Transformational leadership is the type shown most by those at the top of large organisations. Followers are actually transformed by the vision that the leader gives them

Burns' theory (Burns, J. M. (1978). Leadership. New York: Harper & Row) ties this to morality by appealing to the values of the followers. I think you can see this in people like Martin Luther King or Winston Churchill. I think it is naïve to think that the hooks into people's beliefs and motivations are necessarily 'good'.

Bass's theory (Bass, B. M. (1985). Leadership and performance beyond expectation.

The current format war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD generates yawns from most at the moment. No-one wants to buy a player for either format until the whole thing calms down. Who wants to own another Betamax player?

On the Blu-Ray side you've got Sony, who really really want to have a video definition format that they own. Lots of people on Sony's side expect the PS3 to do for Blu-Ray what the original PS did for DVD.

Today (Oct 30th) is "Women's No Pay Day", basically the 17% average pay gap between men and women is equivalent to women working for free from now until 2008. The Fawcett Society are campaigning for every UK company to have to do an equal pay audit.

I'm very pro that, but then my company sells pay auditing software. It's not simple though: EU law is that work has to be of "equal value".

The guys in my work are pretty excited about Halo 3, we have fan-boys from both camps: some have taken most of this week off to play it, others announced that it was rubbish before they'd played it.

Halo 2 is still played quite a lot online, despite being over 2 years old now. It was a pretty good multiplayer, and that gives it a lot more longetivity than single player only games.

One of the 'against' comments was that it looks just like Halo 2, with very slightly better textures.

Recently in the Times was a section on research by Simon Baron-Cohen (yes, he's Borat's cousin) into prenatal testosterone levels and the male brain type.

The basic theory goes something like this: the human brain tends towards either empathy skills or mathematical/pattern recognition skills. Women tend to be more towards the former while men tend towards the latter. Due to this these tendencies are referred to as male and female brain types, even though either gender can have them.

I'm really impressed by this idea: seam carving image resizing. It's relatively simple, but the effect is really impressive. Basically the as the image is stretched or compressed a gradient check is used to remove or add a 'seam' of similar pixels from the image. This leaves the detail parts of the image relatively in proportion.
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This is something I relatively recently conflicted with a friend of mine about. He was much enamoured of a team in his company that always seemed to have the most new features each month.

I finally got to see their project and, well, it works. It just isn't what I'd call finished. Pages can take over 30 seconds to load.

I've been playing a new game Bioshock recently. It's been getting 10/10 reviews and having played it I have to say that it's brilliant.

It isn't perfect, but it's got a fantastic and sophisticated plot, amazing atmosphere and it's a pretty good first person shooter.

I stumbled across this interesting paper by Andrew Odlyzko today: Content is not king. It's really about 3G networks and internet to mobile devices, but the interesting bit is that the 'killer apps' are those that allow communication, rather than content.

The comparison with the web 2.0 bubble is interesting. Companies are throwing money intent on turning user content sites into wealth generating sites, but I don't think it's there.

Job Evaluation is the process of systematically determining a relative value of jobs in an organisation. In all cases the idea is to evaluate the job, not the person doing it.

Job Ranking is the most simple form. Basically you just order the jobs according to perceived seniority. It's easy in a small organisation, but get exponentially difficult with lots of different jobs.
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