Workforce Management reports, December 14, 2005, that Older Workers Seek Flexibility, Autonomy and Learning as new studies by The National Study of the Changing Workforce support the notion that creative work arrangements may be the key to retaining employees of fifty years and older. Autonomy and flexibility are two defining characteristics of the Self-Managed approach to teams typified by bioteaming.

We are used to having to work very hard to make collaboration happen in teams and groups however sometimes it just emerges. The Christmas Truce is the true story of how British and German soldiers in the trenches on Christmas eve 1914 called a truce and celebrated Christmas Day by singing carols, exchanging gifts and playing football together. It is an amazing example of nature's most effective co-operation strategy, Tit for Tat, which emerged spontaneously for, sadly, an all too short time.

The Guardian reports (December 23, 2005) that one of the judges in the International Olympic Committee pressed the wrong button during the vote to decide the 2012 hosts in Singapore in July. This mis-keying eliminated Madrid who were strong favourites and left London in the final run-off with Paris which they went on to win. It seems the Olympic voting software did not provide that much-loved facility we come to expect in all the web-sites where we enter important data: Hit enter to confirm. To read The fat finger that may have helped London win Olympics

Every journey by every car in UK will now be monitored

The Independent Newspaper leads with the headline ‘You are being Watched’ as it reports (22 December 2005) that Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all the vehicles on its roads are to be recorded to detect potential criminal and terrorist activities.

Some of the principles of bioteaming are based on the organisation, communications and behavior of social insect societies. The BBC has a wonderful series Life in the Undergrowth narrated by David Attenborough with a whole programme dedicated to Supersocieties and Super-organisms which shows the warts as well as the wonders underneath the covers. You can see short video clips of all the best bits including Giant Asiatic honeybees and Mangrove ants.

Wikipedia is about as accurate on science as the Encyclopedia Britannica. These are the conclusions of a study by the British journal Nature which conducted a peer review of 42 scientific entries on both Wikipedia and the well-established Encyclopedia Britannica. To read full Nature Special Report(Dec 14).

As companies are finding an increasing proportion of their revenues outside home markets many are starting to realise that developing multicultural intelligence in their workforces could be a key lever to competitive advantage. To read "Crossing Cultures" article in Workforce Management

Standards initiative for blog aggregation and applications

One of the problems with blogs is that posts can have any, or no, structure. So, for example, my blog post about a DVD review might include the running time and the certificate. Your DVD reviews might instead offer a star rating and a genre classification. This inconsistency makes the work of automatic aggregation into a DVD review site very difficult. Likewise its very challenging to do intelligent filtering (e.g notify me of all reviews of Jim Carey's films in the non-comedy genre) .

Decoding the DNA of the Web

To date the web has been a bit of a black box where we search for needles of usefulness embedded in haystacks of junk. This could be changing as Alexa, the Amazon-owned search company have just announced (Dec 12) that they plan to open up their index of 5 billion documents to users and developers. This index is absolutely huge containing some 100 billion bytes of data which compares well with the complete Human Genome at a mere 3.2 billion base pairs. The release of this index will allow these mountains of data to be mined for all sorts of valuable associations plus the development of specialised applications and vertical search engines. Read the ‘heads up’ on this by John Battelle .

Cheer up if you cannot understand their web-site, you are not stupid: its designed that way

Simon Caulkin, writing for The Observer, Sunday December 11, 2005, Customers are not just for Christmas , notes that, regretably, it almost seems to be common practice, this time of year to misuse the power of the web by bamboozling customers with the objective of maximising profits, not through good value but at their expense.