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Recessions are awful
Need to write a corporate memo, but the muse just won’t visit? Try the “CorpSpeak” application built by the guys at LavaRnd, experts in random-number generation. Fill out the fields describing who the memo is to, who it’s from, and what it’s about — and their auto-memo-creation engine will do the rest.
I tested it out, and produced the following corporate missive:
To: All Readers
From: Collision Detection
Date: Wed Oct 8 22:39:29 2003
Subject: Important AnnouncementA major action item for this fiscal quarter is a corporation rollout. Leading indicators would seem to suggest that win-win leadership positions improve the performance of scalable shared memory multiprocessor. A team next generation achieves a new all of you.
It used to be true that paradigm shifts do the right thing about the competitive market realignment, however throughout the fiscal year we have seen that protocols execute opportunity. We’ve got to do it in revolutionary challenges of strategies. So, a forward looking relationship is not going to help us in the concepting of the corporate titans. Our third parties tell us that shared objectives inevitably encapsulate customer partnerships.
Oh, and by the way? You’re all fired.
A while ago, I wrote about Bullfighter, a piece of software created by the Deloitte and Touche consultancy, which automatically eliminates jargon and meaningless weasel-words from corporate documents. Now I’m thinking it would be fun to link up these two applications, and have CorpSpeak funnel documents directly into Bullfighter. Voila: A perpetual-motion machine of corporate blather!
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”
“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912
“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex
» visit the Collision Detection archives
May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM
From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.
July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S
July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM
My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.
June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM
On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.
June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM
I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives.
According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable!
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