Society

Chris Brogan recently blogged about some people who coined the term "Bacn," defined as "any email you receive that isn’t spam, but isn’t exactly a personal message either". The essence is that Bacn isn't Spam, because you signed up for it somehow.

I learned to read from the pages of the Globe and Mail newspaper. For longer than I'm prepared to admit (as in -- since Grade 2) opening that paper has been part of my morning ritual. I've stuck with it through thick and thin, borne with some of it's ill-fated attempts at investigative journalism, it's deep insights, it's left-wing sense of social justice and it's right wing apologists who heaped praise on (choose a pejorative) like Conrad Black, even it's tragically misdirected hiring of Christie Blatchford (complete with some contractual clause that seems to guarantee her at least a sliver of space on the front page every time she writes an article, no matter what).

Last night I attended a presentation by Doug Hyatt, Business Economics Professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Business. Although billed as focusing on the music industry, his comments were actually more broad ranging, even abstract.

I guess that is a telling indication of how early we are in the process of adapting to the digital era. When very smart people who make their careers from studying these problems speak in abstract terms, you know we have a long way to go.

Last month the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation (TWRC) released a report on dealing with the Gardiner Expressway an ageing elevated highway that cuts through the centre of downtown Toronto and pretty universally regarded as an eyesore.

In general it's a well reasoned report, but it's striking for its continuing embrace of car culture.

I just fielded a call from Ipsos-Reid, a large and reputable polling firm. The subject was Canada's "diplomatic and development" role in Afghanistan. The sponsor of the survey was the Federal Government. It began by asking what aspects of the media's coverage I was aware of. Then it went on to ask about how I felt about the role, conveniently ignoring anything to do with the military's current combat operations. Then it asked if I agreed or disagreed with various aspects of our non-military activities. After going through all of these items, it asked again how I felt about the overall role (still restricted to diplomacy and development, of course).

The repetition of the question is fascinating. You expect that really what's being measured here is this question: "If we keep telling Canadians about all the good things, will they change their opinion to support the mission, conveniently ignoring the occasional body bag (which we'll hide by blocking the media from showing them)?"

But that's not the reason for this entry...

Leah McLaren recently wrote an interesting article, titled "Logging out of the blogosphere" where she describes the reasoning behind her decision to stop reading blogs. I must admit I find myself agreeing with her in many respects. Even correcting for the volumes of garbage from spam and search engine placement games, the signal to noise ratio -- the ratio of useful, accurate, or meaningful content to incoherent, unoriginal and redundant content is disturbingly low. This is a problem with ideas that get picked up en masse on the net. Universal accessibility implies average results. For this a favourite phrase comes to mind: It's almost like half the people have below average intelligence.

I caught an episode of HGTV's "Designer Superstar Challenge" last night. It's a pretty hokey pseudo-reality show where a bunch of hopeful "designer host" candidates compete in hopes of landing a job hosting a show on HGTV. Sound like a premise for bad programming? You bet it does. You keep on thinking that the winner will wind up hosting the next challenge, and they'll just keep on endlessly searching for a new host until they find one that's good. It's the perfection of cannibalistic programming, each new season consuming the previous winner.

What takes this from merely cheesy to "bad movie bad" -- as in so bad it's funny -- is Home Depot's sponsorship. More accurately, it's the gymnastics the show goes through in an attempt to integrate Home Depot that took this episode from bad to laugh-out-loud awful.

I read a blog post today by Simon Phipps (DRM and the Death of a Culture) which was a well reasoned complaint about the constraints that DRM can place on use of content. Yet no matter how well reasoned, nor argued from which position, these arguments on DRM don't matter. They don't matter because DRM will never work on static content. This is so basic, so obvious that I'm not sure why anyone ever thought it would. In fact, let's make it more general: all copy protection technologies, past, present, and future do not and will not prevent copying of non-interactive media. In fact they're a colossal waste of time, effort, and money that only serve to inconvenience legitimate users (and as Phipps points out, kill culture).

I did a quick search for the title of this post and mostly found references to "asymmetric warfare", meaning warfare where there's a large difference between each side's military capability or methods of engagement. It's a term frequently used to refer to terrorism. Then there's economic warfare, which can be part of a military effort or completely non-military in nature.

It's interesting to note that Osama Bin Laden's version of terrorism makes for some pretty fine economic warfare in and of itself. One wonders what Bin Laden's total investment has been in his adventures to date. Probably nothing over a few hundred million dollars or so, including labour, materials, equipment, etc.

But what has the rest of the world invested in fighting him? The U.S. tab is probably well over a hundred billion dollars. Add the efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, plus in investments by other "coalition partners" like the U.K. and it's not unreasonable to double that.

So that's a thousand to one return on investment, conservatively. Worse yet, given a reasonably well established and autonomous organization, Bin Laden's cost of ongoing operations is a fraction of his investment to date. Yet the cost of overthrowing governments, replacing infrastructure, improving economic opportunities and installing a resilient democracy remain astronomical. Moreover one can be cerain that the U.S. has invested a mere fraction of its final cost in Iraq so far. What's that take the terrorist return on investment to? One to 100,000?

As far as I'm concerned the USSR collapsed under the economic weight of the cold war. With a far less efficient economy, it was only a matter of time before the West won. Now we find ourselves in a similar situation. All terrorists have to do is motivate the world's larger military powers to mobilize their resources a few times and then wait. We'll fall under the weight of being dramatically less economically efficient at the game. Asymmetrical economic warfare indeed.

DNA testing has given sperm banks an interesting challenge. The concept of an "anonymous donor" has gone out the window. Now a simple, affordable DNA test can verify parentage. Perhaps of more concern is that as more people contribute DNA to public databases, it's becoming easier to identify previously unknown siblings, which leaves just a short step to the father.

With genetic manipulation becoming such an easy thing to do, how long will it be before sperm banks start offering "synthetic" fathers? A few genes from this donor, a few from that, and a few more from over here to finish the job. A baby born from the resulting DNA could theoretically have any number of fathers, none of them traceable to an individual.

Of course it might be a tricky business if there's more interrelationships between genes than previously expected. Then again, given sufficient care, the outcomes of various combinations could be tracked, selected for deireable traits, and in no time the banks would be out in the market with competing "superbaby sperm".

Now there's an ethical mess.