Noise Between Stations

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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

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 [...]