Summary: One of the aspects of life in a community (even an online one) is that one gains self-understanding through observing, and subsequently analyzing, one's effects on others. In the notes below I document the initiation of such an analysis through a comment on another's weblog (in this case S. Paquet). This entry (and its edits) also documents my difficulty with the split nature of a journal which is also public. In my first version of this entry I became overly absorbed in the first part and neglected the fact that there were (or might be) readers looking over my shoulder.The about to be Dr. Paquet piques synopsis through blogged observation just before his 45 minute defense.

Seb has been granted his doctorate from the University of Montreal. Congratulations Seb.

He has kept us up on his thoughts and preparations and ? late last week he listed members of his panel including an outside member from Boston University. Here are his words :

I'm glad to report that Professor Tommaso Toffoli of Boston University has accepted to act as external examiner for this thesis. He himself will be giving a talk (in English, I think) at 3:30 PM on Thursday, May 1, either at room 5340 or 3195, entitled "A Knowledge Home: Personal knowledge engineering for normal people". Here's the first paragraph of his abstract (which you can find in its entirety near the end of this page):

We have started crafting and disseminating the elements of a new cultural package (tools, skills, and traditions) which will help ordinary human individuals---ie, not only nerds and geeks---cultivate and enjoy an extended personal information space---a "knowledge home", as it were. The computer will materially help manage this extended space by providing storage capacity, software tools, and processing power. But these resources will have to be matched, on the human individual's side, by substantial new competencies---a "computational literacy", as it were---whose acquisition, like that of ordinary literacy, will be encouraged and made possible by the Knowledge Home culture.

This sounds really interesting (and a little Spike Hall-ish, might I add[SPH: emphasis mine}).

I will take Seb's thoughts as starting point for inquiry into just what it is that is "Spike Hall-ish". I suspect (and actually hope) that Seb will respond directly. But my curiosity is piqued. [It will be energizing after months of organizing a cross country house move. Quite looking forward to it, actually!]

I will start with Dr. Toffoli (forward link to that article here)and then procede to Dr. Hall. (Dr 2:6/2/03[ Edit for perspective correction, title improvement and to add forward link])