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 Monday, August 12, 2002
NY Times: "Pet food stores weren't the killer app for the Web, but peer-reviewed scholarly journals might be." [Scripting News]
I'll have to check this out in the morning. Scientific publishers are undergoing a tremendous amount of change. 11:32:39 PM 
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Megnut: Blogging for Dollars. Interesting piece. I don't think she nails it though. I want to see weblogs from CEOs and Members of Parliament, people who are responsible, who aren't mouthpieces. I know they can't write, but in the future they will. A hired blogger inside a company is always going to be subject to pressures. It's kind of like hiring an ad agency to write your weblog. Hmm. I'm a Cluetrain guy, I want the head honcho to talk to me, and everyone else. If they do it as a sideline, as the Macromedia bloggers do, a labor of love, somehow I trust that more than if maintaining a weblog is their job. Now, that said, of course there will be professional bloggers, just like there are professional everythings. To me that would be like saying there will be professional word processor users. Hard to argue with. Comments. [Scripting News]
The tricky thing is that a blogger who can not be trusted is a blogger who will have few readers. It is much like a columnist. You just have to make sure you know who your audience is and make it clear to everyone that you know. 11:26:33 PM
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Ozzie on Blogs. Writes Ozzie: What has struck me over the past few weeks is the fact that blogs represent a radical new approach to public discussion - one that, in essence, completely and naturally "solves" the signal:noise problem, and does so through creative exploitation of a unique architecture based upon decentralized representation [E M E R G I C . o r g]
I have been telling people this for some time. The ability of blogs to keep the information dispersal high while keeping noise low is one of its best aaspects. 11:17:15 PM
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Fortune's list of the greediest executives in America. This is a list not to be on. Two years ago, this list would have been called something more positive. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
How rapidly things change. Paradigms are terrible things. 11:07:11 PM
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Collaborative Tools: Interplanetary Collaboration. Collaborative tools are not only useful, they're necessary. They lead to faster and better decisions. They save you money -- in fact, you will earn more money by using them.
They can be as simple as a meeting or a brainstorming session. They can use technology on a basic platform, like Groove on PCs. They can be very sophisticated and they can even be very expensive at the high-end level (more on this later on.) But in any case, they're essential.
Let's first take a look at this NASA development.
When two Mars probes -- the Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter -- went missing in 1998, a subsequent investigation blamed, among other causes, miscommunication at NASA[base ']s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). To uncross signals for its next mission to Mars, the agency is turning to experimental electronic white boards that enable scientists to view and annotate images, charts and presentations unlike ever before.
To get them all on the same page, NASA[base ']s Ames Research Center has adapted the Blueboard, a prototype electronic white board developed by IBM at its Silicon Valley-based Almaden Research Center. Ames calls its version MERBoard, from the acronym for Mars Exploration Rover. The prototype is simple: A transparent touch screen sits atop a five-foot wide plasma monitor, while a notebook computer acts as a thin-client terminal connected to Web server. The total cost of each set-up, including open-source networking software, is roughly $10,000.
For most meetings, the JPL team currently uses paper printouts and blown-up photographic images. MERBoard isn[base ']t designed to replace all the paper inevitably generated by a NASA mission, but to ease information sharing, says Dan Russell, director of the User Sciences and Experience Research division at IBM Almaden, which designed the original Blueboard.
If you're not yet convinced that collaborative tools are absolutely essential, please note the tremendous interest given to Ray Ozzie's Weblog.
As a final example, BusinessWeek published "Carmakers Put the Pedal to the Metal -- in Cyberspace" on Sep. 25, 2000. Here is a short quote.
"You eliminate hard production tools by designing the digital car," says Scott F. Merlis, an analyst at Wasserstein Perella Securities in New York who coined the term E2E (engineer to engineer) to describe the collaborative design process. "An engineer can depress a virtual brake pedal in Stuttgart, and others in Detroit or Tokyo can watch the calipers close to stop the car. These systems can manage thousands of design changes."
Sources: David Propson, MIT Technology Review, Aug. 5, 2002; Alan Hall, BusinessWeek Magazine, Sep. 25, 2000 [Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]
Some very good ideas here. I like Ray Ozzie and think Groove looks useful but since it is a Windows only item, I'll never get a chance to use it. I choose a Mac because it is the best tool for me. When I use Windows I always feel like I am using a knife for a screwdriver. It is okay to use once or twice but if I am doing a lot of screws. I want the right tool. 11:00:33 PM
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Plant detectives seek sources of invasive trees. Like modern day Sherlock Holmeses, plant biologists at Washington University in St. Louis have donned their deerstalkers to get to the bottom of some botanical mysteries. Barbara A. Schaal, Ph.D., Washington University professor of biology and her graduate students use DNA sequences to reveal information on historical events. Schaal and John Gaskin are using systematics and phylogeography to trace the Eurasian source of invasive Tamarix species in the United States. [EurekAlert - Biology]
A nice study that can be replicated with a wide variety of invading species. 10:44:52 PM
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Wired News: DVDs Could Spark Digital TV Sales. What a wrong article. [Hack the Planet]
From what I remember, regular TV has something like 325 lines of resolution, and DVD gets up to 450. High definition is 720 or higher. DVD is not really high definition. And digital TV is different from high definition TV. This sounds like it was written from some PR piece.10:29:43 PM
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Apple offering new G4 towers tomorrow?. MacMinute is reporting this afternoon that Apple will roll out speed bumped G4 tower computers tomorrow. This is being reported as one of those "sources say" kinds of articles, so there is no way to confirm or deny the news right now. I guess we will all see if this is going to happen and its significance tomorrow... [Mac Net Journal]
I hope so. I just might get me one of those new fangled things. 10:21:46 PM
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Intranets in corporate communications. Yes - the blog format has changed. Don't change your bookmark! Many intranets are managed by corporate communications managers in both the USA and in Europe. Certainly intranets featured on the programme of the June 8-12 Conference of the International Association of Business Communicators in Chicago. Many of the papers... [Intranet Focus Blog]
I'll have to check out some of these articles. The titles look interesting. 10:08:44 PM
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Jose Padilla has not been charged with any crime and apparently can be held forever if need be. A quote from the Newsweek article:If this guy thinks he might be there for 20 years with no recourse, he might just say, 'OK, let's talk,' the magazine quoted an administration official as saying.
The government flat out says it can hold someone purely on its say so. Now, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus but at least he did it out in the open. This, however, seems much more like a 'Wag the Dog' scenario, what with midterm elections coming on. 10:01:10 PM
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Predictive Identification of Exonic Splicing Enhancers in Human Genes
William G. Fairbrother, Ru-Fang Yeh, Phillip A. Sharp, and Christopher B. Burge
Science Aug 9 2002: 1007-1013. Published online July 11, 2002; 10.1126/science.1073774 (Science Express Reports)[Abstract][Full Text][Supporting Online Material] [Science]
Recent Segmental Duplications in the Human Genome
Jeffrey A. Bailey, Zhiping Gu, Royden A. Clark, Knut Reinert, Rhea V. Samonte, Stuart Schwartz, Mark D. Adams, Eugene W. Myers, Peter W. Li, and Evan E. Eichler
Science Aug 9 2002: 1003-1007. [Abstract] [Full Text] [Supporting Online Material] [Science]
Several papers I have ti check out. Glad I have a Science feed working. 8:55:09 PM
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