Year: 2010

Blimbonista

I usually avoid politically partisan material, but this caught my eye.

In the whole “Wikileaks” saga recently, I several times made the points that publication of otherwise secret material was never a “right”, and that responsible journalism was always needed in the loop in a working democracy, as opposed to anarchic free-for-all slanging match politics of governance. The immediacy of web social media possibilities does not change that basic need.

Thanks to Dave Snowden for the anti-Fox-News rant on the same point above, and for several other excellent recent posts.[ Moral Purpose. ][ The Last Thing. ][ The Penultimate Thing. ]

Great Defending

In the absence of easy access to a game involving any club we actively support, we made the short trip to The Stadium of Light to see Sunderland versus Premiership underdogs Blackpool on the bank holiday. Ian Holloway’s management ethic is easy to like, and the Tangerines are living a dream, a bubble they hope will never burst, and of course Sunderland have been having a great season so far, particularly invincible at home.

Great prospect. And the best game we’ve seen in a long time. (Since Leeds won at Boro, or Reading won at Anfield.) End to end passing and running from both teams for all but 15 mins towards the end of the first half. Sunderland had 30 odd shots and Ian Evatt the Blackpool No.6 must have calmly stopped more than half of them himself. Sadly for Sunderland, all of those attempts on target that eluded the defence seemed aimed close to keeper Kingson’s body. The seasiders passed the ball and ran to make themselves available for forward passes everywhere on the pitch – you could almost hear Jack Charlton screaming at them to just hoof it out of defense once in a while, but no, not until the final 10 minutes did they resort to that. Even Evatt’s headed clearances were more often than not passes to feet. In fact both teams passed and ran in attacking directions throughout, Gyan, Bent, Elmohamady, Wellbeck, plus Richardson and Malbranque when they came, on all “looked dangerous” but failed to convert the Sunderland chances they created.

Conversely the lively DJ converted half of Backpool’s mere 4 chances.

Who are ya ? Twice people around us without match programs leaned across and asked, “Who is that No6?”. Well player of the season twice at Chesterfield under Roy MacFarland, and in his 4th season in the Blackpool defense, he’s not exactly unknown outside the premiership. The 29 year old Evatt made his first full 90 minute debut for Derby on the last day of the 2001/2 season … at The Stadium of Light.

Irony was the bumbling Titus Bramble making a return from recurring injury at the other end for Sunderland alongside the other Ferdinand boy. Never impressed with Bramble since the Ipswich fans were raving about him wayback, when Reading visited Portman Road. Actually, I reckon Sunderland having to replace the excellent Onuoha with Bramble after only half an hour was probably the difference between the sides. Evatt for England ?

Who Gets to Keep Secrets ?

Special edition of The Edge. Question from Danny Hillis with responses from the great and the good at The Edge.

“Perhaps better would be that we might need separation of ideas/memes/cultures long enough to test them — and then recombine the parts we like best.” George Church

Reinforces the issue of the speed of communication …. no gap between too soon to know and too late to do anything about it, again. And this memetic view is directly analogous to genetic evolution. It can’t be all tooth and claw, there needs to be separation from threats and competition, and nurturing too.

What to do next ?

Interesting NY-Times piece by William Gibson from back in August. (Thanks to Edward at Nixon McInnes)

“I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” said the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.” Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers.

Me too. In fact this whole epistemological knowledge-modelling quest has been about the fact that information is always interpreted in the context of a purpose, and that purpose is about making some decision to act, where deciding to act may of course include deciding to further communicate information or ask another question. The answer as a piece of information is never an end in itself.

Complicated qualifiers ? Tell me about it. In just the previous post I yet again used the phrase “life is just complicated enough”. In fact this leads into the Nils Brunsson “decision-rationality equals action-irrationality” paradox too, the management-hypocrisy or scientistic-neurosis angle.

Interesting piece by Gibson, really pointing out the downside of too much transparency and permanent connectivity in media whose business-architecture we as individuals are not as much in control of, as we might think we are. Add these to the downsides pointed out by Jonathan Zittrain in the earlier post. The media technologies are ever newer, but the human social issues are “nothing new under the sun”.

Oh, and thanks to David Gurteen for tweeting the link to this Steve Denning piece, also about Google, warning how too openly social teams may be poorer at delivering on projects.
(Note to self – The Real Hierarchy – HBR, wayback.)