The Future Place Blog

New York and Steam, Legacy and Safety

On Wednesday central New York was brought to a standstill by an explosion, resulting in about 20 injuries and one death. Given the size of the crater in the middle of the road the immediate fear was that this was a new terrorist attack.

The actual cause of the explosion was a 83 year old steam pipe running under the road. Before this event I was unaware that millions of pounds of steam are pumped beneath the streets of New York every day. The steam system is run by Consolidated Edison, running what may be the world’s largest commercial steam system. The steam is used for heating, air conditioning, and power (in the 21st Century).

Legacy is a term that we use to describe the need to keep old systems running and to achieve backward compatibility (for example Excel and still read Lotus 123, Quattro Pro, and dBase formats). The thought of New York still using a steam network opened in 1882 brought to my mind the need to ensure that we market researchers avoid being stuck with old technologies, for example: tables, CAPI, DP departments, and random digit dialling.

For more information, check out the BBC report.

For more about Consolidated Edison’s steam operations click here.

More Bird Flu, but where’s the hype?

New Scientist reports that two outbreaks of bird flu were found amongst dead wild swans in Germany last month, with cases also being found in the Czech Republic in June. What I find interesting is that last year these reports would have been met by sensational headlines in the popular media claiming that mankind was about to meet the worst pandemic since the 1918 epidemic killed 50 to 100 million people. This year the popular media have largely ignored reports of H5N1 cases.

This is another symptom of the great dumbing down. There is every chance that we will have another pandemic at some stage. But, the probability that any specific threat will be ‘the big’ one tends to be low, resulting in short term over estimation, and long term under-estimation. When the big one does come along the chances are that those journalists who survive it will be asking “why didn’t we see it coming?”.

US Unpopular, so is Putin

The Pew Research Center has published a 47 country study, looking at global issues and the standing of the US. The US has been pretty unpopular for the last five years, but more recently China has been causing increasing concern, and Russian President Putin is now globally disliked almost as much as George Bush. Spain is one of the most sceptical with just 7% having any confidence with either George Bush or Vladimir Putin.

Africa was the region most pro-US, the most anti were some of the countries with large Islamic populations followed by old Europe, such as Spain, France, and Germany.

The full report is available on the Pew Research Center website, although it is 133 pages long.

Which country has the most English speakers?

The idea for this bit of research came from Karl Fisch’s video, Shift Happens. I had a look around the web and the best estimates I cam up with were

1. India, largely the result of the British Empire
2. USA, despite winning their independence from the British Empire over 200 years ago
3. China, largely the result of a policy to promote English
4. Nigeria, again a result of the British Empire
5. UK, despite having had many monarchs over the last 1000 years whose own language was French or German

However, it is widely predicted that China will soon move to the number one position in this league table. I suspect that this news is good news for those of us who struggle to speak one language, never mind several. Given the shifts in power I have felt that the language of the near future would be either English or Mandarin. But with China upping the stakes for English I suspect that it will remain the language for international commerce and for much of the Web.

However, I suspect that Chinese only websites will increasingly feature in the Internet’s top ten. At present there are two Chinese web sites in Alexa’s top 10. Baidu, a search engine, is ranked at number 7, and QQ, an IM site, is ranked at number 10.

Glasgow ‘Cancels’ Illegal Posters

UK (Scottish) Glasgow’s City Council has come up with a new way of tackling illegal fly posters for music gigs, according to a post on BoingBoing. The Council has started issuing it workers with Cancelled stickers, which they stick over the posters, to show that the poster is cancelled.

Not surprisingly, many people assume that it means the concert has been cancelled. It appears that this tactic has caused concert organisers to act rather more quickly than with more traditional routes such as fines against the individuals doing the bill sticking. The Council already spend about £100,000 a year on tackling illegal concert posters.

How many space flights has China had?

I am not sure about the total number, but on June 1st China launched its 100th carrier flight in its Long March series. Although I did not see much about it on the BBC, China View gave it a fair amount of coverage.

The flight launched SinoSat-3, a satellite for radio and television broadcasting. One interesting snippet in the article was the statistic that there are 400 million TV sets in China, which sounds a lot, but there are about 500 million mobile phones in use.

China to become top tourist destination

We are becoming increasingly familiar with the news that China’s economic growth and technological development are pushing it towards the top of the league in terms of GDP, Internet users, PC users, global trade, and consumption of raw materials, but it seems that China is also destined to be the number one tourist destination – something that will be further helped by the upcoming Olympics in Beijing in 2008.

WARC report that China is currently the world’s number four destination, behind France, Spain, and United States. According to the United Nations World Tourism Organisation, if current trends continue China will replace the US as the number three destination in 2008, and by 2015 will be the top global destination.

Although media references to the growth of China and Asia’s influence are fairly common, as is the growth in books talking about the issue, I do not think that it has really entered the mind set of most people yet. Almost the only people who seem to be actively talking about it are US politicians, some of whom seem to be under the misapprehension that they can stop it, but at least they see the change is happening.

It is clearly good that 100s of millions of people in China will be lifted out of poverty, and it should be good that the cost of production of many products and services bought in the West will fall, but the rise of Asia and China will create massive changes and we should be adapting to them now, not when they have already happened.

For example, I believe that it is possible for companies based in the West to continue to be thought leaders in the area of global Market Research even when the seat of economic power moves from the US and Europe to Asia, and for these companies to generate revenues that reflect value added insight, rather than commodity production. But, to do that we should tackling the issues now, for example seeking to check that whether our standard research tools need modifying in China, and looking towards maintaining our non-Internet fieldwork skills in markets like India and Indonesia.

Intel accused of bad ethics over One Laptop Per Child

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a charitable organisation that aims to produce a cheap, robust laptop that Governments in the developing world can buy for about US$100 to provide computers to children. The idea is allow millions of children to leapfrog into the 21st Century and access more of what the world can offer.

The project is headed by Profession Nicholas Negroponte and is due to start shipping laptops this year. When the idea was first floated at Davos in January 2005 it was widely seen as impossible, and was apparently dismissed by Intel Chairman Craig Barrett. However, as the launch date gets closer, more and more people seem keen to launch commercial versions of the OLPC machine.

Intel have launched a low cost machine called the Classmate and are now being accused of trying to sabotage the OLPC effort. Negroponte claims that Intel have distributed literature to Governments, attacking the OLPC concept and stressing the benefits of the Intel based Classmate. Barrett of Intel defends this approach by saying “That’s the way our business works.”. Negroponte asserts that the real issue is that the OLPC machine uses the AMD chip, and Intel is prepared to sell its machine at a loss in order to damage the One Laptop Per Child machine.

I suspect that unless this is sorted quickly it could rebound badly on Intel. Since Enron there as been a change in the public’s feelings about business ethics. Fighting hard to produce better chips than AMD is still seen as a good thing, but damaging the chances of third world children to gain access to IT as a method of hurting your competitor is likely to play badly.

The BBC has more on this issue here.

Google Highlights Darfur Devastation

Reuters have a story about how Google and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum have created an online mapping project that will show evidence of atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Moe than 200,000 people have been killed in Darfur, although the Government keep denying that genocide is taking place. Google have uploaded high resolution satellite to Google Earth. These images allow people to see 1600 damaged or destroyed villages. In addition the remains of 100,000 homes, schools, mosques and other buildings, destroyed by the janjaweed militia are visible.

This initiative by Google is a strong reminder that all aspects of the globe of becoming local, increasingly there is no private, no dark corner, no out of site.

The Netherlands ends analog TV

Willem de Koning posts, on Slashdot, that The Netherlands this week ended all analogue TV broadcasting moving over entirely to digital. It is claimed that this makes The Netherlands the first in the world to complete the switch.

The full article was from chron.com. One thing that reduced the impact of the change is that most of the homes in The Netherlands use cable as their primary method of receiving TV. With a population of about 16 million, just 74,000 households were receiving analogue signals as their primary source of TV.

Belgium is expecting to turn off analogue in 2007, the US in 2009, and Japan in 2011.