Achieving Technological Literacy

Kevin Kelly — the co-founder of Wired magazine and author of the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy and What Technology Wants — decided to home-school his 13-year-old son … and wrote about the experience in The New York Times Magazine.

“One of the chief habits a student needs to acquire is technological literacy,” Kelly wrote. “Technology will change faster than we can teach it. My son studied the popular programming language C++ in his home-school year; that knowledge could be economically useless soon.

“The accelerating pace of technology means his eventual adult career does not exist yet,” he added. “Of course it won’t be taught in school. But technological smartness can be.”

The nine principles of technological literacy that Kelly taught his son are relevant for all of us — especially those of us who graduated from eighth grade more than twenty years ago. Here’s a sampling. (I urge you to read them all.)

• Technologies improve so fast you should postpone getting anything you need until the last second. Get comfortable with the fact that anything you buy is already obsolete.
• The proper response to a stupid technology is to make a better one, just as the proper response to a stupid idea is not to outlaw it but to replace it with a better idea.
• Nobody has any idea of what a new invention will really be good for. The crucial question is, what happens when everyone has one?
• The older the technology, the more likely it will continue to be useful.

Bad News for Bank of America; Worse News for the Consumer

Jason Grodensky paid cash for his house in South Florida last December. With no mortgage and sole ownership, the last thing he worried about was the possibility of foreclosure. Nevertheless, Bank of America foreclosed on the house seven months later. It wasn’t until Grodensky brought his problem to the attention of the Sun Sentinel, that it began to be resolved. Bank of America has said it will straighten out the mess at its own cost.

According to The New York Times, this may be just the tip of the iceberg. In order to feed the investment community’s insatiable hunger for mortgage-backed securities, many banks — including JP Morgan Chase and GMAC Mortgage — took short-cuts and made errors in the recording of deeds. As a result, they’re putting a temporary halt to foreclosures. It’s a step in the right direction, but clearly not the total solution to a complex public relations problem that could continue to haunt lenders, their customers and investors for a long time to come.

Tesla Predicts iPhone, Blackberry and Droid Technology … in 1909

One hundred and one years ago, in a conversation with a New York Times reporter, the brash and brilliant Nikola Tesla, a predicted the current mobile revolution. Popular Mechanics reprinted the Times interview, “Wireless of the Future,” in its October 1909 issue. Here’s an example of what the high-tech visionary was forecasting more than a century ago:

“It will soon be possible, for instance, for a business man in New York to dictate instructions and have them appear instantly in type in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up from his desk and talk with any telephone subscriber in the world. It will only be necessary to carry an inexpensive instrument not bigger than a watch, which will enable its bearer to hear anywhere on sea or land for distances of thousands of miles. One may listen or transmit speech or song to the uttermost parts of the world.”

(Via Boing Boing)

Public Relations: Among the Best Jobs in 2010

The Wall Street Journal recently published a list of the best and worst jobs in 2010, based on a CareerCast.com study that encompassed five criteria: environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress.

The five best jobs (in order) are:
1. Actuary
2. Software engineer
3. Computer systems analyst
4. Biologist
5. Historian

The five worst jobs (in order) are:
1.Roustabout
2.Lumberjack
3.Ironworker
4.Dairy farmer
5.Welder

The job of “public relations executive” is ranked #79 among the best jobs…ahead of attorney (#80), architect (#86), veterinarian (#90), newscaster (#95), psychiatrist (#98), physician/general practice (#128), newspaper reporter (#184) and photojournalist (#189).

Oddly, the job of philosopher is ranked #11…well ahead of public relations. Wow. Well, there are definitely more opportunities in PR than philosophy. A recent search of the Jobs section of The New York Times yielded no “help wanted” ads for a philosopher and over 100 for public relations professionals.

Public relations people tend to be inveterate data hounds, because the intelligence provided to us by research can help us communicate with our clients’ stakeholders at the times, and in the places, that they are most likely to be receptive to PR messages.

So I was very intrigued recently by a nifty interactive chart in The New York Times. Based on the U.S. Department of Labor’s American Time Use Survey, it shows how Americans spend their days. While it’s not comprehensive, I found it very interesting.

Click on the image above. Then, scroll back and forth to see who’s doing what, when. Click on the chart in any activity area to minimize it and get an interesting factoid. Change the demographics to compare and contrast.

Did you know that the majority (53%) of people with advanced degrees wake up between 6:50 and 7:00 am? Not this PR person, alas. I am however one of the very elite two percent of Americans who are already hard at work on the computer at 8:20am.

Mending a Broken Heart

Contrary to popular belief, the human heart has the capacity to regenerate itself.

A team of researchers, led by Dr. Jonas Frisén at the prestigious Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, has discovered that about half of the heart’s muscle cells are replaced over the course of a normal lifetime. (About 1% of the cells are replaced every year at age 25, with the rate gradually falling to less than 0.5% per year by age 75.)

“I think this will be one of the most important papers in cardiovascular medicine in years,” says Dr. Charles Murray, a heart researcher at the University of Washington, The New York Times reports.

In 1987, Dr. Piero Anversa, now director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine at Harvard Medical School, suggested that that heart muscle cells are renewed so fast that at 80, a person has replaced his heart four times over.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S. If scientists are able to discover how the regeneration of heart muscle cells is regulated, it may be possible for the pharma industry to develop a whole new range of cardiovascular drugs to help fix wounded hearts.

Don’t Mess with My Brand!

Want more proof that the company doesn’t own your brand … its customers do?

This month, Pepsico will be scrapping some expensive changes to the packaging of one of its flagship products, Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice. The longtime Tropicana brand symbol, an orange impaled by a straw, had been replaced by the image of a glass of fresh orange juice.

Tropicana’s customers were furious about the brand makeover, describing it in letters, e-mail messages and telephone calls as “ugly” and “stupid,” and saying that it resembled “a generic bargain brand,” according to The New York Times.

Bowing to popular pressure, the original version of the packaging will be brought back next month. According to Tropicana president Neil Campbell, it wasn’t the sheer volume of the outcries that led to the corporate change of heart, it was the fact that the criticism came from some of the Tropicana’s most loyal consumers.

As my colleague Tim Kane has written, “People don’t buy brands. They join them.” You interfere with that relationship at your own risk!

Tough Times Ahead for the Healthcare Sector?

According to a report published recently in Health Affairs, national health care spending grew at 6.1% in 2007 — its lowest rate of growth since 1998 — mainly as a consequence of slower spending on prescription drugs.

What’s more, IMS Health, a leading provider of market intelligence to the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries, reports that it has cut its estimate for growth of U.S. pharma sales to two percent or less this year … a significant decline from earlier forecasts of four to five percent.

The main causes of this deceleration in growth: fewer blockbusters, more competition from generics and consumers on a tighter budget.

But there’s no reason to throw a pity party for pharmaceutical and healthcare companies just yet. According to an article by Robert Pear in The New York Times, “In recessions, when the economy contracts, health spending usually continues to increase. “ Therefore, it’s likely that healthcare expenditures will increase their share of the nation’s GED during the tough economic times that lie ahead.

Are You a TimesPeople Person?

Formerly dubbed the “Gray Lady” for its staid appearance and style, The New York Times has just announced the beta version of TimesPeople, a new social network for readers of the newspaper. If you’re a marketing consultant, financial communications professional, PR practitioner or just a news junkie, you may want to check it out.

Unlike MySpace, it’s not a place to find a potential soulmate. TimesPeople is much more like Digg, in that it lets you share interesting things you find on the NYT website with others in the network. Users of TimesPeople can build up friends lists and can see a “news feed” of the stories their friends are recommending, sharing and discussing.

Currently available only as a Firefox browser add-on, when TimesPeople is formally launched, it will work with all web browsers.

Hedge Funds: The Root of All Evil?

According to Paul Krugman, op-ed columnist for The New York Times, in his blog last month, Iceland believes it may be the victim of a conspiracy of “unscrupulous dealers” trying to break the country’s financial system. “They will not get away with it,” says Central Bank Governor David Oddsson.

According to Krugman, “Such things really do happen … According to the Hong Kong Monetary Authority [HKMA] , several major hedge funds engaged in a ‘double play,’ shorting both the city-state’s stock market and its currency.” The nefarious plot in the late 1990s was thwarted when the HKMA bought up a large fraction of the Hong Kong stock market.

Last year, New York magazine asked the question: “Are hedge funds the virus that’s going to make the markets keel over? Are they an evil cabal?”

Clearly, hedge fund PR is a concept that a lot of people managing these funds today dismiss or overlook entirely. It baffles me. The elements of the perfect storm public relations crisis are all about the hedge fund industry: the “elitist” investment profile, the shadowy but enormous impact on the financial markets and the volatility that is the nature of hedge fund investing. We’ve already seen glimmerings that all these elements can come together and create some serious problems for the industry.