I am currently thinking about how computers are taking over more and more of what we humans can do, in ways we did not think about just a few years ago. The impetus for this, of course, is Brynjolfsson og McAfee’s recent e-book Race Against The Machine, where the main examples given are Google’s driverless cars, instant translation software, and automated paralegal research. I’ll use this blog post as a repository for examples of this, so here goes:
Author Archives: Espen
Trapping the wily professor
I wrote this piece in 2004, and it was published in European Business Forum, a journal sponsored by Boston Consulting Group, which since has disappeared (the journal, not the company!) Hence, I am making it available here in my blog, for your reading pleasure:
Trapping the wily professor
A hunting guide for CLOs
February 2004
Recently, I attended a meeting of senior HR executives from large European companies. The attendants were all engaged in designing and/or running various forms of management training and education in their companies, and a discussion about how to deal with outside suppliers – particularly business schools – came up. A key problem, it transpired, was getting the good professors to engage in company programs. While the schools were more than willing to sell their branded programs, most corporations wanted something tailor-made, designed to achieve a specific corporate learning goal. Furthermore, they wanted it tailor-made by the big names – that is, the professors the students were likely to know. This had proved very difficult. These were big, prestigious companies – why couldn’t they get the big, prestigious professors?
Coming from the supply side of this relationship, I have little problem understanding the difficulties these managers have – so I herewith offer a little guide to hunting down and keeping that rarest of animals, the business-savvy and interesting professor. A warning, though: This is not a task to be approached lightly. Hunting requires knowledge of the prey itself, its living environment, and its reward structures. It requires patience and a keen sense of observation, as well as an ability to communicate with the natives – or at least not to offend them too much.
First: Hunt professors on your turf, not theirs. The best place to hunt for professors is not through the business school sales channels. Instead, invite the professor to come into your company to give a short talk on some very specific point of interest – half an hour is fine – at some small executive meeting, with lunch and informal discussions thereafter. Pay the professor for the presentation. If there is no chemistry, you have listened to a (hopefully) interesting presentation and the professor has made a little money and is likely to think of your company with benevolence. Incidentally, the best referrers of professors are other professors – so use the occasion to extend your network. Carefully cultivated, most professors will come when you call and leave you alone when you want them to.
Secondly: Avoid the obvious blunders. This should go without saying, so the experienced professor-hunter may want to disregard this paragraph. However, any high-powered and dynamic business executive can unknowingly scare away the wily professor without meaning to – the equivalent of putting on aftershave before the hunt and then ondering why you never see any prey. Professors are academics, and you hunt them because they are. Consequently, never use the word “academic” to mean “irrelevant”, “hypothetical” or “impractical”. Never refer to them as “educators” – in academic cynical parlance, an “educator” is someone forced to live by teaching because he can’t do good research. And never – never ever – ask them to include that interesting best-seller (“Who drank my café latte?”) you saw in the airport bookshop in their program curricula. Professors are extremely jealous of outside intellectual competition, and anyone preferring the Heathrow School of Management to them is treated with extreme suspicion, if not outright hostility.
Third: Don’t deal with intermediaries. Typically, the CLO seeking a management education program interacts with a relationship manager from the business school. This person is pleasant, nicely attired and means well, will sell you the standard programs and tell you what you want to hear, but is incapable of trapping the wily professor on your behalf. If you want a program out of the ordinary, talk to the person most critical for its success – and that better be the professor, because if program responsibility lies with the salesperson, you are in trouble. That being said, the school’s relationship manager is very useful as a support person – so let your own support person deal with him or her, and make sure that the minute any content issues spring up, the problem is escalated to you – and the professor. (And, by corollary, don’t fall into the trap of becoming an intermediary yourself, in the case when a business colleague needs a program and asks you to set it up.)
Fourth: Ask not what the professor can do for you, but what you can do for the professor. Professors are not motivated by money. Actually, that is a whopping big lie – they certainly are, but it needs to come in a form palatable to the world they inhabit. Doing executive education does not help a professor in his or her career – at best, it earns him or her non-tradable brownie points for helping the school. What counts in the academic hierarchy – at least officially – is publishing what to the layman appears as unreadable articles in obscure journals read by few and remembered by even fewer. These articles are created through back-breaking work and qualified through an evaluation process that makes Purgatory feel like a day at the beach. To do the work, the professor needs money, in the form of research grants. To get through the evaluation, he or she needs data, obtained by getting access to corporations. If you can give the professors research money and access to data (i.e., your company,) they will happily create executive education programs as part of the research process. They will even teach them. (It is possible to bag a few professors through money alone, primarily the younger ones, but on a repeated basis this will yield a lower quality of prey).
Fifth: It is not what you say, it is what you do. The above will attract and retain professors, but will not earn their undying love. To achieve that, you need to follow through and do what they say. Professors seeing their theories listened to and applied will do anything you ask of them – sit on your Board, talk to your executives, co-write career-enhancing articles with you in trade magazines and even listen to your suggestions for making their theories better. The danger herein lies in that you may go native yourself – and what a tragedy that would be.
So there you are – to bag a professor, start by wining and dining them, paying them for a small presentation, then lure them with money and access to provide you with tailor-made and interesting executive programs. It is easy. You can start now. My email is at the top of the page.
The Digital Economist Index
The Economist has long had the Big Mac index, a surprisingly useful index for all kinds of things (though the magazine use it primarily to track over/undervaluation of a local currency. The Big Mac is a useful indicator because it is locally produced with local labor, but subject to stringent standards in terms of production and provisioning.
The digital version of the Economist, on the other hand, should be the diametrical opposite of the Big Mac – it is the same all over the world (the Economist does relatively little tailoring of its product, seeing its customers are globalists) and the price for delivering it is, of course, the same in all countries (with some provision for sales taxes.) Consequently, you would expect the product to have one price, all over the world.
Alas, that is not the case.
Left brain, right brain, free brain
I loved this one (via Rough Type) mostly for its animation and for its refusal to simplify the split brain – though the extrapolations towards the end come dangerously close to circling all the way back to, well, the left-right brain thing :
Throwable panoramic camera
This seems like just the thing for the enterprising tourist – not to mention journalists in danger zones, or just in crowded situations. Nothing like a little overview, especially with high-res cameras. Would have loved to see someone do this at the Rose March in Oslo, for instance.
Via Extremetech, more at the creator’s web site.
QI shooting for comprehensible incomprehensibility
To me, this just might be the best episode of QI ever (and that says quite a lot, doesn’t it?)
Incidentally, should you miss it, here is the second part:
Now, if someone could just syndicate this show to just about every TV channel on earth, the world would be a much more agreeable place. Smarter, more erudite, and less superstitious. In short, A Good Thing.
Please make it so.
Singularity here and there
The discussion on the technological singularity is firing up again, this time in the MIT Technology Review blog, with this blog post by Paul Allen and Ray Kurzveil’s almost instant answer.
I think it is high time this discussion is taken up by a wider audience – and am working on something to do just that. More about this later.
Pitfalls for the US speaker in Scandinavia
This is an slight update of something I wrote in 2006, adding a few points and incorporating some of the (very good) comments from back then. [Notes: Small updates April 25, 2014. Some of the examples are getting a bit long in the tooth (incidentally, another expression that doesn’t travel well.)]
Here are some pointers for US management speakers wanting to avoid the most obvious pitfalls when visiting Scandinavia (or even Europe in general), in no particular order:
- Don’t blindly use big-name US companies (Walmart, General Motors, General Electric) as examples without explaining who they are. Outside top management echelons, consulting companies and business schools faculties, most people will only know their brand names (incidentally, for GM in Scandinavia, that is largely Opel, in the UK, Vauxhall) and not the companies themselves. Some well known US companies frequently used as management examples (Nordstrom, Verizon, Comcast, Best Buy, AT&T, USAA, Sears, Netflix) do not operate outside the US, at least not with their normal brand names and standard business processes.)
- Never use the US mobile telecommunications industry as an example of something good or advanced (or, at least, be very careful). Mobile communications in Scandinavia (and Europe) generally outshines the US mobile phone industry – you can essentially get into your car in Northern Norway and drive to Rome while continually being on your cellphone. Try that in the US. (This comparison isn’t fair (and the difference is shrinking), there are many pockets of innovation in the US cellphone industry, but most people will judge the industry in terms of connectivity and coverage when they go to the US themselves.)
- Be very careful about using banking examples – US banking is seen as very backward by Europeans, because of the continued use of paper checks, something that disappeared in the 1980s and 90s in Europe. In reality, the US banking industry probably leads the world in technical innovations, but services between banks are not nearly as integrated as in Europe – and therefore are seen as backward. Plus, European banks have a wider range of services in the payment area – services that credit card companies and PayPal do in the US.
- The same goes for airlines and trains – most Europeans don’t understand that the US railroad industry – in my opinion second to none in the world – transports goods, not people. And Europeans certainly don’t like US airlines. Not that most Americans do, either. (Yes, I know much of this has to do with government subsidies and lack of competition. But impressions are formed from actual use.)
- Be careful that you don’t talk about Europe as a single country like the USA. There is much more variation between countries in Europe than between states in the US – language, history, culture, attitudes, economics, etc. Check each country on Wikipedia (particularly economics if you are speaking to a business audience) and make sure you know which country you’re in (and where your audience is from..)
- Don’t refer to going to church (for example, refer to someone as “we belong to the same church” or similar). In Scandinavia less than 10% of the population goes to church regularly, and religion is a very personal thing. Openly referring to church will make many in the audience think you belong to some strange cult.
- In general, Europeans are less inhibited in the off-color joke department than Americans – not that it takes much – but there is considerable geographical variation. However, this apparent frivolity comes with subtle pitfalls: If you tell something that can be construed as demeaning to women, for instance, it will fall very flat even in an all-male audience. The telling of off-color jokes should not be attempted unless you really know your audience (or if you possess an English accent more pronounced than Stephen Fry’s.)
- In general, Scandinavian business people are less formally dressed than Americans during daytime, but they dress up (or keep their business suits) for dinner. Quite the opposite from the US, so don’t change into jeans for that after-work bash. Unless you work in software, which is thoroughly Americanized. (This is changing – if in doubt, ask. Precede it with an “In the US we do this, what’s the custom here?”)
- No US-only sports metaphors! (Which, incidentally, for most US speakers will mean no sports metaphors.) Though Europeans know what American football, baseball and basketball is (especially basketball, NBA has quite a following via cable and Internet), don’t rely on them to know them well enough to understand individual terms such as touch-down, loaded bases or rebound (though they might understand “slam-dunk” from context.) So, unless you are thoroughly familiar with soccer, handball, cricket (UK only) or – in Scandinavia – cross-country skiing, ski jumping or biathlon, don’t use sports metaphors. They simply are not used as much in Europe as in the USA.
- Be careful about Star Trek and Star Wars and various references associated with US TV series – they may be known, but check that first (and this is changing). In the UK, the sci-fi cultural peg of choice is Dr. Who. Good luck to you.
- Some opinions seen as merely “conservative” in the US are considered fascistic or simply crazy in most of Europe. The “right to carry arms”, anti-abortionist sentiments, or religiously based politics is viewed with distaste, if not horror, by most Europeans. Mentioning that you are a member of the NRA will (for those in the audience who knows what that is) position you as a person with a frighteningly loose grip on reality. (Nevertheless, some countries in Europe have more gun ownership than in the USA, but we are talking perceptions here.)
- Never suggest union-busting or de-unionization or trying to stop people from forming unions as a strategy. It is illegal, against the culture, and against anything considered good management by almost every Scandinavian manager. In most companies in Scandinavia, relations with unions are cordial, collaborative and valued.
- By the same token, saying that you should fire large groups of people (or, indeed, individuals) very often just isn’t practical advice. In most of Europe, you formally cannot fire people unless they are doing something seriously illegal or are underperforming by a really large margin. Moreover, you have to follow a lot of very time-consuming, legalistic procedures before you can get there. You simply have to work with people to a much larger degree. (And you may think it is stupid and limiting, but that is the way it is.)
- Be a bit careful about naming prominent people as “friends” and referring to them by their first names. In Scandinavia, “friend” implies a fairly high level of intimacy, usually reserved for the private sphere – and then, you probably wouldn’t refer to them in a management speech. “Warren Buffett is a friend of mine, and…” or “As Steve Ballmer said the last time we met…” will tend to make you look boastful and leave people unimpressed – unless you can show that your conversation has made them change their behavior and that you really have influence.
- The terms “corporate”, “company”, “enterprise”, “division” and SBU have fairly precise definitions in the US. Not so in Europe. Most Europeans do not understand the difference between Vice Presidents and Directors – as a consequence, most people called Directors (on their English-language business card) in Europe are actually VPs. The guy with the title “Director” might just be CEO. Or just a director.
- Don’t expect to score points by mentioning your distant Norwegian ancestry (or even worse, Swedish when in Norway – ref. the Europe-is-not-one-country bullet). For some reason, this does not build much “common ground” with Norwegians. You can score points on your Nordic ancestry if you manage to be specific and show some actual knowledge, but the “my great grandfather migrated from Wormland, and it feels great to be back…” will just make you look out of touch.
- The following concepts are not understood by most Norwegians: Gallons, feet, miles, mph, degrees Fahrenheit, Thanksgiving, the distinction between “state” and “federal”, TiVo, “right on red”. “Leverage” is a rather peculiar word: It has no good definition in Scandinavian languages (and it took me years to understand it and use it properly). The same with “ubiquitous” – so if you say “ubiquitous leverage”, nobody will have any idea what you are talking about. Not even you, methinks.
And there you are. All this being said, you will probably be fine even if you break a few of these. We are after all, quite forgiving and will refrain from complaining. Instead, you’ll just be branded an American, and your opinions and suggestions filtered a bit…
(For suggestions or comments, well, that’s what the comment field is about!)
The future of shopping (at least in Korea)
Here is an interesting video from Tesco, apparently an internal video that went viral:
If we now just could digitize the food itself….
Welcome to our new location…
…as of today, October 17, 2011, Applied Abstractions has found a new home at WordPress.com. The old material at http://www.espen.com/weblog has been transferred, comments and all. For a while, I am sure there will be links that need a bit of updating and other details that will need tending to.
I remains to see how much of all that good Googlejuice I had made over at espen.com makes it over….
When MUDs turn real
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
REAMDE is a techno-thriller in the traditional sense, i.e., technology plays a part, but so does gunfights, teamwork and hardship. Not one of Stephenson’s strongest (that would be Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle), it has some of the nomadic quality of Anathem but, since it is not a science fiction book (the events take place in modern times, the only technological stretch maybe the quality of the T’Rain World of Warcraft-like multiuser game, which differs from WoW primarily in that it is designed with a working economy (again, one of Stephenson’s fascinations – who do you establish a currency in a virtual world.) This means that a lot of what happens stretches the limits of what is possible – you get a bit of the feeling that you get in a run-of-the-mill detective show or war fil, that the bad guys can never shoot straight unless they are aiming for one of the less central characters, preferably those with already life-curtailing afflictions.
The plot is convoluted and centers first on the hunt for some hackers holding important documents hostage (through cryptography), but an inadvertent stumble on a bomb factory in China turns it into a fight between a Jihadist band of terrorists and a collection of technologically astute, well balanced (in terms of gender, ethnicity and geographical starting point) group of hackers, mercenaries and survivalists. Fun, but if you are looking for Stephenson’s best stuff, start with the other books here. Or just relax and treat this as a bit of a diversion, not to be taken too seriously.
A fringe benefit of biking…
… is that you get to take pictures like this on your way to work.
Introduction to BI-Fudan course in Technology Strategy
Here is an introductory video for students of my course in Tech Strat at the BI-Fudan MBA program, in early February. Apologies for bad lightning – this was done between classes in a spare classroom:
IT in Norway: Industry and impact
As part of the Knowledge-based Norway project, I have been writing a report on the Norwegian IT industry, examining the industry as industry, but also its effect on business and government in Norway. You can find it here – and comments are more than welcome. Here is the executive summary:
Executive summary, with policy implications
This report describes and analyzes the Norwegian IT industry, focusing on two categories of companies: Those that provide information technology as a product largely developed by themselves, and those that provide information technology services – mostly by taking foreign technology and making it available to Norwegian companies and organizations.
Contrary to Norway’s classic knowledge hubs – petroleum, maritime, seafood – the Norwegian IT industry, though large, profitable, and knowledge-based, does not see itself as a hub and does not act like one. With a few exceptions (Horten, Trondheim) the Norwegian IT industry is overwhelmingly located in the Oslo area: Along Akerselven, in the City centre, at Skøyen, Lysaker and Fornebu. Few Norwegian IT companies paint on a global canvas, and those that do tend to be acquired by large international companies when they reach a certain size or maturity – growing out of Norway, as it were. In some cases, the companies continue and thrive in place, usually when they address a very specific global (GE Vingmed) or local (Visma) need, in others, they gradually disappear, subsumed into the acquiring organization (FAST into Microsoft development center Norway, Tandberg becoming a unit of Cisco, Trolltech becoming a part of Nokia and then sold to a Finnish software company).
The IT industry’s main contribution to Norwegian society comes in two flavors: Firstly, it provides a group of companies (the large IT service providers and consultancies) with a body of knowledge on how to develop and implement information technology in Norway, increasing the country’s productivity through smart use of administrative and customer-facing systems. The relatively large size of the consulting industry and the extensive use of consultants both by the public sector and the larger companies ensures that the scarce knowledge of IT development and implementation both can be nurtured and rewarded as a core activity inside specialized organizations, and also makes sure that this knowledge is available in a more flexible form than the rather rigid hiring and firing practices of Norwegian working life.
Secondly, the technology provided by the large, international technology providers, by the open source movement, and by administrative software providers ensures an available infrastructure for entrepreneurs in almost any industry: Few, if any, new startups today do not spend time on systems development as a major activity. Furthermore, extensive use of IT lowers the bar for starting new companies, both in terms of their relationship to the public sector, in their mobilization of resources, and in their access to markets. Thus, IT is, at the same time, a competitive arena and a coordination facilitator – an industry as well as an enzyme – in terms of increasing Norwegian innovative performance, productivity and competitiveness.
Knowledge creation and dissemination
Knowledge comes into the IT industry from three main sources: From foreign technology providers, from companies’ own development work, and from academic research in Norway. The latter transfer mechanism happens largely through the production of graduates from computer science and engineering programs – the single-most scarce factor in the industry, underscored by practically anyone interviewed. Academic research in itself, with a few, celebrated examples such as Simula (University of Oslo) and search technology (from NTNU), is not tightly integrated with the industry. Companies are often started by students from the engineering schools and computer science departments, but faculty involvement is largely missing – with a few important exceptions – after the companies are formed. This is partially because contributing to industry goes against the culture of many academics – the universities and colleges do not recruit faculty with entrepreneurship in mind – and partly because company-specific knowledge quickly outruns the more general academic knowledge as soon as development speeds up.
Industry challenges
The IT industry provides a general purpose technology (Basu and Fernald 2008), where value creation is more visible in the industries that use it than in the technology industry itself. The industry is largely located in Oslo, finances its R&D out of own funds or general tax refund programs, and does not to a large degree partake in more long-term research funding. It is an industry where everyone competes and collaborates – there are few, if any, long-term collaborative patters. The IT industry scores relatively low on several cluster dimensions, in particular knowledge dynamics.
The industry needs to raise its profile in order to do better recruitment and increase its chances to enhance value creation, by jointly documenting and exemplifying how it creates value in the Norwegian society. In order to attract talent outside the traditional male, engineering-oriented candidate pool, the industry would benefit from trying to portray itself as urban, cool and interesting – a career choice not just for the technically inclined but for the ambitious and culturally dexterous candidate. Lastly, the industry needs to address the thorny problem of improving productivity – in particular, decision making productivity – in the public sector, by collectively taking a more proactive stance not just on technology direction, but also recommend actions to increase organizational efficiency and goal effectiveness.
Public policy implications
Public IT policy can be divided into policies directed towards the industry, and policies directed towards the use of information technology in public administration and public service companies.
Policies towards the IT industry have been characterized by a quite fruitful neglect: The industry has not (despite entreaties from its interest organizations) been offered much help, nor had many restrictions from the government. This is not necessarily a problem – the industry does not need much public help, since it is used to continual technology-driven change and regularly transforms itself.
A productive public policy of IT in Norway would need to recognize that value creation from IT happens outside the IT industry; that Norway is a very small country which does not necessarily need big systems (but can benefit from simplification of procedures and structures) The IT industry is best supported by addressing the problems felt by the industry (in particular, the talent shortage) rather than forcing it to
respond to relatively short-term political interests such as focus on particular technologies or geographical distribution.
The biggest opportunity for value creation with IT in Norway lies in increasing the productivity in public administration and service provisioning. Procedures and structures are still modeled on paper as a medium and geographical distance as a hindrance. While strides have been made in improving the interface between the public and the government, much remains to be done in the back office.
Norway’s challenge is to convert the enthusiasm with which the population adopts new technologies into an equally strong enthusiasm for government and business to adopt their processes and services to the new technology. Let the final recommendation for the government then be that a post of Minister of IT is created, empowered to reorganize, automate and digitize all aspects of public service provisioning, with a goal of making life better for every citizen and with the added benefit of enabling Norwegian IT companies to export the resulting knowledge and technology to countries less blessed with a strong economy and a technologically enthusiastic population.
MIT for me for now
And just like that, I have moved across the Atlantic to Boston, where I will be for the next year. There are two reasons for this: First, daughter #3 – a bona fide US citizen who moved to Norway as a two-year old – wanted to spend her middle high school year in the United States. She did not want to go with one of the standard exchange programs, because with those you cannot choose where in the US you will be (which essentially means you will be somewhere in the mid-West.) Secondly, I was due for a sabbatical. In both cases, Boston is a good place to be.
So, daughter #3 is now at Brookline High School, and pater familias has infested MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research. This is a academic research group that in its structure and processes operates very much like CSC Index and Concours Group, companies I previously have worked for. In fact, CISR is in the same building as CSC Index used to be (five Cambridge Center, on , only three floors lower. It is very much deja vu – I have already had lunch at the Poppa & Goose truck (now called something else, but the food is the same.) The last week has been busy, getting a great apartment in Brookline (with good help from friends), buying an old (well, old by American standards) but great Mercedes station wagon for transportation, buying used bikes and doing the necessary runs to IKEA for what Douglas Coupland refers to as “semi-disposable Swedish furniture. We even got a whiff of Hurricane Irene, with loss of power for 10 hours and many threes down in the neighborhood.
The rest of the family, for various reasons, could not come with us, but visits are planned (the first one this week) and a long Christmas vacation already booked. Despite having a sabbatical, I still need to go home to Oslo for the occasional executive course, but hopefully not too much – the whole point of a sabbatical is not to have to think about teaching and administration.
Oh well. I see this year as a visit to an intellectual candy store – CISR cohabits with MIT Center for Digital Business, MIT Center for Computational Research in Economics and Management Science, and MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, just to mention some of the closest neighbors – a candy store where gorging does no harm but, indeed, is encouraged.
Bolero in the morning
This video just made me happy, that’s all:
Copenhagen Philharmonic in transit
How to respond to terrorism
Today I participated in a memorial and response to the terrorist attacks in Oslo, a semi-spontaneous gathering of people organized within 24 hours via Facebook and TV. Around 200000 people – a third of the city’s population, the largest gathering in Oslo since the second world war, and that in the middle of the holiday season – met at City Hall Square. the large square between the City Hall and the harbor. I have never seen so many people in the streets of Oslo – and yet, the city was eerily quiet.
Most, including us, carried roses or other flowers. The intention was to have a “March of Roses“, but the number of people made this impossible – instead, it became a silent and stationary memorial, especially moving when everyone held their flowers high and spontaneously and very mutedly sang Nordahl Grieg’s “Til ungdommen.”
There were speeches by many, among them the Crown Prince (“today the streets of Oslo are filled with love. We have chosen to meet cruelty with closeness.”) and the Prime Minister (“evil may kill a person, but will never defeat a people”) but I actually thought the Mayor of Oslo, Fabian Stang, expressed it most cogently: “Together, we will punish the murderer. The punishment will be more openness, more tolerance, and more democracy.”
Before going down to the City Hall Square arrangement, we visited the Oslo Cathedral, which has become a focal point where people have left flowers, candles and letters:
We also went closer to the bomb site to see the damages. This is the building where Julie, our oldest daughter, works:
And here is a view into a coffee shop on the first floor, two blocks away from the blast:
There were lines outside every flower shop:
After the ceremony, people where told to leave their flowers somewhere in the city. Here is one solution to this challenge:
Like one of the speakers, Dilek Ayhan, said: “Today, I am very proud to be Norwegian.”
PS: Many more, and better, images here.
The Oslo attacks
My family and I have received many emails from friends in the USA and other places, offering their condolences and wondering if we are OK. (We live in Oslo, on an island, and from a distance it is natural to worry.) This post is to address those issues and reflect a little on what this means in Norway.
Our youngest daughter was alone at home (about 5 kilometers from the site) when the initial explosion (video here)occurred, and felt the impact in the house. Julie (oldest daughter, interviewed here by Boston Globe) was waiting for a bus in town about 800 m from the bomb site and both heard the explosion and felt the impact quite forcefully. She works in one of the buildings very close to the site, but was on sick leave at the time. Many of the windows in this building were blown out. Our middle daughter was away in the South of Norway. Lena and I were in Germany visiting friends, we returned early this morning.
As far as we know (and the names of the dead and wounded will not be made public until later this week) nobody we know directly has been directly harmed. Our youngest daughter knows, indirectly, five of the youths listed as missing. As I am writing this, 7 people are confirmed dead in the explosion, 86 (later revised down to 68) in the subsequent shootings on the island. About 73 are listed as seriously or critically wounded, 4-5 missing.
Lena and I drove through the Oslo City center on our way home at 2am this morning. The main government buildings and the bombing site are cordoned off and guarded by soldiers, and there are policemen on many street corners.
As unlikely as it may seem, the attacks are probably the work of one man, a fairly well-to-do islamophobe who has planned this for nine years. The intent seems to be to gather attention for a self-published manifesto, a feverish 1500-page PDF screed detailing his inflated self-picture, confused world views and preparations for the attack. The bomb attack was similar in technique and effect to the Oklahoma bombing, but with relatively few casualties due to it being vacation time and relatively late in the afternoon. The ensuing attack on the island (which is very small, about 200 x 500 meters) with the summer camp left such a devastating result because there are few places to hide and nowhere to run. Also, the gunman was dressed as a police officer and fooled many into getting close enough to him that they could be slaughtered.
The whole country is in mourning – at noon a silent minute was observed here and in the other Nordic countries. The Prime Minister and other public figures have shown remarkable dignity and restraint in a situation that must be inhumanely hard, especially since many of the killed and wounded were personal friends.
Norway is very small – as the poet Nordahl Grieg wrote during the second world war: “We are so few in this country, every fallen is a brother or friend.” In proportion to the population size, this attack has claimed roughly twice as many victims as 9/11. The 500 youths at the summer camp came from all over the country. In such a small society, everyone knows or knows of someone who has been harmed.
Norway has always been a very open society – the police is largely unarmed, you can run into public figures with few or no security guards (in fact, we met the Prime Minister on a bike tour in the city forest in April this year,) political meetings and demonstrations take place with a minimum of security presence. This openness and trust is highly valued by all. It is my hope and expectation that the actions of a deranged loner will not succeed in destroying one of the most cherished attributes of this small and close-knit society.
The modern male
This is all over the net in an encore, so let’s hang it here as well – George Carlin in the definitive description of modern manhood:
Gotta go. Things to do…
Orotund oracularity
Oracle Night by Paul Auster
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Lent to me by my daughter, and like her, I admired the writing and story-within-story interconnectedness, but was left with a nagging wonder – what was really the point? Siri Hustvedt, Paul Auster’s wife, has written What she loved, and that is really a better book for this kind of intertwined, dramatic New York story, where violence and mystery happens in a chamber play of mysterious and sometimes amoral characters. But by all means, a good read.
Applied Abstractions 