Another column signaling the seemingly massive change that is occurring to the world economy.

“Physical jobs are disappearing into the second economy, and I believe this effect is dwarfing the much more publicized effect of jobs disappearing to places like India and China.” [W. Brian Arthur, McKinsey Quarterly]

The potential separation between the benefactors of this second economy and the losers is an alarming prospect. How will we equip people with the skills to work and prosper in this new world?  And what are those skills… We are facing many more years of near double digit unemployment.

Is this an inflection point for the business of higher education? Two hundred students pay for the class but 55,000, as of today, are signed up to take the class. The side effect…. 55,000 people will potentially pay $50 or more for the required text book. Sure feels like a change.  

hmmmm - got me to thinking. I have been here. I hated-hated-hated my job and then a turning point came. I made myself sick. So I decided to figure out a way to embrace my job - things have been a hell of a lot better ever since. So bitching may not really mean you like it the way it is - but it surely is not doing anything to fix the situation.

Good article…. An organization’s demeanor starts at the top.

An excellent discussion on the requirements for Entity Resolution and the challenges of Connecting the Dots without a single mention of “disambiguation.” :-)   This problem has massive scale and data entanglement - RDF/OWL is not the answer - but I suspect neither is an RDBMS. It seems the problem is more about the connectivity between entities and the context of the information about the entity versus the entities themselves. Take note of Jonas’ “Flip/Flop” or rollback requirement - reminds me of deleting triples created through rule based inferencing. 

I completely agree with this guy… our employment environment has fundamentally changed.

“The industrial age, the one that started with the industrial revolution, is fading away. It is no longer the growth engine of the economy…” [Seth Godin]

There are tradable jobs and non-tradable jobs. Tradable jobs are the work that can be done anywhere and are the jobs that provide the most potential for growth in our economy. Non-tradable jobs are the ones that can not be moved…. hospital, retail, restaurant, and construction work are non-tradable. For the US to again be the most powerful economy in the world - we have to figure out how to create tradable industry and then export to the world. So, massive government sponsored infrastructure projects may put portions of the country back to work - but it will not fix the fundamental problem. We need the 21st century version of the space race.  I am thinking that my defense industry job has a diminishing future - not immediately but soon enough - feels alot like telecom did 8-9 years ago. What will my next career look like? There is opportunity in this change - but can’t quite grasp where or what it is. Is it energy, pre-fab housing, mobility, or as this guy states, solving smaller more immediate, tractable problems?

hmmmm. Not sure what the moral of the story is here: Primary Founder - $2B, Other Founders (3) - $$312M; VC’s (4) - $4.2B….

I guess… realize your worth if you are the “other” founder.

Let engineers do their jobs… listen to them… care about them… and help them when you can. Not rocket science. Just plain old respect. A little disappointed that Google needed to do a study to figure that out. Was, however, mildly encouraged that they did not employ a survey of employees but used the already voluminous review data.

Excellent article on how innovation is stifled in large companies that either need to be or want to be predictable. 

Passionate employees are not always the happiest, he said, as many chafe at the corporate barriers to innovation. In fact, Hagel said he finds that most large American companies discourage passion among their workers. ”Passion is extremely unpredictable in a world of ‘push,’” he pointed out, referring to the older proprietary business models. “Prediction is everything. Passion is a very dangerous emotion. Passion is something you pursue outside of the workforce — not in the workplace.”

Wow - finally somebody that is thinking….

“For 15 years, Kevin Costner has been overseeing the construction of oil separation machines to prepare for the possibility of another disaster of the magnitude of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill.”