My favorites for week 8, 2011

Something to laugh: my favorite comic strip of the week – about cubicle landscapes

One of the many reasons why I love Dilbert comics is that they very often are about the pleasure to work in these modern cubicle landscapes our employers have crafted for us. Well, I only go there if I have to, otherwise I stay at home. Why should I go through this morning commute madness ( actually not so bad in my case; just a 20 minute car ride into Mainz, a medium size town in Germany ) just to get to a place where I actually can not work efficiently ? Anyway, here is another nice one about this topic:

Something to watch: my favorite video clip of the week – about an amazing Guitarist

Thinking outside the box might mean to use a tool in a very different way than people do usually. Watch Erik Mongrain playing his guitar in a very different way … http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/video/xerqg Amazing Guitarist

Something to enjoy: my favorite photo  on flickr under a Common Creative license – about a crater in Death Valley.

"Little Hebe Crater" by stevelyon. Apparently the Little Hebe Crater must be somewhere in the Death Valley Area, as I assumed when looking at this photo by Steve Lyon, and as I confirmed through Wikipedia. I must have missed it when I was there in 1995. May be next time. You can’t see everythng when travelling…

Something to surprise: my favorite "I really didn’t know this" of the week – about facebook

Did you know that Facebook has 642 726 020 users world wide, most Facebook users come from the US, where 49 % of the population have joined this social network, Germany is on rank 11 with 16 million users, that is 19 % of all Germans in the US the majority of Facebook users are female. Source: These statistics are available here on socialbakers.

Something to talk about: my favorite quote of the week – about language

Language is the source of misunderstandings. ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery, French writer (1900 – 1944) ~ Especially human language ! Watson did a great job last week to deal with this and win the Jeopardy! Challenge. In case you missed it you may want to head to my stream of IBM related videos on youtube and find there 6 10-minute video clips showing how the 20-minutes show episodes went last week on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, or you may just want to watch this nice 10-minute summary. A collection of articles about Watson I have collected here as a Goodle Bookmarks List.

Ford & you

Ford has opened up a new web site in the true sense of social software and web 2.0 allowing users to chime in and participate in all types of discussion around environment, technology and design: “Ford powered by you“. Nice idea.

My first contribution to a posting “A Dissenting View on the Environment” about the question how we – especially as someone who drives a car – should deal with “all the propaganda citing the end of the world”:

I am just reading Frank Schätzing’s book “Nachrichten aus einem unbekannten Universum” ( not sure about the English title ). It is a science book providing all the knowledge he has collected before he wrote the novel “The Swarm“.
A good part of the book is about the history of our planet and he takes the reader through all the geological eras. The beginning and start of those eras of course have been defined by human beings and the way we have defined those time stamps are that a major incidence occurred with dramatic changes for the majority of life on our planet: a meteorite impact, a major earth quake and/or tsunami, vulcano eruptions, methan gas eruptions, eruptions on the sun or birth of others stars “nearby”, moving continents and major climate changes, ice ages converting the entire planet into a snow ball, or combinations of multiple events, some taking a long time, some coming abruptly, which sometimes wiped away 90 % of life from planet Earth.
Who are we that we think we can play a major role here besides those types of events and influences ? After reading all of this I believe we pretty much over-estimate the power we think we have.
Check out for instance this chart in the German wikipedia how amount of oxygen has changed in our atmosphere during the last 1000 million years. The message simply is: dramatic changes on our planet have occurred long before the first human being started walking around on its surface.

With best regards … Axel Magard

Amazon.com: Nachrichten aus einem unbekannten Universum ISBN: 3462036904 ISBN-13: 9783462036909

I am not saying we should not do what we can do to minimize the negative impact any technology would have on this planet and our life. If we can reduce the amount of ozone, lead, asbestos, particulate dust or any other type of dangerous waste in the air we breath every day we better do it. But to what extend we can globally influence our world climate I am not so sure about, especially after reading this book I mentioned above.

Online applications – the next step …

Zoho and Google Docs are two famous examples for provider of online applications offering spreadsheets, document writing, notebooks, calendar, databases, wikis and much more online in the web without the need to install anything on your desktop. These applications have been improved to an extent that they provide lots of features meanwhile so that they become a true and useful replacement for desktop software, and also their user interfaces became so dynamic that sometimes it is hard to figure out the difference between a desktop and a web based application.

All these offerings so far have been what I would call multi-purpose tools you can use for everything during your business day.

Today Lifehacker had an article about a new offering from Zoho: Zoho People. The aim of this offering is to help your company’s HR department keep track of the org chart, recruit candidates, and quickly fill out expense and vacation forms.

After having looked at their home page and screen shots I got the feeling that online applications take the next step now. After coming up with multi-purpose tools in the recent years now the first more business specifc web applications hit the market, this one targeting Human Resource Management for companies.

How long will it take until companies run their entire business based on web applications ?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Supply Chain Management (SCM) including Material Requirements Planning (MRP), Stock / Inventory Management, Manufacturing Capacity Planning and Work Load Optimization, Supplier Relationship Management (SRM), Risk and Compliance solutions and Performance Management – so far everything what SAP has to offer -, Project Management, more Human Resource Management applications, and you name it …

When will all those applications be available as an easy to access and use online application ? What will be the licensing model for those offerings and what gurantee do users have that their data is safe and accurate when using those applications ?

Let me predict here that this will become a huge market in the next years.

Besides the risk, imagine the potential: if multiple supplier use the same SCM applications on the web, wouldn’t it be easier to connect those in order to better manage the entire supply chain covering all suppliers of a particular product manufacturer ? If through smart web2.0 technology and social software we can achieve to plug in Market Demand Management on the other side based on direct customer and consumer input, could we come up with the fully automated supply chain management solution by simply having integrated customer demand and supplier inventory and pipelines ?

Could applications like Zoho People access social networks in the future to discover other useful candidates to apply for an open job ? Could those HR applications explore automatically the skill of a candidate by scanning through his blog posts and wiki contributions ?

What other idea did come up in your mind after reading this ?

The largest project of human mankind

“bild der wissenschaft” 9/2007 calls it the largest project of human mankind: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva. 9200 engineers and scientists from 500 institutes in 80 countries are working on this 4 billion Euro expensive knowledge machine to become operational in May 2008 ( 5 month behind schedule )

Purpose of this machine is to find evidence of the existence of the Higgs boson, a hypothetical massive scalar elementary particle, the missing piece in todays world model of physics to explain how elementary particles get their mass. It was discovered in theory by Peter Ward Higgs from the university of Edindurgh in 1964.

The LHC will be able to generate an environment as it existed 10^-9 seconds after the big bang. Protons or plumb atoms will collide with 99,9 % light speed. ATLAS, one of the detectors to deliver evidence of Higgs bosoms and other particles, has the size of Notre Dame in Paris: 46 meters long and 25 meters in diameter with a weigh of about 7,000 tonnes. 9300 magnets are used to accelerate particles, 6208 additional magnets are needed to control the particle beam. All supra conductive cables together have a length of 6,5 times the length of our equator. The energy consumption of this monster machine is 120 mega watt, as much as a city like Geneva needs. The main part of the LHC is a ring 50 – 175 meters under ground with a diameter of 26.66 kilometer.

In contradiction to other projects of such a size there is no strict hierarchy implemented in the organization for this project. Institute work on their own responsibility and progress is mostly based on the motivation of all participating teams to answer the next hot questions of particle physics. Discovering ( or not discovering ) an evidence of the existence of the Higgs bosom would yield a significant impact on the particle physics world model.

Interesting also this chart showing how more and more scientist have to collaborate in physics ( as in many other science disciplines like for instance genetic research ) to discover new particles: the y-axis shows how many discoverer were needed to find that particle. While only one man was needed to discover the electron and may be two to discover the neutron it will take thousands of people to finally discover the Higgs bosom. Internet and Web 2.0 technology now will be the means by which these huge accomplishments can be achieved through a seamless exchange of knowledge in big communities.

One Laptop per Child (OLPC)

Nicholas Negroponte, sun of a Greek shipowner and brother of the US vice secretary of state has initiated a project which not only has a very reasonable objective – getting all children of the world access to the internet and all available information and enable them to learn on their own, no matter how wealthy their family is – it is also coming with a very interesting technology challenge: to develop a laptop with all the capabilities needed for such a project for the cost of $ 100: “One Laptop per Child” (OLPC).
The price for this device itself is fascinating, but more fascinating also the features of this product:

• the laptop can be used to write, do calculations, play or listen to music,
• the laptop makes it very easy to connect to other computers of its kind nearby and automatically to the internet if one of these other computers has access to the internet, thus makes it very easy for kids to collaborate ( e.g. to solve school homework ) or to get to the world wide web, also through a special user frontend called “Sugar“,
• the screen can be turned around and the entire thing used like a book, also the screen can be turned into a black-and-white mode with good contrast which makes reading screen contents easy even in sun light
• besides regular power connection power can also be generated with a yo-yo type device by pulling a string to generate power: 1 minute exercising for 10 minutes computer power.

One way to build such a cheap computer (current price is around $ 175, but assuming higher production volumes until 2009 it is expected to reach the $ 100 target) is to avoid latest technology where not needed: this laptop comes with a 366 MHz AMD processor and 128 MByte RAM. It runs on Linux.
In additional it has been designed for maximum reliability and maintainability. There is no hard drive in this computer, a 512 Mbyte flash memory is used instead. Most repair can be done by the kids themselves, like replacing the light emitting diodes for the screen. Part of the project is also to organize repair centers and spare laptops in case of a more severe problem.

You would think that this is an outstanding project ? Sure it is, but it came as a surprise to me that there are actually 30 more competing projects out there. Intel for instance offer a $ 300 “Classmate PC”, Microsoft thinks offering a cell phone makes more sense, capable to connect to a keyboard and a TV screen.

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Source: bild der wissenschaft, volume 7/2007, article “Vor dem Lernen Leine ziehen”
Also check out this video; it covers a little bit technology at the beginning, then has lots of interviews about the vision behind and the justification for the project. This project really takes Web 2.0 to a next step – giving access to the web to “information have nots”, like Nicholas Negroponte call those who do not have access to the world wide information net.