Tom Munnecke’s Eclectica

I was recently upgraded to first class on a flight on American Airlines. After a few hours of interesting conversation with my row-mate, he began to open up about some of the difficulties growing, having an Afro-American father and Caucasian mother. I asked him if the difficulties had eased since then, and he mentioned that he had been questioned just that morning while waiting in the first class line by an American Airlines employee, asking him to show his ticket to prove he should be there. He said that he couldn’t prove it, of course, but he suspected that his race had something to do with it. I have never been questioned in the business class lines, even in my casual attire.

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I’ve been seeing much more about the WorldVista hospital information system based on the VA’s VistA system which was my briar patch for so many years. A working demo of their Computerized Patient Record System illustrates what this looks like to a health care provider.

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While poking around news.google.com for news about the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, Sudan, I came across some interesting articles. “Best” case scenarios predict 300,000 deaths. This is also an example of asymmetrical scaling: the negative scales up rapidly and with great synergy, while a positive response to it takes a lot of resources and energy. The political turmoil, famine, and disease outbreaks all combine seamlessly for greater human misery, yet our response to this situation seems to be lost in the noise level with other news.

From CS Monitor:

“When people are starving en masse, television is there to capture their fly-covered faces as they expire….

This moment between Darfur’s ethnic cleansing and mass starvation is not made for TV as it is understood by news producers. They want active visceral footage to enliven a story. And, looming famine or no, video of burnt-out, abandoned villages only goes so far.

So, rather than report early on a horrific tragedy in the making – and thus possibly even contribute to its prevention or at least its amelioration – television news will wait for the starving to begin.

Once that happens, of course, everyone will send in a TV crew to film the dying and the dead. And reporters will link up to the world by videophone to ask why this has happened, and ask why no one did anything to stop it weeks and months before – that is, today, when television is refusing to cover the story.”

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I just read rock star Bono’s University of Pennsylvania commencement speech about his “do something” moment. I see this pattern frequently:

1. Someone travels to another country, to a place far outside their existing culture.

2. They have a Do Something moment, an event which changes the course of their lives and motivates them to work to make the world a better place.

3. The event frequently involves an encounter with a child, particularly seeing the eyes of a child.

Here is Bono’s story:

“An amazing event happened here in Philadelphia in 1985–Live Aid–that whole We Are The World phenomenon the concert that happened here. Well after that concert I went to Ethiopia with my wife, Ali. We were there for a month and an extraordinary thing happened to me. We used to wake up in the morning and the mist would be lifting we’d see thousands and thousands of people who’d been walking all night to our food station where we were working. One man–I was standing outside talking to the translator–had this beautiful boy and he was saying to me in Amharic, I think it was, I said I can’t understand what he’s saying, and this nurse who spoke English and Amharic said to me, he’s saying will you take his son. He’s saying please take his son, he would be a great son for you. I was looking puzzled and he said, “You must take my son because if you don’t take my son, my son will surely die. If you take him he will go back to Ireland and get an education.” Probably like the ones we’re talking about today. I had to say no, that was the rules there and I walked away from that man, I’ve never really walked away from it. But I think about that boy and that man and that’s when I started this journey that’s brought me here into this stadium.”

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Understanding how things fail (i.e. cats die) and how they thrive (herding cats) are two very different ways of looking at the world (see Malgnosis and Benegnosis)

It seems that we have an overwhelming focus on the negative and how to prevent it. Consultants who don’t have a problem to solve probably don’t have a job. Doctors have 1.2 million terms for illness but virtually none for how to be healthy, resilient, or adaptive.

I’ve just joined a group at the Instititue for The Future on cooperation, and the framing question was that cooperation was “always” linked to competition. I’ll agree that this is the case sometime, but why is this the starting point?

Warning: Very Abstract Thoughts here. Normal folks can go on to the next entry without missing anything.

This is an interesting paper on autocatalyic dynamics, applied to pre-biotic life studies:
Spatial Autocatalytic Dynamics: An Approach to Modeling Prebiotic Evolution… This relates by analogy, at least, to the notion of an autocatalytic space for uplift.

Of particular interest is the discussion of the hypercycle and spiral wave dynamics:

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I’ve posted a collection of the papers presented at workshops sponsored by GivingSpace over the years.

Its a remarkable collection of ideas from a remarkable set of people.

Thanks to all for participating.

I’ve done some HTML hacking to do a mockup of what a Better World news aggregator on Google News might look like. (I was inspired to do this mockup after reading the spoof, Goodle. (It seems to be suffering from a “page too popular error” at the moment.)

The basic idea is that this would provide a “container” for positive media, which could then be referenced in other ways. Perhaps I am obsessing over Google, but it strikes me that they are in a fantastic position to make the world a better place. Their track record in building Google as a top global brand without Madison Ave, Their willingness to go public without Wall St. investment bankers, their orientation towards small scale ad-words, and their understanding of scale coupled with their declared ambition to make a better world all combine to make them an exciting force in the future.

Imagine if they succeed in integrating their ?better world? experience with their search experience. People come to Google, get the information they want, and get dispatched to the target site quickly and efficiently. And, they help make a better world. How are its competitors going to compete? What can they do to make the world a better place? What if customers come to EXPECT businesses to make the world a better place, and shun those who don?t? Suddenly, we might have this entire bubble of irrational exuberance about how to make the world a better place. The funny thing about this, however, is that having a mass movement of folks thinking the world is a better place would MAKE it a better place.

I just reviewed the results of the Copenhagen Consensus 2004 held last month which convened a panel of experts to address the 10 major challenges in the world. This is a compelling list, and in the framework within which it was presented, seems logical.

However, it also smacks of the “10 top places to live” types of surveys, in which folks rate cities by some chosen list of criteria, multiply them by some weighting factor, add up the scores, and then rank cities according to a computer generated “objective” result. One such survey recently ranked Yuma, Arizona over San Diego, California. It turns out the survey folks were from Minnesota, and lots of sunshine ranked high on their list. San Diego folks, however, consider Yuma a little more than an offramp on the Interstate, locked in blistering heat. I happen to enjoy rural, quiet, coastal San Diego living in an area with dark skies. I have friends who enjoy downtown, bustling Manhattan living with the bright lights. To create a single ranking of which city is “best” from this mix is not a matter of getting the multipliers right, but rather questioning the question… maybe there isn’t a single ranking of what is best.

The Copenhagen Consensus may not be so misdirected as, but it is still an exercise in linear ranking of problems on a global basis. Perhaps I am over simplifying it, but it basically takes the severity of the problem times the number of victims divided by the cost of solving it.

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