Nice long piece on Dave Snowden and KM at Matts site
Includes the definition of
* Technofetishists who believe that people are just there to enter data and that everyone wants to spend their lives in virtual chat rooms.
* New age fluffy bunnies who believe that technology is the spawn of Satan and that everyone should hug at the beginning of a meeting.
From the Financial Times (subscription required) but the the money quotes are
Goldman in $3bn bail-out of fund Goldman Sachs is to use $2bn of its own money to bail out its Global Equity Opportunities hedge fund in an embarrassing admission that its highly regarded computerised funds malfunctioned last week.The investment bank has raised a further $1bn from outside investors to support the $3.6bn GEO fund, which lost about $1.5bn when computer models failed to predict market turbulence.
Bad computer model. Bad model.
To the modelers (and Goldman Sachs) and the rest of the world please read
"Fooled by Randomness">
The Black Swan
Does this mean people have to give their bonuses back ?
Autism Linked To Mirror Neuron Dysfunction
Science Daily — Seeing is doing -- at least it is when mirror neurons are working normally. But in autistic individuals, say researchers from the University of California, San Diego, the brain circuits that enable people to perceive and understand the actions of others do not behave in the usual way.
So is it becoming more common or more commonly diagnosed
Over at Deal Architect Vinnie Mirchandan comments on
The State of Analytics" We know exactly where one cow with mad-cow-disease is located among the millions and millions of cows in America, but we haven't a clue as to where thousands of Illegal immigrants and terrorists are located." - Anon
Any one know the slick analytical tools Department of Agriculture uses?
The phrase that springs to mind is "yeah right"
Reviewing Fooled by Randomness
Review of "Fooled by Randomness" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
2nd Edition
Thomson Texere
The short review. Go out and buy this book.
The longer review.
This is an interesting, eclectic and wonderful book. I showed this book to a friend of mine, one of the smartest guys I know, as I was reading it. My friend made a very interesting comment, Taleb doesn't reference the right people". Well as Taleb notes, this is not an academic tome, its a reflection that he developed over time. In fact it is difficult to categorise this book. Part popular science, part memoir, part advice on the markets, it is wholly facinating.
The central point of this book is that the world is more random than we think. "The real trouble with this world of ours , as Peter Bernstein author of 'Against the Gods:The Remarkable Story of Risk' wrote, "
I'm trying to reconcile our analog nature with our desire for order. I'll call it our digital desires, how we want things to be simple. Its described in some great books
Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order, , Being Human: the Search for Order and John L. Casti's "Searching For Certainty: What Science Can Tell Us about the future" though as Nicholas Nassim Taleb points out we are "Fooled by Randomness"http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com (review to follow)
Donald Norman points out
The world is not neat and tidy. Things not only don't always work as planned, but the notion of "plan" itself is suspect. Organizations spend a lot of time planning their future activities, but although the act of doing the planning is useful, the actual plans themselves are often obsolete even before their final printing.
and illustrates with a practical example
The United States Navy has a formal, rigid hierarchy of command and control, with two classes of workers -- enlisted crew and officers -- and a rigid layer of formal rank and assignment. There are extensive procedures for all tasks. Yet in their work habits, especially in critical operations, rank seems to be ignored and crew members frequently question the actions. Sometimes they even debate the appropriate action to be taken. The crew, moreover, is always changing. There are always new people who have not learned the ship's procedures, and even the veterans often don't have more than two or three year's experience with the ship: the Navy has a policy of rotating assignment. Sounds horrible, doesn't it? Isn't the military supposed to be the model of order and structure? But wait. Look at the outcomes: the crew functions safely and expertly in dangerous, high-stress conditions. What is happening here?
So why does drives for process efficiency come from. If Druckers idea that it ain't the people that are broken its the process is true then we improve the process, but processes are limited without smart people. So how do we build adaptable processes and systems relying on smart systems. In our drive to build better processes have we missed much of the point?
Plato on the dangers of writing
Writing (Plato, Phaedrus, 360 B.C.: Thamos to Theuth, god of inventions)
... this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
Plato was right to a degree. Experience is important, and so is thoughful reflection on that experience. Think of how the term "Academic" is used to disparage people without practical experience. And these tend to be a group who who write a lot about their subject, almost acting as exemplars of Platos criticisms (and possibly postmodernism is this taken to the worst level. On the whole the benefits of writing outweight the costs. In relation to this Andy Clark has an interesting paper called "Magic Words" where he talks about some of the benefits of extending the mind through language and text, describing how the
"use of words and texts may usefully be seen as computationally complementary to the more primitive and biologically basic kinds of pattern-completing abilities that characterize natural cognition."
The criticisms that Plato makes enable us to use the mind in new ways. Imagine what would happen if we had to consign everything to memory. Thinking about this I wonder if this in what ways will Google change us?
As noted by Dave Snowden via the BBC on Googles purchase of YouTube
"The YouTube team has built an exciting and powerful media platform that complements Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said in a statement.
Dave's point and an excellent one is
Information needs context, and that can only safely be provided by a variety of perspectives and interpretation. What you find when you search is not value neutral; it defines what you know and pay attention to.
He notes that
Nick Carr has a great blog which starts off "It's funny how a set of instructions - an algorithm - written by people can come to be granted, by those same people, a superhuman authority." He has discovered that searching for Marin Luther King gets you to a white supremacist group, and that no one in Google seems worried about it.
And thats just one issue with strpping out context.
When you attempt to strip out context you lose the essence of the information. And when you're attempting to organise all the worlds information you're invariably going to strip out context. What was it Plato said again...
; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality
I don't think that genie's like Google could (or should) be put back into their bottles. What we do need to do is to get smart with how we use them and not cede control of too much information to a single company. I think the most interesting question may be how will our tools shape us, as invariably they do, and we haven't seemed to consider this to any degree.
Just reading "Confused of Calcutta" which comes recommended by the irrepressible Rageboy.
On the site JP posts on
Four Pillars: Thinking about enterprise architecture
* 1. An enterprise IT department is a window into the soul of the enterprise itself.
* 2. An enterprise’s IT strategy is a reflection of its business strategy.
* 3. An enterprise’s IT architecture is a reflection of its organisation structure.
* 4. Centralisation versus decentralisation, global versus regional, many-layered versus not-many-layered, these are all red herrings. What matters is High Cohesion and Loose Coupling, with its consequent empowerment, lack of duplication and consistency.
* 5. These statements hold true regardless of the perceived quality of the organisation or of its IT department, in-house or outsourced. You cannot game the system.
JP's laws to me are a restatement of Conways law
"CONWAYS LAW [1968] "organizations which [sic] design systems...are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."
THis requires a longer and more detailed post but I'd suggest two links
*The original statement of Conway's Law
How Do Committees Invent?
by Melvin E. Conway
* And the very explicit drawing of the implications for enterprise architecture in
Conway's Law Revisited: Successfully Aligning Enterprise Architecture
Date: May 1, 2002 By David Dikel, David Kane. Article is provided courtesy of Prentice Hall PTR.
I've seen this referenced a few places recently, most notably by Donald Norman
Thanks to Nicholas Carr I found a New York Times article by Kevin Kelly
Its an interesting article. Nicholas Carr has some issues with it. On my first read I think I read it differently. One point caught my eye.
Second, the universal library will deepen our grasp of history, as every original document in the course of civilization is scanned and cross-linked. Third, the universal library of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority. If you can truly incorporate all texts — past and present, multilingual — on a particular subject, then you can have a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do know and don't know. The white spaces of our collective ignorance are highlighted, while the golden peaks of our knowledge are drawn with completeness. This degree of authority is only rarely achieved in scholarship today, but it will become routine.
To take the first point first. How will the availability of documents without historians and scholarship and hard work deepen our grasp of history?
On the second point (Kellys third) how the hell is that going to happen? A degree of authority that is generated by machines, based on what is fed to it by people in the past. How will that generate future authority? I don't get it. Its too much AI (Artificial Intelligence) like, and that hasn't worked too well so far. I still think that its going to take hard work to get to this kind of authority, otherwise it is just superficial stuff. The worst kind of book learning.