Category Archives: Essay

Main – 24 March, 2016

  1. Communicating Data to Drive Change | Stanford Social Innovation Review
  2. Foreign Policy Research Institute
  3. The Rhino Den’s Kerry Patton has a call to… – Ranger Up Military and MMA Apparel
  4. Belgium Attacks: “Sit And Wait” – | @TheRhinoDen | Home Of All Things Military
  5. Main Sit
  6. Preview: Cornel West – CBS News
  7. Slavoj Žižek: Why ‘Political Correctness’ Gets In Its Own Way | Big Think
  8. Are You a Psychopath? Take the Test. | Big Think
  9. Dan Harris: Hack Your Brain’s Default Mode With Meditation | Big Think
  10. 2 Times Steve Jobs Beat the Odds by Using a Forgotten Communication Tool | Big Think
  11. How Social Media is Polarizing Us | Big Think
  12. Big Think | Videos, articles, and tips to help you succeed, from the world’s leading experts
  13. Self-Compassion: The Often Missing Ingredient in Healthy Eating – Mindful
  14. Inside Edge Fielding | FanGraphs Sabermetrics Library
  15. Why the Republican establishment is actually winning – The Washington Post
  16. Leveraging American Ingenuity through Reusable and Open Source Software | whitehouse.gov
  17. This mind-boggling study shows just how massive sea level rise really is – The Washington Post
  18. Why Can’t “I” Be Happy? — Matthieu Ricard – Lion’s Roar
  19. Dru Wynings
  20. Top Stories and Breaking News from Inside.com
  21. The Open Mind, Hosted by Alexander Heffner
  22. The Army Has Lost The Art Of Leadership
  23. Politics – Videos on the People, Issues, and Ideas Changing the World – FORA.tv
  24. Home – Pulse Pledge
  25. When it rains, it pours | Retro Reporter
  26. Mindful.org – Once you understand your personality it’s easy to…
  27. Shambhala – Vision, Lineage, Meditation, Community
  28. Apodeictic dictionary definition | apodeictic defined
  29. 3DownNation
  30. MLB Offense Visualized As Contact Vs. Power
  31. Bear Walk Exercise-shoulder STRENGTH LIKE A BEAR!! – YouTube
  32. Learn How To Propertly Do The Bear Walk Exercise
  33. SlitherineGames – YouTube
  34. Kodo – Spirit of Taiko – YouTube
  35. jojo flores – YouTube
  36. Matthew and the Atlas – Fisherman’s Wife [Full Song] – YouTube
  37. Amitabha Buddha Thangka Medium Plus- High Quality Brocade
  38. Booming Tree on Video
  39. Deborah B. – Edmonton Drum Circle (Edmonton, AB) – Meetup
  40. Here’s how to fix America’s crumbling bridges
  41. Mining for metals in society’s waste
  42. Can drinking water be delivered without disinfectants like chlorine and still be safe?
  43. Evolution of moral outrage: I’ll punish your bad behavior to make me look good
  44. Charlie Rose | charlierose.com
  45. John Kasich, Mainstream Republicans’ Last Hope – The New Yorker
  46. The Great Divide – The New Yorker
  47. After the Fact – The New Yorker
  48. How to Beat Writer’s Block – The New Yorker
  49. CBC News The National: Rex Murphy : Archives
  50. CBC News – The National – Rex Murphy
  51. Being Pure: The Practice of Vajrasattva – – Bodhicharya
  52. Heart Wisdom – Complete Set – – Bodhicharya
  53. Supermassive black holes could be a source of mysterious cosmic rays
  54. Acceleration of petaelectronvolt protons in the Galactic Centre : Nature : Nature Publishing Group
  55. Democratic Transitions

The Problem With Social Collaboration On IT Projects

The Problem With Social Collaboration On IT Projects” – Global-cio and Executive insights/interviews – Informationweek.
NB: hereunder is an edited / cut-down version of the full post. –bdt

“Socialize” is one of the über-buzzwords of the day. To socialize an intention is different from communicating, explaining, or discussing it. It requires taking communications to a new level of importance and intimacy with the organization. In fact, to socialize an intention means it’s further from implementation than you might expect.

Socializing generally involves communicating from one to many and, more important, encouraging much more feedback from and interaction among that many. For example, you might socialize your plan to replace Office 2010 with Office 365 by posting this information on the company blog and asking employees to weigh in with comments and suggestions, even alternatives. In the past, the IT organization would just make this decision and implement it.

… most employees have a much stronger opinion. Rather than come to us, the IT experts, for advice (“Which home PC would you suggest I buy?”), employees are now coming to us with advice (“The company should issue everyone iPhones, as I’ve found that they’re the best smartphones on the planet.”).

Not only does socializing involve a fairly broad audience (socializing with your staff doesn’t count), but it also implies true interaction. And with that interaction comes the expectation that the mobile device approach our company ultimately will take won’t necessarily be the one my IT team would lay out if we were (no pun intended) left to our own devices.

We will start the process at the top. I will send a summary of the initial plan to our CEO, and I will then present it at our next senior leadership meeting–not as a fait accompli, but as an idea. I will provide all of the answers to their questions. Members of the leadership team will chat about the idea, and eventually share it with their direct reports and ask them for feedback. Much of that feedback will come in the form of questions, which my team will answer, and I’ll communicate those answers back to the broader management team.

This cycle will continue for a few iterations, before we open the discussion to employees and begin to zero in on the end point.

The Big But

This all may seem like an exercise in bureaucracy and CYA, but I have no doubt that the socializing process will produce a much easier implementation. But … and this is a big but: If the socializing process morphs into consensus-building, we’ll have a huge problem, because there’s no chance everyone will agree on what to do with smartphones, tablets, and other personally owned devices. At some point, our IT organization will have to make a decision based on our expertise, a decision that will be unpopular with some, even many, employees.

In the past, our IT organization’s approach was to get our hands on everything and manage the heck out of it. We negotiated contracts, locked down plans, set policy, centralized and monitored. I slept very well at night.

Adoption of personally owned, corporately enabled devices is very different. Centralized control will be expensive and will stifle the productivity benefits these new devices have to offer. There’s no right answer, but if socializing means coming to a collective agreement, we may be a BlackBerry customer for much longer than I thought.

Transliterature, A Humanist Design

This work derives from a simple question we asked long ago: “How can computer documents– shown interactively on screens, stored on disk, transmitted electronically– improve on paper?” Our answer was: “Keep every quotation connected to its original source.” We are still fighting for this idea, and the great powers it will give authors and readers. (Others would later ask a very different question: “How can computers SIMULATE paper?”– the wrong question, we believe, whose mistaken pursuit has brought us to the present grim document world.)

One part of this project is available already: The Xanadu® Transquoter™, which does indeed keep quotes connected to their origins.

via Transliterature, A Humanist Design.

Where is the sweet spot for monetization?

I’ve been sighted on this niche for many, many years.

“Advertisers are increasingly looking for targeted ad programs that reach specific groups, and the reality is that social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and web-native publishers are seen as better places to achieve that.”

I think something in that picture is very attractive. But there’s a down-side:

“This is the flip-side of the transformation that some newspapers like the NYT have already undergone, where the revenue provided by readers now exceeds the revenue provided by advertising. While that may seem like it would provide great freedom to pursue quality, it also means the the paper is even more beholden to a small group of readers, as Clay Shirky has argued.”

I agree. It’s a niche. And even a viable niche can be seriously limiting.

via Is Mark Thompson what the NYT really needs right now? — Tech News and Analysis.