http://dsoul.blogharbor.com/blog A journal about cybernetics, systems thinking, general systems theory, and the practice of effective management. en-us Wed, 25 Nov 2009 07:27:14 -0800 Cybernetics Blogware dsoul http://dsoul.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2006/1/28/1727872.html http://dsoul.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2006/1/28/1727872.html Sat, 28 Jan 2006 19:36:00 -0800 <a title="collision detection: Are smarter people better at ignoring things?" href="http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2005/11/people_frequent.html">from collision detection: Are smarter people better at ignoring things?</a><br>A team testing the "visual working memory"&nbsp; of a group of subjects by getting them to look at red and blue bricks in a picture found, much their&nbsp; suprise, that&nbsp; people with the largest capacity&nbsp; 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.<br><br><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 153);">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.&nbsp;&nbsp; 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.</span><br><br> Human error Cybernetics memory cognition