“The mind that lies fallow but a single day sprouts up follies
that are only to be killed by a constant and assiduous culture.”
Gregory P. Bufithis, Esq.
Founder/Chairman
The Project Counsel Group
23 December 2015 – A number of years ago I had the opportunity to meet Dominique Senequier, a French businesswoman who is well known in the private equity markets. She is president of Ardian, a private equity firm she created in 1996, spinning it off her long-time employer Axa Private Equity. She told me the trick to happiness and personal success is to be committed to all aspects of your life and disengage from the daily noise and make time for them. You need to disengage, escape the noise, focus on themes and trends. As the scholar Thomas Cahill is fond of noting we tend to learn history and our world in pieces. This is partly because we have only pieces of the past (shards, ostraca, palimpsests, crumbling codices with missing pages) and an ever present information tsunami (news clips, Twitter/Facebook/”name-that-snip” barrages). True, we may never know more than part, as “through a glass darkly”; and all knowledge comes to us in pieces. But if we take a break … force ourselves to take that break from the deafening cacophony of daily noise … we can take the pieces and set them next to one another, examine, contrast and compare, till one attains an overview. It is why I unplug every Sunday, and take four weeks off in the summer, ensconced at my home in Milos, Greece, followed by a Christmas two-week breather. Just to read and ponder.
And such an abundance of material to read. The Project Counsel Group is composed of five business units, their work overlapping to a great extend. Collectively we subscribe to 930 web sites and news feeds. In addition we subscribe to 20 or so print journals.
That, plus the material generated by my attendance and/or participation at such events as Amazon’s re: Invent conference in Las Vegas, the Consumer Electronics and Consumer Technology (CES) trade show in Las Vegas, the Global Competition Review conferences in Washington and Brussels, the International Conference on Machine Learning conference in Lille, the LawTech Europe Congress in Brussels, LawTech New York, LeWeb Paris, the Lift Conference in Geneva, and the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. A lot of material.
As I said: such a plan allows you to contrast and compare, attain an overview, see patterns and themes.
But it is all manageable. We have an infrastructure, a deep learning system — a form of algorithmic technology — into which this information is “poured”, plus a very well trained, crackerjack staff who are empowered to make decisions on my behalf. My information coordinator and social media coordinator know each business unit and funnel the appropriate material to the correct personnel and media feeds. And it provides a wealth of information to our expanding client and subscriber base in the areas of artificial intelligence, legal technology, and digital media.
And I am a voracious reader. I average two to three books a month (a habit my Mom instilled). I travel almost every week and my Karkoa bag has at least one book and a clutch of magazines. My legal assistant knows what I like to read, what I expect to read, what blog posts I am writing, what books I am writing, so she knows what to feed me. In the end, it’s about what you want to create and be, not what you want to have that makes you a successful entrepreneur.
So over this past weekend I plowed through my treasure trove and chose 52 of my favorites links (“stuff I learned”) which are in no particular order, with the help of Tom Whitwell and Paul Jarvis who do the same sort of lists. With my “Big Picture View for 2015” at the end of the list:
- $8 pizza tastes 11% better than $4 pizza, even when the pizza is the same. [Bourree Lam]
- Apple and Star Wars together explain why much of the world around you looks the way it does. [Nicholas de Monchaux]
- 18th Century books looked almost exactly like smartphone screens. [Clive Thompson]
- Every day, WhatsApp handles twice as many messages as the entire global SMS system — around 40bn messages [Benedict Evans]
- Apple uses lasers to tidy up the insides of aluminium iWatches after they’ve been precision machined. Nobody else does that. [Greg Koenig]
- Is Facebook Luring You Into Being Depressed? Social media encourages us to follow those we envy. [Chelsea Wald]
- If you’re selling a product based on emotion, leave out the cents (i.e £16). If you expect purchases to be driven by logic, add some cents (ie £15.97). [Nick Kolenda]
- What Happens When Computers Learn to Read Books? [Caleb Garling]
- Canadian live route map highlights vulnerabilities to NSA spying efforts: they access everything world-wide because of internet routing. [Kieren McCarthy]
- A temple in South India was found to have more than $22 billion in gold hidden away in locked rooms rumored to be filled with snakes. [Rama Lakshmi]
- Trying to simulate the human brain is a waste of bloody time, energy and money. But it will happen because it is a boondoggle. [Peter Hankins]
- The Daily Mail now employs 720 journalists, 200 of them in the US. [Mark Sweney] The Guardian employs 964. [Tom Standage]
- Why are data visualisation experts talking about truth, beauty, revelation and respect?[Eric Brown]
- No, English isn’t uniquely vibrant or mighty or adaptable. But it really is weirder than pretty much every other language. [John McWhorter]
- Amazon’s Alexa bot is not nearly as polite as Siri. iPhone Siri is funnier than Watch Siri. [Ben Hammersley]
- When no ancient chat or post is beyond the grasp of Google, what matters more: the right to forget, or to be remembered? [Alana Massey]
- Uber is delivering 1m rides a day in China, but that’s only 11% of the market, well behind local market leader Didi Kuaidi, which is backed by Alibaba and Tencent. [Sarah Lacy]
- Nixie was the perfect 2015 product: a wearable drone that takes selfies. [David Holmes]
- A clever way to make an e-commerce site really simple is to completely remove the metaphor of a ‘shopping cart’ [Micah Walter]
- Scientists have begun to identify the symphony of biological triggers that powered the extraordinary expansion of the human brain. [Ferris Jabr]
- Machine learning works spectacularly well, but mathematicians aren’t sure why. [Ingrid Daubechies]
- Between January and November this year, 32% of Facebook traffic to publishers disappeared. [Lucia Moses]
- In 2010, the Colombian army communicated with FARC hostages using a pop song with a morse code message hidden in the chorus. [Jeff Maysh]
- “We Are Not Thinking Machines. We Are Feeling Machines That Think.” [Christopher Graves]
- A major advance in computational complexity reveals deep connections between the classes of problems that computers can — and can’t — possibly do. [John Pavlus]
- Leisure, the Basis of Culture: An Obscure German Philosopher’s Timely 1948 Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Human Dignity in a Culture of Workaholism. [Maria Popova]
- “PR people often use the non-fact-checking British press to plant positive stories about their clients, which then become the basis for fact-checking (based on ‘published reports’) in the U.S.” [Michael Wolff]
- The lack of links on Instagram is useful defence against spam [Andrew Watts]
- In December 2014, Vox media re-published 88 old stories on their site. They got 500,000 readers. [Matthew Yglesias]
- Vinyl Me Please, an analog subscription service, earns $2m/year from 7,300 subscribers. [Harley Brown]
- Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives. [Maria Popova]
- Neuroscience alone cannot explain what art is and why humans make it. [Alva Noe]
- How brain architecture leads to abstract thought: some interesting bits on deep learning. [Janet Lathrop]
- Mon-Mon is a stuffed toy that lets children chat with their parents (and learn English) via WeChat [Connie Chan]
- Google Glass briefly found a niche among surgeons wanting to record operations. [Gabe Sterne]
- The power of digital! How do you limit the work of Anwar al-Awlaki, 4 years dead by drone but “alive” on the Net via videos. [Scott Shane]
- Facebook groups are helping refugees to smuggle themselves into Europe undercutting professional smugglers. The cost of a passage to Europe is now dropping in the face of competition. [Matthew Brunwasser]
- You are 23% safer walking the streets of the US today than 10 years ago. [Thomas Baekdal]
- The web is less than 8,000 days old. [Danny Quick]
- Star Wars, Disney and myth-making. The market leader in the industrialization of mythology. And why we love it. [Economist]
- In Silicon Valley, people don’t pitch their idea, because ideas are common and rarely original. Instead, they pitch their growth strategy; how they’re going to build not just a customer base, but an organisation employing tens of thousands of people. [Paul Singh]
- “Some museum or gallery should just do a show called Things You Can Instagram. That’s all anyone wants.” [Russell Davies]
- In the US Supreme Court has bent free speech to protect the super-rich and the ultra-powerful, in America’s winner-take-all society. [Lincoln Kaplan]
- Americans increasing reliance on drugs—prescribed, over-the-counter, illegal, and ordered online like pizza—suggests we have a deeper problem. [Philip Alcabes]
- Some people in book publishing think that “the eBook threat” was a passing fad that is now over, and that this is a good thing. [Porter Anderson]
- In 2011 the Nigerian government handed out 60 million dollars to about 1200 entrepreneurs. Three years later there are hundreds of new companies, generating tons of profit and employing about 7000 new people. Some of the $50,000 grants were given out at random. “What if all the struggle to build infrastructure and services and other stuff was bullshit, and ALL ALONG we should have just been funnelling more cash to the middle and bottom?” [Chris Blattman]
- Programmers of self-driving cars will have to make difficult ethical decisions; “moral algorithms will need to accomplish three potentially incompatible objectives: being consistent, not causing public outrage, and not discouraging buyers” [Jean-François Bonnefon]
- User Error Compromises Many Encrypted Communication Apps. [Rachel Metz]
- Baidu’s Deep-Learning System Rivals People at Speech Recognition. [Will Knight]
- Only 57 percent of India’s smartphone owners ever turn on their data. [Parmy Olson]
- Apple’s new A9 processor for iPhones devices is being manufactured by two different companies, using two entirely different chip designs. This allows Apple to negotiate incredibly hard on price in future, as each company has invested billions in their plants. [Digits to dollars]
- U.S. school reform: technology run amok [Mike Rose]
My favorite books of the year:
“World Order” by Henry Kissinger. Published in 2014, the paperback edition was issued this year. I think it is his best book. As he notes (and he would know) most wars today create waves beyond their borders, and ripples far away. But this is new world, a changed world. It has been shrunk as much by social media as “globalization”. When you can instantly send a picture back from Athens or Berlin to a refugee camp or a shattered city you left only weeks ago, the lure to those who remain becomes stronger. The journey, however hard, however fatal, becomes within reach of the imagination. Within minutes of a murderous attack, we are checking Twitter to see what is being said about it in Syria. The time to think, to reflect, to react has contracted from weeks to hours. Kissinger has a long chapter on technology and how it has overridden observable limits and enabled otherwise smaller, weaker adversaries to escalate.
“The Court and the World” by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. He examines the work of the Supreme Court of the United States in an increasingly interconnected world, a world in which all sorts of activity, both public and private — from the conduct of national security policy to the conduct of international trade — obliges the Court to understand and consider circumstances beyond America’s borders. For those of us working on/following the Microsoft v. United States (aka the “Microsoft Ireland” litigation) I urge you to read it. He notes that it is a world of instant communications, lightning-fast commerce, and shared problems (like public health threats and environmental degradation), and it is one in which the lives of Americans are routinely linked ever more pervasively to those of people in foreign lands: “judicial awareness can no longer stop at the water’s edge”.
“Je tape la manche: Une vie dans la rue“ (My Life As A Panhandler: A Life on the Streets) by Jean-Marie Roughol. This is a bit of a literary marvel in France this year. The book began when Roughol offered to look after the bicycle of Jean-Louis Debre, a former French interior minister, Debre found himself moved by the strategies his new friend said he had to use to survive on the streets and encouraged him to write about his life. As Debre says in the book’s preface, he struggled a lot to live simply. The book is very popular — although royalties don’t begin to reach Jean-Marie Roughol for another 10 months. So with the little money he’s earned so far, he’s bought a smartphone so he can communicate with people who have read his book and now root for him 🙂
The Big Picture in 2015
To me, 2015 was the year it all linked up. Globalization bit back and the biggest news stories tumbled into each other, growing like a cancer. Syria’s civil war is the cauldron where all international turmoil seems to brew, the new power base for jihadists thriving in the chaos as a brutal government clings to power. Syria has been a Petri dish for the latest evolution of jihadist radicalism, seemingly more brutal, more territorially adept than its predecessors.
The numbers fleeing have gone on growing and Europe is the promised land. Even at a time when Europeans doubt their continent, it is largely free of war between its component states, and thus “full of milk and honey in the minds of so many” as Mark Mardell opined in the FT. Our old archenemy, al-Qaeda, seems almost benign by comparison, in the popular imagination at least.
The Islamic State haunts Western politicians, like the Dark Lord in Harry Potter, his very name so powerful that it must not be uttered. That power may stem from the fact that some of its enthusiastic fighters come from European countries, in particular the UK and France, driven to kill, they say, by their belief that the West is in a war with Islam, or at least their brand of it. What happens in Syria fires the ire and imagination of those inclined to despise their European home.
The EU was only just recovering from the seismic shock of the Greek crisis and the near-death experience of the euro, one of the most treasured symbols of European unity. Now, countries that once gleefully tore down the walls are putting up barbed wire fences. Countries that gloried in the symbolism of joining a bloc where passports had become as quaint as the horse and cart are now talking about new borders.
It is another blow to another precious expression of European togetherness. The EU is staggering. Once on its knees, it may not easily rise again.
It goes without saying that the atrocities of Paris on November 13, 2015 were unspeakable and sickening. To find myself (twice this year) resident witness in Paris for events of fear, horror, rage and shock … channeled and shaped into a wave of collective vengeance and hatred … is stupefying. The spectacular bloodshed — the unspeakable scale and intensity of the murders — will only become more outlandish and “creative”.
Over the last 6 years I have been immersed in these events due to my e-discovery war crimes investigation work in the Levant, and my participation at related events in Europe. Since the Paris attacks I have intensified conversations with my multitudinous circle of contacts in the military, law enforcement, cyber world and Middle East (many to be noted and quoted throughout the series described below).
So next month I shall try and leave my normal work world seemingly corralled by algorithms and bring my soul to the chaos of a deadly, dystopic sameness in a series slated for Medium and The Huffington Post France. The series is to be entitled “With what perception must I perceive this?” – ISIS, Paris and the attacks on the West”. The title comes from Simon Kuper, a writer for the FT and a Paris neighbor, who had interviewed a number of people on his street that horrible weekend last month, one of whom asked that very question: “With what perception must I perceive this?”
I have set out a formidable task for this series, dealing with some intractable issues. And … in shameless self-promotion … you can receive the installments by subscribing to my personal blog at www.gregorybufithis.com.
Science and technology will get two chapters. These are the governing concepts of our age. They have brought about advances in human well-being unprecedented in history. Technology has brought about a means of communication permitting instantaneous contact between individuals or institutions in every part of the globe as well as the storage and retrieval of vast quantities of information at the touch of a button. And technology has given us weapons of mass destruction.
And so this networked transparency, and the absence of privacy, has propelled us into a world without limits or order, careening through crises without comprehending them. At one time the most powerful and well-equipped states could only project force over limited distances, in certain quantities, and against so many targets. Ambitious leaders were constrained, both by convention and by the state of communications technology. Now the pace of change has quickened. Asymmetric warfare has become the norm. Traditional doctrines of linear operations against an enemy’s territory are gone. Guerrilla forces, which defend no territory, concentrate on inflicting casualties and eroding the public’s political will. Technological supremacy has turned into geopolitical impotence.
The global scope and speed of communication has eroded the distinction between domestic and international upheavals, and between leaders and the immediate demands of the most vocal groups. Events whose effects once would have taken months to unfold ricochet globally within seconds. Within one hour of the Paris attacks 8 million Tweets were registered … while most traditional media were still trying to produce their copy on the story.
And on that somber note, a holiday wish ….
I want to thank all of our clients and subscribers for their support this year. It has been a wild ride. Subscribers to our various blogs and listservs hit 94,000+. We attended a record 17 conferences and trade shows, and produced 46 video interviews.
Next year will be even more fun. In cooperation with the Association of Tennis Professionals, Babolat, ESPN, IBM, and several other partners we will launch Game, Set, Byte, a video series on the evolution of tennis and technology: the tennis venues, facilities and equipment, coaches and players.
And in cooperation with IBM, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Ralph Losey, and several other partners we will produce a video entitled A look at the math behind the “Black Box” of predictive coding: e-discovery’s favorite child. A short introduction:
Je l’espère, vous pouvez tout avoir une saison des vacances de fête.
