Video: Niall Ferguson on Charlie Rose

Video of Niall discussing his new book, Civilization, as well as his current views on the European debt crisis, Turkey's resurgence, and Iran's future here.

Video: Niall Ferguson on China's 'Achilles Heel'

Video: Niall Ferguson's TED Talk on the Great Divergence

Video: Niall Ferguson - The West and the Rest (Chatham House Talk/Q&A)

'Adult Supervision' at Facebook?

But who is supervising Facebook's 'adults'?

Remarkable timing award of the week.

News of Facebook's secret smear campaign leaks the day after BusinessWeek publishes a rosy cover story on Sheryl Sandberg, which prominently quotes the Facebook COO as providing "adult supervision" at the social network.

However, Sandberg no doubt authorised and perhaps even concocted Facebook's idiotic PR caper.

In the competition over who people should trust with their very personal data, score a checkmark in Google's column and yet another minus against Zuckerberg and Co.

Preview: Niall Ferguson's Civilization - The West and the Rest

Niall Ferguson's new book, titled Civilization: The West and the Rest, will be released shortly on March 3. An accompanying six-part Channel 4 television series premieres on March 6 in the U.K.

Here's a preview:

If in the year 1411 you had been able to circumnavigate the globe, you would have been most impressed by the dazzling civilizations of the Orient. The Forbidden City was under construction in Ming Beijing; in the Near East, the Ottomans were closing in on Constantinople. 

By contrast, England would have struck you as a miserable backwater ravaged by plague, bad sanitation and incessant war. The other quarrelsome kingdoms of Western Europe – Aragon, Castile, France, Portugal and Scotland – would have seemed little better. As for fifteenth-century North America, it was an anarchic wilderness compared with the realms of the Aztecs and Incas. The idea that the West would come to dominate the Rest for most of the next half millennium would have struck you as wildly fanciful. And yet it happened. What was it about the civilization of Western Europe that allowed it to trump the outwardly superior empires of the Orient? 

The answer, Niall Ferguson argues, was that the West developed six “killer applications” that the Rest lacked: competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic. The key question today is whether or not the West has lost its monopoly on these six things. If so, Ferguson warns, we may be living through the end of Western ascendancy. Civilization takes readers on their own extraordinary journey around the world – from the Grand Canal at Nanjing to the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul; from Machu Picchu in the Andes to Shark Island, Namibia; from the proud towers of Prague to the secret churches of Wenzhou. It is the story of sailboats, missiles, land deeds, vaccines, blue jeans and Chinese Bibles. It is the defining narrative of modern world history.

May 1st Update: Just finished watching the full six-part television series, which you can view for a few more days here. It was excellent and I highly recommended it.

I did spot one perhaps small nit: in episode six on 'Work', Ferguson describes American inventor Thomas Edison as the "alternating current (AC) king" of electricity. Whether or not this was another nickname for the "The Wizard of Menlo Park", it was fellow inventor Nikola Tesla (along with perhaps George Westinghouse) who can lay proper claim to being the true AC King. Edison was a fierce opponent of AC in favor of his own alternative (and inferior) direct current (DC) system.

To associate Edison with AC as Ferguson does is at best historically incomplete, or worse perhaps misleading.