Lessons from Google Reader

On March 30, 2009, The Atlantic published an article titled "The Quiet Coup," written by Simon Johnson. Almost immediately, Andrew Sullivan, a blogger at The Atlantic Online posted a reader's response on his blog. As well on the same day, Dani Rodrik, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, posted his thoughts on the article. A slew of comments and other blog posts quickly followed.

I found out about Simon Johnson's article because I subscribe to Rodrik's blog and saw a bunch of related items being shared by friends who also use Google Reader. On April 2, David Brooks published his two cents in his NYTimes column. By the time Brooks came out with his op-ed piece, I had read a half dozen opinions about "The Quiet Coup," and it was pretty tough to put a substantively different spin on what had already been written by premier economists who participate in the blogosphere.

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This one a little bit closer to home. On February 2, CleanTechnica.com published a piece about how Andres Pacheco and Alex Bell, two engineering students from Swarthmore, had built a hydrogen fuel cell-powered motorcycle for their senior project. LivingtheAmericanGreen.org followed suit with a post on February 17 and a Wired.com blog covered the engineering project once again on March 3. Yesterday, the Discovery Channel's Daily Planet put out a video clip featuring interviews with Pacheco and Bell and the motorcycle crawling along Swarthmore pathways.

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So, as I spend more and more time on Google Reader, here are a couple of things that have struck me:

1) Redundancy. As can be seen from above, there is a lot of redundancy in Internet news coverage, and it becomes especially clear when using Google Reader. A friend of mine calls this "echo."

2) The line between traditional media sources (print journalism and TV production) and the Internet blogosphere definitely blurs. Traditional media moves at geriatric speed in comparison to the hordes of freelance writers out there. Note that the Discovery Channel covered the Swarthmore engineers a good two months after CleanTechnica.com caught wind of the story. The claim is that traditional media comes out on top in terms of quality and thoughtfulness, but that notion is pretty quickly challenged when you see the likes of Dani Rodrik or Timothy Burke blogging frequently.

3) What do you do with the idea of authorship? Think of a million students crammed into a single classroom and think of the voices in that classroom. Individual voices inevitably get drowned out in a general din. Who said what first? Can you tell the difference between the original and the echo? I must say: this idea of echo makes me very gun-shy when it comes to posting.

4) My time spent on Google Reader has definitely, definitely crowded out my other reading, and I don't feel good about this shift. At Swarthmore, it's common and often fashionable to complain about the insularity of the campus and how bubble-like it is. I'm beginning to view "the bubble" and "the ivory tower" differently. To constantly be at the cusp of engagement with the world through the Internet and the blogosphere...to always be reading words that are no more than a day old...I need respite from it all. To be sure, I am a neophyte in the blogging world and I feel a bit like a newborn babe when it comes to everything that is happening right at this moment. But this sense of novelty I enjoy and want to preserve. It comes from the four years I spent hidden away between library stacks and it enables me to approach all that is now critically.

I need to crawl back in bed with The Iliad, words that have rung true for centuries. Otherwise, I fear I will be swept away in the sea of voices, lost forever.

Bay Area Culture

A couple of weekends ago, I had a college friend come visit me here in San Francisco. On one of the afternoons that he was here, we walked pretty aimlessly around the city but eventually went to hang out by City Lights Bookstore in North Beach. After perusing the eclectic titles shown in the window display, we made our way towards Vesuvio, which is famous for having been a hangout spot for a lot of the Beat writers, including Kerouac and Ginsberg. Fittingly, the alleyway that separates City Lights and Vesuvio is named Jack Kerouac Alley. Well, in Jack Kerouac Alley, there was a street performer sitting up against the wall plucking away on his guitar a Dylan song and singing plaintively. Next to him, there was a group of four to five guys and girls dancing. Bodies and limbs were being flung every which way, there was a lot of stomping and stumbling as it was obviously free-form interpretive dance. One of the dancers saw that we were admiring the whole scene and beckoned us to join. He took a couple of steps towards us, stopped a second and then said, with conspiracy in his voice, "Right here. This is the energy that created the universe." We walked into Vesuvio and nursed a couple rounds of Anchor Steam beer.

Fertile Ground

Unemployment is not a good thing. I don't think anyone will tell you otherwise. Certainly, as we hear consecutive updates about job losses and the unemployment rate creeping higher and higher, nobody is rejoicing.

Last week, though, The Economist Magazine published a special report on entrepreneurship that I found to be uplifting. With the kind of economy we have right now, a lot of people are losing their jobs through no fault of their own, and a lot of recent graduates are struggling to get their first jobs as well. Not only that, there are tons of people who find themselves underemployed, working at jobs that don't fully utilize their potential. A colleague of mine recently told me a story about a lawyer friend working shifts at a gas station. In economics-speak, we might call all this "labor displacement." It isn't that the growing hordes of the jobless are unemployable or lazy or stupid, it is just that the ground beneath the economy as we know it is shifting.

How to put a positive spin on this dismal reality? Well, with so much displaced labor, there has got to be something that is now in surplus. But what is it? For one thing, there is a lot of excess, underutilized talent floating around. And when you get a lot of free-floating, talented individuals from just about every industry, a likely byproduct is the creative recombination of skills into something novel, something innovative. All of the brainpower that has recently been laid off, after it has exhausted the thrill of severance pay and newfound freedom, well, it has to find something new to feed upon. I find this not only highly comforting but also greatly exciting. High unemployment rate = fertile ground for entrepreneurship! It's just like science! (That's why I used the "equal" sign.)

Job

I want a job with IBM, doing this. But how do I get it?

Photo Blog

I recently reconnected with an old high school friend and he showed me his photo blog. I find it very impressive, and I find the wordpress formatting to be very flattering for the photos. Now I've got to get my act together and take some pictures.

But check it out here. Maybe you'll recognize some neighborhoods.

Spring Forward, the (Tragedy) of Suburbia

In Quito, there wasn't much in the way of seasons. Total daylight varied by maybe forty-five minutes over the course of the year. There was a rainy season to be sure and a dry season as well. But four, well-defined seasons? Forget about it.

Now that I live at a higher latitude, things are a bit different. The days are lengthening noticeably. The golden sun dips into the ocean progressively later each day. Freezing cold mornings, blue skies, warm days, my goodness! it's spring! and what a feeling! What does springtime conjure up in my mind?

Lazy afternoons spent soaking up the sun on Parrish Beach... But more than that, with a Proustian bent, I remember whizzing down hills on a bike in the neighborhood park in Denver suburbs, breathing pungently fresh air mixed in with the occasional gnat, breezing by cattails that lined the creeks streaming by. I remember rollerblading, playing street hockey in the cul-de-sac only a couple blocks away from home, collapsing onto a friend's lawn in exhaustion and being overtaken by the itchiness of rolling around in grass. I remember throwing tennis balls against the stone facade of my house, diving to snag erratic rebounds so that I could play baseball like the Big Cat, Andres Galaragga.

What is it about these pleasant childhood memories spent outdoors in springtime air? They have such a suburban hue, or stench, depending on how you look at it. Subsidized by cheap energy and the interstate highway system. My nostalgia for life in Denver 'burbs, though, is not tinged with any sense of guilt. Hell, I think I'd still like some day to raise kids in the kind of safe neighborhood in which I grew up. I want it all. I want to tread lightly on the environment, I want all the material goods that come from industrial development, I want the safety and sense of space that comes from living in a suburban neighborhood...

Ahhh...springtime!

Engineering Bias: a Transaction Cost?

It's very tempting to view today's energy problem as essentially an engineering problem. A quick scan through popular media turns up all sorts of reporting about the promise of new devices that will help us reduce our energy consumption and thus both our environmental footprint and our dependence on foreign oil. On the supply side, we hear about the need to invest in solar and wind power, or just more efficient, cleaner methods of extracting energy. On the demand side, we hear about pushing for fuel efficiency in vehicles, energy efficiency in our buildings and everyday appliances. These are all good things, positive developments to get excited about. But the one thing that such "solutions" have in common is an engineering perspective, and I worry about this engineering bias.

For one thing, viewing the energy problem in this way allows the layperson to deflect personal responsibility. Climate change? Dependence on foreign oil? Air pollution? These are problems for engineers to solve, one might say. Such a deflection of personal responsibility dictates business-as-usual for all non-engineers. That kind of mentality is worrying when there are demonstrated gains to be had in human behavioral changes.

Also, single-minded focus on engineering solutions crowds out more systematic ways of thinking. Gains in energy efficiency do not have to come at the level of devices. A couple of weeks ago, I attended a lecture delivered by a PhD student from Stanford's Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency. The student's research related to CDMs (Clean Development Mechanisms), which are institutionalized methods for industrialized nations to curb their own environmental footprint by offsetting carbon emmissions more cost-effectively in developing countries. The student observed that transportation systems are being overlooked as an offsetting mechanism and proceeded to analyze the cause of this prejudice. Turns out that the panel that is responsible for approving CDMs is staffed by engineers. It also turns out that it's much harder to quantify to the satisfaction of an engineer's standards the carbon offsets that result from developing a transportation system. (Warning: I am definitely butchering the nuances of the research and the empirical analysis of the causal relations, but this is my take on the talk.) When you take into account these things, it begins to make sense why a panel of engineers might overlook systematic improvements in favor of device-level projects. The idea behind CDMs is to provide an efficient platform for industrialized nations to reduce carbon emissions, but it appears that an engineering bias presents a significant transaction cost that hinders the program's cost-efficiency.

So what big systems-level improvements might we be overlooking right now? Well, this is a thought piece, so I am just going to throw some ideas out there. In addition to transportation systems, I think that the energy-intensity of agriculture needs to be looked at more systematically. And I think policymakers need to think more seriously about reversing urban sprawl and stepping up urban revitalization.