from collision detection: Are smarter people better at ignoring things?
A team testing the "visual working memory"  of a group of subjects by getting them to look at red and blue bricks in a picture found, much their  suprise, that  people with the largest capacity  VWM weren't actually retaining lots of additional information, but infact were simply selective in what they retained....or possibly the real genius comes in stripping out inessential information (filtering) and holding only in mind the red bricks that the researchers asked them to pay attention to.

This, of course, is exactly the type of thing that we would expect a "viable" system should do... keep the requisite variety in balance by filtering .... one of the problems with our corporate IT systems is they are built with an underlying assumption that management's problem is in retaining huge quatities of raw data ... so the database will step up, and by george... it will store everything.   Making subsequent analysis just a tad difficult sometimes.... in the move to real time worlds in business, there is a lesson to be learned here.

In this book by Simon Head (Oxford University Press, 2003) the author maintains that information technology is being used not to liberate workers from drudgery but to further their regimentation... as the HBR says "A sobering view of the new workplace."

Head maintains that far from empowering, the net result of the implementation of the principles of industrialization to skilled (knowledge work, whether at the high income profession positions such as the physician or with the skilled work of lower-inome workers such as call center agents)is what he calls "skill debilitation."

His message is clear, especially when Head speaks out against all encompasing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems: work is becoming more onerous and closely controlled.

This book is descriptive and doesn't cover what regular readers of this site will know is our premise -- that he design of viable systems through the use of sound managerial cybernetics foundations should not be compromised... something that appears not to be the case in the sites that Head has reviewed in his studies. 

The book is evidence of why systems design must not be left to the single focus of low variety re-engineering efforts.

My ranking: * * *

originally Posted to cep.weblogger.com by David Soul on 10/15/05; 11:08:45 PM in the Errors section. permalink#

Seldom do book publishers cover notes reflect the reality of the contents.  Even rarer is the case where they understate the charm and impact that a book can have, but this is the case in this work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Random House, 2005 2nd ed.):

" ... here is the word of mouth sensation that will change the way you think about business and the world.  This book is about luck: more precisely, aobut how we perceive luck in our personal and professional experiences.  Set against the backdrop of the most conspicuous forum in which luck is mistaken for skill -- the markets -- Fooled by Randomness is an irreverent, iconoclastic, eye-opening and endlessly entertaining multidisciplinary exploration of one of the least understood forces in all of our lives."

The author maintains that we undrestimate the share of randomness in just about everything and that "... the Tragic Vision of humankind that believes in the existence of inherent limitations and flaws in the way we think and act requires an acknowledgement of this fact as a basis for any individual and collective action."  ... "Needless to say that the ideas of this book fall squarely into the Tragic category: We are faulty and there is no need to bother trying to correct our flaws.  We are so defective and so mismatched to our environment that we can just work around these flaws."

Methods to work around these flaws are, of course, the themes of the Cybernetic and CEP streams in this web site... You'll find that this book is an excellent starting point to understand the magnitude of task that faces us... and the ultimate reminder that in many cases the false belief in determinism (often brought on by artificial reduction of the dimensionality of things) can be the beginning of the road to ruin for as Taleb so succinctly states in the prologue: "As much as you believe in the 'keep-it-simple-stupid' it is the simplification that is dangerous."

My ranking: * * * * * 
originally Posted to cep.weblogger.com by David Soul on 10/15/05; 8:56:58 PM in the Errors section. permalink#

A reading of a pair of articles from Technology Review.com is instructive about how "received doctrine" can become established fact...and ...   more »