Tag Archives: collaboration

Items of some interest…

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These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

  • col­li­sion detec­tion: The art of pub­lic thinking

    “This year, I’ve had another big load on my time: I’m writ­ing my first book! Thus far it’s called Out­smart: The Future of Thought in the Age of Machines — a title pos­sessed of such pur­ple, sci-​​fi bom­bast that even though I wrote it myself, I still crack up every time I say it out loud. As you might imag­ine, com­ing from me, the book is a gen­er­ally opti­mistic assess­ment of how dig­i­tal tools are gen­er­at­ing new ways for us to learn things, muse over them, and act on them. But the point is that it’s another time hog: Research­ing and writ­ing a book has required such nose-​​to-​​the-​​grindstone work — to say noth­ing of nose-​​to-​​the-​​grindstone pro­cras­ti­na­tion — that it has crowded out what­ever time I might have had for blog­ging. Authors fre­quently describe the process of book-​​writing as sim­i­lar to giv­ing birth to a child, a metaphor I always found faintly icky; but, hey, maybe they were right. I’ve got three kids now, and no blog. Yet as I’ve worked away on the book, I’ve increas­ingly begun to feel intel­lec­tu­ally claus­trophic. It’s hard to describe, but it’s like a cabin fever of the mind. The symp­toms: I’ll get obsessed with a par­tic­u­lar line of research, chew­ing away at it for days or weeks, only to real­ize it’s a) kind of half-​​baked or b) super inter­est­ing but not at all use­ful to my work. Or I’ll read a fas­ci­nat­ing white paper, write a bunch of notes on it, but never crys­tal­lize a solid analy­sis. I now think the prob­lem is I’m not doing enough think­ing in public.”

    via:tsuomela blog­ging social-​​dynamics col­lab­o­ra­tion release-​​early-​​and-​​often essay­ism storytelling-​​is-​​a-​​social-​​process

Items of some interest…

Posted on by

These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

  • [1106.1804] A Crit­i­cal Assess­ment of Bench­mark Com­par­i­son in Planning

    “Recent trends in plan­ning research have led to empir­i­cal com­par­i­son becom­ing com­mon­place. The field has started to set­tle into a method­ol­ogy for such com­par­isons, which for obvi­ous prac­ti­cal rea­sons requires run­ning a sub­set of plan­ners on a sub­set of prob­lems. In this paper, we char­ac­ter­ize the method­ol­ogy and exam­ine eight implicit assump­tions about the prob­lems, plan­ners and met­rics used in many of these com­par­isons. The prob­lem assump­tions are: PR1) the per­for­mance of a gen­eral pur­pose plan­ner should not be penalized/​biased if exe­cuted on a sam­pling of prob­lems and domains, PR2) minor syn­tac­tic dif­fer­ences in rep­re­sen­ta­tion do not affect per­for­mance, and PR3) prob­lems should be solv­able by STRIPS capa­ble plan­ners unless they require ADL. The plan­ner assump­tions are: PL1) the lat­est ver­sion of a plan­ner is the best one to use, PL2) default para­me­ter set­tings approx­i­mate good per­for­mance, and PL3) time cut-​​offs do not unduly bias out­come. The met­rics assump­tions are: M1) per­for­mance degrades sim­i­larly for each plan­ner when run on degraded run­time envi­ron­ments (e.g., machine plat­form) and M2) the num­ber of plan steps dis­tin­guishes per­for­mance. We find that most of these assump­tions are not sup­ported empir­i­cally; in par­tic­u­lar, that plan­ners are affected dif­fer­ently by these assump­tions. We con­clude with a call to the com­mu­nity to devote research resources to improv­ing the state of the prac­tice and espe­cially to enhanc­ing the avail­able bench­mark problems.”

    plan­ning bench­mark­ing algo­rithms horse-​​races engineering-​​design operations-​​research nudge-​​targets

  • [1108.4361] The rela­tion­ship between acquain­tance­ship and coau­thor­ship in sci­en­tific col­lab­o­ra­tion networks

    “This arti­cle exam­ines the rela­tion­ship between acquain­tance­ship and coau­thor­ship pat­terns in a multi-​​disciplinary, multi-​​institutional, geo­graph­i­cally dis­trib­uted research cen­ter. Two social net­works are con­structed and com­pared: a net­work of coau­thor­ship, rep­re­sent­ing how researchers write arti­cles with one another, and a net­work of acquain­tance­ship, rep­re­sent­ing how those researchers know each other on a per­sonal level, based on their responses to an online sur­vey. Sta­tis­ti­cal analy­ses of the topol­ogy and com­mu­nity struc­ture of these net­works point to the impor­tance of small-​​scale, local, per­sonal net­works pred­i­cated upon acquain­tance­ship for accom­plish­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive work in sci­en­tific communities.”

    academic-​​culture network-​​theory cita­tion social-​​networks

  • [1108.4223] The set-​​theoretic multiverse

    “The mul­ti­verse view in set the­ory, intro­duced and argued for in this arti­cle, is the view that there are many dis­tinct con­cepts of set, each instan­ti­ated in a cor­re­spond­ing set-​​theoretic uni­verse. The uni­verse view, in con­trast, asserts that there is an absolute back­ground set con­cept, with a cor­re­spond­ing absolute set-​​theoretic uni­verse in which every set-​​theoretic ques­tion has a def­i­nite answer. The mul­ti­verse posi­tion, I argue, explains our expe­ri­ence with the enor­mous diver­sity of set-​​theoretic pos­si­bil­i­ties, a phe­nom­e­non that chal­lenges the uni­verse view. In par­tic­u­lar, I argue that the con­tin­uum hypoth­e­sis is set­tled on the mul­ti­verse view by our exten­sive knowl­edge about how it behaves in the mul­ti­verse, and as a result it can no longer be set­tled in the man­ner for­merly hoped for.”

    math­e­mat­ics mathematical-​​criticism looking-​​forward-​​to-​​understanding-​​this-​​someday pragmatism-it-ain’t

  • [1102.1934] The struc­ture of the Arts & Human­i­ties Cita­tion Index: A map­ping on the basis of aggre­gated cita­tions among 1,157 journals

    “Using the Arts & Human­i­ties Cita­tion Index (A&HCI) 2008, we apply map­ping tech­niques pre­vi­ously devel­oped for map­ping jour­nal struc­tures in the Sci­ence and Social Sci­ence Cita­tion Indices. Cita­tion rela­tions among the 110,718 records were aggre­gated at the level of 1,157 jour­nals spe­cific to the A&HCI, and the jour­nal struc­tures are ques­tioned on whether a cog­ni­tive struc­ture can be recon­structed and visu­al­ized. Both cosine-​​normalization (bot­tom up) and fac­tor analy­sis (top down) sug­gest a divi­sion into approx­i­mately twelve sub­sets. The rela­tions among these sub­sets are explored using var­i­ous visu­al­iza­tion tech­niques. How­ever, we were not able to retrieve this struc­ture using the ISI Sub­ject Cat­e­gories, includ­ing the 25 cat­e­gories which are spe­cific to the A&HCI. We dis­cuss options for val­i­da­tion such as against the cat­e­gories of the Human­i­ties Indi­ca­tors of the Amer­i­can Acad­emy of Arts and Sci­ences, the panel struc­ture of the Euro­pean Ref­er­ence Index for the Human­i­ties (ERIH), and com­pare our results with the cur­ricu­lum orga­ni­za­tion of the Human­i­ties Sec­tion of the Col­lege of Let­ters and Sci­ences of UCLA as an exam­ple of insti­tu­tional organization.”

    network-​​theory citation-​​networks human­i­ties academic-​​culture quantitative-​​humanities

  • [1108.4220] A Dynam­i­cal Sys­tems Approach for Sta­tic Eval­u­a­tion in Go

    “In the paper argu­ments are given why the con­cept of sta­tic eval­u­a­tion has the poten­tial to be a use­ful exten­sion to Monte Carlo tree search. A new con­cept of mod­el­ing sta­tic eval­u­a­tion through a dynam­i­cal sys­tem is intro­duced and strengths and weak­nesses are dis­cussed. The gen­eral suit­abil­ity of this approach is demonstrated.”

    representation-​​theory plan­ning monte-​​carlo-​​models nudge algo­rithms

  • [1105.5449] AntNet: Dis­trib­uted Stig­mer­getic Con­trol for Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Networks

    “…We com­pare our algo­rithm with six state-​​of-​​the-​​art rout­ing algo­rithms com­ing from the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions and machine learn­ing fields. The algo­rithms’ per­for­mance is eval­u­ated over a set of real­is­tic test­beds. We run many exper­i­ments over real and arti­fi­cial IP data­gram net­works with increas­ing num­ber of nodes and under sev­eral par­a­dig­matic spa­tial and tem­po­ral traf­fic dis­tri­b­u­tions. Results are very encour­ag­ing. AntNet showed supe­rior per­for­mance under all the exper­i­men­tal con­di­tions with respect to its com­peti­tors. We ana­lyze the main char­ac­ter­is­tics of the algo­rithm and try to explain the rea­sons for its superiority.”

    ant-​​colony-​​optimization network-​​theory net­works con­trol algo­rithms nudge-​​targets rout­ing

  • Bozo Sapi­ens: Sacco and Vanzetti: Evidence

    “Wigmore’s tech­nique, like prob­a­bil­ity itself, is both wide-​​ranging and tediously painstak­ing; his book was pop­u­lar only among insom­niac judges. But now that com­put­ers can take on the numer­i­cal drudgery, it is prov­ing its worth in just such tan­gled cases as Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s. The legal schol­ars Joseph Kadane and David Schum have applied a sophis­ti­cated exten­sion of Wigmore’s method to the vast body of evi­dence from the case. Theirs is a remark­able achieve­ment; their charts retain all the orig­i­nal com­plex­i­ties: the facts with­held or per­verted, the hearsay, the lies told and dis­avowed on both sides, the charged polit­i­cal atmos­phere of eighty years ago. They never dis­count a fact, no mat­ter how far-​​fetched; they  sim­ply give it its due weight in their dynamic struc­ture. Their con­clu­sion?  Unjust though it is to sum­ma­rize a book in a sen­tence, the bal­ance of prob­a­bil­ity seems to favor the view expressed long ago by one of the defen­dants’ close com­pan­ions: “every­one in the Boston anar­chis­tic cir­cle knew that Sacco was guilty and that Vanzetti was inno­cent as far as the actual par­tic­i­pa­tion in the killing.” So, there it is: whichever side our polit­i­cal instincts favor, we are des­tined to be half wrong. Vanzetti’s last words were: “I wish to for­give some peo­ple for what they are now doing to me.”  If we were all will­ing to make the extra effort to work out the prob­a­bil­i­ties, per­haps we might not need for­give­ness so often.”

    probability-​​theory legal-​​studies computational-​​methods his­tory

  • Get­ting first sale wrong

    “I hate to imag­ine it, but this deci­sion raises some fright­en­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties and requires greater vig­i­lance on the part of librar­i­ans.  At the very least, libraries must demand infor­ma­tion from pub­lish­ers about where every item has been man­u­fac­tured. Obtain­ing such infor­ma­tion is no longer an option, since our legal uses of the things we buy now depends on know­ing this, and the place where the pub­lisher is located or where the sale took place is sim­ply not suf­fi­cient.  But what I really fear is that pub­lish­ers will begin to man­u­fac­ture more of their works over­seas and then try to demand a higher price – one that includes “pub­lic lend­ing rights” – from libraries. If libraries are in a dif­fi­cult posi­tion, stu­dents may be even worse off under the Sec­ond Circuit’s rul­ing.  Again, pub­lish­ers now have an incen­tive to man­u­fac­ture their text­books abroad and sell them to U.S. stu­dents.  Such stu­dents would no longer have the right to re-​​sell their text­books or to pur­chase used texts.  The defen­dant in the case, Supap Kirt­saeng, had made a lucra­tive busi­ness out of reselling text­books pur­chased in Asia.  He was per­haps an unsym­pa­thetic party, but what he was doing was not dif­fer­ent in kind from the resale of texts that is com­mon on all col­lege cam­puses.  This activ­ity makes higher edu­ca­tion a lit­tle more pos­si­ble for many.  Now pub­lish­ers have an easy way for to close down this sec­ondary mar­ket for text­books, about which they have com­plained for years.  In the process, the cost of edu­ca­tion for col­lege stu­dents would be pushed up even further.”

    copy­right insan­ity intellectual-​​property academic-​​culture librar­i­ans

  • [1106.6037] Black Hole Search with Finite Automata Scat­tered in a Syn­chro­nous Torus

    “We con­sider the prob­lem of locat­ing a black hole in syn­chro­nous anony­mous net­works using finite state agents. A black hole is a harm­ful node in the net­work that destroys any agent vis­it­ing that node with­out leav­ing any trace. The objec­tive is to locate the black hole with­out destroy­ing too many agents. This is dif­fi­cult to achieve when the agents are ini­tially scat­tered in the net­work and are unaware of the loca­tion of each other. Pre­vi­ous stud­ies for black hole search used more pow­er­ful mod­els where the agents had non-​​constant mem­ory, were labelled with dis­tinct iden­ti­fiers and could either write mes­sages on the nodes of the net­work or mark the edges of the net­work. In con­trast, we solve the prob­lem using a small team of finite-​​state agents each car­ry­ing a con­stant num­ber of iden­ti­cal tokens that could be placed on the nodes of the net­work. Thus, all resources used in our algo­rithms are inde­pen­dent of the net­work size. We restrict our atten­tion to ori­ented torus net­works and first show that no finite team of finite state agents can solve the prob­lem in such net­works, when the tokens are not mov­able. In case the agents are equipped with mov­able tokens, we deter­mine lower bounds on the num­ber of agents and tokens required for solv­ing the prob­lem in torus net­works of arbi­trary size. Fur­ther, we present a deter­min­is­tic solu­tion to the black hole search prob­lem for ori­ented torus net­works, using the min­i­mum num­ber of agents and tokens.”

    algo­rithms agent-​​based multi-​​agent-​​systems network-​​theory nudge-​​targets

  • [1106.1821] Col­lec­tive Intel­li­gence, Data Rout­ing and Braess’ Paradox

    “We con­sider the prob­lem of design­ing the the util­ity func­tions of the utility-​​maximizing agents in a multi-​​agent sys­tem so that they work syn­er­gis­ti­cally to max­i­mize a global util­ity. The par­tic­u­lar prob­lem domain we explore is the con­trol of net­work rout­ing by plac­ing agents on all the routers in the net­work. Con­ven­tional approaches to this task have the agents all use the Ideal Short­est Path rout­ing Algo­rithm (ISPA). We demon­strate that in many cases, due to the side-​​effects of one agent’s actions on another agent’s per­for­mance, hav­ing agents use ISPA’s is sub­op­ti­mal as far as global aggre­gate cost is con­cerned, even when they are only used to route infin­i­tes­i­mally small amounts of traf­fic. The util­ity func­tions of the indi­vid­ual agents are not “aligned” with the global util­ity, intu­itively speak­ing. As a par­tic­u­lar exam­ple of this we present an instance of Braess’ para­dox in which adding new links to a net­work whose agents all use the ISPA results in a decrease in over­all through­put. We also demon­strate that load-​​balancing, in which the agents’ deci­sions are col­lec­tively made to opti­mize the global cost incurred by all traf­fic cur­rently being routed, is sub­op­ti­mal as far as global cost aver­aged across time is con­cerned. This is also due to ‘side-​​effects’, in this case of cur­rent rout­ing deci­sion on future traf­fic. The math­e­mat­ics of Col­lec­tive Intel­li­gence (COIN) is con­cerned pre­cisely with the issue of avoid­ing such dele­te­ri­ous side-​​effects in multi-​​agent sys­tems, both over time and space. We present key con­cepts from that math­e­mat­ics and use them to derive an algo­rithm whose ideal ver­sion should have bet­ter per­for­mance than that of hav­ing all agents use the ISPA, even in the infin­i­tes­i­mal limit. We present exper­i­ments ver­i­fy­ing this, and also show­ing that a machine-​​learning-​​based ver­sion of this COIN algo­rithm in which costs are only impre­cisely esti­mated via empir­i­cal means (a ver­sion poten­tially applic­a­ble in the real world) also out­per­forms the ISPA, despite hav­ing access to less infor­ma­tion than does the ISPA. In par­tic­u­lar, this COIN algo­rithm almost always avoids Braess’ paradox.”

    collective-​​intelligence search-​​algorithms figure-​​ground-​​error plan­ning nudge

  • [1108.0404] Exploit­ing Agent and Type Inde­pen­dence in Col­lab­o­ra­tive Graph­i­cal Bayesian Games

    “Effi­cient col­lab­o­ra­tive deci­sion mak­ing is an impor­tant chal­lenge for mul­ti­a­gent sys­tems. Find­ing opti­mal joint actions is espe­cially chal­leng­ing when each agent has only imper­fect infor­ma­tion about the state of its envi­ron­ment. Such prob­lems can be mod­eled as col­lab­o­ra­tive Bayesian games in which each agent receives pri­vate infor­ma­tion in the form of its type. How­ever, rep­re­sent­ing and solv­ing such games requires space and com­pu­ta­tion time expo­nen­tial in the num­ber of agents. This arti­cle intro­duces col­lab­o­ra­tive graph­i­cal Bayesian games (CGBGs), which facil­i­tate more effi­cient col­lab­o­ra­tive deci­sion mak­ing by decom­pos­ing the global pay­off func­tion as the sum of local pay­off func­tions that depend on only a few agents. We pro­pose a frame­work for the effi­cient solu­tion of CGBGs based on the insight that they posses two dif­fer­ent types of inde­pen­dence, which we call agent inde­pen­dence and type inde­pen­dence. In par­tic­u­lar, we present a fac­tor graph rep­re­sen­ta­tion that cap­tures both forms of inde­pen­dence and thus enables effi­cient solu­tions. In addi­tion, we show how this rep­re­sen­ta­tion can pro­vide lever­age in sequen­tial tasks by using it to con­struct a novel method for decen­tral­ized par­tially observ­able Markov deci­sion processes. Exper­i­men­tal results in both ran­dom and bench­mark tasks demon­strate the improved scal­a­bil­ity of our meth­ods com­pared to sev­eral exist­ing alternatives.”

    col­lab­o­ra­tion agent-​​based complex-​​systems emergent-​​design nudge-​​targets

  • [1102.2837] Effi­cient Pro­mo­tion Strate­gies in Hier­ar­chi­cal Organizations

    “The Peter prin­ci­ple has been recently inves­ti­gated by means of an agent-​​based sim­u­la­tion and its valid­ity has been numer­i­cally cor­rob­o­rated. It has been con­firmed that, within cer­tain con­di­tions, it can really influ­ence in a neg­a­tive way the effi­ciency of a pyra­mi­dal orga­ni­za­tion adopt­ing mer­i­to­cratic pro­mo­tions. It was also found that, in order to bypass these effects, alter­na­tive pro­mo­tion strate­gies should be adopted, as for exam­ple a ran­dom selec­tion choice. In this paper, within the same line of research, we study pro­mo­tion strate­gies in a more real­is­tic hier­ar­chi­cal and mod­u­lar orga­ni­za­tion and we show the robust­ness of our pre­vi­ous results, extend­ing their valid­ity to a more gen­eral con­text. We dis­cuss also why the adop­tion of these strate­gies could be use­ful for real organizations.”

    organizational-​​behavior com­plex­ol­ogy complexological-​​amusements agent-​​based com­pe­tence

Items of some interest…

Posted on by

These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

Items of some interest…

Posted on by

These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

  • A sec­ond front

    “Increas­ingly, this seems to be a war for sur­vival.  I under­stand that tra­di­tional pub­lish­ers are get­ting more and more des­per­ate as the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion pro­ceeds and they con­tinue to dither about how to address it.  But aca­d­e­mic fac­ulty mem­bers are the source of almost all the con­tent these pub­lish­ers pub­lish, so this behav­ior is an extreme exam­ple of bit­ing the hand that feeds them.  It is even more stu­pid, in my opin­ion, than the strat­egy of record­ing indus­try who is suing its own cus­tomers, because these pub­lish­ers are attack­ing a group that is both their cus­tomers and those who sup­ply them with a prod­uct in the first place.”

    copy­right academic-​​culture libraries good-​​eating-​​on-​​one-​​of-​​those disintermediation-​​targets

  • jQuery for Absolute Begin­ners: The Com­plete Series | Nettuts+

    “Hi every­one! Today, I posted the final screen­cast in my “jQuery for Absolute Begin­ners” series on the The­me­For­est Blog. If you’re unfa­mil­iar – over the course of about a month, I posted fif­teen video tuto­ri­als that teach you EXACTLY how to use the jQuery library. We start by down­load­ing the library and even­tu­ally work our way up to cre­at­ing an AJAX style-​​switcher. I’m very proud of this series; pos­si­bly more than any other that I’ve done for Envato.”

    javascript jQuery tuto­r­ial pod­cast video

  • Noodle­soft: Hazel FAQ

    “In gen­eral, Hazel can mon­i­tor any folder but keep in mind that cer­tain fold­ers may not be good can­di­dates. For instance, P2P and other apps that might down­load a file slowly, may have their files moved before they are com­pletely down­loaded. In cases like this, it is best if the pro­gram has an option to down­load to one folder then move them auto­mat­i­cally to another (Trans­mis­sion has such an option). This sec­ond folder is the one you should have Hazel mon­i­tor. Hazel does have spe­cial sup­port for Safari, Camino, Fire­fox, Mail and Speed Down­load and knows how to iden­tify when their down­loads are com­plete. We will be adding sup­port for more apps as time goes on so if you have a favorite app of yours you would like sup­ported, please let us know and we’ll look into adding support.”

    util­i­ties MacOS power-​​user sysad­min

  • Kate Oneal and the Myth­i­cal Ital­ian Restau­rant | xPro​gram​ming​.com

    ‘“The artist sug­gested this: ‘Let’s set a dead­line and total bud­get. I’ll keep you posted on how much is being spent, and of course we’ll have the pic­ture on the wall to look at. By the time we’re about half-​​way through, it should be of high enough qual­ity, and have enough pic­ture ele­ments, that we could stop any time. You’ll have more ideas, of course, but by then we’ll both have a sense of how fast we can progress, and you can choose the most valu­able things to add or change. You’ll have total con­trol over how the pic­ture winds up, and if you want to, we can stop on or before the money runs out.’ “Guido wasn’t entirely con­vinced. He wanted to know how he could be sure he wouldn’t be left with a hor­ri­bly ugly wall. The artist told him that she would guar­an­tee to paint it back over and stop any time he wanted, and said she would start by work­ing in some tem­po­rary pig­ment like chalk, so they could erase and change things easily.’

    project-​​management metaphor agile-​​management

  • Our Waste­ful Health Care Sys­tem — NYTimes​.com

    “The other key thing to pay atten­tion to is who this mar­ket­ing cam­paign was tar­geted at: key deci­sion­mak­ers at providers and insur­ance com­pa­nies. Those are the peo­ple who decide whether med­ical pro­ce­dures get ordered. It’s not patients. Patients aren’t going to expe­ri­ence a loss of free­dom or sat­is­fac­tion because an expert reviewer at the Inde­pen­dant Pay­ment Advi­sory Board makes the call as to whether a pro­ce­dure is med­ically ben­e­fi­cial, rather than the cor­re­spond­ing bureau­crat at their insur­ance provider or at the for-​​profit clinic they’re attending.”

    medical-​​culture cor­po­ratism public-​​policy insur­ance health­care mar­ket­ing

  • The Value of Fol­low­ing Pas­sion in a Job­less World — Lane Wal­lace — Life — The Atlantic

    “If I were a 22-​​year-​​old read­ing all this, the whole notion of adult­hood would seem like a prison sen­tence worth try­ing to avoid. But more impor­tantly, the entire premise upon which all this advice is based is false.  Pas­sion, despite how often we use the term to tout com­pany com­mit­ment or extol roman­tic excite­ment, is often mis­un­der­stood or con­fused with other motivations. Many peo­ple view dreams and pas­sion exactly as Brooks painted it: as a hope­lessly ide­al­is­tic, self­ish, or irre­spon­si­ble choice that is dia­met­ri­cally opposed to com­mit­ment to oth­ers, respon­si­bil­ity, secu­rity, or success. But I have spent the past year and a half research­ing a book about pas­sion and peo­ple who fol­low pas­sion­ate paths in life, and noth­ing I’ve found backs up that premise or belief. Indeed, I would argue that pas­sion is one of the most impor­tant ele­ments in any effort to improve a com­mu­nity, build some­thing of value in the world, and even sur­vive tough times or a daunt­ing econ­omy. The fact that it also tends to lead to a sense of ful­fill­ment within an indi­vid­ual is cer­tainly one of its benefits—but it’s not the dri­ving force that com­pels some­one down the pas­sion road.”

    work­life moti­va­tion David-Brooks-doesn’t-deserve-a-lot-of-respect pas­sion

  • Let It Roll — CFO Mag­a­zine — May 2011 Issue — CFO​.com

    “Sep­a­rat­ing the three deci­sions has enabled the com­pany to set tar­gets that are more ambi­tious, intel­li­gent, and moti­vat­ing, says Bogsnes. As a result, the fore­casts are less biased, and resource allo­ca­tion is more dynamic and self-​​regulating. “The ‘bank’ is open 12 months a year, not just six weeks in the fall,” he says. “By mak­ing resource deci­sions as late as pos­si­ble instead of in an annual bud­get, we have bet­ter infor­ma­tion — not just about project attrac­tive­ness but also about our capac­ity to fund or man new projects.“ Encour­aged by pos­i­tive results from aban­don­ing the bud­get, Sta­toil recently decided to abol­ish the cal­en­dar year as a plan­ning tool and intro­duce a busi­ness– and event-​​driven man­age­ment process in its stead.”

    bud­get­ing finance man­age­ment plan­ning fore­cast­ing agility

  • About That Recipe

    “Inter­preters are cou­plers. They enable the two peo­ple, groups, or cul­tures to under­stand each other because they under­stand both. While the meth­ods men­tioned above can facil­i­tate a fur­ther under­stand­ing of past food cul­tures, what about the other part of the connection—between peo­ple today and in the future? The his­tor­i­cal inter­preter has the unusual task of cou­pling peo­ple in one group about which she can only know a part, one group she knows well, and, if she pub­lishes her inter­pre­ta­tion in any form, one group in the future, about which she can­not know. The ques­tion is, then, not only what can we learn about mean­ings in the past, but how can we inter­pret those mean­ings to peo­ple today and in the future?”

    quotable his­tory

  • Lan­guage Log » Straw men and Bee Science

    “Let me start by say­ing that there’s a way to take all this that makes it entirely cor­rect. The key motive of sci­ence is expla­na­tion, and it’s often essen­tial to abstract away from the com­plex­i­ties of raw obser­va­tion, and so on. I took courses from Chom­sky as an under­grad­u­ate and a grad­u­ate stu­dent, and I’m grate­ful for what I learned from him, and for the emi­nently fair way that he always treated me. But increas­ingly, it seems to me, he has been ele­vat­ing his per­sonal dis­taste for the com­plex­i­ties of the real world into a sys­tem­atic phi­los­o­phy. To the extent that oth­ers accept these views, it excludes them from par­tic­i­pa­tion in (what I think are) the most promis­ing and excit­ing cur­rent direc­tions in the sci­ences of speech and language.”

    Noam-​​Chomsky theory-​​and-​​practice-​​sitting-​​in-​​a-​​tree bias sci­ence learning-​​from-​​data

  • Bozo Sapi­ens: Robert Owen: Laboriousness

    “Owen had neglected to notice that expec­ta­tions also change through cir­cum­stance. As our com­mu­nal con­di­tions advance, we all tend to want to become the prophet, not merely the con­gre­ga­tion. Once the prob­lem of sur­vival is solved, it’s no longer enough not to be starv­ing or abused or over­worked – we want per­sonal sat­is­fac­tion and self-​​direction. So, yes: some of the great names in busi­ness – the Low­ell mills, Hershey’s, Cadbury’s, Lever Broth­ers, Google – applied dilute Owenism to great effect, but suc­cess makes employ­ees become more indi­vid­u­al­ist and ask for more of their reward in cash, while hard times make share­hold­ers less gen­er­ous, point­ing out that plenty of peo­ple would take the job with­out the crêche, lec­ture series, or com­pany brass band. Shift­ing expec­ta­tion dri­ves the carousel for another turn; we remain ambiva­lent about work, this thing we do through most of our wak­ing lives, because we still don’t know what it is for.”

    institutional-​​design col­lab­o­ra­tion workantile-​​exchange diver­sity plan-​​for-​​change

  • Cal­cu­lated Risk: The Excess Vacant Hous­ing Supply

    “It is no sur­prise that Florida has the largest num­ber of excess vacant units and that Nevada has the largest per­cent­age of excess vacant units. What might be a sur­prise to some is that Cal­i­for­nia is below the U.S. average.”

    financial-​​crisis real-​​estate housing-​​bubble public-​​policy

  • Strin­gent Response: Sys­tems biol­ogy approach to strin­gent response

    “All this results in bac­te­ria gam­bling all the time: some react to stim­u­lus, some don’t, some pro­duce more pro­teins in response to it, some less. This leads to so called phe­no­typic het­ero­gene­ity, when oth­er­wise (genet­i­cally) iden­ti­cal bac­te­ria become very dif­fer­ent in terms of their responses. This could be a good thing and also could be a bad thing. Hav­ing a col­lec­tion of dif­fer­ent bugs instead of a clone army will pro­vide cer­tain ver­sa­til­ity: some are ready for one con­di­tions, and some are ready for oth­ers. For instance, some are ready to grow and divide right away and some are slower and more cau­tious. Both types of cells can be ben­e­fi­cial in dif­fer­ent con­di­tions: the active ones will drive the pop­u­la­tion growth, but will be sen­si­tive to the antibi­otic treat­ment, and the pas­sive ones will wait until the treat­ment is over and then they will come to life. Sounds like a good strat­egy (and it has a name, this strat­egy — “bed hedg­ing”) and I guess it is exactly the rea­son why clone armies never caught on.”

    diver­sity systems-​​biology evolutionary-​​biology game-​​theory emergent-​​design

  • Time as a Com­pet­i­tive Advan­tage | Mike Cohn’s Blog — Suc­ceed­ing With Agile®

    “Inno­va­tion has become a fer­tile area in which com­pa­nies seek com­pet­i­tive advan­tage today. This has served Apple well over the past decade. I don’t think inno­v­a­tive­ness will be going away soon as a source of com­pet­i­tive advan­tage. But I do won­der whether time is run­ning out on time as a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage. If agile and other inno­va­tions lead us to a world where all com­pa­nies can deliver new prod­ucts and ser­vices equally quickly, com­pa­nies will need to find newer ways to dif­fer­en­ti­ate themselves.”

    inno­va­tion com­pet­i­tive­ness agility strat­egy

  • See­ing Things On Mars: A Long His­tory of Mar­t­ian Illu­sions and Human Delu­sions |Parei­do­lia & Opti­cal Illu­sions | Space​.com

    “Humans have been see­ing strange things on the sur­face of Mars for cen­turies. From the 1700s up through the present day, wide­spread fame has been avail­able to any­one able to pro­duce even the slight­est bit of flimsy evi­dence that there’s Mar­t­ian life.”

    nanohis­tory Mars psy­choce­ram­ics astron­omy belief optical-​​illusions

  • The rise of Glen­core, the biggest com­pany you’ve never heard of | Busi­ness | The Guardian

    “But so jeal­ously has Glasen­berg guarded his pri­vacy that his name means noth­ing to the man on the street. For years he has avoided speeches and, until recently, had given only one inter­view – to his old uni­ver­sity mag­a­zine. If you live out­side the world of com­modi­ties trad­ing or cor­po­rate finance, Ivan Glasen­berg is prob­a­bly the Most Impor­tant Busi­ness­man You Have Never Heard Of.”

    glob­al­iza­tion finance cor­po­ra­tions pri­vacy transparency-it-ain’t

  • Datameer snags $9.25M more to ana­lyze mas­sive amounts of data | VentureBeat

    “Datameer, a com­pany that allows users to ana­lyze mas­sive amounts of data with­out tech­ni­cal know-​​how, today announced a sec­ond round of fund­ing for $9.25 mil­lion. The money will be used to hire addi­tional employ­ees for its engi­neer­ing, sales, and mar­ket­ing teams.”

    data-​​analysis data-​​mining star­tups fund­ing bub­b­li­cious

  • Plan Would Force U. of Wis­con­sin to Return $39-​​Million in U.S. Broad­band Grants — Wired Cam­pus — The Chron­i­cle of Higher Education

    “Another pro­vi­sion in the plan would bar any Uni­ver­sity of Wis­con­sin cam­pus from par­tic­i­pat­ing in advanced net­works con­nect­ing research insti­tu­tions world­wide, accord­ing to Mr. Evers’s memo. For exam­ple, the Madi­son cam­pus would have to with­draw from Internet2, a high-​​speed net­work­ing con­sor­tium, said Mr. Giroux.”

    pol­i­tics Wis­con­sin stu­pid­ity broad­band telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions cor­po­ratism

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