LCCC WIKI

An adjunct faculty person and I are creating a Wiki we plan on using in some of our classes. We hope this will be a great resource created in a large part by our students that will benefit the campus community.

Interested in contributing - contact me

Back...

Back from a too long blog hiatus - my goal is to provide more consistent updates in the future....
I also apologize to a number of comments I left hanging during that time...
I did not realize they were there.... I did reject the comments that were left hanging as they were for very old posts and were irrelevant at this point...

Campaigning 2.0?

from Business Week

There are many reasons why Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic Party nomination to Barack Obama but perhaps the most important is that the Obama campaign’s use of modern principles in design thinking and web social networking principles was superior to Hillary’s traditional approach of marketing metrics and personal networking.

demand for tech workers

demand for tech workers soaring

motorola and six-sigma

motorola and six-sigma

flat world getting bumpy?

BBC Tech article:

A senior executive for Microsoft has said the firm could pull out of non-democratic countries such as China.

originally found on slashdot

Outsourcing and Globalization: National Security Risk?

A BusinessWeek article discusses whether or not there is a national security threat due to the outsourcing of technology.

from the article:

As combat becomes increasingly high-tech, Pentagon officials worry that "accidental defects" or "maliciously placed code" buried within a computer program could compromise the security of the Defense Dept. network and, ultimately, hurt its ability to fight wars, says Pentagon spokesman Maj. Patrick Ryder. A task force of the Defense Science Board is in the final stages of preparing a recommendation on how to deal with the fact that some of the software the military buys is produced offshore. While task force deliberations are secret, the conversations between its members and outside technology and security experts are raising concerns among tech industry groups here and abroad.

more...

The worry is that the Pentagon might enact policies forcing tech suppliers to break off pieces of their global supply chains, making it difficult to deliver the most advanced products at affordable prices. These days, computer builders, chipmakers, software publishers, and tech-services outfits all tap inexpensive programming talent in foreign countries—sometimes assembling Lego-like chunks of code from different sources. This includes not just software for computers and networks but, in some cases, programs for military aircraft, missile guidance, and battlefield management systems. Industry advocates are concerned that efforts to fence out security threats could bring a return to the days when too much of the stuff the Pentagon bought was custom-made—a practice that gave rise, infamously, to $600 toilet seats.

some feel the threat might not be as bad as some fear:

It's not clear yet if the worst fears of the industry will be realized. William Schneider Jr., the chairman of the Defense Science Board, tells BusinessWeek that while he hasn't seen the task force's conclusions, he's confident that the recommendations won't be draconian. They'll affect only the technologies where security is paramount. "Most of the software DOD uses has elements that are written overseas, and that isn't a problem," says Schneider. "The problem is in ultrasensitive defense applications where they are mission-critical and you want a high degree of confidence that nothing's wrong with the software that has been written overseas."

happiness and innovation

from metacool:

I believe that a strong emphasis on personal happiness is the hallmark of an innovative culture.

Tal Ben-Shahar teaches a class at Harvard on positive psychology, and out of this class has created a nice list of principles for enabling happiness.

good design is...

...my scion xb - because, among many other things, it took me 2 seconds to adjust the clock when dst came to an end...without consulting a manual...

little things count - good design can help prevent the devil from being in the details