Month: August 2003

West Meets East – Off to China for a week’s buisness. Will anyone believe me, that it’s purely coincidence I’m in the middle of reading Northrop’s Meeting of East and West ?!

Holochory Rules OK – The world really is just a hologram, well maybe says Scientific American. [indirectly via Apothecary questioning the Delphic Oracle]. Seems this concept is becoming more mainstream after previously being touted by the British Computer Society and its Quantum Information Processing mission statement.

Suspend disbelief ….
The world IS information.
Information IS a fundamental quantum concept.
Holochory / holography IS the most efficient representation of quantum information.

Business Blogging – A collection of links from Lilia Efimova, selling the value of K-Blogs to businesses. An excellent presentation from Nick Finck, plus this quote via John Robb [Quote] knowledge workers spend 35% of their productive time searching for information, while 40% of the corporate users report that they cannot find the information they need to do their jobs on their Intranets” (source: Working Council of CIOs). The Delphi group estimates that this costs the average 20,000 person organization $720 million a year ($120,000 all in cost per employee equates to $36,000 per employee spent searching).[Unquote]

Minority Groups, Women and Julian Baggini – Julian Baggini writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education [via NIBBS] on the Philosophy, Science and Humanities triangle as perceived on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Some interesting points actually, though personally I have trouble with Julian’s style.

More Nature v Nurture of Psychology – Shankar Vedantam writing in the Washington Post [via NIBBS] on the subject of evolutionary psychology – well sex actually, it sells newspapers apparently.

Tom Peters is still at it – The latest buzz on web innovation from Tom Peters [via Seb] [via Russell Beattie] [via Dave Weinberger].

Psychological Feedback Over The Web ? Interesting piece from Spike Hall’s blog, also picked-up by Oliver Wrede. I posted comments on both. Illustrates how important the psychological feedback aspects of knowledge communication are. Metaphorically, if you can’t see into the eyes of the people you’re interacting with, how do you detect understanding, uncertainty, emotion, intent etc. Without time to build-up a long relationship of understanding, what is the web equivalent of getting into someones head ? (Is there any chance for FOAF – Friend of a Friend – I blogged earlier that it seemed to include psychometric profiling stuff !)

Coincidentally, here’s a post from Jorn (with a link to his comp.ai SIMS proposal) about simulating the “neurotic” component of human interaction.

Monstrous Knowledge Management – This article from Ton Zijlstra’s Interdependent Thoughts blog, similar to the post I made about the KM Bandwagon devaluing core intent of KM very rapidly, which prompted comment from Dave Pollard.

Also interestingly, Ton’s next post is on the drying-up of blog-like networks. I posted on reduced blogging rates here too, but think the main point has also been made many times. It doesn’t matter which medium is used for an interactive community of contacts, there is a limit to how many (150 max some say) organised only so many ways (5 to 10 categories say) in which any one human brain can manage and participate. The media will come and go – boards, blogs, wikis, whatever, the underlying modes of human interaction do not actually change. I think Dave Weinberger’s “Small Pieces, Loosely Joined” does however have some lessons about how the sheer connectivity of web-based technologies (whichever mode is in fashion) does bring some new challenges, The one drawback I keep raising is the negative effect of speed on development of ideas. [here] [here] [here].

As Ton puts it “how to allow for digestion and consolidation between spurts of discovery” – without the fashionable mode connecting the current group of peers moving on to the next fashion too soon. Staying power required.