Wednesday May 31, 2006 |
Wednesday May 31, 2006 Global Green Machine!
I have linked to a picture in their project wiki and I suggest you check out either the magazine or the project web sites if you want to know more. tags: Economics Technology OLPC Laptop 
(2006-05-31 13:00:00.0) Permalink Green FuturesI also looked through Green Futures, a magazine about sustainable development which I picked up at one of the Sun offices. It has attracted a number of corporate sponsors, including a number of energy companies and telcos (inc. BT) and surprisingly "First Choice" (one of the UKs biggest travel agents). One of the articles was about Holiday's in 2020 (see also this article..., I wonder if they're linked in anyway?). The main feature was an article by Anthony Lovins, arguing that green energy is cheap energy and that nuclear is both poor environmentally, but also bad economics. (See http://www.rmi.org). I may have to subscribe to this, and I don't see an RSS button. I was surprised when I first heard that Charles Andrews, had been talking to a UK Bank's board members about the brand value of a green data centre, but senior business executives are running with this stuff and I for one need to catch up. tags: Economics environment green future energy
(2006-05-31 12:30:00.0) Permalink Enron: The smartest guys in the roomIt's fairly recent since I last flew Virgin, but I had not seen this documentary about the fall of Enron. (I've not seen it reviewed in Empire either, but that's my fault; they gave it 5 stars here....) Well made, very informative, mixing interview with recorded material from both Enron's corporate archives and the congressional investigating committees. The failings summed up by the ex-trader who states, the Enron tag line was "ask why?", I didn't!, although some people come out of it really well. I wonder if we'll be talking about Bethany McLean, a fortune journalist who wrote the first questioning article in the same breath as Woodward & Bernstein. Probably not, because despite the Bush family and the Republicans being obviously entwined with Enron, it won't bring down the President, although it did contribute to the recall of Schwarzenegger's predecessor in California. (I certainly wasn't aware of the impact of Enron and the politics of energy in that episode.) I suspect its hard to explain "Mark to Market" accounting in a film, or anything short of a term long course in an accountancy or business school, but Bethany McLean followed the money and asked where the revenue was, a simple enough question. The answer was in the manipulated Californian energy market and a corruptly hidden debt mountain. I had just finished reading a "Management Today" article on the private equity (PE) fund business in Europe, and they asked who pays for the PE companies super-profits and argue that its the banks (or their customers) and the same occurred here. Enron's profits (when not fraudulently enhanced) were at the expense of the banks and eventually the Enron staff. In the banks case, their actions in support of Enron were where not illegal, sometimes deeply questionable. tags: Economics Film Enron scandal filmreview
(2006-05-31 11:30:00.0) Permalink Visualising tag cloudsTwo points come to mind on reflecting my conversation with Elias Torres at www20006, (See Tags and Spontaneity below...). First maybe on tag clouds we should use colour for highly used & less frequently used with Red being highly used and Blue (or Indigo) less frequently used. This should mean that the less frequently used tags, which are the most discriminatory (i.e. meaningful) are not visually eclipsed by the most heavily used. Secondly, if we were to look at the structure "UNIX > Solaris > AIX, the significance would only be true if all taggers tagged the articles as UNIX & Solaris or UNIX & AIX, and only then could we be clear on the meaningfulness of a tag. This illustrates that a stranger may need to be familar with the crowd's use of language. Thirdly I'm also not sure how we might 'refine' a query if we start with very meaningful tags, we would have to re-query, although the del.icio.us interface offers you a list of associated tags even for the smallest of queries. tags: Technology www2006 roller tags semanticweb search
(2006-05-31 04:00:00.0) Permalink Cabbage Crates over the BrineyBack to Heathrow for another trip to San Francisco, hopefully I'll get to see some great new stuff. tags: travel
(2006-05-31 03:00:00.0) Permalink |
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Also in Green Futures was an article about 
