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The #140conf Blog

$5 Billion Facebook IPO? Worry About Your Retirement Instead.

Facebook was finally pressured into filing a preliminary prospectus for a huge $5 billion Initial Public Offering (IPO). How do you get a piece of the biggest tech IPO of all time? You don’t, at least not unless you are a frequently-trading client with a large account at the lead underwriter, Morgan Stanley, or, you have great connections with the secondary members of the syndicate involved in the offering: J.P. Morgan and Goldmine, er, Goldman Sachs.

These days, the general procedure for an IPO is as follows: A company desiring to go public could in theory sell shares on its own (that would make for an interesting Facebook ad for a change) but the time-honored ritual is for the company to screw itself by hiring a Wall Street investment bank. This firm engages in “underwriting” which is the means whereby money is raised either by debt or (in this case) equity. The underwriters either stipulate that, for a fee, they can guarantee a certain price for a certain number of securities offered by Facebook, either by buying up the entire public offering of shares themselves and then reselling them (a “firm commitment”) or else the underwriters sell the shares but can’t guarantee the amount raised (a “best-efforts agreement”).

The problem with a “hot issue” like Facebook is that the average person who uses it can’t own a piece of it right away. Facebook screws both the public and itself by hiring investment banks as underwriters who, for a generous fee, sell shares at ridiculously low prices to their own best customers: the institutional customers like pension funds and hedge funds, not the little guys.

Then these gentlemen crooks turn around and sell the cheap shares, which end up on the open market and are bought by little investors at an immense profit to the big guys. It hurts companies like Facebook. Had Wall Street priced the shares at their real value, the company and its original shareholders would get more money and the institutions would make less profit.

In May 2011, Henry Bodget estimated that “LinkedIn’s underwriters, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, et al, just screwed the company and its shareholders to the tune of an astounding $175 million. (Just the way the underwriters of another recent hot IPO, Zipcar, screwed that company).”

But, as stated previously, a company desiring to go public can in theory sell shares on its own. So, when Twitter decides to do its IPO, why not try cutting Wall Street out of the picture? Do an “IPO tweet” to everyone on the system, which would be a link to a site where everybody can purchase shares at ten cents or a buck a share? Even if it didn’t work, it would shake Wall Street to its foundations. And if it did work, who knows how much both institutional and private investors would be willing to pay up front…?

Stepping back for a moment, surely this is just the stuff of populist fantasy. Most little guys in my age bracket shouldn’t be worrying about making a fortune off of Facebook by getting a fair shake from Wall Street, of all places; instead, they should be biting their fingernails over saving enough money for retirement. A friend of mine badgered me into doing some research concerning retirement. The result: just to eke out a stable, low-level living arrangement in retirement, the average baby boomer needs at least $1 million earning interest and/or income of some sort. Wow.

How about all of those 50-ish boomers who’ve been out of work for one or more years? These are people who’ve already rifled through their 401(k) savings and are facing foreclosure and homelessness. How are they going to save $10,000 a month in the years leading up to their retirement?

During boom times, you’d always hear some stuffed shirt business pundit on TV blowing hot air to the effect that, “Companies increasingly recognize the value of the business experience and knowledge of older workers.” When the economy began to hark back to Great Depression levels, however, these same “valuable employees” were either ignored, or told by Human Resources departments that “you’re in your fifties and you’ve been out of work for months—you’ll never work again.” Quite a turnaround, eh?

Thanks to the perpetual political stalemate in Washington, D.C., cautious American businesses have refrained from hiring workers, have laid off more, and have been sitting on a mountain of cash—more than $1 trillion. It’s gone on for so long that American business, through a combination of cost-cutting, automation and increased efficiencies, has figured out how to get along quite nicely without many of its former workers. The USDA reports that about one out of every six Americans had trouble scrounging up enough money to buy food (nearly 49 million people, or 14.5 percent of the population), and more than 20 million U.S. children depend on school meal programs to keep from going hungry. Similarly, there are over 45 million Americans on food stamps and one out of every six elderly Americans lives below the federal poverty line.

In other words, you could take a pretty massive slice of the U.S. population—the part that’s floundering—and dispose of it, doubtless with nary a peep of protest out of any business or public institution.

My Draconian friend thinks that the “doomed segment” of the aging boomers, rather than face a penniless, starving existence living outdoors in packing crates and cardboard boxes, should instead “take the Oregon trail”—which is his way saying that they should head for a U.S. state such as Oregon or Washington, which permit physician-assisted suicide. It sounds more than a little bit over-the-top. “Admittedly,” he says, drawing upon his knowledge of American history and with his tongue buried very deeply in his cheek, “the excess population could visit the eugenics ‘communes’ in California, Virginia, and so forth, for America’s socioeconomic benefit.”

What my friend was referring to, for those history buffs out there, was the really scary eugenics movement in America that flourished during the early-to-mid 20^th century. The word eugenics (from the Greek eugenes or wellborn) was coined in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, who applied Darwinian principles to concoct his pet theories about heredity and why “the best and brightest” people with favorable genetic characteristics should mate and propagate. This immediately got all twisted around into “negative eugenics” which involved the forced sterilization (and sometimes marriage restriction or custodial commitment) of those members of the population exhibiting “unwanted characteristics.”

Between 1907 and 1937 thirty-two U.S. states had compulsory sterilization of various citizens viewed as undesirable: the mentally ill or handicapped, those convicted of sexual, drug, or alcohol crimes and others regarded as “degenerate.” Indeed, more than 60,000 compulsory sterilizations were inflicted on individuals who were mentally disabled or ill, but in other cases simply belonged to socially disadvantaged groups living on the margins of society. Thus, to eugenicists, poverty was not a social problem but just the result of a “bad bloodline” which could be fixed with forced sterilization and selective breeding programs, all to guarantee “racial purity.” David Starr Jordan, a former President of Stanford University, who published Blood of a Nation—A study in the Decay of Races by the survival of the Unfit noted as early as 1898 in his book, Footnotes to Evolution, that “The pauper is the victim of heredity, but neither Nature nor Society recognizes that as an excuse for his existence.”

Ironically, some of the most liberal states were at the forefront of the eugenics movement: California topped the list, with 20,108 people sterilized there prior to 1964.

Today we’re ethically way beyond the more icky events of our glorious past—or at least we’re supposed to be so enlightened. But as the secrets of the human genome are steadily unlocked, as the science and business of organ harvesting of the recently deceased steadily progresses, and as the former middle class of the U.S. population slumps into “low income” and poverty, you just can’t help but feel something ominous in the air, some undefined portent of Doom. The hair begins to stand up on the back of your neck.

Yeah, I definitely need a bigger piggy bank for my retirement!

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Posted on Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

Laughing Across Cyberspace

Back in the 1950s, when budding comedian Orson Bean walked into the upscale New York nightclub, The Blue Angel, and asked for a job, the owner was skeptical.

“Say something funny,” he demanded.

“Belly button,” said Bean.

“Come back tonight,” said the owner. Bean did, performed his act, “and I killed. I was the house comic for the next nine years.”

There are as many theories of comedy as there are theorists. Plato thought that the basis of comedy is “foolish false conceit” in that people fancy themselves as more virtuous than they are. Aristotle thought that comic attitude is “not vituperative but ludicrous.” Elder Olson defined katastasis as the equivalent in comedy of catharsis in tragedy, easing the mind to a pleasant, or euphoric, condition of freedom from desires, concerns and disturbing emotions.

At the “twitter + Comedy” presentation at the #140conf Tel Aviv 2010, comedians Benji Lovitt (@benjilovitt) and Charley Warady (@charleyw) spoke of the impact twitter has had on comedians and humanity’s comic sensibility.

“As I was telling Benji, this is everybody’s standup comedian’s nightmare—following a magician!” exclaimed Waraday. [Laughter] “Couldn’t they have had a guitar act before we started? There seems to be one theme in comedy and twitter that came to my mind. The definition of comedy is ‘tragedy plus time.’ Thanks to twitter that time ‘thing’ is becoming less and less. The question that I posed to Benji Lovitt is, ‘These days, how soon is too soon?’ You know, it’s an interesting concept because what immediately came to my mind was the recent incident with the flotilla. [Referring to the ‘Gaza flotilla raid,’ a military operation by Israel against six ships of the ‘Gaza Freedom Flotilla’ on May 31, 2010 in the Mediterranean Sea.] Benji got into trouble—he was bashed by tweeting… what was it, Benji?”

“Tortilla sounds a little like flotilla, so I tweeted, ‘Tortilla Grande: the newest entrée at Taco Bell,’” said Lovitt. “It’s funnier in America. But like everything in the world today, twitter is totally changing what it means to be in the media. In the States, Saturday Night Live for the last 35 years has been the ground-breaking, envelope-pushing show that gets the first crack at satire. And now there’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and funnyordie.com. So, twitter is the latest mechanism for every comedian to use to take a crack at something.”

Warady chimed in with, “So, in the case of the flotilla, I immediately I tweeted that it’s also the A&W Root Beer’s latest selection of their ‘Root Beer Float-illa.’” [No laughter.]

Lovitt knocked on the microphone with his hand, “Is this still on?” he asked the audience. [Some laughter.]

Warady went on anyway: “A friend of mine told me they had onboard entertainment on the flotilla—it was Lady Gaza.” [Laughter.] “And people kept tweeting ‘The Gaza Flotilla’ which is too long for a 140 character message, so I began referring to it as ‘The Gazilla.’” [Laughter.] He also tweeted, “I can’t believe we keep talking about this Flotilla thing when CELINE DION IS PREGNANT!”

“Twitter is really where every comedian is these days,” said Lovitt. “Has anybody here heard of Jim Gaffigan? He’s one of the biggest comedians in the States, and has a quarter of a million followers on twitter. Actually, he was here in Israel a couple of months ago and did a couple of shows in Jaffa and Jerusalem. He’s a devout Catholic. But basically, you don’t have to wait for comedians to come to your town, because they’re all on twitter. What’s great about it is that, well, if you’re a marathon runner you’re compelled to run. Whatever job you have, you’ve got to do the dirty work. But with twitter comedians can write and perform at the same time. It’s great. It’s really changing everything.”

“Twitter is forcing us to edit,” said Warady. “It forces comedians to do a ‘setup’ and a ‘punch’ all in 140 characters. For a person like me, I tend to stand on stage and tell long stories. For me to compact each one into 140 characters takes a lot of discipline. But another nice thing about twitter is that it is immediate in nature. You have your audience out there and you tweet to them and it’s just like doing a live show. There’s immediate gratification. We’re now determining our own self-worth by the number of our retweets. I’ll tweet something that I think is really funny, then I’ll wait two or three minutes, and they I’ll wonder why nobody has retweeted it—they obviously don’t understand genius. [Laughter.]”

“I did a show on the Fourth of July, and so I tweeted a lot of joke beforehand and used the best ones that were retweeted the most often,” said Lovitt.

“Even so, if you do that, by the time you actually do the show the material can become dated,” said Warady.

“Then there’s the guy Justin Halperin, who tweets about the stuff his old dad says around the house every day. He wrote it down and it became a bestselling book and then the first TV show inspired by a series of tweets,” said Lovitt.

“Twitter is so much a part of my life, I get news from it and every day I try to figure out how to make it funny,” said Warady. “Particularly here in Israel, where there’s no end to the material” [Laughter.] It used to be that a day or two would pass after a tragedy or major event before people would have the opportunity to comment on it. Now, in the age of twitter, people start making fun of it a lot sooner. As a comedian, you don’t want to be the last one. So what you wind up doing is hitting on it immediately. And there’s controversy involved. And that’s wonderful, because if everybody loved the things I tweet, then I’m not doing my job.”

Now that the era of the 140 Character One-Liner is upon us and everyone can “riff” among themselves, some professional comedians may find that they can boost or even completely rehabilitate their careers with twitter and other forms of social media.

Or just the opposite. On January 30, 2012, The Sun reported that two British travelers, Leigh Van Bryan, 26, and Emily Bunting, 24, were questioned for five hours and then barred from entering the U.S. after posts on twitter indicated they had plans to “destroy America” and “dig up Marilyn Monroe.”

Bryan told officials the term destroy was British slang for ‘party,’ and the reference to dig up Marilyn Monroe was a joke from the TV show Family Guy, but the two were reportedly held on suspicion of planning to ‘commit crimes,” spent 12 hours in separate holding cells and then were put on a flight home.

“We just wanted to have a good time on holiday. That was all Leigh meant in his tweets,” Bunting told The Sun.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Posted on Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

Social Media and Social Support Networks

Back in the 1960s, when TV writer/producer Sherwood Schwartz was pitching the idea of Gilligan’s Island to CBS Chairman William S. Paley, he described it as a “microcosm” of society. As Schwartz later recalled in a 1996 interview, Paley was taken aback, blurting out, “Oh, God, I thought it was a comedy show,” to which Schwartz quickly responded, “But it’s a funny microcosm!”

Schwartz admitted in the interview that he did in fact have a social statement underpinning Gilligan’s Island. The message was, “It’s one world, and we all have to learn to live with each other.”

In their 1995 book, Prime Time, Prime Movers, pop culture scholars David Marc and Robert J. Thompson looked at this TV series of seven very different castaways stranded on a desert island, and observed that, “Schwartz was pioneering a dramatic matrix built upon the emerging cultural concept of the ‘support group’: a collection of demographically diverse characters thrown together by circumstance and forced to become an ersatz ‘family’ in order to survive.”

If you look at the present-day State of NOW / 140 Character Conferences, you can see how low-cost video and broadband connections to the Internet have given us the ability to bring more than just a microcosm of humanity to the attention of everyone. The famous, anti-famous, non-famous and infamous have trod upon our stages, expounding on everything from founding schools in Tanzania (Stacey Monk @StaceyMonk) to the impact of Twitter on comedy (Benji Lovitt @benjilovitt; Charley Warady @charleyw), to kids and startups (George Haines @George_Haines) to raising digital media-literate kids (Bill Genereux @billgx) , to getting the message out locally about human trafficking (Jennifer White @jenwportraits) and even a brave, poignant presentation entitled, “Surviving Incest in a Small Town and How Social Media Gave Me the Courage to Speak Openly” (Joe Cheray @wildheart4vr).

As these people hurl out into cyberspace their personal histories, projects, causes, hopes and dreams, you can’t help but feel that, thanks to Internet video and social media, these people’s respective “support groups” are now non-clinical “social support networks” that extend from their close family and friends to their peers worldwide. After all, “online communities” consist of groups of people sharing common interests, who can interact over great distances thanks to the web. A call out into the electronic aether for advice, volunteers and money is now commonplace, as is simply reaching out to gain a sense of belonging, self-worth and security, or perhaps just to fish around for some compliments for a job well done.

Even so, since many of our “characters” rarely encounter many of their online contacts face-to-face, solid virtual relationships can take longer to build. But they do happen all the time, even though “people with a mission” must take on a more systematic attitude when communicating with a large number of people online.

Social media and our State of NOW / #140conf online community has the power to engage people from all walks of life, spurring them to take meaningful action, be they casual advocates or well-heeled “superhero” supporters. And everyone from undocumented immigrants to people in rehab can benefit. Shared human experience and empathy, enhanced by “ripple effects” supplied by serendipity and synchronicity, drive it all forward.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Posted on Monday, January 30th, 2012

Money, Money, Money!

Normally this blog doesn’t wallow in political matters, but the hubbub that’s been happening lately, with Republican candidates arguing over who’s the bigger multi-millionaire robber baron and/or influence peddler, reminds one not so much of a Saturday Night Live skit as it does one of those inadvertently hilarious movies of Ed Wood. It’s Plan Nine from the GOP, plain and simple.

James Surowiecki recently wrote in the The New Yorker (January 30, 2012) that, “the people who run America’s private-equity funds must be ruing the day Mitt Romney decided to run for President.” Conservative candidates—of all people—are portraying private-equity firms, those formerly shining showcases of capitalism such as Romney’s Bain Capital, as predatory, vulture-like creatures that use both their own money and borrowed money to acquire companies in leveraged buyouts, only to suck them dry of funds by having the companies borrow even more and then use that money to pay themselves huge “special dividends” or “management fees.” This enables them to recover their initial investment while keeping the same ownership stake, but sometimes they load the debt on to the point where the acquired companies fail to meet their obligations to creditors and so go out of business, thereby destroying jobs. The private-equity firms then blame the dissolution of the companies on unforeseen changes in economic conditions and “market forces.” (But of course by using this technique with borrowed money, the private-equity firms themselves make money no matter what.)

In his New Yorker piece, Surowiecki notes, “As if this weren’t galling enough, taxpayers are left on the hook. Interest payments on all that debt are tax-deductible; when pensions are dumped, a federal agency called the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation picks up the tab; and the money that the dealmakers earn is taxed at a much lower rate than normal income would be, thanks to the so-called ‘carried interest’ loophole. The money that Mitt Romney made when he was at Bain Capital was compensation for his (apparently excellent) work, but, instead of being taxed as income, it was taxed as a capital gain. It’s a very cozy arrangement.”

Of course, although there are leveraged buyout companies that do indeed suck their companies dry as described by Surowiecki, there are also private-equity companies that bestow upon their companies equity money—but not debt—and, in the best spirit of capitalism, assist them and nurture their growth. Thanks to lobbyist-inspired quirks in the U.S. tax system, however, an increasing number of private-equity firms find it easier to rely on what are essentially government subsidies, with many acquired companies suffering as a result.

As the political scene continues to devolve and the economic gap between the rich and everybody else widens, some amusing scenes from the plays of George Bernard Shaw come to mind…

From Shaw’s Major Barbara (1905):

BARBARA. Oh there you are, Mr. Shirley! [Between them] This is my father: I told you he was a Secularist, didn’t I? Perhaps you’ll be able to comfort one another.

UNDERSHAFT [startled] A Secularist! Not the least in the world: on the contrary, a confirmed mystic.

BARBARA. Sorry, I’m sure. By the way, papa, what is your religion—in case I have to introduce you again?

UNDERSHAFT. My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.

BARBARA. Then I’m afraid you and Mr. Shirley won’t be able to comfort one another after all. You’re not a Millionaire, are you, Peter?

SHIRLEY. No; and proud of it.

UNDERSHAFT [gravely] Poverty, my friend, is not a thing to be proud of.

SHIRLEY [angrily] Who made your millions for you? Me and my like. What’s kep us poor? Keepin you rich. I wouldn’t have your conscience, not for all your income.

UNDERSHAFT. I wouldn’t have your income, not for all your conscience, Mr. Shirley.

Ironically, all of the characters in Major Barbara, even the sardonic, arms merchant millionaire Andrew Undershaft, believe that the greatest crime against humanity is poverty. Undershaft’s views were later echoed by that flamboyant American minister, electronic evangelist, and self-professed heretic, Reverend Ike (1935–2009), who proclaimed that “the best thing you could do for the poor is not to be one of them.” For, as Undershaft says, it the power of money that moves governments and determines our destinies…

UNDERSHAFT. The government of your country. I am the government of your country: I, and Lazarus. Do you suppose that you and a half a dozen amateurs like you, sitting in a row in that foolish gabble shop, can govern Undershaft and Lazarus? No, my friend: you will do what pays us. You will make war when it suits us, and keep peace when it doesn’t. You will find out that trade requires certain measures when we have decided on those measures. When I want anything to keep my dividends up, you will discover that my want is a national need. When other people want something to keep my dividends down, you will call out the police and military. And in return you shall have the support and applause of my newspapers, and the delight of imagining that you are a great statesman. Government of your country! Be off with you, my boy, and play with your caucuses and leading articles and historic parties and great leaders and burning questions and the rest of your toys. I am going back to my counting house to pay the piper and call the tune….

And from Shaw’s Heartbreak House (1919):

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You frequent picture palaces.

MANGAN. Perhaps I do. Who told you?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Talk like a man, not like a movie. You mean that you make a hundred thousand a year.

MANGAN. I don’t boast. But when I meet a man that makes a hundred thousand a year, I take off my hat to that man, and stretch out my hand to him and call him brother.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Then you also make a hundred thousand a year, hey?

MANGAN. No. I can’t say that. Fifty thousand, perhaps.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. His half brother only.

These days, of course, the “99 percent” of us are “poor relations,” increasingly distant from the sources of economic and political control. With social media reinventing social activism, however, the State of NOW and the 140 Characters Conferences can make voices heard and bring about grass-roots-powered change.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Posted on Friday, January 27th, 2012

Barnett Berry and Teaching 2030

Yesterday we spoke with Barnett Berry, one of America’s foremost experts on teaching and President and CEO of the North Carolina-based Center for Teaching Quality (CTQ) (@teachingquality), a nonprofit seeking to spectacularly improve student achievement nationwide by conducting timely research, crafting smart policy, and cultivating teacher leadership. Also on the call was Kristoffer Kohl, a Policy Associate at CTQ. They had read our blog “Do We Need ‘Teacherpreneurs’?” and were interested in doing a presentation at one of the State of NOW’s future #140EDU conferences.

Berry noticed the blog posting because he had used the term teacherpreneur himself—his article, “Teacherpreneurs: A More Powerful Vision for the Teaching Profession” appeared in the March 2011 issue of Phi Delta Kappan. The article was adapted from the book (and initiative) Teaching 2030, where Barnett introduces the works of a team of a dozen innovative educators and their thoughts on the future of teaching. This “TeacherSolutions 2030 Team” includes Jennifer Barnett (Alabama), Kilian Betlach (California), Shannon C’de Baca (Iowa), Susie Highley (Indiana), John M. Holland (Virginia), Carrie J. Kamm (Illinois), Renee Moore (Mississippi), Cindi Rigsbee (North Carolina), Ariel Sacks (New York), Emily Vickery (Florida), Jose Vilson (New York) and Laurie Wasserman (Massachusetts).

Given that, “Better teaching helps all students achieve more, it gives us a foundation to build a school system worthy of American Ideals,” CTQ and Teaching 2030 want to elevate the voices of those accomplished individuals working on the front lines of the teaching profession.

At this point, the cynic whispers in one’s ear that American ideals are incessantly jeopardized by two of the more base aspects of human nature; to wit, greed and hypocrisy, and that anyone who has read Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 book, Anti-intellectualism in American Life, recognizes the timeless bemoaning of businessmen and political candidates, echoing down to the present day, for more workers with a “practical education” suited to their capitalism-run-amok, China-wannabe needs.

Despite today’s somewhat bleak and menacing social and cultural background, the CTQ and Teaching2030, with its financial support from MetLife, boldly professes ideas for overhauling the sorry mess of American education, describing how the teaching/learning experience should appear in the year 2030, and what we can do now (in a sort of “means-ends analysis”) to get there.

One thing that critics and so-called reformers of education forget is how students themselves have changed, thanks in great part to technology. First, there is the “Googled Learner.” In the past, the salesmen from Encyclopedia Britannica or World Book would terrify parents into purchasing copies of their respective multi-volume encyclopedias, instilling the belief that their children’s whole future was at stake. Today, of course, there is no physical limit to what can be stored on the web, and search engines such as Google and Bing can bring it all up for scrutiny.

Second, in the more mobile, cosmopolitan world of 2030, 40 percent of students will be “second language learners.” Third, students will have to compete for jobs in a global marketplace, with communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creative problem solving as the new “basics.” Fourth, digital tools will be used to enable students to monitor their own learning, even if it’s on an informal 24×7 basis. Sophisticated tools will be deployed to determine whether students meet academic standards, and they’ll tweak and “fine tune” instruction if things go awry. Fifth and finally, teaching will have to be connected to a broad spectrum of community needs. Increasing economic turmoil creates instabilities in families and thus in the greater society, which means that health and social services will probably merge in some way with academics.

Barnett Berry and his Teaching 2030 team would like teaching to be “a well-compensated professional career with differentiated pathways into the classroom, but with guarantees that every child has a well-prepared team of educators, led by the most accomplished teachers whose expertise is spread in and out of cyberspace.” Moreover, they believe America can muster “a leadership force of 600,000 ‘teacherpreneurs,’” which they define as “classroom experts who continue to teach students regularly while also serving as teacher educators, policy researchers, community organizers, and trustees of their profession,” and who will “blur the lines of distinction between those who teach in schools and those who lead them.” It’s quite an ambitious proposal. Detractors reading this are now no doubt muttering that it’s a great idea to implement in a “creeping socialist” place—you know, those crazy places where teachers are respected for what they do rather than how much they earn.

Whether teachers can meet the educational demands of the 21^st Century remains to be seen. America, unlike many of its competitors, needs to adjust its priorities in many areas, not just education. But education is fundamental in that it enables the populace to determine what priorities need to be adjusted and why. Perhaps Barnett Berry and his team of uber-educators are the people to accomplish all this. We wish them the best of luck.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Posted on Wednesday, January 25th, 2012

Real-Time Magic on the Real-time Web

A consistently entertaining speaker at Jeff Pulver’s 140conf Tel Aviv shows is “infotainer,” magician and mentalist Lior Manor (@liormanor), one of the world’s busiest and highest-paid corporate and trade show performers. Manor has a huge portfolio of tricks, many contemporary in nature as they use cell phones and twitter (“send me the name of a card,” or “send me a number,” etc.).

Indeed, not just the public but a good portion of the mentalist community as well are completely unaware of Manor’s many contributions to the art—that is, classic tricks actually invented by Manor himself. Take “The Invisible Touch,” for example, which he devised in 1987, now performed worldwide by the world’s top talent. As its name implies, a volunteer is brought on stage and, in plain sight of the audience, feels the mentalist touching him or her lightly, and yet one can see that the magician’s hands are nowhere near the person.

At his presentation at 140conf Tel Aviv 2011, “Magic and the Real-time Web,” Manor revealed that he had started out with a university education in mathematics and computer science. “There is a strong connection between math and magic, and if you want to be a good magician, you really need to know math,” intoned Manor. “When I fly around the world, because I learned computer science I can talk like an engineer. I will stand in a trade show booth of a big company like Oracle, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft or smaller companies such as SolarEdge, or mid-size such as Adobe, and I will attract people by doing a presentation which has some magic inside it. So people have fun and get the message too.”

“A fly a lot,” said Manor. “In this month alone, I was in Europe, in Rome, England, the United States, Australia, and so forth.”

“Despite my travels, I used to have only five good friends,” said Manor. “But thanks to Jeff Pulver I got on Facebook and I now have many more.”

Manor did one trick involving mathematics. First a person in the audience picked a card, the 2 of Diamonds. Then Manor displayed the name “Pulver” on the screen:

Manor then selected a person out of the audience and asked them to think of a four digit number. “Now multiply it by 7,206,” said Manor, “divide it by any three digit number. Now multiply it by a two digit number, now divide it again by a three digit number. So what is the result? Ah, it’s .0071312.”

With that, he turned the image on the screen upside down to reveal the number written backwards (Hebrew style) and then flashed an image of him holding a large version of the 2 of Diamonds card that had obviously been taken beforehand:

He also mentioned, amusingly that “Two plus 131 plus seven equals 140, the name of this 140 Characters Conference.”

Psychologists are just beginning to explore experimentally the techniques used by magicians: Psychological (not just physical) misdirection, cognitive illusions (e.g. since our minds think ahead of events, a coin can be made to vanish after it is apparently passed from one hand to the other, when it has in fact been palmed), and “mental forcing” where a volunteer believes that they have a free choice in (for example) picking a card from all 52 cards, but in fact they have been influenced into making a particular, pre-arranged selection.

Today, vision scientists study visual art and illusions to figure out the human visual system’s internal workings, and cognitive scientists now study the cognitive illusions of magicians and mentalists to elucidate the foundations of human cognition.

In medieval and ancient times, of course, the clergy would simply accuse a magician (or any clever inventive fellow, for that matter) of being an authentic supernatural sorcerer in league with the devil, and burn him or her at the stake. In his 1961 book, Profiles of the Future, Arthur C. Clark wrote that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Back in medieval times, however, any science could be construed as magic. As the late Joshua Trachtenberg wrote in his great book-length elaboration of his Ph.D. thesis, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion (1939), even physicians were not immune, particularly non-Christian ones:

In the field of medicine in particular was the reputed Jewish magical skill called upon to perform miracles. According to the popular view, demons and magic were often responsible for disease, and medicine was therefore the legitimate province of the sorcerer. Jewish physicians, though by no means free from the general superstitious attitude, were among the foremost representatives of a scientific medicine in the Germanic lands. Their wide knowledge of languages, the availability of Arabic-Greek medical works in Hebrew translation, their propensity for travel and study abroad, their freedom from the Church-fostered superstition of miraculous cures, relics, and the like, these often conspired to make of them more effective practitioners than their non-Jewish competitors. Paradoxically, their scientific training, such as it was, made them superior magicians in the popular view, and every triumph of medical science enhanced the Jew’s reputation for sorcery.

In those days it was, in the words of the old adage, “smarter to be lucky than lucky to be smart.”

Now, however, smart fellows with great powers of observation such as Lior Manor both entertain and inform us.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Posted on Monday, January 23rd, 2012

Sharing in Cultural and Capitalist Commotion

“A man asked his wise old uncle, ‘Could it not be simply that we are alone and aimless, doomed to wander in an indifferent universe, with no hope of salvation, nor any prospect except misery, death and the empty reality of eternal nothing?’

The uncle replies: ‘And you wonder why you’re not invited to more parties’.”

—Woody Allen, Getting Even

Normally I’m not the kind of fellow to add a soupçon of schadenfreude to our uplifting, inspiring blog here at the State of NOW / #140conf community, but you must admit things have been pretty intense lately, given the world’s uncertain economic future (and high U.S. unemployment), the crazy, oversexed representatives of a long list of special interest groups (the super-wealthy topping the list) masquerading as statesmen-like Presidential political candidates, an ocean liner bigger than the Titanic recklessly piloted to a crash/sinking within 300 feet of a rocky shore, bankruptcy hitting Kodak (makers of the greatest photographic film of all time, the now-extinct Kodachrome), and Iran’s nuclear ambitions pushing us to the brink of World War III. And to top it off, the founder of Cracker Barrel died.

Maybe it’s just because most people feel isolated, cut off from the “cultural commotion” provoked by the world’s big events. It’s a feeling that’s said to be acutely felt among people living in small towns and rural communities, places with no stoplights that, iconically, encircle a big intersection of a bunch of roads out in the middle of somewhere.

Perhaps, however, the media, with its relentless replay of daily events, exacerbates the situation, instilling the wrong mindset in us all. For example, at #140conf NYC 2011, in the presentation, “How the Real Time Web has Bridged the Gap between Towns of 1000 People and Cities of 10 Million,” liquor store-and-ranch owner Becky McCray (@BeckyMcCray) of Oklahoma asked LogicMaze’s VP, Cody Heitschmidt (@codyks) of Hutchison, KS, his theory of how “the whole world is really like a small town.”

Heitschmidt commented that, where he lived, other than members of his family, the next person could be found two miles away. And yet, he said, because of social media and the Internet, “the whole world has changed in that my kids are now communicating with people all over the world, as opposed to this little niche that, without digital communications, we were kind of stuck in for so long.”

Moreover, by being plugged into the world in this way, small business now becomes big business.

“In small towns, out of a necessity, customer service became the only competitive advantage a businessman had in a small town. The reason is that, if you do something good in a small town, news about it travels fast. If you mess up and do something bad, that too travels just as fast in a small town. There are pro-and-con sides to it. And because of this ‘State of NOW,’ this concept that Jeff Pulver wants us to explore here, the whole world has become a small town. If you do something good or bad, the whole world can find out about it very quickly. That’s the theory. The State of NOW has made the whole world a small town because of communications.”

“That’s great,” said McCray, “because for small business owners, customer service really does become your only, sustainable, competitive advantage in this world.”

So that’s one of the great things about social media: The little guy not only has a voice that can be heard at the highest levels of government, but he or she can grab a piece of the economic pie too.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Posted on Friday, January 20th, 2012

Jeff Pulver at DLD12—and Elsewhere

One of the most astonishing things about Jeff Pulver is his ability to pop up anywhere in the world, be it Delaware (where he spoke with the Governor about making the state a model of innovation) or Israel, or Canada, or London, where he is right now as I write these words.

Actually, it’s not that surprising, since Jeff has long been a restless, curious traveler seeking new worlds. In furtherance of this enviable pursuit, Jeff has become as much a traveler in the physical world as in the world of ideas. Like the intellectual journeyers of old, whose adventurous passages to far and exotic lands implicitly expressed their boredom and dissatisfaction with the status quo, Jeff is forever in motion, seeking out places where other restless souls, by turns both inquisitive and creative, congregate in congenial, cerebral environments to catch the many bright intellectual sparks that fly forth in such marvelous places, fanning them into raging bonfires capable of setting alight the world’s collective imagination.

One such locale Jeff will be visiting is DLD (Digital-Life-Design) 12, the flagship conference of Germany’s Hubert Burda Media empire and, in the words of David Rowan, writing in Wired, “the hottest by-invitation ticket in Europe.” Held January 22–24, 2012 at the HVB forum in Munich, Germany, and chaired by publisher Dr. Hubert Burda and investor Dr. Yossi Vardi, DLD draws over 800 intellectual citizens of the world.

The brainchild of founders Stephanie Czerny and Marcel Reichart, DLD12, like its forebears, bills itself as basically a funfest of digital innovation, though in fact its participants paint on a much bigger intellectual canvas:

Key aspects of DLD12 are data, commerce, mobile, social and the questions: Which rules apply to the data economy? What do social media and mobile devices mean for brands, retail, lifestyle and art? What makes cities attractive places for digital entrepreneurs? Which data protection do we need? What is happiness? What does the new content ecosystem look like? Will we still drive cars ourselves or control computers just with our thoughts? Are founders the new rock stars? Is there life beyond earth? Does Europe have a chance on the digital world stage? What effects do social entrepreneurs have on our society? How does one internationalize Internet companies? What makes social games so successful? India, Turkey, Africa – the markets of tomorrow?

It’s a place where you can experience everyone from Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, to physicist Freeman J. Dyson, to Yoko Ono propounding their ideas. (An old Yoko Ono story: A New York businessman wanted to hold a party for his departing secretary and went in search of a special, exotic cheese. Mysteriously, store after store was sold out of the obscure product. As it turned out, Yoko was holding her own party that week, and had purchased every scrap of the same cheese–also her favorite–that could be found in all of the city’s five boroughs.)

Of course, when Jeff Pulver runs out of places like DLD12 to visit, he holds his own great conferences: None other than The State of Now / 140Conf community get-togethers, where speakers can hop on stage and expound on what can and should be done with the real-time Internet. It’s what we’re all about. But it’s also good to take stock of what’s happening at places like DLD12. And wherever those places are, you’ll be sure to find Jeff Pulver there, in the midst of a group of people, talking, discovering, brainstorming, and having a hell of a good time.

Marco Polo, eat your heart out.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Posted on Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

A Beautiful Outrage

Back in the 1920s, writer and political commentator Walter Lippmann was a firm believer in the “gatekeeper” concept of communications and journalism, and that the role of the journalist was that of a middleman, distilling the words of the policy-making elites and passing them on down to the (somewhat ignorant) masses. Philosopher John Dewey, on the other hand, felt that the public was quite capable of comprehending the issues at hand, and that journalists should be able to engage citizens, experts and elites in the shared generation and evaluation of content—a sort of “community journalism” that has begun to really hit its stride with the rise of the Internet.

Social media, from its first stirrings in SixDegrees.com (which operated from 1997 to 2001), to Friendster (founded in 2002) to MySpace (2003), Facebook (2004), and Twitter (2006), has added an even greater participatory dimension to communications, to the point where the journalist is simply a sort of “first communicator among equals.”

At the #140conf New York City in 2011, Today show host Ann Curry (@AnnCurry) gave a talk entitled “Journalism in the State of Now.” What she spoke of, however, was something far more fundamental and far-reaching than news reporting.

In speaking of social media—twitter in particular: “We are the early ones in,” said Curry. “There are lots of people making mistakes with it, and a lot of people doing good things with it, and finding a betterment of their own life through it. But we’re sort of early in trying to figure all this stuff out. It’s exciting to be in something that is really where no generation has ever gone before. That’s where we are. That’s cool and what I would say to you is that, in the course of the last year since I spoke to you, I’ve seen a real uptick in people trying to use social media, specifically twitter, as a way of ‘selling’ themselves. Everybody’s now getting the picture of how powerful it can be—and dangerous as well—but certainly how powerful it can be. Being in the kind of world for more than 30 years where I have been trying in that time to give people information and knowledge that might as a result give them power, I can tell you that the truth is always the first victim. It is, more than anything else, the thing that people fight over and try to control, because everything else comes from that.”

“So, what I’m starting to see with twitter is that people want to use it—use it to sell things, to sell themselves,” said Curry, “to capture this and create the truth that they want, to satisfy whatever motivation they have. Usually it’s driven by money. What I really hope is that this thing that I’ve seen as a deep part of the character of twitter and Facebook—deep in twitter and Facebook—is this wish to have meaning, to do good, to be a part of something that brings meaning to your own life because you’ve done something to help somebody else. It really is, I think, fundamentally a human wish. We want our lives to matter. And the way to matter is to matter in some way that has been generous to other people. I’m old enough to tell you that, when you’re in your last days, or you’re already gone from this life and people are talking about you, sure they’ll talk about how you were a success in your business or how you were a great father, mother, sister, brother or friend. But in the end your legacy really is the fact that you did something with your life that mattered for others. That is the thing for which you will be glad at the end of your days and that your family, the people who love you, will be so grateful to hold onto you as they mourn you. It is a thing I hope will stay present in how we use this new frontier.”

“There is so much—you don’t need me to tell you—that the world needs: a lot of love, and all the things that that brings,” said Curry. “We see it constantly. I always feel with twitter and Facebook, and as a newswoman I feel this ‘pressure’ where I want to tell people what they need to know, because I know from these years of being a reporter that if I tell people what they need to know about the world, that they will care. Some people will care a lot and those people might actually have a voice in changing human suffering. It’s been the one thing that has been constant in all the sufferings and disasters and difficulties and struggles and disease and genocide, and all those things that I’ve seen as a reporter. The one constant has always been this ‘beautiful outrage‘ that I’ve seen in you, the American people, the big-hearted American people that want to do more, that want to step up, want to at least care, want their elected officials to do something, want to donate to Haiti, constantly pushing. Why? Because, I think deep down, we all want to be forces for Good. Even we don’t have the money to contribute, at least we are outraged and we talk about it and we care. “

“And I think that this power is huge, when it connects with others, and we become this wave of voices that soothes the fire that is raging on virtually every shore,” said Curry. “I think that this is so powerful. It is never to be underestimated, and I think in it are the deepest and most beautiful possibilities of social media. I really hope that as we continue in this adventure towards this unknowing future, in this world that we’re now able to experience, well, it’s kind of better than being in Star Trek. I mean, you don’t know what’s going to happen. But there is a sense of not seeing the edge of this universe, and wondering what will be, and I would simply encourage anyone who can listen to me here to remember the good that it’s capable of, the good that it will do, the good that you’re capable of doing, and as a result the force of good that you can be. As a result of that, think of the meaning that you will have in your lives, so that at the end of your days you will know that you have done something of some service to other human beings.”

“It [social media] may be a way for us to connect with other people who think like this,” said Curry. “They may not be in your family. They may not be among the people you go out and have beers with, but maybe in this way we can connect with each other all over the world, wherever you are, people who want to contribute to our human family.”

In Ann Curry’s new world the journalist is perhaps more of a guide or moderator—perhaps appropriately, the French word for ‘moderated’ is animé, which suggests someone animating the major currents of the whole social informational process. Any particular individual’s real influence on the community will generally be more qualitative than quantitative, aside from such circumstantial factors as financial resources and media exposure. There can be as much creativity, humor and other lighter phenomena in social media as there can be social justice, but certainly everyone should agree that a healthy dose of Curry’s “beautiful outrage” is a good thing.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Posted on Sunday, January 15th, 2012

Let’s Make Delaware ‘The Innovation State’

Delaware, America’s second smallest state after Rhode Island, was one of the original 13 colonies and on December 7, 1787, became the first state to ratify the Constitution of the United States, thereby picking up the nickname, “The First State.” Thanks to its business-friendly corporation and tax laws, over 50 percent of U.S. publicly-traded corporations and 60 percent of the Fortune 500 companies are incorporated in Delaware. Delaware corporation franchise taxes supply roughly one-fifth of the state revenue.

Strangely, although the state ranks second in civilian scientists and engineers as a percentage of the workforce and number of patents issued to companies or individuals per 1,000 workers (thanks partly to the presence of E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, one of the world’s largest chemical companies), Delaware has never attained the corporate “startup incubator” status of Silicon Valley, Boston, Texas, or New York.

Well, folks, perhaps that’s about to change.

On the afternoon of January 11, 2012 our own Jeff Pulver had a meeting in Dover, Delaware with Governor Jack Markell (@GovernorMarkell), to discuss how to make Delaware the innovation and startup capital of the U.S. On his way to see Markell, he stopped by the studios of WDEL 1150 AM News Talk Radio and explained on-the-air what was happening to Rick Jensen (@Jensen1150WDEL) and his audience.

Jensen: Jeff is here “in town” today for a very special reason; trying to make something good happen…

Pulver: I’m here because I was invited to meet with Governor Markell, to talk about innovation. I have this idea to make Delaware the Innovation State for America, to create an opportunity for people to want to come here, live here, to have their dreams come true. I really want to help make Delaware the Innovation State for the United States and at some level, bring back The American Dream.

Jensen: Jack Markell is one of the few governors in this country who really is totally committed to social media such as twitter and has at least one assistant who I know of over there—Felicia Pullam (@FPullam)—who works on that, as well as a lot of other communication duties. So I hear you also got to know Markell by chance through a dinner in New York City.

Pulver: Yes, since November 29^th I’ve been looking forward to be here to spend an hour with the Governor and to share some ideas, and to see whether or not it makes sense to try to make Delaware the “innovation hub” for the United States. So many people who are doing tech startups go to New York City where I’m from, or they go to Boston, or Silicon Valley. Why not Delaware? You know, many companies in the world, not just in the United States, are Delaware “C” Corporations. And yet, the companies are not actually physically here in Delaware. I want to do something to make it fun, to bring back some excitement, and then to tie together different economic interests, whether you’re into biotech, or energy, or some other kind of high-tech. Why not bring all of these different people from across the United States to Delaware to be mentors, to advise and to encourage people to seek out their dreams?

Jensen: I would think Governor Markell would be open to this. He’s been successful in bringing in a company to run the Delaware City Refinery. He’s been successful on a number of different levels… His 30,000 foot view is indeed to try to bring innovation and jobs to Delaware, and that’s what you’d like to do too. Tell us about the format of what you’re looking at…

Pulver: Well, I want to start small, perhaps do a contest. People who have ideas for businesses would apply to come to Delaware to be here for 12 or 14 weeks at a time in rotation. Perhaps there could be a TV reality show format, I’m not sure. But it would happen at an industrial loft building somewhere in an up-and-coming part of a city in the State of Delaware. It will be a place where the business community embraces it and we’re able to leverage the state to help put a “spotlight” on what’s happening. We’ll bring people together who have the dreams, the ideas, the incentives to make things happen, and match them with mentors who have experience. And at the end of the day what are we really doing? We’re giving people the chance to live a dream, to follow their inspiration and to innovate, to truly take the word “innovation” and bring it to the people. Maybe somebody will or won’t have the next Google in their head, but at least we’ll create an environment where people can try out ideas.

A friend of mine explained to me that most great ideas and discoveries start out as serendipity, as somebody else’s “good mistake.” In our lifetime, unless you’re doing deep research in science, most of the things we discover we stumble upon. What I want to do is to bring back the America where people again have an environment where they have the chance to stumble upon great ideas. And because Delaware is half-way between New York and D.C., I think it could work. I think if we could do something in Delaware, it will be a model for other cities, towns and states to embrace.

Jensen: To formalize Delaware as an incubator for entrepreneurship and innovation—I know that’s something they’d like to do.

Jensen and Pulver then speculated about how to monetize such a project.

Pulver: This is the First State. People do things first here. One interesting idea would be to do a tax incentive for everybody on a state level by perhaps creating a program where you could fill out a form and the first $5,000 you owe in taxes can go toward a startup. That way you get a credit toward your taxes, but you’re also investing in innovation. Everybody wants to invest in a dream, and everybody could be involved in this. Of course, the process would be vetted to keep out the scam artists. But could you imagine what the economy would be like with 10,000 startups and, once the word gets out that this is happening, the very deep-pocketed venture capitalists will start coming to Delaware to check out what’s here and invest too.

Jensen: So you’re not looking for any extra extraction of money from citizens in taxes or anything like that.

Pulver: No I’m actually trying to do the reverse, to create wealth, to create prosperity and to bring jobs to the city and state and every local level. But really, what I’m trying to do is bring people back to the level of inspiration that they once had, and to dream again. Whenever someone has a dream to do something but their life doesn’t allow them to follow it, if it’s in high tech, I want them to pursue those dreams. I’ve had a very fortunate life in that over the last 20 years I’ve done over 20 startups myself, some not successful, some very successful. But I’m always around people, and I’ve discovered that one of the best things you can ever do in your life is to believe in somebody. I do that all the time now; I focus on finding people who have ideas and I try to connect them with other people who can help them make things happen. I’ve learned a lot by traveling the world and seeing how other countries do this, and I think it’s about time we tried this in America. It can’t hurt.

Jensen: And why not Delaware?

Pulver: Yes, why not Delaware? Let’s give it a try right here, the First State of the Union. It could become the First Innovation State for the country, maybe for the world.

At this point I could go on at length, picking up on Jeff’s contagious enthusiasm and conflating various superficially-related ideas into an exuberant sales package for making Delaware the Innovation State. Fortunately, I’m sure Jeff and many other minds greater than mine will be doing just the opposite, “de-conflating” (or perhaps I should say disambiguating, after the philosopher Jeremy Bentham who first used that word extensively) the whole big multi-faceted idea into a series of smaller, realizable, measurable steps, all leading to the great goal that is the Delaware of the Future, the preeminent locus of American innovation.

And if you too, Dear Reader, are interested in helping to make Delaware the Innovation State, please feel free to contact Jeff Pulver (jeffp@pulver.com).

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Posted on Thursday, January 12th, 2012