Jens Heurlin in his newly renovated apartment
Vilhelm enjoying the company of Nikoline who is the newly born daughter of Mille and Joakim. The latter is one of my cousins’ sons.
August 30, 2004
August 29, 2004
Malcom Gladwell “Tipping Point”
Just finished reading Malcom Gladwell’s Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Highly recommendable!
August 27, 2004
Famous in Romania
A screenshoot from the Romanian edition web-site of Computerworld apparently mentioned me as speaker at a seminar in Buceresti spring 2004.
August 25, 2004
Marta’s Birthday
A short MPEG video from the 4th birthday day 24 August 2004 of Marta who is the daughter of our friends Alexandra and Andreas. Andreas is sort of a grand nephew that is the son of one of my cousins.
August 23, 2004
“Nigerian Scam” becoming personalized!
Here is what I just recieved. Incredible!
Dear Martin von Haller Grønbæk,
I am Barrister Jean Mustapha (S.A.T) a senior partner at Dan Lewis & Lewis laws, personal attorney to Mr. G. Haller Grønbæk, a businessman and diamond merchant with Shell Development Company in Lome Togo.Herein referred to as my client.
On the 6th November 2000, my client altogether with his family (wife & daughter) was involved in a ghastly auto accident. All occupants of the vehicle unfortunately lost their lives. Since then I have made several enquiries to his embassy here to locate any of my clients extended relatives, this has proved unsuccessful. After these several unsuccessful attempts, I decided to track his last name over the Internet, to locate any member of his family hence I contacted you (although you might not be related to my late client).I have contacted you to assist in repatriating this fund valued at $17.5 million dollars left behind by my client before it gets confiscated or declared unserviceable by the Standard Finance Bank (SFB),Lome-Togo where this amount was deposited. The said Bank has issued me a notice to provide the next of kin or have his dormant account closed and the funds confiscated by the 4th quarter of the banking year.
Since I have been unsuccessful in locating his relatives for over 2years, I now seek your consent to present you as the next of kin to the deceased since you have the same last names, so that the funds can be paid into your account.
30% of the total sum has been mapped out for you for your assistance while 5% will be for expenses that might be incurred during the course of transaction and the remaining 65% will be for my partners and me.
All necessary documents needed to back you up for claim will be duly and legally obtained and issued in your name and favor. All I require from you is your honest cooperation to enable us see this transaction through. I guarantee that this will be executed under legitimate arrangement, that I will protect you from any breach of the law.
Contact me on my alternate e-mail address: jeanmustaph1@yahoo.co.uk
Best regards,
Jean Mustapha.
Rejection 2.0
Several new services add a modern twist to the ancient art of rejection. People unable to say ‘no’ personally to unwanted advances can now sign up for e-mails and phone messages that do the dirty work for them. By Daniel Terdiman. [Wired News]
Linus kan inte vara “nasty”
Business Week har intervjuat Linus Torvalds och skrivit en längre artikel om hans upplysta despotism.
Linus Torvalds säger bland annat:
“I am a dictator, but it’s the right kind of dictatorship. I can’t really do anything that screws people over. The benevolence is built in. I can’t be nasty. If my baser instincts took hold, they wouldn’t trust me, and they wouldn’t work with me anymore. I’m not so much a leader, I’m more of a shepherd. Now all the kernel developers will read that and say, “He’s comparing us to sheep.” It’s more like herding cats.”
Captainitis (Ross Mayfield)
Psychologist Patrick Laughlin from the University of Illinois has a new study that shows that groups outperform even the best individuals in decision making. Always good to rethink groupthink, but I’m not digging up the echo chamber meme.
A cooperating unit benefits from diversity and parallel processing. Without cooperation, errors such as captainitis (when a team defers to the expertise of others) and when a leader possesses so much expertise they isolate themselves. The article suggests a common lesson of invoking collaboration even when its not immeadiately necessary.
With our little company, it helps that we work openly as possible and I try to involve as many people as feasible in a decision. We also borrow the extreme programming practice of pairing to get tasks done. Even Watson and Crick cracked the code through pairing:
At first, Watson ticked off a set of contributory factors that were unsurprising: He and Crick had identified the problem as the most important one to attack. They were passionate about it, devoting themselves single-mindedly to the task. They were willing to try approaches that came from outside their areas of familiarity.
Then he added a stunning reason for their success: he and Crick had cracked the elusive code of DNA because they weren’t the most intelligent of the scientists pursuing the answer. According to Watson, the smartest of the lot was Rosalind Franklin, a brilliant British scientist who was working in Paris at the time.
The only thing more dangerous than someone making decisions in isolation is hoarding the information others need to make decisions.
Related: Best practice does not equal best strategy (process-based strategic decision making fails).
[via Jeff Nolan]
Update: Valids Krebs points out the Captainitis of the new Intelligence Czar, which increases the distance from the President to sources of information. Social network analysis aside, in today’s administration, this could be a good or a bad thing.
