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From: Gail Taylor
Date: December 27, 2000
To: Matt Taylor, Jeff Johnston
Subject: Smart Office
http://www.smartoffice.com/
From: Poparad John T Contr
Date: Fri, 22 Dec 2000 16:47:07 +0000
To: 'Gail Taylor' , 'Patsy' , 'Matt Taylor' , 'Jeff Johnston'
Subject: Scenario material Possibly useful material for read
aheads or a module reference
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/globaltrends2015/index.html
Scenario One: Inclusive Globalization: A virtuous circle develops
among technology, economic growth, demographic factors, and effective
governance, which enables a majority of the world's people to
benefit from globalization. Technological development and diffusion-in
some cases triggered by severe environmental or health crises-are
utilized to grapple effectively with some problems of the developing
world. Robust global economic growth-spurred by a strong policy
consensus on economic liberalization-diffuses wealth widely and
mitigates many demographic and resource problems. Governance is
effective at both the national and international levels. In many
countries, the state's role shrinks, as its functions are privatized
or performed by public-private partnerships, while global cooperation
intensifies on many issues through a variety of international
arrangements. Conflict is minimal within and among states benefiting
from globalization. A minority of the world's people-in Sub-Saharan
Africa, the Middle East, Central and South Asia, and the Andean
region-do not benefit from these positive changes, and internal
conflicts persist in and around those countries left behind.
Scenario Two: Pernicious Globalization Global elites thrive,
but the majority of the world's population fails to benefit from
globalization. Population growth and resource scarcities place
heavy burdens on many developing countries, and migration becomes
a major source of interstate tension. Technologies not only fail
to address the problems of developing countries but also are exploited
by negative and illicit networks and incorporated into destabilizing
weapons. The global economy splits into three: growth continues
in developed countries; many developing countries experience low
or negative per capita growth, resulting in a growing gap with
the developed world; and the illicit economy grows dramatically.
Governance and political leadership are weak at both the national
and international levels. Internal conflicts increase, fueled
by frustrated expectations, inequities, and heightened communal
tensions; WMD proliferate and are used in at least one internal
conflict.
Scenario Three: Regional Competition Regional identities sharpen
in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, driven by growing political
resistance in Europe and East Asia to US global preponderance
and US-driven globalization and each region's increasing preoccupation
with its own economic and political priorities. There is an uneven
diffusion of technologies, reflecting differing regional concepts
of intellectual property and attitudes towards biotechnology.
Regional economic integration in trade and finance increases,
resulting in both fairly high levels of economic growth and rising
regional competition. Both the state and institutions of regional
governance thrive in major developed and emerging market countries,
as governments recognize the need to resolve pressing regional
problems and shift responsibilities from global to regional institutions.
Given the preoccupation of the three major regions with their
own concerns, countries outside these regions in Sub-Saharan Africa,
the Middle East, and Central and South Asia have few places to
turn for resources or political support. Military conflict among
and within the three major regions does not materialize, but internal
conflicts increase in and around other countries left behind.
Scenario Four: Post-Polar World US domestic preoccupation increases
as the US economy slows, then stagnates. Economic and political
tensions with Europe grow, the US-European alliance deteriorates
as the United States withdraws its troops, and Europe turns inward,
relying on its own regional institutions. At the same time, national
governance crises create instability in Latin America, particularly
in Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Panama, forcing the United States
to concentrate on the region. Indonesia also faces internal crisis
and risks disintegration, prompting China to provide the bulk
of an ad hoc peacekeeping force. Otherwise, Asia is generally
prosperous and stable, permitting the United States to focus elsewhere.
Korea's normalization and de facto unification proceed, China
and Japan provide the bulk of external financial support for Korean
unification, and the United States begins withdrawing its troops
from Korea and Japan. Over time, these geostrategic shifts ignite
longstanding national rivalries among the Asian powers, triggering
increased military preparations and hitherto dormant or covert
WMD programs. Regional and global institutions prove irrelevant
to the evolving conflict situation in Asia, as China issues an
ultimatum to Japan to dismantle its nuclear program and Japan-invoking
its bilateral treaty with the US-calls for US reengagement in
Asia under adverse circumstances at the brink of a major war.
Given the priorities of Asia, the Americas, and Europe, countries
outside these regions are marginalized, with virtually no sources
of political or financial support.
Generalizations Across the Scenarios: The four scenarios can
be grouped in two pairs: the first pair contrasting the "positive"
and "negative" effects of globalization; the second pair contrasting
intensely competitive but not conflictual regionalism and the
descent into regional military conflict. * In all but the first
scenario, globalization does not create widespread global cooperation.
Rather, in the second scenario, globalization's negative effects
promote extensive dislocation and conflict, while in the third
and fourth, they spur regionalism. * In all four scenarios, countries
negatively affected by population growth, resource scarcities
and bad governance, fail to benefit from globalization, are prone
to internal conflicts, and risk state failure. * In all four scenarios,
the effectiveness of national, regional, and international governance
and at least moderate but steady economic growth are crucial.
* In all four scenarios, US global influence wanes.
From: Todd Johnston
Date: December 19, 2000
To: Gail Taylor
Subject: "A Nonlinear Dynamics & Complexity Glossary"
http://www.vha.com/edgeplace/think/main_gloss.html
I came upon it while researching terms of art for our manual
project. It's one to bookmark from a casual glance.
Todd
From: Jeff Johnston
Date: December 19, 2000
To: Matt Taylor et al.
Subject: Better Together
Did you hear the story on Morning Edition this morning about
the Saguaro Seminar report on Community Building? The story itself
wasn't all that interesting, but I did go to the "bettertogether"
website (http://www.bettertogether.org/)
and found some really good stuff.
Download the pdf of the report which was released today. (Note:
print it big, the font is really small!)
The website has a "story collector:" "You can read stories about
how people are connecting with each other and creating social
capital. You can connect with other people who are interested
in the same stories you are. You can also add your own story!
"
This will be a great resource for us! Material here is relevant
for a number of events that are currently in the works.
Jeff
From: Matt Taylor
Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2000 11:38:16 -0800
To: Jeff Johnston
Subject: FW: How man apes animal medicine
-----Original Message-----
From: Stuart Silverstone [mailto:ss@graphics.org]
Sent: Saturday, December 16, 2000 11:56 PM
To: ideas@graphics.org
Subject: FWD: How man apes animal medicine
The way chimps and orang-utans use plants for medication is providing
insights that could help their cousins. Aisling Irwin reports
SHE was a constipated chimpanzee called Chausiku, in the Mahale
mountains of western Tanzania, and her behaviour seemed a little
odd. Reaching for the shoot of a noxious tree that chimps would
normally avoid, she peeled it and sucked its bitter pith. Within
a day, the constipation - and other symptoms - were gone. Prof
Michael Huffman of Kyoto University happened to be watching her
that day. It was the first time a scientist had seen a sick chimp
select an unsavoury plant known by humans to have medicinal properties,
and then recover. Prof Huffman believes that he was glimpsing
the evolutionary origins of human medicine. Understanding these
beginnings could lead to new treatments. Since then, there have
been several attempts to catch the great apes healing themselves
and one of the latest is an elaborate project in Gunung Leuser
National Park in Sumatra, Indonesia, home of the orang-utan. Scrambling
up and down the rainforest ridges, as orang-utans swing deftly
above her, is Dr Ivona Foitova, of the University of Veterinary
and Pharmaceutical Science in Brno, Czech Republic. She notes
the eating habits of our complex cousins and collects their dung
for testing. Dr Foitova, with help from students at Gadjah Mada
University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and volunteers from the charity
Earthwatch, wants to gather hard evidence, rather than tall stories.
There are anecdotes in abundance about "zoopharmacognosy", as
animal self-healing is known. In Borneo, Dr Willie Smits, a tropical
forest specialist at the Wanariset Samboja orang-utan rehabilitation
centre near Balikpapan, says he once spotted an orangutan clutching
its head. He had a headache, says Dr Smits. The creature plucked
a flower from a certain plant and munched it. Shortly afterwards,
it had perked up and gone on its way. Some time later, when Dr
Smits had a headache in the rainforest, he tried the same remedy
and says it worked. It is only a tale, and turning such things
into rigorous studies is a laborious task. The scientist stumbling
after the orang-utan must be able to spot ill health, recognise
an unusual ingredient in the creature's variegated diet and witness
the recovery afterwards. Against the odds, Prof Huffman and a
host of other researchers have gradually discovered the details
of a remarkable type of self-medication among chimpanzees in Tanzania.
It was Jane Goodall, the veteran chimpanzee specialist, who first
spotted chimps swallowing leaves in Gombe Stream National Park
in the Sixties. The leaves - from any of 34 different trees -
are swallowed singly, whole. They emerge in the dung intact and
undigested, sporting neat, concertina-like folds. Leaf-swallowing
peaks about two months after the rainy season has begun - about
the same time as the peak of infection with the parasite Oe. stephanostomum.
Prof Huffman has shown it tends to be only the sick among a group
of chimps that will swallow leaves. These all have bristly undersides
and, in the dung, live worms can be found caught among the hairs
and folds of the defecated leaves. His "Velcro theory" of leaf-swallowing
is that, as they pass through the intestine, they catch the worms
and ferry them out of the body. Recently, in collaboration with
Dr Judith Caton of the National University of Australia, he has
also shown that the sick chimps tend to gorge on leaves in the
morning on empty stomachs. They cannot digest the leaves and thus
expel them rapidly in a great physical purging of worms. The few
other known examples of self-medication are chemical rather than
physical. At Bwindi Impenetrable Park and Mgahinga National Park
in Uganda, mountain gorillas eat the bark of the nondescript dombeya
tree as a food. The bark is laden with active ingredients, including
antibiotics that kill common bacteria such as E. Coli, and there
is anecdotal evidence that the presence of various bugs in the
dung matches the dombeya-eating patterns of the gorilla. C hausiku,
the bitter pith-sucking chimp, seems to be a true pharmacist,
though, seeking out an unpleasant substance with no nutritive
value in response to stomach pains. The pith, from the tree Vernonia
amygdalina, has now been scrutinised in laboratories and given
up its secrets. It contains compounds active against many of the
parasites responsible for malaria, dysentery and schistosomiasis.
The local people, the WaTongwe, use the same plant to treat the
same illnesses - and they recover in the same time period. It
seems the scientists have indeed been poking around in the origins
of the human healing arts. Plants contain toxins designed to deter
predators. It is no surprise, therefore, that animals inadvertently
eat low levels of poison in their diet and that these get to work
killing the infections within. Added to this is the deliberate
selection of bitter substances to which animals would usually
have an instinctive aversion. This must be a learnt behaviour,
says Prof Huffman. The great apes have a huge capacity for social
learning. He has seen a young chimp watch its sick mother take
medicine, which it has then tasted itself. For the many researchers
who believe chimps are capable of empathy, it is easy to conclude
that they can learn from their peers the symptoms, the medicine
and the dosage. "Chimpanzees tend to be very conservative in their
feeding habits," says Prof Huffman. "As part of growing up, they
have to learn what and how to eat by watching the behaviour of
their elders. In this way, knowledge and experience of the group
is passed down in the form of behavioural tradition and the danger
of individual experimentation with poisonous plants is limited
to a few." We have marched a long way from great ape forest remedies
to modern medicine, with its purified, single-action drugs, and
Prof Huffman is trying to show how the philosophy of medicine
has changed along the way. As a result of this change, he believes,
we have lost an important principle that breathed potency into
the first medicine cabinets. First, we have separated medicine
and food into different categories. We have then divided food
into graspable concepts such as protein, carbohydrate and vitamins.
This categorisation - and the eating habits that result - ignores
the abundant network of plant toxins whose consumption should
provide us with our first defence against disease. Second, we
no longer exploit the mechanisms by which these plant toxins tackle
disease. Forest remedies rarely expunge the disease; they just
suppress it. The leaf-swallowing chimps still carry parasites,
but in low, safe numbers. At the end of the rainy season, infections
disappear naturally. Modern medicine's success stems from the
opposite approach: "We are using drugs that are one single compound,
that have one mechanism of action," says Prof Huffman. The disadvantage
of this is drug resistance, which happens because the "single
mechanism" approach stimulates the parasite to form a counter-strategy.
"Bitter pith probably contains 20 or more different compounds
with different levels of activity, different effects on the parasite.
Some of the most bioactive compounds act to paralyse the worm,
inhibit movement, prevent egg laying. Other compounds are toxic."
Suppressing disease through a multi-pronged attack that thwarts
the development of resistance among parasites could be a useful
route to new medicines for humans and livestock, researchers believe.
In Sumatra more concrete examples of possible new therapeutic
approaches may emerge. It is the first time anyone has properly
examined orang-utan self-therapists. Dr Foitova is collecting
samples of everything that goes into the orang-utan mouth - from
unripe fruit to soil, honey and insects - and everything that
comes out of the other end. The orang-utans are followed from
dawn to dusk. But time is running out. We may never know more
than a fraction of what lies in the great apes' pharmacies. Their
forests in Africa, Indonesia and Malaysia are falling swiftly
to loggers. Scientists give them only 10 more years in the wild.
In Sumatra, the orangutan sub-species studied by Dr Foitova was
recently listed as critically endangered. The mysteries of wild
great ape remedies may become permanently locked in the past.
From: Poparad John T Contr AEDC/SVT
Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2000 20:21:00 +0000
To: 'Gail Taylor' , 'Jeff Johnston' , 'Matt Taylor' , Graham
Ralph E Civ AEDC/XPX
Subject: Fooled Again
New Scientist, 9 December 2000
It all started with the article "Fooled Again" and led to a
12 alarm headache. So I figured, why should I be the only one
with a head ache? Thinking About Thought Piero Scaruffi Cognition:
A General Property of Matter (Craik, Simon, Newell, Johnson-Laird,
Fauconnier, Lakoff, Marr, Paivio, Kosslyn, Pylyshyn, Finke, Tye,
Selz, Minsky, Schank, Arbib, Leyton, Sowa) Cognition
Cognition is the set of faculties that allow the mind to process
inputs from the external world and to determine action in the
external world. They comprise perception, learning, memory, reasoning
and so forth. Basically, we perceive something, we store it in
memory, we retrieve related information, we process the whole,
we learn something, we store it in memory, we use it to decide
what to do next. All of these are part of cognition. Is all of
cognition conscious? Is there something that we remember, learn
or process without being aware of it? Probably. At least, the
level of awareness may vary wildly. Sometimes we study a poem
until we can remember all the words in the exact order: that requires
a lot of awareness. Sometimes we simply store an accident without
paying too much attention to it. Consciousness is like another
dimension. One can be engaged in this or that cognitive task (first
dimension) and then it can be aware of it with different levels
of intensity (second dimension). It is, therefore, likely that
cognitive faculties and consciousness are independent processes.
Since it processes inputs and yields outputs, cognition has the
invaluable advantage that it lends itself to modeling and testing
endeavours, in a more scientific fashion than studies on consciousness.
Language too is a cognitive process....
(Go to the New Scientist
website, or e-mail Jeff
for the complete article.)
From: Russ White
Date: December 18, 2000
To: Knowledge Base
Subject: Experience Economy pdf
This article is from HBR. I thought it should have a home in
the kbase.
experience_economy.pdf
From: Matt Taylor
Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2000 11:34:41 -0800
To: Lisa Piazza , Todd.Johnston@mgtaylor.com, Jeff Johnston ,
Patsy Kahoe , RK Bruce, DavidC1016@aol.com
Subject: RE: Institutional Trust
This is the great opportunity. A ValueWeb (r) system is a deliberate
self-aware enterprise that is made up of all the components of
a replacement economy (Jacobs). Within this system, new rules
of engagement can be employed. Because of this, the burden imposed
by this fragmented culture can be mitigated. I have always said
that we are inventing a social system. We are reaching convergence
with the opportunity. We have to not get bogged down by the society
of which we are a part that we are trying to help replace.
Matt
From: Lisa Piazza
Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2000 22:51:21 -0500
To: Todd Johnston, Jeff Johnston , Patsy Kahoe , RK Bruce , DavidC1016@aol.com,
Matt Taylor
Subject: Institutional Trust, The Great Disruption ...
Human Nature and the Reconsitution of Social Order - Francis
Fukuyama, June 1999
Worthwhile reading in general ... but particulary interesting
these days ...
"Trust is a key by-product of the cooperative social norms that
constitute social capital. If people can be counted on to keep
commitments, honor norms of reciprocity, and avoid opportunistic
behavior, then groups will form more readily, and those that do
form will be able to achieve common purposes more efficiently.
If trust is a significant measure of social capital, then there
are clear signs that the latter has been in decline. Many Americans
are aware that trust in institutions of all sorts, beginning with
the U.S. government, has been steadily declining over time and
reached historic lows during the 1990's. In 1958, 73% if Americans
surveyed said they trusted the federal government to do with is
right, either "most of the time" or "just about always." By 1994,
this figure had fallen as low as 15 percent (depending on the
poll), though by 1996-1997 confidence had increased again so that
it averaged somewhere in the mid- to upper 20s. Correspondingly,
those trusting the government either "none of the time" or only
"some of the time" rose from 23 percent in 1958 to a range of
71 to 85% in 1995 (again, declining slightly in subsequent years).
Most American institutions have fared only slightly better. Corporations,
organized labor, banks, the medical profession, organized religion,
the military, education, television, and the press all saw declined
in the percentages of those expressing trust in them between the
early 1970s and the early 1990s. Within the government, only the
Supreme Court has more Americans feeling a "great deal" of confidence
rather than "hardly any," a situation that is reversed for the
executive branch and is even worse for Congress. Only the scientific
community had enjoyed a relatively constant level of confidence."
From: Lisa Piazza
Date: December 11, 2000
To: Jeff Johnston
Subject: Knowledge Worker Fodder
12/18/00 issue of Fortune
Need Innovation: Start Locking Up the Tech Toys
http://library.northernlight.com/MG20001218010000099.html?cb=13&sc=0#doc
Need Innovation? Start by Locking Up the Tech Toys
Technology makes it seductively easy to generate more and more
so-called information in less and less time.
Michael Schrage
Technology? Just say no. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General
Henry Shelton reportedly forbids Microsoft PowerPoint-based slide
presentations by his executive officers. So does Sun Microsystems
CEO Scott McNealy. It's not that they hate Microsoft--well, maybe
Shelton doesn't--but that they believe the organizational benefits
of these digital slide shows are outweighed by their costs.
From: Matt Taylor
Date: Sun, 10 Dec 2000 10:52:36 -0800
To: Bill Blackburn , David Calverley , Robert Darling , Pat Gibson
Cc: Jeff Johnston , Todd Johnston , Patsy Kahoe , Lisa Piazza
, Russ White
All... An example of a web site that introduces a cutting edge
product, tells why, tells a story, and does it in a bold and delightful
way. Unfortunately, this is Euro-Centric so you will not be able
to get into all of the site. I understand, that once registered,
Europeans can configure and order their own SMART automobile online.
http://www.smart.com
Notice the entire package: great product, a point of view, brand
image, URL name. This is an integrated concept. Notice how the
central theme of the product is reinforced again and again. The
problems that the designer of this site faced are very similar
to the ones that we have to confront. I believe they were solved
brilliantly. A strong message delivered without offense. The newness
of the product turned into an asset. The essence of the product
expressed DIRECTLY by the site execution. It can be argued, of
course, that this is an expensive and technically sophisticated
site - no question about it. However, there are many where more
was spent for far lesser a result. it is the understanding and
design that counts - no matter how simple or elaborate the result.
Design is just coming to the web. We are a design company - all
business units are. We must lead in this phase of we evolution.
It is our great opportunity to level the playing field.
Matt
From: Jeff Johnston
Date: December 8, 2000
To: Gail Taylor et al.
Subject: cool mapping sites
Found a couple cool sites related to mapping ...
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~feegi/index.html
http://www.aquarius.geomar.de/omc/omc_intro.html
From: Lisa Piazza
Date: December 8, 2000
To: Knowledge Base
Subject: http://www.cio.com/forums/healthcare/
Jeff - I find CIO magazine a well organized resource ... here's
their healthcare space Ê Ê
http://www.cio.com/forums/healthcare/
From: "Lisa Piazza"
Date: Thu, 7 Dec 2000 18:27:06 -0500
To: Knowledge Base
Subject: Healthcare ... Chaos article
Life at the Edge of Chaos Curt Lindberg, Alfred Herzog, MD, Martin
Merry, MD, Jeffrey Goldstein, PhD
http://www.nhgmaine.com/Articles/life_at_the_edge_of_chaos.htm
From: Lisa Piazza
Date: December 7, 2000
To: Knowledge Base
Subject: First Round Healthcare links
Jeff -Ê I'll get into my paper archives for healthcare... maybe
I can talk John into beingÊa pack mule... but here are a few quick
hits off the top of my head: Ê
Red Herring has a whole huge issue (37 page) on "Healthcare and
the Net" a couple of months ago.
"HEALTH CARE AND THE NET , paper-choked industry may badly need
the Internet, but e-health companies face enormous challenges"
HEALTH CARE AND THE NET The Internet will transform the industry
eventually, but it's a tough one to wring a profit from.
CHRONIC AILMENTS The hard economics of health care make a difficult
backdrop for IT vendors.
COMBINATION SHOT Healtheon/WebMD now faces two challenges: integrating
acquisitions -- and making money.
DOCTOR NO Physicians hold the key to the e-health market -- but
they remain unconvinced.
HIPAA TENSION The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability
Act makes Y2K compliance look easy.
RESTRICTED MOBILITY Europe's e-health startups face unique obstacles.
BROKEN RECORDS Don't hold your breath for electronic medical
records.
HYPOCRITIC OATHS Personal information may not be private on consumer
medical sites. Ê
HBR had a Clayton Christensen article on the Innovator's Dilemma
and Healthcare: Ê Will Disruptive Innovations Cure Health Care?
Ê Ê
Health Forum Journal is my favorite healthcare publication (partly
because of graphics, which you don't get in the web version ...
nonetheless, it has a good search engine. Ê Type in the word "innovation"
and you get these titles: Ê The problem with innovation Saturday,
July 01, 2000 - Health Forum Journal The Next Wave of Innovation
Monday, November 01, 1999 - Health Forum Journal An Innovation
Rx Saturday, May 01, 1999 - Health Forum Journal Leadership and
White Space: The Struggle for Strategy Innovation in Health care
Saturday, May 01, 1999 - Health Forum Journal
Here's a few "classics" that we've used: Complexity Science:
A Route Through Hard Times and Uncertainty Ê Gone Chordic: Dee
Hock, the mastermind behind Visa, has some ideas about reorganizing
health care. Ê Knowledge Management: Moving the Care Model from
a Snapshot to a Story Ê This is the Voluntary Hospital Association,
who had a complexity program for a couple of years. I attended
one of their confereces: Complexity Resources for Healthcare professionals
http://www.vha.com/edgeplace/index.html Ê
This was in the World Future Society's "The Futurist" last summer
- I'll send you the hardcopy. It doesn't seem to be available
online. Health Care in 2025: A Patient's Encounter By James O.
Wooten Health kiosks at the mall will handle patients' needs for
medical tests, cancer screening, diagnosis, and referrals for
specialty care.ÊFrom the Futurist Magazine, July/Aug 2000ÊÊ Ê
Here's two I stumbled across but have not used: Annotated Scenario
Bibliography - has some in healthcare ... may be useful in your
archives in general
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/4787/millennium/demogrscen.html
California Healthcare Association
http://www.cha-cahhs.org/res_links.htm
Lisa Piazza
From: Jeff Johnston
Date: December 6, 2000
To: Matt Taylor et al.
Subject: Micro Cosmos
For some beautiful images of "natural" nanotechnology, check
out:
http://www.nikonusa.com/gallery/smallworld/99smallworld.html
Jeff
From: Poparad John T Contr AEDC/SVT
Date: Wed, 06 Dec 2000 16:29:32 +0000
To: 'Gail Taylor' , 'Jeff Johnston' , 'Matt Taylor' , 'Patsy'
Subject: SFI Bulletin
http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/publications/Bulletins/bulletinFall00/index.html
You got to read Volume 15 Number 2 as soon as it's posted. I
have a hard copy and started highlighting only to discover I was
painting the whole thing yellow. This one is a fun edition on
Robustness in addition to the usual good stuff.
From: Poparad John T Contr AEDC/SVT
Date: Tue, 05 Dec 2000 20:44:50 +0000
To: 'Gail Taylor' , 'Jeff Johnston' , 'Matt Taylor' , 'Patsy'
Subject: BUILDING A BEEHIVE
Fascinating that the U S Navy should be printing articles like
this. Met a guy from the War College last time I was at the Santa
Fe Institute who also talked the language.
BUILDING A BEEHIVE - OBSERVATIONS ON THE TRANSITION TO NETWORK-CENTRIC
OPERATIONS, Captain George Kasten, U.S. Navy, Naval War College
Review, Autum 2000, Vol. LIII, No. 4
Conceptual changes always provoke institutional resistance. Some
see network-centric operations (NCOs) as a high-speed train that
will ultimately determine the size and shape of future naval forces.
Others think NCO could derail important programs that they believe
in. There are also concerns that monumental resource allocations
could be pinned to such a new and undeveloped concept. This debate
occurs at a time when there is already fierce interservice and
intraservice competition over the relevance and prioritization
of existing and programmed platforms. There are big bets to be
placed. Is NCO the right horse? The short answer is yes. Of course,
there is much uncertainty. NCO will be the product of many interacting
forces. The resulting complexity will make its final form as unpredictable
as long-range weather. NCO will both shape and be shaped by the
character of future warfare and the development of our strategic
culture, as well as by the reactions of potential adversaries
to our developing style of fighting. That is why NCO should be
allowed to evolve without the constraints of a precise script
that would enslave it to inevitable errors in the details. The
information age has set off an avalanche of fundamental change
throughout society. The best-studied effects are still unfolding
in the transformation of the economy. For decades, people have
been thrilled, made apprehensive, enchanted, or unsettled, but
always dazzled, by the pace of technological change. Below the
surface, however, lost in the commotion of new discoveries and
gadgets, something much more significant has been emerging-a new
economic order.1 Because of networking, the basic rules of economic
behavior have been turned inside out. New laws of increasing returns
describe effects that either had not occurred previously or were
masked by incorrect industrial-age assumptions. During the Industrial
Age, economics, warfare, and other human behaviors were radically
transformed. The current transformation promises to be equally
momentous.
(Contact Jeff if
you're interested in the rest of the article.)
From: Poparad John T Contr AEDC/SVT
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 15:55:44 +0000
To: 'Jeff Johnston' , 'Gail Taylor' , 'Patsy' , 'Matt Taylor'
Subject: In the Zero Luck Zone There's some interesting work
being done under the title's of agile organizations and adaptive
organizations.
In the Zero Luck Zone , by Robert Pool
MOST COMPANIES DON'T WORRY too much about luck. If their luck
is good, so much the better; if it's bad, they hope it's not too
bad. Either way, they figure there is not too much they can do
about it. Some organizations, though, cannot afford to be so nonchalant.
These organizations manage complex, high-risk technologies that
must be kept within a narrow operating range. For them, a bit
of bad luck threatens far more than a dip in the quarterly profits.
Operations may be disrupted and major equipment destroyed, and
people, perhaps many people, may die. These organizations have
responded by finding ways to remove luck almost completely from
their environment, controlling events to a degree that seems impossible
to anyone familiar with the normal, messy world of business. Just
how they do it is an intriguing tale and one that holds lessons
for anyone, particularly those in high tech, who must deal with
the unexpected.
See the November 27, 2000 Forbes
ASAP for the complete article.
From: Lisa Piazza
Reply-To: Lisa Piazza
Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 12:38:35 -0500
To: Bill Blackburn , egibson@proximal.com, Matt Taylor , DavidC1016@aol.com,
Jeff Johnston , Russ White , Gail Taylor
Subject: Stanford Interactive Workspaces Project
I suggest taking a look at this: Stanford Interactive Workspaces
Project
http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/iwork/
From: Ann Badillo
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 09:41:23 -0800
To: Gail Taylor et al.
Subject: EarthLights--Very cool
Friends,
Check this out---It reframes one's perspective.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0011/earthlights_dmsp_big.jpg
Peace,
Ann
From: Matt Taylor
Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2000 05:11:03 -0800
To: Jeff Johnston
Subject: FW: Christopher Alexander speaking in SF
You may want to go to this. I understand that Alexander is filing
a patent on this.
Sequence, of course is one of the basic insights of the DesignShop
(r) process.
Matt
-----Original Message-----
From: Stuart Silverstone [mailto:ss@graphics.org]
Sent: Sunday, November 26, 2000 12:51 AM
To: sf@graphics.org
Subject: FWD: Christopher Alexander speaking in SF
[if anyone in the bay area can cover this event with overview
notes, audio recording and/or video recording the results would
be much appreciated here]
Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium 4:15PM, Wednesday, November
29, 2000 NEC Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B03
Title: The missing link in software pattern theory. Generative
sequences as the next breakthrough in programming.
Speaker: Christopher Alexander Patternlanguage.com
About the talk: Professor Alexander will address the road he
has followed in the last years that have taken him from patterns
to sequences. A generative sequences is a semi-algorithm, a flexible
system of instructions which lay out for the user which decisions
need to be made in which order. Decision A becomes the context
for Decision B and when the sequence is a good one, the morphology
of the resulting design unfolds naturally, reaching a coherent
though highly complex and subtle structure. No backtracking is
necessary. In mainstream architectural practices, there are requirements
for plans and blueprints which force premature decisions which
then become contractually binding and costly to correct. Generative
sequences allow for a more organic unfolding, much as an embryo
unfolds, each stage preserving essential characteristics of the
previous stage, and each stage having "wholeness" in and of itself.
The discussion will also address the issue of protected programs
or sequences and open/shared programs and the ethics of websites
such as c2.com. If you are planning to attend the session, you
may wish to take a look at the website http://www.patternlanguage.com.
In particular, there is a demo and worked example of a short sequence
which takes you through the decision steps in designing an entrance
transition. For the enthusiastic (or sleepless) you can spend
hours on the material posted--and all feedback is welcome.
About the speaker: Following a dual career as a professor at
the Univeristy of California, Berkeley and as a practicing architect,
Christopher Alexander is now taking his ideas and activities "on-line"
through a new website patternlanguage.com. He is most well known
among computer scientists for the book A Pattern Language published
in the late 70's. His new work The Nature of Order is now at the
printer and will soon be available.
From: Jeff Johnston
Date: November 26, 2000
To: Matt Taylor et al.
Subject: Jane Jacobs on cnn.com
check out:
http://www.cnn.com/2000/books/news/11/23/jane.jacobs.ap/index.html
for an article on Jane Jacobs.
Jeff
From: Matt Taylor
Date: Sat, 25 Nov 2000 10:17:29 -0800
To: Jeff Johnston
Subject: FW: Gutenberg Bible headed for Internet
FYI...
Matt
-----Original Message-----
From: Stuart Silverstone [mailto:ss@graphics.org]
Sent: Saturday, November 25, 2000 12:33 AM
To: ideas@graphics.org
Subject: FWD: Gutenberg Bible headed for Internet
Wednesday, 22 November 2000 12:05 (ET)
GUTENBERG BIBLE HEADED FOR INTERNET LONDON, Nov. 22 (UPI) --
The 15th century Gutenberg Bible, the first major book to be printed
in the West, is about to travel the world on the 21st century
information superhighway. The British Library and Japan's Keio
University teamed up to put two of the Bibles on the Internet
at the library's Web site, www.bl.uk, to give scholars around
the globe access without damaging the originals. The British Library
has two copies and a fragment of a third of the 180 Bibles Gutenberg
printed. "The books are actually quite strong," said Kristian
Jensen, the library's curator of early printed books, "but the
one thing that can destroy them is being handled too much." "If
we can give access to them while preventing that," Jensen added,
"it will ensure they will be with us 500 years from now." Using
technology originally designed for spy satellites, 10 researchers
and technical experts from Keio University and Japan's NTT telecommunications
company spent two weeks at the library digitalizing the pages.
Jensen said, that if anyone wants to examine the originals, "a
lot of the images are of such good quality that you would be better
off looking at them on the Internet." "We've been able to magnify
them to such an extent that you can see details that it's very
difficult to see with the naked eye," he said. Experts are worried
about preserving the Gutenberg Bibles. Of the 180 copies printed
using Johannes Gutenberg's revolutionary movable type system,
only "significant parts" of 43 remain. The British Library has
one copy printed on paper and one on vellum. Jensen said putting
both online would make it easier to compare the two. But if experts
still want to view the originals, the curator added, they may
still apply for permission.
http://www.vny.com/cf/news/upidetail.cfm?QID=138174
Copyright 2000 by United Press International
From: Matt Taylor
Date: Sat, 25 Nov 2000 10:17:34 -0800
To: Russ White , Jeff Johnston
Subject: FW: Home servers: The new data butlers
Peer to peer...
Matt
-----Original Message-----
From: Stuart Silverstone [mailto:ss@graphics.org]
Sent: Friday, November 24, 2000 9:55 AM
To: ideas@graphics.org
Subject: FWD: Home servers: The new data butlers
"Home servers: The new data butlers" By John G. Spooner, ZDNet
News November 23, 2000 12:54 PM PT
"The next computing revolution may begin at home. PC makers are
working to create a new home-computing experience that links networked
appliances to server-like PCs with enough bandwidth and storage
to deliver messages, music, and movies to every room in the house."
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0%2C4586%2C2657265%2C00.html
From: Todd Johnston
Date: November 23, 2000
To: Matt Taylor , Jeff Johnston , , Russ White , Gail Taylor
, Lisa Piazza , Mike Bednarek
Subject: Europe Nixes Software Patents
fyi...
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,40329,00.html?tw=wn20001122
Todd
From: Gail Taylor
Date: November 18, 2000
To: Lisa Piazza, Todd Johnston , Jeff johnston
Subject: useful website
This one is the right link.
http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/thinkers.html
From: Matt Taylor
Date: November 10, 2000
To: Bob Taylor et al.
Subject: Software Engineers
All...
This is an interesting piece - Chris Allen sent it. It speaks
a great deal to several things we are about - as a community -
and in our own singular work. A great deal of information regarding
how we should be shaping our message regarding the work environment.
I believe that
http://www.matttaylor.com/public/pod.htm
does answer a number of the issues that were raised. There is
much more, however, to be addressed.
Matt
http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/managing-software-engineers/
From Jeff Johnston
Date: November 9, 2000
To: Matt Taylor , Mike Bednarek , Lisa Piazza , Todd Johnston
, Gail Taylor , Russ White
Subject: Bounty Quest
This is an interesting response to the current IP mess ...
http://www.bountyquest.com/
Get paid for locating prior art to help companies knock down competing
patents.
From Science, 27 October, 2000.
NET NEWS: Win Cash for
Patent Busting
Fact-hoarding scientists and engineers, take note: Now there's
a potential way to cash in on your headfuls of arcane knowledge.
A new Web site hopes to "strengthen the patent system"
by offering a bounty to anyone who can provide obscure documents
to support or shoot down high-stakes patents.
The U.S. Patent Office (USPTO) has come under fire in recent years
for granting patents too readily, especially for software and
biotechnology. One reason is that patent examiners don't have
time to go beyond online databases in their search for evidence
that an invention isn't original. This new site, BountyQuest),
is aimed mainly at helping companies knock down competing patents
by locating this "prior art"--such as journal articles
in foreign languages or technical manuals. For example, you can
win $10,000 for rustling up a document "describing a purified
preparation of primate embryonic stem cells" from before
1994. Cash is also available for information that undermines Amazon.com's
one-click purchasing patent or a gasoline additive.
The idea is "interesting," says Internet Patent News
Service editor Greg Aharonian, but he argues that it would cost
companies less to hire veteran patent consultants to find the
same documents. Besides, Aharonian believes that the real problem
is the glut of bad patents issued by the USPTO. BountyQuest, he
says, is "treating the symptoms, not the disease."
From: Jeff Johnston
Date: November 8, 2000
To: Matt Taylor
CC: Todd Johnston , Lisa Piazza , Gail Taylor , Bill Blackburn
Subject: Community Design
Matt,
check out:
http://www.designcorps.org/designcorps.html
I think you'll find resonance.
Jeff
From: Jeff Johnston
Date: Friday, October 27, 2000.
To: John Joseph
CC: Lisa Piazza , Matt Taylor , Lori Bergeron , K Base
Subject: FW: 10/27/2000 Daily Report from The Chronicle of Higher
Education
Hi John,
It was probably apparent from the K-Base I collected from the
TOEFL DS event that the Chronicle of Higher Education was a useful
source of information. I purchased a 6 months subscription (<$50)
so that I could fully utilize their site in my ETS work a couple
weeks ago, you may want to think about doing the same to support
the ongoing relationship.
http://chronicle.com/
The Chronicle offers a daily or weekly e-mail to inform about
current stories. You may want to subscribe to this as well.
Jeff
From: Jeff Johnston
Date: October 25, 2000
To: Ann Badillo, Gail Taylor
Subject: NYTimes special e-commerce section on health care
Check out:
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/10/biztech/technology/
for what look to be a number of interesting, relevant articles.
Jeff
From: Todd Johnston
Date: October 23, 2000
To: Jeff Johnston, Gail Taylor, Lisa Piazza
Subject: Important Metaphors Concept
Ecotone: the transition zone between two ecological communities,
usually a belt rather than an abrupt line. It has some of the
ecological features of both communities, but has its own distinct
ecological structure.
I came across the term in a NY Times article (on 'design') and
looked it up on the web. It is the subject (or a subject) of many
academic papers and I saw it used in a number of context besides
the purely ecological sense. It would seem a useful concept to
use in modeling how (value) webs and structures and organization
overlaps - and that overlap creates an entity that in some regards,
is different from either (or any) of the overlapping systems.
Todd
From: Todd Johnston
Date: October 23, 2000
To: Jeff Johnston, Gail Taylor, Lisa Piazza
Subject: Re: Important Metaphors Concept
This is a useful page for a definition and launching into related
concepts, such as the 'edge effect' which is the effect caused
on a ecosystem by a neighboring ecosystem.
http://www.britannica.com/seo/e/ecotone/
Todd Johnston wrote:
> Ecotone: the transition zone between two ecological communities,
usually a belt rather than an abrupt line. It has some of the
ecological features of both >communities, but has its own distinct
ecological structure. I came across the term in a NY Times article
(on 'design') and looked it up on the web. It is the >subject
(or a subject) of many academic papers and I saw it used in a
number of context besides the purely ecological sense. It would
seem a useful concept >to use in modeling how (value) webs
and structures and organization overlaps - and that overlap creates
an entity that in some regards, is different from >either (or
any) of the overlapping systems.
>Todd
From: Lisa Piazza
Date: October 23, 2000
To:Todd Johnston, Gail Taylor, Jeff Johnston
Subject: Re: Important Metaphors Concept
Todd, nice!
My immediate insight was to pull in the notion of ecotone, into
some work I've been doing with putting transition management inside
of the entrepreneurial button of stages of an enterprise.
The button is laid down flat to become a landscape. There are
three zones/worlds, not just two.
One zone, has familiar fitness peaks for old ways of working
(that can certainly still be worthwhile to climb, but of course
not necessairly ... in our client's mind it's easy to plant the
notion that traditional process improvement methods can be applied
to these peaks. These are in the zone of stability, linear, sequential
processes, rules, where action and consequenses are close to one
another.
Then there's a middle zone where fitness peaks are a bit more
rugged ... where the other shoe of transition management falls.
This is the landscape of non-linearity/complexity ... where emergence,
creativity, knowledge creation, innovation, group genius rule
the day.
There's a third zone ... where really rugged peaks lie, the home
of chaos, a tendancy towards avoidance ... and yet the best place
to find weak signals, faint patterns of possibility.
Anyway, that a rough and quick description. Nonetheless, the
notion of te ecotones between to ecological communities ... is
useful in this transition management model. Thanks.
From: Gail Taylor
Date: October 21, 2000
To: Jeff Johnston, Lisa Piazza
Subject: lifelong kindergarden
http://el.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/papers/mres/lifelongk/index.html
also visit:
http://www.playfulworld.com
The book is wonderful! useful stuff for upcoming ETA
From Jeff Johnston
Date: October 19, 2000
To: Matt Taylor , Lisa Piazza , Gail Taylor , Todd Johnston ,
Bill Blackburn , Mike Bednarek
Subject: The Swiss House
Just came across this project.
http://www.creativeswitzerland.com/index.htm
Something to visit next time you're in Cambridge.
Jeff
From the website:
The Mission
The Swiss House for Advanced Research and Education is the world's
first digital consulate and serves as a link between the scientific,
academic, and high-tech communities of New England and Switzerland.
SHARE is a community that is both physical and virtual. It serves
as a face-to-face meeting point for creative thinkers and entrepreneurs
from both countries. The interactive Web site with video cameras
in the Swiss House will allow people to tune into what is going
on. The extensive network of the Swiss House allows easy access
to Switzerland for any US-company, institution or researcher seeking
closer links with Swiss know-how.
What We Offer
Our extensive networks in both countries enable us to make the
right connection between two persons in order to establish mutually
beneficial relationships. The information available at the Swiss
House - in research, education, business and culture - serves
visitors as a one stop shop for the new economy. Swiss House meeting
and working space is offered to visitors for a limited period
of time with advance notice.
From Jeff Johnston
Date: October 19, 2000
To: Matt Taylor , Lisa Piazza , Gail Taylor , Todd Johnston ,
Bill Blackburn , Mike Bednarek
Subject: The Swiss House PDF
Attached is a pdf file from the Swiss House webpage (www.creativeswitzerland.com),
in case you missed it.
This is worth looking at in detail as there appears to be direct
relevance/overlap to material in the iterations patent.
Jeff
click here for
the PDF.
From: Jeff Johnston
Date: October 16, 2000
To: Ann Badillo and Gail Taylor
Subject: dna.com
Hi Ann,
I saw this in the October 6 issue of Science.
Jeff
NET
NEWS: DNA Donation Site Draws a Crowd
You
can already use the Internet to shop and make airline reservations;
now= you can donate your DNA, too. A commercial Web site (http;//www.dna.com)
is soliciting volunteers to submit blood for gene= tic disease
research.
You won't receive any obvious benefit, such as your genetic profile
in the mail, if you send your DNA to the company, DNA Sciences
of Mountain View, California. But its Gene Trust project promises
the "excitement and satisfaction" of knowing that "you
played a part in medical history. The company plans to make money
by developing diagnostic tests and by licensing its discoveries
to drug companies.
To participate, you simply answer a few questions--age, ethnicity,
whether you or members of your immediate family have one of 21
diseases--and click a button agreeing to a consent form. DNA Sciences
may then contact you to ask more questions and arrange for you
to give blood.
The strategy is working: Last month, just 6 weeks after the site
opened, the company announced that it had attracted 4500 volunteers,
enough to start studies of colon cancer, breast cancer, and asthma.
(Over 400 have actually given blood.) Its ultimate goal is 100,000
samples. Scientific director Ray White, formerly at the University
of Utah, says he's especially excited about the Internet's potential
for building "ongoing relationships" that follow a subject's
health over many years.
To Stanford University law professor Henry Greely, the voluntary
project is better in some ways than, say, Iceland's controversial
national DNA data banks (Science, 30 October 1998, p. 859).
But he questions
whether informed consent obtained via the Web is adequate and
whether people realize that their DNA could hypothetically be
used for any purpose, such as studying genes for sexual orientation.
From: Jeffrey Johnston
Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2000 09:53:56 -0800
To: Russ White
Cc: Matt Taylor , Apollo Harden
Subject: Cogent network
Russ ... Are you familiar with these guys?
(from the San Jose Mercury News yesterday)
Cogent builds data-only network fiber-optics may transform internet
BY LESLIE WALKER Washington Post WASHINGTON --
Dave Schaeffer's seventh start-up is a doozy, much bigger --
and far riskier -- than the taxicab radio spectrum he rolled up
and sold to Nextel Communications, or the wholesale wireless access
business he built at Pathnet Inc. From his office in Georgetown,
he is poised to light his own fiber-optic Internet backbone next
month and start selling Internet access to tenants inside large
office buildings in major cities at 70 times the speed and two-thirds
the price telephone companies typically charge. Schaeffer's Cogent
Communications has committed to spending more than half a billion
dollars to test his belief that a national network built to carry
only data -- no voice or phone calls -- can make money delivering
an ultra-high-powered Internet to businesses. Cogent is among
a new breed of telecommunication carriers racing to exploit fiber-optic
advances and deliver on the promise of the Internet -- instant
communication with everyone everywhere -- that remains stubbornly
beyond the reach of the average business and consumer. The Internet
for the most part is still a rocky back road because its architects
can't agree on how to build the wider highways needed to handle
the recent explosion of data traffic. ``The Internet is the most
gluttonous consumer of communications resources known to man,''
said Carl Russo, who runs fiber optics for Cisco Systems and pioneered
the switching box that Cogent is installing in office buildings.
``Cogent is offering a cafeteria to the gluttonous. They represent
the future of what is going to happen in the Bell telephone space.''
Cogent's $1,000-a-month, virtually all-you-can-use Internet offer
is puzzling to competitors and potential customers, who wonder
how the price of Internet access could plunge so deeply. Each
Cogent customer will get unshared access at 100 million bits of
code per second, a leap up from the 1.5 million bits per second
that corporate ``T1'' lines typically provide for $1,500 a month.
Those T1 lines use phone-company copper wires originally designed
to carry voice. How Cogent can make such an offer provides an
intriguing glimpse into the fiber-optics revolution, which is
cutting the cost of high-speed data connections and spawning carriers
with names like Cogent, Telseon, CoreExpress and Yipes. Win or
lose, these gambles show the challenges telephone companies increasingly
face from new business models based on breakthroughs in how light
is beamed through glass fibers. ``Fiber is doubling its capacity
to carry data every 10 months,'' said Schaeffer, the 44-year-old
scion of a District of Columbia taxicab empire. ``It's up 16,000-fold
from the beginning of the last decade. Today we are at less than
half a percent of the theoretical capacity of a fiber.'' Advances
in the number and power of glass fibers being laid underground
allowed Cogent to develop an optical network more cheaply than
similar networks of the past. Cogent purchased two fiber strands
running cross-country inside cables laid by Williams Communication,
plus another single strand in various cities from Metromedia Fiber
Networks. Cogent is exploiting another engineering breakthrough,
too, one that has allowed the humble corporate network -- known
as a local area network, or Ethernet -- to reach the transmission
speeds of fiber optics. In effect, engineers devised a way to
plug local area networks directly into the Internet. Glass fiber,
of course, is hardly new in telecommunications. Fiber has carried
voice and data underground across the country for two decades.
But until recently, it was too expensive to reach all but the
largest corporations. In the 1990s, the carrying capacity of fiber
was greatly magnified by prism-like devices that split light beams
into colors so each could carry data as a separate channel. The
economic repercussions are shaking the telecommunications industry,
which is in a tizzy over what kind of networking gear should carry
the next generation of Internet, telephone and television signals.
Why traffic slows The Internet's biggest problem is that it still
rides atop a hybrid architecture that uses both glass fibers and
copper wires designed for voice. This slows traffic because data
packets travel as light through fiber, then are converted into
electrons to move over copper wires. The bottlenecks are the worst
in cities, which have little fiber. Converting to an all-fiber
network could take decades because the Internet has not one but
many backbones, sprawling networks that are owned for the most
part by phone companies -- WorldCom, Sprint and AT&T. All have
a vested interest in maintaining revenue from their copper phone
networks. Change is nonetheless coming fast. As entrepreneurs
lay fiber under city streets, other companies are leasing their
glass strands and running them inside buildings so they can sell
Internet access at rates that underprice phone companies. The
new offerings are many orders of magnitude faster than cable TV
lines or digital subscriber phone lines (DSL). Customers include
an assortment of medium and small businesses, schools, hospitals
and other institutions. Some have only the dimmest idea how they
might use the extra capacity. Jim Linn, information technology
director for the American Gas Association on Capitol Hill, was
incredulous when Cogent cold-called a few months ago. ``The first
thing I thought is, this is too good to be true,'' he recalled,
``to get nearly 100 times the bandwidth that we get now with our
T1 line at two-thirds the cost.'' Comfort level lower Linn admits
he won't have the same ``comfort level'' with a start-up that
he has with Verizon, the local phone company that partnered with
Internet provider Verio to provide his T1 line. But the idea of
being on the Internet's frontier proved irresistible. ``We are
exploring new ways of being a trade association,'' said Linn,
who decided to abandon his T1 and plug in to Cogent's network.
``We did a pilot Webcasting of a local meeting last month. We
want to do more of that.'' Many new carriers are selling voice
as well as data services, piggybacking on the copper wires of
local phone companies. Most also are handing their traffic off
to national carriers like WorldCom's UUNet. Not Cogent. It bought
the pair of fiber strands across 12,500 miles and spent the summer
installing Cisco switching boxes in hundreds of cornfields. Schaeffer
contends that running his own national network will lead to less
data congestion and higher-quality service for customers. Armed
with $116 million in venture funding, Cogent plans to turn on
its network in Washington and three other cities in November,
then expand to nine more cities by spring. So far, it has signed
473 customers in 150 buildings, mostly inner-city office complexes.
Schaeffer projects his network will break even by 2003, because
its data-only focus translates to equipment costs lower than those
enjoyed by competitors like Qwest, Level 3 and Broadwing. They
need expensive switching equipment to handle voice that Cogent
doesn't require. Telephone carriers, meanwhile, dispute the notion
that data-focused carriers will win the day. ``Do we feel threatened?
We do, but we don't feel we are in a losing position,'' said Rahman
Karrier, executive director of the Verizon division serving small
and medium-size businesses. Karrier said Verizon is rolling out
its own fiber initiatives, and customers eventually will want
service bundles that include more than Internet access: ``The
winners are going to be those companies who can deliver bandwidth
in a way customers can use it to meet all of their needs.'' Cogent
and its ilk may be building the next-generation Internet. How
far these start-ups can get before being taken over by telecommunication
heavyweights remains to be seen. But the idea they are chasing
-- a network optimized for data -- seems inevitable.
From: Matt Taylor
Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2000 06:54:25 -0700
To: jeff Johnston
Subject: FW: Floating Test Pad For High Tech
You may want to find out what you can about this...
Matt
-----Original Message-----
From: Poparad John T Contr AEDC/SVT
Sent: Friday, October 13, 2000 6:25 AM
Subject: Floating Test Pad For High Tech
Stuart Kendrick has a Silicon Valley dream job, even though he's
a captain in the Navy. Stationed aboard the Coronado, he's in
charge of "innovations and experimentation": figuring out what
kinds of futuristic technologies will be in ships for "the Navy
after next," circa 2015 and later. Kendrick has spearheaded on-board
installation of a command room that rivals the bridge of the Starship
Enterprise, a "knowledge wall," a Disney-designed "creativity
room," automatic language translators, a head-mounted large-screen
display and a host of whiz-bang devices. The Coronado, which is
at Pier 35 in San Francisco for Fleet Week, will be open to the
public today only from noon to 4 p.m.; other Navy ships moored
at San Francisco, Oakland and Alameda piers will be open for tours
today, tomorrow and Monday. The 16,000-ton, 569-foot-long Coronado
is a kind of floating test bed for cutting-edge digital tools
-- in fact, the Secretary of the Navy is coming to town Monday
to designate it as the Navy's official "Sea-Based Battle Lab."
Kendrick, a 20-plus-year Navy veteran who's been heading an elite
tech team called J9 for 18 months, sounds like a heretic by military
standards. "My mission is to facilitate change in the Navy," he
said, "I'm running around with an ax hacking away at the (old)
legacy systems and telling people they're too slow." The Coronado
has even opened its hatches to some civilian experimenters, spawning
some remarkably touchy-feely projects within the ship's gray hulls.
The creativity room (official name: Collaborative Planning Center),
for example, was designed by Bran Ferren, an Oscar-winning special-effects
creator and former executive with Walt Disney Imagineering. He
used behavioral psychology to craft a space conducive to creative
thoughts and group process, using curved surfaces, soft earth
tones, wood grains and natural lighting. The room "allows you
to think more creatively because your brain isn't cursing the
stale air, bad lighting and crummy colors" of the typical Navy
environment, Kendrick said. Kendrick doesn't let Navy bureaucracy
or what he called "antibodies of progress" stand in his way. He
navigates through red tape by ignoring it. Instead of submitting
lengthy Request for Procurement forms in triplicate, "I buy a
lot of stuff from Fry's in San Diego" (where the Coronado is based),
he said. Buying off the shelf is revolutionary in the U.S. military,
which is better known for procuring gold-plated toilets and $37
pencils. But the Navy is trying hard to catch the wave of the
future. A program called Information Technology for the 21st Century,
or IT-21, lets battleships run on the same tools that power the
average office -- Microsoft Windows NT, for example. The goal
is to get all Navy vessels to run on the same software, hardware
and communications systems for increased efficiency and coordination.
It sounds laudable, until you realize it means Microsoft Windows
-- the same software renowned for its instability -- is at the
helm of warships capable of launching nuclear missiles. Indeed,
Bill Gates' software has already given Navy skippers the same
kinds of headaches it dishes out to average PC users. Windows
NT crashes left the missile cruiser Yorktown dead in the water
-- twice. The battle cruisers Hue City and Vicksburg also were
sidelined by Windows bugs. But the Coronado's technology forays
have met with better success. Some of its innovations got put
to the test this summer during RimPac, a multinational naval exercise
in the Pacific. The Coronado set up "C-WAN" -- a wide-area network
for 50 ships spread out over hundreds of miles around Hawaii.
From aboard the Coronado, Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn, the commander
of the U.S. 3rd Fleet, issued orders to other ships through special
secure Web pages. That might sound as ho-hum as someone posting
a staff list on a corporate intranet, but it's a huge breakthrough
for the Navy, which has been issuing orders since World War II
via the cumbersome Navy Message Track -- "Morse code to the nth
degree," Kendrick said. Instead of laboriously translating orders
into numeric code, the Coronado officers can import a map from
the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, display it on a giant
screen, scrawl an arrow and write "Bomb here" on an overlay. Meanwhile,
the same image can be automatically projected on an aircraft carrier
a hundred miles away. As the command and control vessel for the
U.S. Third Fleet, the Coronado is the nerve center for all Navy
vessels and aircraft from the West Coast to the International
Dateline, an area of 50 million square miles. Its cavernous operational
command center lets McGinn keep track of some 70 ships, 300 aircraft
and 70,000 sailors and Marines. Commander Ellen Jewett of the
J9 team transformed the ship's op center this summer, working
around the clock to get it done in 19 days. Instead of 18 separate
displays showing maps, photos and other data, the center is dominated
by a bank of huge projection screens -- offering "a picture window
into a sea of information," rather than the "portholes into an
ocean of data" of the disparate displays, the Navy says. The touch-sensitive
smart screens wowed the brass from other ships and will soon be
installed on the 7th Fleet flagship, Blue Ridge. That's how Kendrick
wants to get hot technology into the Navy -- through the back
door. "It's a virus scheme; we're injecting people with good ideas,"
he said. "Technology breeds technology." Once innovations have
become "part of the Navy DNA," Kendrick figures they'll be permanently
welded into place. And there's certainly precedent for military
technology experiments becoming part of the civilian world as
well. Many of J9's projects are sponsored by DARPA (Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency). DARPA's best-known previous initiative
was DARPAnet, which became the modern-day Internet.
From: Matt Taylor
Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2000 07:05:11 -0700
To: jeff Johnston , Russ White
Subject: FW: Avatars2000 Online Sunday, see you there?
FYI...
Matt
-----Original Message-----
From: Bruce Damer [mailto:bdamer@ccon.org]
Sent: Friday, October 13, 2000 1:12 AM
To: bdamer@ccon.org
Subject: Avatars2000 Online Sunday, see you there?
Dear Friends in the Bay Area,
This Sunday the 15th from noon to 6pm our time here in California
you will find me and several thousand other people floating about
in our avatars in a large Cyberspace-station we have built in
a 3D virtual world on the net. This is all part of Avatars2000,
our group's 5th annual conference and the 3rd year doing it online.
Its quite a new experience of the Internet so I hope you will
join me! Auntie Galen will be there too, doing a special presentation
on virtual worlds in healing. Its all described at:
http://www.ccon.org/conf00/html/launch.html
and preview the space station itself with screen shots at:
http://www.ccon.org/conf00/html/preview.htm
If you have a Windows PC on the net (modem OK). There will be
easy instructions on the above page but all you have to do is
download and install Active Worlds from: http://www.activeworlds.com
enter the world and look for the signs or people to guide you
to the AV00 Avatars 2000 world. There are events in other virtual
world programs too, such as www.onlive.com and www.blaxxun.com.
Stop in for a few minutes or the whole afternoon to experience
what we feel will be a true Cyberspace for the New Millennium.
If you are really ambitious you can also present a talk on any
subject, hang your digital art in our galleries, broadcast your
webcam, enter your avatar into the Avvy Awards and more (all sign-ups
are now open at the above pages). See you in Cyberspace!
Best,
Bruce
++ The Contact Consortium ++ A Forum for Contact, Culture and
Community in Digital Space Visit us at: http://www.ccon.org PO
Box 66866, Scotts Valley CA USA 95067-6866 reach Bruce at work:
(831) 338-9400 or at the Consortium by email at: bdamer@ccon.org
/- Living, Learning and Working in Virtual Worlds
From: Jeff Johnston
Date: October 12, 2000
To: Apollo Harden
Subject: Underwater PC
check this out ...
http://www.herald.com/content/today/news/broward/digdocs/051752.htm
From: Matt Taylor
Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2000 06:01:52 -0700
To: jeff Johnston
Subject: FW: Humor: A Mind-body Connection
A good piece to hold on to and follow up on... Matt
-----Original Message----- From: Stuart Silverstone [mailto:ss@graphics.org]
Sent: Sunday, October 08, 2000 4:04 AM
To: ideas@graphics.org
Subject: FWD: Humor: A Mind-body Connection
Source: http://www.the-scientist.com/yr2000/oct/rayl_p1_001002.html
Will researchers and comedy legends demonstrate laughter's therapeutic
qualities?
By A.J.S. Rayl
A merry heart doeth good like a medicine, but a broken spirit
dries the bone. --Proverbs 17:22 Can humor cause a positive physiological
impact? Could the gags, quips, and shtick of such legends as Charlie
Chaplin, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, and the Marx Brothers, or
some of today's comedians, really be medicinal? During the last
couple of decades--since the best-selling author Norman Cousins
made headlines by laughing himself well--researchers have been
working to uncover the physiological impact of laughter at the
cellular and neurochemical level. By all indications, the eons-old
notion is grinning and bearing out. Cousins was diagnosed with
ankylosing spondylitis, a degenerative connective tissue disease.
Bedridden and so weak he could barely raise his fingers, he was
given a one-in-500 chance of complete recovery. He could sleep,
he discovered, only after watching Marx Brothers comedies and
Candid Camera episodes. It seemed to reduce his pain. Then, somehow,
in the process of laughing, Cousins began to heal, eventually
making an against-all-odds recovery.1,2 Now University of California,
Los Angeles (UCLA), cancer researchers Margaret Stuber, professor
of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and Lonnie Zeltzer, director
of the Pediatric Pain Program at Mattel Children's Hospital, have
launched a five-year study--dubbed Rx Laughter--to investigate
the impact of humor and laughter on the immune systems of dozens
of healthy children and children confronting life-threatening
diseases. The first physician-researchers to look at the impact
of comedy on both healthy and sick children, Stuber and Zeltzer
are calling on the talents of comedy's legendary heroes to help
them out. "We're not hypothesizing that humor will be curative
or that it is going to take the place of any other kind of therapy,
but we [believe] that humor is going to have an additional benefit
over and above simply removing or reducing stress," explains Stuber.
"What I'm hoping is that we'll actually be changing the level
of arousal in the autonomic nervous system, so we'll get the children
to relax at that central level." Adds Zeltzer: "If you're laughing,
you feel better in general. And since it elevates your mood, it
should do something physically in your body to create that feeling
of well-being. I think we're going to learn that exposing yourself
to humor in life will not only change mood and reduce stress hormones
but also influence serotonin levels, which are involved in the
pain-control system. That would mean laughter could have an effect
on chronic pain over time and enhance immunoreactivity, as well
as help with depression and sleep and anxiety disorders." Stuber
and Zeltzer will measure direct physiological responses of the
autonomic nervous system. Initially, they will take low-invasive
measurements of the children's heart rates, blood pressure, and
stress hormones. They plan to extend the tests, adding blood surveys,
among other things, to investigate the impact of humor on the
immune system and on additional hormones, neurotransmitters, and
natural killer (NK) cells. The researchers will also try to differentiate
which comedies work best for which disorders or diseases and what
types of individuals respond better to different types of humor.
The Rx Laughter study will add to the positive-thinking research
that has been ongoing for the last 20 years at UCLA's Norman Cousins
Center for Psychoneuroimmunology, endowed by the renowned writer
in the late 1970s. It will also expand on the basic science investigations
of Lee S. Berk, associate director at the Center for Neuroimmunology
at Loma Linda University Medical Center, also in southern California.
Berk and colleagues have been at the forefront of investigating
the concept of eustress, or good stress paradigms, beginning in
the 1970s with studies of exercise. Actually, it was Cousins who
set up Berk and colleagues with pilot study funds to begin investigating
laughter as a "real eustress metaphor," says Berk. With a small
cohort of mostly medical students, they established the parameters
of the study and took blood samples via intravenous angiocatheters
as the subjects watched a preselected, self-selected humor video,
Over Your Head by comedian Gallagher (Paramount Home Video) to
measure impact on the neuroendocrine system. They found that mirthful
laughter--which Berk defines as "happy laughter as opposed to
coping laughter or black humor or derogatory humor"--reduces stress
hormone levels.3 "The neuroendocrine responses produced were opposite
to what is seen in classical stress," he says. "We fell on the
floor in disbelief that something from our own apothecary could
actually have such an impact. This silliness is really serious
stuff. It's real biology." The publication of those findings drew
notable media attention, including a segment on CBS's 60 Minutes.
Given that kind of notice and the age-old adage, perhaps the most
surprising thing is that more researchers didn't jump on the bandwagon.
"To my surprise, there are really minimal studies looking at the
impact of humor on sick individuals, and nothing in children,"
says Zeltzer. In fact, the amount of research into eustress and
positive emotions has been minimal overall. The reason, suggests
Berk, "is because there were very few people who could bridge
the gap across the borders of immunology, behavioral sciences,
and the technologies of psychoneuroimmunology." Of course, funding
was also an issue. "If you turned in a grant request for a project
that crossed multiple boundaries, as I often have, nobody knew
what to do with it," he adds. Berk, however, continued to add
slowly to the knowledge base with his small cohort studies. Bill
Marx, Harpo Marx's son, makes a "Harpo" face for Justin Ybarra,
a patient at the Mattel UCLA Children's Hospital during the Rx
Laughter advisory board tour in April. It Came from Hollywood
If the scientific community at large was hesitating, the idea
that laughter could help heal began emerging on other fronts.
Rx Laughter actually came straight from Hollywood, the brainstorm
of Sherry Dunay Hilber, a former ABC and CBS network programming
executive who oversaw such hit sitcoms as Home Improvement, Roseanne,
Coach, Who's the Boss?, and Cybill. The study even has its own
Web site: www.rxlaughter.org . Hilber
came up with the study idea about two years ago in the midst,
she says, "of looking for some more meaningful way of using my
abilities, something beyond worrying about the ratings of last
night's show." She pitched her concept to Stuber and Zeltzer,
who immediately came on board as the co-principal investigators
and honed the study plan, and then enlisted the support of the
offspring of comedy's legends. Included on Rx Laughter's Advisory
Board: Josephine Chaplin, daughter of Charlie Chaplin; Chris Costello,
daughter of Lou Costello; Ronald J. Fields, grandson of W.C. Fields;
Melissa Talmadge Cox, the granddaughter of Buster Keaton; and
Bill Marx, son of Harpo Marx of the Marx Brothers. For a scientific
investigation, it is a unique teaming. But the descendants of
comedy's pioneers needed no convincing. Growing up in the whirlwind
shadows of their famous forebears, they learned early that comedy
was a potent and powerful force. "You grow up with what you know,
and I grew up with some wackos who taught me that when you have
a sense of humor, you automatically have an option in your view
of life," says Marx. Fields agrees and adds, "Humor is nothing
but extreme positive thinking." With their support and assistance,
Hilber secured all the necessary rights and permissions from the
studios, free of any licensing charges--something that almost
seems unbelievable. But, as Chris Costello puts it: "There are
some things you just can't put a price tag on." One reason Hilber,
Stuber, and Zeltzer agreed on the works of Chaplin, Costello,
Fields, Keaton, and the Marx Brothers was that they had withstood
the test of time. "We figured there's got to be a reason for that,
and so we felt pretty safe going with those," explains Hilber.
"When I was a child, I never really understood the impact of what
my father did, but I was watching The King in New York recently
and it is true: These films haven't gone out of date. And if they
haven't gone out of date by now, they never will," says Josephine
Chaplin. The Rx Laughter team also figured that these movies and
shorts would serve to establish a more objective reaction, because
the chances are good that most of the children have not seen many,
if any, of them. For funding, Hilber contacted Comedy Central,
which several years ago had established its Comedy Rx program
to promote the positive effects of laughter. The cable network
responded enthusiastically by putting up the initial $75,000.
'Who's on First?' The impact of laughter on the immune systems
of children has "just been waiting to be tested scientifically,"
says Zeltzer. "It seems like such a no-brainer." The concept may
be obvious enough, but designing the parameters of a study like
this is most certainly not a no-brainer. Comedy is highly subjective,
while science strives to be objective beyond question. The levels
of complexity in a study like this are as numerous as they are
intricate, and there are a lot of critical, basic questions to
consider, including: * How does one determine what will be viewed
as funny across the board? * Does it matter how much somebody
laughs versus how funny they think something is? In other words,
is the physical act of laughter an operative factor? * How does
one test for differences across gender lines? Ethnicity lines?
Age demographics? In adult populations, says Berk, "We learned
that there are a lot of potential pitfalls in selecting comedy.
Self- selection of material is important, because what is funny
to one person is not necessarily funny to someone else. If you
don't like slapstick, you will experience a very different biology
than I would." Researchers investigating the impact of humor must
also control for various other issues. "You have to be really
pure when you do this kind of research," says Berk, based on his
previous studies. "Our subjects [had nothing to eat or drink]
for six to eight hours prior to beginning the study. They could
not have exercised, or had coffee or any drugs or chocolate, and
sex was not allowed." For his research, whether the subject(s)
had seen the video before was less of an issue. "I'm looking for
the conditioned response," he says. Actually, he found that the
conditioned phenomenon is real. "In other words, we found positive
effects from the anticipation." Rx Laughter is a study of children,
so theoretically, the researchers will be dealing with a less
socially conditioned, less biased population. Although the investigators
are in the first phase of selecting the videos and finalizing
study parameters, Stuber and Zeltzer have already begun initial
second-phase testing on healthy children to establish a baseline.
In a third phase, they will look at the impact of laughter on
children with cancer, HIV, and other life-threatening diseases
or disorders. "In terms of selecting the comedy videos, part of
what we have been going for are things that are consistently funny
and things that no parents are going to object to," says Stuber.
That is actually harder than one may think. "We have to be careful,
because today, in the 21st century, we have different eyes for
some of these things than people might have had originally." On
request from the researchers, the offspring of the legendary comedians
made initial suggestions. Chaplin, for example, suggested The
Circus. "I thought it was the funniest one for this project, and
that's the one we offered first," she says. Costello recommended
Abbott Costello Meet Frankenstein, but then offered up all
the duo's projects. Regardless of how parents might view slapstick
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