ThinkingShift

Found this on YouTube. For those of us concerned about Google Maps, this video is funny and highlights the potential intrusiveness of the technology.

Getting my head out of Leadership now and back onto my pet topics. Not content with knowing your search patterns or snapping you standing on a corner with Google Street View, Google now wants to know about your health.

According to The Australian, Google is starting to test its capabilities in storing the health records of 1500 to 10,000 suckers…sorry…people at a health clinic in the US. In their attempt to aggregate everything, Google will provide the participants with a password that will give them access to their health profile, which will contain information about allergies, prescriptions, test results, medical history and so on. An added bonus is that the password will also give access to Google email and personalised search tools (don’t want those people running off to Yahoo! or somewhere else now do we?!).

Apparently, Google views its expansion into medical records management as a logical extension of its search engine capability. Yep, I can sure see the link between searching for information on how to take a good photo and medical history; or LOLCats and medical information (well, okay, if kitty is a bit sick, then I can see the link!).

Now privacy types like me would be asking some questions - how secure will this service be? Doesn’t Google already know enough? Does Google store email discussions? Is the future going to be the Googlization of everyone and everything?

And the lawyer in me asks: given that Google would be a third-party, would the privileged doctor/patient relationship still hold or would it be possible that private medical information might be easier to subpoena or access? And privacy advocates are also asking whether Google will be making money out of this service and whether a taxonomy of medical information held would be tied to Google Ads.

Mmmm…watch this space.

Last week, I ran a 2 day workshop on Leadership, hence less posts. But I thought I’d share with you what I did. Many years ago, I read the Mont Fleur scenarios - four possible pathways to the future for South Africa transitioning from a repressive, apartheid regime to a democratic settlement. In 1991, a multi-disciplinary team of 22 people met at Mont Fleur near Stellenbosch, South Africa to work on possible scenarios for the country’s future. The exercise was facilitated by Adam Kahane (of scenario planning fame). 30 possible stories about the course of events that might take place over the next decade (to 2002) were elicited and then distilled and refined down to 4 possible stories or pathways to South Africa’s future:

• Ostrich: a government with its proverbial head stuck in the past and not wanting to face up to reality or responsibilities.
• Lame Duck: a government like a bird with a broken wing; a long transition; can’t get off the ground; an incapacitated government.
• Icarus: the government embarks on a massive spending spree to meet all the backlogs and needs of the past, and crashes and burns because its quick fix policies are not sustainable.
• Flight of the Flamingo: inclusive democracy and growth. Just as flamingos take off slowly, economic growth would be slow yet sustainable. And just as flamingos take off and fly together, the government would be an all-inclusive one. Yet, the scenario acknowledges that flamingos’ flight is not always smooth.

What do these scenarios have to do with leadership you may well ask? Good question since they originated in scenario planning. The four scenarios have always resonated with me as archetypes and if you apply them to yourself or leadership you could be:

• an ostrich - not wanting to have that crucial conversation with your team member who has the attitude from hell; putting off giving feedback; denying that your team is dysfunctional.
• a lame duck (mmm….a good description for old Dubya!) - someone who is insecure or indecisive, has responsibility but no authority.
• icarus - impulsive, doesn’t plan or think through things, changes course too frequently.
• a flamingo - not impulsive, respects collaboration and understands the notion of “flying together”, supportive of team members, a respectful person who takes values seriously.

So I introduced the participants to these four scenarios as triggers for discussion and we explored how leadership would manifest under each. Obviously, you’re hoping that people don’t aspire to be Lame Duck leaders! So once we thoroughly discussed what Flamingo Leadership would look and feel like, I moved onto exploring a particular leadership model that might get you there. This model is John C. Maxwell’s The 360 Degree Leader. It’s a leadership model I particularly like but other models could be used.

Just because you’re not the CEO doesn’t mean you can’t lead and be a leader. You can lead up, lead down and lead across by developing relationships with your boss, your peers and those who report to you; and you can expand your circle of influence by increasing your social network at work for example.

So stuff we explored and discussed was:

• how do you influence when you might be in the middle of the organisation?
• what do you do if you’re a Flamingo style of leader but your boss is a Lame Duck?
• how do you keep flying high like a flamingo and avoid smacking into mountains (organisational culture or politics, working with difficult people etc)
• what values should the Flamingo leader hold?
• when might it be appropriate to be an Icarus style of leader? For example, innovation might prefer this style.

We then went on to develop a Flamingo Leadership Charter and came up with the Flamingo Model:

F - facilitate the vision of the organisation, flexibility

L - lead by example, listen, lead change

A - accountability, allow people to grow, adaptive

M - mentor and motive, manage performance

I - integrity, inspire, influence, inform

N - networking, nurturing

G - get the heck out of the way and allow the people you’ve hired to do their job

O - opportunities (seek them out), optimism (don’t wallow in negativity and organisational gossip)

You can can read the Mont Fleur scenarios here.

We’ve all heard the arguments that CCTV deters crime (although I’ve blogged before about the stats not backing this up). But even I (yep, me) am willing to admit that there are some positive aspects to CCTV and surveillance. Like what?  When a CCTV image proves that someone was where they said they were and not off committing some violent crime. When CCTV clearly shows thugs beating up someone and these thugs can be identified and locked up. I think there are also some good aspects to tracking and monitoring kids these days. There’s an awful lot kids have to navigate and survive: bullying, drugs, fellow students shooting up a lecture theatre taking you with him like that dude in Illinois the other day. So I can see the efficacy of having CCTV in public spaces as long as they are used for what they are said to be used for.

So…there’s a blog I’ve come across called Big Mother. I like this name. It signals that there can be a protective component to surveillance.  I’m not sure how often it’s updated, doesn’t look like there’s been any posts since December 2007 (the cynical side of me would suggest that Big Brother caught up with Big Mother and shut the blog down

Shorter posts this week as I’m running a workshop on leadership. But I’ll be eager to get my teeth into the special issue of Surveillance and Society on “The Politics of CCTV in Europe and Beyond”. What’s interesting I think are some of the articles looking at the social aspects of CCTV. The whole argument for CCTV is based on conflictual social relationships ie deviants in society threaten the law-abiding innocent. The presence of CCTV creates or shapes a culture into two populations - those lawfully occupying public space and those unlawfully occupying it. The issue has articles that cover all aspects of this including a great article about CCTV in Lyons, France, which explores whether CCTV is used as a form of xenophobia (targeting black African youths).

Particularly fascinating to me was the Editorial on the long history of the relationship between the photographic image and crime control. So, for example, the first commercially viable photographic technique was patented in Paris in 1839 and, by the 1840s, its potential for identifying and documenting the criminal classes was already recognised. Similarly, with the early days of TV, a UK police superintendent suggested the monitoring and analysis of live TV images of Queen Elizabeth II’s wedding.

For those of us interested in surveillance, a great read with this special issue!

Gotta love this. GodTube.com is a social networking and video-sharing site for Christians who want to connect, pray and harness technology as a force of worship. Talk about Christianity 24/7. As the site says, GodTube is about: Representing Baptist, Catholic, Episcopal, Evangelical, Messianic, Methodist and all of the traditional Christian denominations, GodTube is unique in its appeal and in its mission to “Broadcast Him”.

There’s a bunch of people behind GodTube who view videos before posting to the site. Apparently, 14 seminary students act as a board checking into people’s backgrounds, aiming to exclude sexual or violent criminals, before giving someone a profile. Not sure whether this means if a sexual pervert or crim has “found the Lord’ they are not allowed on the site. Not to mention I’d be worried about the privacy aspects of checking into people’s lives.

I didn’t spend a lot of time on the site, but I noted some maybe disturbing aspects. There’s a fairly liberal use of scare tactics if you ask me. Check out this video on the Rapture.  Then there’s a bit of an attack on Islam.

Source: AlterNet 

You may have noticed less on privacy and surveillance issues recently. Don’t get excited - it’s not because I’m no longer interested in these important topics. It’s more about me being somewhat sidetracked by stuff I’ve had to prepare for work and some of the interesting stuff I’ve come across that I’ve been blogging about since the start of 2008. But…..today….I have to bring you this. When you read a list of what surveillance tools there currently are and what are being proposed - that’s when it hits you (hopefully) and you really start to ponder the erosion our civil liberties. I’ve blogged on many of the surveillance tools and techniques I’m about to list before but this post will serve as a good refresher.

ThinkingShift reader, Robyn, sent me a link to this article from People. I’ve been reading similar stuff recently about how the personal details of our lives are increasingly exposed. It’s bad enough that the personal details of 25 million people held on 2 computer discs went missing in the post in the UK in late 2007 (and the UK Government mysteriously waited for 10 days before alerting people). We also have to contend with (and in my case dodge) CCTV, our email details being sold, Google monitoring our searching behaviour and so on. My business email address has recently been hit with “how to enlarge your penis” advertising (most useful, not!) from a slew of different companies, so I suspect somehow my email address has been sold. Apart from being annoying, I object to people using my existence and all the personal information surrounding said existence as a commodity to be bought and sold.

Anyway, here’s what we can look forward to in the way of bugging, monitoring and surveillance:

• remote control helicopters (or spy drones) fitted out with miniature cameras, zooming around
• smart cards for pupil’s so parents can check attendance, how kiddy is doing at school or what’s being eaten from the cateen, and the results of drug tests (let’s get ‘em young so they never know that privacy is an option!)
• microchip implants for kids so parents can track them (heck, we microchip dogs and cats, why not kids). I do realise that in this day and age of violence and wackos, keeping tabs on your kid is probably a sensible thing
• lamp-posts fitted out with mini-cameras so whoever is watching us can eavesdrop on street conversations
• biometric tests for job seekers to highlight genetic illnesses (really scary I think)
• psychometric profiles to check out the lifestyles of proposed employees (if you’re different, you might not be tolerated)
• a new service, 192.com, is probably more intrusive than Google Maps or Street View. It can zoom in close enough to identify individuals
• some insurance companies are apparently insisting that satellite tracking systems be installed in the cars of young drivers as a condition of giving them insurance cover.
• fingerprinting, happens already as we know. But there’s talk of a huge database called “Server in the Sky” (an FBI initiative), which would involve the UK, Australia, the US, Canada and New Zealand forming a consortium to set up an international biometric tracking database. Just the proposed name of this database scares the heck out of me! Bad enough that the FBI, within 15 mins of a trans-Atlantic flight taking off, receive details of every passenger’s name, birthdate, address, gender, phone number, email address, credit card details and nationality under an EU deal.
• passports with RFID
• DNA collection and storage
• helmet cams - police in the UK apparently already have this ability. Mini cameras allowing police to record people they speak to whilst on duty.
• pre-paid Oyster card system. Whenever I’m in Hong Kong, I see these cards and I’m sure they’re useful to pay for transport tickets, newspapers and other stuff. In the UK though, which also has Oyster cards, there was a 300% increase in police using the Oyster system to track suspects, which has led to fears of a black market in these cards
• internet searches tracked by Google (and let’s not forget in 2006 AOL accidentally released details of 650,000 users’ search queries)
• can cams - I do find this hard to believe, but apparently there are miniature cameras put into tins of baked beans or drinks to catch people illegally dumping rubbish. But if The Times Online is reporting it, it must be true!
• mobile/cell phone tracking. Even if you switch your phone off to avoid detection, signals are logged by phone towers and the strength of the signal can be measured through triangulation to pinpoint your whereabouts
• Loyalty cards - I never use these. Someone once told me that you’d have to spend a load of money in supermarkets just to get a reward flight from Sydney to Melbourne. But what they track is your buying behaviour and experts say that they can be used to predict major life events. I can see the day when health insurance companies say people who buy food not on their “approved list” will be denied cover.
• and there’s the usual assortment of CCTV cameras - on buses, trains, streets, public spaces.

I know that people disagree with me, but I really think the future will be a battle over privacy. And we’ll see a whole black market rising up around how to dodge all of the above. One of my favourite shows is the West Wing (still watching all the reruns) and I always remember this quote from Rob Lowe’s character, Sam Seaborn:

In the twenties and thirties it was the role of Government. Fifties and Sixties it was civil rights. The next twenty years it will be about privacy. The internet. Cell phones. Health records. And who is gay and who is not. Besides in a country born on the will to be free what could be more fundamental than this?

We get caught up these days with the ongoing War on Terror, the rise of the BRIC nations, whether China will be THE new superpower and whether we’ll all be outsourced to India. But let’s spend some time thinking about Europe. My step-son is French and he bemoans the decline of the socialist French state and its cradle-to-grave health and welfare system. The heady days of France’s socialist government were 1981 to 2002 when the state spread burdens and responsibilities for health and welfare in an equitable fashion. But France is now in crisis. The unemployment rate is hovering around 12.2% and it’s 22% for those under 25 years. A largely unassimilated African and Arab immigrant population exploded into violent riots and civil unrest in 2005 and 2007. Some say the French language may be heading towards extinction - English is now the lingua franca of diplomacy; French language study has markedly declined in the US due to the competition of Spanish language studies, presumably driven by the large Hispanic American population of the US.

But are the traumas of France an isolated occurrence or is Europe itself on the perilous track to decline? Bruce Thornton’s new book, Decline and Fall: Europe’s Slow Motion Suicide, ponders Europe’s potential demise. A continent that once burnt brightly is perhaps more like a dying star. Thornton, who is a classics Professor, points to a number of factors that are influencing the ability of Europe to reclaim its glory days:

• dwindling birthrate
• unsustainable welfare states
• undiscriminating immigration laws
• a failure to confront the gathering of Islamic jihadism
• Christianity is a receding force in Europe

According to a United Nations report, Europe will need something like 700 million immigrants by 2050 to offset declines in the size of population and to support an ageing population. The population across Europe is expected to decline: Italy, for example, with currently 57 million people, will shrink to 41 million by 2050. The Russian Federation will decline from 147 to 121 million by 2050. And replacement migration will be required to prop up Europe because the projected median age in 2050 is 53 years old. Overall, Europe’s population, currently at around 731 million will likely be 664 million by mid-21st Century. And so Europeans will represent 7% of the world’s population instead of its current 11% share. If you’re interested in projections of population decline in Europe, you can check out the UN report here.

And Europeans’ love affair with leisure and siesta could prove their undoing as well as generous welfare entitlements, which have long been viewed as an antidote to ruthless American-style capitalism. Europe’s economic siesta translates into, for example, a traditional 35-hour working week in France (which Sarkozy killed off recently) as opposed to the 40+ hours the Americans are used to. And it means that for every one person working in Spain, there is one person receiving a social security benefit. Or that a Dutch physicist, who is “stressed”, at the age of 48 can look forward to guaranteed disability benefits of $US1,630 a month until the age of 65.

Of course, this all means spiralling welfare dependency costs; the challenge of welcoming 15-20 million Muslims into the European community; ongoing battles with unemployment rates; dwindling defense spending; and a decline in Europe’s ability to influence in the world. Sarkozy is valiantly attempting reform in France and it will remain to be seen whether the pseudo-religious manner in which Europeans view the welfare state can be arrested and replaced by a move towards a free-market economy. Otherwise, we might be saying “Europe RIP” by 2050.

I was pretty useless with Maths at school. All those boring numbers and equations. History was far more interesting - full of rich, colourful stories of people living in a time long ago and long forgotten. But recently I’ve been getting into figures and numbers - not because I’m making up for lost time but because the future of humanity may depend on a certain number. And that number is 134 trillion. I can’t even imagine such a whopping big number. Does the world even have a trillionaire?…let me check…does Google recognise the term? Is it Bill Gates?

So….apparently, Wired magazine predicted in 1999 that Bill Gates would be a trillionaire by 2005. But that prediction was bombed by the dot.com meltdown. Okay, so could it be de facto Prez, Dick Cheney with his fingers in the “golden oil fields of Iraq” pot? Is it those two smart dudes who came up with the whole Google algorithm thing? Or is it some rich sultan or sheik in some Middle Eastern country? Or is it Queen Elizabeth II?

A little sleuth work…. the combined wealth of the Rockefeller family in 1998 was approximately $US11 trillion and the Rothschilds $US 100 trillion - but I’m looking for a single, extremely wealthy person, not a family. Actually, there does seem to be a very mysterious bunch of dudes, the Global Elite - families with wealth beyond our wildest dreams and who make Buffet and Gates look like small change. But that’s another blog post.

Back to finding my trillionaire. I searched Wikipedia for “trillionaire” and it took me to the “billionaire” page where I found some very rich dudes like Anil Ambani (only worth US$45 billion) and Mukesh Ambani (older bro of Anil and only worth US$20.1 billion). Mmmm….if I combine 45 and 20.1 billion I still don’t get to one trillion (which is 1,000 billion, although remember I flunked Maths) and what’s in the water in India I ask that they have so many rich dudes?

Continuing my search for the world’s elusive trillionaire. Could it be Guy Cramer? Who you ask? In 1993, Cramer discovered a number of algorithms that accurately forecast stock market indexes. In case you’re seriously brainy, you can check them out here because Cramer has very kindly made these algorithms free. He’s not the world’s first trillionaire because, as a Christian, he felt it morally wrong to keep the secret of the algorithms to himself. Now, if I could just work out what the heck all the tables and numbers mean, I could become a trillionaire!

Didn’t end up finding a definitive answer as to who is the world’s first trillionaire if in fact there is one (although I suspect it’s some very shadowy person who is part of that Global Elite mob). But I did find out that 134,000,000,000,000 (wow, check out how many zeros) is a serious, scary number. According to The Optimum Population Trust, if the global population keeps growing at its current rate, it will reach 134 trillion by 2300 (and this is despite Europe’s population decline). World population is expected to reach 6.66 billion in April 2008 (anything in that number: 666?!).

Can you imagine? 134 trillion sweaty bodies trying to hustle and bustle around our cities. I can’t even navigate Pitt Street Mall in my lunch hour without bumping into people or having to avoid idiots who refuse to get out of your way. Forget global warming: population growth could be THE most serious threat to the human species’ continuing existence.

Of course, some global epidemic could wipe a large proportion of us out or we’ll snuff ourselves out with ongoing violence and stupidity. But the UN predicts the world’s population will stabilize at 10 billion in 2200. That’s a whole lot less that 134 trillion. Even so, can you imagine all the food necessary to feed this amount of people? The cattle that will need to be raised to provide meat and the forests that will need to be chopped down to make way for cattle and so on.

Now, before those neo-Nazis I recently had an email tussle with say “let’s revisit eugenics”, let me say I’m not suggesting we should mandate one child families, enforced contraception or that we should all turn to vegetarianism to avoid 33% of the world’s grain being fed to cattle (although there’s a good idea). But it does seem that population growth is going to be a significant future issue. And how many of the 134 trillion (should it come to that) will be poor I wonder? And to what extent will we see a huge gaping divide between those who can spend, spend, spend in our materialistic society and those who will struggle just to feed themselves on a planet over-burdened by the heaving mass of 134 trillion people?

And if you’re wondering how on earth you could spend one trillion dollars, here’s a fascinating fact for you:

• if you spent a million dollars a day, it would take you 2,737.8 years to spend your one trillion (assuming you earned no interest). That’d make an awful lot of lip gloss I’d have to buy

Inspiration: AlterNet

I have to admit to having a couple of online identities, well actually four. I participate in online photo sharing networks under a completely different name (how mysterious of me!). Actually, the name I use is in fact a combination of my two middle names but on some other sites, I use fictitious names. Why? Well, partly because of my dislike for being tracked or people knowing too much about me. But also partly because I think you can feel more liberated to make honest comments or adopt a persona that you’d like to “road test” and see how it feels. The internet allows you to ‘play’: flirt with a different ‘you’; be a male instead of a female; pretend to be 18 when you’re in the twilight of your years (no, I don’t do that). You can be as fragmented as you like with multiple identities without being dragged off to the psych ward.

So I found this chart by Fred Cavazza that maps how our digital identities are managed and how the various aspects of our digital lives become taxonomic categories:

Checking out this chart makes me consider I can adopt more digital personas! I don’t dabble, for example, in Second Life (I’ve never really understood the point of it) - but perhaps I should go off and get an island or whatever it is you do on SL and choose an avatar to represent me (what a decision! is there one that looks like Angelina Jolie??).

I see that Dave Pollard has a new blog that chronicles his experiment in creating an Intentional Community in Second Life (never understood this intentional community business either) - perhaps I’ll check it out and experience SL, could be better than Real Life, who knows!

Source: michaelzimmer.org