From an early age, my life’s goal was to get at “the truth.” There were only two obvious career paths: Science, or investigative journalism. I went the first route, becoming an academic researcher. Proud of the path I chose, and always admiring the other one.
California and Arizona recently began registering ‘benefit
corporations.’ A small California non-profit university with which I’m
acquainted has commenced the transition to for-profit, b-corp status.
I just returned from the Asian Science Park Association
conference in Shiraz, Iran.[1]
One Science Park official asked me, “Companies in our park cannot get any
cooperation from the big petrochemical firms. What can we do?”
Google buses yuppifying San
Francisco. Facebook creepily profiling us. iCloud giving up our pubes to hacker
paparazzi. We poured our faith and money into these companies, and now we feel
like jilted lovers.
Apple once made “the computer for
the rest of us.” OK, we always knew Google wanted world domination, but we
thought it would be benevolent.
It’s banal to mention that technology
is a two-edged sword. That it solves practical problems and creates new ones.
That it makes our lives more comfortable and more complex, and stresses and at
the same time sustains our social relationships. Today we’ll go beyond these
commonplaces to explore two lesser-known aspects of tech’s dark side:
Inequality and unhappiness. Will the dark side prevail? Maybe, but we’ll see
glimmers of hope for the team of truth and goodness.
The growing gap
Nothing boosts the
prospects of page hits on a blog – or funding of a grant proposal – like the
phrase “big data.” Why are we enamored with “big data”?
American business schools, R.I.P.
It’s
curious, all the press attention lavished on this recent article1 in Jour.
Evolutionary Biology.
Noting
the differing proportions of human hands versus those of other primates,
Michael Morgan and David Carrier of the University of Utah concluded human
hands are better suited for making fists. They wondered whether this confers an
evolutionary advantage.
I’m going to go out on a limb, and write about guns. Specifically, handguns and so-called “assault weapons.”I’m not going to opine about what the law should or shouldn’t be, but only about the personal advisability of owning these kinds of firearms.Likewise I make no comment about shotguns and single-action rifles. If you enjoy owning them for skeet or target shooting, I’ve got no argument with you, and in fact I agree those activities are kind of fun. If you like them for dove or deer, more power to you, even though I don’t share your passion for hunting.Pistols
Three reasons why government can look less efficient than it really is:1. Cherry-picking in privatization. Let’s suppose we could rank government agencies or services in descending order of productivity: 1, 2, 3, and so on, with agency 1 being the most efficient and productive. As a reality check, let’s note that such a ranking is indeed possible, in a rough way.
1. Thou shalt not screw thine early adopters. They made thou what thou art, even showing patience with thine inattention to upward compatibility. Yea, though they paid high early prices, thou hast refused them free upgrades. Now as they glance at their boxes of obsolete connectors, power sources, software and disk drives, they plan to make their next purchases from thine upstart competitor.
Prior to World War II and dating back to the 1890s, the phrases “social technology” and “social engineering” carried strong connotations of central planning. This became particularly true in the Soviet Union, where the terms appeared in various tracts.
I started a new job this spring. After a long search in a tough market, I landed my dream job as a senior professor and administrator at a top research university – a university that did not retain a headhunter for its search.Talks at other schools had progressed to first or second interviews before fizzling, and they fizzled due to the ineptitude of the universities’ search firms. The headhunters deserve a whipping, and this column administers ten lashes.
