Our Man in Jonesboro is "Teacher of the Year" at Arkansas State University

One of our longest-running Brain Technologies associates, Dr. David W. Cox, professor of education at Arkansas State University, Jonesboro, has been recognized for being among the best at doing what universities should do best: teach the mind.

David received this year's ASU Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching. A member of the ASU faculty since 1992, he earned his bachelor's and master’s degrees from the University of Florida and his doctorate from the University of Illinois.

He was recognized by his nominators for "his passion to teach, use of innovative teaching techniques, and his love for the field of leadership." Much of his success as a professor, said his nominators, has been attributed to his methods for engaging his students directly and through teleconferencing in "intense dialog" with experts in the field. The web-assisted learning spotlights "hot issues" pertinent to the coursework. He also uses an "array of techniques to stimulate and enhance discussion." (Does he ever! He puts his leadership class grad students through BTC's gargantuan Asset Report self-analysis report every fall.)

Funny isn't it how great teachers are nearly always exemplars of the best human qualities. Dave Cox is like that. We're proud of our long association with him and congratulate him on this well-earned recognition by his peers. And actually, his peers were a little slow in recognizing David's stellar teaching qualities. He was honored last year by the students at ASU for similar reasons. (This information arrived courtesy of wife Faye, who says, "Students are the reason he gets up every morning.")

Posted on April 18, 2006

Because of the Long-Tail Influence of the Internet, We've Suddenly Found Ourselves at Brain Technologies Busier Than We Ever Dreamed We'd Be Running the Bookstore We've Always Wanted to Own

I’ve just spent a week analyzing the digital entertainment revolution for a client who is planning the launch of yet another Internet video delivery service. What I concluded about his product prospects is, of course, proprietary. But I can share some thoughts about the “Internet tv” and similar phenomena and what I suspect some of the most important outcomes might be.

If you’ve been busy doing other things—like attempting to live a normal life and forgoing the temptation to buy another electronic widget or subscribe to another miracle 42-services-in-one combo offer from your friendly telco, cable or satellite broadband digital signal delivery service—you may not be all that clear about what I’m talking about. But I doubt that you’ve escaped its influence.

I’m talking about the latest dot.com phenomenon.

This one has taken hold largely in the past two years. It centers on the burgeoning abilities of all the great data-carrying networks being put in place to accommodate a bandwidth hog called video and deliver it cheaply and with increasing reliability to the PC, the TV, the portable digital media player, the personal digital assistant and, for all I know, the back of your own eyeballs. (Just kidding. Not really, not yet).

What is so exciting and inviting to the entrepreneur like my client is what has been called “the long tail” aspect of the Internet.

Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, coined that term (or, more correctly, borrowed it from statisticians), less than two years ago. In an article in the October, 2004, issue of the magazine (see below), he forecast the emergence of a new digital entertainment and information economy much different from the mass media marketplace that dominated for the entire 20th Century. The dot.com-2 movement (that's my term for it, not his), he predicted, was going to make unlimited selection more the norm than an exception. Even if only a relative few of the world’s billions wanted something bad enough to pay for it and went looking for it on the Internet, or didn’t go looking for it but were hunted down and told it could be delivered on the Internet, then control of entertainment content would be wrestled away from the mass media giants and put in the hands of a myriad of new entrepreneurs looking to service niche markets that only the Internet can turn up.

And that kind of activity has been happening, with a vengeance. To cite a mere handful of examples:
—YouTube.com allows anyone to post videos for free. It is already claiming 35 million views daily, with 35,000 new videos added by users every day.
—MySpace.com allows its users to set up a free “profile page” for themselves allowing access to, among other things, videos. At first, the service was used mainly by youngsters. Already, trafficking on the “long tail” of the Internet, MySpace is increasingly favored by businesses seeking free publicity.
—blinkx TV can take a subject from a user, research a million hours of video and TV and create a unique channel that can be viewed by this single user in an uninterrupted stream.
—Brightcove Inc. allows any video producer to distribute his/her wares to any other Web site that is willing to market them. Then the producer and the selling Web site and Brightcover all share in advertising revenues or sales generated.

My-oh-my. And it’s not just video that is being trafficked on the Internet’s long tail. Take books, for example. Regular readers of this blog are already aware that one of the things we do in here at Brain Technologies is sell books, new and used. At first, we were just dabbling, largely out of our love for books. But the enterprise has just grown and grown.

There are a gazillion used books in America, many of them headed for a landfill. But if you know where to look for them and how to buy them and how to use the Internet to sell them, you can work the long tail of the Net to establish a thriving business.

Just this past weekend, among dozens of sales, our BTC Brain Books To Go and supplementary services sold a $38.50 book published in 1964 to a buyer in Ohio, a $26.50 book published in 1991 to a buyer in Pennsylvania, a $72.95 book published in 1993 to a buyer in New York, a $19.95 book published in 1972 to a buyer in Italy and a $93.95 book published in 1973 to a buyer in Brazil. Nearly all these books were library discards; most of them purchased (by us) for a dollar or less, often much less. What makes all this profitable (and great fun!) is the long tail reach of the Internet. Otherwise we’d never have know there was, for example, a potential buyer for our book, Mechanics of solids: with applications to thin bodies, in Sao Jose dos Campos, SP, Brazil, much less have known how to connect with and then do a successful transaction with him.

So both as an analyst of the long tail phenomenon’s entrepreneurial possibilities and as one of those entrepreneurs, what are some of my suspicions about this unruly Wild West environment that is making the sale and delivery of entertainment and informational products and services a whole new ballgame? Here’s a few thoughts:

• This new phenomenon isn’t the threat to make dinosaurs of the major mass media companies that some observers have forecast. The longstanding media giants are working as hard as anyone to take advantage of the Net’s long-tail revolution of their industries.
• Many of the hopeful new entries into the broadband next-generation, at-home entertainment revolution aren’t going to succeed. There is likely to be more digitalized video available on the Net than there is going to be viewers willing to look at it, much less pay something for it.
• The lengthy periods of relatively unchanged technologies like those that created the “pitcher show” industry will never be experienced again. Planned obsolescence is being surmounted by runaway unplanned obsolescence.
• The winners long-term are likely to be those who do the best job of managing the phenomenon once they identify salable content and services, not the whizbangs who were first to discover a market for old Cisco Kid movies or sailing videos or, to cite a market closer to home, library book discards. Since getting into the used book sales business using Amazon.com’s prepackaged programs, at Brain Technologies, we’ve felt the need to commission our own proprietary book selling management software. Why? One reason is that the price on nearly every one of the thousands of books in our inventory needs to be changed every two weeks at minimum. In the turbulent, long-tailed environment of the Net, the amount of change to be managed is infinitely varied. Of course, that's what creates the long tail effect to begin with.

To read Chris Anderson’s article in Wired, go here: "The Long Tail”

Posted on April 17, 2006

You Can Call Me a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist, In No Particular Order, And All At the Same Time, If You Wish ... And Here's Why

Thanks to invaluable assistance from “the most notable living Polish philosopher” (Wikipeida), Leszek Kołakowski, now at All Souls College, Oxford, I think I’ve figured out what my real political orientation is. I am a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist with the following views (all borrowed, most liberally and described most conservatively, in a very social sense, from Kolakowski):

A conservative believes:

1. That in huiman life there never have been and never will be improvements that are not paid for with deteriorations and evils; thus, in considering each project of reform and amelioration, its price has to be assessed. Put another way, innumerable evils are compatible; but many goods limit or cancel each other, and therefore we will never enjoy them fully at the same time….

2. That we do not know the extent to which various traditional forms of social life—family, rituals, nation, religious communities—are indispensable if life in a society is to be tolerable or even possible. There are no grounds for believing that when we destroy these forms, or brand them as irrational, we increase the chance of happiness, peace, security, or freedom….

3. That the idée fixe of the Enlightenment—that envy, vanity, greed, and aggression are all caused by the deficiencies of social institutions and that they will be swept away once these institutions are reformed—is not only utterly incredible and contrary to all experience, but is highly dangerous. How on earth did all these institutions arise if they were so contrary to the true nature of man?

A liberal believes:

1. That the ancient idea that the purpose of the State is security still remains valid. It remains valid even if the notion of “security” is expanded to include not only the protection of persons and property by means of the law, but also various provisions of insurance: that people should not starve if they are jobless; that the poor should not be condemned to die through lack of medical help; that children should have free access to education—all these are also part of security. Yet security should never be confused with liberty. The State does not guarantee freedom by action and by regulating various areas of life, but by doing nothing….

2. That human communities are threatened not only by stagnation but also by degradation when they are so organized that there is no longer room for individual initiative and inventiveness….

3. That it is highly improbable that a society in which all forms of competitiveness have been done away with would continue to have the necessary stimuli for creativity and progress. More equality is not an end in itself, but only a means….

A socialist believes:

1. That societies in which the pursuit of profit is the sole regulator of the productive system are threatened with as grievous—perhaps more grievous—catastrophes as are societies in which the profit motive has been entirely eliminated from the production-regulating forces. There are good reasons why freedom of economic activity should be limited for the sale of security, and why money should not automatically produce more money. But the limitation of freedom should be called precisely that, and should not be called a higher form of freedom.

2. That it is absurd and hypocritical to conclude that, simply because a perfect, conflictless society is impossible, every existing from of inequality is inevitable and all ways of profit-making justified. The kind of conservative anthropological pessimism which led to the astonishing belief that a progressive income tax was an inhuman abomination is just as suspect as the kind of historical optimism on which the Gulag Archipelago was based.

3. That the tendency to subject the economy to important social controls should be encouraged, even though the price to be paid is an increase in bureaucracy. Such controls, however, must be exercised within representative democracy. Thus it is essential to plan institutions that counteract the menace to freedom which is produced by the growth of these very controls.

Says Dr. Kołakowski, “So far as I can see, this set of regulative ideas is not self-contradictory. And therefore it is possible to be a conservative-liberal-socialist. This is equivalent to saying that those three particular designations are no longer mutually exclusive options.”
I’ve left out some of his comments to shorten the above. The complete essay appears on pages 225-227 of his Modernity on Endless Trial, a book whose every paragraph I’ve found to be enlightening and engrossing. To order a copy, go here: "Modernity on Endless Trial”

Posted on April 07, 2006

Playing Deja Vu and Dat You On the Issue of Who's Nukes Are Holier Than Who's

Our long-time friend and colleague Paul Kordis of Fort Collins, CO, has forwarded a letter he's just sent to Time Magazine. While I have a little different "take" on a point or two, I think he's pointed out anew most effectively the emperior's nakedness!

Dear Editor:

Just read the April 3rd edition of Time and was somewhat puzzled by the alarmist and one-sided essay by Charles Krauthammer. Indeed Iran is acting recklessly and in the thrall of a leader who eats Armageddon for lunch. But are they really that different from us? Who has a president that commands thousands of nuclear weapons that can be instantly deployed, who is continuing to build nuclear weapons, and who has rejected the non-proliferation treaty? What country has a president who pats the Bible every time he is questioned about his policy for the Middle East? Which president continues to court fundamentalist Christians who rabidly uphold an apocalyptic vision for the Holy Lands? For that matter, who built the first nukes in the first place and used them for show when the major Japanese cities had already been fire-bombed to the ground—with Japan already making overtures to surrender? And, I might add, which country showed everyone else how to build a nuke? It is trite and hackneyed, but we really should be looking in the mirror as we jockey for yet another "preemptive" maneuver.

Your faithful reader,
Paul

Paul can be reached here: PaulKordis@aol.com

Posted on April 03, 2006