Two great events coming up:

I ran into the stylish Shaun Sanders, from Graffiti PR, at the recent TEDxSF event and he told me about Geek Chic, Thursday December 3. It's an event he's organized to collect Christmas toys and also to have some fun.

At: K&D showrooms, 700 2nd Street, with gourmet fare, hosted bar, massages, and a VIP goody bag. 7pm $10 in adv./$15 at the door.

Tickets: http://geekchic.eventbrite.com/ ( 20% discount with the code:geekchic )

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Silicon Valley Rocks!
Dec 9 7pm
Great American Music Hall, 859 O'Farrell, San Francisco

This was a lot of fun last year. Alison Murdock and team, have organized a great lineup and all proceeds go to Music in Schools Today (MuST), a Bay Area non-profit that seeks to rescue music programs from school budget cuts.

Featuring:

CORINNE MARCUS & THE KINDRED SPIRITS -- catchy and intriguing with hints of Lilith, pop, rock and lounge. Tech Affiliations: Walden Venture Capitaland Digidesign.

FAREWELL TYPEWRITER -- melodic rock music that's energetic yet tight, dancey but tough. Tech Affiliations: Hewlett-Packard and Thing Labs (makers of Brizzly).

MARROW -- electronica/dance beats guaranteed to make you move your gloomy ass. Tech Affiliations: Pyramind Studios and the "sflogicninja" of YouTube fame.

THE OPEN SOURCE BAND -- featuring Jonah Matranga (lead singer of Far) and Randi Zuckerberg (Facebook) -- a Silicon Valley Rocks! special freely available for your listening pleasure. Tech Affiliations: Facebook, Norwest Venture Partners, Walden Venture Capital and Amplified Music Services.

THE TELL-TALE HEARTBREAKERS -- tearing through the post-punk music scene with tense, guitar and bass-driven songs that reflect the darker side of rock and roll. Tech Affiliations: PDI/DreamWorks.

THE WHITEHALLS -- from straight-ahead rockers to political drama to crowd-pleasing ballads to electronica, this band covers all the bases. Tech Affiliations: Digg.com, Aldon (software), IT for Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco, Bite PR.

Mood music provided by DJ SOSOSOON

Blog - Silicon Valley Rocks

Tickets: Silicon Valley Rocks! 2009 - Eventbrite

Plus get a room and relax: $75 plus tax for a king size bed or two full-size beds at nearby Hotel Carlton. To make a reservation, visit http://www.hotelcarltonsf.com and use this promotional web code: svrocks.

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I've been remarking lately that we haven't yet had the second market correction. People forget that after the stock market crash of 1929 the market seemed well on its way to a recovery before crashing a second time in 1932. It then took decades to recover. Investors would have to wait until November 1954 to recover to 1929 levels.

It won't be pleasant but we need that second correction so that we can get to work on the longer cycle of rebuilding value. With the current recovery in stock markets and some housing markets it seems that we might be building up to that second correction.

Is there anything that can be done to prepare? Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is a student of the great crash so he would know best and be best positioned to mitigate its effects. But maybe there isn't much to be done except to let the financial system work through its destiny.

I was glad to see a post by DK Matai, chairman and founder of mi2g.net and ACTA Open writing about this topic on Facebook and he has some very interesting data. I'm republishing because ACTA Open is a closed group but I think this is an important article.

From:

1932: The Unexpected Second Shock

By DK Matai

They will say, nobody saw it coming. Who could have predicted it... It is worth noting that the 1932 stock market crash is deemed to be the worst in the 20th century and not the one in 1929. By mid-1930, the market was up 30% from the trough of the 1929 crash. However, by the summer of 1932, the Dow reached a low of just 11% of its high in 1929, or a loss of roughly 89%, trading more than 50% below the low it had reached on October 29th, 1929. If one had $1000 on September 3rd 1929, it would have gone down to $108 by July 8th, 1932 -- end of the worst crash -- or an 89.2% loss. To recover from such a loss, one would have to watch one's portfolio go up by 825%!

All this happened despite assurances from prominent government and business leaders of-the-time that the worst was behind.

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I'm looking forward to Le Web in Paris Dec 9 - 10. It seems like it will be "Silicon Valley Goes To Paris" because of the large number of people I know that will be there.

Loic Le Meur's Le Web conference has an excellent reputation for quality, and I'm told the food is marvelous too.

I'll be part of the "Traveling Geeks" group, the same organization that organized the summer trip to London and Cambridge. [See my coverage.]

Traveling Geeks is made possible by a small number of sponsors. We could do with a little more help on this trip to help cover the travel costs of a few more bloggers.

If you can help out please contact the tireless Renee Blodgett, who has been putting in huge numbers of hours into this project.[renee (at)blodgettcomm.com]

The brand new web site is up: Traveling Geeks

And so is the Traveling Geeks Facebook fan page

[BTW the misspelling on Traveling is deliberate :)]

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Guest post by DD Ganguly, CEO, Dimdim

A few years back, I used to work for a global company with more than 13,200 people. My office alone had more than 1,000 people, so when winter rolled around, it'd be hard not to encounter someone who had a cold or the flu. Back then, it was unpleasant to hear a colleague sneezing or coughing in the halls, but it wouldn't prevent me from being in the office, nor would I be upset that they were coming to work sick. But now, coughing in your elbow is not enough to prevent the spread of dangerous, highly contagious diseases like the H1N1 virus. We must change the way we do business to stay healthy.

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A reader writes:

I feel like a tattle-tell by wrinting this, but I think this a story that should be told.

Back in 2004 a person, using the pseudonym "Joe Isuzu" logged into Wikipedia and vandalized 13 records. An alert editor noticed that random editing was being done from the same IP address. Examining the records he found the errors and corrected them. The perpetrator, when confronted with the vandalism, explained it away as a research project to test the validity of Wikipedia data. Had the vandal masked his IP address the errors migh have taken a great deal longer to detect and the actual perpetrator might not have been found. In the law, the fact that he used a pseudonym demostrated "guilty knowledge."

Ordinarily this incident would slip into cyber-history and be forgotten, but the perpetrator has become a Vice President for The Asociation of Internet Researchers (AOIR). This organization holds itself out as the author for Internet research ethics. The role the perpetrator now plays is to be a spokesman for these ethical standards.

IMHO, this situation is equivalent to electing Michael Mitnick (SP) to be a leader of EFF. Dr. Alex Halavais is the perpetrator and the incident can be found by searching on Google for the "Isuzu Experiment."

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Alexander Halavais - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Isuzu Experiment - a thaumaturgical compendium

Association of Internet Researchers » Blog Archive » VP Candidate: Alex Halavais

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