Ben Shoemate's Notebook

"Her Silent Silhouette"

(author unknown) via KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News shared by 5 people

A lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building simple cell models that can almost be called life. The protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that contain the source code for replication. Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system that satisfies the conditions of life, but isn't anything like life on earth now. (Source: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/09/biologists-on-t.html)

Bernard Lunn via ReadWriteWeb shared by 5 people

The internal IT department, headed by the CIO, no longer acts as the gatekeeper for all new technology coming into the enterprise. IT may stand at the gate to the castle, but SaaS and social media startups are swimming across the moat. Internal IT can still set fire to the moat and otherwise make life difficult. But how do you make this a win/win relationship, so that they welcome your entry? Start by understanding how IT is thinking about social media.

Although we will make some generalizations about CIOs in this post, we recognize that there is a huge continuum from progressive to traditional.

Generally CIOs love technology and innovation. It is why they went into technology. Nor do CIOs want to control everything, they know it is impossible and life is too short. Most see that Social Media technology has positive potential. But they do have legitimate concerns. Specifically, social media startups that want to tap enterprise budgets need to deal with 5 big worries:

1. Unpredictable scaling issues. Twitter failure is OK when we are just twittering about our cats, but would be totally unacceptable if this was an enterprise app. The viral nature of adoption is a concern for people who have to ensure that the lights are on and the trains run on time. If you are asking people to do serious business on your service, you have to be solid on the reliability and performance scores.

2. Security against IP loss. This is a legitimate concern. The impact can be major. The fact is that it is no longer possible to "bolt the stable door" as the horse has already escaped. It is virtually impossible to stop an employee, either foolishly or maliciously, sending digital data that should not be sent. Just make sure that your service does not make this worse and has some reasonable controls.

3. Integration. This is the big "well what about...." objection. Just touting open Internet standards is not enough. You need to show how to build adapters to internal legacy systems that don't work to those standards. Without integration you cannot answer the next one. Building adapters is tedious work. But once you have a library of them, they become a barrier to entry.

4. Loss of productivity. Services for consumers do not need to answer the productivity question. We do this stuff for fun and in our free time. But when that time creeps into the 9-5 workday, it is a legitimate concern for those who pay the salaries.

5. Accidental brand damage. People who grew up with social media know that the brand cannot be be protected other than by great products and services. Anything bad that happens will get out there. However this scares the bejesus out of traditional Enterprise managers. It is also a legitimate concern that if you give a lot of powerful social media tools to people who don't know how to use them wisely, there will be a lot of collateral damage. Like physicians you need to show that your service will "do no harm".

These are all negative, objection issues. Clearly there needs to be a compelling positive reason. We will focus on that in a future post. First step is making sure these objections don't stop you on the way in.

If you want to listen directly to one CIO who is thinking hard about this, see this podcast by Intel CIO John "JJ" Johnson on social media in the enterprise.

What have you experienced? As a vendor, have you found and handled these or other issues? As a customer, have Social Media start-ups shown a good understanding of these issues? What other issues are critical?

Josh Marshall via Talking Points Memo shared by 4 people

One of the interesting aspects of this campaign is watching the scales fall from the eyes of many of John McCain's closest admirers among the veteran DC press corps. I'm not talking about the freaks on Fox News or any of the sycophants at the AP. I'm talking about, let's say, the better sort of reporters and commentators in the 45 to 65 age bracket. To the extent that the press was McCain's base (and in many though now sillier respects it still is) this was the base of the base. And talking to a number of them I can understand why that was, at least in the sense of the person he was then presenting himself as.

But over the last ... maybe six weeks, in various conversations with these folks, the change is palpable. Whether it will make any difference in the tone of coverage in the dominant media I do not know. But it is sinking in.

All politicians stretch the truth, massage it into the best fit with their message. But, let's face it, John McCain is running a campaign almost entirely based on straight up lies. Not just exaggerations or half truths but the sort of straight up, up-is-down mind-blowers we've become so accustomed to from the current occupants of the White House. And today McCain comes out with this rancid, race-baiting ad based on another lie. Willie Horton looks mild by comparison. (And remember, President George H.W. Bush never ran the Willie Horton ad himself. It was an outside group. He wasn't willing to degrade himself that far.) As TPM Reader JM said below, at least Horton actually was released on a furlough. This is ugly stuff. And this is an ugly person. There's clearly no level of sleaze this guy won't stoop to to win this election.

And let's be frank. He might win it. This is clearly a testing time for Obama supporters. But I want to return to a point I made a few years ago during the Social Security battle with President Bush. Winning and losing is never fully in one's control -- not in politics or in life. What is always within our control is how we fight and bear up under pressure. It's easy to get twisted up in your head about strategy and message and optics. But what is already apparent is that John McCain is running the sleaziest, most dishonest and race-baiting campaign of our lifetimes. So let's stopped being shocked and awed by every new example of it. It is undignified. What can we do? We've got a dangerously reckless contender for the presidency and a vice presidential candidate who distinguished her self by abuse of office even on the comparatively small political stage of Alaska. They've both embraced a level of dishonesty that disqualifies them for high office. Democrats owe it to the country to make clear who these people are. No apologies or excuses. If Democrats can say at the end of this campaign that they made clear exactly how and why these two are unfit for high office they can be satisfied they served their country.

"beauty alone the road"

Apple aims to enhance your audio listening experience by releasing the Apple In-Ear Headphones that feature two separate high-performance drivers, where a woofer caters for bass needs and mid-range sounds while the tweeter handles high-frequency audio. These drivers will ensure you get accurate and detailed audio all the time, but of course, that is subjected to the quality of your MP3 encoding as well. Amazingly enough, Apple has priced this pair of headphones at just $79, making them much more affordable compared to Shures and other premium brands. Each purchase comes with three different sizes of ear tips to cater for different people, a carrying case for the said ear tips and a cable-control case for the headphones themselves.

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