Friday, September 13, 2002|
Roland's Teriyaki Glaze Pork Ribs: "By popular demand, I'm sharing with you my secret Hawaiian recipe for teriyaki glaze pork ribs... a delightful island treat. Cook it over an outdoor grill, watch your neighbors make a beeline for your back yard... :)" [From the Desktop of Dane Carlson] 10:21:19 PM 
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The Eerie Possibilities of RFID Tags. We already talked here about RFID (Radio Frequency ID) tags, but it was in a very different context. Check "Bye-Bye Bar Codes?" for details. Today, Ephraim Schwartz, from InfoWorld, is telling us about another way to use RFID tags to control crowds -- and individuals. I spoke with Vasily Suvorov, CTO of Moscow-based Luxoft, the leading IT company in Russia, part of IBS Group, with about 2,000 employees. Luxoft is doing work for the Saudi Arabian government and Boeing, among other organizations. Every January, Saudi Arabia gets millions of pilgrims from around the world coming to Mecca for the hajj. It creates a huge problem for logistics, crowd control, and security. To that end, Luxoft is developing the software that works with an RFID tag -- think of it as a smart UPC code -- that will be given to each visitor as part of their visa. Unlike the UPC code on a product in the supermarket, which describes the product, the tag being developed by Luxoft identifies each person in detail, including name, country of origin, where they are staying, and even what language they speak. Stationary RFID readers around Mecca will pick up the data on each passerby for the purpose of monitoring crowd flow and predicting where people are going and how situations might unfold. The data will flow into a command center, Suvorov says, and depending on the information, local team leaders in the field could delay an event or change the direction of the group they are leading. For sure, it's an interesting development. But would you trust the Saudi Arabian government to use this technology only to help people? I would not even trust my own one. This is an intrusive technology, and you don't know what people in charge can do with it. Clearly too dangerous for my taste. Source: Ephraim Schwartz, InfoWorld, September 6, 2002 [Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]10:58:17 AM
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Concrete KM. Had a session with my life coach David this morning. We were chatting about some of the problems I am facing trying to market a product in the knowledge management marketplace. It seems particuarly challenging when so many of the argued for benefits seem very abstract. I had just brought up the old adage that only 20% of the knowledge in a company is usually stored in knowledge-bases whilst the other 80% walks home every night and how, whilst this might be true, it doesn't seem to be effective in convincing people to invest in knowledge management. David then suggested a metaphor that I thought was wonderfully concrete: [Curiouser and curiouser!] 10:56:43 AM
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Teach children to stop hating broccoli: "Young children can easily be trained to enjoy the healthy foods they initially dislike, but most parents give up too soon, a British science conference heard yesterday." [From the Desktop of Dane Carlson] 10:53:18 AM
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Magic Sand. Click Magic Sand to see a clip of this stuff in action.You can get this stuff from Flinn Scientific (800/452-1261) and Educational Innovations (888/912-7474) or make your own by spraying dry sand with ScotchGard and allowing it to dry overnight. [DeepFUN Weblog] 10:40:44 AM
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The insufficiency of language. In an earlier entry I saidIs this why the Gospels sometimes seem to have a surprisingly matter-of- fact tone? Some... [Blur Circle] I implore you to read the original post, and refresh yourself for a few moments. |
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CIO article on Blogging. Got the link from The FuzzyBlog!]. What a crock. One of the big ideas about the combination of weblogs with aggregators is that you only get information about blogs that YOU decide are interesting, not the writer. I check out new blogs all the time, and I easily delete those that hold no interest. Now, in a corporate environment, say you run a weblog about a particular project. Everyone on the project can subscribe and post their info on their own logs. It allows everyone to stay current when THEY have the time to read it. Another example is from research, which is where most KM technology is needed. The company is not concerned about what the admins know (although perhaps they should) or if the janitor has a weblog. It is what this technology can do for the creation of new products. One of the big problems many people have is staying current with the literature. Everyone needs to find hours per week to stay current. But, if people subscribe to newsfeeds for the journals, a single reader can filter out the relevant articles and post them to their weblog. I subscribed to over 50 newsfeeds for biology journals. I could browse over 300 articles in less than 1 hour, posting the important ones to my blog to be read later. That is right. Browse and make posts. I could then link to the article when I had the time. It was incredibly efficient, especially compared to reading each journal TOC individually. Others could then get to the important new literature quickly. People with particular expertise would be the first to find useful articles. This moves information around much faster than any other approach. Because, simply finding an important article is not enough. You need to get it into the hands of others to whom it might also be important. Hard to do in a company of 10,000 without using weblogs and news aggregators. You can capture the tacit knowledge in the heads of people. People are not going to put completely inappropriate info up BECAUSE of the transparency. They know others can easily read it. If someone posts something that may be misleading, others can quickly reply and provide context. This is where e-mails caused legal problems. There was no context so innocently saying 'We will cut off their air supply' could be misconstrued (some satire). Many corporate lawyers hate transparency and that causes most of their problems. It is a lot easier to lie and mislead if no one knows anything. But then it is very hard to move forward. I firmly believe that there would be no Internet if the lawyers had been involved. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog] 10:31:45 AM
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Don't even think about trying to get a job in IT without.... I think I aspire to Heinlein's qualities more than the IT qualities. |
Shirky: Broadcast Institutions, Community Values
Communities are held together through intercast communications, but, to restate Metcalfe's Law, the complexity of intercast grows faster than group size. This means that in an intercast world, uniformly dense interconnectedness becomes first hard and then impossible to support as a group grows large. The typical response for a growing community is to sub-divide, in either "soft" ways (overlapping social clusters) or "hard" ways (a church that splits into two congregations.) (Emphasis mine—rl) (Shirky is using “intercast”—conversation among members of a community—in contrast to "broadcast", which is one-way communication to an audience.) Too relevant for a growing large church. |
