Ged Carroll

Category: innovation | 革新 | 독창성 | 改変

Innovation, alongside disruption are two of the most overused words in business at the moment. Like obscenity, many people have their own idea of what innovation is.

Judy Estrin wrote one of the best books about the subject and describes it in terms of hard and soft innovation.

  • Hard innovation is companies like Intel or Qualcomm at the cutting edge of computer science, materials science and physics
  • Soft innovation would be companies like Facebook or Yahoo!. Companies that might create new software but didn’t really add to the corpus of innovation

Silicon Valley has moved from hard to soft innovation as it moved away from actually making things. Santa Clara country no longer deserves its Silicon Valley appellation any more than it deserved the previous ‘garden of delights’ as the apricot orchards turned into factories, office campus buildings and suburbs. It’s probably no coincidence that that expertise has moved east to Taiwan due to globalisation.

It can also be more process orientated shaking up an industry. Years ago I worked at an agency at the time of writing is now called WE Worldwide. At the time the client base was predominantly in business technology, consumer technology and pharmaceutical clients.

The company was looking to build a dedicated presence in consumer marketing. One of the business executives brings along a new business opportunity. The company made fancy crisps (chips in the American parlance). They did so using a virtual model. Having private label manufacturers make to the snacks to their recipe and specification. This went down badly with one of the agency’s founders saying ‘I don’t see what’s innovative about that’. She’d worked exclusively in the IT space and thought any software widget was an innovation. She couldn’t appreciate how this start-ups approach challenged the likes of P&G or Kraft Foods.

  • Psychotherapy + culture

    Psychotherapy

    Psychotherapy is using psychological techniques to to help improve:

    • Happiness
    • Mental wellbeing
    • Behaviours, beliefs and compulsions that might be holding someone back from achieving their full potential in life

    It can involve sessions that are one on one, or be part of a group experience.

    Psychotherapy in culture

    American TV brought the emotional and mental anguish of life into its programming, for instance, this segment from from Thirtysomething.

    The TV series Frasier put the profession front-and-centre with both Frasier and Niles Crane being psychiatrists by profession. It even brought up the subject of therapy for animals.

    Hollywood has often looked to develop characters by showing them undergoing therapy.

    Matchstick Men
    https://youtu.be/GqskdnjYo_0
    The Joker

    Probably the most famous example is the relationship between Robin Williams as the therapist Dr. Sean Maguire and Matt Damon as his court-mandated patient Will Hunting in Good Will Hunting.

    Over the past 20 years therapy as an activity has become much more mainstream in the UK. And this has been reflected in the media, such as this plot line from the critically-acclaimed BBC comedy series Fleabag, which shows how mental health and therapy have become part of modern middle-class life.

    Age of anxiety

    Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation was published in 1994; yet feels very now. At the time of publishing it turned the drug brand Prozac into a household name. The black and white cover photo of a vacant Wurtzel fitted very much into the grunge aesthetic. As did the authors tale of being a young American battling against depression. There was even a counter-movement over the years of writers who looked to provide alternatives to Prozac (and its peers like Paxil and Zoloft). Their solutions ran from potatoes, to Plato or God.

    Moving forward some three decades and Wurtzel’s writing resonate with a generation battling anxiety and reshaping society around their angst.

    Modern world events from wild fires and climate change seems to have created the conditions for a collective sense of hopelessness and grief. A 10-country survey with a sample size of 10,000 people aged 16 – 25 published in The Lancet found high rates of pessimism. 45 percent of respondents were said worry about climate negatively affected their daily life. Three-quarters of respondents believed “the future is frightening,” and 56 percent said “humanity is doomed.”

    Roots of a crisis

    Wurtzel’s generation too grew up with climate changes, the ozone layer, economic uncertainty due to globalisation and deindustrialisation. They watched the most dynamic economic power on the planet hit a brick wall with the Japanese economic miracle, the internet bubble and imminent global thermonuclear war.

    Over the past half-century we’ve seen wealth flow to the richest while the middle class stagnates or shrinks.

    My Mother's Bible

    So the stressors for anxiety that needs psychotherapy are neither new, nor are they unique. But they have uniquely manifested themselves creating a mass market for psychotherapy in different forms. Like generations of children before them they were brought up as individuals with an upbringing influenced by Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care which shaped childcare from the post-war era onwards.

    Every family home didn’t have a copy of Spock on their shelves, but it shaped advice given out by medics, educators, social workers and the media.

    Like previous generations in the late 20th century their upbringing was marked by a new mass medium. (Previous new mediums would be popular radio, teenage culture including rock n’ roll music, television (and its subsequent proliferation of channels) and the web).

    kid (me) on BMX bike in 70's

    The big generational difference is likely to be level of childhood exposure to risk. Children growing up in the 1960s through to the early 1990s would be familiar with the ‘latch key kid’. They would have played outside with friends, maybe held down a part-time job or even had a degree of personal mobility with a bicycle that they used to cycle everywhere. Playgrounds were fun, but didn’t have the safety measures of modern playgrounds, the playgrounds of the mid to late 20th century had rusty swings and hard concrete surfaces. The decline in ‘outdoor play’ in favour of play dates and electronic amusements was cited as a possible factor by authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their book The Coddling of The American Mind.

    Lukianoff and Haidt’s suggested solution to this age of anxiety was to use a form of psychotherapy known as cognitive behavioural therapy to help boost mental resilience in children and young adults. There is a growing body of work that puts the blame on rising anxiety at the always-on nature of social media through smartphones.

    The age of anxiety has mainstreamed a number of niche product categories from gadgets like fidget spinners to weighted blankets.

    Rebranding psychotherapy

    Going back to the explanation of psychotherapy that I started off with, one of the bulletpoints was ‘behaviours, beliefs and compulsions that might be holding someone back from achieving their full potential in life’.

    A number of decades ago psychotherapy was seen to be something that tended to happen in hospital and the general thinking that a pill may provide the solution or at the very least a chemical cosh for the worst affected or most disruptive.

    The more well-heeled may have seen a therapist in a consulting office. In other communities the role may have been played by the social worker, (in rural Ireland it might have been the local parish priest) or a marriage guidance counselling service. Developments of different psychotherapy techniques over the 20th and 21st century owe as much to philosophy as they do to our scientific understanding of the mind and neuroscience.

    There are now a large amount of therapists and life coaches who have a wide range of certifications and experience addressing the behaviours beliefs and compulsions that might be holding someone back in their personal or professional lives.

    The changing nature of psychotherapy

    Technology and media are changing our relationships, the way we relate to each other and ourselves. Parasocial relationships are asymmetric in nature. Fans believe in an influencer who may not even know them. They supplement or replace friendships that would otherwise be in the fans life. These new forms of relationships can affect both the fan and the influencer when unrealistic expectations aren’t met. Exemplified by ‘Stans‘ in western culture.

    Parasocial relationships

    The kind of relationships that we have now are fundamentally changed. This is especially acute in culture. Influencers, and Asian idol culture mean that we’re much more invested in people we don’t actually know.

    YouTuber Aini has covered how this relates to East Asian pop artist fan culture. In particular young men or women who are in idol groups. Parakin fans go to extreme lengths to support their idol and guide their career in what they believe is the best direction. Parakin fans in China have the idol fulfil a role in their own lives that would otherwise be unmet.

    This is a world away from the model followed by Simon Cowell to Colonel Parker over the past 70 years of popular music.

    The Timepiece Gentleman

    A great example of parasocial relationship is playing out in the luxury watch collecting community at the moment. American watch dealer Anthony Farrer trading as The Timepiece Gentleman matched luxury watches with people who wanted to own them and took a cut off the top.

    Something went horribly wrong and Mr Farrer owes millions of dollars to fellow watch dealers, investors and individuals whose watches he was selling on their behalf. Oisin O’Malley goes into how Farrer’s parasocial relationship with his audience engendered trust.

    • Farrer told his audience his own personal story, complete with his faults and failings
    • He brought the audience inside his business and how it operates
    • He demonstrated a successful lifestyle.

    He was in their lives day-in, day-out. This meant that both industry professionals and consumers put more trust in Farrer than they should have. Farrer brought the formula of the Kardashian media empire to a formerly staid and overlooked retail sector.

    The manosphere

    Much has been shared about the manosphere and the Tate brothers in particular. But in the context of this post, I thought it was worthwhile exploring the role that Andrew Tate’s content fills in the lives of young men.

    First Andrew Tate in his own words

    You can’t slander me because I will state right now that I am absolutely sexist and I’m absolutely a misogynist, and I have fuck you money and you can’t take that away

    Javed, Saman (August 24, 2022). “Andrew Tate shares ‘final message’ after being banned from social media”. The Independent.

    Tate and his business partners offer content and services aimed at young men that ‘solve’ similar challenges to therapy (promising guidance on how to fulfil their full potential)

    For better or worse, Tate sets an example for his audience. The audience are looking for confidence and certainty. Tate provides the answers to the audience through:

    • Social media accounts that promoted an “ultra-masculine, ultra-luxurious lifestyle.”
    • Training courses run by his Hustler’s University business on accumulating wealth and ‘male-female interaction’ to copywriting and cryptocurrency trading.
    • Virtual relationships through a web cam studio described as a total scam.
    • The ‘War Room’ private network that sits somewhere between group therapy, a subreddit and a secret society complete with business networking

    Tate’s work has had an outsized impact in the media and classrooms of the UK. Something a Guardian journalist labeled the ‘Andrew Tate effect’.

    Therapy AI

    As machine learning and chat bots have become more prominent we’ve seen algorithm driven psychotherapy.

    Telemedicine primed market

    The market was primed for the rise of AI driven therapy sessions after platforms like MYNDUP connected people with therapists online or over a mobile app, as part of a wider boom in telemedicine. R/GA talked about telemedicine in terms of it being ‘a more human centred vision of health’ in their Futurevision report series. They saw a clear line of continuity between the kind of service and convenience we’ve received from Amazon and online banking to future telemedicine services.

    Looked at from this perspective, why wouldn’t you want to have online, on-demand therapy sessions?

    So we saw ChatGPT being used for ‘do-it-yourself’ therapy, alongside dedicated systems.

    Dedicated systems like Wysa, Heyy and Woebot use ‘rules based AI’ which is easier to manage from a medical, legal and regulatory point of view.

    Wearables are considered to offer an opportunity for more timely interventions.

    More related content here.

    More information

    Articles

    Esther Perel Thinks All This Amateur Therapy-Speak Is Just Making Us Lonelier | Vanity Fair

    Bessel Van der Kolk on Trauma, America’s Favorite Diagnosis 

    Does Therapy Really Work? Let’s Unpack That. – The New York Times

    The Therapy Issue | The New Yorker 

    Boy Problems – Mother Jones 

    The culture that is Portland – Marginal REVOLUTION 

    America Is Headed Toward Collapse | The Atlantic

    Have Parents Made Their Kids Too Fragile For the Rough and Tumble of Life? | Washington Post

    [Letter from Los Angeles] The Anxiety of Influencers, By Barrett Swanson | Harper’s Magazine – this reads more like something in a Cory Doctorow short story than real life. But its real life

    2021 and the Conspiracies of ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ | WIRED 

    Fitness tracker metrics give rise to health anxiety 

    Fidget spinners, weighted blankets, and the rise of anxiety consumerism – Vox 

    Smartphones and social media are destroying children’s mental health | Financial Times

    Doomscrolling Is Slowly Eroding Your Mental Health | WIRED 

    The Great Feminization of the American University | City Journal 

    The West’s Struggle for Mental Health – WSJ 

    ChatGPT is giving therapy. A mental health revolution may be next | Aljazeera

    Books

    Adrift: 100 Charts that Reveal Why America is on the Brink of Change by Scott Galloway

    The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

  • The Code – Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America

    The Code

    The Code – Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O’Mara is the second book I have read recently about Silicon Valley, this review follows my review of Chip War by Chris Miller. The Code covers the history of Silicon Valley from the post-war to the present.

    Margaret O’Mara

    In terms of her background, O’Mara is a Clinton administration era policy wonk. When O’Mara left policy circles, she became an academic and is now a history professor at the University of Washington in Seattle – at the other end of the country. Her area of focus is on the history of the modern technology industry. She spent five years researching the book in the mid-2010s, just as Silicon Valley was going under a technological and social change.

    The lens shaping everything else that I have written here

    I am a sucker for books on the history of technology and like Chip War, The Code was right in my wheelhouse. It complemented, rather than overlapped some of my existing favourite technology history books like Bob Cringely’s Accidental Empires, John Markoff’s What The Dormouse Said or most of Michael Malone and Steven Levy’s output to date.

    Like Miller’s Chip War, O’Mara brought a degree of distance from her material to her writing. She has done a lot of research and surfaced lesser known characters like community computing pioneer Liza Loop in her work, she doesn’t have the inside track.

    Bob Cringely with his work on InfoWorld‘s Notes From the Field column got an inside track from the Valley’s engineers before he went on to write is magnus opus Accidental Empires. Like Cringely, Michael Malone was brought up in the Silicon Valley area and then worked the business section beat as a reporter for the local newspapers. Cringely and Malone lived and breathed the valley. If you are are fan of Cringely and Malone’s works, expect something that is interesting but stylistically very different.

    On to The Code itself

    Other reviewers have used words like ‘masterful’ and ‘majestic history’ to describe the book – which while being a reasonable guide to overall quality aren’t really all that helpful. In contrast to Chip War which took me six months, I managed to storm through The Code in a week. This is partly down my familiarity to the material covered and the airplane view that O’Mara takes when writing about her subject. I enjoyed O’Mara’s writing, but could also see someone coming to it with a good grasp of American political history and current affairs, but no knowledge of Silicon Valley history enjoying it just as much.

    Being an academic O’Mara worked hard to source everything in The Code, she also provides a recommended reading list that goes into different aspects of the story that she laid out in more depth including John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said and Theodore Roszak’s From Satori to Silicon Valley.

    HP's first product, sitting outside of Bill and Dave's office (in HP's headquarters)
    H-P’s first product taken by Robert Scoble

    The book starts in the post-war period as Stanford and Silicon Valley peaked as an area for military contractors. O’Mara references the political lives of the H-P founders alongside the growth of cold war technologies and the space race.

    O’Mara leans hard into Stanford’s defence industry connections that started pre world war II. The book then veers to the decline of the military industrial complex in the area due to a number of factors. The Vietnam war demolished the defence budget. The space programme started to wind down after NASA met Kennedy’s challenge to put man on the moon. Johnson’s social programmes took spend away from scientific developments. Finally the social climate in the US changed.

    The next stage of computing was shaped by counter cultural values which O’Mara covered the libertarian instincts of Silicon Valley pioneers alongside the more community orientated views of the counterculture folks. Unlike other writers, O’Mara also covers the Boston area technology corridor that Silicon Valley eventually overshadows.

    O’Mara focuses more on the finance of Silicon Valley covering some of the highlights featured in Sebastian Mallaby’s The Power Law. But O’Mara also delves into the public markets and the role of lobbying in the Silicon Valley finance machine.

    O’Mara tells how immigration affected the nature of Silicon Valley through the story of Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!. As is the case with policy wonks she puts a lot of emphasis on Al Gore, the information superhighway and the Clipper chip. The Clipper chip resurrected like Godzilla the libertarian Republican party arm of Silicon Valley elites and paved the way for the likes of Peter Thiel later on.

    The Code finishes on the future hopes for autonomous driving by university research teams and Google’s Waymo business.

    You can get hold of Chip War here. More book reviews here.

  • Gatekeeping + more things

    Gatekeeping

    I wish gatekeeping was a thing back in 2005 and 2006 when I was working on the international launch of Yahoo! Answers. The problem that we had was getting people to contribute answers to questions. Gatekeeping and the exhortation to not gate keep is about sharing knowledge and opinions freely – an in real life version of what we saw in early social publishing. Ironically gatekeeping stands in sharp contrast to oversharing as a social faux pas. The kind of knowledge that concerns about gatekeeping is particularly opposed to is opinion based knowledge or NORA.

    Now ‘your jam’ is no longer your jam, but instead offered up to be other people’s jam instead. Your individuality ready to be cloned at a moments notice. Will everything descend to being ‘basic’ or mainstream? Does it disincentivise possessing good taste?

    gatekeeper

    What the Internet’s Use of ‘Gatekeeping’ Says About Power – The rise of “Don’t gatekeep” has reframed keeping things to yourself as a selfish act. But not everything is for everyone! And sometimes the act of sharing does more harm than good. I’m thinking of how Anthony Bourdain felt conflicted about sending droves of tourists to mom-and-pop restaurants. I’m thinking of gentrification and what happens when certain neighborhoods are positioned as hidden gems.

    Beauty

    Why Groupe L’Occitane may delist from the Hong Kong stock exchange | Vogue Business

    Consumer behaviour

    My Generation, by Justin E. H. Smith – captures a sense of now rather than a generation

    Economics

    Study Times op-ed shoots down new policy options | Pekingology – translation from an article from the Study Times. Comments on infrastructure are particularly instructive in terms of the view point that they reflect: To debunk views such as “infrastructure overcapacity is wasteful,” “promoting infrastructure equates to taking the old path that’s inconsistent with high-quality development,” and “limited space,” it’s crucial to fully understand the role of infrastructure investment from a holistic perspective of national economic development. Infrastructure investment doesn’t only interact with the expansion of aggregate demand to stabilize economic operations, but also enhances macroeconomic efficiency, improves people’s living standards, and robustly supports high-quality development. Overall, there’s no issue of excessive infrastructure. On the contrary, there are areas that hinder the efficiency of the national economy and the improvement of people’s living standards. China’s per capita infrastructure capital stock only accounts for 20% to 30% of the developed countries, and public facility investments per rural resident are only about a fifth of an urban dweller, indicating potential for investment

    New analysis reveals how Porsche-VW ‘short squeeze’ distorted the stock market | The University of Kansas 

    Energy

    US airlines ally with farmers to seek subsidies for corn as jet fuel | Financial Times 

    FMCG

    Reckitt Benckiser: too many sterile quarters leave share price flat | Financial Times 

    McDonald’s Hong Kong and Kevin Poon “Coach McNugget Art World” Exhibition | Hypebeast – via Ian at Deft. This was to celebrate 40 years of the McNugget. McDonald’s have always done some smart cultural marketing work in Hong Kong (such as an McDonalds Big Mac themed issue of Milk magazine). Hong Kong seems like a natural home for these things, I remember activating a Coke Zero x Neighborhood collab while there.) But it isn’t only a Hong Kong thing, McDonalds has done some strong cultural marketing internationally as well: from the Cactus Jack happy meal to a bounty programme for rappers that namedropped McDonalds on their mixtape over the years. As my friend Ian observed this is at odds with their current UK positioning ‘ McDonalds is the perfect place for estranged parents to meet their kids for awkward conversations’. The implication in that McDonalds restaurants are a lower rent third space (than Starbucks or Costa) positioning. I have welcomed their value-priced coffee and breakfasts at the end of an all-nighter on a pitch or a long drive. But the UK’s the third space aspect loses all the joy that McDonalds manages to imbue in their children experiences – the treat, the birthday party, the expectation of picking up a much wanted toy in a happy meal. The child to adult disconnect in the experience is something cultural marketing like this can help bridge if done in the UK.

    Gadgets

    US Feature Phone Market Stages Comeback as Gen Z, Millennials Advocate Digital Detox | Counterpoint Research – the reasons are more diffuse than this article is letting on. People like my parents are being forced to get new feature phones by network upgrades. Some people can’t use a smartphone and then there is the digital detox brigade which spans generations, people who need tough phones AND people still needing second phones

    Germany

    TSMC’s New Fab in Germany – by Jon Y – focus around automotive just has Germany has been caught on the wrong side of the move to electric cars

    Chinese responses to Germany’s China strategy: Attack abroad, assuage at home | Merics

    Health

    Unravelling the Link Between Socioeconomic Status and Obesity | INSEAD Knowledge

    Hong Kong

    Hong Kong’s corporate lawyers test boundaries as Beijing’s influence grows | Financial Times – legal practitioners, including corporate lawyers, are concerned the broadening scope of a sweeping national security law could jeopardise the independence of the city’s legal system, a legacy of British administration, as Beijing tightens its grip. “There is general concern . . . that people are not fully understanding where the boundaries lie,” said a senior corporate lawyer with a global firm who has worked in Hong Kong for more than two decades

    The Great Dilution: Hong Kong’s Changing Population Mix | Asian Sentinel

    Hong Kong delays Jimmy Lai trial as police question woman linked to exiled lawmaker | Radio Free Asia

    Innovation

    FDA Largely to Blame for Physicians’ Misperceptions on Nicotine | RealClearPolicy

    Materials

    DARPA looks to monetise the Moon | EE Times 

    Media

    Artificial Intelligence Lawsuit: AI-Generated Art Not Copyrightable – The Hollywood Reporter

    Online

    What is dark social and why does it matter for your brand? – New Digital Age 

    ICANN warns UN may sideline techies from internet governace • The Register – move towards China’s vision of cyber-sovereignty

    Retailing

    Small retailers and fans step in as Nike refuses to make replica Mary Earps shirt | England women’s football team | The Guardian 

    Security

    US nuclear submarine weak spot in bubble trail: Chinese scientists | South China Morning Post

    New Supply Chain Attack Hit Close to 100 Victims—and Clues Point to China | WIRED and Dark Reading’s take: Chinese APT Targets Hong Kong in Supply Chain Attack 

    Daring Fireball: ‘Changes to U.K. Surveillance Regime May Violate International Law’ – As I see it, the most likely outcome is that the U.K. passes the law, thinking that the grave concerns conveyed to them by the messaging services are overblown. That the platform providers are saying they can’t comply but they really just mean they don’t want to comply because it’s just difficult, not impossible. And when it becomes law, the platforms will hand it off to the nerds, the nerds will nerd harder, and boom, the platforms will fall into compliance with this law. That’s what they think will happen. What will actually happen, I believe, is that E2EE messaging platforms like WhatsApp (overwhelmingly popular in the U.K.), Signal, and iMessage will stop working and be pulled from app stores in the U.K., full stop. The U.K. seems to think it’s a bluff; I don’t

    Singapore

    Money Laundering Bust Puts Foreign Wealth in Singapore on Notice | Asia Sentinel – if that occurred at the behest of the China then we’re likely to see flight overseas from Singapore. It’s also interesting that these raids have come soon after China arrested a Shanghai immigration consultant to get hold of their database of UHNWI overseas (predominantly in the US). They second question I had would be why Singapore would cooperate with China on this?

    Software

    Now is the time for grimoires – by Ethan Mollick – With the rise of a new form of AI, the Large Language Model, organizations continue to think that whoever controls the data is going to win. But at least in the near future, I not only think they are wrong, but also that this approach blinds them to the most useful thing that they (and all of us), can be doing in this AI-haunted moment: creating grimoires, spellbooks full of prompts that encode expertise. The largest Large Language Models, like GPT-4, already have trained on tons of data. They “know” many things, which is why they beat Stanford Medical School students when evaluating new medical cases and Harvard students at essay writing, despite their tendency to hallucinate wrong answers. It may well be that more data is indeed widely useful — companies are training their own LLMs, and going through substantial effort to fine-tune existing models on their data based on this assumption — but we don’t actually know that, yet. In the meantime, there is something that is clearly important, and that is the prompts of experts.

    Style

    Where Streetwear and Tech Cross Paths: ASUS Vivobook X BAPE® – one of the more cynical collaborations that I have seen with streetwear brands

    Technology

    Deal to develop generative AI on quantum computer | EE Times – how will quantum computing affect a GPT type Bayesian model?

    Web of no web

    Trybals is a YouTube channel that features people from the less developed parts of Pakistan and asks their reactions about different aspects of the modern world. It’s an interesting bit of anthropology. In this episode the panel gets to try a VR experience.

  • MLM + more stuff

    MLM

    MLM or multi-level marketing is where people who need to make money buy product from a company like Avon, Amway, Herbalife, Nu-Skin or Tupperware. Usually the franchisee doesn’t buy directly but through a contact. They may be a long way down in a chain of sellers, which means you end up with a pyramid scheme. Some have described the onboarding and seller communications as a cult. (Disclosure, I did a bit of agency work on Nu-Skin when I worked in Hong Kong, I got to see products, but not how they were sold).

    Financial freedom

    The real product of MLM seems to be hope. Discussing the downside of MLM at this time is important. Financial freedom is going to sound particularly appealing to struggling middle class households wrestling with the cost of living crisis and rising mortgage interest rates.

    These videos by Sean Munger give a really good insight into Amway.

    Ponzinomics

    Robert Fitzpatrick’s self-published Ponzinomics seems to be the most cited book talking about the underbelly of MLM. Here’s an interview with him.

    Soviet space programme

    Enough time has gone buy for us to know how innovative the Soviet space programme was. Some of the innovations were dictated to them by limitations in production campacity. I came across these films about it.

    And how Russian closed cycle rocket engines surprised NASA after the cold war.

    I, Claudius

    Robert Graves period drama novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God were remade in 1976 as a 13 part TV series. (The first two episodes are called 1a and 1b, presumably to avoid an episode 13, given that theatre as a whole is superstitious). In 1965, the BBC had done a documentary about the unfinished 1937 film version and had found bringing their version to television difficult due to production rights still tied into the 1937 production.

    I, Claudius was considered to be a high water mark from point of view of audience viewership of more high brow material and latterly critics consider it to be one of the best TV programmes ever on British TV.

    Hello Hong Kong

    I received post from friends in Hong Kong and the package had a large sticker highlighting the Hello Hong Kong campaign which the government has been using to paper over the cracks left by its authoritarian pivot.

    Hello Hong Kong
    Hello Hong Kong mandatory sticker.

    One part of me thought that ambient media such as the sticker might be a good side hustle for mail services everywhere. As I dug into it, I found out that the staff ‘had to’ put these stickers on the packaging and at least some of them were doing so reluctantly. At least some customers were reluctant for their packages to be ‘propaganda banners’ for the Beijing backed regime. Meanwhile 7/21 alleged government backed triad actions are still fresh in the mind of locals.

    YKK

    You don’t think about how YKK clothes zips work effortlessly, but this Asianometry documentary gives you insight into the Japanese zip manufacturer.

    Starbucks Rewards as massive bank

    I used to use the Starbucks pre-payment system back when I could use it in both the UK and Hong Kong, but a rupture came in when Starbucks removed its rewards scheme from stored value cards to an app. So I found this video by ColdFusion reframing the Rewards scheme as a large bank like pool of money more akin to PayPal’s float than Avios loyalty points.

    Apollo project astronauts off the record

    On everything from the context of Project Apollo through to their views on climate change.

    Restaurant of mistaken orders

    A Japanese pop-up retail project with restaurant servers who are suffering from dementia. I was sent the link by a friend of mine from Japan – the Restaurant of Mistaken Orders really brings the impact home.

  • LK99 & room temperature superconductors

    What is LK99?

    LK99 is some sort of lead phosphate compounds called lead apatite with small amounts of copper in it. Apatites are a class of mineral, found in everything from marble to bone and teeth enamel. In marble and other rocks apatites tend to be clear but soft crystals. However, these apatites usually are made of calcium or potassium rather than lead.

    The material was discovered by two people at Korea University in 1999.

    What’s happened about room temperature semiconductors?

    In March, a paper was put online by Korean researchers that proposed a theoretical model of room temperature semiconductors using LK99 as a material. A video was put online that is alleged to support a practical test of a room temperature superconductor.

    The theoretical paper was formerly published at the end of April in a Korean journal.

    In July, they put a paper online and submitted it for peer review claiming that LK99 had exhibited room temperature superconducting properties. EETimes Europe immediately picked up the paper and pointed out its current pre-publication, pre-peer review status. Early reactions to the paper from experts interviewed by Scientific American indicated a high level of skepticism.

    Some claims about about LK99, such as the material’s structure have been verified but at the time of writing the substantive claims of room temperature superconductivity have not been replicated.

    What’s a superconductor?

    A superconducting material allows electricity to pass through it without resistance. This will also exhibit magnetic properties as a magnetic field occurs at right angles to a flow of electricity.

    Superconductor

    Superconductivity usually occurs at temperatures near absolute zero.

    High temperature semiconductors

    In the mid-1980s, IBM Research got everyone excited when it did foundational work on creating special materials that allowed superconductivity to happen at higher temperatures. High temperature superconductivity meant that you could cool the materials with liquid nitrogen, rather than having to use liquid helium. So still extremely cold and often also under extreme pressure. The most common high temperature semiconductors operate at up to -163 centigrade, or 100 Kelvin. The jump from semiconductors operating at -270 centigrade to -163 centigrade bought a lot of hope at the time that a boundless future was just in front of us.

    Modern superconductors are used in hospital MRI scanners, which is where most people will get to see them. They are used in these machines to create powerful electro-magnets. High temperature superconducting materials have yet to be used widely in applications like this due to cost.

    Potential uses

    Cost effective superconductors operating at room temperatures open up a range of possibilities:

    • Much smaller and cheaper to operate hospital scanners
    • Improved efficiency for electricity generation and transmission
    • Improved electric vehicle performance such as practical magnetic levitation railways ushering in aircraft level speeds of travel
    • More efficient electric motors
    • Lower power consumption in electronic devices
    • Commercially viable nuclear fusion for power generation
    • Launching satellites via a rail gun rather than a rocket
    • Convention weapons of unimaginable speed and power

    If this sounds too good to be true, it might be because it is; or we can’t conceive of the technology to do it successfully yet. Think about how unrealistic an iPhone would have seemed to the boffins of Bletchley Park in the 1940s.

    If LK99 were real, it could herald in an exciting future.

    Best case scenario, commercialisation takes a long time

    Even if LK99 was proven to be a room temperature superconductor, it would take decades to make the technology commercially usable. For example, the forerunner of the modern lithium ion battery was invented by a researcher at Exxon in the early 1970s. They tried to commercialise the battery technology, but eventually stopped due to safety concerns. (Given that this was the 1970s, those safety concerns must have been real and reasonably harsh.)

    The Exxon work was built on by multiple universities including Stanford. In 1983, a Japanese team at a joint venture company between Asahi Kasei and Toshiba built an initial prototype, which they then modified and came up with a prototype of a battery close to what we use today in 1985. Sony went on to commercialise the batteries in 1991 and the Asahi Kasei-Toshiba joint venture did so a year later. Sony introduced lithium ion batteries on their Sony CCD-TR1 consumer camcorder in 1991. This was a small (allegedly ‘passport sized’ but more like a stout paperback book to read on holiday) high-end machine at the time featuring Hi-8 (high-band 8mm video recording).

    The Ericsson T28 cell phone was notable at the time for its use of a lithium ion battery when it launched in 1999.

    Worst case scenario

    LK99 adversely affects the reputation of Korea University, one of Korea and the world’s most foremost research universities. There is a lot at stake. You can find out more about materials here.