Thursday, May 19, 2011
FACEBOOK COO SANDBERG: The Women Of My Generation Blew It, So Equality Is Up To You, Graduates
Sandberg gave this commencement address at Barnard yesterday. In it, she says today's young women need to close the ambition gap before they can close the achievement gap. Otherwise, they'll blow it like Sandberg's generation has.]
Thank you, President Spar. Members of the board of trustees, esteemed members of the faculty, proud parents, squirming siblings, devoted friends: congratulations to all of you. But especially, congratulations to the magnificent Barnard Class of 2011.
Looking at you all here fills me with great joy, in part because my college roommate, a member of your faculty, Caroline Weber, is here. Carrie, it means so much to me to be at your school, and in part because I work in Silicon Valley, let’s just say I’m not usually in a room with this many women. For the wonderful men who are here today, if you feel a little uncomfortable, we’re really glad you’re here, and no line for the men’s room. It’s worth it.
I graduated from college exactly 20 years ago. And as I am reminded every single day where I work, that makes me really old. Mark Zuckerberg, our founder and my boss, said to me the other day, “Sheryl, when do midlife crises happen? When you’re 30?” Not a good day at the office. But I am old enough to know that most of our lives are filled with days we do not remember. Today is not one of them. You may not remember one word I say. You may not even remember who your graduation speaker is, although for the record, Sheryl with an S. You won’t remember that it was raining and we had to move inside. But you will remember what matters, which is how you feel as you sit here, as you walk across the stage, as you start the next phase of your life.
Today is a day of celebration, a day to celebrate all the hard work that got you to this place where you can sit, kind of sweltering in that gown. Today is a day of thanks, a day to thank all the people that helped you get here, the people who nurtured you and taught you, who held your hand, who dried your tears. Today is a day of reflection. Excuse me, a little laryngitis.
As you leave Barnard today, you leave not just with an education, but you take your place amongst the fortunate. Some of you came here from families where education was expected and emphasized. Others of you had to overcome far more obstacles to get here, and today you become the very first member of your family to graduate from college. What an amazing accomplishment. But no matter where you started, as of today you are all privileged. You are privileged in the most important sense of the word, which is that you have almost boundless opportunity in front of you. So, the question is, what are you going to do with it? What will you do with this education you worked so hard to achieve? What in the world needs to change, and what part do you plan on playing in changing it?
Pulitzer Prize winners Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristof visited this campus last year and they spoke about their critically important book, Half the Sky.
In that book, they assert that the fundamental moral challenge of the 19th century was slavery; of the 20th century, it was totalitarianism; and for our century, it is oppression of girls and women around the world. Their book is a call to arms, to give women all over the world, women who are exactly like us except for the circumstances into which they were born, basic human rights.
Compared to these women, we are lucky. In America, as in the entire developed world, we are equals under the law. But the promise of equality is not equality. As we sit here looking at this magnificent blue-robed class, we have to admit something that’s sad but true: men run the world. Of 190 heads of state, nine are women. Of all the parliaments around the world, 13% of those seats are held by women. Corporate America top jobs, 15% are women; numbers which have not moved at all in the past nine years. Nine years. Of full professors around the United States, only 24% are women.
I recognize that this is a vast improvement from generations in the past. When my mother took her turn to sit in a gown at her graduation, she thought she only had two career options: nursing and teaching. She raised me and my sister to believe that we could do anything, and we believed her. But what is so sad—it doesn’t just make me feel old, it makes me truly sad—is that it’s very clear that my generation is not going to change this problem. Women became 50% of the college graduates in this country in 1981, 30 years ago. Thirty years is plenty of time for those graduates to have gotten to the top of their industries, but we are nowhere close to 50% of the jobs at the top. That means that when the big decisions are made, the decisions that affect all of our worlds, we do not have an equal voice at that table.
So today, we turn to you. You are the promise for a more equal world. You are our hope. I truly believe that only when we get real equality in our governments, in our businesses, in our companies and our universities, will we start to solve this generation’s central moral problem, which is gender equality. We need women at all levels, including the top, to change the dynamic, reshape the conversation, to make sure women’s voices are heard and heeded, not overlooked and ignored.
So my hope for all of you here, for every single one of you, is that you’re going to walk across the stage and get your diploma. You’re going to go out tonight or maybe all summer and celebrate. You deserve it. And then you’re going to lean way into your career. You’re going to find something you love doing, and you’re going to do it with gusto. You’re going to pick your field and you’re going to ride it all the way to the top.
So, what advice can I give you to help you achieve this goal? The first thing is I encourage you to think big. Studies show very clearly that in our country, in the college-educated part of the population, men are more ambitious than women. They’re more ambitious the day they graduate from college; they remain more ambitious every step along their career path. We will never close the achievement gap until we close the ambition gap. But if all young women start to lean in, we can close the ambition gap right here, right now, if every single one of you leans in. Leadership belongs to those who take it. Leadership starts with you.
The next step is you’re going to have to believe in yourself potentially more than you do today. Studies also show that compared to men, women underestimate their performance. If you ask men and women questions about completely objective criteria such as GPAs or sales goals, men get it wrong slightly high; women get it wrong slightly low. More importantly, if you ask men why they succeeded, men attribute that success to themselves; and women, they attribute it to other factors like working harder, help from others. Ask a woman why she did well on something, and she’ll say, “I got lucky. All of these great people helped me. I worked really hard.” Ask a man and he’ll say or think, “What a dumb question. I’m awesome.” So women need to take a page from men and own their own success.
That’s much easier to say than to do. I know this from my own experience. All along the way, I’ve had all of those moments, not just some of the time; I would say most of the time, where I haven’t felt that I owned my success. I got into college and thought about how much my parents helped me on my essays. I went to the Treasury Department because I was lucky to take the right professor’s class who took me to Treasury. Google, I boarded a rocket ship that took me up with everyone else.
Even to this day, I have those moments. I have those moments all the time, probably far more than you can imagine I would. I know I need to make the adjustments. I know I need to believe in myself and raise my hand, because I’m sitting next to some guy and he thinks he’s awesome. So, to all of you, if you remember nothing else today, remember this: You are awesome. I’m not suggesting you be boastful. No one likes that in men or women. But I am suggesting that believing in yourself is the first necessary step to coming even close to achieving your potential.
You should also know that there are external forces out there that are holding you back from really owning your success. Studies have shown—and yes, I kind of like studies—that success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. This means that as men get more successful and powerful, both men and women like them better. As women get more powerful and successful, everyone, including women, likes them less.
I’ve experienced this firsthand. When I first joined Facebook, there was a well-read blog out in the Valley that devoted some incredibly serious pixels to trashing me. Anonymous sources called me a liar, two-faced, about to ruin Facebook forever. I cried some when I was alone, I lost a bunch of sleep. Then I told myself it didn’t matter. Then everyone else told me it didn’t matter, which just reminded me of one thing: they were reading it too. I fantasized about all kinds of rejoinders, but in the end, my best and only response was just to do my job and do it well. When Facebook’s performance improved, the trash talk went away.
Do I believe I was judged more harshly because of my double-Xs? Yes. Do I think this will happen to me again in my career? Sure. I told myself that next time I’m not going to let it bother me, I won’t cry. I’m not sure that’s true. But I know I’ll get through it. I know that the truth comes out in the end, and I know how to keep my head down and just keep working.
If you think big, if you own your own success, if you lead, it won’t just have external costs, but it may cause you some personal sacrifice. Men make far fewer compromises than women to balance professional success and personal fulfillment. That’s because the majority of housework and childcare still falls to women. If a heterosexual couple work full time, the man will do—the woman, sorry—the woman will do two times the amount of housework and three times the amount of childcare that her husband will do. From my mother’s generation to mine, we have made far more progress making the workforce even than we have making the home even, and the latter is hurting the former very dramatically. So it’s a bit counterintuitive, but the most important career decision you’re going to make is whether or not you have a life partner and who that partner is. If you pick someone who’s willing to share the burdens and the joys of your personal life, you’re going to go further. A world where men ran half our homes and women ran half our institutions would be just a much better world.
I have a six-year-old son and a three-year-old daughter. I want more choices for both of them. I want my son to have the choice to be a full partner not just at work, but at home; and I want my daughter to have a choice to do either. But if she chooses work, to be well-liked for what she accomplishes. We can’t wait for the term “work/life balance” to be something that’s not just discussed at women’s conferences.
Of course not everyone wants to jump into the workforce and rise to the top. Life is going to bring many twists and turns, and each of us, each of you, have to forge your own path. I have deep respect for my friends who make different choices than I do, who choose the really hard job of raising children full time, who choose to go part time, or who choose to pursue more nontraditional goals. These are choices that you may make some day, and these are fine choices.
But until that day, do everything you can to make sure that when that day comes, you even have a choice to make. Because what I have seen most clearly in my 20 years in the workforce is this: Women almost never make one decision to leave the workforce. It doesn’t happen that way. They make small little decisions along the way that eventually lead them there. Maybe it’s the last year of med school when they say, I’ll take a slightly less interesting specialty because I’m going to want more balance one day. Maybe it’s the fifth year in a law firm when they say, I’m not even sure I should go for partner, because I know I’m going to want kids eventually.
These women don’t even have relationships, and already they’re finding balance, balance for responsibilities they don’t yet have. And from that moment, they start quietly leaning back. The problem is, often they don’t even realize it. Everyone I know who has voluntarily left a child at home and come back to the workforce—and let’s face it, it’s not an option for most people. But for people in this audience, many of you are going to have this choice. Everyone who makes that choice will tell you the exact same thing: You’re only going to do it if your job is compelling.
If several years ago you stopped challenging yourself, you’re going to be bored. If you work for some guy who you used to sit next to, and really, he should be working for you, you’re going to feel undervalued, and you won’t come back. So, my heartfelt message to all of you is, and start thinking about this now, do not leave before you leave. Do not lean back; lean in. Put your foot on that gas pedal and keep it there until the day you have to make a decision, and then make a decision. That’s the only way, when that day comes, you’ll even have a decision to make.
What about the rat race in the first place? Is it worthwhile? Or are you just buying into someone else’s definition of success? Only you can decide that, and you’ll have to decide it over and over and over. But if you think it’s a rat race, before you drop out, take a deep breath. Maybe you picked the wrong job. Try again. And then try again. Try until you find something that stirs your passion, a job that matters to you and matters to others. It is the ultimate luxury to combine passion and contribution. It’s also a very clear path to happiness.
At Facebook we have a very broad mission. We don’t just want you to post all your pictures of tonight up there and use Facebook to keep in touch, even though we want that, so do a lot of that. We want to connect the whole world. We want to make the whole world more open and more transparent. The one thing I’ve learned working with great entrepreneurs—Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google—that if you want to make a difference, you better think big and dream big, right from day one.
We try at Facebook to keep all of our employees thinking big all day. We have these posters in red we put around the walls. One says, “Fortune favors the bold.” Another says, “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” That question echoes Barnard alum Anna Quindlen, who said that she majored in unafraid. Don’t let your fears overwhelm your desire. Let the barriers you face—and there will be barriers—be external, not internal. Fortune does favor the bold, and I promise that you will never know what you’re capable of unless you try.
You’re going to walk off this stage today and you’re going to start your adult life. Start out by aiming high. Like everyone here, I have great hopes for the members of this graduating class. I hope you find true meaning, contentment and passion in your life. I hope that you navigate the hard times and you come out with greater strength and resolve. I hope that whatever balance you seek, you find it with your eyes wide open. And I hope that you—yes, you—each and every one of you have the ambition to run the world, because this world needs you to run it. Women all around the world are counting on you. I’m counting on you.
I know that’s a big challenge and responsibility, a really daunting task, but you can do it. You can do it if you lean in. So go home tonight and ask yourselves, “What would I do if I weren’t afraid?” And then go do it. Congratulations, 2011.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-coo-sandberg-the-women-of-my-generation-blew-it-so-equality-is-up-to-you-graduates-2011-5#ixzz1MmdxaBSN
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Adventures in Summer Learning
School may be out, but learning is still in. In Adventures in Summer Learning, you'll meet parents, teachers, and researchers in Washington, D.C., Detroit, and Boston who are discovering the best ways to keep kids engaged with learning during the long summer break — and avoid the 'summer slump.' The research is clear that children who don't read during the summer can lose up to three months of reading progress and that loss has a cumulative, long-term effect. Adventures in Summer Learning offers practical suggestions for parents about how to create a literacy-rich summer, as well as profiles of effective formal programs for at-risk youth and children with learning disabilities.
Feynman 'Fun to Imagine' 4: Magnets (and 'Why?' questions...)
Physicist Richard Feynman explains to a non-scientist just how difficult it is to answer certain questions in lay terms! A classic example of Feynman's clarity of thought, powers of explanation and intellectual honesty - and his refusal to 'cheat' with misleading analogies...
From the BBC TV series 'Fun to Imagine'(1983). You can now watch higher quality versions of some of these episodes at www.bbc.co.uk/archive/feynman/
Leonard Susskind: My friend Richard Feynman
About this talk
What's it like to be pals with a genius? Onstage at TEDxCaltech, physicist Leonard Susskind spins a few stories about his friendship with the legendary Richard Feynman, discussing his unconventional approach to problems both serious and ... less so.
I decided when I was asked to do this that what I really wanted to talk about was my friend Richard Feynman. I was one of the fortunate few that really did get to know him and enjoyed his presence. And I'm going to tell you the Richard Feynman that I knew. I'm sure there are other people here who could tell you about the Richard Feynman they knew, and it would probably be a different Richard Feynman.
Richard Feynman was a very complex man. He was a man of many, many parts. He was, of course, foremost a very, very, very great scientist. He was an actor. You saw him act. I also had the good fortune to be in those lectures, up in the balcony. They were fantastic. He was a philosopher; he was a drum player; he was a teacher par excellence. Richard Feynman was also a showman, an enormous showman. He was brash, irreverent -- he was full of macho, a kind of macho one-upsmanship. He loved intellectual battle. He had a gargantuan ego. But the man had somehow a lot of room at the bottom. And what I mean by that is a lot of room, in my case -- I can't speak for anybody else -- but in my case, a lot of room for another big ego. Well, not as big as his, but fairly big. I always felt good with Dick Feynman.
It was always fun to be with him. He always made me feel smart. How can somebody like that make you feel smart? Somehow he did. He made me feel smart. He made me feel he was smart. He made me feel we were both smart, and the two of us could solve any problem whatever. And in fact, we did sometimes do physics together. We never published a paper together, but we did have a lot of fun. He loved to win. With these little macho games we would sometimes play -- and he didn't only play them with me, he played them with all sorts of people -- he would almost always win. But when he didn't win, when he lost, he would laugh and seem to have just as much fun as if he had won.
I remember once he told me a story about a joke that the students played on him. They took him -- I think it was for his birthday -- they took him for lunch. They took him for lunch to a sandwich place in Pasadena. It may still exist; I don't know. Celebrity sandwiches was their thing. You could get a Marilyn Monroe sandwich. You could get a Humphrey Bogart sandwich. The students went there in advance, and they arranged that they would all order Feynman sandwiches. One after another, they came in and ordered Feynman sandwiches. Feynman loved this story. He told me this story, and he was really happy and laughing. When he finished the story, I said to him, "Dick, I wonder what would be the difference between a Feynman sandwich and a Susskind sandwich." And without skipping a beat at all, he said, "Well, they'd be about the same. The only difference is a Susskind sandwich would have a lot more ham," ham, as in bad actor. (Laughter) Well, I happened to have been very quick that day, and I said, "Yeah, but a lot less baloney."
(Laughter)
The truth of the matter is that a Feynman sandwich had a load of ham, but absolutely no baloney. What Feynman hated worse than anything else was intellectual pretense -- phoniness, false sophistication, jargon. I remember sometime during the 80s, the mid-80s, Dick and I and Sidney Coleman, we met a couple of times up in San Francisco at some very rich guy's house -- up in San Francisco for dinner. And the last time the rich guy invited us, he also invited a couple of philosophers. These guys were philosophers of mind. Their specialty was the philosophy of consciousness. And they were full of all kinds of jargon. I'm trying to remember the words -- "monism," "dualism," categories all over the place. I didn't know what those things meant, neither did Dick -- neither did Sydney for that matter.
And what did we talk about? Well, what do you talk about when you talk about minds? One thing, this one obvious thing to talk about -- can a machine become a mind? Can you build a machine that thinks like a human being, that is conscious? We sat around and we talked about this -- we of course never resolved it. But the trouble with the philosophers is that they were philosophizing when they should have been science-iphizing. It's a scientific question after all. And this was a very, very dangerous thing to do around Dick Feynman. Feynman let them have it -- both barrels, right between the eyes. It was brutal, it was funny -- ooh, it was funny. But it was really brutal. He really popped their balloon.
But the amazing thing was -- Feynman had to leave a little early. He wasn't feeling too well, so he left a little bit early. And Sidney and I were left there with the two philosophers. And the amazing thing is these guys were flying. They were so happy. They had met the great man; they had been instructed by the great man; they had an enormous amount of fun having their faces shoved in the mud; and it was something special. I realized there was something just extraordinary about Feynman, even when he did what he did.
Dick, he was my friend. I did call him Dick. Dick and I did have a little bit of a rapport. I think it may have been a special rapport that he and I had. We liked each other; we liked the same kind of things. I also liked the kind of intellectual macho games. Sometimes I would win, mostly he would win, but we both enjoyed them. And Dick became convinced at some point that he and I had some kind of similarity of personality. I don't think he was right. I think the only point of similarity between us is we both like to talk about ourselves. But he was convinced of this. And he was curious. The man was incredibly curious. And he wanted to understand what it was and why it was that there was this funny connection.
And one day we were walking. We were in France. We were in La Zouche. We were up in the mountains, 1976. We were up in the mountains, and Feynman said to me, he said, "Leonardo." The reason he called me Leonardo is because we were in Europe and he was practicing his French. And he said, "Leonardo, were you closer to your mother or to you father when you were a kid?" And I said, "Well, my real hero was my father. He was a working man, had a fifth grade education. He was a master mechanic, and he taught me how to use tools. He taught me all sorts of things about mechanical things. He even taught me the Pythagorean theorem. He didn't call it the hypotenuse, he called it the shortcut distance." And Feynman's eyes just opened up. He went off like a light bulb. And he said he had had basically the exact same relationship with his father. In fact, he had been convinced at one time that, to be a good physicist, that it was very important to have had that kind of relationship with your father. I apologize for the sexist conversation here, but this is the way it really happened.
He said that he had been absolutely convinced that this was necessary -- the necessary part of the growing up of a young physicist. Being Dick, he, of course, wanted to check this. He wanted to go out and do an experiment. So, well he did. He went out and did an experiment. He asked all his friends that he thought were good physicists, "Was it your mom or your pop that influenced you?" And to a man -- they were all men -- to a man, every single one of them said, "My mother." (Laughter) There went that theory down the trashcan of history. But he was very excited that he had finally met somebody who had the same experience with my father as he had with his father. And for some time, he was convinced that this was the reason we got along so well. I don't know. Maybe. Who knows?
But let me tell you a little bit about Feynman the physicist. Feynman's style -- no, style is not the right word. Style makes you think of the bow tie he might have worn or the suit he was wearing. There's something much deeper than that, but I can't think of another word for it. Feynman's scientific style was always to look for the simplest, most elementary solution to a problem that was possible. If it wasn't possible, you had to use something fancier. But no doubt part of this was his great joy and pleasure in showing people that he could think more simply than they could. But he also deeply believed, he truly believed, that if you couldn't explain something simply you didn't understand it. In the 1950s, people were trying to figure out how superfluid helium worked.
There was a theory. It was due to a Russian mathematical physicist, and it was a complicated theory. I'll tell you what that theory was soon enough. It was a terribly complicated theory full of very difficult integrals and formulas and mathematics and so forth. And it sort of worked, but it didn't work very well. The only way it worked is when the helium atoms were very, very far apart. The helium atoms had to be very far apart. And unfortunately, the helium atoms in liquid helium are right on top of each other.
Feynman decided, as a sort of amateur helium physicist, that he would try to figure it out. He had an idea, a very clear idea. He would try to figure out what the quantum wave function of this huge number of atoms looked like. He would try to visualize it, guided by a small number of simple principles. The small number of simple principles were very, very simple. The first one was that, when helium atoms touch each other, they repel. The implication of that is that the wave function has to go to zero, it has to vanish when the helium atoms touch each other. The other fact is that the ground state, the lowest energy state of a quantum system, the wave function is always very smooth -- has the minimum number of wiggles.
So he sat down -- and I imagine he had nothing more than a simple piece of paper and a pencil -- and he tried to write down, and did write down, the simplest function that he could think of which had the boundary conditions that the wave function vanish when things touch and is smooth in between. He wrote down a simple thing. It was so simple, in fact, that I suspect a really smart high school student, who didn't even have calculus, could understand what he wrote down. The thing was that that simple thing that he wrote down explained everything that was known at the time about liquid helium and then some.
I've always wondered whether the professionals, the real professional helium physicists, were just a little bit embarrassed by this. They had their super-powerful technique, and they couldn't do as well. Incidentally, I'll tell you what that super-powerful technique was. It was the technique of Feynman diagrams.
(Laughter)
He did it again in 1968. In 1968, in my own university -- I wasn't there at the time -- but in 1968, they were exploring the structure of the proton. The proton is obviously made of a whole bunch of little particles. This was more or less known. And the way to analyze it was, of course, Feynman diagrams. That's what Feynman diagrams were constructed for -- to understand particles. The experiments that were going on were very simple. You simply take the proton, and you hit it really sharply with an electron. This was the thing the Feynman diagrams were for. The only problem was that Feynman diagrams are complicated. They're difficult integrals. If you could do all of them, you would have a very precise theory. But you couldn't; they were just too complicated. People were trying to do them. You could do a one loop diagram. Don't worry about one loop. One loop, two loops -- maybe you could do a three loop diagram, but beyond that you couldn't do anything.
Feynman said, "Forget all of that. Just think of the proton as an assemblage of little particles -- a swarm of little particles." He called them partons. He called them partons. He said, "Just think of it as a swarm of partons moving real fast." Because they're moving real fast, relativity says the internal motions go very slow. The electron hits it suddenly. It's like taking a very sudden snapshot of the proton. What do you see? You see a frozen bunch of partons. They don't move, and because they don't move during the course of the experiment, you don't have to worry about how they're moving. You don't have to worry about the forces between them. You just get to think of it as a population of frozen partons. This was the key to analyzing these experiments. Extremely effective, it really did -- somebody said the word revolution is a bad word. I suppose it is, so I won't say revolution -- but it certainly evolved very, very deeply our understanding of the proton, and of particles beyond that.
Well, I had some more that I was going to tell you about my connection with Feynman, what he was like, but I see I have exactly half a minute. So I think I'll just finish up by saying I actually don't think Feynman would have liked this event. I think he would have said, "I don't need this." But how should we honor Feynman? How should we really honor Feynman? I think the answer is we should honor Feynman by getting as much baloney out of our own sandwiches as we can.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Study: Regulating Dangerous Chemicals Does Not Cost Jobs
Study: Regulating Dangerous Chemicals Does Not Cost Jobs
James Heintz: Under current law, thousands of dangerous industrial chemicals are effectively unregulated
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
PARC tour, Part II: Ethnography research
Victoria Bellotti manages PARC's Socio-Technical and Interaction Research team at PARC where she also developed PARC's Opportunity Discovery research targeting methods and program. Victoria studies people to understand their practices, problems, a...
VMware announces Horizon App Manager
Last year at VMworld, VMware previewed Project Horizon, its cloud-based management service, which is part of an effort to help companies embrace the cloud and the wealth of cloud applications currently available on the market. Today, VMware is announcing the first product release associated with that vision, the Horizon App Manager.
"We're seeing all these iPads and tablets coming into the enterprise, and we're also seeing a lot of SaaS adoption," explains Noah Wasmer, Director of Product Management and Advanced Development at VMware. "I was asked to [launch] an initiative in advanced development to look at the next generation of computing."
A big part of computing's next generation is the phenomenon of users accessing an ever-growing number of applications from a myriad of devices, which is quickly making the days of device-centric computing a thing of the past. This presents a host of new challenges for administrators.
"[With] Salesforce and Trovix and SuccessFactors and Box.net coming into the enterprise, administrators are saying, 'How do I secure this? How do I control them?'" says Wasmer. The Horizon App Manager helps administrators address these challenges with a tool that allows them to synchronize their existing users and groups from on-premises directory services into the cloud. "[This] will basically allow you to keep all your security and passwords behind the firewall but now be able to add app entitlement in the cloud."
The service is priced at $30 per user per year, and it is intended to be extremely simple and intuitive to install. It also provides significant benefit for users by providing a single sign-on experience, eliminating the requirement to remember a slew of different passwords for each application.
"On the user portal, one of the things that we saw is that once users start using the service, they actually fall in love with it," explains Wasmer. "Many of us have sticky notes or some way of trailing all these different passwords. Once you start using this, you start saying, 'Wow. This is really how I want to work.'"
Horizon is a hosted service, and VMware expects to release new features and applications for it on a monthly basis. "We just really see cloud applications being the future..." says Wasmer. "VMware has been in the business of helping companies move from the private cloud into the public cloud, and we think this is an important step infrastructurally for us to help move them along."
Thomas Heatherwick: Building the Seed Cathedral
About this talk
A future more beautiful? Architect Thomas Heatherwick shows five recent projects featuring ingenious bio-inspired designs. Some are remakes of the ordinary: a bus, a bridge, a power station ... And one is an extraordinary pavilion, the Seed Cathedral, a celebration of growth and light.
Rick Sammon's Light It!
Rick Sammon's Light It! is an iPad App designed to help you make professional-quality digital SLR people pictures - without spending a small fortune on lighting accessories. Plus the video includes a free lesson!
Monday, May 16, 2011
Google I/O 2011: The Secrets of Google Pac-Man: A Game Show
Come participate in our game show-styled talk and learn the entertaining history of Google Pac-Man and other Google doodles through visual examples and code samples. Play along as we demonstrate the marriage of art and web technologies, talk about HTML5 techniques, discuss the user experience details, confess to bugs, and defend our design decisions.
My PARC tour, Part I: Future of Networking
You might have heard of PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). That's where all sorts of modern tech was invented. Ethernet. Object-oriented programming. Laser printers and much more. Earlier this week they invited me over for an exclusive look at several things they are working on. Here is the fhthttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giftp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifirst part, where we discuss the future of networking, which they call content-aware computing.
Here, Teresa Lunt,http://www.parc.com/about/people/122/teresa-lunt.html http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifce President and Director of the Computing Science Laboratory research organization, and Nacho Solis, http://www.parc.com/about/people/178/nacho-solis.html researcher, tell me how networks are changing.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Modern Slavery in GCC Countries
Adam Hanieh: Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council states created a super exploited migrant work force after facing a radicalized Arab working class in the '60s
Magic Piano for iPad Is Music to Our Ears [Video Review]
Magic Piano by Smule was one of the iPad apps we couldn’t wait to try; now we’ve tried it and we’re in love. While many view the iPad as a device to consume content, if Magic Piano is any indication it’s also going to be a device to help create music.
I got to speak to Dr. Ge Wang, the co-founder, CTO and CCO at Smule yesterday about the development process for Magic Piano, the differences in developing for the iPad versus the iPhone and what the iPad might mean for the future.
Wang, an Assistant Professor at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, really wanted to build an application specifically for the iPad and one that would show off the devices best features.
Working around the clock for just over two months, the team at Smule built Magic Piano to be both an experiment and working proof of concept, as well as an app that could be fun and creative.
Check out this video demonstration that I made earlier today, showing off Magic Piano for iPad:
Wang told me that the size of the screen was both a big inspiration for the app and also something that was highly important in the development process. Unlike the iPhone, which can have 5 multitouch points hit at one time, the iPad has 10. That means you can literally put all of your fingers on the iPad and play or create different sounds.
As for the circular piano shape – while part of that was out of utility — you can fit more keys on screen if you do something in a circle or a spiral — it was also to add a sense of whimsy and fun to the app.
As for the challenges in developing for the iPad versus the iPhone, Wang told me that because the technologies are similar, the size of the device was what was most important to consider. As a side note, it’s clear the company also spent some time dealing with the physics of the device and how the app works; it is something that you can easily use from multiple angles, whether you have it in one hand or propped up on your knees.
Wang sees the iPad as having tremendous potential for the creation of music. Looking at Magic Piano, I have to agree. If this is what you can create in two months as a proof of concept and experiment, who knows what could be built in the next six!
Magic Piano (which costs $2.99) is in many ways the spiritual successor to Ocarina for the iPhone. By that I mean it’s a concept that is simple but brilliant, and one that can truly capture the power of a new device in a way that you may never have considered.
Berkeley Bionics Full Interview
Interviews with leading figures from the world of technology and entrepreneurship.
Gary Vaynerchuk: “99.5 Percent Of Social Media Experts Are Clowns” (TCTV)
In essence, businesses need to better understand how to use social media and how to apply an authentic human touch while doing so. Vaynerchuk thinks current efforts are abysmal. “”99.5 percent of the people that walk around and say they are a social media expert or guru are clowns,” he says, continuing with “we are going to live through a devastating social media bubble.”
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Friday, May 13, 2011
The Mobile Privacy Hearings: Senators Prod, Apple And Google Defend
When researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden announced at the Where 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara a few weeks ago that iPhones and 3G iPads are storing records of where their users are and where they’ve been, the news created quite a stir. Google also stores a similar list on Android devices, so naturally questions have swirled in the last few weeks around how both Apple and Google are collecting and using this location data and to what extent it encroaches on user privacy.
Yesterday, representatives from both companies were called before a senatorial subcommittee to answer questions from the likes of Senators Al Franken (Minn.) and Patrick Leahy (Vt.) on whether or not our mobile devices are becoming Big Brother 2.0.
During the testimony, the senators were careful to say that the government is well aware of the many benefits of the technology created by both companies and is in no way eager to stifle innovation or create knee-jerk legislation. That being said, in the words of Senator Leahy, while the “digital age can do some wonderful, wonderful things for all of us … American consumers and businesses face threats to privacy like no time before.”
Naturally, even without the information that has recently come to light, there has been a growing concern among lawmakers and consumers alike that both Google and Apple are not doing enough to become guardians of the user’s personal data rather than wholesalers. Leahy told the representatives that he was “deeply concerned” about the reports that iPhones and Android devices were “collecting, storing, and tracking user location data without the user’s consent”.
“I am also concerned about reports that this sensitive location information may be maintained in an unencrypted format, making the information vulnerable to cyber thieves and other criminals”, the Senator said.
As to the basic allegations that lay before the two giants of the mobile space, Apple has previously stated that, though it is partly at fault for not educating its users to fully understand the technical issues with providing fast and accurate location information, the company does not (nor has it ever) tracked the location of a user’s iPhone.
At the time, Apple explained that, while it did find a few bugs in the architecture, it was adamant that it is using the location data stored on its devices to maintain and improve upon a crowdsourced database of WiFi hotspots and cell towers — not to keep a log of a user’s prior location. The geo-tagged data from iPhones, for example, is used to help build data about WiFi networks and cell tower locations, which let location-based services work even when GPS/satellite positioning isn’t available or functioning seamlessly.
Be that as it may, Senator Franken noted that consumers remain confused, so he posed the question directly to Apple’s VP of Software Technology Bud Tribble: “does this data indicate anything about the user’s location, or doesn’t it?”
Tribble’s response was to reiterate the main message to the average consumer: that the data is a record of the location of cell towers and WiFi hotspots, it does not contain any customer information. It is anonymous. However, that comes with a nuance. When a portion of that database is downloaded onto your phone, your phone knows which hotspots and towers it can transmit through, so the combination of the location of those towers and your phone knowing which towers it can transmit through, allows the phone to give you a basic location without GPS.
So, he is essentially saying, yes of course Apple tracks your location. That’s what GPS and WiFi and cell tower positioning are designed to do, and yes it does store location-based information on its devices in order to do that, but no it isn’t keeping a full history of your locations, and while it does know where you are, it doesn’t necessarily know who you are.
Though Apple doesn’t seem to be doing anything intentionally nefarious with this information, the point remains that the laws of this country have not yet come anywhere near to adequately addressing the capabilities of modern technologies. In an earlier panel, Jason Weinstein, deputy assistant attorney general of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Justice Dept, told the subcommittee that once companies have access to consumer info (if you give Apple or Google permission to use your location or something similar), they can legally share that data with third-party businesses.
Only when companies have previously promised not to share something, like your location, can they be held accountable in court. As Justin Brookman, the Director for the Center of Democracy & Technology’s Project on Consumer Privacy, said, “the default law in this country for the sharing of data is that you can do anything you want”, with the exception being any prior promise the company has made not to share specific data.
Franken also asked the representatives from the two companies about the fact that they run the biggest app stores in the world, yet require no privacy policy for their apps, and so asked them if they would consider adding a privacy policy.
Alan Davidson, Google’s director of public policy, said that Google has relied on a permission-based model which requires users to give permission before any sharing takes place, but that the next step is important for Google to consider and is “a very good suggestion”. He said that he would “take that issue back to leadership”. And for Apple, Tribble said that Apple contractually requires third-party developers to disclose if they’re going to do anything with user information, but does not integrate an over-arching privacy policy. He then continued on to say that a general privacy policy would not be enough, that true transparency goes beyond what’s in the privacy policy and needs to be integrated into the user interface of an app, designing feedback to the user about what’s happening to the information into the actual app.
Franken then asked Tribble about why Apple only asks users if they want to share location with an app, while Google asks the user if they want to share location, address book information, contacts, and so on. Tribble responded by saying that a long checkmark box of opt-in sharing options would only confuse the user and be unwieldy both to present and read on a mobile device.
There’s no doubt that Tribble makes two valid points here, but Ashkan Soltani, an independent researcher who has worked with the Wall Street Journal on mobile-privacy investigations, shortly thereafter quickly cut to the heart of the matter. He told the senators that the biggest privacy threat to mobile users today is the simple fact that “consumers are repeatedly surprised by the information that apps and app platforms are accessing”. Users are entrusting their phones and computers with a great deal of personal information, he said, and these platforms are not taking adequate steps to make clear to the consumer that third-parties have access to this information.
Not only that, but the other issue is that platform providers, too, are often caught off-guard as to the types (or amount) of information they’re gathering. Soltani cited the examples of Google Street View collecting WiFi information during Street View surveys and this recent example of Apple’s location storage cache.
So, it seems that not only are lawmakers and legislation slow to catch up to the uses and capabilities of modern technology, so too are the providers themselves. Going forward, Soltani suggested, we will need to begin to formulate solid definitions to questions as fundamental as “What does ‘opt-in’ mean?” and further define oft-used concepts like location. Is a user’s location defined within 4 feet or 100 miles? What is “anonymous” going to mean in a location-crazy world, and how are we going to define “third-party” and what those “third-parties” rightly have access to?
The legislative process is just beginning here, and may well be glacial in its progress. Though there is certainly some questionable thinking to be found coming from these two companies in how they’re thinking about privacy, it’s great to see evidence of their willingness to work with the government to find the best solution for enterprise — and more importantly, the consumer — going forward.
Kudos to the senators and the subcommittee for asking the right questions.
YouWeb Incubated Pluto Plays Music Combines Gaming With Helping Kids Learn Music
Social and mobile incubator YouWeb, who has helped create OpenFeint, CrowdStar, iSwifter and Sibblingz, is announcing its latest venture—mobile ‘edutainment’ startup Pluto Plays Music.
Pluto Plays Music is an educational game and iPad app that combines scrolling gameplay dynamics with musical notes to get the kiddies interested in learning music. The game follows the main character, Pluto, a penguin on a quest to master a variety of songs on different instruments. Children can learn basic songs like Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star as well as more classical pieces like The Magic Flute by Mozart, Ode to Joy by Beethoven, Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky.
While Pluto Plays Music is free to download and play, users can purchase virtual goods via the game’s in-game currency, pearls. Using pearls, players can unlock new levels and instruments including the piano, xylophone, and guitar. Players can also earn pearls to use toward purchases by completing simple tasks like opening the app daily and performing songs. The game also ranks players by their level of apprenticeship, depending on how effectively they complete and learn the songs in the game.
The game itself is using sister company OpenFeint’s plug and play social gaming platform to allows players to compare their scores and ranking with other players around the world.
YouWeb founder Peter Relan tells us that he picked this particular company to incubate because of the tremendous potential of edutainment games for children on tablet devices.
Last month, YouWeb celebrated the first exit with the acquisition of OpenFeint by Japanese gaming company, GREE, for $104 million.
Mike McCue: FlipBoard Is Seeing More Than 10 Million Flips Per Day (Video)
When it comes to publishing apps on the iPad, there are two models: 1) social readers that bring all your realtime news feeds together like Flipboard; or 2) single-title apps from major publishers like the New Yorker, The Daily or the New York Times. Those two models are also dividing along the lines of subscriptions versus ad-supported/free.
In the video above, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue makes the case that in tablet publishing, “the bulk of the revenue will come from advertising.” To make his point, he shares some recent numbers from Flipboard, which is seeing more than 10 million “flips per day”, up from 3 million two months ago. A “flip” in the app is like a pageview (in the video, he says 10 million flips per day, but later he checked the number and it is actually 11.4 million). Of the 2 million people who have downloaded the Flipboard app to their iPads, I’ve heard from other sources that about half are active, which would mean that on average each user flips through 10 pages a day.
McCue thinks there will be a place for subscriptions as well, especially for premium media brands, and would love to be able to place subscription buttons on premium content within Flipboard. My idea is that if you already subscribe to a publishing app on iTunes, the articles should be able to appear in Flipboard, News.me or any of the other general reader apps. But if they are not already a subscriber, some sort of all-you-can-eat subscription model would have to be worked out, with Flipboard doling out the money based on how many times articles from a particular publisher is read. It can get complicated because “people like to see their content atomized,” says McCue.
That’s why he thinks advertising will produce more revenues than subscriptions. It is easier to split advertising revenues with publishers based on readership. His investors agree. They just put in another $50 million into Flipboard, betting that he is correct. Although McCue and I have debated whether he needs that much, I also think that advertising is the way to go with tablet publishing. McCue also hints that Flipboard’s iPhone app will come out this summer. Watch the video to find out more.
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Google I/O 2011: Ignite
Brady Forrest, Kyle Machulis, Matt Cutts, Pamela Fox, Jamie Wilkinson, Patrick Davison, Monica Rogati, Annalee Newitz, Joseph Pred
Ignite is back to top off your brain after a packed day. This year we will learn about the Brain API, the similar...
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Discovery Channel: Megaquake, hour that shook Japan documentary Part 1 of 3
Discovery Channel's new one-hour special MEGAQUAKE: HOUR THAT SHOOK JAPAN will tell, through the eyes of those who lived it, the story of the moment the 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck northeast Japan on March 11, 2011 and the tsunami that followed, resulting in more than 12,000 deaths. Poignant testimonies and remarkable footage captured that day will reveal what happened in those crucial moments following the quake as a tsunami barreled toward land at 500 miles per hour. The special will also examine scientifically what happened that day and attempt to piece together when Mother Nature may strike again. MEGAQUAKE: HOUR THAT SHOOK JAPAN, featuring exclusive interviews and never before seen footage, premieres on Discovery Channel on Sunday, April 24 at 10PM e/p and will subsequently roll out on Discovery networks around the world.
Discovery Channel and its production partner, Darlow Smithson Productions, includes in its movie an exclusive sound recording captured at the Wake Island hydro-acoustic station 2,000 miles away in the Pacific Ocean. The station belongs to the global monitoring network of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO). The recording, made by ultra sensitive hydrophones at a depth of 1,300 meters, was subsequently sped up by 32 times so it could be audible to human ears - enabling people to hear the actual sound of a 600km long section of the fault line in the earth's crust rupturing and grinding against rock with the power of 600 million Hiroshima bombs.
Viewers will also hear the very personal stories of those who experienced events of March 11th. Firefighter Takayama Yukio was inside the nuclear plant when the earthquake struck. He will recall the sense of fear and desperation among those inside. The special also includes footage of Yukio and his fellow firefighters inside the reactor.
In the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami, Japan's Sendai Airport was a nightmare - cars were strewn about the runway, debris littered the terminal and there was no power. Hear about the chain of events in an exclusive interview with the air traffic controller, Kibuna Yoshihiko, who was on duty that day.
The special also features interviews with Americans who were in Japan on March 11th, including Paula Lutze who was teaching school in Sendai. Exclusive footage shows Lutsy in school that day. She was instrumental in rescuing children caught up in the chaos of the tsunami.
Additionally, the new Discovery special will examine the Pacific Ring of Fire - a name given to the region devastated by natural disasters in recent years - to assess whether the earth's tectonic plates are in a phase of increased activity, which could result in further seismic events. Through exclusive interviews with top seismologists and oceanographers, the documentary will piece together where Mother Nature might strike next.
MEGAQUAKE: HOUR THAT SHOOK JAPAN is produced for Discovery Channel by Darlow Smithson Productions, where Tom Brisley and Guy Davies are executive producers and Simon Young is producer. For Discovery Channel, Stephen Reverand is executive producer.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
核電變色龍郝龍斌
日本首相菅直人敢停掉濱岡核電, 除了自己的勇氣之外, 一些地方首長的支持也是功不可沒. 靜岡縣知事川勝平太、大阪府知事橋下徹、名古屋市長河村隆之、愛知縣知事大村秀章等等, 都在背後力挺菅直人. 所以, 核電問題雖是中央政府的層次, 地方首長的態度也很重要.
那麼台北市長郝龍斌的態度究竟是什麼呢? 當年陳水扁停建核四時, 郝龍斌曾連署提案倒閣. 光憑這一點, 你會以為他是擁核人士. 但我翻閱一下舊紀錄, 赫然發現他曾在立法院就"立即停建核電廠"一案投下贊成票. 民進黨執政時代, 他當環保署長, 主導通過「環境基本法」，其中第23條明定：「政府應訂定計畫，逐步達成非核家園目標」. 所以蔡英文現在講的非核家園, 郝龍斌也有貢獻.
看來郝龍斌似乎是個反核人士. 但他的立場總是隨著官位而改變. 看我質詢他時的支吾其詞, 就知道他其實是沒有態度的......
Pioneer Prototypes Android-based Cyclocomputer (Video)
If you thought Android can be used just to power phones, tablets, TVs or similar devices, think again: Pioneer is now using the Google OS (version unknown) in the development of a “next-generation” cyclometer. It helps users track four main parameters: speed, cadence, heart rate, and power.
The prototype, which sports a 2.2-inch color LCD (non-touch) screen and a trackball, also features a pedaling motor that measure the force on the crank.
Current features include ANT+ support, GPS, a microSD slot, a microUSB port, a thermometer, and 12 hours of battery life. The device weighs 100g.
This video (shot by our friends over at Diginfonews in Tokyo) provides more insight:
Flipboard's Mike McCue at SXSW
Flipboard's Mike McCue at SXSW
Kara Swisher interviews Mike McCue, CEO and Co-founder of Flipboard, the social and news reading app, at the South by Southwest festival in Texas.
蕭青陽 - Story Island
3 times Grammy's Award nominated designer talked about the creative process of his latest album in TEDx Guangzhou event.
李欣芸《故事島》風潮音樂11/15正式發行。
影片為精裝版內頁製作過程，費時費工！是蕭青陽與《故事島》相遇後，碰撞出充滿台灣味的設計作品！值得您我一起來品味&收藏！
(請注意：影片備註過程皆為12倍速快轉)
Sunday, May 08, 2011
For The High-Tech Naturalist: LeafSnap Identifies Leaves Using Your iPhone’s Camera
This is just plain fantastic. The LeafSnap app for iPhone identifies any leaf you take a picture of, as long as it’s in their library. Right now it’s limited to trees native to the Northeastern US, but they’re working on expanding that. The best part is it’s free! Hopefully this will get me to finally learn the names of the trees around here. All I know is “pine” if it has pine cones and “not pine” if it doesn’t.
The app is a collaboration between Columbia, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institute. Thanks, guys.
Man, this is the best reason I’ve heard of yet to get an iPhone. Luckily it’s coming out for Android and iPad this summer. Check it out at the App Store. It’s free!
Silk: a great new database powers new Next Web site
Here's a sneak peak at a new database that Silk is helping build for The Next Web. Here the founder shows me what makes it special.
Capitalism, Chinese Style
Orville Schell on China's view of American debt
Bio
Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York. He is a former professor and Dean at the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Schell is the author of fourteen books, nine of them about China, and a contributor to numerous edited volumes. His most recent books are, Virtual Tibet, The China Reader: The Reform Years, and Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China's Leaders. He is also a contributor to such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Granta, Wired, Newsweek, Mother Jones, The China Quarterly, and The New York Review of Books.
Transcript
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay. We're in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, the birthplace of the International Monetary Fund, at the INET conference--hundreds of economists brought together to find a solution or debate solutions to the economic crisis. There's barely a panel or a sentence in this conference that doesn't mention the word China. Now joining us is one of America's foremost China experts, Orville Schell. Orville's the Arthur Ross director of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York. He's a former professor and dean at the University of California Berkeley School of Journalism. Thanks for joining us. So at the opening panel, George Soros starts by saying: I'm baffled. And he specifically says he's baffled that more corrective action hasn't been taken dealing with the causes of the financial meltdown, more or less the regulation of Wall Street. He says that his framework of looking at the world would have suggested after such a meltdown there would have been a push to take real action. So when China looks at the United States and sees it seem so little has been done to deal with some of the underlying issues, and given how many American T-bills China owns, how do they look at all this?
ORVILLE SCHELL, DIRECTOR, CENTER ON US-CHINA RELATIONS: Well, China has traditionally, I think, looked up to the United States, particularly as it's begun to marketize and to allow its economy to open up. And they've viewed America as sort of the titan of the world, as most countries have also done. So I think it's with some surprise that they saw this titanic country and the world's largest economy just kind of go into implosion. And it's taken a lot of adjustment for them, as it has for us, to kind of adjust to the fact that this country, which for so many years they were against and that they admired, that they loved, they hated, but that was always hugely important and seemingly implacable to them, that it could have been so fallible.
JAY: Now, China kept its cool, and in fact kept buying T-bills and kept sending signals that, well, we have faith in the US economy and it will all work out. They really had no choice but to say those things. But do you get a sense--what do they really think about it? There must have been some shaking of their confidence in where all this is leading.
SCHELL: Well, I think the Chinese leadership was very rattled to find this sort of pillar of the whole financial architecture of the global economic system so unstable. And it's true that they've invested many hundreds of billions of dollars in Treasury bills and other forms of American securities. And they will continue to do so not because they aren't bothered by what they see, by the fragility of our own system, but because there's no other place for them to put it.
JAY: Where else do they put all the capital?
SCHELL: [incompr.] they're collecting huge amounts of foreign exchange, and they've got to park it someplace. And in a certain sense there is a kind of a symbiotic relationship that's almost like some drunk and their spouse, which is they lend to us, we borrow, we spend in a profligate manner, but we buy their stuff, they make the money, get the foreign currency, and give it back to us so that we can go deeper in debt to buy from them. That's what's been going on until the financial crisis. Now that's got to change. China recognizes it, and I think we do, too. They can't just be an export economy. They have to start generating a greater level of consumption within China. But there the Chinese run into a structural problem of their own, that they have a very high savings rate, which means people don't consume as much as they could. Why? Because they don't have a welfare system and a health care system that provides for people in their old age, so people lock up their money. So it's only to say--and one of the reasons why China comes up every other sentence here in Bretton Woods and everyplace else is because the US and China are insolubly locked together now with one set of sort of economic internal organs.
JAY: Now, Soros's point about being baffled was that he was baffled that there wasn't more serious regulatory action taken to control Wall Street. Given how much at stake China has in all this, they must be more than baffled. Are they not concerned that the underlying reasons have not been addressed, this could all happen again, and they own so much American debt that--or do they just think this economy's just too big, that this is an American economy too big to fail?
SCHELL: Well, here I think the Chinese leadership and George Soros are in accordance, strangely. They both believe the United States has been very reckless in escaping and refusing to sort of regulate itself in a way that would make the system safer for everybody. And, after all, it isn't just the Americans that suffer when the American financial system is shaken; it's the whole world, China included. So China looks at the United States with a good deal of trepidation. But it isn't like there are an awful lot of alternatives for them to go to. First of all, to buy T-bills, which are safe, I mean, unless the US defaults, which I think it--very small likelihood of that. Second of all, we're in this whole new world now where China's piling up capital that wants to go someplace, and it doesn't want just these low-yield Treasury bills or other kinds of securities. It wants mergers and acquisitions. It wants high-yield investments. And what better place to invest than the US? But, of course, here we run into a certain ambivalence.
JAY: 'Cause what you're talking about is starting to buy stuff rather than to buy T-bills. In other words, you buy mines and you buy factories, and perhaps you buy banks.
SCHELL: They want brand name, big league companies. They want to run with the big guys. And China's had a very difficult time getting any company to be sort of brand-known on a global scale. I mean, if I ask you how many Chinese companies do you know the names of, you might think of Lenovo [incompr.] IBM, or you might think of parts of IBM, or /haIr/, the, you know, whiteware, white goods company.
JAY: Why would they--why don't they buy Wal-Mart, given that Wal-Mart is essentially--.
SCHELL: I don't think Wal-Mart is for sale, but they might like to. But can you imagine the reaction in America? That would be like, you know, buying the Queen of England. These are very symbolic things that--. And America's not adjusted well at all at this point to the idea that someone else might start owning us, just the way we--.
JAY: But there's no legal way to stop it, really, is there?
SCHELL: No. Legally, one would have to say America is an open market. We believe in allowing foreign direct investment from around the world. It's a great virtue of this country, and also a great strength. However, we have certain neuralgia against certain kinds of countries, like sometimes Arabs, and China, because it's run by the Chinese Communist Party. So what happens is they'll want to buy a company, and there is a review process, but just for national security purposes. It's seldom used. But people just start talking. Congressmen start writing letters, investment bank gets scared, the Chinese investments don't want to have their name dragged through the mud, and poof, the deal evaporates. That's been the pattern--not a healthy one, I should say, for the United States or for China.
JAY: We go back to this issue we were talking about previously, which is, when China looks at the debate in American politics right now, this stimulus versus austerity, all the austerity hawks seem to be winning this debate. The Obama administration seems to have bought into this idea that the idea is pay down the debt. They're debating how much. In China, the issue, they understood there should be stimulus. And the austerity regime there was never their way out of the crisis. So if they look at this American debate, one would think if there's austerity and [incompr.] layoffs coming at the state municipal levels and the likelihood of employment not going down further--many people are saying it's going to go back up again once the real hit hits at the state level--what do they make of this? They didn't follow these policies in China, and they have so much American debt at stake.
SCHELL: I think the Chinese, like many other countries, have a lot of catching up to do to figure out what's going on in America with these Tea Party people. Where did they come from? You know, what's this all about? How in the name--in their view of heaven has the United States of America, land of reason, freedom, scientific thinking, rationality, how has it been seized by people who believe in none of these things? And the Chinese really don't understand this well. They scratch their heads and they look at us, and they need a lot of help, as many Americans do, to understand what is happening to this great country.
JAY: But clearly it's a section of the American elite that's behind the famous--the ones out front are the Koch brothers, but they can't be doing this all on their own. And there's this--you know, Karl Roves and others were all involved in the last November election campaign. There's a whole section of the American elite that sees the necessity, they think, of austerity. They make paying down the debt the big issue, and they're absolutely against paying any kind of taxes. So the Chinese, are they going to weigh in on this in any way? Or is it just too difficult for them to say anything?
SCHELL: They don't believe in interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, because they don't want anyone to interfere in their internal affairs. So they're not likely to give us, you know, a lot of gratuitous advice about how to run our affairs. However, they are worried--as everybody must be worried--about America, because America sits at the center of everything. So as we go, in certain respects, so goes the world. So it's very important, I think, that America figure itself out better. In the meanwhile, it leaves a lot of other people around the world scratching their head. And that's why it's so important that our financial system remain open, as we always have been--that's been our great strength--and receptive to other countries investing in it, because if we begin to get into trade wars, you know, protectionism, tit-for-tat kind of deals--and we're particularly inclined to do that with China--it could be very deleterious not only to our health, but the health of the global financial system.
JAY: Does China have a plan B? If they think the American politics is going to push American economics really into some downward spiral, have they got a plan B not to be drawn into it?
SCHELL: Well, you know, there really is no plan B for anybody. America is too large on the sort of international economic scene. China is, of course, investing very vigorously in Latin America, Africa, Middle East, around the world, particularly in natural resources. But that still doesn't sort of take up the slack. They're doing that for energy security and resource security. But they've piled up, you know, an awful lot of foreign exchange reserves and they've got to do something with it. So the question is: what? The euro is a bit wobbly, and all these crazy countries, and Athens in, you know, Greece, and Portugal on the abyss, and Japan's no great shakes, the yen, where else do you put your money? There are a very limited set of options. So the US is still a good option. So one hopes that that partnership between the US and China can work its way out in a constructive manner, because in actuality the US now could use Chinese investment for job creation and infrastructure building. That's why it's so important. And that's why the US-China relationship simply cannot be ignored, because without it--well, there is no without it. There's only with it. So you've got to get it right.
JAY: Thanks for joining us.
SCHELL: Pleasure.
JAY: Thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
End of Transcript
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