The Educator's Bed and
Breakfast Network Lodging for US $34 per couple per night, and
breakfast too! Required - a house of your own (or maybe a large
apartment, I suppose) to host fellow members. Membership costs $35
per year with a one-time $10 initial registration fee.
"Educators" is a broad category which includes teachers of
all sorts, writers, journalists, researchers, librarians, probably
DJ's....many bloggers...
Dell's Cheap as in Price, Not Cheap as in Value FM Remote
Dell's Cheap as in Price, Not Cheap as in Value FM Remote05/03/2004 09:23 AM Snaps (in a variety of formations) to Dell for releasing this
excellent FM remote with integrated LCD for the Dell DJ music player,
with a built-in microphone for voice recording and even the ability to
record FM stations to the DJ's harddrive. What gets them the most
love, though, is...
Travel Information Without Travel Sales Pitches
Travel Information Without Travel Sales Pitches12/31/2004 01:03 PM I get so many announcements about sites which are designed to sell
things, or to be roundups for e-commerce information, that's it's
startling (and refreshing) to find out about a...
Enticed by Cheap, Cheap Nortel?05/25/2004 10:04 AM Don't be tempted by Nortel's share-price slide. The worst could be yet
to come.
spam -- it's not just for breakfast any more!
spam -- it's not just for breakfast any more!12/19/2004 02:57 PM Nor in english, not that this is any great surprise to anyone. (And
it looks like nearly half the spam my filters catch isn't
Latin-1/Unicode. I don't know if this is an argument for or against
dumping all the non-Unicode encodings... :) This piece actually made
it through the filters, which was mildly interesting. I'm not 100%
sure it actually is spam (my Japanese isn't very good) but after a
half hour or so with the dictionary and grammar reference it sure
looks like it. I expect I'll poke at it some more, but on the off
chance I'm...
Not just for breakfast anymore
Not just for breakfast anymore11/13/2003 02:01 AM What was your first experience with the sacred cup of java? I don't
remember my very first coffee experience, but...
Sunshine + nature + freshly picked strawberries + champagne + friends
= A pretty good breakfast moment.
Ain't summers brilliant? They're just like winters, except a lot
warmer... ;-)
the bling breakfast
the bling breakfast05/19/2004 11:50 AM a $1000 omelet better come with a side order of "sex with
supermodel"
Diller To Show IAC Is No Travel Company By Creating IAC's Travel Company
Diller To Show IAC Is No Travel Company By Creating IAC's Travel Company12/22/2004 01:16 AM Barry Diller has done a good job buying up various online "middleman"
companies in a variety of spaces from travel to social networking to
dating. However, he says too many people view InterActiveCorp as a
travel company and that's making it more difficult to acquire
non-travel companies. So, in order to prove that he's not
running a travel company... he's
going to show them what it means to really run a travel
company. That is, he's going to spin off all of IAC's travel
properties, including Expedia, Hotwire, TravelNow and Hotels.com, into
one company (which he'll still run), and keep all the other properties
as IAC. While it may be a good idea to realize the value of those
other properties, from the beginning Diller kept talking about the
synergies of having all of these properties under the same umbrella.
Apparently, those synergies only go so far when the stock price isn't
as high as he had hoped.
TV's Breakfast with Frost to end
TV's Breakfast with Frost to end08/13/2004 12:26 PM Veteran TV presenter Sir David Frost is to end his Sunday morning BBC
programme and present a new series.
OMG. I met Guido van
Rossum this morning. Guido is the father of python, my
favorite only programming language. He was in
Helsinki meeting with the Nokia folks working on python Symbian
phones. He will be talking to developers later today.
I have a long history with python. The Ultraseek search engine by
Steve Kirsch at Infoseek was written in python and many of the people
in Digital Garage which I was
co-CEO of at the time were developing the Japanese version and working
in python. Later, Cyrus et al at
Digital Garage use Zope, a python package to build a commerce site.
More recently, I learned python using Dive Into Python by Mark Pilgrim as my tutorial
and I wrote the first useful script in my life, Technobot. In the
process of writing the script, I went for help on #python on Freenode which regenerated my
interest in IRC and led to the birth of #joiito. I owe a lot
to python and therefore to Guido. So thanks!
Fan Club Breakfast 2004
Fan Club Breakfast 200405/29/2004 07:58 AM The first Fan Club Breakfast has been scheduled for Saturday, July 24
at San Diego Comic-Con. Tickets will go on sale Thursday, June 3 at
Starwarsshop.com. For more
info on this event please click here!
New on my wishlist: Breakfast with Hunter03/06/2004 02:02 AM While getting up to date on HST’s ESPN Column Archive , there it
was, an advert… Breakfast With Hunter …...
Food Cart Gets More Students to Eat Breakfast (AP)
Rabid Bat Spoils Woman's Breakfast (AP)07/30/2004 05:04 PM AP - A journalism professor received rabies shots after encountering a
rabid bat while eating breakfast outside of a downtown cafe.
Coffee Flavored Breakfast Cereal
Coffee Flavored Breakfast Cereal12/18/2003 04:51 PM Musrum writes "Hubbards, the New Zealand based makers of fine
breakfast cereals, have launched 'Cafe au Lait', which they describe
as "light coffee flavored ...
Terror alerts as breakfast cereal
Terror alerts as breakfast cereal12/22/2003 12:36 PM
Talented net.cartoonist Goopymart has shipped this new Terror Alert
Chart just in time for the latest installment in the Homeland Security
Free Floating Anxiety System.
Link
(Thanks, Goopymart!)
A
synopsis of a recent breakfast meeting with Dave Snowden, head of the
Cynefin Centre and thought leader on complex systems and narrative and
their application in business.
Last week I attended a
breakfast
presentation by Da
ve Snowden
of the Cynefin Centre in Toronto. He provided us with an entertaining
recounting of his disenchantment with traditional consulting and his
realization why most of what management and experts and consultants
try
to do in organizations has no significant, durable impact whatsoever.
As he described his learnings and discoveries about complex adaptive
systems and how pervasive they are in our business and personal lives,
I began to realize that appreciating
enterprises, organizations and systems as (mostly) complex rather than
merely complicated is more than just a basis for re-framing business
methodologies, it is a completely different way of sensing and dealing
with the world. It changes everything. Here are just a few of the extraordinary
paradigm shifts that this reframing provokes:
Complicated World
Complex World
Assumption of order ("research this to find
out if there's a market for it"
Realization of unorder ("let's explore what might happen if we did this")
Importance of aggressiveness and charisma to
"lead the change"
Importance of collaboration and humility to
participate in the evolution
Actions driven by authority-based
direction
Actions based on learnings from
conversations, consensus and freedom to act bounded by personal
responsibility
Top-down hierarchical communication and
knowledge transfer
Peer-to-peer (networked) communication and
knowledge transfer
Military win/lose competitiveness
Natural win/win cooperation and
coexistence
Emphasis on action (making decisions quickly
and 'expertly')
Emphasis on paying attention (making
decisions continuously, improvisationally)
Assumption of rational choice ("tell people
why they should buy X")
Realization of entrained behaviour ("study
people to discover if they might buy X")
Primacy of objective reality ("what's
happening here")
Primacy of perception ("what do people think
is happening here")
Changing the way things are
Understanding why things are the way they
are
Assumption of intention ("why did this
happen")
Realization of meaning ("what do we learn
from this")
Assess causality
Look for pattern and correlation
Focus
Experiment
Leadership is everything
Membership is everything
Strive for stability
Strive for resilience
Exploit weaknesses, opportunities, needs via
speed-to-market
Explore weaknesses, opportunities, needs via
continuous environmental scan
Mechanistic (machine) models of behaviour,
relationship, order, connection
Organic (natural) models of behaviour,
relationship, order, connection
How do we solve the problem
How do we deal with the situation
Set "go-to-market" mission, objectives,
strategies, actions
Understand the market and actors' identities
and influence the attractors and barriers that bring the market to you
Market as rational
Market as emotional
Here are some of the highlights (to me) of his presentation:
Innovation today is driven by networkers, not by
scientists or marketers
Networks are only as good as their
perceived trustworthiness, reciprocity and quality (personal value of
contacts)
'Edge Cultures' like Singapore, New Zealand and
Canada are
using the networked economy to become highly innovative, both because
they can and because they must
Management science is finally
getting more like real
science, through the use of complex adaptive systems theory, cognitive
science, and anthropology etc.
Taylor's mechanistic view of
organizations and markets
dominated management science for a century, and was still evident
recently in the passion for business process reengineering
Senge et al (learning organization, systems dynamics)
challenged the mechanistic aspects but not the hierarchical aspects of
Taylorism (people were still expected to align themselves to the
strategy, not the other way around); DNA and information ecology
metaphors were first used by this group
<>Then knowledge management challenge the Taylorist
model
further (saying people can't be 'reengineered'), but too much of the
initial KM focus was on the futile effort to make tacit knowledge
explicit ("expecting you to learn how to ride a bicycle by reading the
manual"), and because codifying knowledge erases most of its context
("You can teach in three days what it takes three years to write in a
book" (and the context-rich hands-on teaching is more effective)
KM
began to realize that informal networks are far more important than
the
ones on the organization chart, and to realize that the most
innovative
people are under 25 (few preconceptions on how things should be done)
and over 45 (time and perspective to become aware of
alternatives)
Narratives (stories) are the only effective
mechanism for
translating concrete (hands-on) knowledge into abstract (codifiable)
form, and are also very motivating (e.g. power of myths)
KM
has recently spawned a new discipline Narrative Inquiry
to understand through large collections of anecdotes the true nature
of
the market (they catch 'weak signals' that questionnaires and focus
groups etc. miss)
KM has also spawned a new surge in
Non-Hypothesis Based
Research, where direct observation with no preconception is used (a
form of anthropology) to acquire learnings
There is an increasing awareness that dominant
companies
lose their position because their cultural filters blind them to much
real knowledge, as happened to IBM when they passed up early adoption
of the PC and the innovations that led to Sun's and Microsoft's
successes (this is entirely consistent with Lakoff's and Lappe's
framing theories, except it is applied to organizations and management
rather than to individuals)
This use of narrative-based,
Non-Hypothesis Based Research
actually costs less than traditional analytical hypothesis-testing
methods, and produces far more innovation opportunities
Such research can be made even more powerful by the
use of
Alternative Simulations, a technique that involves asking people to
imagine what would have resulted if something happened in history that
didn't really happen, and which allows preconceptions and blind spots
to be overcome, so participants can begin to 'think ahead' from the
patterns found in the true anecdotes that come out of Non-Hypothesis
Based Research
Such thinking is needed to deal with what Dave
calls the
impending "demographic time bomb" (far too few companies are thinking
ahead to the needs of a much older market population)
There is
a big difference between creativity and innovation
-- the latter requires starvation because it entails risk and
unorthodox thinking that are rarely tolerated until there is no
alternative (this is consistent with Christensen's observations about
disruptive innovations, which I wrote
about on Wednesday)
The adoption of complex adaptive systems
theory seems to be
currently strongest in the pharma, telecom, defence and banking
industries
The current focus of this theory is on what Dave
calls
ABIDE: Attractors, Boundaries, Identities, Dissent, and Environment;
its objective is to get executives thinking about how to have an
impact
on complex systems by changing attractors (the people, groups,
qualities and benefits that attract stakeholders) and removing or
changing barriers (the conditions that impede or inhibit stakeholders)
in stakeholders' various personal identities, rather than focusing on
traditional 'complicated' systems approaches like missions, strategies
and objective-setting
Dave uses this story to illustrate why ABIDE works better than
traditional approaches in complex situations::
Imagine organising a birthday
party for a group of young children. Would you agree a set of
learning
objectives with their parents in advance of the party? Would you
create
a project plan for the party with clear milestones and empirical
measures of achievement? Would you start the party with a motivational
video or use PowerPoint slides? No, instead like most parents you
would
create barriers to prevent certain types of behaviours ("the bedrooms
are off-limits"), you would use attractors (party games, toys, videos)
to encourage the formation of beneficial, largely self-forming
identities; you would disrupt negative patterns early to prevent the
party becoming chaotic or necessitating the draconian imposition of
authority. At the end of the party you would know whether it had been
a
success, but you could not define (in other than the most general
terms) what that success would look like in advance.
If you think the example is unfair because it refers to children, just
substitute 'cocktail party' for 'children's party'. The point is that
we see a complex situation as a merely complicated one, we form an
exaggerated sense of our understanding of the system and what could
happen, our knowledge of all the variables and their causal
relationships, and our control over the situation, and so our
behaviour
doesn't 'make sense', sometimes with terrible consequences. In every
situation there are attractors and barriers over which we have some
control and many others over which we have none. So rather than being
presumptuous, making inaccurate assumptions and setting naive
objectives, we should focus on the attractors and barriers we have
some
control of, pay attention to
what's happening, what's possible and what's needed, and improvise
sensibly to optimize the situation. As in the party example above, we
often have a lot more control over the initial conditions than we have over eventual outcomes, and we should
use that to advantage.
I hope to be able to write about some specific business applications
of
this approach soon, and I suspect it will play an important role in
the
design and operation of AHA! The Discovery and Learning Centre.
Fan Club Breakfast Tickets On Sale
Fan Club Breakfast Tickets On Sale06/04/2004 03:55 PM StarWarsShop.com has tickets on sale for the first Fan Club
Breakfast of 2004. The event will take place Saturday, July 24, 2004
7:00 – 9:00 AM, at the Marriott Hotel & Marina (Ballroom F) during
San Diego, California, during Comic-Con International! Tickets are
priced at $57.32 per person of which one has to be a Fan Club member.
For more details follow this link!
Audio from the AO breakfast on the New, New Media Market
Audio from the AO breakfast on the New, New Media Market06/05/2005 11:41 PM William Luciw has posted audio highlights from Thursday's Always On
Breakfast in Mountain View, CA. Thanks, William! Moderators: Scott
Rafer, CEO, Feedster Bernard Moon, Reality Media Columnist, AlwaysOn
Panel: Michael Moe, CEO & Chairman, ThinkEquity Partners LLC David
Sifry,...
Licensed character breakfast cereal gallery11/12/2003 01:27 PM
Ralston -- now a division of General Mills -- is the cereal company
best known for Cookie Crisp and Chex, but the company also had a
sideline in short-lived, craptacular cereals based on licensed
characters from GI Joe to Rainbow Brite to Slimer. Some of the most
forgettable are gathered into this annotated gallery.
Link
(via Fark)
If there is a worse
investment for me, gadget-wise, than kitchen appliances, I don't know
that it is. I'll buy KitchenAid attachments just because they look
neat, convincing myself that 'amateur sausage making' is going to
sizzle me into a future of home-ground treats, then leave the packages
unopened on the shelf. So you might understand how I could be
intrigued by this Three-in-One Breakfast Toaster Coffee Machine Egg
Boiler, that not only brews your bean juice by can toast a muffin or
bread and steam up to four eggs at once. In my mind, I am sitting here
each morning, writing up the latest gadgets for you, while
simultaneously cooking myself a healthy, albeit bacon-free and
therefore slightly sad breakfast. In reality, I would be purchasing
and ignoring three different kitchen appliances at once.
Breakfast Cart Lets Students Avoid Stigma (AP)12/26/2004 11:10 PM AP - It's not just OK for students to eat on the run when they arrive
at a middle school here each morning. It's encouraged. The program
makes it easier for kids squeezed for time to squeeze in breakfast.
And it removes the stigma that if you eat breakfast in the school
cafeteria, you must be poor.
New Burger King breakfast offering outdoes Whopper - Mar. 28, 2005
This morning, we had a breakfast between the Global Leaders for
Tomorrow, Social Entrepreneurs and Religious Leaders. I got a great
table with a broad range of people from developing nations, religious
leaders, economists, and entrepreneurs.
We started out the discussion talking about the nature of money. We
talked about how greed and the idea that more money means more
happiness is compulsive behavior and the notion that more money makes
you more happy may hold true in developing nations, but is not
necessarily true in developed nations. We talked about how this notion
of more money means more happiness may be contributing to some of the
problems in society. One representative of a global financial
organization talked about how similar to the "poverty line", maybe
there should be a "greed line". An economist pointed out that there
was a book written about economy as a religion where the author
asserted that pollution should be moved to developing nations because
poor people were worth less in a purely economic model. Obviously,
this is not right, and we asked the religious leaders to address some
of the issues such as caring, giving and happiness.
Religions are memories of history, rich with ritual and values.
They need to create a double language, one for internal dialog and
another to share ideas with others. One point I made was that many
religions were designed for environments where people were still
struggling to survive and the focus was on rituals and believes for
such an environment. Many religions focused keeping people alive
rather than providing them with a primary religious experience. For
environments where the struggle to survive is not as big of an issue,
it might be that religions need to help support people more with
things such as their obsessions and ethics.
It was noted that people who live in developing nations still
needed money and that it was important. However, it was pointed out
that many of the economic values have a detrimental effect on
developing nations such as promoting crime. It was also noted that
many churches in developing nations focus on promotion economic
values. (Join the church, get rich.) The notion of sharing and
sacrifice which are very important values that religions promote are
often subverted to raise money for the churches.
David Green of Project Impact in India talked about how he performs
cataract surgery in India. He provides 1/3 of the procedures for free,
1/3 for a low cost and 1/3 for a high price. The rich pay the high
price for first class service, but the basic operation is the same. He
is able to subsidize the operation for the poor and still make money.
He is so successful that instead of paying $300 for the lenses, he was
able to create a manufacturing operation and lower the cost to $4 a
lens and has become the second largest manufacturer in the world. He
provided this as an example of a good economic model can provide a
great deal of good.
Lyra Research’s Jim Forrest to Discuss Ink & Toner Market Trends at Int'l ITC Conference 2005: Forrest to Speak at Breakfast of Champions and Industry Experts Panel
Cheap Trades Here!03/06/2004 01:49 AM Despite the price wars, money isn't everything when choosing a broker.
EMC and Dell get cheap together
EMC and Dell get cheap together05/26/2004 12:14 PM SANity check Grok Description matches for Travel,edification,breakfast-cheap!. GrokA matches for Travel,edification,breakfast-cheap!.
Travel,edification,breakfast-cheap!.
The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry:
Talented net.cartoonist Goopymart has shipped this new Terror Alert
Chart just in time for the latest installment in the Homeland Security
Free Floating Anxiety System.
Link
(Thanks, Goopymart!)
Ralston -- now a division of General Mills -- is the cereal company
best known for Cookie Crisp and Chex, but the company also had a
sideline in short-lived, craptacular cereals based on licensed
characters from GI Joe to Rainbow Brite to Slimer. Some of the most
forgettable are gathered into this annotated gallery.
Link
(via Fark)