Chris Anderson in Wired:

First, steam power replaced muscle power and launched the Industrial Revolution. Then Henry Ford’s assembly line, along with advances in steel and plastic, ushered in the Second Industrial Revolution. Next came silicon and the Information Age. Each era was fueled by a faster, cheaper, and more widely available method of production that kicked efficiency to the next level and transformed the world.

Now we have armies of amateurs, happy to work for free. Call it the Age of Peer Production. From Amazon.com to MySpace to craigslist, the most successful Web companies are building business models based on user-generated content. This is perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of the second-generation Web. The tools of production, from blogging to video-sharing, are fully democratized, and the engine for growth is the spare cycles, talent, and capacity of regular folks, who are, in aggregate, creating a distributed labor force of unprecedented scale.

The evidence is all around us. There are standard-bearers like Wikipedia and Yahoo’s Flickr photo-sharing service. There are entire realms that Second Life users are creating from scratch. And there is the enormous audience that YouTube has conjured with its idiotproof video-sharing technology.

More here.

“The world’s biggest ever nuclear fusion reactor is about to begin construction in the hills of Provence. But with persistent doubts over fusion’s capacity to generate energy efficiently and a raft of engineering conundrums, is this really money well spent?”

Fred Pearce in Prospect Magazine:

They call themselves “fusion gypsies”—scientists who have travelled the world, moving from one nuclear reactor to the next, living the dream that some day, somewhere, they can re-create the reactions that take place in the heart of the stars to generate huge amounts of cheap, clean electricity for the world.

Their goal is nuclear power, but not as we know it. This is fusion and not fission. Fission involves mining, processing and irradiating vast amounts of uranium, and leaving behind an even larger legacy of radioactive waste with half-lives stretching into the next ice age. Whereas, say the fusion gypsies, a small vanload of fuel supplied to a fusion power station could supply the electricity needs of a city of 1m people for a year, and leave behind only paltry amounts of radioactive waste that will decay to nothing within a century.

More here.

Consider what are sometimes cited as seminal events in the early history of bioethics: the Doctors’ Trial at Nuremberg, the Shana Alexander article in Life magazine ‘Who Should Decide?’ or the publication of the first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves [by the Boston Women’s Health Collective]. The first of these in particular is a historical contingency: we are lucky that the Allies won the war and the trial occurred, but it could have been otherwise. Bioethics has roots in the sort of historical contingencies that philosophy abhors. The other two are examples of the type of publications that even today keep the audience for bioethics considerably more egalitarian than just academics. Just as the public declared that ‘Ethics Committees’ should not play God and decide who lives and who dies, and women proclaimed that male gynecologists should not be allowed to make decisions for women concerning their own bodies, bioethics became a field of its own when it was removed from the academic realm of philosophers and joined the practical world of medicine, law, and public policy.

more from Philosophy Now here.

Rail: One of the most challenging aspects about your work is its independence of the pictorial concern or pictorial language. Particularly in your site-specific works, they reveal no single, immediately perceivable image. They are anti-optical while insisting upon the fundamental adherences to structural process in relation to the effective treatment of materials, phenomenological reception through the bodily senses, which has to do with apperceptions of weight and mass, scale and plane, and most importantly site and context where spatial response is matter-of-fact.

Serra: There are certain conditions that are a given and that you can rely on. In sculpture gravity is undeniable. Sculptural form must necessarily confront gravity. I am interested in process and matter, in construction, in how to open up the field. The problem for me is to address within a work circulation or movement that is outside of all representation; that is to make movement itself the subject which generates or constitutes the work. My development has been up to this point fairly logical and sequential. But it’s crucial for me to pay attention to how the work develops and maintain a critical and fresh dialogue with what it is that I’m doing and what I’m intending to do, and then try, if I can, to make the most radical breaks each time out, however, it doesn’t always happen that way.

more from The Brooklyn Rail here.

3quarks pal Tom Bissell tears Robert Kaplan a new one at the Virginia quarterly Review.

Kaplan is worse than a bad writer or thinker. He is a dangerous writer made ever more dangerous by the fact that he is taken seriously. Even his most hostile reviews have treated him as though his arguments are still within the pale. His worldview is, in many ways, that of the current administration, and shared by many Americans. These are people for whom the wider world means only acrimony to be dismissed and obstacles to be knocked over. People who care not for “exquisite subtleties” when it comes to matters of force and occupation. People who do not think in human terms, except insofar as those terms reflect their own beliefs, which are supremely correct. People, in short, who had no use for people, except as cannon fodder—lives whose passing they dutifully mourn on their side and gleefully celebrate on the others. “Kaplan is America’s Kipling,” reads one of Imperial Grunts’s blurbs. This is to slander Kipling, who nevertheless did write one Kaplanesque sentence: “All the people like us are We, / And every one else is They.”

more here.

From The Boston Globe:

FAME IS FLEETING, but to Samuel Beckett’s taste, not fleeting enough. If most writers feel themselves condemned to obscurity, for Beckett the opposite was the case. He was, in his own words, “damned to fame.” Indeed, the durability of his fame is on striking display these days. In celebration of Beckett’s centennial, his plays are being produced in hundreds of theaters around the world; conferences and colloquia are taking place everywhere from Dublin to Oxford, Paris to Tokyo, Ankara to Odense; and a splendid new edition of his works, edited by Paul Auster (and with introductions by Colm Toibin, Salman Rushdie, Edward Albee, and J.M. Coetzee), has just been published by Grove Press.

Beckett, who died in 1989, lived to see the full flowering of his fame, and the retiring Irishman was forced into a spotlight he had no desire to stand in. But what were the chances that this spotlight would shine on him in the first place? He was an obscure writer writing in a foreign language about obscure figures living in a very foreign world. When one considers the strangeness of the works that sealed his fame, the plays “Waiting for Godot” and “Endgame,” both written in the 1950s, not only is it remarkable that they were successes, it is remarkable that they were produced-and that the first audiences were patient enough to await their seemingly endless endings. But wait they did. And to his limitless consternation, Samuel Beckett became an international literary celebrity.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Fellini’s great friend, the screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, once said: “Cinema is a collaboration where everyone tries to erase everyone else’s work.” Certainly the popular convention is to insist that films are made principally by directors; some directors certainly appear to think so. And a second axiom, peddled by the lost generation at Time Out magazine, is that British cinema is weak because it is overly dependent on British theatre.

Both propositions seem to me faulty. A good script is, if not the sine qua non of a good film, at least its most heartening omen. The first gift a playwright has is to write for actors. The better the playwright, the better the roles. This is as true of film as it is of theatre. Harold Pinter regularly offers actors what will become the opportunities of a lifetime: to Meryl Streep, obviously, in The French Lieutenant’s Woman; to Peter Finch and Anne Bancroft in one of the most overlooked of all British films, The Pumpkin Eater; and, unforgettably, to Dirk Bogarde, both in Accident and The Servant. Pinter offers the stuff actors want and with which they can do magic – surface vitality, of course, but also an undertow of narrative and implied feeling which deepens the simplest remark. In the spare, complicated screenwriting of Pinter, “yes”, “no” and “maybe” become words which do a hundred jobs.

More here.

Paola Cavalieri in Logos:

The history of what we call moral progress can for the most part be seen as the history of the substitution of hierarchical visions with presumptions in favor of equality. The recent irruption into the social scene of the animal question is part of this ongoing process–a process that is usually characterized by a direct challenge to the cultural status quo. In fact, in the last few decades, nonhuman animals have been the center of a lively philosophical debate, and many voices have been raised against our current treatment of the members of species other than our own. We routinely use nonhuman animals as mere commodities–we kill them for food, we use them in work and entertainment, we employ them as tools for research of all kinds. In short, we treat them in ways in which we would deem it profoundly unethical to treat human beings. Is this position morally defensible? And, if so, on which grounds? Since behind the present divergence in standards lies a deep-rooted philosophical tradition aiming at the exclusion of nonhuman beings from the protected sphere of ethics, it may be worth considering briefly how we got where we are.

More here.

Paul Boutin in Slate:

For a sneak peek at the future of computing, go to YouOS and click “Try a Demo.” Your browser window turns into a desktop of its own, with sub-windows for e-mail, chat, and Web browsing. There are also links on the YouOS desktop for a sticky-notes program and a rich-text editor. But these programs aren’t on your hard drive—they’re running somewhere in the vast unknown Internet.

YouOS is the fledgling startup of four recent college grads with a bit of angel funding. Its simplicity makes it a great demo. Anyone who logs on can instantly spot the big idea: You don’t need Windows! You don’t even need a PC! You can login and work from anywhere using any gadget with a screen and a keyboard.

More here.

Richard Black at the BBC:

A global switch to efficient lighting systems would trim the world’s electricity bill by nearly one-tenth.

That is the conclusion of a study from the International Energy Agency (IEA), which it says is the first global survey of lighting uses and costs.

The carbon dioxide emissions saved by such a switch would, it concludes, dwarf cuts so far achieved by adopting wind and solar power.

More here.

Robert Andrews in Wired News:

Some DJs spin vinyl or twiddle fader knobs. Others write subroutines in C++.

A new brand of music maestro is turning programming into performance, eschewing turntables for a compiler and a mind for syntax structure. “Livecoding” practitioners improvise using Perl or homemade programming architectures to build compositions from the ground up, replacing instruments and samples with raw code authoring before a live audience.

Alex Maclean, a U.K. livecoder and art student, said he traded in his guitar when he found he could be more creative with code than with strings. He touch-types using Perl at raves and dance clubs, creating a unique visual and musical experience. Sessions with drummers, MCs and other livecoders can be reminiscent of traditional free-jazz improvisation.

More here.

Marek Kohn reviews Broken Genius: the rise and fall of William Shockley, creator of the electronic age by Joel N Shurkin, in the New Statesman:

William Shockley left two extraordinary legacies to posterity. One is the transistor, which is to the electronic world what cells are to the living one. The other is an archive based on the principle that nothing may be thrown away and everything must be filed. In the course of his investigations – which involved the cracking of two safes – Joel Shurkin found a note to General Foods about a Jello recipe, a wooden splinter that had destroyed one of the boy Shockley’s dimples, and a suicide note. He did not, however, find any redeeming features. We can now be confident that William Shockley really was as detestable as he always appeared.

Shockley snatched opprobrium from the jaws of glory. In 1956 he shared the Nobel Prize for Physics for his role in the development of the transistor; in subsequent decades he became notorious for promoting the idea that black people were innately less intelligent than whites. He attempted to capitalise on his scientific success by launching an electronics company, but alienated his senior staff to the extent that they mutinied, dispersing to find fortunes under other banners. Although he thus has a claim to be the founder of Silicon Valley, it’s a legacy that mocks him.

More here.

From Nature:

A company set to begin clinical trials of a stem-cell treatment for a fatal brain disease has announced that the treatment boosts survival in a mouse model. The company, StemCells of Palo Alto, California, received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration in October 2005 to use human neural stem cells to treat infants with neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis, or Batten disease. Infants with this hereditary disorder lack enzymes to break down a chemical called lipofuscin. In those affected, the chemical kills brain cells, and eventually proves fatal.

StemCells plans to give newborns neural stem cells that make enzymes to break down lipofuscin. The neural stem cells, made from cells harvested from human fetuses, are more developed than embryonic stem cells, which can give rise to all the cell types of the body, but more flexible than adult brain cells. On 1 July, Nobuko Uchida, a scientist with StemCells, presented data on tests in mice at the meeting of International Society for Stem Cell Research in Toronto, Canada.

More here.

From The Observer:

It is not easy to get to Imran Khan. I meet his political agent at the 1970s government buildings in Islamabad where he has an airless basement office. We hail a cab and point it in the direction of the hills outside the city, the lowest foothills of the distant Himalayas. The tarmac soon ends and the gradient gets much steeper. There is a bridge over a dried-up gorge, where the river has been dammed further upstream. Young men and boys are laying water pipes beside the rough dirt road in the hundred-degree late afternoon heat. The road gets more precipitous still and our driver gets out to pour a bottle of mineral water over his engine. Eventually at the ridge of a hill with a view across the city with its minarets and half-finished housing projects we reach a set of unlikely electronic gates.

Imran bought these 35 acres four years ago and has built his house in the middle of them. The original plan was to move in here with his family – wife Jemima and their two boys – but as it has turned out he lives up here alone. He waves me through a cool courtyard and into a simply furnished sitting room, with big wooden doors open to the hills. He then sits on a sofa, wearing his sunglasses, and sends texts on three mobile phones, struggling for a signal. He does not speak for five or 10 minutes.

More here. (Thanks to Bibi).

When this diary was published in Russia two years ago, it was immediately, and inevitably, compared with the diary of Anne Frank. It is a very articulate record by an adolescent girl, living in an ever more threatening totalitarian environment, of her fears and frustrations, and it mingles the emotional pains of a girl going through puberty with the anguish of a trapped animal feeling the hunters getting nearer. For a girl of thirteen years old, in a society where there was no information but official propaganda and market rumour, Nina was remarkably well informed and perspicacious: she reports the famine and cannibalism that took the lives of millions of peasants in 1933, when not just the Moscow press but Moscow’s inhabitants were genuinely unaware of the disaster happening five hundred miles to the south. Andrew Bromfield speculates that she may have had access to underground Menshevik or Social Revolutionary literature, but this seems unlikely in the 1930s when all dissidence had been suppressed. Nina’s perspicacity is one of the most mysterious elements in her diary.

more from Literary Review here.

As journalist Robert Kaplan flew into Bamako, Mali, in 1993, he saw tin roofs appear through thick dust blowing off the presumably advancing desert. He used this image of a “dying region” to conclude his Atlantic Monthly article “The Coming Anarchy,” in which he drew a connection between environmental degradation and growing disorder in the Third World, a hypothesis that certainly seemed to fit not only Mali but most of West Africa. When the article was published in February 1994, it made a considerable splash in Washington policy circles.

But even as Kaplan predicted doom, the situation on the ground in Mali did not quite fit his thesis. Yes, life was hard in this impoverished West African nation of 12 million people, and remains so. The 2005 United Nations Human Development Index, based on a combination of economic, demographic, and educational data, lists Mali as fourth from the bottom among 177 countries. Only Burkina Faso, Niger, and Sierra Leone rank lower. But despite persistent poverty and ongoing turmoil in neighboring states, in a single decade Mali has launched one of the most successful democracies in Africa. Its political record includes three democratic elections and two peaceful transitions of power, a transformation that seems nothing short of amazing.

more from The Wilson Quarterly here.

For this 4th of July: Barak Obama’s speech on how and why liberals must engage religion has captured the attention of many in the left-liberal side of the blogosphere and pushed the discussion of the role of religion in public life. (Audio here.)

Our failure as progressives to tap into the moral underpinnings of the nation is not just rhetorical, though. Our fear of getting “preachy” may also lead us to discount the role that values and culture play in some of our most urgent social problems.

After all, the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten point plan. They are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness – in the imperfections of man.

Solving these problems will require changes in government policy, but it will also require changes in hearts and a change in minds.

Amy Sullivan on the speech in Slate.

Millions and millions of faithful, including many evangelicals, have this sort of complicated relationship with their God. One of the enduring mysteries of faith is that it’s not easy to determine divine will. Most of us who consider ourselves religious are engaged in a constant struggle to discern God’s will for us, and we’re always aware of just how far we fall short of meeting that standard. Obama received one of his loudest ovations when he admitted: “The questions I had didn’t magically disappear.”

This humbler version of faith has been in the shadows for the past few years, derided as moral relativism or even a lack of true belief. Obama stepped up not to defend this approach to religion, but to insist on the rightness of it. That should be comforting to anyone who has been deeply discomfited by Bush’s version of Christianity. A questioning faith is a much better fit for a society like ours than one that allows for no challenge or reflection. It also acts as a check against liberals who would appropriate God for their own purposes, declaring Jesus to be the original Democrat and trotting out New Testament verses to justify their own policy programs. Liberals don’t have the answer key to divining God’s will any more than conservatives do.

There’s something quintessentially Angeleno about David Hockney. In spite of the fact that he was born, raised and received his art training in England and spends only a fraction of his globetrotting year in his adopted hometown, his hypersaturated palette, crackpot scholarship and unapologetic hedonism are somehow able to encapsulate L.A. more succinctly than any number of homegrown painters are. One key facet of this serendipitous mesh is a climate that encourages endless socializing. In London or New York, artists can blame the weather for their antisocial binges of studio sequestering. In L.A., where it is beautiful all the time, you have to entertain.

Hockney is a master entertainer, and “David Hockney Portraits” — organized by London’s National Portrait Gallery and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in collaboration with (and currently on view at) LACMA — stands as testimony to the artist’s stubbornly idiosyncratic formalism as a tool in a kind of social sculpture.

more from the LA Weekly here.

From: Alex Cooley and Mark Blyth

To: All Brazil Jockers

Memo: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Wow – what a couple of days. Big teams playing each other in the World Cup usually produce, well, big games. Certainly, the two “clash of the titans” in 2006 delivered. I was also given an amazing lesson in the contrasting psychology of taking penalties across footballing cultures.

The penalty shootout remains perhaps the most tension-filled and cruelest way to settle a football match and two of this year’s quarterfinals (Germany-Argentina and Portugal-England) demonstrated just how differently winning and losing teams approach the spot kicks. Now, anyone who spouts this junk that the shootout is a “lottery” has obviously lost more than their fair share. And growing up in England, I always just assumed that settling a match on penalties was necessarily a torturous and depressing affair for all fans. How wrong I’ve been!

The Germany-Argentina game was instantly an epic encounter – gone was Germany’s earlier flamboyant attack play; the Argentine midfield pressured the German build-up and killed off the tempo of the game through possession football and short passing. When just after half-time Argentine center back Roberto Ayala powerfully headed home a corner the host’s progression in the tournament was put in serious jeopardy. Argentina expertly held on to the ball and wasted time as the Germans looked toothless. Then out of nowhere, with 10 minutes left, Germany’s jack-in-the-box striker Miroslav Klose sprung forward to nod in a flicked on Ballack freekick. 1-1. The packed crowd at my local bar “Schmidt’s” went ballistic and I bear-hugged about 37 random people. As extra-time drew to a close, everyone seemed more and more upbeat. The Germans had taken an Argentine punch, but had survived and the end of the game was a mere formality.

For the first time in my life I saw a crowd actually cheer the end of extra time as if they had already won. As the shootout progressed everyone rhythmically clapped on every German PK taker. The German kicks were flawless, the Argentine kicks less so and Berlin soon erupted into jubilant celebrations and a cacophony of honking cars, world cup anthems and pretty much everything else that you can imagine. The Argentines were left to brood over a stinging defeat and their manager Pekerman’s questionable substitution pattern, especially his decision to take off playmaker Riquelme and not insert the wunderkind Messi to run at a tiring German defense.

In the evening game the Italians clinically dismantled the overmatched Ukrainians (darn, got close with that one although I still maintain they should have played the Aussies!), setting up a 1982 World Cup final repeat against the Germans in the semis.

The next day I experienced what can only be uncreatively described as the “anti-Germany shootout” with a bunch of England fans. Cooley had predicted a Germany-England final, mainly because the draw was kind to England and they, for once, actually had some decent players at almost every position…oops. Although England mostly controlled the first half of the game and Portugal looked toothless without their suspended playmaker Deco, the match followed an all-too-familiar script for the English. In the second half England’s lone striker hothead Wayne Rooney, just like David Beckham against Argentina in 1998, was red carded for stomping all over a Portuguese defender’s private parts. Afterwards, down a man, England elevated their game as the unfairly maligned Owen Hargreaves heroically ran everywhere, but in the end neither team would have scored even if they had played on for another week.

So, just 24 hours later after the German PK party, the inevitable happened – final whistle and groans from all the En-gur-land fans at our large outdoor beach bar screen and lots of grown men half-staring at the screen through gaps in their hands. Even as Portugal missed two PKs and gave England a golden opportunity to claim their spot in the semifinals, England’s supposedly world class midfield duo bottled their penalties. Rubbish kicks from Lampard and Gerrard as well as a retaken miss by Carragher meant that England scored just 1 penalty in 4 – pathetic. English fan began to sob, as did defender John Terry into David Beckham’s arms. There’s no sugar-coating this one – England lost to a relatively poor side that even gifted them two penalty misses. Absolutely not good enough for a team that aspired to win the tournament.

We had no time to drown our sorrows (..well maybe we squeezed in a bit of drowning) as the main course of the quarterfinals was shortly kicking off – France vs. Team NikeFIFASamba in a repeat of that memorable Paris 1998 final. So we settled into our seats and tuned into the pre-match show.

The rest of the evening was simply delicious. It started with Pele waltzing into the ZDF pre-game show in front of a packed studio of blue and gold jockers clashing their approved thundersticks, and then lip-synching his new loungy “hit” single. After the musical promo he and the ZDF analysts patted each other on the back, reviewed tapes of various Brazilian goals and backheels and predicted a comfortable 2-0 or 2-1 Brazil victory. Everyone agreed that now that the important matches were starting we would see what Ronaldo and his buddies could really do. Back on planet earth, however, once the game kicked off it was obvious that only one team was in control.

The magnificent French just outclassed TeamNikeFIFASamba. Zidane was majestic in midfield, orchestrating passes as if in his prime, cleverly creating spaces and flicking telling balls everywhere, while Ribery terrorized Roberto Carlos down the right side. Carlos was also responsible for marking Henry on a free kick but obviously had more important matters to attend to – in the 57th mintue Henry found himself alone at the far post and thumped in Zidane’s sweetly struck ball and the French had their deserved goal. Although ZZ was singled out as the top player on the pitch, the defensive midfield duo of Viera and Makele produced outstanding performances as they built a wall around the French defense and effortlessly cut off all Brazilian passing lanes. In the end TeamNikeFIFASamba went out with a whimper and was reduced to lobbing in aimless balls into the box as Ronaldo and Ronaldhino whined about the refereeing and flung themselves to the turf in search of free kicks. Not only was this over-hyped bunch of millionaires dispatched in style, we were also mercifully spared a future Berlin fashion trend of Ronaldhino-style headbands with a big “R” on them.

Some seem a bit down on the quality of the tournament, but I thought these Q-finals lived up to the hype – lots of tension, drama and high-quality football. I think its a bit unfair to simply compare the number of goals scored at World Cups across different eras as the defenses and tactics these days are just stifling and the fitness of players so much better than in the past. As with most Q-finals, you win some and lose some, and so I am now officially out of the prediction business even though, of course, I do have a dream final in mind. I will be out of Germany for the semis, but will be back in Berlin under the Brandenburg gate for the final. Best to all and remember to practice those PKs!!

Werner Bischof. Farmer, Cambodia. 1952.

Photograph.

More on this superb young Swiss photohournalist here and here.