Notes from north of 49ºN

In the Twittersphere, this Ottawa Citizen article on green stimulus has been going around, based on a forthcoming UN report.  While 15% of the $3.1T in global stimulus investments are green, Canada, under the leadership of Prime Minister Stephen Harper is lagging behind {See data below the jump}, barely in the top 10 in amount spent and percentage of green stimulus.  South Korea is leading the way, in terms of both amount spent and percent of stimulus spending, while the US is third in total green stimulus spending.  Not surprising, given news reports up in Canada::

“A common theme, though, appears to be a series of delays in approvals and disbursements, with less than one-quarter likely to be spent in 2009.”

The UN report recommends that G20 countries increase the rates of investments in green infrastructure and stimulus.  Five key areas for focus were identified::

1. energy efficiency in old and new buildings
2. renewable energy technologies such as wind power
3. sustainable transport technologies such as hybrid vehicles or high-speed rail
4. global ecological infrastructure such as forests
5. sustainable agriculture

I haven’t crunched any numbers, but looking at the list, I think there’s an interaction effect with policy support of green initiatives and clusterings of firms with green innovation strategies.  One of the questions I had is whether, thus far, is the idea that “green” is viewed as a luxury.  While imperfect, I wanted to see the relationship between richer nations {higher GDP per capita} and investment in green stimulus {per capita}.  I crunched these numbers (below the jump, with the GDP data taken from the IMF 2008 data}.  While there are not enough data points to make strong inferences about the data relationship, the following graph tells a story.  South Korea skews the curve::

Taking the US & South Korea out, increases in green stimulus increases at a decreasing rate with respect to higher levels of GDP::

So, looking at the data, South Korea and China are investing in green technologies, despite having lower average national incomes.  It would be interesting to monitor which technologies are being invested in the various countries and track the outcomes.  Canada should heed what’s going on, as they try to shift towards innovation and away from natural resource extraction.

Twitterversion:: #PMHarper’s #Canada lagging #G20 in green stimulus innov. spendng. Richer tend2 spend+, but China& S.Korea making a play. http://url.ie/2ihx @Prof_K

Song:: Everythings Gone Green (Edit) – New Order

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On the UC Berkeley campus, the Center for Open Innovation is doing work in this interesting new area::

“Open innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively. [This paradigm] assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology.”

Henry Chesbrough, Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm

In a recent talk, part of the discussion was on innovation and how it related to higher education.  There was talk of “silos” of knowledge.  So, when students are taking courses, they specialize in tracks, in terms of a functional area like finance or a specific type of engineering.  The problem with this is that this may not be the best preparation for students to work in the area of innovation and I would extend this much more broadly.  In other words, universities should be preparing students to think and problem solve  innovatively.  My experience is that there is lip service paid to this, but what becomes the focus is instilling a corpus of knowledge.

Last spring, Mark C. Taylor created a firestorm of controversy by calling the university on the carpet as an antiquated institution…and graduate education as the “Detroit of higher learning”.  Oh, you didn’t hear about this? That’s because the controversy was mainly in the halls of acadème with the rest of the world marching on without missing a beat.  Nevertheless, Taylor brought up some excellent points, six key ones to be specific.  Two that struck me were revising the curriculum and abolishing departments.  His example on a focus on problems used “water”::

“Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as practices shape beliefs.

A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.”

Many in the academy went ballistic, but often citing “pragmatics” that, to me, were often thinly veiled rationale for preserving extant institutional structures, power bases, and resource allocations.  In a Kuhnian philosophy of science sense, there was a lot of clinging to the existing paradigms and the marginalization of any “crisis.”  There is a crisis.  It is one of relevance.

Open innovation is a new paradigm that’s focused on problems.  If I looked back on labels that have been used to describe my work, it includes marketing, branding, Internet marketing, economic sociology, and social media.  A common theme is “technology & media,” which in my mind defines a particular paradigm examining the intersection of both, which encompasses the humanities, the social sciences, the professional disciplines, and the applied technological.  If I had my druthers, courses would be less about checkboxes and more about developing and synthesizing knowledge structures.  Maybe life sciences with a lab could be substituted with a rigorous survey of the issues, challenges, and opportunities of bionanomedicine.

While paradigms and departments are both social constructions, they can be forced into an artificial structure or allowed to evolve organically…or even die.  I once sat in on a session where local employers close to a university I was working at stated what they wanted in an ideal undergraduate candidate.  There was a lot of passive reaction to what often boiled down to a desire for vocational education for job candidates.  Can students use the advanced features of Outlook or do a mail merge?  Please.  Universities need to redesign what they’re offering after reconceptualizing what they really are trying to do, knowledgewise, starting with the curriculum.  Over a decade ago, I was reading about differential perspectives on knowledge.  Some organizations treat employees {as repositories of knowledge} like stones in a wall to be built.  Others treat them like uniform bricks.  Universities play a role in this shaping.  Over the years, I grew weary of the pressures to create bricks and questioned the true utility of this.

I also think it’s time for universities to move away from churning out undergraduates, graduate, and professional students and become true fixtures of communities with a mission of serving lifelong learning–in the era of the free.

Twitterversion:: Innovation & innovative thinking in higher ed. Will knowledge “silos” persist & how will ivory tower adapt? http://url.ie/2i59 #ThickCulture @Prof_K

Song:: LITTLE BOXES – The Submarines

I’ve always believed that we’re too overawed by our own technological prowess, but this poster presented last June at the Human Brain Mapping Conference should really serve as a cautionary tale for those of us who glance at fMRI research and figure that the findings are wholly trustworthy.

A graduate student at Dartmouth was busily engaged in two things that graduate students do best: research, and general goofiness.  The research, in the area of decision-making, involved scanning people’s brains while they observed photographs and attempted to guess the emotional valence of the subjects depicted.  The goofiness involved using various objects bought at the supermarket as scanning targets while they were developing their protocols.  A pumpkin went in first, and then a cornish game hen.  Finally, the researcher purchased a whole Atlantic Salmon and strapped him into the fMRI machine.  Ever the scientist, he ran the protocols properly, showing the deceased fishie the photographs and asking it to guess at the emotions being displayed.

A certain amount of false positives are expected, but it was where the false positives were that alarmed the grad student – right in the salmon’s dead little brain cavity. 

Rather than worrying, however, that deceased ectotherms have the ability to successfully read human emotions, we should take this as a warning to have a healthy skepticism regarding the interpretation of fMRI data, especially since multiple comparisons, though recommended, are hardly ever done.  I’m always hearing about how fMRI research has pinpointed the part of our brain that may be responsible for (divorce, personality traits, wristwatch preference)… brain imaging research is amazing and we’ve advanced by leaps and bounds – but in a lot of ways, we’re still swimming upstream.

This is a few months old, but interesting.  Paul Smalera at Slate asks if Obama is the Getting Things Done (GTD) president.  Anyone who works in IT or knows someone who works in IT is familiar with the cult (I mean that in a nice way) of productivity guru David Allen and his GTD system for managing work flow.

Smalera asks whether Obama is being too much of a checklist president , focused on moving legislation off his to-do list instead of focusing on fewer bills that would forward a progressive agenda.

To be fair to David Allen, he does talk about conducting a weekly review where you, in personal development speak, adopt a 50,000 foot view of your goals.

My take is that presidents need to be GTD focused in their first six months.  I envision a 2011 State of the Union address where President Obama  can spend 60 minutes ticking off accomplishments from his first term….taking a page out of Bill Clinton’s playbook.  Think about Bush 43’s legislative agenda in his first term which included the Medicare Prescription Drug legislation and No Child Left Behind.

The big question is why we prefer our presidents to be able to rattle off a laundry list of accomplishments.  I think is goes to our core American ethos.  GTD is so popular because it provides people with a manual for fitting into American norms….kind of like The Protestant Work Ethic for white collar workers.

I’m currently reading through George Packer’s wonderful two volume edited collection of George Orwell essays (“Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays” and “All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays”). With all due respect to the erudite defaming of George Orwell in the pages of NYRB, I love the guy. I love his lucid writing. I love his courage in criticizing what he sees as wrong. I love his methodology of putting himself in the middle of things. I love his sentimentality about hearths and his homeland. Earlier this week, I read his well-known, WWII-era essay, “England Your England,” and regard it as among his very best. I believe so much of it speaks to our current state of affairs that I’d like bring some of its key points up to date. Rather than writing a full essay (which would inevitably pale in comparison), I’d like to do a little series pulling out some points of interest. This will be the first.

Orwell begins with the claim that culture differences between nations are big and meaningful: “Till recently it was thought proper to pretend that all human beings are very much alike, but in fact anyone able to use his eyes knows that the average of human behaviour differs enormously from country to country … Things that could happen in one country could not happen in another. Hitler’s June purge, for instance, could not have happened in England.”

This sort of claim remains controversial today. Browning’s Ordinary Men argued that the Holocaust wasn’t based on intrinsic characteristics of the German people, while Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners countered with just the opposite claim. Today, we often hear much about the immutable cultural differences between Americans and Europeans (“Americans live to work, European work to live”). Advocates of a single payer system of health care have repeatedly been told that such a system would never be accepted in the United States. Tom Friedman wrote just this Sunday about how a $1 gas tax should be, but is not up for debate in the U.S. (despite sky-high gas taxes in European countries). The mandatory religious rhetoric in any American political speech (e.g., “God Bless America”) would be the cause of scandal in Europe.

While such limitations on political speech and manner of living are profound burdens, Orwell also claims that being a member of a national culture is, ultimately, meaningful to each of us. “And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time … Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.”

Though we might threaten to leave (if Bush is elected in 2004) and though the vile racism and hatred and ugly nationalism at town halls and “tea party” events might disgust us, America will always feel like a home to those of us who were raised here. We breathe easier in the air we’re accustomed to. Talking loudly while eating a slice of pizza and walking down a city block, the choice of sixteen varieties of mustard in the grocery store, and the simple pleasure of a gas-guzzling muscle car and an open road are, for better or for worse, things that feel like home.

“Yes,” says Orwell, “there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own.”

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell writes about the continuing legacy of the rice paddy for Asian cultures, the “culture of honor” in the American South, and the significance of hierarchy in Korean society. To be sure, our nations and our cultures constrain our behavior and even our ways of thinking. But perhaps perversely, the very culture that limits us also comforts us.

Notes from north of 49ºN, but at 37.9ºN at the moment.

Regular readers of ThickCulture will recall that I post quite a bit on the topic of Canada from an American expatriate perspective.  Way back in May, I blogged about attack ads being aimed at Liberal opposition leader, Michael Ignatieff, framing him as an outsider.  Recently, the Liberal Party of Canada has announced their intent to trigger the next election with a no-confidence vote in Parliament.  In preparation of this, The Liberals started advertising with spots featuring Ignatieff in a forest.  Earlier last week, the Globe & Mail tried to stir up controversy about Liberal Party of Canada ads featuring Michael Ignatieff in a possibly ersatz forest or a forest that cannot be readily identified.  Quite the sin in a timber-bearing land, eh Globe & Mail?

Here are the ads:: “Worldview” & “Jobs”

In my opinion, this constructed “scandal” is meant to stir the pot to get pageviews for the Globe & Mail by feeding the sentiments that somehow he is not as Canadian as everyone else and there is something less-than-authentic about him.  Perhaps this was borne out of the media frenzy over the Obama “birthers” movement.

Interestingly, in the French ads {I didn’t have time to translate the copy}, there is no forest and no guitar strumming in the background.  Just straightforward delivery::

Strategically, candidates need to think about creating a “positioning” strategy, where they create a meaning system in light of the competition.  With voter data on attitudes towards the political leaders {Harper-Conservative, Ignatieff-Liberal, Layton-NDP, Duceppe-Bloc, & May-Green}, multidimensional scaling can be used to try to create dimensions based on the attitudes and positions for each of the candidates along the dimensions.  Ideally, candidates differentiate themselves from the others on the basis of salient voter perceptions, i.e., tapping into the zeitgeist.  On my other blog, Rhizomicon, I did a post that talked about the increased fragmentation of the Canadian electorate.  While the Conservatives are in power with a plurality, my take is that there are several oppositional positions that are distinct and are differentiated from each other.  The question is whether the positions are salient and resonate with voters, which I think is a tough thing to accomplish in Canada these days.

The key issues now are economic, despite the Bank of Canada announcing the economy is turning the corner.  Crafting powerful messages that resonate on this would be no easy feat for any of the parties.  I think the look and feel of the Liberal Party French ad is more effective in conveying an “ominous” message.  As for the attack ads on Ignatieff, this could be dangerous in a politically fragmented environment, as there are already political faultlines along east-west lines.  A strategy framing Harper as fostering policies that are out of touch outside of the West could erode Conservative support.  Ironically, Harper coined the term “Bloc Anglais” to characterize Jack Layton of the NDP, but that same term could be applied to the particular {Reform Party style} conservatism Alberta and parts of interior BC.

So, what’s next?  Maybe Ignatieff’s a robot from outer space…

Twitterversion:: Globe&Mail strts contrvrsy w/ #Ignatieff in forest ads,but how2frame #CanPoli parties givn fragmntd polity? #ThickCulture http://url.ie/2gxo @Prof_K

Song:: Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots Pt.1 – The Flaming Lips

The New York Times has an article on doing something about the Internet as the scourge of the workplace, being a timesuck of epic proportions.

“During the last few weeks, I’ve been using a slate of programs to tame these digital distractions. The apps break down into three broad categories. The most innocuous simply try to monitor my online habits in an effort to shame me into working more productively. Others reduce visual bells and whistles on my desktop as a way to keep me focused.

And then there are the apps that really mean business — they let me actively block various parts of the Internet so that when my mind strays, I’m prohibited from giving in to my shiftless ways. It’s the digital equivalent of dieting by locking up the refrigerator and throwing away the key.”

The author goes on to talk about the various software solutions, but at the end he surmises that it’s human nature to goof off and waste time.

Why?

Michel deCerteau in The Practice of Everyday Life offers up the term, “la perruque,” where workers steal time for their own purposes as a form of resistance to the surveillance of control::

“It differs from absenteeism in that the worker is officially on the job.  La perruque may be as simple a matter as a secretary’s writing a love letter on ‘company time’ or as complex as a cabinetmaker’s ‘borrowing’ a lathe to make a piece of furniture for his living room.”

This probably rings true for many::

In my opinion, people engage in la perruque in resisting the logics of surveillance, but I feel this could be thwarted by developing organizational cultures where people feel motivated to do the work, rather than slack.  In this day and age, employees are often made to feel they are lucky to even have a job and this was before the recession.  Outsourcing and cost-cutting are terms used to “manage” the workforce through fear.  The problem with fear…is that it breeds more resistance.  A vicious cycle.

This is why I always allow students to use laptops in my classes and I don’t even care if they’re updating their Facebook or playing poker.  Why?  Because if I’m doing my job and engaging the students, they wind up using the Internet to complement class discussions, not as a distraction.

Now that I’m a consultant doing my own thing, I find that I still waste time on the Internet.  If it increases, I suppose it’s because I have a jerk for a boss.

Twitterversion:: NewSftware prevnts timesink w/Internet,but is wastng time just”la perruque”by deCerteau. Contrlvs.Motivate?#ThickCulture http://url.ie/2gx8 @Prof_K

Song:: Temptation – Heaven 17

In 1987, ABC launched an hour-long drama called thirtysomething that featured baby-boomers settling down, raising kids, being a part of the establishment, etc.  You know, from fighting “the man” to becoming “the man.”  Part of the storyline was two male friends, Michael and Elliot, working in advertising and sometimes having to deal with their values conflicting with capitalism.  In this episode, the guys, who had their own small agency that went under, are hired by a large agency with a boss {Miles Drentel} who has a penchant for not-so-subtle digs.  This is a long clip, the first 10 minutes of a 1989 episode, “New Job,” airdate:: 11 April.  The whole episode is on this YouTube channel.

Fast forward twenty years and AMC launches Mad Men in 2007.  Unlike thirtysometing’s focus on current issues of values and ideals, Mad Men projects today’s issues in an older period.   The result is a well-polished show that uses the Cold War 1960s that predates the Civil Rights movement, the rise of feminism, and the call for gay rights.  Viewers get to gaze into the workplace with Foucauldian precision, where the official art of capitalism is created like so much sausage in a meat packing plant, in a workplace full of sex, alcohol, and cigarettes, not to mention the occasional firearm.

I take issues with some of the writing on the show, but that’s neither here nor there.  I will say there’s a certain cool detachment that the characters have, as they feed upon opportunism in the workplace, while creating cultural products {ads} that do the same.  On the show, Pete Campbell is a smarmy manor born WASP full of churlishness, ambition, and guile.  We aren’t supposed to like Pete, but it is Pete with his ambition fueling his desire to make a buck for his client who is willing to break the demographic colour barrier, as if he’s the Branch Rickey of advertising.

Here’s Pete, Paul Kinsey , and Harry Crane going over data and finding that urban blacks are buying Admiral TVs::

In the elevator, he does a bit of “qualitative research” by asking Hollis about his brand preferences::

Here’s Pete’s pitch to Admiral, complete with a framework for an “ethnic marketing” strategy::

The client is put off by this, reluctant to engage a strategy that would create black brand associations.  Pete is called on the carpet and Roger Sterling even goes as far to call him Martin Luther King {Jr.}.  This is a few episodes after Sterling donned blackface and sang “My Old Kentucky Home” at a Kentucky Derby party he was hosting::

So, Pete being the übercapitalist is lambasted for not understanding the realities of the economics of branding in the early 1960s.  The implication being “white flight” from the brand.

It is Lane Pryce, a British expatriate in New York, who is the only one besides Pete to see value in “ethnic marketing” strategies.  Pete serves as a metaphor for blind capitalism that serves to take everyone’s money equally.  An idealized capitalism of individuals acting like atomistic agents in the market.  The interesting this is that Pete could have also been in the US music industry in the 1990s, seeing a way to market the unmarketable, hard-edged rap and hip-hop by black artists to mainstream audiences.

So, Pete the weasel turns out to be both the hero of capitalism and racial “equity.”

Twitterversion::  newblogpost:: Clips of #MadMen showing #PeteCampbell’s #ethnicmarketing pitch for a TV brand in 1963. #ThickCulture  http://url.ie/2gwu  @Prof_K

Song:: Brown Sugar – The Rolling Stones

Why is belief that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States and thus ineligible to be chief executive stronger in the South than in other areas of the Country? I know the racism thing is an attractive explanatory reach, but could it be better explained by levels of political polarization, education or political culture? It would be interesting to compare this data with regional breakdowns of the belief that the Clinton’s killed Vince Foster and were running a drug cartel out of Arkansas.

HT: Washington Monthly

Update

Via Tech President...the top ten states in Google searches for “Obama birth certificate”

A look at Google Trends is certainly illuminating. The top ten states where people are searching on the phrase “Obama birth certificate” are:
1. Louisiana
2. Mississippi
3. Colorado
4. Oklahoma
5. Alabama
6. Tennessee
7. Arkansas
8. Missouri
9. South Carolina
10. North Carolina

Political Science super blog The Monkey Cage introduced me to a book by Josiah Ober, a Political Scientist at Stanford entitled Democracy and Knowledge that provides a defense of Athenian Democracy on the grounds that it’s participatory rule-making processes (for example, the Athenian Council of 500 were chosen by random lot rather than election) provided a greater breadth of perspectives on social issues than our current representative democracy.  The argument is that citizens can provide the local knowledge needed to make effective decisions and that social networking technologies might help organize citizen input in effective ways.

Here’s a sample chapter of the book.