brent phillips

Since October 7, 2007 approximately 1,519,627,180 grains of rice have been donated to the United Nations World Food Program through freerice.com.  What is it? Advertisers on the site provide 10 grains of rice for every word you match correctly with its definition. Its addictive!

From the site:

Learning new vocabulary has tremendous benefits. It can help you:

• Formulate your ideas better
• Write better papers, emails and business letters
• Speak more precisely and persuasively
• Comprehend more of what you read
• Read faster because you comprehend better
• Get better grades in high school, college and graduate school
• Score higher on tests like the SAT, GRE, LSAT and GMAT
• Perform better at job interviews and conferences
• Sell yourself, your services, and your products better
• Be more effective and successful at your job

After you have done FreeRice for a couple of days, you may notice an odd phenomenon. Words that you have never consciously used before will begin to pop into your head while you are speaking or writing. You will feel yourself using and knowing more words.

Check it out. Test your vocabulary. Help make a difference.   My current vocabulary score is 36. I need help.

I tuned in to BBC from Nice tonight and picked up an interesting story about processor technology. Part of the discussion focused on gaming supercomputing that would “offer the cinematic quality of modern films”  (like 300 perhaps?) rendered in real-time for game play on the PC. While the technologist in me is fascinated by the notion of such an immersive user experience, as a dad I get very nervous about how this might affect those who play them - especially younger children who are still developing emotionally and cognitively.   I decided to dig around on this and found some great links, the most interesting was a page written by Craig Anderson of the American Psychological Association. This is a good resource if you need more insight on entertainment violence. 

I will offer one outtake that confirmed my assumptions…

Violent video games are significantly associated with: increased aggressive behavior, thoughts, and affect; increased physiological arousal; and decreased prosocial (helping) behavior.

As with many technologies, I look forward to this with cautious optimism. I also firmly believe that the good will significantly outweight the bad. It definitely puts me on guard however, especially having seen the realism of violence in today’s video games. I did not see details of this in Anderson’s paper specifically, but I would imagine that the more realistic the experience, the greater the impact. 

Fixing this, i.e. making sure our kids are not overly exposed to violence, is not the responsibility of the chip and software makers, however. There is a reason why we’re called parents after all. 

I’m in Cannes this week for Gartner’s IT Expo. I’m posting updates on my trip here. Great show after day one and definitely enjoying the weather!

Per my last post, I pulled down a panel discussion from the Stanford Technology Ventures program. Its worth a listen if you follow this space although you won’t get into much granularity. One comment that stood out was a forecast that social network sites will be obsolete in ten years. The thinking is that technology will evolve to such a degree that the notion of specific sites to manage our personas, profiles, and friend lists will seem archaic to users at that time. Instead, the nature of pervasive , or ubiquitous, computing will allow us to make the connections with others more seamlessly and with less effort.  An example given is that we might wear technology that carries our profile and when we come in contact with someone of similar interests, the technologies make the appropriate connection for us - perhaps noting the other user’s profile to be reviewed at a later time (Location based services are evolving rapidly for mobile technology so the idea is not that far fetched).  But I digress. In the end -  good talking points to think about. For now, there is a significant amount of research on the topic as social networks exist today.   One resource that recently came to my attention is the work being done by Dana Boyd (Berkeley) and Nicole Ellison at Michigan State. See Dana’s post here or link directly to their research here. From the site, they cover a usable definition of “social network sites”, a history of some of the major shifts in the development of SNSs, a literature review of work done in this space, and a description of the articles included in the special issue.  This is a great read and a great starting point for those interested in this topic.

I checked out the new iTunes U catalog yesterday and was pleasantly surprised (shocked!) at the breadth and depth of offerings.  For those who are unfamiliar with the service, iTunes now offers video/audio downloads of course lectures from a number of leading universities.  The topics vary as do the number of lectures you might get for each - A Human Computer Interaction course at Stanford, for example, offers  8 lectures, while the IS 103 “History of Information” Series at Berkley offers a staggering 40 lectures. Other offer considerably more. As I reviewed the catalog, I was also impressed by the fact that the lectures all seem to be current (within a year or so) and also - best of all - free of charge.

Now for someone like me, this is a dangerous proposition - although much appreciated. I’m already an avid reader and have a very broad range of interests.  At the very least I see the service as a complement to other professional development activities, but also as a way of brushing up on various hobbies (guitar lessons, anyone?).  My challenge of course is scarcity of time so picking and choosing wisely will be the challenge. 

Shifting gears a bit, I also checked out apple’s website and found the following comment which got me thinking a bit:  ”iTunes U is transforming the way people learn on campus, off campus, and where there’s no campus at all. ” Its a pitch, but also an interesting point that begs the question - Do we need lecture halls anymore? I’ve got some thoughts on that which I will revisit in another post. For now, I’ve started my downloads…

1. Human Computer Interaction: Innovation on User Research Methods during the development of Windows Vista, Gayna Williams, Microsoft.
2. Intellectual Property Scholars Conference 2007, DePaul University. Accommodating the Evolution of Intellectual Infrastructure: Applying Lessons from Trademark and Copyright to Improve Patent Law. Peter Lee.  
3. UC Berkley. Information: An Introduction. Paul Duguid.

I read quite a bit and was recently thinking through a short list of books that I have enjoyed from a marketing / business development perspective over the past few years. As a range, topics cover economics, e-business, social media, innovation, and marketing and business strategy. Certainly there are many, many other - these just happen to be the one I’ve found and taken the time to read. In fact - I would be very interested in any suggestions!

For convenience, I’ve posted a widget to the right (scroll down) which allows you to see details from this site or to click through to the the book profile on amazon.

I recently ordered a new laptop for work and, based on a recommendation from a colleague, opted for the Lenovo T61p. I had not used a Lenovo machine (think ThinkPad) before and was a bit nervous about shifting away from my tablet PC, however, given rather unique requirements and the resulting performance, “ I can honestly say that I am very impressed. My requirements are unique because I need the box to support a number of technologies that Microsoft is working on with Novell - If you are not familiar with our partnership, please follow this link to download our roadmap.  Specifically, in the short term, this means Longhorn Server Virtualization with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, common file access, and document format interoperability (We’ll get to systems management and federated identity some time later). I also wanted to keep a copy of Vista Enterprise on the box for my daily routine.

Setup was pretty straightforward. I used the Windows Server 2008 ‘Longhorn’ RC0 to partition the hard drive (100GB) – basically splitting it in half with  Windows Server on one partition and Vista Enterprise on the other (Both are x64).  With that done, I hit the Lenovo site to reload the automatic update utility for both operating systems to ensure that drivers/etc were in place, my last step for initial setup was to create a common directory for my files.

The virtualization install was also pretty straightforward. After enabling virtualization for the CPU (simple toggle in system setup), I simply loaded a couple of modules from microsoft.com and added the virtualization role in server manager. For details on these steps please see:

Download Windows Server 2008 here. Install Virtualization here.

After a few minutes setting up the virtual machine, I was able to load SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1 (x86) onto the box.  Both servers are running fine and the CPU performance is hovering well under 10% utilization. Not bad.

My next step is to load the office products and file format translators which I do not expect will cause any further stress on the box.

Needless to say, I like the machine. After it came, I did a bit of research and found this post from Keith Combs. He is also a fan apparently and describes the features in a bit more detail from a user perspective. If you’re in the market, I would definitely give it a try.