The director of bioinformatics at the Salk Institute will be giving a seminar this week at PARC in Palo Alto. Video for past events is posted to the web; check back later if you are interested but cannot attend.

We each carry about 850 MB of DNA blueprint to our bodies.

The recent decoding of the human genome has received much acclaim, but as you might expect from any code that had been patched and revised over a few billion years -- it's not the easiest to understand!

This talk will look at how we are looking at the genome, what it is telling us about our fundamental biology, and how we can apply it to live longer and healthier lives.

The genome is also ushering a revolution in biology, moving from a focused hypothesis-driven discipline to one where complexity and data are emergent.

Reading the Genome

The audience will learn that the road to the connected world is wide open, and that today marks the beginning of a new era in the embedded industry.

This event takes place in Palo Alto on Thursday.

Envisioning the Connected World

You could spend a lot of time at this site.

Over a leisurely dinner, we talked about our experiences in various organizations and how the role of leadership and business was changing in the world.

We agreed that the field of leadership and management was approaching an inflection point, and that a deeper and more comprehensive approach to leading change in larger systems was about to emerge.

We wondered how we could help these new ways of thinking, leading, and working together to advance. What would it take?

We realized that it would take, among other things, a place where thought leaders and practitioners could engage in ongoing conversation about and inquiry into the deeper foundations of leadership and change in an increasingly confusing and volatile world.

This site documents some initial results of this ongoing inquiry.

We hope that this material will inspire you in your own work, and we invite you to participate in our ongoing online conversation.

Dialog on Leadership

What's key is the ability to put all the information from the different agencies together, and I think to do that you have to create a kind of community-wide mechanism for allowing the people in the different agencies to express their opinions and have them aggregated.

MemeStreams is a weapon system.

Fighting the Good Infight

I think we actually do find our own lives interesting, but it never occurs to us that anybody else would.

TV or not TV

Generally there should never be a filter between what the reality is and what we’re seeing—particularly when we’re sending people into combat.

Bush's Afghanistan Problem

I only recently started exploring the Lyle Lovett discography. This article is a good roadmap.

Lovett reveals his weird splendor in a schizophrenic jumble of smoky jazz and twangy country that revives whole swaths of neglected popular American music.

Unpop!

"The Road to Ensenada" (1996): This is a Saturday afternoon of an album.

What does that mean? I know what a Sunday morning of an album is ...

The songs "In My Own Mind" and "Working Too Hard" are anthems to satisfied solitude and premeditated withdrawal.

Now you're talking ...

The Thinking Man's Cowboy

They ... seem at times more preoccupied with reputations, budgets, and internal power struggles than with the nation's security.

Speaking of which: How long will it take for me to make it into the top 20 on the MemeStreams social network? Should we take this one to Long Bets?

In the economy as a whole, competition generates innovation and creates wealth. Decentralization is often good; independence encourages responsibility. But there are some things that people can do better together than they can apart.

It turns out that cooperation, not competition, is the real management challenge.

Decentralization and internal competition work only if people believe, and if they’re given incentives to believe, that the organization as a whole matters more than their little part of it.

MemeStreams is a community. Act like it!

Team Players

Why do perks endure? In part, it’s because, despite all the conferences and manifestos and reorganization charts, plenty of American businesses are still run as they were in the fifties.

Here, here!

Perk Hogs

Sometimes, "block" means complete shutdown. In other cases, he simply stops writing what he wants to write. He may manage other kinds of writing, but not the kind he sees as his vocation.

Have you ever gotten Blogger's Block?

Every day for years, Trollope reported in his “Autobiography,” he woke in darkness and wrote from 5:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., with his watch in front of him.

That's a strategy.

He required of himself two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour.

How about, say, 5 posts per quarter hour? (3 minutes each?)

Many readers now believed that literature was something produced by fine-minded, unhappy people who did not hunt, and to this audience his recommendations seemed clear evidence of shallowness.

Are high-volume bloggers necessarily shallow?

The second was a tremendous surge in ambition on the part of American artists -- a lot of talk about the Great American Novel and hitting the ball out of the park. Some of those hopes were fulfilled.

Blockbusters, in the 1940's!

They have reason to be jumpy, though. Writing is a nerve-flaying job. Apart from the effort, there is the self-exposure.

At least with old-fashioned books, you can't do a full-text search and a link analysis of the entire library in 0.10 seconds.

Why do writers stop writing?