Noise Between Stations

Victor

  • Redesigning American Business

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    1 min read

    Bruce Nussbaum’s Redesigning American Business for Business Week identifies what my company is doing: “Designers are teaching CEOs and managers how to innovate… They pitch themselves to businesses as a resource to help with a broad array of issues that affect strategy and organization — creating new brands, defining customer experiences, understanding user needs, changing…

  • Victor

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    1 min read

    They say the fish will be the last animal to discover water. Walking down the street the other day I wondered about the meaning of my own name. Victor means winner, but in my case I was simply named after my maternal grandfather. And Lombardi, especially when I was born in 1969, was synonymous with…

  • Cockroaches stage coup in Ukraine

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    1 min read

    Actually, no. But not so far off when you learn a rat brain has been taught to fly a jet. Gibson extends: “…Thunderbolt IIs have Night Vision Imaging Systems (NVIS), rat brain compatible cockpits forward of their wings and a large bubble canopy which provides the rat brains all-around vision. The rat brains are encircled…

  • Business fuses with design

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    1 min read

    Niti Bhan’s While you were out: changes in the global design industry for Core77 is a good overview on the fusion of business and design, including some nice words about my new company. Niti is from IIT’s Institute of Design who, incidentally, has a newish Master of Design Methods program for those who want a…

  • The ‘fend for yourself’ brand

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    1 min read

    Gerber makes pocket knives and tools, but not the kind of knives I’d feel comfortable pulling out in an office to adjust a screw on my laptop… these are serious knives. Their branding is a direct extension of the products, summed up in the words Fend for yourself… When did we decide campgrounds needed laundromats?…

  • How good are doctors?

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    1 min read

    Atul Gawande’s The Bell Curve in last week’s New Yorker… It used to be assumed that differences among hospitals or doctors in a particular specialty were generally insignificant. If you plotted a graph showing the results of all the centers treating cystic fibrosis—or any other disease for that matter—people expected that the curve would look…

  • Ethnoclassification and retrieval

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    2 min read

    I’ve been doing some product development consulting for a content-centric company, and started to wonder if ethnoclassification could benefit them somehow. I was hard-pressed to think of how, after the content was tagged, the tags would lead to better sets of content. Although they have a lot of content, they only have a few authors…

  • Sorry, I’m not sorry

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    1 min read

    I’ll go on the record here and say that Sorry Everybody is contrary to the ideals that make America what it is. I voted against Bush, but that doesn’t make me want to apologize to the rest of the world that he won. He won because we are a Republic with a democratic voting process…

  • Recent reads

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    1 min read

    William Gibson, blogging again Tom Peters, dispatches from the new world of work Havard Business School, working knowledge

  • Distributed processing on a chip

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    1 min read

    Details are emerging on IBM’s “supercomputer on a chip”, which essentially seems to take the logic that distributes operations to multiple chips that used to be done in applications or the operating system and integrate it at the chip level. This has the potential to exponentially speed up everything that’s not already a supercomputer, as…

  • Get paid for your great IA ideas

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    1 min read

    We just rolled out the AIfIA Information Architecture Progress Grants: Two grants will be awarded in February, 2005… Each grant is for US$1000… Applications should propose work that has the potential to benefit information architecture practioners in a practical way. This includes, for example, original research, a new synthesis of important existing research, or development…

  • WiMAX vs. Hi-Gain

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    1 min read

    While microwave-powered WiMAX is getting more attention these days, I was fascinated to learn on Thanksgiving of a relative’s plan to simply use a hi-gain setup instead. His plan is to go to markets that don’t already have wired broadband internet access — in his case rural Virginia — and put hi-gain antennas on the…

  • Political framing: Taxes

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    2 min read

    After Christina shared George Lakoff’s ideas on framing, I’ve been thinking about developing new frames from a progressive political point of view. We can’t simply react to what the conservatives do, we must proactively create the future. Under the radar, President Bush is gradually moving towards a flat tax, and along the way the changes…

  • Wikipedia

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    1 min read

    If you haven’t already discovered the Wikipedia then you should, if you at all like encyclopedias. And even if you dislike wikis it’s alright, there’s proper search and navigation elements, and enough content there already to be quite useful so that one need not feel guilty for not contributing. Surfing it reminds me of when…

  • Make eight mistakes a day

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    1 min read

    The HealthWorks! Kids’ Museum is a unit of Memorial Hospital in South Bend, Indiana and an organization truly focused on health care, not just illness care. In a recent profile, one employee cited the need for trial-and-error in the design of their education programs, “To innovate, we need to make at least eight mistakes a…