A World Connected - Norman Borlaug: A Billion Lives Saved

Grok Headline matches for A World Connected - Norman Borlaug: A Billion Lives Saved

Lives Being Saved by the Internet
Downunder

Lives Being Saved by the Internet
Downunder 06/28/2004 08:08 PM
Axis of Logic Jun 28 2004 11:30PM GMT

The Man Who Saved The World

The Man Who Saved The World 03/31/2005 01:38 AM
Lots of times I say it doesn't matter if you get credit if your idea succeeds, because if you believe in it, you probably care more about the idea than your own recognition. And more specific to geeks and technology, it doesn't matter if you're first, especially if you have...

How the World Can Be Saved, Redux

How the World Can Be Saved, Redux 02/15/2004 02:35 PM
Recent proposals for dealing with what experts call a dangerous new phase of nuclear proliferation are based on ideas that emerged over 60 years ago.

the story of the man who saved the world

the story of the man who saved the world 12/19/2004 03:52 PM
Petrov Affair 1983

dfw.com/mld/dfw/10439151.htm?1c
track this site | 3 links

A World Connected

A World Connected 08/19/2004 05:42 AM
A World Connected
http://www.aworldconnected.org

Site addresses issues relating to world trade and globalization. State of the debate reports give overviews on topics such as sweatshops, labor standards, outsourcing, and the impacts of globalization on culture, religion, and the environment. Also provides a book listing, links to web resources, anecdotes, and news articles. This has been added to International Trade Resources 2004-05 Internet MiniGuide.

Applications For A (Mostly) Connected
World

Applications For A (Mostly) Connected
World 11/05/2003 08:17 PM
While internet connectivity is getting more and more available no matter where you are (and no matter what device you're using) it doesn't mean you're always connected. I know that it's incredibly annoying to open up my laptop on an airplane, or anywhere where there's no access and have to deal with applications that want to phone home for no particular reason. In many cases, I've blocked these off at the personal firewall level, but not all of them. Intel today launched an initiative to try to get a new generation of applications developed that keep working whether or not an internet connection is present. Intel's reason for all of this, of course, is that the more productive computers and devices are, the more chips they sell - so, at times, they feel the need to whip some developers into shape to get them over a hurdle.

The Man Who Saved the World Finally
Recognized - FEATURE - MOSNEWS.COM

The Man Who Saved the World Finally
Recognized - FEATURE - MOSNEWS.COM 04/01/2005 03:51 AM
In 1983, Stanislav Petrov resisted pushing the missle launch button in the face of an incoming attack (which later turned out to be false) .. singlehandedly refrained from destroying the world .. The Man Who Saved the World Finally Recognized

mosnews.com/feature/2004/05/21/petrov.shtml
track this site | 4 links

The Rise Of Trust In An Always Connected
World

The Rise Of Trust In An Always Connected
World 11/13/2003 02:55 PM
For years, there has been a small group of folks who talk about the importance of online trust and setting up trust metrics, but most big companies aren't particularly thrilled about the idea of trust - which is why they tend to lock things down and piss off customers. However, trust becomes increasingly important in an "always connected" world - and many companies aren't doing much to win the trust of their customers. The article discusses how we have a constant trade-off between being always connected and violating our privacy, and the only way to keep that balance is to build up a clear, trusting relationship. There are some good points in there that explain how trust works, but reading through the list you can see why many companies aren't really big fans of trust. The problem is, without trust, their customers are going to go elsewhere.

Supernova '05: "Apps. for a Mobile,
Connected World"

Supernova '05: "Apps. for a Mobile,
Connected World" 06/24/2005 09:22 PM

Hm. So I spent a good forty-five minutes yesterday writing the next post in my series on Supernova '05, only to lose it catastrophically when Safari collapsed under the weight of 150 open tabs. So this will probably be a slightly shorter version of that post. It may also benefit from having had more digestion time. Who knows.

The first panel of the day was "Applications for a Mobile, Connected World" and featured Lili Cheng of Microsoft, Caterina Fake of Flickr, Amy Jo Kim of SocialDesigner.net, Mena Trott of Six Apart and Evan Williams of Odeo. The area that these people stake out between them could probably be summarised as individual-focused social software, weblogs/personal publishing and amateurised media distribution. All these subjects are very close to my heart and many of the people on the panel are my peers and friends. So again, I should probably throw out a quick warning about perspective and potential bias from the start.

Looking back on the panel, it basically fell into discussions about three main areas: (1) The individual's creation of media, what it means to them and how it can be supported; (2) The effects of taking that personal creation and embedding it in a wider social context - what new things become possible; (3) The role of human psychology, trust and trusted networks in the whole enterprise.

Discussion about individual creation really started with some comments from Ev - probably doubly appropriate because both his work with Noah Glass at Odeo and his previous life at Blogger confront these issues head on. He started off the session by saying, "at Odeo we're here to enable lots of the ideas that we saw with blogging and to take them to a new medium". His starting point was the individual's participation in media in general and their ability to create and share media of their own. As an example of how that could be immediately harnessed, he cited the work that Amazon undertook in enabling participation and the enormously positive effect it had on their business.

Between them, Caterina, Amy Jo, Mena and Lili focused more on the individual's desire to express their identity online and to capture memories. Caterina pointed towards Friendster as the moment when the idea of creating a digital presence for yourself suddenly stopped being strange, alien and geeky. She said, in a comment that I personally found very resonant, that "When I first started weblogging, people thought it was very strange".

Amy Jo picked up on this idea of expressing identity, saying that user-generated content - specifically in her case focused on games - was an incredibly important form of expression and that it was appearing at a whole range of new and interesting registers from overtly publishing in weblogs to the more tacit expression through playlist sharing on services like iTunes.

Mena really brought memories to the fore. She stated that she wished she had a record of everything that had happened in the first twenty-seven yearas of her life like she has since she first started weblogging. She revealed that she takes a picture of herself every day as a hook to hang her memories around - saying that she could see immediately her mood and her background and her surroundings and very quickly get a sense of what she was feeling at that precise moment, even years after the fact... Although there was a bit of scepticism in the backchannel about this concept, Lili Cheng supported it very rapidly by talking about how important she felt it was to capture as much information about what you were doing as possible (presumably connected to her work on Wallop and/or to Microsoft's stuff around MyLifeBits). Her position was really interesting - saying that it was very difficult to know which memories you were going to come to cherish in the future and that having these records gave you a structure to narrativise around.

Later, in the question and answer session, an audience member expressed their anxiety that their weblog wouldn't be there in twenty years time - that it would get lost somehow - and said that they would find that 'devastating'. Mena answered that with a really interesting characterisation of SixApart as a company that 'held memories' for their users. She said they took that responsibility very seriously.

In terms of the social dimension, the panel focused on two major areas - the increasing desire to communicate in small groups of real-life friends and the larger implications / possibilities of being embedded in space where your actions became part of something larger and more powerful. Caterina was particularly interesting. She talked about how one of Flickr's major selling points was the sharing aspect and that this is what differentiated it from the other photo-publishing services online. She pointed out that 80% of all photos on Flickr were public. And she moved on to say that many technologies developed entirely new possibilities when connected to social networks. Her prime example here was the folksonomic tagging approach that Flickr and del.icio.us have pioneered - and she pointed out that this was generating an entirely new way of organising and categorising content online. This wouldn't have been possible with the substrata of the social networking functionality.

Mena and Lili were the particular evangelists of the power of communication within small groups rather than to the world at large. One quote from Mena rang particularly true:

"One of the biggest things that I've been able to see - this whole idea of inward conversations - smaller audiences really matter. I believe that this internal-facing weblog is really important - the kind of conversaiton that you're goign to have with smaller audiences is different to conversations you have in public. We really realised this when we bought LiveJournal this year. An audience of six people really matters to a lot of people.

Lili took this even further by talking about the qualities of the conversations themselves, pointing towards a concept of 'energy' and suggesting that this quality was something that she was now able to move into the rest of Microsoft's work:

"Sometimes you want to find a critical mass in really small circles. What's most important is whether I'm having a dialogue with people which feels like it has energy?

At this point, Ev Williams came up with a point to balance this discussion, talking a bit about his time at Blogger again:

"Of course there are a lot of people out there who only write for strangers. We used to put everyone's name under their posts and people used to really protest. They didn't want people in their every day life seeing stuff they'd written online.

But probably the biggest focus of the panel, and a recurring theme of the conference as a whole was the concept of 'trust' and what it meant. This was a more heavily contested area - related to the idea of social networks and small groups but understood differently by different people. Caterina made a particularly nice high-level and inspiring comment about trust that I enjoyed:

"It's trust that enables us to go out in the world. It's the thing that makes the internet possible."

A slightly more formally expressed and nuanced position (but perhaps a less practical one to implement) came from Amy Jo:

"You don't build trust by 'throwing crap up on your website', even though a lot of the work that people are doing is foundational in building trust - personal control in who sees what. Trust is contextual - I trust my husband to be a good man and a good guy, but I don't trust him to get the right kind of bleach. it's contextual, it's not global.

Finally - moving on from the concept of trust - one other interesting comment came from Ev Williams when talking about the future of podcasting. I'm not completely sure that I agree with it. It was in response to a question from audience about the future of podcasting. His response:

"The future of podcasting is not on the pod but on the phone - and it takes these ideas not only to a new medium but to a whole new audience".

I've heard this particular sentiment from a lot of people recently, but as yet it seems to me entirely unproven. As I understand it, radios on phones have - on the whole - not been an enormous success to date - whether that's because of implementation or use cases is unclear to me at the moment. But podcasting to phones also feels like something whose time is further off, when the handset has been more substantially abstracted from the concept of voice / data connectivity. But that's all speculation, and probably a good point to end this particular batch of notes.

[You can find my full notes from the session here]

Borlaug

Borlaug 03/26/2005 07:37 PM
Here’s a terrific article, outsourced from The Atlantic, on Norman Borlaug, who, they say, has probably saved more human lives than anyone in history. He is a Nobel Peace Prize winner and gave my Dad a job in 1978. The article discusses (but not in much depth) and derides some of the Green opposition to Borlaug’s intensive-agriculture practices. While that opposition has perhaps on occasion been misguided, its existence was necessary. As I saw in my Dad’s thinking, the community of Agricultural scientists at one point had developed a massive environmental blind spot, and tended to measure success only in terms of yield per hectare. This has produced, along with pretty severe environmental damage, anomalies such as the tasteless pink tomatoes and tasteless shiny apples the supermarkets try to sell you. Having said that, it’s obvious that history will judge Norman Borlaug and his cohort of agronomists pretty favorably; you really can’t article with saving the lives of a billion or so people.

UN: World Now Pledged $2 Billion for
Tsunami Aid

UN: World Now Pledged $2 Billion for
Tsunami Aid 01/01/2005 02:26 PM
Reuters via Wired News Jan 1 2005 6:39PM GMT

World Population Reaches 6.4 Billion:
What To Do?

World Population Reaches 6.4 Billion:
What To Do? 01/23/2004 07:40 PM
A "population clock" at ibiblio.org projects that world human population will reach 6.4 billion on January 27, 2004. Over 97% of population growth is now in developing countries (Haub, 2003). This growth will worsen the impact of many negative social and ecological trends. Current demographic developments indicate the population explosion may be slowing. Two trends account for this: The birth rate is starting to slow in many developing countries (reaching a population replacement level) and the death rate is increasing in some of the poorest countries.

Microsoft Aims to Save $1 Billion
(PC World)

Microsoft Aims to Save $1 Billion
(PC World) 07/07/2004 01:13 PM
PC World - Software giant cuts employee benefits, hopes to sell you more software.

Greater Democracy: Democracy for a
connected world.

Greater Democracy: Democracy for a
connected world. 08/27/2004 09:30 PM
Ben Barnes admits helping Bush Jr. into the National Guard During Vietnam .. Watch the video here .. explains .. Video

69.59.167.160
track this site | 5 links

World Bank Corruption May Exceed
$100 Billion (Reuters)

World Bank Corruption May Exceed
$100 Billion (Reuters) 05/13/2004 12:42 PM
Reuters - World Bank corruption may exceed $100 billion and while the institution's leadership has moved to combat the problem, more must be done, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said on Thursday.

World software piracy losses climb to
$29 billion

World software piracy losses climb to
$29 billion 07/08/2004 08:53 AM

Google Archive Exceeds 6 Billion Items
(PC World)

Google Archive Exceeds 6 Billion Items
(PC World) 02/18/2004 03:40 AM
PC World - Leading search engine expands, extends its services.

"American lives are the most important
lives"

"American lives are the most important
lives" 07/31/2004 03:41 AM

World Stonex Extends Global Reach in the
$20 Billion Natural Stone Industry with
Breton, Tekmar Marble, Others

World Stonex Extends Global Reach in the
$20 Billion Natural Stone Industry with
Breton, Tekmar Marble, Others 06/17/2005 03:23 PM
World Stonex, the Online Marketplace for the sale of goods and services by a diverse community of small and large businesses in the natural stone industry, continues to extend its global reach of suppliers to that industry with the addition of companies in Italy, Turkey, Palestine and Egypt. [PRWEB Jun 12, 2005]

Other News: Don Norman

Other News: Don Norman 07/21/2004 11:08 AM
User interface guru Don Norman has some interesting comments in a Computerworld interview.

New Don Norman book

New Don Norman book 02/10/2004 02:47 AM
Christmas cheer. Don Norman has a new book - Norman, D. A. (2004). Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books. Excerpts at www.jnd.org and he also pointed to this site: http://www.ok-cancel.com about usability/interface design. Would that everybody read it!

This all came from a discussion about human factors: The human factor *is* the problem in most disasters, but it is the human managers, policy-setters and designers, not the human users, who are at fault. Go forth and sin no more! and have great holidays!

[EDventure]

Coolio!  Esther gets a real blog going (on blogware!) and Don Norman (my hero) puts out a new book.

Double blessings - a sort of post-Chinese New Year gift.

Norman Schwartzkopf

Norman Schwartzkopf 03/11/2003 10:45 AM
“Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion.”...

[etech] Don Norman keynote

[etech] Don Norman keynote 02/12/2004 02:11 PM
Don's new book is Emotional Design. He uses lots of photos, so the following minimalist representation will not have the, um, emotional impact of his talk. People have emotional reactions to, and relationships with, products. Positive examples: A tiny Sony camera and Mini Cooper. We have two information processes: Cognition (understanding the world) and emotion (judges the world). There are three levels: Visceral (biological and pre-wired), behavioral, and reflective. Bottled water is their bottles. A Perrier bottle is emotional. A cheap plastic one is behavioral. Those fancy blue bottles appeal to us viscerally. The 1961 Jaguar E-type (the one in...

Don Norman, Usability Expert

Don Norman, Usability Expert 06/17/2002 06:56 AM
"His goal is to humanize technology, to make it disappear from sight, replaced by a human-centered, activity-based family of information appliances that are easy to learn, easy to use."

Donald A. Norman on 'Emotion & Design'

Donald A. Norman on 'Emotion & Design' 11/01/2002 07:40 AM

Ergonomics: The Donald Norman Interview

Ergonomics: The Donald Norman Interview 06/04/2002 06:01 AM

Norman H. Horowitz, 90, Explorer of
Mars, Dies

Norman H. Horowitz, 90, Explorer of
Mars, Dies 06/05/2005 10:50 PM
Dr. Norman H. Horowitz, a biologist and geneticist, did pioneering work in biochemical synthesis and designed experiments that looked for life on Mars.

Collector's Collections Gallery: Garrett
Norman

Collector's Collections Gallery: Garrett
Norman 08/11/2004 08:28 AM
Today's Collector's Collections update features and update to the the collection of Garrett Norman from Texas, U.S.A..

scrub your shower curtain, says Norman
Pace

scrub your shower curtain, says Norman
Pace 02/17/2004 06:09 AM
Biohazard Lurks in Bathrooms .. Read article

nature.com/nsu/040216/040216-2.html
track this site | 4 links

Star Wars DVD TRU Release Event, Norman,
OK

Star Wars DVD TRU Release Event, Norman,
OK 09/22/2004 04:58 PM
From Rebelscum reader Brian Weeks: Just thought I'd share some pics of our Star Wars DVD release at Toys "R" Us in Norman, OK. Click on through for more.

Research and Markets: Worldwide
Telecommunications Market Set to Double
from $123 Billion in 2004 to $282
Billion by 2010

Research and Markets: Worldwide
Telecommunications Market Set to Double
from $123 Billion in 2004 to $282
Billion by 2010 03/31/2005 08:57 AM
Research and Markets (researchandmarkets.com/reports/c14700) has announced the addition of Worldwide Telecommunications and Communications Market Opportunities, Strategies, and Forecasts, 2005 To 2010 to their offering. [PRWEB Mar 31, 2005]

Review - LIFT Nielsen Norman Group
Edition

Review - LIFT Nielsen Norman Group
Edition 11/06/2002 10:36 PM
WebmasterBase Nov 6 2002 8:47PM ET

Nielsen Norman Group to Create Flash MX
Guidelines

Nielsen Norman Group to Create Flash MX
Guidelines 06/03/2002 12:04 PM

Dr. Norman Heatley, 92, Pioneer in
Penicillin Supply, Dies

Dr. Norman Heatley, 92, Pioneer in
Penicillin Supply, Dies 01/17/2004 10:58 PM
Dr. Norman G. Heatley was an Oxford University biochemist who helped revolutionize medicine by isolating early samples of penicillin.

Review - LIFT Neilsen Norman Group
Edition

Review - LIFT Neilsen Norman Group
Edition 11/04/2002 09:53 PM
WebmasterBase Nov 4 2002 8:50PM ET

Robert Hughes to write book about Norman
Foster

Robert Hughes to write book about Norman
Foster 10/28/2003 11:08 PM
Great Independent interview with maverick, Robert Hughes, the worlds most renowned art critic who has just written a book about...

Research And Markets - The Telecoms
Market Is Expected To Grow By 5% From
$8.1 Billion In 2004 To $8.5 Billion In
New Zealand In 2005

Research And Markets - The Telecoms
Market Is Expected To Grow By 5% From
$8.1 Billion In 2004 To $8.5 Billion In
New Zealand In 2005 12/19/2004 03:09 PM
Research and Markets (researchandmarkets.com/reports/c11215) has announced the addition of 2005 Telecoms, Mobile and Broadband in New Zealand. to their offering. [PRWEB Dec 17, 2004]

NHS wants extra GBP2 billion for IT
funding, taking it to GBP4.2 billion

NHS wants extra GBP2 billion for IT
funding, taking it to GBP4.2 billion 12/02/2003 05:28 AM
PublicTechnology.net Dec 2 2003 4:11AM ET

Once There Was a New Journalism: Here's
Norman Mailer Covering the 1960
Democratic Convention

Once There Was a New Journalism: Here's
Norman Mailer Covering the 1960
Democratic Convention 07/21/2004 09:20 AM
Novelist, would-be hipster, and one of the most troublesome, quarrelsome, and brilliantly excessive literary characters of his time, Norman Mailer always said he hated journalism. It was 1960. The Democrats were gathered in L.A. John Kennedy was about to be nominated. And Mailer had reporter's credentials for Esquire....
Grok Description matches for A World Connected - Norman Borlaug: A Billion Lives Saved
GrokA matches for A World Connected - Norman Borlaug: A Billion Lives Saved

A World Connected - Norman Borlaug: A Billion Lives Saved

The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry: