Updated: 3/27/08; 6:13:16 PM.
A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Blog
Thoughts on biotech, knowledge creation and Web 2.0
        

Friday, October 18, 2002


Dan Gillmor.  Microsoft piggy bank tops $40 b.  What if Microsoft took $300 m and provided a $3 m grant to 100 small independent companies doing the most innovative software on Windows?  What if they promoted their products to customers?  There are still lots of things that Microsoft doesn't do.  Could this restart the PC upgrade cycle?  I think it could.  The great part about this is that Microsoft would make back that money in less than three years through upgrades.  The PR bonanza would be huge.

However, this won't happen.  Microsoft has now yielded to NIH disease.  They think that the $5 b a year that they squander on R&D will actually yield a real innovation -- it won't.  Hey Ballmer:  most of the smart people in the world of technology don't work at Microsoft.   Real innovation is going on right now in the trenches, as it always has.  However, it is growing slower than it should because the air supply has been turned off. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

It boggles my mind that a company can hold on to that amount of money and NOT provide dividends back to it shareholders. ANd of course little innovation happens at Microsoft. The same is true of most large companies. Accenture had a recent report on biotech that describes the loss of creativity and innovation that appears to happen as biotech companies get larger. What major, popular programs did Microsoft develop completely on its own, without buying/stealing any of it? The business model for almost all really large companies is to maintain enough cash flow to buy the innovations that can carry the company into the next market/paradigm/year. It is usually a waste on money to do much R&D yourself. I am shocked to see that MS appears to have forgotten this point ;-)  10:45:50 PM    



Hawaii's Mauna Loa Volcano Is Beginning To Stir, New Data Reveal. Space Daily Oct 18 2002 9:50PM ET [Moreover - moreover...]

Back at the heighth of the biotech bubble, we entertained the idea of moving to Hawaii's Big Island. It is my favorite but it may be a lot different in the future if Mauna Loa erupts. We already lived through Hurricane Iniki when we visited Kauai. I would not want to be on Hawaii if Mauna Loa erupted.  10:38:18 PM    



Is SSH the Mac's killer app?. The enterprise Mac. IN MAY 2001, Apple began shipping OS X on new Macs. Six months later, at the O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer and Web Services conference, it was clear that a sea change was under way. The open-source geeks who flock to these events were flouting Microsoft not with PC notebooks running Linux, but with PowerBooks running OS X. Displayed on their gorgeous Aqua screens was the Mac's newest and most unlikely killer app: SSH, the secure shell, in all its 80-column, 25-line splendor. [Full story at InfoWorld.com.] ... [Jon's Radio] [Mac Net Journal]

I saw a very similar sea change between 2001 and early 2002 in the field of Bioinformatics. At conferences in 2001, 80% of the PCs were running Linux, and ocassional PC with Windows was present but the number of Macs was about equal to windows (A cursory glance showed that almost all the computer geeks doing biology were using Linux while almost all the biologists used the Mac). At the O'Reilly Bioinformatics meeting in Feb 2002, almost everyone had a Mac, either an iBook or a Titanium. I felt out of it with my old Pismo. I do not recall anyone using a PC with windows. There were some Linux people who were there with PCs but no windows. The Mac OSX was everywhere. I figured this boded well for the future of the Mac in science.  10:26:13 PM    



Researchers Say Science Is Hurt by Secrecy Policy Set Up by the White House. New York Times Oct 18 2002 10:47PM ET [Moreover - moreover...]

Knowledge is always hurt by secrecy. That is one reason science is a success and alchemy is not. Secrecy allows you to continue to believe falsehoods. Science is self-correcting because it is vetted by open eyes. If the science if wrong, others will demonstrate that. Keep the science hidden and you are very likely to fool yourself regarding any results. It has happened before. Openess is not perfect but it is better and safer for us all in the long run than secrecy. We are much more likely to find new effective approaches to viruses like small pox if we can examine all the data. Yes, it is likely that bad guys can use the data to but in many cases they would know this while honest scientists would not. The villian is usually the one helped most by these sorts of overly broad secrecy doctrines.  10:19:59 PM    



War is not necessary.

"I'm not sure which planet they live on". Hawks in the Bush administration may be making deadly miscalculations on Iraq, says Gen. Anthony Zinni, Bush's Middle East envoy. [Salon.com]

» Gen Zinni (ret) seems to be a remarkably clear headed leader of men.  His analysis of past military actions was thoughtful and a warning to all those who think war in Iraq is either necessary or desirable.  If only the Commander-in-chief were half as thoughtful or half the leader.

 

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

I saw 'Patton' today. Here was a man who was an extremely charaismatic, well-educated war machine, who accomplished some absolutely incredible feats while single-mindedly focussing on his manifest destiny to kill lots of Germans before they killed his men. His world was very simple and the movie did a great job showing that his problems arose from the real complexity of the war. It needed a diplomat like Ike to hold things together. Patton might have been able to take Berlin by himself but it would have resulted in a very different, and in my opinion, less rich world. To me, it seems that neo-Pattons are running things now, only without the sense of history or erudition. Generals like van Riper and Zinni have a much more geopolitical view of any war on Iraq (Zinni was head of Central Command for US Forces in the Middle East). I wish I believed that the leaders in Washington had a similar grasp. I really do. It would make life a whole lot easier to deal with. I could just concentrate on getting a job.  10:01:06 PM    



Morgan Stanley's Steve Roach Gets Even Gloomier. Morgan Stanley's Steven Roach gets even gloomier, if possible, about the near-term future of the U.S. economy. I find myself drifting in his direction, but I'm not sure whether I'm catching up to his point of view or just following in his wake... Morgan Stanley: ...Retail sales sagged appreciably in September, consumer confidence was down sharply in early October, new claims for unemployment insurance benefits went back up after a statistically distorted plunge, and industrial production recorded its second monthly... [Semi-Daily Journal]

Where, oh, where are Steve Martin's Happy Feet when we need them?  9:43:59 PM    



Knowledge work as craft work.

Just came across this story of Jim McGee: Knowledge work as craft work

Highlights from the text (bold is mine):

...The "symbolic analysis" that Robert Reich identifies as the essence of knowledge work is designed to create the one-of-a-kind results that characterize craft products...

...There is a dangerous tension between industrial frameworks and knowledge work as craft work that needs to be managed. Forcing industrial models onto the management of knowledge and knowledge work accounts for much of the disappointing results of knowledge management efforts to date...

...One thing that differentiates knowledge work today from other craft work is that, except for final product, knowledge work is essentially invisible...

...While today's tools have made the journey from germ of an idea to finished product so much easier, they have also made it harder by making it less visible...

Direct value of visibility

...One value is in the ability to backtrack to a previous version when a line of analysis fails to pan out. Moreover, that ability to backtrack can make it more likely that alternatives will be explored because the effort and risk of doing so is reduced...

Indirect value of visibility

...The first will be increasing the value of knowledge work as a learning environment for other knowledge workers. As craft work, knowledge work fits more into apprenticeship learning models than in conventional training approaches. Making the work process and its intermediate products more visible will make the apprenticeship process more effective

The second aspect of visibility is better leverage of communities of expertise and practice. More and more of the difficult problems organizations face require groups of experts to coordinate their expertise and invent multi-disiciplinary solutions. These problems don't identify themselves in advance. They show up. They generally get addressed by whatever team can be identified and assembled quickly. The more visible you can make those experts and their expertise by making their thinking visible, the more likely you will be able to field a team that will work...

He logically finishes with linking these to blogs development :)

[Mathemagenic]

The problem I had at Immunex was that my knowledge work WAS invisible to many of the higher ups. Tools like weblogs, social network analysis, etc. make it easier to clarify what knowledge work is being done. Unfortunately, it takes a new view to realise that you need to implement the tools. Invisble work is the same as non-existant work Why would any of these managers allow money to be spent on something they are blind to? It is like trying to explain to someone who only sees shades of gray that there are such things as colors. It may take a lot of work and the person needs to have an open mind. Neither of these is easy.  9:37:04 PM    



Messy papers on my desk.

Knowledge work as craft work also points to The Social Life of Paper (which I'm printing out) with this citation (bold is mine):

But why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking. The psychologist Alison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively, argues that "knowledge workers" use the physical space of the desktop to hold "ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use." The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven't yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. Kidd writes that many of the people she talked to use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to "recover a complex set of threads without difficulty and delay" when they come in on a Monday morning, or after their work has been interrupted by a phone call. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains.

Now I don't feel quilty about those messy papers in my desk :)))

[Mathemagenic]

This is how my work area always is. See, it is also temporally filed. New stuff on top, old stuff on the bottom. The important stuff keeps getting moved to the top. It works for me.  9:32:05 PM    



Johnson & Johnson to pay Amgen $150 million damages over hormone dispute. Ananova Oct 18 2002 6:44PM ET [Moreover - moreover...]

Of course, any effect on the stock price will be of no use to me since I had to sell all my options by today. I am not too happy.  9:08:10 PM    



'Alzheimer's gene' linked to Parkinson's, too [Reuters Health eLine]

Some very useful knowledge about some very difficult neurological disorders.  8:24:30 PM    



Index finger length can predict penis size: study [Reuters Health eLine]

Somehow knowing it was Greek doctors doing the measuring made the report worthwhile.  8:18:18 PM    



O.J. No Longer [base ']100 Percent Sure[base '] He is Innocent [Daypop Top 40]

Yes, it IS humor but I had to check a few times justto make sure ;-)  8:13:24 PM    



Left on.

John Perry Barlow: The American Republic is Dead. Hail the American Empire. Or else.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

John Barlow is one of the important voices today. He is one of the co-founders of the Electronic Freedom Foundation, one of the few groups that 'gets' the Internet and has been instrumental in attempting to educate the people in power about it (i.e. it is not something to fear or to over-regulate). Read this. It says some important things; things that you will not find in any newspaper or TV show. But I think they are things we will hear more and more in the coming days.   7:57:56 PM    



Okay, I actually heard from a couple of head hunters. Well, they left me messages so I may have something to do next week. Just about the time I figure I'll be writing or doing web pages for a living, something like this happens.  7:36:01 PM    


 
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Last update: 3/27/08; 6:13:16 PM.