Asking WIIIFM before you share defeats the objective, you are starting off on the wrong foot. In the same vein, asking you to enter a password protected space with the aim of sharing should send up the warning signals. If your CEO comes back from a KM conference and sets up Lotus Notes with complex access privileges you should question if they have really got the message. Is giving in the knowledge economy just being naive? How about the groupware vendor that sells tools, but sponsors no work on understanding collaboration, group processes or conducts no ethnographic research? Do you believe they have collaboration at heart or are they just selling more software?

4:09:14 PM    

Sjögren's ("SHOW-grins") syndrome is a chronic disease in which white blood cells attack the moisture-producing glands. The hallmark symptoms are dry eyes and dry mouth, but it is a systemic disease, affecting many organs and may cause fatigue. It is one of the most prevalent autoimmune disorders, striking as many as four million Americans.

A good friend of mine may need this information.
12:54:27 PM    

On-demand applications. I never thought the day would come when I'd find myself agreeing with Tom Siebel, but here we are: "In the ... [Loosely Coupled weblog]

Two from the article (the first the full text of the quotation:

"In the not-so-distant future, applications will write themselves to conform to pre-established business processes," the founder and CEO of Siebel Systems told delegates to this week's CRM conference in New York, reports eWeek.

The shortcoming in Seibel's vision is the belief that all business processes can be "established" in advance. Yes, it will be an improvement on current technology to be able to automatically assemble applications from established best practice, rather than having to pay a developer to handcraft a solution. But as soon as you make it possible to assemble them automatically, you create the potential to assemble them on-the-fly, and that's going to be the breakthrough capability that creates new competitive opportunities.

11:14:52 AM    

Tweney.com - Understanding weblogs. Yet another writer discovers that blogs are great low tech knowledge management tools.

While you might not post some things in a public weblog that you'd put in your private diary, the social nature of weblogs adds significantly to their value as knowledge management tools. The crosslinking and cross-commentary by multiple blogs ends up creating very useful, interconnected webs of information. You can learn a lot about a topic by finding a blogger who covers it, and by following her links to other blogs and other information sources.

[Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

Blogs and Knowledge Management

I know—“Knowledge Sharing”, “Tacit Knowledge Publishing”, “Personal Knowledge Publishing”—I'm going to have to create a Radio shortcut for “KM” that expands into an annotated list of people's favorite terms: it will make my blog read like The Amplified Bible:

Proverbs 4:18: But the path of the [uncompromisingly] just and righteous is like the light of dawn, that shines more and more (brighter and clearer) until [it reaches its full strength and glory in] the perfect day [to be prepared].

The path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn,
shining ever brighter till the full light of day.

11:01:16 AM    

Just some morning rambling. How do you talk about something you've seen on a weblog, in comments or a weblog discussion to non-bloggers? Do you just say you were reading on the web, or is there a distinction?

"The other day, a friend was saying..."

well, they're not *really* a friend in the tratidional sense, are they? It could just be a random blog that you found via someone else's blogroll

"The other day, a fellow blogger was saying..."

oh geez, now I've got to give the 5-minute spiel about what blogging is, why I do it, etc. [Steven's Weblog]

Exactly my problem. Was I lollygagging? wasting time? chatting with a friend? reading on the web? I usually say, "I encountered this..." and let any detail slide.
10:01:06 AM    

It is NOT in their minds.

Healthscape: Mysterious liver disease targets women. It strikes women 10 times more often than men. The disease has few symptoms until years after its onset, when the fatigue begins to set in. Even when the illness is fairly advanced, these patients may look like ``the picture of health,'' with a slightly bronzed pigmentation to their skin as if they had just returned from a magnificent vacation. But in fact, these patients are very ill with a mysterious, life-threatening disease called Primary Biliary Cirrhosis (PBC). [Health]

A tough disease. It affects mostly woman and it is very slow with intermittent symptoms. I would imagine that some doctors might have viewed it as 'in their minds'. We are finding out more and more times that it is not in their minds. There are some very unique diseases that affect woman much more than men. It is only in the last decade or so that people have recognized this. But women are still under represented in clinical trials. Not for malicious reasons but because the statistics are easier to resolve if the population in a clinical trial is uniform. Having minorities or woman add complexity to the trials and could increase the size needed in order to adequately answer the questions posed. Since this costs money, some trials only look at white males, or they used to. There is a real recognition that other groups have to be included because they will be taking the drugs, even if they had never been tested on their group. Same with children. Running a good clinical trial is very difficult. But it is the only way we can be sure. Damn placebo effect ;-) [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

I reposted this to make it available to my friends who struggle with mysterious diseases, frequently attributed to their being women. Again, as valuable as the original post, Richard's analysis is what kept me from passing it by.
9:57:25 AM    

Mother (nature) knows best. The simple sunflower seed may hold the key to reducing hypertension and associated loss of cognitive ability, and preventing debilitating strokes. A new research study may be an opening salvo in a new front in the war against strokes, the nation's third leading killer. [EurekAlert - Biology]

Linoleic acid, found in vegetable oils (also in hemp seeds!!), could be very helpful in reducing hypertension. But we aren't supposed to use vegetable olis for cooking or eating. I wonder if this is another aspect of our lowfat, high carbohydrate diets. We have reduced tremendously the amount of vegetable fats that we take in, because of the chances of heart disease, etc. But what if we need linoleic acid to help prevent hypertension? So, lowering fat intake and increasing carbs could have effects not only on obesity and diabetes but maybe on hypertension and heart disease. Oh my. What will happen if it turns out that the recommended diet actually is not helpful to a great many people? I love making hypotheses. There is some very interesting research that will have to be done to answer these sorts of questions. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

Read this man; subscribe to his feed (below). I picked a random post, merely to show the value of Richard's "value added" interpretation, analysis, application of any given post. (K-Log people, he also has a Knowledge Management category.)


9:55:01 AM    

Hosting?.

I can't believe how difficult it is to find a good web hosting service.  I've been surfing all day now and it's impossible to tell what's what.  Does the service actually maintain their machines, or are they reselling?  Does the picture of the snazzy datacenter have anything to do with where the computers actually are?  Do the UNIX sysops really have a clue?  How much should hosting really cost, anyway?

Boy do I wish I had a static IP address.  Ah, well.  Such is life in the internet lane.  If anyone knows of a good hosting service that has PHP/mySQL, supports 4 domains, and is actually reliable, let me know, willya?

[A Blonde on Bioinformatics and Aromatherapy]

Don't trust the snazzy pictures anyway. (Beware: war story ahead.) When I was working for DEC, I moved from Software Engineering in Massachusetts to a field office near Philadelphia, where I ended up consulting. One of my first assignments there was diagnosing a SDLC communication problem between an IBM Series/1 (doing credit bureau queries) and a DEC VAX/VMS system owned by the “bank” that was our customer. (The customer was a financial organization, but not a bank, but close enough that I'll use the term “bank” below.)

I had spent most of my computing days in a cube-farm with other programmers/hackers/engineers, and wasn't wholly comfortable on-site with a customer. (To add to this, my manager was on vacation, the guy in charge for her had asked for volunteers, and I took the challenge because I'd never heard of “SDLC”.) The consultant for the credit-bureau-query company, however—tall (looked like he towered over me, and I'm 6'2"), tanned, well-dressed (I guess), and wearing lots of gold (well, a watch, a few rings, maybe a bracelet, but the gold stood out against the tan). Numbers 13:33: We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.

Anyway, the VAX was reporting an error—it just couldn't handle the SDLC link and the data, probably, surely the bank would want to replace it with a more reliable system made by Big Blue and provided through some other consulting service, etc. The consultant left the DP manager's office and strode with him across the computer room as I followed, an empty paper cup trailing in the wind of his passing.

There was a Hewlett-Packard datascope there, a toy I'd never seen before, displaying the bytes wandering between the two machines. Goliath tapped a few buttons, started a query, and pointed at the screen. “There! See, that's a bad response from the your system.” He went on to talk with the DP manager of higher things, new software, better hardware, etc.

I was fascinated, and wondered what the problem might be. I looked at the VAX's “bad response” and started puttering about, looking for manuals. (It was all on paper in those days, you know.) I looked up the byte sequence in the manual, and found it wasn't just gibberish. I looked over the software data sheet (we had a TLA for that, too, but it is long forgotten) that summarized the software's capabilities. Looked again at the scope, intrigued that you could see the stuff going by. I reached up as high as I could, and gently tugged on the cuff of Goliath's trousers. "Ah, sir?" He looked down from on high.

"Yes?"

"It seems that this is a valid SDLC response. It says that you've sent an illegal character: this one...." I pointed to the scope. "That's not a legal character according to the SDLC spec, which says that all bytes are within such-and-such range.

I went on, looking down at his diminishing figure. "It would seem that your software is sending bad data, and is also incapable of responding to a standard SDLC error report." By now I could barely see him, and I had to duck to avoid hitting my head on the ceiling.

I turned to the DP manager. "Do you want to see if they can fix their software, or would you like to work out some other solution?"

The next day, I started an 18-month residency there.

But now to the point of this story: I went back to the computer room to play with the datascope a bit, because I had wanted to see that particular dataflow again. I was sitting there, hunched over the screen, idly and ignorantly pressing different buttons, hoping to hit on the combination that would bring up the display I'd seen (and used so well to my benefit). I heard the door open behind me, but ignored it. Eventually, in a reflection from a console CRT, I saw something approaching me. I didn't turn around, but realized that a huge professional video camera had been silently rolled in on a rubber-wheeled dolly, and that someone was probably making a video of the data center for the bank's investors, clients, etc. They filmed me for some time, and then moved silently away.

Ever since, I wondered if that scene made the final cut, and if any of the film's viewers realized that the technician using the datascope obviously hadn't a clue how to use it, and if that was the best the company could do, they'd best move their money elsewhere.
9:23:57 AM    

To cif or not to cif.

To cif or not to cif, that is the question...

I spent a disheartening afternoon staring at some of the new extensions of mmCif.  mmCif is the data dictionary for the RSCB protein databank.  http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/  It was designed by and for Xray crystallographers.  Unfortunately, other people are trying to use the data in ways that were unforseen by the committee that designed the data dictionary.

Bad database design seems to be a hallmark of bioinformatics projects.  Most biologists don't understand the importance of a good data model, or how to anticipate how the data might be mined or used.  People who know how to model data don't have the domain expertise to understand what they're modelling.  So, dictionaries like mmCif become entrenched.  They're great for the handful of domain experts who want to capture every aspect of their experiments, but painfully hard to use in any sort of development project.

Well, enought ranting.  The moral of the story is, if you're a biologist, get to know a databaser before you do your next project.  If you're a databaser, talk to a biologist one day - they might just need your help.

[A Blonde on Bioinformatics and Aromatherapy]

8:40:15 AM