Here's a nice piece about mutual aid, social networks, and the 9/11 attack.
Note that most of the positive social behavior that saved so many lives was not organized by any formal agency, much less by any command-and-control mechanism. People saved themselves. Other people converged from all over the city to help.
Cambridge University is changing its copyright policy. Formerly most creative work done at the university belonged to the creators. Now it will belong to the university. Dissenting faculty have launched a web site explaining how the new policy will harm academic freedom, faculty, students, and industry. (Thanks to Red Rock Eater.) [FOS News]
I don't like the sound of this at all. Universities behaving more and more like companies... where are we headed?
For a well baked blog, add topics. Michael DeMaria over at Network Computing wants weblogs to have topical lists of posts. He points out that the time-based format isn't the easiest thing to use when looking for specific posts on selected topics. There are obviously two ways find posts contain a specific topic:
1) Use a search engine. This is the best approach to use when people are resistant to entering metadata.
2) Use a metadata tool like LiveTopics by Matt Mower. Matt has built a tool for Radio that makes it easy for authors to enter in metadata with each post. This makes it easy to provide directories that list post by topic (through use of the outliner). Basically, Livetopics can create a simple list of topical links to posts, or a complex hierarchy of topical links. Matt has a complex hierarchy on his site.
Clearly I think Mike makes a very valid point. Weblogs make great diaries, but the by-date navigation structure sucks for locating topical information. More information about liveTopics can be had by either clicking the liveTopics see-also reference under this post, or going to the liveTopics page on the Novissio website.
What kind of learning skills do we teach most students? None. We have teachers who can’t teach teaching students who do not know how to learn. In this Darwinian process, those students best able to excel under these strange circumstances go on to get their Ph.D.s and become the next generation of teachers. Students are not taught how to take notes, how to get organized, and how to deal with the universe of data that obscures the information they actually need to understand. At some universities students have access to millions of books and everyone has access to billions of Web pages, but most have no idea how to use either effectively.
Tapping customer knowledge. Yet another example of organizations refusing to take advantage of knowledge sitting around available for them just for the effort to reach down and pick it up.
While we are spending endless hours and resources trolling the often unwilling and uninformed public for "the next big idea" relevant to our business, something very interesting is happening. Our own customers are contacting us through our Interaction Centers (via Web, phone, VoIP, email, etc.). And these customers are more eager than ever to offer us as much feedback as we want. All that our agents need to do is listen. We must capture it, analyze it and use it for business intelligence. But almost none of us do. We continue to view our Interaction Centers as a must-have expense designed to handle customer complaints.
Imagine how much faster an organization can learn if it properly exploits its customers' intelligences. Actually, smaller organizations have an edge there, because they have better ears and a more personal contact with customers. Weblog software developers are the luckiest of the lot: their tool provides a natural way for customers to support one another.
Actually the same can be said of education providers. A virtuous cycle arises when learners are able to support one another: the service grows in usefulness and demand rises.
I heard "Hello, Chicago!!!". I wonder if the signal will degrade with further syndication... Phil, next time why not give it a surrealistic spin: "Ceci n'est pas un audioblog"?
Building the underground computer railroad. Anti-globalization activists in Oakland, Calif., are recycling old machines, loading them with free software and shipping them off to Ecuador.
The Undoing of a Star ScientistThe defenders of traditional journals - esteemed publications such as Science and Nature - argue that online publications are not able to provide such rigorous screening. The widely publicized case of a scientist sending numerous - and fudged - articles to these journals undermines that claim. True, the journal editors argue, reviewers cannot be expected to spot every flaw.
But reviewers should be able to pick up on identical data submitted for separate results, unrealsitically precise data, or data that violates the laws of physics. Shouldn't they? The thing is, these articles wouldn't have lasted ten minutes on the web before someone spotted the anomalies - and saved scientists (and readers) two years of wasted work. [OLDaily]
From the article:
Schön substituted data in his published papers, supplying fake graphs that he told investigators "looked better" than the real graphs.
He also used the same graph in a dozen papers on different experiments. And his data were often far too precise, far beyond reasonable statistical probability.
Also:
Bell Labs isn't the only scientific institution to be smacked with charges of fraud recently. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announced in June that it had disciplined a researcher for fabricating the results of a published experiment.
The experimenters claimed to have discovered the world's heaviest atom, element 118. These are cases of high-publicity research where the work was given much attention. But how many unreliable articles like this, but with less extraordinary claims, pass through? How many people are out there trying hard to build on card castles?
Let me quote a scientist from this piece in New Scientist:
"There is nothing more important for a laboratory than scientific integrity. Only with such integrity will the public, which funds our work, have confidence in us."
Amen to that. And who could imagine a better integrity-enforcing, trust-generating self-correction mechanism than a thoroughly open process? Especially now that we have had the means to implement it for a long while...
Stephen Downes: Most people - I am not sure how many - do not work for large corporations. They cannot afford a learning management system that costs $100,000. So why is everybody in this room (the trade room floor) focusing on selling large LMSs and the like to corporate purchasers? What will all of this look like when the e-learning is provided for the rest of us?
The future is in the most accessible system, it would seem.
Education goes open source.. While the computer industry is seriously considering the open-source ethos as a possible way forward, it seems like other industries are slow to catch on. So in steps MIT and drops a bombshell on us all. [kuro5hin.org]
Also see this thread on the (growing, in my opinion) distinction between getting educated and getting credentials.
I agree with Ray. I don't want pingback, trackback, or refererback. I get enough feedback with comments, spam free e-mail, and links to IM. If I wanted to host a discussion group, that is what I would have instead of a weblog. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
» I can't afford to pull up the draw bridge.
PingBack may not be good for John, Ray, and others on the path well trodden. But I think there are lots of people like myself who see things differently. I want to know when someone is talking about what I am talking about and especially when they are talking about something I've written.
Right on the money, Matt. And there are many, many more people in this situation than there are people who are already very visible. So things like this are going to become successful. If UserLand doesn't provide them, others will.
Jill: Anders suggests two cards for the pack we obviously have to make for PhD students and other stuck academics, you know, like Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's "Oblique Strategies" pack of cards for artists.
For me, the point in Oblique Strategies is that understanding happens when you stop thinking. I don't know why I keep forgetting it. Getting the big picture is not something you do, it is something that happens to you. It is instantaneous and can only occur when you finally let go of all those little individual puzzle pieces you were fiercely tring to fit together.
Why is it that they always tell us to work hard, if those crucial a-ha moments only come about when we stop? Because we need the raw materials. Chance favors the prepared mind.
Paul Ginsparg has won a MacArthur Fellowship for his work on arXiv, the pioneering open-access repository for physics, mathematics, and computer science. Venerable by internet time, arXiv was founded in 1991, and is by far the most used and most useful open-access archive for any discipline. It has been indispensable not only for accelerating research in its fields, but for an exemplary "proof of concept" that has accelerated the FOS movement itself. Congratulations Paul! [FOS News]
For a long time Ginsparg has been thinking years ahead of others. While most everyone is timidly thinking of, perhaps, using the Internet instead of paper to organize peer review and making research papers available online in the exact same format as they look on paper, Ginsparg has sensibly rethought the entire research communication infrastructure.
1. Tacit agreements that are wrong have to be uncovered, described, before they can be put into question. Outsiders coming in are much better at doing this than people who've spent their lives living with them. This is why the younger folks embrace disruptive ways.
2. There are very few things that I have been able to rule out beyond all possible doubt, when I've tried. Each time, I found so many basically unproven assumptions.
1+2. Many things seem "obviously impossible" to people because they violate implicit laws that they take for granted and can't examine, much less reexamine. Thus, obviously impossible things are invariably achieved by people who didn't know they were impossible.
Rebecca Blood at the recent panel on weblogs and journalism: The thing I've seen happening that's disturbing to me is I've seen echo chambers being created in the weblog universe. People who link only to people who agree with their point of view. Back in the day when there were only 100 of us, there were real discussions going on. There are now so many weblogs out there that you see people linking only to those who share their basic world view.
Via blogging news: J. Neil Doane in an essay on why he hates blogs: "Clearly weblogs are fucking retarded as a general rule... What can be plainly seen is that most weblog authors need something to push them back into the real world from the self-centered and delusional world they have created for themselves."
Weblogs enable groupthink circles to form. This is only natural and mirrors any real-world social aggregation process. The nice thing about this is that it does not spoil the fun for those who seek intellectual diversity. As a reader, you get to choose your neighborhood on a fine-grained, per-person basis - and this is unlike any other social situation I've seen. You can make that neighborhood as diverse as you want. So you're not stuck with echo effects unless you want them.
This is perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of weblogging from a "knowledge input management" point of view. Developing skill at selecting sources, in order to make the best use of one's limited perceptual bandwidth, is quickly becoming critical for making sense of what's really happening in our complex world. Two keywords for building a good neighborhood are diversity and quality. The corresponding skills one has to cultivate are open-mindedness and critical thinking.
J. Neil's essay is really interesting; I just hope its incendiary style won't put people off and prevent them from seizing the occasion to take a good critical look at themselves. A little overall balance to the piece is provided by Chapter 6, "Acceptable Uses of Weblogs":
The 'Expert in a Field' Model - comparatively advanced/expert commentary on an area of interest.
The 'Celebrity Figure Information' Model - insight into the lives of persons of public interest.
The 'Opinion Of Worth' Model - opinions from someone of notoriety.
The Chronicle Model - chronicling the history of something that someone else might find useful.
The Author Model - a weblog that tries to legitimately attempt daily writings.
Basically it seems Doane's criteria for legitimacy are 1) either seriously attempting to contribute to culture; or 2) being a celebrity.
I'm not really at ease with the second criterion, as I am more inclined to evaluate a blog according to its content rather than its author. Personally, few of the people I find interesting are notorious (look at my blogrolling list.). Those who are are also domain experts and this the reason I read them. Even then, I need not subscribe to their blog. I know I'll hear about them when the people I read point to them.
How would you search for this?. Okay a friend of mine is writing a company memo about a senior staff member leaving. As I joke I want to suggest to her to include a Dilbert cartoon, the one where "Herb Klepford" (or some other such name) is leaving and "The Boss" thanks him for all the office supplies he's stolen over the years.
Now, assuming it was out there somewhere, how on earth would you go about searching for it? [Curiouser and curiouser!]
I'd ask everyone in my blog neighborhood if they recall it, and hope that some will repost the query. Perhaps someone has bookmaked it or sent the URL via email.
Fly by wire. Disenchanted explores how computer systems that interpret our intentions and act on our behalf gradually disconnect us from reality.
Actually, there's another, much older, filter between people and reality: culture. But nowadays cultures are clashing and competing more than ever, which results in many people thinking of upgrading their own, many people getting confused, and many others becoming more rigid.
BBC News: "Why don't we, instead of trying to sell our knowledge over the internet, just give it away." ... "There is no revenue objective for OCW, ever. It will always be free."
What a great idea. Of course, MIT has a great reputation for quality. The long-term implications must scare many, many people shitless. Also see Anders' post.
Very intelligent article on trust, a fundamental but often overlooked success factor, by John Moore over at the KnowledgeBoard (registration required). A meaty discussion follows. (It was the first time I visited this community. I'm impressed so far.)
By the way, I see blogrolling lists as explicitly defining webs of trust, and as instrumental towards furthering generalized trust and disinhibited self-expression in the weblog community.
Trust multiplies creativity[...] What makes a full connection possible is trust. I won’t share my half-formed thoughts, interests and concerns with just anybody. I need to feel confident they won’t run off with them without sharing the benefits with me, and – perhaps even more significant – I need to know that they won’t set out to ridicule or destroy them.
Trust saves energy[...]
Trust is generative If trust is established at the core of an organisation, it is likely to spread, as trust begets trust.
Two people who have established trust can create more value in their relationship as each has more access to the other’s resources. One can compensate for the other’s weaknesses and each is more free to focus on the things they are personally best at. Two people who work together well will be more able to connect with a third person, and so on. Contagious trust can build fantastic creative communities.
(Similarly, once distrust is established between two people, their energy gets channelled into defensiveness. Which reduces openness, and further diminishes trust, in what can be a vicious circle.)
So trust is clearly a jolly useful thing. More so now than ever. Little to argue about there. But what do I do about it?
Being a lazy kind of person, the energy-saving aspect is a killer feature of trust for me.
Professor Emeritus Anthony Barnett from Australian National University in Canberra, speaking on the radio program Ockham’s Razor:
So in a recent book I brushed memes off as vacuous, as explaining nothing. But I now feel that I was too hasty. Memetics is about communication, and the more we understand how we communicate, the better. Memetics can be developed further. It can do this by observing how we learn from each other. [...]
And now for something that needs emphasis but doesn’t get it. Speech makes possible an activity that’s central in all human communities, even the simplest; it’s special to the human species, it’s perfectly familiar, and it begins early, even among children as young as six. What is it? Teaching.
Deadly serious (just don't look at the button GIFs). A great manifesto.
One thing is certain: a great unbalance between the mentalities of the actors and the inner needs of the development of a particular type of society always accompanies the fall of a civilization. Although a civilization never stops proliferating new knowledge, it is as if that knowledge can never be integrated within the interior being of those who belong to this civilization. And after all, it is the human being who must be placed in the center of any civilization worthy of the name. [...]
How can a theoretical particle physicist truly dialogue with a neurophysiologist, a mathematician with a poet, a biologist with an economist, a politician with a computer programmer, beyond mouthing more or less trivial generalities? Yet, a true decision-maker must be able to dialogue with all of them at once. [...]
This process of "Babelization" cannot continue without putting our own existence into danger because a decision-maker becomes increasingly more incompetent regardless of his or her intention. Without exception, each of the major challenges of our era -- for example, the challenge of formulating an ethics adapted to the contemporary world -- require more and more compe tencies. However, it is obvious that even a group comprised of the best specialists from all the various disciplines would only be able to develop one generalized incompetence, for the simple reason that the sum total of competencies is not competence: on the technical level, the intersection between different domains of knowledge is an empty ensemble. Now, what is a decision maker, individual or collective, if not capable of taking into account all the givens of the problem being examined?
The indispensable need for bridges between the different disciplines is attested to by the emergence of pluridisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity around the middle of the 20th century.
166 members; OK, I'm impressed. Plus, they do not look pedantic (God forbid that there should be pedantic transdisciplinarists). But, alas, no forum, and no weblogs.
Mike Batt was accused of plagiarism by Edition Peters, publishers of the late Cage's work, after he put a track called "A Minute's Silence" on his latest album "Classical Graffiti," performed by pop-classics group The Planets. The piece was credited it to Batt/Cage.
Cage's ground-breaking silent composition, 4'33," was first performed half a century ago. The piano piece, divided into three movements, consists entirely of silent notes and takes four minutes 33 seconds to perform. [...]
Earlier this year, the parties attempted to prove their points by each staging a performance of their piece. The result was inconclusive.
"If a child has been murdered in your area and found buried in a shallow grave, you shouldn't have too much trouble finding people with plenty unfocussed pent-up anger."
According to the article "No URL Left Behind?: Web Scrub Raises Concerns," in Education Week, the US Department of Education is in the process of overhauling its Website. One of its main goals is to remove reports, research, statistics, etc. published before 2001, especially material that doesn't support the Bush Administration's approach to education. However, The Memory Hole will be preserving much of this material.
Michelle R. Davis reports:
A directive that went to senior staff members and the Web site office at the end of May mapped out just how that sweep would take place. Some of the problems with the site, according to the memo, include difficulties with navigation, mediocre graphics, and information that is either outdated or "does not reflect the priorities, philosophies, or goals of the present administration."
Note: This is an electronic Fahrenheit 451. Straight out of 1984.
I'm not against redesign, but I don't see why they couldn't set up a virtual data junkyard for curious people on a neighboring, separately indexed, site.
Learnin' on kuro5hin. [...] Back when I was first watching kuro5hin grow, I never imagined I'd see active discusions on what amounts to pure mathematics. It really is stupefying to think that people are spending their time interacting, understanding, and bonding, over math. And there isn't a single ad for coke to be seen. I think hollywood has a very real problem here...
The future is landing... who knows, maybe one day participating in open online communities will be more useful towards learning than attending university courses. In some areas (e.g. programming) it already is the case. So maybe schools also have a real problem (assuming they don't change fast enough).
This morning while taking a walk, I had the bright idea of writing a piece on "Household Knowledge Management", starting off with the pieces of paper that we stick to the fridge to argue that KM is far from an esoteric topic and boils down to very practical, everyday concerns.
Well, Stephen has beat me to it by a few hours. Digital Dashboards, Dirty Dishes, Messy Desk, Workspaces and Web Logs is a splendid essay on how we interface with the world's knowledge. Breadth, depth, and lots to relate to; Stephen again shows he's an astute (self-)observer. Which we all should strive to become.
Googlebombing Coble. I would ask, before you do this, how you think you might react if supporters of coble were to googlebomb Tara Sue? I'm gonna bet you'd be pretty pissed at that kind of lowbrow, fundamentally dishonest tactic.
So you would have us subvert access to Coble's website to reduce the exposure of people to a candidate you don't like? I'm guessing it's because you think the Coble-Berman bill restricts fundamental freedoms right? Ok, uhm... someone needs a smack with a clue-by-four.
Memetics experiment of the nobelest kind? You sure? Really? Seems like a pretty shitty thing to do. Not to mention ever so slightly hypocritical.
» I'm not sure I agree, but It took me a while to figure it out (I started out not agreeing, then thought about it a bit and began to agree, then came right back around again).
As I read him, Seb is really only talking about making Tara sue a top 10 hit on Coble. Not eradicating Coble from the list. In fact I think the idea of having Tara Sue appear in a search for Coble is about right, in fact everyone running against him should appear as a service to the public looking for information about whose running. I notice that Tara actually links to Coble from her page.
So, I don't really think Seb is heading for the Dark Side just yet. But we'd better keep an eye on him, he could turn at any time!
The sad thing is that what really drew me to comment on this post is not the high brow moral philosophy but the phrase "smack with a clue-by-four" for which you are to be congratulated!
Seriously, I didn't (and still don't) see how such an effort could significantly reduce the exposure of Coble, as the effect in the best case would be that a single one of the top search results would link to Coble's opponent. And I wouldn't mind at all if Coble supporters were to googlebomb Tara Sue, as this would give her name much more visibility.
I guess changing the link text to "opposes Howard Coble" (as in "the candidate who opposes Howard Coble") would have the same effect. Would it appear as fundamentally dishonest then?
Actually I'm not really that interested in the Coble-Berman bill; my underlying motivation is to make more people aware of the fact that some politicians now speak directly to voters, and to encourage such behavior.
Here's the next stage of the comment monitor: an RSS feed generator for Radio UserLand comments. Follow that link, click on the server you are using (blogs.salon.com if you are a Salon Blogs user) and make sure it gets your comments right. If it does, past the 'RSS' link into your aggregator (Radio users click here to get to yours) and see what you get.
Drop me a line to say if it's working or not. I'll move it onto www.myelin.co.nz if it does go OK.
IBM turns to social network analysis. A critical resource embedded within organizations is the knowledge that highly skilled workers bring to work on a day-to-day basis. However, aside from human resource policies targeted at the attraction, development and retention of skilled knowledge workers, there has been little effort put into systematic ways of leveraging knowledge that is embedded in people and relationships. Given the extent to which people rely on their own knowledge and the knowledge of their contacts to solve problems, this is a significant shortcoming. Social network analysis allows us to understand how a given network of people create and share knowledge, helping us to move beyond this approach. [Smart Mobs]
An important issue that would arise for me, if I were to work in an enterprise, would be to restrict my sharing to the organization. This would require a degree of corporate loyalty that I just might have some trouble with.
From a personal standpoint, it would be more useful for me to share all my knowledge publicly: it would enable me to build more relationships with outsiders, and establish a reputation that is not limited to my organization. When the time comes to move on, I'd probably be in a better position.
Mob Intelligence Put to Fonts. The concept of a the collective intelligence of a mob, sometimes called the "hive mind", is a facinating theoretical concept -- but it's every cooler when it is put to good use as a websites that allows the creation of a collaborative font. Interesting for the clever user interface if nothing else. [kuro5hin.org]
"Howard Rheingold's new book, "Smart Mobs," is coming out next November. It's a hell of a book, about the ways that technology enable groups of people to spontaneously form and coordinate in response to current events -- from SMS-enabled Filipiino demonstrations over official censorship to ubiquitous Japanese kids who photograph everything with their DoCoMo phones and post them online all the time.
Howard's site, SmartMobs.com, is a blog that talks about technology and events that show smart mobs in action." [Boing Boing Blog]
[...] And in the spirit of smart communication, the book's blog has a RSS feed!
Why has knowledge management come to prominence now. I was asked the other day why has knowledge management come to prominence now. There is a short answer that is summed up in that one word called "Internet". Connectivity, capacity and access for all make it possible to share knowledge.
But the point is - we always have and we always will. The Internet is change in means and mode, not a root cause. I think knowledge management's prominence has deeper roots in an individual's need to learn at this point in history. People are finding they need to become more reliant and old ways don't serve them any more.
We are no longer content to take what the boss gives us and seek greater choice. We are starting to see the need to learn again and that is best done in a community. Knowledge sharing/management is a community based activity. The change we are facing is nothing new. Changes of this magnitude have happened before and will happen again (Industrial revolution anyone?). It's just this time around we have a name.
Well, technologically speaking, KM could have risen several years earlier. But to get serious knowledge sharing going on, we needed a critical mass of people willing to go against the grain and able to find one another and join forces. So I believe the interest in KM owes much to the tremendous growth of the web. Not just universal access but universal involvement.
I don't know why I
haven't done this earlier. This ought to help Google bring interesting
people here. It will also give good cues to help new visitors decide if
they want to hang around or fly elsewhere.
Social software, e-learning,
interdisciplinary communication, knowledge sharing, knowledge
representation, knowledge architecture, unifying concepts, scholarly
networking, collaborative filtering, social networks, social emergence,
open hypertext systems, self-organization, collective intelligence,
online community, trust and reputation systems.
(by the way I currently show up first on searches for "knowledge representation" "online communities", although I'm willing to bet that I'm the only one who has been crazy enough to search for that. :-)
And here are some of my favorite standards, in case acronyms make more sense to you than words: XML, RSS, ENT, XFML, XTM, FOAF, and RDF.
From the article:
