Yes, I know, I do go on about it. Labels. Again. I also mention video gaming, right at the bottom…

But to start with labels, and where better than with Astrology?  Astrology “works” for many people both because it is so accurately imprecise and because it taps into what seems to be true. You believe you really are a Scorpio, for example, because the description is so vague yet targeted: variously a noble, lofty eagle of destiny coupled with a vicious sting. Truth is that everyone has a sting of some sort in their tail, so it rings a bell. And everyone feels noble aspirations at times, so again it “fits”. You can do the same with all 12 signs. And you want to believe that it’s you because it sounds right and it’s generally a pretty safe flag to wave. None of the signs – even the promiscuous Pisceans – are so utterly bad and nasty that no-one wants to “belong”. They are safe homes defined more by the position of solar and planetary bodies than ourselves, so they are apart from us and “objective”.  These are clubs we automatically join just because, and we find it agreeable to so so. Of course if we don’t find it so agreeable and believe ‘this just doesn’t sound like me’, we can always delve deeper into the obscurities of rising signs and oppositions and have an ‘ah-ha’ moment that welds us to our charts. Or simply adjust our time of birth a fraction because mum wasn’t sure about that, was she?

Of course it may be that there’s something “to” astrology, other than possible psychic forces at work (maybe) and a small correlation with the planet Mars (true), but it hasn’t been proven – yet.

Now with the “Generations” label it’s much the same. We are born into it, for starters. It “sounds” right and it has a wealth of scientific-sounding correlation to back it all up. If you are a classic boomer born after the 2nd World War you can feel the connection with other boomers. Maybe you lost relatives in the war. Maybe you remember the shortages, the rebuilding, the focus on doing things right and better this time. You remember the fear, the anger, the pain. You grew up in dour, struggling families with little hope. And it affected you; you determined within yourself to break free, to declare war on war itself, to expand the mind and give peace a chance. You gained optimism out of shared heartache and helped build a better world. And then you feasted on it, taking the wealth that you created and building more. And you remembered where it came from: hard work, loyalty and dedication. And kept it for yourselves.
Alas your kids didn’t share the immediate post-war privations and struggles and shrugged off the idealism and optimism off the 1960s. They were Generation X and they were angry. They didn’t want to just accept what their parents wanted for them, they saw things differently. Jobs were harder to find and they took what they could. They saw wealth all around but couldn’t share in it. They were disenfranchised. They latched onto technology and travel and meandered through their lives, rejecting the home-style values of their parents and making for themselves a more mobile, flexible and detached lifestyle. Oh, and they grew up with the fear of an imminent nuclear holocaust, too, so that affected them lots, eh? But out of all that we got a services-based economy with 24*7 fast food, so it must be all right. And they too grew up and had kids and trips in the country.
Except that the Next Generation has to work those poor hours for low pay and no overtime, whilst bathed in the light of a computer screen, one ear on the MP3 player the other on their mobile. Of course it’s what they want, but, isn’t it? They want flexibility in everything because that’s what they have grown up in. They don’t want a career now, do they? They want to flip and flop and dabble. And those aging boomers had better understand that, rather than whinge about the youth of today and their techno-babble, lack discipline, poor grammar, lousy spelling and loose morals. Oh, but they still eat at Maccas, travel widely and take drives in the country
I could go on. You can smell the truth in there, can’t you? It rings true, if only because the media bombard us with this message about generations and differences on a daily basis. We never hear about similarities, only the differences. We don’t get good news, just bad. Kids are never going to be good enough in this world and we’re going to tell them all about it. Older people just don’t get it – especially if it involves technology – and never will. Kids these days don’t display loyalty and they shift from job to job relentlessly – but that’s because it’s what they want, not because it’s how our modern economy works. I think you get the drift.

Of course it’s labelling. It’s black and white and filled with generalizations. But if you randomly sampled a thousand people across these ‘generations’ you’d get a thousand variations of life, genetics, experience, preferences, skills and education. You’d find common ground in emotions, feelings and human urges like reproduction, of course. And you could say that generally the youngest people have the least influence on society, the least independence, and the least accumulated wealth and experience. But you could do that sample at any point in history and it would ring true. It may shift temporally – we on average live longer and stay at school longer as well – but it’s part of our human reality.
Of course the labelling starts with some innocent marketing surveys. You’d find that at one end of the scale ‘older’ people tended to like big band music, but then they went to dance halls and listened to the steam radio, so what do you expect? They didn’t have MTV or MP3 players after all. And post-war ‘boomers’ tended more towards rock, but this was the great age of rock and roll, so again what do you expect? Some of them actually hated rock, and some didn’t care. Some like surf music. Some liked country or classical. Some still listened to swing, for goodness sake. But we didn’t ask them that.  And underneath they are still human, with feelings and emotions based on a million years of humanity. Why do we latch onto the merest, thinnest skin of our being and label people X, Y and Z? Because it’s easy. Because it makes targeting markets easier. We can spin a convincing story around a product and say it targets “generation Y” and throw our dollars into youth websites and viral campaigns. And because we are fond of joining clubs, especially clubs we have automatic membership of, we accept our labels.

The biggest thing to take away from my ranting and raving is that people remain people. Our environment is important, sure, but we remain human. And we continue to learn and grow and adapt throughout our lives. It may be easier for young kids to adapt to and use the latest techno-gadgets but they aren’t the only ones to use them or to see the usefulness. Not all young people are gadget-focused, either. Old or young, each and every one of us is individual – so let’s de-emphasise “generations” and just treat us all as equals.

Which brings me, perhaps surprisingly, to the future of video games. If you click on the link you’ll see that the Nintendo Wii has outsold its competitors from Microsoft and Sony. How has it done so? By de-emphasising the “generational” focus and simply becoming easier to use. With fewer controls, a more natural action and a broader (read less male-centric and techno-focused) approach it appeals to more people. You’d imagine that someone would have thought of this earlier… now if they applied this thought to more techno-gadgetry imagine how quickly we may all adapt to new technology, irrespective of our generation or our labelling?

From Forbes mag: http://www.forbes.com/2008/02/08/future-video-games-tech-future07-cx_mn_de_0211game.html?partner=alerts

I’m hooked on data – and futurism. (I think there’s a correlation there.) I love trends, even Google trends. And What’s Next is a good, insightful read, as is the allied Top Trends blog.

It’s summer in Australia and it’s – cool? So much for global warming, I hear you say. Hey, not so fast… just because we get one cooler summer out of the last decade doesn’t mean that global warming has become global cooling. I noticed on the TV news someone already claiming that Australia is back to its “normal cycle” of drought and flooding rains after a long – perhaps the longest – drought. Well, maybe, but isn’t it hard to be certain with just one sample? It’s certainly raining now, and raining like crazy, but isn’t that also a prediction of global warming? That our rain will come in bucket loads with ever more powerful and unseasonal storms? Hmmm. It’s rather a bit more complicated than ‘it’ll just get hotter and drier and it’ll never rain again’.
After all Global warming is global, not regional, for starters. We are looking at the overall heat balance of the planet, not your particular country, state or city. The naysayers still believe that ‘puny’ humans can never influence climate and that we are arrogant to even imagine we have such power. They are looking at tiny humanity and contrasting our weak force and size with the immensity of our planet, its atmosphere and its oceans. They are drawing the conclusion that no matter what we do there’s so much water and air on the planet that our emissions are barely noticed. And yes, they are relatively small in percentage terms. But they are growing and have been doing so in abundance since the beginning of the industrial revolution. China and India are still emerging in this regard and many people remain without the means to pollute, at least to the degree that the rich western nations can. Imagine what happens when the rest of the world catches up.
The second argument is that “we have always had cycles of heating and cooling”, which is true. The contention is that the global warming theorists have just mistaken the warming phase of a natural cycle to be caused by humans, which is again a reasonable thing to propose and investigate. The trouble is that the naysayers don’t seem to go out and investigate. They say “wrong” really fast but don’t back it up with any research. None that I’ve seen, anyway. As I’ve already documented in earlier posts it’s clear that we humans have raised the carbon dioxide levels to a higher but still small percentage of the overall atmosphere, but that this level is actually accelerating faster that ever before and is already at higher levels than have ever been found. This is corroborated by samples taken from ice cores, for example. It needs also to be mentioned that there have never been over 6 billion humans on the planet before, let alone the number of cars, houses, factories and power stations we have these days. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see that by ceaselessly clearing land and burning coal and oil we will at some point have an effect on local patterns of weather, if not regionally. And if El Nino/La Nina is anything to go by then these regional influences can have intra-regional effects. And if Australia and affect Peru in that fairly large way then it’s likely that we are impacting climate generally in at least some small way.
I won’t go on. You’ve read it all before. But here’s an article in Science mag that notes the rising temperatures in the North Atlantic over the last 50 years and quite fairly mentions that the human cause – or otherwise – is hard to prove. Indeed. So do we sit and wait and continue to clear land and churn out pollution, or do we take action against a sea of troubles? Your call.

What can I say? Trust me, lots.

First, read this: Britain’s universities are turning out more graduates than ever before, and a report overnight from the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGA) said employers found the generation born since 1982 ambitious, demanding, confident – or overconfident – tech-savvy and ethically conscious. But they also said some were simply “self-centred”, “fickle” and “greedy”. “They are coming up to recruitment stands at events and saying “what can you offer me?”,” LGA chief executive Carl Gilleard said. “Better would be to say “Do you have time so I can tell you what I can offer … Generation Y is me, me, me.” But perhaps unlike the more cynical, disaffected “Generation X” of the 1960s and 70s, they are less focused on salary and more on work-life balance, environment and ethics, he said. With a job for life being something of the past, they are also seen as less loyal to individual employers.

So what do I say? First up, if this is based on a survey – and we can’t tell – then let’s remember that surveys are usually rubbish. Especially when we are given no details on how the report was prepared, or the biases of the organisation. Let’s face it, people say what they think you want to hear, or simply just lie. Sure, some tell it like it is but get lead up the garden path by poor or leading questions. You need to look at actual behaviours, not what people say they think and do.

More particularly, the report says “employers found the generation born since 1982 ambitious, demanding, confident – or overconfident – tech-savvy and ethically conscious”. How did they arrive at a measure for “over-confident”? Is that an empirical value of some sort, or an opinion? Let me guess…. And note that if you were born in 1981 then it doesn’t apply. Just like a light-switch, it’s off or on. Sure. And should we be surprised that young people who have grown up with personal computers and the like to be tech-savvy? On the other hand you could be born in 1957 and still be tech-savvy, enough to know and use the latest gadgets, anyway. Because people continue to learn throughout their lives. Yes, the proportion of uptake varies with the late baby-boomers – as it does even with those born after 1982 – because (a) we have our own needs (b) we are all different. Let’s not forget that the technologies that those born post-’82 are so savvy with were more often than not invented by the un-savvy “boomers”.

It gets more opinionated. The report goes on to say that “they also said some were simply “self-centred”, “fickle” and “greedy”.” Well “some” certainly pins it down. What proportion does “some” represent? 10%? 2%? It reads like a significant percentage, but as always it’s never quantified, is it?

And yet more opinion, and the anecdotal evidence chimes in: “They are coming up to recruitment stands at events and saying “what can you offer me?”,” LGA chief executive Carl Gilleard said. “Better would be to say “Do you have time so I can tell you what I can offer … Generation Y is me, me, me.”

Well fancy people expecting to get answers from employers? They should just accept what’s offered and shut up, eh? And how many of these so-called Gen-Yers actually are so assertive, and how does this compare with say other labels, like their presumably non-assertive baby-boomer or Gen X parents? Well, the whole house of cards falls over because the parents are apparently a problem as well, in that they are acting assertively too!

To quote again: “I think we as parents are certainly partly to blame,” Mr Gilleard said. “In America, there are now big global companies who have to have policies on how to deal with parents… Some parents are coming back and saying their children are worth more – they are effectively acting as agents for their children.” Heavens above, assertive parents, just like their kids. Funny that. The article – from news.com – goes on with examples like how one person apparently showed little initiative in finding transport. That’s convincing. Therefore they are all like that. It has a slap at Gen-X as well and then laments that these kids are living in a global economic boom that may well bust. Can these pampered Gen-Ys actually survive an economic downturn, this opinionated labeller asks. Perhaps they will all melt-down when faced with a problem?

Well maybe these young people have hidden reserves, like all of us, and will adapt. Irrespective of when they were born.

You know how I feel about the cult of personality, that pseudo-scientific urge to label us all by ‘type’ and put us into the appropriate pigeon-hole. By this we ‘understand’ ourselves and can ‘perfect’ our lives. Or so the story goes. It’s like all of those other mildly convincing labels – like Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, Scorpio, Virgo, and so on. It never tells the whole story, does it. Instead it promotes labelling, something that humans do particulary well.

OK, this rant is about teams and terminology and personality. We like to think we need ‘teamplayers’ in our business, and in our lives in general. They sound like assets, don’t they? People who are cohesive, get along, absorb instructions and lead others in the designated direction. They follow the rules, don’t make trouble and work as one with the group to generate the desired result. All goodness, surely?

Mind you, to most of us our vision of a team is based around sporting analogies, tinged with military terminology like tactics and strategy. So we tend to see our manager as a coach, our team leader as a captain and the team working in different positions on the field but playing to the same rules and game plan. Which is all sweet and lovely within a context of strictly enforced rules, clearly delineated roles and an end result (ie winning games, winning the season finale etc) that’s a self-reinforcing common vision.

If we are to critique this just a little, what exactly do we have in common here with modern work practices? Perhaps it was a stronger analogy in the 20th Century’s time-and-motion-manufacturing and typing-pool-style of regimented labor, but does it hold true in a world of increasing role diversity and the blurring of who-does-what-when. Do you see yourself in such a team? I don’t. I work in a geographically dispersed, virtual team, do everything myself (from typing to reporting to creating graphics; scheduling my time, prioritising as I see fit) as and when needed. I set my own hours around a work and life balance and rarely find myself boxed into anything like regimentation. It’s more fluid, organic and diverse, and very flexible.

Sure, I’m just me, just one example. But the shift in work practices – from full time to more part-time work; from office or factory to home-based work; from clearly delineated single-task-based work to multi-tasking, is as real as the shift to a service-based economy. Not everyone works likes this but a heck of a lot more do today than yesterday.

So what does this mean for teams? To some, nothing at all. They cling to old ideas with new labels. They divide people up by ‘personality type’ and advise that you need one of these and two of those and lots of these worker bees to make it hum. Which is great if you are a bee, and ant or maybe a wasp. But what do insects know about teamwork outside of their genetic endowment? What about insects, sorry people who need to generate new ideas to improve the business and match – or beat – the competition? We don’t want to make the same stuff the same way over and over again, do we? Well not if we are making incandescent bulbs in a world that is switching to energy-saving LEDs and fluoros.

In this new 21st Century world we need flexible, adaptable people who think and act on the run. They are assets to the team as well, in fact they are the new team. And if they uncover problems and devise and implement solutions within the overall team context and direction then they are invaluable. So we don’t want mere followers, we want action-thinkers who network with their peers. We don’t want them to buck the system for no reason, and we need a way to accommodate valid dissent, too. We don’t want managers to have to micro-manage, either. So it’s not just the team player per se but the team organisation that needs to allow free thought, innovation and a way to generate and propagate new ideas, quickly. In fact in a lean organisation, and I mean Lean in a particularly business-oriented way, the team player will contribute incremental improvement to process, procedure and organisational design quite naturally. So they are truly a thinking, doing, trying-out-new-ideas kind of beast. Sure, not all of the team members will shine to the same degree, or generate the same caliber or type of idea; but they will support each other and provide an environment of contribution by which the team overall prospers.

So it’s a cohesive environment of contribution that is important, coupled with flexible, empowered individuals. Perhaps thinking about ‘personality types’ and trying to build teams around a shopping list of personalities is too blinkered in this new world. Maybe we need to expect everyone to do a bit of everything, but in their individual way.

OK, I love cars and bikes. I love wheels, basically. I love the ability to travel much further, far easier than on foot. (And I love walking, too.) Trouble is, cars take up too much space, spew fumes and their drivers act like it’s a personal affront to slow down and give pedestrians and cyclists a chance. The ‘modern’ world is simply unbalanced in its love of roads, parking and ever-bigger cars and has forgotten that people actually live here, too, and want to (a) breathe (b) not be intimidated by traffic to the extent where simply crossing a road or even walking alongside one is an ordeal. At this point I publish in toto and excellent riposte by Sydney’s Lord Mayor to the numbskulls at the Aussie National Roads and Motorists Association (of which I am a long-standing and increasingly disenchanted member):

Clover Moore January 11, 2008 “THE NRMA, unsurprisingly, claims that few cyclists use the Epping Road corridor each day. The NRMA, like the big oil companies, has a vested interest to protect, and it is depressing that private car use in Sydney is still rising, with vehicle kilometres travelled increasing at twice the rate of population growth. We are past the day when we have any choice but to pursue alternatives: oil is running out and global warming is increasing at an alarming rate. Our streets are becoming impossibly congested, polluted and unpleasant to use. The health costs, in respiratory disease and obesity, to name but two, are well-documented. Many people choose cars over bikes because they can get directly to any destination. Get on a bike, and you’ll be lucky to find continuous safe passage. Cyclists are expected to levitate through impassable gaps in the network and risk their lives inches from tonnes of speeding metal on car-dominated roads. Despite this, nearly 1.5 million bicycles were sold in Australia last year, 40 per cent more bikes than cars. And this is the eighth year in a row that bikes have outsold cars.

“At last year’s C40 Large Cities conference in New York, I cycled with the mayor of Copenhagen. In the Danish capital 40 per cent of people use bikes to get to work and study. International experience shows that if you provide the facilities, people will use them – but it does not happen overnight. Our top need is for a clean, efficient, sustainable and integrated transport system that includes cycleways and mass transit to move the million-plus people who use the city daily to their destinations. Recent research by the City of Sydney indicates that Sydneysiders would be more likely to cycle if there were dedicated cycle lanes and better awareness by motorists of bicycle safety. Even under the present, less-than-ideal conditions, the Roads and Traffic Authority has reported a 45 per cent increase in bicycle traffic in the CBD in the three years to 2005. The city’s own counts show that about 500 cyclists use Oxford Street each weekday between 7am and 9am – a sixfold increase over the past decade. While there are major recreational cycleways – such as the Sydney Harbour route and the planned Alexandra Canal path – the city’s cycle strategy aims to create an effective and accessible network with major routes less than five minutes’ cycle from every residence. It also includes strategies to increase community awareness about the benefits of cycling, to provide better signage and safer, separated cycle lanes. We are encouraging end-of-trip facilities including the provision of parking, storage, change and shower facilities – which progressive firms like Lend Lease are now providing in their headquarters. On the other side of the harbour, North Sydney Council has its own proposals for getting cyclists safely to the bridge, and local governments across the metropolitan area are looking at ways of creating a cycling network that can get people to work, recreation and educational destinations.

“According to the British urbanist Charles Landry, the average US male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car – driving it, sitting in traffic, parking it. Adding in the time spent working to pay for it, for petrol, tolls and other charges, he calculates that same person spends over 18 per cent of his life on his car. Sydney people have surely got better things to do with that 18 per cent of their lives.”

Clover Moore is Lord Mayor of Sydney and the independent state MP for Sydney.

We all die; although some of us are also re-born, perhaps. But what about an artistic, if commercial, concept? Do artistic constructs die? For example can we truly say that the ‘album’ is dead, in the context of popular music? Of course we can say it, but what does it mean? Is it death in terms of sales alone, or can the spirit live on? I have some 300 hundred vinyl albums in my house – have they just gone skywards? Obviously not (but I’ll check). Or is it the vinyl itself that has died? Well they still make ‘em flat and grooved, so they can’t be totally dead. Or is it the format – the loose coupling of a musical story, an artist’s selection of music that expresses a time or a feeling and fits one of several fairly well defined shapes and sizes? Maybe that’s it.

The first part of that ‘format’ definition surely won’t die – capturing the essence of an artist’s creativity at a time or place, or their particular feeling at that point in time will go on and on. We will continue to make and record music that expresses time and place. But the restriction in shape and size of output may indeed alter. There is no need today to restrict ourselves to 20 minutes of reasonable quality audio per side of LP vinyl, for example. Or even to pack 60minutes onto a CD. We can stream MP3s ad infinitum if we want. But is that an album? Or do we have to redefine ‘album’?

Seems to me that an album is a package of sorts. It must have a theme and a defined size. Photo albums continue to be like that, even in a digital world – they are defined in some way. Otherwise they are just unsorted collections. This is after all our model for musical albums. And just because we can stream data ‘forever’ doesn’t mean we should discard the album as a concept. Or the concept album for that matter. So I think it still exists, but exists in a world where it faces a challenge: do artists want to retain and work within this album format, rather like poets may want to write in sonnet form? Or do they prefer to live with and embrace digital streaming and the endless track-mashing that comes from single-track online sales?

What prompted this rave was this CNET article. The point is that online sales of single tracks takes control away from the artist and gives it to the consumer. All of the artistic pretension in the world can’t overcome the buyer’s urge to buy and listen to only the music they like. But how different is this from the recent past, where we may have bought an album but only played the singles; or simply bought the singles. We’ve always listened to what we liked. Except now we can make these choices even easier and even burn our own CDs in the shape we prefer, if we want. More to ponder in our changing world I guess.

OK, you didn’t ask, but here I go. Some thoughts and questions to consider for today.

1. Why is it that the bicycle industry can make frames that are compatible with the drivetrains of at least 3 major manufacturers and the componentry of just about everyone? Doesn’t that (otherwise very sensible) component commonality impinge upon product differentiation?
2. Why is it that automotive companies can barely get it together to share wheels and tyres and sundry hidden mechanicals and electricals? Sure they have tried to share platforms and engines, and there are plenty of exceptions, but generally they keep reinventing the wheel; or in this case the complete drivetrain and monocoque shell. Does this more complete individualism grant some competitive advantage or are they simply blind to the savings that they could make for themselves, their customers and the world?
3. Why is it that the PC industry is split so unevenly between the bespoke “locked-up” designs like Apple’s and the open, modular and shared componentry that the “IBM-compatible” (or perhaps ‘Intel/Microsoft architecture-compatible’) makers comply with? What can we take away from the far greater market penetration of the latter approach? Or the higher prices and possibly ‘cooler’ designs from the low-volume makers?
4. What is the best approach for the world (including our living environment as well as our economic one)? To evolve shared componentry in all cases and thereby reduce overlap and waste; or to instead foster maximum competitive differentiation with bespoke, individualised design? Or to balance the 2 approaches? Or to find a 3rd way?
5. If there is ‘a better way’, should governments mandate it? Car safety legislation would be one example when government has enforced a common standard of safer design, however I have the sneaking suspicion that there are better, lighter, cheaper safety systems than the amazingly contrived explosive ‘airbag’ system that car companies have foist upon us. Airbags are of course less intrusive than helmets, harnesses and the like – but are they ‘better’? Is this an example where the compromise reached favours maximising car sales over implementing good sense? Or do the practical problems of getting people to wear harnesses and helmets outweigh the benefits?

These are the questions on my mind right now. More later, I’m sure…

Gross Domestic Product. You have to ask why gross, not net? Why only domestic? This is a perennial game of ‘what figures can I come up with quickly and easily that people will believe’, played by politicians and economists on a roughly quarterly basis. When you look into it, it’s a house of cards. It has some relevance as a measure of relative production (so yes, we can say we generated more – or less – quantifiable economic activity within our national borders during the chosen period) but its biggest drawback is that it doesn’t subtract the costs of that production. Sure, we are making and ‘doing’ more stuff, but at what cost to our environment or our real standard of living? It’s looking only at a raw, fat, dirty number. (We can however discount the international product as that is a much smaller part of the whole deal.)

This is not a secret. It’s taught in economics. It’s obvious – it’s actually spelled out in “GDP”. It’s not net. It’s domestic. It’s product. So why don’t we think about it and do something? Because it’s hard to calculate the real costs of production, especially the fuzzy ones like standard of living and loss of environment. Anyway, at least it’s getting mentioned in the press: Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate economist tapped to head a new French study, said Tuesday he sees gross domestic product (GDP), the most often cited yardstick, as an imperfect indicator. Stiglitz, named by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to head a panel to find a new method of economic calculation that will include quality-of-life factors, said the current yardsticks “only reward governments if they increase materialistic production.”

It seems that we can’t let go of labels. As I have noted before we continually stretch the labelling logic with increasingly weak definitions for Baby Boomers, Gens X and Y and of course the weakest link of all, Gen Next. And we can’t leave the Web alone either, with Webs 1, 2 and now 3. But can you tell the difference? Does it matter? Do we agree on the definitions? No, no and no! But Forbes mag has taken a stab at it.

It seems that way, like it’s a war between people and cars. The cars are simply inanimate objects, sure, but they behave like angry bees looking for a fight. Or like the worst sort of human bullies, pushing themselves and everyone else out of their way. How did we get into this state? Why do we allow this anti-social behaviour to continue? Of course the root of this evil is simple – “drivers” are no longer people, or so it seems; instead they are themselves a collectivist entity known as “cars” or “traffic”. Yes folks, step inside this tin can and de-humanise yourself. Become as one with the machine.

OK, it’s a broad brush but as a person, a pedestrian, a cyclist and a driver I see otherwise “nice” people suddenly take on bizarre aggressive traits whilst driving. And they defend their anti-social activities to the death, sometimes literally. “Bikes should not be on the road, roads are for cars”. “We pay road taxes and registration and licence fees, and they don’t”. “It’s not right to slow cars down or to blame them for pedestrian stupidity, instead pedestrians should take more responsibility”. “Speeding fines are just for revenue raising.” And so on. It’s a litany of denial, of abdication of responsibility and a dereliction of due care. And they believe it, too.

I am prompted to write this because of what another rider – Cadel Evans, the number 1 professional rider in 2008 – has been reported to have said, namely: “I’ve cycled in every continent in the world, other than Antarctica, and it’s incredible. Drivers in America and Australia just have attitudes. I don’t necessarily say attitudes towards cyclists, but towards other road users … . people just don’t realise the danger they’re causing other people.” In Evans’s experience, the worst offenders come from the ranks of very young and very old drivers. He despairs that cyclists have to contend with people throwing bottles and driving dangerously close to them.

And I can but agree. It’s been like this in Australia for some years. I gave up commuter cycling for a while because of it. Bullying drivers who leave no room (despite clear laws about keeping to your own lane) and who intimidate, or simply abuse. I had a can thrown at me in a quiet backstreet and a speargun aimed at me at 6:30 in the morning. For no reason. At 5:30AM a bus swerved across 2 empty lanes seemingly to  simply scare me. Several times buses have ignored my presence and just cut in front, barely, and trapped me against the kerb. Cars turn in front of me, or sweep me into the gutter. Or overtake where it’s not safe out of some misplaced desperation to “get ahead”. One friend had a gun pulled on him – he escaped down the Cook’s River canal.

You can see the problem. These are not people, these are “cars”, “buses” and “drivers”. At worst they are arrogant owners of the road. At best they grudgingly give some space. If you met them face to face there’d be no problem. But in their steel tanks they take on a new, angry outlook that leaves no room for anyone else.

Well, I ride, walk and I drive. I pay taxes. I see mistakes being made by people in cars as well as on foot or on bike. Yet I can calmly share and give a bit of space to all, and can slow down and give others some room. Now if I can see all sides of this, and plenty of other people can too, and we can all get along fine, what’s your problem?

I’m being bleak again. So many people, such a large enviro-footprint for each of us (especially we ravenous Westerners). Let’s sort one thing out. Paper. OK, we need to use some paper, but why so much?

Isn’t it up to us to choose a paperless, or vastly reduced paper-use world? Why do people claim that the promise of a paper-free office is impossible? Because they themselves are the problem?

Being the saint I am I haven’t printed anything out at work for almost 10 years – I read on screen and prefer it now – and read most newspapers and magazines on-line as well. Indeed the company I work for transacts everything digitally and stores it digitally. It can be done. There’s nothing stopping us but fear of change. Email and IM has almost totally replaced snail mail. I view my photos on-line and have more confidence in my multiple digital backups than with my faded paper ones. It’s a choice, just embrace it and ditch paper except for purely historical interest or to show kids how it used to be done.

OK, sometimes paper is best, but not often; and less so all the time. We have actually made big progress. If you look back 40, even 30 years ago you’ll see far more paper was used in business and government processes than now – it’s actually vastly different because we have largely replaced paper trails and literal carbon copies with electronic pathways and storage. Many banks, insurance companies and government bodies once stored all info and account details, application forms and even signature records on cardboard or paper, and we transacted 100% with paper checks and paper withdrawal slips. That was cumbersome and wasteful, and it’s largely gone.

So there. We’ve moved on, why are you dragging your heels? If you go back far enough you’ll see just how much paper has been ditched by government and business already, but in terms of individuals printing out paper copies of documents ‘just in case’, you have to ask ‘why do it?’. Because you can’t read off a screen? Kids seem to adapt OK. Because you can’t remember what you read online? Maybe you need to concentrate harder. Do you really need a paper copy of something that’s editable, enlargeable and searchable on-screen? Is it just a habit? There are ways around these things, but people still like to hold it in their hands don’t they? Bizarre.

And of course the truly paperless world will never arrive whilst we need to wrap presents…. and send cards. Oh well. Bleakness returns (although it’s nice to get mail, isn’t it?). Have a nice end-of-year, if you are into that sort of Roman/Gregorian calendar thing.

Well things do change, don’t they? When I started my working life in the mid-’70s modems were quite literally huge boxes offering staggering throughput around 1200 bits/second. Let me think that through for a moment. These were big boxes commonly mounted on walls in banks which tied distant computer terminals to mainframes via telephone lines, so that transactions could be completed “instantly” and printed in passbooks. At 1200 bits per second. Hmmm. Amazing anything got transmitted at all. Fast forward to 1985 and I was connecting at just 300bits/second but using a modem a bit smaller than a shoebox, or about 10% of the size of the first modem I ever worked with. By 1987 I was hooking up to bulletin boards using plug-in PC cards at 1200 bits/second, and a year later at 2400 bps. And shortly thereafter 9600bps. Things were certainly zooming along. But I got bored and drifted away.

At that sort of connection speed the world was really just sending text and numbers. For that it was fast enough. But it was very much a call-pause-respond sort of thing, especially over any distance. It wasn’t replacing face-to-face meetings or threatening to send couriers and the post office to the wall. But it was magical, and we could all see the future possibilities. And in 1990 I saw the Internet for the first time and thought, yes please. Suddenly we had a real world-wide platform to play on and email (with attachments) was workable. But it was still a geeky thing. But by 1994 it was in the daily news, big-time, and the world was shifting under our feet. I can remember my stunned amazement when the world of geeky text and numbers transformed itself into the World Wide Web of graphics, colour and motion. And I jumped back into the world of modems.

So in fast succession we went from 9,600bits/second to 56,000bits/second, yet we wanted more. Now I sit here at home connecting at 7,616,000bits/second and I still want more! And of course we will get more. And with every increase in speed comes an increase in quantity and a change in nature. Things become do-able. Video gets better and better. VoIP becomes clearer. Instant Messaging becomes more instant. Graphics get bigger and better (or worse!). And we inch a bit closer to true virtual reality.

Which is where I start thinking about work, life and friendship. We are quite accidentally teaching our kids how to submerge themselves in a virtual world, where even the nature of friendship is changing. You can see and feel the generational gap. Kids just do it, they connect by phone, face, IM, SMS, chatrooms or Web2.0 – whatever it takes. Old fogeys like me embrace it, sure, after all we are here too – but we also remember the ‘good old days’ of actually having to meet people, to see our teammates and friends face-to-face and to engage in different, human ways. We remember the old ways of facial expressions, of hand gestures, of shared jokes and raised eyebrows. But kids these days use avatars and emoticons as much as expression and eyebrows. Sure, not everyone is ‘into’ it, just as not everyone does everything in life exactly the same. But you can see the shifts happening.

Some of this is good. Working from home can be isolating or it can save petrol. It’s up to us to make it work, to identify when we need to do better. I can easily fall into a lament about the passing of the good old days, when teams were groups of people in one physical location, not avatars roaming around a virtual world. But as bandwidth increases and applications get better at being virtual I can see a day when it all becomes seamless. A day when being virtual is just as engaging as being real. Now it could sound scary, but it could just be what we need to do to survive and prosper. Sitting on our hands crying about change won’t bring our past back to life. It’s time to move on and make the future work for us.

In general we are all human and react in fairly predictable ways to basic stimuli. However we each grow up in different circumstances, often in different cultures, and experience different things. When we try to distill one or two key common denominators across these timeless boundaries we often come unstuck. This, as I’ve said before, is the big problem with “generations” theory. Firstly the theory discounts the core human values – that which is basic to all of us, and assumes instead that being born ‘at a certain time’ overrides genetics and any strong local cultural beliefs. It over-emphasizes both our high-impact events and the dull background noise of life and diminishes the family and our individual preferences. Then it conveniently forgets that people experience both more things and new things as they age; so people labelled as ‘baby boomers’ can never adapt to new circumstances by becoming something else. And by mistaking what is actually ‘aging behaviour’ for ‘generational behaviour’ they continue to mis-tell us what we “should” be like. It’s all about convenience.

Not sure about this? Well think what ‘baby boomer’ means to you; the pop definition, if you like. You get a picture of post-war boomers, cashed-up, people who had lived the peace and love era and moved on to embrace property and success after all. You imagine Beatle-loving hippies who have raised kids and settled into a selfish retirement full of rich expectation. Yet this is a hugely diverse group, even if you only consider ‘boomers’ in the Western nations. Diverse indeed by circumstance, nationality, religion, employment, education and absolute situation. Some indeed had parents who fought in the 2nd World War but many more didn’t. Some were old enough to see the Vietnam war in the news, some only saw the ending. Some remember Korea, most don’t. Some liked the Beatles, but many more were barely old enough to remember the Fab Four breaking up. Yet we lump ‘em all together, or at best divide them into early, late or mid boomer. It’s just a label.

It’s easier to call me a late baby boomer because of my birth year than to actually find out what I’m like. And of course by sheer numbers enough people will fall roughly within broad boundaries to make the label ‘stick’. Enough of us have indeed an affection for the Beatles that marketers can ‘use’ this knowledge to do some targeting. But plenty of us preferred the Stones or the Who, or classical music, or something else again. We reduce ourselves to averages and then try to tar us all with the one brush.

But do some labels stick better than others? What about the great cultural divide between nations? Yes, there are some correlations that suggest that certain styles of leadership resonate more strongly within some cultures. That doesn’t mean we can jump to conclusions, but we can be aware that people who experienced culture ‘a’ will have been shaped to some degree by that culture and will often react in certain ways. With that in mind, read here at Harvard about Mao’s possible influence on Chinese CEOs.

Australia has seen some bizarre turns in its short life, but here’s another one. The outgoing PM, John Winston Howard, has officially lost his seat, as well as the government he clumsily lost last week. He may not have given up all hope but his opponent has claimed victory with confidence – it certainly looks a foregone conclusion. Now it is difficult to underestimate the symbolism here. Australia does not have a presidential system, rather it’s a constitutional monarchy with a British-style bicameral set of houses, upper and lower. The Prime Minister is by convention the leader of the party with the majority of seats in the lower house, the House of Representatives.
So much for how it works. Now what have we done? The Australian people have overwhelmingly chosen to throw out the long-serving conservative, business and G.W. Bush-aligned incumbents for a new Labor government headed by a Mandarin-speaking diplomat who promises a more inclusive, caring approach to government. That’s a big enough change, but the outgoing PM also had to defend his own seat in the House of Reps. That he has failed to retain his own seat – and become only the 2nd incumbent Aussie PM to do so – is enormously humiliating for him, his team, his party. They are collectively in tatters.

Labor now leads government in every Australian state and federally. It’s a whitewash. A bloodless coup. Oh that every country could make sweeping changes look so casual.

Well, the Federal Government, anyway. Certainly the lower house, which changes immediately; and by a quirk of our parliamentary system the upper house as well, but not until next July. It’s a funny old thing, isn’t it? One day we have this long-running, successful but slightly desperate team of conservatives in charge and the next – literally the next day – we have a bright new crew with plenty of bold new rhetoric. It seemed like it would never happen, that this coalition of right-wingers would keep up the bluff and that the Opposition would continue to shoot itself in the foot every 3 years. But the worm turned and the cowardly custard conservatives were revealed to be bitter, divided and poorly directed after all. The sham was indeed a sham – the Howard-Costello “team” was a facade, a falsehood, a hologram of leadership. Having finally as a community made the leap to the other guys we suddenly see that leadership can really mean something positive; a new hope for the future. Well I hope everyone feels this way.

Of course it may all yet end in tears, but I have a good feeling about this new optimism that is afoot.

I’ve always thought it would be helpful if plants could be identified by their DNA in some simple way, like the DNA expressing itself as an easy-to-read label for example. Now that may well be possible, but it may not be desirable. Along similar lines comes this idea from some Japanaes researchers, expanded upon by the NYT: an interesting use of available biological storage, eh?
“Take, for example, an insect from the order blattodea that has 4,500 species in six families, known as the cockroach. A group of Japanese scientists led by Masaru Tomita of Keio University recently used a bacterium’s genome to write four copies of Albert Einstein’s E=mc2 and “1905″ into its DNA. That work has now led to a proposal to create a time capsule by encoding a year’s worth of the New York Times magazine into the DNA of a cockroach. You see, all species have something referred to as junk DNA and, as an example, the human genome has a total of 2.9 billion letters or about 750 megabytes of data, of which only 22,000 letters or genes are used to make us what we are. So there is plenty of capacity, but what makes the cockroach special, is its proven ability to survive almost any conceivable scenario, making it the ultimate information-storage device, devoid of the harshness of evolution and time.” There’s a lot more on this subject here.

You may have noticed the recent DARPA-organised robotic car competition. If you didn’t you can read about it here in a Forbes article. It’s certainly impressive and looked like a lot of fun. Aside from enhancing research into practical robotics, competitions between robotic cars completing ‘races’ in urban environments is an interesting look into a Sci-fi future of immense wonder. There must be a business model here for someone.

Just imagine: robotic sports, anyone? Google-search your way to an urban pleasure robot for hire, perhaps? Replace human-driven taxis with robots and cut down on those inane cab-driver conversations? (Unless the robots get speech chips as well of course.) Or robotic buses that eliminate the end-of-shift grumpy-driver syndrome? Or more seriously, competent robotic day-surgery in remote locations without the need for expensive, highly-trained human surgeons “on-site”. It’s potentially a mix of good and bad, isn’t it? More programmers and robotics experts, fewer jobs for real people.

Now I’m not a Luddite, but I do wonder about whether we think these things through. Like Einstein wondering whether his work opened to door to nuclear war.

And sure enough these harmless-looking robot games have a military goal as well, with lives saved if you can send more robots into battle instead of warm bodies. The downside to robotic wars, however, are grim. Without the appropriate programming robots will not show human mercy or simple judgment, and may indeed be programmed to be exactly that – inhumane killing machines. And war with ‘thinking’ machines instead of people at risk may lower the barriers to war itself. So we get more war with fewer consequences – well, if you are on the winning side, anyway.

Meanwhile Google’s ‘first privately-owned car on the moon’ competition is a bit wacky – and certainly way-out – but hints at where we may be going next in our personal transport. Despite the fun of it all it’s possible that our obsession with cars will end on Earth when we run out of accessible, cheap resources; equally it’s hard to see how lunar exploration and exploitation will solve our immediate problems. But that’s humanity – pressing on, pushing the boundaries and fixing up the broken stuff later.

You can poke holes in anything if you pick the right stats. I guess that’s the great thing about statistics, isn’t it, that it can be used so elegantly and persuasively in support or attack of an idea. For example many believe that lowering  trade barriers and increasing world connectivity (both of which are patently true – it really has happened, if not yet to the “nth” degree) has resulted in a more level playing  field for both individuals (that’s you and me) and businesses (big and small) to compete on a global scale. On the face of it that’s surely true.

Indeed there are many, many examples of small “local” businesses operating on the web and staking a global market share which would otherwise take major investment in distribution effort. Think of the marketing, sales reps, call centres, support staff, wholesalers and distributors required for a small business to expand beyond its local area.  Now think of all the small ebay businesses that have prospered globally, the small shops that garner 10, 20 or 30% of their trade now from a global reach, the companies that leverage Amazon’s computer services and back end distribution services. It doesn’t take much looking to see new forms of distribution and profit-taking that takes advantage both of lower trade barriers and the near-frictionlessness of global Internet commerce.

Well maybe that’s all wrong, or out of proportion, anyway. Apparently Harvard Business School professor Pankaj Ghemawat calls that  vision of the early 21st century “globaloney” and has written a book about it. Now you could say right up front that he is saying “it’s not so” when he’s (a) leveraging the Internet to promote and sell his book and (b) taking advantage of the breakdown of international book distribution cartels by promoting and selling his book globally. But I’m being glib, aren’t I?

He has been quoted as saying that international trade today represents less than 10% of most economies.  He’s criticising a popular “25%” figure but here in Australia I have seen figures for exports alone ranging from 12% in the 1950s to 22% in 1996, and back to 18% of Australian GDP in 2006. Which would indeed support around 25%, if you add in imports, surely? Maybe he’s working on some global average when he gets the 10% figure? Even so, surely trade varies by country and fluctuates with exchange rates and commodity prices, so a net exporter of commodities (things like oil, iron ore and coal, notoriously hard to shift over the Internet) will need to look very closely at the figures and do some breakdowns by type of transaction to really draw conclusions that stick. I’m not sure even the OECD has done the sort of work needed to truly even out the stats globally, but probably they have (I’ll look it up when I get a chance).

In any case his stance is that most  economic activity happens locally, and you can hardly argue with that. Most of us shop at local supermarkets, buy most of our day to day goods and services locally and if we buy a car or build a house – well, there’s a global connection with the car but for most of us it involves local trade. Indeed the highest price is paid by the end user and the global component is diminished substantially by margins added along the way.

So I guess I agree with Pankaj Ghemawat, in that local still rules overall. But that doesn’t mean that the world hasn’t changed, only that some things are more resistant to change than others. It’s still hard to beat shopping at a local store where you can examine and receive the goods (especially food and clothing) immediately. However as real-time Internet commerce improves on static images and provides a more immersive shopping experience I’m sure it will garner a bigger share of these ‘resistant’ products.

And trade barriers have lifted and I can buy imported cars far more easily and cheaply than ever before. I know that’s true. Ghemawat also writes of immigration rates falling as some proof that we aren’t globalising like we think we are, whereas I know that that my personal contact with the greater world community is at an all-time high. Email, online chat and Web 2.0 has brought us all closer, surely? As well, tourism is at an all-time high. People may not be moving to another country to live, but maybe moving to another country is not so necessary now? Perhaps the drivers of population movement are different in the 21st century? Which is also in agreement with Ghemawat’s view, but what actually is he saying by this? That because (for example) Europe hasn’t suffered another World War recently and has been at relative peace and prosperity for some time we aren’t globalising like we think we are? Is Ghemawat comparing the immigration stats for one period of history with another and drawing weird conclusions? Maybe.

To my mind Pankaj Ghemawat is stating the obvious and making some rather unprofound motherhood statements. Yes, it’s true, people are not driven to relocate from country to country like they were. However tourism is up. Yes, it’s true, local transactions beat global ones by volume and value. But the types and numbers of transactions made globally have certainly changed and bear some examination. And trade barriers are down and the patterns of world trade have changed.

If that’s not enough change to mean we’ve ‘globalised’ then that’s fine. It just means that what we don’t actually have is  clear and agreed definition of ‘globalisation’. The BNET story that sparked my rave is here by the way.

I can’t help but watch the cars go past. We live on what is almost an island, just a ridge of mountain with a swampy strip on each side connecting us to the mainland. In the old days there was no road in, all traffic was via the wharves on the southern side of the peninsula. As the settlement grew and the land cleared it became viable and desirable to connect the the old Yow Yow settlement to Kincumber parish, and the first road (Elvy’s) was driven up over the ridge. It’s still there but impassable in places, at least by cars. Bullocks would’ve been the ‘heavy’ traffic, carting timber from Kincumber down to the boat builders at Davistown. And then the road was pushed to the west along the swampy strip, connecting us to Green Point and Erina, and by punt from there to East Gosford. So as I say, there’s now just one road into the place.

So when I stand at my front door I can see all of the traffic to Saratoga and Davistown. In what passes for peak hour it’s a constant stream. Car after car, plus buses and trucks. The buses are full of schoolkids, at least by the time they roam around and collect a load, then quite empty. The cars are mostly driver-only, no passengers. By my rough count we see 50 cars a minute for 2 hours, and 40 a minute for another 3 hours, then 10 a minute for 10 hours. Much less overnight but at a constant trickle.

Now this is a small community. One set of about village shops for Saratoga, another much smaller set of shops for Davistown. One small grocery shop, a fruit shop, a butcher, a baker, a hairdresser and some estate agents at Sara and a newsagent and a take-away in each. Yet when you look at the traffic it’s at least 50*120+40*180+10*600 vehicles during the bulk of the day. That’s 19,200 vehicles passing by every working day and somewhat less at weekends. Let’s be generous and forget weekends. So that’s 96,000 vehicles per week, in and out. The speed limit is 50kmh but most do 60. All of them buzz past houses, children, pets and wildlife and either disturb their rest, their play or just their daily lives. Kids can’t play in the street, nor can they cross the road safely. Even adults have to wait for a break in the traffic before crossing and cyclists are blasted by horns for daring to venture forth.

Now we chose to live here, and it’s relatively quiet behind our screen of trees. We could live in a cul-de-sac. But not everyone can live in cul-de-sacs, or afford the premium paid for a quieter street. And whilst Davistown Road is a funnel that concentrates the traffic, plenty of other streets here and elsewhere have either more or somewhat less traffic to deal with.. and to be honest I am wondering why we allowed this to happen. Why are we encouraging these immense numbers of vehicles to terrorise communities? Is terrorise too harsh? Well imagine a world where kids could play in the street safely and where anyone could just cross the road when they wanted, without waiting for 10 minutes or more. Yes, we love the utility of jumping into our cars are going places but is the traffic, the exhaust, the noise and the fear generated really worth it? Have we blinded ourselves to what we are doing when we swap feet, boats, buses and bikes for cars?

Absolutely.

This has been a bee in my bonnet (which sounds a trifle nasty, doesn’t it?). Generations don’t happen in waves, they happen all the time, seamlessly. To say that because some individuals are born in a particular cluster of years “makes” them a “Boomer” or a part of generations “X” or “Y” and thus gives them certain shared characteristics ignores individuality, parental modeling, the role of genetic variation and the fact that humans are adaptive and will change their behaviours to suit conditions.

At worst it’s just lazy, convenient labelling. At best? Well it’s harmless fun, innit? I don’t doubt that people are affected by both their environment and the events within their lives, but just because the World Wars demonstrably affected a wide selection of the world’s population severely and disastrously doesn’t make it follow that forever more whatever happens will be reflected in some measurable mass generational change of mindset. If we look hard enough we’ll find “something”, but that’s humanity for you – looking for patterns and finding “something”. Like a face on the moon and animal shapes in clouds, or the stars above.

So in today’s Sydney Morning Herald we finally find a change in thinking: There is a little bit of generation Y in us all, says a leading researcher who believes it is time to rip up the generational rulebook and rethink the way we view people’s behaviour. Rather than break down the population into demographics based on age, Mark McCrindle says it is time to look at a whole chunk of Australia as one group based on attitude, or as social analysts like him call it, psychodemographics. And, he says, the prevailing mind-set in the future is that of generation Y.

It’s still a case of looking for a pattern and giving it a label, but at least we are shaking off this “born in year ‘x’ therefore you act like this” rubbish. Which only applies to the rich Westerners who are targeted by marketers anyway. But people are people, wherever they are, and individuals. Let’s treat them as individuals.
Or am I just acting like a wrathful Scorpio?

What in tarnation has this to do with goats? Why are goats linked with anger or frustration and annoyance? (Here’s one theory: The most common story to explain the phrase relates to horse racing in North America and to the common practice of putting a goat in the stall with a skittish thoroughbred racehorse to help calm it. Enterprising villains capitalised on this by gambling on the horse to lose and then stealing the goat. A substantial desire to suspend one’s disbelief is needed to accept this story at face value.). Anyway, my goat has been got again!

I was riding my bike (as I do) and a rider pulled alongside to tell me how in a 40km Sunday morning ride he was spat at and abused by at least 3 separate car drivers and/or their passengers, despite being both legal and sensible about staying out of harm’s way. Now we are used to this sort of behaviour in Australia because the car is king, and I choose to say “king” because it’s most commonly a bully-boy male domination thing, although that doesn’t stop women joining in after a male has set the tone. It’s become accepted behaviour for these alpha-male-wannabes to bully people in smaller or less powerful vehicles, or those on bicycles. Pedestrians of course have no place in this car-mad world, either. Now not everyone is like this, but a large number of people get behind the wheel and actively seek out the weak and intimidate them, presumably because they see their own behaviour and life-choices as ‘normal’ and the life-choices of others as aberrant. Indeed so aberrant that they are filled with hate at the very sight of a bike rider simply minding their own business.

Don’t believe me? Try riding a bike in an urban area for a few years and write a list of the incidents that occur. Be honest about it, if you were even partly to blame then admit it, but I guarantee that it’s not too hard to come up with a ‘clean’ list – one where you did nothing wrong at all yet copped abuse. No amount of electronic drivers’ aids will change the aggressive attitudes of the nut behind the wheel, or even wake people up who are just driving without care, concern or conscience. It’s a psychological problem. OK, maybe some electrodes on the sensitive anatomical parts could help, but ABS and EDC alone do not a good driver make.
Share the roads, people, cars are just conveyances and getting somewhere safely is more important than getting there quickly. And leave a bit of extra space for everyone, irrespective of their personal life-choices. They may be on a bike right now but – glory be – they may actually drive a car, too. And have a wife and kids at home hoping to see them again, just like you.

I happened along to this amusing and provocative account of what Australians and apparently Wisconsins (but no one else) call a bubbler, i.e. a drinking fountain, by Sydney Poet Johanna Featherstone: There are only two places in the world where a bubbler is called a bubbler: Australia, and Wisconsin, USA. It was invented in 1888 at a small waterworks company in Kohler, Wisconsin. From there it was exported throughout the American mid-West, and then to Australia and then the rest of the world. But only Australia kept the original name. In other countries it is a ‘spout’, ‘fountain’, ‘trough’ or ‘cascade’. Whatever you call it, it’s a curious creation. In city streets, swimming pools, schools and alley ways, this humble urn is a point of stillness, a rendez-vous for humans, insects, animals and myth.

It’s not easy, is it? We want to include everyone in our society, to extend our care and concern generally across the community, so that all share equally in the greater good of our civilisation. Everyone wants that, or they say they do. They want us to have our freedom, to do as we like – as long as we don’t hurt others in the process. From that grow our laws, be they enshrined in public legislation or religious text. And as everyone also knows, the law is an ass.

I recently wrote this: And as a consequence we go lightly on both driver qualifications and reprimands for driver ‘infringements’. If we applied tougher rules, or even applied our existing rules in a diligent manner then we’d actually remove that accessibility for a large number of people and hurt them socially and economically, and as a corollary hurt the politicians who act on our behalf. And I believe it’s true. We want everyone to have access to the freedom of personal transport. However as a western society we have ploughed far more investment into car ownership than public transport, so we have ended up with a society where logistically it is difficult to get everywhere and anywhere, easily, without a car. And we have made it easy to get a drivers’ licence, and cheap and easy to buy a car. So we all go out and get cars, and our expectation is that car ownership is a right, not a privilege. However we want to make driving reasonably safe (and we have settled for a dangerous level of accident and injury in our compromise, too, may I add) and thus we impose laws to control errant behaviour. Some things are perfectly obvious, like stopping for red lights and keeping right or left. But other laws are contentious or simply difficult to enforce. People like to speed, car manufacturers like to make ever faster cars, and some people seemingly lack the skill or judgement to not monitor and control speed. We then catch them and fine them until they lose their licence, their job, and their social status. We create enemies within, with a grudge against law makers and enforcers.

It’s akin to setting people up to fail. We encourage and reinforce car ownership and freedom with easy access to licences, cars and roads on one hand, then crack down on people who lack the skill, talent, experience, maturity or judgement to obey the laws. We let them in, then punish them for coming onboard. Why not raise the licensing and ownership bar and keep them out in the first place, so that they don’t go through this agony and loss of privilege? Because we want to be seen to be inclusive? Because we are all sadists at heart? Or because we don’t want to pay for the public transport infrastructure that supports non-car-drivers?

Well it’s a thought, anyway. Another option is to make cars fail-safe, so they cannot exceed posted limits. The technology is certainly here, with GPS, RFID and car-based computer power and ‘fly-by-wire’ controls. It’s just a matter of political will. Who is prepared to take on the car makers who sell speed as well as function with their “hero” car marketing? Who will stand up and be prepared to save thousands, if not millions of lives, by simply rendering cars safe from law-abuse? Whoever takes this on will be called undemocratic for starters – the “freedom fighters” of this world will say that it’s not the car that breaks the law, it’s the driver. And haven’t we heard that line before?

Here’s one less pollutant to worry about – for now. From Sciencemag.com:

The 100,000 or so ships that make up the global commercial and military fleet collectively travel billions of vessel-miles every year, producing a large fraction of the pollution contributed by fossil fuel burning in the transportation sector. In addition to the direct radiative effects of their emissions, caused by the light-scattering properties of the particles themselves, aerosols from the exhaust plumes can produce thin lines of very low clouds in the marine boundary layer, an example of the aerosol indirect effect. It has been shown that the local effects of these clouds can be large, up to 100 W/m2 (for comparison, the average solar flux at the top of the atmosphere is about 340 W/m2), but how large an influence they exert on the global albedo has been an unresolved concern. Schreier et al. analyzed a full year of satellite data derived from ENVISAT AATSR (Environmental Satellite Advanced Along-Track Scanning Radiometer) in order to estimate the size of the radiative forcing caused by ship tracks. They found that, contrary to fears arising from previous global model estimates, the global annual mean radiative forcing from ship tracks was small, 0.4 to 0.6 mW/m2, and negligible compared to estimates of total net anthropogenic radiative forcing, 0.6 to 2.4 W/m2. Thus, it seems that ship tracks are too inconsequential to affect the rate of anthropogenic global warming.

It seems like a big one to wipe of the list, but it’s just one of many “big ones”. Just off the top of my head, how about (in no particular order):

1. Jet exhaust at altitude
2. Jet-related contrail formation at altitude
3. All fossil fuel exhausts at any altitude
4. Methane release from garbage
5. Methane release from cows
6. Carbon release from land clearing
7. Carbon release from intentional fires
8. Carbon release from unintentional fires
9. Diesel particulates
10. Wood stove and wood heater particulates and carbon release.

Here’s a list, for starters… anyone reckon any of this represents a valid, logical and reasoned argument for speeding?

1. I’m in a hurry
2. I was overtaking
3. I’m rich
4. It’s my right
5. It’s a democracy
6. I’m a good driver
7. I don’t want to hold up traffic
8. I don’t get caught anyway, so what’s the problem?
9. If I do get caught I just pay the fine, it’s like a toll not a punishment
10. It’s revenue raising (see below for police conspiracies against me)
11. What harm can I do by speeding?
12. Everyone does it
13. Fuel’s so cheap, I can do it without real cost
14. Breaking the law gives me a buzz
15. I like to go fast, it feels good
16. My mates told me to
17. Sometimes you have to speed to avoid an accident
18. I wasn’t watching the speedo
19. It’s dangerous to watch the speedo
20. I was on the phone
21. I was distracted
22. I missed the sign
23. There are too many signs, it’s their fault
24. This car’s too quiet
25. This car’s too powerful (ie blame GM, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, Hyundai, whoever, but not me)
26. The laws are too complicated
27. The police were hiding, I shouldn’t have been caught (see below for police conspiracies against me)
28. You should catch the bad drivers who get in my way and stop writing this trash (I just can’t stop writing this trash!)
29. I’m not well, I just can’t stop doing it
30. It’s my medication (hey, that’s not a bad one)
31. They are out to get me and it’s all set up to trap me, so I’ll let them get me anyway (perhaps it’s the medication)
32. The police are revenue raising and forced me to speed past their cunningly disguised traps (conspiracy theory 1)
33. The police are revenue raising and out to get me, no matter what I do, so what the heck (2)
34. The police are revenue raising and have poorly calibrated measuring instruments, so how do they know anyway? (3)
35. I was only just over the limit, that’s not speeding (see also ‘everyone does it’) (4)
36. The law is an ass.

It’s a side issue to my pet subject of global warming, or to society generally, but one I find curiously unexplored in the media. It’s treated as a joke, a laugh, something of little consequence rather than a clear case of inadequate lawmaking and ongoing civil disobedience. It’s the question of why we let virtually anyone drive, and then let them do practically anything once they are driving. Yes, we expect them to keep to the left or right, and to not actually hit anyone else (but they do). But generally we just let them go off and do what they like within some very broad guidelines. However the road laws are indeed law, and laws are meant to be respected. So why do we let people hit each other, to speed, to park wherever they like, fail to indicate, fail to stop at stop lights and stop signs, and often to just disregard the rules of the road? Why is that?
Do you disagree? Did you just cop a speeding ticket and are indignant about it? Well being caught may hurt for a short while but honestly you have been getting away with it for years, haven’t you? What did you expect? A public service medal? Most people simply get away with it, most of the time. More than likely you have been ‘getting away with it’ for years yourself and have habituated speeding or other sloppy habits. Just check out any public street, and watch the lawbreakers as they zoom past or park haphazardly. OK, so it’s not that I am advocating a police state, and yes, road rules like other laws are also there to be challenged, but the challenges have to be scrutinised and pass muster on a broader community level, surely. So why do we treat core safety issues like speeding, that is disobeying the posted speed limit, so lightly? Now if a transport professional breaks a reasonable and related law they are reprimanded, punished and disciplined until they conform. And the media comes down on them like a ton (or perhaps tonne) of bricks if they don’t. Whether it’s a airline pilot, a train driver or a bus driver, they can expect to be brought into line, generally, and swiftly. And certainly not let off lightly like it doesn’t really matter. Yet the unprofessional driver is let loose, largely to just get on with it. If they get caught and fined it’s often portrayed in the media as ‘revenue raising’ and written off as something that we all do and, well, ‘what the heck’. Only if they are elderly (and by definition doddery and therefore a danger to us all) or young (and surely inexperienced, menacing hoons, and thus also dangers to us all) are they castigated on a regular basis. But why is it so, and should we let it be, or should we actually do something about it?
Well the answer’s obvious, and it comes in 2 parts. Firstly we can’t afford to police the entirety of the wide open road. It’s too broad, with too many miscreants out there to catch them all, all of the time. Secondly we’ve created a (western) world where we need to travel by car. Shops are often too far away to walk, jobs are no longer confined to ‘traditional’ working hours and are scattered about, and public transport is often patchy at best. So economics alone dictates that we make cars simple, cheap, easy to use and available to all who need them. And as a consequence we go lightly on both driver qualifications and reprimands for driver ‘infringements’. If we applied tougher rules, or even applied our existing rules in a diligent manner then we’d actually remove that accessibility for a large number of people and hurt them socially and economically, and as a corollary hurt the politicians who act on our behalf. If they hurt the number of people they’d have to hurt to fix the problem they’d simply get voted out. Cars have been democratized, it’s effectively enshrined as a freedom.
We could try education. Or praise rather than punishment. And we could move the punishment closer in time and space to the actual law-breaking, but this is just the trimmings. Fact is that most people choose to break these laws, knowing the consequences, or the lack thereof. There’s a disconnect here, between what we see as unacceptable when it happens to us, and how we perceive our own actions when we ourselves are breaking the rules. I’ll prattle on some more, later.

Personality is such a unique thing, so individual. It’s both an inner force that shapes and filters our thoughts and actions and an outer shield that we project to identify ourselves to others and to protect our inner self from harm. It’s our essence, isn’t it? If we feel something we feel it via our perception filters, which are embedded in our personality. If we do something we do it in alignment with who we are and how we think. If we meet and greet someone we project our personality onto our outer skin, or hide it from harm if we don’t wish to expose ourselves. How we make those decisions, whether to be open or closed, jolly or sombre, deep or shallow, is very much up to us, our past experiences and our reaction to the environment around us at the time. If we step outside our skins to act out a fantasy, or shift our perceptions or behaviours to fit into social or work situations, that’s entirely within our control. We may have some ingrained beliefs and “default” options to fall back on but we are powerfully human and mutable to suit the need. You need to be tough-minded to do a job, so you do it. You don’t sit there thinking ‘I’m an introvert and I can’t do this’. Well maybe you do. Point is, only you know what you are thinking.
Unless of course you believe in personality tests. Or believe that they are meaningful, or that they tell you something useful. Personality tests are meant to map you to a fixed number of “qualities” and degrees of belonging within each quality. It is of course labelling – and again it’s very human to want to do this – and it’s tempting to believe that in answering a multitude of carefully selected questions we will be lured into revealing our inner natures, our core drivers. Now I love these tests, I really do. They are great fun. And sometimes I get those “oooh-ahhh” moments when I think yes, it really is me. It really is. But then I get the same feelings from a good astrology reading. Where lies the truth?

I think the jury is still out. It hasn’t been sufficiently demonstrated that personality can be measured, or deduced from cunning questions. We can’t even be utterly sure that you and I are reading the same meanings into the same questions, or that we have the same truthful intent when answering. And we certainly can’t reliably predict our behaviours, let alone our work performance, from our personality assessment. We actually have powerful, possibly unique human thinking processes that let us adapt ourselves to suit the need. That’s why we are at the top of the food chain, not down the bottom with only pre-written reactive programs to help us find food and survive.
Which is why I get the creeps when I read stuff like this: “They thought he was a surface guy. They didn’t think he was deep enough to be the ceo,” says Carlick. But he aced the Myers-Briggs personality test they made him take, and he became chief in February 2004″. Oh please. Is it possible to “ace” the MBTI? I think the journalist in question means that the personality type indicated by the test results is strongly correlated with being a CEO. That is to say that some brilliant researchers somewhere have done a large number of MBTI assessments on many CEOs and have found a statistically powerful connection between certain personality types and those that occupy the top job. Hopefully these same researchers have dug deeper and found that this correlation holds true for successful CEOs and that there’s some defining characteristic that sets them apart from unsuccessful CEOs. Otherwise you may just be repeating the same hiring patterns of the past, irrespective of performance outcomes. And proponents will say exactly that, that they have correlated MBTI results with job roles and successful behaviours. If so, where’s that compelling data? I’ve looked, it’s just not there.
And how do you know for sure what’s going on inside someone’s mind when they complete the MBTI? What if they are lying? And are good at it?
And why don’t we all just give up, accept our labelling and go do what “they” tell us we would be good at? Is my blood boiling? You bet!
Of course there’s a postscript. Having “aced” the MBTI the CEO in question went on to “rename the company Intermix, nixed half a dozen failing businesses and gave MySpace Chief Chris DeWolfe free rein and more resources. MySpace grew from 1,000,000 members to 24 million by October 2005, when Rosenblatt sold Intermix to Fox for $650 million–an eightfold increase from the company’s value on day he arrived. Rosenblatt walked off with $23 million.” Well that proves it, doesn’t it?

“Car! Car! Car!” He’s done it seemingly spontaneously – “car” came hot on the heels of “dad”, “mum” and “that” in his now 18 month-old vocabulary. Neither of our girls took to the car with such delight and obvious enthusiasm, so maybe (on this small sample) it’s genetic? It wouldn’t surprise me if it is, as cars are basically a male-centric invention and should appeal, I would happily assert, to boys more than girls. If you agree there’s a sex-difference in how our brains are wired, of course, then this is but one expression of that.

So please accept that to be the case, or not. In any event most of our Western world has been shaped – driven even – by men, not women, so we have an immediate imbalance in how we address the world. We have sized and shaped our manufactured world around what fits the male taste and then we males have complained bitterly when women generally fail either to appreciate or to fully comprehend the marvelousness of it all. Look at map reading for instance. Men come up with the concept and then laugh at those who don’t quite so naturally grasp the visio-spatial relationship between a 2-D map and the 3-D (plus time) real world. Of course some men also have a problem with maps, but they often hide that fact and join in the laughter when a woman gets the map reading wrong. OK, I generalize, but it’s called setting someone up for failure and “we” have done it over and over again, be it intentionally or not.

Whilst all of that is percolating through my brain I was asked by a market research firm just how excited I was about some new styles of Coca-Cola packaging. Whoopee. Actually it’s not the sort of thing I get excited about I’m afraid. Like toilet paper it has its uses but it’s not a big part of my day. Actually toilet paper has far more of a daily impact on me than Coca Cola or any other soft-drink. And I guess most people are like me – we may have our tastes and preferences but we don’t actually get too passionate about daily necessities or trivial wants. I may be wrong, I certainly prefer Coke over Pepsi, but it’s not at the forefront of my thinking, either.
But in this modern world we do get passionate about some things, and often they are not clearly so connected with our real needs but more with unreal wants. Cars again spring to mind. Why do people – mostly men – get passionate about cars? Sure they matter, but not so much that you have to polish and protect them like some prized rare religious artefact. Cars seem to tap into something that mere transport never could. Walking doesn’t rise above more than ‘useful’ and an occasional past-time for most people, yet many car-owners take every aspect of their transportation device and worship it. We even invent tribal passions about cars where none logically should exist. We become fiercely loyal to GM or Ford, or Alfa Romeo or Ferrari, or whatever brand we choose – regardless that it really doesn’t matter. The differences are so slight between the comparative utility of these same-type vehicles that it should really matter which one we buy. They all work, so why pay a premium? Oh, status you say?
OK, so cars are exciting in a way that just going for a walk isn’t. There’s no status in walking, although it looks healthy it’s usually frowned upon and made difficult by poor footpaths and inconsiderate car drivers charging around trying to hit pedestrians. But cars have style, substance and make noise in a way that attracts attention – if only so we get out of the way before we get hit. And we have managed somehow to drive the car’s market penetration on the back not just of utility but indeed of that tribalism and deep inner want to both fit in and show off. Again the automobile makers just love this, that buyers not just select their purchase on the basis of utility and value but that they “stick” to a brand and continue to feed them money. Indeed more money if they can get that “status” thing happening.

Which brings me back to this game of life and the imperfection of it all. I think I’ll go for a walk.