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 Sunday, April 13, 2003
Examining Layoff Ethics. The stories are familiar. Companies are laying off people left and right - but they're doing it for the wrong reasons, or they're doing a terrible job of it. This article is discussing the ethics of layoffs, pointing out that many companies are laying people off, simply to improve their standing on Wall Street. It's the uncreative way of saying "looking, I'm cutting costs!", even if they're losing out on a greater potential upside. Many businesses don't consider the real consequences of layoffs, and just look at the immediate financial benefit. At the same time, they're handing out fat bonuses to senior management for "helping the company through a tough time". It's all pretty sickening. The article also takes issue with who is chosen to be laid off. Sometimes it's "the troublemakers" - even though most businesses need those people to keep them from getting complacent. Other times it's the most senior people - because they make the most money. Once again, these decisions are being made to impact the short-term bottom line without thinking of the long term effect on the business.
[Techdirt]
Why so many people are cynical when it comes to ANY business having trouble. The wrong people are rewarded. 12:57:05 PM 
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Connection Money. Households in the US are spending an increasing money on "information and entertainment" services. Writes NYTimes:
An analysis of government data by academic researchers over the last 25 years shows that from the 1920's through the 80's, the average household spent about 6 percent of its disposable income on "information and entertainment," a category embracing everything from newspapers and movies to telephone service, radios and television sets.
In the 1990's that figure jumped to 8 percent. Today, "it looks like it's more than 10 percent,'' said John Carey, who teaches courses in new media at Columbia University's graduate school of business. Clearly, Mr. Carey said, the increase in consumer spending on information and entertainment coincided with widespread expansion of cable and satellite TV and with the rapid growth of the public Internet.
Many market analysts predict that the surging popularity of TiVo, the digital television recorder, will inspire new home video servers that capture signals from multiple Internet, cable and satellite networks and feed them to computers, televisions and other devices around the house.
What all these emerging services have in common is a business model based on subscriptions that are billed monthly or yearly.
The clincher: "Research by Professor Katz suggests that the typical American household is nowhere near its limit - that the average family would be willing to spend as much as $500 a month for the right combination of subscription services." [E M E R G I C . o r g]
As we enter the Information Age, we will put more of our income into information services. But they will have to provide good information at a reseanable price to survive. 12:36:23 PM
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Recent Living Code writing:
- SARS Sequence
- Possible Cannabilistic Ancestors
- Difficulty Cloning Humans
- Consumption and Birth Rate
12:30:23 PM
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A Big Radio in a (Very Small) Package. Graduate student Al Molnar's circuit design skills may have landed him a world record, or at least the respect of radio frequency researchers around the globe. The PhD candidate in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences recently devised a transceiver-on-a-chip that's 50 times smaller than a cell phone, consumes 1,000 times less power, yet operates at the same frequency.
Molnar's micro-radio is a key ingredient in the latest iteration of UC Berkeley's Smart Dust, a research project in the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS). Invented by Molnar's adviser, Professor Kris Pister, the tiny and inexpensive Smart Dust Motes can be outfitted with sensors for myriad applications ? from diagnosing a building's structural integrity to measuring light and temperature for energy use monitoring.
Outfitted with their own TinyOS operating system, the motes self-organize into ad hoc wireless networks and pass their data from one to another bucket-brigade style until the information reaches a central computer for processing. The previous generation "Mica" Mote, now commercially available through Crossbow Technology Inc., is the size of a matchbox and runs on two AA batteries.
In March, members of the Smart Dust research team, including graduate students Jason Hill, Ben Cook, Mike Scott, and Brett Warneke, took a major leap forward in their quest to combine ultra-low power computation, communication, and sensing into a single tiny device. Hill successfully tested his design for a new single-chip "spec" mote that's only five millimeters square and includes a transmitter built by Molnar. [Smart Mobs]
The future is nearer than we think. Now if we can have access to all this as well as the government, what a future we will see. 11:43:48 AM
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We will continue to see innocents killed as long as these sorts of events also happen. Working a Marine ckeckpoint may be more dangerous than anyhting else done in this action. 10:47:22 AM
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From Karlin Lillington's weblog: The eyewitness report of a shooting at a Marine Checkpoint raises many questions. Perhaps some day soon we will have answers. 10:28:17 AM
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