Stormy's Corner

Reality Mining the Organization

"Reality Mining" the Organization talks about tracking whom employees talk to, what they talk about and what tone of voice they are using. My first response was "how scary!" I mean, I don't care if my company knows who I'm talking to, but to know when I talk to them, what I say and even what tone of voice I use sounds like big brother. Now, in practice, nobody is actually going to listen to the conversation, like nobody actually reads all my emails that they track. However, I think the data will much more likely be used to correct than to collaborate. So I think it's much more likely that they would discover someone is antagonistic to 90% of people, and decide that combined with their poor performance, they aren't worth keeping, then someone would decide that because someone regularly talks about the latest technology with ten of their friends, that they should be on the new technology team. But you never know, like all technology, its usefulness will depend on how well it's deployed.

InfoWorld: The social enterprise: March 26, 2004: By Jon Udell : APPLICATIONS : NETWORKING

InfoWorld: The social enterprise: March 26, 2004: By Jon Udell : APPLICATIONS : NETWORKING talks about the role that social networking can play in corporations.

Wired News: Playas Pay to Spread the Luv

Wired has an article about a new networking site called FunHi, Wired News: Playas Pay to Spread the Luv. People join, pick a ganster personality type, post a picture and then give each other electronic gifts. These electronic gifts (like virtual airplanes or diamonds) cost less than a quarter on average and you can give them to anyone, but they can't be regifted. You can also rate people on how cool or sexy they are.

FunHi has pulled in more than $10,000 in their first month. Talk about social networking and web based businesses!

Social Networking Blog: The Social Software Weblog - socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com

An interesting social networking blog: The Social Software Weblog - socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com.

Editorial Observer: The Evolution of Women’s Roles, Chronicled in the Life of a Doll

I found this New York Times editorial by Carol F. Lee about Barbie kind of funny: Editorial Observer: The Evolution of Women’s Roles, Chronicled in the Life of a Doll.

Virtual Reality

The MIT Tech Review article My Avatar, My Self talks about virtual reality sites. You logon, define your character and wander around meeting with people, playing games, shopping, etc. It's like the online games such as Everquest but you're not playing a game. You're talking to real people about whatever you want. It's the first version of the "cyberspace" concept prevalent in science fiction books by authors like Neal Stephenson and William Gibson.

The National Marrow Donor Program

I would like to encourage everyone who is able to sign up as a bone marrow donor with The National Marrow Donor Program. Only 30% of people in need of bone marrow find a match within their family. The rest of them rely on people in the donor database.

One of my collegues is currently still looking for a donor for his treatment scheduled in the spring.

Ender's Game

Ender's Game is an excellent science fiction book. The setting is a world in the future where Earth has been attacked once by an alien race. Earth expects the aliens to come back again, and in order to prepare the best and brightest to fight the next invasion, they set up a military school ... for children. The most intelligent and mentally capable children are selected at a very young age to attend the military academy. At the academy they train using "The Game" - a sports game in no gravity that prepares them for war.
Orson Scott Card does an excellent job of character portrayal, and his children, while geniuses, are very believable.
I've read the print edition of this book and recommend it. However, I recently listened to the audio version of this book and it was excellent. It's done in several voices.

Mona Lisa Smile

Mona Lisa Smile is a movie about a young professor from California who takes a job at Wellesley College, a prestigious women's college, in the 1950's. The young professor is played by Julia Roberts. Julia Stiles and Kirsten Dunce play several of the girls. During the movie, Julie Roberts' character struggles greatly with the attitude of both the Wellesley administration, who want her to teach a traditional curriculum, and the students, who are looking forward to getting married. Roberts' character wants the students to think and challenges them to achieve higher academic and career goals. However, most of the girls in the movie are planning on getting married and starting a family, not a career. The movie illustrates the changing roles and attitudes of women in American society in the 1950s and how difficult that was for many people. What struck me most was how different I would have been if I'd grown up in the 1940s and how little understanding and tolerance women of my generation have for the women of previous generations. While being a mother and housewife is certainly still a respectable career, we have little patience with someone who doesn't understand the importance of our outside the home career. Not too long ago, it would have been unheard of for most of us to have the careers we have. I don't think we realize how much we've changed in such a short time.

Just in case after seeing the movie, you think Wellesley College is a school for coeds looking for husbands, you should know that many, many prestigious women have graduated from Wellesley, such as Madame Albright and Hillary Clinton. And 5% of the women that sit on Fortune 500 boards graduated from Wellesley, according to author Harvey Mackay.

Health Blog

See my health blog here: http://stormy.blogs.com/livingwell.

The Path To a Healthier America (or not)

In spite of all of the government funded studies that show that Americans are becoming more and more obese, the newest transportation bill allots less than 1% of the $300 billion total for sidewalks and bicycle paths. As anyone who has tried to run their errands on foot knows, without better walkways, it will continue to be easier and more pleasant to use a car for daily tasks, and we will continue to get heavier and heavier as a nation. For more information, read the New York Times article, The Path to a Healthier America.

High Tech Porta Pottys

While traveling in San Francisco, we ran into the following high tech porta potty. You put a quarter in the slot, the door opens automatically and you step inside. Inside you hit the door close button and enter the world of high tech bathrooms. To wash your hands, you just hold your hands over the sink. The water and soap start pouring automatically and after a time, they shut off and hot air blows out. When you leave, the whole bathroom cleans itself, including the floor and toilet bowl. There's a warning sign telling people not to enter as people leave, as the wash cycle happens automatically!

High Tech Porta Potty

Control Panel

Sidestep

The Wall Street Journal has a column today about travel websites. In it the article I discovered this cool tool called SideStep that you can download from the Sidestep website. It installs as a toolbar in your browser, lets you search for flights and takes you to the website with the fare when you pick one.

Last Juror

I really enjoyed listening to the Last Juror by John
Grisham. (I listened to it on my Otis from Audible. Tell them
"storming" sent you if you sign up.) It's a book about a
young man without much direction in life who moves to a
small Mississippi town and ends up, almost by accident,
buying the town newspaper. We meet the town through him
and hear about many topics affecting small southern
towns in the 1970s such as racial integration, Vietnam,
department stores, etc. All of it chronicled through his
friendships and his ownership of the newspaper. The book
does have a murder mystery in it, so it is more like
some of John Grisham's legal thrillers than Bleachers
was, however it is really a story about a small town and
the people in it.

Innovator's Dilemna

I had a chance to hear Clayton M. Christensen, the author of Innovator's Dilemma and Innovator's Solution, speak today. I enjoyed his first book, Innovator's Dilemma, and it was really interesting to hear him apply his ideas to current technologies. Clayton talked not only about distruptive technologies that companies miss, but disruptive technologies that they are not able to take advantage of in the markets they serve. For example, he argued that solar power will not develop into a mature technology in the United States because we will not be forgiving of an immature product - we expect 24/7 uptime from our electricity. On the other hand, people living in Mongolia are excited to have solar technology - they don't depend on electricity 24/7 and are ok with it going out often. He gave a couple of similar examples and ended up having an interesting conversation with Tim O'Reilly who was in the audience.

Charlie Mike by Leonard Scott

Charlie Mike is a book about the rangers in the Vietnam War. My boyfriend recommended that I read it (and then gave me grief for months as I avoided it.) I enjoyed the book - it was much easier to read a book about the Vietnam War than it was to watch a movie. Without the visual violence I was much more able to relate to the characters. In Charlie Mike, Leonard Scott does a good job of describing the war and the people in it in a way that made it more possible for me to understand some of the awful events and behaviors that came out of the Vietnam War, like why people volunteered, why people were slaughtered in battles that shouldn't have happened, why people enjoy fighting and he did an especially good job of showing us why people enjoy the military.
I do have to say that his female characters were a bit shallow. We didn't really get to meet them. The focus of the book was most definitely the rangers. The characterization of the rangers was excellent.

Bleachers

Bleachers is a book about the coach of a small town's football team. Unlike most of John Grisham's other books, it is not a legal thriller nor a mystery. It's about a small town, a coach and a football team. John Grisham does a good job of describing how the lives of many men have been affected by their high school football coach. Whether or not you agree with the coach's methods, there is no denying that he's a true leader. He changes the lives of those around him.

This is a good short book, so it's well worth your time to read it.

Lost in Translation

There is an opinion letter about Lost In Translation in today's edition of the Asian Wall Street Journal. The author of the letter, Salil Tripathi, argues that critics who say that Lost in Translation mocks the Japanese are wrong. I had to stop and think about it. Lost In Translation is a movie about two Americans that meet in a hotel in Tokyo. They are both suffering from jet lag and a sense of displacement or alienation from the Japanese culture around them. Anyone who's been to Japan on business will find the beginning of the movie funny. At one point I laughed so hard I had tears in my eyes. However, I don't believe the movie was making fun of the Japanese. I think it was highlighting how foreign it all looks to an American. The movie was making fun of that sense of disorientation you can feel when you're encountering a new culture for the first time and you've only had two hours of sleep. Bill Murray, who's not even sure what he's doing in Japan (other than they are paying him lots of money) and he's having problems at home, just looks lost and that's a very familiar to feeling to many business visitors to Japan. Most of us however, do end up sleeping at some point, and begin enjoying the cultural differences. Business trips to Asia are always my favorite. While I really enjoyed the beginning of the movie, I thought the movie was very slow. However, I'd have to agree with Salil Tripathi, I don't think the movie was mocking the Japanese culture.

Two issues I did have with the movie:
- The gyms at international business hotels in Asia are NEVER empty in the early morning hours. There is always a large number of jet lagged business travelers waiting for treadmills as soon as the gym opens in the morning.
- While I've sometimes had problems being understood or understanding what someone was saying in Japan, I've never had them brush me off or continue to repeat the same thing over and over again. In my experience they have always been very helpful and taken great pains to make sure I understood and was understood.

John Kerry, John Edwards & Friendster

Both John Kerry and John Edwards have Friendster accounts. If you belong to Friendster (signing up is free), you can invite them to be your friend and (if they accept your invitation) check out their profile.

Note, there are several John Kerry's. The one with the picture of himself windsurfing is the one that is running for president. John Edwards is the one in the suit and a tie.

I read this in BusinessWeek.

Market Map

Smart Money has a really cool tool. Go to Smart Money, click on Maps, and select "Market Map". A window with a lot of different sized squares and rectangles will pop up. Each square or rectangle represents a different stock. The relative size of the square corresponds to the stock's market share. The color corresponds to the price, green is up. The map is continuously updated to reflect current prices.

This tool allows you to quickly see what the market is doing at a glance and to see how any one particular stock may or may not be acting with the market as a whole.

Ear phones and personal space

For those of you like me who walk around with earbuds in your ears all day, this article will be interesting, More than just a pretty interface. Dr Michael Bull has studied how listening to your own private music (or book) can help people control their environment even in public, ad filled spaces.

I found this on Slashdot.

Social Networking and Online Personality Tests

Tickle.com is an online personality test and social networking site discussed in Getting to Know Me, Getting to Know All About Me: Web Personality Tests. While the article is mostly about social networking and dating sites and how some of them like Tickle.com are adding personality tests to generate conversation and to aid in match making, it was really the second page of the article that caught my attention. They mention which company has bought or sold which social network. The whole idea that social networks can be bought or sold is either intriguing or disturbing depending on your mood. Each site has its own privacy policy but regardless of what privacy they've promised, the company still holds the data - the who knows who. Who thinks like who. Who's emailed who. Who has the same interests. The applications are enormous and so is the potencial for abuse. Although in one sense they are self policing, any site that abuses its users is going to lose its users.

By the way, Tickle.com will let you take lots of tests, but unless you're willing to pay for the detailed results (per test!), you won't find out much.

Smart Dust

Smart Dust is a new technology. Researchers are developing a network that consists of very small sensors that would float in the air like specs of dust. (Currently they are 5mm on a side and cost $5. They are working on getting them to 1 mm and $1.) These "motes" or smart dust would be able to notice things about their environment and communicate it back to a central location. They might sense things like traffic problems, weather (temperature and humidty), the movement of people, etc.

Michael Crichton's science fiction book Prey is built on the idea of smart dust that gains sentience.

You can read more about Smart Dust here:

Smart Dust
Dust Inc.

We Should Abolish the CIA

John Kerry said "We should abolish the CIA. Because the CIA completely and totally missed the Soviet revolution." in this New York Times interview. I'm sure he has more reasons than that - since it's been a long time since the Soviet revolution and the CIA has done a lot (or not) since then. I wish he'd share them. If you have links to other information, please comment.

Herb Garden

My boyfriend made an indoor herb garden today. It's beautiful and it smells really good. He planted sage, mint, basil, oregano, rosemary, cilantro and dill.

To learn more about herb gardens, Google for "indoor herb garden" or start with one of the following articles:

Growing, Preserving and Using Herbs
Indoor Herb Garden

Blog Epidemic Analyzer

Researchers at HP Labs created the Blog Epidemic Analyzer to track how ideas spread through blogs. They've found that the most popular blogs just pick up on ideas from lesser known blogs, often without giving credit. This is another perfect example of Malcolm Galdwell's idea of social epidemics from The Tipping Point. (See my original
review of the The Tipping Point.) Ideas spread through society, or through the web, from experts (who find the info) to networkers (who distribute them widely).

Speaking of giving credit, I
read about this on Wired. I was orginally pointed to Wired from Slashdot, another blog.

CNN.com: Working Poor Face Higher Obesity Rates

Working poor face higher obesity rates

The working poor are those that can least afford healthy food. Often they work long hours, have little free time, little access to stores with fresh fruit and little knowledge of how to prepare healthy food. After a long day of work, it's easier to buy some hamburgers or pop in a frozen dinner.

Good grocery stores with good produce selections are also hard to find in inner cities and neighborhoods that the working poor tend to live in.

Sitting is Bad for Your Health

... at least for long periods of time, like the amount of time I spend on the computer. The Harvard Alumni magazine has an interesting article on health and exercise, The Deadliest Sin. The article covers all of the regular recommendations: exercise more, eat less, etc, but it really stresses how sedentary our lives have become in very recent history. The authors claim that even if you get the recommended 30 minutes of exercise a day, it's still not good to sit for the rest of the day. That's bad news for those of us who have computer jobs!

Another interesting tidbit from the article is that based on our anatomy they think that humans (in all except recent history) actually ran a lot. Not walked a lot, ran a lot.

Which reminds me of the Amish health study I read. Researchers, surprised by the low levels of obesity in Amish populations in spite of diets rich in eggs and bacon, strapped pedometers on several of them and found they walked between 10-20 miles a day!

Snow Crash

I finished listening to Snow Crash this morning. It turned out to be a really good, funny book. The whole premise of the book is that brains are like computers, programmable and capable of getting viruses too. It was interesting because at the same time I was listening to it, I read an article in the Economist, Signs of Success, that studied language in deaf children. They found that groups of deaf children spontaneously create sign languages - sign languages that resemble existing spoken languages. They argue that there must be a grammatical template wired into the brains of infants. Neal Stephenson's book is based on that idea - on the premise that some knowledge in your brain is hardwired from birth and other parts are learned. He equates the knowledge, or the way your brain works, to software. Once again science fiction is predicting the future - or at least future findings - and playing with them.

On top of the somewhat serious premise of the software/brain analogy, Neal introduces many quirky characters and details that make the book humerous. A pizza chain run by the mafia, a motorcycle riding giant who can't be killed because he has a nuclear bomb implant, corporate franchises as neighborhoods ... all of these characteristics add humor. They take some of society's already quirky characteristics, apply a little technology, and show us how strange they really could become!

The Latest in Social Networking: Dogster.com

I laughed when I read this article, Internet goes to the dogs. Dogster is a social networking site, like Friendster, but for dogs. Before you laugh ... the site has been extremely successful! You can create a web page for your dog with his/her nickname, likes, traits, interests, pictures of course and to complete the picture you can have links to all of your dog's doggie friends' pages! Since January more than 8,000 dogs have signed up. Holy Cow. That's 8,000 people that maintain a web site for their dog ... I guess I'd better get with the picture!

Note that the site is really slow today ... they were featured on Slashdot and they are getting even more traffic than normal.

So that brings up one of my favorite topics ... what different web applications can you think of? I know there's money in dogs, and I've though of specialty dog foods, toys, services, etc, but I never dreamed of a dog networking site!

Dogs can too understand people

Anyone who has ever had a dog knows that they can understand you. An article in last week's Economist, 2/21/04 "Sensitive souls", describes an experiment that proves it. Brian Hare from Harvard University did an experiment where he put food under one of two inverted cups. A human then sat behind the cups and indicated the cup with the food, either by pointing, looking, or tapping. Dogs always got the food. Chimpanzees and wolves didn't do any better than chance. He even tried it with dogs with little human contact. Dogs could read the human experimenter's facial expression and figure out which cup the food was under.

So dogs can read your facial expression, and within reason, figure out what you're trying to tell them. But then anybody with a dog knew that.

Although my experience has been that they can understand lots of words. They just get left behind in the grammar arena. Telling a dog that someone is not coming after you've told them they are coming, is impossible.

Other popular dog posts:

• No drinks for dogs!
• How much do dogs sleep?
• Christmas presents for dogs