By referring to research done by Prof. Sydney Finkelstein, Eric Jackson argues for the following seven habits that CEOs of unsuccessful companies did have

1. Habit # 1: They see themselves and their companies as dominating their environment: “Pride will have a fall”, one could say.
2. Habit #2: They identify so completely with the company that there is no clear boundary between their personal interests and their corporation’s interests: this one is interesting, as one would have expected that the more one identifies with one’s company, the better it is. The danger apparently is that a “private empire” mentality may take place.
3. Habit #3: They think they have all the answers: the danger here IMHO is more obvious: one would not listen to other opinions or perspectives.
4. Habit #4: They ruthlessly eliminate anyone who isn’t completely behind them: you loose excellent people in your team …
5. Habit #5: They are consummate spokespersons, obsessed with the company image … and focus too much on the media.
6. Habit #6: They underestimate obstacles: that is an interesting one again. Because, if you are too cautious or cowardly that’s no good either …
7. Habit #7: They stubbornly rely on what worked for them in the past: this may be a classic …

IMHO the difficulty with all of these it that to some degree we want CEOs to have these habits. The tricky thing is to have sufficient but not to much of these properties. The question is how to measure …

• per second, there is an increase by 2.5 people, that is 150 per minute, 9.000 per hour and 216 every day – the error-rate is apparently up to 5 %
• there is quite a number of countries/areas where there exists no official statistics. So areas are being flown over with airplanes and estimates are made; or, from the number of cattle, the number of people in a certain area is inferred.

And I came across two pretty nice live counters/tools:
One is a live counter available at http://www.umrechnung.org/weltbevoelkerung-aktuelle-momentane/weltbevoelkerungs-zaehler.htm:

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The other one is breathingearth.net:

and a truly impressive animation!

So what is this issue about? Increasingly, we are using the Web to answer questions about the “where”: where is the nearest pub? And what’s the shortest path to it? What activities can I do at my holiday location? These and many other location-based issues are addressed by state-of-the-art Web applications. And this special issue of HMD tells you how to engineer Geoweb applications.

Good overview, very much from an information systems’ perspective (and not so much from a computer science point of view. Anyway, well done …

ISO 9001:2000 is an international standard that has its origins in assessing suppliers for technical systems. Salzburg Research today successfully passed the audit (by TÜV Österreich). 

I believe that the following three main points argue for a quality management system:

1. With a QM-System you define rules about processes and interactions; also, these rules are the same throughout the organisation
2. Knowledge is embedded within an organisation (we all know that this is only possible to a limited degree, but anyway)
3. Finally, it is a documentation to the outside world (both customers as well as owner) that Salzburg Research is standing for quality 

On the negative side there is – obviously – some overhead in necessary documentation and also, you may loose some degrees of freedom/individuality.

At Salzburg Research we had an immense amount of people coming to see some applications of our research work (tagIT – a Geo-tagging application; tourguide – a project about pedestrian navigation; a traffic control centre; and finally, a project showing the use of sensors using SunSPOTs). The response was truly positive!

Most amazing to me was that even at 11:30pm we had people coming and wanting to see our demos. We do not expect such a huge interest (overall there were some 300+ unique visitors).

Pictures are available here:

• Lange Nacht der Forschung
• Salzburg Research

ORF Ö1

Available as PodCast on http://oe1.orf.at/podcast/ – highly recommended. I am looking forward to podcasts on navigating, finding the closest (and cleanest) loo (e.g. www.mizpee.eu), rules for filtering e-mails (and how to practically deal with huge amounts of information in general), being locked in in your e-car, …

See http://doktorat.at/Neuigkeiten/3_Jahre_Charta_fuer_Forscher_-_Die_Bilanz.html

• The science fund, for instance, changed its age limits from biological limits to academic limits, i.e., instead of “not older than 35″ to “PhD plus 10 years of experience”
• Another important point is a clear structure for (efficient) support of PhD students. I think the ReMeSe Seminar fits into this category.
• Finally, the commission thinks about a “label” for the Charter. An excellent idea!

ECM can be seen as a technical infrastructure (tools, methods, …) for managing an organisation’s content assets.

On the homepage it says that KAUST will offer “uncommon freedom for pursuit of scholarship” to lecturers.