food

Not your forward planning type

Remember the fable of the The Ant and the Cricket (sometimes the cricket is a grasshopper) by Aesop? They were among the first things that popped into my head in a dream this morning. Basically the little hard working ant works all summer collecting and storing food while the cricket sings the summer away. When the winter comes the cricket goes to the ant to beg for food only to hear the harsh ant reply: “Since you sang like a fool in the summer you better be prepared to dance the winter away!”. The moral is that lazy people lose, but could also be that greedy ants dislike to share.

OK so its easy pop-psychology to say that I am concerned about my work and not being prepared enough. But I also have an alternate interpretation (surely not unique) that the cricket is actually not lazy but rather is busy doing other necessary work. Maybe the ant enjoyed listening to the crickets music while gathering winter supplies. Oh, dear you might think, while returning to more pop-psychology he is either in denial (which would be the wrong pop-psych term) or he is rationalising his actions after the fact.

The good news is that I was reminded of my childhood attachment to Aesop’s Fables and I intend to get a copy to replace the one I lost decades ago. For now I will make do with Bestiaria Latina since they have an enormous collection of myths and fables online.

Posted on by mklang

Travel Tales

Don’t get me wrong. It is a privilege and an adventure to be able to travel. But it is also – occasionally – a real pain. Things like lost bags, missed connections, annoying people, sad food etc have a tendency to bring even the most positive of travelers down. My trip to Belgium has been an easy and comfortable one for me but all around me there were less happy people.

It began early when disembarking I noticed a bag which had been dropped

Someone’s toothbrush will not be following them home. Despite this my bag was not lost so I moved happily along. The hotel was nice, friendly and clean but the wifi was a bit too flakey so most of the time I either had difficulties or was unable to go online.

Travel has been made even more annoying with the new rules at the security check. Actually it is not too difficult but strangely enough too many people have not yet understood that if they do not attempt to have metal items on them – it makes you wonder whether people enjoy being fondled by security.

Just after the security I saw this wonderful sign in a window. What do you think? Is it a recruitment campaign or simply a way of adding insult to the security insult of not being able to carry liquids?

I think its Belgian humor…

Posted on by mklang

Imaginary Centers

The idea of the center is a powerful one. It somehow denotes the middle, equilibrium, balance and this spills over into an idea of well-being. The classic search for centers is Jules Verne â??Journey to the Center of the Earthâ?? which somehow never really makes it into a good metaphor for soul-searching introspection.

In our local lives we have a middle-point. Actually we have several. We have a geographical center that somehow denotes the middle point of our everyday travels. Most of us would like such a point to be the place of our homes but the reality of real estate prices probably puts this point somewhere we may never have been â?? the tube or bus station in between home and work.

But there is rarely one center. We have shopping centers (sorry about the pun), entertainment centers, and centers related to many other activities (e.g. food). The mental images of our travels to and from our centers overlap the physical city. Centers are also important outside the personal context. Centers of culture, economics, shipping, religion and industry abound. But these are centers of the imaginary kind.

Geographic centers are common. One such center, which has been notoriously hard to pin down, is the center of Europe. First we have to start by attempting to define what Europe is. This is a historic, geographic, political and nationalistic quagmire (oh no, donâ??t go there). So we simplify, the center of the European Union (an entity which is not Europe).

On the 1 January 2007 the EU center shifted. This is because both Bulgaria and Rumania joined. More territory joins therefore the center shifts (about 200 kilometers east). According to the IGN he new center of the EU is the German town of Gelnhausen.

But the title is contested since there are plenty of places which seem to want the title. Here are a few: Bernotai, or PurnuÅ¡kÄ?s near Vilnius in Lithuania; a point on the island of Saaremaa in Estonia; the village of Krahule in central Slovakia; the town of Rakhiv, or the village of Dilove, in western Ukraine; Suchowola in north-eastern Poland; and ToruÅ? in the northern part of central Poland; Babruysk or Vitebsk in Belarus (Wikipedia).

Several of these sites have nice markers to celebrate the â??factâ?? and to point out the reason for the significance of the insignificant site.

To be able to arrive at the geographical center of Europe the IGN have taken into consideration the English and French colonies far, far away â?? proving once again that the center is equally a state of mind as a geographic fact.

Despite the fact that the center is an illusion we still tend to seek it out. The newly declared Gelnhausen center is in the middle of an empty field (Google Satelite image of 50°10�21�N, 9°9�0�E), identical to all the other fields around it.

Thatâ??s it isnâ??t it? We strive to find the center only to discover that it is no different from the periphery and yet we still value the center even when it is devoid of distinguishing characteristicsâ?¦

Posted on by mklang

Christmas Reading

So when you have tired of the good company, food and presents here is a hot tip on what to take a look at. Its a pdf entitled “Best Practice Guide” for “Implementing the EU Copyright Directive in the Digital Age” written by Urs Gasser and Silke Ernst released in December 2006. Here is a short extract from the intro:

At a time where the existing EU copyright framework is under review, this best practice guide seeks to provide a set of specific recommendations for accession states and candidate countries that will or may face the challenge of transposing the EUCD in the near future. It is based on a collaborative effort to take stock of national implementations of the EUCD and builds upon prior studies and reports that analyze the different design choices that Member States have made.

I shall be saving it for Boxing day 🙂

Posted on by mklang

Snow!

Another trip to Stockholm. This time to meet with people from UR (utbildningsradion) public service. It was a good meeting and an interesting discussion on how public service television in Sweden can use Creative Commons licensing. After the meeting I had some time to kill so I walked around Stockholm and it started to snow. Finally! So far December has been dismally warm and wet so a little snow makes it feel more like Christmas, even if we will not get a white Christmas in Göteborg.

So now that I have seen snow I feel more disposed to the season – which is good considering I shall be buying the tree tomorrow… Everything else is already all in place (almost). Christmas in Sweden is pretty traditional: tree, presents and too much food. I am looking forward to it.

Posted on by mklang

Social Informatics – Slovenia

Well its Social Informatics in Slovenia. So far I am impressed by the discussions but less so with Slovenia. The hotel was actually the worst I have ever stayed in, this is an impressive position with some strong competition. After the hotel the food is the next thing on the “whats wrong” list. There cannot be many vegetarians in Slovenia, and the ones that are here cannot be well fed. But the worst thing is that connectivity is patchy at best…
So the academic is suffering for his art.

But the papers have been very interesting so far and I am looking forward to the rest of the conference.

Posted on by mklang

Whats Cooking? Norms Based Property Regimes

Somehow, somewhere along the line our society has decided that certain types of intellectual endeavour were worth protecting and encouraging. Not all types. Just some. Through brilliant social positioning and political lobbying these intellectual endeavours have achieved the status of property. (For more on this read No Trespassing â?? Eva Hemmungs Wirtén).

Stop! Think! Property. Property is usually considered amongst the human rights. The focus on property right occasionally risked upsetting the balance of rights and encroaching on other rights. This led Martin Luther King to write:

Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.

Despite the fact that intellectual property protection as we understand it today is not as old as many believe, we have managed to raise it to an eternal value. This is to say we believe that this is the way that it always has been. Implicit with this idea comes the follow-up thought that changing this is not worth the effort.

The interesting thing is that there are many types of knowledge that is not protected by intellectual property. Some of these are not valuable but others are extremely valuable.

A personâ??s honour is something that may be painstakingly built up over a lifetime within the community group. Whether this person is a diamond trader or part of a criminal organisation this is a valuable commodity, which is unprotected. Defamation law attempts to cover certain parts â?? but this protection has nowhere near the far-reaching effects of intellectual property.

A farmerâ??s knowledge over the terrain and weather, a craftsmanâ??s knowledge of tools and materials and a teachers experience are all valuable commodities in the daily life of these people.

My current favourite example comes from an article by Emmanuelle Fauchart and Eric von Hippel (his books are available online free) about the value of the knowledge of French chefs. Especially in their struggle to gain and maintain Michelin stars.

A star in the Michelin Guide is a valuable commodity. It makes and breaks restaurants and the career of chefs. It has also been the source of some scandals (wikipedia).

The question the article poses is why when the commodity is so valuable donâ??t chefs copy each other? Rather than innovate and surpass their competitors why not emulate? There is no law, no intellectual property in food dishes. Despite the fact that they are highly creative. The answer, according to Fauchart and von Hippel lies in â??norms basedâ?? intellectual property systems.

What we see is regulation by advanced group norms that allow the group to:

â?¦specify the nature and extent of rights that a group member can assert to intellectual property. They also include procedures for the claiming of intellectual property rights, and community-accepted types of sanctions for violators.

This is a thought-provoking article. We need more work in this vein to be able to show that the present intellectual property regime is far from being the only game in town.

Posted on by mklang

Edible Computers

The London Science Museum has an exhibition called Dead Ringers, which is on the uses and abuses of discarded mobile phones. It includes some interesting information online. The exhibition goes beyond the simplistic statistics of our rapidly growing mountains of discarded IT stuff.

Beyond more traditional ideas of using specially made biodegradable materials and the idea of re-cycling our gadgets on interesting idea is the use of pasta to make circuit boards.

Pasta Circuit Board

Naturally pasta is biodegradable but it also comes with an additional advantage. Since pasta quickly becomes soft when boiled it is easy to remove components which are attached to the pasta circuit board. This makes the job of re-cycling components more cost efficient and more attractive.

Is there a catch?

Naturally this is not all good. No, the concern is not that food production will be diverted to gadget-making but we do focus more on gadgets than on more basic necessities. The problem is that presenting solutions such as biodegradable materials relaxes concerns. We can collectively shrug and claim that the problem has been solved. This is not so. There remains a missing component for this to be true. We need harsher regulation to enforce rules demanding manufacturers use more biodegradable material in their gadgets. Market solutions would be a nice option but have proven in the past to be ineffective.
More on high tech trash here & here.

Posted on by mklang

The Cool Blogs

It took some time but now I have visited Times 50 Coolest Websites 2005. My favourite section is the blogs (duh). Many of the Times choices were familiar but some were not. They include the amazing to the mundane.

One blog site on the list is PostSecret where people send their secrets on postcards to the blogger who scans them and posts them online. Some are secrets are trivial while others are dark most are disturbing in one form or another. A recent, simple yet disturbing example included the text: I lie to make my life seem normal.

Two sites on the list that are made for procrastination are Overheardinnewyork and Overheardintheoffice. Both sites are reports of snippets of overheard conversations.

The list also includes the design site MoCo Loco and the food fetish site Chocolate and Zucchini just to mention a few favourites.

The list of blogs also include gossip sites and more – but they were not those I would have added to my list…

Posted on by mklang

Social Innovation

It’s a sad truth that most of the world needs technology to resolve immediate serious mundane problems. But most technology development is focused on gadgets.

John Voelcker has chosen 10 innovative technologies which are aimed at solving chronic problems. The article Creating Social Change – 10 Innovative Technologies appears in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (Summer 2006)

  1. A self-contained toilet that treats waste without water or chemicals, protecting precious drinking water from contamination. www.eloo.co.za
  2. An inexpensive kit that turns smog-belching two-stroke engines into cleaner-burning, fuel-efficient sources of power. www.envirofit.org
  3. Small-scale solar power systems that not only produce electric power, but also generate cash by enabling people to set up their own home-based businesses. www.selco-india.com
  4. An electricity-free food preservation system. www.malnutrition.org
  5. A prestigious U.S. university is making many of its academic courses available on the Internet where users can learn from them â?? free. www.ocw.mit.edu
  6. Volunteers have developed a solar-powered microfilm projector that will help tens of thousands of Africans learn to read this year. www.designthatmatters.org/k2
  7. A team of Cuban and Canadian scientists has invented an inexpensive vaccine that could save the lives of half a million infants each year. gndp.cigb.edu.cu/
  8. Low-cost eyeglasses that wearers can tune without the aid
    of an optometrist. www.adaptive-eyecare.com
  9. A Pakistani organization is selling ergonomically correct weaving looms that let adults create the same intricate rugs that children now make. www.ciwce.org.pk
  10. A Brazilian nonprofit is rolling out telecenters that provide Internet access, telephone service, computer training, and other technology-based services to the poor and working class. www.cemina.org.br, www.radiofalamulher.com

This is a good list. I disagree with nr 5 since there are several universities offering similar schemes. In addition I do not believe that it has the same impact and importance as the rest of the list. This is becuase I do not think that by making learning material available people will automatically learn.

Don’t get me wrong – I am sure that these kinds of material are of great value to teachers at other universities since they can take the ideas and adapt them to fit their own classrooms. It’s just that I don’t see that this is on par with clean water, waste disposal and helping poor people access technology.
Despite my complaints – lists such as these are important since they help us open our eyes to the fact that we could all be thinking about solving important everyday problems.
(via Question Technology)

Posted on by mklang