Here’s another one from the tarmac at Milan airport.
In 2009 there were 133,000 books published in the UK – a record number. However, just 500 authors (1%) were responsible for 30% of book sales. But if you think that’s a crazy statistic consider this one. In the US 1 in every 17 books sold since 2006 has been written by James Patterson. (From The New Yorker and Prospect magazines).
Tahmin tehlikeli bir oyundur. Gelecek, asla şu ana dayanan düz doğrusal bir tahmin değildir. Genellikle hiçbir şekilde öngörülmeyen fikirler veya olaylar, en iyi şekilde hazırlanmış planları bozar; ama bu, hiçbir şekilde gelecek hakkında düşünmemekten iyidir.
Gelecek Dosyaları, dünyanın gelecek yarım yüzyılda nasıl değişebileceği hakkında kışkırtıcı tahminlerle dolu.
• Gelecekte niçin uzun banyo yapacağız?
• Orta Doğu, tüm dünyayı dize mi getirecek?
• Makineler, insanların yerini alabilir mi?
• Medya ne konumda olacak?
• Cebimizdeki parayı nerede taşıyacağız?
• Arabanız sizin yerinize karar verebilecek mi?
• Beslenmek eziyete mi dönüşecek?
• Ekonomik pazarda tam yetkiye kim sahip olacak?
• Ömrümüz uzarken genç de kalabilecek miyiz?
• İstediğimiz gibi seyahat edebilecek miyiz?
• Şirketler gelecekte varlıklarını koruyabilmek adına neler yapacaklar?
Posting on my blog – obviously. Aside from that? Sending something off to the MOD, sending a draft presentation for an insurance event and writing a lecture for QDay 2010 – The Human Interface – that is happening this month at the University Aula in Lund, Sweden.
Also sending a few emails, one about the downsides of screen based reading, another on crowd sourcing and open intelligence and another about the NHS in 2040. And, of course, the usual flood of requests and information. Oh, and I’m supposed to be doing something to promote the new US edition of Future Files (the older of my two books) but I’m not.
How about something else to read?
I haven’t bought it yet but I read a review for Why the West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal about the Future by Ian Morris.
Here’s a statistic from the review. In 1750 Europe’s combined share of world manufacturing output was 23% to China’s 33%; by 1900 it was 62% to China’s 6%. That’s fantastic! What caused such a huge shift? It was the invention of steam power in the UK, which was itself created by a pressing need to get to deep seam coal, which in turn required powerful pumps to remove the water from the mine shafts.
Don’t you just love little historical nuggets like that?
Interesting review of The Shallow by Nicholas Carr in last Saturday’s Guardian (piece by Steven Poole). Couple of things he’s dead right about. First, too many essays are being turned into books and the expansion isn’t always justified.
The whole point of an essay is “pithy provocation.” A book is something different. He’s also on the money with an overlooked thought that (in his words) “All to rarely do defenders of books (and, for that matter, newspapers) ask themselves the uncomfortable question: might it be that people are reading fewer of the products not because people are becoming more stupid but because many of the products are not actually very good.”
He isn’t fond of The Shallows (I liked it, although I’d agree that the original essay covered most of the bases) but he does say good things about another book that I haven’t read yet – Born Digital: Understanding the first generation of digital natives by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser. Basically it boils down to a digital optimistic versus an analogue pessimist.
Future Minds has now gone off to print, which is why the blog has suddenly become so active. BTW, did you know that authors are now under pressure from publishers to write books that have titles that are search engine optimised? So I’ve been thinking about what my next book should be called. So far I’ve come up with three ideas.
1. Harry Potter and the Da Vinci code book of Sodoku
2. Six sigma secrets to time management trends
3. What Paris Hilton and the New York Yankees know about innovation
Trying to finish off a book called Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger. Good but I wish it were a long essay rather than a book (ohmygawd, I’m suffering from DIG – Digital Instant Gratification).
Stat from the book (p63).
In 1957, IBM introduced the 305, a computer with magnetic disks as storage devices that offered up to 5 megabytes of space, and which was valued at around $1 million (in 2006 terms). The cost of the storage unit alone ran to about $70,000 per megabyte in the 1950s; by 1980 that price had come down to below $500 (all in 2006 dollars), less than one percent of what it had been just two-and-a-half decades earlier. Twenty years later, in 2000, storage cost had plummeted to about 1 cent, 1/50,000th of what it was in 1980. And in 2008, the cost of storage for one megabyte of information had been reduced to 1/100th of a cent.
So here’s a question. What happens to information when there is almost no cost to store it?
You may remember me raving about The Shallows by Nicholas Carr a few weeks ago. Well I read a review of the book by Sam Leith in last weekend’s Sunday Times. The review is good, but in case you are pushed for time (or on the Internet surrounded by hyperlinks) the two most important points (to my mind) are as follows.
1. “Your brain spends a huge amount of cognitive capital on processing the medium itself, leaving less working memory to process the message.”
2. “His argument is about the form , not the content.”
What to do with thousands on unused red telephone boxes? One idea is to remove the coin-operated telephones and printed phone directories and put library books inside instead. A kind of mini-mobile library if you like. The idea obviously depends on trust (you take one and put one back) and is open to vandalism, but the cost of trying is so low why not give it a go?
Just been sent this book for my birthday. Quite funny. Quite frightening too. BTW, nice quote in the FT from Christopher Caldwell: ” Although we organise our lives around time measured chronometrically, chronometry is not the way we instinctively measure time. The relevant instinctual unit we use to reckon time’s passage is the lifetime.”
I’m still ploughing my way through Delete: The Power of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Mayer-Schonberger, but this little morsel has also caught my eye and may well end up in my Christmas stocking. Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet by Tim Jackson seems like a good read. The argument, I think, is that if economic growth cannot be separated from environmental damage, then growth as an economic measure needs to be abandoned. It certainly sounds appealing. A life lived more locally and more simply is something I certainly aspire too. One problem though. It sounds like Jackson is a technological pessimist. Personally I’m a believer in the Smart Planet scenario. This is where science and technology solve most of our problems and we achieve economic prosperity without environmental degradation.