Bill's Excellent Adventure

inc.com: "Today, 90% of small and midsize businesses run on the Microsoft platform, says Mika Krammer, an analyst at Gartner, a research firm. That's a stranglehold on this enormous market of 8 million companies in the U.S. and 40 million worldwide. Globally, these companies pay almost as much for info tech -- $400 billion a year -- as America spends on defense." [via emergic]

Craigslist background

emergic.org: "Started nearly 10 years ago by soft-spoken software engineer Craig Newmark, Craigslist went from a small e-mail list of local events and parties to become a national and international phenomenon providing local residents with a cheap, simple way to sell junk, find a new job, or find a mate quickly. And as it has grown to encompass 45 cities -- with more to come -- Craigslist has resisted buyout offers and paid advertising while becoming a powerful alternative to daily newspaper and alternative-weekly classifieds -- especially in its hometown."

The Ethical Reporter

transparencynow.com: "Ethical or independent reporting would break the symbiotic and parasitical relationship that now exists between the press and political establishment." [via abuddhas memes] The abject failure of most mainstream Media to ask pointedly pertinent questions and demand candid answers leads to false democracy. The Ethical Reporter would cast truth to the winds of consciousness.

"A truly independent press, one that is unimaginable today, might want to tell more difficult truths about the nature of society and personality, about the role of sex and power and love and hate, about the need for acceptance, order, safety and the fear of death, about the misuse of power and position that pervades society, about ethics and how all these affect both public and private life. It might become a forum for discussions of what society and, ultimately, what humanity, can become."

Taking a longer view this article about sources of bias in news reporting (and its followup here), Andrew Olmstead points out that the military has a similar problem. If all intelligence was dumped on senior commanders they'd drown in data, but when the data is filtered by subordinates there's always a degree of bias and distortion involved. Claude Shannon rigorously examined the basic question, "What is information?" in the late 1940's while working at Bell Labs. He developed what we now call "Information Theory", and there may be no single theoretical work which is more important and less well known. When it comes to information filtration involved in news or in military operations, the problem is all the worse because some sources are trying to deceive us. The way the military deals with this is pretty good, but it isn't perfect. I don't think it is possible for it to be perfect. And there isn't any perfect solution regarding the press, either.

And about learning to do the searching on your own, without the press machinery to guide your world: Search can be characterized as users chasing documents—where a user, by finding and understanding documents, is trying to fulfill a need for information required for some broader task. The push version of retrieval, often called filtering or routing, is not essentially different, it is just a switch to documents chasing users. It's still about individual users, documents, and information needs in the context of broader tasks as discussed via emergic.com.

But discovery applications based on text analysis are quite different. In the next few years, many enterprises looking for new levels of organizational intelligence will deploy 'eyes for text' engines. These text analysis engines will produce a new generation of search applications that more effectively leverage human skills. Humans have Eyes for Text. Handed a document, a person can quickly scan the document and extract all kinds of useful information. The key word is useful. It’s human magic that makes that assessment work in such a broad range of conditions. Machines have generally lacked Eyes for Text. They see the same document as a sequence of bytes, when in fact to us it’s really made of words organized in sentences organized in passages, not to mention all kinds of other structure related to conventions, forms, genres, and so on. Humans are blind in the face of large numbers of documents, while machines are blind to what’s in one document. Eyes for Text software engines will still leave humans to perform their magic of knowing what might be useful. However, now aided by machines that can pull out bits of information well enough to deliver them as the human searches or browses, and to create mostly correct, rough sketches of all what's in there. And out there.

Toward findable objects

findability.org The concept of findability is universal and timeless. However, with a distributed, heterogeneous collection of several billion items, the Web presents unique and important findability challenges. This website is a selective, seriously incomplete, and perpetually evolving collection of links to people, software, organizations, and content related to findability to place findability on a par with usability, where it belongs. Second, to serve as a complex query, run against the brains of users, who will hopefully contribute additional ideas, definitions, categories, and resources. [via Marylaine Block's NeatNews]

Best marketing blogs

marketingSherpa.com
Best blog on small business marketing: Duct Tape Marketing
Best blog on online marketing: Winner: Search Engine Lowdown

Another resource for internet marketers: Cylution is a project of a group of people who are trying to improve the Internet Environment. We are a network of academics, marketing and internet strategists, (functional) designers, programmers, HTML-specialists and cyber philosophers. Our goal is to make a fast and friendly resource/reference site for internet marketers.

Looming labor shortage

futurefile: "We know this much. Your employees are poised to become the power-broker of the next decade. By 2006, two people will be leaving their job for every one person coming in. Most experts believe that continent-wide we will have a shortfall of more than 10 million employees by 2008. When that happens you get two very large shifts in the power balance..."

From the Wharton Knowledge Letter:
According to Patrick Purcell, an economist with the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress, 27% of the population will be over 65 by 2035 compared to 17% now. As the first wave of baby boomers begins to take early retirement, certain industries – like aerospace, utilities and healthcare – are already facing severe labor shortages. By 2020 all baby boomers will be over age 55, with strong implications for the labor markets, adding that by 2010 the U.S. will experience a 6.6 % shortfall of workers which will grow to 13% in 2020. Employers who have been intent on reducing costs and cutting workers during the past years of slow economic growth need to look ahead and plan for a different future.

Mood money

psychologicalscience.org: "Prior research has found that people set a higher price for objects they own than they themselves would be willing to pay - which economists call the endowment effect - the Carnegie Mellon study found that people who are sad actually are willing to accept less money to sell something than they would pay for the same object.

The researchers also found that when people experience disgust, both buying and selling prices fall. "We're showing for the first time that incidental emotions exert a causal effect on economic behavior...

The researchers concluded that sadness triggered an implicit need for individuals to change their circumstances, thus a greater willingness to buy new goods or to sell goods that they already had, while disgust made people want to get rid of what they had and made them reluctant to take on anything new, depressing all prices."

The multitasking myth

eurekalert.org: "It's readily apparent that handling two things at once is much harder than handling one thing at a time. Spend too much time trying to juggle more than one objective and you'll end up wanting to get rid of all your goals besides sleeping. The question is, though, what makes it so hard to process two things at once?

Two theories try to explain this phenomenon: "passive queuing" and "active monitoring." The former says that information has to line up for a chance at being processed at some focal point of the brain, while the latter suggests that the brain can process two things at once – it just needs to use a complicated mechanism to keep the two processes separate. Recent research from MIT points to the former as an explanation -- indicating that the brain can not process two tasks in parallel. [via futurepundit]"

Exploding cancer cells

Genetically-modified virus selectively sweeps through cancer cells and kills them, while leaving normal tissue unharmed. [via newscientist.com]

The father of RFID

siliconvalley.com: "The next time you wave a key card to unlock the door to your office building, think of Charles Walton.

One of Silicon Valley's unsung inventors, Walton's patents on radio frequency identification, or RFID, spawned those electronic door keys. Now the technology Walton pioneered in the 1970s and 1980s is poised to change the way billions of items are tracked. Prodded by Wal-Mart and the Pentagon, manufacturers will soon be tagging everything from diapers to combat boots with RFID chips. The chips transmit information about products' location and use over radio waves to a central computer."

New weapons

sacbee.com: "Test subjects can't see the invisible beam from the Pentagon's new, Star Trek-like weapon, but no one has withstood the pain it produces for more than three seconds. People who volunteered to stand in front of the directed energy beam say they felt as if they were on fire. When they stepped aside, the pain disappeared instantly. The weapon uses beams of electromagnetic energy to heat water molecules just below the skin to 130 degrees in less than a second. End result: astonishing pain. "It tricks the pain sensors...."

In other news, the humble gun may soon have a new lease of life. The basic principles of firing a projectile have been untouched for over 800 years... but electromagnetic launchers - ‘rail guns’ – offer a quantum leap in gun science.

Magazine Art

magazineart.org Art wants to be seen; it does no good if it can't be seen. There's a lot of art that's been hidden away for fifty or a hundred years or more—hidden away not because it's bad art, or because someone tried to suppress it, but just because it was part of something transient.

Magazines shaped our lives. They came into our homes and showed us how to dress, how to act, what to read, which way to vote, and how to think about ourselves, literature, science, art, and the rest of the world. We've created this website because these magazine covers are difficult to find and study, even considering all the influence they had on us.