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| compos mentis. Concision. Media. Clarity. Memes. Context. Melange. Confluence. Mishmash. Conflation. Mellifluous. Conviviality. Miscellany. Confelicity. Milieu. Cogent. Minty. Concoction. |
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Internet and autonomy building in the network society [RealMedia] |
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| Topic: Society |
1:16 am EST, Mar 18, 2003 |
Communication technology as material culture: Internet and autonomy building in the network society An Annenberg Colloquium with scholar Manuel Castells, author of The Internet Galaxy, Reflections on Internet, Business, and Society, and sociology professor at the University of California. An 80 minute lecture by Manuel Castells given in November 2002. Internet and autonomy building in the network society [RealMedia] |
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Why Hierarchies Thrive | Harvard Business Review, March 2003 |
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| Topic: Business |
6:07 pm EST, Mar 16, 2003 |
Hardly anyone has a good word to say about hierarchies. They routinely transform motivated and loyal employees into disaffected Dilberts. Yet, the intensity with which we struggle against hierarchies only serves to highlight their durability. In this article, organizational behavior expert Harold J. Leavitt presents neither a defense of human hierarchies nor another attack on them. Instead, he offers a reality check, a reminder that hierarchy remains the basic structure of most, if not all, large, ongoing human organizations. That's because although they are often depicted as being out of date, hierarchies have proved to be extraordinarily adaptive. Over the past 50 years, for example, they have co-opted the three major managerial movements--human relations, analytic management, and communities of practice. Hierarchies also persist because they deliver real practical and psychological value, and they fulfill our deep need for order and security. Despite the good they may do, however, hierarchies are inevitably authoritarian. You can find the print edition of HBR at your local bookstore or newsstand. Why Hierarchies Thrive | Harvard Business Review, March 2003 |
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All Your Singles Are Hits To Us |
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| Topic: Music |
12:17 pm EST, Mar 16, 2003 |
Polyphonic HMI has developed Hit Song Science, an artificial intelligence application that helps music labels determine the hit potential of music prior to its release. The new application is to music what x-rays are to medicine, allowing labels to see mathematical patterns and structures in music that until now have been hidden. ... Polyphonic also has begun to experiment with the technology at the production level of music creation. There are two possible futures here, and neither is particularly bright for traditional artists and their fans. 1) However impossible it may have seemed before, "pop" music takes a still further dive into homogeneity. Frustated by the turn of events, smart mobs of teens with angst deliberately seek out the rejects, and the new genre of "unpop" is born. It all begins with dumpster diving for discarded hard drives in the alleys behind recording studios. 2) This software is truly as amazing as the hype suggests. In the future, your embedded biocomputer will let you "sample" new music, instantaneously filling you with the emotional impact of an hour's worth of listening to the album. If you like the feeling, you'll buy the album. Shortly thereafter, people will cut the audio out of the loop entirely; instead, already overstimulated teens will flock to Tower Records to pick up the new "essence of post-Britney." Think of it as a kind of digitally encoded musical perfume. Recording studios rapidly evolve into urban laboratories for neurochemistry and bioinformatics. Eye candy and gangstas are replaced as pop stars by thirty-something MD-PhDs who seem more interested in patenting their instruments than copyrighting their music. All Your Singles Are Hits To Us |
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Reinventing Tommy: More Surf, Less Logo |
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| Topic: Business |
10:32 am EST, Mar 16, 2003 |
In the glossy pages of magazines, young men and women frolic on a beach, wearing unlogoed T-shirts and short shorts, their aura that of sun and surfboards. In their relaxed, vaguely privileged demeanor, this photogenic crowd presents an undeniable contrast to the urban image of the same brand a decade ago, when the models wore their hair in dreadlocks and swaggered down the street, bold and cool, with a big "Tommy Hilfiger" on their oversize sweats. Now the dreadlocks are gone from the advertisements -- and the big red, white and blue "Tommys" are pretty much gone from the streets. The Tommy Hilfiger Corporation has announced that it is moving away from its logo ... "It's more about going away from the logo than changing the demographic." "Pattern Recognition" is already making an impact on fashion. Reinventing Tommy: More Surf, Less Logo |
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Emerging Technology: Who Loves Ya, Baby? |
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| Topic: Software Development |
7:42 pm EST, Mar 15, 2003 |
This feature article by Steven Johnson appears in the April 2003 issue of Discover magazine. It's about Valdis Krebs and his InFlow software for visualization of social networks. Emerging Technology: Who Loves Ya, Baby? |
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Email as Spectroscopy [PDF] |
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| Topic: Society |
4:27 pm EST, Mar 15, 2003 |
We describe a methodology for the automatic identification of communities of practice from email logs within an organization. We use a betweeness centrality algorithm that can rapidly find communities within a graph representing information flows. We apply this algorithm to an email corpus of nearly one million messages collected over a two-month span, and show that the method is effective at identifying true communities, both formal and informal, within these scale-free graphs. This approach also enables the identification of leadership roles within the communities. Email as Spectroscopy [PDF] |
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The Man Who Would Be President |
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| Topic: International Relations |
11:51 am EST, Mar 15, 2003 |
Intelligence experts attached to the army of occupation will find the missing people, places and records. They will identify, with dollar figures, just who sold contraband to Mr. Hussein and how shipment was arranged -- a prospect bound to worry some people in Europe and Asia. The "files" will open up the secret history of the Middle East like a field of sunflowers. Could this be the reason why some nations so vehemently oppose military action, or seek to postpone it indefinitely? The Man Who Would Be President |
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Natalie Merchant, No Strings Attached |
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| Topic: Music |
1:56 am EST, Mar 14, 2003 |
Natalie Merchant has stepped off the pop treadmill. After 17 years with Elektra Records, first as the main songwriter and singer of 10,000 Maniacs and then with million-selling solo albums of her reflective folk-rock, Ms. Merchant decided to go it alone. Fans of Natalie Merchant will be interested in this as news, but it's also a revealing commentary on the (dysfunctional) state of the music industry. Mainstream record labels have become pure profit/loss centers specializing in the trafficking of glossy liner notes, accompanied by compact discs which, oh, by the way, just happen to contain some music, if by chance you like that sort of thing. Natalie Merchant, No Strings Attached |
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Putting it all together with Robert Kahn |
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| Topic: Technology |
10:16 pm EST, Mar 11, 2003 |
The co-founder of the Internet recalls the non-commercial early days and looks at today's issues of fair use, privacy and the need for security. Putting it all together with Robert Kahn |
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The founder of Visa on Corporations |
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| Topic: Business |
1:40 am EST, Mar 11, 2003 |
Command-and-control organizations, Hock says, "were not only archaic and increasingly irrelevant. They were becoming a public menace, antithetical to the human spirit and destructive of the biosphere. I was convinced we were on the brink of an epidemic of institutional failure." Decius wrote:
] This is a starting point for some extremely rich and interesting ideas. The author of the article, M. Mitchell Waldrop, also wrote the book _The Dream Machine_, which I logged back in October 2001. (Search my blog for dream machine.) The founder of Visa on Corporations |
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