Category: Uncategorized

Spiral Model for Knowledge Acquisition. “Spiral” metaphor contrasted with “Waterfall” metaphor. Iterative vs Sequential. Right first time is wrong (sets wrong expectation), lots of parallel working and recycle is better. (IBM “Rational” approach for managing S/W development uses this concept if not the same metaphor.) No brainer, common sense. [Here in a psychology context too.] [In knowledge context it comes from Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995]
[Interesting search hit on my blog.]

Robot Wisdom Back On-Line. Hooray … Jorn still does not yet seem to be posting in public anywhere, but his material (home pages and blog) are all back on line in the state they were on 1st October 2003.

Great news given that I am slowly getting to grips with James Joyce’s Ulysses, is that Jorn’s on-line copy annotated with his comprehensive schemata is there to be used. (Oh no, and not only the Nietzsche links, but also McLuhan links as well from Finnegans Wake. So much to research. [Quote] Marshall McLuhan looked up to Joyce as a writer and artist of encyclopedic wisdom and eloquence unparalleled in our time [Unquote, Eric McLuhan]) Jorn is the reason I’m reading James Joyce. He has such a wealth of material self-penned and gathered from the four corners of the global physical and virtual libraries, that it is quite literally staggering. Awesome in its own right. Remembering where Jorn was coming from in AI, he sees Joyce in Ulysses and Finegans Wake (and the one year research period between) on a mission to create the inventory of life, the universe and everything, as described here [Quote] The general hypothesis is this: Various branches of scholarship have been searching for centuries for a universal categorization of human experience— Aristotle, Spinoza, Vico, Roget, Dewey, Polti, and the Yahoo Web index … and now especially the AI (artificial intelligence) community desperately need a concise inventory of psychological themes: [Unquote.]

As well as Dr. James Willis’ Scylla and Charybdis metaphor for the perils of plotting a course between scientific fundamentalism and unscientific irrationality, I made the link to both Dave Snowden’s and Mark Maxwell’s Edge of Chaos.

Ready, Fire, Aim. Picked up on this Tom Peters’ adage several times before as the antidote to the rational ready, aim, fire approach to planning. This link is the conlcuding chapter of this Rand Organisation paper “Seeking Nontraditional Approaches to Collaborating and Partnering with Industry” aimed at US Army business needs.

Liked this [Quote] The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. [Unquote] ? Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future.

Circadian Shift has thousands of interesting links – memetics is a common theme.
[Here] [Info Overload]

Science Blog Beta looks an interesting start too.

When More Means Less. David Walker’s Analysis in today’s Grauniad. On the theme of not being conned by measuring only the things that are easy to count, and the value of managing more subjective measures. Specifically in relation to evaluating value-for-money in civil service context, but part of that general subject again.

Re-usable “Paper”. Blogged earlier link. Didn’t spot this “social life of paper” link from Malcolm Gladwell before though [Stuart’s Henshall’s previous link.] This is an interesting subject if you’re in an industry where the take-up of electronic “devices” seems to be lagging behind possibilities. People are very attached to the paper paradigm, for very good reasons. Makes you think about the way people really interact with information, and what information really means to them.

Stuart is gathering quite a collection of thoughts and links on this subject.

Extra-Specially Weird. Often browse Rivets for amusement (and general education) around some of the more strange (and wonderful) things the web throws up, without straying into the downright perverted or pornographic, often without any particular reason to link to anything on-topic as far as my blog is concerned, but Lindsay Marshall’s own caption sums up this extra-specially weird weirdo.

Data as Narrative. Post from Gary Murphy on advogato referreing to David Gelernter’s New York Times piece. Can’t see the original piece from here (need my NYT account details !), but it describes “scopeware“.

Basic point is organising (and persisting) data sets (files) accoring to things like mime-types or source technology types, is much less relevant than the “narrative” in which the information content is involved. The narrative sequence provides much better context for the “semantic intent” and purpose of the information. Too true.