information

The WikiLeaks story is really becoming a saga. It’s like a new chapter is added every week, with new characters and new ethical questions raised. The latest one helped me work out at least one big answer to move forward with. The answer hinges on trust. It used to be that knowledge was power: it [...]

“Books are being replaced by reading,“ to borrow a phrase from Jack Shafer. Digital technology “distances us from the old magic conjured by books” by giving us better ways to get what’s inside them. Of course the tactile experience is lost, but that’s only a sentimental attachment — not without genuine value, but not without considerable influence from purely [...]

I love that it’s constantly changing. For now. It’s still pretty unpredictable, like the midst of a great big game — like the kind of games that Calvin & Hobbes played. It isn’t just the outcomes that change; our boundaries and rules keep changing too, without much notice. And we can change them (or at least [...]

Yesterday’s announcement of new copyright legislation in Canada was met with the expected array of complaints from complainers, aka bloggers, slackers, n’er-do-wells, social deviants, hipsters, and cultural parasites. They received the news as an affront to their supposed “freedom” to exchange intellectual and aesthetic work and reshape existing artifacts into new “creations.” The dispute comes [...]

Creating a Platform for Collaboration

by Brian on 02-22-2010

in media,web

Yesterday I read a really interesting story about a project to develop a new tool for researchers at the massive CERN laboratory (the folks who made that gigantic particle accelerator in Switzerland) to collaborate and share expertise more effectively. It’s a great complement to what John Seely Brown and John Hagel recently wrote about growing [...]

Continued from the social uncertainty principle post, using the analogy of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Like virtually all of the ideas I’m describing in this series, the social uncertainty principle is a heuristic for observing ideas-in-action and overcoming fallacies that affect them. Specifically it’s a rule of thumb for working out a balance between ideas that [...]

Continuing the previous discussion of object bias and conceptions of time… As a very rough rule of thumb I like to apply a kind of generalized version of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: “the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known, and conversely…” [via SEP] Applied to social and economic models, [...]

These thoughts have been germinating for a while, finally coming together after reading this on Glen Pearson’s blog: I am learning that these people ["from all political stripes" who manage to work together] are looking for a “place,” a way of being that can reflect political differences while at the same time maintaining the deep respect [...]

Just sort of a brainstorm here, following up on some of my relatively more youthful attempts to outline what this is all about: Draft Enterprise Model The Practice of Theory The other day I jotted down a few points — trying to distill the underlying mission of this amorphous enterprise. It has a few different [...]

Information Food Groups

by Brian on 06-19-2009

in humour,media

I left a comment on this post at the LFPress Editor’s Blog about the traffic disparity between Tori Stafford-related livestreams (up to over 5,000 viewers) and yesterday’s Beyond the Crisis panel (55 viewers — it would have been 56 if I didn’t have to work).  By chance, a food metaphor popped into my head: some [...]

China: Mother of All Enrons?

by Brian on 03-17-2009

in economics,global

Directly following up on my last post about the problems of goals gone wild, here’s a look at China’s attempts to keep up their 8% rate of annual GDP growth. (Thanks to Francois in the previous post’s comments for bringing up the abuse of information during China’s Cultural Revolution.) Earlier today, FP Passport reported the World Bank’s quarterly [...]

Citizen Journalism for London

by Brian on 02-11-2009

in civics,london,media

Not just “in” London, but for London — that seems to be the underlying purpose of Dan Brown’s “challenge to London bloggers“: I’m challenging London bloggers to do their own original reporting. [...] If you believe, as I do, that this city deserves excellent journalism, it’s time to lead by example. I think we’ll all be better for [...]