Tue, Apr 10, 2007
On Greatness: Joshua Bell's Street Performing Experiment
#
My friend, Cindy, forwarded me a link to the best article I've read in a
very, very long time. It's written by WashingtonPost staff
writer, GeneWeingarten, and it's entitled,
"Pearls before breakfast." (M78)
The essence of the article is this. Take JoshuaBell, one of the finest
classical violinists in the world. Plant him on a D.C. street corner
during rush hour. See if anyone notices. (M79)
Read the whole article. It's long, but it's totally worth it. It's
well-written, entertaining, and profound on many levels. (M7A)
/articles |
Posted at 10:31pm
Sun, Feb 29, 2004
Dried Squid Leads to Loudspeaker Innovation
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GregoryAharonian reported in the February 27 issue of his PATNEWS
newsletter an interesting
article in the Feedback section of the February 28 issue of
NewScientist. It describes how JVC's engineers decided to soak
birch wood in sake "to make it pliant enough to use as a loudspeaker
cone." According to its inventor, Satoshi Imamura: (14N)
One night I left the laboratory after another day of failed attempts to mould the wood and went to a restaurant. We were eating dried squid and I wondered why something dry was so chewy. The waiter told me that some kinds of dried squid are soaked in sake. So I went back to the lab and put some of the cone wood in sake. When I came back next day I knew I had found the answer. (14O)
Low-focus
thought at its best. (14P)
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Posted at 2:36pm
Wed, Dec 31, 2003
Knowledge Management as Information Brokering
#
DavidGilmour, CEO of TacitKnowledgeSystems, wrote an excellent (and
short) essay in the October issue of HarvardBusinessReview
entitled, "How to Fix Knowledge Management." The gist of the article: (P3)
The problem is that most organized corporate information sharing is based on a failed paradigm: publishing. In the publishing model, someone collects information from employees, organizes it, advertises its availability, and sits back to see what happens. But because employees quickly create vast amounts of information, attempts to fully capture it are frustrated every time. Even the most organized efforts collect just a fraction of what people know, and by the time this limited knowledge is published, it's often obsolete. The expensive process is time consuming, and it doesn't scale well. (16) (P4)
See more....
/articles |
Posted at 3:34pm
IT as Commodity and its Contribution to Productivity
#
There were two interesting articles about IT and productivity in the
HarvardBusinessReview this past year: Nicholas Carr's "IT Doesn't
Matter" (May) and Diana Farrell's "The Real New Economy" (October). (OK)
Carr's title is a bit misleading. It's not that IT no longer matters
at all; it's that IT is less important (for most companies -- a
subtle, but important disclaimer) from a strategic standpoint, because
it has become a commodity. Carr writes: (OL)
What makes a resource truly strategic -- what gives it the capacity to be the basis for a sustained competitive advantage -- is not ubiquity but scarcity. You only gain an edge over rivals by having or doing something that they can't have or do. By now, the core functions of IT -- data storage, data processing, and data transport -- have become available and affordable to all. Their very power and presence have begun to transform them from potentially strategic resources into commodity factors of production. They are becoming costs of doing business that must be paid by all but provide distinction to none. (42) (OM)
See more....
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Posted at 2:37pm
George Soros: "The Bubble of American Supremacy"
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GeorgeSoros? has an excellent
article in this month's
TheAtlanticMonthly entitled, "The Bubble of American Supremacy,"
where he decries the neoconservative Bush doctrine and proposes an
alternative. Soros compares the Bush doctrine to a financial bubble: (OE)
The quest for American supremacy qualifies as a bubble. The dominant position the United States occupies in the world is the element of reality that is being distorted. The proposition that the United States will be better off if it uses its position to impose its values and interests everywhere is the misconception. It is exactly by not abusing its power that America attained its current position. (65) (OF)
See more....
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Posted at 1:37pm
Tue, Nov 18, 2003
Missing Data in Qualitative Research
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I'm currently working with MiroslavKlivansky and JoshRai on
BlueOxenAssociates' next research report -- an extensive case study of
the BlueOxen CollaborationCollaboratory, to be released next month.
The study is based on analysis of the community's archives correlated
with the results of a detailed survey of the community's participants.
The goal of the study is to discuss best practices within this
community and to propose a framework for examining communities and
collaboration. Internally, this is an opportunity to both improve the
collaboratory itself and also refine our research methodology. (AS)
We spent a significant amount of time developing the survey for the
study, which was an amazingly difficult process. We had two goals in
designing the survey. First, we wanted to gather information about
participant behavior that we couldn't gather from the data itself.
For example, we had know way of knowing how much time each participant
spent following the community's discussion. Second, we were trying to
determine whether or not the community had QWAN (QualityWithoutAName).
The problem with this question, of course, is that you can't just ask
it on the survey and expect to get meaningful responses. (AT)
While struggling with these problems, Miroslav drew our attention to
an article by Supriya Singh and Lyn Richards in a recent issue of
QualitativeResearchJournal? -- "Missing data: Finding 'central'
themes in qualitative research" (v3, n1, pp5-17). The article was
therapeutic in that it not only empathized with the challenges we were
facing, it identified them as standard steps in the research process.
Additionally, the article served as a testament to the NUD*IST
qualitative analysis tool (the predecessor to
NVivo). (AU)
See more....
/articles |
Posted at 9:06pm
