Ethics
Google launched Latitude – a features in Google Maps that lets you keep track of your friend’s locations. As with all technologies, this one will pose new challenges. I can’t wait for the first divorce stories to hit the press where spouses tracked their spouse’s activities and logged all of the locations they stopped. “Your [...]
I wondered when this was going to happen. As distribution of early news gets more wide spread (from the two big papers in town to all uhhh hundred million bloggers), I could see the holes appearing in the dyke. Tech Crunch has posted their new policy which is that they’ll agree to any embargoe you [...]
Ben Franklin said it best: “Those who would trade liberty for a bit of safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” This is appalling. I urge everybody to watch this:
This is without a doubt the best business movie of the year for its content. And it is probably one of my favourite movies of the year for its film quality as well. This movie is BRILLIANT. It is the true story of a men’s brogue shoe factory in Northamptonshire, England that in order to [...]
I’m intrigued by stories such as this one in the ABC News about the plumbers union in Philadelphia who claim that no-flush green urinals are a health threat. I wonder if the union sees them more as a health threat to the UNION DUES than to the USERS. Does anybody have any information on negative [...]
(If you are looking for the 2007 event information, please click HERE.) I am very excited about our launch of the 30 Days of Sustainability. For the month of March, Vancouver will host a cornucopia of events and activities, all focused around bringing sustainability to our lives and our city. One key component of the [...]
It is only when you take into account the sum total of a person’s associations, actions, talk, relationships, you get a more complete picture of them in the real world than if you just listen to their words. The corollary in the web 2.0 world (or web 1.0 world for that matter) is that the [...]
Back in 2003, I attended a pivotal event at the Vancouver Enterprise Forum. Normally, these events generally follow a predictable pattern. People fill in the room, buy a drink and wander aimlessly. The venture capitalists avoid the nervous entrepreneurs with the bad pitches and the keen students stand nervously in the corner, not sure who [...]
A Cornell university study has found that 44% of Amerikans favoured “some restrictions on the civil liberties of Muslim Americans.” But remember George Bush, “this is not a war of Christian against Muslim or Westerners against Easterners, it is a war on terror.” Umm, yeah, right. Shockingly, those who were most inclined to vote this [...]
If you have not read about this horriffic case yet, Lisa M. Montgomery of Melvern Kansas had a baby girl fourteen years ago and then had her tubes tied. Since that time, she frequently claimed that she was pregnant to her ex-husband, current husband, and fellow dog-show attendees. Even more recently, she claimed on a [...]
Book-burning and more importantly, book-re-writing has been used throughout the rein of man to erase the collective knowledge and to curb dangerous thoughts and direct society. This infamous technique for hiding knowledge continues unabated today in Texas. Dubya and the ideologues (sounds like a great rock band title), continue to push their ideological and theological [...]
My nephew Matt sent me a link to this Wired article on rat neurons being used to control a flight simulator. In essence, they have plugged the feedback and the control systems into the neurons and have found that eventually the neurons learn how to “fly” the virtual plane. Now, I have heard of using [...]
I love stories like this one at the Christian Science Monitor about Chris Anderson, a New Zealand scientist using crops to clean up contaminated mines. (Thanks Z+Partners for the link.) In one fell swoop, he has come up with a process to improve the environment (both by having plants around and by having the plants [...]
This is an extremely long post on Massive Change, the multi-media exhibition that is intended to be the starting point for a global discussion on the role of design in creating our world. Here is a bit from their website that gives you a sense of the goals of the project.
I love Ray Kurzweil. Here is a short but interesting interview from CIO magazine where Kurzweil predicts things that will sound outlandish to most people: • outsourcing is a good thing and in the bigger picture not an issue because it’s not a zero-sum game – he gives a 200 year view of these similar [...]
See this link with lots of detail over at Macintouch, including some sleuthing from my friend Trevor Inkpen at Quill Services. Smells fishy so far….
I’m pretty sure that I did not get 27 referrals from www.diamondweddings.com yesterday but that’s what my Blogware is reporting. So I checked out their site and they seem to be some sort of aggregator that points to other sites and it is plastered with a row and a column of Google ads. The whole [...]
The whole Martha Stewart débacle fiasco pisses me off. That’s the most eloquent way I can put it. The larger macro-trend is that the government has been under pressure to “do something” about corporate malfeasance. So do they do something about people who are really committing heinous crimes and defrauding people of millions of dollars? [...]
Fast Company has a brief article on the rise of social entrepreneurship and how that is being reflected in the courses that are being designed at the various MBA programs. QUOTE: More young people “want to make money and produce profits, but they want their work to have meaning and a social mission.” As awareness [...]
This new 2 minute clip on how the Republicans have managed to distract Americans despite an entire four years of failure is almost as brilliant as This Land. Look for web-reports that the author of this will surely exceed bandwidth limits on his/her Earthlink site soon.
What a nightmare this year’s election is going to be in Florida. For any of you who are interested, I HIGHLY recommend reading this very long article at the Independent.co.uk website on the state of the Florida election systems. It’s absurd.
Thanks to Fred Wilson for pointing out this NYT article that documents the direct mail campaign that the Republicans used in Arkansas and West Virginia – traditionally religious states. QUOTE mailings include images of the Bible labeled “banned” and of a gay marriage proposal labeled “allowed.” A mailing to Arkansas residents warns: “This will be [...]
I believe that Vancouver can become a global center for technology excellence. Because of that, my goal is to do everything I can to contribute to that community, including learning how to build technology companies, developing our technology community, and working with the greater non-tech community to ensure that the entire fabric of the community [...]
Ouch. This article from Wired Magazine confirms that the 50 year old barrel lock design used in all Krypto bike locks and in many other applications, can be opened with a Bic Pen. The funny part is that this has been known for at least twelve years. This story illustrates so many things. • It [...]
I highly recommend reading this open letter from Curt Goering, Senior Deputy Executive Director of Amnesty International, on the results of their first ever racial profiling report on the U.S. Mr. Goering powerfully states that the results of racial profiling are not helping and indeed are hindering the war on terrorism, and that like so [...]
Life imitates art. Art imitates life. “Godsend“, a movie opening August 17th, starring Robert de Niro as a doctor who clones children for parents who have lost a child due to early accidents or other loss, has a real-life equivalent. Or so says the man in question – Doctor Panos Zavos. Quoting from a news.scotsman.com [...]
Fast Company linked over to this Tufts University transcript of Pierre and Pam Omidyar’s commencement speeches to the Class of 2002. Some key lessons from Pierre and Pam’s speeches: • Prepare for the unexpected – prepare lots and learn lots but don’t feel that you have to connect all the dots at the same time; [...]
Here are a couple of articles on the new report from the Inspector General of the EPA where he states that the White House directly changed the language in the press releases before they were releaased to the public around the time of 9/11. Now there is still a huge amount of pollution, possibly including [...]
Everything old is new again. It’s all about timing. These are only two of a few choice phrases that may describe something that is afoot here in British Columbia. Some major global, national, and provincial forces are in play that are driving the development of a new (to us) association that may be created in [...]
Here is a wonderful article on Laurance Rockefeller, philanthropist, philosopher, mediator, venture capitalist, conservationist. It is inspiring to say the least.
