The model American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it.

An interesting perspective. We can apply this to almost anything. The Spend Time effect. It is interesting to do it on several things you own.

The book publishing industry is dead and they don’t know it. Its like how the typewriter industry died. And how companies like Blockbuster and Borders can’t survive. And the entire music industry is dying. And broadcast television might be on the way.  And the tablet industry is the first sign that companies like DELL might be in major trouble. And companies like Sirius mean the radio industry is dead.

This blog is more about self publishing. But James A's observations of various industries being disrupted is something worth noting (especially if you are in one of those industries). James blogs are great reads.

Expect us to make ambitious bets on our future that distract us from our current business. Some bets we’ll get right, and others we’ll get wrong, but we think it’s the only way to continuously build disruptive products.

I loved this letter of the CEO. There is so much to learn. These are candid and very bold statements to put in an IPO letter. My favorites:

- We are always reinventing ourselves
- We are unusual and we like it that way
- Our customers and merchants are all we care about
- We don't measure ourselves in conventional ways

What if every one of us have the courage to tell ourselves that we are unusual and like it that way or that we do not measure ourselves in conventional ways?

Dr. Wagner has identified what he calls a "global achievement gap," which is the leap between what even our best schools are teaching, and the must-have skills of the future:

• Critical thinking and problem-solving
• Collaboration across networks and leading by influence
• Agility and adaptability
• Initiative and entrepreneurialism
• Effective oral and written communication
• Accessing and analyzing information
• Curiosity and imagination

How do you work on building these skills? No college I know, teaches them yet. How do you embed them into the existing educational system? There are other challenges too? How do you convince teachers, students, parents that you need these skills?

We seek papers about behavior that is both collective and intelligent. By collective, we mean groups of individual actors, including, for example, people, computational agents, and organizations. By intelligent, we mean that the collective behavior of the group exhibits characteristics such as, for example, perception, learning, judgment, or problem solving.

With a fascinating set of topics, this conference promises to be a great one.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

human computation
social computing
crowdsourcing
wisdom of crowds (e.g., prediction markets)
group memory and problem-solving
deliberative democracy
animal collective behavior
organizational design
public policy design (e.g., regulatory reform)
ethics of collective intelligence (e.g., "digital sweatshops")
computational models of group search and optimization
emergence and evolution of intelligence
new technologies for making groups smarter

The more we listen, the more we know. The more we know, the more we notice. The more we notice the more we can use to figure out what we need to know next.

Recursive knowledge acquisition :)

Love this part of the post. Liz does such a great job of articulating how she benefits from Twitter. Your benefits may vary but there is no doubt that there are. Here are some of mine:

1. Made new friends
2. Strengthened some of the old friendships by being in touch more often
3. By connecting my Twitter account to my FB account, I start more conversations
4. I learn so much more than I ever imagined. I make it a point to follow people from many countries and many walks of life. We are getting a virtual tour of all those places through the eyes of our Twitter friends.

The evolution of the social web, explains Botsman, first enabled programmers to share code (Linux), then allowed people to share their lives (Facebook), and most recently encouraged creators to share their content (YouTube). "Now we're going into the fourth phase," says Botsman, "where people are saying, 'I can apply the same technology to share all kinds of assets offline, from the real world.'

Twitter is a tool for sharing knowledge. If you look around you will see many more:

- Quora
- Slideshare
- Scribd
- Wikipedia
- Several specialized wikis

Besides sharing bits there are lots of movements towards sharing places and objects as well. These include:
- BnB (bed and breakfast places)
- Couchsurfing ( where you simply share a couch)
- car pooling
- carshare and zipcar

In a modern economy, information should be the prime asset — the raw material of new products and services, smarter decisions, competitive advantage for companies, and greater growth and productivity.

- the data explosion is also an enormous opportunity
- You need a different set of tools to make sense of large amounts of data
- You need tools to discover the right sources, track information, find patterns, mine information for actionable intelligence
- Resources you can use include Cloud Computing, Data APIs, Linked Open Data, Data Mining, Machine Learning, Information Visualization and Analytics tools

Currently Mahout supports mainly four use cases: Recommendation mining takes users' behavior and from that tries to find items users might like. Clustering takes e.g. text documents and groups them into groups of topically related documents. Classification learns from exisiting categorized documents what documents of a specific category look like and is able to assign unlabelled documents to the (hopefully) correct category. Frequent itemset mining takes a set of item groups (terms in a query session, shopping cart content) and identifies, which individual items usually appear together.

Will update my comments after doing a bit more research and trying things out.

the new core bundle of big data will requirements will be:

1. storage

a MapReduce framework for processing unstructured data

an analytic database

predictive analytics

business intelligence (BI)

Look at the job trends for some of these keywords on Indeed.com. Here is the absolute trends - http://bit.ly/dRmqZP and the relative trends - http://bit.ly/eABRV6