Some interesting tidbits from Gates about computing in the educational arena. The Chronicle of Higher Education has nicely placed the interview outside of their usual paywall.
The Chronicle Interviews Bill Gates. Bill Gates offered some predictions of the future and a defense of Microsoft’s security practices, in an exclusive interview with The Chronicle’s Andrea L. Foster. (The Chronicle, free link)… [The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog]
Shortly after last December’s tsunami, Dina Mehta and a group of fellow bloggers began what started as a blog (The South East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog), grew into a wiki, and became an important experiment and case example of the power of new technologies to support and amplify bottoms-up organizational invention. She’s now written up her analysis and report on that effort from the inside. It’s long, but, as an ethnographer, Dina has created an important story about realizing the potential of these new tools when used in the right ways with the right energy. Lots there for all of us to learn from. Thank you Dina!
Social Tools – Ripples to Waves of the Future.I’ve been meaning to share in detail my tsunamihelp story and experiences – and I got the opportunity to pen my thoughts and reflections when David Gurteen asked me for an article for the Global Knowledge Review. This is the full text of the article – its fairly long by ‘blog’ standards, but it needs to be shared in its entirety :).
Is there some procedure in law school that surgically removes any shred
of common sense or is it some on-the-job thing you pick up working in
particular industries? It smacks of Aristotleian science where any
attempt to observe the actual phenomenon was irrelevant in the face of
authority. Or for those of a more New Testament bent, much like the way
the Pharisees tried to avoid the evidence of their eyes.
Some useful advice worth passing along. Here's hoping you never have cause to take advantage of it.
I just received this form a good friend. I know this is a bit off topic but ID theft is becoming a huge problem.
I’ve read some sobering stories about the devastation having your identity hijacked can wreak. Here’s some excellent
advice from an attorney about how you can protect yourself and what to do if you become a victim.
It’s rather lengthy but well worth reading and doing.
A corporate attorney sent the following out to the employees in his company.
1. The next time you order checks have only your initials (instead of first name) and last name put on them. If someone
takes your checkbook, they will not know if you sign your checks with just your initials or your first name, but your
bank will know how you sign your checks.
2. Do not sign the back of your credit cards. Instead, put “PHOTO ID REQUIRED”..
3. When you are writing checks to pay on your credit card accounts, DO NOT put the complete account number on the “For”
line. Instead, just put the last four numbers. The credit card company knows the rest of the number, and anyone who
might be handling your check as it passes through all the check processing channels won’t have access to it.
4. Put your work phone # on your checks instead of your home phone. If you have a PO Box use that instead of your home
address. If you do not have a PO Box, use your work address. Never have your SS# printed on your checks. (DUH!)
You can add it if it is necessary. But if you have it printed, anyone can get it.
5. Place the contents of your wallet on a photocopy machine. Do both sides of each license, credit card, etc. You will
know what you had in your wallet and all of the account numbers and phone numbers to call and cancel. Keep the
photocopy in a safe place. I also carry a photocopy of my passport when I travel either here or abroad. We’ve all heard
horror stories about fraud that’s committed on us in stealing a name, address, Social Security number, credit
cards.
Unfortunately, I, an attorney, have firsthand knowledge because my wallet was stolen last month. Within a week, the
thieve(s) ordered an expensive monthly cell phone package, applied for a VISA credit card, had a credit line approved
to buy a Gateway computer, received a PIN number from DMV to change my driving record information online, and more. But
here’s some critical information to limit the damage in case this happens to you or someone you know:
1. We have been told we should cancel our credit cards immediately. But the key is having the toll free numbers and
your card numbers handy so you know whom to call. Keep those where you can find them.
2. File a police report immediately in the jurisdiction where your credit cards, etc., were stolen. This proves to
credit providers you were diligent, and this is a first step toward an investigation (if there ever is one).
But here’s what is perhaps most important of all: ( I never even thought to do this.)
3. Call the 3 national credit reporting organizations immediately to place a fraud alert on your name and Social
Security number. I had never heard of doing that until advised by a bank that called to tell me an application for
credit was made over the Internet in my name. The alert means any company that checks your credit knows your
information was stolen, and they have to contact you by phone to authorize new credit.
By the time I was advised to do this, almost two weeks after the theft, all the damage had been done. There are records
of all the credit checks initiated by the thieves’ purchases, none of which I knew about before placing the alert.
Since then, no additional damage has been done, and the thieves threw my wallet away. This weekend (someone turned it
in). It seems to have stopped them dead in their tracks.
Now, here are the numbers you always need to contact about your wallet, etc., has been stolen:
1. Equifax: 1-800-525-6285
2. Experian (formerly TRW): 1-888-397-3742
3. Trans Union: 1-800-680-7289
4. Social Security Administration (fraud line): 1-800-269-0271
We pass along jokes on the Internet; we pass along just about everything. But if you are willing to pass this
information along, it could really help someone that you care about.
All of the Copyfight coverage
of the Grokster case is worth following. This one reminds me the
differing mindsets of executives and policy makers. I was lucky enough
to learn strategy from Mike Porter as he was writing Competitive Strategy. His course was the hottest course at the Harvard Business School.
Several years later, I went back to Harvard to get my doctorate at the
Business School. As part of that process I took the basic course in
Industrial Economics from Richard Caves
who was Porter's thesis advisor and learned that Porter was possibly
even more clever than I already thought. Porter's fundamental insight
was to take the academic research field of Industrial Economics and
invert it. Industrial Economics studies the question of market
failures. What conditions lead to markets that don't conform to the
economic ideal of perfect competition? What conditions make monopolies
and oligopolies likely? The economists study this area with an eye
toward what public policies are useful and necessary to maintaining
competition in its close to ideal form.
Porter's genius was to see that an economists' market failure was a
CEO's wet dream. Competitive strategy could be viewed as an effort to
create market failures. This is what executives are trained to do and
rewarded for. Absent the appropriate policy checks and balances, you
end up with the world that the RIAA and MPAA hope to preserve.
At the heart of Petitioners'
argument is an arrogant and unreasonable claim–even if made to the
legislature empowered to determine such a general issue of social
policy–that the Internet must be designed for the convenience of their
business model, and to the extent that its design reflects other
concerns, the Internet should be illegal.Petitioners' view of what constitutes the foundation of copyright
law in the digital age is as notable for its carefully-assumed air of
technical naivete as for the audacity with which it identifies their
financial interest with the purpose of the entire legal regime.Despite petitioners' apocalyptic rhetoric, this case follows a
familiar pattern in the history of copyright: incumbent rights-holders
have often objected to new technologies of distribution that force
innovation on the understandably reluctant monopolist.
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.
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]
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.
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:
Worth a few cycles of your time to decide whether you've got some resources worth sharing.
Are you one of those people who has one or more computers running all the time? Check out the story posted on
The Cancer Blog today about a new effort to use
spare CPU cycles to assist the Human Proteome Folding Project, which will bring many insights into cancer
research.
Another “isn't the establishment evil and stupid story?” One paragraph
after what's quoted here is the following from the original story:
So perhaps we have a training issue or a somewhat overzealous and
underinformed guard. Is this selective sharing of the story
helpful? You know that this would have disappeared in a heartbeat if
fully reported, while selective quotation gave it some blog legs. Isn't
there enough actual dumb behavior out there that we can let this one
pass?
It is standard operating
procedure for students of art to learn by example by sketching
masterpieces in an art museum. A budding artist in Durham found that
the time honored tradition was challenged while seeking inspiration at
the Matisse, Picasso and the School of Paris: Masterpieces from the
Baltimore Museum of Art exhibit in Raleigh.Over the weekend at the North Carolina Museum of Art there were
works by Matisse, Picasso, Monet, Degas and some Illanas. Julia Illana
is a second grader who was visiting the popular exhibit there with her
parents and was sketching the paintings in her notebook. “I love to
draw in my notebook,” Illana said.Her sketch of Picasso's Woman with Bangs, which came out pretty
good, and Matisse's Large Reclining Nude got the promising artist into
trouble with museum security. A museum guard told Julia's parents that
sketching was prohibited because the great masterpieces are copyright
protected, a concept that young Julia did not understand until her
mother explained the term.
Certainly one indicator of information overload is that this item has been sitting in my “blog this” queue since October. Nonetheless, it remains an important set of insights about the data and information that is being created on a daily basis. It is an excellent update, by
the folks at the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley, of a study they first did in 1999.
In the early days of my career, we thought the problem was to capture and record the information managers needed to make effective business decisions. We’ve more than solved the capture and recording side of the problem; what we’re now working out is how to solve the problem created by that “solution.”
Alan Kucheck (a Borland VP)
tipped me off to this research. Perhaps this explains why he doesn’t have is own
Weblog. 😉
If you created 800 MBytes of new information last year, congratulations: You’re as prolific as the average person on the planet.
That’s a big number, but it will likely grow faster than we can imagine. This is the
“information tsunami” that we refer to from time-to-time. Although MyST and MySmartChannels are far from the solution to this rapid per-capita growth of content, they do represent useful tools for chipping away at many of the information problems that are best addressed by lose-coupling applications.