Category: Innovation, economics, society at large

Wired / Tired / Expired, May 2014 edition

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[Symbol of …, still in T or moving into E ..?]

So, here’s the May edition of my Wired / Tired / Expired jargon watch overviews:

WIRED TIRED EXPIRED
Small wine appellations (see below) Microbrews Quasi- but very failed hip beers from global brand breweries
For the discovery of them. See below Most are technically drinkable but no more than gimmicks in taste. Awww, they’re as hip as LOLcats!
French, Italian, Spanish (very) small appellations Eastern European wines New world wines
Côtes de Toul, for one. Various Savoie sub-appellations. Knowing your way around Italy’s appellation-per-village / -anthill landscape. The many (sub)regions in Spain. The better quality Luxembourg reds (and whites). Try them, and be begeistert! (Oh, German – still ever so tending to over-sweetness… jammie US/Aussie taste failure) The very few good ones, they keep for themselves. The easy currency inflow, they dump on us. [Sigh] Apart from a very few, still very boring, boorishly simple.
Teen Twitter Terror Threat Bugs like Heartbleed Snowden et al.
Because the panic. By one tweet. Out of …? What if (among) the others (there) are encoded similar ones..? Dude, that’s sooo 1980-2013 (give or take some years); self-referential. From the Eastern front, no news. (Unless one would count the many same messages and very, very long spun out aftermath. Tire to kill ..?
Back to the absolute multi of multimedia Game of Thrones Mad Men
Back to the explosion of formats to communicate through; i.e., not only social media but all forms blended, off-line, online, text, video, paper, F2F, just anything, mixed ad hoc. Frantically searching for the right format – per sound bite. Yeah, yeah, just kill eachother already. Might have stayed fun when it would have some actual history. The mehhh of series.
Home cooking Street food French. Or pure Thai.
Because, if (!) one can, this is best, in quality of ingredients and control to not have the bad ones of those (e.g., salt… light if any, not tons to extract flavour from bland wholesale stuff). Pure Markets, hipster cooking vans, et al. Watch out, the hoi polloi of wannabe classy but middle-aged mediocre-minded drones are picking up and overflowing the area with passive-agressive bitchiness..! There’s so much more specialised kitchens – that actually are purely themselves, not still simpled-over-to-fake(!)-narrowminded-average tastes.
Home garden vegetables Bio (-dynamic / organic) veggies Plain supermarket veggies
The purity – of pleasure in seeing them grow, in nurturing. Passive-aggressive B12-insufficients, couldn’t feed the tiniest part of the world population if they’d try to roll their methods out beyond their little kindergarten acre. Semi-purified water, supplemented with E-numbers to add flavour.
OK, one more for this month, on the tech side:
Software Defined everything Managed security services SIEM / IAM
Because abstraction is good for business; mixing less under-standing, less overview and more complexity and (hence) much error-proneness (if that is a word). If they weren’t managed already, move over to Little League / Internal or external, what’s the difference ..! (fundamentally) Process nay procedures infrastructure driven by erstwhile point solutions. Yeah, baby, fire up the klesydra!
And a final one, to throw it in here by lack of a better place
Google Now Siri Dragon
Going strong, and working Joked about often enough. May have started to work i.e., not too little anymore, but too late. Same, big time; desktop oriented hence mehhh.

OK, any suggestions for next month’s edition ..?

Who controls the Watsons…?

First, a picture for your viewing delight:
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[Seems chaotic, yet navigable]

Who controls the Watsons in your pocket, once they arrive ..?
Anoher one triggered by Clive Thompson’s Smarter Than You Think: When not if Watson has morphed into a Software Defined Anything something small enough to fit on your mobile, just about everyone will use it in cyborg / centaur ways to augment oneself. This will require adaptation of the way one goes around in the world, and …
may create a dependence on the Machine, possibly a big one for those that had gained the most by this new ways.

But

  • Where will the database sit that hold all the info to be brute-force searched, in breath and depth ..?
    If it is local, then how are the inputs screened; are they, and by whom ..? Who would know anything about the stuff you/they miss out on ..? Homophilia (groupthink/narrowingmindedness) and its grave dangers.
    If it is somewhere remote, the control issues loom even larger. Yes, capacity-wise this may work much better. But the Central Scrutinizer (eternal thanks) may … will be the blue pills all around solultion …!
  • Even if primarily stored locally, who will have access to the images stored remotely for ‘backup purposes’ ..? Due to the enormous dependence that the PocketWatsons will create, backups are ‘more essential’ than ever, and by their nature must be kept at some distance. What a TLA wet dream would it be to lay their hands on yours…!

That’s only two questions that popped up already. There will be many more. And the answers …
Who will provide those, who will pick the best ones, who will decide what’s best ..!?

To Be Continued.

What’s the Edsel App of 2014 ..?

Would any of you be interested to help me start a competition to find, and have voted, the Edsel App of 2014 ..? Or have an award ceremony every quarter, or so ..?

This would be about the app, or application, or system, or any invention in general, where all that see it at its publication go like what were they even thinking!?

To be clear, this will be called the Edsel App for a reason, being it is the high water mark of an idea smash-bombed into oblivion by its utter ugliness.

Which brings us to all sorts of criteria and competition requirements.
Re eligibility; there are gazillions of apps that never gain any traction. There are even more, that are ugly and/or operationally/practically disfunctional as @#$%&*. But I aim for the ones that were designed by serious, large teams of developers, designers, etc., in reputable large companies with reasonable track records.
Where do we find them; who brings them to us?
How do we ‘ test’ them?

Etc., to be continued. I’ll leave it here for now, with a picture for your viewing delight (??):
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[The Hague parliament, dreadful design outside, same in its operations…]

The age-old question of transcendence

First, a picture of course:
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[“Mehh, why not just put a concrete slab over the canal..?”; Calatrava at Hoofddorp]

After finishing reading (partially as in ‘studying’) Smarter Than You Think (again), I saw this little piece on transcendence … taking it from another angle. Unsure how to marry the two perspectives…

Does ES equal PR ..?

In Clive Thompson’s Smarter Than You Think. near the end there’s a reminder:

In 1996, writer and electronic activist John Perry Barlow proclaimed “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Addressing old-school governments – “you weary giants of flesh and steel” – he proclaimed “You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” As it turns out, nothing of the sort was true.

Now, this raised a question:

How is – or isn’t – Edward Snowdon, or Julian Assange for that matter, not Paul Revere ..?

How is “The regulars are coming!” not just bringing out info that in itself was true and factual, and quite innocent, if it weren’t for its implications for the ruled, by oppressors that were exactly that by overarching secrecy of their operations ..? If you’re doing nothing wrong, then you have nothing to hide works for sousveillance as well.

Paul Revere certainly did it. Calling them Regulars instead of plainly Redcoats as to subvert their attempts to execute him outright as a rebel just for using such indicative langauge, means he understood to neutralise his langauge to that of the oppressor, to expose the latter for all in the know.
So, when Assange and later Snowdon just outed the very documents, not accusations based on them but as extreme summaries, these were minor offences if, not when, the conclusions from those plain flat documents would have been normal legitimate business. The ‘crime’ was created only by the overreactions. The regulars are coming. So what ..?

But for the careless reader, it may not have been clear enough: I really do seek arguments back and forth re this question: How does ES equal PR, or not ..? Your thoughts please [And TLAs listening/reading in: I’m serious about weighing arguments pro and contra…]

And here’s a picture because you waited so patiently for the end…:
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[Exposed modernity, sedate oldness; ON]

Your tips and categories, please re socmed tool evolution

Just a question to you: To deliver categories for social media tools that I will inventorise for innovation and evolution.
Now that Facebook and Whatsapp are going the way of MySpace, and Twitter and Pinterest may be on their heels qua abandonment (?), plus Google+ still being in the dark a bit and WordPress going strong still but Medium and a couple of others are making inroads, a slew of new tools come forward.
I will post some comparison tables on their functionality (primary/secondary functionality, persistence or ephemeral, fringe or potential mainstream, technical complexity, focal verticals, group structures, privacy notes, etc.).
But I’ll need your input. Both for tool tips, but also for categories. As of now, I only have long form blogs; short form notes/blogs; short messaging; picture sharing; classifieds; product/services reviews. There are more, I suspect.

As a thank-you in advance already, herewith a picture, of course:
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[Beautiful Source, cake-style – think that one through (2x)]

Wired / Tired / Expired, April 2014 edition

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[A night at the opera, Valencia style not Marx brothers]

So, here’s the April edition of my Wired / Tired / Expired jargon watch overviews:

WIRED TIRED EXPIRED
Ensemble modeling Descriptive
–
Diagnostic
–
Predictive
–
Prescriptive		 Big Data!
Sort-of scenario modelling (two l’s is the right way). Like the what-ifs in Lotus 1-2-3 of old. Principles still haven’t changed. Already this goes into the Mehhhh category Oh yes. Bee drone.
Curation of content Fedoras H… H… Hip… …eards
just can’t get it out of my throat
Because of this:
Het is Coffee Company beleid dat je met je macbook in de etalage aan je filmscript werkt, anders krijg je geen soja-moccha-latté-decaf. — René van Meurs (@renevanm) February 20, 2014

and similar early indicators that the new wave of content curation, i.e., When in Search For a Better Life, start Writing a Blog, Columns, Articles, Movie Scripts…		 Because of this. Have a look around; you’ll also notice how many #fails you see and how few, desperately few, actual right-wearers. And in the mean time, this (Do click to see it!) has also surfaced…
I’ll leave it here.		 Yes you read it right in:
This Font Is Made From Beard – http://t.co/FxxPH6M3Td — Gizmodo Australia (@GizmodoAU) February 19, 2014
Old and new: I see them bureacratising. I hatin’. Because reasons.
Procurement Compliance HR
Where the new company bottleneck is. By going for the steepest price cuts suppliers can afford that department will squeeze out any and all business partnership that you carefully crafted with your suppliers. Well actually, in the medium run, can’t afford hence they’ll deliver junk then go broke and you have tons of problems again. Procurement saved some x%, you lose some yy% of quality. Bottom line: Big losses all around.
And don’t come around that Procurement wants to be a business partner as well, sitting around the table with you. They will block any giveaway that you negotiate with for fear of death they’ll lose their ability to fetch fat bonuses for, again, squeezing out every last drop – of blood from your suppliers. That’s their job.
And while they’re sitting around the table, they demonstrate to have no clue about the content anyway, but will try to mask that by uttering something stupid (giving them away) on a misinterpretation of something they misheard, leading to question marks all around the table on how to even react.		 Bureacracy defined. Luckily, waning. “We do all your function profiles!” – “Except for the content; you’ll need to supply that yourself. And we’ll turn down whatever you as the content expert want in there, as it doesn’t fit the categories that we have from some external party that doesn’t understand the least of our core business and that are outdated by a decade but we don’t care as these are the officially sanctioned categories as established by some government agency many decades ago.”
“We do all the selection process!” – “Except the actual selection, you’ll have to do that all yourself and we will fault you on not following one of the most obscure and unproven Don’ts.”
“We do all the performance appraisal work!” – “Except the performance appraisals, which you’ll have to do yourself. See previous remark re missing the one obscure nono. And, by the way, however excellent your staff despite the HR department, you must grade everyone Average; we cannot afford otherwise [i.e., otherwise the grading will prove to be a heap of local nepotism].”
Whatever BYOD / Cloud CObIT
The Great Giving Up of Trying to manage Org IT.
Where no-one controls much of anything anymore. It’s about the Data, Stupid! Yes I know, I know even better than you think; it’s not about the data, it’s about the value captured in that information that has data as its carrier. For the time being; value expires in all sorts of wyas. it’s about capturing the value before that. It’s about data-centric security (i.e., fully-transparent data-atomic encryption). If only we could put the right tools in the right places…		 Ouch! Our systems management is exploding!
We need to keep ou faces up as if we are in the lead of this all. We aren’t at all.		 We really need totalitarian control over all IT.
As if that was possible ever, as if not all attempts to implement ITIL, v2, v3 etc.etc. did fail. Jammed between smashing actual productivity under tons of paperwork, and actually doing something, doing firefighting and a full diplomacy circus.

OK, any suggestions for next month’s edition ..?

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord