Corante: technology, business, media, law, and culture news from the blogosphere
OUR PUBLICATIONS:
Corante is a trusted, unbiased source on technology, business, law, science, and culture that’s authored by leading commentators and thinkers in their respective fields. Corante also produces premium conferences and publications that help decision-makers better understand their industries and the world around them.
Corante Blogs
Corante Blogs examine, through the eyes of leading observers, analysts, thinkers, and doers, critical themes and memes in technology, business, law, science, and culture.
Vin Crosbie, on the challenges, financial and otherwise, that newspaper publishers are facing: "The real problem, Mr. Newspaperman, isn't that your content isn't online or isn't online with multimedia. It's your content. Specifically, it's what you report, which stories you publish, and how you publish them to people, who, by the way, have very different individual interests. The problem is the content you're giving them, stupid; not the platform its on."
by Vin Crosbie in Rebuilding Media
There's a problem in the drug industry that people have recognized for some years, but we're not that much closer to dealing with it than we were then. We keep coming up with these technologies and techniques which seem as if they might be able to help us with some of our nastiest problems - I'm talking about genomics in all its guises, and metabolic profiling, and naturally the various high-throughput screening platforms, and others. But whether these are helping or not (and opinions sure do vary), one thing that they all have in common is that they generate enormous heaps of data.
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline
Now that the Web labor market is saturated and Web design a static profession, it's not surprising that 'user experience' designers and researchers who've spent their careers online are looking for new worlds to conquer. Some are returning to the “old media” as directors and producers. More are now doing offline consulting (service experience design, social policy design, exhibition design, and so on) under the 'user experience' aegis. They argue that the lessons they've learned on the Web can be applied to phenomena in the physical and social worlds. But there are enormous differences...
by Bob Jacobson in Total Experience
Clay Shirky, in deconstructing Second Life hype: "Second Life is heading towards two million users. Except it isn’t, really... I suspect Second Life is largely a 'Try Me' virus, where reports of a strange and wonderful new thing draw the masses to log in and try it, but whose ability to retain anything but a fraction of those users is limited. The pattern of a Try Me virus is a rapid spread of first time users, most of whom drop out quickly, with most of the dropouts becoming immune to later use."
by Clay Shirky in Many-to-Many
Over the last few years we've seen old barriers to creativity coming down, one after the other. New technologies and services makes it trivial to publish text, whether by blog or by print-on-demand. Digital photography has democratised a previously expensive hobby. And we're seeing the barriers to movie-making crumble, with affordable high-quality cameras and video hosting provided by YouTube or Google Video and their ilk... Music making has long been easy for anyone to engage in, but technology has made high-quality recording possible without specialised equipment, and the internet has revolutionised distribution, drastically disintermediating the music industry... What's left? Software maybe? Or maybe not."
by Suw Charman in Strange Attractor
Derek Lowe on the news that the Nobel Prize for medicine has gone to Craig Mello and Andrew Fire for their breakthrough work: "RNA interference is probably going to have a long climb before it starts curing many diseases, because many of those problems are even tougher than usual in its case. That doesn't take away from the discovery, though, any more than the complications of off-target effects take away from it when you talk about RNAi's research uses in cell culture. The fact that RNA interference is trickier than it first looked, in vivo or in vitro, is only to be expected. What breakthrough isn't?"
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline
Andrew Phelps: "Recently my WoW guild has been having a bit of a debate on the merits of Player-vs.-Player (PvP) within Azeroth. My personal opinion on this is that PvP has its merits, and can be incredible fun, but the system within WoW is horridly, horribly broken. It takes into account the concept of the battle, but battle without consequence, without emotive context, and most importantly, without honor..."
From later in the piece: "When I talk about this with people (thus far anyway) I typically get one of two responses, either 'yeah, right on!' or 'hey, it’s war, and war isn’t honorable – grow the hell up'. There is a lot to be said for that argument – but the problem is that war in the real historical world has very different constraints that are utterly absent from fantasized worlds..."
by Andrew Phelps in Got Game
Derek Lowe: "So, you're developing a drug candidate. You've settled on what looks like a good compound - it has the activity you want in your mouse model of the disease, it's not too hard to make, and it's not toxic. Everything looks fine. Except. . .one slight problem. Although the compound has good blood levels in the mouse and in the dog, in rats it's terrible. For some reason, it just doesn't get up there. Probably some foul metabolic pathway peculiar to rats (whose innards are adapted, after all, for dealing with every kind of garbage that comes along). So, is this a problem?.."
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline
Bob Jacobson, on shopping at his local Albertsons supermarket where he had "one of the worst customer experiences" of his life: "Say what you will about the Safeway chain or the Birkenstock billionaires who charge through the roof for Whole Foods' organic fare, they know how to create shopping environments that create a more pleasurable experience, at its best (as at Whole Foods) quite enjoyable. Even the warehouses like Costco and its smaller counterpart, Smart & Final, do just fine: they have no pretentions, but neither do they dump virtual garbage on the consumer merely to create another trivial revenue stream, all for the sake of promotions in the marketing department..."
by Strange Attractor in Total Experience
Kevin Anderson: "First off, I want to say that I really admire the ambition of the Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free. It is one of the boldest statements made by any media company that participation needs to be central to a radical revamp of traditional content strategies... It is, therfore, not hugely surprising to find that Comment is Free is having a few teething troubles..."
by Kevin Anderson in strange
Corante Developments
Here you will find the latest news from Corante including updates on upcoming events, new initiatives, product and publication launches, and more.
It was with shock that I returned home from a night out last night to hear the news of Russell's passing. How terribly, terribly sad. Most of all for him, as he'd seemed buoyant, healthier, and content when I'd last seen him several months ago when he was in town - he was happy that work was busy and rewarding and was having fun with it but most of all was thrilled about how things were going with his girlfriend, Ellen.
I've known Russ for what seems like ages now (in a good way) though in fact it's only been about six or seven years since the early days of "commercial" blogging when he started working on various projects at and around Corante. He was a diligent, committed, and prolific journalist who had impressively and more ably than others been able to make the transition from the old-school way of doing things to the new. He had his quirks, as we all do, but I greatly valued that he was good-natured, collegial, reliable, quick to adopt, trustworthy, eager to learn, and earnest in his interest in helping others better understand what he wrote about.
He was also, it should be said, a kind and thoughtful soul and it was the rare conversation in which he didn't ask, with sincerity, about what he knew of my life, e.g. our new babe, and we didn't talk as seemingly old friends about our lives and respective paths. I can't say I knew him very well, of course, but in our half-dozen get-togethers over the years and dozens of conversations I got a good sense of the man: he cared about learning and sharing and his bearing was earnest and ego-less and we'll miss him for that and more.
We wanted to let you know about a discount to New Comm Forum, the annual event event put on by our friends at the Society for New Communications Research. The conference, which runs from April 22-25, will feature many of the field's leading observers and is an important event for those looking, in the words of SNCR, to "better understand new communications tools, technologies and emerging modes of communication, and their effect on traditional media, professional communications, business, culture and society."
Check out the event's website and, if you're interested in attending, be sure to use the code supplied below for a special discount.
EARLY BIRD PRICING - NOW UNTIL FEB. 15th
NewComm Forum Conference - $995.
Pre-conference or post-conference session - $195.
SNCR Jam only - $75.
REGULAR PRICING - AFTER FEB. 15th
NewComm Forum Conference - $1095.
Pre-conference or post-conference session - $249.
SNCR Jam only - $75.
CORANTE READER DISCOUNTS
NewComm Forum Conference - save an additional $100
Use discount code: NCF08100
Pre-conference or post-conference session - save an additional $45.
Use discount code: NCF0845
We've been remiss in letting you know about two new independent blogs we've helped launch in the past month or so.
The first - the ConversationHub - is a companion blog to Supernova 2007, the latest edition of Kevin Werbach's excellent conference on all things connected. As the conference site says: "Supernova examines the effects of an increasingly connected world on business, life, and public policy. As disparate physical and social networks link with one another, a new societal network is rapidly evolving... The New Network is greater than the sum of its parts. It challenges us to re-create everything from the software and hardware we use...to the business models we employ...to the information and entertainment we encounter...to the ways we work and play."
Visit the ConversationHub and you'll find several dozen leading thinkers and doers, led by a few notable ringleaders, weighing in on the themes and trends of the day in technology and business. We encourage you to tune in - feel free to comment and even suggest topics and ideas for posts.
The second blog - Mobile Messaging 2.0 - convenes about a dozen top observers of the mobile messaging space for an intense discussion of the industry and where it's headed. Among its contributors are leading commentators, journalists and players in the field - tune in and you'll find them touching on topics such as mobile device design, messaging platforms, market pressures, user-generated content, interface design, and much, much more.
Also, if you visit the site, which is sponsored by Airwide Solutions, this week, you'll find live coverage and commentary from Global Messaging 2007, to which several of our contributors have traveled to hear about the latest developments from a broad spectrum of the industry's players and providers.
Be sure to catch the Office 2.0 Conference and hear from and engage with leading thinkers and doers in this exciting new market. Find out more here and be sure to use the code "GLDRK" for a special discount for Corante readers.
In the Pipeline: Don't miss Derek Lowe's excellent commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry in general at In the Pipeline
...Actually, this new Gallup report shows that 35% of people believe that Darwin's theory of evolution is not supported by the evidence, while another 29% don't know enough to say, and 1% have no opinion. So perhaps I should say, wrong or uninformed.
1. Faylene on November 19, 2004 04:13 PM writes...
This is a sad reflection on Science literacy in America. We need to find ways to show young people how science works so that this ignorance does not continue into the next generation.
2. darwinfinch on November 19, 2004 04:29 PM writes...
In my experience in talking with the Xian anti-evolution crowd, on the net and in person casually, I'm sorry to say that I feel the great majority are not simply ignorant, but proudly LAZY and (therefore?) fiercely ignorant. They (not being of low intelligence) often are well aware of the idiocy and illogic of their own beliefs, but see no reason to admit so, since this might require them to "think" about something for evem minutes at a time; and with no one paying them!
I began following this debate some years ago, and it has, along with the campaigns of the last six years, convinced me against my will that ignorance is not the real problem, esp. in the USA, but conscious dishonesty.
3. gvander on November 20, 2004 08:45 AM writes...
I find this whole thing amusing. Darwinistic evolution is being whittled away day by day by new discoveries, particularly in Cosmology. I listen to the young-earth pseudo-science fringe with their literal 6-day creation dogmatics and truely agree that is not science. Unfortunately their influence over American opinion is not in direct proportion to their knowledge of science. On the other hand, my daughters have to learn the principles of evolution that either are out of date in their textbooks or elements of evolution that just have been plain proven wrong. The textbook manufacturers just can't keep up with "real science" evidently.
I admit I live on a different planet than the previous two posters and I live in a red state to boot. I have been influenced by at least two scientists who give solid evidence that evolution is a theory in trouble. I am referring to Dr. Walter Bradley and yes, I also admit I am influenced by the anthropic principle arguments of Dr. Hugh Ross. Darwinistic (read that Naturalistic) Evolution does not compute when you bring knowledge of all the sciences together and particularly when you look at the thermodynamics and probability of Darwinistic evolution as we were once taught.
I feel for the two who posted before me, because the young-earth crowd is picking up steam among those not as astute as you obviously are and as I like to think I am. This is not a happy thing to report. I don't think their views have anything to do with true science. As long as there is an Institute for Creation Research and a modern day self-proclaimed Martin Luther and one time science teacher, Ken Hamm, actively enlightening the masses, those statistics are going to get more dismal. The home school movement will only accelerate this process. Yes, there are a lot of lazy and dishonest thinkers out there and getting more organized every day.
4. Jason Potter on November 21, 2004 08:16 PM writes...
What does Cosmology have to do with Biological Evolution?
What has been proven wrong in your daughter's textbook?
Bradley and Ross are physical scientists, they aren't really trained in the biological sciences. I wouldn't call them exactly qualified to make scientific conclusions about biological evolution. These probablity arguments are one big incredulity argument and I won't even comment on thermodynamics irrelevence.
6. Augusta Era Golian on November 22, 2004 05:52 AM writes...
Anyone who thinks the problem is just in evolution is dead wrong. What we are seeing in Texas is a spread in doubt from evolution to the rest of science. Science teachers in general seem to be becoming suspect. There seems to be some feeling that looking at nature too closely is somehow questioning His work.
7. Jari Anttila on November 22, 2004 09:57 AM writes...
"Darwinistic (read that Naturalistic) Evolution does not compute when you bring knowledge of all the sciences together..."
So it's naturalism that really bugs us, isn't it?
No matter how God did it as long as He did it supernaturally. Give us some miracles and we're satisfied.
I assume that gvander is refering to the apparent 'fine tuning' of the physical constants in our universe, such that if they were slightly different then the stars would nova too quickly or everything would collapse into black holes or the universe would expand too quickly... and so on, so that the conditions would be inhospitable for the evolution of life. But once you have our atomic chemistry, long lived stars, and a flat universe, life arises via natural darwinian evolution just fine. And the cosmological fine tuning has lots of tentative explanations - in string theory you can compactify the extra dimensions in many different ways, giving rise to different effective physics at our scale, and a common idea now is of the 'string theory landscape' where you have lots of different domains (perhaps separated by vast distances by inflation) with different physics in them, and we, not surprisingly, find ourselves existing in a region that can give rise to the spontaneous evolution of complex organisms. See, for instance, Lenny Susskind's paper on the subject.
Science is a day to day irrelevance to most people since they happily use its products instrumentally without being curious about how things work. Perhaps questioning and curiosity have been strangled by the educational system? Or the instant answers provided by mass media don't correctly convey the struggle to produce those same answers.
None of the current arguments about God and Science are new in essence. Greek philosophers were accused of atheism for denying the divinity of the heavens, medieval scholars argued over the ability or otherwise of human reason to understand the processes of the world, and many couldn't accepted Newtonian ideas in the 18th century because they somehow did away with a need for a physically involved God.
Perhaps what is needed is public education in the essentials of theology - not orthopraxsis but the philosophy of God - so people can decide for themselves what makes sense of the World. Then they might be immune to the vague arguments about the Divine and Nature's interrelationship that plague current discourse. Creationism is fundamentally flawed because it assumes God is exactly like a human engineer working on some mighty machine - as if engineers ever brought forth anything ex nihilo?
10. Maracucho on November 24, 2004 11:32 AM writes...
There’s lots of hostility out there, and a feeling that “we don't need your science”. Mr. Bush seems to follow that approach, pushing scientists off national advisory panels if they speak openly in favor of things that he doesn’t like. His ownership society will starve the public schools of money, and teachers will become even more demoralized. If science were only of esthetic interest (it has great esthetic interest to me), this wouldn’t matter. Since science bears on many practical realities, such as climate change and antibiotic resistance, the combination of an ignorant public, a corporate controlled government, and stupefying media is dangerous. The mass media personalize every issue- we get two screaming heads- Fred Singer who assures us that global warming is a myth and a nerdy scientist on the other side saying just the opposite. Children must learn about human vanities- consider Peter Duesberg, a decent intelligent microbiologist who went out on a limb against HIV causing AIDS and whose pride won’t let him admit error. He once claimed that oncogenes didn’t cause human cancers, but I haven’t heard that recently- both of those views are flat wrong. Can genetics, diet, drugs, etc. influence the course of AIDS and the likelihood of getting it? Yes, of course, but Duesberg’s basic premise is flat wrong.
Singer and Duesberg, stubborn as they are, are much better informed than the geologists, biochemists etc who speak for Creationism. Joe Sixpack hears the talking/screaming heads and can only decide who to accept based on style, dress, manner of speech etc. Most of our schools are weak(not just about science, but about history and how every nation has religious leaders telling the people that god is on their side); our media, including NPR and PBS, increase public ignorance. US culture is self-destructive. Pay attention to Potter’s comment about how home schooling is going to clarify things. We have 3 million people under age 21 in LA County. Perhaps 2% of them have parents who are educated and economically comfortable enough to home school their children. The assumption is that the other children can get a cheap education and become janitors, waiters, etc. I think that is a formula for first scientific backwardness and later civil war.
11. Faylene on November 27, 2004 02:13 PM writes...
I think it would be useful if people concerned about education, especially parents, could avoid setting up false dichotomies. We need a society that is numerate, literate and scientifically literate. We desperately need to promote tolerance and respect for the wisdom of different traditions. Many people of deep faith are able to reconcile religion and science. It seems to me that curiosity about how the natural world works is the realm of science. The difficult moral issues in our lives can be addressed by religion, philosophy or other personal approaches without literal reliance on ancient creation stories.
This is a difficult time for those of us who regard education as central to our hopes for a better future but we must not give way to elitist sentiments if we wish to have a voice in our children's future.
(I live in a red state too!)
Corante: technology, business, media, law, and culture news from the blogosphere
OUR PUBLICATIONS:
Corante is a trusted, unbiased source on technology, business, law, science, and culture that’s authored by leading commentators and thinkers in their respective fields. Corante also produces premium conferences and publications that help decision-makers better understand their industries and the world around them.
Corante Blogs
Corante Blogs examine, through the eyes of leading observers, analysts, thinkers, and doers, critical themes and memes in technology, business, law, science, and culture.
Vin Crosbie, on the challenges, financial and otherwise, that newspaper publishers are facing: "The real problem, Mr. Newspaperman, isn't that your content isn't online or isn't online with multimedia. It's your content. Specifically, it's what you report, which stories you publish, and how you publish them to people, who, by the way, have very different individual interests. The problem is the content you're giving them, stupid; not the platform its on."
by Vin Crosbie in Rebuilding Media
There's a problem in the drug industry that people have recognized for some years, but we're not that much closer to dealing with it than we were then. We keep coming up with these technologies and techniques which seem as if they might be able to help us with some of our nastiest problems - I'm talking about genomics in all its guises, and metabolic profiling, and naturally the various high-throughput screening platforms, and others. But whether these are helping or not (and opinions sure do vary), one thing that they all have in common is that they generate enormous heaps of data.
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline
Now that the Web labor market is saturated and Web design a static profession, it's not surprising that 'user experience' designers and researchers who've spent their careers online are looking for new worlds to conquer. Some are returning to the “old media” as directors and producers. More are now doing offline consulting (service experience design, social policy design, exhibition design, and so on) under the 'user experience' aegis. They argue that the lessons they've learned on the Web can be applied to phenomena in the physical and social worlds. But there are enormous differences...
by Bob Jacobson in Total Experience
Clay Shirky, in deconstructing Second Life hype: "Second Life is heading towards two million users. Except it isn’t, really... I suspect Second Life is largely a 'Try Me' virus, where reports of a strange and wonderful new thing draw the masses to log in and try it, but whose ability to retain anything but a fraction of those users is limited. The pattern of a Try Me virus is a rapid spread of first time users, most of whom drop out quickly, with most of the dropouts becoming immune to later use."
by Clay Shirky in Many-to-Many
Over the last few years we've seen old barriers to creativity coming down, one after the other. New technologies and services makes it trivial to publish text, whether by blog or by print-on-demand. Digital photography has democratised a previously expensive hobby. And we're seeing the barriers to movie-making crumble, with affordable high-quality cameras and video hosting provided by YouTube or Google Video and their ilk... Music making has long been easy for anyone to engage in, but technology has made high-quality recording possible without specialised equipment, and the internet has revolutionised distribution, drastically disintermediating the music industry... What's left? Software maybe? Or maybe not."
by Suw Charman in Strange Attractor
Derek Lowe on the news that the Nobel Prize for medicine has gone to Craig Mello and Andrew Fire for their breakthrough work: "RNA interference is probably going to have a long climb before it starts curing many diseases, because many of those problems are even tougher than usual in its case. That doesn't take away from the discovery, though, any more than the complications of off-target effects take away from it when you talk about RNAi's research uses in cell culture. The fact that RNA interference is trickier than it first looked, in vivo or in vitro, is only to be expected. What breakthrough isn't?"
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline
Andrew Phelps: "Recently my WoW guild has been having a bit of a debate on the merits of Player-vs.-Player (PvP) within Azeroth. My personal opinion on this is that PvP has its merits, and can be incredible fun, but the system within WoW is horridly, horribly broken. It takes into account the concept of the battle, but battle without consequence, without emotive context, and most importantly, without honor..."
From later in the piece: "When I talk about this with people (thus far anyway) I typically get one of two responses, either 'yeah, right on!' or 'hey, it’s war, and war isn’t honorable – grow the hell up'. There is a lot to be said for that argument – but the problem is that war in the real historical world has very different constraints that are utterly absent from fantasized worlds..."
by Andrew Phelps in Got Game
Derek Lowe: "So, you're developing a drug candidate. You've settled on what looks like a good compound - it has the activity you want in your mouse model of the disease, it's not too hard to make, and it's not toxic. Everything looks fine. Except. . .one slight problem. Although the compound has good blood levels in the mouse and in the dog, in rats it's terrible. For some reason, it just doesn't get up there. Probably some foul metabolic pathway peculiar to rats (whose innards are adapted, after all, for dealing with every kind of garbage that comes along). So, is this a problem?.."
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline
Bob Jacobson, on shopping at his local Albertsons supermarket where he had "one of the worst customer experiences" of his life: "Say what you will about the Safeway chain or the Birkenstock billionaires who charge through the roof for Whole Foods' organic fare, they know how to create shopping environments that create a more pleasurable experience, at its best (as at Whole Foods) quite enjoyable. Even the warehouses like Costco and its smaller counterpart, Smart & Final, do just fine: they have no pretentions, but neither do they dump virtual garbage on the consumer merely to create another trivial revenue stream, all for the sake of promotions in the marketing department..."
by Strange Attractor in Total Experience
Kevin Anderson: "First off, I want to say that I really admire the ambition of the Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free. It is one of the boldest statements made by any media company that participation needs to be central to a radical revamp of traditional content strategies... It is, therfore, not hugely surprising to find that Comment is Free is having a few teething troubles..."
by Kevin Anderson in strange
Corante Developments
Here you will find the latest news from Corante including updates on upcoming events, new initiatives, product and publication launches, and more.
It was with shock that I returned home from a night out last night to hear the news of Russell's passing. How terribly, terribly sad. Most of all for him, as he'd seemed buoyant, healthier, and content when I'd last seen him several months ago when he was in town - he was happy that work was busy and rewarding and was having fun with it but most of all was thrilled about how things were going with his girlfriend, Ellen.
I've known Russ for what seems like ages now (in a good way) though in fact it's only been about six or seven years since the early days of "commercial" blogging when he started working on various projects at and around Corante. He was a diligent, committed, and prolific journalist who had impressively and more ably than others been able to make the transition from the old-school way of doing things to the new. He had his quirks, as we all do, but I greatly valued that he was good-natured, collegial, reliable, quick to adopt, trustworthy, eager to learn, and earnest in his interest in helping others better understand what he wrote about.
He was also, it should be said, a kind and thoughtful soul and it was the rare conversation in which he didn't ask, with sincerity, about what he knew of my life, e.g. our new babe, and we didn't talk as seemingly old friends about our lives and respective paths. I can't say I knew him very well, of course, but in our half-dozen get-togethers over the years and dozens of conversations I got a good sense of the man: he cared about learning and sharing and his bearing was earnest and ego-less and we'll miss him for that and more.
We wanted to let you know about a discount to New Comm Forum, the annual event event put on by our friends at the Society for New Communications Research. The conference, which runs from April 22-25, will feature many of the field's leading observers and is an important event for those looking, in the words of SNCR, to "better understand new communications tools, technologies and emerging modes of communication, and their effect on traditional media, professional communications, business, culture and society."
Check out the event's website and, if you're interested in attending, be sure to use the code supplied below for a special discount.
EARLY BIRD PRICING - NOW UNTIL FEB. 15th
NewComm Forum Conference - $995.
Pre-conference or post-conference session - $195.
SNCR Jam only - $75.
REGULAR PRICING - AFTER FEB. 15th
NewComm Forum Conference - $1095.
Pre-conference or post-conference session - $249.
SNCR Jam only - $75.
CORANTE READER DISCOUNTS
NewComm Forum Conference - save an additional $100
Use discount code: NCF08100
Pre-conference or post-conference session - save an additional $45.
Use discount code: NCF0845
We've been remiss in letting you know about two new independent blogs we've helped launch in the past month or so.
The first - the ConversationHub - is a companion blog to Supernova 2007, the latest edition of Kevin Werbach's excellent conference on all things connected. As the conference site says: "Supernova examines the effects of an increasingly connected world on business, life, and public policy. As disparate physical and social networks link with one another, a new societal network is rapidly evolving... The New Network is greater than the sum of its parts. It challenges us to re-create everything from the software and hardware we use...to the business models we employ...to the information and entertainment we encounter...to the ways we work and play."
Visit the ConversationHub and you'll find several dozen leading thinkers and doers, led by a few notable ringleaders, weighing in on the themes and trends of the day in technology and business. We encourage you to tune in - feel free to comment and even suggest topics and ideas for posts.
The second blog - Mobile Messaging 2.0 - convenes about a dozen top observers of the mobile messaging space for an intense discussion of the industry and where it's headed. Among its contributors are leading commentators, journalists and players in the field - tune in and you'll find them touching on topics such as mobile device design, messaging platforms, market pressures, user-generated content, interface design, and much, much more.
Also, if you visit the site, which is sponsored by Airwide Solutions, this week, you'll find live coverage and commentary from Global Messaging 2007, to which several of our contributors have traveled to hear about the latest developments from a broad spectrum of the industry's players and providers.
Be sure to catch the Office 2.0 Conference and hear from and engage with leading thinkers and doers in this exciting new market. Find out more here and be sure to use the code "GLDRK" for a special discount for Corante readers.
1. Faylene on November 19, 2004 04:13 PM writes...
This is a sad reflection on Science literacy in America. We need to find ways to show young people how science works so that this ignorance does not continue into the next generation.
Permalink to Comment2. darwinfinch on November 19, 2004 04:29 PM writes...
In my experience in talking with the Xian anti-evolution crowd, on the net and in person casually, I'm sorry to say that I feel the great majority are not simply ignorant, but proudly LAZY and (therefore?) fiercely ignorant. They (not being of low intelligence) often are well aware of the idiocy and illogic of their own beliefs, but see no reason to admit so, since this might require them to "think" about something for evem minutes at a time; and with no one paying them!
Permalink to CommentI began following this debate some years ago, and it has, along with the campaigns of the last six years, convinced me against my will that ignorance is not the real problem, esp. in the USA, but conscious dishonesty.
3. gvander on November 20, 2004 08:45 AM writes...
I find this whole thing amusing. Darwinistic evolution is being whittled away day by day by new discoveries, particularly in Cosmology. I listen to the young-earth pseudo-science fringe with their literal 6-day creation dogmatics and truely agree that is not science. Unfortunately their influence over American opinion is not in direct proportion to their knowledge of science. On the other hand, my daughters have to learn the principles of evolution that either are out of date in their textbooks or elements of evolution that just have been plain proven wrong. The textbook manufacturers just can't keep up with "real science" evidently.
I admit I live on a different planet than the previous two posters and I live in a red state to boot. I have been influenced by at least two scientists who give solid evidence that evolution is a theory in trouble. I am referring to Dr. Walter Bradley and yes, I also admit I am influenced by the anthropic principle arguments of Dr. Hugh Ross. Darwinistic (read that Naturalistic) Evolution does not compute when you bring knowledge of all the sciences together and particularly when you look at the thermodynamics and probability of Darwinistic evolution as we were once taught.
I feel for the two who posted before me, because the young-earth crowd is picking up steam among those not as astute as you obviously are and as I like to think I am. This is not a happy thing to report. I don't think their views have anything to do with true science. As long as there is an Institute for Creation Research and a modern day self-proclaimed Martin Luther and one time science teacher, Ken Hamm, actively enlightening the masses, those statistics are going to get more dismal. The home school movement will only accelerate this process. Yes, there are a lot of lazy and dishonest thinkers out there and getting more organized every day.
Permalink to Comment4. Jason Potter on November 21, 2004 08:16 PM writes...
What does Cosmology have to do with Biological Evolution?
What has been proven wrong in your daughter's textbook?
Bradley and Ross are physical scientists, they aren't really trained in the biological sciences. I wouldn't call them exactly qualified to make scientific conclusions about biological evolution. These probablity arguments are one big incredulity argument and I won't even comment on thermodynamics irrelevence.
Permalink to Comment5. Robert O'Brien on November 22, 2004 03:20 AM writes...
Of far more concern to me is mathematical illiteracy in this country. Opinions on evolution don't much concern me.
Permalink to Comment6. Augusta Era Golian on November 22, 2004 05:52 AM writes...
Anyone who thinks the problem is just in evolution is dead wrong. What we are seeing in Texas is a spread in doubt from evolution to the rest of science. Science teachers in general seem to be becoming suspect. There seems to be some feeling that looking at nature too closely is somehow questioning His work.
Permalink to Comment7. Jari Anttila on November 22, 2004 09:57 AM writes...
"Darwinistic (read that Naturalistic) Evolution does not compute when you bring knowledge of all the sciences together..."
So it's naturalism that really bugs us, isn't it?
Permalink to CommentNo matter how God did it as long as He did it supernaturally. Give us some miracles and we're satisfied.
8. Travis Garrett on November 22, 2004 11:31 PM writes...
I assume that gvander is refering to the apparent 'fine tuning' of the physical constants in our universe, such that if they were slightly different then the stars would nova too quickly or everything would collapse into black holes or the universe would expand too quickly... and so on, so that the conditions would be inhospitable for the evolution of life. But once you have our atomic chemistry, long lived stars, and a flat universe, life arises via natural darwinian evolution just fine. And the cosmological fine tuning has lots of tentative explanations - in string theory you can compactify the extra dimensions in many different ways, giving rise to different effective physics at our scale, and a common idea now is of the 'string theory landscape' where you have lots of different domains (perhaps separated by vast distances by inflation) with different physics in them, and we, not surprisingly, find ourselves existing in a region that can give rise to the spontaneous evolution of complex organisms. See, for instance, Lenny Susskind's paper on the subject.
Permalink to Comment9. Adam on November 23, 2004 06:47 PM writes...
Science is a day to day irrelevance to most people since they happily use its products instrumentally without being curious about how things work. Perhaps questioning and curiosity have been strangled by the educational system? Or the instant answers provided by mass media don't correctly convey the struggle to produce those same answers.
None of the current arguments about God and Science are new in essence. Greek philosophers were accused of atheism for denying the divinity of the heavens, medieval scholars argued over the ability or otherwise of human reason to understand the processes of the world, and many couldn't accepted Newtonian ideas in the 18th century because they somehow did away with a need for a physically involved God.
Perhaps what is needed is public education in the essentials of theology - not orthopraxsis but the philosophy of God - so people can decide for themselves what makes sense of the World. Then they might be immune to the vague arguments about the Divine and Nature's interrelationship that plague current discourse. Creationism is fundamentally flawed because it assumes God is exactly like a human engineer working on some mighty machine - as if engineers ever brought forth anything ex nihilo?
Permalink to Comment10. Maracucho on November 24, 2004 11:32 AM writes...
There’s lots of hostility out there, and a feeling that “we don't need your science”. Mr. Bush seems to follow that approach, pushing scientists off national advisory panels if they speak openly in favor of things that he doesn’t like. His ownership society will starve the public schools of money, and teachers will become even more demoralized. If science were only of esthetic interest (it has great esthetic interest to me), this wouldn’t matter. Since science bears on many practical realities, such as climate change and antibiotic resistance, the combination of an ignorant public, a corporate controlled government, and stupefying media is dangerous. The mass media personalize every issue- we get two screaming heads- Fred Singer who assures us that global warming is a myth and a nerdy scientist on the other side saying just the opposite. Children must learn about human vanities- consider Peter Duesberg, a decent intelligent microbiologist who went out on a limb against HIV causing AIDS and whose pride won’t let him admit error. He once claimed that oncogenes didn’t cause human cancers, but I haven’t heard that recently- both of those views are flat wrong. Can genetics, diet, drugs, etc. influence the course of AIDS and the likelihood of getting it? Yes, of course, but Duesberg’s basic premise is flat wrong.
Singer and Duesberg, stubborn as they are, are much better informed than the geologists, biochemists etc who speak for Creationism. Joe Sixpack hears the talking/screaming heads and can only decide who to accept based on style, dress, manner of speech etc. Most of our schools are weak(not just about science, but about history and how every nation has religious leaders telling the people that god is on their side); our media, including NPR and PBS, increase public ignorance. US culture is self-destructive. Pay attention to Potter’s comment about how home schooling is going to clarify things. We have 3 million people under age 21 in LA County. Perhaps 2% of them have parents who are educated and economically comfortable enough to home school their children. The assumption is that the other children can get a cheap education and become janitors, waiters, etc. I think that is a formula for first scientific backwardness and later civil war.
Permalink to Comment11. Faylene on November 27, 2004 02:13 PM writes...
I think it would be useful if people concerned about education, especially parents, could avoid setting up false dichotomies. We need a society that is numerate, literate and scientifically literate. We desperately need to promote tolerance and respect for the wisdom of different traditions. Many people of deep faith are able to reconcile religion and science. It seems to me that curiosity about how the natural world works is the realm of science. The difficult moral issues in our lives can be addressed by religion, philosophy or other personal approaches without literal reliance on ancient creation stories.
Permalink to CommentThis is a difficult time for those of us who regard education as central to our hopes for a better future but we must not give way to elitist sentiments if we wish to have a voice in our children's future.
(I live in a red state too!)