Russell Ackoff, “In Business: Doing It Wrong” (Flash audio), interview by Peter Day, BBC Radio 4, 2010/01/17 January 31, 2010
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Streaming.Tags: ackoff, management, systems, thinking
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Russell Ackoff was interviewed in 2007, and with his passing in 2009, Peter Day put together a coherent digest of the master himself speaking on his ideas.
Russell Ackoff was a great subversive – a business school professor who thought that business schools were a block on management thinking and who delighted in pointing out the flaws in the way companies work. Before he died at the age of 90 in October 2009, this business rebel gave Peter Day some insights into his unconventional approach to getting things done.
Broadcast on: BBC Radio 4, 9:30pm Sunday 17th January 2010
Duration: 28 minutes
Available until: 12:00am Thursday 1st January 2099
Category: * Factual
After a few minutes of program introductions, Ackoff is interviewed on his ideas about systems thinking in management for about 16 minutes. Then, Stefan Stern from the Financial Times describes why he was impressed with Ackoff’s thinking. At the 20 minute point, Ackoff talks about the content published in the book on Management F-laws, and then at the 23 minute point, the conversation turns to management education.
James Greiner, “A Look at MapQuest’s Users” (MP3 audio), O’Reilly Media Where 2.0 Conference, IT Conversations, 2009/05/29 January 27, 2010
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: mapquest users
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Mapquest has been the longest popular mapping site on the web, so they should know a lot about the wants and needs of users.
MapQuest is one of the four leading map publishers on the Web. As part of its market research, the company conducted a customer survey on the Geo community with the aim of finding out what users truly want and what benefits them. James Greiner, the Vice President and General Manager of MapQuest, summarizes the results of his survey into five simple and effective principles whose usefulness cannot be exaggerated.
The first of them is to demonstrate the value of the product to the user before selling it to them. Second, give the user control by personalization and customization. Third, a product or service cannot sell in the absence of a foundation. It is of pivot importance to re-inforce the foundation, and add bells and whistles only later. Fourth, do not just dump data at the user; instead help the user make a decision. Finally, evolve the product with the users.
IT Conversations | O’Reilly Media Where 2.0 Conference | James Greiner
Schuyler Erle, “Mapping the Maximum City” (MP3 audio), O’Reilly Media Where 2.0 Conference, 2007/05/29 January 27, 2010
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: geomapping map mumbai
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While it might seem a challenge to map cities in the first world, it’s tougher in the third world.
With over 14 million people, half of which are squatters or slumdwellers, Mumbai is indeed a “maximum city” according to Schuyler Erle. The obstacles to constructing housing for Mumbai’s huge homeless population pile up long before any plan is drawn: to submit a redevelopment project the area is required to be mapped, and before you can make a map you need reliable data.
Erle describes a daunting challenge to mapping Mumbai: the only data available consisted of many very detailed, but hand-drawn maps, which had been vectorized with no common geographical reference. One of the steps required to go from there to a complete geographical dataset, recounts Erle, involved people covering Mumbai using GPS devices to gather control points.
The help of the open source geodata community was also essential, as freely available software was used to rectify the vectorized data. Describing this project as resting solidly on the shoulders of volunteer help, or as he puts it, “long live free software”, Erle refers to the process as “commons-based peer-production”. Schuyler Erle rounds out his talk by recounting some of the particularities of working by distributed collaboration as applied to other geographic data projects, or any open source development project.
IT Conversations | O’Reilly Media Where 2.0 Conference | Schuyler Erle
Russ Roberts, “Wealth, Growth, and Economics as a Science” (MP3 audio), Econtalk, 2009/04/20 January 27, 2010
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: economics, growth, science, wealth
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I’ve listened to a lot of Econtalk interviews, so it’s interesting to hear the ideas of the voice on the other side.
EconTalk host Russ Roberts talks with reporter Robert Pollie about the basics of wealth and growth. What happens when the stock market goes down or the price of housing? When wealth goes down, where does the wealth go? How do these changes affect our wealth? What is the relationship between wealth and inflation? Roberts explains the economic fundamentals of these changes. At the end of the conversation, Roberts discusses the implications of the current economic crisis for assessing the state of economics as a discipline.
Roberts on Wealth, Growth, and Economics as a Science | EconTalk | Library of Economics and Liberty
John Hanke and Bernhard Seefeld, “The Evolution of the Geoweb” (MP3 audio), O’Reilly Media Where 2.0 Conference, IT Conversations, 2007/05/29 January 27, 2010
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: geoweb google maps api kml
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Many of the advances in the geoweb have come from Google.
If the rapid pace of the evolution of Geoweb is an indicator, then an opportunity is certainly emerging for all of us in this ecosystem to create a map of the world that will be more detailed, more comprehensive, more inclusive than any map that has ever been created; not a map of imagery, but of user annotations, of descriptions, images, movies and sounds. The underpinning for this annotation is the base map. Companies in the geo space are investing aggressively in enhancements to the base map, which will drive the creation of many more interesting applications. This also presents a very large economic opportunity, and also means there will be more mergers and acquisitions in this market.
Today, Google covers more than half the world’s population with high-resolution imagery. This has led to uses of the Geoweb beyond any of our expectations in the beginning. At the Search Innovation Day at Google this year, an application that could take any set of search results and view them on a map was launched. Alongside, we’ve launched Google SketchUp and Google StreetView, which provides 3-D, street level immersive photography with a broad zoom range.
We’re also ramping up our support for GeoRSS and making it available in the Google Maps API. We now index GeoRSS and it is available in geo searches. We’ve submitted KML to the Open Geospatial Consortium and they’ve made it an open standard. We’re working on the next version, which is fully vetted by the standard process. KML 2.2 specification has been made publicly available for review and feedback.
IT Conversations | O’Reilly Media Where 2.0 Conference | John Hanke, Bernhard Seefeld
Don Boudreaux, “Macroeconomics and Austrian Business Cycle Theory” (MP3 audio), Econtalk, 2009/04/13 January 19, 2010
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: austrian economics macroeconomics
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Although the Austrian school of economics emphasized microeconomics, their perspective extended to macroeconomics.
Don Boudreaux, of George Mason University, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the microfoundations of macroeconomics and the Austrian theory of business cycles.
Boudreaux draws on Erik Lindahl’s distinction between microeconomics and macroeconomics, emphasizing the difference between individual choices and the coordination of economic activity. Other topics include the Austrian view of capital and investment, the Austrian view of monetary policy, the issue of aggregation, and the intellectual successes of the Keynesians.
Kevin Coyne, “Breakthrough Thinking from Inside the Box” (MP3 audio), HBR Ideacast, 2007/12/20 January 19, 2010
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: breakthrough thinking constraints brainstorming
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Unbounded brainstorming isn’t the most productive path to creativity. Constraints can make designs interesting.
[...] In our quest for breakthrough ideas, we didn’t ask you to think outside the box. Nor did we ask you to think more intently inside your usual box. We gave you a new box and asked you to think inside that.
Most managers and professionals are quite capable of thinking effectively inside a box. They live with constraints all the time and automatically explore alternatives, combinations, and permutations within their confined space. We have found that if you systematically constrain the scope of their thinking (but not too much), people are adept at fully exploring the possibilities, and they can regularly generate lots of good ideas—and occasionally some great ones. Setting the right constraints is a matter of asking the right kinds of questions: ones that create boxes that are useful, but different, from the boxes your people currently think in.
Ten years ago, as part of a larger project for McKinsey’s strategy practice, we led a team of consultants who developed such an approach to brainstorming. It involves posing concrete questions and orchestrating the process for answering those questions. Since then we have successfully used this method with more than 150 clients engaged in everything from major product innovations and industry-shaping moves to simple process improvements. Our technique helped a consumer goods company identify an opportunity for a chilled beverage that captured 20% of the market in the first six months after its launch. A print media company used it to come up with ways to triple the firm’s penetration of the Hispanic market. A plastic pipe manufacturer uncovered an immediately exploitable opportunity to reduce costs by 75%. A regional bank came up with a process that more than doubled the sales productivity of the branches involved in the pilot. Even those whose job it is to be creative have benefited from the methodology: The editors of a group of prominent magazines who had been stuck in a rut in their efforts to come up with story angles have begun using the approach to develop fresh new articles for every issue.
Now that it has been road tested, we’d like to share our approach. A good place to begin is to examine what’s wrong with conventional approaches to brainstorming.
Breakthrough Thinking from Inside the Box – Harvard Business Review
Mikel Maron, “GeoRSS” (MP3 audio), O’Reilly Media Where 2.0 Conference, 2006/07/13 January 19, 2010
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: georss maps feeds
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Geographic information and feed technologies enable continually updated data.
GeoRSS is establishing itself as an easy and effective way to share and build maps. With the potential to make the most of the “RSS ecosystem” for the Geospatial Web, GeoRSS bridges the practices of GIS professionals and amateurs, web map hackers, and numerous services that enable location-based content.Mikel Maron describes the extensions to RSS/Atom that let GeoRSS encode location in standard feed technology and looks at the current state of development and the services and tools using the format.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could get job postings by area as RSS feeds? What about an RSS feed of all the accidents that took place recently along the route of your daily commute? For some years, there have been efforts to include geographic information in RSS. What started as an IRC chat led to the birth of the W3C’s Geo Vocabulary, which provided a way to specify longitude and latitude information in RDF documents. This format evolved slowly and came to be called GeoRSS. However, today’s GeoRSS bears little resemblance to that original format.
Last year at Where 2.0, Yahoo! announced support for GeoRSS. Following that, interested individuals came together to jumpstart an open process to hash out a baseline for GeoRSS. The goal was to support more geometries and to include altitude, while retaining simplicity. A subsidiary aim was to produce descriptive documentation that could then be endorsed by standards bodies such as the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). So GeoRSS.org was formed, which led to a completely new encoding of GeoRSS with the same name.
GeoRSS is feed format neutral: RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, RDF, Atom and even microformats are supported. And it’s actively being used already for many good causes. In 2004, the USGS became the first organization to publish GeoRSS when it began broadcasting potential earthquake alerts as encoded RSS feeds. Following the 2005 tsunami disaster, the European commission JRC deployed an online tsunami simulator that subscribed to the USGS GeoRSS feed and ran tsunami simulations based on the epicenter and magnitutde information in the feed. The results of the simulation were then published in GeoRSS with polygon geometries indicating the extent of a tsunami wave, hour by hour.
IT Conversations | O’Reilly Media Where 2.0 Conference | Mikel Maron
Peter Cochrane, “Uncommon Sense” (MP3 audio), 2007/05/08 January 19, 2010
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: cochrane bandwidth communications
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The effects of increased bandwidth on communications are a speculation.
Professor Peter Cochrane is a man with uncommon sense. One of Britain’s leading technology futurists and a former of head of research at British Telecom labs, Cochrane is the author of Uncommon Sense as well as the founder of Concept Labs.
We talked to Professor Cochrane about next generation fiber optic connectivity, Web 2.0 and how butterfly wings are the best way to make sense of the future of technology.
Chris Spurgeon, “The Best Geo Hacks of the Last 2,000 Years” (MP3 audio), Where 2.0 Conference, 2006/06/14 January 17, 2010
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: mapping geohacks mercator
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Before geographic data was presented on images on the computer, there have been centuries of alternative ways in development.
While it is true that the last few years have seen an explosion of geo-related innovation, Chris Spurgeon reviews some of the past geo hacks that were pulled off in 1920, or 1790, or 250 B.C.
He surveys some of humanity’s cleverest solutions in its attempts to answer those basic questions “where the hell am I?” and “which way should I go?”Chris’s list includes such topics as the history of mapping, a biography of Mercator, the concept of map projections, and other fascinating geo themes.
IT Conversations | O’Reilly Media Where 2.0 Conference | Chris Spurgeon
George Soros, “Our Superbubble” (MP3 audio), On Point, wbur.org January 17, 2010
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: soros superbubble
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George Soros has developed theories of human behaviour and financial markets, and has boldly applied them in practice.
Billionaire investor, philanthropist, and political player George Soros made his fortune riding the winds of high finance.
Now, he says, the global economy is blowing out of a tremendous bubble. Not a normal bubble, but a “superbubble” that’s coming apart in a superbust.
Soros was there for the dawn of the hedge fund and the high-leverage finance that’s now coming back to bite — in housing and oil and debt and a credit crunch. We’re in for financial destruction and a breakdown of world order, he says. Oh, great.
This hour, On Point: As the economy shakes, a conversation with George Soros.
George Soros and Our ‘Superbubble’ | WBUR and NPR – On Point with Tom Ashbrook
Daniel Klein on Adam Smith “The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Episode 1 — An Overview (MP3 audio), Econtalk, 2009/04/06 January 17, 2010
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download, Uncategorized.Tags: adam smith wealth of natoins
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Although many cite Adam Smith, few have actually read him. Economists who have read Adam Smith’s writings find more clarity in the work that preceded The Wealth of Nations.
Dan Klein, of George Mason University, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about Adam Smith’s lesser-known masterpiece, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, on the 250th anniversary of its initial publication. Klein highlights key passages and concepts of the book including its relation to The Wealth of Nations, Smith’s willingness to accept “vague, loose, and indeterminate” rules rather than precise ones, Smith’s criteria for assessing what is moral and what is not, and Smith’s conception of justice.
This podcast is part of the EconTalk Book Club on The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It will be followed by four bonus podcasts in the coming weeks going through the book systematically. Interested listeners who wish to do the reading in advance can find the schedule along with more background on the book on the EconTalk book club page, accessible from the EconTalk home page.
Mark Herman, “Wargaming for Leaders” (MP3 audio), The Invisible Hand podcast, 2009/01/17 January 17, 2010
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: wargaming trade-offs efficiency effectiveness resilience robustness
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Wargaming can enable an appreciation about the trade-offs of efficiency, effectiveness, and resilience (also described as robustness, by Mark Herman.
Chris Gondek speaks with Mark Herman of Booz Allen Hamilton about the business lessons learned from wargaming.
Mark Herman blogs about wargaming at e-markherman.com
Source: Heron and Crane.
Nathan Torkington, Di-Ann Eisnor, Ben Nolan and Josh Petersen, “Social Data Face-Off: A Panel Discussion” (MP3 audio), Where 2.0 Conference, 2006/06/13 January 17, 2010
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: social networks geodata community
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Although we often think about the Internet as virtual and not in physical space, the evolution of technology is bringing the two back together.
The web has redefined the word “community.” In some ways it has made a user’s physical location irrelevant. Recently, however, a fascination with physical place has engendered a new crop of applications aimed at helping users and social networks to map themselves on the web. These apps lets users identify and annotate places, see where their friends are, and link physical locations with other web-based information and technologies.
Creating effective pushpin apps comes with both challenges and possibilities and in this session Nathan Torkington of O’Reilly Media, Di-Ann Eisnor of Platial, Ben Nolan of Zopto.com, and Josh Petersen of 43places.com field questions about avoiding map spam, encouraging users to contribute effectively, handling corrections and disputes, and addressing interoperability.
This panel of platform creators discusses nuts and bolts issues, such as business models and intellectual property considerations, involved with developing and and using apps that are fundamentally about geodata. They also delve into the positive creative effects of these new avenues for geospatial expression. These apps let our passion for place create new ways for us to learn about each other, ourselves, and share stories about our lives.
IT Conversations | O’Reilly Media Where 2.0 Conference | Social Data Face-Off
John Frank and Schuyler Erle, “MetaCarta API and Trinity interface” (MP3 audio), Where 2.0 Conference, 2006/06/13 January 17, 2010
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: metacarta api mapping trinity
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With the ease of use of Google Maps, we take geodata for granted. Some history of the development of the underlying standards is edifying.
Imagine the power of turning locations in text documents into dots on a map. John Frank and Schuyler Erle from MetaCarta have been providing enterprise customers with that power for a number of years and are now ready to open up their georeference engine to the rest of the Internet. In this short and lively presentation from the 2006 O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference, Frank and Erle discuss the development of their MetaCarta API and Trinity interface.
More geographic data is being created than ever before. In order to take advantage of this revolution, MetaCarta is allowing developers to geoparse plain text locations into mapped locations. MetaCarta has made an open source API available that makes this geoparsing possible in nearly any web application.
Erle, from the MetaCarta labs, presents a few possible applications of this technology. One such implementation allowed him to map all locations mentioned on the CNN homepage with varying degrees of emphasis. Another application let him visualize locations mentioned in texts available at Project Gutenberg, such as Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War.
IT Conversations | O’Reilly Media Where 2.0 Conference | John Frank & Schuyler Erle
