I want to live a life with minimum regret.  Thinking that I can’t be the only one who has this philosophy I Googled to see who else might share my view.  Color me surprised when the first link I found was a video interview with Jeff Bezos on living with a framework of Minimizing Regret.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwG_qR6XmDQ

So here’s to letting those around me who impact me know it.  Here’s to telling people you love them while you have the opportunity.  Here’s to grabbing for the brass ring daily, to reaching for the stars and working your butt off on a goal.  Here’s to living my life to it’s fullest.

…” guess it comes down to a simple choice, really.  Get busy living or get busy dying.”- Andy Dufresne – Shawshank Redemption

Mapping the internet as it goes truly global (Image: Matthew Hurst/SPL)

Imagine what browsing the web would be like if you had to type out addresses in characters you don’t recognise, from a language you don’t speak. It’s a nightmare that will end for hundreds of millions of people in 2010, when the first web addresses written entirely in non-Latin characters come online.

Net regulator ICANN – the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers – conceded in October that more than half of the 1.6 billion people online use languages with scripts not fully compatible with the Latin alphabet. It is now accepting applications for the first non-Latin top level domains (TLDs) – the part of an address after the final “dot”. The first national domains, counterparts of .uk or .au, should go live in early 2010. So far, 12 nations, using six different scripts, have applied and some have proudly revealed their desired TLD and given a preview of what the future web will look like.

The first Arabic domain is likely to be Egypt’s and in Russia orders are already being taken for the country’s hoped-for new TLD. The address HOBЫЙyЧеНЫЙ.pф – a rough translation of “newscientist” with the Cyrillic domain that stands for Russian Federation – can be registered today.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427395.800-2010-preview-the-polygot-web.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

]]> http://kathleenforden.com/2009/12/25/the-polygot-web/feed/ 0 kforden http://kathleenforden.com/2009/12/06/mind-reading-neural-decoding-goes-mainstream/ http://kathleenforden.com/2009/12/06/mind-reading-neural-decoding-goes-mainstream/#comments Sun, 06 Dec 2009 19:26:51 +0000 kforden http://kathleenforden.com/?p=669 ]]> For the past two months I’ve been running a large project for the world’s largest provider of higher education and have not really had a lot of time to post.

During that time I kept seeing signs of what I call the start of the human-machine convergence.  Yes, I know there are precedents for this and these are not the “true first signs”.

I’m interested for another reason, the way it is being marketed.  For some reason it’s being commercialize this holiday season.  Several “toys” are being promoted to consumers that allow brain reading to control objects in front of you.

Mattel and StarWars Science are both offering these toys at your local Walmart or Target.  But good luck finding them, even with a $100+ price tag they appear to have sold out.

I don’t have the time to post all of my thoughts, and came across this article below that sums up what I was missing above.  Have fun and enjoy the read, let me know your thoughts too!

Mind Reading (Neural Decoding) Goes Mainstream | h+ Magazine.

Other Resources:

Evolution of unemployment in the US, down to the county, from 2007 to 2009

http://cohort11.americanobserver.net/latoyaegwuekwe/multimediafinal.html

After working with Scrum with assorted business units, I’ve discovered we don’t always have “Done as Done” shippable products at the end of the Sprints.

You might ask, if each sprint ends up with an incomplete work, when can we see a stable product  ?

Answer is the work around invented by the thought leaders. It is called Stabilization sprints.

What are stabilization Sprints ?

These are sprints dedicated towards tasks such as

Defect fixing
Fixing technical debts
Completing any final rounds of testing
Update or fix any architectural issues
Getting ready for the release by completing release notes, etc

Stabilization sprints can be scheduled based on the need of the hour. There is no hard and fast rule around when it should be scheduled.

Many people call stabilization sprints with different names based on the specific activity being executed. Some names are, Testing Sprint, Technical Debt sprint, Analysis Sprint, etc

Posted via web from kforden.com

Wordle example of blog

I love seeing data in a Visual Data Diagrams almost as much as I love Augmented Reality.  It’s become my second biggest interest in emerging technologies lately.

Thank you IBM Research for allowing Jonathan Feinberg, the ability to reuse code he wrote on your dime to develop this awesome, fun, cool, educational application.

Try it – you too will fall in love – http://www.wordle.net/

<from the site>
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.</from the site>

Sometimes even the best researchers forget that the answer you get depends entirely on who you ask. A new Forrester survey of 2,000 information workers has revealed that despite the hype, it’s not Gen Y that’s getting business to adopt collaborative technology. Gen X, those who are 30-43, are the ones leading the charge for social computing.

Forrester’s analysis is that despite their different view of technology, Gen Y, Millennials, or whatever you want to call those 29 and under, don’t yet have the clout within organizations to make real change. The same Gen X employees who are the fastest growing demographic in Facebook are the ones getting management to accept new technology as more than a fad.

Just Ask Employees

A common method for researching about how people use technology is to ask industry experts and management about what they’ve provided to workers and how they think it’s being used. That’s how many market researchers go about their business.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/09/forget-gen-y-gen-x-is-making-r.php

This column by Ben Lorica mentions them all and in great detail, it’s worth the read.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/09/resetting-expectations-some-augmented-reality-links.html