| Subject: Another tree? A branch? No … it’s a bird! |
| From: “Bernard D. Tremblay (Ben)” |
| Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2007 00:43:25 -0700 |
| To: DLL |
Only a lark, but not really.
“Cat” is nowhere to be seen. (He’s 16, so likely not messin’ with Miss Puss … more likely tryin’ to back off some young’in.) So I’m up for at least another 1/2 hour. (It’s getting cold … he deserves better than a night outside.)
So, top of mind:
====
Late 70s, I’m driving my taxi. My as in I own it, lock stock and permit. And I don’t have to drive, since I’ve got something like 5 figures in my savings account.
I pick up a fare out in the industrial zone and head for downtown … many many miles, since Edmonton is a sprawling prairie city.
We talk about this and that … pretty quickly get onto systems and hardware and layout and what we would now call human factors. What turns the topic to other things is this: something I say leaves him gob-smacked and he announces that he’s in town with IBM overseeing a new project at the refinery and would I like a job.
Haaaaaaaaaaaaa! SigInt in the forces, SAC/Norad with telco, installing with Motorola, computerizing MCR at CBC … I need more hi-tech like I need another hole in the head.
And IBM?
And for an oil company?!
Haaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
But I was polite. I mean not rude. I mean neither patronizing nor condescending.
We talked about airlines or something.
*shrug*
====
Late 90s I’m happy as a clam: contracting gave me a grub-stake and I’m studing cog-psych, criminology, and poli-sci as a mature student.
Talking to a prof about his concentration (teenage depression) I swing the convo to his web-site and suggest (using Socratic method) “Are depressed folk interested enough to use the site?” (Sometimes, yes.) “And folk who’s interest is more academic are also interested in the site?” (Hopefully, yes.) “Sooo couldn’t the site be designed so that those who are depressed perhaps go one way and those whose interest is more academic would go another way? To generate data?” (*long pause* Not certain, but sounds plausible.)
I designed him a new site … just more modular, was all … so we could start from a known base.
He never took it another inch. Barely even replied to my queries. Dead in the water. Go figure.
====
This one I think I told you: talking with ethologist Dr. Fentress (arguably world’s expert on wolf behaviour) about, of all things, relation of parts to whole … taxonomy … I bring it to earth with whatchamacallit inter-rater distinctions. Using foxes, what one observer might call a scoop another might call a tamp. And that would screw up the data.
How to generate operational definition of “scoop” VS “tamp”? Sure, show video to train … but … that’s no fun!
😉
I suggested we use pure numerical measurements to generate animation file for VRML model … /this/ cluster of motion typifies “scoop” while that one there typifies “tamp”. *long pause*
Not only did I get space in his lab, I got a laptop for myself (my choosing) and 2 PCs in the lab (again, my purchase decision) and a monthly honorarium.
====
What I’m going on about is this: people who are actually / really / existentially engaged with “the work” relate to my mutterings.
Folk who are engaged in churn (like the majority of A-list bloggers) really find me unpleasant in some unspecified way for some unspecified reason. (After all these years of Buddhism I’ve got a pretty good lock on just how and just why. Occam’s razor | diamond-cutter logic … two different tools for peeling back the sophistry.
====
My aim is not to secure a comfortable life.
My aim is to deploy a tool.
====
In short? Dialectics, DLL … simply that.
Information is data that makes a difference huh huh huh …
… and if the recipient really doesn’t give a hoot (i.e. if s/he’s engaged in mere churn) then any old system will serve, whether email-list or wiki or blog or forum.
But when it comes to “Are we going to replace the cooling system or switch the farm over to blades?”, then chances are better than even that /somebody/ there has a can tied to his tail. That person would get along real well with me. And the phalanx of sophists and sycophants who surround him? They would just as soon have me eat shit and die.
No cynicism … I trust you here.
“Abhidharma“? Just a term for information theory from another tradition. “Buddhadharma“? A long word for “the philosophy and science of mind.
If a person’s aim is to get click-through then that person will establish co-dependent relationships and produce churn … that’s a limitless appetite.
I know I’m no Chomsky.
But I’m a good technical communicator.
I know my trade.
I know my craft.
I know my field.
Oh heck, I might as well go the distance. Your sensitivity to my IP has been many times evident.
====
*!Warning: Zen in action!*
*** ***
| 42
Most people would just blink. |
| “Momentum” … fine so far. “Inertia” … no problem so far. What’s the diff? Now, that’s nice. So actually inertia is momentum in a direction other than the one we favour. |
| 42 Inertia | Momentum Matters philosophical and crudely physical seem equally ?what? … relative. Meaning / implications / entailments seem to depend on our thinking, as subjective individuals. |
| So … … so what?! Let’s set inertia/momentum aside. This is getting long, it’s late, and my neck is starting to cramp. 42 … the number of fladrams in the fladram bin. Short version: Point is: good answers to good questions is, well hell’s bells, that’s pretty darned good. For a start. As far as it goes. Which, alas, often ain’t very far. Bottom line? Those “good questions” are crap. Let the freakin’ system do the arithmetic. Q: “Do we have enough fladrams for this week’s production run?” |
dang … I’m pret’near cross-eyed … where /is/ that danged cat?!
November 14th, 2007 on 21:25
DLL replies – 1 (1 of 2)
heh!
I was paid by a contract with BP for a year – it was one of the most unpleasant jobs I’ve had and not because the subject was oil inventories and transports…. the indirect effects of being a part of such an organization was mind-numbing. Also because of the people who were attracted to the job who often couldn’t find other things more enjoyable. But at least I made a few very good people contacts within our group.
It might take several years and other self-directed experiences for a person to wake up to what they missed.
You haven’t mentioned this to me. You should have a very interesting resume with all these kind of projects. The failures are also interesting, but harder to reference.
Dialoging focused on what really counts certainly should be the point of it all, rather than merely counting clicks.
[1 of 2]
November 14th, 2007 on 21:41
Re: DLL replies – 1 (1 of 2)
Hello DLL
Feeling defeated.
When doing the cliche karate board break if you hold back you will definitely fail. If you go all you there’s a good chance that you succeed … but if you happen to fail it will really hurt.
When memories of democratic governments over-turned and calamities cynically ignored firmly in mind I’ve been doing my version of “full court press” for years. Maybe more.
“Bacon and eggs” … the chicken was involved, but the pig was committed.
I’m all in.
People talk about “catastrophic” when they have to shorten their trip to Bahamas from 10 days to 5.
So it’s pointless for me to talk about catastrophe …
… no shared vernacular.
HeyHo
I sincerely hope that isn’t literally true. It isn’t right. It isn’t good. It isn’t healthy.
It makes you unavailable.
heh!
🙂
I was paid by a contract with CQ for a year – it was one of the most unpleasant jobs I’ve had and not because the subject was oil inventories and transports…. the indirect effects of being a part of such an organization was mind-numbing.
“The indirect effects of
” … this is key. My cohort are run off their feet (sleep deprived) and/or traumatized by bad situations. The consequences of my having avoided that is that I’m isolated.
I’m glad to hear you’ve established a circle.
It might take several years and other self-directed experiences for a person to wake up to what they missed.
In which case the nice guy who developed his painfully plain-vanilla website will realize the gain.
And the prof might find himself part of a collaborative project dealing with how web-site interactivity can comprise a diagnostic tool.
Me? I’ll be camped at a bus stop watching the pigeons.
You haven’t mentioned this to me.
No? Oh. Yaa … one of a handful of times I’ve had to grapple with taxonomy/ontology in non-abstract terms.
HR only looks at length of employment and blanks in the timeline.
And references.
I’m definitely
persona non grata.
Dialoging focused on what really counts certainly should be the point of it all, rather than merely counting clicks.
And that’s the point: those who are just wool gathering don’t care while those who are truly engaged are (see above) too busy and/or sleep deprived.
Case in point: academics behind Compendium or cMap have hypotheses to press … actually deploying an effective system is parenthetical. And more: an alternative system embodies real competition and so that threatens their viability.
November 16th, 2007 on 21:21
Re: DLL replies – 1 (1 of 2) [1 of 2, both short]
Don’t forget to recognize your victory then.
Stay with it – we are making progress.
Of course, the term is relative to what you are concerned about or able to see. I claim it still has about the same meaning, at different scales in different contexts. Maybe the real problem is that people don’t share enough of the same contexts to communicate clearly with the same words.
My wife says it is pouring rain when I call it a mere drizzle. Her amplifier is stuck on high most of the time.
It is literally true. How much sleep we individually need varies. I believe we know relatively little about sleep, medically, or even socially. The latest issue of Discover has an article (I haven’t finished yet) on the anthropology of sleep – the author was deeply shocked to realize that we know almost nothing about the sociological culture of this activity that consumes about 1/3 of our lives.
I’ve been gradually pushing down to 4 hours, plus the occassional short nap, for a couple years. Before that it was 5, and 6, etc. I still sleep 8 hours on weekends, enjoying much more dreaming in contrast.
I am as alert as I used to be on 7 or 8 hours sleep, except for mid afternoon, during which I get to experience the foggy confusion of random associations, if I haven’t timed my caffeine right.
But we can help a few more people have more of those self-directed experiences, There is an acceleration of the awakening process underway, barely beginning in comparison to how it will be in a few more years.
November 16th, 2007 on 21:22
Re: DLL replies – 1 (1 of 2) [2 of 2, both short]
This is ringing a little bell, sounding several years old. I wonder if I have this in my ancient email archives….
I’ve decided that if HR for some organization doesn’t like what they see, then I probably don’t want to work for them anyway.
I suspect you probably need to write a very different kind of resume. More of a bio than the typical list of jobs. More of a CV of your many projects, whether you were employed or not.
Well yes, but it is more often a gray area. Most people care to a point. Most people have some time and energy, but it is not endless. Practicalities and immediate goals do tend to dominate everything for most people.
November 14th, 2007 on 21:27
DLL replies – 1 (2 of 2)
I understand the foundation of what you are talking about, I would guess. The details in how you intend to use it could make all the difference. I don’t get enough from your following discussion, but I sense a hesitation to reveal too much too fast. Please do trust that I will be respectful of what you claim is your creation. You might have to specify it clearly enough so I know what it is, and what are all the supporting and related issues.
Two points referencing back to prior threads, since I don’t have more time now to go back to them. (Will we ever continue the depth-first traversal, let alone attempt to complete it?)
I did some lookup of diablogs this morning, and other than people coining the term a couple years ago, I didn’t find anyone exploiting this idea. Especially the idea of building a diablog support system where it is not just an open conversation, but the cocreation of participants. I don’t mean to suggest that there would be any other imposition of the structure of the dialog than that, however. Not at first anyway, and maybe no imposition ever but merely a superposition after-the-fact of refective analysis of what transpired. Is this getting close to what you want to build? How much work would it be to adopt an existing blogging system to support minimal diablogging?
By my suggestion that you pursue the blogging for dollars idea, I realize you have been writing lots for years already, and feeling a lack of successful penetration. Perhaps the diablog approach would help engage more readers. I bet it would, and especially if it begins to illustrate exactly what you are talking about by example. What could be better?
One other important ingredient to make this work is that you have to do a little gathering of the audience. Go out yourself, or find willing collaborators (in the French sense) to find related fora, blogs, etc, to reference back to your own work, after each significant addition.
By the way, one of the long-term projects I have always wanted to pursue again (I had a good shot at it back at ODTB, but it was not working out) is really integrating all the different modes of collaboration support, not merely gluing together the different functionality. E.g. From email to IM, it should be a gradual increase in immediacy and engagement rather than a discrete jump frm asynchronous to synchronous. From blogs to wikis, it should be a gradual increase in participation by more people in writing and refining the text of a concept. That sort of thing. Find the connections, the commonality between all things. Opposition is fine for clarifying the dimensions of discourse, but we then need to bridge the gaps between the extremes and explore every nook and cranny in between.
Time’s up.. oh dang.. overtime.. oh well, it was worth it.
DLL
November 14th, 2007 on 21:53
Re: DLL replies – 1 (2 of 2) 1 of …
I mis-spoke here: my aim is to achieve an end, i.e. “participatory deliberation”.
I understand the foundation of what you are talking about, I would guess.
I’m guessing you do, actually.
Heidegger’s “techne“: at best the innovation manifests the thinking that gave rise to it.
So forums and such are blithely lame and futile because the thinking behind them has to do with giving user’s something like a fun experience … it’s all about click-through … lotsa heat, very little light. And the vague sense of waste is swamped by the fact that (yet again) most folk are harried and sleep-deprived.
Almost right: more like checking for shared vernacular … terminology … nomenclature.
Can I just talk about propositional logic and syllogistic reasoning? Prolly best to establish basis / context first, no?
I do, Daniel, truly.
huh huh … what I’m doing is exactly that. But not in the form of a pamphlet that just produces a series of blinks: I’m describing it to best communicate the rationale.
I guess this becomes a case in point / object lesson: even if our email clients weren’t munging cite/quote, we’d still be struggling.
Key point: linear forms suck. Read: suck. As in, suck big-time.
Only a very few are talking about it. And their jobs / careers consists of talking about talking about it.
Individuals’ existential motivations are salesmen’s grist … but otherwise taking that into account seems rude and manipulative.
I’ve end-run all that by targettting, for example, staff at Columbia’s “International Affairs Online”… they have books to sell. Or the IPCC, whose director described their task as “document synthesis and distribution”. (Dozens of working groups, they have.)
If it really doesn’t matter to a person, then status quo is plenty good enough.
And even then, as I’m sure you’ve experienced, in professional or industrial settings folk are very often far too busy to consider alternative solutions to pressing problems … cuz their being pressed and pressured and stressed and run off their feet and all the while sleep-deprived and suffering from “imposter syndrome”, hoping nobody realizes that they aren’t up to the challenge.
There we go … I’ve been fishing for you to say something like that. (I need more than just echoes of my own words and mirror images of my own ego-tainted projections!)
Sorry, you exceeded my capacities here … I didn’t follow that, but suspect there’s something concrete in there.
November 14th, 2007 on 22:26
Structure | constraints
*take 2 on this*
I think I get your drift now.
“Structuration” … a glorious concept, and someday maybe I’ll aim at that. Right now? Pragmatics.
The tool in-forms the activity. So the GUI in-forms the transaction.
What I concluded (sometime previous to the Eureka of DEC02 was that most (all) other systems were, well, intended to sell the system. This in contradistinction to an intention of actually facilitating exchange i.e. discourse e.g. WebDAV.
That was key because it caused me to press hard on the aspect of functionality … actual work flow. Hence the concentration on cog-psych (arising from my mid-80s interest in “cognitive ergonomics”.)
In many popular sites (“social networking” yada-yada bla-bla-blah) the point seems to be “fun” … and some networking … paradigmatic of cocktail party schmooze.
That isn’t my point. It’s ancillary, sure. But it’s peripheral. So we’ve dropped away from *say* 80% of the internet community.
*shrug*
The mandate is to save SpaceShipEarth, not to maximize click through.
What happened DEC02 was as simple as falling off a log.
Now, how I happened to be sitting on that log just then …
… kinda like Newton and the apple: other apples had fallen from other trees on other days. But that one was special.
Or the fellow who real-ized the benzene ring … raindrops spinning and spiralling on the window of the bus he was riding home that night. Other nights? Other windows on other buses, and other raindrops. But that night he saw the ?what? salamander eating its tail. And *presto* Eureka … bolt from the blue.
I’m sure you’ve got a great grasp of imposition/superposition. (I’m resisting the urge to use epiphenomenal in a sentence. *grin*) Likely your understanding is greater in depth and breadth than mine.
So saying, we could write a thesis on CMC (Computer-Mediated Communications, yes?) Or on HCI (Human-Computer Interaction, yes?)
Or we can deploy a system.
I vote for the latter.
🙂
November 16th, 2007 on 21:36
Re: DLL replies – 1 (2 of 2) 1 of … 2 [1 of 2]
I thought I might push on that point, so I am glad you did.
Near the end of my undergraduate college days, I became deeply steeped in what I called “polarity” theory, by which I meant that while opposites do exist, the opposite poles were also inseparably connected, and it was clear to me that many problems were due to people not seeing the connections.
Well forums are infinitely better than no forums. That was fantastic progress that I am convinced fueled all the later work on greater interactivity and collaboration. We now have lots of interesting experiments underway, and people are becoming more aware of what works and what else is needed.
Yes, I know a fair amount of logic, having studied enough math to reach the dizzying heights of irrelevant abstraction, and having written a basic logic proof checker. Did you ever use SNOBOL?
But, yes, assume I have forgotten everything, and I need reminding, which I do.
Good. Such an exchange should be legally binding, better than a verbal agreement, which also has some legal weight, which I’ve always found bizarre.
Yes, the requirements and context. Such an approach will likely drum up all manner of related ideas, old and new.
Well, yes, but it is not so much the linear form that sucks as the limits of time, and the focus on doing what we can in limited time. If we didn’t have so much to say, we could more easily have traversed more of the tree.
This would seem to be a huge market then. I do have a hat I keep around, hanging off my left ear, for thinking in terms of what people want, what helps them learn, and indeed what is fun. For after all, isn’t this exchange fun? At least for us? If only more people found more fun in their daily work, though not at the expense of others,..
November 16th, 2007 on 21:37
Re: DLL replies – 1 (2 of 2) 1 of … 2 [2 of 2]
You are shooting high, and there may very well be a clear case to be made for how such organizations really need this (whatever it is). However, it becomes a sales job, one driven by credentials and track records. So it seems clear we have to start with the messy masses, the huge numbers of small potatoes. And I don’t regret that at all – in fact, I relish in the very thought of helping humanity at the level of everyone. And I mean helping people help themselves, because I am humble enough to accept I don’t know what everyone needs.
Indeed, it is rampent. Again, I would tend to not focus on places that have resistence to new ideas, though they may desparately need them. Find places where we will have easy success first, and use that to leverage the next step.
I was hoping HyperNews would be more of a cocreation support tool, growing the ‘article’ at the top of each forum, and organizing the messages into subforums. I was somewhat dismayed that people used it primarily as a tool for open conversation, and then the masses pushed for it to be a better online reader rather than the archive I had intended. So the needs of the many will find ways to manipulate the needs of the few.
OK, HyperNews has the little icons to indicate your message is a Question, Feedback, Agreement, etc. People have fun using these even if the message is not completely correlated with the chosen icon. I had more ideas about letting users specify a list of keywords, or select from a list, but that didn’t get very far before I was swamped by other demands.
So this is user-directed optional metadata about each message, to aid in the discovery of relationships between messages.
Another approach taken by a few systems, usually unpopular, is the imposition that users must select from a very constrained set of metadata following workflow rules about what kind of messages can be in what places. This is analogous to a program editor that only lets you enter syntactically correct programs, and transition program changes through a series of preordained transformation rules, though it would be vastly more complex if not impossible to ensure program “correctness”.
So I am advocating the lazy, after-the-fact, loosely defined metadata approach, and with suitably smart software, aids to summarizing the current state of an exchange, learning from human feedback, will be much more popular, and more powerful in the long run. Lots of hand waving there, but I hope you get the general idea. This ties into the self-organizing web idea, where messages relate not only to each other but to everything else out there on the web, and figuring out the relationships is mostly what is needed to organize it all.
November 14th, 2007 on 21:56
Re: DLL replies – 1 (2 of 2) 2 of 2
🙂
I’m sorry you didn’t click the link to my prototype … that would have provided context.
But what you’re bringing up here is foundational. That’s where I was in, say, ’98 or so.
When you and I fell out of touch concerning HyperNews I continued on that trajectory i.e. what software is effective and how does that effect discourse.
Sorry, DLL, you’re putting more weight on the term “diablog” than it can hold.
Have I missed something? Do you have reason to think this is a term we share?
Anyhow, http://gnodal.livejournal.com consists of hundreds of posts recording thousands of sites, all of which bear at least some relation to this.
Better? A contract to implement the system. I imagine a co-production of CBC/BBC/PBS … a discourse-based portal to the amazing archives they’ve got sitting there gathering dust. (And yes, we have the tech to point at precise moments in a video … been there / done that.)
Ok, this is where my neurosis flares up.
Years I’ve been doing that. Many. http://gnodal.livejournal.com evidences that.
So, existentially, really, actually, the little I have to show actualizes nothing at all.
Defeated and exhausted, this aulde dawg is. If not dis-heartened.
What follows is break-through
===========
Ok, let’s say you’ve summed up the challenge … the nut of the problem.
I regret that I’ve failed to convey how this is precisely what I’ve been working on … that http://bentrem.sycks.net/gnodal/ does not even with an expert like yourself communicate that reality.
Regrets aside: Dec2002 I experienced *ting* a unifying principle.
John Willinsky on OpenAccess (“Public Knowledge Project”) + Jurgen Habermas on “Discourse Ethics” => “Participatory Deliberation”, a non-graphical discourse / decision support system.
Thanks for this … your authentic engagement produced just what I hoped for. Truly
regards and respect
ben
p.s. I used blogs like this as benchmark:
http://hinchcliffe.org
November 16th, 2007 on 21:26
Re: DLL replies – 1 (2 of 2) 2 of 2 [1 of 2]
I mean the exchange of two (or a few) people in a format that clearly shows who is talking when, while allowing other benefits of hypertexting to augment the words. Even that simple idea has many ramifications, allowing the evolution of many varients. It is not unlike IM or more linearized comment exchanges, except in the following key ways:
* The format is more explicitly a one-at-a-time exchange. Trees are trouble, though I love them. If a threaded exchange format can be tamed, excellent, but I consider it a research project.
* The content of the exchange is edited for readability and soundness. “wish I hadn’t said that” “okay, what did you really mean?” etc. The focus is not just on the original exchange to facilitate its creation, but the followup to make it presentable for the benefit of others.
* Metadata and threads of annotations can hang off of every part of this. Making even that accessible is a challenge.
Yes indeed. A fantastic resource you have built.
I did lots of list collecting in HyperNews early on. I’ve got lots of lists I have accumulated in private in the intervening years. Wish I had your willingness/foresight to expose it to the public. I still can, but many such lists become obsolete over time also.
Ah, but good enough is better than best.
http://www.niquette.com/paul/issue/ratproc.html (interesting, but not what I was looking for)
Ah here it is: http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/good-enough.html
Well, good enough anyway 🙂 The references to the actual article by Richard Gabriel are broken. Maybe you know where to dig up archives. I think I know this Mike Meyer guy from way back.
Anyway, I am a strong believer in doing good enough to get by, because then you make more time to do it a little better later, as needed. Of course there is the risk that you will get mired in never getting better, but you help some more people along the way, learn some more yourself, and move on.
November 16th, 2007 on 21:30
Re: DLL replies – 1 (2 of 2) 2 of 2 [2 of 2]
I looked through many pages of gnodal and did not find anything like back references to things you wrote on other people’s forums pointing back to your creation. That’s what I am talking about. The references out to other people’s work is great, but how are they going to find you? First you have to have something that someone might want to reference. A document, a single blog entry even. Then you go tell people, creating pointers back to your thing.
I did that with HyperNews, and partly because I was early, I didn’t have to do it much. I also had some software that people could install themselves, and part of that was a help link back to my site, so I got more than enough traffic. I also got a few entries in Yahoo’s directory because of all the links I made to other pages on various topics – the hypernews forums were early hubs.
Could just be a misunderstanding.
I looked again, and didn’t find anything about integrating collaboration modalities. All things being related, I can see how you might have been thinking about it, but since you can’t say everything at once, you have to leave some things out.
Excellent. I took an extra hour to finish this reply. Mostly filling out this tree. Always several more things I would explore more, given more time.