In January 2007, Adam Bosworth addressed the team at Google's New York Office on why AJAX failed. Now, nearly a year later, Bosworth has left Google, and is helping people to live healthier lives by working with the health community. Bosworth will discuss how America's healthcare system, analogous to AJAX, can be successful through an alignment of physics, speed and psychology.

From Bosworth:

We are currently spending over 16% of our GDP on healthcare whereas France is around 8% and our overall health is worse.

Healthcare is like AJAX

The goal of the "Tamarin" project is to implement a high-performance, open source implementation of the ECMAScript 4th edition (ES4) language specification. The Tamarin virtual machine will be used by Mozilla within SpiderMonkey, the core JavaScript engine embedded in Firefox®, and other products based on Mozilla technology. The code will continue to be used by Adobe as part of the ActionScript™ Virtual Machine within Adobe® Flash® Player.

The Tamarin virtual machine currently implements the ECMAScript 3rd edition language standard that is the basis for JavaScript, Adobe ActionScript, and Microsoft Jscript, plus some of the new language features proposed in the ECMAScript 4th edition specification. By working on an open source implementation of ES4 with the community, Adobe and Mozilla hope to accelerate the adoption of a standard language for creating engaging Web applications. We hope the Tamarin project accelerates the ability of developers to create and deliver richer, more interactive experiences that work across multiple platforms.

I was sure there had been some discussion here of ES4, but I can't find it. Guess not.

Tamarin Project

The SimpleDB API is neither resource oriented nor HTTP friendly.

A RESTful version of Amazon's SimpleDB

There are a variety of articles and papers that I continue to draw insight from and find myself recommending to others on a regular basis. I decided it would be a useful exercise to assemble them into one set of pointers, add a little bit of commentary, and make it available.

I limited myself to materials that were easily available on the web, which eliminated some more obscure, academic, materials that you probably wouldn’t want to read anyway. I ended up with a dozen items that fall into two categories. The first group represents useful thinking about individual knowledge workers; the second about design principles relevant at the organizational and strategic level.

We talked about Richard Hamming's You and Your Research back in 2002. (It's now available here.) We've talked about As We May Think on numerous occasions. We've also talked about Alan Kay and Doug Engelbart, as well. We've talked about the Rise of the Stupid Network.

The ones I hadn't seen:

“Structured procrastination” - John Perry. A somewhat different, but nonetheless useful take on how to best leverage a multi-tasking, multi-demand world.

"Places to intervene in a system" - Meadows. The changes we need to make to take full advantage of the opportunities that technology presents us depend on thinking and operating at a systems level. This is the best short overview of the leverage points that can be found and used to make this level of change happen.

"Wicked problems and social complexity" - Conklin. As a counterbalance to Meadows, Conklin enriches the discussion of systems change by laying out the notion of “wicked problems.” These are the kinds problems whose solutions arise from the interaction between competing interest groups and change the definition of the problem as they are implemented.<?bq>

Papers you should read in the world of Enterprise 2.0

Amazon’s new e-reader, Kindle, is good because it feels old. Wonder how long that’ll last.

The Victorian iPod

The U.S. intelligence community defines DOMEX as "the processing, translation, analysis, and dissemination of collected hard-copy documents and electronic media, which are under the U.S. government's physical control and are not publicly available." That definition goes on to exclude "the handling of documents and media during the collection, initial review, and inventory process." DOMEX is not about being a digital librarian; it's about being a digital detective.

...

This article introduces electronic document and media exploitation from an academic perspective. It presents a model for performing this kind of exploitation and discusses some of the relevant academic research. Properly done, DOMEX goes far beyond recovering documents from hard drives and storing them in searchable archives. Understanding this engineering problem gives insight that will be useful for designing any system that works with large amounts of unstructured, heterogeneous data.

The DOMEX challenge is to turn digital bits into actionable intelligence.

Linda Stone gave a fantastic talk at ETech, continuing to build out her thesis on the changing ways we pay attention. Her talk began by orienting the audience in the same way as her 2005 Supernova talk, but it then went into new territory. Continuous partial attention is neither good nor bad, it just is. And like all evolved techniques, there are situations in which it's useful and situations in which it's a hindrance. Her thoughts on the new strategies we're building were, with Clay's magnificent talk, the highlights of the conference for me.

ETech: Linda Stone

What is it?

It's a new way of managing files. Or rather not manage files. Currently it's a cross between a calendar and a file browser with labels. It's a free/open source GTK application written in C#.

Codename Nemo

There’s a lot of speculation at any given time about what the future of the web is. I don’t know what it is, but I think I know what it’s not. Facebook.

So what’s the next wave?

Why Facebook is not the future of the web

Somewhere along the way, the zendo quality of the Apple Store changed.

The demi-privacy of it, the clubby feeling -- I know that you know that I know that we know and love Macs like nobody else does-- is fading away. Too much commotion. The ethereal, tranquil, spa vibe (the bath of white light, the polished concrete floors, the glint in the happy eyes of the geniuses at the Genius Bar) has been pierced by the sheer popularity of the place. The TV commercials worked. Mac Guy, even with his non-arrogant arrogance, is your real friend, and then he gathered too many friends, and suddenly he doesn't have time for them all.

The Elite Apple Corps