Richard Gabriel, “On Lisp”, OOPSLA 2007, 2007/12 February 23, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: lisp, poetry, richard gabriel
add a comment
Dick Gabriel not only talks about the history of Lisp, but also his career when he stepped out to study poetry and returned to a field where his skills were obsolete.
In this Episode we’re talking with Dick Gabriel on Lisp. We started by looking at artificial intelligence as the historic context of Lisp, the goals AI tried to reach, and how Lisp was supposed to help reach those.
We then discussed the language itself, starting with the Data As Program / Program As Data concept that is a foundation for Lisp. [....]
After a discussion about the various dialects of Lisp and Scheme, we concluded the Lisp discussion by explaining why Lisp did not really catch on (“AI Winter”) and Lisp’s role in today’s industry.
We ended the episode with a couple of details about Dick’s other life as a poet and his Poem a Day effort.
Episode 84: Dick Gabriel on Lisp | Software Engineering Radio
Francis Fukuyama, “‘The End of History’ Revisited”, Long Now Foundation, 2007/06/28 February 23, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: francis fukuyama, the end of history
add a comment
Francis Fukuyama provides some of the context for The End of History, in reflection, as well as responses to some critiques.
Francis Fukuyama began by describing the four most significant challenges to the thesis in his famed 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. In the book he proposed that humanity’s economic progress over the past 10,000 years was driven by the accumulation of science and technology over time. That connection is direct and reliable.
Less direct and reliable, but very important, is the sequence from economic progress to the adoption of liberal democracy. Political modernization accompanies economic modernization. This is a deep force of history, the book claims.
Fukuyama describes the rise of the idea of human rights in the West as a secularization of Christian doctrine. That led to accountability mechanisms— “You can’t have good governance without feedback loops.” [....]
A second challenge to the universalism of liberal democracy is that it does not yet work internationally. [....]
A third challenge is the continuing poverty trap for so many in the world. [....]
The final challenge that impresses Fukuyama is the possibility that technology may now be accelerating too fast to cure its own problems the way it has done in the past. [....]
Long Views » Blog Archive » Francis Fukuyama, Democracy versus culture
Nick Carr, “The Web 2.0 Revolution”, AfterTv, 2006/04/26 February 23, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: nicholas carr, web 2.0
add a comment
Nicholas Carr, on the promise and hype of Web 2.0.
Are we heading toward the great utopia of citizen media or the equally daunting dystopia of mediocrity? Nick Carr, Author of the controversial “IT Matters”, is one of the few techno-sceptical voices warning against the cultural and economic consequences of the Web 2.0 revolution. He might be in the minority on the blogosphere, but, as we found in our conversation with Carr, his views are anything but insignificant.
Gary Lang, “Opening the Possibilities: APIs and Open Source Code”, OSCON 2006, 2006/07/27 February 23, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: autodesk, gary lang, open source
add a comment
Autodesk has traditionally developed private source software, but recently adopted open source practices.
Autodesk’s Gary Lang explains how the progress in open standards, a shift from ‘core to context’ applications, and user demand for innovation motivated his company to release the code for their popular MapServer software. Web mapping is but one example of ways that standard APIs can create commodization opportunities.
Lang first sets up a framework for thinking about geospatial software development, noting the two paradigms from Eric S. Raymond’s famous book ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’. While there are plenty of purely proprietary or open source successes, Lang contends that robust standards and APIs facilitate migration of certain software genres, such as mapping, into the ‘bazaar’ model. Standardizations, organized largely by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, have created a common framework for developers. The result has been a commoditizing shift for certain applications which no longer generate much revenue themselves. Instead, they begin to provide a rich context for delivery of related products and support. In such cases, it makes a lot of sense for companies to give away the context, such as the web mapping server, and then focus on selling services and desktop applications built on top of the server layer.
IT Conversations | O’Reilly Open Source Conference | Gary Lang
Adrian Slywotzky, “The Upside”, HBR Ideacast, 2007/04/19 February 23, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: Adrian Slywotzky, strategic risk, upside
add a comment
Adrian Slywotzky has developed an idea which will lead business executives to think: strategic risk.
… Adrian Slywotzky, whose latest book is entitled The Upside: The 7 Strategies for Turning Big Threats into Growth Breakthroughs. In the interview, Slywotzky explains how managing strategic threats as forms of risk can not only diminish their impact, but also transform the threats into new growth opportunities.
Clive Thompson, “Google in China”, AfterTv, 2006/05/03 February 23, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: china, clive thompson, google
add a comment
I coincidentally listened to this talk while in Beijing. China doesn’t necessarily work the same way as the western world.
We wanted to understand China’s digital culture. We wanted to know if the online world in China is different from the US. We wanted to understand whether Google’s acquiescing to the restrictions of the Chinese government will help the reformers. So we asked Clive. Clive being Clive Thompson, author of the splendidly informative New York Times magazine feature “Google in China”; Clive who has experienced first hand and up-close the digital culture of China.
Paul Hawken, “The New Great Transformation”, Long Now Foundation, 2007/06/08 February 23, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: blessed unrest, paul hawken
add a comment
Paul Hawken in deeply involved with the Long Now Foundation. In this talk, he discusses some of his personal thinking.
His new book, BLESSED UNREST, was inspired by the countless business cards that earnest environmentalists would hand him after his lectures all over the world. After a while he had 7,000, and he wondered, “How many environmental groups are there in the world?” He began actively building a now-public database, WiserEarth.org, which includes social justice and indigenous rights organizations because he found they indivisibly overlap in their values and activities.
…. Extrapolating from carefully inventoried regions to those yet to be tallied, he estimates there are over 1,000,000 such organizations in the world, adding up to the largest and fastest growing Movement in history.
The phenomenon has been overlooked because it lacks the customary hallmarks of a movement— no charismatic leaders, no grand theory or ideology, no “ism,” no defining events. The new activist groups are about dispersing power rather than aggregating power. Their focus is on ideas rather than ideology— ideologies are clung to, but ideas can be tried and tossed or improved. The point is to solve problems, usually from the bottom up. The movement can never be divided because it is already atomized.
What’s going on? Hawken wondered if humanity might have some collective intelligence that we don’t yet understand. The metaphor he finds most useful is the immune system, which is the most complex system in our body— more complex than the entire Internet— massive, distributed, subtle, ingenious, and effective. The opposite of a hierarchical army, its power is in the density of its network. It deals with problems not through frontal attack but complex negotiation and rapprochement.
Long Views » Blog Archive » Paul Hawken, The New Great Transformation
Anne Pick, “Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanjing”, Ideas Revolutionary, 2007/11/09 February 23, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: anne pick, iris chang, rape of nanking
add a comment
After watching the play “A Nanking Winter“, I was interested in more of the back story. A documentary was also recently developed.
… Canadian director Anne Pick … talk about the documentary film “IRIS CHANG: The Rape of Nanking“. (note: Anne co-directed this film with her husband Bill Spahic.)
Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking – Interview with filmmaker Anne Pick « ideas Revolutionary
Howard Rheingold, “Smart Mobs”, AfterTv, 2006/04/26 February 11, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: howard rheingold, smart mobs
add a comment
There’s a time gap between the publishing of Smart Mobs and this interview. The conversation is wide-ranging.
Howard Rheingold’s 2002 Smart Mobs was one of the earliest books to grasp the radically democratic nature of the mobile digital revolution. The idea of “smart” mobs is, of course, somewhat of a contradiction and Rheingold’s book is ambivalent about the social and political benefits/costs of an always-on society.
Howard Gardner, “Five Minds for the Future”, HBR Ideacast, 2007/05/07 February 11, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: five minds for the future, howard gardner
add a comment
Howard Gardner, on his new book, Five Minds for the Future.
We live in a time of vast changes, and those changes, says Gardner, call for entirely new ways of learning and thinking. In our HBR IdeaCast interview, Gardner defines the cognitive abilities that will command a premium in the years ahead, and helps us understand how we can cultivate them.
Dave Snowden, “The Impact of Web 2.0 on Knowledge Work and Knowledge Management”, Jon Husband’s Wirearchy, 2007/10/24 February 11, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: dave snowden, knowledge management, knowledge work, web 2.0
add a comment
An interview with Dave Snowden, by Jon Husband.
… Dave [articulated] a clear and coherent picture of how he thinks the dynamic hyperlinked digital infrastructure most commonly known as Web 2.0 will usher in important new ways of working with information and knowledge.
He forecasts some major changes to knowledge work and the information systems support of that knowledge work … and no doubt some of those forecasts may be controversial.
Bob Glushko & AnnaLee Saxenian, “Information and Service Design at U.C. Berkeley”, Jon Udell’s Interviews With Innovators, 2007/04/11 February 11, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: AnnaLee Saxenian, Bob Glushko
add a comment
About a new program on Information and Service Design at U.C. Berkeley.
[In] their new program, Information and Service Design, a symposium was held in early March … Graduate students gave presentations based on papers they’d written …. These are mostly older students who have returned to school with a combination of work experience and an appreciation for the contemporary digital lifestyle. Now they’re learning how to apply those perspectives to the new interdisciplinary science of service design. You can see, in those videos, that they’re having fun learning about this stuff. And you can hear, in this podcast, that Bob Glushko and AnnaLee Saxenian are having fun figuring out how to teach it.
IT Conversations | Jon Udell’s Interviews With Innovators | Bob Glushko & AnnaLee Saxenian
Steven Johnson, “The Long Zoom”, Long Now, 2007/05/11 February 1, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: long now, long zoom, steven johnson
1 comment so far
One in the series of Seminars About Long Term Thinking, from the Long Now Foundation:
Steven Johnson began his long zoom survey with the “prior art” of Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus locating himself in himself, his neighborhood, Dublin, on out to the universe. The value of a long zoom is in identifying and employing every scale between the very large and very small, noticing how they change each other when held in the mind at the same time.
Johnson’s core story (and current book) concerned London in 1854, when it was the largest city in the world and in history with 2.5 million people. London famously stank. [....] The authorities decided that the way to cure the frequent cholera epidemics in London was to get rid of the bad odor— pump the sewage into the Thames, which people drank. The cholera got worse.
Johnson’s goal with his book, THE GHOST MAP, was to figure out why the wrong theory of disease lingered so long, and what it took to correct it. The answer, he proposes, is in the perspective of the long zoom.
[...]
Johnson proposed that another word for the long zoom perspective is “consilience”— a fine old word, revived by Edward O. Wilson, that links multiple disciplines and multiple levels into a whole body of knowledge with extra benefits the separate disciplines lack. Science and culture can blend rigorously. What is discovered in consilience is not just scales of distance or time but nested systems.
Long Views » Blog Archive » Steven Johnson, Consilience defeats miasma
Chip Heath, “What Makes Ideas Stick”, Innovation Summit, 2006/09/09 February 1, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: chip heath, made to stick, urban legends
1 comment so far
At a talk at Stanford University …
Do you think human beings only use ten percent of their brains? If you answered yes, as most people do, you’ve just experienced the power of urban legends. This just isn’t true. But there is something that makes this idea stick.
In his new book titled Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Chip Heath, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, analyzes the characteristics of lasting ideas and suggests ways to harness the power of urban legends for a cause.
Roy Vagelos, “The Future of the Pharmaceutical Industry”, Knowledge@Wharton, 2006/04/17 February 1, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: merck, roy vagelos
1 comment so far
Robbie Shell and Steve Guglielmi interviewed Roy Vagelos, former CEO of Merck:
Roy Vagelos, a highly regarded pharmaceutical executive who spent two decades at Merck, including 10 years as CEO, has often said that “research remains my life blood,” and indeed, he has stayed active in the industry since his retirement from Merck in 1994. For example, he is chairman of the board of two small drug companies, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and Theravance, and in 2004 co-authored a book entitled, Medicine, Science, and Merck.
Podcast: The Future of the Pharmaceutical Industry, According to Former Merck CEO Roy Vagelos – Knowledge@WhartonMP3 audio
