Absolutely correct. Been there, done that, had the heart attack at 40.
As I was laying in the hospital bed, wired for sound, my then-five-year-old daughter came in to see me. I will never forget the look of horror on her face when she saw her Daddy laying there, looking like he was one step away from dead. I decided at that moment never to go back. I walked away from a six-figure income to a zero-figure income, got my life together, wrote a book, earned a PhD, and appreciate that there is more to life than working all the time, especially when it's only to make other people rich.
It all depends on where you are, and what school you attend. I am completing a PhD in Canada at one of Canada's Tier 1 universities. I own the copyright to all my work, my notes, my essays, my papers (except those that have been published by a major journal), my blog posts, and my dissertation. And yes, I am funded by the university and a provincial agency.
To get my degree, I grant the university (and the National Library) a non-exclusive license to reproduce my thesis in their respective databases, but I hold the copyright. It even says so on the cover page. In fact, at my university, we even have the option to license it under Creative Commons (which I intend to do when/if I'm done).
The reason this doesn't apply to Canadians has to do with cross-border transport of both finished goods and raw materials. Truckers from both Canada and the U.S. routinely cross the border to minimize transportation distance (among other things, like providing just-in-time inventory supply). Doing the whole fingerprint/photograph thing would interfere significantly with commerce and manufacturing in both countries, so that's why the exception.
The big problem is that pretty much every marketer today is stuck in the "fogey generation," completely trained and immersed in the traditional understanding of marketing that came from an industrialized model. They see SL, and other forms of online interaction no differently than they see (saw) TV, radio, newspapers and billboards - as "channels" to communicate their message, image, and brand.
With a generation of people who have grown up in a massively interconnected world, traditional marketing principles are turned on their head. A presence in SL just ain't going to cut it. Marketers are going to need to figure out how the contemporary world functions in all its interconnected complexity, and change their ways accordingly.
I don't know where you go to school, but I own the copyrights to all my papers, master's thesis and the PhD thesis that I'm wrapping up (soon... very, very soon...) In fact, the standard form of the thesis cover sheet includes my copyright, plus a release form to allow the university to publish it in Dissertation Abstracts, and the National Library Archives. I have published several of my essays as articles in scholarly journals and the copyright is either assigned (yuck) or licensed (better).
The intellectual property rights to certain inventions that are funded by public research money or departmental grants is another matter altogether that goes to patentability and future licensing rights for inventions, but this discussion is about copyright.
The overwhelming response of the sysadmins, and many others, is, it's the employer's computer, therefore everything on it is available to the employer (ie. no expectation of privacy as confirmed by 9th Circuit). But there is another perspective that might be reasonably argued (Of course, IANAL; I am a media theory researcher and prof).
If we consider that electronic stuff (hardware, software and data) as containers within containers, the hardware might be owned by the employer, and the employer might have a right to see what containers are placed on the hardware. However, many of those containers (files) might contain so-called intellectual property that belongs to the person herself. The employer has no right to that (leaving aside, for the moment, contracts in which the individual stupidly gives all IP rights to the employer, even for private, non-work-related, non-compensated creations). The mere fact of physical location does not give the employer the right of unwarranted search. For example, the person's purse happens to be located in the desk drawer of the employer-supplied desk, within the employer's office. The employer does not have the right to search the purse, nor take possession of its contents. By analogy, I would argue that the content of personal data files (not necessarily the wrapper that is the file structure itself) is off-limits to the employer.
In short: the employer has the right (according to court ruling) to see the files on their property, but not necessarily the file content. The courts have not distinguished among respective ownerships of the hardware, the data structures, and the data contents. This distinction is something that will eventually be tested in court, I expect.
Like other posters, I agree that the employer could demand immediate return of the laptop and the individual would lose all of her personal information, and therefore the person must assume that risk of loss, encryption or no encryption. And I use my own laptop for my work - the employer does not have the right to access my machine. If they want my work (which they do) they agree to my terms. Every so often I hear the dire warning of the IT department about not providing me support. But then again, I've had occasion to fix some of the messes on other users' computers that were "supported" by the IT department.
Even if corporations' special rights to personhood are not taken away (and I do not necessarily disagree with that concept), holding corporations responsible for their externalities - the costs that they conveniently slough off to someone else - would go a long way. For example, in Germany, companies are responsible for collecting and disposing of the packaging in which their goods come. This means that Sony Germany is responsible for all the packing materials of all Sony products sold in that country. You can bet your PSP that German companies are far more responsible about the amount of, and recyclability of their packaging. Making companies pay for the health-care costs of people with illnesses caused by their air pollution, metering and charging for effluents into streams and rivers, go a long way.
The other major change that would go a long, long way is to eliminate the assumption of the divine right of capital (the phrase is from a book by that name by Marjorie Kelly). Most stockholders (the so-called "owners" of public companies) have taken no risk aside from the same sort of gamble that occurs in Las Vegas, yet they have the privilege and the rights of "ownership." A more (true) republican model would have all those who contribute to the wealth more democratically involved in decision-making and governance. Indeed, it is more often the case that employees are taking a far higher risk in working for companies - sometimes physical risk to their person, sometimes risking their livelihoods, homes, and healthcare against the decisions of a privileged few.
A pilot has been launched for Toronto, Canada, not by Microsoft, but by a private company. It's called Virtual City and is cute, but not really all that useful, since the ground-level buildings and artefacts are quite out of date (some of the shots are almost a year old).
A major concern is what happens when the nanosubstance enters the body with the ability to traverse the cellular wall. Check out some of the articles on nanoparticles in cosmetics and tanning solutions.
We recently had to replace a washing machine. The salesman was touting the LG model that is lined with nanosilver, claimed as bacteriocidal. When I pointed out that substances that otherwise might be more or less safe take on different bioactive properties when in nano form, the salesman became very concerned and decided not to recommend that particular model any longer. (The other LG washers, btw, are really nice.)
Vodafone Receiver had a philosophical and cultural take on this very topic a few months back. From the article:
When a hard drive fails, or the memory card is erased or misplaced, or when a future computer can no longer read today's media, our culture becomes a little more forgetful, and a little more forgotten. The consequence of our technological advancement is that, centuries from now, historians may well look back on our time as a type of dark age. Compared to earlier generations, very little of our cultural history is being recorded so that it will actually exist into the future. We will literally be a forgotten culture, because those who will come after us will have technologically "forgotten" how to read, or even locate, our ephemeral artefacts. If we want to be remembered at all, we must additionally create artefacts that will travel through time, as the writings, art, and photographs of our forebears have come to us.
Lawrence Britt may not be a Ph.D., but neither is he unqualified, nor is he a mere journalist. Here is an article in the Rochester City with the transcript of an interview with Britt. The last question and answer are the most telling about his 14 Characteristics of Fascism:
City: Looking at the world right now, do you consider the US a fascist state?
Britt: No. By definition it's a democracy. My article is a cautionary tale. This is what I've researched; this is what I've seen; this is what's happened in the past. You can draw your own conclusions: No, this has nothing to do with the United States; or, there are some disquieting trends here that we certainly have to be aware of, and the powers that be exhibit many of these characteristics, and we'd better damn well be careful.
Self-plagarism is an academic offense. "Quoting oneself with appropriate citation demonstrates academic facility and the ability to advance knowledge" (McLuhanesque, 2004). You choose how you want to be considered. For example:
McLuhanesque, M. (2004). On the value of moderating in Slashdot. [Unpublished essay]. Timbuktu: Graduate College of Higher Procrastination.
See? It's not difficult to stay within appropriate bounds.
In the course that I teach, and have taught, I make my lecture notes and powerpoints available for downloading by all my students. I tell them that I don't want them to necessarily be taking copious notes, but rather to be experiencing the learning that is embodied by the in-class experience. Later, they can download the notes and reflect on the combination of the text and the experience.
I have had one or two students in the past that, despite my warnings in the very first class, chose to avoid the seminars and just download the notes. Invariably, they fail the course miserably, since they literally miss half the material - the experiential half - despite the fact that the text that is performed is the text that is downloaded.
A good prof will create a sufficiently engaging and useful experience in the classroom so that the students will do whatever they can to not miss the class.
(As an aside, relative to the "it's my intellectual property" thread, I make all of my materials on applied media theory freely available on request to any professor anywhere in the world who wants to use them under an appropriate CC license. Yes, it's material that I have evolved and developed over years. Yes, it represents a considerable amount of work and scholarship. And yes, it enables me to influence and touch so many more students than I could ever hope to reach directly. In return, I achieve recognition and reputation that are among the important currencies of the academy. Doing so also results in invitations for paying gigs in various cool places around the world.)
User listens to music for free, but there are ads. Where have I heard of this before? Lots of Internet radio around, like Pandora, that nominally doesn't allow the music to be captured, played on a portable device, etc., except if you find where the files are cached, and rename them to SomethingUseful.mp3.
Really nothing to see here, except for the fact that Universal now realizes that music being heard leads to music being bought.
Yes, absolutely leave it alone as an artefact of the time, and an important marker in the history of televised Sci-Fi (not to mention the Star Trek saga itself). The issue is not the content (ie. eye candy), but the context of the times in which it was made. For heaven's sake, didn't we go through this about a decade ago with "colourized" versions of classic old movies? The same reason that there is value in black and white applies to TOS's admittedly cheesy special effects.
As far as it being a classic, the vision of Star Trek: TOS (and later, TNG) was tremendously influential on technology design through the 1990s and into the 2000s. Who here has a clamshell design mobile phone (communicator)? How about a stylus-oriented handheld, or tablet, computer? Don't touch the classics! (And yes, it is a classic, depicting a time in North American history that was, as Spock would say, fascinating.)
This happens to be the topic of my PhD research in organization theory. I have written considerably about the various theoretical foundations of a new theory of organization, most of which is posted, or linked to, on my blog under this category. As well, I have published an article in the latest edition (Summer 2006, vol. 24 no. 2) of the Organization Development Journal entitled "The Penguinist Discourse: A Critical Application of Open Source Software Project Management to Organization Development," that extends the well-known work of Yochai Benkler ("Coase's Penguin") to apply open source principles and motivational factors to general management.
I would be happy to correspond with anyone who might be interested in my work relative to their own workplaces (and I also do OD consulting, btw).
When I finished my undergrad, I had something like a barely B- average from engineering, in a discipline that is now called computer engineering before that discipline had a name. After a 25 year career that spanned the technical (eg. mainframe systems programming, datacentre operations management, etc.) and the non-technical (eg. sales, marketing, management, but not as the PHB), I was burned out. Couldn't stand the corporate world, and, quite frankly, had quite enough of the IT business, because I kept seeing the old patterns in the latest and greatest. (For example, how many of you realized that IBM was the first major open source software company way back in the 1970s and early 1980s?)
So I decided to start on a path of an MA to PhD in a completely different field, drawing on a full career's worth of experience and intimate knowledge of some of the significant problems facing, in my specific case, the workplace. (My grad school GPA is 4.0 for combined master's and PhD coursework.) I'm about half-way through the PhD now, developing a new theory of organization (visit my weblog if you're interested), and can honestly tell you that it is among the best experiences of my life. Now, at mid-life, I feel completely rejuvenated, excited and passionate about what I am doing and the prospects for what I can yet accomplish in my life. Unlike my age-peers who have spent a lifetime as professors, entering grad school directly after their undergrad and worked their way up the academic corporate ladder, I face the students I now teach (and will teach in the future) with excitement and enthusiasm, tempered by a wealth of life experience, not to mention subject matter knowledge drawn from both theory and practice. Many of my professors are contemplating what to do in their retirement. Me? I've got a second life.
My $0.02: Wait for grad school until you find a significant problem that's worth solving, and about which you are so passionate that you cannot wake up in the morning without thinking about it. Then go, and contribute something useful and meaningful to the world.
Like the one published at the beginning of the year by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The Strength of Internet Ties, authored by Jeffrey Boase, John Horrigan, Barry Wellman, and Lee Rainie found "The internet and email aid users in maintaining their social networks and provide pathways to help when people face big decisions" The press release that publicized the report says, "One major payoff comes when people use the internet to press their social networks into action as they face major challenges. People not only socialize online, but they also incorporate the internet into their quest for information and advice as they seek help and make decisions.... One major benefit comes when people want to mobilize their networks as they face problems or significant decisions. The Pew Internet Project survey finds that internet users are more likely than non-users to have been helped by those in their networks as they faced important events in their life. "Internet use provides online Americans a path to resources, such as access to people who may have the right information to help deal with family health crises or find a new job," says John Horrigan, Associate Director for Research at the Pew Internet Project."
The Duke/Arizona study is flawed in its analysis, as it interprets correlation as indicating causality, a common mistake among quantitative researchers.
Marshall McLuhan used to say that in electric communications (thinking of telegraph, radio, and television) the sender is sent. The effects of that type of communication was very much different than a book or a letter by post, both of which could also be sent, but sent as a proxy for the author.
With the acceleration due to the instantaneity of Internet-enabled communications, there is a reversal effect (as described in McLuhan's Laws of Media: The new science). With email, the receiver is received. That is, the person who receives the email imposes her/his own context, mood, and emotion to the received email, as if it was received in a face-to-face (i.e., oral-like) communication. It is the effect of the instant (as in f-t-f), but with the asynchonicity of proxy communication (as in book or post). Until one become acclimatized to the apparent incongruity, misinterpretation is bound to happen.
I remember experiencing the exact same effects when fax was new, and when email was new, both in a business context. When a customer became irate with what I thought was a civil fax, I was confused. When it happened again with the initial email some years later, I remembered the fax incident and thought there might be a pattern here. Now that I've spent the past few years studying, working, and consulting in media theory, I understand why it happens.
Challenging the Managerialist View
on
Unusual Open Source
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· Score: 3, Interesting
As a PhD researcher into the evolution of organizational forms, I find the facile application of open source principles rather distressing - especially when they're used either to reinforce the notion that hierarchies (read: control and power) really are important, or to promote that people should work for free and donate their efforts to the "greater good" (read: more profits for the shareholders and more shite for the workers).
I have a paper that challenges these notions being published in the upcoming (Summer 2006) edition of Organization Development Journal called, "THE PENGUINIST DISCOURSE: A critical application of open source software project management to organization development"
While I can't make the paper available online just yet, the abstract reads as follows:
The apparent altruism observed among contributors to Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) initiatives is often envied by managers seeking to inspire and motivate employees. While conventional managerialist authors often encourage the emulation of FLOSS management style, this paper seeks a social-psychological understanding of FLOSS contributors' motivation, and the control dynamics of the projects' organization. Radical changes to the some of the basic assumptions of conventional practices may be required to translate FLOSS approaches to corporate management.
For those with in-house OD folks, you may want to alert them to the next edition of the journal. (I also do strategy and OD facilitation and interventions on a contract basis; you can track me down via my profile.)
...it's not the first time in history that it's happened. Massive disruption in the way knowledge is constructed occurred in Ancient Greece with the transition from primary orality in the face of the phonetic alphabet, and again in the 15th century with the transition from the manuscript culture to the print culture. Western society is again in the midst of a massively disruptive transition that began with the introduction of the telegraph (marking the transition from print to electric communication) and will end roughly 150 years from now. By that time, our society will quite likely be regarded as quaint, and somewhat primitive.
A much more detailed examination of this is blogged here, with the full text of the lecture available for download.
I left the IT world when I was 40, wandered around a bit - did some business consulting, and other nonsense, and then (re)discovered that I had a knack for teaching. So I ended up in grad school in the social sciences, getting exposure to a whole new way of thinking. Combining this with the type of training I had in IT, plus some on-the-job-trained business skills (marketing, sales, product development, management) I find that I bring some usefully different perspectives to my field of research.
Long story short - I'm doing a PhD, doing a bunch of teaching, developing research into both the future of corporate organizations (taking revenge on all the PHBs) as well as developing some new approaches to online learning environments. Plus I'm having a fabulous time (most of my department is female and tend to go for the guy with experience). Far more fun than undergrad ever was!
I sent my little girl to kindergarten 10 years ago with much the same speech - plus regular talks on "having her own mind," "thinking independently," and "being a leader, not a follower."
Now in high school, she is a straight-A student, socially aware (especially with regard to causes like copyright reform as it turns out), self-confident, articulate, gregarious and outgoing with a massive circle of friends. In fact, earlier this week she has been invited to give testimony to our Parliament's Standing Committee on reforms to the Copyright Act (colour me proud papa!)
It's encouragement like this that develops young women into the architects of tomorrow's society, and the types of leaders that will replace the buffoons that currently sit in places of power in politics, business and education.
Start young, and convince your daughters, granddaughters and nieces that there's nothing stopping them from accomplishment and success.
There is actually some solid and serious research behind this initiative, and other similar projects that are pushing the traditional boundaries of education. I've commented on it here, with links to the research, theory and project pages.
The historical fact is that our current educational system is only about 350 years old, give or take a decade. Prior to that, what was considered knowledge, appropriate pedagogy, and educational techniques were considerably different, and different still compared to the same items in ancient Greece. With the fundamental changes that are occuring in many aspects of our contemporary societies, radical new approaches to education are not only to be expected, but are to be welcomed.
Besides, has anyone considered the idea that the current dysfunction among modern corporations, and the plethora of McJobs may be a direct outcome of a now obsolescent educational system - one that served the industrial age well, but is sadly outdated today?
Slashdot Mirror
Out of idle curiosity, when did "ramblings of a random guy" become "news"?
Ever since they invented cable news channels?
Absolutely correct. Been there, done that, had the heart attack at 40.
As I was laying in the hospital bed, wired for sound, my then-five-year-old daughter came in to see me. I will never forget the look of horror on her face when she saw her Daddy laying there, looking like he was one step away from dead. I decided at that moment never to go back. I walked away from a six-figure income to a zero-figure income, got my life together, wrote a book, earned a PhD, and appreciate that there is more to life than working all the time, especially when it's only to make other people rich.
It all depends on where you are, and what school you attend. I am completing a PhD in Canada at one of Canada's Tier 1 universities. I own the copyright to all my work, my notes, my essays, my papers (except those that have been published by a major journal), my blog posts, and my dissertation. And yes, I am funded by the university and a provincial agency.
To get my degree, I grant the university (and the National Library) a non-exclusive license to reproduce my thesis in their respective databases, but I hold the copyright. It even says so on the cover page. In fact, at my university, we even have the option to license it under Creative Commons (which I intend to do when/if I'm done).
The reason this doesn't apply to Canadians has to do with cross-border transport of both finished goods and raw materials. Truckers from both Canada and the U.S. routinely cross the border to minimize transportation distance (among other things, like providing just-in-time inventory supply). Doing the whole fingerprint/photograph thing would interfere significantly with commerce and manufacturing in both countries, so that's why the exception.
The big problem is that pretty much every marketer today is stuck in the "fogey generation," completely trained and immersed in the traditional understanding of marketing that came from an industrialized model. They see SL, and other forms of online interaction no differently than they see (saw) TV, radio, newspapers and billboards - as "channels" to communicate their message, image, and brand.
With a generation of people who have grown up in a massively interconnected world, traditional marketing principles are turned on their head. A presence in SL just ain't going to cut it. Marketers are going to need to figure out how the contemporary world functions in all its interconnected complexity, and change their ways accordingly.
I don't know where you go to school, but I own the copyrights to all my papers, master's thesis and the PhD thesis that I'm wrapping up (soon... very, very soon...) In fact, the standard form of the thesis cover sheet includes my copyright, plus a release form to allow the university to publish it in Dissertation Abstracts, and the National Library Archives. I have published several of my essays as articles in scholarly journals and the copyright is either assigned (yuck) or licensed (better).
The intellectual property rights to certain inventions that are funded by public research money or departmental grants is another matter altogether that goes to patentability and future licensing rights for inventions, but this discussion is about copyright.
The overwhelming response of the sysadmins, and many others, is, it's the employer's computer, therefore everything on it is available to the employer (ie. no expectation of privacy as confirmed by 9th Circuit). But there is another perspective that might be reasonably argued (Of course, IANAL; I am a media theory researcher and prof).
If we consider that electronic stuff (hardware, software and data) as containers within containers, the hardware might be owned by the employer, and the employer might have a right to see what containers are placed on the hardware. However, many of those containers (files) might contain so-called intellectual property that belongs to the person herself. The employer has no right to that (leaving aside, for the moment, contracts in which the individual stupidly gives all IP rights to the employer, even for private, non-work-related, non-compensated creations). The mere fact of physical location does not give the employer the right of unwarranted search. For example, the person's purse happens to be located in the desk drawer of the employer-supplied desk, within the employer's office. The employer does not have the right to search the purse, nor take possession of its contents. By analogy, I would argue that the content of personal data files (not necessarily the wrapper that is the file structure itself) is off-limits to the employer.
In short: the employer has the right (according to court ruling) to see the files on their property, but not necessarily the file content. The courts have not distinguished among respective ownerships of the hardware, the data structures, and the data contents. This distinction is something that will eventually be tested in court, I expect.
Like other posters, I agree that the employer could demand immediate return of the laptop and the individual would lose all of her personal information, and therefore the person must assume that risk of loss, encryption or no encryption. And I use my own laptop for my work - the employer does not have the right to access my machine. If they want my work (which they do) they agree to my terms. Every so often I hear the dire warning of the IT department about not providing me support. But then again, I've had occasion to fix some of the messes on other users' computers that were "supported" by the IT department.
Even if corporations' special rights to personhood are not taken away (and I do not necessarily disagree with that concept), holding corporations responsible for their externalities - the costs that they conveniently slough off to someone else - would go a long way. For example, in Germany, companies are responsible for collecting and disposing of the packaging in which their goods come. This means that Sony Germany is responsible for all the packing materials of all Sony products sold in that country. You can bet your PSP that German companies are far more responsible about the amount of, and recyclability of their packaging. Making companies pay for the health-care costs of people with illnesses caused by their air pollution, metering and charging for effluents into streams and rivers, go a long way.
The other major change that would go a long, long way is to eliminate the assumption of the divine right of capital (the phrase is from a book by that name by Marjorie Kelly). Most stockholders (the so-called "owners" of public companies) have taken no risk aside from the same sort of gamble that occurs in Las Vegas, yet they have the privilege and the rights of "ownership." A more (true) republican model would have all those who contribute to the wealth more democratically involved in decision-making and governance. Indeed, it is more often the case that employees are taking a far higher risk in working for companies - sometimes physical risk to their person, sometimes risking their livelihoods, homes, and healthcare against the decisions of a privileged few.
A pilot has been launched for Toronto, Canada, not by Microsoft, but by a private company. It's called Virtual City and is cute, but not really all that useful, since the ground-level buildings and artefacts are quite out of date (some of the shots are almost a year old).
A major concern is what happens when the nanosubstance enters the body with the ability to traverse the cellular wall. Check out some of the articles on nanoparticles in cosmetics and tanning solutions.
We recently had to replace a washing machine. The salesman was touting the LG model that is lined with nanosilver, claimed as bacteriocidal. When I pointed out that substances that otherwise might be more or less safe take on different bioactive properties when in nano form, the salesman became very concerned and decided not to recommend that particular model any longer. (The other LG washers, btw, are really nice.)
Self-plagarism is an academic offense. "Quoting oneself with appropriate citation demonstrates academic facility and the ability to advance knowledge" (McLuhanesque, 2004). You choose how you want to be considered. For example:
McLuhanesque, M. (2004). On the value of moderating in Slashdot. [Unpublished essay]. Timbuktu: Graduate College of Higher Procrastination.
See? It's not difficult to stay within appropriate bounds.
In the course that I teach, and have taught, I make my lecture notes and powerpoints available for downloading by all my students. I tell them that I don't want them to necessarily be taking copious notes, but rather to be experiencing the learning that is embodied by the in-class experience. Later, they can download the notes and reflect on the combination of the text and the experience.
I have had one or two students in the past that, despite my warnings in the very first class, chose to avoid the seminars and just download the notes. Invariably, they fail the course miserably, since they literally miss half the material - the experiential half - despite the fact that the text that is performed is the text that is downloaded.
A good prof will create a sufficiently engaging and useful experience in the classroom so that the students will do whatever they can to not miss the class.
(As an aside, relative to the "it's my intellectual property" thread, I make all of my materials on applied media theory freely available on request to any professor anywhere in the world who wants to use them under an appropriate CC license. Yes, it's material that I have evolved and developed over years. Yes, it represents a considerable amount of work and scholarship. And yes, it enables me to influence and touch so many more students than I could ever hope to reach directly. In return, I achieve recognition and reputation that are among the important currencies of the academy. Doing so also results in invitations for paying gigs in various cool places around the world.)
User listens to music for free, but there are ads. Where have I heard of this before? Lots of Internet radio around, like Pandora, that nominally doesn't allow the music to be captured, played on a portable device, etc., except if you find where the files are cached, and rename them to SomethingUseful.mp3.
Really nothing to see here, except for the fact that Universal now realizes that music being heard leads to music being bought.
Yes, absolutely leave it alone as an artefact of the time, and an important marker in the history of televised Sci-Fi (not to mention the Star Trek saga itself). The issue is not the content (ie. eye candy), but the context of the times in which it was made. For heaven's sake, didn't we go through this about a decade ago with "colourized" versions of classic old movies? The same reason that there is value in black and white applies to TOS's admittedly cheesy special effects.
As far as it being a classic, the vision of Star Trek: TOS (and later, TNG) was tremendously influential on technology design through the 1990s and into the 2000s. Who here has a clamshell design mobile phone (communicator)? How about a stylus-oriented handheld, or tablet, computer? Don't touch the classics! (And yes, it is a classic, depicting a time in North American history that was, as Spock would say, fascinating.)
This happens to be the topic of my PhD research in organization theory. I have written considerably about the various theoretical foundations of a new theory of organization, most of which is posted, or linked to, on my blog under this category. As well, I have published an article in the latest edition (Summer 2006, vol. 24 no. 2) of the Organization Development Journal entitled "The Penguinist Discourse: A Critical Application of Open Source Software Project Management to Organization Development," that extends the well-known work of Yochai Benkler ("Coase's Penguin") to apply open source principles and motivational factors to general management.
I would be happy to correspond with anyone who might be interested in my work relative to their own workplaces (and I also do OD consulting, btw).
When I finished my undergrad, I had something like a barely B- average from engineering, in a discipline that is now called computer engineering before that discipline had a name. After a 25 year career that spanned the technical (eg. mainframe systems programming, datacentre operations management, etc.) and the non-technical (eg. sales, marketing, management, but not as the PHB), I was burned out. Couldn't stand the corporate world, and, quite frankly, had quite enough of the IT business, because I kept seeing the old patterns in the latest and greatest. (For example, how many of you realized that IBM was the first major open source software company way back in the 1970s and early 1980s?)
So I decided to start on a path of an MA to PhD in a completely different field, drawing on a full career's worth of experience and intimate knowledge of some of the significant problems facing, in my specific case, the workplace. (My grad school GPA is 4.0 for combined master's and PhD coursework.) I'm about half-way through the PhD now, developing a new theory of organization (visit my weblog if you're interested), and can honestly tell you that it is among the best experiences of my life. Now, at mid-life, I feel completely rejuvenated, excited and passionate about what I am doing and the prospects for what I can yet accomplish in my life. Unlike my age-peers who have spent a lifetime as professors, entering grad school directly after their undergrad and worked their way up the academic corporate ladder, I face the students I now teach (and will teach in the future) with excitement and enthusiasm, tempered by a wealth of life experience, not to mention subject matter knowledge drawn from both theory and practice. Many of my professors are contemplating what to do in their retirement. Me? I've got a second life.
My $0.02: Wait for grad school until you find a significant problem that's worth solving, and about which you are so passionate that you cannot wake up in the morning without thinking about it. Then go, and contribute something useful and meaningful to the world.
Like the one published at the beginning of the year by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. ... One major benefit comes when people want to mobilize their networks as they face problems or significant decisions. The Pew Internet Project survey finds that internet users are more likely than non-users to have been helped by those in their networks as they faced important events in their life. "Internet use provides online Americans a path to resources, such as access to people who may have the right information to help deal with family health crises or find a new job," says John Horrigan, Associate Director for Research at the Pew Internet Project."
The Strength of Internet Ties, authored by Jeffrey Boase, John Horrigan, Barry Wellman, and Lee Rainie found "The internet and email aid users in maintaining their social networks and provide pathways to help when people face big decisions" The press release that publicized the report says, "One major payoff comes when people use the internet to press their social networks into action as they face major challenges. People not only socialize online, but they also incorporate the internet into their quest for information and advice as they seek help and make decisions.
The Duke/Arizona study is flawed in its analysis, as it interprets correlation as indicating causality, a common mistake among quantitative researchers.
Marshall McLuhan used to say that in electric communications (thinking of telegraph, radio, and television) the sender is sent. The effects of that type of communication was very much different than a book or a letter by post, both of which could also be sent, but sent as a proxy for the author.
With the acceleration due to the instantaneity of Internet-enabled communications, there is a reversal effect (as described in McLuhan's Laws of Media: The new science). With email, the receiver is received. That is, the person who receives the email imposes her/his own context, mood, and emotion to the received email, as if it was received in a face-to-face (i.e., oral-like) communication. It is the effect of the instant (as in f-t-f), but with the asynchonicity of proxy communication (as in book or post). Until one become acclimatized to the apparent incongruity, misinterpretation is bound to happen.
I remember experiencing the exact same effects when fax was new, and when email was new, both in a business context. When a customer became irate with what I thought was a civil fax, I was confused. When it happened again with the initial email some years later, I remembered the fax incident and thought there might be a pattern here. Now that I've spent the past few years studying, working, and consulting in media theory, I understand why it happens.
It's not the content; the medium is the message!
I have a paper that challenges these notions being published in the upcoming (Summer 2006) edition of Organization Development Journal called, "THE PENGUINIST DISCOURSE: A critical application of open source software project management
to organization development"
While I can't make the paper available online just yet, the abstract reads as follows: For those with in-house OD folks, you may want to alert them to the next edition of the journal. (I also do strategy and OD facilitation and interventions on a contract basis; you can track me down via my profile.)
...it's not the first time in history that it's happened. Massive disruption in the way knowledge is constructed occurred in Ancient Greece with the transition from primary orality in the face of the phonetic alphabet, and again in the 15th century with the transition from the manuscript culture to the print culture. Western society is again in the midst of a massively disruptive transition that began with the introduction of the telegraph (marking the transition from print to electric communication) and will end roughly 150 years from now. By that time, our society will quite likely be regarded as quaint, and somewhat primitive.
A much more detailed examination of this is blogged here, with the full text of the lecture available for download.
I left the IT world when I was 40, wandered around a bit - did some business consulting, and other nonsense, and then (re)discovered that I had a knack for teaching. So I ended up in grad school in the social sciences, getting exposure to a whole new way of thinking. Combining this with the type of training I had in IT, plus some on-the-job-trained business skills (marketing, sales, product development, management) I find that I bring some usefully different perspectives to my field of research.
Long story short - I'm doing a PhD, doing a bunch of teaching, developing research into both the future of corporate organizations (taking revenge on all the PHBs) as well as developing some new approaches to online learning environments. Plus I'm having a fabulous time (most of my department is female and tend to go for the guy with experience). Far more fun than undergrad ever was!
I sent my little girl to kindergarten 10 years ago with much the same speech - plus regular talks on "having her own mind," "thinking independently," and "being a leader, not a follower."
Now in high school, she is a straight-A student, socially aware (especially with regard to causes like copyright reform as it turns out), self-confident, articulate, gregarious and outgoing with a massive circle of friends. In fact, earlier this week she has been invited to give testimony to our Parliament's Standing Committee on reforms to the Copyright Act (colour me proud papa!)
It's encouragement like this that develops young women into the architects of tomorrow's society, and the types of leaders that will replace the buffoons that currently sit in places of power in politics, business and education.
Start young, and convince your daughters, granddaughters and nieces that there's nothing stopping them from accomplishment and success.
There is actually some solid and serious research behind this initiative, and other similar projects that are pushing the traditional boundaries of education. I've commented on it here, with links to the research, theory and project pages.
The historical fact is that our current educational system is only about 350 years old, give or take a decade. Prior to that, what was considered knowledge, appropriate pedagogy, and educational techniques were considerably different, and different still compared to the same items in ancient Greece. With the fundamental changes that are occuring in many aspects of our contemporary societies, radical new approaches to education are not only to be expected, but are to be welcomed.
Besides, has anyone considered the idea that the current dysfunction among modern corporations, and the plethora of McJobs may be a direct outcome of a now obsolescent educational system - one that served the industrial age well, but is sadly outdated today?