The Economist
Something to watch over you
"HILLARY CLINTON is supposed to have said of her husband that he was a "hard dog to keep on the porch". She is not alone. All over the world, dogs, husbands, children and even inanimate objects are liable to stray from the home--whether willingly or otherwise. Now, though, the technology exists to keep track of them."
"The angel is intended to look after old people who have become forgetful and young children who have become too adventurous, as well as dogs who are too interested in the bitch next door."
6:49 PMredux [02.26.02]
"A Florida technology company is poised to ask the government for permission to market a computer ID chip that could be embedded beneath a person's skin. For airports, nuclear power plants and other high-security facilities, the immediate benefits would be a closer-to-foolproof security system. But privacy advocates warn that the chip could lead to encroachments on civil liberties.
THE IMPLANT TECHNOLOGY is another case of science fiction evolving into fact. Those who have long advanced the idea of implant chips say it could someday mean no more easy-to-counterfeit ID cards, no more reliance on dozing security guards."
redux [02.06.02]
""Derek stood up and said, 'I want to be the first kid to be implanted with the chip,'" Leslie Jacobs said. "For the next few days all he did was talk about the VeriChip.""
"ADS chief technology officer Keith Bolton said he was a bit wary about the family's motives at first, but the Jacobses quickly convinced him they'd be perfect subjects. Since the VeriChip was announced in December, the company has been bombarded with queries from people interested in the device, Bolton said.
"Right now we have over 2,000 kids who have e-mailed, wanting to have the chip implanted," he said. "They think it's cool.""
redux [12.04.00]
"Applied Digital Solutions is launching a new line of products under the "Digital Angel" name that allow the monitoring of a person's whereabouts and vital statistics."
"Although the devices may evoke images of George Orwell's Big Brother, the company says the products could be used to keep track of pets, small children or adults with health concerns such as Alzheimer's disease."
redux [09.07.00]
"Worry no more, doting parents! Whether it's your little pumpkin's first day walking home from school by herself or the millionth time you've lost her at the mall, the BabysitterTM will track your sweetpea's location from a jelly bean-sized microchip implant, discretely tucked under her collarbone. You'll be able to chart her every move. What better way to give her independence, and put your mind at ease?"
Also available: The Constant CompanionTM lets you keep a watchful eye on grandma or grandpa, even when you can't be by their side; The Invisible BodyguardTM offers freedom from fear so you can enjoy the fauna and foliage when eco-tourism takes you to kidnapping hot spots around the globe. Coming soon: The INS Border PatrollerTM; the Maximum Security GuardTM; the Personal Private EyeTM; the Micro-ManagerTM."
redux [09.03.00]
"WHAT can grease the slippery slope toward tyranny, and erode trust within families? Sometimes, it's as simple as parents' love for their children.
A colleague and friend says he'd gladly implant a location-tracking chip in his newborn daughter, to protect her from kidnapping and other threats. He says he wouldn't misuse such surveillance power. I'm sure he means it. I'm sure other parents would say, and believe, the same things.
This location-tracking product does not exist -- yet. Such is the race of technology, however, that it undoubtedly will exist soon enough. By then, I hope my colleague and others in his situation think hard about the consequences if they get what they want."
redux [07.17.00]
"Forget the pager number and don't bother calling.
One company is making it easier for folks to "track" anyone, by allowing them to pull up a map of the person's location on a personal digital assistant (PDA) or computer.
"Cell-Loc isn't the only company to come out with location-sensitive devices. After all, the industry is expected to bring in a whopping $3.9 billion by 2004, according to the Strategis Group.
The same Strategis study showed that people didn't mind being tracked down for emergency situations like roadside assistance."
redux [05.25.00]
"It could be getting harder to hide from the boss.
After allegations that some city employees are loafing on the job, Denver officials said Monday they want to spend $1.5 million to track city vehicles with the military's Global Positioning System satellites."
"One labor expert said it might be counterproductive for an employer to try to scrutinize its workers so closely."
redux [04.11.00]
"Johnny: "Mom! Grandma's missing again!"
Mom: "Don't worry, dear, the satellite will find her.""
"According to Reuters, a Japanese company has come up with a new way to track down grandmas, grandpas and anyone else who forgets where he or she is supposed to be, by using a satellite-based global positioning system and cellular technology."
The O'Reilly Network
Lawrence Lessig Keynote from OSCON 2002
"Remember the refrain: We always build on the past; the past always tries to stop us. Freedom is about stopping the past, but we have lost that ideal.
Things are different now, [different] from even when Walt produced the Walt Disney Corporation. In this year now, we have a massive system to regulate creativity. A massive system of lawyers regulating creativity as copyright law has expanded in unrecognizable forms, going from a regulation of publishing to a regulation of copying. You know the things that computers do when you boot them up? Going from copies to, not just copies of the original work, but even derivative works on top of it. Going from 14 years for new works produced by a real author--there are fewer and fewer of those people out there--to life plus 70 years. That's the expansion of law, but also there's been an expansion of control through technology."
10:45 PMredux [07.25.02]
"This simplistic notion of what copyright is and how people think about it is weakening the debate substantially. We need to be much more aggressive in calling people on this rhetoric, because it's just wrong. It's just not the case that copyright has ever been understood to mean that if you use a copyrighted work in a way unintended by the copyright owner that's "theft." Much more fundamentally, who are the real thieves out there? The public domain was supposed to be fed with new work beginning in 1998 that's been taken away from the public. It's been taken away by Congress legislating to extend the terms of existing copyrights. I think that is theft from the public as much as there is theft going on in other contexts. Now, that's not to say there isn't theft going on. I think piracy is horrendous. But in this moment of transition between the past and the future, we've got to allow new systems to develop in a way that we can evaluate what is going to make sense and what isn't. Then we can worry about enforcing laws against "theft.""
redux [05.13.02]
"A new politics of intellectual property is needed to counteract the content industry's drive toward ever stronger rights. More importantly, a broader awareness is needed that copyright deeply affects the information environment for us all. The digital networked environment has surely changed the economics of production of intellectual property (e.g., the marginal cost of copying is effectively zero), the economics of distribution (e.g., the cost of transmission via the Internet is also effectively zero), and the economics of publication (e.g., posting information on the web is also radically cheaper than in the print environment). This means, among other things, that the actions of individuals can have the same potential market-destructive impact as those of commercial counterfeiters in the olden days. This helps to explain why the content industries have been so anxious about computers and why they favor moving to a pay-per-use or mandated trusted system policy for all commercially valuable information in digital form. Without imaginative proposals for more balanced solutions and without a political movement to support and sustain such proposalsNin other words, without a new politics of intellectual propertyNthere will be little to stop the current politics from having its high protectionist way."
redux [04.08.02]
"Nearly a century ago, the music industry argued that its future was threatened by a new method of creating and distributing multiple copies of a performed song.
The new technology? The player piano roll."
"Throughout history, new technologies -- from the Gutenberg printing press to Napster -- have posed a threat to the owners and creators of music, movies, books and other artistic works. Those publishers, writers, artists and other owners of copyrighted work have always responded with lawsuits and calls for stronger laws."
redux [03.12.02]
"Copyright was invented by and for early capitalism, and its importance to that system has grown ever since. To oppose copyright is to oppose capitalism. Thus, Marxism is a natural starting point when challenging copyright. Marx's concept of a 'general intellect', suggesting that at some point a collective learning process will surpass physical labour as a productive force, offers a promising backdrop to understand the accomplishments of the free software community. Furthermore, the chief concerns of hacker philosophy, creativity and technological empowerment, closely correspond to key Marxist concepts of alienation, the division of labour, deskilling, and commodification. At the end of my inquiry, I will suggest that the development of free software provides an early model of the contradictions inherent to information capitalism, and that free software development has a wider relevance to all future production of information."
redux [12.21.01]
"If intellectual "property" were morally indistinguishable from tangible property--as copyright holders suggest when they equate infringement with theft--there would be nothing wrong with a perpetual copyright. We take it for granted that ownership of a house or a diamond ring does not simply expire after a set number of years and that such assets can be passed on to descendants indefinitely.
A song, a movie, or a book is not quite the same, as the very existence of the Copyright Clause suggests. The Framers did not give Congress the power to grant people rights to their homes, farms, or personal possessions because such rights already existed."
"Copyrights, by contrast, were understood to be a legal invention, and the justification for them was utilitarian: to promote progress and enrich the culture by giving authors an additional incentive to create. But the Framers recognized that copyrights could also impede progress and impoverish the culture by preventing people from building on the work of others."
redux [10.15.01]
""Content": in the modern lexicon, the term denotes everything from the information delivered daily to our doors on newsprint to the multimedia clips streamed over the Internet; from the music carried on the airwaves to the interactive software on CD-ROMs. This so-called content is produced by an increasingly broad and diverse segment of the economy, including not just writers and artists, but also software programmers and other high-tech researchers who create new intellectual property.
And here's the most interesting part. Time and again, the distributors - such as publishers, broadcasters and record labels - recoil in the face of technological advances that could diminish their role."
redux [08.03.01]
"Many of the voices in online debates around IP fall into one of two camps. I won't take the time to do more than very briefly summarize these two positions, because we're all familiar with them by now. The first is the "information wants to be free" camp, which advocates the free and communal sharing of information and rejects any notion that products of the intellect can or should be understood, legally or philosophically, as property. At the other extreme is a camp that is comfortable drawing direct, strong analogies between concepts of ownership of physical property and concepts of ownership of intellectual property. Furthermore, this camp is intent on letting the "free" market determine a value for information, much as it determines a value for more traditional types of property. This second camp usually feels that the anti-IP rhetoric coming from the first camp is merely a rationale for piracy, while the first camp feels that members of the second are mindless shills for the corporate machine.
Somewhere in between these two extremes lies a large majority who find both extremes attractive for different reasons, but who can't in good conscience commit to one stance or the other."
redux [07.13.00]
"The struggle over monetizing the digital economy is now a war, if we follow the rhetoric of its leaders. The battle over music and movies is inspiring Charlton Heston-like images, most recently from Edgar Bronfman, head of Universal Studios (whose last widely distributed quote came years ago when he declared the Internet the "CB radio of the "90s"), in a speech at Real Conference 2000 in May."
""I am warring against the culture of the Internet, threatening to depopulate Silicon Valley as I move a Roman legion or two of Wall Street lawyers to litigate in Bellevue and San Jose," Bronfman said. "I have moved these lawyers - not to attack the Internet and its culture, but for its benefit and to protect it."
Bronfman justified his fight as defense of his "intellectual property rights," and those of creators everywhere. "You own a home. You own a car. They're yours - they belong to you. Well, your ideas belong to you, too. And "intellectual property" is property, period." In pursuit of pirates, he said, "we must restrict the anonymity behind which people hide."
"The semantics of the issues intrigue me, and came to my attention through Richard Stallman, who suggests that terminology is a foundation for our ideas, and that words such as consumer, protection, piracy, and intellectual property reinforce faulty premises."
redux [02.05.00]
"There is an inherent conflict between intellectual property rights and freedom of speech, a tension between your right to control a story you've written and my right to use it as raw material for my own work. Thanks to two trends, that tension is turning rapidly into a collision... On one hand, as information has grown more valuable, copyright and trademark law has become increasingly restrictive. At the same time, there has been, in the words of MIT media studies professor Henry Jenkins, an "explosion of grassroots, participatory culture," a new high-tech folkway that not only draws on pop culture but appropriates from it more easily than ever before, and disseminates itself on a wider scale."
redux [09.04.01]
"In this paper, the author reviews the history and application of copyright and concludes that, although promoted as being in the interests of authors, it is designed in such a way as to be primarily a right which benefits distributors and publishers. The author identifies a number of difficulties faced by distributors and publishers in enforcing their rights in an age where the various sources of "friction" which once limited infringement are being constantly reduced. In particular, in the emerging frictionless world the typical targets of the holder of a copyright monopoly (distributors pirating for profit) are being overtaken by a new breed of target (individuals with a cost reduction motive) and it is uneconomical for a holder of a copyright monopoly to pursue this new breed. The author argues that recent extensions to copyright monopolies add little to the illegality of the infringing acts nor any stigma to the performance of those acts. Instead, they exacerbate one of the main causes of infringement - consumer cynicism as to the benefits to society of the copyright monopoly. The author argues further that, rather than driving further cynicism through more expansive rhetoric relating to rights, holders of a copyright monopoly should instead seek to mollify consumer sentiment and encourage compliance by emphasizing a rhetoric of responsibility in the exercise of those rights. The author proposes three possible principles of responsibility that copyright monopoly holders might evaluate and endorse."
redux [06.08.01]
"Interestingly, with the onslaught of technology and promises of greater opportunity to share and communicate, copyright is now a hindrance to these ideals, serving only the moneyed interests of owners."
"Historically, copyright protections were afforded to promote expressive discourse fundamental to a democratic society. Today, the very notion of intellectual property serves to commoditize expressive ideas, rather than fostering their dissemination. Whereas initially the provision of an economic benefit was secondary to the promotion of original works, modern copyright inverts this ideal in a continuing effort to establish a marketplace for ideas."
redux [01.23.01]
"Converting the whole world to operate without scarcity is a huge task. Such a large economic shift would take decades to spread through the entire world economy, making billions of new winners and new losers. We will be extremely lucky if by 2030 we are prepared to end scarcity without massive social turmoil, including riots, civil unrest, and world war. If we are to find a peaceful path to an era of plenty, we should be starting HERE AND NOW, transforming the industries we have already eliminated scarcity in -- text, audio, and video. Companies that can't adjust should disappear and be replaced by those who can. As these whole industries learn how to exist and thrive without creating artificial scarcity, they will provide models and expertise for other industries, which will need to change when their own inefficient production is replaced by efficient duplication ten or fifteen years from now. Relying on copy-protection now would send us in exactly the wrong direction! Copy protection pretends that the law and some fancy footwork with industrial cartels can maintain our current economic structures, in the face of a hurricane of positive technological change that is picking them up and sending them whirling like so many autumn leaves."
redux [12.17.00]
"Today's received ideas about intellectual property can be distilled into two major threads: technology killed copyright, and copyright is anachronistic in networked culture. Both of these notions are simplistic and ahistorical, and I'll try to argue that they're shortsighted. What we really ought to be talking about is access to works. Access is related to copyright, but is really more fundamental to our freedom to think and experience. I'd like to propose an expanded access scheme and offer an example of small steps that are being taken in that direction."
ZDNet
Is the U.S. headed for a cyberwar? I doubt it
"THE FIRST THOUGHT that comes to my mind when people mention cyberwar is: What kind of attack are they really talking about? We've seen Web page defacements traded between Palestinian and Israeli cyberactivists. The Yaha worm, thought to have originated in India, recently caused a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the Pakistani government's main Web site. In the grand scheme of things, however these are relatively minor inconveniences compared with a major military ground or air attack."
"No one has ever made it clear to me exactly what a cyberwar would entail--and I'm betting I'm not the only one who's confused here. "
10:32 PM"A mock cyberwar enacted by faculty of the US Naval War College and analysts from Gartner does not appear to have fulfilled the Clancyesque predictions of mass devastation envisioned by the leading security paranoiacs of the Clinton and Bush Administrations.
The exercise, named "Digital Pearl Harbor," apparently in tribute to US CyberSecurity Czar and Chief Alarmist Richard Clarke, brought together a team of experts in several areas related to critical infrastructure for a three-day hackfest."
redux [07.23.02]
"Years after orders from the White House to beef up the security of the nation's most important computer systems, the government is having trouble identifying which organizations should be involved and how they should be coordinated, according to a new report."
"Even organizations already involved are slowly discovering the scope of the problems from an increasingly interconnected world."
redux [04.26.02]
"U.S. intelligence officials believe the Chinese military is working to launch wide-scale cyber-attacks on U.S. and Taiwanese computer networks, including Internet-linked military systems vulnerable to sabotage, according to a classified CIA report.
Moreover, U.S. authorities are bracing for a possible wave of hacking attacks by Chinese students against the United States in coming weeks, according to the analysis."
redux [10.04.01]
"Netwar is an emerging mode of conflict in which the protagonists - ranging from terrorist and criminal organizations on the dark side, to militant social activists on the bright side - use network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy, and technology attuned to the information age. The practice of netwar is well ahead of theory, as both civil and uncivil society actors are increasingly engaging in this new way of fighting. We suggest how the theory of netwar may be improved by drawing on academic perspectives on networks, especially those about organizational network analysis. As for practice, strategists and policymakers in Washington and elsewhere have begun to discern the dark side of the network phenomenon - especially in the wake of the "attack on America" perpetrated apparently by Osama bin Laden's terror network. But they still have much work to do to begin harnessing the bright side, by formulating strategies that will enable state and civil-society actors to work together better."
[requires 'free' registration]
""People aren't going to be killing us with computers," Mr. Hunker said, "but our life may be hell because of computer attacks."
The likeliest use of the technology, he said, would be to complicate matters further after a real-world attack, a tactic he describes with the military phrase "force multiplier." That could involve planting false information on the Web to create a panic or taking down crucial computers in the financial or communications sectors."
redux [09.12.01]
"One day after the terrorist attacks against New York and Washington, a congressional report has warned of the vulnerability of the country's computer networks."
""Despite the importance of maintaining the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of important federal computerised operations, federal computer systems are riddled with weaknesses that continue to put critical operations and assets at risk," he said."
redux [08.19.01]
""Taiwan has one of the world's largest computer software and hardware manufacturing bases," said D.K. Matai, managing director of the British-based Mi2. "The computer software programmers in Taiwan are world class. Our view is that getting involved in any kind of conflict with Taiwan, given the kind of intellectual capacity the country has, may prove detrimental."
The Chinese government has been quite open about its future strategic military objective. In paper appearing in the spring issue of China Military Science journal, a member of the Chinese Committee of Science, Technology and Industry of the System Engineering Institute, wrote: "We are in the midst of a new technology in which electronic information technology is the central technology. The technology provides unprecedented applications for the development of new weaponry...Military battles during the 21st century will unfold around the use of information for military and political goals.""
redux [09.06.00]
"The thesis of this think piece is that the information revolution will cause shifts both in how societies may come into conflict, and how their armed forces may wage war. We offer a distinction between what we call "netwar" -- societal-level ideational conflicts waged in part through internetted modes of communication -- and "cyberwar" at the military level. These terms are admittedly novel, and better ones may yet be devised. But for now they illuminate a useful distinction and identify the breadth of ways in which the information revolution may alter the nature of conflict short of war, as well as the context and the conduct of warfare.
While both netwar and cyberwar revolve around information and communications matters, at a deeper level they are forms of war about "knowledge" -- about who knows what, when, where, and why, and about how secure a society or military is regarding its knowledge of itself and its adversaries."
redux [01.04.01]
"Scenes of street violence are played out day after day in Palestinian towns across Gaza and the West Bank. But another modern-day arena for battle between the Palestinians and the Israelis is growing ever more heated, so much so that the Internet war waged by computer-savvy political activists is being dubbed an "e-Jihad.""
redux [03.22.00]
"A group of Pakistani hackers has used the conflict in Kashmir as a reason to deface almost 600 Web sites in India and take control of several Indian government and private computer systems, according to the group."
"Unlike the majority of Web vandals, the MOS members say they secretly take control of a server, then deface the site only when they "have no more use" for the data or the server itself.
"The servers we control range from harmless mail and Web services to 'heavy duty' government servers," says the MOS representative. "The data is only being categorically archived for later use if deemed necessary."
"Take the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade several weeks ago. Rage spread across China and hackers from the mainland attacked the Web sites of the US Departments of Energy and the Interior, and the National Park Service. A subsequent attack brought down the White House Web site for three days. The attacks generated headlines across the country.
What the news media didn't report was that the US government had known for a long time that someone had been in its computer systems - they just didn't know who. Then, in a fit of anger, the Chinese hackers caused some real damage - and gave away the hidden "location" of several "backdoors" they had built in US government networks."
"The US Government Accounting Office estimates 120 groups or countries have or are developing information-warfare systems. According to a report issued by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 23 nations have cyber-targeted the US."
Network World Fusion
Blogs
finding fans in business world
"Are Weblogs a legitimate business tool, or merely the Internet's latest vehicle for personal indulgence?
Phillip Windley, CIO for the state of Utah, is among those trying to find out. In June he launched a program that encourages 2,000 IT staffers and about 18,000 other state employees to use Weblogging software for what might be called strategic noodling."
8:52 PM"It is important to understand that the purpose of a blog is not always to get the largest and widest readership possible. The purpose is usually to communicate with interested individuals. Even in business, the number of those individuals may be very few, but the impact of the communications can have economic impact far beyond its cost. For example, for a business selling high-ticket items or services, one sale can make up for the time cost of a whole year of frequent blogging.
Discussing ideas like this seems to be of interest (and surprising) to many people. As blogging moves more and more into the mainstream, it will eventually be surprising when you don't use a blog."
"What I propose is slightly different: make it a commercial endeavor and hire an experienced blogger. Engage someone who's already proven they can filter, condense, and write. Work with someone who can blog day in and day out for more than a month or two. The idea here is to find an enthusiast, empower them, and fund them, not to dump blogging onto someone's day job, or it's not likely to succeed.
Think of what some of the best bloggers could do if they were financially able to do focused, full-time blogging? Pick a topic you're interested in, now imagine someone had 40 hours per week to cover everything related to that topic, and you get the idea."
redux [04.15.02]
"THE EXPERIMENT HAS BEEN so successful that Javaid says he plans to expand it until virtually everyone at his 60-person company, Mobilocity, has a Weblog. Javaid's brief experience has convinced him that far from an exercise in self-indulgence, Weblogs actually can be used to increase worker efficiency.
Javaid is hardly alone. Increasingly professionals in many fields are adopting a technology that until recently was considered to be largely the province of insomniac teen diarists and technology geeks."
redux [11.19.01]
"Inside of corporations a weblog can be used in a knowledge management or market intelligence function. Every work group seems to have someone on the team who just sends links around via email to all the other people he or she works with. In an environment like that if you give them a weblog and all the sudden the resources start really working for you. Pretty soon everyone wants a weblog to share a resource they found and to annotate useful ways in which that resource can be used by the team."
"A smart company wants to have an employee who's immersed in the rest of the world. The worst thing you can have from the point of view of the management of a company is people who are basically churning your dollars on their own political infighting or whatever's going on inside your culture -- they're not making you any money by doing that. It's better to have people write publicly."
redux [11.05.01]
"One of the major problems with expert communities, according to Snowden, is that they train behaviour and prevent innovation. Encouraging multiple informal communities throughout the company is a critical step toward innovation, he said.
"Identify people with like interests and pull them together. Allow people to cluster and form communities, then reinforce the ones you want." Snowden said. "Informal communities keep organisations together and make things work.""
redux [10.17.01]
"One of the tough tasks in KM is getting expertise located in an organization (that is, figuring out who has it on a subject by subject basis). Tougher still is validating its credibility with other members of the organization. Toughest of all is getting the experts to agree to share their expertise with others, except as part of their regular job. Employees who have spent a career lifetime enhancing their value because they "know" something others don't are logically reluctant to give away their valuable expertise and, in that process, loose some or all of their value."
"But what if the two - blogging and KM - got together? That is, what if we took the technology that allows Bloggers to quickly annotate their journeys through the web with information about the whys and wherefores with a KM system that allowed their organizational colleagues to use the weblogs as a source of expertise?"
redux [07.16.01]
"A recent study by market-research firm Gartner Group suggests companies that proactively manage intellectual assets stand to make more profit than those that don't."
"Harry Bruce, associate dean of the University of Washington's Information School, said knowledge sharing is important because information has value in and of itself in our society."
""Clearly, we're increasingly becoming aware of the complexities of trying to share and transfer information and expertise within organizations and between organizations," he said."
"People constantly exchange information, the raw material of knowledge, with co-workers, business partners and customers... but they do it using personal, unstructured tools such as email. Wouldn't it be nice if companies could benefit from their own collective intelligence? Despite this appealing premise, years of knowledge management (KM) implementations have produced mixed results."
"The fundamental problem is philosophical. KM suffers from the hubris of modernism: the belief we can discover ultimate truths and organize the world according to rational principles using clever code. It's time for postmodern knowledge management."
"Postmodern KM avoids the deterministic view of knowledge that worked at cross-purposes with human nature. Instead, it operates within and on the basis of existing behavior patterns, mining conversation streams and relationships automatically to incorporate structure and context into the information human users already manipulate. It fosters human intelligence and interaction rather than trying to replace them. In the end, postmodern knowledge management isn't about management at all, because management implies external control. The goal of postmodern KM is simpler yet deeper: leveraging people."
redux [06.12.01]
"Within IBM, there's an interesting disconnect between Cooper's team and Larry Prusak's IBM Institute for Knowledge Management, a research group located just across the street from Cooper in Cambridge. While Cooper is trying to sell a sophisticated piece of software that uses automated spiders, linguistic analysis, and Bayesian arithmetic to create topical clusters of documents and identify in-house gurus, Prusak is publishing books and articles that say that the key to developing the kind of strong relationships that make companies more effective -- what he calls social capital -- has nothing to do with software.
In an article in the June issue of the Harvard Business Review, Prusak argues that virtuality -- collaborating with colleagues in an online chat-room, for example -- can eat away at the social fabric of an organization."
redux [05.28.01]
""Good" HCI design practice then, is viewed here not simply as a more practical way to improve productivity on a specific job. It is conceived of as part of larger movement to use technology to foster a more community-based, more contextualized, more systems-oriented view of human knowledge. The consequences include greater chances for improved productivity in the small, but also, in the large, the consequences may include a move toward greater trust and cooperation; less feeling of isolation; more feeling of connectedness; hence, ultimately, more ecologically sound behavior."
The New York Times
Heartfelt Advice, Hefty Fees
[requires 'free' registration]
"The pharmaceutical industry is going Hollywood -- and getting a warm embrace.
In the last year or so, dozens of celebrities, from Ms. Bacall to Kathleen Turner to Rob Lowe, have been paid hefty fees to appear on television talk shows and morning news programs and to disclose intimate details of ailments that afflict them or people close to them. Often, they mention brand-name drugs without disclosing their financial ties to the medicine's maker."
4:29 PM"These sorts of below-the-radar media campaigns, which blur the line between drug advertising and public service efforts, are now rampant. And increasingly crucial to the success of these carefully orchestrated blitzes are celebrities willing to pour out their hearts about how they or a close relative have struggled with a particular illness -- for a price. In the last few years gymnast Bart Connor, Olympic figure skater Dorothy Hamill, jockey Julie Krone, former NFL coach Bill Parcells, San Francisco 49er legend Joe Montana, actors Rita Moreno, Bob Uecker and Debbie Reynolds have participated in this drill for various drug companies. "West Wing" star Rob Lowe recently embarked on a drug-company sponsored awareness campaign for a cancer-related illness called febrile neutropenia that will reportedly net him $1 million.
"It's become a hugely gray area as to where the stars' charitableness begins and where their financial interests begin," says Barry Greenberg, a Hollywood talent agent whose firm, Celebrity Connection, specializes in recruiting stars for the drug companies. "Maybe Katie Couric wasn't being paid to have a hose shoved up her ass, but the rest of the stars, they're getting something." "
"These and other human-interest stories have raised concerns that commercial messages are getting slipped into news stories."
""It's complicated because you want to get attention about a condition," she said. "But really what's happening is they're selling drugs, so it is somewhat insidious. We know it's effective, but we also know that it's confusing.""
"At the heart of our awareness programs is the patient-to-patient connection. We harness the magnetic attraction of celebrities' intimate personal health stories to generate strong interest, promote enhanced awareness and motivate positive behavioral change."
"To maximize impact of our messages, our campaigns are omnimedia in scope, reaching the consumer through multiple distribution channels, web, television, radio, print, software and live events. We create and distribute content that uniquely combines the magnetic attraction of celebrities with the assurance of medical authority. Our signature style is emotionally engaging and easily understood. Our creative solutions are memorable and meaningful, striking deep and resonating with hope."
“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"
Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.
...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”
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