On the correlation between conservatism and education

I was in a fairly regular Twitter conversation with Vijay Vijayasankar (meaning: anything goes) and it happened again: right in between the bartalk, something clever was born. See the dialogue above please, top-down, transscribed here:

@vijayasankarv The abundance of ignorance and misinformation among Americans, especially conservative ones, is staggering

@MartijnLinssen not sure if that is a problem with just conservatives..ppl think in extremes on both sides I think

@vijayasankarv I guess so. It's just that conservatism and lack of education is highly correlated - throughout the world

@vijayasankarv Having said that... if there *is* a correlation, that means conservative parties/govs must do their best to cripple education

@MartijnLinssen that is an interesting hypothesis

Ticking the TOS box means you Agree

There has been some fuss about Google+ deleting someone's profile picture as it showed him giving the middle finger, aka flipping the bird.
Google deleted the profile picture, without notice.
Apparently Mr. Siegler doesn't like G+ doing so, as he can have the same profile picture on Twitter "and other services", as he claims. What does that have to with the price of tea in China?
Mr. Siegler then continues to whine about Google's real naming policy, as if that has anything to do with it either

Afraid of socmediots? Email works just as well

A giant reputation drama has been unfolding since yesterday: Ocean Marketing's Paul Cristoforo has made a complete ass of himself and his company.
A nice compilation is provided by Doug Collins on his blog, and it's aptly called How to Commit Career Suicide

The (apparently almost) entire email thread can be found on Penny Arcade's website right here. It's long, and unbelievably persistent in its bad form

Especially given the time of year and the usual predictions, I find this a splendid example of the fact that email isn't dead yet, and that you really don't need a social media policy

The Law of the Handicap of a Headstart

In discussions about SAP's new stealth weapon, HANA, I have come to become a wee weary. At SAP Inside Track NL we joked about it:

@jonerp @dahowlett @ragtag @applebyj like we said at #sitNL "When lost for words, just end your sentence with HANA and you'll be fine"

What is HANA? In short, it uses SSD storage combined with a lot of in-memory to speed up results. SAP's claim is 3600 times faster results achieved with SAP HANA 1.0 with one 4-way, 8 core server (2.27 GHz clock speed) with 0.5 TB of Main Memory, 2 TB of SSD storage, 1Gb Ethernet running on an open source operating system.

The Perfect Self-Help Mistake

[Photo by jessamyn]

The world is full of Self-help books, coaches, trainers, teachers, gurus - basically anyone self-taught to self-help him- or herself, is also able to help anyone else - it seems

Naturally these self-helpers all preach different ways to the same solution: heal yourself, make yourself better. Quotes that make sense or "go straight to the heart" are one manifestation of this that they all share, and in general the similarities can be summed up into two simple truths: 1) they promise you a better life, 2) if you do what they tell you

Where have we heard that before? Thousands of years of oppression by religion, politics, tradition and in one word, institutionalisation, come to mind, each of which has used these same rules. I've come to call it the False Promise, and it's based on a Lie you're not allowed to question

SAP meets Cloud: something needs to vaporise first

[Photo by John Kerstholt]

I have been comfortably following SAP Influencer Summit 2011 from my chair, and reading up on the various posts and vids released throughout the process. It won't surprise anyone that yesterday's keywords were cloud, ByD, business, SAPonDemand and sales - thank you, you 350 participants who produced 1,500 tweets during the last day

Many people ask the question: with such a traditional on-premise company, will these extremes form a perfect match that complements and makes for combined strength, or will it just be a very unhappy marriage?

Migration 101 - follow the white rabbit

It seems that not every migration is welcomed by applause these days, reasons for which can usually be attributed to a definite lack of success. So, here's a checklist that will help you achieve success. Of course the list is condensed and a lot of detail is left out, as it's just a lot of work to do a proper, prepared and tested, migration - but this is a pretty good approach

Twitter needs a radical change of security NOW

I wrote a post a while back titled Your Twitter security is an egg, not an onion, explaining how Twitter only has one front door, like your house, and if you let people in, you let them in - after which they have access to everything, including your Direct Messages.
A few months after that, Twitter finally changed its security model and now it makes a distinction between complete access, or access to the account without Direct Messages

A little bit better, but still a major failure - as just got proven by spammers

Klout 'o Calypse: 2.5 million people can't be wrong

I wrote an initial post on people killing their Klout on the very same day that Klout enabled them to do so. I took tweets as a basis for my testset, and it appeared that 20% of (the 300) people tweeting about being able to delete your Klout profile, also had actually done so.
Two weeks after that, this percentage had grown to 25%: of those initial 300 people, 75 had deleted their Klout profile. Wow!
Then I read an interview by Rohn Jay Miller with Klout's CEO Joe Fernandez, who stated that less than 0.01% of users have deleted their Klout profile

25% on my side, 0.01% on Joe's - that gap definitely deserves closer investigation. How many people have deleted their Klout profile? The answer is right here

Big Data needs Big Collection and Big Execution

[Image by John M. Kennedy T]


Big Data is the new buzz it seems, and I must say I have been sceptic of it since I first saw the very word - or phrase, what is it?
As an IT architect, I've always equaled data to databases, and information to applications - and knowledge to the people on top of these

For one, I think you can very easily handle the perceived issue when dropping the data, and acting on the information instead. Since when did databases contain useful information?

Vijay Vijayasankar wrote a good post on it, and I'd like to add to that from another point of view