July 2009

Driving Processes

by OpenConceptual on 07-30-2009

in commentary,concepts

You will hear people talking about “latency,” which means the delay between a trading signal being given and the trade being made. Low latency — high speed — is what banks and funds are looking for. Yes, we really are talking about shaving off the milliseconds that it takes light to travel along an optical [...]

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I deliberately called this “Envisioning London’s Downtown Future” rather than merely “Envisioning the Future of Downtown London” because I believe London’s future is downtown… Not everyone would agree (see Dan Brown’s column challenging the notion that downtown is the heart of the city, discussed here), but I wasn’t convinced. Even detractors have to admit it’s [...]

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Processing Deliberative Democracy

by OpenConceptual on 07-28-2009

in concepts

I’m becoming a real fan of Daniel Little’s UnderstandingSociety blog. Here he considers “how good is deliberative democracy?”: The approach that starts and ends with voting among alternatives has a major shortcoming: no one gets a chance to make persuasive arguments to other citizens; no one has the opportunity of having his/her own beliefs challenged; [...]

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I’m not great at math but…

by Brian on 07-27-2009

in general

When a person orders four books at once from Chapters.Indigo.ca — all of which were “in stock” — why did they ship one of them a day before the other three… which, because of the weekend, resulted in all four arriving via the same delivery anyways… with the result that the latter three were in [...]

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At HarvardBusiness.org, Tammy Erickson writes, Future leaders in all spheres will have to contend with a world with finite limits, no easy answers, and the sobering realization that we are facing significant, seemingly intractable problems on multiple fronts. Perhaps the biggest change from the past: leaders will have to listen and respond to diverse points [...]

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Re-Evolution of Digital Media

by Brian on 07-24-2009

in education,media

Another bit of a ramble (I love where it ends up), starting with this Time Q&A: TIME: How difficult was it to chart a history of a massive and diverse thing like blogging? Rosenberg: This is a phenomenon that starts small, then diversifies, then explodes at a certain point. At the small phase, it’s not that [...]

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Relationships Everywhere!

by OpenConceptual on 07-22-2009

in concepts

As maybe one of the most marked turns in the history of mainstream military strategy, Thomas Friedman quotes a US officer in Afghanistan saying, “We don’t count enemy killed in action anymore.” Friedman elaborates: Early in both Iraq and Afghanistan our troops did body counts, à la Vietnam. But the big change came when the officers [...]

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8-Shaped People

by OpenConceptual on 07-22-2009

in concepts

We’ve been hearing for years about “T-shaped people” (with deep knowledge and competence in one or two areas, crossed with wide knowledge across many domains); Microsoft’s Bill Buxton recently wrote about “I-shaped people”: These have their feet firmly planted in the mud of the practical world, and yet stretch far enough to stick their head [...]

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Going Back

by Brian on 07-21-2009

in creativity,education,london,media

I’m still posting more or less daily at Open/Conceptual, focusing on some special interest stuff there, but I haven’t been doing much for BrianFrank.ca lately. It’ll probably stay this way for a while. Lately I’ve been looking back at where I’ve come from. I actually forgot how non-blog-like my blogging was a little over a [...]

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Neurodiversity

by OpenConceptual on 07-20-2009

in concepts

As I started reading Tyler Cowen’s Create Your Own Economy today, I was delighted to discover the whole book is framed by the concept of neurodiversity — specifically, the notion that autism shouldn’t be conceived strictly as an impairment, but as one cognitive style among many, with its own strengths and weaknesses. From the book: [...]

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Designing Ideas for Democracy

by OpenConceptual on 07-19-2009

in concepts

[Update: within minutes I decided to change the title to "Designing Ideas for Democracy" -- replacing "methodologies" with "ideas" -- which occurred to me after I thought about search results, then realized "ideas" is more appropriate anyways.] This will be the provisional mission for Open/Conceptual. As usual, “designing methodologies ideas for democracy” is something that [...]

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In the process of summarizing my last post, Jeff Jarvis suggested I was “searching for a metaphor for what I’ve been calling beta-think.” He’s exactly right — though I wasn’t aware of it when I started writing — so I’m going to take that up with a bit more brevity and focus. The search for [...]

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