West backs Russia over rescue tactics. The US and Britain rally behind President Putin as controversy continues over his soldiers' tactics in ending the Moscow hostage crisis. [BBC News | WORLD]

» I have my qualms about the tacits used to rescue the hostages that survived the siege.  But okay I can understand why you break a siege.

What I find unconscionable is the Russian authorities refusal to aid the doctors treating the victims by either identifying the gas used or providing an antidote.  The official stating "in normal conditions would not lead to lethal results", well, with over a hundred dead from poisoning so far I would have thought he would choke on his own words.  Why not ship them to a military hospital and treat them there?

And what could the security reasons be?  Terrorists already have an arsenal of deadly gases at their commands so it's not them the information is being hidden from.  The only thing I can conclude is that it's a gas that they shouldn't have been using and it would be an embarrassing admission.

Two weeks old link from OLDaily: Visual Thesaurus for playing with meanings of English words. This is definitely something useful for improving my language skills :) [Mathemagenic]

» What a fun tool (think TouchGraph GoogleBrowser).  Thanks for the link.

One of my key challenges right now is to work out how to measure the impact of knowledge-logging.  How does it impact the effectiveness of a person, of a team/project and of a business.  How can we measure this?  How can we evaluate it?

Anyone have any good stuff?

This 1994 U.S. Army paper on evaluating productivity looks like as good a place to start as any.  The Summarizer summary is very poor for this one but here it is anyway:

• The U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratories (USACERL) is developing a computer-based performance support environment intended to improve the productivity of Army knowledge workers.
• This product, the Knowledge Worker System (KWS), is designed to help work groups enhance their performance while documenting and distributing business process information.
• The literature suggests organizations categorize work by content, then select the most appropriate measurement technique based on implementation costs.
• Sardina and Vrat say those who measure productivity should have three objectives: (1) to identify potential improvements; (2) to decide how to reallocate resources; and (3) to determine how well previously established goals have been met.
• It is most simply Output divided by Input."
• The literature review shows that productivity measurement is discussed from a wide variety of viewpoints.
• "Structured" is inversely related to "Complexity," so these two components are at opposite ends of the graph.
• It can be seen from the above discussion that any proposed productivity measurement technique should be examined to determine what it requires to function well.
• Bridges, Bernisha M., "To Measure or Not to Measure, That is the Question," Productivity and Quality Improvement in Government, edited by John S.W. Fargher (Institute of Industrial Engineers, 01/92), pp 412419.
• Shell, Richard L., and O. Geoffrey Okogbaa, "The Effect of Mental Fatigue on Knowledge Worker Performance," Issues in White Collar Productivity (Industrial Engineering and Management Press, Institute of Industrial Engineers, 1984), pp 224231.
• Sink, D. Scott, and S.J. DeVries, "An InDepth Study and Review of 'StateoftheArt and Practice Productivity Measurement Techniques,' " (Institute of Industrial Engineers 1984 Spring Conference Proceedings, 01/84).

I aim to write more about it later (don't I always) but for now here is a quick plug for a great piece of software:

If you are doing issue tracking give JIRA a look.