Geeky Valentine Goodies

As I mentioned in my 2008 Valentine’s Day post, scientists are the geek’s real heartthrobs. David Friedman put together a great collection of printer-ready Valentines featuring Carl Sagan, Einstein, Marie Curie and many others.

You might also like to check out our former Assistant Editor Alex Howard’s Valentine’s advice for Geeks. It’s also from 2008 but its appeal is timeless. Especially that original Internet Love Song.

Then, check out your Latin Lover quotient with our quiz. Will you be able to say “Veni, vidi, vici?”

We’ve also got a special Valentine’s grammar post about affect vs. effect and amorous cats and a little Valentine’s trivia. Do you know what famous writer composed the first Valentine’s verse?

Some of the comments on the Valentines page are priceless too. I especially liked the guy who said he didn’t think that any of them were likely to help him further his DNA (if ya know what he means).

You never know, though some of us really like geeky guys with a sense of humor. Serious smarts + corny jokes = we heart you.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Save money and go viral (or “How to get the blogosphere to market your product better than you ever could have.”)

On the Digital Frontiers blog, Allan Long writes about the canny marketing behind the MacBook Air:

Jobs has a strong understanding of how the web has changed the game; he knew that blogs and journalists had endlessly speculated about the product he would reveal and Apple built up the anticipation even further with banners hinting at “something in the air”. Tech blogs created tags for the Air and anticipation continued to ratchet up – modern consumers were rabid for news about a product they actually had to wait for. Jobs’s keynote at Macworld was masterful. Using his informal style (he knew he was also speaking to nerds in their boxer shorts across the world) and a simple presentation that emphasized the visual wow factor of the Air’s design (what tech bloggers and their readers were most likely to drool over), Jobs nailed the big reveal. Having the Air be the last product in the last speech mirrored the secretive feel of the product and lathered up tech writers even more. Apple wanted people to know about their product – but by making it seem like they were trying to keep it secret they made it more enticing.

So did the product live up to the build-up?

The Air really did not live up to its hype, but its hype was groundbreaking in its magnitude. Google trends shows the Macbook Air never again came remotely close to the level of interest they manufactured around that keynote address.

The Whatis.com Word of the Day today is MacBook Air.

For Auld Lang Syne — Alex Howard weighs in on tech stories of the decade

Former WhatIs Associate Editor and top-ranked technophile Alex Howard sent us his list of the top tech stories of the decade, bless him!

Here’s what Alex had to say:
As the year ended, many tech pundits and publications naturally made lists of the “Top Tech Stories of the Decade.” My colleague Barb Darrow said good riddance to a bad decade.

IDG/Macworld made a similar list, putting Google’s rise to the top at #1.

The iPhone: Apple redefines a market, again
Gates moves on … baby boomers, move over!
The rise of the botnets: Security tops Web worries
The battle over Facebook: Social networking hits prime time
Vista delays …. and launches
Google superstar HP ties the knot with Compaq
Apple launches the iPod, and gets back on track
Microsoft is busted Dotcom deathwatch

CNET (at CNN)

Slideshow of same:
1. Google launches Adwords and becomes tech’s most important company

2. Apple unveils iTunes

3. Microsoft and the feds make a deal

4. Pffft goes dotcom bubble

5. Apple releases iPhone, changes mobile tech

6. Yahoo plays Hamlet with search

7. Craigslist & slow fade of newspapers

8. Google acquires YouTube, legitimizes social media

9. Gates retires

10. HP acquires Compaq

Discovery – focused on tech, not just IT:

10. iPod Crushes Internet Music Piracy (Wrong! -me)

9. YouTube Goes from 0 to 60 in a Click

8. Wi-Fi Takes to the Skies

7. Laptops Get Smaller and Super Cheap

6. Humans Meld with Machines

5. Stem Cells Found in New Sources

4. People Take Action Via Social Networking Web Sites

3. Scientists Create First Synthetic Bacterium

2. Google Becomes a Verb

1. Human Genome Mapped

ZDnet’s list was shorter and gave the nod to Google as well.
1. Apple was big, but Google was bigger.
2. The Apple renaissance.
3. Larry Ellison is a genius: bought PeopleSoft, Siebel, BEA and Sun.
4. Social networking
5. Software as a service emerged

My list? if we limit it to IT, then the top stories are clear. (If we include technology, then Discovery’s list deserves more consideration.)

10. YouTube changes how we watch video

9. Craigslist breaks down e-commerce barriers, disrupts newspapers

8. Mobile broadband and wifi move users closer to pervasive computing

7. Tech gets SaaS-sy, moves into the cloud at Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com

6. M&A: Oracle grows by acquisition, HP-Compaq merge, IBM goes shopping

5. Microsoft settles antitrust suit, finally releases Vista, then Windows 7

4. Dotcom bubble deflates, replaced later by Web 2.0 bubble

3. Social networking redefines how people relate, do business online

2. Apple redefines mobile computing, media and software distribution

1. Google emerges, finds a business model, organizes the world’s info. And more…

******************************************************************************************

We just about crossed emails. In mine, I asked Alex what he saw as the top tech stories of the decade. And in his, he said he’d already prepared this list. Synchronicity and auld lang syne — what could be nicer?

More on optimism as a people skill

Kate Nasser responds:

“Glad you liked my suggestion of aka “people skills”. I read your reply and saw you asked what would I classify “optimism” etc… You call it intrapersonal which could work as a label. I see it this more an “attitude” which translates into skills that you use with other people. So something like optimism is an outlook/attitude and when you use it to lead, serve, communicate etc… then those are people-skills.”

From the virtual mailbag: Should “soft skills” be called “people skills?”

We had a note from Kate Nasser responding to our definition of soft skills:

a)Bravo for having this message out there b)Love your analogy that soft skills are skills you use everywhere yet hard skills tend to be focused on one area/task c)SUGGESTION – you might considering an “also known as” “Soft skills also known as people-skills are mechanism for living and succeeding.”

Over time if we can change the common name from soft skills to people-skills — people will see these skills as inherent to daily living. “Soft” will always have a comparative meaning and some will therefore see these skills as less important than hard skills. Also soft can be a tough word for certain personality types (e.g. Drivers) and (some) men to accept.

Clearly, there’s a case to be made for using “people skills” rather than “soft skills” — at least for the interpersonal ones, like friendliness. What about intrapersonal skills though — optimism, for example, helps you get along with people, but indirectly. Is optimism a people skill? What do you think?

Kate Nasser is a people skills coach. You can follow her on Twitter.

Like X-ray specs — except the technology actually works

“With backscatter, when you scan, you’d see a silhouette of the body. You could see  whatever was on the outside of the body, on the surface of the body or anything sewn into the lining of your coat. It would show up as kind of a gray mass.”

In an interview for the Detroit Free Press, airline security expert Douglas Laird dismisses privacy concerns. “I believe we have to give up some rights for the safety of everybody,” he said. At the same time, however, he realizes that not everyone sees things the same way. “It’s a real nerve that you touch when you mention that.”

MiFi my eye! Why when I was your age…

“Someday, we’ll tell our grandchildren how we had to drive around town looking for a coffee shop when we needed to get online, and they’ll laugh their heads off.” ~ David Pogue

Like others of his generation, Pogue marvels at the idea of a portable wireless broadband connection although he knows that the gol-durned kids of the future will take such wonders totally for granted.

As is only fair, I guess, for the way we laughed at our parents’ fascination with the paper shredder.

Pogue bemoans the pre-MiFi state of affairs:

Getting online isn’t impossible, but today’s options are deeply flawed. Most of them involve sitting rooted in one spot — in the coffee shop or library, for example. (Sadly, the days when cities were blanketed by free Wi-Fi signals leaking from people’s apartments are over; they all require passwords these days.)

And explains, rather nicely, how MiFi operates and what your best options are.

I’m going to get one. If I have to sell my Victrola to do it.

Why Windows 7 is not called Vista Service Pack 2

According to Ron Herardian, chief systems architect of Global System Services Corp. (a Microsoft partner in Mountain View, Calif), Windows 7 is what Vista should have been. Heradian was quoted in this article about the competition between Mac Snow Leopard and Windows 7:

“Vista was an enormous blunder — a disaster. Windows 7 is Vista, fixed, but Microsoft was smart enough to not call it ‘Vista Service Pack 2.’”

Not to mention the fact that you can’t really charge for service packs. My work computer came with Vista installed and during each of my frequent sessions with our tech support, I find occasion to say “I hate Vista,” to which the tech support guy says “I hate Vista, too.”

First, Vista screws up your computer and sets defaults you’d never choose in a million years. Then, when you dig around enough to find out what you should be able to do to fix your problem, you find out that Vista won’t let you do it. I hate Vista.

I’m hoping Santa will bring me Windows 7, since Microsoft is charging for it. But, really, I think they should just call it SP 2 and give it to Vista users — with apologies.

If a virus can be in two states at once, can I?

When you work from home, no one hears you sneeze.

Which is kind-of too bad, because if I had to be in the office to work right now, I would be home lying on the couch in my PJs. As it is, of course, I’m home slumping on the couch and tippity-tapping away on my laptop keyboard.

So, here I am sniffling, whining, and reading email. And in the MIT Technology Review newsletter, I see a link to Schrodinger’s virus.

Here’s the scoop, in a nutshell: Science has already demonstrated that single particles can be in multiple locations simultaneously. Now Doctors Ignacio Cirac and Oriol Romero-Isart are looking at demonstrating the same thing with the flu virus, which is a living entity. And if that works, next up is this little guy, a tardigrade arthropod.

Can cats and editors be far behind?

Some years back, I wrote a bunch of definitions for the site related to quantum theory, including Schrodinger’s cat. Fascinating stuff — I was thrilled to get the chance to research an area like that and write about it, if not a little daunted.

I think it was at the point where I first heard of superposition that I reared back from the page, carefully put the book down and leapt up to pace frenetically for an extended time period, occasionally clutching my head and giving it a shake. Pretty much the way you see ubergeeks and mad scientists do in the movies, on the threshold of some great discovery.

Except, in this case, the discovery’s been made and demonstrated — we know that superposition actually occurs at the subatomic level, because there are observable effects of interference, in which a single particle is demonstrated to be in multiple locations simultaneously.

All I had to do was grasp the implications. For example, as demonstrated in the double-slit experiment:

“What actually occurs is that each photon not only goes through both slits, but also simultaneously traverses every possible trajectory en route to the target. Research into this phenomenon has demonstrated that other elementary particles, such as electrons, exhibit the same behavior.”

So. We’re back to single entities being in multiple locations, simultaneously: Photons > molecules > viruses > arthropods > cats > me?

An alternate state of being flu-less right now would be nice — or even taking an actual sick day… can someone show me how to switch between dimensions? I’ll be in flannel, watching Mary Tyler Moore reruns before you can say “Oh Lou!”

~ Ivy Wigmore

For Effective Communication with Diverse Business Groups, Drop the Jargon

Today’s guest post is by Robert Malmrose.

Jargon can be good. It has its place. The online dictionary, Dictionary.com, defines jargon as “1. the language, esp. the vocabulary, peculiar to a particular trade, profession, or group…”[1]

Jargon is a great method for two equally qualified professionals in the same business group to communicate ideas quickly. They both already agree on the definition of the underlying acronym or “term of art” and can rapidly exchange ideas as if fluently speaking a foreign language.

But now Bill, your tech savvy architect in the Security Group, and Tim, your hands-on “go to” guy in the Networking Group, are explaining to Sally, the most tech-savvy employee on the compliance team, and George, the guy in marketing who wanted his application “secured” before rollout, that Bill and Tim will need 2 more months and a budget amendment to create a “DLP” methodology to co-exist with their “DRM” implementation to be properly monitored by the “SEM” system when deployed.

Sally and George will understand the delay and cost overrun, won’t they? Well… probably not.

In fact, most non-IT people would have little idea what the acronyms, “DLP”, “DRM, and “SEM” actually meant, even though Bill and Tim were sincerely trying to explain the situation to Sally and George.

Jargon has a dark side. The second definition from Dictionary.com defines jargon as “2. unintelligible or meaningless talk or writing; gibberish.”

Too often in business meetings and in writing, IT professionals fail to connect with the other people in their company because of jargon. Even when we have the best intentions, we’re all guilty of this behavior to some degree. Holding advanced knowledge in a profession, such as IT, necessarily requires jargon for efficient day-to-day business activities among similarly trained teammates.

However, when we unconsciously slip jargon into discussions with other business groups or consciously use jargon to impress meeting attendees with the depth of our qualifications, jargon derails the other person’s train of thought and undermines the effectiveness of our presentations.

In the above hypothetical example, Bill, Tim, Sally, and George, are like characters in the tale of the four blind men who chance upon an elephant for the first time. As the story goes, the first man touches the leg and thinks that an elephant is like the trunk of a tree. The second touches the side of the elephant and thinks it’s like a large wall. The third grabs the trunk and says it’s like a snake, while the fourth touches the tail and thinks it’s like a rope.

Similarly, jargon prevents IT professionals from defining and communicating both business challenges and solutions to other business divisions. The result is lost time and energy and a risk that a project never receives proper consideration by all necessary parties. Plus, the detrimental effect of jargon increases as the number of participants in the discussion increases.

Jargon introduces additional communication missteps. When an IT professional uses jargon, people may interrupt a speaker to ask what a piece of jargon means. This breaks the rhythm of the presentation and indicates that the speaker is not being effective.

Conversely, some people will not interrupt when they hear an unknown term, either because they feel that interrupting the speaker is inappropriate at that particular moment or because they do not want to appear unintelligent in front of the group. However, you have lost communicative effectiveness because these people will no longer follow your delivery in its entirety and may even have lost interest in your topic completely.

Most business people who use jargon are overestimating the ability of the audience to remember new technical terms being heard for the first time. Even worse, some people have little awareness or concern that their jargon is preventing them from delivering their message to their audience. They are limiting their own communication abilities for no apparent reason.

Finally, miscommunication through jargon does not only occur between IT staff and the rest of the company. In larger organizations with large IT groups, jargon threatens to reduce communication effectiveness between IT groups with different skill sets and training. For example, an application developer first hearing the terms used by an information security architect, such as “defense in depth” and “least privilege”, may make assumptions about the meaning of these terms that are not correct.

Here are some suggestions to try to make your next memo, business meeting, or presentation a “jargon free” zone when communicating with business people who are unfamiliar with the technical aspects of your career but who are necessary for you to persuade or inform:

· AVOID USING ACRONYMS OR “TERMS OF ART” – Because you probably use acronyms routinely as professional short-hand with your closest team members, you have a tendency to use them unconsciously in meetings, presentations, and memos when speaking with non-team members.

Even if your audience or readers have seen the acronyms in other contexts, they may not even be thinking about them in the same way that you meant. For example, if you casually say “DR” in a meeting, your network engineer assumes you meant “Disaster Recovery”, while the compliance officer may be wondering why you just said “Decision Review”, and the marketing guy is thinking “Daily Report”.

Use the full term to describe a concept instead of an acronym unless the acronym has grown in usage at the company to the point that its meaning is without question. For example, use the terms, “Intrusion Detection System” and “Intrusion Prevention System”, instead of substituting the acronyms, “IDS” and “IPS”.

Do not use “terms of art”, such as “WAN”,”LAN”, or “SAN”, when your audience already has business equivalents that they understand. Instead of saying, “Do you need data stored locally or securely on the SAN?”, you could say, “Do the customer service representatives have any business reason to keep customer data stored at their desks or can we move the customer records to a location that allows us to provide you and your customers better security management?” The business user will probably think differently about the business risk when described in the second example.

· NEVER INTRODUCE MORE THAN TWO NEW ACRONYMS AT ONCE – If you must use acronyms, never use more than two new acronyms with a group or audience when the concepts are new to some members of the audience or discussion.

Even if you define your acronyms before using them, if you use more than two new acronyms in the same meeting, presentation or memo, then you are risking that the audience will not retain their meaning throughout the presentation.

If you need convincing, try this test.

Define three new 2 or 3 letter acronyms for a colleague, in a memo, on slides or orally during a discussion. (Do not tell him or her that you are testing retention.) If you used a memo or a slide, remove it from your colleague’s view. Talk about the topic for about 5 minutes while using the acronyms in slides or in your discussion. Now ask your colleague what the acronyms mean. Most people cannot accurately define two of the acronyms, let alone three of them.

· STOP AND ASK FOR FEEDBACK – If you are in a business meeting or presentation and begin to see obvious signs of confusion in the faces of the audience, take a moment to ask your audience if they have any questions about the terminology that you are using. Be sincere in your approach.

Ask in a way that sends the message that you want them to understand the importance of your message and not that they are dumb for failing to understand. Do not say, “Who doesn’t understand what’s shown on these slides?” but say, “Is there something up to this point that I haven’t made clear enough that I can clarify?”

If you have the time to speak with some presentation attendees informally before a presentation to a large group or before a business meeting, you can quickly gauge the technical aptitude of your audience as well as learn some of their jargon.

If you receive a question that is not related to terminology but some other topic, thank the person for their question and tell them that you will be happy to answer the question at the end of the presentation if the remaining material does not provide a satisfactory answer.

If the person asking the question is too senior or influential in the meeting or presentation for you to defer their question until later, then you will probably have to answer it immediately. Answer the question, ask if anyone else needs clarification with your terminology, and then move forward with the balance of your content.

· USE THEIR JARGON – If you understand your audience well enough, discuss the business problem and solution using their jargon instead of your own.

Studies have shown that people have increased brain activity and respond with greater awareness when hearing their own name versus anyone else’s name. By analogy, a business person is more likely to be engaged in a conversation when you are using their jargon to describe a problem rather than your own.

For example, instead of saying, “We prefer that the users authenticate to the device using two-factor authentication for increased security”, you might say, “We prefer that the retail sales staff are issued a smartcard that they will swipe at POS before entering a password in order to increase the protection of the consumer data generated during each sales transaction.”

If you can phrase business challenge and solution in terms understood by the other business groups, then you have a vastly greater likelihood that your business goals are in alignment with the other groups attending your meeting, presentation or written proposal.

This type of discussion technique takes practice and a concentrated effort during conversation or writing, but can pay huge dividends in leveraging your communication abilities throughout the company.

In conclusion, taking the time to learn “talk the talk” of other business departments will feel awkward until you spend a little time in finding common ground to define business processes and goals across diverse business groups. Once you have set aside your jargon, people will think of you as the person bringing the “solution” to the rest of the group.