The first month of operation turned out to be pretty exciting. Ribbonfarm.com went from zero to 17 articles at a brisk average pace of just over an article every two days. The business, economics, philosophy and thinking themes saw the most development, which sort of surprised me, since I’d assumed I’d be able to develop the science and technology themes the fastest. Here is an article-by-article overview of the action, with highlights of the comments section, and for those of you prefer listening to reading, my first ever experiment with podcasting. The podcast provides an overview commentary of the first month’s activity on the site, and also has a sneak preview of upcoming action. It’s going to take me a while to learn this game, so you can have some fun sniggering at my umms, aahs and run on sentences in the meantime.
The Fifty-Foot Rule Reconsidered
I have heard cited several times the so-called fifty foot law of sociology, which says that most collaborations happen among people who work less than fifty feet apart (the idea is generally credited to Tom Allen of MIT; the primary reference seems to be his monograph, Managing the Flow of Technology, MIT Press, 1977, which I admit I haven’t actually read). Let’s generalize and assert that most relationship interactions happen among people who live/work 50 feet apart, plus or minus an order of magnitude, say 5-500 feet. This being a probabilistic, phenomenological law, it should be interesting to mull how it is changing in Tom Friedman’s flattening world, and to what extent lives are getting transformed in terms of changes to this law.
Breadth-Depth Metaphors and Beyond
We commonly use a set of dynamic spatio-temporal orientation and observation conceptual metaphors to talk about knowledge, its communal organization, and individual styles of knowing. We use depth-versus-breadth to talk about track records and abilities, “long-term” versus “short-term” (and “upstream/downstream”) to talk about intentions and decision-making, and “big-picture” versus “details” to talk about the scopes of discourses. All these will come up for critique and more analysis as I continue developing the themes of this blog. But I want to start off this fresh new week with a question for you to ponder: how do you organize your view of knowledge, and how much faith do you have in your organization?
Framing the Consciousness Debates
What David Chalmers calls the “Hard Problem” of consciousness has been among the main reasons I started this blog. If you view it honestly, it is the last remaining fundamental mystery and, were I to be as extreme as Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus,
Disruptive versus Radical Innovations
Clayton Christenson’s seminal The Innovator’s Dilemma 
Book Review: Competing on Analytics
I read Competing on Analytics because my boss began swearing by it, and my conversations with her were starting to get seriously confusing. So I bought a copy, and was plowing diligently through it at a local Rochester coffee shop, when a friendly woman — your inevitable next-table laptop warrior — noticed the book, came up to me, and struck up what turned out to be a very interesting conversation (which ended with her heading off to the nearest book store, to buy herself a copy). Since I’ve only ever struck up conversations over a book with random strangers twice before in my life, that struck me as an important piece of evidence in favor of the book. So here is my review-slash-summary.
Harry Potter and the Cuaron Slam
Occasionally engineering provides me with startling perspectives on art. This happened for me with the third book in the Harry Potter series, the Prisoner of Azkaban, generally acknowledged to be the most accomplished of the series. Critics make a compelling case that among the movies too, Alfonso Cuaron’s treatment of this book has been the best of the lot so far, and better than even the book itself. So let me offer you a perspective on why the third book and movie are great, based on an analogy to a problem in robotics.
Visualizing the 2d World with Cartograms
Space and time are favorite subjects of mine, since they are the root concepts for two of the most fundamental types of questions we can ask, where and when questions. I discussed three dimensions in detail in a previous post, so I am going to dive into the subject of cartograms and show why you should be careful about your two-dimensional thinking as well. I’ll give you a question to stick behind your ear before I begin: how do tiny island nations like Britain and Japan manage to dramatically influence the world, while huge continents like Africa and South America often don’t even register on the radar? Let me warn you right now, that’s a trick question.
The 15 Laws of Meeting Power
We humans are simpler in collectives than we are as individuals. We like to think there is a “whole greater than the sum of the parts” dynamic to human collectives, but there really isn’t. The larger the meeting, the dumber it is. If you find a large deliberative body that is acting in ways that are smarter than its size should permit, you can be sure its workings are being subverted by, say, Karl Rove. I’ll argue that larger thesis in a future article, but for now, I’ll just use that element of my personal doctrine to explain why I’ve been fascinated by meetings for years — they are simpler to study, understand and influence than individuals (in particular that most stubborn individual, yourself). When introspection gets to be too tiring, I turn to thinking about groups.
Harry Potter and the Leaky Genre
In my first article in this Harry Potter series, I took a serious look at the foundations of the idea of magic in general, and its manifestation in the Potter universe in particular. In this second part, I want to ferret out that elusive aspect of the Potter series that makes it a genre-transcending hit. What explains its broad appeal beyond the fantasy genre? My answer is that the Potter universe is fantasy, but it is not genuine escapist fantasy. That is why people who have never heard of Robert Jordan still read J. K. Rowling. In fact, to find even a remotely similar premise in a major narrative, we have to go all the way back to Lewis Carroll. Not to Alice in Wonderland, but to his lesser known masterpiece, Sylvie and Bruno
