Diane Wilsey President and Thomas Campbell CEO of Fine Arts Museum - Photo courtesy of Chris Knight with LeftCoastScenes.com 

Calling it a “gift of love to the city” the curators of Monet - The Late Years introduced the new exhibit at the De Young Fine Arts museum in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco — on the eve of Valentine’s Day.

It’s a fabulous collection of Claude Monet’s later works from 1909 to 1926 in collaboration with the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. By tyhis stage in his life Monet was wealthy enough not to have to paint and sell art works —which he found very liberating. He used his money to buy a country house and remodel its gardens and ponds.

“When I have no longer need to sell, I have managed to work; now, I think I am as hard on myself as it’s possible to be.”

Over this period he suffered several personal tragedies such as the death of his wife and oldest son plus the constant reminder of the horrors of the first World War that were everywhere in France.

He shut himself off in his ideal gardens and shut himself off from the need to sell paintings. Instead, he found an endless exploration in his water lilies (and weeping willows).

Monet shut the world out — and the world shut him out. There was little interest in his later works even though his earlier paintings remained popular. When he died in 1926 there were more than two dozen unsold paintings.

His later paintings seem like scribbles of familiar shapes — they either reflect what he was seeing because of his failing eyesight or perhaps they reflect a fundamental insight from decades of artistic discipline.

The violet colors of his water lilies are said to reflect a condition of Monet’s failing eyesight which allowed him to see into the ultraviolet spectrum and see colors that would normally be filtered out by normal eyes.

Close-up — you can see the energy of his brushwork and you can easily imagine his hand moving and dabbing across the canvas right there in front of you.

It’s a great exhibition that brings together the best of Texas and California art lovers— and the wealthy private owners that loaned their Monets to the exhibit. It’s at the De Young for the next three months till May 27.

https://deyoung.famsf.org/

Your ID doesn’t change but you are not the same person throughout your day.

Each of has one name but we are at least 18 different people maybe more. Consider how different you are in your day and week when you have a senior role at work compared with your family persona; you are a soccer coach on Wednesday and Saturdays and at weekends you organize a bicycle club; in the evenings you do yoga classes and dance classes; and on Friday afternoons you volunteer at the local food bank.

You visit your grandparents every Sunday with your siblings and children; you go dancing and socializing with the same group of (non-work) pals every Saturday and you regularly attend your local alumni events; then there’s your Sunday silent DJ hiking group and your online photo community, and other professional associations; and then there is your children’s school with its parent and teacher communities,…etc.

Same name —18 very different people.

Yet the algorithms of Facebook and Google have mashed up all these different personas into one ID — but we’re only one person at a time. Despite all their data about us all — these massive platforms still don’t seem to know us much at all.

For example: I don’t need or want to know everything about a work colleague or the office details of a distant family member. And why do I need to impose notifications on my activities to others when it’s not necessary or related. People need partitions between their various activities and they seek them. Just because it is easy to aggregate a person’s activities doesn’t mean it is a service to them — it is not. It is a service for advertisers.

We now have a national debate about people’s rights to their data and to their privacy. We need to recognize that each user is 18 different people with different privacy needs.

As for targeted advertising — which one of my personalities are being advertised to? My personalities are expressed one at a time and do not have simultaneous interests.

Several years ago Google scrapped separate IDs for each of its services in favor of a single user ID. This simplified ad sales and created large potential audiences for advertisers. But the user experience becomes messy and the advertising less effective as the advertising algorithms target one your more profitable online personalities — usually when you aren’t using it. This wasn’t a problem with contextual advertising where ads for cameras appeared on a camera content page.

This might explain why Google's advertising isn’t working very well. Google parent Alphabet [$GOOG] reported strong Q1 financial results earlier this week but again — there was a big drop in revenues per click compared with a year ago and this time it fell nearly one-fifth or 19%.

Every single quarter for the past few years Google announces a substantial loss of revenues per click of 15% to 20%.

But it manages to find more places to sell more ads to counteract what has been an unstoppable slide in revenues per click. Less clicks per ads but more ads — that’s Google’s growth strategy. And that’s our future on Google’s web: even more ads because they are less and less effective.

The ever more intrusive aspects of targeted adverting plus the prospects of a web filled with even more ads puts the future into sharp focus: people will join single-topic walled-garden online communities where shared interests and activities stay there unless voluntarily shared by each person or by community agreement. Many will be subscription based services which means there’s no need to snoop and snitch on users. And many online communities will be very local.

This is the only way that people will take control over their personal data because they have no control over its uses today.

People will be able to retreat into communities with absolutely no advertising. That will be a big setback to the Brands and their insatiable thirst for customer data.

But why does your soap powder need to know so much about you? The data collection is harmful — the Brands have chosen an adversarial marketing strategy that will push people away — and into ad-free enclaves. Good luck reaching them there.

When I was commuting to Menlo Park last year my journey would start on the San Francisco 38 Geary bus. It was always crowded and I’d be fortunate to squeeze in.

I remember one particular gorgeous sunny morning and I’m on a very crowded bus. I look around and everyone’s eyes are on their phones.  

I’m one of the tallest on the bus yet I don’t see a single person — across the entire double-length bus — looking up or around. Everyone’s eyes are down — subservient — I can’t meet anyone’s gaze at all.

I’m thinking, wow! I have this whole bus to myself. Everyone’s mind is somewhere else.

I love this photo of Marc Zuckerberg strolling with a huge grin through a large auditorium where everyone is wearing VR goggles except him.

It amuses me to think that Zuckerberg wants reality all for himself —  a private domain — while everyone else is immersed in manufactured virtual realities.  Just like he buys up houses next to his so no one can see into his world.  

Zuckerberg’s goal is to have 1 billion people in virtual reality writes Dean Takahashi in VentureBeat:

 

“We all have limits to our reality, and opening up more of those experiences to all of us is not isolating,” [Zuckerberg] said. “It is freeing.”

- - - 

I’m discovering a new appreciation for reality — the original kind. I like its razor-sharp definition, it has many levels of challenging gameplay plus the tactile feedback is exquisite.  Reality — it’s the real thing — the others are made by others. 

Chelsea Peretti (above) a comedic actress, introduced the 10th Annual Crunchies — awards celebrating startups and VCs in Silicon Valley — and managed some decent jokes poking fun at the techie audience and coming up with some great app ideas. (The final one is a killer app — people will need full-cycle tracking of nutrients to create total body datasets. See my video here.)

Diversity was once again the bold theme of the event as seen in the careful selections of the nominees for the awards. Time and again the stage was filled with winners: startup teams of mixed color and gender. 

People viewing from outside Silicon Valley would be tremendously impressed that our young startups are so progressive and clearly want to build the future the right way.

But the staged diversity of the Crunchies is far removed from actual reality — the audience of young techies and VCs looks nothing like them. Startup teams continue to be predominately: male, white/Asian; from privileged backgrounds.

The Crunchies are clearly trying to push things forward in the right direction and it takes time. The message needs to be repeated many times.

Soon the startups will get a clue: if you want to be nominated to win a Crunchie you’d better show significant diversity in your teams.

The TJ Miller effect...

The Crunchies has changed a lot since 2015 following a stunning performance from TJ Miller, a standup comedian and one of the actors in HBO's Silicon Valley sitcom. During a long evening of superb improv with the audience he called someone a "bitch." It was scandalous. It was disruptive. It shocked an audience more comfortable with unspoken workplace misogyny.

The organizers apologized and since then they bend over backwards, and they would bend even further if they could, to present an awards show that is all about diversity in capital letters and in bold typeface but without spelling it out because that would be tedious.

The Crunchies show highly diverse startup teams being successful. Success at winning awards equates with likely future success in business.

Monkey see monkey do. The Crunchies award consists of a black monkey holding a stick. The message will eventually get through.

It was a dark and stormy night...

I've been to nearly every Crunchies but these last two have attracted smaller numbers of key people. I would normally run into a lot of high level contacts, a lot of top Silicon Valley CEOs would show up -- but now they don't -- with the exception of Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO, who was presenting an award.

Lots of no-shows: Michael Arrington, the co-founder of the Crunchies, always presents an award with sidekick GigaOM founder Om Malik, also absent.

There were a hundred or so empty seats in the front rows reserved for extra important people who didn't turn up.

It might have been the weather. Or it might be that the new format of the Crunchies is not compelling enough for Silicon Valley’s A-list; or maybe the Crunchies are running out of steam.

Ten years ago the Crunchies held an electric energy and celebrated scrappy startups and unique thinkers. The Crunchies will have a much brighter future if it can recapture some its past.

- - -

And the winners of the 10th Annual Crunchies are... | TechCrunch

The Crunchies' Bitchgate: High Horses With Fake Unicorn Horns Ignore Decades Of Silicon Valley Misogyny -SVW

 Chelsea Peretti introduction: https://youtu.be/jpSH6HS45EI

And the winners of the 10th Annual Crunchies are… | TechCrunch

The winter issue of CNET Magazine is out and comedian T.J. Miller is on the cover and featured in an interview.

Miller is one of the characters in HBO’s sitcom Silicon Valley. In the interview he says,

I consider everybody who takes themselves seriously to be a little bit off,” Miller says. “And Silicon Valley seems to be the most effusive about how important their contributions are to society.

Miller proved his point last year when he hosted The Crunchies awards and upset many in the audience with his jokes about startups and the organizers said he would not be asked back.

Please see: The Crunchies’ Bitchgate: High Horses With Fake Unicorn Horns Ignore Decades Of Silicon Valley Misogyny -SVW

Also in the Winter issue:

- A winter buyer’s guide with 61 excellent gift ideas, just in time for the holiday shopping season. From tiny drones that fit into the palm of a hand to chic wireless speakers fashioned from organic glasses, CNET breaks down this year’s most coveted tech products.

· In “Can the Rhino Be Saved?,” CNET takes an in-depth look at how scientists, conservationists and tech companies are working to stop poachers from killing rhinos who are on the edge of extinction.

· The tech industry is the source of great wealth in San Francisco, but can it help the city’s least fortunate? In “Tech and the City,” CNET examines if tech can help solve San Francisco’s homelessness problem.

· CNET catches up with actor Dan Fogler, star in the Harry Potter spinoff movie, “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” who shares his thoughts on the new film and technology’s role in creating special effects.

· CNET editor Dan Ackerman provides an excerpt from his new book, “The Tetris Effect,” who explains how this simple game from the Soviet Union became a global phenomenon.

Above photo by Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos for WIRED

Joi Ito, head of the prestigious MIT Media Lab told President Obama he is concerned that the core development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is being built by a “mostly white” and “predominately male gang of kids."

Ito's remarks were made at a recent meeting with Barack Obama and Scott Dadich, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine. They have been published here: Barack Obama on Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity | WIRED

Ito said:

This may upset some of my students at MIT, but one of my concerns is that it's been a predominately male gang of kids, mostly white, who are building the core computer science around AI.

They don't know how to communicate with people outside of their group. "They're more comfortable talking to computers than to human beings."

They think AI is an answer to "all the messy stuff like politics and society. They think machines will just figure it all out for us... Everybody needs to understand how AI behaves is important... because the question is, how do we build societal values into AI.

Foremski's Take: Raising the issue of race, privilege and the demands of civil society in how artificial intelligence (AI) systems are designed and deployed is a political and cultural powder keg.

President Obama said nothing and quickly switched the conversation to self-driving cars, and Scott Dadich did not pursue the subject.

But this issue of ethnicity, gender, income and much more, will undoubtably affect the future success of AI systems.

Your AI is not my AI...

As artificial intelligence systems touch more of us throughout the day, and in increasingly important ways such as in healthcare -- how do we know the system understands us?

If a health care AI system is designed by white males will it skew towards protecting the health of that group?

If the government uses AI systems for future services will it be fair to everyone?

"Everybody needs to understand how AI behaves," says Ito. The subtext: if we don't how AI behaves we will suspect it is working against us.

Profiling bans...

AI systems learn from studying human behavior but there are large differences between people. For example: AI systems serving a Hispanic community will require AI systems trained on that population. It will require ethnic profiling.

Similarly, the best AI systems will understand women's needs and will learn from profiling that population.

But will understanding how AI behaves, allow society to accept profiling by AI systems when it's not OK elsewhere?

Is there a backlash building, as suggested by Ito, against the notion that mostly white male technologists can design AI systems that are fair to all?

Will AI systems for African-Americans have to be developed by African-Americans in order to be accepted? Women for women, etc?

These incredibly sticky cultural issues will delay the use of AI and it might be a good thing. My concern is that our heady rush into AI will scale potentially bad decisions and make them worse.

We have enough trouble finding and deploying human intelligence, so why will artificial intelligence be any easier?

Dumb plus dumber does not add up to a genius. IQ doesn't work that way.

Photo from Catan.com 

Guest Post: By Janet Miller — a board game addict, habit scientist, former Silicon Valley executive and cofounder of Jen Reviews.

Settlers of Catan Settlers of Catan was one of the first European games to gain popularity in the U.S., and has been called “the board game of our time" by the Washington Post. 

Settlers has gone from being a Monopoly style game set in an island valley to a social, cult-attracting capitalist paradise. If you don't play, you're not going to fit in with the crowd of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

The game is very popular in Silicon Valley — here’s some suggestions why:

1. The game mirrors Silicon Valley culture. Playing Settlers, each team has to create a dominant community on Catan and outwit each other while competing for extremely rare resources. Does this sound like Silicon Valley itself? 

The fact that the games pieces are made through distribution all over the world is another part of Silicon Valley culture that mirrors itself in the game. Dice are made in Denmark, the pieces in Germany, the cards from Dallas, and the plastic from Wisconsin. It is truly an international game, with components coming from everywhere -- much like tech in Silicon Valley being outsourced all over the globe.

2. Settlers allows employers to meet new employees. Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga Game Network Inc., plays Settlers of Catan with potential employees as a networking tool. 

"It's kind of like our golf game," says Mr. Pincus. It usually lasts about an hour, making it a great choice for busy tech executives.

"We don't have time to play 18 holes, but we can handle pizza and a board game." 

Because of the richly interactive playstyle there is much more to the game than just rolling the dice and going around the board over and over. Some CEOs will play with potential employees to test their ability to think fast on their feet and manage limited resources. They can get a feel for how well new employees would mesh with company culture. 

3. Settlers isn't hard to learn. Players create their own community within the Island of Catan. The game has rich mythology and narrative structure. The art is vivid and exciting, providing an immersive world — and what's best is that it doesn't take a lot of skill to learn. 

There’s a website with an interactive tutorial for Catan that tells you exactly how to play — and a Catan Game Assistant for mobile devices. 

4. Settlers appeals to smart bookworm types. There is no shortage of brilliant minds in Silicon Valley, and Settlers of Catan appeals to this crowd. Bookworms and intelligentsia rejoice in the game because they can become absorbed in it while strategizing for hours on end. 

The rich lore and history have spurred an outpouring of books written about the vast world of Catan, and a wiki dedicated to Catan. This means it’s just the right kind of game for someone who wants to get lost in a world that isn’t our own.[Editor: Who needs VR headsets when we can get lost inside a board game?!]

5. The game has built a "cult" following similar to companies in the valley. Settlers of Catan is going to be turned into a movie. According to Deadline, Gail Katz bought the film and TV rights to the game, and plans to produce it in the coming years. 

 6. Catan involves a sweeping storyline, which Silicon Valley executives love. Have you noticed how much drama there is around the tech narrative in Silicon Valley? The sweeping tale of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg taking the world by storm, the rise of the nerds and their overtaking of the globe overnight? 

Settlers of Catan has a sweeping storyline much like this, making it immensely appealing to Silicon Valley execs. The rich storyline involves history, lore, and imagination much like our own real world narrative. There are pirate raids, settlements, and gold rushes, jungle valleys, and thriving cities. 

7. It's competitive and fun at the same time. The competitive balance with fun and engagement is something that truly appeals to techies about this game. Settlers requires that you be careful with resource distribution, competing carefully, but also -- it's just plain fun. 

It is well-designed, lacks any kind of geekiness or obscurity, and has been adopted by nerds and mainstream culture alike. Now, people play tournaments -- more than 100 entrants qualified in the Catan US Championship.

- - -

Janet Miller is a board game addict, habit scientist, former Silicon Valley executive and cofounder of Jen Reviews. She writes regularly and has been featured on MindBodyGreen, Tiny Buddha, The Muse, The Huffington Post and Fast Company.

Romantic relationships, and a person's relationship with their work, would seem to be too distant and the experience too different to be comparable, yet eHarmony believes its success with the lonely can be put to use to make happier workplaces, and match people with jobs they love.

And if eHarmony's algorithms could also help build more diversity in the workplace, there are many Silicon Valley companies that would love to place an order because this has become a very hot topic and there's no quick solution.

I spoke with Dr. Steve Carter who heads the recently launched eHarmony venture: Elevated Careers. He says the same data science, derived from eHarmony's many years in the dating and mating scene, are applicable to our relationship with work.

Carter says the same methods for predicting romantic bliss can predict compatibility between worker and workplace.

Over the years, eHarmony's analysis of its Big Data on dating, has been honed to such a degree that it can claim a very precise, "438 marriages per day on eHarmony."

If it can bring a fraction of that accuracy to predict a person's job satisfaction,  Elevated Careers will have made a start on its mission of repairing, "A broken recruitment model that costs US businesses $11 billion a year."

Could the same data science be used to help employers make their workplaces more diverse? Could Elevated Careers match people's diversity with compatibility in the workplace? Many Silicon Valley companies are searching for ways to add more diversity by increasing numbers of women, minorities, etc.

"Oh no, we stay away from that type of protected information," says Carter. "We focus on helping each person find a workplace with a high level of compatibility with the company's culture, the hiring manager, and shared attitude towards work."

Elevated Careers can't help build diverse workplaces because it is illegal for a company, or its agents, to discriminate in its hiring practices, based on a candidate's qualities of diversity, rather than job qualifications.

But on a dating site, it is perfectly legal to filter candidates based on ethnicity, gender, size, shape, religion, sexual orientation, looks, color of hair, color of eyes, height and age. It is not racist or sexist when it's used for dating because all these individual preferences are essential in predicting relationship success.

Because eHarmony says that what works in dating also works in predicting success in professional relationships, the best analysis of workplace compatibility would be with all available measurable traits of a person's diversity incorporated into the Elevated Careers algorithm. But that would be illegal.

Elevated Careers can't use eHarmony's vast archives of relationship data; and it can't use the lessons learned in compatibility between people.  Its algorithms would be attacked as racist and sexist if used to measure job compatibility.  This means Elevated Careers begins life with a big job ahead in collecting all the people and workplace data it needs to prove its approach will work.

For example, to predict job compatibility, Elevated Careers needs to survey a significant number of each company's workers independently of the employer, so that a true and honest assessment of culture and job satisfaction can be made, and then matched. 

It's going to take a while for it to build a large enough dataset, adjust its predictive algorithms, and start helping people find a happier relationship with work.

Elevated Careers has a worthwhile mission, and it might improve some workplaces just from the jump in self-awareness that each company will experience when considering questions about its culture, and why it has such a high staff turnover.  

Carter says the same methods for predicting romantic bliss can predict compatibility between worker and workplace.

Over the years, eHarmony's analysis of its Big Data on dating, has been honed to such a degree of precision that it can claim a very precise, "438 marriages per day on eHarmony."

If it can bring a fraction of that accuracy to predict a person's job satisfaction,  Elevated Careers will have made a start on its mission of repairing, "A broken recruitment model that costs US businesses $11 billion a year."

Could the same data science be used to help employers make their workplaces more diverse? Could Elevated Careers match people's diversity with compatibility in the workplace? Many Silicon Valley companies are searching for ways to add more diversity by increasing numbers of women, minorities, etc.

"Oh no, we stay away from that type of protected information," says Carter. "We focus on helping each person find a workplace with a high level of compatibility with the company's culture, the hiring manager, and shared attitude towards work."

Elevated Careers can't help build diverse workplaces because it is illegal for a company, or its agents, to discriminate in its hiring practices, based on a candidate's qualities of diversity, rather than job qualifications. 

But on a dating site, it is perfectly legal to filter candidates based on ethnicity, gender, size, shape, religion, sexual orientation, looks, color of hair, color of eyes, height and age. It is not racist or sexist when it's used for dating because all these individual preferences are essential in predicting relationship success. 

Because eHarmony says that what works in dating also works in predicting success in professional relationships, I would expect that the best analysis of workplace compatibility would be with all available measurable traits of a person's diversity incorporated into the Elevated Careers algorithm. But that cannot be done within the context of hiring.

Elevated Careers has a big job ahead in collecting all the people and workplace data it needs to prove its approach will work.

To predict job compatibility, Elevated Careers needs to survey a significant number of each company's workers independently of the employer, so that a honest assessment of culture and job satisfaction can be made, and then matched. 

It's going to take a while for it to build a large enough dataset, adjust its predictive algorithms, and start helping people find a happier relationship with work. 

Elevated Careers has a worthwhile mission, and it might improve some workplaces just from the jump in self-awareness that each company will experience when considering questions about its culture, and why it has such a high staff turnover.  

Credit: San Jose Mercury

Charles DiLisio is a prominent Silicon Valley photographer focused on preserving the region's history. He tells me there's a new photo contest: Visual San Jose

Visual SJ -- a free photography hosted by Preservation Action Council of San Jose (PAC*SJ) and Content Magazine The contest is geared toward giving photography students recognition and exposure. 

Submissions must be in by April 17.

There are three categories: Students (under 19 years old), Non-professionals and Professionals (earning 50% or more from photography) Winning entries (1st, 2nd, 3rd place) will receive cash, goods and have their photographs in the June/July issue of Content Magazine.

Students can submit up to two photographs that were taken in the San Jose city limits regarding a historical item, neighborhood or artifact. 

There will be a rewards reception on June 16 at The Glasshouse.

Current sponsors: Whole Foods Markets, Bay Photo Labs, Rocky Nook Publishing, SanDisk, San Jose Water Company, Keeble & Shuchat Photography, Dick Dischler Photo Workshops, Big Dog Vineyards and Content Magazine.

More information at the Visual SJ website - www.visualsj.com. Last year's finalists can be seen at 2014 Finalists.

[A Saturday Post... The future is already here — it just needs some connecting dots...]

If we take our technologies of personalization and predictive business analytics to their ultimate conclusion, in the future we won't need marketing or consumers. Products will just show up at your door.

Inside the box, the shirt or whatever the thing is, everything about it will be perfect: a perfect fit, perfect style, perfect color, perfect price — and perfect timing.

This future world is perfectly attuned to you, you'll sit on the apex of all our modern technologies, and you'll have the ultimate customer experience. Your favorite brands will know all about you, and know exactly what it is you need, before you knew you wanted it. And all with frictionless auto-debit.

You will marvel at the perfectly synchronized nature of this caring, observant, intelligent world that you live in, that just now delivered exactly what you needed without you having to even think of it. You didn't even know you wanted it until it showed up. It's all thanks to the incredibly powerful algorithms fueling society's Predictive Engines of Commerce.

A world without "wants"...

You will gradually forget the experience of consumerism, the "wanting to buy something" feeling. That hollow tagging, nagging in the gut, that unscratchable-itch frustration of desiring that thing... Yet knowing all along that it is all a lie, that the desire is manufactured through marketing and advertising.

In the future those conflicting emotions will be gone.

Our Predictive Engines of Commerce will save us from the onerous work of being a consumer: having to watch lots of advertising and hunting around to find something to buy. Then thinking about it, then thinking about owning it, then searching for it, going to the mall, going online, buying it, opening the box, throwing the box away. Finding the box, sending the thing in the box back, getting a new box...

It's a big job being a consumer (plus you need an actual job, too). 

Ending consumerism will mean an end to marketing: no more advertising, no more selling, no more pointless waste of peoples' time and energy. We'll return to a life uncluttered by artificially manufactured desires.

"Want" is cancelled out by "Get." In this world without wants  —you'll always get what you need.

The end of consumerism will undoubtably be recognized as the triumph of our age. And we can return to exploring this curious human experience of being... rather than buying. 

- - -

Vectors Of Engagement And The Click-Free Digital Economy -SVW

CEO Richard Edelman (center) discusses "trust" at a Churchill Club event in 2013.

Public trust in business has plunged across the world and is harming consumer acceptance of innovation, according to a survey of 27,000 people in 27 countries by Edelman, the world's largest PR firm.

The 15th Annual Edelman Trust Barometer found levels of trust in business, government, media, and NGOs had sunk below 50% — a crucial marker — in the US, UK, Germany and Japan,  in two-thirds of countries surveyed. Public trust in business had been a rising trend in prior years and represented a recovery from the financial crisis of 2008/9.  

The release of the Trust Barometer report is timed to the same week as the World Economic Forum's Davos conference.  CEO Richard Edelman (above) is always very active at Davos as a speaker and presenter.

For the first time, the survey asked the public questions about their perception of innovation. Very few, (24%) accept the idea that innovation is making the world a better place. Arun Sudhaman at Holme's Report, called it a "blow to Silicon Valley."

A majority of respondents believe innovation is happening too quickly (51%) and that it is being driven by greed (67%) and business growth imperatives (66%). More than half (55%) feel business is not doing enough testing on new developments. Consumers also want stronger regulations of these innovations by a four-to-one margin, yet only 20% have confidence that government can do it effectively.

"The atmosphere of distrust is undermining innovation and the pace at which those innovations are moving to market is also confounding the level of trust in them," Edelman global corporate practice chair Ben Boyd told the Holmes Report. Boyd admitted the findings had "big implications for Silicon Valley."

- - -

Foremski's Take: I wouldn't be too concerned about the poor showing for "innovation" in the report. The tech industry continues to have the highest levels of trust, ahead of energy, food, and other industries. The continued popularity of the tech industry amongst the global public will make it easy for tech companies to raise trust in innovation

The Edelman Trust Barometer is always a fascinating read but also frustrating because the object of its study, "trust" is not easily defined, or definable in a standard way across cultures, and it certainly has no units of measurement. 

The Annual Edelman Trust Barometer is not a scientific instrument as a barometer is, but it does give us a rare glimpse into which way the global winds are blowing, and what that smell is. 

- - 

Please see:

CEOs at Davos less optimistic about global economy

2014 Edelman Trust Barometer: Tech Industry Risks Loss Of Trust As Government Trust Plunges To Record Levels -SVW

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is featuring a lot of "wearables" reports Techcrunch (above) (which all seem to be smart watches).

Foremski's Take: All the fuss over Apple Watch will certainly help sell a lot of watches - regular and smart. I recently started wearing a normal watch.

I like the watch, not because I can look at the time but I like the way it looks. And that's a decision based on personal style. I might decide in a few months to stop wearing it. A decision that has nothing to do with the performance of the watch.

And that's why "wearables" need to become separated from the whims of personal style and fashion and disappear into the fabric of our lives. If our personal technologies become invisible no longer become objects of fashion — they can last longer than a season, and manufacturers can worry about the tech and not about becoming unfashionable. 

Personal tech is personal

Personal technologies should become personal — which means it is private to me what I choose to use or don't. Invisible personal technologies are private by their very nature nature.

Also, if our personal technologies become invisible they longer create the same social problems with others, such as those encountered by Google Glass wearers.

But personal tech "invisibles" won't come from a company such as Apple. Apple is very much a fashion brand, it makes its products distinctive and very visible. Its purchase of the Beats headphone brand underlines its fashion focus and it is how it can charge a premium. Becoming invisible would be impossible for Apple.

Invisible personal technologies will likely come from companies such as Google, which is interested in selling web services and not in selling hardware.

The future will be full of embedded technologies: all around us, invisible, and on us, and inside us. There will still be visible tech but it will be a tiny fraction of the tech that won't be seen.

The future of reality is a blended reality combining our technology tools with the natural world — screen-free and unobscured.

- - -

My tongue-in-cheek proposal for a new type of invisible wearable is an "unmentionable." The absorbent but shock-proof underwear has several regions that silently buzz notifications from your smart phone. You'll know if you have a message from your boss or your lover depending on if it's your back side or front side that buzzes.  

- - -

Please see:

Here is Marc Cantor on the Apple Watch.

Updated: December 1 — PRWeek named Weber Shandwick a Best Place To Work 2014 - Large Agency, for the second year in a row.

I've been spending a lot of time in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood, working with teams on Weber Shandwick's Mediaco venture, which is helping companies become media companies.

This week Ad Age named Weber Shandwick as one of the best places to work. As an independent observer of only one large Weber Shandwick office, I can attest that everyone is hard driving but super nice with each other and with everyone else. 

I can also attest that there are no private buses whisking staff to work, there are no celebrity chefs in the office kitchens, and there's no free lunch or Blue Bottle coffee for the staff. Tech company HR managers would be aghast.

Free stuff makes you feel entitled. It takes people to make a great workplace. And it has to come from the top, kudos to Weber's management. 

People to people is the most important interface for every business. Miserable staff can't hide it even when they think they can -- people pick up on tiny clues in voice, eyes or manner.

Happy workers are key to ROI. Here is the proof if you don't believe me: watch this short video by one of my favorite CEOs, Shawn Riegsecker at Centro in Chicago.

Shawn Riegsecker, CEO and founder of Centro, explains at a 2013 TechWeek event in Chicago, why he focused his company's culture on the happiness of its employees. 

It's working: Centro has become a giant in the hot ad tech sector. With more than 500 staff and over $300m in revenues - it is Chicago's fastest growing tech company. 

His staff attrition rate is an unbelievable 4% a year. He has no HR problems.

Centro won "Best place to work" in Chicago — no company in any city has won the top accolade twice in a row — Centro has won four years in a row.

I've watched this video many times.

Please see: Centro: Chicago's Ad Tech Giant Aims To Revive Journalism -SVW

Mediaco And Scalable Technologies Of Brand Publishing -SVW

Matthew Reinhold writes:

I want to tell you a little about our project. It's a movement that asks for Oct. 4, to be the day for disconnect to reconnect. A gathering group of mostly Californians, feel overly accessible and need a second to catch their breath, enter the 'Day of Disconnect.'

As Silicon Valley tirelessly endeavors to simplify our lives though tech and innovation, is it possible that with telecom's constant interruption, the creativity's flow might hindered? Maybe this 24 hours of peace can lead to the next Uber, AirBnB or Tindr? 

He adds that the idea belongs to Mac Reynolds of Reynolds Management; Jurgen Grebner, Executive Vice President of Interscope Records; and Anjula Acharia-Bath, CEO of Desi Hits.

Mac Reynolds quote:

Jurgen and I came up with the idea while traveling overseas for work and lamenting the constant onslaught of emails and calls we receive, regardless of time zone. We work in an industry that, like many others, requires us to be available constantly. I used to practice law at a large firm in L.A., where I literally carried two phones everywhere, so I'm no stranger to the feeling.

The concept behind the Day of Disconnect is simple: take at least one day a year where you commit to no calls, texts, or emails. It's almost unfathomable to imagine leaving our smartphones at home, and yet I didn't even own a cell until I was 21 (and somehow got along fine). Somewhere along the line, we all forgot what it means to unplug. I love technology as much as the next person, but as soon as you can't live without a convenience you are in the dangerous waters of addiction.

By setting aside one day as a global communications ceasefire, we can remove the fear and guilt that comes from being the "only one" taking a break - and we owe it to each other.

I often disconnect for days, and I find it very useful in generating creativity and inspiration. It allows me to have an engaging conversation with myself -- though not too loudly to scare my neighbors :)

John Biggs reported:

Investment bankers Bill Hambrecht and Clayton Christensen took to the Disrupt SF stage today to defend the concepts of disruption and to address the ways the Valley predicted the future of financial services and technology.

"'Disruption' is, at its core, a really powerful idea," [Christensen] said. "Everyone hijacks the idea to do whatever they want now. It's the same way people hijacked the word 'paradigm' to justify lame things they're trying to sell to mankind.

"The Original Disruptor, Clayton Christensen, And VC Bill Hambrecht Talk About The Theory Of Disruption | TechCrunch

There wasn't a single mention of innovation in the article. I wonder if it was mentioned at all during the discussion. 

A disruptive company has to be innovative and vice versa. Disruption is the chief characteristic of true innovation otherwise it is an incremental improvement, and that's not enough to shift markets. 

Is "disruptive" now the way we say "innovative?" That doesn't make sense. A bomb is disruptive but it's certainly not innovative. Disruption is a quality of innovation but it is not the thing itself. 

Interestingly, in the discussion above,  Christensen said, "It's not really clear to me that Uber is disruptive." A diplomatic assessment of the poster-boy startup of the "sharing economy" valued at $18 billion.

Uber's disruption of the taxi trade is reliant on lower driver costs by avoiding regulatory and operational business costs such as insurance. That's not innovative but it's certainly illegal in most cities.  

The new Friday market on mid-Market Street was a big hit with hundreds of people enjoying drinks, food trucks, and shopping eclectic stalls on a warm autumn evening. Mayor Ed Lee and several supervisors arrived, too. I managed to speak briefly with the Mayor about some of the tech community issues and urged him to integrate the tech community and not keep it segregated. He agreed and said the Friday market was a step in that direction.

Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to tell the mayor about an idea I had, to have Google et al. up the extra quarter on Muni bus fares. They rose by a quarter to $2.25 on September 1. It would be a great publicity gesture if those firms picked up that quarter for all riders as a show of support for busses for everyone. They have often been criticized for using bus stops and city resources and not paying a full share.

The mayor poses with a Homeland security guard who is always ready to draw.

A charity called San Francisco Beautiful that was founded in 1947 helped organize the event. I spoke with its Executive Director Kearstin Krehbiel. He was very pleased with the turnout. "It's a success, the Mayor is here and at least three supervisors have come."  He said he was hoping to entice local restaurants to be involved in future Fridays, not just food trucks. 

 There will be a Friday Night Market every Friday until October 24 and then it will be extended if it continues to do well.

More photos...

Friday Night Market

- - -

Please see: Tempting Techies Out Of Their Citadels - New Friday Night Market -SVW

CNET's reporters have published a series of articles under the title "Vexed in the City" examining the pressures on housing and community caused by the expansion of San Francisco's population of tech workers.

There are ten articles in the special report including an interview with Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce by CNET Executive Editor Charles Cooper:

What's the role or responsibility of the tech industry?
Benioff: Because it can be so disruptive, it has to be done with a level of compassion and awareness. And that's why I think philanthropy has such a big role. Through philanthropy, we can create models that ease the burden on those who are getting impacted.

Vexed in the city: Benioff says it's time to listen to the dissenters (Q&A) - CNET

The report does a good job in summarizing many of the issues that have been divisive in San Francisco and to an outside reader it will bring them up to date. But apart from Cooper's Benioff interview there is very little new ground revealed and there's a lost opportunity to move this important story forwards. 

For example:

- I'd love to know why the tech companies insist on shipping their tech workers daily to a central holding facility on their colossal creepy looking black windowed buses when there are excellent telecommuting technologies available. Google has chat, hangouts, drive, docs, etc, all are perfect for telecommuting and enabling work group collaboration. Google officials have said that remote teams are as productive as those at the Googleplex. So why do they insist on bussing? 

[Internal Google Study Shows Telecommuting Works - No Need For Buses -SVW]

- The pressure on housing in San Francisco and in Silicon Valley that comes from the all-cash home buyers from China and who are leaving the houses empty.  They see it as a good investment and a hedge against a crash in China's real-estate bubble. This is becoming a  very large problem and is pushing up rents and housing prices because the buyers always pay significantly over the asking price. Thousands of empty houses in San Francisco and the Bay Area amid other pressures on housing is a potential political time-bomb.

[Chinese Investors Fuel California Housing Bubble | The Diplomat]

- How are the free lunches and services affecting local businesses? As Google preps for a massive expansion in San Francisco how will that affect local businesses? It's a big problem in Silicon Valley where the Googleplex has harmed many local restaurants and services. How will San Francisco's small businesses and restaurants survive in competing with Google and the many other tech companies that offer similar perks?

[Living In The Shadow Of The Googleplex: The Takeover Of Mountain View -SVW]

- What are the benefits of having a large tech community in the city when it suffers from the same issues that aflict all other cities? Why are the public schools so bad when there are so many tech companies claiming to change the world and change education, too? Why doesn't charity begin at home?

[Fortune Asks 'Why Does America Hate Silicon Valley?' -SVW]

- How is Twitter gentrifying mid-Market? Has it fulfilled its agreements with the city in return for massive tax relief? What are the responsibilites of the other tech companies that have received similar tax breaks? How is Twitter's free food and services affecting local businesses?

[Are Fabulous Work Perks Needed For Top Talent? Google Says 'No' -SVW]

CNET has made a good start but there's more to be written on this fascinating story of tech and community. I hope the editorial team follows up and stays on top of this story. 

Please see:

The Indifference Of Tech Companies That Make A Difference -SVW

Segregation Of Tech Workers Leads To Mistrust And Conflict -SVW

Photo Essays:

The Not So Sunny Side Of Twitter's Street... -SVW

Christmas Day On Twitter's Street - The Not-So-Sunny Side Of SF's Tech Boom -SVW

There's a lot of backlash out there around Silicon Valley and I think it's largely because of the hypocrisy in techies claiming to be changing the world yet they can't change anything in the very places where they live.

Silicon Valley cities and schools face the same problems and high drop out rates that others face around the nation. What's the point of communities living with tech companies if there's little benefit? Twitter demands huge tax relief in one of the poorest neighborhoods in San Francisco. 

Silicon Valley's halitosis of hypocrisy stinks and it is becoming a laughing stock. Mike Judge's "Silicon Valley" on HBO is very funny -- because it's very true.

Joel Stein at Businessweek comes to the defense of Silicon Valley and its predominately male techies in this month's cover story. However, he ends up reinforcing many negative perceptions of Silicon Valley rather than changing them. Here are some extracts:

Ron Gutman, 41, is even more serious about making the world a better place. "In the interview, if they don't talk about wanting to do good and make a difference, we don't hire them. No matter how good they are, that's the end of the interview process," he says. He puts down his iced green tea and walks to the front of the upstairs half of his office, in front of the wooden stand-up desk, the Buddha statue, and potted flowers.

. . .

The problem, McElroy says, is that those big donations--and many tech companies--have a limited benefit in the Bay Area. "They're still disconnected from the local," she says. "It's about changing the people's lives far away, which is connected to this neocolonialism. There isn't much awareness of the impact their businesses are having here. Google and Apple are offshoring money and exploiting people elsewhere."

. . .

"When you have people doing things that seem inconsequential, that aren't changing the world as they claim... people really hate that. That's a special kind of arrogance," says Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator. 

. . .

Silicon Valley has its own politics, too. Call it liberalitarian. The fact that liberal and libertarian positions sometimes conflict--smaller government and gun control, helping the poor, deregulating industries--doesn't bother most, since they think about politics so rarely.

. . .

Technology entrepreneurs are overwhelmingly male, and fewer women than ever are entering the field. In 2012, 18 percent of computer science majors were female; in 1985 it was 37 percent. 

Silicon Valley Tech Entrepreneurs: Behind the Stereotype - Businessweek

 

Saturday, August 2, there was a memorial service for Berkeley-born chemist Alexander Shulgin, who died recently aged 88. Mike Power, reporting for the Guardian newspaper (above) described his work as "fearless" because 

... his chosen discipline -- the design and synthesis of psychedelic drugs -- was one of the most maligned and least understood. Shulgin invented hundreds of new psychedelic drugs, which he tested on himself, his wife, Ann, and friends, documenting their preparation and effects.

But he wasn't satisfied with mere discovery -- he argued passionately for the rights of the individual to explore and map the limits of human consciousness without government interference.

Alexander Shulgin - The Guardian

Shulgin is best known for his discovery of an easier way to make MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine) known as the notorious club drug "ecstasy."

He helped discover its use in the treatment of psychiatric patients and although the drug was later banned, it is being rediscovered by scientists interested in its considerable therapeutic properties. He did not support the casual use of MDMA, saying it had been "sidetracked into the Yahoo generation."

Shulgin was born in Berkeley, and also studied for his graduate and post-graduate degrees at University of California at Berkeley, and spent most of his life living and working in the Bay Area.

Here are some of my photos from the memorial service.

Here is a wonderful account of the memorial by Laura Childs: Goodbye to the Godfather of Psychedelics: Shulgin Now "Tripping in the Cosmos" | California Magazine

The oft-smiling Shulgin “really liked double-entendre and triple-entendres and if it bordered on the edge of something sexy, that was even better,” he recalled. He loved puns, palindromes, limericks and wordplays. 

Mariavittoria Mangini remembered one of his favorite jokes, about Gandhi, who walked barefoot, ate very little and suffered from bad breath. “This made him a super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis,” she delivered the punchline, which elicited a roar of laughter from the audience.

- - -

Here's an excellent 1997 interview by Ros Davidson at The Guardian:

He has testified as an expert on both sides of drug trials and wrote the classic reference book on US law and drugs, Controlled Substances: Chemical And Legal Guide To Federal Drug Laws. Then, six years ago [1991], and to the dismay of the authorities, the Shulgins declared their love of psychedelics and belief that all drugs should be legal.

His, and his wife Ann's arguments about the nature of drug use and the punishment of drug users, more than two decades ago, were radical at the time, but ultimately prophetic: 

Drug-induced states, argue Sasha and Ann, are so intrinsic to human nature that the use of intoxicants such as tobacco, opium, cannabis, coffee or alcohol can be traced back to the dawn of time. They advocate legalising all drugs, addictive or not. It should be a matter for personal choice, they say, something that is taxed but as available as tobacco and booze.

Drug-related crime would drop, drug-fighting money would be saved and drug use might even fall without the attraction ofillicitness. The only laws needed, Sasha says, would be to prevent people driving when high, drugging someone else without their permission, or giving substances to children. Drug users who get into trouble should be helped, not treated like criminals, adds Ann, as are people addicted to valium or alcohol.

Archive, 1997: Interview with Alexander Shulgin, 'godfather of ecstasy' | Science | theguardian.com

Those arguments they have now become widely accepted as reasonable, and they were very influential in the decrimininalization of marijuana use across many US states, including in the epicenter 0f "The War Against Drugs": Washington, DC.

- - -

From Erowid Alexander Shulgin Vault

Shulgin synthesized and bioassayed (self-tested) hundreds of psychoactive chemicals, recording his work in five books and more than two hundred papers. He was a fixture in the psychedelic community, who has spoken at countless conferences, granted frequent interviews, and instilled a sense of rational scientific thought into the world of self-experimentation and psychoactive ingestion.

In April of 2010, Sasha and Ann Shulgin were honored for their lifetime of achievements in the field at the Psychedelic Science in the 21st Century conference in San Jose, CA, where a portrait of the couple painted by Alex Grey was unveiled for the first time.

On November 17, 2010, Sasha had a stroke. His recovery went well, but he continued to face a variety of age-related health challenges. On June 2nd, 2014, he died at home in bed surrounded by friends and family.

Donate to the Shulgin Collection project to assist in the creation of a public archive of Sasha's lab books, writings, and scientific papers. More Info.

 - - -

Please see:

Celebrating The Life Of Daniel Jabbour: An Intersection Of Psychedelics, Activism And Technology -SVW

Psychedelics And Technology: Albert Hoffman Five Year Anniversary -SVW

The Steve Jobs Way: Intersecting Psychedelics And Technology -SVW

Hippies And Geeks Drop-In For Tim Leary Archive Project -SVW

I'm adamant that San Francisco shouldn't be allowed to be made into a bedroom community for Silicon Valley's business parks. Original ideas require original experiences and companies should take advantage of that and not force their staff onto a bus and ship them to a central holding facility for the day.

San Francisco offers a treasure trove of original experiences. Silicon Valley staff should be told to stay off the bus, telecommute, and get out and about. It'll generate new experiences and possibly new ideas. The same experience every day, waiting for your cubicle to pick you up, won't generate anything new.

Why do we have hundreds of To-Do list apps, Email managers, calendars, get-food-delivered apps...? There's a cornucopia of mundane and me-too apps. Original ideas come from original experiences. Watching the world on Youtube or from a bus window doesn't work. You have to be in it which is a good thing.

By staying off the bus the tech workers become integrated into their neighborhoods. If they stay off the bus their neighbors might even get to know them.

City or company culture?

Inclusion works better for communities than division. The tech workers might even notice some city problems and come up with an app for that.

Separation works better for establishing company culture and that's why Google and the others do it. It never used to be cool to be seen as a "company man" or woman. Eating at the company store and hanging with the company all day, and only using company services. That's a cultural win for Google et al, because that was not considered remotely cool for many decades.

Can the needs of corporate culture trump community culture? Maybe, but in the long term community needs will always win out over the demands of company culture and that's what city officials will ultimately choose. Because company culture is in its very nature and reason for existence, divisive and not inclusive. That's not a good thing especially for a city, where every kind of people have to live together and learn how to sort out problems together.

[London is an excellent example of how the culture has managed to teach people from so many countries, how to peacefully live together, marry together, and create a future together. The UK media deserves much of the credit.]

Please see:  

San Francisco's Incredible History Of Media Innovation -SVW

 San Francisco's Culture War With Silicon Valley's Cubicle Culture -SVW

San Francisco: An Epicenter Of Creativity -SVW

Here is a needlessly long post by Bryan Boyer. I love the sub-head [The big innovations of Silicon Valley are not technical but social]. This bit at the end echoes my views about San Francisco.

Re-engaging with the public realm is the most fundamental tool that companies (and groups of companies) have to connect with the public, to understand needs more holistically, and to convert that understanding into longterm public and private value.

...Seclusion may make it easier to develop technology, but it’s a barrier to deeper innovations in how we live together as a society. Pop the bubble, come out of that garage...

   Secluded innovation — Medium

The Internet Archive is housed in a wonderful San Francisco building that used to be a Christian Science church. In the pews along both sides of the large, skylight-lit auditorium, there is always a congregation: half-sized ceramic figures representing 100 "archivists" -- people that contributed at least three years of service to the non-profit organization.  

A recent reception honored Nuala Creed (above), the California artist, who created the figures over a five-year period. They were commissioned by Brewster Kahle (above), founder of the Internet Archive, following a visit to China and seeing the famous terra cotta warriors.

The 100th ceramic figure is that of Aaron Swartz (above), a brilliant young software engineer, co-founder of Reddit,  and political activist, who took his own life last year following prosecution by the US government. It stands in the front pew next to the figure of Brewster Kahle.

The text on the computer screen reads: 

Be curious. Read widely. Try more things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.

Aaron Swartz 1986 - 2013

- - -

Please see:

To Those That Would Martyr Aaron Swartz: Where Were The Activists When He Needed Them? -SVW

Aaron Swartz Memorial in SF - Our First Digital Liberties Martyr? -SVW

Founded in 1996, the Internet Archive has an historical web collection (the Wayback Machine) of over 150 billion web pages, about 240,000 movies, over 500,000 audioitems (including over 70,000 live concerts), over 1,800,000 texts, 1600 education items, and over 30,000 software items.

Non-ceramic audience (above).

I'm a big fan of the Gray Area Foundation For The Arts (GAFFTA) and its projects, which generally try to link the art and tech worlds of San Francisco, along  with an awareness of the challenges facing urban residents of all incomes and backgrounds.  GAFFTA has found a new home (2665 Mission Street, above) after several exhausting short-term moves. Co-founder Peter Hirschberg announced on Facebook:

This Saturday night: come party at Gray Area's new home in San Francisco. The former Grand Theater, a fabulous 1940s movie house in the Mission, is being reborn as the Gray Area Art and Technology Theater.

We'll share our plans for the future, and immerse ourselves in DJ sets and generative art.Our new Art and Technology Theater is 10,000 square feet of possibilities. There will be classrooms to learn, a cinema to experience and share, a large open space to meet and collaborate, desks and studios to move forward.

As an organization that was almost priced out of San Francisco, we are passionate about bringing this historic cinema back to the artistic community at a critical time in the city's history.

Tickets and details here: https://grandpre.splashthat.com

The May 31 benefit dinner is $250 but the after party at 9.30pm is a sliding scale from $10 to $30 and features international artists and DJs.

One of the projects GAFFTA will be installing is a $100,000 experimental 3-D sound theater designed by Naut Humon, a legendary sound artist and founder of San Francisco's Recombinant Media Labs. I met Naut Humon recently (below, right) and he showed me a version of his experimental sound theater, Cinechamber, which has been installed in Berlin, Moscow, and other places. I'm looking forward to experiencing it at GAFFTA.

Here's a flavor of the sound experience of a Cinechamber:

I popped into the Exploratorium's recent fund raising gala and was told the event had raised $1.5 million, $300K more than it expected. Which is fabulous news because there were some job cuts last year.

I'm a big fan of the Exploratorium but the transition to it's new location has taken time to build up visitor numbers. I love the new location and the Exploratorium has managed to recreate the look and feel of the old place at the Palace of Fine Arts. Plus it's three times larger. 

Thursday evenings at the Exploratorium are a great time to visit because there's a special theme for each "After Dark" event, lectures, and there's a bar too, plus a great looking crowd. This Thursday:

Off the Screen: Doors of Perception

Thursday, May 29, 2014 • 8:00 p.m.

Location:  Exploratorium, Pier 15, Kanbar Forum

These new and newly preserved experimental shorts craft visual illusions and allusions that flicker in your mind's eye long after appearing on screen. Using aesthetic techniques ranging from painstakingly hand-drawn animation to early computer technologies, these films approach visual and temporal perception with new eyes. As Islamic patterns move in careful synch and line drawings literally explode from the screen, another plane of vision emerges, creating a deepened and memorable viewing experience.

Featuring:

• Kitsch in Sync (1975) by Adam Beckett


• Two Space (1985/ 2013) by Larry Cuba


• Cyclopean Perception (1973) by Enrico Chiarucci and Bela Julesz

- - - 

Here's some photos from the Gala fundraising party and recent Exploratorium events:

A bull's penis.

Bugs in a doll's house.

This video is superb and I can't stop playing it: Shawn Riegsecker, CEO and founder of Centro, explains at a 2013 TechWeek event in Chicago, why he focused his company's culture on the happiness of its employees.

It's working: Centro has become a giant in the hot ad tech sector. With more than 500 staff and over $300m in revenues it is Chicago's fastest growing tech company. 

His staff attrition rate is an unbelievable 4% a year. He has no HR problems. Centro has now won "Best place to work" four years in a row -- no company has ever won the accolade twice in a row, in any city.

Please see: Centro: Chicago's Ad Tech Giant Aims To Revive Journalism -SVW

The Psychedelic Society of San Francisco announced the sudden death of its 30 year old founder, Daniel Jabbour, a well known software engineer and political activist. 

There will be a memorial celebration April 19th at 11.30 AM at Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park.

Daniel founded the society in November 2011 and it currently has 1674 members. There's a strong connection between psychedelics and Silicon Valley, please see: The Steve Jobs Way: Intersecting Psychedelics And Technology -SVW. 

Daniel was a passionate political activist on drug policy and spoke at many events. There are videos of his talks on his channel:  Daniel Jabbour - YouTube

Daniel loved volunteering with “Hack the Future,” an organization that teaches kids to code. Here's an account of Daniel at the most recent Hack the Future event, written by one of his colleagues at Amoeba Consulting, where Daniel worked. 

The event was held in the brand new tech studio, a "hands on" discovery area at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. The event brought together a hundred kids with makers throughout Silicon Valley including programmers, game developers, designers, web developers and engineers.

Amoeboid Daniel Jabbour led the web and javascript table- helping kids to get into programming. He supplied them with some basic project starting points and let them discover for themselves what they could accomplish with programming by designing their own blogs and games such as pong and chess. Daniel commented, "for me, it was so fun to help a table full of kids write pong, in javascript, in an afternoon... sitting a hundred feet away from the creator of Pong, Al Alcorn (another mentor at the event)."

Throughout the day, they guided kids through the design process, and helped with whatever they wanted to design- from defining the problems, thinking about their users, coming up with design goals, ideating, sketching, to rapid prototyping for both product and application designs.

Such a great day...

It is with a heavy heart that we announce that Daniel Jabbour, Founder of the Psychedelic Society of San Francisco, passed away in a tragic accident last Sunday. We invite anyone who would like to pay their respects to join us Saturday, April 19, directly before the 1st Annual Bicycle Day Parade for a celebration of Daniel's life. Come dressed in your psychedelic finest--black is discouraged. Hippie Hill is in Golden Gate Park near Haight and Stanyan, through the tunnel and on your right.

Though moving forward without Daniel will not be easy, we are committed to keeping the Psychedelic Society alive and active. In the upcoming weeks, we will be reaching out to you all to ensure that the group's leadership transition happens as smoothly and seamlessly as possible.

Sincerely,

Mischa Steiner
Co-Organizer, Psychedelic Society of San Francisco

Daniel Jabbour Bicycle Day Memorial Celebration - Psychedelic Society of San Francisco (San Francisco, CA) - Meetup

There will be a memorial celebration April 19th at 11.30 AM at Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park.

Sarah Slocum’s recent experience at Molotov’s, a lower Haight Street bar where an irate drinker snatched her Google Glass off her face, did a lot to boost her popularity as TV and newspapers covered the incident. But the association with someone who called the incident a hate crime,  has not been good for Google Glass.

A bouncer outside Molotov’s

Several prominent Google Glass enthusiasts I know have started to leave their digital goggles at home, and I’ve heard others are doing the same. They don’t want to be associated with Slocum even though they like the wearable technology.

It’s not just the Slocum effect: there’s a sense of manners related to the use of any camera in public that requires people to ask permission. 

You can generally see if someone is pointing their phone at you yet it’s difficult to tell if a Google Glass wearer is taking photos, or shooting video. This is especially true in the latest version of Google Glass where the bright tiny screen is now very visible to outsiders and is clearly on even though it might not be recording.  

This makes it creepy to talk with wearers and their owners are noticing this and are becoming self-conscious. It has become very gauche to wear Google Glass in social contexts and people are leaving them at home.

There’s a lot of enthusiasm for wearable technologies these days. It’s worth noting that anything wearable is a fashion item and subject to a fickle world of constantly changing styles. Fashion is a social phenomenon and when the masses decide something is not cool anymore there’s nothing much you can do about it. 

- - -

Sarah Slocum: the infamous face of Google Glass - SFGate

Her assertion that she was the victim of a hate crime was ridiculed. And her past came to light, including a series of restraining orders filed against her - one for video-recording people through an open window of their home.

Critics have said Slocum is not someone who deserves sympathy but is a pushy pioneer in the art of privacy invasion at a time of growing concern about public surveillance…

Slocum’s promotion of the exclusive Google Glass may have backfired… “Companies normally love early adopters of their products. They're so passionate," said David Mitroff, a marketing consultant and founder of Piedmont Avenue Consulting in Oakland. “The problem is that those people can go overboard…”

It also includes the six "least generous" (a generous way to say, "the couldn't care less ") tech billionaires.

Jeff Bezos should learn from his parents:

A libertarian known for his belief in self-reliance--engaged in virtually no philanthropy for years... For a long time, his parents did more giving with their Amazon shares than Bezos did with his billions. Now things are starting to change, with a few high profile gifts going out the door for brain science and cancer research...

Larry Page has short arms:

If this Google co-founder, who's worth $32 billion, has a secret philanthropic life, we'd love to know about it. Because right now it looks like he's a big cheerleader for Google's philanthropic and social endeavors, while kicking the can down the road in terms of engaging in his own serious philanthropy.

Steve Ballmer lost his check book:

We've predicted that he and his wife Connie, a nonprofit veteran, will soon turn on the giving spigot in a big way, drawing on a $19 billion fortune. Otherwise, Ballmer has largely been a no-show in terms of his own philanthropy beyond the occasional big gift here and there.

Larry Ellison has given about half-a-billion dollars to medical research over his lifetime but not much in recent years.

Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo! has made just one gift, $75m to his alma mater -- a comparative drop from his blue ocean.

Bebo co-founders Michael Birch and wife Xochti made out very well when they sold to AOL. Their $595m has partly been spent on $1m to a water charity and much more went here: 

$29 million for a mansion in Pacific Heights and then $13.6 million for a vineyard estate in Sonoma. More recently, Birch has spent millions on his latest cause, which is a private club where the Bay Area elite can hobnob.

Read: Meet the 12 Most Generous Tech Leaders. . . And 6 of the Least 

There’s lot’s more great events coming up. These caught my eye:

Unintended Consequences: Is Too Much Information, Too Fast, Too Much of a Good Thing?

Thu, Mar 27 2014 - 6:30pm
Nicholas Carr, Author, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
Zack Lynch, Founder and Executive Director, Neurotechnology Industry Organization; Author, The Neuro Revolution: How Brain Science is Changing Our World
Marilyn Walker, Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, Professor of Computer Studies and Head of the Natural Language and Dialogue Systems Lab in the Baskin School of Engineering, UC Santa Cruz
Barbara Marshman, Editorial Page Editor, San Jose Mercury News - Moderator

Dr. Jared Diamond

Wed, Apr 9 2014 - 7:00pm
Jared Diamond, Professor of Geography, UCLA; Author, Guns, Germs, and Steel and The Third Chimpanzee for Young People

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Diamond examines the evolutionary history of humans and the unique traits and behaviors that distinguish us from other animals. Diamond also explains why our innate tendencies toward invention and violence have led us to a crucial tipping point. Hear what Diamond has to say about the future of our species.

How Did Oracle Team USA Win the America's Cup - Twice?

Wed, Apr 2 2014 - 6:00pm
Jimmy Spithill, Oracle Team USA Skipper
Norbert Bajurin, Commodore, Golden Gate Yacht Club
Julian Guthrie, Reporter, San Francisco Chronicle; Author, The Billionaire and the Mechanic: How Larry Ellison and a Car Mechanic Teamed Up to Win Sailing's Greatest Race, The America's Cup, Twice
Michael Krasny, Host, KQED’s Forum – Moderator

The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature 

Wed, Apr 2 2014 - 6:00pm
Ben Tarnoff, Author, The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

Tarnoff's latest book focuses on Mark Twain's early years as a struggling writer in Civil War-era San Francisco and on the countercultural community he discovered there. It was a haven for weirdos, gamblers, crooks and draft dodgers, but later became a literary laboratory for new kinds of writing, eventually influencing several of the directions American literature went during the decades that followed.

Jeremy Rifkin: Are We Moving from a Capitalist to a Collaborative Economy?

Wed, Apr 9 2014 - 6:00pm
Jeremy Rifkin, Economist; Author, The Zero Marginal Cost Society

Economist and New York Times best-selling author Jeremy Rifkin will be here to discuss his provocative new book, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, in which he describes how the emerging "Internet of Things" is transforming us into an era of nearly free goods and services and no longer subject to market forces. Rifkin, who is known globally for his work observing the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, society and the environment, theorizes that while capitalism will always be an intrinsic part of our economy, it will lose its position as the dominant economic paradigm later in the century.

Evgeny Morozov 

Thu, Apr 10 2014 - 7:00pm
Evgeny Morozov, Contributing Editor, The New Republic; Twitter: @evgenymorozov

New Republic Contributing Editor Morozov has been described as one of the “most prominent, most multiplatformed critic[s] of the utopian promises coming from Silicon Valley.” He will discuss changes in privacy, democracy and the future of information and technology policy.

War on Whistleblowers: The Snowden Effect | Commonwealth Club

Thu, Apr 10 2014 - 12:00pm
Jesselyn Radack, National Security & Human Rights Director, Government Accountability Project; Author, Traitor: The Whistleblower and the "American Taliban"

Radack works primarily with whistleblowers – including those from the Defense Department, Department of Homeland Security, NSA and CIA – with special focus on torture, secret surveillance and political discrimination. She represented former NSA official and whistleblower Thomas Drake throughout the government's unsuccessful prosecution of him under the Espionage Act. She then represented CIA torture conduct whistleblower John Kiriakou, who is the sole CIA agent sent to jail in connection with the U.S. torture program, despite never having tortured anyone.

Archduke Karl von Habsburg: A Modern Monuments Man

Wed, Apr 30 2014 - 6:00pm
HIRH Karl von Habsburg, Imperial Prince and Archduke of Austria, Royal Prince of Hungary and Bohemia

Archduke Karl von Habsburg, LLM, is truly a modern “Monuments Man.” As president of the Association of National Committees of the Blue Shield and a former member of the European Parliament for Austria, he has specialized in international humanitarian law and intangible cultural heritage protection. Archduke von Habsburg has most recently worked to save cultural artifacts and historical sites in many modern crisis-ravaged parts of Arica and the Middle East. He is a descendant of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination in Sarajevo triggered World War I, 100 years ago this June. In 1961, the Archduke’s father, Otto von Habsburg, renounced all claims to the Austrian throne. Here’s a rare chance to meet a descendant of European Royalty, who is currently working to preserve the world’s most precious treasures.

This ad for  Autism Speaks at a San Francisco bus stop reminded me of an excerpt from an article written by Curt Woodward, senior editor at  Xconomy, about the lack of eye-contact within Google’s top echelon:

During Schmidt's decade as Google CEO, before co-founder Larry Page took the helm, there was a standing rule for one senior-executive meeting: No computers, no smartphones, and talk to each other face-to-face for one hour per week.

It was so hard to resist the pull of the Web, though, that Schmidt had to walk around the meeting room and look for people hiding their phones under the table, dispensing fines to the offenders.

"Even one hour per week, you couldn't have a civilized conversation. So when Larry replaced me, he gave up. And now I sit in the meeting, typing away like everybody else, with no eye contact. So, if you like eye contact, I'm sorry--you lost," he said to laughs.

Schmidt: Google Glass Critics "Afraid of Change," Society Will Adapt | Xconomy

The lack of eye-contact is pervasive and extends well beyond the Google C-suite. It seems likely that our technologies are encouraging autistic types of behaviors.

We even see it in how tech companies try to use "Big Data" to understand social behavior by customers and communities when empathy is pretty much all you need. It provides insights that data analysis won't reveal. Lack of empathy towards others is a sign of autism. 

There are quite a few tech companies who sit at various points on the autistic spectrum. The disorder isn’t curable but it is treatable and companies with an autistic culture can still lead highly productive lives — they just need some help in playing well with others.

Treatment requires sometimes unplugging from our always-on, always-with-us technologies. Be Here Right Now will be a new mantra and the new manners.

It is derived from the 60s rejoinder but remade for our times, with an emphasis on “right now,” and it implies a real-time environment — a concept familiar to engineers.

We only  have ”now.” But our tech steals it from us constantly with shoals of glittery distractions. Sometimes the price is worth paying but other times our technologies get in the way of meaningful experiences.

There’s no such thing as augmented reality, as Google Glass is often described. There’s something in the way — it’s an occluded reality. 

Be Here Right Now is scary and great. It’s a good kind of scary to switch off for a while. It’s great for startups because original ideas come from original experiences. Original experiences are those that are found as unfiltered, and untainted by other people’s opinions, curations, and as un-occluded as possible.  

It’ll lead to original ideas — increasingly rare in Silicon Valley.

- - -

Autism Speaks - it's time to listen.

There's also an app: Autism Speaks.

In the late 1990s , the Herman Miller Aeron chair (below) became the symbol of the startup boom because it seemed that every startup office had them. They weren't cheap, around $900 each, but they were, and still are, very stylish. Nobody knew at the time that chairs were silent killers.

Product Story - The Aeron chair didn't end up in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection just because it looks cool. Although it does. Its looks are only the beginning. Aeron accommodates both the sitter and the environment. It adapts naturally to virtually every body, and it's 94% recyclable. Even if it's black, it's green.

For the dotcoms at the time it was all about "burn rate," you had to spend the money you raised as quickly as possible. The logic at the time was that if you weren't spending money as fast as possible you weren't working hard enough. Buying expensive, cool chairs was an easy way to keep your burn rate at rocket engine levels. 

When the dotcom bust came in the early 2000s they became very cheap, you could pick them up from local auctions for under $100.

The motorized standing desk is emerging as the symbol of this current startup boom. It's part of the current worship of software engineers -- if startups can't provide for their every comfort, then they might not join. 

The motorized standing desk costs about as much as an Aeron chair but it's not as stylish, it won't be found in any museum of modern art. 

However, its health benefits are reported to be life-extending. Maybe this is what Google means about investing in life extension technologies so that it can recruit software engineers?

All good things come to an end and when the current startup boom blows up, the silver-lining will be lots of cheap, lightly used, motorized standup desks. I can't wait for mine!

. . .

[I might add some wheels, and add batteries and use the motor to make my desk mobile. Why get a treadmill for your desk when you can walk your desk in the park?! Then I can lower it, put a rug on top and use it to get around town, magic carpet style...]

The Internet Archive in San Francisco is asking for help in recovering from a two-alarm fire that caused more than $600,000 in damage.

The archive often compares its mission to that of the famous library of Alexandria, Egypt, destroyed by fire more than 2,000 years ago. It underscores that connection with mirror servers located in Alexandria. 

Sarah B. reporting for RichmondSFBlog:

Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle said the 7 to 10 office staff that worked in the building will temporarily relocate to their Richmond, CA facility. The damaged building was originally built in the 1940′s and used as a Christian Science reading room.

The former church next door, which also belongs to the Internet Archive, was not damaged in the fire.

Kahle was in remarkably good spirits when we spoke to him around 9am this morning, and was optimistic about their plans to rebuild the office. He said they mostly lost electronic equipment including cameras and scanners, and thankfully no cultural materials were destroyed in the fire. He said he was still waiting for word from the SFFD on what exactly caused the fire.

 Part of Internet Archive building badly burned in early morning fire

The fire comes just two weeks after the Internet Archive announced a series of new initiatives, some were in response to NSA snooping. 

Donations can be made here: http://archive.org/donate

On Friday, November 8, the Internet Archive is hosting a fund raising to celebrate the 27th birthday of activist Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide earlier this year.

Below: A clay figurine of Aaron Swartz in the Great Room of the Internet Archive building, stands next to a figurine of Brewster Kahle.

Please see:

Scanning Center Fire -- Please Help Rebuild | Internet Archive Blogs

Alexandria 2.0: One Millionaire's Quest to Build the Biggest Library on Earth Wired.com

To Those That Would Martyr Aaron Swartz: Where Were The Activists When He Needed Them? -SVW

(Above from left) Doug MacMillan, Bloomberg; Melissa Daimler, Twitter; Rowan Trollope, Cisco Systems; and Todd Carlisle, Director of Staffing at Google.

There’s enormous competition for software engineers and many companies offer an ever larger array of work perks convinced that it will help them recruit the best.

Kathleen Pender at SFGate.com reports: Tech, social media employers offer perks aplenty 

Tech workers are being wooed with napping stations, unlimited vacation, free housekeeping and errand-running, yoga classes, on-site doctors and masseuses, and gourmet cafeterias…

Social Print Studio of San Francisco is a good example of the modern startup. Along with health care, but no 401(k) yet, it offers unlimited vacation, napping boxes, and a fully equipped jam room where its 20 employees and their friends can record a song or video. 

Foremski’s Take: Are such work perks really necessary? And do they do more harm than good by competing with local businesses?

Google is famous for its work perks such as hiring top chefs to cook gourmet meals for staff and having games rooms, etc.  But when I attended an Inforum panel about “How to attract tomorrow’s talent,” Todd Carlisle, Director of Staffing, shocked fellow panelists from Cisco, Twitter, and Bloomberg, saying that they were not necessary. 

He said no job applicants ask about work perks, and no one turns down a job based on what perks are available.

Adult day care…

When I met with Jedidiah Yueh, CEO of virtual database company Delphix, one of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups I asked how the company recruits top engineers. I asked if it offers a games room, etc. 

“No. We don’t run an adult day care center. The best engineers want the opportunity to work on solving hard problems and that’s what we do here.” 

So if work perks aren’t necessary why do so many companies insist on providing them? Surely, that’s a distraction from their business? And it’s not good for the surrounding community because they are competing with local small businesses trying to make a living providing basic services such as dry cleaning, etc.

This is especially worrisome when a large company such as Google continues to expand its footprint in the middle of Silicon Valley, and its free food and services are pushing local business into bankruptcy. It’s a situation that will worsen when it opens two large office complexes in downtown Palo Alto and Mountain View.

Twitter’s negative effect on local businesses is even greater because its HQ is in San Francisco’s Tenderloin — the city’s poorest district. Yet Twitter is receiving as much as $55m in tax breaks from the city as part of an agreement it made to gentrify its neighborhood. Instead, it ends up competing with local businesses, making the situation worse.

What’s the point in communities having such tech giants in their midst when they result in job losses and high rents? 

[Please see: Living In The Shadow Of The Googleplex: Communities Struggle To Keep Jobs]

Drinking the same koolaid…

Another aspect of this work perks trend is that staff don’t get out much. They spend less time interacting with outsiders and far more time inside their work environment. This leads to a uniformity in thought and culture.

With less experience of the outside world they won’t be getting many bright ideas that could help their companies succeed in real-world environments. And they won’t be evangelizing their company’s web services either. 

Tech company workers live in a pampered world where they miss out on developing skills of basic self-sufficiency such as cooking, shopping, and cleaning their apartments. It’s just like living at home with mom except it’s even better because mom’s not there to tell you to pick up your room — it’s no wonder that the young engineers gain a reputation for being entitled.

Telecommuting failure…

Todd Carlisle was asked about telecommuting, and he said Google had looked at a lot of data on which was better for productivity: office or working remotely.  He said the data showed no difference.

Yet Google’s massive fleet of white unmarked buses, with their sinister looking blacked out windows scoop up tens of thousands of staff every morning from street corners all around San Francisco and the Bay Area, annoying residents and adding to traffic delays. Why?

Delphix has the right answer. Otherwise, you end up recruiting staff who mostly care about perks than the job that needs to be done, which is not the way to build a motivated world-class workforce. 

- - -

The audio from the Inforum panel is here: How to Attract Tomorrow’s Talent and Prepare for the Future Workforce

Gastronomy at the San Francisco Exploratorium.

The Atlantic’s columnist James Fallows recently listed the top 50 innovations by polling “a panel of 12 scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, historians of technology, and others.”

Strangely, I counted only 11 panelists (math wasn’t on the list), which included Silicon Valley VC John Doerr;  Joi Ito from MIT Media Lab; and the perennial favorite of every editor: whoever happens to be around the office at the time, which in this case was The Atlantic’s senior editor Alexis Madrigal.

 The list starts off with:

- The printing press (1430s not the earlier Chinese one). 

Then you have all the ones you’d expect: electricity, semiconductors, optics, internal combustion engine, Internet, of course. But they missed the most important technology breakthrough of all time: Gastronomy.

The editors said they wanted to list the most important innovations since the wheel, or about 6,000 years ago, so that they could avoid listing fire. But that makes little sense because fire is not an invention but a natural phenomenon. And some recent civilizations, such as those in the Americas, didn’t use the wheel for transportation, or like the Mayans used the wheel only for toys. Atlantic could have just said 50 most important breakthroughs (fire and wheel not included).

Mind expanding technology

When we developed the technology of cooking it literally blew our minds — our brain size quadrupled and our stomachs shrank. We became much smarter and we looked fabulous — what other breakthrough technology did that?!

Gastronomy unlocked a vast amount of energy in raw food and we used it to build a much larger brain.

But that brain had to be used for serious things because it is very expensive to maintain, requiring 25% of daily calories in the form of high octane glucose for just 2.5% body mass. And the brain has to be fed 24/7 even if other organs have to be shutdown. 

The cooking pot allowed us to build a Ferrari of a brain, expensive to maintain but incredible in performance. We left the other raw food primates in the dust and now we’re on the doorstep of our next big leap forward, into the mashed-up singularity of some kind of bio-digital reality.

Cooking gave us time to think. Eating raw food takes a tremendous amount of time to chew enough to fulfill daily needs, and so does foraging for it when you haven’t figured out yet how to grow it.

Innovation comes from thinking. In fact, when you think about it, all good things in our society come from having the time to think.

If gastronomy hadn’t been invented there would be no civilization, science, arts, computer technologies, or top 50 lists because we wouldn’t have the time to invent them all — we’d still be chewing.

- - -

The 50 Greatest Breakthroughs Since the Wheel - James Fallows - The Atlantic

The Science Of Food - Gastronomy Night at The Exploratorium -SVW

Historians will look back at the past 20 years as a unique period, a time when there was great opportunity to see deep into the collective soul of entire societies because people’s online behavior was largely naked of any fears of being judged or monitored.

Novelist Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez wrote: “All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.” We once had insight into that secret world. 

People now go “dark” — ditching their natures, becoming self-monitored, self-critical, and second guessing themselves and everything around them, in the wake of the NSA disclosures and the enormous amount of corporate spying on individuals, so that they will buy more products. We lose far more than we gain.

The individual and their search box was almost as private and sacrosanct as the communion box — and exhibited the same honesty.  You can see this in the search data that AOL released in 2006 as part of a research project. It anonymized 658,000 users but for the first time we got to see a narrative from each user that pointed to great sorrow and drama within ordinary peoples’ lives that could not be revealed in any other way.

Here is a list of searches by user “005315”:

letters and responses written by women to emotionally
abusive partners
men that use emotional and physical abandonment to control their partner
warning signs of a mans infidelity or sexual addiction
the sociopathic relationship
southern california newspaper stories about woman murdered by boyfriend in pomona december2005
names of females murdered or found dead in pomona california in 2005
characteristics of a sociopath in a relationship
a person that shows lack of empathy
help in writing a letter to a abusive narcissistic ex boyfriend
how to hurt the narcissistic man
retaliating against the narcisisstic man

AOL search user “4331025” seemed to be going through a divorce:

cheer up plaques
mass custody definitions
kids health
visitation schedule
kids gym places in worcester
counter surveilance products
sample visitation schedules
how are fat girlfriends
revenge for a cheating spouse
civil war a fathers guide to wining custody
first date dos and donts
how to satisfy a woman
penis enlargement
how to get revenge on exwife
how to do a background check with a liscense number

There’s lots more, some of it can be very disturbing.

Selfies and self-centered life…

For a few years, the search box became a new form of confessional and the answers offered some salvation.  Now, that’s gone because the innocence has gone.  However, there’s a ton of archives for future anthropologists to sift — if they become available from Google, et al.

What’s worse than self-censoring your entire life is the boost Internet technologies have given to the incumbent powers. The early utopian ideals of blogging, citizen journalists, and transparency — have not been realized. Those “transformative” technologies have in fact, helped the ruling powers continue to survive amid greatly magnified levers of control and abilities to impose their ideas onto larger masses of people. The social media promises of challenging the status quo failed to be realised and instead, social media became the social distribution of mass media (SODOMM).

Security expert Bruce Schneier, recently wrote in The Atlantic: The Battle for Power on the Internet 

There is more government surveillance than ever before. There is more government censorship than ever before. There is more government propaganda, and an increasing number of governments are controlling what their users can and cannot do on the Internet. Totalitarian governments are embracing a growing “cyber sovereignty” movement to further consolidate their power. And the cyberwar arms race is on, pumping an enormous amount of money into cyber-weapons and consolidated cyber-defenses, further increasing government power…

The interests of corporate and government powers are aligning. Both corporations and governments benefit from ubiquitous surveillance, and the NSA is using Google, Facebook, Verizon, and others to get access to data it couldn’t otherwise.

Mr. Schneier believes that by being nimble, it is possible to use technology to out-fox the ruling powers. However, it doesn’t take long for governments, and corporations to catch up. And as the cloaking technologies become more complex to use, fewer use them, and users can then become very exposed by using them even if their content isn’t.

This is why cloaking technologies should be ubiquitous and built-into the fabric of online infrastgructure because they are essential to a modern democracy. Their absence should be considered anti-democratic and a form of human rights violation because peoples' access to free speech and freedom to organize cannot be guaranteed.

Nearly eight years ago I wrote: The future transparency of the past--we live in glass houses | ZDNet

Will we have Big Brother? Yes, because we can. Because once we digitize something, we can process it, and we can store it--very easily. We can monitor the inventory in coke machines, and we will monitor everything else soon too.

And if we can track people, we will, because we can. If reasonable technologies exist to prevent crime, terrorism, or any other illegal acts, then we would be negligent in not employing those technologies. That will be the logic of the lawyers and legislators.

Welcome to the future transparency of your present moments.

When Big Data can predict who will buy shoes it can also be applied to predict crimes and criminals. Predictive analytics might sound benign when applied to business but in the hands of government or police states it becomes truly frightening. 

When Big Data can predict who will buy refrigerators it can also be applied to predict crimes and criminals. Predictive analytics might sound benign when applied to commerce but in the hands of government or police states it becomes truly frightening.

We could easily paint ourselves into a corner, as in North Korea, or Nazi Germany and become trapped inside hideous societies ruled by inhuman idealogies because of our advanced technologies of control.

This is why techno-optimists must also become techno-activists to ensure that we get the right future — there are many to choose from but only a few that are worthwhile.

We could easily paint ourselves into a corner, as in North Korea, or Nazi Germany and become trapped by our advanced technologies of control.

This is why tech-optimists must also become techno-activists to ensure that we get the right future — there are many to choose from but only a few that are worth fighting for.

Japan's plummeting birth rate is being partly blamed on young males called "Otaku" who show far more interest in computers and comic books than sex.

Tokyo's Akihabara district (below) is filled with gadget and manga book stores and is the favorite hangout for Otaku, reports Anita Rani, for the BBC: The Japanese men who prefer virtual girlfriends to sex

Unless something happens to boost Japan's birth rate, its population will shrink by a third between now and 2060. One reason for the lack of babies is the emergence of a new breed of Japanese men, the otaku, who love manga, anime and computers -- and sometimes show little interest in sex...

Akihabara, an area of the city dedicated to the manga and anime subculture provides one clue to the country's problems. Akihabara is heaven for otaku.

Kunio Kitamara, of the Japan Family Planning Association, describes many young Japanese men as "herbivores" -- passive and lacking carnal desire.

Above, a guide spells out the rules for Akihabara tour.

A survey by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in 2010 found 36% of Japanese males aged 16 to 19 had no interest in sex -- a figure that had doubled in the space of two years.

Even Japanese men in a relationship don't have much sex, a recent survey found that less than 27% had sex at least once a week.

The Akihabara district is packed with computer, gadget and Manga book stores 

The lack of sexual desire could be linked to the poor economic prospects of millennials in Japan compared with their parent's generation. Their lousy socioeconomic position seems to have led to a collective loss of libido -- they've lost their mojo.

Roland Kelts, a Tokyo-based social commentator, said:

"If you compare China or Vietnam, most of those kids on scooters going to nightclubs, and dancing their heart away and perhaps having sex -- they know it's getting better, they know they are probably going to rock their parents' income," he says. "No-one in Japan feels that way."

Life-size Manga characters and anatomically correct robot in an Akihabara store

Does the US have a similar Otaku sub-culture? We should look because there's lots about the Japanese story that is similar to here. Our male millennials love comic books, gadgets, and computers; their job prospects are lousy; plus they carry huge college debt loads; and many have to rely on their parents. 

The same lousy cultural and socioeconomic factors are at play for US, and also European millennials. I'd be surprised if a survey didn't find a sizable population of Otaku.

And how can we help them find their mojo? Because a related problem is hikikomori: young men who shut themselves away in their rooms for years. A Japanese Cabinet Office survey from 2010 found 700,000 but there could be as many as 1 million hikikomori.

Hikikomori: Why are so many Japanese men refusing to leave their rooms?

- - -

Updated: Abigail Haworth reporting for The Guardian's sister publication The Observer: Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex?

The number of single people has reached a record high. A survey in 2011 found that 61% of unmarried men and 49% of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of romantic relationship, a rise of almost 10% from five years earlier. Another study found that a third of people under 30 had never dated at all. ...A survey earlier this year by the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA) found that 45% of women aged 16-24 "were not interested in or despised sexual contact". More than a quarter of men felt the same way.

...

"It's too troublesome," says Kishino, when I ask why he's not interested in having a girlfriend. "I don't earn a huge salary to go on dates and I don't want the responsibility of a woman hoping it might lead to marriage." Japan's media, which has a name for every social kink, refers to men like Kishino as "herbivores" or soshoku danshi (literally, "grass-eating men"). Kishino says he doesn't mind the label because it's become so commonplace. He defines it as "a heterosexual man for whom relationships and sex are unimportant".

The phenomenon emerged a few years ago with the airing of a Japanese manga-turned-TV show. The lead character in Otomen ("Girly Men") was a tall martial arts champion, the king of tough-guy cool. Secretly, he loved baking cakes, collecting "pink sparkly things" and knitting clothes for his stuffed animals. To the tooth-sucking horror of Japan's corporate elders, the show struck a powerful chord with the generation they spawned.

. . .

There was an interesting comment:

Several things at work here but it mostly boils down to "ignorant foreigner who thinks Japan is weird and is going out of there way to find something else to report on and have a giggle about"

"Honne and tatemae are Japanese words that describe the contrast between a person's true feelings and desires (本音 honne) and the behavior and opinions one displays in public (建前 tatemae).
Honne may be contrary to what is expected by society or what is required according to one's position and circumstances, and they are often kept hidden, except with one's closest friends. Tatemae is what is expected by society and required according to one's position and circumstances, and these may or may not match one's honne."

Quote from wiki as it is pretty spot on. This is just one level of complexity but most Westerners have difficulty wrapping their head around this. Makes surveys based on reported attitudes pretty much pointless no matter who conducts them.

. . .

Another comment:

Primarily, I see the main problem with relationships here is the same as most of the problems with Japanese people in general over here; and that is just a matter of time. You note that people work a lot off-handedly, but I see it as THE key problem. People here work 10 hour days, 6 days a week, for an average job. They also generally spend a couple of hours a day commuting. A part-time job is usually 5 days a week! This lifestyle starts from primary school. Kids go to school from 8-5 (or 6), and usually go to school on saturdays for club activities, which sometimes happen Sundays as well.

People have nearly no time to themselves, and I think this is the main reason that relationships suffer. People barely have time to manage their own affairs, and its when you see the average Japanese person's life in this light that you understand why relationships are 'mendokusai'. They simply don't have time. And THIS is the real problem with Japan, for Japanese people (through the eyes of an outsider); they have no relaxation time. Everything is managed to the second; everything is wound so tight. Even holidays; the average holiday is a few days, maybe once a year. There are no evenings off, no weekends off even, there is never any time to sit back, or be indulgent. Its not surprising then that sex and commitment takes a back seat to blowing off a little steam and trying to just have some fun.

- - -

Below, seen in an Akihabara store - a man's tie with a USB-powered fan to cool you off if you get hot under the collar -- won't be needed by Otaku.

Krissy Clark reporting for Marketplace.org writes about a technique for hiring the best talent and automatically increasing gender and ethnic diversity in staffing.

The procedure is simple and was first used by symphony orchestras in the 1970s to increase the number of female musicians. Auditions were performed behind a screen and chosen for best performance, and magically, more women began to be hired.

The judges were screened from their own biases!

Eric Ries, author of "Lean Startup"...

Reis tried an experiment of his own: when he looked at resumes, he'd have someone black out the name, gender and ethnicity of the applicant. "It was actually a very surreal experience," Ries said, explaining that it was harder to picture the candidate or build a story about them in his head.

After he screened those resumes, and chose who to interview, he said "the ethnicity and gender make-up of the next round of our process was different" than his usual selections.

This realization was "very uncomfortable," Ries said

The article also looks at how Catherine Bracy at Code for America hires women engineers:

"We go where they are -- attend conferences where we know that there are going to be women. We reach out on forums where we know they will participate," she said.

Startups experiment to diversify Silicon Valley

Twitter's elite staff work in plush surrounds and eat oysters and lamb chops, outside HQ (above) on the south-side of mid-Market Street is San Francisco's poorest neighborhood -- the Tenderloin. 

There was a recent hearing by the city of San Francisco where Twitter was asked what it had done for the community in return for about $22m in tax savings since 2011. Here's an excellent report by Justine Sharrock on Buzzfeed.

"... it gave away $60,000 in promoted tweets."

 I was walking to an event at Moscone and took a few pictures of the neighborhood. 

Not much has changed on Twitter's street that I've seen. There's not much chance for gentrification when all the workers stay inside and Twitter cleans their apartments, and washes their clothes, and feeds them for free. Competing with local services is the opposite of gentrification. For the young engineers it's great it's like being back at mom's, free food and clean laundry, and without having to deal with mom.

Oscar Wilde in in America, 1882, 28 years old. 

Gary Kamiya tells stories on SFGate.com, from the history of San Francisco and its newspaper archives. It's a rich history for such a small city,  and it's a strong literary history, too, which is apt with Silicon Valley becoming a Media Valley.

This week Mr. Kamiya tells the story of Oscar Wilde's visit to San Francisco in 1882, as part of strange promotional stunt for a Gilbert & Sullivan opera lampooning the Aesthetes, an English artistic and literary set enamored with  a "Cult of Beauty," a heightened level of sensitivity to the beauty of nature, and in the decor of their surroundings — rooms, furniture, and even wallpaper. 

[San Francisco's Legion of Honor museum last year hosted an excellent "Cult of Beauty" exhibit with several pre-Raphaelite artists represented, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti; William Morris graphics design; and Aubrey Beardsley.]

Oscar Wilde was young, just 28 years old but already well known in London for his literary and other achievements, mostly on a very public stage of London society. He was considered a leading light of the Aesthetes, even though after three decades, it was on its way out.

A withered bouquet and a sombrero…

He made a memorable first impression on his arrival San Francisco, the tall, stocky young man quickly attracted a curious crowd, and no wonder:

 He was flamboyantly dressed in a black velvet coat ornamented with a withered bouquet, highly polished pointed shoes and a velvet waistcoat. His long hair hung below a Mexican-style sombrero.

The promoter of the opera paid Wilde $5,000 to go on a lecture tour of the US, so that San Francisco and other cities, could see and meet a member of the Cult of Beauty and thus find the resulting Gilbert & Sullivan performance understandable and hilarious when it arrived later.

… offensively daft

He was scheduled for four lectures in San Francisco. I find this fact hard to believe but Wilde was a terrible public speaker and many reviews were horrible. Here's one from Ambrose Bierce:

"There was never an impostor so hateful, a blockhead so stupid, a crank so variously and offensively daft."

Earning respect…

Wilde always seemed to know how to impress those around him, and for some congregations it didn't require  incisive wit.  During his visit, he was invited to a reception at the city's notorious Bohemian Club.

The merry pranksters assumed that the foppish import was, like his literary alter ego Bunthorne, a hopeless twit, a sunflower-sniffing pansy. They planned to get the "Miss Nancy" drunk and make a fool of him…

Before, during and after dinner, the Bohemians kept pouring drinks, expecting Wilde to lose it, but the beefy, 200-pound Irishman kept downing them and calling for more. Soon it was the rootin' tootin' sons of the Wild West who were collapsing in a drunken heap, their would-be mark still emptying his glass and continuing his urbane conversation.

It is said that the members of the Bohemian Club, filled with newfound respect for the "three-bottle man," commissioned a portrait of Wilde to hang in the club. Wilde returned the compliment to the city, saying he had fallen in love with San Francisco.

Never ever, try to out-drink an Irishman — even if he is dressed as a "Little Lord Fauntleroy."

Mr. Kamiya makes a touching observation: "It was a happy episode in the early life of a great writer, later to be destroyed by Victorian homophobia, in the city that would someday become a beacon of gay pride for the world."

Read the rest here: Oscar Wilde turns tables in surreal sojourn to S.F.

Gary Kamiya is a co-founder of Salon and executive editor of SF Mag. Gary Kamiya - Salon.com

He has a new book "Cool Gray City of Love," about San Francisco, it looks great. Here is Clara Jeffery from the New York Times:

To tell the geo-politico-psycho history of a city as prismatic as San Francisco, and to do it as skillfully as Kamiya does, is no small undertaking…

San Francisco is a metropolis molded, far more than most, by topography and weather, and Kamiya artfully helps us imagine the landscape as it once was: a place of mostly windswept dunes where nomadic bands of American Indians traveled between summer and winter camps, along trails whose contours still exist.

It was great to run into Marshall Kirkpatrick on Market Street. I was passing the busy Powell Street corner and heard "Tom" from somewhere. I usually ignore such voices because I'm not sure if they are external but this one became louder and I turned to see Marshall.

He used to work as a reporter for ReadWriteWeb, which is now just ReadWrite following his departure, (it's missing the "web" and missing his excellent reporting). Marshall said he was in town from Portland for meetings with investors for his startup Little Bird. 

He says Little Bird is doing well and the business model is ready to be scaled. His startup helps marketers spot influential people and monitor what they are sharing and saying online. 

It was good to see Marshall and good to see that he is still writing on his personal blog. He has always been very good at introducing useful tools in content creation, marketing, and importantly, how best to use them: Marshall Kirkpatrick's Blog

He often has good advice for marketers on pitching journalists and related tips on better media relations: How to time your outreach to influencers and press

- - -

A reminder of Japan...

Five years ago we were in Japan together, as guests of Hideshi Hamaguchi  and Toru Takasuka, (below, top left respectively) two of Japan's top entrepreneurs, and pioneers in collaborative software development. We spent a very memorable week in Tokyo.

We got to see it from the inside -- its giant corporations,  its startup communities, meeting top VCs, and government officials (below) in the powerful Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

We saw temples, and a giant Buddha; a bamboo forest, an ancient Zen garden, a traditional tea ceremony.

And we roamed through Tokyo's Akihabara gadget and Manga district, a dreamland for geeks, with tour guides dressed as Manga characters.

We drank coffee in a cafe themed with waitresses in french maid outfits, while Marshall agreed to drink a raw egg and mustard concoction laced with pepper; we scaled a five story bookstore wholly dedicated to women's Manga books. Japanese women love stories about love and romance, however, the characters are all boys and so are the relationships. 

Tokyo's many layered worlds were fascinating and I still think about our experiences. Japan is a very strait-laced place yet also hosts colorful  sub-cultures such as dressing like cowboys, or french maids -- with very precise rules on length of skirt, placement of garter, and every aspect of the costume. No one seems to know how these sub-cultures arise and why the Japanese so easily assimilate cultural icons, images, and language from elsewhere. 

My theory is that it's because of the indigenous Shinto religion and its naturalistic beliefs. They mesh well with our experience of the modern world.

Shinto extremely polytheistic and recognizes 8 million gods, which basically means infinite for all intents and purposes. There's a god of that tree, the rock, this raindrop, divinity is everywhere. That makes it easier  to assimilate yet another "god" -- 8 million and one -- no matter that it takes the form of a cultural icon such as Father Christmas, or dressing in Ghetto fashion. It's a good skill in a changing world. I'd love to visit Japan again.

Tokyo Diary Day 2 - Meeting Top Web 2.0 Entrepreneurs . . .

Hideshi is very much interested in how people collaborate at work. He said that in Japan the entire team pitches in to help its weakest member, who might be struggling to keep up with the work.

I was impressed because that's rarely done in the US. A team will often shun its least productive member and gossip behind their back and try to have them removed. Lots of large US companies, such as Microsoft, Adobe, regularly cull 10 per cent of their staff annually, which greatly encourages division rather than cooperation. Secretly sabotaging a colleague's work becomes a rational act under such circumstances.

You can bet all the Washington Post staff will be reading this edition of Businessweek to figure out the office politics for shmoozing their new boss. The issue is just the start: it contains an excerpt from BusinessWeek reporter Brad Stone's new book: "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.

The cover art promises  a new explosive account that changes "everything you know about Jeff Bezos." We'll see about that, just 12 paragraphs in we read this:

Bezos rarely speaks at conferences and gives interviews only to publicize new products, such as the latest Kindle Fire. He declined to comment on this account, saying that it's "too early" for a reflective look at Amazon's history, though he approved many interviews with friends, family, and senior Amazon executives.

Jeff Bezos, as told by his  "friends, family, and senior Amazon executives" isn't going to yield much beyond how wonderful he is: 

The one unguarded thing about Bezos is his laugh--a pulsing, mirthful bray that he leans into while craning his neck back. He unleashes it often, even when nothing is obviously funny to anyone else. 

There's more flattery:

From a former senior exec: "He had this unbelievable ability to be incredibly intelligent about things he had nothing to do with, and he was totally ruthless about communicating it."

An employee: "You are learning constantly, and the pace of innovation is thrilling."

A senior VP: "He learned things from each of us who had expertise and incorporated the best pieces into his mental model."

Mr Bezos never comes into full view -- at least not in this extract. However, there are interesting tidbits I such as:

His father was a unicyclist performer in the circus but did not raise his son because the marriage broke up very early and he lost touch with the family. His father was tracked down by Brad Stone who revealed that his son is Jeff Bezos, which came as a shock.

Months later his father decided to try to contact his son for the first time in decades. I can't imagine this was welcomed by Jeff Bezos who deliberately wanted to have nothing to do with his biological father (similar to Steve Jobs).

Amazon and its founder are certainly worthwhile subjects but if this excerpt represents the rest of the book -- there might not be too much more to say about both entities --  they both do their jobs very well. Brad Stone's talent as a good reporter can't make up for the dull facts of a story. 

"Explosive new account." Really Businessweek? More like a burp. But maybe the rest of the book has the good stuff.

David Galbraith, co-founder of Yelp and Moreover used to be based in San Francisco and now lives in Switzerland. He recently gave a great talk at CERN's Open Days event, which looks at the cultural impact of the web.

"The web is the most important invention since the Gutenberg press." I certainly agree. Silicon Valley has become a Media Valley, its technologies are media technologies, enabling a giant virtual Gutenberg machine using real-time programmable type, instead of moveable type, and enabling a two-way publishing system in that every computer screen can publish any content -- and publish back.

Interestingly, Dave was the first to realize that the underground room where CERN's Tim Berners-Lee invented the web is located in France and not Switzerland.

Here is the video: The world after WWW - CERN

Slideshare:

Credit: San Jose Mercury

I had a great conversation with photographer  Charles DiLisio (above), who is a man with a mission: photographing, and tracking down old photos of some of Silicon Valley's most important historical buildings for a project he calls, "Silent Icons of Silicon Valley." 

He was recently featured in the San Jose Mercury by veteran columnist Mike Cassidy:

He's a big fan of the past -- the old buildings and the stories they tell about creation, creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. He'd save them all if he could, not necessarily by preserving them in the space they occupy, but by capturing them in digital form and then finding a way to show the world what we have here.

For more than a year, he's been prowling the South Bay, photographing the monuments (or what's left of them) to the valley's past: Fairchild, ROLM, Shockley labs, Ampex.

Most of these company names will be new to the people that make up today's Silicon Valley but they were among the most important companies in the region. They were the Googles, Facebooks, Twitter of their day, and responsible for spinning out hundreds of startups and establishing the area's stellar reputation as the world's engine of innovation.

Mr. DiLisio, says that ROLM, for example, was the first company to build a corporate campus and it had tennis courts and swimming pools.

"Some of these buildings don't exist, or there's a Lowe's on the site. I'm trying to track down photographs of the buildings that might be in the possession of alumni groups, or local history buffs." 

Time is running out for some buildings that still exist such as the one that housed Nobel laureate William Shockley and his team (a team later called the "traitorous eight" because they left to start a new business), it is the true birthplace of Silicon Valley.

As he told Mr. Cassidy, the Shockley site is incredibly important.

"This spawned phenomenal change in the world… This spawned the semiconductor and the semiconductor led to computing, communications, the Internet, all the electronics in your car and all the stuff the NSA is doing or not doing, for good or bad."

He told me that one very large Silicon Valley company wasn't too keen on publicizing its 45 year anniversary because it didn't want to be viewed as "old."  [You don't have to be an "insider" to guess the name of the company.]

Being an old company in Silicon Valley is quite an achievement given the short life of the majority of the startups, it must be doing something right.

I love history but Silicon Valley doesn't have much interest in its heritage. It doesn't really have a united culture, it has many different groups, and communities. Alumni groups centered around Oracle, Apple, Intel, Sun Microsystems, and others are important sub-cultures.

However, since the Google and Facebook cultures aren't too different from each other, and as those companies expand their already large workforces, we might now begin to see a distinct culture emerging in Silicon Valley with shared themes in clothes, mannerisms, and lingo. There's a certain style emerging already.

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, is excellent but it's a relatively recent institution (founded in 1996) and it took ages to build. Its dual use as a large conference center gives the tragically small exhibits area, the look of a an exhibit in hotel or corporate lobby, which is unfortunate because it has an incredible collection of artifacts and papers inside its vaults.

Its online Revolution exhibit is excellent and gives you an idea of the size of its collection.

I love the full size working Babbage engine (photos below), a mass of gears and levers, the first programmable calculating machine and the mother of all computing innovation.

But was it a computer or a printing press? It's both. Its job was to print highly accurate tables of logarithms for Log books. In some ways the Babbage Engine reflects the merging of computing and media that's happening now in Silicon Valley — a giant virtual Gutenberg press, with real-time programmable type instead of moveable type.

Our Internet  technologies are media technologies, they publish information, and most of our companies are technology-enabled media companies. Google publishes pages of content with advertising around it. Facebook, Twitter, etc, too.  Silicon Valley is very much a Media Valley.

Silicon technologies power innovation…

However, it's the tremendous innovations in chip technology that powers our media technologies, and so much more.

The chip industry has provided an exponential powerhouse of innovation in its extraordinary achievements in chip manufacture. Fifty years of relentless doubling of transistors at ever lower prices has provided a platform of innovation that no other technology can match or will be able to match.

Software engineers might think they are the kings of innovation but they aren't — its the chip engineers. Don't confuse the driver of the car with the performance of the car -- this isn't The Flintstones.

Ever faster and ever cheaper chips make bloated software run like a panther, all sleek and agile. Too bad Moore's Law is running out in about seven years; then software won't have all those extra cycles to waste like a trust fund brat, and will have to get learn to get lean and smart. Good luck with that.

So it's fitting that Silicon Valley's name celebrates its chip heritage and how much the modern world owes to this foundational technology. Even though no chips are made here.

Thanks to the historians…

The unique qualities of every place is determined by its invisible history and I applaud the work of Mr. DiLisio and the many others at the Computer History museum, and in local groups of enthusiasts, who are trying to preserve it and display it.

Without them, future generations might never know what it took to build such an amazing place, the source of so much world changing creativity. They might think it was because Mark Zuckerberg moved here to get away from the Winklevoss twins and the cold Boston winters.

- - -

If you'd like to help please visit: Silent Icons of the Silicon Valley

Charles DiLisio (cadilisio) on Twitter

Charles Dilisio Photography Capturing the Sensational ■ Soulful ■ Sublime ■

From Silicon Valley To Media Valley - A Giant Gutenberg Machine Of Programmable Media

Robert Noyce And The Invention Of Silicon Valley

 Computer History Museum.

Babbage Difference Engine, weight five tons.

Printing Log Tables.

Vanity Fair struggled to come up with ten examples of stylish Silicon Valley executives for its slideshow: The Top 10 Best-Dressed Execs in Silicon Valley | Vanity Fair

In fact, a couple of them aren't really Silicon Valley based, and spend more time in New York, such as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey (above) and Pete Cashmore, founder of Mashable. And there's several on the list that you've probably never heard about - the result of desperate Googling in researching this topic. 

Marc Andreessen is listed as well dressed even though he wears the standard VC uniform of Sand Hill Road: blue sports coat  and tan trousers. Vanity Fair says he's not afraid to put on a power suit when needed.

Dressing well is better appreciated in New York than in Silicon Valley where the business-park culture of the  tech companies favors the style set by Mark Zuckerberg's always-on T-shirt and jeans. San Francisco's tech workers dress a little bit better but not by much.

Here are the others on the list:

Marissa Mayer -Yahoo!  Silicon Valley's Stevie Nicks. (Above at Crunchies Awards.)

Sean Parker - Spotify, Facebook. Not really a Silicon Valley exec but a character drawn by Sean Parker.

Alison Pincus - One Kings Lane. Old school classic.

Juliet De Baubigny - Partner At Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Looks great in a ball gown.

Vint Cerf - Google. Looks great in grey suit and grey vest.

Ruzwana Bashir - Peek.Com. She was in a recent New York Times article so it didn't take much Googling to find her. 

Jeremy Stoppelman - Yelp. Yep, he thinks about what to wear.

 From Discover magazine 1988.

It's ironic that with all our technologies for keeping things secret our secrets have a way of coming out into the open. We now know so much about the super-secret NSA and its spying activities that it's as if Spy versus Spy had become a comic reality.

The NSA isn't to blame for this culture of surveillance, it was there long before, in the commercial spying by Google, Facebook, and others; in the nefarious activities of hacker groups; and on occasions, from friends and families. 

Individuals aren't spies but we have been conditioned to think like spies and take similar counter-measures.

The Pew Research Center this week reported that 86% of adults online, regularly take steps to outwit surveillance measures. As many as one in five have been a victim of having their email or social media accounts hacked. A further one in ten have lost important information such as social security numbers to third parties.

They used measures such as using encryption, and deleting cookies on a regular basis to foil trackers. Most people were less concerned about the NSA than they were about spying from advertisers, hackers, or friends and family, reports Pew.

It seems that we live in an online world where there's a great thirst for information versus a great desire to shield information. It's a war pitting technologies of concealment versus technologies of revelation.

Google's mission statement "to index the world's information" can be seen both as liberating and noble, and as sinister and evil. Yet it's the way of the world and appears to be the mission statement of many other organizations, private and public, although on different scales and interests.

Two opposing views means two sets of business opportunities.

We'll get a flood of new startups offering services to individuals as counter-measures to the new surveillance technologies being created by a flood of new startups.

It seems like a poor way to employ the energies of tens of thousands of highly trained people. 

Who will win?Will the technologies of concealment outwit the technologies of revelation? 

It seems all significant secrets eventually become public and it's because people are people. Technology can't keep secrets only people can keep secrets — and we are not wired to do that.

Bradley Manning and Edward Snowdon are examples of our human nature to share information that others don't have. "I know something that you don't," has tremendous value to an individual, a value that is not measured in money but in prestige and status. We learned that on the playground a long time ago.

Which is why secrets will always find the light of day no matter how powerful the technologies used to keep them in the dark. 

Chris Heuer (above) has been asking this question in his salon: Is work broken? It's a good question and very current. The environment of work seems horrid in many organizations and the management unpleasant. 

Cooperation, teamwork, collaboration, and respect -- seem to be on a long list of virtues that are absent from many workplaces.  Can this be changed? Probably, but it might not be worth the effort.

I doubt changes can be made within established organizations, it's better if the die is cast from new, within a brand new enterprise. If better places can be built then, we should see that in a new generation of high performance workplaces arising and outpacing the older model. But what will that new model look like?

This upcoming conference caught my eye and might have some answers: (Via StoweBoyd.)

The Work Revolution Summit -- Co-Create The Future Of Work in New York City September 20-21.

We certainly need some big changes in the workplace. I read this description but I'm still not sure what it is:

The Work Revolution is a movement + campaign that advocates for human and meaningful work for all. We are the pioneers designing radically life-giving workplaces. Join us.

Also, it's not clear if the Work Revolution Summit is a deep dive into the subject and a debate on new directions, or a sales pitch.

Our objective is to provide startups and entrepreneurs with the tools they need to maintain an astonishingly "human" company culture that helps both the employees and the company reach their full potential as the organization grows and scales.

Either way, any way that fixes work is justified if we can produce better, and emotionally healthier workplaces. 

The Work Revolution movement has a manifesto, it's unassailable in its vision but could do without the chocolate: 

You are fearless. A force to be reckoned with. You are unafraid to challenge the status quo (in fact, you kind of enjoy it). You have a low tolerance for outdated workplace practices. You believe that work should be meaningful, and you strive to make it so -- not only for yourself, but for those around you. You find organizational innovations delicious, and devour helpful trends like some kind of delicious exotic chocolate.

It was wonderful to see living history, Daniel Ellsberg (above), famed whistle-blower of "Pentagon Papers" speak at a rally for "Restore the Fourth" in San Francisco, Sunday.

The former US military analyst, said that US democracy, with all of its faults, is worth fighting for and devoting lives to preserving.

He spoke about changes in the US towards whistleblowers and that Edward Snowden had to leave the country. He said that he was able to stay in the country when he leaked The Pentagon Papers. In a recent article:

When I surrendered to arrest in Boston, having given out my last copies of the papers the night before, I was released on personal recognizance bond the same day. Later, when my charges were increased from the original three counts to 12, carrying a possible 115-year sentence, my bond was increased to $50,000.

But for the whole two years I was under indictment, I was free to speak to the media and at rallies and public lectures…There is no chance that experience could be reproduced today, let alone that a trial could be terminated by the revelation of White House actions against a defendant that were clearly criminal in President Richard Nixon’s era — and figured in his resignation in the face of impeachment — but are today all regarded as legal (including an attempt to “incapacitate me totally”).

Ellsberg: Leaker Snowden made the right call | The Japan Times

The rally also featured Mark Klein, the former AT&T worker who in 2006 revealed a secret room in AT&T's San Francisco location that was diverting Silicon Valley and Bay Area communications to the NSA. 

Norman Solomon, politician, media critic and founder of the Institute for Public Accuracy also spoke. He called  San Francisco politician, minority leader Nancy Pelosi, the biggest threat to democracy in the US for her role in defeating a bill that would curtail the NSA.

Several hundred people, many blowing whistles, walked to Nancy Pelosi's office to deliver signatures protesting her recent actions.

Restore the Fourth has wide support among Silicon Valley startup community. Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, is among those that has tweeted support for the organization.

[Please see: San Francisco 'Restore The Fourth' Protest Draws More than 400]

Here's some photos:

12 Galaxies supports Restore the Fourth.

Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, recently made a flip comment in the UK in response to news that the tech giant paid just $16m in taxes on $18.5 billion in UK revenues.

Google's Eric Schmidt: change British law and we'd pay more tax.

He said he had a fiduciary duty to his shareholders to pay as little overseas tax as legally possible.

The British hate paying taxes but consider it a social duty for the upkeep of their communities – and everyone is expected to pitch in and pay their fair share. Not understanding the culture, Mr. Schmidt's Ayn Rand-ish comments seemed better suited for Silicon Valley, and did not sit well with the British public. Which now makes him fair game for British newspapers.

Some of the attention has been tame: Ed Hammond, at the Financial Times, wryly noted that Mr. Schmidt, "Is searching for a London mansion – a prospective £30m purchase that would land him a higher tax bill than the internet group has paid on average in the UK in recent years."

The tabloid newspaper, the Daily Mail, which runs the world's largest news site, went much further. It published a lengthy, raunchy, unflattering account of Mr. Schmidt's sex life, complete with photos of "his string of exotic lovers." 

Caroline Graham reported:

The unlikely sex symbol with thinning hair and pockmarked skin has embarked on a string of affairs with younger women, including a vivacious TV presenter who dubbed him ‘Dr Strangelove’, a leggy blonde public relations executive and a sexy Vietnamese concert pianist.

The headline pulled no punches:

The £5.4billion Google love rat: How boss, 58, of internet giant resisting online porn crackdown has a string of exotic lovers in his 'open marriage'... but DOESN'T want you to know about it

He is the billionaire Google boss under fire for encouraging the company to ‘avoid’ paying massive corporation tax in the UK and for not doing enough to protect children from internet porn.

The reporter Googled much of the information in the story from other newspapers and US web sites such as Gawker. But she did try to take the story further by contacting his wife about their open marriage, and others close to Mr. Schmidt.

It's clear that Google's use of controversial methods in minimizing corporate taxes is starting to backfire. The tax savings will have to be weighed against the costly damage to its brand, and not just in the UK. Not to mention the costs of the salacious attention to Mr. Schmidt's personal brand. 

UK tabloids might decide to focus on founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, next. Maybe even send their paparazzi to their annual executive retreat at Burning Man, which would be a massive buzzkill.  

Google has to turn around public opinion quickly or the ongoing brand damage will become ever more costly. It has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders.

His latest post: Do Things that Don't Scale.

The word "scale" is code for software automation. His post is about startups that believe that all they need to do is launch their web service with sufficient attention and users will sign up and the business will grow (like a hockey stick). 

He points out that successful startups, such as Stripe did not sit back but went out "manually" to "recruit users."

"Sell" is a four-letter word in the geek engineering community, and that's why he doesn't use the word, but it's what he is saying.

The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them.

Sell like hell.

However, …

They'd rather sit at home writing code than go out and talk to a bunch of strangers and probably be rejected by most of them.

And there's the rub, or at least one of them, that's blocking startup success. Engineers don't sell – they code. If they wanted to sell they would be in a different career. Which is why only funding startups led by engineers is not a good idea.

He also reminds startups to focus on solving problems they know.

If you build something to solve your own problems, then you only have to find your peers, which is usually straightforward. 

Selling to your peers in the engineering community is even worse than selling to others. It's very gauche.

Isolationist innovation

Mr. Graham's advice to choose a business idea that they understand is a problem. The Ivy-league educated, mostly white and Asian males that makeup nearly all of the startup teams are running out of ideas for services they want for themselves.

That's why there are so many dating apps, to-do lists, email managers, map apps, music DJ, photo, video uploading apps, etc. Their experience of the world is very narrow, and it's not improving because they don't get out much, they aren't participating in their local communities. There's lots of ideas out there.

There's lots of problems to be solved just down their streets and around the corner, in the cities of Silicon Valley, in the public schools, in the daily struggles of local residents.

For example, there's an urban ghetto marred by poverty and violence in the heart of Silicon Valley - East Palo Alto. There were eight shootings there recently. There's plenty of hard problems to be tackled there.

Or in the public schools of Silicon Valley. They are basket cases instead of being showcases. Lots of work to be done there.

But the startup incubators keep their young teams isolated, they are often gropuped into dorms, and their workspaces are in featureless business parks.

Similarly, the large tech companies make sure to isolate their workers. Huge busses scoop them up in the early mornings and drop them back in the late evenings. They are kept inside the campuses with free food and gyms – deliberately isolated.

Little or no participation in the real world leads to a paucity of ideas. Which is why I occasionally write "Culture Watch" articles to remind startups that all businesses are cultural artifacts and they need to know how they fit in.

Despite their incredibly high failure rate, the isolationist culture of startups shows no signs of changing.

Innovation from necessity

The future innovative businesses will come from dense urban regions because that's where are aware and engaged in real world problems.

Silicon Valley's insular "echo-chamber" bubble-wraps its technologists from even their local communities. This insular culture is by far the biggest threat to the future of Silicon Valley.

Mr. Graham should tell his adoring legions of young engineers to "get out into your neighborhoods, find real problems, and solve them."

If you can make it here…

If they can be successful here, in solving key problems of education, urban living, administration of services, etc, that Silicon Valley communities face daily – they can be successful elsewhere too because the same problems are found in all other communities and cities the world over. That's scale. But they need to get out and about. They need to be in it to know it.

Do things that matter. Things that matter to a lot of people sell themselves.

Things that matter scale very well. 

- - -

Techno-Optimists Celebrated In Silicon Valley Visionary Awards -SVW

It was a spirited turnout for the Restore the Fourth march and protest attracting more than 400 people in San Francisco. The march and rally ended up at the AT&T building (ahove), which has housed an NSA spy room revealed by a whistle blower in 2006.

More photos and a short video:

Someone from the crowd gave a great, short speech. 

David Seaman interviews SF Restore the Fourth organizer. "Invoking the 1st amendment to protect the Fourth." 

Interview: AT&T Tech Blew the Whistle on NSA Spying—in 2006

NSA Spying FAQ | Electronic Frontier Foundation

News: Crowds across America protest NSA in 'Restore the Fourth' movement

Hundreds join New York City march to 'Restore the Fourth' | Politics ...

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Tributes to the genius of computer pioneer Doug Engelbart are flooding the web following the announcement of his death at the age of 88. Yet in the final four decades of his life no one would fund him and he felt he had wasted the last years of his life.

His work transformed the way people use computers today by making them accessible and "personal." His seminal demo of computer graphical user interfaces using a mouse and keyboard transformed people's careers and changed the course of their lives -- even for those that weren't there but heard about it from others! [Doug Engelbart 1968 Demo]

However, despite all the accolades and testaments to his genius, Silicon Valley largely ignored him and he spent decades trying to find funding for his ideas, and even someone just to listen to him.

Counter-culture and the PC

I met him in June 2005 following an event hosted at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 2005 celebrating the book launch of John Markoff's, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry.

A tribute to one of Silicon Valley's most influential and forgotten researchers at Xerox Parc event -SVW

The event was supposed to be about the book, but it quickly  turned into a tribute to Doug Engelbart, as John Markoff, and many members of the Homebrew Club, and former colleagues of his spoke about his incredible influence on their work, ideas, and how he changed their lives.

It seemed as if he was the Buckminster Fuller of Silicon Valley in terms of how insightful and how brilliant he was, in story after story shared by people at the event. Others compared him to Leonardo DaVinci. 

I was astounded when an elderly man sitting behind me, was given the microphone and started to speak. It was Doug Engelbart.  I'd assumed he had passed away a long time ago by the way everyone spoke about him in the past.

I was invited to a post-event dinner for the speakers and press at a local restaurant. I was late in arriving and everyone was already seated. Everyone had crowded onto a large circular table trying to be as close as possible to where New York Times reporter John Markoff was sitting. 

I couldn't believe my luck. Over on another large circular table, half-empty, sat Doug Engelbart. I asked him if I could sit next to him and we talked for hours. I walked out with a great story, a story that no one had written before, a story of a genius whose work was largely killed by the personal computer "revolution" and how he'd spent decades trying to find companies to fund his work and research.

It's a story that shows Silicon Valley's ignorance of its own history and its disgraceful treatment of truly inspired visionaries such as Doug Engelbart, in favor of celebrating PR-boosted business managers who say they are changing the world but don't come close.

Pol Pot and the PC revolution…

As we spoke on that warm summer evening I listened to Mr. Engelbart tell me that the advent of the personal computer marked the end of his work on personal computer systems, and how he then was unable to find any funding over the following decades.

I was shocked. How was it that seminal work of such stature and importance, work that had been lauded so highly and eloquently at the Xerox PARC event a few hours ago, resulted in the exile of its originator, leaving him fund-less for decades?

Yet that's what happened. Hearing his story, the story of the PC "revolution" became more like a story of Pol Pot in Cambodia turning back the calendar to the year zero and we then had to reinvent so much that we already had.

"We had personal workstations that sent messages on a network, we could split a screen remotely, we had email, we had spreadsheets, word processor, applications," he said. This was in the early-70s well before we had the same capabilities on microcomputers from Apple, IBM, etc decades later.

Think of how far we could have come in terms of collaborative apps, augmented systems and more, if we hadn't had to spend more than two decades reinventing what we already had. 

Think of what else Doug Engelbart could have contributed if he had funding in the last 35 years of his life. 

In 2005, Mr Engelbart confided to me: "I sometimes feel that my work over the past 20 or so years has been a failure. I have not been able to get funding and I have not been able to engage anybody in a dialogue."

Power to be people…

His funding was based on the use of large computers connected to personal workstations that looked very much like PCs, a computer architecture called time-sharing.

But the microcomputer and its promise of being self-sufficient, unconnected to anything, was thought to be the future at the time. And the counter-culture with its hatred of "the Man" and centralized systems of power and oppression, rejected the time-sharing mainframe based computer architecture that underpinned the work of Mr. Engelbart and his colleagues. Big centralized systems were out of favor in the computer research communities and so was funding, which went to microcomputer based architectures.

The promise of the individual, power to the people, the ideals of radical self-sufficiency that ruled the counter-culture movement became enshrined in the promise of the stand-alone Personal Computer. It's an example of how popular culture can affect something as seemingly distant and unconnected as computer architecture.

Reinventing the past

Today's computer systems are essentially what we had with time-sharing mainframes in the 1960s and 70s: personal workstations connected to a large central computer system (server farm), able to communicate with each other and run spreadsheets, word processors, and apps. 

Ross Mayfield, in an interview with Doug Engelbart in June 2005, writes:

"We herald the PC revolution, but we should remember that it made us forget to share.  Timesharing enabled groups to share a common pool resource, sharing that, which impacted social dynamics.  With PCs, we were left on our own, however empowered."

He also points out that his work on keywords and tagging; and his work on computer augmentation to help solve some of mankind's most difficult problems. 

Silicon Valley lauds its pioneers but doesn't know what to do with them if they keep living. Logitech, which made a lot of money from the computer mouse, one of Mr Engelbart's creations, gave him permanent office space. And some of his supporters have provided modest amounts of money to enable him to keep working, as part of the Bootstrap organization, recently renamed the Doug Engelbart Institute.

Almost a decade later following our conversation, nothing much changed for Mr Engelbart. A lonely genius wandering for nearly 40 years amidst a desert of resources.

He died in the belief that there is an unfinished computer revolution, and with important unfinished work that he wasn't able to complete.

Silicon Valley has lost not only one of its greatest computer pioneers, but also squandered an incredible opportunity to fund his work and see what else he could have created. What new platforms of innovation could have come from his work, what new hundred billion dollar industries might have emerged? It's a truly tragic loss.

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Here's John Markoff:

 Douglas C. Engelbart, Inventor of the Computer Mouse, Dies at 88 - NYTimes.com

 

In December 1968 … he set the computing world on fire with a remarkable demonstration before more than a thousand of the world’s leading computer scientists at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.

… he sat on stage in front of a mouse, a keyboard and other controls and projected the computer display on a 22-foot-high video screen behind him. In little more than an hour he showed how a networked, interactive computing system would allow information to be shared rapidly among collaborating scientists.

He demonstrated how a mouse, which he had invented just four years earlier, could be used to control a computer.

He demonstrated text editing, video conferencing, hypertext and windowing.

In contrast to the mainframes then in use, Dr. Engelbart had created a computerized system he called the “oNLine System” or NLS, which allowed researchers to share information seamlessly and to create and retrieve documents in the form of a structured electronic library.

. . .

The importance of Dr. Engelbart’s networking ideas would be underscored when, in 1969, his Augment NLS system became the application for which the ARPAnet computer network — the forerunner of the modern Internet — was created.