Category Archives: Science & Technology

Business Communication in the 21st Century

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Spoke with Business Communication class (20 students?) last night. I was channeling Jack Black (School of Rock) with a splash of Robin Williams (the English/Vietnamese class in Good Morning Vietnam). Which is to say I knew I’d never be invited back. I almost always learn more from these little talks than the people I’m speaking to. And I’m usually surprised.

  • only a couple of smartphones in the class, although everyone had a mobile
  • very little engagement with social media. Maybe half the class had Facebook account; a few had heard of Twitter but weren’t sure what it was; only experience with YouTube was watching a video forwarded by email; no bloggers
  • Only one hand went up when I asked who had read a book in the past year. This set me off on a short rant about reading and vocabulary and the obvious –to me– relationship to communication (business or otherwise)

I’m pretty sure this was their first encounter with the idea that social media might be an important part of business communication. When the subject of the iPad came up, the first question was “Can I run Word on the iPad?” followed by “How do we print?”

I was reminded how ingrained MS Word has become in our business culture. Most folks don’t know there are other word processors.

I responded to the print question with, “What do you want to print?”
“Uh, a report for this class?”
“Why not save it as a PDF and email it to the instructor?”

It was clear from the look on the instructor’s face this might not be an option.I suspect college business communication courses still involve a lot of paper. Maybe even mail merge (shudder).

My final transgression was telling them to watch Office Space, any season of The Office, and to read Scott Adam’s The Dilbert Principal. And forget everything else.

End of the desk-top era

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I’ve had a computer on my desk at home since 1984. A lot of them. Zenith, Gateway, IBM, Dell and, most recently, a Mac Mini. No longer. I’m selling the Mini.

Oh, there are still lots of computers around the house. The MacBook Pro long ago became my main box (slab?). And there’s the iPad and the iPhone. But it felt like the end of an era.

This weekend I’ll replace my printer and scanner with a wireless all-in-one from HP and as I started making room, I was struck by how many usb hubs and power-strips were being relegated to a box in the closet.

Yesterday I had a chat with one of our IT guys about where things are headed from a business perspective. Are we getting closer to the day when a company tells a new employee they can use their own computer (any flavor they choose) and hook into the company content via the cloud.

I took a little further and suggested the device of chose would be some sort of tablet, not a laptop. Whatever shakes out, things are going to be much different for the users and the IT folks who support them.

The “human cloud” and the future of work

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I’ve been working almost 40 years (more if you count high school and college jobs) and a lot has changed in how I work; where I work; and –obviously– the work itself. Smarter folk than I are thinking about this, too:

“In the same way that high-speed Internet access disrupted the corporate IT market, creating a “cloud” of web-enabled infrastructure, the human cloud is shorthand for how the web has disrupted the way we work. Companies rely on dispersed teams to get the best talent available regardless of location (or price) and many are using crowdsourcing and other innovative means to achieve their goals.

Meanwhile, many people who work in this new cloud have lives that look nothing like they would have even10 years ago: they may have contracts with a variety of clients, outsource themselves and their skills through a third-party service like Elance or ODesk or collaborate with coworkers in opposing time zones. The companies they work for, and with, may not even know what they look like, or where they live. This is the reality of the human cloud and it is changing us (and the companies we work for) in ways we may not fully realize yet.”

Given the “webby” nature of my work, I have a good bit of contact with the “human cloud” and find myself wondering how I would function there.

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly (TED Talk)

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I finished Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants this weekend. I rank this book up there with Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near in terms of importance. I won’t attempt to review the book, since I’m still try to absorb some of the mind-bending ideas. Like the evolution of technology:

Here are a few ideas that got some highlighter:

Technology and life must share some fundamental essence. … However you define life, its essence does not reside in material forms like DNA, tissue, or flesh, but in the intangible organization of the energy and information contained in those material forms. Both life and technology seem to be based on immaterial flows of information.” – pg 10

Technium – The greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us. – pg 11

How many neurons do you need to have a mind? – pg 13

We can think of technology as our extended body. – pg 44

Ideas fly in flocks. To hold one idea in mind means to hold a cloud of them. – pg 45

Even the tiniest disposable item with a bar code shares a thin sliver of our collective mind. – pg 48

For most humans, for most of time, real change was rarely experienced. – pg 73

“What was impossible billions of years ago becomes increasingly inevitable.” — Simon Conway pg 126

There is only one life. All life today is descended along an unbroken line of duplication from one ancient molecule that worked inside one primeval cell that worked. – pg 127

Continue reading →

Kevin Kelly loves technology

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The full quote (by MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle) is: “We think with the objects we love, and we love the objects we think with.” I came across it near the end of Kevin Kelly’s new book, What Technology Wants. (More on that in a later post.) Mr. Kelly beautifully captures my own feelings about technology:

“I am no longer embarrassed to admit that I love the internet. Or maybe it’s the  web. Whatever you want to call the place we go to while we are online, I think it is beautiful. People love places and will die to defend a place they love, as our sad history of wars proves. Our first encounters with the internet/web portrayed it as a very widely distributed electronic dynamo –a thing one plugs into– and that it is. But the internet as it has matured is closer to the technological equivalent of a place. An uncharted, almost feral territory where you can genuinely get lost. At times I’ve entered the web just to get lost. In that lovely surrender, the web swallows my certitude and delivers the unknown. Despite the purposeful design of hits human creators, the web is a wilderness. Its boundaries are unknown, unknowable, its mysteries uncountable. The bramble of intertwined ideas, links, documents, and images creates an otherness as thick as a jungle. The web smell like life. It knows so much. It has insinuated its tendrils of connection into everything, everywhere. The net is now vastly wider than I am, wider than I can imagine; in this way, while I am in it, it makes me bigger, too. I feel amputated when I am away from it.”

“In that lovely surrender, the web swallows my certitude and delivers the unknown.” Who can ask for more.

COMDEX

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I found this convention badge on a closet shelf this morning and it brought back memories. First, a little background from Wikipedia:

“COMDEX (an abbreviation of Computer Dealers’ Exhibition) was a computer expo held in Las Vegas, Nevada, each November from 1979 to 2003. It was one of the largest computer trade shows in the world, and by many accounts one of the largest trade shows in any industry sector. The first COMDEX was held in 1979 at the MGM Grand, with 167 exhibitors and 3904 attendees.”

I don’t remember what year I first attended COMDEX. Sometime in the lates 80’s or early 90’s if I had to guess. It was my first exposure to geek culture and I loved it. Not sure how I persuaded Clyde to attend (or how I ended up with his badge) but he’s sort of a geek wannabe like me.

The move from the NAB Radio Show to COMDEX marked the beginning of my shift in interest and career path.

In Missouri, judges now calculate cost of punishment

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Missouri (where I live) isn’t known as a hot bed of technology. Or, perhaps it is and I was just unaware. Always a possibility. Anyway… I came across a fascinating story by Monica Davey (New York Times). Judges in Missouri are the first in the country to use a computer algorithm to compute the cost of the sentence they hand down. From Ms. Davey’s story:

“Months ago, members of the Missouri Sentencing Advisory Commission, a group of lawyers, judges and others established by state lawmakers years ago, voted to begin providing judges with the cost information on individual cases.

The concept is simple: Fill in an offender’s conviction code, criminal history and other background, and the program spits out a range of possible sentences, statistical information about the likelihood of Missouri criminals with similar profiles to commit more crimes, and, most controversially, the various options’ price tags.

For someone convicted of endangering the welfare of a child, for instance, a judge might learn that a three-year prison sentence would run more than $37,000 while probation would cost $6,770. A second-degree robber, a judge could be told, would carry a price tag of less than $9,000 for five years of intensive probation, but more than $50,000 for a comparable prison sentence. The bill for a murderer’s 30-year prison term: $504,690.”

This makes perfect sense to me. Good to see Missouri out in front on something like this.

Scott Adams: “Editors are the chefs of the Internet.”

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Scott Adams points to Newser to illustrate what he sees as the future of the Internet:

“Newser works, I believe, because somewhere in their back kitchen is an editor who has an uncommon feel for what stories to highlight, how to summarize them in a folksy voice, and in what order and combination they should appear. There’s some genius happening there. When I read news from other places, I often come away feeling deflated. When I read Newser, I always leave in a good mood. That’s why I return so often. It’s a mood enhancer masquerading as some sort of news site.

And that’s your future of the Internet. The cost of content, such as this blog, and my comic strip, will continue to approach zero. The art will happen with the editing. Others have made the obvious point that editing will be important for the future of the Internet. All I’m adding is the notion that most editors have skill, but few are artists. The world of print publishing is driven by editors who are exceptionally skilled. But they aren’t artists. Newser is edited by an artist. He or she isn’t giving me information; he’s adjusting my mood. That’s art. That’s the future.”

I don’t think I’ve ever visited Newser but I’m headed there now. Like thousands of others.

I’m back. And I wasn’t impressed by Newser but Mr. Adam’s point is a good one, nonetheless.