thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

When my daughter was 3 she used to ask what I did for a job. She has a much better idea now but to keep things simple I used to say something like this.

“I talk with people, I take lots of notes. Then some web stuff.”

Fairly often now some of this takes place all at the same time. Live twitter streams from events are now part of the (new) media mix.  Services like Be in the Room can aggregate social media feeds and we can take questions from external observers via the use of hashtags.

Here is recent example (August 4th) from the Unitec Forum for the Future series on Auckland Super City debates. Look at earlier posts on theDomm website for more about that event and/ or follow on twitter @UnitecFTF At the UnitecFTF those who couldn’t be there asked questions via twitter.

This was the 6th forum event so far. More are planned. Noted business commentator and journalist Rod Oram is the chair for the event and Associate Professor & Head of Department Rob Davis deserves full credit for being the catalyst & firestarter on this project.

As this debate took place in a TV studio with lots of outside media present some of this was captured on video. I even got a rare chance to see myself at work because when you are on live streaming it all tends to be a bit of blur in the moment.

The super city changeover for Auckland is an important change and  it deserves better, smarter, more engaging media and new media engagement.

Well done Unitec cast and crew for making a difference.

Looks like you have visited before, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks again

One of the best jobs I ever had was Research & Analysis Director for a merchant banking company back in the early ’90s. Until then it hadn’t really occurred to me that I could get paid for thinking as work.

My current business tagline is “thinking & planning for marketing success”.

Consequently my wardrobe is mostly t-shirts with think or something similar written on them.

At #wordcampnz 2010 there was a serendipitous moment when I was standing near the screens about to introduce Richard Hollingum from Department of Doing and TEDX Auckland

Richard had up a screen saying I’ve been thinking and I was wearing my favourite REMO t-shirt Think

Kristina DC Hoeppner caught that moment.

“@dialogCRM you made it onto my pic of the day: http://bit.ly/dxGh8e – thanx for all your hard work for prep, the event and now follow-up”

The full set of Wordcampnz 2010 photos by Kristina is on Flickr over here
I blogged about it on behalf of #wordcampnz 2010 over here

Ironically even though we live in a world where ideas can be a force for positive good there are still those who view public discussion and comment as a problem.

“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. “ Winston Churchill

When it comes to debating copyright, IP and access to the internet it would be reasonable to expect policy making on these topics to be more transparent or at least more acessible. So it comes as something of a surprise to catch up on the secret ACTA negotiations being held in Wellington this week.

Nat Torkington writes

“This week marks the start in Wellington New Zealand of the next round of ACTA negotiations, nominally the US-led Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The scope of the agreement, however, has extended well beyond trade in fake medicines and knock-off Gucci handbags into the technical realms of file-sharing, ISP liability, disconnection, and DRM. Such issues have been contentious where they’ve arisen in New Zealand, France, the UK, USA, and elsewhere, yet negotiators seem ignorant of consumer and technology concerns. To correct this, the open PublicACTA conference two days ago drafted and released the Wellington Declaration.”

…”Significant changes to copyright law reflect complex issues with strong public opinion on both sides, and public consultation is essential to make satisfactory law. This was shown last year after New Zealand’s successful opposition to the imposition of three-strikes disconnection law caused the Government to work more closely with those who would be affected, resulting in a significantly better bill to be put before Parliament next month. The ACTA participants are negotiating in secret and countries will sign the agreement before revealing the text, a process that is almost guaranteed to provide bad law.“

Those are my italics on that last sentence – negotiating in secret on very contentious aspects of law governing core freedoms like internet access should be just cause for the NZ government to draw a line in the sand and say “no thanks”.

Michael Geist writes The Wellington Declaration on ACTA: Sign Today

Sunday April 11, 2010

“PublicACTA, a full-day event on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement held in Wellington, New Zealand just in advance of the next round of ACTA talks that run all this week in the city.  The event was a model to be emulated in other communities – over 100 people from the community spent an entire sunny Saturday examining the implications of the draft treaty and discussing what should be done about it.

I will post a video of my talk shortly, but the more immediate action point is the outcome of PublicACTA – the Wellington Declaration. The Wellington Declaration was fashioned as a true grassroots effort to give voice to public concern about ACTA.  The participants spent hours discussing their concerns and then gradually drafting a declaration consistent with those views.  Event organizers plan to submit the Declaration with supporting signatures on Tuesday, so add your name to the list today.”

I recommend that everyone who is concerned about these issues has a look at The Wellington Declaration and signs if you agree with it.

See also Lessig and Goldsmith on ACTA’s Constitutional Concerns - Direct Link for Lessig here

“These mostly secret negotiations have already violated the Obama administration’s pledge for greater transparency. Embracing this deal by sole executive agreement would repudiate its pledge to moderate assertions of executive power. Congress should resist this attempt to evade the checks established by our Framers.”

Here is a snip from the Wellington declaration  which is where we in NZ can have some input:

“ACTA’s process must change:

* Transparency

We declare public scrutiny and accountability to be important aspects of life in a free society. We call for full transparency and public scrutiny of the ACTA process including release of the text after each round of negotiations. Governments have been unwilling to respond to specific concerns raised by the public. Public scrutiny will help to ensure the Agreement has no unintended consequences and has maximum positive benefit.

* Impact Analysis

We believe that Governments should not sign ACTA without an independent impact analysis covering economic, social, environmental and cultural impacts of the agreement on their respective countries.  Such analysis should be published well in advance of any agreement being signed, so it is open to public scrutiny and consideration of its thoroughness.

* Participation

We call for wider participation in setting the agenda and scope of ACTA. The negotiation and consultation process must enable full participation and informed input into reviewing and developing drafts. All governments must be invited to be part of the negotiating process. Input must be sought from affected sectors such as Education, Health Care, Arts & Culture and Information Technology, NGOs, and consumer rights groups.

Local Flexibility
We affirm the importance of local flexibility and the need to preserve a nation’s tino rangatiratanga and sovereign rights to adjust copyright, trademark and patent law to reflect local culture, preferences and conceptions of the public good.”

Thanks to InternetNZ, Michael Geist, Nat Torkington and others who have raised this issue for public debate. To go straight to the petition here is the key link Online petition – PublicACTA – The Wellington Declaration.

I signed it myself over here.

It is time for us to wake up and to use the internet to get informed and communicate to our governments and other policy making bodies about important issues such as ACTA.

With Christmas coming up time to hit the beach with a book (Southern hemisphere here).

We have been through a precarious business year where our faith in the vagaries of the “free market”  should have been very considerably challenged although I personally don’t see too many people taking real notes and they should be.

This is more witless economy than weightless since for all the technology – business growth is still inextricably linked to energy usage patterns and efficiencies.

It seems like the global financial systems are much more unstable than previously acknowledged.

When there is a market meltdown it makes sense to check out the models to see if we missed the equivalent of a fractal thunderstorm. Somewhere there must be an economist who has a much clearer view of the rolling trainwreck we have been witnessing.

Robert Ayres is one economist who might have some clues based on his previous work. I’d be keen to hear from anyone who has read and thought about “The Economic Growth Engine: How Energy and Work Drive Material Prosperity” which seems incredibly apposite to this time.

One of the best things about reading The Last Oil Shock was to get an overview of the work of Professor Robert Ayres on what is coming to be called industrial ecology.

Since 1956 the Solow Residual has been an albatross around the neck of economics because it made a mockery of the very arguments it was trying to support.

Ayres worked out the correlation between energy and economic growth is 14 times larger than that assumed by Solow. In doing so by implication the impacts of a new oil shock are much, much higher than any economists had assumed before then.

Economics has often been dismissed as a dismal science because of many of the classical economic theories have been less than convincing, putting it generously.  As Robert Frenay surmises in this piece when talking about the oil shocks of the 70′s.

“Mainstream economics not only didn’t foresee what happened in the seventies, it couldn’t explain it. To those focused on bioeconomics, the cause was less mysterious. The economic models that held the field then, and in modified form still do, were not connected to the real world.”

Now that is an understatement with far reaching implications.

“There is a potential for confusion here between technological progress and “progress” in the more general, even more undefined sense. Along with many others, I have long tended carelessly to equate economic growth with that kind of undefined progress. Though aware of the difference, I nevertheless assumed for convenience that the one is virtually a surrogate for the other. The time has come to try to sort out this confusion.

In a certain simplistic sense the difference between growth and progress is all too obvious: It is the difference between “more” and “better”. In challenging the growth paradigm itself I am not assuming that growth necessarily means “more” physical goods. Far from it, I insist that the true measure of economic output is not the quantity of goods produced, but the quality and value of final services provided to the consumer. What is most wrong about the “growth syndrome” is not its tendency to consume material resources (as Barry Commoner, for instance, assumed). What is wrong with it is that growth of the kind now occurring in the US and Europe is no longer making people happier or improving their real standard of living.

It is possible to have economic growth – in the sense of providing better and more valuable services to ultimate consumers – without necessarily consuming more physical resources. This follows from the fact that consumers are ultimately not interested in goods per se but in the services those goods can provide. The possibility of de-linking economic activity from energy and materials (“dematerialization”) has been one of the major themes of my professional career.”

Retrieved from “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Ayres” from Turning Point: The End of the Growth Paradigm (London: Earthscan, 1998)

Idea that just as Sir Ken Robinson takes educators to task for an education framework built on a propping up an industralisation view of the work that no longer has much sway.

Abstract from ACCOUNTING FOR GROWTH: THE ROLE OF PHYSICAL WORK
Robert U Ayres & Benjamin Warr
Center for the Management of Environmental Resources
INSEAD
Fontainebleau, France – 2004
Email: robert.ayres@insead.edu

This paper tests several related hypothesis for explaining US economic growth since 1900. It begins from the belief that consumption of natural resources – especially energy (or, more precisely, exergy) — has been, and still is, an important factor of production and driver of economic growth.

However the major result of the paper is that it is not `raw’ energy (exergy) as an input, but exergy converted to useful (physical) work that – along with capital and (human) labor – really explains output and drives long-term economic growth. We develop a formal model (Resource-EXergy Service or REXS) based on these ideas.

Using this model we demonstrate first that, if raw energy inputs are included with capital and labor in a Cobb-Douglas or any other production function satisfying the Euler (constant returns) condition, the 100-year growth history of the US cannot be explained without introducing an exogenous `technical progress’ multiplier (the Solow residual) to explain most of the growth.

However, if we replace raw energy as an input by `useful work’ (the sum total of all types of physical work by animals, prime movers and heat transfer systems) as a factor of production, the historical growth path of the US is reproduced with high accuracy from 1900 until the mid 1970s, without any residual except during brief periods of economic dislocation, and with fairly high accuracy since then.

(There are indications that an additional factor, possibly information technology, needs to be taken into account as a fourth input factor since the 1970s.) Various hypotheses for explaining the latest period are discussed briefly, along with future implications.

Here is more detail on the latest book.

The Economic Growth Engine: How Energy and Work Drive Material Prosperity
Edward Elgar, April 2009
Robert U. Ayres and Benjamin Warr

The authors of this unique book explore the fundamental relationship between thermodynamics (physical work) and economics.

They take a realistic approach to explaining the relationship between technological progress, thermodynamic efficiency and economic growth, the findings of which conclude with a fundamental explanation of endogenous growth that is both quantifiable and consistent with the laws of thermodynamics.

A major implication of this is that future economic growth is not guaranteed inasmuch as efficiency gains that have driven past growth may not continue in the future.

Ayres explains: “According to the standard theory, energy is an intermediate good that can be ‘produced’ by some combination of capital investment and labour (plus technology). This means that economic growth is essentially independent of energy use, which suggests – in turn – that growth can continue indefinitely at historical rates. And when people talk about recovery, implicitly that’s what they’re saying – that right now the world economy has a hiccup or is perhaps suffering from a case of the swine flu, and that we can expect to get back sooner or later to a trajectory of growth that’s based on the last 100 years.”

“But if we’re right – and I think there’s much more than a small chance that we are – you can’t make that assumption. It’s a very dangerous assumption and it’s leading to potentially very risky advice to political leaders. For example, we’re immediately faced with a possible inconsistency  between the idea of taxing energy use, or putting a cap on carbon emissions – either of which will raise the price – while, at the same time, hoping that growth will not be affected.”