Author: Psybertron

I have a pretty evident agenda here that objectifying (and measuring in order to manage) the wrong things, or too narrow a slate of things, is counter-productive: Partly because objectifying or reifying the issue may be misguided in itself, and partly because “governance” is at least a two-way, if not more complex, system-behavioural game anyway, where turning measures into targets generally manifests predictably-unintended, unpredictably-undesirable consequences.

Here Part 1 and Part 2 of a paper by Ron Baker of VeraSage Institute (via LinkedIn). Not yet digested fully, but seems to cover some good ground – starting with counting as obsession and a reference to Saint-Exupery. Also the fact that Peter Drucker was definitely NOT the source of the “if you can’t measure, you can’t manage” maxim, if anything quoting it to make the opposite point – noted here before. (Interesting to see Lord Kelvin as the probable source – originally in a distinctly scientific knowledge context.) Part 2 starts with Milton Friedman’s opening gambit “How do you know?” – sound familiar? Useful reference resource.

Interesting piece in CMS Wire review a Forrester Research paper. I’m sure CMIS Building Blocks with REST API’s must be pretty close to what we’re doing with manageable reference fragments to define information involved at business interface transactions. (Thanks to Margaret Warren on Facebook also LinkedData, EmbeddedMetaData and ImageSnippets in there.)

Steven Pinker in New Republic writing Science Is Not Your Enemy – An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians – for an intellectual truce. (Posted by BHA on Facebook)

Not quite sure why particularly the neglected, embattled and tenure-less, but a plea for a truce between science and humanities. Good to add Pinker to Al Khalili amongst the scientists recognising that ongoing war is not the way forward. Science has no monopoly on intellectual rationality so it, or rather it’s more righteous scientistic humanists, really should stop attacking the humanities if they don’t want to be seen as the enemy.

The Catch-22 is that because scientistic rationality holds sway politically, socially and culturally, the humanities are indeed embattled when it comes the cycles of funding and resources. The Mexican stand-off does require the party holding the upper hand to fold first, but it takes two in any event. Pinker is of course making the case for the scientistic side only, so …

TO SIMPLIFY IS NOT TO BE SIMPLISTIC.

Diagnoses of the malaise of the humanities rightly point to anti-intellectual trends in our culture and to the commercialization of our universities. But an honest appraisal would have to acknowledge that some of the damage is self-inflicted. The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of post-modernism, with its defiant obscurantism, dogmatic relativism, and suffocating political correctness.

If anything is naïve and simplistic, it is the conviction that the legacy silos of academia should be fortified and that we should be forever content with current ways of making sense of the world. Surely our conceptions of politics, culture, and morality have much to learn from our best understanding of the physical universe and of our make-up as a species.

But it’s not simply commercialisation and anti-intellectual trends is it Mr Pinker? That is being simplistic. It’s a reaction to an intellectualism based on scientistic standards alone. It’s a reaction to scientistic commercialism based on objective “outcomes”. Sure there were excesses in post-modernism and the like, their excesses were probably making a point, and all schools have their extremists somewhere along the line. The politically correct suffocation is if anything caused by the scientistic standards in policy-making, which exclude all non-objective standards of “correctness”.

Surely our conceptions of science and rationality have much to learn from our humanistic values. It takes two to truce.

[Post Note : Link to John Brock’s blog – Cracking the Enigma – and his post on Bronowski in response to the Pinker post comments on Twitter. One to follow – majoring on Autism – another topic here.]

It’s difficult enough trying to find balanced scepticism when it comes to anthropogenic global warming claims, but this stuff takes the biscuit. [via email from someone who should know better]

Contrails from aircraft vapour are indeed an indication that air travel dumps a lot of low grade heat, CO2 and water vapour into our atmospheric ecosystem – something we should aim to reduce by any reasonable considerations. The idea that there is some concerted project to deliberately test and introduce additional crap into that ecosystem to globally engineer weather systems is kooky. Sure there have been, and no doubt continue to be, tests and local uses to seed rain clouds in critical areas, lesser of evils, but as a global conspiracy – do me a favour.

And as I said here, I’m not an anthropogenic global warming (AGW) sceptic, I’m sceptical about objective-intentional scientific (and political) claims about AGW. Funnily enough it was this blog What’s Up With That that drew my attention via another rant from PZ Myers about this post on the new editor of Science magazine. A pox on both their houses, I say. So much middle-ground being overlooked when people take sides. Come in Zizek.

Very similar Application UI design approach I think I saw mentioned previously with Angry Birds of all things. (Hat tip to BifRiv – The article acknowledges the approach in games – discovering more plays as you progress through levels of successful use.)

Your UI design must start simple with lots of help for new users using basic new functions – you and your product are both new to its use – but of course the potential power is in ever more expert users finding more efficient and creative use of your product. So your product UI needs to have this layered user approach built in, evolving as the individual user’s use evolves.

Another interesting post from Sam. (My James Willis Scylla and Charybdis ref.)

Ideas evolve, species are created only with hindsight, everyone’s thoughts are woven from others. Original creation is no exception. Good piece on Oliver Sacks from Brain Pickings – Maria Popover again.

Further to the post on the Korean 777 flown into the ground at SFO, here an A380 landing from the cockpit.

Also at SFO, an inaugural Lufthansa landing, this time with two experienced pilots clearly working as a team, as opposed to the “training” situation in the 777 case. (Hat-tip to Smiffy on FB, as Nick commented, that 777 CFIT really should not be possible.) I say “training” but really no different. Experienced pilots in both cases, and in fact in the Lufthansa case it was the first A380 landing at SFO for both pilots, not just one of them.

Noticeable in this A380 example that the pilot audibly / visibly / consciously / physically takes over manual control of the throttles (@5.05) a couple of minutes before the autopilot is actually disengaged (unlike the 777 case where the pilot appears to involuntarily / unconsciously / erroneously override the auto-throttle simply by resting his hand on the throttles).

Lots of other interesting points: Self-checking when hearing unexpected and potentially confusing messages – like the 28L ILS confusion over the instruction to approach 28R (some mention of that in the 777 event too?), like the two aircraft cleared for take-off, and seen taking-off together on 10L and R crossing their runway; the ATC planning courses for approaching aircraft to avoid turbulent wakes of larger aircraft; the “sporty performance” crack as they key in (and the aircraft follows) the ATC instructions to twist and turn onto the approach glide-path; the pilots talking to each other in German whilst communicating in ATC English; the SFO tower taking over from NorCal ATC, and welcoming them in German; the pilots responding in English, and cracking a joke about Monday being wash-day in Germany, as the airport lays on the fire-hose welcome for their inaugural landing; using the outboard engine to swing the beast into its parking bay. Lots of points for the plane-spotting geek.

Fills you with confidence as an air-traveller that the magic choreography generally does work, when the systems allow professionals to do their jobs – you feel they were in command and would know what to do, and be able to do it,  if the unexpected arose.

[Post Note – thanks to Smiffy again – here another 777 coming in too low at SFO, picked-up by ATC / Tower. Seems the ongoing ILS maintenance on 28L is indeed causing some confusion for those approaching 28L and 28R – also mentioned in both the A380 and the 777 CFIT cases – but as the commenters note, this is no excuse for the inability of the aircraft, pilots and systems to fly safely. Those in control simply need to be aware which systems are or are not in play.]

Interesting post from Dave Pollard (hat tip to Euan Semple) on the illusory nature of all those coherent structures that enable life, the universe and everything to tick along as if “business as usual”.

Those coherent structures cover everything from politico-economic structures of mutual governance, down to apparently fundamental physical and cosmological models – and necessarily all the complex, compound, global eco-systems of systems in between. The point is that such things are not (identical with) what they appear, but as of now, they’re the best we have. Denying or rejecting them as not being “real” isn’t necessarily better – nihilist or anarchist – than evolving them to something better.

Obviously however, being too attached to the appearance of coherence as reality is a barrier to that evolution, so it’s healthy to spread the understanding.

“Abstraction is the enemy of clarity” from the Guardian on euphemistic management language hat tip to Johnny Moore, via FB … and modelling abstraction, taken to the generic limit … hat tip to Margaret Warren also on FB, from Geek and Poke:

The Guardian piece is actually pretty good, balanced. Metaphors do die, the best ones always do eventually, but they remain valuable if the visual image remains meaningful. That’s quite different from such metaphors becoming clichés through frequent use in ever less relevant circumstances, or part of an abstraction to say less specifically about the particular circumstance – the latter often associated with the accurate (generically true) but less specifically helpful, often politically-correct, bet-hedging, minimum-committal, euphemistic use of management terminology.

The title is neat too. “The figure of speech isn’t dead.” A figure of speech Quine.