Month: September 2006

De-Centralized Intelligence Agency

putting the intelligence back into CIA

The agency perhaps has the greatest to gain from adopting social software, but also has the greatest hard coded structural barriers (need to know) and a culture that reprimands against participation. Nevertheless, an Intellipedia and blogging at all levels in the organization is burgeoning. There is a shared understanding that these tools, with the right practices and change in culture could transform intelligence from a manufacturing model that delivers reports to a complex adaptive system where intelligence is a conversation with decision makers, an inherently counter spin.

Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community

We must transform the Intelligence Community into a community that dynamically reinvents itself by continuously learning and adapting as the national security environment changes. These changes include allowing our officers more autonomy in the context of improved tradecraft and information sharing. In addition, several new technologies will facilitate this transformation. 2 examples are self-organizing knowledge websites, known as Wikis, and information sharing websites known as Blogs.

Real database

We finally decided to go with a commercial database over the objections of a number of engineers, including myself. To ease the transition it was decided to convert AdWords over to the new system first, and to do the main ads system later. It was a project on a par with the internationalzation effort in terms of the tedious work required to comb over nearly all of the AdWords code and change all of the database queries. (Databases are supposed to all be compatible with one another, but in reality they pretty much aren’t.)

To make a long story short, it was an unmitigated disaster.

adwords runs on mysql (for the next time someone brings up the old “not for enterprise use”)

The Thin Pill

“metabolic syndrome” is the new euphemism for being fat

That is the demographic ripple effect of metabolic syndrome. As the medical establishment reaches further down the causal chain to identify more risk factors and spot them earlier, and as it assigns names, definitions, and treatments to these diagnoses, more and more people are swept into the disease net. Add in our genetic biomarkers and it’s clear that disease won’t be something we can avoid anymore. It will be something we simply have, just as we have freckles or wear glasses. We will all carry our disease portfolios and will be identified through our ailments – or more precisely, our inclinations toward certain ailments. Metabolic syndrome is just the latest step on this path.

Voter registration

heh

We may not be electing a President this November, but important elections are happening in your state – with control of Congress, state legislatures, school boards, and more at stake. So MySpace has partnered with Declare Yourself, a national nonpartisan, nonprofit campaign to energize and empower you. In 2004, DY registered over 1M young voters – this year, MySpace and DY are working together to make it easy for millions more to make a difference.