Recently in Current Affairs Category
I was in Washington DC today, standing in front of the White House taking pictures with my cellphone camera. The President Bush arrived by helicopter amidst lots of drama and media attention. What a scene!
For a quick overview of a public company, Google's service, Google Finance provides an excellent performance summary of a company, its stock market performance and key financial ratios. The site is loaded with links to other sources of information on the company and it provides historical financial statements from Reuters. This is not an in depth profile, but, like Valueline or Standard and Poor's tear sheets, Google's new service provides the most important facts about a company.
Lunch over IP recommends Comment is free, new blog started by the Guardian:
"The British newspaper The Guardian one week ago started a new collective blog, called Comment is free.
For it they recruited more than 100 smart people across the political spectrum, who post when they want about the subjects of their choice writing as many words as they like. There is an editor in charge, to get some coordination and some "hierarchy" - and help out those of the 100 that didn't have previous blogging experience - but copyediting is limited to checking for libel. Comments by regular columnists from the Guardian and its Sunday sibling Observer are also posted on this "open-ended space for debate, dispute, argument and agreement", as the "about" page puts it. The quality of the contributions is impressive.
Georgina Henry is the editor, who made the switch to blogging after 16 years spent on the print side, and she posted today her lessons-learned-in-the-first-week dispatch".
Antonin Scalia, the supreme court justice asserted this weekend that the U.S. Constitution was not a living document and should change as society changes. He is an originalist; believing that the Constitution is not flexible. In fact, he goes so far as to say that people who believe the Constitution would break if it didn't change along with society are "idiots,"
That’s the argument of flexibility and it goes something like this: The Constitution is over 200 years old and societies change. It has to change with society, like a living organism, or it will become brittle and break. But you would have to be an idiot to believe that. The Constitution is not a living organism, it is a legal document. It says something and doesn’t say other things.
I am surprised he did not take off his shoe and pound the table. I seem to remember that it is very hard to change the constitution, so I wonder what his comments were about. Congress and the the American people do not approach changing the Constituion lightly. There is a process that protects us from idiots. However, I don't know how we are protected from the conservative Supreme Court Justices.
technorati tags: Constitution, Justice, Originalist Scalia
My Mom's 75th Brithday is tomorrow and she is celebrating by protesting the war in Iraq in Washington. She is there with my wife, my son. What a great family occasion. I am so proud of them. They are acting as responsible citizens in this democracy. I hope that George Bush notices that so many people feel strongly about ending the war in Iraq.
When they return I will post some of their photos on this site.
Charlie Haden and the Liberation Music Orchestra released an album on August 30th that expresses my sentiment about the country and this administration. The Verve website describes the album: Not in our Name as:
"... a musical manifesto for the disaffection many people in America and all over the world feel about the manner in which the present administration is conducting its affairs both at home and in the global arena. The material on Not In Our Name comes strictly from American composers. As Haden explained, “There was a necessity that I felt to play music from American composers in protest to what’s going on, to make a statement that just because you’re not for everything that this administration is doing, doesn’t mean that you’re not patriotic."
This is a strong quote and expresses the outrage that I feel towards the war in Iraq, nominees to the supreme court, and the response to the disaster in New Orleans. Not in our Name!
I am taking the 30 day challenge at Baptiste Yoga in Boston. The studio will make a donation to the Cam Neeley Foundation for Cancer Care with the proceeds collected from each class, so my money is going to a good cause.
I am finding it quite hard to maintain my momentum, doing yoga everyday, in a hot room takes some disapline, but I am doing it. Today will be my tenth day.
The biggest challenge I am having is staying hydrated, since I lose so much water in the hot room during the class. You really do have to drink a lot of water to stay healthy! The process, however, is allowing me to take on even bigger challenges, like more ambitious writing projects. I'll report on what happens.
David Ortiz was quiet tonight, but he has contributed so much in this series. I have watched every minute of every game. Its a marathon!
A-Rod smacked the ball out of his glove. It was a good call by the umps. Go Sox!
Both American major political parties are running vast databases of voter information. The Democrats have fired up Demzilla from Plus Three, while the Republicans enjoy the Vault, built offshore.
The more data the parties have, and the more ways they search, collate, cross-reference and puree them, using data-mining kung fu perfected by generations of direct marketers, the more precisely they can tailor their pitches to individual voters. Undecided black housewives under 35 will get very different phone calls from the Kerry campaign than Hispanic CEOs over 60. Data mining also helps the parties find, and sway, those all-important swing voters.
(thanks to Peter Rothman)
[Smart Mobs]
I can't help myself, this stuff is just too funny.
clipped from youforgotpoland.com
Extract from an interview by Nicholas Fraser with Umberto Eco in The Sunday Times (1/10/95):
I wondered whether he browsed the Internet for pleasure. Did he believe Utopia was at hand? "I browse for some hours a week only," he says. "The problem - it's a delightful one, really - is that you never know what you can find. There's too much of everything. In the end the abundance of information can paralyse, just like the excess of food, sleep or love. A man in America has put photographs of his colon on the Internet, and I think this is remarkable - just imagine using cyberspace to exhibit your insides in public. The future of education will consist in telling people how to select or reject information. I'm beginning to teach my students the art of decimation. How do you know something will be useful any more? How do you acquire enough information about information? This is better than the old Big Brother problem we had under communism, about whether you were being brainwashed or not, but I suppose it's a serious one, too."
We achieved our first milestone on the beginning of a long road with the Cooperation Project I have embarked upon withThe Institute for the Future. We used the Socialtext wiki, and Ross Mayfield, who was there, blogged the event.
[Smart Mobs]
Yahoo Picks! posted links to a UN site which I felt it was imperative to highlight. The page is called "10 Stories the World Should Hear More About". The site says:
To shine a spotlight on some of the important international issues and developments that often do not get sufficient media attention, the United Nations Department of Public Information presents a new initiative - "Ten Stories the World Should Hear More About."This list includes a number of humanitarian emergencies, as well as conflict or post-conflict situations and spans other matters of concern to the United Nations, although it is far from embracing all of the many issues before the Organization.
THE STORIES
(click to read)
Uganda: Child soldiers at centre of mounting humanitarian crisis
Central African Republic: a silent crisis crying out for help
AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa: a looming threat to future generations
The peacekeeping paradox: as peace spreads, surge in demand strains UN resources
Tajikistan: rising from the ashes of civil war
Women as peacemakers: from victims to re-builders of society
Persons with disabilities: a treaty seeks to break new ground in ensuring equality
Bakassi Peninsula: Recourse to the law to prevent conflict
Overfishing: a threat to marine biodiversity
Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation
Yesterday I posted about who owns the profile that you create as you interact electronically with the internet and devices that record your transactions. Today, I found an another mention of electronic profiles posted at EEK Speaks on December 31, 2003:
Wed, Dec 31, 2003Knowledge Management as Information Brokering #
DavidGilmour, CEO of TacitKnowledgeSystems, wrote an excellent (and short) essay in the October issue of HarvardBusinessReview entitled, "How to Fix Knowledge Management." The gist of the article: (P3)The problem is that most organized corporate information sharing is based on a failed paradigm: publishing. In the publishing model, someone collects information from employees, organizes it, advertises its availability, and sits back to see what happens. But because employees quickly create vast amounts of information, attempts to fully capture it are frustrated every time. Even the most organized efforts collect just a fraction of what people know, and by the time this limited knowledge is published, it's often obsolete. The expensive process is time consuming, and it doesn't scale well. (16) (P4)
Gilmour's solution: (P5)
Instead of squelching people's natural desire to control information, companies should exploit it. They should stop trying to extract knowledge from employees; they should instead leave knowledge where it is and create opportunities for sharing by making knowledge easy for others to find. This requires a shift away from knowledge management based on a publishing model, and a focus on collaboration management based on a brokering model. (17) (P6)
TacitKnowledgeSystems's system does this by scanning all of the email and other documents on a corporate network, and building profiles of individuals based on these behaviors. The system can then alert people to other individuals with similar interests, brokering an introduction between them. If you think there are potential privacy problems here, you're not alone. JoshTyler's SHOCK works in a similar way, but distributes control of the profile to the individual; see his paper, "SHOCK: Communicating with Computational Messages and Automatic Private Profiles."
Interesting comment of Blue Arnaud on John Battelle's widespread posting on the trail we leave on the internet.
In Arnaud's perception privacy is a lost case. It is impossible to keep your data private. A user should make his profile explicit. It is all about the ownership of this (private) trail information. Be in control over your own profile, Blue Arnaud suggests. This profile can be the basis for the social networking services.
[Smart Mobs]
MIT Media Lab Offers a Simple Recipe for Publishing Homegrown News. Veteran journalist Jack Driscoll's research group has teamed up with senior centers and schools around the world to teach would-be journalists how to write and publish community news. The program gives participants simple online publishing tools -- and a few key lessons in how to be reporters and editors. I followed a link to the Silver Stringers site that had a neat page on how to be a journalist. Somone asked that question of a reporter in one of the BloggerCon II sessions, but it couldn't be answered in a few sentences.
This evening I attended a MIT Ashoka Foundation event that featured David Bornstein the author of How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas. David has his MBA from McGill University in Montreal, has worked as a software developer, and is a journalist. He spent several years interviewing Ashoka Foundation fellows and tells the most compelling stories in his book.
How to Change the World tells the fascinating stories of these remarkable individuals—many in the United States, others in countries from Brazil to Hungary—providing an In Search of Excellence for the social sector. In America, one man, J.B. Schramm, has helped thousands of low-income high school students get into college. In South Africa, one woman, Veronica Khosa, developed a home-based care model for AIDS patients that changed government health policy. In Brazil, Fabio Rosa helped bring electricity to hundreds of thousands of remote rural residents. Another American, James Grant, is credited with saving 25 million lives by leading and “marketing” a global campaign for immunization. Yet another, Bill Drayton, created a pioneering foundation, Ashoka, that has funded and supported these social entrepreneurs and over a thousand like them, leveraging the power of their ideas across the globe.These extraordinary stories highlight a massive transformation that is going largely unreported by the media: Around the world, the fastest-growing segment of society is the nonprofit sector, as millions of ordinary people—social entrepreneurs—are increasingly stepping in to solve the problems where governments and bureaucracies have failed. How to Change the World shows, as its title suggests, that with determination and innovation, even a single person can make a surprising difference. For anyone seeking to make a positive mark on the world, this will be both an inspiring read and an invaluable handbook. It will change the way you see the world.
Pasted from http://www.howtochangetheworld.org/text/book.html>
I highly recommend the book and if you are interested in reading more, there is an interview in changemakers.net with David about what he learned.
I put a link in the book section on the lefthand side of the page if you want to buy the book at Amazon.
Scott links to this study: Unemployment level of college grads surpasses that of high-school dropouts...and notes: "The first graph is sheer number of unemployed, and shows that in the U.S. there are now more of them with college degrees than are high school drop outs. This in itself is not that shocking - as the report says, "There are, however, far more college graduates than high-school dropouts in our current labour force." The graph shown in figure two should be more alarming, though its trends be not so steep - it depicts unemployed as a percentage of those two populations, and actually shows a decrease in unemployment for high school drop outs, but a steady increase for college graduates."
What, if anything, do these statistics tell us about the needs of learners today?
[elearnspace]
In his new book The Future of Work, MIT professor Thomas Malone argues that in the future, high tech and knowledge-based businesses will likely be run as loose hierarchies or self-managed democracies. Skilled workers will organize, disband, and regroup around different assembly projects, much as film and construction workers do today. Even cars will be designed by competing teams of freelancers, giving automakers a choice of, say, fuel cells or solar cells.
Malone writes, "We are on the verge of a new world of work, in which many organizations will no longer have a center at all -- or, more precisely, in which they'll have almost as many 'centers' as they have people." In response, he suggests, managers will need to shift from a command-and-control style to a coordinate-and-cultivate mode.
[Source: Boston Globe]
[Collaboration Cafe]
This is the terror alert banana.
'LOW' => 'green',
'GUARDED' => 'blue
'ELEVATED' => 'yellow',
'HIGH' => 'orange',
'SEVERE' => 'red');
Dave Winer wrote in his weblog that we should encourage the presidential candidates to take a position on the internet, and, in particular, that this medium should stay free from Media Companies. I agree, but I would add that it should stay free of taxes, government regulation, and intervention!
I am watching the Red Sox play the Yankees and he just hit a two run homer in the bottom of the fourth. What a nice hit. I live in the city and all around me people are yelling and beeping their horns. Magnificent.
I clipped this introduction from the website. I have not invested in it yet.
"Welcome to the Foresight Exchange!
This is the place to test your ability to predict the outcome of future events. It is also the place to check the current odds of upcoming events and make your own bets. Remember, this is not real money!
Are you finding that your time is vanishing and you are unable to keep up with what's going on in the world? Would it be nice to be able to check out the chances of future events that interest you quickly and easily? How about receiving a notice through email regarding the events that you are interested in. You can do this and more on the Foresight Exchange."
At the Foresight Exchange you are able to use your "funny money" (FX-bucks) to bet on the liklihood of future events. Membership on the Foresight Exchange is being offered on a free trial basis so you can get used to the concept and have some fun.
