Month: March 2011

Please buy this book: a book review with a difference

This is a post recommending that you buy a particular book. Now I’ve written many book reviews in the past, recommended that you read many books in the past. So what’s so different about this particular book? What makes it special?

Well, first off, I haven’t actually read the book.

There’s a good reason for that.

It hasn’t been published as yet.

It may not quite be written as yet.

In which case….

What am I doing reviewing and recommending a book that may not have been written yet?

Simple.

I love the idea of the book, and want to promote it.

[Incidentally, my thanks to @cyberdoyle for bringing it to my attention. I’d noticed mention of it on my radar screen, but hadn’t had the time to check it out. @cyberdoyle, a fascinating person, someone you should all follow, made sure I did.]

So what’s the book?

Quakebook.

As the blog says:

A Twitter-sourced charity book about how the Great Kanto Pacific Earthquake at 2:46 on March 11, 2011 affected us all. All proceeds from the QuakeBook Book go to the Japan Red Cross.

Interesting in finding out more about the book’s origins? Then check out #quakebook on Twitter.

Want to keep in touch with what’s happening with the book? Then follow @quakebook on twitter.

Want to donate now, rather than wait for the book? (Yes, I know you’ve already donated, this is to encourage you to donate more).  Then buy the poster.

Not really a twitter kind of person, more of a LinkedIn type? Then check this out.

Or maybe you’re more mainstream, so facebook is more your thing? Then go here.

Want to know more here and now? Then here’s @cyberdoyle’s wordle of the book:

Why wait? Why not just go and put your name down to buy the book as soon as it is out?

Then just go here. Do it now.

Blog it. Tweet it. Like it. Share it.

Do it.

Now.

A coda. Why? Because somehow the #quakebook phenomenon seemed to go well with the understated stoicness of the people of Japan, particularly at this time. Time for us to stand with the people of Japan. The people who gave us bonsai. The haiku. Origami. Chanoyu. Netsuke. Sashimi. The list is endless. A way of life, styles and habits, an entire culture steeped in dignity and consideration and respect and patience.

Cometh the hour

 

I’ve been to Japan maybe half a dozen times over the years, so I don’t really know Japan that well; this, despite the fact that I studied Japanese economic history while reading Economics at St Xavier’s College nearly half a century ago. Yet there is much about Japan, its people, its culture, its cuisine, that appeals to me.

More than anything else, Japan represents peace to me. Peace in the way its people behave and present themselves, in their social rituals: always welcoming, never angry. Peace in the way the surroundings look: the understated architecture, minimalist art, subtlety of decor. Peace in the way the country is represented in culture and cuisine: measured, elegant, beautiful to look at, wonderful to taste.

A nation that represents peace. A nation dealing with unimaginable tragedy with dignity and grace. A nation that understands, deep within its culture, the might and power of nature, the vulnerability and mortality of man. In one of Japan’s most famous works of art,  Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa, the artist depicts a wave that has been estimated as over 30 ft high, dwarfing Mount Fuji in the distance. In the postscript to his book containing drawings of Mount Fuji, Hokusai has this to say:

From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie.

A country, and a culture, that has faced enormous tragedy more than once, that has managed to survive and thrive despite tragedy.

My heart goes out to everyone in Japan, or with friends and relatives affected by the earthquake and tsunami: my thoughts and prayers are with you.

Something about the week’s events, the sheer scale and awfulness of what happened, gives many of us pause for thought. Perhaps a deeper understanding of God’s grace. Maybe intimations of our own mortality. Fear and wonder at the awesome and awful power of nature.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about, as a consequence, is the role of the internet and the web.

Most of what I’ve read, heard, seen about the tragedy, has come to me via the web.

  • All the news I’ve read has been via the web; the ability to hear interviews and watch video footage helps me realise what’s happening more deeply, and the choice offered by the web ensures I get objective and comprehensive coverage, unlike the controlled channelled pap of the past
  • My faith in human nature leaps up when I see that #helpjapan and #prayforjapan are leading the Twitter trending charts, this during the time of #sxsw and the launch of #googlecircles.
  • My understanding of the magnitude of what’s happened increases as I see amateur videos like this one: http://ow.ly/4dvh0
  • My humility rises as I see the sterling work done by the people at Ushahidi, “a non-profit tech company that develops free and open source software for information collection, visualisation and interactive mapping”. To see what they’re doing in Japan right now, take a look at this. [My thanks to the people at Boing Boing for the details, which can be found here]. As a result of being at WEF Davos the past few years, I’ve had the privilege of spending time with Juliana Rotich this year and Ory Okolloh last year: Ushahidi is a wonderful example of the art and power of the possible when it comes to crowdsourcing of information in crisis.
  • My belief in the power of the web grows as I see companies like Google and Facebook and Apple get involved at scale: Google’s homepage has a link to a comprehensive set of resources to help people in Japan. Facebook, along with Causes, has an extensive project to raise funds for Japan; Apple has made it possible for its 200m account holders to donate via iTunes.

Why am I saying all this? Because I think this is a very important time, a time we can learn some very important things.

  • People are what matter. It’s all about people. This crisis will be overcome because the people of Japan will rise to the occasion and act with resolution and with courage. The technology is secondary, a slave, a set of tools. What happened in Egypt was that the people chose change. The domino effect that followed was a domino of humans. Events in Iran happened because courageous people acted courageously. It has never been about the tools, it has always been about the people. It will always be about the people. We must never forget that.
  • Connected people can help. As the human race, we are more connected than we have ever been before. Ubiquitous affordable communications are a step closer now. [In Japan, when the mobile networks went down, people found it easier to communicate via the web, via twitter and facebook]. Mechanisms for raising funds are improving all the time: zero friction (all the money collected gets to the charity) community leverage (you can call upon your network to join in and help) feedback loops (knowing how much has been collected, where, when, by whom). Open data initiatives ensure that the mapping frameworks are improving; open source projects then use these resources to crowdsource “live” data at speeds and accuracies that were impossible to imagine a few years ago. Translation is easier to achieve. Information flows are harder to corrupt and misuse.
  • We must continue to protect, preserve and improve what we have. The internet, and the web, are global resources.They work because in essence they are designed to be inclusive, democratising, organic, adaptive, affordable. So we have to watch for stupidities. Attempts at master switches to retain “control”.  Strategies to subvert “commons” resources into delivery mechanisms to prop up failing business models. Gaming of state subsidies in order to achieve short-term shareholder value, in effect delaying ubiquitous affordable connectivity. State attempts at usurping power by operating above, beyond and outside the law. Justification of all the above using flawed, sometimes fraudulent, arguments to do with terrorism, pornography, intellectual rights and return on investment.

The web, and the internet it uses, are resources we must conserve, even cherish. Because they help us do things we were not able to do in the industrial age.

They represent more than just digital infrastructures for the delivery of entertainment; more than just new and better ways of doing business; more than just radical routes to overhaul health, education, even government itself.

The web is about our renaissance. And the best way we can learn about our renaissance is to stand up and be counted when our colleagues are in trouble.

The people of Japan are resourceful, resilient, a people to be admired. But they don’t have to be alone in their response to crisis. They aren’t alone in responding to crisis.

We can make sure of this.

So go now. Go to Google. Go to Facebook. Go to Causes. Go to iTunes. Give what you can, of your money, of your time, of your resources. The links provided earlier in this post will help you do it quickly and effectively.

And whatever you believe, whoever you believe in, pray. Pray for the people affected, pray for the world we live in. We all need our prayers.

[Update: I’m delighted to see that my employer Salesforce is doing its bit, with the Foundation opening a matching fund of $50,000 for all staff donations to the cause. Values are what distinguish us at times like this.]

http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/JapanEarthquake2011

Fowler’s Fools: and musing about open and public and shared

I spent much of my childhood and youth in an unusual household, on the 4th floor of a block of flats in central/south Calcutta. Surrounded by books, and by people who’d actually read the books. Full of life, from about 5am to around 1am, and sometimes in between. Populated by around 10 “residents” (including me, my 4 siblings and my parents), and on average another half-dozen “guests” (who sometimes spent more time there than some of the residents). It was not unusual to have two dozen people there of an evening, in what was meant to be 1500 square foot of 2-bedroomed flat.

Wonderful times.

There’d always be something going on. Duplicate bridge in this corner; chess there; carroms in the next room; an intense game of scrabble; a guitar being strummed pensively; late 60s-early 70s music playing in the background, the odd game of cards. Even table-tennis, played on an amalgam of wooden desks with a line of books serving as the net.

If you didn’t feel like “playing” something, then you could just join in the conversation. Or conversations. Usually covering the simple stuff: religion, politics, sport, food and relationships. A classic adda. [Incidentally, I was delighted to find out that the OED now has an entry for adda]. And if you didn’t fancy that, then you could just kibitz, or stay in the corner where trivia questions were being lobbed across the room like water balloons.

In such surroundings you would expect a few odd things to be taken as normal. Doing the Times crossword was one of them; for most of my childhood, we took two copies of the Statesman; for a short period, we took three. My father would not countenance waking up without the day’s virgin Times crossword to complete.

It was a strange house, a literary house. People would wander about spouting poetry from Herrick to Coleridge, Burns to Ogden Nash, trade quotations from Shakespeare and Shaw, sayings from Wilde and PG Wodehouse, Churchill and Caryl Brahms.

Some managed to go placidly amidst the noise and haste, reading whatever took their fancy. Not just fiction and nonfiction, but reference books as well. Of which we had a goodly many. They included, amongst others,  Chambers’ 20th Century Dictionary. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.  Hobson-Jobson.

And Fowler’s Modern English Usage, a personal favourite. (My thanks to Skoob Books for discovering and sharing the rare photo of Henry Watson Fowler).

Which brings me to the point of this post.

One of my favourite sections of Modern English Usage, Fowler’s magnum opus, reads as follows:

respective(ly). Delight in these words is a wide-spread but depraved taste; like soldiers and policemen, they have work to do, but, when the work is not there, the less we see of them the better; of ten sentences in which they occur, nine would be improved by their removal. The evil is considerable enough to justify an examination at some length; examples may be sorted into six groups: A, in which the words give information needed by sensible readers; B, in which they give information that may be needed by fools; C, in which they say again what is said elsewhere; D, in which they say nothing intelligible; E, in which they are used wrongly for some other word; & F, in which they give a positively wrong sense.

The article then goes on to detail each of these six “uses”. Here’s what Fowler has to say about type B, “foolproof uses”:

The particular fool for whose benefit each respective(ly) is inserted will be defined in brackets. Final statements are expected to be made today by Mr Bonar Law & Mr Millerand in the House of Commons & the Chamber of Deputies respectively (r. takes care of the reader who does not know which gentleman or which Parliament is British, or who may imagine both gentlemen talking in both Parliaments). /The Socialist aim in forcing a debate was to compel the different groups to define their respective attitudes (the reader who may expect a group to define another group’s attitude). /It is very far from certain that any of the names now canvassed in Wall Street will secure the nomination at the respective Republican and Democratic Conventions (the reader who may think that Republicans and Democrats hold several united conventions)./ We have not the smallest doubt that this is what will actually happen, & we may discuss the situation on the footing that the respective fates of these two Bills will be as predicted (the reader who has read the prediction without sufficient attention to remember that it is double).

Foolproof uses. What a delightful turn of phrase.

You know something? I wish someone would write something similar on topics like shared, public and open, particularly when it comes to analysing costs.

How many degrees in rocket science does it take to be able to figure out that something shared will cost the sharers less than if each had that something in a not-shared state?

How clever does one have to be in order to figure out that building walls and doors and locks is more expensive than not building them?

What level of IQ does a person need to assess that something available to all is likely to be cheaper than something exclusive?

Making things private and closed and exclusive comes at a cost.

A cost that is considerably higher than that associated with making things public and open and shared.

There will always be reasons to make things private. But that is not the default.

There will always be reasons to make things closed. But that is not the default.

There will always be reasons to make things exclusive. But that is not the default.

People need to understand the waste involved in making things private, closed, exclusive when they don’t need to be so. More on this later.