Month: February 2005

Going Home – Our Reformation

This should certainly be on your short list.

It does provide much on the vision of what might be coming to pass. It
certainly represents much of what I would like to see come to pass and
what I think might be possible to bring into being. It won't, however,
come about simply because we would like it to or simply because we have
new enabling tools or concepts. It is going to take work and that work
will take place against the active and well-resourced resistance of
many who benefit from the status quo and are sorely threatened by these
visions of what might be.

Going Home – Our Reformation. If you read one thing this week, read this. One
commentator described it as “brilliant… and
beautiful… and inspiring.” It is all of that, and
more. It is a vision I support and that I and many other
people I cite in this newsletter are working toward. The
theme of coming home will likely
resonate in my work for a long time.

Robert Paterson writes, “Is not our great
problem that the great institutions of our time,
government, healthcare, education, arts and entertainment,
even business, no longer serve us but only
themselves?

“Is not their organizational doctrine based
on a dogma of control? Have they not divorced their
world-view from observable reality? Is not this split from
the laws of nature their dogma? Are they not prepared to
fight to the death to preserve this dogma? Do we not see
the entertainment industry as an Inquisition? Do we not see
the IP industry as the agent of the controllers and not of
the creative?

“Is not the new 'big idea' of our time to
disintermediate the institutional middleman and to enable
direct relationships? Are supermarkets eternal? Do we need
factory universities to learn? Is our health dependent on a
doctor? Is the news what we see on TV?”

Brave, brilliant, breathless stuff. If you miss
this article, you are mising the essence
of what this whole thing is about. By Robert Paterson,
Robert Paterson's Weblog, February 26, 2005
[Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]

Hold on to your sense of humor

What worries me more than anything else about today's public environment is the loss of any sense
of humor by the powers that be. Granted, the powers that be are, by
definition, likely to be humor challenged. But humor and the ability to
laugh at oneself is essential to flexibility and adaptability. More
than anything else, isn't that what we're likely to be most in need of
in today's world?

Oh my, that's good.

The morons at the Tribune and three other papers banned this comic. Not only is it hysterical, it's accurate (and we all know it).

It's also now being viewed by my
10,000 daily readers. Please post the comic on your blog so your
readers can help counteract this obvious political censorship.

-Russ By weblog@russellbeattie.com. [Russell Beattie Notebook]

A Master Equation for All Life Processes?

If you are curious about how interesting the world turns out to be, here are two great articles to add to your reading list.

A Master Equation for All Life Processes?. In “Life on the Scales,” Science News
recently wrote that some simple mathematical equations, known as
quarter-power scaling laws, can explain the metabolic rates of living
organisms. For example, “an animal's metabolic rate appears to be
proportional to mass to the 3/4 power.” And this “3/4-power law appears
to hold sway from microbes to whales, creatures of sizes ranging over a
mind-boggling 21 orders of magnitude.” The ecologists, physicists and
chemists behind this research are now successfully applying this
equation to plants, fish, full ecosystems and even biology and
genetics, by adding a new key parameter: temperature. Please read this
fascinating article for many more details and references. But save some
time to read another long article, “Ecology's Big, Hot Idea,” published by PLoS Biology,
which states that “the way life uses energy is a unifying principle for
ecology in the same way that genetics underpins evolutionary biology.”
Read more… [Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]

Not so intelligent designer

Fantastic and fascinating editorial turning the purported 'logic' of
intelligent design against itself. The only drawback, of course, is
that ID is only superficially about logic, so this isn't an argument
that will carry any weight with anyone who finds ID appealing.

Intelligent Design's idiotic designer. Cory Doctorow:
A fantastic editorial in this weekend's NYT shreds the idea of
“Intelligent Design” (a pseudo-scientific,
crypto-Christian-fundamentalist way of talking about Creationism
without mentioning God) by taking apart the incompetence and
foolishness of the supposedly intelligent designer.

In mammals, for instance, the
recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the
larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead,
it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and
then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a
20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is
evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.

Such disregard for economy can be found throughout the natural
order. Perhaps 99 percent of the species that have existed have died
out. Darwinism has no problem with this, because random variation will
inevitably produce both fit and unfit individuals. But what sort of
designer would have fashioned creatures so out of sync with their
environments that they were doomed to extinction?

The gravest imperfections in nature, though, are moral ones.
Consider how humans and other animals are intermittently tortured by
pain throughout their lives, especially near the end. Our pain
mechanism may have been designed to serve as a warning signal to
protect our bodies from damage, but in the majority of diseases —
cancer, for instance, or coronary thrombosis — the signal comes too
late to do much good, and the horrible suffering that ensues is
completely useless.

And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily
designed? Fewer than one-third of conceptions culminate in live births.
The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage.
Nature appears to be an avid abortionist…

You are an admin and you do need these lists

We're all admins today. Worthwhile stuff to know.

If you are a network or systems administrator, you’ll want these two lists from the
SilentNight Network and Systems Information Pages (their
descriptions, not mine).

The Default Password List: Here you will find a list with default usernames and passwords to Routers, Printers
etc. This list is useful for system engineers and administrators, and let them easely find security holes, and provide
unknowing customers with a little bit tighter network. If you have one of the items in this list, check it out and be
sure to change user/pass to something not known by every hacker on this planet.

Most Used Passwords: This is the list of passwords you dont wanna use, In fact you would be quite stupid using
one of these combinations cos the use is so widely spread that if anyone would try to compromise your system this will
be their first try.

Hint: If you have a broadband connection and cable/DSL router on your home network, you’re an admin (and if you
don’t, you’re vulnerable to a huge array of attacks)! If you run a WiFi access point, you’re an admin!

Blogs don't get people fired

I have yet to encounter an “I got fired for blogging story” that
doesn't reduce to “I got fired for being stupid.” You can rail
all you want about how big organizations ought to “get it” or how
Dilbert is too painfully true. The Prime Directive in organizations is
to survive and they can be remarkably adept at doing so.

The root blogging policy that ought to suffice is “don't be stupid,”
but we understand how likely that is. What these stories reflect is
that blogs are amplifiers. If you're smart like Scoble, a blog makes that more evident, more rapidly. But it reveals “dumbth” just as quickly. That's the power of this technology–it highlights what is worth attending to and what is worth ignoring.

Blogs don't get people fired. Blogs don't get people fired: In my travels today, I can't easily see what the response is to the blogging Googler getting fired,
but as someone who encourages (mostly without success) employees to
blog, I still must say, I would have fired the guy — only I would not
have waited so long. For stupidity. There are thousands of business
bloggers out there who are displaying how one can incorporate blogging
into their work…but using ones blog as a means to publicly whine
about employee benefits displays the lack of a minimal level of
discretion necessary to work within the borders of a publicly-traded
company. With freedom comes responsibility. “Top ten percenters” (one
of the blogger's bragging points) can still lack walking-around sense.

Update: Robert Scoble, the
authority on the discretionary arts related to corporate blogging
within the borders of a giant publicly-traded entity, has some
authoritative (and diplomatic) observations on the topic.

Quote:

It's
not easy writing in public. All it takes is one paragraph to lose
credibility, have people laugh at you, get you sued, create a PR
firestorm, or get your boss mad at you. Think about that one for a
while. Just a few hundred pixels on the screen can dramatically change
what people think about you.

Online Social Networks 2005

I'm signed up for this and looking forward to interacting with an excellent group of participants.

Online Social Networks 2005. Hey folks, tomorrow is the last day for the early reg price of $35 USD. Then it's $50. Time to sign up for OSN 2005. (Disclaimer: I'm speaking on the 16th but not making any money!) Here is the promo:

“OSN2005 will be a summit for
all those interested in working with social networking processes,
tools, and media. In addition to attending many workshops, panels, and
presentations by leading experts and practitioners, attendees will have
the opportunity to be part of a community with a significant role in
defining the future direction of online social networking. If you want
to help shape this industry, come to OSN2005!

During the OSN2005 summit we will co-create and publish a manifesto
describing what we want and need from online social networking tools.
What are the key criteria for choosing and assessing OSN products and
services? What gaps exist in currently available software and related
tools? What needs to happen before it's common knowledge that OSN
products and services can deliver significant value? What are the most
promising developments in the OSN industry?

Attendees will be invited to participate in a series of focus groups to
provide feedback on current OSN technology and articulate specific
suggestions for future features and developments. A series of White
papers based on these focus groups will be shared with venture
investors who want to know where to place their bets in this industry.

Join Howard Rheingold, Lisa Kimball, Joi Ito, and a host of online social network experts to:

* Exchange ideas with experienced pioneers and leading thinkers in OSN development

* Gain insights in making better use of social capital, successful
collaboration online, and efficient creation and management of
knowledge capital

* See where social software stands today and where it's going in the future

* Make contact with leading solution providers ”

Technorati Tags: , , , By noemail@noemail.org (Nancy White). [Full Circle Associates Online Interaction & Community Blog]