Wednesday, July 9, 2003|
Clickish Roadblocks: "In a recent Stanford Business Magazine article, Innovators Navigate Around Cliques-- a researcher reported that, "Contrary to common assumptions, the evidence suggests that in many cases strong social ties do not provide significant new information, so it helps not to be embedded in them". Are certain types of networks more desirable than other types? Karen: It is not the first time this idea has been out there--of course--and it's not the first time it got published either. Trust is an oppressive power and can stagnate innovation, forcing people to forego more innovative work and instead focus their efforts on "fitting in" and belonging to a network. Sometimes if you have an idea that differs from that of others or the reigning concept of the moment, you will appear as the nail that sticks out and needs to gets hammered back down. This can be painful!
But there is a dark side to trust. You can have too much of a good thing if you will. You could trust too deeply, too much, and when that happens you commune, you change your behavior, you become like them, and you lose your sense of a larger context--one might say objectivity--and then you are not going to be innovative. Real innovation occurs not in the center, but in the periphery. For innovators to survive, they must go around these clique-ish roadblocks." |
Monday, June 30, 2003|
There is a tendentious discussion going on in the RSS community about standardization; at least that is what it seems to be about to me. I don't know much about the internals of RSS so I am lost in the arguments about various versions, capabilities and adaptabilities. To be honest, I really don't want to know those kinds of details. I know I just want it to work and to deliver content to me, my students and my colleagues. I really don't care how it does it. But I do understand personal agendas and it does seem to me as I read the links I find on this issue that there is more to all of this thrashing than a desire for efficiency and standardization. My advice: fix RSS where it needs it and leave it alone where it doesn't. I want to focus on functionality. For example, is there a search engine that delivers content in RSS format as the result of a search? There probably is one and I just haven't paid attention. What I would like is for NetNewsWire (my RSS aggregator of preference) to have a search window, I type in "bagpipes" and get a listing of all the content that, say, Google would normally display in text. I want this INSIDE of an RSS reader so that I don't have to go out of it and into the browser to go to Google to type it in and wait for the hits. The same with Google graphic searches.
This is functionality that I could use each day. Does any major search engine offer this? |
Thursday, June 26, 2003
 To understand bagpipers and their bands, it should be fairly clear that one needs to understand how a bagpipe works. Basically, a set of bagpipes is really an air reservoir (the bag), a pipe to blow into to fill the reservoir (the blowpipe) and a tube with a reed in it (the chanter) connected to the air reservoir. The drill is (1) blow into the bag, (2) put sufficient pressure on the bag to (3) set the reed vibrating in the chanter. This is probably how the pipes originated. Tubes with reeds in them are very old; add a bag and the player doesn't have to take as many breaths and, therefore, should be able to play longer. The sound of the pipes comes primarily from the reed (more on reeds later); they are the focus of most of the obsessive opinions and actions in piping. Finally, the modern bagpipe has three drones (medieval bagpipes had one drone) the tuning of which is balanced to the chanter. Drones do what you expect: drone.
Everything else on the pipes is decoration. |
|
I want to write about bagpiping and bagpipe bands. It is not that these have not been written about before though most of the articles I've read seem copied from the same book. Few pipers write about piping and pipe bands and when they do their writing appears in places that other pipers will read. My audience -- if I had one -- would be the general reader who stumbled across this site and for inexplicable reasons wanted to read about piping. Indeed, there is much that is inexplicable about piping even to pipers. For example, I have piped at funerals for police or firemen and have watched rank after rank of steely-eyed men, tear up fully when the pipes start playing. Why? It is a well-known response from the general public that when hearing the pipes the hair on the back of their necks rises. Why?
I have no answers for these questions; I've had the same responses. What I do have are observations about all aspects of piping gleaned from 20+ years of playing the bagpipes. If you find this the slightest bit interesting, stay tuned (old bagpipe joke!). |
Last update: 7/9/03; 9:00:36 AM .
