Malcolm’s Gladwell New Book: Outliers
Following on the huge success of The Tipping Point and Blink, Gladwell’s publisher has announced his third book: Entitled Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don’t. According to the Amazon description:
In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of “outliers”—the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.
The description from the Little, Brown catalog includes:
Outliers is a book about success. It starts with a very simple question: what is the difference between those who do something special with their lives and everyone else? In Outliers, we’re going to visit a genius who lives on a horse farm in Northern Missouri. We’re going to examine the bizarre histories of professional hockey and soccer players, and look into the peculiar childhood of Bill Gates, and spend time in a Chinese rice paddy, and investigate the world’s greatest law firm, and wonder about what distinguishes pilots who crash planes from those who don’t. And in examining the lives of the remarkable among us—the brilliant, the exceptional and the unusual—I want to convince you that the way we think about success is all wrong.
Sounds interesting to say the least. Only problem is the book doesn’t release until November of this year.
Malcolm's Gladwell New Book: Outliers
Following on the huge success of The Tipping Point and Blink, Gladwell’s publisher has announced his third book: Entitled Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don’t. According to the Amazon description:
In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of “outliers”—the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.
The description from the Little, Brown catalog includes:
Outliers is a book about success. It starts with a very simple question: what is the difference between those who do something special with their lives and everyone else? In Outliers, we’re going to visit a genius who lives on a horse farm in Northern Missouri. We’re going to examine the bizarre histories of professional hockey and soccer players, and look into the peculiar childhood of Bill Gates, and spend time in a Chinese rice paddy, and investigate the world’s greatest law firm, and wonder about what distinguishes pilots who crash planes from those who don’t. And in examining the lives of the remarkable among us—the brilliant, the exceptional and the unusual—I want to convince you that the way we think about success is all wrong.
Sounds interesting to say the least. Only problem is the book doesn’t release until November of this year.
Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks
Ordered myself a copy today of Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks. Can’t wait for it to arrive. I realize how important forms are to business development, lead tracking, and communications. But if I am honest with myself I don’t know enough about them and tend to just throw them together at the last minute.
Lessig’s Future of Ideas Free Download
Larry Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of its Center for Internet and Society. He is founder and CEO of the Creative Commons and a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. So it shouldn’t be much of a surprise he knows what he is talking about. And following his own teachings, that information wants and should be free, his magnificent book The Future of Ideas is now available as a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licensed download.
In The Future of Ideas, Lawrence Lessig explains how the Internet revolution has produced a counterrevolution of devastating power and effect. The explosion of innovation we have seen in the environment of the Internet was not conjured from some new, previously unimagined technological magic; instead, it came from an ideal as old as the nation. Creativity flourished there because the Internet protected an innovation commons. The Internet’s very design built a neutral platform upon which the widest range of creators could experiment. The legal architecture surrounding it protected this free space so that culture and information–the ideas of our era–could flow freely and inspire an unprecedented breadth of expression. But this structural design is changing–both legally and technically.
This now means that The Future of Ideas, Free Culture, and Code v2 for free download. They are all important works and well worth your time.
Lessig's Future of Ideas Free Download
Larry Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of its Center for Internet and Society. He is founder and CEO of the Creative Commons and a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. So it shouldn’t be much of a surprise he knows what he is talking about. And following his own teachings, that information wants and should be free, his magnificent book The Future of Ideas is now available as a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licensed download.
In The Future of Ideas, Lawrence Lessig explains how the Internet revolution has produced a counterrevolution of devastating power and effect. The explosion of innovation we have seen in the environment of the Internet was not conjured from some new, previously unimagined technological magic; instead, it came from an ideal as old as the nation. Creativity flourished there because the Internet protected an innovation commons. The Internet’s very design built a neutral platform upon which the widest range of creators could experiment. The legal architecture surrounding it protected this free space so that culture and information–the ideas of our era–could flow freely and inspire an unprecedented breadth of expression. But this structural design is changing–both legally and technically.
This now means that The Future of Ideas, Free Culture, and Code v2 for free download. They are all important works and well worth your time.
Everything Bad is Good for You
One of the underlining concepts of Steven Johnson’s Everything is Bad is Good for You is the Sleeper Curve. Taken from Woody Allen’s mock sci-fi film, Sleeper has a sequence where scientists from 2173 are stunned, amazed even that twentieth-century society failed to realize the nutritional merits of cream pies and hot fudge.
Johnson builds off the Sleeper Curve concept to argue that pop culture is actually making us smarter, no matter what the politicians and most academics would like you to believe. I’ve tried to explain this concept to a number of my friends who have children, many times unsuccessfully. Many of them seem to fall into the camp that both TV and video games are a “bad” thing. I argue that age-safe video games and TV isn’t a bad thing, if taken in moderation. I generally use two examples.
Green Acres and Dragnet used to be two of the highest ranking prime time TV shows. Catch a few episodes on TV Land then watch a show like Lost or Heroes. The differences in the complexity of the storyline is stunning. Or take a game like Pong or Techmo Bowl. Now compare those games against Final Fantasy XII or Madden ’07. Again the differences are so stark I can’t even put them into words.
Now Johnson does a better job of explaining the changes in our media, but in a nutshell he argues that TV shows have moved away from a single, basic narrative to a multithread narrative on much more complex topics that are interrelated at multiple levels. And the narratives last not a single show, but multiple seasons, building upon themselves to become even more complex.
Today’s video games also share the same type of multithread narrative, but some, like Grand Thief Auto, take it to anther level cause you play in an “open” environment where the gamer shapes their own narrative.
Now again I am for moderation. It is still important that people actually read a book from time to time. Go for a walk. Lay in a field and stare at the stars. Play a pick-up softball game. Talk to people face-to-face. But doing any of those things 24/7, as with TV and video games, isn’t a good idea either.
I say all of this cause as we start to enter a presidential election video games and TV programs are going to come under attack by those looking to score cheap political points on topics they don’t really know much about.
Now I know to a larger extent my audience here on the blogsphere will understand what I am saying far more then the “general” public (any maybe myself). But I caution you all, regardless of political party, to voice your concerns when you’re told the Simpsons and Grand Theft Auto are destroying our civilization.
We live in an exciting time from a media point-of-view. Heck, a world where a major presidential candidate even have campaign offices in the virtual world of Second Life. But I worry that in this presidential election cycle the “fear” card will be played and new laws will be introduced that will stifle these industries and the choices both you and I have moving forward. Ok, rant ended.
