There’s a great, short article hereRUSI- Network Centric Operations Today: Between the Promise and the Practice that looks at some of the findings the US military (and others) are making trying to put Network Enabled Operations into practice.

A coupe of things caught my eye. (Emphasis mine) In Afghanistan,

improved headquarters performance was reported (after a period of adjustment and with strong command support for the new system), including a dramatic change in how people spent their time � shifting from briefing preparation to thinking about the substance of their jobs. Field reports from Afghanistan also indicate that coalition forces were able to create non-doctrinal linkages to pass intelligence and control air strikes because they found ways to get on to the same networks. However, despite a great deal of press reporting about the �marvellous� networks and communication systems available, most of this work was accomplished with high levels of human ingenuity with relatively modest amounts of new technology.

… and from the conclusion

NCO is, at its heart, about people sharing information, collaborating, and working synergistically. The human element remains paramount.

Metaphors seem to be going full circle here: if business is war and war is conversation then business is conversation.

[Update: Martin has a great quote about network centric organisations here]

[Update 2: Network Centric - hmm - much prefer Network Enabled ]

OK. So they don’t really play Twenty20 , but the Aussies still make it look easy.

“Matthew Hayden has some ominous news for English cricket supporters, Australia are starting to get the hang of twenty20 cricket.

The Australia opener proved once again in word and deed last night that there is nothing he likes better than smashing a cricket ball as far and often as he possibly can …

Hayden hit 79 runs off 46 balls in the eight-wicket victory over a PCA Masters XI in Australia’s twenty20 tour curtain-raiser at Arundel in what was his first ever try at the shortest form of the professional game.

It was also only Australia’s second twenty20 outing”

And Clarke got a hat-trick.

Maybe this is reading too much into it, but the signs are looking ominous. All the old jitters are coming back. I’m off to the 3rd day of the first Test in July and I’d really like to be watching a game.

One can only hope that they peak too soon – tomorrow would be good …

Went off to the geek dinner on Tuesday night with 200 or so other people and had a great time. It was held just of Trafalgar Square at a Tex-Mex venue, and I get the feeling the poor people downstairs didn’t really know what had hit them.

Anyway, met some interesting new people, and saw some familiar faces.

• As ever, good to meet Lloyd again, though he has ruined my modelling career
• Thanks to Euan for pointing out that my name badge was one upside down, saved me looking as halfwitted as I am!
• 3 cheers for Nick Swan and the most humble and apologetic elevator pitch I’ve heard – and do have a look at Connect Via Books, it’s a great idea
• Philip Baddeley I suspect I’ll be seeing a lot more of re wiki/blog conferences in Cambridge
• Gi Fernando was good company, and knew why green hair isn’t an indicator of idiocy. Will definitely be braving Shoreditch on a Friday soon to talk more about business process and IT, and see why he really is a fashion leader
• Mark Woodman knew whose round it was – and we had an interesting but too short chat about brittle ontologies and context. Talk to you when you’re back from Ireland, Mark!
• Jason Bates had some fascinating takes on psychology and the organisation – I loved his thought that social software seemed to be patching up the organisational cracks – and he’s got an equally interesting new blog, so have a look at that …

And then there were lots of people I clocked but didn’t have time to go and chat to, as is the way with these things. Hopefully next time!;)

I did, though, at the end of the evening, get a curious insight into what life might be like being Robert Scoble. Some bloke came up, sloshed, and said to me “this is just shuch an honour … you don’t know what this means to me … just to be here … shtanding next to you … in this … where are we? oh shit, I don’t even know where the fuck I am .. but Robert … I can call you Robert can’t I? … Mishter Shcobleizer … you’re like a god to me”.

Made me laugh. a) I don’t even look like Scoble and b) I wasn’t up there with a microphone saying interesting things. But hey, there was a bar, there was good food, and there was company – can’t blame him for overindulging

Anyway, very many thanks to Hugh Macleod for organising it all. It was great fun.

have just found Phil Edwards’ blog, Apparently… . It’s

a place to collect my thoughts on user-centred ontologies, ethnoclassification, folksonomies, emergent semantics and so on. I’m looking at this area as part of a project for a repository of social science data sources at Manchester University

And because of this gem –

in obvious but significant ways, we all are connected individuals: if there’s an element of self-deception in these cases, perhaps it starts with the denial of connection

- I for one will be checking back.

June 07th 2005 | Comments(1) | Asides on People semantic_web social_science

Quote for the day:

“A man who does not know what has been thought by those who have gone before him is sure to set an undue value upon his own ideas”

- Source: Mark Pattison, Memoirs

I don’t really know how to tally this up with the idea that thinking for yourself can be made harder if you do the Lichtenberg “letting books think for you” thing. Humility is definitely a virtue, as far as I’m concerned. And I agree wholeheartedly with Pattison’s sentiment. But equally I think it’s easy to get a variant of Stockholm syndrome if you spend too much time reading other’s thoughts.

Maybe that’s no bad thing, I don’t know. I suppose the sensible approach is to do your thinking first, aware that others may well have thought the same before you, and then do your research. At least then your thinking will be fresh, if not new, and you stand a chance of understanding, rather than parroting.

[via Chris]Spiked have just done a science survey to celebrate Einstein Year, asking a range of renowned scientists what one thing above all they would teach the world about science. There were two gems.

From Frances M Ashcroft:

Science is the art of doubt, not of certainty

And from Dr Alec D Bangham:

Amphiphiles are molecules that have an affinity for both aqueous and non-aqueous media

I should teach the world about amphiphiles. Amphiphiles are, as the Oxford Dictionary of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology puts it, ‘molecules that have an affinity for both aqueous and non-aqeous media’.

Toilet soap is one of the most common and ubiquitous examples.

Have just scrapped my short experiment with fat feeds. My bloglines citations page was getting full of me mentioning me mentioning me. Which was as tedious online as off. Now have an eye on Jack Vinson’s approach to see how it fares for him.

June 03rd 2005 | Comments(1) | Asides on monkeymagic RSS

Coffee shops are waking up to some problems with wifi, it seems. [via the excellent Crumb Trail and IFTF].In Seattle, a

five-year-old cafe added free Wi-Fi when it seemed their customers wanted it a couple of years ago. It initially brought in more people, she said, but over the past year “we noticed a significant change in the environment of the cafe.” Before Wi-Fi, “People talked to each other, strangers met each other,” she said. Solitary activities might involve reading and writing, but it was part of the milieu. “Those people co-existed with people having conversations,” said Strongin.

But “over the past year it seems that nobody talks to each other any more,” she said. On the weekends, 80 to 90 percent of tables and chairs are taken up by people using computers.

There’s some interesting further commentary on the Crumb Trail concerning the interplay of on and offline conversations. Notably, a great post by Wade Roush on the why’s and why not’s of backchannelling at conferences, and a thought-provoking one by Stowe Boyd on why “Continual Partial Attention” is the ethical thing to do in today’s world, despite arguments that interruptions are bad for the brain.

A while ago I wondered whether social software was mimicking the coffee-shop dynamic, and Simon Roberts over at Ideas Bazaar had some great things to say on the same topic, taking a more cross-cultural interesting slant. What is curious about the Seattle Coffee Shop (real world) example above, is not that they don’t talk. I think they do, just via laptops, blogs, etc. What’s curious to me is that, even though a lot of the roles of the old-fashioned coffee shop get subsumed by their online variants, people still go to coffee shops (rather than staying at home). The coffee can’t be that good, can it?

Equally, from Wade’s post, people still go to old-fashioned talks, even though these are increasingly typed/podcasted/whatever but when there they don’t fully listen.

It’s bizarre. And if mobile phones, ICQ, Skype, backchannelling is about relationships, as Stowe says, then surely they’re about human relationships. And if they’re about human relationships, then isn’t it odd that it seems to be turning traditional real world social hubs into ghost towns?

June 03rd 2005 | Comments(6) | Thoughts on connection culture isolation relationships wifi

Clay’s recent polemic misses a key point I think.

Yes, classification is political. Yes, classification is imperfect in a changing world. Yes, we need to be wary of all that. But what are “tags”, “folksonomies”, “ontologies”, and “tag clouds” when you put them together? A classification system, albeit a glossary.

Ontologists of the Semantic Web ilk are not trying to model the world, as I understand it. It is a non-religious undertaking. What they are (generally) trying to do is to improve Computer-to-Computer communication so as better to support computer-mediated communication between us.

Where possible, ontologies add some logic into the mix to allow a level of inference. Zip code is equivalent to post code, on some level. But where they can’t add the logic, then they don’t.

Tags aren’t and can’t be a proof that ontologies don’t work. What tags could be, is a means identifying which areas have enough (political) consensus to be worth developing an ontology for, for understanding how groups talk about certain ideas/events/things and so helping modellers mitigate their observer bias, and the areas where old ontologies are breaking down and an indicator for how to fix them.

June 02nd 2005 | Comments(4) | Thoughts on fear hype ontologies semantic_web

I like this. A lot. Though it makes me wish I could read Norwegian. Jon Hoem over at Diablog :: has come up with a nifty chart which, if I understand it, breaks down relationship types (ish) as a result of where the information is being produced and who is controlling the distribution.

As Jon comments,

What I find particularly interesting is how this typology, among other aspects, makes it easier to discuss the interplay between technical solutions and culture. When discussing this in relation to learning enviroments it became evident to me that the collective aspects of a technology is relying heavily on culture, much more than on the technical solutions used for mediation.

Great stuff.

Does anybody know if you can colour-code links based on where they’re going to?

What I’m interested in is getting (and giving) a quick visual indication of where the links on a post are headed. As far as I see it there are three types of links:
- links to self
- links to group (e.g. internal corporate blogs)
- links to outside (byond the firewall)

Even the first and the last would be great. Any ideas?

Matt Webb has a nice idea on managing feeds.

Here’s a feature I want from my RSS feeder. Every so often it should silently hide one of the feeds. If I notice, and if I remember what it was is that’s been hidden, I should be able to say: Hey, you forgot feed X, give it back!, and the application would say: Okay then, you got me banged to rights, here it is. If I don’t notice or can’t remember, the feed is deleted permanently.

Will add it to my list of things I want to make my aggregator better.

Shamelessly nicked from the interesting Ulises Ali Mejias

Going to wear my ignorance on my sleeve here, so answers on a postcard would be great…

15324. What’s the correlation between complexity theory and size of network? i.e. does emergence etc apply to groups of 12, 50, 150 etc?

Have set up a “fat feed” – which should give entries, comments, and trackbacks – if anyone’s interested. To stop it being a spam-bucket, I’ve switched all comments to moderated, but basically that means that bank loans, poker sites and viagra offers shouldn’t get through, though general “you’re a fool, Mr Young”’s will.

Just got to fix that trackback thing …

{Update: Gone and installed Chad Everett’s MT-Moderate, Mark Carey’s Diguise Trackback URL plug-in, and hoping that’ll do the trick. I’ll keep a weather eye open on it and if the fat feed get’s blotaed on spam, I’ll remove it.)

(Hat tip and low bow to Johnnie Moore. (Details of how to do it with MT are here))

June 01st 2005 | Comments(1) | Asides on monkeymagic RSS