If only Tiger Woods was a Lutheran, he would not have any problems! Enjoy listening to this short excerpt from this weekend's Prairie Home Companion. The Northstar Nerd is from northern Minnesota ... and well ... we could have taught Tiger a few things ... ya know for sure!
If you want to learn more about how to speak and act Lutheran, you need to get Garrison Keillor's latest book by the same name ... you betcha!
Early this morning (around 7 am) before church I read about DARPA's red balloon challenge. As my mind wandered during Pastor Mark's sermon (sorry!) I thought ... gee ... between my corporate Yammer network, and the Yammer Best Practices network ... I could put together a virtual team that would reach across the USA into hundreds of large corporations and involve their techies!
Thus, when I got on my computer after church and got ready to set my plan in action. Darn! Wouldn't you know ... a bunch of MIT students set a network into action and located all the ten balloons in under ten hours. I was already too late before I even started! Next week I'll pay more attention in church!
One of DARPA's goals was to see how quickly social networks could be utilized to achieve a common goal. In this instance the answer was "fast". For an interesting analysis, link on over to General Electric's Global Research Blog. They have a nice post with links which will fill you in on the competition.
The map below shows where the balloons were found (click to view full sized). Thus, as you can see the task was both difficult and a geographical challenge.
Back in August, 2006 I attended Wikimania (my blog post from 2006). At the time, this conference and Wikipedia were "where it was happening" in terms of the web. However, if you fast forward to December 2009, has Wikipedia lost its mojo? In a recent article posted by the Industry Standard's managing editor Ian Lamont, he notes:
"Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia built on the backs of a seemingly never-ending supply of free labor, is in a bit of a bind: Many contributors are throwing in the towel. As reported in a page one story in Monday's Wall Street Journal, "unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police it are quitting." And, the article adds, not enough new blood is coming online to replace the quitters."
Let's return to Wikimania. This conference is Wikipedia's annual event. Back in 2006, attendance was free and the presenter list read almost like a "who's who" of the web. I took time off from work and hung out in a Harvard Law School dorm for $20 per night. Friendships I developed during that conference are still maintained today, and I've even built schools in rural China thanks to Dj. Since the Summer of 2006, the conference has never again been held again in the USA.
While I understand the need for Wikipedia to be a global organization, they need a big annual event in America. In my professional life I lead collaboration projects for a Fortune 100 company. While virtual collaboration is nice, it is critical to physically bring together design teams on an occasional basis. In the corporate environment, we understand this fact (i.e. the need for face to face interaction). Does Wikipedia understand this need? Although I've never contributed a huge number of edits to Wikipedia, unlike most netizens I have contributed. Organizations need to grow and expand their user base, and by this I mean more than those folks who just read Wikipedia's content online.
I wish Wikipedia good luck, and if they ever have another Wikimania in the USA, I would seriously consider attending. 2010 is scheduled for Gdansk, Poland.
Last week I posted about the Google Lego Engineering and the Lego Engineering initiative at Tufts University. Although not strictly Legos, Stanford has an undergraduate robotics course which is worth a look for your advanced First Lego League student. The course is offered via Stanford's Engineering Anywhere initiative. I also added the robotics course to my Lego Robotics Educational Search Engine.
For a number of months, I've occasionally tracked the progress of the Personas project at MIT. Inspired by a LinkedIn status update by Francois Gossieaux where he wondered whether his MIT profile was accurate, I decided to perform a test of my two web personas. The results are shown below. Interested in seeing your own web persona? Here is the MIT link.
Click upon either image to view full sized.
Ah ... this is what vacations are made for ... enough of Web 2.0 for now. The response to the Northstar Nerd's Nordic Fashion Show has been so positive, that I created a new category for this blog, Nordic Skiing. Thus, for better or worse you now can easily pull up all my cross-country skiing posts. Here are just a few highlights from the past few years (now the Nordic Skiing Category):
and finally, the classic
You can link to the Nordic Skiing Category to read all the posts. I promise some new, and unique content this Winter! Stay tuned.
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