Yesterday Stephen Elop delivered an amazing speech at a conference at Wharton.

 

It's definitely worth the time to watch it all the way through. He shows a "productivity vision" video that re-imagines the way we will do work ten years from now. At a visceral level, it looks like science fiction. We (MS) worked very closely with Elop and his team on it, though, and I can tell you that none of it is science fiction. Prototypes of much of the technology are running today in Microsoft and other research labs around the world, and the rest is fairly uncontroversial extrapolations of technology trends we see today, such as increasing network bandwidth and decreasing expense of electronic display materials.

 

This sure looks lik a textbook definition of "use of excessive force" by a police officer on a 15-year-old girl. The police department says there's another side to the story, and I hope they get to tell it... but it had better be good.

A couple of weeks ago Joaquin Phoenix had a surreal interview on David Letterman.

 

This past Sunday night at the Oscars, Ben Still did a sendup of it.

 

Watch both videos all the way through.

Here's the final installment of David Letterman's "Great Moments in Presidential Speeches." A lovely compilation.

Microsoft research is doing its annual Techfest event this week.

 

Here are some videos of some of the realyl cool stuff that was shown yesterday at the "public day."

Here's a great little history lesson from Russ Daggatt.

 

The Sunday Times has an article on an investigation of the research paper that has sparked an anti-vaccination movement with scares of connections between some vaccinations and autism. It turns out that the principal researcher fabricated and twisted data in the study.

 

It's an unfortunate coincidence that health systems recommend a set of vaccinations at the age when autism symptoms usually begin to present. But there is no credible evidence that the vaccinations cause, or even trigger, autism. And now the groundbreaking study conencting the two has been debunked.

Last Friday Steve Ballmer had the opportunity to address the House Democratic Caucus at thir retreat. It was a very thoughtful and interesting speech, and definitely worth five minutes to read. He was pretty unvarnished about what he thinks is wrong with the US economy, as well as Microsoft's approach to dealing with it.

Here's a chart comparing the job losses in this recession vs. other recent recessions.

Seahorses -- and baby seahorses -- are just cool.