Technology Review (a magazine published by MIT) recently asked various thought leaders what the Web might be in ten years. Below is one of the most creative responses but all the interviews are quite intriguing.

Jonathan Abrams
Founder of Socializr and Friendster; San Francisco, CA

“In five to ten years, we will all have chips in our brains. When you look at someone’s face on the street, your Google Brain software will automatically call up every embarrassing photo of them from ancient websites such as Flickr, Facebook, and MySpace; list all mutual friends; and remind you of the person’s annotated bio. As a response to the perceived slowness and verbosity of antiquated services like Twitter, people will send everyone they know nanobursts of information about anything they might do or think before they actually do or think it. Every website, blog, and social-networking profile will include an aggregated feed from every other website, blog, and social-networking service, resulting in an exponential and infinite length of repeated content on every possible site, overloading our brain chips and causing frequent nosebleeds and occasional cerebral hemorrhage.”

Source: The Future of The Web, Technology Review 7/2008

Mint.com released an interesting charting tool since my initial write-up on their online money management services. It’s titled “SpendSpace” and helps you stay “below the average”.

• Now you can track spending online and compare your spending on all the categories you spend on, such as Coffee Shops, Movies, Clothes, Groceries, to the average spending of people in over 30 US cities, all 50 states, or the entire US national average.

Here’s an example:

Pretty cool stuff… and it’s still a work in progress…

Here is a quick email exchange that included some interesting statistics regarding the so-called “New Energy Crisis”. In short, the U.S. department of Labor estimates that as much as 50 percent of the nation’s utility workforce will retire in the next five to ten years. In 2006 there were 549,000 employees in the utilities industry (according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics) which means over a quarter million people are estimated to exit this space as early as 2013. Major energy consulting agencies are already offering planning services and reselling Google’s Enterprise Solutions to enable one of the biggest “brain dumps” in history.

Question:

“Saw this article [below] on one of our industry daily newsletters. Are you
familiar with this Google Enterprise Professional program? Just curious. The company is called K-E-M-A, it’s an international consulting company. Suppose I could google “google enterprise” and get an answer too!”

“Faced with a graying workforce, [electric] utilities are seeking ways to
retain the knowledge and experience of their retiring professionals. K-E-M-A
has joined the Google Enterprise Professional program and is offering a new
line of services that helps utilities capture the knowledge of their aging
workforce by extending the power of Google across the enterprise.
BURLINGTON, MASS. - April 28, 2008 (News Release)”

Answer:

it’s this…

the certification costs $5k per year and has the following “Partner Requirements”:

Potential Google Enterprise Professional partners must meet the following requirements in order to initiate and retain membership in this program:

• Membership Fee
  • Search: $5,000 per year
  • Apps: $5,000 per year
• Partner Specialties - Choose from any combination of the following specialties:
  • Customization / Integration / Development
  • Installation
  • Training
  • Integration with your own Application
• Annual certification– Fulfilled via onsite training and certification, and then renewed annually
• Success Story– As a Google Enterprise Professional, you’ll be providing valuable assistance to Google Enterprise customers and we want to share your stories. Partners are required to publish a customer or solution success story.

Based on K-E-M-A’s press release it looks like they have already become a “partner”. This allows them to resell Google Enterprise Solutions with value-add consulting services to help utility companies establish an archive of their knowledge/data/processes and then hook up a google search appliance (below) to access it.

This is appears to be a smart move on their part based on these two articles:

“The U.S. department of Labor estimates that as much as 50 percent of the nation’s utility workforce will retire in the next five to ten years. From engineers to line-workers, the challenges associated with replacing the vast amount of technical and institutional knowledge of these professionals will be immense. Potential impact on day-to-day utility operations will be significant.” - KEMA

“Anyone and everyone with a power plant in the United States – municipalities, states, private-sector utilities, federal power agencies and manufacturers, as well as institutions from schools to hospitals – has a common challenge. The power industry workforce – the technicians, engineers, linemen and maintenance crews that fuel the industry – will be retiring in unprecedented numbers over the next ten years. The energy industry is one of the first to feel the effect of Baby Boomer retirements. This is partly due to massive hiring freezes and downsizing when the industry deregulated and focused on cost-cutting measures in the 1980s and 90s.” - http://www.uc.edu/news/NR.asp?id=4226

Jack Welch on Work/Life:

“Your boss’s top priority is competitiveness. Of course he wants you to be happy, but only inasmuch as it helps the company win. In fact, if he is doing his job right, he is making your job so exciting that your personal life becomes a less compelling draw.”

The quote above was pulled from:
Jack Welch’s best seller “Winning” (2005)
I read this book a while back and highly recommend it. Recently, I’ve started to publish an excerpt from the book to kick off each week.

After cracking open my old broken video camera I was able to capture a collection of somewhat raw video footage when I was doing “research” in New Zealand a few years back…

Epic 70cm powder runs, cliff drops, helicopters, scenic shots, and snowboard bungee jumping:

Click here to view the super high quality video (quicktime + a really fast connection required)….

Or view the medium quality flash video below…
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
(note: if you’re reading this in an rss reader you’ll need click here to view the videos)

More posts on snowboarding in New Zealand (pulled from the archive)

A Trip to the Broken River Mountains
2003-2004 Season Pass List

After reading this article on Toyota’s Robotics division…. it seemed like a good idea to check in on some of the latest robotics engineering… here’s what turned up:

The Violinist…

YouTube  - Robot Playing the Violin

The Trumpeter…

YouTube  - Robot Playing the Trumpet

Dancing Robots…

YouTube  - Japanese Robot Dance

A Real Live Transformer…

YouTube  - Transformer Robot

The Cyclist…

YouTube  - Robot Riding a Bicycle

Terminator…

YouTube  - The Terminator

The Humanoid…

YouTube  - The Humanoid Robot

Related: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/robots.html

Google Trends allows you to compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. You can type in up to five topics and determine how often they’ve been searched on Google. Although this tool has been out for a while I’ve never really given it the attention it deserves…

1. Presidential Candidates
If Google searches are effective at projecting the next president it looks like we are headed towards another texan Commander in Chief… although this one was actually born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

2. Newspapers, Blogs, Magazines
Blogs are taking over the world. It looks as though searches for blogs have surpassed newspaper searches (in volume) for the first time in history. Good bye traditional media.

3. Food and Exercise
Wow. We love food.

4. Fishing and Hunting
Apparently the Ice Fishermen aren’t pulling their weight. And people are less likely to shoot animals in the summer time (which can be attributed to regulated hunting seasons).

5. Turkey and Diet
Lots of Turkey for Thanksgiving, a little less for Christmas, and a whole bunch of New Year’s Resolutions to lose those extra holiday pounds (that typically last about 1.5 months)

6. Girl Scout Cookies
Girl Scouts of America must have some severe cash flow issues during Q2, Q3 and Q4. Maybe they need to start distributing to grocery stores to supplement their door to door sales?

7. Rain and Depression
Rain rain go away come again another day… seriously… you are driving people crazy!

“Being around people who occupy a variety of roles is good for development, because it facilitates one’s understanding of the world.”

Devin recently sat in on a discussion with Lawrence G. Shelton, a Professor @ the University of Vermont’s Human Development and Family Studies program. Prof. Shelton is in the process of pioneering a new theory he calls “develecology”. It is a composition of topics in ecology and human development.

We got our hands on Prof. Shelton’s 3 page outline on Develecology titled: “Develecology 001: Develecology Made Plain” (from which I’ve extracted some main points):

Key Concepts/Terms:

1. Development: acquiring a more valid and differentiated view of the world you live in and the skills and motivation to maintain it, adapt to it, and restructure it to make it better meet your needs.
2. People participate in activities, relations, and roles.
3. In development, activities become more complex, more important, and more intrinsically motivating.
4. Roles are defined by particular activities and relations and are a way we organize experience and expectations.
5. Being around people who occupy a variety of roles is good for development, because it facilitates one’s understanding of the world.
6. There are multiple types of relations:
   1. Observational: one person watches the other
   2. Joint Activity: two people engage in an activity together
   3. Primary: both people think about each other, even when apart
   4. Developmental: one person is more developed than the other, they engage in activities together, reciprocity gradually increases, power becomes more balanced, and both share positive affect
   5. NOTE: these types are not mutually exclusive in any given relation.
7. As people participate in several relations, the degrees to which they support each other, are compatible with each other, or are in conflict with each other, become increasingly important.
8. A setting is a physical place where people can engage in face to face contact with each other.
9. Each settting has a unique pattern of role, relations, and activities, or Microsystem within it.
10. Each person has a unique ecosystem, defined from the perspective of that particular person.
11. Developmental status is indicated by:
    1. How well we understand the ecosystem and how skilled we are at functioning in it, maintaining it, and modifying it to better promote our development.
    2. The variety and complexity of the roles we occupy.
    3. The number of relationships we engage in.
    4. Our skill at engaging in developmental relations as the more developed person.
12. The relations between the settings one participates in make up a person’s “mesosystem”.
13. The primary link among settings is the person who moves in and out of them, connecting them and thus defining which settings are in hes/her mesosystem.
14. Develecology suggests that people maintain a higher “developmental status” (or maturity) within a macro system when they participate in more activities, engage in more relationships and settings, and are exposed to more roles.
15. Over time, the settings and activities we engage in tend to be related to each other. When several settings encourage the development of a particular complex activity that we are motivated to continue, a “developmental trajectory” is established. A developmental trajectory of settings and related activities tends to underlie each important activity in a life. Developmental trajectories influence which settings we enter, and which ones we don’t, as we choose those that are made available through our developing interests and skills or seek out those that will enhance those interests and skills.
16. Settings a person does not participate in may still influence development, and may be influenced by what happens in the person’s mesosytem settings.
17. Culture, or the Macrosystem is represented at the ecosystem level by the existence of consistencies across settings, microsystems, roles, relations, activities, and relations between settings.

I believe Prof. Shelton is in the progress of writing a book on this topic but the field of develecology is certainly in it’s infancy. If you are interested in finding out more Google won’t be much of a help with just 4 results… all from Prof. Shelton’s course listings on UVM’s website (i suppose we’ll just have to wait for his book to be published)

About Prof. Shelton:

• Lawrence Shelton has taught in the Human Development and Family Studies program since its inception at the University of Vermont in 1971.
• His childhood and adolescence were fairly uneventful, growing up in a healthy family in the small town of Carrollton, Illinois.
• He completed adolescence as an undergraduate at Harvard, where he studied Social Relations. At Harvard, he took [and passed] courses with Erik Erikson, George Goethals, George Gardner, Robert White, Brendan Maher, John Spiegel, and B. F. Skinner, among others.
• Larry earned the Ph.D. in Child Psychology in 1970 from the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota, where he was the first doctoral student of the late John P. Hill, an eminent figure in the field of adolescence.
• Larry describes himself as an applied developmental ecological — or “develecological” — psychologist. His professional goals include to understand and help others understand how development happens, across the whole lifespan, and how experiences in relationships and community settings help shape a person’s life.
• Larry teaches the introductory life span development course, the introductory family course, and the senior level course on the family ecosystem. His seminars include Adolescence and Youth; Advanced Child Development; Parenting through Separation, Divorce, and Remarriage; and Boys and Men: Development, Relationships, and Risks. Source

This article really gets you thinking if you’re someone like me and commit a large part of your nights and weekends to reading, researching, and surfing the internet…

“New studies indicate this is a global problem,” says Kimberly Young, a clinical psychologist who wrote the first book on the subject of Internet addiction, “Caught in the Net,” and founded the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery in Bradford, Pennsylvania. There are clinics for the treatment of Internet addiction in China and in Korea. One clinic director has estimated as many as 2.5 million Chinese suffer from the condition…

….You are looking for someone who is preoccupied with the Internet, hides or lies about their behavior, shows an inability to control their use, uses the Internet as a form of psychological escape, and continues to engage in the behavior despite the problems that it causes in one’s life.” - Link to full article

After reading through the full article on CNN I decided to take a test to see how serious my situation was:

The results came in a lot better than I’d anticipated but I’ve still committed to spending less time online… especially during the summer months. If you are concerned about how much time you spend on the internet take this test and “NetAddiction.com” will tell you how you are doing.

Related:
http://www.narus.com/blog/images/internetAddiction.jpg
http://www.netaddiction.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_addiction

After implementing the Google Sitemap Generator for Wordpress on May 24th I started monitoring the number of pages Google was indexing for this site.

This plugin will create a google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. Currently homepage, posts, static pages, categories and archives are supported.

To calculate the number of pages indexed by Google a simple site:danielpeterjackson.com search was conducted on 5 different occasions during the last 15 days.

Example Search:

Here are the results…

Day 0: (Baseline = 69 pages indexed)

Day 2: (73 pages indexed)

Day 3: (84 pages indexed)

Day 15: (119 pages indexed and some new blue formatting)

With exactly 50 more pages indexed and only 12 new pages created during the 15 days… it appears we are moving in the right direction although counting the total number of pages indexed is a fairly basic metric to measure the effectiveness of this plugin.

You can view the actual Google Sitemap XML here: http://www.danielpeterjackson.com/sitemap.xml

The first project pulled from the archive…

Project Summary: The Student Payroll and Management system was developed during 2002-2003 to automate workstudy management for the Saint Michael’s College Information Technology Department. Once the system proved stable with this department it was planned to be rolled out all department utilizing workstudy labor. Our team consisted of 3 “software engineers” and 1 “project manager”.

“SPAM” provided two main interfaces, one for students and one for administrators. The student section allowed users to log new workstudy hours, track total hours worked, and submit messsages to a supervisor. The Administrator section allowed supervisors to track workstudy hours logged, manage budgets, manage users, view workstudy students currently “on the clock”, and automatically report biweekly timesheets for payroll processing.

Administrator Dashboard:

Documentation:

1. Student Payroll and Management Help File
2. Project Overview: Part 1 (powerpoint)
3. Project Overview: Phase 2 (powerpoint)

I recently stumbled across an archived folder of research from my years at Saint Michael’s College. Over the next few week’s I’ll be reviewing any interesting papers/projects/etc. and posting them right here. Hence… the new category titled: “Research”