June 2002
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Religion and Business
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1 min read
Daniel S. Brenner says, ‘Build a Mosque at Ground Zero, and a church, and a synagogue. An inter-religious center would be a testimony to America’s spiritual power.‘ Then a friend asks, ‘What if the world religions at least got together on the common ground of fair trading? Like co-operative review committees? WTO watchdogs?” In my…
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Stupid Visio Tricks
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1 min read
I usually abhore keyboard shortcuts, since everyone knows mousing is faster. But for zooming and moving in Visio, this rocks… hold down Shift + Control, then: – Left click zooms in– Right click zooms out– Hold right button to drag page (Adobe-style) thanks to Brett for the tip.
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A-Z Indexes
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1 min read
The good folks at the Montague Institute posted a collection of A-Z Indexes on the web. These can be incredibly useful in the right circumstances. What I’d like to connect to these are both a method for choosing the terms and usability guidelines for when they make sense.
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Semantic Studios
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1 min read
hey, I made Peter Morville’s A-list. Though I don’t know why, I haven’t written about information architecture in, like, nine years.
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Word, Covering Its Ass
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0 min read
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Complexity in Business
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1 min read
What’s the Matter With Sun?: Newt Gingrich was talking about large information-technology companies and what they need to say to their customers. Gingrich said, ‘The line should be, The Answer to Complexity Is ( Your Company’s Name Here ).’
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Half-Truths in Business
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2 min read
Memo To: CEOs There is nothing clever about firing large numbers of people. In our finance classes, we are teaching a view of the world that says that each of us is obsessively self-interested and intent on maximizing personal gain. Economic Man, we tell our students, has one goal: more. And to get more, each…
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Language
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0 min read
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Stock Trading Language
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1 min read
When shares of a company plunge on the New York Stock Exchange the trader responsible for that listing must buy into the selling, in their words, she must ‘catch the falling knife.’
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Internet R&D
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1 min read
Mr Patent: ‘There’s an endless series of problems, things that the company needs us to solve, and we go and do that.’ I wonder if any Internet companies have dedicated R&D departments for finding solutions to problems (as opposed to developing new products), or if we all keep fixing the same things repeatedly in different…
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Lockheed Project Management
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2 min read
Fast Company has an interesting article on the management approach at Lockheed Martin that led to winning the U.S. Joint Strike Fighter contract. One important point is the willingness of the Pentagon to prove out the technology during the bidding process: ‘The defense department gave both Boeing and Lockheed $1.1 billion in funding to develop…
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Community
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1 min read
‘No man is an island’ – Thomas Merton Merton was a pretty interesting guy. When the time comes to learn more about monks, which we all do eventually, you could do worse then look him up. Given his faith-questioning ways and interest in Eastern philosophy, I’m surprised the Catholic church didn’t kick him out.
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Johnny Metaseed
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1 min read
It’s nearly impossible to find the contact info for my local bikeshop on the ‘net, a situation not improved by my inability to spell renaissance, so I made them a webpage. Nothing special, just something for people to find when they’re looking.
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Crosswalk
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1 min read
Once we build all these taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies, etc. we’ll run into situations where we’ll have applications that need to access more than one of these simultaneously. Throw in organizational issues like different departments ‘owning’ their favorite organization scheme and it all gets rather messy. We’ll either need to combine them or ‘crosswalk’ them, that…
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Blog Prototype
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0 min read