2009 Worthwhile Year in Review
Topics: History and Philosophy
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For the most part I prefer looking forward as I like the view better. However a new year gives a brief opportunity to look back and reflect on the events of the past year.

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Too many social spaces?
Topics: Social Media
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We’ve seen an explosion of social spaces during the past couple of years – Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. Many organizations have built their own social space to provide the communication needs of their people. I live in several virtual worlds or neighborhoods, some public and some private, and I just got bit by an ugly downside of this!
I teach one MBA class in which we use an online world that includes many of the social networking tools including email. I teach that class one semester every other year.

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How to Prepare for a Programming Contest
Topics: Community Involvement, Fun Stuff
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One of the joys I experience as a bit building professor (aka computer science professor), is taking teams of students to intercollegiate programming contests. Asked once what these events were like, I said imagine a huge multiplayer chess game and then take away the chess board! In other words, very mentally challenging, but definitely not a spectator sport.

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Lessons of Interfacing with a Giant Corporation
Topics: Customer Service
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Recently I had a communication challenge with AT&T. I hope to learn from this experience so that as Worthwhile grows we don’t frustrate our great customers like AT&T frustrated me. I’m fairly confident that no single person that I interfaced with the past 2 months at AT&T intentionally tried to frustrate me. But I think challenges come when “the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing” which seems so often the case in giant companies.

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Visual Data
Topics: Industry Trends, Software Development
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Living in the information age has lots of exciting benefits and challenges. I like to think that working with bits, which are the basic building blocks of digital information, is a lot more fun than building with atoms, relics of the past industrial age. One of the challenges with so many bits is how to see them all. An exciting branch of computer science is starting to gain much attention in the business word. It’s called Data Visualization, and its primary goal is to communicate information clearly and effectively through graphical means.

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