Gongol.com > Radio > Show Notes > March 14, 2009

The WHO Radio Wise Guys
Brian Gongol



Hint: If you live in a country without freedom of speech, you have to watch what you say in front of your kids. An Iranian father is in hot water after his kid revealed on a call-in show that his daddy calls his stuffed monkey "Ahmadinejad."

Regulations on things like peaceable assembly don't work very well in the era of flash mobs. San Francisco authorities are trying to figure out how to get someone to pay for the damage from a flash mob pillow fight that cost $20,000 to clean up. Brian first discussed the emergence of flash mobs in 2003, and noted two years ago that you can't regulate them -- which also means they threaten our existing rules and standards for public safety and anti-terrorism.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is using the Internet to promote his appearances on "Dancing with the Stars"...including a Facebook group and a Twitter page with an iPhone application. (By the way, don't forget that we have a Wise Guys Facebook page and Twitter accounts for both Brian and Dan.)

Brian's starting a campaign to do away with "management" as a business major in college and replace it with "DPI": Development and preservation of institutions. "Management" has been plagued by short-term thinking. It needs to be replaced by something that promotes a long-term perspective. Americans tend to be pretty affectionate about our institutions -- take the uproar over the renaming of the Sears Tower. Why should anybody care about the name any more than about whether they're renaming some side street in Fargo? But we do, because we care about institutions, and how they help shape our memories and identities. Given the hard times being experienced right now by huge American institutions like General Motors and AIG, we're seeing in bold print just how badly many managers have failed to see the importance of preserving their institutions for the long term. And it's not just a business problem -- a US government agency has forgotten how to build a special material needed for nuclear weapons. That's a big deal, considering that we need to know how to make it in order to store those weapons safely. The Internet gives us some profoundly amazing tools for preserving institutional memory -- you can, for instance, review all of our show notes from the last few years online. But institutional preservation and development requires deliberate planning and a commitment to recordkeeping...not to mention a commitment to the people who make the institution work.

If you need to edit some audio files and don't want to pay a fortune, try Audacity, one of the featured programs on our list of favorite free and open-source programs.

If you think your Internet connection is running slowly, you might try an Internet bandwidth speed test.

A short list of rules you might want to run through before naming a baby:

• The last name and first name shouldn't rhyme
• The name should pass the "name game" test
• The first name and middle initial shouldn't form a word (example: Christopher Patrick becomes "Chris P." -- or "crispy")
• Make sure the initials don't form a word -- especially an inappropriate one (we don't know Adam Sandler's middle name, but let's hope it isn't Seth)
• If it's a girl, you might want to check the first two initials against the full alphabet -- your little Beth Ann Smith may be fine now, but if she marries and takes the name of a man named John Greene, her initials could become BAG. And if she hyphenates, they could even be BAGS.

The Space Station has a webcam.

Metal bits are behaving like live animals in a physics experiment at Argonne National Laboratory.

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Gongol.com -- posted 2009.03.14