Having mentioned Qumana in a recent post, the ever-vigilant Qumana team picked up on my comment and asked if I’d look again at the tool. As I promised, here is a note of my re-visit. In the spirit of the thing, this post is written using the tool (3.0.0-b2 Beta). The two things that put me off Qumana before were its inability to post via a web proxy (not tested this time), and the lack of control over the HTML it was creating.
Who could resist a book subtitled “A Complete Guide to the Laws of The Universe”? If you didn’t know that the author was Roger Penrose, you could be forgiven for assuming that The Road to Reality was one of the very many quasi-scientific, faith-based, wild-eyed polemics that appear each year under increasingly garish covers, but instead this tome sets out to be a comprehensive account of the physical universe and the essentials of its underlying mathematical theory.
Innovative wiki company Socialtext have launched group-based pricing for their hosted wiki solutions, including unlimited free wikis for groups of 5 or less. As CEO Ross Mayfield says, this is …reflecting how the unit of value in wikis is the group that uses it…. I’m a big fan of Socialtext, with the help of their hosted solution I was able to get a small project group introduced to the wiki way long before we had in-house wiki facilities, and I always found them very helpful.
Just got around to reading Blink. It’s a quick read – as usual with Gladwell the book’s central theme, the human ability to make almost instant decisions based on the unconscious mind and previously-acquired experience, is presented lucidly and with plenty of examples. He structures the book in three broad areas: Evidence of human ability to make accurate decisions very quickly – faster than conscious thought The strengths and weaknesses this gives us Ways to develop skill and improve the accuracy of your instant impressions Although Gladwell includes notes on sources, my frustration with books like this is that they only present one side of the argument, in favour of the core theory, and don’t really explore what else may be going on.
Via Earl Mardle I’ve found a new tool to add to my personal knowledge management toolkit: Awasu Although the core of the product is an aggregator, it’s a lot more than that as it offers a number of ways of inter-acting with the flow of information through the tool, both manually and in various automated ways. It also offers the facility to add “channel hooks” – plugins which carry out specific actions on selected channels.
Clarke Ching points to Network Rail’s document Consultation On Capacity Study For East Coast Main Line [PDF, 546kb], which documents a Theory Of Constraints approach to managing resource capacity – in this case on a strategic rail route. Clarke quotes the introduction which sets out the way the methodology was adapted, within the body of the document there is more on how they assessed capacity at the various constraints along the route.
This site is an interesting adjunct to my previous note on geneaology – the surname profiler from UCL lets you compare the geographical distribution of a given surname in the UK between 1881 and 1998. I did a quick test using my surname (Elve – or as it was commonly spelled in 1881, Elvey). The 1881 result looks familiar from the 1881 census research I have been doing as part of finding my ancestors:
This place has been looking rather dormant – and I realised that I was sinking into a negative loop – the longer I didn’t write here, the harder it seemed to start. So consider this a metaphorical “get in there and do something”… It’s not that I’ve not been busy – but a lot of that has been the sort of things I don’t write here (details of work stuff, and family life etc.
Earlier this week I had the opportunity to join an evening of Dialogue co-hosted by Johnnie Moore, Alok Singh and Mark Hodge. I’ve played a little with dialogue a few years ago as part of a (now defunct) group that was looking at how a group of independent professionals could develop a self-sustaining, learning, network – we had a few good results but the group dissolved. So I was very pleased to get the invite to “Common Sense – an invite to join a group dialogue into the possibilities for deeper connections within a group”.
Borrowing an idea from Matt, my current “nearest-to-hand” bookshelf is: Strategy Maps Working in the Twenty-First Century Proactive Risk Management: Controlling Uncertainty in Product Development Co-opetition Competing for the Future Thinking Strategically Competitive Advantage