I’ve just read about the most recent update from the Parexel / TeGenero clinical trials that went wrong (Elephant men). The four people who were hardest hit appear to have lost a large chunk of their immune system. Translation: they’ll die, pretty quickly, but on no set schedule. Horrific. Who will take the £2000 vs your life bet?
Archive for July, 2006
There’s some useful stuff on this blog “Personal Development for Smart People”, but the tone of it puts my teeth on edge like scratching blackboards.
The first hard drive is 50 years old. It weighed a ton, was the size of two large fridges, cost $250k/year to lease, held 5Mb of data and had 50 24-inch disks. What made it special? Random access to data rather than sequential read from tapes.
Interesting thoughts on the future of marketing from John Hagel. He describes three forces which are combining to change the approach to customers:
- It’s about attention, not shelf space
- Costs of production and distribution are declining
- Customer acquisition and retention is getting more expensive
These all make it tricky to do traditional marketing (Intercept, Inhibit, Isolate) and presage a shift to collaboration (Attract, Assist, Affiliate). Hagel calls for Return on Attention (on both sides) and Return on Information measures to track progress in this new world. Key point: there is a substantial marketing change programme required to deliver marketeers to this next phase. I don’t see anyone out there doing it.
[More from Maister on individual marketing through blogs and related items.]
Must read summary on why the collapse of the Doha round of world trade talks is a disaster. There appears to be a definite shift in attitude to climate change in the public’s mind, which may well lead to a change in politicians’ attitudes. So the question is this: How to bring about the same situation in trade? It is far less interesting / cute than polar bears falling of shrinking ice caps.
Interesting discussion from Maister on how all of the onion layers of modern working can and should interlink. Is my project / team / office / country / client / boss / industry / specialism the focus of my effort? I can’t do all of them, as there are just too many meetings in the day given all of the interactions between the groups.
I wonder how this would play in central government, where the direct customer contact is more limited. For local government, I can see that very similar rules hold for commercial organisations.
Lovely set of corporate logos reworked for the 2.0 world. Started off here.
Genius album title. Thanks Jonza.
So I’d never heard of khums, an Islamic tax system separate to zakat (which I had heard of). (Lots of good stuff in opendemocracy, by the way.) The article argues that cutting off funding through Lebanon will not cut off funding for Hizbollah, as they could be funded through khums. Well worth reading the longer article on khums. I find this mix of religion, scriptural analysis and economics terribly hard to read; I guess believers must find our economic papers soulless and heartless in a similar way.
Looks like the game’s up for the long tail. 80/20 is becoming 70/30, maybe. But Amazon makes 75% of sales from 100,000 items (that’s 2.7% of its stock). So looks like my earlier thoughts were on track. The question now is whether the “mid” items take too much effort to farm vs a hits only business.
Interesting factoid: the stem cell vote was the first time Bush has used his veto. Other recent presidents have used four or five a year at least. This could suggest that Bush’s power is waning in Senate and Congress, just as his approval ratings are slipping.
Some excellent forward looking articles:
Interesting empirical approach to hiring (I guess you have to do this in large organisations. Summary: always hire above the curve, if posible. I can also see the “no hiring manager” piece working, but wonder if the “fit” between manager and new hire doesn’t potentially suffer. I’ve always found that the last interviews in a series tend to be about fit and selling of the company, rather than the technical skills of the hire. Again, this is for more generalist consulting, not for specific technical competencies.
Lots of mixed stuff today:
- Cheese string theory
- How Google manages click fraud
- Rude Britain (and the world as well now)
- Logmyjourney (not sure I want to pay for the service - would a history of dodgy cabs you’ve been in make any sense in keeping?)
- Empirical Mathematics
- Writing on water (I want, I want as a water feature)
- Some Heston Blumenthal recipes. But how to simulate a vacuum dessicator?
- Are you in a newsworthy part of the world?
- There is an international version of OhmyNews, which has the same “written by 35k newsbloggers” style.
- Colossal images and genealogy writ large
Random generation of Daily Mail headlines. Neat.
Bless:
This is a transcript of the speech made by
Minister for Local Government and Community Cohesion Phil Woolas at a
seminar hosted by the British Toilet Association and Keep Britain Tidy
campaign on 19 July 2006. He talks about public toilets.
These longer (30 minute) CNN interviews look interesting - a bit like From our own correspondent. Let’s hope my ear infection clears up so that I can use my iRiver again…
Caroline is entering this as a navigator. That she gets car sick when she drives and that she’s never done it before and is a very aggressive back seat driver should not worry anyone. NB apologies for confusion - it is the Welsh Endurance Rally, and nothing to do with the Welsh Enduro (as ne ful kno).
Maybe this is something to get into while Caroline is in the states? Apparently it is very good Democracy game: you can’t just create utopia and retire – the increased congestion caused by your green lanes on the motorway cause your approval ratings to drop. Even though you’re doing right, you can’t continue to do right unless you stay elected…
Guy reviews Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail which summarises knowledge to date for the lay person. John Hagel argues that we’re in a transition stage that will cause the current long tail industries to consolidate around the three models (infrastructure, innovation, relationship). How long before people are regularly saying that Anderson invented the term, rather than popularising it - for the record Clay Shirky was writing about it in 2003.
[Update: Jupiter reports on negative coverage of the book. It seems to me that arguing about whether the long tail is or isn’t growing misses some of the point. My take is that providing customers access to the long tail that is important - they will purchase from it. You can have a business with “hits only”, but that will have to be a specific customer service choice.
