When I was 11, I had just the most fantastic music teacher. For the next 7 years we worked on all types of music together, one on one, in group classes, in a wind symphonia and also in the school orchestra.
Later on we did music tours with a 70 piece orchestra made up of the senior players from the 4 high schools that he taught at. Wonderful times and just about the best times I had at school.
Since then I have listened to and played all types of music but not as much as I would like to have but it would be fair to say that music still has an important role in my life
The last two weeks have been a bit too busy and so it has be great to hear two quite different takes on music related by two great people.
The first was on National Radio and was wide ranging and engaging. Just the thing for Saturday morning driving around time. Plenty of music history from 1981 and before plus some current music from Dunedin.
Playing Favourites with Graeme Downes
Senior lecturer in contemporary rock music at the University of Otago, and a founding member of The Verlaines (They recorded 120 songs in their careeer) . File Size:13.2MB about 35 mins
Date: (Sat, 12 Jul 2008 10:06:00 +1200)
Songs by Simon Comber “Jaws of Life” and “Happened Before” by The Tweaks - (not included in the show as they have been edited out for copyright reasons presumably.) Tono and The Finance Company “Daffodils & a Cashbook.” plus a few others that I missed.
Graeme’s PHD was based on the music of Mahler and his musical journey 30 years on makes for an interesting listen.
Benjamin Zander is clearly a great inspirational teacher on many levels and a Mahler fan.
“A leading interpreter of Mahler and Beethoven, Benjamin Zander is known for his charisma and unyielding energy — and for his brilliant pre-concert talks”.
Just the thing for the end of the week.
Or go here if the video doesn’t play for you. When Ben plays a Chopin piece the audience is invited along as well. You have to see it to get the back story. My late and much loved music teacher would have been very proud.
I always thought he had one of the best jobs in the world but to hear Zander reframe it as a way “to awaken possibility in other people” does make a huge difference and that is exactly what TC did.
TED just released news (June 2008) that there have been more than 50 million downloads of their videos.
Ashley Highfield of the BBC mentions that iPlayer has now had more than 75m video downloads (as at May 2008) so clearly we are moving into a new era of accelerated video and this has major benefits right across the spectrum.
Keep reading for more about both stories.
The Johnny Lee short clip (at #10) is one that everyone should watch. It highlights a surprising twist to a technology product which has much wider benefits and implications for product innovation. (5m40sec)
This is a brilliant example of a product taking a life of its’ own when someone else sees a new market for a new product and takes it there. I’d be guessing Nintendo wish they had though of this one.
Why is this Story Important and Significant?
The Johnny Lee story demonstrates clear examples of what Kevin Kelly (in 1999 book New Rules for the New Economy and still worth reading.) Snips and comments on 4 of these rules follow.
1 - “Embracing the swarm, - competitive advantage belongs to those who embrace decentralized points of control” we can be anywhere on the network and still have an impact.
7 - “From places to spaces, - as place is replaced by multiple interactions with anything, anytime, anywhere (space) the opportunities for intermediaries, middlemen, and mid-sized niches expand greatly.” Think of the multiplier effect that YouTube played on this research project.
9 - “Relationship tech, enhance, amplify, extend, augment, distill, recall, expand and develop relationships of all types.” With this amplification comes the opportunity for new people to tilt the paradigm of existing products and take them into new markets in new and exciting ways.I’d love to see a chart on how many controllers there were before Johnnies invention and now how many they are compared to the number of Nintendo consoles being sold.
10 -”Opportunities before efficiencies, - there is far greater wealth to be had by unleashing the inefficient discovery and creation of new opportunities.”
Sharing new ideas and researching new product innovations in a public way kind of like “research powered by video” goes counter to most of what we have understood about value creation and intellectual property management.
The web has changed everything and that is only going to accelerate if we understand what it is that we are looking at. Best of all, many of these change cycles happen in real time and cross- pollinate at a furious and ever increasing rate.
So What Did Mr Lee Actually Do? (If you haven’t watched the video yet.)
Building sophisticated educational tools out of cheap parts, Johnny Lee demos his cool Wii Remote hacks, which turn the $40 video game controller into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer. Researcher Johnny Lee became a YouTube star with his demo of Wii Remote hacks — which is almost more interesting than what he actually did - is the speed at which it has been picked up globally.
To understand Johnny Lee, just take a look at his personal Projects page. Aside from his Wii Remote hacks — voted the #1 tech demo of all time by Digg — you can see all the other places his mind has turned: typography, photography, urban renewal … to say nothing of his interesting sideline in Little Great Ideas, like the hypnotic “___ will ___ you.”
So the question is where else will video take us and what else is happening in the kind of television world that most people inhabit?
The Future of Online Video
A discussion panel [Ashley Highfield (first 11.5mins) , Christian Vollman (Germany), Antonio Campo, Dall'Orto] led by Matthew d’Ancona on the future of online video (35mins) Interesting that Ashley notes that BBC programmes are now available on the Nintendo Wii which is seen as a significant connected device now.
And check the numbers - BBC iPlayer has now had 75million downloads. This really is the mainstreaming of quality video online when you factor in TED and the 4663 channels on Miro (Note: Miro includes much of the same content.) YouTube is still a backbone but will be surpassed by other providers who have much better quality content very soon.
Now that broadband is more pervasive there is huge growth in the on-demand audience for quality video.
Ashley passes on some reports and stats that BBC can do as a public broadcaster and it is the trends that are significant on market share . This is great news for more specialist programming and offers a glimpse into the future trends that are shaping growth in other markets.
It will also ultimately have positive funding implications for programme makers looking at online broadcast platforms and potential audience numbers and revenue models.
Media7 in NZ looks to have a great future for example as it leverages outside experts and applies resources from a larger channel to get results way out of proportion to its actual current size. If you have taste-makers and media influencers in the same room anything can happen. When the audience amplifies that broadcast then you’re cooking with gas.
“annual 2-day conference, which began in 2006, and is by invitation only for around 400 of Google’s strategic partners in the EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) region. This year’s Zeitgeist was held at The Grove in Hertfordshire, an impressive English estate about 40 km’s North-West of Central London.
Thankfully, it wasn’t a trade conference and Google products weren’t pushed down your throat as you might’ve expected, although there was some obvious tie-ins with certain products like YouTube and of course very strong branding throughout the event. The agenda was somewhat TED-like with a diverse mix of technologists, politicians, scientists and entrepreneurs as speakers.
Seems like Coin had a great time entertainment wise but glossed over the really significant parts but since it was a closed set and I haven’t watched all the video it’s is hard to tell.
Regardless, we are a major online video explosion with video everywhere and getting better all the time.
Enjoy. Now go ahead and get enhancing, amplifying, extending, augmenting, distilling, recalling, expanding and developing all those relationships that will help us all create new value and true 21st century wealth.
Lately I’ve been to some funerals and also lots of births in the form of kids birthday parties. At both ends of the curve there are a number of recurring questions but today really looking at just two.
One of the best questions ever is “What are you going to do when you grow up?”
I especially like it when its’ a kid asking me the question and I always take that as a compliment. The honest answer is always made up on the spot and and is usually along the lines of I’m still working that out-depending on who is asking.
After nearly 50 years I have a pretty good idea of where to focus but I still adore the exploration and rediscovery of old and new ideas and their application to the present.
I feel very lucky to still have an open end on most of my work/life and to be able to re-imagine the future. It seems really obvious but there is a huge difference between conscious knowledge and intelligence.
Some of this comes with age, learning style and a desire to want to keep learning and growing which sadly we all sometimes neglect. In my world view boxes are for things not people, and so while it is good to be able to see some connections it is always better to be able to really think outside the cube and even go really fractal when you need to.
Forget the box and the cube, everyday is a tesseract of opportunities. If we stay awake, and take some notes like keeping a journal for example, we will continue to discover new and exciting ways and means to develop. The life as a mystery box idea appeals to me and I was interested to hear JJ Abrams talk about this on a TED video which you can view over here.
The other question people always ask in various ways is “What do you do for a Job?”
My usual answer for the past few years has been “whatever I want to do” and yes I do have the experience and skills to do a wide range of activities quite well. However there is always a reality checklist close by especially when the car breaks down or some other bill looms large. So the dream always remains but sometimes often there are work projects we all need to do a) pay for the groceries and b) pay for the dreams.
But I really like the in between time/s when I can work on thinking and planning for a cornucopia of projects and my natural inclination is to gravitate towards the creative end of the spectrum even though much of my “education” was designed to minimize those abilities.
BTW I’ve found a new word to partly describe my general learning style and also explains why I can seemingly link a series of invisible dots - “all this stuff is connected” as Chris Anderson mentions in his 2002 Vision for TED video. Multi disciplinary views of space and time just suit me because I’m poly-chronic.
The polychronic person will use plans but is quite happy to be flexible in their approach to achieve the desired goal. They may flit from project to project as the mood takes them gaining inspiration from one project to utilise on the other.
Flexibility is a useful trait of the polychronic person”.
Finally an answer as to why I’m happy reading 5 books at once as well as listening to and watching lots of videos on apparently unrelated topics. My brain still enjoys the buzz and it knows what a fractal of a fractal is even if it takes me a while to catch up and articulate that stimulus into a series of useful questions for a client.
So the new answer to the perennial “What do you do?” question is that I’m a polychronic creative generalist (and divergent thinking maven) so chances are good that if you have a great project I can help at some level.
“I am not trying to suggest that generalists are perfect. If you are building banking software or you are launching a space shuttle, where well-defined processes are essentially repeated over and over in the building of the software, then specialists may be preferred.
However, in the Web 2.0 world we live in, where new products and APIs are introduced seemingly every other week, specialization loses its allure. Six months of experience on a particular platform might turn a generalist into a de facto specialist.
At the same time, a generalist brings a variety of hard and soft skills to the task at hand. They often have the ability to quickly assimilate a new technology or skill, and may be able to quickly accomplish tasks in unfamiliar situations. And, from what I’ve seen in the past few years working with the Web, everything is an unfamiliar situation.” (see larryborsato.com)
Snap - dude…I am also an entreprenerial marketer, product developer, planning consultant, researcher and more. On any given day I can be writing a marketing plan, developing a website to go with the brand and talking with CEO’s about their industry strategies and / or enterprise level software to go with with their orders as well.
Equally I’m at home brainstorming with other mavens and turning the metaphorical map upside down with a sprinkle of physics, architecture and whatever other discipline I may be absorbing at that time. Lifelong learning is not just a bright idea, it’s a way of life.
Somehow it all works out because the challenges along the way help cross pollinate the answers on other projects present and future.
There is a wonderful story that Jim Collins tells about writing down observations on himself in a little notebook “about the bug called Jim.” You can listen to the bio story over here (11mins.) (Hear Jim talk about his path to becoming a self-employed professor.* )
His description of an entrepreneur as someone who is “congenetically coded with the defect that they can’t work for other people” …entrepreneurship is a life idea…starting with a blank canvas.. carving your own path and figuring out how to do that in a unique way…”
And overall the joy of the question is something that keeps me revisiting his website and books. I’ve also learned over many years that if I listen to audio that somehow works better for me personally -which is why I’ll sometimes listen to TED videos in the background while I’m working on something else entirely.
Finally part of the reason for this post is that I have been making the equivalent of mix tapes by combining and mashing /recombining some of the 80 video clips from my “creative commons” TED collection.
Despite ranging across the full spectrum of subjects from physics, architecture, design, neurology, photography, dance, business, technology, maths, education and so on - it is not differences that I see, rather - it is the connections between all those subjects that matter most.
I’d much rather they ask the first one about what am I going to do when I grow up—but then you’d expect a creative generalist to have that kind of an answer.
This morning I was reading some questions over on this post. Another related question is what are the public policy impacts of having a tax on a tax (GST on excise for petrol) and shouldn’t that be sorted?
“We think we have it bad in New Zealand paying $1.88 a litre. Converting that to gallons, so we can make a UK comparison, that equals $8.50 a gallon. In the UK motorists $12.76 a gallon, or 50% more than us. And they are closer to the oil fields….
In the UK the Labour Government taxes petrol so much that over 65% of the price at pump returns to them. We consider the 35% in taxes and levies here in New Zealand excessive. Is the government investing that money back into research on alternative fuels, or does it return to the general coffers?”
The writer used the imperial gallon measurement of 4.546 litres to a gallon when doing the pricing calculations. These comparisons can be confusing when comparing with U.S as their liquid gallon is only 3.785 litres.
When the U.S consumers complain about $US4 per gallon they are talking about $US1.05/litre which equates to about NZ$1.35 per litre (at exchange rate of .7793 on May 3 National Bank)
Most of the difference is tax. In the U.S federal tax is 18.4c per US gallon (or 22c per Imperial gallon) which equates to NZ$.89 - however we’d need to translate that to $NZ cents per litre. Note: this is about NZ$19.6cpl compared to NZ$70cpl+) if my math is correct.
The real point is that in the U.S taxes on petrol appear to be much lower than in Europe, U.K or NZ.
Add in the overall decline in easy supplies and the oil companies are getting more profit because they mostly aren’t spending that on exploration or drilling costs it’s all chasing a declining supply.
In NZ most readers will have noticed a debate about how GST is added to petrol prices as an additional tax so that Government gets about 42%* of the fuel price at the pump rather than the 35% that was mentioned in the reference post. (*although as overall base prices go higher the excise rate stays the same but the GST element rises so overall tax percentage is not so easy to calculate.)
Regardless of the justifications used by the government; charging GST on the landed costs & margins and including the excise tax in the base calculation does exaggerate the inequity.
Effectively petrol is in the same category as tobacco and alcohol when it comes to tax and public policy which is plain wrong.
Given the typical distances and congestion of NZ roads most families can’t easily reduce their drive to work costs (in the shorter term) except by changing jobs or moving house if they have to be physically present at their place of work. While public transport is improving it is still not that useful either.
Add to this the element that petrol prices rises get added in to almost everything in our supermarkets as transport charges eventually and the overall effect is much more dramatic.
Sure some people can get public transport but that is not so easy for many and this shows how the calculations compound. Note: they use September ‘07 prices so some ratios have changed slightly since then.
For many years the justification on the excise tax was as a roading charge yet most of the money went into a consolidated fund and only recently has it started to be actually used for roading projects again.
In fairness it is actually very hard to find out the excise tax on petrol because it is hidden away in the 3rd schedule of the Customs and Excise Act 1996 at 99.75 and is expressed as 42.52c per litres plus 8c per g of Pb (lead calculation)
Here are all the taxes / Auckland is or will be different soon due to extra local authority taxes. (from here.)
“Excise tax 42.524 cpl
- ACC levy 7.330 cpl
- Petroleum Fuels Monitoring Levy 0.025 cpl
- Local Authorities Petroleum Tax 0.660 cpl”
What do you think about petrol and tax policy? Perhaps the excise tax should be increased if the GST calculation is changed? What If it can be shown that the extra tax is used on alternative energy options?
Perhaps some clever reader might be able to tell us why this old Treasury working paper hasn’t been updated - and what “marginal excess burdens” actually means in real terms. It seems that the debate so far is light on real world impact calculation. The actual pdf of paper is here - for some reason not linked to the abstract.
And definitely the GST should be calculated on the excluding excise taxes and other levies listed above.
See these related posts in an early series last year on this blog.
Here is a great little conference (Freelance08) on next Wednesday, May 7 and Thursday, May 8 at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Auckland.
It offers huge value for members of the freelance nation. Also a chance to hear from Nicky Hager, Brenda Ward, Virginia Larson and John Cranna as well as old favourites David Cohen and Rod Oram.
The scope is wide enough to include useful business tips for all contractors regardless of whether they get paid to write for a living. And at $100 for the whole day it is very good value.
Registration needs to be before close of business tomorrow so don’t delay. I’ve decided to go along to a few sessions myself. So if you make it, be sure to say hi.
As it happens still do some some contract research and writing for various business documents and it is always helpful to understand the best ways to frame up that kind of work since the creative element and the craft often has to be rationed to the budget at hand.
There is also a big difference between a quick note and a research piece or marketing content and that is not always so easy to explain or get paid for.
Hawking your wares overseas
David Cohen, journalist Tracey Barnett, journalist
Negotiating - a way to better pay
Jenny Ruth, freelance business journalist Julia Thorne, photographer and writer
Slicing/dicing your interviews/expertise
Gill South, freelance writer Rod Oram, journalist and commentator
Making your writing a business
Baubre Murray, director, Dowse Murray Chartered Accountants Simon Penlington, partner, Jones Fee, barristers and solicitors
Hat tip to Kim And Phillipa for nurturing this idea. I believe this is the 3rd conference and it looks like the combination of practical help and actual facetime together has achieved some critical mass.
“creative generalist”
“media futures”
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