Brenda Michelson

• What Would Ben Franklin Do? Influences of America’s First Environmentalist | ThinkProgress

  “Everywhere Franklin went, his feisty personality preceded him, and it was this reputation in Europe that played a key role in securing the foreign aid the revolutionaries needed to triumph over the British. Many consider the celebrated polymath to be the first “American” in numerous regards—in entrepreneurialism, in political discourse, and, of course, in partying. As it turns out, Franklin was also the first American environmentalist, and his inventions influenced the scientific community for decades.”

  tags: benjaminfranklin

• How To Be More Interesting (In 10 Simple Steps) – Forbes

  Words for us geek types to live by:

  “4. Embrace your innate weirdness. No one is normal. Everyone has quirks and insights unique to themselves. Don’t hide these things—they are what make you interesting.”

  tags: talent

• Cloud Computing – Bessemer Venture Partners Cloudscape

  Infographic on players in Cloud Space, broken out in standard manner: SaaS, PaaS, & IaaS

  tags: cloud computing bessemer

• Fresh Copy: How Ursula Burns Reinvented Xerox | Fast Company

  Interesting article on Ursula Burns and the ups, downs and strategic changes for Xerox. Plus, she told President Obama “that he owed her $3 billion.”

  tags: burns xerox

• Martin Scorsese On Vision In Hollywood | Fast Company

  I just enjoyed this article. Scorsese’s creative influences, rules to live by; as well as parallels of the film creation process with software development — takes, composition, and editing.

  We should do more editing in software development.

  tags: creativity scorsese

• Let them eat data | FT Tech Hub | FTtechhub – Industry analysis – FT.com

  Open data and #snark from the FT. What could be better?

  “Whether this measure spawns many new enterprises like PLACR remains to be seen, but it’s the perfect austerity plan. If there isn’t the money to improve the rail infrastructure, get some apps developed instead that will tell people just how long their train is likely to be delayed.”

  tags: opendata

• Napster: Lessons for The Enemies of Shadow IT – tecosystems

  “Given that developers have an increasing portfolio of accessible open source software and cloud services available to them, it’s unlikely that an enterprise crackdown on so-called shadow IT will be materially more effective. And then there’s question of whether throttling the constituency within your business that wants to move fastest is generally a good idea.

  Why not enable them, then? Instead of firewalling the services Shadow IT wants, provide them centrally. Turn the tools that you are wasting your time fighting into an enticement to come out of the shadows. You’ll have better, if still imperfect, visibility into consumption and usage patterns as well as shorter development cycles. What’s not to like?”

  tags: sogrady shadowIT

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Related posts:

1. Link Collection – August 13, 2011
2. Link Collection — October 9, 2011
3. Link Collection – September 11, 2011

• om.co » Why connecting the dots is important too

  “What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ‘em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.”

  tags: execution dotconnecting

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Related posts:

1. Link Collection — November 13, 2011
2. Link Collection — November 6, 2011
3. Link Collection – July 24, 2011

• Google’s Chief Works to Trim a Bloated Ship – NYTimes.com

  “Ever since taking over as C.E.O., I have focused much of my energy on increasing Google’s velocity and execution, and we’re beginning to see results,” Mr. Page, 38, told analysts recently.

  tags: google execution

• 20 Characteristics of the Transleader. ~ Jennifer Sertl | elephant journal

  Jump to the list, under the video. A sample:

  1. Transleaders are intelligence officers. They are always looking for the unexpected insight, the unrecognised trends, and the subtle changes in the marketplace. They are information junkies—about the company’s markets, customers and technologies. And they maintain a large network of sources and informants.

  2. They are intuitive and creative people. They deeply understand the business environment and naturally have insights about how to operate within and beyond it.

  tags: transleader

• MQTT: MQ Telemetry Transport

  “The MQTT protocol enables a publish/subscribe messaging model in an extremely lightweight way. It is useful for connections with remote locations where a small code footprint is required and/or network bandwidth is at a premium. For example, it has been used in remote sensors communicating to a broker via satellite link, over occasional dial-up connections with healthcare providers, and in a range of home automation and small sensor device scenarios. It is also ideal for mobile applications because of its small size, low power usage, minimised data packets, and efficient distribution of information to one or many receivers. “

  tags: eclipse mqtt internetofthings

• IBM Open-Sources Potential “Internet of Things” Protocol

  “IBM announced it is joining with Italy-based hardware architecture firm Eurotech in donating a complete draft protocol for asynchronous inter-device communication to the Eclipse Foundation.”

  “It is being called Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol, the machine-to-machine counterpart of HTTP.”

  tags: MQTT ibm internetofthings

• McKinsey & Company – Report – The great transformer: The impact of the Internet on economic growth and prosperity – October 2011

  “The Internet is changing the way we work, socialize, create and share information, and organize the flow of people, ideas, and things around the globe. Yet the magnitude of this transformation is still underappreciated. The Internet accounted for 21 percent of the GDP growth in mature economies over the past 5 years. In that time, we went from a few thousand students accessing Facebook to more than 800 million users around the world, including many leading firms, who regularly update their pages and share content. While large enterprises and national economies have reaped major benefits from this technological revolution, individual consumers and small, upstart entrepreneurs have been some of the greatest beneficiaries from the Internet’s empowering influence. If Internet were a sector, it would have a greater weight in GDP than agriculture or utilities. “

  tags: mckinsey internet economy

• Seth’s Blog: There’s nothing wrong with having a plan

  Got a mission?

  “But missions are better. Missions survive when plans fail, and plans almost always fail.”

  tags: seth

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Related posts:

1. Link Collection — November 6, 2011
2. Link Collection – September 11, 2011
3. Link Collection – August 13, 2011

• A final thought from The Wisdom of Clouds | The Wisdom of Clouds – CNET News

  I completely agree with James. Echoes why I retired from the Top 3 Stories Podcast, and ground to a halt on Elemental Cloud Computing:

  “For one, cloud computing itself is no longer an innovative new field, but a growing marketplace of hundreds or even thousands of technology and service options. Covering cloud overall has become a journalist’s job, and I see myself more as an analyst and essayist.”

  tags: cloud computing

• Kaggle Solves Big Data Problems With Contests — And Now Has Big Funders and $11M on Board – Liz Gannes – News – AllThingsD

  “What if the Netflix Prize model of solving hard problems about big data sets using contests could be applied to all sorts of other things? In fact, a remarkable start-up called Kaggle is doing exactly that — and already seems to be making it work.

  Kaggle has facilitated breakthroughs in NASA’s analysis of dark matter, improved Allstate’s actuarial methods, predicted many of the top finishers of the Eurovision Song Contest, and is currently hosting a $3 million prize to device ways to reduce unnecessary hospitalizations.”

  tags: bigdata kaggle

• Systems thinking conference highlights practical applications in healthcare, education, product development – MIT News Office

  “A system is a set of interrelated entities that perform a function,” said Crawley, the Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The function that emerges, he said, is greater than what could come from any single entity — and the overall system’s “emergent properties” are what produce value.

  Crawley then explained that systems thinking is a way of looking at problems in context, in order to more successfully predict what will emerge to ensure value. “This is the real art and the real goal of systems thinking — training yourself in the domain in which you work to look at an unprecedented system, predict outcomes and add value,” Crawley said. In essence, using systems thinking helps make complex challenges less complicated.”

  tags: systems thinking mit

• Introducing the 5-watt server that runs on cell phone chips — Cloud Computing News

  “Can ARM wrestle its way into the server market? Calxeda and Hewlett-Packard think so. On Tuesday Calxeda launched its EnergyCore ARM server-on-a-chip (SoC), which it says consumes as little as 1.5 watts (and idles at half a watt). And HP, the world’s largest server maker, committed to building EnergyCore-based servers that will consume as little as 5 watts when running all out. Compare that to the lowest-power x86 server chips from Intel, which consume about 20 watts but deliver higher performance.

  Calxeda, backed in part by ARM Holdings, is banking that the success that ARM chips found in smartphones and mobile devices will carry over into data centers serving large, scale-out workloads. In that arena, it is facing off squarely against chip giant Intel and its x86-based architecture, which dominates the market for chips running in commodity servers.”

  tags: cloud computing chips

• Giving the F.B.I. What It Wants – NYTimes.com

  “Hasan M. Elahi is an associate professor and an interdisciplinary artist at the University of Maryland. This article is adapted from a forthcoming TED Talk.”

  “In an era in which everything is archived and tracked, the best way to maintain privacy may be to give it up. Information agencies operate in an industry that values data. Restricted access to information is what makes it valuable. If I cut out the middleman and flood the market with my information, the intelligence the F.B.I. has on me will be of no value. Making my private information public devalues the currency of the information the intelligence gatherers have collected.

  My activities may be more symbolic than not, but if 300 million people started sending private information to federal agents, the government would need to hire as many as another 300 million people, possibly more, to keep up with the information and we’d have to redesign our entire intelligence system.”

  tags: privacy

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Related posts:

1. Link Collection – August 13, 2011
2. Link Collection – September 11, 2011
3. Link Collection – July 31, 2011

• Linus Torvalds’s Lessons on Software Development M… – Input Output

  “If anyone knows the joys and sorrows of managing software development projects, it would be Linus Torvalds, creator of the world’s most popular open-source software program: the Linux operating system. For more than 20 years, Torvalds has been directing thousands of developers to improve the open source OS. He and I sat down to talk about effective techniques in running large-scale distributed programming teams – and the things that don’t work, too.”

  tags: LinusTorvalds

• Sysco’s Produce Division Makes Room For Local Farmers | Fast Company

  Interesting example of systemic constraints and redesign:

  “When Michigan State University wanted to serve more locally grown produce, Mike Passorelli’s basil would have been ideal. He grows it in a greenhouse two hours west, and labels it organic gardens. But the school can’t buy directly from tons of farms; that would be an organizational nightmare. So in 2007, it asked its food supplier, Sysco, to provide. That turned into a lesson on just how complex our nation’s food system is: To distribute local food, Sysco had to first spend three years restructuring its produce division in Michigan–a feat it’s now reproducing nationwide.”

  tags: produce local systemic change

• The Great Tech War Of 2012 | Fast Company

  Terrific piece in Fast Company:

  “…To state this as clearly as possible: The four American companies that have come to define 21st-century information technology and entertainment are on the verge of war. Over the next two years, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google will increasingly collide in the markets for mobile phones and tablets, mobile apps, social networking, and more. This competition will be intense. Each of the four has shown competitive excellence, strategic genius, and superb execution that have left the rest of the world in the dust.”

  tags: Apple amazon Google Facebook fastcompany

• Big data | BUSINESS RESEARCH

  Good report. Used a sliver in my Active Information post.

  “In June 2011 the Economist Intelligence Unit conducted a global survey of 586 senior executives, sponsored by SAS, to look at the state of big data, along with the organisational characteristics of companies that are adept at extracting value from data. It also explores the most challenging aspects of data management…”

  tags: economist bigdata

• Economist Intelligence Unit: Master data fundament… – Input Output

  This week’s Active Information post:

  “…And sure, we’ve heard all of this before. All those data management activities that get head nods, lumped into architecture and COEs (read: overhead) and then get resource gutted as soon the economy gets challenging, or a “business critical” project comes along.

  But, here’s the thing. According to the EIU research, the organizations that have actively, consistently invested in data management fundamentals are reaping more than business benefits…”

  tags: active-information

• Zen and the Art of Simplicity at Work – The Source – WSJ

  I preach simplicity in architecture everyday, just not so eloquently…

  “Tracing the Zen Aesthetic, what sets shibumi apart as a powerful design ideal is the unique combination of surprising impact and uncommon simplicity.

  It entails achieving maximum effect through minimum means, which, it turns out, is a universal pursuit that takes many forms: artists and designers use white or ‘negative’ space to convey visual power; scientists and mathematicians and engineers search for theories that explain highly complex phenomena in stunningly simple ways.

  What these various forms all have in common, and what shibumi has at its core, is the element of subtraction.

  Not only is the thought of subtracting something in order to create value a very different way of thinking (neuroscientists have shown using functional MRI scans that addition and subtraction demand different brain circuitry), it figures centrally in Zen.”

  tags: simplicity matthewmay

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Related posts:

1. Link Collection — October 23, 2011
2. Link Collection — October 9, 2011
3. Link Collection – July 24, 2011

• There’s Something Happening Here – NYTimes.com

  “There are two unified theories out there that intrigue me. One says this is the start of “The Great Disruption.” The other says that this is all part of “The Big Shift.” You decide.”

  tags: NYTimes.com friedman

• Mechanical Sympathy: Single Writer Principle

  Single Writer Principle
  When trying to build a highly scalable system the single biggest limitation on scalability is having multiple writers contend for any item of data or resource. Sure, algorithms can be bad, but let’s assume they have a reasonable Big O notation so we’ll focus on the scalability limitations of the systems design.

  I keep seeing people just accept having multiple writers as the norm. There is a lot of research in computer science for managing this contention that boils down to 2 basic approaches. One is to provide mutual exclusion to the contended resource while the mutation takes place; the other is to take an optimistic strategy and swap in the changes if the underlying resource has not changed while you created the new copy.

  tags: single Writer patterns

• disruptor – Concurrent Programming Framework – Google Project Hosting

  What is the Disruptor?

  LMAX aims to be the fastest trading platform in the world. Clearly, in order to achieve this we needed to do something special to achieve very low-latency and high-throughput with our Java platform. Performance testing showed that using queues to pass data between stages of the system was introducing latency, so we focused on optimising this area.

  The Disruptor is the result of our research and testing. We found that cache misses at the CPU-level, and locks requiring kernel arbitration are both extremely costly, so we created a framework which has “mechanical sympathy” for the hardware it’s running on, and that’s lock-free.

  This is not a specialist solution, it’s not designed to work only for a financial application. The Disruptor is a general-purpose mechanism for solving a difficult problem in concurrent programming.

  tags: disruptor concurrency java

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Related posts:

1. Link Collection — October 9, 2011
2. Link Collection – July 3, 2011
3. Link Collection- July 17, 2011

• What Visual Designers Can Learn From Biggie Smalls | Blog | design mind

  “I often think of Biggie’s process when we discuss the visual design process in the studio and within the company. What can we as designers learn from it? To me, there are a few strong themes we can embrace from it when facing difficulties in our daily work or when we assess our working methods, regardless of what discipline we work in or the context of our everyday projects.”

  tags: design

• Thoughtful Programmer: Visible Business

  “You may be writing software to detect or determine that “Something has happened”, or you may be writing software to deal with the fact that “Something has happened”.

  Either way, visibility is the key… your software is either making “something that has happened” visible, or your software is making “something that needs to happen” visible. Your software may be making “something” visible to people, or your software may be making “something” visible to another system.”

  tags: visibility events programming

• Charles Eames on Design: Rare Q&A from 1972 | Brain Pickings

  Q: “What are the boundaries of design?” Eames: “What are the boundaries of problems?”

  tags: design

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Related posts:

1. Link Collection – August 13, 2011
2. Link Collection – July 24, 2011
3. Link Collection- July 17, 2011

• Zachman Framework 3.0 Announced Tues, Aug. 23 … Quick Notes — Ron Ross on Business Rules

  “Here’s a zipped pdf of the new 3.0 version of the Zachman Framework (with permission): ZF3.0.zip [approx 1.5M]…

  …Our Editor for BRCommunity.com, Keri Anderson Healy, attended the announcement event – she reports an excellent turnout. The following are some quick first-look notes from Keri (my own comments appear in brackets)…”

  tags: zachman

• Change This – The Art of Hassle Map Thinking

  “Yet we’ve found that organizations that excel at demand creation do exactly that. They examine the lives of customers through the lens of what we call a Hassle Map-a detailed study of the problems, large and small, that people experience whenever they use their products.”

  tags: hassle map thinking innovation

• Change This – The Six Rules Women Must Break in Order to Succeed

  I like: “Proceed until apprehended”
  —
  “We all have thoughts that limit our potential. Some of these beliefs come from our individual experiences; they take hold over the years. “I’m not good at taking credit. I’m much better working behind the scenes. I’m lucky to have this job.” Other beliefs are a result of the gender stereotypes that are all around us. They creep into our heads over time. “It’s my job to nurture everyone else before I take care of my own needs. I am selfish and self-centered if I choose to indulge my ambition.” Still others are simply erroneous conventional wisdom. “I can have it all without compromise. I’m a failure if I can’t make it look easy.”

  We get in our own way when we buy-into these limiting beliefs. But it does not have to be that way. We can nurture the beliefs that will sustain us and help us grow. To rise to the highest ranks in business, women need to unwind some of the traditional thinking that holds us back. We need to rethink the conversations we are having in our heads and tell ourselves a new story. We need to break our own rules.”

  tags: women business

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Related posts:

1. Link Collection – August 13, 2011
2. Link Collection – July 31, 2011
3. Link Collection – July 3, 2011