Month: February 2004

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.

Relevance vs Orthodoxy. A bit of a whinge by someone who didn’t get the job at Harvard Business School, [via Seb Paquet], but that same subject again ….

Orthodoxy – classical reasoning, logical positivism – just doesn’t cut the mustard in real human / social / organisational / business life. In fact it’s almost irrelevant unless you’re an accountant. Yes, irrelevant. Good spot Seb.

The article is worth a further read.

Nietzsche and Joyce. This seems to answer my earlier puzzlement about how Joyce had read and been influenced by Nietzsche before Ulysses. No doubt about it.