Jazz is an IBM Rational project to build a scalable, extensible team collaboration platform for integrating work across the phases of the development lifecycle. We believe Jazz will help teams build software more effectively while making the software development activity more productive and enjoyable.
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A brilliant piece ...
Try to understand where they are coming from. People absolutely hate to be wrong or feel stupid. While you may not agree with them, try to empathize first. From a decade and a half of very successful professional sales experience and dealing with tens of thousands of people, I can tell you without a doubt that it is better to start out by saying "I understand your concern" or "help me understand how you feel" (as in, "I understand your concern, help you understand how you feel that bringing the troops home to be with their families means Dr. Paul doesn't support them" or "I understand your concern about whether or not Ron Paul is a Real Republican, but help me understand how someone who has been a Republican for 30 years, and a libertarian for one yeartwo decades ago isn't really a Republican" or "help me understand how you feel that bringing our troops home from all over the world and back to the United States would make us less safe or bringing our National Guard home would hurt our National defense" or "I understand your concern that we need to win the war, but help me understand how we will know when we have actually won? Didn't President Bush declare 'Mission Accomplished' a few years ago? Please help me understand" than it is to start out saying "You are an idiot and your apathy and mindless following are destroying our country."
Leading members of the corporate community have come together in a first-of-its-kind effort to help the environment, unleashing dozens of innovative, environmentally responsible patents to the public domain.Availability of these patents will encourage researchers, entrepreneurs and companies of all sizes in any industry to create, apply, and further develop their consumer or industrial products, processes, and services in a way that will help to protect and respect the environment.
The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) -- named today by IFI Claims as the leading earner of United States patents for the 15th consecutive year -- are initiating this effort in partnership with Nokia, Pitney Bowes, and Sony. The pledged portfolio, dubbed the "Eco-Patent Commons," is available on a dedicated, public Web site hosted by the WBCSD (http://www.wbcsd.org/web/epc).
Patents pledged to the Eco-Patent Commons -- originally proposed at IBM's Global Innovation Outlook conference -- feature innovations focused on environmental matters and innovations in manufacturing or business processes where the solution provides an environmental benefit. For example, a company may pledge a patent for a manufacturing process that reduces hazardous waste generation, or energy or water consumption. A pledged patent covering a procurement or logistics solution may reduce fuel consumption.
Examples of the environmental benefits expected for pledged patents include:
-- Energy conservation or improved energy or fuel efficiency
-- Pollution prevention (source reduction, waste reduction)
-- Use of environmentally preferable materials or substances
-- Water or materials use reduction
-- Increased recycling opportunity
The other component of the data ghetto that bothers me is that you can’t find that data outside the ghetto. Please, someone point me to a place where there’s dynamic content being fed to the story level pages. I have yet to see where someone’s crime data is being fed into a story about a crime, i.e. a map of murders from the data ghetto’s crime application dynamically generated on a story page about a murder. Or a list of the largest donors to a politician from a campaign finance app on a story about a politician.
And that seems to be a problem we’re creating for ourselves — we’re only thinking about getting the data online, not about what to do next. Or about what else could we do with our data. Or what could someone else do with it if we let them. We’re content with a couple of search boxes, a button and a results page. And we’re content to leave it right where we put it.
- Creativity: Can we offer no more creative way into the data than to make a user put stuff here and hit search? Search is fine in context, but it’s also limiting. What if someone doesn’t know how to spell something, or doesn’t know what they want, or all they want to do is explore the data their own way? You’ve cut that off. In my opinion, browsing is much better. If your data is normalized — i.e. all the cities are spelled the same way, etc. — then you can let people click on the things they’re interested in and get those things. And in the process, they may see other things they’re interested in. To see it in action, look at how PolitiFact is browsable (here, here, here and here). Or better yet, if you don’t believe me, look at chicagocrime.org. There are 10 different ways to browse that data. There’s one search box. Search is a part of it — it has a value in context — but it shouldn’t be your whole app.
- Repeat customers: A lot has been written about the traffic these database sites get. But I want to see what the traffic is like months after it first goes up. What’s the traffic like after the third or fourth update. The reason I ask is because some of these search apps to me seem like a pure voyeur play. What I mean by that is the user sees a salary database, goes and looks up their neighbor and … what? They’re done. They’ve answered the one question they wanted to ask. How are you bringing people back to your data?
- Shaky business model: Are we really building a business model, or even a component of a business model, around making public data searchable? Because guess what? Google is too. That’s right. The search giant is dealing directly with government agencies to help them make their own data searchable. Sound familiar? Think your data ghetto can compete with Google? Do you think people are going to remember your newspaper.com url over Google? Really?
A few years ago, Todd Palmer, an ecologist at the University of Florida, was walking past a fenced-off research site in Kenya when he noticed something curious: instead of thriving, acacia trees that were protected from leaf-eating elephants and giraffes were withering and dying.The acacias and a species of ant that colonize them live together in an arrangement called mutualism. The ants nest in the trees’ thorns and sip on their nectar; in return, they swarm out ferociously, ready to bite, when a tree is disturbed by an elephant, a giraffe or other grazing animal.
But somehow, Dr. Palmer said, the trees seem to sense when no one is munching on their leaves and, after a year or so, seemingly decide, “We are going to reduce our investment in ants” by not producing so many roomy thorns or so much tasty nectar. The ants’ responses — lassitude is one — eventually encourage wood-boring beetles to invade the trees. Soon their tunnels leave the trees sickly, dying or dead.
The finding shows that what looks like two-species mutualism may involve other species. And they offer new proof of the fragility of the web of life, a phenomenon observed, for example, when wolves vanish from mountain landscapes or sharks and other top marine predators are fished out of the marine food chain.
Without wolf predation, elk are freer to roam and eat more plants. Result: aspen begin to vanish. Similarly, the overfishing of sharks and similar large fish leave smaller, algae-eating fish free to graze unhindered on algae growing on (and feeding) coral. Result: dead coral.
We started the day having breakfast with Allen Gunn. I was struck with his breadth of experience with open source project management. Despite this, he was humble, genuine, and a lot of fun to talk with.
We then met up with the Google Health folks, and saw some really cool technology that I wish I could talk about. While I think there was a little bit of “magical thinking” about how their technology will work, in general there was a number of excellent innovative ideas in what we saw. We also got a personal tour from Leslie, met up with a number of the engineers on the campus, raided the schwag closet, and did some planning for some future surprises for our community.
In 2006, advertisers spent $16.9 billion online, up steadily each year from $6 billion in 2002, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau. In the first half of 2007, online advertising reached nearly $10 billion, a nearly 27 percent increase over the first half of 2006.
In the polarized world of Wilson, there is only Good and Evil. At the time, Communist Russia was the Devil himself and had to be stopped at all costs…even if it meant sending weapons to bin Laden’s friends – the future Taliban. And while there was no explicit mention of bin Laden, there doesn’t need to be. Whether we armed bin Laden is irrelevant. The movie makes it clear that we allied ourselves with religious zealots, including Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (who is now listed as a terrorist). Even if we didn’t directly fund or train him, did we not support his cause? Were these rebels not labeled "freedom fighters"?
A powerful illustration of this flip-flopping comes when some powerful Congressman goes to the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan to chant, "God is Great" in Arabic. Imagine doing that today! And this is exactly what Ron Paul is decrying. He understands that the world is complex and changing, filled not with monoliths but nuance. He is too humble to profess to mete out perfect justice.
Max Raskin [send him mail] goes to high school in New Jersey. He was a summer fellow at the Mises Institute in 2007.
School kid? writing like this? Terrific!
REITs pay no corporate income tax as long as they pay at least 90% of their income to shareholders as dividends. However, those REITs were owned by Wal-Mart subsidiaries based in Delaware and therefore owed no tax on the receipt of those dividends. The result: Wal-Mart turned rental payments to itself into state-deductible expenses, even though the money never left the company.
For a four-year period, the setup saved the retailer an estimated $230 million on its tax bill in dozens of states.
I have no love the southern radicals any more than the northern, but in their defense, it was constant yankee carping that brought on those in your face comments about slavery.
As to Fort Sumter? It was a customs house. The war was about taxes. We were paying for the industrial revolution up north and had enough. We said no more. Lincoln decided to reinforce his tax collectors and we said enough. Up to that point, the yankee soldiers had been buying their provisions in the market in Charleston. No body bothered them. But that was too much. So we blasted 'em. They were trespassing in our harbor, and intercepting our commerce. That's brigandage under international law.
While the south was not blameless, the north turned it from a war of words into a ruthless and murderous invasion of private property. They fought like Nazis, we fought, for the most part, like gentlemen. One, exactly one, northern town was burned. Whole states were turned into wasteland down here. So yeah, we view them as monsters. And ourselves as victims. Why wouldn't we?
It must not be forgotten that Sherman and Sheridan were acting under orders when they carried torch and sword to the civilians of the south. They were promoted because other northern generals were Christians and would not fight that way. But Lincoln found his pyromaniacs...
And why do we need provocation to secede? In a voluntary union, we should be able to secede because we wake up in the morning and just plain feel like it! If you can't do that, you are not free. We have gone from chattel slavery to social slavery.
