I just came back from two great weeks of vacation in the US, the first time I went to the country as a tourist, took time to meet people outside of my professional world, and went outside the cities. A few observations:

• Americans have a very different relation with money than we do here in Europe. Having or loving money does not seem to be shameful. Two examples: a friend was explaining me how, during the Christmas dinner of his company, a young intern started to talk to the boss in front of the whole company, saying in substance “tell me what I can do to make more money and I will do whatever you ask me, I want to make a lot of money”.
  Also, homeless folks appear to be thanking those who don’t give them money with sincerity, as they do not show any jealousy towards those who have money. It seems in America and contrary to what happens in Europe you don’t hate those who made money, you look up to them saying to yourself “it will be my turn one day”.
• Americans have a different relation to their country (not surprising I know, but read the rest). If something goes wrong they do not seem to start by blaming the system or the government like we do here in Europe. I say this after seeing homeless folks going around an American flag on their caddies (they all carry caddies around). This is unthinkable in France. If you are homeless, unemployed, or not making enough money, it is the government responsibility, and you hate your country. Very different mentality.
• Americans are the most productive people on earth which is absolutely amazing when you see how much this country is wasting in not value adding activities. After Iraq, one main area: disclaimers. Buy a camera, it comes with 20 pages of useless legal disclaimers (mine came with “do not put heavy objects on the camera as they may fall and hurt others”…). Everything is secured via stupid legal texts that take hours to both write and read. The worse case is what drives the creation of every process, and I wonder how much time it costs to this society every year. One example: the Dallas Forth Worth airport train. You step into it.
  - alarm stars ringing
  - a voice says “be careful, doors are closing”
  - doors close
  - a voice says “sit down, train will start”
  - train starts
  This process has at least two more steps than the Paris underground. It might look like a detail, but every person in this train loses 10 seconds per stop. Millions of stops and travelers later, it makes a different. And everything is like that in the US.
  
• Americans are micro entrepreneurs. All of them have at least 1-2 side businesses, small activities they have beside their day job. I don’t think they make a huge amount of supplementary money this way, but it shows how entrepreneurship is deeply embedded in their genes.
• Bush is a source of national shame. Again, never forget that more than half this country never voted for him, and it shows in every discussion. California is different from the rest of the country as are most coastal states, still it was a surprise to see the hate level, and how they now admire France who has “a president that can speak of politics one on one”.
• Life is built around cars. To an extent that is quite fascinating. Example: when you go to a restaurant there is a whole ceremony around the valet parking. Cool dudes arrive with they Porsche cayenne, give the key to the valet who parks the car. Then when they come out, the valet screams “a white Porsche cayenne” and the driver, all proud and full of himself, grabs the key in front of the waiting crowd. Cars are your social status, and therefore it is almost all of the time the main element around which social places are organized. Amazing. I don’t even have a car!
  
• The US has solved one issue: tobacco. Nice move. The war started 20 years ago and now the results are here. If you want to find foreigners when you go out it’s easy, look in front of the bar, they are the ones smoking a cigarette outside. Now an even bigger fight is coming: the fight against the food industry. My god, it is hard to make a step in this country without behind tempted by food or sodas. You always, ALWAYS have food in sight, and when it is not your eyes that are tempted it is your nose, with many shops carefully rejecting their ovens’ odors to the street. There is a problem there, a large one, Supersize me is a prophetic documentary.
  
• This country is huge, beautiful, offers a multitude of activities, and is one of the easiest place on earth to move around. Recommended, and I think that they are now conscious that you should not treat visitors as terrorists. Going through the customs was easy and smooth (a friend traveling with us got tons of questions because she had an Algerian stamp on her passport after shooting a movie there, but she went through), unlike the time I went to Washington with a broken leg and ended up with two inspectors checking out my orthopedic cast with rulers (a true story…).

“She has always been aware of reaching more people and adapting the communication to suit”

Queen launches YouTube channel

The Chinese government is probably one of the biggest enabler of the North Korean regime. Kim Jong Il’s dictatorship could not stand long if it was not supported by such a powerful ally. But chinese traders are creating changes in the other direction, making a few bucks selling pirated DVDs to North Koreans, passing bits of modernity and openness in the process.

For a country that has been so brainwashed that many citizens think the dear leader has super natural powers, it is a major step.

[…] massive crop failures and widespread famine forced the government to tolerate private trading.
By 2002 [people] could sell fish for cash [used] to buy, among other manufactured goods from China, a color television and a videotape player. Soon [people] were asking local merchants to smuggle in specific video titles from China.
In addition to Bond movies, she learned about the world beyond North Korea from Hong Kong gangster films and from South Korean television, which she could receive on her Chinese-made TV.
Her son, now 17, said his understanding of the United States — where he hopes one day to live — was formed by watching old videos of “Charlie’s Angels.”
Link

The Journal of Adolescent Health studies the impact of media violence and comes up with bad news: exposure to such things is the second worse threat to youth after only lung cancer.

In summary, exposure to electronic media violence increases the risk of both children and adults behaving aggressively in the short-run and of children behaving aggressively in the long-run. It increases the risk significantly, and it increases it as much as many other factors that are considered public health threats. As with many other public health threats, not every child who is exposed to this threat will acquire the affliction of violent behavior, and many will acquire the affliction who are not exposed to the threat. However that does not diminish the need to address the threat.

The relative strength of known public health threats.

Link

Worrying if this gets confirmed by other studies.

Arte (French-German TV channel) was interviewing young Germans picked randomly in the street this week-end. The question: “do you know what the holocaust is?” A few embarrassed “no” later, it became evident that unless the educational system does something to occupy the online landscape were these kids live, a few hard-earned lessons will go down the memory hole.

When the public will discover this, the internet will be the usual suspect. Truth is the educational system has the exact same problem than the media or music industry: a chronic incapacity to follow the new habits of their “audience”. The reasons are different (resistance from professors, lack of training and budget, inertia of centralized programs or presidential interruptions) but the results the same.

It is time for more class blogging and Youtube short documentaries.

After the tragedy that hit Finland a few days ago, Youtube is accused of spreading dangerous messages and the “masses are calling for more control“. I got invited to the Swiss national radio to make a few points this morning:

• You can’t control media. Get over it!
• The debate is not about YouTube, it’s about video on the web. This guy could have posted the video on his own website. The only way to stop this? Shutting down the internet (in itself an impossible task).
• It might actually be a blessing in disguise that he posted it on YouTube where it could be taken down in a click. Obviously this guy did not have the most effective strategy which would consist in allowing users to download his video (i.e. NOT posting it on YouTube), because spreading the video would have been easier and “outsourced” to viewers, therefore totally impossible to shut down.
• It seems the finish teen was replicating scenes of the Columbine massacre which happened in 1999, 6 years before the birth of YouTube. Inciting messages have spread way before new medias arrived, via TV footages and, in the case of Columbine, cinema when Michael Moore used the footage in his movie. Let’s shut down TV and Cinema then?
• Experts validating content is not a solution from the moment cultures don’t agree on what’s right or wrong. Racist discourse is allowed in the US (I am always shocked to see the yearly Ku Klux Klan gatherings happening in this country, certainly blown out of proportion by the media but still…) and punished by law in France. How to deal with that?
• What is an expert in Youtube videos anyway? Is there such a thing as a PHD in guys-mixing-mentos-with-coke-videos?
• Validating videos does not scale economically, it is way too expensive. Do we therefore shut down a media used in a legal way 99.99% of the time in the name of a few mishaps? As Bruno Giussani used to say back in the early days, “you don’t shut down the postal system because it sometimes delivers a letter bomb!“
• From the moment there is no technical solution, the problem has to be handled by the receivers of the information, i.e. you and me. We need to stop being fascinated by this kind of incidents, creating a hunger for coverage and therefore for more “reward” (in a very sick way of course) for those who create this kind of incidents.
• Again, and from a social perspective, this might be a blessing in disguise. Social media are forcing citizens to use their filters again! We will finally stop believing everything that comes from the media, and start questioning things we took for granted. If the NYT says it it must be true. No no, time to think again, you are responsible of your own truth.

The interview (in french) is archived here.

“While science and technology have the potential to create an ideal habitat for humanity over the next millennium, there is the possibility of a monumental genetic hangover over the subsequent millennia due to an over-reliance on technology reducing our natural capacity to resist disease, or our evolved ability to get along with each other.

Link (via BoingBoing)

The above statements come from a “report commissioned for men’s satellite TV channel Bravo” which isn’t exactly Nature or Science, and you can feel sensationalism all over the article. But what happens in our economy (a growing rich-poor divide) could definitely happen in our genes.

Update: evolution is actually stuck! No need to worry! “For any evolutionary change to take place, the environment has to remain more or less constant for many generations, so that evolution can select the traits that are adaptive and eliminate those that are not. When the environment undergoes rapid change within the space of a generation or two […] then evolution can’t happen because nature can’t determine which traits to select and which to eliminate.” Link

There are only a few loose indicators of how good a conference program is. We have the satisfaction of the participants (who by definition get very divided on some presentations like this one), feedback from the speakers, and sometimes there is the pride of seeing something we scheduled one or two years ago become a globally hot topic.

After women in technology (for which I caught a lot of heat back in 2006, now a politically correct discussion), the digital divide at home seems to get a lot of attention after a Pew study that found 49% of Americans have “few tech assets”.

Time to look at our Digital Divide: Bringing it home panel video again, with Sugata Mitra, Lara Srivastava, Pukul Rana, Nathan Eagle and the guy who came up with the idea (you see I actually don’t deserve much credit ;), mister Galipeau.

Interesting theory on how people tend to resist the wisdom of crowds effect because of “culturally embedded religious belief”. The authors goes into details about how intuition makes us miss the point. Wikipedia’s greatness does not depend on edit quality, but on edit selection.

The reason that Wikipedia is as good as it is […] is not due to the average quality of the edits […], it is due to a much harder to observe process: selection. Some edits survive, while others quickly die. While one can look at the history of a Wikipedia article and see each and every edit, it is much harder to tell how many potential editors looked at an article, subconsciously thought “I doubt I could improve this much,” and chose not to try. Each of these can be considered a “selection event”, and the number of such events vastly outnumbers the actual edits. Selection is the heart of what makes Wikipedia — as well as Darwinian evolution — work.

Link

Just like in Darwin’s theories, success of crowd sourced systems is achieved by turning “countless random mutations into sophistication”. Perfection helps the process, but it is in no way a mandatory condition. And that is the part our Cartesian brains have a hard time understanding.

The iPod: Lightning Rod for Criminals?

Crime statistics released Monday by the FBI showed violent crime increased in 2005 and 2006, and a new Urban Institute analysis offers evidence that the concurrent explosion in iPod use may have triggered the spike.

The gadgets are not just entertaining and convenient; their high value, visibility, and versatility make them “criminogenic”—or “crime-creating,” in the vocabulary of criminologists. And their power to distract users can give thieves an advantage. Researchers John Roman and Aaron Chalfin suggest in the report “Is There an iCrime Wave?” that iPods’ popularity with consumers and appeal to criminals may have translated into rising violent crime rates.

Link

Talk about unexpected impact of technology on society. How long until people start defacing their iPods to feel safer?