Category: Personal

ER-6 headphones

Buzz is nothing if not a persuasive salesman. He's been on my case for months to try Etymotics's ER-6 earphones. He finally succeeded a few weeks back and I've now been using them for a while.

I should have given in to Buzz earlier. Understand, I was already using an upgraded pair of UM In-Ear Monitors as recommended by Kevin Kelly at Recomendo. And I used Bose's noise-cancelling headsets when I travelled. The ER-6's replace both of those and give me noticeably better sound over both of those choices.

Tools and problems

Emergence, reverence, and irrelevance.


Via Jerry Michalski, here’s a great text by Russell Ackoff, a pioneer of Operations Research (pdf file), that sketches what I feel is the usual arc trajectory of successful fields of knowledge.

The life of OR has been a short one. It was born here late in the 1930’s. By the mid 60’s it had gained widespread acceptance in academic, scientific, and managerial circles. In my opinion this gain was accompanied by a loss of its pioneering spirit, its sense of mission and its innovativeness. Survival, stability and respectability took precedence over development, and its decline began.

I hold academic OR and the relevant professional societies primarily responsible for this decline-and since I had a hand in initiating both, I share this responsibility. By the mid 1960’s most OR courses in American universities were given by academics who had never practised it. They and their students were text-book products engaging in impure research couched in the language, but not the reality, of the real world. The meetings and journals of the relevant professional societies, like classrooms, were filled with abstractions from an imagined reality. As a result OR came to be identified with the use of mathematical models and algorithms rather than the ability to formulate management problems, solve them, and implement and maintain their solutions in turbulent environments.

Eventually the tails begins wagging the dog. “When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.

[…] In the first two decades of OR, its nature was dictated by the nature of the problematic situations it
faced. Now the nature of the situations it faces is dictated by the techniques it has at its command.

There’s an interesting passage on interdisciplinarity as a sign of the aliveness of a field:

Subjects, disciplines, and professions are categories that are useful in filing scientific knowledge and in dividing the labour involved in its pursuit, but they are nothing more than this. Nature and the world are not organized as science and universities are. There are no physical, chemical, biological, psychological, sociological or even Operational Research problems. These are names of different points-of-view, different aspects of the same reality, not different kinds of reality. Any problematic situation can be looked at from the point-of-view of any discipline, but not necessarily with equal fruitfulness.

[…] The fact that the world is in such a mess as it is is largely due to our decomposing messes into unidisciplinary problems that are treated independently of each other.

Don’t miss the ironic postscript, too.

A related earlier post of mine is Information systems research: towards irrelevance?

[Seb’s Open Research]

Written almost 25 years ago, this gem from Ackoff captures why I’m back in the real world and was never a particularly good academic. I’ve always been more interested in making some progress against interesting problems than in solving toy problems.

I helped pay for my college education as a stage carpenter and electrician. I learned a lot of valuable lessons about tools. Probably the most important was that the tool you could get you hands on now was a lot more useful than the perfect tool back in the shop. The second was that if you had a reasonable collection of tools, you could usually adapt one to the problem. But you could rarely fit the problem to the tool.

Censorware Blocks This Site

Censorware Blocks This Site. Simon Phipps alerts me that one of the big censorware outfits, SurfControl, is blocking this and other blogs as a… [Dan Gillmor’s eJournal]

Hey, I’m hanging in a better neighborhood than I thought. Just checked McGee’s Musings at SurfControl to discover I’m blocked as well. Good to know that SurfControl’s rigorous methodology has carefully classified my blog as Usenet News. Won’t you sleep better tonight knowing your children are safe from my thoughts?

Ruth McGee 1925-2003

Mom passed away last week. I've gone back and forth over whether to post something here or not. What finally tipped it was this write up from yesterday's memorial service that my Dad put together.

Thank you all for coming today and thank you all for your loving care and support. Ruth is delighted.

She firmly believed that we are all created in the image and likeness of Christ so she was convinced that He too was a collector (pack-rat?) of memorabilia (Crayola art, cards, pictures, “Good” report cards, awards, diplomas, knick-knacks, various “can't live without” items from her many travels, etc.). As a result she believed her first assignment would be to clean out all His closets and storage spaces before she could set up bridge games and our rooms. So if you see muddy rain and hear noisy thunder don't be surprised. It's Ruth organizing the clean-up crews. Wear a hard hat. The hail may be rather heavy and odd-shaped.

Thank you again for everything and listen for her infectious laugh.

So now you have a sense for where my occasionally off-center perspective comes from. We're all doing ok. And my hard hat is close at hand.

The issue is user created context

Jeff Jarvis discovers North America user created content

OK, his post-9/11 postings were the direct inspiration for my blogging, and I find his old journo crossover views on this medium fascinating. But occasionally Jeff Jarvis fluffs one, so I’m going to have to diss my blog-daddy. In this case, he happens upon the revelation that about 2/3 of AOL users’ time is spent with other users’ contributions, and riffs from there. Fine to speculate on the implications, but I’m here to tell you this is old news. Similar distributions of user time date well back into the proprietary days of AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy. Remember, I used to read usage time and income reports from the entrails of the CompuServe accounting system. This isn’t anything novel, nor does it have to do with the advent of blogs, social software, or anything else trendy. Same thing happened with crappy old ASCII forums, CB, and proprietary e-mail. It’s related to human nature, not the specific technology – so long as it’s two-way – and that in many ways is very good news.

We now return you to your previously scheduled new media speculation. [Due Diligence]

Glad to see someone out there who has been paying attention all along. You have to be very careful not to get caught up in the news business’s need to pretend there’s something new every day. Couple that with most people’s aversion to anything resembling a sense of history and you get breathless commentary on old news.

I once had the chance to hear the late Herb Simon give a speech on what constituted news. He walked the audience through a funny sketch of his gradual abandonment of the daily newspaper, the nightly news broadcast, the weekly newsmagazine, and monthly magazines as devoid of anything that resembled news. He finally settled on reading the annual update volume to the Encyclopedia Brittanica as being about the right frequency and perspective for his getting updated on what had happened that mattered during the year.

Staying in this context, I’m quite certain that Simon’s primary sources of information about stuff that mattered to him was his network of colleagues and friends, not “content providers” offering to keep him up to date.

What I think may be relevant today is that new tools (weblogs, wikis, etc) are pushing forward along the dimension of context management instead of content. Perhaps what we are building with weblogs, RSS, and the rest is the infrastructure for personalizing and managing context on a new scale.

Political Compass

Just took the political compass test.  I am right between the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela.  Nice company. [John Robb's Weblog]

Looks like John and I are in the same general vicinity, as is Dave Winer. Certainly a more interesting way to think about things than a one-dimensional left-right analysis which always feels overly limiting.  For another look at a richer way of thinking about political orientations you might want to look at Jerry Pournelle's “All Ends fo the Spectrum.”

Lunch with Rick Klau

Lunch with Jim McGee.

Just returned to the office from a thoroughly engagaing lunch with Jim McGee. Jim is every bit as smart and engaging as his weblog would have you think he is.

As has become the norm in first-time meetings with fellow bloggers, all of the ordinary “getting to know you” stuff is gone. We already know each other, we already have an idea of what interests each other, and we jump right into a completely thought-provoking discussion. It was true when I met Chris & Joy, Ernie, Buzz, Matt, Denise, Jonas, Ross and many others.

John Robb wrote about this last year too. With “social software” getting so much attention lately, I think we would be wise to recognize that weblogs have become one of the best ways to get to know people you should know. You decide which people to associate with in part based on what they know — and blogs help establish that.

I’ve been fortunate enough to meet several of my friends face to face, but the most surprising thing is that after meeting them face to face it only reaffirmed what I already knew: they’re interesting, thoughtful people who I’m lucky to know.

By Rick Klau. [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]

Rick skips over the importance of two to an excellent conversation. After almost two years of reading each other's blogs, several phone conversations, and multiple last-minute lunch cancellations, Rick and I finally managed to break bread together.

We did indeed dive right into several conversations that were both challenging and entertaining. Something that would not be possible, by the way, simply as a side effect of several of the various networking websites such as Ryze or LinkedIn. While these sites may have a role to play, the picture you can build of someone on the basis of following their blog on a sustained basis (preferably in your aggregator) is not something that can be replaced by the dry recitation of resume tidbits and interests that make up the relatively static content of these networking sites.

Looking forward to future lunches with Rick.

Congratulations Full Professor AKMA

Rest of the Day.

After mass, I went to lunch with the adult education coordinator of the parish (St. Elizabeth’s, Glencoe — which always makes me think of Scotland’s infamous massacre) that’s invited me out to talk about The DaVinci Code. She and I traded ideas about the panel discussion, which includes Prof. Barbara Newman of Northwestern University and Brian Hastings of Church of Our Savior, over an Indian buffet. She’s rather more sympathetic to Gnosticism than I am, but we held a lively and wide-ranging converstion. It sounds as though the church will be packed; she’s estimating three to four hundred people will attend, overflowing the sanctuary and spilling into an adjacent parish room. If you’re coming, come early, I guess.

When I got back to my office, the Dean rang me up; the Board of Trustees had voted to promote me to full Professor. It sounded as though he said “effective immediately,” but I got lost in a jumble of subsequent topics. To be on the safe side, you may kneel and call me “Full Professor Adam” when you address me. [emphasis added]

Then, alas! I had to drop Margaret off on the train. Pip did her Halloween bit, Si is off at a (church) all-night lock-in, and I’m exhausted. I didn’t sleep well last night; tonight, I’m about to crumple altogether.

[AKMA’s Random Thoughts]

So typical of AKMA to try to bury the news about himself in this post. Even Boards of Trustees do eventually get things right sometimes.  Congratulations on your promotion!