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
Last week my editor at the New York Times asked me to write an article about the evolution of crying, to accompany an article by Sandra Blakeslee on colic. Both articles (mine and Blakeslee's) are coming out tomorrow. As I've written here before, human babies are by no means the only young animals that cry, and there's evidence that natural selection has shaped their signals, whether they have feathers or hair. Among animals, there's a lot of evidence that infants can benefit from manipulating their signals to get more from their parents. On the other hand, evolution may sometimes favor "honest advertisements" that prevent offspring from deceiving their parents. Human crying may be the product of the same conflict of evolutionary interested between parents and children.
This was a tricky article to write, because on the one hand there are some very interesting ideas to examine, but on the other hand, they're only hypotheses that haven't been put to much of a test in humans. I've come across two big papers in the past couple years, this one by Jonathan C.K. Wells in the Quarterly Review of Biology in 2003 and another by Joseph Soltis in the latest issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. They offer and evaluate a number of hypotheses for human crying. They even give some thought to colic, that maddening far end of the crying spectrum where perfectly healthy babies cry for hours, turning their parents into shambling wrecks. According to one hypothesis, colic is just a case of deceptive signals from child to mother, carried to an absurd extreme.
These are just preliminary hypotheses, though, and they face a lot of tough tests. As I mention in the article, chimpanzees show no sign of colic, which makes you wonder how deep the evolutionary roots of colic could go if it is not found among our closest living primate relatives. What I didn't have room to mention in the article were some comments published in response to Soltis's paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences by Hillary Fouts of NIH and here colleagues. They study foraging societies in Africa, and in their years of observing how these people raise kids, they haven't seen any colic either.
One way to account for this pattern is the possibility that colic is a disease of affluence--an adaptation turned maladaptive in the modern age, like a taste for sweets that was once satisfied by fruits and can now be drowned in a sea of high-fructose corn syrup. Wells even suggests that the modern Western food supply may have cut down the cost of crying, making it easier for kids to cry more. In foraging societies, mothers nurse their children up to four times an hour, while mothers in farming and industrial societies nurse their babies far less. Babies also cry to be held (perhaps for warmth and protection from attack), and while foragers hold their babies constantly, Westerners keep their babies separated from them much of the time in cribs, carriages, and car seats. Wells suggests that when a colicky baby sends its cranked-up signal and doesn't get the right response, it cranks up even more.
Again, this is only a hypothesis--a starting point for investigation. Hillary Fouts and her colleagues show what this sort of investigation can look like. In the latest issue of Current Anthropology, they report on a study about the end of crying, comparing how babies respond to weaning in two cultures. Both cultures are found in the same rain forests of the Central African Republic. One group live as foragers, and the others as farmers. The foragers nurse their children many times a day and wean them by gradually taper off nursing. The farmers, on the other hand, cut off their children abruptly--in part because the women need to get back to working in their fields.
Fouts and her colleagues found that the farmer children fussed and cried a lot around the time of weaning, while the forager children didn't show much difference. But the researchers kept following the children and found something interesting: the farmer children stopped fussing before long and then cried a lot less in general. The forager children, on the other hand, kept crying more than the farmer children long after they had been weaned.
Fouts and her colleagues see a subtle strategy at work here. The farmer children may cry in response to weaning because it represents the end of a reliable milk supply and perhaps even because weaning raises the odds of their mothers will get pregnant with another child that will compete for the mother's investment. But once the farmer children are weaned and it is clear that their cries will not do them any more good, they don't waste any further effort on the tears.
The forager children, on the other hand, don't get that clear signal of an impending cut-off, and so they don't fuss and wail more in response. But it's also important to bear in mind that in the foraging community, the children are always around some relative who will be quick to pick up a child. So even after weaning, crying still has some value as a signal, and so the children keep it up.
What I find particularly interesting about this study is that it suggests that we shouldn't use evolution to manufacture a false sense of nostalgia. Just because our ancestors lived in a particular way doesn't mean that the way we live now is automatically bad. Our evolutionary heritage is not completely fossilized; it can in some respects alter itself in response to the conditions in which we grow up. If colic follows this pattern, it is not a cause for collective Western guilt that we don't live as foragers. Instead, it's a call to understand the evolutionary roots of the behavior of our children--both for their well-being and our own sanity.
1. Joseph Poliakon on March 8, 2005 04:23 AM writes...
I enjoyed reading and was informed by the Loom post and linked NYT articles. The material caused me to reflect on my personal experience with crying and crying babies in my family.
I’m the oldest of a multiple sibling family. As the “Alpha” sibling I got to observe and participate in the rearing of six human primates, my brothers.
Based on observed “crying data” from that sample size of six, and considering the Loom and NYT reporting on “crying,” I must conclude that some of my brothers were raised and nurtured by a “forager” mother and the rest by a “farmer” mother.
As for me, being No. 1 Me Maw “liked me best” of course. As a result, I was reared neither as a Forager nor a Farmer, but rather as a Golden Child. So I had nothing to cry about.
2. Ken Shackleton on March 8, 2005 03:45 PM writes...
Interesting article....I am the father of two teenaged daughters and as an infant, my older daughter was "fussy"....not to the point of colic though. I always assumed that colic was a medical condition, not an emotional one as presented here.
I guess that the cure for colic is simply to carry the baby more...
Crying also is used to rid the body of noxious chemicals. Might it not also serve that function in vulnerable children who must eat whatever offered? As for signaling, shouldn't the evolution of the crying behavior be viewed in tandem with brain evolution (and especially female brain evolution), since they must have coevolved?
Surely, modern shopping malls promote the evolution of fussy crybaby kids... and the more they cry, the more candy and stuff their parents will buy them. (A return to "foraging parents" then?)
Interesting... yet provocative! I believe crying is different from colic. Crying is a communication method for babies with their caregivers, and a vital kit for survival, thus conserved through evolution. The benefits of crying are not be one-sided because parents have vested interests in their babies' well-being and crying helps protect and raise fit offsprings.
Colic, on the other hand, can be considered as an extreme and dysfunctional form of babies' communication method because it no longer serves its originally intended purposes. I cannot think of any evolutionary benefits for conserving this behavior. I am not even sure whether this could be considered one of normal human behaviors or developmental stages.
Colic is rare... I believe, only more common in the Western hemisphere. When a baby, say, does not get what she wants, she communicates by crying. When this signal is not responded properly, if this becomes patternized, some babies learn and stop crying; others are more stubborn or slow to learn and keep crying, sometimes become colic. That's how I would see colic.
Reading Dr Karp's five steps, I initially anticipated some magic tricks. They turned out nothing more than what my wife and I practiced when our infant daughter cried several years ago, although they are not exactly word-to-word. We wrapped her snuggly, held her (sometimes for hours each time), rocked her, hummed to her, did everything we could to calm her down. It was not easy, but she has never been colicky. And who says partenting is easy?
I doubt if any "colic" genes could ever be cloned. I doubt if this is an evolutionary phenomenon. I believe it is a social problem that can be cured with lots of care, attention, and proper parenting.
I have 3 sons, now 22, 16 and 14. As babies, they each benefited from strategies their mother and I developed in response to crying. The first boy would sleep well after feeding. He liked to suck his dummy and would wake up when it dropped out of his mouth. the solution was to twist a nappy or nursing cloth into a stiff length of material that would not unravel.
The dummy was secured at one end and placed in his mouth with the other end tucked under his mattress. This worked very well. As he grew stronger he learned to find the dummy if it fell out of his mouth. Problem solved. Mind you, we negotiated over the years to persuade him to give it up finally. In the weeks before his 4th birthday we suggested he be the one to put it in the bin and lo, it worked.
Second boy, very different! His mother was very depressed after the birth. I took over and would sleep with the little mite on my chest in the spare room. It was wonderful. I shall never forget those months as long as I live. The boy and I are very close. Number three was born one month before his mother and I parted. Work committments had kept me away from home and we grew apart.
For the two elder boys, then 3 & 8, they now would stay with me at my house from Friday evening until I dropped them off with their mother on Monday morning on the way to work. The baby boy stayed at home with his mother and her new partner until he was 3. By this time he knew I was his father and wanted to join us at the weekends. He had been that oddest of creatures, a model baby. No colic, no fuss, happy as a sand boy. It was as if he knew times were difficult and had decided to make the best of it.
Foraging or farming? Babies have personalities. Some cry easily, others are tougher. What I am convinced of is that it takes an extended family or hired help to raise babies. It's way too tiring to do it alone. Now the two younger boys have chosen to live with me. The eldest uses his mother's house as a hotel. All in all we are a co-operative family, reasonably sane and the chaps all know that if they look like they want to make me a grandfather, I'll have them neutered. Raising a family is exhausting, wildly expensive and long term. I'll never be able to retire. I am 62 and kids don't leave home until the are 30. That's another 16 years. I think I feel an attack of colic coming on. Bah Bah BAAAA.
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. Joseph Poliakon on March 8, 2005 04:23 AM writes...
I enjoyed reading and was informed by the Loom post and linked NYT articles. The material caused me to reflect on my personal experience with crying and crying babies in my family.
I’m the oldest of a multiple sibling family. As the “Alpha” sibling I got to observe and participate in the rearing of six human primates, my brothers.
Based on observed “crying data” from that sample size of six, and considering the Loom and NYT reporting on “crying,” I must conclude that some of my brothers were raised and nurtured by a “forager” mother and the rest by a “farmer” mother.
As for me, being No. 1 Me Maw “liked me best” of course. As a result, I was reared neither as a Forager nor a Farmer, but rather as a Golden Child. So I had nothing to cry about.
Permalink to Comment2. Ken Shackleton on March 8, 2005 03:45 PM writes...
Interesting article....I am the father of two teenaged daughters and as an infant, my older daughter was "fussy"....not to the point of colic though. I always assumed that colic was a medical condition, not an emotional one as presented here.
I guess that the cure for colic is simply to carry the baby more...
Permalink to Comment3. PacRim Jim on March 8, 2005 03:49 PM writes...
Crying also is used to rid the body of noxious chemicals. Might it not also serve that function in vulnerable children who must eat whatever offered? As for signaling, shouldn't the evolution of the crying behavior be viewed in tandem with brain evolution (and especially female brain evolution), since they must have coevolved?
Permalink to Comment4. A.R.Yngve on March 10, 2005 03:47 PM writes...
Surely, modern shopping malls promote the evolution of fussy crybaby kids... and the more they cry, the more candy and stuff their parents will buy them. (A return to "foraging parents" then?)
-A.R.Yngve
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5. -n on March 13, 2005 09:35 PM writes...
Interesting... yet provocative! I believe crying is different from colic. Crying is a communication method for babies with their caregivers, and a vital kit for survival, thus conserved through evolution. The benefits of crying are not be one-sided because parents have vested interests in their babies' well-being and crying helps protect and raise fit offsprings.
Colic, on the other hand, can be considered as an extreme and dysfunctional form of babies' communication method because it no longer serves its originally intended purposes. I cannot think of any evolutionary benefits for conserving this behavior. I am not even sure whether this could be considered one of normal human behaviors or developmental stages.
Colic is rare... I believe, only more common in the Western hemisphere. When a baby, say, does not get what she wants, she communicates by crying. When this signal is not responded properly, if this becomes patternized, some babies learn and stop crying; others are more stubborn or slow to learn and keep crying, sometimes become colic. That's how I would see colic.
Reading Dr Karp's five steps, I initially anticipated some magic tricks. They turned out nothing more than what my wife and I practiced when our infant daughter cried several years ago, although they are not exactly word-to-word. We wrapped her snuggly, held her (sometimes for hours each time), rocked her, hummed to her, did everything we could to calm her down. It was not easy, but she has never been colicky. And who says partenting is easy?
I doubt if any "colic" genes could ever be cloned. I doubt if this is an evolutionary phenomenon. I believe it is a social problem that can be cured with lots of care, attention, and proper parenting.
-n
Permalink to Comment6. Pericles on March 14, 2005 05:01 AM writes...
I have 3 sons, now 22, 16 and 14. As babies, they each benefited from strategies their mother and I developed in response to crying. The first boy would sleep well after feeding. He liked to suck his dummy and would wake up when it dropped out of his mouth. the solution was to twist a nappy or nursing cloth into a stiff length of material that would not unravel.
The dummy was secured at one end and placed in his mouth with the other end tucked under his mattress. This worked very well. As he grew stronger he learned to find the dummy if it fell out of his mouth. Problem solved. Mind you, we negotiated over the years to persuade him to give it up finally. In the weeks before his 4th birthday we suggested he be the one to put it in the bin and lo, it worked.
Second boy, very different! His mother was very depressed after the birth. I took over and would sleep with the little mite on my chest in the spare room. It was wonderful. I shall never forget those months as long as I live. The boy and I are very close. Number three was born one month before his mother and I parted. Work committments had kept me away from home and we grew apart.
For the two elder boys, then 3 & 8, they now would stay with me at my house from Friday evening until I dropped them off with their mother on Monday morning on the way to work. The baby boy stayed at home with his mother and her new partner until he was 3. By this time he knew I was his father and wanted to join us at the weekends. He had been that oddest of creatures, a model baby. No colic, no fuss, happy as a sand boy. It was as if he knew times were difficult and had decided to make the best of it.
Foraging or farming? Babies have personalities. Some cry easily, others are tougher. What I am convinced of is that it takes an extended family or hired help to raise babies. It's way too tiring to do it alone. Now the two younger boys have chosen to live with me. The eldest uses his mother's house as a hotel. All in all we are a co-operative family, reasonably sane and the chaps all know that if they look like they want to make me a grandfather, I'll have them neutered. Raising a family is exhausting, wildly expensive and long term. I'll never be able to retire. I am 62 and kids don't leave home until the are 30. That's another 16 years. I think I feel an attack of colic coming on. Bah Bah BAAAA.
Pericles
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