Archive for October, 2006
October 7, 2006 at 7:23 am · Filed under Uncategorized
“The Power of Ordinary Practices”; an interview at HBS:
There are two myths in defining creativity. One is the genius myth—that creativity is tied to genius. To the contrary, I’ve found that although some people have extreme levels of talent, everyone with normal human capacities is capable of producing creative work under the right circumstances. The second is the trade-off myth. I have found over and over again that, for complex work in organizations, there is no trade-off between creativity and productivity, efficiency, or work quality.
…
We found three leader behaviors that had negative impact. One was the under- or overspecification of assignments. Much of this has to do with giving people either too little guidance or too much guidance by overconstraining the assignment. The second one is monitoring in a negative form—that is, checking on assigned work too often or not often enough. Or, checking on it for too long, like hanging around and going too much into the details of what people are doing, and giving unconstructive feedback. The third negative has to do with problem solving—either avoiding solving problems that crop up in the team or the project, or creating problems.
(Via Ed Vielmetti.)
One big problem you will surely have noticed: every piece of advice therein is a Goldilocks admonition. Not too much, not too little. An even keel, neither a heavy hand nor laissez faire.
A team succeeds by adapting. Not by direction, not by goal-setting, not by being let free: by adapting, collectively.
October 6, 2006 at 7:58 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Greg Aharonian in his PATNEWS mailing list comments on a paper drawing analogies between Intellectual and Personal Property:
… Epstein ignores Due Process (something you have to swear to do to become an IP professor) - in particular the issue of clear notice of the boundaries of exclusion. Imagine a house and the land it is on. With physical property, you are definitely sure there is a house there and pretty sure where the boundaries are (title check doesn’t hurt to do). With patent law, you are pretty sure a house is there, but not so sure where the boundaries are (there is still a massive contradiction explicit in Markman). With copyright law, you aren’t sure if there is house there let alone if there are any boundaries (17 USC 102), and worse, there is no definition what a ‘house’ is until a judge tells you so.
Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins: From a “Must Culture” to a “Can Culture”: Legos and Lead Users:
…[C]ompanies need to identify what he is calling Lead Users — these are both early adopters (in the sense that they are quick to purchase new products) and early adapters (in the sense that they often hack the products to retrofit them for their specialized needs.) By dealing with these communities and understanding how they appropriate and remake products, these companies can accelerate the design process, anticipating uses and desired features before the product even hits the mass market.
vagueware.com brings up an important point about the diversity of work habits among programmers. Me, I need loud and distracting to work; silence and concentration inevitably let me go too far on my own, and take me down a dead end. This should be taken into account carefully when an agile team, in an open environment, is being staffed — we clearly can’t work together.
I used to argue in one job that if I was doing something particularly complicated in code, a 30-second interruption could cost me an hour of productivity. Colleagues thought I was joking and kept on interrupting. As a result, productivity slowed. They thought I was being lazy. I took a laptop out to a coffee shop, took some noise-cancelling headphones and didn’t come back until I was done coding. Eventually I was able to convince management that coders and sys admins doing complicated roll-outs could not afford to be disturbed if they wanted any work done, not because they were being prima donnas, but because coding requires a level of concentration I doubt they can even relate to. Most people don’t concentrate like coders do at any point in their life after they’ve left school - they forget what it feels like.
“Optimization of hierarchical structures of information flow”:
Abstract: The efficiency of a large hierarchical organisation is simulated on Barabasi-Albert networks, when each needed link leads to a loss of information. The optimum is found at a finite network size, corresponding to about five hierarchical layers, provided a cost for building the network is included in our optimization.
LinuxWorld article on academics studying how Open Source projects are more agile than traditional corporate development projects:
“The belief in the open source software community is that open access to the source turns on all the available brain power, full blast, on every problem, challenge or opportunity,” lead researcher and UC Davis Computer Science Professor Premkuma Devanbu told LinuxInsider. “In traditional products, bits of code tend to be owned or controlled by specific individuals, and thus each bit of code can be on a single-threaded critical path. In open source, anyone can read and comment on a file.”
(via Larry Seiford)
BoingBoing teases me terribly, by showing me a weekly serial steampunk novel that can only be purchased in the UK. Goddamned national borders.< hr />
A non-stealthy ad for stealth marketing :
I am the marketing director for a book publishing company, we are looking for a person or persons to post comments about our books on bulletin boards and book sites throughout the internet. You must be good at searching out sites to post to and able to write short “one paragraph” comments about the book. You will be paid per each comment submitted and can easily make $200 to $300 per month ongoing for only posting 16 comments per week.
(by sound wave from Barbara, via Phantom Scribbler)
October 5, 2006 at 12:20 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Go read this book No, really. Get it from the library if you want. Just go read it. Now.
Read it? Now think not about software, not about product development, not about market-driven customer-facing projects and their associated risks and costs.
Think about research. Academic, corporate. Basic, analytical, theoretical, practical. Statistical, modeling, mathematical, computational. Data mining, graph drawing, process-understanding.
October 4, 2006 at 7:09 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
A series of worthwhile, and leading, blog entries that others have written and I’m starting to link together for you: Smart Mobs quotes “Horizon Report on emerging educational technologies (of cooperation)”:
Collaboration is increasingly seen as critical across the range of educational activities, including intra- and inter-institutional activities of any size or scope. As the ways in which researchers, students and teachers can collaborate with each other increase, knowledge is becoming a community property, and the construction of knowledge is becoming a community activity. A renewed emphasis on collaborative learning is leading to an exploration of the science of gaming, context-aware environments and devices, and their application for teaching and learning.
October 4, 2006 at 5:37 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
A series of worthwhile, and leading, blog entries that others have written and I’m starting to link together for you:
Innovation Creators offers “Participation is the Killer App”:
Whether it is end user participation in content driven conversations on blogs and wikis, or end user developed applications, mash-ups and widgets, I think that it is participation that key difference between Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise 1.0
October 2, 2006 at 11:18 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Making Light reminds those whose lives are on the line:
If you are ordered to violate Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, it is your duty to disobey that order. No “clarification,” whether passed by Congress or signed by the president, relieves you of that duty.
October 1, 2006 at 7:41 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
“President… Jails 938,000 Illegal Enemy Combatants”:
The initial batch of 938,000 detainees will be incarcerated and interrogated at a number of high-security installations at undisclosed locations both within and beyond American territory. No trial or release dates are set, Mr. Grisley said, “but that does not preclude the possibility that we may consider setting a trial or release date at some indeterminate time in the future, if we should for some reason get the urge to do so. But don’t hold your breath.”
(Via Orcinus.)
October 1, 2006 at 5:23 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Chet Raymo points out what exactly it was Thoreau romanticized, and asks if we might consider doing the same:
Thoreau scholar David Foster writes: “Despite the cleared forests, the dwindling animal populations, the dammed and polluted rivers, and the declining numbers of waterfowl and fish, Thoreau was able to find wildness in a thousand scenes, each one shaped by human activity… And, of course, he could turn Walden, a cut-over and ‘tamed’ woodlot, whose shores had recently been desecrated by one thousand workers building the railroad to Fitchburg, into a symbol of solitude, natural values, and wilderness.”
« Newer entries
Subscribe to posts feed