Archive for the ‘the column’ Category

TheADade-Collier Training and Transition Airport was originally planned as the Everglades Jetport, and construction started in 1968 on what was to be the world’s largest airport with six runways to support supersonic transport. Being surrounded by the Big Cypress National Preserve, environmental concerns halted construction, and when commercial supersonic transport didn’t arrive, the project was left as-is, now a lightly-used airport.A(© Google/USGS/DigitalGlobe)

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There is a myth, more of a meme actually, about the ‘inevitability’ of commoditization. It is a view of the world that sees things linearly, in terms of singularities, and the so-called "one right path."

With APB pushing nearly a decade in development, players may start breaking down real doors to finally get their paws on Jones’s game. They have reason to riot. Jones, after two decades in the business, occupies the tiny pantheon of certifiable game gods. His quirky first hit, Lemmings, became a chart-topping sensation and pioneered the real-time strategy genre. His next smash, a little game called Grand Theft Auto, pioneered the killer stuff-open-world mayhem, darkly comic urban realism, radio stations, etc.-which gamers now take for granted. Crackdown, his candy-colored, superhero/crime-lord mashup, is spawning its own sequel this summer.

Designing for the poor is more important now than ever before. It is the future of business growth, as multinationals and local companies are increasingly developing products and experiences that serve not only the upper classes but also the "bottom of the pyramid" a the 4 billion people worldwide living on less than $2 per day.

We talk regularly in this blog about the potential benefits of migrating business processes to the cloud and leveraging the power of SaaS applications to boost productivity and business agility, but sometimes we may not put enough attention into the human (brain) power needed to effectively manage this transition. So the question is: How many IT Consultants does it take to migrate a business into the cloud?

In looking at learning it is not enough to look at "learning how to learn" (ie. concentrate on the learner) but we need to study the basic structure of the subject itself. Papert investigates the basic structure of mathematics in some detail including a critique of the formal logical thinking emphasised in Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica and the "new math" of the 1960s/70s. In Piaget/Papert’s view the basic structure of maths is derived from the thinking of the Bourbaki school: order, proximity (topology), combination (algebra).In Papert’s view it is not natural that advanced maths ideas are inaccessible to most. What Papert has tried to do is restructure maths so as to accommodate the natural tendencies of the child. Instead of mathophobia Papert hopes to create a mathsland where it will be natural to learn maths, like learning to speak French in France.

Possibilianism does not suggest free rein to believe whatever strikes one’s fancy. It is not tantamount to "anything goes". We know a great deal, not only about the cosmos and molecules, but also about human yearning, fallibilities, poor memories and our extraordinary ability to fabricate any variety of fantastic but utterly untrue stories. Within the realm of what is addressable, we profitably apply logic to further knowledge. Possibilianism is "anything goes at first" - but we then use science to rule out parts of the possibility space, and often to rule in new parts.

"We just finished building SpaceShipTwo. We are 18 months away from taking people into space," Branson told a business conference in Kuala Lumpur, adding that the fare will start at 200,000 dollars.

Virgin Galactic, which aims to become the world’s first commercial company to promote space tourism, has already collected 45 million dollars in deposits from more than 330 people who have reserved seats aboard the six-person craft.

Consider our insatiability: As we have seen, our evolutionary ancestors benefited from wanting more of everything, which is why we today have this tendency. But our insatiability, if we do not take steps to bridle it, will disrupt our tranquility; instead of enjoying what we already have, we will spend our life working hard to gain things we don’t have, in the sadly mistaken belief that once we have them, we will enjoy them and search no further. What we must do, again, is misuse our intellect. Instead of using it to devise clever strategies to get more of everything, we must use it to overcome our tendency toward insatiability.