Harry Chen Thinks Aloud

No doubt that blog has changed the way we share knowledge on the Internet. Writing blogs might seem to be a hobby-related activity. Unexpectedly, blog is now finding its ways into the business lives of the top executives. According to

this Fortune article, you can’t really be a good manager if you don’t write blogs.

Jonathan Schwartz, president and COO of Sun Microsystems says, “Blogs are no more mandated at Sun than e-mail. But I have a hard time seeing how a manager can be effective without both.”

Schwartz encourages all Sun’s 32,000 employees to blog, though only about 100 are doing it so far. But they include at least three senior managers other than Schwartz as well as development engineers and marketers. Over at Microsoft, some 1000 employees blog.

“When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.” — Abraham Lincoln.

When doing scientific research, the scientists must follow some kind of research methodology in order to know if the problems that they try to solve are actually worthy to be solved. Without going into the deep issues that surround the philosophy of Science, here is a list of questions that George Heilmeyer, who was the director of ARPA, believes every researchers should try to answer when doing their research:

1. What is the problem, why is it hard?
2. How is it solved today?
3. What is the new technical idea; why can we succeed now?
4. What is the impact if successful?
5. How will the program be organized?
6. How will intermediate results be generated?
7. How will you measure progress?
8. What will it cost?
   

A short article on Heilmeyer’s Catechism by Tim Finin.

Now some companies want to create new business over a service called TVIP (TV over Internet protocol), which allows TV programs to be delivered to your house via a phone line that is equipped with a high speed internet connection.

“TVIP takes advantage of the increasing popularity and prevalence of broadband Internet, plus improved technology for delivering customized video and compressing it to a manageable size without hurting quality. Video on demand essentially works as a pre-loaded digital video recorder, like TiVo or Sky+, with the content stored on a central server. For example, HomeChoice’s music channels function as a customized MTV or VH1, letting subscribers choose which videos they want to watch.”

Read the full story here.

I’m very excited about this new Hydrogen-powered car that is capable of exceeding 185 miles per hour. Looks like we are getting closer to have more environment friendly cars on the road.

However, one problem remains. “The company [BMW] cautioned, however, that while the cars don’t pollute, production of hydrogen as a fuel does entail pollution. Hydrogen is obtained either from fossil fuels such as natural gas or by applying electrical power to water molecules. Ecologically, the problem of finding a regenerating source of primary energy remains. “

Fran?ois is one of my favorite TV ads. If you haven’t seen it, watch it online.

Saw some good things that I like about ask.com. I decided to give it a try. In next few weeks I will use ask.com instead of google.

Also, I’m kind of interested to learn if the new MyJeeves service is actually useful. I have signed up for a free account. Will report more.

How big is five exabytes of information? “If digitized with full formatting, the seventeen million books in the Library of Congress contain about 136 terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress book collections.”

Guss what. The researchers estimited that about five exabytes of new information has been created in the year 2002. This is crazy! With this much of information flowing around, no wonder I often feel that I’m overloaded with things to read and things to understand. Is there any help? Personally, I don’t think so and I don’ think there is any immediate solutions to this information overload problem. However, we can still learn about the underlying causes that are associated with this problem.

I looked around the web and found this paper — Complexity and Information Society: why increasing in efficiency leads to decreasing controls by Francis Heylighen. Good reading if you are interested to investigate this problem further.