AVATAR
The movie’s well on its way to becoming a success. It will probably create a cult-like following like Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and other megahits.

I saw it today in 3D. The plot was familiar but that didn’t detract from the story. The movie’s visual effects were impressive and very enjoyable. My enjoyment of the movie, however, arose from the emotional connection that it made with me. That’s what separates Avatar from other movies that were also rich in visual effects. Waterworld (1995), for instance, was a relative dud despite Kevin Costner’s star (which might have been soaring higher than anyone else’s when the movie was released).

I think that Avatar will succeed on two levels: commercially and as a pop culture icon. There should be nothing deregatory about becoming a pop culture icon. Pop is short for popular and popular culture refers to the “totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture.” (Wikipedia)

Incidentally, “avatar” is a fairly new term. One of my first encounters with it occurred in Second Life. However its roots, according to Wikipedia, can be traced to Hinduism where its meaning loosely refers to the descent of a deity into the physical world. In the movie, the human protagonists are projected into the alternate reality of the alien inhabitants of the fictional planet Pandora.

I recommend it. I think you’ll enjoy it.

SOUND OF MUSIC | CENTRAL STATION ANTWERP (BELGIUM)

Since a nephew pointed it out, I’ve watched this YouTube video time and again without tiring of it.

Click here and enjoy!

About this video: In this promotion, more than 200 dancers danced to “Do-Re-Mi” at the Central Station of Antwerp. It took the morning commuter crowd of 23 March 2009 by surprise. It was organized by a Belgian television program that was looking for someone to play the leading role in its version of “The Sound of Music.” This video was even noted in Wikipedia.

It is truly a feel-good video!

THE PRONOVE-BARTTER SYNDROME

In 1960, a team of medical scientists working at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) identified a syndrome that affects the kidneys. A syndrome is “a group of symptoms that collectively indicate a disease, disorder, or other abnormal medical condition.”

The kidney is one of the body’s vital organs. A vital organ is one that performs an essential life function. Total failure of a vital organ will cause death. We have six vital organs. These are the brain, heart, lungs, liver, pancreas and kidneys.

We have two kidneys. Their function is “to keep the blood clean and chemically balanced. Wastes in the blood come from the normal breakdown of active tissues, such as muscles, and from food. The body uses food for energy and self-repairs. After the body has taken what it needs from food, wastes are sent to the blood. If the kidneys do not remove them, these wastes build up in the blood and damage the body.”

Persons suffering from this syndrome have kidneys that fail to keep the blood chemically balanced. They lose excessive amounts of potassium. It’s a relatively rare but serious condition.

I wrote this entry simply to thank a medical historian for clarifying the origin of the syndrome’s name.

Dear Mr. Enersen,

I am a nephew of the late Dr. Pacita Pronove-Irreverre. She was the lead author of the paper that first described the condition commonly known as the Bartter Syndrome. As you know, naming rights typically belong to the lead author.

In June 2008, I successfully persuaded Wikipedia to include my aunt’s name in the Wiki entry for the Bartter Syndrome. As you also probably know, Wikipedia is edited by the user community. It is a system that ensures rigorous verification. My primary evidence consisted of the relevant entry found at your website.

Apart from expressing gratitude, I want to corroborate your detailed explanation with a firsthand account of my late-aunt’s narration about the incident. This is more trivia than anything but as a historian you might enjoy it for the life it brings to your tale.

Several years before my aunt died and definitely before I knew about the syndrome’s existence, she told me the corroborating story. Auntie Pat had narrated it to her other nephews and nieces as well. (She and her doctor husband had no children themselves.) Auntie Pat told me that after she realized that injustice had been done, she looked Fred Bartter in the eye and Fred was unable to maintain eye contact. There was a smile on her face when she narrated that.

You can picture the times. She was a diminutive Asian woman in a field populated and dominated by white American men. She was still new to the U.S. The medical paper was published in 1960, only several years after she arrived. We can speculate why she partnered with Bartter. He has a Wiki entry and it reveals that he was the son of American missionaries who were stationed in the Philippines. So our aunt, a Filipina, had a common link with him. She must have felt that she had found a friend at her place of employment, the NIH.

She maintained her association with him even after the incident. They published a second paper together. She even had her sister accompany Fred and his wife back to Baguio to locate the graveyard of his parents. When she did this, I am unsure of—I will check with my cousins if they know whether this occurred before or after the incident. She was a gentle and generous soul so either time frame was possible.

Mr. Enersen, we are grateful to you for coming up with the idea for your website. It helped us add a satisfying footnote to both medical and our family’s history. I am sure that future generations of other people will appreciate and thank you for creating such a resource.

On behalf of our extended family, I thank you.

Sincerely,

Alex Pronove

P.S. Our family is preparing Dr. Pacita’s biographical sketch for Wikipedia as well.

TAG CLOUDS & TEXT CLOUDS

Flickr is among the top 40 most popular websites on the Web today. It’s not surprising since it serves a very useful purpose. Instead of attaching photos to an email, a person can simply upload the photos to Flickr and then refer people to it. Most photos are meant to be shared and after it’s been seen, it’s archived. In short, most photos have a very brief life. Look at them once then move on.

Aside from the typical user, bloggers—like me—use Flickr as a photo repository. As of November 2008, it claimed to host more than 3 billion images. That’s according to Wikipedia (a site even more popular than Flickr).

(You can enlarge any image by clicking on it. To return to this page, click on the back-arrow of your browser or press the Backspace key on your keyboard.)

Flickr was the first popular website that used tag clouds.

What’s a Tag or Text Cloud?

It’s a visual depiction of the word content of a website. The most frequent words are depicted. Additionally, each word in the cloud is emphasized according to its frequency. Numerous variations exist but this is the basic idea.

What’s the difference between a tag and text? Tags are text that are placed at strategic locations in the code that comprise webpages. Tags are important because search engines like Google use tags to add webpages to its database. For an example, look at the bottom of this blog entry. Its tags are: analysis, cloud, depiction, father, flickr, google, photo, psychology, seo, tag, technorati, text, visual, wikipedia.

Since I created those tags, they’re referred to as user-generated tags.

Let’s examine a text cloud example that was created from this paragraph. The word “word” appears seven times. In this paragraph’s text cloud (shown below), the word “word” is emphasized by its size and thickness. The word “word” is the largest and thickest word in this paragraph’s text cloud.

This text cloud was created through Wordle.

The first text cloud above is a one-time depiction of some content found in one of my father’s published books. “One-time” means that it’s a snapshot. It’s a static depiction of content. Dynamic clouds also exist, like the one at Flickr’s. Dynamic clouds update at periodic intervals or on demand. Dynamic clouds are typically created by third-party web-based services such as Technorati or Wowzio. These services are currently free.

This blog’s dynamic cloud is hosted by Technorati. It’s on the left sidebar. The other blog that I maintain has a dynamic cloud that’s hosted by Wowzio. I use two different providers because providers are not always operational. I wanted to spread the risk so if this blog’s cloud doesn’t appear, it will in the other blog.

Cloud Psychology

Clouds are an example of innovation being spurred by a new medium (the Web) running on technology (the Internet). A Stanford student explained it this way:

When we look at a text cloud, we see not only an informative, beautiful image that communicates much in a single glance, we see a whole new perspective on text.

TagCrowd is taking tag clouds far beyond their original function:

• as topic summaries for speeches and written works
• as blog tool or website analysis for search engine optimization (SEO)
• for visual analysis of survey data
• as brand clouds that let companies see how they are perceived by the world
• for data mining a text corpus
• for helping writers and students reflect on their work
• as name tags for conferences, cocktail parties or wherever new collaborations start
• as resumes in a single glance
• as visual poetry

The list goes on and continues to grow.

In the future, TagCrowd will develop into a suite of experimental tools and tutorials that empower social and collaborative uses for text clouds and related visualizations.

Our mission is to push the innovation envelope in online and face-to-face communities of all stripes.

Would you like to play with clouds?

These three sites create static clouds. Enjoy!

1. Wordle — this is my favorite
2. MakeCloud
3. TagCrowd

FACEBOOK’s TERMS OF SERVICE: BECOMING SLEAZIER?

I’m reluctantly being sucked into the Facebook vortex.

I had little interest in joining, much less being active, in Facebook. However, when you start receiving emails through Facebook from people that you actually know and would like to stay in contact with, then you have little choice.

One of the things that repelled me when I initially joined was the intrusiveness of Facebook and its numerous third-party applications. Third-party applications are applications that are not part of Facebook but are written to work with Facebook. Third-party applications offer those features that make Facebook more interesting.

An example is SuperPoke. According to Wikipedia, “poking" is Facebook’s analogy to the action of “tapping and/or softly jabbing another person using a finger, stick, or similar object to gain their attention."

SuperPoke was made by slide.com. According to slide, “SuperPoke lets you do stuff to the people you know. And you can do almost anything: try high-fiving, dropkicking, or throwing a sheep at your friends!”

All this is well and good but I’m concerned about all the personal information that is being divulged. It’s one thing to interact informally with another person in private but it’s an entirely different matter if you use a third-party channel (such as Facebook) to do that interaction.

This issue has been debated previously and will undoubtedly be discussed more in the future. However, my nephew linked me to a recent article in the online edition of New York Times that caught my attention. Entitled “Facebook’s Users Ask Who Owns Information," the article revealed that Facebook recently changed its terms of usage.

The pages, called terms of service, generally outline appropriate conduct and grant a license to companies to store users’ data. Unknown to many users, the terms frequently give broad power to Web site operators.

This month, when Facebook updated its terms, it deleted a provision that said users could remove their content at any time, at which time the license would expire. Further, it added new language that said Facebook would retain users’ content and licenses after an account was terminated.

Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, said in a blog post on Monday that the philosophy “that people own their information and control who they share it with has remained constant.” Despite the complaints, he did not indicate the language would be revised.

The changes in the terms of service had gone mostly unnoticed until Sunday, when the blog Consumerist cited them and interpreted them to mean that “anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later.”

It appears that young Mr. Zuckerberg has learned the art of doublespeak.

Be aware of this especially if you’re young and impulsive. You want to minimize the amount of anything adverse to return and haunt you in the future. It may, for example, hurt your chances of becoming the President in the future. ;-)

BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLANNING

Planning takes four steps

It took a while but business continuity planning (BCP) has finally become visible on the radar screen of managers and owners of smaller businesses (< $100 million sales). It’s about time too. The state of the world today is far more volatile than it was a mere eight years ago. Nine 11 did change everything.

Every organization should plan for its continued existence in the event of a major disruption. How will it continue to operate if its operation—and existence—is disrupted by any number of natural or man-made disasters?

The practice of Business Continuity Planning (BCP) has evolved into a recognized field. Job titles that carry or imply this area now exist. Practitioners can join any number of reputable associations that promote this field. Several recognized certifications can now be earned as well.

I had the good fortune of working as a Sales Systems Engineer for the world’s largest enterprise storage vendor just before the dot com crash. I’m referring to EMC, the 800-pound gorilla of the enterprise storage space. At that time, the basic rationale behind EMC’s fabulously expensive SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility) was real-time replication for disaster recovery (DR). Under the proper guidance, it can be a short leap from DR to BCP. And that is where SRDF is now positioned—as the lynchpin of the data side of business continuity planning.

The mission of a Systems Engineer who works in Sales is to support his sales reps by designing the storage and DR solutions for customers and prospects alike. To him fell the task of dealing with the technical aspect of any proposal or project. This frequently involved making technical presentations for prospects and serving as the single point-of-contact for existing customers that were contemplating system upgrades.

Disaster recovery (DR) is a subset of the BC solution. Many fine definitions of the term abound so rather than reinvent the wheel, I will quote some of the better ones. Disaster recovery is:

• the process, policies and procedures of restoring operations that are critical to the resumption of business [Wikipedia].
• the ability of an organization to respond to a disaster or an interruption in services by implementing a disaster recovery plan to stabilize and restore the organization’s critical functions. [Disaster Recovery Journal].

Wikipedia goes on to say that…

• a disaster recovery plan (DRP) should include plans for coping with the unexpected or sudden loss of communications and/or key personnel, although these are not covered in this article, the focus of which is data protection. Disaster recovery planning is part of a larger process known as business continuity planning (BCP).

Disaster Recovery Journal continues as well…

• The management approved document that defines the resources, actions, tasks and data required to manage the technology recovery effort. Usually refers to the technology recovery effort. This is a component of the Business Continuity Management Program.

The two share the common thread in their reference to business continuity planning and its inclusion of disaster recovery within its larger scope.

I will continue this in a subsequent post. For now, let me break down the steps that BCP entails. The process follows these four steps in a logical sequence.

Identification

Identify risks and hazards that confront your business. These can be natural hazards, e.g., flooding and earthquake, or man-made risks, e.g., power outage, theft, fire, attack against your computer network. Obviously you have to draw the line at some point since it is impractical to anticipate some risks regardless of their severity. For example, two key project members in an SAP implementation project I participated in literally met an unfortunate and fatal accident. That incident delayed a major portion of the entire project until replacement personnel were hired.

Assessment

It is possible to quantitatively and qualitatively determine the likelihood, magnitude, and duration of the identified risks. Assessing risks this way allows you to prioritize them. When risks are categorized this way, you can budget your resources more rationally.

Plan Development

You now have the information to create the plans and procedures for preparing your organization to respond to and recover from interruptions. This is a high-level step and as the saying goes, the devil is in the details. This is where senior management, which should have initiated this project to begin with, should return and visibly support the BCP team. The team will need the time to extensively discuss the risks and possible solutions with functional heads. Without that support, the team will find it difficult to get the attention of the functional heads, much less their full-hearted cooperation.

Exercise

In this final step you must exercise the plan. This is the only way to learn what works and what does not. Needless to say, this is another step that senior management must support. Exercising the plan is a continuing activity. In fact, this entire process is performed iteratively. Exercising the BC plans will refine those plans and, more importantly, teach the employees how to respond if and when the real event happens.

REMEMBER SCHWINN BICYCLES?

How bad management destroyed an American icon.

Our personal accountant was (and, may be, still) married to one of the manufacturing executives of Schwinn Bicycle Co. She was our accountant from 1989 until they moved to Colorado in 1994. She was our accountant for both our business (printing) and personal affairs. We had several good discussions about Schwinn’s decision to outsource practically all of its manufacturing to China.

It began with the decision of two generations of Schwinn family descendant. The first descendant inherited a bureaucratic and complacent company. He decided to stay the course and that must have contributed to Schwinn’s failure to recognize the BMX craze that began in the 70s. This was followed by hybrids (road and off-road models). Schwinn missed that too. Then, the market started looking for more exotic metals (like titanium and much later, carbon fiber) to use for bicycle frames. Schwinn also missed that.

Schwinn lost market share and, worse, visibility among the younger generation. Management decided to look overseas for a solution. They decided to downsize and outsource manufacturing. (Of course, terms like “downsize” and “outsource” did not exist at that time but they accurately describe their activities.) Along the way, they antagonized their suppliers and dealers. Their suppliers entered the U.S. market themselves. Their dealers defected. Good grief, what a mess!

Their moves were all band-aid solutions. Schwinn’s decline continued. At about this time, the second (and final, as it turns out) generation took over.

(FYI: New tabs or windows will open for each hyperlink.)

As this Wikipedia article states, this descendant was a great believer in MBAs. (This degree was in its ascendancy at that point. I recall reading an article questioning whether the management of business could really be taught in schools.)

At any rate, the vicious cycle continued. In addition to quality and supplier problems, engineering and marketing were slow to catch up with trends. I suspect that the centralized decision-making had a lot to do with their lack of nimbleness.

As the Wikipedia article states, the firm declared bankruptcy in 1992 and Zell (the Chicago billionaire who now owns The Tribune Co.) bought it. Zell moved corporate to Colorado and that’s when our accountant relocated with her husband to Colorado.

In 2004, another Schwinn descendant, was featured in an article by the Washington Post.

This last one is a beauty. It features a timeline. Read the entries from 1975 on.

This story has many business management-related lessons. Most of them, in my opinion, stem from fossilized management.

Just in case, those links no longer work, I saved archive copies:

1. The Washington Post article
2. The Wikipedia entry