Month: June 2005

The Power Of Us is a nice Business Week article about how companies can tap into their user communities. The punchline is: no matter how big your company is, there are always more people outside of it than inside of it. If you can get all those outside people to help you out, even a little bit, some amazing things can happen. At the same time, it’s a little unnerving giving the Great Unwashed the keys to your house. Is Open Source a friend or a threat? If you can’t find some way to befriend it, you’re in for some real trouble. John Q. Public is a jerk, but he’s rich, and he’s got a few really good ideas. As the irrepressible Jeff Bezos says, “You invite the community in, and you get all this help.” Here’s an extended quote from the article. I like the image of using social graces to turn windmills.

Yochai Benkler, a Yale Law School professor who studies the economics of networks, thinks such online cooperation is spurring a new mode of production beyond the two classic pillars of economics, the firm and the market. “Peer production,” as he calls work such as open-source software, file-sharing, and Amazon.com Inc.’s millions of customer product reviews, creates value with neither conventional corporate oversight nor market incentives such as payment. “The economic role of social behavior is increasing,” he says. “Things that would normally just dissipate in the air as social gestures become economic products.”

I recently read an article about the latest stem cell breakthrough in South Korea and it resonated with something I read about some months ago: medical tourism. Medical tourism is the practice of traveling to a cheap country with excellent doctors, typically India, in order to get uninsured medical procedures done. Tech Central Station and Yale Global both have good articles about the topic. The bottom line is that, if you’re uninsured for a given operation, it can cost as much as two thirds less to do it in India even when you take air travel and recuperation time into account. As both wealth and medical expenses continue to mount in the West, medical tourism is bound to take off. The trends all point in the right direction, and besides, isn’t your doctor already Indian? Or maybe she’s Chinese?

What struck me recently is how therapeutic stem cell research fits perfectly into this picture. You might travel to another country simply because a procedure is cheaper there, but you might do it because it is illegal and considered morally reprehensible where you come from. That is, if you have the means to save your child’s life through the magic of stem cells, then you you will fly to find them wherever they can be found.

House Republican leader Tom DeLay has made his position on stem cells clear. “An embryo,” he said, “is a person, a distinct internally directed, self-integrating human organism.” Korean researchers, however, don’t give a goddamn about Tom Delay’s opinion on stem cell research (aside from perhaps being grateful for the extra business he sends their way). And when, years from now, you need stem cells to treat your withering Parkinsonism, it will be cheap and pleasant to fly to Korea to get them. Think of all the morally upright American institutions you’ll fly over to get there. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, while you’re over there, you see an aging and palsied Tom Delay getting a stem cell boost of his own.

What is a Sudoku? A Sudoku (as explained here in the Wikipedia) is a number/logic puzzle that involves placing the numbers 1 through 9 on a 9-by-9 grid such that no number appears twice on the same row, column, or specially marked 3-by-3 box. Perhaps the real puzzle is why it should have become such a pop sensation in places from Hong Kong to New Zealand to the UK. Here is some coverage of the story from the BBC and Guardian. Nevertheless, a phenomenon it certainly is, and I am not one to shrink from hopping on the bandwagon.

I have been interested in brushing up on my Java skills, and this Sudoku craze has given something good to chew on. With that in mind, I have created Sudoku Satori, the Sudoku solving assistant. Try it out and let me know what you think. It’s in a pretty rudimentary state right now, but it sure works when it comes to solving these puzzles. It’s a simple matter to have the computer solve the puzzle for you. What this tool does is help you see the patterns so you can understand and solve the puzzle (hence the satori part).

I had come across David Rumsey’s historical map collection before, but this article at the
O’Reilly Network provides some nice background on how it came about.

Clay Shirky has posted the full text of his Ontology is Overrated talk. I mentioned this before, but now that the full text is up (including the illustrations from the PowerPoint presentation), it’s worth a read. Here is an example he brings out from the old Dewey Decimal System, which I sure remember from my school libraries growing up.

The one sentence summary of the talk is the title of part two of his talk: “The Only Group That Can Categorize Everything Is Everybody.”

Some blogs just go on and on about stuff that other people create, but occasionally you find a blog, like my friend Nabeel’s, where he doesn’t say too much, but every now and then he actually makes something. As it happens, Nabeel has stitched together a few services (most notably Google Maps) so that he can show you where the information you’re looking for is found. He calls it Geoogle. He starts with Yahoo to find a list of sites that match your search, then uses reverse domain lookup to find the servers address, followed by a web service that resolves addresses into latitude and longitude, which he can finally pour onto a lovely Google map. Got that? Not surprisingly, all the Boston hits are based in Boston. The string “Nabeel”, however, doesn’t return any pointing to the author of the site. His site may become so popular that he claims the top Nabeel spot after a while.

Well done, Nabeel!