Joseph Stiglitz was quoted in the article as saying all our bailouts are focusing on the past, not the future.  Will throwing money at corporations for innovation work?  or should the government be investing in small businesses?  I am not sure either will work effectively.  This is a little farfetched, but what about making all college graduates publish at least 1 academic paper before graduating?  This would show them the power of creating new ideas and the validity of peer review.  I am not sure it would create jobs, but it would certainly make our society one of thinkers and creators, two ingredients for innovation.

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I completely agree that the U.S. and the American people need to start watching the dollars they spend and stop spending money that isn’t there. I agree that we all need to tighten our belts and stop “the limitless consumption of trashy consumer goods”, but where is the incentive for innovation?  Not only do we need to educate, feed and provide health care for the country, but we need something to aspire to.  Kennedy put us on the Moon without knowing the science.  What is the next frontier?  Artificially Intelligent robots in every home?  Mars?  Flying Cars?  What is America’s dream?  Once we figure that out, we will be on the road to recovery.

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Yesterday’s NY Times article wrote about the talks and mentioned that the biggest thing holding things up are the privacy concerns that Verizon has.  The authors mentioned that Verizon hasn’t decided how much data about their customers they want to give over to Google.  I am happy Verizon is thinking about my privacy, but I am still concerned.  What data does Google want?  What kind of data is Verizon thinking about giving over?  Is it only about searches?  Does it include my subscriber status?   

I am going to hope that Verizon is only thinking about giving over information related to searches, because even the thought of more than that scares me.  More than search related data includes: how much I pay a month in usage charges, how long I use the phone for a day, how much money I spend in transactions over my phone, how long I have been a customer, if my GPS is on then where I travel, what my local hangouts are and anything else they know about me.  

In a comment to my post about where privacy and marketers meet, Roman said that I shouldn’t fear marketers because the data they have or want is relatively harmless.  I agree, I do not fear marketers.  I fear ad providers and ad networks because their networks and ad space is worthless if they cannot serve ads that will attract the right customer’s attention.  In order to optimize their ad server technology, they would love to know customer demographics, buying power and search and click patterns.  

If the deal goes through will Verizon allow their customers to opt-out of all the data sharing it is doing with Google?  I am sure not, because Google wants to know where you are when you search. They want to be able to serve you ads for a store right in front of you, or a restaurant down the block or reenforce a banner that is on the side of a building across from you.  Not only will they have the ability to serve local ads to you, they will also be able to interpret the meaning of your searches based on proximity.  For example, a search for the word “Prada” will be more valuable if you are on Fifth avenue in New York City than if you are in the Fort Lauderdale airport.  

At the end of the day, I hope we figure out how to curb all this data sharing and tracking across different media and that Verizon Wireless acts responsibly.

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I really loved the article because as a kid everyone wants to be in the hottest crowd, but then during college I assumed I grew out of it.  In truth, I haven’t.  In the beginning of April I bought a MacBook Air thinking it is time to become a mac user and also buy the lightest one they were selling.  According to Brooks, I am just trying to be cool and become an early adopter of one of the hottest new toys on the market.  Now the question is can I afford to be an early discarder?

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Then I moved on to the opinion section where Olivia Judson has a piece titled “Feel The Eyes Upon You“.  She refers to a some scientific studies that have been done trying to understand how people react when they feel they are being watched.  In situations where people feel they are being watched, even subconsciously, it has been shown that the subjects change their behaviors.  Judson points to the eyes that are watching and ends her piece questioning if we should place more pictures of eyes around and see how they effect crime rates.  

I finished Judson’s piece and was torn.  Lets say we don’t take the eyes from the studies so literally.  What if everyone knew that all criminal offenses are published in an online database like CriminalSearches.com?  Would that make our society better as a whole because everyone would be worried that someone can “see” what they have done?  Although one part of me thinks we should test out putting eyes everywhere and that an online database is the right start, a larger part says no.  I believe that people can change and publishing their crimes in indelible ink on the web will cripple them for the rest of their lives.  

Although swayed slightly by Judson’s piece, the privacy advocate and humanist in me won out.  We need to figure out how to stop sites like CriminalSearches.com from distributing private information to the public for free and so easily.

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As Brooks points out, Obama’s early childhood education proposals are a good start.  But I think that we need to start with the parents and teach them how to instill the value of education into each of their kids.  Most children never surpass their parents’ education levels, so we need to educate the adults.  So the real question is what can we do to stimulate growth within the adult population?  Are there training seminars that keep people yearning for more and trying to innovate?  

Someone at my client recently attended One Day University, a one day program where lecturers from the best universities across the country talk about their fields.  Is this the right idea?  Should the state and government entice people to attend one day programs like this?  Should they sponsor them?  How else do we get people motivated?  

This topic leaves me asking more questions than anything else.  I wish there were some simple answer to it all.

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