By
2010-09-06T14:33:36Z
LONDON (AP) -- Rare color footage of the bomb damage inflicted on London during World War II has surfaced on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the Blitz....
Talk Amongst Yourselves [Official Kotaku Forum]Kotaku 09/06/10 08:30 AMpan>officialkotakuforum
It's Labor Day here in the U.S., the perfect day for talking about video games. raquo;
Obama to Call for $50 Billion Spending on Public WorksNew York Times 09/06/10 08:22 AM
The president’s initiative would create jobs quickly by emphasizing long-term transportation projects like roads, rail and airport runways.
Report: 2,000 more NATO troops may be Afghan-boundAP 09/06/10 08:03 AMBy SLOBODAN LEKIC
2010-09-06T14:03:28Z
BRUSSELS (AP) -- NATO may deploy 2,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan to join the 140,000-strong international force already there, an official said Monday....
Finding Solace in Virtual War [Well Played]Kotaku 09/06/10 08:00 AMpan>wellplayed
Can virtual combat be entertainment for the iers who engage in the real thing on a daily basis? raquo;
Ben Roethlisberger not elected as one of Pittsburgh Steelers' captainsESPN 09/06/10 07:52 AM
For the first time since 2007, the Pittsburgh Steelers did not elect quarterback Ben Roethlisberger as one of the team's captains.
Giant hay bale crushes ex-ELO star to deathMSNBC 09/06/10 07:34 AMCellist Mike Edwards, 62, died after the 1,323 lb bale rolled down a steep field in Devon, southern England, smashed through a hedge and careered on to the road.
n - Edwards - and - o - ube
Twitter’s People Recommendation Engine Appears To Be Working Like A CharmTechCrunch 09/06/10 07:34 AMIt's been about a month since ter turned on its le recommendation engine, a of algorithms that enables the service to magically suggest people you don’t currently follow but may find interesting.
Twitter has indicated that these suggestions are based on a variety of factors, including the people you already follow and the people they follow. They are, for now, only visible on ter.com and the Find People section.
And based on my experience, the algorithms seem to be doing their job fine indeed - I have most certainly discovered a lot of new interesting people on Twitter who I wasn't yet following already, and my own follower count has eased significantly in the past few weeks.
So for fun, I decided to use terCounter to look up the counts for a couple of accounts I follow, to see if this is a general trend of something I'm noticing for my account only.
Remote Work: Pitfalls and How to Avoid themReadWriteWeb 09/06/10 07:30 AMOne big theme to emerge out of our conversation last week about future of the workplace was remote working. I thought it would be beneficial to start this week off by thinking about the disadvantages of remote work and the technologies and policies that may be able to mitigate some of those problems.
Sponsor
Productivity remains a concern for managers unwilling to give their employees a chance, but according to telecommute advocacy groups like ess for Success and American Telecommuting Association, research shows those concerns are mostly unwarranted. However, there are some other problems. Here are some of the issues I've witnessed in organizations of all sizes, and some ideas about what to do to fix these issues.
Please leave your own gripes and solutions in the comments, or e-mail klint@readwriteweb.com, and we'll highlight the best responses in a follow-up on Friday.
Missing Out On "Hallway Meetings"
Anti-meeting commentators, such as those from gnals often point out how unproductive meetings are, and how little hallway conversations are usually where the most important conversations take place. This is probably true, but it creates a communication problem: those important conversations and decisions have to communicated to everyone who needs to know about them.
This can be hard enough when everyone works in the same space. But when employees aren't physically present, keeping everyone in the loop can be even more difficult.
Solution: This is what e-mail and intranets are for. Managers need to be dililgant about documenting and communicating decisions, and making sure that information is easily accessible to employees.
Lack of Responsiveness During Work Hours
One of the proposed advantages of teleworking is the ability to minimize interruptions from co-workers. However, sometimes co-workers have important needs and questions and not being able to get in touch with a remote working employee can damage everyone else's productivity.
This is exacerbated by flex time, especially when flex time overlaps with telecommuting.
Solution: Communicate virtual "office hours," and set standards for timeliness of responses. Instant messaing has proved to be a good medium for communication remote workers, but can be a distracting productivity killer. Setting "IM hours" could be a happy medium.
Being diligent about entering useful information into the organization's intranet will reduce the necessity to be contacted directly. Using QA sites like Quilt could also help employees find answers to questions.
Morale
Jealousy can impact the morale of workers who can't or aren't allowed to work from home. Also, while managers can track the productivity of employees who work from home, co-workers might be less privy to that information and harbor doubts about their remote co-workers accomplishments.
Solutions: Undress for Success mmends the following for dealing with telecommute-envy in the workplace:
Employees need to understand why they were or were not chosen for telework.
Employees should see telework as a benefit that is earned, not given.
Standards of selection should be uniform.
Photo by ard
uss
By
2010-09-06T14:30:34Z
PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- Hundreds of naked and partially nude cyclists have pedaled their way through Philadelphia to promote bicycling awareness and cleaner air....
Ex-ELO cellist killed in collision with hay baleAP 09/06/10 08:27 AMBy
2010-09-06T14:27:52Z
LONDON (AP) -- Police in southwestern England say a former member of the Electric Light Orchestra was killed in a freak collision with a huge hay bale that rolled down a steep hill....
Son: Iran woman who faced stoning to be lashedAP 09/06/10 08:18 AMBy
2010-09-06T14:18:29Z
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- An Iranian woman who had faced death by stoning for adultery has now received a new sentence of 99 lashes after a British newspaper ran a picture of an unveiled woman mistakenly identified as her, the woman's son said Monday....
3 to 4 drinks per week may raise risk of breast cancer's returnUSA Today 09/06/10 08:00 AMDrinking even moderate amounts of alcohol may raise the risk for breast cancer recurrence in some women, but may in fact lower the risk for dying ...
Open House: On the Great Spanish MenNew York Times 09/06/10 07:58 AM
The Spaniards have filled every spot in the top quarter.
PARC Releases New Semantic Technology (in Form of an Outlook Plugin)ReadWriteWeb 09/06/10 07:45 AMThe Palo Alto Research Center is releasing new semantic technology, based on Xerox PARC IP, in the form of an Outlook plugin called in. At first glance, Meshin looks like the ugly stepsister to a similar Outlook tool called i, as it also loads into an email sidebar window, displaying sections dedicated to recent conversations and a summary of attachments shared back and forth via email, among other things. But what makes Meshin different is the engine powering it underneath: a semantic technology that uses "natural language processing" to understand entities, how they connect and what they mean.
Invites available! Click through for link.
Sponsor
The engineers freely admit that Meshin's user interface (UI) is currently the Achilles' Heel of the app. It's nowhere near as polished and put together as competitor Xobni's, for example. But they'll fix that, they promise. "We're hiring a UI designer," they tell us.
Focusing on the looks, though, is missing the big picture. in is different from other email-based contact management systems including not only Xobni, but analysis engines like , too. Where those companies hinge on the person - here's their title, where they work, their emails, attachments, their blog posts, their last Twitter update, etc. - Meshin actually analyzes the information found in the information streams it examines. It then extracts related conversations, related messages, related people and other semantically understood data. And it does so by looking beyond keywords. It knows what things mean. It knows if a word is referring to a person, place or thing. It can also surface related links and news from the Web for any given entity.
Read More about i and .
Already, the engine behind Meshin isn't limited to email messages alone. For example, if you subscribe to RSS feeds within Outlook, those are also understood as being a part of the relationship map with another person. If you subscribe to Twitter feeds within Outlook, again, those are analyzed, along with the other streams.
Meshin arose from a Xerox-funded project inside PARC whose goal is to commercialize older PARC IP for a broader audience. The project has been in development for only a year, with a small core team and support from PARC researchers. The long-term goal for Meshin is to extend itself beyond Outlook, in order to connect other types of information streams together.#160;
The researchers are contemplating where they should take the technology next - another email platform? An RSS reader? A standalone product? Should they open up Meshin APIs (application programming interfaces) for developers to use within their own applications and services? All these models are a possibility, but first the engineers wanted to just get the technology out there, in the hands of users.
We're helping them with that by distributing invites to the private beta. For access, k here.
uss