Wiki White House

I subscribe to a weekly Technology Today podcast from Fora.tv. This week's feed was the audio version of a panel discussion sponsored by the New America Foundation, Wired Magazine, and Google. They discussed the challenges facing the new administration on transparency and communication. Those same challenges are facing every organization on the planet today, especially as we respond to the global economic meltdown.

Here's a clip from the New America Foundation site:

"Technology evangelists believe that Barack Obama has the potential to fundamentally alter communication between the presidency and the people. Wikis in the White House? Online public comments on legislation? A real-time two-way conversation between citizens and their elected officials?"

I especially enjoyed the comment from Craig Newmark (the Craig's List guy) to "Set the Geeks Free!" It was a good 1.5 hours of listening. You can also watch the event on You Tube.

The Next 100 Years

I subscribe to John Mauldin's Outside the Box weekly blog letter. It's mainly about economics from a systems perspective. Big pictures - really big! This latest one is a keeper.

But today in a special Outside the Box from my good friend George Freidman of Stratfor We will look out a bit further George is just about to release his latest book, The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century. (Even pre-release it's already at #11 on Amazon's non-fiction bestseller list!) Here's my quick summary; and to cut to the chase, it's just fascinating.

What reads like a geopolitical thriller gives a thought-provoking glimpse into what the world will look like in the coming century. George's strength is his ability to take geopolitical patterns and use them to forecast future events, sometimes with startling and counterintuitive results.

After this little teaser, 8 (printed) pages of discussion from author George Freidman follows. George suggests that Poland and Turkey will emerge as world powers and that China cannot possible become great. He also suggests that Mexico will challenge the United States and that the world's population will actually start to decline by mid-century. Fascinating!

I intend to read this over several times, to make sure I understand.

Anti Virus 2009 Infection

Our Windows XP machine at home got infected by the Anti Virus 2009 scam. It is sneaky! Go to an infected site and a window pops up saying a malicious program is attempting to install itself. Do you want to remove it? The message looks just like it is coming from your already-installed AV software. (We us AVG 8.0 Free version because we are behind a router-firewall.) The natural human inclination is to click "yes, please remove this bad thing." In doing so, you have authorized download and installation of the very thing you were trying to avoid! As the bad program started installation, our existing AVG monitoring kicked in and blocked it. But the brain still thinks the objective is to remove something, so you authorize the action to continue.

All kinds of windows and messages appeared, saying our virus protection was out of date. Do you want to purchase an update? Most people now realize they have infected their machine and have the presence of mind to stop. However, a small percentage of people fall for the scam and make a payment for something worthless. This small percentage can bring in a lot of cash from millions of infected machines. Huge cash!

At this point, the best thing is to shut down the machine. Hold the power button down for 5 seconds if necessary to force a shutdown.

Here's the method I used to clean our machine.

1. Start the machine in Safe Mode with Networking. This keeps all the extra stuff, including your recent infection, from starting. But it is not obvious how to do this SAFE MODE thing. The start (boot) screen only says F2 for setup and F12 for maintenance. On Windows machines, the key to press is F8 (as it is loading). Although it doesn't appear to be working at first, the Windows system is indeed loading in safe mode. You are presented with a black and white text screen giving several options. Choose SAFE MODE with NETWORKING. Even though this sounds wrong - after all it was the bad Internet that just infected your machine - you will need to download and update a special program soon. I logged in as Administrator.
2. Once in safe mode, the screen has all your desktop icons, but bigger. Start your browser (we use Firefox, but Internet Explorer will work too) and go to the Malwarebytes site: www.malwarebytes.org Download their free Anti-Malware program. Save it to the desktop or someplace easy to remember. Close the browser. Locate the mbam-setup.exe file you just got and double click. This installs the new cleaning program. I used all the default choices. Start the Anti-Malware program by double-clicking the desktop icon. Select the UPDATE tab at the top and download the latest database. This is important, as you want the most recent bad-guy signatures installed. Now run a full scan on the c: drive. It took me 15 minutes to scan 11,000 files. 9 infections were detected! Now choose REMOVE ALL. If you want to look at the log of what was done, you can fine the text file in the anti-malware folder in Program Files. Malwarebytes allows you to upgrade their program for a small fee. They are good people and you should consider supporting them.
3. Even though your machine is now scrubbed of the bad guys, copies might be hanging around in hidden places. They love to reinstall themselves and do their evil again. While still in the SAFE MODE, open c:\windows\prefetch. Select all the files here and hit delete. None of the files are needed. They just make programs start faster and will rebuild again as you run your clean machine.
4. There is a small chance that the bad files might reside in their own folder in c:\Program Files. I looked and found nothing unusual.
5. One of the Windows features many people keep on is System Restore. A couple years ago, things were much simpler. The idea was to take a snapshot of registry and preference settings, as well as supporting files, before installing a new program. If things didn't work out, you could always roll back to the before condition. Windows sets aside some hard drive space to accommodate these rollback files. Unfortunately, bad files can also hide out here. So, I went to Control Panel --> System and selected the System Restore tab. There is a disk use slide control to set aside space for these restore files. I moved the slide all the way to the left (zero space). By clicking Apply, the previous files - including any contaminated ones - were removed. Then I clicked the box to turn off System Restore.
6. Just to make sure, I ran a full scan of my hard drive with AVG Free. One hour later, it reported no infected files. Whew!
7. I restarted the machine normally and everything was fixed. To prevent another human override of my installed AVG Free program, I enabled Auto-Heal in the AVG Advanced Settings. If the (good) AVG anti-virus program detects something bad, it nucs it without asking.

If I missed anything, or failed to make it clear, please post your comments below.

Presentation Zen

This new book by Garr Reynolds says that PowerPoint presentations don't have to be bad! As the name implies, simplicity and focus can result in outstanding presentations. He cites the TED Talks several times, as examples of how it should be done. (I have blogged before on how great these presentations are.) Here are some of the book highlights:

1. Identify the 2-4 main points you want to get across.
2. Design the presentation away from the computer first. Use story boards and drawing tablets to unleash your creativity.
3. Develop a story, remembering your focus is your audience. How can you enrich their lives?
   
4. Simplicity matters big. Use bullet points sparingly. Use strong stock photos and very short - but big - captions.
5. The presentation should not stand alone. You are needed to tell the story.
   
6. Apply classic design principles of contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity. Use the photographer's rule of thirds. Keep the signal-to-noise ratio down.
7. Be present when you deliver the talk, connecting with your audience as a friend. Keep the lights up, so they can see you and you them.

Boy, would I like to see more people apply these concepts! The book is well worth your time and $20 investment.

Update: I just viewed a presentation on Slideshare by Kevin Gee called The Science of Presentations. In 17 1/2 minutes, he reinforced the concepts given by Garr Reynolds.

Future of Everything

I just posted something about my paper on the future on a wiki for the Trans-humanist Society:

Change in technology is accelerating. Research shows that technology growth is exponential. The synergistic effect of combining two different technologies is yielding even more significant contributions to our world. As an example, combining changes in biological research and computer technology allowed scientists to determine the human genome in 5 years. That’s phenomenally quick, when you look at other scientific discoveries from the past. This synergy phenomenon is called convergence. Combining convergence with accelerating change leads many to believe that machines could be more intelligent than humans within 30 years. Called the Technological Singularity, we cannot possibly know what life will be like after artificial general intelligence, but we can examine the approach. There are skills that quality, engineering, safety, and environmental professionals must learn in order to successfully contribute to our businesses as we approach this Singularity. Just what are those skills we need to explore and polish? First is an appreciation for patterns, the language of life. Second is a systems understanding of events. Rarely does something happen by itself. Third is a realization that quality, safety, environment, security and finance are all forms of the same thing: Risk. We are evolving into a profession of risk management specialists.

Success Lessons from Amazon.com

Another good post from the Online Investing AI Blog:

As mentioned in my previous post, Amazon.com is having its best holiday season ever. It’s pretty interesting to notice how one company can thrive, while most other companies are losing money, and many are about to go bankrupt. The question is, what can we learn from this successful company?

more

Kaizen and the Japanese Automakers

Here is an interesting post by the Online Investing AI (Artificial Intelligence) blog:

Recently there has been a lot of news about the big three American automakers going bankrupt. The CEOs of the American automakers show up in Washington, go before Congress, and ask for billions of dollars. Their argument is that if they go bankrupt, its bad for American workers.

It’s true that nobody wants the American automakers to go bankrupt. But it’s also true that the CEOs are responsible for making the company succeed, not for asking the government for a handout. The CEOs, like most people, blame the credit markets, the economy, the stock market, the weather, and anything else they can think of.

What about the Japanese automakers? Do they go to Congress asking for money? No. It’s true that they are not making as much money as before, and in Toyota’s case, losing money for the first time in 70 years. However, they don’t go before any Congress asking for money, because they are not on the brink of bankruptcy.

They suggest that one of the principle factors is the attitude of continuous and small improvement. You can read the entire story in George's post.

Social Responsibility ISO Standard

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) recently issued the first public draft of a standard on Social Responsibility. To date, only the writing committee has seen the document. Now, they are asking for public input. This is your chance - as an individual or an organization - to make your thoughts known on this (very important) document.

Don't be fooled by the title. Social Responsibility is not a communist plot to eliminate capitalism. Nor is it an attempt to impose Western values on other nations of the world. As viewed by most nations (outside the USA), it is seen as the integration of quality, safety, environment, security, labor, finance, and sustainability. All into one package. The movement is strong in Europe. I noticed excitement for the concept at two recent conferences I attended - in South Africa and Mexico. It's big.

Of concern to many is the application of this standard to Conformity Assessment, called "certification" in many places. The document makes clear it is NOT to be used for registration/certification. Nor is it to be used as a substitute for national laws and regulations.

You can participate in the dialog by going to the ASQ Standards Central web site: www.asq.org/standards/. This is an open site and does not require a password. There you may download the Committee Draft pdf document, a form for sending in comments, and a two-page executive summary from ANSI (the American National Standards Institute) of the whole thing. No charge.