Robert Paterson: UPEI

What is going on with Boys and Men in Education

Tue, 05 Aug 2003 10:52:09 GMT

There is a North American problem for boys and school. Boys are doing very badly in the education system. But on PEI, we have reached a crisis.

We have the highest drop rate for males in high school at 22.6%. Male literacy is in the basement. In 1998 82% of females could read at a level 3 compared to only 60% for boys. Way below the national average. In a 2001 survey of grade 12 - 62% of females said that they planned to attend university. Only 42% of boys made the same claim. UPEI is granting 1.8 degrees to women for every one for men. In 1998 28% of women in the 25-29 age group had degrees, in line nationally, but only 17% of men.

Anecdotally I hear that in 2003 70% of freshmen are women at UPEI. I hear that medical schools, law schools even engineering are packed with women. There have been rumblings about boys doing badly but this is surely a crisis? We surely cannot accept that it is all the boys' fault. There is something really wrong about how we raise and school boys.

We have to have a serious look at schools and ask what is it about how we run them that turns boys off. We have to look at how we as parents raise our boys as well. How have we taken their desire to achieve away?

There have been rumblings about this issue but surely we are on such a poor track that we have to step back and apply our best efforts to re- engage the male gender in their education.

Organizational complexity - A New Math Required and New Tools

Sun, 13 Jul 2003 18:54:16 GMT

I am doing some OD work for a university. One of the issues confronting all universities today is a quantum increase in organizational complexity. My ingoing sense is that the mechanism's for managing complexity are poorly understood and that as maths changed at the turn of the century to take complexity into account, so we have to look for novel ways of managing complexity at universities.

My thesis is that we manage today as if cause and effect were our universe. Our systems are too complex for this midset and if we remain in cause and effect, conflict will be the only result. Some type of systems tool is required. A start may be some type of council that brings all partiers to the table - but I get ahead of myself.

Let's look at the world of 1969 when I went up to Oxford and then at the world of 2003 for a modern urban university in Canada

When I went to Oxford 35 years ago, my college, Christchurch was mainly an undergraduate college attached to a cathedral. The Dean ran both. He and the Dons ran the college with a handful of secretaries and a lot of servants and he and the Canons ran the Chapter again with a few secretaries and a lot of servants. Christ Church was part of a Coop called the University where a few Dons sat on committees and set policy. That was the University - a few committees.

Our world was really the college. Small and compact. 90% of the teaching was in the college. We all lived in college. Each college had a its own funding. Christ Church was immensely wealthy with large endowments of land that had accrued over hundreds of years. There were few of us. All of us that went paid fees and it cost me then about L1,000 a year in fees and I spent about another L1,000 on having a good time. We were heavily subsidized by the college but it also lived well within its means. Our accommodation, though splendid, was also spartan as only an all male place of the time could have been. In my quad, the only toilet was on the ground-floor, and the building was 6 stories high. We used the sink for most things! The only baths were in the basement in one corner of the quad. When this was pointed out to the dean who built the quad, his reply was that " they are only here for 8 weeks at a time". I think I only had a handful of baths in the 3 years that I was there. I would go home on the weekends for a clean up.

Again my point - a simple set up with not much money flowing either way and almost no government involvement. The world was the college and the faculties. Being small there was little managerial complexity. All who were not faculty were in effect servants or students. There were no money problems and, apart from maintenance, little need for capital investment. The money fit inside the capital envelope of the college. The university ran a few libraries and exams. The simple college was our world where everyone knew everyone perhaps better than they wanted too.

I use Oxford as an example because it was the model for many other universities. But now what is the university world?

Money and social engineering are compelling drivers. The state has entered the game in most countries and has funded a huge increase in enrollment which has driven a huge increase in the capital requirement. Coed is the norm and modern plumbing has entered the male preserve at great cost. Equipping my college with toilets and bathrooms on every floor cost over L20 million! Imagine the plumbing issues in 16 -1 19th century buildings.

So what are the issues in many Canadian Universities today. They have a president whose job is to fund-raise and to deal with governments. His job is mainly a business role. He has to get the budget and make the money work. He has to compete for capital donors and he has to lobby government for more research and operating funds. He is supported by a staff that would not be out of place in any large commercial enterprise. But he has no power to tell the faculty what to do. The Product end of the university has not changed much since I was an undergraduate or indeed since the middle ages. The faculty is divided into separate disciplines who jealously guard their turf. Now usually unionized, my Tutor Charles Stuart must be turning in his grave, they hold back the online world as they know that this will destroy how they work. They do not want to teach because they move up the tenure track and in status by publishing. So they employ armies of servants, TA's to you and I, to teach and mark in their name. In my day all the dons in every discipline met every night over dinner in hall. Today they all go home to their SOS's and children. So the linkages between them are poor. All the fertile research ground has been tilled and new entrants scrap for weeds deep in the mud.of their field. There is little sense of collegiality.

They fear that the president will make their university into a BUSINESS - horror of horrors! They sense that undergraduates already pay too much but that is the President's problem. They sort of know that demography will send fewer young their way - but that is the president's problem. After all they don't want to teach them anyway. . They reject any idea of using technology to teach differently - they fear that their precious IP will be lost if they make what they do accessible. So reducing the cost of teaching is the-President's problem. They have their heads firmly in the sand but will not give an inch of thie power up to help.

Governments want every one to have access to university. They have set up a loan sharking business to facilitate this. The average debt for BA is about $30,000. The theory is that BA's get high paying jobs and will easily pay this off. Not so. Most are caught and flip hamburgers or some double up and go onto graduate work. Students will find new ways of getting what they want and will turn away from the traditional delivery and costs - they have no choice.

While the students are finding university too expensive. 50% of the faculty will be in the retirement zone in the next 10 years. Already a bidding war for the new talent is happening. In key areas, new hires are earning more than the old guard. resentment is building and costs are going up.A classic squeeze play is emerging. Costs are too high and rising. Each party balmes the other.

Universities have become huge. They now have armies of Administrators and Technicians who are still treated like servants by the faculty. They are unionized as well and have a deep sense of bitterness and entitlement.

So who would want to be a University President?

How can universities reduce this complexity. Maybe they can take a lead from our Provincial Politicians. They are recommending the formation of a council where the premiers meet as a matter of course with the Prime Minister. The underlying idea is that there is no process other than confrontation to meet the complex needs of a diverse set of groups who live under one hat, Canada. So maybe for universities. Currently each powerful group has to attack the others. The poor President is stuck in the middle.

Maybe this is true for all organizations? Management and the rest was OK for simpler times. The 3 body problem demands a more sophisticated process. It recognizes that once there are more than two parties, then using cause and effect as the metaphor leads to conflict and failure. Most organizations are more complex than two body systems now. Understanding complexity and chaos will become essential tools for managment. More later

Natural Capitalism - Paul Hawken comes to PEI August 13th

Fri, 11 Jul 2003 18:41:00 GMT

"The Laws that we are ignoring determine how life sustains itself. Commerce requires living systems for its welfare -- it is emblematic of the times that this even needs to be said. Because of our industrial prowess, we emphasize what people can do but tend to ignore what nature does. Commercial institutions, proud of their achievements, do not see that healthy living systems -- clean air and water, healthy soil, stable climates -- are integral to a functioning economy. As our living systems deteriorate, traditional forecasting and business economics become the equivalent of house rules on a sinking cruise ship."

Being an Island and being dependent on our natural resources for the 3 pillars of our economy, Agriculture, Tourism and the inshore Fishery, PEI is on the knife edge. Our use of the traditional industrial model has stressed all the connected systems to the limit. How to save ourselves is the question. Debates about the environment are usually futile arguments from one group who says that we cannot change because if we do, we will lose all the jobs and while the other says that we should not have an economy at all and merely save the environment. The result is that we remain stuck.

For many years Paul Hawken has being saying something different. His message is that an economy is essential. The issue as he sees it is not to chose between jobs and the planet but to have both. The work is to design a new type of economy that works according to the laws of nature and physics. Hence the term Natural Capitalism.

Paul is coming to PEI to speak formally to the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy on August the 14th. But he will speak to the public of PEI at UPEI on the evening of August the 13th.

Over the next few weeks I will post as many good articles that I can about what we face here as issues and also what we now know about a new design that may help us. Please help me by adding your comments and by leading me to other good articles.

Mon, 16 Jun 2003 16:40:46 GMT

Reminder: Weblog Night in Charlottetown. "Tonight at 7:00PM at UPEI, Weblog Night in Charlottetown: a seminar introducing weblogs and personal web publishing. All welcome. Tune into CBC Radio PEI this afternoon to hear Peter Rukavina and Catherine Hennessey disussing their weblogs and the seminar." (38 words - posted by steven) 1 reply [Acts of Volition]

Sat, 14 Jun 2003 18:13:46 GMT

A question for educators who do weblogs. For BloggerCon, one of the areas of focus will be weblogs in education. So we've got a couple of people lined up who are scholars who use weblogs with excellence. No announcements yet. Now I want to balance that with a couple of educators who have successfully created weblogs in a school, school district, college, university. I'm looking for people who support people who use weblogs, in a context that is not about weblogs, if possible. For example, a history class where each student keeps a weblog. Teachers who manage classes with a weblog. My goal of course is to learn from them, and then figure out what the next steps are. What do they need from other educators. What software is missing? We've already got some famous universities, I want to get connected with some not-so-famous universities. Who is leading in use of weblogs in education? Who do you look to for insight and inspiration? That's who I want for BloggerCon. [Scripting News]

What a coincidence! We at UPEI are starting a push into Weblogging - could not be smaller than us

UFIT - Testamonial

Fri, 13 Jun 2003 19:20:06 GMT

The Tech.. Good Morning. Week 3 at the gym begins. No more pain, but all gain. My energy level has stopped suffering from my gym and UFit workouts, and I am starting to feel better than I have in years. Good Stuff. [The Tech. For Blogpeople.]

UPEI - PEI can we change in time?

Wed, 28 May 2003 11:23:35 GMT

Can PEI change in time?

Here is my response to my students. We are wondering whether PEI can make the changes it needs for its long term survival without a crisis. While we talk about PEI, the isue of whether we are at the end of the industrial system and what this means is a question for all of us

I suspect that PEI will need to experience a number of profound shocks and drop into Chaos to adapt. Why? Because I fear that our state of equilibrium is so powerfully held by a number of structural elements.

Many of you talked about demography, education and politics on PEI. These are some of the structural issues that concern me. Your comments have caused me to think a bit more about this myself.

While there are many conservative young people, it is fair to say that young people are less set in their ways. The percentage of young to old on PEI is low and will get lower. On PEI, as in Atlantic Canada we have a birth rate less than replacement and many young have to leave to get work - what are your plans? Much of our immigration, PEI does relatively well here, is made up of retired Islanders returning for their Golden Years - many of who have been holding onto, I bet, a fantasy about how PEI was when they were young and wanting to find this again. Our older and homogeneous population will have strong braking effect on change.

With the majority of our population likely to be over 50 in 15 years time - this will be a powerful barrier to change. That is unless of course that having this skewed age distribution itself causes a crisis. What will we do with all those schools and teachers? What will we do to afford healthcare? Who will pay all the taxes? So I see on balance this trend as one that drives a crisis. We risk holding onto the old for dear life until it is too late and our system snaps.

Another possible future is that we open the doors on PEI for immigration from the =rest of the world. We will never be Toronto but we could do one thing here that others wont - we could open the doors for foreign professionals such as doctors who end up driving cabs in Toronto. It might only take a few thousand to shift our equilibrium of white Christian culture and expose us to more change and to a more aggressive set of people.

Education. More than 43% of adult Islanders never finished high school. It is very challenging to cope with change if you have a limited education and therefore few choices.

This is I think a key factor in PEI politics where so many voters look to a top down paternal government to solve their problems and to give them work. We have the political system that we have I think as a result.

This strong equilibrium is held more tightly because of I think two things. The well-educated tend to leave the Island, making the education skew worse and our electoral districts are so small that a hundred voters can lose you your seat. How can you consider tough change when your seat losing voters don't want it and look to you for all the answers to their life's problems?

PEI has started to think about electoral reform. My sense is that we are too sensitive a system and that larger districts and fewer MLA's would help. But I have no confidence that this will fly - do you?

I think that our Conservative mindset will therefore lead us to a crisis rather than a soft landing.

There are many sign s that our potato industry and our fishery are very vulnerable to a crisis. So is Tourism. It is easy to see how this may happen with border closing and health related excuses (Mad Cow, wart, SARs - how about Foot and Mouth?). These industries pay for our way of life - roads,schools, healthcare .

It will then be change or die and those who wanted no change will demand it - while of course blaming the last government for not acting!

So what do we do? Give up?

I don't think so. Ideas are powerful things and take time and circumstances to become accepted. What we are talking about in this course are ideas that most don't know of and have no meaning. Most people think that if we only worked harder at what we are doing now that everything will be OK. They are in the old valley. But if you are working to build a link to the next valley, it will be there when the time comes.

When a crisis happens there is a vacuum - often a vacuum of the right next idea. I suspect that, like the canary in the mine, PEI's crisis will happen earlier than most, other economies are more robust, but all industrial systems are vulnerable. If we are first and we have a critical mass of thinking going on already about using nature as our guide, we will come out of this earlier and as a leader.

We are not on our own here on PEI. What gives me most hope is that when the bifurcation comes it will shock the heartland even more than us. They will hang on longer because they are so invested in the old system. It made their success.

Deep in Islanders is a practical memory of living with nature. We are only one generation away from a group that "knew" nature because most Islanders worked directly with it and in it. Ideas about using nature a sa model will have an easier sell in a crisis her than in Ontario - what do you think?

UPEI - Societal Immune Systems and Memes

Fri, 23 May 2003 10:39:20 GMT

Is resistance to ideas natural? Are the Agents in the Matrix really the white blood cells that a society uses to protect itself from new ideas that may upset the current system?

UPEI - A Summer online course on the new networked economy

Thu, 22 May 2003 13:17:01 GMT

The link takes you to the course outline that I am teaching online for the next 6 weeks. I plan to post some of my responses to my students questions and some of their ideas as a periodic series..

The course looks deeply into why our machine model for organization has become the problem today and how the application of natural models is overwhelming the machine.

UPEI Context for the Course

Fri, 16 May 2003 12:26:28 GMT

What is the course all about really?

It is about seeing the difference between the machine
metaphor for organization and for life and the organic
metaphor of how nature and life itself is organized.

Why should we do this? I think that we can establish
that the machine model does not have the flexibility to
cope with the pace and the scale of change that we are
living in today.

Oh you say there has been a lot of change so far and
things seem ok - what's new?

This is what is new. It is the scale and pace that is
new. Here are some of the factors that make our time
more difficult to cope with and which demand immense
flexibility? Any one of them would be tough to cope
with. They are all converging into a crisis in the next
5 years.

1. Demography - In 10 years time most of the population
in the developed world will be over the age of 60! There
will be a very small cohort of 30 year olds - you. This
has never happened before.To any species! The average
age of nurses is 48. The same with farmers. The top
three levels of the public service are all the same age
and can all retire on full pension in the next 10 years.
The imbalance of old is especially extreme in Atlantic
Canada. Older folks consume more than 3 times the
healthcare costs of a young person. Old people consume
1/2 their total health care costs in the last year of
life. There will be very few kids. The birth rate is
around 1, or half of replacement. - What will this mean
for government? What will this mean for business? What
will this mean for you - you are going to have to do all
the work and pay all the taxes and raise all the
children and look after your old parents? Looks like
fun. We will have to rethink retirement. We will have to
rethink healthcare and education. We will have to
rethink immigration. We will have to rethink employment.

2. The rapid and disruptive shift in technology. It took
70 years for the telephone to become mainstream and in
every house. It has taken only 7 years for the internet
to become the centre of life. The cost of computing
drops and its power rises at an exponential rate. This
is leading to disruptive shifts in our world. Online
shopping is attacking conventional shopping. EBay is on
track to match Wal mart over time as the largest mart in
the world. Just as some retailers are becoming vast -
there is now room for micro retailing where an artist or
a craft person can sell small amounts of stuff. Think of
cars. If you learned how to fix a car engine 75 years
ago, you could still fix one now - just. But what about
hybrids? What about fuel cell cars? It seems that in
every area new stuff is coming that will disrupt the old
system. Hey what about online learning or telemedicine -
what affect will this have on bricks and mortar based
offerings. Can you imagine what this will mean to
education and health care?

3. Shifts in our values. Many of us don't want to be
part of either a mass market or a Dilbert cubicle world
anymore. There are maybe 35 million like me in North
America that are self employed and who could never go
back to working for an institution. Neither of my
children could work in a regular job and are both self
employed. The internet and the supporting technology
enables this type of life style. I type this now in my
home office in my pyjamas - (thank God I have the
web-cam off) Survey after survey tells us that the next
generation - you? - want a work life that fits your
whole life. Some of you have old me that you have seen
the sacrifices that your mother made and you demand more
balance. Many of you have seen your parents loyalty to
their employer disregarded. Many of you know that you
will not even start work with the thought that you will
be in the same place all your life. So your generation
is small and does not need to play the old work game.
What kind of workplace will you demand??? Will you have
power in this new employment game or will the employer?

4. Lastly we live in a time when how we live and how we
organize is affecting the planet itself. At the heart of
our impact on the planet - think of the loss of the cod,
the loss of topsoil, fertility and fish kills on PEI,
think of the weird weather, think of the growing
shortage of fresh drinkable water in the world and so on
- is how we organize for business - the business
organization itself seems to be a big part of our
problem with the environment. Will our agriculture have
to change? Will the change be small or comprehensive?
Will our how we go to work have to change? How can we
balance work and family and say commuting costs if
nothing about how we go to work will change? Will thee
changes be cosmetic or cultural and deep?

This is the context for the course. Surfing will talk
about the emerging "Natural Model" It has both theory
and case studies. It challenges the basis of the
industrial model of design - make market - sell. It
offers a new model of adaption and interaction with the
environment. Just a theory?

Think of EBay, think of Amazon, think of Southwest
Airlines. Think of Dell. The new is here and is kicking
the ass of the old.

Ironically think of the US Army. No matter what you
think of the war. The US military is the most advanced
exponent of the new model where the base idea is that
the organism that adapts to a fast changing and
unpredictable environment best and than applies the
maximum energy in the key place will win. Above all the
story of the US Army is about the reintroduction of the
human back into the organization

Test

Tue, 01 Apr 2003 20:01:43 GMT

Test

Online Web Course on Organizational Design for the New Economy Offered at UPEI

Tue, 25 Mar 2003 12:20:27 GMT

The course outline for Organizational Design for the New Economy is linked to the header of this post. The course begins on May15 and ends at the end of June. This is a credit course at the Univerisity of Prince Edward Island

Fri, 14 Mar 2003 17:56:37 GMT

Great article from the Times - shows how the economics works for an established star. She has a much lower profit threshold. She will also market mainly to her fans - your best customer is an existing customer. Expect to see more do this. Also expect to see connecting hubs build that will link to groups of artists.

My class is working on this idea - our focus will be Celtic Music - hope to have some of their work to post next week

Rob

Natalie Merchant abandons the recording industry. Pat sez, "Natalie Merchant has completely severed her relationship with the commercial recording industry. Her new album, to be released this June, won't be released by a major label, but on her own independent imprint through her website."

They expect fans to learn about the album from Ms. Merchant's Web site and through publicity and a small advertising campaign. To gauge demand, they may offer fans who order the CD in advance a downloadable file of a song from the sessions that is not included on the album. In an increasingly consolidated retail business, a handful of chain stores, like Borders and Barnes & Noble, have accounted for a large percentage of Ms. Merchant's sales in the past; now her label is approaching them directly.
"I don't know that every artist has the capability to go directly to these chains, but Natalie has a history," Mr. Smith said.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!) [Boing Boing Blog]

Is Valdis a Galileo or Pasteur - The Man who uses a tool so that we can see what was unseen before?

Fri, 14 Mar 2003 10:36:55 GMT

Who Loves ya ,Baby?.

DISCOVER Vol. 24 No. 4 (April 2003)
Table of Contents

article in full...
Pass your e-mail through some new software and the answer will become obvious
By Steven Johnson

Illustration by Leo Espinoza

In his classic novel Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut explains how the world is divided into two types of social organizations: the karass and the granfalloon. A karass is a spontaneously forming group, joined by unpredictable links, that actually gets stuff done— as Vonnegut describes it, "a team that do[es] God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing." A granfalloon, on the other hand, is a "false karass," a bureaucratic structure that looks like a team but is "meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done."

No doubt you've experienced these two types of networks in your own life, many times over. The karass is that group of friends from college who have helped one another's careers in a hundred subtle ways over the years; the granfalloon is the marketing department at your firm, where everyone has a meticulously defined place on the org chart but nothing ever gets done. When you find yourself in a karass, it's an intuitive, unplanned experience. Getting into a granfalloon, on the other hand, usually involves showing two forms of ID.

For most of the past 50 years, computers have been on the side of the granfalloons, good at maintaining bureaucratic structures and blind to more nuanced social interactions. But a new kind of software called social-network mapping promises to change all that. Instead of polishing up the org chart, the new social maps are designed to locate karasses wherever they emerge. Mapping social networks turns out to be one of those computational problems— like factoring pi out to a hundred decimal points or rendering complex light patterns on a 3-D shape— that computers can do effortlessly if you give them the right data.

Until software designer Valdis Krebs came along, however, there wasn't an easy way to translate social interactions into a machine-readable language— short of following people around, anthropologist-style, noting whom they called or whom they chatted with at the watercooler, and then typing it all into a PC. "In the late '80s," Krebs says, "I was taking two graduate classes at UCLA— a class in organization design and a class in artificial intelligence. I was real busy at my day job, and I had a lot going on in my personal life, and I started thinking, 'Boy, it would be great if I could figure out a way to do one project to hand in for both classes.' " It seemed like an unlikely combination, until a friend showed Krebs an article about an early rendition of social-network-mapping software. "I looked at the article and had that 'aha!' moment: 'Here's the project for both my classes.' "

Krebs has spent most of the last 15 years honing his mapping software, which he called InFlow. He quit his day job in 1995, after IBM agreed to license the technology, and now he makes social maps full-time. Krebs is half sociologist and half digital cartographer: Many of his organizational maps are based on surveys taken of employees answering questions about whom they collaborate with, what their work patterns are. That data is then fed into InFlow, which paints striking visual portraits of social structures in organizations. They look almost like images from a chemistry textbook— dozens of molecules strung together in an intricate shape, each one representing an employee. The links between each person are a way of visualizing the flow of information through a company. "The maps show how ideas happen, how decision making happens, who the real experts are that everybody goes to," Krebs says. They show the karass buried inside the granfalloon.

Of course, modern corporations no longer need surveys to make sense of their employees' social interactions. With the rise of e-mail, chat rooms, bulletin boards, and Web personals— the watering holes of the digital realm— our social interactions now leave behind an increasingly long trail of data. And that makes them easy to map.

"If we're going to spend more of our social life online," Judith Donath says, sitting in her office at the MIT Media Lab, "how can we improve what that experience feels like? How can you convey the sense of being in a crowd or the movements of a crowd?" Stylish, and aided by a subdued, affable vocal style, Donath runs the Media Lab's Sociable Media Group, exploring what we can do with all the digital data we're implicitly collecting about ourselves.

"You have this enormous archive of your social interactions, but you need tools for visualizing that history, for feeling like you're actually inhabiting it," Donath says. Turning her sleek, black flat-panel display toward me, she loads up Social Network Fragments, created by Danah Boyd, a grad student, and Jeff Potter, a programmer. The program is visually stunning, if somewhat overwhelming: a floating mass of colored proper names projected over a black background and clustered into five or six loosely defined groups. It looks more like a work of information sculpture than a supplement to e-mail software.

The program was featured as a work of art in a gallery show in New York City in the summer of 2002. But the data it represents are culled from mundane sources: the addresses of e-mail messages sent or received. By looking at the names of people whom you send messages to or receive them from, and who gets cc'd or bcc'd on those messages, the software builds a portrait of your social networks. If you often send messages to your entire family, the software will draw links between the names of all the people you've included in those messages; if you cc a few colleagues on a message to an important client, it will connect those names as well.

Assuming you have a significant amount of e-mail traffic, the software will create a remarkably sophisticated assessment of your various social groups, showing you not only their relative size but also the interactions between different groups. If your college buddies have grown close to members of your family, you'll see those two groups overlap on the screen, like two crowds huddled next to each other.



				Intelligence analysts once assumed that terrorists organize in isolated cells. But social-network maps revealed that the 9/11 hijackers' cells morphed into a hub-and-spoke pattern with an obvious leader: Mohammed Atta. The active structure resembled that of an IBM project team.

If these visualizations are interesting for individuals, they're even more interesting for large organizations, where social networks can play a key role in the success or failure of the operation without any individual really knowing where all the networks are. Every large organization has its granfalloons and its karasses. You have your executive vice president for sales, and the 10 deputies who report to her— that's a granfalloon. The karass is the group of 10 people from 10 different divisions who come together to make sure the new product ships on time. Granfalloons are what you see in the annual report and the business plan; the karass is what actually happens on the ground, when things are going well. It's that implicit social structure that both Donath and Krebs are after, in their different ways.

Social mapping is not just for corporate sociologists. Krebs has used his software to analyze the social networks visible in book-buying patterns on Amazon.com, by tracking the "people who bought this book bought these other books" feature. The software starts with one book and follows the links out to five books connected by an Amazon customer's purchasing habits; then the software moves on to 25 books connected to the five. (If he's attempting a particularly broad study, he'll do another sweep.) Then the InFlow software creates a map showing clusters of books that are often purchased together— and by association, clusters of book buyers with shared interests. These are implicit social networks, not explicit ones; you don't necessarily know the people in your cluster, but you have a lot in common nonetheless.

Not surprisingly, social-network software is ripe for political analysis. "A few weeks ago," Krebs says, "I got into a discussion online about the state of the country politically, and some people were arguing that the country was really divided, that we were back to where we were after the 2000 election. One side can't stand the other side. And I started thinking, I wonder if you could see evidence for this in the book-reading networks." Krebs used InFlow to analyze the network of book purchases surrounding two best-selling titles, one from the left (Michael Moore's Stupid White Men) and one from the right (Ann Coulter's Slander).

"What I got were two cliques that were about as distinct as they could be. I kept looking for paths that crossed between them. Every time I tried to follow one of these paths, I'd go out three or four steps, and then boom, I'm right back in the clique." Most strikingly, the two networks intersected only on a single title: Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong. Otherwise, the two groups were engrossed in entirely different reading lists, with no common ground.

Those two cliques make it clear that tools designed to detect social networks are just as good at detecting antisocial behavior as well— for sniffing out the karasses that don't ever speak to each other or those linked by one solitary thread. For corporate managers and sociologists alike, this may prove to be the software's most useful function. It shows us the gaps in the network, the borders that no one dares cross.

RELATED WEB SITES:

Learn more about InFlow and the work of Valdis Krebs: www.orgnet.com.

Read about Danah Boyd and Jeff Potter's Social Network Fragments project at smg.media.mit.edu/ projects/SocialNetworkFragments.

[Ross Mayfield's Weblog] Too Good an article to miss Rob

The Resilience of Networks

Tue, 11 Mar 2003 15:32:49 GMT

Untapped Networks
What do Microsoft, Kevin Bacon, and cell-signaling pathways have in common? According to sociologist Duncan Watts, all three are part of the new science of networks.

Q&A with Duncan Watts
March 7, 2003 MIT Technology

On Sept 12, 100,000 people had no office to go to. One week later they did. How did they do it? The Network effect. How can Msft deal better with the security issues of their software? By stopping the vain effort to make it more secure and by dismantling it into separate parts? Sound counter intuitive? It's the network effect - great article!

Chaos Theory and the Upcoming War

Tue, 11 Mar 2003 00:56:17 GMT

Most of the conversation that I have about the war to come is all about whether Bush or any of the key players really knows what they are doing.

Did the world's leaders know that they were doing in 1914? Maybe huge "tectonic" forces are taking us to the bifurcation point?

As I went back to this article of mine, I have begun to wonder if it is possible to rationalize this type of event. Surely in 1914, the pressures for the overthrow of the Feudal system by the industrial system had reached such a point? Denied a breakout in 1848, they had reached such a head of steam by 1914 that it took a 40 year European civil war and the emergence of the great industrial power, America, to resolve.

I am feeling that we stand at the end of the industrial age and that if we do not hit the wall now, it is only a matter of time. The longer we bottle it all up the bigger the bang. We are surely in the "critical" stage of a bifurcation event. Not only is peace fragile, but so are all our institutions. So is the weather, the markets, our health. It will not take much to knock it all over. That is the essence of understanding Chaos.

Dell - The New Model

Mon, 10 Mar 2003 00:17:21 GMT

I think that we can see the new model for busines today. No inventory. Take the order and then build. Build community. Dell, Ebay, Southwest, Amazon even Walmart all shre some or all of these characteristics

Sun, 09 Mar 2003 15:01:04 GMT

Sony CEO on micro-payments and music industry. Part 1 of Tony Perkins interview with the CEO of Sony over at Always On Network.

[via Werblog]

Interesting interview overall, but I found this choice quote:

"They have to change their mindset away from selling albums, and think about selling singles over the Internet for as cheap as possible—even 20 cents or 10 cents—and encourage file-sharing so they can also get micro-payments for these files."

I've been thinking about paid content a lot lately, and the issue of micro-payments as an approach. It's certainly true that the value of digital assets (often) approaches zero, but that the available volume and cost of distribution is radically larger. Micro-payments for secured digital content seems to make sense, but hasn't worked for a variety of reasons. Would you pay 25 cents for a music file? $2 for a copy of a video? What else would you pay less than $5 or $10 for (the cost which becomes uneconomical for credit-card and other payment systems to handle because the 2% clearing fee doesn't cover their transactions costs)?

[Jeremy Allaire's Radio]

Interactive Art - A New definition

Fri, 07 Mar 2003 11:21:10 GMT

500 years ago, Pictoral art took on a new perspective from one based on positional hierarchy ( Kings were huge, Bishops big and peasants small) to one based on a two dimensional distance based hierarchy (Things close up were big and things far away were small) The reason for the shift was a change in world view or consciousness. My son James has been working on a new perspective and palette that only a computer can deliver - a holographic perspective where the art interacts with you as if it were alive and the perspective shifts as you look at the art from a different direction.

Have fun with playing with James's main page. Look for the "blob" on the circle and move it

Also good stuff showing his work for Bjork etc. If you have small children or if you are looking for your own "inner child" - look at his work for Diesel called "Delight" a Sundance Nomination.

Academic writing at its worst

Thu, 06 Mar 2003 01:10:46 GMT

Every year, the scholarly journal Philosophy and Literature, based in New Zealand, holds an international Bad Writing Contest. Its aim? To ridicule the worst excesses of academic writing. Entries must be real examples from academic books and journals. The judges recently announced their prizes for 1998. And the results are as funny as they are lamentable.

The winner was Judith Butler, a professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, whose [sic!] been described as "one of the 10 smartest people on the planet." Here's her "prize-winning" sentence, from an article published in the scholarly journal Diacritics:

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relationships in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."

Which means, I guess, that class systems are based, not just on money, but on differences in political power and social status. Since I'm not one of the 10 smartest people on the planet, I'm not sure.

Thank God they did not find some of my stuff

The Atlas of Cyber Space

Wed, 05 Mar 2003 13:26:08 GMT

Utterly Brilliant site - Weeks of Value - Shows the many ways that Cyberspace can be mapped and visualized

What is Wiki?

Wed, 05 Mar 2003 10:46:41 GMT

I am struggling to understand better. Here is a useful page. As I understand it, Wiki is a group editor with a "Darwinian" power - crap will be edited out. Am I close?

Is this what Socialtext is about?

Ross if you see this I could do with some help - Rob

Wed, 05 Mar 2003 10:34:31 GMT

A Gold Mine - See the example page on quitting smoking - Best health site I have found - Good tools plus community. There is so much ribbish about web sites - this is a gem!

Captology, persuasive technologies and web credibility.

Last couple of days almost everyone points to Persuasive Design: New Captology Book. It's not common for Jakob Nielsen to focus his Alertbox column describing work of others so positiely :)

So, the gem:

It is a rare book that defines a new discipline or fundamentally changes how we think about technology and our jobs. Dr. B.J. Fogg's new book, Sam Adkins in Learning Circuits Blog points to the follow-up reading: www.captology.org with key concepts, examples, relevant groups, collaboration suggestions, events and newsletter. Good read before you can grad the book.
Between other links this site points to Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility (these guidelines are referred in the Alertbox column; references to supporting research are included).

Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site.
Show that there's a real organization behind your site.
Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide.
Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site.
Make it easy to contact you.
Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose).
Make your site easy to use -- and useful.Update your site's content often (at least show it's been reviewed recently).
Update your site's content often (at least show it's been reviewed recently).
Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g., ads, offers).
Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem.

[Mathemagenic]

McDonalds - The New York Times Weighs In

Mon, 03 Mar 2003 10:46:36 GMT

An excellent arrticle that deals with trends in taste, risks and the frianchisee

Peter Rukavina has recommended that we look at this page

Sun, 02 Mar 2003 12:45:50 GMT

Example of how to self promote music