Xenky's Been Sick

Xenky thanks the readers who have written about the gap between IT Bulletins. Xenky was ill, not SARS, mind you, but something kept Xenky groggier than usual and definitely unable to write. There's a great deal of news. Read on.

Xenky's New Word...Actually, Acronym

Xenky encountered this acronym cocktail in a recent government document: "The delta between the ACWP and the BCWP is a problem." Xenky scurried to the Internet and chased down these interesting but somewhat opaque acronyms. The ACWP is Actual Cost of the Work Performed or what one might commonly called the "invoice." The BCWP is the Budgeted Cost of the Work to be Performed or in simpler English the "estimate." The problem one surmises is that the invoice was larger than the estimate. Too simple for government writers. Just simple enough for a goose.

America Offline Watch

Xenky finds AOL a very interesting online operation. The company starts to get traction with its Instant Messenger service and then finds that there are limits on what it can do. Meanwhile Yahoo! and Microsoft are marching forward with more instant messaging services, including an upgrade from Microsoft.

CNet's Bill Royce reported in April 2003 that dial-up subscribers are leaving AOL. Not much of a surprise to Xenky. The loss, reported by AOL in a Securities & Exchange Commission filing is likely to clip along at about 250,000 in 12 weeks. If the loss rate stays at this level, America Online will lose about one million customers. Figure $240 per year per subscriber, and AOL may face a downturn around $200 million. With the cost of subscriber acquisition rising every year, AOL may be forced to find a way to generate revenue quickly — and $750 million settlements with Microsoft won't be coming their way too often. Rate hike, anyone?

Mr. Royce notes that AOL's U.S. subscribers numbered 26.5 million as of December 31, 2002, compared with about 25.2 million a year earlier and 26.7 million at September 30, 2002, according to the filing."

When You Need a Web Milestone

If you need a World Wide Web milestone, the 3WC has a useful "History of the World Wide Web." Finding the page on the W3C site is a bit of keystroking. Check out the chronological list at http://www.w3.org/History.html.

eBay "Hack"

Ebay — the money engine that keeps the U.S. economy afloat — is a favorite destination for Web hackers.

"A loophole remains open in the security system of the eBay online auction house." The story appeared in Computerbild, one of Europe's largest computer magazines.

The story alleges that hackers can slip through a loophole and bid at auctions using member names or evaluate other members. The intrusions are or were not snagged by eBay's security systems. The hackers gain access by answering the "password question."

When a new user registers for eBay, the user specifies a questions to which he / she knows the answer. The mother's maiden name or "your first pet" are popular.

If the eBay user has forgotten his password he can create a new one after answering the question which is freely accessible to every Internet user. However, even without changing the password users can bid and evaluate other members with a simple mouse click on a particular menu button, since they are registered automatically in the eBay system after answering the password question.

The result is that clever folks get to the secret answers. Some eBay members worldwide are careless with their personal data. On their individual eBay pages or the "me" pages on eBay, the users leave facts or clues which answer the password question.

Computerbild reported that a hacker demonstrated to an editor the hacking process. With access, the hacker could have auctioned goods. According to Computerbild, eBay spokesman Joachim M. Guentert played down the risk: "We wouldn't describe this as a security loophole. The situation is very similar to EC cards on which people note their secret code number. We shall consider carefully how to treat this information. First of all, we shall provide our members with more detailed information." Computerbild went on to recommend that eBay users check their own password questions and to remove any personal information they might have placed on the internet.

Bye, Bye Desktops

The Register (March 26, 2003) reported that notebooks accounted for about 25 percent of personal computer sales in 2002. Wireless connectivity and the nomadic nature of some jobs are contributing factors. With notebooks creeping up a few percentage points each year, notebooks are likely to account for half of personal computer sales before Xenky becomes a key component of a down-filled duvet. Nomadic computing means computing whilst walking to a Starbuck's and answering e-mail with a mug of java nearby.

Google Censorship?

Let's get this straight. Xenky is telling readers about a Web site that talks about Google censorship. Xenky himself knows that Google would never, ever censor anyone or anything. Google is a software script, not a 50-year-old Victorian house mistress with indigestion.

However, if you suspect Google may censor or otherwise fiddle diddle with page rank, hits, and displays, you need to know about Seth Finkelstein's Web site. The information about Google's alleged censorship is here.

The basic premise of the Google information is that some information is removed from Google. Anyone who does searches will be interested in Mr. Finkelstein's view.

• Right-Sizing Content Management. This is a commissioned white paper. Mr. Arnold took money, reviewed the client's software, and created this analysis. Like most white papers authors, Mr. Arnold provides a review of the client's product (Ektron CMS 100, CMS 200, and CMS 300). He also prepared a financial worksheet and cost estimate. Xenky believes that the financial material and a table comparing Ektron's product with Microsoft's content management software, and Red Dot's product are the two highlights of this report. You will find the Ektron white paper here. (Xenky heard that people are downloading this document from the Bitpipe Web site at a hefty pace.)
  
  
• "Vivisimo: Clustering Delivers Information Overlook" is a short article prepared for Information World Review. This is a draft of the essay, not the final version, but it provides the person interested in search with a close up look at the Vivisimo clustering technology and metasearch service. Mr. Arnold has long been an advocate of looking for useful information in multiple places. With the explosion of pay-for-placement services, anyone performing online research may want to look for information in multiple repositories. This essay talks about metasearch, the application of technology to a user's query so that the results of that query present relevant or irrelevant hits from two or more Web indexes or information sources.
  
  
• "Real-Time News: Can the Gray Ladies Do XML?" Mr. Arnold has completed a feature story for a European technology tabloid that provides a bit of technology history with a loose comparison of two new online products. The point of the article is not the content of the new Thomson Corporation service or the basic business of the Associated Press, both the subject of the analytic part of the article. The hook for this feature is that the blog phenomenon is getting attention from such companies as Google. As noted elsewhere in this issue, Google bought Pyra Labs, owners and operators of Blogger.com. The "gray ladies," which is Mr. Arnold's poorly conceived way to describe the flagships of the news and information industry, are only now exploiting a handful of the Extensible Markup Language's features. Unseen and possibly below the slightly paunchy tummies, a new world of news is rapidly gaining credibility. Mr. Arnold reminds the reader that news about news is not in the news.
  
  
• Implementing Enterprise Search: Five Pitfalls (Government Client). Xenky learned that Mr. Arnold was ill before and after his April 8, 2003, presentation at the Infonortics' Search Engine Conference (Boston, Massachusetts). He did ingest every medication his Kentucky physician provides and gave the talk. Due to Mr. Arnold's illness and general incoherence, the visual materials that usually accompany Mr. Arnold's talk were skipped. The old windbag gave an extemporaneous presentation on five pitfalls a vendor of online search is likely to encounter when trying to sell to the U.S. government. The pitfalls are ho-hum to Xenky; for example, avoid criminal prosecution (maybe more difficult than it looks at first glance) and understand the policy environment in Washington, D.C.). The best part of the rather shoddy presentation is the list of Web sites that list work for which commercial companies can bid. The old wheeze also includes the "GSA codes" under which search software is usually listed. Anyone wanting the inside scoop on Autonomy, Verity, Open Text, academic text research will want to look elsewhere. This is a "how to sell" presentation, not a "under the kimono" presentation. Click here to download it.
  
  
• ez2Find: Search Morphs to Global Metasearch. This is a pre-publication working draft of a short article for VNU's Information World Review. Xenky demands that all readers subscribe. For more on metasearch, read the article in this issue of the newsletter.
  

Swarm crime is the use of stolen or disposable mobile phones to organize robberies or other crimes. The idea has been discussed by Mr. Arnold at his talks for OSS, Inc. (http://www.oss.net) and the Defense Technical Information Center. In September 2003, he will explore new directions in swarm crime and other aspects of social software at the OSS 2003 Conference.

Information about the use of mobile phones to coordinate a loosely-organized group of operatives is not widely available in public sources. Xenky wants to provide a bit of information about this activity. Swarm crime and other types of "hive behavior" are characteristics of the social software environment.

Social software itself is not well understood and only a handful of researchers, developers, and entrepreneurs are beginning to understand the scope of this new interest area. Xenky will provide more information about social software in future issues, but he wants to focus on swarm crime for two reasons: [a] it provides a useful point of reference for important concepts in social software enabled "activity areas" and [b] it is quite new and Xenky wants to provide readers with evidence that a goose is not necessarily silly.

If the reader knows a friendly law enforcement or intelligence officer, asking that person for concrete case details is an easy way to round out Xenky's high-altitude review of the subject.

Welcome to Rio, Americano

The happy American tourists step out of their hotel facing Copacabana in the pricey Princess of the Sea neighborhood at 10 am ready for a morning stroll in Flamengo Reclaim. Quickly five or six 10-year-olds run to the tourists. The children seem to appear from everywhere all at once.

With a bit of laughing, hands are extended with Por favor from the cluster of young boys. The folks from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, stop, momentarily confused. Then, as quickly as they arrived, the youngsters dash in different directions. Mr. and Ms. Cedar Rapids look at one another and check pockets and camera bags. The billfolds are gone. The camera bag empty, and Mr. and Ms. Cedar Rapids have no idea what happened in a crowd of people on a bright sunny day.

Hard facts about how quickly American and European tourists are robbed after stepping from the hotel lobby to the street varies. Xenky has seen Americans stripped within two minutes of a hotel. Others went a day or two before losing wallet, passport, or jewelry.

The new development, according to Xenky's sources, is that the crimes are carried out by children. The crimes are now organized by older boys and girls who recruit children casually near a favela. (See the picture taken by Favela-Bairro, favela do Vidigal, Jorge Mário Jáuregui, foto: Divulgação.)

An Example of Swarm Crime in Action

Here's how it works, according to Xenky's low-profile and publicity-averse sources. A criminal who is an adult identifies or approaches a 15- to 17-year-old with a proposition. The deal is for the 15- to 17-year-old to organize 10 kids who are eight to 10 years old to pull a trick on tourists. The 15- to 17-year-old whom we will call "Neil" (not a real person) gets a share of the tourists' money and jewelry.

The adult gives Neil 10 stolen or disposable mobile phones, a list of numbers, and a mobile phone number Neil can use to contact the adult. When Neil has organized the 10 eight to 10-year-olds, Neil calls the mobile number of the adult.

The adult provides Neil with the day and place for the kids to assemble. Once at that location, Neil watches the hotel, calls each of the children Neil recruited, and gives them instructions and where to meet after the tourists have been robbed.

If a law enforcement officer sees the crime and catches a child, the child can only talk about Neil. The mobile phone is not traceable. If the police catch Neil, he can only provide a mobile phone number. The adult allows Neill to collect the money ad jewelry, pay the kids, and then meet to pass over the loot to the adult. The adult is effectively "cut out" of the actual crime. Although some of the intermediaries like Neil or the children performing the crime may keep the money and jewelry for themselves, the adult repeats the process.

Swarm crime is a form of behavior made possible by wireless devices. Just as online hackers coordinate to steal credit card numbers or breach the security of an Internet site, mobile phone crime has these characteristics:

• Use of technology to organize disparate, often-geographically separated people to perform an action
  
  
• Reliance on use of intermediaries or "cut outs" to prevent an easy trace to the crime mastermind
  
  
• Spontaneous organization of the crime team when an opportunity presents itself; for example, a cluster of two or three Americans stepping from a hotel to Rio's busy sidewalks
  
  
• New problems for law enforcement officers to address: [a] fluidity of the crime and perpetrators, [b] spontaneous nature of the crimes, and [c] dealing with the children who commit the crime in the criminal justice system.
  
  

Remediating Actions

Xenky's sources say that similar uses of "swarm" architectures are becoming more common in online Web attacks, forming meeting times and exact locations for terrorists, and arranging narcotics transfers.

Law enforcement organizations in Brazil and elsewhere are facing more "social" crime that is enabled by wireless devices, network connections, and a highly-distributed approach to planning, executing, and sharing the "loot" from a crime.

What's the remedy? Xenky's sources identify these actions:

• Law enforcement education must address swarm crime in planning and educational programs
  
  
• Tourists want to rethink what they take with them when on holiday, particularly on outings in unfamiliar areas
  
  
• Broader awareness of swarm crime and its challenges at the senior levels in legislative bodies. Additional funding will be required to put processes in place to deal with this obvious but still relatively new trend in criminal activity.
  
  

Xenky never carries a wallet, a passport, or jewelry. It is not so much intelligence as a consequence of being a goose. Humans aren't geese.

The topic is Getting Traffic and Search. Conference organizers, including the Library of Congress, have a penchant for gluing words together to create snazzy titles. Mr. Arnold told Xenky that he accepts the titles and talks about one of the two topics in the title. "This makes it easier on the audience. The idea of a single subject, three to five points, and a conclusion."

This talk, according to Mr. Arnold, presents new information and a framework for thinking about building Web site traffic. He said, "Most of the information of getting traffic to a Web site is designed to sell a marketing person a sure-fire solution. The problem is that traffic is getting more and more difficult to build intentionally."

The 90 minute presentation explores these subjects:

• The majority of traffic goes to a small number of Web sites. "Most sites get fewer than 1,000 hits a month from all sources," Mr. Arnold said. "Network traffic flows through a number of concentration points. We know these as Yahoo, Google, and other high-traffic sites."
  
  
• Traffic is a result of three actions, according to a pre-release copy of the talk. As Xenky understands the often-confused Mr. Arnold, these actions are: [a] buy words on Yahoo, [b] create new, interesting, and valuable content for the Web site's intended audience, and [c] make use of RSS, a Web content syndication format.
  
  
• Search, in Arnold's framework, is a consequence of high-value content, links, backlinks, and metatags. The idea is that automated search robots or spiders visit sites that provide accurate information about the site's data. The metadata included in static or dynamic Web pages speeds indexing. "The Google popularity algorithm is having an impact on other search engines. Each of the leading engines has a way to eliminate low-value Web pages from their indexes."
  
  
• The future, according to Mr. Arnold, is going to make buying key words, traditional marketing, and freely-roaming search engines undergo rapid change. The new Internet wave is a blend of Web logs (blogs), real-time information posting (Wiki), RSS, group discussions, e-mail, and instant messaging. The new "big thing" is sometimes called "social software." Unlike the older and somewhat woolly term virtual community, social software focuses on applications.
  
  

Mr. Arnold has allowed Xenky to link to this presentation. Trend surfers may want to view the presentation before the irascible gas bag deletes the presentation from his server.

Apple Computer, according to The Register's Andrew Orlowski (April 23, 2003) will offer "semantic searching." Apple's innovation will supplement the folder metaphor. Documents will be organized by their semantic content.

The concept is the fruit of Gitta Salomon and her colleagues at Apple's Advanced Technology Human Interface Group. The idea was first articulated in 1991. The computational horsepower is now available to make the concept feasible.

Documents are organized the way Xenky arranges leaves and sticks in his nest. Many piles of papers and magazines are stacked within the reach of a webbed foot.

Apple's implementation will use content-based filtering and some artificial intelligence to group documents in a useful manner. Apple will use a visual depiction of the stacks of information.

One of the designers of the BeOS operating system joined Apple in 2002. The Be, as many readers will undoubtedly remember, indexed metadata when documents were saved to the hard drive. Apple, according to Apple watchers, will implement functions that allow documents to be related to others. The ideas is that "edges" of documents touch. In addition, the documents can be restacked. Other modes of access include a Scopeware type of time "spread" view, and possibly a page-turning metaphor.

The approach matches with the increased emphasis on data sharing. In fact, one company that does technology development for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency offers a similar tool for organizing information.

Apple's interest in its semantic approach reflects a sense of reaching a dead end with the ubiquitous search box. Xenky believes the Mac fanatics will be able to get a closer look at the semantic search tool at the next Apple technology conference in the fall.

Before Xenky fell ill, he promised when in delirium that [a] he would stop picking on customer relationship management and [b] avoid the childish "CRM Means CRiMinal." Well, Xenky is a no-good goose. He's going to do it again.

Newsfactor, one of the RSS-compliant services Xenky monitors, carried a remarkable story by Erika Morphy with the engaging title "IT Value." Even better was the kicker for the story, "The Fast ROI Lie." Xenky likes the phrase ROI Lie. With the economy heading south faster than Xenky's cousins, Ms. Morphy makes a number of interesting observations:

First, Ms. Morphy acknowledges that anyone can choose software. But making that software pay off: that's the tricky part. She references a study from the dynamic duo of Deloitte & Touche LLP and the IDG Research Services Group.

Second, Ms. Morphy reveals that few know what the pay off from some big software projects will be. The canny or uncanny information technology professionals talk about bits and bytes. The "quantifiable results" have to make the users see the value of a new system. Not surprisingly, users don't see much value in some IT boondoggles.

Finally, Ms. Morphy reminds her readers that people think information technology is as good as sliced bread. But about two thirds of those in the studies say that information technologists can't explain the value of a new system to users. Metrics to demonstrate value? Nope, just bits and bytes chatter.

Ms. Morphy trots out some red-hot concepts. Xenky particularly likes "CIO dashboard" and "metrics." The nasty reality is, however, that neither senior managers nor information technology professionals can explain the financial bang behind major software engineering jobs.

Just look in your digital rear view mirror. The wreckage of ill-conceived CRM projects are still visible despite the organization's best effort to put distance between the wreckage and themselves.

Metasearch is a term used to finding Web sites or other data through a number of search engines simultaneously. The results of a metasearch may be presented as one concatenated list. Alternatively, the hits from each site may be listed under a separate heading.

To look at the separate listing approach, visit Dogpile, one of the first metasearch engines available on the Web. Readers may want to note that InfoSpace owns Dogpile. Providing personal information to any Web form available via an InfoSpace property is one sure-fire way to get some electronic mail. To see the Dogpile engine in action, click here.

To see a single-list approach, look at Ixquick, a service developed in midtown Manhattan and now owned by a rocket scientist, some individual investors, and Holland Venture.

Several points warrant comment:

First, both of these engines focus on the Web. Neither has been built to integrate wider types of content. Although the technology could be applied to Intranets, neither of these companies is a major player in the Intranet market space at this time with their metasearch technology.

Second, the look and feel of these sites is from the "Google School of Design." Both are using relatively clean interfaces. When advertisements are included, they are slotted into the borders of page displays. Neither site provides the user with the visual cues or tags that mark a "pay for placement" listing from a "hit" that the search engines find objectively. (Xenky believes that objective search results are a gone goose, but that is a subject for review in a subsequent issue of this newsletter.)

Third, some metasearch sites are providing the user with guidance about the most relevant "hits" in a results list. Ixquick uses stars. Vivisimo, ultimately a metasearch engine, puts like documents in folders and ranks the results using a proprietary technique. Other metasearch providers offer similar cues. Ixquick developed an algorithm that considers terms in a Web page, site traffic, and other factors such as the number of links on a page.

Metasearch is the core of IntelliSeek's Bull's Eye and Copernic's Agent Pro and shareware products. What these services offer is a desktop client, real-time Web updating of the instruction tables necessary to perform valid queries at a search engine, and various value-added features. Copernic's software allows the user to save a result list in a format that delivers an attractive document from a printer. IntelliSeek offers packaged lists of Web sites that cover particular topic areas well. A user of IntelliSeek Bull's Eye can select a "book review" icon, run a query, and the results are narrowed to book review information.

Xenky learned that the geezer Arnold wrote about Copernic in his Information World Review column earlier in fall 2002. A version of that article is located here. Some readers may find it interesting. The key points of the column are that Copernic wants to add for-fee content to their search results. Sorry, Google already does that with its for-fee link to the Financial Times's subscription service. And Copernic is actively marketing an Intranet version of its product. Unlike Google, the Copernic Intranet software handles for-fee content plus the other assorted 225 file types routinely encountered in today's IT-challenged organizations.

More Needed

Xenky believes that more is needed in the unsettled land of Search and Retrieval. Metasearch — or at least variants of the concept — have some promise. Metasearch should be able to look at diverse content indexes and provide the user with more focused results. Users are not likely to change their query formation habits. As Xenky understands user behavior, about 95 percent of the people looking for information type an average of 1.5 words, hit the enter key, and pick the best looking result from the first page of hits.

With the rush to "pay for placement" on Google, Yahoo, and other major search services, the first page of results may contain advertisements disguised as relevant Web pages. An expert can spot the advertisements. Some Web users either don't care if the "hit" is an advertisement as long as the information on the page answer the user's question. Some Web users don't know. Either way, the numbers are with the users who take what they get.

Metasearch, however, can be applied in clever ways to Web results as well as to content located inside an organization and available to users of the organization's Intranet. Most metasearch tools index content in different file types and present search results that mix and mingle HTML documents, PDF, Word, and the ever-wonderful PowerPoint files.

What's needed is a metasearch technology that allows specific domains or collections of content to be defined; for example, directory information. A number of directories may exist. A user looking for an address or a vendor in a specific location wants only directory listings. At this time, there are some customized solutions that deliver this type of functionality. One example is the PlumTree Software portal toolkit. With PlumTree and the underlying Verity search technology, cross-domain or cross-corpus metasearch can be assembled. The drawback to most users is that only a few hundred organizations are using the PlumTree tools.

Metasearch has been viewed as a step child to the more challenging problems in search and retrieval. Visualization, agent-based retrieval, and natural language processing are "hot." Metasearch is not as glamorous to some whiz kids.

Some remarkable innovation is underway in metasearch. Readers will want to look at Vivisimo (mentioned earlier in this piece). Another Web site using enhanced metasearch is EZ2find. Once again, the gas bag (Stephen Arnold) profiled this site in his Information World Review column. Nevertheless, he omitted some important observations, which Xenky will gleefully point out:

First, the EZ2find technology blends a portal-type presentation with domain specific metasearch. Here's a screenshot of the EZ2find splash page (clicking on it will take you to the actual page). Note that topics such as "Directories" are metasearches of various directory sites. More impressive is that if the user is accessing the Web page from Spain, for example, the directories queried as in Spanish. The personalization is automatic and non-intrusive. None of the "Welcome, Xenky" stuff that grates on Xenky each time he visits Yahoo.

Second, EZ2find provides a blend of RSS-based news (personalized to more than 40 languages), weather, and the standard search box. Queries run against different Web search services. EZ2find has told a close associated of Xenky that some of the Web sites want to be paid for supporting the metasearch queries. If so, this is an interesting indication of the monetizing lust at Web search services. Most sites are thrilled to get the initial hit and click.

Third, metasearch — as implemented at EZ2find — is essentially unobtrusive. Most users will not know the technology is in operation. The metasearch functions of Ixquick, Dogpile, and even the client-side software keep the metasearch functionality squarely in the user's face. Pick this category. Pick that search engine. EZ2find says, "Search for answers or click if you want. It is okay either way."

EZ2find is a service that is generating money for the owners, who operate from a duck pond sized town south of Toulouse. The service runs on a mid-range Pentium computer and has been coded using Open Source tools.

EZ2find sells advertisements, offers various types of reseller deals, and charges users to have specific sites indexed. None of this monetizing is intrusive. The result is a remarkably helpful, semi-automatic metasearch technology.

What's the Future?

Metasearch is becoming increasingly important in searching internal repositories of information. Dumping content into one repository can be difficult when security and access to content can vary and quickly. Most large corporations have had to accept the fact that research chemists need one type of access to their data, and accountants need another. One size search engine does not fit all. Metasearch fits into organizations where the information landscape is not smooth. Large publishing companies may have information produced by different business units in highly specialized formats. The ideal may be to make all of a publisher's data conform to one super document type definition. The reality is that true data normalization at a large publishing company is still in the future. The short-term solution may be metasearch technology.

What's clear is that getting on-point results to queries across blogs, directories, Web pages, and databases is a complex problem. The solution may require the wizards in the advanced text retrieval laboratories to encourage young researchers to push the boundaries of metasearch. EZ2find near Toulouse did.

Whilst lying ill in his nest of reeds, Xenky listened to National Public Radio each morning and afternoon. On one blurry day, Xenky heard a reference to Dietrich Dörner's The Logic of Failure. (ISBN: 0201479486 Perseus Publishing; January 15, 1996).

When the book first became available in English in 1996, Xenky ordered two copies. One for himself and one for the first of his clients to ask, "Wonder why that project went off the rails?" Alas, in seven years, none of Xenky's clients posed this type of salient question. In fact, no one thought about Chernobyl before the melt down.

Nevertheless, Xenky thinks the book is useful, and he is thrilled that a participant on a live radio program would mention this 200-page essay by a cognitive psychologist. Herr Dr. Dörner describes the roots of failure as many small individually sensible steps that a precursors of the failure. The idea behind the book is that anyone who knows what leads to disaster can make an effort to avoid it. Obviously, some of the managers at Enron, Arthur Andersen, and Tyco, among other firms, were unfamiliar with the book.

Herr Dr. Dörner pinpoints four delightful human traits that make failure a handmaiden of many activities. These are:

1. Going fast. Making decisions quickly may not allow sufficient time to absorb information and weigh consequences.
   
   
2. Looking decisive. Some leaders believe that making a firm decision is a sign of intellectual acuity. Sometimes discussion and deliberation are useful.
   
   
3. Human traits. Humans have difficulty absorbing and remembering large amounts of information. When overloaded, humans fall back on tried and proven models.
   
   
4. Short-term. Many decision makers look at the short-term aspects of a problem. The longer-term problems are ignored or not understood.
   
   

None of this should be revolutionary to the enlightened readers of Xenky's IT Bulletin, Herr Dr. Dörner had a best seller on his hands in Germany. Xenky recommends this book.

A summary of Mr. Arnold's May speech in New York is below:

• Wireless devices now outsell personal computers
  
  
• In parts of Japan, China, Taiwan, and other Asian countries, the mobile phone is the online access device
  
  
• Automatic connections are becoming more important, particularly in some cost-conscious organizations. Eliminating cables and the fixed-access furnishings can save as much as 15 percent over the life of the system
  
  
• Among the new devices are high-resolution cameras in mobile phones and a dual-processor phone from NTT (Nippon Telegraph & Telephone)
  
  
• The wrap up included information about search software that support access from different types of devices. The search results are automatically displayed in the form factor of the user's device. The example was Systal SA's Pertimm system. http://www.systal.com.
  
  

This issue, I'm not going to give you a specific tip to change or enhance your computer system. Instead, I'm going to point you to some great "tweak" utilities that will let you mess around with making seemingly countless changes on your own. Here are three free ones to play with. You can change your system's appearance, change its behavior, or even change under-the-hood settings which deal with things like memory. Insert standard disclaimer about keeping your system backups up-to-date, and creating a new System Restore Point is always a good idea before installing new hardware or software.

• TweakUI — the granddaddy of the Windows tweaking tools, versions of this PowerToy have been around since Windows 95. You've probably used this one if you've ever used a tweaking tool in your life. Note that while other Windows versions could all make use of the same TweakUI program, you need to install one designed specifically for XP. Not as powerful as the other two listed here, but a must-have on any system. (Special tip of the week: Browse the rest of the download page, you might find some useful things among the other XP PowerToys.)
  
  
• TweakALL — Tons of options containted within an expandible plug-in architecture. If you don't want a particular tweaking function, just don't download it. This one's been around for a while and is loved by many.
  
  
• Xteq X-Setup — Its creators call it the "ultimate tool for black belt system tuning," and they've got a point. This one, which also allows for plug-ins, probably has more tweaks available for it than TweakUI and TweakAll put together. If I could only choose one, it would probably be this one, but I'm glad that all three are available and free for the downloading.