Free Online Educational Opportunities, Present and Future
January 11, 2012
- Lifehacker’s Spring course catalog, with listings from major educational institutions
- An overview of MIT’s plans for highly extensive online learning opportunities (hat tip: Brian Pan)
Cyber-Attacks on Lockheed Martin
May 29, 2011
You may have read by now about recent cyber-attacks on defense contractor Lockheed Martin. The following quote, from Anup Ghosh, “a former senior scientist at the Pentagon’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency who worked on securing military networks” stuck me especially:
“I think it tells us that DHS [the US Department of Homeland Security] doesn’t know much about what’s going on.”
The increasing level of organization of cyber-attacks can surely be met, in some measure, by improved technology and increased vigilance. But do centralized organizations such as Lockheed attract too much attention to be sustainable in a future in which the barriers to entry for sabotage are lower? And can weapons of war, for instance, be reliably developed in organizations that are anything other than centralized?
Collaborative Drug Discovery, Revisited
May 23, 2011
“Failure is free” today, claims Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody. A recent e-mail I received demonstrated how this reality is being put to use in the pharmaceutical industry. Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD), about which I’ve written before, offers cash to pharmaceutical researchers willing to share “compounds they have synthesized but are no longer actively pursuing.” Incidentally, of course, the pharmaceutical industry is having trouble innovating at the same rate as it had been accustomed to.
Here’s most of the text of the e-mail:
Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) would like to share with our users an opportunity to take advantage of the compounds they have synthesized but are no longer actively pursuing.
By uploading the structures of these compounds at InnoCentive’s Novel Molecule Pavilion your compounds will be considered for purchase by their Seekers for screening in their Seekers’ assays.
Alternatively, submit your compounds to Innocentive using your CDD Vault. Sign up here and we will facilitate passing the data on to InnoCentive.
Initial awards range from $100-1,000 per compound, while coming up as a hit in a Seeker’s assay could be far more valuable. Please forward any questions to Christian Stevenson (cstevenson@innocentive.com).
Thanks, and best of luck in the lab! – Sylvia
Sylvia Ernst, Ph.D.
Sr. Director, Community Growth
Here’s an excellent interview with historian Elin Whitney-Smith about the nature of the Information Revolution (thanks to my brother, Jeremy, for this reference).
A key quote:
Digital technology makes it possible for those who have a vested interest in the long-term health of the organization to have more information. In new, flatter organizations, the rank and file will know everything about the organization, including its financial secrets. They will know everybody’s salary. They will be able to say, “Well, I think you’re making too much for the amount of value you’re producing. You can’t siphon off that money, because we need to reinvest it.” Companies that become flatter, that look more like networks and less like hierarchies, and that reform their finances, will be able to survive. Otherwise, companies that use these new ways of organizing will out-compete the old.
I just heard a talk by someone involved in the Electronic Industry Citizenship Corporation (EICC; detailed project information can be found here), which seeks to develop common standards for corporate citizenship across the electronic industry. What I found most fascinating were the elaborate procedures for the sharing of supplier audit information across the company-members of the EICC.
Essentially, one EICC member can gain access to a supplier audit commissioned by another EICC member or, alternatively, several EICC members can work share costs for the audit of a supplier that interests all of them. All of this is done without disclosing the identities of the companies awaiting the audit results. At the same time, costs are shared and common standards are actualized.
A great deal of legal care is necessary to administer this form of cooperation in an industry that is otherwise, quite naturally, rather competitive, and that needs to avoid (a) the bleeding of competitive advantage through leaked IP and (b) even the appearance of improper collaboration across companies.
Social conscientiousness in a competitive environment requires this sort of thoughtful and intricate approach; competitive pressures and a concern with reducing public relations risk, at the same time, force companies to develop predictable standards across an industry.
Crowd-sourced Radiation Data from Japan
April 6, 2011
Here’s a link to the live map (map below is static).
And here’s an interesting piece (from The Atlantic) on the subject. Key quote:
“It’s one thing to blindly trust the experts. It’s quite another to doublecheck them with a distributed network of 215 Geiger counters — forcing them to earn that trust.”
And this blogger and “Information Visualization enthusiast” wonders if
“grassroots projects like geigercrowd and pachube make progress in closing the data gap [of unreported values].” [brackets mine]
An interesting example of a traditional government function being taken over (in some measure) by the crowd.
China and Gmail
March 23, 2011
China and Google are currently arguing over who is responsible for the current slowness of Gmail in China. Naturally, I don’t have any specific information about who is to blame but can report the following technical observations, pursuant to my recent return from China:
- Unsurprisingly, expats with whom I spoke universally blame the Chinese government for the problems.
- The problems seem to be manifesting themselves all over the country.
- I couldn’t open my Google Calendar on several occasions and couldn’t open Google Docs at all during my 8-day trip
- One investor indicated that much of his fund’s information infrastructure is located on Google and that his firm was accordingly affected negatively.
It was interesting to note that at least one experienced expas seemed to think that the central government would eventually change its policy. He, a savvy China-based consultant who has lived there for two decades, believed that the Chinese government’s interest in creating a friendly business environment would overwhelm other considerations with regard to the speed of Gmail.
I’ve written in the past about how the cloud is changing the way that supply chain organizations work. (see here and here). It’s also interesting to consider how the traditional supply chain issues affect the way that the cloud itself is organized. A recent post on the Amazon Web Services blog implicitly discusses, for instance, the classic trade-off between distribution center centralization and lead times (the time it takes for a product to be delivered):
“Developers in Japan have (said) that latency [basically, travel-time] and in-country data storage are of great importance to them,” Amazon Web Services said on [its] blog. “Long story short, we’ve just opened up an AWS Region in Japan, Tokyo to be precise.” [brackets mine; quote pulled from this discussion at NetworkWorld]
Specifically, the article is about the movement of data storage capacity to sites closer to customers. That shouldn’t be surprising but it might remind casual observers (and hoity-toity theoreticians) about the relevance of old operational logistics paradigms to the new cloud.
Businesses and the Evolving Social Contract
February 23, 2011
I heard business author and technology consultant Geoffrey Moore speak today at an SAP conference in New York. He talked about “the consumerization of IT.” The following quote (paraphrased) struck me, in particular:
“There’s a new social contract in communication and businesses are violating it every day by the way they share information.”
What he’s talking about is making data analysis more interactive and customizable, as well as allowing social exchange across business data networks (in Moore’s words, “moving from ‘Systems of Record’ to ‘Systems of Engagement.’”).
What does it take to shut down the internet?
January 31, 2011
A somewhat technical discussion on what it took for Egypt to shut down its internet, as well as a discussion of how difficult such an action would be in the United States.
