Breaking Up With CPU

Listening to CBC this morning I heard a touching song. It's about breaking up with your computer. It made me shed a tear. One particularly good quote:

"I love my old girl may the good God bless her but you can't compete with a dual processor,
And the bloated apps these days make her look so slow."

The song is quite witty. It amazes me that the non-stop rush of the high-tech electronic consumer boom is now the victim of satire!

If you want to hear the song, the artists (3 Dead Trolls in a Baggie) have made a number of tracks available over at Ampcast.com: Breaking Up With CPU. A number of their other tracks are also quite entertaining. I particularly like: Every OS Sucks, Behind the Scenes @ Microsoft, and Paul's Finacial Report.

Blogging and Teens

An article from the New Time Magazine. Quite good. Here's a pull quote:

M. is an unusually Zen teenage boy -- dreamy and ruminative about his personal relationships. But his obsessive online habits are hardly exceptional; he is one of a generation of compulsive self-chroniclers, a fleet of juvenile Marcel Prousts gone wild. When he meets new friends in real life, M. offers them access to his online world. ''That's how you introduce yourself,'' he said. ''It's like, here's my cellphone number, my e-mail, my screen name, oh, and -- here's my LiveJournal. Personally, I'd go to that person's LJ before I'd call them or e-mail them or contact them on AIM'' -- AOL Instant Messenger -- ''because I would know them better that way.''

Applications of SNA

I have an interest in social networks. I'm particulary fascinated by the way they can create a nutural or holisitic classification and representation of some corpus. Jonathan D. Farley of MIT has recently used to SNA to explore international terrorism, specifically the structure of sleeper cells. Farley notes that operations should be directed at knocking out the weak ties in terrorist organizations so that the cells become isolated. Towards these ends, Farley notes that certain nodes aren't just nodes--a hierarchy exists. A weakly tied colonel, for example, is far more important than a weakly tied foot soldier. There may be interesting applications of Farley's work for analyzing corporate structures.

References

Farley, J.D. 2003. Breaking Al Qaeda cells: A mathematical analysis of counterterrorism operations (A guide for risk assessment and decision making). Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 26(November-December):399-411. Abstract available at http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/link.asp?id=0bywhr7hhhfm4vqe.

Bibliometrics... or something else

I found a link to an interesting article over at Plastic. The Science News article explains how researchers are using statistical techniques to determine authorship of works. Interesting stuff... although I'm not sure how information science concepts get completely missed.

New Blog

I'm splitting out my (incredibly rough) dissertation writing from my "other" writing. If you're interested in my dissertation--what ever that may be--check out www.facetation.com/deregulo/draftZero/draftZero.html

New Reading List


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Law, John and John Hassard, eds. 1999. Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wieck, Karl E. 1995. Sensemaking in organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. London: Penguin.

Callon, Michel. 1986. Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fisherman of St Brieuc Bay. In Power, Action and Belief. A new sociology of knowledge?, edited by J. Law, 196-223. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Cowan, Robin, Paul A. David and Dominique Forray. 2000. The explicit economics of knowledge codification and tacitness. Industrial and corporate change 9: 211-53.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1976. Philosophical hermeneutics. Berkeley, CA. University of California Press.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989. Truth and Method. London: Sheet and Ward.

Granovetter, Mark S. 1985. Economic action and social structure. The problem of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology 91(3): 481-510.

Higgin, Gurth and Neil Jessop. 1965. Communications in the building industry. London: Tavistock Publications.

Luhmann, Niklas. 1995. Social Systems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

McLaughlin, Janice and Andrew Webster. 1998. Rationalization knowledge, IT systems, professional identities and power. Sociological Review 46(4): 781-802.

Marshall, Nick and Jonathan Sapsed. 2000. The limits of disembodied knowledge: challenges of inter-project learning in the production of complex products and systems. Paper presented at the Conference “Knowledge management: concepts and controversies”, University of Warwick, Coventry, 10-11 February.

Marshall, Nick and Tim Brady. 2001. Knowledge management and the politics of knowledge: illustrations from complex products and systems. European journal of information systems 10: 99-112.

Schutz, Alfred. 1972. the phenomenology of the social world. London, Heinemann.

Tavistock Institute. 1966. Interdependence and uncertainty: A study of the building industry. London: Tavistock Publications.

Teece, David J. 1998. Capturing value from knowledge assets: The new economy, markets for know-how, and intangible assets. California Management Review 40(3): 55-79.

Teece, David J. 2000. Strategies for managing knowledge assets: The role of firm structure and industrial context. Long Range Planning 33: 35-54.

Thompson, James D. 1967. Organizations in Action. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Brown, John S. and Paul Duguid. 2000. Balancing Act: how to capture knowledge without killing it. Harvard Business Review 78(3): 73-80.

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Polanyi, Michael. 1966. The tacit dimension. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith.

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www.cyc.com

Cory Doctorow, “Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia,” Aug 2001. www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm.

Predication and Ontology: The Categories. http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cats320.htm

Leibniz: Logic and Harmony. http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/4j.htm

Descartes: A New Approach. http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/4b.htm

Skepticism—Sources of Knowledge. http://www.philosophyonline.co.uk/tok/scepticism2.htm
Saeed, John I. Semantics. Oxford: Blackwll, 1997.

What is "knowledge" (a la Korzybksi)? http://www.xenodochy.org/gs/knowledge.html

Popper's Philosophy of Science. http://www.xenodochy.org/article/popper.html

Genetic Epistemology http://www.xenodochy.org/gs/gesum.html

Brown, Cecil H. Language and Living Things. Uniformities in Folk Classification and Naming. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984.

Wardhaugh, Ronald. Introduction to Linguistics. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972.

Wierzbicka, Anna. Semantic Primes and Universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Lakoff, George. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. New York: Basic Books, 1990.

Folk Biology and the Anthropology of Science: Cognitive Universals and Cultural Particulars. http://www.bbsonline.org/documents/a/00/00/04/23/bbs00000423-00/bbs.atran.html

THE NATURAL SEMANTIC METALANGUAGE HOMEPAGE http://www.une.edu.au/arts/LCL/disciplines/linguistics/nsmpage.htm

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus http://www.kfs.org/~jonathan/witt/tlph.html

Ogden’s Basic English http://ogden.basic-english.org/basiceng.html

What kind of system of 'coding' of semantic information does the brain use? http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0381.html?printable=1

Just-In-Time Information Management http://www.mhxml.com/papers/km-essays.htm

The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization http://www.newarchitectmag.com/documents/s=4181/new1013635633/

Economic Classification Policy Committee Issues Paper No. 2 Aggregation Structures and Hierarchies http://www.census.gov/epcd/naics/issues2

What is an Ontology? http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/kst/what-is-an-ontology.html