My students taught me that everything was personal - history, politics, foreign relations - but this approach creates boundaries as well as connections
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tcp-old's blogtony curzon priceYou may have noticed that our banner spot is now occasionally filled with Google AdWords. We've experimented in the past with Google Adsense, and we stopped when, after the Thai coup, our coverage of Thailand was attracting Google's advertisments for "Thai Massage Parlours". When the Google sales team rang us a month ago proposing a new set of services, they assured us that we could now filter out unwanted ads. So if anything appears that you find untoward, please leave a comment in this blog, and we'll see if we can get the filter to work properly. 18 - 04 - 08
tony curzon priceThe sight of symbolic attacks on a symbol (the flame) of a symbolic representation of war (the games) may seem too layered even for our mediatised sensitivities. And yet .... the protest works for me. I asked Grace and Kanishk in the office today, and neither could muster much enthusiasm for the games. I asked David (our Front Page editor) later on, and he remarked: "... it all seems overdetermined, don't you think? the games, Tibet ... it's a big year". 07 - 04 - 08
tony curzon priceMy two previous posts from the Summit are on OurKingdom: Lots of programs - but where are the progressives?Want to feel good about the short term world outlook? Read the rest of this post...06 - 04 - 08
tony curzon priceOur friends at Avaaz (including openDemocracy's co-founder, Paul Hilder) have been working at getting a global and significant petition to represent world opinion about events in Tibet. Pasted below is their latest request, which I fully support. Read the rest of this post... 19 - 03 - 08
tony curzon priceI posted yesterday about what was looking like a difficult moment for Malaysian democracy. You will have seen, read or heard since then of the astonishing result: although the ruling party won enough seats to form a government, by usual standards, it only scraped through. The opposition went from 19 to 82 seats of the 222 seat parliament. An opposition coalition thought-up by Anwar Ibrahim that stitched together urban middle classes, Chinese and Malay Muslims represents a turning point for Malaysian --- and maybe Muslim --- democracy. Ethnic divisions appear to have been transcended, and a united front against corruption and mis-management by the ruling Barisan Nasional mobilised voters. 09 - 03 - 08
tony curzon priceHere are this week-end's warnings from friends in democratic difficulty, from Malaysia and Russia: Folks, Anwar’s party is winning a considerable number of seats ... there is currently no news whatsoever domestically being carried on Anwar’s wins, and there is some concern over whether such wins will in effect be permitted...a time, for Anwar’s friends outside to be vigilant and vocal. 08 - 03 - 08
tony curzon priceFrom Zittrain to Aristotle in 600 wordsTony Curzon Price March 6th 2008 Here is a picture taken during Jonathan Zittrain's LSE lecture yesterday on ``The Future of the Net (and how to stop it)''. In case you can't read it or guess it, the word tattoo-projected onto JZ's forearm is not ``open is we'' or ``CC rules'' but ``Communitarian''. When I saw the word, the memory bells started to ring. I'll tell you why. Read the rest of this post...07 - 03 - 08
tony curzon priceI had a note from Masha Lipman about the closure of the European University at St Petersburg (EUSP). Read the rest of this post...26 - 02 - 08
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Location 23 - 02 - 08
tony curzon priceMicrosoft has done the decent thing and proposed to Yahoo. More even than Google's presence at Davos, it marks the end of the teenage years for the search and internet advertising business - excitement, discovery, novelty and rivalry were all part of it. Dreams of a revolutionary and different future. Google announced disappointing profits, dragged down by lower than expected growth in pay-per-click revenues (the right hand side of Google search results and Google ads on others' web pages). Click fraud - the activity by which you cripple a competitor's pay-per-click advertising campaigns by automatically clicking on their advertisements and causing their budget constraints to bite - at Yahoo and Google has gone up from about 20% last year to 30% this year. Almost 1 in 3 paid-for clicks is non-genuine. 01 - 02 - 08
tony curzon priceThe tuberculosis sanatoria of the Magic Mountain at Davos fill every year with the business leaders who, ill of their tarnished images, want to put themselves into the spotlight of the media and tell the world that they are better than the world thinks. This year, this involved luring Google/YouTube into the "Davos Question": ask the world to post 1 minute videos outlining solutions to the world's problems, and have the leaders watch them. You might be able to spot two problems with the formulation already: a) if you get each person to describe a solution in 1 minute, you can expect something pretty reductive, and b) what if 10 million people did upload their views? How would you filter them? How would the business leaders, with their valuable time measured in the $millions per hour, ever be able to come good on their promise to watch them? 28 - 01 - 08
tony curzon priceEvan Davis, the telegenic and usually excellent BBC Economicscorespondent, had a heart-stoppingly bad argument this morning on theToday show. Darling is hauling in the gas and power companiesto hear justifications of the 60% price increases we've seen this year.Evan Davis went through A-level oligopoly theory, explaining that"prices are sticky ... energy firms won't reduce prices because theyknow that others will follow them if they do, so doing no good buthurting profits ... and that our energy suppliers know that we don'teasily switch anyway." So much, so (half) true. Read the rest of this post...08 - 01 - 08
tony curzon priceThere's a new buzz about the way Internet watchers are trying tounderstand what's happening on the web - a sort of generalised hunt forthe next web 2.0. Tim O'Reilly---the one who Trade Marked web 2.0 --- hasbeen posting about the links between financial markets andweb services like Google, Wikipedia, etc. He is particularly intriguedby the parallel between market makers trading on their own accounts(possibly in conflict with their clients), and Google entering contentprovision, in services like YouTube and Blogger. CoryDoctorow and Jim Wales are writing about the possibility ofopen source, transparent search --- the moment and the reasonfor the community to take the power back from Google. Indeed, "Jimbo" has announced the launch of WikiSearch with the hope that "Transparency" and social aggregation will yield better results than Google. Read the rest of this post...06 - 01 - 08
tony curzon pricepredictive-jan08.htmlThe oD SophocratsopenDemocracy launched a set of predictivemarktes in January 2007. The idea was that byallowing oD readers to buy and sell forecasts, the oD crowd wouldreveal its special wisdom. 350 readers signed up to the markets over the year. They were give$1000 to buy forecasts. For example, at the start of the year, youcould buy "Sarkozy becomes French President" for $40. When he becamepresident, you could cash that out for $100. In between time, if theprice on Sarkozy seemed to you out-of-kilter, you could trade andspeculate on the price movements. The top ten traders have shown a realskill and dedication. Tan Copsey, my colleague from China Dialogue,had an eye-popping run of profitable predicting, turning those $1,000into $135,442 - I am sure that he can rest assured of an alternativecareer as a carbon trader. Read the rest of this post... 05 - 01 - 08
tony curzon priceI've been looking forward to Becker's blog posting on sub-prime for a while. I think the current financial crisis will be to economic liberalism what Iraq was to political liberalism: a failure so vast, so shameful, that many will be led to re-assess their world view. So what does Chicago-school Becker make of it? He starts with a great piece of fighting rhetoric: The "belief in the beneficial effects of greater knowledge aboutmortgage terms is inconsistent with the evidence that the mostsophisticated banks and investment companies, including Merrill Lynch,Citibank, and Morgan Stanley, have written down their housinginvestments by billions of dollars. No one can reasonably claim that these banks lacked the skills andknowledge to evaluate all the terms of, or the likelihood of repayment,on the subprime and other mortgages that they originated or held asassets." Read the rest of this post...30 - 12 - 07
tony curzon priceHow should we interpret the massive investments from sovereign wealth funds being taken by UBS, Citi and Morgan Stanley to shore up their capital reserves? Just when the central banks are making huge amounts of liquidity available cheaply, why are these banks going elsewhere for capital? This seems strange: the public is trying to force cheap money into your pockets, and you go elsewhere to shore-up your balance sheet. Are the Chinese and Gulf States offering even cheaper money?Not likely. Banking shares have fallen sharply, indicating that equity finance is very expensive at the moment. In fact, you can expect that the new part-owners have negotiated very good terms. The banks are taking money when they need it - always a sign that they'll get it over a barrel. Read the rest of this post... 20 - 12 - 07
tony curzon priceWill Hutton was interviewed on Today - the jolly slot at 0857 - about whether the 30,000 UK resident super-rich are good for the country. He talked about incentives, Scandinavia, giving back, Quaker business, Robert Owen ... but I think he missed a real trick - the one Martin Wolf points out in a recent column: the banking super-rich are there thanks to taxpayer subsidy. In a profoundly radical column in the FT, Martin Wolf asks why the City is so rich and why banks have such a high return on their invested capital - most of the time. For the past 10 years, UK banks have returned an average of 20% on equity, year in, year out. This is huge. The usual defense is that bankers take big risks: hard cash is put up for the mere promise of more later. This is the essence of capitlalistic risk-taking. Of course it earns! - you have to compensate everyone for the roller-coaster ride. Read the rest of this post...30 - 11 - 07
tony curzon priceWho you are determines what you mean. What you say can make who you are.This dance of talking and being makes listening quite hard, and nowhere more so today than in the questions about Islam and the West. But listening well allows us to find hopeful pluralism in positions that seem opposed. Compare these two moments in the London culture-sphere: the Guardian's argument around Martin Amis' Islamo-criticism, (the best of it here in Ian McEwan's letter) compared to Ayaan Hirsi Ali's tour of the city. (Ed Hussain and Douglas Murray yesterday, Timothy Garton Ash today) Read the rest of this post...22 - 11 - 07
tony curzon priceI am in Vienna, a guest of the Institut fur die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, who, for their 25th anniversary, gathered a group ``Towards a European Public Space; International workshop on European media networking''. Mostly new serious media types, with a few academics (and some who were both) and one Commission representative, Habermas hovered over the day. There was lots of really good material--Mark Hunter's combination of INSEAD hard-headedness with a career in investigative journalism; Jeremy Druker's description of TOL's training/editorial business model; Thierry Chervel, founder of the wonderful SignAndSight project, etc... I will have time to return to these. Read the rest of this post...09 - 11 - 07
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