Interrelativity

Interrelativity: musings about interrelatedness

  • Coffee and conversation with congressional candidate Suzan DelBene

    Two local Coffee Party groups – from Redmond and Renton / SE Lake Washington – organized a meeting with Suzan DelBene, the Democratic candidate for Washington's 8th Congressional District, at Vovito Caffe & Gelato in Bellevue last week. A dozen or so people participated in a civil and engaging conversation with the candidate about a…

  • Empowered: More Platform Thinking, De-Bureaucratization and Redistribution of Agency

    The new book, Empowered, by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler of Forrester Research, proclaims an inspiring message: social media is increasingly empowering customers to draw attention to their problems, and the best way for businesses to provide effective solutions is to empower their employees with the same tools. The book makes a strong case for…

  • The Starbucks Digital Network, Engagement, Enlightenment and Third Places

    In a recent interview at TheGrill media and entertainment conference, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz extolled the virtues of video streaming and other proprietary media that will soon be made available via free Wi-Fi on the Starbuck Digital Network. At the end of the interview, he briefly mentions the unique opportunity that Starbucks offers as a…

  • Creativity, Distractability and Structured vs. Unstructured Procrastination

    I have been practicing structured procrastination while allowing a few blog posts to, uh, ferment a bit longer (not to mention other things I want to get done). As evidence, after reading Jonah Lehrer's recent post about unstructured procrastination – Are Distractable People More Creative? – I feel inclined to write about that, rather than…

  • Jonah Lehrer’s Metacognitive Guide to College

    Jonah Lehrer, the 27 year old author of How We Decide, gave the Opening Days convocation keynote at Willamete University last Friday. After being introduced by Willamette president M. Lee Pelton as “a humanist disguised as a neuroscientist”, Lehrer offered a fun and fascinating whirlwind tour of neuroscience, psychology and sociology, in the context of…

  • A warm welcome at Willamette University Opening Days

    We brought our daughter down to Willamette University this week and enjoyed a warm welcome during their Opening Days orientation program. I had written about our short tour of small colleges in the Pacific Northwest last March, which included Willamette and several other schools she was considering. Meg eventually applied to and was admitted to…

  • Hadoop Day in Seattle: Hadoop, Cascading, Hive and Pig

    I attended Hadoop Day – a community event to spread the love of Hadoop and Big Data – at Amazon's Pac-Med building in Seattle a week ago. I missed the morning session of the event, but recently became better acquainted with some of the dimensions of this space via the excellent overview and analysis by…

  • Wine, Cheese, Technology and Jobs in Seattle

    The Eastside Networking Event last night, organized by Andrew Vest, included an interesting mix of wines, cheeses and Seattle area technology companies looking to hire people – primarily, but not exclusively, engineers. At one point, one of the speakers asked how many people in the room were engineers, and only about one quarter or so…

  • The facts and opinions surrounding the Proposition 8 ruling

    I was elated by U.S. District Court Judge Vaughan Walker's ruling agaist California's Propostion 8 last week. The 136-page ruling, overturning the state's ban on same-sex marriage, renews my hope for full civil rights for all of us's, including lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender (LGBT) people. Over the weekend, I have read some interesting facts…

  • Minority Report and Recent Advances in Pervasive Personalized Advertising

    Several recent articles I've read about new developments in tracking and advertising in different countries – most of which reference the science fiction movie, Minority Report – reminded me of a quote often attributed to science fiction author, William Gibson: The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed The articles describe the…