Dana Blankenhorn

What Year Are You Living In?

Here's how you can use my generational thesis to analyze current political actors.

First, think of the pattern as a wave. Each crisis election is the bottom of the wave. The high point of each new thesis is at the top of the wave, with the AntiThesis period and Excess period sending the wave back to its bottom.

Now, look at a subject politician seriously (or look at yourself) and try to figure out what year they are living in. Once you have that, you know where they expect political forces to line up, you know what presses their buttons. And hopefully you can deal with them.

As we discussed yesterday, Joe Lieberman lives in 1962, the High Kennedy period. This was the start of the excess which destroyed the New Deal coalition. It was the early part of the Civil Rights Era, when the issue really was black-and-white. Once you understand this about Lieberman, and pin that year on him, you can understand what he considers his own best self and deal with it.

We also discussed Lester Maddox yesterday. Here's a quiz: what year was he living in?

(No peeking.)

This Week's Clue: Final Five: Always On

I am folding A-Clue.Com into this blog as of January. To celebrate the end of 10 years in e-mail publishing I am posting 5 essays covering the letter's main topics.

This week I talk about The World of Always On, an idea I considered "the next big boom" after finishing work on my Moore's Law book, but one that has yet to come to pass. Enjoy.

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By all rights we should be in the middle stage of a tech revolution as important as the commercial Internet itself.

I am talking here about what I call The World of Always On. (To the right is the current state of the art in active heart monitors.)

The vision is simple. Extend applications into the air by using 802.11 WiFi routers as application platforms. Use sensors and motes to collect data on our bodies, our homes, and our property, creating new valuable applications that live in the air. Use Internet standards to let you control these applications from anywhere.

I first began exploring this idea in 2003, after the dot-boom went dot-bust. Having explained (for myself if no one else) how progress was inevitable with Moore's Law, I sought out the new direction it would take.

I was struck by two things. First, how small powerful chips were getting, with line widths reaching the nano-level. Second by the need for people to "age in place," and the monitoring requirements of that.

I posited a true "killer app," a heart monitor linked to an 802.11 router. Perhaps, I speculated, it might have a bluetooth link to a cellphone, so the whole thing could live wherever the user went? At the same time, I noticed, Intel was doing fascinating work with Alzheimer's patients, creating multi-chip systems that could identify when a patient was acting confused, and when they were not, lowering the load on care-givers.

The Last Kennedy

Joe Lieberman may be the most hated man in Washington today.

Unlike George W. Bush, who is widely hated on the left but still embraced by many supporters (I continue to see those ovoid W '04 bumper snickers on cars) Lieberman has few real friends.

His situation really is analogous now to that of Lester Maddox, as I wrote some weeks ago.

But it's important for us to ask why this is, in order to put Lieberman (and Maddox as well) into proper historical context.

As the title of this piece states, Joe Lieberman considers himself to be the Last Kennedy. Not as in Teddy Kennedy, or any of the Kennedy children, but in terms of the original politics of John F. Kennedy.

In all the ritual hatred of Kennedy as meaning "liberal" the fact is that John F. Kennedy won election by going to the right of Richard Nixon on national security. He talked about there being a "missile gap" with the Soviets, and promised to be tougher on Castro. His handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis -- the perception was he saved the world and forced the Soviets to back down -- won his party victory in the 1962 mid-terms (and seemed to bury Nixon under California Governor Pat Brown, Jerry's dad.)

While historians will always debate whether Kennedy was indeed ready to walk away from South Vietnam before his assassination, the fact is that he was engaged there, in what Robert McNamara later called "a cold war activity," until the day he died.

Rice Biochemistry Fights the Flu

Sometimes, even I get a little embarrassed (just a little) reporting week-after-week about the latest miracles coming from the Rice chemistry department.

But this one is important.

The story reads that Jane Tao and a team that includes some UT people have unlocked the structure of the Influenza-A virus. Specifically, they have revealed the crystal structure of a molecule required for its reproduction. (All Influenza A has this structure, including the deadly bird flu and the epidemic 1918 flu.)
 

With the target protein's crystalline structure revealed, scientists can now focus on designing a drug that will prevent it from reproducing.

 

The Lesson of Yahoo

The press reported on the executive changes at Yahoo but ignored the real story.

That "media" idea? Crap.

Yahoo is moving back toward being a tech company. It's going to emphasize research, especially into search. It's going to try, finally, to become what it should have been in the first place, which was Google.

The real tragedy people have never reported about Yahoo is that its founders had the right idea, but they sold out too early. David Filo and Jerry Yang wanted to build a site from which you could find anything, and in its early, heady days that's what Yahoo was.

Then they hired a "grown-up" and stepped away. His name (and this is too ironic) was Tim Koogle.  It was Koogle (above) who first tried to make Yahoo a media company -- he called it a portal. He did it through acquisitions, of Geocities and Broadcast.Com and Yoyodyne and on-and-on, until Yahoo was extraordinarily top-heavy, filled with people whose job it was to make money off what other people were doing, not what they themselves were doing.

The Second Explosion

AP reports (very badly) on a Brookings Institution report showing that suburban poverty rates are catching up with those of the inner city.

"Economies are regional now," said Alan Berube of Brookings, implying that if a metro area's economy is sound poverty rates will be low everywhere, and if they're high they will be high everywhere.

That's true, but it misses the key point.

The key point is what I call "the second explosion" of urban development.

Manhattan is a good example. Manhattan is a dreamland, south of 110th Street. But with small apartments now worth $1 million or more, folks are forced to move in other directions. The first steps were to areas like Brooklyn Heights and lower Harlem -- the Clinton office on 125th Street is a good example of this. Gradually this wave spreads out into other areas of the city that have easy, reliable transport links with the center, replicating the city's initial development over a century ago.

Explosions like Manhattan are happening, and have happened, around the country. That's why so many new ballparks are being built in urban centers, why so many new museums and other attractions are going there. The center, which was once where the offices were, is now where best people are. The offices are now somewhat off-center, often in "edge" neighborhoods with good freeway links.

The explosion in the center moves outward, and pushes the poor out with it. Some hang on, older folks may move out with relatives who have "made it" in the suburbs, and a new ring of poverty forms, at the edge. These were the original "edge city" developments, around an Interstate highway that may be known as the "loop" or "perimeter." The poor cluster beyond this edge, in older suburbs, and this ring, too, starts moving outward.

I have watched this happening in my own hometown of Atlanta since I moved here in the early 1980s. What is different now is that our government is actually supporting the second explosion. Mayor Shirley Franklin has invited high-end developers in. Some neighborhoods have been destroyed in the process. But the result is that the demographics of the city are changing.

How the 21st Century Robber Barons Operate

The Bell monopoly is the most destructive economic roadblock of our time.

 

It has caused the United States to fall behind the rest of the world in broadband.

And now these same monopolists are threatening to make things worse by favoring specific Web providers over others, eliminating the network neutrality agreement that has allowed the Internet to grow.

They have to be stopped, now.

This monopoly is identical, in its impact, to the robber barons of the 1880s whose depredations gave rise to Populism and the first government regulations. (This book on the original robber barons available at Amazon.Com, despite being 44 years old.)

In this case, however, we are taking about something more pernicious. That's partly because these monopolists are already, supposedly, regulated, on both the federal and state level. These forums have been manipulated so they actually support the monopoly, and subsidies meant to improve service to under-served areas are simply pocketed by the monopolists.

Which brings me to the main point today, which is how both the urban and rural poor are manipulated to maintain the monopoly.

The short answer is they're bought off.

It's easy to see what's in this for the sellers. For minority legislators, the speed of the broadband service available to the community is not a big issue. Competition is not a high priority. In rural areas, just having service is the priorit y – the idea that they might have multiple vendors is not considered. In both these areas, the answer to service people can afford is said to be subsidy, not competition.

Subsidies meant to provide rural access to services and lower-cost service to urban areas come in various forms, but the most popular are the so-called Universal Service Fund and E-Rate for schoools,, disparaged as the Gore Tax   in the 1990s but now and essential element in subsidizing the Bell monopoly.

 

A Modest Proposal for the New Congress

I know the new Congress is going to be very busy. But if I could make one suggestion, it would be for someone with oversight (like Rep. Ed Markey ) to host some hearings on this topic:

How do we accelerate technology?

For six years the Bush Administration has been claiming that its laissez faire big corporate plan for the technology industry will work. And for six years the pace of change has been decelerating.

This, more than anything else, is responsible for our trade troubles. China can't adapt as fast as we can to technological change. India lacks the infrastructure to adapt. Russia is mainly an oil supplier. Yet all these countries have gained enormous power in the last six years, and America has lost power, because the pace of American innovation has slowed.

When was the last time you were excited about something in the computing field, something really new and different? It's been a long, long time.

Sure, we have better game machines – foreign-made game machines. But our data now moves at a snail's pace compared to what our competitors enjoy. Our software companies have spent their time replicating the past – re-building applications for open source or re-creating a stale, slow, small file version of the online world in the case of cellular.

We keep falling behind.

Still Ahead of his Time

Whenever I wonder if I should be more actively involved in politics, I look at Jimmy Carter and know I shouldn't.

Carter has spent a generation telling us truths we didn't want to hear, and paying the price for it. He was far ahead of his time when he was elected -- although few knew that -- and remains so today.

He is still telling us hard truths we don't want to admit. Iraq is America's greatest blunder. Israel is practicing a form of Apartheid in the occupied territories. Who will ever forget his "cardigan sweater" speech in the 1970s telling Americans to conserve fuel and seek alternatives to oil? How many millions of people would not have died horrible deaths in war had we listened to him?

The fact is we didn't. The fact is we still don't. Coverage of Carter's latest book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid has drawn minimal coverage from the U.S. media. Europeans are far more interested. But they can do far less than we can.

Old School Science

Much of the science I celebrate here is hard and complex, based heavily on the application of raw computing power.

But today I want to celebrate science of a different type.

Civil engineer Ed Sutt (right, from Popular Science)  has probably saved millions of people from the damaging impacts of hurricanes and earthquakes thanks to his persistence in trying to improve the nail.

Suit, a Clemson grad (go Tigers) has been on this crusade for over a decade, and spend six years at the Stanley Works in Rhode Island experimenting with wind tunnels and nail designs.

Note what was needed. A dedicated researcher, wind tunnels for testing, and a company willing to invest to re-invent an age-old product. We need more of that in America.