Using NodeXL,  a super-cool plugin for Microsoft Excel, you can (relatively) easily graph the relationships you have with the people you swap emails with in Microsoft Outlook.

NodeXL’s supercoolness is secondarily amplified by it’s cost and ease-of-use.  You can download it here.  The plug-in adds network graphs to the pies, bars, lines and other standard graphs we all know and love.  On the email part – NodeXL leverages the index that supports search in Outlook and aggregates the relationships represented between the From/To fields, and if you so desire, the To/CC and To/BCC lines.

Here’s my full universe –

As quick example, I’ve sectioned out the bits that are blue above in the graph below.

I’m an analyst and am directly connected to an account manager here at work with whom I exchange many mutual emails in a direct from/to fashion.  You can see from the big blue arrow pointed from the account manager to me that most of this communication is one way…

The account manager in turn is connected to other people on the client side – emails I’ve been CCed on to stay in the loop – but folks with whom I have not had the old from/to.

Have a wack at it yourself!

-Sean

This led me to an interesting question of our local community; the greater Burlington, VT area, what can be done to encourage higher population density to non-farming individuals in the local area? This leads to the areas local institutions; what if the local colleges encouraged more of their students to live in dormitory style living in centralized campus locations rather then spread out across the community.

The larger institutions like, the University of Vermont, Champlain College, and Saint Michael’s college should be encouraged to build and maintain larger on campus communities to the point of creating disincentives for living off campus. By moving local students back on campus (to be fair I am currently unaware of the current on-campus/off-campus proportions at each institution) the local void in housing could be filled by year-round local residences. This would likely cause a decrease in local rents from decreased demand that would then be filled by residence moving back into a centralized area.

Main considerations would be how to encourage local institutions to move students back to campus. Some arrangement with the college would need to be made, or incentives given to the schools to build new larger facilities and set aside funds to maintain this added expense. At the school level they have the authority to require students live on campus, however during a transition period may offer incentives of living on campus, or disincentives for populations living off campus. To the landlords currently renting to students there would be a significant shift to the types of apartments available. It would be an opportunities for local communities to do in depth health and safety inspections of the current apartment stock, as well as a temporary reassessment/relaxation of property tax for landlords with tenant voids. While the local property owners might loose tenets in the beginning the void likely would be filled by local residences in coming months to move closer to town centers and work places.

The political will need to over come would be from the schools, local governments. At the school they would need to change policy that they my feel present them as non-competitive (students else where can move off campus and might choose to go to other institutions). This might be easily overcome by using the change as an advertisement to encourage environmental and civilly minded students. The local governments would need to have the ability and resolve to put some sort of incentives to the schools to build new facilities and work with local landlords during the proposed inspection process and willingness to relax taxation during the transition when students normally would fill the buildings.

- Jon

Students enrolled in Appalachian State University’s Fundraising course taught by Dr. Lynn Gregory, will be working this year to learn about the organizational needs and context of Tumul K’in while they fundraise to help students at Tumul K’in pay for tuition.

Tuition at Tumul K’in costs just $250 USD a year and that cost covers lodging, classes, meals, books and uniforms.  Many students at Tumul K’in are unable to pay their tuition and so the Fundraising class at Appalachian State University will be initiating a campaign to help cover their costs and help provide students with an education.

Please consider donating a little or a lot to help fund a high school education for students at Tumul K’in. To make a donation click below.  All donations are secure and backed up by The Initiative, an Educational 501(c)3 Non-profit organization.

The Students of Tumul K'in Celebrating at an Annual Parade in Punta Gorda Town, Belize

Visiting the local Maya temple, Lubaantun.

We create streams of data about ourselves

The information generated by our credit card purchases has long been tracked by credit card companies to predict the risk that you won’t pay back your balance.   Your GPS device may allow a car thief to point your car towards your “home” or recent destinations…   cell phone are constantly broadcasting their presence to terrestrial towers, betraying their general – and sometimes very specific – vicinity.

We spawn data.  It’s a fact of life.  This reality is the basis of behavioral targeting.

Behavioral targeting is most prevalent in the world of online advertising – but is best understood generally.  Behavioral targeting is the practice of predicting future behavior, based on past behavior available in databases.

It’s smart marketing, and it can be eerily accurate. Behavioral targeting is used pervasively in online advertising – our online activity is tracked and used to serve us the ads that we’re most likely to click, based on the webpages we’ve been browsing.

Urinal-poster advertising, by contrast, seems to suffer with just basic targeting issues.

Behavioral targeting is not without its critics, significant privacy concerns have been raised in high-profile clashes. Facebook, massive networker of all things social, has had it’s various behavioral initiatives challenged by the likes The Consumerist and MoveOn who had varying levels of success.  The issue has been enough of a pain point for Facebook that they have a Chief Privacy Officer assigned to the issue.  And the position isn’t filled by  a small potato – Facebook’s CPO is a serious contender for Attorney General in California.

AOL responded to the behavioral targeting issue with a cartoon video.   The video explained how a penguin that visits anchovygourmet.com could be served an anchovy ad when visiting penguinnews.com later that day.  It’s cute, but doesn’t ease the creepy for me.

On the legislative front the FTC revised it’s guidelines for behavioral advertising, which comprises four principles;  transparency and consumer control, reasonable security and limited data retention, affirmative consent for changes to data collection, and an “opt-in/opt-out” principle.

In June, five organizations from the marketing and advertising industry published a set of voluntary behavioral marketing guidelines in response to the FTC’s own guidelines. With a little wordsmithing and addition, industry was able to up the principle-count from the FTC’s four to seven; education, transparency, consumer control, data security, material changes, sensitive data and accountability.

Curious how this sounds to our  audience. Does the legislative effort satisfy you? Is behavioral targeting too creepy to be allowed? Is it a fact of life?

-Sean

President Nicolas Sarkozy speaking at the Sorbonne University, Sept 14th 2009

Today French President Nicolas Sarkozy described his intent to create a happiness indicator for the French economy, a metric focused on maintaining an account of development of well-being instead of the traditional income or GDP.  In his speech at the Sorbonne University in Paris he spoke the words, “The crisis doesn’t only make us free to imagine other models, another future, another world.  It obliges us to do so,” he said.

Sarkozy’s speech is a major landmark in the trend towards using measures of happiness in economics.  As frequent readers may already know, The Commonage is involved in a collaborative study with the Brookings Institution in Washington DC to study aspects of well-being and supports complementing traditional economic indicators with measurements that focus more closely on the state of our collective well-being.   Sarkozy’s plan was based on a report supported by two Nobel Prize winning Economists, Joseph Stiglitz and Armatya Sen and is being seen by many as an insightful, timely and commendable step in the right direction. “What we measure affects what we do,” said Prof Stiglitz of Columbia University. “If we have the wrong measures, we will strive for the wrong things.” (FT)

In times of strife it is common for us to over-correct and so while I fully support, and in no way mean to detract from the enthusiasm that is due to Sarkozy’s plan, I’m compelled to also discuss the potential issues involved of using happiness as an economic indicator so that we may best avoid them.  With that said we should consider what happiness research can and cannot tell us about the state of our citizenry and thereby our economy.

What GDP and other consumption-based indicators tell economists is the nature of revealed preferences, those preferences which are displayed by the implication of our consumption.  Revealed preferences are vital indicators of our intent, however also include flaws centered around the fact that our consumption choices are often the result of economically irrational behaviors such as addiction, social norms, incomplete information and so forth.  What happiness surveys offer is insight into subjective preferences, which are the preferences we state directly and without implication.  Quite predictably these subjective preferences also include flaws, and they are centered around our inability to accurately estimate our well-being or choose what we may later determine to be good for our happiness.  It’s this interrelation between revealed and subjective preferences that is the basis for the argument why happiness-based and income-based indicators must be interpreted by economists to complement and not compete with one another.  A lot of the debate around GNH indicators and the Economics of Happiness at-large includes a somewhat reactionary “out with the bad, in with the new” sentiment.  The test however will be to see how economists are able to harmonize all indicators, economic, psychological and environmental, in order to best guide us toward a sustainable global well-being.

I’m confident that Sarkozy’s speech on Monday Sept 14th 2009 will be a landmark in the economic progress of redirecting our global economy toward more relevant measurements of well-being, but at the same time we can do well to preempt our potential missteps in the attempt to pave a better path toward our happiness.

- Jeff

In Brazil, single-species, also known as monoculture, plantations implemented with the focused intent of sequestering carbon have resulted in several unintended consequences.  Now, a growing consensus is emerging showing the negative impacts that plantation projects have on biodiversity, groundwater use, and soil fertility (Smith 2007).

It appears that geo-engineering will be at least part of the solution to climate change.  However, solving the challenge presented by the limited atmospheric waste capacity of our atmosphere is a whole-systems problem.  It must be addressed on all fronts for the issue to be successfully resolved, not from the single perspective of trying to soak up as much carbon as physically possible.  Perhaps the waste absorption capacity of the atmosphere can be supplanted by future technologies but we should first imagine what such a world might look like before we begin working towards such a future.

Smith, K. (2007). The Carbon Neutral Myth: Offset Indulgences for your Climate Sins. Amsterdam, Carbon Trade Watch.

-Dave

The author defines peak oil as “the theory that geological scarcity will at some point make it impossible for global petroleum production to avoid falling, heralding the end of the oil age and, potentially, economic catastrophe”(Lynch 2009).  While advocating that greater technology is making more oil accessible and promoting alternative solutions such as tar sands, the author fails to mention the idea of energy-return-on-energy-invested (EROEI) even once.

While EROEI is not directly tied to peak oil, this concept is a major reason that tapping the remaining oil is making less sense over time.   EROEI is “the ratio of the amount of usable energy acquired from a particular energy resource to the amount of energy expended to obtain that energy resource”.  So regardless of how much oil is actually left in the earth, if the amount of usable energy acquired from that energy source is less than the energy acquired from the resource, we should be re-assessing whether this resource should really be the primary fuel driving our economy.  It is my opinion that any article on peak oil would do well to include EROEI in any future discussions.

- Dave

Like so many aspects of modern American life, the term “hipster” can be traced to African American Jazz culture in the early 20th century. The word “hip” derives from “hep” – a long-used term with African roots loosely meaning “to see”.  ”Hep” was employed in the form of “hepcat”  during the early days of jazz and was used to describe people that were “in the know”.

As jazz led to swing and the circle of those “in the know” grew, “hepcat” eventually gave way to “hipster”.

The original hipsters were lydian-mixing black musicians.

Hipster actually has two wikipedia entries – one referring to its original use described above, and another for the modern iteration of the term. The second entry aptly characterizes that je ne sais quoi of modern hipsterdom, but in cleaving the old and new uses of the term we do little justice to its evolution and origin.

Wikipeida maps the term “hippie” to hipster, and claims that “hippie” was first used in the 60’s to describe beatniks in the famed Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.

The term “beat generation” was introduced by Jack Kerouac in 1948 and the term “beatnik” entered the popular lexicon in a few years earlier as a way to characterize the lifestyles portrayed in Kerouac’s novels. The behaviors and values of “the beatnik” were so directly attributable to jazz culture that “jazznick” was a popular variant of the moniker.

So lets re-cap. “Hep” and “Hepcat” gave way to “hip” and “hipster” in about the 40’s as an authenticity differentiator in the world of jazz. “Beatnik” arose in the 50’s and 60’s to describe the barret-doned white jazz enthusiasts and the cultural iconoclasm they collectively embodied.  ”Hippie” was used to label a particular group of beatniks in the 60’s that were more affirmatively embracing the alternative lifestyles developed by their contemporaries.

“Hipster” has now re-emerged in the 1990’s as a slang term used in a very general (and often self-contradictory) way to describe younger people embracing alternative lifestyles.

The term “hipster” evolved as a way for people to identity those that were “in the know” as the elements of in-the-knowness slowly leaked into mainstream society and the distinction between leaders and followers became less clear. This struggle is nothing new. It’s the same revulsion that so many die-hard fans had when Phish released their arguably-pop album Farmhouse. The same phenomenon explains the rift between die-hard Red Sox fans and those that wear pink Red Sox hats.

It is the threshold where the incubators of social trends decry the shark to have been jumped and it is the point at which our cultural vanguards begin working on the next big thing.

Be afraid – we’re all already wearing aviators. I personally fear any wider distribution of Pabst or plaid that might result from even more mass adoption of the hipster lifestyle.  There is also little  room for any additional sarcasm in modern discourse.

However.

I think poetry and psychedelic rock are already in need of a revival, and I can’t wait to be a one of the squares that co-opts their new iterations from the beatniks of 2010 and the hippies of 2020.

-Sean

Glenn Beck is a master at playing the sensationalism game. The Glenn Beck Program receives around six million radio listeners a day and Glenn Beck aired on Fox news with solid numbers — until recently when his comments on the show caused twenty sponsors to drop their advertising on his show. He even recently wrapped up a comedy tour– Glenn Beck’s Common Sense Comedy Tour– in which Mr. Beck toured six cities and had screenings of the tour in some movie theaters for one night only. The man has a following and is able to pay the bills — and that is great for him but lets keep Glenn Beck where he belongs.

Like false news stories it would be nice if other media outlets ignored people like Glenn Beck. Let the man speak but stop highlighting what was said no matter how sensational. To turn on news networks like CNN or MSNBC or tune into some talk radio hosts and hear about what Glenn Beck said today is disappointing — let his comments stay on Fox News and his own radio frequency. In Glenn Beck’s Common Sense Comedy Tour Glenn Beck plays Glenn Beck by over exaggerating the stigma applied to him by other media talk show hosts and news outlets. The man is not even a comedian but he is getting his material from what others say about him and performing for sold out crowds.

Some will say that it is good to expose false news stories and sensationalism for what they are and, yes, it is good and one of the roles of journalism to do just that — but then move on.  Stop constantly pushing certain people and sensational stories into the limelight and eventually these ideas and people fade away or at least are confined to their long time core audiences.

-Andrew H. A. Meggison

Andrew H. A. Meggison is a graduate of Clark University with a BA in Political Science and currently a Graduate Student attending Northeastern University.