Archimedes’ Hot Tub

I had coffee today with DD Gangully, CEO of Dimdim, which makes an open source Web conferencing tool of the same name (and it has nothing to do with his own name, but was picked at random. When I noted the similarity, he sighed and said “I’m thinking of changing my name”). He told me his biggest issue as an entrepreneur is taking home his stress, which had been such a problem for him in his first startup that he avoided starting a second company for years.

But he has addressed this issue with the stress management spreadsheet shown here on his blog.

DD told me that tracking his stress levels at home have worked very well. I guess if you’re disciplined enough to keep a spreadsheet, you probably can be disciplined enough to do what you must to reduce your stress.

I just got off the phone with my friend Niall McKay, and got the great news that a documentary he’s proposed about his father, The Bass Player, has gotten funding. Niall also has a series of other projects that he’s pursuing, such as this PBS project on Sikhs in America. I’m jazzed for Niall, who has a special talent for telling powerful stories featuring everyday folk. I can’t wait to see these!

Niall had other good news, too, but I’m not at liberty to share…

I’m already in more than half-a-dozen online social networks, and just last week was invited to two brand new ones. One represented the first time I was invited to a socialnet built by someone using Ning, the other a new business social network called Doostang.

While I think these networks are fundamental tools for Web sites, I’m now frowzy about them. I don’t for the most part seek to grow my networks — I was aggressive about inviting people to LinkedIn a few years ago, but stopped after breaking past the 150-connection mark. The 150 number is what social scientists think was probably the maximum village group in early human history. I am now at close to 300 connections, but almost always because people now invite me to join their networks, so I’m part of their 150 connections.

I have taken an interest in Facebook, which I joined after three people invited me in one week. I like many elements of how it is organized, and what I can manage. It’s also more personal than something like LinkedIn, and, for me, easier to use than MySpace (it also lacks the spam of that network). All the rest of my networks are basically untended. I even found that I hadn’t gone to Second Life in so long that I lost all three of my friends. Frankly, I find just treading water on two or three networks a time sink (and I’m not including social sites like Flickr).

These social networks have a surface purpose — getting better jobs or friends or dates — but also an evolutionary function – you rack up big online networks and then show them off, as if they said something about our prospects (or, perhaps, our parties). In some cases, as Owen Thomas notes, they’re part of our personal marketing effort, so they really can enhance our prospects. But in most cases I think they’re digital peacock feathers.

I note that none of the social networks I’m on feature a good calendaring function. That’s probably because most of us don’t actually want our networks to see our calendar. My guess is that this will start to change — I was interviewing David Weinberger today for my next Prototype column, and he mentioned that Jimmy Wales used to have it set up so that anyone could schedule an appointment with him just by going to his public calendar and snaring some time (I went and looked and that no longer seems to be the case). As with our parties, we will have to deal anew with the awkwardness of deciding who does not get access to our to-do list or get to see what we really have on our schedule that we claim prevents us from seeing them. A whole new form of social hazard looks poised to emerge.

I spoke this spring with John Williamson, an economist at the Institute of International Economics who created the idea of ‘The Washington Consensus’ as a set of expected reforms for dealing with economic crisis (a term since hijacked for other purposes).

We talked about currency issues in the global economy, and the growing pressure created by the gigantic surpluses China and other nations have built with the U.S. His big worries were that the U.S. trade deficit could send the economy into recession or cause a retreat from free trade. There is no quick fix for the deficit, but he thinks that with quick action, it might be halved in four years.

Despite his worries, he kept his sense of humor.

People tend to break down into two types, those who say we’ve called it as it is and wish the official world would start doing something about it, and others who say we’ve heard you calling wolf before, and nothing’s happened. And that of course is true (laughs). But it doesn’t mean there isn’t a real problem there just because disaster hasn’t happened yet.

The interview as I submitted it to Shukan Daiyamondo is here.
World Voice: John Williamson

Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post has an enlightening piece in today’s paper, Norway Debates the Promise, Costs of New Drilling. Norway is the world’s third largest oil exporter, but there is a significant discussion as to whether it should take advantage of the melting of the Arctic ice caps to drill still more.

A memorable quote was this one, from an activist:

“We are a country of petroholics. A nice, little, selfish country of petroholics.”

There’s also an intriguing reference to a philosopher who advises the Central Bank on where to invest its oil profits. I’ll bet this person is not one of Heilbroner’s Worldly Philosophers.

I ran a race for the first time in more than 20 years, part of my fitness kick, which has seen me drop 25 pounds and be in better shape than I’ve been for at least a decade. Age has not improved my racing tactics, which caused me to go out too fast and fade, but I was proud to finish without stopping. I’m not in the picture above the results of the Artesani Park 5K, but my kids are.

Shankar Vedantam’s Washington Post column this week is The Color of Health Care: Diagnosing Bias in Doctors. He looks at a study on bias in treatment by doctors. The study showed that without being aware of it, doctors would identify heart attack symptoms in blacks more often than those in whites, but would prescribe medicine to treat it less frequently. That’s despite no conscious bias on the part of the doctors, as this comment shows:

Mahzarin Banaji, a co-author and Harvard psychologist who helped develop the Implicit Association Test used in this study, said the racial bias unearthed by the study is at odds with conventional views of bigotry — and perhaps more insidious. Rather than harboring deliberate ill will, she said, the physicians had apparently internalized racial stereotypes, and these attitudes subtly influenced their medical judgment without their even realizing it.

It would be interesting to see if some sort of educational effort could be made to reduce this kind of bias, in much the way that some people talk about inoculating religious believers from holding extreme views, like that God approves of suicide bombers.

Inc. has posted my article on Windows Vista, which it titled Nice View, Rough Terrain. It’s also posted my latest technology guide, a look at social networking tools with a business bent.

Here’s an interview on the ongoing development of the massively multiplayer game Lord of the Rings Online, featuring its creative director, Cardell Kerr (also known as my brother-in-law).

My latest Prototype column for the New York Times,
It Takes Deep Pockets to Fight Global Warming, looks at some of the big ideas in climate change, and how hard it will be to get them implemented.