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Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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My Trademark Attorney is a Blues Fan
How To Think About A Presentation
Private Intelligence and the Sovereign Individual
New Prostate Cancer Test Show Promise
Private CIAs
I Stye
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Should a President Expect Congressmen to Read the Bills They Pass?
Politico.com is having a public poll to help determine questions to be asked of candidates in tomorrow's Republican Presidential Candidate Debate. I just cast my vote for the question:Do you believe that Congress should have to read the bills they pass? In other words, do you support adoption of the "Read the Bills Act"?There are many important issues but, frankly, none of them matter if we don't get some way of forcing politicians to actually read, understand, and acknowledge the full contents of bills for which they vote. At present, Congress camouflages bills with euphemistic, patriotic-sounding names that are completely irrelevant to the contents and impact. But the name is just about all most Congressmen know about a bill before they vote on it.
Whether your issue is Iraq, torture, WMDs, global warming, or whatever you should understand that as long as Congress keeps score by how many bills they pass, and that in most cases they have absolutely no clue what's actually in the bills on which they vote, your issue is never, ever going to be treated in the open fashion any and every serious issue deserves.
If you're interested, go to Politico.com and cast your vote for the questions you think are important, or submit one of your own.
Terry Frazier at 3:28 PM
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My Trademark Attorney is a Blues Fan
Marty Schwimmer is my trademark attorney. I never met him except via The Trademark Blog. Turns out he’s a blues fan. Cool.
After the Blogging Thing, Kingston Mines Tonight
After the blogging get-together tonight at the Billy Goat Taven (which, I am told, is below street level so look for the stairs), a bunch of us are meeting up at Kingston Mines (a blues club), 2548 N. Halsted.
How To Think About A Presentation
My friend and colleague Sean Murphy, who is a great synthesizer and sensemaker, came up with an excellent presentation idea a while back. He’s done this a few times now and if you’re in the San Jose/Silicon Valley area and have a chance to see Sean’s “12 Books for the Busy CEO” you should do so. Links to his next session is below:
Crucial Marketing Concepts for Consultants @ PATCA May 10
I will be presenting a revised and improved version of the “12 Books for the Busy CEO” presentation on Thursday May 10 at 6pm at the PATCA monthly dinner at the Embassy Suites Santa Clara - Silicon Valley on 2885 Lakeside Drive in Santa Clara.I will cover a dozen books and offer a synthesis of the key marketing concepts (this is not a sequence of twelve book reports) that they offer. I will have an article on crucial marketing concepts that I will give out for attendees. There is good content here for entrepreneurs, whether they are starting out as consultants or embedding their expertise in software or a SaaS offering.
Spend an hour and leave with a summary of key marketing insights and some rules of thumb for successful innovation in Silicon Valley. You may even identify one or two books that you haven’t read that will be worth your time. I will cover a dozen books that form the basis for conventional wisdom on marketing in Silicon Valley. They provide the terms, the metaphors, the parables–in short the language–that successful high technology firms use to develop their plans and monitor their execution. Some of these books are old–most have stood the test of time, which in Valley years is a decade or more–but still provide succinct guidelines for new product introduction and sales.
I want to thank Mark Duncan for helping us turn a set of black and white PowerPoint slides that were primarily text bullets into a colorful and illustration rich article.
Terry Frazier at 9:53 AM
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Private Intelligence and the Sovereign Individual
In The secret service for the rest of us, Matt Mower writes:I've often wondered how feasible it would be for us to setup an intelligence service to watch them (most recently I was wondering whether there are intelligence services at work in Second Life). After all; What is an intelligence service other than an organization that collects data from the edge and analyzes it for the benefit of its customers?
Blogs and other read/write web tools give us all the ability to gather data and, in our own fashion, analyze it and pass it on. We are each miniature intelligence services for a varied clientelle and, although we too are biased, our bias can be adjusted for since it is more easily determined (over time).
More than a decade ago two futurists – James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg – wrote of the coming breakdown of state-based security and the growth of independent, individual security forces in their books “The Great Reckoning” and “The Sovereign Individual.” They were ridiculed pretty widely at the time and the books were considered fodder for bunker-dwellers, albeit rich bunker-dwellers. Much of what they projected was based on cultural and social models already visible at the time in Latin countries dominated by drug cartels. 15 years and the meteoric rise of technology have changed the landscape of what can be done but, if anything, the predictions of Davidson and Rees-Mogg seem more tangible than ever. If they were guilty of anything, it was merely being too far ahead of their time.
Current futurists and military analysts like John Robb (my source for the original story) are busily deconstructing the projected fall of the nation-state, peak oil, the rise of non-state entities, etc all of which is important. But no one seems to be thinking about my problems in the way that Davidson and Rees-Mogg did – deciphering what all this chaos means to the individual – and more importantly what to do about it.
How do we predict the unpredictable? How do we assess probability and impact? How do we, as individuals, make the right choices for where to live, where to put our money, how to prepare for the unexpected, how to protect our family, our friends, ourselves? Packing the basement full of survival rations, bottled water, duct tape and gas masks is a shallow, and rather ineffectual, approach.
What we really need is analytic intelligence for the individual. Governments – no matter who’s – are unreliable sources of information for the individual (if they can be considered reliable sources for anything at all save waste and corruption.) But to get such intelligence will be very difficult. Matt is right, current social software tools provide a glimpse of what may be possible, and many of the tools are being deployed within intelligence communities. But that is the key. Could we, as individuals, build our own intelligence communities?
Monday, April 30, 2007
New Prostate Cancer Test Show Promise
A little over a year ago I lost a long-time friend and mentor to prostate cancer. He was a relatively young, healthy 60 years old. He was diagnosed in August of last year. He died in January. By the time he died the cancer had spread to his lungs and his brain. His loss will be felt for a long, long time.The statistics on prostate cancer are discouraging - it's the most common malignancy among American men. The treatments are barbaric, and our ability to diagnose early or with any specificity is poor, at best. But there is good news on the horizon.
As reported at MedicineNet, a new protein, called prostate cancer antigen-2 (EPCA-2), looks like it's going to provide a far more accurate marker for cancer cells than the common PSA test:
"We've been able to show that blood levels of it are low in normal individuals and high in prostate cancer, and that it distinguishes between cancers that are confined to the prostate and those that have spread outside the gland," explained study lead researcher Dr. Robert H. Getzenberg, professor of urology and director of research at Johns Hopkins University's James Buchanan Brady Urological Institute, in Baltimore.Speaking of curing cancer, if you want to donate to one of the world's most efficient charities (by efficient I mean in excess of $.90 of every dollar goes directly to research) Seth has his Pan-Mass Challenge page up. All proceeds go to the Jimmy Fund at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.His team published its findings in the May issue of Urology.
[...]
Spotting especially life-threatening prostate tumors is "the holy grail" of diagnosis, he said. Current PSA testing cannot distinguish between cancers that will grow so slowly that they pose no danger to life and those that require quick action. The hope is that the ECPA-2 test will identify men whose slow-growing cancers make them candidates for "watchful waiting" rather than immediate surgery or other treatment.
Terry Frazier at 10:40 AM
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Private CIAs
John Robb, independent military analyst, futurist, and author of “Brave New War,” on Friday posted this interesting tidbit on Friday regarding the move by GlobalCos into the intelligence and security space:JOURNAL: Private CIAs
A strong sign that the nation-state is in decay is the frequency we see announcements of companies that are replicating some of the most sensitive government services. The most recent mover is Walmart, which is in the process of putting together its own intelligence arm (it's being built by a former CIA/FBI officer Kenneth Senser). For those unable to afford their own global intelligence unit, Blackwater's Cofer Black is building one called Total Intelligence Solutions.
If you want to get up to speed quickly, the background for this is available in BNW.
This makes sense, of course. As these companies plan long-term deployments across the globe they can little afford not to know the risks involved. And the intelligence fiasco of Iraq WMDs showed how unreliable government intelligence can be. This looks, to me, like another area where oligopoly control of a market makes sense. I wonder how the potential for shared intelligence organizations, and perhaps shared risk, will alter the oligopoly landscape?
Terry Frazier at 10:22 AM
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Saturday, April 28, 2007
I Stye
A couple of weeks ago I was on a flight from STL to ATL and my left eye was really bothering me - felt like I had something in my eye the whole trip, but I couldn't find it. When we landed I went to the restroom and managed to see that I had what I can only describe as an in-grown eyelash. It was sort of curled back in on itself and part of it was caught under the eyelid causing irritation.
So I managed to get ahold of it and pull it out. Actually, it pretty much fell out when I touched it. And all was right with the world. Until yesterday. My eye got sore yesterday morning. By afternoon I had developed a whopping stye in exactly the same place as that in-grown eyelash. Boy, does that hurt. According to AllAboutVision the best treatment is mostly doing nothing - maybe use a little ointment or eyedrops to increase comfort. I have antibiotic opthalmic ointments and homeopathic eyedrops. Guess that's all I can do for it at the moment. It's a beautiful day for a motorcycle ride, but I'm not sure I want to ride with only one good eye...
Terry Frazier at 11:59 AM
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