Davos Newbies

I was in the midst of a business conversation today, speaking to someone about the clever technology their company has developed, when he tried to give me an example. “It’s like the video of the skateboarding dog.” I said I’ve never seen the video of the skateboarding dog.

If you want a definition of stunned silence, that’s what confronted me. It was like that scene in David Lodge’s Small World when Philip Swallow admits he has never read Hamlet.

I don’t think being ignorant about the skateboarding dog puts me in the category of fuddy-duddy high court judges — “What is this Beatles of which you speak?” — or the first president Bush who was amazed by a supermarket bar code scanner. But perhaps I’m wrong. Am I now disqualified from being in touch with the technology zeitgeist?

By the way, after our conversation I was sent a link to the skateboarding dog. I haven’t watched it, hoping my ignorance gives me a certain cachet.

Say cheese.

By my reckoning, only Milo Djukanovic, prime minister of Montenegro, is clearly taller than president Obama. I also admire the pluck of the Kosovar translator who sneaked into the picture.

My Reuters column on the real-time web was posted today. If you want to leap to the conclusion:

If the real-time web is more than a fad, there are two likely developments. First, it can’t remain largely the property of Twitter. The success of the Internet has been fueled by its openness. Twitter is more like the closed gardens — think AOL — of the web’s early history. I love the real-time web, but I don’t want to be locked into Twitter. There are also major questions as to whether Twitter, a centralized system, can truly scale globally. Users are already accustomed to seeing the fail whale. Alternatives will emerge, and they will be open, not closed. Second, Google will need to find a way to respond to the real-time web, beyond its largely unheralded, rather timid steps with PubSubHubbub. Google founder Larry Page acknowledged earlier this year that Twitter had stolen a march on the search giant. If Google doesn’t provide real-time search, it can’t be the world’s best search engine. And if it loses that crown, the lock it has on advertising dollars will fade away as well.

Everything I write for Reuters will also appear on my own Reuters page, which has its own RSS feed. You’ll find a bewildering variety of views on the main Commentaries page.

The New Republic has a very good profile of the world’s best economics commentator, Martin Wolf. Wolf is also, I’ll hazard, the most quoted person over ten years of Davos Newbies, for what that’s worth.

There are two important little details that I’d add to Julia Ioffe’s article. First, she notes that Wolf studied economics at Oxford. His graduate work was in economics, but before he turned to the social sciences, Wolf completed his degree in Literae Humaniores, known as classics to the barbarians among my readers. I think the lucidity and logic of Wolf’s writing owes an enormous debt to his years studying Greek and Latin.

The other aspect to Wolf that Ioffe misses is the columnist he supplanted. Sir Samuel Brittan still clogs up the Financial Times’ op-ed page from time to time. But before Wolf, Brittan (brother of Mrs Thatcher’s Home Secretary, Leon Brittan) was the stentorian voice of economic analysis at the FT. I always found him unreadable, however brilliant his analysis was meant to be. Part of Wolf’s success was the contrast between his clear prose and Brittan’s sludge.

Update See Martin Wolf’s comment below. He spent the first half of his undergraduate years at Oxford doing Greats, and then switched to Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

I love food, although I’m more of an Alice Let’s Eat type than a gourmet. So The Guardian’s list of the 50 best things to eat in the world had me salivating. I’ve only been to four of the 50, so there’s clearly room for improvement in my life. Still it was nice to see that one of the 50 is in my own town:

Chez Panisse doesn’t just do the world’s best Californian food: it is quite simply the best restaurant in the world. Superb.

Photo by Emptyhighway from Flickr

A few weeks ago I was disparaging about Google’s Power Readers initiative. The choices on the reading lists were so boring.

Now I think Power Readers is a great idea. Have a look at the 12th of Markos Moulitsas’ 19 picks. Funny how one’s perspective can change so swiftly.

My debut column for Reuters just went up. Here’s the kernel:

If the world is counting on innovative companies to solve global warming, we may be in trouble. Venture investment in cleantech is slumping. Venture capitalists in the US poured $2 billion into 139 cleantech start-ups in the first half of 2008, according todata from PricewaterhouseCoopers. In the first half of this year, venture investments in the sector plummeted to $513 million in 89 companies…

At the root of the cleantech bust is that there are fundamental science problems that need to be solved before many of the current ideas are investable. For all the strides in solar power, photovoltaic cells are still too inefficient to be cost-effective. No one has cracked the problem of energy storage for solar, wind and tidal energy. Carbon sequestration is a regular mantra in political speeches — particularly for legislators from coal-producing states — but it’s still a largely theoretical exercise.

Venture capitalists, for all their rhetoric about pushing ground-breaking innovation, are bad at science projects. In fact, one of the most damning verdicts a VC can offer is to tell someone that their start-up idea is a “science experiment”.

But there’s more, much more, if you go to the Reuters Commentaries site — the clever tagline is “raising intellectual capital”.  Reuters is putting significant effort into beefing up its commentary. Richard Edelman posted an interesting summary of their strategy just last week.

Brad DeLong explains the expectations he has for the students in his course on the world economy in the 20th century:

This is the University of California at Berkeley, the finest public university in the world. You are all upper-middle class or upper class–if not in the size of your parents’ houses in your options and expections–and thus much richer than the average taxpayer of California. Yet, even at today’s reduced funding levels, the taxpayers of California are spending $10,000 a year subsidizing your education. Why are they doing this? Because they believe that if your brains get crammed full of knowledge and skills than many of you will do great things that will redound to the benefit of the state, the country, and the world. Therefore it is my business to cram your brains full of knowledge and skills. It is then your business to go out and try to do great things–and if those great things happen to involve a lot of money, remember the investment that the poorer-than-you taxpayers of California made in your education, and pass some of the resources you will earn on to your successors here at Berkeley.

I’ve seen lots of people writing about Personas, a project by Aaron Zinman at MIT Media Lab. Enter your name and it scans various search databases to see how the Internet “sees” you.  For some reason “sports” is the largest segment on my profile, followed closely by “domestic”, “online”, “social” and “professional”. Whatever any of that means.

I have no idea about the rigor of the analysis, but Personas in action is one of the more beautiful things I’ve seen recently on the Web.

Sensible people in Britain seem shocked — shocked! — that right-wing liars in the US are spreading lies about the National Health Service.

In my 27 years in the UK I had consistently excellent healthcare, so I’m a big fan of the NHS. I know that a single-payer system, to say nothing of a massive government bureaucracy for health, isn’t remotely on the agenda in the US, but the American misunderstanding and fear of the NHS is absurd.

Fortunately, today’s Guardian has two helpful articles sorting truth from lies: Is public healthcare in the UK as sick as rightwing America claims? and America’s right turns its fire on the NHS. They’ve also put together a nice spreadsheet of comparative data on health in different countries. There doesn’t seem to be a way to embed the spreadsheet so have a look over on Google Docs.

Update Ezra Klein has more. I missed the Twitter storm on this.

Photo by Pickersgill Reef from Flickr