View all entries in the 'Datapoints' Category

A challenge to a practical mind - the Bay Area buy-vs-rent dilemma

by eleanor on 24 Feb 2005 @ 9:52 am in Datapoints   ++

There was a fascinating discussion yesterday on a “chick list” I’m on, the SF Women of the Web, about housing prices in the bay area and bubble-or-not. Someone posted a link to this massively interesting rant on buy-vs-rent by Patrick Killelea. I’m right in Menlo, just over the ped bridge from PA, and I get to watch how quickly homes get sold — often only to be put back on the market within a year.

Patrick is right on when it comes to renting, which Russ’ househunting this past week proved. Happily, Russ is moving to our hood. His househunting (as he called it) gave me cause to explain to someone that yes - of course, househunting means rental when it’s proclaimed so cheerfully. Otherwise it’s just trauma, right? When Russ IM’ed me his Craigslist of candidate houses this weekend, the low prices surprised me — I hadn’t looked at house prices in more than 3 years. I know the price for our appartment (very nice, hanging off the edge of the San Francisquito and a park) kept going down, but wasn’t inclinded to scope out an upgrade.

What a strange world when renting keeps getting more cost effective (and ever more practical, with Mike working in SF and me with a to-be-determined commute as I scope for a new position). As I’m not a happy driver, it’d be terrible to be fully committed to living in Menlo if there was a juicy company in Pleasanton or Emeryville or San Rafael. That’s one cost that Patrick doesn’t even consider - the decreased flexibility that comes with owning a home or flat.

People continue to wonder how people “afford” houses around here. The answer is you build a great company and manage to so that you can have a few such houses. Or you scrimp and save and hope to profit by selling your house to someone flush with market success. Rinse and repeat.

But with time comes growth. I’m much more accepting of the market here now. Previously I expected to take the money and run to some island bunker. $700K takes you further just about anywhere, why not pick somewhere more convivial. I haven’t blogged about this (as I avoid political and newsish stuff), but the tsunami really made me reconsider the idea of tropical paradise. It’s an odd reflection to have, but since I’ve been mulling the life of an expat integrated into an adopted community, I’ve been troubled by new aspects of this experience that I could see in the aftermath of the tsunami. My somewhat glibly independent and adventurer instincts have been tamed by a sort of morbid practicality. Unspoiled is unspoiled and you can build your own infrastructure, but if something goes wrong, there’s little public infrastructure — the sort of safety net we take for granted here. In the event of some huge devastation like we saw this winter, it’s just impossible to recover. We’d rebuild together, if that was even feasible, but the timeline and cost are much different than recovering from a NorCal earthquake. Brewing up gourmet yuppie rum wouldn’t dig us out of that one (but the BVI’s aren’t so remote as Phuket).

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Further indications things are back on track

by eleanor on 13 Jan 2005 @ 9:24 am in Events & Happenings | Datapoints   ++

I came home last night from the Steve Case/Walt Mossberg discussion at the Computer History Museum to find a final datapoint that things are getting better: Mike and I have to renew our lease and this is the first year that our rent has not actually gone down! It hasn’t gone up, and our two options (12 mos and 6 mos) are priced at parity, whereas before there was a slight discount to the 6 month lease. I always thought that reflected optimism on the part of our landlord that he could quickly ratchet it up once the good times came rolling. We’ve been here 3 full years now, and the spread between the two got wider, only to disappear completely this year.

The second stream of indicators come from all the events and happenings. Last night there was the CHM thing, which was pretty good, but not quite the thing to hold my concentration after a day with my sick dad. Afterwards, a bunch of us went out for pizza - Mike, Niall, Brendan Wilson and his wife Ashley who works at PayPal, and Micah Alpern. It’s kind of like you can find or make a “party” where ever you go.

Tonight, a chick group that I belong to is having a party - SFWOW is basically a mailing list with random discussion and tech stuff. It’s free or $3 depending on how full they are, at Cafe Metropole in SF. Afterwards, I get to get some art with the IronVJ battle at 1015 Folsom in SF, which should at least make me laugh.

Hope to see some of you there.

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Changing usage patterns of the Internet

by eleanor on 2 Nov 2004 @ 8:41 pm in Datapoints   ++

There may be hope for the internet yet, moralists may say. Or maybe it’s just that the marketers are taking over. Wired reporta that Sex Is Out, Consuming Is In with some new stats on Internet usage patterns:

“Twenty percent of all searching was sex-related back in 1997; now it’s about 5 percent,” said Amanda Spink, the University of Pittsburgh professor who co-authored Web Search: Public Searching of the Web with Penn State professor Bernard J. Jansen.

“It’s a little bit more in Europe, 8 to 10 percent, but in comparison to everything else, it’s a very small percent,” Spink said. “People are using (the web) more as an everyday tool rather than as just an entertainment medium.”

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McKinsey on consumer migration from wireline service

by eleanor on @ 7:12 pm in Emergent | Mobility | Datapoints | Life-Culture-Play   ++

The McKinsey Quarterly brings perspective on the wireline vs. wireless telephony debate with the results from a survey of wireless subscribers:

Although only 10 percent of the respondents had canceled their landline service, 28 percent plan to do so. The resolve to “go wireless” didn’t diminish with age. In fact, 29 percent of respondents over the age of 55 intend to switch—worrisome news for incumbents banking on these customers’ loyalty. But wireless companies shouldn’t rest too easy, since respondents with imminent plans to dump their landlines were more than twice as likely as other subscribers to change their wireless carriers at the same time.

These cross-effects - where consumers (and businesses) find themselves confronting multiple layers of choice - will drive consolidation in the industry as players seek to establish a consistent brand, and capture landline defections in their own mobile offerings. If the core business will inevitably be cannibalized, it is best to do it yourself.

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Personal media keeps coming up

by eleanor on 28 Oct 2004 @ 7:04 pm in Emergent | Datapoints | Life-Culture-Play   ++

To frame the discussion, here are some datapoints: SDForum held an Emerging Technology SIG on Music and Meta Data last week. Creative Common’s novel licensing is attracting most interest around the areas of personal media, mostly audio and video. The ‘podcasting’ phenomenon is gaining almost mainstream status, as users take to the airwaves (even though their broadcasts are canned files posted for later consumption). Check out the article “The Long Tail” from for an idea of the pervasiveness of this concept - the message is clear - with the limitless storage potential of the web, efficient search means the fringe is accessible to all, and with that exploration enabled - personalization is becoming revenue driver. These are real markets - just look at the incredible sales (and usage!) of cameraphones and the staggering fact that the ringtone market was $3.5B in 2003. Sales of add-on, momentarily-cool novelties to kids has become a viable business overnight

Consumer applications often drive technology — we see this constantly with games and pR0n. At this point in time we seem to be seeing a great deal of innovation around personal media.
Perhaps the iPod is to blame - users seem to have established much more personal relationships with the iPods than even previously with their cell phones. But it’s clear that these ‘toys’ are bringing broadband applications out of the house and the office.

So, it’s in light of these developments that I’m inclined to read this piece on emergent music technologies with less skepticism. I’ve never heard that story about Motorola’s genesis….

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Sifry’s Alerts: Oct 2004 State of the Blogosphere: 4.6 posts per second

by eleanor on 12 Oct 2004 @ 11:57 am in Emergent | Datapoints   ++

Sifry’s Alerts: Oct 2004 State of the Blogosphere: 4.6 posts per second

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IDC on Global IT Spending

by eleanor on 8 Oct 2004 @ 2:01 pm in Datapoints   ++

Also this week I tuned in to IDC’s teleconference on “State of the Market: Global IT Spending 2004-2005” which gave their predictions for growth areas in the next year. You can find the presentation here. The summary is that spending on infrastructure upgrades is finally starting to slow – with the focus on pc upgrades shifting to network and peripherals. Hot areas of software investment are areas such as anti-virus, security and communications.

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SMB market has higher rate of IT spending

by eleanor on 29 Sep 2004 @ 12:19 pm in Enterprise IT | Datapoints   ++

InformationWeek had a piece, Oracle Puts Pressure On Microsoft, which captures an interesting datapoint:

Oracle’s move toward small and midsize businesses is being driven by a saturated software market at larger companies. Also, IT budgets at small and midsize companies are on the rise, in part because of a need to remain competitive. Today, small and midsize companies spend an average 6.3% of revenue on IT, compared with larger enterprises whose budgets are typically at 2% for manufacturers and 5% for services companies, according to AMR Research.

Implications:
While this outwardly looks promising, this larger ratio means that IT is a larger net line-item in operating budgets for SMBs; it’s relatively more money, and so will receive relatively more scrutiny. And, the budgets of thes relatively cash-strapped SMBs are unlikely to grow much beyond their current rate (in my estimation), and then they will decline as the larger players woo customers by promising to take cost out of their IT budgets. The competition will erode prices, and eventually decrease this rate to something approaching parity with larger firms. This will likely take several years to play out.

Still, from the perspective of the larger players now entering this market, that 6.3% of revenue was flowing to others, and thus represents a revenue growth opportunity - even if the market itself shrinks.

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Meta on IBM’s Lotus Workplace

by eleanor on 3 Aug 2004 @ 7:04 pm in Emergent | Enterprise IT | Datapoints   ++

David Yockelson of the Meta Group with Matt Cain in a MetaView audio briefing. More information, the audio stream, and the slides can be found here.

David:  Matt, how are you doing today?
Matt:  I’m well, thank you, David.

David:  Well I’m glad to hear it. For this Meta View, we’re going to talk about Lotus Workplace and I could succinctly put this as, this is the summary… well, I guess this is two things, it’s a summary and it’s a look forward at what IBM is doing post Notes, and along with Domino. But it’s also a way for IBM to better work WebSphere into the picture and have it intermingle, if not co-exist with Domino.
Matt:  That’s right, David. Now, be careful, I think you said “post Notes”, and, so the firs thing that IBM wants you to understand is that there is no “post Notes”. And so they will clearly continue to maintain Domino at least until the end of this decade. And that’s interesting because clearly this is a message they want to get out because some of the earlier messages around this whole strategy suggested at one point that there would be more or less a forced migration over to the Workplace environment from the Domino environment. And so the first point here is really very important, that after years of conflicting messages about the relationship between Domino and WebSphere, there’s now a clear strategy and what that strategy really is is that Domino applications will become integrated with Workplace services and that new development and collaboration services are hosted on WebSphere.
Now what we believe, David, is at work here, is that ultimately what IBM really wants is to get the very large Domino customer base moved over to WebSphere Portal server. And now, what we believe is that the final bullet point - and IBM I think takes issue with it quite frankly - but we think that future Domino development will really be focused in smoothing integration with the WebSphere strategy and the Workplace strategy, at the expense of any groundbreaking functionality improvements to the core Domino platform. So we think, although IBM will continue to manage and maintain Domino for some time to come, certainly through the end of the decade, we think they’re going to put more time, effort, money and functionality on the Workplace side. So therefore kind of providing a carrot to the installed base to migrate over to the Workplace environment.

David:  OK, so we’ll look at that in a second, and I’ll take a position that that is not necessarily a bad thing, but first, it’s a good thing I said Notes, and not Ray Ozzie or Iris, because then we’d go way back. But let’s go on to the next slide, and you’re going to talk a little bit about what we call Knowledge Worker Infrastructure (KWI) frameworks. Now, to the point you made a second ago, where IBM is essentially placing its bets and world focus, now one could argue that focusing in and around the portal, given it’s ability to drive context, and aggregate and manage and perhaps to ultimately lead the end users and lead IBM through an ability to create wonderful composite applications, and so on, would be the right bet to make. But why don’t you walk us through what goes into this particular KWI framework and what does that mean.
Matt:  Yeah, that’s right, David. So, there’s no doubt about it, that the portal certainly is a natural aggregation point for applications, info, for data, collaboration and so it is important to note that we like the IBM strategy, but, by the way, portal is really just one center of gravity that you can talk about for Knowledge Worker Infrastructure, and that includes collaboration. Microsoft is really approaching at it really from an Office centricity standpoint. Then you have content guys like an OpenText or Documentum that tend to say collaboration and other KWI assets really should be focused around documents and content. And then you have enterprise app guys, like Oracle, SAP, PeopleSoft, who say hey, we’re kind of the center of gravity there. So portal is really just one of four different centers of gravity that you can look at for the foundation of your KWI which includes collaboration.
Now looking specifically at the IBM strategy, what we find here, on the left side, basically is old Domino, and of course it does have its own applications, like SameTime and QuickPlace for synchronous and asynchronous collaboration of course. And then on the right hand side, we’re looking at Lotus Workplace. And the first thing to note is that Workplace has different modules for different instantiations, so there are separate modules for email, for learning for collaboration, for content management. There will be more.
Now underneath that is WebSphere Portal DNA. Now we’re careful there, because you don’t get a full WebSphere Portal license. It does utilize quite a bit of WebSphere code, but again, it’s not necessarily a full license, though there are some different packaging you can buy.
Now underneath, basically you have the WebSphere App Server and then DB2 as a core store, a directory, and then we believe that over time Tivoli will be increasingly used for managing this environment.
David:  Sure, it makes sense. And just as a point of clarification in terms of the Portal DNA, I would suspect, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, that some of the things you don’t get along with this are the (?Critical Fusion?) or reportlets that are available or the packaged integrations to other applications.
Matt:  Yeah that’s exactly right. Some of the middleware stuff and other things.
And so, why is IBM doing this? Well, to a certain extent it doesn’t make sense for the Software Group to manage and maintain two separate stacks and they know that DB2, Tivoli, and WebSphere are their strategic products moving forward. So if they can basically move to kind of one code base over time that is, of course, to their advantage. It goes without saying that this is all a J2EE environment, and of course that’s the core part of the IBM strategy moving forward. It certainly is logical.
And let’s face it, David, that Domino came out, what?, in 1989 I believe, so we’re talking about a 15 yr old product. So basically what we would suggest is that if you think about IBM’s overall Knowledge Worker Infrastructure strategy, it’s really very much focused on the portal.

David:  Ok, so now given that you gave us a little bit of a preview at, say, a 20,000 foot level, of Workplace. Next slide, walk us through a little bit more of the nuts and bolts of the Workplace client, and what goes on there.
Matt:  The workplace client is interesting from a number of perspectives. Basically, I believe that what we’re looking at here is IBM’s long term plan to basically get some real estate back on the client, they were really pushed off by Microsoft. And all the sudden they recognized that with Longhorn coming from Microsoft, and that’s really going to be a fairly dramatic change, if they could have a very flexible and low cost management client that would sit on top of your existing Windows so that you don’t have to upgrade your Windows, and it would sit on top of Linux, so they could certainly begin to enjoy the benefits of that should Linux really begin to escalate its presence on the desktop.
They will be well positioned to come back on the desktop, and some of the components that we have with this Workplace client… First of all it is based on a lot of open source Eclipse components. Eclipse originally was a development environment, an IDE, but since it’s been repurposed more toward the client end and you have something called the Open Services Gateway Initiative that allows you in real time basically to download and upload services that are going to be requisite for whatever task is at hand. So it’s not a fat client, basically it loads in real time but it does have some persistent components, like a Cloudscape database, which would allow you to take all of the backend Workplace components offline. And so this is essentially kind of a fat client, but has the attributes of browsers as well.
You have the Lotus folks that are contributing things like the system tray and the status bar. You’ve got some IBM-specific components. And of course, they’re going to have some office plug-ins to make it somewhat compatible with MS Office. And over time, David, what they’ll be doing is actually taking the Notes client functionality and wrappering it into Workplace. And so at that point in time, basically, you can have one client for both Domino on the back end and Workplace on the back end. So you can start to see some of those integration strategies.
What I would suggest to listeners is, as you contemplate the IBM strategy, you’re also going to have to look at the impact on the client, oddly enough, but this is a very intriguing client play that they’re making here.

David:  OK - so from the client, let’s extend almost every place, go on to the next slide, and we’ll look at what is the IBM collaboration story four years from now.
Matt:  That’s right David, I got my crystal ball out and I rubbed it around and this is what I saw. The first thing to mention here is that we do see some common elements here between the Domino legacy and the Workplace stuff. So we would expect to see common message hygiene services - spam blocking, virus blocking - for both mail systems, common management, common LDAP directory, common authentication, common backup, so there is some efficiencies to be gained when you are running both with common elements.
We still suspect that most organizations will still have a large number of Legacy Domino applications, and one of the very interesting things here to note is that one would kind of assume that, let’s say, calendar services from Domino calendar and Workplace calendar would work together - but they don’t. The integration will be through something called iCal, the iCal standard, which isn’t the greatest. And one would also assume that IM would work flawlessly across SameTime and Workplace Collaboration, and the answer is no, it won’t. You’re going to need a SIP gateway in between. So you can see that the Workplace stuff is basically brand new stuff.
And of course, over on the Workplace side we see J2EE apps and you may take Domino apps and run them as JSR168 applications on top of that platform. We’ve got some more generic modules like Workplace Learning, but some specific Workplace modules for things like Business Controls.
And then of course, what we see beginning to create a common access layer is really the portal services that we’ve talked about. When you utilize the full Portal Server license, you do get access to the portlet library we mentioned before as well as the middleware and kind of we’ll have to assume that we’re really talking about a Workplace client here that will, again, act as a common interface to two back ends.
The notable point here, David, is that nothing has been superseded here. You’re really managing a dual system environment and despite the common elements, still no one wants to manage two environments when you could manage one. And so over time we think the Domino side will start to fade out and we’ll see more and more investment on the Workplace side.

David:  OK, so there’s certainly opportunity for people to take a bet and in some cases, as you’re saying, it would make sense for people to move in one direction, or in only one direction. Now, moving to a different crystal ball, looking at Domino development, what do you think happens there?
Matt:  Well, it’s interesting, because if you think about Domino developers today, they’re typically associated with the business unit and that they’re outside of the core AD function, and that’s both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that they can bat out applications really rapidly that business people love, and on the other hand there’s the lack of standards…
David:  It’s not exactly a growing market.
Matt:  It’s not a growing market, and it leads to a lot of redundancy, and quite frankly, a lot of inappropriate Domino applications. And really, traditionally it’s been things like Domino Designer and Lotus Script. Over time of course, if you move into a J2EE environment, now all of a sudden, we’re talking not about knowledge of Domino, but of WebSphere App Server, the Portal Server, Tivoli Management, and high-falutin things like MQSeries, and requiring DB2 DBA people and development…. From a skills transfer, central IT development function, now you’ve got a range of services depending on a particular application. But David, I will tell you that in my opinion, the greatest challenge for IBM to get people to adopt the Workplace environment comes down to this: Domino has a great rapid application development environment. If you try to write the same application in J2EE, you can, but what might be weeks in a Domino environment, would be months in a J2EE environment. So I talk to many many Domino shops, and they say that until they get that same AD capability in Workplace, we’re going to be a little suspicious. And so therefore the challenge, the onus on IBM is really to develop this rapid application development environment on top of a J2EE framework.

David:  Yeah, and I think a piece of that, just to move it up a level, but one of the popular and convincing things about Domino applications is that they always had, and you could argue good-bad, but it always had workflow built into it. In other words they were very tight into process. And there really isn’t much, there certainly isn’t anything in the native J2EE environment to do that, so the other thing that’s incumbent would be for IBM to bring that along. Whether it’s a sense of industry process, something at a slightly lower level in terms of specific business process, but something that will, in addition to the look and the feel and the underlying logic, something that can move things along and get work done. That was a hugely appealing piece of the Domino puzzle.
Matt - Right, said another way, Domino apps have always been great for routing and tracking. And they need to bring that to J2EE.

David:  OK, so bottom line for us, what should clients do in the future?
Matt:  The first thing to note clearly is to thoroughly understand this Workplace strategy and what has been all over the map for the last couple years. I think they’ve got a good strategy. They all seem to be singing out of the same hymn book these days and time is ripe to go and get briefed and to really understand the strategy and the implications at the infrastructure level, the development level, and the applications. And certainly understand it’s inherent portal centricity, You also may want to play around with your own sketch, which is, what would our environment look like if we were to invest in Workplace a couple years out, and that needs to part of a strategic Knowledge Worker Infrastructure plan.
We talked a little bit about the different centers of gravity in terms of portals and Office and process applications, as well as content applications, you know, clearly understand those dynamics (ek there’s a good opportunity for some research here). And then look at your Domino infrastructure, do an inventory of your developers and your applications and look at how people use it. Would it be applicable in a Workplace environment? Certainly be aware of the skill sets and the political implications of a shift from Domino to Workplace. Again, just looking at the developers, that could be very political, where they end up and to whom they report to.
Also I would suggest that, even though IBM is making some fairly broad claims about the fact that you can swap in Oracle for DB2 or you could use a BEA App Server, we’re a little skeptical of that and we need to see more of that before we’re entirely convinced. And also this is a bold new world for IBM so we would suggest that everyone take with a grain of salt promised release dates and product maturity as you would with any vendor these days. David, that’s basically the quick tour of what we’re thinking these days.

David:  Ok, so it sounds like there’s certainly a lot of promise but also potentially some pain, or at least work to do, whether it’s relative to migration or whether it’s relative to skill sets, trying to discern what sort of applications should live in which environments. So lots of decisions for our clients to make.
Matt:  Precisely so.

David:  Well, thanks very much, and for all those listening, thanks very much and that was today’s Meta View.

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IT ‘Shadow Spending’ Has Doubled - Computerworld

by eleanor on 14 Apr 2004 @ 7:12 pm in Datapoints   ++

Computerworld has a piece, IT ‘Shadow Spending’ Has Doubled, discussing an undercurrent within IT spending that could have a large impact upon how sales are made.

In the late 1990s, shadow IT spending was estimated to be 10% of the formal IT budget. Most of the shadow IT spending was due to support and training shortfalls from formal IT. Business-unit resources often provide informal support for various technologies and applications as users seek “how to” or technical assistance from local peer experts rather than the service desk. This informal support mechanism was estimated to be four times more costly than formal support. By improving service levels and running public relations campaigns to improve the image of the service desk, CIOs sought to reduce this hidden cost and, in turn, reduce shadow IT. Such best-practice efforts were effective for many companies — often resulting in 40% reductions in shadow IT costs.

But today’s new form of shadow IT spending is much more costly and extremely difficult to manage. Recent research estimates that shadow IT spending has doubled from 2000 to 2003 to consume 20% of total IT spending in the average organization. According to our research, the average U.S. company spent around 3.7% of revenue on IT in 2003, or $10,283 per employee. With rogue spending at 20% of the official IT budget, shadow spending adds more than $2,000 per employee. In several organizations where the business was rapidly changing (typically because of mergers and acquisitions) and formal IT spending was severely constrained, we found shadow IT expenses as high as formal IT spending.

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Why your mass e-mail requests get ignored | CNET News.com

by eleanor on 12 Apr 2004 @ 5:25 pm in Strategy-Marketing | Datapoints   ++

Interesting research from Greg Barron, a research fellow at Harvard Business School, and research partner Eldad Yechiam, a postdoctoral research fellow at Indiana University’s Department of Psychology (primarily on email yielded this insight:

In biology, and more recently in economics, the theory of honest signaling provides some possible insights. According to the theory, signals that are costly to produce and send provide a mechanism by which two parties can have reliable communication, despite conflicting interests (Zahavi’s handicap principle). Examples include male peacocks that use costly ornaments to display quality to potential mates and baby birds that use costly begging calls to display hunger.

Interesting for what impact it has on corporate signalling, specifically what IBM is doing with Linux and On Demand, and HP with its Adaptive Enterprise.
Sources: originally read on CNET Why your mass e-mail requests get ignored | CNET News.com, more infomation available on the HBS website at

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Gartner - CRM Services Market Size Forecast

by eleanor on 29 Mar 2004 @ 6:01 pm in Enterprise IT | Datapoints   ++

From notes I took at the DataQuest library on
North America: CRM Services Market Size and Forecast, 2002-2006
17 June 2003.

Process management services dominate other services offerings within CRM
space.

Process mgmt	Development & integration	IT mgmt.	Consulting	SW maintenance support	HW maintenance support
$8.59B	$6.05B	$3.24B	$1.42B	$.73B	$.58B

The market was saturated during 2000-2001 with long term contracts -
which meant early stage revenues trended downwards, while support and
maintenance services trended upwards. The market is cycling up to
support new projects with upfront consulting.
The top tier globabl consulting and SI vendors captured most market
growth (see Gartner’s
CRM Service Providers 2003 Americas Magic Quadrant, Magic Quadrant for CRM B2B Large-Enterprise Suites, 2004, Magic Quadrant
for Worldwide CRM ESPs, 2004

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More on climate theory

by eleanor on 10 Feb 2004 @ 9:29 am in Datapoints   ++

Supplemental to last week’s post on scenario planning and climate change, I ran into this more complete paper from Robert Gagosian, Pres & Dir of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which presented a couple of weeks ago at Davos. WHOI’s Climate and Change Institute has done a lot of the research to support this theory.
This paper gives a very good description of the science behind the idea, and shorter than the Nova or other PBS spot I saw sometime last year.

Source: Ocean & Climate Change Institute - Abrupt Climate Change

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CA bans use of devices in cars

by eleanor on 3 Jan 2004 @ 10:37 am in Datapoints   ++

Yesterday’s buzz is about a new CA law that went into effect about banning use of pdas and computers in the front seats of cars. Check slashdot for the story and other comments.
It’s fascinating to see, that no matter how unresponsive the CA legislature might be to normal issues, they hopped on this one right away.   No sooner do we see the appearance of optional dvd-kid entertainment systems in common minivans, than we see laws like this pass.
This may be a boon for other wireless access devices - such as smartphones, hiptops, and blackberries.   They are small-profile enough that their use would be less obstructive and, of course, they could also be hidden quickly if necessary.   It also remains to be seen if the some of the systems under development by car manufacturers (of which OnStar and other satellite connected services are just the beginning) will be impacted by these regulations.
More cynically, considering how I use my cli� for directions all the time - I wonder if they would outlaw paper as well.   That would certainly make me feel better about all the drivers out there working with files…..

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New wi-fi distance record, stretching across 82 miles

by eleanor on 31 Dec 2003 @ 3:59 pm in Datapoints   ++

The new distance record for plain vanilla wifi is now 82 miles, as proven by students at Utah’s Weber State University.

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Changing face of office space

by eleanor on 24 Dec 2003 @ 9:59 pm in Datapoints   ++

Sheila Muto brings us an update from one of the underpinnings of business growth - the world of leaseholds.   Property developers are doing more to attract new tenants while facing some of the highest vacancy rates in the last decade.   Not only are they thinking differently about what is needed to attract leasors, they’re thinking strategically about managing their businesses.   They’re making the investment, at significant cost savings and to also achieve consistency across their properties.

Equity Office Properties Trust Inc., the nation’s biggest office owner, began installing suites in its office properties across the U.S. this year. So far, the Chicago-based real-estate investment trust has built out about 200 such suites, ranging in size from 2,500 to 10,000 square feet. Building several at a time costs 10% to 20% less than building out a single suite “because we get the economies of scale,” says Chief Operating Officer Peyton “Chip” Owen.
The upfront investment appears to be paying off for Equity Office. The company completed about 37,000 square feet of suites last month in San Francisco. About half of that space is leased. “We’ve had incredible response,” says Mr. Owen. “Small businesses are leading us out of the recession.”
Not only does the space lease quickly, but “in some situations the space becomes an incubator” because many of these small tenants eventually will need to expand, says Joseph Brancato, a managing principal in New York at Gensler Architecture, Design & Planning Worldwide. The architecture firm has been designing prebuilt space for landlords, such as Boston Properties Inc. and Tishman Speyer Properties Inc., says Mr. Brancato.

from The Wall Street Journal Link to the article while you can.

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Summary of the Year in Ideas, 2003, from The New York Times Magazine

by eleanor on 16 Dec 2003 @ 10:38 am in Datapoints   ++

Extract of the 67 keenest ideas The New York Times Magazine could find for 2o03. It’s interesting to me that I had run across about a third of them during the course of the year.

Here’s how it works:

Each December, The New York Times Magazine looks back at the year through an unusual lens: ideas. We send out a team of researchers and reporters to investigate the latest thinking in every subject imaginable — not just war, medicine and politics but also cosmetics, literary theory and Wiffle-ball technology — and to bring back the most innovative, intriguing, mystifying and promising ideas they can find. Then we boil that vast intellectual stew down to the issue you hold in your hands: an alphabetical encyclopedia of the 67 inventions, breakthroughs and theories (big and small, nice and nasty) that made a difference in 2003.

1) Proving You’re Human
2) The Projection Keyboard
3) The Instantly Pass� Trend
4) PowerPoint Makes You Dumb
5) Post-Belief Christianity
6) The Pod Car
7) Offloading Your Memories
8) The Nicotini
9) Iraq, Outsourced
10) News Guarantees
11) The Jules Verne Project
12) Junk Food Is Good for You
13) New Tools for an Occupation
14) Mind Over Matter, for Real
15) Makeup for Men
16) Kid Power
17) Labor Disputes Can Be Deadly for Consumers
18) Tornado in a Can
19) The Real Man’s Wiffle Ball
20) Translucent Leather
21) Tribute Bands in Denial
22) Turning Garbage Into Oil
23) Turnout Wins Elections
24) Ultracams
25) Unjuicing Golf
26) Video-Game Art
27) Young Success Means Early Death
28) The Time Gap
29) The Thunder Run
30) Theory Is Finished
31) Theater for One
32) Text Messager’s Thumb
33) Suspended Nationhood
34) Spray-On Stockings
35) Social Networks
36) The See-Through Coat
37) Sampling Bob Griese
38) Quiet Parties
39) The Homeland-Security Neighborhood Watch
40) The Drought-Proof Lawn
41) Darknets
42) Coincidence Theory
43) Civil Disobedience Against Affirmative Action
44) Body Language Reveals All
45) Bite-Size Nukes
46) Billboards That Know You
47) Biblical Taxation
48) Airborne Humans
49) Cinema Meets Real Life
50) Gratitude Visits
51) The Cancer Vaccine
52) Injectable Beauty
53) Hit Song Science
54) The Hammock Doesn’t Work Anymore
55) G.P.S. Art
56) Give Felons the Vote
57) G.I. Bill for College Athletes
58) Futures Markets in Everything
59) The Gray-Goo Problem
60) Forget the South
61) The Foolproof Umpire
62) The Food Simulator
63) Flop Penance
64) The Fish-Eater’s Cheat Sheet
65) Enough Debating — Let’s Start Hating
66) The Ethical Sneaker
67) Espresso You Can’t Mess Up

Source: The New York Times Magazine, December 14, 2003

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Submit to our presentation

by eleanor on 15 Dec 2003 @ 10:02 am in Datapoints   ++

This guarantees to be joked into oblivion, but it’s a good reminder, and no doubt, I’ll wonder where it came from later.
The New York Times Magazine cites an essay by information theorist and author Edward Tufte which first drew attention to the rather remarkable claim that endless, detailed powerpoint presentations are indeed mind-numbingly boring.

” In August, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA released Volume 1 of its report on why the space shuttle crashed. As expected, the ship’s foam insulation was the main cause of the disaster. But the board also fingered another unusual culprit: PowerPoint, Microsoft’s well-known ‘’slideware”

It’s a very good reminder to ensure that the purpose of a presentation is not art, or completed assignment, it is to communicate information, which takes tuning.

Source: NYTimes.com Abstract. Full article is available for purchase from NYTimes.

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