Skype

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pages: 731 words: 134,263

Talk Is Cheap: Switching to Internet Telephones by James E. Gaskin

Debian, decentralized internet, end-to-end encryption, Ford Model T, packet switching, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, telemarketer

When you can't get satisfaction, especially when dealing with Moneybookers, join many others with similar tales of woe in the Skype Forums. It won't solve your problem, but at least you won't feel alone. Skype does an excellent job using animation on their web site to help new users configure Skype and their computers to support Skype. Go to www.skype.com/help/guides/ to start one of the dozen animations and see for yourself how to handle configuration issues. The primary Skype support forum (forum.skype.com/viewforum.php?f=2) includes thousands of user questions. I can't decide if it's good that so many people go to the source to find solutions, or if it's bad because so many people have trouble. But Skype claims over 20 million registered users, so a few thousand messages in the help forum constitutes a tiny user percentage.

When you can't get satisfaction, especially when dealing with Moneybookers, join many others with similar tales of woe in the Skype Forums. It won't solve your problem, but at least you won't feel alone. Skype does an excellent job using animation on their web site to help new users configure Skype and their computers to support Skype. Go to www.skype.com/help/guides/ to start one of the dozen animations and see for yourself how to handle configuration issues. The primary Skype support forum (forum.skype.com/viewforum.php?f=2) includes thousands of user questions. I can't decide if it's good that so many people go to the source to find solutions, or if it's bad because so many people have trouble. But Skype claims over 20 million registered users, so a few thousand messages in the help forum constitutes a tiny user percentage.

Many people rely on their cell phone and never subscribe for a traditional telephone line from their local phone company, but that's a better option today than trusting a computer-centric service. 6.3.4.3 Passion Skype wins this category hands down. One goal of Skype founders was to recreate the buzz and "viral marketing" of KaZaA, where a program spreads like a runny nose in an overcrowded preschool. They achieved that goal. Skype users aren't quite as fanatical as early Macintosh users, but they love Skype capabilities and Skype community. The Skype forums are full of people thrilled with Skype. Australian Rotarian groups are signing up en masse. Love blooms, photos are file transferred, meetings happen.


pages: 361 words: 76,849

The Year Without Pants: Wordpress.com and the Future of Work by Scott Berkun

barriers to entry, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Broken windows theory, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, future of work, Google Hangouts, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Kanban, Lean Startup, lolcat, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, post-work, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Stallman, Seaside, Florida, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the map is not the territory, The Soul of a New Machine, Tony Hsieh, trade route, work culture , zero-sum game

Regardless of the reason, it was refreshing to be cared for so directly by people in important positions. One boring task I did discover was manually entering my coworkers into my Skype. There was no automatic way to add the dozens of employees as contacts. While waiting for Hanni or Barry to do something, I'd go to the list and manually add people. I asked if there was an automated way to do this, as you'd expect in a smart company like this one, but none existed. As this went on, I was interrupted on Skype by Beau, the first of many entertaining Skype chats I'd have with him: Beau Lebens: [Please add me to your contact] Scott Berkun: [Scott Berkun has shared contact details with Beau Lebens] Lebens: Beat you to it!

Communication at Automattic was roughly broken down as follows: 1. Blogs (P2): 75 percent 2. IRC: 14 percent 3. Skype: 5 percent 4. E-mail: 1 percent Of course, since Skype and e-mail were private, these are just guesses. Most of the uses of e-mail, as low as it was, were for notifications about new posts or comments on P2s. I'd eventually take to e-mailing people individually on my team once a month to ask deeper questions about their performance and mine. But for day-to-day work, it was all P2, IRC, and Skype. P2s were much more than just for documenting meetings. Brainstorming, bug reports, discussions, rants, and jokes all found their primary home on the more than fifty-six P2s across the company.

It was always assumed that people would drop in and out of being online. Since we rarely had short-term deadlines, it was okay for conversations to float over a day or two, whether they were on P2 or Skype. We all had the habit of leaving a note somewhere, often in our IRC channel, if we were going to be offline. I might ping Peatling in Skype with a question, and he'd respond an hour later, and then I'd reply that night. We all respected the need to be online at the same times when needed, but often it wasn't necessary. Skype was the best indicator of who was around at any moment, but even when people were online, it could take minutes or an hour before they'd respond.


pages: 288 words: 66,996

Travel While You Work: The Ultimate Guide to Running a Business From Anywhere by Mish Slade

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, business process, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, content marketing, crowdsourcing, digital nomad, Firefox, Google Chrome, Google Hangouts, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, job automation, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Lyft, Multics, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Salesforce, side project, Skype, speech recognition, turn-by-turn navigation, uber lyft, WeWork

Here's a list of all the supported countries: www.worktravel.co/skypecountries. Here's how it works (this example is taken from Skype's website): Say you live in London and you want to use Skype To Go to call a client who lives in Boston, USA. Add your Boston client as your Skype To Go contact, and Skype will give you a London phone number. When you want to call your client, simply dial that London number from your phone, and your call will be put straight through to your client on their phone in Boston at Skype's low rates. But what if your client isn't on Skype, or doesn't know how to use it? That's fine: with a Skype To Go number, you also get an "Access Number" that works like a regular calling card number.

For outgoing calls, there's also a "web callback" feature that works out cheaper than Skype in most cases. You will need an internet connection for it, but only to kickstart the call; after that it all happens through your phone (so it still comes in handy if you have an unreliable connection that might drop in and out during Skype calls). Aaand done! The Didlogic website is a bit of a mess – and thoroughly useless in helping you get started – so Rob's recorded a quick screencast with an overview of how to set everything up. Register your purchase of this book at www.worktravel.co to get hold of it! Skype To Go Repetition alert! Skype To Go was mentioned briefly in Chapter 4: Be A Productivity Powerhouse.

: www.worktravel.co/quora2 Stay focused and filter out distractions Unroll Me (unsubscribe from emails): www.worktravel.co/unroll Gmail "plus sign" trick: www.worktravel.co/plustrick Trello: www.worktravel.co/trello Pomodoro Technique: www.worktravel.co/pomodoro Pomodoto (Pomodoro timer): www.worktravel.co/pomodoto You Can Book Me (appointment-booking software): www.worktravel.co/bookme iDoneThis (track what you've achieved): www.worktravel.co/donethis AskMeEvery (track what you've achieved): www.worktravel.co/askme Kransen headphones: www.worktravel.co/kransen ShareDesk (coworking spaces): www.worktravel.co/sharedesk Coffitivity (concentration app): www.worktravel.co/coffitivity Focus@Will (concentration app): www.worktravel.co/focus Optimise your workspace Roost laptop stand: www.worktravel.co/roost Portable keyboards: www.worktravel.co/keyboard Mini-mouse: www.worktravel.co/mouse ZestDesk (standing desk): www.worktravel.co/zestdesk StandStand (standing desk): www.worktravel.co/standstand Kinivo ZX100 laptop speakers: www.worktravel.co/zx100 Deal with wifi issues Wifi speed test: www.worktravel.co/speedtest Huawei E5330 mobile hotspot: www.worktravel.co/hotspot Didlogic (cheap international calls without internet): www.worktravel.co/didlogic Skype To Go: www.worktravel.co/skypetogo Google Docs Offline: www.worktravel.co/docsoffline CHAPTER 5: FREELANCE FROM ANYWHERE Emailing Boomerang (to delay when an email gets sent): www.worktravel.co/boomerang Scheduling World Time Buddy: www.worktravel.co/worldtimebuddy Doodle: www.worktravel.co/doodle Mixmax: www.worktravel.co/mixmax You Can Book Me: www.worktravel.co/bookme Phone/video calls Buy a Skype Number: www.worktravel.co/skypenumber Zoom (alternative to Skype): www.worktravel.co/zoom GoToMeeting (alternative to Skype): www.worktravel.co/gotomeeting Join Me (alternative to Skype): www.worktravel.co/joinme Didlogic (cheap international calls without internet): www.worktravel.co/didlogic Skype To Go: www.worktravel.co/skypetogo Screen sharing Screenleap: www.worktravel.co/screenleap Document signing HelloSign: www.worktravel.co/hellosign EchoSign: www.worktravel.co/echosign Getting paid PayPal: www.worktravel.co/paypal Stripe: www.worktravel.co/stripe Freshbooks (for information about PayPal Business Payments): www.worktravel.co/freshbooks Harvest (for information about PayPal Business Payments): www.worktravel.co/harvest TransferWise (cross-currency payments): www.worktravel.co/transferwise CHAPTER 6: HIRE LIKE A CHAMP Hire remote contractors Upwork (formerly Elance/oDesk): www.worktravel.co/upwork Guru: www.worktravel.co/guru Freelancer: www.worktravel.co/freelancer Gigster: www.worktravel.co/gigster 99 Designs: www.worktravel.co/99designs Crowdspring: www.worktravel.co/crowdspring Fancy Hands: www.worktravel.co/fancyhands Information about "milestones": www.worktravel.co/milestones Screencast-o-matic (record screencasts): www.worktravel.co/screencast Hire permanent employees Working Mums (UK): www.worktravel.co/workingmums Hire My Mom (US): www.worktravel.co/hiremymom Remotive: www.worktravel.co/remotive Remote OK: www.worktravel.co/remoteok WFH.io: www.worktravel.co/wfh We Work Remotely: www.worktravel.co/wework Authentic Jobs: www.worktravel.co/authentic Upwork: www.worktravel.co/upwork Information about KPIs: www.worktravel.co/kpi Topgrading (hiring tips and resources): www.worktravel.co/topgrading Buffer's 45-day contract period: www.worktravel.co/bootcamp CHAPTER 7: RUN THE BEST BIZ Team chat software Slack: www.worktravel.co/slack HipChat: www.worktravel.co/hipchat Structured meetings and ad-hoc calls Mastering The Rockefeller Habits (book): www.worktravel.co/rockefeller World Time Buddy: www.worktravel.co/worldtimebuddy Google Calendar: www.worktravel.co/calendar Zoom (alternative to Skype): www.worktravel.co/zoom Appear.in (alternative to Skype): www.worktravel.co/appear Screen sharing Screenleap: www.worktravel.co/screenleap Giving tutorials and training Screencast-o-matic: www.worktravel.co/screencast ScreenFlow (Mac): www.worktravel.co/screenflow Camtasia (Windows): www.worktravel.co/camtasia Procedures Google Drive: www.worktravel.co/drive Process Street: www.worktravel.co/process Project management Trello: www.worktravel.co/trello Basecamp: www.worktravel.co/basecamp Asana: www.worktravel.co/asana Teamwork: www.worktravel.co/teamwork Wikipedia's "Comparison of project management software" page: www.worktravel.co/pmtools Cloud storage Dropbox: www.worktravel.co/dropbox OneDrive: www.worktravel.co/onedrive Google Drive: www.worktravel.co/drive Information on Google Drive "offline mode": www.worktravel.co/docsoffline Box: www.worktravel.co/box Amazon Cloud Drive: www.worktravel.co/acd Other useful tools and resources LastPass (password management): www.worktravel.co/lastpass HelloSign (document signing): www.worktravel.co/hellosign EchoSign (document signing): www.worktravel.co/echosign Sqwiggle (video team chat): www.worktravel.co/sqwiggle Zapier (task automation): www.worktravel.co/zapier IFTTT (task automation): www.worktravel.co/ifttt Also by the author… Protect Your Tech: Your geek-free guide to a secure and private digital life If your password for every website is "monkey" or "iloveyou"… you need to read this book.


pages: 317 words: 98,745

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert

4chan, air gap, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Brian Krebs, call centre, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, connected car, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, digital divide, disinformation, end-to-end encryption, escalation ladder, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Hacker Ethic, Herman Kahn, informal economy, information security, invention of writing, Iridium satellite, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, South China Sea, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, Stuxnet, Ted Kaczynski, the medium is the message, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Faced with this word-soup, most of us just click “I agree.” What we are agreeing to might surprise us. Skype users, for instance, might be alarmed to find out that when they click on “I agree” to the terms of service they are assigning to Skype the right to change these terms at any time, at Skype’s discretion, and without notice. Skype does not inform users about whether and under what conditions it will share user data with law enforcement or other government agencies. Users might not know that while they can stop using Skype, they cannot delete their accounts: Skype does not allow it. The Internet is sometimes described as a massively decentralized and distributed “network of networks,” a virtual place where information from everywhere is concentrated and accessible to all, an egalitarian thing of beauty.

McChesney, “No Tolls on the Internet,” Washington Post, June 8, 2006, http​://www​.washing​tonpo​st.c​om​/​wp-dyn​/​cont​ent​/​arti​cle​/​20​06​/​06​/​07​/​AR200​6060​702​10​8.html; and Milton Mueller, Net Neutrality as Global Principle for Internet Governance (Syracuse: Internet Governance Project, 2007). 3 The Chinese version of Skype: The TOM-Skype investigation is documented in Nart Villeneuve, “Breaching Trust: An Analysis of Surveillance and Security Practices on China’s TOM-Skype Platform,” Information Warfare Monitor, September 2009, http​://www.i​nfowar-m​onitor.n​et/​2009​/09​/​breac​hing-trust-an-analy​sis-of-surv​eilla​nce-and-secu​rity-pract​ices-on-chi​na’s-to​m-skype-plat​form/. See also John Markoff, “Surveillance of Skype Messages Found in China,” New York Times, October 1, 2008, http​://w​ww.nyti​mes.com​/​200​8​/​10​/​02​/​techn​ology​/​inte​rnet​/​02sk​ype.h​tml​?

faced in China might well be part of doing business in that country, but where should foreign companies draw the line? In 2008, as previously mentioned, the Citizen Lab’s Nart Villeneuve discovered that there was a content filtering system on the Chinese version of Skype. Called “TOM-Skype,” it is a joint venture between Skype (which at the time was owned by eBay, but is now owned by Microsoft) and the Chinese media conglomerate, the TOM Group. The Citizen Lab looked into TOM-Skype’s content filtering mechanism, and found that each time certain keywords were typed into the chat window a hidden connection was made. We followed that hidden electronic trail, apparent only through detailed packet capture analysis, to a server in China which, it turned out, had a directory that was not password protected.


pages: 218 words: 44,364

The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman, Rod A. Beckstrom

Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Burning Man, creative destruction, disintermediation, experimental economics, Firefox, Francisco Pizarro, jimmy wales, Kibera, Lao Tzu, Network effects, peer-to-peer, pez dispenser, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, The Wisdom of Crowds, union organizing

They had to maintain all of the costly infrastructure associated with handling a call—everything from phone cables to operator facilities. Skype bore none of these costs. Skype capitalized on new technological advances to offer a previously monopolized privilege for free. This spells bad news for the traditional phone companies. It requires only a small amount of software to create a desktop system that works like Skype. The barrier to entry for becoming a long-distance provider, once huge and insurmountable, is quickly disappearing. Anyone with a few million dollars to invest can build a Skype-equivalent. Thus, although Skype may or may not thrive in the long run, it has opened a Pandora's box.

Here was Zennstrom's idea: take the lesson from Kazaa—avoid central servers. Zennstrom's new company, Skype, let people connect to each other directly. No servers routing calls, no telephone lines to worry about. As a bonus, this time Zennstrom was going to do it within the confines of the law. Meanwhile, Skype's users were getting a great deal. They got to communicate freely with any other Skype user in the world without ever having to rely on a phone line. All a user had to do was download some free software from Skype and plug a headset into his PC. Everything was done over the Internet. It didn't cost a cent.

The pieces were replicated multiple times across computers around the world. The brilliance of this open system was that Skype avoided the costs of storing names on its own servers. The only transactions that ever hit Skype servers were credit card payments. In pushing the cost of calls to zero, Skype rendered the telephone industry's models of generating profits through longdistance charges obsolete. As Michael Powell, then chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), told Forbes in 2004: "I knew it was over when I downloaded Skype, when the inventors of Kazaa are distributing for free a little program that you can use to talk to anybody else, and the quality is fantastic, and it's free—it's over.


pages: 506 words: 151,753

The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze by Laura Shin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Airbnb, altcoin, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, cloud computing, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, DevOps, digital nomad, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial independence, Firefox, general-purpose programming language, gravity well, hacker house, Hacker News, holacracy, independent contractor, initial coin offering, Internet of things, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, litecoin, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, off-the-grid, performance metric, Potemkin village, prediction markets, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social distancing, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Turing complete, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks

He and Gavin got in touch, and on Christmas Day, while Gavin was on the couch at the farm and Jeff was at his parents’ house in the woonerf, they Skype-chatted about the white paper’s intricacies. BY THIS POINT, various Ethereum Skype channels were sprouting up. Gav, Jeff, Charles Hoskinson of the Bitcoin Education Project, Anthony Di Iorio of the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada, Mihai, and others began piling in, including Vitalik’s Colored Coins friend Amir Chetrit, whom Vitalik had nicknamed “capitalist Amir,” whereas Amir Taaki was “anarchist Amir.” Capitalist Amir had previously hit it off with Anthony Di Iorio. Another Skype participant was Taylor Gerring, a compact, outgoing Chicago-based developer with an easy, boyish smile and laugh lines around his eyes, as well as a tattoo of the word “love” with a row of hearts under it on his arm.

If you have initiated a split and it’s currently open, message @griff. If you don’t know what a split is then don’t worry.” Meanwhile, Christoph, Simon, Vitalik, and the others hopped on Skype calls and created a few Skype groups with all the old faces—Lefteris, Vitalik, Gav, Jeff, Aeron Buchanan, Péter Szilágyi, Christian Reitwießner, Avsa, Taylor Gerring, Fabian Vogelsteller, and so on. They tried to discern the method of attack to be able to counterattack and recover the coins. Several of them jumped into a Skype group with exchange operators, where Vitalik wrote, possible mitigation strategies are: 1. seizing any stolen either that goes through exchanges 2. there is one person who will split within 2 hours if we can contact him then we may be able to copy the attack and recover a large portion of it Vitalik was referring to the fact that the DAO attacker had used a split DAO to perform the attack.

They had to be shrewd because they knew if they made any missteps, Charles would have their heads. They first reached out to Mihai. On a late-night Skype call on May 26 with Mihai, Roxana, Taylor Gerring, and Richard Stott, Stephan and Mathias brought up the issue of Charles. Mihai soon agreed that Charles’s behavior represented a real problem. The call was also significant to at least one person in the Spaceship for a separate reason. Taylor recalls that Stephan and Mathias were somewhat drunk and loose-lipped and that Stephan, who as the head of communications was in both the business and dev Skype groups, mentioned that he saw a big political chess match going on. Taylor says Stephan indicated he was convinced that, once the crowdsale money came in, Switzerland and the business guys would lose power and the devs would hold the purse strings.


pages: 302 words: 95,965

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Neither of us knew how big Skype video would become, and how great a communications tool it would be, and how much freer the world would be because of it, but we knew that the world would never be the same. Skype became the largest telecommunications company in the world by most metrics. In 2009, Skype sold out to eBay for $4 billion in cash and eBay shares, and after being briefly held by a private equity firm, was sold to Microsoft for $8.5 billion. There have been more than one billion downloads of Skype, over 300 million daily active users, and users have been on Skype for more than one trillion minutes.

Instead of sharing the deal, that first round went exclusively to Dad. The team changed the name to Skype and the peer-to-peer free calls were a hit. The company would give free calls to anyone who had signed up for Skype and charge for calls, both incoming and outgoing, that came from outside the network. The service was taking off. It had over three million users and was running about 100,000 simultaneous audio calls. Skype was now a hot ticket. The company decided to raise more money from venture capitalists, and our partnership was now ready to go in big. It was competitive, because by now many venture capitalists knew about Skype’s newfound ubiquity, but we were lucky that Howard was on our side.

Any product that is communications based uses viral marketing. The AT&T Friends and Family marketing program, the LinkedIn network and the Twitter hashtag are some obvious examples. Facebook and Snapchat use viral marketing to share photos. The founders of Skype implemented several viral elements in growing their audio business and even more when Skype video was introduced. The Skype Video Story I was fascinated by the new peer-to-peer technology that allowed people to share files. I met with Napster, Streamcast, and Grokster as I researched the industry. I had gotten the distinct impression that the file-sharing business was pretty much crushed by a powerful and litigious music industry, but I was pretty sure there would be other applications to this revolutionary technology.


pages: 244 words: 69,183

Squid Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Cephalopods by Danna Staaf

3D printing, Anthropocene, colonial rule, Kickstarter, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Skype, wikimedia commons

., “The Devonian Nekton Revolution,” Lethaia 43, no. 4 (2010): 465–477. 2Christian Klug, Phone interview with the author, January 15, 2016. 3Christian Klug, Linda Frey, Dieter Korn, et al., “The Oldest Gondwanan Cephalopod Mandibles (Hangenberg Black Shale, Late Devonian) and the Mid Palaeozoic Rise of Jaws,” Palaeontology 59, no. 5 (2016): 611–629. 4Klug, Phone interview with the author, January 15, 2016. 5Jakob Vinther, Skype interview with the author, March 15, 2016. 6Dieter Korn, Skype interview with the author, January 29, 2016. 7Neil H. Landman, William A. Cobban, and Neal L. Larson, “Mode of Life and Habitat of Scaphitid Ammonites,” Geobios 45, no. 1 (2012): 87–98. 8Mark Norman, Cephalopods: A World Guide (ConchBooks, 2000). This guidebook is packed with gorgeous photographs and includes most of the great cephalopod sex stories: “Breeding Nautiluses,” “Giant Cuttlefish Spawning Grounds,” “Cross-Dressing Cuttlefish” (that’s those sneaker males), “Sperm Wars,” “The Night of Love and Death” (about mass spawning and subsequent death in squid), “Giant Squid Sex,” “Eggs, Brooding and Spawning,” and “Weird Sex” (including that of the argonauts). 9Steve Etches, Jane Clarke, and John Callomon, “Ammonite Eggs and Ammonitellae from the Kimmeridge Clay Formation (Upper Jurassic) of Dorset, England,” Lethaia 42, no. 2 (2009): 204–217. 10Royal H.

., “The Evolution and Development of Cephalopod Chambers and Their Shape,” PloS One 11, no. 3 (2016): e0151404. 19Korn, Skype interview with the author, January 29, 2016. 20David P. G. Bond and Paul B. Wignall, “Large Igneous Provinces and Mass Extinctions: An Update,” Geological Society of America Special Papers 505 (2014): SPE505-02. 21Matthew Clapham, Interview with the author, March 24, 2016. 22For more details about scientific studies on current and projected ocean acidification, visit this beautifully readable site maintained by the Smithsonian Museum’s Ocean Portal: http://ocean.si.edu/ocean-acidification (accessed January 28, 2017). 23Korn, Skype interview with the author, January 29, 2016. 4.

Chamberlain, “Ammonite Aptychi: Functions and Role in Propulsion,” Geobios 47, no. 1 (2014): 45–55. 27Isabelle Kruta, Skype interview with the author, March 31, 2016. 28Isabelle Kruta, Neil Landman, Isabelle Rouget, et al., “The Role of Ammonites in the Mesozoic Marine Food Web Revealed by Jaw Preservation,” Science 331, no. 6013 (2011): 70–72. 29K. N. Nesis, “On the Feeding and Causes of Extinction of Certain Heteromorph Ammonites,” Paleontological Journal (1986): 5–11. 30Jakob Vinther, Skype interview with the author, March 15, 2016. 5. Sheathing the Shell 1A. Packard, “Operational Convergence Between Cephalopods and Fish: An Exercise in Functional Anatomy,” Archivio Zoologico Italiano 51 (1966): 523–542. 2P.


pages: 935 words: 197,338

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Golden was impressed by Skype’s innovation and its exploding popularity. But he soon understood that Skype would be a challenging investment; there was more “hair on the deal” than he had ever seen before, as he wrote in his investment note.[6] Accel was accustomed to backing solid, straight-arrow entrepreneurs, but Skype’s founders had been sued by the entertainment industry over online music theft. Accel favored startups that developed intellectual property that entrenched their market leadership; worryingly, Skype licensed its IP from a separate company and did not actually own it. Finally, Skype’s founders were ruthless and inconstant in the negotiations over the term sheet.

Soon after it got going, in September 2009, Andreessen Horowitz plunked down $50 million for a stake in the breakout telephony company Skype, which by now was owned by eBay. The bet amounted to fully one-sixth of a16z’s first fund, yet it had little to do with its promise to coach green technical founders. After all, Skype was already six years old; it had no shortage of sophistication. Instead, the Skype deal had everything to do with Andreessen’s recent exposure to Milner and to his privileged position at the heart of the Valley network. The starting point for a16z’s Skype bet was Andreessen’s presence on the board of eBay. Having bought Skype four years earlier, in 2005, the auction giant was struggling to incorporate telephony into its business.

Having bought Skype four years earlier, in 2005, the auction giant was struggling to incorporate telephony into its business. It had fired Skype’s Swedish creators amid a series of management battles, and the Swedes had responded by suing eBay over the ownership of Skype’s core technology. When a private-equity group, Silver Lake, offered to take Skype off eBay’s hands, the Skype founders sued Silver Lake for good measure. As an eBay board member, Andreessen had a front-row seat at each stage of this drama. Being familiar with Milner’s Facebook coup, he saw an opportunity. Playing on his reputation as a software guru, he made contact with the Skype founders. He understood their vision and their technical prowess; in fact, Skype was exactly the type of product that a16z believed in—software that promised to displace hardware.


The Icon Handbook by Jon Hicks

augmented reality, Debian, Firefox, Google Chrome, Kickstarter, Skype, web application

While having the hands at the sides looks more correct to those in the West, the hands folded in front conveys warmth and sincerity The bow icon from the smallest (20px) to the largest (80px) notice how details like the hands become just straight rectangles on the smallest version I talked to Mark McLaughlin, the design lead for mobile at Skype, about their side of the process: How many Skype users are there worldwide? had 170 million average monthly connected users for the three months ending 30 June 2011. This excludes users connected via our joint venture partners. How long has Skype had its current emoticons, and what was the reason for the change? Emoticons have been in Skype since the earliest versions of our Windows application, the first appearance of which was an internal build from way back in May 2004.

Summary Now that we’ve looked at all the ways in which icons can be used beyond simple adornment, we can move on to actually creating them… Chapter references International symbol, icon blunders can be avoided http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705370663/International-symbol-icon-blunders-can-be-avoided.html AIGA icons for the Department of Transport http://www.aiga.org/symbol-signs/ McDonald’s Nutrition Icons: http://www.translationdirectory.com/articles/article1387.php http://www.boxercreative.co.uk/our_work/McDonald’s_nutrition.html Skype http://www.telecompaper.com/news/skype-grows-fy-revenues-20-reaches-663-mln-users http://hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/new-skype-emoticons http://julianfrost.co.nz/things/skype-emoticons/ Chapter 3 Favicons Now we’ll start building up our icon skills, beginning with favicons. Even if you’ve never created any other types of icons before, I’m willing to bet that everyone reading this has at some point made a favicon.

They call them emoji (絵文字), a combination of e (絵) ‘picture’ + moji (文字) ‘letter’. They go beyond facial expressions to include objects such as food and hand gestures. It even has a standardised Unicode set of 722 characters. Case study New Skype emoticons With millions of users worldwide, Skype Chat’s emoticons are very widely recognised. Originally designed by Priidu Zilmer when he joined the Skype visual design team in 2004, Hicksdesign and animator Julian Frost were commissioned to update the emoticon set in 2011, and create multiple sizes. As part of the redesign, Zilmer's hidden icon was updated too The original emoticons only existed as 19×19px and, while they had transparent backgrounds, the edges were aliased.


pages: 305 words: 93,091

The Art of Invisibility: The World's Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data by Kevin Mitnick, Mikko Hypponen, Robert Vamosi

4chan, big-box store, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, connected car, crowdsourcing, data science, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, evil maid attack, Firefox, Google Chrome, Google Earth, incognito mode, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, off-the-grid, operational security, pattern recognition, ransomware, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, Tesla Model S, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Now, analysts will have the complete ‘picture’,” the Guardian wrote.17 In March of 2013, a computer-science graduate student at the University of New Mexico found that TOM-Skype, a Chinese version of Skype created through a collaboration between Microsoft and the Chinese company TOM Group, uploads keyword lists to every Skype user’s machine—because in China there are words and phrases you are not permitted to search for online (including “Tiananmen Square”). TOM-Skype also sends the Chinese government the account holder’s username, the time and date of transmission, and information about whether the message was sent or received by the user.18 Researchers have found that even very high-end videoconferencing systems—the expensive kind, not Skype—can be compromised by man-in-the-middle attacks.

Apps such as AIM, BlackBerry Messenger, and Skype all store your messages without encrypting them. That means the service provider can read the content (if it’s stored in the cloud) and use it for advertising. It also means that if law enforcement—or criminal hackers—were to gain access to the physical device, they could also read those messages. Another issue is data retention, which we mentioned above—how long does data at rest stay at rest? If apps such as AIM and Skype archive your messages without encryption, how long do they keep them? Microsoft, which owns Skype, has said that “Skype uses automated scanning within Instant Messages and SMS to (a) identify suspected spam and/or (b) identify URLs that have been previously flagged as spam, fraud, or phishing links.”

Tools like these, which detect the full spectrum of potential cellular threats, were once bought largely by the government—but not anymore. As user-friendly as it is, Skype is not the friendliest when it comes to privacy. According to Edward Snowden, whose revelations were first published in the Guardian, Microsoft worked with the NSA to make sure that Skype conversations could be intercepted and monitored. One document boasts that an NSA program known as Prism monitors Skype video, among other communications services. “The audio portions of these sessions have been processed correctly all along, but without the accompanying video.


pages: 426 words: 105,423

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, call centre, clean water, digital nomad, Donald Trump, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, fixed income, follow your passion, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, global village, Iridium satellite, knowledge worker, language acquisition, late fees, lateral thinking, Maui Hawaii, oil shock, paper trading, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, passive income, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, remote working, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

[Company name] has used this site for a few months to test its usability and has also been tested on multiple computers in Argentina (thanks to my sister testing it out for me while she was in Argentina). *Skype—www.skype.com, Skype is a free software that allows you to talk for free via the Internet. You can also use Skype with regular phones to make calls internationally for a low rate of about .04 cents a minute. Skype also has video chatting capabilities and conference call capabilities for meetings. The setup requires downloading the Skype software free) and buying a headset with microphone ($10) and webcam ($ ranges) for each computer. I have tested this software with my sister and it works well for her in Argentina and for me here.

JungleDisk and Mozy—I use the latter—have fewer features and are more specifically designed for automatic backups to their online storage. Free and Low-Cost Internet (IP) Telephones Skype (www.skype.com) Skype is my default for all phone calls. It allows you to call landlines and mobile phones across the globe for an average of 2–5 cents per minute, or connect with other Skype users worldwide for free. For about 40 euros per year, you can get a U.S. number with your home area code and receive calls that forward to a foreign cell phone. This makes your travel invisible. Lounge on the beach in Rio and answer calls to your “office” in California. Nice. Skype Chat, which comes with the service, is also perfect for sharing sensitive log-in and password information with others, as it’s encrypted.

eLance (www.elance.com) (877–435–2623) Craigslist (www.craigslist.org) LIFESTYLE DESIGN IN ACTION I’m a U.S. citizen and it was impossible for my friends and relatives to track me down by phone. Enter Skype In. It’s not new but allows you to lease a fixed U.S. (or other country) phone number which then forwards to your Skype account. About $60/year. Within Skype you can then set up call forwarding to ring you at your local number. You pay the rate as if you were calling from the United States to wherever you are. I’ve used this in about 40 countries and it works like a treat. The call quality is usually great and the convenience is amazing. http://www.skype.com/allfeatures/onlinenumber/. A caveat is to always, ALWAYS get a local SIM card for your unlocked GSM phone.


pages: 353 words: 104,146

European Founders at Work by Pedro Gairifo Santos

business intelligence, clean tech, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, deal flow, do what you love, fail fast, fear of failure, full text search, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, information retrieval, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, Multics, natural language processing, pattern recognition, pre–internet, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, technology bubble, TED Talk, web application, Y Combinator

Klein: Initially, I was on the board when I joined Skype. It just soon became clear in terms of my role at Skype that I was just so involved and so busy at Skype that it was not practical. We were growing like crazy at Skype: we went from thirty to four hundred people in a year, from two hundred thousand dollars in revenue to sixty million in revenue, from two offices to seventeen locations. I had no time to think about LOVEFiLM, to add value as a board member. Perhaps one of the best experiences I had in terms of the narrative of being a founder, was sitting in one of the first board meetings after Simon had taken over. I was at Skype and just watching the rest of the team present.

Aren't I lucky?” Santos: One question about Skype. You passed from a founder's role to a VP role in another company. And at the same time, you have the investor background. It doesn't seem like a very normal move. What convinced you to go to Skype? Which became a huge success, as everyone knows. Klein: Look. I think you have to trust your instincts in all of the important things in life. My wife and I decided to get married after four days of really knowing each other, and eight, nine years later we're very happy with two kids. And that was good instincts. As far as Skype goes, I've never been someone who was hung up on titles.

Santos: And you mentioned that you got investments, as you said, from Google, Skype. Was it in the NGO phase or after? Varsavsky: After the NGO. Yeah, obviously, when we said we'll be a NGO, we didn't get any investments. When I decided to turn this into a corporation, that's when I got the investments. Santos: And how did you convince Google and Skype? What was the interest from those companies? Varsavsky: Well, we were the first European investment that Google ever made, the first European company Google ever invested in, and the first European company Sequoia ever invested in. I think Google felt and Skype felt that if there's Wi-Fi everywhere, their products will be more successful.


Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

In her new role as managing partner, Theresia advised Efrusy on a new company that he was chasing for Accel as a possible investment. The company, offering free phone calls over the Internet, was called Skype. Skype went live for the first time on August 29, 2003, and was an instant hit, attracting close to a million users. Efrusy was one of the first on the team to identify the new peer-to-peer Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) as a possible game changer. “The challenge,” Theresia told him, “is that there are multiple geographies and multiple complications.” For starters, Skype founders Niklas Zennström of Sweden and Janus Friis of Denmark were in hiding somewhere in Europe to avoid being served with court summonses by U.S. lawyers.

Golden had discovered that the core peer-to-peer technology behind Skype was licensed via a company that Zennström and Friis partially controlled. This meant that Skype could not entirely control its own destiny and potentially created conflicts of interest. For Skype not to own or fully control its core intellectual property at this stage was highly unusual for this kind of investment. With any deal, Golden needed to see how a company “invented” or innovated in some meaningful way to solve a problem or create an opportunity. Golden also learned that the creators of Skype’s VoIP technology were freelance developers rather than employees where all work was clearly owned by the company.

The best founders Theresia knew were those driven to make life richer, better, and fuller. “I am concerned,” Golden finally said of the Skype deal. He wanted to work with “people who will be very focused on doing things the right way and creating durable value for the ecosystem around them.” In the end, after final efforts to find a workable compromise, but facing deal fatigue and far weaker terms than originally negotiated, Golden decided to pull out of the Skype deal. As he did, a dozen other venture firms continued the chase. It was a financial blow for Accel, as Skype went on to become a valuable and important new Internet platform. Golden would have mixed feelings, including regret that he had let his partners down.


pages: 330 words: 91,805

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism by Robin Chase

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business climate, call centre, car-free, carbon tax, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion charging, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, decarbonisation, different worldview, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Shoup, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, Gini coefficient, GPS: selective availability, high-speed rail, hive mind, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, language acquisition, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, Post-Keynesian economics, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, vertical integration, Zipcar

Fortune 500 in 2014, working their way back to the top and striving for monopoly status again. Today, wireless communication is central to their business: AT&T had 110.4 million wireless customers in 2013, and Verizon had 102.8 million.3 Skype was founded in 2003 and had amassed 633 million users by 2010. In 2013, it had 36 percent of the market in international calling.4 Skype built its company by finding another use for our personal computers, video cameras, and data connections. Making the decision to sign up and join the Skype network takes about two minutes and costs nothing. Listing on Craigslist. The seeds of this list are directly rooted in excess capacity. In the mid-1990s Craig Newmark had been doing a lot of evangelizing about the Internet and “saw a lot of people helping each other out.”

WhatsApp also uses your existing phone number and the numbers in your contacts to provide its service, unlike Skype, which requires each person using it to acquire a new, Skype-specific number. WhatsApp lets you send text, photos, and videos for free to your friends—turning all that content into data and avoiding the extortionate fees charged by telecom providers to send messages via SMS. Four years after it launched, 450 million people were active users of the app, with a million more joining each day.4 And unlike any of the other most popular apps (Google Maps, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Skype), WhatsApp is the only one that isn’t free, charging $1 per year starting with the second year.

For the first few years, the New York Times was able to enter the online world and learn it at a very low cost, paving the way for the future reality of its dominance as the location for consuming news. Given the changes in the way we read over the last decade, we would now say that the print edition is repurposed copy from the online version. Same content, new outlet, some additional readers. I’m interrupted by the sound of an incoming Skype call. Skype was built on the back of the excess capacity found in my computer (third example), my built-in video camera (fourth example), and my already purchased data plan (fifth example) on the Internet (sixth example). Voice calls (and now video calls) were previously brought to my house by copper cables.


pages: 629 words: 142,393

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Kessler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, c2.com, call centre, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, illegal immigration, index card, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, license plate recognition, loose coupling, mail merge, Morris worm, national security letter, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, post-materialism, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert X Cringely, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

At the Black Hat Europe hacker convention in 2006, two computer scientists gave a presentation on Skype, the wildly popular PC Internet telephony software created by the same duo that invented the KaZaA file-sharing program.101 Skype is, like most proprietary software, a black box. It is not easy to know how it works or what it does except by watching it in action. Skype is installed on millions of computers, and so far works well if not flawlessly. It generates all sorts of network traffic, much of which is unidentifiable even to the user of the machine, and much of which happens even when Skype is not being used to place a call. How does one know that Skype is not doing something untoward, or that its next update might not contain a zombie-creating Trojan horse, placed by either its makers or someone who compromised the update server?

Linux, THE REGISTER, Oct. 22, 2004, http://www.theregister.co.uk/security/security_report_windows_vs_linux/; Posting of Triple II to Mostly Linux, 10 Things a New Linux User Needs to Unlearn, http://mostly-linux.blogspot.com/2006/06/10-things-new-linux-user-needs-to.html (June 17, 2006) (“Reboots are not SOP (Standard Operating Procedure).”). 3. See Skype, Can I Call Emergency Numbers in the U.S. and Canada?, http://support.skype.com/index.php?a=knowledgebase&j=questiondetails&i=1034 (last visited June 1, 2007) (“Skype is not a telephone replacement service and emergency numbers cannot be called from Skype.”). 4. Jim Davis, TiVo Launches “Smart TV” Trial, CNET NEWS.COM, Dec. 22, 1998, http://news.com.com/TiVo+launches+smart+TV+trial/2100-1040_3-219409.html. 5. See Richard Shim, TiVo, Gemstar End Lawsuit, Team Up, CNET NEWS.COM, June 9, 2003, http://news.com.com/2100-1041-1014674.html; see also Jennifer 8.

., Scenarios for the Network Neutrality Arms Race, 1 INT’LJ. COMMC’NS 607 (2007) (describing “technical and non-technical countermeasures” ranging from letter-writing campaigns to end-to-end encryption that prevents an ISP from discerning the activity in which a user is engaging). 21. See Skype, http://skype.com (last visited May 15, 2007); Wikipedia, Skype, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype (as of May 15, 2007, 17:45 GMT). 22. Notably, the Nintendo Wii has been configured in this manner. Although its Internet Channel software allows users to browse the entire Internet using the Wii, to date user-configurability of the home page and other features has been limited.


pages: 253 words: 75,772

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald

air gap, airport security, anti-communist, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, Edward Snowden, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Rubik’s Cube, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Ted Kaczynski, WikiLeaks

At the time of its purchase, Microsoft assured users that “Skype is committed to respecting your privacy and the confidentiality of your personal data, traffic, and communications content.” But in fact, this data, too, was readily available to the government. By early 2013, there were multiple messages on the NSA system celebrating the agency’s steadily improving access to the communications of Skype users: Not only was all this collaboration conducted with no transparency, but it contradicted public statements made by Skype. ACLU technology expert Chris Soghoian said the revelations would surprise many Skype customers. “In the past, Skype made affirmative promises to users about their inability to perform wiretaps,” he said.

I went back to my laptop and randomly clicked on the next document, a top secret PowerPoint presentation, entitled “PRISM/US-984XN Overview.” Each page bore the logos of nine of the largest Internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Skype, and Yahoo!. The first slides laid out a program under which the NSA had what it called “collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” A graph displayed the dates on which each of these companies had joined the program. Again I became so excited, I had to stop reading. The source also said he was sending me a large file that I would be unable to access until the time was right.

But he says he has many, many more. For some reason, he’s in Hong Kong, I have no idea why yet, and he wants me to go there to meet him and get the rest. What he’s given me, what I just looked at, show some pretty shocking—” Gibson interrupted. “How are you calling me?” “By Skype.” “I don’t think we should talk about this on the phone, and definitely not by Skype,” she wisely said, and she proposed that I get on a plane to New York immediately so that we could discuss the story in person. My plan, which I told Laura, was to fly to New York, show the documents to the Guardian, get them excited about the story, and then have them send me to Hong Kong to see the source.


pages: 478 words: 149,810

We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency by Parmy Olson

4chan, Asperger Syndrome, bitcoin, call centre, Chelsea Manning, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, it's over 9,000, Julian Assange, lolcat, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, pirate software, side project, Skype, speech recognition, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day

No one could see his amblyopia, and people valued his wit and creativity far more. He became bolder and funnier. There was an equality he had never experienced before, an ease of conversation and a sense of shared identity. When the Internet telephone service Skype came along, he used it to talk to his new friends by voice for the first time. One day on Skype, someone suggested doing a prank call and letting everyone else listen in. Jake jumped at the opportunity. He found the number for a random Walmart outlet in the United States, then told the woman who answered that he was looking for a “fish-shaped RC helicopter.”

Brown added a link to one of Barr’s e-mails, saying, “I had a meeting with Bill Wansley over at Booz yesterday.” Over the next few days, Brown kept sending messages to Topiary about HBGary. Topiary soon got the hint that Brown was serious and he invited him into a private Skype group with Gregg Housh and a few others to focus on researching the e-mails more deeply. Topiary kept the Skype group open at all times and found for the next two weeks that he was increasingly being pulled into its conversations, spending at least seven hours a day on the investigation into what Barr had really been working on. Brown gave it a name: Operation Metal Gear, after an old Nintendo game, and its goal, in a nutshell, was to find out how the intelligence community was infiltrating the Internet and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to spy on American citizens.

He could send a hundred thousand people to a YouTube video and grant the account holder a huge increase in views, or he could send the horde to crash a small website or IRC network. LulzSec’s attacks would become a lot more fun. He and Ryan started talking and doing some prank calls on Skype with some of Ryan’s friends as an audience. Then Ryan set them up with a joint Skype Unlimited account so they could call anywhere in the world, dropping eighty dollars in credit without blinking an eye. Topiary had an idea. Instead of making prank calls, what if they got LulzSec’s Twitter followers to call them? Topiary suggested setting up a Google Voice number so that anyone in the world could call LulzSec (or at least himself).


pages: 349 words: 102,827

The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet With Ethereum by Camila Russo

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, altcoin, always be closing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asian financial crisis, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Cody Wilson, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, East Village, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hacker house, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, mobile money, new economy, non-fungible token, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, QR code, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Turing complete, Two Sigma, Uber for X, Vitalik Buterin

“Let’s dream big,” he would type into the Bitcoin Magazine Skype chat from his home in South Korea as he was trying to rally the team behind publishing a physical magazine. He got some lukewarm support, but Mihai, who was getting ready to return to Romania after registering the business as Bittalk Media Ltd. in the United Kingdom, argued they didn’t have enough money or experience to do something like that. Thinking that was the end of it, he boarded his flight back to Bucharest and by the time he got to a computer, hundreds of messages on the Skype group had popped up. As he scrolled down, trying to understand what was going on, he clicked on a link, and there it was, a press release stating in bold letters, “The First Issue of Bitcoin Magazine Goes to Print.”

But nothing happened. He waited a few seconds, then a minute, and still nothing. “There’s something wrong here, the transaction is not being picked up,” he said, but at the other end of the call, there was silence. He was disconnected. Skype was offline. He opened Google. His computer was offline. After trying to turn his modem on and off, with still nothing, he got back on Skype using his phone connection. “Guys my internet is offline! Can someone take over?” “Let me try!” Griff said. While Alex frantically called his internet service provider, Griff connected to the Ethereum blockchain, but he had to wait until he was in sync with the latest block.

He contacted the owner of one of the sites he used for downloading poker books to get a better sense of this worldwide community, and that’s when he heard about Bitcoin for the first time. The website’s owner mentioned that many of his clients were paying for goods with a peer-to-peer digital currency that didn’t have to go through banks. It was pseudonymous so, in theory, people behind the transactions were hard to track down. The idea went over Mihai’s head in that Skype call but a few weeks later, lying in bed one afternoon, he remembered that part of the conversation. He started going through all the links Google provided when he searched for more information on this digital cash, and those pages led to more pages, and the search for Bitcoin led to more obscure cryptography terms, and soon he had spent hours reading everything he could.


pages: 200 words: 47,378

The Internet of Money by Andreas M. Antonopoulos

AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global reserve currency, information security, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, Marc Andreessen, Oculus Rift, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, QR code, ransomware, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, the medium is the message, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, underbanked, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Someone recently asked me, and I get this question a lot, “Can’t tyrannical governments block or ban the transmission of bitcoin transactions?” The answer is no, but I don’t think people quite understand why the answer is no. I’ll give you a couple of theoretical examples to show what I mean. 9.4.1. Transmitting Bitcoin Transactions via Skype as Smileys My first ridiculous example is the encoding of bitcoin transactions as emoticons or smileys in Skype. Skype has a 128-character emoji alphabet which allows you to send various frowny faces, smiley faces, thumbs up, thumbs down, sunny days, beating hearts, birthday cakes—you know, all of those kinds of things. Now, let’s look at that from an information-content perspective.

In the script, I can take the hexadecimal representation of a bitcoin transaction and encode it in emoticons. I can then copy that into a Skype window anywhere in the world. As long as the recipient who receives that string smileys types it into a decoder script and then simply injects it into the bitcoin network, that transaction will go through. The recipient could be a robot. The recipient could be an automated listening station that is designed to decode smileys into transactions and transmit them onto the bitcoin network. Now, explain to me how anyone can make that stop, other than by shutting down Skype. If they shut down Skype, I’ll use Facebook. If they shut down Facebook, I’ll use Craigslist.

Perhaps it’s a fancy phone/fax, perhaps a multifunctional printer/fax/phone. It’s very fancy. So, the phone companies look at this and say, "Oh, it’s a fancy phone. We can do this." They were wrong, fortunately. Otherwise, every time I went on a Skype call, there would be a little slot on the side of my computer, and I would have to deposit quarters every three seconds to make a Skype call. Fortunately, the phone companies didn’t get to write the rules. They couldn’t possibly predict the outcomes we saw on the internet, because most of the interesting things were not incremental improvements or extensions of the things before.


iPad: The Missing Manual, Fifth Edition by J.D. Biersdorfer

clockwatching, cloud computing, Downton Abbey, Firefox, Google Chrome, incognito mode, Internet Archive, lock screen, Skype, stealth mode startup

Best of all, you can get Skype for free in the App Store. To use Skype, you need to set up an account with the service. It’s sort of like setting up an instant-messaging program. During the process, you pick a user name and password. Your name appears in Skype’s Contacts list, along with the names of other Skypers you can make calls with. To make a call from Skype, just tap the name of a person (who needs to be online) in your Contacts list. To call a regular phone line, tap the telephone-keypad icon in the toolbar (circled), punch in the numbers, and hit the green Call button. Skype calls are free if they go from computer or iPad to computer or iPad, but Skype charges a bit of coin to jump off the Internet and call a real phone number.

Skype calls are free if they go from computer or iPad to computer or iPad, but Skype charges a bit of coin to jump off the Internet and call a real phone number. The rates are low compared to standard phone services, and it’s a popular way to make cheap overseas calls. For instance, with a $9 monthly subscription, you can make unlimited calls to landlines in Europe (you can choose from more than 20 countries). Check out the prices for Skype’s various calling plans at www.skype.com. Skype can be a great way to keep up with the folks back in the Old Country on the cheap, but call quality can vary. The Internet can be a very busy network, which can affect the fidelity of the voice signals.

, Set Up an Email Account (or Two), POP3 and IMAP Accounts on the iPad, Syncing With iTunes, Sync and Organize Apps in iTunes, Sync and Organize Apps in iTunes, Sync and Organize Apps in iTunes, Adjust App Preferences, Sync Books Using iTunes, Manually Sync to Your iPad, Sync Music, Audiobooks, and Podcasts, Getting Videos Into iTunes apps, Sync and Organize Apps in iTunes email, POP3 and IMAP Accounts on the iPad manually, Manually Sync to Your iPad Music, Sync Music, Audiobooks, and Podcasts Notes, Syncing With iTunes organizing apps in, Sync and Organize Apps in iTunes, Sync and Organize Apps in iTunes, Adjust App Preferences transferring videos from, Getting Videos Into iTunes with email, Set Up an Email Account (or Two) with iBooks, Sync Books Using iTunes with iPad, Sync Your iPad with iTunes, Sync Your iPad with iTunes Notes, Cut, Copy, Paste, and Replace Text Reminders, Use Reminders T T-Mobile hotspots, Use Public WiFi Hotspots tabbed browsing, Use Browser Tabs in Safari–Use Browser Tabs in Safari, Use Browser Tabs in Safari tethering, Use the iPad as a Personal Hotspot text messages, Send Messages–Send Messages, Send Messages, Send Messages The Internet Archive, Get Music from Other Online Stores The New York Times, Find Newspaper and Magazine Apps thumbnails and finger gestures, View Pictures on Your iPad Timer, Timer Top Charts (iBooks), Browse and Search for Books transferring photos, Transfer Photos with iTunes–Transfer Photos with iPad Camera Adapters, Automatically Download Photos with Photo Stream, Transfer Photos with iPad Camera Adapters transitions between photos, Play Slideshows on Your iPad, Turn the iPad into a Picture Frame troubleshooting, Troubleshoot Apps–Troubleshoot Apps, Troubleshoot Apps, Troubleshoot Games, Troubleshooting iWork Files–Getting Help with iWork, Getting Help with iWork, Getting Help with iWork, Troubleshoot Syncing Problems, Troubleshooting Basics, Troubleshooting Basics, Troubleshooting Basics, Download iTunes and iTunes Updates, and Reinstall iTunes–Download iTunes and iTunes Updates, and Reinstall iTunes, Download iTunes and iTunes Updates, and Reinstall iTunes, Download iTunes and iTunes Updates, and Reinstall iTunes, Use iPad Backup Files, Start Over: Restore Your iPad’s Software apps, Troubleshoot Apps–Troubleshoot Apps, Troubleshoot Apps backup files, Use iPad Backup Files battery level, Troubleshooting Basics games, Troubleshoot Games iTunes, downloading and reinstalling, Download iTunes and iTunes Updates, and Reinstall iTunes–Download iTunes and iTunes Updates, and Reinstall iTunes, Download iTunes and iTunes Updates, and Reinstall iTunes, Download iTunes and iTunes Updates, and Reinstall iTunes iWork, Troubleshooting iWork Files–Getting Help with iWork, Getting Help with iWork, Getting Help with iWork syncing problems, Troubleshoot Syncing Problems TV, The iTunes Window, Play iPad Videos on Your TV–Play iPad Videos on Your TV, Play iPad Videos on Your TV, Play iPad Videos on Your TV, Play iPad Videos on Your TV, Play Slideshows on Your TV–Play Slideshows on Your TV, Play Slideshows on Your TV, Play Slideshows on Your TV, Photo Stream for Windows Users cables, Play iPad Videos on Your TV connecting iPad to, Play Slideshows on Your TV finding and playing videos, Play iPad Videos on Your TV–Play iPad Videos on Your TV, Play iPad Videos on Your TV, Play iPad Videos on Your TV libraries, The iTunes Window Photo Stream, Photo Stream for Windows Users playing slideshows on, Play Slideshows on Your TV–Play Slideshows on Your TV, Play Slideshows on Your TV Twitter, Take a Safari Tour, Use the Safari Action Menu, Social Networking on Your iPad, Social Networking on Your iPad, Use Twitter, iTunes and Social Media, Twitter U Ultraviolet, Video Formats That Work on the iPad Universal Access, Tour iTunes Update Genius (iTunes), Make a Genius Playlist in iTunes updating software, Update Your iPad’s Software Upgrade to iTunes Media organization, Where iTunes Stores Your Files USA Today, Find Newspaper and Magazine Apps USB, Sync Your iPad with iTunes syncing iTunes, Sync Your iPad with iTunes Use Side Switch, Use the Mute/Lock and Volume Buttons, General V VCF files (Contacts file standard), File Attachments Verizon, Cellular: 4G LTE, 4G, and 3G Networks, Use Public WiFi Hotspots, Sign Up for Cellular Data Service, Use a Mobile Broadband Hotspot, Use the iPad as a Personal Hotspot data calculator, Sign Up for Cellular Data Service hotspots, Use Public WiFi Hotspots mobile hotspots, Use a Mobile Broadband Hotspot using iPad as personal hotspot, Use the iPad as a Personal Hotspot video calls, Make Video Calls with FaceTime–Use Skype to Make Internet Calls, Adjust Your FaceTime Settings, Use Skype to Make Internet Calls, Use Skype to Make Internet Calls video mirroring, Beam Games to an Apple TV, Video Mirroring videos, Your Home Screen Apps, Make Video Calls with FaceTime, Stream Web Audio and Video–Stream Web Audio and Video, Stream Web Audio and Video, Stream Web Audio and Video, The iTunes Window, Watch, Create, and Edit Videos–Delete Videos, Watch, Create, and Edit Videos, Get Video Onto Your iPad, Get Video Onto Your iPad, Get Video Onto Your iPad, Transfer Video from iTunes to iPad, Transfer Video from iTunes to iPad, Getting Videos Into iTunes, Find and Play Videos on Your iPad, Find and Play Videos on Your iPad, Find and Play Videos on Your iPad, Find and Play Videos on Your iPad, Find and Play Videos on Your iPad, Find and Play Videos on Your iPad, Find and Play Videos on Your iPad, Find and Play Videos on Your iPad, Play iPad Videos on Your TV, Play iPad Videos on Your TV, Shoot Your Own Videos, Share Your Video Clips, Share Your Video Clips, Share Your Video Clips, Edit Videos on the iPad, Edit Videos on the iPad, Edit Videos on the iPad, Edit Videos on the iPad, Edit Videos on the iPad, Edit Videos with iMovie, Edit Videos with iMovie, Edit Videos with iMovie, Edit Videos with iMovie, Video Formats That Work on the iPad, Video Formats That Work on the iPad, Video Formats That Work on the iPad, Video Formats That Work on the iPad, Video Formats That Work on the iPad, Delete Videos, Videos Aneesoft iPad Video Converter, Video Formats That Work on the iPad deleting, Edit Videos on the iPad from Camera Roll, Edit Videos on the iPad Done button, Find and Play Videos on Your iPad editing, Edit Videos on the iPad, Edit Videos on the iPad, Edit Videos with iMovie, Edit Videos with iMovie on iPad, Edit Videos on the iPad, Edit Videos on the iPad with iMovie, Edit Videos with iMovie, Edit Videos with iMovie FaceTime, Make Video Calls with FaceTime formats, Video Formats That Work on the iPad getting into iTunes, Getting Videos Into iTunes HandBrake, Video Formats That Work on the iPad iMessage, Share Your Video Clips iTunes Store, Get Video Onto Your iPad library’s contents, The iTunes Window movie trailers, Stream Web Audio and Video–Stream Web Audio and Video, Stream Web Audio and Video, Stream Web Audio and Video movies, Watch, Create, and Edit Videos HD, Watch, Create, and Edit Videos Play/Pause, Find and Play Videos on Your iPad Previous, Next, Find and Play Videos on Your iPad scroll slider, Find and Play Videos on Your iPad settings, Videos sharing, Share Your Video Clips streaming apps and websites, Get Video Onto Your iPad transferring to computer, Transfer Video from iTunes to iPad volume, Find and Play Videos on Your iPad Widescreen/Full Screen, Find and Play Videos on Your iPad Wondershare iPad Video Converter, Video Formats That Work on the iPad Zoom/Unzoom, Find and Play Videos on Your iPad VIP Mailbox, Set Up a VIP Mailbox virtual private network (VPN), General Vlingo, Dictation Options for Older iPads voice commands, Enter Text By Voice–Using Dictation on the iPad, Using Dictation on the iPad, Using Dictation on the iPad Voice Memos, Connect Through iPad Jacks and Ports VoiceOver feature, General VoIP, Use Skype to Make Internet Calls volume, Use the Mute/Lock and Volume Buttons, Control the Now Playing Screen Now Playing screen, Control the Now Playing Screen Volume Limit (iPod), Music W Wake, Turn the iPad On and Off Wall Street Journal, Find Newspaper and Magazine Apps wallpaper, View Pictures on Your iPad, Change the iPad’s Wallpaper, Brightness & Wallpaper WAV files, Stream Web Audio and Video, Change Import Settings for Better Audio Quality Web, iPad Keyboard Shortcuts, Surf the Web–Use Other Web Browsers, Take a Safari Tour, Take a Safari Tour, Use Browser Tabs in Safari, Use Browser Tabs in Safari, Zoom and Scroll Through Web Pages, Zoom and Scroll Through Web Pages, Use Safari Reader, Use Safari’s Reading List, Jump to Other Web Pages, Use Autofill to Save Time, Use Autofill to Save Time, Add New Bookmarks on the iPad, Call Up Your History List, Edit and Organize Bookmarks and Folders, Edit and Organize Bookmarks and Folders, Save and Mail Images from the Web, Save and Mail Images from the Web, Stream Web Audio and Video, Stream Web Audio and Video, Work with Online Apps, Use iCloud Tabs, Use the Safari Action Menu, Social Networking on Your iPad, Social Networking on Your iPad, Surf Securely, Surf Securely, Surf Securely, Use Other Web Browsers, Use Other Web Browsers addresses, iPad Keyboard Shortcuts Autofill, Use Autofill to Save Time saving and emailing images, Save and Mail Images from the Web security, Surf Securely streaming, Stream Web Audio and Video WebDAV server, iWork by Online Server Website Data, Safari Wi-Fi Plus Cellular switch, Cellular Data (Wi-Fi + 4G/3G iPads Only) Wi-Fi Sync (iTunes), Sync Your iPad with iTunes, Connect Through iPad Jacks and Ports, Sync Bookmarks, Set Up an Email Account (or Two), Sync Your Personal Info to the iPad, Set Up Your Calendars, Maintain Contacts, Take Notes, Sync and Organize Apps in iTunes, Sync Books Using iTunes, Troubleshoot Syncing Problems, General maintaining contacts, Maintain Contacts organizing apps, Sync and Organize Apps in iTunes syncing bookmarks, Sync Bookmarks syncing books, Sync Books Using iTunes syncing calendars, Set Up Your Calendars syncing email, Set Up an Email Account (or Two) syncing notes, Take Notes Widescreen (videos), Find and Play Videos on Your iPad WiFi, Activate and Set Up Your iPad Over WiFi, Activate and Set Up Your iPad Over WiFi, Get Your WiFi Connection, Use Public WiFi Hotspots, Use a Cellular Data Network, WiFi activating and setting up, Activate and Set Up Your iPad Over WiFi choosing network, Activate and Set Up Your iPad Over WiFi connection, Get Your WiFi Connection hotspots, Use Public WiFi Hotspots settings, WiFi Windows Address Book, Maintain Contacts Windows Contacts, Maintain Contacts WMV files and iTunes, Video Formats That Work on the iPad Wondershare, Video Formats That Work on the iPad World Clock, Track Time With the iPad’s Clock X Xbox 360 gaming console, Control Your Xbox Game Console Y Yelp reviews service, Find Your Way with Maps YouTube, Your Home Screen Apps, Stream Web Audio and Video–Stream Web Audio and Video, Stream Web Audio and Video, Stream Web Audio and Video, Share Your Video Clips movie trailers, Stream Web Audio and Video–Stream Web Audio and Video, Stream Web Audio and Video, Stream Web Audio and Video Z Zinio Magazine Newsstand, Find Newspaper and Magazine Apps Zoho, Work with Online Apps Zoom/Unzoom, Zoom and Scroll Through Web Pages–Zoom and Scroll Through Web Pages, Zoom and Scroll Through Web Pages, Zoom and Scroll Through Web Pages, Find Your Way with Maps–Find Your Way with Maps, Find Your Way with Maps, Meet iWork, Create Presentations in Keynote, Shoot Your Own Videos, Take Photos With the iPad’s Camera, View Pictures on Your iPad, Picture Frame iWork, Meet iWork Maps, Find Your Way with Maps–Find Your Way with Maps, Find Your Way with Maps photos, Take Photos With the iPad’s Camera, View Pictures on Your iPad Picture Frame, Picture Frame presentations, Create Presentations in Keynote videos, Shoot Your Own Videos web pages, Zoom and Scroll Through Web Pages–Zoom and Scroll Through Web Pages, Zoom and Scroll Through Web Pages, Zoom and Scroll Through Web Pages About the Author J.D.


pages: 411 words: 80,925

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live by Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, Community Supported Agriculture, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global village, hedonic treadmill, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, information retrieval, intentional community, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Simon Kuznets, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, South of Market, San Francisco, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, web of trust, women in the workforce, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Hundreds of thousands of early users spread the brand through discussing a new service called VoIP, whereby you could call people anywhere in the world for free on blogs, Facebook, and forums. Skype made it easy for the brand to go viral by providing users with items they could easily share, such as Skype buttons for personal Web sites. Within a couple of years, the verb “to Skype” was being used almost as often as “to Google.” The network effect was in play. Given that any Skype user can call any other Skype user, it was in the early adopters’ self-interest to get their friends and relatives to sign up to Skype, not Vonage or Go2Call or any other VoIP service. But awareness of Skype grew at a rapid rate primarily because people felt that they made a discovery of something new and valuable and immediately wanted to talk it up.

The role of brand is far from dead in the world of Collaborative Consumption, but the way brands are built, managed, and spread has changed. The path that many emerging brands of Collaborative Consumption follow is similar to well-known Web 2.0 household names such as Flickr, Skype, and Facebook. They are based on empowering communities (often using the Internet as a platform to give consumers a voice) and embracing that it takes a community, not a campaign, to create a brand. Skype went live in August 2003. Within two years there were more than 100 million user accounts. By the end of 2008, Skype had hit 405 million users and people made more than 2.6 billion minutes of SkypeOut calls.6 Not a dollar had been spent on traditional, expensive advertising campaigns.

“The Consumer Decides: Nike Focuses Competitive Strategy on Customization and Creating Personal Consumer Experiences” (February 26, 2007), http://mass-customization.blogs.com/mass_customization_open_i/2007/02/the_consumer_de.html. 5. “Nike + Community = Leadership,” blog post on Go Big Always (April 30, 2008), http://gobigalways.com/nike. 6. “Skype Fast Facts,” press release (Q4 2008), http://ebayinkblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/skype-fast-facts-q4-08.pdf. 7. Geoffrey Heal and Howard Kunreuther, “Social Reinforcement: Cascades, Entrapment and Tipping,” Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (December 2008), http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/risk/library/WP2009-03-09_GH,HK_SocReinf.pdf. 8.


pages: 542 words: 161,731

Alone Together by Sherry Turkle

Albert Einstein, Columbine, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, fake news, Future Shock, global village, Hacker Ethic, helicopter parent, Howard Rheingold, industrial robot, information retrieval, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rodney Brooks, Skype, social intelligence, stem cell, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Great Good Place, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Year of Magical Thinking

Once a week, she would call her grandmother in Philadelphia using Skype, an Internet service that functions as a telephone with a Web camera. Before Skype, Ellen’s calls to her grandmother were costly and brief. With Skype, the calls are free and give the compelling sense that the other person is present—Skype is an almost real-time video link. Ellen could now call more frequently: “Twice a week and I stay on the call for an hour,” she told me. It should have been rewarding; instead, when I met her, Ellen was unhappy. She knew that her grandmother was unaware that Skype allows surreptitious multitasking. Her grandmother could see Ellen’s face on the screen but not her hands.

They begin with an affirmation of the value of technology: mothers insist that they are more frequently in touch with their daughters than, as one puts it, “I would have ever dared hope.” Mothers detail the texts and the Skype calls. A few, only a few, say they get an occasional e-mail. Since Skype has video as well as voice, mothers say they can tell if their daughters are looking well. Everyone is vigilant, worried about swine flu. Several hate that their daughters can see them. The mothers are in their late forties through early sixties, and they are not all happy to be closely observed. “I stopped putting on makeup for Skype,” one says. “It was getting ridiculous.” Another insists that putting on makeup for Skype is important: “I want her to see me at my best, able to cope.

But even with the constant updates, I don’t have much of a sense of what is really happening. How she really feels.” For another, “Texting makes it easy to lie. You never know where they really are. You never know if they are home. They can be anyplace and text you. Or Skype you on their iPhone. With a landline, you knew they were actually where they were supposed to be.” One mother shares my feeling that conversations on Skype are inexplicably superficial. Unlike me, she attributes it to the technical limitations of her Internet connection: “It’s like we are shouting at each other in order to be heard. The signal cuts off. I’m shouting at the computer.”


pages: 410 words: 101,260

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, double helix, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fear of failure, Firefox, George Santayana, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, women in the workforce

The leader’s message provides an overarching vision to start the car, and the user’s story offers an emotional appeal that steps on the accelerator. At Skype, Josh Silverman knew the best way to activate the go system wasn’t through his words alone. After talking about how Skype enabled his own children to have a deep personal relationship with their grandparents despite living eight time zones apart, he breathed life into the vision by giving the floor to Skype users as a regular feature of his all-hands meetings. A married couple shared how they survived a yearlong separation during their engagement “only thanks to daily talks on Skype.” A serviceman spoke about how Skype had allowed him to maintain a close relationship with his children while serving in Iraq; they even opened Christmas presents together.

“It helped employees see what a difference we could make in the world.” As they grasped that Skype was about connecting people, the team’s anxiety gave way to excitement. Inspired to build a video feature that would enable more meaningful conversations, they shipped Skype 4.0 on schedule with high-quality, full-screen video calls. Soon, Skype was adding about 380,000 users per day; by the end of the last quarter of the year, more than a third of the 36.1 billion computer-to-computer minutes spent on Skype were video calls. Less than three years after Silverman shared his vision and brought in users to inspire the team, Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion, a 300 percent climb in value.

His first step mirrors how a technology leader dealt with fear among his employees. Outsourcing Inspiration When Josh Silverman took the reins of Skype in February 2008, the company was facing significant challenges. Employee morale was plummeting as the company was failing to maintain the explosive growth that Skype had experienced after pioneering free computer-to-computer calls and cheap long-distance calls between phones and computers. Silverman decided to make a big bet on an original feature: full-screen video calls. In April, he announced a moon-shot goal to release Skype 4.0 with the video feature by the end of the year. “The emotion among many employees was passionately negative.


The Jobs to Be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs by Jim Kalbach

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Build a better mousetrap, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, data science, Dean Kamen, fail fast, Google Glasses, job automation, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, market design, minimum viable product, prediction markets, Quicken Loans, Salesforce, shareholder value, Skype, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Zipcar

Why should the big players care? Then in 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype for $8.5 billion. Skype’s market share of all international calls nearly tripled that next year. And a few years later, Microsoft launched Skype for Business. Now, Skype was on equal footing with other premium services. Even telephone providers were feeling the effect, with the per-minute cost of international calls being commoditized to near zero. Skype also changed the playing field in terms of security, technical architecture, and capabilities, such as a rise in video calls. Skype’s rise is an example of what’s called “disruption,” a concept formalized by Clayton Christensen in his 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma.

CHAPTER 7 (Re)Developing Value IN THIS CHAPTER, YOU WILL LEARN ABOUT THESE PLAYS: • Ways to survive disruption using JTBD • How to create a jobs-based strategy • How to organize around JTBD • How to expand your business through aspirations When Skype first launched in 2003, it had limited functions, and the quality of the calls was poor, but it was free. Users just had to sign up, and they could speak with each other around the world. Incumbent web conferencing providers, such as WebEx and GoToMeeting, largely ignored the service. “We’re suited for business customers. Skype is for college kids to chat with one another,” they’d say or something similar. Established telecommunication companies thought nothing of Skype either. After all, it was a free service that targeted the lower end of the market.

But it moved to a dominant strategy with UberX, and then to a disruptive strategy with Uber Pool. Or a product may start out with a disruptive strategy—getting the job done worse but at a lower price. Then, over time, as the offering improves, it may start to get the job done better, reaching a dominant strategy, such as with Skype. Any analysis done with the matrix is dynamic and reflects a point in time. If JTBD is a core factor that explains market disruption, basing your offering strategy on JTBD helps give predictability into disruption and overall long-term success. Although present here in a few simple steps, using the growth strategy matrix requires rigor and mastery of both JTBD and strategy.


pages: 169 words: 43,906

The Website Investor: The Guide to Buying an Online Website Business for Passive Income by Jeff Hunt

buy low sell high, content marketing, deal flow, Donald Trump, drop ship, frictionless, frictionless market, intangible asset, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, passive income, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Skype, software as a service

I include my full name and contact information so that the seller will have confidence early on that I am a serious buyer. As the auction progresses and I get more serious about bidding or buying, I naturally have more questions. Often the answers are complex and need more explanation than is comfortable in an email or private message. I suggest having a conversation over the phone or on Skype. Skype calls, TeamViewer, or other chat systems are effective because the seller can share his screen and show you the website while answering your questions. It’s a good idea to record your own screen while he shares his so that you can review the information later on. You will want him to walk you through proof of sales, proof of traffic, and anything that the public can’t access (like behind the scenes administrative panels and tracking systems).

Plans started developing in mind to keep more of the profits by managing my own network of magicians and eventually cutting the broker out. Shoot, I might even learn a few tricks myself. The seller provided access to all kinds of information. He showed me phone logs, invoices, and emails. He gave me access to traffic statistics and showed me his PayPal account over a Skype screen-sharing session. I spent about three hours on the phone with him over the course of the auction. I was becoming very confident that this was going to be a winner. Then came the red flag. While the magician was sharing his screen, we were looking at his Google Webmaster Tools account. The bad news came in the form of a message from Google that said they had levied a manual action against the entire website due to “unnatural links.”

Some sellers take a screen-capture movie that shows themselves logging into their Analytics, PayPalPayPal, Bank, or other accounts to prove the website statistics. These videos can also be faked, but it is much more difficult. A common technique is to ask the seller to share his screen with you over Skype or Teamviewer and show you exactly what you want to see, in real time, on the seller’s PC. “Sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make.” —Donald Trump Some kinds of accounts, like Google Analytics, will allow for the creation of a “read only” guest account. Most honest sellers are happy to add your gmail account to their Analytics accounts so that you can browse the historical and current statistics at your leisure.


pages: 301 words: 89,076

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

YouTube has instant machine translation for many foreign-language YouTube videos. You just go to the settings “gear,” click on captions, and choose “auto-caption.” Instant, free spoken translation is also possible with the add-on option Skype Translator. This will allow you to understand foreign-language speakers you are Skyping with. It is not perfect, but being able to Skype freely with someone who doesn’t speak your language is nothing short of marvelous. Microsoft and Amazon have entered the race as well. Microsoft is using its digital assistant, Cortana, to allow users to speak in any of twenty languages and have the results appear as text in up to sixty different languages.

Think of standard telepresence as extremely good Skype—but so much better that it becomes a new experience. Telepresence makes it almost seem like people are in the same place even when they are not. I used it in spring 2017 to present my book, The Great Convergence, to the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM). I was in London with a couple of analysts and connected via telepresence with another group of NBIM economists located in New York City and with yet a third group in Oslo. At first it seemed like nothing more than Skype with a really good screen. But that soon changed.

We cannot know what new jobs will be, but by studying the competitive advantage of AI and RI, we can say quite a bit about what sheltered jobs will look like in the future. By taking a close look at what RI does well, it is clear that the jobs that survive competition from telemigrants will be those that require face-to-face interactions. Psychologists have studied why in-person meetings are so different than email, phone, or Skype. The “secret sauce” for why real face time is so much more valuable is complex, and based on evolutionary forces that shaped our brains over millions of years. While digitech is creating ever better substitutes for being there, it seems that for many years, “being there” will still matter for some types of work-place tasks.


pages: 347 words: 94,701

Don't Trust, Don't Fear, Don't Beg: The Extraordinary Story of the Arctic 30 by Ben Stewart

3D printing, Desert Island Discs, Edward Snowden, imposter syndrome, mega-rich, new economy, oil rush, Skype, WikiLeaks

‘Illegal drugs. That’s what they’re saying.’ Seconds later the BBC’s Moscow correspondent tweets the news. The Skype groups explode with messages. Aaron Gray-Block: Daniel Sandford @BBCDanielS Russia’s Investigative Committee now saying ‘poppy straw’ and ‘morphine’ found on the @gp_sunrise ‘Jesus Christ,’ Mads Christensen mumbles to himself, staring at his screen. ‘This is bad. This is very bad.’ He unmutes the video link to London and taps the microphone. Eight heads look up. ‘You lot seeing Skype? The Russians are saying they’ve found drugs on board the Sunrise. They’re saying they found morphine and poppy straw.’

Nobody is saying much. Then a Skype message lands from St Petersburg. Jan Beránek: IMP UPDATE from Katya’s hearing: Prosecutor said he is NOT against a bail in case of Ekaterina. The judge interrupted the hearing so that she can prepare the decision. Katya Zaspa is the ship’s 37-year-old doctor from Moscow. Jan Beránek: UNCONFIRMED: Katya’s lawyer got information that her bail will be accepted. But we still need to wait for judge to pronounce her decision. Mads Christensen unmutes the video link from Copenhagen. ‘Did you guys just see that? Ben Ayliffe looks up. ‘Jan’s Skype message?’ ‘He says Katya’s lawyer’s been told she’ll get bail.’

The lies come from all corners of the Russian establishment – from journalists, ministers, the security services, and from the state-owned oil company, Gazprom.5 In Amsterdam – where Greenpeace International is based – the organisation’s digital campaign team is looking to mobilise global public opinion. A conversation on Skype sees the first use of a phrase that will soon become the name of an international drive for the crew’s freedom. James Sadri: we want to go for a big push on #freethesunrise30 as a hashtag to mobilise people Andrew Davies: #savethearctic Andrew Davies: It keeps arctic in the frame James Sadri: #freethearctic30 Andrew Davies: #FreeTheArctic30 James Sadri: nice Meanwhile, Greenpeace legal chief Jasper Teulings is working with Moscow to assemble a team of lawyers for Murmansk.


pages: 269 words: 83,959

The Hostage's Daughter by Sulome Anderson

Ayatollah Khomeini, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, failed state, false flag, Kickstarter, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Skype

It’s an interesting scenario, and others seem to find it plausible as well. When asked during a Skype conversation, my dad’s fellow hostage Terry Waite agrees that it makes sense to separate the Islamic Jihad from Hezbollah when discussing the IJO’s acts of terrorism—at least to some extent. “I think it’s very plausible that each unit, like Hezbollah on the one hand, and this splinter group [the IJO] on the other, had their own modus operandi, and therefore they didn’t necessarily overinterfere with each other,” Waite tells me via Skype. “It could well be that what Hezbollah says is true, and they didn’t have direct responsibility for the abductions, but didn’t do a whole lot to prevent them.”

She used to be my mother’s best friend, although they’ve lost touch now, the consequence of some decades-old fight—my mother nurses her grudges with great care and attention—which is sad because she was a sort of aunt to me growing up. I’ve known her since I was a toddler in Cyprus, and her stories of what a cute but stubborn child I was are as much a part of my understanding of those years as the ones my family tells. In a Skype conversation from Iran, she shares how she remembers that day while I sit rapt at my computer in the living room of our house in Fanar, Lebanon. It’s highly uncomfortable because my mother, in one of her characteristic bouts of stubbornness, refused to get air-conditioning in the house when she had it built.

I’m not sure when the U.S. government first heard of him, but two of my father’s friends would see his name scrawled on a napkin in a Cyprus bar, and soon after, it became clear that this man was a key player in the Islamic Jihad’s twisted game. All of Dad’s circle of friends were reporters. They had their own sources, and after he was abducted, they all worked their connections as hard as they could, trying to find information on his whereabouts and condition. During my first Skype conversation with Shazi, as I sit sweating at my dining room table in Fanar, she tells me about how she and Robert Fisk began their quest to find my father. “I had a very good source in Tehran,” she begins. “We used to call him Annie so that nobody would know who we were talking about, but it was a man.


pages: 168 words: 50,647

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5 by Taylor Pearson

Airbnb, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Black Swan, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Hangouts, Hacker Conference 1984, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, means of production, Oculus Rift, passive income, passive investing, Peter Thiel, power law, remote working, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, telemarketer, the long tail, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

They don’t need to spend decades developing management theories or new products—they just need to read the book, or more often, photo copy it. Improving Communication Technology: From $20 Phone Cards to Skype Recalling a trip to Europe less than twenty years ago, a friend of mine remembered squeezing into a phone booth and scratching the code off of a ten dollar phone card to make a thirty-minute call back to the U.S. On a recent trip to Asia, he made the same call over Skype using free wifi in a cafe while he was having lunch. The shift moving jobs overseas is also being driven by communication technology which makes it easier to find, hire, and manage remote workers.

Not only have education standards improved, but the communication technology to reach and work with people around the world has improved in lockstep. Two decades ago, trying to call someone on another continent involved prepaid phone cards in cramped telephone booths. Hardly the way to run a company or manage a team. Today, a $40 internet connection and a free Skype account gives anyone access to the greatest talent pool in history. Instead of competing against the labor pool of a few hundred thousand or a few million people in the area near you for your job, you’re competing against seven billion people around the world. The same technologies, machines, and globalization that have increased your competition in the job market have been a boon to entrepreneurs.

There were plenty of individuals that were talented editors, looking for work, and knew about craft beer ten years ago, yet it was hard to find them. Today, you can search for them and find a specific person that has “editor” and “craft beer” in their profile. The same improvements in technology that have made hiring easier also made managing and working with remote teams easier. Online video conferencing has become ubiquitous. Skype pioneered free video calls after launching in 2003 and other software like Google Hangouts and GoToMeeting have followed, making it possible to see and talk with anyone with an internet connection and a smartphone. Which, as of 2015, was 1.75 billion people and rising fast. Other companies have exploded around remote communication and management.


pages: 232 words: 63,846

Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares

Airbnb, content marketing, Firefox, Hacker News, if you build it, they will come, jimmy wales, Justin.tv, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Salesforce, side project, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, software as a service, TechCrunch disrupt, the long tail, the payments system, Uber for X, Virgin Galactic, web application, working poor, Y Combinator

If you have a subscription product, ask them to upgrade to annual billing, which guarantees they will not cancel within the next year. Similarly, if you run a scaled pricing business (e.g., you pay $9/month for five users, $20/month for ten users, and so on), you can set up special emails for customers nearing their plan limits and ask them to upgrade. When you’re about to run out of Skype credits, Skype will email you asking you to re-up or upgrade to a subscription service. EMAIL MARKETING FOR REFERRALS Due to the personal nature of email, it is also excellent for generating customer referrals. If a friend emails you to tell you about a new product she is enjoying, you’re far more likely to try it than if you saw her mention it briefly on Facebook.

Word of mouth also causes many movies, books, diets, and TV shows to take off. Inherent virality occurs when you can get value from a product only by inviting other customers. For example, if your friends don’t have Skype, the application is worthless. Apps like Snapchat and WhatsApp also fall into this category. This type of virality comes with the advantage of “network effects,” where the value of the network increases as more people get on it. That is, the more people who are on Skype, the more valuable it becomes. Other products grow by encouraging collaboration. In this case, the product is still valuable on its own, but becomes more so as you invite others.

We’ve built some pretty cool tech to make this happen smoothly, and it works with your existing layout (iPad layout only activated when the blog is accessed from an iPad). Okay, I’ll shut up now and you can check out the demo links/feature pages below, which are much more interesting than my pitch. PS—Would also be happy to do giveaways to TC readers. Thanks again and feel free to reach out if you have any more questions (Skype, phone, etc. listed below). Video Demo: http://vimeo.com/13487300 Live demo site (if you’re on an iPad): jasonlbaptiste.com Feature overviews: http://padpressed.com/features Jason Kincaid warned against having your pitch come across as a “wall of text,” something busy reporters who receive hundreds of emails get tired of seeing.


pages: 393 words: 102,801

Welcome to Britain: Fixing Our Broken Immigration System by Colin Yeo;

barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, G4S, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, lump of labour, open immigration, post-war consensus, self-driving car, Shamima Begum, Skype, Socratic dialogue

Overall, around 40 per cent of British citizens working full- or part-time do not earn enough to be able to sponsor a foreign partner.3 And all this has consequences. In 2015, the Children’s Commissioner estimated that there were, after only three years of the new system, already as many as 15,000 children growing up in ‘Skype families’, where one of the parents was ineligible to live in the UK and instead had to stay in touch via Skype or similar technology.4 The number can only have grown since then and a simple extrapolation of the Children’s Commissioner estimate would suggest around 40,000 children affected by 2020. The Home Office’s own advance prediction of the number of couples affected was in the range of 108,000 to 142,000 by 2020.5 And in 2018, the expert number-crunchers at Oxford University’s Migration Observatory looked at whether it was possible to calculate the number of affected families, concluding that it was likely to be ‘in the tens of thousands’.6 Imagine you are British and, like any number of people, you met your partner at a university or college in the UK, where they were attending as a foreign student.

It may be that the civil servants who use the copy-and-pasted phrase in their refusals really believe what they say. Maybe they think that a toddler and their father can meaningfully engage on Skype, tell each other about how their day has been and tenderly articulate their love for one another. More likely, it is a fig leaf for a refusal that everyone knows will split the family apart. It is a lie that officials use to insulate themselves from the real-world impact of the rules they must enforce as part of their job. As one family law judge noted, rather more realistically, ‘You can’t hug Skype.’8 The Home Office will say that affected families are not ‘forced’ apart because they can always go and live in another country.

For my clients CONTENTS Title Page Dedication Note on Terminology Introduction Chapter 1 Welcome to Britain Chapter 2 Net Migration: The Accidental Target Chapter 3 Hostile Environment: Papers, Please Chapter 4 Complexity and Cost: No Way to Run a Whelk Store Chapter 5 Families and Friends: You Cannot Hug Skype Chapter 6 Asylum: Sandbanks and Crocodiles Chapter 7 Economic Migration: Points Mean Prizes Chapter 8 Students: Awesome or Bogus? Chapter 9 Free Movement: Auf Wiedersehen, Pet Chapter 10 Deportation, Exile and Modern Transportation Chapter 11 Immigration Detention: Enforcing Control Chapter 12 Citizenship, Nationality and Integration Conclusion: What Now?


pages: 391 words: 71,600

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw, Jill Tracie Nichols

3D printing, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, anti-globalists, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bretton Woods, business process, cashless society, charter city, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Mars Rover, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, place-making, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Soul of a New Machine, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, two-sided market, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional, zero-sum game

See also specific products Seattle Children’s Hospital, 8, 41–42 Seattle Seahawks, 4 security, 169–80, 191–94, 202, 205, 224, 227–28, 238 senior leadership team (SLT), 2–6, 10–11, 81–82 sensors, 13, 79, 147–48, 150 September 11, 2001 attacks, 172 Serling, Rod, 159 server and tools business (STB), 53–59 servers, 2, 45, 139 edge of cloud and, 89 private vs. cloud-based, 57 privacy and security and, 173, 176 service sector, 240 Shaikh, Saqib, 200 Snapchat Spectacles, 145 Shaw, Frank, 98, 99 Shenzhen, 229 Shin, Jong-Kyon (J.K.), 133 Shum, Harry, 3, 51–52, 82 Sikhs, 19 silicon photonics, 228 Silicon Valley, 12, 21, 24, 26–27 silos, 57, 102 Sinclair ZX Spectrum kit, 21 Siri, 201 Sirosh, Joseph, 59 skills development, 226–27, 240 Skype, 64, 121, 155, 164, 171 Skype Translator, 59 small firms, 217 smartphones, 45, 66, 73, 132–34. See also mobile phones; and specific products Smith, Brad, 3, 131, 170–71, 173, 189 SMS, 216 Snapchat, 193 Snapdeal, 33 Snow Crash (Stephenson), 143 Snowden, Edward, 172–73, 179–80 Social Connector, 137 social contract, 239 socioeconomic change, 12–13 software design, 27, 49 software engineering, 74 solar, wind, and tidal power, 43, 228 Sony, 28 Sony Pictures Entertainment, 169–70, 177, 179, 189 Soul of a New Machine, The (Kidder), 68 South Zone, 37, 115 sovereignty, 170 space exploration, 145–46 Spain, 215 spam filters, 158 speech recognition, 76, 89, 142, 150–51, 164 Spencer, Phil, 106–7 sports franchises, 15 spreadsheets, 143 SQL (structured query language), 26 SQL Server, 53, 55 Stallone, Sylvester, 44 Stanford University, 64 One Hundred Year Study, 208 Start-up of You, The (Hoffman), 233 Station Q, 162–63, 166 Stephenson, Neal, 143 string theory, 164 Studio D, 65–66 success leadership, 120 Sun Microsystems, 26–29, 54 Super Bowl, 4 supercomputers, 161 superconducting, 162–65 supply-chain operations, 103 Surface, 2, 129 Surface Hub, 89, 137 Surface Pro 3, 85 Surface Studio, 137 Svore, Krysta, 164–65 Sway, 121 Sweden, 44 Swisher, Kara, 138 Sydney Opera House, 98 symbiotic intelligence, 204 Synopsys, 25 Syria, 218 tablets, 45, 85, 134, 141.

One of the early decisions I made was to differentiate Azure with our data and AI capabilities. Raghu and team designed and built the data platform that could help store and process exabyte-scale data. Microsoft was developing machine learning and AI capability as part of our products such as Bing, Xbox Kinect, and Skype Translator. I wanted us to make this capability available to third-party developers as part of Azure. A key hire for Azure was Joseph Sirosh, who I recruited from Amazon. Joseph had been passionately working in ML for all his professional career, and he brought that passion to his new role at Microsoft.

We were already running at-scale services such as Bing, Office 365, and Xbox Live. But with Azure we were now powering thousands of other businesses every minute of every day. Our team had to learn to embrace what I called “live site first” culture. The operational culture was as important as any key technology breakthrough. We would have on a single Skype call dozens of engineers plus our customer-facing field teams, all of whom would swarm together to coordinate and fix any problem. And every such incident would lead to rigorous root-cause analysis so that we could continuously learn and improve. I would, from time to time, join these calls to see our engineers in action.


pages: 272 words: 64,626

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs by Andy Kessler

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, disintermediation, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Michael Milken, Money creation, Netflix Prize, packet switching, personalized medicine, pets.com, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, vertical integration, wealth creators, Yogi Berra

Index it, package it, slice and dice it, write opinions on it, just don’t be in the business of selling it. I like the expression: because they can. Someone will give a zero margin cost product or service away—because they can! This is true of content like music and movies, but it’s also true of many services. Voice calls can be free, so Skype and others made them free, only charging when they have to touch the old antiquated phone system. Skype was lucky that AT&T still charged for phone calls so they could undercut them and still charge for something. Same for classified ads and what Craigslist did to newspapers. Classifieds could be done for free so they were, with just a $75 fee added for job listings, creating enough revenue for Craigslist to cover all their costs, and then some.

But for inexplicable reasons, eBay made a habit of raising prices every year instead of lowering them. For a good six or seven years it didn’t matter; the company grew and their stock kept going up. But eventually the higher prices caught up with them and now they’re just another company looking to acquire businesses like PayPal and Skype for growth. On the other hand, some things get cheaper but don’t Scale. Drugs for irritable bowel syndrome don’t scale. Cigarettes don’t scale. Twinkies don’t scale. Coffee doesn’t scale. And I’m not quite sure energy scales anymore. If a leukemia drug got cheaper every year, I don’t think any more doses would be sold.

It sounds odd, but a partnership between two profitdriven enterprises is usually more manageable and productive than the relationship between two divisions of a large company, each of whose VP wants to be CEO someday. Vertical phone company giants like AT&T saw their growth taken away by horizontals like Level 3 and Skype; the PC business all over again. ON THE SURFACE, a horizontal structure is counterintuitive. For instance, one good reason to integrate vertically is supply. When there are long, slow supply lines, or unsure supplies of key inputs, it makes sense to integrate vertically to make up for the lack of certainty.


pages: 598 words: 134,339

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

Michael Isikoff (13 Aug 2013), “Lavabit.com owner: ‘I could be arrested’ for resisting surveillance order,” NBC News, http://www.nbcnews.com/news/other/lavabit-com-owner-i-could-be-arrested-resisting-surveillance-order-f6C10908072. US government convinced Skype: Serge Malenkovich (21 Mar 2013), “Does Big Brother watch your Skype?” Kaspersky Lab Daily, http://blog.kaspersky.com/skype-government-surveillance. James Risen and Nick Wingfield (20 Jun 2013), “Silicon Valley and spy agency bound by strengthening web,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/technology/silicon-valley-and-spy-agency-bound-by-strengthening-web.html. We don’t know what the changes were: Microsoft Corporation (13 Oct 2011), “Microsoft officially welcomes Skype,” Microsoft News Center, http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2011/oct11/10-13skypepr.aspx.

monitors physical spaces: Calum MacLeod (3 Jan 2013), “China surveillance targets crime—and dissent,” USA Today, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/01/03/china-security/1802177. Messages containing words: Vernon Silver (8 Mar 2013), “Cracking China’s Skype surveillance software,” Bloomberg Business Week, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-08/skypes-been-hijacked-in-china-and-microsoft-is-o-dot-k-dot-with-it. 30,000 Internet police: John Markoff (1 Oct 2008), “Surveillance of Skype messages found in China,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/02/technology/internet/02skype.html. India: John Ribeiro (13 Jan 2011), “RIM allows India access to consumer BlackBerry messaging,” CIO, http://www.cio.com/article/654438/RIM_Allows_India_Access_to_Consumer_BlackBerry_Messaging.

Larger, more beholden companies would never do that. We must assume that every other computer company that received a similar demand has eventually complied. For example, we know that the US government convinced Skype—through bribery, coercion, threat, or legal compulsion—to make changes in how the program operates, to facilitate eavesdropping. We don’t know what the changes were, whether they happened before or after Microsoft bought Skype in 2011, or how they satisfied whatever the government demanded, but we know they happened. In 2008, the US government secretly threatened Yahoo with a $250,000-per-day fine, with the daily amount increasing rapidly if it didn’t join the NSA’s PRISM program and provide it with user data.


pages: 382 words: 120,064

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do by Brett King

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, asset-backed security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, fixed income, George Gilder, Google Glasses, high net worth, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Infrastructure as a Service, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Pingit, platform as a service, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, self-driving car, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, telepresence, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, underbanked, US Airways Flight 1549, web application, world market for maybe five computers

The problem is that the teams that manage the Twitter channel are generally totally disconnected from traditional contact centres and often still refer customers back to the call centre after an initial contact. Siri, Lola, Skype and VoIP We are also seeing more use of technologies such as web-chat and Skype. These are hardly universal, but a few banks have experimented with context-sensitive web-chat and integrating Skype into the web/tablet experience. In fact, when UBank launched as NAB’s online direct banking brand experiment back in 2009, it deliberately integrated Skype into the customer onboarding and support mechanisms. UBank states on its website: “You can ‘Skype™ us’ from anywhere in the world for free (excluding ISP costs). UBank is the first Australian bank to enable Skype™ calls directly into our 24×7 Australian-based Direct Banking Centre.”

Always banking, never at a bank™ The core function of the branch in the 21st century Branch innovations built to engage What happens when they don’t visit anymore? Branch improvements today Chapter 4: Onboard and Engaged—The Ecosystem for Customer Support The need for better support Siri, Lola, Skype and VoIP When a consumer wants to become a customer Customer-centred means organisational change Responsive architecture Conclusions: Tactical channel improvement Chapter 5: Web—Why Revenue Is Still So Hard To Find . . . Why aren’t we buying more online? What sells online? Screen (web/tablet/mobile) first Cross-sell to existing customers Internet channel improvement today Chapter 6: Mobile Banking—Already Huge and It’s Just Getting Started The greatest device ever sold The landscape Bringing banking to the unbanked What does the future hold?

On every product or transaction page on your website, list the specific call centre number for that type of product/service. This can direct customers to an Interactive Voice Response menu specifically designed for that query, which will reduce call centre load and ensure CSR (customer service representatives) are appropriately equipped to answer specific questions. Even better, put a Skype calling button on the website where they can contact someone from the bank as they have a question, rather than waiting for them to find the correct number and call you separately. UBank™ in Australia used this methodology with great success. Customers are already coming to your website to find the solution, so why not put a list of the most frequent call types, issues or questions in the same area of the site where customers look up the telephone number?


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How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the Secrets of the Most Successful Entrepreneurs of Our Time by George Berkowski

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business intelligence, call centre, crowdsourcing, deal flow, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, Paul Graham, QR code, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, ubercab, Y Combinator

From the very get-go, your company – and especially the product-and-development teams – should be fostering a culture of openness, inviting real people to use your app, and then inviting feedback that can be shared throughout the company to drive improvements. One great example is Skype’s mobile app. In 2013 it had more than 300 million active users across a number of mobile platforms. Jonathan Moore was in charge of mobile product there (until Hailo headhunted him to join its product team) and he introduced a great practice: get out there in front of users every single Friday and get real-world feedback. Granted, Skype has a usability lab with dedicated people working just on that (what a luxury!). As a result Skype continually tested all kinds of changes and improvements. This led to a culture of experimentation, and great improvements in not only user-satisfaction levels but also app-related revenues.

If Snapchat can disrupt the market, then clearly so can others. VOICE-CALL-RELATED, 22 TIMES PER DAY: Mobile carriers still carry the vast majority of calls over non-data networks, but plenty of apps have come to eat more of their pie. Skype is a leader in voice calls with its mobile app (200 million active users and $200 million in annual revenue), as is the Viber app, which amassed 300 million active users by early 2014.8 Like Skype, it uses instant messaging and a voice-over-Internet protocol (VOIP). Google has its own Hangouts app, and Apple has its Facetime app built right into the iOS platform. As mobile carriers realise that their future lies in data, they have offered unlimited national calling packages, removing revenue opportunities for apps that want to compete.

There’s clearly a huge amount to learn from them, not only from the way that they have adapted to the mobile world, but also because they are great examples of modern companies that have grown from ideas to billion-dollar powerhouses by developing better products, great leadership, constant innovation – and, above all, superb execution. Companies such as Google, Facebook, Skype, PayPal, eBay, Amazon, Pandora, Dropbox, Box, Groupon and Evernote fall into this category. Concrete steps The world of mobile technology is exciting – and daunting. The mobile landscape is constantly changing: every week seems to herald the arrival of a new mobile device – from smartphones to smart watches, to tablets, to phablets (that’s a combination of phone and tablet).


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Home Sweet Anywhere: How We Sold Our House, Created a New Life, and Saw the World by Lynne Martin

connected car, Downton Abbey, East Village, Hacker News, haute cuisine, McMansion, pink-collar, Skype

• Say “Yes”: When someone offers you an opportunity to go somewhere, see something, do something new, say “Yes” whenever possible. Your best stories will come from things you never expected, but tried! Postpone nothing! • Keep in Touch: Use your Internet connection to speak with friends and family via Skype or FaceTime. A thirty-minute chat can feel like a visit home and be a great tonic to you and the ones you love and miss. Best of all, Skype to Skype calls are free! • Shop Green: Don’t be shy. Charity shop browsing is considered chic in most countries. When seasons change, you can supplement your wardrobe without going broke, then recycle your purchases and enjoy the bonus of feeling righteous!

Tim had nabbed a hot baguette on the way home from the Metro, we had some gorgeous pâté, so we were all set. This gave us a good opportunity to call home. We manage to speak with our daughters and friends often and have learned to compensate for the nine-hour time difference between Europe and California. They’re having coffee while I’m toasting them on Facebook or Skype with my first lovely Côtes du Rhône of the day. That day we fired up Skype on our computer and indulged in a long chat with Amandah, Tim’s daughter in Florida. We got to see four-year-old Sean paddling around in the pool! We miss our family deeply, and longing for them is the only part of our experience that makes us sad. It’s dreadful to miss many family events, and we know that whole dramas come and go in our absence.

We considered yelling down to the store to get help, but we knew we couldn’t explain ourselves to the Turkish-speaking fellow who was on duty. Besides, it would be embarrassing to shout our stupidity from the rooftops, so we waited some more. After sitting in silence for about fifteen minutes, inching our chairs ever closer to the wall to escape the hot sun, Tim said, “Hey, you have Skype on your phone. Try calling him.” The owner answered immediately. I explained our problem and he said he’d send Kubilay and a locksmith as soon as possible. We offered to pay for the mistake, but he said he wouldn’t hear of it. He told us it had happened before, which eased our humiliation. Somewhat.


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The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, lolcat, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Sinatra Doctrine, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, Steve Jobs, Streisand effect, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

This is particularly true when it comes to voice communications. While it was relatively easy to bug a phone line, this is not such an easy option with voice-over-the-Internet technology like Skype. (The inability to eavesdrop on Skype conversations bothers Western governments, too: In early 2009 the U.S. National Security Agency was reported to have offered a sizeable cash bounty to anyone who could help them break Skype’s encrypted communications; to date no winners have been announced.) Second, there is so much data being produced online that authorities cannot possibly process and analyze all of it.

Meet Pro-Putin Activist Maria Sergeyeva, Russia’s Rising Political Star.” New York Daily News, March 9, 2009. Osipovich, Alexander. “NoizeMC, aka Ivan Alexeyev, and Russian Rap Inspire a Movement.” Wall Street Journal, July 24, 2010. Page, Lewis. “NSA Offering ‘Billions’ for Skype Eavesdrop Solution.” Register, February 12, 2009. www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_for_skype_pwnage/. Podger, Corinne. “China Marshalls Army of Bloggers.” Connect Asia. Radio Australia, August 21, 2008. Pretel, Enrique Andres. “Twitter’s Heady Rise Has Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in Spin.” Reuters, March 30, 2010. “Prjamaja Rech.” Prilozhenie Telekom, Kommersant, November 16, 2006. www.kommersant.ru/doc.aspx?

“Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists.” Applefritter, January 4, 2006. www.applefritter.com/bannedbooks. “P2P Comes to the Aid of Audiovisual Search.” PhysOrg.com. November 18, 2009.www.physorg.com/news177780052.html. Page, Lewis. “NSA Offering ‘Billions’ for Skype Eavesdrop Solution.” Register, February 12, 2009. www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_for_skype_pwnage/. Palmer, Maija. “Face Recognition Software Gaining a Broader Canvas.” Financial Times, May 22, 2010. ———. “Google Debates Face Recognition Technology After Privacy Blunders.” Financial Times, May 20, 2010. Pankavec, Zmіcer. “KDB Verbue Praz vkontakte.ru.”


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Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy by Melanie Swan

23andMe, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, banking crisis, basic income, bioinformatics, bitcoin, blockchain, capital controls, cellular automata, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative editing, Conway's Game of Life, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital divide, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, friendly AI, Hernando de Soto, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, operational security, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, personalized medicine, post scarcity, power law, prediction markets, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, sharing economy, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, software as a service, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the long tail, Turing complete, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks

“The NSA Can Listen to Skype Calls (Thanks to Microsoft).” The Mac Observer, July 11, 2013. http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/the-nsa-can-listen-to-skype-calls-thanks-to-microsoft; Goodin, D. Encrypted or Not, Skype Communications Prove ‘Vital’ to NSA Surveillance.” Ars Technica, May 13, 2014. http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/05/encrypted-or-not-skype-communications-prove-vital-to-nsa-surveillance/. 85 Brin, D. The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books Group, 1999. 86 Chaffin, B. “The NSA Can Listen to Skype Calls (Thanks to Microsoft).”

This method captures tweets that might be censored out later by takedown requests.82 Florincoin’s key enabling feature for this is transaction comments, a 528-character field for the recording of both metadata and tweet content.83 The expanded commenting functionality could be used more broadly for many kinds of blockchain applications, such as providing metadata and secure pointers to genomic sequences or X-ray files. Another freedom-oriented application is Ostel’s free encrypted Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony service, because the United States National Security Agency (NSA) can listen in on other services like Skype.84 Ostel is a nice example of David Brin’s bottom-up souveillance counterweight85 to top-down NSA surveillance (of both traditional telephone calls and Skype86). Decentralized DNS Functionality Beyond Free Speech: Digital Identity Beyond its genesis motivation to enable free speech and provide a countermeasure to the centralized control of the Internet, there are other important uses of decentralized DNS functionality in the developing Blockchain 3.0 ecosystem.

“The NSA Can Listen to Skype Calls (Thanks to Microsoft).” The Mac Observer, July 11, 2013. http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/the-nsa-can-listen-to-skype-calls-thanks-to-microsoft. 87 Dourado, E. “Can Namecoin Obsolete ICANN (and More)?” The Ümlaut, February 5, 2014. http://theumlaut.com/2014/02/05/namecoin-icann/. 88 Rizzo, P. “How OneName Makes Bitcoin Payments as Simple as Facebook Sharing.” CoinDesk, March 27, 2014. http://www.coindesk.com/onename-makes-bitcoin-payments-simple-facebook-sharing/. 89 Higgins, S. “Authentication Protocol BitID Lets Users ‘Connect with Bitcoin.’” CoinDesk, May 7, 2014. http://www.coindesk.com/authentication-protocol-bitid-lets-users-connect-bitcoin/. 90 Rohan, M.


Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Benjamin Mako Hill, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, collaborative editing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, Erik Brynjolfsson, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Larry Wall, late fees, Mark Shuttleworth, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, optical character recognition, PageRank, peer-to-peer, recommendation engine, revision control, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Saturday Night Live, search costs, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, transaction costs, VA Linux, Wayback Machine, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

If this is a sharing economy, it is a thin sharing economy. • Think of the “Voice Over IP” service called Skype. With Skype, you can make free Internet calls, and very cheap Internet-to-regular-phone calls (and vice versa). But Skype is designed to use, or “share,” the resources of the computers connected to this VOIP network. When you’re on the Skype phone, Skype is using your computer to make its network work better.46 This is like AT&T drawing electricity from your house when you use the telephone, as a way to keep its electricity costs down. I don’t mean to criticize Skype for this: it certainly helps make the service better. But when someone participates in this “sharing economy” of computer resources, what is the most salient motivation?

Fourth and finally, he notes that contributors may be motivated by their attachment or commitment to a particular open source project or group. In other words, the good of the group enters into the utility equation of the individual contributor. (Ibid., 927.) 46. Or so the terms of service for Skype say. See “Skype End User License Agreement—Article 4 Utilization of Your Computer,” Skype, available at link #69 (last visited July 31, 2007). 47. Daniel H. Pink, “The Book Stops Here,” Wired, March 2005, available at link #70. 48. All quotes from Jimmy Wales taken from an in-person interview conducted May 4, 2007. 49. Seth Anthony, “Contribution Patterns Among Active Wikipedians: Finding and Keeping Content Creators,” Wikimania Proceedings SA1 (2006), as summarized at link #71 (last visited August 20, 2007). 50.

But when someone participates in this “sharing economy” of computer resources, what is the most salient motivation? Is it to advance the cause of Skype? Or is it simply a by-product of people’s desire for cheap calls? I suggest the latter, making this too a thin sharing economy. • Think finally of AOL’s IM network. The value of that network increases for everyone. This is a consequence of network effects: the more who join, the more valuable the resource is for everyone. There are many contexts in which this network effect is true. Think, for example, about the English language. Every time someone in China struggles to learn English or a school in India continues to push English as a primary language, all of us English speakers benefit.


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Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success by Tom Eisenmann

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, clean tech, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, drop ship, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, growth hacking, Hyperloop, income inequality, initial coin offering, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, nuclear winter, Oculus Rift, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk/return, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software as a service, Solyndra, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

A product that facilitates interactions between its users has network effects if adding users makes the product more valuable to every user, by providing more potential partners for interactions. For example, the first Skype user couldn’t do anything with the product until a second user came on board. The subsequent arrival of each new Skype user made the product a little bit more valuable for every existing user, by offering yet another potential conversation partner. For the same reason, Skype’s growing user base made the service more attractive to nonusers, by boosting the odds that someone with whom they wanted to speak already had Skype. With network effects, users beget more users. And the stronger the preference for additional interaction partners, the stronger the network effect.

For example, credit card companies serve cardholders and merchants, recruiting websites match job seekers and corporate employers, and videogame consoles connect gamers with game developers. By contrast, one-sided networks have just one type of user. Although every Skype call has a sender and a receiver, these roles are transient: Most Skype users make and receive calls at different times. In a two-sided network, members on each side generally prefer having access to more users on the other side; these are positive cross-side network effects. For example, signing up more merchants makes a credit card more attractive to consumers—and vice versa.

Assuming a 50 percent chance of a good outcome for any given challenge, the probability of getting five out of five good outcomes is the same as the odds of picking the winning number in roulette: 3 percent. To win such a gamble, these entrepreneurs were betting on Cascading Miracles. Some late-stage startups that followed the Cascading Miracles pattern were legendary flops, including Iridium, Segway, and Webvan. More recent examples include Joost, a YouTube competitor from Skype’s founders; numerous Initial Coin Offerings; and a venture I’ll profile, Better Place, whose charging stations for electric cars used robots to rapidly swap depleted batteries with fully charged replacements. Such ventures are often launched by charismatic founders who seduce employees, investors, and strategic partners with an opportunity to help usher in a dazzling future.


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They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy by Lawrence Lessig

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Columbine, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joi Ito, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Upton Sinclair, Yochai Benkler

For a fantastic analysis of the antitrust problem raised by “free” data, see Dirk Bergemann and Alessandro Bonatti, “The Economics of Social Data” (working paper, January 15, 2019) (while identifying a competitive problem, the authors have no clear remedy beyond data portability). 94.Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 172–73. 95.Microsoft acquired Skype for $8.5 billion on May 10, 2011. “Microsoft Officially Welcomes Skype,” Microsoft, October 13, 2011, available at link #124. Microsoft revealed its speech recognition capabilities through an announcement that demonstrated Star Trek–like technology (the “universal translator”). “Skype Translator Preview—An Exciting Journey to a New Chapter in Communication,” Skype, December 15, 2014, available at link #125. Microsoft assures users that no personally identifiable data is gathered from Skype and that the data is not used for advertising. “Skype Translator Privacy FAQ,” Skype, available at link #126. 96.Andrew C.

And while there is a potential for abuse—and that potential should be regulated—there is all the difference in the world between my neighbor (or the Stasi) reading my mail and Google “reading” my emails. The same is true about Microsoft and Skype: When the public wondered why Microsoft was willing to pay $8.5 billion to buy Skype, it was quickly revealed that the company would use the Skype calls to train voice recognition algorithms.95 “So wait, Microsoft is listening to my Skype-based telephone calls?” Yes, in a sense, but not in the sense that the FBI might be listening to your telephone calls. That again is not to say that we shouldn’t be concerned about abuse, or even about the potential for abuse, given the architecture as it has developed.


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In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

Halfway through the development cycle, an opportunity arose that Google’s leaders felt compelled to consider: Skype was available. It was a onetime chance to grab hundreds of millions of Internet voice customers, merging them with Google Voice to create an instant powerhouse. Wesley Chan believed that this was a bad move. Skype relied on a technology called peer to peer, which moved information cheaply and quickly through a decentralized network that emerged through the connections of users. But Google didn’t need that system because it had its own efficient infrastructure. In addition, there was a question whether eBay, the owner of Skype, had claim to all the patents to the underlying technology, so it was unclear what rights Google would have as it tried to embellish and improve the peer-to-peer protocols.

“Salar is like the secret president of Google,” says Chan, who laid out the reasons why a Skype acquisition would be a disaster. Kamangar agreed. Then the two of them talked to Sergey and won him over as well. With those allies on board, Chan devised a plan to kill the Skype purchase. As he later described it, his scheme involved “laying grenades” at the executive meeting where the purchase was up for approval. Chan tricked the business development executive who was pushing the acquisition into thinking that he was in favor of the deal: he had even prepared a PowerPoint presentation with all the reasons Google should buy Skype. Chan says that halfway through the presentation, though, the trap sprang.

A lawyer said it might take months to get approval. Finally, Brin looked at Chan and asked why Google would want to take the risk to begin with. Chan dropped his defense entirely and began explaining why Google had no need for Skype. “At that point,” recalls Chan, “Sergey gets up and says, ‘This is the dumbest shit I’ve ever seen.’ And Eric gets up and walks out of the room. The deal’s off.” Not long after, eBay sold Skype to a group of investors, taking a loss from its original purchase price. In March 2009, Google Voice made its debut with a thunderclap. In addition to all the services GrandCentral offered, such as one number for life, the company had added others, including integration with Gmail and Google Calendar.


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The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay by Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cross-border payments, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, government statistician, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, labor-force participation, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, patent troll, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Steve Jobs, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, very high income, We are the 99%

In 2004, a few months after Google transferred its intellectual property to Bermuda, Skype—a company founded by a Swede and a Dane—moved most of its voice-over-IP technology to a subsidiary incorporated in Ireland. What’s interesting in the case of Skype is that thanks to “LuxLeaks”—a trove of confidential documents leaked in 2014 from PricewaterhouseCoopers—we know the details of this transaction. According to PwC, how much was the groundbreaking technology that was going to disrupt the telecommunications market worth? A grand total of 25,000 euros.8 In September 2005, a few months after this transaction, Skype was bought by eBay for $2.6 billion.

A grand total of 25,000 euros.8 In September 2005, a few months after this transaction, Skype was bought by eBay for $2.6 billion. It’s not a coincidence that Google and Skype sold their intellectual property at the same time to shell companies located somewhere between Ireland and Bermuda. Around 2003–2004, this was the dodge of choice for the tax-avoidance industry. Skype, like Google, was given the same advice: move fast, before being listed as public companies or bought back by another firm. Why? Because it’s harder to pretend your core technology is nearly worthless when the market values you in the billions. With these examples, we can see that corporate tax dodging, whatever may be said about it, is quite simple.

These states sell a key ingredient, a vital input without which the scams peddled by the Big Four would be of little use: their own sovereignty.16 Since the 1980s, the governments of tax havens have engaged in a new sort of commerce. They’ve sold multinationals the right to decide for themselves their rate of taxation, regulatory constraints, and legal obligations. Everything is negotiable. Apple asks for a low tax rate to locate some of its companies in Ireland? Dublin obliges. Skype is worried that the taxman might one day contest the price at which it sold its intellectual property to its Irish subsidiary? Not to worry, the Grand Duchy sells insurance, in the form of what are known as advanced pricing agreements—contracts that rubber-stamp the transfer prices used by multinationals ahead of time.


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The Creative Curve: How to Develop the Right Idea, at the Right Time by Allen Gannett

Alfred Russel Wallace, collective bargaining, content marketing, data science, David Brooks, deliberate practice, Desert Island Discs, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gentrification, glass ceiling, iterative process, lone genius, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, pattern recognition, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, too big to fail, uber lyft, work culture

By night, I’ve done everything possible to answer the question of whether there is a pattern to creative success. I’ve spent the last two years interviewing some of the world’s most successful creators. From culinary titans to bestselling novelists and even top YouTube Creators, I sat down, ate, chatted, and Skyped with some of the leading so-called creative geniuses of our time. In addition, I spoke to the most distinguished academics in the studies of creativity, genius, and neuroscience. What did I find? It turns out that the mythology around creativity is just that, myth. You do not have to be born with some X-Men-like superpower to achieve great artistic or entrepreneurial heights.

I tackled the problem by going right to the source. I spoke with people who had reached the pinnacle of creative and commercial achievement. I wanted to uncover what the world’s most successful people did to unlock their potential, even if they couldn’t put exact words to it. Flying around the world to meet painters and chefs, Skyping with rock stars and entrepreneurs, I interviewed dozens of creative geniuses on their process, asking about their childhoods, their brainstorming process, and even the layouts of their workspaces. I wanted to see if I could find any dots that would connect. I met these people through a variety of circumstances.

I asked these people questions about their childhoods, how they conceived of new ideas, how they turned those ideas into reality, and how they promoted them once they were done. I often felt like a shrink, especially since I conducted a lot of interviews on couches. People invited me into their homes, their offices, and their favorite restaurants. When we couldn’t meet in person, we would chat over the phone or Skype. In the end, it turned out that many of the stories I heard were similar. Ultimately I discovered four patterns that creators use to come up with ideas that are optimized for commercial success. These methods were also supported by a variety of sciences ranging from psychology to sociology to neuroscience.


pages: 332 words: 97,325

The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups by Randall Stross

affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, always be closing, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Burning Man, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Elon Musk, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, inventory management, John Markoff, Justin.tv, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, medical residency, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Morris worm, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, transaction costs, Y Combinator

The “idea”—the product or service that the startup will offer—often mutates between the time the applicants submit their application and the time of their interview. This is the case here. The idea that the Kalvins had submitted a few weeks earlier was encapsulated as “past memories sent to your in-box.” In a preinterview via Skype with a YC partner the week before, they had been encouraged to think of something else. “We pivoted the idea a little bit,” says one Kalvin—Jason Shen in this case, but in the eyes of the YC partners, the finalists are a blurry succession of faces without individual names. “We’re going to be the Mint.com for photo books.

A two-person team from Ireland—the older member is twenty-three but the younger one is eighteen and still in high school—has been invited for an interview. When the time arrives, Livingston brings in David Dolphin, the older one, but Patrick O’Doherty is not with him—he remains in Dublin. Dolphin sets his laptop on the table, allowing O’Doherty to be heard via a Skype voice call. Graham does not regard this to be a satisfactory substitute for physical presence. Y Combinator, through its investments, has made online communication services more robust and varied. But in its own operations, face-to-face communication, without electronic mediation, is deemed indispensable.

Graham believes having the founders gather once a week, in person, prods them to work harder because of the power of shame avoidance: they would not want to embarrass themselves by having little progress to report to their peers at the weekly get-together. Graham and his YC partners insist that the founders be physically present for the consultations. When one founder asks if he could use Skype to have a video chat in place of coming over to YC for a conversation in the flesh, Graham says he’d permit it but then frowns. “It doesn’t work as well,” he says. “It turns out that startups are so hard, you kind of have to talk about them face-to-face.” To organize those face-to-face conversations, YC has adopted another academic practice: office hours.


pages: 181 words: 52,147

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future by Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, deep learning, DeepMind, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, gigafactory, Google bus, Hyperloop, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, life extension, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, microbiome, military-industrial complex, mobile money, new economy, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Davenport, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

When the professional humans’ role of broadcasting becomes one of guiding, the guides will be able to work with far more pupils, and to do it remotely, too. In fact, parts of this have been happening for years. British grandmothers have been teaching Indian kids using Skype. A number of Skype-based language and teaching businesses are operating right now. (Not surprisingly, this also works in reverse: Skype connects foreign teachers to American students to provide more affordable lessons and tutoring, giving the foreign teachers a good income by local standards.) There will always be benefits to physical presence, to being in the same room with fellow students and a teacher.

In 2010, Uber had no market share in providing rides to the U.S. Congress and their staffs. By 2014, despite the service’s continuing illegality in many of the constituencies of these political leaders, Uber’s market share among Congress was a stunning 60 percent.1 Talk about regulatory capture. Companies such as Uber, Airbnb, and Skype play a bottom-up game to make it nearly impossible for legacy-entrenched interests and players to dislodge or outlaw newer ways of doing things. In fact, most of the smartphone-based healthcare applications and attachments that are on the market today are, in some manner, circumventing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s cumbersome approval process.

And testing equipment is far away: trips to better-equipped clinics can require a full day’s travel or even a plane ride. For U.S. women trapped in the maw of urban poverty, getting top-notch medical care requires navigating a horrific bureaucracy. Medical devices such as HealthCube Pro will enable doctors to diagnose otherwise inaccessible patients remotely via Skype and FaceTime. Telemedicine is a fast-growing field, but doctors practicing it usually lack the diagnostic information that their nurses collect during office visits. The ability of patients to take regular tests in the comfort of their homes and upload data to shared servers will make it possible to dramatically increase the quality, and lower the cost, of the health care they receive.


pages: 106 words: 22,332

Cancel Cable: How Internet Pirates Get Free Stuff by Chris Fehily

Firefox, patent troll, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, WikiLeaks

To set the maximum upload rate automatically (OS X): Quit all programs that access the internet, including browsers, mail/chat clients, antimalware, Skype, iTunes, and backup tools. Open uTorrent. Choose uTorrent > Preferences or press Command+, (comma). In the Preferences window, click Bandwidth, and then turn on “Limit upload rate automatically.” To set the maximum upload rate manually (Windows or OS X): Quit all programs that access the internet, including browsers, mail/chat clients, antimalware, Skype, iTunes, and backup tools. Open your browser and go to a website that can test broadband speeds. I use speedtest.net or dslreports.com/speedtest, but you can find others by searching the web for speed test, bandwidth test, internet connection speed, or a similar phrase.

Because too much outbound traffic can choke your download speed, you must throttle, or limit, uTorrent’s maximum upload speed. In general, you don’t have to throttle download speed. You can throttle upload rates automatically or manually. To set the maximum upload rate automatically (Windows): Quit all programs that access the internet, including browsers, mail/chat clients, antimalware, Skype, iTunes, and backup tools. Open uTorrent and choose Options > Setup Guide or press Ctrl+G. In the uTorrent Setup Guide, choose the location closest to you from the Bandwidth drop-down list. If a somewhat nearby place isn’t listed, skip the remaining steps and set the upload rate manually, as described later in this section.

In OS X, choose uTorrent > Preferences (Command+,) > Bandwidth, turn off “Limit upload rate automatically,” turn on “Limit upload rate manually to,” and then set the limit to the number that you calculated in the preceding step (rounded to the nearest whole number). Close Preferences. Other Settings Though uTorrent’s default configuration settings work fine in most cases, you can adjust them to suit you. Limit download rates. If uTorrent is hogging bandwidth and slowing your browser, Skype calls, or other internet applications, you can do any of the following: Shut down uTorrent for a while. Limit the download rate. In Windows, choose Options > Preferences (Ctrl+P) > Bandwidth (in the left pane) and set “Maximum download rate (kB/s).” In OS X, choose uTorrent > Preferences (Command+,) > Bandwidth, turn on “Limit download rate to,” and then set the download limit.


pages: 302 words: 90,215

Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do by Jeremy Bailenson

Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, computer vision, deliberate practice, experimental subject, fake news, game design, Google Glasses, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, overview effect, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telepresence, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury

They won’t look like cartoons—they will be super high-resolution models, with perfect lighting effects for shadows and reflections. They will dwarf the fidelity of the networked faces you see on Skype, Facetime, or other videoplatform conferences, which need to keep the realism level suppressed in order to prevent latency. The visual quality of the networked Faceshift avatar simply blew me away. It was the “realest” face I had ever seen networked. Another unanticipated benefit became clear within minutes of using the system. I often Skype with my mom, who lives across the country, and she is typically holding a tablet while we talk. It’s massively challenging for her to hold the tablet in a way that keeps her face in the center of the frame.

Perhaps an article one is reading online will have VR content attached, your brother will send a VR video of your nephew’s graduation ceremony, or you’ll decide you want to watch highlights from the NBA finals as if you were sitting in a courtside seat—you’ll just put on the VR headset for 15 minutes or so. It’s true that the idea of using the Internet with goggles on seems outlandish today, but then, a few years ago, so did a world in which everyone was staring at iPhone screens, or Skyping, or walking around city streets wearing massive, noise-canceling headphones. Once people get a taste of the experiences VR can bring them, the strangeness of the HMD will go away. And what all this means is that intense virtual experiences will, sooner than many expect, be available to a massive consumer audience.

The pairs had to perform a task together using maps. Two results emerged—first, participants in the delay condition made more mistakes in the task. The lag in conversation actually made productivity suffer. Second, the speakers interrupted one another more often during high latency. Most of us have had this experience during bad cell phone or Skype conversations. Delay harms the “flow” of the conversation, or in Kendon’s words, the synchrony.10 Since Kendon’s landmark work in the late ’60s, dozens of studies have examined the effect of interactional synchrony on outcomes. A study from the late 1970s looked at about a dozen college classrooms over time, and demonstrated that students and teachers with high nonverbal synchrony in posture had better relationships than those with low synchrony.


pages: 304 words: 91,566

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption by Ben Mezrich

airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cryptocurrency, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, game design, information security, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, new economy, offshore financial centre, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, QR code, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, transaction costs, Virgin Galactic, zero-sum game

Charlie had been telling the online audience about BitInstant, how none of the investors he’d approached understood Bitcoin and would fund him, how he just needed a little financing to make it work. Four hours after he was off the show, he’d received a Skype from a famous Bitcoin enthusiast named Roger Ver. Ver, known in the Bitcoin community as “Bitcoin Jesus” because of his proselytizing and the many investments he’d made in the industry, had begun the brief Skype conversation by asking Charlie how much money he needed; when Charlie had thrown out a number, almost off the cuff, Ver had instantly agreed. And just like that, without ever meeting in person, they’d struck a deal; Ver had wired Charlie $120,000 for a 15 percent ownership of BitInstant.

But despite these mostly successful blinkered rabbinical strategies, which had kept the Syrian Jewish community intact—all of Charlie’s cousins, uncles and aunts, grandparents, and family going back generations lived within a quarter mile of his house—and are firmly lodged in the Brooklyn landscape—the SYs had simultaneously managed to extend themselves outward in financial empires, in areas including real estate, retail, electronics, and, more often now, technology. Charlie reached the desk and dropped into his chair, yanking out the earbuds and resting his phone next to the keyboard. Then he powered up his computer, heading right for his Skype account. It took less than a minute for his business partner to appear in the lower left corner, shrunk down so that Charlie could talk while simultaneously monitoring the computer code that was now free-flowing like a river down the center of his screen. “You’re late,” his business partner croaked through the internal microphone of Charlie’s computer.

But Gareth was certainly excited now: this was something big, important. Revolutionary. Over the ensuing years, Charlie had realized that the Welshman was right. He moved his face closer to the screen as the last few lines of code flowed upward. He was totally in the zone, barely listening as Gareth offered comments from his Skype corner, as the EDM music still leaked, in tinny twists, out of the earbuds on the desk by Charlie’s cell phone, as footsteps reverberated through the basement ceiling above him: his mom, working on that brisket. Almost three years after reading Satoshi’s white paper, Charlie was certain: it was going to change everything.


pages: 203 words: 63,257

Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe by Ray Jayawardhana

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, New Journalism, race to the bottom, random walk, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, Skype, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

id=2554. 3 centenary of Amundsen: There are many excellent books on Antarctic exploration, and The New York Times published an article titled “Amazing Race to the Bottom of the World” by John Noble Wilford on December 12, 2011, to mark the centenary. 4 I went to Antarctica: See my article “The Meteorite Hunters” in the November/December 2011 issue of Muse magazine (Chicago: Carus Publishing Company; www.musemagkids.com). 6 small flags that: Francis Halzen kindly sent me photographs taken by his colleagues so that I could see what IceCube looked like on the Amundsen centennial. 6 IceCube: Description of IceCube is based, in part, on a telephone interview with Francis Halzen conducted by the author on December 12, 2011, and on material on the project website at http://icecube.wisc.edu/. 6 phototubes: Though I have used the term “phototube” for simplicity, in fact these are photomultiplier tubes (PMTs for short); incident light generates an electric current in the PMT, which is then amplified up to tens of millions of times to make the detection easier. 8 “If you’re trying”: This Janet Conrad quote is from a telephone interview conducted by the author on March 4, 2013. 8 Boris Kayser: Quotes are from a telephone interview conducted by the author on August 9, 2012. 9 Hitoshi Murayama: Quotes are from a Skype interview with the author on March 28, 2012. 10 Klaatu: Lyrics of their song “Little Neutrino” are available at www.klaatu.org/lyrics/347est_lyrics.html. 10 popular sitcom: Quotes are from the fourth episode, titled “The Griffin Equivalency,” of the second season of The Big Bang Theory. 11 OPERA: The initial CERN press release and the subsequent updates are available at http://press.web.cern.ch/press-releases/2011/09/opera-experiment-reports-anomaly-flight-time-neutrinos-cern-gran-sasso. 11 “If the Europeans”: Quoted from Michael D.

Description of the early days of the AMANDA experiment and the quotes “Learned immediately appreciated,” “To have your career,” and “a nearly meaningless blur” are from Halzen’s essay “Antarctic Dreams,” first published in The Sciences (March–April 1999): 19–24. For additional background on Halzen’s scientific interests and the development of AMANDA, see Halzen’s essay “Ice Fishing for Neutrinos” at http://icecube.berkeley.edu/amanda/ice-fishing.html. 17 John Learned: Biographical information and quotes are from a Skype interview conducted by the author on March 6, 2013. 22 “PeV events”: See Aya Ishihara, “Ultra-High Energy Neutrinos with IceCube,” Nuclear Physics B Proceedings Supplement (2012), available at www.ppl.phys.chiba-u.jp/research/IceCube/ThePeVNeutrinoDetection/IceCubeEHE2012_v6.pdf; and “High-energy (PeV) neutrinos observed!

COSMIC CHAMELEONS 97 Three physicists: Leon Lederman, Melvin Schwartz, and Jack Steinberger received the 1988 physics Nobel Prize for the discovery of the muon neutrino: www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1988/. 97 tau particle: Fermilab press release, July 20, 2000 announcing the discovery of the tau neutrino: www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/donut.html. 98 neutrinos oscillating: Gribov and Pontecorvo published their paper, “Neutrino Astronomy and Lepton Charge,” in Physics Letters B 28, no. 7 (1969): 493–96. 100 MSW effect: Also known as the “matter effect.” 100 “The MSW effect is a beautiful idea”: This Bahcall quote is from Johnson, “Elusive Particles Continue to Puzzle Theorists of the Sun,” The New York Times, June 9, 1998. 101 atmospheric neutrinos: See Edward Kearns, Takaaki Kajita, and Yoji Totsuka, “Detecting Massive Neutrinos,” Scientific American, August 1999, pp. 64–71. 101 “That was the smoking gun”: From an interview with Ed Kearns conducted by the author in person at Boston University on January 27, 2012. 102 Sudbury Neutrino Observatory: The official SNOLAB website is www.snolab.ca/. Other sources include an interview with Art McDonald conducted by the author via Skype on January 27, 2012; Nick Jelley, Arthur B. McDonald, and R.G. Hamish Robertson, “The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory,” Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science 59 (2009): 431–65; and Arthur B. McDonald, Joshua R. Klein, and David L. Wark, “Solving the Solar Neutrino Problem,” Scientific American, April 2003, pp. 40–49. 106 “We’ve solved”: This Art McDonald quote is from Kenneth Chang, “Sun’s Missing Neutrinos: Hidden in Plain Sight,” by The New York Times, June 19, 2001. 106 “We now have high confidence”: As quoted in a SNO press release issued on June 18, 2001 (www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/sno/first_results/). 106 “Super-K told us”: From the author’s interview with Kearns. 107 he felt like dancing: As quoted in Chang, “Sun’s Missing Neutrinos: Hidden in Plain Sight.” 107 “For three decades”: This John Bahcall quote is from the Nova television documentary “The Ghost Particle,” PBS, February 21, 2006.


pages: 163 words: 46,523

The Kickstarter Handbook: Real-Life Success Stories of Artists, Inventors, and Entrepreneurs by Steinberg, Don

3D printing, crowdsourcing, fulfillment center, Kickstarter, multilevel marketing, Skype, TikTok, Y Combinator

Nathaniel Hansen, a Boston filmmaker who has been involved with more than a dozen Kickstarter projects, has advised taking an even more severe policy toward the hassles and costs of shipping: “I try not to put anything in the mail for under $50.” To that somewhat mercenary rule-of-thumb, allow us to add another caveat: Don’t offer any individually customized reward for under $100. Haughey offers the important reminder that your time is valuable, too. “I’ve seen people offer ‘a Skype conversation with me,’ and then twenty or thirty people choose that! The person then has like six hours of Skype conversations to do.” Sometimes Kickstarter campaigners have been happily surprised by the number of high-end rewards their most passionate backers go in for. Yehuda Berlinger, founder of the board-game website Purple Pawn, wrote in a summary of his Kickstarter research that “early-adopting gamers—the ones you are trying to court—are loyal, fervent, communicative, know a lot about what makes a good game, and have cash to spend but don’t want to be cheated.

Kickstarter Award Ideas by Creative Category Category Entry-Level Reward Midlevel Reward High-End Reward Film digital download of film, DVD, name in “thank you” crawl in credits, behind-the-scenes photos, soundtrack music, T-shirts, mugs “producer” credit, movie poster, autographed script or photo, screening or party invitation appear as an extra in the movie, spend the day as director’s assistant, phone or Skype call with director or actors, iPad with the movie preloaded on it, personal screening Music digital download of the music, CD, T-shirt, poster signed CDs, name in CD liner notes, handwritten lyrics, release party invitation, admission to invitation-only performance name on the tour van, customized song for the backer, music or vocal lesson, DJ’d party at your house, private concert Design product accessories, actual product (low cost) actual product (midcost), multiple products, product with accessory package, product with color or feature selection actual product (high cost), multiple products, highly customized or limited editions, personal visit to install or set up product Art digital version of artwork, physical artwork (very small), art on T-shirt, mug, postcards, poker chips, calendar artwork (small to medium), art book, print or giclée of original painting, backers-only gallery opening Large art piece, custom made art, art lesson, day with the artist, portrait of backer by the artist, exclusive opening or reception, personal visit/exhibition from artist (large/mobile installations) Publishing e-books, paperbacks, magazine issues, subscriptions, T-shirts, mugs hardcover edition, autographed copies, poster, hoodie conference workshop passes, launch party invitations, time or chat with book author, chance to guest-edit or contribute content to magazine Technology project-related T-shirts, stickers, decals, product accessories midpriced product produced in the project high-end product produced by the Kickstarter campaign, assembled version of DIY kit, customized versions Theater CD or DVD, show program, poster tickets to rehearsal or performance invitation to party or reception, behind-the-scenes access to production, acting class Games copy of game (digital apps), listing in credits, game accessories, T-shirts copy of board game or computer/video game, USB thumb drive containing game rules custom or original artwork, access to closed beta test, backer name or image in the game, naming rights to objects in the game, “our products for life” Food recipes, food, foodie implements and accessories cookbook, more food, cooking class, restaurant meal offer to plan meal/choose wine for backer, create custom food item, prepare and serve a meal on location, personal cooking lesson Photography digital images, inkjet prints, images on T-shirts, photo book (inexpensive) framed and unframed photo prints, high-end or signed photo book photography lesson, personal photo shoot, exclusive gallery opening or reception invitation Comics stickers, decals, T-shirts and other items with comic art, digital comics, or special Web access, backer thanks in graphic novels hardcopy books, USB thumb drive containing digital versions, signed posters original artwork, personalized illustration by artist, your character drawn into the comic Fashion print, T-shirt, tote bag, mug related to garment designs midpriced garment created by the Kickstarter project high-end garment, custom-fit garment, garment named after the backer Dance credit in performance literature or on website, tote bag, T-shirt, poster, digital video DVD of performance, rehearsal admission, entry to group dance class, garment or prop used in performance private dance lesson, consultation with a show seamstress, exclusive performance tickets, choreography of backer’s event, personal dance performance We do it all for you: Some personalized rewards Because you can never have too many ideas for cool rewards, here are some specific, highly personalized ones offered by real-life Kickstarter creators.

her updates included taking requests for a show, soliciting album title ideas and fan votes, and offering many video and text updates from her studio. In one update, she offered to do a phone call with the person whose pledge pushed her past her $2,000 goal (she ended up raising $7,711). She followed that with an update containing an entertaining video of the Skype call she made to Melbourne, Australia, to chat with the backer who made the victory-clinching pledge. Updates can continue well after a campaign has been successful. After Weiss’s first project ended in triumph in early August of 2009, she continued to send updates for another nine months, through December of that year.


pages: 562 words: 153,825

Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State by Barton Gellman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, active measures, air gap, Anton Chekhov, Big Tech, bitcoin, Cass Sunstein, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, Debian, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, evil maid attack, financial independence, Firefox, GnuPG, Google Hangouts, housing justice, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, off-the-grid, operational security, planetary scale, private military company, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Robert Gordon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, standardized shipping container, Steven Levy, TED Talk, telepresence, the long tail, undersea cable, Wayback Machine, web of trust, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

See Tony Scott’s classic Enemy of the State (Touchstone Pictures, 1998). My friend Barry Eisler, a CIA officer turned thriller writer, takes some liberties along these lines in The God’s Eye View (Seattle: Thomas & Mercer, 2016). For the record, the NSA does not have death squads and does not control live video feeds from space. the project’s Skype interface: The “User’s Guide for Skype PRISM Collection,” dated August 2012, is on file with author. In 2014, Der Spiegel published the guide with light redactions at www.spiegel.de/media/media-35530.pdf [inactive]. Analysts could ask for instant notifications: The presentation alluded to these as RTN, which stands for “real-time notification.”

Conveniently for U.S. intelligence, an outsized share of global communications traversed the United States. A call or email from Barcelona to Bogotá might well pass through Miami. PRISM, or S35333, was another kind of access for the eagle folk. Here the special sources were the American-based internet giants: Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. Also a service called Paltalk, which I had not heard of but that presumably hosted accounts of attractive targets. The great thing about those companies, from an intelligence collector’s point of view, was that they did much more than push data through pipes. Unlike AT&T and other common carriers, they stored the content their users sent and received.

Its peers in the PRISM collection system, along with Dropbox and other soon-to-be-added partners, dominated the global marketplace for search, messaging, video, email, and cloud storage. The NSA, in concert with the FBI, dipped into this treasure trove under a secret interpretation of the legal authority that Congress granted in 2007 and 2008. Until then, the government could not search a Skype or AOL account without a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Each warrant required probable cause to believe that a specific account belonged to an agent of a foreign power. The court nearly always granted those warrants, but it did perform an individual review. After Congress passed the Protect America Act and the FISA Amendments Act, Justice Department lawyers persuaded the court that it could authorize surveillance of an unlimited number of accounts with a single order.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

On the privacy front, officials in many European countries, including France, Spain, Holland, Belgium, and Germany, are conducting long-running investigations into Facebook’s frustratingly opaque relationship with its users’ data.42 The EU is also clamping down on US messaging apps like the Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Jaan Tallinn’s Skype, now owned by Microsoft. In August 2016 the EU announced its intention to extend the privacy rules covering traditional telecom services to apps like WhatsApp and Skype.43 The following month, the German government ordered Facebook to stop collecting data on Germany’s roughly twenty-five million WhatsApp users.44 In 2010, Max Schrems, an Austrian graduate student, while researching a thesis on European privacy law, asked Facebook to send him all the data it had attached to his account.

To borrow some language from the Berlin venture firm BlueYard Capital, Borthwick wants to “encode” the “value” of openness into the architecture of the internet. It’s a kind of network neutrality for the AI age. And his model for this is the World Wide Web, the open platform so generously donated to the tech community by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, on which innovative first-generation internet companies like Skype, Amazon, and Borthwick’s own Ada Web flourished. And that’s why, Borthwick tells me, he is advising the nonprofit Knight Foundation on its “Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund”—a $27 million fund announced in 2017 that is dedicated to researching artificial intelligence for the public interest.1 But as Borthwick acknowledges, for every public-spirited Berners-Lee or Knight Foundation, there is a private corporation seeking to dominate the market through its complete control of the technology stack.

But rather than learning about the hottest new Estonian start-up, I am here to hear about the end of the world. I have come to listen to a speech on the existential risks of digital technology given by Jaan Tallinn, a cofounder of Estonia’s two greatest digital success stories—the internet communications platform Skype and the peer-to-peer music-sharing website Kazaa. I am here to learn about what one of Europe’s foremost technologists believes might be the darkest threat to the human species in its two-hundred-thousand-year history. Tallinn is speaking at “Machine Learning Estonia,” an informal conference about artificial intelligence.


pages: 271 words: 62,538

The Best Interface Is No Interface: The Simple Path to Brilliant Technology (Voices That Matter) by Golden Krishna

Airbnb, Bear Stearns, computer vision, crossover SUV, data science, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, impulse control, Inbox Zero, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, lock screen, Mark Zuckerberg, microdosing, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, QR code, RFID, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Y Combinator, Y2K

Products Generated in the Municipal Waste Stream, 1960 To 2012,” Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States Tables and Figures for 2012, February 2014. http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/nonhaz/municipal/pubs/2012_msw_dat_tbls.pdf 3 Anna Quindlen, “About New York,” New York Times, May 5, 1982. http://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/05/nyregion/about-new-york.html 4 “Paperback Best Sellers; Mass Market,” New York Times, January 25, 1981. http://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/25/books/paperback-best-sellers-mass-market.html 5 “The Office of the Future,” Businessweek, June 30, 1975. http://www.businessweek.com/stories/1975-06-30/the-office-of-the-futurebusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice 6 “Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Luxembourg, Skype is a division of Microsoft Corp.” “About Skype - What is Skype,” Microsoft, Last accessed August 2014. http://www.skype.com/en/about/ 7 “Business Brief,” The Economist, December 27, 1980: p.3. 8 “This is CRYPTOLOG—a new vehicle for the interchange of ideas on technical subjects in Operations.” Herbert E. Wolff, “A letter of introduction,” Cryptolog, August 1974. https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/cryptologs/cryptolog_01.pdf 9 “. . . everyone knows that traffic analysts are clear-eyed, clean-limbed people who draw meticulously neat—if arcane—squares and circles on paper, and that cryppies are two-headed people who tend to twitch.

Spiegel said something that really stuck out to me: “The biggest constraint of the next 100 years of computing is the idea of metaphors,” he said. “For Snapchat, the closer we can get to ‘I want to talk to you’—that emotion of wanting to see you and then seeing you — the better and better our product and our view of the world will be.” Instead of allowing you to ring friends for a video chat, as with FaceTime or Skype, Snapchat forces both users to be present inside a chat window before video can begin. So, instead of texting someone to set up a FaceTime call, you can simply chat them on Snapchat, and if they log on, you can start a video chat when you’re both in the same conversation. The “Hey, want to chat?” text replaces the ring entirely.

I don’t know how much hard copy [printed paper] I’ll want in this world.”5 In 1980, the Economist printed its own take with “Towards the Paperless Office,” and a business brief with a section about the “Death Sentence for Paper Shufflers.” From the imaginative latter, written twenty-three years before Skype:6 “He checks his mail by displaying it on the screen—President Clive Greaves in the New York office regrets he will not be able to attend the video teleconferencing session at 2pm (GMT) but will fax his revised forecasts beforehand.”7 They looked past the trends of the day and imagined something better.


pages: 98 words: 30,109

Remote: Office Not Required by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

Broken windows theory, David Heinemeier Hansson, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Google Hangouts, job satisfaction, Kevin Kelly, remote working, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Skype, The future is already here

This is especially important if your company is remote, since you see people less often and remote cultures are trickier to manage. Check out Know Your Company at http://knowyourcompany.com. Skype. The old standby is still kicking for a reason—it’s damn good! Excellent for international calling, conference calls, video conferences, and even basic screen sharing, it’s hard to go wrong with Skype when you need to talk to people who aren’t nearby. Extremely reliable, and widely adopted, and available for just about every platform under the sun. Check it out at http://skype.com. Instant Messaging. For quick text-based chats with one other person, it’s hard to beat Instant Messaging.

Questions that could have been answered in a few minutes via email or the phone turn into forty-five minute in-person conversations. Once in a while these gabfests are fine, but when they become the norm—when they’re abundant—you’ve got a problem. This is where remote working shines. When most conversations happen virtually—on the phone, via email, in Basecamp, over instant message, or in a Skype video chat—people actually look forward to these special opportunities for a face-to-face. The scarcity of such face time in remote working situations makes it seem that much more valuable. And as a result, something interesting happens: people don’t waste the time. An awareness of scarcity makes them use it wisely.


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Left to their own devices, ad tracking firms will eventually be able to connect your various data selves. And then they will break down the name wall, if they are allowed to.”131 A month after Microsoft purchased Skype in 2011, Microsoft patented a “legal intercept” technology that could “silently copy” every communication done on VOiP services like Skype. Microsoft refuses to say whether the technology is integrated into Skype’s architecture.132 Viktor Mayer-Schönberger regards this as nothing less than a “redistribution of information power from the powerless to the powerful.”133 The greatest fear of Schneier’s—arguably the leading global expert on computer security—is not cyberterrorism, cybercrime, identity theft, WikiLeaks, or illegal downloads of music and Hollywood films.

Emily Steel and Julie Angwin, “The Web’s Cutting Edge: Anonymity in Name Only,” Wall Street Journal, Aug. 3, 2010. 130. Cited in Heather Brooke, The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches from the Information War (London: Heinemann, 2011), 133. 131. Madrigal, “I’m Being Followed.” 132. Ryan Gallagher, “Skype Won’t Say Whether It Can Eavesdrop on Your Conversations,” Slate, July 20, 2012, slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/07/20/skype_won_t_comment_on_whether_it_can_now_eavesdrop_on_conversations_.html. 133. Quoted in Pariser, Filter Bubble, 147. 134. Sengupta, “Trust.” For elaboration, see Bruce Schneier, Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive (Indianapolis: John Wiley & Sons, 2012). 135.

“Anybody who gets that powerful can push people around, and Amazon pushes people around.”57 This is nothing new; Joseph Stiglitz describes how Microsoft used its “monopoly power” to crush Netscape in the 1990s.58 Bill Keller writes about how Facebook disabled the game Critter Island in its system in 2010, and Critter Island went from 14 million users to zero in 48 hours.59 What’s the point of being a monopolist if you don’t let everyone know who’s boss? The empires each spend many billions to purchase digital upstarts and midsize firms. Many familiar brand names on the Internet—from PayPal and YouTube to Skype and Hotmail—are owned by a giant. In 2011 alone, Google, for example, spent $14 billion to make eighty acquisitions.60 Sometimes the firms are willing to overpay to lock in the potential of a new industry or to prevent another empire from getting the jump on them. As The Economist acknowledges, one of the benefits of being a cash-flush giant is that you are “rich enough to buy up potential rivals.”61 The fortunes being generated online go not only to the owners of the empires, but also to the owners of the upstarts that are sold to the empires.


pages: 404 words: 124,705

The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter by Susan Pinker

assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, facts on the ground, fixed-gear, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, indoor plumbing, intentional community, invisible hand, Kickstarter, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, neurotypical, Occupy movement, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), place-making, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social contagion, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, tontine, Tony Hsieh, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning, Yogi Berra

“Internet use does not pull people away from public places, but rather is associated with frequent visits to places such as parks, cafes, and restaurants,” write Wellman and Rainie.27 But as the Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman reminds us, “Go into Starbucks and a third of the customers are having coffee dates with their laptops.”28 Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it can hardly be viewed as an intimate connection. Still, talking to our friends and loved ones by landline, mobile phone, or Skype is the next best thing to being there, as Ma Bell presciently put it. I’m certainly a convert. We recently Skyped the son of a close neighborhood friend into our Passover seder. He was serving in the military at the time, but we set a place at the table for the Ethan laptop. Another friend who used to live across the street joined us at Chinese New Year celebrations via her father’s iPad, which was passed around from guest to guest like a wedding videographer’s microphone so everyone could greet her.

During her years at home with small children, my mother’s fully extended nine-foot-long kitchen phone cord kept her attached—in more ways than one—to her social circle. Now it’s my turn. If I can’t see my friends and loved ones in person, I use a combination of cordless, cellphone, email, text, and Skype to keep up with my social network, which, graphed out, looks something like this: My sociogram: the bold dots indicate people profiled in this book. The circles are female, the triangles are male. (image credit itr.1) A Pew Internet study confirms that cellphone users have larger personal networks—12 percent larger, to be precise—than the small fraction of people who shun them.29 But in a different set of studies, the same group of scientists showed that avid users of social networking sites have more diverse electronic networks, but know fewer of their neighbors and are less integrated into their local communities than those who rarely use social media.30 “A man must be clothed with society, or we shall feel a certain bareness and poverty,” Emerson wrote in 1857.

When Alex Perchov, the comic antihero of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything Is Illuminated, strives to leave Ukraine for the United States, he’s trying to escape Soviet-era privations and provincialism, to be sure, but also his mother, who tells him, “One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.”28 The no-strings-attached Western ideal creates gaps in intimacy that, despite the miracle of Skype, are not being bridged by technology. In the United States, more than sixty-two million people—equal to the entire population of the United Kingdom—say they are socially isolated and unhappy about it. More than half of them (thirty-two million) live alone, the highest proportion in the nation’s history.


pages: 383 words: 108,266

Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely

air freight, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, computer vision, corporate governance, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, endowment effect, financial innovation, fudge factor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, housing crisis, IKEA effect, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, lake wobegon effect, late fees, loss aversion, market bubble, Murray Gell-Mann, payday loans, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, price anchoring, Richard Thaler, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Upton Sinclair

Would this kid have taken cash from my wallet, even if he knew for sure that no one would ever catch him? Maybe, but I imagine that the answer is no. Instead, I suspect that there were some aspects of Skype and of how my account was set up that “helped” this person engage in this activity and not feel morally reprehensible: First, he stole calling time, not money. Next, he did not gain anything tangible from the transaction. Third, he stole from Skype rather than directly from me. Fourth, he might have imagined that at the end of the day Skype, not I, would cover the cost. Fifth, the cost of the calls was charged automatically to me via PayPal. So here we had another step in the process—and another level of fuzziness in terms of who would eventually pay for the calls.

None of this makes logical sense, but when the medium of exchange is nonmonetary, our ability to rationalize increases by leaps and bounds. I HAD MY own experience with dishonesty a few years ago. Someone broke into my Skype account (very cool online telephone software) and charged my PayPal account (an online payment system) a few hundred dollars for the service. I don’t think the person who did this was a hardened criminal. From a criminal’s perspective, breaking into my account would most likely be a waste of time and talent because if this person was sufficiently smart to hack into Skype, he could probably have hacked into Amazon, Dell, or maybe even a credit card account, and gotten much more value for his time.

Was this person stealing from me? Sure, but there were so many things that made the theft fuzzy that I really don’t think he thought of himself as a dishonest guy. No cash was taken, right? And was anyone really hurt? This kind of thinking is worrisome. If my problem with Skype was indeed due to the nonmonetary nature of the transactions on Skype, this would mean that there is much more at risk here, including a wide range of online services, and perhaps even credit and debit cards. All these electronic transactions, with no physical exchange of money from hand to hand, might make it easier for people to be dishonest—without ever questioning or fully acknowledging the immorality of their actions.


pages: 366 words: 87,916

Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It by Gabriel Wyner

card file, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, index card, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, language acquisition, machine translation, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Skype, spaced repetition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Yogi Berra

If you really hit it off, you can exchange contact information and chat later using a video-chat service like Skype (Skype.com). LiveMocha.com is one of many language exchange websites. Other notables are Busuu.com, MyLanguageExchange.com, and Language-Exchanges.org. They resemble dating websites for language learners. You put up a profile—I’m an English-speaking tax attorney, seeking a like-minded Russian speaker for video chatting—search through other users’ profiles, and try to make friends. Once you find a few interesting people, you set up video-chat dates (usually via Skype), where you chat and alternate languages until you decide to stop.

In exchange, you’ll record someone else’s English text. The service is lovely, but be aware that it can occasionally take several days to get a response. Rhinospike.com SELF-DIRECTED WRITING See Output. SKYPE A computer program that facilitates free phone calls and video chats across the Internet. For the purposes of language learning, it’s the program you’ll use to connect with language exchange partners and private tutors on the Internet. Skype.com SPACED REPETITION An extraordinarily efficient learning method whereby you learn something and then wait a few days to review it. If you still remember, then you wait even longer before your next review.

italki.com LANG-8 A free language exchange community devoted to providing writing corrections. You sign up, submit some writing, correct someone else’s writing, and get a correction of your own, usually in less than a day. Lang-8.com LANGUAGE EXCHANGE A language-learning arrangement between you and a speaker of your target language. You’ll meet up, typically via Skype video chat, and talk for a predetermined time in your language and for the same amount of time in your partner’s language. LANGUAGE EXCHANGE WEBSITES Websites that are designed to help you find language exchange partners. Livemocha.com, Busuu.com, MyLanguageExchange.com, italki.com, and Language-Exchanges.org are some of the better-known language exchange websites.


pages: 565 words: 151,129

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

“Mahatma Gandhi’s Views,” TinyTech Plants, http://www.tinytechindia.com/gandhi4.htm (accessed June 14, 2013). 56. Prarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Poornahuti, vol. 10: The Last Phase, part 2 (Ahmedabad, India: Navajivan Trust, 1956), 522. Chapter 7 1. “Skype in the Classroom,” Skype, 2013, https://education.skype.com/ (accessed November 6, 2013); Sarah Kessler, “Skype CEO: Our Goal Is to Connect 1 Million Classrooms,” Mashable, September 21, 2011, http://mashable.com/2011/09/21/skype-in-the-classroom-tony-bates/ (accessed November 12, 2013). 2. “Curriki at a Glance,” Curriki homepage, April 2012, http://www.curriki.org/welcome/wp -content/uploads/2012/06/Curriki-At-a-Glance-04.04.12-update.pdf (accessed April 23, 2013). 3.

The educational models are designed to free students from the private space of the traditional enclosed classroom and allow them to learn in multiple open Commons, in virtual space, the public square, and in the biosphere. Classrooms around the world are connecting in real time, via Skype and other programs, and collaborating on joint assignments. Students separated by thousands of miles pair off in virtual-cohort teams, study together, make presentations, debate with one another, and even get graded together. The global collaborative classroom is quickly becoming a reality. Skype in the Classroom, a free online community, has already registered 60,447 teachers in its global classroom project and has set a goal of connecting 1 million classrooms across the world.1 Collaborative Classrooms, another Internet learning environment, allows thousands of teachers to cocreate curricula online and share the best lesson plans with one another—for free—in a global education Commons.

It’s when she checked into the online class forum that she experienced her “being-blown-away moment.” She writes: The traffic is astonishing. There are thousands of people asking—and answering—questions about dominant mutations and recombination. And study groups had spontaneously grown up: a Colombian one, a Brazilian one, a Russian one. There’s one on Skype, and some even in real life too. And they’re so diligent! Cadwalladr says, “If you are a vaguely disillusioned teacher, or know one, send them to Coursera: these are people who just want to learn.”16 While student enthusiasm for MOOCs is running high, educators find that the number of participants that actually complete the courses and pass the tests is often substantially less than students in brick-and-mortar classrooms.


pages: 561 words: 114,843

Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, + Website by Matt Blumberg

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airport security, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Broken windows theory, crowdsourcing, deskilling, fear of failure, financial engineering, high batting average, high net worth, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, pattern recognition, performance metric, pets.com, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype

We’re frugal in a number of areas—offices, travel, and so on—but generous on things that mean a lot to individuals, like cell phones or gym memberships. Communication patterns. Are you meeting-centric? Email-centric? Are you even going to have phones? Or will you rely on people’s cell phones? Because we’ve always had multiple locations, we’re very email- and IM-centric at Return Path. (More recently, Skype and Cisco videophones have become a big part of our corporate communications.) Historically, we’ve had phones everywhere, though a number of our employees (especially engineers) hardly ever use them. Recently, we acquired an engineering office that never had phones on every desk—so we’re experimenting with that.

I interview a lot of people: I probably interviewed 60 people last year and will interview at least that many this year. Until the year we hired over 100 people for the first time (which brought our team to about 275), I interviewed everybody. Not just direct reports—or even reports of reports—but every last intern. Usually, these were on the phone or Skype. In most cases, they lasted for only 15 to 30 minutes. For the most part, I only wanted to meet what were almost certain to be new employees and validate my managers’ decisions. It was only in extremely rare cases that I overrode a hiring manager’s decision and dinged a recruit. In those cases, it was clear that the manager was rushing the process to fill a seat—which didn’t happen often and needed to be stopped when it did.

We advise remote employees to set up an adequate work space with all the necessary equipment and supplies. Work areas should be quiet and free of distractions, ideally with a door so there’s a clear separation of “work” and “home.” We also insist that remote employees have enough bandwidth to support high-intensity business applications, including Skype or a videophone. Expenses. We allow remote employees to expense a fixed amount each month to cover supplies and incremental bandwidth charges. Remote employees who want to use a co-working space need to get that approved since it usually costs more than supplying a home office, but we encourage it whenever it makes sense.


pages: 349 words: 114,038

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution by Pieter Hintjens

4chan, Aaron Swartz, airport security, AltaVista, anti-communist, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, bread and circuses, business climate, business intelligence, business process, Chelsea Manning, clean water, commoditize, congestion charging, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Debian, decentralized internet, disinformation, Edward Snowden, failed state, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, gamification, German hyperinflation, global village, GnuPG, Google Chrome, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, M-Pesa, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, no silver bullet, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, packet switching, patent troll, peak oil, power law, pre–internet, private military company, race to the bottom, real-name policy, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, selection bias, Skype, slashdot, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, transaction costs, twin studies, union organizing, wealth creators, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, Zipf's Law

Nonetheless, most of us learned to use our PCs as thin clients, especially by 2005 or so, when web applications became powerful enough to replace desktop applications. Today, PCs are rarely used for anything intensive except high-end gaming. There were some very successful mesh-like applications up until 2005 or so, including Skype (before Microsoft changed Skype to use centralized servers). However even pre-Microsoft Skype and infamous P2P file sharing protocols like BitTorrent all worked through the broadband connection, allowing the ISPs to see all the traffic, filter it, log it, and so on. The Internet was based on a promise of a smart edge (computers) connected over a dumb fabric (TCP/IP), and then the Web turned that inside out, giving us a dumb edge (thin clients) talking to a smart center (websites).

They will just silently turn on the microphones and cameras in our laptops, or hack into the "always on" cameras on our entertainment systems and smart TVs. As Sean Hollister asks in the Verge, "Will the NSA use the Xbox One to spy on your family?" noting that despite denying it was even technically possible, "Microsoft gave government agencies access to private Skype video and audio calls, perhaps even going so far as to integrate Skype into the NSA's controversial PRISM surveillance system." The change could come when they convince us that they need to "protect the children" or "provide security services to the elderly." It could start with some vulnerable section of the population such as criminals who are on parole, or drug users in rehabilitation.

Flickr and YouTube, launched in 2004 and 2005, mixed the pretty new Ajax technologies with community and self-created content to create massive hits. The Internet has continued its explosive takeover of technical, social, economic, and political life. Pretty much every person on the planet is connected -- if not directly, then by immediate proxy. We amplify our lives through Facebook, Twitter, massive multiplayer games, email, chat, Skype. The only people who are not on line fairly regularly with a diverse network of contacts are too poor, too old, too young, or (and I'm speculating here) young men who are so socially isolated as to present a "lone wolf" threat. Digital political activism has never been more aggressive, confident, and successful as it confronts abusive cults, authoritarian governments, and dictators, and spreads its philosophical anarchist vision of the future.


pages: 346 words: 97,330

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, blue-collar work, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, hiring and firing, ImageNet competition, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine translation, market friction, Mars Rover, natural language processing, new economy, operational security, passive income, pattern recognition, post-materialism, post-work, power law, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Second Machine Age, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, union organizing, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

All new hires start out on a 90-day trial, but if they make it through the first 90 days, keep up their requirements by logging in and staying connected to teams for at least 20 hours a week, and make it to their shifts on time, they get an automatic bump of 8 percent in their hourly pay. In exchange for a 20-hour commitment, workers must provide their own computer and internet connection, be able to work with office software like Microsoft Word, Excel, and Google Docs, and be comfortable using instant-message and voice-chat software, like Skype. Zaffar works on a laptop he bought himself. He likes to move to different parts of his house, to break up his work shift, rather than sit anchored to the desktop computer that he set up in the foyer that serves as his home office. Like Zaffar, 85 percent of workers on LeadGenius are between the ages of 18 and 37.27 Slightly more than 70 percent of LeadGenius’s ghost workforce—called researchers—have at least a bachelor’s degree.

This is the flip side of workers being hypervigilant, as constantly being alert for good work also results in requesters getting flooded with applicants, which makes picking a worker hard. Another marketing manager said, “Especially when you’re getting responses from around the globe, sifting through all those people can be painful.” Vetting workers was a time-consuming, manual process that often involved a phone or Skype call. A VP of communications at a startup discussed the importance of getting the vetting done right: “A lot of the workers have good technical skills but poor communication skills, so you have to really vet for this. I’ve also had situations where the website they created might look good, but then you have another person come in later to do work on it and they find dirty code and unfinished code.

So, to understand the scale and structure of this effort to collaborate, we asked MTurk workers to help us map their entire communication network. Our HIT was a “Facebook-Lite” for MTurk workers in that it allowed them to anonymously report the online nickname of who they communicate with and the medium they use to communicate, such as email, SMS, Skype, or one of the many online forums workers use.6 Workers could see a variety of information about their connections, such as why the worker started working on MTurk and how they stay motivated, along with whatever demographic information that worker felt comfortable sharing. The network consists of 10,354 workers and 5,268 connections between them.


pages: 247 words: 81,135

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small by Steve Sammartino

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, helicopter parent, hype cycle, illegal immigration, index fund, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, lifelogging, market design, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe's law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, Rubik’s Cube, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, The Home Computer Revolution, the long tail, too big to fail, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, web application, zero-sum game

He finally connected with Esther (he found her email via other means) and she answered his email, but decided not to invest. He didn’t give up. In fact, he told me he had sent the same Skype request to more than 100 other investors and technology pundits before I accepted. Digital tenacity I quickly learned that Raul doesn’t give up easily. After others declined to invest, Raul started asking me to back his project. I told him I was small fry in the world of venture capital and technology, but he just wouldn’t go away. Every day, the moment I logged in online I’d hear that little sound Skype makes when you receive a message — ‘whooooop’ — mere seconds after I was connected. It was as though he was waiting for me or had some kind of alert already set up.

Mind you, this would be around midnight in Romania. So we started chatting on Skype every other day. I quickly learned that he’d already done some projects that proved his technical capabilities, if not tenacity. He’d already built a small jet engine in his backyard, a steam engine from a bicycle pump, and he’d learned to fly a plane. He could get stuff done. He was starting to turn me into a believer, not because of what he said, but because of what he’d already done. He showed me the proof via the live video chat over Skype and his YouTube videos. A few short years ago, none of these tools existed so he would have had no way of proving himself.

What’s more interesting is that his business employs more people in Moldova than the original startup we worked on ever did here in Melbourne. And his development team now works in every form of coding/language/mobile device you can think of. When Vasilii was in town, it was like hanging out with a long-lost relative. He’s just like the guy I used to speak to every day on Skype, a strange thing to say now that we know the virtual world is the real world. It’s also a great reminder that the online and real worlds should only ever be preambles to each other and in some ways seamlessly interchangeable. While the tools this digital revolution has provided are amazing, it’s the human connections that are creating a truly Sans nation state economy.


pages: 700 words: 160,604

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 13, Apple II, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bernie Sanders, Colonization of Mars, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Edward Jenner, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, Henri Poincaré, iterative process, Joan Didion, linear model of innovation, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, mouse model, Nick Bostrom, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

CHAPTER 17 CRISPR-Cas9 Success When Doudna returned to Berkeley, she and Jinek began a series of Skype calls with Charpentier in Umeå and Chylinski in Vienna to plot a strategy for figuring out the mechanisms of CRISPR-Cas9. The collaboration was like a model United Nations: a Berkeley professor from Hawaii, her postdoc from the Czech Republic, a Parisian professor working in Sweden, and her Polish-born postdoc working in Vienna. “It became a twenty-four-hour operation,” Jinek recalls. “I would do an experiment at the end of my day, I would send an email to Vienna, and Krzysztof would read it as soon as he got up in the morning.” Then there would be a Skype call, and they would decide what the next step should be.

“Krzysztof would execute that experiment during the day and send me the results while I was asleep, so that when I woke up and opened my inbox there would be an update.”1 At first, Charpentier and Doudna would join the Skype calls only once or twice a month. But the pace picked up in July 2011, when Charpentier and Chylinski flew to Berkeley for the fast-growing annual CRISPR conference. Even though they had bonded over Skype, it was the first time that Jinek had personally met Chylinski, a lanky researcher with an affable personality and an eagerness to be involved in turning basic research into a tool.2 Emmanuelle Charpentier, Jennifer Doudna, Martin Jinek, and Krzysztof Chylinski at Berkeley in 2012 In-person meetings can produce ideas in ways that conference calls and Zoom meetings can’t.

David Ishee is a ponytailed rural Mississippi dog breeder who uses CRISPR to edit the genes of Dalmatians and mastiffs to try to make them healthier, stronger, and in one offbeat experiment glow in the dark. He joined by Skype from a wooden shed in his backyard crammed with lab equipment. When Zayner said that they would be streaming their experiments for the next two months, Ishee took a sip of a Monster energy drink and interjected in his languid honeysuckle-scented drawl, “Or at least until the authorities come for us.” Also Skyping in was Dariia Dantseva, a student in Dnipro, Ukraine, who created her country’s first biohacking lab. “Ukraine is pretty easy about regulating biohacking, because the state literally does not exist,” she says.


pages: 392 words: 108,745

Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think by James Vlahos

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TechCrunch disrupt, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

And the company hoped that at least some developers would make chatbots for Skype, the platform that Microsoft owned. Google, in turn, now had Allo, where people could message with each other, bots, and the Assistant. For companies beyond the world of tech, the expanding array of conversational options for reaching customers was both exciting and confusing. Forward-looking executives could see that they needed to embrace new ways to digitally represent themselves just as they had with websites and apps in the past; to not do so was to risk becoming digitally dead. But how? With chatbots, on Messenger or Skype? With voice applications, known as “actions” on the Assistant platform and “skills” on Alexa?

Developers would have the option to let users speak via Siri to apps in six categories: messaging, audio and video calling, payments, photos, exercise, and ride booking. With access tightly controlled by Apple, this was hardly Cheyer’s doors-wide-open approach. But it was a start. Siri could now help users book an Uber, make a Skype call, PayPal a friend, track a run, and more. But you could argue that the biggest Siri-related news of the spring didn’t happen at Apple. Three of her original creators—Cheyer and Kittlaus, plus a computer scientist named Chris Brigham, who had been part of the team ever since the SRI days—revealed that they had launched a company and created a new virtual assistant.

And she highlights what makes the friendship application both fascinating and ethically complicated. Four years before Barbie’s incarnation as a perky cyborg, a seven-year-old girl named Toby sat on the floor of her family’s toy room with her father. She was chatting with her grandmother using the Skype app on an iPhone. After the call, Toby gazed across the room at her favorite stuffed animal, a fuzzy rabbit she called Tutu, which sat atop a bookshelf. Then Toby looked back at the phone in her hand. “Daddy, can I use this to talk to Tutu?” she asked. Her father, a technology entrepreneur named Oren Jacob, laughed at what struck him as a flippant question.


pages: 353 words: 106,704

Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution by Beth Gardiner

barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, connected car, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Hyperloop, index card, Indoor air pollution, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, meta-analysis, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, white picket fence

Today, Fields lives with her family in the suburbs east of Los Angeles, an area known for its terrible air, where the city’s smog sits against the Santa Ana Mountains. The baby she had as a teenager is now a young man, and his sinuses act up just like his mom’s. Her youngest son, an energetic grade schooler who climbs on the back of her chair as we speak on Skype, has asthma. The attacks don’t happen often, but they’re frightening when they do. It started suddenly, when he was a toddler. “He just kept vomiting and vomiting and got very lethargic, and panting like a puppy, and I could not understand what was going on,” she tells me. It’s never been quite that bad again, but “it’s like he can’t get a full breath of air in, so in trying to breathe in he’s coughing.”

And indeed, the Harvard researchers found in 2009 that death rates had fallen along with pollution levels in all their study cities, even the cleaner ones.28 * * * In chunky black glasses and a patterned scarf, her dark hair pulled back, Beate Ritz still looks more the sophisticated European than the casual Californian, even after decades in America. Sunshine streams through a window into her home in the Santa Monica Mountains, above Los Angeles, as we speak on Skype, and she pours herself a cup of tea. Ritz is an epidemiologist at UCLA, and she knows it can be nearly impossible to link one individual’s health problem to a specific environmental cause. But the work that would shape her career began with a nagging, personal worry. The smog blanketing L.A. came as a foul shock when she arrived from her native Germany.

Traffic exhaust is just one of many sources of Delhi’s pollution, but the long hours many ordinary people spend on and beside the streets each day are a big reason for the disparate impact. A few miles from Paharpur, on busy Mathura Road in south Delhi, a woman’s smiling face beams down from a huge billboard advertising free Skype calls. “Green Delhi Clean Delhi,” boasts a dirty white banner that bends around the corner just beneath it. Although it’s Sunday, traffic is near a standstill. Sleek SUVs and packed buses inch along, drivers leaning into their horns. Beside the billboard, a vendor carries a pile of wooden recorders in a bundle tied to a pole, and the high-pitched whistle he blows adds to the ear-splitting noise.


pages: 327 words: 112,191

War Doctor: Surgery on the Front Line by David Nott

Desert Island Discs, Kickstarter, Live Aid, no-fly zone, Skype

The day before the operation we had one last Skype conversation and it was confirmed that they had two units of blood available for the procedure. As it happened, I had been asked about the situation in Aleppo by BBC Two’s Newsnight programme and told them I was about to oversee a challenging operation there via Skype. They agreed to record the procedure, and share with the world the remarkable courage of Aleppo’s besieged doctors. So there I was in London, looking at a large television screen. The patient was asleep on the operating table at M10 in Aleppo. We set up the Skype call and someone in the operating theatre put an iPhone on a selfie stick that was held over the table, so I could see everything that was going on during the operation.

I embarked upon a media offensive as well, appearing on the radio and television whenever I could to talk about what was happening, and the risk the doctors were facing – a risk which was brought home horribly in early October, just a few weeks after the successful Skype operation. I was sent a WhatsApp video of a bunker-busting bomb dropping directly onto the operating theatre in M10. The target was so precise that the co-ordinates of the theatre must have been known. I could only think, to my horror, that somebody must have hacked the Skype call and somehow deduced M10’s location. In the minutes after the bunker bomb fell, a further three barrel bombs and two cluster bombs were dropped on M10. At the time, the hospital’s intensive care unit was full, the wards were full and the recovery unit was full.

There was also a small arterial blood-gas machine to measure the oxygenation of the blood. How was it possible that such a high-tech environment could be run by a solitary nurse? The nurse smiled and gestured to two cameras pointing at each patient – one to monitor the patient himself, the other to observe the charts. The nurse told us that these were fed by Skype directly into the intensive care unit in one of the hospitals in Washington DC, where there was a Syrian–American ICU specialist looking at the monitors twenty-four hours a day, and adjusting the patient’s medication and ventilation based on the clinical parameters. Not just at our hospital, either.


pages: 89 words: 24,277

Designing for Emotion by Aarron Walter

Abraham Maslow, big-box store, cotton gin, en.wikipedia.org, game design, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Skype, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, Wall-E, web application

Do the emotional design methods I’m using interfere with the base layers of the user’s hierarchy of needs (making the site less functional, reliable, usable)? You may have a hard time answering these questions honestly, in which case you might conduct simple user research and usability tests to evaluate your assumptions. Do you have access to people in your target audience? Round up three to six people to meet in person or via Skype (http://skype.com) or GoToMeeting (http://gotomeeting.com). Ask your users open-ended questions that will give you the insights you seek. You might ask things like: Describe your initial reactions to the website. How does the website make you feel? If this website were a person, who would it be and why?

q=%22Guess+I+could+have+waited+for+today+if+all%22&in=81&type=contents&view=posts&search=true&button_search.x=54&button_search.y=-106&button_search=true 13 http://www.alistapart.com/articles/understandingprogressiveenhancement/ 14 http://google.com/websiteoptimizer Resources 15 http://amzn.com/1592535879 16 http://getmentalnotes.com/ 17 http://amzn.com/0465051367 18 http://amzn.com/0393334775 19 http://amzn.com/014303622X 20 http://amzn.com/030746086X 21 http://amzn.com/0979777747 22 http://amzn.com/0321607376 23 http://uxmag.com/design/beyond-frustration-three-levels-of-happy-design 24 http://uxmag.com/design/the-psychologists-view-of-ux-design 25 http://uxmag.com/design/organized-approach-to-emotional-response-testing 26 http://boxesandarrows.com/view/emotional-design Index 37Signals 8-10 A Able Design 88 aesthetic-usability effect 27-28 A List Apart 90 Apple 7, 27 anticipation 54-58, 87 apathy 75 Arts and Crafts movement 2, 94 B baby-face bias 18-20, 28, 32 Basecamp 8-10, 70 Betabrand 13-16, 75 Blue Sky Resumes 88-90, 93 bible 31-33 Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse, A 19 Bowman, Doug 21, 55-56 Brain Rules 12 Breathing Status LED Indicator 27 Bringhurst, Robert 20 Brizzly 19-20 C calligraphy 31 Carbonmade 40, 42-45 Clippy 60 CoffeeCup Software 85-87, 90 Cornelius, J. 86 contrast 22-25, 28, 44 Convertbot 40-41 D Damasio, Antonio 67 Darwin, Charles 17-18 design persona 35-40, 48, 91, 92 Don’t Make Me Think 77 dot-com bubble 3 Dribbble 55-56, 59 Dropbox 72-74 E Etsy 2 Elements of Content Strategy, The 75 Elements of Typographic Style, The 20 Emotional Design 27 Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal, The 17 F Facebook 3, 7, 54, 59, 74, 86-87 face-ism ratio design principle 46 fail whale 7 Fletcher, Louise 90 Flickr 3, 51, 54, 79-82, 93 Freddie Von Chippenheimer IV 37, 60-65 G Getting Real 8 GigaOm 56 Gmail 70 golden ratio 20-21, 27 Google Site Optimizer 93 GoToMeeting 76 Gould, Stephen Jay 19 Gorum, Dave 44 Groupon 62 Gruber, John 42 Gupta, Amit 51-52 Gutenberg, Johannes 31-33 gut instinct 67-68 H Hale, Kevin 11 Happy Cog 46 Hick’s Law 24, 28 hierarchy of needs 5-6, 35 Hipmunk 7 Hodgman, John 33, 36 Housing Works 40, 45-46, 75, 93 HTML 3 Human-Computer Interaction 29 I iPhone 40 iPod 20 industrial revolution 1 iTunes 7 Ping 7 Pink Panther 15-16 Putorti, Jason 69, 71 priming 59-65, 76 progressive enhancement 90-91 Pythagoras 20, 27 J Jobs, Steve 27 Jardine, Mark 41-42 K Kickstarter 2 Kissane, Erin 75 Krug, Steve 77 L Lindland, Chris 13-16 Long, Justin 33, 36 M Mac 33, 36 Mall, Dan 46 MailChimp 20, 36-40, 60-65, 91 Mashable 56 Maslow, Abraham 5-6 Medina, John 12 memory 11-13, 49, 82 messagefirst 33-35 Mestre, Ricardo 25-26 Microsoft Office 60 Mint 69-72, 93 N Norman, Donald 27, 82-83 O open system 54 Oprah Magazine 90 P Parthenon 20 party pooper 91 persona 33-40 Photojojo 49-52, 59, 65 Q Quicken 72 R rosy effect 82 S Scoutmob 62 Shakespeare 10 Silverback 77 Sims 54 Skype 76 Smith, Matthew 88-89 StickyBits 20 Squared Eye 88 Super Mario Brothers 54 surprise 49-54 T Tapbots 40-42 Tumblr 23-24 Trammell, Mark 55 Twitter 3, 7, 20-21, 54, 55-59, 74, 86-87 V variable rewards 62, 87 velvet rope 57, 87 Volkswagen Beetle 32 W WALL•E 41-42 Warfel, Todd Zaki 33 Weightbot 40-41 Wilson, Rainn 4 Wufoo 9-11, 13, 52-54, 93 Y YouTube 37, 60 About A Book Apart Web design is about multi-disciplinary mastery and laser focus, and that’s the thinking behind our brief books for people who make websites.


pages: 299 words: 91,839

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, business process, call centre, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, clean water, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, don't be evil, Dunbar number, fake news, fear of failure, Firefox, future of journalism, G4S, Golden age of television, Google Earth, Googley, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, old-boy network, PageRank, peer-to-peer lending, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Across the table sat Tom Evslin, the unsung hero of the web who made the internet explode when, as head of AT&T Worldnet, he set pricing for unlimited internet access at a flat $19.95 per month, turning off the ticking clock on internet usage, lowering the cost for users, and addicting us all to the web. Evslin gave a confounding lesson on networks. Explosive web companies—Skype, eBay, craigslist, Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, and Google itself—don’t charge users as much as the market will bear. They charge as little as they can bear. That is how they maximize growth and value for everyone in the network. Evslin used an ad network to illustrate the value of building scale in this manner.

To sum up Evslin’s law of networks: Extract the minimum value from the network so it will grow to maximum size and value—enabling its members to charge more—while keeping costs and margins low to block competitors. That’s not how many old networks operate. Cable companies wrap their wires around us to squeeze maximum fees out. Ditto for phone companies, newspapers, and retailers. Charging what the market would bear made perfect sense for them. But now they face competition from next-generation networks. Skype—which at the end of 2007 had 276 million accounts in 28 languages—exploded as a free service before it added paid features that drastically undercut old phone companies. Its founders pulled value out of the business when eBay bought it. eBay itself had created a new retail marketplace by extracting little from each sale.

Amazon helps us organize communities of consumer opinion around every product offered there. Facebook and other services like it—LinkedIn (big in business), Bebo (big in Europe), Google’s Orkut (big in Brazil and India), and StudieVZ (big in Germany)—help us to organize our friends and colleagues. Skype, AOL, and Yahoo give us the tools to collaborate through chat, phone, and video, organizing our communication. Flickr lets us organize our photos and also communities of interest around them. del.icio.us does the same for our bookmarks and web recommendations. Daylife organizes the world’s news. BlogAds lets bloggers organize ad networks.


pages: 378 words: 94,468

Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High by Mike Power

air freight, Alexander Shulgin, banking crisis, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, drug harm reduction, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, frictionless, fulfillment center, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, John Bercow, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Network effects, nuclear paranoia, packet switching, pattern recognition, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, pre–internet, QR code, RAND corporation, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, trade route, Whole Earth Catalog, Zimmermann PGP

A happy consequence for the government of its targeting of this straw man folk devil will be unfettered access to all our private thoughts and conversations. You can never be sure a conversation is private without encryption, John Callas, an American computer security expert who co-founded PGP Corp with Zimmermann, tells me. The German government broke Skype’s encryption models by releasing malware and viruses into the wild that can easily unscramble voice calls across the network, allowing it to eavesdrop at will, he tells me – across a Skype line. ‘In the old days, hundreds of years ago people could speak privately by going out and taking a walk around the green and talking among themselves and there was no way people could listen in,’ he told me.

You’d never guess that this elderly gentleman, with his tidy beard, plain spectacles and owlish manner, is responsible for getting thousands of people incapably stoned. On a mild spring afternoon in 2012, Huffman was kind enough to speak to me while relaxing after a recent bout of painful surgery. The professor chuckled down the Skype line mellifluously, sometimes gazing at the nearby Smokey Mountains, as I asked him how the Spice story happened. Between 1984 and 2011, Huffman and his colleagues had created over 400 synthetic cannabinoid compounds while studying the structure-activity relationship between a series of compounds that resembled tetrahydrocannabinol, the active constituent of marijuana, and the human brain.

They created thousands of threads in which they discussed openly the price for bulk import and export of chemicals that most American judges would, in a heartbeat, class as illegal analogues of banned substances. It was only a matter of time before the axe fell. The site’s founder, Justin Steven Scroggins, known as w00t, was arrested on 10 April 2012. Undercover federal agents had infiltrated his site – not a hard task, since registration was open – and had eavesdropped on his Skype calls with a laboratory in the Jiangsu province of China that is still operating today. At the time of the investigation, this laboratory sold only seventeen products, all of them considered analogues of banned Schedule 1 substances in the US, according to the indictment. Scroggins was charged with the importation of just over two kilos of cathinones, none of which was specifically illegal at the time, but all were considered analogues of methcathinone and other banned substances.


pages: 324 words: 89,875

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, disintermediation, driverless car, fake it until you make it, future of work, gig economy, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, patent troll, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, platform as a service, power law, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, the medium is the message, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

The value of a producer’s matching intention can vary depending on the type of interaction involved. But for exchange platforms, that matching intention always has a limited, discrete value. Expressed as a ratio, a producer’s matching intention on an exchange platform is 1:1 or at most 1:few. A three-way Skype conversation is an example where the matching intention of the person making a call would be 1:2. However, the matching intention of a person making a Skype call still is limited by the number of people he or she feasibly can communicate with at a given time. Maker platforms don’t have this same limitation. The matching intention for a producer on a maker platform is, theoretically, infinite.

Plenty of companies improved their margins and streamlined their supply chains by using software and connecting their businesses to the Internet. Andreessen named a few in his op-ed, including FedEx and Walmart. But he also named a litany of companies he saw as leading the charge of the new software economy. The list included Apple, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, Microsoft, Foursquare, Skype, Amazon, Flickr, Square, and PayPal. Yet Andreessen missed the opportunity to explain how different these companies were from the old-line businesses he named. Yes, each of these companies was built around the Internet. But more important, they are all platforms. Rather than merely squeezing a little more efficiency out of an existing business, these companies operate on a completely different model that truly capitalizes on the Internet’s potential.

Any number of people can consume the same YouTube video, download and use the same app, or read the same article on Medium. The producer publishes an app or a piece of content and broadcasts it to an audience. In these cases, the matching intention is 1:∞, or at least 1:Many. Contrast a live stream on Twitch (a content platform where you can watch other users play video games) with the Skype example. The person broadcasting to an audience on Twitch doesn’t communicate in a 1:1 manner with every person watching the stream. Rather the person is broadcasting out to a large group of people who are viewing the stream. Another way to think about this dynamic is that exchange platforms have limited inventory—only a certain number of people can consume the platform’s available inventory at a given time—while maker platforms do not.


pages: 252 words: 74,167

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future by Luke Dormehl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, book scanning, borderless world, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Flash crash, Ford Model T, friendly AI, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, hive mind, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, PageRank, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

‘What I was thinking was that this could be a great way of letting you collect and curate your digital footprint throughout your life,’ he says. ‘The avatar would be an interface for accessing that information.’ He pitched the idea to the group as ‘Skyping with dead people’, and hurried to note that a lot of the AI technology needed to bring such a project to life already existed in various labs around the world. Despite the group receiving a total of 130 ideas – of which Ursache acknowledges his was the oddest – ‘Skyping with dead people’ was accepted as a project worth pursuing. Ursache had his reservations, however. ‘I knew that it would have to do something more than just simulating a conversation with a dead person,’ he says.

Unlike the artisans of the Industrial Revolution, though, today’s workers in the artisan economy can use technology to augment, rather than replace, their employment opportunities. Scaling a business to reach millions, or even billions of people, is possible in a way that it never was before the digital age. In 2014, a story appeared on Business Insider about an SAT tutor who charges $1,500 for ninety minutes of one-on-one tutoring – carried out via Skype. Even in an age of educational apps and online learning tools, the tutor was able to command incredibly high prices due to his proven ability to raise test results. Another example of the artisan economy at work is Etsy, the online marketplace where people can sell handmade or vintage products. Having launched in 2005, Etsy currently offers more than 29 million different pieces of handmade jewellery, pottery, clothing and assorted other objets d’art.

And people in the future could actually interact with your memories, stories and ideas, almost as if they were talking to you? Eterni.me collects your thoughts, stories and memories, curates them and creates an intelligent avatar that looks like you. This avatar will live forever and allow other people in the future to access your memories.’ Currently the technology doesn’t exist to allow us to ‘Skype with dead people’ as Ursache would eventually like. While his team work on the machine-learning tools that will make the technology a reality, Eterni.me instead focuses on collecting the users’ data that will one day give its avatars their digital lifeblood. He doesn’t think Eterni.me’s 30,269 early adopters are going to be waiting forever, though.


pages: 268 words: 76,702

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, cryptocurrency, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, financial engineering, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, Leonard Kleinrock, lock screen, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, packet switching, patent troll, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Crocker, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, The Chicago School, the long tail, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, yield management, zero day

There is a twist worth noting at this stage, though, which is that VCs aren’t quite as much of a bubble as they can seem. It’s easy to think of VC as its own world with its own (arguably toxic) culture, and in many ways it is: most of the top VCs are the internet entrepreneurs of the last generation. Marc Andreessen was a co-founder of Netscape, then became a top VC funding Facebook, Skype, Twitter, and more. Peter Thiel co-founded PayPal, then became Facebook’s first outside investor, and now funds much more. There are many others we could name. But they are not only investing their own money – they might well be investing yours, as Brian O’Kelley, an advertising tech executive and investor (who speaks at length next chapter), notes.

In the twenty-first century, it mostly meant something else: tracking the internet – and in that US-dominated network of networks, where people from across the world would use US companies, US servers and US cables to communicate. In the old days, it would have been entirely legal for the NSA to monitor a telephone call of interest between someone in Iran and someone in Syria – so why should it suddenly become different if they’re now both using Gmail and its US servers, or Skype, and so US networks? Developing the USA’s online capabilities while staying on the right side of the Constitution was maybe the thorniest problem in US intelligence. Alexander (whose PR representatives declined an interview for this book) was widely seen as being on one side of that debate: collect it all, expand it all, and worry about the legal niceties when the time came for analysts to look at the material that was collected.

If it detects your traffic is from Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, it could offer you a ‘social package’ with unlimited social networking for just an extra £2.99. This could go further. Let’s imagine your telecoms provider is also the company which provides your internet. Would it really want to let you use services like Skype or Facetime, rather than using your minutes, or paying as you go? Without a principle enforcing net neutrality – in essence forcing the pipework behind the network just to be ‘dumb pipes’ that send and receive whatever they get – this would be legally possible. Beyond that still, activist groups warn that if the infrastructure needed to analyse each packet as it travelled and looking into its contents became normal, tyrannical governments could easily make use of it to restrict access to content, control the internet and tighten their hold on power.


pages: 125 words: 28,222

Growth Hacking Techniques, Disruptive Technology - How 40 Companies Made It BIG – Online Growth Hacker Marketing Strategy by Robert Peters

Airbnb, bounce rate, business climate, citizen journalism, content marketing, crowdsourcing, digital map, fake it until you make it, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Hacker News, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, pull request, revision control, ride hailing / ride sharing, search engine result page, sharing economy, Skype, social bookmarking, TaskRabbit, turn-by-turn navigation, Twitter Arab Spring, ubercab

Most critics agree that two actions in particular damaged the highly successful company during these years, the purchase of Internet telephone service Skype in September 2005 for $3.1 billion and a failed attempt to enter the China market. Whitman retired from the company in 2008 and was succeeded by Jack Donahoe who was faced with re-growing an already successful, but then floundering company. One of the primary fundamentals of growth hacking is constant reassessment and redesign, which is exactly what Donahoe did. He saw Skype as a distraction that brought no added value to the company, so he sold a 70% stake in the service to a private equity firm for $2.75 billion.

Although this success was not sufficient to achieve the desired levels of growth, it did prove the concept and created an initial pool of users. This was enough to raise $1 million in seed money and allowed the finders to keep the ship afloat as they worked on recruiting experts, experienced academics, and authors to become instructors. This involved hours of one-on-one meetings via Skype, but no real exciting content was forthcoming until the Udemy founders hit on the idea of filming a series of meetings with their own investors. The “Raising Capital for Startups” course took off and led to the creation of two more offerings in the same format. Each one earned $30,000 to $50,000 and gave Udemy real traction with potential instructors.


pages: 587 words: 117,894

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know by P. W. Singer, Allan Friedman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, air gap, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business continuity plan, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, do-ocracy, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fault tolerance, Free Software Foundation, global supply chain, Google Earth, information security, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, M-Pesa, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, packet switching, Peace of Westphalia, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, Twitter Arab Spring, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day, zero-sum game

As the censors seek to find ways to block access to the network, Tor tries to circumvent each new technique. For instance, one innovative effort to keep Tor open for users behind the “Great Firewall of China” piggybacks Tor traffic inside a Skype video conference connection. This technique is innovative not only because it successfully hides Tor traffic within another protocol, but also because if the Chinese authorities were to shut it down, they would be forced to shut down all Skype traffic in the country, an impossible task given Skype’s importance to multinational firms communicating with branch offices. Censorship then comes with a real monetary cost. Tor illustrates the tension that can emerge between cyber freedom and security.

But, in turn, several of the SHAC hactivists were convicted for various crimes, including Internet stalking and using their websites to incite violence. But no one should think that hactivism is solely antibusiness. Recently, private firms have grown more involved in various hacktivist endeavors. For example, during the 2011 “Arab Spring” popular uprisings, firms like Google, Twitter, and Skype provided technical support to protesters and various workarounds to the government Internet censorship. When the Egyptian government tried to shut down Internet access during the mass protests, the firms provided a service called “Speak to Tweet,” whereby voicemail messages left by phone were converted to text tweets and downloadable audio files, so that news could still get out.

., “Tor Browser Bundle,” https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en, accessed March 17, 2013. circumvent each new technique “How China Blocks the Tor Anonymity Network,” The Physics arXiv (blog), MIT Technology Review, April 4, 2012, http://www.technology-review.com/view/427413/how-china-blocks-the-tor-anonymity-network/. Skype’s importance Hooman Mohajeri Moghaddam, Baiyu Li, Mohammad Derakhshani, et al., Skypemorph: Protocol Obfuscation for Tor Bridges (Waterloo, ON: University of Waterloo, 2010), http://cacr.uwaterloo.ca/techreports/2012/cacr2012-08.pdf. WHO ARE PATRIOTIC HACKERS? “Russia is attacking Estonia” “Statement by the Foreign Minister Urmas Paet,” Estonian Foreign Ministry statement, May 1, 2007, http://www.epl.ee/news/eesti/statement-by-the-foreign-minister-urmas-paet.d?


pages: 525 words: 116,295

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives by Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen

access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Andy Rubin, anti-communist, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, borderless world, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, false flag, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, hive mind, income inequality, information security, information trail, invention of the printing press, job automation, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Bork, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Susan Wojcicki, The Wisdom of Crowds, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, young professional, zero day

Some governments will consider it too risky to have thousands of anonymous, untraceable and unverified citizens—“hidden people”; they’ll want to know who is associated with each online account, and will require verification, at a state level, in order to exert control over the virtual world. Your online identity in the future is unlikely to be a simple Facebook page; instead it will be a constellation of profiles, from every online activity, that will be verified and perhaps even regulated by the government. Imagine all of your accounts—Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Google+, Netflix, New York Times subscription—linked to an “official profile.” Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance; even the most fascinating content, if tied to an anonymous profile, simply won’t be seen because of its excessively low ranking.

And, unfortunately, not even P2P communications are a perfect shield against infiltration and monitoring. If authorities (or criminal organizations) can identify one side of a conversation they can usually find the other party as well. This is true for messaging, voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) calls—meaning phone calls over the Internet (e.g., Google Voice and Skype) and video chats. Users assume they are safe, but unless the exchange is encrypted, anyone with access to intermediate parts of the network can listen in. For instance, the owner of a Wi-Fi hot spot can listen to any unencrypted conversations of users connected to the hot spot. One of the most insidious forms of cyber attack that P2P users can encounter is known as a “man-in-the-middle” attack, a form of active eavesdropping.

Man-in-the-middle attacks occur in all protocols, not just peer-to-peer, yet they seem all the more malicious in P2P communications simply because people using those platforms believe they are secure. And even the protection that encryption offers isn’t a sure bet, especially given some of the checks that will still exist in the physical realm. In the United States, the FBI and some lawmakers have already hinted at introducing bills that would force communications services like BlackBerry and Skype to comply with wiretap orders from law-enforcement officials, introducing message-interception capabilities or providing keys that enable authorities to unscramble encrypted messages. P2P networking has a history of challenging governments, especially around copyright issues for democracies (e.g., Napster, Pirate Bay) and political dissent for autocracies (e.g., Tor).


pages: 164 words: 57,068

The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society by Charles Handy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, bonus culture, British Empire, call centre, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, delayed gratification, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, falling living standards, future of work, G4S, greed is good, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, late capitalism, mass immigration, megacity, mittelstand, Occupy movement, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Veblen good, Walter Mischel

How then will the institutions engage with such people, given that they will still need their talents? How should society prepare these young people for self-sufficiency in such a world? Can schools, as institutions themselves, prepare people to live outside institutions? Will families remain the bedrock of society or will they, too, increasingly fragment into looser associations? Can emails and Skype, Facebook and Twitter compensate for physical connection? Can you indeed ever trust someone that you have never met, may never meet? The questions rumble on. What will hold a society together? Will we dissolve into ghettos of religion and race or will we find something better than war or economic success to build a united country?

Now that the technology exists to warn people when they are going into heart failure, to measure their heart rate and respiration, even how fast and far they walk or how obese they are, the responsibility falls back on the individuals to take the necessary remedial actions or to contact their doctor, probably through Skype or an app on their phone. The downside of all DIY is that being in control also means being responsible. When things go wrong it is most likely to be your fault. As I suggested in the Introduction, self-responsibility will be a feature of the emerging society. That will be uncomfortable for many who have grown up in a society that has assumed ever more responsibility for our personal safety and well-being, to the extent that we are tempted to assume that anything that goes wrong must be the fault of someone or something else.

Other large organisations, my old oil company included, are gradually going federal although they don’t necessarily call it that, aiming to be big where it matters and small where they can in order to keep it human and flexible. They look for a requisite variety of shape and size and style, while keeping it all connected by company websites, emails, Skype, messaging and even the old-fashioned telephone turned smartphone. The new fashion for this virtual connectivity means that our laptops are effectively our offices and, of course, they need not reveal to anyone where we physically are. Convenient though that is, it also means that I can never leave my office.


pages: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

I couldn’t talk to my wife on Skype without someone eavesdropping. It was as though I was being subjected to a cruel psychological experiment in which I was released each day to forage and prowl on the streets and then returned to the cage each night, only to discover that someone had moved my things while I was out. A few days on this zero-privacy regimen put me on a permanent hair trigger. * * * I returned to Hacker Condo to find a new guy on the couch. He was tall and blond and engrossed in his laptop. I said hello and asked where he was from. “I’m Norwegian. I’m in the middle of a Skype conversation,” he said.

* * * I found Corey Ferreira through his website, makefiverrmoney.com, which was a marketing vehicle for his e-book, Fiverr Success: $4000 a Month. 8 Hours of Work a Week. The e-book cost $17. For $50 more, Corey would throw in one hundred free gig ideas, thirty prerecorded video lessons, an audiobook, and an audio recording of a “webinar.” Betting on the empathic bond of our common forename, I emailed Corey to request a Skype chat. He agreed. Then I persuaded him to reveal his secrets for free. Corey, a Toronto native in his late twenties, had been making money online since the age of sixteen, when he built a website for a friend of his father’s and earned $100. Fiverr offered dramatically lower rates, but he saw the service as an opportunity to land more clients.

The Zuckerberg-backed group also lobbied for an expansion of the existing H-1B specialty workers visa, the lucky winners of which live in perpetual uncertainty and are exploited mercilessly by tech industry labor brokers known as body shops. Schulte shared the stage with one such labor broker, whose company played “matchmaker” for San Francisco startups seeking “high-talent workers” from abroad. “Kick-ass policy changes … that’s what my man Todd is working on,” she said. Another panelist, a former Skype executive and Andreessen-Horowitz “entrepreneur in residence” from Estonia, now leading an immigration startup in Palo Alto, had grandiose designs that went far beyond ass kicking. “We want to make every single government in the world compete for every single citizen,” the entrepreneur, Sten Tamkivi, said.


pages: 291 words: 81,703

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Amazon Mechanical Turk, behavioural economics, Black Swan, brain emulation, Brownian motion, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deliberate practice, driverless car, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, full employment, future of work, game design, Higgs boson, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, Loebner Prize, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, P = NP, P vs NP, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, reshoring, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

This proliferation of questions may force real people out of the business of asking and answering questions, because they will be swamped by a kind of conversational spam. That in turn will create even more space and opportunities for the bots. “Face time” will become all the more important as a signal of actual interest and caring, because “computer time” will be too easy to replicate through the bots. Maybe you’ll use Skype to prove it is really you, and that will work for as long as bots cannot replicate your facial expressions and voice patterns through a streamed image. These days, we’re even finding computer programs that can pass aesthetic Turing tests, so to speak. Computers are composing music, and it’s not always easy to tell which tune comes out of a human and which comes out of a computer.

If it’s a thirty-year-old instructor of chess or anything else teaching a ten-year-old novice, that teacher is first and foremost a role model and a motivator and to some extent an entertainer. He is a flesh-and-blood exemplar. He shows that success is possible. He exudes enthusiasm for the pursuit of knowledge, or he is not going to make a very good teacher, no matter what his level of expertise. For all these reasons, chess lessons on Skype, as you might commission from India, have not become popular, even though they are cheaper than face-to-face instruction. The programs have forced chess instruction to evolve, in largely beneficial ways, and—here is a key point—in ways that make the job harder to outsource. The instructor who teaches human qualities like conscientiousness and who motivates his student needs to be there.

It will become harder to live in the nice parts of Los Angeles or Orange County—or even in the less nice parts, such as the still-expensive Anaheim. The need to move to a much cheaper area will grow. Meanwhile, the internet makes it more possible for at least some people to work at a greater distance, or to chat with their grandkids over Skype. Income polarization, by the way, will have some more severe consequences for financial net worth than people might expect at first. By the time people get old, they are often not living off their income but living off their wealth. For a given difference in lifetime income, between two groups of people, the eventual difference in wealth is usually much greater.


pages: 401 words: 108,855

Cultureshock Paris by Cultureshock Staff

Anton Chekhov, clean water, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, Louis Pasteur, money market fund, PalmPilot, QWERTY keyboard, Skype, telemarketer, urban renewal, young professional

Customer service tel:1014 Toll-free English-speaking help line: 08.00.36.47.75 English-speaking line from abroad: (33).1.55.78.60.56 Website:http://www.orange.fr Inquire about all their pricing plans before subscribing and check out telephone companies that offer competitive prices for telephone, Internet, and television packages. http://www.skype.com (in English) and http://www.skype. com/intl/fr (in French). In effect, you’d be making phone calls using your computer or—depending on how you configure it—your iPhone, iTouch or other smart phones that support VoIP software. Domestic and international calls to other Skype customers are always free, and those to other landlines and mobiles are reasonably priced. It’s important to know about VoIP, for this is the current wave, and if Skype has hit France, other providers will surely follow. Check out, too, several services that offer cheap international calling without a subscription plan: Minutes Direct; website:www.lesminutesdirect.com.

Internet providers are also offering these services at extremely competitive prices, so you should make sure to check out all the options before subscribing to a plan: Free: website: http://www.free.fr Budget Télécom: website: http://www.sfr.fr Other Options There are yet other options for inexpensive calling. Just taking hold in France, for example, is Skype, which uses the technology called Voice Over Internet Protocal (VoIP). If you have broadband cable internet service (see Numericable on page 104) or DSL, which divides the phone line into voice and data, you should investigate Skype: 146 CultureShock! Paris FRANCE TELECOM Remains the major telephone provider for landlines. Customer service tel:1014 Toll-free English-speaking help line: 08.00.36.47.75 English-speaking line from abroad: (33).1.55.78.60.56 Website:http://www.orange.fr Inquire about all their pricing plans before subscribing and check out telephone companies that offer competitive prices for telephone, Internet, and television packages.


pages: 390 words: 109,519

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, borderless world, Burning Man, complexity theory, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, deep learning, do what you love, Donald Trump, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, eternal september, fake news, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, game design, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jean Tirole, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral panic, multi-sided market, Netflix Prize, Network effects, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two-sided market, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Harassment is a broad category of problematic behaviors, and has grown both as we investigate its nuances and as harassers continue to innovate.18 It can encompass anything from trash talk to insults to bullying to unwanted attention to threats to stalking to abuse that spills out into real-world consequences. Exactly what crosses the line as harassment varies across platforms. Foursquare draws a wide circle when it prohibits “negativity directed at another person.” Skype even used to prohibit embarrassment, though I suspect this was one of those rules it did not try to enforce: “Don’t . . . harass, threaten, embarrass, or do anything else to another Skype user that is unwanted.” Periscope emphasizes intention: “Do not engage in dialogue or behavior that intends only to incite or engage in the targeted harassment of others.” DeviantArt justifies its prohibition as avoidance of a slippery slope: “Discouraged commentary is typically considered to have the potential to escalate into an aggressive or abusive situation.”

And there are also plenty of social media sites that are long dead, or nearly so—Friendster, MySpace, Orkut, Revver, Veoh, Chatroulette, Ping, Delicious, Xanga, Airtime, Diaspora, Vine, Yik Yak—that also faced the challenges of moderation, and can still be illuminating examples. I did not include messaging services, which are hugely popular competitors to the platforms mentioned above. Millions regularly use WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, QZone, WeChat, Kik, Line, Google Hangout, and Skype to communicate and congregate online. Because they are generally person-to-person or group-to-group, and overwhelmingly between known contacts, they sidestep many of the problems that plague platforms that offer public visibility and contact with strangers. But they too engage in their own forms of moderation.

The other sort of preamble, now more common, justifies platforms as community keepers: the platform makes possible a diverse but fragile community, one that must be guarded so as to survive. This frame shows up in the statements from Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, Instagram, Last.fm, Nextdoor, Secret, Skype, Vimeo, and YouTube; here’s Soundcloud’s version: “We want SoundCloud to be a community where everyone feels respected. It’s up to all of us to make that happen. This page includes important information about our expectations of you while using SoundCloud. Please take the time to carefully read through this information; we take these guidelines seriously and expect you to do the same.”


pages: 515 words: 126,820

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Why do those people wait in line to send money via a physical point of sale using decades-old technology instead of what they have at their fingertips? Dollars are a lot less data intensive than HD video. In fact, according to Skype, video calling consumes 500 kilobits per second.43 Sending one bitcoin takes about 500 bits, or roughly one one-thousandth the data consumption of one second of video Skype! By disintermediating traditional third parties and radically simplifying processes, blockchain can finally enable instant, frictionless payments, so that people don’t wait in line for an hour or more, travel great distances, or risk life and limb venturing into dangerous neighborhoods at night just to send money.

“Aid and Remittances from Canada to Select Countries,” Canadian International Development Platform, http://cidpnsi.ca/blog/portfolio/aid-and-remittances-from-canada/. 41. World Bank Remittance Price Index, https://remittanceprices.worldbank.org/en. 42. 2011 National Household Survey Highlights, Canadian Census Bureau, www.fin.gov.on.ca/en/economy/demographics/census/nhshi11-1.html. 43. https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA1417/how-much-bandwidth-does-skype-need. 44. Interview with Eric Piscini, July 13, 2015. 45. http://corporate.westernunion.com/Corporate_Fact_Sheet.html. 46. At the time of writing, Abra had not opened its doors in Canada. However, we were able to test Abra’s technology with Analie and her mother successfully with Abra’s help. 47.

You need only to transmit the signed transaction to any of the bitcoin network nodes from anywhere using any medium. Said Antonopoulos, “People could shut down the Internet, and I could still transmit that transaction over shortwave radio with Morse code. A government agency could try to censor my communication, and I could still transmit that transaction as a series of smiley emoticons over Skype. As long as someone on the other end could decode the transaction and record it in the blockchain, I could effect the [smart contract]. So we’ve converted something that, in law, is almost impossible to guarantee into something that has verifiable mathematical certainty.”44 Consider property rights, both real and intellectual: “Ownership is just a recognition by a government or an agency that you own something and they will defend your claims on that ownership,” said Stephen Pair, CEO of BitPay.


pages: 428 words: 136,945

The Happiness Effect: How Social Media Is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost by Donna Freitas

4chan, fear of failure, Joan Didion, Jon Ronson, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Skype, Snapchat, TED Talk, Year of Magical Thinking

Usually they date frequently enough that it’s not that weird.” Also, Dinah explains, there is the miracle of Skype. If the couple lives far enough away, they may have Skype dates—approved and chaperoned—but not the traditionalists, she says. They don’t even allow people from different towns to date. “So if you’re dating an out-of-town boy, chances are your family isn’t going to really object to Skype dating. But then Skype dates are like regular dates. You don’t just decide, ‘Oh, I want to talk to him, let’s Skype him.’ You make an appointment, and you talk about dating-type stuff, for say two or three hours, and then you hang up.

Ephraim says this last bit with a smirk on his face followed up by a roll of his eyes. Ephraim and his Orthodox Jewish guy friends are also allowed smartphones, and one of the consequences is that they can explore sex in ways that girls are barred from doing. He starts telling me about how, for a while, they were all obsessed with ChatRoulette—a Skype-type platform that connects people randomly via video—you never know who you are going to get. I wonder if going on ChatRoulette is an example of the “wild times” Ephraim told me about earlier on in our interview, when he mentioned living in that basement with lots of other guys. Ephraim refers to it as part of “the underbelly” of the online world.

See also Snapchat age-appropriateness of, 204–5 attachment style and, 325n3 ethics of, 193–5 by minors, 11, 303n5, 325n3 negative views on, 207–8 nude photos, 202, 204, 325n3 within relationships, 203, 206 religious lifestyle restrictions and, 116 riskiness of, 208 views on responsible manner of, 205–7, 208 sexual assaults, 9 sexual orientation, and social media, 146, 180–4, 200 sexual selfies, 96 shame, and comparison trap, 32, 41 shaming. See bullying/cyberbullying shares. See comparison trap, and likes/retweets Skype dates, 185 sleep, and smartphones, 327n2 smartphones, 209–30 addiction to, 208, 215–7, 219–21, 223 always “on call,” 213, 218–9 camera capabilities, 92, 204 classroom bans on, 61, 271 as distraction from responsibilities, 215, 327n1 effects on sleep, 327n2 examples of unplugging, 210–8 female sense of safety and, 225 gender differences and, 121 as necessity, 9 remembering life before, 221–5 summary conclusion, 228–30 unplugging forever, 226–8 use of relational language for, 223 Smith, Christian, 277 Snapchat, 8 authenticity/inauthenticity, 132–4, 258 as catharsis, 134 comparison to Facebook, 132–4 disappearing posts on, 131–5 My Story feature, 35, 133 as outlet for play, 263 ranking of friends, 280–1 selfies on, 85, 86 sense of control on, 150 sexting on, 203–4, 206 social issues.


pages: 567 words: 122,311

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster by Alistair Croll, Benjamin Yoskovitz

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, constrained optimization, data science, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, frictionless market, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, Network effects, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, platform as a service, power law, price elasticity of demand, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social software, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, web application, Y Combinator

Done right, it’s one of your unfair advantages. It’s also critical to distinguish between artificial virality and inherent virality. If your service is inherently viral—meaning that use of the product naturally involves inviting outsiders, as it does with products like Skype or Uberconf—the newly invited users have a legitimate reason to use the product. A Skype user you invite will join in order to get on a call with you. Users who join in this way will be more engaged than those invited in other, less intrinsic ways (for example, through a word-of-mouth mention). On the other hand, if your virality is forced—for example, if you let people into a beta once they invite five friends, or reward people with extra features for tweeting something—you won’t see as much stickiness from the invited users.

For intrapreneurs, this means applying Lean methods to new product development, rather than starting an entirely new company. More people means adding users, ideally through virality or word of mouth, but also through paid advertising. The best way to add users is when it’s an integral part of product use—such as Dropbox, Skype, or a project management tool that invites outside users outsiders—since this happens automatically and implies an endorsement from the inviting user. More often means stickiness (so people come back), reduced churn (so they don’t leave), and repeated use (so they use it more frequently). Early on, stickiness tends to be a key knob on which to focus, because until your core early adopters find your product superb, it’s unlikely you can achieve good viral marketing.

Finding the best mix of these tiers and prices is a constant challenge, and SaaS companies invest considerable effort in finding ways to upsell a user to higher, more lucrative tiers. Because the incremental cost of adding another customer to a SaaS service is negligible—think of how little it costs Skype to add a new user—many SaaS providers use a freemium model of customer acquisition.[29] Customers can start using a free version of the service that’s constrained, in the hopes that they’ll consume all the free capacity and pay for more. Dropbox, for example, gives subscribers a few gigabytes of storage for free, then does everything it can—including encouraging sharing and photo uploads—to make sure users consume that capacity.


pages: 197 words: 59,946

The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, Golden age of television, hiring and firing, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, new economy, pre–internet, Skype, social software, Tony Hsieh

This is where I see an opportunity to both build the ecosystem and, ultimately, help myself…I am a firm believer in ‘doing it right.’” He adds, “Today, this ecosystem is dependent on social media and connectivity. The founders I work with live and breathe Twitter and Skype, so I live and breathe Twitter and Skype. I work when they work—even if that means doing a Skype video conference at 11:30 at night so we can talk to the team member in Hyderabad.” Culture + Intent = Word of Mouth Heyming insists that it does not take a lot of time to offer fledgling startups his services, and his investment is quickly paid off once the companies get financing and he can start charging them like regular clients.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Hank Heyming: A Brief Example of Well-Executed Culture and Intent What do you call a lawyer who tweets? Smart. Heyming is an attorney who has used social media tools to build his practice within a global law firm, grow his personal brand, and communicate with his clients and the startup community. There might be many blogging, tweeting, skyping, Quora-contributing lawyers practicing on either coast, but in Richmond, Virginia, Heyming stands out as an example of how implementing and acting upon proper culture and intent can reap great rewards in the Thank You Economy. Taking Advantage of the Culture Culture has a lot to do with Heyming’s success.


pages: 124 words: 36,360

Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent by Douglas Coupland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, British Empire, cable laying ship, Claude Shannon: information theory, cosmic microwave background, Downton Abbey, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, hiring and firing, industrial research laboratory, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Marshall McLuhan, messenger bag, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, oil shale / tar sands, pre–internet, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, Turing machine, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, urban planning, UUNET, Wall-E

Steiner has degrees from the University of Mannheim and Télécom Paris Tech, but has also served as a paratrooper in the German Army’s Special Operations Division. He is an expert in peer-to-peer file sharing or, in more generic terms, “What happens to information when there’s no central command.” He describes his work over the years as being “proto-cloud,” useful in advancing mobile Internet use and services like Skype. I ask him the question all scientists dread: “We should be able to see what’s next, and yet we don’t. Why is it so hard to see what’s next?” Moritz reflects, “Instead of asking ‘What’s next?’ we instead need to ask, ‘What do people want?’ Maybe that’s as close as you can get to an answer for that question.”

“When firms are developing a new product, and doing market surveys, they always ask people whether they think their new gadget is ‘cool’ or not. But they also have to ask whether people would actually pay to have this new thing in their life. There’s a huge difference.” In 1962 AT&T and Bell Labs forgot to ask people that question when they premiered the picture phone at the Seattle World’s Fair, and lost billions as a result. Skype arrived four decades later, and most people remain ambivalent about having their day-to-day face blasting out into the universe for other people to not only see, but also take screen snaps of, so that later, at their leisure, they can go in and count the blackheads from the day’s conversations. < br > Next I meet Shawn Brennan, a customer support engineer, whose cubicle is tumbleweed empty, except that on his screens are vibrant high-res images of tropical fish and lagoons—which is an apt reminder that what you see on the outside of a person is not necessarily a reflection of what’s on the inside.

It’s like making a Rolls Royce and then using it only as a shopping cart. “Another ad shows a female executive using a touch-tone phone booth in a crowded railway terminus. On the screen above the phone, a baby appears. ‘Have you ever tucked your baby in … from a phone booth?’ The commercial gets Skype and video chat right, but it’s happening at a payphone booth. So the rule of futurology really is: Always make it more extreme. This was Steve Jobs’ genius. He would never have allowed a payphone to appear in a commercial about the future.” (Later that night I go to view more of the commercials in my hotel room.


pages: 373 words: 112,822

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Boris Johnson, Burning Man, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collaborative consumption, data science, Didi Chuxing, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, East Village, fake it until you make it, fixed income, gentrification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, inflight wifi, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Necker cube, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, race to the bottom, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

Mott, “Watch Our PandoMonthly Interview.” Chapter 2: Jam Sessions 1. “Uber Happy Hour,” Vimeo, February 2, 2011, https://vimeo.com/19508742. 2. M. G. Siegler, “StumbleUpon Beats Skype in Escaping eBay’s Clutches,” TechCrunch, April 13, 2009, http://techcrunch.com/2009/04/13/ebay-unacquires-stumbleupon/. 3. “Travis Kalanick, Uber and Loic Le Meur, Co-Founder, LeWeb,” YouTube video, December 13, 2013, https://youtu.be/vnkvNQ2V6Og. 4. Siegler, “StumbleUpon Beats Skype.” 5. Erin Biba, “Inside the GPS Revolution: 10 Applications That Make the Most of Location,” Wired.com, January 19, 2009, http://www.wired.com/2009/01/lp-10coolapps/. 6.

Andreessen Horowitz would rectify the oversight the following year and lead the Series B, a less lucrative but still hugely profitable investment. Another venture capitalist that passed was across Sand Hill Road at a firm called August Capital. Howard Hartenbaum, an investor in the online video-calling service Skype, met with Chesky repeatedly that fall and took the founders to dinner at Alexander’s Steakhouse near the new office in San Francisco. Chesky impressed Hartenbaum; he seemed to have poise, intelligence, and a fierce determination to succeed. But Hartenbaum couldn’t wrap his head around the numbers.

Launching in Paris required accepting foreign credit cards, converting euros to dollars, and translating the app into French, among other tasks. Kalanick simply directed his team to work harder. “Never ask the question ‘Can it be done?’” he was fond of saying at the time, recalls one employee. “Only question how it can be done.” Kalanick left for LeWeb but stayed in touch from his hotel room over Skype video chat, his disembodied head still a loud, demanding presence in the office. Everyone was working around the clock, on little sleep and ebbing patience. “Someone turn Travis off!” yelled the new chief of product, a former Google manager named Mina Radhakrishnan, when Kalanick berated them for not having the service ready in Paris on time.


pages: 387 words: 112,868

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money by Nathaniel Popper

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, banking crisis, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buy and hold, capital controls, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, life extension, litecoin, lone genius, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, QR code, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Startup school, stealth mode startup, the payments system, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

Gox administrative account by either guessing the password with the brute force of a computer program or by gaming the system that allowed users to create new passwords. In the end, Mark calculated that the site had lost only a few thousand Bitcoins, which he promised to reimburse with the company’s money. Mark then moved on to rewriting the Mt. Gox code so that he could reopen the site. Two days after the crash, he appeared briefly, via Skype, on The Bitcoin Show, a relatively new online production created by an enthusiast in New York. Mark took the opportunity to blame the code he inherited from Jed McCaleb, which he said had “a lot of problems.” “The new system was written from scratch with absolutely no code from the old system,” he said.

Roger had first seen Charlie talking about his company, BitInstant, on Bruce Wagner’s The Bitcoin Show. A small, cherubic twenty-two-year-old, with a Brillo Pad of curly hair and a slight Brooklyn accent, Charlie pitched BitInstant as the easy way to get money into and out of Bitcoin without wiring funds internationally to Mt. Gox’s bank account in Japan. Roger quickly reached out to Charlie by Skype, and asked how much money he needed. Charlie offered him 10 percent of the company for $100,000. Roger sent over a wire payment for $120,000. THE YOUNG MAN Roger had invested in was, outwardly, an unlikely candidate to become the entrepreneurial leader in a futuristic global movement like Bitcoin.

Wences drew the group in with an explanation of the basic notion of a new kind of network that could allow people to move money anywhere in the world, instantaneously—something that these financiers, who were frequently moving millions between banks in different countries, could surely appreciate. “You can call someone in Jakarta on Skype,” Wences told them. “You can see them and you can hear them and there’s a synchronous connection with a lot of bandwidth. There’s a ton of magic happening, which is incredible. And you hang up and you want to send them one cent and that’s not possible. That’s ridiculous. It should be a lot easier to send a cent than to see video and audio.”


pages: 361 words: 117,566

Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth by Dan McCrum

air gap, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Citizen Lab, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, forensic accounting, Internet Archive, Kinder Surprise, lockdown, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, multilevel marketing, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, price stability, profit motive, reality distortion field, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Vision Fund, WeWork

Maybe there was something more there? The trio resolved to pool their resources from that point on. Earl was the master of internet sleuthing, and everywhere he looked there was more material; rabbit holes in which to disappear. They were soon spending their evenings online together, sitting with a Skype chat or call open as they pieced together a picture of Wirecard and its various associates, partners and former executives. Every new discovery was an endorphin hit, another brick in the wall of their growing confidence, and the investigation soon had the character of an obsession. Revisiting the Schutt case led them to a company called Bluetool, set up by Simon Dowson’s paperwork factory in Consett.

He’d identified the true support of the country for leaving Europe with the help of Dave the IT guy who, Perring claimed, was a master of advanced techniques to mine sentiment revealed from comments on Facebook. Yet as autumn arrived, Perring and Earl fell out over money. One day Perring popped up on a Skype chat claiming Earl owed him about £100,000 for research costs. Earl was nonplussed. So far as he was concerned, he had done the bulk of the research, Roddy had contributed much of the rest and anyway most of the company filings he’d found were free. The expenses he could think of didn’t come close to a five-figure sum, let alone six figures.

Photos of each man were published on Twitter, above the ominous title ‘Zatarra RIP’. Perring’s photo was from Facebook, but Earl’s was a hidden camera snap from his doorstep months before, judging by the bloom of his cherished geraniums. The photos of emails we’d seen in November were there, along with a collection of text messages, emails and Skype conversations confected into a grand conspiracy: ‘Zatarra is a story of greed, of self-pity and frustration, of men full of ambition but little ability to build, only to destroy. It is the story of men who could not accept that they were mistaken and that what they were doing was wrong. But Zatarra is also a story of corrupt journalists eager to make a name for themselves, eager to make some money on the side, disappointed with their lives and desperate for any story, no matter whether true or not.’


pages: 412 words: 116,685

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple Newton, augmented reality, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, game design, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, hype cycle, intermodal, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, non-fungible token, open economy, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Planet Labs, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, satellite internet, self-driving car, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, Y2K

In the 2000s, these services were surpassed by those focused on live audio, such as Skype, which also connected to traditional and offline phone systems. The mobile era saw a new crop of leaders such as WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Slack. These players didn’t just focus on offering Skype but were made for mobile devices. They built services predicated upon different usage behaviors, needs, and even communication styles. WhatsApp, for example, is intended for nearly constant use—not scheduled or occasional calls, as was the case with Skype—and it is a forum where emojis articulate more than typed words. Whereas Skype was originally built around the ability to make low-to-no-cost calls to the traditional “Public Switched Telephone Network” (i.e., telephones connected to telephone lines), WhatsApp skipped this feature altogether.

With iOS 7, Apple ditched these legacy design principles for those native to the mobile era. It was during Apple’s skeuomorphic era that many of today’s leading consumer digital companies were founded. Companies such as Instagram, Snap, and Slack reimagined what digital communications would be—not using IP to call a landline (Skype) nor text (BlackBerry Messenger), but to reinvent how we communicate, why, and what about. Spotify didn’t try to rebroadcast the radio over the internet (Broadcast.com), nor produce internet-only radio (Pandora), but instead changed how we accessed and discovered music. For the foreseeable future, “Metaverse apps” will be stuck in the early stage of development—a videoconference, but in 3D and situated in a simulated corporate boardroom; Netflix, but inside a virtual theater.

., ix–x Royal Dutch Shell, 166 Rube Goldberg machines, 56–57, 190, 253 Rumble Pak for the Nintendo 64, 151–52 Russia, 11, 156n, 170 Safari web browser, 194–96, 209 Samsung, 25, 61n, 137, 148, 150, 213, 243 Sandbox, The, 115 Saudi Arabia, 11 Save the Children, 9 Schaldemose, Christel, xiv “Science, the Endless Frontier,” x Scott, Travis, 12, 54–55, 77, 139, 280 Second Life, 9–10, 22, 45, 110, 247, 276 Security Times, xiii, xivn Sega, 173 Sesame Street, 26 SETI@HOME, 101 shared experiences, 48–49, 51 Shopify, 217 Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, 308 skeuomorphism, 47, 307 Skybound Entertainment, 260 Skype, 61, 308 Slack, 61, 135, 308 “smart contracts,” 226–30, 300 smart gloves, 151 smart lenses, 154, 205 smartphones, 148–51, 158–62, 188. See also specific models and manufacturers Smilegate RPG, 277 Snap game, 115 Snap, Inc., 144, 307–8 Snapchat, 61, 92, 116, 298–300 Snapchat Stories, 24, 298–99 Spectacles AR glasses, 144–46, 147, 150, 159 Snow Crash, 3–5, 8, 21–22, 46, 66, 68, 305 social graph features, 47, 135, 215–16 social media/social networks, xi, 12, 34, 116 advertising and marketing, 263–65 blockchain avatars on, 293–94 dangers of, 291–92 as driver of change, 249 Metcalfe’s Law and, 16 toxicity in, 129, 229 see also specific social networks software development kits (SDKs), 142, 175, 203, 309 Somnium Space, 115 Sony anime streaming services, 280 Decima game engine, 117 Dreams, 281 God of War, 139, 280 Hawk-Eye system and sports officiating, 280 investment in NFTs, 201 “strategic partnership” with Microsoft, 281n see also PlayStation; PlayStation Network Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), 280 Sony Music, 201, 280 South China Morning Post, 128 South Korea, xii–xiii, 203, 296, 303.


pages: 353 words: 91,520

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era by Tony Wagner, Ted Dintersmith

affirmative action, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, David Brooks, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, immigration reform, income inequality, index card, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, school choice, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the scientific method, two and twenty, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Y Combinator

Help the student attain true conversational fluency. Look for opportunities to speak frequently in the language—through travel if possible, Skype sessions with students in foreign countries, or field trips to immigrant communities in surrounding areas to learn about their culture and speak with them. And, above all, make it fun. Read books the students care about. Have entertaining discussions in class in the language. Watch movies in the language. Find a partner class or student in a foreign country and use tools like Skype to really learn about life there. But don’t require our kids to spend several years on something of no long-term value just to check off a thoughtless graduation requirement.

They work in teams on the following question: “Why do you think the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gained overwhelming support?” Each team presents its views to classmates and responds to questions. Students can use any available resource to support their work (we observe kids doing these types of challenges who resourcefully find people or classes all over the world and interview subjects via Skype as part of their research). They then explore whether the Gulf of Tonkin vote should have imparted lessons to our legislators in 2002 when the overwhelming majority of U.S. senators voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq. In these case studies, the first class spends a week largely memorizing facts—any of which can be readily looked up.

Today, adults need to work across national boundaries, understanding other cultures and how to collaborate on important problems and achieve results. Our global innovation economy spans cultures and languages. Imagine a customer service leadership team of a global company having a regular meeting—one based in the United States, one in Singapore, one in India—all on Skype or GoToMeeting. It is scheduled for 9 p.m. to best span the time zones. How do these teams work together, given their differences in cultures? Who speaks first? When is it okay to disagree? How do you disagree? Managers and team members must pay attention to these cultural differences to ensure they achieve the desired goals.


pages: 284 words: 92,688

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blue Bottle Coffee, call centre, Carl Icahn, clean tech, cloud computing, content marketing, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, dumpster diving, Dunning–Kruger effect, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, Googley, Gordon Gekko, growth hacking, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, pre–internet, quantitative easing, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, tulip mania, uber lyft, Y Combinator, éminence grise

In 2009, during Andreessen’s tenure on the board, eBay decided to sell Skype, the messaging service, which it had acquired in 2005; eBay paid $2.6 billion for Skype and sold it four years later in a deal that valued the company at $2.75 billion, not much of a gain. The investors who bought Skype included a private equity firm called Silver Lake Partners—and Andreessen Horowitz. As with Instagram and Oculus, Andreessen found himself on both sides of a deal, working as both buyer and seller. Eighteen months after buying Skype, Andreessen and his partners sold the company to Microsoft for $8.5 billion—three times what they paid.

To some, Andreessen’s role as both an eBay director and an investor acquiring an asset from eBay seemed like a problem. “Andreessen, he’s screwed more people than Casanova, for Christ’s sake, and yet he goes and takes this attitude that he’s on the high moral ground,” activist investor Carl Icahn said on CNBC. Icahn complained that eBay had sold Skype for less than what it was worth and that eBay’s investors had been shortchanged. Andreessen said Icahn was “making up a fake conspiracy theory out of thin air.” The tech press sided with Andreessen. The story went nowhere. Andreessen is relentlessly optimistic and pounds away on the same message, which is that no matter how high the valuations of start-ups might go, this all makes sense.


pages: 340 words: 90,674

The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain

airport security, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Kickstarter, land reform, lockdown, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, phenotype, pirate software, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, speech recognition, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, WikiLeaks

No matter how many times they tried, the computer scientists at Microsoft Research Asia, and other emerging companies, were hitting a wall. AI developers in China and Silicon Valley told me in 2012 that building a neural network would be a gold mine for Microsoft. Microsoft had acquired Skype, the popular visual calling and conferencing software used worldwide, for $8.5 billion in May 2011—its largest acquisition up to that time.6 If Skype or Microsoft Windows could secure the ability to recognize speech and faces, it would be a breakthrough. It would form the basis for real-time translation abilities and cybersecurity that depended on facial recognition. In 2011, I had met a group of young Chinese researchers in Beijing who, enduring late nights and weekends, toiled away at a gnawing set of problems.

“Notes from the AI Frontier: Applications and Value of Deep Learning,” McKinsey Global Institute, April 17, 2018, https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/artificial-intelligence/notes-from-the-ai-frontier-applications-and-value-of-deep-learning#. 6. Andrew Ross Sorkin and Steve Lohr, “Microsoft to Buy Skype for $8.5 Billion,” New York Times, May 10, 2011, https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/05/10/microsoft-to-buy-skype-for-8-5-billion/. 7. The World Bank, “Individuals Using the Internet (% of Population)—China,” https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?locations=CN. 8. China Internet Network Information Center, “The Internet Timeline of China (2011),” February 19, 2013, https://cnnic.com.cn/IDR/hlwfzdsj/201302/t20130219_38709.htm. 9.

.… I have relied only on pen and paper to diplomatically request the human rights, legal rights, and autonomous regional rights for the Uyghurs.… However, I have never pursued a violent route and I have never joined a group that utilized violence.9 After Jewher settled in Indiana, she began talking with her father on Skype every day. Sometimes three times or more a day. “One day, all of a sudden, he asked me to write down the names and phone numbers of journalists and American diplomats he knew,” she said. “Why are you doing this?” Jewher asked, worried. “I have a bad feeling,” he said. “You study hard. You need to get into college as soon as possible.


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Once a YWCA camp, and still without televisions or landlines in its guest rooms, this retreat is separated by an eighty-mile drive from Silicon Valley. Here in early January 2017 many of the leading researchers and luminaries of the information age secretly gathered under the auspices of the Foundational Questions Institute, directed by the MIT physicist Max Tegmark and supported by tens of millions of dollars from Elon Musk and Skype’s co-founder Jaan Tallinn. The most prominent participants were the bright lights of Google: Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Ray Kurzweil, Demis Hassabis, and Peter Norvig, along with former Googler Andrew Ng, later of Baidu and Stanford. Also there was Facebook’s Yann LeCun, an innovator in deep-learning math and a protégé of Google’s Geoffrey Hinton.

Layers three and four tend to be a bastion of central powers, where governments and their intelligence arms chase down domain names and addresses, entities such as ICANN and even the UN’s ITU. When they discover a Silk Road or perhaps an Alpha Bay, they track it down over layer three. Above layer four is layer five—the all-important session layer—which governs a particular two-way communication from beginning to end, whether a video stream, a Skype call, a Session Initiation Protocol conference, a messaging exchange, an email post, or even—and this would prove fateful—a transaction. Layers six and seven are the schemes for presentations and applications—user interfaces, windows, formats, operating systems, and so on. These are summed up in the ingenious schemes of hyperlinks (click on a word and go to a new page) and universal resource locators (URLs) addresses.

The Startup Cities Institute has its home there, part of a movement Mark Klugmann conceived of, at least in part, as a vessel for digital currencies—recalling Ayau’s vision, nearly half a century ago, of a community engaged in discovering “the probable shape of the future.” “Who is holding the bag?” • • • Tuur Demeester’s disdainful voice flared over the Skype link from Belgium to the classroom in Guatemala. The wide screen showed a young man with a conservative haircut and a studious, collegiate appearance. I had presumed to suggest that perhaps his precious bitcoin currencies might prove to be a Ponzi scheme, with the bellwether “miners” getting rich and the latecomers getting fleeced.


pages: 253 words: 65,834

Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get From Start-Up to IPO on Your Terms by Jeffrey Bussgang

business cycle, business process, carried interest, deal flow, digital map, discounted cash flows, do well by doing good, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pets.com, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technology bubble, The Wisdom of Crowds

This has happened on only rare occasions, but the prudent entrepreneur nonetheless should be careful about the downside of divulging too much about their business to an EIR. On the other hand, EIRs can be great entry points into the VC firm if they become enthusiastic sponsors of your idea. Nitzan Shaer, who had been an executive with eBay and Skype, joined Flybridge as an EIR in 2007. “The idea of becoming an EIR was introduced to me after I started considering my next steps at Skype,” Nitzan wrote on my blog, Seeing Both Sides.7 “I had three options on the table: join an early-stage start-up, start a company of my own, or become an EIR. Honestly, there was no start-up I found that excited me, but there were a bunch of ideas that I wanted to pursue—not all of them in my direct area of expertise, so I knew I would need time and advice.”

., who became the first professional West Coast venture capitalist after serving in the Truman administration as an implementer of the Marshall Plan. His father, Bill Draper, is one of Silicon Valley’s legendary venture capitalists and still invests out of his own firm. Tim has created a legacy of his own by investing in early-stage companies, including Skype, Hotmail, and Baidu, the Chinese-based search company that is profiled later in Chapter 7. DFJ is based in Menlo Park, California, but starting in 2005 began to aggressively expand outside of the United States, with affiliated funds in Israel, Europe, India, China, Vietnam, and others. The model DFJ has taken is analogous to the McDonald’s franchise model.

See Negotiating deal Primack, Dan Principals, role of Protective provisions Quan Zhou background information entrepreneurs, assessing Home Inn IDG-Accel China, development of MySpace China Ravikant, Naval Recruitersrole as Redpoint Ventures References, of VC firm, checking Ries, Eric Risk, presenting to VC Rock fetch Rohaly, Janos Rosenbloom, Micah pitch to VC selling Brontes 3D 3M, role at Roving Software Sabet, Bijan Sarbanes-Oxley Act Schmidt, Eric Scott, David Meerman Selling business Brontes 3D example decision-making considerations following IPO time to discuss timing, importance of Sequoia Capital development of Series A financing Shaer, Nitzan, as entrepreneur in residence (EIR) Shah, Dharmesh Sharp, Philip Shong, Hugo Sideways scenario Siemens Sim, Ed Sinclair, Dr. A. David Sirtris Pharmaceuticals development of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) purchase IPO/sale process See also Westphal, Dr. Christoph Six Apart Skok, David Skype Social media tools impact on VC LinkedIn Socialnet Sohl, Jeffrey Starbucks Start-up advice, seeking by CEO and board of directors CEO failure scenario complexity of conflict avoidance tips 80/20 rule, following as ensemble founder/outside CEO conflict initial public offering (IPO) phases of selling business VC abandonment Stock option pool participation feature Stone, Biz Strategistsrole as S2S Medical Publishing Sun Microsystems Surowiecki, James Suster, Mark Swensen, Dave Swisher, Kara Syndication Taylor, Bill Term sheet control elements detail, level of elements of exploding term sheet protective provisions rescinding offer See also Negotiating deal Thiel, Peter 3M, Brontes 3D, purchase of Trinity Ventures Truth Teller, board member as Twitter investors in as networking tool See also Dorsey, Jack TypePad Union Square Ventures.


pages: 229 words: 67,869

So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

4chan, Adam Curtis, AltaVista, Berlin Wall, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Clive Stafford Smith, cognitive dissonance, Desert Island Discs, different worldview, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, gentrification, Google Hangouts, Hacker News, illegal immigration, Jon Ronson, Menlo Park, PageRank, Ralph Nader, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, urban planning, WikiLeaks

On the Sunday night - the night before publication - he’d been giving a keynote at the 2012 Meeting Professionals International’s World Education conference in St Louis. The subject of his talk had been the importance of human interaction. During it - according to a tweet posted by an audience member, the journalist Sarah Braley - he revealed that since the invention of Skype, attendances at meetings had actually gone up by 30 per cent. After he left the stage she found him and asked where that implausible statistic had come from. ‘A conversation with a Harvard professor,’ he replied. But when she requested the professor’s name he mysteriously refused to divulge it. ‘I’d have to ask him if it’s all right to tell you,’ he explained.

‘A lot of people move around in life chronically ashamed of how they look, or how they feel, or what they said, or what they did. It’s like a permanent adolescent concern. Adolescence is when you’re permanently concerned about what other people think of you.’ It was a few months earlier and Brad Blanton and I were talking on Skype. He was telling me about how, as a psychotherapist, he had come to understand how so many of us ‘live our lives constantly in fear of being exposed, or being judged as immoral or not good enough’. But Brad had invented a way for us to eradicate those feelings, he told me. His method was called ‘Radical Honesty’.

They’re all assigned physical tasks. Then there are workshops - on sex abuse, domestic violence, anger management, then lunch, then in the afternoon they focus in on job training, housing. There are books. There’s cake. There’s the library. Then the mothers can read bedtime nursery rhymes to their children over Skype.’ There were glimpses of a summer day through the windows and as a corrections officer let us in she said that tensions were high because warm days are when a person really feels incarcerated. Jim gathered the women into a circle for a group meeting. I wasn’t allowed to record it and so I managed only to scribble down fragments of conversations like: ‘… I come from a small town so everyone knows where I am and that tears me up inside …’ and ‘… most people know why Raquel is in here …’ At that a few women glanced over at the woman I took to be Raquel.


pages: 235 words: 63,487

The Last Black Unicorn by Tiffany Haddish

El Camino Real, Skype

Ex-Husband: “Yeah, I’ll never be a Jehovah’s Witness, but you should be one, because they know how to be submissive. They’re submissive to their men. They do whatever their men tell them to do, so that’s what you should do.” The Jehovah’s Witnesses do Bible study on Skype. When I got back to my hotel room at nine in the morning, they hit me up on Skype for our regular Bible study. JW: “What happened to you?” I hadn’t even looked at myself, and when I saw myself on the Skype . . . I saw there was a knot on my forehead, there were all these welt marks across my throat. Tiffany: “Oh man. My husband came out here, we got into it, he choked me.” Jehovah’s Witnesses do not believe in divorce.

Jehovah’s Witnesses do not believe in divorce. Not for any reason. They were all like: JW: “You need to get a divorce. You have to get out of this.” Then the lady leading the Bible study calls her husband. Her husband’s an elder, but she gets him on Skype right away. JW: “Look at Tiffany. Look at her. She needs to get a divorce. Don’t you think?” He is an elder, he is big-time. At first, he started off with the normal lines: Elder: “Nobody gets divorced. We could talk through this. You could work it out.” JW: “LOOK AT HER FACE!” He got real quiet. Then he said in a solemn voice: Elder: “You have to get a divorce.


pages: 274 words: 63,679

Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America by Angie Schmitt

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, car-free, congestion pricing, COVID-19, crossover SUV, desegregation, Donald Trump, Elaine Herzberg, gentrification, global pandemic, high-speed rail, invention of air conditioning, Lyft, megacity, move fast and break things, off-the-grid, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, wikimedia commons

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Traffic Safety Facts, “Critical Reasons for Crashes Investigated in the National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey,” February 2015, https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812115. 29. Center for Active Design, “Vision Zero: Learning from Sweden’s Successes,” accessed March 29, 2020, https://centerforactivedesign.org/visionzero. 30. Daniel Firth, Skype interview, December 4, 2019. 31. Firth, Skype interview. 32. Lisa Groeger, “Unsafe at Many Speeds,” ProPublica, May 25, 2016, https://www.propublica.org/article/unsafe-at-many-speeds. 33. Bo Bjerre et al., “A Swedish Alcohol Ignition Interlock Programme for Drink-Drivers: Effects on Hospital Care Utilization and Sick Leave,” Addiction 102, no. 4 (March 12, 2007), https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1360-0443.2006.01726.x. 34.

International Transport Forum/OECD, Road Safety Data, “Road Safety Annual Report 2019: Sweden,” October 7, 2019, https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/sweden-road-safety.pdf. 52. Xinhua, “Norway Best in World in Traffic Safety: Report,” Global Times, June 27, 2018, http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1108618.shtml. 53. Firth, Skype interview. 54. Laura Nelson, “L.A. Backs Venice Boulevard’s Controversial ‘Road Diet’ as Activists Threaten to Sue,” Los Angeles Times, March 8, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-venice-mar-vista-bike-lane-20190308-story.html. 55. Angie Schmitt, “Are We Starting to See Progress toward Vision Zero?

Angie Schmitt, “Are We Starting to See Progress toward Vision Zero?,” Streetsblog USA, May 22, 2019, https://usa.streetsblog.org/2019/05/22/are-we-starting-to-see-progress-toward-vision-zero/. 56. Transport for London and Mayor of London, “Vision Zero Action Plan,” July 24, 2018, http://content.tfl.gov.uk/vision-zero-action-plan.pdf. 57. Firth, Skype interview. Chapter 7. A Hard Right Turn 1. Safe Routes to School North Carolina, “Walk to School Day Participation in North Carolina Skyrockets,” 2015, https://www.eatsmartmovemorenc.com/News/Texts/North_Carolina_Walk_to_School_Day_Report_2015.pdf. 2. Safe Routes to School Guide, “The Decline of Walking and Bicycling,” accessed March 30, 2020, http://guide.saferoutesinfo.org/introduction/the_decline_of_walking_and_bicycling.cfm. 3.


pages: 660 words: 141,595

Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know About Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking by Foster Provost, Tom Fawcett

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Gini coefficient, Helicobacter pylori, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, iterative process, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, Netflix Prize, new economy, p-value, pattern recognition, placebo effect, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, Teledyne, text mining, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

Consider this more complex sample document: Microsoft Corp and Skype Global today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Microsoft will acquire Skype, the leading Internet communications company, for $8.5 billion in cash from the investor group led by Silver Lake. The agreement has been approved by the boards of directors of both Microsoft and Skype. Table 10-3 shows a reduction of this document to a term frequency representation. Table 10-3. Terms after normalization and stemming, ordered by frequency Term Count Term Count Term Count Term Count skype 3 microsoft 3 agreement 2 global 1 approv 1 announc 1 acquir 1 lead 1 definit 1 lake 1 communic 1 internet 1 board 1 led 1 director 1 corp 1 compani 1 investor 1 silver 1 billion 1 To create this table from the sample document, the following steps have been performed: First, the case has been normalized: every term is in lowercase.

Terms after normalization and stemming, ordered by frequency Term Count Term Count Term Count Term Count skype 3 microsoft 3 agreement 2 global 1 approv 1 announc 1 acquir 1 lead 1 definit 1 lake 1 communic 1 internet 1 board 1 led 1 director 1 corp 1 compani 1 investor 1 silver 1 billion 1 To create this table from the sample document, the following steps have been performed: First, the case has been normalized: every term is in lowercase. This is so that words like Skype and SKYPE are counted as the same thing. Case variations are so common (consider iPhone, iphone, and IPHONE) that case normalization is usually necessary. Second, many words have been stemmed: their suffixes removed, so that verbs like announces, announced and announcing are all reduced to the term announc.

., The news story clusters separating classes, Example: Overfitting Linear Functions sequential backward elimination, A General Method for Avoiding Overfitting sequential forward selection (SFS), A General Method for Avoiding Overfitting service usage, From Business Problems to Data Mining Tasks sets, Bag of Words Shannon, Claude, Selecting Informative Attributes Sheldon Cooper (fictional character), Example: Evidence Lifts from Facebook “Likes” sign consistency, in cost-benefit matrix, Costs and benefits Signet Bank, Data and Data Science Capability as a Strategic Asset, From an Expected Value Decomposition to a Data Science Solution Silver Lake, Term Frequency Silver, Nate, Evaluation, Baseline Performance, and Implications for Investments in Data similarity, Similarity, Neighbors, and Clusters–* Using Supervised Learning to Generate Cluster Descriptions applying, Example: Whiskey Analytics calculating, The Fundamental Concepts of Data Science clustering, Clustering–The news story clusters cosine, * Other Distance Functions data exploration vs. business problems and, Stepping Back: Solving a Business Problem Versus Data Exploration–Stepping Back: Solving a Business Problem Versus Data Exploration distance and, Similarity and Distance–Similarity and Distance heterogeneous attributes and, Heterogeneous Attributes link recommendation and, Link Prediction and Social Recommendation measuring, Similarity and Distance nearest-neighbor reasoning, Nearest-Neighbor Reasoning–* Combining Functions: Calculating Scores from Neighbors similarity matching, From Business Problems to Data Mining Tasks similarity-moderated classification (equation), * Combining Functions: Calculating Scores from Neighbors similarity-moderated regression (equation), * Combining Functions: Calculating Scores from Neighbors similarity-moderated scoring (equation), * Combining Functions: Calculating Scores from Neighbors Simone, Nina, Example: Jazz Musicians skew, Problems with Unbalanced Classes Skype Global, Term Frequency smoothing, Probability Estimation social recommendations, Link Prediction and Social Recommendation–Link Prediction and Social Recommendation soft clustering, Profiling: Finding Typical Behavior software development, Implications for Managing the Data Science Team software engineering, data science vs., A Firm’s Data Science Maturity software skills, analytic skills vs., Implications for Managing the Data Science Team Solove, Daniel, Privacy, Ethics, and Mining Data About Individuals solution paths, changing, Data Understanding spam (target class), Example: Targeting Online Consumers With Advertisements spam detection systems, Example: Targeting Online Consumers With Advertisements specified class value, Supervised Versus Unsupervised Methods specified target value, Supervised Versus Unsupervised Methods speech recognition systems, Thinking Data-Analytically, Redux speeding up neighbor retrieval, Computational efficiency Spirited Away, Example: Evidence Lifts from Facebook “Likes” spreadsheet, implementation of Naive Bayes with, Evidence in Action: Targeting Consumers with Ads spurious correlations, * Example: Why Is Overfitting Bad?


pages: 138 words: 41,353

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, high net worth, illegal immigration, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, technoutopianism, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

Comorian lawmakers and Comoro Gulf Holding employees all pointed to established citizenship- and residence-by-investment programs in other countries as a sort of basis, or justification, for the Comorian law. “Thank God there’s this opportunity,” Adnan Tarabishy, a Syrian media executive and acquaintance of Kiwan’s, explained over Skype in February 2015. Tarabishy said he was in the process of applying for a passport from the island of Dominica to compensate for the inconvenience of being Syrian. “Market access is like a nightmare, so we consider this as part of our business investment,” he told me. There’s a late-capitalist logic to the scheme.

“We were living the project, seeing Corniche billboards, crater lake billboards, investments in telecom, mini ports . . . see[ing] that happening in a country like that and [being] involved in everything and controlling everything gave me a high sense of achievement and satisfaction which I haven’t found anywhere else.” Elie Wakim, a close friend and associate of Kiwan’s who says he helped pitch the Comoros proposal to the Emirati government in a closed-door meeting, came to embrace the initiative. “I understand very well that people might be shocked by this principle,” he said over Skype. “But these are people who have no country, who are spread out over the Arab world, who can’t travel or have an identity or hold certain jobs without facing discrimination.” “It’s an idea that’s developing, and there are societies that can help,” he added, citing, as an example, “I can have a St.

After spending a night in the hotel, Khaleq moved into an apartment, where he stayed for almost two months. A neighbor, it turns out, was legitimately from the Comoros. They would run into each other in the lobby and talk about their shared country. “I said, you are the original, I am the duplicate.” He spoke to his family on Skype and felt another new emotion: homesickness. Over the summer, Khaleq obtained his asylum approval and was assigned to emigrate to London, Ontario, a Canadian city not far from Detroit. On September 11, he flew to Toronto via Hong Kong, then boarded a bus that took him to London. The Cross Cultural Learner Centre a non-profit that helps refugees integrate into their new communities, helped him find an apartment, sign up for English lessons, and get his precious library card.


pages: 457 words: 126,996

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous by Gabriella Coleman

1960s counterculture, 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, Debian, digital rights, disinformation, do-ocracy, East Village, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, false flag, feminist movement, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Santayana, Hacker News, hive mind, impulse control, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, lolcat, low cost airline, mandatory minimum, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pirate software, power law, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, SQL injection, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, TED Talk, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, zero day

They had become so close, in fact, that everyone knew, roughly, where everyone else was logging in from (real names were never shared) Most were headquartered in or around the UK, except Sabu. Some had even foolishly spoken over Skype, which is how Topiary had determined that Cleary’s voice was “annoying”. OpSec, short for Operational Security, is the art of protecting your group’s human and digital interactions. One of the foundations of good OpSec is the knowledge that one’s computer is secure. Depending on proprietary software packages—opaque in both source code and business practices—can compromise that knowledge. The use of free software, such as GNU/Linux, and the avoidance of tools like Skype (commonly understood to have government backdoors) are necessary measures in the never-ending journey of vigilant OpSec.

Quickly the excitement faded as I contemplated the ruinous reality this could bring down upon me if I got on the wrong side of these notorious trolls; I remembered that I had already decided to focus on the activism of Anonymous and not its trolling heyday for a very good reason. In the end, I hoped weev would ignore the email from me sitting in his inbox. But, when he emailed me back, I realized there was nothing to do but commit. We finally connected via Skype chat. His handle was “dirk diggler,” after the porn star protagonist of the 1997 film Boogie Nights. Later, when we switched to IRC, he used “weev”: dirk diggler: how are you? biella: good and you? dirk diggler: coming down off of some vile substance biella: you are up early dirk diggler: methylenedioxypyrovalorone i think it was called dirk diggler: its late, technically dirk diggler: as i havent slept biella: i woke up at 3 am but that is not all that usual for me dirk diggler: i am working on my latest shitstorm right now dirk diggler: disruptive technological developments are gr8 biella: you are pretty adept at that as well dirk diggler: yes i am switching from the mdpv to the coffee dirk diggler: i am hoping this will smooth the downward spiral long enough for me to ship this motherfucker live today biella: no chance you will be in nyc in the near future, is there?

The only thing you are able to judge a post by is its content and nothing else. This elimination of the persona, and by extension everything associated with it, such as leadership, representation, and status, is the primary ideal of Anonymous. (emphasis added) This “Anon,” who was lecturing anonymously on Skype to my ten enraptured students, immediately offered a series of astute qualifications about this “primary ideal.”: the self-effacement of the individual. When Anonymous left 4chan in pursuit of activist goals in 2008, he explained, this ideal failed, often spectacularly; once individuals interacted pseudonymously or met in person, status-seeking behaviors reasserted themselves.


pages: 299 words: 19,560

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

Meanwhile, prominent psychologist Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011) paints a predominantly negative portrait of social media as leading many of us away from the solitude and intimacy that, she claims, we actually seek. No less importantly, the communications company Skype has also become exceedingly popular as a generally free (as of 2011) means of consumers using computers as telephones to communicate across long distances. “Skype me” is now a favorite phrase. The company began in 2003 as an online alternative to conventional telephone companies, with their usually high rates.15 Recent and Contemporary Utopian Communities Before we look at cyberspace communities, it is important to recognize the persistence of “conventional” utopian communities into the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first centuries.

More generally, according to countless newspapers and magazines, television and radio programs, opinion surveys, and, not least, websites and Internet discussions, much of the world has for years now been experiencing “techno-mania” of an unprecedented intensity. Not only are endless high-tech advances all the rage, but those advances—especially computers, the Internet, the Web, cell phones, Skype, iPods, iPhones, and, most recently, iPads—are rapidly transforming the world, and generally for the better. By the time of his death in 2011, Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs had become the foremost promoter of “techno-mania,” though hardly the only one.2 We are given to believe that Americans have never seen so much scientific and technological change in so short a time and have rarely been so optimistic about the future.

See also “Texting is not Talking,” Boston Globe, Editorial, June 16, 2009, A14; and Matt Richtel, “In The Resurgence of Utopianism 16 17 18 19 20 Study, Texting Lifts Crash Risk by Wide Margin,” New York Times, July 28, 2009, A1, A15. See also Verne Kopytoff, “To Match Profit with Popularity, Skype Looks to New Markets,” New York Times, December 22, 2010, B1, B2. This paragraph and its quotations are adapted from The Center for Land Use Interpretation, “Drop City Site,” http://ludb.clui.org/ex/i/ CO3134. See also Timothy Miller, “Roots of Communal Revival, 1962–1966,” http://www.thefarm.org/lifestyle/root2.html.


pages: 56 words: 16,788

The New Kingmakers by Stephen O'Grady

AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, DevOps, Hacker News, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Netflix Prize, Paul Graham, Ruby on Rails, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Y Combinator

In addition to the hard output—potentially useful software—this offers soft gains in goodwill, talent identification, and recruitment that usually more than offset the costs. Ultimately, developers are going to use open source whether you like it not. If you want to create a developer friendly atmosphere, then, you must create an open source friendly atmosphere. Go Global with Your Hiring Before tools like distributed version control, instant messaging, and Skype existed, working from home was a synonym for taking a day off. Attitudes toward remote workers have shifted over the past decade, even within some of the largest employers in the world. Still, skepticism remains—and with good reason. As Zack Urlocker, COO at Zendesk, puts it: “Distributed development is not cheaper, much harder, but worth it.”

As Marc Andreessen noted in his Wall Street Journal op-ed “Why Software is Eating the World,” the world’s largest bookseller (Amazon), largest video service by number of subscribers (Netflix), most-dominant music companies (Apple, Spotify, and Pandora), fastest-growing entertainment companies (Rovio, Zynga), fastest-growing telecom company (Skype), largest direct marketing company (Google), and best new movie production company (Pixar) are all fundamentally software companies. It should be no surprise that even traditional businesses like Sears are trying to become software enabled via APIs. Those that aren’t following suit should be. The alternative isn’t keeping things the way they are now—it’s watching developers help build and extend your competitors’ business.


pages: 669 words: 210,153

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

In my limited experience, if anything is going to go wrong (and undetected until too late), it’ll be a loose fitting on one of these. Bluecell 5-pack of microphone windscreen foam covers: These minimize the clicks, pops, and other noises picked up from vocals, as well as background noises and actual wind. Brand doesn’t matter much here. Phone/Skype Interviews * * * Ecamm Call Recorder for Skype: This is used for recording “phoners” via Skype. I haven’t found any software that blows me away, but this gets the job done. I’ve used it for more than 50% of my podcast interviews. Zencastr also gets good reviews but sometimes requires a lot of hard drive space on the part of your interviewee.

When I was interviewing athletes and coaches from 2008 to 2010, digging up non-obvious tactics for The 4-Hour Body, I sent different combinations of the following questions to dozens of experts. These can be modified for any skill or topic, not just sports. Just replace [SPORT] with what you want to learn, and track down your mentors. You can often find past gold and silver medalists willing to answer these via Skype for $50 to $100 per hour, which is an incredible steal and could save you years of wasted effort. Who is good at [SPORT] despite being poorly built for it? Who’s good at this who shouldn’t be? Who are the most controversial or unorthodox athletes or trainers in [SPORT]? Why? What do you think of them?

., the smart toilet) 10 books I can write (The Choose Yourself Guide to an Alternative Education, etc). 10 business ideas for Google/Amazon/Twitter/etc. 10 people I can send ideas to 10 podcast ideas or videos I can shoot (e.g., Lunch with James, a video podcast where I just have lunch with people over Skype and we chat) 10 industries where I can remove the middleman 10 things I disagree with that everyone else assumes is religion (college, home ownership, voting, doctors, etc.) 10 ways to take old posts of mine and make books out of them 10 people I want to be friends with (then figure out the first step to contact them) 10 things I learned yesterday 10 things I can do differently today 10 ways I can save time 10 things I learned from X, where X is someone I’ve recently spoken with or read a book by or about.


pages: 266 words: 80,018

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man by Luke Harding

affirmative action, air gap, airport security, Anton Chekhov, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, disinformation, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Firefox, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, job-hopping, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, undersea cable, web application, WikiLeaks

Let off the legal leash and urged to make America safe, the NSA and its British junior partner, the Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ (secretly allied with the internet and telecommunications giants who control the hardware), have used all their technical skills to ‘master the internet’. That is their phrase, not ours. Democratic control has been vague, smothered in secrecy and plainly inadequate. The result has been a world that is spied on. The technologies that the west has trumpeted as forces for individual freedom and democracy – Google, Skype, mobile phones, GPS, YouTube, Tor, e-commerce, internet banking and all the rest – are turning into machines for surveillance that would have astonished George Orwell, the author of 1984. The Guardian was, I am glad to say, first among the free press to publish Snowden’s revelations. We saw it as our duty to break the taboos of secrecy, with due regard, as Snowden himself wanted, to the safety of individuals and the protection of genuinely sensitive intelligence material.

This is indeed a lot of data – more than 21 petabytes a day – and the equivalent of sending all the information in the British Library 192 times every 24 hours. Yet inside GCHQ there is still anxiety that the organisation will fall behind. One of the team responsible for managing TEMPORA sets out how the agency’s ‘mission role’ grew. New techniques had given GCHQ access to huge amount of new data or ‘light’ – emails, phone calls and Skype conversations. ‘Over the last five years, GCHQ’s access to “light” [has] increased by 7,000 per cent.’ The amount of material being analysed and processed had increased by 3,000 per cent, he said – an astonishing figure. The agency was ‘breaking new ground’ but also struggling to keep up. ‘The complexity of our mission has evolved to the point where existing management capability is no longer fit for purpose.’

One slide emphasised the dates when Silicon Valley’s technology companies apparently signed up and become corporate partners of the spy agency. The first to provide PRISM material was Microsoft. The date was 11 September 2007. This was six years after 9/11. Next came Yahoo (March 2008) and Google (January 2009). Then Facebook (June 2009), PalTalk (December 2009), YouTube (September 2010), Skype (February 2011) and AOL (March 2011). For reasons unknown, Apple held out for five years. It was the last major tech company to sign up. It joined in October 2012 – exactly a year after Jobs’s death. The top-secret PRISM program allows the US intelligence community to gain access to a large amount of digital information – emails, Facebook posts and instant messages.


pages: 231 words: 71,248

Shipping Greatness by Chris Vander Mey

business logic, corporate raider, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, fudge factor, Google Chrome, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, minimum viable product, performance metric, recommendation engine, Skype, slashdot, sorting algorithm, source of truth, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, two-pizza team, web application

For example, when I worked on Google Talk, I had a mission: “Allow anyone to communicate with anyone else, anywhere, on any device.” I looked at the competitive landscape for unified communications, video conferencing, and VoIP. I looked at Google’s unique assets. One unique and durable differentiator was that unlike Skype or other video conferencing providers, we could use Google’s massive cloud infrastructure to provide video conferencing through a switching technology, rather than through the older and much more expensive encode-decode-mix-encode-decode process. Typically, multiway video systems like that cost tens of thousands of dollars and worked poorly because the hardware added so much latency.

When I looked at our millions of Google Apps customers and industry trends, I saw an emerging market segment composed of workers who were increasingly distributed and working from home. On top of that, the conference-calling space was huge, and we had powerful assets in Google Voice that we could offer to users. Given this data, I argued that we should try to lead the market in low-cost unified communications for businesses. This strategy would enable us to leapfrog Skype’s older technology and undercut Microsoft’s more expensive systems in the SMB and Midmarket segments. Ultimately, you can see that Google didn’t follow this strategy, choosing instead to emphasize its social efforts and Google+ Hangouts. But you get the point. As you think about your company, customers, and competition, pay special attention to how your product will serve your customers better than the competition’s product in the long term.

If you’re based in California, for example, New York will only assume something was miscommunicated, get on a plane, fly to California, and complain loudly. Even the best engineering teams in Sydney and India, on the other hand, straight-up panic. They’re so far away from the States that they assume they’re misunderstood, underappreciated, and kept out of the loop. The best thing you can do to ameliorate these feelings is to overcommunicate. Use Skype, Google+ Hangouts, WebEx, and generally anything you can get your hands on to increase the quality of your communication with your remote teams. Because developers hate using telephones, reducing initiation friction is really important. One team I had at Google was split between Seattle and Mountain View.


pages: 252 words: 79,452

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'Connell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cosmological principle, dark matter, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, double helix, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Extropian, friendly AI, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, impulse control, income inequality, invention of the wheel, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Lyft, Mars Rover, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, profit motive, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Skype, SoftBank, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge

“I wouldn’t describe myself these days as a transhumanist,” Nick told me one evening over dinner at an Indian restaurant near the Future of Humanity Institute. Though he was married, his wife and young son were based in Canada, and he lived alone in Oxford. The arrangement involved frequent transatlantic flights, and regular Skype check-ins; regrettable though it was from a work-life balance point of view, it allowed him to focus on his research to a degree that would not otherwise have been possible. (He ate at this particular restaurant so frequently that the waiter had brought him a chicken curry without his having to make any explicit request for same.)

It seemed to me odd, though not especially surprising, that a hypothetical danger arising from a still nonexistent technology would, for these billionaire entrepreneurs, be more worthy of investment than, say, clean water in the developing world or the problem of grotesque income inequality in their own country. It was, I learned, a question of return on investment—of time, and money, and effort. The person I learned this from was Viktoriya Krakovna, the Harvard mathematics PhD student who had cofounded—along with the MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark and Skype founder Jann Tallinn—the Future of Life Institute, which earlier that year had received an endowment of $10 million from Musk in order to establish a global research initiative aimed at averting AI catastrophe. “It is about how much bang you get for your buck,” she said, the American idiom rendered strange by her Ukrainian accent, with its percussive plosives, its throttled vowels.

When I thought of DARPA, I thought, among other things, of its administration of the so-called Information Awareness Office, exposed by the former CIA employee Edward Snowden as a mass surveillance operation organized around a database for the collection and storage of the personal information (emails, telephone records, social networking messages, credit card and banking transactions) of every single resident of the United States, along with those of many other countries, all of which was accomplished by tapping into the user data of marquee-name tech companies like Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Skype, Google—the corporate proprietors of the sum of things that might be factually and usefully said about you, your information. “Look at him go!” said Prabhakar now, as the robot rounded the second safety barrier, bringing the car over a line in the sand, and gently to a halt in front of the door through which the industrial disaster zone stage set was to be accessed by means of knob-turning.


pages: 269 words: 77,876

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos by Sarah Lacy

Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, BRICs, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fear of failure, Firefox, Great Leap Forward, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, income per capita, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, McMansion, megacity, Network effects, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), paypal mafia, QWERTY keyboard, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

According to Dow Jones Venture Source, from 2001 to 2008, venture capitalists invested a whopping $10 bil ion in Israel, but those investments returned a paltry $860 mil ion in IPOs and acquisitions over the same period. Meanwhile, Europe—a place long considered too stodgy and risk-adverse for venture capital investing—returned $6.3 bil ion to venture investors over the same period. Sure, two-thirds of that was eBay’s acquisition of Skype, but that’s exactly the point: Israel had no big, single multibil ion homerun of the last 10 years, just a bunch of singles and misses. To be fair, the numbers probably don’t count al of Israel’s exits over the last decade. For one thing, many companies move their headquarters from Israel to the United States after raising money, so they may get counted as Israeli when they take funding and American by the time they get bought or go public.

There is no way to sugarcoat that, and LPs are hurting from that.” Saul Klein, an investor from London-based Index Ventures, is another concerned believer in Israel. While Israel has declined, Index has had a hugely successful decade investing in stodgy old London, a place far less known for taking entrepreneurial risk. Among Index’s hits are Skype, MySQL, and last.fm, which netted nearly $3 bil ion in returns between them. Klein puts it best when he says, “Israel is in serious danger of being a one-decade wonder.” The keys to both the mystery of Israel’s great run in the 1990s and the mystery of why its returns crumbled a decade later are found by looking at a few factors: the unique nothing-to-lose chutzpah of Israeli entrepreneurs, several smart policy moves by the Israeli government that played to the country’s endemic strengths, and some stel ar market timing.

See Emerging markets Digg Digital Equipment Corporation Digu Discovery Channel Disney, Walt Disney video Djalal, Dino Patti Domino’s Pizza, Brazil Dot-com crash (2000) Dow Jones Venture Source Dubai, as investor Duke University eBay: censorship issues as competitor founder of as Internet power PayPal purchase Skype purchase as tech giant Economic issues: Brazil China India Indonesia Israel Rwanda U.S. Economic Policy Institute Edison, Leontinus Eisenberg, Michael Eko India Financial Services eLance El ison, Larry Emerging markets. See also specific countries advantages of entrepreneurship in new world order vis-à-vis U.S.


pages: 271 words: 77,448

Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will by Geoff Colvin

Ada Lovelace, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Black Swan, call centre, capital asset pricing model, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Freestyle chess, future of work, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, job automation, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, rising living standards, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

A broad description of the disappointing progress of artificial intelligence in translating languages, playing chess, and performing other tasks as of 1972 can be found in Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (Harper & Row, 1972). Now Google translates written language for free . . . See https://translate.google.com/. Regarding Skype, see “Skype Update Translates English and Spanish in Real Time,” Christian Science Monitor, 15 December 2014. Economists Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane . . . Levy and Murnane, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market (Princeton University Press, 2004). Steven Pinker observed in 2007 . . .

While it seems like common sense that the skills computers can’t acquire will be valuable, the lesson of history is that it’s dangerous to claim there are any skills that computers cannot eventually acquire. The trail of embarrassing predictions goes way back. Early researchers in computer translation of languages were highly pessimistic that the field could ever progress beyond its nearly useless state as of the mid-1960s; now Google translates written language for free, and Skype translates spoken language in real time, for free. Hubert Dreyfus of MIT, in a 1972 book called What Computers Can’t Do, saw little hope that computers could make significant further progress in playing chess beyond the mediocre level then achieved; but a computer beat the world champion, Garry Kasparov, in 1997.

., 165 Ryder Cup, 117–20, 124 Saddam Hussein, 148, 149 Saloner, Garth, 196 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 170, 171 scanning vs. focusing, 184–86 Schank, Roger, 155 Schmidt, Eric, 203 See’s Candy, 171 senses, 59–60 September 11 attacks, 134, 138 sex, 153 sexually violent persons (SVPs), 33–36, 43 Shapiro, Johanna, 85 Shenk, Joshua Wolf, 170–71 Shy, John, 106 Simmel, Marianne, 150, 153 Skype, 40 sleep, 80–81 Smith, Adam, 64, 172 social abilities and sensitivity, 125, 132, 135, 178, 191 developing, 195–96, 199, 209–10 of women, 125, 178–83, 186–89, 210 social interactions and relationships, 36–40, 71, 129 bonding in, 63–64, 153 brain and, 36–40, 57, 64–66 and downside of social media, 61–64, 82 emotions in, see emotions empathy in, see empathy in groups, 125–29, 134–35, 138, 140 innovation and, 167–69 in-person, 56–58, 63–66, 129–31 jobs and, 44–45, 47–49 military and, 49–53 mimicry in, 77–78, 187 phones and, 61–63, 67, 82, 173, 174 physical proximity and, 171–74 Southwest Airlines and, 193–94, 210 spoken conversations, 61 technology and, 55–68, 82 testosterone and, 181, 187–88, 190, 195 texting, 56, 61, 63, 67, 82, 83 touch and, 59–60 sociometric badges, 126–28, 164, 169, 170 Sony, 5, 164 Southwest Airlines, 193–94, 210 Stanford University, 197–98 status competition, 188–89 stories, 141–60 authenticity of, 146–47 brain and, 147, 157 DARPA’s study of, 156–57 Denning and, 141–47 happy endings in, 155–56 in-person telling of, 146, 147, 152, 158–60 memory and, 155, 158–60 motivation and causality in, 148–51 neural coupling and, 151–52 oxytocin and, 153–54 power of, 145, 148, 151, 154, 158–60 structure of, 153–55 technology and, 145–48 Strategic Air Command, 139 Strategic Social Interaction Modules, 202–3 stress, 29 Stricker, Steve, 119–20 submarine commanders, 98 Sullivan, John, 168 Summers, Lawrence H., 12–15 Sunday Times (London), 165 surgery, 139–40 survival, 78–79, 136, 140 Symantec, 17 systemizers vs. empathizers, 182–84, 191 System 1 and System 2, 149 taker cultures, 133 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 148 teams and groups, 116, 117–40, 191 at Apple, 138 at Bank of America, 128 cognitive vs. social, 134–35 conformity and, 135–36 creativity in, 169, 170, 176–77 effectiveness of, 125–29, 131–35, 137, 138 engagement in, 169–71, 74 exploration in, 169, 171 groupthink and, 168–69 happiness and, 136–37 human interaction in, 125–29, 134–35, 138, 140 importance of, 120–22 IQ of, 122–25, 178–80, 188–89 online interaction and, 129–31, 79–80 physical distance and, 173–74 piloting, 138–39, 140 rowing, 136–37 Ryder Cup, 117–20, 124 social sensitivity in, 125, 132, 135, 178 status competition in, 188–89 surgical, 139–40 time needed in, 137–39 of two, 170–71 women in, 125, 178–80, 188–89 technology, 88–89, 160, 171–72, 175, 191, 192, 199, 210, 212 brain and, 59 business models and, 58 fear of, 10–11 gender differences and, 181, 183 groups and, 129–31 information, 6, 16–18, 48, 49, 53, 54, 72, 121, 184, 199–203 jobs eliminated by, 3–4, 10–14, 45 social interaction and, 55–68, 82 stories and, 145–48 turning points in, 15–17 see also computers television, 82 Terminator movies, 42 terrorists and insurgents, 156–58 testosterone, 181, 187–88, 190, 195 texting, 56, 61, 63, 67, 82, 83 Thatcher, Margaret, 186 Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman), 133 thinking modes, System 1 and System 2, 149 Think Like a Commander, 200 Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall, 38–39 Thrun, Sebastian, 197–98 Tichy, Noel, 205 Tolkien, J.


pages: 248 words: 72,174

The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future by Chris Guillebeau

Airbnb, big-box store, clean water, digital nomad, do what you love, fixed income, follow your passion, if you build it, they will come, index card, informal economy, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, late fees, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, price anchoring, Ralph Waldo Emerson, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, web application

During an unconventional book tour, I traveled to sixty-three cities in the United States and Canada (and eventually more than fifteen additional countries), meeting with people who had made the switch from working for The Man to working for themselves. I then worked with a small team to create a comprehensive, multiyear study involving more than a hundred interview subjects. Combing through reams of data (more than four thousand pages of written survey answers in addition to hundreds of phone calls, Skype sessions, and back-and-forth emails), I compiled the most important lessons, which are offered here for your review and action. This blueprint to freedom is fully customizable and highly actionable. At many points along the way, you’ll have a chance to pause and work on your own plan before continuing to learn more about what other people have done.

How did Lisa do it … and what lessons could we learn from her? Each case study subject completed several detailed surveys about his or her business, including financial data and demographics, in addition to dozens of open-ended questions. The group surveys were followed up with further individual questions in hundreds of emails, phone calls, Skype video calls, and in-person meetings in fifteen cities around the world. My goal was to create a narrative by finding common themes among a diverse group. The collected data would be enough for several thick books by itself, but I’ve tried to present only the most important information here. You can learn more about the methodology for the study, including survey data and specific interviews, at 100startup.com.

The change came in the form of a 25 percent raise, something he was initially afraid to do, but he was greatly relieved after it was done. “The simple act of raising my rates by 25 percent allowed me to either work seven hours less a week or make a significant increase in my monthly income,” he told me on a Skype call from Belfast. “The other, unexpected benefit was that it gave me much more confidence. Until I upped the rates, I didn’t make the connection that I was worth more than I had been charging.” Andy’s story was repeated in various forms by other service providers and a few product-based businesses too.


Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian by Boyle, Frankie

banking crisis, Boris Johnson, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, David Attenborough, Dennis Tito, discovery of penicillin, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Etonian, falling living standards, Google Earth, heat death of the universe, high-speed rail, hive mind, Jeffrey Epstein, low interest rates, negative equity, Ocado, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Red Clydeside, Right to Buy, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, wage slave

They’ve stayed together through thick and thin – or Jack and Kelly, as they’re otherwise known. They wanted to inject something new into the show so they’ve brought back Sharon – who, of course, has had so many new things injected into her you could bounce a coin off her face. Sharon’s set to do X Factor mentoring by Skype. Is Skyping right for an X Factor judge? Maybe I’m tiring of the show but the way I’d most like to see them giving advice is via an Ouija board. Contestants mustn’t worry, as they can ask Simon’s advice at any point, just by writing their question in urine dribbled from an upturned crucifix, then throwing it into the fire.

All these kooky shows about not being able to relate to your dad performed by people as indifferent to the fate of the Earth as a Dr Who villain. It’s bizarre in an age in which we are increasingly connected that we willingly choke our planet by taking unnecessary journeys. Flights and trains are packed with business arseholes going to meet people they could Skype, who spend the whole journey calling, texting, emailing home. The ultimate aspiration is to be ‘jet set’, jumping on planes to be away from our families, with headphones on to be away from ourselves. How much bleaker do things need to get for these guys? Extreme weather events are becoming more powerful and more frequent.

No human contact for three months now. Just dildos. Surviving on the moisture that condenses on their cold plastic shafts. Send help. Please don’t send dildos. I confess I’ve just bought my son an iPad. With the help of a Stanley knife I’ve wedged it in the face of his favourite teddy bear so I can Skype him when I’m on tour. I confess I forgot to account for the cooling ventilation holes at the back. Lucky he’s still a bit of a bed wetter, though I suspect there could be a few problems in later life caused by having to urinate on a burning fluffy bear with the face of his father. There’s actually a new mobile phone aimed at four-year-olds.


pages: 742 words: 137,937

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind, Daniel Susskind

23andMe, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Atul Gawande, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Bill Joy: nanobots, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clapham omnibus, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, death of newspapers, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lump of labour, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Metcalfe’s law, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Skype, social web, speech recognition, spinning jenny, strong AI, supply-chain management, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telepresence, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, Two Sigma, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, world market for maybe five computers, Yochai Benkler, young professional

In a fairly primitive way, this is already happening via Skype. Doctors, for example, use telemedicine to consult with their patients, employing traditional methods but from a distance; while religious leaders use online platforms to preach and proselytize without meeting their congregants and possible converts in person. In Chapter 2 there are many other illustrations. Future systems, using ‘telepresence’ techniques (for example, high definition desktop-to-desktop video-conferencing), will provide an experience for both provider and recipient that is greatly superior to current video-conferencing systems. We think of telepresence as ‘Skype on steroids’.

In other words, this is the inability of a sceptic, because of the shortcomings of current technology, to concede that future systems may be radically more powerful than those of today. Thus, senior doctors and lawyers might reject the idea of conducting a consultation by video-conference because of, say, a poor recent experience of a Skype call with a grandchild. A variation of this myopia is the inability to imagine that a modest user base of today might extend from a small group of early adopters to mainstream use. Technological myopia is a cousin of the phenomenon of ‘retrospective modernism’, as identified by Frederick Maitland, the legal historian.90 He was referring to the limitations of viewing and evaluating historical events through the lens of today.

Instead, what we have here is the relocation of jobs and tasks to similarly qualified (or even better credentialed) individuals who undertake work at lower cost than traditional professionals, employed in expensive buildings, in expensive cities, in countries where wages are high. In our research, we were told, for instance, of architects in Kenya who draw up plans for international clients, and of teachers in India who provide tutorials to British students by Skype—at far lower rates than in the United Kingdom and United States. There are two broad approaches here. The first is ‘offshoring’, when an organization transfers work packages to one of its lower-cost centres, for example, in Malaysia. On this model, the work is still undertaken within the boundaries of the organization, but is done in places where overheads, and especially wages, are lower.


pages: 343 words: 102,846

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future by Hal Niedzviecki

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor

Half the students had words we tangentially associate with the elderly—words, for instance, like Florida (which became the name of the study). All the students were then asked to walk down the hall to another room. The students who had been given the Florida grouping of words walked down the hall at a noticeably slower pace. They were subconsciously influenced by the set of words they had read.34 Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Google. These companies are not just the new middlemen, the monopolistic cultural arbitrators of their day, the new judges, the new Hollywood, the new record company A&R. They are also our touchstones, verbs, and identities. They are the twenty-first century. And they are not just offering us momentary fame and fortune decided on by the whims of boardroom executives.

What we see when we look at the XPrize is, again, the philosophy of future first embodied in real life, and altering our institutions on the most elemental level. If institutions ranging from colleges to governments can’t get us to the future fast enough, then we need to replace them with newer, better institutions. Or maybe, we don’t need institutions at all. ° ° ° ° ° ° To learn more about the XPrize philosophy, I reach Mark Winter via Skype. Winter is the senior director of the Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize Challenge. He has had a thirty-year-plus career in Silicon Valley working for companies including Adobe and Apple. Most recently he was a founder and executive vice president of a company providing wireless monitoring of blood glucose levels for people with diabetes.

Novak is a self-described amateur historian and futurist best known for his popular and often very funny blog Paleofuture, which lived on the website of the Smithsonian Institute and now resides on Gizmodo.com.28 Paleofuture chronicles what people in the recent past thought about the future. Novak blogs about advertisements, commercials, TV shows—The Jetsons!—newspaper articles, 1960s time capsules, letters to the year 2000, and so much more. I reach Matt Novak via Skype in his hometown of Los Angeles. He listens attentively to my theory about the move to a different conception of future in which individuals are empowered and even required to pursue the time to come. But he’s not convinced. He warns me about making blanket statements about a certain generation and their conception of the future.


pages: 349 words: 109,304

American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road by Nick Bilton

bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, crack epidemic, Edward Snowden, fake news, gentrification, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, Ross Ulbricht, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, the market place, trade route, Travis Kalanick, white picket fence, WikiLeaks

Given that there was nowhere for Ross to sit that adhered to that protocol, he turned around and walked back outside. He had a lot on his mind, as always. He had made plans with Julia to video chat that evening. “Can we skype tonight?” she had asked over e-mail. “Sure, what time?” “Is 8 my time good?” “Sure, see you then,” he wrote, following up with a “:)” as he knew exactly what kind of Skyping they’d be doing. The air was calm as Ross contemplated where to go next. He needed Wi-Fi but didn’t have many options at 3:00 p.m. in this sleepy corner of the city. He looked to his left, in the direction he had just come from, and knew Cup Coffee Bar had closed an hour earlier.

It had been difficult for Tyrus to be away from his dad so much, but Jared had explained that this was all temporary, and the travel was important because “I’m trying to catch a pirate who is doing bad things.” (Tyrus, hearing this, accepted his father’s quest. Pirates, after all, were bad characters in the storybooks he read, and needed to be caught.) But Tyrus had one request, that Jared Skype with him each night before bed. “Of course,” Jared replied as they both curled up on the couch and fell asleep. The next morning Jared woke up and left for work again. As he pulled his car into the parking lot of the HSI offices in Chicago and it chugged to a stop, his phone rang with a New York phone number.

To top it all off, his poison oak rash hadn’t gone away. But there were things to be grateful for. Ross was soon going to Austin, where he would see Julia. She had told him in an e-mail she would pick him up from the airport, and he could stay with her. Just like old times. They had been having romantic Skype sessions a lot too and sending long, dirty e-mails back and forth about what they would do to each other in person. Ross had also had an epiphany over the weekend. After the bonfire and the fireworks on Ocean Beach, he had written in his diary (alongside his travails on the Silk Road and an explanation for how he got the poison oak rash) that he needed to “eat well, get good sleep, and meditate so I can stay positive.” 12:15 p.m.


pages: 379 words: 109,612

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

For the Internet is currently both the oxygen of a truly open society and of spectacular transnational terrorism. Here are two snippets that illustrate this duality: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” says the cunning canine in Peter Steiner’s 1993 New Yorker cartoon; and on the Internet, any two communicators can believe they are the world. “The media is [sic] coming!” Skyped the Lashkar-e-Taiba handler to the killers for God at the Taj Hotel in Mumbai, signaling to them that now was the best timing for their martyrdom. Around the Shi’ite holiday of Ashura—December 28, 2009—I received an e-mail from a friend in Tehran who said how helpless he felt to stop the merciless beating of a young woman by government thugs, but he went on to say, “We will win this thing if the West does nothing but help us keep the lines of communication open with satellite Internet.”

No, the Internet is changing the way I think because its whole is greater than the sum of its parts—because of its massive connectivity and the resulting emergent phenomena. When I was a child, they said we would be living on the moon, that we would have antigravity jet packs and videophones. They lied about everything but the videophones. Via private blogs, Skype, and a $40 webcam, I can collaborate with my colleagues, write equations on my blackboard, and build networks of thought that stagger me with their effectiveness. My students and I work together so well through the Internet that its always-on library dominates our discussions and helps us find the sharp questions that drive our research and thinking infinitely faster than before.

Lesser minds would come to pay homage and, let’s be honest, use the famous library, since that was the only way of knowing what was known and who knew it. The centers ruled and knew it. Darkness is falling when I see the light on in the lab and stop by to see who else is working late. There’s a conversation going on over Skype. It’s totally incomprehensible. Even its sounds are unfamiliar. There’s no Rosetta Stone software for the language my two students are learning from their correspondent, who sits in a café in a wretched oiltown on the edge of the rain forest in Ecuador. It’s spoken only by a few hundred Indians. All but their children were born as nomads, in a forest that has the luck to be sitting on billions of barrels of oil.


pages: 382 words: 107,150

We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages by Annelise Orleck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, food desert, Food sovereignty, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, immigration reform, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McJob, means of production, new economy, payday loans, precariat, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

With photographer Elizabeth Cooke, I conducted interviews in windowless worker dormitories, union offices, and on the streets, at protest marches, in city council hearing rooms, in brightly lit restaurants and shaded back rooms, in elegantly shabby colonial hotels, at factory gates, by phone and via Skype. I interviewed in English, my native tongue, and with interpreters, in Spanish, Khmer, Tagalog, Visayan languages, Bangla, Mixtec, and Zapotec. Oxnard translator Yessica Ramirez navigated the distinct dialects spoken by indigenous Oaxacans. In Manila, Joanna Bernice Coronacion deftly switched back and forth between Tagalog and English, and Jamaia Montenegro translated from the Visayan languages spoken in the southern Philippines.

Interview with Tep Saroeung, Phnom Penh, November 29, 2015. 2. Chhay Channyda and Vincent MacIsaac, “Beer Girl Allies Target Carslberg,” Phnom Penh Post, August 9, 2011. 3. “CFSWF Response to the Carlsberg Statement Issued on February 9, 2016,” March 4, 2016, https://sarmorablog.wordpress.com. CHAPTER 5—HOTEL HOUSEKEEPERS GO NORMA RAE 1. Skype interview with Massimo Frattini, October 20, 2015. 2. “The Law of Hotel Housekeeper Occupational Health & Safety,” Transnational Development Clinic at Yale Law School, February 25, 2014, http://www.iuf.org/w/sites/default/files/TheLawofHotelHousekeepers.pdf. 3. Interview with Chhim Sitthar and Pao Chhumony, Phnom Penh, November 26, 2015. 4.

Interview with Chhim Sitthar, Phnom Penh, November 27, 2015; e-mail correspondence with Em Atienza, June 22, 2016; Rishi Iyengar, “The Killing Time: Inside Rodrigo Duterte’s War on Drugs,” Time, August 25, 2016. 6. Interview with Maria Elena Durazo, Los Angeles, September 11, 2015; interview with Josua Mata, Manila, November 22, 2015. 7. Skype interview with Moshrefa Mishu, October 10, 2015. 8. Kim Scipes, KMU: Building Genuine Trade Unionism in the Philippines, 1980–1994 (Quezon City: New Day Books, 1996). 9. Iain Boal, “Up from the Bottom,” in First World, Ha Ha Ha! The Zapatista Challenge, ed. Elaine Katzenberger (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1995). 10.


pages: 392 words: 104,760

Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners by Michael Erard

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, cognitive load, complexity theory, European colonialism, language acquisition, machine translation, pattern recognition, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Skype, Steven Pinker, theory of mind

No, these methods probably weren’t so special, actually. Is this a credible beginning for a hyperpolyglot? A modern person would think, To communicate, one must communicate. To talk meaningfully, one must have explicit lessons in doing so, you might suppose. But Mezzofanti did no role plays, no skits; had no phone apps; didn’t Skype with his native-speaking tutor. The language lab was an invention two hundred years away. As I later found, hyperpolyglots tend to succeed no matter the type of specific teaching methods. Some are devoted autodidacts; others happily study in classrooms; others learn what they need from other speakers.

An email address and a phone number appeared in his post. One by one, forum members reported that they’d spoken with Fazah in Russian, or Cantonese, or Mandarin, or Spanish, claiming that he speaks with an accent in those languages, but he’s a nice guy and clearly passionate about languages. Someone said they were going to hire him to teach via Skype. I watched all this unfold with bemusement—Fazah hadn’t shied from public performances in the past. Why wasn’t he defending himself now? In this vacuum, his reputation took its final, fatal dive. In 1997, he’d appeared on a Chilean TV show, Viva el lunes. As with the tournament that Pope Gregory XVI had arranged for Mezzofanti, so much depended upon a single spectacle.

The only solution was to interrogate a live person. Thinking I would meet a pop culture polyglot, I found instead Alexander, a man who practices the polyglottish lifestyle that he preaches. Alexander doesn’t pursue oral communication, though he could say a lot of things in his languages. Once, to humor me, he logged on to Skype with a fellow language aficionado and had a conversation that switched from English to Russian to Korean to Arabic. Mostly, he reads. He criticizes the modern language-learning paradigm of shopping, migration, and tourism that artist Rainer Ganahl identifies as characteristic of our era. Instead, he longs to learn languages for the reasons that drove monks and philologists centuries ago, a semimystical desire to touch the origins of literary texts.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

The majority of mid- and high-range televisions today are IoT compatible and come preloaded with apps such as Netflix, Skype, Facebook, and Hulu, not to mention embedded cameras, microphones, and USB ports. Worldwide nearly ninety million smart TVs were sold in 2013, and soon legacy “dumb” TV sets will be hard to find, a potentially troubling trend for those who value privacy and security. Many brands have been found to contain security vulnerabilities, such as Samsung Smart TVs, which allowed hackers to remotely turn on the built-in camera meant for Skype calls and surreptitiously snap photographs and watch viewers in their living rooms and bedrooms.

The fact is that each of us has private special moments in our lives, made exceptional by limiting with whom we share such intimacies. For those who believe the fallacy of nothing to hide, perhaps a lesson in something to fear might be appropriate, for all of us have details in our lives we would rather not share. For example, Google Voice, Skype, your mobile phone carrier, and any number of government agencies have records of anyone who has ever phoned an abortion clinic, a suicide hotline, or a local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. Data aggregators know who has searched for “slutty cheerleaders,” “Viagra,” or “Prozac” across any of their electronic devices.

When the attackers set out to sea from Pakistan under cover of darkness, they wore night-vision goggles and navigated to Mumbai using GPS handsets. They carried BlackBerrys containing PDF files of the hotel floor plans and used Google Earth to explore 3-D models of target venues to determine optimal entry and exit points. During the melee, LeT assassins used satellite phones, GSM handsets, and Skype to coordinate with their Pakistan-based command center, which monitored broadcast news, the Internet, and social media to provide real-time tactical direction to its ground assault team. When a bystander tweeted a photograph of police commandos rappelling from a helicopter onto the roof of the besieged Jewish community building, the terrorist ops center intercepted the photograph, alerted its attackers, and directed them to a stairwell leading to the roof.


pages: 150 words: 50,821

How to Be Human: An Autistic Man's Guide to Life by Jory Fleming

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, Isaac Newton, microbiome, neurotypical, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, Skype, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Plus one sentiment that stopped me cold: “Because no human-generated space is going to be a safe space for me forever.” And most of all, how to capture that in a book? The answer: let Jory speak for himself. To that end, I sat with hundreds of transcript pages from conversations, many conducted over Skype, but some had on walks through the British university city of Oxford or seated on park benches, overlooking quaint English gardens, surrounded by the twitter of birds. We would often circle back to the same topic weeks or even months apart, so I took the liberty of grouping related material in one place.

When you have some level of trust, then people share something that they would not have shared otherwise. It’s tied into vulnerability or real thoughts. Anytime you can get to real thoughts, as opposed to small talk, or trust, or create a shared value, that is always worth it. It only happens in person too. You can maybe do it over video calling or Skype, but really in person is where you get those things, at least as I’ve found it. I don’t really form first impressions. The picture is always going to start off really bad because it takes me a while. I can carry on a conversation with almost anyone, but as far as feeling like I know that person, well, to get from that basic level to anything else, it probably takes about seven or eight separate interactions of at least twenty to thirty minutes, and only after a few months will I know some stuff about them.

I could do none of this without the wonderful Grecia Carattini, thank you. And extra thanks to sweet Cree, who never left my side or lap as I typed. I knew this story was something extraordinary when my two teenage boys would come home from school, silently set down their backpacks, tiptoe into the room, and listen as Jory and I Skyped. At the end of each conversation, they would say, “That was really interesting, especially the part about…” The greatest blessing and honor in my life is to be Nathaniel and BC’s mom. Thank you and love you with all of my head and all of my heart. —Lyric W. Winik More in Personal Memoirs The Glass Castle Shoe Dog The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo Year of Yes An Invisible Thread Primates of Park Avenue About the Authors © RYAN DAWKINS JORY FLEMING recently completed a Master of Philosophy in environmental change and management at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.


pages: 286 words: 82,065

Curation Nation by Rosenbaum, Steven

Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, future of journalism, independent contractor, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Mary Meeker, means of production, off-the-grid, PageRank, pattern recognition, post-work, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, Yogi Berra

Many of those interviews were conducted in person, and rather than take notes, the conversations were recorded and then transcribed. The rest of the interviews were conducted via Skype, and those too were transcribed. In both cases the transcriptions were turned around almost magically by a team of online workers known as Turkers, who are members of an Amazon service called Mechanical Turk. I talk more about Mechanical Turk in chapter 6, so I won’t repeat the details here. Suffice it to say that the ability to have a Skype interview at 5 p.m. and have a transcript in your in box at 9 a.m. the next morning is for this author an awe-inspiring experience.

I feel and I see things that are just literally in front of me, not necessarily in front of anybody else. It’s been like that forever.” From ham radio, Pulver saw the early day of voice-as-software and was able to help shape and grow the Voice over Internet Protocol movement (VoIP), the shift from old-fashioned landlines to the often-free calls you can now make on Skype. He built a series of companies, including Vonage, and time and time again knew how to bet early and get out when the time was right. So when Pulver saw Twitter, he knew there was a need for a community, a conference, and a brand name: the 140 Conference (since 140 characters is the maximum you can use in a Twitter message).

Rosen, Jay Rosenblatt, Richard RSS feeds Rubel, Steve Rueter, Joseph Safe harbor protection Sambrook, Richard SB Nation Schlatter, Elizabeth Schmidt, Eric Scime, Erin Scoble, Robert scobleizer.com Scordato, Alexa Scott, Jason Scraping Search engine optimization (SEO) Seave, Ava SEED SEMRush 7 Days in September (film) Sexting ShareASale Sharp Hi8 Viewcams Shearer, Harry Shirky, Clay ShoeDazzle Shopkeepers, in Curation Nation Showtime Silberman, Michael Simpson, O. J. Sirulnick, Dave Skype Slate Sling Social media accidental curation and content strategy and as curation mechanism Flickr Flipboard Foursquare Magnify.net need for human filters (See also Facebook; MySpace; Twitter) SocialMediaToday.com Society of American Magicians Sohn, David Solis, Brian Soylent Green (film) Sponsorships Sports NBA Entertainment SB Nation Squidoo Srinivasan, Vasu Stanton, Louis L.


pages: 244 words: 81,334

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality by Laurence Scott

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, colonial rule, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, deepfake, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, Internet of things, Joan Didion, job automation, Jon Ronson, late capitalism, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, Neil Armstrong, post-truth, Productivity paradox, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, SoftBank, technological determinism, TED Talk, Y2K, you are the product

Today, our private and public realities, our inner and outer worlds, coexist in a way particular to these times. The horror movie2 Unfriended (2015) is about a girl who kills herself after some humiliating drunken footage of her is circulated online. The girl’s ghost wreaks revenge on a group of friends, one by one, while they chat on a group Skype call. The webcam view onto a scene of paranormal torture is suddenly obscured by the latest victim’s Skype-profile picture. One moment there are screams of anguish or spurting blood, the next we cut to a frozen picture of the same terrorised teen in happier times: wearing a woollen hat with animal ears, or full of youthful vanity, flexing biceps. This collision of the real and the mediated is a macabre version of a common experience.

We can of course communicate aspects of bereavement online, but these platforms often make it difficult to capture the rawness of shock, or to bear relation to the unending, quiet No behind the ‘Nooooooo!!!’ And yet, the opposite is also true. One of our emerging problems, which will require careful legislation, is the horrific proximity of online death. Suicides and murders make news whenever they are live-streamed on Skype or Facebook. The vlogging millionaire Logan Paul was recently ‘punished’1 by YouTube for his video from Japan’s ‘haunted’ Aokigahara forest. The place is a notorious suicide spot, and in the video Paul is filmed beside the body of a dead man. In his Twitter apology he describes being ‘misguided by shock and awe’, but nonetheless YouTube demoted him from their lucrative ‘Google Preferred’ programme, which allow stars such as Paul to receive the largest cuts from the brands advertising on his channel.

Herzog, quoted in Nik Papageorgiou, ‘How the brain produces consciousness in “time slices”’, EPFL News, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, April 2016; ‘ball of clichés …’, Jenny Diski, ‘A Diagnosis’, The London Review of Books, 11th September 2014. Backstage Pass 1 ‘Obscenity is always …’, Ludwig Marcuse, Obscene: The History of an Indignation, trans. Karen Gershon (London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1965). 2 ‘The horror movie …’, the commentary on Unfriended first appeared in my essay ‘Death by Skype’ for the Financial Times, 1st May 2015. Thanks to John Sunyer for commissioning and editing this piece. 3 ‘either apologizing, or …’, Tom Rachman, ‘Leakzilla’, in Basket of Deplorables (Hastings-on-Hudson, NY: Riverrun, 2017). 4 ‘The archetypal choice …’, a version of this description of the ‘selfie’ expression first appeared in my essay ‘A Sentimental Portrait’, Emotional Supply Chains (London: Zabludowicz Collection, 2015).


pages: 266 words: 87,411

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed by Carl Honore

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 13, Atul Gawande, Broken windows theory, call centre, carbon credits, Checklist Manifesto, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, drone strike, Enrique Peñalosa, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, game design, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index card, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, lone genius, medical malpractice, microcredit, Netflix Prize, no-fly zone, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty

In the early 2000s a trio of software whizzes in Estonia wrote some code that made it easy to make telephone calls over the Internet. Result: the birth of one of the fastest-growing companies of the 21st century. A decade later the Skype headquarters in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, remains a shrine to start-up chic, with bare brick walls, bean bags and funky art. Everywhere you look, multinational hipsters are sipping mineral water or fiddling with iPads. On a landing near the room where I meet Andres Kütt, Skype’s young, goateed business evangelist, stands a whiteboard covered in squiggles from the last brainstorming session. Even in this iconoclastic bear pit, the wrong fix can win stubborn defenders.

Even in this iconoclastic bear pit, the wrong fix can win stubborn defenders. At 36, Kütt is already a seasoned problem-solver. He helped pioneer Internet banking and spearheaded efforts to get Estonians to file their tax returns online. He worries that, by growing old enough and big enough to have vested interests, Skype has lost some of its problem-solving mojo. “Legacy is now a big problem for us, too,” he says. “You make a massive investment to solve a problem and suddenly the problem is surrounded by a huge number of people and systems that want to justify their existence. You end up with a scenario where the original source of the problem is hidden and hard to reach.”


pages: 270 words: 79,992

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

But who wants to write in zeros and ones? Imagine if instead of typing E you typed the letter in zeros and ones, or binary code. It would look like this—01000101. That seems silly and inefficient, but in another sense, it is simply amazing. Every thing you do on your computer—every YouTube video you watch, every Skype call you make, every e-mail you send—is broken down into its requisite zeros and ones and then reassembled somewhere else. As Arthur C. Clarke says, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”22 Software was created in part to offer an abstraction of “electricity–no electricity,” so that you could use a mouse or type Shift + e to get E.

The most common platforms are Microsoft Windows, Apple’s Mac OS (operating system), and Linux (the open-source option common on Web servers). As a software platform, Microsoft Windows worries about communicating with the keyboard, the monitor, the mouse, and the printer—so that applications like Microsoft Word, Skype, Firefox, and Photoshop don’t have to. The platform provides efficiencies between the hardware and the applications, smoothing the user interface (so you don’t have to worry about the zeros and ones) and making the applications more efficient and able to specialize on what they do best—like word processing or Web browsing or any one of a number of things.

The message jumps to your phone and checks to see if you’re my mother’s phone. You’re not, so it jumps to the next phone. Is this my mother’s phone? And on and on—like the classic children’s book, Are You My Mother?—until the message finds my mother’s phone and is delivered. This is actually pretty similar to how Skype works right now in making voice phone calls. Mesh networking only functions well if a large number of devices are participating in the network. But it’s not a remote or new technology. It’s been around a while, and it is continuing to improve and change. The One Laptop per Child project out of MIT’s Media Lab saw mesh networking early on as a way to provide network connectivity in remote parts of the world lacking traditional network infrastructure.


pages: 296 words: 82,501

Stuffocation by James Wallman

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Black Swan, BRICs, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, high net worth, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Hargreaves, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, post-materialism, public intellectual, retail therapy, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, Streisand effect, The future is already here, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, World Values Survey, Zipcar

A work of non-fiction may only have one name on the cover, but in truth it is the work of many people. There are a huge number of people without whom the book you are holding in your hands would not exist. More than 100 people gave up their time to discuss the idea with me over tea, coffee, lunch, dinner, beer, wine, Skype, Skype video call, telephone, and email. There are the people, especially on America’s West Coast and in Australia, who got up early or stayed up late so that the timings worked for them and me. There are the people whose work I have drawn on, both directly and indirectly. (I have tried to credit all those in the Endnotes.

In the past, Deborah Richmond in Berkshire in the UK, for instance, would have quit her corporate marketing job and become a hippy. But instead, she launched a business consultancy that means more to her called BrandYoga. And Olga Sasplugas might have just had a job as a dance therapist. But, thanks to her computer, the internet, and Skype, she chases debts, deals with distribution, runs spreadsheets – and everything else her New York-based business requires. But she does not do this from there, or even a regular office. She does it from Barcelona or Bali or India, or wherever she happens to be. “This way of life feels so normal and fun, and it’s so easy to do it,” she will tell you.

Your dedication to discovery, and to challenging the status quo and the conventional wisdom, is exactly the sort of thing that raises the fog a bit more, so that people like me can have a better view of the direction the world is turning. Thank you for that, and also, among other things: for your suggestions of more avenues to explore, for challenging and inspiring me over lunch and email and phone and Skype, for responding to far more fact-checking emails than strictly necessary, for patiently explaining how you do what you do, and for pushing me to re-examine whether I believed in what I believe – and whether I really was reading the data right. So, thank you: Richard Thaler, Oliver James, Barry Schwartz, Stuart Ewen, Robert Fogel, Chris Goodall, Michael Schrage, Ron Inglehart, Ryan Howell, Jeanne Arnold, Darby Saxbe, Travis Carter, Leaf van Boven, Tom Gilovich, Brian Wansink, Geoffrey Miller, Danny Miller, Rupert Pennant-Rea, Garson O’Toole, Daniel Franklin, John Andrews, Rob Hyndman, Corinne Shefner-Rogers, Jim Dearing, Juliet Schor, Anna Coote, Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, Pippa Norris, Trudi Toyne, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Avner Offer, Peter Stearns, Joe Pine, Jim Gilmore, Grant McCracken, Blake Mycoskie, Rob Symington, Alice Marwick, Harry Parr, Sam Bompas, Jules Evans, Bob Cummins, Bernice Steinhardt, Chris Hoenig, Mark Tungate, Ann Mack, Albert Cañigueral, Anna-Maren Ashford, James O’Shaughnessy, Joe Goodman, Alastair Humphreys, Richard Layard, Tim Kasser, Vicki Robin, Gabriel Rossman, Janice Rutherford, and Eve Fisher.


pages: 312 words: 84,421

This Chair Rocks: A Manifiesto Against Ageism by Ashton Applewhite

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Downton Abbey, fixed income, follow your passion, ghettoisation, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, obamacare, old age dependency ratio, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning, white picket fence, women in the workforce

Inexpensive video technology and storage sites like YouTube give people a new way to tell their story and get feedback, and not just from the grandchildren. My father worked with Buckminster Fuller and enjoyed tracking the work of his acolytes online. It deeply engaged him and ensured a steady trickle of geeky visitors dropping in to talk about the remarkable inventor. Ruth, my partner’s mom, and a bookseller, Skypes prospective customers on her iPad to show them her wares, making her unusually wired for a nonagenarian. I’ve resisted her entreaties to join Words With Friends, but she’s got six or eight games going at any time with no help from me. Asked on her seventieth wedding anniversary what was the most remarkable invention she’d witnessed during her lifetime, she answered, “My iPhone.”

There’s plenty of internalized ageism in the assumption on the part of older people that they’re too old to learn how to maneuver in a wired world, or don’t want to bother. My mom, who typed hundreds of long and entertaining letters over the years, claimed she couldn’t get the hang of e-mail. Pia Louise hosts a radio show called Living Portraits, and requires her guests to participate via Skype or Google Hangout. “I feel people my age, fifty-plus, should keep up with technology. Instead I find they respond that ‘they have no need for it,’” she wrote. “Yikes! What do you think?” Here’s my response on my Q&A blog, Yo, Is This Ageist? Because it applies to all guests, your policy isn’t ageist.

Editor Nancy Peske increasingly relies on her teenager and his best friend for help with certain skills she doesn’t have time to acquire, “and they’re more visual than I am,” she notes. “But I teach them big-picture things with tech and information they otherwise wouldn’t learn for years, so it’s an even exchange.” Getting together online is no substitute for actual “face time,” of course, although Apple’s or Skype’s simulacrum is a great way to check in on faraway friends or family, especially when moving around is difficult or travel expensive. The important thing is to sustain existing connections, be open to new ones—especially across generations—and to actively solicit them. Mix it up with friends of all ages In the US, nonfamily relationships tend to be age-homogenous.


pages: 251 words: 80,831

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, asset light, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, business intelligence, buy and hold, Chris Wanstrath, clean water, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, General Magic , gig economy, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, nuclear winter, PageRank, PalmPilot, Parker Conrad, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, power law, QR code, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the payments system, TikTok, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator

He hated those rides—“detested” them, to be exact—and spent the trips dreaming about being able to visit her without having to travel. Even today, Eric travels a lot less than other CEOs; he prefers using Zoom, of course. Video communication has been around for more than twenty years, and when Zoom was getting started it had several fierce competitors, including Skype, Polycom, and Cisco’s WebEx. In fact, Cisco controlled close to 50 percent of the market back in 2011. Skype, which offered a free service, had just been acquired by Microsoft, an incumbent with decades of experience selling to enterprises. Given these challenges, Zoom still emerged as the winner. This is because Eric knew exactly what shortcomings he needed to fix—he was working at a company he would soon be competing against.

Pedro had a similar background: he started coding as a kid and became pretty well known after he was the first person in the world to jailbreak the iPhone 3G. When he was fourteen, Brazil’s largest payments company hired him to rebuild their app and make it secure against hackers. We met at the end of 2012 on Twitter, basically fighting over which text editor was best. We later moved the conversation to Skype and became good friends. We wanted to build something like PayPal or Stripe, but for Brazil. It turned out to be fairly complicated because it wasn’t just software; it was a financial business, directly regulated by the Central Bank of Brazil. We had 150 employees at one point. We ran that business for two and a half years, until Pedro and I were twenty years old.

• Competition is good, or at least not an extinction risk; over half of billion-dollar startups competed with large incumbents at the time of founding. It’s good to compete with incumbents or compete in fragmented markets; they are easier to beat than a highly funded startup with the same idea. Remember Zoom’s founder telling the story of competing against incumbents like Cisco and Skype by focusing on the quality of the product and attention to customers. Billion-dollar companies created defensibility through engineering—the expertise and amount of time and work needed to build a product—but also through network effects, scale, brand, and intellectual property. Those with network effects were more likely to become billion-dollar companies


pages: 390 words: 109,870

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World by Jamie Bartlett

Andrew Keen, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, brain emulation, Californian Ideology, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, gig economy, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, life extension, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, off grid, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, QR code, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rosa Parks, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the long tail, Tragedy of the Commons

But he could not do it as a candidate of the Transhumanist Party. This distinction is extremely important. Under electoral law, it is forbidden to claim to have a political party if you do not or to receive donations as a representative of a political party that does not exist. Zoltan had been doing both. I Skyped Zoltan shortly after and asked him whether there was such a thing as the Transhumanist Party. Barely missing a beat, Zoltan fired back. ‘My critics may have a technical point. But they are forgetting that everything that succeeds is a revolutionary party. So is the Transhumanist Party!’38 Yes, he admitted, he’d been breaking the FEC laws all this time.

Everyone was also part of a larger ‘neighbourhood’, which would come together in plenary meetings to make decisions. Each neighborhood sent a spokesperson to a General Assembly, where all major decisions were taken. ‘It was unbelievable,’ John Jordan, one of those involved in setting it all up, told me via Skype from France (where he was occupying a large site trying to prevent a new airport being built). ‘An enormous, functioning community, without hierarchies. And it worked.’ Activists came to see climate change as the inevitable by-product of a capitalist system that promotes endless consumption, the pursuit of profit and corporate interests.

‘Good morning ladies and gentlemen, ministers, ambassadors and friends of liberty, it’s my great honour to moderate this conference for you,’ said Martin Panek, a timid, slightly awkward man in his early thirties in a suit. ‘It was supposed to be moderated by the president, but, er, he called me Thursday to say he was denied entry by Croatia.’ Vit’s four-foot-high smiling face was projected on the wall in front of us, beamed in via Skype, from his ‘exile’ in the Anne Caffe Hotel in Bezdan, twenty kilometres away in Serbia. Vit is an unassuming man, who looks younger than his thirty-two years. He wears a short goatee beard, which matches his strawberry blond hair, and has a Greek wrestler’s build. He is also blessed with that rare condition of a face that rests on a smile.


pages: 474 words: 120,801

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

That number rose to 30 percent of the population worldwide in 2010 (and to more than 73 percent in developed countries).22 By 2012, eight-year-old Facebook was on its way to having more than 1 billion users (with more than half of them accessing it via their mobile phones and tablets), Twitter (launched in 2006) had 140 million active users, and Skype—the voice-over-Internet service created in 2003—boasted almost 700 million regular users.23 The Twitter and Facebook revolutions in the Middle East and the impact of social media on politics are much discussed, and we examine their role in the decay of power. But in terms of this initial discussion of the Mobility revolution, we should also consider the impact of another tool that does not get the credit it deserves for changing the world: the prepaid phone card.

Moreover, corporations that used to be household names have disappeared—no more “Kodak moments,” to name just one storied brand that in 2012 ended up on the ash heap of history. The list of companies at the top now routinely includes new names, including many hailing from places not known for spawning world-class businesses—Estonia (Skype), India (Mittal Steel), Brazil (Embraer), and Galicia in Spain (Zara) among them. And whether newcomers or not, those at the top are no longer assured as lengthy a stay among the leaders as in the past. We are not talking about the displacement of one behemoth by another. More often than not, the space once controlled by old leaders has been filled by a different set of players that rely on new rules, sources of power, and competitive strategies.

IBM, for example, has recast itself from a maker of PCs, disk drives, and other computer equipment into a tech visionary that uses brainy consultants and analytics software to solve thorny global problems—an effort captured in its 2012 “Smarter Planets” ad campaign. But even brand advantage has grown slippery. Some of the most dynamic brands whose contribution to the total value of their firms has grown the fastest in recent years are upstarts like Skype (now owned by Microsoft). Just as brands have surpassed physical assets as a component of company value, the brand advantage itself is becoming harder to hold on to as new players establish their name. Access to Capital Few obstacles to enterprise are as crippling as the lack of access to capital.


pages: 518 words: 49,555

Designing Social Interfaces by Christian Crumlish, Erin Malone

A Pattern Language, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, c2.com, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commons-based peer production, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, ghettoisation, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, if you build it, they will come, information security, lolcat, Merlin Mann, Nate Silver, Network effects, Potemkin village, power law, recommendation engine, RFC: Request For Comment, semantic web, SETI@home, Skype, slashdot, social bookmarking, social graph, social software, social web, source of truth, stealth mode startup, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, Yochai Benkler

Download at WoweBook.Com Activity Streams 135 Why Real-time communications and the buddy list to support them add an immediate and real-life component to what are often asynchronous online experiences. Related patterns “Adding Friends” on page 361 “Many Publics” on page 228 “Private Conversation” on page 298 As seen on Adium (http://adium.im/) AIM (http://www.aim.com/) Skype (http://www.skype.com/) Yahoo! Messenger (http://messenger.yahoo.com/) Activity Streams When status updates first emerged in the context of instant messenger programs, they were inherently fleeting, temporally tied to the immediate moment and then discarded. It really doesn’t make that much sense to keep an infinite log of Available, Busy, Idle, Offline, and so on for the life of the user or the application.

. • Consider promoting or featuring interesting group discussions. Download at WoweBook.Com 304 Chapter 11: Watson, Come Quick! Related patterns “Groups” on page 376 “Private Conversation” on page 298 “Public Conversation” on page 296 As seen on Acrobat Connect (http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatconnect/) AIM (http://www.aim.com) Skype (http://www.skype.com/) WebEx (http://www.webex.com/) Yahoo! Instant Messenger (http://messenger.yahoo.com) Yuuguu (http://www.yuuguu.com/) Arguments Flame Wars Flame wars break out when a person responds in a volatile manner to a negative, hostile, or otherwise personal attack against him by another person (usually a troll, a person trolling for a reaction).

Many-to-many communications—message boards and forums, listservs, chat—allow multiple people to discuss multiple topics, usually bound by a parent topic. Anyone can start a conversation, and everyone can read it and participate. These are often public, but listservs generally require membership to participate. One-to-one communication—instant messages, Twitter direct messages, Skype—provides communication between two people (or a small group), usually in real time and often in private. Download at WoweBook.Com 290 Chapter 11: Watson, Come Quick! Meaning-Making Machines Grandma Powazek once told me why she stopped making cucumber salad. She’d been chopping cucumbers when her hands started to hurt.


pages: 174 words: 56,405

Machine Translation by Thierry Poibeau

Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, AltaVista, augmented reality, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, easy for humans, difficult for computers, en.wikipedia.org, geopolitical risk, Google Glasses, information retrieval, Internet of things, language acquisition, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, natural language processing, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, RAND corporation, Robert Mercer, seminal paper, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, technological singularity, Turing test, wikimedia commons

Today, the techniques used for automatic subtitling coupled with machine translation allow for the production of subtitles in various languages, live and without additional cost. The quality of the result, however, remains a problem, and applicable solutions are not yet deployed on a large scale. Direct Translation in Multilingual Dialogue Automatic speech translation is seen as a major opportunity by most information technology companies. Skype, for example, owned by Microsoft, developed a prototype that was incorporated into its communication platform. The trend is now widespread: the mobile messaging application WeChat has also announced the integration of a machine translation system. WeChat is first and foremost an interactive service of written messages, but it also allows for exchanging voice messages: these will be automatically translated in the same ways once the quality of the system is considered sufficient.

They need to be first on the technological front and propose new features that may be an important source of revenue in the future. The future will likely see the integration of machine translation modules in new kinds of appliances, as seen in chapter 14. Microsoft has already presented live demonstrations of multilingual conversations, integrating speech translation into Skype. Google, Samsung, and Apple are creating similar applications for mobile phones, and even for “smart” eyeglasses. While it is not yet clear whether these gadgets will really be used in everyday life, they are interesting for specific professional contexts, such as the maintenance of complex systems in the aeronautic or nuclear industry, where technicians must be able to communicate while keeping their hands free.

See also Bilingual dictionary; Lexical resource Semantics, 36, 58, 67, 124, 156, 159–161, 174–179, 206 Sentence alignment, 101–108, 163 representation, 19, 24–32, 63, 115–116, 160, 176–179, 185–187, 189 structure, 12, 14, 23, 27, 30, 70, 115–116, 117, 122, 140, 152, 156–160, 164, 183, 187, 189, 191, 255 Sentence-by-sentence translation, 14 Shallow semantic analysis, 115. See also Semantics Shannon, Claude, 52, 55, 76 Siemens, 87 Silence, 157, 158 Skype, 240, 250 Slavic languages, 214 Smart glasses, 242–243, 250 Smart watch, 242–243 Smirnov-Trojanskij, Petr Petrovitch, 46–48, 51, 246, 269 Social network, 221, 229, 248 Sparck Jones, Karen, 66, 270 Speech-to-speech application, 241–242. See also Speech translation Speech transcription, 126, 226, 239–241 Speech translation, 22, 126, 227, 236, 239–241, 250 Statistical machine translation, 121–146 Stemming, 51 Stratificational grammar, 65 Style (of a text), 10–13, 15, 46, 55, 92, 208–209 Suffix, 18, 264.


pages: 220

Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea Into a Global Business by Mikkel Svane, Carlye Adler

Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Burning Man, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, credit crunch, David Heinemeier Hansson, Elon Musk, fail fast, housing crisis, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marc Benioff, Menlo Park, remote working, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Tesla Model S, web application

If you want to be good at it, you need to: • Have a proper home office that both you and your family consider more “office” than “home.” • Let go of the fact that the garage needs to be cleaned up, even though you look at it all day. It’s harder than you think. 34 Page 34 Svane c02.tex V3 - 10/24/2014 8:23 P.M. The Salad Days • Make Skype your friend. You have to check in with your team members, peers, and boss all the time. Out of sight, out of mind. It’s remarkable that we live in a time when we can work from anywhere. But the bigger challenge is whether or not you have the personality to be productive at it. I could never do it again.

Luckily, our move West attracted some of the people who previously worked with us and knew exactly what we needed—like Mick, a great engineer who had worked in Copenhagen as a contractor three days a week. He had wanted to come to the United States to pursue his American dream, but he had had no interest in moving to Boston, complaining that it was “boring and colder than Denmark.” Now Morten and Alex Skyped him from San Francisco: “Guess where we are,” they taunted. And then, “Want to come?” “Absolutely,” Mick replied. He sold his house—none of us had done that—packed up his family in time for the kids to start school at the beginning of the year, and was in our office ready to take on our scaling challenges.

Page 199 Index day of, 175–177 determining how much you’re worth, 173–175 postponing, 168–169 preparing for, 158–160 road show, 169–171 surviving an IPO road show, 171–173 Zendesk’s IPO experience, 167–178 iterating, 53–55, 187 J Janz, Christoph, 65–67, 106 K Kleha, Amanda, 134–135, 181 L Latkiewicz, Matthew, 100–102, 181 Laughing Squid, 48 Law of Jante, 125 LiveUniverse, 65 logo design, 41–42 Lund, Morten, 34 M Malik, Om, 68 Marooney, Caryn, 170 Materna, 17–20 McDermott, Adrian, 136–138 media companies, 14 Mentor, 42 Mick, 124, 181–182 Musk, Elon, 25 N naming the company, 39–42 No Meeting Wednesdays, 34 Nygaard, Toke, 41–42 O office space, 115–119, 154–158 OneLogin, 180 OpenDNS, 130 P Pageflakes, 65 Pedersen, Thomas, 73–74, 90, 103, 180 personalized emails, 104 Pisoni, Adam, 130 Playdom, 129 pricing, 143–150 Primdahl, Morten, 1–2, 17–18 as chief technology officer, 26 early days at Zendesk, 31, 33 epilogue, 179, 180 fear of complacency, 165 financial struggles, 36–37, 39 handling the growth of the business, 122–123 and the inception of Zendesk, 20 Project Eisenhut, 40 R reaching scale, 74 real estate lessons learned, 118–119 refunds, 139 relationships, 150, 185–188 relocating to America hiring employees, 124–129 hiring first employees, 100–102 legal and tax challenges of relocating to America, 92–93 moving the company to Boston, 87–88, 90–91 personal issues surrounding, 97–99 settling in in Boston’s Leather District, 99–100 relocating to San Francisco finding office space, 115–119 making the decision to move, 112–114 Rigoli, Rick, 99–100, 108, 109, 112–113, 158–160 epilogue, 181 Riviera Partners, 136 Ruby on Rails, 14, 26, 28 199 Svane samind.tex V1 - 10/28/2014 12:18 A.M. Page 200 INDEX S SaaS. See Software-as-a-Service Salesforce.com, 27 Scribd, 53 second chances, 16–19 self-service sales, 45–47 Series A rounds, 83–84 shifting strategy, 152–154 Skype, 35 Software-as-a-Service, 47 Square, 24 Startupland, 3 stereograms, 8–9 strategy shift, 152–154 T Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, 46 TechCrunch, 42–45, 53, 68, 129, 144 Capital Summer Party, 69–71 Tesla, 164 Thank You Machine, 40, 73 37signals, 14, 28 3D Magic Eye books, 8 Twitter, 53, 91, 122, 124 U Uber, 124 V value-added resellers, 14 VARs.


pages: 525 words: 142,027

CIOs at Work by Ed Yourdon

8-hour work day, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, distributed generation, Donald Knuth, fail fast, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, Googley, Grace Hopper, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Innovator's Dilemma, inventory management, Julian Assange, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Multics, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Zipcar

So, eventually, I think the economy is going to break that down, the same way it has broken down barriers in terms of dealing with China, trading with China. It’s going to break down the telecommunication barriers also because we’re going to have to communicate to be in business, and if that’s the case, if it’s too expensive, it won’t get done. And Skype is in business; you’re doing this on Skype. Skype is in business because they found a way to get business done and in a cheaper way. Yourdon: Good point, good point. Temares: And economics kills everything. Yourdon: Yeah. Temares: And it changes things. Yourdon: Let me move on to another category. You hear a lot of talk these days about IT being a strategic weapon to enhance the business.

Of course, in many cases the cell phone communications infrastructure is the most affected by an earthquake or something of that sort. Was that true in Japan? Gupta: I don’t have data points, to be honest. I do know that there was disruption to the communications infrastructure. You could see it on the broadcasts on BBC, there were a lot of people communicating over Skype and all sorts of other things when they were doing interviews with broadcasters. But the extent to which they—well, clearly, in the towns and cities that had pretty much disappeared, the masts went with them, without a doubt. Yourdon: Ahh, okay. Gupta: I don’t know if there was a big amount of disruption to the mobile communications network in Tokyo and other parts because of the earthquake.

., 87 attributes, 108 capital market community, 91 cash/actual trading business, 88 channel marketing departments, 92 cloud computing, 97 CNBC, 89 collaborative technology, 95 collective intelligence, 95 communication skills, 102, 106 conference organizations, 99 consumer marketplace, 94 data center, 90 decision making, 105, 108 economy standpoint, 100 e-mail, 100 Fidelity Investments, 105 financial services, 92 IEEE, 101 innovative impression, 94 Internet, 98 iPad, 97 iPod device, 91 labor laws, 110 listening skills, 106 logical progression, 104 Mac, 96 mainframe, 104 management and leadership, 104, 105 market data system, 89 micro-second response time, 89 mobile applications, 94 multidisciplinary approach, 103 multimedia, 97 multi-national projects, 110 multiprocessing options, 99 network operating system, 103 NYSE Euronext, 87 open outside system, 88 parallel programming models, 99 personal satisfaction, 109 PR function, 106 proclaimed workaholic, 109 real estate business, 88 regulatory and security standpoint, 96 Rolodex, 94 Rubin, Howard, 99 server department, 97 software development, 89 sophisticated technology, 101 technology business, 88 technology integration, 91 trading engines, 90 typewriter ribbon, 94 virtualization, 98 Windows 7, 96 younger generation video games, 93 visual interfaces, 93 Rumsfeld, Donald, 222 S San Diego Fire Department, 224 Santa Clara University, 36 SAS programs, 131 Scott, Tony, 10, 33, 236 Android, 43 Apple Computer, 35 architectural flaw, 44 BASIC and Pascal, 35 Bristol-Myers Squibb, 33 Bunch, Rick (role model), 34 business groups, 42 COO, 39 Corporate Vice President, 33 Corvus disk drive, 36 CSC, 35 Defense department, 45 dogfooding, 37, 38 games and arcades, 35 General Motors, 33 IBM's role, 37 information systems management, 36 integrity factor, 40 Internet, 44 iPhone, 43 IT lifecycle management process, 37 leadership capability, 40 leisure studies, 34 macro-architectural threats, 44 Marriott's Great America, 35 math models, 36 Microsoft Corporation, 33, 36, 38, 41, 44, 46 Microsoft's operational enterprise risk management, 33 parks and recreation, 34 Petri dish, 44 playground leader, 42 product groups, 42 quality and business excellence team, 33 Santa Clara University, 36 Senior Vice President, 33 smartphone, 43 social computing, 38 Sun Microsystems, 36 theme park industry, 35 University of Illinois, 34 University of San Francisco, 36 value-added business, 33 Walt Disney Company, 33 Senior Leadership Technology and Product Marketing, 71 Shakespeare, 30 Shirky, Clay, 220 Sierra Ventures, 191 Silicon Valley companies, 68 Silicon Valley software factories, 323 Skype, 118 Smart Grid Advisory Committee, 177 Smartphones, 20, 27, 43, 54, 217, 238 Social care computer electronic record system, 279 Social computing, 38, 320 Social networking, 51, 53, 56, 58 Society trails technology, 21 SPSS programs, 131 Sridhara, Mittu, 71 Amazon, 76 American Airlines, 72 back-end computation and presentation, 80 banking, 77 B2B and B2C, 85 business/product departments, 82 business work context, 74 buzzword, 77 career aspiration, 73 career spans, 73 coders, 72 cognitive surplus, 79 competitive differentiation, 74 computing power, 78 contribution and energy, 85 convergence, 75 CPU cycles, 78 cross-channel digital business, 71 cultural and geographic implementation, 72 customer experience, 84, 85 customer profile, 76 data visualization, 79, 80 DDoS protection, 81 economies of scale, 77 elements of technology, 72 encryption, 82 end customer, 83 entertainment, 75 ERP system, 72 Facebook, 84 finance and accounting, 73 foster innovation and open culture, 81 friends/mentors/role models, 74 FSA, 76 gambling acts, 81 games, 79 gaming machines, 80 GDS, 72 global organization, 71 Google, 75, 84, 85 Group CIO, Ladbrokes PLC, 71 industry-standard technologies, 77 integrity and competence, 83 IT, 74, 82 KickOff app, 71 land-based casinos, 79 live streaming, 78 London Business School, 73 mobile computing, 78 multimedia, 84 new generation, 84 on-the-job training, 73 open-source computing, 79 opportunity, 80, 83 PCA-compliant, 81 personalization, 76 real-time systems, 74 re-evaluation, 81 reliability and availability, 77 security threats, 80 smart mobile device, 75 technology-intense customer, 85 top-line revenue, 74 trader apps, 82 true context, 73 underpinning business process, 76 virtualization, 78 Visa/MasterCard transactions, 78 Web 3.0 business, 76 web-emerging web channel, 76 Wikipedia, 79, 85 Word documents and e-mail, 82 work-life balance, 84 young body with high miles, 72 Zuckerberg, Mark, 73 Stead, Jerry, 214 Storefront engineering, 212 Strassmann, Paul, 228, 309 agile development, 340 Amazon EC2, 314 America information processors, 322 Annapolis, 340 AT&T, 332 backstabbing culture, 339 BlackBerry, 317 block houses, 319 CFO/CEO position, 337 CIM program, 309 Citibank, 337 Citicorp, 313, 339 cloud computing, 310, 311, 313 coding infrastructure, 341 communication infrastructure, 341 corporate information management, 329 Corporate Information Officer, 309 counterintelligence, 320 cyber-operations, 338 Dell server, 314 Department of Defense, 329, 332 Director of Defense Information, 309 employee-owned technology, 316 enterprise architecture, 316 exfiltration, 313 financial organizations, 320 firewalls and antiviruses, 312 General Foods, 309, 326–328 General Motors, 321, 329, 332 George Mason School of Information Technology, 309 Google apps, 314 government-supported activities, 326 Harvard Business School, 331 HR-related issues, 331 IBM manpower, 311 infiltration, 313 Internet, 316, 322 interoperability, 315, 317, 341 Kraft Foods Inc, 309 MacArthur's intelligence officer, 327 Machiavellian view, 327 mash-up, 316 military service, 331 NASA, 309, 333, 334 police department, economics, 312 powerpoint slides, 324 Radio Shack, 319 senior executive position, 334 service-oriented architecture, 316 Silicon Valley software factories, 323 social computing, 320 Strassmann's concentration camp, 318 structured methodologies, 342 U.S.


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Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

That’s right—when I was running around in 2004 declaring that the world was flat, Facebook didn’t even exist yet, Twitter was still a sound, the cloud was still in the sky, 4G was a parking space, “applications” were what you sent to college, LinkedIn was barely known and most people thought it was a prison, Big Data was a good name for a rap star, and Skype, for most people, was a typographical error. All of those technologies blossomed after I wrote The World Is Flat—most of them around 2007. So a few years later, I began updating in earnest my view of how the Machine worked. A crucial impetus was a book I read in 2014 by two MIT business school professors—Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee—entitled The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.

This type of integration is called “seamless,” explains Mundie, “since the user never notices when software functions are handed from one underlying Web service to another … APIs, layer by layer, hide the complexity of what is being run inside an individual computer—and the transport protocols and messaging formats hide the complexity of melding all of this together horizontally into a network.” And this vertical stack and these horizontal interconnections create the experiences you enjoy every day on your computer, tablet, or phone. Microsoft’s cloud, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, not to mention the services of Facebook, Twitter, Google, Uber, Airbnb, Skype, Amazon, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Tinder, or NYTimes.com—they are all the product of thousands of vertical and horizontal APIs and protocols running on millions of machines talking back and forth across the network. Software production is accelerating even faster now not only because tools for writing software are improving at an exponential rate.

The Designers It is fun to be around really, really creative makers in the second half of the chessboard, to see what they can do, as individuals, with all of the empowering tools that have been enabled by the supernova. I met Tom Wujec in San Francisco at an event at the Exploratorium. We thought we had a lot in common and agreed to follow up on a Skype call. Wujec is a fellow at Autodesk and a global leader in 3-D design, engineering, and entertainment software. While his title sounds like a guy designing hubcaps for an auto parts company, the truth is that Autodesk is another of those really important companies few people know about—it builds the software that architects, auto and game designers, and film studios use to imagine and design buildings, cars, and movies on their computers.


May We Be Forgiven by A. M. Homes

anti-communist, Burning Man, dumpster diving, friendly fire, if you build it, they will come, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, Skype, South China Sea

“And I can see you too,” I say into the phone. “We can hang up the phones,” he says. And I do. “Can you hear me?” I can. A video camera mounted in the computer—it’s terrifying. What if someone has been watching me? “What do you call this?” “Facetime, iChat, or Skype,” he says. “It just depends on the program—the end result is pretty much the same thing.” “Skype,” he says, and all I can think of is Ella Fitzgerald singing skat. “What can you see?” I ask Nate, wondering how fine the resolution is. “I see Dad’s whole office, his bookcases, his prizes. Everything that’s behind you. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before—we could have been talking face to face this whole time.…” “Yes, we could have been talking like this all along,” I say, all the while obsessing about my earlier encounter, wondering if there’s any evidence left behind on the bookshelf—some missed bit of something.… Video chat is like talking NASA-style; there’s an ever-so-slight delay to the sound and images that reminds me of pictures sent from outer space, pixelated, like some weird postmodern animation.

Nate asks as I’m walking out of the room. “No,” I say. By morning, Sakhile has e-mailed back several times, wondering when we can talk—anytime is good for him. Wondering how much money is coming their way and when they might get it. We schedule a village meeting via Skype, and I leave it to Nate to tell them about the Web site and the donations. “How much?” Sakhile asks excitedly via Skype. Nate smoothly defers a direct answer. “Quite a bit,” he says. “Enough to make a difference.” And quickly the conversation becomes about want. From South Africa we hear that the village should have a car or a bus that would run back and forth to the bigger cities.

“While I have you on the phone—do you want an update on your father?” “No,” says Nate. “Okay,” I say. I’m not going to force it on him, but I don’t exactly like being the only one sitting with information. “So—can we plan a conference call with Ash to talk about the trip?” Nate asks. “Of course. Should we Skype with Ash?” I ask, more softly. “Can’t,” Nate says. “Her school doesn’t allow video chat—they’re worried about predators and stuff.” “Okay, then, we’ll set up a regular call for later this week.” A few nights later, with both kids on the phone, I begin by saying, “The purpose of this call is to come up with a plan for the holidays.”


Creatures of a Day: And Other Tales of Psychotherapy by Irvin D. Yalom

fixed income, place-making, pre–internet, Silicon Valley, Skype

“You say I knew all this? You give me far, far too much credit.” “I don’t think so. I’m just siding with the part of you where wisdom dwells.” We both looked at the clock. We had run over several minutes. As Natasha rose and collected her things, she said, “May I get back to you by email or Skype if I have more questions?” “Of course. But remember: I’m aging. So don’t wait too long.” ~ 4 ~ Thank You, Molly A few months ago I attended an outdoor funeral service for Molly, my long-term bookkeeper and Jane-of-all-trades who had worked for me for decades and had been both a godsend and a major thorn in my side.

If I get too friendly with one, then she’ll be looking for me at every meal and every activity. If you get involved with one, there’s no chance you can date another without hell to pay.” “How about people you knew before you went into the retirement community?” “I have a son. He’s a banker living in London, and he phones or, lately, Skypes every Sunday morning. Good kid. Two grandchildren—a boy and a girl. And that’s about it. Lost touch with everyone else from my former life. My wife and I had a lively social life, but she was the hub. She organized everything, and I just went along.” “It’s curious, isn’t it? You say you’re lonely, yet you have such good social skills, and you’re surrounded by people whom you try to avoid.”

We’re just starting out, I know, but you’ve laid out a lot of your personal life already, and I have a hunch that’s uncommon for you.” “Very uncommon. But you’re making it minimally painful. I do open myself up to two good friends, Connie and Jackie, friends from college days. We live in different parts of the country, but we stay in contact by Skype or phone at least once a week. Connie’s folks have a great vacation home on Lake Michigan, and we have a reunion every summer.” “And they’re close confidants?” Justine nodded, “Yep, they know almost everything. Even about my son. They’re my only confidants.” “Aside from me?” “Right.


pages: 371 words: 93,570

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

4chan, Ada Lovelace, air gap, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, crowdsourcing, D. B. Cooper, dark matter, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Edward Charles Pickering, game design, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Network effects, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, PalmPilot, pets.com, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, semantic web, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Soul of a New Machine, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

Like Sherry, she spent her days on the phone: checking in on San Francisco’s social workers, suicide-prevention hotlines, homeless shelters, senior centers, community groups, and Switchboards. “It really felt to me like putting the tools to exactly what they were meant to be used for, to serve the needs of people,” she tells me, a cat perched on her shoulder, when I reach her over Skype. “They figured out a way to put technology to use in a way that really touched people’s lives, and that just seemed completely appropriate and cool.” To keep the directory accurate, the women made dozens of phone calls a day and collated pages by manually laying them on the floor in alphabetized piles.

And like programming a generation before, it was where the women were. MICROCOSM To understand hypertext, I’ve turned to one of the brightest computer scientists in the world. Dame Wendy Hall is a garrulous, strawberry blonde Brit with a disarmingly warm manner and a busy calendar. We’re talking over Skype, nine hours apart. Wendy, who was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire—the female equivalent of being knighted—in 2009 for her contributions to computer science, is in a hotel room in London, dressed for dinner. I’m in my pajamas, drinking coffee, surrounded by index cards, in my office in Los Angeles.

And while linkbases and constructive hypertext were easily maintained in relatively contained research and classroom environments, or on small networks of computers all running the same operating system, they would have quickly become unmanageable on a global scale. Today, we accept 404 Errors as the cost of doing business, and the Web runs the world. MULTICOSM The second time I talk to Wendy Hall, she’s finishing up a long day with the department she now chairs at Southampton, the Web Science Institute. As I reach her on Skype, she’s just saying good-bye to the last students trailing out of the conference room where they’ve been meeting. “Claire’s writing a book about me,” she says, laughing, to someone I can’t see, gesturing at my head on the screen. “Or people like me, anyway.” Wendy will be the first to tell you that she’s a very social person.


pages: 319 words: 89,477

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel Iii, John Seely Brown

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, future of work, game design, George Gilder, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Benioff, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Network effects, old-boy network, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, software as a service, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, TSMC, Yochai Benkler

More than just bits and bytes, this digital infrastructure consists of the institutions, practices, and protocols that together organize and deliver the increasing power of digital technology to business and society. And new products and services are cascading out of this digital infrastructure at a dizzying rate. Taking communications technology as an example, think of Skype, the iPhone, Android, and Google Voice as just a few of the breakthroughs that have been made in recent years. These products have changed the way we communicate. Those who have figured out how to use the new communication tools to best advantage have a leg up on the competition. Yet many of us—especially those who have achieved success—tend to believe that the approaches we used in the past will continue to work in the future.

They were discussing business ideas and blog postings about the events in Iran when Sean told Joi about Dan’s intentions to release the script—any minute now—in a tweet. Joi reacted with concern. Wasn’t the Iranian government actively monitoring Twitter streams? Surely the government would be quickly alerted to the existence of this script. Agreeing that this was a big risk, Sean reached out to Dan and within fifteen minutes had set up a three-way Skype call bringing the three of them together. It turned out that Dan’s hack was amazing and robust—and the Iranian government might never have been able to crack it—but Joi wanted to buy as much time as possible to support the free expression of the protesters. Dan quickly agreed to pursue a better way of getting the script into the hands of the right people—a way that would not alert the Iranian government to its existence.

As for Sean Bonner, his website proudly proclaims: “It’s rather difficult to say what Sean Bonner does exactly.” Let’s just say that Sean is a well-known web publisher and cultural curator as well as an inveterate Internet troublemaker. With his deep technology background, Joi knew there had to be a better way to disseminate this script. Within minutes of the Skype chat with Dan and Sean, he began reaching out to select people in his network through a combination of cellphone text messages, e-mails, and tweets. He quickly found relevant people at Human Rights Watch, WITNESS, Global Voices, Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center, and other organizations—people he knew shared a common concern over the deteriorating situation in Iran and a passion for preserving human rights and free speech in a country that was moving quickly to suppress them.


pages: 311 words: 90,172

Nothing But Net by Mark Mahaney

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Burning Man, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial engineering, gamification, gig economy, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), knowledge economy, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, medical malpractice, meme stock, Network effects, PageRank, pets.com, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, subscription business, super pumped, the rule of 72, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

TABLE 4.1 The Fundamentals Behind the eBay Rocketship Then things began to change. In late 2005, eBay announced the surprise acquisition of Skype, an Internet communications company, for approximately $3 billion. Synergies at the time of the deal were unclear, and they became less clear over time, with eBay forced to take a $1.4 billion write-down of the Skype asset only two years later. Only later did the interpretation start to gain credence that Skype may have been something of a Hail Mary acquisition by a company increasingly concerned by a potential material deceleration in its core business.

, 87–90 Reverse stock splits, 28 Reyes, George, 145 Robust earnings, companies with, 232–235 Rogan, Joe, 128 Rohan, Jordan, 157 ROI (return on investment), 147–148 Roku, 261t Rule of 72, 260 Salzberg, Matt, 18, 20 Saturday Night Live (SNL), 121, 187–188, 207 Saudi Arabian Oil Company, 305 Savored, 31 Scale: benefits of, 132–133, 168–170 and profitability, 250–251 Schlumberger, 5 Schmidt, Eric, 9, 157, 219 Schumer, Amy, 128 Seattle Times, 180 Securities and Exchange Commission, 201 Selling, of dislocated high-quality stocks, 282–290, 292 Sell-offs, 35–53, 294 Amazon, 48–52 Facebook, 36–41 Google, 45–48 and lockup expirations, 73 Netflix, 41–45 as universal events, 50–51 Semel, Terry, 311 7 Now, 163 SFIX (see Stitch Fix [SFIX]) Shareholder letters, 214–216, 216t–217t Shatner, William, 90 Shopify (SHOP): as competitor, 310 and Covid-19 pandemic, 17 during Covid-19 pandemic, 303 fundamentals at, 261t management teams of, 203–204, 204t, 220t revenue of, 79 as tech stock, 3 Short-term investments, 55–59 Short-term volatility, 52, 56–59, 311 Shutterstock (SSTK), 289, 290f Singh, Sumit, 69 SiriusXM, 132 Skype, 84 Smartphones: and apps, 165–167, 168t as disruption, 172 and Google, 155 Snap (Snapchat; SNAP) AWS used by, 118 Snap (Snapchat; SNAP) during Covid-19 pandemic, 17 as downloaded app, 168t earnings outlook and valuation of, 234 fundamentals at, 138t, 261t as long-term investment, 59–65 market cap of, 247t marketing potential on, 137 and network effects, 170 product innovation, 137–139 profitability of, 248–250, 249t revenue and stock price, 283, 283f share price, 64f as tech stock, 3 SNL (Saturday Night Live), 121, 187–188, 207 The Social Dilemma (film), 269 The Social Network (film), 210, 269 Spectacles (smart glasses), 60, 62 Spiegel, Evan, 60–62, 138 Spotify (SPOT): as disruption, 172 fundamentals at, 261t market cap of, 7, 247t and pricing power flywheel, 197 product innovation, 128–133 share prices, 130f total addressable markets, 163–167, 166t, 296 Square, 139 Squier, George O., 212 SSTK (Shutterstock), 289, 290f Stanley Morgan, 83 Step-fixed costs, 169 “Still So Much to Like,” 232 Stitch Fix (SFIX): fundamentals at, 126t product innovation, 114, 124–128 share price, 124f Stock market: after Covid-19 pandemic, 106 taking losses in, 33, 35 Stock-picking, fundamentals of, 15–18 Stocks: driven by fundamentals, 76, 110 growth rates of, 229t, 230t reverse stock splits, 28 when to sell, 282–290, 292 (See also Bad stocks) Stone, Biz, 134 Stone, Brad, 206 Story stock, 254 Streaming services, 119–123 Streep, Meryl, 135 Subscription businesses, 41–43, 101, 237, 270 Sun Basket, 20 Szkutak, Tom, 192 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 18 TAMs (see Total addressable markets [TAMs]) Tarrant, Brenton, 36–37 Tech stocks: cost of, 227–232 and Covid-19 pandemic, 17 growth rates of, 229t, 230t importance of fundamentals for, 110 mindset for investing in, 79 performance of, 2–3 Telegram, 168t Tenacity, 218 Ten-baggers, 1–2 Tencent: growth of, 305 management teams of, 203–204, 204t, 220t market cap of, 7 net income of, 5, 6, 6t Tesla (TSLA): as founder-led company, 209–210 management teams of, 203–204, 204t, 220t product innovation at, 114, 139 on S&P 500, 87, 247 Ticket Monster, 30 TicketMaster, 31 TikTok, 3, 168t, 170, 310 Time Warner, 7, 8 Total addressable markets (TAMs), 143–172, 296 Amazon vs. eBay, 180 and benefits of scale, 132–133, 168–170 and Blue Apron, 19 DoorDash, 161–163 of Facebook, 268 Google, 145–157 Netflix, 98, 122–123 of Netflix, 273 Priceline, 93–94 Spotify, 132–133, 163–167 Uber, 158–161, 275 understanding your, 63 The Trade Desk (TTD), 3, 261t, 288 Trading: around quarters, 74 investing vs., 55–59, 302 Travelocity, 90 TREE (Lending Tree), 1 Tripadvisor (TRIP), 284–286, 285f TrueCar (TRUE), 287–288, 288f Trump, Donald, 51, 135 TSLA (see Tesla [TSLA]) TTD (The Trade Desk), 3, 261t, 288 20% revenue “rule,” 107–109, 109t Twitter (TWTR): fundamentals at, 138t, 261t growth of, 5 net income of, 6t product innovation, 133–139 profitability of, 248–250, 249t revenue and stock price, 284, 284f share price, 133f as tech stock, 3 Uber (UBER): during Covid-19 pandemic, 17, 303 dislocation periods of, 274–276 fundamentals at, 261t as long-term investment, 71–73 market cap of, 247t and network effects, 170 profitability of, 252–253, 253t share price, 72f, 277f as tech stock, 3 total addressable markets, 158–161, 158f, 171, 296 and valuation, 226–227, 244–246, 245t volatility of, 311 Uber Eats, 159, 160, 162, 185f, 253 Uber Freight, 159, 160 Uber Rides, 253 UGC (user-generated content) companies, 248–249 Unit economics advantages, 169 USA Today, 69 User-generated content (UGC) companies, 248–249 Vadon, Mark, 23–24, 68 Valuation, 225–258, 298–299 companies with minimal earnings, 235–242 companies with no earnings, 242–254 companies with robust earnings, 232–235 cost of tech/growth stocks, 227–232 long-term outlook in, 102 and precision trap, 254–255 Priceline, 93 and revenue, 78–79, 78f Uber, 160 Venn diagram challenge, 21–22 Verizon, 8, 88 Vogel, Paul, 131 Volatility, short-term, 52, 56–59, 311 Vollero, Drew, 61 Wal-Mart Stores, 6, 10, 49 Wanamaker, John, 149 Wayfair, 303, 310 Waymo, 208 Wehner, David, 39 WFH (work-from-home) companies, 303 WhatsApp, 168t Whitman, Meg, 8 Whole Foods, 80 Wikipedia, 168 Williams, Evan, 134 Williams, Rich, 31 Wing, 208 Wix, 3, 247t Work-from-home (WFH) companies, 303 Yahoo!


pages: 304 words: 95,306

Duty of Care: One NHS Doctor's Story of the Covid-19 Crisis by Dr Dominic Pimenta

3D printing, Boris Johnson, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, fake news, global pandemic, iterative process, lockdown, post-truth, Rubik’s Cube, school choice, Skype, social distancing, stem cell

My phone felt hot and caustic in my hand by the end of the day, and the cool leather of the Bible felt like a balm. I started to read the New Testament each night in small segments. I found it calming and familiar, and having to concentrate to follow the text helped me switch off from everything else. I told my dad about it the next weekend over Skype. He started crying. There was no less division, but at least we had more to talk about. • • • That weekend I had taken on some extra shifts again, this time covering two peripheral hospitals, which I needed to drive between. Both sites had ward rounds to do and new patients to see – it was tough work to get everything done in the morning and get to the next site to start over in the afternoon.

Dilsan lays it out: “Your dad is very high-risk, from the kids and possibly from Beck. It probably isn’t COVID but do you want to risk it?” I don’t. It’s a little heartbreaking. Mum takes it in her stride, although I can hear the hurt in her voice. Beck understands, but she is really upset. So we Skype Mum and Dad instead. We chat about religion and Dad is more engaged over the webcam than ever. I reflect on how lucky we are to have this technology, which even just a few years ago was not capable of enabling a human interaction like it can do now. I can’t get hold of Beck for the rest of the day, and when we finally catch up, she’s crushingly disappointed.

Dilsan stays serious and tries to pull the conversation around to the gravity of the situation, to warn the group of what is likely coming. Her cousins listen, but the tone is light, and before long Dilsan is laughing at the decades-old private jokes only families have. It’s good for her to connect. I think of my own family and promise myself to call Mum and Dad tomorrow, to Skype with my brother Paul and his girls more. I also try and check in on our elderly neighbours. As if on cue, an email lands in my inbox from my Aunt Judy. She has been planning her 80th birthday party for the end of the month, 26 March. A big family get-together is quite a rare and special occasion and this one has been in the works for nearly a year.


pages: 239 words: 62,311

The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa by Irene Yuan Sun

"World Economic Forum" Davos, asset light, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business logic, capital controls, clean water, Computer Numeric Control, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, means of production, mobile money, Multi Fibre Arrangement, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, tacit knowledge, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population

Wall Street Journal, July 3, 1991, A4. 36. Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness, 9. 37. Leslie T. Chang, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2008), 74. 38. E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” 80. 39. Kelly Pike, interview by the author on Skype, March 10, 2016. Chapter 6 1. Stephen Sigei, interview by author, Nairobi, Kenya, July 10, 2016. 2. Larry Hanauer and Lyle J. Morris, Chinese Engagement in Africa: Drivers, Reactions, and Implications for U.S. Policy, (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2014), 30–31. 3. Dinah Jerotich Mwinzi, remarks at the Africa Tech Challenge 2016 Opening Ceremony, Nairobi, Kenya, July 12, 2016. 4.

Dan Munro, “Ebola: While Big Pharma Slept,” Forbes, September 14, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/danmunro/2014/09/14/ebola-while-big-pharma-slept/#a8293ee6627a; and Mirjam Gehrke, “Pharmaceutical Industry Neglects Developing Countries,” Deutsche Welle, October 26, 2012, http://p.dw.com/p/16WgN. 16. Doctors Without Borders, “No Time to Quit: HIV/AIDS Treatment Gap Widening in Africa,” May 2010, http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/sites/usa/files/MSF-No-Time-to-Quit-HIV-AIDS.pdf. 17. Daniel Berman, interview by author on Skype, July 22, 2016. 18. Yanzhong Huang, “Chinese Pharma: A Global Health Game Changer?” Council on Foreign Relations, New York, March 31, 2015, http://www.cfr.org/china/chinese-pharma-global-health-game-changer/p36365. 19. Viral Shah, “Evolution of Pharmaceutical Industry: A Global Indian & Gujarat Perspective,” Journal of Pharmaceutical Science and Bioscientific Research 2, no. 5, Sept–Oct 2012, 219–229, http://www.jpsbr.org/index_htm_files/5_JPSBR_12_RV109.pdf. 20.

Ina Skosana, “New State-Run Pharmaceutical Company to Produce ARVs by 2019,” Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism, http://bhekisisa.org/article/2016-02-17-new-state-run-pharmaceutical-company-to-produce-arvs-by-2019. 27. United Nations Industrial Development Organization, “Kenya Pharmaceutical Sector Development Strategy,” 2012. Author Skype interview with Daniel Berman, July 22, 2016. 28. Haddis Tadesse, interview by author, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, July 19, 2016. 29. Government of Ethiopia and World Health Organization, “Launch of Ethiopian National Strategy and Plan of Action for Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Development and Improving Access,” July 14, 2015. 30.


pages: 190 words: 62,941

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination by Adam Lashinsky

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Benchmark Capital, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google X / Alphabet X, hustle culture, independent contractor, information retrieval, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, new economy, pattern recognition, price mechanism, public intellectual, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, young professional

Among the most prominent was Andreessen Horowitz, then a two-year-old firm helmed by Marc Andreessen, a cofounder of Netscape. Andreessen Horowitz was media savvy and aggressively self-promotional. It also found early success with an unusual deal. It had been part of an investment group that bought the Internet calling service Skype from eBay—a private-equity transaction rather than a VC play—and quickly flipped the company to Microsoft for a gain of $5 billion for the group. Andreessen’s marquee name appealed to Kalanick. Having the backing of such investors conferred legitimacy on start-ups, particularly attractive to an entrepreneur who had toiled in obscurity for as long as Kalanick had.

He asked each candidate for a city general manager job to prepare a “city presentation,” a PowerPoint deck that showed how the potential executive would build out a market for Uber. Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, a Frenchman who had been working for a hedge fund in London, prepared such a presentation in the fall of 2012, hoping to become general manager for Paris. A short while later he found himself on Skype with Kalanick and Graves. Kalanick’s goal in interviewing candidates is to try “to simulate real-life interaction in an office,” says Gore-Coty. “Travis spent ten to fifteen minutes discussing my previous experiences, asking me about my investments and my analysis of the media industry”—topics that might have little bearing on Uber.

Whereas many of the original Scour employees had stuck with Kalanick at Red Swoosh or followed Michael Todd to Google, Droege went his own way after Scour’s collapse. He founded an online shop to sell used golf equipment called Back 9 Golf. Then he helped start a company called Gizmo5 Technologies, eventually bought by Google, that created an Internet calling service similar to Skype but aimed at small businesses. Next Droege joined Taser International, the stun-gun maker, which had begun selling body cameras to police officers. Droege oversaw a Web-based repository for all the video cops uploaded called Evidence.com. Droege had discussed working at Uber before, but he decided to see things out at Taser, a publicly traded company in Arizona.


pages: 455 words: 133,719

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte

8-hour work day, affirmative action, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deliberate practice, desegregation, DevOps, East Village, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, game design, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, machine readable, meta-analysis, new economy, profit maximization, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Zipcar, éminence grise

Heart surgeries. Back surgeries. Graduations. Anniversaries. Births. Deaths. Check. Check. Check. The handwriting often snakes up the sides of the letters into the margins of the decorative garland of stockings and tinsel stars. We put the letters aside for a moment and Burnett calls two colleagues on Skype to catch up on their ongoing research on busyness. They’ve studied how living fast and busy frays relationships. Couples they’ve interviewed lament that they have no time for each other. “I can’t honestly tell you when actually we had the last real conversation,” one told her. They likened their lives to living on a “speeding train,” a “roller coaster,” and a “carousel and there’s no way to get off.”

They’re deep in the process of analyzing the language women have used in interviews to describe their lives. “One woman we interviewed said, ‘It’s not the kind of cars you drive anymore, it’s how busy you are, how many activities you’re in, the bumper stickers on your car—that shows status,’” Burnett’s colleague, Becky DeGreeff, says over Skype. Another woman admitted judging people for taking time off. “We assume that if people aren’t always busy, then they must be lazy,” she told them. “I don’t know how people would not be busy,” sniffed another. “I’m so tired. I need a sabbatical,” one woman said, before quickly vowing she’d never take one, as if that would be admitting a lack of stamina to keep up.7 DeGreeff says she overheard two mothers who’d dropped their daughters off at a dance class and were busy grocery shopping before the class let out.

“They can choose not to be equal partners with their wives, in which case having children will help their careers with the fatherhood bonus. Or they can choose to be equal partners and hurt their careers even more than women. As long as that’s the case, we’ll have a few brave souls, but that’s it. Brave souls.” He’s stuck. With smartphones and Skype and e-mail and other fast-emerging technologies keeping us all tethered to work, the ideal worker is now expected to be on call and ready to roll all day, every day, all the time. And because the ideal worker is just that, a demanding, voracious ideal, no one can ever measure up. No matter how much you do, how hard you work, how much you sacrifice, how devoted you are, you can never attain that ideal.


pages: 473 words: 140,480

Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town by Beth Macy

8-hour work day, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apollo 13, belly landing, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, call centre, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, desegregation, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, Joseph Schumpeter, new economy, old-boy network, one-China policy, race to the bottom, reshoring, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, value engineering, work culture

I was the longshot and the underdog, but fortunately for me, John Bassett was too, whether he was ready to admit it to a reporter or not. With any luck at all, he would help me explain this circuitous piece of American history, from its hardwood forests to its executive boardrooms; from handsaws and planing tools to smartphones and Skype; from the oak logs that sailed from the port of Norfolk, Virginia, to Asia and then returned, months later, in the form of dressers and beds. 2 The Original Outsourcer Someday I’ll buy and sell you. —J.D. BASSETT SR. TO HIS FATHER, JOHN HENRY BASSETT To understand JBIII, you have to understand where he comes from, a place where everywhere he looked, he saw his name: on the WELCOME TO BASSETT sign, the bank, the library, the school, and the myriad company smokestacks that rose high above the town.

He’d spent the past decade developing a fiberboard-and-laminate flooring-supply business, called Plantation Timber Products, based in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan, a place even remoter than Dalian. “Labor was less of a factor with this one, which was all about being where the trees were,” Michael Moh said in a Skype interview from Shanghai. In the small city of Leshan, the Mohs had provided work for five hundred rural peasants and rare cash for wood for five hundred thousand subsistence farmers, he added. In the interim, Larry Moh had also made a bundle off a considerable heap of AOL stock. As Tothill, his old supplier buddy, recalled, “He liked to make risky investments, and he was very good at picking them out.

I began asking in the spring of 2012, which was lousy timing—it was soon after the mass suicides to protest working conditions at the Foxconn factory in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Micah Goldstein made it clear: He didn’t want a story about working conditions in Indonesia. “We don’t own the factories there,” he said repeatedly. When I landed in Surabaya in March 2013, I had already Skyped with Stanley’s vice president for Asia operations, a British-born factory man named Richard Ledger whose career perfectly mirrored the arc of globalization in the developing world. He’d met his wife in the Philippines in 1997, back when the furniture workers he supervised there were earning twenty-five dollars a month.


pages: 128 words: 28,129

Exercise Every Day: 32 Tactics for Building the Exercise Habit (Even If You Hate Working Out) by S.J. Scott

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, fear of failure, Inbox Zero, Kickstarter, Mr. Money Mustache, obamacare, Skype

You keep meaning to get started on your micro-commitment, but you have to answer that text, Skype message, email, etc. It never seems to end. You will always have interruptions. If you let these interruptions dictate your life, you will never, ever accomplish anything beyond the immediate priorities of your job and personal life. This is called survival mode—putting out fire after fire as they pop up. This is no way to live, and it certainly isn’t a way to thrive and get the most out of life. In order to break the cycle of interruptions messing up your plans, you have to take back control of your life. You need to schedule your day and set aside certain times for email, Skype, phone calls, and communication with others.


pages: 322 words: 99,066

The End of Secrecy: The Rise and Fall of WikiLeaks by The "Guardian", David Leigh, Luke Harding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, air gap, banking crisis, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, Downton Abbey, drone strike, end-to-end encryption, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, friendly fire, global village, Hacker Ethic, impulse control, Jacob Appelbaum, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, machine readable, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, operational security, post-work, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Levy, sugar pill, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

If media groups did not learn to work across borders on stories, the stories would leave them behind. In the run-up to cable D-Day, Ian Katz, the deputy editor managing these complex relationships, held regular Skype chats with the Guardian’s multilingual counterparts. “They were hilarious conversations,” Katz recalls. The reason the Spaniards were holding up the number of a US state department cable to the Skype camera was security – it had been agreed that no sensitive mentions would be made over the phone or by email. In Berlin, similarly, Marcel Rosenbach, from Der Spiegel, was the first to unearth a cable with the deceptively bland title: “National HUMINT Collection Directive on the United Nations.”

None of the team worries deeply about the consequences of losing a computer, though, because the lines of code to control the site are stored on remote computers under their control – “in the cloud” – and the passwords they need for access are in their heads. Popular for day-by-day in-house conversations is the internet phone service Skype, which also uses encryption. Because it was developed in Sweden rather than the US, the team trusts it not to have a “back door” through which the US National Security Agency can peer in on their discussions. As its name suggests, WikiLeaks began as a “wiki” – a user-editable site (which has sometimes led to confusion with the user-editable Wikipedia; there is no association).

Now Casson worked brutally long days comparing the Guardian’s editing decisions with those of his counterparts, and considering the representations about particular cables from the US state department that were passed on by the New York Times. The task was made vastly more difficult by the journalists’ determination not to discuss cables on the phone or in emails; after his daily round of Skype calls with international partners, Casson would meticulously alter the colour of some of the 700 or so cables listed on a vast Google spreadsheet that only he could understand. He looked like a man close to the edge. And then there were the legal risks. Could the Guardian be prosecuted under the British Official Secrets Act or the US Espionage Act?


pages: 360 words: 96,275

PostgreSQL 9 Admin Cookbook: Over 80 Recipes to Help You Run an Efficient PostgreSQL 9. 0 Database by Simon Riggs, Hannu Krosing

business intelligence, business process, database schema, Debian, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, GnuPG, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Skype

His previous experience covers management and senior technical roles in the banking, telecommunications and software industries. Simon's early research work has been published by the Royal Society. Hannu Krosing is a principal consultant at 2ndQuadrant and a Technical Advisor at Ambient Sound Investments. As the original database architect at Skype Technologies, Hannu was responsible for designing the Skytools suite of replication and scalability technologies. Hannu has more than 12 years experience working with and contributing to the PostgreSQL project. About the Reviewers Gabriele Bartolini is a long time open-source programmer, writing Linux/Unix applications in C and C++ for over 10 years, specializing in search engines and web analytics with large databases.

PostgreSQL Administration Cookbook offers the information you need to manage your live production databases on PostgreSQL. The book contains insights direct from the main author of the PostgreSQL replication and recovery features, and the database architect of the most successful startup using PostgreSQL, Skype. This hands-on guide will assist developers working on live databases, supporting web or enterprise software applications using Java, Python, Ruby, .Net from any development framework. It's easy to manage your database when you've got PostgreSQL 9 Administration Cookbook at hand. This practical guide gives you quick answers to common questions and problems, building on the author's experience as trainers, users, and core developers of the PostgreSQL database server.

It's been a personal mission of mine over the last six years to improve server performance and the team have been successful in making the server highly performant and very scalable. That gives PostgreSQL enormous headroom for growth. Who is using PostgreSQL? Prominent users include Apple, BASF, Genentech, IMDB.com, Skype, NTT, Yahoo, and The National Weather Service. PostgreSQL receives well in excess of 1 million downloads per year, according to data submitted to the European Commission, who concluded "...PostgreSQL, is considered by many database users to be a credible alternative... We need to mention one last thing.


pages: 281 words: 95,852

The Googlization of Everything: by Siva Vaidhyanathan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data acquisition, death of newspapers, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full text search, global pandemic, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pirate software, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, single-payer health, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

It now hosts e-mail for millions of users. Google purchased the innovative and free blog-hosting service Blogger in 2003. It runs a social networking site called Orkut that is popular in Brazil and India, but nowhere else. Google Voice offers a voice-over-Internet-provider (VoIP) that competes with Skype’s long-distance Internet phone service. It facilitates payment for Web-based commerce through Google Checkout. Google is also a software company. It now offers online software such as a word processor, spreadsheets, presentation software, and a REN D E R UNTO CA ESA R 17 calendar service—all operating “in the cloud” and thus freeing users from managing multiple versions of their files and applications on different computers, and easing collaboration with others.

“It is unacceptable,” Graham wrote to Eric Schmidt, “to roll out a product that unilaterally renders personal information public, with the intention of repairing problems later as they arise.”47 A few days after the Broughton incident, I had a long conversation with Peter Barron, head of communication and public affairs for Google in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. “This was actually a fantastically successful launch” in the United Kingdom, Barron told me over a Skype connection. We had record numbers of people visiting Google Maps. Many, many millions of people used and enjoyed and found the product extremely useful. We had a very small number of complaints—complaints in the hundreds—about the fact that people’s houses were up or maybe their faces weren’t blurred.

See also censorship semantic searches, 22–23 Sennett, Richard, 231n33 seven deadly sins, 76, 77 sexually explicit content, 38. See also pornography Shell Oil corporation, 131 264 IND EX Shenk, David, 175 Shirky, Clay, 175, 231n33, 234n71 Shi Tao, 127 Silicon Valley, 56, 70–71 Sinsheimer, Robert, 207 Skype, 16 social networking, 16, 17–118, 90–92, 95, 116 social responsibility, 42–44 Solove, Daniel, 95, 96, 236n20 Souter, David, 170 South Africa, 121, 122, 128 South Korea, 25, 142–43, 145 Soviet Union, 121–23 Spain, 142, 146 speed, priority placed on, 51–54 Spencer, Herbert, 181 sponsored results, 26, 60 Stanford University, 56, 158, 187, 195 “Star Wars Kid,” 95–96 stock market, 79, 229n14 Street View.


pages: 390 words: 96,624

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom by Rebecca MacKinnon

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business cycle, business intelligence, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital Maoism, don't be evil, Eben Moglen, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Global Witness, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, online collectivism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pre–internet, race to the bottom, real-name policy, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

This ability could potentially make it more difficult for independent and nonprofit citizen media to reach large audiences or build broad communities. If ISPs are allowed to discriminate, they can also block other content services that happen to compete with their own. Internet service providers now have the technical ability to “see” what kinds of application a particular subscriber is using at a given moment in time: Are you using Skype? YouTube? Streaming movies on Netflix? Or are you accessing a nonprofit website that uses the open-source WordPress platform? Your service provider knows. Currently in most countries, there is no law preventing Internet service providers from discriminating between services for a profit: your ISP could in theory offer a “tiered” access package in which access to certain services belonging to major brand names (Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, and Facebook, for example) would be cheaper than access to the general Internet or to lesser known applications.

Several months later, the FCC issued rules that generally reflected this compromise: though mobile carriers would be prohibited from blocking websites, they would be free to block applications or services unless those applications directly competed with providers’voice and video products, such as Skype. The rules allowed for some “network management,” which includes prioritization of some services over others, and did not rule out “paid prioritization” of services, with the stipulation that carriers must be transparent about how they implement their traffic management. Net neutrality opponents and proponents were both highly critical with the compromise position.

In early 2011 the fifth-largest wireless carrier in the United States, MetroPCS, began offering a $40/month “no long-term commitment” service plan on one of its 4G phones, targeting lower-income customers. The service allowed unlimited talking, texting, web browsing, and YouTube access. Other premium multimedia services were available at additional cost, although some popular brand-name services like Skype and Netflix were excluded altogether. Apps from those services were blocked from being downloaded to the user’s handset. Though the logic for the blockage is that these tools tend to use a lot of bandwidth, which costs the providers money, the precedent of blocking certain applications and not others is potentially a slippery slope.


pages: 402 words: 98,760

Deep Sea and Foreign Going by Rose George

Admiral Zheng, air freight, Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, bank run, cable laying ship, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Costa Concordia, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Filipino sailors, global supply chain, Global Witness, Google Earth, intermodal, Jones Act, London Whale, Malacca Straits, Panamax, pattern recognition, profit maximization, Skype, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, urban planning, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

First, the interior attractions: a karaoke machine in the crew’s lounge, a dart board and Wii machine in the officers’. A library on D-deck is equipped with cheap DVDs, books and two computers for gaming only. Kendal is only four years old, but it has no provision for browsing on the internet and no Skype. Internet access is not freely available: crew members pass their emails to the captain once a day and he sends them and transmits the replies. The last time I had that level of internet freedom was in 1995. There are outdoor facilities: a basketball hoop on the poop deck near the stern, where the decks seem too slippery to play safely, and the low railings an invitation to lose balls to the ocean.

He says the godfathers – the land-based pirate controllers – come here to spend their gains, that the money-changers are mostly Somali-owned. ‘The government turns a blind eye, maybe because of corruption. They can make you not see them.’ * There is no need for secrecy in piracy. John Chase’s negotiators often communicate by Skype. It’s not like in Afghanistan or Iraq, where you are trying to negotiate out of sight of governments who want to rush in and rescue. Somalia is different. ‘The pirates will talk on the phone for hours at a time. Everyone knows where they are, it’s not an issue of trying to locate them.’ Everyone knows where the hostages are, but no-one is rushing to rescue them.

I wasn’t even sure how to pronounce its name until Captain Glenn told of a girl in the office who pronounces Salalah like ‘Ooh-la-la!’ (the stress, at least in English, is on the first ‘la’). The spectacular view is to be had from the terrace of the Oasis Club, a bar-restaurant on the cliffs above the port. I go there twice in 24 hours, with whoever can grab a few hours’ leave to come with me, enough for a quick Skype home; perhaps a drink – non-alcoholic of course – and a meal that hasn’t been cooked by Pinky, some fruit that doesn’t look as sad as ours. In the better ports around the world, sailors always head for a mission to use those precious hours. Run by church organizations – the Norwegian Church, the Seamen’s Church Institute of New York and the UK’s Mission to Seafarers are the best known – these missions, or seafarers’ centres, offer internet, food, drink and a small period of solace and different company to that on your ship.


pages: 368 words: 96,825

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

At the time Anderson wrote Free, beyond a few extremely obscure papers, economists had not studied the idea of free in the marketplace. It was a blank spot on the map. In other words, even people who make their living studying economic trends were fooled. Once demonetization arrived, they didn’t know what hit them. Nor is it just economists or, for that matter, Kodak executives. Skype demonetized long-distance telephony; Craigslist demonetized classified advertising; Napster demonetized the music industry. This list goes on and on. More critically, because demonetization is also deceptive, almost no one within those industries was prepared for such radical change. Dematerialization.

CONSULTANT 1987 Up to $2,000 $3,988 7 Video player free Toshiba V-8000 1981 $1,245 $3,103 8 Video camera free RCA CC010 1981 $1,050 $2,617 9 Music player free Sony CDP-101 CD player 1982 $900 $2,113 10 Encyclopedia free Compton’s CD Encyclopedia 1989 $750 $1,370 11 Videogame console free Atari 2600 1977 $199 $744 Total free $902,809 *Year of Launch The roughly $900,000 worth of applications in a smart phone today Source: Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, page 289 * Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price It shows all the 1980s luxury technologies that have dematerialized and now come standard with your average smartphone. An HD video camera, two-way video conferencing (via Skype), GPS, libraries of books, your record collection, a flashlight, an EKG, a full videogame arcade, a tape recorder, maps, a calculator, a clock . . . just to name a few. Thirty years ago the devices in this collection would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars; today they come free or as apps on your phone.

BE OPEN TO NEW WORKING METHODOLOGIES “The other day I was in London,” said Barrie, “and I met a financial analyst working from home doing financial models for pension funds on things like infrastructure projects. He needed a mathematician to develop these models in MATLAB to be able to do his research and present his findings, so he hired a PhD student in Pakistan to do the work. They set up a chat on Skype. The streaming video quality to somewhere like Pakistan is now unbelievable. It was just like the guy was in the room with him. He’d get up in the morning, have his cup of tea, sit down, put the iPad there, do the video call, and then they’d sit there and talk all day as if they were in the same room together.


pages: 322 words: 99,918

A Year of Living Danishly: My Twelve Months Unearthing the Secrets of the World's Happiest Country by Helen Russell

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, death from overwork, do what you love, Downton Abbey, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, microdosing, obamacare, offshore financial centre, remote working, retail therapy, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, work culture

Great. Now I feel much better… ‘It’ll be OK,’ Lego Man says eventually, shuffling closer towards me on the sofa and putting his arm around me. ‘We just need to get to know the place better. You should get out and about more, meet people.’ He’s probably right. Working from home and socialising via Skype and FaceTime isn’t good for a girl. But then neither is Sticksville-on-Sea’s public transport system. Having suffered frostbite and fury at the mercy of infrequent buses and trains since Lego Man started commuting to work with our sole mode of transport, a leased Lego-mobile, I decide that the time has come to buy my own car out here.

I’ve just about got my head around this new state of affairs and Lego Man’s early arrivals when I hear a car crunch onto the drive at 2.30pm. The sound of the door handle turning gives me such a shock that I knock over a glass of water while speaking to a time management expert in New York. I have to pretend to her that the resultant cursing is coughing and that the madly barking dog is interference on the transatlantic Skype line. ‘Well, thank you so much for your time,’ I say as I scribble some final notes in poor shorthand. ‘I won’t keep you any longer!’ I add slightly manically in order to be heard over the din of the dog, whimpering with excitement at the return of his master, and Lego Man, bringing his characteristic drafts and noise into the house.

We talk fast – not at the pace I realise I’ve been adopting out here, over-enunciating every word to try and make myself understood. We catch up on each other’s news. We eat snegles. We take group pictures at the porny pony fountain in The Big Town. It’s A Lot Of Fun. A couple of them have small children, so there are daily Skype sessions before toddler bedtimes, reminding me of how much I want that life too. I love being a godmother to two utterly edible small people back home, and delight in being a not-at-all-related ‘special auntie’ to several more, but it’s not the same. And I still have to swallow down the lump that appears in my throat sometimes when I think about this.


pages: 365 words: 96,573

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor

Albert Einstein, epigenetics, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Khan Academy, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, off-the-grid, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, stem cell, TED Talk

He’d written dozens of posts and self-published a book explaining breathing from the subatomic level on up, all annotated with hundreds of studies. He’d also become one of Scandinavia’s most respected and popular breathing therapists, helping to heal thousands of patients through the subtle power of healthy breathing. When I mentioned during one of our Skype conversations that I would be mouthbreathing for ten days during an experiment, he cringed. When I asked if he wanted to join in, he refused. “I do not want to,” he declared. “But I am curious.” Now, months later, Olsson plops his jet-lagged body onto the examination chair, puts on the video glasses, and inhales one of his last nasal breaths for the next 240 hours.

We’re eating the same food at the same time as we did ten days earlier, sweating through the same stationary bike workouts in the same gym, and having many of the same conversations. This afternoon we’re discussing Olsson’s favorite subject, his obsession for the past decade. We are, once again, talking about carbon dioxide. It is hard to admit now, but when I first interviewed Olsson more than a year ago, he was not a source I entirely trusted. On our Skype calls, he liked to hammer the importance of slow breathing, and he’d sent me a half-dozen PowerPoint presentations and reams of scientific studies on how paced breathing relaxed the body and calmed the mind. This part made perfect sense. But when he started in on the restorative wonders of a toxic gas, I began to wonder.

I understood why only one person showed up for the first conference he held on breathing, in 2010, and why, after honing his message and building his research base, he was now something of a Swedish media star who filled auditoriums, his grinning, perpetually tanned, rom-com face popping up on newspapers, magazines, and nightly news shows. In these interviews, he championed the therapeutic effects of nasal breathing and beseeched audiences with the same message of slow breathing. I returned home to San Francisco, and Olsson and I kept in contact. Every few weeks I’d get a new email or a Skype call about some new long-lost scientific discovery he’d just unearthed in a medical library. He’d continued his self-experimentation too, always seeking to use his own body to prove the power of breathing and wonders of the “metabolic waste product,” carbon dioxide. This is how Olsson ended up, a year after our first meeting, in my living room in San Francisco with a face mask Velcroed to his head and an EKG electrode clipped to his ear


pages: 599 words: 98,564

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans by Eben Kirksey

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double helix, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microdosing, moral panic, move fast and break things, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, special economic zone, statistical model, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technological determinism, upwardly mobile, urban planning, young professional

JK had said he wanted to bring CRISPR to the fertility clinic, but at the time the initiative had seemed like an unrealistic long shot, a pipe dream. Now, seeing the text, Ryan was curious to learn more, so he called him up on Skype. “It was like seeing a warning in a rearview mirror,” Ryan told me, “like that object you saw in the distance is right next to your car.” JK told him that a woman was pregnant from his CRISPR experiment. The Skype call was short, and somewhat confusing. Within a few weeks, Ryan was on a flight to Shenzhen. Ryan took vacation time from HDMZ to explore the possibility of working for JK as a consultant. On that trip, in May 2018, he spent just a few days on the ground.

Before trying to alter his friend’s DNA, David initially tried a simpler experiment: he tried to splice green fluorescent protein genes from jellyfish into dogs to make them glow. On the side David was breeding attack dogs, and he knew that glowing puppies would fetch top dollar. He successfully introduced jellyfish DNA into dog sperm, but damaged the sperm in the process. When I first spoke with him on Skype he showed me a new litter that had just been born. But the puppies were normal, non-GMO. Tristan and David met each other through Ascendance Biomedical, a network of hackers who shared an interest in genetic engineering and human enhancement. As this collective started to form, excitement began to build about a do-it-yourself gene therapy for HIV.

Moving through a series of provocative poses—on all fours, throwing her mane of hair back as she sits up—she casts a sultry look at the camera. Then the male dancer joins her as a European photographer shouts stage directions. The pair strike a serious pose, then crack smiles. Then they start to dance to the refrain of the music: “I got this, got this, got this … I don’t care…”2 When we initially chatted over Skype about the ideas driving Project Tamara, she told me: “This performance is about the power of color and identity.” Like many others who have insisted that “black is beautiful,” Tamara was bringing attention to internalized racism and feelings of self-loathing that motivate many people to change the color of their skin.


pages: 239 words: 64,812

Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty by Vikram Chandra

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, business process, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, conceptual framework, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, East Village, European colonialism, finite state, Firefox, Flash crash, functional programming, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, haute couture, hype cycle, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, land reform, London Whale, Norman Mailer, Paul Graham, pink-collar, revision control, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, tech worker, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, theory of mind, Therac-25, Turing machine, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce

They also provided seed funding to members of their community.83 These efforts were successful enough that the denizens of Silicon Valley sometimes refer to these networks, with decidedly mixed admiration and resentment, as the “Indian Mafia.”84 The resentment curdles and boils over in discussions of outsourcing. Since the nineties, American companies have gained commercial advantage by leveraging the new landscape of instant communication made possible by the internet and the disparities in programmer salaries around the globe. If you can manage employees via e-mail and Skype, it makes economic sense to have your code written in Bangalore rather than next door, and pay a fraction of the salary that a programmer living in San Jose would demand. American programmers have watched with mounting fear and fury as work has been outsourced; meanwhile, in India, the demand for competent programmers has steadily driven wages up.

The open-source database SQLite, at the time of this writing, has 1,177 times the amount of test code as it does program code.14 Most non-programmers have never heard of SQLite, but it is the most widely deployed database in the world.15 SQLite is a tiny program. It runs within your Firefox browser, storing your bookmarks; it is used widely within the Mac operating system; it runs within each copy of Skype; it runs on your smartphone, storing contacts and appointments. SQLite’s vast suite of tests is an attempt to prevent bugs from creeping into a program that has become an essential, foundational component of the working memory of humanity. Programmers work doggedly toward correctness, but the sheer size and complexity of software ensures that bugs lurk within.

—San Francisco Chronicle Paperback / Ebook available “Essays that reconfigure dream, fact and reflection.” —The New York Times Book Review “D’Agata is an alchemist who changes trash into purest gold.” —Guy Davenport, Harper’s Magazine Paperback / Ebook available WWW.GRAYWOLFPRESS.ORG Many Graywolf authors are available to chat with your book club or classroom via phone and Skype. E-mail us at wolves@graywolfpress.org for further details. Visit graywolfpress.org to sign up for our monthly newsletter and to check out our many regularly updated features, including our On Craft series, Pub Talk series, Poem of the Week, author interviews, special sales, book giveaways, tour listings, catalogs, and much more.


Southeast Asia on a Shoestring Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, clockwatching, colonial rule, flag carrier, gentrification, Global Witness, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, large denomination, low cost airline, Mason jar, megacity, period drama, restrictive zoning, retail therapy, Skype, South China Sea, spice trade, superstar cities, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce

International roaming is prohibitively expensive and not available in Myanmar. »Wi-fi & Internet Access Internet cafes are common in tourist centres and wi-fi is often free in guesthouses in some countries. »Calling Home International calling rates are fairly affordable. To call home on a mobile phone, dial an international access code + country code + subscriber number. Internet cafes are often equipped with headsets and Skype as an alternative. With mobile wireless capability, you can also make Skype calls from a mobile phone. * * * Top of section if you like... Fabulous Food Southeast Asian cuisine celebrates its tropical bounty with fresh and bold flavours. Thai chillies turn a meal into a head rush, Vietnamese food is so refreshing you won’t need a beverage and exotic fruits are sweeter than desserts.

Post Main post office (St 13; 7am-7pm) Located in a grand old building, this has increasingly reliable postal services. Telephone The cheapest local and domestic calls in Phnom Penh are found at private stalls with the mobile telephone prefixes displayed. Many internet cafes offer low-cost international calls via the internet (or free via Skype). Tourist Information There is not much in the way of official tourist information in the Cambodian capital. Pick up the free listings mags and get up-to-date information from other travellers or guesthouses. Travel Agencies Reliable travel agencies include the following: Hanuman ( 218396; www.hanuman.travel; 12 St 310) VLK Tourism ( 723331; www.vlktravel.com; 195 Monivong Blvd) Getting There & Away Air See Click here for a list of airlines that serve Phnom Penh.

Mobile phones, whose numbers start with 01, 07, 08 or 09, are hugely popular with both individuals and commercial enterprises. Foreigners need to present a valid passport to get a local sim card. For listings of businesses and government offices, check out www.yellowpages-cambodia.com. Many internet shops offer cheap international calls for 100r to 1000r per minute, though in places with broadband speeds you can Skype for the price of an internet connection (usually 2000r to 4000r per hour). International calls from mobile phone shops cost about 1000r per minute. Time Cambodia, like Laos, Vietnam and Thailand, is seven hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time or Universal Time Coordinated (GMT/UTC). Travellers with Disabilities Although Cambodia has one of the world’s highest rates of limb loss (due to mines), the country is not designed for people with impaired mobility.


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The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation by Jono Bacon

barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), collaborative editing, crowdsourcing, Debian, DevOps, digital divide, digital rights, do what you love, do-ocracy, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, Guido van Rossum, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jono Bacon, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, openstreetmap, Richard Stallman, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, software as a service, Stephen Fry, telemarketer, the long tail, union organizing, VA Linux, web application

While IRC is useful, I have always been conscious to remember that most members start out unfamiliar with IRC and how to use it. You should always ensure that there are nice, clear instructions (with screenshots) showing how to connect with IRC. Voice over IP (VoIP) Examples include: Skype Ekiga Online telephony such as Skype or a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) client such as Ekiga is the equivalent of having a conference call. As such, the same benefits and limitations apply: you can’t practically have more than 5–10 people in a conversation, but it does feel engaging. A downside of this medium is that it requires (a) a reasonably powerful Internet connection and (b) sound hardware and a microphone, which may not be as common as you would expect.

Here we want to separate out emotion and get to the heart of what really happened. You should first speak to those on both sides of the conflict and ask them to provide you with their stories. To engage in this discussion, you need to decide how to communicate with them. I highly recommend doing this on the phone or via Voice over IP (such as Skype) if possible. A phone conversation is far more interpersonal and allows both parties to communicate more quickly than over email or a chat medium such as IRC. When you gather this initial story, you should expect a fairly significant amount of venting and emotion. Expect both parties to speak quickly, dart the focus around different issues, and keep remembering details and frustrations they had previously forgotten to mention in the conversation.

By finding these patterns, you can make progress toward a general agreement and also build a more positive atmosphere around shared values as opposed to differing ones. The first step is to schedule the discussion. If the conflict is between two specific people, the best medium for discussion is typically a conference call. This can happen on a range of online telephony services (such as Skype) or by using a conventional telephone conference call service. Many conventional handsets even support three-way conversations at no extra cost. If the conflict is public and part of a team or group, schedule a public meeting. I have found the most suitable medium for this to be IRC. It allows people to share thoughts quickly so long as they can all get online at a specific time.


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The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

Maria’s family is from Waziristan—or, as she puts it, “Yes, my parents, my in-laws, myself, we all belong to this place called Waziristan.” She now lives in Lahore, where her husband is stationed as a civil servant, but no matter her physical location, the virtual business is bustling. Maria Umar shares her story on a Skype call from her son’s bedroom in Lahore, the only place in her home where she can keep her kids out and have a quiet conversation. A Barcelona soccer flag is draped on the wall above her son’s twin bed, which she sits on as she talks about her improbable success. The story starts six and a half years ago when Maria was pregnant with her second child and teaching in a local private school.

Its GDP of over $25,000 per capita is 15 times what it was at the fall of the Soviet Union and ranks number one among the fifteen former Soviet republics. The real success of Estonia is reflected not only in these statistics, but also in its place as one of the world’s leading centers of innovation. Estonia has not produced a centi-billion-dollar company like Google, but it has achieved some notable successes, including Skype. More significant, it has innovated in a way that every place in the world, including Silicon Valley, should envy. In doing so, it has improved its civic and political life in a way that positions it as well as any place in the world for the industries of the future. CLOSED FOR BUSINESS Estonia and Belarus were in nearly the same position following independence and made opposite decisions about their future.

CHAPTER 2: THE FUTURE OF THE HUMAN MACHINE Survival rates for a first relapse are slim: “Doctor Survives Cancer He Studies,” McDonnell Genome Institute, Washington University, http://genome.wustl.edu/articles/detail/doctor-survives-cancer-he-studies. They decided to do something: Lukas Wartman, Skype interview with Teal Pennebaker, December 2, 2013. It turned out that one: Gina Kolata, “In Treatment for Leukemia, Glimpses of the Future,” New York Times, July 7, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/health/in-gene-sequencing-treatment-for-leukemia-glimpses-of-the-future.html?pagewanted=1. Four years later: Wartman, interview.


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Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

4chan, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, citation needed, context collapse, Day of the Dead, DeepMind, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Firefox, Flynn Effect, Google Hangouts, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, lolcat, machine translation, moral panic, multicultural london english, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, off-the-grid, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social bookmarking, social web, SoftBank, Steven Pinker, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, Twitter Arab Spring, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine

Semi Internet People’s early internet cultural touchstones consist more of funny chain emails than the crudely animated Flash videos of the Full Internet People. Although they took longer to develop, by now Semi Internet People do generally have some relationships that they keep up via technology, especially using email, texting, chat apps, Facebook, Skype, FaceTime, or other video calls. They’re often aware of internet slang, especially the kinds that got popularized in the late 1990s, when they were first coming online. They never quite got into as many emoticons as the more internetty cohorts, probably sticking to :-), but they leapfrogged directly into emoji.

They’ve both never really known an internet without Facebook and YouTube and wifi and touchscreens, and they’re both disproportionately likely to be using their family members’ cast-off electronics. Pre Internet People generally have one account somewhere that a more adept internet person set up for them, which may be on email, “the Facebook,” a text chat app like WhatsApp, or videochat like Skype or FaceTime. They know how to do basic things like send and receive messages there, but if they ever get logged out or if the app changes its interface, they’re going to have to ask for help again. They might only use the internet through a touchscreen device like a smartphone or tablet, but if they use a computer, they probably have a desktop shortcut helpfully labeled “The Internet” or “E-Mail,” and woe betide them if anything ever happens to it.

The problem with videocalling was that it faced an insurmountable social obstacle: with a robust norm of always answering a ringing phone and no efficient way to plan a phone call except via the same medium, the risk was too great of catching someone unclothed or with a messy house in the background. Picking up a videocall out of the blue was simply too awkward to contemplate. But since every videochat program includes a text messaging feature, you can plan a videochat before committing to one (“hey, you ready to skype?” “just give me 2 min”) and this awkwardness vanishes: you have the option to decline via text where no one can see you, or a minute to scramble into a decent-looking shirt. Paradoxically, having access to the lesser intrusiveness of chat conversations makes it easier to have higher-bandwidth conversations in video.


Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

It was the same story across almost all of the Snowden disclosures. There was the infamous PRISM program, the second Snowden-related bombshell reported by the Washington Post and the Guardian, on June 6, 2013. The initial coverage of the PRISM program mistakenly described the NSA as “tapping into” the servers of Facebook, Apple, Skype, Microsoft, and other high-tech giants with some kind of “direct access.”25 In fact, the data was turned over to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation by the companies under lawful access procedures, and then shared with the nsa. That explains why the companies responded to the news reports with denials of knowledge of PRISM: the latter was a code name the NSA had given to the arrangement, not something the companies themselves would recognize.

How easy it is to track their movements, to see their planning in progress as it unfolds from the very device they hold in their hands, and that they carry with them as they go about their daily business. How different it is from the time when moving to another country would shield them from the dictator’s totalizing gaze and iron grip. Thanks to social media and spyware, we’re in your chats. We’re in your Skype calls. We’re in your bedroom. We’re in your mind … Whetting the appetites of autocrats, while simultaneously educating them on means and methods, have been the private intelligence and surveillance contractors, most of them based or originating in the West. While states do develop surveillance systems in-house, the reality is that most surveillance services are outsourced to private industry.

Says Lepawsky, “No amount of post-consumer recycling can recoup the waste generated before consumers purchase their devices.”340 * * * Work-from-home and social isolation rules surrounding the COVID crisis prompted a huge increase in demands on the communications ecosystem. Uses of Zoom, FaceTime, Google Hangouts, Skype, Microsoft Teams, and other means of teleconferencing ballooned as friends and family checked in virtually and office routines migrated into makeshift bedroom and living room offices. In the evenings, citizens around the world flocked to already popular streaming video services like Netflix, or to online games like Doom and World of Warcraft.


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Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

Even if political borders remain physically robust, the world has still become more borderless as countries eliminate extraneous visa requirements, currencies are exchangeable in real time at ATMs, content from almost anywhere can be accessed online, and the cost of phone calls drops to zero due to Skype and Viber. The more societies trade and communicate—and depend on each other for food, water, and energy—the less we can pretend that borders are the most important lines on the map. The absence of the full panoply of man-made infrastructure on our maps gives the impression that borders trump other means of portraying human geography.

Google began as a Web browser but has become a global data utility. In the race to provide pervasive and low-cost connectivity, Internet service providers are effectively becoming telecoms themselves, with Google launching Wi-Fi Zeppelin blimps to connect off-grid populations to its services; meanwhile, Internet-based telephony such as Skype or WhatsApp has all but eliminated calling charges; there is no “roaming” on the Internet. No matter how much they compete for eyeballs and data, Google and Facebook agree that there is no higher virtue than expanding connectivity, hence their partnership to launch more satellites to serve the “Other Three Billion.”*1 In the most remote corners of the world where there are neither hospitals nor electricity people have solar or motion-powered mobile phones.

Critics such as Harvard’s Robert Putnam and MIT’s Sherry Turkle who point to digital life as eroding family bonds ignore the importance of these new and more diverse relationships, as well as how digital communications reduce transaction costs and free up time for new kinds of engagement, learning, consumption, or investment. For example, Skype calling minutes increased by 500 percent from 2008 to 2013, no doubt bringing many families closer together while also enabling individuals to more easily afford to learn everything from the piano to Mandarin.*9 We should also remember that in low-trust societies such as Latin America, social media are essential to circulate accurate information to circumvent elite lies.


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European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain

3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, debt deflation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Irish property bubble, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, peer-to-peer rental, price stability, private sector deleveraging, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, savings glut, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, working-age population, Zipcar

Wayra, one set up by Telefónica, a Spanish telecoms company that owns O2 in the UK, has fourteen academies in twelve countries in Europe and Latin America that provide funding of up to €40,000 plus office space and mentoring. Europe needs to champion angel investors such as Niklas Zennström, the Swedish co-founder of Skype, who has raised $165 million for his second London-based venture-capital firm, Atomico Ventures II. “When it took us more than a year to get financing for Skype, we knew what line of business we eventually had to get into,” he observes.700 Marc Simoncini, the French founder of Meetic, Europe’s biggest dating website, has earmarked €100 million of his fortune for this.701 Brent Hoberman, the co-founder of lastminute.com, is a partner in PROfounders, an early-stage investment firm.

Italy did worst of all: a big fat zero.19 Europe’s productivity pipeline is blocked. Not enough new businesses are launched. Start-ups have trouble lifting off. Growth in promising small companies often stalls. Established businesses don’t innovate enough or invest enough in future growth. With a few notable exceptions such as Skype, Spotify and Shazam, the internet revolution has largely happened elsewhere. The new giants of our digital world – Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, PayPal, eBay – are all American. There is no European equivalent of Silicon Valley. Europe isn’t just falling further behind the US; it also faces ever-greater competition from China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, Korea and other emerging economies – not just in lower-end manufacturing but also in higher-tech sectors.

Median income – that of a household richer than half of the population and poorer than the other half – plunged by more than a fifth in Greece between 2010 and 2012.536 The poorest tenth lost a third of their income – falling back to where they were in 2001.537 The poorest tenth in Germany have not experienced a sudden fall in income, but are scarcely richer than they were in 2001. Median income has fallen by 5 per cent in Britain, while the poorest tenth have stood still. Technological progress has continued, however. Home computers, then laptops and now tablets have proliferated. An unimaginable wealth of information can now be googled anywhere for free. You can skype your friends across the world and have a video chat without it costing you a penny. A global conversation is beginning on Twitter. Mobile phones are ubiquitous, most of them smart. As a student in 1994, I used to copy mix tapes for my friends; now you can carry all your music in your pocket, or stream it from a massive jukebox in the cloud.


What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge by Marcus Du Sautoy

Albert Michelson, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, banking crisis, bet made by Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, Black Swan, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, Georg Cantor, Hans Lippershey, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, Necker cube, Paul Erdős, Pierre-Simon Laplace, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, Turing test, wikimedia commons

By taking data from different sensors, the highly integrated nature of a network with high Φ can make recommendations for future action. This ability to project oneself into the future, to perform mental time travel, seems to be one of the key evolutionary advantages of consciousness. A network with a high Φ appears to be able to demonstrate such behaviour. But why couldn’t it do all this while unconscious? SKYPING CONSCIOUSNESS Christof Koch, he of the Jennifer Aniston neuron, is a big fan of Φ as a measure of consciousness, so I was keen to push him on whether he thought it was robust enough to provide an answer to the ‘hard problem’, as philosopher David Chalmers dubbed the challenge of getting inside another person’s head.

It’s all open science, it’s not for profit, and they release all the data free. As Koch says: ‘It’s a pretty cool model.’ Since it was going to be tricky to make another trip to California to quiz Koch on his views on Φ and Tononi’s integrated information theory, I decided the next best thing was to access Koch’s consciousness via a Skype call. Koch was keen, though, to check which side of the philosophical divide I was on: ‘Sure, we can chat about consciousness and the extent to which it is unanswerable. But I would hope that you’re not going to turn away young people who are contemplating a career in neuroscience by buying into the philosopher’s conceit of the “Hard problem” (hard with a capital H).

It is a story that I have kept in mind ever since embarking on this journey into the unknown. Koch added another important voice to the debate, that of his collaborator Francis Crick, who wrote in 1996: ‘It is very rash to say that things are beyond the scope of science.’ Koch was in excited mood when we finally connected our consciousnesses via Skype – actually, I’ve never seen him anything but excited about life at the cutting edge of one of today’s greatest scientific challenges. Two days earlier, the Allen Institute had just released data that tried to classify the different cell types that you find in the brain. ‘One of the unknowns is how many different sorts of brain cells are there.


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American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales

4chan, access to a mobile phone, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, dark pattern, digital divide, East Village, Edward Snowden, feminist movement, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, invention of the printing press, James Bridle, jitney, Kodak vs Instagram, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, San Francisco homelessness, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, The Chicago School, women in the workforce

After camp, they started gradually making contact through Facebook messaging, occasional texting, favoriting each other’s tweets, and liking each other’s pictures on Instagram. “I just thought of him as a friend after camp until a month or two ago,” Lily said. And then something happened when they Skyped. “We just talked and talked for like four hours and he really liked talking to me and I really liked talking to him so…yeah.” Again she nervously rearranged her hair. Ever since then, she said, she and Josh had been Skyping most nights for about an hour, and then for three- or four-hour stretches every weekend, only stopping “when we have to, like, go to the bathroom or take a shower.” Now they were texting all day, every day, even during school (“We just talk about whatever we’re doing, or we’ll say like, Hey, what’s up, hi, bye”).

Of course I want to amount to great things,” she said, “but when everyone’s telling you and constantly badgering you about it, it can be really stressful. At the school I go to, one bad grade can, like, crush a person.” And so she wasn’t sure whether she could fit “a relationship” into her jam-packed schedule. Josh lived on Long Island, too, in a town nearby, but through all of this texting and Skyping and favoriting and liking, they had never managed to actually see each other in person. “And that’s why I wanted it to be a movie date,” Lily said, rambling along in her restless way, “a double date, because if it’s weird to see each other again there will be other people there.” She had enlisted the help of her best friend, Priya, to come along that night “in case it gets awkward,” and Josh was bringing another boy as Priya’s date.

“It’s almost like a title people associate me with”—meaning “Instafamous.” She relayed all this as if she thought it were ridiculous. The other girls listened with slightly strained expressions. I asked them what social media accounts they were on. “I have Facebook, a YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat,” Melissa said, “Vine…” “Path, Skype,” Zoe added. “Tumblr,” said Padma. “I have a Twitter, but I don’t use it except for stalking other people,” Greta said. The other girls smiled knowingly. “I think everyone does it,” said Greta. “Everyone looks through other people’s profiles, but especially being teenage girls, we look at the profiles of the males we find attractive and we stalk the females the males find attractive.


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A Burglar's Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh

A. Roger Ekirch, big-box store, card file, dark matter, Evgeny Morozov, game design, index card, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Minecraft, off grid, Rubik’s Cube, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, statistical model, the built environment, urban planning

Another useful resource on this topic is the FBI’s own collection of “surreptitious entry” files, available online as a thirty-part sequence of PDFs called “Surreptitious Entries (Black Bag Jobs).” The FBI’s definition of burglary also comes from the FBI website (fbi.gov). Retired burglar Jack Dakswin—a pseudonym—told me his story over Skype and, to a certain extent, e-mail. Witold Rybczynski’s question “Where is the front door?” comes from his book How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013). 2: Crime Is Just Another Way to Use the City The specific flights with the LAPD Air Support Division described in this chapter took place in July 2013 and January 2014; quotations or references to conversations with LAPD pilots and tactical flight officers come from my interviews.

Westlake, whose books The Hot Rock (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1970) and Thieves’ Dozen (New York: Mysterious Press, 2004) are particularly enjoyable. 3: Your Building Is the Target Bill Mason’s memoir, Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief (New York: Villard, 2003), written with Lee Gruenfeld, is a thoroughly enjoyable introduction to the life of a cat burglar. Mason’s appearance on CNN was in September 2003; a transcript of the show is available online. My conversation with Jack Dakswin—a pseudonym—took place over Skype, with some preliminary details shared over e-mail. The book I refer to here, Local Code: The Constitution of a City at 42 Degrees North Latitude by architect Michael Sorkin, was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 1996 and appears to be out of print. “Where Have All the Burglars Gone?” was published by The Economist in July 2013.

Elston Avenue in Chicago, Illinois. The scene described here took place on June 5, 2013. John “Jack” Benigno is a sergeant with the Chicago Police Department, but spoke to me in an unofficial capacity, as a civilian locksport enthusiast. We spoke in person at the event at PS:One, but much more extensively over Skype and e-mail. Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995, translated by Alan Sheridan) has become a classic in the field of security studies. The story of the Antwerp diamond heist is told in the book Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History by Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell (New York: Sterling, 2010).


pages: 477 words: 75,408

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

In January 2016 Baidu (often described as China's Google) showed off a system called DuLight which uses a camera to capture an image of something in front of you, sends the image to an app on your smartphone, which identifies the object and announces what it is. One application of this is to help blind people know what they are “looking” at.[xc] You can download a similar app called Aipoly for free at iTunes.[xci] Speech recognition systems that exceed human performance will be available in your smartphone soon.[xcii] Microsoft-owned Skype introduced real-time machine translation in March 2014: it is not yet perfect, but it is improving all the time. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed an intriguing discovery which he called transfer learning: “If you teach it English, it learns English,” he said. “Then you teach it Mandarin: it learns Mandarin, but it also becomes better at English, and quite frankly none of us know exactly why.”

In a number of genre categories, especially romance and crime, the most popular books are written by AIs. Major sporting competitions have three strands: robots, augmented humans, and un-augmented humans. Audiences for the latter category are dwindling. Long-distance communication is massively improved by VR Skype. Dating sites have become surprisingly effective by requiring their members to provide clothing samples from which they extract data about their smells and their pheromones. The discovery that relationship outcomes correlate closely with these data have slashed divorce rates. 11. Management.

t=33 [lxxxviii] http://news.sciencemag.org/social-sciences/2015/02/facebook-will-soon-be-able-id-you-any-photo [lxxxix] http://www.computerworld.com/article/2941415/data-privacy/is-facial-recognition-a-threat-on-facebook-and-google.html [xc] http://www.wired.com/2016/01/2015-was-the-year-ai-finally-entered-the-everyday-world/ [xci] At the time of writing, April 2016, Aipoly is impressive, but far from perfect. [xcii] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-23/speech-recognition-better-than-a-human-s-exists-you-just-can-t-use-it-yet.html [xciii] http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/05/28/microsoft-unveils-near-real-time-language-translation-for-skype/ [xciv] http://www.technologyreview.com/news/544651/baidus-deep-learning-system-rivals-people-at-speech-recognition/#comments [xcv] https://youtu.be/V1eYniJ0Rnk?t=1 [xcvi] http://edge.org/response-detail/26780 [xcvii] http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/19/how-real-businesses-are-using-machine-learning/ [xcviii] http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-cutting-edge-ibm-20160422-story.html [xcix] http://www.wired.com/2016/04/openai-elon-musk-sam-altman-plan-to-set-artificial-intelligence-free/ [c] http://www.strategyand.pwc.com/global/home/what-we-think/innovation1000/top-innovators-spenders#/tab-2015 [ci] 2013 data: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/rdit1/gross-domestic-expenditure-on-research-and-development/2013/stb-gerd-2013.html [cii] http://insights.venturescanner.com/category/artificial-intelligence-2/ [ciii] http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/25/investing-in-artificial-intelligence/ [civ] http://www.wired.com/2015/11/google-open-sources-its-artificial-intelligence-engine/ [cv] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/13/google-updates-tensorflow-open-source-artificial-intelligence [cvi] http://www.wired.com/2015/12/facebook-open-source-ai-big-sur/ [cvii] The name Parsey McParseFace is a play on a jokey name for a research ship which received a lot of votes in a poll run by the British government in April 2016. http://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-open-source-parsey-mcparseface-helps-machines-understand-english-1463088180 [cviii] Assuming you don't count the Vatican as a proper country. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/google-project-loon-provide-free-wifi-across-sri-lanka-1513136 [cix] https://setandbma.wordpress.com/2013/02/04/who-coined-the-term-big-data/ [cx] http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/37701/amara-s-law [cxi] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n05/john-lanchester/the-robots-are-coming [cxii] Haitz's Law states that the cost per unit of useful light emitted decreases exponentially [cxiii] http://computationalimagination.com/article_cpo_decreasing.php [cxiv] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/technology/circuits/07essay.html [cxv] . http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/02/intel-forges-ahead-to-10nm-will-move-away-from-silicon-at-7nm/ [cxvi] .


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When You Find Out the World Is Against You: And Other Funny Memories About Awful Moments by Kelly Oxford

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Donald Trump, Joan Didion, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Snapchat

He makes prayer hands to the sky. “Yes, we Skype two times a day. I came to Canada to work at McDonald’s and send them money. It’s much more money than I could have made there in a lifetime.” Jesus, Kelly. Shit. Shit. Shit. Keep smiling, fucking nod. Keep your fucking shit together for this man right now. “I can grab the food for you.” He steps away from the window, packs our food in the bag and passes it to me, then drapes his arm back across his body and slightly rocks back and forth. I smile like a crazy person, nodding. “That’s so great that you can Skype! Okay! Thanks. I hope I’ll see you soon!

Whatever it is, whatever I’m doing, the kids happy. I’m lucky to be here, I’m lucky to be here. I am happy I know there are probably others like me, like Aiden’s mom. Maybe she’s alone sipping a McDonald’s Coke right now, too? I am the village. I’m happy I don’t have to send money across the world to my children I have to Skype twice a day. I let the suction in my mouth go, relax, sip the Coke, wipe my eyes, and go back into the house. 5 Keeping Score “Mom,” she sighs, trying to roll her eyes but only succeeding in doing a strange-looking thing where her eyes dart back and forth. “I’m not going to school, ever again.”


pages: 277 words: 79,360

The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50 by Jonathan Rauch

behavioural economics, endowment effect, experimental subject, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income per capita, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, loss aversion, public intellectual, Richard Thaler, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TED Talk, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Online, Barb found an international school in Cairo that needed a special education teacher with strength in math. “We did Skype interviews and the people at the school there were just great. You could tell it was going to be a good institution.” Their kids were in their twenties. Her husband was retired. They felt ready. How did the move go? “We loved it.” Barb and her husband reveled in Egypt’s rich history and culture. She learned some Arabic, made local friends, camped in the desert with a bedouin guide. Her husband got involved with the local schools. Then, when Barb’s principal moved to a school in Chennai, Barb and her husband followed her. When I Skyped with her there, she described Chennai as amazing, a place where the people are gentle and the school absorbing.

In my survey, she described her fifties as exciting, full, entertaining, and rated her life satisfaction at nine, near the top of the Cantril scale—versus only a four for her forties, for which her descriptors were struggle, stressful. I rarely see turnarounds of that magnitude, so I tracked her down for an interview—via Skype to India, where she lives and works. Barb was raised by a conservative family in Texas and never felt she fit in well. She used a lot of drugs and alcohol in her teens. In her twenties she met her husband and entered what turned out to be a successful marriage, but she struggled to figure out who she was.


pages: 261 words: 71,349

The Introvert Entrepreneur: Amplify Your Strengths and Create Success on Your Own Terms by Beth Buelow

do what you love, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Skype, solopreneur, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh

Without me needing to be present, two people promoted my services, and a client was born. This is one of the best ways to expand your reach while still preserving your energy. Find those people who are your biggest cheerleaders and advocates. They could be family members, friends, teachers, mentors, and professional colleagues. Reach out intentionally, in person if you can, or via Skype, VoIP, or phone if distance is a challenge. At the most basic level, you’ll want to learn more about each other’s businesses and needs so you can extend your reach to more people. This process is about cultivating a group of mutual champions. Each person in the relationship is actively seeking opportunities to promote the other.

Remember to cross-reference the profiles to get the complete picture. If someone seems to be in sync with you, your business, and values, reach out to her through the most appropriate social media platform. Suggest a coffee date if you live in the same area; if not, have “virtual coffee” over Skype or other videoconferencing service. You don’t need to go into the conversation with a strict agenda. Let the other person know when you send your introductory message that you’re interested in learning more about her business, in the event you can share her as a resource or otherwise support her goals.

See also Self-reflection for fear, 44–45 Rehearsal in networking, 102 in sales, 126–27 Religious groups, for networking, 94 The Reluctant Rainmaker: A Guide for Lawyers Who Hate Selling (Fleming), 129–30 Research, 58 for networking, 99 for niche, 120 risk as, 71–72 on social media, 99 Research and development (R&D), 145 Respect, 12 Retreats, 140 Reverse blogging, 173 Risk of failure, 71–73 of introvert entrepreneurs, 66 as research, 71–72 on social media, 164 voice and, 71–73 Robbins, Tony, 175 Roberts, Julia, 13 Rotary, 179 Sales by ambiverts, 148–49 content for, 128–47 Doerr on, 149–51 education in, 128–29 energy management and, 116 by extroverts, 148 financial return on, 144–47 by introvert entrepreneur, 115–51 love and, 144–45 message for, 116–19 middle ground for, 148–49 niche for, 116–22 old story about, 122–28 patience in, 127 public speaking for, 177 questions in, 126–27 rehearsal in, 126–27 steps for transformation, 125–28 strengths in, 124–28 success in, 141–44 value equation in, 149 voice in, 147 winners in, 149–51 Sales Success, 60 Scarcity in collaboration, 210 competitiveness and, 86 fear and, 34–35 Schleef, Susan “Joy,” 32 Schwab, Charles, 13 Self-care energy management with, 88 for networking, 88, 99 Self-effacing, 14 Self-loathing, 19 Self-possessed, 15 Self-promotion of introvert entrepreneur, 19, 122–28 old story about, 122–28 self-talk about, 123–24 Self-Promotion for Introverts (Ancowitz), 179 Self-reflection assumptions and, 39 of introvert entrepreneur, 15–17 for reality check, 39 Self-reliance, 14–15 “Self-Reliance” (Emerson), 15 Self-talk, 106 on content, 130 about self-promotion, 123–24 Sellner, Jadah, 226–28 Shakespeare, William, 87 Shulman, Joan, 36 Simple Green Smoothies, 226–28 Sinek, Simon, 99–101, 113 Skype, 83, 168 Small Planet Studio, 202 Small talk, 77 Social media. See also Facebook; LinkedIn; Twitter content on, 163 extrovert on, 164 hobbies on, 167 for networking, 20, 82, 86, 114 for other people, 86 overview of, 161–64 real life with, 165–68 research on, 99 risk on, 164 transparency on, 153, 164–65 tribe and, 155–58, 161–64 values and, 167 vulnerability on, 164 Solitude of introverts, 22–23 networking and, 76 Spielberg, Steven, 13 StartOut, 112 Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (Sinek), 99, 113 Success business expansion with, 217–18 in collaboration, 209, 210 defined, 64 freedom as, 143–44 Janeczko on, 113 motivation and, 143 in public speaking, 177–78 in sales, 141–44 ways to set yourself up for, 229–40 Surface acting, 67 Sustainability choices for, 21 for introvert entrepreneur, 21, 236–39 tribe and, 155 Swenson, Paula, 105 Talbot, Betsy, 28–29, 54–55 Talking to extroverts, 11–12 to introverts, 10–11 small talk, 77 Team Introvert, 13 Technology, 158–61 TED talks, 178 Telephone discomfort with, 44 for networking, 83 Testimonials from networking, 84, 85 for public speaking, 180 thank-you note for, 85 Thank-you notes, 85 TheIntrovertEntrepreneur.com, 63, 138, 139 on collaboration, 193 leadership resources in, 220 Toastmasters, 178, 179 Transparency authenticity and, 68–69 with content, 131 of introvert entrepreneurs, 153, 164–65 on social media, 153, 164–65 in tribe, 156–57, 185 Trial and error, 74 Tribe.


pages: 280 words: 79,029

Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation Is Reshaping Our WorldÑFor the Better by Andrew Palmer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Innovator's Dilemma, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, Northern Rock, obamacare, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, transaction costs, Tunguska event, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vanguard fund, web application

They worked out the appropriate exchange rate by using the midmarket rate published on Reuters and saved themselves hundreds of pounds in foreign-exchange fees. Hinrikus, a T-shirt-wearing, mild-mannered Estonian with a beard, may not seem like an obvious threat to mainstream banks. But he also happened to be the first employee of Skype, the service that lets you make calls over the Internet for free. Skype at the time was based on a “peer-to-peer” system, in which each user acted as a node in the infrastructure. That same networking concept underpins TransferWise, the firm that Hinricus and Käärmann launched with their own money in 2011 to enable international money transfers.

., 32 Keys, Benjamin, 48 Kharroubi, Enisse, 79 Kickstarter, 172 King, Stephen, 99 Klein, David, 182 Krugman, Paul, xv Lahoud, Sal, 166 Lang, Luke, 153, 161–162 Laplanche, Renaud, 179, 184, 188, 190, 193–194, 196–197 Latency, 53 Law of large numbers, 17 Layering, 57 Left-digit bias, 46 Lehman Brothers, x, 44, 65 Lending direct, 84 marketplace, 184 payday, 200 relationship-based, 11, 151, 206–208 secured, xiv, 76 unsecured, 206 See also Loans; Peer-to-peer lending Lending Club, 172, 179–180, 182–184, 187, 189, 194–195, 197 Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci), 19 Lerner, Josh, 59 Lethal pandemic, risk-modeling for demographic profile, 230 exceedance-probability curve, 231–232, 232 figure 3 historical data, 228–229 infectiousness and virulence, 229–230 location of outbreak, 230–231 Leverage, 51, 70–71, 80, 186, 188 Leverage ratio, 76–77 Lewis, Michael, 57 Liber Abaci or Book of Calculation (Fibonacci), 19 LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate), 41 Liebman, Jeffrey, 98 Life expectancy government reaction to, 128–129 projections of, 124–127, 126 figure 2 ratio of young to older people, 127–128 Life-insurance policies, 142 Life-settlements industry, 142–143 Life table, 20 Limited liability, 212 Liquidity, 12–14, 39, 185–186 List, John, 109 The Little Book of Behavioral Investing (Montier), 156 Lo, Andrew, 113–115, 117–123 Loans low-documentation, 48–49 secured, 76 small business, 181, 216 student, 164, 166–167, 169–171, 182 syndicated, 41 Victory Loans, 28 See also Lending; Peer-to-Peer lending Logistic regression, 201 London, early fire insurance in, 16–17 London, Great Fire of, 16 London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR), 41 Long-Term Capital Management, 123 Longevity, betting on, 143–144 Loss aversion, 136 Lotteries, 212, 213 Low-documentation loans, 48–49 Lumni, 165, 168, 175 Lustgarten, Anders, 111 Lynn, Jeff, 160–161 Mack, John, 180 Mahwah, New Jersey, 52, 53 Marginal borrowers assessment of, 216–217 behavioral finance and, 208–214 industrialization of credit, 206 microfinance and, 203 savings schemes, 209–214 small businesses, 215–219 unsecured lending to, 206 Wonga, 203, 205, 208 Marginal borrowers (continued) ZestFinance, 199, 202, 205–206 Maritime piracy, solutions to, 151–152 Maritime trade, role of in history of finance, 3, 7–8, 14, 17, 23 Market makers, 15–16, 55 MarketInvoice, 195, 207, 217–218 Marketplace lending, 184 Markowitz, Harry, 118 Massachusetts, use of inflation-protected bonds in, 26 Massachusetts, use of social-impact bonds in, 98 Matching engine, 52 Maturity transformation, 12–13, 187–188, 193 McKinsey & Company, ix, 42 Mercator Advisory Group, 203 Merrill, Charles, 28 Merrill, Douglas, 199, 201 Merrill Lynch, 28 Merton, Robert, 31, 113–114, 123–124, 129–132, 142, 145 Mian, Atif, 204 Michigan, University of, financial survey by, 134–135 Microfinance, 203 Micropayment model, 217 Microwave technology, 53 The Million Adventure, 213–214 Minsky, Hyman, 42 Minsky moment, 42 Mississippi scheme, 36 Mitchell, Justin, 166–167 Momentum Ignition, 57 Monaco, modeling risk of earthquake in, 227 Money, history of, 4–5 Money illusion, 73–74 Money laundering, 192 Money-market funds, 43, 44 Monkeys, Yale University study of loss aversion with, 136 Montier, James, 156–157 Moody, John, 24 Moody’s, 24, 235 Moore’s law, 114 Morgan Stanley, 188 Mortgage-backed securities, 49, 233 Mortgage credit by ZIP code, study of, 204 Mortgage debt, role of in 2007–2008 crisis, 69–70 Mortgage products, unsound, 36–37 Mortgage securitization, 47 Multisystemic therapy, 96 Munnell, Alicia, 129 Naked credit-default swaps, 143 Nature Biotechnology, on drug-development megafunds, 118 “Neglected Risks, Financial Innovation and Financial Fragility” (Gennaioli, Shleifer, and Vishny), 42 Network effects, 181 New York, skyscraper craze in, 74–75 New York City, prisoner-rehabilitation program in, 108 New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), 31, 52, 53, 61, 64 New York Times, Merrill Lynch ad in, 28 Noncorrelated assets, 122 Nonprofits, growth of in United States, 105–106 Northern Rock, x NYMEX, 60 NYSE Euronext, 52 NYSE (New York Stock Exchange), 31, 52, 53, 61, 64 OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), 128, 147 Oldfield, Sean, 67–68, 80–84 OnDeck, 216–218 One Service, 94–95, 105, 112 Operating expense ratio, 188–189 Options, 15, 124 Order-to-trade ratios, 63 Oregon, interest in income-share agreements, 172, 176 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 128, 147 Overtrading, 24 Packard, Norman, 60 Pandit, Vikram, 184 Park, Sun Young, 233 Partnership mortgage, 81 Pasion, 11 Pave, 166–168, 173, 175, 182 Payday lending Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, survey on, 200 information on applicants, acquisition of, 202 underwriting of, 201 PayPal, 219 Peak child, 127 Peak risk, 228 Peer-to-peer lending advantages of, 187–189 auction system, 195 big investors in, 183 borrowers, assessment of, 197 in Britain, 181 commercial mortgages, 181 CommonBond, 182, 184, 197 consumer credit, 181 diversification, 196 explained, 180 Funding Circle, 181–182, 189, 197 investors in, 195 Lending Club, 179–180, 182–184, 187, 189, 194–195, 197 network effects, 181 ordinary savers and, 184 Prosper, 181, 187, 195 RateSetter, 181, 187, 196 Relendex, 181 risk management, 195–197 securitization, 183–184, 196 Peer-to-peer lending (continued) small business loans, 181 SoFi, 184 student loans, 182 Zopa, 181, 187, 188, 195 Pensions, cost of, 125–126 Perry, Rick, 142–143 Peterborough, England, social-impact bond pilot in, 90–92, 94–95, 104–105, 112 Petri, Tom, 172 Pharmaceuticals, decline of investment in, 114–115 Piracy Reporting Centre, International Maritime Bureau, 151 Polese, Kim, 210 Poor, Henry Varnum, 24 “Portfolio Selection” (Markowitz), 118 Prediction Company, 60–61 Preferred shares, 25 Prepaid cards, 203 Present value of cash flows, 19 Prime borrowers, 197 Prince, Chuck, 50–51, 62 Principal-agent problem, 8 Prisoner rehabilitation programs, 90–91, 94–95, 98, 108, 112 Private-equity firms, 69, 85, 91, 105, 107 Projection bias, 72–73 Property banking crises and, xiv, 69 banking mistakes involving, 75–80 behavioral biases and, 72–75 dangerous characteristics of, 70–72 fresh thinking, need for, xvii, 80 investors’ systematic errors in, 74–75 perception of as safe investment, 76, 80 Prosper, 181, 187, 195 Provisioning funds, 187 Put options, 9, 82 Quants, 19, 63, 113 QuickBooks, 218 Quote stuffing, 57 Raffray, André-François, 144 Railways, affect of on finance, 23–25 Randomized control trials (RCTs), 101 Raphoen, Christoffel, 15–16 Raphoen, Jan, 15–16 RateSetter, 181, 187, 196 RCTs (randomized control trials), 101 Ready for Zero, 210–211 Rectangularization, 125, 126 figure 2 Regulation NMS, 61 Reinhart, Carmen, 35 Reinsurance, 224 Relendex, 181 Rentes viagères, 20 Repurchase “repo” transactions, 15, 185 Research-backed obligations, 119 Reserve Primary Fund, 44 Retirement, funding for anchoring effect, 137–138 annuities, 139 auto-enrollment in pension schemes, 135 auto-escalation, 135–136 conventional funding, 127–128 decumulation, 138–139 government reaction to increased longevity, 128–129 home equity, 139–140 life expectancy, projections of, 124–127, 126 figure 2 life insurance policies, cash-surrender value of, 142 personal retirement savings, 128–129, 132–133 replacement rate, 125 reverse mortgage, 140–142 savings cues, experiment with, 137 SmartNest, 129–131 Reverse mortgages, 140–142 Risk-adjusted returns, 118 Risk appetite, 116 Risk assessment, 24, 45, 77–78, 208 Risk aversion, 116, 215 Risk-based capital, 77 Risk-based pricing model, 176 Risk management, 55, 117–118, 123, 195–197 Risk Management Solutions, 222 Risk sharing, 8, 82 Risk-transfer instrument, 226 Risk weights, 77–78 Rogoff, Kenneth, 35 “The Role of Government in Education” (Friedman), 165 Roman Empire business corporation in, 7 financial crisis in, 36 forerunners of banks in, 11 maritime insurance in, 8 Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs), 209–210 Roulette wheel, use of in experiment on anchoring, 138 Royal Bank of Scotland, 186 Rubio, Marco, 172 Russia, mortgage market in, 67 S-curve, in diffusion of innovations, 45 Salmon, Felix, 155 Samurai bonds, 27 Satsuma Rebellion (1877), 27 Sauter, George, 58 Save to Win, 214 Savings-and-loan crisis in US (1990s), 30 Savings cues, experiment with, 137 Scared Straight social program, 101 Scholes, Myron, 31, 123–124 Science, Technology, and Industry Scoreboard of OECD, 147 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 54, 56, 57, 58, 64 Securities markets, 14 Securitization, xi, 20, 37–38, 117–122, 183–184, 196, 236 Seedrs, 160–161 Sellaband, 159 Shared equity, 80–84 Shared-equity mortgage, 84 Shepard, Chris, xii–xiii Shiller, Robert, xv–xvi, 242 Shleifer, Andrei, 42, 44 Short termism, 58 SIBs. See Social-impact bonds Sims, Kath, 96 Single-family-home rental sector, 85 Single-family rental bond, 85 Skype, 190 Sleeping sickness, SIB program for elimination of, 103 Small businesses, as marginal borrowers, 215–219 Smart money, comparison of to dumb money, 155–158 SmartNest, 129–131, 211 Social Finance, 93, 97 Social-impact bonds (SIBs) benefits of, 91, 98–102, 104, 106 in Britain, 95–97 cost-effectiveness of, 100–102 data collection, 104 defined, 90 financial incentive, effect of on donors, 110–111 flexibility of, 105–106 Fresno, California, pilot program in, 103–104 G-8 task force on, 97 health-impact bonds, 103–104 individual givers, attraction of, 109 Massachusetts, prisoner-rehabilitation programs in, 98 New York City, prisoner-rehabilitation program in, 108 Peterborough, England, pilot in, 90–91, 94–95, 104–105, 107 philanthropists, role of, 108 possible abuses of, 111 purpose, 107 risk management in, 108 in United States, 98 Social-impact bonds (SIBs), uses for accomodation for homeless people, 96–97, 106–107 adoption of hard-to-place children, 97 cutting HIV infection rates in Swaziland, 103 early detection of health conditions, 102–104 elimination of sleeping sickness in Uganda, 103 improving educational outcomes for girls in India, 103 keeping troubled adolescents out of foster care, 96 prisoner rehabilitation programs, 90–91, 94–95, 98, 108 soldiers reentering civilian life, 102 Social insurance, 183 Social-investment bank, 92–93 Social Security, 128 Societas publicanorum, 7 SoFi, 184 South Sea Bubble, 36 South Sea Company, 36 S&P 500 index, 29, 40, 157 Spain, banking crisis in, xiv–xv, 69, 75 Spanish flu outbreak (1918–1919), 228, 230 Spear, Leeds & Kellogg, 61 St.


pages: 227 words: 76,850

Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life by Sarah Edmondson

Albert Einstein, dark matter, financial independence, Keith Raniere, Mason jar, Skype, Steve Jobs, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, young professional

Barbara Bouchey told me that for a lot of people, the trickiest part for a yellow sash to rise to orange is to work out his or her emotional issues. There were several components to the process to track my progress and hold me accountable. First, I undertook a weekly one-hour session the company called Goals Lab, phone calls or Skype sessions where I’d check in with my goals coach to discuss whether I was overcoming my limitations in order to progress successfully toward my aim of getting my orange sash, and discuss next steps. I studied to show them my proficiency in the principles, the curriculum, and the sales techniques. I flew myself to every Five-Day they offered, including one in Monterey, Mexico, and now I was playing a small role in helping to run the intensives.

This was a huge deal for me, for the Vancouver ESP community, and for NXIVM as a company. In July 2009, at the end of a forty-person intensive, the upper ranks promoted me in front of the entire coaching staff and our class. Mark was in town to help run that training, and for the promotion ceremony he Skyped in both Barb J. and Nancy. After the new students received their red stripe for completing the Five-Day, my two mentors paid me extensive tribute for all of my hard work as Mark placed that crisp orange sash around my neck. I had visualized this moment so many times! Getting to proctor status meant I had reached official, paid coach rank.

Getting to proctor status meant I had reached official, paid coach rank. I had worked my butt off for four years to get there, taking thousands of hours of NXIVM coursework and recruiting hundreds of devotees. I’d done it. Reaching proctor gave me a sense of worth, esteem, and completion that I’d never in my life felt before. Via Skype, Nancy applauded me. Reaching that point made all the hardships I had gone through to get there, and any doubts I had, disappear. There was nothing holding me back. Prior to this, we’d had no proctors in Vancouver or anywhere in Canada. My new status also meant I could open an actual center, as long as I did so in collaboration with a green sash.


pages: 269 words: 70,543

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

With China-created superapp WeChat, you can text or chat in groups or one-on-one; transfer cash to peers; pay bills; get a loan within seconds; buy movie tickets; find nearby friends; order groceries; shop for fashions; and post videos, news, emoticons, and photos. No need for a business card. You just exchange a barcode-like QR (quick response) code on your smartphone and, presto, you’re connected. WeChat is super innovative—it combines the functions of Facebook, Twitter, Skype, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Amazon. WeChat has more than 1 billion users worldwide, and it’s hard to beat it for work or for play. A San Francisco venture capitalist completed a term sheet for an investment deal in Beijing entirely on WeChat. Fans surrounding a Bay Area venture investor speaking at a Shenzhen conference connected instantaneously with him by scanning his WeChat QR code from their smartphones.

Table 5-5 Key China Unicorns and Chief US-China Venture Investors Xiaomi: Morningside Venture Capital, Qiming Venture, IDG, Temasek, DST Global Meituan Dianping: Qiming Venture, Sequoia Capital China, General Atlantic Pinduoduo: Lightspeed China, IDG Capital, Banyan Partners, Sequoia Capital China ByteDance: SIG Asia, GGV Capital, Qiming Venture, New Enterprise Associates, Hillhouse Capital, Sequoia Capital Kuaishou: DCM Ventures, Sequoia Capital China, Morningside Venture Capital SenseTime: Tiger Global, CDH, IDG Capital, Fidelity International, Temasek, Silver Lake, HOPU Capital Face ++: Qiming Venture, Sinovation Ventures Didi: GGV Capital, GSR Ventures, Matrix Partners China DJI: Sequoia Capital China, Accel Partners NIO: Sequoia Capital China, Temasek, IDG Capital Xiaohongshu: ZhenFund, GGV Capital UB Tech: Qiming Venture, CDH Investments Mobike: Qiming Venture, Vertex Ventures, Hillhouse Capital Source: Silicon Dragon research Stumbles along a Digital Silk Road Despite the growth opportunity for startups, the wide-open landscape for new technologies, and the entrepreneurial culture of China, success is not a given. Several top-tier Sand Hill Road firms have stumbled along this digital Silk Road, not able to transfer their knowledge in from the Valley. Staying power in China is tough. Tim Draper, known for his bets on Skype, Hotmail, and Tesla, was a very early supporter of China tech innovation, dating back nearly two decades. But he’s stopped investing in China, though an early bet on search company Baidu through DFJ and ePlanet made a 33 percent return on a 28 percent stake after the search startup went public on Nasdaq in 2005.

., 208 Shanghai-based Qiming Venture Partners, 8 Shanghai World Financial Towers, 9 Shen, Neil, 128–129, 194 Shenzhen, 2 Short video entertainment apps, 7 Silicon Dragon, 109 Silicon Valley, 20–22, 27, 29, 31, 33, 42, 44, 50–52, 60, 63, 68–69, 79, 95, 105, 117, 129, 132–134, 137–143, 145–146, 150, 153, 158, 178, 192, 196, 199, 204–205, 218–220, 223–225 Silver Lake Partners, 38 Simon Loong, 171 Sina Corp., 95 Sino—US Venture Investors, 135–136 Sinovation Ventures, 110, 146, 165–166 Skype, 1 Snap, 64 Snapchat, 81, 84 Lens Challenges, 69 Social commerce, 20 SoFi, 44 SoftBank, 38, 51, 83, 138, 151, 183 Sonny Wu, 157 Southeast Asia, 56–57, 149 Alibaba and Tencent Investments in, 59 SpaceX, 51, 220 Spielberg, Steven, 52 SQream Technologies, 56 Squawk Box, 86 Stanford university, 10 Starbucks, 15, 99–100, 102–104, 111 initiative with Alibaba, 100–101 Reserve Roastery, 101–102 Startup Asia, 57 “Startup Nation” of Israel, 56 Steven Ji, 128 STX Entertainment, 52 Su Hua, 85 Sun Microsystems, 128 Supercharging stations, 7 T Tai, Bill, 137 Ta-lin Hsu, 102, 139 TangoME, 63 Tang Xiaoou, 167 Taobao, 28, 185, 187 Tao Peng, 113 TechSauce, 148 Temasek, 172 Tencent, 12–13, 20–21, 26, 28–32, 38, 44, 46–48, 51–52, 57, 61, 70, 80–81, 83, 95, 138, 147, 153, 163–164, 171, 190–191, 197, 206, 224 China Literature, 41 corporate culture, 63 diversification strategy, 67 gaming business, 40, 64, 66 growth of, 39–40 social networking service, 41–42 strategic investments, 63–66 in US, 52, 63–65 war with ByteDance, 85 youth culture, 39 Tencent Music Entertainment, 41 Tencent Video, 41, 84 Terminator: Dark Fate, 53 Tesla, 2, 15, 64, 196, 209–210, 220 Thiel, Peter, 138 Thompson, Ben, 77 Tian, Edward, 118–119 Tian Xu, 193 Tiger Computing Solutions, 163 TigerGraph, 163 Tiger Qie, 178 TikTok, 2, 21, 29, 31–32, 39, 43, 66, 69–70, 82, 84, 87 Tina Ju, 140 TMD, 43–44, 69 Tokopedia, 58 The Tonight Show, 85 3D Robotics, 219–220 TopBuzz, 82 Toutiao (Today’s Headlines), 21, 69–70, 80–81, 86–88 Traffic Brain, 178 Trump, Donald, 15, 45, 54–55, 164, 191 Tsai, Joe, 50 Tujia, 116 Twitch, 51 Twitter, 1, 15, 28, 43, 47, 84, 87, 104 U UBazaar mobile, 111 Uber, 21, 44, 51, 57, 60, 64, 83, 103–104, 128, 144, 173, 176–183 Uber Eats, 69, 90 Ubisoft, 64 UBTech, 213 UCAR, 103 UC Berkeley, 11 Ucommune, 110–111 UCWeb, 200 URWork, 110 US-China trade imbalance, 15 Ushi, 107 US IPOs, 131 US market, 46 US privacy laws, 7 US venture fund performance, 130 V Valentine, Don, 132, 139 VC Dixon Doll, 155 Venture capital market of China, 12, 130–158, 224 AI startups, 166 center of gravity for venture investing, 158 cross-border investors, 145–146 digital Silk Road, 136–139 funding for Asian companies, 148 history as a budding venture superpower, 139–140 investment returns, 141 investments in tech companies, 132–135 NEA’s China investing, 141–143 Sino—US Venture investment, 135–136, 146–148 venture firms, 150–158 Video streaming market, 2, 6, 19, 60, 83, 85, 154 Viomi, 77 VIPShop, 189–190 Vipshop, 156 Virtual gifts, 6 Virtual reality, 19 Visa, 32 Visualead, 56 Vivendi, 64 Vivo, 76 Vizio, 54 Volvo, 204 W Waimai, 60 Waldorf Astoria Hotel, 54 Walmart, 57–58 Wang Xing, 43, 89, 91, 94–95, 97 Wang Yi, 169 Wanka Online, 148 Warburg Pincus, 38 Warner Brothers, 51 Wayne Shiong, 121 Waze, 51 WeChat, 1–2, 29, 31, 34–35, 41–43, 46, 82, 106, 115, 144, 177, 187, 191, 197 WeChat Moments, 85 WeChat Pay, 5, 19, 32, 63, 182–183 WeDefend, 170 Wedo, 110 WeFlex, 170 Weibo, 35, 47, 82, 168, 197 Weiner, Jeff, 105–106 Weixin, 41 Wei-Ying Ma, 89 Wei Zhou, 121, 134 WeLab, 170–171 WeReach, 170 WeWork, 15, 104, 111 WeWork China, 108–111 WeWork Go, 109 WhatsApp, 1, 43, 51 Whitman, Meg, 85 William Li, 200, 206 Williams, David, 52 Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati (WSGR), 142–143 Wonder Woman, 52 Woo Space, 110 Workingdom, 110 Wu Xiaoguang, 199 X Xiadong Jiang, 172 Xia Huaxia, 92 Xiaodong Jiang, 142 Xiaomi, 20–21, 68–70, 75, 138, 141, 153, 168 business model, 76–79 core strength of, 73 customers, 72 growth, 72–73 international market, 79–80 Mi Home store locations, 73–74 mobile phone features, 70–71 range of internet-connected devices, 71 sales, 75–76 US market, 73–74 Xiaomi Finance, 80 Xiaonei, 95 Xiaopeng He, 122 Xiaozhu, 116 Xi Jinping, 12, 47, 208 Xpeng Motors, 19, 196–197, 200, 203–206 XPerception, 164 XTMD, 69 Xu Li, 161, 168–169 Y Yahoo!


Engineering Security by Peter Gutmann

active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business process, call centre, card file, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, combinatorial explosion, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, domain-specific language, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, false flag, fault tolerance, Firefox, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Hacker News, information security, iterative process, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, linear programming, litecoin, load shedding, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, nocebo, operational security, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, post-materialism, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, random walk, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolling blackouts, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, semantic web, seminal paper, Skype, slashdot, smart meter, social intelligence, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain attack, telemarketer, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, Therac-25, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wayback Machine, web application, web of trust, x509 certificate, Y2K, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Using the concept of the SSB from above, instead of having users navigate to arbitrary locations in the hope that they correspond to their bank, allow them to have a contact list like Skype or IM clients currently do to take them to sites where security is critical. Build the concept of a secure session into your application at a fundamental level, in the chrome and the site/contact-management system. When you’re connected to a remote site or system, display the information in an unmistakeable, unspoofable manner as many IM clients or applications like Skype do (although Skype as a whole isn’t much of an example of good UI design, one thing that they have got mostly right is their session management model).

I know that TLS requires a cert over the other end, and there is a potential client-side cert. But without that knowledge, a user would be lost […] It took longer to do the setting up of some security options than it takes to download, install, and initiate an encrypted VoIP call over Skype with someone who has never used Skype before” [153]. One of the reasons why Skype’s security model works so much better than (say) encrypted email is because it relies on end-to-end transport security, which can be made completely transparent to the user. Encrypted email, in contrast, offloads the transport security to the end user, creating an encrypted blob capable of safely passing through hop-by-hop store and forward systems that then arrives at its destination still in encrypted blob form, requiring tedious manual effort from the recipient to unravel.

[261] “Report of incident on 15-MAR-2011”, 23 March 2011, Comodo, http://www.comodo.com/Comodo-Fraud-Incident-2011-03-23.html. [262] “The Recent RA Compromise”, Phillip Hallam-Baker, 23 March 2011, http://blogs.comodo.com/it-security/data-security/the-recent-cacompromise/. [263] “Microsoft Advisory about fraudulent SSL Certificates”, Johannes Ulrich, 23 March 2011, http://isc.sans.edu/diary/Microsoft+Advisory+about+fraudulent+SSL+Certificates/10600. [264] “Phony SSL Certificates issued for Google, Yahoo, Skype, Others”, Paul Roberts, 23 March 2011, http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/phony-webcertificates-issued-google-yahoo-skype-others-032311. [265] “Iranian hackers obtain fraudulent HTTPS certificates: How close to a Web security meltdown did we get?”, Peter Eckersley, 23 March 2011, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/03/iranian-hackers-obtainfraudulent-https. [266] “Web Browsers and Comodo Disclose A Successful Certificate Authority Attack, Perhaps From Iran”, Steve Schultze, 24 March 2011, http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/sjs/web-browsers-andcomodo-disclose-successful-certificate-authority-attack-perhapsiran


pages: 385 words: 118,901

Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street by Sheelah Kolhatkar

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Carl Icahn, Donald Trump, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, fear of failure, financial deregulation, hiring and firing, income inequality, junk bonds, light touch regulation, locking in a profit, margin call, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, medical residency, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, p-value, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, The Predators' Ball

Freeman was so intense: Eder, Rothfeld, Strasburg, “They Were Best of Friends, Until the Feds Showed Up.” “the log”: FBI notes from interviews with Noah Freeman, hereafter Freeman 302s. his numbered Gmail accounts: Details of Longueuil’s Gmail accounts; Freeman 302s. most of his instant-message chats through Skype: Longueuil use of Skype; FBI notes from interviews with Samir Barai, hereafter Barai 302s. They didn’t get home until 2:30 A.M.: U.S. v. Samir Barai and Donald Longueuil, No. 11 Mag. 332, February 7, 2011; reference to video surveillance, exit and return times from affidavit filed by FBI Special Agent B. J. Kang.

All along he’d been exceedingly careful, never saving any of the illegal information on his SAC computer, and never writing anything incriminating in his work email. All of his questionable dealings had been conducted via one of his numbered Gmail accounts on his laptop, with all his notes saved on the external drives. He tried to do most of his instant-message chats through Skype, which he was sure couldn’t be wiretapped. He tore around his apartment looking for a pair of pliers, which he used to rip the USB and hard drives apart, stripping them into little bits. Then he divided the pieces into four ziplock bags. He stuffed the bags into the pockets of his North Face jacket and turned to his fiancée.

— In early December, a couple of weeks after the raids on Diamondback and Level Global, Donald Longueuil was still feeling insecure. After smashing his hard drives he was hopeful that he had destroyed any evidence that would implicate him in any illegal trading. Still, he told his friend Noah Freeman, they should communicate from now on only by Skype. Freeman, since his firing from SAC the previous January, had attempted to turn his life around. He had a wife and a baby daughter and was trying to be a hands-on father, a present father. He had started teaching economics at the Winsor School in Boston, a private all-girls academy. He missed the money from his old life, but he felt better about himself.


pages: 144 words: 43,356

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence by Calum Chace

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, discovery of the americas, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Flash crash, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hedonic treadmill, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, life extension, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter Thiel, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Wall-E, zero-sum game

TABLE OF CONTENTS TITLE PAGE INTRODUCTION: SURVIVING AI PART ONE: ANI (ARTIFICIAL NARROW INTELLIGENCE) CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 2 CHAPTER 3 PART TWO: AGI (ARTIFICIAL GENERAL INTELLIGENCE) CHAPTER 4 CHAPTER 5 PART THREE: ASI (ARTIFICIAL SUPERINTELLIGENCE) CHAPTER 6 CHAPTER 7 PART FOUR: FAI (FRIENDLY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE) CHAPTER 8 CHAPTER 9 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ENDNOTES COMMENTS ON SURVIVING AI A sober and easy-to-read review of the risks and opportunities that humanity will face from AI. Jaan Tallinn, co-founder Skype, co-founder Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), co-founder Future of Life Institute (FLI) Understanding AI – its promise and its dangers – is emerging as one of the great challenges of coming decades and this is an invaluable guide to anyone who’s interested, confused, excited or scared.

In November 2012 Microsoft research executive Rick Rashid demonstrated the company’s simultaneous translation software at a large presentation. The software rendered his speech in Mandarin in real time, almost flawlessly. The system is now available in 45 languages on a number of Microsoft platforms, including Skype. One of the most impressive recent demonstrations of AI functionality was DeepMind’s presentation at Lake Tahoe in December 2013 of an AI system teaching itself to play old-style Atari video games like Breakout and Pong. These are games which previous AI systems have found hard to play because they involve hand-to-eye co-ordination.


pages: 159 words: 42,401

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance by Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge

air gap, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, computer vision, crowdsourcing, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Nomadland, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Robert Bork, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, Tim Cook: Apple, web of trust, WikiLeaks

Of these, none are fully transparent about the system of encryption they are using.” The researchers also learned that some companies don’t practice what they preach. “For example, Microsoft has a clear stated commitment to human rights, but is not applying any form of end-to-end encryption on its Skype service,” they wrote. Other organizations are leading the charge to protect the rights of minorities and targeted groups. All Out, a global LGBT+ rights organization, has mobilized members to protest what it has referred to as the Egyptian government’s “anti-gay witch hunt”: the surveillance and arrest of gay, bi, and trans Egyptians.

., 145–6 Risen, James, 40, 45 Risk (Poitras), 16 Romero, Anthony, 47 Roosevelt, Franklin, 52 Rosen, James, 29 Rubinstein, Julian, 13–14, 50 Russia, 139. See also Moscow Safari (browser), 139 Salon, 17, 72 San Francisco, 143–4 Scahill, Jeremy, 124, 126, 127–8 Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (Ellsberg), 36–7 Sensenbrenner, F. James, Jr., 47 Sheehan, Neil, 43 Signal (messaging app), 131–2, 136 Singer, Natasha, 146 Skype, 145 Snowden, Edward, 1–3, 45, 92, 94; archives, 126–8, 130; “B. Manning” pseudonym, 1, 28, 121–2; “Citizenfour” pseudonym, 64–5; commentary on Assange indictment, 130; Gellman and, 41; Greenwald and, 6–7, 44–5, 48–9, 70–4, 75–6; Guardian video, 48–9, 92; middle name gaffe, 56; Micah Lee and, 74–6; Mills and, 80, 133; Moscow, 42, 56, 59, 122, 133; “odds never matter,” 116; “patternrecognition machines,” 131; Poitras and, 20, 22–5, 35–6, 37, 39–45, 55, 62, 72–7, 122–3; posters, 117; public ignorance regarding, 95; public response to revelations, 107, 108, 110; “Restore the Fourth” statement, 85; Timm and, 62–3; trust, 121; USPS use, 1–2, 28, 50, 57–9; Washington Post, 54 Snowden, Lonnie, 124 Soho House Berlin, 117–18 Stasi, 4, 18, 118 State of War (Risen), 40 Stone, Andy, 137 Stop Watching Us, 84 Sullivan, William, 86–7 Tails (operating system), 33, 34, 39, 77, 79, 116, 117, 119 Talen, William.


pages: 298 words: 84,394

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

Albert Einstein, illegal immigration, language acquisition, Schrödinger's Cat, Skype, theory of mind, your tax dollars at work

Sometimes the chimps don’t feel like having guests, and they show it by rushing the wall, body-slamming it with a loud crash, making the glass shiver in its frame. When this happens, we go away, come back another time. The center is their home. They get to decide who comes in. But we also have a Skype connection in the classroom. I leave this open throughout the morning, so my students can check on the chimps anytime they like, and the chimps can do likewise. Only six chimps remain here now. Three are younger than Fern—Hazel, Bennie, and Sprout. Two are older, both males—Aban and Hanu. So Fern is not the largest, nor the oldest, nor the malest.

My kindergartners say she’s kind of mean, but to me she’s just a good mother. She manages the social life at the center and doesn’t tolerate nonsense. When there’s a row, she’s the one who stops it, forces the rowers to hug and make up. Sometimes our own mother appears on the other end of the Skype connection, telling me to pick something up at the store on my way home or reminding me that I have a dentist appointment. She volunteers at the center daily. Her current job is to make sure Fern gets to eat the foods she likes. The day our mother walked in for the first time, Fern refused to look at her.

We’d had to remind Grandpa Joe in his nursing home that Dad had died, over and over, and five minutes later he’d be asking us again, in an anguished voice, what he’d done so bad that his only son never came to see him. But Fern has never mentioned either one. Sometimes my kindergartners and the chimps do a craft project together, either when we visit or over Skype. We finger-paint. We cover paper with paste and glitter. We make clay plates with our handprints impressed into them. The center holds fund-raisers, where they sell chimp artwork. We have several of Fern’s paintings on the walls of the townhouse. My favorite is her rendition of a bird, a dark slash across a light sky, no cage for creature or artist in evidence anywhere.


pages: 252 words: 80,924

Sarah Millican--The Queen of Comedy by Tina Campanella

call centre, Desert Island Discs, fake news, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, side project, Skype, Stephen Fry, upwardly mobile

I still can’t quite believe it. Australians love a bloody badge. I am running low. My new material for my new show is working (thank God). I am broody. For a tiny baby koala of my own.’ Sarah loved Melbourne but she really missed her family and her boyfriend. She kept in touch via Skype but sometimes it wasn’t enough and she found herself feeling very down. During one Skype session, she said to Gary, sadly: ‘You’re too far away…’ Her boyfriend misunderstood and moved the webcam closer to his face. It made Sarah laugh and she immediately saved the moment in her memory – it was great comedy material. But despite the difficulties of being apart from her loved ones, her first Australian festival was a success.

Whether I’ve needed it or not, there’s always been someone in my life all too keen to dish out relationship advice. But to be fair to him, he’s been married for 47 years. He’s not here, but we can talk to him now, via the magic of the Internet…’ Sarah announced her next guest to be her dad Philip, and he soon appeared on screen via Skype. For Sarah it was the perfect way to involve her family in her new comedy world. And she knew that Philip was funny – after all, he’d been making her laugh all her life. Philip smiled and waved to the audience from the family home in South Shields, before recounting a story about how he had met Sarah’s mum.


pages: 301 words: 85,126

AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together by Nick Polson, James Scott

Abraham Wald, Air France Flight 447, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, business cycle, Cepheid variable, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Edward Charles Pickering, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Flash crash, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Higgs boson, index fund, information security, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, late fees, low earth orbit, Lyft, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, mass incarceration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Moravec's paradox, more computing power than Apollo, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, survivorship bias, systems thinking, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional

• The version of Google Translate that went live in 2016 represented a massive improvement over previous efforts at machine translation. The software can now generate respectable translations for over 100 languages—many of them directly from your smartphone camera, like for a restaurant menu or a sign in a train station. Skype can do something similar during a video chat, in real time. • Chatbots—software designed to simulate human conversation—are becoming a pervasive feature of the digital world. They’re especially popular on Facebook Messenger, where you can ask a bot to book a trip through Kayak or pester a merchant to check the status of a delayed package.

Think of the immense collections of spoken and written English sentences found on the servers of the world’s major tech firms. Think of a library with every book, magazine, newspaper, journal, song, film, and play ever written. Now think way bigger. Every web page. Every email in history. Every Google search or product review, every text message ever sent, every chat on Slack or Skype, every post on Facebook or Twitter, every comment on YouTube or Instagram. By volume, this collection of sentences makes the Library of Congress look like a third-rate bookmobile. And around 2010, the best minds in AI had finally developed the right tools for using all that data to its full effect.

politics prediction rules contraception and deep learning and evaluation of Google Translate and Great Andromeda Nebula and image recognition and massive data and massive models and as models natural language processing and neural networks and overfitting problem training the model trial and error strategy Price, Richard principle of least squares privacy ProPublica Quetelet, Adolphe rage to conclude bias ransomware Reagan, Ronald recommender systems health care and large-scale legacy of Netflix See also suggestion engines Rees, Mina Reinhart, Alex robot cars Bayes’s rule and introspection and extrapolation (dead reckoning) LIDA image of a highway LIDAR (light detection and ranging sensor) SLAM problem (simultaneous localization and mapping) and Waymo robotics Bayes’s rule and in China revolution of SLAM problem (simultaneous localization and mapping) search for USS Scorpion and Stanford Cart Theseus (life-size autonomous mouse) See also robot cars Rose, Pete Royal Mint coin clipping Great Recoinage (1696) Newton, Isaac and Trial of the Pyx Russell, Alexander Wilson S&P 500 Salesforce Sapir, Edward Sarandos, Ted SAT (standardized test) Scherwitzl, Raoul Schlesinger, Karl Schuschnigg, Kurt Schweinfurt-Regensburg mission (World War II) sci-fi AI anxiety and robots self-driving cars. See robot cars Sendak, Mark Shannon, Claude Shapley, Harlow Sieveking, Edward Henry Silicon Valley Skype SLAM problem (simultaneous localization and mapping) Slattery, Francis A.. See also USS Scorpion Slipher, Vesto smart cities smart medical devices smart watch smartphones apps GPS technology social media. See also Facebook SpaceX speech recognition Harpy (early program) See also natural language process (NLP) Spotify conditional probability personalization square-root rule (de Moivre’s equation) Standard and Poor’s Stanford University Statistical Research Group (SRG) statistics Stigler, George Stripe (payment system) submarines.


pages: 267 words: 82,580

The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett

3D printing, 4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, carbon footprint, Cody Wilson, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, degrowth, deindustrialization, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, eternal september, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, global village, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Lewis Mumford, life extension, litecoin, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mondo 2000, moral hazard, moral panic, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, pre–internet, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

She had signed up to pose for a series of nude photographs for an alternative soft-core company called God’s Girls to earn some extra cash while she was at university. One day, she overheard some friends at God’s Girls discussing camming as a good way to make money. After a spot of research, she bought a webcam, and signed up to perform private shows on Skype with a local camming company. ‘I was very nervous the first time I did it. I talked way too much,’ she tells me. ‘I had twenty visitors in my room, and that felt insane! I think I made about thirty pounds.’ She then joined Chaturbate, and almost immediately started making enough money for it to become her sole source of employment.

The Climax Vex has never met her viewers, and doesn’t plan to. Her relationship with her regulars exists strictly online, a boundary she is determined to keep. But part of Vex’s appeal is that she is obviously real. Her shows are unashamedly home-made – a mixture of porn and, as one regular viewer describes it, a Skype chat with your girlfriend. Shirley tells me that camming is so popular because people want ‘the real girlfriend’ experience, warts and all. If people are going to use the internet for sexual satisfaction – and they will – camming is a more realistic and meaningful experience. Things go wrong, there are mistakes, there’s chat, cats wander in and out.

‘From that point I decided to dedicate my life to the transhumanist cause,’ Zoltan explains. He has a wife and two young children – but makes time, he says, for twelve to fourteen hours a day of transhumanist-related work. His ultimate aim, he tells me, is to live for ever, or as long as possible – 10,000 years or so. ‘If you and I were offered the chance,’ he tells me over Skype from his home in California, ‘we’d certainly try it. We’d have awe-inspiring superhuman powers.’ ‘But what would you do?’ I ask. ‘Ten thousand years seems like an awfully long time.’ ‘I can only answer this based on my current brain,’ Zoltan patiently replies. ‘One day we’ll have brains the size of the Empire State Building, connected to thousands of servers.


pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Such drag on costs and operations is simply not acceptable in an Exponential Organization—or, indeed, for any company trying to compete in the 21st century. Telepresence has been around for many years in the form of videoconferencing. Although videoconferencing was quite a hassle in the past, an organization can now leverage services such as Skype and Google Hangout, which are fast, easy to use and available on every device. Telepresence enables employees to work proactively from any location and interact on a global scale, reducing travel costs and improving well-being. Even greater improvement comes from Telepresence robots such as Beam, from Suitable Technologies, and Double Robotics, which leverage the user’s tablet.

After all, everybody in a place like Silicon Valley has an idea for a new tech business. Instead, the key to success is relentless execution, hence the need for passion and the MTP. To demonstrate, consider the number of times the founders of the following companies pitched investors before finally succeeding: Company Number of Investor Pitches Skype 40 Cisco 76 Pandora 300 Google 350 What if Larry Page and Sergey Brin had stopped pitching after 340 attempts? The world would be a very different place today. Just as intriguing: what magical technologies and businesses don’t exist today because the founders gave up one investor pitch too soon?

According to Google, deep personal loss has resulted in employees who are more humble and open to listening and learning. Finally, Rate of Learning will become a mainstream measure to gauge the progress of an individual, team or even a startup. Key Opportunities Implications and Actions Digital job interviews and meetings Job interviews and collaboration leveraging video (Skype), telepresence (Double Robotics) or virtual reality (Oculus Rift or High Fidelity) for virtual meetings, as well as testing to enable the growing global Staff on Demand workforce. Social networking skills will increase in importance, as will internships and a focus on real life skills testing. Hire employees who ask the right questions We’re moving into a world of open data, open APIs and even open source (deep learning) algorithms.


pages: 403 words: 87,035

The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti

assortative mating, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business climate, call centre, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, gentrification, global village, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Sand Hill Road, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, special economic zone, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, thinkpad, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Wall-E, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Crucially, one of the requirements the company imposes on the firms it finances is that they move to San Francisco. It argues that the benefits from this kind of startup accelerator program—in which the venture capitalists guide firms from idea to product launch—can occur only face-to-face. In the end, geographical proximity to venture capitalists still matters. Skype and cell phones have not changed this simple fact. This is one of the reasons that the world of high tech is and will remain geographically concentrated. Advantage 3: The (Almost) Magical Economics of Knowledge Spillover ECOtality is a company at the forefront of clean transportation and power storage technology, which in 2010 moved its headquarters from Arizona to the Bay Area.

Most of our crucial interactions are still face-to-face, and most of what we learn that is valuable comes from the people we know, not from Wikipedia. The vast majority of the world’s phone calls, Web traffic, and investments are still local. Telecommuting is still incredibly rare. Videoconferencing, e-mail, and Skype have not made a dent in the need for innovative people to work side by side. In fact, that is more important than ever. At the same time that goods and information travel at faster and faster speeds to all corners of the globe, we are witnessing an inverse gravitational pull toward certain key urban centers.

See Wages and salaries Salinas–Sea Side–Monterey, California, [>] Salk Institute, [>] Salt Lake City, [>], [>] San Antonio, [>] San Diego, [>], [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>], [>] San Francisco, [>], [>]–[>] architects in, [>] artisanal workshops in, [>], [>] bookbinding business in, [>]–[>] college graduates in, [>], [>] college-educated immigrants in, [>] computer science salaries in, [>] cost of living in, [>] land-use regulation in, [>] Mission District of, [>] new housing limited in, [>] and venture capitalists, [>]–[>] waiters in, [>] Zendesk in, [>] San Francisco Bay Area, [>]–[>], [>], [>] biotech firms in, [>] clean-tech companies in, [>] employment gains in, [>] Walmart in, [>] San Francisco Chronicle Building, [>]–[>] San Francisco–Oakland–Vallejo area, [>] San Francisco–San Jose region, [>], [>] San Francisco–Silicon Valley region, as adapting, [>]–[>] San Jose, [>], [>], [>] college graduates in, [>], [>], [>] salaries of, [>] computer science salaries in, [>]–[>] and cost of living, [>] divorce rate in, [>] See also San Francisco–San Jose region Sanmina, [>] Santa Barbara, [>], [>], [>] Santa Barbara–Santa Maria–Lompoc area, [>] Santa Cruz, California, [>], [>] Santa Rosa–Petaluma, California, [>] Schmidt, Eric, [>] Schultz, Howard, [>] Schumpeter, Joseph, [>], [>] Scientific R&D, [>] Scott, Allen, [>] Scott, Eric, [>] Scranton, Pennsylvania, [>] Scripps Research Institute, [>] Seattle, [>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>] Capitol Hill district in, [>]–[>] college graduates in, [>], [>] and divergence from Albuquerque, [>]–[>] employment gains in, [>] exciting celebrities in, [>] and Microsoft, [>], [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>] as anchor company, [>] and software leadership, [>] Pioneer Square in, [>], [>] smart growth policies in, [>]–[>] waiters in, [>] Seattle-Everett, and cost of living, [>] Secular change, [>] Segregation economic, [>] educational, [>] sociological, [>] Semiconductors in Portland, Oregon, [>] and Shockley, [>] and Taiwan, [>] Sequoia Capital, [>] Serbia, PISA scores of, [>] Service ecosystems, [>]–[>], [>], [>] Services sector as hurt by manufacturing loss, [>] innovations in, [>] local jobs in, [>] Microsoft’s effect on, [>] Shah, Dharmesh, [>] Shanghai, [>] innovative concentration in, [>] PISA results for, [>], [>] Sharma, Vinita, [>] Sharon, Pennsylvania, and cost of living, [>] Shen, John, [>] Shenzhen, China, [>]–[>] and Pixar, [>] Shockley, William, [>] Siemens, [>] Silicon Alley (New York), [>] Silicon Laboratories, [>] Silicon Valley, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>] cell phone firms in, [>] clustering in, [>] cricket games in, [>] diversification in, [>] dot-com boom in, [>] ecosystems of, [>] Facebook’s move to, [>], [>] high-tech jobs as driver in, [>] in innovative area, [>] and life expectancy, [>] nondescript locations in, [>] and personal computer industry, [>] as possible Microsoft location, [>] post-WWII Detroit compared to, [>], [>] San Francisco as residence for workers in, [>], [>] Trulioo success in, [>] Simmons, Russel, [>] Singapore iPhone parts from, [>], [>] PISA scores of, [>] Sivadasan, Jagadeesh, [>] Skype, vs. side-by-side work, [>] Slaughter, Matthew, [>] Slovenia, PISA scores of, [>] Small businesses, [>] Smart growth policies, [>], [>] in Seattle, [>]–[>] Smith, Vaughan, [>] Social class, [>]–[>] Social multiplier effect, [>]–[>], [>] Social Network, The (movie), [>] Social return on education, [>] on research, [>]–[>] (see also Knowledge spillovers) Software industry, jobs in, [>], [>] Solar-panel industry, [>]–[>] in Fremont, California, [>]–[>], [>] See also Clean-tech companies Solyndra, [>]–[>], [>], [>] South (American), as convergence example, [>] Soviet Union, and Norilsk, Siberia, [>]–[>] Spain mobility in, [>] PISA scores of, [>] and solar panels, [>], [>] Spartanburg, South Carolina, Chinese factory in, [>] “Spatial mismatch,” [>]–[>] SpringLeaf Therapeutics, [>] Springsteen, Bruce, [>]–[>] Square (company), [>] Stamford, Connecticut, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>] Standard of living innovation as driver of, [>] and productivity, [>] See also Quality of life Stanford University, [>] and Google, [>] and Silicon Valley, [>] Starbucks, [>] Stars, academic, in biotech, [>], [>] Startups, [>], [>] and Austral Capital, [>] and biotech academics, [>] in digital music business, [>] in Seattle, [>] and venture capitalism, [>] Star Wars (movie), [>], [>] State College, Pennsylvania, [>] Stellar Solutions, [>] Stockton, California, [>] Subsidies, [>] in “big push” programs, [>], [>] on Chinese solar panels, [>] of college education, [>], [>], [>] for high-tech industries in Fremont, California, [>] and solar industry, [>], [>], [>] for local investment, [>]–[>] Empowerment Zone Program, [>]–[>] of R&D (research), [>], [>] for thick labor markets, [>] and TVA, [>] varying value of, [>]–[>] Sun-tech, [>] “Supply side approach” to revitalizing cities, [>] Svane, Mikkel, [>], [>] Sweden, PISA scores of, [>] Switzerland, [>], [>] Taiwan, [>], [>] Talent, economic value of, [>]–[>] Tallahassee, Florida, [>] Tax advantages, [>] Taylor, Bret, [>] Taylor, Lori, [>] Technological progress and commercial knowledge, [>] and geography of jobs, [>] and increase in value of innovation, [>]–[>] innovation sector driven by, [>] as job creator, [>] and manufacturing loss, [>] productivity increase in, [>] and skilled-labor demand, [>] and standard of living, [>] in technologies of the earth, [>] See also Innovation Telecommuting, vs. side-by-side work, [>] Television manufacturing industry, [>] Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), [>], [>]–[>], [>], [>] Terre Haute, Indiana, and cost of living, [>] Tesla Motors, [>] Texas, “Emerging Technology Fund” for, [>] Texas Instruments, [>] Thailand, PISA scores of, [>] Thiel, Peter, [>] Thomas, Paul, [>] Three Americas, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>], [>] 3M, [>] 3scale Networks, [>] T-Mobile, [>] Tocqueville, Alexis de, [>] Toledo, Ohio, [>], [>], [>] Topeka, Kansas, [>] Tourist destinations, [>] Trade Adjustment Assistance, limited allocation allowance for, [>] Traded (tradable) sector, [>]–[>], [>], [>] and innovation, [>] innovative hubs, [>] and multiplier effect, [>] Trajtenberg, Manuel, [>] Travelocity, [>] Travel websites, [>]–[>] Trenton, New Jersey, [>], [>] Trina Solar, [>] Trulioo, [>] Truly Disadvantaged, The (Wilson), [>] TRW, [>] Tulsa, immigrants with little education in, [>] Tunisia, PISA scores of, [>] Turkey, [>], [>] TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority), [>], [>]–[>], [>], [>] Twilight: New Moon (movie), [>] Ufford, Stephen, [>] Unemployment in Berlin, [>] in Detroit vs.


Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything by Kelly Weill

4chan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Big Tech, bitcoin, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, medical malpractice, moral panic, off-the-grid, QAnon, recommendation engine, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, tech worker, Tesla Model S, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, Wayback Machine, Y2K

He got a niche of people who could go ‘Not only are we being lied to, but also the government is now spawning these extraneous groups that are trying to detract people from the truth.’ ” Globe Earthers took note of Dubay’s 200 Proofs video and made their own videos debunking Dubay’s arguments—not that these fact-checks vanquished the theory. A growing cohort of conspiracy YouTubers began dabbling in Flat Earth in 2014 and 2015. They began organizing digital hangouts on Skype, then in person at localized meetups. And unlike the polite, anonymous debates on the Flat Earth Society forums, this crowd was less interested in arguing their points with nonbelievers and more focused on building a boots-on-the-ground movement with real faces and real money. 96 OFF THE EDGE Zen Garcia, a writer who’d focused for decades on obscure Christian offshoots, turned his focus to Flat Earth in 2016, churning out book after book on the topic and opening a publishing house for other Flat Earth writers.

She wasn’t going back to dating Globe Earthers, though. At fifty-six in 2019, she was looking for her true love, her soul mate, she said in a video that has since been removed from YouTube. And she thought she’d found him. Antonio Subirats was a small-time Flat Earth YouTuber, a bit player on the scene until Steere invited him to Skype into her show, she said in the video. They had the chemistry that was missing from Steere’s relationship with Sargent. Their webcam conversations continued long after they stopped recording. “We went from talking about ideas to talking about each other and the things we valued in love. I thought he was a very deep person, a very wise person, and a very kind person,” Steere said in the video.

A lot of them will just pull down the blinds and be like, ‘All I need is me, myself, and I, and my friends on the internet.’ ” It’s a disconnected way to live. Before Flat Earthers started organizing meetups, Robbie Davidson told me, the movement looked like “just some kooky, crazy conspiracy people online.” Believers would host video hangouts, but the kinship they craved was fragmented by screens and laggy Skype connections. When “you sit down with someone, look them in the eyes, and see their mannerisms, it becomes real,” Davidson said. Meetups, many of which sell individual tickets for hundreds of dollars, are critical to the movement. “I always encourage people, go to a meetup, even if you have to drive two, three hours,” Wolfe told me.


pages: 295 words: 84,843

There's a War Going on but No One Can See It by Huib Modderkolk

AltaVista, ASML, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, call centre, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Google Chrome, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine translation, millennium bug, NSO Group, ransomware, Skype, smart meter, speech recognition, Stuxnet, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

What I wanted to know was why he had attacked the Netherlands’ biggest telecom company and plunged it into chaos. I wanted to know how he’d learned to do what he did. And what happened to him after his arrest. Our chats were erratic. One day he’d be effusive and engaging, then he’d become remote. Sometimes days would pass before he answered a message. It would turn out he was in Asia. We also talked on Skype, once. I wanted to meet. He did, too, he said. But we never would. Edwin was cremated a few months before this, my second visit to his parents. As we talk, grief over the loss of their adopted son rears up suddenly several times. Ruud, his father, was the last person to see Edwin alive, and it still weighs heavily on him

‘Should I have let him come back home?’ he wonders. ‘Should I have given him one more chance?’ And then, regretfully: ‘I’d reached my limit. I just couldn’t do it.’ I hadn’t been planning to interview Edwin’s parents. I’d wanted to hear the story from Edwin himself, but that didn’t work out. The one time we Skyped, he’d been in a hotel room in South Korea. Eight minutes into our call he signed off with a smile and a peace sign. After that we chatted sporadically over WhatsApp. His final messages were laced with despair. ‘I don’t like it here,’ he wrote, ‘They’ve got guns’ and ‘I want to get out of here ASAP,’ He stopped responding to my questions about KPN.

Arranging a video call was also problematic. The two men had to travel south to the country’s capital at Mogadishu, a hazardous trip that took days and required a security escort. The only option we had was to bring them to a safe house in the capital where they could tell their story through an interpreter over Skype. The first man we interview is a Somali herder named Omar Mohammad Ali. On that particular Sunday, says Omar, he had taken his herd of forty sheep and goats to a large plain around the southern village of Haaway. Accompanying him were his two daughters, Saharo (nine) and Nimo (eight). The girls were especially fond of the goats.


The Future of Technology by Tom Standage

air freight, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, creative destruction, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, double helix, experimental economics, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, hydrogen economy, hype cycle, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, labour market flexibility, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, railway mania, rent-seeking, RFID, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, software as a service, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jurvetson, technological determinism, technology bubble, telemarketer, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Y2K

So what should the consumer see? 97 THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY The mom test A geek’s benchmark for true simplicity ith e-mail, it wasn’t till my mom could use it that it became ubiquitous. The real test is always the mom test,” says Brad Treat, the boss of SightSpeed, an internet video company. “If my mother flips over to some Skype thing …,” begins Michael Powell, America’s media and telecoms regulator, answering a question about internet telephony. “If my mother is going to use it …,” starts Ray Lane, a venture capitalist, asked whether this or that technology has a future. Mothers come up surprisingly often in Silicon Valley conversations.

The caller’s voice is broken into packets of digital information that are routed separately to their destination and reassembled at the other end. In pure form, such conversations are called internet telephony. This might involve a video call between two SightSpeed customers, or a voice call between two computers that use software from Skype, a fastgrowing European firm. This pure form is still rare, however, because most people still use traditional phones, which requires people calling from a pc or an internet phone to “bridge” over to the phone network. The umbrella term that includes such hybrid calls is “voice-over-internet S 103 THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY protocol”, or voip.

This is opening the door to disrupters such as Comviq, in Sweden, which has taken 39% of market share away from the incumbent, Telia, by offering half as many handset features and radically simpler pricing plans. Wireless and fixed-line telephone companies may simultaneously become vulnerable to new providers of internet telephony or voip, such 109 THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY as Skype and Vonage, or networking companies such as Cisco (especially once fast, wireless internet access has become ubiquitous and totally reliable). The disruption could be especially severe if the upstarts not only make calling dirt-cheap or free, but also find ways to help consumers with jobs such as simplifying their communications as a whole or meeting their needs for privacy.


pages: 288 words: 16,556

Finance and the Good Society by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market design, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, profit maximization, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social contagion, Steven Pinker, tail risk, telemarketer, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Karlan and McConnell (2009) showed experimentally that such publicity increases the amount given. The desire for recognition may be evidence that gift-giving is at least in part a form of disguised exchange. See Stark and Falk (1998). 10. List and Lucking-Reiley (2002). 11. Falke (2004). 12. One such Skype call, complete with smiles and kisses, is shown at “Meeting Our Compassion International Sponsored Child over skype!!!” at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT3CY8Lwiak. 13. “Except Gifts from Income,” New York Times, June 17, 1917, p. 3. 14. The Chicago Tribune estimated in 1920 that $4 billion had been given to war organizations, the Red Cross, religious and educational movements, and other causes since 1915. “$4,000,000,000 to Philanthropy,” Chicago Tribune, April 25, 1920, p. 8. 15.

Save the Children, established in the United Kingdom in 1919, led the way by assigning a single child in poverty to each contributor, who would correspond by mail, giving the contributor a sense of personal relationship. Save the Children is now an international organization, and a number of other such organizations have followed. Some now employ more advanced communications tools, such as Skype calls between donors and recipients, to allow a closer bond to develop. One can look the child in the eyes and feel empathy as never before.12 It seems that we are gradually learning more about how to make the giving experience more meaningful, and that current strategies are not the nal word in encouraging such giving.

., 69, 73 Sharpe, William, 34, 81 Sharpe ratio, 34, 35 Shefrin, Hersch, 78, 80 Shiller, George, 174 Shiller, Robert J., 2, 166, 172, 178, 180, 185–86, 193, 195 Shubik, Martin, 116 Simmons, Joseph P., 161 Simonov, Andrei, 28 Singapore, Central Provident Fund, 214 Singh, Manmohan, 3 SIVs. See structured investment vehicles Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, 98 Skelton, Noel, 212 Skype, 200 sleaziness: in finance, 159–60, 161–62; overreactions to, 166–67; perception of, 159, 165, 166 Small Business Administration (SBA), 216–17 Smith, Adam, xvii, 124, 140, 237, 238 social comparison theory, 191–92, 234 social epidemics, 180, 181 social influence, 181 socialist market economies, 3.


pages: 540 words: 119,731

Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech by Geoffrey Cain

Andy Rubin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, business intelligence, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double helix, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Hacker News, independent contractor, Internet of things, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, patent troll, Pepsi Challenge, rolodex, Russell Brand, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

Her family used another: Peter Arnell, interview by the author (via Skype), July 4, 2017. More information on Taki’s career is in Tomio Taki and Adam Taki, Zennovation: An East-West Approach to Business Success, ed. Mortimer Feinberg (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2012). “[Tomio] had been at Donna Karan”: Peter Skarzynski, interview by the author, December 28, 2016. in a tennis outfit: Peter Skarzynski, interview by the author, December 28, 2016. “I did all the ad work”: Peter Arnell, interview by the author (via Skype), July 4, 2017. “New York’s worst bosses”: Emily Gould, “New York’s Worst Bosses: Peter Arnell,” Gawker, March 15, 2007, https://gawker.com/​244608/​new-yorks-worst-bosses-peter-arnell.

“Samsung had eight or nine operating systems running our devices,” he said. Software developers were struggling to design an in-house operating system called Bada (“ocean” in Korean). It was released in February 2010, just a month before T.J.’s arrival, and the company quickly realized it was a failure. Basic applications like Skype couldn’t be used because of restrictions on VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) software, and the GPS system was poor. Samsung’s executives realized they had a chicken-and-egg problem. Few people were willing to use a junky operating system without applications, and few developers are willing to make applications for their software without users.

“to match what Apple was doing”: T.J. Kang, interview by the author, January 29, 2016. “I very much wanted T.J.”: Ho Soo Lee, interview by the author, September 5, 2016. “Why don’t you come”: T.J. Kang, interview by the author, January 29, 2016. “Samsung had eight or nine”: Ibid. Basic applications like Skype: Joern Esdohr, “Petition: VoIP for Bada!” Joern Esdohr, September 13, 2010, http://www.joernesdohr.com/​bada/​petition-voip-for-bada/. the GPS system was poor: Gareth Beavis, “Samsung Wave Review,” TechRadar, August 8, 2010, https://www.techradar.com/​reviews/​phones/​mobile-phones/​samsung-wave-680092/​review/​9.


pages: 412 words: 128,042

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits by Richard Davies

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anton Chekhov, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, big-box store, cashless society, clean water, complexity theory, deindustrialization, digital divide, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Global Witness, government statistician, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, it's over 9,000, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, large denomination, Livingstone, I presume, Malacca Straits, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, rolling blackouts, school choice, school vouchers, Scramble for Africa, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, subscription business, The Chicago School, the payments system, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, uranium enrichment, urban planning, wealth creators, white picket fence, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

He began writing computer code at ten and in his twenties he and his business partner Janus Friis helped found Kazaa (an early illegal file-sharing site, similar to Napster) and, later, Skype. Well over six feet tall, with sharp features and a shock of blond hair, he could only be northern European; he wears tailored trousers from an expensive suit with a faded T-shirt. Mr Heinla appears half nerd, half businessman and it is a lucrative combination: Skype was sold to eBay in 2005 for a reported $2.6 billion and, after being bought back by private owners, sold once more to Microsoft for $8.5 billion in 2011. Having got in early and retained stakes in the company through its rise, Mr Heinla is thought to be a millionaire many times over; his co-investor Mr Friis is worth over $1 billion.

Concerns over the impact of technology make Tallinn an interesting test case. Just as Akita offers a glimpse of the economics of ageing we will all soon experience, Tallinn is a technology frontier, and has already adopted many technologies that look set to catch on in our own economies. The capital is famously home to Skype, and pushed as a ‘start-up paradise’ by the government with some justification (the number of new companies established per head of population is one of the highest in the world). But what makes Estonia stand out as a leader in a way Silicon Valley does not is the role of technology in the government.

Abercrombie, Sir Patrick 203 Aceh 2–39, 10, 331, 332, 333, 334, 335 ‘building back better’ 24–5, 29–31, 42 civil war 32–3 education 13, 31 financial system 20–22 history 17–18 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) 32, 33 tsunami 2–3, 6, 12–14, 15, 16, 18–19, 23 ageing populations 6, 212–49, 331 agglomeration see industrial agglomeration AI see artificial intelligence Akita, Japan 212–49 ageing population/ low birth rate 7, 213–25, 227–49, 331 suicides 225–6 Allende, Salvador 296–8, 301 amoral familism 196, 202 Anglo-Dutch wars 25 Angola: Kongo people 83 Angola (Louisiana penitentiary) 5, 76–104, 331, 335, Angolite, The 80 Argentina 110, 144, 291, 303 Arkwright, Richard 267 Arrol, Sir William 191 artificial intelligence (AI) 245, 268–9, 270, 284, 286, 287, 378 automation: and job losses 253 see also technology Azraq refugee camp 57–67, 71, 72, 144, 334, 340, 348–9 Bajo Chiquito, Panama 106, 108–9, 1112, 133, 136, 139 Banda Aceh 13, 16, 18, 20, 26–7, 34–5 Bandal, Kinshasa 144, 162 Bandudu, Congo 164, 165 banks 97, 99 in Aceh 19, 21, 22 Chilean 296, 297, 302 in Kinshasa/ Congo 151, 158 online 99, 278 Panamanian 131 Barbour, Mary 203, 366 barter economy, prison 89–90 Bevan, Aneurin 201 birth rates, falling 215–16, 226–7, 233, 247 Blockbuster Video 97 blood circulation (William Harvey) 3–4 borders: and conservation of common resources 126–7 Borland, Francis: History of Darien 107 Brazil: ageing population 213, 214 Brazzaville, Congo 174–5 Bruce, Robert 203 Brumberg, Richard 218 buccaneers and Darien 112–14 business start-up rates 54 Calabria, negative social integration 195–6 Calton, Glasgow 179, 190, 191, 192 Cambridge University 26, 182 Cameron, Verney Lovett 141, 143, 149 cannabinoids, synthetic 93–4, 95–6, 352 cartels, Chilean 321–3 Casement, Roger: on Congo Free State 150 cash vs. barter 89–90 Castro, Fidel 298 Castro, Sergio de 301 centenarians, Japanese 215, 216 Chesterton, George Laval 77 Chicago Boys 294–5, 296, 300, 301, 314, 325 El Ladrillo (economic plan) 301–5, 315–16, 317, 323–4, 325–6 protests against 305, 317 Chile Allende period 296–8, 301 education 294, 295, 302, 304–5, 310, 311–12, 312, 313–17, 318, 324, 326, 327 national income 291–3 nationalization 296–7 Pinochet dictatorship 298, 300–1, 305, 322, 383 tsunami 15 see also Chicago Boys ‘Chilean Winter’ 317–18 Clyde shipyards 178–9, 181, 183–4, 185 Cold Bath Fields prison 91 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 113 Colombian peace accord (2016) 111, 134 common resources and conservation 124–5 depletion paradox 122–39 overgrazed land 122–3 and self-regulation 125, 126–8 Confucian ethics 220 Congo, Democratic Republic of ‘Crisis’ 151–8 GDP per capita 153, 173 independence (1960) 151 unemployment 142–3 see also Kinshasa; Mobutu, Sese Seko; Zaire consumerism as slavery 319 copper mining 143, 151, 156, 296, 323–4 corruption 133 in Kinshasa 143, 145–6, 148, 159–61, 168, 333, 361 credit: and poverty 308–10 Crompton, Samuel 267 crop rotation 279 Cunard Line 185 currencies cacao beans 91 cigarette papers 91 cigarettes/tobacco 92, 95 coffee 77, 96, 100 commodities 90–91 ‘dot’ payment system 97–100 dual-currency system 166–7 ‘EMAK’ (edible mackerel) 92 postage stamps 92 in prisons 91–101 ramen noodles 92 roles played (Jevons) 90 on Rossel Island 91 salt 91 Yoruk people 91 Cut Nyak Dhien 35 Dael, Syria: refugees 42–4 Dagahaley settlement, Kenya 45, 46 Dampier, William 113, 114 Daraa: and Syrian civil war 44 Darien Gap 6, 106, 107–39, 332, 333, 334 borders and common resource conservation 126–7 buccaneers’ accounts 112–14 eco-tourism 132 environmental damage 6, 120–21, 129–31 ethnic rivalry 126–8 externalities 131, 138, 183, 186, 332 illegal immigrants 132–7 market failure 109–10, 122–3, 129, 138 Scottish disaster 114–15, 133, 137–8 Darien National Park 126, 132 deaths lonely 225, 226, 236, 237, 248 premature (‘Glasgow effect’) 192–3 suicide 194, 213, 224, 225–6, 236, 248, 366 see also life expectancy digital divide 254, 281, 377 digital ID 277, 279 digital infrastructure, Estonian 259 drugs in Angola (prison) 81, 82, 88, 93–4, 95–6, 97, 99, 100, 101, 352 in Chile 306, 310, 322 in Darien 110, 111, 128, 134, 135 in Scotland 191–2, 193 in Tallinn 206 Dunlop, John Boyd 150 Durkheim, Emile: La Suicide 194, 196, 206 e-democracy (Estonia) 284, 287 e-Residency (Estonia) 277–8, 279, 283, 287, 379 education in Aceh 13, 31 in Chile/Santiago 295, 302, 304–5, 310, 311–12, 312, 313–17, 326, 327 in Italy 195 in Japan 220, 223, 229 in Louisiana 81 in Zaatari camp 67, 71, 349 see also universities Embera tribe 108, 109, 111, 119, 127, 128, 129, 133, 136, 137, 138–9, 357 entrepreneurs 331 in Aceh 19, 22, 23, 24, 27, 30, 39 in Akita, Japan 236–7, 238 in Angola (prison) 89, 102–3 Chilean 295, 296 in Darien 5, 114 Estonian 270, 275, 278–9, 281 in Glasgow 181, 182 in Kinshasa 162, 171 in Zaatari camp 43, 46, 54, 55–8, 62–3, 71 environmental damage see Darien Gap Estonia 256–7, 259 Ajujaht competition 252, 260, 275, 276, 278, 283–3 companies 281 economic revival 275–87 e-Government services 254–5 as ESSR 257–9, 272–4 labour shortage 280 Russia border 271–2 Russian population 272–4, 281–3 technology 252–6, 259–87 externalities 183, 206 Darien Gap 131, 138, 183, 186, 332 Glasgow 183–4, 186, 189–90, 333 and markets 332 extractive economy 122–39 Fairfield Heritage 349 Fairfield shipyard 178, 186, 189, 200, 206 FARC guerrillas 111, 132, 133, 134–5, 137, 355, 357 Ffrench-Davis, Ricardo 302 Foljambe, Joseph 265–6 Force Publique 150 foreign aid 23, 27–9, 54, 170 foreign exchange traders 166–7 Franklin, Isaac 83 free markets 128, 131, 174, 296, 300–3, 316, 320, 326–7, 331–2, 356 Frente Amplio coalition 318, 384 Friedman, Milton 289, 295, 303, 319, 326, 383, 384 GAM (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka) freedom fighters 18, 32, 346 Gbadolite 159 GDP see Gross Domestic Product Gécamines 155–6 Geddes, Reay: report 189–90 gender roles, Japanese 223–4, 232 Germany 187, 195, 222, 227, 247, 249, 292, 302, 360 Glasgow 6–7, 176, 177–207, 333 culture 180 drug users 191–2 externalities 183–4, 186, 189–90, 333 population density 197 shipbuilding 178–9, 181, 184–6, 187–8, 189, 190–91, 199–200, 206–7, 333, 334 tenement homes and social capital 196, 197–202, 205, 335 unemployment 190 see also Calton; Gorbals; Govan and below Glasgow City Council (GCC) 202–4 Glasgow City Improvement Trust 202–3, 366 ‘Glasgow effect’, isolation 205–6 Glassford, John 181 Glenlee 179 gold in Aceh 17, 20–22, 37, 332, 334 in the Congo 143 in Darien 109, 113, 117, 120, 356 Golden Island 114–15 Good Neighbor Policy (USA) 294, 383 Goodyear, Charles 150 Gorbals, Glasgow 176, 191, 192, 204, 205, 367 Govan, Glasgow 176, 178, 184, 186, 192, 197–8, 201–3, 206, 207 Great Depression 26 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 26 Aceh 27, 37–8 Chile 316 Congo 153, 173 Estonia 259 Hagadera refugee camp, Kenya 45 Han, Byung-Chul 319 Harberger, Arnold ‘Alito’ 295, 305, 326 Hargreaves, James 266, 267 Harris, Walter 115 Harvey, William 1, 3–4, 5, 6, 329, 330, 336 Heinla, Ahti 263–4, 268, 282, 284, 285 Hinohara, Shigeaki 211 housing 90 Aceh 12–13, 16, 19, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29–30, 26, 38, 39 Akita, Japan 223, 228, 229, 230, 232, 233, 236–7, 239, 248 Azraq and Zaatari camps 44, 45, 48, 54, 55, 59, 61, 63, 70, 71 Chile 296, 297, 300, 302, 204, 306, 207, 308, 326 Darien 118, 139 Glasgow 197–9, 202–6 Kinshasa 142 Louisiana 95, 102 human capital 38–9, 168, 305, 335, 346–7 human rights abuses 300–1 Hyakumoto, Natsue 235 ID cards, personal data 260–61 Ifo refugee camp, Kenya 45 incarceration rates, USA 76–7, 78 industrial agglomeration 182–6, 200, 206, 330–31, 333, 365 inequality 6, 18, 254, 331, 337 in Chile 6, 291–2, 292, 293, 297, 298, 304, 308, 311, 317, 318, 324–7 intergenerational (Japan) 221–3, 238, 248 informal economies 122–5, 214–15, 331, 333–4, 336 Aceh 21–2, 24, 30, 31, 34, 37 Akita 233, 248 Chile 297, 306–7, 310, 323 Darien 122, 128, 129 Estonia 258 and Glasgow 204, 206, 334 Italy 196, 336 Kinshasa 142, 146, 148, 163–6, 167–8, 170, 173–5, 334 in prisons 77, 78–9, 86–7, 91, 93, 96, 99, 100–1, 102 in Zaatari camp 43, 45, 47, 57, 61, 64, 71, 72, 86 Innophys 245 innovation in Chile 315 and currency 97, 99–100 and economies 43, 79, 80, 87, 100, 122, 162, 333, 334 in Estonia 252, 256–7, 258–87 in Glasgow 179, 180, 182, 185, 188, 192, 201 technological 97–8, 183, 187, 252, 256–7, 258–87 intergenerational inequality (Japan) 221–3, 238, 248 International African Association (IAA) 149 International Cooperation Administration (ICA) 294 International Monetary Fund 303 inventions 265–6 in Estonia 252–3, 260, 265, 275–6, 282–3 isolation, ‘Glasgow effect’ 205–6 Italy 195–6, 201, 202, 335–6, 366 ageing population 213, 220, 222, 243, 331 population decline 227, 230, 233, 249 ivory trade 149 Jackie Chan Village 35–7, 39 Jackson, Giorgio 317–20 Jadue, Daniel 322, 332 Japan ageing population 6, 213–25, 227–49, 331 common forest conservation 124, 125 education 220, 223, 229 shipyards innovation/ competition 187–8, 189 tsunamis 15 Japan Football Association (JFA) 212–13 Jendi, Mohammed 54–5, 56, 71 Jevons, William Stanley 75, 89–90, 99, 352 Kabila family 154, 161, 162, 173 Kajiwara, Kenji 238 Kakuma refugee camp, Kenya 45 Kalanick, Travis 57 Kasa-Vubu, Joseph 151 Katanga 143, 151 Katumba refugee camp, Tanzania 45 Kenya: refugee camps 45, 46 Keynes, John Maynard 5, 7 Kinshasa 6, 140, 141–75, corruption 143, 145–6, 148, 159–61, 168, 333, 361 informal economy 142, 146, 148, 163, 166, 167–8, 170, 173, 334 natural wealth 143 pillages 157–8 police 159–61 roads as informal markets 163–6 tax system 145–6, 147–8, 16 Kirkaldy, David 4, 5, 6, 330 Kuala Lumpur 293 Kuna tribe 126, 340 Laar, Mart 258 labour pools, industrial agglomeration 183, 184–5, 200 Ladrillo, El see Chicago Boys Lagos 293 Lampuuk 2–3, 6, 13, 14, 22–3, 26, 32, 33, 35, 37, 345 Lancashire 266, 267 Las Condes 288, 290, 293, 304, 306, 307, 308, 309, 321, 322, 325 Lasnamäe, Tallinn 272, 281 Le Corbusier: Cité radieuse 203 Leontief, Wassily: Machines and Man 251, 377 Leopold II, King of the Belgians 149–50 Lhokgna 10, 12–13, 14, 26, 27–8, 29, 31, 33, 34, 35, 38, 345 life-cycle hypothesis 218–19, 248 life expectancy Glasgow 179, 190, 191–3 Japan 215 Russia 273–4 Swaziland 179 Lima 293 Liverpool 89, 177, 192, 193, 205–6 Livingstone, David 148–9 Lloyd, William Forster 122–3 lonely deaths 225, 226, 236, 237, 248 Louisiana 74, 76, 81 Department of Public Safety and Corrections 83 Prison Enterprises 83–4, 85, 351 State Penitentiary see Angola Lüders, Rolf 293, 295, 304, 305, 325 Lumumba, Patrice 151 machine learning 268–70 Makarova, Marianna 272, 274 Malacca Strait 10, 17,. 18, 35, 39 Malahayati, Admiral Laksamana 34–5 Maluku steel mill, Kinshasa 155, 156–7 Manchester 192, 193, 205–6 market economies Chile 297, 302, 305, 317 prison 78, 79, 87, 89, 100, 101, 103 markets 71, 122, 332–3, 336 Aceh 20–22, 36–7, 38, 144, 331 Azraq camp 62–4, 71, 144 Chile 295, 296, 297, 298–9, 304, 309, 319, 320–23 Darien 122, 126–7, 128, 129, 131, 138 free 128, 131, 174, 296, 300–3, 316, 320, 326–7, 331–2, 356 Glasgow 181, 190 Japan 232, 233, 248, 249 Kinshasa 143, 145, 146–7, 162, 163–6, 167, 173, 174 Zaatari supermarkets 48–53, 64, 348 Marshall, Alfred 182–3, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 194, 200, 206, 329, 330, 365 Maslow, Abraham 41, 65–7, 68, 71, 72, 286, 319, 326, 349 Meikle, Andrew 266 Melvin, Jean 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 205 ménage lending system 201, 334 Menger, Carl 90, 99, 352 Michelin brothers 150 military coup, Pinochet’s 298 Mill, John Stuart 11, 38, 335, 346–7 minimum wages 94, 267, 296, 307–8, 310 Mishamo refugee camp, Tanzania 45 Mississippi River 74, 76 Mobutu, Sese Seko (formerly Joseph-Désiré) 141, 151–2, 154–9, 161, 162, 166, 173, 297, 333, 360–61 Modigliani, Franco 218–19, 372 Mojo (synthetic cannabis) 92–4, 95–6, 97 monopolies, facilitated 319 Montgomery, Hugh 3–4 Moore, Gordon 269 Morgan, Henry 112–13 Narva, Estonia 250, 271, 272, 274, 283, 287, 378 National Health Service 201–2 nationalization 187, 296, 301–2, 383 natural disasters: and economic growth 24–5 New Caledonia 114, 356 New Orleans 74, 76, 79, 93, 101, 102, 103 Ninagawa, Yukio 234–5 norms, economics and 196, 200, 201, 323, 334, 336 obesity 81, 309, 326, 351 opportunism: and depletion of common resources 126–38 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 291, 316, 326, 377 Ostrom, Elinor 123–5, 137 Pan-American Highway 106, 110, 111, 115–17, 118–19, 121, 139, 355 Panama 106, 108-9, 110, 111, 113, 117, 118, 121, 130, 131, 356–7 see also Darien Gap; FARC guerrillas Panian refugee camp, Pakistan 45 Paro robot 243–5 Paterson, William: A Proposal to Plant a Colony in Darien 107 pawn shops 200, 334, 367 Penguins’ Revolution 317 pepper: global boom 17, 345 Pepper robot 246–7 personal data 260–61 Petty, William 25–6, 38n, 346 Piñera, Sebastián 309 Pinochet, General Augustine 298, 300–1, 305, 322, 383 pirate economies see informal economies population 122, 125, 330, 347 Aceh 14, 16, 18 Chile/Santiago 291, 324 China 76 Congo/Kinshasa 143, 150 Dael 42 Darien Gap 126, 128 Estonia 255, 256, 265, 272 Glasgow 179, 197 Greece 238 Japan 226–7, 229 Portugal 238 refugee camps 44, 45, 49, 57, 348 Sweden 238 US prisons 76–7 see also ageing populations Portugal 213, 227, 230, 233, 238, 243, 249, 291, 331, 351, 360 poverty Chile 291, 293, 300, 301, 303–4, 305, 208, 311. 15. 326 Congo/Kinshasa 143, 144, 160, 169, 11, 173 Glasgow 192 Italy 195 Japan 220, 226, 233, 248 Louisiana 81, 351 prices 147–8, 302 Pride of York 207 Prisoner’s Dilemma 174 privatization 169, 173, 301–2, 315, 326, 361 Pugnido refugee camp, Ethiopia 45 Putnam, Robert 195–6, 201, 202, 335–6, 366 Rahmatullah mosque, Aceh 14 rainforest destruction 121, 128–31 Rand, Rait 260, 275–6, 283, 284 Red Road Estate, Glasgow 203 refugee camps 45, 46, 55, 173 see also Azraq; Zaatari Reid, Alexander 180 resilience 3, 5, 6, 13, 16, 22, 31, 34, 35–9, 78, 103, 109, 122, 123, 146, 170, 248, 293, 325, 333–7, 384 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia see FARC Rideau, Wilbert 79–80, 82, 87–8, 100, 351 Rio Chucunaque 117, 119 robotics/ robots and care 243–4, 245–7, 248 delivery robots 262–4 for egalitarian economies 284–5 human overseers/ minders 280 ‘last-mile problem’ 264 machine learning 268–70 Sony AIBO robotic dogs 245 trams, driverless 264 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 294, 356 rosewood trees 120, 128, 138 rubber trade 149–50 Russian-Estonians 272–4, 281–4, 286–7 salarymen, retired 223–4, 228, 248 Samuel, Arthur 269 Santiago 7, 288, 289–327 see also Chile schools/ schooling markets 165, 311–15 Scotland Darien disaster 114–15, 133, 137–8 see also Glasgow self-governance 125–8 shipbuilding 178–9, 181, 184–6, 187–8, 189–91, 199–200 Sikkut, Siim 259, 277, 284 Skype 254, 263, slavery 82–6 smuggling 42, 46–8, 68 social capital 195–6, 199, 200, 202, 323, 325, 335–6, 366 social inequality 142–3, 324–5 Somalia 15 South Korea 213, 214, 220, 227, 233, 247, 319, 373 Spain 115, 137, 213, 222, 227, 243, 331 Spice (synthetic cannabis) 352 Spice Islands 17 Spiers, Alexander 181 Spinning Jenny 267, 269, 274, 378 Sri Lanka 15, 17, 49 Stanley, Henry Morton 148–9 Stanyforth, Disney 266 Starship Technologies 262–4, 269, 280 stateless people 255 store cards, prepaid 97–8 students 81, 168, 218, 221, 223, 236–7, 238, 248, 282, 283, 294–5, 304–5, 311–14, 315–18 suicide 194, 213, 224, 225–6, 236, 248, 366 Sumatra 17-18, see also Aceh supermarkets, Zaatari 48–53, 64, 348 Swing Riots 266, 378 synthetic cannabis see Mojo; Spice Takahashi, Kiyoshi 235, 236 Tallinn 7, 250, 251–87 Russian population 272–4, 281–4, 286–7 start-up paradise 254 Tallinn, Harry 278, 282–3 Tanzania: refugee camps 45 taxation 25, 346 Aceh 32 Chile 295, 302, 307, 315–17, 325 Darien 111, 130 Estonia 256–7, 259, 273, 278, 287 Glasgow 190 Japan 220, 231 Kinshasa 145–6, 147–8, 151, 152, 158, 161–2, 165, 167–8, 169, 173–4 in Zaatari refugee camp 48, 56 Tay Bridge collapse 5 teak trees 116, 130–31, 138, 333, 356, 357 technology and inequality 253–4 innovation 97–8, 183, 187, 256–7, 258–9 spill-overs 183, 189 and unemployment 253, 262, 270, 279, 286, 287, 377, 379 tectonic plates 13–14 tenement buildings, Glaswegian 196, 197–202, 205, 335 Thailand 15, 144, 213 tobacco 77, 85–6, 92, 95, 100, 143, 156, 181, 191, 202, 365 Tomaya, Yoichi 235 Törbel, Switzerland: forest conservation 124 towerblocks 203, 204, 205 trade in prison 97–100 in Zaatari camp 43–57, 67–70 see also markets traditions, economic resilience and 21, 22, 24, 34, 196, 336 trust 148, 150, 174, 196, 199, 201, 206, 248, 261, 295, 321, 323, 325, 335 Tshisekedi, Félix 154 tsunamis 2–3, 12–14, 15, 16, 18–19, 22–3, 25 Tull, Jethrow 266 Turkey 28, 58, 144, 213 Uber 57 Ukegawa, Sachiko 234 underground economies 77–9, 87–101 see also informal economies unemployment 64–5, 142–3, 190, 275 Chile 290, 297, 302, 307, 311 Congo 142, 359 Estonia 270, 273, 275, 279, 283, 379 Glasgow 179, 190, 191 and technology 253, 262, 270, 279, 286, 287, 377, 379 United Kingdom 4, 18, 26, 181, 187, 188, 199, 213, 223, 278, 335 agriculture 265, 267 housing 232 jails 86, 91, 96, 352 National Health Service 201, 203 population 226 and technology 253, 254, 257, 260, 262, 264 see also Glasgow; Scotland United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 44, 46, 48, 54, 57, 72, 348 World Food Programme (WFP), and Zaatari 48, 49–50 universities Aceh 13, 33, 34 Akita, Japan 221, 223 Chile 294, 305, 313, 314, 315, 316–17, 318, 324, 326 Congo/Kinshasa 151, 160, 166, 168 Estonia 275, 282, 283 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) 189 urbanization: and agglomeration forces 330–31 United States 26, 54, 76, 83, 93, 213, 223, 253, 262, 279, 292, 294, 297–8 prisons 76–7, 78, 81, 91–2, see also Angola population 226 and technology 260, 262, 264, 267, 269, 276 USAID 28, 29 Valdez, Samuel 121, 128–9, 130 Vallejo, Camila 317–18, 384 Van Gogh, Vincent 180 Vatter, Ott 277, 278 Viik, Linnar 257, 258–60, 261–2 Wafer, Lionel 113–14, 134, 355 Waisbluth, Mario 313 Walpole, Sir Spencer: A History of England 177 Walsh, David: History, Politics and Vulnerability … 177 Watanabe, Hiroshi 234 wealth 4–5, 159, 218–19, 324–5, 329, 334–6 nation’s 25, 38n, 346–7 natural 109, 132, 143 workforce 184–5, 264–8, 275, 297 World Bank 303, 305, 346 World Health Organization (WHO) 63, 215 World Trade Organization 303 Wounan tribe 126, 127 X-Road data system 261, 274–5, 279, 283, 377 Y Combinator 252 Yamamoto, Ryo 236–7 Yaviza, Panama 110, 111, 116–20, 127, 132, 135, 138, 144, 356 Yida refuge camp, South Sudan 45 Zaatari Syrian refugee camp 6, 40, 41–73, 86, 89, 100, 163, 173, 308, 331, 332, 334, 335, 348, 349 declining population 57 education 67, 71, 349 informal economy 43, 45, 47, 57, 61, 64, 71, 72, 86 smuggler children 42, 46–8, 68 supermarkets 48–53, 64, 348 trade development 43–57, 67–70, 71, 72 UNHCR cedes control 44–6 Zaire 152, 154, 155–6, 159, 361 Zorrones 324 TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS 61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA penguin.co.uk Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.


Peggy Seeger by Jean R. Freedman

anti-communist, anti-work, antiwork, cotton gin, feminist movement, financial independence, glass ceiling, job satisfaction, Multics, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Skype, We are the 99%, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Botkin, “Folksong Revival,” 107. 18. Peggy Seeger, Skype interview with the author, July 29, 2015. 19. Ellen J. Stekert, “Cents and Nonsense in the Urban Folksong Movement: 1930–66,” in Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, ed. Neil V. Rosenberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 99–100. 20. Peggy Seeger, “A Singer for My Time,” program of Smithsonian Folklife Festival 2000, 95. 21. Peggy Seeger, “Singer for My Time,” 95. 22. Boyes, Imagined Village, 3. 23. Peggy Seeger, “Singer for My Time,” 95. 24. Peggy Seeger, Skype interview, July 29, 2015. 25. Peggy Seeger, Skype interview, July 29, 2015. 26.

Liner notes, Heading for Home, Appleseed Recordings APR CD 1076, 2003. 31. Calum MacColl, interview, August 24, 2009. This story has clearly become a family legend. When I interviewed Kitty, she asked, “He's [Calum] told you the balls story?” (August 24, 2009) 32. Peggy Seeger, email message, July 27, 2014, emphasis in original. 33. Kerry Harvey-Piper, Skype interview with the author, August 4, 2014. 34. Peggy Seeger, personal interview, May 20, 2011. 35. Heading for Home. 36. “About Peggy,” http://www.peggyseeger.com/about/whats-new/2003, accessed August 11, 2016. 37. Crazy Quilt, Timely Productions, 2008. Massey has written about his experience in Kill!

Judith Tick, Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer's Search for American Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 11. 33. Ray Allen and Ellie M. Hisama, eds., Ruth Crawford Seeger's Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Music (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2007). 34. Judith Tick, telephone interview with the author, July 14, 2014. 35. Peggy Seeger, Skype interview with the author, July 20, 2014. 36. Rhythms of the World, unedited material from program on Ewan MacColl, videotape, roll number: SL 115-222, Ewan MacColl/Peggy Seeger Archive, Ruskin College, Oxford, England. 37. Ken Hunt, Q magazine, http://www.peggyseeger.com/listen-buy/an-odd-collection/an-odd-collection-reviews, accessed August 11, 2016. 38.


pages: 160 words: 45,516

Tomorrow's Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future by Richard Susskind

business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, disruptive innovation, global supply chain, information retrieval, invention of the wheel, power law, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, supply-chain management, telepresence, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Crucially, also, the report did establish that a video link between a police station and a court can be used successfully to conduct a first hearing in the majority of criminal cases—and, in the pilot, it reduced the average time from charge to first hearing, it cut down the failure-to-appear rates, and it saved the costs of transporting prisoners from prisons to courts. The growing use across society of video-calling and video-conferencing—from Skype to ‘telepresence’ (which is like Skype on steroids)—suggests there is enormous scope for virtual courts, if not for trials then for earlier hearings, when judges could sit in their chambers and all participants could attend remotely. For tomorrow’s lawyers, appearance in physical courtrooms may become a rarity. Instead, virtual appearances will become the norm, and new presentational and advocacy skills will be required.


pages: 472 words: 141,591

Go, Flight!: The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control, 1965-1992 by Rick Houston, J. Milt Heflin

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, crewed spaceflight, cuban missile crisis, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gene Kranz, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pneumatic tube, private spaceflight, Skype

Telephone interview with Rick Houston, 12 July 2013. Reed, H. David. Email correspondence with Rick Houston, 9 May 2013. —. Email correspondence with Rick Houston, 9 September 2013. —. Email correspondence with Rick Houston, 24 October 2013. —. Email correspondence with Rick Houston, 3 March 2014. —. Skype interview with Rick Houston, 3 June 2013. —. Skype interview with Rick Houston, 4 June 2013. Renick, J. Gary. Telephone interview with Rick Houston, 2 August 2013. Ross, Jerry L. Telephone interview with Rick Houston, 5 May 2014. Scott, Craig. Email correspondence with Rick Houston, 29 December 2013. Scott, Gary B. Telephone interview with Rick Houston, 10 December 2013.

JSC Oral History interview with Roy Neal, Houston, 19 March 1998. —. JSC Oral History interview with Rebecca Wright, Houston, 8 January 1999. —. Telephone interview with Rick Houston, 10 July 2013. —. Telephone interview with Rick Houston, 31 July 2013. Lewis, Charles R. Telephone interview with Rick Houston, 2 August 2013. Liebergot, Seymour A. Skype interview with Rick Houston, 2 April 2013. Loden, Harold A. Email correspondence with Rick Houston, 23 July 2013. —. Email correspondence with Rick Houston, 22 August 2013. —. Telephone interview with Rick Houston, 12 July 2013. Loe, T. Rodney. Telephone interview with Rick Houston, 5 July 2013.

Telephone interview with Rick Houston, 23 April 2013. —. Telephone interview with Rick Houston, 1 May 2013. Mattingly, Thomas Kenneth, II. Telephone interview with Rick Houston, 12 June 2013. McCandless, Bruce, II. Email correspondence with Milt Heflin, 19 August 2013. —. Email correspondence with Rick Houston, 28 August 2013. —. Skype interview with Rick Houston, 22 August 2013. Merritt, W. Merlin. Email correspondence with Rick Houston, 14 October 2013. —. Telephone interview with Rick Houston, 20 August 2013. Mill, Jerry W. Telephone interview with Rick Houston, 21 August 2013. Miller, Harold G. Email correspondence with Rick Houston, 17 June 2013


pages: 441 words: 136,954

That Used to Be Us by Thomas L. Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum

addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andy Kessler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, drop ship, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, full employment, Google Earth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Lean Startup, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, oil shock, PalmPilot, pension reform, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

We know where this eventually goes—to universal connectivity to the Internet via cell phone, smartphone, or traditional computer, probably within a decade. “I call my mother in Karachi every day. I use Skype and she uses her regular phone. It costs so little, it’s almost free,” Raziuddin Syed, a senior IT engineer based in Tampa, Florida, told the Pakistani newspaper Dawn (February 20, 2011). Syed “works for an international accounting firm, thanks to internet-connected laptop computer and the Voice over Internet Protocol technology. ‘Five years ago the cost of phone calls, especially those using VOIP, was much higher than it is today. Calls between members of services like Skype are always free but calls to other phones, landlines or mobiles, carry a very small per minute charge,’ Syed says.”

When Tom wrote The World Is Flat, Facebook wasn’t even in it. It had just started up and was still a minor phenomenon. Indeed, in 2005 Facebook didn’t exist for most people, “Twitter” was still a sound, the “cloud” was something in the sky, “3G” was a parking space, “applications” were what you sent to colleges, and “Skype” was a typo. That is how much has changed in just the last six years. In fact, so many new technologies and services have been introduced that we would argue that sometime around the year 2010 we entered Flat World 2.0—a difference of degree that deserves its own designation. That is because Flat World 2.0 is everything Flat World 1.0 was, but with so many more people able to connect to the Flat World platform, so many more people able to communicate with others who are also connected, and so many more people now empowered to find other people of like mind to collaborate with—whether to support a politician, follow a rock group, invent a product, or launch a revolution—based on shared values, interests, and ideals.

Shi, Katheryn Cheng Shiite Muslims Shriver, Sargent Shriver, Timothy Shultz, George Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society Silicon Valley Simpson, Alan Simpsonville (South Carolina) Singapore; education in Singh, Kartikeya Sinha, Abhinav Sinha, Abhishek Sirsi (India) situational values 60 Minutes (television series) Skype Smithsonian magazine Socialist Party Social Network, The (movie) social networks; see also Facebook; Twitter social safety net Social Security; cuts in; federal deficits and costs of; partisan politics and; Reagan’s reform of So Damn Much Money (Kaiser) Soffer, Edy Soil Science Society of America solar energy; Chinese investment in; declining cost of; for electric cars; for low-income housing Somalia Sorbonne Sosa, Sammy South Africa South Carolina South Korea Southwest Airlines Soviet Union; invasion of Afghanistan by; launch of Sputnik 1 by Spain Special Olympics Spelman College Splinter, Mike Spruance (Virginia) Sputnik Sridhar, K.


pages: 464 words: 127,283

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

Not far from where those early cable networks first appeared decades earlier, the AMC set up shop in Reading, Pennsylvania. There, with a grant from the National Science Foundation, in 1975 they built a primitive, yet functional, two-way interactive cable television network.6 Using a split-screen display and telephone lines to transmit voices, the rudimentary Skype-like multiparty video chat room linked three senior citizens’ centers. Burns and her team intended to experiment with new ways to deliver social services such as counseling, health care, and education online over television cable links—some forty years before Cisco would craft its own vision of a smart city around interactive video in Songdo in South Korea.

What they mean is that it’s not a priority, not worth the hassle of making it work with their existing systems. Haselmeyer sighs. “Do you think it will fit into the lives of 380,000 people in your city? To get up in the morning and go to work?” I can tell from his tone he didn’t close the deal. As I speak with him by Skype from his office in Barcelona, Haselmayer paints a convincing picture of situated software gone wrong. “Look at Germany. You have twenty-four cities which each have their own mobile app for parking. Every city backs its own local service provider thinking that they’re helping the next Google to emerge.

The award was designed to “give these companies visibility, help them to get an opening internationally.” When we spoke in late 2011, there were signs that the model was working—he reported that pilots based on winning projects in 2011 were up and running in Chicago, Taipei, and Lagos. A few months after our conversation over Skype, I met up with Haselmayer in Barcelona. As we wove our way across the old city, ducking in and out of medieval plazas, Haselmayer beamed as he explained the latest thrust in his campaign to promote smart-city start-ups, a new website called CityMart. He recited his pitch: “It’s a platform that provides cities with market intelligence about what kind of solutions are being developed, and where they are working.”


pages: 362 words: 134,405

Completely Mad: Tom McClean, John Fairfax, and the Epic of the Race to Row Solo Across the Atlantic by James R. Hansen

Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Neil Armstrong, Skype, social distancing, UNCLOS

I looked up, and came to know very well, its mournful yet wistful lyrics of challenge, loneliness, escape, defiance, perfect solitude, and finality that so brilliantly told the story of Don Allum’s final brave Atlantic row. I watched an interview, posted on YouTube, in which Marillion leader Steve Hogarth explained why he wrote the song and how and why he thought the song touched the hearts of so many of the group’s fans. I managed to Skype with Hogarth to ask him questions about the song and get contact information for the Allum family (Don had died in 1992, at age 55.) Through social media, I met and chatted with other devotees of the song. For many of them, as with me, their love of Marillion began with “Ocean Cloud.” For us, the song is very special in that it brings goosebumps, tears, and, finally, a tender smile.

Instead, I would direct my readers to pick up those four books, if interested, and read the full firsthand accounts penned by the two men themselves. I doubted that anyone would benefit greatly from a standard set of source notes similar to those one would find in any of my other books. As for my Skype interviews with Tom McClean, with Tom’s permission my plan has been to offer them for publication on the website of the Ocean Rowing Society. The only source materials that might be in question are the emails I received from Sylvia Cook in response to the questions I asked her about John Fairfax.

NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS John Fairfax, “How I Rowed the Atlantic and Found Florida,” Esquire, April 1, 1970, accessed at https://classic.esquire.com/article/1970/4/1/how-i-rowed-across-the-atlantic-and-found-florida. INTERVIEWS CONDUCTED BY AUTHOR Cook, Sylvia, Sussex, England (by telephone) July 14, 2020 August 4, 2020 McClean, Tom, Morar, Scotland (via Skype) June 18, 2020 June 24, 2020 July 2, 2020 July 16, 2020 August 14, 20202 September 4, 2020 November 18, 2020 December 17, 2020 January 21, 2021 March 18, 2021 April 1, 2021 July 8, 2021 August 20, 2021 June 30, 2022 August 4, 2022 September 16, 2022 December 14, 2022 E-MAIL CORRESPONDENCE WITH AUTHOR Cook, Sylvia, Sussex This correspondence between the author and Ms.


pages: 898 words: 266,274

The Irrational Bundle by Dan Ariely

accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business process, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, compensation consultant, computer vision, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Donald Trump, end world poverty, endowment effect, Exxon Valdez, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, first-price auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, IKEA effect, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, late fees, loss aversion, Murray Gell-Mann, name-letter effect, new economy, operational security, Pepsi Challenge, Peter Singer: altruism, placebo effect, price anchoring, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, second-price auction, Shai Danziger, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Skype, social contagion, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, young professional

Would this kid have taken cash from my wallet, even if he knew for sure that no one would ever catch him? Maybe, but I imagine that the answer is no. Instead, I suspect that there were some aspects of Skype and of how my account was set up that “helped” this person engage in this activity and not feel morally reprehensible: First, he stole calling time, not money. Next, he did not gain anything tangible from the transaction. Third, he stole from Skype rather than directly from me. Fourth, he might have imagined that at the end of the day Skype, not I, would cover the cost. Fifth, the cost of the calls was charged automatically to me via PayPal. So here we had another step in the process—and another level of fuzziness in terms of who would eventually pay for the calls.

None of this makes logical sense, but when the medium of exchange is nonmonetary, our ability to rationalize increases by leaps and bounds. I HAD MY own experience with dishonesty a few years ago. Someone broke into my Skype account (very cool online telephone software) and charged my PayPal account (an online payment system) a few hundred dollars for the service. I don’t think the person who did this was a hardened criminal. From a criminal’s perspective, breaking into my account would most likely be a waste of time and talent because if this person was sufficiently smart to hack into Skype, he could probably have hacked into Amazon, Dell, or maybe even a credit card account, and gotten much more value for his time.

Was this person stealing from me? Sure, but there were so many things that made the theft fuzzy that I really don’t think he thought of himself as a dishonest guy. No cash was taken, right? And was anyone really hurt? This kind of thinking is worrisome. If my problem with Skype was indeed due to the nonmonetary nature of the transactions on Skype, this would mean that there is much more at risk here, including a wide range of online services, and perhaps even credit and debit cards. All these electronic transactions, with no physical exchange of money from hand to hand, might make it easier for people to be dishonest—without ever questioning or fully acknowledging the immorality of their actions.


pages: 606 words: 87,358

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, buy low sell high, call centre, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, commodity super cycle, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, domestication of the camel, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, financial intermediation, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Henri Poincaré, imperial preference, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invention of the telegraph, investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, New Economic Geography, out of africa, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, profit motive, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, Skype, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus

Psychological research shows that “microexpressions”—split-second facial changes lasting only a twenty-fifth of a second—can indicate whether a person is concealing an emotion, consciously or unconsciously. These reactions cannot be perceived over regular video calls or Skype and, indeed, these sorts of nonverbal messages are one of the reasons face-to-face meetings generally lead to better understanding and trust than calls or Skype. Such systems are already deployed in high-end services sectors. They have reduced the need for face-to-face meetings in businesses such as consulting firms and financial services companies. However, they are still expensive and still limited to fixed facilities.

Face-to-Face Costs, the Virtual Presence Revolution and Telerobotics The third separation cost—the cost of face-to-face interaction—is also likely to persist on its downward path. More specifically, really good ICT is creating reasonable substitutes for in-person meetings. This “virtual presence revolution” is based on high-quality video and audio systems on both ends of what can be thought of as “the telephone wire.” It is—in essence—really, really good Skype. An example is Cisco Systems’ TelePresence. This combines full-size images of participants, using three plasma screens, sound channels, high-precision microphones, custom lighting, and high-definition cameras. Audio is arranged such that the voices of the participants on the “left” (who could be in Mumbai) sound like they are coming from the left.


A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution by Jennifer A. Doudna, Samuel H. Sternberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, CRISPR, double helix, Drosophila, dual-use technology, Higgs boson, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, mouse model, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, zoonotic diseases

At least, it seemed to be essential in bacteria within the Streptococcus genus, but it stood to reason that any critical component of one group of Type II systems would be just as vital in all the others. Exactly what role Cas9 was playing, however, remained to be determined. Together with Martin, I had a Skype meeting with Emmanuelle to begin strategizing about our Cas9 experiments. Setting up the call had been a challenge, underscoring the logistical difficulties of our collaboration. Emmanuelle was at Umeå University in northern Sweden, ten hours ahead of Pacific standard time, and the PhD student leading the CRISPR project from her lab—Krzysztof Chylinski—was working out of the University of Vienna, where Emmanuelle’s lab had previously been located.

To explore this latter possibility, Martin and Krzysztof began testing different ways of setting up the DNA-cutting experiment. In one of the many serendipitous twists to the story, they soon discovered they had grown up just across the border from each other—Krzysztof in Poland and Martin in what was then Czechoslovakia—and both spoke Polish, which greatly helped the increasingly frequent Skype sessions they held to brainstorm about their experiments. Eventually, Krzysztof and Martin performed experiments in which they included not only the CRISPR RNA but also the second type of RNA, called tracrRNA, that Emmanuelle’s lab had found to be required for production of CRISPR RNAs in S. pyogenes.

In June 2012, Emmanuelle and Krzysztof came to Berkeley for a conference, giving Martin and me a chance to finally see them in person again. Incredibly, given the scientific distance all of us had traveled together, our communication up until that point had been almost exclusively virtual. After innumerable phone calls, Skype discussions, and e-mail exchanges, we were all sitting in my Berkeley office, marveling at the results of our brief but intense collaboration. Emmanuelle and Krzysztof were in town for the fifth annual CRISPR conference, a meeting that brought together members of the twenty or thirty laboratories that were studying the bacterial defense system in 2012.


pages: 354 words: 92,470

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

… the tendency of the time is to throw all power into the hands of the greater empires … But, if Greater Britain remains united, no empire in the world can ever surpass it in area, in population, in wealth, or in the diversity of its resources … Extracts from a speech by Joseph Chamberlain, Secretary of State for the Colonies, at the annual dinner of the Royal Colonial Institute, 31 March 1897 INTRODUCTION The Andalucían Shock ONE-WAY TRAFFIC Globalization is often regarded as ‘one-way traffic’. In the modern age, we think of extraordinary advances in technology that allow us to connect in so many remarkable – and increasingly inexpensive – ways. We can communicate verbally and pictorially through WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook. We can talk to each other via FaceTime and Skype. We can search for recipes and the structure of the human brain through Google. We can purchase chicken madras and salmon nigiri over the internet and have them brought to our homes via local delivery services. We can stream music for free thanks to Spotify and watch our favourite artists and cat videos on YouTube or Vevo.

It’s time to look at technology in a new – more sceptical – light. 9 THE DARK SIDE OF TECHNOLOGY THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING WORLD Technology supposedly shrinks the world. The falling cost of telecommunications has linked citizens, countries and continents together in ways that previously would have been unimaginable. Search engines have provided us with information at the press of a button or the swipe of a screen. With the advent of web-based systems such as Skype and FaceTime, we can talk to each other (and, if we really have to, look at each other) wherever we happen to be in the world. And we are not being directly billed for the privilege. These extraordinary connections suggest that technology and globalization are fellow travellers. And they appear increasingly to be travelling at the economic equivalent of the speed of light.

(i), (ii)n1 Roosevelt, Theodore (i), (ii) Rothwell, Jonathan (i) Rousseff, Dilma (i) Royal Navy (i), (ii) Rumsfeld, Donald (i) Russia (i) see also Soviet Union 19th century (i), (ii) 20th century (i) Cold War in Africa (i) debt default (i) EU and (i) Eurasian Economic Union (i) George Bernard Shaw on (i) Germany and (i) military spending (i) Ottomans and (i) Persia defeated (i) Peter the Great (i) Putin becomes president (i) railways (i) Syria and (i), (ii) Ukraine and (i) Russo-Japanese War 1904–05 (i), (ii) S&P 500 index (i) Saddam Hussein (i), (ii), (iii) Safavid dynasty (i) Sahara (i) Salmond, Alex (i) Sanders, Bernie (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Sarajevo (i) Sardinia (i) Saudi Arabia Iran and (i), (ii), (iii) military spending (i) petrodollars (i) Sunnis (i) savings and loans crisis (i) Saxony (i) Scarborough Shoal (i) Schatzalp (i) Schengen Agreement (i), (ii), (iii) Schuman Declaration (i) Schwab, Klaus (i) Scotland (i), (ii) Scottish National Party (i), (ii) Second World War Coca-Cola in (i) economic progress following (i) Germany implodes (i) living standards and (i), (ii) US and (i), (ii), (iii) US and Soviet Union after (i) US, Britain and (i) World Bank and (i) Security Council (UN) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) see also UN self-determination (i), (ii) Seljuk Turks (i) Senate (US) (i) Senkaku Islands (i) Serbia (i) Sevastopol (i) Seville Cathedral (i), (ii) Shanghai (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) (i), (ii), (iii) SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) (i) Sharia law (i) Shaw, George Bernard (i), (ii), (iii) Shi’as (i), (ii) Shimoda, Treaty of (i) Sikhs (i), (ii) Silk Road (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Singapore Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (i) British in (i) IMF and World Bank (i) Lee Kuan Yew (i) mathematical abilities (i) TPP (i) Western living standards (i) Skype (i) slavery (i), (ii) Slavs (i) Slovakia (i) Slovenia (i) Smith, Adam (i), (ii), (iii) Smoot–Hawley tariff (i), (ii) Snowden, Edward (i) social media (i), (ii) social mobility (i) social welfare (i) socialism (i), (ii), (iii) Somalia (i), (ii) South China Sea (i) South Korea (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) South Sudan (i), (ii) Southern Kurils (i) Soviet Union see also Russia American suspicions of (i) collapse of (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Eastern Europe freed from (i), (ii), (iii) invades Afghanistan (i), (ii) Korean War and (i) League of Nations and (i) living standards (i) perceived threat to US (i) post-Second World War balance of power (i) Steffens impressed by (i) Spain Andalucía (i) Battle of Trafalgar (i) EU deficits (i) joins EU (i) living standards increase (i) Spaniards head north for work (i) Spanish speakers in US (i) US military presence (i) Spanish Succession, War of the (i) Speakers’ Corner (i) Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) (i) Spice Islands (i) ‘Spirit of Davos’ (i) Spirit of the Laws, The (Montesquieu) (i) Spratly Islands (i) St Petersburg (i) Stability and Growth Pact (i) Stalin, Joseph (i) Stanley, H.M.


pages: 340 words: 96,149

@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex by Shane Harris

air gap, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Brian Krebs, centralized clearinghouse, Citizen Lab, clean water, computer age, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, Firefox, information security, John Markoff, Julian Assange, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, peer-to-peer, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Stuxnet, systems thinking, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

Under a secret program called the SIGINT Enabling Project, it strikes deals with technology companies to insert backdoors into their commercial products. Congress allocated $250 million for the project in 2013. Working in conjunction with the FBI, the NSA got inside knowledge about a feature in Microsoft’s e-mail product, Outlook, that could have created obstacles to surveillance if left unaddressed. The agency also got access to Skype Internet phone calls and chats as well as Microsoft’s cloud storage service, SkyDrive, so that NSA analysts could read people’s messages before they were encrypted. Classified documents also show that the NSA invites makers of encryption products to let the agency’s experts review their work, with the ostensible goal of making their algorithms stronger.

See signals intelligence SIGINT Enabling Project, [>], [>] Signals Intelligence Directorate, [>], [>], [>], [>] signals intelligence (SIGINT), [>], [>], [>], [>], [>] signature (hacker methods). See threat signature signature (written name), [>] Silk Road, [>] sinkholing, [>] SkyDrive, [>] Skype, [>] Snort, [>] Snowden, Edward: background, [>]–[>]; information released by, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>] n. [>] software: antivirus, [>]; cybersecurity, [>]; cyber targeting, [>]; data filtering, [>]; data mining, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]–[>]; distributed computing, [>], [>]; to fend off automated probes, [>]; geo-location, [>]; malicious (see malware; spyware); network forensics, [>], [>]–[>], [>]; patches and updates for, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]; and secret/illegal access (see backdoors) software manufacturers, [>], [>], [>].

See Tailored Access Operations Target, [>], [>], [>] TASC, [>]–[>] Team Themis, [>]–[>] telecommunications companies, [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>]. See also specific companies telecommunications networks: DOD, [>]; fiber-optic trunk lines, [>], [>], [>]; Google, [>]; kill switch provision, [>]; right to spy in exchange for US license, [>]; Skype, [>]; undersea cables, [>], [>] Telvent, [>]–[>], [>] terrorism. See counterterrorism; 9/11 attacks threat signature, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>] thumb drives, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>], [>] Tier [>], [>] tippers, within communications data, [>] Tiversa, [>]–[>] Tor, [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>] Tranche 2 plan, [>]–[>], [>] Transportation Security Administration, [>] transportation system.


pages: 320 words: 90,526

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America by Alissa Quart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, antiwork, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, business intelligence, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Elon Musk, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, late capitalism, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, new economy, nuclear winter, obamacare, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, post-work, precariat, price mechanism, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, school choice, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stop buying avocado toast, surplus humans, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Or, as Karen Kelsky, a former anthropology professor who founded a counseling service called The Professor Is In, has put it: “find a ‘real job.’” (I paused at this, wondering how being a professor was not “real” in Kelsky’s mind.) Kelsky’s clients pay her $150 per hour to edit their documents or résumés. Two email consultations are $15. An hour-long Skype session for interview prep is $250. This is all part of the guidance she offers clients in reinventing themselves, she said, and, for some, in expressing “rage, despair, and disappointment” about their disappearing profession. “Adjuncts can accrue massive debt to support their children,” she noted, and in the process “destroy their health, teach at five campuses, in a professional death spiral.

The first time she left them had been nine years earlier, when she came to the United States on a student visa; she spent the initial few months crying and sleeping fitfully. Esther made enough money as a baby nurse and sleep trainer—$20 to $25 an hour—to send her kids to a boarding school in Kenya. “Now my daughter is a teenager. We are Skyping, and she says, ‘I want to ask you a question, Mama,’ and I want to hug her, but I cannot.” The separation is painful for mother and daughter. “But it is important that I am doing this,” said Esther, slapping the table. Her wages were supporting eight family members, including her two children. She sent home checks in varying amounts, sometimes for as much as $1,000.

She gestured at a long leafy ivy plant in a china pot that stood in one of the only two small windows of her apartment. “This plant has been my company since I moved here—that plant is my best friend,” she laughed. Then there was the fact that she hadn’t seen Guido for two years—buying the new clothes he’d need would be difficult. “He’s taller than me,” Blanca said. Guido didn’t Skype with her, since he didn’t have Internet access, so she had trouble picturing him sometimes. She had bought him boxers, socks, and pajamas with hearts on them, but she didn’t know his size, and “he’s very boy, so I am not sure he will like these hearts.” At some point, she called Guido as he prepared for his journey and talked to him in Spanish about the clothes he was packing.


pages: 339 words: 88,732

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

By now, the number of pages of digital text and images on the Web is estimated to exceed one trillion.2 As discussed in chapter 4, bits are created at virtually zero cost and transmitted almost instantaneously worldwide. What’s more, a copy of a digital good is exactly identical to the original. This leads to some very different economics and some special measurement problems. When a business traveler calls home to talk to her children via Skype, that may add zero to GDP, but it’s hardly worthless. Even the wealthiest robber baron would have been unable to buy this service. How do we measure the benefits of free goods or services that were unavailable at any price in previous eras? What GDP Leaves Out Despite all the attention it gets from economists, pundits, journalist, and politicians, GDP, even if it were perfectly measured, does not quantify our welfare.

But this decrease in costs lowers GDP even as our personal well-being increases, leaving GDP to travel in the opposite direction of our true well-being. A simple switch to using a free texting service like Apple’s iChat instead of SMS, free classifieds like Craigslist instead of newspaper ads, or free calls like Skype instead of a traditional telephone service can make billions of dollars disappear from companies’ revenues and the GDP statistics.5 As these examples show, our economic welfare is only loosely related to GDP. Unfortunately many economists, journalists, and much of the general public still use “GDP growth” as a synonym for “economic growth.”

Schreyer, Peter Schumpeter, Joseph science: effect of digitization on government support of prizes in rapid progress in science fiction robots in SCIgen Sears Second Industrial Revolution second machine age: career opportunities in characteristics of complementary innovations in economic data relevant to intangible assets of interventions for key advances of long-term recommendations for mental power boosted by metrics of second machine age (continued) policy recommendations for Power Law distributions in reality of values of see also digitization SecondMachineAge.com self-organizing learning environments (SOLEs) semiconductors Sen, Amartya senses, human sensorimotor skills sensors, digital Shabtai, Ehud Shakespeare, William Shannon, Claude Shapiro, Carl Shinar, Amir Siciliano, Francis SIGGRAPH conference Silicon Valley Simon, Herbert Simon, Julian Sims, Peter Singapore: education system in Electronic Road Pricing System in singularity Singularity Is Near, The (Kurzweil) Siri Siu, Henry Sixteenth Amendment Skype smartphone applications smartphones Smith, Adam Smith, Michael social media Social Progress Index Social Security Socrates software open source solar flares Solow, Robert Sony PlayStation 3 South Korea, education system in Soviet Union speech recognition Spence, Michael Spiegel, Eric Spotify Sprague, Shawn spread bounty vs.


pages: 335 words: 95,549

Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell

Airbnb, British Empire, cashless society, credit crunch, Donald Trump, fulfillment center, mail merge, Neil Armstrong, period drama, Skype, zero day

I had anticipated that it would last me until Sunday, but on the strength of experience I probably ought to have guessed that she’d devour the entire thing. When I mentioned it to her, she replied, ‘Fuck off, fucking bastard.’ The cursing side of her English vocabulary has considerably expanded since she arrived. Bed at 4.30 a.m. after a late Skype with Anna, who seems resigned to settling back in America, although she clearly feels that Scotland is her spiritual home. Till Total £257.88 26 Customers FRIDAY, 11 SEPTEMBER Online orders: 1 Orders found: 1 Nicky shuffled in just after 9 a.m. She started the day with a hectoring lecture about evolution and what a ridiculous concept it is.

Emailed John, the builder, about the chimney. We need to repair it before the weather really turns wintery and causes further damage. No reply, so I phoned Wacek, the Polish builder. Message from Granny on Facebook: ‘Shaun, you shitty bastard, why you not write to the Granny? I miss Scotland, with the rain and the sheep.’ Replied that I’ll Skype her next week. Isabel came in at two o’clock to do the accounts. She was raving about the ‘Night Before Christmas’ videos. Telephone call at 2.30 from a man near Dumfries with 2,000 books to sell. I have arranged to visit him on Friday as he has Oxfam coming to collect them next Tuesday if I don’t get there first.

., as darkness was falling, a customer asked, ‘Where did you get your lights from? They’re really good.’ Me: Which lights do you mean? Customer: The emotionally sensitive ones out the back. They come on really quickly. I’m not sure if incredulity can be considered an emotion, but if it can, those lights should be blazing right now. Skyped Granny. She talked for over an hour, barely letting me get a word in edgeways, and complaining that I never message her. She’s clearly missing Scotland and threatening to come back. Till Total £15 2 Customers FRIDAY, 4 DECEMBER Online orders: 3 Orders found: 3 Norrie in. As we were sorting through the endless boxes of books, I found a book called The English Tourist in Italy, which contains the following extremely useful phrases: Your niece has very beautiful arms, how old is she?


pages: 282 words: 93,783

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

I remember using Windows for the first time and the first alien pop, hiss, and static crackle of my teenage babysitter’s modem connecting over our phone line, as he fed half a dozen floppy disks into the beige Compaq to download Operation Wolf. I was there at the dawn of it all: Email. AOL. ICQ. Ethernet. Skype. Cell phones. Napster. iPods. Blackberries. iPhones. iPads. The first MacBook I bought after I sold my first article. The first photo I took on a digital camera. The day I created a social media account. The moment I connected to the internet wirelessly, like magic. The first pixilated breast I saw on a computer screen (Leisure Suit Larry behind Josh Dale’s bedroom door)… I remember it all.

This is why all those digital conversations fell short. We could talk. We could joke. We could make faces and share stories. But it wasn’t the same. Of course not. Anyone who lived away from their family could tell you that. When I lived in South America for nearly three years, I talked to my parents almost every day on Skype but only visited home once a year for a month. The two experiences were incomparable. Not just because of the physical surroundings—their smell and sound, the hugs and subtle body language—but because when I was actually with them, our conversation never ended. It just wrapped itself around whatever we were doing.

I’ve seen kind people turn into vicious trolls, given the right prompts and subjects, and been ashamed of myself when I’ve responded to a message or post with the type of off-the-hip snideness I would never, ever dare to use when speaking to the same person face-to-face. “Screens are amazing at conveying bad emotion,” Alter told me when we spoke by Skype. “The acuteness of anger I feel watching a screen is the same as if you cut me off in my car. But you’ll never feel the joy and ecstasy that you will feel in real life on a screen.” Social media takes conversation and weaponizes it. It removes the human, makes other people more abstract, and then rewards us for behaving in ways we know we shouldn’t.


pages: 186 words: 49,595

Revolution in the Age of Social Media: The Egyptian Popular Insurrection and the Internet by Linda Herrera

citizen journalism, crowdsourcing, decentralized internet, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Google Earth, informal economy, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, RAND corporation, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, WikiLeaks

The first was Egypt’s 6th of April Youth Movement, and the second was Colombia’s No More FARC (acronym for the “Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia”), also known as One Million Voices Against FARC. Oscar Morales, an unemployed web developer, ingeniously adapted the tools and architecture of Facebook, Skype, and instant messaging to build a spectacularly successful transnational campaign against FARC, the military wing of the Colombian Communist Party, designated a terrorist group by the US. This citizen-initiated campaign culminated in massive demonstrations on February 4, 2008, when some fourteen million people took to the streets of cities in Colombia and around the world.

See Tamarud Reporters Without Borders, 103–4 Revolution 2.0, 1, 42, 64, 79, 121, 149 See also Ghonim, Wael Ross, Alec, 42–3 Sabahi, Hamdeen, 124 Said, Khaled, 46, 47–101, 107, 108, 110–11, 150–5 January 25th event and, 5, 19 See also “We Are All Khaled Said” saint, 151–5 Saint Avatatas, 11 Sakhr, 7 Sakr, Rehab, 121 Salafi Front, 91–2 satellite dishes, 7, 8–10, 12 Satellite Thief (Harami al-Dish), 9 Saweris, Nagib, 10 Schmidt, Eric, 44 See also Google Serbia, 18, 33–4 Shafik, Ahmed, 120, 122 Sharp, Gene, 35, 88 Sidi Bouzid, 99, 101 silent stand, 65–68, 87–89, 97 el-Sisi, Abdel Fattah, 136–41, 155–6 6th of April Youth Movement, 22–3, 34, 59, 86–7, 107 AYM and, 35, 38, 46 members of, 37, 75, 107, 110, 119 Skype, 35 soft power, 25–7, 156 Spacenet Internet cafe, 47, 49 State Department, 2, 23–4, 28–44, 106, 146–8 Stepka, Matthew, 1 Stone, Biz, 22 See also Twitter Suez, 114 canal, 14 Supreme Constitutional Court, 136 Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF), 3, 74, 120 taboos, 12–14, 158 Al Taghrir.


Mastering Prezi for Business Presentations by Russell Anderson-Williams

business process, call centre, market design, off-the-grid, Skype

However, if you do not take into account the simple points raised in this chapter your design is likely to fail. It probably won't engage your audience as you'd hope it would and this could mean you've wasted an awful lot of time designing it in the first place. Be realistic when you plan your online Prezi. People are extremely busy these days and normally have e-mail, web pages, Skype, and other distractions coming through their computer screens at them all day long. If you want your Prezi's message to hit home and engage, then make it clear from the start what the user has to do, design your Prezi to look and sound great, and above all keep it short and to the point. The next chapter looks at importing slides into your Prezi canvas.

If your Prezi doesn't have paths, you can zoom around freely and your guests will also move along with you. Audio We obviously recommend you use some kind of audio system to speak with your guests as well. Prezi doesn't have any built-in function for using audio, so a company conference line or Skype will be sufficient enough. Make sure you mention the audio details on your invite, and also in the very first frame of your Prezi link we have in the following screenshot: [ 202 ] Chapter 10 Where have they gone? The only real danger you face when presenting online through Prezi meeting is losing people on your canvas.


pages: 161 words: 51,919

What's Your Future Worth?: Using Present Value to Make Better Decisions by Peter Neuwirth

backtesting, big-box store, Black Swan, collective bargaining, discounted cash flows, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, Long Term Capital Management, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, the scientific method

One day I got an urgent call from David who summoned me to his office to tell me the exciting news that we had just received an invitation to bid on a massive project to assist a consortium of telephone companies—including all of the old “Baby Bells,” who were formed when the government broke up AT&T in the early ’80s—with an effort to convince the FCC that a new set of accounting rules (regarding retiree medical benefits) was going to increase company costs so much that the government should allow all the local telephone companies to raise the rates that they charged AT&T to use their lines. (AT&T still controlled all the long distance calls, while the “Baby Bells” provided local service.)23 Obviously it is a very different world today. Not only do most of the “Baby Bells” no longer exist, and AT&T itself is just one of several cell phone carriers, but in a world with Skype, Wi-Fi connections, and multiple cable companies providing everything from streaming video to teleconferencing, the notion that there would be one national phone system managed and regulated by the government seems downright bizarre. But twenty years ago, the old order was still very much in place, and David, who had a great deal of expertise in navigating intricate regulatory schemes (the UK system of rules governing pension, insurance, and actuarial matters is a veritable puzzle palace), viewed this opportunity as truly golden.

See also actuarial perspective applicability of, 4 balance between present and future and, 4 better decision making with, 23 in complicated situations, 62–64 and compound interest, 52 and consideration of all possible futures, 5 in day-to-day world, 23–37 definition of, 4–5, 52–54 vs. discounted cash flow method, 117–118 in evaluating time shares, 31–37 failure to properly utilize, 120–128 5-step process for comparing, 7–13 implied rate of discount by, 119 importance of proper use of, 82, 124–125 improving decision making with, 4 improving society and, 4 improving the world and, 150–157 in life-and-death decisions, 130–138 lifestyle choices and, 135–138 and liquidity premium, 54 in long-term decisions, 139–148 math of, 52, 109–116 mischaracterization of, 59–60 mechanics of, 51–57 in medical tests, 135–138 not-for-profit organizations and, 142 in a nutshell, 4 and “once in a lifetime” opportunities, 27–31 for organizations and communities, 117–128 and personal rate of discount, 54–57 question answered by, 55 and real estate, 60–62 and rental properties, 60–62 relative weights, importance of, 108, 110 and risk, 54 and risk-free return, 53 in saving and investing strategies, 37 rental properties and, 60–62 risk-free return and, 53 and value of time, 30 Present Value thinking in big decisions, 39–49 importance of taking your time, 35–36 taking responsibility for owning process of, 48 problems, simplification of, 116 public employees retirement programs, 120–128 pure randomness, 80 R rate(s) of discount, 11 definition of, 51, 55–57 example of, 26 extraordinarily high, in companies, 119 implied in present values, 119 infinite, 98 math behind, 56–57 for organizations vs. individuals, 104–118, 120 personal, 54–57, 98–100, 101–108 variation in, 99–100 real estate, 60–62 regime change, 89–90, 94 Relativity, Theory of, 90 relaxed playful attitude, 116 Rest of Life Communications, 159 retirement plan, private vs. public sector, 124 risk, 54 risk-free return, 53 risk management, 93 RPA, 116 S saving and investing strategies, 37 Schwartz, Mordecai, 15–21 signal in the noise, 80 Skype, 84–85 Stanford’s Center for Longevity, 160 statistical significance, 77, 79–80, 89, 89 T Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 87–88, 92, 94, 118 The Power of Now (Tolle), 2 The Wall Street Journal, 86, 91 Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman), 10 time horizon, 98, 118–119 and elections, 127 for organizations, 120 time preference, 54 time, risk, and money, 104 time shares, 31–37 time, value of, 30 Tolle Eckhart, 2 Towers Watson, 153 Tversky, Amos, 77 U University of Pennsylvania, 86 US Social Security, 153–154 V Verney, Arthur (Tad), 99,101–108 Vernon, Steve, 157–160 Vonnegut, Kurt, 65 W Walter, Bob Watson Wyatt, 159 Wickes, Gene, 150–157 Z Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig), 68–69 About the Author Peter Neuwirth has been an actuary for over thirty-five years, and after decades of having been asked too many times the question “What is an actuary exactly?”


pages: 360 words: 101,038

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax

Airbnb, barriers to entry, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, creative destruction, death of newspapers, declining real wages, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, gentrification, hype cycle, hypertext link, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

Each March, Moross attends the technology conference South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas, where he hears about the next app predicted to kill the business card. Meanwhile, everyone in the room is still ordering more cards from MOO, which supplies stationery to such technology companies as Skype, LinkedIn, and Uber. “Attempts to reinvent business cards for the digital age have got nowhere,” The Economist wrote in 2015. “Even at the trendiest of Silicon Valley tech gatherings, people still greet each other by handing out little rectangles made from dead trees rather than tapping their phones together.”

On any given day there are thousands of encounters happening all over the world thanks to Meetup, from bird-watching groups in Bangkok to record swaps in Buenos Aires. But Meetup only has one office, which is in New York City, and all its employees work under one roof. When I met Heiferman there, he told me this was a conscious choice. “I don’t do phone calls, I don’t let people Skype into a meeting, and I’m going to eat lunch with my friends,” he said, as we sat on folding Coleman chairs in a small meeting room made to look like a campsite, complete with walls covered in photos of Meetup hiking groups. Heiferman refuses to have important conversations by phone, e-mail, or other digital means unless absolutely necessary.

88 scalability, 170, 172 school libraries, 187 schools alternative, 208 physical versus virtual, 176–177, 200–201 See also education Schram, Stefanie, 200 Schumpeter, Joseph, 153 Schwartz, Barry, 130 Scorsese, Martin, 71 Scott, Ken, 25–26 Scrabble, 76, 77, 85 screen-free parenting, xv screen-free schools, 208 Search Inside Yourself, 206 Seasick Steve, 22 Sebregondi, Maria, 32–34, 35, 36, 39, 40, 41, 46, 47, 48–49, 111 Second Life (virtual world), 81, 217 Senk, Glen, 134 sensory experience, xiii, xvii, 32, 83, 111, 113, 131, 132, 180–181, 188, 195, 225–226, 231 Serena and Lily, 137 serendipity, 113, 115, 131, 238 Settlers of Catan, 76, 85, 89–90, 93, 239 7-inch EP format, 8, 22 “Shake It Off” (Swift), 6 Shake It Records, 21 Shapiro, Dan, 226 Sharma, Mala, 210 Sharman, Mark, 119, 120 Sharman’s, 119–120 Sheridan College, 195 Shinola, 149–152, 157–158, 159–161, 167–168, 169, 171, 172 shipping costs, 135–136, 137 shopping experience, 126–127, 134, 137 Shut Up and Sit Down (blog), 90 sign making, 215–217 Silicon Valley, xv, xvii, 45, 155, 166, 178, 206, 208, 211, 213, 223, 225, 226, 229, 238 Singer, Dorothy, 181–182 Sinkov, Andrew, 222, 223 Siwak, Heidi, 196–198 16 mm film, 56 sketchbook, 221–222 Skidgel, John, 221, 222 Skype, 45, 220 Slack, 219 Small World, 85 smart boards, 191, 213 smartphones abstaining from, xii, xv, 27, 115, 205, 231, 234, 235, 241, 242 attachment to, xii–xiii, 27, 235 companion to, 31 in education, 182 handwriting and, 46 music on, ix photography and, 62, 69–70 role of, in analog’s rise, xvii years living with, 237 Smolokowski, Slava, 69–70 Snakes & Lattes, 75–76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86–88, 89, 90, 93, 95, 96–98, 239–240 Snapchat, 234 social interaction, experiencing, xv, 82, 144, 212, 217–219 social media/networks creating real social experiences for, 217–218 dominance over, 163 film photography and, 62 limitations of, 144 role of, in analog’s rise, xvii surge of, notebooks and, 43 tabletop gaming and, 80, 91, 94 See also specific social networking service software building, role of analog in, 209, 215 educational, 179, 181, 186, 190 and the Great Recession, 156 inherent bias of, 36 role of, in analog’s rise, xvii Songlines, The (Chatwin), 33 Songza, 20 Sony, 9, 11, 17 Sound on Sound (magazine), 22 Sour Soul (album), 27 South by Southwest Interactive, 45 Spark Notebook, 43 Spence, Michael, 163 Sperduti, Anthony, 138 Spin Master, 85 Spotify, 10, 13, 20 Stack, 103, 106 Stack Live, 103, 105 stamps, 132 Standage, Tom, 110 standardization, 7, 36, 118, 145, 162, 186, 194 Stanford University, 193, 201 Stapleton, Rich, 103–104 Star Wars: The Force Awakens (movie), 72 Starcraft (game), 94 Starr, Ringo, 26 startup trend, xiv stationery, 36, 45, 132, 218 stationery stores, 33, 34, 44 Steelcase, 190 STEM programs, 192 Sterling, Greg, 218 still film, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58–59, 63, 64, 68 Stoltz, Kelly, 22 Stoppelman, Jeremy, 217 Strand, 127, 128 streaming services, x, xvi, 10, 12, 19–20, 22, 242 streaming video technology, 201 Street Fighter 2 (game), 80 Studio O+A, 211–213 Success Academy, 189 Sun Records, 5 Super 8 film, 71 Super Mario Bros.


The Despot's Accomplice: How the West Is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy by Brian Klaas

Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, citizen journalism, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, moral hazard, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Seymour Hersh, Skype, Steve Jobs, trade route, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, unemployed young men, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

I was only allowed out of the cell one hour per day to go for a “walk” but in a closed space. I measured it. It was thirty-five steps long. But I still refused to sign.27 â•… Being told these harrowing stories while also being followed by KGB agents is a little unnerving. I woke up in my Minsk hotel room the day after arriving to a series of automated alerts from Skype saying that my account had been targeted by a hacking attempt. My account was shut down; it had been compromised. But during my visit, I was reassured by one of my contacts, a pro-democracy dissident, in startlingly frank language: “don’t be afraid—while the EU is processing some grants for Belarus, you can feel safe here as I do.”

Afifi, a former Egyptian police officer who stood up to his superiors, fled Egypt in April 2008 and landed in New York “with nothing but $50 and a gold watch.”6 After being granted political asylum, Afifi settled in Falls Church, Virginia—inside the DC beltway and just a fifteen-minute drive from the Pentagon. During the Arab Spring and the social media-fueled Tahrir Square 163 THE DESPOT’S ACCOMPLICE standoff between protesters and President Mubarak, Afifi shared insider tips about how police tactics would be used to crush the protests. He used Skype to stay in constant contact with those occupying the square. He used Google Maps to highlight potential routes that protesters should use if and when the eventual crackdown came.7 There is no doubt that the digital revolution influenced the Egyptian Revolution. â•… However, just as Afifi played a part in establishing Egypt’s brief experiment with democracy, he also played a part in its downfall.

., 138 Development Assistance Committee (DAC), 58 Devlin, Larry, 43 Diamond, Larry, 171 Dictator’s Learning Curve, The (Dobson), 210 digital communications, 49, 125, 161–75, 207, 208, 221, 223 Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), 48 direct democracy, 28–9 disabled rights, 141, 144 disinformation, 207–8 Dobson, Will, 210 “Don’t Forget Me” (GooGoosha), 140 Dubai, 82 Duékoué, Côte d’Ivoire, 105 Dulles, Alan, 41 Durack, Western Australia, 29–30 Duvalier, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc”, 114 Ebola, 184 echo chamber effect, 165 Egypt, 6, 9–10, 13–16, 27, 88, 155, 163–4, 225 1987 US aid payments begin, 14 2001 EU Association Agreement, 155 2008 Afifi exiled to US, 163 2009 Clinton describes Mubaraks as ‘friends of my family’, 6; Obama’s Cairo speech, 9–10, 218 2011 Tahrir Square protests begin, 10, 13, 163–4; Mubarak ousted, 13, 164 2012 Morsi elected president, 14; anti-Morsi demonstrations begin, 164, 247 2013 coup d’état; el-Sisi comes to power, 14–16, 88, 164; Saudi Arabia announces aid package, 15 Eid al-Kabir, 124 Eisenhower, Dwight David, 38, 43 elections campaign finance, 185–8, 238 foreign aid/intervention, 97–110, 143 “free and fair”, 8, 14, 88–90, 102, 159, 193 gerrymandering, 180–5, 188, 251 grade inflation, 88–9, 158, 159 inclusivity, 24, 129–31, 221 observation/monitoring, 8, 65, 81, 83–4, 88–90, 102, 158–9, 173–4, 178, 211, 223 polling, 174–6 respect for, 5, 37–48 rigging of, 22–3, 34, 61, 63–4, 70–1, 83–5, 87, 112, 158–9, 166, 210–11 short-term thinking, 26, 54, 56 turnout, 180, 184 Electoral Integrity Project, 189, 238 Elizabethville, Congo, 43 “emerging democracy”, 88 Emory University, 136 261 INDEX “End of History”, 163, 214 English Civil War (1642–51), 31 Ennahda party, 126–8 Equatorial Guinea, 6, 11, 121, 173, 220 Erdoggan, Recep Tayyip, 20, 161–3, 176 Eritrea, 11, 24 Estonia, 17, 149, 151 Ethiopia, 27 Eton College, Berkshire, 202 European Commission, 150 European Parliament, 84, 180 European Partnership for Democracy (EPD), 58 European Union (EU), 2, 3, 56, 61–3, 65–7, 84, 90, 100, 143, 145, 148–56, 160, 180, 195, 214, 223, 225, 247 1999 European Parliament elections, 180 2004 Eastern Bloc countries accede to Union, 148–9 2005 intervention in Palestinian election campaign, 100 2006 asset ban on Lukashenko government, 63 2008 aid given for Ghanaian election, 143 2009 Eurozone crisis begins, 180, 190 2013 endorsement of Azerbaijani election, 84; endorsement of Malagasy election, 90 2014 Riga designated European Capital of Culture, 148, 225 2015 Riga summit; Juncker slaps Orbán, 150 2016 Belarus sanctions suspended, 65, 67, 195; Zimbabwe sanctions suspended, 247; UK € 262 holds membership referendum, 1 Eurozone crisis, 180, 190 Facebook, 125, 161–3, 165, 168, 172, 223 Falls Church, Virginia, 163 famine, 24 Fatah, 99–102 Fats Domino, 207 Ferjani, Said, 125–33, 142, 156, 221, 224 Fidesz Party, 150–2 financial crisis (2008–9), 185, 206 FixMyStreet, 171 Florida, United States, 117 Forces Nouvelles, 106 Ford, Gerald, 45 Foreign Affairs, 53 foreign aid, 14–15, 47, 49, 52, 57, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 100–1 Fourteen Points (1918), 35 France, 2, 33, 44, 55–6, 58, 72, 89, 106, 108–10, 115, 129, 214, 225 “free and fair”, 8, 14, 88–90, 102, 159, 193 free speech, 94, 103, 161–3, 165, 188 free trade zones, 152–60 Freedom House, 139, 140, 189 Friedrich Ebert Foundation, 189 Front Populaire Ivorien, 105 FSB (Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti), 61 Fukuyama, Francis, 74, 163, 214 fungibilty, 95 Gaddafi, Muammar, 24, 76–9, 102, 113, 129 Gambia, The, 121 Gandhi, Jennifer, 136 INDEX Gaza, Palestine, 100–1, 240–1 Gbabgbo, Laurent, 105–10, 111, 119 General Motors, 48 Geneva Convention, 177 Geneva, Switzerland, 140 George III, King of the United Kingdom, 31 Georgia, 143 Geraldton, Western Australia, 30 Germany, 17, 23, 35, 44, 56, 58, 74–5, 103–4, 147–8, 165, 189, 201, 204, 208, 213, 223 Gerry, Elbridge, 181–2 gerrymandering, 180–5, 188, 251 Ghana, 17, 143, 144, 171 Ghani, Rula, 137 globalization, 153 Globe & Mail, 94 golden handcuffs, 111, 119–21, 154 golden parachutes, 19, 116–21 Gollum, 20, 161–3, 165, 176 Google, 164 GooGoosha (Gulnara Karimova), 140, 145 Government Organized NonGovernmental Organizations (GONGOs), 209–10, 212 grade inflation, 88, 99, 158, 159 Great Leap Forward (1958–61), 24 Greece, 20, 21, 22, 27–30, 31, 156, 230 Green Revolution (2009), 135–6, 166–8 gridlock, 184–5, 187 Guardian, 166 gun regulation, 186–7 gunboat diplomacy, 116, 118, 120 Gutiérrez, Luis, 182 Guyana, 171, 220 Guys and Dolls, 40 Hague, William, 77 Haiti, 114–21 Hamas, 99–104, 241 Harmodius, 28 Harvard University, 45 health care, 184–5 Henry IV “the Impotent”, King of Castile and Léon, 30, 231 Herodotus, 29 Higiro, Robert, 94 Hipparchus, 28 Hitler, Adolf, 23, 103–4, 165 HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), 116, 207 Hobart, Tasmania, 153 homosexuality, 12, 20 Hong Kong, 168–70, 176, 221 House of Representatives, 33, 181 human rights, 10, 11, 52, 54, 57, 64, 113, 118, 139, 209, 213 Humphrey, Hubert, 21 Hungary, 150–2, 160, 171 Hussein, Saddam, 63, 72, 73, 79, 124, 156–7 I Paid a Bribe, 170–1 Ibragimbekov, Rustam, 82 Iceland, 88 Iglesias, Julio, 140 “illiberal democracy”, 227 Illinois, United States, 182–3 Iloniaina, Alain, 222–3 imihigo program, 93 Immunization of the Revolution, 127 inclusion, 24, 129–31 India, 56, 98, 152, 156, 170–1, 172, 220 Indonesia, 27, 156, 218 Indyk, Martin, 102 insidious model effect, 46, 48 Inter-Commission Working Group 263 INDEX on International Cooperation, 211 Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), 52, 53 International Criminal Court (ICC), 106, 109, 118, 119 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 105 International Republican Institute (IRI), 58, 142 Internet, 49, 125, 161–75, 207, 208, 221, 223 iPad, 151 iPhones, 20, 83, 135–6, 145 Iran, 26, 30, 36, 38, 47, 48, 69, 98, 117, 135–6, 145, 208, 232 1951 nationalization of AngloIranian Oil Company, 38 1953 Operation Ajax; Mossadegh ousted, 38–42, 98, 208 1979 Islamic Revolution, 42, 117, 216 2009 intervention in Lebanese election, 98; presidential election; Green Revolution protests, 135–6, 166–8 2010 VOA announces “citizen journalism” iPhone app, 135–6, 145 2015 nuclear deal, 26 Iraq, 2, 5, 20, 49, 63, 67, 72–5, 77, 78, 79, 98, 124, 128, 129, 133, 156–7, 198, 213 1979 Saddam comes to power, 72, 129 1990 invasion of Kuwait, 156 2003 US-led invasion, 63, 72–3, 77, 84, 98, 156, 201, 234; de-Ba’athification campaign, 72, 77, 124, 128 2006 formation of al-Maliki government, 73 264 2015 IS execute election officials, 74 Ireland, 90, 217 Islam, 11, 12, 16, 99, 105, 123–6, 129, 131, 177, 218 Islamic State (IS), 74, 78, 131 Islamism, 99, 123–6, 129, 131, 177 Israel, 14, 99–104 Italy, 98, 192 Jackson, Peter, 162 Jammeh,Yahya, 121 Japan, 17, 24, 35, 56, 58, 74–5, 89, 112, 154, 156, 164, 204, 206, 217, 218, 220 al-Jazeera, 76 Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 172 Joan of Portugal, Queen consort of Castile, 231 Jobs, Steve, 151 Johnson, Boris, 202 Jordan, 18, 60, 155 Juncker, Jean-Claude, 150 Kabila, Joseph, 121 Kabul, Afghanistan, 70 Kagame, Paul, 6, 91–6 Kagan, Robert, 217–18 Kakul Military Academy, 53 Kallel, Abdallah, 124 Kant, Immanuel, 118 Karbala, Iraq, 201 Karegeya, Patrick, 94 Karimov, Islam, 139–40, 142, 154 Karimova, Gulnara, 139–40, 145 Karnataka, India, 170 Karoui, Nébil, 131 Karzai, Hamid, 70 Katanga, Congo, 43–4 Keane, John, 30 INDEX Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 11, 35–6, 55, 190, 192 Kenya, 220 KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti), 3, 61–2, 147–8, 194, 225 Khan, Rana Sanaullah, 52 Khomeini, Ruhollah, 167 Kim Jong-un, 136, 181 Kingdom of Ebla, 28 Kipling, Rudyard, 69 Kissinger, Henry, 44–7, 214 knee-jerk reactions, 26, 55 Koch Brothers, 185–6 Konrad Adenauer Foundation, 58, 189 Kounalakis, Eleni, 151 kratos, 27 Kununurra, Western Australia, 30 Kuwait, 156, 229 Kyrgyzstan, 185 2011 NATO-led intervention, 76–7; death of Gaddafi, 76–7, 113 2013 Political Isolation Law, 77, 128 LINE, 164–5 Literary Digest, 174 lobbying, 186–7 local-level democracy, 3, 18, 169–73 locusts, 6–7 London, England, 132–3 long-term thinking, 4, 46, 48, 51–67, 138, 141, 234 Lord of the Rings (Tolkien), 20, 161–3, 165, 176 “Luck Be a Lady Tonight”, 40 Lukashenko, Alexander, 61–7, 154, 193–5, 206, 222 Lumumba, Patrice, 42–4 Lumumbashi, Congo, 43 Lake, Anthony, 117 Landon, Alf, 174 Langouste (Ramakavélo), 87 Laos, 200 Latin Earmuffs, 182 Latvia, 147–50, 151–2, 154, 160, 225 League of Democracies, 152–60, 212 Lebanon, 98 Léon, 30–1, 231 Léopoldville, Congo, 43 Levy, Phil, 157 Libya, 2, 5, 20, 24, 49, 67, 69, 76–9, 102, 113, 128, 129, 133, 156, 213 1969 coup d’état; Gaddafi comes to power, 78, 113, 129 2008 Rice makes visit, 76 MacCann, William, 34 Madagascar, 3, 6–9, 17, 20, 59, 85–91, 96, 200, 220, 222–3, 234–5 1991 Panorama Convention, 87 1992 presidential election, 87 1993 population census, 89 2006 presidential election, 85–6 2009 coup d’état; Rajoelina comes to power, 6, 90 2012 Rajoelina announces capture of bandits’ sorcerer, 7 2013 general election, 8, 89–90, 211, 222–3 Madagascar Effect, 6–8, 17, 81, 96, 159, 204, 234–5 Madison, James, 31–2 Malaysia, 153, 218 al-Maliki, Nouri, 73–4 Mao Zedong, 23, 24 265 INDEX marketplace of ideas, 24, 219 Mauritius, 220 May, Theresa, 26 McCain, John, 77 McMahon, Michael, 83 McSpedon, Joe, 49 Megara, 156 Mejora Tu Escuela, 171 El Mercurio, 47 Merkel, Angela, 208 Mesopotamia, 28 Mexico, 27, 149, 155, 156, 171, 172, 178 MI6, 43 Miami, Florida, 117 Miloševicc, Slobodan, 98, 120 Minnesota, United States, 21, 186–7 Minsk, Belarus, 19, 61–2, 66, 192, 193 Mo Ibrahim Foundation, 119 Mobutu, Joseph-Desiré, 43–4 Mogadishu, Somalia, 116 Moghaddam, Ismail Ahmadi, 167 Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, 39–42, 117 Moldova, 195–6 Mondale, Walter, 21 Mong Kok riots (2016), 169 Mongolia, 17, 30, 189 Morjane, Kamel, 130 Morocco, 155, 171 Morsi, Mohammed, 14, 15, 164, 247 Moscow, Russia, 210 Mossadegh, Mohammed, 38–42, 43, 232 Mosul, Iraq, 72, 73 al-Moubadara, 130 Mubarak, Hosni, 6, 13, 164 Mugabe, Robert, 112–13, 157–8 Mugenzi, Rene Claudel, 94–5, 189 € 266 Muhirwa, Alice, 93 Muñiz de Urquiza, María, 90 Munyuza, Dan, 94 Musharraf, Pervez, 51–7 Myanmar, 218, 225 Nasiri, Nematollah, 40 Nation, The, 198 National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), 197 National Democratic Institute (NDI), 58, 92, 142 National Endowment for Democracy (NED), 58, 60, 144, 247 National Rifle Association (NRA), 186–7 Native Americans, 32, 33 Nawabshah, Pakistan, 51 Nazi Germany (1933–45), 23, 44, 74–5, 103–4, 147–8, 165 Nepal, 98 Netherlands, 58, 89, 143 Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy, 58 New Stanford Hospital, Palo Alto, 26 NewYork Times, 71, 93, 185–6 New Zealand, 112, 156, 209 Nicaragua, 24, 98 Nidaa Tounes, 131 Niger, 185 Nigeria, 171, 172 Nixon, Richard, 44–7 Niyazov, Saparmurat, 25 Nobel Prize, 18, 24, 131, 156, 163 non-alignment, 43 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 58–60, 141–2, 144, 158, 209–10, 212, 238 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 45, 55, 77 INDEX North Carolina, United States, 183 North Korea, 4, 11, 136, 138, 144, 173, 176, 181 Norway, 24, 77, 205, 219 nuclear power/weapons, 26, 192 Nunavut, Canada, 153, 230–1 Nunn, Sam, 116 Nuristan, Afghanistan, 70 Nyaklyayew, Uladzimir, 61–2, 65 Nyamwasa, Faustin Kayumba, 94 Obama, Barack, 6, 9–10, 14, 49, 54, 55, 57–8, 76, 96, 111, 183, 204, 205, 218 Obiang, Teodoro, 6, 121 Odysseus, 22, 153 oil, 4, 11, 16, 24, 84, 192, 229 olive oil, 125 Operation Ajax (1953), 38–42, 98, 208 Operation Desert Storm (1991), 156 Operation Enduring Freedom (2001–14), 70 Operation Uphold Democracy (1994–5), 116 Orbán, Viktor, 150–2 Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), 64 Ortega, Daniel, 98 Orwell, George, 15, 101, 199 Oswald, Lee Harvey, 192 Ouattara, Alassane, 105–10, 119 Oxford University, 198, 202 OxfordGirl, 166 Pakistan, 18, 50–7, 70, 220, 233 Palestine, 99–104, 108, 240–1 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 99 Panama, 117 Panorama Convention (1991), 87 Papua New Guinea, 188 parliaments, 31 partisan engagement, 99–104 Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), 156 People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD), 197, 202 Pericles, 29 Persia, 28 Peru, 153 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 33 Philippines, 218 Pinochet, Augusto, 47–8, 225 Piromya, Kasit, 204–5 Plateau Dokui, Abidjan, 107 Plato, 29 Poland, 201 Political Isolation Law (2013), 77, 128 polling, 174–6 Pomerantsev, Peter, 210 Pongsudhirak, Thitinan, 165 Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 117 Portugal, 218, 231 Pouraghayi, Saeedah, 167 Powell, Colin, 116, 120 Préval, René, 117 Price, Melissa, 30 Princeton University, 186 prisoner’s dilemma, 200 process engagement, 99–100 propaganda-industry tax, 209 protectionism, 177 proto-democracy, 28 Public Diplomacy of the Public Chamber of Russia Elections, 211 Pul-i-Charki, Kabul, 71 Putin, Vladimir, 63, 64–5, 194–5, 204, 207, 214 267 INDEX al-Qaeda, 18, 50, 52–3, 55, 78, 177, 234 Qatar, 155, 229 Qatif, Saudi Arabia, 11, 16 Queen, 121 racism, 176, 218, 250 Rajoelina, Andry, 6 Ramadan, 126 Ramakavélo, Desiré-Philippe, 86–7 Rao, Bhaskar, 170 Rassemblement des Républicains, 105 Ratchaburi, Thailand, 199 Ravalomanana, Marc, 6 Reagan, Ronald, 35–6, 55 realpolitik, 4, 45, 48, 98, 104 refugees, 208 representative democracy, 30–3 Republican Party, 39, 58, 79, 124, 142, 181, 182–8 Rever, Judi, 94 Riahi, Taghi, 39–40 Rice, Condoleeza, 76, 102 Riga, Latvia, 147–8, 150, 160, 225 rock lobster, 87 Rojanaphruk, Pravit, 198–9, 221, 223–4 Romania, 149, 209 Rome, Ancient (753 BC–476 AD), 21, 30 Romney, Mitt, 112 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 39, 174 Roosevelt, Kermit, 38–40, 208 Roosevelt, Theodore “Teddy”, 39 de Rosas, Juan Manuel, 34–5 Roskam, Peter 183 rule of law, 10, 27, 73, 77, 136, 159, 209, 218 Rumsfeld, Donald, 145 Russia Today (RT), 207–9 268 Russian Federation, 24, 27, 60–1, 63–5, 82, 106, 140, 149, 190, 191–6, 204, 205–12, 214, 221, 229 1996 Commonwealth with Belarus established, 194 2002 proposal for re-integration of Belarus, 194 2005 support for Moldovan opposition on Transnistria, 195–6; Russia Today established, 207 2010 Putin sings Fats Domino’s Blueberry Hill, 207 2013 endorsement of Azerbaijani election, 211 2014 annexation of Crimea; intervention in Ukraine, 64, 65; RT reports “genocide” in Ukraine, 207; RT reports CIA behind Ebola outbreak, 207 2015 NED banned, 60; pressure on Belarus to host military base, 65, 195 2016 RT report on rape of “Lisa” in Germany, 208; Putin praised by Trump, 214 Rwanda, 6, 20, 91–6, 120, 185, 189, 215, 216 Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), 91 San Diego State University, 209 sanctions, 52, 62–5, 67, 103, 106, 135–6, 145, 156–8, 160, 195, 247, 253 Sandinista National Liberation Front, 98 Sandy Hook massacre (2012), 186 dos Santos, José Eduardo, 112–13 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 108 INDEX SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), 25–6 Saudi Arabia, 5–6, 9–12, 15–16, 19–20, 85, 98, 138, 144, 200, 216, 229 1962 slavery abolished, 11 2009 intervention in Lebanese election, 98; children sentenced to prison and lashes for stealing exam papers, 11, 16; Jeddah floods, 172 2010 Indonesian maid mutilated by employer, 11, 12; arms deal with US, 10–12 2011 Qatif protests, 16 2013 aid package to Egypt announced, 15; purchase of US naval craft announced, 16; Badawi sentenced to prison and lashes, 16 Saudi Arabia Effect, 5, 9, 16, 85, 138, 200 Schneider, René, 45 School of the Americas, 115 Seattle, Washington, 77 Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), 43 Sen, Amartya, 24 Senate, US, 32–3, 187 Senegal, 42, 121 September 11 attacks (2001), 18, 52–3, 55, 70 Serbia, 98, 120 Shanghai Cooperation Organization, 211 Sharif, Nawaz, 51–2, 233 Shinawatra, Thaksin, 196, 199, 201, 202, 205 Shinawatra,Yingluck, 198 short-term thinking, 3–4, 26, 46, 48, 51–67, 120, 138, 141, 234 Shushkevich, Stanislav, 192–3 Siberia, 147, 148 Sidick, Koné Abou Bakary, 107–9 Sierra Leone, 88, 171, 209 Singapore, 23, 24, 27, 93, 155, 215, 216, 217, 229 Siripaiboon, Thanakorn, 165 el-Sisi, Abdel Fattah, 15 Skujenieks, Knuts, 148 Skype, 62 slavery, 11, 29, 32 social media, 49–50, 125, 161–70, 173, 176, 199, 207, 208, 223 Socrates, 29 Solon, 28 Somalia, 42, 116 Sophocles, 29 Sopko, John, 137 Sousse attacks (2015), 131 South Africa, 27, 94, 157, 189 South Korea, 17, 27, 112, 152, 156, 218 Soviet Union (1922–91), 1, 22–3, 35–6, 37–50, 61, 64, 82, 121, 147–8, 150, 160, 192–4, 201, 204, 206–7 Spain, 218 Sparta, 28, 29 St John’s College, Oxford, 202 Stalin, Joseph, 23 Stanford University, 171 State Department, 11, 15, 54, 202 state power, 27 Statkevich, Mikalai, 61–2, 65, 222 Stewart, Jon, 53 Sting (Gordon Sumner), 140 Stockholm Syndrome, 199 Sudan, 206 Sukondhapatipak, Werachon 198 Sundaravej, Samak, 197 Super PACs, 185 Supreme Court, US, 185, 188 Sweden, 92, 220 269 INDEX Switzerland, 118, 140, 205 Syria, 78, 120, 131, 198, 208, 217, 224, 225 Szájer, József, 151 Tahrir Square, Cairo, 10, 13, 163–4 Taiwan, 27, 218 Taliban, 18, 52, 56, 71, 138 tame democracy promotion, 59 Taming of Democracy Assistance, The (Bush), 59 Tarakhel Mohammadi, 70–1 Tasmania, Australia, 153 Tasting and Grumbling, 197 Tea Party, 185 terrorism, 11, 16, 18, 19, 20, 26, 52–3, 55, 63, 70, 78, 97, 100, 101, 131, 156, 201, 234 Tetra Tech, 138 Thailand, 3, 19, 27, 154, 164–5, 196–206, 212, 221, 223–4, 253 1973 pro-democracy uprising, 199 1976 student protests, 199 1982 launch of Cobra Gold exercises with US, 201 2003 troops dispatched to Iraq, 201 2006 coup d’état, 196, 197 2008 judicial coup, 196, 197, 202, 253 2010 protests and crackdown, 202 2014 NCPO coup d’état, 164, 196–206, 221; junta gives out free haircuts, 154; rail deal with China, 203; junta releases LINE “values stickers”, 164–5 2015 man arrested for insulting Tongdaeng, 165 270 2016 constitutional referendum, 197, 223 Thirty Tyrants, 29 Thucydides, 28, 29 time horizon, 55 Tobruk, Libya, 77 Togo, 170, 177–8 Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel, 20, 161–3, 165, 176 Tongdaeng, 165 torture, 11, 28, 43, 48, 52, 124–7, 132, 139, 141, 222, 224 Trans-Pacific Partnership, 153 Transnistria, 196 transparency, 26, 82, 170, 174, 212, 218 Tripoli, Libya, 77 Trojan War, 22 Trump, Donald, 1, 20, 25, 79, 178, 180, 187, 188, 204, 205 Tudeh Party, 41, 232 Tunisia, 12–13, 17, 18, 19, 27, 65, 77, 123–33, 142, 143, 144, 155, 156, 209, 218, 221, 224–5 1987 coup d’état; Ben Ali comes to power, 124, 126, 129 1991 Barraket Essahel affair, 123, 126, 224 1995 EU Association Agreement, 155 2010 self-immolation of Bouazizi; protests begin, 12, 126, 224 2011 ousting of Ben Ali, 13, 124–6, 130 2014 assembly rejects bill on political exclusion, 128; law on rehabilitation and recognition of torture victims, 224; presidential election, 130 2015 Bardo Museum and Sousse attacks, 131, 156; National INDEX Dialogue Quartet awarded Nobel Peace Prize, 18, 131 Tunisia’s Call, 131 Turkey, 20, 27, 39, 149, 161–3, 165, 176 Turkmenistan, 11, 25, 26, 138, 144, 154 Twitter, 49, 162, 163, 166, 168, 176, 199, 208 U2, 92 Udon Thani, Thailand, 201 Uganda, 166, 176 Ukraine, 2, 27, 64, 65, 171, 198, 207, 213 Umbrella Movement (2014), 168, 176, 221 United Arab Emirates (UAE), 229 United Kingdom (UK), 1–3, 31, 33, 38, 43–4, 56, 58, 71–2, 92, 94–5, 126, 129, 132–3, 156, 166, 171–2, 180, 189, 202, 214 1707 Acts of Union, 31 1947 Churchill’s statement on democracy, 22, 190, 215 1951 Mossadegh nationalizes Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, 38 1987 Ferjani arrives in exile, 126 1999 European Parliament election, 180 2003 invasion of Iraq, 72–3 2009 OxfordGirl tweets on Iranian Green Revolution, 166; Blair meets with Kagame, 6, 92 2011 intervention in Libya, 77; Kagame appears on BBC radio; threat against Mugenzi, 94–5, 189 2012 launch of FixMyStreet, 171 2016 EU membership referendum, 1 United Nations (UN), 104, 105, 106, 108–10, 118, 130, 132, 140, 152 United States (US) 1787 Constitutional Convention, 31 1812 redrawing of Massachusetts senate election districts, 181–2 1869 Wyoming grants women vote, 33 1870 non-white men receive vote, 33 1913 Seventeenth Amendment enacted, 32 1917 Wilson’s “safe for democracy” speech, 35 1918 Wilson’s Fourteen Points, 35 1920 women receive vote, 33 1924 protections to ensure Native American voting rights, 33 1936 presidential election, 174 1948 CIA intervention in Italian election, 98 1953 Operation Ajax; Mossadegh ousted in Iran, 38–42, 98, 208 1960 plot to assassinate Lumumba with poisoned toothpaste, 43 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, 14–15 1962 Saudi Arabia pressured into abolishing slavery, 11; Cuban Missile Crisis, 50 1963 Kennedy’s Berlin speech, 35; assassination of Kennedy, 192 271 INDEX 1965 protections to ensure minority voting rights, 33 1973 ousting of Allende in Chile, 47 1982 launch of Cobra Gold exercises with Thailand, 201 1987 Reagan’s Berlin speech, 35; aid payments to Egypt begin, 14 1988 Reagan’s “city on a hill” speech, 10, 35, 179, 188, 189 1990 intervention in Nicaraguan election, 98 1991 launch of Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, 156 1992 presidential and House of Representatives elections, 183–4 1993 Clinton assumes office, 115; Battle of Mogadishu, 116 1994 launch of Operation Uphold Democracy in Haiti, 116; Cessna crash at White House, 116; Cédras given “golden parachute”, 116–17 1997 USAID Cambodia claims to have “exceeded expectations”, 59 1999 Pakistan urged to return to democracy, 52, 53 2001 September 11 attacks, 18, 52–3, 55, 70; cooperation with Pakistan begins, 52–3, 55; invasion of Afghanistan, 70, 71, 84, 98 2002 Bush announces new approach for Israel/Palestine conflict, 99 2003 invasion of Iraq, 63, 72–3, 77, 84, 98, 156, 201, 234 272 2004 Belarus Democracy Act, 63, 194 2005 Senate vote on armorpiercing bullet ban, 187; intervention in Palestinian election campaign, 99–104 2006 Musharraf appears on The Daily Show, 53 2008 Afifi arrives in exile, 163, 247; Rice’s visit to Libya, 76 2009 Obama assumes office, 55, 57; Clinton describes Mubaraks as “friends of my family”, 6; Obama’s Cairo speech, 9–10, 218; military helicopter drops ballot boxes in Afghanistan, 70; Kagame receives Clinton Global Citizen award, 92 2010 VOA announces “citizen journalism” app for Iran, 135, 145; Citizens United v.


pages: 463 words: 105,197

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

The institution then sends a small number of profiles of matching applicants to the families. The profile includes detailed information about the applicant’s background, interests, skills, and so on. The host family can interview some or all of the applicants, or reject them, whereupon the agency will send the family another group of profiles. The interview takes place over Skype. Once an applicant is selected, she goes through a week of training—in which she learns about American ways of doing things—and then is sent to the host family. The agency periodically sends people to check on the au pair and family. Among other things, it interviews the parties privately. If one or both sides are unhappy, then the agency will try to match the au pair with another family, so that she will not have to return to her home country.

Antitrust authorities, who are accustomed to worrying about competition within existing, well-defined, and easily measurable markets, have allowed most mergers between dominant tech firms and younger potential disrupters to proceed. Google was allowed to buy mapping start-up Waze and artificial intelligence powerhouse Deep Mind; Facebook to buy Instagram and WhatsApp; and Microsoft to buy Skype and LinkedIn. While such acquisitions doubtless help accelerate a path to market for start-up products and provide badly needed financing, they also have a dark side. Economist Luís Cabral has named these mergers “Standing on the Shoulders of Dwarfs”: they may crush the possibility of new firms emerging to challenge the business model of existing industry leaders, instead co-opting them to cement the dominance of those leaders.57 To prevent this dampening of innovation and competition, antitrust authorities must learn to think more like entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, seeing possibilities beyond existing market structures to the potential markets and technologies of the future, even if these are highly uncertain.

., 176 Roosevelt, Theodore, 175 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 86 Russia, 12, 13, 46 same-sex marriage, 89 sample complexity, 218 Samuelson, Paul, 97–98, 106–7, 142–43 Sanders, Bernie, 12 Satterthwaite, Mark, 50–51, 66, 69 Saudia Arabia, 158–59 savings: growth and, 6; labor and, 150–51; mercantilism and, 132; Radical Markets and, 169, 172, 181; retirement, 171–72, 260, 274; squandering, 123 Schmalz, Martin, 189 Schumpter, Joseph, 47 Segal, Ilya, 52 self-assessment, 31, 55–56, 61–62, 70, 72, 258, 260, 270, 302n63 self-driving cars, 230 serfs, 35, 48, 231–32, 236, 255 Shafir, Eldar, 114 Shalizi, Cosma, 281 shallow nets, 216–19 shareholders, 118, 170, 178–84, 189, 193–95 Sherman Antitrust Act, 174, 262 Show Boat (film), 209 Silicon Valley, 211 Silk Road, 131 Singapore, 160 siren servers, 220–24, 230–41, 243 Siri, 219, 248 Skype, 155, 202 slavery, xiv, 1, 19, 23, 37, 96, 136, 255, 260 slums, xiii, xviii, 17 Smith, Adam, xix–xx, 4; capitalism and, 34–35; competition and, 17; diamond-water paradox and, 224–25; efficiency and, 37; immigrants and, 132–33; inequality and, 22; markets and, 16–17, 21–22; monopolies and, 173; Wealth of Nations and, 22 social aggregation, 117–18 Social Democratic Party, 45 social dividend, 41, 43, 49, 73–75, 147, 256–59, 263, 269, 298n13, 302n63 socialism: central planning and, 39–42, 47, 277, 281; George and, 37, 45, 137, 250, 253; German right and, 94; industry and, 45; irrationality of capitalism and, 39 (see also capitalism); labor and, 137, 299n24; laissez-faire and, 250, 253; markets and, 277–78, 281; Marx and, 137, 277; property and, 37–42, 45–49; radical democracy and, 94; Radical Markets and, 293; Sanders and, 12; Schumpeter on, 47; von Mises and, 278; workers’ cooperatives and, 299n24 social media, 251–52; data and, 202, 212, 231, 233–36; democracy and, 117, 126; Facebook, xxi, 28, 50, 117, 202, 205–9, 212–13, 220–21, 231–48, 289; Instagram, 117, 202, 207; Reddit, 117; Twitter, 117, 221; WhatsApp, 202; Yelp, 63, 117 Social Security, 274 Southwest, 191 sovereignty, 1, 16, 86, 131–32 Soviet Union, 1, 19, 46–47, 277–78, 281–82, 288 spam, 210, 245 special interest groups, 25, 98, 256 Spense, A.


pages: 354 words: 99,690

Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse: And Other Lessons From Modern Life by David Mitchell

bank run, Boris Johnson, British Empire, cakes and ale, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, Etonian, eurozone crisis, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Julian Assange, lateral thinking, Northern Rock, Ocado, offshore financial centre, payday loans, plutocrats, profit motive, Russell Brand, sensible shoes, Skype, The Wisdom of Crowds, WikiLeaks

Will DNA analysis of the stick reveal that it’s a sword after all? All of which means it feels like an inopportune moment for Keith Bristow, the director general of the new National Crime Agency, to request more police powers. He’s trying to influence the new communications data bill so that he’ll be able to scour Skype and social media networks for wrongdoers. But he’s quick to allay the fears of those who call the bill a “snoopers’ charter”: “I value my privacy, I don’t want to be snooped upon,” he explains. “That’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about criminals who run organised crime gangs that import drugs … We’re talking about predatory paedophiles, we’re talking about dangerous people.”

He’s not trying to find out what other books they might want or be short of. He’s just dispensing the Word of Gove from on high. Transport minister Norman Baker would probably advocate doing it remotely. No need to drag Moses all the way up the mountain when you can just tell him what’s what over Skype. Responding to the Whitehall plan to “cut or change” 50% of civil servants’ journeys during the seven-week Olympic and Paralympic period by encouraging people to work from home, Baker said: “I’m very keen to use this opportunity to record speeches remotely.” He continued: “It’s much better value than travelling maybe hundreds of miles to make a 10-minute speech.”

A spokesman for Cadbury’s said: “If they could get the chocolate to stick to the Curly Wurlys properly, maybe they’d deserve the minimum wage.” Shock WikiLeaks revelations The debate over transparency and freedom of information intensified in 2019 when WikiLeaks published details of what everyone in the world would be getting for Christmas. “Secrets are used to control people,” said Julian Assange via Skype from his Mars-bound prison rocket. “Wrapping paper is one of the most oppressive inventions in human history. As for the Christmas cracker, it is a highly dangerous form of violent concealment. In order to satisfy the human need to discover what is kept hidden, one must actually trigger an explosion.


pages: 417 words: 97,577

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Maslow's hierarchy, means of production, merger arbitrage, Metcalfe's law, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive investing, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, undersea cable, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, very high income, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, you are the product, zero-sum game

Sellers want to go where all the buyers are, and buyers want to be where all the sellers are. The more buyers and sellers there are, the greater the value of Uber as a platform. The same is true for Skype. If almost no one is on Skype, you can't call anyone, but the more people there are, the more you can call. PayPal doesn't work well if only a few people use it, but if everyone accepts it, you can pay for almost anything with it. The more people that use eBay, PayPal, Skype, Twitter, or Facebook, the less likely it is that they will face competitors. Various mathematicians have come up with mathematical formulas to ascribe value to networks: Sarnoff's Law, Metcalfe's Law, and Reed's Law.


pages: 420 words: 100,811

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves by John Cheney-Lippold

algorithmic bias, bioinformatics, business logic, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer vision, critical race theory, dark matter, data science, digital capitalism, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, informal economy, iterative process, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, lifelogging, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, price discrimination, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software studies, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological singularity, technoutopianism, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Turing machine, uber lyft, web application, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

NBC News, “Inside the Mind of Edward Snowden, Part 3,” May 29, 2014, www.nbcnews.com. 12. The NSA’s assemblage depends heavily on several different code-named programs: PRISM was the system used to access emails, chat messages, search queries, and personal data within Microsoft’s, Google’s, Yahoo!’s, Facebook’s, PalTalk’s, AOL’s, YouTube’s, Skype’s, and Apple’s secure networks; XKeyscore acted as a “front-end search engine” for all of the NSA’s recorded data—like a Google for the NSA’s huge cache of data that lets analysts search the near entirety of the past three to five days of Internet traffic; Trafficthief and MARINA both produced reservoirs of Internet metadata from physical wiretaps. 13.

., 235 sexuality, 42, 50–53, 67, 85, 137, 149, 219–22, 243, 252, 257–58, 277n40; algorithms producing, 29, 50–53, 55–56, 74, 81, 87–89, 194, 219–22, 237, 277n40, 299n61; intersectionality and, 76, 86, 184; as social construction, 45. See also Gaydar Shenk, David, 245 Sherman, Jamie, 119 Shimon, 68–72, 70, 85, 90–91, 260–61, 280n91 SIM cards, 3, 188, 190 Simondon, Gilbert, 194 Skype, 289n12 Smith, Brian Cantwell, 47–48 Smith, Zadie, 252 Snapchat, 133 Snowden, Edward, 154–56, 168, 174 social constructionism, 8, 11, 46, 77, 196, 242 The Social Network, 167, 252 societies of control, 26, 100–101, 105, 107, 168, 172 Solove, Daniel, 32, 167 Spade, Dean, 220 Spartacus, 232 Spivak, Gayatri, 192 SRI International, 75 Star, Susan Leigh, 7, 52 Stevens, Roger, 51 Stiegler, Bernard, 50 Sun Microsystems, 207 Sunnstein, Cass, 28 Super Mario Brothers, 218 superpanopticon, 171–72, 228 supervised learning, 79 surveillance, 15, 24, 100, 112, 122, 157, 185, 198, 205–9, 216–17, 223, 231–32, 234, 242, 262, 270n18, 273n59, 295n103, 301n98; assemblages, 20, 80, 108, 144, 155, 240; Data Wars and, 20–21; digital epidermalization and, 12, 278n60; measurable types and, 74, 97; NSA, 154–56, 160–62, 174–75, 189, 199, 219, 289n12; ubiquitous, xii, 4, 9, 29, 35–36, 56–57, 131, 156, 193, 227, 236, 241, 244.


The Complete Android Guide: 3Ones by Kevin Purdy

car-free, card file, crowdsourcing, Firefox, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, John Gruber, lock screen, QR code, Skype, speech recognition, telemarketer, turn-by-turn navigation

With the Voice app on Android, the call is connected automatically (though there's still a short wait between calling and hearing a dial tone). Connected to Voice, you start ringing the other number. On their caller ID, they see your Voice number. If they pick up, you're now both talking through Google Voice's servers—they're using advanced VoIP technology, or, in layman's terms, running a huge internet-to-voice, Skype-style system. Whether you connect with Voice or not, you're still using your actual cellphone voice connection, so Voice won't save you cellphone "minutes"—unless you're using a handy little billing trick, detailed further down. The difference is in the number others see when you dial, and whether your call routes through Google's servers.

These extensions also offer instant SMS and message checking abilities, making them well worth the download for any Voice enthusiast. Moving an app icon Make free desktop calls with Voice: Your Android handles Google Voice calls just fine. Need to save on minutes, or just like the convenience of headset calling? You can make free, internet-based, Skype-like calls from your computer using free software. I detailed the setup at Lifehacker. Listen to voicemails in Gmail: In your Google Voice settings (on the google.com/voice web page), you'll find options to have your voicemail messages sent to an email address (and SMS, too, though that can be a bit overwhelming).


Lonely Planet Cancun, Cozumel & the Yucatan (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, John Hecht, Sandra Bao

Bartolomé de las Casas, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Day of the Dead, illegal immigration, income inequality, low cost airline, mass immigration, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, traffic fines

Calls from Telmex card phones cost M$3 for unlimited time for local calls (M$1.50 per minute to cell phones); M$2.50 per minute for long-distance within Mexico (M$3 per minute to cell phones); M$5 per minute to the continental US, Canada and Central America; and M$10 per minute to anywhere else. VOIP Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) services such as Skype (www.skype.com) are a very economical option for travelers who have a computer and the required software. You can also use Skype at internet cafes. Time The entire Yucatán Peninsula observes the Hora del Centro, which is the same as US Central Time – GMT minus six hours in winter, and GMT minus five hours during daylight-saving time (horario de verano, summer time), which runs from the first Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October.

Check that the policy covers ambulances and emergency flights home. Worldwide medical insurance for travelers is available online at www.lonelyplanet.com/travel-insurance/ Internet Access Internet cafes (which charge about M$10 per hour) abound in the Yucatán. Many have webcams, headphones and Skype. Many places (hotels, bars and restaurants) have wi-fi available, but in some hotels the signal only reaches the lobby. In this book the wi-fi icon means the signal reaches at least some part of the premises, while the internet icon means the establishment has internet-available computers for guests.


Lonely Planet Cancun, Cozumel & the Yucatan (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, John Hecht, Lucas Vidgen

Bartolomé de las Casas, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Day of the Dead, illegal immigration, low cost airline, mass immigration, off-the-grid, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, traffic fines

Calls from Telmex card phones cost M$3 per minute for local and national calls; M$1.50 per minute to cell phones; M$5 per minute to the continental US, Canada and Central America; and M$10 per minute to anywhere else. VOIP Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) services such as Skype (www.skype.com) are a very economical option for travelers who have a computer and the required software. You can also use Skype at internet cafes. Time The states of Campeche, Chiapas, Tabasco and Yucatán observe the Hora del Centro, which is the same as US Central Time – GMT minus six hours in winter, and GMT minus five hours during daylight saving time (horario de verano, summer time), which runs from the first Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October.

Worldwide medical insurance for travelers is available online at www.lonelyplanet.com/travel-insurance. You can buy, extend and claim online anytime – even if you’re already on the road. Internet Access Internet cafes (which charge about M$10 per hour) abound in the Yucatán. Most computers have Skype installed. Many places (hotels, bars and restaurants) have wi-fi available, but in some hotels the signal only reaches the lobby. We use the wi-fi icon in our reviews if the signal reaches at least some part of the premises; an internet icon refers to establishments with internet-ready computers for guests.


pages: 189 words: 57,632

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cognitive load, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, general purpose technology, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, new economy, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, patent troll, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Sand Hill Road, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social software, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine

This decision held that the VCR was legal because it was "capable of sustaining a substantially non-infringing use." That means that if you make a technology that your customers can use legally, you're not on the hook for the illegal stuff they do. This principle guided the creation of virtually every piece of IT invented since: the Web, search engines, YouTube, Blogger, Skype, ICQ, AOL, MySpace... You name it, if it's possible to violate copyright with it, the thing that made it possible is the Betamax principle. Unfortunately, the Supremes shot the Betamax principle in the gut two years ago, with the Grokster decision. This decision says that a company can be found liable for its customers' bad acts if they can be shown to have "induced" copyright infringement.

Kazaa's business model was to set up offshore, on the tiny Polynesian island of Vanuatu, and bundle spyware with its software, making its profits off of fees from spyware crooks. Kazaa didn't want to pay billions for record industry licenses — they used the international legal and finance system to hopelessly snarl the RIAA's members through half a decade of wild profitability. The company was eventually brought to ground, but the founders walked away and started Skype and then Joost. Meantime, dozens of other services had sprung up to fill Kazaa's niche — AllofMP3, the notorious Russian site, was eventually killed through intervention of the US Trade Representative and the WTO, and was reborn practically the next day under a new name. It's been eight years since Sean Fanning created Napster in his college dorm-room.


pages: 198 words: 59,351

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning by Justin E. H. Smith

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Adrian Hon, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic management, artificial general intelligence, Big Tech, Charles Babbage, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, global pandemic, GPT-3, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kuiper Belt, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meme stock, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, passive income, Potemkin village, printed gun, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, strong AI, technological determinism, theory of mind, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, you are the product

On most understandings of the ontology of a musical work, when we hear music streaming through Spotify or YouTube, we are hearing the music itself, and not just a representation of it. And much less or much more mysteriously (depending on your philosophical commitments), when we pay bills online, when we issue such speech acts as promises or threats via Facebook or Twitter, when we tell our loved ones we love them over Skype or Zoom, we are bringing about real transformations in the world, in our financial situation, in our social standing, in our hearts. All of this is conducted through electrical pulses, but it is not all mere “simulation.” The remote-controlled vibrator or the 3D-printed gun are only further twists on a power we had already mastered and were already exercising, to effect world-changing action at a distance.

., 2–5, 22, 26, 45–46, 63, 93, 102–7, 109, 111–20, 129–33, 136–38, 147, 157, 160–62 Leonardo da Vinci, 169 Leopold, Aldo, 39 lichen, 69–70 LinkedIn, 122 Linus, Franciscus, 148 Llull, Ramon, 4, 147 Lotze, Hermann, 25 Lovelace, Ada, 104, 130–31, 134–39 Lucian of Samosata, 61, 65 Luddites, 5–6 Lumière Brothers, 31 Lunch, Lydia, 47 Malebranche, Nicolas, 116 Malmesbury, William of, 101 Manson, Marilyn, 47 Marcus Aurelius, 60, 126–27, 140–42 Marx, Karl, 50 memes, 40, 89–90, 142 memory, 33–34 Menabrea, Luigi, 131–35, 139 Mendel, Gregor, 70 Mesmer, Franz, 62, 74 metaphor, 24, 30, 51, 60, 72, 80, 92, 126, 130, 138–46, 148–49 metrics, 40 mindfulness, 36 Modi, Narendra, 49 More, Thomas, 125, 154 Münster, Sebastian, 154 Musk, Elon, 90 Nabokov, Vladimir, 18 Newton, Isaac, 63, 70 normies, 2 Orbán, Viktor, 49 Ortelius, Abraham, 159 Pāṇini, 34–35 Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim), 74 Pascal, Blaise, 4, 102, 118, 136, 153 perennialism, 12 Perrault, Charles, 121 Peter the Great, Tsar, 160 phenomenology, 6, 8, 17, 24, 27, 29, 96, 156 Plato, 91, 114 Pliny the Elder, 75 Pony Express, 76 “proof of concept,” 61, 78, 125 Proust, Marcel, 32 QAnon, 44–45 Ramelli, Agostino, 168–71 Ramus, Petrus, 157 Renfrew, Colin, 77 Republic of Letters, 76 ResearchGate, 122 rhizomes, 67, 80 Ricoeur, Paul, 149 Rorario, Girolamo, 95 Russell, Bertrand, 3 Sallust, 172–73 Scharf, Caleb, 94 Schiller, Friedrich, 45 Schneider, Susan, 93–95 Schwitzgebel, Eric, 97 Scientific Revolution, 82, 157 Scott, James C., 82 Searle, John, 107–8 semaphore, optical, 73–74, 80 Seress, Rezső, 47 Serres, Michel, 14 Shakespeare, William, 153 Shapin, Steven, 82 Simone, Nina, 47 simulation argument, the, 43, 89–93, 99–100, 164 Siri (voice-activated search), 28, 101–3 Skype, 164 slime molds, 86–88 Smith, Brian Cantwell. See Cantwell Smith, Brian sociobiology, 71 Source, The (computer network), 8 Spotify, 47–49, 164 Srinivasan, Balaji, 29 Stanley, Manfred, 6–7 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), 35 telecommunication: among humans, 59, 83–84, 124; among plants and animals, 56–59, 73–74, 83–84 teledildonics, 164 TikTok, 50 Tinder, 21 Tormé, Mel, 47 trolley problem, 13 Trump, Donald, 44, 49 Tupi (language), 108 Turing test, 30 Turing Tumble (toy), 110–11 Twitter, 32, 53–55, 122, 155, 164 Tyson, Neil DeGrasse, 90 Uber, 45 Vaucanson, Jacques de, 98, 119, 128–30 video games, 41, 43–45, 122 virality.


pages: 416 words: 106,532

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond by Chris Burniske, Jack Tatar

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Future Shock, general purpose technology, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, high net worth, hype cycle, information security, initial coin offering, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, litecoin, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, packet switching, passive investing, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, smart contracts, social web, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, two and twenty, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y2K

All it takes is typing in the person’s bitcoin address and clicking send, a functionality that all exchanges and wallets provide (which we cover in Chapter 14). Bitcoin’s utility in sending value using the Internet is similar to that of Skype, which can safely, quickly, and efficiently transmit anyone’s voice and image to anyone, anywhere in the world. The innovative investor might say: “OK, I understand that bitcoin can have utility as MoIP, just as Skype has utility as VoIP, but how does that translate to bitcoin being worth $1,000 a coin?” Bitcoin’s utility value can be determined by assessing how much bitcoin is necessary for it to serve the Internet economy it supports.

This is often referred to as the market capitalization of an asset on many current resources, but the authors prefer this term as more accurately conveying the total value of a cryptoasset. 2. https://coinmarketcap.com/. 3. http://cryptome.org/jya/digicrash.htm. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/quick-history-cryptocurrencies-bbtc-bitcoin-1397682630/. 7. http://karmakoin.com/how_it_works. 8. MoIP is a riff off the term “VoIP,” which stands for Voice-over-Internet-Protocol. Skype, FaceTime, and Google Hangouts are all examples of VoIP. 9. Remember that a coinbase transaction goes to the miner that discovered the block through the proof-of-work process. 10. As more machines are dedicated to mine on the network, there are more “guesses” at the solution to the PoW puzzle, which means the solution will be guessed more quickly if the difficulty of the problem is not increased.


pages: 369 words: 105,819

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Carl Icahn, cuban missile crisis, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Brooks, declining real wages, delayed gratification, demand response, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, fake news, false flag, fear of failure, illegal immigration, impulse control, meta-analysis, national security letter, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School

Instead, the Ethics Committee of the APA decided, without polling the members, to double down on the Goldwater rule by extending it beyond the realm of diagnosis to include any and all comments on the mental functioning of this or any president or prominent public figure. In addition to changes in the availability of coverage on TV, there has been an evolving use of phone and Skype in the distant treatment of patients in both psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Many contemporary psychiatrists no longer feel that their patient must be present in the consulting room with them. While clinicians vary in their comfort and experience with phone and Skype therapies, there is a definite trend toward these modalities as essential if one is to conduct a full-time practice and extend treatment into underserved areas. This shift in attitude toward “remote” treatment conducted through previously untried communication methods is relevant to why commenting on President Trump’s mental function feels not only comfortable but necessary.

In particular, does the stance of the APA, with its newly minted version of the Goldwater rule, prevent a psychiatrist-psychoanalyst from attempting such an analysis? A classical psychoanalyst would scoff at the idea that any psychoanalysis could be done from a distance, whether by telephone or by Skype. For such an analyst, both analyst and analysand must be present in the consulting room, so that observations of the patient who is practicing free association can be made continuously. The unconscious is to be found and interpreted to the patient at the moment of interaction. Judged by the criteria of classical psychoanalysis, no analysis of candidate or President Trump is possible.


pages: 380 words: 104,841

The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us by Diane Ackerman

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, airport security, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, dark matter, dematerialisation, digital divide, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Google Earth, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, Higgs boson, hindcast, Internet of things, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, Masdar, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, microbiome, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, rewilding, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, skunkworks, Skype, space junk, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the High Line, theory of mind, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

It looks like water, ripples like water, and when he touches it, it plashes and burbles. But it doesn’t feel wet. And when he lifts his fingers to his nose, he doesn’t smell water. From his sensory perspective, it’s strange. Not as strange, though, as interacting with humans and other orangutans via Skype. The first time Budi saw Richard Zimmerman, the director of Orangutan Outreach, calling to him in a halo of light, he touched the screen, as if thinking, He’s talking to me. Then, puzzled, he reached over and touched Matt’s face. On the screen, a talking human, who knew him by name, was looking right at him and smiling, calling to him in a friendly voice.

Only twenty years later, the basic experience is the same, but its scope has been vastly amplified. For example, our proprioception, the sense of where we are in space, now spins far beyond the physical body. We can spy on ourselves in sly, public, or cloak-and-dagger ways, from lavish perspectives, inside and out. By satellite, a drone’s eye, via Skype, on security cameras, through electron microscopes. Some of us are even relaxed about, or excited by, the promise of connecting our brains to the world outside of the body. In such sweeping sensory adventures, our cameo of who and what we are shifts, and also how we may decide to know ourselves in the future.

It’s a little odd thinking of computers taking meetings on the fly and gabbing together in an alien argot. But naming it the Internet of Things domesticates an idea that might otherwise frighten us. We know and enjoy the Internet, already older than many of its users, and familiar now as a pet. In an age where even orangutans Skype on iPads, what could be more humdrum than the all-purpose, nondescript word “things”? The Internet of Things reassures us that this isn’t a revolutionary idea—though, in truth, it is—just an everyday technology linked to something vague and harmless sounding. It doesn’t suggest brachiating from one reality to another; it just expands the idea of last century’s cozy new technology, and animates the idea of home.


pages: 465 words: 109,653

Free Ride by Robert Levine

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Anne Wojcicki, book scanning, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, commoditize, company town, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Firefox, future of journalism, Googley, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Justin.tv, Kevin Kelly, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, offshore financial centre, pets.com, publish or perish, race to the bottom, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

“The usually voluble Brin grew quiet,” Auletta writes, “ready to change the subject.”22 To Google, Auletta’s book is just a series of ones and zeros—and not very many of them, compared with a movie. To Auletta, those ones and zeros were exceptionally expensive to create—at least in terms of time—since the technology that has revolutionized the cost of distributing text hasn’t dramatically changed the nature of writing it. Reporters can access online databases and interview sources by Skype, but they still have to read documents and ask the right questions. In cases like this, “information wants to be expensive.” Therein lies the conflict. Most online companies that have built businesses based on giving away information or entertainment aren’t funding the content they’re distributing.

As Griffin read Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by the economist Peter Bernstein, he saw how the need to allocate risk on the voyages of English merchant ships in the eighteenth century led to the advent of “actuarial economics.”2 As opposed to “transactional economics,” which involves the purchase of individual items, actuarial businesses gather pools of money and divide them according to the outcome of subsequent events. Such pools can be used to defray the risk to anything, from an eighteenth-century trade vessel to a teenager’s Toyota. Griffin points out that Ooma, the voice-over-Internet system he uses for long-distance service instead of Skype, works on an actuarial model, since customers buy the machine from the company, which then covers the cost of all their calls out of that price. And he consulted on Nokia’s Comes with Music service—it didn’t catch on—which made music free with the price of a cell phone. “I increasingly think of copyright as copyrisk,” Griffin says.

., 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 Sarkozy, Nicolas Sarnoff, Richard, 6.1, 10.1 Saturday Night Live, itr.1, itr.2 Saudi Arabia Schmidt, Eric, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 4.1, 8.1 Schmitz, Kim Schuler, Barry Scientific American Scientology Scribd search engines, itr.1, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 10.1; see also Google Seattle Post-Intelligencer, itr.1, 4.1, 4.2 Seattle Times Secure Digital Music Initiative, 1.1, 2.1, 7.1 Seidler, Ellen, 3.1, 3.2, 7.1 Senate, U.S., 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 10.1 SESAC Shapiro, Gary, 1.1, 2.1 Sherman, Cary Siler, Megan Silicon Valley, itr.1, 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 3.1, 4.1, 7.1, 10.1 Simon & Schuster, 6.1, 6.2 Singer, Mitch, 7.1, 7.2 SkyDrive, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 Skype, itr.1, 9.1 Slate, itr.1, 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 10.1 smartphones, 2.1, 3.1, 5.1, 10.1, 10.2 Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs, et Éditeurs de Musique (SACEM) software, itr.1, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 10.1, 10.2 Sohn, Gigi, 3.1, 3.2, 9.1 songwriters, 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 4.1, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 10.1, 10.2 Sony BMG Music Entertainment, 2.1, 2.2 Sony Corp., 1.1, 3.1, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1 Sony Corp. of America v.


pages: 480 words: 112,463

The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St Clair

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, butterfly effect, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, flying shuttle, Francisco Pizarro, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gravity well, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Neil Armstrong, North Ronaldsay sheep, out of africa, Rana Plaza, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spinning jenny, synthetic biology, TED Talk, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic, Works Progress Administration

The reason for the odd choice, according to Nexia, lay in the similarity between spider silk glands and the milk-producing ones of goats. 26Hirsch; Kenneth Chang, ‘Unraveling Silk’s Secrets, One Spider Species at a Time’, New York Times, 3 April 2001 <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/03/science/unraveling-silk-s-secrets-one-spider-species-at-a-time.html> [accessed 5 February 2017]; Rogers. 27Even if someone could replicate a spider’s spinnerets, it would still be insufficient: they produce silk too slowly for an exact mechanical copy to work commercially. 28Dr Randy Lewis, molecular biologist at the University of Utah. 29Adams. 30Fritz Vollrath, zoology professor, University of Oxford, Skype interview with author, February 2017. 31Vollrath, ‘The Complexity of Silk’, p. 1151. 32Fritz Vollrath, zoology professor, University of Oxford. Vollrath, ‘Follow-up Queries’. 33Ibid. Adams. 34Jamie Bainbridge, VP of product development at Bolt Threads, told me proudly: ‘There are no spiders in our building.’ 35Widmaier, ‘Spider Silk: How We Cracked One of Nature’s Toughest Puzzles’; Widmaier, phone call with author. 36Bainbridge. 37Widmaier, phone call with author. 38Bainbridge. 39Peers, phone interview with author.

, Chicago Tribune, 5 August 2016 <http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-olympics-swimsuits-20160805-story.html> [accessed 17 December 2017] ———, ‘Roger Bannister’s Sub Four-Minute Mile Running Shoes Sell for £266,500’, the Guardian, 11 September 2015, section UK news <http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/sep/11/roger-bannisters-sub-four-minute-mile-running-shoes-sell-for-266500> [accessed 6 January 2018] ‘Astronauts’ Dirty Laundry’, NASA <https://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/livinginspace/Astronaut_Laundry.html> [accessed 12 December 2017] B Bailey, Ronald, ‘The Other Side of Slavery: Black Labor, Cotton, and Textile Industrialization in Great Britain and the United States’, Agricultural History, 68 (1994), 35–50 Bainbridge, Jamie, VP of Product Development at Bolt Threads, Skype interview with author, October 2016 Bajaj, Vikas, ‘Fatal Fire in Bangladesh Highlights the Dangers Facing Garment Workers’, New York Times, 25 November 2012, section Asia Pacific, p. A4 Balter, Michael, ‘Clothes Make the (Hu) Man’, Science, 325 (2009), 1329 ‘Bangladesh Factory Collapse Death Toll Tops 800’, the Guardian, 8 May 2013, section World news <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/08/bangladesh-factory-collapse-death-toll> [accessed 4 October 2017] Bar-Yosef, Ofer, Belfer-Cohen, Anna, Mesheviliani, Tengiz, et al., ‘Dzudzuana: An Upper Palaeolithic Cave Site in the Caucasus Foothills (Georgia)’, Antiquity, 85 (2011), 331–49 Bard, Kathryn A.

., ‘Carbon Disulphide Poisoning in Viscose Rayon Factories’, British Journal of Industrial Medicine, 11 (1954), 235–44 ‘Viking Ship Is Here, The’, New York Times (New York, 14 June 1893), p. 1 ‘Viking Ship Sails, The’, New York Times, (New York, 2 May 1893), p. 11 Vogt, Yngve, ‘Norwegian Vikings Purchased Silk from Persia’, Apollon, 2013 <https://www.apollon.uio.no/english/vikings.html> [accessed 31 July 2017] Vollrath, Fritz, ‘Follow-up Queries’, 14 February 2017 ———, ‘The Complexity of Silk under the Spotlight of Synthetic Biology’, Biochemical Society Transactions, 44 (2016), 1151–7 <https://doi.org/10.1042/BST20160058> Vollrath, Fritz, and Selden, Paul, ‘The Role of Behavior in the Evolution of Spiders, Silks, and Webs’, Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 38 (2007), 819–46 Vollrath, Fritz, Zoology Professor, University of Oxford, Skype interview with author, February 2017 W Wade, Nicholas, ‘Why Humans and Their Fur Parted Ways’, New York Times, 19 August 2003, section News, p. F1 Walker, Annabel, Aurel Stein: Pioneer of the Silk Road (London: John Murray, 1995) Walmsley, Roy, World Prison Population List, Eleventh Edition (Institute for Criminal Policy Research, October 2015) Walton Rogers, Penelope, Textile Production at 16–22 Coppergate, The Archaeology of York: The Small Finds (York: Council for British Archaeology, 1997), xvii Wardle, Patricia, ‘Seventeenth-Century Black Silk Lace in the Rijksmuseum’, Bulletin van Het Rijksmuseum, 33 (1985), 207–25 Wayland Barber, Elizabeth, Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) ———, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years.


pages: 422 words: 104,457

Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance by Julia Angwin

AltaVista, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Graeber, Debian, disinformation, Edward Snowden, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, medical residency, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, prediction markets, price discrimination, randomized controlled trial, RFID, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, sparse data, Steven Levy, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

We published much of the literature online in a database called “The Surveillance Catalog: Where governments get their tools.” The brochure for Gamma Group’s FinSpy, the tool used to monitor the Bahraini activists, touted its capability of “monitoring of encrypted communications.” The brochure also stated that it had been used in an Internet café to monitor Skype communications, and even to take pictures of people as they use Skype. “FinSpy is a field-proven Remote Monitoring Solution that enables Governments to face the current challenges of monitoring Mobile and Security-Aware Targets that regularly change location, use encrypted and anonymous communication channels and reside in foreign countries,” the brochure stated.

Security Engineering (Anderson) security questions Security Theater September 11, 2001, attacks sexual orientation Shahzad, Faisal Shearson, Julia Shilkin, Rob Shiller, Benjamin Reed Shopping.com Shutova, Ekaterina Shutterfly Signal conference Silent Circle Silent Phone Silent Text Sinclair, Upton Singer-Vine, Jeremy Skyhook Skype Slobogin, Christopher smart card Smith, Stephen Smith, Will Snowden, Edward social networking sites. See also specific sites social network mapping social security numbers Soghoian, Christopher Soltani, Ashkan Sonic.net “sousveillance” South Africa Southern District of New York (federal court) Soviet Union spamgourmet.com spam messages SpiderOak Spokeo spoofing Sputnik spy satellites spyware Staas, David stalkers Standard Oil Company Staples Stasi state and local governments stealth wear Stecklow, Steve Steel, Emily Strauchs, John J.


pages: 324 words: 106,699

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, disinformation, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, information security, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, pattern recognition, peak oil, pre–internet, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, trade route, WikiLeaks, zero day

Once Wendy goes back, reassess things. 6.3.2013 Brought Wendy to the airport, to fly back to MD. She didn’t want to go back, but she has work. I took her as far as I could go and hugged her. I didn’t want to let go of the hug. Then she got in line for security. Came home to find Ed’s Skype status has changed to: “Sorry but it had to be done.” I don’t know when he changed it. Could’ve been today, could’ve been last month. I just checked on Skype and happened to notice it, and I’m crazy enough to think he’s sending me a message. 6.7.2013 Woke up to a call from NSA Special Agent Megan Smith asking me to call her back about Ed. Still feeling sick with fever. I had to drop off my car at the autobody shop and Tod gave me a ride back on his Ducati.

Additionally, Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act allows the IC to target any foreigner outside the United States deemed likely to communicate “foreign intelligence information”—a broad category of potential targets that includes journalists, corporate employees, academics, aid workers, and countless others innocent of any wrongdoing whatsoever. This legislation was being used by the NSA to justify its two most prominent Internet surveillance methods: the PRISM program and upstream collection. PRISM enabled the NSA to routinely collect data from Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple, including email, photos, video and audio chats, Web-browsing content, search engine queries, and all other data stored on their clouds, transforming the companies into witting coconspirators. Upstream collection, meanwhile, was arguably even more invasive. It enabled the routine capturing of data directly from private-sector Internet infrastructure—the switches and routers that shunt Internet traffic worldwide, via the satellites in orbit and the high-capacity fiber-optic cables that run under the ocean.


pages: 403 words: 110,492

Nomad Capitalist: How to Reclaim Your Freedom With Offshore Bank Accounts, Dual Citizenship, Foreign Companies, and Overseas Investments by Andrew Henderson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, birth tourism , bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, capital controls, car-free, content marketing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Elon Musk, failed state, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, intangible asset, land reform, low interest rates, medical malpractice, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, peer-to-peer lending, Pepsi Challenge, place-making, risk tolerance, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, too big to fail, white picket fence, work culture , working-age population

The former Soviet state of Estonia has become an excellent example of innovation in both the private sector and government. In 2016, US presidential candidate Jeb Bush suggested that his country should adopt a tax system as simple as that of Estonia. Thirty years earlier, Estonia was part of a failed state minutes away from dissolution. In one generation, Estonians went from boiling stones for dinner to inventing Skype and creating one of the most transparent governments on earth. The reality is that none of us can know what will happen next. Like bankruptcy, countries tend to become irrelevant very slowly… and then all at once. Betting the house on the future of one country is risky, but fortunately you can diversify and take the best parts of each place.

It also gives you better travel and investment options, as well as another place you can go and live, among other benefits. Chapter Five: Birth, Love, and Children Is This Only a Young Man’s Game? Dateline: Hanoi, Vietnam “Where did your mother go into labor?” a throaty voice greeted me at the other end of the Skype call. I had just arrived in Hanoi – the 1000-year-old historic capital city of Vietnam – where I was about to embark on a six-month scouting trip throughout Southeast Asia looking for investment opportunities. In preparation, I had arranged calls with several fellow nomads with experience in the area.

In addition to business-friendly laws, Estonia is finding innovative ways to attract capital and preserve freedom, including their e-residency program and zero corporate tax model. It has some of the best offshore banks in the world and its capital, Tallinn, is fast becoming a hub for entrepreneurship. As any Estonian will proudly tell you, Tallinn is where Skype was founded. The Balkans present an even greater opportunity. It is a very interesting, emerging region. If you want to invest somewhere that is absent the EU but close to European markets, the Balkans will provide you with more area to grow. Montenegro is very open to business and foreign investors.


pages: 38 words: 11,262

My South American Odyssey: on a budget by Doug Thompson​

Skype

We lost, but noticed that the Germans weren’t drinking all of there beer when we scored a shot. In most countries this would be seen as a foul. However the referee was drunk too and awarded the title to the Germans, but at least we were honest sportsmen. What a night! Really hung-over in the morning. Rob and I feel this is a good opportunity to skype with our girlfriends before we grab a vodka and orange to cure the hangover. Everyone searches for that elusive hangover cure when it’s standing right in front of their eyes. All it requires is that you drink more alcohol than the night before. As I said from the beginning, I hope my words inspire you not advise.


pages: 678 words: 216,204

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business logic, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, dark matter, desegregation, digital divide, East Village, Eben Moglen, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, George Gilder, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, machine readable, Mahbub ul Haq, market bubble, market clearing, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, random walk, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, software patent, spectrum auction, subscription business, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Here, too, perhaps more dramatically than in either of the two other functionalities, we have seen the development of sharing-based techniques. The most direct transfer of the design characteristics of peer-to-peer networks to communications has been the successful development of Skype--an Internet telephony utility that allows the owners of computers to have voice conversations with each other over the Internet for free, and to dial into the public telephone network for a fee. As of this writing, Skype is already used by more than two million users at any given moment in time. They use a FastTrack-like architecture to share their computing and communications resources to create a global [pg 87] telephone system running on top of the Internet.

BitTorrent and eDonkey were both used by the Swarthmore students when their college shut down their Internet connection in response to Diebold's letter threatening action under the service provider liability provisions of the DMCA. The founders of KaZaa have begun to offer an Internet telephony utility, Skype, which allows users to make phone calls from one computer to another for free, and from their computer to the telephone network for a small fee. Skype is a p2p technology. 742 In other words, p2p is developing as a general approach toward producing distributed data storage and retrieval systems, just as open wireless networks and distributed computing are emerging to take advantage of personal devices to produce distributed communications and computation systems, respectively.

., 539-541 medical and pharmaceutical innovation, 611 models of, 89-94 openness of personal computers, 719-720 peer-to-peer networks and, 171-172 radio patents, 346, 348-349 scientific publication, 578-580 software patents, 764-766 strategies for information production, 88-99 trademark dilutation, 522, 782-786 trespass to chattels, 791-795 university alliances, 598-604 wireless communications policy, 291 wireless networks, 177, 290-292 Proprietary rights, inefficiency of, 79-87, 100-104, 208-224, 221, 571, 810-813 capacity reallocation, 221-224 property protections, 571 Public Library of Science (PLoS), 579 Public goods vs. nonrival goods, 79-83 Public opinion, 338, 358, 367, 373 iconic representations of, 367, 373 synthesis of, 338, 358 Public sphere, 27, 31-34, 324-328, 327, 331, 340, 356-358, 376-484, 385, 403, 416, 425, 429, 437, 467, 469, 473, 481, 515, 631, 642, 649, 686, 817-818 Diebold Election Systems case study, 403-415, 469, 686-689 Internet as concentrated vs. chaotic, 429-436 authoritarian control, working around, 473-480 basic communication tools, 385-393 critiques that Internet democratizes, 416-428 future of, 481-484 liberal, design characteristics of, 331-339 loose affiliations, 27-28, 631, 642, 649-653 mass media platform for, 327-330, 340-341 topology and connectivity of, 437-466 transparency of Internet culture, 515-527 watchdog functionality, 425, 467-472 Public sphere relationships, 559, 577-583 see social relations and norms publication, scientific, 559, 577-583 Public-domain data, 559-560 Putnum, Robert, 641 Q Quoting on Web, 392 R RCA (Radio Corporation of America), 346, 350-351 RCA strategy, 91-92, 93 RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), 733 Radio, 341-354, 345, 346, 348, 363, 655, 682, 711-712 as platform for human connection, 655-656 as public sphere platform, 345 market concentration, 363 patents, 346, 348-349 Radio Act of 1927, 352 Radio B92, 475 Radio telephony, 349 Raw data, 559-560, 787 database protection, 787-790 Rawls, John, 338, 505, 544-545, 547 Raymond, Eric, 132, 264, 464 Raz, Joseph, 269 Reallocating excess capacity, 166-181, 221-224, 297, 620-622 Reallocation, 221-224, 291, 571 property protections, 571 wireless communications policy, 291 Redistribution theory, 544-545 Referencing on the Web, 392, 437, 791 linking as trespass, 791-795 power law distribution of Web site connections, 437-466 Regional clusters in network topology, 34 Regulated commons, 122 Regulating information, efficiency of, 79-87, 100-104, 208-224, 810-813 Regulation by social norms, 27, 41, 67, 120, 145-148, 157, 183, 208, 273, 421, 430, 459, 629-667, 631, 649, 654, 659, 664, 818 Internet and human coexistence, 664-666 Internet as platform for, 654-658 Slashdot mechanisms for, 157-160 enforced norms with software, 659-663 fragmentation of communication, 41, 421, 430-431, 459-460, 818-819 loose affiliations, 27-28, 631, 649-653 motivation within, 183-187 property, commons, and autonomy, 273-278 software for, emergence of, 659-663 technology-defined structure, 67-76 thickening of preexisting relations, 631 transaction costs, 120, 208-224 working with social expectations, 649-653 Regulations by social norms, 642 loose affiliations, 642 Reichman, Jerome, 789 Relevance filtering, 34, 135, 151-161, 152, 153, 154, 155, 204, 297, 314-322, 317, 336-337, 355, 358, 397, 423, 425, 426, 429, 462-466, 467 Amazon, 152-153 Google, 153 Open Directory Project (ODP), 154 Slashdot, 155-161, 204-205 as distributed system, 317-318 as public good, 34 by authoritarian countries, 426 capacity for, by mass media, 358 concentration of mass-media power, 297, 397-402, 423, 429-436 power of mass media owners, 355, 358-365, 397-402 watchdog functionality, 425, 467-472 Repeater networks, 179-180 Research, commons-based, 568-583, 584, 609, 624-628 food and agricultural innovation, 584-608 medical and pharmaceutical innovation, 609-623 Responsive communications, 358 Reuse of information, 81-83, 108 Reynolds, Glenn, 470 Rheingold, Howard, 393, 472, 634-636 Right to read, 771 Romantic Maximizer model, 90-92 Rose, Carol, 122 Routers, controlling information flow with, 281-284, 296, 298, 355-358, 702 influence exaction, 296, 298-300 Rubin, Aviel, 408 S SBG (Sinclair Broadcast Group), 360, 396-402 SETI@home project, 168-170 Sabel, Charles, 123, 218, 266 Saltzer, Jerome, 705 Sampling, digital (music), 777 Samuelson, Pamela, 63, 730 Sarnoff, David, 351 Scholarly Lawyers model, 91-92, 94 Scientific data, access to, 559-560 Scientific publication, 559, 577 commons-based welfare development, 577-583 Scope of loose relations, 27-28 Scope of loose relationships, 631 Scott, William, 622 Second Life game environment, 150, 263 Security Systems Standards and Certification Act, 721 Security of context, 273-278 Security-related policy, 146, 695, 803-807 vandalism on Wikipedia, 146-148 Self-archiving of scientific publications, 580-581 Self-determinims, extrinsic motivation and, 187 Self-esteem, extrinsic motivation and, 187 Self-organization, 40, 140, 154, 218, 525 Open Directory Project, 154 See clusters in network topology self-reflection, 40-41, 525-526 Wikipedia project, 140-148 self-identification as transaction cost, 218 Services, software, 575-576 Shaping perceptions of others, 281-288, 285, 295, 298, 315-316, 397, 531 influence exaction, 295-296, 298-300 with propaganda, 285, 397-402, 531-536 Shapiro, Carl, 558 Shareable goods, 220-222 Sharing, 91, 98, 118-181, 166-181, 221, 225, 239, 297, 613, 620, 709, 711 capacity, 711-712 emergence of social production, 225-243 excess capacity, 166-181, 221, 297, 620-622 limited sharing networks, 91, 98 open wireless networks, 709-714 radio capacity, 711-712 technology dependence of, 239-240 university patents, 613-618 Shirky, Clay, 81, 320, 455, 660 "shoulders of giants", 81-83 Shrink-wrap licenses, 778-781 Sidewalk.com, 794 Simon, Herbert, 441 Sinclair Broadcast Group (SBG), 360, 396-402 Skype utility, 176, 741 Slashdot, 155-161, 204-205 Small-worlds effect, 454-457 Social action, 55-56 Social capital, 189, 638-639, 640-653, 643, 649 networked society, 649-653 thickening of preexisting relations, 643-647 Social clustering, 446-453 Social production, relationship with market-based business, 244-250 Social regulations and norms, 145-148 Social relations and norms, 27, 41, 67, 120, 157, 183, 208, 273, 421, 430, 459, 629-667, 631, 642, 649, 654, 659, 664, 818 Internet and human coexistence, 664-666 Internet as platform for, 654-658 Slashdot mechanisms for, 157-160 enforced norms with software, 659-663 fragmentation of communication, 41, 421, 430-431, 459-460, 818-819 loose affiliations, 27-28, 631, 642, 649-653 motivation within, 183-187 property, commons, and autonomy, 273-278 software for, emergence of, 659-663 technology-defined structure, 67-76 thickening of preexisting relations, 631 transaction costs, 120, 208-224 working with social expectations, 649-653 Social software, 659-663 Social structure, defined by technology, 67-76 Social-democratic theories of justice, 550-554 Software, 573, 659, 764 commons-based welfare development, 573-576 patents for, 764-766 social, 659-663 Software, open-source, 19, 37, 96, 125-132, 202, 247, 573, 762, 803 as competition to market based business, 247 commons-based welfare development, 573-576 human development and justice, 37 policy on, 762-763 project modularity and granularity, 202 security considerations, 803-807 Solla Price, Derek (de Solla Price), 441 Solum, Lawrence, 476-477 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, 776, 798 Specificity of price, 214-219 Speilberg, Steven, 732 Stakes of information policy, 808-829 Stallman, Richard, 20, 129-131 Standardizing creativity, 214-219 Starr, Paul, 45, 342-343, 682 State, role of, 52-56 Static Web pages, 388-389 Steiner, Peter, 368 Stolen Honor documentary, 397-402 Storage capacity, 175, 218 transaction costs, 218-244 Strategies for information production, 88-99, 120, 208 transaction costs, 120, 208-224 Strogatz, Steven, 454 Strongly connected Web sites, 448-450 Structure of mass media, 327-330 Structure of network, 171, 179, 278, 279, 319, 392, 437, 448, 451, 455, 737, 791, 805 autonomy and, 278, 279-303 emergent ordered structure, 455-460 linking as trespass, 791-795 moderately linked sites, 451 peer-to-peer networks, 171-175, 737-752, 805 power law distribution of Web site connections, 437-466 quoting on Web, 392 repeater network, 179-180 strongly connected Web sites, 448-450 Structure of organizations, 200-207, 221, 543 granularity, 200-203, 221-222 justice and, 543-545 modularity, 200-203 Structured production, 200-207, 204, 221 granularity, 200-203, 221-222 maintenance of cooperation, 204-205 modularity, 200-203 Sunstein, Cass, 421-422 Supercomputers, 167-168 Supplantation of real-world interaction, 631, 642-647 Supply-side effects of information production, 95-96 Sustainability of peer production, 208-224 Symmetric commons, 122 Syngenta, 597 Synthesis of public opinion, 338, 358 See also accreditation, 358 T TalkingPoints site, 398 Taste, changes in, 249 Taylor, Fredrick, 265 Teaching materials, 582 Technology, 44, 67, 111, 239, 385-393, 594, 659, 813 agricultural, 594-610 costs of, 813 dependence on, for sharing, 239-240 effectiveness of nonmarket strategies, 111-113 enabling social sharing as production modality, 239-243 role of, 44-46 social software, 659-663 social structure defined by, 67-76 Telephone, as platform for human connection, 657 Television, 262, 341, 355, 363, 366, 463, 638, 646 Internet use vs., 638-639, 646 culture of, 262 large-audience programming, 355, 366-375, 463-464 market concentration, 363 Tendrils (Web topology), 448-450 Term of copyright, 776, 798-799 Text distribution as platform for human connection, 655-656 Text messaging, 393, 647, 651 Textbooks, 582 The Halloween Memo, 245 The Memory Hole, 203 Thickening of preexisting relations, 631, 642-647 Thinness of online relations, 638 Thurmond, Strom, 470 Ticketmaster, 794 Tirole, Jean, 187, 207 Tirole, Jean,von Hippel, Eric, 207 Titmuss, Richard, 186, 343 Tocqueville, Alexis, de, 342 Toll broadcasting, 349-351, 349-351 Tools, information-embedded, 558 Toomey, Jenny, 245 Topical clustering, 446-453 Topology, network, 171, 179, 278, 279, 319, 392, 437, 448, 451, 455, 737, 791, 805 autonomy and, 278, 279-303 emergent ordered structure, 455-460 linking as trespass, 791-795 moderately linked sites, 451 peer-to-peer networks, 171-175, 737-752, 805 power law distribution of Web site connections, 437-466 quoting on Web, 392 repeater networks, 179-180 strongly connected Web sites, 448-450 Torvalds, Linus, 130, 205, 264 Trade policy, 568-572, 624-628, 798-799 Trademark dilutation, 522, 782-786 Traditional model of communication, 16, 29, 31, 57-66, 120, 146, 208, 244, 309, 327, 340, 356, 539, 611, 671, 674-807, 679, 685, 695, 803, 808, 825-826 autonomy and, 309-310 barriers to justice, 539-540 emerging role of mass media, 327-330, 340-341, 356-358 enclosure movement, 671-672 mapping, framework for, 685-698 medical innovation and, 611 path dependency, 679-684 relationship with social producers, 244-250 security-related policy, 146-148, 695, 803-807 shift away from, 31-34 stakes of information policy, 808-829 structure of mass media, 327-330 transaction costs, 120, 208-224 Transaction costs, 120, 208-224 Transfer of knowledge, 562 Transparency of Internet culture, 515-527 Transparency of free software, 575 Transport channel policy, 701-717, 704, 709, 715 broadband regulation, 704-708 municipal broadband initiatives, 715-717 open wireless networks, 709-714 Trespass to chattels, 791-795 Troll filters (Slashdot), 157 Trusted systems, computers as, 721-722 Tubes (Web topology), 448-450 U UCC (Uniform Commercial Code), 780 UCITA (Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act), 778-781 Uhlir, Paul, 789 Universal intake, 335-336, 355-358 University alliances, 598-604, 613-618 University-owned-radio, 347 Unregulated commons, 122 Users as consumers, 249-250 V Vacuity of online relations, 638 Vaidhyanathan, Silva, 501 Value of online contact, 638 Vandalism on Wikipedia, 146-148 Variety of behavioral options, 286-288, 316 Varmus, Harold, 559 Virtual communities, 630-639 see also social relations and norms, 630 Visibility of mass media, 356 Von Hippel, Eric, 20, 98, 250 Voting, electronic, 403-415, 469, 686-689 Vouching for others, network of, 653 W WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), 636 Walter, Benjamin, 530 Walzer, Michael, 508 Watchdog functionality, 425, 467-472 Watts, Duncan, 454 Weak ties of online relations, 638, 644 Web, 387-391, 392, 437, 448, 463, 753, 759, 791 backbone sites, 448-450, 463-464 browser wars, 759-761 domain name addresses, 753-758 linking as trespass, 791-795 power law distribution of Web site connections, 437-466 quoting from other sites, 392 Weber, Steve, 205 Welfare, 255, 297, 427, 542, 550, 555, 568 commons-based research, 568-583 commons-based strategies, 550-554 digital divide, 427 freedom from constraint, 297-299 information-based advantages, 555-562 liberal theories of justice, 542-549 see also justice and human development, 542 Well-being, 50 Wellman, Barry, 45, 642, 644, 650 Westinghouse, 346-347, 350-351 Wet-lab science, peer production of, 622-623 Wikibooks project, 201 Wikipedia project, 140-148, 205, 519 Barbie doll content, 519-521 Wikis as social software, 659-663 Williamson, Oliver, 120 Winner, Langdon, 45 Wired communications, 290, 704 market structure of, 290 policy on, 704-708 Wireless communications, 177-179, 289, 392, 437, 448, 463, 709, 715, 753, 759, 791 backbone sites, 448-450, 463-464 browser wars, 759-761 domain name addresses, 753-758 linking as trespass, 791-795 municipal broadband initiatives, 715-717 open networks, 709-714 power law distribution of Web site connections, 437-466 privatization vs. commons, 289-292 quoting from other sites, 392 Writable Web, 388-391 Written communications as platform for human connection, 655-656 X Y Z Zipf, George, 441 Zittrain, Jonathan, 477


The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture From a Journey of 71 Million Miles by Astronaut Ron Garan, Muhammad Yunus

Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, book scanning, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, clean water, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, fake it until you make it, global village, Google Earth, Indoor air pollution, jimmy wales, low earth orbit, optical character recognition, overview effect, private spaceflight, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, Stephen Hawking, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber for X, web of trust

“Because of the networking that we have from the International Space Station,” Polk continued, “if I needed something, I could reach out and touch the Japanese flight surgeon, the ESA [European Space Agency] flight surgeon, the Canadian flight surgeon, the Russian flight surgeon. We are a global network.” Technology also played a big role in the operation and enabled much of the international collaboration, as well as communication with the miners underground. Social media, e-mail, Skype, and other communications capability enabled quick organization and 108â•…  L O O K I N G F O R WARD information transfer between the two hundred or so people on-site and the rest of the world. And the entire world stepped up with ideas, designs, and support. Another key factor in the collaboration was the operation leaders’ insistence on open, honest, two-way dialogue, and their leadership by example.

The Africans consulted with the folks in Nepal to show them what they were doing, and surely they will help the next region to come online. Each region is sharing knowledge to build a global network. For the most part, this is accomplished through commonly available social and communication platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, or Skype. For Irwin, the most rewarding result is that SERVIR catalyzed the involvement of so many elite scientists and researchers around the world. “It’s been a really nice example of scientific diplomacy,” he said. “It’s been a sharing and a two-way street of knowledge exchange. We may have some of the satellite knowledge and the applications knowledge, but it’s the people in the field that understand how their system works, and we’re bringing those two together.”


pages: 169 words: 61,064

Maeve in America: Essays by a Girl From Somewhere Else by Maeve Higgins

Black Lives Matter, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, imposter syndrome, Jon Ronson, Lyft, place-making, quantum entanglement, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, Snapchat

There is no distinction made between a throwaway line or a joke that contains an actual kernel of truth, a clue as to where the joker’s loyalty may lie, so it’s safer never to utter either. The subversive power of comedy is taken seriously by these dictators and the systems that exist to uphold them, and that is a legacy that would take years to undo. Ali Farzat, a Syrian artist and head of the Arab Cartoonists Association, joined the workshop by Skype. He called from Kuwait where he now lives, having left Syria after being attacked by government forces who smashed his hands and left him for dead. Mark had tried to get him to Erbil but it proved impossible because of visas and paperwork. Still, the call went well, with the Iraqi cartoonists, including some elderly men, huddled around a phone exchanging low, gentle words of encouragement while a young woman, herself a political cartoonist, filmed the scene and wiped tears from her eyes.

She also told me that it’s helpful to have someone in your life who can gently suggest you may be overthinking a situation that isn’t as complicated as you think. I assured her that I do not have a problem with overthinking. “I’m not prone to that, I’m a person of action, unafraid of anything!” I insisted before we finished Skyping. I then went immediately to the nearest body of water, the lake in Prospect Park, and sat cross-legged on the ground, staring at the water until both of my legs went dead, thinking. I thought about a cure for loneliness and about trying something different because what I’m doing now isn’t working anymore, and I thought about not being afraid and also about how I tend to overthink things, so perhaps it was time for action.


pages: 338 words: 62,714

Code Red: Know Your Flow, Unlock Your Super Powers and Create a Bloody Amazing Life. Period. by Lisa Clark

Skype, stem cell

You are a bearded man-god + I’m in a deep bow to you for embracing, honouring + celebrating me + my cycle, and for knowing that on Day 25 when I’m Kali Ma incarnate, it’s best to feed me chocolate + work a late shift. I love you hard. My BFF, Susie – I LOVE YOU. Tamara Protassow – word minx and woman o’ awesome, thank you so much for adding punctuation to my 5-line-long sentences, for delicious Skype calls and for totally getting me and this work. Best. Editrix. Ever. The gorgeous women who have shared their SHE story in this book. As MM, said, ‘my story is your story.’ When you share your story, you allow others to hear their truth – thank you, thank you, thank you. Mark Leruste – for being French, having an awesome beard and for being the most badass cheerleader, coach, friend + lipstick buyer.

Creatrix of the SHE Flow protocol – yoga, sacred movement and ancient menstrual health practices – Lisa works directly with women who: Bleed Suffer from menstrual health related dis-ease, irregular bleeds, infertility and PMS symptoms Want to work with their cycle and not against it Want to access their monthly super powers so they can create a bloody amazing business, relationship + life How to work with Lisa 1-to-1 SHE Flow sessions: menstrual mentoring + consultations in person or via skype Womb wellness + love-your-lady-parts sessions SHE Flow Yoga classes – a fierce + feminine movement practice that puts the ‘ass’ into asana The SHE Chocolate Experience – Yoga nidra, radical yin resting + inner journeying co-partnered with the transformative and healing power of a SHE Chocolate ceremony Crack Your Lady Code – 1-day in-person workshop Explore Your Lady Landscape – 28 day online programme For more details on Lisa and how you can work with her, visit: www.thesassyshe.com or email her at: Lisa@thesassyshe.com LOVE BITES Feedback from amazing women who have worked with Lisa… My belief is that the Divine Feminine is calling more of us to allow her expression to come through us.


pages: 561 words: 163,916

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality by Blake J. Harris

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, airport security, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, call centre, Carl Icahn, company town, computer vision, cryptocurrency, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, financial independence, game design, Grace Hopper, hype cycle, illegal immigration, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, sensor fusion, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, unpaid internship, white picket fence

Then, as the burst of excitement subsided and they felt more like just two guys eating pizza—permutations of partnership running through each of their heads—they both couldn’t help but wonder: So how, exactly, is this relationship going to work? Chapter 7 Freedom Is Happiness June/July 2012 “I NEED TO UPDATE YOU ON SOME STUFF,” LUCKEY TYPED TO HIS TRUE-BLUE buddy Chris Dycus over Skype the day after his meeting with Iribe. “What stuff?” Dycus asked, assuming it would probably be something related to their beloved online forum, ModRetro. “Sony offered to hire me after E3,” Luckey said. “$140k salary.” “Holy crap,” Dycus replied. Here he was, just a senior in high school—graduating in a few weeks and then taking community college classes in the fall—and his best friend—who was only one year older—was being offered the job of a lifetime.

But he wasn’t sure he was comfortable with resigning to make that happen. “I know it’s a lot to ask,” Iribe told him. “But you can’t go on behalf of Oculus while you’re still employed at Gaikai. So we have to decide what to do here about QuakeCon . . .” “WANT TO COME TO QUAKECON?” LUCKEY MESSAGED HIS FRIEND CHRIS DYCUS over Skype. CHRIS DYCUS: What’s happening there? PALMER LUCKEY: We have a booth. And I am on a panel. CHRIS DYCUS: Ooh, sounds sweet. But wouldn’t it be sold out by now? PALMER LUCKEY: We don’t need no stinking passes! By the way: Brendan emailed you. Wants to have a phone chat. I should brief you really fast CHRIS DYCUS: All right.

You guys know I’m an open book:-) Bettner was a true optimist, and he truly believed in VR. But having gone through a high-priced acquisition himself, he feared what this would mean for his friends at Oculus. MEANWHILE, IN HAWAII, A PAIR OF ENTREPRENEURS WHOSE PARTNERSHIP HAD recently dissolved had a heated discuss over Skype: “Been trying to reach you for a few days,” typed one of the entrepreneurs: Ron Igra. “I’m going after Oculus . . .” “My views on taking Palmer to court are the same as before,” typed the other entrepreneur: Thomas Seidl. “That it makes bad financial sense for you and me.” In response to this, Igra called Seidl—who answered only to immediately hang up.


pages: 606 words: 157,120

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

It’s this propensity to view “the Internet” as a source of wisdom and policy advice that transforms it from a fairly uninteresting set of cables and network routers into a seductive and exciting ideology—perhaps today’s über-ideology. Science and technology writer Steven Johnson has offered perhaps the sharpest summary of this ideology in Future Perfect. For Johnson, “the Internet” is much more than just a cheap way of sending Skype messages or adding hilariously unfunny captions to photos of cats. Rather, it’s an intellectual template for how society itself should be reorganized; it’s not “the solution to the problem, but a way of thinking about the problem.” Thus, writes Johnson, “one could use the Internet directly to improve people’s lives, but also learn from the way the Internet had been organized, and apply those principles to help improve the way city governments worked, or school systems taught students.”

It starts from the premise that openness of the platform is the main reason why “the Internet” has unleashed so much innovation. On “the Internet,” no one has to ask for permission to start a new service. Google could build a search engine without negotiating with ISPs. Wikipedia could build an encyclopedia without negotiating with the likes of Microsoft or AOL. Skype could build its impressive software without negotiating with AT&T. As an explanation of what has happened in the last two decades, Zittrain’s is a very elegant and pithy theory. However, generativity also prescribes how things should be done in the future: if we want this great wave of innovation to continue, the argument goes, we should maintain—even proactively defend—the openness of “the Internet.”

It seems that Internet-centrism turns our most insightful analysts into Martians, who have just landed on Earth and have a hard time imagining how things are run over here. So, in their doomed quest to understand these quirky humans, they venture into a modern university, where they encounter professors, who spend hours coauthoring papers with strangers on other continents, browsing academic journals housed on servers miles away, giving Skype presentations at international conferences. “Ah,” say the Martians, “we get it: this Internet thingy is the network that generates all your knowledge. Let’s drink to that!” Poor Martians: they’d never understand that the real knowledge-generating networks lie elsewhere—they tie together scholars, universities, conferences, computer servers, books, norms and practices, the phenomena they study and the tools and laboratories that allow them to do so.


pages: 453 words: 114,250

The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths;

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mobile money, Occupy movement, pets.com, profit motive, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, undersea cable, WikiLeaks, zero day

“Go, go, go,” he said. It was the last time she would ever see him in person. * Over a year after that day in the Beijing airport, Jewher sat by her computer in Bloomington, where she had been living in de facto exile, refreshing her browser for news on her father’s trial. She had talked to Ilham on Skype every day between her leaving China and his arrest in January 2014. She still had the suitcase he’d packed for his move to the US. Accused of separatism and inciting ethnic hatred, few among Ilham’s supporters doubted that he would be found guilty. Chinese courts have a conviction rate of nearly 100 per cent.2 Five years earlier, Ilham had predicted in an interview that he would be imprisoned, maybe even executed.

Badiucao and Rebel Pepper were among the early victims of this type of overseas harassment by pro-government trolls, but online abuse is a common tactic, said Sophie Beach, editor of China Digital Times, the website founded by Xiao Qiang that focuses on censorship and free expression. It shows how far the government is willing to go in stamping out dissent even beyond its borders. “Dissidents and activists have been subjected to very personal attacks,” she told me via Skype from California. “The kind of language used in the attacks is the kind of language used in government propaganda.” In the years since then, trolls like those who went after Badiucao have become emboldened, launching campaigns on foreign social media against other dissidents, Australian and Taiwanese celebrities, and even the president of Taiwan, after Tsai Ing-wen irritated Beijing by attending an official flag-raising ceremony.15 China’s online influence effort is sprawling, dwarfing even those of Russia and the US.

Glenn Greenwald, who helped break the NSA spying story, almost missed out on it due to his lack of a secure email account and initial unwillingness to use the clunky PGP encryption method to communicate with Snowden.39 Telegram, along with a similar app, Signal, which was endorsed by Snowden himself, helped make encrypted communications easy and straightforward.40 Increased competition from these apps in turn forced larger tech companies to adopt similar security protocols, with Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Microsoft-owned Skype both adopting end-to-end encryption for fear of losing market share. Encryption doesn’t only hamper spies; it can also help bypass filtering, making DPI impossible and forcing censors to either block all traffic from the app or allow it through. China swiftly banned Telegram, with an editorial in the People’s Daily saying it had been used by human rights lawyers to coordinate “attacks on the party and government”.41 Chinese dissidents weren’t the only ones using the platform, however, and if the timing of the Snowden revelations helped Telegram, another geopolitical development proved almost fatal.


Central America by Carolyn McCarthy, Greg Benchwick, Joshua Samuel Brown, Alex Egerton, Matthew Firestone, Kevin Raub, Tom Spurling, Lucas Vidgen

airport security, Bartolomé de las Casas, California gold rush, call centre, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Day of the Dead, digital map, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, land reform, liberation theology, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Suez canal 1869, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Many towns and cities frequented by tourists have privately run call offices where you can make international calls for reasonable rates. If the telephone connection is by internet, the rates can be very cheap (Q1 a minute to the USA, Europe and Australia), but line quality is unpredictable. Many travelers use an account with a VOIP service like Skype (www.skype.com). If an internet cafe does not have Skype installed, it can usually be downloaded in a matter of minutes. Headphone and microphone equipment in Guatemala is of varying quality, if it exists at all – if you’re planning on using internet cafe computers to make calls, buy earbuds with a microphone attached before you leave – they take up very little room in your pack and you can plug them into the front of most computers in the country.

TELEPHONE Local phone calls are cheap, but domestic long-distance and international calls can be expensive unless you call from casetas telefónicas (or locutorios; call offices where an on-the-spot operator connects the call for you), which offer international calls from M$3 or M$5 per minute. Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) calling like Skype is available from many internet cafes and is a great money-saver. Area codes have three digits and local numbers have seven. To call Mexico from abroad, dial your international access code, then 52 (Mexico’s country code), followed by the area code and the seven-digit number. To call abroad from Mexico, dial 00, followed by country code, area code and number.

A second branch, one block east, changes US dollars and euros. Visa & MasterCard ATM (5a Av Norte) Facing Parque Central. Post Post office (cnr 4a Calle Poniente & Calz de Santa Lucía Norte) West of Parque Central, near the market. Telephone Most internet cafes offer cut-rate international calls, though Skype calls may be even cheaper. Conher (5521-2823; 4a Calle Poniente 5) Charges Q0.75 per minute to USA or Europe. Tourist Information Antigua Guatemala: the City and its Heritage, by long-time Antigua resident Elizabeth Bell, is well worth picking up at a bookstore. It describes all of the city’s important buildings and museums, and neatly encapsulates Antigua’s history and fiestas.


pages: 257 words: 64,285

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition by David Levinson, Kevin Krizek

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, collaborative consumption, commoditize, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, dematerialisation, driverless car, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Google Hangouts, high-speed rail, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the printing press, jitney, John Markoff, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Lyft, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Network effects, Occam's razor, oil shock, place-making, pneumatic tube, post-work, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, tacit knowledge, techno-determinism, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The future is already here, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Transport planning has been consumed with finding the best ways to connect matter moving along physical networks. But it is now easier to conceptualize other forms of exchange. The scenarios that we painted earlier about buying a book or a movie point to such. Or think of how instead of meeting in person, people transmit moving pictures of themselves in the form of data over digital networks (e.g., Skyping with video calling, or broadcasting live with Meerkat or Periscope). While it is difficult to conceive of things moving over digital networks, the rise of 3D printing means data is being sent and instantly manufactured at physically remote locations. Ordering — and delivering — a pizza over the Internet, might be here sooner than later.149 Producing three dimensional solid objects from a digital file is clearly in its infancy.

Driving to work five days a week and driving to the big box store for detergent are both disappearing. The Amazon Dash button336 demonstrates how we might take care of some of this. Parents will soon be able to order a self-driving car to take their children to soccer practice. Relying on descendants of apps like Skype and FaceTime and Google Hangouts, workers will meet colleagues periodically at both offices and random third places. Yet to crystalize effects will be rendered by 3-D printers. Stimulus Effects? While the traditional workplace will shrink in size and importance, it will not vanish. Work, like shopping and much of life, has a social as well as economic function.


pages: 189 words: 64,571

The Cheapskate Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of Americans Living Happily Below Their Means by Jeff Yeager

An Inconvenient Truth, asset allocation, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, delayed gratification, do what you love, dumpster diving, index card, job satisfaction, late fees, mortgage debt, new economy, payday loans, Skype, upwardly mobile, Zipcar

Free meals for the kids (MyKidsEatFree.com): A nationwide directory of thousands of restaurants where kids can eat for free when accompanied by an adult. Free audio books (LibriVox.org): Volunteers record books found in the public domain (i.e., no longer covered by copyright), and you can download their recordings from this nonprofit website. Free calling (Skype.com): Use Skype software and worldwide computer-to-computer calling is free. Another cheap—but not free—favorite is the $40 magicJack device (magicJack.com) that plugs into the USB port on your computer and allows you to make unlimited local and domestic long-distance calls for $20 a year. Free foreign languages (bbc.co.uk/languages): Jumpstart your training in a wide range of foreign languages using these online audio and visual teaching tools, compliments of the British Broadcasting Corporation.


pages: 270 words: 64,235

Effective Programming: More Than Writing Code by Jeff Atwood

AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, cloud computing, endowment effect, fail fast, Firefox, fizzbuzz, Ford Model T, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Chrome, gravity well, Hacker News, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Merlin Mann, Minecraft, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, price anchoring, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, science of happiness, Skype, social software, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

I know, I know, the whole reason we got into this programming thing was to avoid talking to other people, but bear with me here. You can’t be face to face on a remote team without flying 6-plus hours, and who the heck has that kind of time? I’ve got work I need to get done! Well, the next best thing to hopping on a plane is to fire up Skype and have a little voice chat. Easy peasy. All that human nuance which is totally lost in faceless ASCII characters (yes, even with our old pal *<:-)) will come roaring back if you regularly schedule voice chats. I recommend at least once a week at an absolute minimum; they don’t have to be long meetings, but it sure helps in understanding the human being behind all those awesome check-ins.

We walked the list of everything we could think of to solve it, and then some: swapping network ports replacing network cables a different switch multiple versions of the network driver tweaking OS and driver level network settings simplifying our network configuration and removing TProxy for more traditional X-FORWARDED-FOR switching virtualization providers changing our TCP/IP host model getting Kernel hotfixes and applying them involving high-level vendor support teams some other stuff that I’ve now forgotten because I blacked out from the pain At one point in this saga our team almost came to blows because we were so frustrated. (Well, as close to “blows” as a remote team can get over Skype, but you know what I mean.) Can you blame us? Every few days, one of our servers — no telling which one — would randomly wink off the network. The Chaos Monkey strikes again! Even in our time of greatest frustration, I realized that there was a positive side to all this: Where we had one server performing an essential function, we switched to two.


pages: 221 words: 71,449

Not My Father's Son: A Memoir by Alan Cumming

British Empire, colonial rule, Downton Abbey, financial independence, friendly fire, Skype

I had eaten in my hotel room alone, the crew having had to go and get some location shots before the sun went down. As much as I knew it was necessary for me to have time on my own to process everything that was happening, and to allow myself the chance to give rein to my emotions, I also yearned for company. I Skyped with Grant back in London, which offered little relief. It was great to be able to see him, not just hear him, and for this I am grateful to modern technology. But at the same time, seeing the one you love but not being able to touch, when their comfort is what you crave most, actually makes you feel worse, and more depleted, than if you had not seen them at all.

I flew from Singapore to Tokyo and then had a few hours’ layover and once more was able to indulge in my lounge worship. But even this swanky Air Nippon lounge couldn’t quite lift me out of the numbness that had descended. It was now Saturday morning around 8 A.M. My body clock was all over the place. I was drinking a sake Bloody Mary (I am very adaptable!) and Skyping with my assistant who was at my house in the Catskills, preparing for the influx of friends who were coming up for the Fourth of July holiday weekend. There the time was 8 P.M. the night before. As much as I was looking forward to seeing Grant and my friends, I was a little apprehensive. I felt like one of those soldiers returning from the battlefield a different man.


pages: 239 words: 56,531

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

As for the cinema, which was itself swallowed up by televisual prostheses like videocassette recorders (VCRs), DVRs, and DVDs, the computer simulates it, migrates it online, chops it into YouTube segments, has it pirated on peer-to-peer networks, and shoots, stores, and projects it digitally. When computers simulate telephones, everything becomes available from the free Internet calling on services like Skype to mobile tele/computing hybrids like the iPhone. When we are talking about communication devices, simulation engenders participation. After establishing communication between machines, between machines and people, and between people themselves, the next step is to allow the user to make 15 CHAPTER 2 something and then put it out into the network, where others will be able (and more crucially willing) to download that which has been uploaded.

., 11 Royal Dutch Shell, 112, 112–113 Royal Library of Alexandria, 89 R-PR (Really Public Relations), xvi, 123–127 RSS feeds, xvii Rumsfeld, Donald, 99 Running room, 74–77 Run time, 57 212 INDEX environmental perception and, 16 memes and, 19, 53–54, 76, 87, 91, 98, 113, 143–144, 149–150, 156–162, 165–170, 178, 194n1 mimicry and, xvii MP3s and, 27 participation and, 15–17 stickiness and, 15–19, 27, 32, 35 unimodernism and, 39, 49, 53–54, 57, 71–76 Sinatra, Frank, 63 Skype, 15 Skyscrapers, xiv Slow movements, 5–7, 181n7 Slurpees, 4 “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (Nirvana), 62 Smith & Hawken, 113 Snakes on a Plane (film), 30 Snow White (Disney film), 20 Social issues advertisement and, 23, 52, 57, 59, 107, 175–177, 184nn12,15 Aquarians and, xv, 144, 152, 157, 159–169 atomic age and, xi (see also Atomic age) Berlin Wall and, 85, 97, 99, 104 bespoke futures and, xvi, 97–139 blogosphere and, xvii, 30, 34, 49, 68, 80, 92–93, 101, 175, 177, 181n7 capitalism and, 4, 13, 66, 75, 90, 97–100, 103–105 capitulationism and, 7, 24, 182n1 cell phones and, xiii, 23, 42, 53, 56, 76, 101 Communism and, 97–98, 103 computers and, xvi, 5, 15–19 (see also Computers) Cuban Missile Crisis and, xi dangers of overabundance and, 7–10 desk jobs and, 3 89/11 and, xvi, 97, 100–102, 105, 130 Enlightenment and, xvi, 129–139 Sacred texts, 28 Saint Laurent, Yves, 60 Saks Fifth Avenue, 31 Samizdat, 59 Scenario planning bespoke futures and, 111–119, 191n19, 192n20 chaos theory and, 117–119 crafting of, 113–116 Ogilvy and, 113–114 Schwartz and, 113–114 Scènes de la vie Bohème (Murger), 61 Schindler, Rudolph, 45 Schrödinger, Erwin, 49 Schwartz, Peter, 113–115, 119 Scott, Ridley, 107 Scratching, 53 Searchers, 167, 177–178 Brin and, 144, 174–176 description of term, xv–xvi Page and, 144, 174–176 Sears, 103–105 September 11, 2001, xvi–xvii, 99–101, 130 SETI@home, 122 Sex, 7, 19, 88, 129–130, 167 Shakespeare, William, 28, 44 Shannon, Claude, 148 Shockley, William, 156 Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, 156 Silicon Valley, 149, 161, 164 Silly Symphonies (Disney film), 88 Simon, John, Jr., 39 Simulation, xvi, 2, 11 affordances and, 16–17 bespoke futures and, 98, 121, 124, 126–127 buttons/knobs and, 16 communication devices and, 15–16 culture machine and, 143–144, 147– 152, 156–160, 166–168, 175–178 downloading and, 143, 168 emulation and, 183n3 213 INDEX Social issues (continued) figure/ground and, xvi, 42–43, 46, 102 folksonomies and, 80–81 hackers and, 22–23, 54, 67, 69, 162, 170–173 Holocaust and, 107 Hosts and, xv, 144, 167, 175 hypercontexts and, xvi, 7, 48, 76–77 information overload and, 22, 149 MaSAI and, xvi, 112, 120–123, 127, 193nn32 meaningfulness and, xvi, 14, 17, 20, 23–29, 42, 67, 77, 79, 119, 123, 128–129, 133, 173 narrative and, xv, 2, 7–8, 58–59, 67, 71, 76, 108, 110, 130–132, 143– 145, 174, 178, 180n4, 188n25, 193n34 personal grounding and, xiv–xv play and, xvi, 13, 15, 32–34, 39, 53, 55, 62, 64, 67–77, 85, 88, 110–111, 130–131, 143, 153, 160–163, 185n22, 188n25 Plutocrats and, xv, 144, 152–159, 163–166, 170 plutopian meliorism and, xvi, 127–129, 133, 137–138 power and, xvi, 8, 13, 17, 22 (see also Power) relationship with data and, 32 religion and, xi, 1, 13, 76, 130–135, 138 R-PR (Really Public Relations) and, xvi, 123–127 Searchers and, xv–xvi, 144, 167, 174–178 suburbs and, 3, 8 television and, xii (see also Television) terrorism and, 99–101, 130–131, 134, 137 unfinish and, xvi, 34–37, 51, 67, 70, 76–79, 92, 127–129, 136 urban planning and, 84–86 utopia and, 36, 73, 97, 101, 104, 108, 110, 120, 127–129, 138 wants vs. needs and, 13, 37, 57 wicked problems and, 158 World War I era and, 21, 107, 123, 146, 190n1 World War II era and, xi, 18, 25, 32, 47, 73, 107–108, 144–150, 157, 170 Socialists, 102–105 Software platforms, 15, 164, 170 Sontag, Susan, 135 Sopranos, The (TV show), 7 Soundscapes, 53–55 Soviet Union, 31, 85, 88, 146 Berlin Wall and, 85, 97, 99, 104 Cuban Missile Crisis and, xi Exhibition of the Achievement of the Soviet People’s Economy (VDNX) and, 102–105 fall of, 104 gulags of, 107 samizdat and, 59 unimodernism and, 49–52, 73 Space Invaders, 71 Spacewar!


pages: 204 words: 67,922

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley

Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, call centre, clean water, commoditize, company town, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, feminist movement, financial independence, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, informal economy, insecure affluence, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, Michael Shellenberger, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, off grid, oil shock, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, post-industrial society, post-materialism, principal–agent problem, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

During the 1990s, she traveled in the backseat of the car on family trips with her laptop humming, the power cord hooked into the cigarette lighter, and a black metal rectangular box clipped onto the screen, dashing off e-mails in real time Awhile chatting on another black boxlike cell phone. The laptop clip-on was called “Ricochet,” a product that used radio networks to provide linkage to the Internet as we sped through California’s Santa Clara Valley before the advent of GPRS (Internet service) on BlackBerries and Treos. A few years later, she became an early adopter of Skype—the Internet-based phone system— so that she could video-conference with Australia (her home continent), the UK, and Belgium about various projects. When our son would wet his bed, he would wander out to a blazingly lit living room to find his mother discussing project proposals for cageless zoos, color-coded interactive parking lots, and upside-down tree plantings with various collaborators around the globe.

Or maybe we just want to escape the chaos of home life, as some sociologists have suggested, and find work to be a calming refuge from the demands of kids and spouses (home offices, of course, threw a wrench into that plan).35 After all, working on solving a software problem for our employer (or for our online, open-source community) may feel a lot more rewarding than taking out the garbage, doing the shopping, or scrubbing the oven. Perhaps, then, we may stay late at the office so we can browse eBay—and avoid having to do the laundry in the process. Or instant-message with old flames on Skype while toggling over to finish up a dreadful report due on our boss’s desk the next morning. Or maybe we just sneak off, excusing ourselves prematurely from the family “dinner” in order to write that report in the den—the same report we should have been working on all day when instead we were e-mailing.


pages: 233 words: 64,702

China's Disruptors: How Alibaba, Xiaomi, Tencent, and Other Companies Are Changing the Rules of Business by Edward Tse

3D printing, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, bilateral investment treaty, business process, capital controls, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, experimental economics, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, middle-income trap, money market fund, offshore financial centre, Pearl River Delta, reshoring, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trade route, wealth creators, working-age population

Its marketing has improved enormously, not just for its smartphones but also for its tablets and high-end PCs. One of its smartest moves was signing up Hollywood star Ashton Kutcher as a “product engineer” to help promote new products. Kutcher, who played Steve Jobs in the Jobs movie, also has a strong record as an investor in tech start-ups, among them Skype, Foursquare, and Airbnb. Even if its purchases of Motorola Mobility and IBM’s low-end servers both fail, that wouldn’t bring down the company. If they succeed, however, they have the potential to transform Lenovo from a $50 billion company into a $100 billion one. THE TACTICS OF EXPANSION Which Chinese companies will be most successful at internationalizing themselves?

Warren, 93–94 McGrath, Rita Gunther, 99 Manganese Bronze, 133 manufacturing, 109–10 Mao Zedong, 13, 42, 51 Cultural Revolution instigated by, 4, 42, 43 Marks and Spencer, 194 media, 157–62, 213 medical research, 109 Meituan.com, 53, 191 Metallurgical Corporation, 124 MG Rover, 136–37 Mi, 68 see also Xiaomi Miasolé, 123 Microsoft, 112 middle-income trap, 213–14 Mindray Medical International, 122–23, 178 mining, 119, 163 Mitchell, James, 136 motorcycles, 47, 76, 95, 100, 178 Motorola Mobility, 127, 128, 129, 136 Nan Fung, 224 Nanjing Auto, 136 Naspers, 86, 194 National People’s Congress, 43, 81 Navarro, Peter, 9 Nestlé, 194, 196 New Citizens Movement, 170 New York Stock Exchange, 33, 52, 159, 206 Nexen, 119–20 Nike, 195 Nissan, 180 Noah Wealth Management, 12, 150, 153, 212 Nokia, 102, 112 Nortel, 102 open markets, 71, 72–77, 83, 85, 88, 97 Panda W, 205–7, 208, 225 Pan Shiyi, 48 People’s Liberation Army, 101–2 Pepsi, 180 Pew Research Center, 219 piracy, 9, 75, 199 pollution, 115, 209, 212, 217, 221 Pope, Larry, 22 pride, 41, 55, 57, 61, 123 private-equity funds, 79 Procter & Gamble, 12, 175, 177 products, updating of, 97 property rights, 81, 170 Pudong New Area, 224 Putzmeister, 130 Qihoo 360, 84, 113 Qingdao Refrigerator Factory, 4–5 see also Haier Qingqi, 76 QQ, 85, 86, 160, 185, 201 Reckitt Benckiser, 194, 196 Red Packet, 88 Red Rice smartphone, 69 Renault/Nissan, 133 Renren, 52–53 Ren Zhengfei, 11, 43–44, 54, 60, 101–3, 175, 200 Rio Tinto, 119 robots, 110 Roche Diagnostics, 155 Roewe, 137 Russia, 13, 68 doctorates in, 108 oligarchs in, 17 SAIC Motor Corp, 136–37 Samsung, 67, 68, 89, 128 Sany, 178 Sanyo Electric, 7 Schumpeter, Joseph, 163 Sehgal, Aditya, 196 Sequoia Capital, 113, 150 SF Express, 100 shared heritage, 55, 61–64 Shen, Neil, 113 Shenzhen Stock Exchange, 156 Shunwei China, 112 Siemens, 102 Silicon Graphics, 112 Silicon Valley, 18 Silk Road, 57 Sina Weibo, 69, 87–88, 161, 170, 191 Singapore, 68, 100, 155 SingPost, 100 Sino Iron mine, 124 Sinovac Biotech, 109 Sky City, 217–18, 221 Skype, 129 smartphones, 9, 11, 67–70, 75, 89, 128, 135, 139 Smithfield Foods, 22, 120 Softbank, 37, 156, 194 SOHO China, 48 Sohu, 158, 159 sourcing networks, 188 South China Morning Post, 37 South Korea, 121, 141 special economic zones, 43 Standard Chartered, 151 State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television, 219 State Council, 215 state-owned enterprises, 9–10, 13–14, 36, 40, 76, 80, 119, 137, 158, 164, 176, 179–80, 209, 213 strategy+business, 49–50 Su, Sam, 196 subsidies, 9, 163 Surprise (series), 160 Sze Man Bok, 43, 176, 177 Tabarrok, Alex, 113 Taikang Life Insurance, 45, 55, 148 Taiwan, 68, 121, 214 Taizhou, 44 Tang dynasty, 28–29, 229 Tango, 135 Tan Wanxin, 13 Taobao, 34–35, 38, 40, 184 TCL, 76, 84, 148 Tedjarati, Shane, 190, 196 telecoms, 103–4, 122, 178 television, 76, 158, 178, 219 Tencent, 11, 18, 39, 52, 60, 80, 81, 83–84, 85–88, 90, 101, 135, 136, 151, 158, 159, 161, 162, 185, 191, 201, 222, 225 founding of, 49, 85 innovation by, 94, 113 Naspers’ purchase of stake in, 86, 194 overseas listing of, 89 revenue of, 87 Tenpay system of, 36 Tenpay, 36, 87 Tesco, 180 Tetra Pak, 196 ThinkPad, 128 Third Plenum of the 18th Party Congress, 211, 214, 215 Thomas Group, 177–78 3D printing, 110–11 360 Mobile Assistant, 84 Tian, Lawrence, 147–48 Tiananmen Square, 44 Tingyi, 180 Tmall, 36, 38, 87, 184, 195, 206 Tmall Global, 195 Toyota, 133, 180 TPG Capital, 225 transport, 115 Tsai, Joe, 37 Twitter, 87, 222 United Kingdom, doctorates in, 108 United States, 18 doctorates in, 108 R&D spending in, 107 technological supremacy of, 106 urbanization, 28, 115, 214 Uyghurs, 53 Vanke, 148 Vantone Holdings, 46, 148 vehicles, 115 venture capital, 79 Vipshop, 84, 113, 206 Volkswagen, 133, 137, 179, 180 Volvo, 123, 131, 132, 133, 134, 138, 185 wage pressure, 98 Wallerstein, David, 136 Wal-Mart, 96, 194 Wanda E-Commerce, 88 Wang, Diane, 12, 57 Wang, Victor, 145–47, 167, 168–69, 171 Wang Jianlin, 48, 88, 172 Wang Jingbo, 12, 150, 152 Wang Shi, 148 Wang Wei, 147–48 Wang Xing, 52–53 Wanxiang, 130, 134, 178 Ward, Stephen, 126 water, 6, 25, 106, 188 WeChat, 18–19, 84, 87, 88, 139, 160, 185, 191, 201, 212 Wen Jiabao, 147 WhatsApp, 18–19, 191 WH Group, 21–22, 120 Wong, Jessica, 205–7, 208, 210, 214, 225 World Economic Forum, 147 World Health Organization (WHO), 114 World Trade Organization, 6, 16, 37–38, 47, 122, 222 Xiangcai Securities, 150 Xiaomi, 11, 12, 57, 67–70, 75, 77, 89, 101, 128, 139, 162, 191–92, 197, 226 innovation by, 94, 112, 113 Xiaonei, 52–53 Xi Jinping, 78, 80, 152, 160, 165, 167, 168, 170, 181, 210–11, 213, 223, 229 Xu, William, 222 Xue, Charles, 161, 170 Xu Lianjie, 12, 43, 53, 175–78, 200 Yabuli, 145, 147, 149, 166 Yahoo, 194 Yang Yuanqing, 11, 125–26, 128, 148 Yao, Frank, 205–7, 210, 214, 225 Yihaodian, 11, 89, 95–97, 194 Yinlu, 194 Yoga IdeaPad, 127 Youku Tudou, 84, 114, 158–60, 161, 162, 209, 212, 218 YouTube, 158, 218 yuan, 9 Yu’e Bao, 39, 40, 153, 212 Yu Gang, 11, 94–96, 100, 112 Yum!


pages: 225 words: 65,922

A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering by Ann K. Finkbeiner

Albert Einstein, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, digital map, Galaxy Zoo, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Magellanic Cloud, Skype, slashdot

Ed Mannery, Walt Siegmund, and Russ Owen, University of Washington, Seattle, WA: 4/11/07. Bruce Margon, University of California, Santa Cruz; by Skype: 8/22/08. Kevin Marvel, American Astronomical Society; by phone: 5/23/07. Tim McKay, University of Michigan; by phone: 10/25/07. Matt Mountain, Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD: 8/10/07. Heidi Newberg, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; by phone: 12/21/07, 6/25/09. Robert Nichol, University of Portsmouth; by e-mail: 5/21/08; by Skype: 5/21/08, 5/22/08; at collaboration meeting, Princeton, NJ: 7/27/09. Jerry Ostriker, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ: 5/16/07, 8/14/07, 1/14/08.


pages: 976 words: 235,576

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

as much as $100,000: Emma Jacobs, “The $600-an-Hour Private Tutor,” Financial Times, December 12, 2013, accessed November 18, 2018, www.ft.com/content/080d6cce-61aa-11e3-aa02-00144feabdc0. Hereafter cited as Jacobs, “The $600-an-Hour Private Tutor.” $1,250 per hour: Caroline Moss, “Meet the Guy Who Makes $1,000 an Hour Tutoring Kids of Fortune 500 CEOs over Skype,” Business Insider, August 26, 2014, accessed November 18, 2018, www.businessinsider.com/anthony-green-tutoring-2014-8. Hereafter cited as Moss, “Meet the Guy Who Makes $1,000 an Hour Tutoring Kids of Fortune 500 CEOs over Skype.” Robert Frank, “Meet the $1,250-an-Hour Tutor,” CNBC, December 12, 2013, accessed November 18, 2018, www.cnbc.com/2013/12/12/meet-the-400000-a-year-tutor.html. Hereafter cited as Frank, “Meet the $1,250-an-Hour Tutor.”

An exhaustive analysis recently studied Google data on searches initiated in both the most and least prosperous counties in the country (ranked according to an index that includes income and education). The study revealed that the searches most correlated with prosperity include digital cameras, baby joggers, Skype, and foreign travel. By contrast, the searches most correlated with deprivation included health problems; weight loss; guns; video games; and the Antichrist, hell, and the Rapture. Even geography now separates the rich from the rest. Palo Alto has left St. Clair Shores behind. Median incomes in Palo Alto now almost triple those in St.

Veritas Tutors Agency, run by a Princeton graduate based in Manhattan but serving clients nationwide, charges $600 an hour for tuition in basic academic subjects; a typical tutee’s family spends between $5,000 and $15,000 on Veritas services, and some families have spent as much as $100,000. Amazingly, Veritas is not even the top of the market. One test preparation tutoring company that caters to students in New York City charges $1,500 for a ninety-minute Skype tutoring session, requiring a minimum of fourteen such sessions in order to enroll. Another charges $1,250 per hour. And a third recruits Ivy League professors to give individual tuition, offering to pay the professors nearly $1,000 an hour and charging the students substantially more. (Some professors, unsurprisingly, have accepted the arrangement.)


pages: 400 words: 124,678

The Investment Checklist: The Art of In-Depth Research by Michael Shearn

accelerated depreciation, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, business cycle, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, compound rate of return, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, do what you love, electricity market, estate planning, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, London Interbank Offered Rate, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, Network effects, PalmPilot, pink-collar, risk tolerance, shareholder value, six sigma, Skype, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, technology bubble, Teledyne, time value of money, transaction costs, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional

For example, for a Father’s Day gift, power tools may serve as a substitute for a necktie. The threat of substitute products is high if they can offer the customer an attractive price or performance tradeoff to the current industry product or service. Here are a few examples: International calling cards suffered when low-cost Internet-based service Skype entered the market. Advancements in digital photography replaced the duopoly on traditional film that Kodak and Fuji had. Kodak and Fuji took too long to transition to the new digital medium and therefore lost significant market share. There are certain types of businesses that are currently immune from the competitive threats of substitute products.

Watch for those businesses that retain employees after an acquisition as this is often a good sign that the management team is making a good acquisition.13 Does Management Have Discipline or Is there a Risk That They Will Overpay? Management teams, even good ones, usually overpay for acquisitions. This represents a huge source of risk for you as an investor. For example, in October of 2007, online auction house eBay admitted it overpaid when it acquired the Internet phone services company Skype Technologies for $2.6 billion in 2005, and took a $1.4 billion write-down. This write-down represented 53 percent of the total EBITDA generated by eBay in 2007. Companies overpay because quite simply, they don’t know the real value of the target company. They often think they do, which adds to their problem.

See return on invested capital Rollins, Kevin Rose, Pete Roth, John Rutherford, John salary, stock ownership versus sale indicators, management activity as sales, inflating same-store sales Samsung Electronics Schwartz, Mark schedule 13-D Schultz, Howard Scrushy, Richard Seagate secular trends, business growth due to selling, forced service, competing on services customer dependency on high quality purchasing Seyhun, Nejat shared values shareholder letter shares, tracking a business via Sharpe, Isaadore Shell Sheth, Jagdish short-term earnings, growth and Silberman, Robert Sinegal, Jim Singleton, Harry Sisodia, Rajendra Skype Technologies slowing growth SOE. See state-owned enterprises Sonkin, Paul sourcesevaluating interview locating of supplies Southwest Airlines balance sheet of speed of growth Spirit Airlines spreadsheet, tracking investments via Stahl, Jack stakeholders, benefitting Staples Starbucks state-owned enterprises (SOE) static ratios Stemberg, Thomas Stericycle sticky accounts stock awards, restricted stock options dilution, offsetting stock options employees managers and stock ownership required salary versus stock returns, employee relations and stock screens, using stock buying back financing acquisitions with management buying or selling transaction motivation strategic plans failure of long-term planning versus setting financial goals Strayer Education structural advantage subscription-type firms, metrics for substitute products, risks from Sun Microsystems Sunbeam suppliers dependence on innovation by relationship with supplies, sources of supply chain management sustainable competitive advantage finding business with structural switching costs synergy Sysco Tan, Seng Hock Taubman, Alfred tax purposes, selling stock for taxes, generally accepted accounting principles versus IRS technology price transparency and Tesco TEV.


pages: 480 words: 123,979

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

It might make remote collaboration work better, and that might reduce humanity’s carbon footprint. Transportation brings people together for meetings, classes, comedy clubs, etc., but burns a lot of carbon and causes a lot of congestion. Straightforward camera-to-camera contact, such as in the familiar Skype experience, can do a lot, but not as much as we might like. Remember when I mentioned that there’s a subconscious information channel between people that’s transmitted by head motion? Add eye motion, skin tone, tiny changes in expression, and undoubtedly other factors we are not yet aware of. MIT’s Sandy Pentland dubbed these the “honest signals.”

“Telepresence” used to mean being connected with a robot in such a way that you felt as though you were the robot, or at least that you were in the robot’s location. The community that studied telepresence had started way back in the analog era, well before Ivan Sutherland, or even Alan Turing. Lately it has a broader usage, including Skype-like interactions in VR or mixed reality. “Tele-existence” was coined by the wonderful pioneering Japanese VR researcher Susumu Tachi to include both telepresence and VR. I wish I could remember the precise moment when I started using the term “virtual reality.” It was in the 1970s, before I came to Silicon Valley, and it served as both my North Star and my fledgling calling card.

See also DataGloves sensorimotor loops sensorimotor mirror sensors “set and setting” principle sex sexism sexual singularity shakuhachi shaman Shankar, Uday ship design shitposting Shulgin, Sasha SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics conference for the Association for Computing Machinery) sign language silence Silicon Graphics Silicon Valley similarity, recognition of simulated code Sinatra, Frank Singapore Singer, Alex singing singularity freaks Sketchpad Skinner, B. F. Skinner box skin sensor cells ski simulator Skype Slater, Mel Smalltalk smartphones Smith, Adam Smith, Alvy Ray Smith, Graham Smith, Jack Smolin, Lee Snapchat Spectacles snark Snow, Michael socialism social media social networking social VR software. See also programming abstractions and obsolescence and two-phase nature of VPL and songlines sonic general purpose programming language Sony PlayStation VR headset Sound of One Hand sounds source code Soviet Union spacetime topological quantum computers Spacewar!


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

They prefer a slowdown in the pace of market change. Innovation and corporate destruction How the mighty fall! Nokia’s history of producing mobile handsets is now, well, history. It sold its mobile unit to Microsoft for a little more than $7.2 billion a few years ago – much less than what Microsoft paid for Skype, and many times below Nokia’s peak value just a few years earlier.4 Nokia stumbled – and squandered shareholders’ money. It failed to do what the company prided itself on: “changing with the times, disrupting the status quo,” as its own hagiography put it.5 Companies with new business models and technological applications relevant to the mobile sector outcompeted Nokia in the handset consumer market.

Steve Ballmer, the then newly minted heir to Bill Gates, described how Microsoft would create a “unified platform through which devices and services co-operate with each other.”7 Microsoft predicted the need for interconnected web services that could be used across platforms and shared between colleagues or family members. It understood what would come in location-aware devices, voice-control services, and photo sharing. Microsoft even predicted the services, or variants thereof, that later became known as Facebook and Skype. However, Microsoft did not reshape the consumer market with these products. Since the millennium it has been trying to catch up with the kinds of new devices and services that have made the shareholders of other companies rich. While it is only natural that fast-growing and technology-intensive markets have many successful companies, it is remarkable that Microsoft – given its dominant market position for operating systems – could not lead the consumer market with new products and technologies it knew was coming.

(i)n17 savings aggregate (i) corporate (cash hoarding) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) retirement (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) Schmidt, Eric (i) Schumpeter, Joseph (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Schumpeterian innovation (i), (ii) “scientific civilization” thinking, and planning (i) scientific research (i) see also R&D; research Scrooge character (i) “second half of the chessboard” (Ray Kurzweil) (i) Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee) (i), (ii) Second World countries, and globalization (i) Seinfeld (TV series) Art Vandelay and “importer-exporter” conversation (i), (ii) “Art Vandelay logistics operation” (i) self-driving vehicles see driverless vehicles self-regulation (i) Sellers, Peter (i) Servan-Schreiber, Jean-Jacques, Le Défi américain (The American Challenge) (i) services and globalization (i) and market contestability (i), (ii) and second unbundling of production (i) see also online services “servicification” (or “servitization”) (i), (ii) SetPoint nerve stimulator (i) shale gas, and regulation in Europe (i) shareholders (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) shares buybacks (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) share/stock structures (i) see also stock markets Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Prometheus Unbound (i) shipping containers (i) short-termism (i) Sidecar (i) SIFIs (systemically important financial institutions) (i) Silicon Valley (i), (ii), (iii) silo curse (i) Silvia, John (i) Simons, Bright (i) Simphal, Thibaud (i) Sinclair, Clive (i) Sinn, Hans-Werner, “bazaar economy” (i) size see corporate size skill deficiencies, and productivity (i) Skype (i), (ii) Slyngstad, Yngve (i) smartphones (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Smith, Adam economy of specialization (i) labor and wealth (i) “man of system” (i) The Wealth of Nations (i), (ii) Smiths, The (rock band), “hang the DJ” lyric (i) social democratic vision (i) social regulation (i), (ii) socialism and bureaucracy (i) and community-generated content (i) corporate socialism (i), (ii) and Cybersyn project (i) and death of capitalism utopia (i) and labor vs. work (i) market socialism (i) and open source technology (i) socialist planning (i) and Swedish hybrid economy (i) Söderberg, Hjalmar (i) software technology, and regulation (i) Sombart, Werner (i) Sony (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) sourdough production, history of (i) South Africa, taxi services and regulation (i) South Korea “Asian Tiger” (i) R&D spending (i) Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute (i) sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) (i), (ii), (iii) “Soviet–Harvard illusion” (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) (i) space flights, commercial (i) SpaceX (i) Spain biofuels regulation (i) and diffusion of innovations (i) and globalization (i) left-wing populism (i) lesser dependence on larger enterprises (i) pensions (i) public debt (i) taxi services and regulation (i) specialization and corporate control (i) and creative destruction (i) and deregulation (i) and firm boundaries (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) and globalization (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) and innovation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) and organization (i) and sunk costs (i), (ii) vertical (i), (ii) speech codes, in universities (i) staff turnover rates, and economic dynamism (i) Stanford University (i), (ii) Star Trek (TV series) (i) start-ups (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Startup Genome Report (i) statistics see recorded data (national accounts) Statoil (i) Stein, Gertrude, “there is no there there” quote (i) Stern, Ariel Dora (i) stock markets changing role of (i) and corporate politics (i) post-financial crisis growth (i) and sovereign wealth funds (i) see also shareholders; shares stockholding periods (i), (ii), (iii) strategic management (i) strategic planning (i) strategy, and managerialism (i) Stratos pacemaker (i) subprime mortgage crisis (US) (i) see also financial crisis (2007) subsidies domestic companies (i) US firms (i) sunk costs (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Sunstein, Cass (i) supply chains fragmentation of (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) German-Central European supply chain (i), (ii) globalization of (i), (ii) and market concentration (i) marketization of (i) and multinationals (i) and Nokia (i) outsourcing of (i) and private standards (i) see also value chains Sweden corporate renewal levels (i) economic situation: 1970s–1980s (i); globalization and post-financial crisis (i) productivity and incomes (i) services and globalization (i) sourdough hotel (Stockholm) (i) state telecommunication monopoly and mobile technology (i) SWFs (sovereign wealth funds) (i), (ii), (iii) SWOT analyses (i) systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs) (i) Tabarrok, Alex (i) tablets (i), (ii) Taibbi, Matt, “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?”


pages: 510 words: 120,048

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Here is how it could go: Students at colleges ranked lower than Stanford would tune in to Stanford seminars, and gradually wonder why they’re paying their local, lower-ranked academics at all. If locals are to remain valuable once a globalized star system comes into being over the ’net, it can only be because they are present and interactive. But online experts can also be made virtually present and interactive. Perhaps tutors will be Skyped in the cheapest places. Forget people. Artificial intelligence can animate a simulated tutor. Imagine Siri, but as a digital talking head with the faraway look and awkwardly groomed countenance of a graduate assistant in a math class. Why should we keep on paying for colleges? Why pay for all those levees that benefit a privileged class of middle-class people?

To the dismay of generations of computer scientists, the first glimmer of the wonders we have built was a dystopian tale. In the story, what we’d call the Internet is known as the “Machine.” The world’s population is glued to the Machine’s screens, endlessly engaged in social networking, browsing, Skypeing, and the like. Interestingly, Forster wasn’t cynical enough to foresee the centrality of advertising in such a situation. At the end of the story, the machine does indeed stop. Terror ensues, similar to what is imagined these days from a hypothetical cyber-attack. The whole human world crashes.

., 75, 91, 266–67 New York Times, 109 Nobel Prize, 40, 118, 143n nodes, network, 156, 227, 230, 241–43, 350 “no free lunch” principle, 55–56, 59–60 nondeterministic music, 23n nonlinear solutions, 149–50 nonprofit share sites, 59n, 94–95 nostalgia, 129–32 NRO, 199–200 nuclear power, 133 nuclear weapons, 127, 296 nursing, 97–100, 123, 296n nursing homes, 97–100, 269 Obama, Barack, 79, 100 “Obamacare,” 100n obsolescence, 89, 95 oil resources, 43, 133 online stores, 171 Ono, Yoko, 212 ontologies, 124n, 196 open-source applications, 206, 207, 272, 310–11 optical illusions, 121 optimism, 32–35, 45, 130, 138–40, 218, 230n, 295 optimization, 144–47, 148, 153, 154–55, 167, 202, 203 Oracle, 265 Orbitz, 63, 64, 65 organ donors, 190, 191 ouroboros, 154 outcomes, economic, 40–41, 144–45 outsourcing, 177–78, 185 Owens, Buck, 256 packet switching, 228–29 Palmer, Amanda, 186–87 Pandora, 192 panopticons, 308 papacy, 190 paper money, 34n parallel computers, 147–48, 149, 151 paranoia, 309 Parrish, Maxfield, 214 particle interactions, 196 party machines, 202 Pascal, Blaise, 132, 139 Pascal’s Wager, 139 passwords, 307, 309 “past-oriented money,” 29–31, 35, 284–85 patterns, information, 178, 183, 184, 188–89 Paul, Ron, 33n Pauli exclusion principle, 181, 202 PayPal, 60, 93, 326 peasants, 565 pensions, 95, 99 Perestroika (Kushner), 165 “perfect investments,” 59–67, 77–78 performances, musical, 47–48, 51, 186–87, 253 perpetual motion, 55 Persian Gulf, 86 personal computers (PCs), 158, 182n, 214, 223, 229 personal information systems, 110, 312–16, 317 Pfizer, 265 pharmaceuticals industry, 66–67, 100–106, 123, 136, 203 philanthropy, 117 photography, 53, 89n, 92, 94, 309–11, 318, 319, 321 photo-sharing services, 53 physical trades, 292 physicians, 66–67 physics, 88, 153n, 167n Picasso, Pablo, 108 Pinterest, 180–81, 183 Pirate Party, 49, 199, 206, 226, 253, 284, 318 placebos, 112 placement fees, 184 player pianos, 160–61 plutocracy, 48, 291–94, 355 police, 246, 310, 311, 319–21, 335 politics, 13–18, 21, 22–25, 47–48, 85, 122, 124–26, 128, 134–37, 149–51, 155, 167, 199–234, 295–96, 342 see also conservatism; liberalism; libertarianism Ponzi schemes, 48 Popper, Karl, 189n popular culture, 111–12, 130, 137–38, 139, 159 “populating the stack,” 273 population, 17, 34n, 86, 97–100, 123, 125, 132, 133, 269, 296n, 325–26, 346 poverty, 37–38, 42, 44, 53–54, 93–94, 137, 148, 167, 190, 194, 253, 256, 263, 290, 291–92 power, personal, 13–15, 53, 60, 62–63, 86, 114, 116, 120, 122, 158, 166, 172–73, 175, 190, 199, 204, 207, 208, 278–79, 290, 291, 302–3, 308–9, 314, 319, 326, 344, 360 Presley, Elvis, 211 Priceline, 65 pricing strategies, 1–2, 43, 60–66, 72–74, 145, 147–48, 158, 169–74, 226, 261, 272–75, 289, 317–24, 331, 337–38 printers, 90, 99, 154, 162, 212, 269, 310–11, 316, 331, 347, 348, 349 privacy, 1–2, 11, 13–15, 25, 50–51, 64, 99, 108–9, 114–15, 120–21, 152, 177n, 199–200, 201, 204, 206–7, 234–35, 246, 272, 291, 305, 309–13, 314, 315–16, 317, 319–24 privacy rights, 13–15, 25, 204, 305, 312–13, 314, 315–16, 321–22 product design and development, 85–89, 117–20, 128, 136–37, 145, 154, 236 productivity, 7, 56–57, 134–35 profit margins, 59n, 71–72, 76–78, 94–95, 116, 177n, 178, 179, 207, 258, 274–75, 321–22 progress, 9–18, 20, 21, 37, 43, 48, 57, 88, 98, 123, 124–40, 130–37, 256–57, 267, 325–31, 341–42 promotions, 62 property values, 52 proprietary hardware, 172 provenance, 245–46, 247, 338 pseudo-asceticism, 211–12 public libraries, 293 public roads, 79–80 publishers, 62n, 92, 182, 277–78, 281, 347, 352–60 punishing vs. rewarding network effects, 169–74, 182, 183 quants, 75–76 quantum field theory, 167n, 195 QuNeo, 117, 118, 119 Rabois, Keith, 185 “race to the bottom,” 178 radiant risk, 61–63, 118–19, 120, 156, 183–84 Ragnarok, 30 railroads, 43, 172 Rand, Ayn, 167, 204 randomness, 143 rationality, 144 Reagan, Ronald, 149 real estate, 33, 46, 49–52, 61, 78, 95–96, 99, 193, 224, 227, 239, 245, 255, 274n, 289n, 296, 298, 300, 301 reality, 55–56, 59–60, 124n, 127–28, 154–56, 161, 165–68, 194–95, 203–4, 216–17, 295–303, 364–65 see also Virtual Reality (VR) reason, 195–96 recessions, economic, 31, 54, 60, 76–77, 79, 151–52, 167, 204, 311, 336–37 record labels, 347 recycling, 88, 89 Reddit, 118n, 186, 254 reductionism, 184 regulation, economic, 37–38, 44, 45–46, 49–50, 54, 56, 69–70, 77–78, 266n, 274, 299–300, 311, 321–22, 350–51 relativity theory, 167n religion, 124–25, 126, 131, 139, 190, 193–95, 211–17, 293, 300n, 326 remote computers, 11–12 rents, 144 Republican Party, 79, 202 research and development, 40–45, 85–89, 117–20, 128, 136–37, 145, 154, 215, 229–30, 236 retail sector, 69, 70–74, 95–96, 169–74, 272, 349–51, 355–56 retirement, 49, 150 revenue growth plans, 173n revenues, 149, 149, 150, 151, 173n, 225, 234–35, 242, 347–48 reversible computers, 143n revolutions, 199, 291, 331 rhythm, 159–62 Rich Dad, Poor Dad (Kiyosaki), 46 risk, 54, 55, 57, 59–63, 71–72, 85, 117, 118–19, 120, 156, 170–71, 179, 183–84, 188, 242, 277–81, 284, 337, 350 externalization of, 59n, 117, 277–81 risk aversion, 188 risk pools, 277–81, 284 risk radiation, 61–63, 118–19, 120, 156, 183–84 robo call centers, 177n robotic cars, 90–92 robotics, robots, 11, 12, 17, 23, 42, 55, 85–86, 90–92, 97–100, 111, 129, 135–36, 155, 157, 162, 260, 261, 269, 296n, 342, 359–60 Roman Empire, 24–25 root nodes, 241 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 129 Rousseau humor, 126, 129, 130–31 routers, 171–72 royalties, 47, 240, 254, 263–64, 323, 338 Rubin, Edgar, 121 rupture, 66–67 salaries, 10, 46–47, 50–54, 152, 178, 270–71, 287–88, 291–94, 338–39, 365 sampling, 71–72, 191, 221, 224–26, 259 San Francisco, University of, 190 satellites, 110 savings, 49, 72–74 scalable solutions, 47 scams, 119–21, 186, 275n, 287–88, 299–300 scanned books, 192, 193 SceneTap, 108n Schmidt, Eric, 305n, 352 Schwartz, Peter, 214 science fiction, 18, 126–27, 136, 137–38, 139, 193, 230n, 309, 356n search engines, 51, 60, 70, 81, 120, 191, 267, 289, 293 Second Life, 270, 343 Secret, The (Byrne), 216 securitization, 76–78, 99, 289n security, 14–15, 175, 239–40, 305–8, 345 self-actualization, 211–17 self-driving vehicles, 90–92, 98, 311, 343, 367 servants, 22 servers, 12n, 15, 31, 53–57, 71–72, 95–96, 143–44, 171, 180, 183, 206, 245, 358 see also Siren Servers “Sexy Sadie,” 213 Shakur, Tupac, 329 Shelley, Mary, 327 Short History of Progress, A (Wright), 132 “shrinking markets,” 66–67 shuttles, 22, 23n, 24 signal-processing algorithms, 76–78, 148 silicon chips, 10, 86–87 Silicon Valley, 12, 13, 14, 21, 34n, 56, 59, 60, 66–67, 70, 71, 75–76, 80, 93, 96–97, 100, 102, 108n, 125n, 132, 136, 154, 157, 162, 170, 179–89, 192, 193, 200, 207, 210, 211–18, 228, 230, 233, 258, 275n, 294, 299–300, 325–31, 345, 349, 352, 354–58 singularity, 22–25, 125, 215, 217, 327–28, 366, 367 Singularity University, 193, 325, 327–28 Sirenic Age, 66n, 354 Siren Servers, 53–57, 59, 61–64, 65, 66n, 69–78, 82, 91–99, 114–19, 143–48, 154–56, 166–89, 191, 200, 201, 203, 210n, 216, 235, 246–50, 258, 259, 269, 271, 272, 280, 285, 289, 293–94, 298, 301, 302–3, 307–10, 314–23, 326, 336–51, 354, 365, 366 Siri, 95 skilled labor, 99–100 Skout, 280n Skype, 95, 129 slavery, 22, 23, 33n Sleeper, 130 small businesses, 173 smartphones, 34n, 39, 162, 172, 192, 269n, 273 Smith, Adam, 121, 126 Smolin, Lee, 148n social contract, 20, 49, 247, 284, 288, 335, 336 social engineering, 112–13, 190–91 socialism, 14, 128, 254, 257, 341n social mobility, 66, 97, 292–94 social networks, 18, 51, 56, 60, 70, 81, 89, 107–9, 113, 114, 129, 167–68, 172–73, 179, 180, 190, 199, 200–201, 202, 204, 227, 241, 242–43, 259, 267, 269n, 274–75, 280n, 286, 307–8, 317, 336, 337, 343, 349, 358, 365–66 see also Facebook social safety nets, 10, 44, 54, 202, 251, 293 Social Security, 251, 345 software, 7, 9, 11, 14, 17, 68, 86, 99, 100–101, 128, 129, 147, 154, 155, 165, 172–73, 177–78, 182, 192, 234, 236, 241–42, 258, 262, 273–74, 283, 331, 347, 357 software-mediated technology, 7, 11, 14, 86, 100–101, 165, 234, 236, 258, 347 South Korea, 133 Soviet Union, 70 “space elevator pitch,” 233, 342, 361 space travel, 233, 266 Spain, 159–60 spam, 178, 275n spending levels, 287–88 spirituality, 126, 211–17, 325–31, 364 spreadsheet programs, 230 “spy data tax,” 234–35 Square, 185 Stalin, Joseph, 125n Stanford Research Institute (SRI), 215 Stanford University, 60, 75, 90, 95, 97, 101, 102, 103, 162, 325 Starr, Ringo, 256 Star Trek, 138, 139, 230n startup companies, 39, 60, 69, 93–94, 108n, 124n, 136, 179–89, 265, 274n, 279–80, 309–10, 326, 341, 343–45, 348, 352, 355 starvation, 123 Star Wars, 137 star (winner-take-all) system, 38–43, 50, 54–55, 204, 243, 256–57, 263, 329–30 statistics, 11, 20, 71–72, 75–78, 90–91, 93, 110n, 114–15, 186, 192 “stickiness,” 170, 171 stimulus, economic, 151–52 stoplights, 90 Strangelove humor, 127 student debt, 92, 95 “Study 27,” 160 “Study 36,” 160 Sumer, 29 supergoop, 85–89 supernatural phenomena, 55, 124–25, 127, 132, 192, 194–95, 300 supply chain, 70–72, 174, 187 Supreme Court, U.S., 104–5 surgery, 11–13, 17, 18, 98, 157–58, 363 surveillance, 1–2, 11, 14, 50–51, 64, 71–72, 99, 108–9, 114–15, 120–21, 152, 177n, 199–200, 201, 206–7, 234–35, 246, 272, 291, 305, 309–11, 315, 316, 317, 319–24 Surviving Progress, 132 sustainable economies, 235–37, 285–87 Sutherland, Ivan, 221 swarms, 99, 109 synthesizers, 160 synthetic biology, 162 tablets, 85, 86, 87, 88, 113, 162, 229 Tahrir Square, 95 Tamagotchis, 98 target ads, 170 taxation, 44, 45, 49, 52, 60, 74–75, 77, 82, 149, 149, 150, 151, 202, 210, 234–35, 263, 273, 289–90 taxis, 44, 91–92, 239, 240, 266–67, 269, 273, 311 Teamsters, 91 TechCrunch, 189 tech fixes, 295–96 technical schools, 96–97 technologists (“techies”), 9–10, 15–16, 45, 47–48, 66–67, 88, 122, 124, 131–32, 134, 139–40, 157–62, 165–66, 178, 193–94, 295–98, 307, 309, 325–31, 341, 342, 356n technology: author’s experience in, 47–48, 62n, 69–72, 93–94, 114, 130, 131–32, 153, 158–62, 178, 206–7, 228, 265, 266–67, 309–10, 325, 328, 343, 352–53, 362n, 364, 365n, 366 bio-, 11–13, 17, 18, 109–10, 162, 330–31 chaos and, 165–66, 273n, 331 collusion in, 65–66, 72, 169–74, 255, 350–51 complexity of, 53–54 costs of, 8, 18, 72–74, 87n, 136–37, 170–71, 176–77, 184–85 creepiness of, 305–24 cultural impact of, 8–9, 21, 23–25, 53, 130, 135–40 development and emergence of, 7–18, 21, 53–54, 60–61, 66–67, 85–86, 87, 97–98, 129–38, 157–58, 182, 188–90, 193–96, 217 digital, 2–3, 7–8, 15–16, 18, 31, 40, 43, 50–51, 132, 208 economic impact of, 1–3, 15–18, 29–30, 37, 40, 53–54, 60–66, 71–74, 79–110, 124, 134–37, 161, 162, 169–77, 181–82, 183, 184–85, 218, 254, 277–78, 298, 335–39, 341–51, 357–58 educational, 92–97 efficiency of, 90, 118, 191 employment in, 56–57, 60, 71–74, 79, 123, 135, 178 engineering for, 113–14, 123–24, 192, 194, 217, 218, 326 essential vs. worthless, 11–12 failure of, 188–89 fear of (technophobia), 129–32, 134–38 freedom as issue in, 32–33, 90–92, 277–78, 336 government influence in, 158, 199, 205–6, 234–35, 240, 246, 248–51, 307, 317, 341, 345–46, 350–51 human agency and, 8–21, 50–52, 85, 88, 91, 124–40, 144, 165–66, 175–78, 191–92, 193, 217, 253–64, 274–75, 283–85, 305–6, 328, 341–51, 358–60, 361, 362, 365–67 ideas for, 123, 124, 158, 188–89, 225, 245–46, 286–87, 299, 358–60 industrial, 49, 83, 85–89, 123, 132, 154, 343 information, 7, 32–35, 49, 66n, 71–72, 109, 110, 116, 120, 125n, 126, 135, 136, 254, 312–16, 317 investment in, 66, 181, 183, 184, 218, 277–78, 298, 348 limitations of, 157–62, 196, 222 monopolies for, 60, 65–66, 169–74, 181–82, 187–88, 190, 202, 326, 350 morality and, 50–51, 72, 73–74, 188, 194–95, 262, 335–36 motivation and, 7–18, 85–86, 97–98, 216 nano-, 11, 12, 17, 162 new vs. old, 20–21 obsolescence of, 89, 97 political impact of, 13–18, 22–25, 85, 122, 124–26, 128, 134–37, 199–234, 295–96, 342 progress in, 9–18, 20, 21, 37, 43, 48, 57, 88, 98, 123, 124–40, 130–37, 256–57, 267, 325–31, 341–42 resources for, 55–56, 157–58 rupture as concept in, 66–67 scams in, 119–21, 186, 275n, 287–88, 299–300 singularity of, 22–25, 125, 215, 217, 327–28, 366, 367 social impact of, 9–21, 124–40, 167n, 187, 280–81, 310–11 software-mediated, 7, 11, 14, 86, 100–101, 165, 234, 236, 258, 347 startup companies in, 39, 60, 69, 93–94, 108n, 124n, 136, 179–89, 265, 274n, 279–80, 309–10, 326, 341, 343–45, 348, 352, 355 utopian, 13–18, 21, 31, 37–38, 45–46, 96, 128, 130, 167, 205, 207, 265, 267, 270, 283, 290, 291, 308–9, 316 see also specific technologies technophobia, 129–32, 134–38 television, 86, 185–86, 191, 216, 267 temperature, 56, 145 Ten Commandments, 300n Terminator, The, 137 terrorism, 133, 200 Tesla, Nikola, 327 Texas, 203 text, 162, 352–60 textile industry, 22, 23n, 24, 135 theocracy, 194–95 Theocracy humor, 124–25 thermodynamics, 88, 143n Thiel, Peter, 60, 93, 326 thought experiments, 55, 139 thought schemas, 13 3D printers, 7, 85–89, 90, 99, 154, 162, 212, 269, 310–11, 316, 331, 347, 348, 349 Thrun, Sebastian, 94 Tibet, 214 Time Machine, The (Wells), 127, 137, 261, 331 topology, network, 241–43, 246 touchscreens, 86 tourism, 79 Toyota Prius, 302 tracking services, 109, 120–21, 122 trade, 29 traffic, 90–92, 314 “tragedy of the commons,” 66n Transformers, 98 translation services, 19–20, 182, 191, 195, 261, 262, 284, 338 transparency, 63–66, 74–78, 118, 176, 190–91, 205–6, 278, 291, 306–9, 316, 336 transportation, 79–80, 87, 90–92, 123, 258 travel agents, 64 Travelocity, 65 travel sites, 63, 64, 65, 181, 279–80 tree-shaped networks, 241–42, 243, 246 tribal dramas, 126 trickle-down effect, 148–49, 204 triumphalism, 128, 157–62 tropes (humors), 124–40, 157, 170, 230 trust, 32–34, 35, 42, 51–52 Turing, Alan, 127–28, 134 Turing’s humor, 127–28, 191–94 Turing Test, 330 Twitter, 128, 173n, 180, 182, 188, 199, 200n, 201, 204, 245, 258, 259, 349, 365n 2001: A Space Odyssey, 137 two-way links, 1–2, 227, 245, 289 underemployment, 257–58 unemployment, 7–8, 22, 79, 85–106, 117, 151–52, 234, 257–58, 321–22, 331, 343 “unintentional manipulation,” 144 United States, 25, 45, 54, 79–80, 86, 138, 199–204 universities, 92–97 upper class, 45, 48 used car market, 118–19 user interface, 362–63, 364 utopianism, 13–18, 21, 30, 31, 37–38, 45–46, 96, 128, 130, 167, 205, 207, 265, 267, 270, 283, 290, 291, 308–9, 316 value, economic, 21, 33–35, 52, 61, 64–67, 73n, 108, 283–90, 299–300, 321–22, 364 value, information, 1–3, 15–16, 20, 210, 235–43, 257–58, 259, 261–63, 271–75, 321–24, 358–60 Values, Attitudes, and Lifestyles (VALS), 215 variables, 149–50 vendors, 71–74 venture capital, 66, 181, 218, 277–78, 298, 348 videos, 60, 100, 162, 185–86, 204, 223, 225, 226, 239, 240, 242, 245, 277, 287, 329, 335–36, 349, 354, 356 Vietnam War, 353n vinyl records, 89 viral videos, 185–86 Virtual Reality (VR), 12, 47–48, 127, 129, 132, 158, 162, 214, 283–85, 312–13, 314, 315, 325, 343, 356, 362n viruses, 132–33 visibility, 184, 185–86, 234, 355 visual cognition, 111–12 VitaBop, 100–106, 284n vitamins, 100–106 Voice, The, 185–86 “voodoo economics,” 149 voting, 122, 202–4, 249 Wachowski, Lana, 165 Wall Street, 49, 70, 76–77, 181, 184, 234, 317, 331, 350 Wal-Mart, 69, 70–74, 89, 174, 187, 201 Warhol, Andy, 108 War of the Worlds, The (Wells), 137 water supplies, 17, 18 Watts, Alan, 211–12 Wave, 189 wealth: aggregate or concentration of, 9, 42–43, 53, 60, 61, 74–75, 96, 97, 108, 115, 148, 157–58, 166, 175, 201, 202, 208, 234, 278–79, 298, 305, 335, 355, 360 creation of, 32, 33–34, 46–47, 50–51, 57, 62–63, 79, 92, 96, 120, 148–49, 210, 241–43, 270–75, 291–94, 338–39, 349 inequalities and redistribution of, 20, 37–45, 65–66, 92, 97, 144, 254, 256–57, 274–75, 286–87, 290–94, 298, 299–300 see also income levels weather forecasting, 110, 120, 150 weaving, 22, 23n, 24 webcams, 99, 245 websites, 80, 170, 200, 201, 343 Wells, H.


pages: 482 words: 121,173

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age by Brad Smith, Carol Ann Browne

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, air gap, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Celtic Tiger, Charlie Hebdo massacre, chief data officer, cloud computing, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, immigration reform, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, national security letter, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Given the sensitive nature of the program this is the earliest opportunity we have had to contact you for comment.” He wanted a response by six p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, or three p.m. for Seattle. The Guardian had obtained classified intelligence documents that detailed how nine US technology companies—Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple—purportedly had signed up for a voluntary program, called PRISM, granting the NSA direct access to email, chat, video, photos, social networking details, and other data. Dominic’s plans for lunch—and for most of the coming days—were abandoned. He did an about-face and bolted up the stairs, two at a time, back to the fifth floor.

“This is the house of freedom and it should constantly remind us how subtle and sensitive the barrier is between freedom and its opposite, totalitarianism.”3 Each year, the Vabamu Museum takes more than fifty thousand visitors from around the world on Estonia’s journey through occupation and freedom—and, as it turns out, how technology can become a weapon. The internet helped push Estonia out of the shadows of Communism, transforming what would become the home of Skype into a vibrant self-proclaimed “e-democracy.” But in 2007, Estonia’s former occupier struck the country’s digital underbelly, revealing democracy’s inherent fragility and how the very technology that helped define a nation’s freedom also made it more vulnerable. That spring, Estonia suffered the first cyber-based nation-state attack on another country, a digital siege called a denial-of-service attack that froze much of the country’s internet, including sites that powered Estonia’s government services and economy.

., 56, 84, 85, 98, 174, 176 Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, 323n9 elections and, 83 Intelligence Committee, 95 Judiciary Committee, 26 September 11 terrorist attacks, 8–9, 71, 72 Shadow Brokers, 63–64 Shaw, Frank, 215, 218, 306 Sheinwald, Nigel, 110 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 152 Shields, Mike, 279–80 Shum, Harry, 207–8, 252 Siebel, Edwin, 309n2 Siemens AG, 111, 122, 294 singularity (AI superintelligence), 197, 199, 328n12 Skillful initiative, 325n18 Skype, 2 Slate, 101, 199 smartphones, cell phones, 34–35, 94, 158, 159, 200, 241, 270 Snapp, Mary, 180 Snowden, Edward, 4–5, 8, 9, 13–14, 17–19, 25, 41, 263 social media, 89–107, 212 disinformation campaigns and, 90, 94–98, 102–4 illegal content on, 99, 103 NewsGuard and, 104 privacy and, 145 regulation of, 98, 100–104, 144 Russia and, 95–98, 103 terrorists and, 99, 100, 125–26 violent material on, 102 Socolow, Michael, 318nn27–28 Socrates, 259 software: creative aspects of software development, 140–41 Hippocratic oath for coders, 207–8 open-source, 264, 276–78, 283 resource allocations and trade-offs in development, 15 role of software architects for GDPR, 140–41 Software Freedom Law Center, 314n8 Sony Pictures, 63 Sotomayor, Sonia, 33–34 South Korea, 81, 124, 316n2 Soviet Union, 40, 90, 91 in Cold War, 12, 40, 107, 116–18 KGB in, 92 Spain, 63 Spalter, Jonathan, 323n9 spear-phishing, 79, 83 speech recognition, 194–95, 197, 201 Spielberg, Steven, 211–12 Stahlkopf, Dev, 125, 293 Stamos, Alex, 97 Standard Oil, 148, 310n6 Stasi (State Security Service), 39–41, 44 Stern School of Business, 333n16 Stored Communications Act, 23 Strontium (Fancy Bear; APT28), 78–81, 84–85 student activism, 217–18 Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), 323n9 Supreme Court, 7, 33–35, 52–56, 58, 228, 299, 311n15, 314n10 Surace-Smith, Kathy, 50, 308 surveillance, 1–19, 45, 131, 289–90, 292, 300 commercial, 145; see also privacy facial recognition and, 227–28 FISC and, 12 Fourth Amendment and, 34 GPS, 33–34, 228 PRISM and, 1–4, 8, 9, 310–11n4 Reform Government Surveillance coalition, 16–17 see also privacy Swift, Taylor, 256 Switchboard data set, 197 Symantec, 120 T Tallinn, Estonia, 89–90, 92 Tallinn Manual 2.0, 128, 320n19 taxes, 146, 182–83, 290 Tay, 255–56 Taylor, Anne, 287–88, 334–35n1 TechFest, 170–71 tech intensity, 289 technology(ies), 129–30, 184, 221, 247 cultural values and, 244–45 Einstein on, 129, 209–10, 289 government and, 109–30 international collaboration on, 300 managing, 287–304 market barriers to, 257 network effects and, 270 regulation of, see regulation time needed for adoption of, 240–41 technology companies: banks compared with, 11 blitzscaling and, 292 cultural change and, 292 cybersecurity and, 294–95 employees’ role at, 217 entrepreneurs in, 335n9 government and, 11, 19, 23, 76, 85–86 interns and young employees at, 218 leaders in, 293, 295 as nation, 119 principles in, 293–94 PRISM and, 1–4, 8, 9 regulation of, 11 talent gap and, 169–90; see also education; immigration White House meetings with leaders of, 16–19, 111–12 women and racial minorities at, 184–85 Technology Education and Literacy in Schools (TEALS), 178–79 Techonomy, 192 techplomacy, 127 TechSpark, 233, 331n8 telegraph, 192 telephones, 161, 192, 289, 299 cell, 34–35, 94, 158, 159, 200, 241, 270 landline, 94, 159 television, 159, 299 white spaces, 159–60, 162, 163, 167 Tencent, 256 Terminator movie franchise, 202 terrorism, 9, 12, 25, 26, 99, 100, 102, 203, 222 Christchurch mosque shootings, 99–100, 102, 125–26 facial recognition and, 330n21 in Paris, 26–28 Pearl kidnapping, 21–22 September 11 attacks, 8–9, 71, 72 social media and, 99, 100, 125–26 Thompson, John, 221, 252 Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station, 143–44, 146 Tiku, Nitasha, 225 TitleTownTech, 331n8 Tomahawk missiles, 66–67 Toronto, 316n2 Total, 122 trademark law, 80 transparency, 30, 32, 35 artificial intelligence and, 200–201, 207 transportation, 185–86 Trudeau, Justin, 142–43 Trump, Donald, 58, 73–75, 82, 83, 115, 144, 157, 172–74, 180, 214, 263, 279–82, 284 meeting at Trump Tower with tech executives, 172–73, 176 technology strategy for 2016 presidential campaign, 279–82 Trump, Ivanka, 180 Trunnell, Matthew, 272–73, 275, 276, 278, 282, 284–85 Turing, Alan, 328n12 Twitter, 90, 95, 104, 125 Christchurch mosque terrorist shootings and, 99, 126 2001: A Space Odyssey, 328n12 U Uganda Wildlife Authority, 288 UHF, 159 Ukraine, 69–72, 90, 317n2 unemployment, 152, 156 unions, 216 United Kingdom, 14, 42, 53, 69, 75, 95, 103, 265, 284 Brexit and, 131–32, 139, 238 cyberattack in, 63 war between France and, 105 in War of 1812, 46, 313n5 United Nations (UN), 72, 129, 160 United States Trade Representative, 257 University of Washington, 178, 182, 208, 273, 286, 297, 325n11 V Vabamu Museum of Occupations and Freedom, 90–92 Vail, Theodore, 161 Vatican, 208–10 Verizon, 2–3 VHF, 159 vision, computer, 194–95, 197, 201 Voice of America, 107 voting, see elections W Walker, Kent, 12–13 Wall Street Journal, 21, 104 Wang, Kevin, 178 WannaCry, 63–69, 71–74, 122, 294, 300, 301 war, 204–5, 302, 329n29 cyberwar, cyberweapons, 69, 118, 130, 205–6, 289 see also military weapons Ward, Patrick, 61–62 WarGames, 116–17 Warner, Mark, 98, 99, 103, 105 War of 1812, 46, 313n5 Warren, Samuel, 330n24 Washington, George, 105, 106, 319n36 Washington Post, 4, 13–15, 298 Washington State Opportunity Scholarship program, 181–82, 325n20 WeChat, 256 Wicker, Roger, 323n9 Wikileaks, 78 Wilkes, John, 5–6, 23 Willard InterContinental Washington, 160–61 Wilson, Woodrow, 100 Windows, xx, 12, 29, 63–65, 203, 212, 253, 270 Wired, 225 wireless technologies, 159, 167, 296 broadband, 151–67, 289, 296, 322n6, 323n9 TV white space, 159–60, 162, 163, 167 Wiretap Act, 47 Word, 50, 264 workforce, see jobs Workforce Education Investment Act, 182–84 World Bank, 325n18 World Economic Forum at Davos, 191–93, 202 World Trade Organization, 257 World War I, 123 World War II, 28, 40, 61, 62, 77, 88, 90, 95, 117, 122, 123, 166, 172, 209, 317n2 writ of habeas corpus, 10 X Xamarin, 277 Xbox, 72, 100, 126, 140, 160 XiaoIce, 255, 256 Xi Jinping, 249–52, 268 Y Yahoo!


pages: 392 words: 124,069

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard

air gap, Anthropocene, biofilm, British Empire, clean water, company town, Easter island, government statistician, Mason jar, New Journalism, Skype, trade route, zero-sum game

“Don’t worry, Suzanne, I’ve got this,” he’d assured me in his British brogue. We’d have to time our Skype meetings according to my stamina. The day they labeled, I felt as if I were climbing a mountain without air, wishing I were in the game but grateful they were carrying on without me there. “We stayed up all night in the greenhouse,” Brian wrote after the trees were harvested, their mycorrhizas counted, tissues ground for carbon-13 analysis. I lay back on the couch with a sigh. A month later, we conferred on Skype, with Amanda’s data tables and figures on the screen. She started by saying, “Hey, you look great.”

“Do you think it’s important that we’re seeing that Mother Trees are also bigger when they’re next to their kin?” Amanda asked. “It makes sense if they’re passing signals back and forth.” Of course it did. Being connected and communicative affects the parents as much as the kids. The next day, I clicked on Skype to join Amanda and Brian looking over the isotope data. Even before their images grew into focus, Brian was excitedly saying, “Look at this!” “The amounts are small,” Amanda said, “but the Mother Trees are sending more carbon to the mycorrhizal fungi of their kin than the others! Kin-recognition molecules seem to have carbon and micronutrients.”


pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

In an attempt to solicit more funds, the agency boasted that some of these “enabling” projects were “at, or near total completion.” That year, 2013, the NSA claimed that it planned to “reach full operating capability for SIGINT access to a major Internet Peer-to-Peer voice and text communications system.” The Snowden leaks did not say which system, but Skype was the obvious suspect. It also claimed to have “complete enabling for the two leading encryption chip makers used in Virtual Private Network and Web encryption devices.” In other words, the NSA was making fools of anyone who believed they could thwart spies using off-the-shelf encryption tools like VPNs—virtual private networks that route a person’s web activities through a protected, encrypted tunnel.

A backdoor for one party, national security officials knew better than anyone, would become a target for all. The idea these companies would leave Americans more vulnerable to cybercriminals and nation-states to satisfy law enforcement’s needs was off the table. Then there were the logistical challenges. Not every tech company was based in the United States. Skype, for example, was originally hosted in Luxembourg. How many backdoors, for how many government agencies, would these tech companies be required to produce? What NSO offered law enforcement was a powerful workaround, a tool to keep from going blind. By hacking the “end points” of the communication—the phones themselves—NSO’s technology gave authorities access to data before and after it was encrypted on their target’s device.

Not long after Caproni testified to Congress, Hulio and Lavie pivoted and began pitching their remote access technology as a surveillance tool. They called the tool Pegasus, and like the mythological winged horse it was named for, it could do the seemingly impossible: capture vast amounts of previously inaccessible data—phone calls, text messages, email, contacts, calendar appointments, GPS location data, Facebook, WhatsApp and Skype conversations—from the air without leaving a trace. Pegasus could even do what NSO called “room tap”: gather sounds and snapshots in and around the room using the phone’s microphone and video camera. It could deny targets access to certain websites and applications, grab screenshots off their phones, and record their every search and browsing activity.


pages: 302 words: 73,581

Platform Scale: How an Emerging Business Model Helps Startups Build Large Empires With Minimum Investment by Sangeet Paul Choudary

3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, fake it until you make it, frictionless, game design, gamification, growth hacking, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, Paul Graham, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, search costs, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social software, software as a service, software is eating the world, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, TaskRabbit, the long tail, the payments system, too big to fail, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Wave and Pay

In terms of the producer-consumer parlance that we used to explain network effects in Section 1, the problem can be reduced to the following pattern: Problem. How do I get producers and consumers, given that Condition 1. I need producers to get consumers, and Condition 2. I need consumers to get producers? If the two roles are not too distinct (e.g. Skype), the pattern may simply be stated as: Problem: How do I get users, given that: Condition 1: Users will not come unless there is value in the platform, and Condition 2: There is no value in the platform without having users on it? The chicken-and-egg problem continues to persist till a certain point at which there is enough overlap between supply and demand to sustainably enable interactions.

Much of 9GAG’s viral growth also stems from consumers sharing creations on the platform, rather than the producers alone sharing those creations. Platforms that require users to explicitly connect with each other, before they experience network effects, grow virally through invites. Communication networks, like Skype and Facebook, require users to explicitly connect with others. These platforms rely on local network effects, where users benefit only from having more friends within their immediate network. In contrast, every user on YouTube or Airbnb benefits when there are a greater number of users using the overall network.


pages: 274 words: 73,344

Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World by Nataly Kelly, Jost Zetzsche

airport security, Berlin Wall, Celtic Tiger, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Eyjafjallajökull, glass ceiling, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the market place

Indeed, the Internet has been quietly breathing new life into the Irish language. Google Translate is now available in Irish, and there is an Irish user interface for Facebook. Many Irish language lessons are available on the Internet, and there are even apps for iPhones and iPads. Who would have thought that you could do a video chat via a Skype user interface in a language dating back to the third and fourth century? Well, you can with Irish. But perhaps the most convincing reason of all to care about the future of languages like Irish is best expressed in a saying from the language itself, “Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam,” which translates into English as, “A country without a language is a country without a soul.”

Terms for “to tweet” are now quite common in every market where Twitter has seen success, though some languages have employed the tried-and-true strategy of simply turning the product name into a verb (German users prefer to twittern rather than to tweeten, just as English users like to google or to skype), and Turkish Twitter users creatively prefer to tweetle. As if these new terms weren’t enough, many languages have also adopted new terms for “retweet,” which is when one person sends the same message another user sent previously via Twitter. Other languages have elected to keep it simple, using terms that just mean “resend” or “send again.”


pages: 293 words: 78,439

Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future by Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apollo 13, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Internet of things, invention of hypertext, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, long term incentive plan, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, pez dispenser, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, the long tail, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transfer pricing, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Like all mobile providers, Singtel built and operated communications networks that historically were used by consumers to make voice calls. At first, the shift from voice calls to messages and other data services was a boon for the industry. However, it created opportunities for new competitors like Skype, WhatsApp, Facebook, and others to ride over the top of the communications networks and provide competing services. The industry had nightmares of becoming a so-called dumb pipe, bearing all the costs of building expansive, expensive networks but seeing the returns go to these upstarts. Singtel has a deep finance function, plans rigorously and thoroughly, and regularly wins awards for having the best corporate governance in Asia.

., 62 Singapore Institute of Management, 110–113 Singapore Post (SingPost), 50–53 acquisitions by, 67 focus at, 117 Singapore Prison Service, 178–179 Singlish, 145 SingPost. See Singapore Post (SingPost) Singtel, 24, 51, 53, 135–137, 140, 185 curiosity at, 142–150 exposing leaders to new thinking at, 145–147 reinforcing curiosity at, 147–150 Singtel Learning Fiesta, 146 Siri, 67 Skype, 136 Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), 58, 59 space race, 115–116, 132 stakeholders, 11, 167–168 communicating to, 195–196 Starbucks, 57, 67 The Startup Owner’s Manual (Blank and Dorf), 153 startups disruption and, 58–59 established businesses versus, 72–73 Stone, Biz, 49, 138 strategic opportunity areas, 123–127, 216 strategy fitness landscape and, 5–8 future-back approach to, 129–133 at Manila Water, 117–128 predictability and, 137–139 story at the center of, 171–173 transformations A and B and, 16–20 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn), 68 Systrom, Kevin, 2 talent bringing in special-purpose, 44 capability development via external hires, 66–69 communicating to, 195–196 Tan, Wilson, 51 Taobao, 201–202 Tata Sons, 149 Tay Soo Meng, 135 TechCrunch, 206 Temasek, 136 template, goals and boundaries, 123, 215 Tencent, 106, 202 Tesla, 178 Theranos, 61 3Com, 13 Thrun, Sebastian, 205 Tiddler (Donaldson and Scheffler), 171 Time Warner, 96 transfer pricing, 85 transformation A, 27–45 at Adobe, 31–32, 33 aggressive implementation of, 43–45 balancing with transformation B, 173–175 business model blueprint, 214 business model innovation in, 40–42 crises of conflict in, 163–168 at Deseret Media, 29–31 determining job to be done after, 36–39 distinguishing from other strategic choices, 16–20 driving, 36–45 in dual transformation equation, 12 interface management and, 75, 80–87 leaders of the critical role of, 187 metrics in, 42–43 at Netflix, 32–36 systems for, 80–82 trigger point for, 36–37 at Xerox, 14 transformation B, 47–70 “aliens” and “diplomats” in, 68–69 at Amazon, 53–55 balancing with transformation A, 173–175 business model iterative development in, 59, 63–66 capability development in, 66–69 consumption patterns transformation in, 61–62 crises of commitment in, 161–163 crises of conflict in, 163–168 distinguishing from other strategic choices, 16–20 in dual transformation equation, 12 in higher education, 55–58 identifying constrained markets in, 59–63 interface management and, 75, 80–87 keys to success in, 58–69 at Netflix, 69–70 at SingPost, 50–53 systems for, 80–82 at Xerox, 14 transformation blurbs, 129 transformation maps, 211–212 transparency, embracing, 153–154 TripAdvisor, 50 Trustwave, 188 TurboTax, 132 Turner Broadcasting System, 2, 95–99 Turner Classic Movie, 99 Turner Entertainment Networks (TEN), 95–99 decision making at, 102, 109 early warning signs at, 108 focus at, 117 Tushman, Michael, 53, 54 TVinContext, 99 Twitter, 49, 138 Tyson, Mike, 64 Uber, 205 UK-92480, 138–139 Ulmer, Dave, 71–72 Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, 35 universal resource locators (URLs), 3 value, business model innovation and, 40 Vasquez, Robbie, 127 venture capitalists, 103–104, 112, 140–141 corporate, 143–144 Verizon, 49 Viagra, 138–139 Viki, 143 von Braun, Wernher, 116 vPost, 52 Walgreen, Charles R., Sr., 60 Walgreens, 60–61 Wanamaker, John, 67 warning signs, 102–113 assessment table, 213 catalysts, 104–105 circumstances, 103–104 how to spot, 107–110 impact, 106–107 underestimation of, 120 Wasson, Gregory, 60–61 Watson supercomputer, 70, 204 WebMD, 100 WeChat, 106 Welch, Jack, 177 WhatsApp, 48, 136 white space, 63, 66 will.i.am, 151 Williams, Ev, 49, 138 Wilson, Joseph C., 13 World Media Enterprises, 156 Wright brothers, 64–65 Xerox, 13–16 acquisitions and partnerships at, 67 arbitration at, 86 business model innovation at, 42, 63–64 capabilities link at, 14–15 focus at, 117 postdisruption job to be done at, 39 transformation journey at, 182 Xerox Global Services (XGS), 14, 63–64, 86 Yahoo, 49 Y Combinator, 72 Yelp, 50 Young Broadcasting, 156 YouTube, 97, 105, 108 Zillow, 50 Zipcar, 205 Zuckerberg, Mark, 48, 97 Acknowledgements From the team The central idea in Dual Transformation—that leaders need to simultaneously reposition today’s business and create tomorrow’s—has been core to each of our professional careers since 2000.


pages: 258 words: 74,942

Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business by Paul Jarvis

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, big-box store, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, call centre, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital nomad, drop ship, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, follow your passion, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, growth hacking, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, index fund, job automation, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, passive investing, Paul Graham, pets.com, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, software as a service, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, uber lyft, web application, William MacAskill, Y Combinator, Y2K

I would add small bits of helpful advice without offering my own services or charging them. More important, I wouldn’t be pushy about it—I’d just look for folks who have questions I have answers to. This free help I offer wouldn’t be a month of work or a redesign of their whole website, but rather emails and chats, either in person or by phone or Skype. Basically, I would offer a free consult or a project roadmapping session. In this way, I’d learn the key factors involved when people are thinking about hiring a web designer and gain insight into why and how they end up choosing to hire one. Just like Alex Franzen in Chapter 4, I’d start by finding a single person to offer my knowledge to.

Even when I was charging good money for consulting, I’d still be at the top of each client’s list to hire. Being helpful proved to be a great lead-generation funnel. My new business would be based on helping others first, with a contract for web design or design consulting coming later. I’d do it this way not because I frown on capitalism and want to sit around a Skype video-call singing “Kumbaya,” but because I know this is how you build a loyal client base and following. Many people would view this approach as advice for building a charity or aiming a business only at your close friends—it couldn’t possibly be applied to a business that makes enough money to put clothes on the children, keep food on the table, and pay the rent.


pages: 232 words: 78,701

I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual by Luvvie Ajayi

affirmative action, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, clean water, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, fake news, feminist movement, gentrification, glass ceiling, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, Skype, Snapchat, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, upwardly mobile

We’ve had a bad rap sheet since the beginning of time: the first sin was committed by woman (Eve), and she convinced man (Adam) to disobey God, so the things that women uniquely suffer from are said to be direct punishment for that. We were condemned to pain in childbirth, Aunt Flo, and to be ruled by men. It’s not our fault that Adam didn’t know how to make decisions for himself. In fact, if we were able to trick Adam into eating the forbidden fruit, why should he be trusted to lead us? NAWL. He couldn’t lead a Skype meeting. Chauvinism in biblical texts has justified laws that have led to the persistence of subservience of women to men. The Bible actually sanctions women being property, and too many societal norms have been informed and justified by this view. A wife is told to submit to her husband because he’s the head of the house, but submission is not blind obedience.

Everyone who is connected to you, on your friends list, or as your fan is not necessarily a genuine cheerleader. So pull back a bit. We are opening up our private lives for public consumption, and most of us aren’t even getting paid for it. The Internet cannot replace real life friends who we can call, see (or Skype), and touch. We can start friendships online, but they also need to be accessible if any of our social platforms are shut down. We need to have the phone numbers of those we have learned to love through social media, because if our relationship might end due to a suspended account, how tangible is it?


pages: 326 words: 74,433

Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup by Brad Feld, David Cohen

An Inconvenient Truth, augmented reality, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, fail fast, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, lolcat, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business

The Cheezburger Network serves over 10 million page views every day. Luckily for me, I have no idea how many servers it takes to do that. The reason is because we use WordPress (free!) to host our content. We also use YouTube (free!) to host our videos. We share information in the company using Google Apps (free!) and every day I jump on Skype to talk (free!) and videoconference (free!) with people around the world. We use dozens of open source applications (free!) to run our business. Our philosophy is to outsource everything that we're not great at to someone who is a proven and scalable leader, preferably without paying them. Because we have this philosophy, our developers get to spend 90 percent of their time doing something valuable instead of chasing down complexity.

You may have to give up a few features here and there, but you'll be more nimble as a company. By using what's free and avoiding complexity, you'll find that you can do more faster. Every great startup entrepreneur uses the tools Ben mentions and more. In addition to WordPress, YouTube, Google Apps, and Skype, the TechStars companies told us that they routinely use the following free or very inexpensive products: Balsamiq for screen prototyping DimDim for web meetings DropBox for file storage and sharing Evernote for organizing tidbits of information Gist for keeping on top of your contacts GitHub for source code sharing Jing for screencasting MogoTest (TechStars 2009) for making sure your applications look great on every browser Pivotal Tracker for issue tracking SendGrid (TechStars 2009) for e-mail delivery SnapABug (TechStars 2009) for chatting with customers who visit your web site Twilio for audio conferencing and phone and SMS services Vanilla (TechStars 2009) for hosting a great forum for your community Be Tiny Until You Shouldn't Be Jeffrey Powers Jeffrey is a co-founder of Occipital, which uses state of the art computer vision in mobile applications for faster information capture and retrieval.


pages: 245 words: 72,391

Alan Partridge: Nomad: Nomad by Alan Partridge

Apollo 11, cuban missile crisis, glass ceiling, Neil Armstrong, Neil Kinnock, rolodex, Skype, TED Talk, University of East Anglia

We live in a post-Yewtree age. Now, this is an uncomfortable thing to discuss, but I run towards discomfort like a man who has strapped truth explosives to his body and made his peace with God. And I’m saying that broadcasters are now deeply, deeply wary of any interaction with children. Some of our Sunday Skype Clubs116 have been given over to discussing this very issue. We hurl in scenarios and the group debates whether they should be red-flagged. Is it OK to hug a crying child? All right, what if the child is fifteen and a girl? Or if this takes place in your dressing room and you’ve taken wine? Or if the child’s parents are present but temporarily distracted?

But other than Richard Keys, there are very few men out there who have so much hair on their shoulders that it needs to be shampooed. (Richard even blow-dries his.) Around a man’s privates, however, it’s a very different issue. I’m no branding expert but surely a better name would have been Head & Groins? 116 The Sunday Skype Club is a weekly video-call social – usually taking place when Sunday Politics comes on and Eamonn (Holmes) has finished his breakfast – in which me, Eamonn (Holmes), John Stapleton (when allowed), Pete Sissons and a Hairy Biker meet up to shoot the breeze, tackle the issues of the day and slag off other broadcasters.


pages: 231 words: 75,147

438 Days: An Extraordinary True Story of Survival at Sea by Jonathan Franklin

Air France Flight 447, fixed-gear, off-the-grid, Skype, the long tail

The thought of a reunion with his grown daughter flooded him with fears. What if she refused to forgive him? What would be her first reaction to her estranged, yet world-famous, father? Would she see a dad or a deadbeat? “I couldn’t really talk, it was too much,” said Alvarenga once his family popped up on Skype. “My mom, my daughter, my dad was there. It was hard to believe it was true.” Fatima stared back, also in disbelief. This was her father? “He was shaven and he said hello and then he started crying,” Fatima remembers. “I could not believe it, there he was. My dream comes true.” But the connection was more of a group cry than conversation.

I want to thank my seven daughters, who put up with Dad being away for weeks on end, always supporting me and brainstorming about what makes a great book. Before too long, I will be editing your manuscripts. I missed you dearly, Francisca, Susan, Maciel, Kim, Amy, Zoe and last but not least my little Akira. Finally to my loving partner, Toty, who never tired of dropping me off at the airport, suffering through impossibly bad Skype connections and keeping our family emotionally united. Special kudos to my head of research, Bud Theisen, without whom this book would never have been so complete. From tracking down turtle experts to finding world-class meteorologists, Bud was always one step ahead. His role in crafting this story was fundamental and much appreciated.


pages: 259 words: 73,193

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris

4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Burning Man, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Google Glasses, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, moral panic, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, pre–internet, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Steve Jobs, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, traumatic brain injury, Turing test

In Forster’s vision of the future, humans live below the surface of the earth, happily isolated in hexagonal rooms like bees in a massive hive. They each know thousands of people but are disgusted by the thought of physical interaction (shades of social media). People communicate through “plates” (they Skype, essentially), and all human connection is conducted through the technological grace of what’s simply called the Machine, a massive networked piece of technology that supplies each person with pacifying entertainment and engaging electronic connections with other people. The Machine does not transmit “nuances of expression,” but gives “a general ideal of people” that’s “good enough for all practical purposes.”

(Capek), 56–57 Russell, Bertrand, 195 Sabinus, Calvisius, 143–45 Sas, Corina, 156 Science, 142 Scoville, William Beecher, 138 search engines, 142–43, 146 Second Life, 104 Seed, 105 Seife, Charles, 145, 146 Sejong, 12n self-documentation, 68–71 selfies, 68 Seneca, 118, 143–44, 203–4 senses, 161, 179, 205 synesthesia and, 62–63 Sergeant Star, 59–60 Sesame Street, 1–2, 3 sex, 104, 164–77 pornography, 83, 88, 168, 169, 174 Shallows, The (Carr), 38, 86 Shaw, George Bernard, 57 Shelley, Mary, 56 Skinner, B. F., 114 Skype, 106 Sloth Club, 204 Slowness (Kundera), 184 Small, Gary, 10–11, 37–38 smartphones, see phones Smith, Gordon, 186 “smupid” thinking, 185–86 Snapchat, 168 social media, 19, 48, 55, 106, 150–51, 175 Socrates, 32–33, 40 solitude, 8, 14, 39, 46, 48, 188, 193, 195, 197, 199 Songza, 90–91, 125 Space Weather, 107 Squarciafico, Hieronimo, 33, 35 Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE), 94 Stanford University, 94–97 Statistics Canada, 174 sticklebacks, 124 Stone, Linda, 10, 169 Storr, Anthony, 203 stress hormones, 10 Study in Scarlet, A (Doyle), 147–48 suicide, 53–54, 63, 67 of Clementi, 63, 67 of Todd, 50–52, 67 sun, 107–9 surveillance, 66n synesthesia, 62–63 Tamagotchis, 29–30 technologies, 7, 18, 20, 21, 99, 179, 188, 192, 200, 203, 205, 206 evolution of, 43 Luddites and, 208 penetration rates of, 31 technology-based memes (temes), 42–44 Technopoly (Postman), 98 television, 7, 17, 27, 31, 69, 120 attention problems and, 121 temes (technology-based memes), 42–44 text messaging, 28, 30–31, 35–36, 100, 169, 192–94 Thamus, King, 32–33, 35, 98, 141, 145 Thatcher, Margaret, 74 theater reviews, 81–84, 88–89 Thompson, Clive, 141–42, 144–45 Thoreau, Henry David, 22, 113, 197–200, 202, 204 Thrun, Sebastian, 97 Thurston, Baratunde, 191 Time, 154 Timehop, 148–51, 160 Tinbergen, Niko, 124 Todd, Amanda, 49–53, 55, 62, 67, 70–72 Todd, Carol, 51–52, 71–72 Tolle, Eckhart, 102 Tolstoy, Leo: Anna Karenina, 125–26 War and Peace, 115, 116, 118, 120, 122–26, 128–29, 131–33, 135, 136 To Save Everything, Click Here (Morozov), 55 touch-sensitive displays, 27 train travel, 200–202 Transcendental Meditation (TM), 76–78 TripAdvisor, 92 Trollope, Anthony, 47–48 Trussler, Terry, 172 Turing, Alan, 60, 61, 67, 68, 186, 190 Turing test, 60–61 Turkle, Sherry, 30, 55–56, 103–4 Twain, Mark, 73 Twitch.tv, 104 Twitter, 9, 31, 46, 63, 149 Udacity, 97 Uhls, Yalda T., 69 Unbound Publishing, 88 Understanding Media (McLuhan), 14 University of Guelph, 53 Valmont, Sebastian, 166 Vancouver, 3–4 Vancouver, 8–11, 15 Vaughn, Vince, 89 Vespasiano da Bisticci, 33 video games, 32, 104 Virtual Self, The (Young), 68, 71 Voltaire, 83 Walden (Thoreau), 113, 198–200 Wales, Jimmy, 77 Walker, C.


pages: 260 words: 76,223

Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It. by Mitch Joel

3D printing, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, behavioural economics, call centre, clockwatching, cloud computing, content marketing, digital nomad, do what you love, Firefox, future of work, gamification, ghettoisation, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, place-making, prediction markets, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, vertical integration, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

The constant hum of music, the muted bumps from the Embody office chair as it rolls across the floor, and the 3:32 a.m. sounds from the gourmet coffee machine. Oh, and let’s not forget about the heated debates that creep through the walls of the apartment and seep into the neighbors’ space—the conversations that seem to increase in volume and frustration when the video Skype call fails. Why doesn’t this guy just go to an office during the day like the rest of us? THIS IS THE STORY OF MARCO ARMENT… Marco Arment is changing the face of business forever with his computer, smartphone, home office, and one new user after another. What does the near future of business look like?

But Cisco is now predicting that mobile data use worldwide is poised to grow to more than twenty times the current usage by 2015. It would be interesting to see what the prediction is for voice. As we get more and more connected, not only do email, text messaging, and chat start chewing into the voice usage, but it’s clear that FaceTime, Google Hangouts, mobile Skype, and other soon-to-follow products could make voice calls as relevant as sending a letter in the mail (with all due respect to the pains that the postal industry is currently facing). So where’s the true purgatory in all of this? Mobile networks versus Wi-Fi versus telecommunications companies. Interoperable devices.


pages: 265 words: 74,000

The Numerati by Stephen Baker

Berlin Wall, Black Swan, business process, call centre, correlation does not imply causation, Drosophila, full employment, illegal immigration, index card, information security, Isaac Newton, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, McMansion, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, off-the-grid, PageRank, personalized medicine, recommendation engine, RFID, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, workplace surveillance

Does Al Qaeda follow similar patterns? JUST AS OUR experience on the Internet is moving beyond the written word, so is the data pouring into NSA computers. Much of it arrives as spoken voices, images, and video. It might be a face in a crowd in Baghdad, or perhaps a raspy voice giving orders in Farsi from a Skype account somewhere in the Horn of Africa. To mine this outpouring of data, machines must make sense of the words we speak in scores of languages. They must learn to pick out one or two faces from six billion others. To extend their nets into sounds and images, the counterterrorists need new technologies.

Over the course of an entire school year, this data would show the researchers not only where the students went and how they communicated with each other, but also who they circulated with, and even who they were spending the night with. This was a privacy invasion huge enough to agitate a congressional oversight committee. But all of Eagle's subjects signed lengthy consent forms. By the time I catch up to Eagle, he's living on the coast of Kenya, working on an education project. Our Skype connection fails, so we chat online. He tells me that he's watching turtles swimming in to lay their eggs on the beach below, where they're hard-pressed to protect them from local poachers. "You can get six shillings for these eggs in town," he writes. I nudge him toward faraway Cambridge, and he tells me about his experiment.


pages: 314 words: 77,409

The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters by Sean B. Carroll

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, clean water, discovery of penicillin, Fellow of the Royal Society, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, Skype, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship

Goldstein and M. Brown, Letter to R. Vagelos, 5/5/1983; courtesy of J. Goldstein. 86Within a few months: Roy Vagelos, Phone Interview, 12/17/2014; Tobert (2003). 86Merck’s new head of Basic Research: Edward Skolnick, Skype Interview, 12/1/2014. 86Goldstein and Skolnick later shared a lab: J. Goldstein, Phone Interview, 12/1/14; Brown and Goldstein (2004). 87Skolnick was confident: Skype Interview with Dr. Ed Skolnick, 12/1/2014. 87After two years of testing: Havel et al. (1987); The Lovastatin Study Group III (1988). 87The results were better: Scandanavian Simvastatin Survival Study Group (1994). 87Thanks in considerable part: National Institutes of Health (2012), p. 10. 88“Without Endo, the statins”: Brown and Goldstein (2004), pp. 15–16.


The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

The former chief technology officer for the CIA, Ira “Gus” Hunt, summed up the government’s philosophy when he said, “We try to collect everything and hang on to it forever.”72 Through his disclosures about NSA spying, particularly the NSA’s PRISM program (given the green light by the Patriot Act), Snowden showed Americans how they are subject to what Schneier calls “ubiquitous mass surveillance.”73 The NSA collects internet communications from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, YouTube, AOL, Skype, Apple, and many other tech companies whose services millions of Americans rely on. Meanwhile, the CIA’s Mobile Devices Branch has perfected a wide range of hacking systems, malware, and viruses that it uses to track people through their smartphones. Documents from WikiLeaks show that both the NSA and the CIA can bypass encryption.74 “Corporate and government surveillance interests have converged,” Schneier contends.

., 37, 54, 57 Rongwen, Zhuang, 94 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 88 Rousseff, Dilma, 97 Rudder, Christian, 23 rural areas: internet access for, 29, 149–50 Salesforce: employees organizing at, 148; immoral projects at, 154 Sandberg, Sheryl, 107 Sanders, Bernie, 103–5, 110 Santana, Feidin, 19, 20 Santelli, Rick, 105 Saudi Arabia, censorship in, 95 Scavino, Dan, 88 Schifter, Doug, 127 Schillinger, Klemens, 8 Schneier, Bruce, 135 Schrems, Max, 151 science fiction, 126 Scott, Walter, 19, 20 scraping, 71 Seamless, 30 search algorithms, 51–52, 53 Seasteading Institute, 124 Seinfeld, Jerry, 110 self-esteem, 65 selfies, 59–60 selfish behavior, 138–39, 154–56 self-monitoring tools, 69 service jobs, 33–34 Seth, Jodi, 56 sexism, 23–27, 35 sexting, 25–27, 35 sexual division of labor, 74–75 sexual harassment, 25, 27, 126–27 sexuality, 23–27, 35 sexual violence, 25 shareholder value society, 98 sharing on social media, 60–61, 84 Sharpton, Al, 102 shopping, mobile, 31–32 short message service (SMS), 6 Sidewalk Labs, 41 Sierra Club, 157 signals intelligence, 95–96 “silent spring,” 7 Silicon Valley, 115–41; distrust of, 125–31; and government control, 124; and spirit of capitalism, 115–25; taking back control from, 131–41 Silicon Valley Rising (SVR), 147 Sina Weibo (China), 94 Singh, Jagmeet, 93–94 the Singularity, 123 skeptics, 7–8 Skype, 81 slacktivism, 111 Slager, Michael, 19 Slutwalks, 108 smartness, 9 smartphone(s): demographics of, 3, 4; vs. “dumb phones,” 167n15; loss of, 1; ownership of, 3, 13–14; repurposing of, 161–62 Smith, Adam, 67 “smombie,” 3 SMS (short message service), 6 Snapchat, 41, 60 Snowden, Edward, 80, 81, 96 social change, 12 social class, 62 social cohesion, 8, 9 “social credit system” (China), 94 social limits of digital frontier, 84–85 social media, 59–86; addiction to, and fears about, 65–69; and big data, 82–86; characteristics of, 59–65; connection on, 63–64; content on, 60–65; and government, 80–81; as performance, 63, 64; and privacy, 69–72; and profit, 72–79; and self-esteem, 65; sharing on, 60–61; and smartphones, 6; time spent on, 60–61 social movements, 92 “social utility,” 54, 172n46 sociotechnical layers of cognitive map, 145 “sock-puppet subsidiaries,” 49 Spain, 97 Spare5 mobile task app, 32 Spencer, Richard, 105–6, 111 spying.


pages: 532 words: 139,706

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

Three years earlier, in 2002, there was a total of 308 cable and video networks, a number that had tripled from just eight years earlier, and would double over the next four. The radio industry was also squeezed by newer technologies that allowed the iPod and Internet and satellite radio to subvert their traditional ad-supported broadcast model. The phone companies nervously watched their traditional landline business erode, and with the 2005 acquisition by eBay of Skype, a largely free Internet phone/voice service, and Google’s voice-chat software also released that year, the erosion would accelerate. The cable companies were unsettled—as were all existing media—by how new media, from sharing networks like MySpace.com or Meetup.com to video games, captured the attention of their customers.

And that burgeoning business—now taking in twenty-one billion dollars a year worldwide and expected to double by 2012—was expanding from action games for teens to mass-market Wii games for adults to play with their kids, or with one another. Telephone companies watched their lucrative landline phone business rapidly lose customers to Skype Internet calls and mobile and new cable phone services. Yahoo and Microsoft were tossed in the digital storm. With better search and advertising technology, Google’s search widened its lead. With the promise of cloud computing and free software applications, Google menaced Microsoft’s packaged software business.

The snickers from those who thought the Google test must have failed, as David Pogue noted in the New York Times, became sneers. In March 2009, Google Voice was announced, and the sneers turned to gasps. Everyone in the telephone business—from telephone companies to new entrants like cable companies to eBay’s Internet phone service, Skype, which imposes small charges on calls made on regular phones—had reason to be concerned. Google would at first give away the phone service for free, with a nominal charge for long distance calls, and hoped one day to sell the service to corporations at a low price.What was an advance for consumers was a potential setback for these companies.


pages: 411 words: 127,755

Advertisers at Work by Tracy Tuten

accounting loophole / creative accounting, centre right, content marketing, crowdsourcing, follow your passion, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, QR code, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

I feel happy that I work for people that didn’t let the traditional rules stop them. I feel enormously fortunate that I have a husband and kids, parents, and extended family who all said “we are here to help.” And I thank God every day for technology. Because if I didn’t have technology, this would not work. Whether I am Skyping or Facetiming with my kids, or Skyping or Facetiming with my co-workers, technology enables this whole thing to happen. Tuten: What led you to advertising as a profession? Did you grow up wanting to work in the field? Cavallo: Heavens, no. I worked in sales and I got my undergraduate degree in business from James Madison University.

I think we’re going to get to the point in the world pretty soon where we’re going to have bandwidth that’s like twenty to thirty times more than what we have right now. The experiment that Google’s doing in Kansas City is an example. When this happens, and again, this is not far off, communication such as PowerPoint, Skype, and basic videoconferencing that we see now as being standard practice will seem incredibly primitive. I don’t want to go all the way to say there will be holograms that we’ll look at and communicate via gesture, but certainly, from the perspective of what is possible when one can transmit large amounts of data, we’ll begin to see these possibilities to be true.


pages: 460 words: 131,579

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

It is a serious threat to the nation’s competitiveness now that so many opportunities are opening up elsewhere. The positive change is the global spread of the entrepreneurial revolution. The European Union is far more entrepreneurial than it was a few decades ago. Europe has produced some notable startups. Skype, which pioneered Internet-based telephone calls, exemplified the continent’s potential strengths: it was founded by a Swede and a Dane who based the company in London, contracted out much of their work to computer programmers in Estonia, and eventually sold their creation off to an American company, Microsoft, for more than $8 billion.

Two of the company’s founders were based in Boston, the third in Sydney, and the fourth in Tel Aviv. The company made its first videos in Australia and found its first customers on the West Coast. The impecunious founders were able to make this arrangement work because of the cost-destroying wonders of Skype and the Internet. Born-global entrepreneurs are forming some surprising cross-border collaborations. Shai Agassi, an American businessman based in Palo Alto, California, is promising to revolutionize the car industry in alliance with politicians, entrepreneurs, and corporations in Israel, Denmark, Japan, and France.

., 211–212, 224, 229, 375, 409 Shirky, Clay, 68 Siemens, 91 The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times (Anthony), 71 Simon, Hermann, 56 Simon-Kucher & Partners, 56 Singapore, entrepreneurs and, 181–182 Sirkin, Harold, 64 Sisodia, Raj, 262 Skilling, Jeff, xv, 10, 309 Skinner, Jim, 376, 404 “Skunks,” 101 Skype, 178–179 Slim, Carlos, 114 Sloan, Alfred, 22, 79, 153–155, 208, 252, 341 Sloanism, 153–155. See also Capitalism Sloan Management Review, 52 Sloan School of Management, 58 Slogans, 273 Smart Is Not Enough! (Guarino), 365 Smith, Adam, 22, 77, 270 Smith, Fred, 197 Smith, Roger, 260 Snakes on a Plane, 157 SNCF, 304 Social contract, 358–359 Social networks, 359 Social responsibility, 38 Soifer, Ray, 11 Soifer Consulting, 11 Soros, George, 57 The Soul of a New Machine (Kidder), 259 Southwest Airlines, 172 Sovereignty at Bay (Vernon), 272 S&P 500, 366 Stalk, George, 111 Stanford Business School, 61 Starbucks, 38 Steiner, George, 253, 267 Stephenson, Howard, 194 Stewart, Matthew, xiii, 14, 15–16, 59 Stone, Bob, 319 Stonecipher, Harry, 298 Strategic Planning (Steiner), 253 Strategy & Business, 64 Strengths Based Leadership (Rath and Conchie), 64 Strengths Finder 2.0 (Rath), 64 Sull, Donald, 71 Sulzberger, Arthur, 114 Summers, Larry, 126, 133 Sun Microsystems, 240 Sunstein, Cass, 331 Supercapitalism (Reich), 127–128 Sykes, Richard, 236–237 Syriana, 118 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, 159 Taleb, Nassim, 67, 149–150 Taobao, 184 Tapscott, Don, 67, 240, 242, 243, 326–327 Tata, Ratan, 239, 285–286, 289 Tata Chemicals, 209 Tata Communications, 286 Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), 208–209, 210–211, 218, 221–222, 226, 227, 285 Tata Global Beverages, 285 Tata Group, 288, 415–416 Tata Motors, 239, 286 Tata Sons, 287 Tata Steel, 46, 166, 285 Tavistock Institute, 80 Taxes, 178 progressive, 390 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 3–4, 68, 77–79, 235, 252 TCHO, 241 TCS.


Ukraine by Lonely Planet

Anton Chekhov, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, gentrification, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, low cost airline, megacity, Skype, stakhanovite, Suez canal 1869, trade route

Post Central post office ( ; vul Khreshchatyk 22; internet per hr 12uah; 9am-7pm Mon-Fri, internet 24hr; Maydan Nezalezhnosti) The entrance is on maydan Nezalezhnosti. DHL International ( 490 2600; www.dhl.com.ua; vul Chervonoarmiyska 1; Pl Lva Tolstoho) Telephone Internet cafes (Click here) often offer VOIP calls or Skype. Central telephone centre (vul Khreshchatyk 22; 24hr; Maydan Nezalezhnosti) You can make international calls here or purchase phonecards. Tourist Information Kyiv lacks a tourist office but many hotels have an information bureau. Travel Agencies Chervona Ruta ( Червона Рута ; Click here ; 253 6909; www.ruta-cruise.com; vul Lyuteranska 24; Khreshchatyk) This is your only port of call if you’re interested in Dnipro River and Black Sea cruises.

Krakivsky Market Market (Краківський ринок ; Click here ; vul Bazarna) Fans of outdoor markets will enjoy this real, bustling Soviet-style rynok (market) with all the fresh fruit, raw meat and cheap junk that entails. Information Central telephone office ( Укртелеком ; vul Petra Doroshenka 37; 8.30am-7pm Mon-Fri, 9am-4pm Sat) Central post office ( Поштамт ; Click here ; vul Slovatskoho 1) Chorna Medea ( Чорна мідія ; vul Petra Doroshenka 50; per hr 6uah; 24hr) Lviv’s greatest internet cafe, with drinks, Skype and cheap, speedy web connection. InLviv ( 032-235 7630; www.inlviv.info) InLviv runs a variety of tours and has a website with loads of information on Lviv. Krylos.com ( 032-225 8215; www.krylos.com) Runs a range of themed tours and arranges transport tickets, hotels and apartment rental. Lonely Planet (www.lonelyplanet.com/ukraine/western-ukraine/lviv) Head here for planning advice, author recommendations and travel reviews.

Nicknamed the tolkuchka or tolchok (both meaning ‘push’ in Russian), its appeal lies in its sheer size, rather than its shopping selection, which mainly entails row after row of the same old cheap knock-offs and junk. The official name comes from its location about 7km outside the city. To get there, take a marshrutka (fixed-route minibus) marked ‘7KM’ from Privoz bus station. Information Angar18 ( Ангар -18; vul Velika Arnautska 52; per hr 6uah; 24hr) Internet at any time of day plus Skype and photocopying. Central post office ( Почта ; vul Sadova 10) European Business Center (vul Preobrazhenska 34; per hr 6uah; 9am-midnight) Modern internet place on the ground floor of the Passazh Hotel. Lonely Planet (www.lonelyplanet.com/ukraine/odesa) You’ll find planning advice, author recommendations and travel reviews here.


pages: 457 words: 128,838

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

Some in the VC community have serious doubts—they just don’t seem to express them often. In a post on the StrictlyVC blog by Connie Loizos titled “A Bitcoin Bear in Silicon Valley, It’s True,” Josh Stein, the managing director at Tim Draper’s Menlo Park firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, is quoted describing himself as a “bitcoin bear.” Stein, whose firm has invested in Twitter, Skype, and Tesla, argued that transaction-cost savings on bitcoin weren’t much more competitive than electronic wires or new dollar-based payment technologies, and that bitcoin, unlike gold, had no “intrinsic value.” In a telling turn, however, Loizos wrote that Stein quickly cut his comments short, claiming that publicly revealing his views would “cue the trolls.”

Similarly, a decentralized organization has no central point of vulnerability and is thus virtually impossible to shut down or destroy. Brafman and Beckstrom explore some contemporary Internet organizations that thrived under the starfishlike advantages of decentralization: Wikipedia, Craigslist, and Skype, for example. They also cite cases from outside the Net: the leaderless Alcoholics Anonymous, the Apache tribe, and the ultimate decentralized institution of our era, al-Qaeda. The experiences of Napster and BitTorrent are also instructive. While the former’s groundbreaking file-sharing service posed a challenge to record companies’ control of the music business, its network was centralized, controlled on an identifiable server.

philanthropy Philippines Philo Pierce, Brock Piper pizza Plug and Play Tech Center Polis, Jared political donations Ponzi schemes Portugal poverty Powell, Jesse Prasad, Eswar Pretty Good Privacy printing press privacy private key proof of burn proof of stake proof of work property rights ProtonMail public key Purse QuickCoin Quigley, William Rabois, Keith Radar Capital Radtke, Autumn Raspberry Pi Ratha, Dilip Reagan, Ronald Realcoin Reddit Reed, John regulation regulatory arbitrage remittance business Renaissance revolutions Ripple Rivest, Ron Robbins, Scott Robinson, Scott Rolling Stone Roman Empire Rosen, Sholom Rossiello, Elizabeth Roszak, Matthew Roubini, Nouriel RSA Rulli, Francesco Russia Sacramento Kings Safaricom Saggers, Laura Salomon Smith Barney Salt Lake City San Francisco, Calif. 20Mission in SAP satellites SatoshiDice Schechter, Joshua Schmidt, Eric Schopenhauer, Arthur Schumer, Chuck Sclavos, Stratton scrypt Sean’s Outpost SecondMarket Secure Electronic Transactions (SET) Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) securities contracts seigniorage Selkis, Ryan Serrano, Sebastian sharing economy Shasky Calvery, Jennifer Shavers, Trendon Shiller, Robert Shrem, Charlie Silbert, Barry Silent Circle Silicon Valley accelerator programs Silicon Valley Silk Road Simpson, David Singapore Sirer, Emin Gün Skype smart contracts smartphones smart property Smith, Adam Smith, Peter Snowden, Edward societal changes Softcard Spain spam bitcoin and Square stagflation Stanford, Leland Starbucks Starfish and the Spider, The: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations (Brafman and Beckstrom) staters Stein, Josh Stellar Stockholm Stockman, Steve Strauss, Levi StrictlyVC Stripe Summers, Larry Sutter, John Sutter’s Mill Swarm Sweden Switzerland Szabo, Nick Taaki, Amir Tally Capital Target taxes capital-gains regulatory arbitrage and taxi services technology(ies) bitcoin as disruptive Tel Aviv Tencent Holdings Terpin, Michael TerraMiner terrorism Tesla Texas 37Coins Thornburg, Jonathan Time Times (London) T-Mobile Toronto trade Tradehill Tradenet transaction fees bitcoin and Travelers Group Treasury Department, U.S.


pages: 588 words: 131,025

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands by Eric Topol

23andMe, 3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anne Wojcicki, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, Big Tech, bioinformatics, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, connected car, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, gamification, global village, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, job automation, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, lifelogging, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize

There are more than seven billion cellphones on Earth, which is way more than the number of toilets or toothbrushes in the world, making this technology the most pervasively deployed in the history of mankind.35 The conversion of “dumb” cellphones to smartphones is occurring at a torrential pace, as is the increase in video connects between people via Skype and FaceTime. This sets up the potential to bring multimedia expertise from one place to another virtually anywhere and anytime. Ironically, smartphones and tablets are now helping children learn to read in remote places around the world.36 The big social networks that span the globe connect their participants from all 196 countries.

It would not take much to see a device help guide medication adherence, coach a healthy lifestyle, and respond to questions customized to the individual patient’s circumstances and needs. The Outpatient Visit of the Future It seems like every week there is a new headline for an article related to who will see you (the smartphone, robot, avatar, algorithm, or Dr. Siri) for medical care or how you will be seen (cellphone, smartphone, Skype) (Figure 9.2).23,36–49 Fast Company had an article titled “Could ePatient Networks Become the Superdoctors of the Future?” and asserted “the idea of going down to your doctor’s office is going to feel as foreign as going to the video store.”50 That may seem bold, but they got that one right. Physical office visits are on their way out.

Wasserman, “The Doctor Will See You Now—On Your Cellphone,” Mashable, December 10, 2013, http://mashable.com/2013/12/10/doctor-on-demand-app/. 39. R. Xu, “The Doctor Will See You Onscreen,” New Yorker, March 10, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2014/03/the-doctor-will-see-you-onscreen.html?printable=true&currentPage=all. 40. A. Sifferlin, “The Doctor Will Skype You Now,” TIME, January 13, 2014, http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/printout/0,8816,2161682,00.html. 41. K. Bourzac, “The Computer Will See You Now,” Nature 502 (2013): 592–594. 42. “The Robots Are Coming. How Many of Us Will Prosper from the Second Machine Age?,” Raw Story, January 4, 2014, http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/01/04/the-robots-are-coming-how-many-of-us-will-prosper-from-the-second-machine-age/. 43.


First Time Ever: A Memoir by Peggy Seeger

belling the cat, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, Easter island, index card, Kickstarter, Nelson Mandela, place-making, pre–internet, Skype, the market place

I have a mixed singing voice with no vocal break in the middle of my two-octave range. Now those bridge notes have become difficult. Eliza Carthy – daughter of Master Martin Carthy and Regal Norma Waterson and a law unto herself, no holds barred on stage – recommends her voice coach, Dr Denise Borland, who lives in Edinburgh and teaches via Skype. Where Eliza Skypes, there Skype I. I sit at the computer and try to sing for Denise. I have to fight the tears. I have sung since forever and now I can’t. Denise, with her red lipstick, pink headphones and cheerful, mobile face, guides me as I warble across the river and over the bridge to grandmother’s house, where she’s humming, burbling, singing with and without words, searching for the Ease of Singing that she had always taken for granted.


pages: 445 words: 135,648

Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno by Nancy Jo Sales

Airbnb, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital divide, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, emotional labour, fake news, feminist movement, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, global pandemic, helicopter parent, Jaron Lanier, Jeffrey Epstein, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, post-work, Robert Durst, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TikTok, women in the workforce, young professional

It was a long-distance relationship, since Buckley had relocated to Arizona to be near his children after his wife had moved them out there to be with the guy from Facebook, so I was spending money on travel. No, Buckley didn’t buy my tickets; he was devoutly frugal. He didn’t seem to feel like he had to do much of anything to keep this relationship going—and why should he, when I was doing everything? I was setting up the Skype calls and putting on shows for him like a free webcam girl. When I visited him, I even cleaned his house. “Poor Buckley,” I thought, “I will cheer him up by scrubbing his tub.” But no, Buckley’s house was a mess because Buckley had never been taught that he had to clean up after himself. He was home most days, listlessly playing the stock market while he waited for his father to join the stock exchange in the sky.

“A Brief History of ‘F**kboy,’ the Internet’s Favorite New Man-Bashing Slur.” HuffPost, June 3, 2015. www.huffpost.com/entry/f—kboy-definition-take-that-haters_n_7471142. Bonos, Lisa. “The Awkward Intimacy of Video Dates, When They’re in Your Bedroom but You Can’t Touch.” Washington Post, March 26, 2020. www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2020/03/26/video-date-facetime-skype-zoom/. Bonos, Lisa, and Emily Guskin. “It’s Not Just You: New Data Shows More Than Half of Young People in America Don’t Have a Romantic Partner.” Washington Post, March 21, 2019. www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2019/03/21/its-not-just-you-new-data-shows-more-than-half-young-people-america-dont-have-romantic-partner/.

Forbes, June 4, 2019. www.forbes.com/sites/hayleycuccinello/2019/06/04/from-taylor-swift-to-katrina-lake-americas-richest-self-made-women-under-40/#61d963e1753a. Curtin, Sally C., Margaret Warner, and Holly Hedegaard. “Increase in Suicide in the United States, 1999–2014.” NCHS Data Brief No. 241, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, April 2016. Dawkins, Philip. “Phone Sex Is Safe Sex: Please Postpone Your Hookup. Get Off on Skype Instead.” New York Times, March 20, 2020. www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/opinion/coronavirus-sex.html. Dean, Michelle. “The Story of Amanda Todd.” New Yorker, October 18, 2012. www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-story-of-amanda-todd. Dean, Signe. “Widespread Loneliness Is Killing People and We Need to Start Taking This Seriously.”


pages: 122 words: 19,807

Tmux: Productive Mouse-Free Development by Brian P. Hogan

en.wikipedia.org, Ruby on Rails, Skype, web application

It was actually my first introduction to tmux, and I immediately saw the potential as my friend walked me through using its various features. Pair programming has a lot of great benefits. Working with another developer can help you see things you might not have seen on your own, but unless you’re physically in the same location, pair programming can be somewhat difficult. Screen-sharing through iChat, Skype, or even GoToMeeting takes up a lot of bandwidth and can be dodgy when you’re not using the best network connection. In this chapter, we’ll explore using tmux for pair programming, so you can work remotely with another developer on even the slowest hotel Wi-Fi connection. There are two ways to work with remote users.


pages: 72 words: 21,361

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy by Erik Brynjolfsson

Abraham Maslow, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, business cycle, business process, call centre, combinatorial explosion, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, hiring and firing, income inequality, intangible asset, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, minimum wage unemployment, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ray Kurzweil, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, self-driving car, shareholder value, Skype, the long tail, too big to fail, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

At a less abstract and more personal level, the digital frontier is also improving our lives. If you have Internet access and a connected device today, it’s both free and easy to keep in touch with the people who mean something to you—your kith and kin—even as you and they move around. You can use resources like Skype, Facebook, and Twitter to send messages, make voice and video calls, share still and moving pictures, and let everyone know what you’re doing and how you’re doing. As any lover or grandparent will tell you, these are not trivial capabilities; they’re priceless ones. Many of us use these resources so often now that we take them for granted, but they’re all less than 10 years old.


pages: 80 words: 21,077

Stake Hodler Capitalism: Blockchain and DeFi by Amr Hazem Wahba Metwaly

altcoin, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, congestion charging, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, information security, Internet of things, Network effects, non-fungible token, passive income, prediction markets, price stability, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Skype, smart contracts, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin

The advancement of encryption technology has raised many legal and privacy issues in the information age. Due to cryptography's potential to be used in espionage, illicit activities, and other counterfeit applications, many governments have classified it as a weapon and have restricted or even banned its use and export. Skype, for example, uses a proprietary custom implementation of the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption algorithm. If you don't know what AES means, the important thing to understand is that cryptography is what keeps our privacy and safety assured during this information age. Some jurisdictions where the use of encryption is legal may require legislators to disclose encryption keys for documents related to investigations.


pages: 274 words: 85,557

DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You by Misha Glenny

Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, BRICs, call centre, Chelsea Manning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, James Watt: steam engine, Julian Assange, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, pirate software, Potemkin village, power law, reserve currency, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, SQL injection, Stuxnet, urban sprawl, white flight, WikiLeaks, zero day

One day in early February 2008 an alert that warned of suspect software flashed up on Darryl’s screen. Unauthorised Application: Messenger. Darryl’s systems were looking out for several different types of unauthorised application. The word ‘Messenger’ suggested that someone was trying to install or operate some form of communications package like Skype. Within minutes Darryl had traced its origin to one of the chemical engineers who represent the backbone of GSA’s business. Walking over to the workstation in question, Darryl decided simply to ask him outright whether he was running any new instant messenger on his machine. ‘And he turned to me quite cooly and said “No!”

It is, of course, embarrassing continually having to ask people fluent in the tongue why a ‘buffer overload’ can have alarming consequences for the security of your network, but geeks are not a patronising clan and are generally happy to oblige. Estonia may be small, but it is the most wired country in Europe and one of the leading digital powers in the world, from where – among other inventions – came Skype. Free wireless can be found in most places, as connectivity is considered a basic right, not a privilege. You won’t find hotels gouging your wallet for Internet access here. However, I was talking to Hillar Aarelaid not about Estonia’s go-ahead approach, but about its fabled position in the now fast-growing history of international digital strife.


pages: 294 words: 87,986

4th Rock From the Sun: The Story of Mars by Nicky Jenner

3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Astronomia nova, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, Golden age of television, hive mind, invention of the telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, overview effect, placebo effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, retrograde motion, selection bias, silicon-based life, Skype, Stephen Hawking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Virgin Galactic

One of the 100 candidates, Joseph Roche of Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, expressed his concerns in a 2015 interview with Matter. He claimed not to have met anyone from the organisation in person, to have been chosen purely based on the amount of his donation and to have only been vetted via a 10-minute Skype call. ‘That means all the info they have collected on me is a crap video I made, an application form that I filled out with mostly one-word answers … and then a 10-minute Skype interview,’ Roche said. ‘That is just not enough information to make a judgment on someone about anything.’ The Mars One critics are almost certainly correct in their cynicism; every one of Lansdorp’s grand plans has been delayed by several years.


pages: 398 words: 86,023

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia by Andrew Lih

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Free Software Foundation, Hacker Ethic, HyperCard, index card, Jane Jacobs, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, jimmy wales, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, optical character recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Stallman, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons, Y2K, Yochai Benkler

The book was composed on a combination of open source and commercial software. I’m grateful to the many authors of NeoOffice, Mozilla Firefox, Text-Mate, Quicksilver, MacJournal, MyMind, TextExpander, and Colloquy as critical tools for writing. For accessing the Internet from China, OpenVPN, OpenSSH, Foxy-Proxy, Tor, and Skype helped cope with any issues regarding Internet blocking. Writing a book with a broken arm is no easy task, unless you have friends and relatives to help you through eight weeks of disability. These included Abigail Tay, Joe Merican, and Dr. Mahmoud Merican, who all helped to arrange treatment during holiday season.

But as work started to get more rapid, leaving messages on talk pages and waiting for replies became inefficient for quick collaboration. As 2001 progressed, the community experimented with trying out a form of online communication in the form of Internet relay chat, or IRC. As a simple, open standard, IRC was a group chat space that preceded today’s modern “instant messaging” such as AOL, MSN, Skype, or Jabber. With IRC, users could run a program to connect to the central machine operated by Freenode, one of the largest IRC servers, and chat in real time with other Wikipedians. It was a new experience for Wikipedians to converse synchronously, and it provided an even faster feedback loop with which Wikipedia could evolve.


pages: 294 words: 87,429

In Pursuit of Memory: The Fight Against Alzheimer's by Joseph Jebelli

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, CRISPR, double helix, Easter island, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, global pandemic, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, parabiotic, phenotype, placebo effect, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, stem cell, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traumatic brain injury

So numerous were the breakthroughs and new theories, I wanted to clone myself and put a copy of me in every room. I wondered if my research using the brain’s immune cells was still cutting-edge. Like an octopus, the field appeared to have spread its arms into wholly uncharted territory. One evening that week, alone in my hotel room, I received a Skype call from my father. Like others in my family he wanted to know if I’d spotted anything that might have helped Abbas. I told him that the research here was experimental and probably wouldn’t have done much for Granddad. I could see the disappointment on his face. I think that after seeing Abbas’s decline he had grown fearful of dying in the same way.

‘I immediately told him about Tony Wyss-Coray’s work,’ Nikolich said, sitting in his home office in Palo Alto, California. I’d just asked him to recount the inception of this radical new therapy, and he was beaming. It was 5 a.m. for him–the time he usually starts his day–and we were talking over Skype. He was easy-going and casually dressed, and yet had the face of a stern industrialist. ‘Afterwards I rang Tony and said, “Can you believe this!?” He said it was the first time he’d ever heard of a human situation where this may actually be helpful. We were fascinated.’ Alex had told the Hungarian professor about his grandfather over lunch in Hong Kong.


pages: 286 words: 87,401

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

Because it is so easy for the rest of the team to communicate with one another, you have to make an effort to constantly communicate with any remote members to keep them on the same page as the rest of the team. Communications tools like Slack not only provide a medium where all teammates participate on the same terms but also allow for asynchronous communication, which helps overcome time zone differences. Another approach some companies take is to set up a 24/7 videoconference using tools like Skype or Google Hangouts to simulate being in the same room. These informal bonds remain a critical part of the communications process, even as your firm grows into a global giant. Human beings are social animals, and the bonds between coworkers and teammates require regular dialogue. However, as early as the Tribe stage, you will need to begin implementing processes to supplement the one-to-one dialogue.

All these new ecosystems around the globe represent interesting and potentially differentiated opportunities, much like China fifteen years ago or Silicon Valley twenty-five years ago. Boston has won a leadership position in health, for example, because of its world-class hospitals and universities, while New York is the leader in fashion-related businesses like Rent the Runway and Birchbox. Countries like Estonia have made their dependence on international markets a strength; Skype (founded by Estonian programmers Priit Kasesalu and Jaan Tallinn) wasn’t likely to have started in the United States because international phone calls simply weren’t as important to the US consumer. CHINA: THE LAND OF BLITZSCALING Remember Pony Ma’s decision to launch and then blitzscale WeChat in 2010?


pages: 276 words: 81,153

Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives by David Sumpter

affirmative action, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, classic study, cognitive load, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, post-truth, power law, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, traveling salesman, Turing test

I am just waiting for it to happen. That same thing that has happened to me at almost every social gathering for the past year. A period during which I have spent most of my time locked in my office: coding algorithms, fitting statistical models, writing about my results and interviewing engineers and scientists over Skype. There is small talk. I listen politely. Then someone brings it up. It is not the same thing each time. The stories are slightly different, but the theme is the same. ‘The danger with Facebook is that it controls what people see,’ he says. ‘I read about one study they did where they only showed people negative posts and they got depressed.

Lovisa and I had been worried at first – might this online ‘friend’ turn out to be a 40-year-old paedophile? Our concerns were unjustified. Elise met up with a normal 13-year-old with bright blue hair. This summer she wants to go to visit another friend she has made online who lives in Poland. They often chat on Skype while they do their homework together. Elise’s parents will have to think long and hard about whether this will be allowed or not. My son, Henry, and I had just returned from a trip to Newcastle. Through Twitter, I had got in contact with another dad, Ryan, who like me, trains his son’s football team.


pages: 283 words: 81,376

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DeepMind, digital map, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, tech billionaire, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, Turing test

He wipes silverware before using it. His health-food diet is complicated. He’s concerned about the effects of certain foods on the brain. He does not drive a car. Bostrom listens to audiobooks played at two or three times normal speed to avoid wasting time. His sociologist wife and son live in Montreal. They communicate by Skype. If anyone is improbably special, Bostrom is. The Future of Humanity Institute has two conference rooms named for Cold War Soviets. One honors Vasili Arkhipov, who was almost literally Brandon Carter’s philosophic nuclear submariner. During the height of the Cuban missile crisis one Russian submarine remained submerged and out of radio contact with Moscow.

The Future of Humanity Institute is an expression of a global movement. There are comparable think tanks on both sides of the Atlantic. The Oxbridge orbit has not only Bostrom’s institute but the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge, cofounded by Martin Rees. The United States has the Future of Life Institute at MIT, founded by Max Tegmark and Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn, with a board of advisors including the ubiquitous Elon Musk (who donated $10 million). Silicon Valley has two such think tanks: the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, founded by computer scientist Eliezer Yudkowsky and tech entrepreneurs Brian and Sabine Atkins; and the OpenAI Foundation, founded by Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and others.


pages: 244 words: 82,548

Here I Am: The Story of Tim Hetherington, War Photographer by Alan Huffman

blood diamond, British Empire, friendly fire, illegal immigration, no-fly zone, satellite internet, Skype

Once the photographers arrived at the media center, Hondros uploaded his photos to Getty while the others checked e-mail and Martin “got all domestic,” as he put it—took a shower and changed into some dry clothes. After his shower, Martin sat on a small couch, downloading and backing up his photos and Skyping with his partner back in Budapest, Polly Fields. Occasionally Hetherington “would literally throw himself down and peer over my computer and comment about what I was doing,” Martin said. Without a laptop or a digital camera, Hetherington had time to kill. He did have his iPhone with him, and Michael Brown had, in Martin’s words, “made a splash with his,” selling Hipstamatic-enhanced iPhone photos to National Geographic and other magazines.

I have also drawn extensively from transcripts of Sebastian Junger’s interviews for his documentary film, which he very generously shared with me, as well as from his book War and from James Brabazon’s memoir My Friend the Mercenary. I conducted my interviews face to face, primarily in New York City and Misrata, and over the phone, via Skype, and through e-mail. I also drew from my own experiences in Monrovia, Liberia and from my personal conversations with Tim. Quotes from all interviews are verbatim, when accompanied by quotation marks, with the exception of some that were quoted by other published sources, which I am not in a position to verify, and of others that have been edited in small ways, such as by the deletion of repetitive filler words (“um” and “like”), conversational breaks that are needlessly disruptive in print.


pages: 275 words: 84,418

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, cloud computing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Dynabook, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Googley, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software patent, SpaceShipOne, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, web application, zero-sum game

Gundotra’s falling-out with Jobs earlier in 2008 had, by the end of the year, made him a staunch Android ally, and he focused his team on not only building basic Google apps for the iPhone—such as search, Maps, and YouTube—but on developing a mobile version of software called Google Voice. Like Android, Google Voice grew out of the acquisition of a start-up in August 2007. The company, GrandCentral Communications, seemed like a weird purchase at first. It was like Skype. It made software to enable telephone calls that traveled over the Internet instead of via a telephone company. But to many Google engineers that was like owning a fancier buggy whip. Telephone conversations were something their parents did. To them it was old, increasingly obsolete technology. When Google had moved to its current office complex, Brin and Page had looked into not installing telephones at all—until they were told that would be a violation of the fire code.

Samsung trial; iPad and; iPhone given to; Jobs and; Open Handset Alliance and; role at Google; on smartphones Sculley, John SEC Seidenberg, Ivan Sense by HTC Sequoia Capital Sewing Machine Combination sewing machines Shazam Shockley, William Sholes, Christopher Latham Showtime Sidekick smartphone Sigman, Stan Silicon Valley; convergence and; entertainment industry and; software copyright law and Silver Lake Capital Singer, Isaac Siri Skype smartphones; Android, see Android phones; apps for, see apps; BlackBerry, see BlackBerry; carriers for, see wireless carriers; Google applications on; Internet and; iPhone, see iPhone; network for; price of; Quattro Wireless and; sales of TVs vs.; Schmidt on; switch from cell phones to; Windows on Snow Fall project social media: Facebook, see Facebook; MySpace; Twitter software: copyright law and; patents on Sony SOPA/PIPA SpaceShipOne Spacey, Kevin Spindler, Michael Spotify spreadsheet programs Sprint Stahl, Norman Stanford University Star7 Stone, Matt Stratton, John Strickon, Josh Stringer, Christopher Summly Sun Microsystems Symbian tablets; EO; GRiDPad; iPad, see iPad; Microsoft; Nexus 7; sales of televisions vs.


pages: 314 words: 83,631

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum

air freight, cable laying ship, call centre, digital divide, Donald Davies, global village, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, inflight wifi, invisible hand, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, messenger bag, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, packet switching, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, satellite internet, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, undersea cable, urban planning, UUNET, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

It occurred to me that Crouch was part of the small global fraternity that knows the geography of the Internet the way most people know their hometowns. Her boss, a Texan named Alan Maudlin who improbably led TeleGeography’s analyst team from his home in Bratislava, possessed one of the best mental maps of the physical infrastructure of the Internet. I’d spoken with him before coming. “I don’t need to look at a map,” he told me over Skype. “I have in my mind, and I can almost note, which cables connect everywhere in the world.” Rather than maps of the Internet, his study in Slovakia was decorated with antique maps of Texas. “I suppose it is kind of like the Matrix, where you can see the code. I don’t even have to think about it anymore.

As I approached the beach parking lot, there were more manholes and then a little compound of equipment surrounded by a wood fence, nestled in the reeds. It hummed. Sprouting out of a drainage ditch were huge prehistoric stalks of Gunnera, or giant rhubarb, each one bigger than a man—as if their growth were nurtured from below by the light passing beneath them. That night at the B&B, I Skyped with my wife in New York, about the drawings our daughter made at day care, the mess the dog made, the man who was coming to fix the leak. Unlike a phone call, our conversation went over the Internet; it was free and crystal clear, composed of something like 128,000 bits each second. Afterward, out of curiosity, I ran a traceroute to see if I could discern which way they had all gone.


pages: 309 words: 79,414

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists by Julia Ebner

23andMe, 4chan, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, game design, gamification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Greta Thunberg, information security, job satisfaction, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, off grid, OpenAI, Overton Window, pattern recognition, pre–internet, QAnon, RAND corporation, ransomware, rising living standards, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, SQL injection, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Transnistria, WikiLeaks, zero day

‘That’s a shame, you’ll miss out on a great evening and the opportunity to meet other members of GI.’ Before I leave Café Prückerl, we agree that I will stay in touch and set up an initial call with the UK-based Identitarian leaders. That same night, the FPÖ receives 26 per cent of the country’s votes,11 a shocking success for an Austrian party with links to neo-Nazi fraternities. I log on to Skype. Thomas is waiting for our voice call; he joins me from Scotland. Although the new GI Scotland leader has been living in the UK for seven years, selling software, he has kept his Austrian dialect. He has a friendly laugh and a calm voice. Thomas was on a family visit when he decided to go to one of Generation Identity’s regular meet-ups in a Viennese café half a year ago.

The Austrian Identitarian Markus Willinger had been active in the New Right for five years when he published his book Generation Identity: A Declaration of War Against the ’68ers at the age of twenty.18 ‘Then I did my first GI summer camp in France,’ Liam says. He tells me that they are in the process of screening people for GI UK at the moment. ‘So first we do a Skype interview and screen their social media profiles, then we meet them in person – we just go for a beer with them.’ Over a drink he tells me that he attended the march organised by the Football Lads Alliance (FLA), a group of English football fans who claim to be fighting extremism of any kind but have become increasingly associated with far-right activists.19 ‘They kept saying “every form of extremism”,’ Liam adds, bursting into laughter.


pages: 291 words: 90,771

Upscale: What It Takes to Scale a Startup. By the People Who've Done It. by James Silver

Airbnb, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, call centre, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, DevOps, family office, flag carrier, fulfillment center, future of work, Google Hangouts, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, pattern recognition, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

A serial entrepreneur with two decades of experience building and exiting companies in the US, Israel and Europe, Saul has a passion for working with seed- and early-stage businesses. Most recently he co-founded Kano and Seedcamp. He co-founded and was CEO of LOVEFiLM International (acquired by Amazon) and was also part of the original executive team at Skype (acquired by eBay). CHAPTER 5 ‘Skilled coders don’t necessarily make the best managers.’ Toby Moore, co-founder and former CTO at Space Ape Games, and now venture partner at Entrepreneur First, on scaling your startup’s tech team. When Toby Moore first moved to London as a Java developer over a decade ago, he assumed he was going to go into banking, ‘because that’s what Java developers did in those days’.

‘But there’s a big difference between meeting someone for a coffee and someone actually engaging with you and being part of your success within that role. It did make a big difference to me, and I’ve seen it make a big difference for others too. ‘The nice thing is that we’re now approaching the second or third generation of tech startups in London. I’ve been there for 12 years now and we’ve had the Skypes and Last.fms, the Moo.coms and Mind Candys and we’ve got the third generation coming through now. A lot of people from the second generation are now doing what I’m doing, which is taking a bit of a break before starting another company, and spending it with startups to help them grow.’ Toby Moore has been a technical leader since the early 2000s in a variety of early-stage and scale-up roles, most notably as co-founder and CTO at Space Ape Games, an award-winning mobile gaming studio based in London, and as Mind Candy’s CTO for six years, where he helped build and scale the Moshi Monsters entertainment juggernaut.


pages: 328 words: 84,682

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, general purpose technology, gig economy, Google Chrome, GPS: selective availability, Greyball, independent contractor, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Metcalfe’s law, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Network effects, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, web application, zero-sum game

Technological innovation and regulatory change eventually allowed new competitors, such as MCI (Microwave Communications Inc., founded in 1963), to use microwaves (not phone lines) to offer telephone and data services to large businesses. But there were still no mass-market alternative telephone platforms until wireless companies like Sprint and then cable TV companies and Internet-based services such as Skype gradually got into the voice communications business, most notably during the 1990s and 2000s. FROM THE WHITE PAGES TO THE YELLOW PAGES American Bell Telephone introduced the White Pages in 1878 along with the first telephones in order to help people find each other.7 This was simply a catalogue, with names in alphabetical order and divided by towns or local regions, of every individual and organization with a publicly listed telephone number.

See economies of scale Schmalensee, Richard, 69, 82–83, 250nn21–22 seafood.com, 110 self-driving cars, 224–26 self-regulation and curation overview, 90–91, 186, 207–8 EU allows self-regulation of hate speech, 205–6 and Facebook, 186–87, 191 moving toward self-regulation, 199–206 openness and curation tradeoff, 191 platform businesses evolving into curated business, 219–20 as platform defining what they stand for, 208–9 social media’s resistance to, 189–90, 191 on YouTube, 204–5 Shor, Peter, 228 Sidecar, 112–15, 116–18 sides of your platform cross-side or indirect network effects, 17, 42–44, 46–47, 94–96 engaging multiple sides of a market, 15–16, 41–42 same-side or direct network effect, 16, 42–44 Siemens’s MindSphere for IIoT, 166 “6 Reasons Platforms Fail” (Van Alstyne, Parker, and Choudary), 111 Skype, 37 smartphone market, 130–35 smartphones, value of platforms associated with, 21–22, 23t, 24–25, 251nn23–24 smart platforms, 51 Snapchat, 55–56, 70–71, 97, 218 social networks and social networking, 6–7, 70–71, 110. See also specific social networks Sony, 43–44 specialized retail platforms, 55 Spiegel, Evan, 55–56 Sprint, 37 stand-alone firms, lifespan and failures of, 109 Star 360, 55 Starwood Hotels and Resorts, 142 state sales taxes, 201–2 strategies for platform businesses overview, 18–21, 19f, 25–26, 240t, 241t choosing which side of the market to subsidize, 112, 114 See also business models Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs (Yoffie and Cusumano), ix success, measuring, 236–37 sustainability, 86 switching costs, 48 Symbian (Nokia), 79–80, 130, 131 Taiwan, 142–43 TALEN (transcription activator-like effector nuclease), 232 “technically impossible” defense against liability, 178–79 telephone network effects, 32–37 Tencent (China), 58, 100–101 third-party innovators, platform-offered building blocks for, 18–19, 68 Tinder, 70–71, 81 tipping, viii TOM Online (Hong Kong), 123 Toys “R” Us and Amazon, 152 traditional businesses, 141–71 overview, 27, 141–44, 169–71 building a new platform, 159–69 General Motors and Lyft, 147–48 joining a competing platform, examples of, 145–51 joining a competing platform, pitfalls of, 151–52 London’s black cabs, 148–51 peer-to-peer transaction platforms vs., 9 Pharmapacks, 145–47 product platforms of, 12–13, 20 rules related to, 11–12 stand-alone products of, 5, 18 Walmart buying existing platforms, 153–59 See also General Electric transaction platforms overview, 19f, 20–21, 80, 101–3, 250n22 adding an innovation platform, 102 advertisements on, 85 Amazon Marketplace as, 57–58 choosing your market sides, 69–71 complementary services, 83–84 complementary technology sales, 84–85 designing your business model, 77–78, 80–85 establishing and enforcing ecosystem rules, 85–86, 90–93 innovation platforms vs., 22, 23t, 24 lifespan and failures of, 108–9 matchmakers, 80–83 mistrust in, 119–24 reducing friction in transactions, 82–83 solving the “chicken-or-egg” problem, 71–72, 74–77 two-sided, Yellow Pages as, 39 value associated with, 21–22, 23t, 24–25 See also Alibaba’s Taobao; Facebook; Google Search TripAdvisor, 85 trust, building, 119, 122, 124, 137, 185–86 Tumblr, 89, 135 Twitch, 56 Twitter blocking Instagram’s “Find Friends” feature, 89 choosing market sides, 70–71 multi-homing effects, 42–43 opening and closing API interfaces, 88–89 subsidizing one side of platform, 76 two-sided transaction platform, Yellow Pages as, 39 tying as exclusionary practice, 181, 182 Uber attempting winner-take-all, 77–78 and autonomous vehicle technology, 224–25 challenges ahead, 136–37 and current laws, 206–7 driver rating system, 92 and London’s black cabs, 149–51 no sex rule, 90 performing driver background checks, 90 platform model and losses, 81–82 predecessors, 107 regulatory scrutiny, 111 roll out on Windows phone, 135 as start-up, 115, 116–19 UberX, 115–16, 118, 148 United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, 127 Upwork, 46–47, 81, 91 U.S.


pages: 291 words: 85,908

The Skripal Files by Mark Urban

Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Jeremy Corbyn, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Skype

‘Team’, his Whitehall minders, apparently even offered to bring Yelena over to the UK and buy Skripal a bigger house so that they could live together. At the end of 2010, a few months after he arrived in Britain, the Skripals had seen in the New Year together via Skype; Sergei and Liudmila in Salisbury, Yelena, Valery, and his daughter in Yaroslavl. It brought them comfort as they adapted to life apart. Sergei kept up the regular phone calls to his mother but did not, following her accident, use the video feature of Skype. Watching her in this predicament, fading away, when he could do nothing practical to help was too much for him, perhaps. Although Sergei must have found this separation from family, and the inability to attend his brother and son’s funerals, to be a great sorrow, he did not see an alternative.


Crushing It! EPB by Gary Vaynerchuk

augmented reality, driverless car, fear of failure, follow your passion, imposter syndrome, Mark Zuckerberg, passive income, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, TED Talk

Visiting the book’s Amazon page, Pat noticed something else. Gary was actually replying to the occasional negative reviewer and saying, “Hey, I’m sorry this book didn’t speak to you. Let’s get on the phone and chat.” I couldn’t believe that an author was paying attention, responding to comments, and offering a phone or Skype number. Many of the one- or two-star reviewers came back with a follow-up comment. They might not have changed their opinion, but they’d say, “Gary, I still don’t agree with you, but I so appreciate the time you took to reach out to me and understand where I was coming from.” That impressed me more than even the content of the book itself.

Within six months, he saw a rise in viewership: one hundred views, then two hundred. All along, he was commenting, answering questions, and interacting with viewers. He made himself available to anyone who wanted to talk. Crush It! talks about building your business off of search.twitter.com. I also made it a point to answer every single e-mail that came in. I put up my Skype number so that anybody could call at any hour. If I was sitting there, I would take the call. Then I would get the caller’s permission to record the call, because there’s nothing like free content. They were asking me questions, and if they’re asking it, then other people probably have the same one.


pages: 514 words: 152,903

The Best Business Writing 2013 by Dean Starkman

Alvin Toffler, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, computer vision, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fixed income, fulfillment center, full employment, Future Shock, gamification, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, late fees, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Parag Khanna, Pareto efficiency, price stability, proprietary trading, Ray Kurzweil, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, tail risk, technological determinism, the payments system, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, wage slave, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y2K, zero-sum game

She needs this job, too, so she has no choice but to tell me something I have never been told in nineteen years of school or at any of some dozen workplaces. “You’re doing really bad,” she says. I’ll admit that I did start crying a little. Not at work, thankfully, since that’s evidently frowned upon, but later, when I explained to someone over Skype that it hurts, oh, how my body hurts after failing to make my goals despite speed-walking or flat-out jogging and pausing every twenty or thirty seconds to reach on my tiptoes or bend or drop to the floor for 10.5 hours, and isn’t it awful that they fired Brian because he had a baby, and, in fact, when I was hired I signed off on something acknowledging that anyone who leaves without at least a week’s notice—whether because they’re a journalist who will just walk off or because they miss a day for having a baby and are terminated—has their hours paid out not at their hired rate but at the legal minimum.

Which in this state, like in lots of states, is about seven dollars an hour. Thank God that I (unlike Brian, probably) didn’t need to pay for opting into Amalgamated’s “limited” health insurance program. Because in my 10.5-hour day I’ll make about sixty dollars after taxes. “This is America?” my Skype pal asks, because often I’m abroad. Indeed, and I’m working for a gigantic, immensely profitable company. Or for the staffing company that works for that company, anyway. Which is a nice arrangement, because temporary-staffing agencies keep the stink of unacceptable labor conditions off the companies whose names you know.

They aren’t entitled to raises, either, and they don’t get vacation and they’d have a hell of a time unionizing and they don’t have the privilege of knowing if they’ll have work on a particular day or for how long they’ll have a job. And that is how you slash prices and deliver products superfast and offer free shipping and still post profits in the millions or billions. “This really doesn’t have to be this awful,” I shake my head over Skype. But it is. And this job is just about the only game in town, like it is in lots of towns, and eventually will be in more towns, with U.S. Internet retail sales projected to grow 10 percent every year to $279 billion in 2015 and with Amazon, the largest of the online retailers, seeing revenues rise 30 to 40 percent year after year and already having sixty-nine giant warehouses, seventeen of which came online in 2011 alone.


pages: 523 words: 143,139

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths

4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, cognitive load, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, constrained optimization, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Sedaris, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, double helix, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, exponential backoff, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, first-price auction, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google Chrome, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Lao Tzu, Leonard Kleinrock, level 1 cache, linear programming, martingale, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, NP-complete, P = NP, packet switching, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert X Cringely, Sam Altman, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, sorting algorithm, spectrum auction, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, traveling salesman, Turing machine, urban planning, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Earlier networking research, Vint Cerf notes, had been founded “on the assumption that you could build a reliable underlying net.” On the other hand, “the Internet was based on the assumption that no network was necessarily reliable, and you had to do end-to-end retransmissions to recover.” Ironically, one of the few exceptions to this is in transmitting the human voice. Real-time voice communications, such as Skype, typically do not use TCP, which underlies most of the rest of the Internet. As researchers discovered in the early days of networking, using reliable, robust protocols—with all their ACKs and retransmission of lost packets—to transmit the human voice is overkill. The humans provide the robustness themselves.

Fully extricating the Internet from bufferbloat will draw on all of these changes and require the patience of many years. “This is a long-term swamp,” says Gettys. But there’s a lot to look forward to about a post-bufferbloat future. With their inherent latency, buffers are bad for most interactive processes. When we speak via Skype, for example, we generally prefer an occasionally staticky signal now to a clear recording of what our caller said three seconds ago. For gamers, even a 50-millisecond lag could be the difference between fragging and being fragged; in fact, gaming is so sensitive to latency that all important gaming honors are still contested in person, with players boarding airplanes to gather and compete over a network serving just a single room.

See also randomness San Francisco Sartre, Jean-Paul Saxena, Nitin saying no scale, sorting and scale-free distributions scheduling Schmidt, Eric Schmidt, Peter Schooler, Lael Science Scientific American Scientific Management Scientist in the Crib, The (Gopnik) Seale, Darryl search, gap between verification and search engines search-sort tradeoff self-organizing lists second-chance scenario secretary problem burglar variant full-information variant recall variant rejection variant seeding selfish routing self-organizing lists sequential information processing serendipity Shallit, Jeffrey Shaw, George Bernard Shi, Yong Shoenfield, Joseph shop hours Shortest Processing Time unweighted weighted Shoup, Donald Sibneft oil company Sieve of Erastothenes Silicon Valley Simulated Annealing Sinatra, Frank Single Elimination single-machine scheduling Siroker, Dan size dominance hierarchies and memory hierarchy and sorting and Skype Sleator, Daniel slot machines small data as big data in disguise Smith, Adam Smith, Dan soccer social media Social Network, The (film) social networks social policy socks, sorting software, term coined solid-state drives solitaire sorting Sorting and Searching (Knuth) sort-search tradeoff soy milk space-time tradeoffs SpaceX spinning sports league commissioner overfitting and season scheduling tournament structures Sports Scheduling Group squirrels SRAM standardized tests Statistical Science status pecking order and races vs. fights and Stewart, Martha Steyvers, Mark stock market.


pages: 559 words: 155,372

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez

Airbnb, airport security, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Burning Man, business logic, Celtic Tiger, centralized clearinghouse, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, content marketing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, drop ship, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, Gary Kildall, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hacker News, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, information security, interest rate swap, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, second-price auction, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Socratic dialogue, source of truth, Steve Jobs, tech worker, telemarketer, the long tail, undersea cable, urban renewal, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, éminence grise

., AdGrok) to the epoch changing (e.g., SpaceX). First, the ability to monomaniacally and obsessively focus on one thing and one thing only, at the expense of everything else in life. I lived, breathed, and shat AdGrok. Thanks to focusing on AdGrok, I watched my daughter grow up through the frame of a Skype window while I was in AdGrok’s Mountain View shit hole. I had no social life outside of schmooze-and-booze tech events, at which I would wear my AdGrok T-shirt and engage in techno small talk with people I didn’t really care about. I had no hobbies or outside activities of any kind, except very occasional trips to the gym.

This was the personnel state of Facebook Ads when I signed on: about thirty or so engineers and one designer, spread out over about a dozen products, grouped into broad areas nucleated by six product managers, of which I was one. The whole merry circus was run by my boss, Gokul Rajaram, who seemed to always be writing three emails at once, along with attending at least two meetings, one in person, the other via Skype or his mobile. Gokul was the nominal product leader for Ads, meaning he was the “product masseur” who gave overall direction to what Facebook actually built in Ads, as well as managing the product managers themselves, at the time an unruly lot, each with their own miniature product fiefdom. Rather than an overall ads strategy, what we had was a general feeling in the air, a sort of collective mood that, like a slanted floor, tended to send more people one way than the other.

Second, it meant the Growth team’s ever-present task of getting users to connect to other users was rendered trivial: simply hoover in the contact list on a user’s phone, and that person has instantly “friended” everyone he or she knows (none of this Facebook business of prodding you via pseudo-ads to friend your long-lost classmate). Reportedly, the reason for spurning the usual made-up app identity of a user name–password combo for WhatsApp was due to its founder and CEO, Jan Koum, constantly losing his Skype password, and wanting to do away with a log-in process altogether. * In a bit of feel-good Valley news that soon became folklore, Jan Koum signed the multibillion-dollar deal’s documents on the door of the welfare office his family would frequent for food stamps, after they immigrated from the Ukraine.


pages: 88 words: 25,047

The Mathematics of Love: Patterns, Proofs, and the Search for the Ultimate Equation by Hannah Fry

Brownian motion, John Nash: game theory, linear programming, Nash equilibrium, Pareto efficiency, power law, recommendation engine, Skype, stable marriage problem, statistical model, TED Talk

Eli Finkel, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, has done a lot of work on the so-called ‘non-conscious synchrony’ that happens between two people, and believes that much of the technology to integrate these measures into online matchmaking already exists – or is just around the corner. Imagine if you could have a series of short online speed dates on a Skype- or FaceTime-like system over the course of an evening. Siri-type technology could track your language patterns, while image-recognition software could keep a log of your body language. At the end of your evening, a realistic and meaningful compatibility statistic for your matches could be delivered, giving you a much better basis on which to judge who is worthy of being graced with your real-life presence.


pages: 346 words: 89,180

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

In all three cases, the economic disadvantage of not having vibrant cities that can grow have become larger and larger as the importance of intangibles has increased. But creating the infrastructure for spillovers is not just about physical space. Currently, the most effective collaborations happen face-to-face, despite the dizzying variety of digital technologies for socializing and collaboration, from Skype and e-mail to Facebook and Slack. But just because the widely predicted death of distance has not come to pass, doesn’t mean that it will never do so. It seems very likely that at some point people will discover better ways to interact meaningfully with one another at a distance using IT, as new applications develop and the workforce becomes populated by people who grew up with online social lives and hobbies.

., 131 rules and norms, 211–14 Sadun, Rafaella, 53, 82 Salter, Ammon, 197 Sampson, Rachelle, 168 Samsung, 73, 112 Sanders, Bernie, 223 Santa Fe Institute, 80 scalability, 9–10, 58, 60, 87, 101–2; definition of, 246n2; importance of, 67–68; income inequality and, 133–34; and increased investment, 110; and intangibles, 65–67; secular stagnation and, 103–5 Schreyer, Paul, 40 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 16 Science: The Endless Frontier (Bush), 232 Second Machine Age, 30 secular stagnation, 91, 116; explanation for, 101–16; and intangibles investment, 102–3; profits and productivity differences and, 103–7; relationship of scalability and spillovers to, 109–16; symptoms of, 92–96 Shankar, Ravi, 61 Shi, Yuan, 168 Shih, Willy, 85 Shinoda, Yukio, 42 short-termism, 161, 168–69 Sichel, Dan, 4, 5, 39, 42, 43, 45 Siemens, 60–61, 204 single-factor productivity, 98–101 Six Sigma, 51 Skype, 217 Slack, 152, 217 smartphones, 72–73, 81 Smil, Vaclav, 146 Smith, Adam, 36, 188 social capital, 156, 236 soft infrastructure, 156 solar energy, 85 Solow, Robert, 39, 125 Song, Jae, 129, 131, 135 South Wales Institution of Engineers, 83 speculation, 249n1 spending, 46–47, 54; on assets, 20; rent-seeking, 113 Spenser, Percy, 80 spillovers, 9, 58, 61, 87, 102; contestedness and, 87; importance of, 77–79; and intangibles, 72–77, 109–16; Jacobs, 138; Marshall-Arrow-Romer, 62, 138; physical infrastructure and, 147–51; secular stagnation and, 103–4; slowing TFP growth and, 107–9; venture capital and, 178 Spotify, 18 Stack Overflow, 29 Stansted Airport, 1–2, 3–4 Starbucks, 34, 52, 65, 140, 183, 195, 197; scalability of, 67 start-up ecosystems, 222 Statute of Anne (1709), 76 stock markets, 167–68, 205–6; IPOs and, 171–72 stock of intangible assets, 56–57 Summers, Larry, 93 sunkenness, 8–9, 58, 60, 87, 246n5; as characteristic of intangibles, 68–70; importance of, 70–72; venture capital and, 175–76 sustained advantage, 250n2 Sutton, John, 67 symbolic analysis, 132–34 synergies, 10, 58, 61, 87–88, 213; and intangible assets, 80–83, 83–86; among investments, 110; maximizing the benefits of, 214–18; physical infrastructure and, 147–51; venture capital and, 176 System of National Accounts, 20, 43, 51 systems innovation, 198 tacit knowledge, 65 tangible investments, differences between intangible and, 7–10, 58 taxes, 139–40, 235; and financing, 166, 219 technology: and cost of intangible investment, 28; inequality as result of improvements in, 123–24, 126–27; and productivity of intangibles, 28–30; and spillovers, 151–52 Tesla Motors, 24, 111, 209 Thatcher, Margaret, 127 Theory of Moral Sentiments, The (Smith), 188 Thiel, Peter, 78, 175, 184–85, 187, 223 3M, 194 Toffler, Alvin, 4 Tonogi, Konomi, 42 total factor productivity (TFP), 96, 98, 102; poor performance of, 109–9, 114 Toyota, 29, 51 trade and inequality, 124 trademarks, 76 training and education, 51–52, 170, 228–30 Trajtenberg, Manuel, 106 Trump, Donald, 122, 141–42, 143 trust, 156 23andMe, 152 Twitter, 185, 187 Uber, 24, 28, 51; building of driver network by, 112–13; contestedness and, 115; legal travails of, 187; scalability of, 67, 101–2, 105; and synergies, 82; venture capital and, 174, 175 uncertainty, 87 Ure, Andrew, 126 Ur-Nammu, 75 US Federal Reserve, 4, 40, 41, 42, 165 US Food and Drug Administration, 154 Van Reenen, John, 82, 136, 173, 195 venture capital (VC) funding, 154–55, 161, 166, 174–75; problems with, 177–79; and intangibles, 175–77 Vlachos, Jonas, 131 Volcker, Paul, 165 von Mises, Ludwig, 38 von Wachter, Till, 129 Wallis, Gavin, 42, 223–24 Walmart, 81, 187 Warsh, David, 62 Wasmer, Etienne, 128 Watt, James, 78 wealth, 119–20, 121; housing and, 122, 128–29, 136–39; inequality of, 139–40; intangibles’ effects on, 129–40 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 36 Weightless World, The (Coyle), 4 Weitzman, Martin L., 195 Welch, Jack, 184 Whalley, Alexander, 224 “What Is the U.S.


pages: 389 words: 87,758

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar

“US education is a brand that travels well,” he notes.32 DATA AND COMMUNICATION Perhaps the most dramatic change in recent years has been the speed at which information is flashing around the world. More than two-thirds of humans have a mobile phone, and the proportion is rising rapidly. “Today, there are more phones than people. . . . And we can call almost any part of the world at almost no cost through Internet services such as Skype,” notes Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. “This level of teledensity means that people have become interconnected at a level never seen before in history.”33 One-third of the planet is online. At more than 1.35 billion, the community of Facebook users is equivalent to the population of the world’s largest nation.

At more than 1.35 billion, the community of Facebook users is equivalent to the population of the world’s largest nation. Global online traffic rose from eighty-four petabytes a month in 2000 to more than forty thousand petabytes a month in 2012—a five-hundred-fold increase. Cross-border voice traffic has more than doubled over the past decade, and Skype call minutes have increased more than 500 percent since 2008.34 These connections have already had an enormous impact and are poised to have an even greater one, especially in developing countries. Internet-related consumption and expenditure is now bigger than either global agriculture or the worldwide energy sector.35 In 2005, mobile subscriptions in aspiring countries—defined as the thirty countries with the economic size and dynamism to become significant global players—accounted for 53 percent of worldwide subscriptions; just five years later, that share had risen to 73 percent.


pages: 255 words: 88,987

An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield

Apollo 13, dark matter, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Neil Armstrong, off-the-grid, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Skype, éminence grise

Educational outreach is part of an astronaut’s job, but it’s a particular passion of mine. For 20 years I’d been speaking about the space program in tiny town halls, elementary schools and Rotary Clubs—anywhere that would have me, basically. In 2010 I set up a program called “On the Lunch Pad,” where I talked with school kids via Skype during my lunchtime. I have found it frustrating at times that so few people know what the space program does and, as a result, are unaware that they benefit from it. Many people object to “wasting money in space” yet have no idea how much is actually spent on space exploration. The CSA’s budget, for instance, is less than the amount Canadians spend on Halloween candy every year, and most of it goes toward things like developing telecommunications satellites and radar systems to provide data for weather and air quality forecasts, environmental monitoring and climate change studies.

We get it: you’re safe!” Apparently the thrill of a phone call from space had worn off. The two-second delay on the line, that irritating echo, didn’t help matters. On Earth, my family doesn’t typically talk very much on the phone because the kids are so far-flung, but we do communicate constantly via a family Skype chat room: Kristin is at university in Ireland, Kyle lives in China and Evan was, until recently, at university in Germany. I couldn’t easily access the site on orbit, though, so instead I got into the habit of phoning and emailing with Helene daily, and primarily emailing with Kristin and Evan. Kyle, though, still had to put up with some phone calls because he’s not a good emailer.


Industry 4.0: The Industrial Internet of Things by Alasdair Gilchrist

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air gap, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, business intelligence, business logic, business process, chief data officer, cloud computing, connected car, cyber-physical system, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, DevOps, digital twin, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, global value chain, Google Glasses, hiring and firing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, microservices, millennium bug, OSI model, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, platform as a service, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RFID, Salesforce, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, smart transportation, software as a service, stealth mode startup, supply-chain management, The future is already here, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, web application, WebRTC, Y2K

The robots are designed to provide reassurance to friends and family, by enabling a relative or carer to call up the Giraff from a remote computer or smartphone from any location. The 3G audio/video channel displays the carer’s face on the Giraff's video screen, allowing them to chat to the patient via a Skype-like video call. The Giraff launched in 2013 as a pilot trial. The Giraff robots are just under five feet tall with wheels, and a video screen instead of a head. They are fitted with high-definition cameras to monitor the home and provide remote surveillance. The Giraff allows relatives and carers to keep a vigilant eye on the patients, to ensure they are taking their medication and eating meals, while also providing a method for social exchange potentially from hundreds of miles away.

Industry 4.0 XMPP (Jabber) XMPP stands for the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, which is an open technology for real-time communication developed to deliver a wide range of applications. XMPP was developed to focus on the advent of technologies such as instant messaging, presence, and video conferencing, which were dominated by Skype and WhatsApp. There was also the possibility of even entering into collaboration, for developing lightweight middleware, and content syndication. However, to understand XMPP, we need to understand why it was originally designed. That was for use in instant messaging, to detect presence, and allow people to connect to other people and exchange text messages.


pages: 406 words: 88,820

Television disrupted: the transition from network to networked TV by Shelly Palmer

AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, call centre, commoditize, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, Golden age of television, hypertext link, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, James Watt: steam engine, Leonard Kleinrock, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, market design, Metcalfe’s law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, recommendation engine, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, yield management

• Media RSS - a kind of syndication of media files used by Yahoo! • MMScast - podcasting to mobile phones using MMS. • Mobilecast - podcasting to mobile phones. • Palmcasting - podcasting to Palm devices like Treo and LifeDrive. • Punchcasting - punching podcasts directly into smartphone devices. • Skypecasting - recording Skype text, voice or video conversations. • Soundseeing tour - podcast utilizing ambient noise and descriptions. • Streamcasting - when an RSS feed contains a link to streaming media instead of a file, RSS becomes a way to control streaming syndication. • Vodcasting/Vidcasting - video-based podcasts.

SHVA states that satellite service providers like, DirecTV and DISH Network, can only allow clients with national networks to use their services when the signals from their local network affiliates are not available through the use of a rooftop antenna Copyright © 2006, Shelly Palmer. All rights reserved. 13-Television.Glossary v2.qxd 3/20/06 7:29 AM Page 213 SBC/ATT – Subscriber 213 Skype A Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service that uses the public Internet. Skyscraper A type of web advertisement that is taller than it is wide. Visit, http://www.iab.org for details. Smart Card Plastic cards the viewer can insert in the set-top box, which intelligently trigger the box to decrypt content programming.


pages: 343 words: 91,080

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, business logic, call centre, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive load, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death from overwork, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Chrome, Greyball, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social software, SoftBank, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, Tim Cook: Apple, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, urban planning, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

In some places where Uber was illegal, I observed and interviewed drivers while they worked underground, and I returned to observe after the company came out in the open. In all, I have conducted interviews with 125 drivers who work for ridehail companies, as well as some taxi drivers, in cars, on the phone, through Skype, and occasionally in online chats. I have also made observations by riding along with over 400 drivers in cars. Hundreds of rides later, the treacly scent of air fresheners I inhale on each trip still makes my eyes water. The stories that these ridehail drivers share with me remain etched in my mind.

Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains (New York: Viking, 2017), 31. 55. Jordan Pearson, “Uber’s AI Hub in Pittsburgh Gutted a University Lab—Now It’s in Toronto,” May 9, 2017, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3dxkej/ubers-ai-hub-in-pittsburgh-gutted-a-university-lab-now-its-in-toronto. 56. Calo and Rosenblat, “The Taking Economy.” 57. Anne Washington in Skype interview with author, August 5, 2017. 58. Andrew Zimbalist and Roger G. Noll, “Sports, Jobs, and Taxes: Are New Stadiums Worth the Cost?” Brookings, June 1, 1997, www.brookings.edu/articles/sports-jobs-taxes-are-new-stadiums-worth-the-cost/; Gregg Easterbrook, “How the NFL Fleeces Taxpayers,” Atlantic, October 2013, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/how-the-nfl-fleeces-taxpayers/309448/; Bret Schrotenboer, “Abandoned NFL Cities Have Old Stadium Debt, New Outlook,” USA Today, March 31, 2017, www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2017/03/31/relocation-oakland-raiders-san-diego-chargers-st-louis-rams/99848210/. 59.


pages: 325 words: 90,659

Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel by Tom Wainwright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, barriers to entry, bitcoin, business process, call centre, carbon credits, collateralized debt obligation, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, failed state, financial innovation, illegal immigration, Mark Zuckerberg, microcredit, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Skype, TED Talk, vertical integration

Inside, in an office lined with books and papers, Clark, whose research interests focus on Tijuana’s ample underbelly, tells me about market conditions in the people-smuggling business. He regularly chats with the local “coyotes,” as people-smugglers are known; some of them have even participated in his lectures in San Diego, appearing via Skype to talk to American students about the smuggling game. Broadly, he says, there are two types of service. The basic option is to sneak over the frontier with a guide on foot, hoping to avoid the US Border Patrol’s sentries. For those with deeper pockets, or without the stamina to wade through rivers or cross deserts and mountains, there is a luxury option: crossing “in the line,” meaning walking up to the immigration desk with fake documents.

The Instituto Madre Assunta, which is run by a network of Catholic missionaries, allows female migrants to stay for up to two weeks, during which time they are given three meals a day, clean clothes, and access to medical and legal help. In a small computer room off a sunny courtyard, women talk to their children on Skype. Mary Galván, the center’s director, is depressed about the US approach to immigration. “We had great hopes for Obama. We expected there would be a big reform to help migrants,” she says. But it was “todo lo contrario”—exactly the opposite. During Obama’s first presidential term, from 2009–2013, an average of nearly 400,000 illegal aliens was deported each year—double the number at the turn of the century, and nearly ten times more than in the early 1990s.


pages: 339 words: 94,769

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

Let’s create our own meaning, based on something more profound than having jobs. AGI can enable us to finally become the masters of our own destiny. Let’s make that destiny a truly inspiring one! Chapter 9 DISSIDENT MESSAGES JAAN TALLINN Jaan Tallinn, a computer programmer, theoretical physicist, and investor, is a co-developer of Skype and Kazaa. Jaan Tallinn grew up in Estonia, becoming one of its few computer game developers, when that nation was still a Soviet Socialist Republic. Here he compares the dissidents who brought down the Iron Curtain to the dissidents who are sounding the alarm about rapid advances in artificial intelligence.

THE SECOND MESSAGE: AI RISK My exposure to the second revolutionary message was via Yudkowsky’s blog—the blog that compelled me to reach out and arrange that meeting in California. The message was: Continued progress in AI can precipitate a change of cosmic proportions—a runaway process that will likely kill everyone. We need to put in a lot of extra effort to avoid that outcome. After my meeting with Yudkowsky, the first thing I did was try to interest my Skype colleagues and close collaborators in his warning. I failed. The message was too crazy, too dissident. Its time had not yet come. Only later did I learn that Yudkowsky wasn’t the original dissident speaking this particular truth. In April 2000, there was a lengthy opinion piece in Wired titled “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” by Bill Joy, co-founder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems.


pages: 345 words: 87,534

Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, deplatforming, en.wikipedia.org, false memory syndrome, Frances Oldham Kelsey, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Jeff Bezos, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, scientific mainstream, Skype, social contagion, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, TikTok, unpaid internship

“There are different pathways that can lead to gender dysphoria, but it’s an intellectual and clinical mistake to think that there is one single ‘cause’ that explains gender dysphoria,” he said in a BBC documentary about his life’s work.⁵ In the case of one child he treated, the boy’s desire to be a girl stemmed from wanting to connect with his single mother, who had briefly abandoned him, to keep her from leaving again. The therapy addressed his feelings of abandonment and only secondarily the child’s gender dysphoria. * * * I spoke to Dr. Zucker several times, mostly over Skype. At sixty-nine, he has a close-cropped white beard, the gentle manner of someone who excels at working with kids, and a Talmudic habit of answering every question with a question. Although he has maintained a clinical practice for decades, when he talks about his work he is the consummate academic—apparently incapable of providing a straightforward answer to any question without considering every nuance, drawing all sorts of fine distinctions, and reaching for every caveat that will make his ultimate statement precise.

“I think the whole area has become politicized,” said psychotherapist Marcus Evans, who resigned from England’s national gender clinic, the Tavistock Foundation, over the lack of careful protocols in its treatment of transgender-identified children. “The drugs, you know, the hormone blockers, first of all, they say it’s a neutral act. What are they talking about? You’re going to powerfully interfere with a person’s biological development,” he said to me over Skype. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it…. But you don’t say it’s a neutral act…. They’re not with their peers anymore.” Even if those peers are perfectly sensitive and supportive, surely the girl on blockers will be acutely aware of her strangeness. Other girls her age have breasts, hair under their arms, struggle to manage their periods, say things that indicate sexual awakening—all things she knows little about.


pages: 328 words: 90,677

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, housing crisis, hype cycle, Hyperloop, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, OpenAI, Paul Graham, peak oil, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tail risk, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork, work culture , Zipcar

Ultimately, as we will see, Tesla would struggle to get the costs of making and selling a car under control—and it would pay a high price for its first lesson in the economics of the car business. CHAPTER 4 THE STARTUP TRAP Raising venture capital is the easiest thing a startup founder is ever going to do. Marc Andreessen By 2006, Silicon Valley had fully shaken off its post-dot-com-bubble hangover and was entering a new golden age. The “Web 2.0” wave had already made companies like Skype, Pandora, and Yelp into household names, Facebook and Twitter were just starting their rise to ubiquity, and Apple was putting the final touches on the world’s first smartphone. The venture capitalist Paul Graham captured the mood in a speech he gave that year called “How to Be Silicon Valley.” Between deriding the stifling effects of bureaucracy and celebrating the valley’s “rich people and nerds,” Graham argued, “a place that tolerates oddness in the search for the new is exactly what you want in a startup hub, because economically that’s what startups are.

Edwards, 56 Department of Energy (DOE) loans from, 68–89, 118, 120, 121 as shareholder of Tesla, 82–86, 90 detractors, 102–108 Detroit, Michigan, 2, 4 Detroit Auto Show, 68 disruptive innovator, Tesla as, 195–197 DOE. see Department of Energy doors falcon-wing, 137–141 gull-wing, 136–137 Downey, California, 76 Drori, Ze’ev, 49–50, 65 Dunlay, Jim, 58 E Eberhard, Martin as advocate of Tesla, 67 founding of Tesla by, 21–24, 27–31, 35, 37–40 ouster of, 44–48, 50, 79 EBITDA, 215 Eisner, Michael, 45 Electrek, 97–101 electric vehicles (EVs), 3, 12–14, 24, 77, 202, 207 Energy Independence and Security Act, 67 Enron, 105 environmental issues, 112–113, 119 Esquire, 61 e-tron quattro, 203 EV1, 13, 24, 34 EVs. see electric vehicles F Facebook, 41 Falcon One, 28 falcon-wing doors, 137–141 FCW (Forward Collision Warning), 125 Ferrari, 60, 200–201 Fiat, 11, 34 financial crisis (2008), 75–76, 105 fixed costs, 54 Flextronics, 47 FOIA (Freedom of Information Act), 72, 131 Ford, Henry, 56, 194 Ford Focus, 159 Ford Fusion, 75 Ford Motor Company, 3, 4, 56, 75, 181, 194, 204, 216 Forward Collision Warning (FCW), 125 Founders Edition Roadster, 215 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 72, 131 Fremont, California, 53, 206, 218 funding (fundraising), 29, 40, 44–47, 50, 69–71, 85 G Gage, Tom, 27–29 Galileo Galilei, 105 Gao Yaning, 128 Gartner, 175 gas prices, 11, 14 General Motors (GM). see also specific models bankruptcy and bailout of, 2–3, 88 and electric cars, 11–13, 34 Impact concept car, 24 and Lotus, 36, 37, 53 OnStar system, 194 Germany, 203, 204 Ghosn, Carlos, 197–200 Gigafactory, 77, 183–184, 189, 218 GM. see General Motors G170J1-LE1 screens, 228 Goodwill Agreements, 149 Google, 44, 120–124, 171 Graham, Paul, 41 “A Grain of Salt” (blog post), 152–153 Grant, Charley, 100 “green car” companies, 11 GT Advanced Technologies (GTAT), 95–97 gull-wing doors, 136–137 H Harrigan, Mike, 30 Harris Ranch, 115–116, 119 Harvard Business School, 195 herd mentality, 96 Hethel, England, 49 Hoerbiger, 138–140 Holzhausen, Franz von, 137 Honda, 201 “How to Be Silicon Valley” (speech by Paul Graham), 41 Hyperloop, 16, 88, 217 I IDEO, 38 IGBT (insulated-gate bipolar transistor), 49 Impact concept car, 13, 24 imperfection, 55 incumbent companies, 196–197 innovation, 193–210 by Citroën, 193–195 disruptive, 195–197 by Carlos Ghosn, 197–200 by Tesla, 201–210 “Innovation Killers: How Financial Tools Destroy Your Capacity to Do New Things” (Christensen), 196–197 The Innovator’s Dilemma, 197 insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT), 49 internal conflict, 29–32 InvestorsHub, 99 Israel, 4, 12 J Jaguar I-PACE, 202–203 Jivan, Jon, 98 Jonas, Adam, 172 K kaizen, 58, 60 Krafcik, John, 176 L Lambert, Fred, 98–101 Lamborghini, 204 Land Rover, 60 lead-acid batteries, 23–24, 197 Leech, Keith, 146–147, 156 Level 4 autonomous cars, 175–176 Level 5 autonomous cars, 170, 172, 175–176, 178 Lexus, 204 lithium-ion batteries, 22–24, 26, 34 “long tailpipe,” 110 losses, 11 Lotus, 36–37, 38, 43, 44, 49, 59 Lotus Elise, 28, 36, 37, 38, 40, 43 Lotus Evora, 59 “Ludicrous Mode,” 16 Lyons, Dave, 64 M Mac, Ryan, 218 Magna Powertrain, 48–49 Magna Steyr, 202 manufacturing, 180–192 of batteries, 183–184, 188–189 and continuous reiteration of Model 3s, 182–192 Elon Musk on, 180–182 preproduction as, 187–188 Marchionne, Sergio, 11 market saturation, 10 Marks, Michael, 47, 48, 50 Mars, 25 “Master Plan, Part Deux” (blog post), 164 McLaren F1, 25–26, 39 media hype, 88, 90–91, 93–95, 97–102, 130, 211–224 and base version of Model 3, 220–224 Elon Musk as cause of, 217–224 at Semi/Roadster unveiling, 211–215 as stock price stimulant, 215–216 Menlo Park, California, 28, 58 Michelin, 194 Miles, 11 Mobileye, 167–170 mobility technology, 11 Model 3, 8–10, 180–182 base version of, 220–224 production of, 182–192 Model S, 15, 74–75, 81–84, 90, 99, 135–137. see also Whitestar Model T, 56 Model X, 101, 134–145 Model Year 2008, 69 Moggridge, Bill, 38–39 Montana Skeptic, 105–108 Morgan Stanley, 172 Morris, Charles, 43 Motley Fool, 98 Musk, Elon on belief, 21 and branding of Tesla, 16–17 as cause of media hype, 217–224 childhood and personality of, 25–26 clientele knowledge of, 60 “cluelessness” of, 33–35 and culture of Tesla, 60 and Daimler, 68 detractors of, 102–108 and electric cars, 25–28 and Elise-Roadster conversion, 38–39 on financial viability of Tesla, 72–73 and fundraising, 44, 69–71 and loans, 70, 78 on manufacturing, 180–181, 190 on Model 3, 8–9 on Model S, 74 on Model X, 144–145 on obstacles faced by Tesla, 46 offers of, to sell Tesla, 120–121 on price increases, 71 and production process, 142, 165 as public figure, 15 on Series D, 47 and JB Straubel, 26 and stress, 64–67, 77–78 and Superchargers, 109–119 and Tesla cofounders, 29–32, 45, 47–48 on Tesla’s master plan, 21–22, 30–31, 58, 163 at town hall meeting, 70–71 and Whitestar, 51 Musk, Errol, 25 Musk, Justine, 25–26 Musk, Kimball, 65 N National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 66 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), 127, 131–132, 149–162 National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), 132, 167 NDAs. see non-disclosure agreements Neil, Dan, 59 Neuralink, 16, 217 New Mexico, 48, 67 New United Motor Manufacturing, 53 New York Times, 2, 30, 66 NHTSA. see National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Nissan Leaf, 198 Nissan-Renault Alliance, 197–200, 207 Noble M12, 27 nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), 5, 149–151, 152, 155–156 Norway, 12 NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), 132, 167 NUMMI plant, 76, 81 Nürburgring, 203 NuvoMedia, 23 O Occupy Wall Street, 80–81 Ohno, Taiichi, 57 OnStar, 194 Opel, 36 Opel Speedster, 36 OpenAI, 217 operating profits and losses, 89 P Packet Design, 23 Page, Larry, 44 Paine, Chris, 13, 64, 71, 73–74 Panasonic, 77 Pandora, 41 PayPal, 16, 28 Peak Oil, 11 Pinnacle Research, 25 platforms, 135–136 Porsche, 24, 26, 39, 203–204 Porsche 911, 39 power electronics module (PEM), 49 Powertrain Technology, 58 Prenzler, Christian, 100 preproduction, 187–188 price increases, 71 Prius, 24 profitability, 81–82, 89 Project Better Place, 4–5, 11–12 public, going, 80–81 Q quality, 55, 59–60 Quality Control Systems, 131 R Ranger, 60 Reddit, 97, 99–100 reliability, 143 Renault Kwid, 207 Renault Zoe, 198 Reuters, 66 Revenge of the Electric Car (film), 64 Roadster as Elise conversion, 37–39 launch of, 14–15, 29, 42, 47–51, 59–61 new model of, 211–215 profitability of, 71–72, 81 securing investments for, 44, 45 and Tesla startup, 2–3 robotaxis, 166–167 Rogan, Joe, 219 Rosen, Harold, 26 Rosen Motors, 26 S Saleen, 99–100 San Carlos, California, 28 San Francisco, California, 59 San Jose, California, 75–76 Santa Monica, California, 45 Saudi Arabia, 218–219 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 45 Scion xB, 27 Seagate, 23 “The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan” (blog post), 21 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 67, 160, 219–220, 224, 234 Seeking Alpha, 103, 105–107 self-driving cars, 120–133 Semi, 211–215 Senate Finance Committee, 67 Series A funding, 29 Series C funding, 40, 44–45 Series D funding, 46, 47 Series E funding, 50 S 40 model, 84 Shashua, Amnon, 167–170 Silicon Valley, 4, 14, 15, 17, 45, 53, 54, 58 Siry, Darryl, 65, 73 60 Minutes, 66 S 60 model, 84 “skateboard” chassis, 134, 202 Skype, 41 Smart (Tesla car), 68 software startups, 54–55 SolarCity, 110–111, 164 solar power, 109–114 Sorbonne University, 66 South Africa, 25 SpaceX, 15, 16, 25, 28, 39, 66, 78, 100 Spiegel, Mark, 102–103 Stanford University, 4, 26, 27, 28, 121 startups, 41–43, 59, 62, 76 “stealth recalls,” 160–161 stock price, 89, 90, 93, 97, 100, 102–103 StockTwits, 98 Straubel, JB, 26, 28, 48 SunCube, 146–147 Superchargers, 109–119 SYNC, 194 T TACC (Traffic Aware Cruise Control), 125 Tama, 197 Tarpenning, Marc, 21–24, 27, 31, 37, 43, 113 Tea Party movement, 80–81 “Tesla Death Watch” (blog posts), 3 Tesla Energy Group, 68 Tesla Founders Blog, 50 Tesla Motors. see also specific headings and barriers to entry, 35, 56 branding of, 16–17, 18, 59–63, 225–234 and collisions, 127–133 concept of, 34–36 continuous improvement at, 58 culture of, 51–52, 60 detractors of, 102–108 as disruptive innovator, 195–197 EBITDA of, 215 and environmental issues, 112–113, 119 “factory-less” model of, 35–36 innovation by, 201–210 internal conflict at, 29–32 legacy of, 19 Model 3 introduced by, 8–10 personal approach to public relations, xii raising capital for, 44, 69–71, 85 “shaky ground” of, 4, 5 as startup, 2–3 stock price of, 89, 90, 93, 97, 100, 102–103 strategy of, 22 and Supercharger network, 109–119 and whistleblowers, xii Tesla Motors Club (TMC), 95–97 Teslarati, 100 “Tesla stare,” 60 “Tesla Suspension Breakage: It’s Not the Crime, It’s the Coverup” (blog post), 151 Thailand, 48, 218 Think Global, 11, 67 Thrun, Sebastian, 121 TMC (Tesla Motors Club), 95–97 Too Big to Fail, 91 Toyoda, Akio, 76 Toyoda, Sakichi, 57 Toyota, 184, 201. see also specific models auto sales, 11 contract with, 81, 83 electric vehicles of, 159–160 and 2008 financial crisis, 76–77 pragmatism of, 209 safety scandal, 149–151 Toyota Previa, 214 Toyota Production System (TPS), 56–60, 76–77, 142, 183 Toyota Way, 58, 77 TPS. see Toyota Production System Traction Avant, 193–194 trading volume, 89 Traffic Aware Cruise Control (TACC), 125 The Truth About Cars (TTAC) (blog), 1–3 Tse, Bernard, 67 turnarounds, financial, 83–87 Twitter, 41, 98, 104–108, 113, 152, 156, 217–220, 224, 236 tzero, 23–24, 26, 27, 31, 37 V Valor Equity Partners, 47 Vance, Ashlee, 38, 47, 66, 73, 84, 120–121, 137, 227–228 VantagePoint Capital Partners, 66 variable costs, 54 V8 engine, 62 Volkswagen, 11, 171, 203–205 W Wall Street Journal, 2, 18, 100, 129, 132, 168, 187 Waymo, 173–174 Web 2.0, 41 Weintraub, Seth, 97–98, 101 Wharton School of Business, 25 whistleblowers, xii Whitestar, 46–48, 51, 65, 67, 68, 73 Who Killed the Electric Car?


How to Work Without Losing Your Mind by Cate Sevilla

Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, emotional labour, gender pay gap, Girl Boss, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, imposter syndrome, job satisfaction, lockdown, microaggression, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, remote working, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Skype, tech bro, TED Talk, women in the workforce, work culture

People who had never worked from home before were suddenly doing it every day. People who previously had no idea what Zoom was were suddenly using it several times a day for important meetings (and the occasional pub quiz). Suddenly we were all that guy on the BBC whose wife and child burst into the room while he was Skyping a report on BBC News. Those of us who had previously been told that it was impossible for us to do our jobs remotely or part-time from home were shown that, well, that wasn’t exactly true. For all the parts of work that have changed, altered or shifted – there is one element that has stayed the same, and has often been amplified: STRESS.

Plus, once again, it’s making life easy for you – providing a contact number just in case you can’t find each other at the venue or whatever. I send a similar message before all my meetings now. The complicated etiquette of virtual meetings and video calls Whether it’s Zoom or Google Meetup, Skype or Microsoft Teams – taking part in a video call or ‘virtual meeting’ is more complicated than you might expect. If you work at a tech company or an international firm with remote workers, you were probably already very familiar with video meetings before coronavirus happened. However, the pandemic saw more of us using these apps for virtual meetings than ever before, and it became quite clear that the etiquette of how they should run was as fuzzy as the resolution of your colleagues’ webcams.


pages: 317 words: 89,825

No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings, Erin Meyer

Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, FedEx blackjack story, global village, hiring and firing, job-hopping, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, late fees, loose coupling, loss aversion, out of africa, performance metric, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, super pumped, tech worker, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, work culture

According to Adam, it was one of the greatest documentaries he’d ever seen: It follows this crazy story of a Colorado-based journalist, Bryan Fogel, who is also a cyclist and wants to run an experiment to see if he can dope himself, get away with it like Lance Armstrong did, and show the extreme progress the doping allows him to make in a bike race. Through a contact he reaches out to the head of Russia’s anti-doping program, this guy Rodchenkov, who agrees to help. They become Skype friends. But partway through Bryan’s experiment, Russia is accused of doping its Olympic athletes—and it’s Rodchenkov who’s been running that doping program (alongside his anti-doping program!). Rodchenkov flees Russia and hides out in Fogel’s house, afraid Putin is going to have him killed. You just can’t make up a story like that.

Then I wrap up by stating, “This is just my opinion, for whatever it is worth,” and “You can take it or leave it.” The elaborate dance is quite humorous from a Dutch person’s point of view . . . but it certainly gets the desired results! Ise’s words sum up the strategies Netflix learned for promoting candor as they opened offices around the world. When you are leading a global team, as you Skype with your employees in different cultures, your words will be magnified or minimized based on your listener’s cultural context. So you have to be aware. You have to be strategic. You have to be flexible. With a little information and a little finesse, you can modify the feedback to the person your speaking with in order to get the results that you need


pages: 326 words: 91,532

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything by Gottfried Leibbrandt, Natasha de Teran

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global pandemic, global reserve currency, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Irish bank strikes, Julian Assange, large denomination, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine readable, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Network effects, Northern Rock, off grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-industrial society, printed gun, QR code, RAND corporation, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Rishi Sunak, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tech billionaire, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, you are the product

Taavet and Kristo, two enterprising Estonians, were living in London in the late 2000s. Taavet worked for Skype and got paid in euros but needed pounds for his day-to-day living costs. Kristo earned in pounds but needed euros to pay his mortgage in Estonia. They both became frustrated with the high fees charged by their banks for transferring money back and forth between Estonia and the UK. And (just like my brother with me) they soon realised that they could avoid the banks by pooling their needs and wants with friends and family. They started doing just that. Taavet transferred his euros from Skype to pay Kristo’s mortgage and Kristo sent his pounds to Taavet to pay his London bills.


The Empowered Empath: A Simple Guide on Setting Boundaries, Controlling Your Emotions, and Making Life Easier by Judy Dyer

fear of failure, Skype

Working like this enables you to plan your own schedule, set your own rules, and take breaks at will when you need to recharge your batteries. Empaths prefer to be self-employed to avoid being overwhelmed by coworkers, managers, frequent meetings, and demanding schedules. If being self-employed is too risky for you, some businesses allow you to work from home. With advanced technology such as Skype, emails, text messages, and access to the internet, it is not always necessary to work in an office. So, you may be able to split your time during the week so that you are working from home for a few days. One important point to take into consideration is that you need to be careful not to become too isolated when working from home.


pages: 552 words: 168,518

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

Soon hundreds of volunteers around the world were using Ushahidi-Haiti to translate, categorize, and geo-locate urgent life-and-death text messages in real time. Many of the volunteers spent weeks on end on their laptops in a dimly lit school basement in Boston that Meier converted into a makeshift situation room. Although located some 1,640 miles from the scene, the volunteer crisis mappers used Skype to relay critical information about the location of potential survivors to search-and-rescue teams on the ground in Port-au-Prince. They responded to requests from the World Food Program and the aircraft carrier USS Vinson in the middle of the night. And to better link calls with specific GPS coordinates, they even got direct access to DigitalGlobe’s high-resolution satellite imagery and to the U.S.

After all, the car is not just a vehicle for moving around; it’s a place for work, learning, and entertainment with a series of software programs connected to a wireless network. Now imagine a car with a set of open APIs allowing thousands of programmers and niche businesses to create a cloud of applications for your car—from remote personal assistants to navigation and geospatial search applications to on-demand movies and music, and why not throw in mobile Skype for good measure. Optimizing Our Infrastructure with a Ubiquitous Data Grid A rich cloud of in-car services can do more than inform and entertain us; it could help optimize our entire transportation infrastructure. Accompanying your iTunes service, for example, would be an infinite number of applications that enable you to fundamentally change the way you use your car.

When Estonians regained independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991, they not only acquired new political freedoms, they inherited a mass of rubbish—thousands and thousands of tons of it scattered across illegal dumping sites around the country. When concerned citizens decided that the time had come to clean it up, they turned not to the government, but to tens of thousands of their peers. Using a combination of global positioning systems and Google Maps, two entrepreneurs (Skype guru Ahti Heinla and Microlink and Delfi founder Rainer Nõlvak) enlisted volunteers to plot the location of over ten thousand illegal dump sites, including detailed descriptions and photos. That, in itself, was ambitious. Phase II of the cleanup initiative was, by their own admission, rather outrageous: clean up all of the illegal sites in one day, using mass collaboration.


pages: 97 words: 28,524

Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life by Joshua Fields Millburn, Ryan Nicodemus

agricultural Revolution, price anchoring, Skype, young professional

Over the course of a year we met with each of these individuals face to face—all five of whom lived thousands of miles away—and learned from their experiences. We bought them coffee or lunch and offered to add value in any way we could. We took copious notes and thanked them for adding value to our lives. We stayed in contact with these guys via email, phone, Skype, social media, etc., establishing a stronger bond over time. After meeting them and learning from their experiences, it was clear to us what we needed to do to successfully turn our passions into our mission. That’s when we took action; that’s when we created our website and worked incredibly hard on adding value to other people’s lives through our writing and various other content.


pages: 370 words: 94,968

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive by Brian Christian

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Blue Ocean Strategy, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, l'esprit de l'escalier, language acquisition, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Menlo Park, operational security, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, starchitect, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Thales of Miletus, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

He replied by giving me the name of Philip Jackson, a professor at the University of Surrey, who is the one in charge of the logistics for this year’s Loebner Prize contest in Brighton, where it will be held under the auspices of the 2009 Interspeech conference on speech and communication science. I was able to get in touch via Skype with Professor Jackson, a young, smart guy with the distinct brand of harried enthusiasm that characterizes an overworked but fresh-faced academic. That and his charming Briticisms, like pronouncing “skeletal” so it’d rhyme with “a beetle”: I liked him immediately. He asked me about myself, and I explained that I’m a nonfiction writer of science and philosophy, specifically of the ways in which science and philosophy intersect with daily life, and that I’m fascinated by the idea of the Turing test and of the “Most Human Human.”

Evolution appears to have been willing to trade interhemispheric lags for a disproportionate increase in computational power. 10. High Surprisal One-Sided Conversations Eager to book my room in Brighton, I did some quick digging around online and found an intriguing (and intriguingly named) place, just a stone’s throw from the Turing test, called “Motel Schmotel.” I called them up via Skype. Now, I don’t know if it was the spotty connection, or the woman’s low speaking volume, or the English accent, or what, but I could barely understand a word of what she was saying, and immediately found myself hanging on to the flow of the conversation for dear life: ____tel. Presumably, she’s just said something like “Hello, Motel Schmotel.”


pages: 347 words: 97,721

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

But if, for example, a lung cancer diagnosis arising from the KRAS gene had 90 percent confidence, that would give a doctor a very different feeling than he or she would have about a 30 percent level diagnosis. The real-time nature of some decision contexts will preclude a reporting of the confidence of some decisions. In Google Translate or Skype Translator, for example, it won’t help much to know the confidence level for each word or phrase in a translation. In general, however, knowing and reporting the level of confidence for an automated answer or decision is an important step for smart machines. It will help us know when to trust these systems.

., 238, 248 Rudin, Cynthia, 193 Rumsfeld, Donald, 214 Russell, Stuart, 227–28 Sachs, Jeffrey, 228 Sadler-Smith, Eugene, 117–18 Safecast, 247 Saffo, Paul, 24 Salovey, Peter, 113, 116 Samasource, 168 Sand, Benjamin, 6 SAP, 133 SAS, 104, 132, 140, 141, 194 Saxena, Manoj, 45 Schneider National, 132, 147–48, 189–90, 196 Short Haul Optimizer, 147, 190, 191 Scientific Music Generator (SMUG), 126 “School of One,” 141 Science: The Endless Frontier (Bush), 248 Scott, David, 67 Scott, Rebecca, 162 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 6, 74 self-driving vehicles, 4, 51–52, 213–14, 244, 246 Sharp, Phillip, 209 Shaughnessy, Dan, 117 Shiller, Robert, 7 Simon, Herbert, 163 Singapore, 250 Singularity Is Near, The (Kurzweil), 36 Skype Translator, 56 smartphones, 53, 235, 239 “social license to operate,” 233 Spanish National Research Council, 54–55 Spielberg, Steven, 125 spreadsheets, 69–70 Standing, Guy, 241 Starner, Thad, 65 Stats Inc., 97 Steinberg, Dan, 124–25 Stepping Aside, 77 artisanal jobs, 119–21 augmentation to free people up, 121–24 characteristics of a candidate, 129 for financial planners and brokers, 87 how to build skills for, 129–30 incursion of machines into human attributes, 124–27 in insurance underwriting, 81 jobs with nonprogrammable skills, 109–12 learning “noncognitive” skills, 115–18 multiple intelligences and, 112–14 for teachers, 85 value of human involvement, 127–28 what it means, 108 where a candidate is likely found, 130 Stepping Forward, 77, 176–200 adding new sources of data, 196–97 broadening application of tools, 194–95 broadening the base of methods, 194 characteristics of a candidate, 199–200 consultants, 187–89 creating usability and transparency by business users, 192–94 data scientists, 179–80 embedding automation functions, 196 entrepreneurs, 185–87 examples, successful people, 179–89 for financial planners and brokers, 88 focusing on behavioral finance and economics, 198–99 how to build skills for, 200 in insurance underwriting, 83–84 internal automation leaders, 189–91 jobs, technical and nontechnical, 177–91 marketers, 183–85 number of jobs, 191–92 product managers, 182–83 programmers and IT professionals, 178 reporting and showing results, 195–96 researchers, 181–82 for teachers, 85–86 what it is, 176 where a candidate is likely found, 200 working on the math, 197–98 Stepping In, 77, 131–52 automation technologies and, 134–35 bright future for, 149–51 characteristics of a candidate, 151–52 common attributes of, 145–49 examples, successful people, 132, 134–35, 137–48 for financial planners and brokers, 97 having an aptitude for, 142–45 how to build skills for, 152 in insurance underwriting, 81–82 predecessors of, 132–34 purple people, 131, 133–34, 135, 147, 151 for teachers, 85 value provided by, 138–42 what it is, 131–32 what candidates are and aren’t, 135–38 where a candidate is likely found, 152 working with vendors and, 140–41 Stepping Narrowly, 77, 153–75 achieving mastery and, 162–66 augmentation and, 166–69, 173–74 building on your narrowness, 161–62 characteristics of a candidate, 174 education for, 232 examples, successful people, 153–54, 159–60, 162, 163, 164, 170, 172–73 for financial planners and brokers, 87–88 finding a specialty, 158–61 “hedgehog” thinker and, 171 how to build skills for, 175 individual psychology and, 169–71 in insurance underwriting, 82 “long tail” and, 157, 162 machine-unfriendly economics and, 155–58, 162 in medicine, 157 niche business, 153–54, 171–73 for teachers, 85 where a candidate is likely found, 175 Stepping Up, 76–77, 89–107, 155 automation decisions and, 93–95 big-picture perspective, 98–100 building and ecosystem, 100–102 careful work design for automated business functions, 103–4 characteristics of a candidate, 106 creating a balance between computer-based and human skills, 105–6 examples, successful people, 89–91, 95–98 for financial planners and brokers, 86–87 in financial sector, 92–93 how to build skills for, 106–7 in insurance underwriting, 80 in marketing, 93 staying close, but moving on and, 102–3 for teachers, 84–85 what it is, 91–93 where a candidate is likely found, 107 Stewart, Martha, 111 Summers, Larry, 95, 227 Suncor, 205 Surrogates (film), 125 Sutton, Bob, 170–71 Sweetwood, Adele, 104 taste, augmentation and, 122 TaxCut, 22 tax preparation, 22, 67–68 Tegmark, Max, 243–44, 247 Telefónica’s O2, 49 Teradata, 43 Terminator films, 65 Tesla, 213, 246 Thiel, Peter, 243 Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman), 236 Thinking for a Living (Davenport), 5 This, Herve, 164 Thompson, Derek, 242 Tibco, 194 Time magazine, AI cover and article, 36 TopCoder, 168 Torrence, Travis, 132, 147–48, 189, 190 Tourville, Lisa, 83–84, 137 TurboTax, 22, 67–68 “12 Risks That Threaten Human Civilization” (Armstrong), 249 2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 76, 245 Udacity, 178 UltraTax, 22 UnitedHealthCare, 83 University of California, Berkeley, 51 University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, 115 “Unusual and Highly Specialized Practice Areas” (Bohrer), 159 UPS automated driver routing algorithm (ORION), 196 USAA, 87–88 U.S.


pages: 572 words: 94,002

Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy by David Sawyer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, beat the dealer, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Cal Newport, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, Desert Island Discs, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, financial independence, follow your passion, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, index card, index fund, invention of the wheel, John Bogle, knowledge worker, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive income, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart meter, Snapchat, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, The 4% rule, Tim Cook: Apple, Vanguard fund, William Bengen, work culture , Y Combinator

This new hyper-connected world has had profound effects on the world of work, too. There’s an online tool for everything. Systems, services and software that once were the domain of large companies and organisations are now available to the one-man band (strumming their song in a coffee shop) for nothing. There’s Skype, the cloud, everywhere-wifi and 4G. There is no need for us to be chained to our desks, yet the way we work is still catching up. Flexible working is trumpeted but not implemented. All this change is hard to process; it takes generations. Change will come and you better be ready Change will transform what employers look for in their recruits.

First up, influencer marketing expert Scott (Guthrie). I’ve met Scott only once, yet his friendship has come to mean a great deal to me. We’ve both worked in the PR industry for more years than we care to remember. And we both “went digital” at pretty much the same time, starting in 2013; him in Sydney, me in Glasgow. Over the last two years, we’ve skyped (often glass in hand) every month. Scott has been invaluable in helping loosen tight knots in RESET’s structure, and listening. Love you mate. Second, the rest of my alpha readers (people who read your shitty first draft out of kindness and obligation). What a stellar band they’ve formed. There’s Cousin Paul (Thompson) on meaning, purpose and so much more; Jane (Cumming) the PR guru on grammar; big third sector cheese Ian (Williams) on intro-cutting and gentle persuasion; Neal (Gibson) the ultramarathoner on inadvertent sexism (mine not his); Kenny (Barr) the top newsman on meeting me to say how fantastic he thought it was; Rob (Sykes) the accountant on intro-hatred and questioning the maths; Peter (Donelan) the Tanzanian shoulder-dwelling devil, who made me think in a writerly fashion about such elevated topics as the narrator’s voice; Steve (Murray) on monthly trips to the best front-room-bar in the world (“Matthew’s”), and well-meant but offensive casual remarks (again, mine, not his); and sister-in-law Robyn (Maguire) who demanded I remove that bizarre comment about cats.


pages: 340 words: 97,723

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

Microsoft, which at one point published industry-leading research on computer vision, machine reading comprehension, and natural language processing, never successfully gained internal alignment and momentum on how to compete in AI. Now the company is downsizing and primarily supplying support to its legacy systems: what’s left of its original Azure cloud, SharePoint, Skype, and Outlook. While IBM’s Watson found partners and clients, IBM’s cloud service, which had long been a distant third to Amazon and Microsoft, shrunk once Google began offering competitive rates for both government and big corporations. Its other business units—such as data centers, storage, and semiconductors—have found it impossible to compete against companies in Taiwan, which are now the world’s largest suppliers.

See also Future and AI, catastrophic scenario of; Future and AI, optimistic scenario of; Future and AI, pragmatic scenario of Schmidt, Eric, 211–212 Self-driving taxi services, catastrophic scenario of future and: Amazon riders, 218–219; Google riders, 219 SenseTime, 5 Sentinel AIs, need for, 241 Shannon, Claude, 24, 25, 29, 31; “A Symbolic Analysis of Switching Relay Circuits,” 24. See also Dartmouth Workshop SharePoint, 215 Shaw, Cliff, 30. See also Dartmouth Workshop Shopping, brick-and-mortar store: in optimistic scenario of future, 162 Simon, Herbert, 30, 34; Logic Theorist program, 30, 34. See also Dartmouth Workshop Siri, 13, 43, 119 Skype, 215 Smart city pilot programs: in optimistic scenario of future, 168, 176 Smart glasses: Apple, 161; Applezon, 191; in catastrophic scenario of future, 221; Google, 191; in pragmatic scenario of future, 191, 192 Smartphones: Apple, 94; in pragmatic scenario of future, 191 Social Credit Score system, 6, 80, 82, 152, 154, 209; in Rongcheng, 81; tradeoffs for desirable, 211 Socrates, 17 Sorenson, Arne, 75 South China Morning Post, 69–70 Southern, Taryn, 15 SpaceX, 87 Splinternets, 83; pragmatic scenario of future and, 198 Spy birds, 77–78 Stanford, 60, 63; Artificial Intelligence Lab, 65 Stasis: among U.S. policymakers and think tanks, 213; cigarette smoking danger and, 213; climate change and, 213 Step reckoner, 21, 24 Subscription model, smart wearables and tools: in pragmatic scenario of future, 192–193 Suleyman, Mustafa, 43, 117 Summit supercomputer, 146 Sunstein, Cass, 142 Supercomputers, 146 Surveillance capitalism, 95 Sweeney, Latanya, 113–114, 122 Syllogistic logic, Aristotle and, 18 Synthetic data, 182 Tanzania, 83, 200, 210 Taobao, 68–69 Technology, deployment of: need for technical simulations and risk mapping before, 241–242 Tencent, 3, 5, 9, 49, 65, 67, 70–71, 96, 158; cloud service, 71; conversational interfaces, 76; corporate slogan, 70; digital assistant, 71; facial and object recognition lab, 71; healthcare partnerships, 71, 76; management philosophy, 100; market value, 71; mobile payment system, 71, 186; movie studio, 71; original product, 70; pharmaceutical company investments, 71 Tencent Pictures, 71 Tenpay, 71, 186 Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), 91 TensorFlow, 91, 92, 139 TensorFlow Object Detection API, 91 TensorFlow-GAN, 91 Terminator, The: Skynet, 2 Tesla, BAT investment in, 72 Thinking machines, 23, 24, 25, 35, 36, 50–51, 60, 98, 106, 127, 135, 138, 149, 150, 154; ceding control to, 131; computers as, 22; first, 145; generally intelligent, 159, 189 Thousand Talents Plan, 84–85 Tiān Māo, 13 Tianhe-1 supercomputer, 146 Tinsley, Marlon, 39; versus CHINOOK, 39 Transparency: among G-MAFIA in catastrophic scenario of future, 208; G-MAFIA Coalition adoption of as core value in optimistic scenario of future, 157; in pragmatic scenario of future, 188.


pages: 379 words: 99,340

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Ayatollah Khomeini, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Burning Man, business cycle, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, David Graeber, death of newspapers, disinformation, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, job-hopping, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Port of Oakland, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skype, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, too big to fail, traveling salesman, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional

If, after all these admissions, you were to ask me why you should read on, I would respond: because the world I’ll describe is probably very different from the one you think you’re living in. The problem is that there are so many superficially dazzling aspects of the information tsunami. When I sit in my study in Vienna, Virginia, and Skype with someone in Beirut, Lebanon – that’s dazzling. It feels remarkable even as I’m doing it. So, naturally enough, attention has focused on the capabilities of digital platforms like Skype, Facebook, and Google, on the proliferation of communication and collaboration around the globe, or on the unprecedented growth in the volume of information. I understand the fascination – my own journey started with these concerns.


pages: 323 words: 95,939

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

I had neglected my email for the fourteen hours it took to get from outside New York to outside Berlin, and there were already second and third pings in the inbox from people wondering why they hadn’t yet received a reply to their initial missives. (Teaches me right for answering emails so quickly and creating unrealistic expectations.) Not that I hadn’t made a valiant effort to connect while in transit. The plane had some sort of WiFi while we were over land, but someone kept trying to make Skype calls, which crashed all the passengers’ connections. After the flight attendant restarted the system for the third time, I gave up, took a pill, and fell asleep to the movie. I tried again from my iPhone at the airport but couldn’t log on. Now that I was at the hotel with plug-in power, I knew I’d have an easier time catching up with all that was waiting for me.

See consumers short forever. See overwinding SimCity (game), 62 Simmons, Bill, 41 simplification, 220, 247 The Simpsons (TV show), 23, 25–26, 28 simulations, digiphrenia and, 84 singularity, 3, 8, 252, 253, 254, 256, 258, 260, 263 situation comedies, 30 skaters, 132–33 Skype, 70 Slavin, Kevin, 179–80 sleep, polyplastic, 95 smart phones, 83, 84, 99, 211 Smith, Adam, 226 Smith, Zadie, 34 soap operas, 33 social games, 62–63 social interaction: digiphrenia and, 85, 96, 109; overwinding and, 169, 184; television and, 24 social issues, games and, 63–64 social media/networks: fractalnoia and, 199, 204, 209, 211, 214, 215, 216–17; narrative collapse and, 64.


pages: 370 words: 97,138

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

The future of Solar System exploration may lie in telepresence, a set of technologies that allow a person to feel that he or she is in a remote location. Videoconferencing is one familiar and simple form of this technology. The market for projecting images and sound to connect meeting participants from around the world is growing 20 percent a year and is worth nearly $5 billion. Skype video calls now account for a third of all international calls, a staggering 200 billion minutes a year. Other examples include using robots with sonar to explore the ocean floor or robots with infrared sensors to explore caves. The robot provides the “eyes and ears” for an operator who doesn’t have to leave the comfort of an office or home.

., 239 Los Angeles Times, 71 Losing My Virginity (Branson), 86, 87 Louis IX, king of France, 23 Louis XVI, king of France, 68 Lovelock, James, 286 Lowell, Percival, 163–64 Lucian of Samosata, 20 Lucretius, 18–19 Luna program, 50–51 Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, 156 Lunokhod rover, 143 Lynx rocket plane, 101 M5 fiber, 161 McAuliffe, Christa, 55, 74 Mack 3 Blackbird, 69 McKay, Chris, 173 McLellan, William, 283 magnetic implants, 207 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), 190 magnetic sails, 186, 223 magnitude of time, 248–50, 249 Manhattan Project, 36, 221 Manifest Destiny, applied to space, 146–47, 199 Manned Habitat Unit, 169 many worlds concept, 17–20, 17, 49, 267 Mao Zedong, 141 Marconi, Guglielmo, 237 Mariner 2, 51 Mariner 4, 164 Marino, Lori, 190 Marriott hotels, 145 Mars, 28, 237, 270 challenges of travel to, 166–70 distance from Earth to, 50, 148, 166 Earth compared to, 171–72, 216 establishing a colony on, 166–71, 169, 192, 195, 200–201, 203, 214, 248 evidence of water on, 124–25, 163–66, 165, 173 fly-bys of, 51, 170 imaginative perceptions of, 163–65 latency on, 178 map of, 163 obstacles to exploration of, 66–67, 148 one-way journey to, 166, 170–71, 200 as potentially habitable, 124–25, 163, 165–66, 171, 172–74, 234, 278 privately funded missions to, 170–71 probes to, 40, 51, 52, 164–65, 176, 246 projected exploration of, 94–98, 101, 104, 115, 119, 157, 161, 163–74, 178, 181, 182 property rights on, 145, 198–99 sex and reproduction on, 200 simulated journey to, 169–70 soil of, 170 staging points for, 161 terraforming of, 172–74, 182, 216, 227 tests for life on, 52 Mars Direct, 169 Mars500 mission, 169 Mars One, 170–71, 198–201 Mars Society, 166 Mars 3 lander, 51 Masai people, 120 Massachusetts General Hospital, 250 Masson-Zwaan, Tanja, 199 mathematics, 19 as universal language, 236–37 Matrix, The, 260 matter, manipulation of, 258 matter-antimatter annihilation, 220, 220, 221–22 Mavroidis, Constantinos, 182 Max-Q (maximum aerodynamic stress), 46 Maxwell, James Clerk, 183 Mayor, Michel, 126–28, 133 medicine: challenges and innovation in, 92–93, 263 cyborgs in, 205 medicine (continued) as lacking in space, 200 in life extension, 259 nanotechnology in, 225, 259 robots in, 180, 181, 182, 205 mediocrity, principle of, 261 Mendez, Abel, 278 mental models, 13–17, 18–19 Mercury: orbit of, 126, 215 property rights on, 145 as uninhabitable, 124 mercury poisoning, 118 Mercury program, 41, 42, 71, 74, 272 meta-intelligence, 94 meteorites, 152, 160, 160, 164, 195 methane, 52–53, 125, 132, 278 as biomarker, 217–18 methanogens, 217 “Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, A” (Goddard), 30, 31 Methuselah, 131 mice, in scientific research, 48–49, 250–51 microbes, microbial life, 97–98, 173, 174, 217, 241, 246, 286 habitable environments for, 122–25, 165–66, 186 microcephaly, 203 microgravity, 115 microsatellites, 90 Microsoft, 84, 188 microwaves: beaming of, 223–24 signals, 187 Microwave Sciences, 223 Middle East, population dispersion into, 8, 118 migration: early human population dispersion through, 5–9, 9, 15, 19 motivation for, 9–12, 11 military: covert projects of, 69–72 Eisenhower’s caveat about, 79 in Internet development, 77, 78–79 nanotechnology in, 180–81, 225 in rocket development, 30, 32–39, 55–56, 71 in space programs, 73, 76, 79, 144, 153 Milky Way galaxy, 227, 240, 253, 263, 270 ancient Greek concept of, 18 Drake equation for detectable life in, 188, 233–35 Earth-like exoplanets in, 129–33, 233, 291 formation and age of, 235 size of, 242 Millis, Marc, 290 mind control, 245 mind uploading, 259 miniaturization, see nanotechnology minimum viable population, 201, 251 mining: of asteroids, 155–56, 182, 214 of Enceladus, 227 on Moon, 214 by robots, 178, 182 Minsky, Marvin, 177, 179 MirCorp, 75 mirrors, 173 Mir Space Station, 75, 115, 167–68 Miss Baker (monkey), 47–48, 48 Mission Control, 43, 100, 158, 269 MIT, 38, 77, 90, 141, 226, 257 mitochondrial DNA, 6, 9 Mittelwerk factory, 33, 35 Mojave Desert, 71, 82, 83 population adaptation to heat in, 118–19 molecules, in nanotechnology, 151 Mongols, 23, 24 monkeys, in space research, 47–48, 48 Montgolfier brothers, 68 Moon: age of, 50 ancient Greek concept of, 18 in asteroid capture, 156 distance from Earth to, 49–50, 150, 166, 267 first animals on, 49 first man on, 71, 158 latency on, 178 lunar base proposed for, 157–63, 158, 160, 195, 214, 248 manned landings on, 44–45, 49–50, 54, 56, 63, 71, 84, 99, 104, 108, 143, 157, 158, 176, 219, 270, 272 obstacles to exploration of, 66 orbit of, 25 probes to, 40, 51, 129, 140, 143 projected missions to, 92, 143, 157–63, 166, 214, 275 property rights on, 145–47, 198–99 proposed commercial flights to, 102 in science fiction, 20, 26 soil of, 159, 160, 162 as staging point for Mars, 161 staging points for, 148 telescopic views of, 31, 49–50 as uninhabitable, 124, 166 US commitment to reach, 41–45 Moon Treaty (1979), 146 Moon Treaty, UN (1984), 279 Moore, John, 203 Moravec, 259–60 Morgan, Barbara, 74 Morrison, Philip, 187, 239 Mosaic web browser, 79 Moses, 148 motion, Newton’s laws of, 25, 67–68 multistage rockets, 29 multiverse, 252–57, 255 Musk, Elon, 94–98, 97, 100–101, 112–13, 148, 205 mutation, 6–7 cosmic rays and, 204 7R, 10–12, 11, 15 mutually assured destruction, 42 Mylar, 184, 225 N1/L3 rocket, 44, 54 nanobots, 179–82, 181, 224–28 NanoSail-D, 184, 185 nanosponges, 180 nanotechnology, 151–52, 179–82, 208, 214, 245, 280, 283 projected future of, 257–59 see also nanobots National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 83, 90, 96, 97–98, 114, 116–17, 128, 144, 153, 156, 176, 178, 182, 184–85, 185, 195, 200, 205, 206, 216, 224, 226, 271, 275, 280, 290 and Air Force, 71 artistic depiction of space colonies by, 196, 196 budget of, 39, 42, 43, 49, 54, 64, 75, 99, 104, 140, 144, 158, 166, 188, 238, 270, 272, 284 cut back of, 45, 49, 54, 188 formation of, 38–39, 145, 269 private and commercial collaboration with, 99–102, 104 revival of, 103–5 space program of, 51, 55–56, 71–76, 92, 157–58, 285–86 stagnation of, 63–67, 141, 147, 166 National Geographic Society, 7, 265 National Radio Astronomy Observatory, 187–88 National Science Foundation (NSF), 78–79 Native Americans, 118 naturalness, 256 natural selection, 6, 16, 123, 164, 251, 291 Nature, 187 Naval Research lab, 37 Navy, US: Bureau of Aeronautics, 30 in rocket development, 36–37 Nayr, Ernst, 238 Nazis, 48 Propaganda Ministry of, 32 von Braun and, 32–34, 141, 269 NBC, 75 Nedelin, Mitrofan, 43 “needle in a haystack” problem, 188–89, 242–43 “Nell” (rocket), 29 Neptune, 127, 131, 225 as uninhabitable, 125 Nergal, 163 Netscape, 80 New Mexico, 88, 88, 105 Newton, Isaac, 24–25, 25, 30, 67–68, 110, 262, 267 New York Times, 30, 94 Nicholas, Henry, 214 Niven, Larry, 198, 253 Nixon, Richard, 108, 167 Nobel Prize, 126, 180, 214 nomad planets, 128 Noonan, James, 266 nuclear fission, 220, 220, 221 nuclear fusion, 110, 161–62, 220, 221, 221, 222 nuclear reactors, 224 nuclear weapons, 36, 42, 78, 129, 146, 197–98, 222, 234–35, 244, 245, 246, 286 Nuremberg Chronicles, 17 Nyberg, Karen, 200 Obama, Barack, 104 Oberth, Hermann, 28, 31–32, 36, 268 oceans: acidification of, 195 sealed ecosystem proposed for, 197 Oculus Rift, 176 Ohio, astronauts from, 74 Okuda, Michael, 228 Olsen, Ken, 213 100 Year Starship project, 224 100 Year Starship Symposium, 229 101955 Bennu (asteroid), 156 O’Neill, Gerard, 196, 251–52 Opportunity rover, 165 optical SETI, 190, 243 Orbital Sciences Corporation, 100–101, 275 orbits: concept of, 25 geostationary, 149–50, 150 legislation on, 146 low Earth, 49, 54, 63, 70–71, 70, 74–75, 97, 100, 110, 113–14, 151, 155, 184 manned, 40–41, 141–42 staging points from, 148 orcas, 190 Orion spacecraft, 104 Orteig, Raymond, 90 Orteig Prize, 90–91 Orwell, George, 35 OSIRIS-REx, 156 Outer Space Treaty (1967), 145–47, 198–99 “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking” (Clarke), 201 oxygen, 156, 159, 161, 170, 172, 173–74, 182, 193–95, 214 Oymyakon, Siberia, population adaptation to cold in, 119–20 ozone, as biomarker, 217 Pacific Ocean, 9, 224 Pac-Man, 175 Page, Larry, 92 Paine, Thomas, 167 Pale Blue Dot (Sagan), 121 “Pale Blue Dot,” Earth as, 53, 118–22, 121, 130 Paperclip, Operation, 141 parabolic flight, 93 paradox, as term, 241 Paratrechina longicornis (crazy ant), 193 Parkinson’s disease, 202–3 particle physics, standard model of, 256 Pascal, Blaise, 120 Pauley, Phil, 196–97 PayPal, 95, 97 Pensées (Pascal), 120 People’s Daily, 162 People’s Liberation Army, 144 Pericles, 18 Pettit, Don, 100, 273 phenotype, 6 philanthropy, 95 PhoneSat, 185 photons, 183, 186 in teleportation, 229, 230, 231 photosynthesis, as biomarker, 217 pigs, 250 Pinker, Steven, 16 Pioneer probes, 50, 51–52 piracy, 24 Pitcairn Island, 202 planetary engineering, 172 Planetary Resources, 156 planetary science, 51–52, 176 Planetary Society, 184 planets: exploration of, 49–53 formation of, 156 plate techtonics, 132, 241 play, imagination in, 10, 14 pluralism, 17–20, 17, 49 plutonium, 66 poetry, space, 272–73 politics, space exploration and, 63–64, 104, 141, 214, 238 Polyakov, Valeri, 115, 167–68 population bottleneck, 201–2, 287 Poynter, Jane, 193 Princess of Mars, A (Burroughs), 164 Principia (Newton), 25 Project Orion, 221, 221 Project Ozma, 187–88, 237, 253 prokaryotes, 172 property rights, in space, 145–47, 198 Proton rockets, 65, 113 proton scoop, 222–23 Proxmire, William, 238 Puerto Rico, 239, 243 pulsar, 131 Pythagorean Theorem, 238 Qian Xuesen, 141 Qi Jiguang, 24 Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize, 92 quantum entanglement, 230–32, 230 quantum genesis, 255 quantum mechanics, 258 quantum teleportation, 230–32, 230 quantum theory, 189 qubits, 230 Queloz, Didier, 126–28, 133 R-7 rocket, 37 R-16 rocket, 43 radiation, infrared, 109, 253–54, 254 radioactivity, as energy source, 124, 181 radio waves, 66, 187, 189, 242 ramjets, 222–23 RAND Corporation, 222 Rare Earth hypothesis, 241 RCS Energia, 106 RD-180 engine, 72 Reagan, Ronald, administration of, 167, 271 reality TV, 75, 171, 214, 282 “Realm of Fear,” 229 reasoning, human capacity for, 13–17, 18–19 red dwarfs, 131 Red Mars (Stanley), 174 Red Scare, 141 Redstone rocket, 36–37, 71 reindeer, 119–20 remote sensing, 175–91, 224 RepRap Project, 227 reproduction, sexual, 6, 172 Ride, Sally, 74 “Right Stuff,” as term, 71, 114 Right Stuff, The (Wolfe), 272 Ringworld series (Niven), 253 risk: as basic to human nature, 9, 262 genetic factor in, 10–12 of living on Mars, 167–70 in pushing human limits, 120 of space tourism, 102, 105–9, 155 of space travel, 42–43, 55–56, 56, 106–9, 152–53 Robinson, Kim Stanley, 174 robonaut project, 179 robots, robotics: as aids to humans, 249, 250 in asteroid redirection, 104 commercial, 178 ethical issues of, 179 nanotechnology in, 179–82, 181 remote control of, 177–78 remote sensing through, 176 self-assembly and self-replication by, 226–28, 258, 259 in spacecraft, 50, 100, 100 space exploration by, 53–57, 66, 98, 133, 161, 177–79, 179, 208, 224–28 see also cyborgs; nanobots Rocketdyne, 112 rocket equation, 27, 53, 72–73, 110–11, 111, 148, 220, 268 rocket fuel, 110–13, 148, 156, 159, 161 comparison of efficiency of, 219–24 Rocket Performance Calculator, 222 rockets: alternatives to, 148–53 “bible” of, 267 challenges in launching of, 43–44, 46–49, 106, 107, 111–12, 148 comparison of US and Soviet, 44 cost of, 112–13, 113 developing technology of, 21–39, 43, 101, 103, 112–13, 183, 262 fuel for, 110–13, 148, 156, 159, 161, 220–21 launched from planes, 84 liquid-fueled, 28–29, 29 physics and function of, 110–14 proposed energy technologies for, 220–24 reusable, 101, 103, 111, 112, 113 solar sails compared to, 183 as term, 23 visionaries in development of, 26–30, 94 in warfare, 22–24, 30, 32–34 see also specific rockets “Rockets to the Planets in Space, The” (Oberth), 28 Rogers Commission, 271 Rohrabacher, Dana, 284 Rome, ancient, 18, 67, 163 Rovekamp, Roger, 207 rovers, 66–67, 92, 125, 140, 143, 158, 165, 167 nanotechnology in, 181–82 remote sensing through, 176 Rozier, Jean-François de, 68 RP-1 kerosine, 110 RS-25 rocket, 112 Russia, 23, 26–27, 149, 178 space program of, 37, 65–66, 72, 75, 84, 91, 104, 106, 107–8, 113, 114, 140, 143, 168, 184, 195, 200, 271 space tourism by, 75, 102 tensions between US and, 72 see also Soviet Union Russian Revolution, 27, 47 Russian Space Agency, 102 Rutan, Burt, 72, 82–86, 85, 88, 88, 89, 91, 97–98, 105–6, 214 Rutan, Dick, 83–84 Rutan Aircraft Factory, 83 Saberhagen, Fred, 177, 259 Sagan, Carl, 53, 121–22, 121, 176–77, 184, 198, 234–35, 238, 240 Sahakian, Barbara, 98 Sahara Desert, 238 sails: solar, 183–86, 185 wind-driven, 67–68, 183, 262 Salyut space station, 54, 108 satellites: artificial Earth, 36–39, 37, 40, 65, 71, 106 commercial, 96, 105 communications, 101, 142, 153 in energy capture, 253 geostationary, 149 GPS, 144 launching of, 154, 154 miniature, 90, 184–85 Saturn: moon of, 125, 227 probes to, 52–53 as uninhabitable, 125 Saturn V rocket, 43, 44, 46, 54, 83, 104, 111, 113, 113, 166 Scaled Composites, 83, 89 science fiction, 192, 196, 222, 223, 239, 250, 253 aliens in, 186–87 in film, 28, 204 Mars in, 164, 174 roots of, 20 technologies of, 228–32, 259 see also specific authors and works scientific method, 213 Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), 187–90, 234, 239, 254 evolution and technology of, 237–39, 242–43, 242 lack of signals detected by, 236–37, 240–44 new paradigms for, 258 “Searching for Interstellar Communications” (Cocconi and Morrison), 187 sea travel: early human migration through, 8, 9 exploration by, 109, 262 propulsion in, 67–68 self-replication, 226–28, 258, 259 Senate, US, Armed Services Preparedness Committee of, 39 SETI Institute, 188 78–6 (pig), 250 sex: promiscuous, 12 in reproduction, 6, 172 in space, 200, 214 Shackleton Energy Company, 161 Shane, Scott, 98 Shatner, William, 88–89 Shelley, Mary, 206 Shenlong (“Divine Dragon”), 145 Shenzhou 10, 142–43 Shepard, Alan, 41, 84 Shostak, Seth, 243 Siberia, 65, 119–20, 238 population dispersion into, 8, 118, 218 Sidereal Messenger, The (Galileo), 270 Siemienowicz, Kazimierz, 267 Simonyi, Charles, 75 Sims, 175 simulation: infinite regression in, 261 living in, 257–62 simulation hypothesis, 261 Sinatra, Frank, 45 singularity, 207 in origin of cosmos, 255 and simulation, 257–62 technological, 258–59 Singularity University, 94, 259 Skylab space station, 54, 116 Skype video, 176 smart motes, 181, 225 smartphones, 92, 185 Smithsonian Institution, 30, 81 Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, 85, 91, 271 Snow Crash (Stephenson), 103 Snowden, Edward, 178 social media, 195 Sojourner rover, 165 SolarCity, 96–97 solar flares, 167 solar power, 96, 181, 183–86 solar sails, solar sailing, 183–86, 185, 223, 225, 227 Solar System: discovery of first planet beyond, 126–27 edge of, 50, 53, 121 formation of, 156 habitability potential in, 122, 124–26 latency variations in, 178 probes into, 51–52, 66, 177, 185–86, 208, 270 projected travel within, 248–49, 263 property rights in, 145–47, 198 worlds beyond, 126–29, 156, 208, 215, 250, 263 solar wind, 162, 223 sound barrier, breaking of, 69, 71 South America, 11, 202, 218 Soviet Union, 30, 34, 37, 141 fall of, 47, 65, 75, 197, 271–72 rocket development in, 35–39 space program failures and losses of, 43, 47, 50–51, 54, 269 space program of, 37–39, 40–43, 141, 149, 237, 271 Soyuz spacecraft, 43, 55, 75, 84, 91, 102, 106, 113, 143 crash of, 107–8 space: civilians in, 55, 74 civilian vs. military control of, 37–39, 69–71, 79, 153 commercialization of, 55, 63, 73–76, 79–80, 88–89, 92, 97, 99–109, 100, 110, 147, 153–56, 154, 199, 214, 249, 275 debris in, 144, 152 first American in, 41 first man in, 40–41, 41 first women in, 40, 74 as infinite, 18, 19, 22 as inhospitable to human beings, 53–54, 114–17, 121 legislation on, 39, 78, 90, 144, 145–47, 198–200 living in, 192–208 “living off the land” in, 166, 200 peaceful exploration of, 39 potential for human habitabilty in, 123 prototype for sealed ecosystem in, 192–97 Space Act (1958), 39, 90 Space Adventures, 102, 275 space colonization: challenges of, 197–201 cyborgs in, 204–8 evolutionary diversion in, 201–4 legal issues in, 198–200 of Mars, 166–71, 169, 192, 195, 203 off-Earth human beings in, 215, 250–51 prototype experiments for, 192–97 space elevators, 27, 148–53, 150, 160–61, 185, 280 “Space Exploration via Telepresence,” 178 Spaceflight Society, 28 space hotels, 102–3 Space Launch System (SLS), 104 space mining, 155–56, 161–62 “Space Oddity,” 142 spaceplanes, 71–72, 85, 144 Spaceport America, 1–6, 105 Space Race, 35–39, 37, 40–43, 50, 55, 139 SpaceShipOne, 72, 85, 85, 88–89, 88, 91 SpaceShipTwo, 88, 101, 105 Space Shuttle, 45, 46, 49, 64, 72, 84, 85, 111–13, 112, 159, 167, 194, 219–20, 222, 275 disasters of, 55–56, 56, 74–75, 107, 111–13 final flight of, 271 limitations of, 55–56, 64–65 as reusable vehicle, 54–55 space sickness, 114 spacesuits, 89, 182, 195–96 space-time, 255, 255 manipulation of, 258 space tourism, 63, 73, 75–76, 79–80, 88–89, 91, 101–3, 154, 170, 214 celebrities in, 88, 101–2 revenue from, 154–55, 155 risks of, 102, 105–9, 155 rules for, 105 space travel: beyond Solar System, see interstellar travel bureaucracy of, 105–10, 271 cost of, 39, 42, 45, 49, 54, 55, 66, 75, 81–82, 91, 112–14, 113, 139–49, 153, 155–56, 158–59, 161, 166, 179, 183, 198, 214, 217, 222, 224–26, 252, 270, 275, 284 early attempts at, 21–22, 22 effect of rocket equation in, see rocket equation entrepreneurs of, 81–98 erroneous predictions about, 214 failures and disasters in, 21–22, 22, 38, 43, 47, 50–51, 54–56, 56, 63–64, 68, 72, 74–75, 101, 102, 107, 142, 184, 269, 271, 275 fatality rate of, 107–9 fictional vignettes of, 1–4, 59–62, 135–38, 209–12 Internet compared to, 76–80, 77, 80 life extension for, 250–51 lifetimes lived in, 251 living conditions in, 114–17 new business model for, 99–105 Newton’s theories as basis of, 25 obstacles to, 21, 63, 66–67, 105–109 space travel (continued) as part of simulation, 261–62 public engagement in, 45, 73, 85, 93, 162, 177, 217 remote sensing vs., 175–91 risks of, 43–44, 83, 89, 93, 105–9 speculation on future of, 76–80, 133, 213–32, 248–52 suborbital, 84 telescopic observation vs., 49–50 visionaries of, 26–39, 80, 94, 109 SpaceX, 96, 97, 100–103, 113–14, 275 SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, 96, 100, 100, 102, 170 special theory of relativity, 228, 231 specific impulse, 220 spectroscopy, 127, 165, 176 spectrum analyzer, 237 Speer, Albert, 34 Spielberg, Steven, 238 Spirit of St.


pages: 400 words: 94,847

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science by Michael Nielsen

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dark matter, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Higgs boson, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, means of production, medical residency, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, P vs NP, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, social intelligence, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, University of East Anglia, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler

Body language, facial expression, tone of voice, and regular informal contact are all tremendously important to effective collaboration, and cannot be replaced. With people you like, in-person conversation is enjoyable and stimulating, and online collaboration loses something by contrast. Of course, this loss is gradually being offset by more expressive collaborative technologies—a tool such as Skype video chat is remarkably effective as a way to collaborate. Over the longer run ideas such as virtual worlds and augmented reality may even make online contact better than face-to-face contact. Still, today the online experience of direct person-to-person collaboration lacks much of the richness of offline collaboration.

See designed serendipity sex workers, training for technology jobs, 22 Shallows, The (Carr), 20 shared data. See data sharing shared praxis, 75–77, 78–82, 198 Sheppard, Alice, 133, 135 Shirky, Clay, 153, 154, 219 signaling. See scoring Simon, Herbert, 217, 223 Sinclair, Cameron, 46 Singh, Simon, 165–67 Skilling, Jeffrey, 165 Skunk Works, 36 Skype video chat, 41 sky surveys, 98 of Hipparchus, 104 of Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, 107, 151 of Palomar Observatory, 102 of Ptolemy, 98, 102, 104. See also Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Slashdot, 163 Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), 96–105 data-driven intelligence and, 112, 114 data sharing by, 102–5, 108–10, 181 data web and, 111 Galaxy Zoo’s use of, 138, 139, 140 new pattern of discovery and, 106–7 potential of networked science and, 175 Schawinski’s use of, 134 spectra of galaxies in, 138 Sloan Great Wall, 97, 99, 100, 112, 116 small contributions, 33, 48, 63–64, 227.


pages: 377 words: 97,144

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World by James D. Miller

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, barriers to entry, brain emulation, cloud computing, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Netflix Prize, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Norman Macrae, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, placebo effect, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, supervolcano, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, twin studies, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture

Donated $1.1 million to the Institute;91 •Ray Kurzweil—famed investor and Singularity writer; •Justin Rattner—Intel’s chief technology officer; •Eric Drexler—the father of nanotechnology; •Peter Norvig—Director of Research at Google; •Aubrey de Grey—leading longevity researcher; •Stephen Wolfram—developer of the computation platform Mathematica; and •Jaan Tallinn—founding engineer of Skype and self-made tech decamillionaire who donated $100,000.92 I also spoke on the economics of the Singularity at the Institute’s 2008 Summit. Given the superficial bizarreness of some of Eliezer’s beliefs (e.g., that an intelligence explosion could create an ultra-AI), the support he receives from these men is impressive.

At least six people mentioned in this book have signed up with either Alcor or the Cryonics Institute: •Ray Kurzweil, inventor and leading Singularity intellectual357 •Peter Thiel, self-made technology billionaire358 •Robin Hanson, economist •Eliezer Yudkowsky, leading friendly-AI theorist •Michael Anissimov, Media Director for the Singularity Institute •Eric Drexler, the father of nanotechnology359 Furthermore, •super-genius Thomas McCabe, who helped edit this book, told me he was in the process of completing the paperwork at the time I talked with him; •Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn said that although he isn’t currently signed up, he would use cryonics if he or a loved one were about to die; and •former Alcor president Stephen Van Sickle told me that there are one or more famous businesspeople, not associated with the Singularity movement, who are [secret] Alcor members.


pages: 344 words: 96,020

Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success by Sean Ellis, Morgan Brown

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, DevOps, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, minimum viable product, multi-armed bandit, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, working poor, Y Combinator, young professional

AVOIDING GROWTH STALLS One of the greatest threats to long-term success is when companies aren’t vigilant enough about responding to the changes in their market—whether it’s by failing to spot product or channel fatigue, acknowledge new competition, make needed updates to products or marketing adjustments in a timely fashion, or embrace new technology coming online. One prime example of the dangers of such complacency is Skype, which was once massively successful by any measure, but which failed to continue to innovate after its acquisition by Microsoft. As a result, it is now rapidly losing ground to mobile apps offering chat service, such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, and the fast-growing group chat company Slack that is sweeping the corporate world. Where did Skype go wrong? Put simply, the product and executive teams failed to grasp the appeal of mobile messaging and perceive how rapidly mobile phones and tablets were being integrated into workplace communication.


pages: 362 words: 97,288

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

As I soon learned, the management consultants (the guys with the scotches over at the bar) call this whole emerging category of driverless droids “automated ground vehicles”—or just AGVs for short, hitting the G hard to distinguish them from their larger cousins. I call them conveyors (Figure 3-2, page 61) instead, because they remind me of buckets on a warehouse belt as they jog along the sidewalk. This one hails from Estonia and was built by Starship Technologies, a startup founded by the same guys who created Skype. For over a year, the company had been testing the little droids to deliver lunch to college students in Tallinn, the capital. Their thinking was that European cities could adopt conveyors as substitutes for the fleets of delivery cars used by fast-growing companies like Postmates and Deliveroo, which were adding to traffic, noise, and air pollution on neighborhood streets.

“self-driving,” 38 early self-steering schemes, 5–6 private-sector funding, xiv self-driving bicycles and tricycles, 62–63 self-driving vehicle at Tsukuba, 6, 8 Stanford University’s self-driving robots, 6–7, 63 see also driverless vehicle development semacodes, 231–32 semi-autonomous suitcases, 125 Senseable City Lab (MIT), 66 Serendipitor, 87 SharedStreets, 233 “sheds with beds,” 199 sheet-to-tiller system for ships, 3–4, 4 shipping cost effect on demand, 130–32, 131 shipping costs decline in twentieth century, 130 shuttle lines in high-tech clusters, 100 shuttles. See driverless shuttles Shyp, 133 Sidewalk Labs, 209, 210, 211, 222, 232 Silverdome (Pontiac, MI), 196n SilverRide, 95 Singapore, 97, 167, 169, 177, 209, 211 singletons, 237–38 Singularity predictions, 234–35, 236–38 Skype, 56 smartphones, 13, 64, 89, 90, 139, 169 see also mobile phones SoftBank, 176, 176–78, 238 software trains, 70–71, 70–72, 197, 200–201, 202, 204, 206 Son, Masayoshi, 176, 178 Space10 (IKEA), 72–73 specialization overview, 16 shifts in daily travel patterns, 53–54 of taxibot rides, 95–97 of traditional automobiles, 52, 80 vehicular variety increase, 16, 18, 52–55 see also specific types of AVs Speedostat, 24 Sprinter delivery vans (Mercedes), 125 Stae, 247 Standard Oil, 174 Starship conveyors, 55–56, 57, 125, 192 Starship Technologies, 56, 57, 124–25 Starsky Robotics, 46 status quo bias, 49–50, 52 steering wheel introduction, 4 Steffens, Lincoln, 180 store closures in US, 117–18, 121 streetcars, 58, 59, 88–89, 106, 174–75, 180–81, 186 “street furniture,” 77 suitcases, semi-autonomous, 125 Sullenberger, Chesley, 45 Superintelligence (Bostrom), 236–37 supermarket, origins of, 116 Superpedestrian, 66 surge pricing, 17, 87, 181 Swift Nick, 161 task model for computerization of work, 150–54, 151, 155 taxibots (AV cabs) computer models of growth, 97–98, 99 doubts about cost-effectiveness, 97–98 impact on taxi business, 94–95 overview, 60–61, 94–95 price savings, 94, 96 rides for pregnant women, 96–97 specialization of rides, 95–97 traffic congestion and, 99 Waymo self-driving taxi service, 8, 46, 97, 230, 240–41 see also mobility as a service taxis automation predicted by 2030, 10–11 impact of taxibot takeover, 94–95 meters in, 169 number of vehicles, 10 ride-hail push to deregulate the taxi business, 40 Waymo self-driving taxi service, 8, 46, 97, 230, 240–41 Teague, 127 TECO Line streetcar (Tampa, FL), 58, 59 Teetor, Ralph, 24, 26 Tel Aviv’s traffic gridlock, 85–87, 88 Tesla, 26–29, 44, 60, 62, 231 three big stories of the driverless revolution, 16–20, 187–88, 238, 248, 253 see also financialization of mobility; materialization; specialization Thrun, Sebastian, xiv, 7, 8 ticketing in transit systems, 89, 90–91, 93, 109, 110–11 time wasted on commuting, 9, 12, 30–31 Toffler, Alvin, 120 toll roads in Great Britain, 162–63 Toronto, Canada, 209–10, 213–14, 222 traction monopolies investors, 176–78, 182–83 in New York City, 174, 174, 180 in Philadelphia, 180 SoftBank, 176, 176–78, 238 in streetcar era, 174, 174–75, 180 traffic congestion cost of time wasted, 9, 12, 30 driverless shuttles and, 106 predicted effects of AVs, 9 ride-hail and, 168 taxibots and, 99 see also congestion pricing trafficgeddons, 85–86 Trafi, 109, 216 transects of the driverless city, 187–88, 188–89, 194–95, 198–99, 200–201, 206–7, 208 transit oriented development (TOD), 200, 202, 203–4 transit systems autonomist contempt for, 214–15 impact of ride-hail, 215–16 as mobility integrators, 216 response to driverless revolution, 214–17 ticketing in, 89, 90–91, 93, 109, 110–11 as transportation utilities, 216 workforce changes, 216–17 TransMilenio (Bogotá), 69 Trikala, Greece, 102–3 trip chaining, 54 Tron (film), 137 trucks and trucking accident risks, 156 automated fleets impact on economic risks, 156–58 automation and types of truck drivers, 153–54 freight AVs and, 125–26 industrial sprawl and, 12–13 investment in self-driving truck startups, 152 “land trains” and “road trains,” 69 last-mile delivery, 121–29, 154, 218 platoons and platooning, 68–69, 70–71 self-driving tractor-trailers, 68, 122 software trains, 70–71 volatile energy costs, 157 Tsukuba, Japan, 6, 8, 216 turnpike trusts in Great Britain, 162–63 Turpin, Dick, 161 Uber betrayal of cities, 181 Careem purchase by, 177 competition with Lyft, 177–78, 179 congestion pricing, 179, 181 dynamic pricing, 181 fatal AV–pedestrian accident, 231 Greyball program, 178 initial public offering, 97, 177, 181 Jump bike-share platform, 202 limited global footprint, 98 market cap, 97 Micromobility Robotics, 67 number of vehicles, 10 partnerships with public transit, 110–11 relationship with transit, 215 SoftBank and, 177 specialization and variety of rides, 95, 96, 110–11 subscriptions, 244 surge pricing, 17, 87, 181 taxibots, 97 traffic congestion and, 168 Uber Eats, 124 vertically integrated urban-mobility empire, 98 Udelv, 57–58 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), 246 UPS, 116, 120, 127, 130 urban design and driverless cities automation and urban concentration, 186–87 automobiles and urban expansion, 185 complete streets (shared streets), 208–9 core, 187, 188, 188–96, 194–95 desakota, 187, 189, 205–8, 206–7 freight tunnels, 211 fulfillment zone, 187, 188, 196–99, 198–99 infill housing, 204, 253–55 legibility, 229–30, 231 megablocks, 209–10 microsprawl, 187, 189, 200–201, 200–205, 243 parking, 189–93 population growth and home building, 253–54 separation of people and vehicles, 208–12, 210 transects, 187–88, 188–89, 194–95, 198–99, 200–201, 206–7, 208 transit oriented development (TOD), 200, 202, 203–4 urban growth since 1950, 186 Urbanetic, 58 Urban Mobility in a Digital Age, 88 urban ushers, 76–77, 77–79 Vélib system (Paris), 63 VeoRide, 67 Via, 107 Vickrey, William, 165–67, 168, 169, 172 Vinge, Vernor, 233–34 Vision Fund, 176, 178 Vitruvius, 169 von Neumann, John, 234 “Walking City” (Herron), 74 warehouseless distribution systems, 157–58 Waste Management, 142 wayfinding, 229–30 Waymo improvement in rate of disengagement, 42 lidar cost reduction, 35 market cap, 97 market share goal for 2030, 11 remote human safety monitors, 46, 98 self-driving taxi service, 8, 46, 97, 230, 240–41 see also Google Waze, 86–87 Webb, Kevin, 233 Where Do Cars Go at Night?


pages: 335 words: 100,154

Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath by Bill Browder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist lawyer, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Clive Stafford Smith, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Donald Trump, estate planning, fake news, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, Ponzi scheme, power law, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon

If the Russian authorities couldn’t stop the Swiss case from going forward, their next best option was to stop Perepilichnyy. To do so, the Russians promptly launched a new criminal case targeting him. Then, in early September, a man named Andrei Pavlov, the consigliere and personal lawyer to Dmitry Klyuev, started communicating with Perepilichnyy over Skype. Pavlov suggested there might be a way to resolve Perepilichnyy’s issues if the two men could meet in person. Since there was no way Perepilichnyy was going to return to Moscow, they agreed to meet at Zurich Airport. Early on September 6, Perepilichnyy flew from London to Zurich. The two men had never met, so Perepilichnyy wore a bright orange jacket.

., 117 Nordlinger, Jay, 269 Nord Stream 2 Pipeline, 134 Novaya Gazeta (newspaper), 192 Novichok, 276–277 NTV (Russian state-controlled TV), 95 Obama, Barack, 89, 230–231, 266, 285 Oliver, Spencer, 69, 75, 76–78 Omtzigt, Pieter, 294 Open Russia, 156, 158 Orban, Viktor, 133 Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), 79–82, 102, 189, 192, 218–219, 273 Painton, Priscilla, 125 Panama Papers, 190–196, 197, 218 Parker, Kyle, 199–200, 204, 206, 210, 221–223, 284, 294 Kara-Murza and, 167–169, 172–173 Magnitsky Act development, 155–156, 167, 283 at the Newseum film presentation, 216–218 at the US Helsinki Commission, 289, 289n Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE PA), 28, 69–78, 140n, 195 Pavlov, Andrei, 65–67, 75–77, 195, 203, 230–231, 239 at the Depository Insurance Agency (Russia), 296 Magnitsky Act sanctions, 295 Pepper, Alisdair, 202–203, 204, 212, 213 Perepilichnyy, Alexander, 35–36, 64, 65–68, 74, 84–86, 87, 231, 292, 293 Peskov, Dmitri, 140 Pieth, Mark, 55–57, 59–60 Pirogov Hospital, 164–166, 172–175 Politico, 225, 246 Porton Down, 168, 171, 174, 176 Prevezon Holdings, 88, 96–97, 98, 100, 102, 106, 114–121, 142–144, 147–152, 178–179, 181, 182, 185–187, 191, 223, 224, 245–249 Nikolai Gorokhov as witness against, 234–244, 245 Moldovan file and, 80–83 settlement, 248 Priebus, Reince, 261 Prokhorov, Vadim, 163–166 Protsenko, Denis, 164–166, 172, 173, 176, 297 Putin, Vladimir, 132–136, 218–219 Albert, Prince of Monaco and, 70–71 Browder as threat to national security and, 18 at the G20 Summit (Hamburg), 250, 277 at the Helsinki Summit (2018), 277–289 need to repeal the Magnitsky Acts, 90–91, 95–96, 252–253, 263–264, 282, 283–289, 291–293 Nemtsov and, 137–141 as prime minister, 64 Roldugen and, 193–196 Trump and, 225, 227–229, 231, 232–233, 256, 277–282 Raab, Dominic, 294 Radio France Internationale, 135, 137, 160–161 R&B Strategies, 297 Reagan, Ronald, 197 Red Notice (Browder), 111, 124–126, 127–131, 132, 133–137, 261, 264 Regency Hotel (New York City), 115 Rehe, Aivar, 291 Rohingya genocide (Myanmar), 295 Rohrabacher, Dana, 197–199, 204–205, 206, 208–210, 211, 215, 217, 256, 265, 289n, 293 election defeat (2018), 297 at R&B Strategies, 297 Roldugen, Sergei, 191, 192–196, 218, 263 Rosneft, 232 Rouda, Harley, 297 Royce, Ed, 199, 204–205, 208, 211, 220–221 RT, 158, 210 RTVI, 153 Ruperto (Spanish lawyer), 3, 6, 10 Russian Central Bank, 34, 145, 290 Russian Federation Council, 197 Russian General Prosecutor’s Office, 177–178, 272–273, 283, 292 “Browder Organized Crime Group” and, 283–289 Russian Interior Ministry, 31–32, 34–35, 48, 50–53, 60, 66–67, 71, 139 Andrei Pavlov and, 239 domestic wanted list, 20, 70 Gorokhov complaint and, 241–244 Natasha Magnitsky and, 299–301 raids Magnitsky’s home, 26 raids on Hermitage offices, 18, 20–21, 24 Russian Laundromat data leak, 273–275, 276, 291 Russian State Investigative Committee, 24–25, 64 Russian Treasury, 24–26, 32–36, 100, 274 Russia Today (RT), 158 Rutte, Mark, 134–137, 292 Sabah, Mark, 71–78, 174 Safra, Edmond, 95 Salomon Brothers, 17 Sampo Bank (Estonia), 290, 291n Sberbank, 297 Scaramucci, Anthony, 261–262 Schiff, Adam, 288–289 Schnell, Vinzenz, 272n Schröder, Gerhard, 133 Schwartzman, Aleksander, 237, 283–284, 284n SEB, 291 Senate: Judiciary Committee, 246–249, 253, 256, 257–264, 268 resolution rejecting Putin’s “incredible offer,” 289 Servettaz, Elena, 135, 137, 160–161 Sessions, Jeff, 286–287 1782 subpoena, 26–27, 28–29, 57 Shearer, Cody, 228–229, 231–232 Shearer, Derek, 228 Sheremetyevo Airport (Moscow), 136, 190 Simon, Neil, 75–77 Simpson, Glenn, 214–216, 217, 219, 223–224, 225, 232–233, 252, 253, 257, 258, 259, 263, 293 Sjoerdsma, Sjoerd, 294 Skirpol, Sergei, 276–277 Skripal, Yulia, 276 Sky News, 10, 282 Skype sessions, 65 Slate, 128 SO15 (London Counter Terrorism Command), 277 Southern District of New York (SDNY), 92–97, 117, 144, 147, 234–238, 245, 296 SRF (Swiss national broadcasting company), 62–63, 64 Starlite Diner, 52 State Customs Committee, 34 State Department, 216–217, 284, 288 State Museum of Fine Arts (Kazan), 157 Steele, Chris, 232 Stepanov, Vladlen, 35–36, 43, 54, 60, 61, 64, 66, 68, 180, 295 Stepanova, Olga, 35–36, 54, 60, 61, 64, 66, 68, 180, 295 Stewart, Jon, 128–131 Sturgess, Dawn, 276 Sullivan, Drew, 218–219 Sussman Godfrey, 182–183 Swedbank, 291 Swiss Ministry of Justice, 55–57 Swiss ski vacation, of Brower, 270–272 TASS, 114 Time, 10 Total, 55 Transparency International, Corruption Perceptions Index, 275 Trump, Donald: elected president, 227–233, 278 at the G20 Summit (Hamburg), 250, 277 at the Helsinki Summit (2018), 277–289 Magnitsky Act and, 230–231 Pussygate scandal, 228–229 Putin and, 225, 227–229, 231–233, 256, 277–282 as Republican nominee for president, 225 transgender ban in military service, 258 Trump dossier and, 228–233, 263 Trump, Donald, Jr., 251, 253, 255, 256, 257, 259, 262, 285 Trump, Melania, 256 Trump Tower meeting, 250–256, 263, 277, 281, 285 Trusted Traveler program, 265–269 TV Centre (Moscow), 138 Twitter feeds, 4, 5–6, 8, 10, 258, 264, 272, 277–278, 288–289 Tyco, 21 UBS, 82–83 Uighur concentration camps (Xinjiang), 295 UK Law Society, 28 Universal Savings Bank, 20, 32, 34–35, 36, 48–50, 56 Van Ruymbeke, Renaud, 188, 227 Veselnitskaya, Natalia: indictment by US government, 296 Prevezon case and, 114, 120–121, 148, 151, 178–179, 185–186, 203, 204, 206, 212, 215–216, 217, 219, 220–221, 223–224, 236, 238, 296 Trump dossier and, 232 Trump Tower meeting and, 250–256, 263, 277 US arrest warrant and freezing order, 296 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, 170–171 VKontakte (Russian version of Facebook), 37, 244 Wall Street Journal, 128, 180, 214, 215–216, 224–225 Washington Post, 10, 219, 224–225 Whitehouse, Sheldon, 264 Wicker, Roger, 38, 289, 294 Winter, Jonathan, 283–284 World Economic Forum (Davos), 54–57 World War II, 58, 222 Wurzmann, Eduardo, 182–186 Wurzmann, Lina, 182, 183, 186 Yakunin, Vladimir, 198 Yandex (Russian version of Google), 81 Yeltsin, Boris, 41 YouTube videos, 35, 38, 69, 118, 203n Zakaria, Fareed, 255 Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 www.SimonandSchuster.com Copyright © 2022 by Hermitage Media Limited All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.


pages: 307 words: 101,998

IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives by Chris Stedman

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, context collapse, COVID-19, deepfake, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, game design, gamification, gentrification, Google Earth, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, move fast and break things, off-the-grid, Overton Window, pre–internet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sentiment analysis, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TikTok, urban planning, urban renewal

But our relationship never deepened beyond the occasional ping between long stretches of digital silence. From what little I gathered on Twitter, his life seemed incredibly ordinary. He posted about travel and politics. He loved Stevens—a lot. He was friendly. It all seemed very pleasant and basic. I didn’t see the point in looking any closer. I had no clue. In fall 2018 Zain answered my Skype call, and, after some initial pleasantries, I asked him to tell me his story. As it turns out, Zain was born into a conservative Shia Muslim family in London in 1982, five years before I was born to a young secular couple in their early twenties sharing a Section 8 apartment in Minnesota. My family had resided in the US for at least a couple of generations; Zain’s was far newer to their nation.

After five years of chatting they became good friends, and eventually Merisa told her she was trans and planned to transition someday. After that, she became a confidante and resource, helping Merisa navigate and improve her relationship with her parents and even helping her get in voice practice over Skype. A few years ago, after Merisa had saved enough money from her full-time job at a school district to move out of her parents’ house, she came out again and began to transition, and the two started dating. Today, Merisa and her girlfriend run an online game community together—an explicitly queer- and trans-inclusive space for people to play, because they want to create the kinds of welcoming gaming spaces that Merisa benefited from when she was younger.


pages: 121 words: 31,813

The Art of Execution: How the World's Best Investors Get It Wrong and Still Make Millions by Lee Freeman-Shor

Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Black Swan, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, family office, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Pershing Square Capital Management, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game

You’ll soon see what was particularly rabbit-like about their investing habits: CASE STUDY: Vyke Communications Vyke Communications was a UK-based company that specialised in software that allowed users to make telephone calls and send text messages over the internet using their mobile phones, computers or normal landlines. Very big things were expected for this company when one investor started looking at it, not least because it basically meant that users could more or less make international phone calls for free. This seemed like a huge deal. Perhaps Vyke was the next Skype. It could revolutionise global communications. The investor bought shares in Vyke on 31 October 2007 at £2.10. As it happened, this would be more or less its peak price. When the stock started to fall shortly after his initial purchase he bought more. So far, so good – this is, after all, what you should do if you are sticking with a stock for the right reasons.


Lonely Planet Mexico by John Noble, Kate Armstrong, Greg Benchwick, Nate Cavalieri, Gregor Clark, John Hecht, Beth Kohn, Emily Matchar, Freda Moon, Ellee Thalheimer

AltaVista, Bartolomé de las Casas, Burning Man, call centre, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Day of the Dead, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, informal economy, language acquisition, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, New Urbanism, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, traffic fines, urban sprawl, wage slave

Call an operator on 020 for domestic calls, or 090 for international calls. Some casetas de teléfono (below) and hotels will make collect calls for you, but they usually charge for the service. Internet Telephony Internet phone services such as Skype (www.skype.com) can be the cheapest option if you have an account and an appropriate headset and microphone. You can use Skype at internet cafés with high-speed internet (that’s most of them), or on your laptop in places with wi-fi access. Locutorios & Casetas de Teléfono These are call offices where an on-the-spot operator connects the call for you. Costs are often lower than those for public card phones.

The Spanish built a fortress here to protect their trading galleons from marauding British and French pirates. It was also the port from which Junípero Serra, the ‘Father’ of the California missions, embarked on his northward peregrination. Information Banamex (Av Juárez s/n) Has an ATM. Cibernet la Web (Canalizo 155B; per hr M$15; 9am-9pm Mon-Sat, 5-9pm Sun) Speedy internet and Skype access. Health Clinic ( 285-12-07; cnr Azueta & Campeche; 24hr) Lavandería Express ( 729-85-11; Sinaloa 47; 5kg wash & dry M$40; 7:30am-8pm Mon-Sat, 7:30am-3:30pm Sun) Post office (cnr Sonora & Echeverría) Tourist office ( 285-00-73; Juarez s/n; 9am-3pm Mon-Fri) This basic tourist office, in the Casa de Cultura, has maps and brochures about the area and the state of Nayarit.

HSBC (Map; cnr Insurgentes & Miramar) Just north of the Río Cuale bridge. POST Main post office (Map; Colombia 1014) TELEPHONE & FAX Pay phones (card only) are plentiful everywhere in town, as are casetas de teléfono (public telephone call stations) with fax and long-distance service. Many internet cafés offer Skype service. TOURIST INFORMATION Municipal tourist office (Map; 226-80-80, ext 232; Juárez s/n; 8am-8pm Mon-Sat, 10am-6pm Sun) Vallarta’s busy but competent office, in the municipal building at the northeast corner of Plaza Principal, has free maps, multilingual tourist literature and bilingual staff.


pages: 920 words: 237,085

Rick Steves Florence & Tuscany 2017 by Rick Steves

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, carbon footprint, Dava Sobel, Google Hangouts, index card, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Murano, Venice glass, new economy, place-making, Skype, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, wikimedia commons, young professional

On your device’s menu, look for “cellular data usage” or “mobile data” and reset the counter at the start of your trip. Use Skype or other calling/messaging apps for cheaper calls and texts. Certain apps let you make voice or video calls or send texts over the Internet for free or cheap. If you’re bringing a tablet or laptop, you can also use it for voice calls and texts. All you have to do is log on to a Wi-Fi network, then contact any of your friends or family members who are also online and signed into the same service. You can make voice and video calls using Skype, Viber, FaceTime, and Google+ Hangouts. If the connection is bad, try making an audio-only call.

When you’re done, avoid further charges by manually switching off “data roaming” or “cellular data” (in your device’s Settings menu; for help, ask your service provider or Google it). Another way to make sure you’re not accidentally using data roaming is to put your device in “airplane” or “flight” mode (which also disables phone calls and texts), and then turn on Wi-Fi as needed. Don’t use your cellular network for bandwidth-gobbling tasks, such as Skyping, downloading apps, and watching YouTube: Save these for when you’re on Wi-Fi. Using a navigation app such as Google Maps over a cellular network can take lots of data, so do this sparingly or use it offline. Limit automatic updates. By default, your device constantly checks for a data connection and updates apps.

If the connection is bad, try making an audio-only call. You can also make voice calls from your device to telephones worldwide for just a few cents per minute using Skype, Viber, or Hangouts if you buy credit first. To text for free over Wi-Fi, try apps like Google+ Hangouts, Whats App, Viber, Facebook Messenger, and iMessage. Make sure you’re on Wi-Fi to avoid data charges. USING A EUROPEAN SIM CARD IN A MOBILE PHONE This option works well for those who want to make a lot of voice calls at cheap local rates, and those who need faster connection speeds than their US carrier provides. Either buy a basic cell phone in Europe (as little as $40 from mobile-phone shops anywhere), or bring an “unlocked” US phone (check with your carrier about unlocking it).


pages: 184 words: 35,076

Irrationally Yours: On Missing Socks, Pickup Lines, and Other Existential Puzzles by Dan Ariely, William Haefeli

behavioural economics, endowment effect, financial independence, gamification, Google Hangouts, loss aversion, sealed-bid auction, Skype

I suspect that this is the case, which means that maybe we should all start picking projects that are smaller, and more self-contained. Habits, Effort, Goals ON THE ART OF MULTITASKING “Are you multitasking me?” {Illustrations © 2015 William Haefeli} Dear Dan, I spend a lot of time on not-very-interesting conference calls using Skype and Google Hangouts. I usually try to answer emails during this time, so I turn off the video capability, so that no one can see me. On top of that I try to type quietly, so that no one can hear. But the sound of the keyboard seems to vibrate through the computer, and I suspect that the other participants know that I am not really paying attention.


pages: 139 words: 35,022

Roads and Bridges by Nadia Eghbal

AGPL, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, Debian, DevOps, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, GnuPG, Guido van Rossum, Ken Thompson, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, leftpad, Marc Andreessen, market design, Network effects, platform as a service, pull request, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software is eating the world, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Tragedy of the Commons, Y Combinator

Data accessed May 20, 2016. https://www.openhub.net/languages/compare [43] https://story.californiasunday.com/tim-hwang-infrastructure-tourist [44] http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-magpie-developer/ [45] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Engineering_Task_Force [46] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language) [47] https://www.quora.com/How-was-the-idea-to-develop-React-conceived-and-how-many-people-worked-on-developing-it-and-implementing-it-at-Facebook/answer/Bill-Fisher-17 [48] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/React_(JavaScript_library) [49] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language) [50] https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/PATENTS [51] http://venturebeat.com/2015/06/13/docker-now-valued-at-1b-paid-someone-799-for-its-logo-on-99designs/ [52] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-14/docker-said-to-join-1-billion-valuation-club-with-new-funding [53] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/meteor [54] http://info.meteor.com/blog/announcing-meteor-galaxy [55] http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/06/its-actually-open-source-software-thats-eating-the-world/ [56] http://words.steveklabnik.com/is-npm-worth-26mm [57] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/github [58] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303292204577517111643094308 [59] https://www.python.org/doc/essays/foreword/ [60] http://blog.codeeval.com/codeevalblog/2015#.VjvKZhNViko= [61] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_van_Rossum [62] http://skillcrush.com/2015/02/02/37-rails-sites/ [63] https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/SuccessStories [64] https://twistedmatrix.com/glyph/ [65] https://peerj.com/preprints/1233.pdf [66] Email interview with Arash Payan [67] https://medium.com/@shazow/urllib3-stripe-and-open-source-grants-edb9c0e46e82 [68] https://readthedocs.org/sustainability/ [69] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/12/10/mozilla-open-source-support-first-awards-made/ [70] http://blog.readthedocs.com/ads-on-read-the-docs/ [71] Skype interview with Eric Holscher [72] http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2013/the-perils-of-mixing-open-source-and-money.html [73] http://blog.codinghorror.com/is-money-useless-to-open-source-projects/ [74] http://www.datamation.com/open-source/linus-torvalds-and-others-on-community-burnout-1.html [75] http://www.apple.com/customer-letter/ [76] https://www.blackducksoftware.com/future-of-open-source [77] http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2013/12/19/dvcs-and-git-2013/#ixzz2qyfVpSR9 [78] As of January 6, 2016. https://www.openhub.net/repositories/compare [79] http://readwrite.com/2014/01/21/git-subversion-developers [80] https://github.com/blog/841-those-are-some-big-numbers [81] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub [82] https://github.com/blog/1724-10-million-repositories [83] http://dirkriehle.com/publications/2008-2/the-total-growth-of-open-source/ [84] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Overflow [85] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ [86] http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/271080/the-mit-license-clarity-on-using-code-on-stack-overflow-and-stack-exchange [87] http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/272956/a-new-code-license-the-mit-this-time-with-attribution-required [88] http://www.infoworld.com/article/2615869/open-source-software/github-needs-to-take-open-source-seriously.html [89] http://www.infoworld.com/article/2611422/open-source-software/github-finally-takes-open-source-licenses-seriously.html [90] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/18/github_licensing_study/ [91] https://twitter.com/monkchips/status/247584170967175169 [92] http://blog.codinghorror.com/please-dont-learn-to-code/ [93] https://medium.com/@wob/the-sad-state-of-web-development-1603a861d29f#.443lcznv1 [94] https://coderanger.net/funding-foss/ [95] Email interview with Hynek Schlawack [96] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/Security-experts-expect-Shellshock-software-bug-to-be-significant/articleshow/43657819.cms [97] http://www.scmagazineuk.com/openssh-flaw-opens-the-door-to-brute-force-attackers/article/428304/ [98] http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/01/bug-that-can-leak-crypto-keys-just-fixed-in-widely-used-openssh/ [99] https://medium.com/@christophera/i-ve-been-working-to-address-this-gap-for-a-while-thus-my-recent-exploration-of-the-commons-in-my-8094d41a874a#.qyh31ida4 Quote edited for clarity by source


Trixie and Katya's Guide to Modern Womanhood by Trixie Mattel, Katya

Lyft, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, trickle-down economics, uber lyft

If my husband ever dies prematurely, just remove the body and his belongings from my home—I bet I’d completely forget I was ever married. YELL FROM ANOTHER ROOM If you’re only lightly involved in your own problems, like me, you can let your TaskRabbit or teenage child worker describe items to you vaguely via Skype while you lounge in another part of the house. I pull out my earbuds only long enough to scream, “Keep” or “Toss.” KEEP GOING Sure you’ve eliminated all of your unworn clothes and excess tchotchkes, but why stop there? Pick up every single item in your house with your hands, close your eyes, and think, “Is this something I need to survive?”


pages: 112 words: 33,537

Simple Matters: A Scandinavian’s Approach to Work, Home, and Style by Jenny Mustard

messenger bag, place-making, sensible shoes, Skype

Alemanys 5—Girona, Spain: Here are a few things to consider, that might help you realize what you need to hone and shape that perfect-fit home: Where You Spend Your Time When awake, where in your home do you find yourself? Is the kitchen the heart of your home, or do you lounge on the sofa during your at-home time? Maybe you take a bath every chance you get, or hide under the comforting covers of your bed with dinner trays or makeup bags or Skype sessions or morning coffees, depending on the time of day. The office, that’s where you’ll find me. Know and appreciate where your home life takes place, and let that space be the focus. The other rooms and spaces can grow from there, complementing the heart of your home. What You Spend Your Time on Once you know where, why not look at what you spend your time doing?


pages: 125 words: 35,820

Cyprus - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture by Constantine Buhayer

banking crisis, British Empire, business climate, centre right, COVID-19, financial independence, glass ceiling, Google Earth, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, lockdown, low cost airline, offshore financial centre, open economy, Skype, women in the workforce, young professional

The “tut” sound (done by snapping the tip of the tongue against the back of the upper two front teeth), accompanied by the raising of the eyebrows, means “no.” If that sound is repeated two or three times, it means “out of the question.” Repeated several times in succession while slowly shaking the head means “what a pity,” “what a shame,” or expresses disapproval, as in “you shouldn’t have done that.” DIGITAL PROTOCOLS The moment Skype calls were available, Cypriots were onto it and there was no going back. The sudden necessity for daily video conferencing imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic raised some interesting cultural questions. There was a brief debate as to whether people could smoke when online. At home a person can smoke without affecting others.


pages: 398 words: 105,032

Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve And/or Ruin Everything by Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, connected car, CRISPR, data science, disinformation, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Google Glasses, hydraulic fracturing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, market design, megaproject, megastructure, microbiome, moral hazard, multiplanetary species, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, personalized medicine, placebo effect, printed gun, Project Plowshare, QR code, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Skype, space junk, stem cell, synthetic biology, Tunguska event, Virgin Galactic

If your brain is connected to a computer and the two can modify each other, you are not a human being as we have always known ourselves. It would be an end and a beginning. Nota Bene on Dr. Phil Kennedy We open this section with a brief transcript from Kelly’s interview with Dr. Leuthardt. It actually happens on Skype, but for the sake of drama, please imagine a dark castle room with cold stone walls, littered with strange biological specimens and leather-bound tomes. Add lightning flashes as needed. Dr. Leuthardt: The technology is not the issue. If I had, actually not that much money, I could build one of those today. . . .

., 154 sanitation, 157 satellites, 20, 34, 41, 47 Schalk, Gerwin, 313 Schall, Gerhard, 177 Schrödinger’s cat, 329 Schrödinger’s Killer App (Dowling), 330n Schwenk, Kurt, 187 See No Evil, Hear No Evil (film), 328n seizures, 300, 301, 302 Select Sires, Incorporated, 197n self-driving cars, 123 Sensorama, 168 Shapiro, Beth, 222, 223–24 Shotwell, Gwynne, 19 Shtetl-Optimized (blog), 330n Siberia, 224 sickle cell amenia, 237 Silberg, Joff, 210–11, 218–19 silicon, 52, 54 Silver, Pamela, 204, 205–6, 208–10, 219 Simberg, Rand, 44 Skylon, 22 Skype, 314 Skywalker, Luke (char.), 324 Slingatron, 25–26 slums, 157 smallpox, 216, 217 Smart Helmet, 179 “smart homes,” 111 smartphones, 169 smell, sense of, 174–75, 186–89, 334 Smith, Noah, 153n, 154 snakes, 187 social media, 248, 250 privacy issues of, 180–81 software, 102, 104–5, 124 hacking of, 122 solar flares, 60 solar panels, 58 cost of, 320 solar photovoltaic cells, 92, 208 solar power, space-based, 319–21 solar wind, 37 Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium, 162 solid rocket boosters, 39 solid tumors, 238, 240–41 Solomon, Scott, 200n sound, speed of, 21 South Africa, 48 Southern California, University of, 145, 308 Soviet Union, 38, 58, 99, 100, 135 space cannon, 23–26 space debris, 39–40 space elevators, 31–38, 39, 41, 42–43, 314, 320 spaceflight, 13–50 air-breathing rockets and spaceplanes for, 19–24 benefits of, 41–45 concerns about, 38–40 cost of, 41, 44–45 present cost of, 13–14 reusable rockets for, 18–19 space elevators and tethers for, 31–38 starting at high altitude, 29–30 spaceplanes, 19–24, 39 space settlements, 40 Space Shuttle, U.S., 18, 39 space tethers, 31–38 space tourism, 42 space travel: fusion energy in, 94 supergun for, 23–26 SpaceX, 8n, 18–19, 30 spatial resolution, 288, 289, 292–93 spearmint, 334 spinal damage, 312 Sputnik, 39 SR-71 spy plane, 21 Starbucks, 180 Star Trek franchise, 34, 86 Star Wars franchise, 78n, 82, 263 steam turbine, 76 stem cells, 263, 272–73 Stevens Institute of Technology, 92, 122 STL-file, 267 storytelling, 178 stratospheric spaceport, 29–30 straw, reconfigurable, 103–4 stress, 246 stroke, 247 strong nuclear force, 77 strontium-90 (Sr-90), 99 Stuttgart, University of, 104, 143 S-type (stony) asteroids, 53, 54 sugar molecules, 210 sugar sintering, 270–71 sun, 59, 78 Sung, Cynthia, 108, 119, 127 superconducting levitation, 326–27 superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID), 4, 6, 290 superconductors, 4–6 room-temperature, 325–28 supergun, 46–50 supersonic ramjet (“scramjet”), 21–22, 26, 126 Sure Shot Cattle Company, 197n surgery, 185–86 Surrey, University of, 122 swarm bots, 119–20, 121–22 SWARMORPH project, 113–15 swarm robots, 149–53 switchgrass, 209–10 Switzerland, 22n SYMBRION, 115 Syn 3.0, 215 synthetic biology, 190–225 benefits of, 220–21 concerns about, 216–19 environmental monitoring by, 210–12 fuel production by, 208–10 generalizing of, 212–14 grassroots approach to, 216 “Synthetic Biology for Recycling Human Waste into Food, Nutraceuticals, and Materials: Closing the Loop for Long-Term Space Travel” project, 160 synthetic materials, 101–2 syphilis, 230n Syria, 156 Systems & Materials Research Consultancy, 159 T cells, 242–43 technology, 3–4 asteroid-moving, 67 contingent nature of development of, 3–7 discontinuous leaps in, 2 Telegraph, 183 Teller, Edward, 98 temporal resolution, 288, 292–93 Terminator (film), 103 termites, 120, 149, 150–51 terrorism, 36, 38, 217 Tethers Unlimited, 63 tetracycline, 200 theft, 130 3D printers, 144–49, 151–52, 259 prosthetics and, 322 3D printing, 125, 152 of food, 159–63 of organs, see bioprinting software for, 267 3554 Amun, 53 Throw Trucks with Your Mind (game), 312 thyroid, 60 Tibbits, Skylar, 103–5, 118, 123, 126 titanium, 35 “tokamak” configuration, 88, 92 tornados, 25 touch, sense of, 175 Tourette’s syndrome, 301 transcranial magnetic stimulation, 302, 304 transfer RNA, 193–94, 195 Transformers series, 102 The Tree of Life (Web site), 234n tritium, 74, 77n, 91 tumor cells, 205 tumors, 290 “Tunable Protein Piston That Breaks Membranes to Release Encapsulated Cargo, A” (Silver, et al.), 206 “Tunguska event” (1908), 67 turbofan engine, 20–21, 22 Turner, Ron, 35, 36, 37 23andMe, 251, 252 Twitter, 20n, 187, 250 Two and a Half Men (TV show), 310 Type II superconductors, 326 Umbrellium (Haque Design + Research), 111 Underground Railroad, 178 UN-Habitat, 157 Unilateral Forced Nostril Breathing (UFNB), 189 United Nations, 96 United States, 39, 135–36 Universal Semen Sales, Inc., 197n uranium, 58 U.S.


pages: 345 words: 104,404

Pandora's Brain by Calum Chace

AI winter, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, Extropian, friendly AI, hive mind, lateral thinking, machine translation, mega-rich, Nick Bostrom, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, technological singularity, theory of mind, Turing test, Wall-E

‘Have to be more careful next time.’ Matt leaned back in his imitation Aeron chair and glanced around his bedroom. The deep familiarity of the room and its contents gave him a bittersweet comfort. His desk was mostly clear, apart from a framed photo and the monitor he was using to play video games and Skype with Carl, but every other surface was covered by the clutter of a young man with an enquiring mind and no taste for tidyness. Books stood in unsorted ranks on shelves along one wall, and also idled in collapsed piles on the floor and furniture. Novels, magazines, schoolbooks, illustrated non-fiction books mingled in defiant disorder.

I’m going to a party with Alice on Saturday evening, and she’s staying the night, so I have to be positively vetted by her parents again over dinner first.’ ‘There’s a showing at two, so you could easily get to Alice’s in time for dinner. In fact, she could come along – especially if she wants to bring a friend.’ Carl’s sly grin was unconvincing, even via Skype. Matt always thought it odd that someone as smart as Carl was so lacking in confidence around girls. He and Carl reversed the usual stereotypes: Carl, the philosophy, politics and economics student, became mute and flustered in the company of women, even though his black hair, green eyes and dark complexion made an attractive combination.


pages: 382 words: 105,819

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

All it offered was interesting features, and Facebook imitated the good parts quickly. Facebook took no chances with Google+. The company went to battle stations and devoted every resource to stopping Google on the beach of social networking. The company cranked up its development efforts, dramatically increasing the size limits for posts, partnering with Skype, introducing the Messenger texting product, and adding a slew of new tools for creating applications on the platform. As 2012 began, Facebook was poised for a breakout year. The company had a new advertising product—Open Graph—that leveraged its Social Graph, the tool to capture everything it knew from both inside Facebook and around the web.

.: Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, 209 Google and, 282 Judiciary Committee, 128, 131, 132, 136, 209 Select Committee on Intelligence, 12, 111–12, 127, 132 Sherman Antitrust Act, 136 Signal, 271 Silicon Valley, 3, 5, 10, 15, 16, 26, 31–51, 83, 84, 104, 110, 112, 118, 130, 147, 151–52, 157, 173, 194, 197, 206, 225, 248, 253, 254, 263, 269, 274 diversity and, 45 libertarianism and, 44–45, 49 women in, 49–50 see also technology Silver Lake Partners, 28–30 Sinclair, Upton, 110 Siri, 43 SixDegrees.com, 54–55 60 Minutes, 81, 109, 161 Skype, 70 Slack, 41 Slate, 179, 186, 231 smartphones, 17, 59, 81, 84, 101, 105–8, 158, 225, 233, 250, 253, 255, 261, 265, 267, 269, 272–74 Android, 138, 204, 271, 282 checking of, 86–87, 99, 100, 257, 271 iPhone, 38, 84, 100, 105–6, 271 social apps on, 106 Snapchat, 99, 110, 140, 156, 214, 246, 253 Snyder, Timothy, 278 social graphs, 55, 70, 224, 264 social media, 38, 41, 48, 54–56, 63, 69, 102–5, 147, 153, 155, 177, 213 extreme views and, 91 human-driven, 108 mobile platforms and, 106 Social Network, The, 65 social reciprocity, 98–99 Soros, George, 159–63 World Economic Forum speech of, 159–63, 301–12 Space-X, 48 Speak & Spell, 22 Squawk Alley, 118 Sri Lanka, 178, 180, 204, 232, 239, 245, 247, 254, 277 Stamos, Alex, 119, 174, 183–84, 191–92 Standard Oil, 47, 136, 137 Stanford University, 54, 83, 107, 146–48, 160 startups, 40–41, 43, 45, 48–50, 104, 223–25, 259, 261–63, 284 lean, 41–42, 46, 48 state attorneys general, 120, 172, 227 Stein, Gertrude, 213 Stewart, Martha, 27 Steyer, Jim, 119, 156 Stoppleman, Jeremy, 48 Stretch, Colin, 131–33 suicide, 213 Summers, Larry, 60 Sun Microsystems, 26, 152 Sunstein, Cass, 90 Sybase, 26 Taylor, Bob, 34 technology, ix, 1, 9–10, 13, 31–51, 104, 106, 121, 135, 165, 177, 206, 214, 235–36, 238, 250–51, 254–55, 257, 258, 267–75, 282 addiction to, 100–101, 106–7, 162, 206, 240, 246, 250, 253, 254, 257, 268, 269, 281 business shift in, 33 changing personal usage of, 274 children and, 106, 156, 166, 237, 255, 268, 269, 272–73, 279–80 government era of, 32–33 human-driven, see human-driven technology and humane design McNamee’s investments in, 1, 7, 21, 24–30, 56–57 regulation of, 47–48, 112–14, 130, 173, 201, 206, 208, 220–21, 238, 282–83 society changed by, 10, 87 as value neutral, 129 see also Silicon Valley TED Conference, 66–67, 109–10, 111 television, 10, 17, 68, 87, 105, 106, 125–26, 158, 267, 284 terms of service, 100, 102, 114, 159, 253–54 Facebook, 97, 178, 182, 211, 253–54 terrorism, 230 Tesla, 48 Texas secession movement, 114–15 texting, 254, 255, 269, 271 Thiel, Peter, 45, 48, 54, 58, 113 3Com, 32 time sharing, 33 Time Well Spent, 108, 157 Tinder, 207, 218 transistor, 225, 226 trolls, 90, 116, 124, 126, 253 T.


pages: 383 words: 105,021

Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Fred Kaplan

air gap, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, computer age, data acquisition, drone strike, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, game design, hiring and firing, index card, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Morris worm, national security letter, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, packet switching, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stuxnet, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Wargames Reagan, Y2K, zero day

Inglis moved on to what he and his colleagues considered a far more important and damaging Snowden leak. It concerned the program known as PRISM, in which the NSA and FBI tapped into the central servers of nine leading American Internet companies—mainly Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google, but also Facebook, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple, and Paltalk—extracting email, documents, photos, audio and video files, and connection logs. The news stories about PRISM acknowledged that the purpose of the intercepts was to track down exclusively foreign targets, but the stories also noted that ordinary Americans’ emails and cellular phone calls got scooped up in the process as well.

.: Armed Services Committee of, 46, 71, 283 Church Committee of, 37, 230, 252 Foreign Relations Committee of, 197 Governmental Affairs Committee of, 48, 94 Intelligence Committee of, 35–36 Select Committee on Intelligence of, 126, 127, 231–33, 256 sensitive compartmented information facilities (SCIFs), 243 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 3, 140–41, 155, 171, 174, 192, 195, 241, 244, 261 Serbia, U.S. hacking of phone systems in, 113, 132 Shady RAT, Operation, 226 Shalikashvili, John, 67, 68, 146 Shamoon computer virus, 213–14 Shaw Air Force Base, 7, 108–9 Shiite Muslims, 147, 160 Shinseki, Eric, 111, 112 Siemens, logic controllers of, 204–5, 206, 211 Signal Security Agency, 11 609th Information Warfare Squadron, 7, 108–10, 120 60 Minutes (TV program), 240 Skype, PRISM and, 247 Slocombe, Walter, 44 Sneakers (film), 31–32, 33 Snowden, Edward, 194 NSA programs leaked by, 63–64, 228–30, 231, 234, 242, 244, 245, 251, 257–59, 262, 282, 285, 298n Social Security, 99 Social Security numbers, hacking of, 265, 268 Solar Sunrise cyber attack, 74–78, 80, 81, 98, 101, 119, 120, 123, 183, 187, 241 Sonic.net, 77 Sony Online Entertainment, hacking of, 268 Sony Pictures Entertainment, North Korean cyber attack on, 268–71, 272n South China Morning Post, 229 South Korea, North Korean cyber attacks on, 213, 269 South Ossetia, 164–65, 241 Soviet Union, 12, 13 collapse of, 162 Space Command, U.S., 122, 146 Spiegel, Der 228, 229, 298n Sputnik II, 119 Stabilization Force (SFOR), 110–12 “Star Wars” program, 2 Stasi, 235 Stellar Wind, 155n Stimpy (pseudonym), 77–78 Stimson, Henry, 11 Stoll, Cliff, 61–62, 82–83 Stone, Geoffrey: civil liberties expertise of, 239, 244, 251, 259, 264 in Review Group, 239, 244, 246, 250–52, 253, 254, 264 Strategic Command, U.S., 183 Studeman, William, 21–22, 26, 27, 28, 30, 42, 84, 128 as acting CIA director, 45 as CIA deputy director, 41 information warfare as focus of, 41 as NSA director, 126–27, 275–76 Stuxnet, 201, 213, 216, 217, 218–19, 228, 242, 304n–5n Alexander and, 204–5, 206 Bush and, 203, 205, 206, 208, 209, 212, 215 centrifuges speed manipulated by, 209 exposure of, 210–11 false data sent to monitors in, 208, 209 Gates and, 206 Iranian confidence as target of, 208 Israel and, 207 Natanz centrifuges targeted by, 203 Obama and, 203, 208–9, 210, 212 Siemens logic controllers infected by, 204–5, 211 successes of, 209–10 TAO and, 205–7 valve controls overridden by, 207–20 Summers, Lawrence, 200 Sunni Muslims, 147, 160 Sunstein, Cass, 239, 253 Suter, 161 Swire, Peter, 239–40, 243–44, 251, 253, 255 Sylvania Labs, 14–15 Symantec, 210, 211 Syria: cyber attacks by, 4 Israeli bombing of reactor in, 160–61, 198, 301n Taiwan, 224 Taliban, 149, 229 Tallinn, Estonia, 165 cyber attack on, 162–64 Tango, Operation, 111 TAO (Office of Tailored Access Operations), 135–37, 156, 158, 182, 195, 273n hacking software of, 136 Hayden and, 135 Minihan and, 134–35 Snowden leaks and, 229–30 Stuxnet and, 205–7 tools and techniques of, 298n Technical Advisory Group, 126 telecom companies: metadata collection and, 194, 247, 248, 253, 263 Snowden leaks and, 234 telecommunication networks, switches in, 44–45 Tenenbaum, Ehud (The Analyzer), 77, 78 Tenet, George, 113, 140 terrorism, terrorists: Bush (G.W.) administration complacency about, 140–41 CNE and, 139 cyber attacks by, 98 FISA and, 192 infrastructure as targets of, 39, 41, 42, 53 Internet and, 35 Obama’s focus on, 197–98 post-9/11 fear of, 195 Thompson, Fred, 95 thumb drives, malware on, 182, 207, 304n Thurman, Max, 145 Titan Rain, 224 Toyota Prius, hacking of, 273n Trailblazer, 132, 156–57, 158 Transportation Department, U.S., North Korean cyber attack on, 213 Treasury Department, U.S.: cyber security as low priority of, 172–73 North Korean cyber attack on, 213 “Trilateral Memorandum Agreement,” 216–17 Truman, Harry, 12 Turbulence, 157–58, 195 Unit 8200 (Israel), 161 United Arab Emirates, 75, 76 United States: Chinese relations with, 221–28 as digital communications hub, 191–92, 193, 248 see also five eyes university computers, as entry points for hackers, 61, 73, 82 UNIX operating system, Sun Solaris vulnerability in, 73–74 U.N.


Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World by Matt Alt

4chan, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, game design, glass ceiling, global pandemic, haute cuisine, hive mind, late capitalism, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, period drama, Ponzi scheme, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, union organizing, work culture , zero-sum game

“Tomino did not realize the impact”: Patrick W. Galbraith, The Moé Manifesto: An Insider’s Look at the Worlds of Manga, Anime, and Gaming (Singapore: Tuttle Publishing, 2014), 181. “It was like, finally, we had a word for them”: Personal interview, Tomohiro Machiyama, conducted April 5, 2014, via Skype. In 1989, a young man by the name of Tsutomu Miyazaki: Ibid. There was pre-Otomo and post-Otomo: Nobunaga Minami, Gendai Manga no Bokentachi: Otomo Katsuhiro Kara Ono Natsume Made (Adventurers of Modern Comics: From Otomo Katsuhiro to Natsume Ono) (Tokyo: NTT Shuppan, 2008), 32–38. Upon meeting Otomo around this time: Kei Ishizaka, Suntory Saturday Waiting Bar Avanti, “Vol. 132,” Tokyo FM Podcast, October 4, 2008, https://podcasts.tfm.co.jp/​podcasts/​tokyo/​avanti/​avanti_vol132.mp3.

In 2005 Fortune reported: Christine Yano, “Monstering the Japanese Cute: Pink Globalization and Its Critics Abroad,” in In Godzilla’s Footsteps: Japanese Pop Culture Icons on the Global Stage, ed. William M. Tsutsui and Michiko Ito, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 156. “I was practically raised in Sanrio shops”: Skype interview with Krista Suh, April 30, 2018. Variety dismissed animator Osamu Tezuka’s: “Cleopatra, Queen of Sex,” Variety, Wednesday, May 10, 1972. Pornhub announced that “hentai”: Pornhub Insights, “2018 Year in Review,” Pornhub, December 11, 2018, https://www.pornhub.com/​insights/​2018-year-in-review.


Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization by Edward Slingerland

agricultural Revolution, Alexander Shulgin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Burning Man, classic study, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, Day of the Dead, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Drosophila, experimental economics, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, hive mind, invention of agriculture, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, lateral thinking, lockdown, lone genius, meta-analysis, microdosing, Picturephone, placebo effect, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, search costs, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Zenefits

Especially given the enhancement in efficacy and ease of use that has been made possible by modern science, they should continue to play a similar role in today’s world. Why Skype Didn’t Eliminate Business Travel In 1889 Jules Verne predicted that the “phonotelephote”—essentially a dedicated videoconferencing device that he imagined would become commonplace by the year 2889 (!)—would make business travel obsolete.34 We didn’t have to wait a thousand years. Videoconferencing became a real technology in 1968 with AT&T’s “Picturephone.” The advent of Skype and other videoconferencing technologies in the mid-2000s brought phonotelephotes into every home that had access to a decent internet connection.


pages: 368 words: 108,222

Parkland: Birth of a Movement by Dave Cullen

3D printing, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Columbine, crisis actor, gun show loophole, impulse control, Lyft, megaproject, side project, Skype, Snapchat, uber lyft

I started packing while hitting up my media and survivor networks to find a way to make contact with the kids. I was down there Monday, and once I met those kids, I was hooked. I have spent much of the past two decades working with children. Countless high schools and colleges have brought me in as a speaker, and I had been Skyping with classes regularly until I put that on hold to finish the soldiers book. So I am used to being amazed by kids, and I never really bought into the idea that they’re incapable of huge undertakings. Still, the march was a lot. Once I saw Jackie and her team pull off Tallahassee, I had no doubts.

He wanted to weave clips of actual survivors into the show. I suggested Kiki and Paula, and ABC eventually hired me (for the day) to interview them and three survivors of other brutal situations on camera. It aired in February 2016. Kiki has taught Columbine as a text in one of his English courses for the past several years. The first year, I Skyped in with the class. He knows writers struggle to make ends meet, and on several of my trips to Colorado, he and his wife, Kallie, invited me to stay at their house for a few days, and I accepted. That included both trips covered in this book: the April trip in this chapter, and the August trip in chapter 19.


pages: 1,007 words: 181,911

The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Timothy Ferriss

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Blue Bottle Coffee, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital nomad, en.wikipedia.org, Golden Gate Park, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Loma Prieta earthquake, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, microbiome, off-the-grid, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Pepsi Challenge, Pepto Bismol, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Skype, spaced repetition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the High Line, Y Combinator

Today, $100 30-frame-per-second cameras and the Internet, to name just two advances, improve both access to expertise and the speed of the feedback loop. Take, for instance, how I learned to pop up on a surfboard. Prior to a planned trip to Costa Rica, I found myself in Berlin, with no beach or pool in sight. I connected via Skype video with Brad Gerlach, formerly the #1-ranked surfer in the world. In 2006, he won the prestigious Billabong XXL by successfully riding a 68-foot wave in Todos Santos, Mexico. Now, he’s turned his mind to teaching. To start, he forced himself to surf “switch stance” (opposite foot forward) just so he could better communicate the mechanics.

CREDITS COVER Jonathan Arvizu, Trapdoor Studio TITLE PAGE IMAGES Drew Kelly DEDICATION Tim Ferriss ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS Christopher Michel HOW TO USE THIS BOOK: CONFESSIONS, PROMISES, AND GETTING TO 20 MILLION Drew Kelly: Bobby Flay quote sign Tim Ferriss: Tim’s notes, Tim with book piles, and White House coffee cup Culinary Artistry by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page (John Wiley and Sons, 1996): chart META-LEARNING “BILL GATES WALKS INTO A BAR…”: THE POWER OF OUTLIERS Olivia Grabowski-West: Ed Cooke Nick Cunard, Rex USA: Daniel Tammet Barry Ross: Girl doing torture twist exercise Jim McDonald, supertraining.TV: Mark Bell dead-lifting Tim Ferriss: Japanese characters poster, Vital Judo book cover DECONSTRUCTION: EXPLORING THE GREAT UNKNOWN Justin Kern: Deconstructed cheesecake Tim Ferriss: Fire starting steps (A–F and finished fire), deconstructing languages notes ASSIGNMENT: LEARNING TO “TASTE” iStockPhoto/RedHelga: Basil leaves Hillside Supper Club: Turkey testicle soup Culinary Artistry by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page (John Wiley and Sons, 1996): Ze Herbs text SEQUENCING: THE MAGIC OF PROPER ORDERING Shawn Koppenhoefer, tangopics.com: Tango dancers COMPRESSION: CHEAT SHEETS FOR ANYTHING Tim Ferriss: Simplify wall-hanging, Slow-Carb before-and-after Daniel Krieger: Plating steps FREQUENCY: CRAMMING SIX MONTHS OF CULINARY SCHOOL INTO 48 HOURS Drew Kelly: Meat doneness points, travel cooking kit Tim Ferriss: Culinary cram school, chart sketches, stack of books, Brad Gerlach on Skype ENCODING: MAKING SLIPPERY IDEAS STICK Penny De Los Santos: Hanafuda card set THE DOMESTIC RETHINKING RECIPES Tim Ferriss: Practice cooking without cooking Drew Kelly: Muay Thai kickboxer THE 80/20 PANTRY: ALL YOU NEED Penny De Los Santos: Salt, pepper, sherry vinegar, garlic, sliced almonds, mustard, canned tomatoes, lentils, beans, glycerine, chocolate iStockPhoto/David Palmer: Bell peppers TOP GEAR: FROM SURGICAL TOWELS TO BIG GREEN EGGS Susan Burdick: The Basics (except De Longhi Hand Blender), Anatomy of a Knife, Obsessive World of Knives, Extras and Upgrades (except cutting boards), Shopping Spree, Novice Nine (except ramekins) Penny De Los Santos: De Longhi Hand Blender, OXO and John Boos Cutting Boards, Novice Nine ramekins LESSON 01: OSSO “BUKO” Tim Ferriss: Finished Osso “Buko” (top) Daniel Krieger: Finished Osso “Buko” (bottom), Osso “Buko” process A–C Penny De Los Santos: Ingredients, Jude’s Chuck Roast ingredients Susan Burdick: How to Hold Your Blade, Favorite Teas and Tools LESSON 02: SCRAMBLED EGGS Daniel Krieger: Finished Scrambled Eggs (both), separating eggs process A–C, pickup A–C Penny De Los Santos: Ingredients SLOW-CARB WINES: THE TOP 10 LISTS David Bishop, Inc.: Wine bottle Gary Vaynerchuk: Gary Vaynerchuk with wine LESSON 03: COCONUT CAULIFLOWER CURRY MASH Daniel Krieger: Finished Coconut Cauliflower Curry Mash, Prep C–D Penny De Los Santos: BCAAs, Ingredients, Prep A–B LESSON 04: UNION SQUARE ZUCCHINI Daniel Krieger: Using the Peeler, finished Union Square Zucchini, prep A–B, prep A–F, finished Squash Pappardelle Penny De Los Santos: Ingredients, garlic on fork, Squash Pappardelle ingredients THE VOCABULARY OF CUTTING Penny De Los Santos: Vocabulary of Cutting Daniel Krieger: How to Coarsely Chop INTRODUCTION TO DIM MAK Daniel Krieger: Fingertip placement, body placement for discarding, hand placement, finger placement, cutting angles for speed Margot Rogers: Body placement illustration Drew Kelly: French cutting method, Chinese cutting method LESSON 05: HARISSA CRAB CAKES Daniel Krieger: Finished Harissa Crab Cakes, cutting board organizations, forming the crab cake Penny De Los Santos: Ingredients LESSON 06: BITTMAN CHINESE CHICKEN WITH BOK CHOY Daniel Krieger: Finished Bittman Chinese Chicken with Bok Choy, Prep, Prep fresh ginger Penny De Los Santos: Ingredients LESSON 07: ARUGULA, AVOCADO, AND ROMA SALAD Daniel Krieger: Finished Arugula, Avocado, and Roma Salad; Correct and incorrect washing, Pickup A–C, Eggocado process A–G Penny De Los Santos: Ingredients Tim Ferriss: EVOO container, finished Arugula, Avocado, and Roma Sald first attempt © Billy Fung: Finished Eggocado Dan Bornstein: Conducting egg experiments with chef James Simpkins, boiled eggs results Jonathan Arvizu, Trapdoor Studio: Peeling egg blow method LESSON 08: SEXY-TIME STEAK Daniel Krieger: Finished Sexy-Time Steak, Pickup A–D, Pickup 13 Tim Ferriss: Book inscription Penny De Los Santos: Ingredients, steak resting Albert Law: Tim with Chef Joshua Skenes 1–4 Alanna Hale: Aging sidebar IN SEARCH OF THE PERFECT CUP OF COFFEE Reprinted with permission of Ephemera, Inc. www.ephemera-inc.com: Drink Coffee: Do Stupid Things Faster Susan Burdick: My Tools (except AeroPress plunger and Chemex), process A–G Chemex: Chemex Brand Coffeemaker Penny De Los Santos: AeroPress plunger Tim Ferriss: Finished mug of coffee LESSON 09: 9TH MEAL—4-PERSON DINNER PARTY Penny De Los Santos: Rosemary tea iStockPhoto/Shawn Hempel: David Blaine’s Morning Juice LESSON 10: ROASTED GARLIC AND GAZPACHO Daniel Krieger: Finished Roasted Garlic and Gazpacho, Prep D–E, Pickup A–E, Garnish Tim Ferriss: Roasted Garlic process A–C Penny De Los Santos: Ingredients, peeling garlic methods LESSON 11: TIM’S TOP 4 IMMERSION SAUCES: PICK ONE Daniel Krieger: How to Chiffonade Basil LESSON 12: ROCK ’N’ EEL Tim Ferriss: Cod with Chinese five-spice Daniel Krieger: Finished Rock ’N’ Eel, Prep and Pickup A–D iStockPhoto/Jon-Erik Lido: Sushi restaurant rock-and-roll Penny De Los Santos: Ingredients LESSON 13: SOUS-VIDE CHICKEN BREAST Daniel Krieger: Finished Sous-Vide Chicken Breast, Prep A–C, Prep A–D, Pickup, Finished Kale Chips Tim Ferriss: Michelin 2-Star Bathroom Sink Penny De Los Santos: Ingredients, Kale Chips ingredients LESSON 14: SEARED SCALLOPS Jonathan Arvizu, Trapdoor Studio: Chinese characters Daniel Krieger: Finished Seared Scallops, Seared Scallops process Penny De Los Santos: Ingredients LESSON 15: CHICKEN HIGADO PÂTÉ Daniel Krieger: Finished Chicken Higado Pate, chopping onion process Penny De Los Santos: Ingredients OPTIONAL LESSON 16: “MLBJ” Sex Pots…And Pans, by Munroe Howard (Paperback Library, 1970): book cover Penny De Los Santos: Ingredients Tim Ferriss: Finished MLBJ, process A–J LESSONS 17+17½: THE FIRST HOSTING PARTY, THE SECOND DINNER PARTY Jonathan Arvizu, Trapdoor Studio: Bear-Ninja-Cowboy THE WILD TOP GEAR SURVIVAL: TARPS, TRAPS, AND TACTICAL KNIVES Susan Burdick: All Gear items Getty Images/Hugh Turvey: Suitcase x-ray THE IMPORTANCE OF RABBITS iStockPhoto/Alina Kurbiel: Rabbit close-up Hero Design Studio/Beth Manos & Mark Brickey: The Importance of Rabbits illustration Excerpted from The French Laundry Cookbook.

In 1981, there were 1,945 characters; since 2010, there are 2,136. 8 Which I learned in judo’s “sacrifice throw.” 9 In the world of cooking, such paralysis is most often induced by herbs and spices. 10 For any vegetarians who might land there, the oboro tofu is incredible. 11 This logic reiterates the benefit of this book: even if you never cook, you’ll increase your enjoyment of meals. 12 If they coach and do hourly consultations, you could also just pay for a telephone or Skype session. 13 Strangely, the basketball principles later produced a quantum leap in my handgun marksmanship—most important, that you should solve left-right deviation before worrying about long-short adjustments. 14 Even for tepee-style fires, you can ensure a smoke-free start by lighting the end of a rolled up newspaper and holding it up the chimney for 10–15 seconds before lighting the fire. 15 Prayer edited to reflect the Catholic version as it would have been in the 18th and 19th centuries (though translated into English). 16 This is a bonus 13th, to be explained later. 17 I can’t hold back on one more tip: to start, you can just learn the I and you (first- and second-person) conjugations, as you will be using those more than 80% of the time. 18 FOR NERDS: What about that bonus line in parentheses?


Lonely Planet Chile & Easter Island (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Carolyn McCarthy, Kevin Raub

California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, Colonization of Mars, company town, East Village, Easter island, gentrification, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, land reform, low cost airline, mass immigration, New Urbanism, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, QR code, rewilding, satellite internet, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, white picket fence

However, it isn’t recommended to undertake long treks in the wilderness by yourself. Telephone Throughout Chile there are call centers with private cabins and reasonable international rates, although these are rapidly being replaced by internet cafes with Skype. Remote tour operators and lodges have satellite phones with a Santiago prefix. Cell Phones Cell-phone numbers have eight digits, plus the two-digit prefix 09. The prefix must be used when calling from a land line or Skype-type calling service. Throughout this book, cell numbers are listed with their prefix. Drop the 09 prefix when calling cell-to-cell. If calling cell-to-landline, add the landline’s area code.

The one-hour, scenic narrow-gauge train ride comes with historical explanations in English and Spanish. Reserve in January and February, when cruise-ship tours take over. You can take it one way and return via minibus. Hitchhiking is feasible, but many cars may already be full. ESTANCIA HARBERTON Tierra del Fuego’s first estancia (grazing ranch), Harberton (Skype: estanciaharberton.turismo; www.estanciaharberton.com; tour & museum admission adult/child AR$45/free, half-board lodging s/d/t AR$802/1266/1772; 10am-7pm Oct 15–Apr 15) was founded in 1886 by missionary Thomas Bridges and his family. The location earned fame from a stirring memoir written by Bridges’ son Lucas, titled Uttermost Part of the Earth, about his coming of age among the now-extinct Selk’nam and Yaghan people.

Emphasizing the region’s marine mammals, the museum has inventoried thousands of mammal and bird specimens; among the rarest specimens is a Hector’s beaked whale. Much of this vast collection was found at Bahía San Sebastián, north of Río Grande, where a difference of up to 11km between high and low tide leaves animals stranded. Confirm the museum’s opening hours with the estancia. Reserve well in advance as there are no phones at the estancia, though Skyping may be possible. With advance permission, free primitive camping is allowed at Río Lasifashaj, Río Varela and Río Cambaceres. Harberton is 85km east of Ushuaia via RN 3 and rough RC-j, a 1½- to two-hour drive one way. In Ushuaia, shuttles leave from the base of 25 de Mayo at Av Maipú at 9am, returning around 3pm.


Robot Futures by Illah Reza Nourbakhsh

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, Burning Man, business logic, commoditize, computer vision, digital divide, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, phenotype, Skype, social intelligence, software as a service, stealth mode startup, strong AI, telepresence, telepresence robot, Therac-25, Turing test, Vernor Vinge

Beingthere and not-being-there will become a blurred distinction; just where we are at any given point in time will have less meaning than ever before in our cultural experience. The excitement 80 Chapter 4 and anxiety of this new mode of physicality is wrapped up in the reach we will have. Unlike Skype, Face Time, and all other communication portals that place an image and audio source on the table or in a pocket, this time the space traveler will jump off the table, out of the pocket, and push back on the distant world with his own volition, sharing physical space with locals more literally. Three key ingredients combine to offer this blurred physicality in which people may interact with the world: the immersive human interface system, the spatial extension provided by physical robots, and the seamless adjustable autonomy offered on those robots.


pages: 119 words: 36,128

Dead People Suck: A Guide for Survivors of the Newly Departed by Laurie Kilmartin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, call centre, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, Uber for X

Reading off their social security number, confirming their address. Saying “he died” or “she died,” over and over and over again. You need to be home. ARE YOU AN EMPLOYER? FOUR REASONS TO OFFER FOUR WEEKS OF MORTERNITY LEAVE DYING IS DISTRACTING: Is Facebook making your employees less productive? Try having one of them Skyping with their dying mom during lunch. (And from a cubicle, because it’s never the employee with her own office.) The energy spent ignoring a coworker’s sobs and nose-blowing could be catastrophic for your bottom line. The increase in Kleenex purchasing alone could put you out of business. It’s in your economic self-interest to get that weeper out of the office until his mother is dead and buried.


pages: 133 words: 36,528

Peak Car: The Future of Travel by David Metz

autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, bike sharing, Clayton Christensen, congestion charging, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, driverless car, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Ford Model T, gentrification, high-speed rail, Just-in-time delivery, low cost airline, megaproject, Network effects, Ocado, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Suez canal 1869, The future is already here, urban sprawl, yield management, young professional

In Britain, only five per cent of us usually work at home. Video‑conferencing has also made only a small impact as yet, although there is substantial potential for growth, taking advantage of the increasing availability of high quality hardware for business meetings and of low cost Internet‑based communication such as Skype. The question is whether this is likely to affect the amount of travel. To what extent can remote contact substitute for meeting face‑to‑face? Or perhaps ease of communication helps people build bigger networks of friends and colleagues with whom they’ll want to meet with when they can, not least for informal contact over food and drink to cultivate understanding and trust.


Lonely Planet Pocket Bruges & Brussels by Lonely Planet, Helena Smith

Easter island, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, non-fiction novel, Skype

You must dial the area code, even when dialling from within the relevant area. Telephone numbers given in this book include the necessary area codes. Making International and Domestic Calls › Public telephones that accept stored-value phonecards (available from post offices, tele­phone centres, newsstands and retail outlets) are the norm. › You can use Skype to call internationally at internet cafes, and at the computer terminals of some hostels. Useful Numbers › Directory assistance (English-speaking operator) ( 1405) › International dialling code ( 00) › International operator ( 1324) Toilets Public toilets are generally clean and well looked after.


Pocket Bruges & Brussels Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Easter island, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, Skype

You must dial the area code, even when dialling from within the relevant area. Telephone numbers given in this book include the necessary area codes. Making International & Domestic Calls APublic telephones that accept stored-value phonecards (available from post offices, telephone centres, newsstands and retail outlets) are the norm. AYou can use Skype to call internationally at internet cafes, and at the computer terminals of some hostels. Useful Numbers Directory assistance (English-speaking operator) 1405 International dialling code 00 International operator 1324 Toilets APublic toilets are generally clean and well looked after.


pages: 123 words: 37,853

Do Improvise: Less push. More pause. Better results. A new approach to work (and life) (Do Books) by Poynton, Robert

Berlin Wall, complexity theory, Gene Kranz, Hans Rosling, iterative process, off grid, Skype, TED Talk, Toyota Production System

It took much longer to type this up than it did to do (even though I type fast). Along the way, in a matter of seconds, I also got two other ideas - from ‘drips’, the idea of a drip ‘campaign’ - regular, small drops of information that put me on the radar of my American friends. From ‘round’, the idea of a Skype round-table session to share learning or client contacts. So if you want to get new ideas, find a way to embrace constraint. Connect or collide constraints of different kinds into your issue. Use whatever you have to hand, from a coffee cup to a sales director or a two-hour deadline. You need enough freedom to question assumptions, but wide-open vistas of possibility are less productive than combining things that normally don’t go together.


Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It by Kamal Ravikant

back-to-the-land, off-the-grid, Silicon Valley, Skype

I’d like to gift you a session.” I have no idea what a Theta whatchamacallit is, but I don’t care. When life sends a gift, you accept. “It’s a little out there,” he says. “Are you okay with that?” I spent enough of my life in Northern California. Bring on the woo-woo. Next thing I know, I’m in a Skype session with a blond Swedish woman named Erika in Ubud. She has a centered presence about her, warm and caring. It’s like she glows. Okay, worst case, I get to talk to a nice glowy person. She walks me through her process, asking a series of questions about my beliefs, and something pops out. “They always leave me,” I find myself saying.


pages: 437 words: 113,173

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

These properties have rendered distance, time and the costs of both largely irrelevant to the distribution and exchange of ideas. As recently as 2001 the average long-distance phone call between, say, the US and the UK cost up to $1.75 per minute, and we rationed those minutes accordingly. Today, thanks to digital services like Skype, the cost has fallen by a factor of 100, and we’ve largely ceased to care about it. International call volumes have almost quadrupled since 2001, from 150 billion to about 600 billion minutes.23 The only relevance distance has to a phone call anymore is the hassle of coordinating time zones—which is one reason why asynchronous modes of contact like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger have taken off.

See systemic risk risk-taking, 135, 225, 244 Russia, 66, 78, 84, 260, 262 and life expectancy, 88 and migration, 57, 68 and politics, 22–3, 223, 226 and trade, 24, 43, 49 and urbanization, 54 and World Trade Organization, 24 Savonarola, Girolamo, 203–10, 212, 214–16, 224, 228–9, 261 Savulescu, Julian, 121 Schawinski, Kevin, 148 Schott, Joannes, 17 Schwab, Klaus, 167 Sen, Amartya, 89 September 11, 2001, 4, 166, 207, 219, 227, 242 Servetus, Michael, 108 Sforza, Ludovico, 173–4 Shakespeare, William, 65 shipbuilding, 60–3 Singapore, 63, 96, 96, 98, 180, 193, 248 Skype, 33 slavery and slave trade, 40, 56, 64–5, 92–3, 166 smartphones, 25, 31–2, 136 Smith, Adam, 41 Snowden, Edward, 24 social division, 213–14 protest, 221–5 in the Renaissance, 214–18, 223–4 and risk exposure, 227–31 social media, 4, 65, 112, 138, 145–6, 198, 242, 252, 261 social safety nets, 244 Somalia, 98, 101 South Africa, 23, 64, 76 South Korea, 43, 86 Southern African Development Community (SADC), 25 Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR), 25 Soviet Union, 21–2, 24, 57, 98, 223.


pages: 492 words: 118,882

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

Over the past 30 years, as competition and openness increased, not only did the sector see a myriad of new entrants, but in terms of services offered, it cannot even be compared to what it was before. From the days of dial-up Internet access , the industry has grown to offer free encrypted texts (WhatsApp) and free calls (Skype). The change has not only resulted in creating metrics-saturated, hyper-efficient business models, but it has led to a change in the mindset of society. Ask a teenager to surrender their smartphone for a day and watch the symptoms of a panic attack set in. Thus fragmentation does seem to be the antidote to the current economic malaise .

Rather, it provides a top-layer cryptographic escrow system which allows funds to move between ledgers with the help of intermediaries it calls “connectors.” As stated by Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas, “As long as your ledger supports [Interledger], you can participate in a payment and someone will be able to provide liquidity. It can be PayPal, Alipay, bitcoin, bank ledgers or Skype, anywhere people hold balances, they have a ledger” (Rizzo, 2015) Footnotes 1The Advertising Slogan Hall of Fame, sponsored by AdSlogans.com, recognizes excellence and best practice in advertising, identifying the best in branding. 2Ian Richardson played the character Francis Urquhart in the 1990’s while Kevin Spacey, plays the character Frank Underwood today.


pages: 302 words: 82,233

Beautiful security by Andy Oram, John Viega

Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Bletchley Park, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, corporate governance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, defense in depth, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, Firefox, information security, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, market design, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Leeson, Norbert Wiener, operational security, optical character recognition, packet switching, peer-to-peer, performance metric, pirate software, Robert Bork, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, security theater, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, SQL injection, statistical model, Steven Levy, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Upton Sinclair, web application, web of trust, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

SECURING ONLINE ADVERTISING: RUSTLERS AND SHERIFFS IN THE NEW WILD WEST 95 $9.99/month—the very opposite of “free” (see Figures 6-4 and 6-5). Or consider an ad promising a “free credit report”—even though the touted service is actually neither free nor a credit report. Other bogus ads try to sell software that’s widely available without charge. Search for “Firefox,” “Skype,” or “Winzip,” and you may stumble into ads attempting to charge for these popular but free programs (see Figure 6-6). These scams fly in the face of decades of consumer protection law. For one thing, not every clause in an agreement is legally enforceable. In particular, material terms must be clear and conspicuous, not buried in fine print.‖ (For example, the FTC successfully challenged deceptive ads that promised ice cream was “98% fat free” when a footnote admitted the products were not low in fat.#) Yet online marketers often think they can promise “free ringtones” or a “free iPod” with a small-type text admitting “details apply.”

“Free” ringtones that aren’t FIGURE 6-5. “Unlimited Free” ringtones that actually cost $7.99 ‖ “FTC Advertising Enforcement: Disclosures in Advertising.” http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/workshops/ disclosures/cases/index.html. # Häagen-Dazs Co. 119 F.T.C. 762 (1995). 96 CHAPTER SIX FIGURE 6-6. Charging for Skype and Winzip Fortunately, regulators are beginning to notice. For example, the FTC challenged ValueClick’s deceptive banners and pop ups, which touted claims like “free PS3 for survey” and “select your free plasma TV.” The FTC found that receiving the promised merchandise required a convoluted and nearly impossible maze of sign-ups and trials.


pages: 421 words: 110,406

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

As we saw in chapter 7, this helps to explain Apple’s 2012 introduction of Apple Maps in response to the enormous popularity of Google Maps. Some kinds of platforms need still other customized metrics during their maturity phase. These include labor platforms such as Upwork, data platforms such as Thomson Reuters, connection platforms such as Skype, and platforms that connect machines such as GE’s Industrial Internet. Although these are distinct platform types with disparate needs, they all face the challenges of facilitating a core interaction, measuring the drivers of value, and innovating to maintain the platform’s ability to produce significant value for users.

, 275 side switching, 26, 198, 299 Siemens, 76, 204, 247, 284 signal-to-noise ratio, 199, 200 sign-up methods, 66, 81–85, 190 Silicon Valley, 16, 76–77, 112, 252–53, 281–82 siloed industries, 176, 178 Singapore, 160–61, 179 single-side strategy, 95–96, 105 single-user feedback loop, 45–46, 100–101 Siri, 147 Sittercity, 47, 122 Skillshare, 4, 96, 111, 122, 124, 212, 265, 266 Skullcandy, 162 Skype, 200–201 small businesses, 72, 276–77 smart grids, 272–74 smart metrics, 201–2 smartphones, 64, 66, 92, 113, 131, 140 Smith, Adam, 280 Snapchat, 217 social losses, 238, 239 social networks, 3, 11, 36, 41–42, 45, 51, 58, 71, 72, 90–91, 92, 95–104, 113–15, 120–21, 131–33, 152, 163, 185, 198, 204, 217, 218, 221, 226, 245, 251–52 software, 33, 52–54, 57, 62–63, 67, 91–92, 95, 125, 136, 137, 143, 151–53, 159, 170, 173–75, 216–17, 219, 254–55, 267, 295 SolarCity, 273 solar panels, 69, 273 Sollecito, Raffaele, 129–30 Sony, 61, 75, 94, 124, 137, 138–39, 178, 211, 240, 246, 259, 270–71 Sony Corp. of America v.


pages: 409 words: 112,055

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats by Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Exxon Valdez, false flag, geopolitical risk, global village, immigration reform, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kubernetes, machine readable, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, Network effects, open borders, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, quantum cryptography, ransomware, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, software as a service, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

Meanwhile, corporate players are busy dividing up the internet into commercial enclaves where users log in to a contained world that is curated for them, probably by Facebook or Google. Real names are increasingly mandatory. Even business communications, once the domain of email and its open standard, are moving into proprietary channels such as Slack and Skype. For a brief period, the corporate world did battle with governments. The corporations lost. Early internet companies tried to convince bureaucrats that the internet was an open, flat network and was therefore a “take-it-or-leave-it” proposition. Countries such as France and Germany were told that they could either opt in to the global internet or opt out.

We do not know of a good way to be highly confident that your security cameras are secure, but if you’re able to access them via a web browser without entering any username or password, you can probably assume that if somebody really had a reason for wanting to watch what your cameras are picking up, they could probably do so with very little work. If your cameras do use authentication, use the aforementioned best practices for choosing a password. So, what can you do about this? To begin with, tape over the camera (or use a Post-it note) on your laptop or desktop until you want to use it for FaceTime or Skype, or use a sliding webcam cover, which can be found with ease on the internet (and is now ubiquitous in the cybersecurity world). Again, there is little probability that someone is sitting around watching what goes on in your household all day, but if you’re worried regardless, turn the interior cameras off when you get home.


pages: 397 words: 113,304

Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone by Juli Berwald

clean water, complexity theory, crowdsourcing, Downton Abbey, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, Panamax, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Skype, sparse data, stem cell, Suez canal 1869, TED Talk, the scientific method, Wilhelm Olbers

With a list of publications on gelatinous creatures that stretched back to the 1970s and required two generous scroll-downs of my computer screen to reach the oldest articles, she is one of the field’s most knowledgeable and prolific scientists. I asked her for an interview. Jenny was working in Qingdao, China, as a consultant to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Despite being separated by eleven time zones, we arranged to meet virtually face-to-face using Skype. When she appeared on my computer screen, I saw a no-nonsense woman with matter-of-fact short dark hair and discerning eyes framed by sensible glasses. Our conversation ranged over a broad swath of jelly topics, like what they eat (a lot more fish than most people realize), how bad the sting of Japanese giant jellies is (could be quite bad), and how a North American comb jelly managed to invade seas worldwide (it’s a “formidable predator”).

., “The Jellyfish Buffet: Jellyfish Enhance Seabird Foraging Opportunities by Concentrating Prey,” Biology Letters 11 (2015). submersibles and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs): Jennifer E. Purcell, “Extension of Methods for Jellyfish and Ctenophore Trophic Ecology to Large-Scale Research,” Hydrobiologia 616 (2011): 23–50. meet virtually face-to-face: I interviewed Jenny Purcell by Skype on April 5, 2012. 2. What’s Your Agenda? conference on jellyfish blooms: There have been five International Jellyfish Bloom Symposia. The first was held in Gulf Shores, Alabama, in 2000; the second, in Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, in 2007; the third in Mar del Plata, Argentina, in 2010; the fourth in Hiroshima, Japan, in 2013; and the fifth in Barcelona, Spain, in 2016.


Nepal Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, land reform, load shedding, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, traffic fines

Private call centres charge around Rs 10 to 40 per minute to most countries. Internet phone calls are cheaper, costing around Rs 10 per minute (calls to mobile phones are often more expensive), but these are only available in Kathmandu and Pokhara. Most internet cafes offer internet phone calls through Skype (www.skype.com) for a couple of rupees per minute on top of their normal internet rates. Local phone calls cost around Rs 5 per minute, with long-distance domestic calls costing around Rs 10 per minute. Out in rural areas you may find yourself using someone’s mobile phone at a public call centre. Mobile Phones Ncell ( 9809005000; www.ncell.com.np) is the most popular and convenient provider.

FedEx Offline map Google map ( 4269248; www.fedex.com/np; Kantipath; 9am-6pm Sun-Fri, to 1pm Sat) Telephone You can make international telephone calls from any of the dozens of ‘communication centres’ for around Rs 20 per minute. A public-telephone rank below Or2k offers international calls for Rs 10 per minute to the US or UK. Most internet cafes offer Skype. Ncell Offline map Google map ( 9805554338; www.ncell.com.np; Sherpa Mall, Durbar Marg; 9.30am-7.30pm) is the most convenient central office to get an Ncell SIM card. Tourist Information There are a number of good noticeboards in Thamel that are worth checking for information on apartments, travel and trekking partners, courses and cultural events.


pages: 1,909 words: 531,728

The Rough Guide to South America on a Budget (Travel Guide eBook) by Rough Guides

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, banking crisis, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, centre right, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, company town, Day of the Dead, discovery of the americas, Easter island, Francisco Pizarro, garden city movement, gentrification, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, it's over 9,000, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, off grid, openstreetmap, place-making, restrictive zoning, side project, Skype, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, urban sprawl, walkable city

You can make direct-dial international calls from most South American phones, apart from remote areas, where calls must be made through an operator. International phone calls are, in general, expensive from South America, so you’re best off trying to buy international calling cards where they exist or using web services such as Skype – most internet cafés are set up with webcams and headsets. Mobile phones If you want to use your mobile phone in South America, check with your phone provider whether it will work abroad, and what the call charges are (beware of amassing a fortune in data charges and use wi-fi wherever possible).

Attempting the trip in the rainy season (Nov–March) is not recommended. Communications Most hotels and some restaurants offer free (though generally far from fast) wi-fi. Internet cafés are ubiquitous but connections are often slow. Expect to pay about B$2–6/hr. Calling internationally, the cheapest landline option is via an internet phone service such as Skype. Most mobile users in Bolivia have WhatsApp. There are ENTEL phone centres and Punto Cotel offices in most towns, where you can make local, national and international calls. It may be worth buying an inexpensive mobile phone, or bringing one with you, and getting a Bolivian pay-as-you-go SIM card (chip).

Mobile phone numbers are eight digits and start with a 9, 8, 7, 6 or 5; if you’re phoning from a landline, you need to use the prefix “09”. Calls abroad from the numerous centros de llamadas to most European countries and North America cost around CH$150–250/min, although prices vary from area to area. Many internet cafés in Chile are Skype-equipped. Alternatively, get an inexpensive Chilean SIM card for an “unlocked” mobile phone; to do this, annoyingly, you now need to register (for free) online – visit multibanda.cl for more information. Overseas mail sent from any part of Chile via Correos de Chile, the national postal service, generally takes two or three weeks to reach its destination.


pages: 130 words: 43,665

Powerful: Teams, Leaders and the Culture of Freedom and Responsibility by Patty McCord

call centre, data science, future of work, job satisfaction, late fees, Silicon Valley, Skype, subscription business, the scientific method, women in the workforce

Bethany once worked with Reed on filling a director position. They met on a Thursday morning to discuss what type of candidates they were looking for. The next afternoon, Reed sent her an email telling her he had sent messages to twenty prospects he had found on LinkedIn and had gotten three responses. He had also gone ahead and had a Skype session with one of them, really liked him, and wanted to have him come in on Monday. When hiring managers are so engaged, that makes recruiters only all the more competitive. Bethany told me that after she got that message from Reed, she became determined to find someone even better. (We ended up hiring Reed’s guy and Reed gloated about it for years.)


pages: 472 words: 117,093

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

He came across a video uploaded to YouTube earlier that year by Ivan Owen, a “mechanical special effects artist” who had built a giant metal extension of his own hand as part of a costume for a “steampunk” convention.§§ Although separated by more than 10,000 miles, Van As and Owen collaborated via e-mail and Skype to build a functional prosthetic finger. Their work was greatly accelerated when the 3D printer company MakerBot donated two of its desktop Replicator 2 machines to the effort. These enabled the makers to iterate and generate prototypes much more quickly, and eventually to come up with working mechanical digits for Van As.

accessed February 8, 2017, http://www.synbioproject.org/topics/synbio101/definition. 272 The campaign attracted over $70,000: Indiegogo, “DIY CRISPR Kits, Learn Modern Science by Doing,” accessed February 8, 2017, https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/diy-crispr-kits-learn-modern-science-by-doing#. 272 “I played God”: Andrew Tarantola, “I Played God with The Odin’s DIY CRISPR Kit,” Engadget, June 30, 2016, https://www.engadget.com/2016/06/30/i-played-god-with-the-odins-diy-crispr-kit. 272 Harper’s Open Agriculture Initiative: Open Agriculture Initiative, “Farming for the Future,” accessed February 8, 2017, http://openag.media.mit.edu. 272 “permissionless innovation”: Adam Thierer, Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom (Arlington, VA: Mercatus Center, 2014), section 1.02. 273 He came across a video: “Large Mechanical Hand,” YouTube, April 2, 2011, 0:48, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEHiAItVdiw. 273 Van As and Owen collaborated via email and Skype: Robert F. Graboyes, “A Hand for Innovation—Ivan Owen, Jon Schull and e-NABLE,” InsideSources, October 19, 2016, http://www.insidesources.com/a-hand-for-innovation-ivan-owen-jon-schull-and-e-nable. 273 “Corporal Coles could pick up a button”: eHive, “Corporal Coles Prosthetic Hand; Robert Norman; 1845; AR#1723,” accessed February 8, 2017, https://ehive.com/collections/5254/objects/387275/corporal-coles-prosthetic-hand. 274 “The cost of a workable prosthetic”: Graboyes, “Hand for Innovation.”


When Computers Can Think: The Artificial Intelligence Singularity by Anthony Berglas, William Black, Samantha Thalind, Max Scratchmann, Michelle Estes

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, AI winter, air gap, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, backpropagation, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, call centre, cognitive bias, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, create, read, update, delete, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, DeepMind, disinformation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, factory automation, feminist movement, finite state, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general-purpose programming language, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, job automation, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, patent troll, patient HM, pattern recognition, phenotype, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Thomas Malthus, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zero day

Technology billionaire Elon Musk recently warned that research into artificial intelligence was “summoning the devil” and that artificial intelligence is our biggest existential threat. World famous physicist Stephen Hawking expressed his concerns that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has expressed concern. Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of Skype, commented “I wish this was science fiction, but I know that it is not”. In January 2015 many of the worlds leading researchers into artificial intelligence signed a letter written by the Future of life institute warning of the dangers and promoting research so that “our AI systems (must) do what we want them to do”.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates said that at first semi-intelligent machines will perform a lot of tasks, but a few decades after that strong intelligence will be a concern. “I do not understand why some people are not concerned.” Other noteworthy commentators include Bill Joy, ex Chief Scientist at Sun Microsystems who wrote a paper “Why the future does not need us”. Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of Skype, commented “I wish this was science fiction, but I know that it is not”. Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said fears over artificial intelligence and robots replacing humans are “misguided”. He refers to the introduction of disruptive technologies during the industrial revolution that eventually led to our current high standard of living.


pages: 413 words: 119,587

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

In college, Cheyer had begun visualizing goals clearly and then systematically working to achieve them. One day just as they were getting started he wandered into an Apple Store and saw posters with an array of colorfully crafted icons representing the most popular iPhone applications. All of the powerful software companies were there: Google, Pandora, Skype. He focused on the advertising display and said to himself: “Someday Siri is going to have its icon right here on the wall of an Apple Store! I can picture it and I’m going to make this happen.” They went to work. In Gruber’s view, the team was a perfect mix. Cheyer was a world-class engineer, Kittlaus was a great showman, and Gruber was someone who could build high-technology demos that wowed audiences.

“Eventually, I think human extinction will probably occur, and technology will likely play a part in this.”11 For an artificial intelligence researcher who had just reaped hundreds of millions of dollars, it was an odd position to take. If someone believes that technology will likely evolve to destroy humankind, what could motivate them to continue developing that same technology? At the end of 2014, the 2009 AI meeting at Asilomar was reprised when a new group of AI researchers, funded by one of the Skype founders, met in Puerto Rico to again consider how to make their field safe. Despite a new round of alarming statements about AI dangers from luminaries such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, the attendees wrote an open letter that notably fell short of the call to action that had been the result of the original 1975 Asilomar biotechnology meeting.


pages: 461 words: 125,845

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers by Andy Greenberg

air gap, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Burning Man, Chelsea Manning, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disinformation, domain-specific language, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, hive mind, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mondo 2000, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, operational security, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Ralph Nader, real-name policy, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, SQL injection, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Teledyne, three-masted sailing ship, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Zimmermann PGP

But Shirky’s analogy remains useful: Just as governments may have spied on each other’s citizens for the last sixty years, citizens are now spying on each other’s governments. “What we’re seeing is a pattern of transnational leaking,” he told the conference. “WikiLeaks is the first media outlet that is genuinely multihomed. There is no one country’s laws that govern how WikiLeaks operates.” Just minutes before, Birgitta Jónsdóttir had spoken to the same crowd via Skype, unable to travel to the United States for fear that her association with WikiLeaks would tempt U.S. authorities to keep her for questioning in its unfolding investigation. In her virtual talk, she outlined her plan for the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative and how she had tasked four ministries of the Icelandic government with changing thirteen laws to make Iceland the most liberated media nation in the world.

He began to monitor its leaks closely, and even experimented with uploading an unverified document that a source had sent him, in the hopes that this mysterious group might be able to authenticate it and publish it to a global audience. The document, written in Bulgarian, never surfaced on the site. It was only after the Cablegate release that Tchobanov began to consider the full power of WikiLeaks’ model—not just to protect journalism, but potentially to advance it. In a Skype chat with a few other journalists and technologists who worked on and off with Bivol, they proposed the idea of a leaking site that would publish locally focused documents that WikiLeaks wouldn’t, a leaking syringe targeted at the Balkans and its neighbors rather than a hose aimed at the world at large.


pages: 677 words: 121,255

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

Cockell in a series of meetings with scientists and scholars from varied fields in two conference proceedings titled Human Governance Beyond Earth and The Meaning of Liberty Beyond Earth. To learn more about what to do when the most basic necessities of life – oxygen, water, and food – are under the control of one company (SpaceX?) or one government (the US of Mars?), I spoke with Dr. Cockell by Skype, starting with the observation that Earthlings colonizing Mars will be nothing like Europeans colonizing North America.6 “Space is an inherently tyranny-prone environment,” Cockell told me. “You are living in an environment where the oxygen you breathe is being produced by a machine.” On Earth, he notes, governments can rob their people of food and water, “but they can’t take away your air, so you can run off into a forest and plan revolution, and you can get your friends together and you can try to overthrow a government.”

The real magicians are the scientists who have worked this all out. Quite by chance, my Scientific American column came out the same week that the popular podcaster Joe Rogan hosted a debate between me and Graham, along with his colleague Randall Carlson, plus our hand-selected “phone-a-friend” Skyped-in guests (geologist Marc Defant for me, planetary scientist Malcolm LeCompte for Hancock and Carlson). It was a three-hour-and-thirty-five-minute marathon that, at the time of this writing, many millions of people have heard or viewed on the usual podcast platforms. In preparation for the debate, I put together half a dozen reasons why alternative archaeologists in general, and Graham Hancock in particular, have failed to convince most scientists and archaeologists to abandon the theory about the timeline of the development of civilization over the past 13,000 years and to embrace his theory of an ancient lost advanced civilization dating back tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of years.


User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

Working with the blind yielded a smoother registration process for new Windows users, with clearer and better-timed, more concise user prompts; working with the blind, and screen-reader technology, yielded a captioning tool for PowerPoint presentations that would translate for the presenter in real time. That project, in turn, morphed and melded into a retooling of Skype that provided real-time captioning—then real-time language translation, so that people could hold conference calls without speaking each other’s language. In each case, making technology more assistive spawned innovations whose scope was far greater than the initial germ. This brings to mind Pellegrino Turri and his typewriter, Alexander Graham Bell and his telephone, and Vint Cerf and email—these were inventors who all started with people with disabilities in mind but eventually helped us all.

., 87 Neeleman, David, 309 Nespresso, 117 Nest, 92, 336, 344–45 Netflix, 230–31, 260, 351n33 neural networks, 36, 44 neuroscience, 96 Newby, Paul, 342 news feeds, 134, 247, 248, 318 New York, 94 New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, 303 New York City subway system, 311 New Yorker, The, 67–68 New York Times, The, 110, 183, 225, 259, 263 Nielsen, Jakob, 318 911 emergency calls, 51–53, 71; Ripple device as alternative to, 53–55, 80, 117, 204 Nokia, 308 Norman, Donald, 22–26, 45–46, 86, 95, 96, 103, 112, 124, 272, 287, 302, 318, 326, 334; at Apple, 22–23; The Design of Everyday Things, 22, 312, 339, 340; Emotional Design, 326, 340; Three Mile Island and, 24–25, 30, 38, 338–39 Nostradamus, 198 Noyes, Eliot, 8 nuclear radiation exposure, 19–20 nuclear reactors, 23, 25, 26, 29, 44, 45, 80, 113; see also Three Mile Island nuclear weapons, 100, 164, 167, 261, 291; missile warning, 121–22 Nuttall, Mike, 177 obsolescence, artificial, 69 Omondi, Wycliffe Onyango, 281–85 “On Exactitude in Science,” 91–92 operations research, 6 Oppenheimer, Robert, 247, 261 organized crime, 39 Ossete, Leslie Saholy, 279–85 OXO peeler, 202–203, 341 Padgett, John, 217, 221–22, 226, 228–32, 234, 235, 237–39, 242, 312, 323–24, 345 Page, Larry, 342 paintbrushes, 358n22 Panama-Pacific Exposition, 60 Papanek, Victor, 290 Patnaik, Dev, 307 Pattison, Mary, 63, 64 Pearl, 50 Pearlman, Leah, 247–49, 262, 292, 344 peeler, OXO, 202–203, 341 Peloton, 316 personality, 265–67 personalization, 231, 239, 245; Carnival’s Ocean Medallion and Personal Genome, 233–39, 268, 296; Disney’s MagicBand and MyMagic+, 217–29, 237, 243–44, 288, 304, 317, 345 personas, 178, 207, 261, 341 personification, 155–57 personnel research, 81 Piano, Renzo, 157 pilots: crashes of, 77, 81–85, 102–103, 104, 106, 121, 257; lost and confused, 75–78, 86, 87, 144; “pilot error” concept, 81, 83, 102–103, 121, 335 Pittman, Matthew, 260 Pitts, Walter, 36 Pixar, 211 Plunkett, Joseph, 57–58 Poland, 276 Polaroid camera, 117, 336, 342 politeness, 108–10, 112, 113, 239–40, 258; driverless cars and, 125, 126 Porter, Joshua, 329 postmodernism, 157–58 pottery making, 90 PowerPoint, 208–209 Princess Cruises, 230; see also Carnival Cruise Line Princess phone, 337, 371n21 Principles of Scientific Management, The (Taylor), 333 prototypes, 165, 180–82 psychologically natural controls, 84, 85; scrolling, 359n25 psychophysics, 84, 95 purpose, 33 radar, 32, 76–79, 83, 87 radio, 76, 77, 79, 84–85 Rams, Dieter, 46, 90, 338, 343, 370n17 Rand, Paul, 8 Raskin, Jef, 140, 141 Ratzlaff, Cordell, 317 razors, disposable, 154–55, 157 Read, Max, 262 Reddit, 249 Reeves, Byron, 110 Regal Princess, 229–30, 236 Renuka, 130–33, 147, 315 rewards, variable, 254, 255, 259 Ripple help button, 53–55, 80, 117, 204 RKO theater, 55–56, 92, 173–74, 335 robots, 115, 117; see also artificial intelligence (AI) Rogers, Richard, 157 Rohingya, 263 Rolls, Charles, 332 Rosenstein, Justin, 247–51, 262, 274, 291–92, 344 Russia, 201, 250, 313 Saarinen, Eero, 5, 8 Saproo, Sameer, 125–27 Sarajevo, 49–50, 54 savings accounts, 319 Scheiber, Noam, 259 Scheimann, Fred, 15–18 Schiller, Phil, 342 Schmidt, Eric, 191 Schon, Donald, 358n22 Schüll, Natasha, 255 Schulze-Mittendorff, Walter, 334–35 Schwartz, Barry, 231 science, 45 scientific management, 63, 333 Scott, Walter Dill, 81 scrolling direction, 359n25 Sears, 66, 69, 335 self-driving cars, see cars, self-driving Selfridge, Harry Gordon, 150, 333 self-service checkouts, 303 semiconductors, 168, 175 senses, 84 sewing machine, 72 sexual assault, 51–55, 204, 352n4 Sheehan, Kim, 260 Sholes, Christopher Latham, 332 Shum, Albert, 202 Silicon Valley, 3, 168, 175, 177, 180, 182, 221, 229, 257–59, 270, 291–92, 340 Simpsons, The, 161–62, 164, 180 Singapore, 24 Siri, 122, 151, 190–91, 193, 195, 208, 312 Sittig, Aaron, 344 skeuomorphism, 148, 202, 210 Skinner, B. F., 251–56, 258, 261, 268, 335 Skinner box, 252–56, 261, 268, 270, 312, 335 Skype, 205 slaughterhouses, 60 Sloman, Steven, 271 slot machines, 253–56, 260 Smalltalk, 140–44 Smart Design, 138, 164, 174, 175, 177, 202, 305, 343 smartphones, 26–27, 44, 45, 80, 124, 132, 151, 207, 219, 236, 242, 256, 257, 268, 271, 287, 294–95, 311; blind people and, 203–204; in China, 191–93; iPhone, 5, 23, 43, 127, 145–47, 149, 191, 216, 228, 259, 274, 289–90, 291, 296, 313, 327, 338, 343; Magic Bus Ticketing and, 283–86; phone-call icon on, 91 Smith, Brad, 325–26 Snapchat, 36, 37, 260, 346 social media, 240–42, 263, 287, 292–93 social mores, 108, 112, 114, 240, 264 social progress: consumption as, 55, 65, 90, 175; design as, 68–70, 271, 290 Society for Ethical Culture, 57 Sony Walkman, 242, 342 Space Shuttle, 175 specialization, 86 Sri Lanka, 263 stage design, 55–58 Staggs, Tom, 223–24, 226, 227 standardization, 84 Stanford Research Institute (SRI), 188, 190, 338 Stanford University, 104, 164, 165, 168, 180–82, 258, 344; d.school, 181–82, 330 Starbucks, 325 State Department, 201 Stein, Robby, 37 Stevens, S.


pages: 388 words: 211,074

Pauline Frommer's London: Spend Less, See More by Jason Cochran

Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, British Empire, congestion charging, context collapse, David Attenborough, Easter island, electricity market, Etonian, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Multics, Nelson Mandela, Skype, Stephen Fry, urban planning

The English send well over a million text messages a month; they know, as you should, that for quick communications, they’re cheaper than even a local call. If you’ll be traveling with a laptop and you’ll have broadband Web access where you’re staying (two big “ifs”), consider downloading a free Internet phone service such as Skype (www.skype.com), which will allow free calls to anyone who also has the program, worldwide. You’ll have the option of being able to buy cheap credits enabling you to make phone calls to regular phones using your computer. Using a USB headset gives you the best call quality (and call privacy), but that’s one more thing to pack.

The most easterly of the bunch, so requiring a slightly longer commute to town, the Premier Inn London Docklands (ExCeL) (Royal Victoria Dock, E16; % 0870/ 0238-3322; Tube: Prince Regent DLR) also sports lower prices than any of its in-town brethren: £67 Fridays and Saturdays and £86 weekdays. £ 07_308691-ch03.qxp 82 12/23/08 Chapter 3 9:16 PM Page 82 Accommodations, Both Standard & Not Staying Web Connected in Your Room These days, even budget travelers are packing their laptops and keeping in touch with e-mail and free Internet-based phone calls such as Skype. (Hide those computers under your dirty socks, though, because most lowcost hotels don’t have in-room safes.) You can’t judge Web availability by the room rate. About 50% of inns currently offer some kind of in-room high-speed Web access, almost always for free. Many more provide free service on terminals in their lobbies, and a few charge by the minute for lobby use.


Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World by Jeffrey Tucker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, altcoin, anti-fragile, bank run, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, driverless car, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, informal economy, invisible hand, Kickstarter, litecoin, Lyft, Money creation, obamacare, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, public intellectual, QR code, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, the payments system, uber lyft

I mean, you are probably right, but let’s just say that I think you made this whole thing up. I can dispute this in front of the judge?” “Yes, sir, you may. Just see the court date.” “And where is this court?” “Right here in this county.” Of course I had to explain to him that I was headed to the airport and that I live 1,000 miles away. I asked whether I could use Skype or Google Hangout to attend my hearing. “I’m sorry, sir, you have to attend in person.” I continued on: “So I have to drive to Atlanta, catch a flight to Dallas, rent a car and drive 100 miles south on some particular date in order to have my rights realized? You do understand that this would cost me probably two days of work and as much as $1,000?”


pages: 416 words: 129,308

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

Airbnb, animal electricity, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Lives Matter, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Higgs boson, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, information security, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, John Gruber, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, M-Pesa, MITM: man-in-the-middle, more computing power than Apollo, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, pirate software, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, TSMC, Turing test, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, zero day

The CMOS, meanwhile, is in the iPhone and has beaten out the CCD as the go-to technology for phone cameras today. You can’t talk about iPhone cameras without talking about selfies. FaceTime video streaming, which Bilbrey’s algorithms still help de-clutter, was launched as a key feature of the iPhone 4 and would join Skype and Google Hangouts as burgeoning videoconferencing apps. Apple placed the FaceTime camera on the front side of the phone, pointed toward the user, to enable the feature, which had the added effect of making it well-designed for taking selfies. Selfies are as old as cameras themselves (even older, if you count painted self-portraits).

When I ask him about Apple and the iPhone, his response is swift: “We don’t blame Apple. We blame Foxconn.” When I ask them if they would consider working at Foxconn again if the conditions improved, the response is equally blunt. “You can’t change anything,” Xu says. “It will never change.” That may not be merely a gut feeling. One night in Shenzhen, I set up a Skype interview with Li Qiang, the executive director of China Labor Watch. Li himself was a former Foxconn worker; he became a labor organizer and an advocate for better working conditions after living through the horrors at the company. He fled the country and now runs CLW out of New York City. Li had high hopes for the chance at reform in the wake of the suicide epidemic and the resulting media spotlight.


Frommer's Denver, Boulder & Colorado Springs by Eric Peterson

airport security, Columbine, Easter island, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, life extension, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, Ronald Reagan, Skype, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, young professional

., check out www.t-mobile.com/coverage. And you may or may not be able to send SMS (text messaging) home. VOICE-OVER INTERNET PROTOCOL (VOIP) If you have Internet access while traveling, consider a broadband-based telephone service (in technical terms, Voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP) such as Skype (www.skype.com) or Vonage (www.vonage. com), which allow you to make free international calls from your laptop or in a cybercafe. Neither service requires the people you’re calling to also have that service (though there are fees if they do not). Check the websites for details. Online Traveler’s Toolbox Veteran travelers usually carry some essential items to make their trips easier.


pages: 444 words: 130,646

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

I had started interacting with them early—I was the twelfth person they followed, but that was just the beginning for them. In one night, @TahrirSupplies acquired more than ten thousand followers—far more than I had at the time. Within a day, these four young people were coordinating almost all supplies for ten field hospitals. To keep in touch with doctors on the ground, they also used Skype and other messaging apps. To keep track of supplies, they used publicly viewable Google documents and spreadsheets embedded on the website they had hastily put up. They used the spreadsheets, updated in real time, to list supplies and needs by hospital and to organize the volunteers who were transporting supplies.

Eric Lipton, and Scott Shane, “Democratic House Candidates Were Also Targets of Russian Hacking,” New York Times, December 13, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/house-democrats-hacking-dccc.html; Eric Sanger, David E. Lipton, and Scott Shane, “The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.,” New York Times, December 13, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html. 38. “Erdogan on Skype, Announcement (Turkey Military Coup) 16.07.2016,” YouTube, July 15, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3uN340XHyc. 39. Konda survey, “Demokrasi Nöbeti Araştırması: Meydanların Profili,” July 26, 2016, http://konda.com.tr/demokrasinobeti/. 40. H. Akin Unver and Hassan Alassaad, “How Turks Mobilized against the Coup,” Foreign Affairs, September 14, 2016, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2016-09-14/how-turks-mobilized-against-coup. 41.


pages: 510 words: 141,188

Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom by Katherine Eban

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Madoff, Frances Oldham Kelsey, global pandemic, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Upton Sinclair, urban planning

Hesitantly, Thakur consented to the call. But still wanting to maintain control of the interaction, he tried to school Rivera-Martinez on the best and most secure way to set up the conference call. “Do you have access to publicly available VOIP applications?” he asked in one email. “I mean apps like GoogleTalk or SKYPE? In order to use either of these apps, you only need a microphone and speakers on your computer.” He then sent links for the FDA official to download. But the FDA had its own technology—and its own way of operating. Thakur ended up phoning in to the agency, as instructed. The conference call lasted about ninety minutes.

.”, xxi, 368–69, 371, 386, 391, 397 Singh, Malvinder, xix, 246–47 AIDS drugs, 122, 123–24, 126 Daiichi Sankyo merger and, 196–203, 207–8, 210–14, 439n death of father and, 79–80 Deshmukh and, 199, 200, 201–3, 208, 211, 213–14, 398 education of, 149–50 FDA meeting, 161, 163–66 guilty plea of, 318–19, 397 Kumar’s board presentation of fraud (SAR), 115–17, 165–66, 199–201, 208–9, 215 lies and efforts to conceal, 113, 128–29, 171, 202, 207–8, 217 role as CEO, 149–52, 195–203 sense of crisis at Ranbaxy, 207–8, 210–12 Tempest as CEO, 60–61 update on, 398–99 Singh, Manjit, 77–78 Singh, Nimmi, 149–50, 151–52 Singh, Parvinder, xix, 75–80, 149 company portrait of, 33–34, 63 Deshmukh and, 26 education of, 75–76 Singh, Shivinder, 79, 150–51, 196, 203, 398–99 Skype, 144 SmithKline Beecham, 62 “Smoking gun theory,” 281–82 Sobti, Atul, xix, 278 “Soluble and Immobilized Catalase” (Thakur), 13 Sotret, 27–30, 209–10, 415 FDA inspections and findings, 153, 154, 165, 170–71, 185, 209–10 launch of, 28–30 Malik and failed tests, 28–30, 91–92 Pant and investigation report, 30, 170–71 Ranbaxy fraud and settlement, 317 Spreen and failed data, 112–13 whistleblowers on, 185 South Africa, AIDS drugs, 63–65, 83, 87–88 Spreen, Kathy, 112–13 Stability testing, 109–10, 123, 124, 125, 126, 135 Starling, Randall, xxiii, 240–43, 402–3 Stavudine, 82–83 Stearn, Douglas, 279 Stein, Jacob, 174 Stein, Mitchell, Muse & Cipollone LLP, 174–75, 176, 252–53, 312, 399 Stotland, Nada, xii Stouffer, Carla, 270–71 Substandard drugs, 115, 341–50, 419 Sulfanilamide, 49–50 Sulfathiazole, 50 Sun Pharmaceuticals, 398–99 Swaminathan, Venkat, 16, 58, 60–61, 109, 117 Synthroid, 260 Syracuse University, 15 Tacrolimus, 193–94, 240–43, 402, 418, 444n Taj Mahal, 39–40, 362–63 Taj Mahal Palace (Mumbai), 333–34 Takahashi, Karen, xxii, 144, 163, 273–79, 281–82, 289, 313 Tave, Steven, xxi, 249, 250–51, 279 Taxpayers Against Fraud Education Fund (TAFEF), 173–74, 380 Taylor, Paige, 280 Tempest, Brian, xix, 121 AIDS drugs, 39, 63, 64, 124–25, 126 Kumar’s board presentation of fraud (SAR), 115–17, 146, 200 lies and efforts to conceal, 128–29, 217 preliminary report of fraud, 109–10 promotion to CEO, 60–61, 149 Sotret launch, 27–28 Temple, Robert, xxii, 260, 263–70 Tetanus, 48 Tetracycline, 21 Tetzlaff, Ron, 164–65 Teva, 19, 24 Budeprion XL, 262–70, 419, 445n Thakur, Dinesh, xx appearance of, 9 Beato and, 174–78, 274, 312–14, 396 advice on wife Sonal, 252–53, 255–56 first conversation with, 174–75 first meeting, 177–78 at BMS, 9–12, 14–16 challenges of living in India, 32–33 childhood of, 13, 138–40 consulting work of, 138, 155 drunk pedestrian incident, 35–36, 141 education of, 13–14, 138–40 efforts to reform India drug industry, 377–79, 382, 383–84, 387, 389–93, 397 at Infosys, 155–56, 157, 162 moral dilemmas of, 139–40, 141 Pant and, 103, 256–57, 388–89 police registration in India, 32–33 at Ranbaxy, 11–13, 16, 32–33, 36, 61–63 Arun Kumar and, 102–5, 433–34n ARV drugs study, 63–65 Clinton visit, 38, 39 efforts to transform culture, 57–62 findings of fraud, 101–9, 114, 117–18, 137–38 Raj Kumar and, 62–65, 108–10, 114–15, 145–46, 171, 316 records retention policy, 59–60 resignation, 117–18, 137–38 Ranbaxy settlement, 312–14, 377–78 Ranbaxy settlement hearing, 314–18 as Ranbaxy whistleblower, 173–74, 176–78 awards for, 319, 379–81 meetings, 161–63, 173–74, 177–78 pseudonymously reaches out to FDA, 141–47, 161–62 seeking a lawyer, 173–74 Robertson and, 156–57, 161–67, 171, 251, 311–12, 317–18 meetings, 161–63, 173–74 Sciformix, 252, 313 Sonal and family life.


pages: 260 words: 130,109

Frommer's Kauai by Jeanette Foster

airport security, Easter island, indoor plumbing, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, Skype, sustainable-tourism

There are plenty of package deals available, including family plans, discounted senior rates, and room and car package deals. 73 1 2 S TAY I N G CO N N E C T E D TELEPHONES information, dial 1, then the appropriate area code and 555-1212. CELLPHONES VOICEOVER INTERNET PROTOCOL VOIP If you have Web access while traveling, you might consider a broadband-based telephone service (in technical terms, Voice-over Internet Protocol, or VoIP) such as Skype (www.skype.com) or Vonage (www.vonage.com), which allows you to make free international calls if you use their services from your laptop or in a 3 S TAY I N G CO N N E C T E D Just because your cellphone works at home doesn’t mean it’ll work in Kauai (thanks to our nation’s fragmented cellphone system).


pages: 466 words: 127,728

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, complexity theory, computer age, credit crunch, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jitney, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, operational security, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, risk-adjusted returns, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Stuxnet, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, working-age population, yield curve

Reporting on Estonia in 2012, CNBC’s Paul Ames writes, “Shoppers throng Nordic design shops and cool new restaurants in Tallinn, the medieval capital, and cutting-edge tech firms complain they can’t find people to fill their job vacancies.” The BELLs have also made good use of their human capital and a relatively well-educated workforce. Estonia in particular has become a high-tech hub centered on its most successful company, Skype, which has more than four hundred employees in a worker-friendly campus near Tallinn. The New York Times published a story on Latvia in 2013 that accurately captured the trajectory of steep collapse and strong recovery that used to be typical of business cycles but is now mostly avoided by Western governments at the expense of long-term growth: When a credit-fueled economic boom turned to bust in this tiny Baltic nation in 2008, Didzis Krumins, who ran a small architectural company, fired his staff . . . and then shut down the business.

., 51–52 Scotland, 136 Second Bank of the United States, 199 self-organized criticality, 270 Serbia, 136 Seven Years War, 115 shadow finance system, in China, 101–4 shadow gold standard, 236 Shafik, Nemat, 194–95 Shakespeare, William, 67, 88 Shamoon digital virus, 60 Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), 150–52 Shapiro, Mary, 59 Shinohara, Naoyuki, 194–95 sight accounts, in gold, 276 signal amplification, 22 in stock trading, 23 terrorist insider trading and, 24, 25, 26, 27 Skype, 144 small-and-medium-sized (SME) lending, 79–80 Smith, Adam, 70, 71, 72, 87, 218, 255 Snowden, Edward, 39, 54, 149 social disorder, 294–95 solidus, 114 Solyndra, 123 Sony, 82 Sorkin, Andrew Ross, 51 Sorman, Guy, 132 Soros, George, 45, 292 sou, 114 sound-dollar policy, 118, 176–77, 210, 211 South Africa, 139, 235.


pages: 418 words: 128,965

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, British Empire, Burning Man, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eben Moglen, Ford Model T, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, open economy, packet switching, PageRank, profit motive, radical decentralization, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, seminal paper, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

The devices, in a similar way, are also “telecom-friendly”: designed to operate with one carrier only, they reinforce the favored telephone company’s power—for a price. The veto that Apple maintains over functionality and specific applications is not notional, but one wielded in service of its partnerships’ interests. The first major exercise was in blocking Skype, the voice-over-IP firm whose software lets users call each other over the Internet for free, eating into AT&T’s long distance margins. Later, during the summer of 2009, Apple bodychecked an application written for the iPhone by Google. The product, named “Google Voice,” was designed to make a single phone number, when dialed, ring on all one’s phones at once.

Consider all the mischief that the information firms could undertake but choose to eschew. Cable operators, though not obliged by law to do so, generally carry channels that a cruder calculus would motivate them to block. Likewise, Apple, the maker of the iPhone, has been, in effect, shamed into allowing apps, such as Skype or Line2, that compete with its own services. Meanwhile Verizon, a born-and-bred Baby Bell, gains public applause by publicly declaring itself an “open” company. And Google, one of the great corporate hegemons of our time, does likewise under its banner “Don’t Be Evil.” Whatever its missteps and shortcomings, that firm has, so far, done more than any other to promote what we have been describing as a constitutional policy of separations for the information industry.


Jennifer Morgue by Stross, Charles

Boeing 747, call centre, Carl Icahn, correlation does not imply causation, disinformation, disintermediation, dumpster diving, Dutch auction, Etonian, haute couture, interchangeable parts, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, operational security, PalmPilot, planetary scale, RFID, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, stem cell, telepresence, traveling salesman, Turing machine

I stretch in place, try to massage the crick out of the side of my neck, and yawn. Then I wake up my laptop. Almost immediately the Skype window starts flashing for attention. You have voice mail, it says. Voice mail? Hell, yes — in this Brave New World there's no escape from the internet, even at 40,000 feet. I yawn again and plug in my headset, trying to shake off the influence of Ramona's distantly sensed repose. I glance at the screen. It's Mo, and she's on Skype, too, so I place a call. "Bob?" Her voice crackles a little — the signal is being bounced via satellite to the plane and the latency is scary.


Virtual Competition by Ariel Ezrachi, Maurice E. Stucke

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Arthur D. Levinson, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, cloud computing, collaborative economy, commoditize, confounding variable, corporate governance, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, deep learning, demand response, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, electricity market, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental economics, Firefox, framing effect, Google Chrome, independent contractor, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, light touch regulation, linked data, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, Milgram experiment, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, nowcasting, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, power law, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search costs, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, yield management

Consequently, the debate among some neoclassical economists is whether and when the government should intervene in certain markets. Dynamic Markets Will Correct Themselves Many online industries are dynamic and fast-growing. The European Commission, for example, took account of the dynamic market characteristics when it approved Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype. In upholding the Commission’s decision, the General Court observed that the consumer communications sector was “a recent and fast-growing sector which is characterised by short innovation cycles in which large market shares may turn out to be ephemeral.”12 In such a dynamic context, the Court noted, “high market shares are not necessarily indicative of market power and, therefore, of lasting damage to competition. . . .”13 Some argue that courts and agencies should rarely, if ever, intervene in dynamic industries.14 They claim that governmental intervention in dynamic economic markets will often harm consumers.

., 118, 120, 294n2 Levinson, Arthur, 147 Lewis, Michael, 65, 220 LIBOR, manipulation of, 47, 268n5 Light touch antitrust policies, 22–26 Lobbying, by super-platforms, 244–245 Location data, extraction of, 162–163, 315n13 Loyalty programs, differential pricing and, 91–93, 229–230, 285–286n21 Lyft, 6, 51, 155, 210 Maas, Jenna, 170 Machine-to-machine communication (M2M), 18 Marcus, David, 17 Market-clearing prices, planned economies and, 211–214 Mattress industry, complexity of pricing and, 109 Maverick firms, as threat to collusion, 45, 65, 73, 80–81, 228–229, 230, 237–238 McKie-Mason, Jeff rey, 295n6 McKinsey & Company, 106 Messenger collusion scenario, 36, 39–45; algorithms as intermediaries in, 42–44; hub and spoke collusion scenario differs from, 48 Metasearch engines. See Comparison intermediaries Microsoft, 18, 138, 174, 227; antitrust issues and, 222, 247, 263n2; decoy products and, 106; personal assistants and, 201; Skype and, 25; as superplatform, 148, 175–176; Uber and, 155; voice activation and, 17; Windows phone platform, 149 Index Milgram, Stanley, 43–44 “Milgram’s 37 (We Do What We’re Told)” (song), 43 Misener, Patrick, 90 Mobile devices, 163–170; ad blocking technology and, 171; data extraction and, 162–170, 313n3; differential pricing and, 90, 108; do not track standards and, 172; Frenemy dynamic and, 148–151, 158; tracking of customers and, 94–96 Morgan Stanley, 269n9 Morozov, Evgeny, 239 Most Favored Nation (MFN) clauses, comparison intermediaries and, 140–142, 143 Neoclassical economics, 205; behavioral discrimination and, 120–121; price discrimination and, 117–119, 295nn4–9, 297n12 Nest Labs, 154 Netfl ix, 238, 337n22 Network effects: of comparison intermediaries, 133–135, 303n6; market power and, 237–238; super-platforms and, 175 New market dynamics, imperfection of, 27–31 New York Times, 92–93, 137, 215 1984 (Orwell), 199 Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, 23 Nissan Leaf, 243 Nomi Technologies, 95 North, Douglass, 225 Notice-and-consent privacy model, broken nature of, 226–228 Obama, Barack, 189 Obama administration, 224, 244, 248 Object illegality, 35, 42, 80, 269n10, 270n18, 271n20 Octo Telematics, 16–17 Office Depot, 90 Office of Fair Trading (OFT), in U.K., 7 Oligopolistic price coordination.


pages: 544 words: 134,483

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars by Jo Marchant

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, complexity theory, Dava Sobel, Drosophila, Easter island, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, founder crops, game design, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, overview effect, Plato's cave, polynesian navigation, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, trade route

See also the following analysis which suggests that anywhere between 22 and 73 percent of people believe in astrology, depending on what you mean by “believe”: Nicholas Campion, “How many people actually believe in astrology?” The Conversation, April 28, 2017, https://theconversation.com/how-many-people-actually-believe-in-astrology-71192. “dislocated from its cosmology”: Skype interview with Nicholas Campion, May 28, 2018. “undermining the very fabric”: Trevor Jackson, “When Balance Is Bias,” British Medical Journal 343 (2011): d8006. “shriveling and cheapening”: Richard Dawkins, “The Real Romance in the Stars,” The Independent, December 31, 1995, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-real-romance-in-the-stars-1527970.html.

a great ocean: Freya Mathews, “Panpsychism as Paradigm,” in Blamauer, ed., Mental as Fundamental, 141–56. “riding something alive”: Freya Mathews, Reinventing Reality: Toward a Recovery of Culture (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2005), 111. “shining with light . . . centre of things which is beyond”: Author’s Skype interview with Itay Shani, July 26, 2019. See also: Itay Shani, “Cosmopsychism: A Holistic Approach to the Metaphysics of Experience,” Philosophical Papers 44 (2015): 389–437; Itay Shani and Joachim Keppler, “Beyond Combination: How Cosmic Consciousness Grounds Ordinary Experience,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 4 (2018): 390–410.


pages: 476 words: 139,761

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World by Tom Burgis

active measures, Anton Chekhov, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, energy security, Etonian, failed state, fake news, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Julian Assange, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, WikiLeaks

Only once he was waiting to board did he speak to her again. ‘Who am I meeting?’ he asked. ‘Where am I going?’ Bota gave him the name of a hotel. She said he should get there as quickly as he could after his plane landed. Ablyazov’s wife and daughter had been kidnapped. * * * Madina woke at 5 a.m. to feed the baby. She noticed her Skype: lots of missed calls. That was how they stayed in touch. Her father had gone into hiding more than a year ago. She had found it perplexing that you could be sent to prison in Britain for something called ‘contempt of court’. She had never believed that her father was a crook. Nazarbayev and his people had been saying he took money from here and there ever since Ablyazov first showed he would not be subservient to the boss; the BTA Bank stuff was just the same thing with bigger numbers.

She knew not to ask where he was, just whether he was safe. At least her mother and her six-year-old sister Alua had EU residence permits. They had gone to Rome, where they could live quietly until Ablyazov’s latest political troubles were over. As she got up to go to the baby, Madina saw not just the missed Skypes but her father’s messages: Call me call me call me. She called him. ‘Mum’s been arrested,’ he said. They had come in the middle of the night. Italian police, dozens of them, armed, had hammered on the doors of the house where Alma was living with her sister and her sister’s husband. Alua had been asleep.


pages: 1,318 words: 403,894

Reamde by Neal Stephenson

air freight, airport security, autism spectrum disorder, book value, crowdsourcing, digital map, drone strike, Google Earth, industrial robot, informal economy, Jones Act, large denomination, megacity, messenger bag, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, new economy, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, ransomware, restrictive zoning, scientific management, side project, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, South China Sea, SQL injection, the built environment, the scientific method, young professional

Canvassing chat rooms to communicate with English-speaking gold farmers, he confirmed his suspicion that many of them were having trouble expanding their businesses because of a chronic inability to transfer funds back to China. He formed a partnership with “Nolan” Xu, the pathologically entrepreneurial chief of a Chinese game company, who was obsessed with finding a way to put Chinese engineering talent to work creating a new massively multiplayer online game. During an epic series of IM exchanges and Skype calls, Richard managed to convince Nolan that you had to build the plumbing first: you had to get the whole money flow system worked out. Once that was done, everything else would follow. And so, just as a way of learning the ropes, they worked out a system whereby Richard acted as the North American end of a money pipeline, accepting PayPal payments from American and Canadian WoW addicts, then FedExing hundred-dollar bills to Taiwan, where the money was laundered through the underground Filipino overseas worker remittance network and eventually transferred from Taiwanese bank accounts to Nolan’s account in China, whence he was able to pay the actual gold farmers in local specie.

Custom stump cups and other modifications would, of course, be needed, but the result was that Sokolov got something a bit nicer than what he would have been issued by the National Health Service. At eleven in the morning, after they had all come back from the memorial service—a ceremony honoring not only John but Peter, Chet, Sergei, Pavel, the bear hunters, the RV owners, and two of Jake’s neighbors—Zula hooked her laptop to the big flat-screen on Grandpa’s porch, and they made a Skype connection to Olivia in London. She had just returned to her apartment after work and was looking every inch the smartly turned-out intelligence analyst. Once the connection was made, she insisted that Zula put her face up to the little camera above the laptop screen and display her new artificial tooth, which was indistinguishable from the one that had been knocked out, and the lip in front of it, which bore a hairline scar and a little notch.

“You had nothing to pay for,” Sokolov said. “Oh,” Zula said, “I think I did.” The silence that followed was more than a little uncomfortable, and after giving it a respectful observance, Olivia edged around into view, standing behind Sokolov, and said, “Speaking of which, what do we hear from Marlon?” “We’re going to Skype him later,” Csongor said. “It is early in the morning, yet, in Beijing.” “He doesn’t work all night anymore?” Olivia said wonderingly. “Nolan has him on banker’s hours,” Richard said. “Oh, he was up as recently as a few hours ago, playing T’Rain, but we’re going to let him catch a little shut-eye before we confront him with this.”


pages: 281 words: 47,243

Tuscany Road Trips by Duncan Garwood, Paula Hardy, Robert Landon, Nicola Williams

call centre, car-free, haute couture, low cost airline, Skype

International Calls A To call Italy from abroad, call the international access number (011 in the USA, 00 from most other countries), Italy’s country code (39) and then the area code of the location you want, including the leading 0. A The cheapest options for calling internationally are free or low-cost computer programs such as Skype, cut-rate call centres and international calling cards. A Cut-price call centres can be found in all of the main cities, and rates can be considerably lower than from Telecom payphones. A Another alternative is to use a direct-dialling service such as AT&T’s USA Direct (access number 800 172444) or Telstra’s Australia Direct (access number 800 172610), which allows you to make a reverse-charge (collect) call at home-country rates.


pages: 212 words: 49,544

WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency by Micah L. Sifry

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital rights, Evgeny Morozov, Gabriella Coleman, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Network effects, RAND corporation, school vouchers, Skype, social web, source of truth, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Something had changed. After all, Assange had been in the United States just weeks earlier for the Collateral Murder press tour. But now he was not willing to risk another visit. We ended up conducting a virtual meeting on the PdF stage in New York, with Ellsberg seated next to me and Assange plugged in via Skype video from Australia, his head projected above us like some kind of strange Big Brother image. We had some trouble with the connection, which made our dialogue somewhat stilted. But one back-and-forth with Assange stands out. I had asked him if he thought the current crackdown on whistle-blowers in the United States, where several cases are under way for what is a very rarely prosecuted crime, might be related to the existence of WikiLeaks.


pages: 174 words: 52,064

Operation Lighthouse: Reflections on Our Family's Devastating Story of Coercive Control and Domestic Homicide by Luke Hart, Ryan Hart

access to a mobile phone, Jeremy Corbyn, late fees, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Skype, zero-sum game

Their names are Claire and Charlotte Hart.’ My voice was unsteady. The short pause before the woman on the end of the phone responded was excruciating. ‘Can I please take your name?’ ‘Ryan Hart’ I choked. ‘Hi Ryan, can I take a contact number for you and I’ll get someone to call you back soon?’ I gave my mobile number and Skype work number. At this point I was beginning to get tearful. I hurried an email to my manager to explain the situation and that I needed to take the afternoon off: ‘…even though I’m sure they’re OK, I’ve worked myself up too much to be able to concentrate.’ Scooping up my belongings from the small room, I hurried out of the office and back to the hotel, breaking into a jog once I was out of the office lobby.


pages: 167 words: 49,719

Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism by Fumio Sasaki

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, death from overwork, fixed-gear, Lao Tzu, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mirror neurons, Skype, Steve Jobs

Though I no longer own a TV, I can visit the websites for TV networks and purchase archived programs that I’d like to watch. E-mail can be checked anywhere with my Gmail account, and I can work wherever I am by storing my files using cloud storage services like Dropbox. Wi-Fi infrastructure and Bluetooth connections have reduced the hassle of carrying around cables, and meetings can be done on Skype. We live in a wonderful world now where we can work without a physical office at all. The spread of a sharing culture Minimalist technology has expanded to include services as well. I live in Tokyo where traffic is always a nightmare and the public transportation system is very reliable, so there’s really no need to own a car.


pages: 172 words: 50,777

The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future by Julia Hobsbawm

8-hour work day, Airbnb, augmented reality, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cal Newport, call centre, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Graeber, death from overwork, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, digital nomad, driverless car, emotional labour, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Greensill Capital, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Ocado, pensions crisis, remote working, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, social distancing, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Upton Sinclair, WeWork, work culture

The London-based Norwegian-Nigerian entrepreneur and investor Tom Adeyoola, who successfully founded and sold Metail, a sustainable digital fashion technology start-up operating in the Asia-Pacific region and Europe and with over two hundred employees, subcontractors and remote-based workers spanning engineering and manufacturing, design, sales and marketing, told me: Engineers like to work in a quiet space, and then they go into other rooms to be noisy, whereas more creative types like to be in a noisy space, and they go into rooms to be quiet. So there’s a clash between them, but you want to try and create the ability for them to connect in ways which are low friction. So how can you do that? We spent a lot of time trying to create ways on Skype, or now Zoom rooms, where you could just walk in digitally, which still gave a sense of connectivity. In other words, experimenting with ways to use digital in a similar way to physical space, with the equivalent of ‘do not disturb’ for those who need it, while still being reachable and connected to what else is happening if they are needed.


pages: 171 words: 54,334

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia by Becky Hogge, Damien Morris, Christopher Scally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, disintermediation, DIY culture, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, mass immigration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

As the rest of the world woke up to the web, it was up to this next generation to explain and, eventually, defend those ideals. And it wasn’t going to be easy. * * * Chapter 4: Just Kids I hear from Rop Gonggrijp again in late January, a week after my meeting with Brand. I’m logged into Skype when he pops up in my chat window to let me know he’s in Reykjavik, working with Julian Assange from WikiLeaks. “Working on the revolution here,” he types, before sending me a link to the planned “Media Freedom Bill” he hopes Iceland’s Parliament will vote to adopt soon. I glance at it – it looks interesting.


pages: 170 words: 51,205

Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age by Cory Doctorow, Amanda Palmer, Neil Gaiman

Airbnb, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Brewster Kahle, cloud computing, Dean Kamen, Edward Snowden, game design, general purpose technology, Internet Archive, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, MITM: man-in-the-middle, optical character recognition, plutocrats, pre–internet, profit maximization, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Streisand effect, technological determinism, transfer pricing, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy

Even a “solitary” project like writing a novel will involve an operating-system vendor, a word-processing vendor, an email-hosting company (to communicate with your editor and agent), an ISP (so you can access the email), an email-software vendor, and probably a few online file lockers for previewing cover art, exchanging unwieldy electronic galleys, and the like. And whether you go indie or through one of the big five publishers, you’ll likely be expected to use some combination of blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to promote your work. You might “visit” libraries or schools by Skype. If you go out on tour, you’ll want to use something like Upcoming.org to get the word out, and you might use a payment processor to sell tickets to some of your events. And, of course, the book itself will be sold through Amazon, BN.com, and the online shops run by independent stores. On top of that, there’s the world of e-books, whose intermediaries include specialist file-conversion houses that turn InDesign print layout files into ePubs, Mobipocket files, PDFs, HTML 5, and a million other potential formats, and the companies that sell those e-books, from the aforementioned Amazon and Barnes & Noble to Google Books and all its independent booksellers.


pages: 189 words: 52,741

Lifestyle Entrepreneur: Live Your Dreams, Ignite Your Passions and Run Your Business From Anywhere in the World by Jesse Krieger

Airbnb, always be closing, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, commoditize, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, do what you love, drop ship, financial independence, follow your passion, income inequality, independent contractor, iterative process, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, search engine result page, Skype, software as a service, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, warehouse automation

Your IVR system can forward calls to any numbers in the world, allowing your team to be distributed across country or across the globe. A search in your country for “IVR providers” or “get toll-free number” will yield many options for you to choose from. Suffice it to say that your initial system can be pretty basic, as long as it can forward calls to any numbers you designate. Also, you can sign up for SkypeIn numbers from Skype.com and route the IVR to your team members’ SkypeIn numbers, which will ring on their computers if they are working, or on their phones if they are offline. This is especially cost effective if you are routing calls internationally, as it will cut out potentially costly long distance calling fees.


pages: 173 words: 54,215

How to Weep in Public: Feeble Offerings From One Depressive to Another by Jacqueline Novak

David Sedaris, Neil Armstrong, placebo effect, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Skype

Being around people who have their shit together is an invitation to feel even worse. But a properly depressed friend—someone who also wants to be alone and mope—can be delightful company. My friend Deirdre* is frequently depressed, and it’s wonderful for me. I’ve found that when two depressives get together (by phone, Skype, et cetera, no pressure to go anywhere), they can have a shockingly good time. When you’re depressed, it’s a vicious circle: you hate yourself because you’re depressed and you’re depressed because you hate yourself. But when you hang out with other depressed people, you can actually spend a few hours with humans without being completely bowled over by how much better they are than you.


Pocket London Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Boris Johnson, British Empire, congestion charging, death from overwork, G4S, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, Skype

International Calls & Rates › International direct dialling (IDD) calls to almost anywhere can be made from most public telephones. › Many private firms offer cheaper international calls than British Telecom (BT). In such shops you phone from a metered booth. › Some cybercafes and internet shops also offer cheap rates for international calls. › PIN-activated international calling cards, available at most corner shops, are usually the cheapest way to call abroad. › Skype can be restricted in hostels and internet cafes due to noise and/or bandwidth issues. Local & National Call Rates › Local calls are charged by time alone; regional and national calls are charged by both time and distance. › Daytime rates apply from 6am to 6pm Monday to Friday. › The cheap rate applies from 6pm to 6am Monday to Friday; weekend rates apply from 6pm Friday to 6am Monday.


How Will You Measure Your Life? by Christensen, Clayton M., Dillon, Karen, Allworth, James

air freight, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Clayton Christensen, disruptive innovation, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, job satisfaction, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, Nick Leeson, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, working poor, young professional

Diane Coutu, I thank you for sharing your enthusiastic vision of reinventing your own life with me that one day we drove across town together. You have no idea what wonderful things you helped set in motion. To my friends, both inside and outside the workplace, you have been the source of so much joy and support over the years. I owe you all a debt of enormous gratitude. I wanted to thank Skype, Google Docs, and Dropbox for making it possible to write this book with coauthors in Boston while living in London, but James tells me we should instead write a blog about how we used those tools to build our extraordinary working relationship…. So that will have to wait. But most of all, I want to thank my family.


pages: 194 words: 56,074

Angrynomics by Eric Lonergan, Mark Blyth

AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, full employment, gig economy, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low interest rates, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, precariat, price stability, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, universal basic income

The policy changes and technology introduced into v.3.0 significantly increased competition, created a wide dispersion of returns between the winners and losers among owners of capital. Think again about telecoms. As a result of these technological and regulatory changes we all get cheaper telephone calls and digital phones that are powerful computers. When we were children, long-distance calls to relatives or friends were rare, special and brief events. Now we can Skype for free. But whenever we transition from one technological order to another there is an increase in the dispersion of returns, who gets what and how much of it, the creation of new winners and losers, which affects capital as well as workers. If you were a fixed line operator in the 1990s who had invested in copper wire infrastructure, the value of that capital was destroyed by the shift to mobile technology.


pages: 554 words: 149,489

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change by Bharat Anand

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Eyjafjallajökull, fulfillment center, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, managed futures, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Minecraft, multi-sided market, Network effects, post-work, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, two-sided market, ubercab, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

But while most of those ventures struggled, Tencent’s offerings grew from instant messaging and its associated iconic penguin mascot to an impressively broad suite: a social networking site, a news portal, a mobile platform, single- and multi-player games, and a microblogging service. Its most recent product, WeChat, was a mobile app that combined voice chat (similar to Skype), photo sharing (similar to Instagram), social network features (similar to Facebook), e-commerce capabilities (similar to Amazon), group messaging, and walkie-talkie features into a single offering—for free. By 2015 Tencent’s products and services were used by more than a billion Chinese, who accessed them through mobile phones, personal computers, and Internet cafés.

Notable were several features centered on three specific user needs: “the need that comes from people’s curiosity about others,” “the need that comes from your feedback and those of your friends,” and “the need that comes from a sense of presence from interacting with others which makes them feel comfortable.” A 2012 article in TechCrunch described WeChat as combining the best features of WhatsApp, Skype iMessage, Instagram, and Google’s Circles. The description may have been overly effusive, but it pointed to an interesting evolution of Tencent’s strategy. The company’s past success had come from its ability to leverage network strength from a single product, IM, into a portfolio of products including games, a news service, a social network, and a microblog.


pages: 482 words: 149,351

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer by Nicholas Shaxson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, forensic accounting, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Global Witness, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land value tax, late capitalism, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, two and twenty, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, wealth creators, white picket fence, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Michael Porter, ‘How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy, Harvard Business Review, March 1979. Porter built a lucrative consulting business out of these ideas. See Steve Denning, ‘What Killed Michael Porter’s Monitor Group? The One Force that Really Matters’, Forbes, 20 November 2012. The Watson quotes come from my Skype interview with Watson, March 2015. 17. Michael Porter, The Competitive Advantage of Nations, Harvard Business Review, March/April 1990. He says ‘Government has critical responsibilities for fundamentals like the primary and secondary education systems, basic national infrastructure, and research in areas of broad national concern such as health care.

See Andy Bounds, ‘Local councils to see central funding fall 77 per cent by 2020’, Financial Times, 4 July 2017; and Tom Crewe, ‘The Strange Death of Municipal England’, London Review of Books, 15 December 2016. As this last notes, ‘local authorities in the top 20 per cent for rates of health deprivation and disability have had their spending power cut by an average of £205 per head, 12 times the average reduction faced by those in the bottom 20 per cent’. 14. The Lazonick quotes come mostly from my Skype interview with him on 7 June 2017. See also Bill Lazonick, ‘Stock buybacks: From retain-and-reinvest to downsize-and-distribute’, Brookings Center for Effective Management, April 2015; and ‘The functions of the Stock Market and the Fallacies of Shareholder Value’, Brookings Center for Effective Management, 3 June 2017.


pages: 547 words: 148,732

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Mother of all demos, off-the-grid, overview effect, placebo effect, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, satellite internet, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Whole Earth Catalog

Even years after their experiences in the trials, the volunteers I spoke to recalled them in vivid detail and at considerable length; the interviews lasted hours. These people had big stories to tell; in several cases, these were the most meaningful experiences of their lives, and they clearly relished the opportunity to relive them for me in great detail, whether in person, by Skype, or on the telephone. The volunteers were also required to write a report of their experiences soon after they occurred, and all of the ones I interviewed were happy to share these reports, which made for strange and fascinating reading. Many of the volunteers I spoke to reported initial episodes of intense fear and anxiety before surrendering themselves to the experience—as the sitters encourage them to do.

While suppressing entropy (in this context, a synonym for uncertainty) in the brain “serves to promote realism, foresight, careful reflection and an ability to recognize and overcome wishful and paranoid fantasies,” at the same time this achievement tends to “constrain cognition” and exert “a limiting or narrowing influence on consciousness.” After a series of Skype interviews, Robin Carhart-Harris and I were meeting for the first time, in his fifth-floor walk-up in an unposh section of Notting Hill, a few months after the publication of the entropy paper. In person, I was struck by Robin’s youthfulness and intensity. For all his ambition, his affect is strikingly self-effacing and does little to prepare you for his willingness to venture out onto intellectual limbs that would scare off less intrepid scientists.


pages: 490 words: 146,259

New World, Inc. by John Butman

Admiral Zheng, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, currency manipulation / currency intervention, diversified portfolio, Etonian, Francisco Pizarro, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, market design, Skype, spice trade, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, wikimedia commons

But we have been almost ineffably facilitated by online resources—such as the British History Online database (which includes the Calendar of State Papers) and the JSTOR database of articles—and by online tools, such as Evernote, which facilitates the storage, organization, search, and access of huge quantities of information in many forms. Continuing the digital theme, we would also like to recognize the role played by Skype. This book is an Anglo-American collaboration that would have been difficult, not to say impossible, to accomplish without the face-to-face conversations that we conducted over Skype on a weekly basis over a period of two years. Above all, we would like to pay tribute to our families for their encouragement, tolerance, understanding, advice, forebearance, interest, and love during the all-consuming process of creating this book.


pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

“To the extent that you’re spending 8, 9, sometimes 10 hours, 12 hours a day working with engineers, people who think like you,” she said to him, “when you shift from that, you almost need to decompress a little bit before you’re fit for the rest of society.” He admits it’s true. He works in a home office, surrounded by his wide-screen monitor and (when I Skyped with him) a jumble of hardware projects. When he finishes work, he’ll immediately start critiquing whatever Mo’s doing. “Is this what we’re having?” he’ll ask, if she’s cooking dinner. “Is that how you cook that? Is there enough oil there?” It’s as if he’s still wrangling with his nerdy colleagues.

As he tells the crowd, there are a ton of forums where people can talk, but few tools to help them get things done, he explains; Pursuance aims to help fix that. “I notice, watching some online activists operate, that there’s way too much manual work done that could be automated,” Phillips says crisply as he shows off the software. On the screen over him, Barrett Brown has Skyped in to talk about the philosophy of Pursuance in his slight southern drawl, while sitting in his living room and puffing heavily on a vape pen. Afterward, the group heads out to a Thai restaurant for dinner. “That was nerve-racking—we were still putting stuff into the database, like, ten minutes before we went onstage,” says Marty Yee, a young coder whose day job currently is working for Behive, a small social-networking app.


pages: 470 words: 148,444

The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, demand response, different worldview, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, intangible asset, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Paris climate accords, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

” * * * — OBAMA’S TRIP TO HAVANA would be in March, because he wanted it to coincide with Sasha and Malia’s spring break. Every detail of the trip—from the policy changes we were both pursuing, to supporting the American businesses trying to get into Cuba, to the intricacies of Obama’s schedule—was a subject for painstaking negotiation, in endless Skype sessions and multiple trips to Havana. At the end of one of our meetings, Alejandro asked to see me alone. They had one dramatic proposal that they wanted me to explore. “We are very interested in Guantanamo,” he told me. “We know of President Obama’s interest in closing the prison. And so we would propose to take custody of Guantanamo.”

Yet that disposition also ensured the painstaking review that established the facts about what happened and raised additional questions about what the Trump campaign had done, which would endure long after we were gone. If Obama’s faith in norms and institutions is validated, then the truth will all come out, and consequences will flow from that. * * * — THE DAY AFTER THE ELECTION, in a Skype session with the Cubans from the Situation Room, I apologized for my confidence that Clinton would win, which I had predicted would lead inexorably to the lifting of the embargo. Alejandro Castro showed no irritation. “You are the first person from your country who approached us with a sense of mutual respect and equality,” he said.


pages: 1,025 words: 150,187

ZeroMQ by Pieter Hintjens

AGPL, anti-pattern, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, cloud computing, Debian, distributed revision control, domain-specific language, eat what you kill, Eben Moglen, exponential backoff, factory automation, fail fast, fault tolerance, fear of failure, finite state, Internet of things, iterative process, no silver bullet, power law, premature optimization, profit motive, pull request, revision control, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Skype, smart transportation, software patent, Steve Jobs, Valgrind, WebSocket

For application developers, HTTP is perhaps the one solution to have been simple enough to work, but it arguably makes the problem worse by encouraging developers and architects to think in terms of big servers and thin, stupid clients. So today people are still connecting applications using raw UDP and TCP, proprietary protocols, HTTP, and WebSockets. It remains painful, slow, hard to scale, and essentially centralized. Distributed peer-to-peer architectures are mostly for play, not work. How many applications use Skype or BitTorrent to exchange data? Which brings us back to the science of programming. To fix the world, we needed to do two things. One, to solve the general problem of “how to connect any code to any code, anywhere.” Two, to wrap that up in the simplest possible building blocks that people could understand and use easily.

Many APs solve this by randomly disconnecting clients when they reach some limit, such as 4–8 devices for a mobile hotspot, 30–50 devices for a consumer AP, or perhaps 100 devices for an enterprise AP. What’s the Current Status? Despite its uncomfortable role as enterprise technology that somehow escaped into the wild, WiFi is already useful for more than making a free Skype call. It’s not ideal, but it works well enough to let us solve some interesting problems. Let me give you a rapid status report. First, point-to-point versus AP-to-client. Traditional WiFi is all AP-client. Every packet has to go from client A to AP, then to client B. You cut your bandwidth by 50%—but that’s only half the problem.


pages: 543 words: 147,357

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Hence McKinsey notes that there seems to be a survivors’ curse: organisations struggle to remain competitive and effective beyond twenty years. New firms do not have to worry about legacy investments, so they are free to explore as widely and as radically as they can. Moreover, if they simply replicate their larger peers, they are less likely to find a distinctive niche. Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Apple, Skype and Amazon all started as just one or two people – often supposed eccentrics and misfits – doing something very different from the norm. The death rate of incumbents is increasing. Most firms that were in the S&P 500 in 2007 will be gone by 2020, according to McKinsey. Surviving is becoming increasingly difficult.

., 64, 65 Rowthorn, Robert, 292, 363 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), 25, 150, 152, 157, 173, 181, 199, 251, 259; collapse of, 7, 137, 150, 158, 175–6, 202, 203, 204; Sir Fred Goodwin and, 7, 150, 176, 340 Rubin, Robert, 174, 177, 183 rule of law, x, 4, 220, 235 Russell, Bertrand, 189 Russia, 127, 134–5, 169, 201, 354–5, 385; fall of communism, 135, 140; oligarchs, 30, 65, 135 Rwandan genocide, 71 Ryanair, 233 sailing ships, three-masted, 108 Sandbrook, Dominic, 22 Sands, Peter (CEO of Standard Chartered Bank), 26 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 51, 377 Sassoon, Sir James, 178 Scholes, Myron, 169, 191, 193 Schumpeter, Joseph, 62, 67, 111 science and technology: capitalist dynamism and, 27–8, 31, 112–13; digitalisation, 34, 231, 320, 349, 350; the Enlightenment and, 31, 108–9, 112–13, 116–17, 121, 126–7; general-purpose technologies (GPTs), 107–11, 112, 117, 126–7, 134, 228–9, 256, 261, 384; increased pace of advance, 228–9, 253, 297; nanotechnology, 232; New Labour improvements, 21; new opportunities and, 33–4, 228–9, 231–3; new technologies, 232, 233, 240; universities and, 261–5 Scotland, devolving of power to, 15, 334 Scott, James, 114–15 Scott Bader, 93 Scott Trust, 327 Second World War, 134, 313 Securities and Exchanges Commission, 151, 167–8 securitisation, 32, 147, 165, 169, 171, 186, 187, 196 self-determination, 85–6 self-employment, 86 self-interest, 59, 60, 78 Sen, Amartya, 51, 232, 275 service sector, 8, 291, 341, 355 shadow banking system, 148, 153, 157–8, 170, 171, 172, 187 Shakespeare, William, 39, 274, 351 shareholders, 156, 197, 216–17, 240–4, 250 Sher, George, 46, 50, 51 Sherman Act (USA, 1890), 133 Sherraden, Michael, 301 Shiller, Robert, 43, 298, 299 Shimer, Robert, 299 Shleifer, Andrei, 62, 63, 92 short selling, 103 Sicilian mafia, 101, 105 Simon, Herbert, 222 Simpson, George, 142–3 single mothers, 17, 53, 287 sixth form education, 306 Sky (broadcasting company), 30, 318, 330, 389 Skype, 253 Slim, Carlos, 30 Sloan School of Management, 195 Slumdog Millionaire, 283 Smith, Adam, 55, 84, 104, 112, 121, 122, 126, 145–6 Smith, John, 148 Snoddy, Ray, 322 Snow, John, 177 social capital, 88–9, 92 social class, 78, 130, 230, 304, 343, 388; childcare and, 278, 288–90; continued importance of, 271, 283–96; decline of class-based politics, 341; education and, 13, 17, 223, 264–5, 272–3, 274, 276, 292–5, 304, 308; historical development of, 56–8, 109, 115–16, 122, 123–5, 127–8, 199; New Labour and, 271, 277–9; working-class opinion, 16, 143 social investment, 10, 19, 20–1, 279, 280–1 social polarisation, 9–16, 34–5, 223, 271–4, 282–5, 286–97, 342; Conservative reforms (1979-97) and, 275–6; New Labour and, 277–9; private education and, 13, 223, 264–5, 272–3, 276, 283–4, 293–5, 304; required reforms for reduction of, 297–309 social security benefits, 277, 278, 299–301, 328; contributory, 63, 81, 283; flexicurity social system, 299–301, 304, 374; to immigrants, 81–2, 282, 283, 284; job seeker’s allowance, 81, 281, 298, 301; New Labour and ‘undeserving’ claimants, 143, 277–8; non-contributory, 63, 79, 81, 82; targeting of/two-tier system, 277, 281 socialism, 22, 32, 38, 75, 138, 144, 145, 394 Soham murder case, 10, 339 Solomon Brothers, 173 Sony, 254–5 Soros, George, 166 Sorrell, Martin, 349 Soskice, David, 342–3 South Korea, 168, 358–9 South Sea Bubble, 125–6 Spain, 123–4, 207, 358–9, 371, 377 Spamann, Holger, 198 special purpose vehicles, 181 Spitzer, Matthew, 60 sport, cheating in, 23 stakeholder capitalism, x, 148–9 Standard Oil, 130–1, 132 state, British: anti-statism, 20, 22, 233–4, 235, 311; big finance’s penetration of, 176, 178–80; ‘choice architecture’ and, 238, 252; desired level of involvement, 234–5; domination of by media, 14, 16, 221, 338, 339, 343; facilitation of fairness, ix–x, 391–2, 394–5; investment in knowledge, 28, 31, 40, 220, 235, 261, 265; need for government as employer of last resort, 300; need for hybrid financial system, 244, 249–52; need for intervention in markets, 219–22, 229–30, 235–9, 252, 392; need for reshaping of, 34; pluralism, x, 35, 99, 113, 233, 331, 350, 394; public ownership, 32, 240; target-setting in, 91–2; threats to civil liberty and, 340 steam engine, 110, 126 Steinmueller, W.


pages: 579 words: 160,351

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by Alan Rusbridger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, country house hotel, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, forensic accounting, Frank Gehry, future of journalism, G4S, high net worth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, natural language processing, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-truth, pre–internet, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ruby on Rails, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

In pure profit and loss terms the big winner was, ironically, the broadsheet Telegraph, still delivering an operating profit of £32 million in 2016/7. Chapter 21 examines the price the company separately paid in terms of editorial reputation. The Independent started planning its tabloid in early 2003. We went Berliner on 5 September 2005. That period saw the launches of LinkedIn, Skype, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Bebo and YouTube. Historians might well argue that, for two years, Fleet Street had had its collective head buried in the sand. 10 Dog, Meet Dog A newspaper never sleeps. This book is concerned with the backstage of institutional life as well as the play itself.

Sullivan case (1964) ref1 New Yorker (magazine) ref1, ref2, ref3 Newland, Martin ref1 Newmark, Craig ref1 Newmarket Road (Cambridge) ref1, ref2, ref3 News Corporation ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7n News Digital Media ref1 News Group Newspapers (NGN) ref1, ref2, ref3 News International (NI) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10n News Network ref1 Newsday.com ref1 Newseum (US) ref1 Newsnight (TV) ref1 Newspaper Money (Hirsch/Gordon) ref1 Newsworks’ Shift conference ref1n NHS ref1 Nielsen NetRatings ref1 1984 (Orwell) ref1 Nixon, President Richard ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 North Africa ref1, ref2 North Briton (newspaper) ref1 North Korea ref1 Northcliffe, Lord ref1 Northcliffe Media ref1 ‘Not Invented Here’ (NIH) resentment ref1 Nottingham Evening Post (newspaper) ref1 Nougayrède, Natalie ref1 Obama, President Barack ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Ofcom ref1, ref2, ref3 Official Secrets Act (OSA) ref1, ref2 Official Secrets (Hooper) ref1 O’Hagan, Andrew ref1 oil companies ref1, ref2, ref3 O’Kane, Maggie ref1 Old Bailey ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Oliver, Craig ref1, ref2 Omidyar, Pierre ref1 On Demand ref1 ‘On Journalism’ (Scott essay) ref1, ref2n, ref3n Open Democracy ref1, ref2, ref3 Open Weekend (2012) ref1, ref2 Operation Weeting ref1 O’Reilly, Tony ref1 ‘original sin’ ref1 Orphan ref1 Orwell, George ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Osborne, Peter ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Oscars ref1 ownership model ref1 Oxford University ref1 Pacino, Al ref1 page views ref1 Panopticon ref1, ref2, ref3n Panorama (TV) ref1 Paris climate talks ref1, ref2 Parker, Andrew ref1 Paton, John ref1 Patriot Act (2001) ref1, ref2 PayPal ref1 paywalls ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11n ‘hard’ ref1, ref2 metred ref1, ref2 Peake, Maxine ref1 Pearson & Co ref1, ref2 Pemsel, David ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n, ref6n, ref7n Pentagon ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 People Like Us (Luyendijk) ref1 Perch, Keith ref1n Perettu, Jonah ref1 Periscope ref1 perjury ref1 Permira Advisers Ltd ref1 Peterloo Massacre ref1, ref2, ref3 Petraeus, General David ref1 Pfauth, Ernst-Jan ref1 PFE (Proudly Found Elsewhere) ref1 philanthropy ref1 Philby, Kim ref1 Piano, Renzo ref1 Pilhofer, Aron ref1, ref2n Plastic Logic ref1 Plender, John ref1 podcasts ref1, ref2n Podemos ref1 Podesta emails ref1, ref2 Poitras, Laura ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 police ref1, ref2, ref3 passim, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n, ref7n, ref8n political subsidy ref1 Politico ref1 Politics.co.uk ref1 Popbitch ref1 Popplewell, Sir Oliver ref1, ref2 Porter, Henry ref1 Post Office Act (US 1792) ref1 Pound, Ezra ref1 power ref1 Prescott, John (MP) ref1 Press Acquisitions Ltd ref1 Press Association ref1, ref2 Press Complaints Commission (PCC) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7n Press Holdings Ltd ref1 Preston, Peter ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 price war ref1, ref2 Price Waterhouse Cooper ref1 Pride and Perjury (Aitken) ref1 The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Eisenstein) ref1 printing presses ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 prisons ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 privacy ref1 Private Eye (magazine) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8n private investigators ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 private sector ref1 Proctor & Gamble ref1 Prodigy Internet Service ref1 Product Development Unit (PDU) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Professional Footballers’ Association ref1 proportionality ref1 ProPublica ref1, ref2 Proudler, Gerald ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 public goods ref1, ref2 public interest ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 passim, ref1, ref2 passim, ref1 passim, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n, ref6n Public Library of Science (PLoS) ref1 public service ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 passim, ref1, ref2, ref3 public space ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 ‘publicness’ ref1 ‘purchase driver’ ref1 Putnam, Robert ref1 pyjama injunction ref1 Qantas ref1 Qatar ref1, ref2, ref3 Quatremer, Jean ref1 Qur’an ref1 R2 ref1 Raines, Howell ref1 Randall, Mike ref1 rape ref1, ref2, ref3n Rath, Matthias ref1 Ray Street offices ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 ‘reach before revenue’ model ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 readers ref1 American ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 knowledge ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 letters ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 readers’ editor ref1, ref2, ref3n response ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 talkboards ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n see also circulation Reading Football Club ref1 Real Networks ref1 Reckless, Mark (MP) ref1 Reddit ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Redford, Robert ref1, ref2 Reds (film) ref1 Rees, Jonathan ref1, ref2, ref3 referendum (UK 2016) ref1, ref2 regulation ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Regulatory Funding Council ref1 Reid, Harry ref1 religious stories ref1 rendition, Gibson report on ref1 Reuters ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Richard (reporter) ref1 Rinehart, Gina ref1 riots ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n Ritz hotel (London) ref1, ref2, ref3 Ritz hotel (Paris) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 rivalry ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7n Robards, Jason ref1 Roberts, Brian ref1 Roberts, Justine ref1 Robinson, Geoffrey (MP) ref1 Robinson, Stephen ref1 Rockefeller Foundation ref1 Rohm, Wendy Goldman ref1 Rolling Stones ref1 Rosen, Jay ref1, ref2, ref3 Rosenstiel, Tom ref1 Rossetto, Louis ref1 Rothermere, Lord ref1n, ref2n Rowlands, Tiny ref1 Royal Air Force (RAF) ref1 Royal Courts of Justice ref1, ref2, ref3 Rusbridger, Alan ref1, ref2n, ref3n, ref4n, ref5n Russian intelligence service ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Ryanair ref1 Saatchi, Maurice ref1 Sachs, Jeffrey ref1 Saffron Walden (Essex) ref1 Said Business School (Oxford) ref1 St Paul’s Cathedral ref1 Salon ref1 samizdat methods ref1 Sampson, Anthony ref1 San Jose Mercury (newspaper) ref1 Sanandaji, Tino ref1 Sandel, Michael ref1 Sanders, Bernie ref1, ref2 Sandy Hook ref1 Sandys, Duncan (MP) ref1 Sardar, Ziauddin ref1 Sark ref1, ref2 Sark Newspaper ref1 SAS ref1 Saudi Arabia ref1, ref2, ref3 Savoy Hotel (London) ref1, ref2, ref3 Savoy Taylors Guild ref1 Sawers, Sir John ref1 Schirrmacher, Franz ref1 Schmidt, Eric ref1, ref2 Schneier, Bruce ref1 Schudson, Michael ref1n science ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8n scoop ref1 Scoop (Waugh) ref1 Scotland Yard ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Scotsman (newspaper) ref1, ref2, ref3 Scott, C.P. ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9n, ref10n Scott, David ref1 Scott, Edward ref1 Scott, Henry E. ref1 Scott, John ref1 Scott, Richard ref1 Scott Trust ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15n Sellers, Frances Stead ref1 Selvey, Mike ref1 Senate Church committee (US) ref1 Senate Intelligence committee (US) ref1 Sensenbrenner, Jim ref1 September 11 (2001) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Serious Fraud Office (SFO) ref1 Shadid, Anthony ref1 Shainin, Jonathan ref1 Shaw, Fiona ref1 Sheehan, Neil ref1 Sheen, Michael ref1 Shenker, Jack ref1 Sherwood, Charles ref1 Shirky, Clay ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Siegal, Allan M. ref1 Silicon Valley ref1, ref2, ref3 passim, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 comes to Oxford (SVCO) ref1 Simon, David ref1 Simonds, Gavin ref1 Simpson, O.J. ref1 Singer, Marc ref1 Skype ref1 Slate Group ref1 smartphones ref1, ref2 Smith, Ben ref1 Smith, Brad ref1 Smith, Julian (MP) ref1 Smith, Shane ref1 Smith, Tim (MP) ref1 Snapchat ref1 Snowden, Edward ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 passim, ref1 passim, ref1 passim, ref1, ref2n, ref3n Snowden (film) ref1 Soho offices ref1 Sony ref1 Soros ref1 Sorrell, Martin ref1 sources ref1 South Africa ref1, ref2, ref3 South, Christopher ref1 Sparrow, Andrew ref1 Spectator (magazine) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Spielberg, Steven ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n sponsorship ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 sport ref1 Spotify ref1, ref2 Springer, Axel ref1 The Square and the Tower (Ferguson) ref1 Stalin ref1, ref2 Standage, Tom ref1 Starr, Paul ref1, ref2 ‘Start Me Up’ (song) ref1 Start the Week (radio) ref1 State of the Union speech (Clinton) ref1 Steele, Christopher ref1 Steele, Jonathan ref1 Stephenson, Sir Paul ref1, ref2, ref3 Stewart, Mr Justice ref1 Stone, Biz ref1 Stone, Oliver ref1, ref2, ref3n Strathairn, David ref1 Streep, Meryl ref1 subscription ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14n ‘subsidariat’ ref1, ref2n Suez ref1 Sullivan, Andrew ref1, ref2n Sulston, John ref1 Sulzberger, A.G. ref1, ref2, ref3n Sulzberger, Arthur ref1n super-injunctions ref1 Supreme Court (UK) ref1 Supreme Court (US) ref1, ref2 Sweden ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n Sweeney, John ref1 Swift, Jonathan ref1 Switzerland ref1, ref2, ref3 Sydney Morning Herald (newspaper) ref1, ref2 Sykes, Richard ref1 Syria ref1, ref2 tabloids ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 passim, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9n, ref10n Tahrir Square (Cairo) ref1 Taliban ref1, ref2, ref3 talkboards ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n Tapscott, Don ref1 Task Force 373 ref1 tax ref1 avoidance ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n havens ref1, ref2, ref3 Taylor, Gordon ref1, ref2, ref3 Taylor, John Edward ref1, ref2 Taylor, Matthew ref1 Technorati ref1 Terrorism Act (2000) (UK) ref1, ref2 terrorists ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 counter-terrorism ref1, ref2, ref3 Terry, Quinlan ref1 Tesco ref1, ref2, ref3n, ref4n Thailand ref1, ref2, ref3n Thalidomide ref1, ref2n Thatcher, Prime Minister Margaret ref1 Thatcher, Carol ref1 Thatcher, Mark ref1 The Onion Router (TOR) ref1 Thewlis, David ref1 Thirty Club ref1 Thompson, Bill ref1 Thompson, E.P. ref1, ref2 Thompson, Robert ref1 threads ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 ‘threat reports’ ref1 Three Little Pigs boiling the Big Bad Wolf (film) ref1 Thurlbeck, Neville ref1 Time (magazine) ref1 Times Educational Supplement (magazine) ref1 Tomasky, Michael ref1 Tomlinson, Ian ref1, ref2 Topix.net ref1 torture ref1 Tow Center for Digital Journalism ref1, ref2 toxic waste ref1 Trafigura ref1, ref2, ref3n training ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 travel writing ref1, ref2n Travis, Alan ref1 Treanor, Jill ref1 Tribune Co (US) ref1 Trinity Mirror ref1, ref2, ref3 TripAdvisor ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n trolls ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Trump, President Donald ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15 Trump Bump ref1, ref2, ref3n, ref4n trust ref1, ref2 passim, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 passim, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 passim, ref1n Trust ownership ref1 truth ref1 passim, xxiv, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 reverse burden of ref1, ref2n Tucker Carlson Tonight (TV) ref1 Tugendhat, Mr Justice ref1 Turkey ref1 Tweetdeck ref1 Twitter ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 passim, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7n Tyas, John ref1 typesetting ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n UHNWI (ultra-high net-worth individuals) ref1 UKIP ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n, ref5n Ukraine ref1 unions ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 Unique Selling Point ref1 unique users ref1 United Nations (UN) ref1, ref2 University of California (Berkeley) ref1 Upworthy ref1 USA Today (magazine) ref1, ref2 Usenet ref1 Utley, T.E. ref1, ref2n van Beurden, Ben ref1 The Vanishing Newspaper (Meyer) ref1, ref2 Vanity Fair (magazine) ref1, ref2 Vaz, Keith (MP) ref1 Verizon ref1 ‘verticals’ ref1 Vice (magazine) ref1, ref2 Vickers, Paul ref1 video ref1, ref2, ref3 Vietnam War ref1 ‘viewspaper–newspaper’ ref1, ref2, ref3 Vignette ref1 Viner, Kath ref1, ref2, ref3 Vodafone ref1 Volkswagen ref1 Vyshinsky, Andrey ref1 Wadsworth, A.P. ref1 Wagner, Adam ref1 Waldman, Simon ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n, ref5n Wales, Jimmy ref1 Walker, Christopher ref1 Wall Street ref1 Wall Street Journal (newspaper) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 Wallis, Neil ref1 Walter, Justin ref1 WAN-IFRA ref1 WannaCry ref1n Wapping ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 War Office ref1 Watergate ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Watson, Tom (MP) ref1 Waugh, Evelyn ref1 We the Media (Gillmor) ref1, ref2 Weatherup, James ref1 Web 1.0 ref1, ref2 Web 2.0 ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 ‘web monkeys’ ref1 Webster, Phil ref1 Weinstein, Harvey ref1 Weisberg, Jacob ref1 Wellcome Trust ref1, ref2, ref3 Wells, Holly ref1 West Africa ref1 West Coast giants see Silicon valley Westminster ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics (Lloyd) ref1 whistleblowers ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 White House (US) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 White, Michael ref1 Whitehall ref1, ref2, ref3 Whittam Smith, Andreas ref1 Whittow, Hugh ref1 ‘Why I Write’ (Orwell essay) ref1 WikiLeaks ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Wikinomics (Tapscott) ref1 Wikipedia ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Wilby, Peter ref1 Wilkes, John ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n Williams, Francis ref1 Wilton’s (restaurant) ref1 Windows 95 ref1 The Wire (TV) ref1 Wired (Anderson) ref1 Wired (magazine) ref1 Witherow, John ref1, ref2 witnesses ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Witty, Andrew ref1 Wolf, Armin ref1 women ref1, ref2 Wood, Graeme ref1 Woodward, Bob ref1, ref2 Workthing ref1, ref2 World Cup (football) ref1 World Economic Forum ref1 A World Without Bees (Benjamin) ref1 Worsthorne, Peregrine ref1 WPP plc ref1 Wu, Tim ref1 Yahoo ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Yates, John ref1, ref2, ref3 The Year the Future Began (Campbell) ref1 Yemen ref1 Yo!


pages: 523 words: 154,042

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

This includes subscriber information, log files, and email accounts with whom subscribers have corresponded. These records may allow investigators to move laterally through the criminal conspiracy, figuring out the attacker’s partners and seeking information about the attacker. To get access to content, such as email messages, photographs, texts, Skype messages, and social media posts, agents must escalate even further by applying for search warrants. Prosecutors must apply to a court showing the evidence collected thus far demonstrates probable cause that a crime has been committed or is being attempted. With a search warrant, investigators can piece together a criminal conspiracy, insofar as cybercriminals usually communicate electronically with one another.

Paras was impressed by the only company able to beat Mirai and contacted Coelho to congratulate him. The discussion between the two men—one a black hat, the other white—is fascinating. Even though Paras had attacked ProxyPipe and caused the company almost $400,000 worth of damage, the discussion is cordial, even friendly. Paras messaged Coelho on Skype at 10:00 a.m., September 28, under the handle Anna-Senpai. Pasting a screenshot from the comment on Krebs’s blog, Paras wrote, “Don’t get me wrong, im not even mad, it was pretty funny actually. nobody has ever done that to my c2 (goldmedal).” Because Paras was posting pseudonymously, Coelho still did not know his old friend was one of the hackers behind Mirai.


pages: 223 words: 58,732

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

Part Three: Fallout 1 Jake Sherman, ‘Poll: voters liked Trump’s “America First” address’, Politico, 25 January 2017, <http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/poll-voters-liked-trumps-inaugural-address-234148>. 2 Dana Priest, ‘The disruptive career of Michael Flynn, Trump’s national-security adviser’, New Yorker, 23 November 2016, <http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-disruptive-career-of-trumps-national-security-adviser>. 3 J. Lester Feder, ‘This is how Stephen Bannon sees the entire world’, Buzzfeed, 16 November 2016. Transcript of a 2014 speech by Bannon via Skype to a conference in the Vatican in 2014: <https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world>. 4 I am indebted to Jonathan David Kirshner, of Cornell University, whose paper ‘Keynes’s Early Beliefs and Why They Still Matter’ (Challenge, 58:5 (October 2015)) brilliantly elucidates the evolution in Keynes’s thinking. 5 Graham Allison, ‘The Thucydides Trap: Are the US and China Headed for War?’


pages: 173 words: 58,260

Sober Stick Figure: A Memoir by Amber Tozer

East Village, Skype

All of our conversations feel big and meaningful and real. Sherri, my friend Bridgette, and the bigwig, fancy producer, and many other sweet and brave people are my sober safety net and I love them a lot. Lesley and I are still friends and probably will be forever. Jen lives in Switzerland now. We Skype once a week, and she has read every draft of this book. Thank you, Jen. I occasionally talk to my old bandmates Stu and Andy. Hi, guys! Let’s get the band back together or maybe not! Lisa lives with her three kids in Chicago, and we call each other once in a while and laugh so hard about those road trips.


Learning Flask Framework by Matt Copperwaite, Charles Leifer

create, read, update, delete, database schema, Debian, DevOps, don't repeat yourself, duck typing, full text search, place-making, Skype, SQL injection, web application

If, however, you all work in disparate locations where a centralized database is not ideal or impossible to secure, the other solution is to use a file-system based database engine such as SQLite. Then, when an update is made to the database, that file can be spread to others via e-mail, Dropbox, Skype, and so on. They then have an up-to-date copy of the database that they can locally run Frozen-Flask from to create the publishable content. Asynchronous tasks with Celery Celery is a library that allows you to run asynchronous tasks within Python. This is especially helpful in Python as Python runs single threaded and you may find that you have a long-running task that you wish to either start and discard; or you may wish to give the user of your website some feedback on the progress of the said task.


pages: 282 words: 59,980

The Low Fodmap Diet Cookbook: 150 Simple, Flavorful, Gut-Friendly Recipes to Ease the Symptoms of Ibs, Celiac Disease, Crohn's Disease, Ulcerative Colitis, and Other Digestive Disorders by Sue Shepherd

Skype

Shepherd Works offers consultations to people who need education regarding the low-FODMAP diet and gluten-free diet, and dietary management for conditions such as IBS, celiac disease, lactose intolerance, fructose malabsorption, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, and other digestive health issues. Sue and her team are committed to improving the quality of life for people with food intolerances and allergies, as well as increasing community awareness of these conditions. For more information, please visit www.shepherdworks.com.au. Shepherd Works has several offices in Australia and offers Skype or telephone consultations for those who do not live nearby. Thank you for purchasing this ebook. Join our email list to learn about new releases, ebook deals, bonus content and more from The Experiment. Join [eepurl.com/ApHK5] You can also connect with us on: Facebook /experimentbooks Twitter @experimentbooks Pinterest /theexperiment


The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Kickstarter, Menlo Park, obamacare, Parler "social media", Skype, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois

And I was certain that I would do the same for my children and the children who come after me. My parents were absolutely pleased with my new appreciation for my family and my country, until they discovered that I had run up our international phone bill by over one thousand dollars in just a month. If only I had had the good sense to develop a program akin to Skype. Maybe dad was right and a computer science degree would have come in handy. * * * 7 Yes, I have a brother named Amadou and about ten cousins named Amadou. My grandfather’s name is also Amadou. I have a brother named Malick, and I have about ten cousins named Malick. Both names are like the equivalent of John and James, respectively.


The Non-Tinfoil Guide to EMFs by Nicolas Pineault

Albert Einstein, en.wikipedia.org, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, off-the-grid, precautionary principle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter

Disable 4G/LTE Remember how much radiation was emitted from my iPhone 6 while downloading a Youtube video on 4G/LTE? This amount was cut down by 84% when I did the same thing using the slightly slower 3G network. My trick is to keep my smartphone on 3G all the time, unless I somehow need the extra download speed (streaming video, Skype, etc.). This can be done inside your smartphone’s settings. 407 Based on the research of Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt. See it-takes-time.com/2015/07/10/microbial-growth-and-electromagnetic-radiation/ © 2017 N&G Media Inc. Distance From My iPhone 6408 (3G only) Peak RF Radiation (V/m) Phone right next to head409 1.69 3 inches 0.62 6 inches 0.38 12 inches (1 foot) 0.27 Precautionary levels: stay under 0.2 V/m during the day. 2.


pages: 184 words: 58,557

The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee by Sarah Silverman

haute couture, index card, Nelson Mandela, Saturday Night Live, Skype

I bought vitamins that tell your brain when you are full. I bought vitamins that build immune systems inside you. I bought "fat-burning lemonade." I spent hours at Staples. I went to lunch with friends. I met friends for coffee. I met friends for breakfast. I called my parents to catch up. I Skyped with my friend Heidi and lectured her about doing something with her life. I smoked pot to help the creative juices flow, which resulted in looking way too closely in the mirror, being disgusted, taking pictures of my breasts in awkward but flattering positions to e-mail to a manboy I've been seeing, mixing odd combinations of kitchen cabinet remnants and finding them "fucking unbelievably delicious" and then falling asleep, face unwashed.


pages: 204 words: 58,565

Keeping Up With the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics by Thomas H. Davenport, Jinho Kim

behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, business intelligence, business process, call centre, computer age, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, forensic accounting, global supply chain, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, hypertext link, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, longitudinal study, margin call, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Myron Scholes, Netflix Prize, p-value, performance metric, publish or perish, quantitative hedge fund, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Shiller, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, six sigma, Skype, statistical model, supply-chain management, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport

The next time he took the qualifying exam, he got the highest score. Patil eventually graduated and became a faculty member at Maryland, and worked on modeling the complexity of weather. He then worked for the US government on intelligence issues. Research funding was limited at the time, so he left to work for Skype, then owned by eBay. He next became the leader of data scientists at LinkedIn, where the people in that highly analytical position have been enormously influential in product development. Now Patil is a data scientist in residence (perhaps the first person with that title as well) at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners, helping the firm’s portfolio companies to think about data and analytics.


pages: 202 words: 59,883

Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy by Robert Scoble, Shel Israel

Albert Einstein, Apple II, augmented reality, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, connected car, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, factory automation, Filter Bubble, G4S, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, lifelogging, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, ubercab, urban planning, Zipcar

Currently, the most advanced gesture technology is Microsoft Xbox One with Kinect, a $500 platform that now includes sensors good enough to determine a player’s excitement level by measuring heartbeats. Microsoft unofficially confirms it sees a future in the home for Kinect that goes beyond its use in Xbox game platforms. Microsoft recently added a Skype version to its voice-command-operated Xbox. We can see the day when Kinect joins the fray as a gesture-enabled PCA. Perhaps someday it will connect to your family robot. Microsoft has churned out a few interesting additional consumer apps in recent times, not the least of which is Blink, a unique Windows feature that lets you hold down your camera shutter to grab quick blink-like bursts of brief video clips.


pages: 194 words: 59,290

The Covert Passive-Aggressive Narcissist: Recognizing the Traits and Finding Healing After Hidden Emotional and Psychological Abuse by Debbie Mirza

cognitive dissonance, Skype, Snapchat

I wanted to make this the most comprehensive, thorough, and accurate book I could for you. The interviews were fascinating. Even though our stories were different, and some of the relationship types were different, I found myself feeling like I was looking into a mirror when each person would tell me their story over Skype or across the table at a restaurant. These brave people furthered my motivation to get all this information down in one place. I will be using stories from the people I’ve interviewed, but I have changed their names and specific information to protect their identity. I will not be sharing who the narcissists are in my life.


pages: 2,020 words: 267,411

Lonely Planet Morocco (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Paul Clammer, Paula Hardy

air freight, Airbnb, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, Day of the Dead, Dr. Strangelove, illegal immigration, low cost airline, Multics, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, place-making, Skype, spice trade, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Skip pleasantries Say hello before asking for help or prices. Morocco’s Tangled Web Royal rose gardens are lined with internet kiosks, cybercafe screens shield couples smooching via Skype, and commentators discuss breaking news in Egypt via Twitter: welcome to Morocco, home of techie trendsetters. Social-media adoption has accelerated across Morocco, often outpacing political controls. With periodic restrictions on services like YouTube and Skype and arrests of local bloggers, Morocco’s 2013 ranking on Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index sits at 136 out of 178 countries. Yet as Morocco’s new National Press Syndicate reported in 2010, Moroccans’ preferred information source is now the internet.

USEFUL NUMBERS Morocco country code 212 International access code from Morocco 00 Directory enquiries 160 Spain country code (including Melilla & Ceuta) 34 International Calls » International calling cards are available from telecommunication shops such as Méditel. » If you can find a reasonable internet connection, a Skype call will likely be cheaper. Computers in internet cafes normally have headsets. » Méditel’s Dawlia card offers rates starting at Dh1.75 per minute. To use the Dawlia card, call the 10-digit card number prefixed with 133, then type in the four-digit PIN number and follow the voice prompts. » France, Spain and Italy are the cheapest countries to call, and rates are lower between 8pm and 8am, at weekends and on public holidays.


pages: 197 words: 60,477

So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport

adjacent possible, Apple II, bounce rate, business cycle, Byte Shop, Cal Newport, capital controls, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, deal flow, deliberate practice, do what you love, financial independence, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge worker, Mason jar, medical residency, new economy, passive income, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, renewable energy credits, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Bolles, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, web application, winner-take-all economy

I went to the children’s museum and zoo probably more than anybody else in the city,” she recalls. “They couldn’t stop me from doing these things, as I was just a contractor.” I interviewed Lulu early on a weekday afternoon, and the timing didn’t seem to matter at all. “Hold on, let me make sure Skype is turned off so no one can bother me,” she told me soon after I arrived. Taking an afternoon off on a whim to do an interview is not the type of decision she could have gotten away with if she had followed a traditional career path to become a stock-owning, Porsche-driving, ulcer-suffering VP. But then again, stock-owning, Porsche-driving, ulcer-suffering VPs probably enjoy their lives quite a bit less than Lulu.


pages: 275 words: 62,757

The Complete Low-FODMAP Diet: A Revolutionary Plan for Managing IBS and Other Digestive Disorders by Sue Shepherd, P. R. Gibson

placebo effect, Skype

She has authored ten cookbooks for people with celiac disease, FODMAP intolerance, and irritable bowel syndrome, and runs Australia’s largest dietitian private practice specializing in gastrointestinal nutrition called Shepherd Works (www.shepherdworks.com.au), where Sue and her team of expert dietitians treat people with these conditions, including overseas consultations via Skype. She is the consultant dietitian on medical international advisory committees for gastrointestinal conditions, is on the editorial committee for Australia’s leading health magazine, Healthy Food Guide, regularly consults to the media, and was the resident dietitian on a national television program.


pages: 251 words: 63,630

The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends That Will Disrupt the World by Shaun Rein

business climate, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, glass ceiling, high net worth, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income per capita, indoor plumbing, job-hopping, Maui Hawaii, middle-income trap, price stability, quantitative easing, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trade route, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional, zero-sum game

Many of the sofas Americans buy come from this factory, or one of its sister facilities down in Guangzhou in southern China. I was there to discuss with Bob, the president of the company, how to deal with rising labor costs and an appreciating renminbi. The combination of the two was killing Laura Furniture’s margins, Bob had told me on a crackling Skype call the previous week, and he was looking for strategies to adapt to the changing trends. He needed me to come to see their operations and help them figure out what to do. Bob told me Laura had faced the same problems in America two decades earlier, when rising labor costs and improved global shipping convinced them to shut their factories in the Midwest and relocate to China in search of a limitless supply of cheap labor.


pages: 217 words: 63,287

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World by Neil Gibb

Abraham Maslow, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, gentrification, gig economy, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kodak vs Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, Network effects, new economy, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, urban renewal, WeWork

AA doesn’t charge any fees for its services and takes no outside donations, yet it has been financially self-sufficient for well over half a century, steering its way through a world war and a number of severe economic downturns with no problems. It has never needed to reposition, restructure, or bring in turnaround consultants. And most importantly, AA has a very successful product – one that works for people where all other methods have failed. What is more, it gives it away for free. It’s like the Skype of addiction treatments. AA – and its system of recovery, the 12-step programme (which has been appropriated by many other recovery programmes) – is the biggest and one of the most effective health-care systems on the planet. And it does it with no contributions from the public purse. In an era when health-care costs are soaring, and governments are struggling to balance the needs of aging and ever more demanding populations with reducing cost, there is much to be learned from AA.


pages: 202 words: 62,901

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

Many of us freely, without expectation of any reward, spend time and energy writing reviews and giving out stars to products or even just mindlessly browsing on Amazon and other technology platforms. This is work that we and others benefit from. Even over the course of one day, we may repeatedly engage in unpaid labor to rate everything from the relatively innocuous, such as call quality on Skype, to the more serious, such as posts, comments and links on Facebook and Twitter, to the potentially very impactful on individual lives, such as the “quality” of Uber drivers. Under capitalism, the social labor of many is transformed into profit for the few: the filtering may be “collaborative,” but the interests it serves are competitive and very private.


pages: 216 words: 61,061

Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed by Alexis Ohanian

Airbnb, barriers to entry, carbon-based life, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, Hans Rosling, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Occupy movement, Paul Graham, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social web, software is eating the world, Startup school, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, unpaid internship, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

As a founder, investor, and adviser, I knew this was the right question to ask the Internet audience. Nearly every hand went up. “Can the journalists get a look here? Look at all the companies, America, that are looking to hire Americans right now.” And on it went. After that talk I dashed off to the closest café that had wireless Internet access and Skyped into another interview. There was a last-minute CNBC interview I had to phone in on a mobile phone—I still regret not having a landline for that one. By the time I caught my breath I was wrapping up an interview on Fox Business and figuring out a dinner reservation for me and my girlfriend so I could start to make up for the vacation snafu.


pages: 219 words: 63,495

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

On one level this is fine. In many cases it’s faster, more convenient and cheaper to use text rather than voice. But there’s a cost. It is very difficult to convey tone using text, so the opportunity for making mistakes and misunderstanding increases. Hopefully, an increasing use of face time (via Skype or another multidimensional medium) will change this. Buying and selling nothing What happens if the economic downturn stops you from buying a $3,000 Gucci bag? Simple. Buy a virtual version of the same bag for $4 instead. Virtual Greats is a US-based company that acts as a broker between brands and celebrities to get their products on sale in virtual worlds such as Gaia or Second Life online—where people spend real money to buy virtual goods, including clothing and virtual land.


pages: 292 words: 66,588

Learning Vue.js 2: Learn How to Build Amazing and Complex Reactive Web Applications Easily With Vue.js by Olga Filipova

Amazon Web Services, business logic, continuous integration, create, read, update, delete, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Google Chrome, leftpad, MVC pattern, pull request, side project, single page application, single source of truth, Skype, source of truth, web application

Creating a button to toggle the sound It's really nice that we have the noise sound bound to the working state of the Pomodoro application. It's also nice that the sound is paused when we pause the application. However, it might be also useful to be able to pause the sound without having to pause the whole application. Think about those situations when you want to work in complete silence, or you might want to receive a Skype call. In these situations, having a noise in background, even if it's nice and pink, is not nice at all. Let's add a button to our application to toggle the sound. Start by declaring a store property called soundEnabled and initialize it with true. Also, create getter for this property. So store.js and getters.js start looking like the following: //store.js <...> const state = { <...> soundEnabled: true } //getters.js export default { <...> isSoundEnabled: state => state.soundEnabled } Now we must provide a mechanism to toggle the sound.


Natural Language Processing with Python and spaCy by Yuli Vasiliev

Bayesian statistics, computer vision, data science, database schema, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, loose coupling, natural language processing, Skype, statistical model

When a user sends a message to the bot, the messenger processes it and then forwards it to the addressee. The bot chooses an appropriate handler—a routine that generates responses to a certain type of user messages—and sends the generated reply to the user. The intermediary program that the chatbot uses to interact with users is often a bot platform provided by a messenger app, such as Skype, Facebook Messenger, or Telegram. From the messenger’s standpoint, the bot is a third-party application that runs inside the messenger. The next section guides you through the process of deploying a chatbot implemented in Python to the Telegram’s bot platform. You’ll see some bot implementation details that are specific to the Telegram’s bot platform and will learn to use its features to make bot development easy.


pages: 201 words: 60,431

Long Game: How Long-Term Thinker Shorthb by Dorie Clark

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Blue Ocean Strategy, buy low sell high, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, Google X / Alphabet X, hedonic treadmill, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Lean Startup, lockdown, minimum viable product, passive income, pre–internet, rolodex, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, solopreneur, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Levy, the strength of weak ties, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

The director, now nearly seventy, wasn’t easy to reach. He didn’t even have a website. But after some detective work, I hunted down what I thought—maybe, possibly—was his email address. I wrote him a note and waited. Two weeks later, a reply popped into my inbox. “I will be in the US East Coast from Monday, so perhaps we could discuss by phone or Skype when you have a moment,” he wrote. That led to an in-person meeting with him and my composing partner and—miraculously!—an agreement. Instead of simply licensing his work, he wanted to collaborate, so I’d have the chance to work directly with one of my idols. We snapped a selfie to celebrate. Getting in touch as the project moved forward wasn’t easy, since he was shooting in South America and France.


pages: 836 words: 158,284

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss

23andMe, airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Buckminster Fuller, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, Dean Kamen, game design, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, index card, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, language acquisition, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, messenger bag, microbiome, microdosing, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, placebo effect, Productivity paradox, publish or perish, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

—Laura Roden, chairman of the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs and a lecturer in Corporate Finance at San Jose State University “With this kind of time management and focus on the important things in life, people should be able to get 15 times as much done in a normal workweek.” —Tim Draper, founder of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, financiers to innovators including Hotmail, Skype, and Overture.com “Tim has done what most people only dream of doing. I can’t believe he is going to let his secrets out of the bag. This book is a must read!” —Stephen Key, top inventor and team designer of Teddy Ruxpin and Lazer Tag and a consultant to the television show American Inventor ALSO BY TIMOTHY FERRISS The 4-Hour Workweek Copyright © 2010 by Tim Ferriss All rights reserved.

San Francisco Sex Information (http://sfsi.org/wiki/Main_Page) Have a question about any aspect of sex? Confidentially and anonymously contact SFSI, which provides free and nonjudgmental information about sex and reproductive health. The telephone hotline is available in the United States (or from anywhere if you use Skype), and the “Ask Us” e-mail service is available to English and Spanish speakers. “TED Talk—Mary Roach: Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Orgasm” (www.fourhourbody.com/roach) Sexual physiology has been studied for centuries, behind the closed doors of laboratories, brothels, Alfred Kinsey’s attic, and, more recently, MRI centers, pig farms, and sex-toy R&D labs.


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Communication Third, whenever we communicate using digital means—which in the digital lifeworld will be very often indeed—we open ourselves up to filtering in that realm too. To take a basic example, our email messaging systems already use algorithms to determine what is spam and what isn’t. (It’s always vaguely upsetting to learn that someone’s email system decided that your message was ‘junk’.) Alarmingly, users of the Chinese version of Skype are literally prohibited by the application’s code from sending certain terms to each other, including ‘campus upheaval’ and ‘Amnesty International’.18 This reflects a broader trend in which communications technologies are made subject to real-time censorship based on prohibited terms. The Chinese system WeChat, the fourth largest chat application in the world with nearly 900 million monthly users, is censored according to key words.

E. 398 Schechner, Sam 419 Schmidt, Eric 374, 376, 384, 385, 398, 435 Schneider, Nathan 430 Schneier, Bruce 388 Scholz, Trebor 430 Schrems, Max 64–5 Schultz, Jason 325, 394, 418, 429, 431 Schumpeter, Joseph 218, 219, 221, 242, 409 Schwab, Klaus 319, 379, 381, 382, 417, 428 Scoble, Robert 381, 404, 405 Scott, Clare 385 Scott, James C. 127–8, 130–1, 133–4, 395 scrutable nature of society 127–34, 337 scrutiny 89, 122–41 auxiliary function 124, 125 cryptography 182 digital liberation 170 in digital lifeworld 127–40 disciplinary function 124, 125–7 implications 141 nature of 123–4 power of 124–7 public and private power 154, 155, 156–7, 160 separation of powers 358–9 of staff 267 search engines perception-control 147–8, 150, 151, 152 totalitarianism 177 see also Google Sedol, Lee 31 self-driving vehicles 30 communication between 48 ‘cyber’ and ‘real’ distinction, disappearance of 97 democracy 359 digital liberation 169 embedded rules 73–4 force, digitization of 103–4 harm principle 198, 204 liberty and private power 192 lidar 49 machine learning 35 privatization of force 116, 117–18 robotics 54–5 technological unemployment 299 totalitarianism 178 utility analogy 158 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Index self-enforcing law 101–3 Semayne’s Case 396 Sen, Amartya 408 Sensifall 407 sensitivity of technology 49–53 separation of powers 358 sexism 273 neutrality fallacy 291 rule-based injustice 283, 285 sexuality Apple’s homosexuality ‘cure’ apps 235–6 Hart–Devlin debate 202 justice in recognition 272–3 neutrality fallacy 289 political agenda 72 Shakespeare, William 308, 310, 331, 426 Shanahan, Murray 373, 374, 375, 376, 379, 436 whole-brain emulation 33 shared values principle 353–4, 355, 357 sharing economy 335–6 Shead, Sam 424 Shel, Israel 381, 404, 405 Shiller, Benjamin Reed 419–20 Shin, Laura 379 shopping platforms, and distributive justice 269 Siedentop, Larry 389, 418, 429 Siegel, Eric 397, 398, 419 Silicon Valley automation of morality 177 brain–computer interfaces 48 employee characteristics 8, 294 employee numbers 319 ‘Google Doctrine’ 15 Moore’s Law 39, 41 philosophical engineers 8 startups, claims of 6–7 Silva, Shiroma 413 Silver, David 372, 374 Silverman, Craig 412 Simon, Julie 410, 414, 416 Simonite, Tom 375, 386, 404 Singer-Vine, Jeremy 419 Singh Grewal, David 428 511 Skinner, Quentin 167, 401 Skunk Riot Control Copter 179 Skype 148 Slee, Tom 290–1, 422, 423 Sloan Digital Sky Survey 65 smart assets 47 smart cities 44, 50, 66 fairness principle 353 scrutiny 130 smart contracts 47, 106–7 automation of force 119 smart devices 43 automation of force 119 code’s empire 97 connectivity 45, 48 dolls 182 glasses 58 guns 106 hacking 182, 183 harm principle 197–8 pervasiveness 43–4 pills 51 privatization of force 116 productive technologies 316 scrutiny 134, 135–6 toilet paper dispensers 51 toilets 182 vibrators 135–6 smart dust technology 50 smartphones Android 318 checking 42 Direct Democracy 240 Freedom app 166 GPS 64 implantable 52 interfaces 51 location prediction 139 NeuroSky headsets 48 perception-control 146 Pokémon Go 58 processing power 38 scrutiny 135 sensors 50–1 smart stores 299 Smith, Adam 264, 301, 325, 326, 429 Smith, Bryant Walker 383 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS 512 Index Smith, Cooper 387 Smith, Mat 377 Snapchat 44, 58 Snowden, Edward 156 social justice 3, 10, 24–5, 346 algorithmic injustice 279–94 in distribution 257–70, 274, 278 future 340–1 nature of 258–9 property 313–41 in recognition 271–8 sharing economy 336 technological unemployment 295–312 Socrates 136, 217, 226 Solon, Olivia 419 Solove, Daniel J. 194, 406 Soltani, Ashkan 419 sousveillance 63 South Africa 179 Spain 50, 58 Special Air Service (SAS) 287–8 speech freedom of 190–1, 235–7 recognition 30 Spence, Michael 425, 427, 431 Spencer, Herbert 308, 426 spinach, bomb-detecting 51 Spinoza, Baruch 224, 411 spintronic materials 41 Spotify 236 Sprat, Thomas 79 Squires, Judith 72, 389, 420 Srnicek, Nick 426 stability, and democracy 225, 234 standards digital law 107–8, 109–10, 113 network effect 320, 321 Staples 269 state and distributive justice 264, 265 ownership of capital 329–30 supercharged see supercharged state Statista 378 statistics 17–18 status, and work paradigm 301, 307–9 Steele, Billy 396 Steiner, Christopher 391, 421 Stephen, James Fitzjames 201–2, 407 Stoics 323 Straitens, Iman 416 structural regulation 356–9 Sudha, L.


pages: 678 words: 159,840

The Debian Administrator's Handbook, Debian Wheezy From Discovery to Mastery by Raphaal Hertzog, Roland Mas

bash_history, Debian, distributed generation, do-ocracy, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, failed state, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Jono Bacon, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, precautionary principle, QWERTY keyboard, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Skype, SpamAssassin, SQL injection, Valgrind, web application, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Using it does have a notable influence on system performance, however. This is why it is useful to use the 64 bit mode on a server with a large amount of RAM. For an office computer (where a few percent difference in performance is negligible), you must keep in mind that some proprietary programs are not available in 64 bit versions (such as Skype, for example). It is technically possible to make them work on 64 bit systems, but you have to install the 32 bit versions of all the necessary libraries (see Section 5.4.5, “Multi-Arch Support”), and sometimes to use setarch or linux32 (in the util-linux package) to trick applications regarding the nature of the system.

Foreign packages can then be installed with apt-get install package:architecture. IN PRACTICE Using proprietary i386 binaries on amd64 There are multiple use cases for multi-arch, but the most popular one is the possibility to execute 32 bit binaries (i386) on 64 bit systems (amd64), in particular since several popular proprietary applications (like Skype) are only provided in 32 bit versions. Before multi-arch, when you wanted to uses a 32 bit appliction on a 64 bit system, you had to install ia32-libs to have 32 bit versions of the most popular libraries. That package was a huge hack that repackaged 32 bit libraries in an “amd64” package. 5.4.5.2.


pages: 638 words: 156,653

Berlin by Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, indoor plumbing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Skype, starchitect, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal

CIRCUS HOTEL Map Hotel €€ 2839 1433; www.circus-berlin.de; Rosenthaler Strasse 1; d €75-105; Rosenthaler Platz; The Circus crew has upped the ante once again with the opening of this stylish outpost in late 2008. The 60 rooms, small suites and apartments are located on the opposite corner from the hostel Click here and come with lots progressive touches, including iPod and baby-phone rentals, an onsite restaurant and bar and a garden for dedicated unwinding. Free wi-fi and Skype phone. HOTEL HONIGMOND Map Hotel €€ 284 4550; www.honigmond-berlin.de; Tieckstrasse 12; r €110-200, without bathroom €90-1105; Oranienburger Tor; This delightful hotel scores a perfect 10 on our ‘charm-meter’, not for being particularly lavish but for its familial yet elegant ambience. Rabbits frolic in the garden, the restaurant is a local favourite and rooms sparkle in restored glory.

Clean, cheerfully painted rooms, abundant showers and competent, helpful staff are among factors that keep the Circus at the top of the hostel heap. Stay in dorms, private rooms (some with en suite baths) or a penthouse apartment with kitchen and terrace. The downstairs café serves inexpensive breakfasts, drinks and small meals, while the basement bar puts on different activities nightly. Free wi-fi throughout and Skype phone downstairs. Its new Circus Hotel across the street, opened in late 2008. EAST SEVEN HOSTEL Map Hostel € 9362 2240; www.eastseven.de; Schwedter Strasse 7; dm €17, s/d/tr/q €37/50/51/78, linen €3; Senefelder Platz; Our favourite small hostel in town is a friendly, familial and fun crash pad within strolling distance of hip hangouts and public transport.


Frommer's San Diego 2011 by Mark Hiss

airport security, California gold rush, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, El Camino Real, gentrification, glass ceiling, machine readable, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

D (& 877/706-2327 or 858/ 430-2327; www.bearcom.com), deliver to hotels within the metro area. PLANNING YOUR TRIP TO SAN DIEGO Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP) If you have Web access while traveling, consider a broadband-based telephone service (in technical terms, Voice-over Internet Protocol, or VoIP) such as Skype (www.skype.com) or Vonage (www.vonage.com), which allow you to make free international calls from your laptop or in a cybercafe. Neither service requires the people you’re calling to also have that service (though there are fees if they do not). Check the websites for details. Internet & E-Mail WITH YOUR OWN COMPUTER More and more hotels, resorts, airports, cafes, and retailers are going Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity), becoming “hotspots” that offer free high-speed Wi-Fi access or charge a small fee for usage.


pages: 568 words: 164,014

Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat by John P. Carlin, Garrett M. Graff

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Andy Carvin, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business climate, cloud computing, cotton gin, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, eat what you kill, Edward Snowden, fake news, false flag, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Hacker Ethic, information security, Internet of things, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, Wargames Reagan, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, zero-sum game

Josephine Wolf, “How a 2011 Hack You’ve Never Heard of Changed the Internet’s Infrastructure,” Slate, December 21, 2016, www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/12/how_the_2011_hack_of_diginotar_changed_the_internet _s_infrastructure.html. 9. Tony Bradley, “Hackers Target Google, Skype with Rogue SSL Certificates,” InfoWorld, March 24, 2011, www.infoworld.com/article/2623620/firewall-software/hackers-target-google--skype-with-rogue-ssl-certificates.html. 10. “Black Tulip: Report of the Investigation into the DigiNotar Certificate Authority Breach,” Fox-IT, August 13, 2012, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269333601_Black_Tulip_Report_of_the_investigation_into_the_DigiNotar _Certificate_Authority_breach. 11.


pages: 208 words: 65,733

This Is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor - the Sunday Times Bestseller by Adam Kay

airport security, butterfly effect, Kinder Surprise, post-work, Skype

I’m excited about a bleep-free existence and hopeful I haven’t forgotten how to have a relationship that isn’t conducted over hurried breakfasts and apologetic texts. The problem with being in a bubble is that it only takes one prick to burst it. It comes in the form of an email from medical staffing, letting me know I now need to work the middle weekend. None of my colleagues can swap with me and I don’t know how to deliver babies over Skype, so I go back to medical staffing to explain my predicament. I have the kind of sinking feeling you’d have going to the headmaster’s office to deny you stole liquorice from the tuck shop, with teeth stained carbon-black. I know colleagues who’ve had to cut honeymoons short and miss family funerals, so the odds were never great for them bending the rota for a holiday.


pages: 233 words: 66,446

Bitcoin: The Future of Money? by Dominic Frisby

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, capital controls, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer age, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, game design, Hacker News, hype cycle, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, Julian Assange, land value tax, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Occupy movement, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing complete, Twitter Arab Spring, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, War on Poverty, web application, WikiLeaks

Its founders say the potential applications are unlimited: from peer-to-peer betting, to financial derivatives, to identity and reputation systems, to insurance and legal contracts. Some say Satoshi Nakamoto may now even be working for Ethereum. Its former CEO is Charles Hoskinson. A bespectacled, bearded, extremely bright, friendly and fast-talking mathematician. I met him over Skype. I wanted to talk to him about Ethereum. But there was something else. I’d been tipped off that he was holding copies of all the private emails Satoshi had sent when Bitcoin was being developed. People had handed copies of their correspondence with Satoshi over to him, on the understanding that Hoskinson would archive it all and make it publically viewable.


pages: 242 words: 68,019

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, From Atoms to Economies by Cesar Hidalgo

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, assortative mating, business cycle, Claude Shannon: information theory, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Ford Model T, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, New Economic Geography, Norbert Wiener, p-value, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, price mechanism, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, working-age population

“Free Exchange: Down Towns,” The Economist, August 15, 2013. However, the change in communication technologies has been mostly qualitative. To estimate the change in costs fairly, we would need to know how much a late nineteenth-century industrialist would pay for asynchronous technologies such as email, or for a simple Skype call. And it is interesting to note that, as James Gleick describes beautifully in The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (New York: Pantheon, 2011), the French invention of the telegraph was based on contraptions whose arm positions were used to transmit information. This mechanical telegraph long predated the electric telegraph that we are more familiar with, and which became the standard image that comes to mind when using the word. 15.


pages: 237 words: 64,411

Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Jerry Kaplan

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, bank run, bitcoin, Bob Noyce, Brian Krebs, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, driverless car, drop ship, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flash crash, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, haute couture, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, information asymmetry, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, Satoshi Nakamoto, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, Turing test, Vitalik Buterin, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The first is the simple truth that most automation replaces workers, so it eliminates jobs. That means fewer places for people to work. This threat is easy to see and measure— employers roll in a robot and walk a worker to the door. But sometimes change is less visible. Each new workstation may eliminate the need for one-fifth of a salesperson, or free Skype calls may allow you to work more productively at home one day a week, deferring the need for that new hire until next quarter. If this happens slowly, the resulting improvements in productivity and reduced cost eventually create wealth, stimulating job growth that compensates for the losses. The growth may be directly in the newly improved enterprise, as lower prices and better quality increase sales, creating a need to hire more workers.


pages: 214 words: 71,585

Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids by Meghan Daum

delayed gratification, demographic transition, Donald Trump, financial independence, happiness index / gross national happiness, index card, Joan Didion, Mason jar, Multics, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, Skype, women in the workforce

One afternoon, Christian e-mailed to say that he and Mikey had something important they wanted to talk to me about. His Important Conversations could be unpredictable and sometimes terrifying: Why He Is the Wrong Boyfriend for You; Your Job Is a Poisoned Chalice; That Lipstick Shade Does Not Flatter. (We all feared the familiar words “I’m going to say this with love…”) We skyped; I trained my face to look serenely receptive. But this time, it was not about me. The comedy of it! While my family had glanced covertly my way, wondering when I’d get around to marrying, my gay brother had gone and done it. And now, while they’d politely held their tongues on the subject of grandkids, he’d visited a clinic in Connecticut to flip through binders full of baby mamas.


pages: 247 words: 63,208

The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance by Jim Whitehurst

Airbnb, behavioural economics, cloud computing, content marketing, crowdsourcing, digital capitalism, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, Google Hangouts, Infrastructure as a Service, job satisfaction, Kaizen: continuous improvement, market design, meritocracy, Network effects, new economy, place-making, platform as a service, post-materialism, profit motive, risk tolerance, Salesforce, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tony Hsieh

To add a new service, like call-waiting, the operator had to reprogram the central switch, an expensive and risky endeavor. Screw it up and you could bring down the whole network. Not surprisingly, innovation proceeded at a snail’s pace. Today, the web hosts hundreds of web-based communication services including Apple’s iMessage, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Kakao Talk, Google Hangout, WeChat, and Grasshopper. On Skype alone, users spend more than 2 billion minutes communicating each day. The web has also spawned thousands of special interest groups, like wrongplanet.net, a site dedicated to improving the lives of individuals with autism. The community’s eighty thousand members have posted more than 1.2 million comments on the site’s general discussion board.


pages: 202 words: 64,725

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett, Dave Evans

David Brooks, fail fast, fear of failure, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, impact investing, invention of the printing press, iterative process, knowledge worker, market design, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

There were three great and totally different possibilities in front of him. At this point in his life, he could afford to check them all out, and that’s what he did. Of course, what finally happened was something Chung had never imagined at all. During his first, two-year internship, he stayed in contact with his other undergraduate buddies, talking and Skyping regularly. After about nine months, all of them except Chung found themselves unhappy and disillusioned with life after college. That wasn’t so surprising. Leaving college is pretty stressful, and Chung was having some struggles on the job himself, but what was different was how everybody felt about it.


pages: 235 words: 62,862

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

Our computers, cameras, and phones are all smarter, speedier, and snazzier than ever, but also cheaper, and therefore they scarcely figure.9 Where we still had to shell out $300,000 for a single storage gigabyte 30 years ago, today it costs less than a dime.10 Such stunning technological advances figure as little more than pocket change in the GDP. Free products can even cause the economy to contract (like the call service Skype, which cost telecom companies a fortune). Today, the average African with a cell phone has access to more information than President Clinton did in the 1990s, yet the information sector’s share of the economy hasn’t budged from 25 years ago, before we had the Internet.11 Besides being blind to lots of good things, the GDP also benefits from all manner of human suffering.


pages: 251 words: 67,801

And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East by Richard Engel

East Village, friendly fire, invisible hand, Mohammed Bouazizi, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, satellite internet, Skype, Yom Kippur War

Now in Syria, Assad was threatening to crush the opposition in Aleppo and had already started doing it, but Washington’s reaction was only hand-wringing. In my conversations with rebels it was clear they were becoming increasingly disheartened and desperate. (The rebels would usually communicate with each other on Skype, blending in with the billions of people using the Internet instead of going through cell-phone towers.) The United States was apparently still skittish about sending in arms because it feared they would end up in the hands of Islamic extremists, but that, like so many unintended consequences of US foreign policy in the Middle East, was a self-fulfilling prophecy.


Exploring Everyday Things with R and Ruby by Sau Sheong Chang

Alfred Russel Wallace, bioinformatics, business process, butterfly effect, cloud computing, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, data science, Debian, duck typing, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Gini coefficient, income inequality, invisible hand, p-value, price stability, Ruby on Rails, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, text mining, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, We are the 99%, web application, wikimedia commons

In no particular order, I would like to thank: Mike Hendrickson for agreeing to this rather different type of programming book. It was a wild shot sending in the book proposal and I didn't really expect it to be picked up, except that it was. Andy Oram for being patient to a first time O’Reilly author, and arranging really long distance Skype calls halfway around the world, and waking up really early to speak to me every Tuesday evening. Kristen Borg, Rachel Monaghan, and the whole production editing team for doing such an awesome and professional job with the book. Jeremy Leipzig, Ivan Tan, Patrick Haller, and Judith Myerson for their help in doing the technical reviews and giving great advice.


pages: 279 words: 71,542

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport

Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cal Newport, data science, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, financial independence, game design, Hacker News, index fund, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mr. Money Mustache, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, price discrimination, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

She could have replaced it right away, but delaying this decision struck her at the time as an act of symbolic defiance against the thief—a perhaps misguided, but good-intentioned way of saying, “See, you didn’t hurt me.” In an article she wrote about her experience, King listed several “nuisances” of life without a phone, including the need to look up maps in advance before heading to a new destination, and the slightly increased complexity of talking with her family (which she did over Skype on her laptop). She also experienced a small number of major annoyances, such as the time she was stuck in the back of a taxi, running late for a meeting with her boss, desperately hoping to snag a Wi-Fi signal from a nearby Starbucks on her iPad so she could send him a note. But for the most part, the experience was less drastic than she feared.


pages: 246 words: 70,404

Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free by Cody Wilson

3D printing, 4chan, Aaron Swartz, active measures, Airbnb, airport security, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, assortative mating, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Cody Wilson, digital rights, disintermediation, DIY culture, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, Google Glasses, gun show loophole, jimmy wales, lifelogging, Mason jar, means of production, Menlo Park, Minecraft, national security letter, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, printed gun, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Skype, Streisand effect, thinkpad, WikiLeaks, working poor

And for the rest of that semester during each group discussion, I get asked the man-of-color perspective. You flip the polarities.” I laughed, and hard, but I was fading. “Hey, man, do you need to rest?” “I just need to lie down.” “Have the rest of the night.” I woke near one a.m. that night, hearing Varol in his room speaking to someone on Skype. “Yeah, but he’s got great verbal intelligence. I think we need to back this guy.” * * * I was invited to a tech meet-up in a misty din downtown. There I met a young, well-dressed economic minister from the Netherlands. “What do you do?” “Bitcoin,” I answered. “I have a bitcoin project.” Tonight’s was a series of timed demonstrations of Google Glass.


pages: 272 words: 66,985

Hyperfocus: How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction by Chris Bailey

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bluma Zeigarnik, Cal Newport, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, functional fixedness, game design, imposter syndrome, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Parkinson's law, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, side hustle, SimCity, Skype, TED Talk, twin studies, Zipcar

To measure how stressed participants felt after multitasking or doing email, Mark and Czerwinski strapped monitors to them to wear twenty-four hours a day to chart their heart-rate variability—a scientifically validated measure of stress. With their permission, Mark and Czerwinski installed a logging program on participants’ computers to observe exactly how often they switched between tasks—every forty seconds. Shockingly, we interrupt ourselves even more often when we keep apps like IM and Skype open—every thirty-five seconds. Their work is worth calling out for a number of reasons. First, in situ research is much more difficult to conduct—it took Mark six years to find an organization that would let her study employees when they went without email for a week, for example—but the approach is particularly worthwhile.


pages: 243 words: 65,374

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

A. Roger Ekirch, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, big-box store, British Empire, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jacquard loom, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Live Aid, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, Murano, Venice glass, planetary scale, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, techno-determinism, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, walkable city, women in the workforce

It was a social, collaborative process from the very beginning, thanks to the simultaneous development of our PBS/BBC television series. The stories and observations—not to mention the overarching structure of the book—evolved out of hundreds of conversations: in California and London and New York and Washington, via e-mail and Skype, with dozens of people. Making the series and book was the hardest work I have ever done in my life—and not just when they forced me to descend into the sewers of San Francisco. But it was also the most rewarding work I’ve ever done, in large part because my collaborators were such inventive and entertaining people.


pages: 274 words: 70,481

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Albert Einstein, Ascot racecourse, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, false flag, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, Jon Ronson, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, Skype

So Being or Nothingness has created a strange loop of people and it is a vessel for them to self-reference.” She paused. “I think that’s Hofstadter’s message.” It was a compelling theory, and I continued to believe this might be the solution to the riddle right up until the moment, an hour later, I had a Skype video conversation with Levi Shand, who, it was soon revealed, wasn’t an invention of Douglas Hofstadter’s but an actual student from Indiana University. He was a handsome young man with black hair, doleful eyes, and a messy student bedroom. He had been easy to track down. I e-mailed him via his Facebook page.


Realtime Web Apps: HTML5 WebSocket, Pusher, and the Web’s Next Big Thing by Jason Lengstorf, Phil Leggetter

Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, don't repeat yourself, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Google Chrome, MVC pattern, Ruby on Rails, Skype, software as a service, SQL injection, web application, WebSocket

A lot of the features offered by applications also require a connection, such as any piece of functionality that makes use of other Internet services or APIs (for example: public transport apps, features that synchronize your information across devices such as to-do or note-taking applications such as EverNote, or mapping applications that in no way could store all the information a user could potentially request). Some of these applications, such as EverNote, can still provide useful functionality while offline. But others, such as Skype, can’t offer any of its core functionality without a connection. They may as well refuse to open. Once a native app is downloaded on your device, all the resources (in most cases, at least) are now stored on the device, meaning it should be possible to use it offline. But many applications assume connectivity leading to a very frustrating user experience. 14 http://caniuse.com/#feat=stream http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5298467/prevent-orientation-change-in-ios-safari 15 62 Chapter 4 ■ Choosing Web Apps Over Native Apps There’s no real reason for this to be the case, and the same goes with web applications.


pages: 266 words: 67,272

Fun Inc. by Tom Chatfield

Adrian Hon, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, An Inconvenient Truth, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, behavioural economics, Boris Johnson, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer age, credit crunch, game design, invention of writing, longitudinal study, moral panic, publication bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, upwardly mobile

I’ve interviewed and talked to a huge number of people for this book, not all of whom have even made it into this final cut (my fault, not theirs). One of the greatest pleasures of writing about the games industry has been the sheer goodwill and passion I’ve encountered amongst those working in and around it, and their willingness to explain themselves for hours to – or to swap emails and Skype calls with – a persistent stranger with a Dictaphone and a coffee habit. A thousand thanks and more to those inside, around and interested in all matters fun-related, including: Naomi Alderman, Richard Bartle, Adam ‘Mogwai’ Brouwer, Michael Bywater, Peter Bazalgette, Edward Castronova, Jenova Chen, Timothy Crosby, Julian Dibbell, Jim Greer, Dawn Hallybone, Adrian Hon, Rupert Humphries, Raph Koster, Liz & Ville Lehtonen, Sam Leith, Simon Levene, Jason ‘Jagarr’ & Kim ‘Lambytoes’ Long, Nicholas Lovell, Adam Martin, Jon ‘Magicmoocow’ Matheson (aka Baxie), Graham McAllister, Craig McKechnie & the Hooligans, Philip Oliver, Tim Phillips, Rhianna Pratchett, Michael Rawlinson, Derek Robertson, Kristian Segerstråle, Suzanne Seggerman, Michael Smith, Linda Snow, Justin Villiers, Peter Watts, David Wortley, Nick Yee, Riccardo Zacconi … Plus numberless, nameless others who have found themselves cornered by me at parties and in cafés and compelled to talk about games.


pages: 260 words: 67,823

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever by Alex Kantrowitz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, anti-bias training, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer vision, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, fulfillment center, gigafactory, Google Chrome, growth hacking, hive mind, income inequality, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Jony Ive, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, work culture , zero-sum game

“What began as a lean competition machine led by young visionaries of unparalleled talent has mutated into something bloated and bureaucracy-laden, with an internal culture that unintentionally rewards managers who strangle innovative ideas,” the article said. As aQuantive faded, Elamiri transferred to Microsoft’s Skype group. And from there, he saw the winds of change blow in. Ballmer stepped down in 2014, giving way to Satya Nadella, a twenty-two-year Microsoft veteran. A “consummate insider,” in his own words, Nadella understood Microsoft needed to reinvent itself to survive—or Hit Refresh, as he titled his bestselling book.


pages: 227 words: 71,675

Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything by Becky Bond, Zack Exley

battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, declining real wages, digital rights, Donald Trump, family office, fixed income, full employment, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, immigration reform, income inequality, Kickstarter, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, plutocrats, randomized controlled trial, Skype, telemarketer, union organizing

This was how we knew that she would be the perfect partner for publishing this book. When we approached her about our idea for a book back in June, she was generous with her time and advice. Once we got started, she coached us through the entire process, offering positive reinforcement along with the directive feedback we desperately needed. Had Margo not told us, via a Skype call to a small conference room where we were camped out in a Berlin hotel, that our sample chapters and outline were all wrong, we never would have gotten this book to press. Once we were headed in the right direction with our drafts, she brought in the full force of Chelsea Green’s resources along with the amazing Brianne Goodspeed to be our editor.


pages: 229 words: 66,652

Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect by Jonice Webb

animal electricity, family office, Skype

Margo tells her friends’ mothers all about how awful her own parents are to her, so they are sympathetic to her. Unfortunately, Margo’s parents are too apathetic to follow up with other parents, so Margo’s description of their alleged atrocities stands. At home, Margo stays in her room and video chats with men on Skype. She shocks her friends by telling them about her daring video sexting episodes. Margo’s parents, Elaine and Bruce, are good people. They give to charity, belong to a church, and are kind and respectful to all. But each of Margo’s parents is depressed in a different way. They are a little older than her friends’ parents, having adopted Margo after years of futile fertility treatments.


pages: 225 words: 70,241

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland

affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer vision, creative destruction, driverless car, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, high net worth, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, open immigration, PalmPilot, rent control, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, young professional

You ask them why they are doing it, it spills out—“It’s so exciting, all of those other people are doing it wrong, we’ve got a great avenue, and we know exactly what we’re going to do!” If they say they’re doing it for the money, that’s not enough, because money will just come and go, come and go. I’ve seen start-ups change an industry and challenge huge companies. We saw Tesla change the auto industry, Skype changed the long-distance carriers, and Hotmail changed the post office. Huge things are happening out there, over the last forty-five to fifty years. So much improvement, thanks to the private sector. I always describe these entrepreneurs as heroes. Heroes are our past, the people we look back on and say they did great things.


pages: 232 words: 68,570

Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident by Donnie Eichar

anti-communist, disinformation, off-the-grid, Skype, Tunguska event

He didn’t tell me why, but he said it with such gravity, that for a second I believed it to be sage advice. In the end, I made sure that my toothbrush was easily accessible in the side pocket of my pack. My new friend, after all, was missing a significant number of his teeth. The last bit of business before bed was to call my family. First, I called my girlfriend on Skype, in what turned into a teary half-hour exchange, at the end of which I promised her that I’d return home safely. Even more poignant was my son’s puzzled look as he stared at the computer screen at a face he was having trouble placing, but one that his mother kept referring to as “Papa.” His lack of recognition cut my heart in half.


pages: 206 words: 64,212

Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris

airport security, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, David Sedaris, defund the police, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, index card, McMansion, Minecraft, pre–internet, QAnon, Skype, social distancing, Transnistria

Just as I was certain that every aspect of the coronavirus had been exhausted, I found an article on how it was adversely affecting prostitutes. They couldn’t exactly file for unemployment benefits, so many had apparently started GoFundMe campaigns. When I mentioned the article to my agent, Cristina, she said, “I don’t see why they can’t just Skype. Not that it will really fix anything. It won’t be long before sex robots drive all those people out of business.” Who are you? I wondered. I mean, sex robots! This was my agent! There was also FaceTime, of course, which I supposed could be amended in this case to Sit-on-Your-Face Time. A lot of people were moving their business online, though.


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

“Lenovo has forgone the notion of a corporate headquarters, so essentially I am flying around the world most of the time,” former CEO Bill Amelio explained. Neither a Chinese nor an American company, Lenovo is managed by tag teams of executives dispersed throughout the world. No one has ever tried to run a $16 billion company on Skype calls, e-mail, and the occa-sional Paris rendezvous until now. The company calls this “worldsourcing.” “It’s about leveraging the best people, processes, and costs, no matter where they’re located,” says Gerry Smith, the American running its global supply chain from Singapore. “I have staff in Shenzhen, Raleigh, Baddi [India], and Brazil.

And I think those are going to start going away,” Las Colinas included. He suspects the entire industry will effervesce into a cloud of software, reconnecting in person by air only when necessary. This is consistent with Kasarda’s Law, which predicts that Lutz and his colleagues will end up aloft more than ever. If Skype, Twitter, netbooks, and smart phones erode the need for daily physical contact, then air travel will pick up the slack, bringing together the ad hoc teams tasked with catching lightning in a bottle. The upstarts nipping at their heels do so already. The original companies without propinquity were start-ups, because the economics made too much sense.


pages: 579 words: 183,063

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, fear of failure, Gary Taubes, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global macro, Google Hangouts, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, helicopter parent, high net worth, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, index fund, information security, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Mr. Money Mustache, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, sunk-cost fallacy, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

Ashton Kutcher FB: /Ashton aplus.com ASHTON KUTCHER is a prominent actor, investor, and entrepreneur. He began his acting career in the popular sitcom That ’70s Show, which aired for eight seasons, and he starred in the comedy and box office hit Dude, Where’s My Car? He is a renowned technology investor, with investments in Airbnb, Square, Skype, Uber, Foursquare, Duolingo, and others. He is currently a co-founder and chairman of the board of A Plus, a digital media company devoted to spreading the message of positive journalism, where he leads strategic partnerships with brands and influencers. In 2009, he became the first Twitter user to reach one million followers, and he now has close to 20 million

., 91 Schaffhausen, Brian, 108–9 Schmidt, Eric, 221 Scholly, 79 School, adopting a, 449–50 School of Visual Arts, New York City, 24 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 69 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 14 Schweitzer, Albert, 206 Scudder, Vida Dutton, 112 Seattle Seahawks, 412 Seneca, 39, 112, 206, 253, 513 Shabalov, Alexander, 369 Shake Shack, 371 Shapiro, Dani, 28 Sharapova, Maria, 182–84 Shavit, Michal, 556 Shaw, George Bernard, 235 Shea, Ryan, 492–94 Shopping.com, 31 Shungite stone, 269 Siegel, Dan, 62 Silbermann, Ben, 495–500 Simmons, Louie, 309 Simmons, Marshall, 358, 359 Simon and Garfunkel, 161 Skype, 250 Slater, Kelly, 419–20 Sleep, 3–4, 232 as investing in yourself, 212–13 naps, 319 for stress relief, 529–30 Sleepio, 243 SleepPhones, 36 Slide, 92 Sling Shot, 309, 311 Slovic, Paul, 190 Smelling salts, 387 Socrates, 224 Sohn Conference Foundation, 56 Sonen Capital, 324 Sony, 281 Sorkin, Andrew Ross, 145–46 Soros Fund Management, 428 SoundTracking, 101 Sowell, Thomas, 205 “So what” exercise, 90 SpaceX, 42, 293 Special Olympics, 509 Spiceworks, 64 Spiralizer, 306 Spotify, 286, 288 Square, 250 Stanton, Brandon, 254–55, 565 Starrett, Kelly, 316, 317 StartUp Health, 243 Stay Covered Big Wave SUP leash, 196 Stephenson, Neal, 470–71 Stewart, Zeph, 224 Stiller, Ben, 135–39 Strauss, Neil, 96–99 Strayed, Cheryl, xviii SubPac M2 Wearable Physical Sound System, 57 Suffering, 16, 32, 33, 83, 122, 237, 344, 381, 558–60 Sun Tzu, 436 Super Training Gym, Sacramento, 309 Susan G.


pages: 3,292 words: 537,795

Lonely Planet China (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Shawn Low

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, birth tourism , carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, country house hotel, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, G4S, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Japanese asset price bubble, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, off-the-grid, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, young professional

The International Post Office (Zhongguo Youzheng MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %6393 6666; 276 North Suzhou Rd; h7am-10pm) is just north of Suzhou Creek. Public Security Bureau Public Security BureauPOLICE (PSB; Gong’anju GOOGLE MAP ; %2895 1900; 1500 Minsheng Rd; h9am-5pm Mon-Sat) Visa extensions in Shanghai are available from the PSB. Telephone After Skype (www.skype.com) and Viber (www.viber.com), internet phone (IP) cards are the cheapest way to call internationally (¥1.80 per minute to the US), but may not work with some hotel phones. For mobile phone SIM cards, China Mobile shops are ubiquitous; cards can also be bought from newspaper kiosks with the China Mobile sign.

Note that cars frequently turn on red lights in China, so the green ‘walk now’ man does not mean it is safe to cross. Telephone Mobile Phones A mobile phone should be the first choice for calls, but ensure your mobile is unlocked for use in China if taking your own. If you have the right phone (eg Blackberry, iPhone, Android), Skype (www.skype.com) and Viber (www.viber.com) can make calls either very cheap or free with wi-fi access. Also consider buying a data SIM card in China for constant network access away from wi-fi hotspots; plans start at under ¥70 for 300mb of data, 50 minutes of China calls, and around 240 free local SMS per month.

Domestic and international long-distance phone calls can also be made from main telecommunications offices and ‘phone bars’ (huaba). Cardless international calls are expensive and it’s far cheaper to use an internet phone (IP) card. Public telephone booths are rarely used now in China but may serve as wi-fi hot spots (as in Shanghai). Phonecards Beyond Skype or Viber, using an IP card on your mobile or a landline phone is much cheaper than calling direct, but they can be hard to find outside the big cities. You dial a local number, punch in your account number, followed by a pin number and finally the number you wish to call. English-language service is usually available.


pages: 254 words: 76,064

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Joi’s extended family, however, lived on the coast not far from the Fukushima plant. As night gave way to a blustery, rainswept morning, Joi still hadn’t managed to reach his wife, and he was facing another thirteen interviews at the Media Lab. In stolen moments between interviews he tracked down his friends and family in an overlapping series of emails, online chats, and Skype calls. Over the course of the day, two facts emerged: One, all of Joi’s loved ones were safe. Two, the visit had been a success. Joi was now the leading candidate to fill Negroponte’s big shoes. Not that he had much time to think about career prospects. All Japanese caught outside the country when the quake hit faced a kind of survivor’s guilt.


pages: 230 words: 76,655

Choose Yourself! by James Altucher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, cashless society, cognitive bias, dark matter, digital rights, do what you love, Elon Musk, estate planning, John Bogle, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, mirror neurons, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, PageRank, passive income, pattern recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, Steve Jobs, superconnector, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, Y2K, Zipcar

Ten ridiculous things I would invent (the smart toilet, etc). Ten books I can write (Ex: The Choose Yourself Guide to an Alternative Education, etc). Ten business ideas for Google/Amazon/Twitter. Ten people I can send ideas to. Ten podcast ideas I can do, or videos I can shoot (“Lunch with James,” a video podcast where I just have lunch with people over Skype and we chat). Ten industries where I can remove the middleman. Ten ways to make old posts of mine and make books out of them. Ten ways I can surprise Claudia. (Actually, more like one hundredways. That’s hard work!) Ten items I can put on my “ten list ideas I usually write” list. Ten people I want to be friends with and I figure out what the next steps are to contact them (Azaelia Banks, I’m coming after you!


pages: 232 words: 77,956

Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else by James Meek

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, business continuity plan, call centre, clean water, Deng Xiaoping, electricity market, Etonian, Ford Model T, gentrification, HESCO bastion, housing crisis, illegal immigration, land bank, Leo Hollis, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, Mikhail Gorbachev, post-industrial society, pre–internet, price mechanism, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor

It only took a minute for the sender’s email to flash to MCI’s state-of-the-art receiving centre in Brussels, where it would be lovingly printed out and hand-carried to its destination by a Belgian postman. And then everybody learned to type. Before I started researching the mails, I thought about trying to set up interviews by post. I didn’t think about it very long. I sent no letters, and received none. I phoned, emailed, texted, Skyped, Vibered, Gmail chatted and Googled. By Easter, I’d only just used the last of my Christmas stamps. I sent a card to a friend to thank her for dinner and she emailed back to thank me for my thank you. The morning I wrote this, my post consisted of a bank statement and a credit card statement (which, as my bank keeps telling me – ‘Go paperless!’


pages: 243 words: 74,452

Do Over: Rescue Monday, Reinvent Your Work, and Never Get Stuck by Jon Acuff

Albert Einstein, fear of failure, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Ruby on Rails, Skype, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh

You can learn how to engage and encourage people whose teeth you clean during your first year on the job. People will always want to be treated with respect and kindness. The less experienced person you talk to, who will often be younger than you, can help you learn about new innovations in the industry. Continuing our dental example, a new hygienist who learned new tools like online booking and Skype consultations can help you become aware of new skills you might need. To have the best Career Savings Account possible you must continually learn new skills and hone old ones. Remember When you refuse to practice a skill today, it makes it harder to practice it tomorrow. Weeds of fear grow stronger the longer we wait to hustle.


pages: 265 words: 79,896

Red Rover: Inside the Story of Robotic Space Exploration, From Genesis to the Mars Rover Curiosity by Roger Wiens

Apollo 11, computer age, James Webb Space Telescope, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, Ronald Reagan, Skype

In Los Alamos, Sam Clegg was standing by to host a crowd at the local science museum, where a new exhibit was opening. There, a live NASA feed would be shown on a big screen. In New York City, the NASA feed would be displayed on the big screen in Times Square. Anyone interested in watching at 1:30 A.M. would be able to do so. A friend of mine was ready to Skype back to an auditorium filled with Mars enthusiasts in London, where the landing would take place at 6:30 A.M. A thousand people ended up watching in Toulouse, France, where it was 7:30 A.M. In Los Alamos, the original plan had been to seat friends and family members of our team in the museum’s thirty-seat theater, which had a big screen.


pages: 251 words: 76,225

The Geek Feminist Revolution by Kameron Hurley

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, clean water, commoditize, desegregation, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Kickstarter, means of production, microaggression, Nelson Mandela, Skype, the long tail, women in the workforce

People are always going to trot that one out to try to insult you, like taking up more space in the world, as a woman, is the absolute worst thing you can do. Which I, of course, find hilarious. And yet, I get it. I do. I feel it. As internet bandwidth has increased, we’ve entered the age of the quick video, the vlogger, the YouTube sensation, the Skype session. I’ve felt an increased pressure, as a writer, to not only go out in public but to widely share my public image in ways that are often beyond my control. I’ve been asked more and more to complete video projects, not just for fiction endeavors—acceptance speeches, video blogs, Google hangouts, taped panels, and the like—but also for job interviews.


pages: 291 words: 77,596

Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything by Gordon Bell, Jim Gemmell

airport security, Albert Einstein, book scanning, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, full text search, information retrieval, invention of writing, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, language acquisition, lifelogging, Menlo Park, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, RFID, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Ted Nelson, telepresence, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, web application

More important, the card can geolocate every photo—so long as there are Wi-Fi signals at your location. For audio recording, I carry an Olympus WS-320 audio recorder (though changing batteries is a pain). In a pinch, I also record using the audio recording function in my cell phone. For recording meetings, I like to use OneNote and record directly into my PC. To save telephone conversations, Skype calls can be saved automatically. Recording from a cell phone or home phone is presently more complicated, and there are legal issues; I’d wait for that space to evolve a little more before you jump in. HEALTH DATA Health logging is going to rapidly improve in quality convenience in the next few years.


Yes Please by Amy Poehler

airport security, Albert Einstein, blood diamond, carbon footprint, David Sedaris, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, gentrification, Google Hangouts, Pepto Bismol, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, the medium is the message

This book deals with the fact that most people who divorce with small children still need to see each other every day. Any good parent will try to put their children’s needs first, and so this book will help teach you how to have a knock-down, drag-out fight and still attend a kid’s birthday party together on the same day. Are you in your early twenties and recently broke up with someone over Skype? This book is not for you. Have you successfully avoided your ex for over six months except for a close call at your friends’ art opening? This book is not for you. Have you heard secondhand that your ex is building houses for Habitat for Humanity and you rolled your eyes at how fucking phony the whole thing sounded and then sighed because you don’t miss him but you liked playing with his dog?


pages: 225 words: 71,912

So Close to Being the Sh*t, Y'all Don't Even Know by Retta

centre right, Downton Abbey, lock screen, McMansion, messenger bag, pink-collar, retail therapy, Skype, Snapchat

Mad love to JL Stermer for holding my hand during the book proposal process and when I was feeling overwhelmed and wanted to quit, for suggesting that I “just see if they’d give me an offer.” Holy shit, I can’t believe that shit worked! You’re the best, mamma. Thank you to Dibs for the many hours of sitting together/Skyping in order to pull these stories out of me. For laughing at my silliness and engaging me so that I would remember these stories. For taking my verbal vomit and putting them in some sensible order. You for sure did the lion’s share of handholding and I appreciate you for it. Thanks to Paul Fedorko for coming on to the project and dealing with the stuff I didn’t know how or want to do.


pages: 290 words: 72,046

5 Day Weekend: Freedom to Make Your Life and Work Rich With Purpose by Nik Halik, Garrett B. Gunderson

Airbnb, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, business process, clean water, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Ethereum, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, gamification, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, initial coin offering, Isaac Newton, Kaizen: continuous improvement, litecoin, low interest rates, Lyft, market fundamentalism, microcredit, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Skype, solopreneur, subscription business, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, traveling salesman, uber lyft

For example, you could coach people on fitness, public speaking, media relations, writing, visual or performance art, and even things such as fashion and appearance. Fortune magazine reports that it’s possible to earn $50,000 a year coaching people to play video games!9 In this industry as in others, technology is making it easier than ever before. You can offer coaching services via Skype and webinars and use advanced scheduling software to manage your calendar. Consulting Forbes reports that consulting is a $100 billion industry. The internet has broken down the barriers to setting up a home consultancy business. In most cases all you need is a laptop, cell phone, and the skills you already have with no investor capital.


pages: 230 words: 71,834

Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality by Melissa Bruntlett, Chris Bruntlett

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active transport: walking or cycling, ASML, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, car-free, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, intermodal, Jones Act, Loma Prieta earthquake, megacity, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, safety bicycle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, starchitect, Stop de Kindermoord, the built environment, the High Line, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

That opportunity would not have arisen without the cooperation of the conference organizers: Sjors van Duren, Moniek van Daal, and Robert Smits. Of course, it would have been impossible to complete this book without all of the people who generously took the time to sit down with us for interviews, negotiating several time zones and Skype call-ins, as well as the individuals who selflessly assisted us in connecting with those interviewees, specifically: Jehudi van de Brug, Dale Calkins, Clarence Eckerson Jr., Bettina van Hoven, Kevin Quinlan, Seth Solomonow, and Herbert Tiemens. Finally, we could not have reached this milestone without the endless love and support of our parents: Wendy, Ed, Margaret, and Robert.


pages: 280 words: 71,268

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs by John Doerr

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Bob Noyce, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, intentional community, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, web application, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

And they needed less work, not more. By Day 15, we had a crude beta version of Remind. On a sheet of printer paper, over hand-drawn symbols for mobile phones and email, I scrawled, “Your students can receive your messages. . . .” Below were three options: “Invite,” “Print,” “Share.” After reaching a teacher on Skype, I’d hold the paper to the screen and say, “You can type any message you want to your students, hit the button, and they’ll never see your phone number or social networking profile.” I did this countless times, and the teachers just about fell out of their chairs—every time. “My God,” they’d say, “that would solve such a big problem for me!”


pages: 232 words: 76,830

Dreams of Leaving and Remaining by James Meek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, bank run, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Etonian, full employment, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, working-age population

Soon afterwards his deputy was fired, and such power as the union had was broken. ‘These multinational companies, they don’t just move production to countries that are cheaper, but also to places where workers are easier to manipulate, where there are no strong traditions of worker unions,’ Wachowski told me from Holland on Skype. ‘We had no previous experience. We got no help from the union. We were like a leaf in the wind.’ An anonymous spokesman for Mondelez in Poland said, by email: ‘In general we have a constructive relationship with our labour representatives. We are not aware of any Polish industrial tribunal in this case … We do not accept any kind of discrimination, bullying or victimisation.’


pages: 283 words: 73,093

Social Democratic America by Lane Kenworthy

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, business cycle, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Brooks, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, full employment, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, school choice, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Steve Jobs, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, working poor, zero day

Product variety has increased for almost all goods and services, from cars to restaurant food to toothpaste to television programs. We have much greater access to information via the Internet, Google, cable TV, travel guides, Google Maps and GPS, smartphones, and tablets. We have a host of new communication tools: cell phones, call waiting, voicemail, e-mail, social networking websites, Skype. Personal entertainment sources and devices have proliferated: cable TV, high-definition televisions, home entertainment systems, the Internet, MP3 players, CD players, DVD players, Netflix, satellite radio, video games. Last, but not least, discrimination on the basis of sex, race, and more recently, sexual orientation have diminished.


pages: 288 words: 73,297

The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease by Marc Lewis Phd

behavioural economics, deep learning, delayed gratification, helicopter parent, impulse control, language acquisition, meta-analysis, no-fly zone, Rat Park, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Walter Mischel

She found herself at a party early in her first year, feeling shy and anxious, not knowing anyone there. These were familiar feelings. What was new was that she was starving. She recalls standing by the food table, sort of planting herself there, taking refuge. And then helping herself to a large, rich cookie. She showed me the size of this cookie with her fingers on a Skype call. One would be plenty for most people. That night Alice ate fourteen of those cookies, one after another. She remembers the number exactly, because she herself was astonished. “It felt so good,” she told me. “It was absolutely what I wanted, what I needed.” An empty place finally filled. Binge eating soon became a regular event.


pages: 264 words: 71,821

How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee

air freight, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, food miles, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Skype, sustainable-tourism, two and twenty, University of East Anglia

Your presents are thoughtful but not necessarily expensive. You encourage people to be honest in their reaction and you’ve kept all the receipts. You have LED Christmas lights. You stay at home and you send cards only to a few people that you haven’t seen for ages and with whom you really don’t want to lose touch. You video-Skype your distant relatives and make plans to see them properly another time. Some British friends of ours spread the word that only children were going to get presents worth more than a strict limit of £1 ($1.50) . They asked everyone to reciprocate, packing any cash saved off to the charity of their choice.


pages: 256 words: 76,433

Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by Elizabeth L. Cline

big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, clean water, East Village, export processing zone, feminist movement, high-speed rail, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, megacity, messenger bag, Multi Fibre Arrangement, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Skype, special economic zone, trade liberalization, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, Veblen good

In 2010 China placed 72 percent of the world’s orders for modern spinning equipment, 84 percent of the orders for the most modern weaving looms, and three-quarters of the orders for new knitting machines.5 At Lily’s factory a sharply dressed man quietly entered the room and took a racer-back tank top out of my hands. Twenty minutes later it had magically been drawn up using design software on an Apple computer, where I could see it in different colors. Of the five factories I visited, a number had their own design teams and sample rooms, and to this day, Skype and e-mail me regularly with spreadsheets and high-resolution photos of their latest styles. And the Chinese factories I talk to are always available. Katy, one of the factory sales girls, e-mails me at 10 p.m., when she’s watching TV in her factory-provided apartment, to see how I’m doing, to find out if I have any orders for her, and to meddle in my love life.


pages: 238 words: 73,824

Makers by Chris Anderson

3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, carbon tax, commoditize, company town, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deal flow, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, DIY culture, drop ship, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, Ford Model T, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, planned obsolescence, private spaceflight, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator

But we certainly would have missed the cake maker, the graphics artist working for the Brazilian ad agency, the guy who runs the Italian ambulance radio company, the retired car-dealership owner, the Spaniard working for an energy company in the Canary Islands, and all the others who followed their passions into the project, even though their careers had taken them elsewhere. In short, because we don’t operate the company in a Coaseian model, we’ve got more and smarter people working for us. We minimize transaction costs with technology, not proximity. A social network is our common roof. Skype is the “next cubicle.” Our shared purpose is really shared, not dictated. Joy wins: The open-manufacturing model Joy’s Law and the new breed of companies and communities built on open-access Web principles turned Coase’s Law upside down. Now, working within a traditional monolithic company of the sort Coase had in mind often imposes higher transaction costs than running a project online.


pages: 287 words: 80,180

Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim, Renée A. Mauborgne

Asian financial crisis, Blue Ocean Strategy, borderless world, call centre, classic study, cloud computing, commoditize, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, endogenous growth, Ford Model T, haute couture, index fund, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, machine translation, market fundamentalism, NetJets, Network effects, RAND corporation, Salesforce, Skype, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

In the last decade, there has been a fundamental shift in the cost and ease of becoming a global player from virtually any corner of the globe. This is a trend no organization can afford to downplay. Consider just a handful of facts. With the ease and low cost of setting up a website, any business can have a global storefront; today people from anywhere can raise money via crowdfunding; with services like Gmail and Skype, communication costs have dropped significantly; trust in transactions can now be rapidly and economically achieved by using services like PayPal, while companies like Alibaba.com make searching for and vetting suppliers across the world relatively quick and easy. And there are search engines—the equivalent of global business directories—that are free.


pages: 240 words: 74,182

This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev

4chan, active measures, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, data science, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, illegal immigration, mass immigration, mega-rich, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, post-truth, side hustle, Skype, South China Sea

With the PRI out of power Alberto wanted to learn more about his adversaries. He’d heard that a part had been played by a campaign manager nicknamed Chochos, who was reputed to run an army of online trolls, bots and cyborgs. Chochos’s Facebook page was a grinning clown face.10 He agreed to talk to Alberto over Skype, but refused to show his face. Though they were on opposing sides of the digital barricades, Alberto and Chochos spoke like two mutually respectful professionals swapping notes. When my translator transcribed their conversation, she kept getting confused over who was who. Alberto asked about the fake pictures of looted supermarkets that had been spread during the gas protests, which had encouraged them to turn violent.


pages: 258 words: 79,503

The Genius Within: Unlocking Your Brain's Potential by David Adam

Albert Einstein, business intelligence, cognitive bias, CRISPR, Flynn Effect, Gregor Mendel, job automation, John Conway, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, SimCity, Skype, Stephen Hawking, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray

Only nineteen, depression had such an impact on Colin’s young life that by the time he walked into Stubbeman’s clinic he had already tried to commit suicide. Both Colin and Mavis walked away from his office, Stubbeman says, fully recovered, after he used magnetic brain stimulation to treat their conditions. That sounds extraordinary, but it’s not the reason I arranged a Skype conversation with him. I wanted to ask about the impact his brain stimulation had on his tennis. Stubbeman plays a lot of tennis and he has won a lot more matches recently. Much of the improvement is down to a staggering increase in the number of first serves he says he now delivers with unerring accuracy.


pages: 292 words: 76,185

Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One by Jenny Blake

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Cal Newport, cloud computing, content marketing, data is the new oil, diversified portfolio, do what you love, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fear of failure, future of work, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lean Startup, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, passive income, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, solopreneur, Startup school, stem cell, TED Talk, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game

It provided reasonably predictable cash flow, I could throttle it up and down relatively easily, and I could do it from anywhere. When I decided to work from Bali and Thailand for two months in 2013, I was worried no one would want to work with me because of the unpredictability of Internet access or having to make our calls over Skype across time zones. But surprisingly I got the most clients in the history of my business. That was enabled largely by the platform of readers with whom I had built trust in the years leading up to my travels, negating potential distance issues. Developing a community takes time, and strong ties will be more helpful than large stats.


pages: 240 words: 78,436

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems by Lauren Turner Claire, Laure Claire Reillier, Benoit Reillier

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, blockchain, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Diane Coyle, Didi Chuxing, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, multi-sided market, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Altman, search costs, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, Y Combinator

Both have made their investors healthy returns: somebody who bought $1,000 of Facebook stock when it IPO’d on 12 March 2012 would have had $4,327 four years later, equivalent to a yearly return of 40.2%, while somebody who bought $1,000 of Microsoft when it IPO’d in 1986 would have $879,343 thirty years later, equivalent to a yearly return of 24.9%.36 Like Apple, Google and Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook achieved these performances by adding and combining platforms with other business models to further strengthen their respective platform-powered ecosystems. The acquisitions of Nokia’s mobile phone unit in September 2013 (for $7.2 billion),37 collaborative communications platform Yammer in June 2012 (for $1.2 billion), peer-to-peer IP-based telecoms platform Skype in May 2011 (for $8.5 billion) and LinkedIn in June 2016 (for $26 billion) were driven by Microsoft’s willingness to become the leading business platform-powered ecosystem and ‘recreate the connective tissue of enterprises’.38 The acquisitions by Facebook of messaging app WhatsApp in February 2014 (for $19 billion),39 photo sharing platform Instagram in April 2012 (for $1 billion)40 and virtual reality hardware company Occulus in March 2014 (for $2 billion)41 are also key moves aimed at consolidating its platform ecosystem and gaining control of a new physical interface.


pages: 338 words: 74,302

Only Americans Burn in Hell by Jarett Kobek

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", AltaVista, coherent worldview, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, East Village, General Magic , ghettoisation, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, mandelbrot fractal, microdosing, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, pre–internet, sexual politics, Seymour Hersh, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996

And, like Celia, he was also wearing a T-shirt. Unlike Celia, his T-shirt did not advertise a heavy metal band from the 1980s AD. His T-shirt said this: The man’s T-shirt was very long. That morning, with his body smarting from the previous night’s Abu Ghraib-themed BDSM/taqiyya session, HRH had done a Skype interview. The journalist was from Portland, Oregon. The interview subject was the Klaus Mann Center, a homeless shelter in Portland that HRH had opened in 2007 AD. The shelter had a specific focus on LGBTQIA+ youth. “I believe,” said HRH into a laptop that displayed the computerized face of the interviewer, “that it is our duty to protect the least fortunate of society.”


pages: 250 words: 75,151

The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution Is Making the World a Better Place by Felix Marquardt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, digital nomad, Donald Trump, George Floyd, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joi Ito, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, out of africa, phenotype, place-making, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sustainable-tourism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Yogi Berra, young professional

This gave him the idea of creating an app for traders: ‘In 2009, smartphones were becoming a thing. I had the idea of building an app to deliver news on your iPhone instead of having to go online and sit at a desktop.’ This was his first experience of working with people remotely. ‘I built the app with an engineer in Pakistan over Skype. We never met. It took us four months.’ The project became his first success: ‘I put it in the app store, called it iEconcalc – clearly, marketing wasn’t my forte – and it started selling for $1.99. Then I realised it was a very niche app so I could increase the price because big bankers were downloading it.


pages: 244 words: 73,700

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

barriers to entry, behavioural economics, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, classic study, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, financial independence, Girl Boss, growth hacking, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lockdown, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, multilevel marketing, off-the-grid, passive income, Peoples Temple, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Y2K

A deeper dive soon reveals that Bentinho Massaro was born in Amsterdam but relocated to Boulder, Colorado, and later to the occult mecca of Sedona, Arizona, to run pricey spiritual retreats. All the while, he puts spectacular effort into growing his web presence. Using a Silicon Valley–savvy social media strategy and a portfolio of snazzy websites, he aims to sell you . . . well, your soul. Costing as little as an Instagram follow or as much as $600 per hour on Skype, you can gain access to doses of Massaro’s sacred science—the answers to everything from how to cultivate profound personal relationships to how to become “a human god.” In his YouTube videos, Massaro sits close to the camera, creating the cozy atmosphere of a home gathering or a one-on-one conversation, as he expounds upon subjects like “The Inner Black Hole,” “Presence-Energy Vibration,” and “Cutting Through the Illusion of Mind.”


The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention by Simon Baron-Cohen

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Greta Thunberg, intentional community, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jim Simons, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, theory of mind, twin studies, zero-sum game

As I finish this book, on March 24, 2020, when governments around the world have declared a state of emergency in the war against the biggest viral pandemic for a century, we humans remain connected even in a state of physical isolation by using video phone calls that hyper-systemizers invented. Our thanks should go to people like Janus Fris, the Danish co-inventor of Skype, who had no formal education and dropped out of high school. And night and day, in molecular biology laboratories, hyper-systemizers are working tirelessly to invent a new vaccine that will outsmart the invisible killer that is COVID-19, the new coronavirus. And as we look beyond COVID-19 at the other major challenge our planet faces—climate destruction—we look to hyper-systemizers to invent new solutions.


pages: 303 words: 74,206

GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why It Must Now Change by Ehsan Masood

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, energy security, European colonialism, financial engineering, government statistician, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mahbub ul Haq, mass immigration, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mohammed Bouazizi, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, zoonotic diseases

Health care data in this paragraph is from Chencho Dorji, “Bhutanese Health Care Reform: A Paradigm Shift in Health Care to Increase Gross National Happiness,” in Gross National Happiness: Practice and Measurement: The Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Gross National Happiness, 24–26 November 2008, ed. Dasho Karma Ura and Dorji Penjore (Thimpu: Centre for Bhutan Studies, 2009), 413, accessed October 1, 2015, http://www.bhutanstudies.org.bt/category/conference-proceedings/. 8. Dasho Karma Ura, Skype interview with the author, December 27, 2013. 9. Tashi Wangyal, “Rhetoric and Reality: An Assessment of the Impact of WTO on Bhutan,” in The Spider and the Piglet: Proceedings of the First International Seminar on Bhutan Studies, ed. Karma Ura and Sonam Kinga (Thimpu: Centre for Bhutan Studies, 2004), accessed October 2, 2015, http://www.bhutanstudies.org.bt/category/conference-proceedings/.


pages: 434 words: 77,974

Mastering Blockchain: Unlocking the Power of Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts by Lorne Lantz, Daniel Cawrey

air gap, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, call centre, capital controls, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, currency peg, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, global reserve currency, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Kubernetes, litecoin, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, margin call, MITM: man-in-the-middle, multilevel marketing, Network effects, offshore financial centre, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, Steve Wozniak, tulip mania, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, web application, WebSocket, WikiLeaks

Szabo was clearly conceptualizing a trustless version of E-gold with bit gold. The Bitcoin Experiment By 2008, the world was already relying on the internet as a distributed entity for a large number of services. With electronic maps and GPS apps, people looked to the internet to help them get from point A to point B. Email, texting, Skype, WhatsApp, and other communication apps allowed almost instantaneous connections with friends and family near and far. In addition, people had begun buying more and more goods and services online rather than in-store. Credit and debit cards had become popular payment methods, along with PayPal and other services.


pages: 277 words: 70,506

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News by Eliot Higgins

4chan, active measures, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, anti-globalists, barriers to entry, belling the cat, Bellingcat, bitcoin, blockchain, citizen journalism, Columbine, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, fake news, false flag, gamification, George Floyd, Google Earth, hive mind, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, post-truth, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Tactical Technology Collective, the scientific method, WikiLeaks

We just got down to work, especially after the British police released those images of the two unidentified Skripal suspects in September 2018. At first, we uploaded pictures of ‘Alexander Petrov’ and ‘Ruslan Boshirov’ onto search engines, seeking reverse image matches. Nothing came back. We searched through Skype handles, seeking variants of their supposed names. Nothing. We scanned Russian news reports for clues and dredged Twitter for insights. Christo led the Bellingcat Investigation Team with Daniel Romein, a key contributor in the MH17 investigations, along with the close collaboration of Roman at The Insider.


pages: 256 words: 73,068

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

* * * Musk was part of the 2017 Future of Life Institute conference that aimed to build a set of aims for current AI use – and, later, AGI. The Boston-based Future of Life Institute was set up by Max Tegmark, a professor of Physics at MIT and author of several books about AI, and Jaan Tallinn – founding engineer of Skype. Over a weekend at the Asilomar conference centre in California, 100 or so scientists, lawyers, thinkers, economists, tech gurus and computer scientists put together 23 principles to guide AI development. These are a significant advancement on Isaac Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics, that first appeared in his 1942 short story ‘Runaround’: 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.


pages: 342 words: 72,927

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? by Pete Dyson, Rory Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 747, BRICs, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, demand response, Diane Coyle, digital map, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, functional fixedness, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high-speed rail, hive mind, Hyperloop, Induced demand, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low cost airline, Lyft, megaproject, meta-analysis, Network effects, nudge unit, Ocado, overview effect, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Rory Sutherland, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, selection bias, Skype, smart transportation, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, yield management, zero-sum game

Now Existing digital technologies, innovation from outside-in E-commerce/videoconferencing/digital connectivity/digital platforms Journey planners/shared mobility/car clubs/demand-responsive transport Near Existing physical technologies accelerated by transport Micromobility (e-scooters, e-bikes and more) Electric cars Far Emerging technologies pioneered by transport Driverless cars/autonomous vehicles/drones Hydrogen-powered freight, trains and shipping Hyperloop trains/electric planes The ‘hype curve’ shows how new technologies start more slowly than insiders expect. Skype started in 2003 and Ocado in 2010, and while the benefits of both were clear from the outset, they saw modest usage until an exogenous shock – the Covid-19 pandemic – acted as a trigger for an explosion in home working and online shopping. Meanwhile, it took Uber many years – as well as questionable business practices and $14 billion in cumulative losses – from its founding in 2009 to gain widespread adoption, with dozens of gig-economy and ride-share services also finding that people’s aptitude and appetite for smartphone-­connected travel fell short of their founders’ original enthusiasm.


Home Grown by Joan Smith

autism spectrum disorder, Boris Johnson, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Columbine, Donald Trump, drone strike, G4S, ghost gun, Jeremy Corbyn, microaggression, no-fly zone, operational security, post-materialism, Shamima Begum, Skype

In her book Two Sisters: Into the Syrian Jihad, the Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad describes what happened to a ­Norwegian-Pakistani woman from Oslo when she agreed to become the second wife of Bastian, a foreign fighter based in Raqqa. Predators have a sixth sense when it comes to finding fresh victims, and Aisha had already been in an abusive marriage before she married her new husband in a ceremony conducted via Skype while she was still in Norway. When she arrived in Syria with her young son, Aisha found herself in a familiar situation as Bastian began to assault her and the child, who was called Salahuddin. Seierstad writes: Bastian locked her indoors. He locked her out of the house. He hit her. Worst of all, he beat Salahuddin . . .


pages: 287 words: 82,576

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, business climate, business cycle, circulation of elites, classic study, clean water, David Graeber, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, East Village, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, Google Glasses, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, income inequality, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, security theater, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

It is too soon to tell whether this decline is temporary or indicative of a long-term trend.”28 Of course, these measures don’t entirely reflect negative trends. To the extent that people are commuting less because they’ve moved back into cities, or using the subway less because bike sharing and bike lanes have made that form of travel more efficient and safer, that’s great. And if video chat and Skype have meant that we have to travel less for business meetings, or to keep in touch with family and friends, there’s certainly some good there too. Still, the overall picture on transportation does not suggest a dynamic economy. Slow, inefficient travel has made Americans less likely to travel, with the knock-on effect of removing political pressure to improve transportation systems.


pages: 322 words: 84,752

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up by Philip N. Howard

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, British Empire, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital map, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Google Earth, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Internet of things, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, packet switching, pension reform, prediction markets, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stuxnet, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

AccessNow, the main organization that lobbied corporations to keep communications networks running and pressured technology companies to stop selling software tools to dictators, organized the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference in November 2011.23 The event was sponsored by Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, AT&T, Skype, and other technology firms, and it brought together the corporate leaders and foreign policy officials of major Western democratic nations to design policies for corporate social responsibility in the interest of international human rights. Similarly, the governments of the United States, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the European Union all created formal funding programs totaling more than $100 million to support digital activists working from within repressive regimes.


pages: 262 words: 80,257

The Eureka Factor by John Kounios

active measures, Albert Einstein, Bluma Zeigarnik, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, classic study, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Flynn Effect, functional fixedness, Google Hangouts, impulse control, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Necker cube, pattern recognition, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, US Airways Flight 1549, Wall-E, William of Occam

This principle is actually quite profound. Hundreds of years ago, most people lived in small villages and rarely traveled far from home. They couldn’t read, so they had little awareness of the larger world beyond their community. Now, travel is common, and advancing technology is fueling rapid globalization. Millions use Skype, Google Hangouts, and other Internet services to hold live teleconferences with people all over the world. People watch international television programs and videos on cable, satellite TV, and the Internet. When a consumer in the United States picks up the telephone to call customer service, she may well speak to someone in a call center in India.


pages: 293 words: 81,183

Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill

barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, clean water, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, experimental subject, follow your passion, food miles, immigration reform, income inequality, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job automation, job satisfaction, Lean Startup, M-Pesa, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microcredit, Nate Silver, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, self-driving car, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, William MacAskill, women in the workforce

DeCamp professor of bioethics at Princeton University and author of Animal Liberation and The Most Good You Can Do “Humanity currently spends more money on cigarette ads than on making sure that we as a species survive this century. We’ve got our priorities all wrong, and we need effective altruism to right them. If you want to make a real difference on the biggest issues of our time, you need to read Doing Good Better.” —Jaan Tallinn, cofounder of Skype, Kazaa, and MetaMed “MacAskill leads his readers on a witty, incisive tour through the ideas and applications of effective altruism, which seems increasingly poised to become a dominant social movement of the twenty-first century.” —Julia Galef, cofounder of the Center for Applied Rationality “This is the most valuable guide to charitable giving ever published.


pages: 265 words: 83,677

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing

East Village, forensic accounting, gentrification, global village, late capitalism, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Snapchat

His attachment at once prefigures and establishes our own age of automation: our rapturous, narcissistic fixation with screens; the enormous devolution of our emotional and practical lives to technological apparatuses and contraptions of one kind or another. Though I made myself venture out each day for a walk by the river, I was spending increasing hours sprawled on the orange couch in my apartment, my laptop propped against my legs, sometimes writing emails or talking on Skype, but more often just prowling the endless chambers of the internet, watching music videos from my teenaged years or spending eye-damaging hours scrolling through racks of clothes on the websites of labels I couldn’t afford. I would have been lost without my MacBook, which promised to bring connection and in the meantime filled and filled the vacuum left by love.


No Way Down: Life and Death on K2 by Graham Bowley

British Empire, Skype

On K2, he had taught Van Rooijen and the other climbers in the Dutch team some Irish sayings, such as “Tiocfaidh Ar La,” which was pronounced as “Chukky Are Law,” an old Irish Republican Army phrase meaning “Our day will come.” Climbing the slopes, Cas van de Gevel and Wilco van Rooijen shouted it back at him in fun. From Alaska, communicating with Van Rooijen by email and Skype, McDonnell had found a special 5mm white, lightweight rope for K2. It was stronger and lighter than the so-called plastic 10mm or 11mm ropes that expeditions usually picked up in Pakistan or Nepal. Its white color meant it reflected sunlight and so was less likely to melt grooves in the ice. He also found himself a strong helmet.


pages: 309 words: 84,038

Bike Boom: The Unexpected Resurgence of Cycling by Carlton Reid

1960s counterculture, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, bike sharing, California gold rush, car-free, cognitive dissonance, driverless car, Ford Model T, Haight Ashbury, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, military-industrial complex, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stop de Kindermoord, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban planning, urban renewal, Whole Earth Catalog, Yom Kippur War

Cyclists managed to convince the government that it would be held liable for accidents caused by the … dangerous designs, which were then withdrawn. As was shown in the previous chapter, the bikeways movement faded away not because it was crowded out by vehicular cyclists but because its leading proponents melted away with the ending of the boom. Forester—no shrinking violet—doesn’t believe he had the impact others claim for him. In a Skype interview, I asked him whether he stopped the building of any bikeways. “Not really,” he replied. But did he at least put a stick in their spokes? “Yes.” He added: People assert that vehicular cycling is why local government didn’t install bike paths. That’s not true. Every election cycle since then, there has been more money put into bikeways.


pages: 301 words: 85,263

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

This data was collected by the phone company before being turned over to the FBI, who in turn passed it to NSA. The next day came the exposure of the PRISM operation, which gathered up all of the data passing through the servers of the largest internet companies – including emails, documents, voice and video chats, and pictures and videos from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, YouTube, Skype, Apple and others. A short time later, it was revealed that the intelligence agencies’ reach went even deeper into the system, including the collection of raw data from the actual cables that carry information around the world. When asked what it was like to use NSA’s back end system, XKeyscore, Edward Snowden replied, ‘You could read anyone’s email in the world, anybody you’ve got an email address for.


pages: 336 words: 83,903

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work by David Frayne

anti-work, antiwork, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Californian Ideology, call centre, capitalist realism, classic study, clockwatching, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, Ford Model T, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, moral panic, new economy, Paradox of Choice, post-work, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, unpaid internship, work culture , working poor, young professional

Through her interviews with office workers, Gregg shows how technologies such as email or instant messaging, whose best design feature is that they allow for asynchronous communication, have ultimately had the opposite effect on today’s busy employees, who feel a pressure to be always present, responsive and available, whether in or out of the office (Gregg, 2011). An article on the career tips website The Grindstone suggests that many professionals are now accustomed to the idea of being constantly on call. One reader writes in: Keeping up with a client in trouble or with a question via cell or Skype can turn a potential crisis into a gentle bump in the road. Clients will not tolerate an ‘I was on vacation’ excuse. If we do not perform, my next vacation will be in a hot bath at home with my rubber ducky. (Lepore, 2012) Like their laptops, it seems that the plugged-in workers of today’s high-commitment organisations must always remain on standby.


pages: 303 words: 81,071

Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan

3D printing, augmented reality, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, driverless car, fake news, Free Software Foundation, friendly fire, gentrification, global supply chain, hydroponic farming, Internet of things, Mason jar, messenger bag, off grid, Panamax, post-Panamax, ransomware, RFID, rolling blackouts, security theater, self-driving car, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, surveillance capitalism, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning

Not just fear of what comes next, but fear of having to accept a loss he hasn’t prepared for, a situation his custom software can’t counter. All he can think of is Scott. Fucking Scott. Scott, who’s not here, who’s three thousand miles away. Scott, whom he’s not seen in the flesh for nearly two months. Scott, who was yelling at him the last time they spoke. Skype, Hangouts, Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, Signal, Gmail. Every channel he tries to open fails to connect, hangs, leaves him staring at pointless spinning disks and error messages. Somewhere, behind his screens, out past the protective barriers of the Croft, the Internet is melting, and the distance between Scott and him grows ever farther.


pages: 249 words: 80,762

Odd Girl Out: An Autistic Woman in a Neurotypical World by Laura James

autism spectrum disorder, cognitive dissonance, Kintsugi, Minecraft, neurotypical, pink-collar, Skype, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk

My sense of logic tells me so. Toby will be in London and I am there a couple of times at least, pretty much every week. He’ll want me to buy him suppers at Pizza Express, probably more than he ever did when he was at home. Jack will be in Brighton, a city I visit often. We have Facebook, Messenger, Twitter, FaceTime, Skype, iMessage and – the boys’ last resort – the phone. It’s not like the days when you dropped them off at halls and didn’t hear from them for weeks. I know many non-autistic mothers struggle with this time, but autism seems to add another layer. The loss of control over my environment and my emotions unnerves me.


pages: 252 words: 78,780

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

More than half of the HR people surveyed said their workers were stressed out and burned out. The companies were suffering, too. They were not getting any net benefit from doing all this changing. Rees and Rumbles published their results in a paper titled “Continuous Change and Organizational Burnout.” In the summer of 2017 I tracked down Rees and Rumbles, speaking to them via Skype at their office in Portsmouth. I asked them if things had perhaps changed since they published their research. They said yes, things indeed had changed—the situation had become even worse. “There’s been an intensification of work,” Rumbles told me. “Companies are creating incredibly stressful environments.”


pages: 267 words: 81,144

Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton

butterfly effect, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, rolodex, sharing economy, Skype, TED Talk

I still felt fragile from the break-up and I didn’t want to socialize. The first person who noticed something was wrong was Alex, Harry’s sister, who I had become very close to during our relationship and who, thankfully, stuck by me through our break-up. She had just moved to New York and we were skyping every day. One day, in the middle of one of our chats, I stood up while we were speaking and she saw my body in full length for the first time in months. ‘Where are your tits?’ she asked me, her eyes widening as she scanned me up and down, leaning into her camera. ‘They’re there.’ ‘No they’re not.


pages: 302 words: 85,877

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Rubin, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, commoditize, corporate governance, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, Google Chrome, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Naomi Klein, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, pirate software, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, ransomware, Richard Stallman, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

While Arbor was mulling more work for the government, Song quietly developed a new sniffer that captured deeper data. He planned to show it off for Microsoft executives at Window Snyder’s first BlueHat conference in 2004. Song went and talked about his improved sniffer, which analyzed instant-message contacts and documents and did full transcriptions of voice over IP calls, such as those on Skype. He produced a dossier on Microsoft employees as part of the demonstration. Then he decided the danger of such a surveillance tool outweighed the security benefit of catching insiders stealing data. He convinced the other Arbor executives to drop the contracting plans and bury his project. One of @stake’s young talents had worked out of the San Francisco office.


pages: 302 words: 84,881

The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy by Paolo Gerbaudo

Airbnb, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, gig economy, industrial robot, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, post-industrial society, precariat, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, software studies, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, WikiLeaks

While Pirate Parties, except for Sweden, Germany and few other countries, have remained a relatively fringe phenomenon, the spectacular growth of the Five Star Movement in Italy and Podemos in Spain has made their use of online decision-making platforms a topic of renewed interest. At its official launch in 2009, the Five Star Movement hosted a Skype discussion with Pirate Party activists to learn from their experience, and pledged to use digital democracy for its decisions. Other formations have soon followed the example. In Spain, Podemos recruited developers hailing from the 15-M protest movement to create its own participatory portal called Participa.


pages: 365 words: 88,125

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, borderless world, business logic, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, ending welfare as we know it, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rent control, Robert Solow, shareholder value, short selling, Skype, structural adjustment programs, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

The washing machine beats the internet Compared to the changes brought about by the washing machine (and company), the impact of the internet, which many think has totally changed the world, has not been as fundamental – at least so far. The internet has, of course, transformed the way people spend their out-of-work hours – surfing the net, chatting with friends on Facebook, talking to them on Skype, playing electronic games with someone who’s sitting 5,000 miles away, and what not. It has also vastly improved the efficiency with which we can find information about our insurance policies, holidays, restaurants, and increasingly even the price of broccoli and shampoo. However, when it comes to production processes, it is not clear whether the impacts have been so revolutionary.


pages: 297 words: 84,009

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Goals other than simple profit maximization often end up boosting both business profits and social benefits. For example, the people who work at SpaceX, the Elon Musk company that launches satellites using advanced and sometimes revolutionary rocket technology, often really do believe in the dream of colonizing other planets and the stars. The founders of Skype and the managers who work there seem to believe in the ideal of bringing friends, families, and business associates together. Many journalists and newspaper editors are at least trying to make the world a better place. Friedman failed to understand that the cultural, intellectual, ideological, and even emotional foundations of business go far beyond an attachment to profit.


pages: 449 words: 85,924

Lonely Planet Maldives (Travel Guide) by Planet, Lonely, Masters, Tom

British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, haute cuisine, income inequality, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, sustainable-tourism, trade route, women in the workforce

There are offices of both providers at the airport, so it's easy to pick up a local SIM on your way to your resort. All resorts have telephones, either in the rooms or available at reception. Charges vary from high to astronomical, starting around US$15 for three minutes; our advice is to avoid them and stick to Skype instead. The international country code for the Maldives is 960. All Maldives numbers have seven digits and there are no area codes. To make an international call, dial 00. Time The Maldives is five hours ahead of GMT, in the same time zone as Pakistan. When it’s noon in the Maldives, it’s 7am in London, 8am in Berlin and Rome, 12.30pm in India and Sri Lanka, 3pm in Singapore and 4pm in Tokyo.


pages: 270 words: 85,450

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande

Abraham Maslow, Atul Gawande, Checklist Manifesto, clean water, delayed gratification, different worldview, longitudinal study, off-the-grid, peak-end rule, Skype, stem cell, the long tail

She will discard the narcotics, arrange the death certificate, wash his body, arrange with the funeral home.” “Right now, we’re not thinking of death,” my mother said firmly. “Just paralysis.” “Okay,” the nurse said. She asked my father what his biggest concerns were. He said he wanted to stay strong while he could. He wanted to be able to type, because e-mail and Skype were how he connected with family and friends all over the world. He didn’t want pain. “I want to be happy,” he said. She stayed almost two hours. She examined him, inspected the house for hazards, sorted out where to place the bed, and figured out a schedule for the nurse and the home health aide to visit.


pages: 296 words: 86,610

The Bitcoin Guidebook: How to Obtain, Invest, and Spend the World's First Decentralized Cryptocurrency by Ian Demartino

3D printing, AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, buy low sell high, capital controls, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decentralized internet, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, forensic accounting, global village, GnuPG, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, initial coin offering, Jacob Appelbaum, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, litecoin, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Oculus Rift, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, printed gun, QR code, ransomware, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, Skype, smart contracts, Steven Levy, the medium is the message, underbanked, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

Another developer, Phil Vadala, who had been in charge of Coinstand, split off from both groups and allegedly stole a few Prime Controllers from Garza, though it is unclear how Garza claimed ownership of Prime Controllers supposedly sold to private investors. Coinstand was later revealed to have been funded by Garza, despite his initial claims that he had nothing to do with the site. This action led to Garza posting a Skype conversation with Vadala in which Garza claimed the Prime Controllers belonged to organized crime elements in Russia and a Middle Eastern investor who Garza said shouldn’t be crossed.15 It never seemed to cross Garza’s mind that admitting he had done deals with criminal organizations was a mistake.


pages: 317 words: 84,400

Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World by Christopher Steiner

23andMe, Ada Lovelace, airport security, Al Roth, algorithmic trading, Apollo 13, backtesting, Bear Stearns, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, delta neutral, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, dumpster diving, financial engineering, Flash crash, G4S, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, High speed trading, Howard Rheingold, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge economy, late fees, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, medical residency, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Sergey Aleynikov, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

Their story and their project remain almost unbelievable—and fun. I’m grateful that they, along with David’s father, Jim Barksdale, a technology legend by any measure, took the time to tell me how they dug their secret hole. Ben Novak has one of the most interesting stories in this book, and he took time from New Zealand to hop on a few Skype calls and tell me about it. Mike McCreary, whose technology made Novak’s music popular, was generous in providing the history of his company as well as his own history, which is dotted with inventive creations. David Cope, the creator of algorithms that can mimic the composition style of Bach, took hours to speak with me about his work.


The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison

Atul Gawande, crowdsourcing, gentrification, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, land reform, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, subprime mortgage crisis

—Salon Paperback / Ebook available A debut that uses nonliterary forms to delve into a mix of obsessions “[Monson’s] geek act has charm…. [He] revels in the way information flows through the world.” —The New York Times Book Review Paperback WWW.GRAYWOLFPRESS.ORG Many Graywolf authors are available to chat with your book club or classroom via phone and Skype. Email us at wolves@graywolfpress.org for further details. Visit graywolfpress.org to sign up for our monthly newsletter and to check out our many regularly updated features, including our On Craft series, Pub Talk series, Poem of the Week, author interviews, special sales, book giveaways, tour listings, catalogs, and much more.


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

According to a June 2013 report in the New York Times, the Prism program “grew out of the National Security Agency’s desire several years ago to begin addressing the agency’s need to keep up with the explosive growth of social media.”48 Prism showed the backdoor access to the data of their customers that Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple all gave—or were legally required to give, according to these companies—to the government. As the Internet historian John Naughton notes, Prism uncovered the “hidden wiring of our networked world”49 and revealed the fact “that Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are all integral components of the US cyber-surveillance system.”50 The Prism scandal reveals what the New York Times’ James Risen and Nick Wingfield call the “complex reality” of data mining as “an industry and a crucial intelligence tool” that “binds N.S.A and Silicon Valley leaders.”51 The Atlantic’s Michael Hirsh argues that “the government’s massive data collection and surveillance system was largely built not by professional spies or Washington bureaucrats but by Silicon Valley and private defense contractors.”52 As the New York Times’ Claire Cain Miller adds, some Internet companies, notably Twitter, “declined to make it easy for the government” to collect personal data.


pages: 281 words: 79,958

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives by Michael Specter

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 13, Asilomar, autism spectrum disorder, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, food miles, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, invention of gunpowder, John Elkington, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, placebo effect, precautionary principle, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Simon Singh, Skype, stem cell, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, twin studies, Upton Sinclair, X Prize

But we don’t have two cultures anymore, we have one. Students in many classrooms seek answers to the remaining intricacies contained within the human genome, and if they don’t understand their research they can always turn to the Internet to find an eager tutor from one of a dozen nations. In India and China, young engineers and biologists use Skype to conduct videoconferences with colleagues from Boston to Berlin. It costs nothing. Two generations ago, in the unlikely event that their grandparents had known how to write a letter, they would never have been able to afford postage stamps or find a place to mail it. Ultimately, dramatic achievements have always taken us past our fears and overcome denialism—because progress offers hope and for humans nothing beats hope.


pages: 294 words: 81,292

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat

AI winter, air gap, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Automated Insights, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, California energy crisis, cellular automata, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, don't be evil, drone strike, dual-use technology, Extropian, finite state, Flash crash, friendly AI, friendly fire, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, lone genius, machine translation, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, rolling blackouts, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart grid, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

When he set out on this career more than a decade ago, he was one of very few people who had made considering AI’s dangers his life’s work. And while he hasn’t taken actual vows, he forgoes activities that might take his eye off the ball. He doesn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs. He rarely socializes. He gave up reading for fun several years ago. He doesn’t like interviews, and prefers to do them on Skype with a thirty-minute time limit. He’s an atheist (the rule not the exception among AI experts) so he doesn’t squander hours at a temple or a church. He doesn’t have children, though he’s fond of them, and thinks people who haven’t signed their children up for cryonics are lousy parents. But here’s the paradox.


pages: 327 words: 84,627

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth by Jeremy Rifkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, book value, borderless world, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, decarbonisation, digital rights, do well by doing good, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, failed state, general purpose technology, ghettoisation, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, megacity, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, prudent man rule, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Citizens began to empathize with each other based on their nation-state identity. In the Second Industrial Revolution in the twentieth century, empathy extended to like-minded cosmopolitan and professional ties in an increasingly borderless world. In the emerging Third Industrial Revolution, a generation of digital natives Skyping in global classrooms, interacting on Facebook and Instagram, gaming in virtual worlds, and obsessively traveling the physical world are beginning to see themselves as a planetary cohort inhabiting a common biosphere. They are extending empathy in a more expansive way, coming to think of themselves as members of a threatened species and empathizing with their common plight on a destabilizing Earth.


pages: 269 words: 83,307

Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits by Kevin Roose

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Carl Icahn, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, East Village, eat what you kill, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, fixed income, forward guidance, glass ceiling, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, hedonic treadmill, information security, Jane Street, jitney, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Michael Milken, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, plutocrats, proprietary trading, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tail risk, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, two and twenty, urban planning, We are the 99%, work culture , young professional

They’d met the previous year, when Chelsea was a senior and Anton was a freshman. And even though the three-year age gap had seemed crazy at the outset, it worked. Anton was kind, thoughtful, and mature, and he didn’t seem to mind her long hours at the bank. He was still in school, so the actual contact he and Chelsea had was limited. They Skyped late at night, and every third or fourth weekend, she would board a Megabus for the four-hour trip to Washington, D.C. There, she would work remotely and, once in a while, pry herself away from her BlackBerry in order to spend time with him. As summer turned into fall, though, Chelsea became deeply lonely.


The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work by Vishen Lakhiani

Abraham Maslow, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, data science, deliberate practice, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, meta-analysis, microbiome, performance metric, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social bookmarking, social contagion, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, web application, white picket fence, work culture

For a ten-person team this can take five minutes per person, but it helps everyone connect deeply and get to know each other. The rule is that each person shares one thing that they are grateful for. It could be a cup of coffee their spouse made them that morning. Or the smile of a child waking them up with a hug. Or a work victory. For remote teams I’ve seen this done very effectively via Skype or even Slack, where everyone posts emoticon-filled messages. Weekly Rituals When my executive team meets every Wednesday, we open with Ezekiel, our CHRO, asking, “So what’s going on in everyone’s life and how are you all feeling today?” The rule is that we then share our week, but we’re not allowed to discuss work.


pages: 296 words: 83,254

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles, Mehmet Cansoy

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, carbon footprint, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, future of work, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, global supply chain, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, mass incarceration, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer rental, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Stewart Brand, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, wage slave, walking around money, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Uber/Lyft (Isak Ladegaard) We conducted seventeen semi-structured interviews of forty-five minutes to sixty minutes with each participant. Most interviewees were recruited through the ride-hail platforms—that is, during a ride—but we also contacted drivers on social media, ride-hailing-focused websites, and by snowballing. With the exception of one Skype interview, all interviews were conducted in person, with the majority conducted in public locations such as cafes and parks. We asked open-ended questions about their experiences, including how they got involved with ride-hailing, their best and worst rides, how they decided which rides to accept, how they manage their profiles and listings, and what kinds of experiences they have with rating customers and being rated by them.


Know Thyself by Stephen M Fleming

Abraham Wald, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, backpropagation, citation needed, computer vision, confounding variable, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, global pandemic, higher-order functions, index card, Jeff Bezos, l'esprit de l'escalier, Lao Tzu, lifelogging, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, patient HM, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, recommendation engine, replication crisis, self-driving car, side project, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury

It would therefore seem strange to tell myself that I’m wrong about what I want. Or would it? This was the question that I began to tackle with my friend and UCL colleague Benedetto De Martino in 2011, just after I moved to New York to start my postdoc. On trips back to London, and over multiple Skype calls, we debated and argued over whether it was even sensible for the brain to have metacognition about value-based choices. The key issue was the following: if people “knew” that they preferred the orange over the apple, surely they would have chosen it in the first place. There didn’t seem to be much room for metacognition to get into the game.


pages: 282 words: 85,658

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century by Jeff Lawson

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, create, read, update, delete, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DevOps, Elon Musk, financial independence, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microservices, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, software as a service, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, transfer pricing, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, Y Combinator

Ashton has a deeper understanding of how engineers work—and how to motivate them—than most venture capitalists (and definitely than most actors!). That’s part of why the venture fund he cofounded in 2010, A-Grade Investments, has grown from $30 million to $250 million (according to Forbes), earning Kutcher a reputation as a standout VC. His keen eye has led him to invest in success stories like Warby Parker, Spotify, Skype, and Airbnb. One of his best investments was $500,000 that he put into Uber in 2011. None of this is surprising when you learn that Kutcher once studied biochemical engineering at University of Iowa. “When I was in engineering school,” he told me, “one of my engineering professors used to say, ‘Scientists find problems, and engineers fix problems.’


pages: 306 words: 82,909

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back by Bruce Schneier

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Automated Insights, banking crisis, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Brian Krebs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computerized trading, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark pattern, deepfake, defense in depth, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake news, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, first-past-the-post, Flash crash, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, late capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, payday loans, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Skype, smart cities, SoftBank, supply chain finance, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, union organizing, web application, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, WikiLeaks, zero day

Depending on how good the hacker is at making the details plausible, how distracted and trusting the employee is, and how this all fits into whatever situation is actually going on, it can be a very successful fraud. Toyota lost $37 million to this scam in 2019, one of many victims, big and small. In 2015, Syrian agents posing as beautiful women on Skype were used to steal battle plans from gullible rebels, as well as the identities and personal details of senior leaders. Russian agents have used this same tactic to try to glean classified information from US service members. Technology is making this kind of chicanery easier. Criminals are now using deep-fake technology to commit social engineering attacks.


Germany by Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, computer age, credit crunch, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, haute couture, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, place-making, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Skype, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

Rates change daily and are published in the newspapers or online at www.billigertelefonieren.de (in German). Telephone call shops, which tend to cluster around train stations, may also offer competitive calling rates but often charge steep connection fees. Always make sure you understand the charges involved. With a high-speed internet connection, you can talk for free via Skype (www.skype.com), or use their SkypeOut service, which allows you to call landlines from your computer. Phonecards Most public pay phones only work with Deutsche Telekom (DT) phonecards, available in denominations of €5, €10 and €20 from DT stores, as well as post offices, newsagents and tourist offices.

Return to beginning of chapter Information Harz-Klinikum Wernigerode ( 610; Ilsenburger Strasse 15) Medical services. Police ( 6530; Nicolaiplatz 4) Post office (Burgstrasse 19) Tele.Internet Center Westerntor ( 625 046; Westernstrasse 36; per 15min €0.50; 10am-11pm Mon-Sat, 11am-11pm Sun) Internet access with Skype, telephones. Volksbank (Breite Strasse 4) Banking services and ATM. Wernigerode Tourismus ( 553 7835; www.wernigerode-tourismus.de, in German; Marktplatz 10; 8.30am-7pm Mon-Fri, 10am-4pm Sat, 10am-3pm Sun May-Oct, 8.30am-6pm Mon-Fri, 10am-4pm Sat, 10am-3pm Sun Nov-Apr) Tourist information, free map and room-booking service.

Group tickets for five are available, too. EMERGENCY Medical emergency service ( 314 044) Police ( 110; Raschplatz) Beneath the overpass on the north side of the Hauptbahnhof. INTERNET ACCESS Teleklick Hannover ( 763 5201; Kurt-Schumacher-Strasse 11; per hr €1.80; 9am-11pm) Comfortable place with Skype and telephones, plus muffins and coffee. LAUNDRY Wasch-Treff (cnr Friesenstrasse & Eichstrasse; per wash €3.50; 6am-11pm) Conveniently opposite this laundry is an organic bakery-cafe. MEDICAL SERVICES Hospital ( 304 31; Marienstrasse 37) MONEY Reisebank ( 322 704; Hauptbahnhof; 8am-10pm Mon-Sat, 9am-10pm Sun) ATMs plus currency exchange services, inside the station.


pages: 1,510 words: 218,417

Lonely Planet Norway (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Donna Wheeler

car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, energy security, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, low cost airline, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, North Sea oil, place-making, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban renewal

Usually costing Nkr100, they allow you to make over six hours' worth of calls using a scratch PIN number on the back and a local access number. The only drawback is that they, too, can be difficult to find – some kiosks sell them, but the easiest place to look is an 'ethnic' grocery store. For international calls, internet-connected calls (eg www.skype.com) are the way to go; unfortunately few internet cafes are Skype-enabled. You cannot make phone calls from municipal library computers. Time Note that when telling the time, Norwegians use 'half' as signifying half before rather than half past. Always double-check unless you want to be an hour late! Although the 24-hour clock is used in some official situations, you'll find people generally use the 12-hour clock in everyday conversation.


pages: 298 words: 89,287

Who Are We—And Should It Matter in the 21st Century? by Gary Younge

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, call centre, David Brooks, equal pay for equal work, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, feminist movement, financial independence, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, Steven Levy, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wolfgang Streeck, World Values Survey

But with the rise in neo-liberal globalization, such contradictions have become particularly acute. On the one hand, we all have more in common than we used to. We drink Coke, wear Nikes and eat at McDonald’s, and many of those who cannot, generally speaking, would like to. Thanks to Facebook, email and Skype, we have never communicated more with more people in more places. As consumers, we have never had more in common. In India, call-center workers learn to flatten their vowels, take Western names and learn the plotlines of American sitcoms to make customers in a continent they have never visited feel more at home.


pages: 363 words: 92,422

A Fine Mess by T. R. Reid

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, game design, Gini coefficient, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial robot, land value tax, loss aversion, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Tesla Model S, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

With an excellent higher education system, the nation also had a talent for high-tech advances. There wasn’t a word in the language for innovation, so the Estonians created one: innovatsiooni. They might not have had a word for it, but they knew how to do it. Estonia built up a mini Silicon Valley in the suburbs of Tallinn; among other successes, the Internet phone service called Skype is a product of Estonian innovatsiooni. The former dusty backwater is today a global leader in computerizing government functions. You can renew your driver’s license, cast a vote, close on a real estate transaction, borrow from the library, or renew a prescription from a computer screen at home. Of course, Estonia has an e-tax system for paperless filing of tax returns; the national tax office says the average time it takes to file a tax return is seven minutes.


pages: 407 words: 90,238

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Future Shock, Hacker News, high batting average, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, hype cycle, Hyperloop, impulse control, independent contractor, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, TED Talk, time dilation, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

The Bell Tolles for Thee In February 2009, Oprah Winfrey teamed up with2 Eckhart Tolle for Oprah and Eckhart: A New Earth, a ten-part online video series devoted to Tolle’s nontraditional ideas about spirituality. Eleven million people from 139 different countries tuned in to watch. Global brands—Chevy, Skype, and Post-it—sponsored the series. A New Earth attracted 10 million people3, or 800,000 more than turned up in New York City for the pope’s last visit and 9 million more than the largest haj (pilgrimage to Mecca) on record—making this webcast one of the ten largest spiritual “gatherings” in recorded history.


pages: 304 words: 93,494

Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton

4chan, Airbus A320, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, friendly fire, index card, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, messenger bag, PalmPilot, pets.com, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technology bubble, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks

“We’ve had a bit of a change of plan,” she said. “We’ve decided we want you on the show with Oprah tomorrow.” The butterfly wing had just turned into a hurricane. The producer explained that Ev would be interviewed by Oprah—in front of seven million viewers—and that Ashton Kutcher would be patched in via Skype videoconference from California. This would all follow Oprah sending her first tweet on live television. Ev hung up the phone, his face white. “Who was that?” Sara asked. “Holy shit, I’m going to be on Oprah tomorrow,” he said, petrified and excited. After e-mailing the team to tell them about the change of plan, he tweeted, “Tomorrow just became a very big day.


pages: 310 words: 91,151

Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children by John Wood

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, British Empire, call centre, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, fear of failure, glass ceiling, high net worth, income per capita, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Marc Andreessen, microcredit, Own Your Own Home, random walk, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Ballmer

Had we been 100 percent buttoned-up, the prospect of volunteering for Room to Read would have been inherently less interesting as it would not have made a demand on people’s creativity. IN APRIL, ERIN LEFT FOR HER INITIAL TRIP TO SRI LANKA. SHE WAS EXCITED to meet Suba, with whom she had only spoken via Skype and e-mail. Suba and the team had already adopted over a dozen projects, and Erin was anxious to visit them and to see the progress and the barriers. She braved the long set of flights: from San Francisco to Seoul, then on to Delhi, then to Sri Lanka’s capital city of Colombo. Meanwhile, I flew east to attend the Skoll Foundation conference on social entrepreneurship at Oxford University.


pages: 345 words: 92,849

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins, Yaron Brook

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, profit motive, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Uber for X, urban renewal, War on Poverty, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

And even products that don’t last as long as their predecessors more than make up for their shorter lifespan with markedly lower prices.50 It’s also important to keep in mind that many of the advances we’ve enjoyed over the past forty years do not even show up in economic statistics. Statistics do not capture the value of products, only their price. But how would you quantify the value of being able to sing your daughter to sleep while you’re away from home using a free video conferencing technology like Skype or FaceTime? Or of never having to worry about getting lost, thanks to GPS devices like Google Maps? Or of being able to find the answer to almost any question at the touch of a button, thanks to sites like Wikipedia? Or of being able to gain instant access to any book, song, or movie? These and countless other advances matter, and the fact that economists can’t quantify them doesn’t mean that we can ignore them when making pronouncements about our standard of living.


pages: 327 words: 88,121

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community by Marc J. Dunkelman

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, Broken windows theory, business cycle, call centre, clean water, company town, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Brooks, delayed gratification, different worldview, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, helicopter parent, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, invention of movable type, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Richard Florida, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban decay, urban planning, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

That points to a different aspect of mobility: our capacity today to move from place to place. We’ve already established that digitization has, as Thomas Friedman argued, “flattened” the globe. Today, I can read about what’s happening locally in Cincinnati or Buffalo by clicking on a few Web sites; my wife can Skype regularly with her high-school friend in Malaysia. We needn’t wait for newspapers to be heaved onto our front porches or for letters to be delivered by the Postal Service. But even beyond the virtual world, new technology and infrastructure makes us more physically mobile. Consider the evolution of the airline industry.


pages: 263 words: 89,368

925 Ideas to Help You Save Money, Get Out of Debt and Retire a Millionaire So You Can Leave Your Mark on the World by Devin D. Thorpe

asset allocation, buy and hold, call centre, diversification, estate planning, fixed income, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, junk bonds, knowledge economy, low interest rates, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, payday loans, random walk, risk tolerance, Skype, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Buying in bulk not only tends to cut the cost per unit down, but often results in less packaging per unit, reducing the landfill pressure. A big jar of peanut butter, for instance, may cost half as much per ounce as the small jar. In the landfill or in the recycling process, the one big jar will end up doing less damage than the set of smaller jars required for an equivalent amount of peanut butter. Use Skype (bit.ly/M3QgK) or a Hangout on Google+ (bit.ly/NSNFGC) to see far away friends and family instead of going to see them. (You can do this for business, too.) The energy saved by avoiding travel can be huge! Take a train instead of a plane. Be careful, it isn’t always cheaper, and in the U.S. it is rarely faster, but a train ride could be a real adventure and is much greener than air travel.


pages: 295 words: 89,430

Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends by Martin Lindstrom

autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, big-box store, correlation does not imply causation, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Richard Florida, rolodex, self-driving car, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, too big to fail, urban sprawl

In the past few years, beds have literally expanded, as the result of teenaged boys and girls using them as command posts. Sure, some kids still use desks when doing their homework, but for most teenagers and even college students, the bed is where they read, study, doze, slump, text, post, FaceTime, Skype, listen to music and watch videos, usually simultaneously. As a result, the concept of light has also changed. All around the world, when we wake up, the first thing most of us reach for is our phone, which has become as much a transitional object as the blankets we carried around with us when we were young.


pages: 336 words: 88,320

Being Geek: The Software Developer's Career Handbook by Michael Lopp

do what you love, finite state, game design, job satisfaction, John Gruber, knowledge worker, reality distortion field, remote working, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sorting algorithm, systems thinking, web application

These micro-disturbances of the Force are a constant reminder that Anne's not there. She's being projected on the conference room wall like a well-intentioned screensaver. This isn't just hurting the tempo of the meeting, it's eroding her credibility. In this case, surprisingly, less technology, rather than more, is better. Skype's proximity to my computer and the usual lack of lag is far superior to videoconferencing for 1:1s, and spending a little money on a quality Polycom is a fine solution for the staff meeting, but technology is a tool and never the answer. Friction detection is paying attention to all the ways a remote employee interacts with the group and constantly asking, "Is this working?"


pages: 713 words: 93,944

Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement by Eric Redmond, Jim Wilson, Jim R. Wilson

AGPL, Amazon Web Services, business logic, create, read, update, delete, data is the new oil, database schema, Debian, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, full text search, general-purpose programming language, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, linked data, MVC pattern, natural language processing, node package manager, random walk, recommendation engine, Ruby on Rails, seminal paper, Skype, social graph, sparse data, web application

It has sophisticated transaction handling, has built-in stored procedures for a dozen languages, and runs on a variety of platforms. PostgreSQL has built-in Unicode support, sequences, table inheritance, and subselects, and it is one of the most ANSI SQL--compliant relational databases on the market. It’s fast and reliable, can handle terabytes of data, and has been proven to run in high-profile production projects such as Skype, France’s Caisse Nationale d’Allocations Familiales (CNAF), and the United States’ Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). You can install PostgreSQL in many ways, depending on your operating system.[3] Beyond the basic install, we’ll need to extend Postgres with the following contributed packages: tablefunc, dict_xsyn, fuzzystrmatch, pg_trgm, and cube.


pages: 357 words: 88,412

Hijacking the Runway: How Celebrities Are Stealing the Spotlight From Fashion Designers by Teri Agins

Donald Trump, East Village, haute couture, new economy, planned obsolescence, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, women in the workforce

Coming from the celebrity who had great taste and fashion instincts, who wasn’t a trained designer, her honest revelations came across as charming. Despite such admissions, all her people took pains to explain how much in control she was, working every day, running her fashion house. Every story about her talked about how she was a control freak, a workaholic perfectionist who set her alarm to be up at three A.M. so she could be on Skype to meet with her London office and steer the ship. “She’s incredibly involved in pricing, wanting to know where we’re at in terms of turnover and how costs are being managed,” Zach Duane, the company’s senior vice president for business development, told The New York Times in 2010—the second consecutive year that the brand generated sales “in excess of $7 million.”


pages: 291 words: 88,879

Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone by Eric Klinenberg

big-box store, carbon footprint, classic study, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, employer provided health coverage, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, fear of failure, financial independence, fixed income, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, young professional

Although the machine is still a work in progress, its 2010 incarnation featured a short, sleek human form with a head, a cartoon face, and a video camera on top; a box with two large wheels at its base; and a large touch-screen monitor at its midsection, which its human companions could use for a wide range of Internet-mediated communications. The designers of Kompaï envision the family, friends, and health providers of the machine’s user contacting them through an Internet-based program such as Skype or Facebook or an instant messaging service. When completed, Kompaï will be able to locate and move to its owner, and its speech recognition software will allow physically impaired people to communicate by voice.8 Machines like Kompaï may appeal to homebound and elderly singletons because they provide greater access to a kind of communication that people who live alone are already enjoying.


pages: 294 words: 96,661

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

You know all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he’s sure he can control the demon, [but] it doesn’t work out.” Bill Gates threw his hat in the ring on the side of the concerned: “I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned.” Jaan Tallinn, one of the cofounders of Skype, refers to AI as “one of the many potential existential risks.” He goes on to add, optimistically, that “if we get the AI right, then basically we’ll be able to address all the other existential risks.” Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple, looks at it this way: “If a computer is a hundred times better than our brain, will it make the world perfect?


pages: 372 words: 92,477

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game

And they collaborate on even core functions like innovation: Procter & Gamble, once as self-contained as GM, now gets more than half of its ideas from outsiders. But above all companies are constantly on the move—rethinking what they do and then rethinking the rethinking. It is not so long since Nokia and AOL were the companies of the future and people talked about taking pictures with a Kodak. Ten years ago Facebook did not exist and Skype was an Estonian start-up. In Sloan’s day, jobs were for life and age brought seniority. He ran GM for two decades. The tenure of the average American CEO has halved over the past two decades to around five years. Lower down the chain, people move on even more quickly: The average length of job tenure in the American retail sector, which now employs far more people than manufacturing, is closer to three years.1 The new high-tech firms usually employ a slither of their industrial predecessors.


pages: 299 words: 88,375

Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy by Eric O'Neill

active measures, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, computer age, cryptocurrency, deep learning, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, fear of failure, full text search, index card, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, PalmPilot, ransomware, rent control, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Skype, thinkpad, Timothy McVeigh, web application, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, young professional

In one of the largest document leaks in the CIA’s history, WikiLeaks released thousands of pages outlining sophisticated tools and techniques the agency allegedly used to break into mobile phones, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and computers. The leaks are a catalog of offensive hacking tools that include instructions for compromising a wide range of common devices and computer programs, including Skype, Wi-Fi networks, PDFs, and even virus scanners. If you believe WikiLeaks, the entire archive of stolen CIA material consists of several hundred million lines of computer code. It was like putting a virtual gun in the hand of every angry hacker on the planet. One software vulnerability lost in the NSA hack was named EternalBlue.


pages: 340 words: 91,745

Duped: Double Lives, False Identities, and the Con Man I Almost Married by Abby Ellin

Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Burning Man, business intelligence, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, content marketing, dark triade / dark tetrad, Donald Trump, double helix, dumpster diving, East Village, fake news, feminist movement, forensic accounting, fudge factor, hiring and firing, Internet Archive, John Darwin disappearance case, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, meta-analysis, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, TED Talk, telemarketer, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Benedict Carey, “The Secret Lives of Just About Everybody,” New York Times, January 11, 2005, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/11/health/psychology/the-secret-lives-of-just-about-everybody.html. 43. Ibid. 44. Tim Weiner, “Why I Spied: Aldrich Ames,” New York Times Magazine, July 31, 1994, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/31/magazine/why-i-spied-aldrich-ames.html. 45. Skype interview with author. Six: Post-Deception Stress Disorder 1. Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), quoted Maria Popova, “Adrienne Rich on Lying, What ‘Truth’ Really Means, and the Alchemy of Human Possibility,” Brain Pickings, n.d., https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/11/13/adrienne-rich-women-honor-lying. 2.


Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life by David Allen

Abraham Maslow, cognitive dissonance, index card, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, shareholder value, Skype, telemarketer

I do a reasonably good job of creating some systems in the shed that make it easier for me to keep things replaced properly while I’m focused on a project in the garden, but it’s almost never totally pristine. The same is true of one of my desk drawers that has become the repository for various small electronic and digital accessories—earphones for Skype calls, adapters, power cords, and so on. I’ve learned to use plastic bags and my labeler to corral these runaway parts, but it’s hardly ever completely current. My objective here is not to judge the failure to capture things that have part of our psyche as either right or wrong—it’s simply to point out that those distractions do affect our energy.


pages: 307 words: 88,180

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

With the rise of O2O, WeChat had grown into the title bestowed on it by Connie Chan of leading VC fund Andreesen Horowitz: a remote control for our lives. It had become a super-app, a hub for diverse functions that are spread across dozens of different apps in other ecosystems. In effect, WeChat has taken on the functionality of Facebook, iMessage, Uber, Expedia, eVite, Instagram, Skype, PayPal, Grubhub, Amazon, LimeBike, WebMD, and many more. It isn’t a perfect substitute for any one of those apps, but it can perform most of the core functions of each, with frictionless mobile payments already built in. This all marks a stark contrast to the “app constellation” model in Silicon Valley in which each app sticks to a strictly prescribed set of functions.


pages: 310 words: 88,827

The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell

invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Skype, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

I told him that, yes, we have several copies in the Scottish room. Without even bothering to reply, let alone check, he left the shop. I made a wooden shield mount from an old tray, mounted the shot Kindle and hung it in the shop. There has been no sign of Captain, the shop’s cat, since Sunday. When I spoke to Anna on Skype and mentioned it, she seemed very worried and depressed about it, imagining all sorts of unlikely fates that may have befallen the unfortunate creature. Till total £235.47 27 customers WEDNESDAY, 10 SEPTEMBER Online orders: 3 Books found: 3 Nicky came in to work today. She managed to find the two books that I couldn’t find yesterday.


pages: 307 words: 88,745

War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Etonian, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, school choice, side project, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

You do not want me reduced to poverty and testifying under oath there. You and [ ] need to figure out how I am going to be honorably extricated from this miserable situation . . . Michael Bagley responded in a brief message just a few days later, on September 29, 2017. Jason . . . I am just receiving your Skype message. I’m sorry for the developments on your side, but my group was never able to get our project off the ground. To this day, we never received any funding. It seemed quite likely that Bagley and the Londoner had not taken Jason as seriously as he had taken them. And Jason seemed to have suffered from naiveté.


pages: 312 words: 92,131

Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning by Tom Vanderbilt

AlphaGo, crowdsourcing, DeepMind, deliberate practice, Downton Abbey, Dunning–Kruger effect, fake it until you make it, functional fixedness, future of work, G4S, global supply chain, IKEA effect, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, performance metric, personalized medicine, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, Steve Jobs, zero-sum game

Bolstered by new understanding of the methods for effective learning, programs like Duolingo, meanwhile, promise to compress a semester’s worth of language classes into thirty-four hours of online instruction. In chess, players’ chess ratings as a whole have been rising because they can learn from (and play) better opponents, human or otherwise, on online platforms or take Skype lessons from international masters. YouTube contains a vast constellation of instructional videos—more than 135 million, last time someone checked—everything from how to make your own knife to how to cook seal meat. You can learn how to do a backflip or fly a 747. You can learn how to boil water or change toilet paper rolls (those are the cheeky ones).


pages: 350 words: 90,898

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload by Cal Newport

Cal Newport, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collaborative editing, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, fault tolerance, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Garrett Hardin, hive mind, Inbox Zero, interchangeable parts, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Nash equilibrium, passive income, Paul Graham, place-making, pneumatic tube, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, work culture , Y Combinator

One ten-minute gathering can eliminate dozens of ambiguous messages that would otherwise generate frequent interruptions throughout the day. Of course, many modern knowledge work organizations include remote employees, making it impossible for everyone working with a given task board to show up in person for these review meetings. The standard solution is to use conferencing software such as Skype, Zoom, or FaceTime (if the groups are small). The key is real-time interaction. Task Board Practice #4: Use Card Conversations to Replace Hive Mind Chatter One of the more powerful features of digital board systems is the discussion function built into each virtual card. In Trello and Flow, for example, in addition to attaching files and information to cards, you’ll find tools for message board–style conversation stored directly on each card.


pages: 340 words: 91,416

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder

Adam Curtis, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, double helix, game design, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, random walk, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Skype, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, TED Talk, the scientific method

And when you look for someone to speak up on sexism and harassment in science, Astrokatie’s there for you too: she uses her Twitter reach to call attention to the underrepresentation of minorities and women in science, something that many scientists prefer to forget. Here’s a modern scientist, I think, and send her a message. Behind Katie’s public persona is a professional astrophysicist and postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia. When we speak on Skype, Katie wears a jacket with the NASA logo, and nothing has ever looked cooler than that. I ask about her research area, and she sums it up with: “I have worked on a lot of things that dark matter probably isn’t.” “What makes a model attractive?” I ask. “For the stuff that I do, what makes a model interesting is does it have consequences that we can find,” Katie says.


pages: 297 words: 88,890

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, big-box store, Cal Newport, call centre, cognitive load, collective bargaining, COVID-19, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minecraft, move fast and break things, precariat, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, school choice, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vanguard fund, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

But the same dire prediction holds true for large swaths of Gen X and boomers, and will only get worse for Gen Z. The overarching clarity offered by this pandemic is that it’s not any single generation that’s broken, or fucked, or failed. It’s the system itself. Introduction “I THINK YOU’RE DEALING WITH SOME BURNOUT,” MY editor at BuzzFeed very kindly suggested over Skype. “You could use a few days off.” It was November 2018, and frankly, I was insulted by the idea. “I’m not burnt out,” I replied. “I’m just trying to figure out what I want to write about next.” For as long as I could remember, I’d been working pretty much nonstop: first as a grad student, then as a professor, now as a journalist.


pages: 319 words: 89,192

Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies by Barry Meier

Airbnb, business intelligence, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, global pandemic, Global Witness, index card, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Londongrad, medical malpractice, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, WikiLeaks

Simpson opted for another tactic and arranged for the Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones magazine, David Corn, to interview Christopher Steele. Simpson hadn’t invited Corn to the meetings at the Tabard but now he had him come to the offices of Fusion GPS to review Steele’s memos and interview the ex-MI6 agent over Skype. Bruce Ohr, the Justice Department official, wrote in a memo that Simpson told him he viewed Corn’s interview as a “Hail Mary pass” to generate publicity for the dossier. Corn still couldn’t identify Steele by name in his article. But it was agreed that he could treat whatever Steele told him as “background,” meaning he could attribute his comments to an unnamed “former Western intelligence officer” or a “former spy.”


The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy by Matthew Hindman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, bounce rate, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, fault tolerance, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the telescope, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, lake wobegon effect, large denomination, longitudinal study, loose coupling, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, New Economic Geography, New Journalism, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pepsi Challenge, performance metric, power law, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Robert Metcalfe, search costs, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, sparse data, speech recognition, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, Thomas Malthus, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

See, for example, O’Reilly, 2005; Wu, 2011. 5. The major exception, the Chinese site Weibo, illustrates the same logic: the fact that social networks in China and the United States barely overlap has allowed 194 • Notes to Chapter 2 a different firm to seize this niche in China. Other internet services, from instant messaging to Skype, show the same pattern. 6. E.g. Pariser, 2011, p. 41. 7. Hundt, 1996. 8. See, for example, Briscoe, Odlyzko, and Tilly, 2006. 9. Cialdini and Goldstein, 2004; Asch, 1955. 10. Kirkpatrick, 2011, p. 101. 11. Ksiazek, Peer, and Lessard, 2014. 12. Sonderman, 2012. 13. Toth, 2014. 14. Sonderman, 2011. 15.


Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior

4chan, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Chelsea Manning, Columbine, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Golden arches theory, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, plutocrats, public intellectual, QAnon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, unpaid internship, white flight, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

I realized I could not afford to enter the job market. To apply for jobs, I would have to pay thousands of dollars to attend the academic conferences in expensive cities where job interviews are held. There was no rationale for universities to do this—interviews could have been done through phone or Skype—but it was their way of culling the herd. My husband and I had no money to spare, and I felt like incurring debt was an irresponsible move for a mother of two in a bad economy. I also resented these prohibitive entry costs in a field that was supposed to be based on merit. When I asked my professors what to do, they said most students borrowed money from their parents at this point.


Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen by Dan Heath

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, food desert, high-speed rail, Housing First, illegal immigration, Internet of things, mandatory minimum, millennium bug, move fast and break things, Nick Bostrom, payday loans, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, self-driving car, Skype, Snapchat, subscription business, systems thinking, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

Within a year, they had distributed more than 1,000 Daddy Dolls to military kids. They later expanded the concept beyond military fathers to include military mothers, departed loved ones, and more. They’re now called Hug-a-Hero Dolls. Their dolls are on some deployment checklists—the list of things soldiers need to address before they depart, ranging from setting up a Skype account to writing a will. Liz Byrne, the wife of an Air Force lieutenant colonel, bought Hug-a-Hero Dolls for her daughters. “As adults, we handle things a little bit better,” she said. “You go through the stages: The first couple days he’s gone, you’re just crying, you don’t want to do anything.


pages: 277 words: 89,004

We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy by Caseen Gaines

Albert Einstein, index card, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Skype

Without jumping through too many hoops, I got a hold of Zemeckis’s assistant, who promptly scheduled a half-hour interview for us, with only one request: “We respectfully ask that you contain the time to the thirty minutes which we have allotted.” No big deal, I thought, until a week later when it was six minutes before our scheduled interview and the software I use to record Skype calls on my computer stopped working. It was 12:24 P.M. Pacific Standard Time. I was based on the East Coast, but had grown accustomed to working my day around what I reductively referred to as “Los Angeles Time.” Each second became more and more important. There was no way I was going to call Bob Z late.


pages: 263 words: 89,341

Drama Queen: One Autistic Woman and a Life of Unhelpful Labels by Sara Gibbs

Airbnb, Asperger Syndrome, coronavirus, fake it until you make it, gentrification, Helicobacter pylori, neurotypical, one-state solution, payday loans, Skype, tech billionaire

I started to dissociate. I had no idea who I was any more without this relationship defining me. Sven, feeling responsible for me, took me to his house and put me on suicide watch. I must say it was incredibly healing playing the role of the unstable ex-girlfriend tucked up in his bed while he went into another room to Skype his actual girlfriend. Sven graduated that summer and moved back to Denmark and I spiralled out of all control. I manufactured a reconnection with an old classmate from school, one of those ‘left before he could figure out I was bad currency’ exchange students I had loosely stayed in touch with who just happened to be Danish.


pages: 301 words: 90,239

Pivot: A Story of Dropping the Ball, Picking It Up Again, and Turning Things Around. by Laura Lexx

carbon footprint, credit crunch, lock screen, Skype

Her voice sounded drier and less strong than she was trying for, and she cleared her throat to get it back to normal. Something about the liveliness of Leon made her feel a bit paler: a bit more like a cartoon old woman with adult sons who discussed what they would do if she ever had a fall. ‘He didn’t tell you? They had a Skype or a Zoom or whatnot. Some sort of excruciating-sounding quiz.’ The wind left Leon’s sails. ‘No, no he didn’t. It’s not a problem or anything’ – even Jackie wasn’t convinced by her tone – ‘Michelle is part of your dad’s life now so of course you boys should meet her.’ The kettle finally mercifully boiled but the sound vanishing just left a far more oppressive silence.


pages: 308 words: 94,447

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert

Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, double helix, Easter island, Honoré de Balzac, index card, Jacob Silverman, Maui Hawaii, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, out of africa, seminal paper, Skype, Steven Pinker, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Yogi Berra

A paper published in Nature by the former head of the One Tree Island Research Station, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, predicted that if current trends continue, then by around 2050 visitors to the Great Barrier Reef will arrive to find “rapidly eroding rubble banks.” * * * I CAME to One Tree more or less by accident. My original plan had been to stay on Heron Island, where there’s a much larger research station and also a ritzy resort. On Heron, I was going to watch the annual coral spawning and observe what had been described to me in various Skype conversations as a seminal experiment on ocean acidification. Researchers from the University of Queensland were building an elaborate Plexiglas mesocosm that was going to allow them to manipulate CO2 levels on a patch of reef, even as it allowed the various creatures that depend on the reef to swim in and out.


Israel & the Palestinian Territories Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, flag carrier, G4S, game design, gentrification, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, information security, Khartoum Gordon, Louis Pasteur, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Ascent Institute of SafedKABBALAH ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %077-360 1101; www.ascentofsafed.com; 2 Ha’Ari St; hclasses Sun-Thu) Offers Jews interested in ‘spiritual discovery’ drop-in classes on the Torah and Jewish mysticism. Run by members of the Chabad Hasidic movement. Staff have a variety of opinions on whether Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902–94), aka the Lubavitcher Rebbe, is in fact the Messiah. For 200NIS a rabbi will sit with you for an hour (also possible via phone and Skype) to find your 'personal Torah code', based on your birth date, which Ascent promises will 'reveal matters connected to your personality and purpose in life' and give you 'tools for success and fruition'. A scam? You decide. TTours While it’s easy to float around Tsfat on your own little trip, it’s a town where stories and secrets run deep.

Now most young locals choose to pursue university studies in either Israel or Germany. 1Sights Shouting HillHISTORIC SITE Druze families separated by the conflict between Israel and Syria long used megaphones to communicate with relatives and friends assembled on opposite sides of a UN-controlled ravine on the eastern outskirts of town. In recent years Skype and cellphones have pretty much replaced this ritual, which featured prominently in the award-winning 2004 film The Syrian Bride. 4Sleeping Narjis HotelHOTEL (Malon Butik Narkis; %04-698 2961; www.narjishotel.com; Rte 98, Majdal Shams; d 450-650NIS; aW) This stylish, locally owned hotel has 21 huge, romantic rooms with modern decor, Jacuzzi, balcony and fridge.


pages: 825 words: 228,141

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom by Tony Robbins

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Dean Kamen, declining real wages, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index fund, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Lao Tzu, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, optical character recognition, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, telerobotics, The 4% rule, The future is already here, the rule of 72, thinkpad, tontine, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, World Values Survey, X Prize, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

These young boys and girls had heard about JT’s loss and wanted to reach out across the globe to share a message of healing. These orphans had all survived one of the worst tragedies in history. In 1994, mass genocide in Rwanda led to the death of as many as 1 million Tutsis, who were killed by their Hutu neighbors in roughly 100 days. During a Skype call, one of the girls, Chantal, told JT how sorry she was for the loss of his brother. But she wanted him to know that no one can take away joy and happiness from your life, only you; the shooter does not have that power. She then went on to share her own story of how she was only eight years old when she had been forced to witness the horrendous sight of her parents being hacked to death by men with machetes.

Her example of service to others touched JT deeply, and he became obsessed with the idea of giving. He decided that helping to create a better future for this extraordinary girl was his mission. He began to work day and night to raise money to put her through college. Within several months, this 13-year-old boy was able to Skype back and announce that he had raised $2,100—enough money to send Chantal to college for a year! She was incredibly touched. But like many young people, especially in the third world, university was simply not a practical option for her, especially as she had already started her own small business as a shopkeeper.


pages: 360 words: 100,991

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence by Richard Yonck

3D printing, AI winter, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, backpropagation, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, ghettoisation, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of writing, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Skype, social intelligence, SoftBank, software as a service, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing test, twin studies, Two Sigma, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Review, working-age population, zero day

Adding emotional awareness to these devices and thereby conveying instant information about a lover’s feelings could actually facilitate better connections between partners who have to be apart for extended periods due to circumstances such as a new job or military deployment. Similarly, telepresence will be enhanced by adding a channel for emotional communication. This feature may not appear first for sexual purposes but will almost certainly be quickly appropriated. Already lovers and strangers use phones, Skype, and Facetime for verbal and visual sex play. Adding transmitted feelings in real time will only enhance the experience. Of course, this may not be to everyone’s liking, in which case the emotional channel could be disabled. The methods and mechanisms of such transmission will no doubt evolve over time, from simple projected emoticons early on to literally experiencing a lover’s feelings through a shared-brain interface a few decades in the future.


pages: 382 words: 100,127

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, central bank independence, centre right, coherent worldview, corporate governance, credit crunch, Crossrail, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, market friction, mass immigration, meritocracy, mittelstand, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, obamacare, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Skype, Sloane Ranger, stem cell, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

Despite recent increases in geographical mobility, about 60 per cent of British people still live within 20 miles of where they lived when they were fourteen.5 Of course, few of us belong completely to either group—we all have a mix of achieved and ascribed identities—and there is a large minority of Inbetweeners. Even the most cosmopolitan and mobile members of the Anywhere group retain some connection with their roots and even the most small town Somewhere might go on holiday abroad with EasyJet or talk on Skype to a relative in Australia. Moreover, a large section of Britain’s traditional elite remains very rooted in south east England and London, in a few old public schools and universities. Indeed they are more southern-based than in the past as the dominant families of the great northern and midland towns have gravitated south.


pages: 327 words: 102,322

Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, diversified portfolio, indoor plumbing, Iridium satellite, Jeff Hawkins, junk bonds, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, PalmPilot, patent troll, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the new new thing

Carriers typically charged $10 to $20 per month for SMS plans in developed markets. BBM and its rivals, by contrast, did not require a separate monthly fee, so customers could send hundreds, even thousands, of messages per month at no cost provided they stayed within the limits of their data plans. The popularity of these and other messaging platforms such as Skype skyrocketed. In 2011, users sent 4.4 billion of these so-called over-the-top messages per day, just over a quarter the number of SMS texts sent. It was just a matter of time before instant messaging surpassed SMS text volumes. Carriers were just starting to grasp the emerging challenge: their profitable SMS revenues would gradually erode as customers turned to BBM and its peers.


pages: 317 words: 100,414

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock, Dan Gardner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Swan, butterfly effect, buy and hold, cloud computing, cognitive load, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, desegregation, drone strike, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, forward guidance, Freestyle chess, fundamental attribution error, germ theory of disease, hindsight bias, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index fund, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, operational security, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, tail risk, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

In year 1 (2011–12), before a single superforecaster had been tagged and classified, we randomly assigned several hundred forecasters to work alone and several hundred others to work together in teams. The team forecasters wouldn’t meet face-to-face, of course, but we created online forums for discussion and team members could communicate by e-mail, Skype, or however else they wanted. They would still be scored as individuals, but individual scores would be pooled to create a team score. Forecasters would see how both they and their team were doing. Beyond that, forecasters could organize however they wished. The goal was accuracy. How they achieved it was up to them.


pages: 326 words: 103,170

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo

air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Firefox, Google Chrome, growth hacking, Herman Kahn, income inequality, information security, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, Laura Poitras, machine translation, market bubble, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, Paul Graham, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social web, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Vernor Vinge, zero day

Connected forces can move like a capricious monster, smashing businesses or national economies or ecosystems with little warning and merciless efficiency. Connected terrorists have cost trillions to fight; linked-up businesses have demolished trillions of dollars of profits from old sources with their cold, clicking efficiency. Skype didn’t steal hundreds of billions of dollars of long-distance telephone fees, for instance. It made them disappear. Amazon, in the space of a few years, crippled physical retail empires built at the cost of trillions of dollars. The world we’re entering into now is one of constant, sensor-filled data streams.


pages: 296 words: 98,018

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

Ursula talked of the depression that gripped her, her father’s Parkinson’s, and her mother’s dementia. Leibrock’s job brought her into contact with a section of America that the Valley mostly ignored. Interview by interview, Leibrock was cultivating a sense of this other country. One day she was interviewing via Skype a woman named Heather Jacobs about her life and finances. The conversation began awkwardly, because Jacobs had misunderstood what was on offer. Her husband had told her that Even provided free credit, which it didn’t. When Leibrock asked about Jacobs’s work, she knew to choose her words carefully: “Tell me about your—you’re being paid for something.


pages: 332 words: 100,601

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations by Nandan Nilekani

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, call centre, carbon credits, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, digital rights, driverless car, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, fail fast, financial exclusion, gamification, Google Hangouts, illegal immigration, informal economy, information security, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, law of one price, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, more computing power than Apollo, Negawatt, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, price mechanism, price stability, rent-seeking, RFID, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software is eating the world, source of truth, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

If you can buy fruits and vegetables over the internet, why can’t a farmer order fertilizers and seeds online, and have them delivered to his door? Why can’t a poor family order cooking fuel using a smartphone? Why can’t crop insurance funds be automatically transferred to a farmer’s bank account as soon as a drought is declared? You can now take personalized courses on a variety of subjects through Skype, and students across India now have access to classes from some of the world’s best universities through online platforms like Coursera, Udacity and edX. Is it possible to achieve the same outcome for every student in every government school in India? You can now find a doctor through your smartphone thanks to businesses such as Practo, which allow users to rate medical practitioners based on their quality of service.


pages: 343 words: 101,563

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Ethics at the End of the World The twin towns of San Ignacio and Santa Elena, Belize, are fifty miles from the coast and 250 feet above sea level, but the alarmist climatologist Guy McPherson did not move there—to a farm in the jungle that surrounds the towns—in fear of water. Other things will get him first, he says; he’s given up hope of surviving climate change, and believes the rest of us should, too. Humans will be extinct within ten years, he tells me by Skype; when I ask his partner, Pauline, if she feels the same way, she laughs. “I’d say ten months.” This was two years ago. McPherson began his career as a conservation biologist at the University of Arizona, where, he mentions several times, he was tenured at twenty-nine; and where, he also says several times, he was surveilled by what he calls the “Deep State” beginning in 1996; and also where, in 2009, he was forced out of his department by a new chair.


Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life by Alan B. Krueger

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, bank run, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, butterfly effect, buy and hold, congestion pricing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, gig economy, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral hazard, Multics, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, power law, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, random walk, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776). 25. Grateful Dead, “Playing in the Band,” Ace, Warner Bros., 1972. 26. Frank Sinatra, Sinatra at the Sands, Reprise Records, 1966. 27. Author’s calculations using data from Billboard Top 100 Songs. 28. Skype interview with Dan Wilson on Jun. 29, 2018. 29. Gary Trust, “Happy Birthday, Billboard Charts! On July 27, 1940, the First Song Sales Chart Debuted,” Billboard, Jul. 27, 2017. 30. Robert Daniels, “The Hip Hop Economy Goes Free Trade,” Fortune, Apr. 25, 2012. 31. Jacob Slichter, So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star: How I Machine-Gunned a Roomful of Record Executives and Other True Tales from a Drummer’s Life (New York: Broadway Books, 2004). 32.


pages: 404 words: 95,163

Amazon: How the World’s Most Relentless Retailer Will Continue to Revolutionize Commerce by Natalie Berg, Miya Knights

3D printing, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, asset light, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business intelligence, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, computer vision, connected car, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, driverless car, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), Elon Musk, fulfillment center, gig economy, independent contractor, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kiva Systems, market fragmentation, new economy, Ocado, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QR code, race to the bottom, random stow, recommendation engine, remote working, Salesforce, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, underbanked, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, white picket fence, work culture

Softbank’s Pepper robot has been deployed in multiple customer-facing situations, including taking Pizza Hut orders in Asia, and electronics retailer MediaMarktSaturn has deployed a robot called Paul to greet and guide customers. The German retailer is also among those around the world testing autonomous robotic delivery vehicles developed by Starship, a start-up owned by Skype founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis. Even so, robots won’t be replacing humans altogether anytime soon. From self-checkout to no checkout So, we come to Amazon Go, which first opened its doors in Seattle in 2018. The computer vision-equipped, AI-powered store uses Amazon’s patented ‘Just Walk Out’ technology to enable customers to literally walk out with their goods without having to go through any checkout process at all.


pages: 367 words: 99,765

Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks by Ken Jennings

Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, British Empire, clean water, David Brooks, digital map, don't be evil, dumpster diving, Eratosthenes, game design, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, helicopter parent, hive mind, index card, John Harrison: Longitude, John Snow's cholera map, Mercator projection, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Journalism, openstreetmap, place-making, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Stewart Brand, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, three-masted sailing ship, traveling salesman, urban planning

First, what’s the trick? And second, what kind of horrific stage parents do this to their little girl? “We had nothing to do with maps before Lilly did,” insists James Gaskin. I’ve tracked Lilly’s family down to Cleveland, Ohio, where her dad is currently working on his PhD in management and information science. Via Skype, I can see the whole family in their living room. Lilly is now four, and she’s clambering on the back and arms of the sofa with one of her younger sisters. James and Nikki, their parents, are a young, freshly scrubbed couple straight out of a Clearasil ad or a megachurch youth ministry. “Once we discovered she could do the things with the maps, she wanted to do it,” Nikki adds.


pages: 349 words: 95,972

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford

affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche

With a broad plan, or no plan, it’s easy to accommodate these obstacles and opportunities. Some people manage to take this to extremes. Marc Andreessen is one of the first Internet wunderkinds: he cofounded Netscape in 1994, sold it for over $4 billion, and founded a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that invested in companies such as Skype, Twitter, and Airbnb. Besieged by invitations and meetings, Andreessen decided that he would simply stop writing anything in his calendar. If something was important, then it could be done immediately. Otherwise it wasn’t worth signing away a slice of Andreessen’s future. “I’ve been trying this tactic as an experiment,” he wrote in 2007.


pages: 391 words: 97,018

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy by Daniel Gross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset-backed security, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, congestion pricing, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, demand response, Donald Trump, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, index fund, intangible asset, intermodal, inventory management, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, LNG terminal, low interest rates, low skilled workers, man camp, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk tolerance, risk/return, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Wall-E, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Replacing five calls per month with Google searches, or by dialing 1-800-Bing411, as my employer has instructed me to do on my work phone, saves $120 per year. When I travel abroad, I often wind up calling home from hotel phones to ensure a good connection, or I have my family call me from home. Those minutes easily add up to another $40 per year. But in the fall I finally installed Skype on my laptop and on our computers at home; a twenty-minute investment yielded instant returns. Or consider bill paying. At Chase a sheaf of five hundred checks costs $75, or 15 cents each. If I add the stamp (45 cents) and envelope (14.3 cents), every monthly payment I mail instead of paying online costs an extra $8.80 per year.


pages: 362 words: 99,063

The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late by Michael Ellsberg

affirmative action, Black Swan, Burning Man, corporate governance, creative destruction, do what you love, financial engineering, financial independence, follow your passion, future of work, hiring and firing, independent contractor, job automation, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, mega-rich, meta-analysis, new economy, Norman Mailer, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social intelligence, solopreneur, Steve Ballmer, survivorship bias, telemarketer, Tony Hsieh

“I think one person whom I graduated with has a full-time job; everyone else is struggling or has taken a bunch of part-time jobs. This guy I graduated with had a bunch of honors and fancy awards—he was very, very smart. He’s working at Starbucks because he can’t get a job anywhere else.” In addition to her lucrative freelancing over the Internet and Skype, which allows her to divide her time between London, New Zealand, and New York, Marian also now sells a course she’s created online, called the “Pajama Job Hunt,” so that others can have the same success she’s had in using social media and personal branding to get jobs. Marian’s advice to recent grads?


pages: 309 words: 100,573

Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel: Questions, Answers, and Reflections by Patrick Smith

Airbus A320, airline deregulation, airport security, Atul Gawande, Boeing 747, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, collective bargaining, crew resource management, D. B. Cooper, high-speed rail, inflight wifi, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, legacy carrier, low cost airline, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, pattern recognition, race to the bottom, Skype, Tenerife airport disaster, US Airways Flight 1549, zero-sum game

Indeed, this is part of what has made carriers like Emirates, Singapore Airlines, and others so successful. 3. Complimentary wireless Internet What do we do at airports? We kill time. And there are few better and more productive ways of killing time than logging on to the web. Send an email to your mistress; read my blogs at askthepilot.com; Skype your friend in Slovenia. Many, if not most, major terminals have Wi-Fi access, but it’s often expensive and cumbersome (few things in life are more irritating than those credit card payment pages). It should be everywhere, and it should be free. 4. Convenience stores It appears the evolution of airport design will not be complete until the terminal and shopping mall become indistinguishable.


Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

In the early nineties, Andreessen, along with Eric Bina, had created the Mosaic Web browser, forever changing the way people used the Internet. Mosaic became Netscape, which became one of the earliest Internet super-successes with its IPO in 1995. Since then, Andreessen had made hundreds of millions of dollars investing in companies like Skype, Twitter, Groupon, Zynga…and Facebook. He also sat on Facebook’s board. I flew to San Francisco in the spring of 2016 to start briefing relevant parties on what I’d seen at Cambridge Analytica. Sheela set up a meeting at the Andreessen Horowitz offices, on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. From the outside, the building looked like a slightly upscale suburban dentist’s office, but inside, a rather bland lobby gave way to walls hung with fantastically expensive art.


Data and the City by Rob Kitchin,Tracey P. Lauriault,Gavin McArdle

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic management, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, dematerialisation, digital divide, digital map, digital rights, distributed ledger, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, floating exchange rates, folksonomy, functional programming, global value chain, Google Earth, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, nowcasting, open economy, openstreetmap, OSI model, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, place-making, power law, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, semantic web, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, software studies, statistical model, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, text mining, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, urban planning, urban sprawl, web application

Consider, for example, the seemingly efficient sharing of images of grandchildren on Facebook, leaving them for anyone, compared to handwritten letters which includes a physical drawing from said grandchildren. The issue is not one of sentimentality only – for example, a synchronous engagement through a video call over Skype between the grandparent and grandchildren, which requires mutual presence and concentration, is qualitatively different from the Facebook sharing and fleeting ‘likes’. Borgmann’s analysis is especially important to the question of technology and the city since he frames his investigations toward the development of a meaningful and fulfilling human life – thereby addressing the age-old philosophical question of ‘the good life’ within technological societies (Higgs et al. 2000; Verbeek 2002).


pages: 331 words: 96,989

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam L. Alter

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bluma Zeigarnik, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, death from overwork, drug harm reduction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Richard Thaler, Robert Durst, side project, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, three-martini lunch

Carlson, and Natasha Whipple, “From External Regulation to Self-Regulation: Early Parenting Precursors of Young Children’s Executive Functioning,” Child Development 81, no. 1 (January 2010): 326–39; Susan H. Landry, Karen E. Smith, and Paul R. Swank, “The Importance of Parenting During Early Childhood for School-Age Development,” Developmental Neuropsychology 24, nos. 2–3 (2003): 559–91; Sarah Roseberry, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, and Roberta M. Golinkoff, “Skype Me! Socially Contingent Interactions Help Toddlers Learn Language,” Child Development 85, no. 3 (May–June 2014): 956–70; Angeline S. Lillard and Jennifer Peterson, “The Immediate Impact of Different Types of Television on Young Children’s Executive Function,” Pediatrics 128, No. 4 (October 2011): 644–49; N.


pages: 303 words: 100,516

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, asset light, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital nomad, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, fake news, fear of failure, Gavin Belson, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, the High Line, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

Adam flew friends from Israel to New York ostensibly for a friendly visit only to give them hammers and put them to work. When Hill asked for help managing the company’s rapidly expanding operations, Adam hired Zvika Shachar, a high school friend from Kfar Saba who worked at a Sushi Samba in Israel and spent six months helping Hill via Skype before joining the company in New York. Ariel Tiger, a friend from the navy, became WeWork’s first CFO. Tiger had graduated at the top of Adam’s class at the Israeli Naval Academy, though Adam bragged to a group of WeWork employees that he had bested Tiger in a sailing course. “I beat you in everything else,” Tiger said.


pages: 350 words: 98,077

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, ImageNet competition, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, ought to be enough for anybody, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, tail risk, TED Talk, the long tail, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers

Shortly thereafter, Google’s self-driving cars showed up on the roads of Northern California, careful and timid, but commuting on their own in full traffic. Virtual assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa were installed on our phones and in our homes and could deal with many of our spoken requests. YouTube started providing impressively accurate automated subtitles for videos, and Skype offered simultaneous translation between languages in video calls. Suddenly Facebook could recognize your face eerily well in uploaded photos, and the photo-sharing website Flickr began automatically labeling photos with text describing their content. In 2011, IBM’s Watson program roundly defeated human champions on television’s Jeopardy!


pages: 304 words: 99,836

Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story by Greg Smith

Alan Greenspan, always be closing, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, bonus culture, break the buck, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, delayed gratification, East Village, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, information asymmetry, London Interbank Offered Rate, mega-rich, money market fund, new economy, Nick Leeson, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, technology bubble, too big to fail

I would like to thank the following people for all their help and integrity: Jonathan Leibner, Paul Fedorko, Jen Rohrer, Tess Dmitrovsky, Sammy Bina, Fred Newman, Sheryl Galler, and Mark Levine. I would also like to thank James Kaplan for his wisdom and invaluable help during this process. I am so grateful to have been with my brother, Mark (in person), and my best friends, Lex Bayer and Dan Lipkin (on Skype), just minutes after the op-ed was published. None of them knew it was coming but it was so comforting to have them with me, and to have their advice and friendship, which I value so highly. My close group of friends rallied to my side and supported me without question immediately: Jackie, Phil, Adam, Amitav, Ariel, Shimrit, Michael, Alexandra, Dov, Gavin, Sean, Jody, Sentheel, Brian, Ralph, Rowan, Hayley, Kevin, Alon, Gopal, John, and Kris.


pages: 419 words: 102,488

Chaos Engineering: System Resiliency in Practice by Casey Rosenthal, Nora Jones

Amazon Web Services, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, blockchain, business continuity plan, business intelligence, business logic, business process, cloud computing, cognitive load, complexity theory, continuous integration, cyber-physical system, database schema, DevOps, fail fast, fault tolerance, hindsight bias, human-factors engineering, information security, Kanban, Kubernetes, leftpad, linear programming, loose coupling, microservices, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no silver bullet, node package manager, operational security, OSI model, pull request, ransomware, risk tolerance, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software as a service, statistical model, systems thinking, the scientific method, value engineering, WebSocket

Unknown Events/Unexpected Consequences A few years back I worked on the Bing infrastructure team. One day my Outlook application stopped working. I was not too concerned at first, as our IT department had its own sense of when to mandate updates, but Outlook did not work after restart either. Then I noticed Skype stopped working too and a few other tools. Something felt “off.” That’s when I heard the sound of someone running through the hallway. People running in the office is usually a bad sign. High-level managers running is even worse. This manager stopped at my door and said, “Grab your laptop and come with me.”


Reaper Force: The Inside Story of Britain’s Drone Wars by Dr Peter Lee

crew resource management, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital map, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no-fly zone, operational security, QWERTY keyboard, Skype

Something about going to Dover; about giving them time to let the family know; about coming back in a few hours to talk; about being there for them throughout the entire process. Alicia could see how nervous the Unterburger was and asked if it was his first time. ‘It’s ours too, and we will get through it together,’ she responded. They felt like they were on autopilot when they called Matt’s brother, Josh, in St Paul. Thank you God, that he was on a Skype call with an old family friend and wasn’t alone, thought Alicia. Then they made their rounds to family and friends to tell them in person. Each time they said, ‘Matt was killed in action, IED,’ it became harder and harder. The next day, as Ross drove into work at Creech Air Force Base, he saw the American flag at half-mast.


Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

The general outline of the systems described in these documents was not news to journalists who have covered the American national security state. But the vastness of these systems shocked many citizens. Snowden’s leaks also revealed the complicity of major platform companies in surveillance projects.5 Microsoft installed a backdoor in its Skype messaging system for the NSA, while companies including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, and AOL allowed the agency to eavesdrop on their servers as part of the PRISM program.6 While it is probably a stretch to say these findings radicalized a broad American public against mass surveillance, Snowden’s disclosures did change mainstream political commentary and prompted worldwide protests.


pages: 296 words: 96,568

Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus by Sarah Gilbert, Catherine Green

Boris Johnson, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, global pandemic, imposter syndrome, lockdown, lone genius, profit motive, Skype, social distancing, TikTok

This was because, unlike saline solution, it has similar minor side effects to the real vaccine – sore arm, headache, slight fever – making it harder for volunteers to guess whether they had received the real vaccine or not, and therefore making the trial better blinded and better controlled. fn5 His tweet read: ‘Fake news has been circulating on social media that the first volunteer in the Oxford vaccine trial has died. This is not true! I spent several minutes this morning chatting with Elisa Granato via Skype. She is very much alive and told me she is feeling “absolutely fine”.’ fn6 I had assumed that we were all easy to find anyway through the CBF’s website, but it turned out that wasn’t possible because the website was so out of date. I still haven’t had time to update it. fn7 They also came back after 182 and 364 days.


pages: 363 words: 98,496

Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy by Matthew Campbell, Kit Chellel

big-box store, coronavirus, COVID-19, drone strike, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, eurozone crisis, failed state, Filipino sailors, financial innovation, information security, lockdown, megacity, offshore financial centre, Skype, South China Sea, trade route, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

Often, the salvor hosted him for Greek meals that he prepared in the tiny galley, simple affairs of grilled fish or stew that, for a man so far from home, felt like the height of luxury. Vergos was hopeless with technology, and in return for his hospitality, Plakakis began teaching him to send emails and make Skype calls, the two men sitting shoulder to shoulder as Vergos fumbled with the mouse. They also tried to push business each other’s way. When he spoke to ships’ captains and port agents about bunkering, Plakakis might mention that Poseidon was available for services like underwater cleaning. The company could also furnish security details, putting groups of armed Yemenis sourced by Nashwan onto a Poseidon tug called the Voukefalas—named, rather grandiosely, for the horse that Alexander the Great rode into battle—to escort passing ships.


pages: 316 words: 100,329

A Short Ride in the Jungle by Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent

colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, digital map, Global Witness, Higgs boson, Kickstarter, Skype, South China Sea, trade route

It was exciting, unpredictable and at times infuriating. This time though, I could never have foreseen how this abrupt change of plan would affect the next few years of my life. A month earlier I'd accepted a job producing the popular BBC television series World's Most Dangerous Roads. Since then I'd been having crackly Skype conversations with fixers in Magadan and watching grainy films of hollow-cheeked prisoners digging Siberia's 'Road of Bones' out of the ice. But unexpected changes in the filming schedule meant I needed to get on a plane to Hanoi and recce the Ho Chi Minh Trail instead. Someone else would go to Russia in my place.


pages: 329 words: 99,504

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud by Ben McKenzie, Jacob Silverman

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Ben McKenzie, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, capital controls, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, data science, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, housing crisis, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Jacob Silverman, Jane Street, low interest rates, Lyft, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, offshore financial centre, operational security, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uber lyft, underbanked, vertical integration, zero-sum game

So did its CEO, the eccentric Ukrainian-Israeli tech entrepreneur Alex Mashinsky. Mashinsky’s résumé was gilded with a long list of supposed innovations and business accomplishments. For example, he professed to have invented voice over IP (VOIP), the ability to conduct phone calls and multimedia sessions over the internet (think of the companies Skype and Zoom as successful examples in the field). But there was little evidence backing Mashinsky’s bold assertions. Now, he claimed, he was using his experience and business acumen to help bring wealth to the crypto masses. “He was different because he was this guy who was like, ‘I was this big CEO and I did all these great things.’ ” Later, James would find that Mashinsky had either exaggerated or invented a great deal of his professional history.


pages: 340 words: 101,675

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction by Adrian Hon

Adrian Hon, air gap, Anthropocene, augmented reality, blockchain, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, defense in depth, discrete time, disinformation, disintermediation, driverless car, drone strike, food desert, game design, gamification, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, impulse control, income inequality, job automation, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, machine translation, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, peak oil, peer-to-peer, phenotype, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, precariat, precautionary principle, prediction markets, rewilding, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, social graph, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, telepresence, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Turing test, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, VTOL, working-age population

“The 2000s and 2010s were the golden age of journalism. Back then, most articles were still written by hand,” reminisces Ryholt. “I’d get to the office at 8:45 a.m., Starbucks coffee to my right, iPhone to my left, and two monitors in front. Back then, glasses were things you wore to correct your vision. Three columns of Tweetdeck, Skype in one window, Gmail in another, Safari on top. Yeah, it was the closest you could get to immersion back then. “In tech news, it was all about being first. That meant we had long, long hours, and they had a rhythm that shaped my day. And there were no agents, no data-mining, no reputation metrics or automated fact-checkers; it was the wild west!


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

An American in 2015, compared with his or her counterpart a half-century earlier, will live nine years longer, have had three more years of education, earn an additional $33,000 a year per family member (only a third of which, rather than half, will go to necessities), and have an additional eight hours a week of leisure. He or she can spend that leisure time reading on the Web, listening to music on a smartphone, streaming movies on high-definition TV, Skyping with friends and relatives, or dining on Thai food instead of Spam fritters. But if popular impressions are a guide, today’s Americans are not one and a half times happier (as they would be if happiness tracked income), or a third happier (if it tracked education), or even an eighth happier (if it tracked longevity).

That means they tend to contribute little to measured output even if their impact on consumer welfare is very large.”21 The dematerialization of life that we examined in chapter 10, for example, undermines the observation that a 2015 home does not look much different from a 1965 home. The big difference lies in what we don’t see because it’s been made obsolete by tablets and smartphones, together with new wonders like streaming video and Skype. In addition to dematerialization, information technology has launched a process of demonetization.22 Many things that people used to pay for are now essentially free, including classified ads, news, encyclopedias, maps, cameras, long-distance calls, and the overhead of brick-and-mortar retailers.


pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

The cost of person-to-person communication began to drop. When I left India in 1980, it cost me over £1 per minute to phone my mother from the United Kingdom, at a time when my take-home pay after tax and bills was around £100 per month. That was when you used to have to wait at least three years to get a landline in India. Today, I can Skype my mother for nothing, and get a mobile phone while waiting for my luggage at the airport on arrival. Times change. Figure 10.1: Global migration between 2005 and 2010 across the world (Source: Circos/Krzywinski, M. et al.) As the costs dropped, more and more people began to get connected with each other; and so to today, where families and friends may be physically disparate yet otherwise connected.


pages: 416 words: 108,370

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, always be closing, augmented reality, Clayton Christensen, data science, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, hindsight bias, hype cycle, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, information trail, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Roose, Kodak vs Instagram, linear programming, lock screen, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, subscription business, TED Talk, telemarketer, the medium is the message, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, women in the workforce

He built his own social network with tens of thousands of buyers, but, ironically, he did it not by writing jokes for all ten thousand people at once, but by writing jokes for just a few of them at a time. • • • The most popular mobile apps in the world are various shades of self-expression. The most downloaded nongaming apps in iPhone history are Facebook, Facebook Messenger, YouTube, Instagram, Skype, WhatsApp, Find My iPhone, Google Maps, Twitter, and iTunes U. In other words: maps, videos, and a whole lot of talking. If you think the download counts are skewed, try the independent surveys. According to a 2014 Niche study, the most common mobile uses for teenagers are texting, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Pandora, Twitter, and phone calls.


pages: 437 words: 105,934

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media by Cass R. Sunstein

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, digital divide, Donald Trump, drone strike, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, friendly fire, global village, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, John Perry Barlow, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, prediction markets, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

As of September 2015, roughly 250 Americans traveled or attempted to travel to Syria, with about 150 succeeding in doing so.20 The average was about 10 Americans per month between 2014 and mid-2015 (according to FBI director James Comey, that figure declined sharply to about 1 person per month as of May 2016).21 While the numbers are not large, a feature that ties these people together is that they are active in online jihadist circles, and are prolific posters on social media.22 Consider a journalistic account of how ISIL targeted a lonely twenty-three-year-old American woman on Twitter, e-mail, and Skype.23 ISIL recruiters sought to isolate her from other viewpoints online and in her community, politely answering her questions while slowly indoctrinating her and pushing her toward more extreme perspectives. In online communications, the recruiters advised the woman not to go to a local mosque that disavowed ISIL, telling her that it had been infiltrated by the government.


pages: 331 words: 104,366

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins by Garry Kasparov

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, business process, call centre, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, computer age, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Freestyle chess, gamification, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, job automation, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, low earth orbit, machine translation, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, rolodex, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

On April 23, 1963, Joseph Licklider, a director at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), sent out an eight-page memo to his colleagues, broadly describing the goals for their new project to get computers to talk to one another, and addressed it to “Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network.” Talk about ambition! That document, and several others that followed, established the scope of ARPA’s quest, including descriptions of transferring files, email, and even the potential for digital voice transmission that we would now recognize as Skype. The Internet did not become a transformative technology, essential to many in their daily lives and economically impactful on a global scale, until over twenty years after Kleinrock sent those first letters. Email predates the Internet and was already widely used in the scientific community and on university campuses; it is the web we think of as the world-changing invention.


pages: 375 words: 106,536

Lost at Sea by Jon Ronson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Columbine, computer age, credit crunch, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Easter island, Etonian, false memory syndrome, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, late fees, Louis Pasteur, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, telemarketer

Have you worked out how to pay less tax like really rich people do?” “No,” Ellen replies. “I pay forty-two percent.” “Good,” I say. • • • FIVE TIMES Ellen is a man named Nick Hanauer. His taxable income is, he tells me, “tens of millions. In a bad year it can be ten million.” We speak via Skype. I’m in London. He’s at his home in Seattle. What little I can see of it looks lovely. He’s in some kind of an office/den with an electric guitar in the corner. His parents made good money from the pillow trade. After college he set up a few OK businesses, but then one day he met a girl who was dating a guy.


pages: 376 words: 110,796

Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight by Chris Dubbs, Emeline Paat-dahlstrom, Charles D. Walker

Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Dennis Tito, desegregation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Elon Musk, high net worth, Iridium satellite, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, private spaceflight, restrictive zoning, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, technoutopianism, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, young professional

Other than Bigelow himself, no one was happier about the success than his launch campaign manager, space lawyer and head of Bigelow's Washington DC Office Mike Gold. Gold orchestrated the Genesis I project from birth to launch and was at Kosmotras mission control, relaying the countdown process and results via Skype to Bigelow Aerospace's head office in Las Vegas. For their part, the Russians did not disappoint, delivering the space habitat to within four hundred meters of its planned orbital parking space. It took Gold, under Bigelow's leadership, about half a decade to pull off launching the first privately owned module into space.


pages: 471 words: 109,267

The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain? by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, call centre, central bank independence, congestion charging, Corn Laws, Credit Default Swap, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Etonian, failed state, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, market bubble, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, moral panic, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, Right to Buy, shareholder value, Skype, smart meter, social distancing, stem cell, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, working-age population, Y2K

They have spent the last six months training full time, including a week learning basic phrases in Dari and Pashtun. When they arrive, they would train for two weeks at Camp Bastion in Helmand, where they know they will be mocked by the regulars. Then they head off to train and mentor Afghan NCOs. Quentin said his family was apprehensive. ‘There will be good communications out there and I can talk to them on Skype.’ He paused and added, ‘I can’t alleviate my mother’s fear, but she didn’t say “Don’t go.” We had emotional farewells. It’s a time to say things you might not ever say otherwise, things you should say, but you never quite get round to.’ By 2010, the army was full up. Was it the attraction of fighting a real war, or the effect of recession and unemployment?


pages: 361 words: 107,679

Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova

anti-communist, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Fall of the Berlin Wall, megaproject, Skype

They made plans to marry, but she was older than him, which was perhaps why the Moroccan government didn’t give them permission. Apparently, the government of Morocco had to approve all marriages, and in particular the King must give his blessing. It was impossible for Kemal and Julie, so after Julie had gone back to Paris and they endured a year of Skype, Kemal decided to follow her. But he couldn’t get a visa. So he travelled to Turkey, then got smuggled into Bulgaria, and that’s where he was arrested. After a few months in the same detention centre where Nizar had been, he took stock of his situation: Julie’s failure to make an appearance or even reply to his phone calls was telling him something.


pages: 409 words: 105,551

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, Chris Fussell

Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Chelsea Manning, clockwork universe, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, Ida Tarbell, information security, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, job automation, job satisfaction, John Nash: game theory, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pneumatic tube, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Quickly, though, that audience grew. We urged everyone from regional embassies to FBI field offices to install secure communications so that they could participate in our discussions. When people think of cutting-edge military hardware, they usually picture weaponry, not a bulked-up version of Skype, but that was our main technological hurdle and point of investment for several months. We knew that forging the neural network that would facilitate our emergent analysis of complex problems was vital for our long-term success, so we designed prepackaged communication bundles that our teams could take into the field, wherever they were in the world.


pages: 367 words: 109,122

Revolution 2:0: A Memoir and Call to Action by Wael Ghonim

British Empire, citizen journalism, crowdsourcing, digital divide, financial independence, Khan Academy, Mohammed Bouazizi, Skype, WikiLeaks

I e-mailed Ali ElBaradei, introducing myself and explaining that I managed the ElBaradei Facebook page. He did not know about the page, yet he welcomed any kind of cooperation and promised to set up an appointment with Dr. ElBaradei when I was next in Cairo. At the same time I e-mailed Mahmoud al-Hetta, who managed the “ElBaradei President of Egypt 2011” group. We spoke on Skype when I was in Dubai and discussed how we could cooperate. I was amazed at how brave this young man was, as were the other activists who used their real names on the Internet. Yet I advised him to hide his name, as Facebook enables you to do, for the sake of the campaign’s sustainability. There was no need to publish names where State Security might see them, I said.


pages: 335 words: 107,779

Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson

airport security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cable laying ship, call centre, cellular automata, edge city, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker Ethic, high-speed rail, impulse control, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, megaproject, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, packet switching, pirate software, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social web, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, X Prize

During the rest of the time, my workday underwent a gradual and almost insensible transition that will sound familiar to anyone over the age of forty. It used to be that reading the mail required walking to the mailbox, slicing open envelopes, and other small but real physical exertions. Now we do it by twitching our fingers. Similar remarks could be made about talking on the phone (now replaced by Skype), filing or throwing away documents (now a matter of dragging icons around or, if that’s too strenuous, using command-key combinations), watching television (YouTube), and meeting with coworkers (videoconferencing). The portion of the day allocated to staring at pixels kept growing, and my physical movements were increasingly restricted to minute, repetitive movements of the finger and the hand.


pages: 385 words: 101,761

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

ENGAGEMENT FRAMING A decade or two ago, someone in the media might have a couple interactions in one day: an interview or two, a talk with an editor, a morning meeting with a team. Compare that with today when that same person might peruse hundreds of Tweets, use Facebook to interview five people for a story, Skype with a team in Asia, write six short posts for his or her work blog and personal Tumblr, and still have that morning news meeting. Thanks to social media technologies and globalization, the typical American, Brazilian, and German now actively engages with a larger number and a much more diverse group of people than ever before.


pages: 334 words: 104,382

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits

The next day—while nuclear tensions ramped up between the United States and North Korea—the most popular article in the New York Times was an op-ed calling for Pichai’s resignation. It is not an exaggeration to say that, for a solid week in Silicon Valley, this memo was the main topic of conversation. I interviewed Damore just two days after his firing. He Skyped into our Bloomberg studio from his Mountain View apartment. He seemed a little shell-shocked by the dramatic turns his life had taken, looking a bit like Richard Hendricks, the perpetually bewildered main character on HBO’s Silicon Valley. Damore told me the reaction to his memo both internally and externally was deeply unfair.


Bit Rot by Douglas Coupland

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, bitcoin, Burning Man, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, index card, jimmy wales, junk bonds, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, McJob, Menlo Park, nuclear paranoia, Oklahoma City bombing, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, space junk, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, uber lyft, young professional

I think it’s the fact that they look at the mechanics of voting and compare it to the universe they inhabit, and they collectively say, You have to be kidding: every four years I go into a plywood booth and use a graphite-based stylus to “fill in a box” beside my choice for who’s best for the job? What century are we in? How is this still even happening? And they have a point. Voting methods feel archaic, like taking everyone’s computers and devices away and telling them they have to instead use envelopes and stamps to communicate with each other. In the era of Airbnb, Netflix and Skype, we have a political selection ritual straight out of the nineteenth century. Millennials must view terms such as hanging chads (Bush election, November 2000) and recounts (almost every election) and wonder how so many useless voting methods still manage to exist. Why don’t we just vote online? How hard can that be?


pages: 374 words: 111,284

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

But the rate of improvement has been immense, even though they do not function at a level that many people find acceptable. Soon, though, at the click of a mouse, it should be possible to translate anything to any language at a very high level of competence, indeed beyond the capability of most human translators. In March 2014, Skype introduced real-time machine translation. In June 2013, Hugo Barra, Google’s top Android executive, said that within several years he expects a workable “universal translator” that could be used either in person or over the phone.26 Mind you, even if these improvements continue and routine translation work is all done by machine, there will still be people who will make their careers out of being language experts.


pages: 453 words: 111,010

Licence to be Bad by Jonathan Aldred

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, nudge unit, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spectrum auction, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

There are too many situations where businesspeople are trying to do deals without any expectation of future interaction: they cannot assume they are playing a repeated game. Instead, they unconsciously rely on facts about human psychology which game theory ignores. It is, for instance, much easier to decide whether someone can be trusted if you meet them face to face. This is why, even in the era of Skype, business leaders are still willing to fly across the world for a crucial meeting. Clearly, some game-theoretic explanations of trust and long-term cooperation seem to miss the point. But there is a more basic problem with this kind of response to the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Even if strategies like tit-for-tat can help sustain cooperative behaviour when people interact repeatedly over a fairly long period, what about one-off interactions?


pages: 414 words: 109,622

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

He acknowledged that the attitude seemed extreme, but he also pointed to others who held similar beliefs. As they created DeepMind, he and Hassabis tapped into this community. They came to Peter Thiel through the Singularity Summit. They secured another investment from Jaan Tallinn, one of the founders of the Skype Internet phone-calling service, who would soon join a group of academics in creating what they called the Future of Life Institute, an organization dedicated to exploring the existential risks of artificial intelligence and other technologies. Then Hassabis and Legg carried these ideas to new places.


pages: 363 words: 109,834

The Crux by Richard Rumelt

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air gap, Airbnb, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Blue Ocean Strategy, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, creative destruction, crossover SUV, Crossrail, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Herman Kahn, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Just-in-time delivery, Larry Ellison, linear programming, lockdown, low cost airline, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, meta-analysis, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, performance metric, precision agriculture, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, search costs, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, software as a service, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Teledyne, telemarketer, TSMC, uber lyft, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork

The new company, Zoom, was based on building a video-centered conferencing tool, one that would be much easier to install, use, and maintain than WebEx. The crux of the technical and commercial challenge was to eliminate the complexities involved in signing up, opening an account, and downloading a program and then an app for your phone for WebEx, Skype, Microsoft Teams, TeamViewer, and other offerings. Plus, creating easy-to-use high-quality video conferencing was not easy—the engineers had to make it work in any browser, regardless of firewall settings, and the video had to be separately compressed for screen sharing, with adjustments for each user’s computer speed.


pages: 338 words: 104,815

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It by Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, Boston Dynamics, butterfly effect, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, ChatGPT, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, financial thriller, forensic accounting, framing effect, George Akerlof, global pandemic, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, Keith Raniere, Kenneth Rogoff, London Whale, lone genius, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart transportation, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, transcontinental railway, WikiLeaks, Y2K

In 2016, the owner of a French wine company was contacted by someone posing as the defense minister of France, Jean-Yves Le Drian. The caller asked for €300,000 to help rescue hostages being held overseas. The owner was on the verge of complying when a friend walked in, heard a few moments of their Skype conversation, and said, “That’s a scam.” The rethink prompted by that one outside comment saved the winemaker from joining dozens of wealthy victims who lost about $90 million to the “faux Le Drian.”14 Of course, for the ask-a-friend method to work, you have to be open to changing your opinion in response to the advice you get.


pages: 489 words: 106,008

Risk: A User's Guide by Stanley McChrystal, Anna Butrico

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, fear of failure, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Googley, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, inflight wifi, invisible hand, iterative process, late fees, lockdown, Paul Buchheit, Ponzi scheme, QWERTY keyboard, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, source of truth, Stanislav Petrov, Steve Jobs, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, wikimedia commons, work culture

The sound of background chatter from other cubicles and breakout rooms was replaced with barking dogs and the pitter-patter of feet from children who were also learning from home as their schools closed to combat the virus’s spread. Working from home produced some interesting developments. On one hand, organizations had to provide Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype, GoToMeeting, and other communication technologies to their employees, not all of whom were tech-savvy and none of whom had on-site, in-home IT support. And organizations had to do so in a matter of days. For many firms the frightening transition was surprisingly smooth. Connections were quickly established, meetings shifted to being virtual, and thankfully the sky didn’t fall.


pages: 357 words: 107,984

Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic---And Prevented Economic Disaster by Nick Timiraos

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, fear index, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, moral hazard, non-fungible token, oil shock, Phillips curve, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Rishi Sunak, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Skype, social distancing, subprime mortgage crisis, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

The programs meant the Fed would effectively purchase bonds directly from companies such as Walmart or Comcast in order to ensure that large corporations would be able to maintain employment and normal operations through the pandemic. In exercising this authority, the Fed was once again doing something it never had before. Powell traded updates he was receiving from lawmakers with Lael Brainard. She had been among the last to work in her office in the Fed, but by week’s end Brainard was logging into WebEx and Skype meetings from the upstairs of her home in Northwest Washington. Lehnert called in from a guest bedroom at his Arlington home that he had converted into a makeshift office to discuss the construction of the emergency-lending programs with Van Der Weide, the Fed’s general counsel. Conditions all over were far from ideal, but none of them needed to be urged to work around the clock.


Scandinavia by Andy Symington

call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, connected car, edge city, Eyjafjallajökull, full employment, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, low cost airline, mass immigration, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, out of africa, period drama, retail therapy, Skype, the built environment, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban sprawl, walkable city, work culture , young professional

International access code 00 Norway country code 47 Local area codes None (these are incorporated into listed numbers) Directory assistance 180 (calls cost Nkr9 per minute) PHONECARDS Your best bet is to go for one of the phonecards issued by private companies. Usually costing Nkr100, they allow you to make more than six hours of calls using a scratch PIN number on the back and a local access number. For international calls, internet- connected calls (eg www.skype.com) are the way to go, although unfortunately if you’re not travelling with a laptop, few internet cafes are Skype-enabled; you cannot make phone calls from municipal library computers. Time Time in Norway is one hour ahead of GMT/UTC, the same as Sweden, Denmark and most of Western Europe. When telling time, note that in Norwegian the use of ‘half’ means ‘half before’ rather than ‘half past’.


pages: 396 words: 112,832

Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love by Simran Sethi

biodiversity loss, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, data science, food desert, Food sovereignty, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Ken Thompson, Louis Pasteur, microbiome, phenotype, placebo effect, Skype, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, women in the workforce

They both did what they did for love and joy. Because it was what they wanted for themselves—and what they wanted to share with us. Months later, Caleb and I did a virtual tasting. I was nervous, still smarting from my wounded heart and my misidentifications of the aromas in the Le Nez du Vin wine kit. Over Skype, I opened up my bottle of Trousseau Gris as Caleb swirled his in the glass. I told him I hoped to find what I found before at Camino, but worried I wouldn’t be able to. He offered a compassionate smile and said, “The specific aromas aren’t as important for me as they used to be. I’m looking for the whole of it—the balance, the soul and the heart.


pages: 391 words: 117,984

The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World by Jacqueline Novogratz

access to a mobile phone, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business process, business process outsourcing, clean water, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Hernando de Soto, Kibera, Lao Tzu, low interest rates, market design, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, tontine, transaction costs, zero-sum game

The boy I encountered had never seen a television show, made a telephone call, or taken a photograph, whereas his counterpart today, an urban youth wearing secondhand clothes in Kigali, is likely to have access to a cell phone and the Internet. As for my counterpart, today’s 20-something professional working in Kigali won’t feel the isolation I did; she is likely to e-mail and call her friends on Skype at least once a day and check her local newspaper on the Internet to learn about the goings-on at home. We have the tools to know one another and the resources to create a future in which every human being, rich or poor, has a real chance to pursue a life of greater purpose. I have changed, too.


pages: 549 words: 116,200

With a Little Help by Cory Efram Doctorow, Jonathan Coulton, Russell Galen

autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, death of newspapers, don't be evil, game design, Google Earth, high net worth, lifelogging, lolcat, margin call, Mark Shuttleworth, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Ponzi scheme, reality distortion field, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, sensible shoes, skunkworks, Skype, traffic fines, traveling salesman, Turing test, urban planning, Y2K

Players with offensive-capable pets will receive an extra 0.5% share for every power-level in the pet, to be paid equally from all other players' shares 1922 7. Chris is the official book-keeper for the Guild, and he will keep the Guild's books on a group-accessible Google spreadsheet, and he will balance all accounts weekly # 1923 The May seventh, 2012 Amendments, failed to pass in a deadlocked 2-2 tie by Skype conference 1924 1. Chris is no longer the book-keeper for the Guild. 1925 2. All Guild members will serve a rotating turn as bookkeeper # 1926 The May thirtieth, 2012 Amendments, passed by unanimous acclaim at the Guild Hall in the Fibonacci Spiral Fortress on Gunnarsen Island: 1927 1. During half-term, the Guild will engage solely in "fun play," rather than paid work 1928 2.


pages: 443 words: 112,800

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bike sharing, borderless world, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, decarbonisation, deep learning, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, knowledge economy, manufacturing employment, marginal employment, Martin Wolf, Masdar, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tech billionaire, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

The new education reformers emphasize breaking down the walls and engaging diverse others in more distributed and collaborative learning communities, both in virtual and real space. The proliferation of social networks and collaborative forms of participation on the Internet are taking education beyond the confines of the classroom to a global learning environment in cyberspace. Students are connecting with distant peers in virtual classrooms through Yahoo! and Skype technology. When students from very different cultures participate in joint academic assignments and class projects in real time in virtual space, learning is transformed into a lateral experience that stretches around the world. Students at Brooklyn High School of Telecommunications and Lee School in Winterthur, Switzerland, were involved in a joint virtual-classroom project during the Iraq war, exploring how their different cultures viewed the war in the Middle East and other global conflicts and peace initiatives.


pages: 482 words: 117,962

Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future by Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron, Meera Balarajan

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, conceptual framework, creative destruction, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, life extension, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine readable, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, open borders, out of africa, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, spice trade, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

Peggy Levitt refers to this phenomenon as a growing “transnational social field”: “Simultaneity, or living incorporated into daily activities, routine, and institutions located both in a destination country and transnationally is the reality for increasing numbers of migrants and their descendants.”14 While borders maintain physical distance between people, the lives of migrants and nonmigrants can be connected in a myriad ways through e-mail, phone calls, Skype calls, and family visits. Transnational networks serve as conduits of culture, information, ideas, beliefs, and money between migrants and nonmigrants. Transnational ties can “test the nature and reach of nation-states.”15As Steven Vertovec concludes, “Migrant transnational practices are stimulated and fostered by many of these globalization processes.


pages: 385 words: 118,314

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

In time Bloomberg also added new services to the line: in 2009 he campaigned for re-election on the ticket of adding real-time information on the transit system; that same year he also launched a stop smoking programme. The line also coordinates with the nyc.gov website and individual queries can be pursued online; there is now a 311 app as well, and questions can be asked via SMS or Skype. The idea has now been adopted by other cities throughout the US. Yet it is not just the politicians who are driving the initiative forward. Technology also allows the traffic of information to travel from the street to city hall. While schemes like 311 are hugely popular, they are still in the hands of the civic administration.


pages: 394 words: 117,982

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger

active measures, air gap, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, computer age, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Google Chrome, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, RAND corporation, ransomware, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

The companies were ordered to stay quiet about the program, and they were paid several million dollars to compensate them for the cost of compliance. Inside the NSA the operation was run by a group known as “Special Source Operations,” which sought to recruit American companies to the cause after the September 11 attacks. Everyone from Microsoft to Yahoo! to Apple to Skype participated, some more reluctantly than others. Government intelligence analysts working around any encryption systems could search the companies’ huge databases of information. The smiley-face document, combined with the PRISM revelations, suggested the NSA was actually accessing corporate servers two different ways: the court-ordered way, with all its legal oversight, and via a covert effort overseas, for which no court order was needed but much stealth was required.


pages: 380 words: 118,675

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, buy and hold, call centre, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, deal flow, Douglas Hofstadter, drop ship, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, fulfillment center, game design, housing crisis, invention of movable type, inventory management, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Larry Ellison, late fees, loose coupling, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Rodney Brooks, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Skype, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, zero-sum game

Only then did eBay finally commit to allowing fixed-price sales to share space alongside auctions on the site and in search results on eBay.com.2 Meanwhile, Amazon invested heavily in technology, taking aggressive swings with digital initiatives like the Kindle. Amazon also focused on fixing and improving the efficiency of its fulfillment centers. EBay executives searched for high-growth businesses elsewhere, acquiring the calling service Skype in 2005, the online-ticketing site StubHub in 2007, and a series of classified-advertising websites. But it let its primary site wither. Customers became happier over time with the shopping experience on Amazon and progressively more disgruntled with the challenges of finding items on eBay and dealing with sellers who overcharged for shipping.


pages: 397 words: 110,130

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Carvin, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, context collapse, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, iterative process, James Bridle, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, lifelogging, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patent troll, pattern recognition, pre–internet, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, superconnector, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Vannevar Bush, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize, éminence grise

Many young entrepreneurs I interview these days put off getting an office for a surprisingly long time, regarding it as a drag on resources and even productivity; instead, their employees all work from home or cafés or coworking spaces around town (or around the world), keeping in constant lightweight contact via tools like chat and Skype. “I think the biggest office supplier right now, in terms of being a landlord, is Starbucks,” as Scott Annan once joked to me; a Canadian entrepreneur, Annan ran his software firm Mercury Grove with a staff of twelve, for more than five years without an office, and now runs the startup Accel.io. In a similar fashion, ambient contact is beginning to kill off that earlier technology of contact—the phone call.


pages: 385 words: 119,859

This Is London: Life and Death in the World City by Ben Judah

British Empire, deindustrialization, eurozone crisis, gentrification, high net worth, illegal immigration, mass immigration, multicultural london english, out of africa, period drama, plutocrats, Skype, white flight, young professional

He looks at me: sometimes he wakes up on grey mornings before coming to the shop and asks himself the same question over and over again. Am I depressed? Then he waits in the drizzle for the bus to Neasden. But he is already thinking about her. ‘The worst day in Neasden was when they tell me she marries.’ The villagers back home told him over Skype. He felt a cold flush, then a hot one. Then he sobbed. Now his days come and go. The bus journey comes and goes a hundred times. He wakes up asking himself the same question. It comes and goes. But he keeps on seeing her. The moment he lets his mind wander – at the till, in bed, on the top deck of the bus, staring out into the itchy, sooty, particle-dust haze over the North Circular – he keeps imagining her face flickering in and out of the static in his head.


pages: 384 words: 118,572

The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time by Maria Konnikova

Abraham Maslow, attribution theory, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bluma Zeigarnik, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, endowment effect, epigenetics, Higgs boson, higher-order functions, hindsight bias, lake wobegon effect, lateral thinking, libertarian paternalism, Milgram experiment, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, post-work, publish or perish, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, seminal paper, side project, Skype, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, the scientific method, tulip mania, Walter Mischel

CHAPTER 4: THE ROPE The story of Matthew Brown derives from news sources, along with two interviews conducted by the author in 2015 with individuals purporting to know Brown from childhood—but with shady enough backstories that the author suspects them of being Brown himself, on one occasion hidden behind sunglasses in Skype video, and on another in a series of e-mails that never quite added up. The Cazique of Poyais appears courtesy of several books and news stories, and the Nigerian prince and Cassie Chadwick come, as do many of the older cons in this book, from Jay Robert Nash’s Hustlers and Con Men, an important older account of many original con games.


pages: 309 words: 114,984

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Robert Wachter

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cognitive load, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, Google Glasses, human-factors engineering, hype cycle, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Marc Benioff, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, pets.com, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Hendricks, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra

Rather than isolating themselves from clinical care, some are now relocating their reading stations in clinical areas, such as the ER and the ICU, to be in the line of sight of their clinician colleagues. Others are resurrecting interdisciplinary conferences and training their staff in customer service. Technological solutions that allow radiologists and frontline clinicians to communicate through PACS and the electronic health record are springing up (through programs that create a mash-up of a Skype-like communication tool and a John Madden–style telestrator). Said Paul Chang, the University of Chicago radiologist whose advocacy of PACS so upset his father, “We have to go beyond isolating ourselves and concentrating on messages in a bottle, where we just write a report and are done with it, but instead fostering collaboration.”


pages: 390 words: 114,538

Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet by Charles Arthur

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, pre–internet, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, software patent, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the long tail, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, turn-by-turn navigation, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

Believe me, nothing else could have made it happen except the quiet tyranny of a single screen for everything. Last.fm, Sonos and Elbow for the soundtrack. I wrote this book on an Apple MacBook, did a lot of the searching using Google’s search engine, and made many, many phone calls using (Microsoft-owned) Skype. For listening to music I’d use an iPod Touch and for mobile calls a Google Nexus S smartphone. (I couldn’t balance it with a Zune, because Microsoft never sold them in Europe.) I hope that will suffice for balance. And of course to my marvellous wife, Jojo, who actually does write books again and again, and to Saskia, Harry and Lockie, all inspirational in their own way.


pages: 397 words: 110,222

Habeas Data: Privacy vs. The Rise of Surveillance Tech by Cyrus Farivar

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, call centre, citizen journalism, cloud computing, computer age, connected car, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Golden Gate Park, information security, John Markoff, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lock screen, Lyft, national security letter, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, Port of Oakland, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech worker, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, you are the product, Zimmermann PGP

In fact, the same month that the iPhone was released, Marcus Thomas was promoted and named the assistant director of the Operational Technology Division. By at least early 2008, within the halls of government and the FBI itself, Haynes and Thomas began expounding on what they termed Going Dark. Essentially, the FBI was concerned that if newer tools, ranging from Skype to Xbox Live calls, began offering encryption enabled by default, that there would be no way for law enforcement to access such data. In other words, the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies feared that their ability to surveil suspects and gather data as part of routine investigations was becoming more and more difficult.


pages: 450 words: 113,173

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, computer age, crack epidemic, critical race theory, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Attenborough, desegregation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, Future Shock, George Gilder, global value chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, James Bridle, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, Norman Mailer, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, post-industrial society, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

That the government ran such programs around the world was not altogether surprising. What made the story more serious was the revelation of how widely the spy agencies had cast their net domestically and how closely they worked with Silicon Valley. A program called Prism gave the NSA access to information from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple. The companies’ role in sharing it was never fully clear, but Verizon, for example, was ordered to share with the NSA the records of all American phone calls, domestic and international. Either the United States was monitoring its citizens through a twentieth-century-style secret police operation run as a public-private partnership (the sort of thing Ron Paul’s libertarian followers worried about), or it was singling out a fifth column of mostly immigrant Muslim radicals (the sort of thing the American Civil Liberties Union worried about).


pages: 501 words: 114,888

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

Already, it’s been rolled out in ten countries, including New Zealand, France, and Germany, but its August 2016 debut was critical—as it was the first time we’d seen robotic home delivery. It won’t be the last. A dozen or so different delivery bots are currently entering the market. Starship Technologies, for example, a startup created by Skype founders Janus Friis and Ahti Heinla, has a general-purpose home delivery robot. Right now, the system is an array of cameras and GPS sensors, but soon models will include microphones, speakers, and the ability—via AI-driven natural language processing—to communicate with customers. Since 2016, Starship has carried out fifty thousand deliveries in over one hundred cities in twenty countries.


pages: 573 words: 115,489

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow by Tim Jackson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, biodiversity loss, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, secular stagnation, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, Works Progress Administration, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

A young Indonesian economist asked me if I’d talk with a group of government economists involved in developing a ‘one-hundred-year’ plan for Papua Province. I had my doubts about questioning economic growth in a country with an average per capita income of less than $3,500 and I said so. But the idea of contributing to the discussion of a hundred-year plan was somehow too enticing. So I spent half a day in a Skype conversation with the group. Their premises were simple. We have rich natural resources, an enormous development challenge and a desire to create our own vision of prosperity rather than borrow the broken dream of the West. How can we make that work? At a meeting at the UN in New York in November 2013, I gave a 20-minute keynote talk on the ‘growth dilemma’ to an international audience.


pages: 405 words: 112,470

Together by Vivek H. Murthy, M.D.

Airbnb, call centre, cognitive bias, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, gentrification, gig economy, income inequality, index card, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, medical residency, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, stem cell, TED Talk, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

These poses, in fact, are a form of social withdrawal. They may let us pretend that we’re more accepted, but the pretense only intensifies our loneliness. Not all the effects of social media and technology are negative, of course. Technology can also facilitate better connections. It all depends on how it is designed and used. Platforms like Skype allow students to attend classes across the country and businesspeople to confer with clients and colleagues on other continents. Social media can also allow people who are isolated due to disability or illness, or because they belong to marginalized groups, to find communities with which to connect.


pages: 521 words: 110,286

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together by Philippe Legrain

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean tech, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, digital divide, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, job automation, Jony Ive, labour market flexibility, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, moral hazard, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open immigration, postnationalism / post nation state, purchasing power parity, remote working, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, WeWork, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

Such punchy ads have helped make TransferWise, a fintech start-up that enables people to avoid the rip-off bank charges on foreign currency transactions, famous. The company is the brainchild of two Estonians, Taavet Hinrikus and Kristo Käärmann, who came up with the idea while both working in London. Taavet had worked for Skype in Estonia, so was paid in euros. Kristo was paid in pounds, but had a mortgage in euros back in Estonia. They devised a simple scheme. Each month the pair checked that day’s mid-market rate to find a fair exchange rate. Kristo put pounds into Taavet’s UK bank account and Taavet topped up his friend’s euro account with euros.


pages: 390 words: 115,303

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow

Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business intelligence, Citizen Lab, crowdsourcing, David Strachan, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, forensic accounting, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Live Aid, messenger bag, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Skype

Norm Lubow, a former producer on The Jerry Springer Show and pusher of several dubious celebrity scandals, helped orchestrate the lawsuit and acted as the plaintiff’s intermediary in the press. The plaintiff herself was difficult to reach. One attorney who represented her told me even he sometimes had trouble finding her. Few reporters ever made contact with her. One, Emily Shugerman, said that the woman’s lawyer canceled a planned Skype or FaceTime interview several times, then replaced it with a brief phone call. Shugerman emerged as doubtful as most journalists about the story and the elusive woman at the heart of it. Possibly she was being threatened into retreat. Or possibly she was an invention of the checkered figures around her.


pages: 463 words: 115,103

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

Around 70 percent of the German population live in towns of less than 100,000. It contributes to a sense of a more settled society than in the United Kingdom. Mobility is not, of course, a vice. And it is very different today than in the nineteenth century. Then you seldom saw or spoke to your family again. Now that you can phone, email, skype, WhatsApp, and maybe return home from London at the weekend, moving doesn’t seem as daunting. And a successful, London-based journalist I know who comes from Bury, near Manchester, likes to challenge people who talk too passionately about communitarian values by asking: “So, do you think I should have stayed in Bury, then?”


pages: 414 words: 117,581

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix by Dade Hayes, Dawn Chmielewski

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, borderless world, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, digital rights, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, hockey-stick growth, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, late fees, lockdown, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, Netflix Prize, Osborne effect, performance metric, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, QR code, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, remote working, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech bro, the long tail, the medium is the message, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, vertical integration, WeWork

The Metropolitan Opera streamed vintage performances, and a starry tribute to musical theater legend Stephen Sondheim’s ninetieth birthday took on extra poignance because the performers originally slated to share a physical stage all appeared, isolated but joined, onscreen. “Take me to the world,” its title entreated, and, for two blissful hours, the performers did. TV networks featured on-air personalities and aesthetics heavily influenced by the online realm. Guests occupied murkily lit, Skype-like split screens as they weighed in on the news of the day from their home offices. Morning and late-night shows featured household names broadcasting from their living rooms, with nary a hair or makeup crew member in sight. Quarantine TV felt like one long group FaceTime call. Le stream, c’était nous.


Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison by The Class Ceiling Why it Pays to be Privileged (2019, Policy Press)

affirmative action, Ascot racecourse, Boris Johnson, Bullingdon Club, classic study, critical race theory, discrete time, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Hyperloop, if you build it, they will come, imposter syndrome, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Martin Parr, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, nudge theory, nudge unit, old-boy network, performance metric, psychological pricing, school choice, Skype, starchitect, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, work culture

The ‘Position and salary’ column gives somewhat different information for each case study: for TC, 6TV and Coopers we give the firms’ categorisation of each interviewee’s position; for TC and 6TV we give the salary range associated with that job description, while for Coopers we have self-reported income in ranges, and for actors we simply asked them about how much they earned in a year and report that here. 247 Woman Woman Woman Man Man Claire Cora Daniel Dave Woman Alice Catherine Woman Alex Woman Woman Aisha Bridget Woman Aila Man Woman Aika Bill Gender Name 248 White British White British White British White British White British White British White British White British White Other Black British White British Mixed/ multiple Ethnicity 50s 20s 40s 50s 30s 60s 50s 40s 20s 20s 40s 30s Age Table A.1a: 6TV interviewees FE teacher Teacher Senior civil servant IT technician Senior manager Steelworker Factory machine operator Hospital porter Factory worker Teacher Actor Taxi driver Father’s occupation Office manager Teacher Housewife Admin assistant Secretary Housewife Housewife Cleaner Secretary Police officer Nurse Shop assistant Mother’s occupation Medium Medium High Medium Medium Low Low Low Low Medium Medium Low Inherited economic capital High High High Low Medium Low Low Low Low Medium Medium Low Inherited cultural capital Grammar State Private State State Grammar State State State State State State Schooling Senior manager, £60k–120k Senior manager, £60k–120k Senior manager, £60k–120k HoD/exec, £100k–500k Senior manager, £60k–120k HoD/exec, £100k–500k HoD/exec, £100k–500k Assistant/admin, £21k–60k Prof/tech, £25k–70k Prof/tech, £25k–70k HoD/exec, £100k–500k Prof/tech, £25k–70k Position and salary range Commissioning Commissioning Legal and Commercial Technical and Strategy Technical and Strategy HR, Finance, Estates Commissioning Commissioning Legal and Commercial Marketing and Communications HR, Finance, Estates Legal and Commercial Department London London London London London London London London Glasgow London London London Interview location Steady Accelerated Steady Steady Steady Steady Steady Impeded Impeded Steady Accelerated Steady Career trajectory The Class Ceiling Woman Woman Man Woman Kate Katie Keir Kerry Woman Holly Man Woman Hannah Josh Man George Man Woman Gemma Javid Woman Esme Man Man Dean James Gender Name 249 White Other White British White British White British White British Indian British White Other Chinese British Black British White British White British White Other White Other Ethnicity 60s 50s 50s 20s 40s 20s 60s 20s 50s 30s 30s 30s 30s Age Senior civil servant Scientist Dentist N/A Headteacher Factory worker Medium-size business owner Cook Plasterer Barman Labourer Builder Shopkeeper Father’s occupation Housewife Housewife Housewife Cleaner Care worker Factory worker Housewife Waitress Hairdresser Admin assistant Cleaner Dressmaker Shop assistant Mother’s occupation High High High Low Medium Low High Low Medium Low Low Medium Medium Inherited economic capital High Medium Medium Medium High Low High Medium Low Low Low Low Low Inherited cultural capital Private State Private Grammar Private State Private State State Private State State State Schooling HoD/exec, £100k–500k Senior manager, £60k–120k Manager, £35k–80k Senior manager, £60k–120k HoD/exec, £100k–500k Senior manager, £60k–120k HoD/exec, £100k–500k Assistant/admin, £21k–60k Manager, £35k–80k Prof/tech, £25k–70k Prof/tech, £25k–70k Prof/tech, £25k–70k Senior manager, £60k–120k Position and salary range Commissioning Technical and Strategy Technical and Strategy Marketing and Communications Commissioning Sales, Digital, Trading Commissioning Commissioning HR, Finance, Estates Commissioning HR, Finance, Estates Technical and Strategy Sales, Digital, Trading Department London London London London London London London London London London London London London Interview location Steady Steady Steady Steady Accelerated Impeded Accelerated Impeded Impeded Steady Steady Steady Steady Career trajectory Methodological appendix Woman Woman Man Man Woman Mary Michael Mo Monica Woman Lizzie Martha Man Leon Man Woman Kylie Mark Man Kieran Woman Man Kevin Maisie Gender Name 250 White British Mixed/ multiple White British Black British White British White British White British White British White British White British White British White Other Ethnicity 30s 20s 40s 20s 40s 30s 30s 40s 20s 40s 20s 50s Age Teacher Taxi driver University lecturer N/A Headteacher Scientist N/A Professor Soldier Factory worker Labourer Large business owner Father’s occupation Table A.1a: 6TV interviewees (continued) Office manager Shop assistant Pharmacist Catering assistant Social worker Teacher Home help Housewife Shop assistant Primary school teacher N/A Senior business manager Mother’s occupation Medium Medium High Low Medium High Low High Low Medium Low High Inherited economic capital Medium Low High Low High High Low High Low Medium Low High Inherited cultural capital State Private State State Private Private State Private State Private State Private Schooling Senior manager, £60k–120k Prof/tech, £25k–70k Senior manager, £60k–120k Prof/tech, £25k–70k HoD/exec, £100k–500k Senior manager, £60k–120k Manager, £35k–80k HoD/exec, £100k–500k Manager, £35k–80k Senior manager, £60k–120k Assistant/admin, £21k–60k Senior manager, £60k–120k Position and salary range Commissioning HR, Finance, Estates Commissioning HR, Finance, Estates Commissioning Commissioning HR, Finance, Estates Commissioning Sales, Digital, Trading Sales, Digital, Trading Commissioning Commissioning Department London London London London London London London London Glasgow London London London Interview location Steady Steady Steady Impeded Steady Accelerated Steady Accelerated Steady Steady Impeded Accelerated Career trajectory The Class Ceiling Woman Woman Man Sophie Suzy Theo Woman Rachel Man Man Peter Sam Woman Patricia Woman Man Nish Ruth Man Nigel Man Woman Natalia Roger Gender Name 251 White British Black British White British White British White British White Other White British White British White British Asian British White British Black British Ethnicity 30s 40s 30s 30s 50s 50s 40s 30s 40s 50s 40s 20s Age Farmer Unemployed Senior manager Plumber Large business owner Senior manager Professor Teacher Managing director Architect Management consultant N/A Father’s occupation Secretary Waitress Translator Missing data Teacher Housewife Editor Radiographer Teacher Nurse Secretary Porter Mother’s occupation Medium Low High Low High Medium High Medium Medium High High Low Inherited economic capital Low Low High Low Medium High High Medium Medium High High Low Inherited cultural capital State State Private State Private Private State State Private State Private State Schooling Manager, £35k–80k Manager, £35k–80k Senior manager, £60k–120k Prof/tech, £25k–70k Manager, £35k–80k HoD/exec, £100k–500k Senior manager, £60k–120k Senior manager, £60k–120k HoD/exec, £100k–500k HoD/exec, £100k–500k HoD/exec, £100k–500k Assistant/admin, £21k–60k Position and salary range Technical and Strategy HR, Finance, Estates Commissioning HR, Finance, Estates Marketing and Communications Legal and Commercial Commissioning Marketing and Communications Technical and Strategy Legal and Commercial Marketing and Communications Commissioning Department Glasgow London London Glasgow London London London London London London London London Interview location Steady Impeded Accelerated Steady Steady Accelerated Accelerated Accelerated Steady Accelerated Accelerated Impeded Career trajectory Methodological appendix Man Man Man Man Woman Man Colin Eugene Fraser George Georgia Giles Woman Bev Man Woman Beth Woman Man Benedict Christopher Man Ben Charlotte Woman Barbara Woman Man Ally Cathy Gender Name 252 White British White British White British White Other White British White British White British White British White British White British White British White British White British White British White British Ethnicity 50s 20s 20s 20s 20s 40s 20s 20s 40s 30s 30s 20s 60s 20s 20s Age Doctor Missing Missing Missing Lawyer Tax inspector Missing Missing Legal executive Builder/estate agent Shop owner Missing Carpenter Missing Missing Father’s occupation Table A.1b: Turner Clarke interviewees Doctor Missing Missing Missing Marketing executive Middle manager Missing Missing Secretary Secretary Housewife Missing Shop assistant Missing Missing Mother’s occupation High Missing Missing Missing High Medium Missing Missing Medium Low Medium Missing Low Missing Missing Inherited economic capital High Missing Missing Missing High Medium Missing Missing Medium Low Low Missing Low Missing Missing Inherited cultural capital Private Private State State Private Private State State Grammar State State State State Private State Schooling Partner, £100k–500k Trainee, £25k–50k Trainee, £25k–50k Trainee, £25k–50k Trainee, £25k–50k Partner, £100k–500k Trainee, £25k–50k Trainee, £25k–50k Partner, £100k–500k Partner, £100k–500k Director, £75k–125k Trainee, £25k–50k Partner, £100k–500k Trainee, £25k–50k Trainee, £25k–50k Position and salary range Advisory Advisory Audit Audit Tax Audit Tax Tax Audit Advisory Advisory Audit Advisory Advisory Tax Department London London London London London St Albans London London London London London London London London Interview location Accelerated Steady Steady Steady Steady Accelerated Steady Steady Steady Impeded Impeded Steady Impeded Steady Steady Career trajectory The Class Ceiling Gender Man Woman Woman Man Woman Man Woman Woman Woman Man Man Woman Woman Woman Name Graham Hayley Imogen James Jane Jason Jennifer Jenny 253 Jess Joe Joshua Judy Karen Lola White British White British White British Black British White British White British Pakistani British Chinese British White Other White British White British White British Black British White British Ethnicity 50s 40s 40s 20s 40s 50s 20s 20s 40s 50s 40s 20s 20s 40s Age Toolmaker University professor Finance manager Hotel manager Environmental health officer Factory worker Taxi driver Missing Teacher Accountant Politician Missing Missing Actor Father’s occupation Seamstress Housewife Housewife HR manager Teacher Cleaner Housewife Missing Teacher Nurse Housewife Missing Missing Actor Mother’s occupation Medium High High Medium Medium Low Medium Missing Medium High High Missing Missing High Inherited economic capital Low High Medium Medium Medium Low Low Missing Medium High High Missing Missing High Inherited cultural capital State State Grammar Private Private State State State State Private State Private State Private Schooling Partner, £100k–500k Partner, £100k–500k Partner, £100k–500k Trainee, £25k–50k Partner, £100k–500k Partner, £100k–500k Trainee, £25k–50k Trainee, £25k–50k Partner, £100k–500k Partner, £100k–500k Partner, £100k–500k Trainee, £25k–50k Trainee, £25k–50k Partner, £100k–500k Position and salary range Audit Support Advisory Audit Tax Tax Tax Advisory Audit Advisory Advisory Advisory Tax Audit Department London Milton Keynes London London Milton Keynes Cardiff London London Manchester Manchester Cardiff London London London Interview location Impeded Steady Accelerated Steady Steady Impeded Impeded Steady Impeded Accelerated Accelerated Steady Steady Accelerated Career trajectory Methodological appendix Man Woman Man Man Man Man Woman Rebecca Robert Roger Terry Will Yasmine Man Nigel Raymond Man Neil Man Man Matthew Philip Man Martina Man Man Martin Paul Gender Name 254 White British White British White British White British White British White British White British White British White British White British White British White British White British White British Ethnicity 20s 20s 20s 50s 40s 20s 40s 40s 50s 30s 30s 40s 20s 40s Age Missing Doctor Missing Middle manager Senior manager IT manager Electrician Gardener Salesman Senior manager Senior manager Engineer Barman Large business owner Father’s occupation Missing Lawyer Missing Secretary Office manager Nurse Housewife Shop assistant Housewife Housewife Middle Manager Shop owner Cook Housewife Mother’s occupation Table A.1b: Turner Clarke interviewees (continued) Missing High Missing Medium High High Low Low Low High High Medium Low High Inherited economic capital Missing High Missing Medium Medium High Low Low Low High High Medium Low High Inherited cultural capital State Private State Grammar Grammar State State State Grammar Private State State State Private Schooling Trainee, £25k–50k Trainee, £25k–50k Trainee, £25k–50k Partner, £100k–500k Partner, £100k–500k Trainee, £25k–50k Partner, £100k–500k Partner, £100k–500k Partner, £100k–500k Partner, £100k–500k Partner, £100k–500k Partner, £100k–500k Trainee, £25k–50k Partner, £100k–500k Position and salary range Tax Advisory Audit Advisory Advisory Advisory Audit Advisory Advisory Advisory Audit Tax Advisory Audit Department London London London London London Leicester Cambridge Manchester Birmingham London Milton Keynes Manchester Milton Keynes Leicester Interview location Steady Accelerated Steady Steady Accelerated Accelerated Impeded Impeded Impeded Accelerated Accelerated Steady Impeded Accelerated Career trajectory The Class Ceiling Gender Woman Man Woman Man Man Man Woman Man Woman Woman Man Man Woman Man Man Woman Woman Name Abigail Aiden Alaina Andy Archie Brian Carrie Carter Charlotte Daisy 255 Dani Daniel Deborah Derek Douglas Ella Ellie White British White British White British White British Black British White British Asian (mixed) White British White British White British White British Black British White British White British White British White British White British Ethnicity 30s 40s 30s 50s 40s 20s 30s 30s 30s 50s 30s 40s 50s 20s 20s 20s 30s Age Table A.1c: Actors interviewees Headteacher Draughtsman Small business owner Labourer Office clerk Technician Teacher Teacher N/A Engineer Architect N/A Farmer Doctor Chef Unemployed N/A Father’s occupation Senior manager Hairdresser Housewife Secretary Shop assistant Admin assistant Teacher Teacher Civil servant Housewife Housewife Singer Housewife Doctor Admin assistant Care assistant Teacher Mother’s occupation High Medium Medium Low Low Low Medium Medium Medium Medium High Low Medium Medium Low Low Medium Inherited economic capital High Low Medium Low Low Low High High High Medium High Medium Low High Low Low High Inherited cultural capital State State Private State State State Private State Grammar Grammar Private State State State State State State Schooling £20k £12k £18k £27k £8k Negligible £36k Missing £30k £12k £18k £10k Negligible Missing £15k £60k £16.5k Salary Birmingham London London London Newcastle London London London London London London London London London London London London Interview location Steady Impeded Steady Impeded Impeded Impeded Accelerated Steady Steady Steady Steady Steady Impeded Steady Steady Steady/ impeded Steady Career trajectory Methodological appendix Woman Man Man Woman Man Woman Leon Lewis Lily Lloyd Lola Woman Jane Man Man Jack Leah Woman Isabelle John Woman Imogen Woman Woman Grace Man Man Fraser Joan Woman Faith Jim Gender Name 256 White British White British Chinese British White British White British Black British Chinese British White British White British White British White British White British Asian (mixed) White British White British Mixed/multiple Ethnicity 40s 40s 50s 40s 30s 20s 40s 30s 50s 40s 30s 20s 30s 30s 20s 40s Age N/A Mechanic Medium-size business owner Mechanical engineer Teacher Engineer Teacher Medium-sized business owner Van driver Office clerk Musician Kitchen fitter Actuary Builder Maintenance man Priest Father’s occupation Table A.1c: Actors interviewees (continued) Unemployed Care assistant Primary school teacher Cleaner Secretary Teacher Teacher Teacher Barman Office clerk Arts administrator Sales buyer Housewife Housewife Admin assistant Social worker Mother’s occupation Low Low Medium Medium Medium High Medium High Low Medium Medium Medium High Medium Medium Low Inherited economic capital Low Low Medium Low High Medium Medium Medium Low Low High Medium High Low Low Low Inherited cultural capital State State State State State Private State Grammar State State State Grammar Private State State State Schooling Missing £17k £34k £4k £25k Missing £20k Negligible £35k £100k–200k £40k £20k £24k–27k £27k Negligible £20k Salary Glasgow London London London London London London London London Glasgow Edinburgh London London Liverpool London London Interview location Impeded Steady Steady Steady Steady Steady Steady Impeded Impeded Accelerated Accelerated Steady Steady Steady Impeded Impeded Career trajectory The Class Ceiling Man Man Ted Tommy Man Olly Woman Man Nathan Sophie Woman Mollie Man Woman Millie Man Woman Mia Sandy Man Mason Ray Man Mark M Woman Lucy Peter Gender Name 257 White British White British White British White British White British White British White British White British White British White British White British White British White British White British Ethnicity 30s 50s 30s 20s 20s 20s 30s 40s 30s 50s 40s 40s Teens 20s Age Large business owner Cleric Labourer Senior manager N/A Cleric Actor Actor Large business owner Stockbroker Electrician Factory worker Company director Labourer Father’s occupation Housewife Primary school teacher Housewife Housewife Care worker Barrister Actor Actor Office manager Education manager Housewife Factory worker Marketing assistant Housewife Mother’s occupation High Medium Low High Low Medium High High High Medium Medium Low High Low Inherited economic capital High Medium Low High Low Medium High High High Medium Low Low Medium Medium Inherited cultural capital Private Grammar State Private State Grammar Private Private Private State State State State State Schooling £40k £20k Negligible £24k Negligible £14k £35k £50k £45k £12k–20k £30k Missing £12k–15k Negligible Salary London Skype Manchester London London London London London London Portsmouth London London London Liverpool Interview location Accelerated Steady Impeded Accelerated Impeded Steady Accelerated Accelerated Accelerated Steady Steady/ impeded Steady Steady Impeded Career trajectory Methodological appendix Man Man Man Man Man Connor Daffyd Dan David Woman Christine Colm Woman Anna Man Man Amir Clive Man Amin Woman Man Alan Claire Gender Name 258 White British White British White British White British White other White British White British White British White Other British Pakistani British Pakistani White British Ethnicity 40s 20s 20s 20s 20s 40s 30s 30s 20s 20s 30s 30s Age Potter Engineer Purchasing manager Sales representative Engineer Architect IT manager Retail manager Solicitor Unemployed Taxi driver Architect Father’s occupation Table A.1d: Coopers interviewees Primary school teacher Small business owner Retail manager Physiotherapist Nurse Shop manager Headteacher Engineer Nurse Housewife Housewife Osteopath Mother’s occupation Medium High Medium Medium Medium High High Medium Medium Low Low High Inherited economic capital Medium High Medium Medium Medium Medium Medium Medium Medium Medium Low High Inherited cultural capital State State State State State State State State State State State Private Schooling Partner, £60k+ Architectural Assistant, up to £24,999 Architectural Assistant, £25k–39,999 Architectural Assistant, £25k–39,999 Architectural Assistant, £25k–39,999 Partner, £60k+ Architect, £25k–39,999 Office Team, £40k–59,999 Architectural Assistant, £25k–39,999 Architectural Assistant, prefer not to say Partner, £60k+ Associate, £40k–59,999 Position and salary category London London London London London London London London London London London London Interview location Steady Steady Accelerated Steady Steady Steady Steady Steady Steady Steady Accelerated Accelerated Career trajectory The Class Ceiling Woman Man Man Kirsten Kristof Luke Man Gary Man Woman Gabriella John Woman Fran Woman Woman Finola Jessica Woman Elena Woman Man Eamon Helen Gender Name 259 White British White Other White Other White British White British Mixed Other White British White Other White Other White Other White Other White Other Ethnicity 20s 40s 20s 40s 20s 20s 50+ 20s 20s 20s 30s 30s Age Hotel manager Engineer Hotel manager Local authority manager Craftsman Doctor Mason Senior company manager Company director Business owner – construction Engineer Sales representative Father’s occupation HR manager Secretary Public relations manager Charity administration Local authority manager Social worker Canteen worker Housewife Receptionist Housewife Physiotherapist Primary school teacher Mother’s occupation Medium Medium High Medium High High Low High High Medium High Medium Inherited economic capital Medium Medium Medium Medium Medium Medium Medium High Medium Medium Medium Medium Inherited cultural capital State State Private State Private Private State Private State State State State Schooling Architect, £25k–39,999 Architect, £40k–59,999 Architectural Assistant, £25k–39,999 Associate, £60k+ Architectural Assistant, up to £24,999 Office Team, up to £24,999 Partner, £60k+ Architectural Assistant, £25k–39,999 Architect, £25k–39,999 Architectural Assistant, £25k–39,999 Architectural Assistant, £25k–39,999 Associate, £40k–59,999 Position and salary category London London London London London London London London London London London London Interview location Steady Impeded Steady Steady Steady Steady Steady Steady Impeded Steady Steady Steady Career trajectory Methodological appendix Woman Woman Man Man Woman Sarah Seamus Simon Sofia Man Paul Sara Man Paolo Woman Man Mike Pauline Man Miguel Woman Man Martin Paula Gender Name 260 White Other White British White Other White Other Black African White British White Other White British White Other White British White Other White British Ethnicity 30s 30s 20s 40s 20s 20s 30s 40s 20s 40s 40s 20s Age Business owner Architect Public-sector senior manager Engineer Dentist Entrepreneur Clerical Engineer Lawyer Architect Doctor Graphic designer Father’s occupation Table A.1d: Coopers interviewees (continued) Teacher Civil servant Physiotherapist Personal assistant Housewife Entrepreneur Clerical Researcher Nurse Canteen worker Housewife Local authority manager Mother’s occupation High High Medium High Medium Medium Medium Medium High Medium High Medium Inherited economic capital Medium High Medium Medium Medium Medium Medium Medium Medium Medium Medium Medium Inherited cultural capital State State State Private State State Private State State State State State Schooling Associate, £40k–59,999 Associate Partner, £40k–59,999 Architectural Assistant, £25k–39,999 Associate, £60k+ Architect, £25k–39,999 Architectural Assistant, £25k–39,999 Associate, £40k–59,999 Partner, £60k+ Architectural Assistant, £25k–39,999 Partner, £60k+ Associate, £40k–59,999 Architectural Assistant, £25k–39,999 Position and salary category London London London London London London London London London London London London Interview location Impeded Steady Steady Impeded Steady Steady Impeded Steady Steady Impeded Steady Accelerated Career trajectory The Class Ceiling Methodological appendix Check your privilege!


pages: 495 words: 114,451

Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs by Juli Berwald

23andMe, 3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, George Floyd, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lateral thinking, Maui Hawaii, microbiome, mouse model, ocean acidification, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Skype, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, TED Talk, the scientific method, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons

Misha had a years-long collaboration with Line Bay, the scientist at the Reef Futures meeting who had shown the giant mind-map of what it would take to breed corals for a future Great Barrier Reef, and put me in touch with her. She had offered to give me a tour of SeaSim, where she oversees the coral genetics, while I was in Australia. Instead, we met by Skype. Due to the time difference, she drank a cup of morning coffee while I contemplated pouring a glass of wine. With her blond bob and stylish glasses, Line spoke with a measured yet warm manner that encapsulated the seriousness of her position and the optimism required to do her work. Laying out the range of research questions under her purview, she said, “Can we identify genetic markers that underpin heat and tolerance?


The Secret World: A History of Intelligence by Christopher Andrew

Able Archer 83, active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francisco Pizarro, Google Earth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Julian Assange, Khyber Pass, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Skype, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, two and twenty, union organizing, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, WikiLeaks, éminence grise

The CIA’s director, Mike Pompeo, claimed in June 2017 that leaking of official secrets has ‘accelerated’, thanks in large part to ‘the worship of Edward Snowden’.87 Like other senior US intelligence officers, Pompeo also claims that the Snowden revelations have done serious damage to US SIGINT operations: ‘In fact, a colleague of ours at NSA recently explained [in spring 2017] that more than a thousand foreign targets – people, groups, organizations – more than a thousand of them changed or tried to change how they communicated as a result of the Snowden disclosures. That number is staggering.’88 A terrorist group which, to take a hypothetical example, discovers from the Snowden material that its phones and emails can be intercepted, but not Skype, inevitably switches to Skype when planning its next operation.89 Intelligence whistle-blowing is still frequently seen in too narrow and short-term a perspective. It has contributed most to understanding the roles of intelligence communities not in the West but in authoritarian regimes. Whistleblowers have greatly enhanced, arguably transformed, our knowledge of, notably, KGB operations in the Cold War, the prison camps run by North Korean state security, and the Tiananmen Square massacre of Chinese pro-democracy campaigners.

., 412, 413 Shaw, Byam, 553, 554 Shebarshin, Leonid, 698 Sheffy, Yigal, 565 Shelepin, Aleksandr, 689, 694 Sher Ali, Afghan Amir, 418, 419 Shin Bet (Israeli domestic security service), 18, 732 Short, General Walter, 634 Shpigelglass, Sergei, 620 Shrewsbury, Earl (later Duke) of, 258 Shuisky, Prince Andrei Mikhailovich, 146 Sibylline Books (Libri Sibyllini), 43–4, 44† Sicinnus (Greek double-agent), 29–30 Sick, Gary, 701 Siebert, Benno von, 489–90 ‘Siege of Sidney Street’ (1910), 560 signals intelligence (SIGINT) Baldwin government tightens security procedures, 582–3 British–American SIGINT accords (1946/48), 670–71, 673–4, 734–5 Chiffrierabteilung (code department) of OKW, 639, 644 and colonial Government of India, 6* European innovation in sixteenth century, 127 FDR’s Second World War neglect of, 610 and First World War, 6–7 in First World War Middle East, 564–5 French pre-First World War mishandling of, 483–5 German establishment of agency (First World War), 497–8, 502 Göring’s Forschungsamt, 644 Lincoln’s interest in, 411–12 MI-8 (first specialized US agency), 569 neglect of in studies of Cold War, 8, 671–3 Pers Z at Foreign Ministry, 644 public recognition by heads of state, 206, 206‡ Richelieu founds cabinet noir, 5, 210–11 Russia as pre-First World War world leaders, 470, 485, 497 and SD (intelligence arm of Nazi SS), 644 and Second World War, 7–8, 169 Signal Security Agency (SSA), 642, 643–4 and Soviet S&T espionage, 692 UK/US Second World War alliance, 7, 8, 169, 566–7, 608, 609, 641–4 US navy Code and Signal Section (later OP-20-G), 610, 611–12, 628–30, 631–3, 634, 637, 643 US reorganization after Pearl Harbor, 637 US Signal Intelligence Service (SIS), 610–12, 627, 628–30, 631–3, 634, 637, 645 see also cryptanalysis; message interception Sihanouk, Prince, 707 Silber (Vienna police chief), 364, 365 Simonetta, Francesco (Cicco), 127* Simonides of Ceos, 29 Simpson, Sir James, 405, 406 Sims, Admiral (US navy), 543 Sinan Pasha, Grand Admiral, 123 Sinclair, Admiral Sir Hugh ‘Quex’, 575*, 578, 614 Sinelobov, Alexei, 597 Sipiagin, S. N., 437 Sipido, Jean-Baptiste, 433 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 623–4 Sixtus IV, Pope, 111 Sixtus V, Pope, 138 Skeres, Nicholas, 187–8 Skinner, Dr Thomas, 228–9 Skinner, Quentin, 10 Skyfall (Bond film), 27 Skype, 750 Slutsky, Abram, 601, 620 Small, Albert W., 611 Smith, F. E., 532–3 Smith, Captain John, 196 Smolensk, Battle of (16 August 1812), 359 ‘Snettisham Treasure’, 74* Snowden, Edward, 746–7, 748, 749, 750 Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in USA, 599, 624–5 Socialist-Revolutionary (SR) Party in Russia, 437–9 Société des Saisons (Blanqui’s secret society), 378–9, 383 Sokollu Pasha, Mehmed, 123–4, 129 Solomatin, Boris Aleksandrovich, 685–6 Somer, John, 162–3, 162†, 166, 167 Somers, Abbé Michael, 321, 323 the Somme, Battle of (1916), 508, 520, 528, 530–31, 532–3 Sophia of Hanover, 264 Sorensen, Theodore, 680 Sorge, Richard, 593–4, 626, 627 Soro, Giovanni, 127, 128, 129, 137 Souers, Admiral Sidney W., 676 Soult, Marshal Nicolas, 403 ‘South Sea Bubble’ (1720), 272 Southwick, George, 193 Soviet Bloc in Europe covert action as central to establishment of, 680 disintegration of, 705 dissident movements within, 699, 712, 751 Hungarian Uprising (1956), 699 and operation RYAN, 695–6 Prague Spring (1968), 699, 712, 751 repressive role of intelligence, 698–9 security services of, 680–81 Solidarity movement in Poland, 699 Soviet Union August 1991 coup, 699–700, 704 Bedell Smith’s Custine comparisons, 377–8 breaks Japanese PURPLE code, 627, 628 British interwar decrypts, 577–80, 583–4, 616–17 Cambridge spy ring, 183, 593, 621, 649–51, 661–2, 673, 711 censorship and media control, 110 Cheka founded, 7, 110–11 Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), 556, 557 ‘Curzon ultimatum’ to, 579–80 diplomatic relations with USA (1933), 586 disintegration of, 700, 704–7, 708–9 dissidents’ struggle for human rights, 712 early Cold War ‘Zionist conspirators’, 680–81 ‘envoys’ plot (1918), 559–60, 561 Fifth Directorate, 627–8 foreign embassies in Moscow, 674–5, 749 German invasion of (BARBAROSSA, 22 June 1941), 326*, 627 Germany embassy (from April 1918), 557–8 Great Patriotic War, 628 Left Socialist Revolutionaries (LSRs), 557–8 loss of intelligence operatives to purges, 621, 623 military technology gained through S&T, 691–3 Moscow as new capital city, 556 operation RYAN (early 1980s), 695–8, 705–6, 713–14 penetration of Roosevelt administration, 662–3, 669, 673 purges of intelligence operatives, 620 Red Terror, 556–7, 558–9, 573–4 Stalinist show trials, 107, 108, 600, 601, 620, 667 Stalin’s Great Terror (1936–8), 104, 105, 107–8, 141, 143, 318, 326*, 594–602, 620–21, 711, 751, 752 UK breaks off diplomatic relations (1927), 583–4, 616–17 ULTRA intelligence given to by Cairncross, 649 US embassy in Moscow, 592–3, 662, 674–5 wartime ethnic cleansing by intelligence agencies, 654–5 see also Cheka (later GPU, OGPU, NKVD, KGB); KGB; Lenin; Stalin, Joseph Sovin, Alexander Grigoryevich, 152 Spaatz, General Carl, 741 Spain Anglo-Spanish peace treaty (1604), 192, 195 cipher security as poor, 139–40 Council of State, 195, 196, 202 Drake attacks Cádiz harbour (April 1587), 180–81, 184 Dutch Revolt, 114, 137, 139–40, 166–70 English agents working for, 183–4, 200, 203 failure of Protestantism in, 115, 115* Ferdinand and Isabella as joint rulers, 111, 112–13 First World War neutrality, 519 and French Wars of Religion, 137, 138 inferiority in foreign intelligence under Philip II, 137 intelligence in seventeenth century, 195, 196–201, 202–3, 207–9, 210, 211–12 James I declares war on (1624), 204, 207 Jewish population in Middle Ages, 111–13 Joseph Bonaparte as king, 344, 348, 349–52 loss of Portugal (1640), 211 Moorish (Muslim) kingdoms, 111 Nootka Sound crisis, 313–14 war with France (from 1635), 211–12 Spanish–American War (1898), 116, 423–4 Spanish Armada (1588), 1, 161, 180–83, 184 Spanish Inquisition, 4, 111–13, 115, 116, 130 Spanish Succession, War of the (1702–14), 261–7, 268 Special Operations Executive (SOE), 338†, 609, 646 creation of (1940), 619 SIS takes over, 678 Spencer, Earl (First Lord of the Admiralty), 333 Speransky, Mikhail, 355 spice trade, 119, 121 spies and agents Alexander I’s in Paris, 354–5, 357 American Revolutionary War, 294–8, 299–301, 302–8, 309–11 in ancient China, 56* in ancient Indian culture, 60–62, 63–4 anti-Nazi ‘Lucy Ring’ in Switzerland, 649 in Aztec Empire, 133, 135 Aphra Behn, 235, 236, 237, 303† Boudicca’s, 74–5 British guaranteed indefinite anonymity, 343–4 British in Jacobite ranks (1740s/50s), 283, 284–5 British in Napoleonic France, 342 British in revolutionary France, 313–14, 314*, 317–21, 323–4 British–American in Cold War GRU/KGB, 683, 696–8 buried in Westminster Abbey, 237, 237‡, 303, 303† Byzantine, 93, 95–6 Cadogan’s network in France, 262 caliphs’ use of, 96, 97 Cambridge spy ring, 183, 593, 621, 649–51, 661–2, 673, 711 Carthaginian, 42 of Sir Robert Cecil, 190, 193 against Charles I’s regicides, 219, 221 Chinese view of, 58, 59, 60 Cold War motivation as money not ideology, 686–7 at Congress of Vienna, 363, 364–6 Culper spy ring (set up 1778), 305 of early Caliphate armies, 94, 95 English agents working for Spain, 183–4, 200, 203 of English Commonwealth, 220–21 escapes of Soviet agents due to Philby, 673, 749 FDR’s gentlemen spies (The Room/Club), 605–6, 607–8 in First World War German shipyards, 526–7 Fouché’s agent network, 342 Frederick the Great’s categories of, 286–7 of French Committee of Public Safety, 322, 323 French word espionnage, 279 frumentarii in Roman world, 76–7 Gaunt’s Czech-American ring, 523 German naval in Britain, 454 Boris Godunov’s, 155, 156 history of spy scares before wars, 107, 476 and Hundred Years War, 107*, 159, 159*, 160, 476 illegals, 593–4, 622, 626, 665, 666, 673, 681–2, 699, 714–15, 751 Jacobite network, 269, 270, 283, 284 Japanese at Port Arthur, 466, 467 Judas Iscariot, 2, 24–5 KGB in Cold War USA, 684–7, 709, 711 La Dame Blanche in First World War Belgium, 562, 571–2 in London Corresponding Society (LCS), 327–9 and Karl Marx, 389–91, 392–3, 397–9 MI5’s in German embassy (late 1930s), 612–13, 614, 615 Moses’ in Canaan, 1–2, 3, 13, 14–16, 17–18, 19 Muhammad’s, 87–8, 89–90, 91, 92 of the Okhrana, 425–6, 437–41, 457 Ottoman, 120, 120†, 123 parliamentary in Civil War, 216–18 pre-Tudor England, 159–60 royalist in Civil War, 214–15 royalist émigrés during French Revolution, 323–4 Russian in Austria, 486 selling to highest bidder, 124–5 during Seven Years War (1756–63), 288–9 of seventeenth-century Spain, 198–200, 207 Soviet, 299, 593–4, 625 Soviet in foreign embassies, 591–2, 627–8, 749 Soviet in Nazi Germany, 593–4, 625 Soviet penetration of MANHATTAN Project, 664–8, 669, 673, 691 Stafford as Spanish agent (1580s), 183–4 Steinhauer’s German agents in Britain, 475, 477, 479, 480–81, 495–6 Sun Tzu’s five types of, 55 surveillance of émigré revolutionaries, 388, 389–91, 392–4 and system of resident ambassadors, 121–2, 149–50, 154, 155–6 Thurloe’s in The Hague, 227 Van Lew’s network in Richmond, Virginia, 413–14 Venetian, 119–20, 121, 122, 124, 125–6, 207 Waldegrave’s in France, 281, 282 of Walsingham, 151, 154, 154†, 160, 161, 165–6, 171–4, 175–6, 180–86 Wellington’s use of, 345–7 William III’s at Saint-Germain-enLaye, 256–7, 259 Spina, Carlos, 203 Spinola, Andrea, 121 Spiridonova, Maria, 557 Spring Rice, Cecil, 456–7, 522, 534, 548, 567 Spurinna (Caesar’s haruspex), 51–2, 52* spy fiction, 431 James Bond, 2, 27, 483 James Fenimore Cooper: The Spy, 310–11 Edwardian spy novelists, 472–3, 474, 476 spy satellites, 683, 707 Sri Lanka, 721 SS (Nazi Schutzstaffel), 142, 644, 645, 646, 648, 656 St Albans, 75 St Bernard of Clairvaux, 101 St Cyprian, 108 St Dominic Guzman, 103–4 St John, Henry, 266 Stadion, Johann von, 357 Stafford, Sir Edward, 183–4 Stalin, Joseph as admirer of Ivan the Terrible, 141, 145 as admirer of Skuratov, 143 and assassination of enemies, 62–3 and Churchill, 626, 650 constant fear of conspiracies, 146, 152, 594, 598–602, 619–20, 625–6, 680–82 death of (5 March 1953), 682 deceived by police spies (early 1917), 393 enthusiasm for intelligence, 7, 591, 603 fears Japanese attack, 589–90, 591, 627 Great Terror (1936–8), 104, 105, 107–8, 141, 143, 318, 326*, 594–602, 620–21, 711, 751, 752 ignores BARBAROSSA intelligence, 625–7 Kremlin Plot to kill, 595–7 marshal’s uniform of, 648 move to paranoia in mid-1930s, 594–5, 596, 597, 598–602, 619–20, 680–82 obsession with Trotsky, 598–600, 621–5, 680, 743 Okhrana surveillance of, 7, 441–2, 603 as own intelligence analyst, 594 personal archive, 441, 445 and personal security, 594–5 plans for Tito’s assassination, 681–2 post-war imaginary enemies, 680–82 Stalingrad, 646, 647–8, 656, 664 Standen, Anthony (alias Pompeo Pellegrini), 161, 180–81, 182, 185–6, 188* Standen, Baron von, 144, 145 Stanley, Venetia, 511 Stanton, Edwin M., 411* Stark, Admiral Harold R.


pages: 481 words: 125,946

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

We may eventually have to worry about all-powerful machine intelligence. But first we need to worry about putting machines in charge of decisions they don’t have the intelligence to make. WE NEED TO DO OUR HOMEWORK JAAN TALLINN Cofounder, Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, Future of Life Institute; founding engineer, Skype, Kazaa Six months before the first nuclear test, the Manhattan Project scientists prepared a report called LA-602. It investigated the chances of nuclear detonation having a runaway effect and destroying the Earth by burning up the atmosphere. This was probably the first time scientists performed an analysis to predict whether humanity would perish as a result of a new technological capability—the first piece of existential-risk research.


pages: 312 words: 93,504

Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia by Dariusz Jemielniak

Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), citation needed, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, Debian, deskilling, digital Maoism, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, Google Glasses, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Menlo Park, moral hazard, online collectivism, pirate software, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, Wikivoyage, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Additionally, the book relies on reflexive qualitative interviews (Alvesson, 2003), a method often accompanying observation (Darlington & Scott, 2003). Twenty-six interviews were conducted with Polish and English Wikipedia administrators (including five stewards and representatives of Wikimedia chapters). Five Wikimedia Foundation employees were also interviewed. All interviews were oral, either face to face or by Skype, except two that were conducted via text chat. Each lasted for about an hour and was unstructured (Whyte & Whyte, 1984). Transcripts of the interviews were prepared following the ethnomethodological procedure (Silverman, 2005): with maximal accuracy to the actual conversation, including pauses and mistakes.


pages: 421 words: 125,417

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey Sachs

agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business process, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, energy security, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Global Witness, Haber-Bosch Process, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mass immigration, microcredit, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, unemployed young men, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, zoonotic diseases

The concerts were not only simultaneously presented on television and the Internet, but they were mutually broadcast between the various concert sites. It was a worldwide gathering, not merely a simultaneous broadcast of distinct events. Creative educators are increasingly forging global classrooms in which lectures and scientific symposia link multiple sites around the world through live videoconferencing. Group meetings by Skype or other digital platforms can meld together teams in dozens of countries. Social networking tools such as MySpace and Facebook are becoming crucial tools for cross-cultural contacts and group mobilization as well. These social networking tools, which connect tens of millions of individuals in online networks of friends, hobbyists, fans, and bloggers, are now turning to mobilization for social causes.


pages: 621 words: 123,678

Financial Freedom: A Proven Path to All the Money You Will Ever Need by Grant Sabatier

8-hour work day, Airbnb, anti-work, antiwork, asset allocation, bitcoin, buy and hold, cryptocurrency, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, drop ship, financial independence, fixed income, follow your passion, full employment, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, lifestyle creep, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, side hustle, Skype, solopreneur, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, TaskRabbit, the rule of 72, time value of money, uber lyft, Vanguard fund

I was able to get access (and learn from) a global expert, and now I have access to information that you can’t even find online. I’ve done this many times for legal and tax questions. You can also do it for financial questions or when you run into a complex issue. Many financial advisors can even chat with you over Skype on your own time. Ideally use financial advisors to fill your knowledge gaps, not manage your money. If you want to work with a financial advisor, work with fee-only financial advisors who charge per hour, not based on a percentage of your assets. CHILL AS HARD AS YOU HUSTLE Making money can be addictive, and it’s easy to spend all of your time and energy pursuing financial independence.


pages: 400 words: 121,378

Red Platoon: A True Story of American Valor by Clinton Romesha

Berlin Wall, centre right, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Kickstarter, Skype, WikiLeaks

The aid station was pretty sweet for a number of important reasons, starting with the fact that the medics almost always had electricity because they were connected into the command post’s backup generator. This meant that they not only had air-conditioning, but also their own phone as well as Internet with a DSN line, which meant that you could call back home to the States or set up a Skype chat on the computer. Cordova and Courville were extremely generous with both the phone and the computer, and the guys who were married tended to lean on that generosity pretty heavily even though—in a reflection of how much stress we were all under—their calls home would often lead to absurd and pointless arguments.


Multicultural Cities: Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles by Mohammed Abdul Qadeer

affirmative action, business cycle, call centre, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, game design, gentrification, ghettoisation, global village, immigration reform, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, market bubble, McMansion, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, place-making, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional

Immigrants go back and forth, send money to relatives, build homes and vacation in their homeland, invest in businesses, send children to learn “our” culture and keep up with the homeland news on a daily basis. Native-born Americans and Canadians work and live in many countries, linking cultures and building cosmopolitan lifestyles. 54 Multicultural Cities A global economy, jet travel, inexpensive international calls, the Internet, Facebook, and Skype has scrambled the boundaries between cultures. Kwame Appiah argues that “contamination” of cultures, not the ideal of purity, has been the order of human societies.30 Diaspora is a way of living in two cultures. It is now a common experience, not limited to the jetsetters of what Pico Iyer calls the Global Soul.31 It is not just a transitory phase in the assimilation of immigrants.


pages: 391 words: 123,597

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again by Brittany Kaiser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, dark pattern, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, haute couture, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Russian election interference, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, the High Line, the scientific method, WeWork, WikiLeaks, you are the product, young professional

Assange hadn’t even bothered to respond to him. Neither of these revelations surprised me. As far as I knew, Julian Assange had no reason to help out a man like Alexander Nix, and he wasn’t exactly a man to accept cold calls, either. In December, the House Judiciary Committee had interviewed Alexander by Skype and requested that he turn over all the emails between Cambridge and the Trump campaign. While Alexander told the company that the request was all part of the “fake news” Russia conspiracy, the request, and the threats, had concerned the company enough for it to take added measures to protect itself.


Cyprus Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, New Urbanism, place-making, Skype

In both the North and the South, mobile phones are popular. If you have an international GSM-equipped phone, check with your local service provider if global roaming is available. You can make overseas calls from any public telephone box. However, calling from your computer using an internet-based service such as Skype is generally the cheapest option of all. Mobile Phones Republic of Cyprus In the South, mobile-phone numbers begin with 99. If you plan to spend any time in the South, you may want to buy a SIM card for your (unlocked) mobile phone. CYTA’s SoEasy pay-as-yougo mobile-phone plan is one option.


pages: 516 words: 116,875

Greater: Britain After the Storm by Penny Mordaunt, Chris Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, accelerated depreciation, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, failed state, fake news, Firefox, fixed income, full employment, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, impact investing, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lateral thinking, Live Aid, lockdown, loss aversion, low skilled workers, microaggression, mittelstand, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Ocado, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Panamax, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, quantitative easing, remote working, road to serfdom, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, transaction costs, transcontinental railway

Today, the parliamentary estate has shifted its centre to Portcullis House, with its highly modern, light and airy atrium. And to correct Barry’s shortcomings in the older buildings, there are enough ladies’ toilets. The outside world, though, is still barely discernible through Miss Havisham’s curtains. Skype was introduced in 2019, as was a code of conduct aimed at protecting staff from inappropriate behaviour from members. The facility of enough seats in the chamber is still some way off, however. Likewise seats or shelter from the elements for taxpayers queuing outside to see their representatives. Over the next ten years, the whole estate will be renovated at an estimated cost of £5.6 billion.15 The optics of this, given other priorities, may be hard to take.


pages: 436 words: 127,642

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, CRISPR, dark matter, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, George Santayana, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Monty Hall problem, Murray Gell-Mann, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paradox of Choice, Paul Erdős, Peter Singer: altruism, Plato's cave, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum entanglement, random walk, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, Skype, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, wage slave

Carr tells us of his own attempt to emancipate himself from the nervous digital world and return to a Woody Allen–like condition of contemplative calm. He and his wife move from “a highly connected suburb of Boston” to the mountains of Colorado, where there is no mobile phone reception. He cancels his Twitter account, suspends his Facebook membership, shuts down his blog, curtails his Skyping and instant messaging, and—“most important”—resets his e-mail so that it checks for new messages only once an hour instead of every minute. And, he confesses, he’s “already backsliding.” He can’t help finding the digital world “cool,” adding, “I’m not sure I could live without it.” Perhaps what he needs are better strategies of self-control.


pages: 473 words: 121,895

Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski Ph.d.

cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, delayed gratification, meta-analysis, nocebo, placebo effect, Skype, Snapchat, spaced repetition, sugar pill, the scientific method, twin studies

It might help to pull your skin taut by tugging upward on your mons with your other hand. It might also help to lubricate your finger with spit, commercial lube, some allergen-free hand cream, or even a little olive oil. I have a specific reason for asking you to actually look at your clitoris: A student came up to me after class one night and told me that she had been Skyping with her mom, talking about her classes that semester, including my class, “Women’s Sexuality.” The student mentioned to her mom that my lecture slides included actual photos of women’s vulvas, along with diagrams and illustrations. And her mom told her the most astonishing thing. She said, “I don’t know where the clitoris is.”


pages: 410 words: 120,234

Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings by Earl Swift

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, COVID-19, data acquisition, Internet Archive, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, zero-sum game

In an email of September 5, 2020, retired Marshall engineer Ron Creel told me it was “before or at the PDR.” My description of the wax tanks relied on Creel’s emails of August 31, September 2, and September 5, 2020. Creel worked on the LRV’s thermal subsystem. The Vomit Comet flights were described by Jerry Carr in a Skype interview on December 12, 2019. I also relied on Morea’s input for the weekly notes of January 23, 1970; the fifty-nine parabolas are noted in the weekly notes of March 30, 1970. 40 Morea explained his worries about missed milestones in our interview of February 20, 2020. His comment to Kudish, and the response, are ibid.


pages: 521 words: 118,183

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

In 2007, the Estonian government decided to move a Soviet-era memorial in the capital of Tallinn—a statue that many Estonians viewed as a monument to Soviet occupation, but which ethnic Russians in the country saw as a symbol of their heritage. Riots broke out in front of Estonia’s embassy in Moscow. In late April, hackers launched cyberattacks on critical institutions. Estonia—the birthplace of Skype—is so technologically advanced that it is sometimes referred to as “E-stonia.” But under the digital barrage, government websites and banking systems went down. The denial-of-service attacks were followed by a denial of responsibility. Russian authorities insisted on their innocence, even as they refused to cooperate with investigations.


pages: 494 words: 121,217

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, augmented reality, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, Cody Wilson, commoditize, computerized markets, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, forensic accounting, Global Witness, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, index card, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, market design, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, ransomware, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, Social Justice Warrior, the market place, web application, WikiLeaks

CHAPTER 20 BTC-e When the criminal complaint against Force and Bridges went public, just a few weeks after Tigran Gambaryan’s meeting with Michael Gronager in March 2015, it included a note stating that Gambaryan had “conferred with an individual who has a substantial background in blockchain analysis,” a tacit credit to Gronager’s double check of the IRS and Justice Department’s work. Afterward, Gambaryan called Gronager and asked him to serve as an adviser and expert witness in the case if it went to trial. Soon Gambaryan and Gronager were emailing and speaking on Skype constantly, chatting and checking notes. Gronager, with the permission of Mt. Gox’s bankruptcy trustees, started sending Gambaryan regular updates on his Mt. Gox investigation. One increasingly frequent subject of their conversations was BTC-e, this mysterious bitcoin-trading platform that seemed to exist nowhere and be run by no one.


pages: 470 words: 125,992

The Laundromat : Inside the Panama Papers, Illicit Money Networks, and the Global Elite by Jake Bernstein

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, central bank independence, Charlie Hebdo massacre, clean water, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, high net worth, income inequality, independent contractor, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Skype, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

On the first day, after a brief speech by Hernández, the executives discussed Mossfon’s appearances in the media, covering the Nevada case, the Commerzbank story, and an unflattering piece in Vice titled “The Law Firm That Works with Oligarchs, Money Launderers, and Dictators.” In one of the last sessions, on the final day of the meeting, Luis Martínez delivered his forty-minute presentation, according to the schedule. His subject was “Data Loss Protection.” Jóhannes Kr. Kristjánsson failed to make it home to his Reykjavík apartment in time for his scheduled Skype call with ICIJ’s Marina Walker. He pulled into a gas station and parked near a car wash to take the call on his cell phone. It was May 28, 2015. The burly, bearded Icelander had no idea what Walker wanted. Kristjánsson was one of Iceland’s best-known investigative reporters, having already amassed enough triumphs and disappointments to fill several careers.


Frommer's Israel by Robert Ullian

airport security, British Empire, car-free, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, East Village, Easter island, gentrification, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Mount Scopus, place-making, planned obsolescence, Silicon Valley, Skype, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yom Kippur War

Note: In the Jordan Valley and The Dead Sea area, which are the lowest points on earth and far below sea level, cellphone communications are not usually optimum. VOICE-OVER INTERNET PROTOCOL (VOIP) If you have Web access while traveling, consider a broadband-based telephone service (in technical terms, voice-over Internet protocol, or VoIP) such as Skype (www.skype.com) or Vonage (www.vonage.com), which allows you to make free international calls from your laptop or from a cybercafe. Neither service requires the people you’re calling to also have that service (though there are fees if they do not). Check the websites for details. 87 INTERNET & E-MAIL W I T H YO U R O W N C O M P U T E R Downtown West Jerusalem from the post office on Jaffa Road to the Ben-Yehuda Mall, up to King George Street, and the adjacent Yoel Salomon, Rivlin Street and Jerusalem Courtyard neighborhoods are Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) access zones: Cafes and restaurants are filled with locals and travelers communing with their computers.


pages: 890 words: 133,829

Sardinia Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Skype

Calling Sardinia from abroad Call your international access number, then Italy's country code (39) and then the local number (including the area code with the leading 0). Calling abroad from Sardinia Dial 00 to get out of Italy, then the relevant country and area codes, followed by the telephone number. The cheapest options for calling internationally Free or low-cost computer program or smartphone apps such as Skype or Viber. Time Sardinian time is one hour ahead of GMT/UTC. Daylight-saving time, when clocks are moved forward one hour, commences on the last Sunday in March. Clocks are put back an hour on the last Sunday in October. Italy operates on a 24-hour clock, so 6pm is written as 18.00. The following times do not take daylight-saving time into account.


pages: 411 words: 140,110

Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery by Scott Kelly, Margaret Lazarus Dean

Apollo 11, clean water, dark matter, game design, inventory management, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, Skype, space junk, the scientific method, traumatic brain injury, twin studies, Virgin Galactic, Y2K

After we finish up with the mouse and communicate with the ground about it, I have my first videoconference with Charlotte. Unlike phone calls, these conferences have to be planned in advance. I’m ready with my laptop and my headset on at the appointed time, and when Charlotte’s round face pops up on my screen she breaks out in a huge smile. The interface is similar to Skype or FaceTime—I can see Charlotte’s face and the room behind her in a large window on the right of my laptop screen, while on the left is a smaller window that shows me floating in my CQ. I haven’t seen her since Baikonur, a month ago. She is eleven and looks different every time I see her—she seems to have aged a year.


pages: 428 words: 134,832

Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, financial deregulation, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, indoor plumbing, intermodal, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, jitney, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, parking minimums, peak oil, pension reform, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional, Zipcar

After an overnight visit with friends, I was on another express train, this one headed north to Copenhagen. Train travel’s superiority over cars and planes, particularly in mid-distance intercity trips, has only increased in the era of high-speed technology. Since Europe’s trains cater to business travelers, you can now Skype your family, answer emails, or just wander to the bar car for a decent meal and a bottle of beer. For a visitor who wishes to savor the scenery, bullet trains can sometimes seem a little too fast: our sheer velocity made even the middle-distance into a blur, and the bare-branched oaks of late fall, tangled with cats’ cradles of mistletoe, seemed to strobe past like some never-ending magic lantern of dancing skeletons.


pages: 474 words: 130,575

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

This equipment, maintained by the FBI, passes the NSA request to a private company’s system.”29 The tasking creates a digital wiretap that then forwards intelligence to the NSA in real time, all without any input from the company itself.30 Analysts could even opt-in for alerts for when a particular target logs in to an account.31 “Depending on the company, a tasking may return e-mails, attachments, address books, calendars, files stored in the cloud, text or audio or video chats and ‘metadata’ that identify the locations, devices used and other information about a target.”32 The program, which began in 2007 under President George W. Bush and which was expanded under President Barack Obama, became a gold mine for American spies. Microsoft was the first to join in 2007. Yahoo! came online a year later, and Facebook and Google plugged in to PRISM in 2009. Skype and AOL both joined in 2011. Apple, the laggard of the bunch, joined the surveillance system in 2012.33 Intelligence officials described PRISM as a key feeder system for foreign intelligence.34 In 2013, PRISM was used to spy on over a hundred thousand people—“targets,” in the parlance of the NSA. James R.


pages: 442 words: 135,006

ZeroZeroZero by Roberto Saviano

Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, call centre, credit crunch, double entry bookkeeping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Kinder Surprise, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, open borders, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Steve Jobs, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

A February 2008 army raid on the El Mezquito, one of Los Zetas’ farms near the city of Miguel Alemán, about sixty miles west of Reynosa, uncovered 89 assault rifles, 83,355 ammunition cartridges, and enough explosives to blow several buildings sky-high. Los Zetas members are highly professional; they use a modern phone-tapping system, encrypted radio signals, and Skype instead of regular telephones to elude surveillance. Their internal hierarchy is rigid. Every plaza has its own capo and bookkeeper, who manages the finances for the criminal cell, which, in addition to drugs, exploits various niches of the criminal economy: theft, extortions, kidnappings. According to Mexican and American sources, there is a precise division of duties within Los Zetas, each with its own name: —Las Ventanas, the Windows: kids who sound the alarm when they spot police officers sticking their noses into drug-dealing zones; —Los Halcones, the Falcons: who take care of distribution; —Los Leopardos, the Leopards: prostitutes trained to extort precious information from clients; —Los Mañosos, the Clever Ones: in charge of weapons; —La Dirección, the Command: the brains of the operation


pages: 505 words: 127,542

If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy? by Raj Raghunathan

behavioural economics, Blue Ocean Strategy, Broken windows theory, business process, classic study, cognitive dissonance, deliberate practice, do well by doing good, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fundamental attribution error, hedonic treadmill, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Phillip Zimbardo, placebo effect, science of happiness, Skype, sugar pill, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Hsieh, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The first step involves connecting with another reader of this book who is also interested in adopting a healthier lifestyle, and setting up a mutually convenient time to chat and motivate each other on a daily basis for an agreed-upon period (say, a month). For example, you may agree to chat at six p.m. each day via Skype or WhatsApp. This step of the exercise is based on an interesting finding from research on goal pursuit: you are much more likely to achieve a goal when you are jointly pursuing it alongside someone else rather than all by yourself. The second step in the exercise involves formulating a plan for leading a healthier lifestyle.


pages: 519 words: 136,708

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

Its latest ‘Taurus’ or ‘Collect-It-all’ ground station antennae represent a step-change in the NSA’s ability to monitor global satellite traffic.27 Linked also with the NSA’s systems for tapping terrestrial communications over ordinary radio transmissions, and secret optic fibre connections that can handle the equivalent at least 100,000 telephone calls simultaneously, bases like Menwith Hill to covertly collection, with agreement from IT service providers, of large swathes of the traffic of the whole Internet. This includes the monitoring of all traffic over the Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple networks, data from which is transmitted back to the NSA’s huge new ‘data fusion’ complex in Utah. Using supercomputers and classified decryption software, Menwith Hill and its allied bases provide automatic analysis and classification of a huge range of intercepted data in order to track a wide assortment of identified ‘targets’.


pages: 476 words: 132,042

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

As my wife and I gathered in our California den to lean toward a curved white screen displaying the moving image of our daughter in Shanghai, we mirrored the old magazine’s illustration of a family crowded around a picture phone. While our daughter watched us on her screen in China, we chatted leisurely about unimportant family matters. Our picture phone was exactly what everyone imagined it to be, except in three significant ways: the device was not exactly a phone, it was our iMac and her laptop; the call was free (via Skype, not AT&T); and despite being perfectly useable, and free, picture-phoning has not become common—even for us. So unlike the earlier futuristic vision, the inevitable picture phone has not become the standard modern way of communicating. First Glimpse of the Picture Phone. From Bell Telephone’s pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.


pages: 455 words: 133,322

The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Benchmark Capital, billion-dollar mistake, Burning Man, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, global village, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Network effects, Peter Thiel, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, SoftBank, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, UUNET, Whole Earth Review, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

A committed community around the message.’” A Facebook group has a “wall,” where members can post thoughts, as well as discussion forums that allow organized, long-lasting conversations among many members. Morales soon bonded with several people who were posting there with special vigor. They exchanged instant messaging and Skype addresses and cell-phone numbers so they could continue their conversations offline. As more and more Colombians joined the group, members started talking not only about how mad they were about FARC, but what they ought to do about it. On January 6, just the second full day, a consensus on the page was emerging that the burgeoning group should go public.


pages: 453 words: 130,632

Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood by Rose George

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, airport security, British Empire, call centre, corporate social responsibility, Edward Snowden, global pandemic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, Jeff Bezos, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, period drama, Peter Thiel, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Skype, social contagion, stem cell, TED Talk, time dilation

He has forgotten to wear socks. His moody beauty, his pale skin, his rosy lips: He looks like a vampire. “Really?” says Jesse Karmazin. A vampire? He never intended such a thing. “I think we just thought athleticism, because of the bike. Maybe I’ll look at it again.” Karmazin and I talked late one night over Skype, transatlantically. It was past my bedtime, in the hours of witching and vampires. Karmazin was the name my “young blood” Google alert produced now and then and consistently for the past year or so. I researched him before we spoke and found images of a fit Paralympian rower (he was born missing half a leg).


pages: 420 words: 130,503

Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges and Leaderboards by Yu-Kai Chou

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Firefox, functional fixedness, game design, gamification, growth hacking, IKEA effect, Internet of things, Kickstarter, late fees, lifelogging, loss aversion, Maui Hawaii, Minecraft, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, QR code, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Skype, software as a service, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs

At the end of the day, you know in your heart that this is dreadful work, and the young colleague simply needs to “pay their dues” before they can get other interns to do the same. But when it comes to Wikipedia, people are volunteering their precious time outside of their jobs to do the exact same thing without getting any “real” benefits! When you come home from work, there are lots of things you can do - practice your daily boss-complaining ritual, watch TV, Skype with your significant other, or even play games. People choose to police Wikipedia above all those other activities because they feel like they are protecting humanity’s knowledge - something greater than themselves. When it comes to Epic Meaning & Calling, it’s not about what you want as an individual nor about what makes you feel good.


pages: 449 words: 129,511

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester

Albert Einstein, ASML, British Empire, business climate, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, discovery of the americas, Easter island, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, GPS: selective availability, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, John Harrison: Longitude, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, means of production, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, trade route, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Indeed, the physical principle involved is known as passive ranging, and in its essence, it is disconcertingly simple. Suppose there are two clocks that are entirely reliable and show exactly the same time. Suppose further that one clock is in London, the other in Detroit, and that both clocks are linked by a video stream, are both on Skype, or FaceTime, or WhatsApp. In this scenario we have total faith in the exactness and accuracy of the two timekeepers, and we know with total certainty that they were both set at the same time, that both are consequently displaying the same time. And this is certainly true for those observers, those clock watchers, who are in the same rooms as each of the two clocks.


pages: 493 words: 136,235

Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves by Matthew Sweet

Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, computer age, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, game design, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Skype, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

“But there was no psychological manipulation”: Peter Bourne, email message to the author, February 27, 2016. he borrowed Peter’s name for his hero: Kathleen Ryan O’Connor, “Bourne in Oxford,” GTC Magazine, 2009, http://petergbourne.co.uk/Bourne-in-Oxford.pdf. he thought Michael Vale and Bill Jones had been spooks from the start: Mats Widgren, Skype interview with the author, September 30, 2016. “an agency of North American origin”: Aktuellt, Sveriges Radio AB, TV2, Sweden, October 22, 1975. “I cannot deny that it is an American intelligence organization”: Ibid. “That it is now expanded to Europe”: Håkan Hermansson and Lars Wenander, Uppdrag: Olof Palme: Hatet, Jakten, Kampanjerna [Mission: Olof Palme: the hate, the hunt, the schemes] (Stockholm: Tiden, 1987), p. 116.


pages: 389 words: 131,688

The Impossible Climb: Alex Honnold, El Capitan, and the Climbing Life by Mark Synnott

blue-collar work, California gold rush, Google Earth, index fund, Nate Silver, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, trade route, Y2K

Alex had met him while he was at the university, and Joseph had scanned the man shortly after Alex. Joseph had made clear from the start that the test results of Alex’s scan were not scientifically valid because there had been only one control. This was not a study that would be published in any medical journals. “Is my brain intact?” asked Alex via Skype. “It’s perfectly healthy,” said Joseph. The images produced by fMRI brain scans use various colors to illustrate the strength of synaptic activity, similarly to how meteorologists portray the intensity of thunderstorms on radar maps. The image of Alex’s brain showed two gridlines that formed a plus sign directly over his amygdala.


pages: 598 words: 140,612

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, declining real wages, desegregation, different worldview, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, endowment effect, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Thales and the olive presses, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

The term Jevons’s paradox has come to refer to any situation in which efficiency improvements lead to more, not less, consumption—one reason why low-calorie cookies can lead to larger waistlines and fuel-efficient cars can end up consuming more gas. Jevons’s paradox applied to information technology means that as we acquire more efficient means of transmitting information, like e-mail or Skype, we spend more, not less, time transmitting information. One might think that better information technology would reduce the need to learn from other sources, like face-to-face meetings in cities. But Jevons’s Complementarity Corollary, which follows naturally from Jevons’s paradox, predicts that improvements in information technology can lead to more demand for face-to-face contact, because face time complements time spent communicating electronically.


pages: 458 words: 135,206

CTOs at Work by Scott Donaldson, Stanley Siegel, Gary Donaldson

Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, bioinformatics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, distributed generation, do what you love, domain-specific language, functional programming, glass ceiling, Hacker News, hype cycle, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, Pluto: dwarf planet, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, systems thinking, thinkpad, web application, zero day, zero-sum game

Cherches: My role was to transfer knowledge from NISC USA to NISC India. Everything that we had been doing was proprietary. So that's when custom solution development got introduced first at NISC. Half of my goal was to work with a project manager over there, who hired very smart people. And then we would just be on the phone. Skype I guess didn't exist yet, but there was a time difference obviously, and it was challenging, mostly for them. I would work from 9 to 9 right next to another individual who was from India. Most of the internet programming knowledge I've learned I actually learned from that guy. He was just amazing.


pages: 452 words: 134,502

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers, Josh Levy

4chan, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, immigration reform, informal economy, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Overton Window, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, power law, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, Silicon Valley, Skype, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, The future is already here, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Its original sponsors understood it as the elimination of a government mandate that forced researchers to embrace a specific business model. The academic publishers who sponsored the bill knew very well that it would slow competition from open-access journals. I could go on and on. Telecom companies asking regulators to impose new burdens on Skype, or toy manufacturers asking regulators to force Etsy sellers who make hand-carved wooden toys to be subjected to a rigorous certification process that only makes sense for large manufacturers. The point is that we have to step back and see these policy proposals as the inevitable byproduct of the transformation of our economy.


pages: 607 words: 133,452

Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin, David K. Levine

accounting loophole / creative accounting, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, business cycle, classic study, cognitive bias, cotton gin, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial innovation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, independent contractor, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jean Tirole, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, market bubble, market design, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, new economy, open economy, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pirate software, placebo effect, price discrimination, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Richard Stallman, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, the market place, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Y2K

Nowadays copyright and patents stand at the core of the software industry, which has become both monopolized and substantially less innovative than in the past.1 Innovation and creativity come from the competitive fringe, which has great difficulty hiding behind “intellectual property” protection. Neither Google nor YouTube nor Skype is the golden egg of the patents’ chicken, and in fact they do not use patents to retain their competitive advantage. By contrast, Microsoft would have had a hard time imitating and then catching up with Netscape had the latter managed to patent the idea of a browser, something it could do today. 42 P1: KNP head margin: 1/2 gutter margin: 7/8 CUUS245-03 cuus245 978 0 521 87928 6 May 8, 2008 13:56 Innovation under Competition 43 These are the facts: the great role of patents in giving us modern software is unadulterated fantasy.


pages: 486 words: 132,784

Inventors at Work: The Minds and Motivation Behind Modern Inventions by Brett Stern

Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Build a better mousetrap, business process, cloud computing, computer vision, cyber-physical system, distributed generation, driverless car, game design, Grace Hopper, human-factors engineering, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart transportation, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the market place, value engineering, Yogi Berra

And it was literally a dream list, since my underlying motive in undertaking the project was to investigate how dreamers have changed or influenced the everyday waking world of the rest of us. The breadth of this book from conception to consumption illustrates how profoundly and rapidly our world has been transformed by these dreamers. I sat musing at my desk, then I Googled around on my Mac, and then I recruited my dream team on my iPhone. I conducted the interviews over Skype while recording the conversations using Call Recorder software, which I converted into MP3 files and then uploaded to Dropbox, from which a specialist transcribed them into Microsoft Word documents, probably with the aid of voice-recognition software. Then I uploaded the manuscript to my publisher’s interactive platform, on which I collaborated with a team of brilliant editors and production people scattered all around the country, as cozily as though we were all sitting together around a table.


pages: 471 words: 127,852

Londongrad: From Russia With Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs by Mark Hollingsworth, Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Geldof, Bullingdon Club, business intelligence, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, energy security, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Global Witness, income inequality, kremlinology, Larry Ellison, Londongrad, mass immigration, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, offshore financial centre, paper trading, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, power law, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Sloane Ranger

It was not until 2002, when he moved into new offices at Down Street, near Hyde Park Corner, that a brand-new, ultra-secure computer system was installed. Security became an obsession. Berezovsky even created his own e-mail and telephone network outside conventional norms. His mobile phone bills had been astronomical - thousands of pounds a month. Now, with an early version of Skype, they were substantially reduced. He used Siemens’ ‘Top-Sec’ S35 mobile phones because their scramble signals made them almost impossible to bug. For this reason, they were often used by MI5 officers and the British Army. But they were expensive, at £2,000 apiece, and not easy to find, so they were purchased cheaper in Russia and then brought into the UK.


The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain by Brett Christophers

Alan Greenspan, book value, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Corn Laws, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, estate planning, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, ghettoisation, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, late capitalism, market clearing, Martin Wolf, New Journalism, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Right to Buy, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, wealth creators

There is a wide group of friends and colleagues around the world who have not yet read a word of this book – indeed, who in almost all cases had no idea I was even writing it – but whose collective imprint on the ideas animating it, and on the energy and enthusiasm invested in producing it, is now clear for me, at least, to see. Without them, and without the conversations in person, by email and by Skype that we have had over the years, not only would the book look nothing like it does, but nor, I imagine, would I. So, belatedly but absolutely wholeheartedly, I want very much to thank Philip Ashton, Trevor Barnes, Christian Berndt, Patrick Bigger, Tim Blackwell, Marc Boeckler, Bruce Braun, Dick Bryan, Noel Castree, Dan Clayton, David Demeritt, Jessica Dempsey, Desiree Fields, Ben Fine, Shaun French, Chris Gibson, Vinay Gidwani, Sarah Hall, Gill Hart, David Harvey, Stuart Hodkinson, Leigh Johnson, Kelly Kay, Mark Kear, Sarah Knuth, Greta Krippner, Bill Kutz, Mazen Labban, Bob Lake, Paul Langley, Rebecca Lave, Nick Lewis, Andrew Leyshon, Geoff Mann, James McCarthy, Chris Muellerleile, Daniel Mügge, Kathe Newman, Chris Niedt, Phil O’Neill, David O’Sullivan, Shiri Pasternak, Jamie Peck, Jane Pollard, Mary Poovey, Shaina Potts, Scott Prudham, Mike Rafferty, Mary Robertson, Erica Schoenberger, Susanne Soederberg, Matt Sparke, Kendra Strauss, Nik Theodore, Dick Walker, Sophie Webber, Rachel Weber, Marion Werner and Heather Whiteside.


pages: 459 words: 138,689

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

Furthermore, most of the processors lie above the line of exponential speed-up in the early period and below it since 1990. The line is curving downward. Moore’s law has, in reality, not been a law for many decades. If we want to see real technological progress, we should look at the recent historical trajectory of communication: letters, telegrams, telephone, email, Skype, social media networks. Determine what is very innovative and what is not, and ask whether we are still moving as rapidly forward now. Being able to send a letter was once revolutionary. Being able to flash a message on a friend’s phone is what children now do (and adults tend not to). Today even our washing machines can talk to one another.


pages: 506 words: 133,134

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

Emily Lancia, 20, a junior at college, described how, walking on campus, she was inspired to call her best friend from childhood, someone who she texts with almost daily but had never once called before.34 In the UK, mobile phone operator O2 revealed that a quarter of its clients aged between 18 and 24 phoned a friend for the first time ever after lockdown began in March.35 Video-calling was of course the other big beneficiary of the lockdown. Global downloads of Zoom, Houseparty and Skype increased exponentially in March 2020 as parties, quiz nights and business meetings migrated onto video. Microsoft Teams saw the number of video calls grow by more than 1,000% that month. Some couples even began to date on video, having only ever ‘seen’ each other onscreen. The extent to which our appetite for voice and video-based exchanges persists beyond the immediate crisis is impossible to predict with any certainty at this point, although it’s likely that business-oriented video meetings will continue for some time given social distancing requirements and restrictions on travel.


pages: 530 words: 145,220

The Search for Life on Mars by Elizabeth Howell

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, British Empire, dark matter, double helix, fake news, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, Google Earth, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, James Webb Space Telescope, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ronald Reagan, Skype

Nicholas Booth spoke with many of the European ExoMars scientists and engineers in the summer of 2019. They include Jorge Vago at ESTEC, Paul Meacham at Airbus, Professor Charles Cockell at Edinburgh, Dr. Claire Cousins at St. Andrews, Dr. Peter Grindrod at the Natural History Museum in London, and Professor John Bridges at Leicester University in November. He rounded off his interviews with a Skype interview with Professor Bethany Horgan in early December 2019. General Adam Steltzner’s book The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation, cowritten with William Patrick, has more on his philosophy of teamwork. For general background, see Wall, Mike, “Four Mars Missions Are One Year away from Launching to the Red Planet in July 2020,” Space.com, July 25, 2019, and Haynes, Korey, “Scientists Gear Up to Look for Fossils on Mars,” Discover, May 21, 2019.


The Radium Girls by Moore, Kate

Charles Lindbergh, information security, life extension, Skype, women in the workforce

Interviews Original interviews conducted by the author in the United States in October 2015 with the following, with her sincere thanks: Michelle Brasser Mary Carroll Cassidy Mary Carroll Walsh Kathleen Donohue Cofoid James Donohue Eleanor Flower Art Fryer (interview conducted in December 2015, via Skype) Patty Gray Len Grossman Darlene Halm Felicia Keeton Ross Mullner Randy Pozzi Donald Purcell Dolores Rossiter Jean Schott Don Torpy and Jan Torpy Miscellaneous Articles and Publications Conroy, John. “On Cancer, Clock Dials, and Ottawa, Illinois, a Town That Failed to See the Light,” National Archives.


pages: 432 words: 143,491

Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle With Coronavirus by Jonathan Calvert, George Arbuthnott

Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, gig economy, global pandemic, high-speed rail, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, lockdown, nudge unit, open economy, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Skype, social distancing, zoonotic diseases

Johnson attempted to correct his mixed message about Mothers’ Day by tweeting a public information video. ‘You might want to see your mum today, but think about every other mum. Don’t put them at risk,’ it chided. His aides quietly briefed journalists that he had meant that he would be seeing his mother Charlotte on Skype. He skipped the daily press briefing on Saturday 21 March and took a break with Symonds at Chequers. Over that weekend, a further 420,000 infections are estimated to have spread across the UK, taking the total to 1.2 million, according to the Oxford and Imperial back-dated modelling. Johnson was back for the Sunday afternoon press conference, where he revealed that letters were now being sent to 1.5 million people who had been identified from their medical records as being extremely vulnerable because of existing conditions.


pages: 458 words: 132,912

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Perhaps in times of national crisis, such as World Wars I and II and September 11, 2001, diverse people, scattered over three thousand miles, could reconnect as Americans with the aid of shared radio or, after 1950, continuous television news coverage. Yet, even now, in the age of more intrusive and ubiquitous social media, email, Zoom, and Skype, it is hard to imagine transnational or transcontinental democracies comprising hundreds of millions of people with different cultures and traditions normally trusting in a shared commonwealth of values. Few dare to agree that citizens of the world so often are more insensitive to the needs of their own fellow citizens in their very midst.


pages: 479 words: 140,421

Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss

activist lawyer, back-to-the-city movement, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Broken windows theory, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, food desert, gentrification, global pandemic, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, plutocrats, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Skype, starchitect, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, young professional

Richard Wilkinson, a social epidemiologist in the United Kingdom, has long studied the impact of economic inequality on public health. He has written on the extensive research that shows how the most unequal societies breed social dysfunction, including higher rates of violence, drug abuse, and mental illness, along with malignant narcissism. I got in touch with Wilkinson and chatted with him over Skype. “Inequality makes us more antisocial,” he explained. Living in a place with a wide income gap makes people withdraw from community engagement. We trust each other a great deal less and we become less willing to help vulnerable people, like the elderly and disabled. “Downward prejudices,” Wilkinson added, “become stronger” in such a society, so that people with higher social status openly display more negative attitudes toward lower status groups.


pages: 483 words: 127,095

The Road to Roswell: A Novel by Connie Willis

Doomsday Book, illegal immigration, Skype

Francie looked eagerly around. “No. She doesn’t know anything about this,” he said, motioning to Francie to get in the back of the van and clambering in after her. “She thinks you were kidnapped by an escaped convict. And that’s the story you need to stick to.” He gestured to her to sit down. “She’s on Skype.” He picked up a laptop and started typing. “You’re calling her from FBI headquarters.” Which was apparently the reason for calling from inside the van, so Serena couldn’t see any of what was going on outside. “What if she asks for details about this convict who kidnapped me?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you fill me in on what she’s been told?”


Central Europe Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Defenestration of Prague, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flag carrier, Frank Gehry, Gregor Mendel, Guggenheim Bilbao, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Peter Eisenman, place-making, Prenzlauer Berg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, trade route, urban renewal, white picket fence, young professional

Free & Toll Numbers 0800 numbers are free, 0810 and 0820 cost 0.10c and 0.20c respectively per minute, and 0900 numbers are exorbitant and best avoided. Mobile Numbers Austrian mobile ( Handy ) telephone numbers begin with 0650 or higher up to 0683. Public Telephones These take phone-cards or coins; €0.20 is the minimum for a local call. Call centres are also widespread, and many internet cafes are geared for Skype calls. Roaming The network works on GSM 1800 and is compatible with GSM 900 phones; it is not compatible with systems from the USA unless the mobile phone is at least a tri-band model. Roaming can get very expensive if your provider is outside the EU. SIM Cards Phone shops sell prepaid SIM cards for about €10 (calls for about 0.10c per minute) that can be refilled at kiosks anywhere.

Reök Palace EXHIBITION SPACE ( 541 205; www.reok.hu, in Hungarian; Tisza Lajos körút 56) Art nouveau palace that’s been polished up to its original lustre and now hosts regular photography and visual arts exhibitions as well as occasional theatre and dance. Information Cyber Arena (Deák Ferenc utca 24-26; per hr 500Ft; 24hr) Internet access with Skype set-ups and cheap international phonecards. Main post office (Széchenyi tér 1) OTP Bank (Klauzál tér 4) Tourinform ( 488 699; http://tip.szegedvaros.hu; Dugonics tér 2; 9am-5pm Mon-Fri, to 1pm Sat) Tourist office hidden in a courtyard. Getting There & Around The train station is south of the city centre on Indóház tér; from here, tram 1 takes you along Boldogasszony sugárút into the centre of town.


pages: 495 words: 154,046

The Rights of the People by David K. Shipler

affirmative action, airport security, computer age, disinformation, facts on the ground, fudge factor, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, mandatory minimum, Mikhail Gorbachev, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, RFID, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, working poor, zero-sum game

His administration released documents on torture but withheld photographs of abuse in Abu Ghraib prison, transferred some terrorism suspects to criminal courts but reserved the option of indefinite detention, and continued widespread monitoring of Americans’ communications. He sought legislation to force companies to give government the keys to their codes, in effect to facilitate surveillance by requiring that encrypted networking Web sites such as Skype and Facebook, and e-mail devices such as BlackBerry, be redesigned to empower the FBI and intelligence agencies to unscramble conversations and messages. His Justice Department invoked state secrecy (in one case using language identical to the Bush administration’s) to block lawsuits by those who had been spied on or subjected to “extraordinary rendition.”45 In fact, Obama continued the practice of capturing suspects overseas and spiriting them to other countries, and fought their efforts to gain access to federal courts.


pages: 535 words: 158,863

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making by David Rothkopf

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, carried interest, clean water, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, fake news, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global village, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Elkington, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Skype, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, William Langewiesche

Taking a globally and sectorally representative sample of three hundred members of the superclass drawn randomly from the list, we find that nearly three out of ten attended one of just twenty elite universities, led by Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Chicago. As a rule, the superclass is much better educated than the population at large. Whereas only 9 percent of Americans have a postgraduate degree, 47 percent of the superclass does. Only 2 percent are like the Skype founder Janus Friis, the Danish entrepreneur who does not have even a high school diploma; 91 percent of the superclass have an undergraduate degree. And if you are from the emerging world, you are much more likely than your countrymen to attend a university in the developed world: Over 41 percent of superclass members from developing countries did so.


pages: 928 words: 159,837

Florence & Tuscany by Lonely Planet

Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, European colonialism, haute couture, Kickstarter, period drama, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, retail therapy, sensible shoes, Skype, trade route, urban planning

Some six-digit national rate numbers are also in use (such as those for Alitalia, rail and postal information). As elsewhere in Europe, Italians choose from a host of providers of phone plans and rates, making it difficult to make generalisations about costs. International Calls The cheapest options for calling internationally are free or low-cost computer programs such as Skype, cut-rate call centres or international calling cards, which are sold at news-stands and tobacconists. Cut-price call centres can be found in all of the main cities, and rates can be considerably lower than from Telecom payphones for international calls. You simply place your call from a private booth inside the centre and pay for it when you’ve finished.


pages: 537 words: 158,544

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

With their deep historical ties to liberal Western European culture, Tallinn and Riga today have thoroughly replaced the crumbling architecture of Soviet modernism and revived the European economic linkages of their Hanseatic League heritage. Thirtysomethings dominate both politics and business, with Western European techies clamoring to work for Estonian companies like Skype. The EU has Eurasianists too, and they want to absorb and Europeanize Russia. Russia is often portrayed as having Europe over a barrel because of its oil and gas reserves, but there are limits to Russia’s ability to bite the hand that feeds it.7 Most of Russia’s trade and energy exports go to Europe, but as Europe diversifies its sources (including increased renewable energy and North African natural gas), its leverage over Russia grows.


pages: 549 words: 147,112

The Lost Bank: The Story of Washington Mutual-The Biggest Bank Failure in American History by Kirsten Grind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, big-box store, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, financial engineering, fixed income, fulfillment center, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, junk bonds, low interest rates, Maui Hawaii, money market fund, mortgage debt, naked short selling, NetJets, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Shoshana Zuboff, Skype, too big to fail, Y2K

In Seattle, most of my time was spent in the dining rooms, living rooms, back patios, and neighborhood coffee shops of the numerous executives and employees who still live in the city. WaMu’s reach stretched far, and its employees are scattered throughout the world, so I also conducted interviews, often via Skype, and at odd hours of the day and night, with sources in multiple other countries. When I embarked on this project full-time in the summer of 2010, I discovered a large knowledge gap related to the financial crisis. On the one hand, many people I talked with—namely those in some way related to the banking, finance, mortgage, or real estate industries—had been bombarded with information about the inner workings of a subprime security and unusual mortgages.


pages: 487 words: 147,891

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld by Misha Glenny

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, colonial rule, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, forensic accounting, friendly fire, glass ceiling, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, trade liberalization, trade route, Transnistria, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile

In a medium-size business, there will be hundreds of these units—and each of them is a separate portal through which an attack can take place. Already businesses store data of incalculable value on their systems, but soon most people will be using voice-over Internet Protocol telephone systems for the bulk of their verbal communications. VoIP networks such as Skype are increasingly attractive for offices, as they reduce costs so dramatically. But what would happen if your business depended on telephone sales and somebody inserted a virus into the system to block the phones? “Today antivirus programs are becoming ever less important because they can’t protect you,” Amrit Williams pointed out.


pages: 473 words: 154,182

Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them by Donovan Hohn

An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, clean water, collective bargaining, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Exxon Valdez, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, hindcast, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, intermodal, Isaac Newton, means of production, microbiome, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, post-Panamax, profit motive, Skype, standardized shipping container, statistical model, the long tail, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, traveling salesman

The characters on Desperate Housewives were “really crazy.” Her friends told her she was crazy for working so much. Someday, she’d like to live abroad, preferably in Australia, though she’d settle for Germany. In the meantime, she spent most of her free time on her cell phone or at her computer, surfing the Web, keeping up with her clients via Skype, the Internet phone service. Afraid that she wasn’t skinny or pretty enough, yet unafraid to speak her mind (“Put me in your book!” she said when I told her I was a writer), she reminded me a lot of the young Americans I used to teach. 23 Vendors sell black-market goods openly on the streets of Guangzhou.


pages: 500 words: 146,240

Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay, Peter Molyneux

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, book value, collective bargaining, Colossal Cave Adventure, do what you love, financial engineering, game design, Golden age of television, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index card, Mark Zuckerberg, oil shock, pirate software, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, Steve Jobs, Von Neumann architecture

Ramsay: Are you picking up where you left off in terms of looking at opportunities in emerging markets? Daglow: That’s a great example of where there is continuity. The way we build games now is so different from the way we did it a few years ago because you have online, and you have shared work groups across continents. You have Skype. We have all these tools and new methodologies. With the explosion of online and social games, all sorts of massively multiplayer online games, and the indie community, there are so many different ways to build and distribute games. In those respects, everything I’m doing is actually quite different because it’s a different era and the methods are different.


pages: 504 words: 147,722

Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick by Maya Dusenbery

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, gender pay gap, Helicobacter pylori, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Joan Didion, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microaggression, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, phenotype, pre–internet, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, Skype, stem cell, TED Talk, women in the workforce

If I go out for more than two hours in a day, I’ll pay for it.” In 2015, she cofounded #MEAction, an online platform for ME/CFS advocacy efforts. For the last four years, she’s been working on a documentary about living with ME/CFS, called Unrest, featuring her own story and those of other patients around the world, which she directed mostly from her bed via Skype. The Sundance award–winning film had its theatrical release in 2017. The neglect of ME/CFS by the medical community for three decades feels personal to Brea. “I was two years old when the Incline Village outbreak happened,” she says. “I feel like there was a gunshot that went off during that outbreak.


pages: 501 words: 145,943

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Mayor Park seems to prefer to talk not about his academic and law credentials (he spent time as a prosecutor, too) but about his experience as a human rights advocate and community organizer. His view of urban politics and democracy is rooted in bottom-up, gradualist reform rather than constitutionalism or legalism—as I learned in an hour-long Skype conversation with him broadcast on Korean television, and a recent visit to Seoul. As a founder (in 1994) of the nonprofit watchdog NGO People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, he monitored government abuses of power, promoted tax reform, and sought to expand citizen participation in government and civil society.


pages: 505 words: 147,916

Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made by Gaia Vince

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, bank run, biodiversity loss, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, climate change refugee, congestion charging, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, driverless car, energy security, failed state, Google Earth, Haber-Bosch Process, hive mind, hobby farmer, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, Late Heavy Bombardment, load shedding, M-Pesa, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, microdosing, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, supervolcano, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology

‘The villagers are now able to communicate with people in other villages and even with their family members abroad by email and using VoIP [Voice over Internet Protocol] phones,’ he says. ‘And they can talk for free within the village network using the local VoIP system.’ I realise that Mahabir and the kids have been using VoIP for longer than me. Having always had access to a landline phone, I’ve only started using VoIP – Skype – within the past couple of years to make cheaper overseas calls, whereas the village adopted the technology a decade ago. Teachers are a rare commodity in this part of the world, but the children are no longer being taught by barely literate soldiers. The Wi-Fi network means that a teacher, based here or even in Kathmandu, can teach classes across many villages, face to face with students via the monitors, answer questions and receive and mark homework.


pages: 517 words: 155,209

Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation by Michael Chabon

airport security, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, clean water, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, glass ceiling, land tenure, mental accounting, microdosing, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, off grid, off-the-grid, Right to Buy, Skype, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

The evening stretches out in familial intimacy; it is quiet, the boys aren’t home yet. Times are difficult here: Hisham, the father, whom Nour affectionately calls Baba—daddy in the local Arabic dialect—rolls his r’s and mops his brow, his eyes weary, his skin pallid, his smile sad. I notice his lifeless hand. Learning that I am French, he tries a Skype call with one of his cousins who lives just outside Toulouse while Nour sends WhatsApp messages and Aisha, curious as a cat, circles around me. At around eleven o’clock the mother serves us tea and cakes, then we look at photos of the eldest daughter, who lives in Jordan, in Amman. It gets later; the little girl is sent to bed, but she drags her feet, returns, demands that we take photos using a homemade selfie stick.


pages: 874 words: 154,810

Lonely Planet Florence & Tuscany by Lonely Planet, Virginia Maxwell, Nicola Williams

Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Costa Concordia, G4S, haute couture, Kickstarter, period drama, post-work, retail therapy, Skype, trade route

Some six-digit national rate numbers are also in use (such as those for Alitalia, and rail and postal information). As elsewhere in Europe, Italians choose from a host of providers of phone plans and rates, making it difficult to make generalisations about costs. International Calls The cheapest options for calling internationally are free or low-cost computer programs such as Skype, cut-rate call centres or international calling cards, which are sold at newsstands and tabacchi. Cut-price call centres can be found in all of the main cities, and rates can be considerably lower than from Telecom Italia payphones for international calls. You simply place your call from a private booth inside the centre and pay for it when you’ve finished.


pages: 550 words: 154,725

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, business climate, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, Edward Thorp, Fairchild Semiconductor, Henry Singleton, horn antenna, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, invention of the telephone, James Watt: steam engine, Karl Jansky, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Metcalfe’s law, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Picturephone, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Russell Ohl, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, space junk, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Teledyne, traveling salesman, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

AT&T archives. 15 Claude Shannon, oral history conducted in July 1982 by Robert Price, IEEE History Center, New Brunswick, NJ. 16 Dick Frenkiel also made the case, as did many others I interviewed, that present telecommunications and Internet costs would likely be higher had the Bell System remained intact. Nevertheless, it is difficult to broadly contend that telecommunications is, at present, “cheap.” Some technologies (Gmail, Skype) undoubtedly are; others (monthly iPhone plans with unlimited data) arguably are not. 17 John R. Pierce, letter, January 24, 1997. Pierce Collection, Huntington Library. 18 See also Steven Johnson, “Innovation: It Isn’t a Matter of Left or Right,” New York Times, October 30, 2010. 19 Fred Block and Matthew Keller, “Where Do Innovations Come From?”


pages: 509 words: 147,998

The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School by Alexandra Robbins

airport security, Albert Einstein, Columbine, game design, hive mind, it's over 9,000, Larry Ellison, messenger bag, out of africa, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics

The rise of geek chic and nerd merch, the proliferation of nerdcore hip-hop artists, and celebrity endorsements of and appearances at the “nerd prom” known as Comic Con all contribute to what Jerry Holkins, the creator of the Penny Arcade webcomic and video game conference, called “the social pariah outcast aesthetic.” The massive mainstreaming of spheres that once were the domains of nerds and geeks—video games, Internet destinations like Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Skype; technological gear like Bluetooth headsets and BlackBerries; the literary genres that encompass Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Twilight; pop culture remixes like Transformers and X-Men; activities like forwarding or embedding viral videos and blogging—provide ample evidence that a once-stigmatized subculture is now embraced and thriving.


Rome by Lonely Planet

bike sharing, bread and circuses, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, double helix, G4S, gentrification, Index librorum prohibitorum, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, low cost airline, Murano, Venice glass, Pier Paolo Pasolini, retail therapy, Skype, urban planning

These are available at newsstands and tobacconists, and are often good value. Another alternative is to use a direct-dialling service such as AT&T’s USA Direct (access number 800 172 444) or Telstra’s Australia Direct (access number 800 172 610), which allows you to make a reverse-charge call at home-country rates. Skype is also available at many internet cafes. To make a reverse-charge (collect) international call from a public telephone, dial 170. All phone operators speak English. Mobile Phones Italian mobile phones operate on the GSM 900/1800 network, which is compatible with the rest of Europe and Australia but not with the North American GSM 1900 or Japanese systems (although some GSM 1900/900 phones do work here).


pages: 641 words: 147,719

The Rough Guide to Cape Town, Winelands & Garden Route by Rough Guides, James Bembridge, Barbara McCrea

affirmative action, Airbnb, blood diamond, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, carbon footprint, colonial rule, F. W. de Klerk, gentrification, ghettoisation, haute cuisine, Maui Hawaii, Murano, Venice glass, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, out of africa, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, transfer pricing, young professional

When buying baggage cover, make sure that the per-article limit will cover your most valuable possession. Internet Accessing the internet is easy in and around Cape Town and the Garden Route: internet cafés are found even in small towns, and most backpacker hostels and hotels have internet facilities, albeit sometimes too slow for Skype calls. It’s easiest to bring your own device, enabling you to use the paid or free wireless hotspots at airports, cafés, malls and accommodation. Bring your smartphone too, as South Africa is increasing its reliance on apps for ordering everything from taxis to takeaway food. Mail The deceptively familiar feel of South African post offices can lull you into expecting an efficient service.


pages: 529 words: 150,263

The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris by Mark Honigsbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, biofilm, Black Swan, Boeing 747, clean water, coronavirus, disinformation, Donald Trump, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, indoor plumbing, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, moral panic, Pearl River Delta, Ronald Reagan, Skype, the built environment, the long tail, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

However, he does not discount the possibility that the high rates might be due to an unknown environmental cofactor. “There is still so much we do not know about Zika,” Marques acknowledged. “We have decades of work ahead of us.” Like Turchi, Marques was full of praise for Brito, and I was looking forward to meeting him face-to-face. Although we had previously spoken by Skype, his English was halting and as my Portuguese was nonexistent I feared much may have been lost in translation. Fortunately, when we did eventually meet at a restaurant near my hotel, he brought his daughter, Celina, a second year medical student, to translate. The restaurant specialized in tapioca, the traditional accompaniment to any meal in Pernambuco, and after ordering some tapioca flour pancakes we got down to business.


Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

That year, 180 miles west of London, a baby was born, named Arthur, who would come to be regarded as the preeminent science fiction writer of the twentieth century. As he became more famous, Arthur C. Clarke increasingly regarded predicting the future a “discouraging, hazardous occupation.” That may be true, but Clarke was awfully good at it, anticipating satellites, home computers, email, the internet, Google, live-streaming TV, Skype, and smart watches. Clarke had some strong opinions about scientists: a physicist in his 30s was already too old to be useful. In other scientific disciplines, a 40-year-old has likely experienced “senile decay.” And scientists of over 50 are “good for nothing but board meetings, and should at all costs be kept out of the laboratory!”


pages: 576 words: 150,183

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Albert Einstein, data acquisition, easy for humans, difficult for computers, gravity well, low earth orbit, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, patent troll, Skype, South China Sea, time dilation

“Dr. Matsuka would like to respectfully request a detailed description of the process.” Stratt stepped aside and gestured to her chair. “Doctor, have a seat and lay it out for us.” “Hold on,” I said. “Who are these people? Why am I on a Chinese aircraft carrier? And have you ever heard of Skype?!” “This is an international body of high-level scientists and political operatives that I have assembled to spearhead Project Hail Mary.” “What’s that?” “That would take a while to explain. Everyone here is eager to hear about your Astrophage findings. Let’s start with that.” I shuffled to the front of the room and sat awkwardly at the head of the table.


pages: 1,324 words: 159,290

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, Ford Model T, garden city movement, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, power law, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, Skype, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, working-age population

Starting with the typical charge for an international call in 1930, the relative cost fell by 90% in 1972, to less than 1% in 1993 and to just 0.1% in the year 2000 (OECD 2013), a 1,000-fold decline in 70 years. And during the first 15 years of the 21st century the cost fell by another order of magnitude (Figure 7.2). And in the era of e-mail, Skype, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, Viber, or Google Hangout, when an individual can reach simultaneously, and virtually cost-free, large numbers of people anywhere in the world, waiting for an operator to connect an expensive intercontinental call on an indistinct line with a distinct delay is a distant memory.


Lonely Planet Southern Italy by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, Google Earth, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, land reform, low cost airline, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, post-work, Skype, starchitect, urban decay, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

International Calls A To call Italy from abroad, dial your country’s international access code, then Italy’s country code (39), followed by the area code of the location you want (including the first zero) and the rest of the number. A To call abroad from Italy, dial 00, then the country code, followed by the full number. A Avoid making international calls from hotels, as rates are high. A The cheapest way to call is to use an app such as Skype or Viber, connecting through the wi-fi at your accommodation. Wi-fi is also available at numerous cafes and bars. Mobile Phones A Italian mobile phones operate on the GSM 900/1800 network, which is compatible with the rest of Europe and Australia but not always with the North American GSM or CDMA systems – check with your service provider.


pages: 772 words: 150,109

As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age by Matthew Cobb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Apollo 11, Asilomar, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Build a better mousetrap, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Higgs boson, lab leak, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, out of africa, planetary scale, precautionary principle, profit motive, Project Plowshare, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Wayback Machine, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

As Doudna later recalled of her work with Charpentier and their teams: ‘we would be quite the international group: a French professor in Sweden, a Polish student in Austria, and a German student, a Czech postdoc and an American professor in Berkeley’.32 Scattered across the world, the researchers discussed and communicated their results with each other via Skype and FedEx.33 2012 was the decisive year, as two interlinked races took place. First, there was a competition among the microbiologists, until recently the only people interested in CRISPR, to show exactly how the system worked and to demonstrate that it could be manipulated in microbes, targeting the CRISPR enzymes at any DNA sequence.


Italy by Damien Simonis

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, bike sharing, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, company town, congestion charging, dark pattern, discovery of the americas, Frank Gehry, haute couture, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, large denomination, low cost airline, Murano, Venice glass, pension reform, period drama, Peter Eisenman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, retail therapy, Skype, spice trade, starchitect, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Funny Palace (Map; 06 447 03 523; www.hostelfunny.com; 5th fl, Via Varese 31; dm €15-25, s without bathroom €30-70, d without bathroom €55-100; ) Run by a friendly international crew, with the Splashnet Laundry as their office-laundry-internet cafe, this great little backpackers’ hostel has doubles, triples and quads, with a comfortable, homey feel. Thoughtful touches such as clean towels, a bottle of wine on arrival and vouchers for breakfast in a nearby cafe make it an excellent choice. Wi-fi is available, as is Skype. No credit cards. They also run the similar Amazing Place around the corner. M&J Hostel (Map; 06 446 28 02; www.mejplacehostel.com; Via Solferino 9; dm €10-35, s €50-70, d €60-100; ) The long-established M&J is a hotel-hostel run by two well-travelled brothers. There are a number of brightly painted dorms (up to 10 people), one of which is female-only and some of which have their own bathrooms.

EMERGENCY Police station ( 075 572 32 32; Palazzo dei Priori) INTERNET ACCESS Over a dozen internet cafes have popped up recently, most charging around €1.50 per hour. If you’re sticking around, ask for an abbonamento discount card from the cafe you frequent the most, which will save you about 15% on 10 hours. Many cafes now have Skype, with accompanying headphones and cameras. Tempo Reale ( 075 573 55 33; Via del Forno 17; 10am-11.30pm Mon-Sat, 10am-10pm Sun) Central and friendly, with high-speed connection, ample opening hours and cheap long-distance telephone service. INTERNET RESOURCES Perugia Online (www.perugiaonline.com) Offers info on accommodation, restaurants, history, activities and sights.

Umbria’s real stand-out accommodation is located in the countryside. BUDGET Camping Il Rocolo ( /fax 075 517 85 50; www.ilrocolo.it; Str Fontana 1/n, Loc Colle della Trinità; per person €6.50-8, per car €3-4, per tent €5.50-6.50; Easter-Sep & during Eurochocolate; ) International newspapers, Skype telephone connection, 24-hour hot showers and 100 shaded sites make this a safe choice, and there’s also an on-site restaurant, friendly multilingual staff and plenty of extras (barbecue pit, TV area, bocce party, small market, proximity to a bus into Perugia). Centro Internazionale per la Gioventù ( 075 572 28 80; www.ostello.perugia.it; Via Bontempi 13; dm €15, sheets €2; mid-Jan—mid-Dec; ) If the 10am to 4pm lockout doesn’t scare you off, then you’ll appreciate the sweeping countryside view and wafting sounds of church bells from the hostel’s terrace, where guests often gather after making dinner.


Costa Rica by Matthew Firestone, Carolina Miranda, César G. Soriano

airport security, Berlin Wall, centre right, desegregation, illegal immigration, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, sustainable-tourism, the payments system, trade route, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, young professional

Café Internet Omni Crisval (Map Click here; Av 1 btwn Calles 3 & 5; 9am-9pm Mon-Sat; per hr ₡400) A dozen terminals with speedy connections located on the main floor of the Omni shopping center. Más Móvil Internet (Map Click here; Av 5 btwn Calles Central & 1; 2221-4080; per hr ₡300) Sixteen machines, some of which have Skype for online calling. Return to beginning of chapter Laundry Do-it-yourself laundry services are hard to find in San José. However, most hotels and hostels offer this service. Expect to pay in the vicinity of ₡4400 to ₡5500 for a load. High-end places may charge by the piece, which is generally more expensive.

Some travelers have had their access numbers pilfered by thieves. To call Costa Rica from abroad, use the country code (506) before the eight-digit number. Find other important phone numbers on the inside front cover of this book. Due to the increasing popularity of voice-over IP services such as Skype, it’s sometimes possible to skip the middle man and just bring a headset along with you to an internet cafe. Ethernet connections and wireless signals are becoming more common in accommodations, so if you’re traveling with a laptop you can just connect and call for pennies. Return to beginning of chapter TIME Costa Rica is six hours behind GMT, so Costa Rican time is equivalent to Central Time in North America.


Eastern USA by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, the built environment, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Pay Phones & Phone Cards »Pay phones are readily found in major cities, but are becoming rarer. »Local calls cost 50¢. »Private prepaid phone cards are available from convenience stores, supermarkets and pharmacies. »AT&T sells a reliable phone card that is widely available in the USA. Internet Calls Services such as Skype (www.skype.com) and Google Voice (www.google.com/voice) can make calling, especially internationally, quite cheap. Check the websites for details. Time The Eastern region is split between the Eastern and Central time zones, which are an hour apart. The demarcation line slices through Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and Florida.


The Rough Guide to Jerusalem by Daniel Jacobs

centre right, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, low cost airline, Mount Scopus, Skype, Suez canal 1869, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, Wall-E

To call abroad, from Jerusalem, dial the international access code (00), then your country code (see box below), the area code (omitting the initial zero if there is one; this does not apply to North America) and the subscriber number. Calling abroad is easy. You can do it from a hotel (pricey), with a mobile (slightly cheaper), with a phonecard from a public call box (cheaper still), or at Mike’s Centre (see p.40), which offers very economic rates. If you’ve got a laptop with access to a VOIP network such as Skype, then you get the best rates of all. Many phone companies issue calling cards that you can use abroad and charge to your home bill, but these will be much more expensive than paying locally. You can also call home collect, using a “home country direct” number, but again this will cost you much more than paying locally.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

“Work,” not “jobs,” should be the organizing principle for our map of the future labor economy. There is plenty of work to be done. IT’S UP TO US At my 2015 Next:Economy Summit, an event I’d organized to explore the impact of technology on the future of work, Limor Fried, the founder and CEO of Adafruit, appeared via Skype, giving us a virtual tour of her factory and warehouse in New York City. She showed us the design workstation where she creates innovative electronic devices and kits; a few steps away were the pick-and-place machines for placing chips on the circuit boards she develops herself, as well as other small-scale manufacturing equipment.


pages: 735 words: 165,375

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Video visits are straightforward for anyone with broadband service; phone calls are easier still. In response to COVID-19, an entire telemedicine industry was invented overnight. In no time, telemedicine became ubiquitous. Hooray for physicians for making this happen! But why did it take COVID-19 for people to be able to Skype with their doctors? The fact that tele-visits didn’t pay was surely part of it. Because of our open-ended, Jeffersonian commitment to medical care, the United States is unique in the extent of its bias toward expensive treatment. We accept that taxpayers will pay for health care without empowering representatives of those taxpayers to limit costs.


pages: 741 words: 164,057

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing by Kevin Davies

23andMe, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, bioinformatics, California gold rush, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hype cycle, imposter syndrome, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, phenotype, QWERTY keyboard, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rolodex, scientific mainstream, Scientific racism, seminal paper, Shenzhen was a fishing village, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, traumatic brain injury, warehouse automation

“I liked her intensity. I can get that way, too, when I’m really focused on a problem. It made me feel that she was a like-minded person.”2 And Doudna had published her first papers on CRISPR by this time. Back in Berkeley, Doudna persuaded Martin Jínek to work on the Cas9 project with Charpentier’s lab. Jínek began skyping with Chyliński, the grad student, who had stayed in Vienna after Charpentier, who didn’t have tenure, had taken a group leader position in Sweden. Although they could converse in something approximating Polish—Jínek learned the language watching Polish television as a child—the two scientists mostly communicated in English.


pages: 684 words: 188,584

The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era by Craig Nelson

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, El Camino Real, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, music of the spheres, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, Project Plowshare, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, TED Talk, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, éminence grise

Abbasi and his wife escaped more or less unharmed, but one of his colleagues was killed by a similar attack, as was an Iranian particle physicist in January 2010, an electronics specialist in July 2011, and a manager at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant in January 2012. Teheran blamed Tel Aviv and Washington for the assassinations, as well as for the malware viruses known as Flame and Stuxnet, which were discovered in the spring of 2012 infecting Iran’s uranium enrichment computers. Flame is lithe spyware that turns on computer microphones and Skypes the recorded conversations; scans the neighborhood’s Bluetooth gadgets for names and phone numbers; and takes pictures of the computer’s screen every fifteen to sixty seconds. Stuxnet infected Iran’s uranium-enriching centrifuges and sped them up until they committed suicide. A Russian nuclear executive summed up that after the fall of the USSR, “the great powers were stuck with arsenals they could not use, and nuclear weapons became the weapons of the poor. . . .


pages: 611 words: 188,732

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

Alan Kay: We could actually see that ideas could be organized in a different way, that they could be filtered in a different way, that what we were looking at was not something that was trying to automate current modes of thought, but that there should be an amplification relationship between us and this new technology. Engelbart’s NLS terminal had a screen and keyboard, windows, and a mouse. He showed off a way to edit text, a version of e-mail, even a primitive Skype. To modern eyes, Engelbart’s computer system looks pretty familiar, but to an audience used to punch cards and printouts it was a revelation. The computer could be more than a number cruncher; it could be a communications and information-retrieval tool. In one ninety-minute demo Engelbart shattered the military-industrial computing paradigm, and gave the hippies and freethinkers and radicals who were already gathering in Silicon Valley a vision of the future that would drive the culture of technology for the next several decades.


pages: 834 words: 180,700

The Architecture of Open Source Applications by Amy Brown, Greg Wilson

8-hour work day, anti-pattern, bioinformatics, business logic, c2.com, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative editing, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, continuous integration, Conway's law, create, read, update, delete, David Heinemeier Hansson, Debian, domain-specific language, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, finite state, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, friendly fire, functional programming, Guido van Rossum, Ken Thompson, linked data, load shedding, locality of reference, loose coupling, Mars Rover, MITM: man-in-the-middle, MVC pattern, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, Perl 6, premature optimization, recommendation engine, revision control, Ruby on Rails, side project, Skype, slashdot, social web, speech recognition, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, WebSocket

Lessons Learned When we started work on SIP Communicator, one of the most common criticisms or questions we heard was: "Why are you using Java? Don't you know it's slow? You'd never be able to get decent quality for audio/video calls!" The "Java is slow" myth has even been repeated by potential users as a reason they stick with Skype instead of trying Jitsi. But the first lesson we've learned from our work on the project is that efficiency is no more of a concern with Java than it would have been with C++ or other native alternatives. We won't pretend that the decision to choose Java was the result of rigorous analysis of all possible options.


Lonely Planet Andalucia: Chapter From Spain Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, credit crunch, discovery of the americas, Francisco Pizarro, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, Skype, trade route, urban renewal

Many towns also have cheap-rate call offices known as locutorios, where you can make international calls for low rates (eg around €0.20 a minute to the US or €0.30 a minute to Australia), although calls within Spain are generally at similar rates to street payphones. Cheapest of all are internet phone calls, available at some locutorios and internet cafes, or on your laptop via sites such as www.skype.com. Mobile Phones If you’re going to make lots of calls within Spain, it’s worth considering buying a Spanish SIM card. Shops on every main street and in every shopping centre sell phones at bargain prices and Orange (www.orange.es), Movistar (www.movistar.es) and Vodafone (www.vodafone.es) are widespread and reputable brands.


How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, autism spectrum disorder, Drosophila, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, framing effect, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, longitudinal study, luminiferous ether, meta-analysis, nocebo, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Shai Danziger, Skype, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, systems thinking, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

And my heartfelt thanks go out to the generous and thoughtful colleagues who spent time answering my questions, including Howard Fields, who was always available for enticing and enlightening discussions about the relation between nociception, reward, and interoceptive processing; Vijay Balasubramanian, who provided extremely useful explanations in response to my extensive questioning about the visual system; Thom Cleland, who enthusiastically shared his insights on the olfactory system; Moran Cerf, who gave me the inside scoop on intracranial electrical recording in live humans; and Karl Friston, who rewarded my out-of-the-blue email on predictive coding with an insightful email discussion wrapped in encouragement. Several others provided helpful answers to my questions via email or Skype, including Dayu Lin, who provided a detailed discussion of her research using optogenetics; Mark Bouton, who taught me the basics of contextual learning in mammals; Earl Miller for explaining the implications of his single-cell recording research on category learning in macaques; and Matthew Rushworth, who offered additional details about his mapping of the anterior cingulate cortex.


Frommer's Mexico 2008 by David Baird, Juan Cristiano, Lynne Bairstow, Emily Hughey Quinn

airport security, AltaVista, Bartolomé de las Casas, centre right, colonial rule, Day of the Dead, East Village, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, low cost airline, Maui Hawaii, out of africa, Pepto Bismol, place-making, Skype, sustainable-tourism, the market place, urban planning

., VOICE-OVER INTERNET T-Mobile, AT&T Wireless, and Cingular PROTOCOL (VOIP) use this quasi-universal system; in If you have Web access while traveling, Canada, Microcell and some Rogers cus- you might consider a broadband-based tomers are GSM, and all Europeans and telephone service (in technical terms, most Australians use GSM. GSM phones Voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP) function with a removable plastic SIM such as Skype (www.skype.com) or Voncard, encoded with your phone number age (www.vonage.com), which allows you and account information. If your cell- to make free international calls if you use phone is on a GSM system, and you have their services from your laptop or in a a world-capable multiband phone, such cybercafe.


Frommer's England 2011: With Wales by Darwin Porter, Danforth Prince

airport security, Ascot racecourse, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Babbage, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, double helix, Edmond Halley, gentrification, George Santayana, haute couture, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Sloane Ranger, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, sustainable-tourism, the market place, tontine, University of East Anglia, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

From abroad, researching the wide array of options is a daunting task, but as a means of getting started in your search, go to www.britishtelecom.com. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) If you have Web access while traveling, consider a broadband-based phone service— in technical terms, Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP—such as Skype (www.myskyp.com) or Vonage (www.vonage.com), which allow you to make free international calls from your laptop or in a cybercafe. Neither service requires the people you’re calling to also have that service (though there are fees if they do not). Check the websites for details. 82 06_615386-ch03.indd 8206_615386-ch03.indd 82 8/24/10 2:06 PM8/24/10 2:06 PM Internet & E-mail WITH YOUR OWN COMPUTER WITHOUT YOUR OWN COMPUTER TIPS ON ACCOMMODATIONS Reserve your accommodations as far in advance as possible, even in the so-called slow months from November to April.

Lawrence), 275 Shepherd Market (London), 105 Shepherd’s Tavern (London), 231 Sherborne Wharf Heritage Narrow Boats (Birmingham), 510 Sherlock Holmes (London), 232 Sherman Theatre (Cardiff), 704 Sherwood Forest, 577–578 Ship Inn (Port Eynon), 720 Shires Shopping Centre (Leicester), 564 Shoes, London, 215 Shopping, best buys, 68–69 Shoulder of Mutton (Bradford), 667 Shrine of Edward the Confessor (London), 171 Singles Travel International, 75 Singleton (Swansea), 718 Single travelers, 75 Sir Alfred Munnings Art Museum (Dedham), 549 Sir Francis Drake’s House (Yelverton), 412 Sir John Soane’s Museum (London), 193 Sissinghurst Castle Garden, 304 606 Club (London), 224 Sizergh Castle (Kendal), 626 Skaigh Stables (Belstone), 415 Skype, 82 Slade, 719 The Slopes (Buxton), 568 Smallhythe Place (near Rye), 295 Smoking, 87, 757 Smuggler’s Haunt (Port Eynon), 720 Snape Maltings Concert Hall (Aldeburgh), 550 Snowdonia National Park, 730 Snowdon Mountain Railway (Llanberis), 731 Society of London Theatre, 217 Soho (London), 106 accommodations, 125–126 restaurants, 149–151 Solomon’s Temple (near Buxton), 570 Somerset and North Devon Coast Path, 400 Somerset Rural Life Museum (Glastonbury), 397 Sound (London), 223 Southampton, 342–345 Southampton Maritime Museum, 345 Southampton Market, 345 Southbank Centre (London), 221 South Bank (London), 108 restaurants, 158 shopping, 216 The South Downs Way, 11 The Southeast (Kent, Surrey & Sussex), 89 South Galleries (Brighton), 320 South Kensington (London), 109–110 restaurants, 161–163 South (Manchester), 599 Southsea, 337 Southsea Castle, 342 South Stack (Holyhead Mountain), 747 South Wales, 91 Southwark (London), 108 accommodations, 133 South West Coast Path Association, 400 The Southwest (Dorset, Somerset, Devon & Cornwall), 89 Spa Complex (Scarborough), 678 Spaniards’ Point (Mousehole), 448 Speakers’ Corner (London), 198 Specialty Travel Index, 76 Spode Museum (Stoke-onTrent), 520 Spode (Stoke-on-Trent), 520 Squerryes Court (near Westerham), 304–305 Stansted Airport, London, 103–104 Stansted Express, 104 GENERAL INDEX St.


Germany Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, sensible shoes, Skype, starchitect, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

Circus Hostel HOSTEL € Offline map Google map (2000 3939; www.circus-hostel.de; Weinbergsweg 1a; dm €23-29, d with/without bathroom from €80/€64, 2-/4-person apt €95/150; ; Rosenthaler Platz) Clean, cheerfully painted rooms, abundant showers and competent, helpful staff are among factors that keep Circus at the top of the hostel heap. Welcome tech touches include laptop and Skype phone rentals and laptop-sized in-room lockers with integrated electrical plug. To download its free self-guided MP3 city tour, go to www.circus-berlin.de/bustour. Arte Luise Kunsthotel BOUTIQUE HOTEL €€ Offline map Google map (284 480; www.luise-berlin.com; Luisenstrasse 19; d €100-210, without bathroom €80-110; ; Friedrichstrasse, Friedrichstrasse) At this ‘gallery with rooms’ each unit is designed by a different artist, who receives royalties whenever it’s rented.

Rates change daily and are published in the newspapers or online at www.billigertelefonieren.de (in German). Telephone call shops, which cluster around train stations, may also offer competitive calling rates but often charge steep connection fees. Make sure you understand the charges involved. With a high-speed internet connection, you can talk for free via Skype, or use the SkypeOut service, which allows you to call landlines from your computer. Mobile Phones »German mobile numbers begin with a four-digit prefix, such as 0151, 0157, 0170, 0178. »Mobile (cell) phones are called Handys and work on GSM 900/1800. If your home country uses a different standard, you’ll need a multiband GSM phone while in Germany. »To avoid high roaming costs consider buying a prepaid local SIM, provided you have an unlocked phone that works in Germany.


pages: 786 words: 195,810

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bletchley Park, crowdsourcing, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, hydroponic farming, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Larry Wall, megacity, meta-analysis, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, New Journalism, pattern recognition, placebo effect, scientific mainstream, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, the scientific method, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Throughout Ralph 124C 41+, the eponymous hero (not coincidentally, a reclusive “great American inventor”) and his muse, a Swiss ham radio operator named Alice 212B423, address one another as if they’re reading from technical manuals, complete with an abundance of brand names and calculations carried to several decimal places. “Both the Power mast and the Communico mast were blown down the same day, and I was left without any means of communication whatsoever,” Alice informs Ralph when they meet by chance owing to the equivalent of a Skype glitch. Ralph then rescues Alice by remotely directing his microwave beams to melt an onrushing avalanche. Vive l’amour! — THOUGH GERNSBACK’S OWN ATTEMPTS to write fiction were invariably clunky and stiff, he was brilliant at fostering the formation of communities of shared interest. He began publishing his subscribers’ names, radio call numbers, and addresses in a wireless registry that appeared at the back of Modern Electrics, and in three years, his circulation base soared from eight thousand to fifty-two thousand.


Bali & Lombok Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, first-past-the-post, Kickstarter, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, retail therapy, Skype, spice trade, sustainable-tourism

Don't leave valuables on a beach while swimming Use front desk/in-room safes Traffic & Footpaths Apart from the dangers of driving in Bali, the traffic in most tourist areas is often annoying and frequently dangerous to pedestrians. Footpaths can be rough, even unusable; gaps in the pavement are a top cause of injury. Carry a torch (flashlight) at night. Telephone Internet Calling Most hotel wi-fi service in south Bali and Ubud will allow Skype to work. Internet centres may add a surcharge for the call to your connection time. Mobile Phones SIM cards for mobile phones cost only 5000Rp. They come with cheap rates for calling other countries, starting at US$0.20 per minute. SIM cards are widely available and easily refilled with credit.


pages: 685 words: 203,949

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, big-box store, business process, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Exxon Valdez, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, human-factors engineering, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, index card, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, information security, invention of writing, iterative process, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, pre–internet, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shared worldview, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

Again, an efficient system is one in which you’ve exploited affordances by off-loading as many memory functions as possible from your brain into a well-labeled and logically organized collection of external objects. This can take many forms, limited only by your imagination and ingenuity. If you find you’re often confusing one file folder for another, make the folders different colors to easily distinguish them. A business that depends heavily on telephone or Skype calls, and has clients, colleagues, or suppliers in different time zones, organizes all the materials related to these calls in time-zone order so that it’s easy to see whom to call at which times of day. Lawyers file case material in numbered binders or folders that correspond to statute numbers.


pages: 829 words: 186,976

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't by Nate Silver

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, book value, Broken windows theory, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Freestyle chess, fudge factor, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Laplace demon, locking in a profit, Loma Prieta earthquake, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oklahoma City bombing, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, power law, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, public intellectual, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, savings glut, security theater, short selling, SimCity, Skype, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

What’s interesting is that the technology itself has in some ways exceeded our expectations. Can you imagine what an investor in 2000 would have done if you had shown her an iPad? And told her that, within ten years, she could use it to browse the Internet on an airplane flying 35,000 feet over Missouri and make a Skype call* to her family in Hong Kong? She would have bid Apple stock up to infinity. Nevertheless, ten years later, in 2010, technology companies accounted for only about 7 percent of economic activity.42 For every Apple, there were dozens of companies like Pets.com that went broke. Investors were behaving as though every company would be a winner, that they wouldn’t have to outcompete each other, leading to an utterly unrealistic assumption about the potential profits available to the industry as a whole.


pages: 700 words: 201,953

The Social Life of Money by Nigel Dodd

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, German hyperinflation, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Herbert Marcuse, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kula ring, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mental accounting, microcredit, Minsky moment, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, Neal Stephenson, negative equity, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, postnationalism / post nation state, predatory finance, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, remote working, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Scientific racism, seigniorage, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Veblen good, Wave and Pay, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

This is a transaction database shared by all nodes participating in the system. 25 But unlike credit and debit card transactions, where the bank or card company manages the ledger, Bitcoin ledgers consist of block chains. 26 See https://www.casascius.com/. 27 For example, on April 15, 2013, an Asus laptop was available for 6.2271 BTC, which the website states was equivalent to US$629 (see https://www.bitcoinstore.com/). 28 See “Bitcoin takes an important step toward becoming part of every web browser on the planet,” http://qz.com/78014/bitcoin-is-now-part-of-the-web-sort-of/, accessed May 10, 2013. 29 Around 70 percent of items sold on Silk Road are drugs; other items include erotica, books, and fake IDs. 30 See http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013–04–12/virtual-bitcoin-mining-is-a-real-world-environmental-disaster.html. 31 See http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/adam-smith-hates-bitcoin/?smid=tw-NytimesKrugman&seid=auto. 32 See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYHoE21kUcs. 33 One version of Bitcoin malware used Skype to turn infected computers into “slaves” of a Bitcoin generator (see http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/208194210/Skypemageddon_by_bitcoining). 34 The December 2013 crashes were linked to new Chinese government restrictions on Bitcoin transactions, see “China Bans Banks from Bitcoin Transactions,” Financial Times, December 5, 2013.


pages: 720 words: 197,129

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

Over the next six years, culminating in 1968, Engelbart went on to devise a full-fledged augmentation system that he called “oNLine System,” or NLS. In addition to the mouse, it included many other advances that led to the personal computer revolution: on-screen graphics, multiple windows on a screen, digital publishing, blog-like journals, wiki-like collaborations, document sharing, email, instant messaging, hypertext linking, Skype-like videoconferencing, and the formatting of documents. One of his technocharged protégés, Alan Kay, who would later advance each of these ideas at Xerox PARC, said of Engelbart, “I don’t know what Silicon Valley will do when it runs out of Doug’s ideas.”38 THE MOTHER OF ALL DEMOS Engelbart was more into Greek folk dances than Trips Festivals, but he had gotten to know Stewart Brand when they experimented with LSD at the same lab.


Lonely Planet London by Lonely Planet

Boris Johnson, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Babbage, congestion charging, Crossrail, death from overwork, discovery of the americas, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Etonian, financial independence, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market design, place-making, post-work, Russell Brand, Skype, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent

Some cybercafes and internet shops also offer cheap rates for international calls. » International calling cards with a PIN (usually denominated £5, £10 or £20), which you can use from any phone by dialling a special access number, are usually the cheapest way to call abroad. These cards are available at most corner shops. » Note that the use of Skype can be restricted in hostels and internet cafes because of noise and/or band-width issues. Local & National Call Rates » Local calls are charged by time alone; regional and national calls are charged by both time and distance. » Daytime rates apply from 6am to 6pm Monday to Friday. » The cheap rate applies from 6pm to 6am Monday to Friday; weekend rates apply from 6pm Friday to 6am Monday.


The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier by Ian Urbina

9 dash line, Airbnb, British Empire, clean water, Costa Concordia, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Filipino sailors, forensic accounting, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global value chain, Global Witness, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, Jones Act, Julian Assange, Malacca Straits, Maui Hawaii, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, standardized shipping container, statistical arbitrage, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

I developed a personal relationship with the security staff at my credit card company. At one point, they froze my Visa card while I was in Somalia due to suspicious activity (mine). This caused me no small amount of heartburn because I urgently needed to use the card to buy plane tickets online and to top up my Skype account to make phone calls. “Your card showed charges coming from the Maldives, Somalia, U.A.E., and Mexico,” the Visa fraud alert office said to me at one point during a call. “Can you explain how that’s possible?” As I made my way to Malaysia and then to Seaventures, I contacted several engineers from Malaysian universities who had researched creative ways to deal with the aging platforms.


PostGIS in Action by Regina O. Obe, Leo S. Hsu

business logic, call centre, crowdsourcing, database schema, Debian, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, functional programming, Google Earth, job automation, McMansion, Mercator projection, Network effects, null island, openstreetmap, planetary scale, profit maximization, Ruby on Rails, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, SQL injection, traveling salesman, web application

Common favorites are SQL, PL/pgSQL, PL/Perl, PL/V8, and for GIS users PL/Python and PL/R are the most popular. There are more esoteric languages that are designed more for specific domains, such as PL/SH (which allows you to write stored functions that run bash/shell commands) and PL/Proxy (designed by Skype Corporation and freely provided, designed to replicate commands between PostgreSQL servers). The only languages preinstalled in all PostgreSQL databases are SQL and C. PostgreSQL allows you to bind a C function in a C library to a stored function wrapper so that it can be used in an SQL statement.


pages: 1,380 words: 190,710

Building Secure and Reliable Systems: Best Practices for Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Systems by Heather Adkins, Betsy Beyer, Paul Blankinship, Ana Oprea, Piotr Lewandowski, Adam Stubblefield

air gap, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, bash_history, behavioural economics, business continuity plan, business logic, business process, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, continuous integration, correlation does not imply causation, create, read, update, delete, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, database schema, Debian, defense in depth, DevOps, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, exponential backoff, fault tolerance, fear of failure, general-purpose programming language, Google Chrome, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, information security, Internet of things, Kubernetes, load shedding, margin call, microservices, MITM: man-in-the-middle, NSO Group, nudge theory, operational security, performance metric, pull request, ransomware, reproducible builds, revision control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, self-driving car, single source of truth, Skype, slashdot, software as a service, source of truth, SQL injection, Stuxnet, the long tail, Turing test, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Valgrind, web application, Y2K, zero day

Communications Emergency communication channels are the next critical factor in emergency response. What should on-callers do when their usual chat service is down or unreachable? What if that chat service is compromised or being eavesdropped on by the attacker? Pick a communications technology (e.g., Google Chat, Skype, or Slack) that has as few dependencies as possible and is useful enough for the size of your responder teams. If that technology is outsourced, is the system reachable by the responders, even if the system layers outside your control are broken? Phone bridges, though inefficient, also exist as an old-school option, though they’re increasingly deployed using IP telephony that depends on the internet.


pages: 562 words: 201,502

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

“I fucking like humanity, dude.” Musk was therefore dismayed when he heard at the end of 2013 that Page and Google were planning to buy DeepMind. Musk and his friend Luke Nosek tried to put together financing to stop the deal. At a party in Los Angeles, they went to an upstairs closet for an hour-long Skype call with Hassabis. “The future of AI should not be controlled by Larry,” Musk told him. The effort failed, and Google’s acquisition of DeepMind was announced in January 2014. Page initially agreed to create a “safety council,” with Musk as a member. The first and only meeting was held at SpaceX.


pages: 803 words: 415,953

Frommer's Mexico 2009 by David Baird, Lynne Bairstow, Joy Hepp, Juan Christiano

airport security, AltaVista, Bartolomé de las Casas, centre right, colonial rule, Day of the Dead, East Village, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, low cost airline, out of africa, Pepto Bismol, place-making, Skype, sustainable-tourism, the market place, urban planning, young professional

To dial the cellular phone from anywhere else in Mexico, first dial 01, and then the three-digit area code and the seven-digit number. To dial it from the U.S., dial 011-52, plus the three-digit area code and the seven-digit number. VOICE-OVER INTERNET PROTOCOL (VOIP) If you have Web access while traveling, consider a broadband-based telephone service (in technical terms, Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP) such as Skype (www.skype.com) or Vonage (www.vonage.com), which allow you to make free international calls from your laptop or in a cybercafe. Neither service CELLPHONES requires the people you’re calling to have Telcel is Mexico’s expensive, primary cell- that service (though fees apply if they do phone provider. It has upgraded its sys- not).


England by David Else

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, country house hotel, Crossrail, David Attenborough, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, sceptred isle, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

To make reverse-charge (collect) calls, dial 155 for the international operator. It’s expensive, but at least the person at the other end is paying. To call England from abroad, dial your country’s international access code, then 44 (the UK’s country code), then the area code (dropping the first 0) and the phone number. Most internet cafes now have Skype or some other sort of VOIP system, so you can make international calls for the price of your time online. Local & National Calls From public phones the weekday rate is about 5p per minute; evenings and weekends are cheaper, but still with a minimum charge of 20p. Local calls (within 35 miles) are cheaper than national calls.

And finally, thanks to Cliff Wilkinson, my commissioning editor at Lonely Planet London, and to all the friendly faces in the editorial, cartography, layout and design departments at Lonely Planet Melbourne who helped bring this book to final fruition. Oliver Berry As always a whole host of thank-yous. Back home a huge thanks as always to Susie Berry for keeping me fed and watered during long nights of typing, Jenks and the o-region boys for keeping things ticking over Kernowside while I was on the road, TSP for serial long-distance Skyping, and the Hobo for constantly keeping my shadow company. Special thanks to the Cumbrian Tourist Board and the region’s many excellent tourist offices, to Lucy’s in Ambleside, to David Else and Cliff Wilkinson for casting an experienced eye over my front chapters, and especially to my coauthors for providing me with plenty of useful material to back up my own research.


pages: 795 words: 212,447

Dead or Alive by Tom Clancy, Grant (CON) Blackwood

active measures, affirmative action, air freight, airport security, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benoit Mandelbrot, defense in depth, dual-use technology, failed state, false flag, friendly fire, Google Earth, Panamax, post-Panamax, Skype, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl

Talking directly to the commander of his ground team had been an impromptu decision on his part, and certainly dangerous, especially given his own precarious circumstances, but the risk was warranted. The communication method was as secure as any, a homemade encryption package they had married to the house’s VoIP—Voice over Internet Protocol—computer-to-computer Skype account. Having decided to proceed with Ibrahim’s operation, the Emir wanted a final discussion, as a measure of reassurance not only for himself but also for Ibrahim. If he should lose his life on the mission his true reward would come in paradise, but here on earth he was still a soldier going into battle, and soldiers often needed praise and encouragement.


pages: 708 words: 223,211

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture by Brian Dear

air traffic controllers' union, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple Newton, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairchild Semiconductor, finite state, Future Shock, game design, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, lateral thinking, linear programming, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, Plato's cave, pre–internet, publish or perish, Ralph Nader, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, three-martini lunch, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

Ozzie became the chief software architect of Microsoft, laying the groundwork for the Azure project, which became Microsoft Cloud. In 2010 he left and formed Talko (named after Talkomatic), a mobile conferencing platform largely focused on voice messages and annotations to those messages. In 2015 Microsoft acquired Talko, which the company absorbed into Skype, the global Internet communications service Microsoft had acquired in 2011. Epilogue “Service interruption in 60 seconds…” The familiar message appeared at the bottom of the computer screens of the twenty-two die-hard NovaNET users scattered around the country. It was 2:16 a.m. Central Time on the first of September, 2015.


pages: 821 words: 227,742

I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution by Craig Marks, Rob Tannenbaum

Adam Curtis, AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, financial engineering, haute couture, Live Aid, Neil Armstrong, Parents Music Resource Center, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Tipper Gore, upwardly mobile

The main introduction and some chapter introductions incorporate a few quotes from other sources—we’ve denoted those quotes by placing them in the past tense (“Keith Richards said”) rather than the present tense (“Janet Jackson says”). The writing of this book was made easier by some products we love: Apple Computers, Diet Coke, DropBox, Facebook, Gmail, LinkedIn, Scrivener, Skype, Valium, Wellbutrin, YouSendIt, and YouTube. We don’t know how Charles Dickens survived without them. From Craig Marks: Thanks to my employers and coworkers at Billboard magazine and Popdust, who pretended not to notice while I YouTubed early-’80s new wave videos at my desk. Thanks to my friends and fellow music journalists, whose ideas about and knowledge of videos I blithely ransacked and whose support for this book was incalculably fortifying.


pages: 879 words: 233,093

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, collaborative economy, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, distributed generation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, feminist movement, Ford Model T, global village, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, Recombinant DNA, scientific management, scientific worldview, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, supply-chain management, surplus humans, systems thinking, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, working poor, World Values Survey

Now the world truly is a stage and everyone is an actor. But Andy Warhol’s quip that everyone will get their fifteen minutes of fame has had to be amended. Today millions of people spend a lifetime role playing and performing for each other on the World Wide Web. Hundreds of millions of young people, equipped with webcams, Skype, cell phone cameras, video recorders, and the like are acting out their lives for one another—and experimenting with new roles and personas in the largest continuous performance in history. Young people today are in front of the screen or on the screen, spending much of their waking day in virtual worlds where they are scripting multiple stories, directing their own performances, and choreographing virtually every aspect of their lives—hoping that millions of others will log on and follow along.


PostGIS in Action, 2nd Edition by Regina O. Obe, Leo S. Hsu

business logic, call centre, crowdsourcing, database schema, Debian, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, functional programming, Google Earth, job automation, McMansion, megacity, Mercator projection, Network effects, null island, openstreetmap, planetary scale, profit maximization, Ruby on Rails, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, SQL injection, traveling salesman, web application

Common favorites are SQL, PL/pgSQL, PL/Perl, PL/V8, and for GIS users PL/Python and PL/R are the most popular. There are more esoteric languages that are designed more for specific domains, such as PL/SH (which allows you to write stored functions that run bash/shell commands) and PL/Proxy (designed by Skype Corporation and freely provided, designed to replicate commands between PostgreSQL servers). The only languages preinstalled in all PostgreSQL databases are SQL and C. PostgreSQL allows you to bind a C function in a C library to a stored function wrapper so that it can be used in an SQL statement.


pages: 809 words: 237,921

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty by Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kula ring, labor-force participation, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, openstreetmap, out of africa, PageRank, pattern recognition, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, the market place, transcontinental railway, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks

But as we already pointed out in Chapter 10, this hasn’t happened under the control of society, as became painfully clear in June 2013 when the media began to report some of the secret documents released by Edward Snowden revealing the existence and functions of the classified surveillance programs of the federal government. The first program to be revealed was PRISM, which allowed for direct access to Americans’ Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Facebook, YouTube, and Skype accounts. We also learned about a secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over millions of Americans’ phone records to the National Security Agency (NSA); about Boundless Informant, a data-mining program collecting metadata information on billions of e-mails and phone calls; and about XKeyscore, a computer system that allows for collection of “almost anything done on the internet.”


France (Lonely Planet, 8th Edition) by Nicola Williams

active transport: walking or cycling, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, company town, double helix, flag carrier, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information trail, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Murano, Venice glass, pension reform, post-work, QWERTY keyboard, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, Sloane Ranger, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, V2 rocket

And the company is still driven by the philosophy of Across Asia on the Cheap: ‘All you’ve got to do is decide to go and the hardest part is over. So go!’ * * * OLIVER BERRY Back home a huge thanks as always to Susie Berry for keeping me fed and watered during long nights of typing, Jenks and the o-region boys for keeping things ticking over Kernowside while I was on the road, TSP for serial long distance Skype-ing, and the Hobo for constantly keeping my shadow company. Special thanks across the Channel go to Philippe Camba and all the excellent tour guides around the Vézère Valley (especially the staff of Rouffignac), Stéphane Michon and the Mushroom Museum, the Hotel Aïtone in Évisa (always a pleasure!), Thierry Dupont and the team, and the countless people who helped me out and gave their time along the way.


pages: 790 words: 253,035

Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency by James Andrew Miller

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, collective bargaining, corporate governance, do what you love, Donald Trump, Easter island, family office, financial engineering, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, Joan Didion, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, obamacare, out of africa, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, stem cell, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, union organizing, vertical integration

It would soon turn out CAA wasn’t the only agency making big decisions about private equity. In May of 2012, Silver Lake bought a 31 percent stake in WME for $250 million, and Egon Durban, its managing partner, became part of the agency’s executive committee. Silver Lake had hit a grand slam when it made a big-time gamble on Skype, buying 65 percent of the company in 2009, and then selling it approximately a year and a half later for a profit of more than two billion dollars. A few weeks later, ICM publicly announced that it had done the near opposite, buying out the Michigan-based Rizvi Traverse Management company. The stock repurchase was the culmination of an internal war within ICM pitting chairman and CEO Jeff Berg—who lost and would soon exit the agency—against Chris Silbermann, ICM’s president.


pages: 827 words: 239,762

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

The three pioneered the “spray and pray” approach of making a large number of investments in promising young firms. The approach—making one hundred bets in the hopes that a few “ten-baggers” pay for all the losers—has been widely emulated by VCs and angel investors since. Among DFJ’s winners: Tesla Motors, Skype, Baidu, and SolarCity. There is Tom Perkins (’57), the former director of corporate development of Hewlett-Packard who founded Kleiner Perkins along with Gene Kleiner, one of the Fairchild Eight, with $8.4 million in outside capital in 1972. Early investment winners in Tandem Computers and Genentech helped establish Kleiner as the first highly-visible VC brand, which led to expansion and further HBS recruits, including Frank Caufield (’68).


pages: 1,028 words: 267,392

Wanderers: A Novel by Chuck Wendig

Black Swan, Boston Dynamics, centre right, citizen journalism, clean water, Columbine, coronavirus, crisis actor, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, fake news, game design, global pandemic, hallucination problem, hiring and firing, hive mind, Internet of things, job automation, Kickstarter, Lyft, Maui Hawaii, microaggression, oil shale / tar sands, private military company, quantum entanglement, RFID, satellite internet, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, supervolcano, tech bro, TED Talk, uber lyft, white picket fence

The woman looked younger, maybe Benji’s age—copper-red hair, white suit. The man was older, maybe in his fifties or sixties, with a trim, flattop haircut—he wore a sour, dour face, and his lips and jaw moved like he was trying to work a seed out from between his teeth. Neither was projected as they would be in any other videoconferencing call—Skype, FaceTime, et cetera—as a set of shoulders, a head, a face. Instead it was their full bodies standing there flat against the wall. Not a hologram, not three-dimensional, but eerily lifelike. The woman spoke first: “I’m Moira Simone, and this is William Craddock.” “Bill,” the projection of the man said.


Great Britain by David Else, Fionn Davenport

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, credit crunch, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mega-rich, negative equity, new economy, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

To make reverse-charge (collect) calls, dial 155 for the international operator. It’s expensive, but what the hell – the person at the other end is paying. To call Britain from abroad, dial your country’s international access code, then 44 (the UK’s country code), then the area code (dropping the first 0) and the phone number. Most internet cafes now have Skype or some other sort of VOIP system, so you can make international calls for the price of your time online. Local & National Calls From public phones the weekday rate is about 5p per minute; evenings and weekends are cheaper – though still with a minimum charge of 20p. Local calls (within 35 miles) are cheaper than national calls.

JAMES BAINBRIDGE Many thanks to Andy Sibcy, Richard Schiessl and their families for all the help on Jersey; to Davina and John for the warm welcome in St Peter Port; to the helpful tourist offices and museums throughout the islands; and to Nick Coram and Kieron Maguire for coordinating my On the Road shot at the end of the road. OLIVER BERRY As always a whole host of ‘thank yous’. Back home a huge thanks as always to Susie Berry for keeping me fed and watered during long nights of typing, Jenks and the o-region boys for keeping things ticking over Kernowside while I was on the road, TSP for serial long-distance Skyping, and the Hobo for constantly keeping my shadow company. Special thanks to the Cumbrian Tourist Board and the region’s many excellent tourist offices; to Lucy’s in Ambleside; to David Else and Cliff Wilkinson for casting an experienced eye over my front chapters; and especially to my co-authors for providing me with plenty of useful material to back up my own research.


pages: 945 words: 292,893

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

Apollo 13, Biosphere 2, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Danny Hillis, digital map, double helix, epigenetics, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filipino sailors, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, kremlinology, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, machine readable, microbiome, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, phenotype, Potemkin village, pre–internet, random walk, remote working, selection bias, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, statistical model, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tunguska event, VTOL, zero day, éminence grise

I don’t think any moon shards are going to make it out that far.” Doob reread the message. “You’re right,” he said. “All he says is that they’re thrusting. Nothing about transferring back to low Earth orbit. Then he asks for a situation report.” He put his hands over his face and rubbed it. “I’m fading,” he announced. “I should be Skyping my family right now.” “Get outta here,” Dinah said. “I can work on the report. And I can encrypt it, now that you showed me how it works.” Doob pushed off and drifted to the exit, then caught himself and turned back. “I could figure this out myself,” he said, “but it’s late. Maybe you know off the top of your head.


pages: 1,104 words: 302,176

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

and the answer appeared on my computer screen in a fraction of a second. Communication has also been revolutionized. Long ago, telephone calls eliminated personal letters, and then e-mail eliminated many types of telephone calls. Now communication is possible by many new options, including Facebook, Twitter, and Skype, which allows a soldier in Afghanistan to have daily video chats with his parents in Nevada. The benefits of the computer and the Internet, though overwhelmingly positive, have begun to raise concerns about some side effects of the revolution. The first problem is the exacerbation of inequality. Lack of access to computers and the Internet inside the home greatly handicap the efforts to succeed in school of students whose families live in poverty, for they are competing with the majority of students, who have computers at home and who have parents who show how to use them.


pages: 1,309 words: 300,991

Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations by Norman Davies

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, classic study, Corn Laws, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, labour mobility, land tenure, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Red Clydeside, Ronald Reagan, Skype, special economic zone, trade route, urban renewal, WikiLeaks

Estonia with a status of ‘Free’ comes 6th out of 175, higher than both the United Kingdom and the United States; Russia with a status of ‘Not Free’ comes 153rd.7 Surprisingly perhaps, the aspect of life in Estonia which many choose to praise is not democracy, sightseeing or communing with nature, but the electronic revolution. Tallinn, the home of Kazaa and Skype, is publicized as the ‘super-connected capital’ and the ‘champion of the digital age’: Estonia has broken free from its Eastern bloc shackles to emerge anew as European champion of the digital age… In Tallinn free internet access is taken for granted and the acceptance of digital ID cards has opened up a world of mobile phone-enabled e-commerce.


Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, classic study, Corn Laws, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, labour mobility, land tenure, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Red Clydeside, Ronald Reagan, Skype, special economic zone, trade route, urban renewal, WikiLeaks

Estonia with a status of ‘Free’ comes 6th out of 175, higher than both the United Kingdom and the United States; Russia with a status of ‘Not Free’ comes 153rd.7 Surprisingly perhaps, the aspect of life in Estonia which many choose to praise is not democracy, sightseeing or communing with nature, but the electronic revolution. Tallinn, the home of Kazaa and Skype, is publicized as the ‘super-connected capital’ and the ‘champion of the digital age’: Estonia has broken free from its Eastern bloc shackles to emerge anew as European champion of the digital age … In Tallinn free internet access is taken for granted and the acceptance of digital ID cards has opened up a world of mobile phone-enabled e-commerce.


The Rough Guide to Egypt (Rough Guide to...) by Dan Richardson, Daniel Jacobs

Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, colonial rule, disinformation, Easter island, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Livingstone, I presume, satellite internet, self-driving car, sexual politics, Skype, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War

Owned by a Danish woman and her Egyptian partner, the tranquil Eye House (named after the Wadjet Eye of Horus) has apartments with balconies overlooking a garden (sleeping up to four people) and rooftop chalets (sleeping two) with kitchens and views of Luxor Temple and the Theban Hills, both rented on a weekly basis with free wi-fi. €130/150/week Mohammed El-Kady 010 0666 9462, elkady820002000@yahoo.com. Rents several blocks of a/c flats in Ramleh, some sharing a rooftop with fine views, or a garden: a two-bedroom flat costs £E400 a week. Mousa Ahmed 010 0381 7422, on Skype as “Mousaahmed”. Rents flats in Djorf, all with a/c and wi-fi and costing £E1500/£E4000/week/month for an upstairs flat, £E1200/£E3500 for a ground-floor one. Villa Bahri Gezira 010 0441 3504, villabahriluxor.co.uk; map. This lovely villa has a two-bedroom garden flat and a large one-bedroom rooftop studio apartment, with arabesque furnishings, wi-fi and a/c.


pages: 1,213 words: 376,284

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

Material use has indeed been decoupled from growth since the 1980s in rich OECD countries, but it has not declined in absolute terms, nor diminished in environmental impact. It is not clear why the latest technology (ICT and the internet) would break with this historical pattern. Business flights and conference trips are more frequent than ever, notwithstanding the availability of Skype and videoconferencing. The crux of the matter is that new technologies don’t automatically replace existing patterns of use. They often complement or add to them. In addition to virtual consumption, telecommunication and the internet have, arguably, reinforced physical consumption by expanding the awareness of the objects and places that exist in the world and making it easier to buy and visit them.


pages: 1,263 words: 371,402

The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois

augmented reality, Bletchley Park, carbon tax, clean water, computer age, cosmological constant, David Attenborough, Day of the Dead, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, financial independence, game design, gravity well, heat death of the universe, jitney, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, lolcat, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, power law, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Skype, stem cell, theory of mind, time dilation, Turing machine, Turing test, urban renewal, Wall-E

We crossed the brown ribbon of the Mekong with its jeweled belt of burning cars on the Friendship Bridge. I remember a Mercedes floating in the water like a paper boat on Loi Kratong, burning despite the water all around. Afterward, there was silence from the land of a million elephants, a void into which light and Skype calls and email disappeared. The roads were blocked. The telecoms died. A black hole opened where my country had once stood. Sometimes, when I wake in the night to the swish and honk of Los Angeles traffic, the confusing polyglot of dozens of countries and cultures all pressed together in this American melting pot, I stand at my window and look down a boulevard full of red lights, where it is not safe to walk alone at night, and yet everyone obeys the traffic signals.


pages: 1,351 words: 385,579

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

As long as you have access to a telephone, a Xerox machine, and a conference grant fund, you’re OK, you’re plugged into the only university that really matters—the global campus.142 Morris Zapp had a point, but he overemphasized the technologies of the 1980s. Two decades after his words were written, they have been superseded by e-mail, digital documents, Web sites, blogs, teleconferencing, Skype, and smartphones. And two centuries before they were written, the technologies of the day—the sailing ship, the printed book, and the postal service—had already made information and people portable. The result was the same: a global campus, a public sphere, or as it was called in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Republic of Letters.


pages: 889 words: 433,897

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey by Emmanuel Goldstein

affirmative action, Apple II, benefit corporation, call centre, disinformation, don't be evil, Firefox, game design, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, information retrieval, information security, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, late fees, license plate recognition, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Oklahoma City bombing, optical character recognition, OSI model, packet switching, pirate software, place-making, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RFID, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, undersea cable, UUNET, Y2K

Phillips Semiconductors is manufacturing UMA chips for cell phones, Texas Instruments is coming out with WiLink 4.0, Ericsson is manufacturing UMA phones, and Qualcomm, Nortel, Verizon, and Sprint are all using a protocol called “EV-DO Revision A.” Motorola, 94192c16.qxd 6/3/08 3:35 PM Page 689 A New Era of Telephony through Skype, is planning releases this spring, and this technology is soon to be popular. At present, the more popular option is to run over a managed network, versus an unmanaged network (i.e., the Internet) due to voice quality concerns. Uses and Abuses Now if you’re a hacker, you understand the great potential behind this.


Frommer's California 2009 by Matthew Poole, Harry Basch, Mark Hiss, Erika Lenkert

airport security, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Columbine, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, European colonialism, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, post-work, retail therapy, rolling blackouts, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

For reversed-charge or collect calls, and for person-to-person calls, dial the CELLPHONES 55 VOICE-OVER INTERNET PROTOCOL (VOIP) If y ou hav e Web access while trav eling, you might consider a br oadband-based telephone ser vice (in technical terms, Voice o ver I nternet pr otocol, or VoIP) such as S kype (www.skype.com) or Vonage (www.vonage.com), which allo ws you to make fr ee international calls if y ou use their ser vices fr om y our laptop or in a cybercafe. The people y ou’re calling must also use the ser vice for it to wor k; check the sites for details. INTERNET/E-MAIL Without Your Own Computer To find cyber cafes in y our destination check www.cybercaptive.com and www. cybercafe.com.


Frommer's Caribbean 2010 by Christina Paulette Colón, Alexis Lipsitz Flippin, Darwin Porter, Danforth Prince, John Marino

cotton gin, European colonialism, haute cuisine, hydroponic farming, jitney, Murano, Venice glass, offshore financial centre, Saturday Night Live, Skype, sustainable-tourism, white picket fence, young professional

For more information on cellphone use in the Caribbean, see the individual “F ast Facts” sections of each chapter , or see www.frommers.com/planning. VOICE OVER INTERNET PROTOCOL (VOIP) If y ou hav e Web access while trav eling, you might consider a br oadband-based telephone ser vice (in technical terms, Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP) such as S kype (www.skype.com) or Vonage (www.vonage.com), which allo ws you to make fr ee international calls if y ou use their ser vices fr om y our laptop or in a cybercafe. The people y ou’re calling must also use the ser vice for it to wor k; check the sites for details. SAVING ON YOUR HOTEL ROOM WATCH OUT FOR THOSE EX TRAS!


Principles of Corporate Finance by Richard A. Brealey, Stewart C. Myers, Franklin Allen

3Com Palm IPO, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Boeing 747, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, compound rate of return, computerized trading, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, equity premium, equity risk premium, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, fudge factor, German hyperinflation, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate swap, inventory management, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Larry Ellison, law of one price, linear programming, Livingstone, I presume, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, market friction, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the rule of 72, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, VA Linux, value at risk, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game, Zipcar

See also Information effect dividends and, 403–405 stock repurchase and, 405 Simkins, B. J., 666, 666n, 684 Sindelar, J. L., 392 Singal, V., 857 Singapore Exchange (SGX), 668 Singh, R., 383n Singleton, K. J., 603 Sinking funds, 611 Sivakumar, R., 842n Six Flags, 600, 848 Size factor, in three-factor model, 206–208 Skeel, D., 855n Skinner, Douglas J., 401n, 417n, 419, 421 Skype, 806 Small business. See also Mergers and acquisitions forms of organization, 6 higher investment returns and, 202–204, 328–329 small-firm effect in three-factor model, 206–208 Small Business Administration (SBA), 595, 794n Smart, S. B., 386n Smit, H., 578n, 580 Smith, Clifford W., Jr., 655, 660n, 786n, 799 Smith, J.


Spain by Lonely Planet Publications, Damien Simonis

Atahualpa, business process, call centre, centre right, Colonization of Mars, discovery of the americas, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, intermodal, Islamic Golden Age, land reform, large denomination, low cost airline, megaproject, place-making, Skype, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent, young professional

Some offer student rates, while most have deals on cards for several hours’ use at much-reduced rates. The Centro de Turismo de Madrid (right) offers free internet for up to 15 minutes. Bbigg (Map; 91 531 23 64; Calle Mayor 1; 1/5hr €2.50/3; 9.30am-midnight; Sol) A massive internet centre in the heart of town with separate sections for Skype, internet and games. Café Comercial (Map; 91 521 56 55; Glorieta de Bilbao 7; per 50min €1; 7.30am-midnight Mon, 7.30am-1am Tue-Thu, 7.30am-2am Fri, 8.30am-2am Sat, 9am-midnight Sun; Bilbao) Surf the net in one of Madrid’s grandest old cafes. Drop & Drag (Map;91 532 93 72; Calle de Augusto Figueroa 7; per hr €2; noon-1am Mon-Fri, 3pm-midnight Sat & Sun; Tribunal or Chueca) Handy if you’re in Chueca.