December 1, 2009
My 15th minute
So. Remember when I went to Africa last year? Life-changing, job-changing, everything-changing. Yes, well, the program I was a part of -- called the IBM Corporate Service Corps -- recently was profiled by Fortune Magazine in their issue on the best companies for leaders. The CSC is both a leadership development program and a way to assist small businesses in "pre-emerging" markets. And Fortune loves IBM for that (and other things).
The other news -- which took me quite by surprise -- is that my experience is actually the opening lede to the story (which in print is on the cover). Wow.
Have a read: How to build great leaders, Fortune Magazine, Nov. 20, 2009.
Posted at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
April 26, 2009
Meedan
So there's this project I've been working on for years which I've been (mostly) mum about.
No more. Now's the time for talking -- across borders, between languages, outside of our disconnected ecosystems of news-gathering.
Welcome to Meedan.
Meedan is a space for conversation and networking -- the word 'meedan' (ميدان) means 'town square' or 'gathering place' in Arabic -- where everything posted is mirrored between English and Arabic using a mix of human and machine translation.
The project is based on the simple (even self-evident) premise: it's easy to distrust and misconstrue someone you can't have a one-on-one conversation with. While the web is a place of massive social interaction, this interaction is almost universally bounded within language groups -- a startling barrier to true understanding.
Meedan focuses on reducing this barrier by enabling English and Arabic speakers to
- share news and opinion from the English-language and Arabic-language web
- join cross-language conversations about technology, arts, business and politics
- widen their social network with people who speak a different language and who partake of very different cultures
- write, vet and edit translations in collaboration with users around the world
The project is led by the Meedan organization, a non-profit in San Francisco, with technical development and translation technologies from IBM. Here's a video introducing Meedan.
So, how does it work?
Comments are instantly translated into Arabic or English using IBM's machine translation. But because machine translation is not perfect (especially with a language as complex as Arabic) community translators are allowed to edit the translation.
This ability to improve the translations works like editing a Wikipedia article and, in my opinion, is the really novel use of social media on Meedan. (The plan is to allow translations to be rated such that, over time, the best translators emerge as part of a social network of trusted bilingual users.) As a final step, professional translators vet the community-submitted edits. Here's a video demonstrating comment translation.
These hybrid machine-human translations are then fed back into the system which learns from the ever-growing, vetted corpus. The more people talk, the smarter the machine translation becomes.
Can the system be gamed? Sure. Will there still be misunderstanding, enmity, and deliberate mischievousness? Likely. You can't change human nature. What Meedan does is provide tools for mitigating the less salutary effects of long-distance, networked conversation between peoples of different cultures.
That's the hope, anyway. Meedan is in an open (though relatively quiet) beta phase right now. Come on in.
Update: You can get updates via Meedan on Twitter or at their blog.
Posted at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
April 22, 2009
Everything I need to know about people management I learned from M
A while back I was editing my annual business goals, the benchmark against which I am evaluated at the end of the year. Coincidentally my wife and I and some friends were also watching the latest Bond flick, Quantum of Solace.
Turns out there is a ton of great management advice sprinkled in between the car chases, gun fights, and general tuxedo-style bad-assery. Nearly all of these are said by Judi Dench's icy Q M*.
How to tell someone that they may be laid off
"I need to know that I can trust you."
How to give someone the appearance of a last chance even though in your mind you've already laid them off
"I need to know you're on the team. I need to know you value your career."
How to answer a phone with confidence
"What is it?"
How to delegate
When asked for something have an assistant say on your behalf "Not in the mood."
How to motivate
"Impress me."
How to deal with competitors
Ask "Is he one of ours?" If he is not, say "Then he shouldn't be looking at me."
How to compliment a colleague
"There is something horribly efficient about you."
How to deal with government "regulation"
"I don't give a shit about the CIA."
How to deal with an over-eager assistant
"[I need] nothing, go away."
How to end a conversation
Calmly interject "Quiet," then walk away.
* Update: Wasn't minding my P's and Q's and got M's code name wrong in the original of this post. Sorry, Bond nerds!
Posted at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
October 8, 2008
Supercharged culture-geeking
This past Monday, IBM and the Office of Digital Humanities of the NEH convened a bunch of smart folks to talk about what humanities scholars would do with access to a supercomputer, real or distributed. I had been looking forward to this discussion for months, if not years in the abstract. It was a wonderful convergence of two of my life interests.
We had a broad representation of disciplines -- a librarian, a historian, a few English profs, an Afro-American studies professor, some freakishly accomplished computer scientists, and a bunch of "general unclassifiable" folks who perfectly straddle the worlds of technology and culture.
The topic was how to get scholars thinking in terms of problems that require high performance computing to solve. The NEH is out front on this, partnering with the Department of Energy (of all places) who run most of the world's fastest machines (modeling nuclear blasts, etc) and who have graciously and enthusiastically offered time on their monster boxes to humanist scholars. IBM is in the mix too (besides being the maker of said monster boxes, e.g. Blue Gene) with our World Community Grid project, a distributed "virtual" supercomputer.
The grid has about a million devices on it and packs some serious processing power, but to date the only projects that have run on it have been in the life sciences. We were trying to think beyond that yesterday.
My job was to pose some questions to help form problems -- mostly because, outside the sciences, researchers just don't think in terms of issues that need high performance computing. But that doesn't mean they don't exist. It's funny how our tools limit how we even conceptualize problems.
On the other hand you might argue that this is a hammer in search of a nail. OK, fine. But have you seen this hammer?
Here's some of what I asked:- Are there long-standing problems or disputes in the humanities that are unresolved because of an inability to adequately analyze (rather than interpret)?
- Where are the massive data sets in the humanities? Are they digital?
- Can we think of arts and culture more broadly than typical: across millennia, language, or discipline?
- Is large-scale simulation valuable to humanistic disciplines?
- What are some disciplinary intersections that have not been explored for lack of suitable starting points of commonality?
- Where is pattern-discovery most valuable?
- How do we formulate large problems with non-textual media?
- Perform an analysis of the entire English literary canon looking for rivers of influence and pools of plagiarism. (Literary forensics on steroids.)
- Map global linguistic "mutation" and migration to our knowledge of genetic variation and dispersal. (That's right, get all language geek on the Genographic project!)
- Analyze all French paintings ever made for commonalities of approach, color, subject, object sizes.
- Map all the paintings in a given collection (or country) to their real world inspirations (Giverny, etc.) and provided ways to slice that up over time.
- Analyze imagery from of satellite photos of the jungles of southeast Asia to try to discover ancient structures covered by overgrowth.
- Determine the exact order of Plato's dialogues by analyzing all the translations and "originals" for patterns of language use.
Discussion swirled around but landed on two major topics both having to do with the relative unavailability of ready-to-process data in the humanities (compared to that in the sciences). Some noted that their own data sets were, at maximum, a few dozen gigabytes. Not exactly something you need a supercomputer for. The question I posed -- where is the data? -- was always in service of another goal, doing something with it.
But we soon realized that we were getting ahead of ourselves. Perhaps the very problem that massive processing power could solve was getting the data into a usable form in the first place.
At present it seems to me -- I don't speak for IBM here -- that the biggest single problem we can solve with the grid in the humanities isn't discipline-specific (yet), but is in taking digital-but-unstructured data and making it useful. OCR is one way, musical notation recognition and semantic tagging of visual art are others -- basically any form of un-described data that can be given structure through analysis is promising. If the scope were large enough this would be a stunning contribution to scholars and ultimately to humanitiy.
The possibilities make me giddy. Supercomputer-grade OCR married to 400,000 volunteer humans (the owners/users of the million devices hooked to the grid) who might be enjoined to correct OCR errors, reCAPTCHA-style. Wetware meets hardware, falls in love, discuses poetry.
The other topic generating much discussion was grid-as-a-service. That is, using the grid not for a single project but for a bunch of smaller, humanities-related projects, divorcing the code that runs a project from the content that a scholar could load into it. You'd still need some sort of vetting process for the data that got loaded onto people's machines, but individual scholars would not have to worry about whether their project was supercomputer-caliber or what program they would need to run. In a word, a service.
Who knows if either of these will happen. It's time now to noodle on things. As always, if you have ideas for how you might use a humanitarian grid to solve a problem in arts or culture, drop a line. We're open to anything at this point.
A few months ago Wired proclaimed The End of Theory, basically noting that more and more science is not being done in the classical hypothesize-model-test mode. This they claim is because we now have access to such large data sets and such powerful tools for recognizing patterns that there's no need to form models beforehand.
This has not happened in arts and culture (and you can argue that Wired overstated the magnitude of the shift even in the sciences). But I have to believe that access to high performance computing will change the way insight is derived in the study of the humanities.
Posted at 8:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
September 3, 2008
Slave to the cliché
Recently I've had occasion to reflect on the awful state of presentations. You see them all the time -- in meetings, at conferences, shunted around via e-mail -- and they sap the soul.
There are many aspects of crappy presentations, but I'll focus here on only one.
From Wikipedia:
"Shave and a Haircut" featured in many early cartoons, played on things varying from car horns to window shutters banging in the wind. Decades later, the couplet became a plot device in the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the idea being that Toons cannot resist obeying cartoon conventions. Judge Doom uses this to lure Roger Rabbit out of hiding at the Terminal Bar by circling the room and tapping out the five beats on the walls.
In film there's a term called "mickey mousing" which refers mostly derogatorily to the underscoring technique of using music to exactly ape what's seen on screen. Early cinema used it all the time, as the medium was new and unexplored. Examples include playing a sea shanty when a ship floats into view or mimicking the slicing of Janet Leigh in the shower in Psycho.
As with any technique used smartly it had its place, but mickey mousing quickly devolved into caricature as a stock device in cartoons (hence the name). Music in cartoons, usually orchestral, almost always reinforces in the most literal way the action on screen. Which is fine, because cartoons are meant to be laughed at.
But most presentations are not meant to be laughed at -- at least not all the way through -- and this is a problem. The idea behind mickey mousing pervades most presentations. That is, presenters often attempt to reinforce what is being conveyed in one medium (usually bland bulleted text) with another (usually hideous clip art of illustration).
This is almost always a bad idea. And the reasons are many.
First, it distracts from the real message. Presentations should be about the presenter, not about what's on screen. If there is an image on screen it should complement, even slightly modify what the speaker is saying, not mindlessly illustrate what the bullets say. (Which goes the same for the bullets too: if what you're saying is on the screen why even present at all?)
Second, mickey mousing in presentations demeans the intelligence of your audience. Do you really need to put a clip art image of an airplane next to your point about airborne supply chain routes? Does this make your point more compelling? Might it not say something more about the point itself? Or your confidence in the point? Or maybe just your confidence as a presenter? Most audiences, if not snoozing, are smart enough to ask these questions themselves.
And sometimes bad graphics have much direr consequences.
There are plenty of resources out there to help you make a better presentation. If you want an example of an extraordinary interplay between what's being said and what's being shown, have a look at Dick Hardt's Identity 2.0 talk from OSCON 2005.
My colleague Ian Smith has put together a great overview of strategies for making yours more persuasive and entertaining. Highly recommended.
Maybe the simplest piece of advice is to ask yourself, is my presentation a deliverable or a performance? That is, is it meant to be read, studied, and digested (a solitary activity) or is it meant to sketch broad themes to many people and connect the authority of the presenter with the validity of the material?
These two things -- a document and a presentation -- should almost never be the same thing. They can cover the same material, but throwing a presentation made for reading up on the screen is like projecting the score of a symphony in the orchestra hall in lieu of music.
Posted at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
August 22, 2008
A workshop on high performance computing in the humanities
A few years back I mused, where are the humanities applications for supercomputing? Well, we're going to try to answer that.
Announcing a special one-day workshop to brainstorm uses of high performance computing in arts, culture, and the humanities. If this is your thing, please consider attending and/or passing it on.
A Workshop on Humanities Applications for the World Community Grid
On October 6, 2008, IBM will be sponsoring a free one-day workshop in Washington, DC on high performance computing for humanities and social science research.
This workshop is aimed at digital humanities scholars, computer scientists working on humanities applications, library information professionals, and others who are involved in humanities and social science research using large digital datasets. The session will be hosted by IBM computer scientists who will conduct a hands-on session describing how high performance computing systems like IBM's World Community Grid can be used for humanities research.
The workshop is intended to be much more than just a high-level introduction. There will be numerous technical demonstrations and opportunities for participants to discuss potential HPC projects. Topics will include: how to parallelize your code; useful tools and utilities; data storage and access; and a technical overview of the World Community Grid architecture.
Brett Bobley and Peter Losin from the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities have been invited to discuss some of the NEH's grant opportunities for humanities projects involving high performance computing.
If attendees are already involved in projects that involve heavy computation, they are encouraged to bring sample code, data, and outputs so that they can speak with IBM scientists about potential next steps for taking advantage of high performance computing. While the demonstrations will be using the World Community Grid, our hope is that attendees will learn valuable information that could also be applied to other HPC platforms.
The workshop will be held from 10 AM - 3 PM on October 6, 2008 at the IBM Institute for Electronic Government at 1301 K Street, NW, Washington, DC. To register, please contact Sherry Swick. Available spaces will be filled on a first-come, first served basis.
More about World Community Grid below.
More about the World Community Grid
World Community Grid, a philanthropic initiative developed by the IBM Corporation, offers researchers a unique opportunity to accelerate the pace of their work while also mobilizing people worldwide around critical social issues.
Launched by IBM in November 2004, World Community Grid uses grid technology to harness the plentiful, underutilized resource of PCs and laptops to support humanitarian research. Today, volunteers around the globe have donated the computational power of close to 1 million PCs; World Community Grid is harnessing their power when the computers are on but not in use to help advance promising research. Results on critical health issues have already been achieved, demonstrating World Community Grid's potential to make significant inroads on a great range of future projects that can benefit the world.
World Community Grid is available free-of-charge only to public and not-for-profit organizations to use in humanitarian research that might otherwise not be completed due to the high cost of the computer infrastructure required in the absence of a public grid. As part of IBM's commitment to advancing human welfare, all results must be published in the public domain and made public to the global research community. Current research partners include The Scripps Research Institute, The University of Texas Medical Branch, New York University, University of Washingon, French Muscular Dystrophy Association, the University of Cape Town and The Ontario Cancer Institute.
If you are interested in having your project considered for World Community Grid, please submit a proposal here.
Posted at 5:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
August 3, 2008
IBM@10
Today I mark one decade in the full-time employ of IBM. No, I don't believe it either.
Back in 1998, as the go-go days of the first boom were about to go-go away, I was struggling between two job offers. IBM's was low, a producer role at the relatively iconoclast Interactive Media group in Atlanta. The other, with a start-up consultancy called iXL, was much sexier, promising a higher salary and 10,000 options (oh, the promises).
To this day I don't really know why I chose IBM. Might have been the I in the acronym -- the suggestion of a career spent globetrotting and doing business in different cultures. Which is precisely what it turned out to be, though I've taken the jetsetting to some kind of perverse extreme. Being in Africa while marking this "anniversary" rather puts an exclamation point on it.
10 years is a completely arbitrary duration of time, but it does feel important somehow. More important than the extra week of vacation, that is. (Seriously, does anyone count vacation days anymore?)
I'd known since the beginning of the year that I wanted to use the anniversary as an evaluation point. And then the Corporate Service Corps opportunity came up I thought, what a perfect way to evaluate my career than to be yanked out of it for a month and plopped into a wholly unfamiliar environment.
With two weeks to go in Africa, I have no stunning insights to share as yet. I suppose if any do come it will be when I am back in the US and can reflect a bit. I do know what I miss and what I don't (a future post, of course), but as for what I want to be when I grow up ... still thinking firefighter, librarian, or World Dictator. Will let you know how it all turns out. (By the way, for those interested in what it is I actually do you can learn more here.)
So how did I celebrate this occasion? I waited until shortly after midnight last night, silently marked the anniversary, went over to the pool, and jumped in fully dressed. Seemed appropriate somehow.
Posted at 2:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
March 22, 2008
But enough about you
Once upon a time when I was going to be an English professor I studied at Washington University is St. Louis. I bailed out with an MA only and set down a path that took me not as far away from there as I might have thought.
Recently Wash U.'s alumni mag did a feature on me. It's fluffy, but I'm certain generous alumni benefactors are now crawling out of the woodwork to donate to the school.
That's where I work, by the way. On the bridge of a starship.
There's great work being done at Wash U. in the digital humanities these days. If that's your thing I'd recommend keeping an eye on The Spenser Archive.
Posted at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
March 15, 2008
Soar with turkeys
Flickr's Paul Hammond made a comment in his panel at SXSW that's resonating a bit with a colleague or two.
Process is an antidote to working with stupid people.
It is an understandly resonant phrase at a conference like SXSW where the predominant vibe is entrepreneurial and innovative and all about small-scale Getting Real-inspired business models.
Truth is, I couldn't agree more. When not everyone is at the same skill or knowledge level (i.e., when they are "idiots" compared to you) a common methodology enables collaboration where sheer similarity of perspective can't.
But the statement has stuck with me and I think now that it might not be as simple as that. I do, of course, work in a gigantic, process-laden company where there are many arguments for following a common process. Quality assurance is one, presenting a unified approach and brand to customers is another. But both of those could legitimately be accomplished with a small team of non-idiots.
The real value of process comes from the inherent inability of small, smart teams to scale. When your team is based solely on shared perspective (whether of educational background, skill set, or job experience) there are only so many people you can add before that perspective will fray. I don't know what the limit is, but I imagine it can't be more than maybe 20 people. At this size some sort of common process needs to be implemented if for no other reason than to allow everyone to speak the same language.
Now, many small companies, especially in tech, recognize this and find it to be no limitation at all. They don't want to scale beyond their current size. And that's just fine. Note that I'm not referring to the scale of a project that can be undertaken or the scale of customers that can be served. Small teams can do this as effectively as large companies in many instances.
But if you do want to make your company larger -- or if you actively seek diversity of perspective -- then having some common framework for working is really the only way to do it. For instance when working on international projects, I find that process, in some cases rigid process, is the only way to work together. In the absence of cultural or language understanding it is sometimes the only common platform from which to work.
Too much process, the wrong process, sometimes any process at all can kill creativity. I see it all the time. And, in truth, I'm lucky to have worked with some of the smartest people in my field for the last seven years. I rarely encounter the need for process. But I do recognize the need and can see where it might usefully be applied with nary an idiot in sight.
Posted at 9:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
September 26, 2007
The National Museum of African American History and Culture
It doesn't have a building and it doesn't have a collection*, but today the newest museum in the Smithsonian family is open to the public on the web. The National Museum of African American History and Culture's Museum on the Web is the first cultural institution that I know of to fully embrace the bottom-up contributions of web-users in an effort to populate itself with stories, photos, and media, oral-history style.
This functionality, called the Memory Book, permits site visitors to compose and upload their own “memories” about anything having to do with the African American experience. The posts can be tagged and are plopped into a visualized web of topics and other memories, forming what is hoped over time will become a rich, dense tapestry of interconnected stories. The Memory Book also contains the bulk of the museum's material on the major figures and events in African American history. You can for instance, tag your memory “civil rights” and see it enmeshed in the same web of relations of the major figures relating to the movement.
I was four years old. The youngest of seven children. I could not read. But I could watch TV. Seeing my big sister on TV made me know she was either a movie star or she was in BIG trouble. Years later, I learned it was a little of both.
Hooray intangible culture and compelling storytelling. And double hooray for the museum's small staff for truly embracing the concept of a museum for the people, by the people.
This is the latest project by IBM in the cultural space, my first major launch for an institution in the United States. (And my first project built on Ruby on Rails.) I'm proud of the accomplishment and exceptionally so of my team.
The Washington Post has a short story on the Museum on the Web. UPDATE: a bit of local flavor in the Chicago Tribune and the official write-up at IBM.
[*] But it does have a spot on the Washington Mall, the last slot on the north side just east of the Washington Monument.
Tags: african-american, culture, history, museum, nmaahc
Posted at 7:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
February 20, 2007
Project wisdom from the old NASA
“If a major project is truly innovative, you cannot possibly know its exact cost and its exact schedule at the beginning. And if in fact you do know the exact cost and the exact schedule, chances are that the technology is obsolete.”
-- Joseph G. Gavin, Jr., discussing the design of the lunar module* that landed NASA astronauts on the moon.
Yeah, boss. That's why we're late and over budget. You don't want to be obsolete, do you?
[*] The upper half of which is called, ahem, an ascent stage. We're all about inspirations to innovation around here.
Via SvN.
Tags: NASA, projectmanagement
Posted at 1:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 7, 2007
Gathering in the town square
The MIT Technology Review has a short article on one of my main projects, called Meadan, which I've not discussed at all on this blog. Mostly this is because we're still in development, but recently we embarked on a closed alpha test phase so this seems like as good a time as any.
From the article:
The basic idea is simple: it's a website that brings English and Arabic speakers together around daily postings of news articles, broadcasts, and events that are of common interest, and it gives users a platform to communicate through dialogues, blogs, and other exchanges. All the while, it allows users to pinpoint their location so that people can share views across continents. The hard part is creating a system that allows users to express their ideas in their native tongue.
What's really interesting about Meadan -- apart from its small part in removing barriers to rationale discourse between the West and the Muslim world -- is how it uses social networking technologies both to create communities (the “traditional” use of social networking) but also to enlist users to rate, edit, and correct the English-Arabic machine translation. Social networking as language feedback loop. What's missing from so much machine translation is a sizable corpus of informal conversation (not bizspeak or medical parlance, for instance). This is what helps MT learn grammatical and dialectical nuance and this is precisely the kind of conversation we envision on the Meadan site.
Much more on this in the coming months, of course.
Tags: arabic, english, machinetranslation, socialnetworking
Posted at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
February 2, 2007
Stirring the gene pool with a cello bow
There are days where my job is not much fun. Tuesday last week was not one of those days.
I spent the morning with Yo-Yo Ma and his Silk Road Ensemble paired with Dr. Spencer Wells of the Genographic Project. Actually, so did the student body of the Prosser Career Academy, a Chicago public high school on the west side. And this was all part of the Sister Cities Schools program.
Confused? It was a bit of a you-put-your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter event, but it actually worked. Sister Cities is a program that encourages multicultural exchange between the planet's urban centers. Their new schools program extends this by putting students in contact from around the world. The Silk Road Project is a really interesting endeavor by Yo-Yo Ma to demonstrate the interplay of cultures via music, taking the ancient trans-Eurasia trade route as a metaphor for this journey. The Genographic Project in some ways has the same goals -- a greater understanding of human diversity -- but comes at it by seeking to more fully understand the patterns of human migration out of Africa by mapping genetic markers from people around the world. IBM's life science group is providing the computational firepower for the massive amount of data that Wells and his team are collecting from the field.
Yo-Yo Ma is a huge fan of the Genographic project. In fact, I think he has a man-crush on Spencer Wells. Together they spoke to an AP History class and explained the goals of each project. The students were given genography kits to plot their own lineage on the world map and Ma played a short piece for the class, explaining the multiple cultural influences that coalesce in classical music. His specific example was how an African dance was incorporated in a piece he played by J.S. Bach.
The full Silk Road Ensemble then entertained an all-school assembly in between video clips of Spencer Wells traveling to crazy remote places to obtain information and blood samples from indigenes. At times the yoking-together of genetics and music seemed a bit forced, but it clearly can be done and does make some sense conceptually. Genetic proliferation and lingustic variation, for example, are tightly coupled; one offers insight where the other falls short. Will be interesting to see if Ma and Wells can uncover other points of intersection between the projects.
The students loved it all, actually. A teacher remarked that she's never heard a full school assembly so oddly silent. I suppose everyone wonders where they come from, ultimately. One of life's meta-questions.
See also: Macro-genealogy and A long walk out of Africa
Tags: chicago, diversity, genographic, mancrush, silkroad, yoyoma
Posted at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
January 30, 2007
Return to the Hermitage
My first major project when I joined IBM in 1998 pretty much changed my life. I was asked to lead the interface design of a new website for the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. The site was to be the public face for some three thousand newly-digitized high resolution scans of artwork. By most measures the site was a resounding success. At the time, and even for a few years afterwards, the site boasted the largest number of high-quality images on any museum website.
But web sites age quickly. Especially sites whose aesthetic impact is as important as its functionality. The site badly needs a facelift. So, in two weeks I'm headed back to St. Petersburg for the first time since 2000. It won't be the massive overhaul that I undertook before, but I'm certain we'll come up with something.
It's strange thinking about returning to a place or project that was so formative to one's career. You can obviously never go back. It is seven years on and I have an uneasy sense that I'll be disrupting memories that have crystallized (probably falsely) into my own version of a Golden Age or a myth about the true beginning of my career. This all sounds flighty, I know, but there's a part of me that wants to keep St. Petersburg associated with wide-eyed naivete and awe. Like not wanting to return to a special place from youth for fear of wrecking the memory of it by seeing it through adult eyes.
I dug up a long e-mail I wrote on one of my first trips to Russia. Here's a taste (so to say) of the experience.
Call it snobby Americanism if you will, but I demand a positive ID on all soupy meat by-products prior to letting them circular-saw through my digestive system. I'll drink most anything alcoholic, but, come on, don't tell me that you opened the bottle of wine before you got to the table to save me the trouble -- I can taste that it has been oxidizing in a warm room for about three months now. (Hell, I've made hooch that tastes like that.) Even the attempts at more traditional American junk food, which is fairly difficult to screw up, are mostly failures. For example, a waitress asked me if I wanted french fries with a meal the other night so I said sure. I was brought a platter of fries -- as an appetizer, mind you -- that were so disgustingly salty that my tongue began to wince before each fry reached my tastebuds. It was like magnetic repulsion or something. The fries looked like they had been dragged behind a car across the flats of Nevada. Then, in case I had not had my fill of this delicacy, my main meal arrived with a side order of fries. Thank god I had the refreshing bottle of flaccid wine to wash it all down.
Not exactly culturally sensitive*, to be sure, but also not a memory I want at all sullied by finer dining experiences this time around. I'll gladly take the hyper-salted fries and a bottle of skunked wine.
[*] A few years after we launched the site, a paper appeared that claimed IBM's work on the Hermitage site was a form of “cybercolonialism.” Say what you will about that, but the primary argument rested on IBM purportedly forcing the Hermitage to use American English rather than their standard British English. Whenever I read that I chuckle. You will too if can read and know the difference between 'color' and 'colour'.
Posted at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
December 17, 2006
Twelve islands
It isn't exactly news that IBM is interested in virtual worlds, but Friday represented a bit of a milestone when we unveiled our official land in Second Life -- twelve interlinked islands, open and built-out for business use, research, internal collaboration, and anything else we can think of. As always, Eightbar has the inside scoop.
It's exciting times, but not because we're in Second Life. We've been working in SL for months, albeit without the sanctioned presence that this island megaplex gives us. This is important because it represents the results of collaboration between a somewhat bewildering variety of interests inside IBM and it points to much more to come. This event, the founding and development of the twelve islands and not Sam Palmisano's announcement in Beijing (much as I loved it), is the real beginning of IBM establishing itself in this space (literally).
But what really interests me -- end press release, start me release -- is that this will be a springboard to the rest of the metaverse. Second Life itself is but an island, really, a popular walled garden that was one of the first to the game. Zoom out and move forward a few years and SL will be just a powers-of-ten-sized chunk of a much larger universe of virtual worlds. The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time will be one, as will thousands of others. In fact, to really make an impact there shouldn't be distinctions between the various worlds. One should be able to hop about as from webpage to webpage, seamlessly. That's a bit of a dream these days with the leaders in the industry less interested in standards and interop than community-building. But we've seen that before with the browser hell of the early web days and we'll no doubt see it again.
If you're in Second Life and would like to visit, just search for IBM on the map and pick an island. There's a lot to see. I'm Immerito Foley in-world. Ping me if you need a guide.
Tags: ibm, secondlife
Posted at 5:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
October 23, 2006
40<40
So here's the deal on that post about the L train photo shoot. In what can only be described as a momentary lapse of reason, the good people at Crain's Chicago Business have selected me for their annual 40 Under 40 issue. Sorry if reading that just made coffee shoot out your nose. It's true. They think I'm important.
The theme of the issue was "sanctuary." The reporters wanted to know where we went to get away from it all. Well, they picked a bad few months to ask me. With the birth of my daughter (and two rambunctious boys) this summer was completely up-ended. Hmmm, sanctuary, sanctuary? Does locking myself in the bathroom count? Home is crazy; work is crazy; so that left only the commute in between. And thus was born the idea that riding the train is my escape.* This is true to some degree. I can relax, read, or just people-watch. I should probably thank my profile's author, Mark Scheffler, for not making me out as some sort of trainspotting lunatic.
The issue is full of lots of interesting stats. Would you believe none of the 40 Under 40 (which actually total 43, huh?) has a tattoo and that the honorees are overwhelmingly Cubs fans? The best part is that I get to see fellow honoree Jason Fried (of 37Signals) tomorrow night and (re)introduce myself as a "merchant of complexity." What a perfect intro line.
So the full profile is online as well as a little slideshow of honorees. The print version is out today.
[*] Ironically the editor chose the easiest photo (me just sitting on the train) for the issue. I can only guess that the several dozen gigabytes of shots of me on the train platform seemed too much like an escape of a different sort. Don't jump, man!
Posted at 5:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
April 21, 2006
Corporate lingo watch
Ever since I first heard someone ask to "take this conversation offline" I've had a biochemical aversion to corporate parlance, especially when technical terms are used unironically to describe non-technical things. Today's morsel went something like this:
"Thanks, Bob, I really like those ideas. One that I'd particularly like to double-click on was ..."
Shouldn't it be "click"? I mean, isn't the implication here that this is an idea that should be followed, like one follows a link? Or is he double-clicking it to run it like an application? Start it up?
You know, if you're going to lace discussions with technical metaphors that are already a minefield of business-specific terms you could at least strive not to sound like you've just discovered the mouse and GUI. Oooh, the pretty icons make my copy of WordPerfect come alive!
Two bitter posts in a row. Feels good.
Posted at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
March 23, 2006
Dayjob
I'm just back from the annual gathering of my particular tribe inside of IBM and I figured I'd take the time to tell you, loyal readers, actually what I do for a living. I’ve occasionally mentioned projects here but never actually talked about what I do. This is not because of some corporate policy. In fact, IBM’s external blogging guidelines are some of the most liberal in the industry. Many of our executives blog externally and quite candidly. Internally, blogs thrive for personal use, project teams, and professional topics.
I work for IBM’s Corporate Community Relations, a name which really doesn’t do a good job of describing our mission in the company. In a nutshell, we’re the group responsible for demonstrating innovation that matters to the world (as opposed to innovation that matters only to our company or to our customers, for example). Our programs are what might have traditionally been considered philanthropy or corporate social responsibility, but really that suggests a disconnect from the business itself. IBM Corporate Community Relations is not a function of corporate marketing but rather a group within our Innovation and Technology management line. Why is this important? Because we don’t view corporate citizenship as merely an extension of our brand. Of course, it is that in part -- what you do is as much your brand as any logo or slogan -- but addressing social, educational, and humanitarian problems is a lot more important than marketing. As a company of 330,000 employees in over 170 countries our “community relations” efforts have to amount to more than sponsoring the local Little League team or cutting checks to charities. Here’s a smattering of what we do.
On Demand Community – IBM’s tool for matching employees to community volunteer efforts and for preparing them with materials and training. Hours volunteered earn credit towards making a cash grant to the community organization. Amazingly successful: 60,000 employees are signed on as volunteers with over half coming from outside the US. Over 3,000,000 volunteer hours logged since the end of 2003.
Transition to Teaching - First-of-its-kind program to address the shortage of high quality math and science teachers in America. As part of the pilot IBM will pay the tuition of employees interested in leaving IBM for a career in education.
World Community Grid - Our program for solving computation-intensive projects in the life sciences. The current project FightAids@Home allows people all over the world to contribute idle processing power on their own machines to create a distributed virtual supercomputer powering the search for a cure for AIDS.
TryScience - Long-running science meta-museum with activities and virtual field trips for children and educators. Also a successful kiosk program distibuted to museums worldwide.
Web Adaptation - Project to donate accessibility technology for web users with vision and/or motor skills impairment.
KidSmart Early Learning Program - Early childhood education initiative which includes the KidSmart learning guide site and donations of Young Explorer computer systems to schools around the world.
¡TradúceloAhora! - Education-focused automatic online machine translation for English and Spanish, soon to providing instant e-mail translation.
IBM Crisis Response - Among the myriad ways IBM assisted during the Asian tsunami and US hurricane disasters of the past year, we shipped thousands of biometrically-enabled PC's for tracking of displaced persons that tied into a system for first-responders and aid organizations to use during recovery. For Katrina, among other things, we developed the employment opportunity portal called Jobs4Recovery. Unlike many companies, IBM refused to capitalize on the public relations aspects of recovery assistance, which is why you won't find much information about our crisis programs.
The Genographic Project - Supercool collaboration with National Geographic to map the dispersal patterns of humans out of Africa (and by extension the nature of human diversity) by analyzing the inherited mutations in indigenous peoples worldwide. Public participation is encouraged; you can swab your cheek for placement on the world migration maps. Think of it as macrogenealogy.
Eternal Egypt - Must I tell you more about this? (A map is now available for all Eternal Egypt kiosk donations around the world.)
Well I suppose I didn't answer the question about what I do, in particular. For the valiant few who have made it this far in a too-long post, I'll note that I manage all the programs in CCR that relate to cultural heritage. This includes, obviously, Eternal Egypt above plus two truly exciting new projects which I can't yet talk about but which very careful readers of this site might have an inkling about. I work with project managers, developers, and designers and of course with our partners to deliver these types of projects. It is a great gig, I have to admit, getting to work in high technology and culture at the same time.
Recently, our CEO Sam Palmisano remarked that "the world won't look at you as a great company if all you do is make a lot of money." I suppose you could say that the goal of my team in IBM is to make it that great company.
My goodness, you'd think I was paid to do that. What ever happened to bloggers who dish the dirt on their employers?
Less feel-good posts coming, promise.
Posted at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
January 25, 2006
Where are they now?
It isn't an overstatement to say that my life would be different if not for Anucha Browne-Sanders. According to the headlines today I'm guessing Isiah Thomas might say the same thing. Anucha used to work for IBM and she brought me my very first project, what became the State Hermitage Museum website and the thousands of digitized images on it. Anucha was larger than life to me. Fresh out of grad school I was naive and eager where Anucha was bold and forthright. She had heard of my group's work and so she brought an IBM executive down from New York to see if we actually had the goods to deliver. We did and I went to Russia with Anucha and the rest is a history that I consistently mark as my professional beginning.
So now she and Isiah Thomas take their quarrel to the public. I really never liked that guy, but who knows. Guess I'll follow it in the press like everyone else.
Posted at 8:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
January 16, 2006
Conferences call
Gonna be at a couple of conferences in March. If you're attending and want to meet up, drop me a line.
March 11-14, South by Southwest, Austin. Very first panel. Yeah there'll be tons of people there.
March 22-25, Museums and the Web, Albuquerque. No paper this year (and no Best of the Web!), just glad to observe for a change.
Oh, also, the video from my presentation at UCLA is available online. Prepare to be rivetted to your seat.
Posted at 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
November 21, 2005
FightAIDS@Home
Lots of great new things happening at the World Community Grid. It seems like it has been running for a lot longer than a year, but our first birthday just passed and we're happy to announce a new project running on the grid to contribute to AIDS research. FightAIDS@Home uses computational methods to identify new candidate drugs to block HIV protease, a key molecular structure that, when blocked, stops the virus from maturing.
For the last year the World Grid ran the Human Proteome Folding Project, which has been providing scientists with data on how individual proteins within the human body affect health, enabling them to develop new cures for diseases like lyme disease, malaria and tuberculosis. Scientists now have descriptions of 120,000 protein domains that are critical to human well-being.
Also new is section for children at sister-site TryScience.org that explains the concept behind grid.
If you're unfamiliar with the Grid project, it basically allows you to use idle processor cycle time (or share it with other apps) to conrtibute to large, distributed computationally-intensive problems. A great way to participate in meaningful research.
Yes, I'm still hoping for a humanities-related grid project, but it is hard to argue for limited resources when there are so many humanitarian and life sciences challenges to solve.
Posted at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
October 6, 2005
Happy holidays
Rosh Hashanah, Ramadan, and the Chinese National Day holiday all overlapped this week. Interesting trivia, except that my three main projects -- One Voice (in Israel), Eternal Egypt, and somethin' somethin' going on in China -- are all on hiatus. Wonderful, really.
But why the hell am I still so busy? Answer: all the stuff I never get to because of "real" work. If I had another week then I would really be living the life of leisure, but of course all holidays come to an end.
Posted at 7:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
September 30, 2005
Expelling freedom
Yesterday Governor Pataki killed the International Freedom Center, a project I have been working on for over a year. This facility, part of the original master plan for Ground Zero and once championed by Pataki, was intended as a complement to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum also to be built on the original parcel of land that the towers occupied.
The idea was simple and highly-regarded: to respond to great tragedy with great hope, to show the world that freedom is the opposite of the forces that led to the destruction of the World Trade Center. The IFC had wide bipartisan support. It was led by a personal friend of the President's and advised by academics on both sides of the political spectrum as well as relatives of victims. The governor, the mayor, the LMDC, and everyone else directly involved in the rebuilding of Ground Zero was pleased with this approach.
Until a grieving a family member with a political agenda provided an argument that set the conversative blogosphere and news networks aflame. She claimed that presenting multiple perspectives on freedom -- what it means to different people, how it is struggled for, how the ideal of freedom guides and misguides our nation and the world -- that this multitude of voices would end up "blaming" America for 9/11. Her rhetorical trick (which the right lapped up and spewed out again and again) was to conflate a multiplicity of perspectives on freedom with a multiplicity of perspectives on what happened on that horrible day. These are fundamentally different things. Yet, the distinction was lost on the grass-roots bloggers who galvanized victim's relatives and first responder organizations in NYC to their cause, pouring salt in the open wounds of these family members by telling them that the IFC would dishonor their deceased loved ones.
Soon the IFC was labelled as anti-American. And the press loved that. The screech of the media feedback loop made this falsehood louder and louder. The Bush Administration early on left it to NYC to decide on the IFC fate. Pataki waffled and made the IFC (and Drawing Center -- a one-time tenant of the same space) promise never to do anything that would "denigrate America". The IFC agreed to this. Yet, Pataki still killed the Center, apparently having made up his mind anyway.
If this has taught us anything it is that emotions are still extremely raw -- too raw for reasoned, non-politicized discussion -- when it comes to the terrorist acts of 9/11. (Even the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania finds itself embroiled in a controversy of dubious merit.) Though the wounds will never heal for many people, the passing of time will permit a critical distance from which to judge the various proposals for how to treat the space. But there is no time. Leaving Ground Zero unbuilt temporarily seems like a weak position to politicians. So Pataki has put an end to the IFC and suggested that the memorial museum, currently underground, will occupy the building once designed for it. Meanwhile, across the street, an additional 300,000 square feet of retail space has been approved.
The International Freedom Center would have been a noble response to the vile acts of people imprisoned by perverse conviction. Now, if the "Take Back The Memorial" groups have their way visitors to Ground Zero will be treated to the twin horrors of an oversized memorial devoted to graphically retelling the story of Sept. 11 and a monstrous retail mall begging for their tourist dollars.
Are crushed fire trucks festooned with American flags really an appropriate way to memorialize what happened that day? Wasn't more assaulted that day than people and property?
Posted at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
September 21, 2005
Jobs4Recovery
It is good to drop everything you are working on once in a while, you know? After Katrina hit I was asked to develop a quick employment portal for job-seekers in the states most affected by the disaster. The result, a partnership between IBM and the US Chamber of Commerce, is a search front-end that links into data from Indeed.com and JobCentral.com, plots results via Google Maps, and delivers state-specific secondary resources. This is what happens when you have a smart, talented team to work with.
Need a job? http://www.jobs4recovery.com
Or post one.
Let's get to work people! There's much to do.
Posted at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
July 8, 2005
Toot toot
Eternal Egypt is Macromedia's Showcase Site of the Day. Thanks, Macrodobe! (Remember when Cool Site of the Day was a must-visit web destination in the Netscape era?)
Might as well mention that the site also won a Webby Worthy award recently and, from a while back, a Best of the Web at Museums and the Web 2005.
Toot.
Posted at 8:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
June 12, 2005
Premiere tonight
Posted at 6:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
June 6, 2005
Searching, searching
Remember those trips to Egypt from late last year and early this year where I was traipsing around with a film crew? Well, the documentary is finally going to be broadcast and I'm very pleased with it. Kunhardt Productions and especially the writer-director Graham Judd did a fantastic job. I get to play armchair geek Egypt tech guy in the last part of the show.
The subject of the show is the history of Egyptology, a survey of major trends in the discovery and documentation of Egypt's historic past. The work of my team at IBM and our partner CultNat on the Eternal Egypt project is featured in the final "act" of the show -- the high-tech continuation of a tradition of documentation and preservation that stretches back in the modern era to Napoleon. My team also developed the prominently-featured 3-D environments used to illustrate certain segments of the show. The fidelity and dramatic quality of these environments surpass anything on the website.
We don't chisel into the pyramids with a robot. We don't claim to have found the mummy of Nefertiti. We don't even mention the death of Tutankhamun. But this is why you are going to tune in, right? Something fresh!
More information at The History Channel.
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May 19, 2005
International Freedom Center building design announced
The design for the International Freedom Center -- the only above-ground building on the original parcel of land from the World Trade Center -- was released to the public today. Given the flashy, contentious architecture of the Freedom Tower and a desire not to loom too prominently over the memorial pools, the IFC designs are fairly understated. The building is raised off the ground to permit lots of ground-level interacion and wandering. But what I love most is that the raised structure is the opposite of a building that falls down. It levitates, is ascending -- an implicit counterpoint to the collapse of the towers.
Snøheta, the Norwegian design firm responsible for the Biblioteca Alexandrina (a true masterpiece), created the plans.
Full press release here.
Posted at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 6, 2005
Projects like menstrual cycles
A friend recently made the observation that no matter how many projects we have running concurrently in our development center they all seem to slide into lock-step and arrive at phases and milestones simultaneously. The analogy she used was that this seemed similar to the way that menstrual cycles of women in close quarters tend to synchronize over time. I find a lot of truth in this and don't exactly know how to explain it. The extremes don't seem to apply -- if you are in the design phase of one project and launching another you're obviously too far apart -- but projects with only a few months offset do seem to synchronize, somehow. This is most noticeable when you realize that an entire entire category of skilled resource is busy simultaneously. (How come all the information architects are swamped all of the sudden?)
Why does this happen? Could be coincidence, but what if it a kind of macroscopic inability of an organization to truly multi-task? That is, what if there is some underlying tendency which drives teams working in close proximity to maximize productivity by shifting timelines slightly so that they are all in the same phase of a project at once? One benefit would be a kind of lateral development support. (Need help solving this particular design problem? Look at the team next door.) Other than that, though, it seems to me to be a trend fraught with downside: vertical resource shortages, projects completing at the same time (putting large numbers of people on the bench, potentially), and organization-wide single points of failure (if something should happen to prevent some step of the project methodology from being able to proceed.)
Maybe it has to do with pheromones. Thoughts?
Thanks, SBA!
Posted at 1:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
April 16, 2005
Innovative, so I'm told
Well, here's a great surprise. Eternal Egypt is on the other side of "and the winner is ..." for a Best of the Web award at Museums and the Web 2005 in Vancouver. The project received the accolade in the Best Innovative or Experimental Application category. Eternal Egypt joins a pretty distinguished group of sites, including the Theban Mapping Project (which still makes my jaw drop) and of course the venerable Hermitage project which garnered the overall Best of the Web award in 2000.
Congratulations to CultNat and the IBM team!
Posted at 9:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
March 30, 2005
Recontextualizing the Collection
The paper I will be presenting at the Museums and the Web conference in Vancouver next month is now online. I know you can't wait to get at it, so here's an appetizer from a section called Tools of Representation.
All museums are places of technologically-enhanced representation. At its most fundamental level, a museum is a place for the re-presentation – the presenting again – of something created, used, or identified with someplace else. Many technologies or tools assist in this enterprise. Plate glass, cases, framing, interior architecture, lighting, climate-control, and signage combine to form a sometimes surprisingly high-tech, if mostly transparent, "machine" for the presentation of a cultural artifact, artwork, or other exhibit. Certainly more complex mechanisms exist. Interactive technologies both in physical space and on-line enable museums to act as platforms for the creation of an experience. In the manner that a theater stage is a kind of machine for the production of an experience or a run-time application is a virtual machine for enabling lines of code to be actualized, the museum today operates as an enabler of visitor experience. For many museums and cultural organizations, this experience is made possible by providing context. But it has not always been this way.
I know, I know, how dare I leave you with such a cliffhanger? The whole thing is located here.
Posted at 4:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
March 14, 2005
Museums and the Web 2005
I'll be presenting at this year's Museums and the Web conference in Vancouver, April 13-16. If you're going to be there (or live in Vancouver) and want to meet up, drop me a line. Five years ago one of my projects won the Best of the Web award here. Here's hoping Eternal Egypt can regain the honor amongst such worthy competition.
Posted at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Eternally yours
The Eternal Egypt project -- long my primary focus at work -- has just released a screensaver for PC. It is actually a functional app, cycling between three separate modes. It will run a loop similar to the splash screen on the website and will download images randomly from the site (with a running history and ability to send an e-card). My favorite, though, is the mode where it continuously traverses the spatialized relationship web known as Connections. You can do so manually straight from the screensaver too. Have fun!
Posted at 9:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 7, 2005
Digital Guide at MoMA
The Museum of Modern Art in New York has just launched a new visitor service. The MoMA Digital Guide, a story-based multimedia tour guide developed in collaboration with IBM, is the next generation of the service originally developed for the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. I'm part of the team who developed the app, so I'm naturally biased, but I think it is a very fine complement to the very fine new MoMA space. For now, renting the guide is free. Go on Friday evening between 4 and 8PM and admission's free too.
Business Week recently ran a short piece on the Digital Guide. If you're interested in the technical details, feel free to e-mail me.
Posted at 8:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
January 3, 2005
OneVoice gets a lot louder
Daniel at OneVoice is in overdrive. With the attention of the world cast toward the upcoming Palestinian elections there's a great chance that moderation can snatch the spotlight from extremism. OneVoice is doing all they can to help in the snatching. Good news from the OV blog today.
The first-ever Get-Out-The-Vote Campaign in the Palestinian Authority, conducted by OneVoice-Palestine, is about to release a Public Service Announcement that will turn heads: it juxtaposes Sheikh Taysir al Tamimi, the Chief Palestinian Islamic Justice, and Father Attallah Hanna, the Patriarchite of the Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem, with Richard Gere, the film star and humanitarian. They all encourage the Palestinian people to go out and vote. Sheikh Tamimi calls it a "religious and a national commandment" to participate in the elections.
The main site -- very soon to receive a facelift, by the way -- can tell you a heck of a lot more.
2004 ended with tragedy. Let's start 2005 on the other end of the spectrum of human emotion.
Posted at 5:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
December 9, 2004
New media everywhere
Matt Kirschenbaum asks "What if new media simply became a part of what writers and artists did, not something special or new?"
Well, first thing you'd need to do is stop calling what we do new media, but that's peripheral. I'd tweak Matt's question just slightly to ask: What if new media -- or whatever name we give it -- is just something that people do? Not artists or writers, per se, but people in general. New media is, after all, just expression, creation, manipulation using a computer. Some of it is mundane (e-mail), some of it is beautiful though perhaps not art (elegent code)*, and some of it would qualify as art because of the way it partipcates in an emotional and intellectual dialogue with the viewer/user. Digital communication today is a completely normal mode of human expression for most people. Very little is 'new' about it, even if it is very young medium. So I'm with Matt. Let's ride that bandwagon of normalcy. If we ply our trade well it will be highly considered, irrespective of medium designations.
* This is a topic for another day. I'm not so sure code isn't art.
Posted at 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
December 7, 2004
Once a hardware company, always ...
Well, it's official. IBM is selling its personal computing division to Chinese computer-maker Lenovo. The ubiquity and sometimes-elegiac tone of the coverage of the transaction points to a fact that I live with every day: people still think IBM is a hardware company. I have come to see the futility of trying to overpower that meme. No matter that over 60% of IBM's revenue comes from services and consulting. When IBM does something again as revolutionary as invent a personal computer then maybe the public perception will shift. Until then -- even after IBM is long out of the personal computing market -- people will think it outrageous that I work on a Mac at the office and find it odd that many IBM client solutions have no IBM hardware at all in them.
'Course, I use a ThinkPad too and I think it is a superb machine, the best PC laptop made. And I thought that well before I took a job with the big 'BM. That's the only part of the sale that gives me pause. I certainly hope Lenovo can keep up the quality. By the way, did you know the ThinkPad design was inspired by a traditional Japanese lunchbox?
And, no, I don't believe the Apple rumors. It just doesn't make sense to me. But hey, strange bedfellows abound.
Posted at 8:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
December 4, 2004
OneVoice
Daniel Lubetzky is going to win the Nobel Peace Prize one day. You read it here first. Daniel is the founder of PeaceWorks, a not-only-for-profit business based on the principle that economic interdependence eventually can overcome socio-political turmoil. Basically they get people on opposite sides of a conflict to work together to produce high-end foodstuffs. But that's only half the story.
The PeaceWorks Foundation -- a group I have been working with for a few weeks now -- is the non-profit wing of the company. Their main project is OneVoice, a unique grass-roots effort to promote the views of the vast swath of moderate Israelis and Palestinians. The process is fairly simple. Once Israelis and Palestinians are registered to vote with OneVoice (both online and by volunteers on the ground) they are asked to state their opinions on a variety of issues. The referenda are rolled out in phases and contribute to a progressively more honed and unified position statement that will eventually be forwarded as a mandate to global leaders. One interesting point is that, in an effort to promote negotiation, absolute rejection of a proposal is not allowed. You are alloted a limited number of points with which to register your relative level of discord. Use too many on any one issue and you may not have the ability to reject a point later in the vote. The mechanism is a gravitational pull to the center.
There's a real urgency now with the upcoming Palestinian elections. Daniel and his team are preparing for television coverage, new voting, and a high probability that a supporter of the OneVoice initiative will succeed Arafat. To capture some of this momentum, they've created a blog. It's nascent, but look for it to mature rapidly in the coming week or so.
I'm proud to be a part of this.
Posted at 2:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
November 19, 2004
Re-MoMA
The Museum of Modern Art in NYC re-opens to the public tomorrow after a two-and-a-half year absence from Manhattan. I've been in the new space a few times during construction and last night I was lucky enough to go to the re-opening party. More on that in a second. First, the building. Impressive. There's a new spaciousness to the galleries that really allows the works of art to exist in meaningful relation to one another rather than simply next to one another. Yoshio Taniguchi has made some great choices with interior windows and portals, teasing visitors (spot Matisse's Dance ) with snatches of art seen from afar. Perhaps my favorite part of the new architecture are the windows (specially treated to minimize direct sunlight) that look out onto the sculpture garden and the museum's "architectural neighbors" in Midtown. Upcoming tours available in the museum will actually make a point of commenting on the architecture visible from the windows, an extension of the museum's architectural holdings -- literally a museum outside the walls. I like that concept.
The party was well done. DJ's on every floor, a band on the top floor, open bar, cafés turned into hip lounges. One can't complain. No red wine though. "We're MoMA. We don't do red wine," I was told. I wasn't cool enough to construct a comeback so I can only think he meant they don't serve red wine because of the staining possibilities. But maybe there's another story. Like, we're MoMA and red wine is so The Whitney.
A few photos of the space and event are available.
Posted at 3:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
November 16, 2004
Hot off the grid(dle)
Today the World Community Grid opened to the public. Basically IBM has developed a distributed computing system (think SETI@Home) for tackling major problems in science and health, all with a humanitarian bent. Coverage in the Times and the Trib.
Rejoice, for now you can satisfy your hitherto unmet desire to crunch human proteome data with your computer's free processing cycles.
Posted at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
November 11, 2004
At Zero
I'm part of a team working with the International Freedom Center, one of the four cultural institutions that are part of the World Trade Center redevelopment. Today I visited Ground Zero for the first time. I'd gotten close before, but never felt I was ready or had enough time to be able to reflect on it. The experience was somewhat uplifting, really. There was so much human bustle and vitality orbiting it (and in it at the rebuilt PATH station). Like platelets coagulating over a deep wound.
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