Addiction treatment is going online. Cancer survivor groups too. The lack of proximity, while a hindrance, is no longer insurmountable. This, again, is nothing new. Additionally,  a study also pointed out that online social networks seem to be grouping certain health problems together surreptitiously. These might be heart disease or obesity. These aren’t people seeking out other cardiac patients, but instead, it is a condition that is endemic to certain self selected networks of individuals online without regard to their health.

Current thinking places health issues like obesity and heart disease at the crossroads of lifestyle/environment and genetics. This would imply that these groups are forming for one of these two reasons (or a combination of the two).

In a completely unrelated article, the question of why are some nations taller than others was explored. I don’t want to ruin it, but they aren’t particularly certain. Most of the common sense answers don’t have data to back them up. Diet seems to make a difference, health and disease makes a difference, GNP makes a difference. None, on its own truly satisfy the question. Not to ruin the article (it is a fun read by the way), but there isn’t a specific consensus on why heights of nations move in sync, but they do. That is to say, that people tend to be roughly as tall as their society, give or take. And, that the population, as a whole, varies in hight relative to other populations over time. It is not genetic, as immigrants can assimilate rapidly to their societies’ heights. So it would seem to be a combination of genetic and lifestyle/environmental factors.

If God is love and Love is Blind. Ray Charles is God. Using a related logic, Is it possible that virtual social networks could create profound physiological changes of groups relative to each other? How much of it is a self fulfilling prophecy and how much is epigenetic?

It is a straight forward concept. If someone is willing to quit for $1,000, Zappos feels they lack the passion Zappos wants in its workforce.

I do wonder, has the recession altered the take rate? With the job market getting tougher, maybe they will need a bigger check to lure employees lacking the emotional connection Zappos wants in its staff.

Another question, how much would you have to be paid to quit your job?

I, of course, am talking about Duncan Donuts, Rachel Ray and Islamic terrorists. A scarf Rachel Ray wore in Dunkin Donuts advertisement may look similar to garb worn by terrorists. Some bloggers were afraid that this show of support would embolden terrorists.

I was thinking about it from the other side. Maybe what we need is more Dunkin Donuts in the West Bank. If we appropriate the terrorists synbols and replace their insidious meaning with banality, don’t we win? Maybe one day young men in the middle east will think that Mujahideen is a custom coffee blend. Keffiyeh patterned napkins will keep the sugary crust of their Glazed Muchkins from getting on their fingers.

I talked with one of our soldiers in Baghdad. (aside - He is living proof that we have some smart, insightful, honest, competent people trying to fix this.) He half jokingly said that if we wanted to win in Iraq, we should bombard the country with gangster rap and pornography. That might be a little extreme, but Rachel Ray hawking donuts might be a step towards hearts and minds.

Jezebel, Gawker’s guilty pleasure gossip destination, took LOL Cats and created LOL Vogue, where they transfer the common tropes and text styling to fashion photography. What results is critique, satire, parody and entertainment all rolled into one. Here are a couple of my faves.

Gerd Leonhard is blazing the trail with his writings on End Of Control. He covers the basic theory of how and why it is happening and a glimpse into both the current state and clues to where this post-control word is heading. Many of these ideas are captured anecdotally in Erick Schonfeld’s article on TechCrunch.

The Washington Post seems to think that the studios are getting the message. The headline “In First for Studios, Paramount Offers Snippets of Movies“, shows the lack of understanding on both sides. From the Reporter’s side, that this is somehow interesting or news worthy. Paramount offering snippets is just another example of the control first mentality of traditional media. The more profound realization is that these snippets have been there for a long time. Not only that, without the control of the studios, they have flourished into better marketing vehicles than any control obsessed executive could ever imagine or admit.

So, here is the dessert portion of the menu. One of my favorite youtube collections from Barringer82. His fan edits are authentic and full of craft in only the way a true fan can create. Here is a small snippet, if you will, of what studios are giving up by listening to control.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This reminded me of Clay Shirky talking about the cognitive surplus being used by television at the Web 2.0 conference. By his calculation, Americans spend as much time every weekend just watching commercials as it would take to re-write wikipedia from scratch…. in every language.

I’m not certain that is actually true. One hour of work is not always equal to one hour of work. Fatigue and other factors can make working weekends less than full throttle. Even so, the rough tabulation is staggering. Clay needs a better yard stick than Wikipedia for the average joe to understand. Maybe how many episodes of CSI could be created or missions to the moon. Here is Clay’s stellar talk… below Clay’s video is Howard Rheingold’s vlog post.

And here is The WELL party video. Truly time capsule worthy.

I think this is a very interesting space for fan interaction. It isn’t a mashup and isn’t narrative. It is the creative equivalent of going through the bible and making all the words Jesus says red. Only in this case, all the words only have for letters and Jesus is an outlaw in frontier America. Which raises the question, Is this good for anything? Does this make better fans or bring new fans?

I think it does. At the least, it shows other fans that they are not alone. At best, it highlights a unique spirit of a film or TV show. These are my faviroites, like this one from House about lupus -

Click here to view the embedded video.

or this one from The Big Lebowski, featuring ‘dudes’

Click here to view the embedded video.

There are a ton more on the Waxy list, and i think this will only be the beginning. It is such a simple concept and it pleases fans in the places they like to be pleased.

I don’t have the time or energy to check it out. I’m sure it is great, and it makes me feel better about the Dilbert brand. For all the ‘cooler than school’ bloggers out there, I’ll take the counter position. Fair play to the Scott Adams team out there. Ajax ‘Web 2.0′ destination sites are this year’s neckties and word a day calendars. And, yeah, I’m sending this link to my engineering relatives.

It reminds me of a study I saw on European Gypsy communities or, to be fair, Romani Communities. The study dissected the linguistic artifacts to retrace the origins of the secretive society. What they found was fascinating. At the root, they were able to tell the origins of the Romani language. They were from India. But, more than that, they were able to infer that they were of the Kshatriya caste, warriors. They could track the time down to an Asia Minor invasion where a large army repelled the invasion. It was the vocabulary. The base language and writing were from Sanskrit, but all vocabulary involving war and military were lifted directly from India during that time. All of the words dealing with agriculture were Persian. Metal working and industry, Byzantine.

A linguistic fossil record placing a whole peoples not only in locations but a narrative as to the color and shape of their daily lives.

One day, languages will converge. The human desire is to communicate. The internet is the universal tapestry for the stories of the individual. Decentralized society but in a common fabric. It necessarily undermines the concept of the nation state (I’ll get back to that thought another day).

I can imagine a single global language. Maybe fringes based on shared experiences. Certain peer groups will carve out an exclusive language for their purposes, but there will be a lingua franca of the internet that will then be the universal language on the streets of the world. It won’t be english or chinese or dutch. It will be an amalgam reflecting something about us we can’t yet perceive. When it happens, where will our words for joy and happiness come from? What language will be the language of our highest aspirations? Which will be the language of sorrow, anger and hate?

I also thought about how the ‘regular’ button on gas pumps is always abused.

and one for fun.

(for Dave)

You see, the primary person on the show is working at a real place with a real job. Whether she does all the tasks or not, we will never know. But, what we do know is that another person, a real person, lost their job. The other person never signed up to be on a reality show, and The Hills is, by their own admission, “a little fake.”

I live with my nieces, both quite young. They are old enough to be sucked into the world of Hannah Montana. If you aren’t up to speed, or missed the Barbara Walters’ Oscar Special, here is a quick synopsis. Miley Stewart, played by Miley Cyrus, is a bit of a nerd at school during the day. She has boy troubles and all that jazz. At night, she dons a blonde wig and becomes a singing superstar, Hannah Montana. Her theme song being “best of both worlds”. Miley Cyrus is, in real life, the daughter of the achy breaky Billy Ray Cyrus.

Her dad on the show, Bobby Stewart, is played by Billy Cyrus. Further deepening the confusion of little girls is that their suburban parents can buy them tickets to go see Hannah Montana in concert. My niece was somewhat offended when I told her that the tv show was filmed on a set and that Miley’s real house was much nicer than the house on TV. Then she thought about it and told me that I was incorrect. Miley watches TV on TV; therefore, it was her real house. Her logic, not mine.

Why is it such a big deal? Why does it make me feel uneasy? Am I that much of a curmudgeon? I mean Jerry Seinfeld played Jerry Seinfeld, a stand-up comedian on TV. Why can’t Heidi Montag play herself on The Hills with the help of some writers?

Then I saw Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova perform at the Oscars and it hit me.

Authenticity.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I really liked Once, the movie staring Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova. It isn’t too ambitious. Just a simple story of a busker trying to make it. He makes a demo and heads off to an uncertain fate at the end of the film. Now I know why it had such resonance… The film was the demo. Glen and Marketa wrote and performed the songs in the movie. In the end, the movie went out into the world and culminated in the most arresting musical performance in Oscar history.

Does that make me a sucker? For now, I will tell myself it is authenticity. The emotions and expression were authentic. Seinfeld, was never presented as Jerry’s real life, but The Hills is presented as a quasi-documentary. And while Miley/Hannah are clearly fictional characters, the publicists are doing everything possible to blur those lines. Miley even wrote a song about the loss of her grandparents on her new album. Were those her real grandparents or fictional ones? Does it matter since she co-wrote it with a couple label assigned writers.

With the degree of personal interaction in our daily lives (facebook, IM, WoW), we crave personal engagement with our entertainment at a greater level than ever before. Digital transportation of our thoughts and emotions through skype and twitter bring more people closer to us and crowd out less engaging diversions.

Some in the entertainment industry, clued in by ‘reality’ game shows, picked up on this and have been flipping out these new style wares like High School Musical (Did you know that Gabrielle is really dating Troy, I mean Zac, well Vanessa Hudgens is anyway). The connected life means more than sports highlights on my cell phone and stock alerts on my bathroom mirror. It means an opportunity to build and maintain authentic relationships at a greater velocity than in the physical world alone. This is translating into TV especially, and just like Myspace, WoW or any other virtual meeting place, authenticity is the illusion offered by yester-media and the potential promised by the new.

Neil Aspinall, who ran Apple Corp. for most of its existence, died today. Many people saddle him with the slow adoption of The Beatles catalog into new media, first the CD and now digital distribution. That may well be a part of his legacy, but I think we can take the opportunity to look at the relationship of media (not ‘the’ media) and the music industry.

Around 1800, the music industry, such as it was, made the first steps to greatness with the advent of the lithograph. Performers made money and entertainment was big business, but not an industry.

You see, industry is an anti-market force. Industry interjects a structure for extracting value from the flow of energy. Once the structure is in place, industry leverages control to increase relative value to economic substitutions. (To read more about concepts of the anti-market, check out this book)</stilted babble>

Back to the music industry, specifically.  In the 19th century, paper was the physical media by which music was transmitted. Mostly as sheet music, but in some degree as piano rolls. Through the first quarter of the 20th century, publishers and composers were getting their money from paper distribution of their songs. The great music of this time period (1800-1925) is mostly highly arranged and structured music (played by orchestras and traditional musicians) or folk music (Stephen Foster, Scott Joplin, German Polka, Hymns).

Then came a new technology, the vinyl record. While classical music was the first to embrace the technology, it was jazz who found its natural pairing with acetate. Recordings were made live and etched directly onto a master. The personal and immediate expression of Louis Armstrong and the early jazz pioneers resonated. Other performers, like Bing Crosby, could break out of night clubs and into the collective consciousness.

And they resonated on another new medium, electromagnetic wave. A shared media experience across vast distances. Both by physical transport and electrical. The analog nature made a new caliber of star. The Great Caruso, who had been slung around the world on flattenned plastic was fully eclipsed by the synergies of record and radio. Stars were born.

The next major media change was magnetic tape. Its linear physical nature and ability to be changed repeatedly mandated muti-track recording. People like Les Paul and Buddy Holly started tinkering with the possibilities. With live recordings, like recording to records, it took a sizeable team of musicians. These musicians had to get it right the first time. It required a certain ethos of musician. A vocational musician. Re-recording, refining, multiple takes. Linear creativity began shifting to non-linear imagination. While Elvis and Sinatra made big splashes they were another example in a long line of the last generation making the first bucks in a new media. But their message was not aligned with the freedom of magnetic tape. It was the empowered music of Motown and a new type of song smith the likes of The Beach Boys and of course, The Beatles.

In each of these earlier transition we see a false spike of previous messages that are eventually, over time, over-run by the native message of the medium.

For the last 20 years we have been rolling into the digital age. Gun and Roses, Madonna, Grunge, Britney. But what is the real nature of digital? Lossless reproduction of easily editable segments. Zero capital costs for reproduction. Zero marginal costs for recording. What is the spiritual alignment we expect to see. I think we will see samples, derivative works, collaborations and remixes. Non-affiliated producers. Decentralized creation. Surely many of these forms are already popular and rampant. The mainstream is using them in nearly every pop success. I’m not making a bold prediction about their existence. My prediction is that these will become the primary and dominant form of musical expression, but that is just a guess.

So, as we see those that fought and drove the cult of magnetism shedding their mortal coil, we can look forward with excitement to what digital media is really going to mean. Neil Aspinall not only rode the previous wave, he was an integral part of carving the face of that wave. With the greatest respect and admiration, I say thank you as steward of an era. I hope we do so well with the next.

First I hit the CBS Tournament. Other than requiring a ton of information (do you really NEED to have my phone number and mailing address), sign up was pretty easy. No email verification necessary. When selecting teams, a mouse over gives you a snapshot overview and what percentage of participants had picked that team. Very slick, but what about the hours I used to spend reading all sorts of bracket overviews?

Then I hit Rotohog. Very easy to sign up. The selection process was basic, but, on the plus side, come in first and you win $100.

ESPN is running their Tournament Challenge. They offer a top prize of 10k . They also have pop up details for each team. While the information is more detailed, they leave out the percentage selected by other participants. Personally, I like the ESPN info better than CBS’. The one annoying thing about signing up was the way they attempt to trick you to opting in to every newsletter and advertising vehicle they have. Brutal. It is like the RealPlayer of yore.

Over at Bracket Contest, signup was a snap, but there was one hidden check box for the newsletter (pre-checked for your convenience). The bracket was very bare bones. They opted for drop down menus, which can be pretty tedious. Their award system is a bit different. They set aside a pool for each round, and everyone that gets that round perfect splits the pot. Fill out a perfect bracket, you’ll have your share of $1,375,000. Not bad at all.

It certainly isn’t the same as sneaking out for a long lunch on Thursday with co-workers to watch the first matches. You also don’t have the personal connection to the people you are competing against. But, I did get an invitation from my sister and was able to easily add my picks to her work pool.

Each finalist will be offered $10,000 in cash if he or she agrees permanently to resign or retire from any and all careers in education… (and) signs a release agreeing to have his or her name and the reasons for his or her winning a Top Ten Worst Union-Protected Teacher award published by the Center for Union Facts.

This contest is a malevolent straw man whose outcome is pre-determined. The mighty Center for Union Facts will identify 10 poor souls. These teachers will be grossly offended, and not agree to the degrading terms. More evidence proving whatever cock-eyed point this group is trying to prove with no hope of ameliorating the situation. The only outcome will be hostility and resentment.

That attitude is certainly despicable, but it does open an interesting discussion. What makes a teacher bad or good for that matter? The first step is agreeing on the purpose of education. The smartest people in the world have been wrestling with this for all of recorded history. Are we trying to supply a superior workforce? Are we arming youth with the tools to enjoy a fulfilling life? Are we making sure that the brightest are empowered and trained to lead? Maybe we are conditioning individuals to facilitate the productivity of existing social institutions.

Pitting these and many other missions against each other, even an idealistic or fictional education system achieves one effectively at a time. In most cases, full pursuit of one purpose is opposed to the others and partial pursuit would yield partial success (at best). Best or worst teacher monikers are meaningless without first choosing the primary goal of education beneath which the praise or scorn is delivered.

Even then, the efficacy of any instructor or administrator can only be estimated in real time. True proof would take years to materialize. If the mission of the education system is to supply a workforce, you have to evaluate the workforce and regress back those performing well versus not performing well. If the system is supposed to be providing the tools for a fulfilling life, it may take that long to validate the quality of instruction as a child.

And then, when we do identify these good and bad teachers, good and bad missions, good and bad education, why not take a small portion of the hatred and divisiveness expressed by The Center for Union Facts and bring guidance and help to the teachers and, more importantly, to the students.

Still, we could probably pick a few bad apples, but how do they know what they can do to improve if we don’t agree on the reason for institutional education in the first place.