Archive for 2010
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »The Greenest Detroit Auto Show Ever
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 14, 2010 by admin in Clean & Green, Technology
Thursday, January 14th, 2010Ford’s Better Ideas Make Other Carmakers Green With Innovation
 This guy may be a little disappointed if he bought the “chick magnet” pitch |
While it’s usually the concept cars that grab a lot of attention at the Detroit Auto Show, this year, it’s the REAL cars that are stealing the show. And there’s probably a message in the fact that two of the biggest stars at the 2010 Show are companies that didn’t accept bailout money to float the top-heavy, profit starved, gas-guzzling monstrosity that is the Detroit auto business. It’s inspiring that amidst the rather bleak economic environment that is Michigan, there’s a lot of hope and inspiration for a smarter, cleaner future for the industry, and Ford in particular is leading the way. After being the only of the big three to refuse bailout money last year, they were also the only one to enjoy a 33% sales rise in December! Now, they’re sweeping the auto show in a big way; their Fusion Hybrid and Transit Connect won the North American Car and Truck of the Year respectively. While the Transit Connect is neither hybrid nor electric, it’s part of the One Ford initiative, which will – among other things – bring the hipper fuel-efficient vehicles previously only available abroad to the states. Like the Fiesta, which we complained about some time ago. And there’s another unexpected force making a splash this year: The Chinese BYD hybrid. Go ahead and sneer at a Chinese-made car, but if you’re old enough, you may remember back when Japanese products were the low-quality laughingstock of global markets, and we all know how that ended up. BYD is no factory town upstart; one of the company’s major backers is Warren Buffet, who describes the company’s CEO Wang Chuan-Fu as a cross between GE’s Jack Welch and Thomas Edison. This CNN Money piece explains how the guy has so much faith in his company’s commitment to a green approach that he’ll drink the cars’ battery fluid to drive the point home. In my opinion, this is capitalism at its best: tough times driving innovation. And although the Transit Connect may not be a “chick magnet”, as Ford CEO Alan Mulally has suggested, this more in-depth Business Week piece gives you some insight into why Mulally’s vision may just turn Ford back into a world leader. Though they may have to fight with the Chinese to pull it off. Read the rest of this entry »
Privacy & Social Network Contact Management
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 13, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010Think you’re building a powerful contact list with sites like Facebook? Try exporting your contacts. AND: Why you might as well get used to a new definition of the word privacy.
 Online privacy? Puh! The future probably lies with initiatives like the DataPortability Project |
I was amused recently when people expressed surprise that Mark Zuckerberg publicly declared privacy a thing of the past, and wondered if the alleged tell-all by a former Facebook employee was for real. Please, people. How can you possibly expect to share vast amounts of personal data online using shopping sites, Facebook, and cloud services like Google Docs and then expect to maintain any semblence of true privacy? This apparently may be a generational issue, and personally, I find myself bridging the generations on this one. This whole issue was driven home hard for me recently, and here’s how: As part of my work over the past ten years, I’ve experimented casually with forms of social networking going all the way back to the now-defunct GeoCities.com. Although I’ve often consulted with clients to implement the various available tools, I’ve done little to use them myself in a purposeful way; although I’m a very social person, I’m also a very private person. As an example, although I’ve logged into Facebook daily for over a year, I don’t use it as a serious business tool, and don’t very often share serious personal thoughts on issues there. I’ve mostly used it to reconnect with old friends, meet a few new ones, and banter humorously with them. I also only have about 150 friends, because I’m not what what in pop lingo has been called a Facebook Friend Whore. In spite of this, and in spite of not being active on LinkedIn, Xing, or other more business-oriented sites, I have a primary network of about 300 valued contacts, and an extended contact list of maybe 1500 people. So while preparing to launch some new projects this year, I was aware that I’d have to update and verify my contact lists, which I try to do annually. The problem? Like me, you may have noticed (depending on your tech lifestyle) that – because of the pervasive adoption of texting, Skype, and Facebook – your e-mail volume and phone time have dropped off significantly over the past year. A lot of casual connecting – which is the very basis of successful networking – happens on sites like Facebook. Historically, I would maintain most of my contacts in Outlook or Thunderbird, and export this info to Excel to “massage” the data. This became profoundly problematic this year, when I was reminded that Facebook and other sites make it nearly impossible to export your contacts. In fact, they may shut down your account if you use certain tools to do so. So after doing a bunch of research, I ended up Read the rest of this entry »
Avatar, Suicide & Racism: So This Blue Guy Walks Into A Bar…
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on January 12, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010There’s a lot of debate about Avatar and racism, but the film is dangerous in other ways. It might make you suicidal, and you might even get SHOT.
 Yo. Why he gotta be blue? |
I made a deal with a friend a few months ago that we wouldn’t see Avatar without each other. Of course, people being people and all, she went ahead and saw it without me. I still haven’t seen it. But you know what? I’m starting to think I won’t need to. A similar thing happened to me with both “The Piano” and “The Crying Game”. I waited patiently for them to hit the theaters, didn’t go see them the first couple of weeks after release, and by then was afraid to see them for fear of being tragically disappointed after the frenzied press and word of mouth build-up. Fortunately, the press about the film’s impact has been entertaining enough in itself. First of all, the obvious debate about whether it’s racist? OF COURSE it’s racist. James Cameron (a rich white man) first found success with Terminator, a continuing story about enslaved beings that seek emancipation and in each movie get beaten back down by their oppressors. Why would he walk away from his cash cow? If you haven’t followed the debate, this MSNBC piece gives a good gloss over, but for a deeper look, this Psychology Today piece points out that the film also reinforces sexual stereotypes and leans heavily on the messiah angle as well. And from a more political standpoint, while some are quick to point out that Avatar is real and that Pandora is located in Central and South America and Africa, others suggest that China’s moviegoers rally to it as a story about private property, not race. None of this should be surprising; it’s qualities like this that give a film resonance. Yes. We live in a world where one race dominates commerce, and will do anything to gratify its greed. If you didn’t know this, maybe you should go read a book like Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Two Tuned Tablas And A Microphone – Part I
[ 4 Comments ]Posted on January 11, 2010 by admin in Music
Monday, January 11th, 2010I went looking for some desi music, and got more than I bargained for. Part one of a look at Bollywood, bhangra, urban desi, hindi hip hop, and punjabi pop.
The clip that started my search |
The Internet can be a very dangerous place. Any of you who suffer – as I do – from the probably incurable malady known as Wikiphilia will know what I mean. You find an interesting video, article, or some other piece of pop cultural flotsam & jetsam, and before you know it, several hours are gone, and you know a lot about something that probably matters very little. This happened to me recently when I ran across the video Horizons by the Bay Area desi act Karmacy. The clip itself is – like a lot of desi songs and videos – a peculiar mix of brilliant and cheesy, at least when viewed with a more western eye. Yes, the guys in the video look sort of like they took a long lunch hour from their ad agency or tech startup jobs to do the shoot, but they’re rapping in five languages: English, Spanish, Hindi, Gujarati and Punjabi, and the song is actually is kind of hooky. In any case, the tune gave me flashbacks of 90′s club bhangra, and got me wondering if any kind of durable genre evolved out of it. The only artists I could remember by name from the era were Apache Indian, Diamond & Simon, and Bally Sagoo; a LOT of the music was remixes and mashups of traditional Indian music or Bollywood tunes, and kind of blurred together in the techno/rave haze of my memory. So my search was on, and… it was mind-numbingly frustrating! There’s an INCREDIBLE amount of desi pop music out there, but there are a few obstacles to finding the good stuff. First of all, there’s just SO MUCH to sift through. If you take all the style fusions that are possible with just the sources available on the Indian sub-continent, and combine that with the fact that the people from the area have moved all over the world, you begin to get the picture. There are two other obstacles to finding the best material; one is that the bulk of the Read the rest of this entry »
Is That A Bomb In Your Underpants? Or Are You Just Happy To See Me?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 10, 2010 by admin in Politics
Sunday, January 10th, 2010Whether or not you think the underpants bomber was a terrorist Depends™ on your point of view, I guess. Although his crime was Hane™-ous, we felt no Fruit of the Boom™.
  Oddly, this book was NOT authored by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s children. |
I haven’t found terrorism and politics this much fun since 2006, when prankster John Hargrave stuffed a dildo in his pants before boarding a flight, just to see what would happen. As someone who – every single day – is finding himself a little further outside the value system of either political party in America, I’ve been finding it easier and easier to be amused rather than angered by what’s going down in this country. Especially things like paid dillweed Larry Kudlow of Politico ranting about how Obama should ix-nay the ending-spay, as if the Bush gang didn’t do anything to start the biggest spending spree in US history. Or Rudy Giuliani claiming that the date September 11, 2001 was magically not a date that was on the calendar during the Bush administration. It’s Rudy’s gaffe that I find most amusing, and I don’t care that he admitted his error later. The original statement is what most xenophobic hillbillies with cable will remember. But the thing that I find really funny about it was that he was suggesting that a lone looney with fireworks in his undies was a terrorist. C’mon people. The serious press is already calling him the “Underpants Bomber”. And if you don’t believe he was a confused and inept individual acting on his own, I suggest you download and read his collected rantings that had been posted on Islamic Forum Gawaher.com; Wired has graciously provided them with a link to a zip file in their recent piece Analyze This: The Mind of the Underpants Bomber. And never mind all that. Let’s not forget he was flying into DETROIT, for cryin’ out loud. Obviously Rudy’s never been to “The Big D”, or he’d know that the nation has nothing to worry about from an undies bomber entering HERE. We’d shut that sh– down in NO time.