Monthly Archives: October 2008
The maturing human network
This otherwise uninspiring white paper from Deloitte Consulting on the interesting topic of social networking in the enterprise makes the significant point that organizations are increasingly investing in Web 2.0 technologies as a way to retain knowledge and solve problems:
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How do you find what you want and how do you know it is true?
Judy Breck quotes Howard Rheingold on the information morass that is seeking what you want and knowing if it is true:
All of the world's knowledge is in the air to be plucked down by our telephone. Of course it's also all the world's disinformation, misinformation, spam, porn, Nigerian frauds, urban legends, hoaxes. So how do you find what you want and how do you know that it's true? Those seem like to me both extremely important questions today . . . .The answer, says Judy Breck, is nothing less than
to change both where we look and the way we ascertain truthfulness.
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Debunking Psychological Stages
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages of grief. Sigmund Freud's five stages of psychosexual development. Lawrence Kohlberg's six stages of moral development. The urge to compress the complexities of life into neat, tidy stages is irresistible...and has very little to do with reality.
Those stage theories reflected a time when most people marched through life predictably: marrying at an early age; then having children when young; then work, work, work; then maybe a midlife crisis; then retirement; then death. Those 'passages' theories evaporated with changing social and economic conditions that blew the predictability of our lives to hell.
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Never Say Die: Why We Can’t Imagine Death
Jesse Bering on why so many of us think our minds continue on after we die; rather than being a by-product of religion or an emotional security blanket, such beliefs stem from the very nature of our consciousness.
And so person permanence may be the final cognitive hurdle that gets in the way of our effectively realizing the dead as they truly are—infinitely in situ, inanimate carbon residue. Instead it's much more "natural" to imagine them as existing in some vague, unobservable locale, very much living their dead lives.
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You’re Sick. Now What? Knowledge is Power.
Oncologist Marisa Weiss's advice to those inclined to research their own medical care: it's mandatory. "The time you have with your doctor is getting progressively shorter, yet there's so much more to talk about. You have to prepare for this important meeting." This New York Times special section, Decoding Your Health, offers useful advice on evaluating what you might find: a primer on interpreting medical studies shows that "no matter how compelling and exciting a hypothesis is, we don't know whether it works without clinical trials"; and self-diagnosis via the internet may well prove you have a fool for a doctor.
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Ocean View
Jesse Smith's review of the recently renovated US National Museum of Natural History points out the metamorphosis from stuffy science institution to modern entity that must "educate without boring, elucidate without offending, and advocate without annoying." For example, the museum offers no linear progression through the exhibit, but rather any number of natural courses that reflect the chaos of the ocean itself:
Earth's oceans, we are reminded, form a single interconnected body of water. Its species and currents are not constrained by labels such as Atlantic and Pacific, so why should their interpretation? Sections meld seamlessly into one another, but information in each is presented in a constrained manner so that if you do, say, jump from a stuffed penguin in Poles to a preserved Coelacanth (the giant fish considered extinct until a fisherman found one off the coast of South African in 1938), a visitor can still learn or experience at each. With the exception of the Journey Through Time exhibit — which explores the slow march of evolution that began underwater — there is never a progression to follow, no order by which a visitor must read or look. In this way, touring the hall feels a lot like surfing the Web.
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