In April 2010, Janet Maslin wrote “A Magazine Master Builder” for The New York Times. When Henry Luce graduated from the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut in 1916, he received not a single vote in the “most likely to succeed” category. That oversight remains amazing, not only because he would attain such eminence as Time Inc.’s founder and long-reigning autocrat but also because of what Luce, at 18, had already accomplished. At 14, the son of American Protestant missionaries in China, he had overweening ambitions. He had none of the advantages that his classmates’ money could buy, yet he was prepared to struggle past every social, financial and intellectual obstacle that stood between his schoolboy realities and grandiose dreams. By graduation he had found a wealthy mentor, become editor of a campus publication and boastfully labeled it “First in the Prep School World.” Luce’s success story would be sheer romance if it could surmount one basic problem: Luce himself. On the evidence of “The Publisher,” Alan Brinkley’s graceful and judicious biography, Luce began as an arrogant, awkward boy. He made up in pretension what he lacked in personal charm, and he was “able to attract the respect but not usually the genuine affection of those around him.”
“Henry Luce wanted to create the most beautiful and riveting picture magazine ever published, and it was that. It was a magazine that could project a vision of what America was like, or at least what he wanted America to be like. Luce believed that under everything else there was a united America. There was a single culture that everyone was part of. And that’s what Life Magazine projected into the world, a sense of a kind of consensual America. That was not an accurate picture of what America was like.”
“Henry Luce believed that Chiang Kai-shek was one of the great figures of history. And Luce cared so much about the future of China and of making China a sort of modern democratic nation, he saw Chiang Kai-shek as the only hope for that. But he ignored or dismissed all of the things that Chiang Kai-shek did badly, and there were many such things. Teddy White, the famous Time Magazine editor in China - they both believed in Chiang Kai-shek, but Teddy White lost that belief and began to write about Chiang Kai-shek as someone who had failed. And Luce was furious, and that led to his departure from Time, Inc.”
In May 2010, Maureen Corrigan wrote “A Publishing Titan’s Life and Time” for NPR. The weirdest — and maybe even the most revealing — episode in Alan Brinkley's teeming biography of Henry Luce occurred in 1960 when Luce — a publishing potentate who reigned over an empire that included Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Life magazines — experimented with LSD. Luce's second wife, the playwright, congresswoman and loose cannon, Clare Booth Luce, had already dabbled with the hallucinogen under a psychiatrist's supervision. Clare later claimed she had cajoled her husband into trying LSD to provide him with the same "serenity" the drug had given her and, thus, save their troubled marriage. Whatever the reasons, Luce took a dose and then, according to the psychiatrist's diary, sat down at his desk and began calmly reading Lionel Trilling's biography of Matthew Arnold. Even LSD couldn't whisk Henry Luce off on a magic carpet ride! No matter how much he may have yearned to attain freaky visions, Luce was always tethered to late Victorian ideas about duty and ethical culture.
“Well, to the left, in particular, especially in the '40s and '50s, when the Communist left was still a significant force, they hated these ideas that America would be the great capitalist leader of the world. But equally infuriating to readers of the magazine, who just wanted a magazine that would sound fair in the treatment of politics, in much of the '40s and '50s, Time Magazine was not fair. By 1952, there hadn't been a Republican president in 20 years, and Luce was desperate to see a Republican elected president. And he loved Eisenhower, and through the whole eight years of his presidency the magazine was constantly supporting and admiring Eisenhower. And it infuriated many readers, although not too many gave up their subscriptions.”
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.”
“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.”
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
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.
"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.
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.
"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...
"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."
When people die, they leave behind sensitive information—all their online profiles, email accounts, and social media histories. This produces a dilemma for one's family members or friends to either leave it up or take things down. Of course, different sites have different policies regarding a person's death with an account on either Facebook, Twitter, any email service, etc.
"Accounts like PayPal are really interesting because many of us have our PayPal accounts linked to our checking accounts and it's very easy to transfer money out of those accounts, so it's worth looking at it systematically, and thinking about, 'If so-and-so has access to this, then they might also have access to this,' and really thinking about [the] worst-case scenario of what could happen and safeguarding yourself against that."
In September 2009, Duncan Jefferies wrote “Preparing for the digital afterlife” for the Guardian. Unless you're an undertaker, chances are you spend as little time as possible thinking about death. Eventually, however, most of us get round to drawing up a will. Beneficiaries for houses, cars, stocks and shares must all be decided upon. But who gets your email account? Although people increasingly live their lives online, few bother to specify what should happen to their digital assets once they log off for good. But failure to plan for the digital afterlife can cause problems for those left to sort out the affairs of the deceased. Without a username and password family members can struggle to access valuable web domains, online accounts – even photographs and documents on a PC. "People aren't very aware of what you might call their living online legacy – potential employers looking at their Facebook accounts, for example. The issue of what happens to that information after their death is an extension of that," says Yorick Wilks, a senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute.
"It's our recommendation that you realize that anything of a financial matter should be executed according to your legal will as we like to call it — to provide a differentiation between your digital estate planning. That said, there are a lot of accounts that allow you to spend money and make money online that only exist online. I would recommend that you take steps and store those passwords so that your executor has access to them. Let's say, for instance, you may run an online business and may need to provide your business partner or spouse with that information."
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.
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."
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 (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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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. 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.