Michael Moritz: Return to the Little Kingdom: Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple

In April 2010, Owen Thomas reported on the author, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital and author of the book, Return to the Little Kingdom, for Venture Beat. Tech pundits like to look forward, not back. But at a speaking appearance on Tuesday, Mike Moritz, a partner at Sequoia Capital, admitted to two regrets: passing on Netflix and never repairing his relationship with Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Moritz appeared at the Rosewood Hotel on Sand Hill Road, the epicenter of the venture-capital business, at an event sponsored by Silicon Valley Bank to discuss his new book, Return to the Little Kingdom: Steve Jobs, the Creation of Apple, and How It Changed the World. The book is actually a reissued and updated version of his original 1984 biography of Jobs, The Little Kingdom. And the reporting for that book, done when Moritz was a reporter for Time magazine, is part of what led him to his unlikely career as a venture capitalist.

“So much of what has happened has been associated with Apple and the tale of this extraordinary company that I find that Apple’s breadcrumbs are strewn across the path of my life. As a correspondent for Time magazine, I had this wonderful calling card.”

- Michael Moritz, author of the book: Return to the Little Kingdom: Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple

“At that point, Steve Jobs had just begun work on a little computer that at that point didn’t have a name, was just a skunkworks project. He was interested in having its evolution documented, and I was interested in telling the story of Apple Computer.”

- Michael Moritz, author of the book: Return to the Little Kingdom: Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple

In December 1982, Andy Hertzfeld recounted incidents that were corroborated by Michael Moritz’s book. Those anecedotes were recently archived on Folklore.org, a collection of first-hand accounts at Apple. The February 15th, 1982 edition of Time magazine featured none other than Steve Jobs on its cover, appearing in an article entitled "Striking It Rich: America's Risk Takers". Instead of a photograph, Steve was depicted in a drawing with a red apple balanced on his head that was pierced by a zig-zag bolt of light emanating from an Apple II. The article inside focused on a number of high tech start-ups, but there was a long sidebar that told the story of Apple's meteoric rise, written by a young business reporter named Mike Moritz. It was a bit critical in places ("As an executive, Jobs has sometimes been petulant and harsh on subordinates"), but in general it was positive about the company and its prospects. Macintosh development was shrouded in secrecy, even within Apple, so we were surprised one day a few months later when Steve appeared in the software area of Bandley 4 accompanied by the Time reporter, Mike Moritz. Steve requested that I give him a demo of the Macintosh, and answer all of his questions. Apparently, Mike wanted to write a book about Apple, and managed to convince Steve to give him total access to the company, including the Macintosh team.

“The previous year, a development team at Data General was immortalized by Tracy Kidder's best selling book, "The Soul of a New Machine", about the ups and downs of developing a new mini-computer. Now it seemed like Mike Moritz was going to do something similar for the Mac team. Over the next few months, Mike spent lots of time hanging around the Mac team, attending various meetings and conducting interviews over lunch or dinner, to learn our individual stories. Mike had grown up in South Wales and attended Oxford before moving to the US for grad school, obtaining an MBA from Wharton. He was in his mid-twenties, about the same age as most of us, and was very smart, with a sharp, cynical sense of humor, so he fit right in, and seemed to understand what we were trying to accomplish.”

- Andy Hertzfeld, former Apple Employee; December 1982

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Recent Quotes, by Steve Jobs:

"I love Apple so much and hope to be back as soon as I can," Jobs, 55, said in the e-mail.

Jan 17, 2011 BusinessWeek (1479 occurrences)

"The curiosity over my personal health continues to be a distraction not only for me and my family, but everyone else at Apple as well," Jobs wrote in 2009.

Jan 17, 2011 PC World (2528 occurrences)

In a press release announcing the lawsuit, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said, "We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We've decided to do something about it," said Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

Dec 30, 2010 Apple Insider (1395 occurrences)

"My doctors think they have found the cause -- a hormone imbalance that has been robbing me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy," he said in early 2009. "The remedy for this nutritional problem is relatively simple and...

Jan 17, 2011 AOL News (1252 occurrences)

"With more than 1,000 apps, the Mac App Store is off to a great start," Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement on the firm's website... "We think users are going to love this innovative new way to discover and buy their favorite apps."

Jan 6, 2011 Vancouver Sun (138 occurrences)

Douglas Rushkoff: Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age

From the Daily Kos: As we shuffle in this morning, we're all gathering on a plane of electrons, held together by... well, for most of us it might as well be library paste and fairy dust. But hey, who needs to understand how all this technical stuff works? After all, you don't need to know how a television works to catch Law & Order: Yet Another. You don't need to know how a combustion engine works to drive your car to work. Why should you need to know anything about the programming behind the pixels just to get around the web? Because, as Douglas Rushkoff reminds us in this slim volume, the web is different. It's both medium and content. It delivers us to work, delivers our entertainment, hosts our conversation, and more often than not, shapes our opinions. It's medium and message, highway, vehicle, post office, confidant, and huckster. We don't just put our ideas into the web, we also draw ideas out. And the difference in being able to place messages in the medium, and realizing how the medium shapes the message, is the difference between tossing a pebble into water and digging a canal. This is not a coffee maker you're using, and the web is not the Sunday paper. What you do in here can be dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. We like to think that we're old hands at the information age, but what Douglas Rushkoff shows is that those who march into the web thinking that knowledge of the outside world will be enough to use this new conduit, have been sadly mistaken over and over. Retail powerhouses in the brick & mortar world find that not only are they unable to easily leverage the web to their advantage, simply putting their prices online makes it easier for companies that only exist in this new universe to quick trump their prices and take their customers. Newspapers find that their ability to aggregate information can't keep up with tools available to their (former) readers. Politicians find that rather than giving them a simple super-phone-bank-money-extractor, operating in the web can also mean being mired in a bog of electronic overload and inaction. What's the difference between being able to operate in the web, and being able to thrive there? The difference is in being able to understand the how and why of this new world. In ten chapters or commands, Douglas Rushkoff lays out how to live in this new world. Some of this advice will seem straightforward, some of it will need explanation, and some of it will seem more than a little counterintuitive. But all of it is delivered with verve and insight that makes you rethink your interactions on the web. Are you driving your life here, or only a passenger? If you want to get your hands on the wheel, this book is a good place to start.





From Wikipedia: Douglas Rushkoff (born 18 February 1961) is an American media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist and documentarian. He is best known for his association with the early cyberpunk culture, and his advocacy of open source solutions to social problems. Rushkoff is most frequently regarded as a media theorist, and known for coining terms and concepts including viral media (or media virus), digital native, and social currency. He has written ten books on media, technology, and culture. He wrote the first syndicated column on cyberculture for The New York Times Syndicate, as well as regular columns for The Guardian of London, Arthur, Discover, and the online magazines Daily Beast, TheFeature.com and meeting industry magazine One+. Douglas Rushkoff currently teaches in the Media Studies department at The New School University in Manhattan. He has previously lectured at the ITP at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and taught a class called Narrative Lab. He also has taught online for the MaybeLogic Academy. Rushkoff graduated from Princeton University in 1983. He moved to Los Angeles and completed a Master of Fine Arts in Directing from the California Institute of the Arts. Later Douglas Rushkoff took up a post-graduate fellowship from the American Film Institute. He is currently a PhD candidate at Utrecht University's New Media Program, writing a dissertation on new media literacies. Rushkoff emerged in the early 1990s as active member of the cyberpunk movement, developing friendships and collaborations with people including Timothy Leary, RU Sirius, Paul Krassner, Robert Anton Wilson, Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna, Genesis P-Orridge, Richard Metzger, Grant Morrison, Mark Pesce, Erik Davis, and other writers, artists and philosophers interested in the intersection of technology, society and culture.





In December of 2010, The Jewish Week (New York) asked the author this: In your book “Program or be Programmed,” you write that one either figuratively creates the software “or you will be the software.” Which sounds like a new way of saying that a person without vision, who lacks guiding principles, is spiritually lost. Is the Jewish community creating its own software? Who is, who isn’t? The author replied: I think too many Jews are more comfortable thinking of Torah and Talmud as the word of God, as sacred and locked down, rather than mutable creations of human beings. They would rather be driven by Torah than partner with Torah. Today, the Reconstructionist community seems the best at maintaining this awareness — that Judaism is a process. But I’m finding many Modern Orthodox practicing in highly evolved and open-minded ways; many Reform shuls engaging with Torah and totally rethinking their approach to their after-school programs; many Conservative synagogues revitalized by embracing gay and lesbian constituencies.





In September of 2010, Douglas Rushkoff wrote "Why Johnny Can't Program: A New Medium Requires A New Literacy" for the Huffington Post, in which he said this: Ask any kid what Facebook is for and he'll tell you it's there to help him make friends. What else could he think? It's how he *does* make friends. He has no idea the real purpose of the software, and the people coding it, is to monetize his relationships. He isn't even aware of those people, the program, or their purpose. The kids I celebrated in my early books as "digital natives" capable of seeing through all efforts of big media and marketing have actually proven *less* capable of discerning the integrity of the sources they read and the intentions of the programs they use. If they don't know what the programs they are using are even for, they don't stand a chance to use them effectively. They are less likely to become power users than the used. Amazingly, America - the birthplace of the Internet - is the only developed nation that does not teach programming in its public schools. Sure, some of our schools have elected to offer "computer" classes, but instead of teaching programming, these classes almost invariably teach programs: how to use Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, or any of the other commercial software packages used in the average workplace. We teach our kids how to get jobs in today's marketplace rather than how to innovate for tomorrow's. Just last year, while researching a book on America's digital illiteracy, I met with the Air Force General then in charge of America's cybercommand. He said he had plenty of new recruits ready and able to operate drones or other virtual fighting machines - but no one capable of programming them, or even interested in learning how. He wasn't even getting recruits who were ready to begin basic programming classes. Meanwhile, he explained to me, colleges in Russia, China, and even Iran were churning out an order of magnitude more programmers than universities in the US. It is only a matter of time, he said - a generation at most - until our military loses its digital superiority.

Joe Flood: The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City-and Determined the Future of Cities

In the interview and article for the Atlantic monthly magazine, "The Fires This Time: Joe Flood on Managing New York City" Joe Flood said this: One of the big appeals of using numbers to understand complex problems is getting counterintuitive results, which by definition go against common sense. After all, why spend all the time and money on a study that will only tell you what you already suspected? And we love surprising, counterintuitive takes on the world--it's one of the reasons we like reading Freakonomics, or Malcolm Gladwell's work or Michael Lewis' Moneyball, where the numbers reveal that the chubby guy who strikes out a lot is actually incredibly valuable to a baseball team. Those are the kind of results the city hired RAND to produce, and that's what they got. According to the models, they could close busy fire companies in fire-prone areas without much impact on overall service. For the city, that meant saving money, focusing budget cuts in politically weak areas and supposedly not losing much fire protection. That was exactly what everyone wanted to hear, and they ran with it. It just happened to be wrong. It wasn't the first time it had happened and certainly wasn't the last. Think of Robert McNamara's Pentagon during Vietnam, or Wall Street computer models alchemy that turned no-money-down mortgages into AAA-rated securities. Modelers usually come from a purely scientific background, but things like finance and government services aren't sciences--there's a human element. The models will never be perfect, and people who make and use them need to take a humble approach and second guess their own work. Bill James, one of the heroes of Moneyball, once said something along the lines of, "Any new metric should tell you 80% what you already knew, and 20% what you didn't. Less than 20% and it's not very useful, more than 20% and there's probably something wrong with the numbers." That "more than 20%" part is where RAND got caught. They believed their own studies, the fire department and mayor's office believed in RAND (and in the political usefulness of RAND's findings) and no one bothered to question whether the results were too good to be true.



The Wall Street Journal: In his new book, Joe Flood writes about a New York City governed by a technocratic, data-driven mayor facing a crippling budget deficit who is forced to close firehouses. “The Fires” chronicles the deteriorating 1970s New York of Mayor John Lindsay, when an epidemic of fires destroyed huge sections of the Bronx, Lower Manhattan, Harlem and Brooklyn. Sure, vast swaths of modern-day Queens aren’t about to go up in flames — we hope — but the book underscores undeniably eerie parallels between Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s well-run city and Lindsay’s New York. Like Bloomberg, Lindsay prized the notion of applying rigorous metrics to analyze the performance of city agencies. Faith in data-driven technocratic solutions led Lindsay to embrace the RAND Corporation, a military think tank brought in to make city services more efficient. The FDNY, led by a brilliant, modernizing chief named John O’Hagan, eventually adopted RAND’s reforms and closed dozens of firehouses in some of the city’s most run-down and fire-prone neighborhoods. (RAND, for it’s part, disputes the book’s characterization of its role. “The book’s central contention that fire companies were reallocated based on race or economic conditions in the neighborhoods where changes were made is not supported by the facts,” a RAND spokesman said.)

The author also wrote "Why the Bronx burned: Blame statisticians, not arson. And New York City could be making the same mistake all over again." for the New York Post, in which he said this: It was game two of the 1977 World Series, a chilly, blustery October night in the South Bronx. The Yanks were already down 2-0 in the bottom of the first inning when ABC’s aerial camera panned a few blocks over from Yankee Stadium to give the world its first live glimpse of a real Bronx Cookout. "There it is, ladies and gentlemen," Howard Cosell intoned. "The Bronx is burning." The scene quickly became a defining image of New York in the 1970s, a fitting summation of the decade perfect in every way but one: It never happened. Cosell, tapes of the game show, never said, "The Bronx is burning." Fire fatalities in New York City doubled in the 1970s, as President Jimmy Carter, Mayor John Lindsay and Fire Chief John O'Hagan faced a disaster of the government's own making, a new book claims. "It’s a great quote, if it had been a real one," says Gordon Greisman, who co-wrote and produced ESPN’s "The Bronx is Burning" mini-series based on the Jonathan Mahler book. "But we got all of this footage from Major League Baseball, including the entire broadcast of that game, and we went through all of it and it’s not there, because God knows if it was there we would have used it."

Michio Kaku: Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

Publisher-provided book-description: Based on interviews with over three hundred of the world’s top scientists, who are already inventing the future in their labs, Kaku—in a lucid and engaging fashion—presents the revolutionary developments in medicine, computers, quantum physics, and space travel that will forever change our way of life and alter the course of civilization itself. His astonishing revelations include: The Internet will be in your contact lens. It will recognize people’s faces, display their biographies, and even translate their words into subtitles; You will control computers and appliances via tiny sen­sors that pick up your brain scans. You will be able to rearrange the shape of objects; Sensors in your clothing, bathroom, and appliances will monitor your vitals, and nanobots will scan your DNA and cells for signs of danger, allowing life expectancy to increase dramatically; Radically new spaceships, using laser propulsion, may replace the expensive chemical rockets of today. You may be able to take an elevator hundreds of miles into space by simply pushing the “up” button. Like Physics of the Impossible and Visions before it, Physics of the Future is an exhilarating, wondrous ride through the next one hundred years of breathtaking scientific revolution.

Michio Kaku On Future Civilization - The best video clips are here

Michio Kaku (加來 道雄 Kaku Michio, born January 24, 1947) is an American physicist, the Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics in the City College of New York of City University of New York, the co-founder of string field theory, and a "communicator" and "popularizer" of science. He has written several books on physics and related topics, has made frequent appearances on radio, television and film and writes extensive online blogs and articles. Michio was born in San Jose, California to Japanese immigrant parents. His grandfather came to the United States to take part in the clean-up operation after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. His father was born in California but was educated in Japan, so spoke little English. Both his parents were put in the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, where they met and where his brother was born. Kaku attended Cubberley High School in Palo Alto in the early 1960s and played first board on their chess team. At the National Science Fair in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he attracted the attention of physicist Edward Teller, who took Kaku as a protégé, awarding him the Hertz Engineering Scholarship. Kaku graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University with a B.S. degree in 1968 and was first in his physics class. He attended the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and received a Ph.D. in 1972 and held a lectureship at Princeton University in 1973. During the Vietnam War, Kaku completed his U.S. Army basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia and his advanced infantry training at Fort Lewis, Washington. However, the Vietnam War ended before he was deployed as an infantryman.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Michio Kaku
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Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> March to Keep Fear Alive

From Wikipedia: Michio Kaku was a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and New York University. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is listed in Who's Who in Science and Engineering, and American Men and Women of Science. He has published research articles on string theory from 1969 to 2000. In 1974, along with Prof. K. Kikkawa, he wrote the first paper on string field theory, now a major branch of string theory, which summarizes each of the five string theories into a single equation. In addition to his work on string field theory, he also authored some of the first papers on multi-loop amplitudes in string theory, the first paper on the divergences of these multi-loop amplitudes, the first paper on supersymmetry breaking at high temperatures in the early universe, the first paper on super-conformal gravity, and also some of the first papers on the non-polynomial closed string field theory. Many of the ideas he first explored have since blossomed into active areas of string research. His most recent research publication, on bosonic quantum membranes, was published in Physical Review in 2000. Kaku is the author of several doctoral textbooks on string theory and quantum field theory and has published 170 articles in journals covering topics such as superstring theory, supergravity, supersymmetry, and hadronic physics. He is also author of the popular science books: Visions, Hyperspace, Einstein's Cosmos, and Parallel Worlds, and co-authored Beyond Einstein with Jennifer Thompson. Hyperspace was a best-seller and was voted one of the best science books of the year by both The New York Times and The Washington Post. Parallel Worlds was a finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction in the UK. In Physics of the Impossible, he examines the technologies of invisibility, teleportation, precognition, star ships, antimatter engines, time travel and more—all regarded as things that are not possible today but that might be possible in the future. In this book, he ranks these subjects according to when, if ever, these technologies might become reality. In March 2008, Physics of the Impossible entered the New York Times best-seller list, and stayed on for five weeks.







From the Science Channel: Dr. Michio Kaku holds the Henry Semat Professorship in Theoretical Physics at the City College of New York and also the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He graduated summa cum laude, and first in his physics class, from Harvard, and received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Calif. at Berkeley. He has taught at Harvard, Princeton, and for over 30 years at the City Univ. of New York. He has been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He is the co-founder of string field theory. His Ph.D. level textbooks on string theory are required reading at many of the world's leading physics laboratories. He has appeared on the Larry King Show, 60 Minutes, 20/20, Good Morning America, CNN, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and BBC World. He has done numerous interviews with PBS's Nova, the Discovery Channel, the Science Channel, the History Channel, the National Geographic Channel. Dr. Kaku has also hosted numerous science specials. He hosted a 4-part series about Time for the Science Channel. He hosted a 3-part series about the future called 2057 for the Discovery Channel. He hosted a 3-hour series called Visions of the Future for BBC, soon to air in the U.S. on Science Channel.

Evgeny Morozov: The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom

Product description: “The revolution will be Twittered!” declared journalist Andrew Sullivan after protests erupted in Iran in June 2009. Yet for all the talk about the democratizing power of the Internet, regimes in Iran and China are as stable and repressive as ever. In fact, authoritarian governments are effectively using the Internet to suppress free speech, hone their surveillance techniques, disseminate cutting-edge propaganda, and pacify their populations with digital entertainment. Could the recent Western obsession with promoting democracy by digital means backfire? In this spirited book, journalist and social commentator Evgeny Morozov shows that by falling for the supposedly democratizing nature of the Internet, Western do-gooders may have missed how it also entrenches dictators, threatens dissidents, and makes it harder—not easier—to promote democracy. Buzzwords like “21st-century statecraft” sound good in PowerPoint presentations, but the reality is that “digital diplomacy” requires just as much oversight and consideration as any other kind of diplomacy. Marshaling compelling evidence, Morozov shows why we must stop thinking of the Internet and social media as inherently liberating and why ambitious and seemingly noble initiatives like the promotion of “Internet freedom” might have disastrous implications for the future of democracy as a whole.





Evgeny Morozov wrote "Think Again: The Internet
They told us it would usher in a new era of freedom, political activism, and perpetual peace. They were wrong" for the periodical, Foreign Policy, in which he said this: "The Internet Has Been a Force for Good" No. In the days when the Internet was young, our hopes were high. As with any budding love affair, we wanted to believe our newfound object of fascination could change the world. The Internet was lauded as the ultimate tool to foster tolerance, destroy nationalism, and transform the planet into one great wired global village. Writing in 1994, a group of digital aficionados led by Esther Dyson and Alvin Toffler published a manifesto modestly subtitled "A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age" that promised the rise of "'electronic neighborhoods' bound together not by geography but by shared interests." Nicholas Negroponte, then the famed head of the MIT MediaLab, dramatically predicted in 1997 that the Internet would shatter borders between nations and usher in a new era of world peace.





From www.EvgenyMorozov.com: Evgeny Morozov is the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (out in January 2011). He is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy and runs the magazine's "Net Effect" blog about the Internet's impact on global politics (neteffect.foreignpolicy.com). Morozov is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University and a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation. He was formerly a Yahoo! fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University and a fellow at George Soros's Open Society Institute, where he remains on the board of the Information Program. Before moving to the US, Morozov was based in Berlin and Prague, where he was Director of New Media at Transitions Online, a media development NGO active in 29 countries of the former Soviet bloc. Morozov's writings have appeared in The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, Times Literary Supplement, Prospect, The Sunday Times, The Boston Globe, Slate, Le Monde, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Review, Foreign Policy, Project Syndicate, Dissent and many other publications. He has appeared on CNN, CBS, SkyNews, CBC, Al Jazeera International, France 24, Reuters TV, NPR, BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service. His research has been quoted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Wall Street Journal, CNN.com, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Bloomberg News, The Globe and Mail, Die Zeit, Il Sole 24 Ore, Der Standard, L'Express, AFP, Der Spiegel, Corriera della Serra, El País, Le Figaro, and many others



Evgeny Morozov wrote "How the Kremlin Harnesses the Internet" for The New York Times, in which the author said this: Hours before the judge in the latest Mikhail Khodorkovsky trial announced yet another guilty verdict last week, Russia’s most prominent political prisoner was already being attacked in cyberspace. No, Khodorkovsky’s Web site, the main source of news about the trial for many Russians, was not being censored. Rather, it had been targeted by so-called denial-of-service attacks, with most of the site’s visitors receiving a “page cannot be found” message in their browsers. Such attacks are an increasingly popular tool for punishing one’s opponents, as evidenced by the recent online campaign against American corporations like Amazon and PayPal for mistreating WikiLeaks. It’s nearly impossible to trace the perpetrators; many denial-of-service attacks go underreported, as it’s often hard to distinguish them from cases where a Web site has been overwhelmed by a huge number of hits. Although most of the sites eventually get back online, denial-of-service attacks rarely generate as much outrage as formal government attempts to filter information on the Internet. In the past, repressive regimes have relied on Internet firewalls to block dissidents from spreading forbidden ideas; China has been particularly creative, while countries like Tunisia and Saudi Arabia are never far behind. But the pro-Kremlin cyberattackers who hit Kodorkovsky’s Web site may reveal more about the future of Internet control than Beijing’s practice of adapting traditional censorship to new technology.



Evgeny Morozov also wrote "Edit This Page: Is it the end of Wikipedia?" for the Boston Review: Can you trust Wikipedia? Most of us have stopped asking and simply bookmarked it. That makes sense when you consider the alternatives: you can explore the first dozen or so Google search results, or you can go straight to the occasionally erroneous Wikipedia entry, typically culled from the very same search results. If you are looking for fast, up-to-date information, it is Wikipedia or Google (not Wikipedia or Britannica), and Wikipedia wins on speed. Wikipedia still has its critics, skeptics who doubt its merits as a reference source. But even they cannot deny the tremendous social innovation unleashed by Wikipedia-the-project. Every professional conference—on topics ranging from entrepreneurship to journalism to philanthropy—now includes the mandatory, impassioned plea for the industry to adopt The Wikipedia Model, as if it were a set of Lego pieces that could be ordered from eBay and assembled in a newsroom or on the trading floor.



Also for the Boston Review, the author, Evgeny Morozov, wrote "Texting Toward Utopia: Does the Internet spread democracy?" In part, this is what he said: In 1989 Ronald Reagan proclaimed that “The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip”; later, Bill Clinton compared Internet censorship to “trying to nail Jell–O to the wall”; and in 1999 George W. Bush (not John Lennon) asked us to “imagine if the Internet took hold in China. Imagine how freedom would spread.” Such starry–eyed cyber–optimism suggested a new form of technological determinism according to which the Internet would be the hammer to nail all global problems, from economic development in Africa to threats of transnational terrorism in the Middle East. Even so shrewd an operator as Rupert Murdoch yielded to the digital temptation: “Advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere,” he claimed. Soon after, Murdoch bowed down to the Chinese authorities, who threatened his regional satellite TV business in response to this headline–grabbing statement.

Joseph Menn: Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet

From fserror.com (promotional website for the book): Joseph Menn’s third book, “Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet,” was published in the US in January 2010 and in the UK in February 2010 by PublicAffairs Books. Part true-life thriller and part expose, it became an immediate bestseller, with Menn interviewed on national television and radio programs in the US, UK, Canada and elsewhere. Menn has spoken at major security conferences including RSA, Black Hat DC and DefCon on his findings, which include hard evidence that the governments of Russia and China are protecting and directing the behavior of some of the world’s worst cyber-criminals. He also has given invited talks at meetings convened by the US Secret Service and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. “Fatal System Error accurately reveals the secretive global cyber cartels and their hidden multibillion-dollar business, proving cybercrime does pay and pays well,” said Richard A. Clarke, special advisor to President George W. Bush for cyber security and author of “Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror.” The New Yorker magazine said it was “riveted” by the tale, comparing it to the novels of Stieg Larsson, while Business Week called it “a fascinating high-tech whodunit.” Fatal System Error has been placed on the official reading list of the US Strategic Command and is being translated into Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Menn has reported on technology for more than a decade at the Financial Times and the Los Angeles Times, mostly from his current base in San Francisco. His coverage areas for the FT include technology security and privacy, digital media, and the PC industry. He is a two-time finalist for the Loeb Award, the most prestigious in financial journalism, for coverage of Microsoft and the Hollywood writers’ strike. Earlier, he won a “Best in Business” award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers for tobacco coverage at Bloomberg News, where as legal editor he directed stories that revealed the landmark settlement talks between the cigarette companies and the states.



Regarding Wikileaks and the security measures that the organization's taken in order to thwart those actors that would like to see the site shut down permanently, the author wrote this for the Financial Times: WikiLeaks appears to be winning the technological fight to publish secret US diplomatic cables, hopscotching around the world to avoid government pressure and hacking attacks. The site has been forced to change a number of service providers, including those hosting its documents and providing bandwidth, and on Friday had to change its website address, moving from wikileaks.org to wikileaks.ch. “The Cablegate archive has been spread to more than 100,000 people. If something happens to us, key parts will be released automatically,” said Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder. While the shuffling occasionally meant that the cables were unavailable, they demonstrated both the group’s resilience and the extreme difficulty of keeping anything off the internet, particularly something not universally condemned by technology companies and experts. Read that article, in full, here. See also: Wikileaks and Julian Assange. Shlomo ben Ami, Avigdor Lieberman, the Mossad..., WikiLeaks documents expose US foreign policy conspiracies. All cables with tags from 1 5000 [DOES NOT CONTAIN TEXT OF CABLES], WikiLeaks: Removing the 'top secret' seal. NPR affiliate, KQED, recently aired a Forum broadcast on cyber crimes and cyber security; the author was a guest there. See the podcast of that show, just below.

Steven Johnson: Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

Johnson--writer, Web guru, and bestselling author of Everything Bad Is Good for You--delivers a sweeping look at innovation spanning nearly the whole of human history. What sparks our great ideas? Johnson breaks down the cultural, biological, and environmental fuel into seven broad "patterns," each packed with diverse, at times almost disjointed anecdotes that Johnson synthesizes into a recipe for success. A section on "slow hunches" captivates, taking readers from the FBI's work on 9/11 to Google's development of Google News. A section on error takes us through a litany of accidental innovations, including the one that eventually led to the invention of the computer. "Being right keeps you in place," Johnson reminds us. "eing wrong forces us to explore." It's eye-opening stuff--although it does require an investment from the reader. But as fans of the author's previous work know, an investment in Johnson pays off, and those who stick with the author as he meanders through an occasional intellectual digression will come away enlightened and entertained, and with something perhaps even more useful--how to recognize the conditions that could spark their own creativity and innovation. Another mind-opening work from the author of Mind Wide Open.





The figure of the lone genius may captivate us, but we intuit that such geniuses’ creations don’t materialize in a vacuum. Johnson supported the intuition in his biography of eighteenth-century scientist Joseph Priestly (The Invention of Air, 2009) and here explores it from different angles using sets of anecdotes from science and art that underscore some social or informational interaction by an inventor or artist. Assuring readers that he is not engaged in “intellectual tourism,” Johnson recurs to the real-world effects of individuals and organizations operating in a fertile information environment. Citing the development of the Internet and its profusion of applications such as Twitter, the author ascribes its success to “exaptation” and “stacked platforms.” By which he means that curious people used extant stuff or ideas to produce a new bricolage and did so because of their immersion in open networks. With his own lively application of stories about Darwin’s theory of atolls, the failure to thwart 9/11, and musician Miles Davis, Johnson connects with readers promoting hunches and serendipity in themselves and their organizations.



Steven Berlin Johnson (born June 6, 1968) is an American popular science author. Steven Johnson has graduate degrees from Columbia University in English literature, and as an undergraduate studied semiotics at Brown University, which is a part of its modern culture and media department. Steven Johnson has worked as a columnist for magazines such as Discover Magazine, Slate, and Wired. He co-founded the early webzine Feed Magazine in 1995, and the Webby-award-winning news discussion site Plastic.com in 2001. He is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He is the author of the best selling book, Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (2005), which argues that over the last three decades popular culture artifacts (like television dramas and video games) have become increasingly complex and have helped to foster higher-order thinking skills. On March 5, 2009, he appeared on The Colbert Report to promote his new book, The Invention of Air. In 2006, he announced a new online service, Outside.in, which he described as "an attempt to collectively build the geographic Web, neighborhood by neighborhood". Steven Johnson is married and has three sons. He lives with his family in Brooklyn.

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Jane Smiley and "The Man Who Invented the Computer"

The New York Times introduces the new Jane Smiley book this way:

“You know the story of the invention of the computer?” one character asks another midway through Jane Smiley’s best-selling 1995 novel “Moo.” The speaker, an animal scientist, dreams of striking it rich by pioneering a new dairy-farming technology. To that end, he hopes to pry major grant money out of the agricultural industry, and he wields the history of the computer as both cautionary tale and crowbar. “The short version,” he explains, “is that the guy at Iowa State who invented the computer in the late ’30s never patented a thing. . . . And the university . . . forgot about the old machine, and threw it out.” Now, in Smiley’s new book, “The Man Who Invented the Computer,” we have the long version. The title character — the ­real-life “guy at Iowa State” — is John Vincent Atanasoff, a physicist and mathematician who invented the computer largely out of frustration. Anyone who has studied calculus knows that solving differential equations is a tedious process: labor-­intensive, error-prone, slow. That process grows more arduous as equations grow more complex, and by the 1930s, as Smiley recounts, the difficulty of calculation was impeding scientific advancement. In response, Atanasoff designed a machine to do what his own mind could not. “I did not want to search and invent,” he confessed, “but sadly I turned in that direction.”

Read that NYT piece here.

Where Are The 'Hackers' Now? from NPR Podcast Science Friday

In his 1984 book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, author Steven Levy profiled some of the personalities whose work brought PCs to the people, including Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Levy discusses his book, recently reissued, and hacker ethics in the Internet age.

Download the podcast here. See also: Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age, The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness, In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, On The Path



MIT's periodical, "Technology Review," recently said this about the anniversary edition of the book: "In Hackers, Captain Crunch shows up primarily as an adjunct to the nascent Apple computer company, where he was briefly employed to create a circuit board that, when connected to a phone, could enable an Apple II to reproduce his feats of phone hacking. Fearing legal entanglements, the board was never released, and Captain Crunch didn't last long at the fledgling company, but the "blue box" on which the board was based became the workhorse of the phone hacker "phreaking" community." See that TR article here. Pair the Hackers book with the movie, "Pirates of Silicon Valley." Note: "Hackers," starring Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller, is not as relevant.

William Powers and Paper in the Digital Age

In 2007, William Powers wrote an essay, "Hamlet's Blackberry." The paper was a part of the Discussion Paper Series, out of Harvard University. The subtitle and underlying theme to the essay is that "... Paper Is Eternal." Powers writes:

We live in an age obsessed with new technologies. The sophisticated modern consumer knows the fine points of all the latest media devices. There are countless popular magazines dedicated to helping us stay abreast of our media devices, and they cover every imaginable kind of technology except the one on which the magazines themselves are printed. Paper is the most successful communications innovation of the last 2000 years, the one that has lasted the longest and had the profoundest effect on civilization. One can easily make the case that without the technology that is paper, there would be no civilization. Yet most of the time, we don’t even think of paper as a technology. And so we don’t ask the questions we routinely ask about other technologies: How does it work? What are its strengths and weaknesses? Is it easy and enjoyable to use? Paper doesn’t seem to require much consideration because it’s so simple: a thin, flexible material that reflects light, crisply displaying any marks you make on it. What more is there to say?

Find that essay here, on Harvard's servers. In July NPR's Morning Edition covered the book and author. The story's webpage prefaces the subject with a series of questions: "Do you find yourself checking Facebook as soon as you wake up in the morning? Do you answer e-mails on your Blackberry while surfing the Web? Even as you read this article, is your right index finger twitching on the mouse, just itching to click on something new?" The webpage continues: "Powers' book is not a Luddite manifesto. The writer may question the way we use our gadgets, but he certainly doesn't condemn it. ("With a few keystrokes, I can bring up an old manuscript from the British Museum. That is miraculous," he says.) He does, however, recognize the downside of constantly being flooded with new information — or what he calls the "conundrum of connectedness."" Read from that feature story's webpage here, from/on NPR.org. And download that Morning Edition podcast here. Powers was also a guest on This Week in Mobile; YouTube video below.

Jeff Papows - The Impact of Faulty Software from IT Conversations - Tech Nation Podcast

Dr. Moira Gunn talks with author and former Lotus Development President, Jeff Papows, about the three forces which create software glitches, how they are effecting society at large, and how we can fix them.

Download the podcast here. Industry Week had this to say about the ideas in the book:

For the on-the-go business professional or tech-savvy teen, that might be welcome news. The question, Papows asks, is "whether we are using technology to add value on behalf of the consumer or simply doing it because we can." "Automobiles are becoming moving wide-area networks," Papows tells IndustryWeek. "They are more and more digital and less and less mechanical. So it logically follows that given all of the challenges that information technology professionals are facing, the more digital [vehicles] become, the more risks there are inherently." In his book, Papows points to Toyota Motor Corp.'s February recall of approximately 148,000 Prius and Lexus models to update the software in the vehicles' antilock brake systems (ABS). At the time, Toyota noted that some owners of 2010 Prius hybrids and 2010 HS 250h Lexus vehicles "have reported experiencing inconsistent brake feel during slow and steady application of brakes on rough or slick road surfaces when the ABS is activated in an effort to maintain tire traction."

The cautionary article and cursory introduction to the book, can be found here. See also: The Software Conspiracy: Why Companies Put Out Faulty Software, How They Can Hurt You and What You Can Do About It, Fault Tolerance in Distributed Systems, Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It

New Horizons: Curtis Bonk from New Horizons in Education

Bob Kustra talks with Curtis Bonk about his book "The World is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education."

Download the podcast here. See also: Empowering Online Learning: 100+ Activities for Reading, Reflecting, Displaying, and Doing, The Handbook of Blended Learning: Global Perspectives, Local Designs, Online Education For Dummies, Building Online Learning Communities: Effective Strategies for the Virtual Classroom (Josse Bass Higher and Adult Education)

"Program or Be Programmed": Rushkoff's Digital Rules from On Point with Tom Ashbrook Podcast

We talk with big thinker Douglas Rushkoff about his "ten commands" for living right in the digital age. His new book is "Program or Be Programmed."

Listen to the full show here, and make sure to listen to the part about the car analogy. He's so on point with this book. It's all about "driving" versus being the passenger. And this is completely true. This is what our blog is about, in essence; it's about not being passive with the content that you're consuming. And to a large extent, you're seeing passivity reign through venues such as Facebook, even, where you simply just fall in line with certain things. You've got to check out the author's other books as well, super good reads: Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back, Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say, Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism,