ME and Ophelia

Saturday, June 05, 2010

 
BIO: DR. JAMES F. MOORE

HISTORIC stuff. Over six years ago, utilising ground-breaking social media networking and blogging technology, Jim Moore, while working at Harvard, initiated and led the campaign that put the world's spotlight on a humanitarian crisis in Darfur, western Sudan. Here is a copy of Jim's latest bio and photo.
James F. Moore: Strategic change in large-scale organizational systems



James F. Moore studies leaders, strategies, organizational innovations, and technologies that help businesses and other organizations succeed.

He is involved in a number of ventures. Future Economies is a management consulting company focused on human resources strategies for the networked, community-based workforce and economy. Medical Information Innovation celebrates apps that benefit health and medicine, and tells the stories of the innovators and creatives who invent them. Cognition, Inc. develops radio technology for broadband mobile. Newsilike Media Group, Inc. develops social media software and hardware systems. Stylefeeder.com was purchased by Time Warner in 2010 to become the basis for that firm’s next generation integration of commerce and media.

He worked as a full-time volunteer in the campaign to stop the genocide in Darfur, Sudan in 2004-2005. He was co-founder and served for more than a year as the day-to-day editor for the web campaign “Sudan: Passion of the Present” and helped develop and sustain a number of other activist individuals and organizations including Save Darfur and the Genocide Intervention Fund/Genocide Intervention Network. These organizations are part of a broader campaign to establish a world capability to prevent or intervene to halt and recover from genocidal situations.

In 2003 and 2004 he served as the National Director of Internet and Information Services for the US Presidential Campaign of Howard Dean, overseeing all social media as well as technology infrastructure.

He wrote “The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head” which considers how citizens worldwide are joining through communications technology to engage international institutions and shape global policy. The article became an Internet phenomenon and was reviewed in publications ranging from the National Journal to the New York Times. In 2004 Jim was honored by the 4th World Forum on e-Democracy as one of the top 25 individuals, organizations and companies that are having the greatest impact on the way the Internet is changing politics worldwide.

From 2000-2004 he was a Senior Fellow at Harvard Law School, promoting legal reforms in developing countries in order to support entrepreneurship and technology diffusion. While at the law school he organized and chaired the board of Hewlett-Packard’s “E-inclusion” program to create technology for and in developing world economies. He founded the Open Economies Project to promote laws supportive of digital entrepreneurs. As part of a team sponsored by the Markel Foundation, he advised the South African Government on policies to promote digital development, including telecom law reforms. He served as a member of the United States delegation to the Digital Opportunity Task Force of the G8 Group of Nations, and was an adviser to the United Nations ICT Task Force and to the ICT initiative of the World Economic Forum.

From 1989-1999 he was the founder and CEO of GeoPartners Research, a management consulting and investment strategy firm, where his clients ranged from Muppets creator Jim Henson to AT&T, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Royal Dutch Shell. In addition to management consulting, Jim was involved in corporate venturing on behalf of AT&T Ventures, Intel Capital, GE Capital and Softbank (the largest single investor in the Internet economy, and the only major investor to sustain its success). He also advised and invested in start up companies, and served on the board of directors of two public companies.

Jim has written widely on business topics. He developed the concept of “business ecosystems” to describe networks of companies that collaborate and co-evolve to generate economic value. His Harvard Business Review article on business ecosystems, “Predators and Prey: A New Ecology of Competition,” won the McKinsey Award for best article of the year for 1993. His 1996 book “The Death of Competition: Leadership and Strategy in the Age of Business Ecosystems” won numerous awards (“one of the ten best books of the year,” BusinessWeek, and “one of the ten best books of the decade for entrepreneurs,” Wall Street Journal) and was a best-seller. It was translated into and published in several languages including Chinese. His work was featured in publications including Fortune, BusinessWeek, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal. He appeared on national television, including being interviewed on the Charlie Rose Show on PBS.

While most of his career has been in high technology, his early work was in health care organizations. These included Boston Children’s Hospital (MA) community primary care service, Wrentham State School (MA) services for the developmentally disabled, the Bedford (MA) VA Hospital alcoholism service, the Santa Clara County (CA) mental health system, and American Medical International (CA), national health management. His doctoral thesis grew out of a multi-year study of Alcoholics Anonymous as an informal but systematic environment for community and personal healing. He has continued to follow the evolution of clinical practice under changing conditions of policy and organization, society, technology, and patient/clinician/community behavior.

He was an early friend and adviser to the Harvard AIDS Institute and the Harvard Society and Health Program (now Harvard Department of Society, Human Development and Health), and has recently become involved with the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.

Moore earned a doctorate in Human Development from Harvard University in 1983, where he combined studies in organizations with cognitive and developmental psychology. He was a post-doc in organizations at Stanford University, and conducted research at Stanford and Harvard business schools. He earned his undergraduate degree in 1976 from The Evergreen State College in Washington State—one of the most innovative organizations in public higher education. He is active in college affairs, and received the Bud Koons Award for Service from the college in 2006.

Moore lives in Massachusetts with his wife Sarah Moore, a lawyer and minister. He has three children, two teenagers who attend public Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, and one infant.
Jim Moore's blog can be found online at: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jim/

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# posted by Ingrid J. Jones @ 6/05/2010 0 comments

Friday, October 09, 2009

 
$10 billion takes fibre optic cable to every school, hospital in the US

The US has more than 120,000 schools, hospitals, and libraries, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation believes that they can all have fibre optic Internet for $5 billion-$10 billion.

Report from ARS by Nate Anderson, October 9, 2009:
$10 billion takes fiber to every school, hospital in the US
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation knows how to get things done.

On October 5, the Foundation met with FCC broadband coordinator Blair Levin. The purpose of that meeting was to provide a cost estimate for one of the Foundation's ideas: running fiber optic cables to every "anchor institution" in the US—libraries, hospitals, community colleges, public schools. By October 8, the FCC was asking for public comment (PDF) on the plan and the viability of its cost estimates, which say the entire project could be completed for $5-$10 billion.

The Gates Foundation has identified 123,000 "anchor institutions" in local communities that could make good use of fiber Internet connections. In addition to serving the community that comes to each institution, the idea is also to run fiber into the center of every community in the country, with the goal of making it easier to then expand Internet access to homes and businesses in the community.

A rural hospital, for instance, could stick a white spaces broadband antenna on its roof, link the antenna to its fiber connection, and suddenly bring at least basic wireless connectivity to the surrounding area at minimal cost.

The Foundation admits that the cost estimate is not a complete one; it doesn't include costs for network management and upkeep, and additional backhaul costs might be needed in some areas to feed these fiber links. In addition, the group estimates that 13 percent of libraries and 20 percent of other anchor institutions already have fiber connections. Wiring up the rest would cost between $4.9 billion and $10.1 billion, with much the variability linked to the amount of trenching that might be involved in running the fiber.

In putting together its national broadband plan, due in February 2010, the FCC is considering numerous ideas like this—but the quick public request for comment indicates that it is specially intrigued by the Gates Foundation proposal. The agency wants to know by October 28 whether the cost estimates are reasonable, whether other sorts of buildings should count as "anchor institutions," and to what extent "will providing fiber to these institutions directly assist last-mile build-out economics in currently un- or under-served areas."

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Nobel laureate Charles Kuen Kao, the father of fibre optics

From Earth Times by dpa, 08 Oct 2009:
Brilliant mind of Nobel laureate scientist affected by Alzheimer's
(Hong Kong) - The brilliant scientist awarded the Nobel Prize for physics is suffering from Alzheimer's disease and may not be able to give a speech when he collects his prize later this year, a news report said Thursday. Nobel laureate Charles Kuen Kao, the man hailed as the father of fibre optics, was diagnosed with the degenerative brain disease earlier this year and now has difficulty with speech.

According to his wife Wong May-wan, Kao finds it difficult to complete a sentence, raising doubts that he will be able to give a lecture on his work, as is traditional for winners of the prize.

A report in the South China Morning Post said Kao, a former vice-chancellor of the Chinese University in Hong Kong, is now living in California with his wife where he is being treated for the disease.

Professor Ambrose King, also a former vice-chancellor at the university, said the Kao had communicated to him via his wife in a phone call after the award was announced.

"His wife said Kao cannot speak very well," he said in the Post. "It would be good if the award came a year earlier. However it is still not too late for him."

Kao, 75, was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize on Tuesday for his "groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibres for optical communication."

Comments made by Kao following the announcement of the award, in which he said lightheartedly that his inventions had helped the news of the award travel so fast, were made through a university colleague.

Kao, who holds both British and American citizenship, was born in Shanghai in 1933, went to school in Hong Kong and gained his PhD in electrical engineering from Imperial College, London.

His pioneering work, carried out in the 1960s in England, demonstrated that light rather than electricity could be used to transmit speech and data accurately at very high speeds.

It led to 29 patented discoveries and contributed to the development and commercialisation of optical fibre communications that made the technological revolution possible.

Kao was awarded the Nobel Prize jointly with Americans Willard Boyle and George Smith for their "invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit - the CCD sensor" - the electrical eye of a digital camera.

The group will receive their award, a diploma, medal and a share of 10 million kronor (1.4 million dollars), at a ceremony in Stockholm on December 10. Kao is to receive half the prize, while Boyle and Smith will each receive a quarter.

Born in Shanghai in November 1933, Kao was educated in London and has dual US-British citizenship.

In 1970, he moved to Hong Kong to establish the electronics division of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and worked on the commercial development of optical fibres and systems.

From 1987 to 1996, he served as university vice chancellor. He also served on a government advisory panel in the then-British colony.

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