Robert Paterson's Weblog

What happened in Media will happen for Food - A New World Returns!

When we think agriculture today we think dependence on BIG Machines that can only be made in Big Factories by Big Companies - that we cannot control or these days afford. This leads to Big Fields - Big Farms and Big Banks.

This is the core of the old model. A few BIG men control a few Big Institutions that control us. 

But this model is under real attack.

You had to be BIG to have a Newspaper.

You had to be BIG to have a TV station

But these BIG things have been taken on by small distributed tools that are cheap and can be used in a new way to make BIG things happen. The Power of Big Media is crumbling.

To be BIG you had to control lots of financial capital. To be BIG you have to be centralized.

The New Powerful is based on SMALL that is Connected into a BIG Network. Small cheap blogging tools - small cameras - small editing suites that ALL can afford - connect and combine into the New BIG.

Now this process of small and smart and distributed is about to be applied to Food!

This is an epochal event because Food is always the centre of our main culture. For how we get our Food determines where and how we live and who has power and not.

Food sets our culture.

It was our Hunter gatherer Food Model that shaped us until 10,000 years ago. We are naturally best fitted in small groups tied by purpose. Social Capital was our natural wealth.

It was early farming that settled us and set up the idea of "property" and so a social hierarchy based on a small class that owned the land.

It was mechanized farming that created the modern world - took us off the land and centralized an urban proletariat in mega cities ruled by a small social hierarchy that controlled money.

This video shows us how all this can change again and allow a more distributed system to evolve where the capital that is held most dear is social capital. This is in effect a modern return to a way of being that is more fitted to who we really are as humans.

GVCS in 2 Minutes - High Resolution from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.

 

HT to Ton Zijlstra for this.

We have seen the power of this force in media - we are seeing the old institutions of education trembling. I will introduce you soon to a similar process for health. Many bastions of the old model are creaking or even in their death throes. 

The DNA of the New Big is when key tools become small and affordable for most people. They then do small things that aggregate into BIG. All this at a cost that undercuts the old BIG by 100 of times. The Old Big cannot compete. This is a Darwinian process of how humans use their culture to get ahead.

The pieces for the whole new Food Set are coming together as they did a few years back with Media.

Already the ideas of urban agriculture are established. So is the new technology of using natures' rules - Permaculture. We know how to create a new distribution system.

But what we have been missing is the machinery to aid us so that we can do small scale but with leverage.

What happens with Food will then move into industry. For it was the Agricultural Revolution that lead to the Industrial Revolution. If we can apply small scale leverage to Food, we can do the same in manufacturing. Fab Labs offer a hint here. 

The last shoe to drop will be energy - we too have to find a worthwhile, local low cost, distributed approach that relies less on financial capital than social capital.

On PEI I think that Biomass may be a step in the right direction.

In the darkness - light!

My dad died 29 years ago this weekend - Dying Young? Growing UP?

29 years ago this morning I was having breakfast in our family home and heard my sister Diana call out "Daddy's dead - Daddy's dead!" He was 55 - I was 31. It seems so long ago.

I have been thinking this weekend about what his early death meant for me. After nearly 30 years pondering this, I know now that his early death was a gift to me. His death forced me to grow up.

Suddenly there was never going to be a fall back position for me. Not that he had been one - but I felt that if the crunch really came he may help me out. Now I was solely responsible for me. 

Is this how most of us feel? Is it the same when your father is say 75? Is the death of our parents an important step in our own maturity?

Sanity and Sincerity #jonstewart

 

And via Dave - a Canadian view

 

Twitter and the Dunbar Number

The company, (Twitter) meanwhile, is trying to avoid the bureaucracy that plagues larger businesses. The topic is important to Mr. Williams, who says he started companies because he didn’t believe in aligning himself with institutions.

Twitter’s executives talk about the “Dunbar number” — the maximum number of people, generally believed to be 150, with whom one person can have strong relationships. This effort, mind you, comes from a company with a business model that fosters a multitude of ever-growing — and largely glancing — interactions among Twitter’s users.

“I’ve never seen a company so focused on avoiding the Dunbar number,” says Adam Bain, who recently joined Twitter from the News Corporation as head of global revenue. “You can tell Ev planned it out.”

Each time employees log on to their computers, for instance, they see a photo of a colleague, with clues and a list of the person’s hobbies, and must identify the person. And notes from every meeting are posted for all employees to read.

Speaking to a group of new hires at an orientation session last spring, Mr. Williams said Twitter had three goals: to change the world, to build a business and to have fun.

“You can succeed by only building a business, and many companies do,” he said. “We won’t consider it success unless it’s all three.”

via nytimes.com

When will "Magic Numbers" become central to HR? If you wish to look into Dunbar's work here is a link that will take you there directly. 

I find it bizarre now that much of the science of human groupings is known, that few business schools or HR department pay any attention. They still work in the realm of Alchemy.

So for all of you who wish that your schools would not have bullying, that your organization would be more functional, that your church would be better, that your twitter experience itself would be more satisfying, that as a entrepreneur you could see see the perils in store as you grow - here is Rob's Coles Notes.

As a reminder - Here are the Lego Blocks of the science of human groups. From these precise grouping you build the best performing organizations.

As with Lego, there is nothing random about how best to organize human beings. All well functioning organizations use these groups and they avoid the "Dip" - you will see the "Dip" below.

8 The Circle of Intimacy (The section): where you intuitively communicate as a great sports team will - 15 the dangerous nowhere group that you must either go back to 8 or rush to 34 from - 34 the ideal compound group (The platoon) - 89 the ideal large team - 144 The maximum unit where all can know each other to use trust rather than rules.

source Christopher Allen

This graph by Christopher Allen was drawn from work on Guild sizes in WOW. They are aggregations of the data. They offer us a observable tendency to group according to the theory. It also shows that Dreaded Dip at about 15 people that also represents one of the worst hurdles for growing a small business. Moving from the "family" to the organization.

Our Tribal ancestors used to live in tribal groups of about 30+. The breakdown would be 8 men, 8 women and 15- 16 younger one.

So where do these numbers come from - for 144 or 150, the Dunbar Number is not the only number. The Numbers are of course found in the Fibonacci sequence

and are not made up but represent how nature stacks humans best. So here is the curve with the key numbers:

Here is how this was first put into practice - not because the Romans had a good theory but because they found that these numbers worked best in practice. The Roman Legion of more than 5,000 men was made up of units of 8 and 80. It had a head office of 3!!!!!

Here is the core of Dunbar's work - It is rooted in our evolution, our brain and the key insight that - humans use Culture to evolve more than biology. We live in a modern age but are wired as Neolithic People. Our wiring has not caught up with our culture.

It is generally accepted that human cultural evolution has proceeded at a very much faster pace than our anatomical evolution during the past few millenia. Given that our brain size has its origins in the later stages of human evolution some 250,000 years ago (Martin 1983, Aiello & Dean 1990), we may assume that our current brain size reflects the kinds of groups then prevalent and not those now found among technologically advanced cultures. The closest we can get to this is to examine those modern humans whose way of life is thought to be most similar to that of our late Pleistocene ancestors. These are generally presumed to be the hunter-gatherers (Service 1962, Sahlins 1972)............

In addition, it turns out that most organised (i.e. professional) armies have a basic unit of about 150 men (Table 3). This was as true of the Roman Army (both before and after the reforms of 104BC) as of modern armies since the sixteenth century. In the Roman Army of the classical period (350-100 BC), the basic unit was the maniple (or "double-century") which normally consisted of 120-130 men; following the reforms instituted by Marius in 104BC, the army was re-organised into legions, each of which contained a number of semi-independent centuries of 100 men each (Haverfield 1955, Montross 1975). The smallest independent unit in modern armies (the company) invariably contains 100-200 men (normallly three or four rifle platoons of 30-40 men each, plus a headquarters unit, sometimes with an additional heavy weapons unit) (Table 3). Although its origins date back to the German mercenary Landsknechts groups of the sixteenth century, the modern company really derives from the military reforms of the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus in the 1620s. Despite subsequent increases in size to accomodate new developments in weaponry and tactics, the company in all modern armies has remained within the 95% confident limits of the predicted size for human groups. The mean size of 179.6 for the twentieth century armies listed in Table 3 does not differ significantly from the 147.8 predicted by equation (1) (z=0.913, P=0.361 2-tailed).

So what is your organization based on? What is being taught at your business school? What is your HR function telling you?

 

U.S. Says Genes Should Not Be Eligible for Patenting - NYTimes.com

Reversing a longstanding policy, the federal government said on Friday that human and other genes should not be eligible for patents because they are part of nature. The new position could have a huge impact on medicine and on the biotechnology industry.

via nytimes.com

Wow! Finally a step to progress

PEI Healthcare Costs - The Tipping Point is in sight

The Elephant in the room for politics on PEI are healthcare costs. No party can make controlling them, if this means reducing services, an issue. But we are now in sight of the moment in time when if we don't control them, we will fail as a society.

Please let me show you what has happened and what will happen if we don't talk about this in a new way.

I arrived on PEI in 1996 - total expenditure on healthcare that year was $233 million. The estimate for 2010 is $630 million. In 2010 the Province expects to collect $784 million from its own resources and $617 million from the Feds leaving a deficit for this year of $85 million.

The average compound growth rate since 2005 is 11.8%. If growth continues at this rate, the total bill for Healthcare will be $1.2 billion in 2015! It will double to $2.4 billion in only 3 years in 2018.

This is an exponential curve and this is the "shape" that we all have not looked at before. Once growth becomes exponential, then we enter a new realm.

But as bad as this is, it is an underestimate for as the total population ages, the relative use of the system increases at a compound rate as well.

I think that this is a conservative picture of what confronts us.

This graph above shows the rate of spend by age group in the traditional system. Now look below at our demographic mix.

The combination of how we approach healthcare and our demography is the bomb that can blow us all up. The Tipping Point for this is not 3 elections away but 2 at the most. The time to act is now. So what to do?

First of all to get the true numbers out into the public domain - this is what was not done for instance when we looked at the schools. We have to take the crisis to the people first. Islanders have to see the numbers and know what will happen if nothing is done.

We also have to look at the projected revenue. Until now tax revenues and the Feds have enabled PEI to keep up with the relative rise of the healthcare budget. But the slope of the compound growth now will steepen as the effect of the aging population is felt. Also the weak underpinning of the economy means that it is not likely that tax revenues will keep up.

Also our aging population will affect tax revenue too as soon most Islanders will be over the age of 60 and we continue to lose most of ur best educated young.

Our demographic situation works both sides of the income statement.

So when we get the full picture out there - how do we look for solutions?

I don't think that the old ways of simple cuts will work. I think instead that we will have to look at where the dynamics of the system interact. Let me show you a few of these so that you can see what I mean.

Our system today has a number of "norms" that we don't question. We have to question them. Here are just 3 Norms that if changed will reduce our costs significantly.

Manors and or Retirement Homes - The Norm is that when we get old, we go to a manor. The cost of a seniors residence on PEI is roughly $36,000 a year for the residential portion. This is a significant strain on either a family or the state. 5,000 widows in nursing homes at this rate would cost PEI $180,000,000 a year or a third of the current healthcare budget. 

The old idea of institutionalizing seniors as the only way will not be affordable. Other ways will have to be considered. At Veterans Affairs, the big push has been to help families keep their parents independent in their own homes for as long as possible.

Another factor is that many of the very old are disconnected from their families. Back in 1991 1/3 of senior women said that their closest family member lived in another town. 50% said that they had no close family member. 50% will come from Rural communities of less than 1,000 people, where there will be no alternative but institutionalization in a major centre.  This will only get worse as more and more young leave rural areas or the Island.

I don't have THE solution for this but the norm has to be changed.  

Work and Health - The old norm is that when I retire, I will see my grandkids and garden. This will not be enough for many. The easiest path to getting frail and ill as we get older is to no longer have a good reason to get up in the morning. Meaningful work is very helpful. Making it easy to find good work - it does not have to be paid - but it does have to be a help will help.

The new norm is that most of us will have to find work.

Death is a mistake - We spend nearly half the lifetime costs for a person in the last six months of life. So as the population ages this factor will drive the costs significantly. Why is this so and how can we change this?

Our healthcare system is based on dealing with “acute illness”, aggressive  intervention is the only choice available to the patient, the family and the medical profession. 

Recently, results of an eight-year clinical study of dying in America, (funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation) revealed that half of the 9,105 terminally-ill patients studied spent at least eight days comatose, in intensive care, or in pain just before they died. Little relationship was found between what patients wanted and what, in fact, physicians did.  Living wills made little difference.

Death for the elderly is not an acute illness. This is a challenge for both the profession and for families. The choice may often be - do we let mum go with flu or pneumonia or "cure" her to die of cancer or Alzheimer's. Not easy!

Finding a more holistic view of death that most will accept will be an essential new norm.

As I hope you can see, avoiding bankruptcy by healthcare will be hard work. If you thought closing schools was hard - this is will be much more complex. 

If we make it political with one party promising that somehow we can go on as we have been and the other trying to do what is right, we will fail.

That is why I suggest that we instead engage each other and the Island with what is coming and what our choices are.

It need not be that we lose but that if we do this right that we gain.

 

The web is the dominant force in the UK economy - so what are you doing?

The Internet contributed 100 billion pounds (155 billion dollars, 115 billion euros) to the British economy last year, about 7.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), a report showed Thursday.

The sector is bigger than the construction, transport or utilities industries in Britain, according to the study by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which was commissioned by the British arm of Internet giant Google.

The research also predicted that by 2015, the British 'Internet economy' is likely to grow to 10 percent of GDP, eclipsing the financial sector.

"The Internet is pervasive in the UK economy today, more so than in most advanced countries," said Paul Zwillenberg, a partner with BCG in London.

"Whether they are driving international expansion, improving their interactions with customers or the efficiency of their supply chains, UK companies are increasingly embracing the Internet's potential."

Much of the growth is driven by consumption, the majority of it online spending but also what consumers spend on getting access to the Internet, while the rest comes from government spending, private investment and exports.

The study found that about 62 percent of adults, or 31 million people, have bought goods or services online so far this year and collectively they spent about 50 billion pounds last year on goods or travel.

More than 19 million out of a total of 26 million British households have an Internet connection and broadband access has doubled since 2005.

Overall, Britain was ranked sixth among major economies on the BCG "e-intensity index" which judges the reach and depth of the Internet, after Denmark, South Korea, Japan, Sweden and the Netherlands.

via breitbart.com

So in 5 years even larger than financial services! A marker for all of us to consider as we all have business plans.

Have you made the web the CENTRE of your operation?

I bet for many the answer is no. Yes you have a website. Yes maybe you do stuff there but have you made the web CENTRAL?

A good model of what I mean is knitting. 10 years ago, knitting was almost dead. Even a large city like Toronto could hardly support a shop. Now knitting is huge. Why? The web!

One of the best community sites in any sector is Ravelry.com - Here knitters have their own say, do business, share patterns and information, explore new things. This surely can be a model for any group - why not yours? 

This is the splash page for members.

Here is the group page

Knitting has the same kind of "Star" system as the social web did in the good old days. The Scoble of Knitting is the Yarn Harlot. She is in the top 50 of all bloggers and has a global impact.

The Knitting Samurai is maybe the Chris Locke.

What is the lesson here?

Knitting put the community first and Knitters put their work and their person first - before the transactions. Mainly women - I am not surprised.

They use very a simple approach to technology. Ravelry is a sophisticated bulletin board. The Top bloggers use very simple platforms - it's all about the content and the person not the tool.

They have fun!!!!!

In a way Etsy is a bit like this too - but the Knitters have created their own space and their own community. Etsy is more like an artisanal department store. Another lesson maybe then to create your own sector's Ravelry?

 

Euan Semple - When I grow up I want to be like him

 

Making Regular TV New By Using Digital #ketc

While KETC works to develop a way of creating a local cloud for our community, we are also making our regular TV offering more distinct. We have used our digital channels to break up our content into the equivalent of specialty channels for public TV.

This is what it looks like in practice

 

What do you think of this separation?

The face of unemployment today - leading to what? Revolt?

We have all seen the stats and the graphs. I found this short piece by CBS's 60 Minutes very powerful. 

 

Who are the new unemployed? Well these people all look like me and all have had my life. And now have no hope either.

What is going to happen? What will happen in 2 years time when most will still be without work for then 4 years? Election time!

Here is a link to hundreds who have commented on Facebook to a question by NPR on people's unemployment experience. It will give you a feel for the pian and anguish out there.

History reminds us that when the middle class are treated badly enough for long enough, they react. No wonder the Tea Party exists. No wonder many are just scared about immigration. Fear and anger are rising. For the foundations of the American way of life are crumbling.

Many see the Tea Party as an adjunct of the GOP. I am not so sure. I think that this is the first stage of a wave of anger and fear.  This video shows that people are still just hanging on. BUT it is also clear that in another year, most will have tipped and will have lost everything and will have nothing to lose. This anger and fear will not go away - it will get bigger.

Dangerous times ahead - for our political system sails above all of this in its own bubble. It feels like France in the 1780's. A bankrupt government and a ruling class that is isolated from the lives of the people.

I am reading Hilary Mantel's novel about the French Revolution. It focuses on a core of people Robespierre, Danton, Marat, Desmoulins - who rise up as middle class folks and get the revolution going - It is Robespierre, the quiet one, who sets the Terror in motion.

Now I am not saying that this is will happen - what I am saying is that when the middle class has nowhere to go - watch out - titanic forces can be unleashed.

As in France back then, I can only see political gridlock that will prevent anything that might help. Do you see a way forward?