It’s a cloudless summer Sunday and the vast parking lots are filling early at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, 50 miles south of Los Angeles. New SUVs, guided by marshals, queue for the best spots before their occupants spill out happily into the sunshine, heading for a huge auditorium.
They make their way up imposing steps, past palm trees and crystal-clear waterfalls tumbling down artificial rocks. The children’s play area has a stream that parts like the Red Sea, courtesy of two invisible plastic sheets. On a nearby hillock, a replica of Jesus’s tomb has a hydraulic stone that can be rolled away.
The Saddleback campus, opened in 1992, has the eighth-largest congregation of any church in the United States – expanding from its first gathering of 200 in a high school gym in Easter 1980 to a current average weekly attendance of 17,500.
Inside, the only religious symbol is a wooden cross and, during the service, there is no communion and none of the familiar liturgy. Instead, there’s slickly executed Christian rock from a live band.
Saddleback’s founder is Rick Warren, 57, the US’s most famous pastor. He bounds across the stage wearing his trademark goatee, a black T-shirt, Converse trainers and jeans. He is preaching about self-examination: “If you’re doing something that’s messing up your marriage or destroying your finances, it’s because there is some kind of emotional pay-off. I don’t know what it is – maybe it’s to mask your pain, maybe it’s to cover up a fear, maybe it’s an excuse to fail, maybe it’s to compensate for guilt.”
Reinventing Conferences, Again
Is it time for a new twist on the TED model? The esteemed Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference, soon to be pushing 30, has become a juggernaut–what with sellout events, the viral success of online TED Talks, and the spin-off of smaller TED-X conferences. But the conference’s original founder, Richard Saul Wurman, is working on a new creation that radically overhauls the formula used by TED–much as TED itself reinvented the standard business conference model when Wurman launched it in 1984.
Wurman, who is no longer affiliated with TED (he sold most of the rights to Chris Anderson’s Sapling Foundation back in 2002 and broke off his remaining ties with the spin-off TEDMED Conference earlier this year), recently announced plans for his new WWW.WWW conference, slated to debut in Fall of 2012. So far, he has lined up some heavyweight collaborators—R/GA’s Bob Greenberg and @radical.media’s Jon Kamen are on board, GE is an early sponsor, and Yo-Yo Ma and Herbie Hancock will see to the music. Featured guests are still to be determined, though Wurman promises that the conference will be “like a dinner party with a hundred of the world’s greatest minds having a conversation, two at a time.”
But here are a few things the show won’t have: Speeches, slide shows, or tickets. Wurman’s plan is to stage a series of improvisational one-to-one conversations, held in front of a small invitation-only audience and then disseminated to the outside world via a high-quality, for-sale app that captures the event.
The Quietest Pitchman
On a Hollywood soundstage, Adam Lisagor walks an actor who looks like him through a set that looks like a living room. Sort of: The actor is a taller, skinnier doppelganger for the 33-year-old director, and the set, just a few modern pieces arrayed against bare walls, suggests less a living room than the Platonic ideal of one. The scene is slightly, stylishly unreal. At the moment, though, Lisagor isn’t worrying about style. He’s shooting a promo video for the streaming music service Rdio and wants the tone to be as real as he can make it. “You’re going a little commercial,” he softly chides the actor. “Take it down. Keep it dry.”
Advertising takes place in half-worlds of its own devising, and this one is carefully crafted by Sandwich Video, which Lisagor runs out of his Los Angeles apartment. It has quietly, dryly become the premier producer of online product videos for web services and tech gadgets, cultivating a tone that perfectly reflects a generation of creators who are more interested in (or at least, more comfortable with) invention than hype.
Obama salutes Navy SEALs killed in Afghan helicopter crash
Eli Saslow and David Nakamura:
President Obama had made this exact trip before, flying in secret from the White House to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to stand on the tarmac and salute the dead. He was a new president back then, in the fall of 2009, and he was weighing a decision to send more U.S. troops to fight in Afghanistan. He traveled to Dover because he wanted to witness the consequences of war firsthand.
Almost two years later, after so many decisions and so many consequences, Obama arrived at Dover again Tuesday afternoon. Nothing about his presidency felt new anymore; he looked tired, solemn and gray as he stepped onto the tarmac. Since his last trip, 874 more Americans have died in Afghanistan, and Obama has signed 874 handwritten condolence letters. The war is fully his now. This time, he went to Dover to greet the charred and dismembered remains of Americans he had ordered to Afghanistan himself.
Robots put leadership under skills pressure
We love robots – tireless, productive workhorses of the modern assembly line. But we also hate robots – sinister mechanical simulacra of the human workers they make redundant.
In the latest episode in our complicated relationship with automatons and automation, it is appropriate that Foxconn should have a lead role. The Taiwanese company manufactures the chattering classes’ favourite piece of science fiction come true, the Apple iPad, as well as devices for Nokia and Sony. It employs 1m people in China. It was the epicentre last year of concern about pressure on low-paid young workers, following a series of suicides at its Shenzhen factories. It is, in short, iPad users’ window on to dilemmas of assembly-line politics and management that the developed world last grappled with on this scale decades ago.
In developed economies, Lynda Gratton writes in her new book The Shift, “when the tasks are more complex and require innovation or problem solving, substitution [by machines or computers] has not taken place”. This creates a paradox: far from making manufacturers easier to manage, automation can make managers’ jobs more complicated. As companies assign more tasks to machines, they need people who are better at overseeing the more sophisticated workforce and doing the jobs that machines cannot.
US exorbitant privilege: what price?
How valuable is the exorbitant privilege? The ratings downgrade of US sovereign debt has not erased the dollar’s special position – as the numeraire of international transactions, the currency of choice for storing trade surpluses and the instinctive home for money in troubled times. But it is a forceful reminder that the special status could some day be lost.
The main beneficiaries of the privilege are US government bonds and the dollar. The former’s gain can be estimated with a global return forecasting factor (GFF), as set out in a paper by Rebecca Hellerstein of the New York Federal Reserve. She used clever statistical techniques to isolate the effect of global risk appetite on the gap between short- and long-dated US Treasury yields. The result: at times of cross-border investor confusion or stress – including all of the last year – the GFF has shrunk this gap by 25-50 basis points. In other words, if investors with worries and countries with trade surpluses stopped considering US Treasuries to be safe, yields on 10-year would be as much as half a percentage point higher.
How Obama has Disappointed The World
He was constrained by a number: 140, the maximum characters a Twitter message can contain. On a recent Wednesday afternoon, it was US President Barack Obama’s own, self-imposed limit. Obama was hosting a “Twitter Town Hall Meeting” in the East Room of the White House, where he hoped to explain his policies through the new medium.
It’s a challenge for a politician to restrict his comments to 140 characters, especially during a budget crisis in which anger and shouting seemed to prevail over actual arguments.
“I’m going to make history here as the first president to live tweet,” Obama said with an amused smile, as he walked up to a laptop adorned with the presidential seal. These were big words for a particularly insignificant event.
Obama has always managed to win over Americans with big words. He used big words to raise expectations and establish a mood of change in the 2008 presidential election campaign, when he inspired the country with his slogan “Yes, we can.”
German Police Call Airport Full-Body Scanners Useless
AFP:
BERLIN — Body scanners being tested at Germany’s Hamburg airport have had a thumbs down from the police, who say they trigger an alarm unnecessarily in seven out of 10 cases, a newspaper said Saturday.
The weekly Welt am Sonntag, quoting a police report, said 35 percent of the 730,000 passengers checked by the scanners set off the alarm more than once despite being innocent.
The report said the machines were confused by several layers of clothing, boots, zip fasteners and even pleats, while in 10 percent of cases the passenger’s posture set them off.
Software models nepotism
That’s because Allesina has created a computer model that can determine the frequency of nepotism in hiring. He applied it to academic life in Italy, but the same model could just as easily be applied to political hiring here.
“I wanted to keep it simple so anyone with a laptop can repeat it,” he told us. “What I wanted to show was that it’s not a few bad apples. I wanted to show the magnitude.”
His findings, published in the online journal PLoS ONE, proved that nepotism is widespread among academics in Italy, and now the Italian media are all over it. But what about Chicago?
US borrowing tops 100% of GDP: Treasury
AFP:
US debt shot up $238 billion to reach 100 percent of gross domestic project after the government’s debt ceiling was lifted, Treasury figures showed Wednesday.
Treasury borrowing jumped Tuesday, the data showed, immediately after President Barack Obama signed into law an increase in the debt ceiling as the country’s spending commitments reached a breaking point and it threatened to default on its debt.
The new borrowing took total public debt to $14.58 trillion, over end-2010 GDP of $14.53 trillion, and putting it in a league with highly indebted countries like Italy and Belgium.