ESD.942: 10 Simple Suggestions re Your Blog Building Tactics

Hello everyone,
Tomorrow is our last day of ESD.942 class and we are trying to summarize what we have learn during this week.

I would like to make several comments regarding building your blog. Especially if you do not have your personal mit.edu or .com domain.

As I was saying in the first class, blogging is addictive and sometimes painful process. As a social media pessimist I would like to share ten simple rules you may chose to follow.

1. Take your time and think about the goal of your blog. You may choose to have specific field, language, etc. Or you may just start sharing your thoughts without constraining yourself into specific tags and topics.

2. Ask yourself if you want to go public from day one? In my personal experience, I just started to write and generate different content first. Moreover, for the first four months, my blog was private. Only when I felt comfortable I opened it for public to read.

3. Think about your audience. Who are these people - your friends, classmates, potential employees, potential business partners. Why do they care?

4. Most important advise is focus on your content. You can spend as much time on the design. But design is an iterative and time consuming process.
After your fourth and fifth posts you will get a better idea how your blog should look like. But please do not waste your time on that. Most dissatisfaction with the design and absence/necessity of specific plug ins may disappear as you start writing. Very often your blog may require simplicity and different design features are just fancy distractions for your and your readers.

5. Take a minute to review your old notes on creative writing. Most of them are applicable to your new blog (Clearly I did not follow this rule myself).

6. After several week review the name of your blog and ask yourself - "Does your name actually reflect its content". At an early stage do not constrain yourself with consistency in topics. These will allow you to re-shape your blog as you become more comfortable in this environment.

7. Combine blog writing with some other activities in your life - writing reflection paper for your classes, general emails to your friends, book reviews, op-ed, announcements on upcoming events or short reports on these events.

8. If you are more visual person and do not have time to write long posts - there are micro-blogging platform such as http://www.tumblr.com . It has simple and intuitive user interface that can save you from pain of writing "original" ideas. If you have 10 minutes to integrate your platforms, I would spend them on setting your Blognetworks http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/ interface. This will let your blogpost appear on your Facebook page.

9. If you decide to get your own domain - ask yourself how much money are you ready to spend ANNUALLY on maintaining this domain. If you start using mit.edu domain - ask yourself what would be the eventual transition cost from mit.edu domain to some other domain when you leave MIT.

10. If you remember one thing from this post remember this - platforms will come and go. Last year it was LifeJournal, yesterday it was Wordpress and Facebook, today it is Twitter and Tumblr. Tomorrow it will be something else. You can be everywhere or you can be just in one place. That is not important. What matters is your name. Your name should be connected to correct information about you, as well as content created by you or about you.

Best,
Azamat Abdymomunov

KnowledgeMap: http://www.abdimom.com/blog/
http://www.linkedin.com/in/abdimom
http://socialmedia.mit.edu/

TODAY: Department of Play info session! Wed (9/22) 6-7:30pm @ E14-240

Hello everyone,

How can young people use digital media, mapping & mobile tools to document, share and organize for neighborhood change?  Come play around and see!

   What: The Department of Play info session

   When: Wednesday (9/22) 6-7:30pm 

   Where: room e14-240 of the new Media Lab building (http://whereis.mit.edu/?go=E14)

The Department of Play (DoP) is a working group of researchers, students, and community practitioners at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media who share a common value: the design of new technology and methodologies to support youth as active participants in their local communities.  

Let us know if you will be coming so that we can order pizza, ok?  For additional information, please check http://www.departmentofplay.org/ or get in touch with us via departmentofplay@media.mit.edu

Looking forward to seeing you there!

The DoP Research team

Speakers at the Conference "Using Prediction Markets in Government". September 22, 2010, Washington, DC.

Rich Byrne, MITRE

Mr. Richard Byrne is a vice president in The MITRE Corporation's Center for Integrated Intelligence Systems. In this role, he directs MITRE's work on behalf of the U.S. intelligence agencies, military intelligence organizations, and the combatant commanders with a particular emphasis on integration topics. Prior to joining MITRE, Mr. Byrne was a founder and engineering manager at VTC, a semiconductor startup where he led the design and production release of more than 150 products over five years. From 1980 to 1985, Mr. Byrne worked as the technical manager of VLSI Design Methods for telecommunication at ITT's Advanced Technology Center  where he designed custom, ASIC, standard cell, and gate array products and advanced CAD tools. A member of the IEEE and the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA), Mr. Byrne sits on the board of the AFCEA Lexington-Concord Chapter. In 2010, he received AFCEA International's Benjamin H. Oliver Gold Medal for Engineering. He received the 2006 AFCEA International Meritorious Award for Engineering and the 2004 AFCEA International Golden Link Award. He served as the chairman of the Semiconductor Research Corporation's Design Sciences Board for two years and was a contributor to the first International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors. Mr. Byrne received a B.S. in electrical engineering and an M.S. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT. He is a 2006 graduate of the Harvard Business School General Management Program, where he was elected class speaker.

John Michitson, MITRE

During his 29 year career he has been a technical manager, systems engineer and engaged in research and development, and product management for engineering corporations on the forefront of technology, such as the MITRE Corporation and Bell Labs, as well as Internet startups. He is currently leading a cross-functional team applying technical guidance across several airborne networking programs to ensure interoperability. He is currently spearheading two internal research proposals that leverage open innovation and prediction markets for Federal Government markets. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Merrimack College and recently completed the Entrepreneurship Development Program at MIT's Sloan School of Management. John is very active in his community. He served 10 years on the City Council in Haverhill, Massachusetts, including his last two years as President.

Ricardo Valerdi, MIT

Dr. Ricardo Valerdi is a Research Associate in the Engineering Systems Division at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  His research focuses on systems engineering metrics, cost estimation, test & evaluation, human systems integration, enterprise transformation, and performance measurement.  His research has been funded by Army, Navy, Air Force, and BAE Systems. Dr. Valerdi is the co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Enterprise Transformation and served on the Board of Directors of the International Council on Systems Engineering.  He received a Ph.D. in Industrial & Systems Engineering from the University of Southern California.

Matthew Potoski, Iowa State University

Matthew Potoski is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Iowa State University where he teaches courses on public management and policy.  He has received Iowa State University LAS awards  for Early and Mid-Career Achievement in Research.  He is Co-Editor of both the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management and the International Public Management Journal.  Dr. Potoski's research investigates public management and policy in domestic and international contexts, including public sector contracting and service delivery, environmental policy, and voluntary regulations.  He is co-author with Aseem Prakash of the Voluntary Environmentalists (Cambridge, 2006) and Co-Editor of Voluntary Programs: A Club Theory Approach (MIT 2008).  He is author or co-author of over thirty articles appearing in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, and Public Administration Review. Dr. Potoski received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Indiana University in 1998 and a bachelor's degree in Government from Franklin and Marshall College.

 

Rob Henry, MITRE

Mr. Henry has been with MITRE's Center for Acquisition and Systems Analysis (CASA) since 1995 and co-leads MITRE's risk analysis and management community of practice.  He has a broad range of risk analysis and management experience developed over ten years supporting a diverse set of sponsors (US Government Classified and intelligence agencies, Office of Secretary of Defense, Air Force, Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Department of Homeland Security, Census Bureau, FAA, Department of the Treasury, NOAA) and MITRE research initiatives.  Mr. Henry has a demonstrated ability to assess the risk analysis and management needs of an organization.  He develops, tailors, and implements a wide variety of risk analysis and management methodologies, approaches and tools supporting capability-based risk assessments, risk metrics, enterprise risk management, program risk management, risk-informed portfolio analysis, analysis of alternatives, and trade-space analysis.  Additionally, Mr. Henry is a trained facilitator and has facilitated numerous risk analysis and mitigation planning sessions.  He has provided risk theory and practice training to well over a 1,000 individuals in government organizations. Rob has an M.A. in Teaching, History from Salem State College and a B.A. in History from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

 

Jason Matheny, IARPA

Jason is an Incisive Analysis Program Manager at Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity (IARPA) and is interested in Statistical Forecasting, Econometrics, Risk Analysis, Human Judgment, Uncertainty, Bio-surveillance, Epidemiology, Modeling and Simulation. Jason has a B.A. from the University of Chicago, an M.B.A. from Duke University, an M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins University, and a Ph.D in Applied Economics from Johns Hopkins University.

 

Jon Schuler, MITRE

Jon Schuler has been with the MITRE corporation since 2007, specializing in applied mathematics, statistics, data mining, as well as computational sociology of organizations, program requirements, and other relational dependencies. Prior, Jon spent 12 years in the field of image and signal processing of airborne tactical infrared and hyperspectral imaging sensors for the Department of Navy, and holds a patent on image super-resolution. Professionally, Jon has migrated from the analysis of 'hard sciences' (and correspondingly well-defined data sets), to analysis of the 'soft sciences', represented by subjective assessments and qualitative measurements. Jon strives to tease out actionable, reproducible conclusions from such data sets using non-parametric statistical methods. Jon is a huge fan of 'The Black Swan' and 'Freakonomics'

 

Thomas Montgomery, Ford

Tom is a Technical Expert in Ford Motor Company's Research and Advanced Engineering.  He has a B.S. in Physics and PhD in Distributed Artificial Intelligence from the University of Michigan.  Tom has specialized in text mining (data mining from text-based sources), with a recent expansion into prediction markets.  Seventeen years in Ford Research has given him the opportunity to contribute to many areas of the company including supply base risk analysis, competitive intelligence, customer satisfaction, survey verbatim analysis, early warning in warranty claims, failure mode simulation, and market share analysis.  Tom says, "it is a target-rich environment at Ford -- there is never a dull moment, always another interesting and challenging problem to work on."

David Rejeski, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

David Rejeski directs the Science and Technology Innovation Program at the WoodrowWilson International Center for Scholars, a non-partisan policy research institute in Washington, DC.  The program's mission is to explore the scientific and technological frontier, stimulating discovery and bringing new tools to bear on public policy challenges that emerge as science advances.  Project areas presently include: nanotechnology, synthetic biology, serious games, participatory technology assessment, and geoengineering.  He was recently a Visiting Fellow at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and has been an adjunct affiliated staff member at RAND.  Between 1994 and 2000, he served as an agency representative (from EPA) to the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). Before moving to CEQ, he worked at the White House Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) on a variety of technology and R&D issues, including the development and implementation of the National Environmental Technology Strategy. Prior to working at OSTP, he was head of the Future Studies Unit at the Environmental Protection Agency.  David sits on the advisory boards of a number of organizations, including the National Science Foundation's Advisory Committee on Environmental Research and Education; the Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); the National Council of Advisors of the Center for the Study of the Presidency; the Journal of Industrial Ecology; and Games for Change.  From 2004 to 2009, he was a member of EPA's Science Advisory Board. He has graduate degrees in public administration and environmental design from Harvard and Yale and studied industrial design at Rhode Island School of Design.

 

Adam Siegel, Inkling Markets

Adam is the co-founder of Inkling Markets, a yCombinator funded company offering prediction market software and solutions to companies, governments, and non-profits. Before co-founding Inkling, Adam worked at Accenture where he served over a dozen clients across multiple industries for over a decade. He also managed an internal venture fund to seed the development of new ideas and ran a research initiative around next generation user experiences. Adam is a regular speaker at conferences and in M.B.A. classrooms and has been published in Forbes, Risk Management Magazine, and the Journal of Prediction Markets. Adam has a B.A. in Political Science from Indiana University.

 

 

Principle 43

In order to control a process four conditions are required:

1. Goal Condition: The controller must have a goal or goals (e.g. to maintain the setpoint).

2. Action Condition: The controller must be able to affect the state of the system. In engineering, control actions are implemented by actuators.

3. Model Condition: The controller must be (or contain) a model of the system.

4. Observability Condition: The controller must be able to ascertain the state of the system. In engineering terminology, observation of the state of the system is provided by sensors.

(Leveson, Engineering a Safer World, pp.54-55).

"Bear Traps: Can Russia Avoid the Pitfalls on the Road to Sustainable Economic Growth" (C. Gaddy and B. Ickes)

Just received by email and reading new report by Clifford G. Gaddy and Barry W. Ickes called "Bear Traps: Can Russia Avoid the Pitfalls on the Road to Sustainable Economic Growth?".   The report was prepared by the Center for Research on International Financial and Energy Security (Brookings Institution and Pennsylvania State University). As it happened with Clifford's book (The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold), I think the latest research will be subject of many heated discussions in the russian speaking domain of the internet.

There are several chapters that will require particular attention given my research thesis:

2.7 Machinery and Equipment

3.2 Cost of Cold

3.3.1 Siberia and the GULAG

4.1.1 Decentralization versus Federalism

4.6.1 Federalism versus Efficiency

Clifford and I discussed related topics this spring when I visited him in DC. I am looking forward to further discussion this fall.

For more info please see Barry W. Ickes' blog, http://ickmansblog.blogspot.com/

Goodbye Wordpress.com, Hello WordPress!

WELCOME TO MY NEW WEBSITE

One year after I started my blog on abdimom.wordpress.com I made my decision to build and migrate to my own website. What started as innocent collection of System architecture principles (thank you Professor Edward Crawley), have become full-time hobby.

I am very disorganized person, who lives very much in the present. Around late January 2010, as I gained pace and habit of collecting my system architecture principles, I started to realize that my blog can be the place for both collecting what I've learned in the past and what I will [and need to] learn in the future.



Building and maintaing your own blog is very time consuming and often painful endeavor, but I hope it will payback in the long term.  Special thanks to Rafael Maranon at http://rafaelmaranon.mit.edu/ for his help and support, thanks to Leyla Abdimomunova (no blog reference for now, but she is next) for her patience and tolerance to my addiction. Special thanks to Lois Slavin, Communications Director at MIT System Design and Management program for motivation and support, as well as for linking my blog to http://sdm-blog.mit.edu/.

PS: I also started to put together my thesis (for now just Chapter 1), which I would like to share with you.

First year blogging anniversary

Just a quick post. Today is my first year blogging anniversary. I would like to thank my family and friends for support and encouragement. Without your support and encouragement this blog would not have happened. Snapshot statistic: 80 posts, 77 tags and 8140 clicks. Geography: US, Kazakhstan, Russia, Europe, India, Japan.