Net Visionaries Seek New Vistas. At the Telluride Tech Festival, the inventors of the Web and the TCP/IP protocol describe their visions for the next phase of innovations: an Interplanetary Internet and a Semantic Web. By Mark K. Anderson. [Wired News]

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Brain Rot - Excerpted from The Beginner's Guide to Mathematica V4. (SOURCE:Krzysztof Kowalczyk's Weblog)-Lots of juicy quotes and wisdom here!

I didn't say incompetence is a sufficient condition for progress. I do say it is a necessary one. If you want to move beyond endless drudgery, you have to have technology (or slaves, servants, or a spouse) to free you from the otherwise all-consuming task of survival. Technology is the least-objectionable way of generating free time, in my opinion. Of course, some people will use their free time more responsibly than others.

Jerry: People are very attached to the value of their skills. They believe that the skills of their generation should be preserved, with new skills added on.

Theo: Such an attitude represents a tremendous degree of disrespect of our forepersons. It was really, really hard to be a cave person. The skills needed to live comfortably in, say, northern Europe in 20,000 BCE were extremely complex. They required then and would require now the full range of human intelligence.

To think that a modern human should be able to do everything that previous generations have been able to do (hunt, speak Latin, do square roots by hand, etc.), and also have any time left over to learn anything new (microbiology, email, calculus), is basically insulting to all those previous generations, since it implies that they under-employed their intelligence. It is also quite false. ... Children need to know certain facts, but acquiring them is not the main point of learning, especially not in the earlier grades. Mainly children need to have effective habits of mind and an ability to think analytically. They also need to be self-motivated, because in real life there isn't always someone there to provide external motivation (unless they join the army).

The hardest things to teach are the skill of solving problems with incomplete information, the skill of figuring out which problems need solving in the first place, and the skill of finding and bringing together the resources needed to solve a problem. Children are primed to want to learn. They start out valuing learning and accomplishment above anything else in the world. If you see a child uninterested in learning, it is overwhelmingly likely that the child was made that way by something in the child's world: Children do not start out that way.

(Of course there are always exceptions, but they are just that: exceptions.) Let's go through our list of features of "good quality software" and see how each feature affects these learning goals. (Many of these points are made very effectively in the fine book Failure to Connect by Jane M. Healy, Simon & Schuster 1998.) [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

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[] A few weeks back I was in a second hand book shop in Godalming and I bought a couple of books - at the counter I was told that having bought two books - I could get one free. I quickly stepped up to the philosophy section and run my fingers over the titles and spotted a thin red book by [Bertrand Russell]. It was called [Let the People Think] - knowing of Bertrand Russell but knowing little of his work I thought it was the ideal choice.

As I got back to the car and flicked through it I was delighted - it was a collection of short essays and one caught my eye - it was entitled Useless Knowledge Here is a quote from the essay:

"Curious learning not only makes unpleasant things less pleasant, but also makes pleasant things more pleasant. I have enjoyed peaches and apricots more since I have known that they were first cultivated in China in the early days of the Han dynasty; that Chinese hostages held by the great King Kanisaka introduced them into India, whence they spread to Persia, reaching the Roman Empire in the first century of our era; that the word "apricot" is derived from the same Latin source as the word "precocious" because the apricot ripens early; and that the A as the beginning was added by mistake , owing to a false etymology. All this makes the fruit taste much sweeter."

In knowledge management we often talk about focusing on productive knowledge and that KM should not be an intellectual exercise and to a degree this is right but Bertrand Russell pulled me up - as he says elsewhere in the essay "Perhaps the most important advantage of "useless" knowledge as that it promotes a contemplative habit of mind." Now to me taking time to reflect is at the heart of KM. So paradoxically "useless" knowledge can promote KM. I like it!

And oh yes Apricots have also tasted sweeter to me since! [Gurteen Knowledge-Log]

In the U.S., at least, business tends to be an anti-intellectual environment. Thinking and knowing for their own sake are suspect. Here's a compelling counter-argument

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A tinkerer's blog. Edward Felten, the Princeton prof who stood up to the music industry when they nastygrammed him over his white-paper on the security flaws in the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), has started a blog called "Freedom To Tinker" where he keeps track of legal threats to tinkerers, the people who pry open technology to understand how it works, to improve it, or to make interoperable devices. Link Discuss (via Vitanuova) [Boing Boing Blog]

good new resource to have available.

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Latest Udell column. Latest Udell column. Put people first for a change. Can't go wrong with that.  [Scripting News]

"If it were just about the data, we'd have been done three years ago," Groove's vice president of development [Jack Ozzie] says. "The problem is capturing the context that surrounds the data."

The underlying conundrum of knowledge management--connecting data to context.

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Sam Gentile: "How do we get people to collaborate?" [Dave's Handsome Radio Blog!]

Some observations about Groove as a collaboration tool

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Clues for bad drivers.... ...like myself. From a professional truck driver, rules of the road to remember when driving around truckers. Some of them apply to all driving situations, such as "you are not as good a driver as you think you are," "SUVs are not suits of armor," and my favorite, "If you've been cruising blithely along in the left (or center, on a three-lane highway) lane for a half-hour or so, please consider moving the fuck over, you selfish ass-pirate." (I almost spewed soda all over my monitor when I read that one.) [jarretthousenorth News]

Loved this rules of the road story in its own right. Well written, to the point, useful, and funny. But I couldn't immediately figure out why it stuck in the back of my mind until the next morning.

This piece is also an excellent case example of the power of good storytelling in knowledge management. It's also an example that good storytelling and good knowledge management can be about the most seemingly mundane topics. The ability to capture the telling detail and the capacity to trigger reflection for the reader are what make knowledge management work at its best.

So, go read the rules of the road for your future driving safety and for fun. And then think about how to become a better storyteller about your own work, whatever that might be.

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