Get Rich U. : There are no walls between Stanford and Silicon Valley.  This article in the New Yorker is full of fascinating information, but the thing that interested me immediately was toward the end when author Ken Auletta begins addressing the issue of “distance education”, the emergence of online learning. It seems that online learning is being perceived by some in the administration at Stanford University as a looming threat to the University’s on campus traditions. A recent experiment in online courses was a surprising success, but the credit went mostly to the professor who created the courses, not the University. Now that professor has left Stanford to embark on an education regimen all his own as a private educator. Many other faculty are seeing the possibilities in this, and there is a rising interest in professors as “private contractors”.

Up until now, the idea of forward-thinking technology has worked in Stanford’s favor. They are, after all, the birthplace of much of Silicon Valley’s imaginative financial success, and are still closely tied to many of them. The philosophical dictum, “digital disruption is normal, and even desirable,” was fully embraced by the University. “It was commonly believed that traditional companies and services get disrupted because they are inefficient and costly,” according to Auletta. “But online education might also disrupt everything that distinguishes Stanford,” he adds. Suddenly, the disruption of the “old order” seems less attractive.

The article ends with a quote from John L. Hennessy, the president of Stanford who, until now, fully embraced the idea of “digital disruption.” Suddenly he sees Stanford as being vulnerable to, and even threatened by, digital innovation just as newspapers, the music companies, publishing, and much of traditional media has been during the last fifteen years. It doesn’t feel so good when the digital disruption is focused on your own back yard. “There’s a tsunami coming,” Hennessy is quoted as saying. And indeed there is.

The second article of interest is “Entrepreneurs’ New Nightmare: The Invasion of the Startup Snatchers.” It seems that Silicon Valley startups are being cloned and copied and outmaneuvered by unscrupulous “knock-off” artists, just as if their digital creations were a Prada purse knock-off sold on the streets of the major cities of the world. Copycat startups are holding the companies they are cloning hostage to their own identities. Again, suddenly (again), Silicon Valley is being set on its ear by the same kind of “innovation” that they have so long held as their birthright to upend traditional media. Problems ahead. Now copyrights and “rules” seem like a good idea.

The third article of interest: “These Islands Aren’t Just a Shelter from Taxes” appeared in today’s New York Times op ed pages. It was written by Robert M. Morgenthau the Manhattan district attorney from thirty-four years. It’s a short article with some block buster quotable quotes: “The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 2008 [note the date] estimated that at least $5 trillion to 7 trillion was sheltered in offshore juristictions like the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Gibraltar, Bermuda and the Bahamas”.  And, “Consider the British Virgin Islands, home to about 30,000 people and 475,000 companies.” And, “Where there is no transparency, there can be no oversight.” And, “When companies use secrecy juristictions to commit fraud or to evade sanctions, legal remedies may come as cold comfort.”

Read this short op ed piece if you want to see how these three articles are tied together even further. None of these things happen in isolation.

In the UK and the EU privacy issues vis-à-vis the Internet were a concern early on. Internet users in the U.S. have come to the battle far later than the rest of the world, but now that is changing. Americans consistently list privacy, specifically Internet privacy, as one of their main issues of concern in many recent polls, and now there is far more national discussion about it. But, in terms of the speed with which things happen in the digital world, Americans have come to the issue late in the game.

I’ll write more about this in the months to come, because it is a major theme element in my upcoming novels. (And more about those soon, too.)

Here are links to the last two articles in The Battle for the Internet series. “Me and my data: how much do the internet giants really know?”, and “How to Download Your Data from Google and Facebook”. Read the article and then follow through with downloading your data. It may rattle you. And it should.

Good luck.

The first article deals with the quirky confusions of the puzzle that is the adolescent mind.  What’s Wrong with the Teenage Mind? , written by Allison Gopnik, professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, appeared in the Wall Street Journal in January of this year. As we all know, adolescence has always been trouble, and now, for reasons that are not altogether understood, puberty is kicking in at an earlier and earlier age, causing even more confusion for every one. Dr. Gopnik discusses how this new phenomenon is changing the way we think of the developing human mind. It’s a thoughtful article, and if your life touches the life of an adolescent in any way, you’ll want to read this.

The second article was the cover story in the New York Times Magazine this past Sunday. How Companies Learn Your Secrets by Charles Duhigg, discusses what has now become a common practice of almost all major consumer related businesses from grocers to investment bankers (and, though he didn’t say it, intelligence services as well). That is, the practice of employing the science of “predictive analytics” to cunsumer psychology.  This is the “golden age” of behavioral research. Never before in history have so many known so much about so many. We can thank the new digital age for that last odd sentence. There are few secrets anymore, and anyone who believes their lives are “private” in the sense that we understood it twenty years ago, are badly misinformed. But Duhigg’s article discusses one particular aspect of our human nature that is becoming increasingly understood–and exploited–by all of those in this consumer obsessed society who want to sell us something: habit. You’ll probably be astonished to learn that “habits, rather than conscious decision-making, shape 45 percent of the choices we make every day.” And that statistical fact contains a treasure trove of information for everyone who wants something from you and me…for whatever reason…for good or ill. As always, it’s a blade that cuts both way.

Both articles discuss how behavior actually shapes our brains. To say that we are “hard-wired” to be a certain way is a vast overstatement. It’s true that habit is a predominate driver of the way we live our lives, but the good news is that it doesn’t have to be. In fact the human brain is enormously sensitive and responsive. Our social and cultural life shapes our biology. If we learn that certain habits are detrimental to us, then we can change the way we live, and thereby change our habits, and thereby change our lives. Self awareness is the first step in becoming the captain of our own destiny.

A Push for Privacy in the Wake of the Carrier IQ Controversy

by Josh Levy

Remember Carrier IQ, the company that makes the secret spying software that’s installed on more than 140 million phones? You know, the software that can record our most sensitive personal data?

Cellphone companies including AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile use Carrier IQ to track what smartphone users are doing on their phones, but it’s unclear what data is being tracked and what is being done with that information. While both these companies and Carrier IQ claim they want our most sensitive information only to diagnose hardware and software problems, the public — and some members of Congress — still have questions about what, exactly, this powerful software can do.

Thanks in part to the 22,000 people who joined Free Press’ call for a congressional investigation, some of those questions are closer to being answered and mobile users are closer to being protected.

The protection comes in the form of a bill from Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey. Markey released a draft of a bill called the “Mobile Device Privacy Act” that would require phone companies to disclose to users just what is being done with all of their data. If the bill passes, an opt-out provision would go into effect a year later and would require companies to allow users to opt out of data-collection schemes like the one developed by Carrier IQ.

The second bit of good news is a request from Reps. G.K. Butterfield, Diana DeGette and Henry Waxman to hold a committee hearing on Carrier IQ and consumer privacy. “There continue to be many unanswered questions about the handling of this data and the extent to which its collection, analysis and transmission pose legitimate privacy concerns for the American public,” they wrote.

It’s not OK for companies to collect or sell our data under a veil of secrecy. Rep. Markey’s bill and the call for a hearing will help stop the practice. Let’s hope both items move forward.

This is a website to love…The Sartorialist…watch this great video clip (and enjoy the background music): Lunch for 25.

Sunday’s New York Times carried an opinion article about the increased use of armed drones and Presidential war powers…and the decreased influence of Congress regarding both. Peter Singer, Director of the 21^st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution, and author of “Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict of the 21^st Century”, considers how the continued technological advancements in unmanned weaponry (robotics), and the President’s willingness to use those weapons, is gradually unlinking the traditional and deep bonds between Americans and their wars.

Today America has about 18,000 “unmanned aerial systems”, popularly called drones. Last year those drones carried out hundreds of strikes (overt and covert) in six countries. These strikes have killed hundreds of people in countries with whom we are not in a “state of war”. What bothers Singer is how technology is short-circuiting the decision-making process “for what used to be the most important choice a democracy could make. Something that would have previously been viewed as a war is simply not being treated like a war.”

When technologies develop to the point that they remove humans from the battlefield, we enter a “new normal” for war. The new standard for establishing what used to be considered an act of war, is that presidents  need to seek approval only for operations that send people into harm’s way…not for those that involve waging war by other means.

The United States has carried out more than 300 unmanned system strikes in Pakistan since 2004, killing an estimated average of 2,000+ combatants and civilians (New America Foundation). “Yet the Pakistan operation has never been debated in Congress; more than seven years after it began, there has not even been a single vote for or against it.” Having armed drones means that we can now kill other people without fear that our own sons and daughters will be killed in the process. This “convenience” removes one of the last political barriers to war. We no longer have a draft. We no longer declare war (the last time we declared war on another country was 1942). We don’t buy war bonds, or pay war taxes anymore.  “During World War II, 85 million Americans purchased war bonds that brought the government $185 billion; in the last decade, we bought none and instead gave the richest 5 percent of Americans a tax break.”

We no longer treat the weighty matters of war and peace the same way.

“Without any actual political debate,” Singer writes, “we have set an enormous precedent, blurring the civilian and military roles in war and circumventing the Constitution’s mandate for authorizing it. Freeing the executive branch to act as it chooses may be appealing to some now, but many future scenarios will be less clear-cut. And each political party will very likely have a different view, depending on who is in the White House…..These days when it comes to authorizing war, Congress generally sits there silently, except for the occasional clapping. And we do the same at home.”

Singer’s argument is a thoughtful and provocative one. This is a subject that we should not treat as an abstract consideration just because we are not directly involved. It is precisely because we are not directly involved that we should take it seriously. We’ve never walked in these shoes before, and we need to consider very carefully the path we’re taking, and the precedents we are setting.

On the other hand, over the years I’ve often been struck by the number of high achievers (fill in your favorite prestigious professions here) who are voracious novel readers. When I first began to take note of this, shortly after I began writing fiction, I wondered how it was that their world so easily wandered into mine, while mine seemed so seldom to cross over into theirs. And I was curious what this high-achieving executive, or banker, or lawyer, or CEO, “got” out of reading novels. I had my own intuitions about this, and had always assumed that a person who habitually read fiction was unusually curious and, in their own way, creative.

Then I came across a fascinating article in a recent issue of the Scientific American Mind, that sheds a lot light on the nature of fiction reading. Keith Oatley, professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the university of Toronto and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, published an article examining recent research that shows that curling up with a good novel or collection of short stories, actually improves our social skills by helping us better understand other human beings. It seems that …“the process of entering imagined worlds of fiction builds empathy and improves your ability to take another person’s point of view…it is actually an exercise in human interaction.”

In Professor Oatley’s article, he cites numerous facts established in years of scientific experiments about the relationship between reading fiction and improved emotion perception and social cognition. Here are some bullet points from the article:

• the more fiction people read, the better they were at perceiving emotion in the eyes and…correctly interpreting social cues

• persons who read fiction performed better on tests evaluating both analytic and social reasoning

• reading fiction improves one’s ability to make mental models of others, known as theory-of-mind attributes…the ability to take the perspectives of other people, to make mental models of others, and to understand that someone else might have beliefs and intentions that are different from one’s own,

• people who read predominately fiction were less likely to be lonely and had more social support than people who were largely nonfiction readers

Using a functional MRI scanner scientists found that a reader’s brain responds to fictional characters and their actions in exactly the same way the reader’s brain would respond if the reader himself were actually doing what the character was doing. Learning to experience “life” from someone else’s point of view, enabling people to think and feel in new ways, increases a person’s empathy and understanding of those with whom we interact.

Fiction, it seems is not so much a solitary action of frittering away one’s time, as it is a social interaction which enables us to better understand our fellow man, and through him, ourselves.

Imagination is, indeed, the eye of the soul.