Agile is popular and efficient

What does "Agile" mean"?

In ordinary dictionaries it is defined as "moving quickly and lightly ", in Encarta it is defined as "able to move quickly and with suppleness, skill, and control".

A brief statistical overview may provide us an indicative mental picture on frequent use of this word. For example:
-Google found 20,200,000 entries on "Agile".
- Technorati found 7173 blogs on "Agile"
- Ecademy blogs search resulted in 151 blogs with the word "Agile" in it and/or in title.

When I browsed the literature including mainly technology and science publications online, I found hundreds of phrases indexed. The following are only a number of them to give you an idea:
agile alliance
agile applet
agile application
agile business process platform
agile communications
agile data method
agile development
agile enterprise
agile management
agile manufacturing
agile methods
agile modeling
agile processes
agile product
agile programming or software development
agile project management
agile property
agile software corporation
agile testing

I believe "Agile" will be used a lot in the future, particularly for the "Web 3.0" a.k.a. "Semantic Web" development, if we want to be ready within 2 years or so.

My point is to understand how important "Agile" is for your business. I'd like to obtain your views and insights on this very popular concept:
1. Do you have certain phrases related with "Agile" that you use in your business?
2. What does "Agile" mean to you?
3. What is it? Is it an important concept, function or process in your business?

Do you use and trust machine translators?

Computational linguistics is a comprehensive area. As a brief background, machine translation (MT) is a sub-field of computational linguistics. It investigates the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one human language to another. MT performs simple substitution of words in a language for words in another. They use some advanced techniques such as corpus technique. These techniques help with:
-phrase recognition,
-better handling of differences in linguistic typology,
-translation of idioms, proverbs, metaphors, analogies and
-the isolation of anomalies.

Recently I met a co-networker from Germany with limited English skills. And my German is very limited too. His profile is in German and was looking for translators to help him. As a technologist, I used the Google's online translation applet for it and it really helped us to create the profile in a few minutes time with over 90% accuracy. I use translation software specifically for scientific documents written in other languages; at least the abstract. Even though they are not 100% accurate yet, I still find them useful. They are faster than finding a friend who can help in desperate times. They make good progress with new techniques and inventions. Considering the emergent technologies being tested, I believe we will have great translation programs soon.

I would like to obtain your views on this concept and available commercial tools:
1. Do you ever need to translate any documents from other languages? Which languages mainly?
2. Have you ever used; or do you use any machine translators (translation software)? If so, which ones?
3. Do you know what is the gap in this area?
4. What would you add to your wish list in this area?
5. How important are they for our business considering globalisation?

Any other comments are welcome.

Who says technology has no emotion?

They say technology has no emotions. It is mechanical and only logic works! I disagree with respect.

Technology carries a lot of emotions around itself. Technology is not something happens by itself. There are millions of people who experienced sleepless nights, missed lunches, and challenging hours in their lives. Whilst creating, designing, implementing, deploying, selling and maintaining technology, many emotions are involved. For example, frustration in code writing, bug fixing; anger for crashing codes; fear of not meeting deadlines, fear of understanding complexity and so on. As a person in technology for many years, I experienced anger, fear, sadness, excitement, disappointment, and love of course.

1. What are your emotions related to technology either as a technology person or a user of technology at work?
2. How do those emotions affect you and impact positive change in our business and our lives?
3. How can we turn negative emotions to positive ones for a better mental health, ie fear and anger to love!

Paradox of Open Social and Professional Networks: Conservative vs Diverse

It is interesting to observe two kinds of typical networking patterns in a number of social and professional networking sites.

1. Conservative: those members who want to connect only with the similar, familiar people from the same circle. They are uncomfortable with people from different backgrounds. Common ground is essential for them. They have tighter filters. A small network is sufficient for them.

2. Diverse: those members open to connections from different people, different personalities, different characteristics, new ideas, different cultures, different visions etc. They have more flexible filters and more tolerant to ambiguity. They see each connection as an opportunity. They prefer large, diverse network of people.

I believe our values, expectations and experience with people have a deciding factor for the category we choose.
My personal preference is diverse. I would like to know which category you are or you prefer. Diverse, Conservative or both? Or other combination? What are your key expectations from online social/professional networking?