ThinkingShift

For those of us who love Howard Rheingold’s work, he is flinging himself into video blogging (or I suppose video podcasting). Twenty years ago (that long?), Rheingold penned A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community and as he thought about updating it, video came to mind as a way of sharing the parts of his life that we don’t know about such as his painting, gardening and sculpting. Plus, he’ll be doing a series of short videos that document how he uses social media in his professional and personal life.

Now showing is a video on how he used technology way back when for activism and how more powerful technology has changed things and moved us towards participatory media. He also talks about the impact of social networks and collective action.

Well, I’ve been a Chief Knowledge Officer. Perhaps I could morph myself into a Chief Sustainability Officer - especially given Patrick Lambe’s rather depressing survey results, which revealed how much organisations invest in their KM initiatives (and Australia doesn’t come out smelling very rosy). So if the life of a knowledge manager is “nasty, brutish and short”, then you could turn your attention to organisational efforts in sustainability (which must surely require some KM input).

Forbes recently highlighted how the new role of Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) is emerging within the corporate echelons. The CSO’s role is to balance the difficulties and opportunities created by climate change. The article suggests that as the world cooks, the CSO might become the most influential corporate position as organisations struggle to identify and embrace the business opportunities that present themselves. So green is a growth opportunity and those that snap up the opportunities will survive in an increasingly complex and environmentally-troubled world.

A sustainable approach to business can produce a healthier bottom line. Better resource use and energy management can lower operational and manufacturing costs and reduce pollution and waste; “green” products, services and technologies can increase revenue; critical resources can be conserved; and a corporation can be seen as environmentally responsible, which boosts the brand and results in positive PR opportunities. A further benefit of course is that pursuing sustainability goals can attract employees who wish to “make a difference”.

Since the 1960s, there has been an organisational role that focuses on the environment but from the perspective of regulatory compliance. The focus is now shifting to this role feeding into strategy, product design, marketing and corporate communications. The CSO is now the bridge between the environment and business. What was once good for the environment was considered bad for business. The CSO role can bridge these opposing forces perhaps.

And what might be the competencies the CSO needs? According to Forbes:

• someone who sees the “big picture” and the long-range trajectory
• a strategist with the ability to rethink organisational structure and recognise levers for change
• someone who’s not afraid to “rock the boat”
• a charismatic person
• a leader with the ability to create consensus and drive change
• needs to be involved in integrating environmental thinking into every layer of the organisation
• needs to create awareness that the role is about creating a better way of doing business, a more sustainable way of doing business
• facilitator and enabler
• someone who is not easily intimidated by corporate bureaucracy
• and I’ll add my own one - a fox terrier who bites the corporate ankle, thrashes around and doesn’t let go until mission accomplished.

Mmmm….so far, sounds a lot like the competencies a KM person requires. A 2006 survey of 25 US companies found that 15 of the CSOs are vice-presidents; 6 are directors; and women fill 9 of the chief environmental positions. But like KM, the position the CSO occupies in the corporate hierarchy says a lot about the value that organisation places on environmental issues.

I seem to remember a lot of CKOs in the early 2000s (myself included) but the KM world is less populated with CKOs these days. So the CSO is probably the new CKO. If the CSO position is a top role in the hierarchy, then there’s some hope of influencing a corporation’s sustainability journey (as with the CKO and the “KM journey”). The CSO will be able to survey the whole corporate ecosystem and identify patterns etc.

I’ll be interested to see if the CSO role becomes popular in Australia. A quick search of Seek didn’t throw up anything and ferreting around Google only showed CSOs in US companies, like Dupont. If you know of any Australian positions, leave a comment.

And what qualifications will a CSO need - legal, government background, science, research and development? The experiences of some US companies sounds a lot like KM again - Owens Corning Inc plucked their CSO from its research department, whilst Home Depot found their CSO lurking in merchandising. KM people come from disparate backgrounds too and are often plucked from the ranks of a company to fill a KM position (and after a stint in KM in my experience, these people are often all too happy to go back from whence they came!). Perhaps we’ll start to see University courses like Graduate Certificate in Sustainability as we see now with KM. There are already educational institutions that offer an MBA in Sustainable Business or who offer a green MBA curriculum.

Well, my career in KM hasn’t been “nasty, brutish and short” since I’ve been in the field since around 1996 or so. But a CSO role sure looks interesting!

Let’s kick off 2008 with an overview of what’s happening with some of Earth’s spectacular and precious species.

First up is this giant rat - a new species found in Indonesia’s Papua province. During an expedition to Papua’s Foja Mountains (an area known as the ‘lost world’), scientists discovered a treasure trove, including a pygmy possum previously unknown to science and dozens of new plants and animals.

The rat is known as a Mallomys giant rat (no kidding, look at the size of it!) and is about five times the size of your average city rat. It had no fear and came waltzing into the scientists’ camp. Just hope said rat doesn’t make an appearance in my house too soon. Source: New Scientist. Image credit: ABC.

A mysterious mammal has been caught on film - check out the ears! It’s a long-eared jerboa, a small nocturnal animal that dwells in the desert areas of Mongolia and China. This little chap has been very elusive to scientists. It hops like a kangaroo and has hairs on its feet to help with hopping along the sand. During the day, jerboas hang around in underground tunnels. They are endangered due to habitat disturbance. How cute is he! Source: BBC News.

A 10-millimetre new frog has been discovered. The little critter was found under ferns and leaf litter in the steamy rainforest of the Western Ghats of Kerala, a mountainous region in western India. The frog has been given the name Nyctibatrachus minimus and is the smallest of all known land vertebrates in India. Apparently, he belts out a mating song from under the leaf litter during the monsoonal period. Source: Science Daily. Image Credit. Image courtesy of University of Delhi.

And for ThinkingShift’s international readers, a good news animal story from Australia. The Mogo Zoo on the south coast of New South Wales is the first zoo in the world to successfully rear a pride of five male white lion cubs. How cute are these fellows, affectionately called ‘the gangsters’. Apparently, producing a pride of five male white cubs is unique. The zoo specialises in endangered species and is now home to a 12-strong pride of big white cats.

All good news so far, but red squirrels in Scotland are in danger of going kaput. Scotland’s 121,000 red squirrels, which make up 75% of the country’s squirrel population, could die out within 50 years because their woodland habitats are being lost and they are being threatened by grey squirrels, which were brought to the UK from the US in the late 1800s. Grey squirrels out-compete the reds for food and they also carry and spread the deadly squirrel pox virus. Source: BBC News.

A really fascinating piece from Alternet, which asks whether there is a similarity between the US and Nazi Germany. Do yourself a favour and read the whole article, but here’s a summary:

The burning of the German parliament building (Reichstag) took place on Feb. 27, 1933. In a journal by Sebastian Haffner (pen name for Raimund Pretzel who was a young lawyer in Berlin during the Nazi takeover and wrote a firsthand account), Haffner referred to the “sheepish submissiveness” with which the German people reacted to this 9/11 type event.

• Haffner found it alarming that none of his colleagues or friends “saw anything out of the ordinary in the fact that, from then on, one’s telephone would be tapped, one’s letters opened and one’s desk might be broken into.”
• The Bush Administration began eavesdropping on its own citizens seven months before 9/11.
• the mantra of “after 9/11, everything has changed” has given Bush and his croneys license to spy illegally on its own citizens.
• the Democrats were briefed in February 2001 on plans to snoop on American citizens without the court warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 - did they knowingly acquiesce?
• there may be contemporary parallels with Nazi Germany - the Nazi Party, after the Reichstag fire, only received 44% of the popular vote, but the Social Democrats and other parties who received 56% of the German peoples’ trust allowed the Nazis to take power. Haffner writes that:”They went along with everything: the terror, the persecution of Jews. … They were not even bothered when their own party was banned and their own members arrested.”

I found this a very interesting article (if not a warning) because the same sheepish submissiveness can be seen in our contemporary society. We don’t seem to be fully grasping that our civil liberties and privacy are being eroded; some of us don’t even seem to care. Opposition parties are perhaps caving in or being co-opted. But here’s a poignant warning from Haffner:

“There was not a single example of energetic defense, of courage or principle. There was only panic, flight, and desertion. In March 1933 millions were ready to fight the Nazis. Overnight they found themselves without leaders. … At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed. They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown. … The result is today the nightmare of the rest of the world.”

And perhaps we should all have a re-read of Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here - a political novel, which warned that political movements like Nazism could come to power in the US when people blindly and submissively support their leaders. Let’s recall the warning signs of fascism:

• powerful and continuing nationalism
• disdain for human rights
• identification of enemies as a unifying cause
• supremacy of the military
• rampant sexism
• controlled mass media
• obsession with national security
• religion and government intertwined
• corporate power protected
• Labor power suppressed
• disdain for intellectuals and the arts
• obsession with crime and punishment
• rampant cronyism and corruption
• fraudulent elections.

Then think about the current state of the US (and Australia to some extent). Scary.

Privacy International has just published a map of surveillance societies around the world. There’s also an accompanying report that details surveillance and privacy protection issues. The colour-coded map shows societies with the best privacy laws, with the privacy-hostile societies highlighted in black. There are 7 colour-coded levels.If you don’t want to wade your way through the report and map, I’ll provide you with some tasty tidbits:

• I’m still looking for an area on the map highlighted in Blue (consistently upholds human rights).
• the 2007 rankings indicate an overall worsening of privacy protection across the world, reflecting an increase in surveillance and a declining performance of privacy safeguards.
• there is an increasing trend for governments around the world to archive data on the financial, geographic and communication records of its citizens, leading to the conclusion that citizens are under suspicion.
• there is a substantial decline in privacy protection across Europe following surveillance initiatives coming out of Brussels
• the lowest ranking countries are (big surprise, not!) - Russia, Malaysia and China
• the highest ranking countries for 2007 are Greece, Romania and Canada (always loved Canada, where’s that emigration application I once was about to fill out!)
• the worst ranking EU country is? the UK, which you’ll see on the map has fallen into the black (endemic surveillance society)
• no surprise that the US  is in the black area 
• the really astute amongst us will see Australia is in the red, two levels up from black. This means we’re sitting at level 5 and Australia’s rank is “systematic failure to uphold safeguards”. 
• Australian ranks worse than South Africa and New Zealand
• Australia ranks badly when it comes to constitutional protection
• Argentina scored higher than 18 of the 27 EU countries
• Venezuela requires your fingerprints just to get a phone
• South Korea requires a government registration number linked to your identity before you can post on message boards.

Okay, off for a lie down!

Don’t know about you: but I’m finding it hard to get revved up into 2008. I’m still in holiday mode and enjoying my new toy: a Nikon D40 with a Sigma 18-200mm lens. So I’m prowling around looking for insects and poor unsuspecting birds to freeze frame! But I did find this article by Richard Ackland of the Sydney Morning Herald to be of some concern. He takes a look at civil liberties violations in Australia and concludes that our “relaxed and comfortable land” is watching these liberties go down the toilet. And frankly, whilst I was overjoyed to see Rudd win the PM election, I’m getting the vibe that the Federal Labor Government will continue its predecessor’s authoritarian track record. But time will tell.

Ackland offers up a crop of 10 violations - if you’re too lazy to go off and read the SMH article, here’s a run down:

• The Trent Smith “witch-hunt” - he’s a trade economist (from DFAT) who was sacked by the Howard Government for allegedly leaking information by email to a Labor staffer and for having loose-lips. Smith worked as an ALP adviser between 1997-1999 and there were accusations from Labor of a “witch-hunt”. It was a four-year, $1 million witch-hunt, with police ferreting through 8,000 emails. Although cleared of wrongdoing after an investigation, Smith was ultimately sacked (and I believe the reason was that in an email he referred a Labor staffer to publicly available material).

• Escalation in police powers. APEC and the Cronulla riots have given police new powers to create restricted, cordoned off areas and the police (without warrants or reasonable suspicion) can search people and confiscate “offensive property” (which apparently includes mobile phones and the Australian flag - didn’t think the flag was THAT bad).

• Deportation. ASIO is busy appealing to the Federal Court over its obligations to provide deportees with details of their adverse security arrangements. So we have, for example, Scott Parkin, the US peace activist thrown into jail in Australia and then deported, without any explanation. And 2 refugees who were kept in the dark and held on Nauru (where Australia has a refugee detention centre) for 5 years.

• The Pine Gap Four. Some Christian pacifists gained entry to Pine Gap. They alleged that the base was being used by the US in their bombing of Iraq. The four were prosecuted under an unused piece of legislation - Defence (Special Undertakings) Act of 1952. The Crown asked the court to send the four to jail.

• Dr Izhar ul-Haque. An Australian judge found that ASIO falsely imprisoned, kidnapped and intimidated a Sydney medical student, Izhar ul-Haque, for allegedly receiving terrorist training in Pakistan.

• A strong campaign AGAINST human rights for Australia. Hello?

• Philip Ruddock. The former Attorney-General is singled out for saying that any accused person can have a “fair trial” based on hearsay evidence and evidence extracted by coercion. Obviously, he went to a different law school from me.

• The High Court of Australia. The court has whittled away freedom of speech with the Channel Seven Adelaide v Manock decision. Majority ruling in this case suggests that for any published comment to be defensible it must be “reasonable”. So the right of any “ratbag or crank” to speak up about unpopular cases has been severely curtailed.

• David Hicks. As if 5 or so years of detention without charge wasn’t enough, the control order issued by a Federal magistrate certainly ensures that Hicks continues to be hounded.

• Dr Mohamed Haneef - need we say more.

So maybe, just maybe, before we Australians declare we live in a free, open country, we should take some time to familiarise ourselves with all of the above and look at the holistic pattern. Might make us stop and think a bit.

I always like reading about what the future has in store for us. I’d love to pop back in 1000 years or so - would humans still be roaming the Earth or would we have snuffed ourselves out? I imagine a forlorn landscape of abandoned cities being reclaimed by the jungles and forests. Okay, I probably watch too many dark sci-fi films.

So what are the futurists saying we can expect beyond 2008? I always like to read The Futurist’s predictions and they have just announced their Top 10 forecasts. Here’s a taste:

1. By 2025, there will be a million billionaires in the world. Globalisation and technological innovation mean increasing opportunities and prosperity. You only have to look around to see how quickly some people seem to be able to come up with an idea and cash in quick to figure that this prediction is probably a goer. And I wonder how many of the billionaires will be Russian?
2. We’ll all be wearing clothes made of smart fabrics and clothes that are wired to sense temperature or change colour. I sure like this one - I can never decide what colour to wear each day, so I usually end up in black of some sort. I’d love to wear a shirt in red and if I didn’t like it one hour later, have it turn itself into green. Wristwatches that hold every piece of data about you and which you can use to pay bills by swiping it at point of sale. Shoes that tell you “watch out for that pothole”. Or clothes that clean themselves.
3. I’m not at all surprised by this forecast - a new Cold War hotting up with China or Russia, replacing terrorism as the bogeyman.
4. A cashless society. If you read just a little bit about new technologies, you’d know for instance that passports with RFID chips can be read by a mobile scanner nearby and you could be the victim of identity theft. And so with sophisticated scanning technologies - they may provide counterfeiters a golden opportunity for printing fake currency. The world may move to adopting a cashless economy.
5. The Earth is on the verge of a significant extinction event. No surprise with this one either I reckon. The 21st Century could see a biodiversity collapse 100 to 1,000 times greater than any previous extinction since the dawn of humanity.
6. Water will be what oil was to the 20th Century. I’ve blogged before about my fear that water wars could erupt as this precious commodity becomes scarcer. Recently, I saw a marked car that had Water Conservation Police written on it (might have been Authority but either way it said “Water Conservation”). It was parked outside a house of a chap who loves his garden and waters it regularly. Now, the car may have belonged to a friend or relative. But maybe it was the first signs of a world in which our consumption of water will be very tightly controlled and watched.
7. By 2050 the world’s population may be a whole lot more than expected, mainly due to longer-living and healthier people. The UN has increased its forecast from 9.1 billion to 9.2 billion.
8. By 2080, the number of Africans threatened by floods will grow 70-fold. The natural flow of water is being disrupted by increasing development and urbanisation in Africa, which may result in flooding. If climate change causes global sea levels to rise by the predicted 38cm by 2080, then 70 million Africans could be affected.
9. There will be a stampede to the Arctic. No surprise with this one I think, not when you think about Putin’s recent grab for a large chunk of the Arctic region. The Arctic has glittering resources like copper, zinc, forests, fish etc. I think this will be too much temptation for our greedy world and the pristine Arctic will sadly be exploited.
10. And finally…and a bit scary I think - more decisions will be made by “non-human entities“. Well, frankly a lot of people who make decisions in this world could be accused of being “non-human”! But the forecast is talking about robots and intelligent, non-carbon networks that will make financial or even political decisions for us. And the reason for this? Humans’ competency is not keeping pace with advances in technologies well enough to avoid human error.

Well, I think most of these are pretty sensible forecasts. If I had to predict things, I would include the declining power of the USA and the rise and rise of China and Russia. So any future Cold War might not factor in the US. But who knows: once the US kicks out Bush, it could be a whole different ball game. I think too we’ll see portions of society breaking off into smaller communities in an attempt to get away from the chaos of the world. We may see a return to caring more for each other and the environment - focusing less on the individual and more on the collective. A return to a simpler life perhaps.

What are your predictions?

To kick-start the New Year, let’s have a look at some curious bits and pieces I’ve found.

Glow-in-the-dark kitty. Perhaps you’re tired of the usual assortment of colours cats come in: tan, black, white, gray, marmalade, chocolate. So why not colour-coordinate so kitty matches your personal colour scheme preference? Scientists first cloned a cat in 2002 (the cat was named Copycat - how droll) but not content to just clone felines, researchers have now found a way to change the colour of cats. By modifying a gene, the enterprising scientists have produced the planet’s first red cloned cat (seems the colour palette is limited to red at the moment, so if red’s not your fav colour, bummer). The photo above shows two cloned Turkish Angola kittens (cute!). Due to the red fluorescence protein in their skin cells, the kittens look reddish under ultraviolet light.

I would think this would be a most useful feline feature should you have trouble finding kitty in the dark. Here’s a video of the glow-in-the-dark cats.

Source: The Korea Times

A beetle of many colours: staying with the colour theme, there’s a golden beetle species in Panama that can do its very own colour-changing trick without the need for gene modification. If it desires, the Panamanian tortoise beetle can turn brick-red in less than two minutes. This is not due to external temperature changes. The beetle can alter the flow of fluid in its ecoskeleton, which consists of 20 to 40 layers. Apparently, when the beetle is wet, wavelengths of light bounce off the ecoskeleton due to the porous nature of the layers and gives the beetle an overall glossy golden colour. But when the beetle has dried off, the light doesn’t bounce off evenly and the ecoskeleton becomes translucent, revealing red pigment. The colour-changing trick could have implications for biomimicry. If a house plant dries out, for instance, the pot could change colour to warn that the plant needs watering. Source: Discover Magazine

Don’t bug a cockroach in the morning. If you’re not a morning person, well you have some company: neither are cockroaches. Scientists have found that the learning ability of cockroaches is pretty kaput in the morning, but by evening, they’re raring to go with learning tasks and it’s the first example of an insect whose ability to learn is controlled by its biological clock. Now, I was more interested in what on earth scientists are teaching cockroaches. It seems they were taught to associate peppermint, which they don’t like, with sugar water so they would favour peppermint over one of their favourite smells - vanilla. Apparently, the bugs trained at night could remember the smell association for several days, but their morning trained counterparts were incapable of learning anything new, let alone remembering it. Mmmm….better get that vanilla out of my pantry or start training cockroaches fast! Source: Reuters.

How much would you pay for dessert? Well, if you have a spare US$14,500, you can savour the taste of the world’s most expensive dessert. A Sri Lankan hotel is serving up a chocolate pudding but this is no ordinary choc pud. This pudding includes a gemstone - an 80 carat aquamarine. The dessert sits on a pedestal with a model of a fisherman perched on a stilt and contains chocolate, champagne, caramelised sugar and the gemstone. This culinary experience costs seven times the average national income and so far only one dessert has been ordered. Let’s hope the person didn’t choke on the gemstone. Source: BBC News.

Japanese mutant ninja mice. Back to messing around with animals’ genetic make-up - a Japanese university professor has been interfering with the receptors in the olfactory bulb of mice and has produced fearless mice. Normally, a mouse gets a whiff of a cat and runs fast in the opposite direction. But because the part of the brain that processes information about smell has been blocked, the mice are so fearless they actually play with their nemesis as if they were long-lost friends. Mind you, the cat in the video below is Mochikko-chan, a cat that was specifically selected for the demonstration because of her docile nature. But still this mouse is pretty game!

A Happy 2008 to all ThinkingShift readers! I’m sure, like me, you’ve pledged the usual New Year’s resolution and, if like me, around about late February you’ll be saying “what New Year’s resolution?”. I hope you’ve had a restful Christmas and New Year and now we need to focus on 2008. What does 2008, the Year of the Earth Rat in the Chinese zodiac, have in store for us? Well, I’m sure I’ll continue to slug it out with people who don’t believe in climate destabilization. Following my post the other day on this topic, I was beaten up on a social network that discusses global warming and labeled an “eco-entrepreneur”. I rather like the “entrepreneur” bit, but not quite sure what on earth an eco-entrepreneur is. But I enjoy a bit of a dust up, so no doubt there will be more fracas for me to get into during 2008

And so for 2008: we need to keep focused on important global issues like poverty reduction, slavery and of course climate destabilization, but here’s a sobering thought for the start of 2008. World food stocks are dwindling rapidly and food prices are soaring to historic levels. I was in the supermarket the other day (I try to shop organic where I can but where I live, it’s not always easy). I nearly fell over when I saw that capsicums were $AU 9.98 a kilo. And in Australia, we’ve been warned that the price of fruits and vegetables will rise fairly sharply because of our ongoing struggles with drought.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation is already seeing some alarming trends. The total cost of foodstuffs imported by the neediest countries rose 25%, to $107 million, in the last year. At the same time, reserves of cereals for example have dramatically declined - world wheat stores declined 11% this year, to the lowest level since 1980. And there are only 8 weeks of corn left in reserve. Whilst food stocks are dwindling, food prices are soaring. Wheat prices have risen by $130 per ton, or 52%, over the last year.

Demand for cereals and grains comes from two sources: an increasing global population and cattle that need to be raised and fed to cater for a growing population of meat-eaters. Higher oil costs also impact on shipping rates putting enormous stress on nations that need to import food. Climate destabilization has seen unusual weather events and patterns - such as droughts, floods and hurricanes - and these have decreased production in important exporting countries like Australia and Ukraine.

Scientists are suggesting that farmers can adapt to warmer weather (between 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) to 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees) by switching to hardier species and storing water for irrigation. But beyond 3 degrees Celsius - kaput.

Clearly, agricultural policies will need to be rethought and food aid programs will need to be helped. As we sit down to our next meal, let’s give a thought to people in this world who are facing increasing food shortages. Could be us next.

Source: International Herald Tribune