Seb's Open Research
Pointers and thoughts on the evolution of knowledge sharing
and social software, collected by Sébastien Paquet

Webfeed (?)
email me


Home
Introduction
My keywords
My popular pieces
Stories and articles
2002 weekly archives
2003 weekly archives
2004 weekly archives
Neighborhood tour
Technorati cosmos
Blogstreet profile
Today's referers
Seb's home


My other weblogs:
Many-to-Many: Social Software groupblog
My public mailbox
My 'Quantum Bits' blog
En français SVP!


Topicroll:
Montreal, QC
Syndication
Musiclogging
Group-forming
Social Software
Augmented Social Net
Emergent Democracy
New webloggers
TopicExchange
Edblogging
KMPings
Wiki


Communities:
open-education
SocialSoftwareAlliance
Research Blogs
group-forming
Ryze
K-Logs
IAWiki
KmWiki
Ko4ting
Meatball
ThinkCycle
Kairosnews
ShouldExist
PhDweblogs
infoAnarchy
RSS MEETUP
Minciu Sodas
First Monday
Blog MEETUP
missingmatter
ThoughtStorms
ConstellationW3
AmSci E-Prints
Weblog Kitchen
Knowledge Board
Weblogs at Harvard
EduBlogging Network
NewCivilizationNetwork
Reputations Research
Transdisciplinarity
Know-How Wiki
PlanetMath
LoveBlog
YULBlog


Teams:
 
Flickr
StreamLine
JC Perreault
SocialDynamX
Smart Mobs
Socialtext
Blue Oxen
OpenFlows
Fleabyte
Idéactif
iXmédia
Thot
Edge
sosoblog
Web Tools- Learning
OpenAccessScholarship


People:
 
with a weblog


Spike Hall
Chris Dent
John Baez
Bill Tozier
Erik Duval
Clay Shirky
Jill Walker
Jim McGee
David Tosh
danah boyd
Sylvie Noël
John Taylor



Ton Zijlstra
Joseph Hart
Ed Bilodeau
Peter Suber
David Deutsch
David Brake
Steve Cayzer
Lilia Efimova
Mark Hemphill
Alex Halavais
Mike Axelrod
Paul Resnick
Cosma Shalizi
Andrew Odlyzko
Lance Fortnow
Tom Munnecke
Henk Ellermann
Mark Bernstein
Jeremy Hiebert
Jacques Distler
Michael Nielsen
Thomas N. Burg
Hassan Masum
Ian Glendinning
Marc Eisenstadt
George Siemens
Howard Rheingold
Stephen Downes
John Bethencourt
Sebastian Fiedler
Kevin Schofield
José Luis Orihuela
Martin Terre Blanche
Elizabeth Lane Lawley
Paul Cox
Jon Udell
Don Park
*Alf Eaton
Lion Kimbro
Phil Wolff
Jay Cross
Julian Elvé
Matt Webb
Adina Levin
*Marc Canter
Matt Mower
Kevin Kelly
Dina Mehta
Greg Searle
Ross Dawson
Al Delgado
Rajesh Jain
Lee Bryant
Jesse Hirsh
David Sifry
Jeff Bridges
Stowe Boyd
Walter Chaw
Piers Young
Barbara Ray
Dave Pollard
Ian McKellen
Josep Cavallé
Hylton Jolliffe
Lucas Gonze
Jerry Michalski
Chris Corrigan
Boris Anthony
Michael Fagan
Mary Messall
Denham Grey
*Ross Mayfield
*Phillip Pearson
Whiskey River
David Gurteen
Tom Portante
Chris Wenham
Pierre Omidyar
Stuart Henshall
Greg Costikyan
David Gammel
Renee Hopkins

Peter Van Dijk
Peter Lindberg
Michael Balzary
Steven Johnson
Robert Paterson
Eugene Eric Kim
Jason Lefkowitz
*Flemming Funch
Bernie DeKoven
Edward De Bono
Maciej Ceglowski
Charles Cameron
Christopher Allen
*Philippe Beaudoin
Richard MacManus
The Homeless Guy
Ward Cunningham
Hossein Derakhshan
Stewart Butterfield
Stefano Mazzocchi
Evan Henshaw-Plath
Gary Lawrence Murphy
Karl Dubost
*Dolores Tam
Norbert Viau
Patrick Plante
Daniel Lemay
Sylvain Carle
Bertrand Paquet - Hydro-Québec
Michel Dumais
Mario Asselin
Robert Grégoire
Roberto Gauvin
Clément Laberge
Stéphane Allaire
Gilles Beauchamp
Jean-Luc Raymond
 
without a weblog
Steve Lawrence
Simon B. Shum
Stevan Harnad
Brian Martin
John Suler
Christopher Alexander
Johanne Saint-Charles
Douglas Hofstadter
John Seely Brown
Murray Gell-Mann
Steve Newcomb
Howard Gardner
Anthony Judge
Patrick Lambe
Donald Knuth
Phil Agre
Jim Pitman
Chris Kimble
Peter Russell
Roger Schank
Howard Bloom
John McCarthy
John C. Thomas
Doug Engelbart
Seymour Papert
Hossein Arsham
W. Brian Arthur
N. David Mermin
Tommaso Toffoli
 
offline
Brian Eno
Will Wright
Jean Leloup
Daniel Boucher
Daniel Bélanger
Laurence J. Peter
Plume Latraverse
 
dead
George Pólya
Thomas Kuhn
Edsger Dijkstra
Hermann Hesse
Abraham Maslow
Benjamin Franklin
Shiyali Ranganathan
Andrey Kolmogorov
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Georges Brassens
Bertrand Russell
Astor Piazzolla
Kurt Cobain
Socrates


Resources:
Google Search
Fagan Finder Blogs


Googlism
Google Glossary
Dictionary.com
Thesaurus.com
WordNet


NEC ResearchIndex
arXiv.org e-prints
SEP Bibliography
citebase search


Complexity Digest
Principia Cybernetica


All Consuming
Audioscrobbler
gnod musicmap
Logical Fallacies
W3C Link Checker
Wayback Machine
RemindMe Service


Music streams:
Radio Tango Argentino
Boombastic Radio
secret-sound-service
Limbik Frequencies
Radio Paradise
lounge-radio
Magnatune
Accuradio
Phishcast
SomaFM
WeFunk
kohina
KPIG
shoutcast streams
electronic streams index


Quotes


Subscribe with Bloglines





Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.

 

 

Wednesday, September 25, 2002
 
MIT OpenCourseWare opens on September 30th

BBC News: "Why don't we, instead of trying to sell our knowledge over the internet, just give it away." ... "There is no revenue objective for OCW, ever. It will always be free."

What a great idea. Of course, MIT has a great reputation for quality. The long-term implications must scare many, many people shitless. Also see Anders' post.


What do you think? []  links to this post    11:41:57 AM  
Distrust is cholesterol to knowledge flows

Very intelligent article on trust, a fundamental but often overlooked success factor, by John Moore over at the KnowledgeBoard (registration required). A meaty discussion follows. (It was the first time I visited this community. I'm impressed so far.)

By the way, I see blogrolling lists as explicitly defining webs of trust, and as instrumental towards furthering generalized trust and disinhibited self-expression in the weblog community.

  • Trust multiplies creativity[...] What makes a full connection possible is trust. I won’t share my half-formed thoughts, interests and concerns with just anybody. I need to feel confident they won’t run off with them without sharing the benefits with me, and – perhaps even more significant – I need to know that they won’t set out to ridicule or destroy them.
  • Trust saves energy [...]
  • Trust is generative If trust is established at the core of an organisation, it is likely to spread, as trust begets trust.

Two people who have established trust can create more value in their relationship as each has more access to the other’s resources. One can compensate for the other’s weaknesses and each is more free to focus on the things they are personally best at. Two people who work together well will be more able to connect with a third person, and so on. Contagious trust can build fantastic creative communities.

(Similarly, once distrust is established between two people, their energy gets channelled into defensiveness. Which reduces openness, and further diminishes trust, in what can be a vicious circle.)

So trust is clearly a jolly useful thing. More so now than ever. Little to argue about there. But what do I do about it?

Being a lazy kind of person, the energy-saving aspect is a killer feature of trust for me.


What do you think? []  links to this post    11:32:42 AM  
Memetics: A Short Leap Forward?

Professor Emeritus Anthony Barnett from Australian National University in Canberra, speaking on the radio program Ockham’s Razor:

So in a recent book I brushed memes off as vacuous, as explaining nothing. But I now feel that I was too hasty. Memetics is about communication, and the more we understand how we communicate, the better. Memetics can be developed further. It can do this by observing how we learn from each other. [...]

And now for something that needs emphasis but doesn’t get it. Speech makes possible an activity that’s central in all human communities, even the simplest; it’s special to the human species, it’s perfectly familiar, and it begins early, even among children as young as six. What is it? Teaching.


What do you think? []  links to this post    10:05:59 AM  
A large transdisciplinarity association

Centre International de Recherches et Études Transdisciplinaires.

Deadly serious (just don't look at the button GIFs). A great manifesto.

One thing is certain: a great unbalance between the mentalities of the actors and the inner needs of the development of a particular type of society always accompanies the fall of a civilization. Although a civilization never stops proliferating new knowledge, it is as if that knowledge can never be integrated within the interior being of those who belong to this civilization. And after all, it is the human being who must be placed in the center of any civilization worthy of the name. [...]

How can a theoretical particle physicist truly dialogue with a neurophysiologist, a mathematician with a poet, a biologist with an economist, a politician with a computer programmer, beyond mouthing more or less trivial generalities? Yet, a true decision-maker must be able to dialogue with all of them at once. [...]

This process of "Babelization" cannot continue without putting our own existence into danger because a decision-maker becomes increasingly more incompetent regardless of his or her intention. Without exception, each of the major challenges of our era -- for example, the challenge of formulating an ethics adapted to the contemporary world -- require more and more compe tencies. However, it is obvious that even a group comprised of the best specialists from all the various disciplines would only be able to develop one generalized incompetence, for the simple reason that the sum total of competencies is not competence: on the technical level, the intersection between different domains of knowledge is an empty ensemble. Now, what is a decision maker, individual or collective, if not capable of taking into account all the givens of the problem being examined?

The indispensable need for bridges between the different disciplines is attested to by the emergence of pluridisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity around the middle of the 20th century.

166 members; OK, I'm impressed. Plus, they do not look pedantic (God forbid that there should be pedantic transdisciplinarists). But, alas, no forum, and no weblogs.


What do you think? []  links to this post    9:46:33 AM  
Silence Plagiarism Case Settled

Mike Batt was accused of plagiarism by Edition Peters, publishers of the late Cage's work, after he put a track called "A Minute's Silence" on his latest album "Classical Graffiti," performed by pop-classics group The Planets. The piece was credited it to Batt/Cage.

Cage's ground-breaking silent composition, 4'33," was first performed half a century ago. The piano piece, divided into three movements, consists entirely of silent notes and takes four minutes 33 seconds to perform. [...]

Earlier this year, the parties attempted to prove their points by each staging a performance of their piece. The result was inconclusive.


What do you think? []  links to this post    9:26:21 AM  
The 8 Most Common Myths About Teamwork

are debunked here. My summary:

  1. Responsibility is individual, not diffuse.
  2. Teambuilding is a bottom-up process.
  3. Motivation counts more than skills.
  4. People must love the goal, not necessarily one another.
  5. Self-interest is good.
  6. Getting the job done and treating one another humanely are not antagonistic.
  7. Teambuilding happens in the course of work.
  8. Keep the plans under scrutiny throughout.

What do you think? []  links to this post    8:18:06 AM  
Group-Forming Networks: the Dark Side?

Vigilante Mobs Totally Rule. Think of the Children is a British anti-pedophile site that offers schedules and support for starting your own angry vigilante mob:

"If a child has been murdered in your area and found buried in a shallow grave, you shouldn't have too much trouble finding people with plenty unfocussed pent-up anger."

[Memes.org: Memes are Mind Viruses]

Follow the link. I can't tell you more.


What do you think? []  links to this post    7:39:34 AM  
Knowledge Shredding

 Department of Education to Delete Years of Research From Its Website

According to the article "No URL Left Behind?: Web Scrub Raises Concerns," in Education Week, the US Department of Education is in the process of overhauling its Website. One of its main goals is to remove reports, research, statistics, etc. published before 2001, especially material that doesn't support the Bush Administration's approach to education. However, The Memory Hole will be preserving much of this material.

Michelle R. Davis reports:

A directive that went to senior staff members and the Web site office at the end of May mapped out just how that sweep would take place. Some of the problems with the site, according to the memo, include difficulties with navigation, mediocre graphics, and information that is either outdated or "does not reflect the priorities, philosophies, or goals of the present administration."

Note: This is an electronic Fahrenheit 451. Straight out of 1984.

[Memes.org: Memes are Mind Viruses]

I'm not against redesign, but I don't see why they couldn't set up a virtual data junkyard for curious people on a neighboring, separately indexed, site.


What do you think? []  links to this post    7:31:07 AM  


Learning communities

Learnin' on kuro5hin. [...] Back when I was first watching kuro5hin grow, I never imagined I'd see active discusions on what amounts to pure mathematics. It really is stupefying to think that people are spending their time interacting, understanding, and bonding, over math. And there isn't a single ad for coke to be seen. I think hollywood has a very real problem here...

The future is landing... who knows, maybe one day participating in open online communities will be more useful towards learning than attending university courses. In some areas (e.g. programming) it already is the case. So maybe schools also have a real problem (assuming they don't change fast enough).


What do you think? []  links to this post    12:14:19 AM  


Click here to visit the Radio UserLand website. Copyleft 2006 Sebastien Paquet.
Last update: 4/22/2006; 12:04:56 PM.
This theme is based on the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme.

September 2002
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30          
Aug   Oct





Syndicated content: