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IT Conversations
Executive Producer

News from IT Conversations

The Executive Producer of IT Conversations is Phil Windley, and you can read his blog for IT Conversations news and more. Here are some recent stories:

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Pete Blackshaw - Consumer Megaphones

Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Pete Blackshaw, author of "Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends," about consumer megaphones -- the folks who get extremely displeased and upset with products or services.
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Dr. David Lacey - Bone Loss Treatment

Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Dr. David Lacey, Senior Vice President of Research at Amgen, who talks about a new treatment for bone loss, no matter what the cause.
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Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky - StackOverflow Episode 19

Joel and Jeff discuss scaling and social effects in Stack Overflow, how to handle growth and the launch in a controlled way, and answer listener questions about backups, database design, and maintenance programming.
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Evan Prodromou - Open Micrioblogging

Identi.ca is an open microblogging service. Users can post short messages about themselves to Identi.ca, which are then broadcast to friends in their social network using instant messages (IM), RSS feeds, and the Web. The product's developer, Evan Prodromou, joins Phil and Scott to discuss the project, including its open source license.
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David Recordon - Open Standards, Communities and Mobile

David Recordon, Open Platforms Tech Lead for Six Apart, pitches the telephony community on grassroots efforts as a means for the development of open standards. Grassroots community groups can serve as the catalyst for addressing challenges that corporate groups have chosen to ignore, and begin to bridge gaps between existing web technologies and mobile service providers.
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Ben Goertzel - Nine Years to a Positive Singularity

"Nine years to the Singularity, if we really, really, try," says Dr. Ben Goertzel, chief science officer and acting CEO of Novamente. Is this really possible? Dr. Goertzel believes the path to the development of Artificial General Intelligence - a real thinking machine with human level intelligence and beyond - can be accelerated through the use of virtual worlds as incubators for nascent artificial intelligence systems.
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IEEE Spectrum Special - Wind and Solar Energy

On this edition of IEEE Spectrum Radio, explore the fascinating energy technologies of the present and future. Listen to specials on "Wind Energy," "Vertical Wind Turbines," and "The Solar Challenge" where the ups and downs of Europe's wind energy are discussed and futuristic vertical-axis turbines that you could fit on your property become a possibility.
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David Huynh - Parallax: Searching Freebase

For MIT's Project SIMILE, David Huynh built an amazing series of web tools for exploring and organizing structured information. Two months into his new gig at Metaweb, he's done it again. On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell asks Huynh about his Parallax prototype, which creates a powerful new way for users to click their way through related sets of information in Freebase. In essence, a Wikipedia-like database built on a semantic web foundation.
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Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky - StackOverflow Episode 18

In the eighteenth episode of Stack Overflow, we finally meet Michael Pryor, the co-founder of Fog Creek Software -- and discuss the progress of the Stack Overflow beta in some depth.
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Dick Hardt - Sxipper

Sxipper is a free Firefox add-on that saves you time by keeping track of an unlimited number of usernames and passwords as well as the personal data you share every day over the web. Dick Hardt, founder of Sxip, joins Phil, Scott, and Ben, to discuss the product, as well as the entire issue of privacy and identity on the web, as well as how to market plug-ins as products.
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Paul Ehrlich - Human Evolution

Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich about his latest book, "The Dominant Animal," which looks at human evolution and the environment.
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Dr. Ian Boddy - Livestock & Global Warming

Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with AgResearch's Dr. Ian Boddy, about the contribution of livestock to global warming and what their biotech research center is doing about it.
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Davis Isenberg - Network Neutrality is Not Enough

During past few years we have witnessed a drastic reduction in competition for network services in the US. David Isenberg, author of the essay "The Rise of the Stupid Network", a paper that shook the telecom world in 1997 and continues to have an impact today, puts the blame squarely on decisions made in Washington DC. This short but pointed talk discusses how this trend is likely to stifle future innovation if it isn't stopped, and what can be done about it.
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John Voelcker - Electric Cars

In this special green automotive edition of IEEE Spectrum radio, join John Voelcker at the LA Auto Show, the Electric Vehicle conference, and ride an electric motorcycle. At the LA Auto Show, all of the major car companies showed electric or fuel cell models. At the Electric Vehicle conference, there was tension between electric vehicle enthusiasts and car companies over the suitability of current battery technology. Finally, the Brammo Enertia is a new electric motorcycle, available for purchase today.
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Kent Beck - Test Driven Development and Extreme Programming

Relating anecdotes from the past, Kent Beck, the father of Extreme Programming and JUnit, reflects back on the impact his ideas have had in the last 20 years, especially with respect to the history of Test Driven Development (TDD), Design Patterns, and Extreme Programming (XP). According to him, good ideas take about that much time to mature and come to fruition.
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Philip Rosedale - Open Source Second Life

Second Life is not a game - it is a social, interactive, 3D version of the Internet. In this talk from the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Philip Rosedale, CEO and Founder of Linden Lab, discusses the implications of the virtual world Second Life, his company's move towards open source, and the value of open source as a business strategy in a network-effects market.
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W. David Stephenson - Citizen-Government Relationships

On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell speaks with W. David Stephenson, who reflects on how Web 2.0 technologies -- and mindsets -- are transforming the relationship between citizens and governments.
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Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky - StackOverflow Episode 17

In this special "developer edition" podcast, Jeff and the Stack Overflow development team discuss the development processes and decisions that go into building a public community web site for programmers.
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Britt Blaser, Doc Searls, Jon Udell - iYear

Independence Year is the year between the next two Independence Days. The fireworks began on July 4th, 2008 at iYear.US. Independence Year (iYear) is a new way to interact with your government at every level. It's where you can gather or join a crowd around your concerns. Britt Blaser, Doc Searls, and Jon Udell, join Phil and Scott to discuss the project.
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MÃ¥rten Mickos - Thriving in an Online World

What is the impact of the world going on line? By any measure, it's huge. In order to thrive, argues MySQL's Marten Mickos, we must preserve two key types of freedom: the freedom to do things, and the freedoms that protect us. Highlighting key attributes of Ubuntu and MySQL that reflect these ideas, he illuminates the potential for opens source developers to further transform software, and the world, in positive ways.
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