Gordian Knots

Slashdot | Big Arctic Perils Seen in Warming: “Reading a scientific report on a hot, highly fundable subject is an exercise in weedoing out the real science from the money grubbing science.

IMO, while there is some correlation between projections of the effects of ‘greenhouse gasses’ and observation, it’s still a stretch to infer causality.

Furthermore, the associated hysteria is unwarranted. There have been rapid warming periods in the past. There have also been rapid cooling periods. Through it all, life goes on”

We’re facing another climate change and we should accept it. Is it fault of humans? Maybe, maybe not. But remember there were times where glacier covered half the Europe, there were times when Sahara was a green country, when what today is mediterran sea was a valley of a huge river… It just happens. Now just be wise and prepare to face it instead of looking who is to blame”

biotechhobbyistmagazine: “Brodwin, Paul E., ed. Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxiety, Ethics. Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 2000.

Bud, Robert. The Uses of Life: A History of Biotechnology. New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1993.

Clarke, Adele, and Teresa Montini. ‘The Many Faces of RU486: Tales of Situated

Knowledges and Technological Contestations.’ Science, Technology, and Human

Values 18 (1993): 42-78.

Doyle, Richard. On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences.

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Duster, Troy. ‘The Sociology of Science and the Revolution in Molecular Biology.’ In

The Blackwell Companion to Sociology. Edited by J.R. Blau. New York:

Blackwell, 2001.

Fortun, Michael. ‘The Human Genome Project: Past, Present, and Future Anterior.’ In

Science, History and Social Activism: A Tribute to Everett Mendelsohn. Edited by

Garland E. Allen and Roy M. MacLeod. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer,

2002.”

Franklin, Sarah and Margaret Lock, eds. Remaking Life and Death: Toward an

Anthropology of the Biosciences. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press,

2003.

Fujimura, Joan. Crafting Science: A Sociohistory of the quest for Genetics of Cancer.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Fukuyama, Francis. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology

Revolution. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2002.

Heath, Deborah and Michael Flower. ‘Micro-Anatomo Politics: Mapping the Human

Genome Project.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 17 (1993): 27-41.

Holland, Suzanne, Karen Lebacqz, and Laurie Zoloth, eds. The Human Embryonic Stem

Cell Debate: Science, Ethics, and Public Policy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,

2001.

Jordan, Kathleen and Michael Lynch. “The Sociology of a Genetic Engineering

Technique: Ritual and Rationality in the Performance of the ‘Plasmid Prep.’” In

The Right Tools for the Job: At Work in the Twentieth-Century Life Sciences.

Edited by Adele E. Clarke and Joan H. Fujimura. Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1992.

Kay, Lily. Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code. Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1999.

——-. The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise

of the New Biology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Landecker, Hannah. “New Times for Biology: Nerve Cultures and the Advent of Cellular

Life In Vitro.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical

Sciences 33 (2002): 667-694.

Nelkin, Dorothy and Lori Andrews. “Homo Economicus: Commercialization of Body

Tissue in the Age of Biotechnology. Hastings Center Report, September-October

1998.

Rabinow, Paul. Making PCR, A Story of Biotechnology. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1995.

——-. French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

——-. “Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality.” In

Zone 6: Incorporations. Edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter. New

York: Zone, 1992.

Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. Towards a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in

the Test Tube. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Stevens, Jacqueline. “Symbolic Matter: DNA and Other Linguistic Stuff.” Social Text 20

(1), (Spring, 2002): 106-140.

Thackray, Arnold, ed., Private Science: The Biotechnology Industry and the Rise of

Contemporary Molecular Biology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

Press, 1998.

Economist.com | The Buttonwood column: “The dollar looks in danger of plunging, the price of oil continues to surge, gold is going up and world growth is slowing. Oh, and America is about to hold an election that could create as much uncertainty as it removes. Small wonder that there are a few growls from financial markets. Buttonwood has a nasty feeling that something worse is in store.”

Slashdot | P2P Not Dead, Just Hiding: “‘Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first it is ridiculed, in the second it is opposed, in the third it is regarded as self evident.’

- Arthur Schopenhauer”

Slashdot | An Open Source Tipping Point?: “Over at LinuxWorld there’s an article arguing that open source will be propelled to market predominance by the same disruptive mechanism that brought Sony, Microsoft, and others to be market leaders at the moment. ‘The improbable is possible – leaders have been dethroned in the past,’ writes the author, who is also apparently the producer of an upcoming documentary entitled, ‘The Digital Tipping Point’ to be released in September 2005. The story refers to a corroborating article from South Africa and to Clayton Christensen’s Seeing What’s Next which backs up this general idea”

“Money does not bring out the best in people, or the worst – it just amplifies who they really are.”

Amazon.com: Books: The Brand You 50 : Or : Fifty Ways to Transform Yourself from an ‘Employee’ into a Brand That Shouts Distinction, Commitment, and Passion!: “Michael Goldhaber, writing in Wired, said, ‘If there is nothing very special about your work, no matter how hard you apply yourself you won’t get noticed and that increasingly means you won’t get paid much either. In times past you could be obscure yet secure — now that’s much harder.’

Again: the white collar job as now configured is doomed. Soon. (’Downsizing’ in the nineties will look like small change.) So what’s the trick? There’s only one: distinction. Or as we call it, turning yourself into a brand . . . Brand You.

A brand is nothing more than a sign of distinction. Right? Nike. Starbucks. Martha Stewart. The point (again): that’s not the way we’ve thought about white collar workers–ourselves–over the past century. The ‘bureaucrat’ on the finance staff is de facto faceless, plugging away, passing papers.

But now, in our view, she is born again, transformed from bureaucrat to the new star. She works in a professional service firm and works on projects that she’ll be able to brag about years from now.

I call her/him the New American Professional, CEO of Me Inc. (even if Me Inc. is currently on someone’s payroll) and, of course, of Brand You.

Step #1 in the model was the organization . . .a department turned into PSF 1.0. Step #2 is the individual . . .reborn as Brand You.

In 50 essential points, Tom Peters shows how to be committed to your craft, choose the right projects, how to improve networking, why you need to think fun is cool, and why it’s important to piss some people off. He will enable you to turn yourself into an important and distinctive commodity. In short, he will show you how to turn yourself into . . . Brand You.

“

132 of the most influential titles

“# Action Learning, Reg Revans

# Administrative Behavior, Herbert Simon

# The Age of Discontinuity, Peter Drucker

# The Age of E-tail, Alex Birch, Philipp Gerbert & Dirk Schneider

# The Age of Unreason, Charles Handy

# All the Right Moves, Constantinos Markides

# The Art of Japanese Management, Richard Pascale & Anthony Athos

# The Art of War, Sun Tzu

# The Art of the Long View, Peter Schwartz

# A Behavioral Theory of the Firm, Richard Cyert & James March

# Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte

# Blown to Bits, Philip Evans & Thomas Wurster

# Blur, Stan Davis & Christopher Meyer

# The Book of the Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi

# The Borderless World, Kenichi Ohmae

# The Brand You 50, Tom Peters

# Built to Last, James Collins & Jerry Porras

# Business @ the Speed of Thought, Bill Gates

# A Business and Its Beliefs, Thomas Watson Jr

# Capital, Karl Marx

# The Caring Economy, Gerry McGovern

# The Change Masters, Rosabeth Moss Kanter

# The Changing Culture of a Factory, Elliot Jaques

# The Clickable Corporation, Jonathan Rosenoer, Douglas Armstrong & Russell Gates

# Clicks and Mortar, David S. Pottruck & Terry Pearce

# The Cluetrain Manifesto, Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searle, & David Weinberger

# Co-opetition, Barry Nalebuff and Adam Brandenburger

# Competing for the Future, Gary Hamel & C.K. Prahalad

# The Competitive Advantage of Nations, Michael Porter

# Competitive Strategy, Michael Porter

# Complexity, Mitchell Waldrop

# Corporate Strategy, Igor Ansoff

# Corporate-level Strategy, Michael Goold, Marcus Alexander, & Andrew Campbell

# The Death of Distance, Frances Cairncross

# Digital Capital, Don Tapscott, David Ticoll and Alex Lowy

# Digital Darwinism, Evan Schwartz

# The Dilbert Principle, Scott Adams

# Direct from Dell, Michael Dell

# The Discipline of Market Leaders, Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema

# Du syst�me industriel, Henri de Saint-Simon

# Dynamic Administration, Mary Parker Follett

# E-shock 2000, Michael De Kare-Silver

# Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman

# The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin

# The Entertainment Economy, Michael Wolf

# The Experience Economy, B. Joseph Pine & James H. Gilmore

# The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge

# The Functions of the Executive, Chester Barnard

# Funky Business, Jonas Ridderstr�le and Kjell Nordstr�m

# A Future Perfect, John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge

# Futurize your Enterprise, David Siegel

# General Theory of Employment, John Maynard Keynes

# General and Industrial Management, Henri Fayol

# Getting to Yes, Roger Fisher and William Ury

# The Goal, Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox

# The HP Way, David Packard

# Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, Yamamoto Tsunetomo

# High Stakes, No Prisoners, Charles Ferguson

# How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie

# The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization, Elton Mayo

# The Human Side of Enterprise, Douglas McGregor

# In Search of Excellence, Tom Peters & Robert Waterman

# In the Age of the Smart Machine, Shoshana Zuboff

# The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Manuel Castells

# Information Rules, Carl Shapiro & Hal R. Varion

# Innovation in Marketing, Theodore Levitt

# The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen

# Intellectual Capital, Thomas Stewart

# The Knowledge-creating Company, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi

# Leaders: Strategies For Taking Charge, Warren Bennis & Burt Nanus

# Leadership, James MacGregor Burns

# Leading Change, John Kotter”

# The Living Company: Habits for Survival in a Turbulent Business Environment, Arie de Geus

# Living on Thin Air, Charles Leadbetter

# The Machine That Changed the World, James Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos

# Made in Japan, Akio Morita

# Management Teams: Why They Succeed or Fail, R. Meredith Belbin

# The Managerial Grid, Robert Blake & Jane Mouton

# Managing, Harold Geneen

# Managing Across Borders, Christopher Bartlett & Sumantra Ghoshal

# Managing on the Edge, Richard Pascale

# Marketing Management, Philip Kotler

# Maverick!, Ricardo Semler

# Megatrends, John Naisbitt

# The Mind of the Strategist, Kenichi Ohmae

# Moments of Truth, Jan Carlzon

# Motion Study: A Method for Increasing the Efficiency of the Workman, Frank Gilbreth

# Motivation and Personality, Abraham Maslow

# The Motivation to Work, Frederick Herzberg, Bernard Mausner, and Barbara Bloch Snyderman

# My Life and Work, Henry Ford

# My Years with General Motors, Alfred Sloan

# Natural Capitalism, Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins

# The Nature of Managerial Work, Henry Mintzberg

# The New Corporate Cultures, Terrence Deal and Allan Kennedy

# The New New Thing, Michael Lewis

# New Patterns of Management, Rensis Likert

# The New Pioneers, Tom Petzinger

# On War, Carl von Clausewitz

# On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Charles Babbage

# Onward Industry, James Mooney & Alan Reiley

# Organisational Culture and Leadership, Edgar Schein

# The Organization Man, William Whyte

# Organizational Learning, Chris Argyris & Donald Schon

# Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming

# Parkinson’s Law, C. Northcote Parkinson

# The Peter Principle, Laurence Peter

# Planning for Quality, Joseph M. Juran

# The Practice of Management, Peter Drucker

# The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli

# The Principles Of Scientific Management, Frederick Winslow Taylor

# Principles of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill

# Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, David Ricardo

# Quest for Prosperity, Konosuke Matsushita

# Real Time, Regis McKenna

# Reengineering The Corporation, James Champy & Michael Hammer

# Riding the Waves of Culture, Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner

# The Rise of Fall of Strategic Planning, Henry Mintzberg

# Six Sigma, Mikel Harry and Richard Schroeder

# Small Is Beautiful, E.F. Schumacher

# Strategy Safari, Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand, and Joseph Lampel

# Strategy and Structure, Alfred Chandler

# Tableau Economique, Francois Quesnay

# The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Max Weber

# The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler

# Toyota Production System, Taiichi Ohno

# Up the Organization, Robert Townsend

# Valuation, Tom Copeland, Jack Murrin, and Tom Koller

# The Visionary’s Handbook, Watts Wacker & Jim Taylor

# The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edward Tufte

# The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith

# The Will to Manage, Marvin Bower

# Work This Way, Bruce Tulgan

Techdirt:Software That Saves Lives: “For all the stories we hear about technology screwing up, Ephraim Schwartz, has an interesting post over at InfoWorld about some software that is being used to clean up a dangerous mess. We all know about problems of buried landmines in former war zones. This particular software, called Mapguide, helps to collect and organize as much data as possible about where landmines might be buried, and gets it into the hands of those working to get rid of them. It can be used to better pinpoint where landmines are likely to be, as well as pick out higher risk areas. It’s unfortunate, first of all, that this is a problem at all, and it’s unfortunate that we don’t hear more stories of software products like this helping save lives. However, every once in a while, it’s a good reminder that there are software products that really make a difference.”

“‘Sure, the lion is king of the jungle, but airdrop him into Antarctica, and he’s just a penguin’s bitch.’ -Dennis Miller”

We are just begining to scratch the surface of what’s out there in Molecular Biology. We are just beginning to understand the signifigance of glycoproteins in cellular systems. We are still trying to figure out some of the basics of single celled organism’s internal signaling. There are a huge amount of genes that we dont have the slightest clue about their function, we know what they build now, but we need to figure out what it’s for.

Imagine in 1776 you had a portable gas generator, and a truckload of computer parts from the last 20 years. Could you assemble a computer? sure. But what If you had 18th century knowlege. Your not really going to understand what the generator is for. Your probably going to try and make the peices into some sort of clock arrangement, marveling that you got the PCI card properly inserted into an ISA port.

I’m not ragging on Biological Scientists, but right now were at the stage where we have found the pile of computer parts, and we know how a few of them fit, but It might be a while before we notice that seam on the back of the palm pilot for batteries. Because it doesn’t look important.”

Slashdot | Ray Kurzweil On IT And The Future of Technology: “In this interview with CIO Magazine, Ray Kurzweil says that one day, software and computers will reside inside us. He adds that by 2020, ‘we will be placing millions or billions of nanobots — blood cell-size devices — inside our bloodstream to travel into our brains and interact with our neurons.’ He also says that if we’re not enhanced by machines, they will surpass us. But he doesn’t think it will happen. According to him, machines and humans will merge. In the mean time, he’s pursuing his anti-aging quest and takes about 250 supplements to his diet every day! With this regime, he says his biological age is 40 while he’s 56 years old. By 2030, there will be very little difference between 30-year-old and 120-year-old people, says Kurzweil. He’s certainly a bright person, but I’m not sure that I agree with someone taking daily such an amount of pills. What do you think? This summary contains some selected — and biased — excerpts to help you forge your opinion.”

Satellite smashes Chinese house: “A Chinese satellite has smashed into a villager’s house on its return to earth, the country’s media reports.

The satellite destroyed the building in Sichuan province, but officials say no-one was hurt.

A local newspaper printed a picture of a kettle-shaped capsule which appeared to be about two metres long, lying amid broken bricks, beams and roof tiles.

The satellite was part of a space probe to carry out land surveys and other research, Xinhua news agency said.

‘The satellite landed in our home. Maybe this means we’ll have good luck this year,’ the tenant of the wrecked apartment was quoted as saying by the newspaper.”

I think the following Israeli model can be applied to Indian settings.

“For years, the israeli start-ups have perfected the model of local (Hertzlia based…) R&D with US based headquarter. The model is now applied more and more to European (here a French example) start-ups. Meiosys whose software is designed to make a virtual version of a computer application and keep it running while it is transferred to another server just relocated from France To California and announced a new D round of funding of $7.5M< .

Two good articles on the legal side of this transformation (the infamous Delaware Flip) can be found from SJ Berwin or Hale Dorr “

Product Marketing, the difficult art of linking a technology to a product to a customer is one of the hardest tasks for a technology CEO.

I have used the Geoffrey A. Moore framework that he describes…

- For (target customers – beachhead segment only)

- Who are dissatisfied with (the current market alternatives)

- Our product is a (new product category)

- That provides (key problem-solving capability)

- Unlike (the product alternative)

- We have assembled (key whole product features for your specific application)

… and found out that it works as a sharp tool that can be used to crystallize your thinking on what product you have. My key leanings from using the framework are:

- Get two three customers before you try to solidify your answers and use the framework

It’s hard to use, but almost impossible to use BEFORE you have 2 or 3 customers that will anchor you in reality.

- Run a first internal cross-functional workshop with representatives from sales, marketing, technology and service.

The framework will force and structure the internal discussion, and build consensus on the company and product mission and positioning.

- Run then an external workshop with representatives from the key members of your eco-system i.e. consulting organisation, customer, integrators, EOM partners etc…

The framework will help describing the rules of engagement between the various member of the eco-system, and describing the whole-product (product view from the end user perspective) .

NASA ENose Sniffs out Danger in Space: “NASA is developing an electronic nose sensor that can detect concentrations of ammonia as low as 1 part per million (PPM). The human nose can’t detect ammonia until it reaches about 50 PPM, although concentrations of just a few PPM can be dangerous to humans. NASA is concerned about this because the cooling system aboard the International Space Station is based on a complex network of pipes carrying ammonia throughout the station. The ENose sensor can identify other compounds as well and will probably become part of a complete atmospere safety system aboard the ISS. Meanwhile, medical and robotics researchers are looking into applications for the ENose here on Earth. For more, see the NASA Electronic Nose Project page or the recent press release on the ENose.”

Engines of our Ingenuity: ” – The Engines of Our Ingenuity is an American public radio program that describes how culture is molded by human creativity. The site carries transcripts of each broadcast since the program’s inception in 1988. If you’re at all curious about how art, technology, and ideas have shaped us then take a listen. Every episode reveals a nuance about how we have come to a culture with cable cars and civil wars, submarines and bar codes. As with all good multimedia presentations there are a few spinoffs for consumption too. Material for talks, classroom materials (still under construction unfortunately), there is even a free text book of college-level engineering – A Heat Transfer Textbook, by presenter John Lienhard IV and John Lienhard V available as well as an audio CD called Inventing Europe. The online episode at the time of this review was number 1720, which is rather impressive run to say the least. Episode 1720 talks about the Silk Road, the almost mythical trade route between China and the eastern end of the Mediterranean that went by way of Tibet, Siberia, Samarkand, and Baghdad. The show’s presenter John Lienhard IV has presented some 1720 episodes so far and is still an active emeritus professor of the University of Houston and presents episodes like the Silk Sea Lane with much passion.”

Techdirt says: “Along with Netflix’s earnings announcements today, they also revealed that Amazon is about to enter the DVD rental market, requiring them to drop their own prices. First off, it’s pretty interesting to see a company revealing a potential product launch from an unexpected competitor. You don’t see that every day. Still, it says something about the nature of competitive information these days. Furthermore, despite all the hype about Wal-Mart and Blockbuster getting into the DVD rental business, it’s Amazon’s pending entrance that clearly has NetFlix worried. That’s because Amazon is much more able to compete to NetFlix’s strengths: offering movies that fall under the long tail, and coming up with good recommendations for other such movies to rent. Neither Blockbuster nor Wal-Mart were likely to compete all that strongly on either front, but Amazon clearly has experience in both. Amazon also has a pretty impressive logistics team, though, it will have to be adjusted for rental offerings, rather than simply selling goods”

I was once a Biomimetic robot engineer. I worked in the Small Smart Systems Center in University of Maryland, designing micro-robots using what we called ‘artificial muscles’ (polymer-based MEMS).

IEEE Computer Magazine has a good article on Biomimetic Robots: “Biomimetics is a general description for engineering a process or system that mimics biology. The term emerged from biochemistry and applies to an infinite range of chemical and mechanical phenomena, from cellular processes to whole-organism functions.”

Leonardo da Vinci made drawings of potential flight contraptions based on detailed anatomical studies of birds, and the Wright brothers based their airplane structure on observations and analysis of bird flight. However, researchers diverge in precisely how they define biomimetics. “‘Biomimetic’ is often a vague term, much like ‘robot,’” says Pratt.

Mark Cutkosky, a professor in Stanford University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, is part of a team working on a family of legged robots based on cockroach locomotion. He says their team defines biomimetics as “extracting principles from biology and applying them to man-made devices—particularly robots.”

Cutkosky says two forces are driving the “new wave” of robotics. First, biological research has exposed a huge amount of biological process data that roboticists can apply to their work. Second, advances in low-cost, power-efficient computing systems allow researchers to create robots that work outside laboratories. Cutkosky says that roboticists can “really put some of the lessons we’re learning from biology to practice. Ten years ago, even if I had understood exactly what materials and mechanical principles underlie the cockroach’s robust dynamic locomotion, I would have been unable to build a robot that embodied them.”

Not that current biomimetic robots are dependent on the fastest computing technologies available.

“The interesting thing about the biomimetic work,” says Butler Hine, manager of the computing information and communications technology program based at NASA-Ames, “is it uses nature’s evolved way of doing things rather than the computationally intensive way.” In lieu of algorithmic-intense artificial intelligence, Hine says, some researchers are using control loops and 8-bit processors and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for command control rather than lines and lines of programming.

Biomimetic robots are still relatively new, however, and the possible collaborations among biologists, robotic engineers, and computer scientists have barely begun.

There’s more to this process than simply constructing a workable, autonomous robotic device, say scientists. “How birds fly, how fish swim, how dolphins locate objects, and how humans walk might best be discovered and understood by trying to reproduce these activities in a device,”contends IMHC’s Pratt. “The knowledge gained might not be immediately useful, but it could some day lead to useful technologies based on, but not necessarily mimicking, these phenomena.”