Seb's Open Research
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Monday, January 27, 2003
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Everything is old... but we forget
Mitch Ratcliffe: David Weinberger cites one of my favorite philiosophers, Richard Rorty, who nicely deconstructs the argument that everything is new at the forefront of history. In fact, everything is old and only newly considered.
This is an important point of humility that "visionaries" and "revolutionaries" conveniently forget, leaving the rest of us to pick up the pieces. Pragmatic thinking about the whole of history, instead of just the recent changes, places society, individual life, business, investments, all of it, on a much firmer foundation.
 12:59:02 AM
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"The only way to have a successful revolution in any field of human activity"
In a recent post on Interconnected, Matt Webb quotes Kurt Vonnegut:
Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening team with a peculiar membership goes to work on them. Otherwise, life will go on exactly as before, no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright dumb that life may be.
The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise, the revolution, whether in politics or the arts of the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.
I'll let you read the rest on Matt's site. Tom subsequently writes on how Malcolm Gladwell rediscovered pretty much the same idea.
12:53:47 AM
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What do others think about this?
I find Technorati even more useful given this handy bookmarklet I found on Teledyn. Here's how it works. Bookmark this link (In Internet Explorer 6, just drag and drop it on your "links" bar). Then click the new bookmark while reading some page to get a pop-up window of what other blogs are saying about the site you're viewing.
12:16:01 AM
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Sunday, January 26, 2003
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Stones Self-Organize into Circles. Scientific American reports that scientists feel they've found an explanation to how stones manage to self-organize. In many polar and high alpine areas stones form strange circular patterns. Now they've identified how that might take place quite naturally through repeated freezing and thawing. Well, self organization IS the most natural thing in the world, whatever the medium. [Ming's Metalogue]
11:33:33 PM
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Cluetrainish MDs
Communities of Practice - The real thing!. Here is an excellent example of a medical team building their own Community of Practice using Radio so that they can serve their own Community better. [Robert Paterson's Radio Weblog]
This looks like it kicks serious ass. From their "What we're doing" document:
It seems very likely that the needed essential innovation in healthcare is sociological, more than technological innovation, more than economic innovation. We have more advanced medical technology than we can currently deliver to patients. We spend abut twice as much per person on healthcare delivery in the US as is spent in Great Britain and there is little to indicate our patients have better health or higher satisfaction as a result. The sociological innovation will be discovering how to cooperate. Some community will discover how they can cooperate among providers and with patients. That is the highly leveraged innovation. That community will change everything for the rest. The sciences of complex adaptive systems and social networks need to come together. To these we need to add the art of community conversations.
11:26:39 PM
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Group mind at work
Is this mob just too smart?. Collective Detective, www.collectivedetective.org, is an online community dedicated to Collective Gaming and Immersive Entertainment. Collective Detective members who joined together to play Terraquest, www.terraquest1.com, an online game by MindQuest Entertainment, solved the first phase of the game only Three days after Terraquest's launch. Phase One, offering a $25,000 prize for it's solution, was scheduled to last for a month. However, the organized "Detectives" on Collective Detective, managed to pool information and rapidly sort through clues, leading them to the solution, long before the planned phase conclusion. There are five phases remaining in the game.
Collective Detective, located at www.collectivedetective.org, is a subscription based, member driven community, custom developed for the Immersive Entertainment genre. Collective Detective provides the community with a forum for "human information filtering," a unique problem-solving strategy consisting of group discussion, collective research and real-time information sharing. [Smart Mobs]
I wrote about a similar story a while back. Imagine if we could harness this kind of collective commitment in the real world instead of just in games. Solve wicked problems in months instead of decades. But everyone is focusing on a different problem, it seems. Maybe a group should form and agree to order them and then tackle them one after the other. But this world's problems are not easy to state. Perhaps what we need to really get our act together is a threat that is imminent and really obvious to everyone.
11:20:42 PM
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Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
4/22/2006; 12:12:26 PM.
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