Posts

Russia has had some incredibly disturbing instances of human rights abuses over the last few years which appear to be getting worse rather than better. Journalists assassinated or silenced, whistleblowers punished or marginalized and known police abuse or outright torture ignored or covered up. Love this ad from AI France about not letting this go unchallenged.

Our Moscow office was always one of my favourites when I was Amnesty’s IT Director because of the dedication of the people working there and fact they were on the front lines of the human rights fight (Hey Yuri!)

With the assassination of Rudd, the election is nigh upon us (smart money is guessing Aug 28th) and our awesome video guru, SimonDW, couldn’t help himself but put together a spoof ad. Quite seriously, there are 1.4M estimated people who need to get enrolled pretty damn quick in order to be able to exercise their democratic rights in this election so there is a method to our madness (and the AEC doesn’t allow online enrollment so it’s a painful process they need to start now).

I just realized the Swedish chef sounds a lot different than when I was a kid. Weird. Still awesome though.

via Neatorama .

Are company culture acquisitions the new black? Following hard on the heels of the Zappos acquisition, Amazon acquired woot.com.

Absolutely love the letter from the CEO on the acquisition which I think is a perfect reflection of the company’s style. Read the whole thing . Seriously.

Plus check out the video :

Great ad. Can’t say too much so as not to give it away, but it’s very well done, clever and environmental.

Sent this round the office and then forgot to post it. Find this video curiously beautiful, compelling and a little frightening.

If you’re a CTO moving heavily into cloud services, one of the things that keeps you awake at night is what happens if one of your providers goes under or just becomes so unreliable you have to move. Let’s face it, lock in goes along with the cloud as the fact of the matter is you code to exploit a specific platform.

The amazing thing about Fog is that it acts as a universal interface in front of the cloud, allowing you to control a variety of cloud services though a unified API. It deals with both servers and storage already supporting EC2, Rackspace servers, vCloud and Slicehost and numerous cloud based storage vendors S3 and Rackspace Files.

The first organism created from a totally artificial and constructed genome - the first creature since the beginning of creatures with no ancestor to put it in perspective, was unceremoniously announced in the pages of Science on the 20th of May.

Sure, analogies to Frankenstein’s creation will abound (particularly since they had to use the “dead” body of another organism to get the DNA to do its stuff), but the fact is this is probably one of the quietest, most monumental breakthroughs in the history of science. Humanity has paved the way for the creation of designer life.

Yeah, just geeking out…

For reasons astronomers can’t currently explain completely, Jupiter has lost an entire ginormous and very visible stripe from its surface, altering the face of the solar system’s largest planet.

The entire SEB (South Equatorial Belt), which is twice as wide as the Earth and twenty times as long, just vanished, 2001: A Space Odyssey style. I love all the mysteries about Jupiter and how little we actually seem to know. Like, why the Big Red Spot is red or has been a sustained, raging Earth-sized atmospheric storm for so incredibly long.

Wow. Constantly amazed at how Umair Haque keeps making such amazing observations and good calls on what really needs to be done for the future. Love this post on The Betterness Manifesto .

Here’s the score. The global economy faces a series of tectonic structural shifts. The great gears of this vast machine must be reset over the next decade. Consumption must fall. Savings must rise. Investment must be more productive. Incomes and wealth must be shared more broadly. Borrowing from tomorrow must slow. The rate at which we value the future must grow. Growth itself must be revitalized.