To Be Titled

Japanese couples, too busy for a normal social life, are increasingly turning to actors to play their friends on the most important days of their lives.

Something has gone awry in Japan. If I didn’t have enough close friends to come to my wedding/funeral, I would seriously examine the priorities in my life rather than hiring a company to research me and send me fake friends.

Henry Farrell draws some obvious contrasts between Ignite conferences and APSA (American Political Science Association) conferences:

Ignite gives you precisely (and only) five minutes to speak - your Powerpoint/Keynote or similar presentation has 20 slides that advance inexorably every fifteen seconds. What’s nice about it is that it forces people to cut to the chase.

I’ve only recently found out about Ignite. It seems to be a great way to share knowledge and experience within communities, and I hope to participate at some point in the future. Farrell continues:

I don’t think I have ever seen a conference presentation at APSA that couldn’t have been improved by being cut down to five minutes with inexorable advance, requirement for advance planning over what you actually want to say and so on.

I think the APSA presentations I have seen recently are a lot better than the ones I saw in previous years. (I may simply be doing a better job of choosing panels with better presenters.) But I still see some horrible presentations as well. Presenters should not have more than 5-6 slides for a 12-minute presentation. Ignite format for APSA would be interesting.

The recent spates with Joe Wilson, Serena Williams and Kanye West left some people wondering if America lost its civility. If you enjoy pop culture or politics it may seem that way.

I try to have good manners—be polite, civil and friendly to both people I do not know as well as my friends and family members. I think it makes the world a better place and is important. [HT: MFM]

I walked/bussed to work this morning and had a chance to watch another TED talk. This is an absolutely amazing story of a little girl getting adopted from Korea. The photographer who facilitated the process in the late 1970s—Rick Smolan—is a great storyteller. Watch this instead of a sitcom episode.

Dan Benjamin started this new website. It is a good concept and I like the style, but the content is disappointing. I’m not sure who the target audience is—it might be roughly the same as that of Cookie magazine.

Cases in point: Hand-crank locomotive for $4,100. Anonymous Nakashima-inspired chair for $550. I love my son and would like him to have fun and have a good place to sit, but I’m never paying those prices. The fact that Benjamin sought advice from the founder of Uncrate probably contributed to this.

Clay Shirky on collaborative arrangements replacing traditional institutions—e.g. firms, journalists, etc.—given the right information infrastructure. What he argues is happening at the domestic level seems to be how international institutions (e.g. the GATT/WTO) have long functioned—by decentralizing implementation and enforcement. In that sense, international institutions have always been closer to collaborative arrangements than traditional institutions at the domestic level. This is especially true since whatever collective outcomes that international institutions seek to generate, the state-level behaviors have to be self-enforcing like Flickr users voluntarily choosing to tag their photos with certain keywords in Shirky’s example.

An interesting question is whether international institutions will better utilize the information technology infrastructure that has emerged and is evolving. The best example so far of such an attempt seems to be http://www.globaltradealert.org/

Okay, so, that’s what was in my keyboard just now. I didn’t know it was in there when I sat down to compliment Buffering on his 105 words that made me think about how I love little stories. This is why writing is fucked up and awesome and makes a 42-year-old man cry about cigarettes and Pete Rose and an ugly green car on a perfectly temperate Sunday afternoon.

Your keyboard will have different things in it than mine does, of course. But, it’s impossible to know what’s in there until you’ve made the clackity noise for a few minutes. You think you know what’s in there. But you don’t. It’s not your brain that makes the clackity noise, it’s your fingers.

This is a take by Merlin Mann that pulls together 1) the importance of collecting stories (by Jonathan Harris) and 2) the fleeting/uncertain nature of creative writing (by Elizabeth Gilbert). I agree with his call for changing the culture of banality online. [Via Kung Fu Grippe; HT marco]

This is clearly a case of property rights gone awry:

As things now stand, approximately 10,000 cases have been filed and another 20,000 or so await filing. That’s 30,000 cases for 18,000 Palauans – quite a handsome ratio. And that’s not just because a few Palauans are filing a lot of cases, for one estimate is that 99 percent of Palauans are involved in land claims.

What’s fascinating is why whatever common-law system of explicit property rights they imposed could not approximate the traditional system that was in place.