Tuesday, December 19, 2006
DAIC, which sounds like Daisy, is one of those BSchool/Psychology-Today frameworks I picked up at some point in my work life. It’s mnemonic for four roles that employee’s might play in the process of reaching a decision: Driver Approver Informed Consultant Since entrepreneurs ran the organization inside of which I learned this particular framework they [...]
Because it is proported to be about emotions I have been looking forward to getting my hands on the new book out of the Harvard Negotiation community Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as you negotiate by Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro. It’s pretty good, which is a relief, since most books about emotions written by [...]
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Joel Garreau wrote Edge City quite a few years ago. In the literature about the growth of the suburbs it’s somewhat unique. He love’s them, and he really loves their developers. Which is fun because he can cheerfully explain all their jargon without the least bit of eye rolling. That, in turn, allows the reader [...]
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
I love the way given a heterogeneous audience a single bit of humor can be at once all kinds of humor. Fun Fact about Common Lisp: standard Common Lisp has no networking libraries at all, but it does have a built in function to print integers as Roman numerals — using either the new style [...]
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
The label passive aggressive is oft ascribed to others but rarely subscribed to. When you deploy this label your accusing the other side of acting both with a hidden agenda and out of weakness. Note that the accusation of a hidden agenda is usually an indirect way of admitting that you haven’t a clue what [...]
Sunday, November 20, 2005
Some more notes from my reading on proffessionalism. Engineering is just different than the three archtypical professions Law, Medicine, and the Priesthood. 1. Knowledge base changes faster 1a. Reduces opportunity and value of standarizing practice patterns. 1b. Reducing the advantage of mature practitioners. 2. Work products are more tangible. 2a. Can be inspected by third [...]
Thursday, November 3, 2005
… asked us if we ever intentionally got lost in a town, perhaps a town new to us, so that we had to learn the place in order to get back to a place we knew. Several people nodded vigorous agreement, and one guy noted that he and his colleagues use a similar technique to [...]
Saturday, October 29, 2005
I very much liked this list of design traps. It’s taken from the middle of a paper (pdf) by the always brilliant Phil Agre. In that context Phil is talking about the problem of designing a technology rich system that will presumably transform an existing large social institution, libraries. But it’s a really good list [...]
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Here is a another really delightful metaphor for the power-law dialectic between the elite and the long-tail. In his essay on Tolstoy’s philosophy of history, Berlin starts with the fragment of the Greek poet Archilochus, “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The conventional interpretation of this proverb is that [...]
The book I was looking for was not on the shelf, but this was a few books down. The original copyright is 1904. Prudence Hyde renewed the copyright in 1938 by Prudence Hyde. The five great philosophies? Epicurean Pursuit of Pleasure Stoic Self-Control by Law Platonic Subordination of Lower to Higher Aristotelian Sense of Proportion [...]
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