b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Ergonomics of Reading
Combining Toolset and Mindset
Increase Radio Editor Window
The Root of Poverty
IBM Knowledge Research
Bypassing Radio's ftp
Monday, February 10, 2003
Quad/Graphics Leads in Healthcare
This brief from the Dec. 16, 2002 Business Week notes how Quad/Graphics has turned the problem of providing healthcare to 14,000 employees into an opportunity for innovation.
[...] At Quad/Graphics, a printer with 14,000 employees, the company's own doctors and nurses offer primary care on-site, and the company has a small network of specialists. Over the past four years, Quad's health-care costs have risen just 6% annually. That means their health-care spending is now 17% less than the industry average. "Our plan saves us money, cuts down on the bureaucracy associated with managed care, and employees love it," says John Neuberger, a director at Quad. [...] [BW Online]
Ergonomics of Reading
I do not pay nearly enough attention to proper ergonomics when reading, maybe because if I get too comfortable I go to sleep. With as much reading as we need to do in knowledge worker roles, it only makes sense to understand the physical factors involved and how to use them to get the most from our reading experience. The article from Ergoboy covers lighting, bookstands, and chairs with links to their products in each area.
Ergonomics of reading. Ergonomics of reading is not the same as haptics of comprehension...read about factors involved before opening the book. [future of the book news]
Combining Toolset and Mindset
Theory of Constraints (TOC) specialist Frank Patrick uses a recent CNET News article on employee unrest to demonstrate the unique nature of TOC, and how it addresses the very real needs we have, as employees, to feel a sense of significance in our work.
Unrest Among Tech Ranks. Unrest Among Tech Ranks -- CNET News.Com reports on a survey of 1,100 workers and 300 executives at medium and large companies across North America."The study, released last week, found that people relate to their work on a personal level, basing much of their satisfaction on whether their job provides them a sense of confidence or control over their destinies. "Employees are not apathetic or indifferent, as many suppose. In fact, people have very strong emotions about their work," researchers wrote. [...][...] "The study also found that managers underestimate the importance of many factors contributing to workplace satisfaction, including career development opportunities, rewards, challenging tasks and a sense of self-confidence."
[...] As one of the three canonical "necessary conditions" that are required for organizational success, "satisfaction and security of associates, now and in the future," this is a significant component of most TOC implementations. At the very least, bringing joy to the work, or at least the chance of enhancing the joy component, is something that I consciously strive to bring to every engagement in every organization with which I get involved.
And, fortunately, the toolset and mindset that I try to bring helps me considerably in this endeavor.
In my opinion, one of the key contributions of Goldratt's theory and it's supporting body of knowledge and applications is the integration of the "human and the humane" with the "logistical" aspects of management. [...] [Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog]
Frank goes on to explain just how TOC supports this business/human integration, and provides several supporting anecdotes. He also makes a useful ancillary point -- how his toolset and mindset provide a dual base for his practice.
As a solo practitioner Frank takes his project management and TOC expertise to a variety of companies, and the need for both a well-developed toolset and a proper mindset are crucial to success. I'm learning this in my own entrepreneurial efforts. Companies often hire you based on your toolset -- e.g. which popular methodology you use, or how much experience you have with a particular strategic framework. But they continue to work with you because of your mindset -- both how you manage your own efforts and how you position your efforts within their organization.
In the end, TOC may be one of the only frameworks that incorporates the right mindset as a fundamental element, making it one of the best toolset choices for independent practitioners in business strategy.
Increase Radio Editor Window
A simple modification to Radio.root to change the depth of the editor window.
Radio tweak: editor size.From the helpful folks at thought?horizon comes this useful tweak:
We have just added a useful tip on how to modify the size of the editor window used to write posts. The short depth of 9 lines makes longer posts difficult.
The basic steps are:
- Open the Radio Userland console
- Open Root.root tables
- Navigate to user.radio.prefs.browserBasedEditorSize
- Set whatever value you like and return to your home page.
You can read more in our Radio How-To. Look under Tricks and Tips, Look and Feel.
[thought?horizon] [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]
Sunday, February 9, 2003
The Root of Poverty
Buried in this little bit of social theory is an explanation of why the 40-year, multi-hundred trillion dollar "War on Poverty" and other social engineering efforts have failed. And why they will continue to do so in a free society (actually, in any society.) Funny what one can learn from a little blog analysis.
How blogs got an A-list. Clay Shirky's latest piece on the "A-list" of blogging and the means whereby power-law distributions emerge in all online communities is fantastic.
A persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of weblogging is to note (and usually lament) the rise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world...(via Hack the Planet) [Boing Boing Blog]Prior to recent theoretical work on social networks, the usual explanations invoked individual behaviors: some members of the community had sold out, the spirit of the early days was being diluted by the newcomers, et cetera. We now know that these explanations are wrong, or at least beside the point. What matters is this: Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality.
In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution...
If we assume that any blog chosen by one user is more likely, by even a fractional amount, to be chosen by another user, the system changes dramatically. Alice, the first user, chooses her blogs unaffected by anyone else, but Bob has a slightly higher chance of liking Alice's blogs than the others. When Bob is done, any blog that both he and Alice like has a higher chance of being picked by Carmen, and so on, with a small number of blogs becoming increasingly likely to be chosen in the future because they were chosen in the past.
IBM Knowledge Research
This is another example of the quality, free research available on the Web -- one could spend a lifetime just trying to absorb the ideas and insights available in the intellectual commons. Lilia has provided this list she found while conducting research for her own work. I took a look at "Social Construction of Knowledge and Authority in Business Communities and Organizations."It builds on data collected from 20 companies to derive four models of how knowledge is originated, refined, authored, and authorized in business. An interesting aspect is the authors' discussion of the contrasts between the business models they found and the academically-derived models they expected, supporting the idea of significant differences in knowledge behavior between hierarchical and non-hierarchical communities.
IBM research papers on communities, learning and more.Trying to find a paper on-line gives you a lot of other interesting things. So, I came accross public papers of IBM Watson Research Center. These are some I'd like to check out:
[Mathemagenic]
- 02-07 Understanding the Individual, Community and Organizational Benefits of Work-Based Communities
- 02-01 Understanding the Benefits and Costs of Communities of Practice
- 01-06 The Dynamics of Social Interaction in a Geography-based Online Community
- 01-03 Social Construction of Knowledge and Authority in Business Communities and Organizations
- 00-07 Coming to the Crossroads of Knowledge, Learning, and Technology: Integrating Knowledge Management and Workplace Learning
- 00-06 New Workplace Learning Technologies: Activities and Exemplars
- 00-05 Designing Learning: Cognitive Science Principles for the Innovative Organization
Saturday, February 8, 2003
Bypassing Radio's ftp
Today I am experimenting with something dangerous -- automatic synchronization between a local folder on my hard drive and the remote ftp folder holding all my Radio-generated web pages. I just can't accept the miserable performance of Radio's pathetic built-in ftp driver any longer, so I'm looking for some way to bypass it.Thanks to help from the Radio Discussion Group, I found Radio's fileSystemDriver which allows Radio to render all it's pages to a local hard drive. After a little configuration and testing I have this upstreaming one of my Categories to a local folder. Now I'm working on the ftp synchronization process.
This isn't as easy as one might think. My regular ftp client doesn't support synchro, so I downloaded a couple of shareware programs -- WS_FTP Pro and FTP Voyager. Both support synch'ing folders, but Voyager seems only to do a brain-dead bulk copy. WS_FTP seems to have the right scheduling and synch'ing options, but it tries to delete all sorts of parent directories on my remote drive. Bad! I know this has something to do with configuring exclusions, but I don't know how to fix it. Yet.
In the end I will have a crufty, kludgy, inconvenient workaround for upstreaming my Radio pages to my domain. But at least it should be reliable. It should run without sucking up 95% of my CPU cycles and a 60%-70% failure rate. I have a lot of time invested in building my sites with Radio, and I appreciate all the nifty things the program can do. But this is a web publishing software package, and it damn well ought to be able to publish to a standard ftp server without puking all over itself.
ftp upstream problems are among the most common topic on the discussion group, so lots of people have issues with the way this (doesn't) work. It needs to be fixed, or else removed from the program entirely so that Userland makes no pretense the program can publish to a standard server.
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