*michael parekh on IT*

ON A VIDEO HOMAGE RE-IMAGINED

ROCKS AND ROLLS

One can't be too sure about most things these days, but one thing that is almost a sure thing is that the query "#TBRB" is going to be one of the top trending topics on Twitter within a day or two of September 9th.  TBRB, as Dan Neil of the LA Times explains, stands for "The Beatles: Rock Band", and

"... will consume much of the industry's advertising bandwidth this summer ahead of its Sept. 9 release.
A collaboration between MTV Games' Harmonix and the Beatles' Apple Corps Ltd., TBRB -- which had its press debut at the E3 gaming convention in Los Angeles this month -- lets players stand in the Beatles' pointy Italian boots, singing and playing along on peripherals fashioned to look like Paul McCartney's Hofner bass and Ringo Starr's Ludwig drum kit. That's coolness measured in Kelvins."

The reason this piece merits a complete read in my view is this description of how the game is introduced to millions who are both familiar, and not too familiar with what made the "Fab Four" so cool:

"Summing up the Beatles' story is no easy task, and yet -- as per the conventions of video game design -- a summing up of the story, a reprise of the narrative world, must be built into the game itself. These mini-movies are called "cinematics," and they usually appear when the game is booted up. They are also crucial parts of a game's advertising campaign, amounting to online commercials that air endlessly and freely on YouTube and Hulu. These films are a rare instance of meritocracy in advertising art; the better they are, the more they get watched.
For TBRB, Harmonix called on London's Passion Pictures and director Pete Candeland, who have created one of the most beautiful and compelling animated sequences I have ever seen, a pocket masterpiece that in its surrealistic bravura is worthy of "Sgt. Pepper" and "Yellow Submarine." It's also startling in its economy, telling the Beatles' saga in 2:45 minutes. Not bad for a video game."

He goes on to describe in detail how this piece is laid out, and is worth reading even though it may be a bit of a spoiler when we all get to see the clip on YouTube, and when the game is out.   Sounds like it's quite a bit of work, and does it's subject ample justice.

ON A NEW PLAYBOOK FOR CHRYSLER

SOMETHING BORROWED

Normally a story on how one auto company plans on turning around another post a merger would not be head turning in the current environment where all auto companies, especially US ones, seem to be driving in only one direction.  But Time magazine's story on how the CEO of Fiat, Sergio Marchionne, plans on making it's investment in Chrysler a success, caught my eye with this bit:

"Since he took over as chief executive of Italy's Fiat in 2004, the chain-smoking Canadian Italian has used Apple as a model, focusing on the way Steve Jobs transformed it from an also-ran computer company into a global icon of cool. 

He encourages Fiat managers to take a close look at Apple's branding prowess and even asks them to benchmark their activities against the company. 

His biggest success at Fiat is the 500 — a tiny, very cool 21st century version of a 52-year-old Italian icon once driven by movie stars such as Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren — which Marchionne calls "our iPod."

Apparently, Mr. Marchionne intends on using a similar playbook at Chrysler, where his company starts with a 20% stake, that could go as high as 35% depending on how the turnaround goes:

"Marchionne is likely to hew closely to the playbook he used to revive Fiat. On June 10, the day Fiat sealed the deal, he announced a thorough organizational revamp. From now on, each of the four individual brands — Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge and Mopar (which makes parts) — will be distinct business units responsible for profit and loss. He also reached deep into the ranks, bypassing the engineers and putting a younger, energetic generation of managers with marketing experience in charge of the brands. "That's a mirror image of what he did at Fiat," says a longtime Fiat executive. Next up: installing Fiat production platforms at Chrysler plants and using Fiat's sales network to sell Jeeps and other Chrysler models around the world."

Who knows, Mr. Marchionne may even come up with a way to make a car dealership as fun to go to as an Apple store.

ON RISKS OF A DOLLAR CARRY TRADE

SLIP-SLIDING AWAY

Barron's this weekend has a piece that may make one's head hurt at first reading, but is important enough to read twice.  Appropriately titled "Money for nothing and bucks for free", the piece makes the following point:

"The dollar could become the main funding source for the carry trade. To review, the carry trade consists of borrowing cheaply to invest in something with a higher return. ("Carry" in this instance refers to the cost of holding or "carrying" an inventory, be it a commodity or a security, which mainly consists of financing charges.)

The preferred way to fund the carry trade had been to borrow in yen, where the cost is near zero. Those yen could be converted into anything with a higher yield, such as U.S. mortgage-backed securities, to garner the spread.

The key risk -- aside from the loss of value of the asset being bought, as with any purchase on margin -- was that the cost of the liability would increase. That would happen with a rise in the yen in this case. And, not coincidentally, the yen rose in tandem with the dollar as carry traders had to unwind their positions during the crisis.

Now, with the Fed pinning the federal funds rate near zero and market rates -- such as the Libor, the London interbank offered rate, a money-market benchmark -- returning to their pre-Lehman collapse relationships versus the Fed's target, borrowing in dollars to fund carry trades looks tempting.

Remember, one of the big risks of a cross-border carry trade is if exchange rates bite you. But what's the risk of borrowing dollars at less than 1% if the U.S. currency's trend is down? Then you're effectively paid to borrow."

Why is this something to potentially worry about?  Well, it puts the Fed in a bit of a difficult position:

"America...still has a substantial current-account deficit that has to be financed with capital inflows. Outflows, as to finance dollar carry trades, would increase the need to attract capital inflows, which would put added downward pressure on the greenback.

Pomboy posits this could potentially lead to the return of such contrivances as the interest-equalization tax, a levy introduced in the 1960s to deter such outflows of capital.

Stanching the free flow of capital would be 21st century equivalent of the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff, which importantly contributed to the contraction of global trade in the Great Depression..."

In choosing between the lesser of two evils, they may opt to allow the dollar to fall rather than impose draconian measures to curb dollar selling or deflating the economy to defend the exchange rate, the traditional medicine.

Then the response of other countries will be key. Do they permit an appreciation of their currencies, which would hurt their export competitiveness? Or do they follow the dollar's decline?

So far, equity markets have viewed the dollar's slide benignly. Stock investors haven't looked beyond the positive impact of exchange-rate moves on earnings of the Standard & Poor's 500.

But as the world sees a lower dollar as a one-way bet, it will be hard to stop."

Good point to keep in mind, especially for financial worry-warts.

* Image source.

ON A CHANGE OF PACE

SOMETHING DIFFERENT

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed the absence of daily posts of late, something I've managed to keep up for over four years of writing this blog. 

A couple of reasons are behind this change of pace, starting with some projects of late that have taken up a lot more of my daily time.

The second reason is an my increasing use of Twitter as a publishing platform, which has taken more of my daily cycles over the past few months. 

As you can see from the Twitter posts column on the upper right, I've been fairly busy publishing items that interest me, and hopefully are interesting for readers.  Please feel free me to follow me at www.twitter.com/mparekh.  I look forward to following you back.

As a result of these two factors, I'm experimenting with a slower pace of publishing on this blog this summer.  The plan is to publish something several times a week, but not necessarily every day.  The posts on Twitter though should be at daily pace, barring scheduling and travel issues.

Thanks as always for your readership and comments.  Look forward to resuming a daily schedule on the blog fairly soon.
* Image source.

ON GOD AND THE BRAIN

SEEKING THE TRUTH

Some new work by scientists at Johns Hopkins University gets at a question long asked by neuro-scientists:

"...is God a delusion created by brain chemistry, or is brain chemistry a necessary conduit for people to reach God?"

As this NPR article, the first in a five-part series by Barbara Bradley Hagerty, goes on to explain:

"...now, some researchers are using new technologies to try to understand spiritual experience. They're peering into our brains and studying our bodies to look for circumstantial evidence of a spiritual world. The search is in its infancy, and scientists doubt they will ever be able to prove — or disprove — the existence of God.

I spent a year exploring the emerging science of spirituality for my book, Fingerprints of God. One of the questions raised by my reporting: Is an encounter with God merely a chemical reaction?"

In a subsequent piece in NPR, the third in the series, the author goes on to recount some experiments by Andrew Newberg from the University of Pennsylvania:

A few years later, Andrew Newberg made that possible. Newberg is a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania and author of several books, including How God Changes Your Brain. He has been scanning the brains of religious people like McDermott for more than a decade..."

"Newberg found that result not only with Baime, but also with other monks he scanned. It was the same when he imaged the brains of Franciscan nuns praying and Sikhs chanting. They all felt the same oneness with the universe. When it comes to the brain, Newberg says, spiritual experience is spiritual experience.

"There is no Christian, there is no Jewish, there is no Muslim, it's just all one," Newberg says.

A little theological dynamite there — but, remember, the research is just beginning."

Theological dynamite indeed, but the nascent field of neurotheology (aka the Science of Spirituality), is intriguing indeed, especially when the studies start to explore the so called "God Chemical":

"...Snyder, who is chairman of the neuroscience department at Johns Hopkins and was not involved in the study, says scientists suspect that a key player in mystical experience is the serotonin system.

The neurotransmitter serotonin affects the parts of the brain that relate to emotions and perceptions. Chemically, peyote, LSD and other psychedelics look a lot like serotonin, and they activate the same receptor."

The whole series is worth reading, including listening to the audio in the interactive guide that accompanies the series.

(Hat-tip to my friend Greg Ostroff for his original tweet that led me to these articles).

* Image source.

ON A HISTORIC SILK ROAD SPOT

CHANGING TIMES

One of the most memorable places I've had the opportunity to visit over the years is the ancient town of "Kashgar in the western-most regions of China.  As this New York Times article earlier this week explains:

A thousand years ago, the northern and southern branches of the Silk Road converged at this oasis town near the western edge of the Taklamakan Desert.
Traders from Delhi and Samarkand, wearied by frigid treks through the world’s most daunting mountain ranges, unloaded their pack horses here and sold saffron and lutes along the city’s cramped streets.
Chinese traders, their camels laden with silk and porcelain, did the same.
The traders are now joined by tourists exploring the donkey-cart alleys and mud-and-straw buildings once window-shopped, then sacked, by Tamerlane and Genghis Khan.

Now, Kashgar is about to be sacked again."

The piece goes on to explain how this historic town is likely to be changed forever as the central government in Beijing moves forward with it's plans to make the town's residents "earthquake proof" by essentially razing the many parts of Kashgar that make it so special for visitors and those interested in preserving history.

"Over the next few years, city officials say, they will demolish at least 85 percent of this warren of picturesque, if run-down homes and shops. Many of its 13,000 families, Muslims from a Turkic ethnic group called the Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs), will be moved.

In its place will rise a new Old City, a mix of midrise apartments, plazas, alleys widened into avenues and reproductions of ancient Islamic architecture “to preserve the Uighur culture,” Kashgar’s vice mayor, Xu Jianrong, said in a phone interview.

Demolition is deemed an urgent necessity because an earthquake could strike at any time, collapsing centuries-old buildings and killing thousands. “The entire Kashgar area is in a special area in danger of earthquakes,” Mr. Xu said."

Some of the motivation here at the highest levels of the Chinese government may be to control and contain some of the separatist efforts in recent years to carve out a more independent identity for the region.  The piece is worth reading in it's entirety.
The place is not very critical in the global scheme of things.  But once visited, it remains etched as a very special place in history.  Here's hoping some of Kashgar is preserved for generations to come.

ON LIGHTS GOING GREEN

SLOW AND STEADY

The New York Times has a good piece outlining the promise and challenges of LED lighting (Light Emitting Diode) to change things for the better for users and the planet.  First the promise:

"Studies suggest that a complete conversion to the lights could decrease carbon dioxide emissions from electric power use for lighting by up to 50 percent in just over 20 years; in the United States, lighting accounts for about 6 percent of all energy use. A recent report by McKinsey & Company cited conversion to LED lighting as potentially the most cost effective of a number of simple approaches to tackling global warming using existing technology..."

"LEDs are more than twice as efficient as compact fluorescent bulbs, currently the standard for greener lighting. Unlike compact fluorescents, LEDs turn on quickly and are compatible with dimmer switches. And while fluorescent bulbs contain mercury, which requires special disposal, LED bulbs contain no toxic elements, and last so long that disposal is not much of an issue."

And then some of the challenges:

"Though the United States Department of Energy calls LED “a pivotal emerging technology,” there remain significant barriers. Homeowners may balk at the high initial cost, which lighting experts say currently will take 5 to 10 years to recoup in electricity savings. An outdoor LED spotlight today costs $100, as opposed to $7 for a regular bulb.

Another issue is that current LEDs generally provide only “directional light” rather than a 360-degree glow, meaning they are better suited to downward facing streetlights and ceiling lights than to many lamp-type settings.

And in the rush to make cheaper LED lights, poorly made products could erase the technology’s natural advantage, experts warn."

The technology driving this innovation is changing rapidly, so that we may see some of these metrics change markedly for the better in the near-term.  In the meantime, LED lighting does seem to be the low-hanging fruit in going green.

ON A COOL KINDLE FEATURE

ONE SMALL STEP

I've been an avid user and fan of Amazon's Kindle book reader since the original launch, having now bought and read hundreds of books on the Kindle and the excellent Kindle for iPhone (free) software App. 
One of the big differences between reading a book on the Kindle (either generation) and the iPhone App has been the ability to highlight the content of the book and write notes in the margin as it were (can't do all that on the Kindle App...yet).
But once the notes are in the Kindle, attached to a specific book, they're kind of trapped in there.  The opportunity around making this stuff available on the web is of course a no-brainer.  Today Amazon took a baby step in this regard, as this TechCrunch piece explains:

"Amazon opened up a new feature on the Kindle: the ability to read your notes and highlights on the Web. Readers have always been able to make notes and highlight text on the Kindle itself. Now those annotations appear on your account at http://kindle.amazon.com. Once you sign in, you can see all your notes.

While this opens up all sorts of possibilities, Amazon is taking a very conservative approach. You can’t share your notes with others. You can’t even edit them in your browser.

All you can do is read them. That makes the feature little more than a Web archive of your notes and highlighted text snippets. It is a convenient feature, but why not enable sharing?

Why can’t I share an excerpt with my friends on Facebook or Twitter (with the beginning of a quote and a short link)?

Amazon needs to connect the Kindle to the rest of the Web.  Hopefully, this is the first step in that direction."

Couldn't agree more.  Hope Amazon's listening.

ON DOWNSIDES OF UNLIMITED TEXTING

TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING

I'm always amazed at the way a young person these days seems to be able to text away at seemingly amazing speeds on the numerical keypad of an otherwise ordinary cell-phone.  And come away thinking how cool it is that they've been able to learn to do that, much as I had to learn how to type on a QWERTY keyboard at their age. 

But this cautionary piece in the New York Times about the potential downside of unlimited texting by teenagers especially, raises some other aspects of this phenomenon.  First the context:

"Spurred by the unlimited texting plans offered by carriers like AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless, American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company — almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier.

The phenomenon is beginning to worry physicians and psychologists, who say it is leading to anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation."

All this may be too early to blame just on texting, as the piece goes on to emphasize,

"The rise in texting is too recent to have produced any conclusive data on health effects. But Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who has studied texting among teenagers in the Boston area for three years, said it might be causing a shift in the way adolescents develop."

Another thing for teenagers to learn to do in moderation, as if the list wasn't already long enough.

ON A COOL HOT SAUCE

AGAINST ALL ODDS
Not too often does one see a full feature in the New York Times on something as prosaic as hot sauce.  Unless of course, the sauce in question happens to be Sriracha hot chili sauce, something that's been a staple for me for a long time.  For those not familiar what's special about the sauce and the company behind it, some background may be in order:

"Some American consumers believe sriracha (properly pronounced SIR-rotch-ah) to be a Thai sauce. Others think it is Vietnamese. The truth is that sriracha, as manufactured by Huy Fong Foods, may be best understood as an American sauce, a polyglot purée with roots in different places and peoples..."
"Sriracha has proved relevant beyond the epicurean realm. Wal-Mart sells the stuff.
So do mom-and-pop stores, from Bristol, Tenn., to Bisbee, Ariz. Sriracha is a key ingredient in street food: The two Kogi trucks that travel the streets of Los Angeles, vending kimchi-garnished tacos to the young, hip and hungry, provide customers with just one condiment, Huy Fong sriracha. "

Do read the article for the full flavor and history of this remarkable product, and the founder behind it.  And  of course try some if you haven't already. 
If you're already a fan, you may want to try a hot chili garlic sauce by Huy Fong that's also become a staple for me. 
One special feature of that sauce, is it's zero calories...but of course a ton of flavor and zest.