Reihan Salan points out on the revamped group blog the American Scene that the noted economic historian and analyst Robert Fogel has just issued some quite optimistic predictions about China's economic prospects. In a draft article, Fogel argues that China's economic output in 2040 will reach $123 trillion, or three times the output of the entire world in 2000. By 2040, China will still lag the United States, but it will have left India and Europe in the dust.
In other words, the world's most populous nation will grow "from a poor country in 2000 to a superrich country in 2040." The following speculative figures give a sense of how the world's economic power centers could shift: The European market (meaning the countries now in the EU) will grow by roughly 60 percent. The United States market will grow by 300 percent or so. The Indian market, meanwhile, will balloon by some 1,400 percent, and China's by 2,400 percent. (As of yet, the article is available only to subscribers to the working-papers service of the National Bureau of Economic Research.)
Fogel imagines that the English language may still dominate in 2040, but we could see "an explosion of business managers in the West who can speak Mandarin."
Why so bullish on China? For one thing, China's leaders, the University of Chicago business-school professor says, have stressed education more than any other politicians in the world, including ours. From 1998 to 2002 enrollment in Chinese colleges grew by 165 percent. (India, on the other hand, is dogged by mass illiteracy, despite excellent universities.) China has also been remarkably effective at shifting workers from agriculture into industry.
Skeptics of Chinese growth cite such negatives as environmental recklessness, the rigid thinking inherent in a one-party system, looming social unrest, and a stifling lack of freedom of expression. But Fogel says it's crucial to grasp that the Chinese Communists "are aware of" these problems and working to fix them.
Isn't that last argument a bit curious -- sort of like saying, "No worries: the king is well aware of the drawbacks of a monarchy"? (For a much more skeptical take on China than Fogel's, check out Tyler Cowen's comments at Marginal Revolution.)
In any case, Fogel says that the Communist Party is distributing power to the provinces, tapping the expertise of free-market-minded thinkers, and laboring to reduce inequality. And India, with its Hindu-Muslim split and caste system, is far more likely to explode than China, he thinks.
"The gradual loosening of controls on expression in China is likely to continue," Fogel predicts. And if it doesn't? Fogel says China will still be an economic super-tiger -- eclipsing Europe, if not the United States.
Idly language-linking here and there, I recently discovered that the most famous punctuation book of all time has not just a website but also an interactive quiz. Naturally, I couldn't resist.
It's only 12 questions, the first six on apostrophes and as straightforward as apostrophe questions can be. You click to add punctuation, as needed, to expressions like "the children's hands" and "four yards' worth."
The next six, on commas, are more complicated. "Stop, or I'll scream"? The quiz demands the comma, but does it really belong in that short, urgent command? When I check the book, I see the problem: Truss thinks "Stop" is an interjection, like "blimey" or "golly" or "heh-heh." But it's not -- it's a verb. And in a short compound sentence like "Stop or I'll scream," that comma is absolutely optional.
Then there's this puzzler:
Of course there weren't enough tickets to go round.
The test wants a comma after "of course." But for me, the punctuation would depend on what that "of course" is meant to do. And in the sample sentence, it's very hard to guess. The "of course" might be emphatic:
"Of course there weren't enough tickets to go round -- he always forgets to buy me one."
Or it might be parenthetical:
Jane gave us six tickets. Of course, there weren't enough tickets to go round, but we knew not everyone would want to see the play.
In the first case, the comma digs a pothole in the rhythm; in the second one, it's natural.
Oddly enough, in the book this test sentence is used to illustrate "weak interruptions" (like "of course") that don't always require commas: Truss says she, and you, can go either way.
Skipping the commas may drop your score down to "75 percent stickler," but that doesn't mean you're not 100 percent correct.
Several news reports of Paris Hilton's post-jail interview with Larry King quoted her as saying she wanted to help keep women from going to jail repeatedly. "I know I can make a difference and hopefully stop this vicious circle," she said.
Wow, I thought -- Paris Hilton knows it's vicious circle, not vicious cycle? That's unexpected.
The term “vicious circle” was invented by logicians to describe a form of fallacious circular argument. . . . The phrase has been extended in popular usage to all kinds of self-exacerbating processes such as this: poor people often find themselves borrowing money to pay off their debts, but in the process create even more onerous debts which in their turn will need to be financed by further borrowing. Sensing vaguely that such destructive spirals are not closed loops, people have transmuted “vicious circle” into “vicious cycle.” The problem with this perfectly logical change is that a lot of people know what the original “correct” phrase was and are likely to scorn users of the new one.
Unfortunately, Hilton's "vicious circle" was even more surprising once I'd seen the interview. (I had to watch it -- tediously, in segments, on YouTube -- because other people's ears can't be trusted; in fact, one website did misquote Hilton's words as "vicious cycle.") King looked as if he might nod off, lulled by the soporific stream of inanities: "Everything happens for a reason," "everyone makes mistakes," "I'm an Aquarius."
I suppose there must be, somewhere in the vast crowd of the momentarily famous, a celebrity whose conversation is less spellbinding than poor Paris Hilton's. But at the moment, I'm finding it hard to imagine.
Here's a YouTube video people keep telling me to watch. It's half a millennium's worth of portraits of women, morphing into one another:
Funny -- as naturalism gives way to impressionism, expressionism, surrealism, cubism, and so forth, there's a rotoscoping effect, as though an image of a real woman's face had been cartooned over.
Earlier today, I said that what we need at least as much as Web 2.0 visionaries are Web 2.0 handypersons, helpful individuals interested in bringing those of us stranded helplessly in the real world into the virtual world of social networking, user-created content, and so forth.
Well, earlier this week Alberto Pepe, a doctoral student at UCLA's Graduate School of Information, did the opposite. He aggregated "emotional and temporal" data from a popular new-ish Web 2.0 website -- FutureMe.org, which allows users to send emails to their future selves, and also to share some of those emails with the general public -- and figured out a way to materialize it in the real world.
The visualization was performed using data from around 7,000 emails. Emails were sorted by time lag (the time between authoring and delivery of the email) and divided in 99 batches. For each batch, the general "mood" was computed based on the recurrence of selected keywords. Color was used to represent mood: four shades of air balloons, from light pink (sadder) to dark red (happier).
The balloons were installed at UCLA in a pattern representing "time lag across space." Sounds complicated, but looks beautiful:
The blogosphere is abuzz about an item published this week in Slate's "Human Nature" column: "Are burqas making Muslim women ill?." Slate points to a June 2007 article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition which suggests that conservative Muslim dress codes are causing vitamin D deficiency by depriving women of sunlight. In two studies of burqa-wearing Arab and East Indian women residing in the United Arab Emirates, researchers discovered that almost all of them were vitamin D deficient.
Among the many comments made about this study, I was particularly interested in one made by sometime Ideas contributor Jonah Lehrer. At his science blog Cortex, Lehrer notes that studies like this make him skeptical about reductionist evolutionary biology theories that would explain away all of our cultural practices as byproducts of natural selection. After all, writes Lehrer,
it's hard to construct a biologically rigorous theory of culture or religion that can explain why someone might willingly cloak themselves in a black covering (in an area dominated by hot deserts) and put themselves at high risk for a variety of serious illnesses caused by vitamin D deficiency.
I have a psychological, not biological, burqa theory of my own. In the mid-1940s, the psychologist Anna Freud described "identification with the aggressor" as a neurotic attempt to avoid punishment by internalizing the values of one's oppressor. It seems to me that Americans are so worried about Islamofascist terrorists that we're slowly turning ourselves into conservative Muslims. I've even got proof, torn from women's magazines that I've perused this year:
Michael Kors cashmere hooded top, in Vogue (4/07)
Ad for Born shoes in Elle (4/07)
Page 1 of "burkini" spread in Marie Claire (7/07)
Page 2 of "burkini" spread in Marie Claire (7/07)
Let me know what you think...
Thanks, Tom Nealon, for scanning the magazine pages for me!
Not long ago, the University of Chicago Press published a fascinating book, "From Counterculture to Cyberculture," which offered historical and cultural context for a phenomenon that most of us take for granted: the fact that "conversations about computers so quickly turn into conversations about idealized societies," as the Berkman Center's Ethan Zuckerman puts it.
"Alphaville"
The book's author, Stanford communications professor Fred Turner, points out that until the mid-1960s, countercultural utopian dreamers were terrified of computers, which they feared would eventually organize social life in a logical -- but inhuman, remorseless, totalitarian -- fashion. (Dystopian fictions on this topic that leap to mind include: Godard's "Alphaville" (1965); Vonnegut's first novel, "Player Piano" (1952); Dick's first short story, "Stability" (1947); and a 1967 "Star Trek" episode titled "A Taste of Armageddon.") Yet thanks in large part to ex-Merry Prankster Stewart Brand, who popularized cybernetic metaphors in his communalist Whole Earth Catalog, and who cofounded the WELL, an influential early online community, today it seems natural and inevitable to talk about networked computers and radical social progress in the same breath. How often have you heard that Web 2.0 technologies will -- one way or another -- empower the individual, restore community, overcome prejudice, revitalize democracy, and make us smarter and richer?
"A Taste of Armageddon"
In his excellent 1998 book "Techgnosis," independent scholar Erik Davis pointed out that computer networks have inspired media theorists and others to wax not merely utopian -- in 1969, for example, Marshall McLuhan told Playboy that computer networks held out the promise of creating "a technologically engendered state of universal understanding and unity" -- but apocalyptic. Not necessarily in a negative way: Davis suggests that apocalyptic thinking can "shatter the illusory sense that the world today is simply muddling on as it always has." Boston-based inventor and techno-visionary Ray Kurzweil, for example, is an apocalyptic thinker: He once told Ideas that human technological advancement follows the law of accelerating returns -- which means, among other things, that within the next few decades we'll be able to download our minds onto a computer, making us effectively immortal.
Kurzweil
OK, perhaps that's going too far: But even us sober-minded observers of Web 2.0 (websites and technologies that combine user-created content, social networking, and new publishing technologies like blogging, podcasts, and wikis) tend to believe that -- nowadays -- those of us who can get online are uniquely able to "resonate with like minds across the planet, mine rich veins of unexpected information and images, and respond to the frazzled chaos of life with constructive communication and a plethora of points of view," as Davis puts it.
The only problem, for many of us, is... we don't know how to do these amazing things. We visit the Internet like we visit New York: cautiously, following the exact same route every time. Our homepages, if we have homepages, are lame; we don't know how to blog or podcast; our browsers are out-of-date, plagued with viruses and spyware, and slow. What to do? Forget the Web 2.0 visionaries -- they're no help. What we need is a Web 2.0 handyman, the online equivalent of an omnicompetent and friendly next-door neighbor who's always willing to lend a hand with a stalled engine or carpentry project. I was fortunate enough to stumble across just such an individual a decade ago: Mark Frauenfelder.
Frauenfelder
Originally a mechanical engineer and illustrator, in 1988 Frauenfelder cofounded an attractive futurist-pop culture zine called bOING bOING, which urged "happy mutants" to have fun with technology. It's one of my favorite zines ever. Frauenfelder's enthusiasm was contagious: He ended up doing much the same thing as an editor at Wired (he was the founding editor of Wired Online) and as a Playboy columnist for most of the '90s. In 2000, Frauenfelder and friends launched a group blog called Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things, which is now one of the most popular blogs in the world, and a must-read for anyone trying to stay abreast of what's happening online. (He's also the editor of the Popular Mechanics-for-hackers magazine Make, among other things.) Now, Frauenfelder has published a guide to doing "anything and everything on the Internet -- better, faster, easier." Hallelujah!
Frauenfelder's "Rule the Web" includes tips on: starting a blog, getting word-of-mouth publicity for it, and following other blogs with an RSS reader; setting up a private wiki, joining an online social network that's right for you, and sharing digital photos; browsing the Web free from viruses, ads, and spyware; shopping and selling online; downloading music and videos; using the Internet to become more productive at work and at play; protecting and tuning up your computer and software; and much more.
The book was published earlier this month, and instead of browsing through it, I've been carefully reading it from the first page forward. Thanks to Frauenfelder, I've finally figured out how to add a message board to any website (via QuickTopic), find photos online that I can use for free (via Open Photo, Flickr, and Creative Commons), edit and retouch photos online (via Snipshot), find unlisted phone numbers (via Zabasearch), and more -- and that was just the first two chapters. Phew!
So will "Rule the Web" help empower the individual, restore community, overcome prejudice, revitalize democracy, and make us smarter and richer? Let's put it this way: It's much more likely that these things will happen if everybody reads Frauenfelder's book than if they don't.
PS: Hotshot media theorist Douglas Rushkoff is also a fan of "Rule the Web."
I praised Matthew Sharpe's brilliant, very funny post-apocalyptic novel "Jamestown" a while back. Now you can hear him reading from the book via this podcast.
One of the excerpts that Sharpe reads includes a particularly excellent line: "Some great, quaint, pre-Annihilation philosopher described the movement of history as thesis-antithesis-synthesis, whereas I've seen a lot more thesis-antithesis-steak knife-breadknife."
Hey, book review junkies -- good news! I know, I know, newspapers are downsizing and killing their book review sections at an alarming pace, these days. But there are still plenty of book reviews published every week in newspapers, magazines, and online. How to keep tabs on everything from the Atlanta Journal Constitution to Bookforum, Bookslut, and the Boston Globe to the Washington Post and Wilson Quarterly? Last month saw the launch of Critical Compendium, a website that takes care of that for you, by cherry-picking reviews from a few dozen English-language periodicals, and linking to them -- thereby offering "a daily dose of book reviews from around the world."
Today, for example, Critical Compendium links to reviews of: Saul Friedlander's "The Years of Extermination" in the New York Times, Pascal Richet's "A Natural History of Time" in the New York Sun, Mary Saums's novel "Thistle & Twigg" in the Nashville Scene, and "Steven Bach's "Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl" in Common Review.
Two ex-Bostonian artists, Laylah Ali (whose work is in the ICA) and Kanishka Raja, are included in a terrific-sounding exhibit at the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, in Virginia Beach, VA. The show, titled "Counterparts: Contemporary Painters and Their Influences," pairs artworks by Raja, Ali, and others with works by their favorite artists. Here are the matchups:
Laylah Ali + Ida Applebroog
Kevin Appel + Philip Guston
Judith Eisler + Richard Prince
Inka Essenhigh + Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Barnaby Furnas + Carroll Dunham
Laura Owens + Mary Heilmann
Kanishka Raja + Kerry James Marshall
George Rush + Fairfield Porter
Alas, Raja has moved to New York, and Ali has moved to Williamstown, Mass. They were important figures in Boston's art community. I miss them both!
Painting by Kanishka Raja
The exhibit runs from June 29 through September 23. Click here for more info on "Counterparts."
This Saturday was the 25th annual Mermaid Parade on Coney Island. The Mermaid Parade "pays homage to Coney Island's forgotten Mardi Gras which lasted from 1903 to 1954, and draws from a host of other sources resulting in a wonderful and wacky event that is unique to Coney Island," according to the official website.
As Brainiac readers know, I was recently in San Francisco and witnessed that city's wonderful and wacky Bay to Breakers event. Come on, Boston! We need a giant parade featuring costumes, nudity, and public drunkenness. Besides the one on Saint Patrick's Day, I mean.
I've never been to the Mermaid Parade, but I know all about it because my old friend, the spooky-kooky cartoonist Dame Darcy, who may actually be a mermaid, often participates. Here's a self-portrait by DD:
Boston-based freelance writer Ari Herzog visited Castle Island the other day, and now he has a rhetorical question:
I recognize that times are tight and state funds are low, but I doubt it [can cost] more than a dollar or two, including labor, for someone to paint an I where it peeled off, can it?
In the Business section of today's Globe, a report from the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last week breathlessly predicts that
a second wave of collaborative technologies -- including wikis, blogs, videos, and mashups, platforms and features borrowed from social-networking sites like MySpace -- soon will wash onto computers in the workplace.... They have the potential to transform commerce, simplifying communications between employees, suppliers, and customers.
The idea is to "help companies empower workers, pool expertise across departments and geographies, and attract young workers who grew up with blogs and social networks." Sounds fun! But, of course, not every young person is a fan of social-networking technologies. Here's a funny graffito from London, posted to the blog Modus Eundi this weekend:
I mentioned recently that MIT theater prof/whizkid director Jay Scheib had just directed a play in Germany called "4 Hermenauten." ("Hermenaut" is a term that I coined in the early '90s.) Scheib now sends along these photos:
See the logo on this Hermenaut's sleeve? It was created for Hermenaut (the magazine) by Boston-based designer Tony Leone.
One of the Hermenauts, it seems, is a sword-wielding alien.
