…or, what if the things you believe are fundamental to keeping your society together are in some way linked to the negative effects that you see around you? That might be the sort of question you ask after reading a study published in the Journal of Religion & Society which suggests that a high level of religious belief may harm a society. As reported in the Times, the study, Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies looks at data across the first world Western democracies, and examines both the level of overt belief in God / disbelief in evolution and the occurrence of various societal measures such as homicides, early mortality, STDs, teenage pregancy and abortion.
Like Gary Turner, I recently suffered a garage-burglary in which the scumbags helped themselves to a couple of bikes. Luckily though my insurance company works with Wheelies Direct to handle cycle-replacement claims. The staff at Wheelies have been friendly and helpful all the way from validating the details of the bikes I lost (they know their stuff) through to selecting replacement bikes and dealing swiftly with some transit damage to one of the replacements.
I’ve been reading Working in the Twenty-First Century, which describes itself as an evidenced-based look at the future of work in the UK over the next 20 years by Michael Moynagh and Richard Worsley, published by the Economic and Social Research Council and The Tomorrow Project. Four main themes emerge from the report: The British economy will (be forced to) move up the value chain, changing the nature of the jobs that are available.
I’ve been having a problem with DNS failures on my home setup for the last week or so. So, it would appear, have a lot of other people with similar setups, and it turns out to be the fault of Apple who introduced a version of Bonjour into iTunes for Windows version 5. D-Link have published a workaround, but the answer seems to be to install version 5.0.1 of iTunes…
Dave Pollard has written about the psychology of information, or why we don’t share stuff, the organisational and human factors that impede knowledge-sharing: Bad news rarely travels upwards in organizations People share information generously peer-to-peer, but begrudgingly upwards, and sparingly downwards in organizational hierarchies. People find it easier and more satisfying to reinvent the wheel. People only accept and internalize information that fits with their mental models and frames. People cannot readily differentiate useful information from useless information.
In how to build on bubble-up folksonomies Tom Coates says: […] The concept is really simple – there are concepts in the world that can be loosely described as being made up of aggregations of other smaller component concepts. In such systems, if you encourage the tagging of the smallest component parts, then you can aggregate those tags up through the whole system. You get – essentially – free metadata on a whole range of other concepts […] and goes on to play with ideas for aggregating tags on radio songs into folksonomic descriptions of aggregates of those songs (radio shows, albums) and aggregations of aggregations (a radio station, an artist’s body of work).
[bliki]Enterprise Architecture[/bliki] is one of those Humpty-Dumpty-like words that conveniently mean whatever you want them to mean. I’ve also found that a lot of people have a violent antipathy to the term, as for them it summons up the spectre of IT geeks piling layers of jargon and obfuscation on top of their common-sense understandings of how a set of systems fit together with the business they serve. Add in a healthy dose of scepticism about the use of any jargon by someone who is trying to spend your money, and you wonder why any of us continue to use the term at all.
Over the summer I’ve been spending more time reading than writing, but even then the reading has been going more slowly than I expected! Just finished [bliki]Thinking Strategically[/bliki] and started to wrap my thoughts around [bliki]Strategy Maps[/bliki]. Unlike the previous books in my strategy reading which have focused on the [bliki]Game Theory[/bliki] approach to strategy, this book is more aligned to the core competence / resource-based view of the firm.
Developer.* has published Places To Intervene In a System by the late Donella Meadows, with an afterword by Don Gray applying the thinking to software devleopment. Thought-provoking stuff – Meadows herself cautions that the essay is not a recipe for finding leverage points. Rather it’s an invitation to think more broadly about system change. In summary (original numbering scheme!), places to think about intervening: Numbers Material stocks and flows Regulating negative feedback loops
A podcast and related blog post from Dave Winer [via Doc Searls] makes some important points about the true impact of DRM on the media industry, and led me to start thinking about the strategic forces at play in the current “Internet will eat the Media” debate. In this post I summarise his key points, and then build on them to produce a value net analysis of the media industry from the perspective of the current incumbents.