December 31, 2008

What Got You Here Wont Get You There

Finished reading, What Got You Here Won't Get You There.

This was an excellent book which took me an unusually long time to finish because it presented a lot of interesting thoughts. I'd read a few pages and need to set it down and think about it for a few days (which is, of course, what I'm hoping for in a book - I need to have thoughts provoked).

While most self-development books want to help you to "get there", this book is for people who've already gotten "there" and want to either increase their effectiveness or prepare for the next level. (Sounds like the summary of a Zelda cheat book.)

Instead of recommending providing positive actions (do A, do B, do C) one of the Zen concepts in the first half of the book is that if you've already achieved some modicum of effectiveness, maybe you need to learn to stop doing counter-productive things more than you need to add a few more marginal tweaks.

The author dwells on the paradox that the habits that have made you successful may be the barrier to future success. This makes sense to me. Once at a clinic in Pittsburgh I had lunch with Lance Armstrong's nutritionist, a PhD candidate (btw, never have lunch with a nutritionist, they look at the food on your plate and chuckle knowingly) and he said, "You know, the things that drive Lance Armstrong to be the best bicyclist in the world don't necessarily contribute to making him a very nice person", and he is right.

In the second half of the book Marshall Goldsmith lays out a path for improvement: Apologizing, Advertising, Listening, Thanking, Follow-Up, and Feedforward. Feedforward is his phrase for future-facing feedback; instead of asking for an autopsy of what when wrong in the past (which can't be changed), he suggests asking for suggestions for what to do in the future (which can be changed).

Two of the recurring themes I enjoyed in this book are the inclusion of family and loved ones in the sphere of people impacted by your "successful" habits, and the way in which his Buddhism illuminates paradoxes.

There's a very clever section about how dogs demonstrate the efficacy of sucking up - everybody professes to detest sycophants, but dogs are total kissups and we reward them for it, often greeting the dog before we greet our (less attentive, non-suckup) children. Also, there's a great koan by Tanzan about Two Monks And A Woman (Walk Into A Bar).

This is not a read for a first-job manager or recent graduate, but I think it's an excellent read for an experienced (code for corrupt middle-aged bourgeois) person that might benefit more from correcting some counter-productive baggage gained on the way up, than from a new Franklin Planner checklist.
December 30, 2008

It's all Greek Text to me

The proximate cause for this post is the introduction of a new website, Lorem 2.0. This site delivers placeholder text in a variety of formats - paragraphs/ lists, short/ long, English/ Spanish. To a geek it's pretty cool.

Lorem Ipsum is the best-known example of "Greek Text", which is used to fill out design compositions with unrecognizable and non-offensive text copy. You'd use greek text, for instance, if you were working on a newsletter design. It's placeholder text that also approximates the number of spaces and word lengths seen in contemporary English.

Greek texting is used because (in a layout exercise) the presence of actual sentences distracts the observer from the layout. The brain and eye yearn to make sense of the text, so designers use sentences in another language that the observer cannot focus on. Standard filler text is provided to prevent ne'er-do-wells from inserting clever ditties about their friends, former lovers and managers into a document that ends up on the executive's desk. The standard Lorem text is here, along with a history of Greek text.

There are alternatives, but they are generally more of an amusement than something you'd actually present to a client. The Greek Machine will deliver a variety of alternative Greek text listings, including (for instance) Hillbilly GreekText:
Promenade cowpoke dumb rustle plumb, highway, redblooded, ails tobaccee, has, tonic buy. Plug-nickel caboodle hoosegow caught hobo grandpa aunt. Go hauled hillbilly beer hollarin', cow truck.

Ain't shed uncle, hillbilly skanky wild. Mule gritts catfish, drinkin' heapin' fer.

Ever weren't beer rottgut chitlins tornado maw good saw.

Butt, barefoot gonna tornado, whomp salesmen. Chitlins right salesmen pappy everlastin' round-up gonna barn no liniment skinned dumb, grandpa.
So creative people use Lorem text to fill out a design, you send it to the Boss for review, and sometimes the Boss jumps the gun and sends the mockup to the printers asking for overnight processing. This could easily happen on a time-critical project where the boss likes the design and the designer called in sick that day. You end up with a lot of brochures or webpages in front of the public with Lorem text embedded in the columns, and of course it can't be the Boss' fault so the designer takes the hit. Examples: here, here, or here. (via Jim Heid).

Call for Entries: Pittsburgh Greek Text

Please feel free to submit your composition of Pittsburgh-ese Greek Text. Please enter your submission as a Comment below.


Similar faux pas happen in the world of graphic (rather than text) layout, where the designer wants to use a stock image in the layout. Rather than buy the stock photo and risk the boss not approving it, the designer downloads a low-rez sample of the stock photo containing the seller's watermark and uses the "dummy" picture in the layout. The routine is: when the boss/client approves the design, the designer purchases the high-rez photo and replaces the watermarked image. Inevitably, the piece gets into print or on the web with the watermarked photo, as we see in these actual photos and screenshots below:


December 29, 2008

What's Your Blog's Myers Briggs Type Indicator?

New website TypeAlyzer offers to read your blog and discern the author's Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). I fed in my blog's URL, and here's what I got:

(Let me say that I don't think I'm an ISTP In fact, that's wrong on 2 out of 4. But It's possible that I write ISTP.)

The temptation was for me to immediately enter the URLs of other Burgh blogs (see the Burgh BlogRoll on the left margin) to see what Myers-Briggs types their writing seems to be, but
  • I think that would be bad form, although it would be interesting to enter Pittsburgh mayoral candidate's blogs if they had any
  • I generally disdain magazine-survey-mood-ring analysis of this sort
  • I wonder about the role of Comments in the analysis - if comments are displayed, does it make the blogger seem neurotic?
Could comments corrupt the analysis? Could this be like Amazon's Recomendations, which built up a truly amazing profile of what I like -- until I did some Christmas shopping for my weird nephew Ralphie and now it keeps suggesting Goth music and vampire fan fiction?
December 28, 2008

The Dukes of Moral Hazard

Decisions and actions generally have consequences- good decisions and good actions generally yield good consequences, bad decisions and bad actions generally yield bad consequences. That's what we try to teach our kids.

But Sometimes, decisions and actions become insulated from consequences. Sometimes that's a retroactive implication, and sometimes there's a future implication.

Here's an exaggerated example: the North Carolina realtor tells a client: Sure you can build a beach house right on the dunes, the federal government will reimburse you when it gets washed away every three years. Or another: when a social program tells the welfare queen that she'll get increased benefits and a bigger place if she has another kid. Either case, when risk is subsidized, risky behavior is more likely to occur.


The lack of connection between decisions/actions and consequences is called Moral Hazard. The phrase comes out of economics and the insurance industry, and the memo goes like this: if you protect somebody too well from likely outcomes, then they will act differently, probably in a manner that would be ordinarily considered irresponsible.

Although it sounds like something a preacher would say, there's no moral critique or condemnation of behavior; the term moral hazard strictly refers to behavior in the face of artificially relieved or subsidized risk.


Generally, we're talking about government guarantees. Some government programs are good things: we want recently unemployed people to have a safety net. If there were no risk involved in not returning to work, we'd have moral hazard. Often, moral hazard occurs when a well-intentioned, altruistic goverment program extends beyond the initial scope to become a counter-productive anti-pattern.

There are interesting social and economic responses to moral hazard, summed up in those three little words: "I want mine". When I find out that my neighbor is immune from consequences, I think I'd also like to be immunized. If he can have some, I want some. This certainly skews the notion of government of the people and turns Uncle Sam into Big Daddy with Special Dispensations.

So General Motors is in trouble. Ford is in trouble. Some people want to bail them out, because there's a lot of jobs at stake, there's politics involved, and anyway - they're too big to be permitted to fail, the spokesmen tell us. And somehow the Government is going to take $2000 from you and your kids (which you've made, presumably, with good decisions and actions) and give it to those Corporations and businessmen who made bad decisions.

This of course, increases competitive pressure on the carmakers who were making good decisions all along, and who aren't angling for your $2000. Toyota calls "foul!", but we don't know what to do about that.

Wall Street is in trouble, too. They just got $700B of your money because they made bad decisions. I don't remember getting any of theirs when they made good decisions.

Thomas Friedman says "the only question will be, is it being done for you or to you?" Will this transfer of funds change Detroit/Wall Street's future behavior, or just delay the inevitable reckoning (with your money?) Friedman also suggests these CEOs shouldn't be looking for a bailout, they should be looking for bail.

Where's the bailout for the 250 Fore/Marconi/Ericcson employees?
Where was the bailout for the USAirways retirees and employees?
Where was the bailout for the steel mills?
Have you ever seen a corporation bail out a town?
Have you ever seen a casino bail out a loser?
December 27, 2008

New Google Image Search : Photos, Faces, Line, Clip Art

Now if you use Google's Advanced Image Search you can specify whether you want Photos, Faces, Line Drawings, or Clip Art. If you're searching for a particular style to use in a presentation etc, you can narrow the search to what you want. It's pretty cool.

For instance, here's the type of result you get when you do a Google Image Search for "House" in each of the following categories:
photo
 faces
 line art
 clip art
 
December 25, 2008

Theft of the Magi

Holidays Christmas in the New Millenium:
Theft of the Magi

XKCD is a Geek comic strip, there's a Wiki entry explaining it here. Fair warning: the content is not always safe for young children.
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What I Did Not Get For Christmas 2008 (But Maybe for Christmas 2013 if I'm Good) : A 3-D Printer

I did not get a 3-D printer for Christmas. It would fit on top of my desk, along with my monitor and my 2-D printer. (Yes, I've still got one of those old things!)



Inkjet printers can do a lot of things. Some restaurants are hacking their inkjets and replacing the inks with edible flavored dyes and printing on edible paper, giving their clientele edible menus that they can eat after they place their orders. Appetizers, sir? Oh no, please just eat your menu. No really, I mean it...


How does 3D printing work? Suppose you wanted to fabricate a sphere of 2-inch radius. The printer builds it in a thousand very thin layers. First the printer deposits a very thin layer of particle dust (plaster, corn starch, or resins) all across the printing area, say a five-inch square platform. Then the printer sprays ink onto the dust wherever the part is going to exist on that level. The dust that gets the ink solidifies, the dust that gets no ink remains powder and later blows away. Layer after layer build up. When it's done, a vacuum sucks out all the non-solidified dust, and then an Easy-Bake-Oven heats the output to solidify it as one peice. Let it cool off and presto, you've got a part. The products have the strength and properties of Lego blocks.



So these printers used to cost a million dollars, last year they cost $15K, and an outfit called Desktop Factory expects to sell them in 2009 for about $5K. This is just like personal computers all over again, in five years (Christmas 2013, hint, hint) they'll be priced at around $1000, and I'm going to want one.

What would you do with one? Make things! For instance, the tinkerers over at CandyFab.org are achieving 20dpi and making some pretty intricate sugar confections. Check out their site, best logo ever in the top-left corner.



In general, these 3D printers are corporate tools. But Another group of midnight engineers are building an open-source 3D printer called RepRap. RepRap is a plastic 3D printer. Here's the pitch that makes it unique: Once you assemble it, you use it to make (print) another one. It's a self-REPlicating RAPid prototyper. RepRap is an open source project, and although there's a lot of sweat equity and time involved in building one, it's going to cost $500 instead of $5000.

Right now, high school students are doing things with computers, scanners, and printers that only major corporations with large staffs could do thirty twenty years ago. Think about it - in 1988, what would it take to make a slideshow presentation with photo art? And print it in color? And make revisions and reprint? Today these are so easily done, we might forget how magical it is - which is the sign of a mature technology. For instance, nobody asks how the fridge keeps the beer cold.

Little Billy lost his house key? Print a new one. Cousin Sally forgot her night brace? No problem. Christmas eve and the mike stand for your Guitar Hero playset came out of the box broken? Hey, Dad can fix that! Visiting cousin (and bad boy) Stosh wants a Ninja Death Star? Sure -- oops, maybe not!

Does this affect the loss of manufacturing to China? Probably not, because desktop 3-D is still going to be more expensive than the China price. Will this support innovation and entrepreneurship? I think so.

Lest I get too positive, let me mention that if (as I believe) the unintended consequences of events outweigh the intended consequences - what will happen when bad people get these? To be sure, smart, funded bad people can get things made now; the change will be that more idiots will be able to obtain previously unobtainable items (like, for instance, rapid-fire trigger assemblies). (edited)

Another thing I find interesting is the shift in control. Previously, only factories and machine shops (which generally means people with money) held the means of production. With a 3D printer, that measure of control is lost and means of production become distributed. I don't want to sound like Karl Marx, who argued that limited distribution of the means of production exploits labor and produces the class system, but there's intriguing implications in this. As a geek, I just want the capability, but there's more in this than techno. (edited)

And finally, to kick it up a notch: remember those Star Trek chow hall replicators? That's where this ends up. Instead of printing big clunky parts somebody's going to make a molecular ink-jet using carbon nanotubes for the inkjet spray nozzles, and then all sorts of things will change.
December 21, 2008

God Rest Ye, Merry Consumer

Something to Consider at Christmas.

There are, in fact, real people up on a wall, far from home, for our sake.
December 20, 2008

Best Pittsburgh T-Shirt : Mike Tomlin, Sally Wiggin, WYEP ?

I'd like to identify my personal bias: I think the long-sleeve WYEP t-shirt I get with my renewal is the Best Pittsburgh T-Shirt. Having said that, I'd like to point out that two local | blogs have each posted one hell of a t-shirt this week. You can click each image to see them on their respective URLs.

    
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What's Killing The Pittsburgh Bloggers?

What's Killing The Pittsburgh Bloggers? Five Gone in Five Months:
  • In December 2008, The Burgh Report, a mostly local-political blog, shut down. In this posting, the author says "Maintaining my anonymity was too much stress to deal with".

  • In November 2008, TheBurghBlog (Pittgirl) shut down. In this P-G article, she says "I don't know if I would be fired or forced out or what, and I'd like not to find out... I was anonymous for a good reason and when that was threatened, we pulled the trigger so to speak."

  • October 2008, Pittsblog shut down due to time constraints.

  • Sept 2008, The Conversation shut down due to time demands.

  • August 2008, Teacher. Wordsmith. Madman. shut down.
This is not a tragedy on the scale of three Americans a day dying in Iraq/ Afganistan. Doesn't even come close. But it is a negative. A few inchoate mumblings:

If bloggers are supposed to be part of the new media, and bloggers shut down when they develop a beat/ niche/ groove, what does that mean for public discourse? What does it mean for democracy?

I've ruefully said before that Pittsburgh is a Used To Be town. Used to be steel mills, used to be jobs, used to be a mill-hunky work ethic, used to be an airport, used to be a baseball team. How will Pittsburgh become a "City 2.0" if even our blogs are all succumbing to used to be?

The pattern in the blog closings is (1) threat of identification and (2) time constraints. I get the time issue. But there's never been allegations of falsehood, inaccuracy, or slander. Why is good blogging risky? Is this a Burgh thing? Why are Burgh Bloggers in the closet?
December 18, 2008

5 Stories, 4 Heroes: Elbert Hubbard, Ida Straus, Lt. Rowan, John Pruitt

I'm not thoughtful by nature, I'm more of a feral child than a Social Compact man, but I enjoy reading good advice in a good story, particularly if it's stood the test of time.

I have known for some time about A Message to Garcia, a short exhortation written in 1899 by Elbert Hubbard. This isn't just one great story, there are really several great stories bundled together.

The short piece A Message to Garcia (AM2G) praises the virtues of initiative and resourcefulness, and bemoans the absence of these in too many people. It tells the wartime story of a special mission behind enemy lines. (how cool is that?) The President needs a message delivered to General Garcia, conditions call for a special man, and the man is found and he accomplishes the mission (through initiative and resoucefulness).

AM2G's Lieutenant Rowan was a Get Things Done (GTD) guy before his time. No dithering, no procrastination, he got right on task, one action item after another.

The second great tale in this package is the story of how this article spread around the world. Elbert Hubbard himself tells the story of how the narrative moved around: a Russian railroad executive travelling in the US read the original letter, and had it translated into Russian. Upon his return to Russia,
"he had the matter translated into Russian, and a copy of the booklet given to every railroad employee in Russia.

Other countries then took it up, and from Russia it passed into Germany, France, Spain, Turkey, Hindustan and China. During the war between Russia and Japan, every Russian soldier who went to the front was given a copy of A Message To Garcia. The Japanese, finding the booklets in possession of the Russian prisoners, concluded it must be a good thing, and accordingly translated it into Japanese.

And on an order of the Mikado, a copy was given to every man in the employ of the Japanese Government, soldier or civilian."
(This is an excellent demonstration of the epidemeological distribution of memes.)

The third remarkable thread in this bundle is about Ida Straus, co-owner of the Macy's department store chain. Ida Strauss was on board the Titanic when it struck the iceberg, and refused to leave her husband Isidor to go into the lifeboats, saying, "We have lived together for many years. Where you go, I go." Her words were witnessed by those already in Lifeboat No. 8 as well as many others who were on the boat deck at the time. Isidor and Ida Straus were last seen alive sitting together quietly on deck chairs on Titanic's boat deck.

Hubbard dramatised the story of Ida Strauss in a speech, saying "One thing is sure, there are just two respectable ways to die. One is of old age, and the other is by accident. All disease is indecent. Suicide is atrocious. But to pass out as did Mr. and Mrs. Isador Straus is glorious. Few have such a privilege. Happy lovers, both. In life they were never separated and in death they are not divided." Remarkably, Hubbard was to have a chance to walk his talk; he and his own wife were aboard the Lusitania when she was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat in 1915. Hubbard and his wife followed the courageous example of Ida Straus. It's easy to write these things, it's hard to live these things, but Hubbard actually died in the manner he recommended:
Ernest C. Cowper, a survivor of the Lusitania, wrote of their death in a letter to Hubbard's son: "They did not move very far away from where they originally stood. As I moved to the other side of the ship, in preparation for a jump when the right moment came, I called to him, 'What are you going to do?' and he just shook his head, while Mrs. Hubbard smiled and said, 'There does not seem to be anything to do.'

The expression seemed to produce action on the part of your father, for then he did one of the most dramatic things I ever saw done. He simply turned with Mrs. Hubbard and entered a room on the top deck, the door of which was open, and closed it behind him.

It was apparent that his idea was that they should die together, and not risk being parted on going into the water."

The fourth great story is the truth, (finally, the truth!), the true story of how Lt. Rowan carried AM2G. In How I Carried The Message To Garcia, Colonel Andrew Summers Rowan provides the report from his memoirs, and the true story surpasses the public legend. It's an interesting read, and what struck me is that Rowan did not blindly follow his orders to the letter, instead improvising and using judgement in the face of change and chaos.


Finally, the fifth great story here is about John Pruitt. I had occasion this week to present A Message to Garcia to two younger folks who were visiting for training. I gave them the story about initiative and resoucefulness and then waited and observed, hoping to see a response. They each read it and gave positive comments, but nothing more. I was a bit disappointed because I hoped that they would look into it, do some research, find Rowan's memoirs - in short, treat the story with the initiative that it extols. But there was no spark and I was disappointed in a minor way. When you set bait, sometimes you catch a fish, sometimes you don't.

My disappointment was lifted by John Pruitt, who was not the intended audience for AM2G but who found the article where one of the two recipients had left it, and John Pruitt's serendipitious response was everything I could have hoped for - he'd researched Rowan, examined the relationship between Hubbard and his son (which some believe was the real reason for the original article), he read Rowan's memoirs - in short, John Pruitt had responded to the story in the same spirit in which Lt. Rowan responded to his mission. At the end of my week, I am grateful for John Pruitt, and if we continue to have men like him we will do well.
December 14, 2008

What are Tag Clouds ?

Tag Clouds are a navigation tool seen increasingly on websites these days. Tag Clouds are a non-hierarchical presentation of hyperlinked key words, emphasized by frequency or importance. I'm experimenting with different types of tag clouds in the blog.

There are different ways to structure and categorize information - in books, websites, etc. The choice of a structure enables swift and predictable navigation, but it constrains choices and options - just like every map ignores some things while exaggerating others.

  


One type of structure is the Outline, a vertical list showing subordinate items by horizontal indentation. Another is the Menu, in which you choose a major category, then a sub-category, then a lesser category, then a micro-category, and then finally find the content that you want. These are modern constructs based on accepted norms in text-based decision making.

But now we see a new type of info-structure. Think of a gift basket of fruit and candy - you're presented with a jumble of options, you might need to rotate it to choose a treat, there's a lot of different things stuffed in there in a pile, and yet your brain is able to find the Junior Mints mini-pack without great difficulty.

A tag cloud is a gift basket. There are lots of choices available, they're presented without any categorical structure (the fruit, cookies and candy are all mixed up) and it works - the brain can work it out. Think about what your first response is when you come across a bountiful fruit basket - it's often, "wow, let's see what's in here. Hey, there's a kiwi! I love kiwis!".

There really is nothing new under the sun. Think about Early Man, in whatever epoch you place him. He's walking through the forest, and there's a lot of objects all around him - fruit, small game, a deadly snake, water. We've been scanning, interpreting, and prioritizing jumbled and non-hierarchical information for a long time. In fact, we're good at it, we're just not proficient at it these days.

And so, we've gone full circle and "invented" the tag cloud. The tag cloud is a visual presentation of word frequency. What's that mean? Words used more often are presented with larger letters, and the words used less are presented in lower letters. Wow, cool, new, web 2.0! Not really - road maps have been doing that for a long time now; big cities get big letters, medium cities get medium letters, tiny towns get tiny type. Nothing new there. Visual designers call it a weighted list. Compare Cuddy (bottom-left) with Pittsburgh. Notice how well you do that without consciously sounding out every single name.



So we get a jumble of words, and now we know that they're emphasized on frequency, or maybe sometimes on some definition of importance. But part of the web application means that the words in the tag cloud are links to content - and that opens up a new potential navigation schema.

Sometimes words that occur "close" to each other are grouped together by brightness (in a monochrome presentation) or by color. So it's not really just a cluster, there's a few dimensions to it, but I'm not sure how the non-digerati are supposed to get these notions.

Color is dangerous because the audience does not have a consistent habit of using color-coding, and there are non-trivial cultural implications with color. A wise use of color is variation of shades within a single hue.

Having given that quick-and-dirty understanding of tag clouds, let me back up and say -- No, that's not a definition of tag clouds, that's a definition of "word clouds"! No Fair! Everything we've said so far is really just about WORD CLOUDS.

So what's a tag cloud? What's a tag? A meta-tag or tag is a word that's significant to the meaning in an article. The word probably appears in the article, but it may not be in a headline or a sub-headline. So the NY Post headline may read There He Hos Again, but the tags might be "stupid, governor, Spitzer, repeat, hooker, prostitute, scandal, idiot". The notion is that the content is closely associated with the few words presented as tags.

In a legacy publishing perspective, the mighty Author owns the tags, and specifies the tags the author thinks are pertinent to the content. This is a taxonomy, a top-down structure. Very right-brain.

In a more recent development, publishers may open up the tagging system to the audience, and let the audience contribute tags to an article. This sort of a bottom-up schema is called a folksonomy, a tagging taxonomy created by the audience. The significance of this approach cannot be understated.

Folksonomy, or audience-tagging, allows the community of users to use their own terminology to make the content more findable to their peers. In this way, the users make the content more useful and more valuable, which is a key web2.0 concept.

What's next in cloud tags? The right-minders like the idea of audience-contributed tags, perhaps with benevolent moderating, but they don't like the messy mishegoss, so there's a flirtation with "tag indexes", user-defined tags presented in an alphabetic listing:

Some sites allow the user to choose between a tag cloud and a tag index:


Another new development in cloud tagging for websites is the "tag cloud page", an alternative sort of sitemap. Since the tag cloud needs a lot of real estate, the full-page application may achieve the promised benefits more than the 2-inch left margin placement.

The functional differences between a tag index and a tag cloud are differences of state and serendipity, or perhaps search-and-surf: the tag index assumes that the user has a particular word in mind, while the tag cloud permits notional and serendipitious discovery.

Having said what it is and listed the benefits, let's identify the negatives and say what it's not.

The downside of tag clouds are that they're intolerant of plural/singular changes and synonyms. They make an unwarranted positive assumption about user intent. They're good for serendipity but not effective for search. So they're not the Semantic Web. They're not Google. That's okay.

Tag clouds are not to be confused with cloud computing, which is something completely different. Cloud computing is replacing local hardware with offsite systems-as-a-service (SAAS).

URLs for Cloud Generators:
  • http://www.tagcloud-generator.com/
  • http://tagcrowd.com/
  • http://tagcloud.oclc.org/tagcloud/TagCloudDemo
  • http://www.tag-cloud.de/


Further reading:
  • http://www.adammathes.com/academic/computer-mediated-communication/folksonomies.html
  • http://infotangle.blogsome.com/2005/12/07/the-hive-mind-folksonomies-and-user-based-tagging/
  • http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/page/Tag_Cloud.html
  • http://rashmisinha.com/2005/09/27/a-cognitive-analysis-of-tagging/
  • http://www.joelamantia.com/blog/archives/ideas/tag_clouds_evolve_understanding_tag_clouds_1.html
  • http://www.joelamantia.com/blog/archives/ideas/second_generation_tag_clouds.html
  • http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/11/07/tag-clouds-gallery-examples-and-good-practices/
December 06, 2008

India - US Relations and the Pittsburgh Pirates

There are Bad Guys that mean us serious harm, AKA Taliban, Al Queda. They're a religious movement, not a country, so they move, shift, evolve.

They're in Afganistan. We go into Afganistan and they move to Pakistan. They don't give the Pakis a hard time, they stay out of the way in isolated country, they even do some Robin Hood stuff for the locals. The Pakis won't engage because they're afraid of them, and maybe there's even some common ground with them.

Pakistan, the country that was shocked, shocked to find that their chief scientist was selling A-bomb plans around the world. We don't have a lot of traction with Pakistan; they want F16s, we sell them F16s, and we're really not completely in charge of our military-industrial complex anyway. The Pakis won't give us permission to go after the Bad Guys who are camped in their mountains.

Strategic alliance is often driven by, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Trouble is, we don't have too many enemy-enemy-friend linkups in this area. If this was LinkedIn, we'd have a network of 0.

But now, India is mad at Pakistan. India blames Pakistan for the Mumbai 9-11. And India is really very effective at being mad at Pakistan. These guys fight over Kashmir like France and Germany used to fight over Alsace-Lorraine.

Want a clue that the bad guys are concerned? They offered Pakistan a cease-fire if the Pakis wanted to send their troops to the Indian border.

India, world's third largest country, big land mass, lots of educated people, not Muslim. They're mad at somebody we're mad at. Could be an enemy-enemy-friend linkup. They could be our new greatest ally. All we need is a little push of friendship between the United States and India, a little spark.

Hmmm. What could capture the imagination of the Indian people and make them realize, hey- we're a lot like America! Former English colonies who threw off the yoke of Prince Charles! Bollywood, Hollywood! What else could bring us together in a new way?

Let's bring India's first two pro baseball players, right-hander Dinesh Kumar Patel, and left-hander Rinku Singh, to the United States! And they're not coming to play just anywhere, they're coming to play for... The Pittsburgh Pirates. The two new pitchers will report to the Pirates' spring training facility in Bradenton, Fla., in late January. They're not long-term baseball phenoms, they're the winners of an Indian TV baseball-throwing contest.

The Hinustan Times thinks it's pretty cool. So does the Indian Express, and the Times of India.

Our two new minor league pitchers, Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel, have a blog. It's worth reading. Lots of people in India are reading it.

This might work out much better than Siddharta Finch with the NY Mets. I'm just saying.
December 01, 2008

Email is Broke; Responding with Zero Email Bounce

Email, back when it worked, was over rated. Now email is broken. When it worked, email was good for exchanging hard data - "arriving 2pm on USAir Flight 2345 from Boston, meet me at baggage claim" is a good email message. Email is also good for imperative communication (orders): "Fire Jones. Hire Baker. More cowbell!"

Email was never good for discussion, negotiation, evaluation, or conversation. Tone of voice and all the non-text cues are lost. Subtlety is gone. Misunderstandings abound. There's no added value in communication when you're emailing, and that's a great loss; communication should always add value.

And there's the perverse utility of email; it's so easy and fast to send an email, a lot of emails are sent with errors or unwise messages. Used to be you'd write (dictate? ancient!) a memo, and your boss would review it, and the secretary would check it for real, and often somebody would come up to you and say, "Uhh, did you really mean to say this?" There's no safety net in email. Email lets you make bigger and faster mistakes.

Now, email (which was supposed to be an efficiency and productivity tool, remember that promise?) is broken. It's a stream of offers for bogus pharmaceuticals and charming letters from Nigerian officials. Spam filters try to keep out the trash, but every now and then they also delete a client's note. So we spend time taking the trash out of the messages we do receive, and looking for treasures in the SPAM folders.

And if and when we do become focused, maybe with the DoNotDisturb button on our phones engaged, the email rings a bell and says "you've got mail!", except it's probably a smooth corporate sounding little tone that's every bit as effective at distracting you from whatever thought you were almost about to have. Email means anybody with a mouse can interrupt you, and these days there's an awful lot of people who can send you email and interrupt you.

Most obvious indication that email is broken? The younger Adepts doesn't use it nearly as much as the Geezers do. They're IM'ing and Twittering. They've moved on.

But email is here, it's established, and it's not going away. What's the response? Damage control to minimize the loss - they call it Zero Email Bounce (ZEB).

The ZEB concept, which is a sub-memo of the Get Things Done (GTD) school, says that if the world is delivering a flow to your mailbox, the only way to not be behind is to make your Inbox empty once a day by working the messages quickly and performing a sort of digital triage. If your mailbox has last week's junk in it, you'll keep working the trash and it'll suck up your time. Keep moving things out of your inbox until you bounce against the bottom of it. Empty Inbox = Zero Email Bounce.

Getting to ZEB doesn't mean you've done everything your email stream demands, it just means that you've categorized your messages and know where they are. At one point in the day, they're all either deleted, delegated, responded to, defered, or done.

The slideshow below, which was given by Merlin Mann for Google, says that since Time and Attention are Finite, and the inbound email stream is InFinite, only a disciplined approach will keep our time and attention from being overwhelmed by email. ZEB offers options to be deployed when you decide to go through your email: Delete (the best), Delegate, Respond, Defer, Do (next-best).

  • Can you Delete it? (this is a liberating question)
  • Is it more appropriate for you or somebody else? Somebody else= Delegate
  • Is it a simple request you can complete with a quick response? Respond.
  • Can you Do it in two minutes or less? Do it. Doing is good.
  • More than two minutes? Defer it. Schedule it, file it, let it wait.


I've found that my Respond technique is "delete-and-call" a lot more now; it's good to break through the mail-tag and speak to a real person. It's also worth noting that the ZEB folks treat email as a decision; they choose when to go through the email, rather than letting the "you've got mail" sound interrupt their attention.

Here's Merlin Mann's slideshow. His presentation style relies on the speaker's words, so they slideshow isn't a complete essay, but the notion is in there. Anybody wants to email me, click here. Sigh.