Slumdog Millionaire means more than a movie

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Watching Slumdog Millionaire scoop up Oscars tonight is more than a sign that this is a great film. I’d suggest it’s also a sign that the world is getting smaller and flatter and that brilliant, talented folks don’t all come from the USA. Although this film is a British more than Indian production, the appeal is thanks in large part to a rising India.

Of course we all have known for some time that there are millions and millions of talented folks from nations all over the world, but the lesson of Slumdog’s Oscar success is that we’ll be seeing a lot more of that Talent in a lot more venues a lot more often.

The Slumdog phenomenon is ‘in your face’ globalization, and its importance is significant. We’ve enjoyed
great success and prosperity in the USA much to the envy and sometimes the anger of other parts of the world. We’ve shared some stuff and hogged other stuff, but the new rules of a global economy have equalized much of the playing field – flattened the earth as Tom Friedman suggests in his book “The Earth is Flat”.

We’ll be reeling for some time from the negative economic forces created as tens of millions played the paper wealth game while the government fiddled and Wall Street schemed to cash in on the folly of a massive housing bubble. Yet this is likely to pale in comparison to the massive global changes sweeping over us at every turn. These changes are unstoppable and mostly positive if you believe in fair chances for everybody.

The overwhelming success of Slumdog Millionaire isn’t just telling us that the Indian themes and talent in the film industry are rising, its telling us that the whole developing world is rising up to match – and sometimes exceed – the remarkable history of American accomplishment and prosperity.

In this increasingly globalized world it’s not longer enough just to copy and expand on former great ideas – we all need to look for the best ways for *everybody* to be run faster, jump higher, and be smarter and more productive than ever before.

But before that I’m going to finish watching the Oscars…

Hulu Aliens Eat Boxee’s Brain

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Hulu.com had one of the best superbowl commercials, where the increasingly menacing and chubby Alec Baldwin explains Hulu’s plans for world domination as a brain-eating alien.

I thought they were kidding and just pretending to be ruthless and menacing aliens.

But today Hulu announced that it is dispatching Boxee in one fell swoop by preventing the very popular, award winning service from distributing Hulu’s content. Boxee’s approach was allowing people to view the Hulu content on regular TVs – in a sense focusing on the opposite direction of Hulu which is allowing you to view TV shows on computer and mobile devices. The Boxee/Hulu combination could be used to cut out a cable or satellite provider while retaining a lot of that functionality, but I don’t think this is what bothered Hulu. Instead I’m guessing they simply are dispensing with the big happy family convergence model and doing their Web 2.0 business the old fashioned way – kill your competitor before they can grow to threaten you.

Hulu’s apologetic blog post “sorry we ate your brain Boxee”

Fred Wilson’s take.  As a Boxee investor it’s not surprising he’s unhappy though I’m guessing he expected a buyout rather than a freeze-out.

If I was a better advocate for the virtues of convergence, open media, and copyright dodging I’d express more outrage but I don’t really have dog in this fight, and frankly I’m tired of the predictable and short sighted arguments on both side of the convergence and copyright issues.

New media folks whine about how the big players need to see the light and give away their high cost of production stuff and will make more by doing so when of course they will not make more. Legacy media profits have come in large part from controlling the means of distribution and profits will fall as that control goes away. I don’t see this loss as anything all that significant. Our entire culture is adrift in a sea of media mediocrity and whatever replaces it is more likely to improve rather than diminish our lives.

Old media folks are on even weaker ground when they suggest that users benefit from copyright rules, which currently do far more to protect the interests of the vast network of distribution and marketing middlemen than the interests of most artists and end users. Does anybody seriously think that pruning the songs and mega profits of Britney Spears or the Jonas Brothers is worthy of more than a tiny footnote in music history? Even now, as the old rules fall away and are ignored by end users we are seeing something of a niche musical renaissance as artists who had no chance in LA or Nashville can make their mark, promote, and distribute their work online. Few will make millions this way but many will be able to keep doing what they love and entertaining fans – in many cases establishing closer relationships with fans than any superstar could ever enjoy.

If Boxee fans show enough loyalty Hulu may even have to regurgitate their tiny competitor, though I’d guess Hulu is already close to launching their Boxee equivalent.

The Hulu aliens ate Boxee’s brain, and the show goes on.

The End of Economic Exhuberance

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The markets as predictions of our economic future have spoken (are speaking might be more accurate) and appear to think the stimulus spending plan … won’t do much.    Optimists can note however that they also are not predicting a finanacial catastrophe – rather we seem to be resetting a lot of economic indicators (DOW, SP, Home Prices, etc) to the levels of ten years ago.

The tendency of economic forces to reset the whole show to 1990’s levels actually makes a lot of sense to me, and a quick look at stock index charts suggests that we may be seeing a very simple thing right now – resetting many metrics to the values they would have if we had simply skipped the economic exhuberance era and grown the economy the good old fashioned way – with real rather than paper wealth.   I’m not saying the big upticks in the indexes and housing were not “natural” – in fact i think they were the natural extension of several factors including reduced regulations (a small factor IMO), personal trading stock investment frenzy (a big factor IMHO), and the speculative real estate bubble combined with low interest rates (the key factor IMO).

As details of the TARP and stimulus plans come out I think many pundits are starting to see what most regular folks have known for some time – the economic groundhog saw his shadow and we’re looking at a lot more economic bad news and trouble before the sun shines again.   But the indexes are predictors of the economy of the future so I think people should not look for things to spring back anytime soon – once we have “reset the economy” to a reasonable level we can reasonably expect things to start growing again at modest historical rates rather than with the exhuberant frenzy of the last 10-20 years.

Is the stock bloodbath over yet?   I’m guessing pretty much yes – we have now about halved the indexes from their highs and returned to the places we’d be without the bubble, and the trillion about to be pumped into the economy will at least add that much to the GDP yielding a modest and expensive but noticeable positive effect.

Twitter Celebrities – The Celebrity Twitter List

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Twitter Celebrities – my list on Twitter

————

Soon  almost everybody who spends much time online will be on Twitter, the world’s most popular, fastest growing, and best funded microblogging service where you can share and obtain snippets of news, wisdom, and drivel in 140 character doses from friends, followers, and if you are interested also these celebrities, news anchors, and technology leaders.

Movie, Music, Sports, and TV Celebrities

Jimmy Fallon http://twitter.com/jimmyfallon

Taylor Swift http://twitter.com/TaylorSwift13

Kathy Ireland http://twitter.com/KathyIreland

Penn Jillette http://twitter.com/pennjillette

Britney Spears http://twitter.com/britneyspears

Greg Grunberg http://twitter.com/greggrunberg

David Lawrence http://twitter.com/dhlawrencexvii

Lance Armstrong http://twitter.com/lancearmstrong

Shaquille O’Neal http://twitter.com/THE_REAL_SHAQ

John Cleese: http://twitter.com/JohnCleese

Ashton Kutcher: http://twitter.com/aplusk/

Demi Moore: http://twitter.com/MrsKutcher

MC Hammer: http://twitter.com/MCHammer

Tiny Fey: http://twitter.com/tinafey FAKE

Steven Fry http://twitter.com/stephenfry

Kevin Smith http://twitter.com/ThatKevinSmith

Levar Burton http://twitter.com/levarburton

Natalie Gulbis http://twitter.com/natalie_gulbis

Brea Grant http://twitter.com/breagrant

Politics and News Celebrities

Barack Obama (staff writes this so it’s not as interesting)  http://twitter.com/BarackObama/

Al Gore http://twitter.com/algore

Arnold Schwarzenegger http://twitter.com/schwarzenegger

Maria Shriver http://twitter.com/mariashriver

Anderson Cooper http://twitter.com/AndersonCooper

Rick Sanchez http://twitter.com/RickSanchezCNN/

Technology Celebrities

Pete Cashmore http://twitter.com/mashable

Veronica Belmont http://twitter.com/Veronica

Mike Arrington http://twitter.com/TechCrunch

Biz Stone http://twitter.com/biz/

Evan Williams http://twitter.com/ev

Leo Laporte http://twitter.com/LeoLaporte

Robert Scoble http://twitter.com/Scobleizer

Wil Wheaton http://twitterholic.com/wilw/

Kevin Rose http://twitter.com/kevinrose

Matt Cutts http://twitter.com/mattcutts/

Shel Israel http://twitter.com/shelisrael

Here’s a website with excellent celebrity following built right in: CelebrityTweet.com

(More  coming as I pull this list together)

I don’t make my own celebrity list but of course I’m on Twitter as Joe Duck:   http://twitter.com/joeduck/

Twestival and Charity:Water

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Thursday the Twitter community is coming together in cities all over the world to meet and have fun, and support a great international development cause called Charity:Water that works to solve what is arguably the world’s single most pressing problem – the lack of clean water for hundreds of millions of people all over the world.

Southern Oregon does not seem to have the critical mass needed for a Twestival event, but I’ll show my support with $100 donation to a great cause and my encouragement to others to chip in as well.

The really cool thing about this type of charity is that all the funds go to providing water and the ROI is very high compared to a lot of other good-but-relatively-low-ROI causes. Providing basic health to the developing world doesn’t just do some good, it … feels good too!

Dvorak on SEO as Snake Oil Salesmanship

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John Dvorak has an interesting article today about his own misadventures with SEO – specifically URL renaming to improve Google indexing. Based on advice from a friend and SEO expert John renamed the URLs at his website and wound up suffering a huge loss in traffic.

In my opinion he makes some good general suggestion about SEO: beware the SEO snake oil salesman and beware any extravagant claims, and try to simply work on basic and obvious issues relating to the structure and content at your website.

Ironically, though, his main beef about URLs is probably wrong – ie URLs are best named for the post and not with a number and ?. This “best practice” comes from the advice of no less than Matt Cutts at Google who is as close as you come to the final word on best practice SEO. Matt’s been the senior webmaster contact person at Google for years and has given countless presentations on the topic.

What likely happened in Dvorak’s case was that the *change* of URLs confused his Google rankings leading to they problem he describes which was a large traffic drop which has now recovered. Best practices would have him naming the URLs at the beginning, not after they’ve been indexed with the inferior naming structure.

Generally massive changes at large sites is to be avoided as I have learned the hard way … twice.

So, is SEO snake oil? Sometimes, but I think it’s fair to say that as with so many things it should be used in moderation.

Want some simple advice on best practices? Matt’s happy to oblige at his SEO Section which is “must reading” for anybody with any interest in Google ranking. The big caveat is that Matt does not talk much about the specifics of how the Google algorithm works, and for many websites it is algorithmic penalties and downranking that have hurt you. For specific questions a new excellent source of advice are the Google webmaster forums where there is an abundance of free and excellent SEO advice that is under constant monitoring by many, generally keeping things very helpful.

Singularity University

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Singularity University is the first major academic effort to study the acceleration of technological change. many believe will lead to the most profound changes the world has ever seen, first in the form of conscious computing and then perhaps as an explosion of change that will transform all of humanity.

Sound incredible?  It will be which is why NASA, Google, and a host of interesting folks are all involved in the project which will be based at NASA Ames in Silicon Valley.

More details are in the Singularity University Press Release

The world’s most important “to do” list: The Copenhagen Consensus

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The Copenhagen Consensus is arguably the world’s most rational approach to Government spending.    The group, which includes many luminaries in economics, science, and development, reviews many approaches to making the world a better place and ranks them in terms of global priority.     The approach takes the return on investment in terms of dollars for lives very seriously.   Unlike political spending these decisions are looking at the most bang for the buck, rather than the most political benefits which are often strongly influenced by irrational concerns from lobbyists or personal agendas.     Obviously there’s no perfect way to allocate money but it’s certainly the best major effort to date and people *opposed to this approach* should be the ones making their case against it.      One of the most pressing reasons to move ahead with these efforts – even during a time of economic crisis – is that they are very, very cheap ways to do a huge amount of good both morally and strategically.    The reason we do not proceed?   Ignorance, pure and simple ignorance.

http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/Default.aspx?ID=953

Solution
Challenge
1
Micronutrient supplements for children (vitamin A and zinc)
Malnutrition
2
The Doha development agenda
Trade
3
Micronutrient fortification (iron and salt iodization)
Malnutrition
4
Expanded immunization coverage for children
Diseases
5
Biofortification
Malnutrition
6
Deworming and other nutrition programs at school
Malnutrition & Education
7
Lowering the price of schooling
Education
8
Increase andimprove girls’ schooling
Women
9
Community-based nutrition promotion
Malnutrition
10
Provide support for women’s reproductive role
Women
11
Heart attack acute management
Diseases
12
Malaria prevention and treatment
Diseases
13
Tuberculosis case finding and treatment
Diseases
14
R&D in low-carbon energy technologies
Global Warming
15
Bio-sand filters for household water treatment
Water
16
Rural water supply
Water
17
Conditional cash transfers
Education
18
Peace-keepingin post‐conflict situations
Conflicts
19
HIV combination prevention
Diseases
20
Total sanitation campaign
Water
21
Improving surgical capacity at district hospital level
Diseases
22
Microfinance
Women
23
Improved stove intervention
Air Pollution
24
Large, multipurpose dam in Africa
Water
25
Inspection and maintenance of diesel vehicles
Air Pollution
26
Low sulfur diesel for urban road vehicles
Air Pollution
27
Diesel vehicle particulate control technology
Air Pollution
28
Tobacco tax
Diseases
29
R&D and mitigation
Global Warming
30
Mitigation only
Global Warming

Copenhagen is not focused on reviving the flailing global economy although I’d love to see us evaluate the types of global stimulus we’d see by funding innovative solutions to pressing global problems.     New grass for the national mall might put a few fertilizer guys to work for a few months, but it would be a lot more interesting  (let alone morally imperative) to throw a tiny fraction of that budget item towards some innovative new jobs in the health and poverty sectors, where simply improving health and reducing poverty will have powerful positive effects on raising the US and global GDP.      Raising living and health standards lowers birth rates so one of the consequences of spending the relatively tiny sums budgeted  by Copenhagen Consensus is helping to reduce population pressure as well as improve the quality of life for those already here.

Dear President Obama – Fund these projects FTW!

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I’ve written about the remarkable Blue Brain project here and at Technology Report, but there is a new AI project on the block that some seem to think has more potential to attain “strong AI” or independent computer thinking and probably  machine consciousness.   That project is called SyNapse and the lead researcher explains some of the thinking behind this amazing effort:

The problem is not in the organisation of existing neuron-like circuitry, however; the adaptability of brains lies in their ability to tune synapses, the connections between the neurons.

Synaptic connections form, break, and are strengthened or weakened depending on the signals that pass through them. Making a nano-scale material that can fit that description is one of the major goals of the project.

“The brain is much less a neural network than a synaptic network,” Modha says.

There’s not much information yet about this new project but a Wiki that appears to be open to the public has started here.

IBM and five universities are involved in this with funding from DARPA, the US Military’s cutting edge technology folks.   I’m glad to see what appears to be a very open architecture approach here because there should be very real concerns that a militaristic AI would be less likely to be “friendly”, and once we open the Pandora’s box of machine consciousness and superintelligence there is little reason to think we’ll ever be able to close it again.

The upside of these projects is literally and quite simply beyond our wildest imaginations.    A thinking, conscious machine will solve almost every simple problem on earth and is very likely to solve major problems such as providing massive amounts of cheap  energy, clean water, and health innovation.   Although I’m guessing we’ll still run around killing other humans for some time it’s reasonable to assume that a thinking machine will be the last significant human innovation as it ushers in the beginning of a remarkable machine-based era of spectacular new technological innovation.

Fareed Zakaria GPS – Ashraf Ghani on Afghanistan

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Once again Fareed Zakaria’s great new show on CNN, Global GPS, brings us face to face with people who *should* be household names here in the USA but rarely are because we focus far more attention on Britney Spears’ hair style than we focus on the looming war that Obama will be prosecuting in Afghanistan.  Today Zakaria is interviewing Ashraf Ghani, former Chancellor of Kabul University and former Afghan finance minister and a leading prospective leading candidate for the next President of Afghanistan, a role that will intersect on many levels with the USA and the foreign policies of our new President.

Ghani is critical of what he sees as Karzai’s “tolerance” of the levels of corruption in Afghanistan and what he suggests is the criminalization of the entire Afghan economy via the drug trade. Lke many I think I was initially very impressed by Karzai but have not been paying attention for some time. Ghani’s argument is that Afghanistan is now failing as drugs and threats of violence trump the need to build infrastructure.

On one point almost everybody can agree – Obama faces a huge and his key new point people in the region Hillary Clinton and Richard Holbrook face perhaps the USA’s greatest foreign policy challenge in Afghanistan, especially along the Pakistan border where the Taliban and supporting warlords have some local support and continue to fight to restore the Taliban to power in Afghanistan.

From a strategic point of view I remain very skeptical that a primarily military approach will succeed in Afghanistan. There’s a tendency to simplify the analysis into the idea that “getting rid of the bad guys” will allow the regular folks to take control and establish a flourishing democracy. This view is both naive and dangerous and it’s the main reason we failed to bring stability to Viet Nam, Iraq, and Afghanistan after the first Taliban war. A far more sophisticated strategy takes a decades-long view of societal change and will focus on changing the views of the youth while funding and defending infrastructure improvements. It’s well understood now that many of the current troubles in Afghanistan stem in large part from a failure to bring the promised aid after international forced led by the USA forced the Taliban from power. Will we keep making the same mistakes of the past by imposing ourselves militarily with far too little regard for infrastructure and changing views of the youth. Those are the tactics that will most effectively undermine the objectives of the enemies of the US for whom ongoing instability represents a huge tactical advantage. Development and infrastructure funding should our paramount concern. Not because it is a moral imperative, rather becauase it is a *strategic* imperative in terms of protecting our long term national interests.

Today’s program should be available soon here at GPS:
http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/fareed.zakaria.gps/