ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

Matt Taibbi, one of the US’s best journalists currently working, takes apart how the biggest banks are bringing down American cities just like they brought down Greece. In “Looting Main Street” for Rolling Stone, Taibbi makes understandable the complex financial fraud that caused a US$250 million sewer system in Jefferson County, Alabama to put the county more than US $5 billion in debt and residents’ sewer bills to increase 400 percent.

Justin Fox, writing in a Harvard Business Review blog, examines what America’s founding fathers really had in mind for corporations and corporate personhood. In an email discussion with Baruch College history professor Brian Murphy, Fox learns that after the American Revolution the citizenry decided to democratize the corporate legal form which had been inherited as a royal privilege from Britain. Corporate charters were originally granted in the 1790s for “infrastructure projects that states did not have the money to build themselves,” writes Murphy. These charters “specified their capitalization limitations, limited their lifespan, and dictated the boundaries of their operations and functions.” Murphy believes the US Supreme Court was simply wrong when it interpreted corporations as associations of citizens, no different from schools or other groups. The founding fathers understood that “corporate personhood was a legal fiction that was limited to a courtroom.”

Clay Shirky doesn’t write publicly often, but when he does, it’s always worth study and reflection. His “The Collapse of Complex Business Models” is no exception. Applying Joseph Tainters 1988 The Collapse of Complex Societies to our current condition is, in five acts, a must-read for anyone interested in sustainable business models and everyone else that merely wants to avoid complexity-driven collapse.

ESRD

What to do with elderly kidney failure patients? The medical community consensus is that transplant, when possible, is always a better treatment option than dialysis. Kelly Brewington, writing for the Baltimore Sun, reports that transplantation doubles a kidney failure patient’s life expectancy. Brewington cites Dorry Segev, lead author of a recent Johns Hopkins study, as finding “the likelihood that people 65 and older will survive five years on the blood-filtering treatment [dialysis] is just 27 percent.” The solution, according to Segev and others, is to use organs from expanded criteria donors (ECD organs; less-than-optimal organs from donors older than 60, donors between 50-60 who died of a stroke or heart problems, or donors with decreased kidney function). ECD organs are more likely to fail and last half as long. The problem is that transplant centers are penalized when their outcomes fail. Keith Melancon, director of kidney and pancreas transplantation at Georgetown University Hospital, told Brewington, “there is no area of health care as highly policed as transplants and transplant outcomes.”

Internet

Tim O’Reilly writes an excellent and thought-provoking analysis of the internet operating system—the space between individual machines. Highly recommended.

Politics

Teabonics is a flickr set of photographs of primarily Tea Party protesters holding misspelled or grammatically incorrect signs.

Publishing

I rarely buy printed books any more, preferring the ebook format on my MacBook Pro. I read as much as I ever have, but I find I’m much pickier about what I purchase. Peachpit has always been one of my favorite technical publishers and there are several titles published by Peachpit that I’d like to buy. Actually there are a few that I really need to buy. But I won’t because Peachpit continues to wrap its ebooks in Adobe’s outrageous digital rights management (DRM) scheme. Every time I moan about this on Twitter, Peachpit responds that “they’re working on it.” The pre-Pearson Peachpit knew better.

Jeff Jarvis disturbingly reveals that he doesn’t know as much about publishing as I had hoped. He’s allowed Silicon Alley Insider to usurp the information authority of one of the best pieces he’s written in a while—the day-after regrets of purchasing an iPad. The BuzzMachine piece is the authoritative source. Why he would allow another publication to republish it and diminish the authority of his own source is dumbfounding. It’s the web, folks: link don’t copy. What works really well in the print world doesn’t work like that here.

Sustainability

A new Greenpeace campaign warns about cloud computing contributing to climate change. Greenpeace talking points are starting to pop in the international media. Unfortunately, Greenpeace—an organization I avidly support—is wrong. Worldchanging‘s Alex Steffen looked up the numbers: “Computing accounts for a bit less than 3% of US energy usage, according to Lawrence Livermore Labs. The global IT industry as a whole generates about 2% of global CO2 emissions.” Automobiles remain the single largest contributor to climate change, and, as Steffen notes, “in some cases, that Google search can replace that trip to work or the mall. Technology can in fact greatly increase the efficiency of urban living, particularly car-free living in walkable neighborhoods….”

Technology

Cory Doctorow has a wonderfully thoughtful take on why he won’t buy an iPad, citing the Maker Manifesto: “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it. Screws not glue.” Doctorow reminisces that Apple’s first products, up through the Apple ][+ “came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better.” And—wait for it—invokes William Gibson’s description of a consumer: “Something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth… no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote.”

Joel Johnson has an excellent counterpoint to one of Doctorow’s points on Gizmodo.com. But Johnson fails to address the the walled garden and sole provider nature of Apple’s iTunes store.

Steven Levy, one of my all-time favoriate tech writers, writing for Wired, sums up the iPad as pointing “to a Third Way—sitting in between the phone and the laptop—of interacting with information.”

User experience

Since 2006, I’ve thought the resistance I’ve met with regard to user experience at the University of Minnesota’s College of Design was peculiar to the college. Or maybe the University. Juding from the responses to Mark Greenfield’s query, “Why is higher ed the toughest gig in all the web?” it’s clear the resistance is widespread.