Five years ago today, Apple introduced the iPhone. We haven’t quite seen a presentation like the one Steve Jobs gave that day before, we haven’t seen one since, and we may never see one on that same level again. Typically, we have a fairly good idea of what Apple will introduce. That day, we had no idea—and what they did introduce was so far beyond what we thought capable for mobile phones, it blew our minds, and shifted the entire mobile industry. And laid the foundation for the iPad, which is doing the same for computing generally.

Here’s a link to Apple’s video of the presentation. Here’s Ryan Block’s coverage of the presentation for Engadget.

The Labor Department announced today that the economy added 200,000 jobs in December and that the unemployment rate dropped to 8.5 percent. Most encouraging, though, is the decrease in the unemployment rate was not primarily due to people dropping out of the job market, as has been true in previous months:

Among the pieces of good news in Friday’s report: the drop in the jobless rate came largely from real gains, not from discouraged workers giving up the job hunt. The new jobs were spread broadly across industries, with transportation and warehousing, retail, manufacturing and restaurants all hiring.

200,000 jobs is significant, too, because it’s more than the 125,000 jobs or so a month required to keep up with population growth. We need much more growth than that to dig ourselves out of the hole the 2007-2009 recession dug, but at this point, any growth is positive.

William Gibson:

The idea that all this stuff is potentially grist for your mill has been very liberating. This process of cultural mongrelization seems to be what postmodernism is all about. The result is a generation of people (some of whom are artists) whose tastes are wildly eclectic- people who are hip to punk music and Mozart, who rent these terrible horror and SF videos from the 7-11 one night and then invite you to a mud wrestling match or a poetry reading the next. If you’re a writer, the trick is to keep your eyes and ears open well enough to let all this in but also, somehow, to recognize intuitively what you should let emerge in your work, how effective something might be in a specific context. I know I don’t have a sense of writing as being divided up into different compartments, and I don’t separate literature from the other arts. Fiction, television, music, film- all provide material in the form of images and phrases and codes that creep into my writing in ways both deliberate and unconscious.

I’m not sure when this interview was conducted, but this couldn’t be more relevant today.

Idaho will require all high school students to take some online courses to graduate, and are giving each student and teacher a computer or tablet. Instead of lecturing, Idaho intends for teachers to increasingly provide guidance for students as they move through lessons on computers or tablets.

Unsurprisingly, many people are angry. One teacher doesn’t understand how this could possibly improve education:

Rather than relying on technology, she seeks to engage students with questions — the Socratic method — as she did recently as she was taking her sophomore English class through “The Book Thief,” a novel about a girl in a foster family in Germany during World War II.

Ms. Rosenbaum, tall with an easy smile but also a commanding presence, stood in the center of the room with rows of desks on each side, pacing, peppering the students with questions and using each answer to prompt the next. What is an example of foreshadowing in this chapter? Why did the character say that? How would you feel in that situation?

…

She said that while technology had a role to play, her method of teaching was timeless. “I’m teaching them to think deeply, to think. A computer can’t do that.”

She said she was mystified by the requirement that students take online courses. She is taking some classes online as she works toward her master’s degree, and said they left her uninspired and less informed than in-person classes. Ms. Rosenbaum said she could not fathom how students would have the discipline to sit in front of their computers and follow along when she had to work each minute to keep them engaged in person.

Nothing wrong with the Socratic method—my favorite high school teacher used it extensively, and I learned more in that class than I did in many of my college courses—but perhaps Ms. Rosenbaum should re-consider her strategies if she has to “work each minute” to keep them engaged. There’s no way the Socratic method is effective for her if her students are so chronically disengaged.

In-person classes still require a lot of self-directed effort from students, like actually reading the material, and there’s nothing she can do if they aren’t doing it. The problem she’s facing has nothing to do with technology. Her problem is the same one all teachers face and that they will face regardless of whether there is technology involved or not: motivating her students.

Her job is not just to get her students through the material. Her job is to get through to them. Her job is to make them see why the piece of literature they are reading is relevant and meaningful and insightful. Without doing that, whatever teaching method she employs will be completely ineffective.

Which is why her criticism is completely beside the point: whether she has to adopt the state’s new method of teaching, or sticks with her traditional method, her primary purpose remains the same.

(Via Fraser Speirs.)

Ken Rogoff eviscerated Joseph Stiglitz in 2002, and it’s worth reading again, as Stiglitz hasn’t exactly gotten any better since:

Let’s look at Stiglitzian prescriptions for helping a distressed emerging market debtor, the ideas you put forth as superior to existing practice. Governments typically come to the IMF for financial assistance when they are having trouble finding buyers for their debt and when the value of their money is falling. The Stiglitzian prescription is to raise the profile of fiscal deficits, that is, to issue more debt and to print more money. You seem to believe that if a distressed government issues more currency, its citizens will suddenly think it more valuable. You seem to believe that when investors are no longer willing to hold a government’s debt, all that needs to be done is to increase the supply and it will sell like hot cakes. We at the IMF—no, make that we on the Planet Earth—have considerable experience suggesting otherwise. We earthlings have found that when a country in fiscal distress tries to escape by printing more money, inflation rises, often uncontrollably. Uncontrolled inflation strangles growth, hurting the entire populace but, especially the indigent. The laws of economics may be different in your part of the gamma quadrant, but around here we find that when an almost bankrupt government fails to credibly constrain the time profile of its fiscal deficits, things generally get worse instead of better.

This is also worth reading because those same recommendations Stiglitz made for developing nations then are the same ones Krugman et al. are making now for European nations struggling under the heavy weight of their debt.

One Al Qaeda supporter says funding they enjoyed from Arab states is now going toward Arab Spring movements:

New recruits have stopped coming, Hanif says. “When new people came they brought new blood, enthusiasm, and money. All that has been lost.” The money may be a bigger problem than the manpower, he says. Al Qaeda used to receive millions of dollars a year from Arabian Gulf contributors, but Hanif’s uncle says his contacts tell him the donations have dried up. Instead, he believes, the money is going to the more productive and generally nonviolent Arab Spring movements in North Africa, Syria, and Yemen. “I think Arab people now think the fight should be political at home and not terrorism aimed at the West,” says the uncle. “The peaceful struggle on Arab streets has accomplished more than bin Laden and Zawahiri ever have.”

If so, that’s a huge shift in the Arab world. Before, after living under dictatorship for decades, Arabs were largely cynical and did not believe they could change their political system at home. That’s changed, and regardless of whether each country ends up a liberal democracy, channeling their frustration and energy into political discussion and reform is much, much more productive. Having a discussion about what kind of government they want, and what role religion plays in it, is an incredible step forward.

Of course, the Arab world is entering a period of instability. A better outcome is not guaranteed when regimes controlled societies for decades and weakened or destroyed political processes and culture in the process are suddenly gone. But peoples which suffered under dictatorship with no hope for a better future now do have that hope, and there’s no reason to have mixed feelings when that’s the case.

(Via Chris Martucci.)

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Reihan Salam points out that until the 1980s, the growth in health care costs was in line with most of the developed world, and since the 1990s this held true, too. What this means is that while the U.S.’s health care costs are a larger percentage of our GDP than in other developed nations, this isn’t because our costs are growing faster—it’s because we started from a higher base as a result of outsized growth during the 1980s.

Salam argues this invalidates arguments that our higher health care costs relative to single-payer countries means single-payer is more cost-effective:

So if the real problem with U.S. health spending is that the U.S. diverged from its peer countries for a decade-long stretch, solving that problem isn’t quite as simple as mimicking the institutions and strategies of our peer countries, whether it’s Canada’s single-payer system or the hybrid models of France or Germany. Our peer countries are facing the same challenges we are, albeit with slightly more breathing room.

This isn’t something to celebrate, either—actually, it’s a warning sign that the rest of the world’s health care costs are growing at roughly similar rates to our own. If the rest of the world is in the same boat, there’s no easy solution to slow our own health care costs, but it’s something we’ll have to do. And we’ll have to find a way to slow them even more than the rest of the world, because we’re starting from a much bigger hole.

Clive Crook:

A new report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows that in the middle of the last decade — i.e., after the Bush tax cuts were introduced — the U.S. income tax was about as strongly redistributive as income taxes in Canada, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden. You might have noticed that the CBO report on top incomes was widely quoted, but one finding got less attention: Between 1979 and 2007, “the federal individual income tax became slightly more progressive.”

The awkward truth is that the U.S. income tax system is anomalous not because it taxes the rich lightly but because it taxes everybody else lightly.

Kara Swisher is reporting that Apple is planning an event for the end of January:

According to sources close to the situation, Apple is planning an important — but not large-scale — event to be held in New York at the end of this month that will focus on a media-related announcement.

Jim Dalrymple is hearing the same thing, too.

Sounds like something related to publishing, but I have no idea what it’d be.

Walmart has made significant steps to make themselves, and their operations in China specifically, more environmentally-sustainable:

Acknowledging that Walmart customers “need low prices,” he said he also believed that “more and more, they will be looking at the entire life cycle of a product: How is it made, how is it sold, how is it used, and how is it reused? To meet these customer expectations, we need to ask ourselves: Is a product made in a factory that is a responsible steward of the environment and our natural resources?”

Interesting report by Orville Schell for The Atlantic. His point that Walmart and the Chinese Communist Party are made of similar, if not the same, cloth is a bit vapid, but it’s worth reading for discussion about how Walmart is exerting pressure on its manufacturers in China to become more environmentally-friendly.

Of late, the Obama administration has been invoking the progressive era as a sort of model to guide them. David Brooks doesn’t find it particularly applicable:

In sum, in the progressive era, the country was young and vibrant. The job was to impose economic order. Today, the country is middle-aged but self-indulgent. Bad habits have accumulated. Interest groups have emerged to protect the status quo. The job is to restore old disciplines, strip away decaying structures and reform the welfare state. The country needs a productive midlife crisis.

In the broader strokes, I think Brooks has it absolutely right.

Creating in OmniGraffle: a five-step introduction attempt in less than 140 words.

Desired outcome: a new mockup of WebsiteThing.

1. Start it up. Download OmniGraffle here. Choose “Blank” from the template window.
2. Frame it. Stencils?Software?Konigi Wireframes. Designing for an iPhone? Drag out the iPhone browser. Lock object in place with ?+L.
3. Build it. Check out what else the Konigi stencil offers: position placeholders, buttons, and forms on your canvas. Turn on Snap to Grid (Arrange?Grid?Snap to Grid) for quick alignment.
4. Fine-tune it. Replace Konigi elements with real copy or graphics if ready. Add labels for the benefit of others.
5. Share it. Email, show off to colleagues via AirPlay, and more.

It’s all possible on the iPad, too. If you’d like, explore a bit more.

Ross Douthat:

Republicans should have just taken yes for answer, embraced a bipartisan tax cut, declared victory and gone home for Christmas. Instead, a Republican Party that blithely voted to extend the Bush tax cuts without any offsets suddenly became very, very concerned about “paying for” a far more modest measure, and a G.O.P. that’s supposedly committed to the lowest possible middle class tax burden decided that it needed to extract concessions from a Democratic president in exchange for supporting… a middle class tax cut.

In a rather dull report from the Wall Street Journal on Apple’s intentions for TV, there was one line of interest:

Apple’s uptick in talks with its media partners is part of the company’s strategy to change the way consumers watch TV, just as the company transformed the music and cellphone industries. Mr. Jobs envisioned building a TV that would be controlled by Apple’s mobile devices in order to be easier to use and more personalized, according to people familiar with the matter.

I don’t find that particularly surprising, but it does shed a bit of light on what Jobs meant when he told Isaacson that he had finally “cracked” the problem of making a good TV. Relying on iOS devices to control the TV would solve a couple of the biggest problems with an Apple TV: what kind of remote to use to control it and how they get around the issue that people purchase new TVs only every five years or so, which means the device’s capabilities would be quickly outdated.

It’d certainly be an interesting model. Apple TV applications could reside on the iOS device, and the TV acts more or less as a dumb display. Managing applications would be simple and so would controlling the TV, and even better, the Apple TV’s capabilities could be upgraded with each new iPhone or iPad, since what it can do would depend on them.