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Knowledge Management in Concurrent Engineering – Picked up this invite to CE2003 – Concurrent Engineering conference, July in Madeira – through my normal industrial channels, and scanned the topics / threads. It barely matters what the headline title is, the same topics expand to fill every space. Whether its automation, AI, integration, whatever the industry, the buzzwords are enterprise, distributed and knowledge – Oh, and management of course. In fact Knowledge Management is rapidly becoming the catch-all subject for everything to do with the management of the effectiveness and efficiency organisations, whatever the aims of the organisation. When I did my MBA dissertation on the “Management of Change” over 15 years ago I very quickly concluded that my subject was quite simply about “decision making” – the inputs, the processes, and the outcomes – and in any organisation of any kind, decision making is a human social event, and furthermore in any such event there is a discovery and learning aspect concerning the information involved in the outputs. This is true whether you are an individual inside the ACME Widget Company deciding whether to buy component X or to design and build component Y, or whether you are the collective governments of the “free world” deciding whether or not to give Saddam a bloody nose. So another cynical case of “it was ever thus” ? …. well actually it’s encouraging to see the human dimension being recognised more and more often … so for example

Roberta Cuel is delivering a paper on “Emergent Knowledge Management Theories and Practises”, and she is also an active member of the Knowledge Board, where I note that in a paper she co-authors, the abstract says …
[Quote] … we criticise the objectivistic approach that underlies most current systems for Knowledge Management. We show that such an approach is incompatible with the very nature of what is to be managed (i.e., knowledge), and we argue that this may partially explain why most knowledge management systems are deserted by users. We propose a different approach – called distributed knowledge management – in which subjective and social (in a word, contextual) aspects of knowledge are seriously taken into account. Finally, we present a general technological architecture in which these ideas are implemented by introducing the concept of knowledge node.[Unquote] …. and this architecture turns out to be essentially P2P. So knowledge is about peers interacting then ?

Also on Knowledge Board, Martin Vasey commenting specifically about the organisation of office space in the context of knowledge management
[Quote] Having spent several years from 1993 involved in a major new office building which invoked hot desking I can confirm that an office and a desk means far more to people than a place to sit and do their work. The effectiveness of an individual is significantly affected by who they are in proximity with. If people are not sitting with their working teams they are actually better virtual working, and having regular physical team meetings, than they are sitting with members of different teams. The hot desking project was ultimately abandoned under pressure from staff, with an immediate improvement in morale and productivity. [Unquote] So knowledge is about peers interacting then ?

Write the Web is back up and running again. Maybe worth watching.

Land of the Free – From The Guardian [via rivets].

My Pedagogic Creed. This 1897 work by John Dewey available on-line. Thanks to Evan Orensky / Guy Dickenson of Participo [via Spike].

Know Your Place – Interesting little set of images [via Seth], [via boingboing].

Alan Alda on PBS – Actually on reflection Alan Alda’s contribution to the Edge World Question Centre 2003 (previous blog) is easily the most though provoking – spot on the main event – the dangers of rationality, I said. I didn’t know Alan Alda moved in these circles – I guess one price of living this side of the pond is not experiencing PBS TV. Wow – the power of humour and art in science – too sad the message will be entirely missed by the target of the letter – Dubya, go on prove me wrong !

One quote from Alan Alda is so evocative of the quotes blogged earlier from William Barrett – about man now having the power of global destruction in his hands being a reason to seriously re-think rationality – and the fact that this perception is as old as philosophy and science itself – that I thought I’d share it with you …

Alan Alda says in 2003 [Quote] We live in a time when massive means of destruction are right here in our hands. We’re probably the first species capable of doing this much damage to our planet. We can make the birds stop singing – we can still the fish and make the insects fall from the trees like black rain. And ironically we’ve been brought here by reason, by rationality. We cannot afford to live in a culture that doesn’t use the power in its hands with the kind of rationality that produced it in the first place. The problem is that, although we’re all entitled to our beliefs, our culture increasingly holds that science is just another belief. Maybe this is because it’s easier to believe something – anything – than not to know ….. Above, all, Mr. President, I think your science advisor needs to help you help our country learn to be comfortable with uncertainty, and – as hard as this might be to believe – to put reason ahead of belief. [Unquote]

Williams Barrett said in 1958 [Quote] To be rational is not the same as to be reasonable ….. Nowadays we accept in our public life the most humanly unreasonable behaviour, provided it wears a rational mask and speaks officalese, which is the rhetoric of rationality itself. Witness the recent announcement that science has been able to perfect a “96% clean” hydrogen bomb. Of course the quantification makes the matter sound so scientific and rational that people no longer bother to ask themsleves the human meaning of the thing itself. …. the fear of what may happen to mankind in our time is a recurrent thing …. Karl Jaspers citing 4000 year old Egyptian …. Ortega y Gasset citing Horace the Latin poet …. etc. [Unquote]

You know my motivations are neither political nor global, but basic organisational decision making in business, and how lousy it seems to be getting. It was ever thus.

The Edge – World Question Centre 2003 – The latest offering from the Digerati of the Third Culture [via John Robb]. Though provoking if a little deliberately over-hyped as per the original Reality Club concept, edited by John Brockman.

Actually this collection is generally a little sad, patronising, and cloyingly patriotic, if predictable – too much “homeland security” driven – inclusive science education for Islamists (!) for example.

Some of my favourites

Denis Dutton, Department of Philosophy, Christchurch, New Zealand says …. [Quote] Today, it is much easier for scientists to receive grants if they indicate their research might uncover a serious threat or problem – economic, medical, ecological. Media fascination with bad news is partly to blame, along with the principled gloominess and nagging of organizations such as Greenpeace. But government itself has played its natural part. After all, as H.L. Mencken once remarked, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Since I’m sure you’re keen to avoid such alarmism, you’ll need an advisor who can see through the fashions of science, and understand something of their psychology. The epidemiologist who slightly overstates the conclusiveness of his study suggesting that french fries might cause cancer (in mice) or the young climatologist on the global-warming gravy train are not basically dishonest people. You too might more easily buy into some doomsday scenario, if it meant regular business-class flights to major resorts to compare computer climate models with other experts (models that you know in your heart could not possibly predict average atmospheric temperatures fifty years hence, but what hell, the food’s great). [Unquote]

Similarly, the contribution from Freman Dyson is wittily ironic.

In fact quite a few of the recommendations are about making science less “accountable” in the short term. [Quote] Science, like business, has been totally captured by the next quarter mentality, and it will require a deliberate effort to stress the long view so that our knowledge matches our predicament. [Unquote] from Kevin Kelly is typical.

Marvin Minsky is brief and to the point.

David Myers puts the peverse economics of homeland security into stark perspective.

Stuart Pimm is probably closest to the truth of the futility of a Presidential Scientific Advisor.

Nancy Etcoff is the most imaginative, in proposing a new National Institute for Humanism

Stop Press ! Susan Blackmore, she of Meme Machine fame, is the most radical, proposing legalisation of all drugs as the most valuable contribution to world science. Nice argument.

Another favourite is Alan Alda, not only witty and ironic, but spot on the main event IMHO – the dangers of rationality.

Quantum Mind 2003 – Centre for Consciousness Studies at Uni of Arizona [via Danny] [via Don Mitchell] is hosting this interesting conference in March. Also has a huge resource of on-line papers collected by David Chalmers, including Searle, Dennett, Millikan, Fodor, Block, Hilbert, Carnap, Putnam and many more.

(Currently reading Jerry Fodor’s “Psychosemantics”, prompted by all the references in Dennett and Pinker. Looking good, common sense and easy to read.)