Psybertron Asks

Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened. – Sir Winston Churchill [Quote via Foundations]

Peter Drucker Foundation. Some interesting stuff about management of non-profit organisations setting future trends of business management including this interview with Charles Handy. Some good recommended reading lists too, including …. The March of Folly by Barbara Tuchman (Ballantine, 1992), ….. the follies of humankind in bringing about …. disasters that could have been avoided [...]

Uncertainty About the Uncertainty Principle. Can’t anybody get Heisenberg’s big idea right? By Jim Holt in Slate (via Apothecary). Not even Heisenberg apparently. Strange when I read Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy I posted earlier that I was puzzled as to why he seemed to imply the “measurement disturbance” view of uncertainty in his many examples. [...]

Conspiring to Mis-inform. New page from Robot Wisdom with this quote resonating with the summary statement of my manifesto in the header above. [Quote] Defining a universal ontology will require defining explicit categories for every variety of human experience, and every step in this direction must tighten the noose around the conspiracy of self-deception.[Unquote]. My [...]

Sir Robert Winston interviewed on Breakfast BBC this morning, plugging his new TV Series (and obligatory book of the series). Several interesting and relevant tidbits. Firstly, echoing the previous post, the instinct (genetically inherited and socially conditioned) that allows us to recognise friend or foe from first impressions (fractions of seconds contact even) is an [...]

Just a little anecdote I found myself re-telling last night. Sylvia and I have a tacit understanding that allows us to agree with a nod or a wink about individuals we encounter in any service industry context – teller, check-out, waiter, barman etc. whereby we instantly know if this is an individual we would employ [...]

Ron Lusk’s K-Log. Notice that Ron’s Blog has now spawned a Klog. Looks interesting. Good link to Community and knowledge sharing from McGee’s Musings, which includes a link to Seb’s Blog. Some good sources on Chaos and Complexity in (irrational) Organisations – a recurring theme of mine. Small world.

Still reading Eco at the moment, though finding only brief moments to do so, but still looking very good and building on Nietzsche, Kant and Peirce. Obtained Steven Pinker’s latest last night – The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. If the introductory chapter is anything to go by this is right on [...]

Collaboration. Some interesting developments in various blogs collaborating. This particular idea from Seb’s blog. Suggested linking initiative to John Robb’s Kloggers Forum. Other interesting things happening at Seth’s blog and Danny’s too. Using this idea at KnoWBlog [dead link] too, though still in set-up & evaluation at present.

Knowledge Management Technology. Good IBM paper by A D Marwick (via Danny). Interesting to note that the analysis builds on Nonaka’s model of organizational knowledge creation – something which captured my imagination earlier. [I'm experiencing very slow / erratic publish / refresh from either Blogger or my ISP at the moment.]

Small World. Danny’s Blog includes a link to the on-line edition of WROX XML Meta-Data text. I actually spotted this link to Danny some months ago when at the same time spotting Daniel R-M and Ann W as co-authors, and colleagues of mine at KnoW – when this text turned up with the developers at [...]

The MS vs Mac Scam. This story, linked from Adam Curry, has been circulating in many forms, including amongst colleagues at work. Adam makes the strong point – Why are we surprised ? One commentator says – Why do we go through the motions of appearing offended ? Interesting that in the workplace the main [...]

Why Science Needs Us to be Afraid. From Cringely, quoting a letter from Australian engineer scientist Richard Worsley. [Quote] … I’ve done my time in the trenches …. therefore feel able to comment on the lot of the scientist today….. science is not separate from society …. what you are seeing is a symptom …. [...]

The Pepys Connection. Atlantic Online review (via Jorn) by Philip Hensher of “Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self” by Claire Tomalin. Interesting angle on the plethora of seemingly irrelevant first person details being key to why Pepys’ record represents a more important body of knowledge than any other 17th and 18th century objective accounts. Good advert [...]

Kurzweil’s Paradigm. Report on talk by Kurzweil by Weinberger of JOHO [Quote] Killer soundbyte from Kurzweil: The genomic information about the brain is 12 million bytes of compressed data, “smaller than Microsoft Word.” [Unquote]

I’m an American tired of American lies. Woody Harrelson (!) in The Guardian (via Gimbo). What was it I was saying about lying ?

The Classification of Links. Interesting link (via Seth) from “Hypertext Links: Whither Thou Goest, and Why” by Claire Harrison at First Monday. The ontology is a bit contrived and a bit focussed on e-biz dot.com web site domains, but (like Jorn’s simple text buttons) a step towards modelling the right bits of the semantic web [...]

Managing to find some time to read Eco’s Kant and the Platypus at last. He is a big fan of Nietzshe’s Truth and Lies and quotes ” … truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms … that subsequently gel into knowledge.” That’s just about where I’m coming from. Eco goes on to [...]

Subjects, objects, data and values. Sept 2001 (Rev 10 !!) of Robert Pirsig‘s original 1995 paper. Although I bogged a link to the Quantonics site many moons ago, I didn’t spot there was so much Pirsig related stuff here and on the MoQ “Metaphysics of Quality” site, both recently added to the side-bar. Spooky to [...]

Chrucky’s paper (yesterday’s blog) covers interesting ground, even if the purpose is a catholic religious / abortion argument about what constitutes a human person. The concept of whether “morals” are something fundamental and whether consciousness and communication shared between “persons” are really part of some social contract, existing at tacit levels to build on more [...]

Transforming Information into Knowledge. Information Glut and Knowledge Creation in Biotechnology by Richard Gayle (via Seb’s Blog). Good paper – bases view of business on Porter’s stuff (see references in my own dissertation) therefore not limited to Biotech. [Quote] As companies grow and as the amount of information generated increases, fewer people have time to [...]