Beloit College has been running this list each August to offer some insight into the formative years that characterize the 18-year olds about to enter college. It always makes me feel old. I’ve picked a few that strike home particularly for me. Check out the entire list and previous years’ as well.
Each August since 1998, as faculty prepare for the academic year, Beloit College in Wisconsin has released the Beloit College Mindset List. A creation of Beloit
Michael Levin is a “Friend of Buzz” I met a few years back when I was visiting Buzz when he was still based in Florida. Michael is a Java developer and all round good guy. I thought this was worth passing along to my engineering friends and those who live with them. I found it helpful
Comprehending Engineers – Part 1:To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist, the glass is half empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
Comprehending Engineers – Part 2:What is the difference between Mechanical Engineers and Civil Engineers?Mechanical Engineers build weapons, Civil Engineers build targets.
Comprehending Engineers – Part 3:Three engineering students were gathered together discussing the possible designers of the human body. One said, “It was a mechanical engineer. Just look at all the joints.” Another said, “No, it was an electrical engineer. The nervous system has many thousands of electrical connections.” The last said, “Actually it was a civil engineer. Who else would run a toxic waste pipeline through a recreational area?”
Comprehending Engineers – Part 4:”Normal people … believe that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain ‘t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet.”
Comprehending Engineers – Part 5:An architect, an artist and an engineer were discussing whether it was better to have a wife or a mistress. The architect said he preferred a wife, as they could build a solid foundation for an enduring relationship.
The artist said he preferred a mistress, because of the passion and mystery he found there.
The engineer said, “I like both.”
“Both?”
Engineer: “Yeah. If you have a wife and a mistress, they will each assume you are spending time with the other woman, and you can go to the lab and get some work done [Michael Levin’s Weblog]
I am continuing to recover from my shoulder injury last month. Although the progress feels slow, both my physical therapist and orthopedic surgeon tell me that things are right on schedule and doing well. When I first posted about the accident I had just met with the surgeon and we had not yet completed all the diagnostic tests. Once the CAT scans were in, together with more detailed x-rays, it was clear that I had done significantly more damage than I initially thought. What I had was, in technical terms, “a closed, comminuted fracture of the right proximal humerus.” In more colloquial terms, what I had was a “head split,” where I had turned the ball of my shoulder into something resembling a jigsaw puzzle. Quite remarkable what you can do to yourself falling off a bike at 0 MPH.
Continue reading An update on my shoulder and recovery progress
Dan Bricklin nicely summarizes most of the nice things I would have said in calling your attention to John Sviokla s new blog (Sviokla s Context). I think I can rightly take some credit for persuading John to add his voice and thinking to the mix. John and I first met twenty plus years ago at the Harvard Business School. John was just finishing his DBA (Doctor of Business Administration, not Data Base Administrator – this was HBS s original version of a Ph.D. in business that explicitly emphasized interdisciplinary thinking) as I was starting work on mine. He joined the faculty there and I worked as his research assistant for a while.
When HBS foolishly chose not to offer him tenure ten years later, I persuaded him to join me at Diamond, where he ended up becoming my boss again. Calling John quite bright is along the lines of describing Tom Brady as a pretty good quarterback. If you are at all interested in how technology and strategy fit together, John is someone you would best pay attention to.
John Sviokla s blog. As part of my work as a DiamondCluster Fellow I ve spent a lot of time talking with their vice-chairman and Global Managing Director of Innovation and Research John Sviokla and listening to his presentations. We ve also produced a few episodes of a podcast together. Prior to DiamondCluster (a consulting firm that merges technology and strategy consulting) John was a professor at Harvard Business School (not when I was there as I recall). He s quite bright and helps me understand big businesses and organizations.
John has recently started blogging at a somewhat regular pace (a new long post every day or so). Given the disclaimer that I have a financial interest in DiamondCluster, that I do consulting for them, that I talked with John about his blog a few weeks ago as this was starting, and that he pointed to me today when writing about Motorola wikis, etc., etc., I have to tell you this because I think I d be doing my readers a disservice if I didn t: John Sviokla s new blog is really worth reading. He covers technology and business in a way that will help people in both worlds. He brings interesting perspectives that remind you of those moments in business school when after 60 minutes of discussing a case in class it all starts making sense there s a way of looking at things I hadn t considered.
His blog is Sviokla s Context and it has an RSS feed.
John is trying to add his voice to the blogosphere. I think it s a welcome addition. A nice sign of the times as a blog may be pushing aside the white paper at a major consulting firm. [Dan Bricklin on John Sviokla]
I finally got around to finishing the transition from Radio to WordPress for McGee’s Musings. I don’t think there will be an serious breakage, but do let me know otherwise. I’ve elected to simply cut over from Jan 1 forward and leave the old Radio blog archives in place. Someday I might get around to porting them.
With the switch to WordPress, I am re-enabling comments and trackbacks, which will be moderated. Let’s hope that the platform change will also lead to some increase in posting frequency. Not that technology has been the excuse for my recent general level of silence.
I expect I will continue to fiddle with the new design and new platform. Feedback of any kind is welcome.
I've got a spiffy new logo over in the right sidebar (and yes, I know
that I need a major visual makeover – real soon now). I'm very
impressed with what Corante is trying to accomplish and extremely
flattered to have been asked to participate. At the very least, it will
serve as another gentle reminder for me to make more time for writing
about this tremendous transformation of work and technology we're all
living through.
Welcome to the Corante Web Hub
Welcome to the Corante Web Hub. From the world's first blog media
company comes a new effort to gather some of today's leading voices to
articulate the exciting unfoldings of the Web.To get started, I'd encourage you to view the complete list of the contributors.
After you have familiarized yourself with these folks, you can check
out some of their latest posts under the “More from The Corante
Network” section. These posts come straight from the contributors'
blogs, meaning that you receive unedited straight talk, perspectives,
and insights.If you like what you see, consider subscribing to the Corante Web Hub Network Feed,
which is an aggregated feed for all contributors. For non-RSS users,
you can subscribe via email under the “Subscribe via email” section in
the right-hand sidebar.As your editor, my work will always appear in the top section of the
page. I'll attempt to synthesize what's occurring both inside and
outside of the hub, highlighting the day's talking points and tying
together pervasive themes and important ideas.Of course, we are just getting started and are very interested in your feedback. As we move forward, be sure to drop us a line
and let us know what you like or where we could improve.
Here's to a bright future!
Ken Yarmosh
Corante Web Hub Editor
I'm not sure which is more disturbing. The thought that I successfully
navigated my dissertation because my committee didn't know about this.
Or that they knew full well and let me graduate anyway.
Regardless, for any of you who need to decipher academic writing, this will prove helpful.
Translations of phrases often seen in dissertations and scholarly articles
- “It has long been known” … I didn't look up the original reference.
- “A definite trend is evident” … These data are practically meaningless.
- “While it has not been possible to provide definite answers to the
questions” … An unsuccessful experiment but I still hope to get it
published.- “Three of the samples were chosen for detailed study” … The other results didn't make any sense.
- “Typical results are shown” … This is the prettiest graph.
- “These results will be in a subsequent report” … I might get around to this sometime, if pushed/funded.
- “In my experience” … Once.
- “In case after case” … Twice.
- “In a series of cases” … Thrice.
- “It is believed that” … I think.
- “It is generally believed that” … A couple of others think so, too.
- “Correct within an order of magnitude” … Wrong.
- “According to statistical analysis” … Rumor has it.
- “A statistically-oriented projection of the significance of these findings” … A wild guess.
- “A careful analysis of obtainable data” … Three pages of notes were obliterated when I knocked over a glass iced tea.
- “It is clear that much additional work will be required before a
complete understanding of this phenomenon occurs” … I don't
understand it.- “After additional study by my colleagues” … They don't understand it either.
- “Thanks are due to Joe Blotz for assistance with the experiment and
to Cindy Adams for valuable discussions” … Mr. Blotz did the work and
Ms. Adams explained to me what it meant.- “A highly significant area for exploratory study” … A totally useless topic selected by my committee.
- “It is hoped that this study will stimulate further investigation in this field” … I quit.
By terrywfrazier@gmail.com. [b.cognosco]
Just a quiet little pointer from Dave Winer this morning on the idea of his that has ended up driving a huge amount of my experimentation with creating an environment for personal knowledge management.
1/4/01: “In the centralized model for the Internet, your browser makes requests of a server that could be very far away, or slow for other reasons. Now imagine that the server is very close and you don’t have to share it with anyone, it’s yours and yours alone. It would be fast!” [Scripting News]
My work means that I am frequently not connected to the web for significant chunks of time. Ten years ago, the solution to that problem was Lotus Notes as both an email and document management environment that understood the problems of intermittment connectivity. Unfortunately, Notes got hijacked by the IS group and locked down behind layers of complexity that prevented amateur programmers from rolling their own solutions.
That was followed by a period where Outlook and Microsoft Office were almost the only tools I used on my notebook machine. For all its strengths, Office, IMHO, is fundamentally focused on the production aspects of final deliverables and is either weak or an active hindrance in the earlier stages of creating and developing knowledge work products. Nor do the components of Office do much helpful to support the real issues of producing final products that are the joint collaborative efforts of a team (compare Word’s Track Changes against any reasonable version control system that software developers would take as a necessary tool in their world).
Somewhere around the time Dave wrote this, I started playing with Userland’s Frontier and Manila and then began to use “Radio” as my< blogging platform. One of the key value added features for me was the built in outlining capabilities hidden inside Radio. Unfortunately, they are a bit too well hidden even for someone who loves outlining as a key thinking tool. Also, the innovative energy around Radio and Frontier dropped off from my amateur's perspective. I no longer have the time or the skill to do major development. I am fundamentally a technology user. What I can do is take advantage of the efforts of others and tweak and adapt what they do to my needs. That works best if you can plug into a thriving environment of developers and users. I've posted elsewhere (Experimenting with Web 2.0 on my laptop, Details of my Windows/LAMP Environment) about my current practices, but I wanted to make the connection back to the original ideas that drove my approach.
To date, most of this experimentation has been about improving my own knowledge work effectiveness over time. Moving that to the level of project team and work group has been more difficult. First, because you need to overcome the blinders imposed by the marketing investments of most software vendors who generally promise more than they deliver and who actively ignore the organizational change issues of new work practices. Second, there are the barriers imposed by IS groups who tend to be more focused on managing the risks introduced by users who are unwilling or unable to understand the technology they already have than they are on helping a handful of mavericks push the envelope. In a world of worms, viruses, and Sarbanes-Oxley that’s an entirely appropriate focus, of course. I work hard to keep the folks in IS informed and happy.
Today, even though I’m making less use of the specific tools he’s developed, I continue to make very productive use of Dave Winer’s insights and perspective.
This is an exciting addition to the upcoming BlawgThing conference. I've been using and advocating mindmaps
for years (I have one 26-year old hand drawn mindmap near my desk that
I used to organize my studying for exams at the end of my first year of
business school). MindManager was the first, and in my view still the
best, tool I found that made mindmapping on a computer a useful and
productive practice.
Jack Vinson and I have
already been exchanging MindManager mindmaps as we develop our session
for Blawgthink and will likely use it for anything we choose to present
as part of the session. I'm definitely looking forward to having the
tool and the technique be a core part of the experience.
Mindjet is excited to announce the first “Powered by MindManager” conference. BlawgThink 2005,
to be held Nov. 11-12 in Chicago, will be the first large conference to
use MindManager as its central organizing principle. Breakout sessions
will be run with MindManager, conference “scribes” will take notes in
MindManager, the main conference room will feature a large map of all
the thinking going on, and there will be presentations on using
MindManager in the legal field. The event organizers plan to use
MindManager’s External Linker” (available for free in the Mindjet Labs)
to instantly pull information from the breakout sessions into the main
conference map. And they have a lot more ideas in mind on using
MindManager to create the perfect conference environment.
If
you have any interest in how MindManager can be used in the legal
arena, this one conference will probably tell you more in two days than
you would learn in two months. Go to the BlawgThink site for more information on this first-ever “Powered by MindManager” event as the date gets nearer.
And
please let us know if you have any thoughts on how MindManager can help
improve the value and quality of conferences. Think of BlawgThink as a
bit of a test lab for using MindManager to build the perfect large
interactive event. How would you do it?
If it's my blogiversary, then it's also Liz Lawley's. So, a happy blogiversary
to you over at mamamusings.
