A plan to save civilization

This coming week, I’m in Taiwan but through the magic of auto-posts, ThinkingShift lives on. I hope to take heaps of shots with my new plastic fantastic Superheadz Pink Dress camera.

But today I’m bringing you a slide presentation you need to look at. Awhile back I told you about Lester Brown, the American environmentalist. His website, Earth Policy Institute, has just published a slideshow called Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. Plan B refers to the response to the environmental challenges our planet now faces. The major challenges, as I’ve blogged about many times, are food insecurity and climate change. Here’s a summary of the slide show:

• Earth’s average temperature will rise 1.1-6.4˚C (33.98 ºF-43.52 ºF) during the 21st century;
• we are already outpacing these predictions;
• crop yields drop by 10% for every 1˚C rise in temperature;
• in an effort to ensure their own food security, some affluent food importing countries, such as Saudi Arabia, China and South Korea have begun buying or leasing land abroad to grow their own food. If you don’t believe that rich dude countries are leasing foreign land, then check out this – Pakistan is having a hissy fit that Saudi Arabia is planning to lease 202,342.8 hectares of farmland in Pakistan. I would have thought Pakistan had enough hungry people without leasing out precious land. And Libya is planning to grow wheat on 100,000 hectares (250,000 acres) in Ukraine ;
• historians have argued long and hard that the fall of the Roman Empire was due to food shortages and skirmishes over access to food (along with the Sumerian and Mayan civilisations). The fall of our own civilisation will be due to food shortages and battles over water. I’m now seeing articles about future water wars. My own view is that we’ll see the rise of water privateers. Here’s just one example I can give you of how the poor in developing countries (not to mention you and me) will get shafted by the privatisation of water. Water is going to be the oil of the 21st Century. Private companies will buy rights to water. Two French companies – Suez Lyonnaise des eaux and Vivendi Environnement – are the ones I think we need to watch. Just search for these two companies on the internet – go ahead, it will freak you out to find that these two companies alone supply water to 230 million people around the world (and this includes the US).

The slide show offers up some responses (Plan B):

• a worldwide switch to highly-efficient lighting would cut electricity use 12%, equivalent to closing 705 coal-fired power plants;
• the wind potential in North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas alone could satisfy U.S. energy needs.

There are heaps of ideas in the slide show to save the planet and our civilisation. There are also a ton of facts that will freak you out such as:

• soaring food prices – from mid-2006 to mid-2008, world grain and soybean prices tripled;
• since 1981, oil extraction has exceeded new discoveries by a widening margin. Most of the easily recovered oil is already pumped;
• between 1950 and 2000, world water use tripled. Some 70% of water use is for irrigation. Over-extraction is leading to disappearing lakes and rivers failing to reach the sea. Aquifer depletion is causing water tables to fall and wells to go dry;
• massive Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets are melting at accelerating rates. Together hold enough water to raise sea level 12 meters (39 feet). A 10-meter rise in sea level today would inundate coastal areas home to more than 600 million people.

Games for change

So you know the next two weeks will be thin on the ground for me – I’ll be flat out like the proverbial lizard preparing for my KM study meeting in Taiwan, flying to Taiwan blah blah.

I don’t want you to hit the Unsubscribe button though because I’ll be back with those long, raving and ranting posts I know you love so much. But to clear up my backlog of interesting stuff to share with you – here’s a great site I found that uses games to bring attention to the most pressing issues of our day, such as poverty, human rights, global conflict and climate change.

So a lot of arty geeky types, along with academics, journalists and individuals from the nonprofit and government sectors have collaborated on the site Games for Change. I’ve been dabbling with some of them because I need to design curriculum in the next few months.

There are various game channels – I really wish I had access to this sort of interactive, educative stuff when I was a teacher back in the mists of time. I particularly like the games on global conflict and human rights. They deal with real-world issues.

Check out this game – 3rd World Farmer - designed for ages 11+ years, the game lets players manage a small virtual farm in a developing country and experience the hardships and dilemmas faced by the poor.

Ars Regendi is a political game where a player can found their own State and lead it according to his or her political ideals. And Escape from Woomera is probably a very timely game for Aussies to play given the current situation with Sri Lankan refugees. The game gets players to try and escape from an immigration detention centre.

And my favourite? It’s a game called Civilization IV: Quality of Life and involves players in using their moral values to reward a society.

Given Gen Y and Millenials penchant for virtual worlds, these digital games are a fabulous way of raising social, legal and moral issues and facilitating social change. The site also has a toolkit of the game-making process and prompts you to think about the sorts of questions you need to ask if you’re thinking of designing a digital game. Cool!

Future of learning

For the next couple of weeks,  I will be “on the road”. I’m off to Taiwan to participate in an Asia Pacific Knowledge Management study meeting.  I’ll be speaking on Intellectual Capital – more when I come back.  See – I actually still do stuff in KM

This is good news for you dear reader as it means I won’t have any time for long, ranting posts.

But next week, I’ll be offering a lucky reader a 3 month free subscription to Choice magazine! Stay tuned for competition details.

Meanwhile, I have a backlog of interesting stuff to share with you. Look what I’ve found!  I’m excited by this even if you’re not. I spend a fair bit of time teaching uni students. This semester, I’ve taken a break from face-to-face teaching but in 2010 I’ll be getting back into it. For over 6 years, I’ve been teaching in a virtual environment via an online facilitation system. This of course means that I spend a fair bit of thinking time on education – how to engage students; how to design interactive stuff; how to encourage students to engage in intellectual discourse and so on.

So I was doing some research about educational trends and I found this cool site on the future of learning. I often wonder if F2F teaching will become a quaint relic of the past and whether students and lecturers will be engaging in a virtual environment like Second Life. I wonder how gamers will influence learning; or how Gen Y will bring a whole new perspective to education.

The 2020 forecast has some great insights and examines the forces that will impact on education over the next few years.  Here’s a quick summary:

• we are shifting towards a “culture of creation” and this means individuals can grasp the opportunity to create new selves, organisations, systems, societies, economies and knowledge;
• “educitizens” define their rights as learners. Participatory media will lead to a re-articulation of identity and community in a global society;
• resilience (which is a concept I spend a lot of time thinking about in relation to KM) – schools and educators will need to equip students with skills that facilitate resilience eg networking power; using social media to engage with the wider community; applying collective intelligence;
• new tools for visualising data will require new skills in discerning meaningful patterns – I actually think this will be a huge area for educators as software applications that help people to visually think and problem solve become smarter;
• local values will reawaken. Economies of group connectivity—combined with fears of globalism and concern over dominance of big business—will create a revival of localism. New civic processes will emerge and educators and learners will need to engage with this;
• youth media and Gen Y will dominate – smart networkers will push the organisational edge for employers and community leaders. Gen Y’s experience with interactive games and virtual worlds will result in community learning that stresses cooperative strategies, experimentation and parallel development.

There’s sooooooooo much on this site and explored in the trend map but I’m short on time as I have to prepare stuff on intellectual capital. So I’m going to leave it to you to check out the interactive map - pretty cool the way you can navigate the map and drill deeper. At the very least, it will trigger thoughts about the way educators and learners will need to change course over the next few years and how a “learning ecosystem” will be the future of learning.

Make sure you check out the section on Altered Bodies and A New Civic Discourse. For KM people, there’s also some great resources on scenario planning.

Open wallets

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks. The highlight was being invited to blog and Twitter about the Choice Shonky awards. I’ve become a real fan of Twitter actually – despite earlier doubts. I much prefer it to Facebook, which I don’t use really (am I the only person on the planet who doesn’t use FB??). I prefer the live conversation going on in the Twittersphere and the connections you can make. If you missed my blog post about the Choice lab tour and the Twitter stream, go here and here.

And speaking of the connections one can make on Twitter, I’ve connected with some really interesting people. I’ve even connected with a KM colleague in Melbourne, who I’ve never met and just put him in touch with a company in Melbourne who contacted me about some consulting work in KM. And one of my Twitter connections is Dr Stephen Saunders who is @shoppologist

Regular readers know I don’t pimp products on this blog but I will mention stuff I think is useful or would like you to know about (and no, I don’t get paid). So to today’s post. Stephen is an expert in consumer behaviour and has over 25 years’ experience with retail and marketing organisations.  Pause: I had to chuckle a bit – thinking of how Stephen would scratch his head in puzzlement if he ever followed me on one of my shopping “kamikaze raids”. Would his years of experience equip him to cope with me, in full flight, at the lip gloss counter??!!

I digress. Stephen has put his expertise to great use and produced a book that is a gem for both retailers and consumers. It’s amazing to what extent psychology is used to attract shoppers and try to keep them in the store. I love looking at retail shop windows – particularly quirky or brightly coloured displays. One of my favs is L’Occitane, who have the kind of shop display that just tempts you to wander in. You expect to smell the lavender of Provence as you enter the shop.

Another shop window you might find me in front of (I try not to go in though) is Darrel Lea, which is an Australian family-owned confectionery company in business since 1927. They have consistently colourful and intriguing window and in-store displays like this:

But there are things that will propel me out of a shop fast:

• cheap, tacky, nasty looking displays with confusing signs screaming 50% off here, 30% off there. Like this:

• shops that look cluttered or the entrance is festooned with bins of 50% items, like this:

• harsh lighting that makes you wish you’d brought your sunglasses along, like this:

• dead boring shop front windows that scream beige-ness, like this:

So what does Stephen have to say in his fab e-book? Well, can’t give too much away – you can buy it here. But some tidbits for you:

• “Shoppers like to belong to groups called shopping ‘tribes’ – any good tribe has a badge or insignia. This is also why a good shopping bag is important”. (Mmmmm…never thought of it this way. Must admit I like my Body Shop and L’Occitane bags, which identifies me as belonging to the environmentally sensitive shopping tribe I guess);
• don’t put stock outside the store – destroys sight lines, adds clutter, conveys ‘discount’ image”. (Totally agree: I hate those discount shopping bins outside a shop. I always feel like I’m rummaging through reject stuff, stuff other people have not wished to purchase. It’s like you’re getting palmed off with second best-crap);
• “Shoppers want to identify with their stores, they want to know what a store stands for. Especially important for browsers.” (Yep: personally I think this is something a lot of retailers just don’t get. This is why I like, for example, L’Occitane. The “story” is obvious and told via the window and shop displays – authentic and natural products);
• “There should be some ‘mystery’ about the layout – areas that look interesting from the front of the store”;
• “Don’t let your merchandising disrupt navigation sight lines”.

There’s a heap of practical advice and tons of photos to illustrate Stephen’s points.  I learnt some valuable lessons about the psychology used to tempt shoppers. Check out the e-book and also Stephen’s blog, which I particularly like because he always seems to be cruising around shops taking photos (great job!). I have shamelessly ganked photos from his blog for this post.

Meanwhile, Stephen here’s a story for you. The other day, I was at Priceline in Toronto NSW. I know Priceline well in Sydney and quite like that shop as there is plenty of room to browse and you don’t get swooped on by the dolly birds asking “can I help you or are you just happy browsing?” (really hate this: if I need help I’ll ask thanks). So I walk into this Priceline and at the very door to the shop the dolly bird asks the question. I flee to an aisle and settle in for some lipgloss browsing, only to be aware of the dolly bird lurking pretty close behind me.  She asked (again) THE question to which I replied “look, I’m just browsing thx”. She keeps lurking in the aisle, not far away. My patience melted and I asked her why she was standing there. Her response was “I have to stay in this aisle”. Okay, maybe this is because (a) the retailer is worried about shoplifting; or (b) this is standard practice. Whichever, it’s ANNOYING to have someone so blatantly lurking nearby.

So if it’s not in your e-book Stephen, please add “Note to retailers: do not ruffle the feathers of your customers by irritating them with obvious security measures. This signals lack of trust to your customer”.

Needless to say, I gave up browsing and left Priceline in a hissy fit sans lipgloss.

NZ CCTV guidelines

New Zealand’s Privacy Commissioner has just released guidelines on the use of closed-circuit television systems (CCTV). Clearly, the Privacy Commish is an astute woman for she says:

“CCTV has an important role to play in detecting and prosecuting crime, and even deterring some types of crime. But this does not need to be at the expense of privacy.”

I’ve read the guidelines and I think they are well-considered and offer small business and organisations practical advice on deciding whether CCTV is actually needed; how to store images; and making sure employees and the general public are aware of CCTV cams and their positioning.

2.2 of the summary is something I’m very pleased to see – “Where appropriate, consult with the community and other key stakeholders on your business plan.” 2.4 is also targetting an aspect of CCTV I’m always concerned with: “Develop a clear policy on how images collected by CCTV will be handled. Make this policy easily accessible (for example, on your website).”

Section 8 of the summary document outlines controlling who can see images and suggests a log of all access to CCTV images should be kept. This is a good step towards addressing another issue I’ve raised before: who the hell can see the images, how they are stored and who has access.

And then 9.2 suggests a very sensible step: after a year of operation, do an audit and evaluate the operation of the system to determine its effectiveness and continuing viability.

Appendix A of the guidelines is a handy checklist for small business and helps to think through clear reasons for operating a CCTV system.

Go here for the summary and the guidelines.

Social media revolution

Here’s a really interesting video on social media. I have to admit I haven’t heard of Hulu have you? Hang on….let me see….okay found it. Hulu offers commercially supported streaming video of TV shows and movies from NBC, Fox, ABC and other networks. I found one of my fav TV shows on it: Glee. But bummer: Hulu can only stream videos within the United States.

Some really powerful stats in this video, which suggests that social media is the biggest social shift since the Industrial Revolution. Here are a few tidbits:

• social media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the internet (frankly, I reckon porn is dated stuff associated with Hugh Hefner and the 1980s);
• it took radio 38 years to reach 50 million users; TV 13 years; and Facebook – less than 9 months to reach 100 million users (scary);
• if Facebook was a country, it would be the 4th largest;
• the fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year old females.

Fascinating stuff. Watch the video and tell me what you think.

GFC: lessons learnt

I attended a talk this week on the US banking and regulatory system. The dude who spoke is a lawyer in California who’s worked at pretty high levels in the US Government (he must have been over 70 years old but he sure was sharp and spritely). What was really interesting was the report he referred us to. I’ve now had a squizz of the paper, known as the De Larosière Report.

The European Commission mandated a bunch of high level dudes to get together and figure out what the hell went wrong that led to the GFC and provide advice on the future of European financial regulation and supervision. There’s 80+ pages so unless you’re really keen, I’ll give you the juicy bits.

I was particularly interested in chapter 1, which examined in detail the causes of the GFC and the section in Chapter 3, Lessons From the Crisis: What Went Wrong? Here’s what they think:

• ample liquidity and low interest rates have been the major underlying factor behind the present crisis;
• strong macro-economic growth since the mid-1990s gave the illusion that permanent and sustainable high levels of growth were not only possible, but likely;
• excess liquidity showed up in rapidly rising asset prices;
• central banks – particularly in the US – felt no need to tighten monetary policy;
• very low US interest rates helped create a widespread housing bubble. This was fuelled by unregulated, or insufficiently regulated, mortgage lending and complex securitization financing techniques;
• in the US, personal savings fell from 7% as a percentage of disposable income in 1990, to below zero in 2005 and 2006;
• consumer credit and mortgages expanded rapidly. In particular, subprime mortgage lending in the US rose significantly from $180 billion in 2001 to $625 billion in 2005.

So everyone became greedy; investors sought higher and higher yields; the US became trapped in the dream of everyone owning their own home (especially low income earners); risk became mis-priced. Banks became way too clever for themselves – in an effort to improve yield, they developed complex (and often risky) instruments such as mortgage or asset backed securities. They thought risk was spread but there were fundamental failures in the assessment of risk, both by financial institutions and by those who regulated and supervised them. It all blew up in our faces. The report also talked of the role played by the “shadow banking system”, which I’ve heard a lot about recently. The shadow banking system refers to non-bank financial institutions that lend money.

The lawyer dude spoke about the failure of the Basel I framework -a document written in 1988 by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, which recommends certain standards and regulations for banks (and is now considered outdated). And he laid blame squarely at the feet of the explosive growth of Over-The-Counter credit derivatives markets, which were supposed to mitigate risk, but in fact added to it.

So what are the lessons learnt? The speaker wasn’t encouraging. He felt that the entire banking system and capitalism needs to be chucked out (I’d agree with this) and he warned that the 80 year period of prosperity we’ve enjoyed since the Great Depression is….well..never going to happen again. The report highlights a number of lessons. Although EU-specific, they point to what went wrong:

• lack of adequate macro-prudential supervision, including supervision of non-banks;
• ineffective early warning mechanisms – although individual risks might have been identified, at the macro level they were not or no action was taken;
• different types of failures in supervision – supervisory behaviour was not always to an adequate standard. This lesson is really talking about competencies as well as referring to a lack of cooperation between supervisors and a lack of consistent supervisory powers;
• failures to challenge supervisory practices on a cross-border basis. So when a financial institution spread its activities into countries other than its home country, host countries were reluctant to challenge the decisions of the home regulator.

On another note, what was really frightening was the slide showing the US banking system – I’ll see if I can get hold of it. Scary.

One thing I don’t think should happen is the creation of a super-Regulator in the US, which the Senate is talking about. The Americans have long been suspicious of the aggregation of power and a super-Regulator would be a concentration of power that would probably be of benefit to large banks but not community or small banks. Anyway, read the report. I think you’ll find it illuminating.

Economist social media video

The Economist has a rather nifty “Did You Know” video on social media. It’s US-centric but contains some interesting stats and facts for those of us into social media. Here are some interesting tidbits:

• 2,000,000 TVs are in the bathrooms of Americans. Dudes, the bathroom is for bathing, cleaning your teeth – that sort of stuff – not for watching the latest episode of Mad Men, as tempting as this might be;
• newspaper circulation is down 7 million in the last 25 years;
• but in the last 5 years, unique readers of online newspapers are up 30 million.

And here’s the thing I thought was staggering – more video was uploaded to YouTube in the last two months than if ABC, NBC and CBS had been airing new content 24/7/365 since 1948 (which was the year ABC started broadcasting). Amazing.

Watch the video. Oh and if you don’t know what Rickrolling is, go here.

Twittering away

A few months back, I took the plunge and started Twittering. You can follow me on Twitter – see right hand panel of this blog for TS tweets. I like it far better than Facebook (which leaves me cold) because it’s more about having the global conversation that The Cluetrain Manifesto talked about back in 1999 (has it really been 10 years since this great book was published?).

I don’t think I’m using Twitter to its full advantage. I dabble in it, carrying on about something, have a conversation with Twitter friends about MasterChef, that sort of thing. But as I’m about to take on a consulting gig that will require me to know more about Twitter, I have been researching.

And I came across this great site that offers up 100 ways to use Twitter in the library. It’s mind-boggling really what you can do with Twitter. I’ve now discovered tweetparty, which helps to create Twitter groups; TweetScan, where you type in keywords and get tweets that match your keyword emailed to you (how cool is that!); and you should check out all the libraries and publishers on Twitter.

NeoConOpticon

I am pretty well hyper-ventilating. You know I have said MANY times that we are sleepwalking into a surveillance society (to paraphrase the UK Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas).  I’ve asked why there are so many sheep out there, not asking serious questions about why we are being surveilled, who is doing the surveilling, who has access to and can use the information about us.  Some sheep people have used the tired old mantra “if you have nothing to hide…” blah blah.

Well, perhaps they (and you) should read a chilling report I’ve found. It’s called NeoConOpticon, written by Ben Hayes for the Transnational Institute and Statewatch. You can download it here.

Let me give the gist of it though:

• the European Union has gone mad
• it is outsourcing to major corporations the development and implementation of the European Security Research Programme (ESRP) aka a powerful, interoperable European surveillance system that will be used for civilian, commercial, police, security and defence purposes alike;
• these major corporations (eg Thales, Saab) will develop and bring “security technologies” to market and assist with a Homeland Security framework for Europe;
• there has been no public debate about ESRP; minimal monitoring of its implementation; and bodies created outside of the EU decision-making structure eg Security Research Advisory Board;
• the ESRP is not there to protect civil liberties or keep the European Union safe from terrorists and weirdos – nope, it is going to foster the growth of a very lucrative and globally competitive “homeland security” industry in Europe. Defence and IT contractors will be rolling in money, whilst EU citizens’ civil liberties will be kaput.

Here is what the future holds for the EU and its citizens according to the report and I quote (p5):

“Despite the often benign intent behind collaborative European research into integrated land, air, maritime, space and cyber-surveillance systems, the EU’s security and R&D policy is coalescing around a high-tech blueprint for a new kind of security. It envisages a future world of red zones and green zones; external borders controlled by military force and internally by a sprawling network of physical and virtual security checkpoints; public spaces, micro-states and mega events policed by high-tech surveillance systems and rapid reaction forces; peacekeeping and crisis management missions that make no operational distinction between the suburbs of Basra or the Banlieue; and the increasing integration of defence and national security functions at home and abroad.

It is not just a case of sleepwalking into or waking up to a surveillance society, as the UK’s Information Commissioner famously warned, it feels more like turning a blind eye to the start of a new kind of arms race, one in which all the weapons are pointing inwards. Welcome to the NeoConOpticon.”

I think the title of the report is clever: Neocon of course referring to the political philosophy that supports military and economic power to bring democracy to countries and, through this, make a heap of profit. Opticon referring to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon – a prison design that allowed the prison guards to observe all the prisoners ie inward-looking surveillance.  So the title is referring to the private sector’s central role in delivering surveillance-based security technologies and putting us all in the Panopticon.

The fact is: before 9/11 the “Homeland Security” industry didn’t exist. The Neocons keep carrying on about making us safe from terrorism but what is really happening is this – militarisation and securitisation – and this will ultimately mean increased authoritarianism.

Don’t kid yourself into thinking that all this security and surveillance crap is there for your benefit. It’s no longer based on a sense of security. It’s shifted to being based on profit, fear mongering and control. And Israel appears to be in the centre of things (because of its world leading security industry).

Don’t believe me. READ THE REPORT. Yes, I’m shouting at you because I want you to wake up and arm yourself with information.