Viable

BCLA Community of Practice

dsoul — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 01:19:37 -0800

BCLA Community of Practice Login

Peace One Day

dsoul — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 22:39:30 -0700

Tangler Treats

dsoul — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 17:56:16 -0700

In light of my personal view of Tangler as a potential Third Place of Learning I'm going to capture here some of the "best of Tangler"

Third Places of Learning

dsoul — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 16:09:11 -0700

Third Places of Learning - slides from a keynote at EDEN Conference 2007 (Naples)

Particls goes Public Beta

dsoul — Mon, 28 May 2007 19:36:43 -0700

Particls learns what you care about and alerts you when there's new information on those subjects...

Seth Godin's: Flipping the Funnel -a new ebook

dsoul — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 23:45:54 -0800

Seth's Blog: Flipping the Funnel--new ebook
Seth's new ebook is based on the simple premise that you should "Give Your Fans the Power to Speak Up" .... it is much more than just recognizing word-of-mouth or "buzz" but incorporates the idea that, as Seth states in one of his previous blog entries:
"Embracing the funnel changes the way you treat people. And treating different people differently is what consumers demand."

Patents 2.0

dsoul — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 22:04:37 -0800

IEEE Spectrum: Patents 2.0 Writing in Spectrum online, Lee Hollaar sugests ".... scrapping software patents altogether is not the solution. Instead, I propose that a new form of intellectual property be considered that gives reduced benefits in exchange for speedy protection."

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Hollar's suggestion is that showing that the technology had been independently created before the patentee's first commercial use would be an absolute defense for a second party, but the patent would still be valid against others who couldnot show substantial developement of their product prior to the patented product's introduction....

EFF Sues AT&T to Stop Illegal Surveillance

dsoul — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 22:00:38 -0800

EFF Sues AT&T to Stop Illegal Surveillance ... alleges that Telecom Collaborated with NSA to Spy on Customers (thanks to Jason Schultz LawGeek )

And in the the State of the Union Address, the President maintains not only is the practice legal but that the key people of the legislative branch were advised, and all is right... I'm still confused as to why the appropriate search warrants couldn't be obtained within the 72 hours after the taps were first made... since this argument doesn't seem to be debated very much (rather just the yes he can, no he can't factions seem to be vocal)...I must be missing something... what?

Are smarter people better at ignoring things?

dsoul — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 19:36:22 -0800

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.

CEP Start Here Guide

dsoul — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 20:56:55 -0800

originally put in place for a predecessor weblog (http://cep.weblogger.com) this page was still under construction at the time that this website was started... it may be updated sometime.... the links marked "#" point to the articles on the weblogger site:

The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age

dsoul — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 20:18:55 -0800

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#

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

dsoul — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 20:17:45 -0800

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 prime piece of evidence linking human activity to climate change turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics.

dsoul — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 20:14:30 -0800

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

Technology over Tsunami ?

dsoul — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 20:11:58 -0800

David Coursey isn't so sure that a computerized monitoring system would have saved lives.... human nature being what it is.......

'Airlines have become way too dependent on computers'

dsoul — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 20:09:45 -0800

Airlines' computer systems questioned according to this report carried on CNN.com ....Tuesday, December 28, 2004 Posted: 1524 GMT (2324 HKT) ...

Human error: models and management

dsoul — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 20:07:56 -0800

A most interesting article in BMJ (British Medical journal) .....

BMJ 2000;320:768-770 ( 18 March )
Education and debate

Human error: models and ...

Electrical Blackouts: A Systemic Problem

dsoul — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 20:05:47 -0800
"Although human error can be the proximate cause of a blackout, the real causes are found much deeper in the ...

Lessons Forgot : patent policy circa 1882

dsoul — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 19:41:42 -0800
Since I resurrected this weblog I've been asked several times if there is any rhyme or reason for the eclectic ...

A Brewing ....

dsoul — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 19:39:58 -0800
SAN FRANCISCO--A mysterious bidder paid $15.5 million in a bankruptcy court auction of dozens of Internet-related patents--and then rushed out of ...

XML Patent : Core Techcnology locked up ?

dsoul — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 19:36:46 -0800
This Can't be Good: Over the past year, there have been a number of cases where patents have been asserted against core technologies,

FTC Tosses Out Case Against Rambus

dsoul — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 19:34:55 -0800
Although the FTC will release its full ruling this coming Monday the agency made its decision known on Tuesday. ......

Stop Predatory Patentees

dsoul — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 19:32:36 -0800
Patent law's requirement that a patent attorney be hired every time one becomes aware of a patent that may relate to their activity is "irrational and unjustifiably prejudicial," ...

The Future of Ideas: the Fate of the Commons in a Connected World

dsoul — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 19:30:15 -0800
I just finished reading this and must agree with the people that have been insisting ....

Crafting an Effective Patent Invalidity Opinion - Is It the Last Bastion of Defense?

dsoul — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 19:26:52 -0800
This white paper (pdf) Crafting an Effective Patent Invalidity Opinion - Is It the Last Bastion of Defense? comes to the conclusion "In a perfect world, an accused infringer should not have to rely solely on an opinion of counsel to avoid a willfulness finding and/or enhanced damages or attorneys’ fees. However ....

More than just software patents fall into Ludicrous Category

dsoul — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 19:24:08 -0800
U.S. Patent 6,368,227, issued April 9,2002 describes a method for swinging ``in which a user positioned on a standard ...

Rambus being hit on all fronts

dsoul — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 19:22:08 -0800
A very interesting case... Rambus sat on industry standards groups and was accused of flagrant violations of the process... never-the-less in inital patent wranglings in the USA their patents were allowed to stand. But then federal investigators started to look to see if the transgressions in the standards group process were themselves actionable...results on this to come shortly, but according to theis article Rambus is also in trouble in Europe:
Europe to revoke Rambus memory patent While memory maker awaits ruling on FTC fraud allegations The Register
- goto
origiannly Posted to cep.weblogger.com by David Soul on 2/13/04; 11:43:31 AM in the IP section. permalink#

Microsoft snags XML-related patent

dsoul — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 19:20:27 -0800
The company wins another U.S. patent for XML-related technology, one of the first in an expected flood of filings surrounding ...

Pandora's Box for Open Source

dsoul — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 19:17:23 -0800
Open source has become something like the invisible hand of the software economy ...

Ordinary Skill in the Art

dsoul — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 19:10:32 -0800
According to Jeffrey Ullman, there are significant abuses of the patent system...

The Coming Software Patent Crisis: Can Linux Survive

dsoul — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 19:04:48 -0800
Bogus software patents pose a genuine threat to computer industry innovation. ...