Month: March 2005

Extreme Accounting

I guess accounting has become very boring since the crackdown on Enron and other companies, so what have the accountants done? With no interesting illegal schemes to apply their creativity to, they’ve created extreme accounting:

Extreme accounting is the latest – and unlikeliest – adrenaline sport. Accountants visit challenging locations like mountain tops, seabeds, caves and rollercoasters. And, inspired by the extreme ironing craze, they take their work with them, reports the Sun.

South African Keet Van Zyl is the sport’s reigning champion. A spokesman for the Chartered Institute of Management Accounting said: “It’s a phenomenon that pushes accountants to their limits – and beyond.”

Read: BusinessPundit

Policing Ourmedia

Dickson has written up a post explaining a few more problems with Ourmedia. I also listened to the interview on IT Conversations that Dickson did, and I have pretty much the same thoughts – pipe dream. I’m ready to be proven wrong, but the policing of content will be another headache to add to the list I created a few days ago.

Marc Canter just kills me. Near the beginning of the interview, he tries to apply the term “open source” to Google, Amazon and eBay because they provide an API for their platform. Aside from the fact that Eric Raymond and others probably have a thing or two to say about that, if those three companies are open source, why not Microsoft? Microsoft is not a software company, they are a platforms company. Windows is a platform with extensive APIs. Same with .NET. Same with Windows Mobile. Same with Office. Same with the new XBOX. The list goes on.

While we’re talking about Ourmedia, if you want to know what its like for users who just go and try it out, read this post and this post from Robert Scoble. Robert described it like this: “The Our Media experience was a bit rough.”

China's Next Cultural Revolution

Think we’re advanced with our hybrid electric cars? Think again, and read the hook for a new article in Wired: “The People’s Republic is on the fast track to become the car capital of the world. And the first alt-fuel superpower.”

China has a both a huge problem and a huge advantage over Western nations when it comes to energy sources. The big problem of course is the gigantic population. A population as big as China’s, which is expcted to hit 1.5 billion by 2030, means that “pollution-related illness will suck up as much as 15 percent of the country’s gross domestic product” by the same time. Rising GDP means that more families have disposable income and thus money to spend on cars, seen as a sort of status symbol much like North America of a few decades ago. The big advantage of course, is that China lacks an entrenched energy industry.

For hydrogen powered cars to work in North America, one has to deal with the oil companies. They don’t want to see the combustion engine go – that’s their bread and butter. China doesn’t have such an industry. There are no oil companies to deal with. They could very well leapfrog the entire combustion engine era and go straight to alternative fuel automobiles. And that’s probably a good thing for the rest of the world too because as Yang Yiyong, the deputy director of the Institute of Economic Research says, “If you pump for oil, you have to fight wars for it.” China is already the world’s second largest oil consumer after the United States, so anything to avoid confrontation between the two when reserves run low is a good thing.

And in North America, clean fuel sources are being developed out of interest and a desire by a relatively select few to protect the environment. In China, the same technologies are being “created by people desperate enough to imagine it.” There’s a big difference there, and I think that’s the reason China will become the world’s alt-fuel superpower.

Read: Wired

Podcasting on CBC News: The Hour

CBC’s new current events news program The Hour recently ran a special segment on podcasting. Dawn and Drew are kindly hosting a video of the segment, so check it out! Among other things, the segment highlights “godcasting”, the so called religious group of podcasts.

[Via Podcast Wizard Blog] [Tags: ]

Mendelian Genetics Challenged

Think back to high school biology. What did you learn about? Among other things, you probably learned all about Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk who experiemented with peas and formed our basic understanding of inheritance. Now, researches from Purdue University have come up with evidence that contradicts some basic rules of plant evolution formed by Mendel:

In the experiment, the Purdue researchers found that 10 percent of watercress plants with two copies of a mutant gene called “hothead” didn’t always blossom with deformed flowers like their parents, which carried the mutant genes. Instead, those plants had normal white flowers like their grandparents, which didn’t carry the hothead gene and the deformity appeared only for a single generation. The normal watercress plants with hothead genes appear to have kept a copy of the genetic coding from the grandparent plants and used it as a template to grow normally.

All I can say is “hardcore.” Makes me wonder if everything I learned about inheritance might be wrong one day, or at least fundamentally different. Details of the new experiment appear in today’s issue of Nature.

Read: Wired

Coca-Cola Zero

For all my fellow Coke addicts, a new no-calorie version is coming soon, called Coca-Cola Zero:

The drink will be sweetened partly with a blend of aspartame and acesulfame potassium. Aspartame is a key ingredient in Diet Coke, but a spokesman for the Atlanta-based company said Coca-Cola Zero will have a unique taste.

The new drink will debut in the United States in June, and hopefully not too long after that in Canada. The can looks pretty sweet, I must say. Of course I want to try it, if for no other reason than because it’s a Coke product. But makes me wonder happened to Coke C2? Failure? Sure doesn’t seem relevant anymore.

Want to know what the coolest part about Coca-Cola Zero is? The marketing campaign is slick! According to the official site, the company will be auctioning off “a special Coca-Cola Zero sample pack” on eBay sometime in April, with all proceeds being donated to charity. Regardless of how neat that idea is, the press release makes me laugh:

The auction marks the first time The Coca-Cola Company has offered any new product on eBay prior to launching it nationally.

You don’t say! I don’t know ANYONE who has bought Coke on eBay, probably because it’s a dumb place to buy it. I can’t believe they had to point that out!

Read: MSNBC and Press Release

iPods banned at Sydney's International Grammar School

Those crazy Aussies in Sydney at the Internation Grammar School have decided to ban iPods because, apparently, they enable students to “avoid communication with others” and may lead to “social isolation or escape from our community.”

Anyone else think this is dumb? I mean, really, it’s not the iPod that causes social isolation, it’s the headphones! If students didn’t use headphones with their iPods there would be no problem right? If I was an administrator at that school that’s what I’d have done, ban the headphones. Problem solved. Sheesh.

Read: Engadget

Will Firefox always be more secure?

Speaking at PC Forum, Mitchell Baker of the Mozilla Foundation proclaimed that Firefox will always have less security vulnerabilities than Internet Explorer, even as its popularity grows. But he didn’t stop there! Baker went on to say:

“There is this idea that market share alone will make you have more vulnerabilities. It is not relational at all.”

No? I guess we’ll find out when Firefox has more than the 5% market share it has now. I am willing to bet the number of vulnerabilities will increase. Furthermore, Firefox will experience new security breaches at a faster rate than Internet Explorer ever did. Why? Because it’s open source. A hacker has to play with IE a bit, use some trial and error, to get the desired result. With Firefox, anyone can look at the code. As soon as Mozilla patches something, a hacker (for lack of a better name) can go and look at the code for the patch to see if it was in fact implemented correctly.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Firefox. It has been my default browser on all computers for a long time now. It’s just that I don’t agree with the “invincibility” some open source pundits think they have. Sooner or later it’ll all come crashing down.

Read: CNET News.com

Tagging is the next wave!

As you probably noticed yesterday we launched Podcast Tags, a service that lets you categories your podcast episodes using keywords. We’re the only tagging service for podcasts, but there are many others for different types of media. Flickr is one of the best known, and their tagging capabilities are one of the major reasons Yahoo acquired them:

Flickr is a pioneer in a new method for cataloging the Internet that some believe could revolutionize Web search. As a result, Flickr could give Yahoo new competitive tools to take on Google, if it can put Flickr’s community-based technology to broader use. Flickr’s trick has been to enlist large numbers of unsupervised volunteers to individually classify files using searchable metadata. Anyone can “tag” files with personal descriptions to help everyone find them more easily.

One of the most interesting things about tagging is the information that naturally presents itself. Relationships appear between items that you wouldn’t normally consider to be related, and that’s one of the coolest effects. The other great thing is that tags are democratic. A search company or other organization is not giving you a choice of categories. Rather, you select the tags that you think are most appropriate, in effect, voting for your tags.

The buzzword for all of this seems to be “folksonomy”. According to Wikipedia, “Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords.” It’s pretty cool stuff and I have no doubt you’ll hear more about it this year.

I also wanted to mention that we updated the Podcast Tags site last night to display links to other tagging sites. So if you link to http://podcasttag.com/paramagnus for example, we also show links on that page to Technorati, Flickr, etc. Once there are a large number of tagging sites out there, it will be extremely interesting to see the global relationships and folksonomies that form.

Read: CNET News.com