The J Curve - A new way to understand why nations rise and fall, by Ian Bremmer

Ahhh…economics. I’ve done a bit of economics at uni. You know the one - more graphs without units on their axes than you can poke a stick at (and of course, as anyone with an engineering/physics/maths background will tell you, this is “really bad” TM). Eco101 is actually quite valuable in a degree - I don’t know why more courses don’t insist on it. If you haven’t done it then I’ll present you the first three weeks of the course through the next graph.

The curve can move up or down depending on some country-specific factors. If the price of oil rises, for example, a country that is a large exporter of oil will receive more money which enables the government to increase the stability of the country without having to increase its openness.

Ok, got that? Note the lack of units? Note how the graph isn’t defined for all values of price? Ok - that’s all you need to know.

Welll…I tell a lie, actually. It’s not all you need to know, it’s all my economics lecturers implied I needed to know. The thing is, the most important factor in a market is consumers. Consumers are not rational. Therefore, whilst drawing up silly graphs might be fine in theory, in practise observations of consumer behaviour don’t fit to the pretty lines.

(At this point, if you’re still reading you’re probably vaguely interested in the subject matter. Good on you! Here’s a reward. Jessica Hagy’s website contains more graphs without units on their axes but they’re really funny/thoughtful graphs and Venn diagrams. It’s a like a social mathematician’s ultimate comic.)

But wait, isn’t this review filed under ‘Politics’? Yes it is. Bremmer’s book discusses the stability of nations being a function of how open they are to the outside world. If you were to plot stability versus openness the graph would look a bit like the letter ‘J’, hence the title.

So just looking at the J Curve graphically what can we imply? Nations that are closed (left side countries) can be more stable than slightly more open countries but cannot ever be as stable as the most open countries (right side countries). We can also see that for a country to progress from a very open system to a very closed one (or vice versa) it must, at some point, suffer a period of instability (the depths of the J curve) as it transitions.

The curve can also move up or down depending on some country-specific factors. For a large exporter of oil, a rise in the price of oil gives the government more money which it can use to increase the stability of the country without making it more open. Hence, the entire J curve rises upwards.

Finally, notice the slope of the graph. It is easy for a left side nation to fall into the depths of the curve quite quickly but it will take a right side state a lot more effort to do so. Likewise, little effort is required for a close state to reach stability but an open state has to work much harder to achieve the same level.

That, in a nutshell, is the gist of chapter 1. The remainder of the book discusses three far left side nations (North Korea, Cuba and Iraq under Saddam), three borderline left side nations (Iran, Saudi Arabia and Russia), two nations in (at the time) the depths of the curve (South Africa and Yugoslavia) and three right side nations (Turkey, Israel and India). The penultimate chapter is devoted entirely to China, such is the importance Bremmer places on it.

In each of these country dossiers Bremmer gives the reader a brief history of the country in question, then justifies why it resides on the given point of the J curve. Although on the whole I found these parts fascinating, as I ploughed through I began to find Bremmer’s language to be somewhat repetitive - I felt that it went beyond hammering home his message.

In the end I found myself agreeing with Bremmer’s central concept. The model holds up well, although as he notes, China is attempting to cross from the left to the right of the curve without bottoming out into chaos so time will tell as to whether the model is broken by the worlds most populous nation.

Having said all of that I would hesitate to recommend this book to someone with only a passing interest in world politics and/or history. As I mentioned, I didn’t find the pages slipping away under my fingers. It certainly is a book for thinking. It is not, as the cover jacket suggests, the Freakonomics of world political books. This will not bring a whole new group of people who have never cared about politics before to the field. It will most likely only interest people with an existing affection for global politics.

So…to buy or not to buy? I’d suggest getting it if you’re a die hard fan of global politics, but you could also watch one of the lectures Bremmer gave to Google which would probably satisfy most people.

TutorLinker is a Web 2.0-style service designed to match tutors with students. It uses the Google Maps API to show where potential tutors are located in your city. Tutors register their qualifications, hourly rate, distance they’re prepared to travel, subjects they want to tutor and their time availability. When students (or their parents) find someone they like they can view their profile and send them an email message to arrange something.

No, this isn’t my profile

There’s probably going to be a few problems that tutorlinker is going to face. The first is popularity. In the populous areas of the US for example, I would guess (and I am just guessing) that the site will be popular enough to sustain a fair amount of business. In the relatively sparse areas the tutor selection and the demand for tutors will probably be sporadic. Doing a quick check, there are three tutors in the whole of Australia at the moment (including me). It will take a bit of effort for it to reach a critical mass of both supply and demand.

Second on the list is the ’stranger danger’ fear. Tutorlinker make it clear that background checks are the responsibility of the student/parent and not the site itself. With the MySpace paedophilia/murder stories hitting the news every few weeks you can’t blame parents for being at least a little suspicious. Tutorlinker strongly encourages that tutors include a photo in their profile which provides at least a basic step towards the ‘creep factor’. Having said that though, not all bricks and mortar do police checks on their tutors, either.

I don’t have any major gripes about the site itself. There are some internationalisation issues that could be fixed, though. Some of the subjects tutors can elect to tutor in are very American-ised and certainly don’t apply to Australia. The second is the massive range of subjects. Whilst this may seem like a positive, when the site is in its infancy (in terms of Australian content, at least) it probably wouldn’t hurt to scale down the choices. There doesn’t really need to be six different maths choices for high school tutoring.

Overall, TutorLinker looks promising - maybe I’ll even get a job from it.

(via Lifehacker)

Thunderbird as an RSS reader is dead. Here is why…

I’m a slave to my RSS feeds. I like to be the first (or almost the first) to see stuff. That’s just how I am. Google Reader is an online feed-reader created by, funnily enough, Google. I’ve switched over from Thunderbird to Google Reader and I’ll never look back. This isn’t really an apples-to-apples comparison though. One is a standalone application that needs to be installed and can only really be used on one pc. The other is an AJAXy Web 2.0 application that can be run wherever you have a web browser.

But first, what is an RSS feed? You may have a few favourite sites that you check every day. I know I do. Then there’s sites that you might check every month or so because they don’t update very often or whatever. However, holding a list of all these sites in your head can suck, especially when you forget about a site and it slips away. RSS feeds deliver updates to your favourite sites so they’re right your fingertips. Not only that but they pretty much get to you right away.

I used to use Thunderbird for my RSS feeds. Once per day I’d open it up, click get new messages, wait for my computer to go crazy (Thunderbird was really slow when fetching new messages) and then see the day’s RSS feeds. This was fine but there were a few things that were getting annoying:

When you start subscribing to quite a few feeds the list down the left hand side of all your sites can get very long and clumbersome to navigate. This happens a lot if you have feeds that aren’t updated very often (which I do).

I know that above example is rather benign but imagine having a whole screen’s worth of not-updated feeds and one or two updated ones. Imagine having Thunderbird open all day so only one or two feeds update at any one time. Heaps annoying!

How does Google Reader combat this? It just hides feeds that don’t have anything unread. Or in other words, you only see feeds for which there are new items. How simple!

And of course you’ll note that on the off-chance that you actually want to see an old feed then you just click the show all button.

My second annoyance, and one that I didn’t realise was a problem until I tried out Google Reader is retention. If you were using Thunderbird as I was and you only opened it once per day you were actually missing RSS items. For sites with many updates (eg. Kotaku, Blues News, CNet, Slashdot, etc.) this is a problem because there is actually no indication that you may have missed something. Because Google takes care of fetching the actual feeds for you, you won’t have any items fall down the crack.

The next thing is less of a Thunderbird annoyance and more of a Google feature. The problem is that the Thunderbird philosophy regarding RSS items is to treat them more or less the same as email messages. This is a fundamental design error (in my opinion, anyway) because people read RSS items differently to email. Using expanded view in Google Reader is great. It basically loads all the pages at once so you can scroll through without having to click on the individual RSS items. Compare browsing Lifehacker - which one is easier do you think?


Of course, Google Reader can do pretty much the same list view that Thunderbird does, except links open in a new tab (which could be a good or bad thing, depending on your preference).

If you’re familiar with Gmail’s starring system you’ll be right at home with Google Reader. See something you want to come back to? Just click on the star this post button and it’ll be added to your starred items. You can also click the share button on RSS items you find interesting and Google will create a webpage just with your shared items on it - an instant website without pretty much all the work done for you!

Finally of course there’s the keyboard shortcuts which makes going through all your items a snap. I’m still discovering better ways to do mine, I know that.

Overall, I’d suggest you just try it out! You don’t have to install anything, you can import your existing feeds from Thunderbird or pretty much any other RSS program - you just need a Google account, which is a piece of cake to get.

Recommended.

http://reader.google.com

So I saw Remote Memory in JB’s the other day when I was looking for a copy of Figure 8 to give to a friend. I thought - why not, I mean I have pretty much everything else related to Elliott Smith. If you don’t know about him, Elliott Smith is a singer/songwriter. I suppose you could call his music indie-rock, although that term is fast becoming so broad that it doesn’t really mean that much anymore. You can tell that Smith listened to a lot of Beatles. I described it the other day as ‘post-Beatles’ and although it’s a little wankish I think it’s fairly accurate. Tragically, his career was cut short (sorry for the pun in bad taste. If you don’t get it click the link underneath his name and see how he died) just as he seemed to be getting his life together.

There’s two kinds of good covers in my opinion. There’s the cover where the coverer takes the song in a whole new direction and the other where the coverer makes subtle changes. Unfortunately the only example of the first case, Leeroy Lee’s version of Southern Belle, falls flat on it’s face. Although kudos should be given for adding a distinctly subcontinental feel it killing the tempo to a crawl doesn’t really suit it. In striking contrast, Edoardo Santoni’s cover of Baby Britain feels immensely Beatle-ish whilst also retaining the multi-layered vocalising melodies that so personified Smith’s work. I was waiting for the drums to kick in but they never did, a gutsy move but one that I think pays off.

I’m not going to go through every track but I didn’t think that The Ramalamas lead singer (whoever he is) had the voice to pull off Waltz #2 (XO) which is a shame because it’s one of my favourite Smith songs. Damian Robison does an excellent acoustic version of Shooting Star. If you’ve heard any of Smith’s live sets (here’s the archive.org link but there are others floating around) you’ll probably agree that his voice is a pretty darn good match.

Finally, a mention to the chicks. They’re all brilliant. I just can’t express more eloquently than that. Lisa Hill, Jodi Martin, Melanie Horsnell, Bridie O’Brien - take a bow. I should probably say more but there’s nothing to nit-pick. The sombre tone of the cello really tips O’Brien’s version of Between the Bars into ‘wow’ territory.

Recommended (if you have Figure 8, XO and From a Basement)