on rising sea levels.

When I think of Australia as a habitable continent, it looks almost exactly like the 300 metres sea level rise except for one thing, by that stage all the fertile land would be gone as well.

Misdirected Thinking

Australia has a number of bizarre laws either on the books or on the way, all of them attempting to censor the world, to remove from it information that the government finds disturbing.

Which is why, yesterday, there was Uproar over MP's tips on suicide.

A DEMOCRATS MP from South Australia has created an uproar by using parliamentary privilege to catalogue suicide methods.

... Ms Kanck expected her speech to be included in Hansard, posted on the Parliament's website, and to provoke "a constitutional clash".

Instead, she outraged her own party and sparked a furore.

The Prime Minister, John Howard, who was in Adelaide yesterday, lead the condemnation.

"I think that's irresponsible and I think it is against the collective expression of public opinion on this issue," he said.

While Ms Kanck may be a little strange, her opinions on Ecstasy (the drug not the religious experience) are hanging from the fringe; the PM is not a lot closer to reality.