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More detail on Wicked Problems from Jeff Conklin.
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Big pile of foundational companies-in-their-environment questions for the future.
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S&W hiring/after interns - great opportunity for someone who's smart, gets things done and wants to learn with Lanky and The Brain. Would want to do this myself except too old and slow and skillless. But the day they need big hair and weight I'm in.
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Another good company hiring: we haven't worked with FP but, from meeting Tom and everything we've heard, FP are clearly of the first rank. Get in there clever mobile people.
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Author/illustrator of The Secret (comic without text or dialogue) and Horace Dorlan (same interspersed with chapters of text), teaches at RCA.
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"half-waking encounter by Klimowski [was] the source of Dorlan's initial symbolic dream [He] had been struck by a woman's unusually elongated elegance, like a human preying mantis [...] she disappeared inside a grand building [...] Institute of Entomology
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A more positive review of Horace Dorlan.
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"Horace Dorlan isn't an entirely successful experiment: the text, which now dominates the narrative, just isn't up to the standards of the illustration"
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Very good, mysterious comic (novel-without-words as some reviewers put it) - a surreal version of Spoorlos/The Vanishing perhaps. Some really good Schulzean moments of comics and vision self-referentiality.
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Very, very good, completely un-dated sociopolitical-sf. Undateable.
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"An ideogram used in geology to represent twisted rock formations. The Nsibidi people in Ghana, Africa, use the same structure to indicate a situation where two witnesses contradict each other, and one is telling the truth (the straight line)"
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"In a genealogical context, this sign means buried. [...] The Egyptian hieroglyph [which looks like a key from a keyboard], used in connections with the idea of truth, true, is structurally similar."
rodcorp
books, stories, art, architecture, maps and occasionally how teams and systems work. @rod
« May 2007 | Main | July 2007 »
June 30, 2007
links for 2007-06-30
Posted at 01:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
June 29, 2007
links for 2007-06-29
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"5. Your train of thought is sacred"
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Simple, visual, diy ERP system: do some process mapping, kill redundant processes, get a whiteboard, put the right stuff on it, point a webcam at it, and run Quickbooks. 2k instead of SAP's 500k odd.
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When tightly-coupled (for efficiency) systems experience cascading points of failure...
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"This article charts the rise of a private criminal justice system in [USA], provides a rough blueprint of what a fully functioning private criminal justice system will look like, and offers suggestions as to how to guide its development."
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How to be a hardcore home buyer.
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"I am not sure if its the camera or the browsing that kills the battery but I know that I have to charge intraday to be sure of making it to bedtime. [...] If they fix the battery life issue the phone is perfect"(tags: mobile blackberry)
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"display is made of a sturdy glass, not plastic, and while it did pick up smudges, it didn’t acquire a single scratch [...] error-correction system didn’t seem as clever as the one on the BlackBerry [...] handle corporate email using Microsoft’s Exc
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"Water is the osmotic slave of salt and follows sodium with utmost fidelity."
Posted at 01:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
June 26, 2007
links for 2007-06-26
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Perceived victimless crime: "willingness among apparently law-abiding citizens to fiddle the system in their favour [...] strong tendency amongst consumers to "hit back" when they feel treated unfairly by big and small business, even by illegal means."(tags: criminaljustice)
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Prisons Inspector Anne Owers's warning: "Three years ago a NOMS was set up to reduce reoffending through joined-up management of each offender, in and out of prison [...] entirely predicated on a reduction in prison numbers"
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"experience design’s Achilles heel is that contemporary American customer service standards are nowhere near the level of refinement routinely achieved [and specced] by product and interactive designers"
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"to the extent that jurors have significant expectations and demands for scientific evidence, it may have more to do with a broader “tech effect” in our popular culture rather than any particular 'CSI effect'." [and increased expectations are good](tags: criminaljustice police)
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Academia on mapping crime...
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"We show that while discriminative policing always reduces violence, policing methods that hit members of targeted groups at equal force independently of how violent they are, may, in fact, increase violence"
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plus notes on his non-invasive Crystal methodology.
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"SQLite is a small C library that implements a self-contained, embeddable, zero-configuration SQL database engine."(tags: dev)
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Ministry of Justice has published a research report on bias in the jury system (13 June): "Some jurors were more lenient towards a defendant of the same ethnic group, but the system of 12 jurors ironed out individual prejudices, the study found."
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A speculation: "I wonder if we have higher expectations of interfaces that feel more natural – for instance mobiles with touch screen and stroke interfaces as compared to those with button, thumbwheel, trackball, stylus etc interfaces."
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"Nowadays, though, the traffic seems to flow one way only. While artists and curators still draw inspiration from writers, publishing has dumbed itself down."
Posted at 01:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
June 23, 2007
links for 2007-06-23
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Part one of my notes from GovNet’s Modernising Justice through IT event, 12 June 2007.
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Part two of my notes from GovNet’s Modernising Justice through IT event, 12 June 2007.
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Accounting etc saas(tags: saas accounting)
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Alonso and Hamilton at McLaren: "They debrief at the same table, with engineers and strategists from both sides of the garage. Concealing information is impossible."
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"Levitt has his own, now famous, account [in Freakonomics]: legalized abortion diminished the population most likely to commit crime [...] I think we are still missing something. Call it the “esteem” or “Goffman” explanation": rap.
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When did architectural proposal walkthroughs become music videos?
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"Documenta 12 is a disaster. [...] The trouble is that so intrusive is the installation design, and so confusing the layout, that everything rapidly turns into a kind of visual sludge."
Posted at 01:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
June 22, 2007
links for 2007-06-22
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VNC and Skype.
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"I now have an [Republican National Committee] BlackBerry which you can use to email me at any time. No security issues like my [White House] email." - not the kind of security BlackBerry typically has in mind.
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"Because BlackBerry[s] run through US and British servers, French security officials are concerned that messages could be intercepted by US intelligence agencies [...] the ban is not holding and French officials are using their BlackBerry[s] in secret"
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"SMS is to tell you I miss you, Email is to organise our dinner, Voice is to say I’m late, and IM is to continue our conversation"
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"Infrastructure software like ESB's (Mulesource) and CRM (Salesforce, SugarCRM) that used to be extremely high touch and expensive is now sold self-service at much lower pricepoints"
Posted at 01:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
June 21, 2007
links for 2007-06-21
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Release on licence up to 18 days early (the difference between R on L and executive release being the reason Faulkner will claim "no u-turn!")
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Their second-class post contract with Amazon (UK only?) was worth 8mm annually.(tags: books postoffice)
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Annotatable (?) media- and location-based timeline infoviz at an event, data collected by RFID-dongle.
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Timelines RFID dongle. One button: "bookmark now".
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Flapping mobiles in the air to get signal...(tags: mobile blackberry)
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"This post is a run-down of various patterns we've encountered for authenticating applications and users" [and happy birthday migurski]
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Great top-down standards setting: all mobile chargers in China to use usb.(tags: mobile)
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Good sitrep on NHS IT (cf also baseline article some months ago) and the IT Director's exit in an environment where top-down monolithic IT plans are increasingly being complicated/eroded by federal/local plans... [has same happened with Justice IT?]
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Immigration minister: "I suspect that the National Identity Scheme will be just a normal part of British life - another great British institution without which modern life, whatever it looks like in 2020, would be quite unthinkable." [great or snafu?]
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Zoho, Google apps etc compared
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Adrian - the wood-chopping (cf Interesting2007) bike rider from Howies - wants to borrow Lance's Trek time trialler to beat his work commute best time. I really hope Trek come through for him.
Posted at 01:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
June 19, 2007
Very Interesting 2007
Russell Davies's Interesting 2007 was very enjoyable and surprising: the talks were all meaty (not a single one was poor!), and the enthusiastic and engaged attitude of the attendees and speakers left me feeling energised about making some proper progress on some of my dormant projects outside of work. For me the day was a welcome reminder that the internet/blogging community often behaves as if it has the monopoly on both the creation of interesting things and the explication of what's interesting and important in the world - this classifying tendency is all too inward and techno-utopian*. It was also very lightly and humanely managed by Russell and his crack team. For all of that, bravo.
I didn't take notes, but did make drawings: Russell had asked me to do some. I'd planned to do a hundred, but the talks were so good that I kept forgetting to knuckle down to the job. The drawings were done in a carbonpaper-less duplicate book because I wanted to give away the drawings and - as the selfish artist often wants to keep hold of their own work - wanted to be able to keep an imperfect copy for myself.
About half of the "originals" went into Russell's In box on the stage, and many of the others I gave to the subjects (hey, stick them online if you can); there are a few here too, and all of the "copies". The originals I set a white and black point for in the computer afterward, and the copies were simply Auto-Levelled, a process that leaves most of the aesthetic judgement in Photoshop's hands and, rather appropriately to the drawing method, results in a rather nice shadowed, ghostly quality. The drawing here is of Adrian who is from both Howies and some beautiful Welsh woods, and did a great talk on wood-chopping.
* Grant McCracken's suggestion that it isn't the architectures of knowledge that are falling, rather "what collapsed was mostly the intellectuals' favorite interpretative frames" leaves me unsure whether we're in agreement or whether he's supplying a refutation in advance. And I forgot to give him the drawing of him as Dr Manhattan.
Posted at 02:45 PM in Art, architecture, books | Permalink | Comments (0)
links for 2007-06-19
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"Hundreds of prisoners are to be moved to open jails almost two months before the end of their sentence as part of emergency measures to tackle prison overcrowding."(tags: prison criminaljustice)
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Regional dialects considered confusing, harmful, pricey. "Because airtime on the new system is expensive, brevity will be encouraged." - I see the desire to standardise but officers may feel it's unnecessary and at odds with locally-sensitive policing.
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Hain: "Prison is not working when the number of prisoners is shooting up, suicides are at record levels and the rate of reoffending is going up as well", particularly unfair to women inmates and young black men. (Risky pitch for deputy leadership?)
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"The top four factors, in order, are living in council accommodation, a lack of English in the home, being born to a single mother and being born in a home where 'the mother's ethnicity is black'." - how to ensure that "at risk" doesn't become pre-crime.
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Prison Governors' Assoc "had entered an official dispute with the Prison Service [...] urging its members not to volunteer to supervise the temporary jails. But the Ministry of Justice is forcing governors to carry out the task."
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"The figure of 80,977 prisoners is 165 higher than the previous record, set three weeks ago, and means the prisons are just 481 places away from their official absolute capacity."
Posted at 01:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
June 18, 2007
links for 2007-06-18
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(tags: interesting2007 russelldavies)
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"Drawings produced by pens attached to the tips of tree branches, as the branches move in the wind the tree draws on to a panel or drawing board on an easel."
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"Sanders tells us how the exhibition design came together, upon the discovery of giant scenic backings from classic movies like North by Northwest and The Clock." (with stills by Hill)
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Russell's posts on Interesting2007. A great success.(tags: interesting2007 russelldavies)
Posted at 01:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
June 16, 2007
links for 2007-06-16
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Review of Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible, a comics novel. See also Kaufman's All My Friends Are Superheroes, which is good. (To read: Tuten, Barthelme, Coover etc)
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New play by friend Steve Brown.(tags: stephenbrown theatre)
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(tags: reboot9)
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J2Me porting: community betas, services like Mobile Complete, or DIY/outsourcing to people like Babel. [Are inhouse porting skills really worth it in the longrun? Perhaps, given that porting is an ongoing activity like maintenance]
Posted at 01:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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