detrius

Derren Brown The so called Messiah 1 of 8

Reverse Engineering Google's Innovation Machine


Can You Say What Your Strategy Is? (And if you need an article in the Harvard Business review to figure it out you have a big problem.

Multitasking is Evil
Great example. Not really EVIL. More suboptimal but a necessary feature of life.

Fixing Windows Vista
My problem with a lot of this article says basically don't install anything and it'll be grand. Is that a recommendation for saying the only thing to run on Vista is Google Apps?

Medical records security and privacy. Interesting and serious.

Overhead in a Statoil Station.

"The economy is fucked."

"How do you figure that out"

"The Breakfast rolls have gone down from 50 sold in a morning to 20 a morning"

Makes as much sense as anything else I suppose

Arthur C. Clarke (RIP)

Together with Issac Asimov he was one of my favourite authors when I was growing up. One of the reason's I'm a little suspicious of "childrens fiction" is I read adult fiction from the age of about 11. Together with Robert Heinlein he and Asimov were THE big 3 Science Fiction authors. Asimov and Clarke are the people who set fire to my imagination.

Quotable Quotes

• "Life is just one big banana. Science fiction allows us all to peel open the reality and discover the yellow truth inside."

Clarke's three laws:

1. "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
2. "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."
3. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

 

For anyone confused about Irish identity or what it means to be Irish stop navel gazing and enjoy this.
And Happy St. Patricks Day
Thanks to Cory at Boing Boing.

So we had a fair few photos to get developed. Yes I'm still partially analog especially when it comes to photos's. More importantly so is Granny and a host of others. So with a plenty of photo's to develop and I decided to give online developing a try. Its kind of a gradual progression, since Xtravision shut up shop locally its been Screenclick.com.

I ended up trying 3 different providers. Snapfish, Photobox and Aldi

I wanted 6x4 prints. Aldi don't do 6x4 but the others do. So I divided my 150 snaps in 3 and went ahead. The experience was interesting to say the least. Photobox and Snapfish use java tools to help you upload as well as a local tool you install. Aldi gets you to download an application. I found the Aldi application a pain. It was incredibly user unfriendly and I ended up downloading two differnet applications and visiting the site at least 3 times to figure out what was going on. That said once it was installed and running it seemed quite straighforward to use. Oh they offer a discount on the first set of orders but unlike the others the cupon comes via email after you register so I missed out on that for the first order. Like all of them it depends as to whether I will order again or not.

The process is very similar in the case of all three. Upload, review, order the size and go ahead.

Estimated 1-2 days to process and a few more days to deliver. Sounds OK. All confirmed the order and all confirmed the processing within 24 hours (one at 4am in the morning).

Anyway I was delighted to see the Snapfish envelope when I arrived home the other day. First through the door. Delighted until I opened the envelope. The first disappointment was the size. Not 6x4 as ordered but 5.something x4 and the slightly smaller size (which is what Aldi will deliver is not great). What was worse was the quality of the photos. They were universally dreadful. Lets be blunt. This is the worst set of photos I have ever received with a digital camera. They all had a terribly washed out look to them.  Its very hard to put my finger on but there is a serious quality problem. My wife agrees. They are not the same as the original digital prints and my only conclusion is that I will not be using Snapfish again. For comparison purposes I'm going to get the set of 50 reprinted using foto.com to see if there is a noticable difference (particularly as they both use Kodak paper).

So we await the Aldi and Photobox prints with baited breath.

The photos were created with a Canon Powershot S5IS in case anyone is interested

There was an interesting discussion on the radio the other day about the recent Public Library of Science article on Antidepressants PLoS Medicine - Initial Severity and Antidepressant Benefits: A Meta-Analysis of Data Submitted to the Food and Drug Administration

The discussion became a little strange at one point. The person speaking (a psychiatrist whose name escapes me) said that the study wasn't published in a high impact journal and that a lot of libraries (university and research libraries I presume) didn't carry it.  It was a strange statement as Public Library of Science is just that - a Public Library. Their first two principles are

1. Open access. All material published by the Public Library of Science, whether submitted to or created by PLoS, is published under an open access license that allows unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
2. Excellence. PLoS strives to set the highest standards for excellence in everything we do: in content, style, and aesthetics of presentation; in editorial performance at every level; in transparency and accessibility to the scientific community and public; and in educational value.

So all the psychiatrist needs is a machine with Internet connectivity (and seriously does any serious researcher look for articles in paper any more). As to the issue of impact. I think with studies like this one the PLoS Medicine will be failry high impact fairly quickly. 

Espen Andersen lists   the following as the core of the technology canon for people to have read.

My take on it

The first two are really interesting as they were recommended by our Introductory Programming Course in College. (Those and "How to Solve IT" by Polya). So its very interesting to see them turn up here

# Gödel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden braid by Douglas Hofstadter
- Read It, Own it, Wonderful book. I should reread it as there is something to be learned in each reading

# Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
- Read It. Own more than one copy - particularly as the updates and later postscript are important. This book I've given to people. My mind melted a little when I first read it. I reread it regularly as there are some fundamentally important ideas in here, even the philosophical system is incomplete.

# How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand
On the too read list. Don't own a copy.

# A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander
- Own and read. Great book. Trying to use elements of it in planning changes to our house.

# Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age by J. D. Bolter
- Never heard of it before today.

# The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
- Have an unread copy.

# The Mythical Man-month by Frederic Brooks
- Owned and read. Again "No Silver Bullet" was give to us in College so there was a trend there.

# Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
- Owned and unread. Interesting to see fiction on the list

# The Control Revolution by James Beniger
- Never heard of before today. That two off this list. And I consider myself reasonably well read and if I haven't read it at least I know its something I should read. This I haven't even had the pleasure of residual guilt for not having read the damn thing.


# Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation by James Utterback
Unread

# The Innovator's Solution by Clayton M. Christensen
Unread. I've only read parts of the innovators dilemma as well.

# Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett
Read and owned. Not sure it fully explains consciousness but worth the read as is most stuff by Dennett.

# The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler
Unread.

# The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig
Read. Good book.

Interestingly both "The Soul of the New Machine" and "Gödel, Escher, Bach" both won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction

Tomorrow to add my own books to the list. Starting with
"The Social Life of Information" by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid

You'd be forgiven for thinking we'd just qualified for the world cup. Or even better won the damn thing. What we appear to have done is pay someone a large amount of money to come and manage the Irish team. I'm not sure how that qualifies as an achievement. Isn't that the point in paying large sums of money. Hope he does well. It'll be  an interesting contrast to Steve Staunton no doubt

Somehow this quote pops into my mind.

"Pity the land that has no heroes," says Andrea, a pupil of Galileo. "Pity the land that needs heroes,"

Galileo, by Bertold Brecht, translated by Charles Laughton

Still though maybe the moaning will stop for a few months.

Mmmmh. Rides to the rescue of the FAI. He does to a huge amount for charity. Still be interested in him staying in the country and paying his taxes like say Michael O'Leary.

Listening to George Hook tonight. The Movie segment. And somethings bothered me about it for a while. Its Philip Molloy. And the reviews are OK. He likes what he like and doesn't like what he doesn't like. We can agree to agree or agree not to agree but thats not really the point. The point is not having Google in the studio. Someone was ringing in to ask about a sequel to "Band of Brothers". I'd heard of something about Spielberg doing a treatment of the war in the Pacific along the same lines. Philip hadn't heard of anything. The listeners texted in with the details.

Somehow there seems no reason in this day and age not to be able to check this out on the fly in the studio. Why don't they have web access in the studio? Then you gotta ask the question about whoever texted in. Why didn't they Google the answer (not web literate, not aware?). So I guess the question is what is someone bringing to the show thats of value of an evening. The questions seem trite - is such and such available, when is such and such out, - go visit entertainment.ie or aint'itcoolnews or IMDB or Amazon.com.

There has to be something different offered by these programs or else there is no point if I can get it all from Google.