Seb's Open Research
|
Saturday, November 29, 2003
|
|
| |
CIOs wake up and smell the coffee
John Patrick on Blogs. Insightful. Eloquent. The guy oozes common sense. Heck, I'm almost quoting the whole interview.
I think a lot of times people see something come along and they say,
"What's the big deal? We had that in 1972,"—like knowledge management
or artificial intelligence. When instant messaging started, a lot of
people said, "oh, this is no biggie. We had this on the mainframe in
the 1960s." It's true—we did. But what makes IM different is that now
we have the Internet—the widespread sharing of information. That allows
for collaboration, it allows for a global effort. So it spawns many
more ideas, it allows a new thought to take off like wildfire.
[...] Blogs have the power to introduce new voices into the mix, which will
enrich the quality of information available. Voices not necessarily
heard before, thanks to limitations of money, access or
hierarchy—you're not the CEO, you're just a guy with a big idea—now you
can bridge those gaps. Say you're a CIO who wants to develop some
thought leadership around the need to rethink the company's approach to
mobile workforce strategies. Blogs can give you access to the
grassroots and to your peers that you might not otherwise have had.
[...] There are millions of people who are experts at certain things, have a
point of view and are good communicators. They are not journalists in
the traditional sense, but they will create large amounts of
information that will be syndicated around the world. People will no
longer just do a Google search to find information on a topic. Instead,
they will search the blogsphere to find out what those in the know are
currently thinking and writing on a topic.
[...] I suspect that blogging is already happening, in most major companies
today, even though the CIO may not have ever heard of it. Run a search
across the intranet and look for XML blog files. You'll find them.
[...] We all know somebody in our organization who knows everything that's
going on. "Just ask Sally. She'll know." There's always a Sally, and
those are the people who become the bloggers.
(via Internet Time Blog)
 2:19:37 PM
|
|
Take care
Self-care flowcharts.
Straightforward, hyperlinked and handy, though I wish more branches
ended with something other than "see a doctor". An example: cough. Omni says:
These patient oriented flowcharts (also known as decision trees) are
designed for self-diagnosis and self-care. Taken from "The AAFP
Family
Health & Medical Guide", published by the American Academy of
Family Physicians and Word Publishing, these flow charts provide easy
to follow advice on when to consult a doctor. Presently there are 45
flowcharts covering a variety of health topics.
12:49:37 PM
|
|
|
|
|
Friday, November 28, 2003
|
|
|
|
Thursday, November 27, 2003
|
|
| |
Thinking like an outsider
The two paragraphs I found most interesting in danah's profile in the New York Times actually relate to her life before she became a researcher:
Ms. Boyd grew in up in Lancaster, Pa., and was introduced to
far-flung virtual communities in the early 1990's by her younger
brother. Soon afterward, their mother wisely signed up for two
Compuserve accounts. "It gave me an opportunity to talk to people who
were far more like me than anybody I knew in real life," Ms. Boyd said.
She
said she comes to her research through experiences as a perpetual
outsider. "I didn't grow up in an elite community," she said. "I was
the daughter of a single mother. I grew up queer in a rural
environment. I grew up as a woman in computer science. I grew up
constantly negotiating these spaces where they didn't exactly welcome
me with open arms."
The outsider mindset is part of my thinking toolbox as well, and I
think that being able to take the point of view of outsiders is crucial
to gaining an understanding of disruptive innovations before most
people do. For instance, record company executives were not used to
thinking about, and identifying with, people who couldn't afford their
product. (This is a problem with executives at large companies in
general, though there are exceptions.) Poor college students did, and
that's a big part of why they came up with schemes for electronic music
distribution years before the established players.
Now, there are divides everywhere - academia, business, art, you name
it - separating insiders from outsiders. Though the experiences of being outside
of the inner circles are all different, I surmise that there is a
commonality between those experiences. So outsiders might understand
one another more easily, even if they aren't outside the same circles.
By thinking and conversing in general terms they could exchange tips on
how to break inside, or route around, the inner group in order to reach
their respective goals.
Which brings me to the following question. Can there arise a community
of outsiders-in-the-general-sense? If so, who's an outsider then?
(I'm not sure that was clear. Does anyone understand what I'm trying to say?)
(Writing this reminded me of a book Maureen Baehr once recommended to me, Colin Wilson's The Outsider - anybody read it?)
10:38:37 AM
|
|
|
|
|
Wednesday, November 26, 2003
|
|
| |
'Google' is a transitive verb
Valdis Krebs: What's Your Google Number.
Interesting piece on creative uses of Google - for reputation
assessment, reference checking, etc. Google can tell a lot about you,
including things you may not be aware of yourself! The best part of the
article is under the heading "Associations".
Several months back I had two very similar inquiries about mapping
supply networks. Putting each inquirer through Google, I found
information about them individually. But putting both of them together
through Google – “John Smith” AND “Jane Doe”[not their real names] – I
found that they worked at the same large consulting firm, and that they
had co-authored a white paper a while back. They knew each other, but
had lost contact since both left the New York office over 5 years ago.
Now they were working across the Atlantic from each other. How
surprised they both were when I mentioned they should call each other
about supply networks.
(via Stowe)
2:06:39 PM
|
|
The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick
Nice Wired article on Philip K. Dick
that highlights how, nearly half a century ago, he explored many of the ideas
surrounding reality manufacturing and hacking that are becoming quite
popular these days. It quotes his essay "How to Build a Universe That
Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" that I blogged about last month.
At
a time when most 20th-century science fiction writers seem hopelessly
dated, Dick gives us a vision of the future that captures the feel of
our time. He didn't really care about robots or space travel, though
they sometimes turn up in his stories. He wrote about ordinary Joes
caught in a web of corporate domination and ubiquitous electronic
media, of memory implants and mood dispensers and counterfeit worlds.
This strikes a nerve. "People cannot put their finger anymore on what
is real and what is not real," observes Paul Verhoeven, the one-time
Dutch mathematician who directed Total Recall. "What we find in Dick is
an absence of truth and an ambiguous interpretation of reality. Dreams
that turn out to be reality, reality that turns out to be a dream. This
can only sell when people recognize it, and they can only recognize it
when they see it in their own lives."
The piece ends with Dick's metaphysics in capsule form. I like.
11:44:33 AM
|
|
Feedrolling
If you're reading this in a browser (as about one-third of my readers
appear to do), you might have noticed that I'm now syndicating content
from the Many-to-Many weblog on social software in the right sidebar. As time goes by I'm probably going to rotate between blogs I like.
9:28:04 AM
|
|
Better than coffee
Nowadays I often begin the day by loading up Alf Eaton's playlist (Real, WinAmp).
8 tracks' worth of undiscovered, diverse musical goodness, hand-picked
by someone with a similar taste in music to mine, streamed directly to
my headphones free of charge and without any waiting. What could put me
in a better mood?
8:32:51 AM
|
|
|
|
|
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
|
|
| |
"Life is not the way it's supposed to be. It's the way you cope with it that makes the difference."
Virginia Satir (1916-1988)
9:15:35 PM
|
|
Social software collectibles
Ross Mayfield offers a Social Software Reader. Thanks for putting this together, Ross!
Assembling these kinds of lists is a low-cost way of adding value (and
providing extra exposure) to older pieces of writing. I should do that
too at some point.
Here are a few of my favorite picks in Ross's list:
4:26:51 PM
|
|
Ming's conflicts over open source
Flemming writes:
I've written a
lot of code, a lot of software, some of which has been very useful to
others. I've written chat rooms, bulletin boards, calendars, task
managers, weblogs, member databases, mailing list managers, website
authoring programs, shopping carts, content managers, image
manipulation, DNS administration, server monitoring, and probably much
more I'm forgetting.
But I've never made a program open source. [...]
I'm considering changing my mind,
and picking one of my projects as something I can make limited and
solid enough that I can actually export it to other people. [...]
Ming, by all means please do! Based on what I've seen of your impressive New Civilization Network architecture, I think the world could benefit a lot from your open-sourcing the fruit of your efforts.
11:47:01 AM
|
|
another interesting lowercase-loving researcher
 first there was danah, and today on my radar (by way of éric) comes u of t's monica m.c. shraefel, who's been focusing on "how to make web-based and (more recently) non-web-based hypermedia systems more tunable for user exploration."
In particular, mSPACE
("architecture and interaction design to support
exploration of information spaces for the domain-naive user.") seems ambitious and
interesting.
11:37:15 AM
|
|
Jan Michl: Design as redesign
Steve (who runs a great blog for divergent thinkers, by the way) points to an interesting paper.
A
meandering essay that visits semantics, Darwinism and aesthetics,
professor at the Oslo School of Architecture Jan Michl argues for a
perspective on design that is less solitary and myopic and more
cooperative and historical. In other words, redesign.
The
concept of redesign has the advantage that it actually contains the
word design, i.e. the concept retains the individual creator dimension
of the word design while at the same time, through the prefix re-,
emphasising that the individual creative process has the character of
step-by-step changes in, improvements on, and new combinations of
solutions that already exist. In this way, the concept reminds us that
every complex product that is improved embraces a large number of
clever solutions that earlier designers have contributed, and which the
latest designer freely adopts, makes into her own, and builds on. In
other words, the concept of redesign underlines the fact that – both as
process and product – design always contains a collective, cooperative
and cumulative dimension.
Yup, we're not really doing this all by ourselves. When a design
becomes really successful, often the last person in the lineage is
celebrated while
the predecessors are almost forgotten. Of course, similar things also occur in
academia.
I really liked the quotes at the beginning of the essay, especially this one:
“ if anybody were to start where Adam started, he would not get further than Adam did…”
- Karl Popper, philosopher, 1979
9:22:58 AM
|
|
A wiki system that is easy to install
Ed laments the absence of wikis that are easy to install and use. Well, I can say that Clifford Adams' UseModWiki
is easy enough to install that even I was able to do it, multiple times
even. It reached version 1.0 this fall, and now supports RSS feeds out
of the box. Freely distributed under the GPL license. Download here.
9:03:27 AM
|
|
Drawing the line
Somehow lives I know are worth more than lives I don't know.
I've a feeling that in that lies the root of a lot of what ails the world.
8:40:57 AM
|
|
Feed pounding and bandwidth issues
This worries the RSS geek in me a little bit. Gary writes about "the great sucking sound RSS can make when set out into the real world" in The End of RSS (304 link mine):
These can't be 30,000 unique requests, so why don't they all
just register 304 codes telling them I haven't posted a new story to
that site in days? Isn't that what RSS protocol is all about?
8:33:00 AM
|
|
|
|
|
Monday, November 24, 2003
|
|
| |
David Brin.
"It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power
attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other
things than power." [Quotes of the Day]
4:06:29 PM
|
|
From users to programmers
 A few months ago Steven Garrity's blog was host to an interesting conversation on the gap between user and programmer.
I hope the computer environments of the future will enable ordinary
people to just "get things done" without encountering steep learning
curves, even when that involves choregraphing
the work of several applications. The growing adoption of scripting languages and availability of open interfaces
to services suggests things might indeed be evolving in that direction.
Reading through the discussion reminded me of Python inventor Guido van Rossum's currently-limboed
Computer Programming for Everybody initiative, and of Tomasso Toffoli's vision of the knowledge home. Alan Kay comes to mind, too.
The information objects we are manipulating, while they are meaningful in and of themselves, ought to become things that
have a more powerful and easily learnable interface than "view/save". We're
stuck with trinkets that are nice to look at, but hard to combine in
new ways. We need tinkertoys and Mindstorms. In the information routing arena, this is the kind of direction I was getting at with that feed algebra idea.
3:51:47 PM
|
|
DIY cortical hacking
Wired: The Key to Genius.
A few interesting ideas in there, though I'd put a quotation mark after
that title... part of the secret to genius seems to be about overriding
or bypassing the usual specialization that occurs in areas of the brain.
Miller
formulated a provocative hypothesis to explain the fact that as some
[frontotemporal dementia] patients get worse, they also get better. He posited that the
dementia does not create artistic powers in these patients, it uncovers
them. The disorder switches off inhibitory signals from the left
temporal lobes, enabling suppressed talents in the right hemisphere to
flourish.
This
ability of the brain to heal itself and compensate for loss of function
is called neuroplasticity. But the brain's ability to redraw its own
cortical maps on the fly is not limited to routing around damage.
In
Germany, a young man named Rüdiger Gamm, who is not autistic and did
poorly at math in school, has trained himself to divide prime numbers
to the 60th decimal point, calculate fifth roots, and raise numbers to
the ninth power in his head - skills previously thought to be the lofty
province of math geniuses and savants like the calculating twins.
People
typically use short-term memory to solve math problems, but PET scans
show that Gamm has recruited areas of his long-term episodic memory -
the neurological archive of his life story - to perform his lightning
calculations. Brian Butterworth of the Institute for Cognitive
Neuroscience in London compares what Gamm is doing to the way
"computers extend the capacity of RAM by using swap space on the hard
drive to create a larger 'virtual memory.'"
A
decade ago, this kind of DIY cortical hacking would have been strictly
Philip K. Dick territory, but neuroscientists are discovering that the
processing centers in our heads swap resources all the time.
When
most people listen to a piece of music, they track melody with the
right hemisphere and rhythm with the left. But among professional
musicians, both are tracked with the left, which handles behaviors that
have become routine. MRI scans show that skilled violinists have
enlarged areas of tissue in the left planum temporale, an auditory
crossroads that serves both music and language.
[...]
Sacks
maintains a personal shrine to creative intelligence over his desk in
Greenwich Village. There, his friends smile from a collection of
photographs: the chemists Roald Hoffman and Linus Pauling, the
virologist D. Carleton Gajdusek, the playwright Jonathan Miller, the
neuroscientist Vernon Mountcastle, and a 19-year-old wunderkind, Nick
Younes, whom Sacks calls Big Nick.
"These
people are very unlike savants," he explains. "They're people of great
all-around g. One feels it strongly in the size of someone's universe,
its depth and spaciousness, in their intellectual agility, and in the
power of generalizing, which seems to cross all the particular
modalities."
Related earlier post of mine: Latent inhibition and creativity.
11:01:12 AM
|
|
|
|
Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
4/22/2006; 12:13:28 PM.
This theme is based on the SoundWaves
(blue) Manila theme. |
|
|
I am thrilled to report that learning objects metadatadude