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The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.   Plutarch

Have you ever had the experience of having your child say something to you in an air of defiance, only to have that trigger the memory of you having said the same thing to your parents?  Or sometimes it’s the reverse, where you tell your children something in the heat of the moment with that “voice of authority” only to have it trigger the memory of how you hated hearing that when you were a child.

That’s when you realize that as you’ve gotten older, you are becoming your parents.   Now I don’t have children, but I recently had the experience that I’m becoming my teachers.  This idea struck me at a recent get-together with classmates Scott Tomlinson, Rich Carroll, and Marty Leonard here in the Southern California area.   Marty showed me a copy of our old High School Yearbook.   I had the memory of our teachers as being somewhat larger than life.   But now when I looked at our teacher’s pictures, I was struck by the thought that we were now looking a lot more like them (or sometimes even older).

I am not a teacher in the formal sense of teaching in a school, high school, or university, but I have had great respect for teachers throughout my life, mostly based on the excellent teachers I had in grade school and then in high school at Homewood-Flossmoor High School.    There are three levels of engagement with work:   it is either a job, a career, or a calling.    I’m sure for the best teachers, it was certainly a calling.   They were the ones that would encourage you when needed, but sometimes be tough enough to push you not listen to your own voice that said “I can’t”, but rather to reach inside and find the fire to take your own abilities as far as they could go.

Not all of the teachers I had in the Homewood-Flossmoor school system were so encouraging, however.   My third-grade teacher asked us to do a “show-and-tell” report, and I was fascinated with the country of Afghanistan because it was featured in a National Geographic magazine which my parents subscribed to.   I fashioned my bed sheet into the guise of a tribal costume I had seen depicted in some of the stunning photographs, and tried coming down the staircase to dinner in the dignified air of a tribal chieftain.   I almost broke my neck as I tripped over the bed sheet and tumbled down the stairs.   Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-DUMP!   It wasn’t the dignified entrance I had been hoping for.   But my parents encouraged me (after they stopped laughing) to do well on the report the next day.

When I got done with the report, my teacher proceeded to yell at me.  “I gave you clear instructions.   You were to do a report on what other children in the class might be interested in.   They don’t care about some place called … Franistan.”  “Afghanistan”, I helpfully corrected her.   “WHATEVER!   Now sit down!”   I was not as much sad, as in shock about this totally unexpected reaction.   When I told my mother and father what she had said, my mother was at the principal’s office the next day saying in no uncertain terms that my teacher was never to speak to me again in such a discouraging manner.

I promised myself to never be like that ignorant teacher who tried to discourage me because I refused to perform like an average student.   When I see younger people now that want to learn something, I do my best to encourage them like my math teacher and many others that I had later at H-F.   For example, when the younger claim examiners at Tokio Marine wanted to learn about Japanese culture and language, I volunteered and taught them every Friday at lunchtime.   And recently in our Toastmasters club, I mentored some young people during their first three speeches.  It is a joy to encourage young people to learn and gain confidence in their own abilities, like a deer overseeing a fawn with wobbly legs finally learn to stroll on the savanna.   Because of the excellent teachers I’ve had in my life, I resolve to be there for the next generation encouraging them to just GO!

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The World Economic Forum’s Risk Response Network or RRN has come out with Global Risk Report 2012 in January 11 of this year, which can be viewed and downloaded on their website http://reports.weforum.org/global-risks-2012/#.

The report discusses global risks using the following methodology:

a)  Identify global risks, which are risks that are global in geographic scope, cross-industry relevance, uncertainty as to how and when they will occur, and high levels of economic and/or social impact.

b)  Categorize the global risks into five Risk Categories: economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and technological.

c)  For each Risk Category, rank each risk according to likelihood and severity.

d)  Using the ranking, identify the risks of greatest systemic importance as the Centers of Gravity for each of each Risk Category.

e)  Identify Critical Connectors which are risks that are connected to the multiple Centers of Gravity, and thus link all global risks into one coherent system.

The result is a map which shows the ecology of global risks and how they are all interrelated.

The report also contains three case studies which focus on special categories of risk, and one special report on the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011.

Case 1:   The Seeds of Dystopia

This case explores the risks due to the combination of fiscal imbalances and demographic trends.

Case 2:   How Safe are Our Safeguards?

This case explores the risk of the unexpected negative consequences of regulations.

Case 3:   The Dark Side of Connectivity

This case explores the critical systems failures that could occur because of problems with cyber security of the World Wide Web.

Special Report–The Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011

This special report traces the unforeseen consequences of the earthquake as they rippled through Complex Global Systems.

The purpose for the report discussing these global risks is to develop strategies to mitigate them.   I will be going through the report in several blog posts to discuss the methodologies, the findings, and the recommendations of this report.

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As I mentioned on a post written three days ago, I finished watched the “new” Battlestar Galactica on Sunday.    I’ve been thinking about the series this week, and I’ve found some food for thought in the lectures Joseph Campbell did on James Joyce’s literary works called The Wings of Art.   In the first part of this six-part lecture series, Campbell describes James Joyce’s thoughts on art and aesthetics that he gleaned from three sources:  Aristotle, Dante, and Thomas Aquinas.

In this post, I wanted to describe the aesthetic concepts of beauty and the sublime to illustrate how Battlestar Galactica is effective as a work of art.   These are discussed in James Joyce’s novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.   Thomas Aquinas said that universal beauty has three hallmarks, integritas or wholeness, consonantia or harmony, and claritas or radiance.   When you have an art work such a painting, you have a frame, and it is this frame which makes the art work a whole.   In the case of a television series, you have the framework of the “previous episode recap”, the opening credits and the “teaser” for the following episode, the episode itself, and the closing credits.   Harmony is the rhythm of the elements in the artwork.   When I think of the themes that are represented in the BSG series, I think of a symphony where you have the opening statement of a theme, and repetitions of that theme with variations throughout.   Even the Cylon characters which have multiple versions of themselves carry this meme of “variations on a theme”.

If an artwork is fortunately composed, then the magic comes through in the last hallmark of claritas.   This is where the rhythm achieved within the framework creates a sort of corresponding echo within the mind of the audience.   A musical analogy would be that of the sitar.   The sitar consists of a series of main strings which are played, and then a series of strings which are never played called sympathetic strings, which run parallel to and below the main strings.   They vibrate in sympathy with the main strings, giving the sitar its shimmering, echo-like quality.

BSG was so well crafted that many watchers, like myself, found themselves stirred in sympathy either emotionally by the characters or intellectually by some of the themes involved.    That is why I would call it “beautiful” from an aesthetic viewpoint, because it moves me–sometimes to laughter, and sometimes to tears.    There were characters that I liked, or wished I could be more like, and there were other characters I despised, sometimes because on reflection I was more like them than I would have liked.

Another aesthetic experience is that of “wonder” or “awe”, and this is called the sublime.   This is when what is experienced is not something to which you can easily relate to, such as in the case of beauty, but rather something elemental or powerful which “blows you away”.    The experience of the sublime can come from sudden expansion of one’s perspective with regards to space or time (such as looking up at the night-time sky), or from natural or elemental forces with tremendous power (such as a tsunami or an atomic explosion).   Most Western art covers the aesthetic experience of beauty, but does not deal with the sublime, with one notable exception:   science-fiction.

BSG has moments of the sublime, such as the episode where the Cylons destroy the 12 colonies of the Colonials with nuclear explosions in the opening episode of the series.   The magnitude of the destruction is impossible for the brain to fathom, and you are left with the mind trying to shrink from the implications of what it has just seen.  However, for me the combination of the beautiful and the sublime was what made BSG a truly memorable experience.     The experience of beauty, of art to which my mind and emotions could relate to, was certainly there in the growing relationship I had with the various characters and their stories.   But these moments of intimacy were punctuated by moments of the sublime where I would just stare at the screen in wonder, locked into aesthetic arrest.

Those sublime moments sometimes came in the form of the sheer scale of the plot in terms of both time and space.   Other times it came because of prodigious violence, like in a battle scene between groups of ships.   However, some of the most surprising moments of the sublime came not in violence, but in silence.    Some of the prototypical moments of the sublime from the Old Testament come from these two extremes:   you have Job 38:1 where “”the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind” and then in explicit contrast, the “still, small voice” that spoke to Elijah in 1 Kings 19:12.

An example of these extremes in BSG was a chilling scene where a breach in the hull developed.   This caused pandemonium in a causeway of the ship, and the camera tracked a hapless crew member as she was sucked out into the vacuum of space.   The cacophony of the out-rushing air and her screams faded into the deadly silence that ensued, given the absence of any air to carry the sound.

But spellbinding moments of the sublime like these were always leavened by the beauty I felt in the unfolding of the characters’ stories, at times delicate and other times brutal, and it was this particular combination for me which made it a science-fiction experience unlike any other I’ve had before.   So say we all.

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As I mentioned on a post written two days ago, I finished watched the “new” Battlestar Galactica on Sunday.    I’ve been thinking about the series this week, and I’ve found some food for thought in the lectures Joseph Campbell did on James Joyce’s literary works called The Wings of Art.   In the first part of this six-part lecture series, Campbell describes James Joyce’s thoughts on art and aesthetics that he gleaned from three sources:  Aristotle, Dante, and Thomas Aquinas.

In this post, I would like to relate James Joyce’s thoughts on what he called proper vs. improper art.   Proper art is what we normally think of when we hear the phrase “art for art’s sake.”   Improper art, on the other hand, is used in the service of either desire for an object, which Joyce calls pornographic art, or criticism of an object or idea, which he calls didactic art.

I have to explain that Joyce’s term of pornographic art can be somewhat misleading, because art which is used to make you desire an object could include sexual desire, but it means any form of desire.    All commercial art, or commercials in general can be considered pornographic art because they are not drawing attention to themselves but rather are making you want to buy a product or service.   The commercials on television are certainly pornographic under this definition, what about the program Battlestar Galactica itself?

Let’s take a look at the way the characters are portrayed through the writing.  Pornographic art in terms of character portrayal would be the typical Hollywood “hot” star who draws viewers simply through sex appeal.   I think the dialogue for the characters was so good that even if you felt an initial surface attraction for a character because he or she was attractive, this would melt into a sympathy or empathy for them based on the experiences they went through during the 73 episodes of the series.   So I wouldn’t consider BSG improper art under the category of pornographic art.

What about the other category, that of didactic art?   This is art which wants to turn you against something, usually not a person as much as an idea.    In Harold Bloom’s book The Western Canon:  The Books and School of the Ages, he argues that one of the lamentable trends in the humanities at the university level was to attack the very idea of the canon or list of classics as a propaganda tool to promote the interests of the elites in society.   He refers to that trend in the humanities as the “School of Resentment”.    Part of this trend is to advocate for books that may not be aesthetically as good as those in the traditional canon, but which served as an agent of progressive social change, such as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” by Harriet Beecher Stowe.    This is precisely the definition of “didactic art”, and it is what Harold Bloom deplored.

Looking back on Battlestar Galactica, I commend Ronald Moore and other writers for NOT taking sides when it came to exploring difficult questions such as the use of torture, as opposed to a series like “24” which was obviously pushing the “pro-torture” side of the debate.    When it came to questions involving economic inequality, it was obvious that the writers felt these issues important because the equivalent on BSG of the “working class” were depicted in many of the episodes, as opposed to shows in the Star Trek franchise where they were much more rarely seen.   But even here the issues were more evenhandedly dealt with, and they weren’t trying to convert the audience to one or another point of view.    That takes not only sophistication as a writer, but it takes a sophisticated view of the audience.

As Harold Bloom pointed out with reference to Shakespeare, we have no idea based on the hundreds of characters in his plays what Shakespeare’s own sympathies or allegiances were on the political spectrum.    In a similar way, Ronald Moore and the other writers allow you to make up your own mind, which is a tremendous compliment to the audience.

So the series tried not to take sides in political and/or economic debates, and was therefore not didactic.   Even if you were attracted to some of the characters because they just happened to be good-looking, you always were taken way beneath the surface so that you felt some sympathy or empathy for them, and so the series was also not pornographic (in this limited definition of the term).   Therefore, it is a good example of “art for art’s sake” or “proper art”.

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I recently went to a local reunion of my high-school class, so the phrase “class reunion” brings up fond memories for me.  However, in another context, “class reunion” represents my wishes for the future on this May Day, namely, that the growing economic inequality in this country can be reversed.   I tend to be somewhat sympathetic to the conservative position that there should be economic equality of opportunity, but not necessarily equality of outcome.  However, the problem with the current economic inequality in this country is that it is creating feedback loops of corruption of the political process which could end up threatening the legal foundations of democracy in this country.

The science fiction writer H. G. Wells, in his novel The Time Machine, postulated what would happen if economic inequality between the social classes grew to the point where the upper class and the lower class became essentially two different species.   However, even in that far-flung future, the classes ended up having a symbiotic relationship.

Ideologies on the left and right side of the labor/capital divide point to their side as being the real host of economic activity and pointing to the other side as being a sort of parasite on that host.  In Ayn Rand’s novels, for example, evil is a parasite on the good, and Rand’s heroes must continually fight against those parasites who demand the benefits of the heroes’ labors, with the government collaborating with those parasites to extract those benefits.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, on the other hand, sees the so-called 1% as the parasites who are extracting the wealth of the 99% with the collaboration of the government.  So there is a current of mutual disregard that is set in the background of today’s May Day festivities.

There is a new book out called Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by MIT Economist Daron Acemoglu and Harvard political scientist James Robinson in which they describe the difference between developing economies which are successful and those which are unsuccessful.

I watched an interview of Daron Acemoglu on the Up with Chris Hayes program last Sunday, April 29th.  I have not yet read the book, but Isobel Coleman, a Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council of Foreign Relations, summarizes the thesis of the book in her blog Democracy in Development as follows:

Successful nations have good institutions that are “inclusive” and “pluralistic” and create incentives for people to work hard and invest in the future. Unsuccessful states, on the other hand, are characterized by “extractive” or “absolutist” institutions that economically and politically benefit a small group of elites at the expense of everyone else.

The problem with extractive institutions is that they end up bringing down the temple by destroying the source of their wealth extraction and themselves with it.

I’m sure that was not what the elites in Rome or Britain intended to do at the end of their empires, but the American economic and political system could end up collapsing as well if we don’t realize that the various classes in this country actually depend on each other, ideologies of left and right notwithstanding.

As Benjamin Franklin once said to his fellow colonists in the context of the Revolutionary War, “if we don’t hang together, we will all hang separately.”  Let’s have a class reunion in this country before it is too late.

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I must admit from the outset that I didn’t watch the original series during the late 1970s, and I didn’t watch the new series during its original run on TV, from the airing of the initial three-hour miniseries from December 2003 until the final episode on March 30, 2009.   The reason why I didn’t watch the original series or the new series when it first came out on television was not because I don’t like science fiction.   I tend to read a lot more science fiction and fantasy than I watch either on television or in movies.  My cousins in St. Louis, on the other hand, are avid fans of both media science fiction as well as written science fiction.   They had raved about the series, so I figured I would give it a try.  I decided to give up cable TV last year as part of a New Year’s Resolution to conserve both my time and money,  and this was my impetus for purchasing the series on DVD that I could watch each weekend as a “carrot” to keep me working hard during the week on various professional and educational projects.  I’ve been watching about an episode a week and I got to the final episode of the final season of Battlestar Galactica or BSG (the newest series) just last night.

I’m still reeling from the impact that the series has had on me.  The first emotional response I took from the series, besides my love of the individual characters portrayed, was the message that it is important to have empathy for one’s adversary.  The Cylons are a race of man-made robots that end up turning against the Colonials, the human inhabitants of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol.  The entire four-season series deals with the relations between the Colonials and the Cylons, who go from being implacable enemies to allies whose futures are intertwined.

Aristotle was said to have lectured on both the comic and tragic emotions in Greek theater.    According to Aristotle, the comic emotion is that of joy.   BSG does have moments of joy and humor, which are greatly appreciated given the darker nature of most of the material.    Aristotle’s lectures on comedy have unfortunately been lost.   As a side note, the entire plot of the historical mystery novel called The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, set in a Benedictine monastery in the year 1327, is based on the idea that a lost copy of those lectures by Aristotle was found.  The threat of the subversive power of laughter that the book represents to the Church authorities sets off a series of murders in the monastery which Franciscan friar William of Baskerville is ordered to investigate.

Aristotle’s lectures on the tragic emotions, however, have survived in his work the Poetics.   Tragedy serves a social function by being a catharsis or public release of emotions.  There are two cathartic emotions associated with tragedy:  pity and terror.  Pity is defined as whatsoever is grave and constant in human affairs which unites the audience with the human sufferer.  What makes a tragic work universal are the key words “grave and constant in human affairs”.  If you tell a personal story of loss, that may have meaning to those that know you personally, but to tell a universal story of tragedy, you have to tell a story that any audience member can relate to.  If they can relate to the hero or protagonist, then the suffering that the hero undergoes will create sympathy from the audience and attract them to the story you have to tell.

The emotion of terror seems similar to that of pity, but with a twist:  it is whatsoever is grave and constant in human affairs which unites the audience with the secret cause of the suffering.  The suffering of the human protagonist is caused either by another antagonist or it could be something more elemental such as the workings of fate, time, or Providence.  Terror in this context is secret empathy for the adversary, and Hitchcock was famous for being a master of terror for this very reason.  At the same time you are watching one of Hitchcock’s films and thinking that a murderer is despicable, Hitchcock manipulates you through point-of-view shots, etc., to have some sort of empathy for the character nonetheless.  As Nathaniel Hawthorne once wrote, “Man must not disclaim his brotherhood, even with the guiltiest.”

The simultaneous sympathy for the hero and empathy for the adversary are the elements of what takes a work of tragedy from the beautiful to the sublime.  In the case of Battlestar Galactica, the heroes among the Colonials are seen as good but flawed people, and this naturally evokes the emotion of pity or sympathy in the audience.  But the triumph of Battlestar Galactica is that you end up having empathy for those who are ostensibly the enemy, the Cylons.  And in the end, you realize that they are both grappling with the same issues of survival and the search for meaning.   The series makes us ask ourselves:   are there Cylons we meet in life that we confront as adversaries who might become our allies someday?

Learning to have empathy with one’s adversary is a principle which has guided me throughout my life, and it’s one of the reasons why BSG has meant so much to me this past year or so.  I am sure it will continue to resonate with me to the end of own personal tale of survival and the search for meaning along the way.

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I was living in Japan when riots broke out in Los Angeles on April 29, 1992.   Almost a year later, there was another violent event that occurred in the United States, namely, the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas on April 19, 1993.   The Japanese reacted quite differently to these violent events, and this weekend’s commemoration of the events that occurred 20 years ago has made me recall all of this.

There was news in Japan about what were termed the “race riots”, and a lot of my Japanese colleagues at Mitsubishi Motors were asking about how I felt about what was going on, whether the riots would spread to other cities, etc.   I told them that the event that it reminded me of the most was the five-day Watts riots from August 11-15, 1965.   I was only a child at the time, but I remember my parents discussing the event.

Later on in life, during my history class while taking Asian Studies in graduate school at the University of Illinois, I read about race riots in Japan that occurred between World War I and II.   I remember interesting classroom discussions about the relationship that these riots had to the rightward drift of Japanese politics in the interwar period.  Now there is a book by Rick Perlstein called Nixonland about the origins of the rightward drift in American politics after the 1960s, and the incident the book starts out with is … the Watts riots of 1965.

About one year later after the LA Riots, on April 19, 1993, I was listening to news from the US over Armed Forces radio about the story of the tragic ending to the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.  There is a direct line between the Waco incident and Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.   That bombing was widely reported on in Japan, of course, but the Waco Siege back in 1993 received very little coverage.

Later on I wondered about the difference between the prominent coverage of the LA race riots of 1992 and the sparse coverage of the Waco Siege of 1993.   I asked several Japanese colleagues about this at the time, and after much thought, they said that it was because the Japanese people could comprehend the race riots given their own history, but the story about a suicidal religious cult was something that didn’t show up on the Japanese cultural radar screen.   They understood that there were foreigners who might be religious fanatics to the point of being homicidal, but it seemed them almost “un-Japanese” for someone to get so worked up about religion that they would kill for it.

The sarin gas attack called the “Subway Sarin Incident” on the Tokyo subway perpetrated by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult on March 20, 1995 changed the perception of the Japanese forever with regards to the possibility of the connections between religion and terrorism in Japan.

But back in 1993, it was something that the Japanese could not relate to as much as the race riots in LA, and that was the reason for the differing coverage by the media.   I learned a lot during my five-year stay in Japan from 1990-1995, about race, religion, and the different ways they were perceived in Japan and the US, namely, that our culture is the filter through which we view the news of the world.

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Looking back on my days at Homewood-Flossmoor High School has been a wonderful experience, largely in part due to the many posts of Tina Landry Otte, Shari Hahn-Kozak and others who have helped take me and many others down memory lane. 

I know that while the recent reunion was being organized, mention was made to those “invisible” members of the Class of ’75 whom people had lost track of.  I myself was one of those invisible members until recently.  I think it took me longer than others to connect to our classmates because in general those with more introverted personalities like mine find it harder to reach out socially to others, but I’m very grateful that someone took the effort to reach out to me!  Back in H-F, our class of 1975 had somewhere between 900 and 1000 students.  It was SO big that it was easy to get lost sometimes.  I’m not just talking about navigating one’s way between classes, but navigating one’s way through the social world of high school. 

For those that were naturally more outgoing or socially adept, the path was still probably not easy, but to those of us who felt more introverted there were many times when we felt envious of those who found it easier to go out and make new friends.  But that was the beauty of having such a large group of students; there were so many diverse groups that were all supported by the school that you were bound to find some people who shared common interest. 

That diversity in our student body meant that there were many people who inspired me because they were different from most of the students but still seemed to thrive.  I would like to mention two of them here:  Jacqueline Ambrose Knight and Cedric Yap.  They don’t know it, but they ended up inspiring me in later life after leaving Homewood-Flossmoor High School. 

When I lived in Japan for five years, part of getting used to living in a new country was the fact that I was considered by the Japanese to be a member of a racial minority.  It took some adjustment to my self-image because I had never been part of a racial minority before.   I distinctly remember thinking back on my days at H-F and empathizing with students I had seen like Jacqueline and others who had to endure being a racial minority back then.  When I saw them, they seemed to be successful in school, and yet I’m sure they felt differently than the other students, mainly because some students may have treated them differently.  If figured, “well, if they survived H-F, I can survive my stay in Japan”.  So I wanted to just give a shout out to Jacqueline and others who didn’t realize that they were pioneers who would end up inspiring their classmates someday.

I was not a close acquaintance of Jackie’s, but Cedric Yap I did know because we shared an interest in mathematics in common.  I remember going over to his house and becoming interested in a cursory way with his family’s language and culture.  Later on those seeds became in an interest which led to me studying Chinese in the Asian Studies program in graduate school at the University of Illinois.

So the fact that H-F was such a large class may have created its difficulties for those who found it harder to go and meet such a large number of people, but that very diversity meant that I ended up meeting a far greater variety of people than I would have if I had gone to a smaller school.   That in turn has helped me throughout my life relate to other people from other cultures who speak different languages. 

Now when I look back at our days in Homewood-Flossmoor, I see that our class prepared us for larger world more than we ever knew at the time.   The only regret I have about reconnecting with the class of 1975 is that it took me so long to do so.

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Here are the notes I took at the meetup last Saturday, April 21^st, at the Social Media Mastermind Orange County meetup.

1.  Hashtag–“What does # mean?”

Hashtags, the act of adding # in front of a topic in Twitter, makes that topic sortable, linkable, and can make a virtual “Twitter chat room”.  We did an experiment using #earthquake to see who could find out the fastest when the most recent earthquake occurred anywhere in the world.  You can create a stream in Hootsuite which uses a particular hashtag as another means of sorting Tweets other than lists.

It can send a Tweet to LinkedIn with the #in tag, as long as your LinkedIn account is setup to accept these tweets.  The general consensus is don’t send all of your Tweets to your LinkedIn account because this generates too much “noise”.

2.  Klout—measuring social media influence

There was a discussion of Klout and other sites which measure influence in social media, such as Kred.com, Peerindex.com.  Why should you care about Klout, other than bragging rights about your score?  Other than comparing your score with those you influence, your poors, or those who influence you in social media, it can be useful for a longitudinal (time) study of your own influence.  This can help you figure out what you’re doing that increases your influence.

Klout used to be based on three social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, but it is now expanding to six platforms, including Google+, WordPress, and Foursquare.

3.  Foursquare—the “drive-in” version of social media

What is Foursquare and why should we care?  When you go to a store, or an event, and you check in on Foursquare, it can give you the following advantages:

a)  It tells you where you are (helps you hook up with your friends).

b)  It gives you motivation through points which can earn badges like being the “mayor”.

c)  These badges can earn you discounts and other benefits from the hosting company or event (parking privileges, seating privileges, or price discounts).

d)  It can help brand you by having a record of the places you like to visit.

e)  It can help with personal security (tells your friends where you are).   Some cynics said it also tells your neighbors when you’re away from home which might not enhance your home’s security.

4.  SocialBro—managing your Twitter account

If the quantity of your Twitter community is getting out of hand, or the quality leaves something to be desired, SocialBro can help you analyze and manage that community.  You can have it search all of your followers and delete those that may be spammers, for example, by eliminating all those with less than 50 tweets.  However, once you tell it how what to do with your followers lists, you need to synchronize it with your Twitter account in order for it to take effect.

5.  Pinterest—Social media meets “scrapbooking”

Pinterest has gained enormous publicity of late, but this wave of popularity is starting to wane somewhat as the 13 million participants towards the beginning of the year have now dwindled to 8 million (which is still a lot).

There are other Pinterest clones, such as “WeHeartIt” geared towards women and “Gentlemint” geared towards men.  The majority of Pinterest users are still women, although the ratio of women to men is decreasing.

6.  Meetup—the human face is the ultimate social medium

There was a big discussion of the value of Meetup groups, of which SMMOC was but one example.  It is a great way for businesses to attract clientele, but you have to be careful about trying to monetize the Meetups directly by charging for membership or attendance at events.  Allowing free membership or events at which people can discuss or sample a product (such as wine) is ultimate the surest way to generate interest in a business or group.

7.  Privacy issues related to government and social media platforms

There is an Onion satirical story that says that Facebook is a program that was developed by the CIA to collect personal information on US citizens and it has saved the agency millions of dollars.  However, this satire contains a grain of truth, because legislation is being considered by Congress (CISPA) which would allow the government to access the personal information collected by such sites as Facebook, Google+, without the consent or even knowledge of the person whose information is being sought.  This legislation needs to be monitored by those who are concerned about personal privacy.

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The following are notes from the lecture series done by Dr. Richard Bulliet for the History of the Modern Modern Middle East course held at Columbia University (Columbia Course Catalog No. W3719) in the Spring semester of 2009 which is available on iTunes U.

7.  Radical vs. moderate Islam

There was a subset of obsessions in modern Middle East history that had to do with concept of radical Muslims vs. moderate Muslims.

Moderate regimes (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan) were always contrasted with radical regimes (Iran, Syria).  To understand this term correctly, you have to realize that “moderate” means “pro-American”; it has nothing to do with moderation.  There is no regime less moderate than Saudi Arabia; it is an extremist regime.  But it is moderate if you consider that term to mean “pro-American”.  Radical then means “anti-American”, and so the concept of radicalism is actually substance-free; it only has to do with how the country is aligned politically with regards to the United States.

Another dimension of this whole question of Modern Middle Eastern history is therefore, what is the perspective of the United States towards the Middle East?  The prominence of the United States and Saudi Arabia, as countries who are the central agents for everything that happens in the Middle East in the present day, is something that could not be foreseen by any of the standard histories of the modern Middle East.

8.  Similarities between United States and Saudi Arabia with regard to religion

And yet there are some things that make the United States and Saudi Arabia strikingly similar countries.

a. Both of them have enormously powerful religiously conservative, puritanical population blocks.

b. Both of them have political systems that are hostage, to some degree or other, to those religious blocks.

You might say that this is purely happenstance, and something that has no historical roots.  But curiously enough, the founder of militant puritanical intolerant Islam in Saudi Arabia, a man by the name of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab was born in 1703, the same year as John Wesley, the founder of Methodism.

NOTE:  The word “Wahhabi” comes from part of the Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s name.  Incidentally, “Wahhabi” is not the proper term for people who follow his doctrines; they prefer to be called the “Muwahadeen”, which means the “believers in Tawheed, or the unity of God”.   However, Prof. Bulliet will refer to them as “Wahhabi” because that is the term most Americans recognize.

What comparison can you make between Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and John Wesley?  The great success of Methodism was in the British colonies that would later become the United States, which was the wild frontier compared to sophisticated, cosmopolitan European Society.  What you found in Georgia, where John Wesley went to preach along with his brother Charles in the early 1700s, was very different from you would find in London, Paris, or other major centers of Europe.  You had a frontier that was almost completely removed from the great cultural centers, and over time, particularly with John Wesley’s successor, George Whitefield, there grew a revival called The Great Awakening.  This was when people who were living in what would become the United States in the 18^th century discovered the depth of their Protestant zeal, particularly in the South and Middle West, but also in other parts of the country.

There were a series of four Great Awakenings, two in the 18^th century, two in the 19^th century, and in each case you had great waves of Protestant zealotry.  People were summoned by preachers, of whom John Wesley was one of the pioneers who felt that a preacher could preach outdoors and didn’t have to be in a church.  In these successive Great Awakenings there was an enormous amount of Protestant zealotry, which promoted Protestant values.  At the same time, it promoted anti-Catholicism, because Catholics served the Pope who was considered to be the anti-Christ.  They were anti-Jewish as well, but there weren’t many Jews around in colonial frontier America, so they took their zealotry out mostly on Catholics.  This country was profoundly anti-Catholic in the 19^th century.

Saudi Arabia, in parallel, is profoundly anti-Shiite, because of the teachings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab.  Another consequence, starting with the third Great Awakening in the early 19^th century, was the birth of the great missionary movement, whereby tens of thousands of Protestant Americans went abroad.  They went particularly to the Middle East and to China, but even more so to the Middle East, in order to spread the gospel.  They went preaching either to new converts or, since they could not legally convert Muslims to Christianity, to those who needed it most, namely, other Christians who did not believe in the right form of Christianity, the Greek Orthodox, the Catholics, the Armenians, or others.  Most of what America knew about the Middle East down to World War II came from missionaries.

The story of missionaries in the Middle East is actually a fascinating story.  We had far more people who were expert in the Middle East in the 1920s than we have today, in proportion to our population.  This was because the missionaries went over to the countries of the Middle East, they learned the languages, and they got to know people at the level of everyday life.  They were not like diplomats, or Peace Corps people who only stayed a year or two; they would sometimes stay there 20, 30 or 40 years.  They represented an ideology that was fundamentally based on the idea that they had a superior religious view.

Now it’s interesting that the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia have the same puritanical views.  They have the same intensely nasty hatred of their religious enemies, the Shiites and the Sufi Brotherhoods.  And they were enormously interested in sending missionaries around, so that today, the two largest exporters of religious missionaries around the world are Saudi Arabia and the United States.  The amount of money expended to send American Protestants around the world and to send Wahhabi missionaries around the world is enormous.   Even in Saudi Arabia, it is is primarily private funds that tend to support the Saudis who go around to every Muslim community in the world and try to improve their views (?) of Islam, in the same way the Protestants used to focus more on what the other Christians were doing than finding new converts to the Christian faith.

It is not a coincidence, but rather there is some parallel in that Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the 18^th century was also bringing his message to the frontier wilderness, the most remote part of the great cosmopolitan world of the Ottoman Empire, far away from big centers like Damascus, Cairo, or Istanbul, out in the middle of Arabia.  That was where the Wahhabis flourished, the middle of Arabia being the equivalent of Mississippi or Illinois in comparative terms.

The contrast between the culture of the cosmopolitan centers and the culture of the frontiers (Europe as opposed to America, Istanbul and Cairo as opposed to central Arabia) is an important one and one that is still important.  After all, if you look at the areas where official America and Europe have the most concern about Islam, they are the frontier areas, such as the northwest frontier province in Pakistan, Somalia, and any place where you are far away from any cosmopolitan area.  That is where religious zealotry seems to flourish—it’s the Muslim version of Idaho, just to name Sarah Palin’s home state.

Prof. Bulliet says he will come back to this theme during the semester, but there is something peculiar about the Saudi-American connection that antedates oil, and explains some of the particulars about the situation we see in the world today, and it goes back to the 18^th century.

This concludes the formal first lecture in the 26-lecture course; the rest of the lecture was devoted to mechanics of the teaching of the class related to lectures, discussion sessions, and exams.

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