Data, Information and Knowledge.

Many years ago I was working at one unit of CSIRO (Australia's major research organisation) and there were regular brown-bag sessions covering aspects of related areas.
There were a number of good talks, sometimes internal, sometime from visitors from other units, other countries etc. There is one that I particularly remember which was about the difference between 'Data', 'Information' and 'Knowledge'.

As I remember the definitions used were something like:
Data = a record, or a set of related values which tell you something about the world.
Information = a document. I remember the presenter spending sometime justifying this point but don't remember the details. It came down to the fact that information was a concrete entity which could be written down and persisted. Thinking about this now I don't think that a physical document should be required. Just that the information should be abstractly external and therefore documentable.
Knowledge = what is in someone's head. He was clear on the fact that knowledge always required someone to know it. Knowledge is not passed on to someone else, but rather created within their own minds as a partial copy of the original. The point being, of course, that no-one can be sure that what they know about a topic is the same as some-one else's view. If nothing else the mental models and contextual links will be quite different.

Several years later I tried to see if any of this had ever been published or was available somewhere within the organistion. I was unable to define exactly when I had heard it, who had presented or even what unit they were from. Naturally I was unsuccessful.
I have found other definitions of Data, Information & Knowledge* but none seem to match the approach I remember.
In other words - I am not sure if what I have written above matches in any way the actual presentation. Still, it provides a basis for further thought.

The approach has significant consequences for things such as knowledge bases or knowledge transfer sessions etc. An organisation, if treated as an organism, has knowledge of its environment and its internal processes. This knowledge is a conglomeration of the knowledge of the constituents, the individual members, of the organisation and is subject to contexual links between them. (I suspect the same applies to knowledge within individuals). Communication patterns - how information is processed and propagated - within any group of people will have a significant impact on the operational knowledge the group uses to perform its function - and on the sensory knowledge it derives to examine its environment.
To maintain knowledge within an organisation requires that it be sufficiently dispersed amongst the members of the group so that the removal of any specific element has no significant impact. Dispersal of the knowledge requires that sufficient communication paths exist to distribute information amongst the people most involved in it. Since knowledge tends to be stratified within an organisation (i.e. each level in the hierarchy has its own priorities; despite "Undercover Boss" you would not expect the CEO to know how to work on the shop floor - their priorities are different) the most important communication paths are between peers. A good manager should understand this and encourage it; while still understanding enough of his people to be able to cover the inevitable gaps.
There is a whole discipline there about the creation of knowledge in new members of a group. Depending on the maturity and size of an organisation and the clarity of the knowledge, there are very many different mechanisms for achieving this. Teaching, Training, Mentoring, Coaching, Leading, or just chatting between the old hands and the newbies. Each has its own advantages and drawbacks and areas of effectiveness. All are related to re-creating knowledge held by one person in the mind of another.
Converting knowledge to documents allows it to be propagated and stored. But storage of information in a repository can only be useful as a back-up mechanism and with full understanding of the limitations. 'Knowledge bases' are only useful if used as temporary storage and constantly updated. Nailing down knowledge as information makes it static and isolated. It removes context and the documentation is locked in place where it quickly goes stale. If picked up in time, by someone who has some mental framework in which to place it, the information can be brought back to life as knowledge. But over time, the signal to noise ratio decreases and it becomes more and more difficult to identify what is relevant.
In other words, unless carefully organised and maintained - and with regular turn-over - any 'knowledge store' collects so much outdated information that it becomes a major effort to find the uesful tidbits. This is the whole point of librarians. They specialise in the organisation, maintenance and search for meaningful information that may be used to re-create knowledge.

but one point that I think I may return to is that one view of the Internet is as a vast information repository. Most of it is turned over very regularly and hence is relatively useful - depending on the relevance it has to the knowledge you already have in your head**. While not particularly well organised (and, I think, all the more powerful because of it), the information can be reached easily which mitigates somewhat. However current search mechanisms could easily become a problem. 4M responses to a simple query is not targetted and it is very difficult to find anything when the relevant keywords are too generic (try finding about a problem where IE8 freezes occassionally - what other search terms can I think of?). Extracting the signal from the noise becomes more and more difficult as the total volume of information increases.

I am not sure where I am going with this and in re-reading the post seems to ramble about a bit. But it touches on a number of points that I think I will explore in more detail later and I don't want to leave them out. Besides - since no-one is reading this anyway, who cares :-)

* For instance: Information and Knowledge as the first and second derivatives respectively of Data with respect to Intelligence. A cute definition but not particularly useful - even mathematically :-)
** Useful is a very relative term. It has a critical dependence on the inclinations of the person acquiring the knowledge and how closely it can be linked to existing knowledge.

Building a kitchen

I work for an IT company designing and implementing software systems for large companies. The following was an analogy that I put together for one engagement to explain why the request we were asked for was not as simple as the customer expected. The work itself was to introduce a new point of sale application to their retail stores. The old system was a "green-screen" interface to an ancient main frame which was also used to manage their repairs centre.

"Our clients intend to renovate their kitchen. They have bought a set of modular units from Ikea and have hired us to put it in place in their house. Their existing kitchen has only the one row of cupboards with the bench-top and the fridge stuck in the corner. The new set of units contains a proper pantry, work-table and a set of drawers.

The project is currently at the stage of working out how the modules should be arranged in the space available so that it can be used the way that they intend. The trouble that we are running into is that they believe everything they need is “out of the box”. It is - mostly - but the box is a flat pack and the pieces need to be screwed together and fitted together in the most efficient layout. We have our screw-drivers and hex keys in hand but need to know which units go next to each other and what the most common activities in the kitchen will be. And plumbing and wiring were never going to be provided with the kitchen units.

For instance – we have been asked to make sure that there is a power outlet near the cutlery drawer. Fair enough, but why? So that it is not necessary to move around much while making a cup of coffee. It turns out that in the current kitchen the coffee is kept on the bench next to the kettle and the cups are in the cupboard underneath, while the teaspoons are across the room. The client believes that having power near the drawer will allow them to have all these things in one place. BUT – in the new kitchen, the cups will be in a cupboard above the bench and the coffee will be kept in the pantry.

If we follow the request to the letter, it will not solve the underlying problem. So we need to understand the *actual* requirement is not to have the power near the spoons but to make it easy to put together a cup of coffee without travelling all over the room. Extracting this requirement from what the customer *thinks* they want is the skill of the designer.

At the same time – we also need to take into account things that the customer doesn’t even think of. The pantry should be near the main entry point so that groceries don’t have to travel far, and the fridge should ideally be against an outside wall for energy efficiency reasons.

One of complications to all this is that our client has had everything laid out in the old kitchen in logical relation to how it is used. With only a single set of cupboards there is no logical grouping according to purpose, but grouping according to task. Hence food is kept next to the utensils used to prepare it and implements next to where they are used.

The off-the-shelf replacement has a completely different, though equally valid, justification for where everything is placed. And that layout is implicit in the structure of the cupboards such that altering will mean cutting and patching the packaged components.

There is also another issue is the customer has also been doing repair work on the kitchen table and keeping the tools and parts in the cupboards and drawers along with the cutlery and plates. Part of our job is therefore to put together a workshop - which should be, of course, in a separate room. I am expecting this separation to also cause some angst, and I am going to have to have some discussion with our team since the same modules (cupboards) will be used for the workshop as for the kitchen. Most of the tradesmen won’t understand why they need to kept as separate as I intend them to be."

Corporate memory

Every organisation, from its inception and throughout its existence, gathers knowledge about its business environment and about its internal operations. In most cases, this knowledge resides in the minds of the people which make up the organisation: the company direction may be held in the head of the CEO, while the correct way to process a claim form is maintained by finance clerks.

All of this information constitutes the organisation’s knowledge base. It may be considered a sort of ‘corporate memory’. Every structured group of people – from the local football club through to nations and global communities – has a corporate memory. In the former case it may be statistics and a set of stories about past greats. In the latter it is comprised of the history and cultural behaviours. In all cases this collective knowledge guides the behaviour of members.

However, the structure of most corporate memories is extremely messy to say the least. In many (most?) cases it is not formally structured or even recognised as a valuable resource. Pieces of information are scattered in many different brains and a thousand documents. Cross-connections rely on random coagulations of data by the members of the group and random associations based on past knowledge.

Entry into any group will always involve some induction or initiation procedure whereby one is introduced to the corporate memory. These processes go by such names as ‘training’, ‘induction’, ‘gaining experience’ and ‘mentoring’ [This is the subject of an entirely other field of study known as ‘teaching’]. There will also be some method for propagating knowledge amongst existing members, although this is commonly less controlled and often completely unmanaged. Compare how much organisational knowledge is gained through rumour and gossip as opposed to reading formal documents.

Mechanisms for passing on knowledge amongst existing vary greatly. There is some that is passed along in sound-bites; a mode designed to ensure that everyone in the organisation has at least a passing understanding. The corporate vision or mission statement is usually of this kind. [The fallacy in this is that just because everyone has heard the mission statement, company values or corporate vision doesn’t mean that they have understood or believe it. The normal response is to simply repeat the same statement it over and over again. Advertisers also use this approach with marginally more success.] At the other extreme are regulations and policies which may run to hundreds of pages – and which are rarely read.

As an organisation becomes larger and more established, knowledge is nailed down in a set of pre-defined processes and procedures such as templates, check-lists, instruction manuals or forms. All these may be considered as conditioned responses to specific stimulus by the corporate organism. Hence small or young organisations have less standard processes and procedures to define their actions. They have had less time or opportunity to learn and react to troublesome situations. On the other hand large organisations can go too far in this direction and institute so many hard and fast rules that they restrict any variation or flexibility away from THE fixed process. Deciding where and when tight rules are required and when loose guidelines should be implemented is not easy.

A formal knowledge base, attempts to resolve some of the issues surrounding the normal diffuse nature of the corporate memory. It does not (and cannot) expect to contain all the disparate knowledge which may be contained within the organisation. However, it should provide a first point of call for any member of a group to find out about anything relevant to the group.

mental notes made physical

I've taken to carrying around a little note-book.
I found that I think best when moving, such as walking, when my mind is not occupied with all the distractions found at a desk.
I also found that I commonly would explore a concept in my mind and make mental notes about various aspects of it. The thoughts could have been about what was going on around me, drifting or chewing over some topic that had come up earlier, or even ideas about work that should be shared or considered in more detail.
The trouble was remembering the points that I had considered later when I got back to somewhere I could write things down. All the marvellous phraseology and concise explanations disappeared and the fine detail of the thought process was gone.
Hence the idea of a physical manifestation of a mental note. With a small notebook I can jot down some mnemonic or phrase to remind my self later where my head was at.
Part of the point of this blog was to get stuff down on paper so that I did not continue to re-visit it so much later. Re-circulating ideas was becoming a problem. I have even lain awake at night because of worries or ideas or fuming or something buzzing through my head. I found that writing it down trapped the thought and I could let it go. Since I was trapping it anyway, putting it out in public (such as it is) made sense. Killing two birds with one stone as it were.
However, it is generally not possible to write things down immediately on a screen - nor desirable I suppose. The notebook so far is bridging the gap neatly - and also allows me to keep track of those rare ideas about work which would otherwise be lost.

Shrinking Office Space

It recently occurred to me that every time I have changed the work that I do, the available space has reduced. If the trend continues I will be doing all my work on a laptop sitting in a chair in the corner.

This started as an undergraduate where I had an entire room. Granted it was also a bedroom as well and not very large, but it was wholly mine (shared accommodation at universitys are not common in Australia, although I gather it is standard in the US) and was my major workspace at the time. I did a lot of good focussed work in that room - as well as a bit of socialisation.

As a post-graduate, I did nearly all my work in the lab; a room about 8m x 8m with 4m ceilings. I shared with my supervisor, his research assistant and 3-4 other students. Despite not being particularly interested in the topic I was able to get a fair bit done and had close, but not intrusive, contact with everyone I need to collaborate with.

As a post-doc fellow, I had a small glass-walled office in a corner of much smaller lab. The rest of the team (more senior people) had their own offices elsewhere, but that room was the meeting place when we were working together.

My first 'real job' was in a open-plan office. Partitions were shoulder-high on a standing person and each section was about 4m square with 4 seats in it. Since teams were almost always co-located (we moved desks a lot) there was always a lot to talk about with the people in the 'pod' with me and there was not a lot of interruption from outside. Again a productive enviroment - if a little de-personalising.

That was at a client site. When we moved back to our own company offices the sections were smaller - maybe 3m on a side - with walls at waist height. It was possible to stand at one corner of the floor and look over to the other to see if someone was at their desk or not. Noisy conversations (which were not uncommon) in the next partition led to frequent interruptions and it was at this time that I really appreciated the fact that I tend to get in a couple of hours before the majority of my fellows. It was really quite difficult to do any individual work during the main part of the day.

Several years later and our company has moved to new offices and our workspaces have shrunk dramatically. No more sectioning of the space - we now have rows of desks stretching across an open space 100m across. The 'wall' between me and person in the desk facing is roughly eye-level while seated. By roughly, I mean slightly less so that I can look them in the eye if I peer around the screen.

Company management congratulate themselves on the design and how modern and efficient it is to cram as many seats as possible into the space available. I just feel like one of the cattle in a stalls - although with less room or privacy. Or more relevant, like one of a thousand monkeys banging away at a keyboard trying to produce something - even a limerick (forget about aiming for Shakespeare). I get more creative work done on the train on the way home.

I see a scene reminiscent of 1950s movies with wage-slaves, heads bent over hand-cranked calculators, under the watchful eye of the floor supervisor.
I wonder when the whole idea of a productive workplace was lost.

Letting go

I have just come off a project where a great number of things went wrong. Without going into details (I may cover later - or not, given the topic of this post) I found myself fuming most evenings.
It was apparent to me very early on that we were rushing head-long towards the edge of a cliff, but could not get any of the managers to agree. By the end of it, I had been completely marginalised and could say nothing without it being ignored or verified with someone else.
This is despite the fact that most of the concerns I raised blew up at some point and led to major issues. Indeed, throughout the project, we spent more time painting over the cracks without ever addressing the cause. The result is now in production and as beset with more problems than I expected - and still no-one is addressing the underlying issues, just patching the immediate failures.
But that is not the point, and yet again I find myself getting off topic.
The question is why I spend so much time angry and stewing about it. There are probably a number of things I could have done - although what is still not clear. But going over and over what should have been was never very helpful. Even more so now that I am not even involved any more! There is really no point in getting upset over an injustice done over a year ago when no-one else involved even remembers the situation.
[It is quite apparent that our managers never recall the past and only ever look a short distance into the future. This is not right but neither is it something that can be fixed by complaining.]
So, chalk it up as a learning experience (and I DID learn a lot) with one of the major learnings to be when to let go and when to push harder.
Now if I can only put that into practice...

The Master's Cat

There was an old master at a mountain monastery came to own a small kitten which he loved dearly.

Unfortunately the kitten would try to climb into the abbot’s lap every morning while he was meditating. To remove the distraction the abbot asked the youngest of the novices to tie the animal to a nearby tree during the morning observances.

This continued for a number of years. As the novice was promoted another took his place and made sure that the cat was tied up each morning.

Eventually the old master died and was buried with great ceremony. The next morning, the youngest novice again tied the cat to the tree. This was his task and he had not even been at the monastery when the master had first found his mediations being disturbed.

As time passed, the task of tying up the cat continued to be assigned to the newest novice until, as happens to all things, the cat itself grew old and died. By this time, no-one remembered why it needed to be tied up, only that it must be done every morning during observances. So, of course, another cat was obtained to ensure that there would always be one tied to the tree.

In such a way are traditions born.

Knowledge Bases

Some time ago I started writing a whitepaper on the concept of knowledge management. It was never finished, for a number of reasons, and eventually the motivation for it disappeared. One of the problems I had with it was that whenever I sat down to write about one aspect the topic started to diverge and I ended up talking about something else. Not so good for a tight coherent whitepaper.

But exactly the sort of thing that appears in blogs. So why not explore some of the thoughts here?

The original incentive was a small application that my brother-in-law put together. The purpose, as far as I could tell, was to extract semantics from a digital artefact and hence more closely correlate items from multiple sources. One of the major intended uses was in targeted search. Of course, I may be a bit wrong on that since the descriptions I got were rarely so clear or concisely expressed.

At the same time our team at work were talking about how to induct new people into the fairly esoteric set of tools that we use. In particular how to make sure that key knowledge from our experts did not get lost as they moved on to other things. The company knowledge base is a useless tool which just collects scattered documents of all sorts and vaguely sorts them into general categories. Besides the team knowledge we had gathered was not generally applicable outside.

So how do you draw something meaningful from several hundred artefacts, of many different types. There were documents specific to a very narrow area and overview diagrams which purported to show the high level. Spreadsheets summarising the last twelve months and 100 slide packs which detailed yesterday’s status updates. All of which was essentially useless because it was not possible to find anything specific without talking to the person who put it there – if they remembered themselves.

So the ideas of what constituted a useful knowledge base were on my mind and I made several starts on covering off the key points that it should cover. The first of which is the critical role that searchability plays!

One other aspect is the actual definition of a knowledge base and why one would be useful. Obviously the purpose would drive the which aspects were most important and hence the design of any specific instance.

The best known and most readily available knowledge base is, of course, the internet itself. Almost anything you need to know is out there somewhere and there are a number of very clever people who have dedicated themselves to helping you find it. However the approach taken is to identify the pages (or pages) which most closely match the request.

What do you do when ALL the documents are at least tangentially related to the search topic, or when the information desired is scattered over a number of different artefacts. This is where a well designed knowledge base could be used.

DC or not DC

My previous article reminded me of something that has been on my mind in the past.
Electronic devices, ones that do very little mechanical work, generally operate best with DC power supplies. In mobile devices such as phones or notebooks, the input power is used to charge the battery and it is the battery which supplies the actual electronics. But even in a desktop computer there is an internal power supply which changes the input AC power into various DC voltages before passing it on to the different components.
This is obvious with devices which are charged through a transformer (technically a SMPS). The transformer is commonly a little black box on the power plug which makes it impossible to fit in the socket next to any other device (who designs these things?).
While ideally there is as little as 5% loss of energy in per device, it may actually be significantly higher. And each one is wasting power.
Now AC is supplied to homes because this is the most efficient way to transmit electricity over long distances. Devices which draw large amounts of power – such as whitegoods or power tools – also built make use of the full amount available. But smaller devices need to drop power to reduce it to usable levels and this basically wastes the energy as heat.
An alternative, hinted at above, would be to have a single transformer which converted the input supply to some standard DC voltage for use within the home. As car chargers are common amongst the devices in question, a 12V supply would seem to be appropriate.
It would even be fairly easy so set up such a system. All you need is a couple of car batteries, a trickle charger and a bank of sockets to plug in the device chargers. A competent electrician should be able to do it in an afternoon.
I imagine that the best option in most houses would be a single supply point where mobile devices could be charged, but there is no reason why multiple points could not be spread throughout the house. It would mean a secondary wiring job but DC is a lot easier to deal with than AC and the concept of twinned supply already exists with grey water systems.
Another extension to the concept would be to wire in solar panels (which naturally supply DC) so that the secondary system is fully self-contained.

Big battery

I just caught a news item about a town in Texas which is building the world’s biggest battery. The intent is to maintain power supply when the single line from the national grid goes out – as it regularly does.
Now I don’t know how much wastage there is in storing power in this way, but the idea is great from a theoretical point of view. The normal pattern for electricity is for a central point of supply with failure prone transport to the point of usage. The risk of failure in transport is (usually) mitigated by using multiple redundant pathways – the electricity grid. This mechanism fails in the case mentioned in the article because there is only the single line into the town.
There are several known problems with the standard way that power is supplied. One of the biggest is that the grid is built around large scale centralised feed-in to the network and storage is apparently not practical at that scale. Hence electricity is generated to match demand – increasing production as more is drawn from the grid and dropping when usage falls. The possibility (probability) of under or over supply is obvious.
Balance is managed by using several sorts of power generation, at least some of which can quickly and easily brought on- or off-line. Even petrol powered generator may be included occasionally to meet short term peaks. At the other end, power is shed (read wasted) when supply outstrips demand.
In other words load balancing is done with methods which are quite expensive from both monetary and environmental points of view.
Storing (relatively) cheaply generated power during slack times and drawing against high demand would seem to make a great deal of sense. I assume that this is not possible at the national scale and so cannot be used in the central power plants. Given the fact that a town-sized battery is such big news, I guess that even storing at the sub-station level would be difficult.
But let’s take the concept further; how about power storage at the street or house level? Could each office building, which already have maintenance staff, include some electrical storage mechanism?
There may be maintenance concerns around having a bank of batteries behind the switch-board in every property – especially since traditional technologies use a number of toxic chemicals. But battery technologies have progressed fairly far in the last decade, riding on the back of the green movement and electric cars. At the same time the environmental and financial drivers for such a strategy are becoming stronger.
The idea ties in very well with the local generation of power. The input to the storage device need not be the national grid, it could just as easily be solar panels or a wind turbine placed on top of the house.

Carbon Trading

There has been much discussion in the last few years about carbon dioxide and how to reduce emissions. I don’t want to talk about global warming or similar. To my mind reducing any sort of venting of any sort of waste is a good thing; whatever justification is used.
Australia’s response has been to introduce a framework for trading in carbon dioxide. Companies who vent are charged accordingly but given credits based on various factors (which I admit I have not bothered to understand). These credits can be traded to reduce or eliminate the amount that needs to be paid.
The idea is, of course, to artificially impose a market value on carbon and hence allow the normal economic forces to counter the drive to throw it away. The trouble with this is the unintended consequences which attend almost any attempt to use economic forces to drive anything.
The intended consequence is for the artificial costs of producing CO¬2 to be passed on to the consumer which, in theory will reduce demand. In many areas this will provide incentives for alternatives – even in areas such as power generation. However, there are so many other consequences that I suspect that the dynamics of the situation are likely to change completely. I will leave it to the economists to consider in detail.
However, one major point of concern is that this is an artificial market in carbon. Indeed the market is in a secondary resource – carbon emission credits. I would have thought that a better solution, although considerably more difficult, would be to create a real market in carbon. Who would vent a valuable commodity into the air if it could instead be sold to off-set production costs?
The underlying problem is not with CO2 production per se, but with the fact that it is vented to environment. Indeed this is the case with any pollutant: gaseous, particulate, solid or liquid. They are created because the most efficient industrial processes used to produce the enormous number of consumables we use also create large amounts of waste product as a side-effect. Disposal of the waste products is done in the most cost effective way – which often means just venting because capturing and/or storing them is often more expensive.
The problem here is the classification of substances as ‘waste’. One industry’s waste is another industry’s raw material. The point of carbon trading is to make the CO2 worth something so that it is traded instead of thrown away. But the value created is artificial – imposed by government regulation. But what if the gas had some real and tangible value as a raw material in some other industry?
Actually there are a number of industries whose waste product provides a raw material for some other industry. Connecting these production systems could (does?) provide a lucrative business for some entrepreneur.
This could be a prime area for some basic research – what can CO2 be profitably used for?
I am not an expert in this field and so I cannot answer that question myself but I would have thought that it was a ripe – over ripe – field of inquiry. Is there anyone in the world looking into it? I know it can be used to carbonate drinks, but I suspect that this will not use a great deal of the current world supply. I have heard of mechanisms of using C02 as a purifying agent – say for de-caffeinating coffee. Injected CO2 can be used to greatly enhance the strength of concrete. I can conceive of using it as a fuel or additive in cars – thus reducing petrol consumption at the same time.
CO2 is used to make dry ice – is this something that could be more extensively used in our society? Are there any other properties of the gas which may be useful? Could we fill our greenhouses with it – or at least increase the partial pressure a little (we don’t want to kill those people who work in greenhouses). Are there any medical uses? The possibilities are endless (mostly because I don’t know enough to discard them).
By providing funds to research agencies (most of which are government owned in Australia) to follow this chain of logic is likely to provide greater benefit for less outlay than the current approach. Of course, the approach is not restricted to carbon. Most major industries could profit from creating an alternate market for their own waste material. Even in obscure cases - waste heat from power generation need not be vented, especially when the power is, itself, going to be used to generate heat somewhere else. The trouble is in transporting the waste from the major industrial centres where it is generated to the places where it can profitably be used.
However, that is drifting off topic somewhat and I think I will explore another time.

Waiting for the Train

Standing on the platform,
Watching the last of the stars fade from the sky.
The scattered clouds painted with brilliant colour by the rising light
As the sun cranks itself up in the same direction as the arriving train.

My fellow commuters,
In clumps where the doors will be,
Huddled in black and grey,
Staring at the ground.

Words

Words are tricky things.
It is difficult to get them to say exactly what I want. Individual words carry connotations which vary not only with the person hearing them but also with the context and ideas which they have in mind at the time. Sentences (should) only carry a single thought and therefore ignore all the other inter-related aspects which impact on the underlying idea.
There is this whole mental construct with a myriad of implications and ramifications, multiple different aspects to be explored; and it can only be passed on through a single linear stream of variable symbols. Whatever is said, it leaves out so much and implicitly orders the remainder so that an unnatural prioritisation is applied.
Following one train of thought means neglecting all the other possible paths. But all facets are important to faithfully transmit the underlying concept. For anything but the most basic of ideas, what is communicated is, at best, a rough outline and at worst a completely distorted view.
There are, of course, other communication methods – most of which revolve around pictures or diagrams. These 2D mechanisms are better but can only be used in specific circumstances. But they are not generally useful in normal conversation.
Part of the purpose of this blog is for me to practice expressing complex concepts in this sort of linear fashion. When running an idea through my head I will often chase down the various chains and linkages to explore all sides of an idea. Where the idea came from, both in the context of why I am thinking it and conceptual pieces which compose it. The logical consequences and the other ideas that flow from it. The inter-relationships with other conceptual structures.
Trying to order all this in my head is difficult and can take some time – picking words and making connections to properly express the idea to myself. And when I have worked through it all and find the concept is fully formed, all these words and images are no longer necessary and the framework disappears. However then, for whatever reason, it becomes necessary to make someone else aware of the implications. The whole thought process needed to be re-constructed; preferably without all the false starts and doubling back.
What I am trying to do here is get the process done in appropriate words the first time so that I can avoid the re-work later. This does double duty of getting it out of my head so that I don’t keep running over the same old ground. However, the ideas that do occur to me are likely to be a fairly eclectic bunch since the driver for doing this is not so much the ideas themselves but the process.

Seeing broadly

I recently re-read one of Heinlein’s old books and came across a concept which obviously had caught his attention at the time. It has to do with a technique of training a person to be more attentive their environment and Heinlein referred to it as “Renshawing” after the creator.
Obviously the technique is not in common usage now (at least not that I have ever heard) but out of curiosity I looked it up in Wikipedia. Few of the training methods can be applied without specialised equipment, but there was one which required nothing other than your own eyes. It has to do with consciously noticing things that occur at the edge of your vision – cars passing as you walk past and store displays being the examples given.
Apparently this not only increases your awareness of your surroundings but may have a positive effect on your vision generally. Being of a ‘certain age’ I have noticed significant deterioration of my vision in the last couple of years. So, although some of the benefits sound a little implausible, I thought that I may as well try it occasionally. Especially since increasing awareness is supposed to be a significant factor in ‘luckiness’.
Of course, introducing any new habit, means actually remembering to follow it occasionally – often easier said than done. Remembering to perform some action, at least for me and in this sort of context, triggers a round of thought processes about the purpose of the action and especially why it might be something worth doing: creating a mental model about what it happening and the underlying basis for it.
All of which is a round about way of getting to a series of thoughts about how eyes are used. Being an office worker I spend a lot of time in front of a computer. This requires focussing on a small area of my full range of vision (about 50cm – or probably less – in diameter). Much of the rest of the time my gaze is focussed on a small area – a book, a face or similar.
There are few situations in a city dweller’s my world where a wide view is necessary. And there are so many extraneous details that tight focus is often advantageous. This sets up a positive reinforcement to the extent that people walking in the streets don’t notice anything happening around them; and the bigger the town the worse the effect. (I live in a small town and work in the city.)
As it comes to the end of summer I realise that sunglasses also contribute. There is a great deal of my field of view which is NOT covered. But in general use I don’t tend to notice this – I only see what is in front of me and therefore what can be seen through the lenses.
Obviously this is all the absolute opposite of the technique described above. I wonder what the constant tight focus is doing to both our vision and to our view of the world around us.

Resource Decentralisation

One of the major issues with the environmentalist/sustainability/climate change debate is why the developing countries should restrict their standard of living because of the excesses of the western world – especially the US.
But the normal articulation of the problem skips over one key step in the argument. The implicit assumption is that it is not possible to have a high standard of living without the excesses. But a large percentage of the resources expended in the developed countries add nothing to the lifestyle of their citizens. There is enormous amounts of waste which are inherent in almost every part of the system. Removing this waste could allow the same end result with much less raw materials.
Waste is generally a consequence of inefficiencies. And the supply side of is constrained by mechanisms and processes put in place a hundred years ago.
Consider for instance, power supply. It is enormously inefficient to generate power in massive facilities and then ship it across distances the size of a country. Transmission lines use very high voltage because this reduces losses in the line. Even so, carrying the power over hundred of kilometres means that a large percentage is lost. How much better it would be to generate the power at the point it is to be used. [Aside: this is the mechanism used in cars or gas appliances. The energy is generated at the point of use by burning a suitable fuel. The trouble is that you still have to move the fuel to the usage location.]
There are a number of reasons why this solution has been locked in; not least of which is the enormous investment made into power stations and associated infrastructure (such as transmission lines). However, while new technologies do not YET afford a practical alternative, they are not far off. Concerted effort driven by an urgent need (such as climate change?) is likely to lead to fairly rapid progress. The problem is that there is not such a drive in the western world which already has the expensive infrastructure in place and additions can be considered incremental costs (although fairly large increments given the cost of power stations).
However, the developing world has not yet made as much commitment to existing paradigms. Although, there is some and they do provide a significant barrier to alternatives, they are no where near as difficult to pass as in the ‘developed’ countries. The barrier is even lower in places such as much of Africa where there is no established infrastructure. There is no real reason why such places should not leap-frog the cul-de-sac that the European settled countries find themselves in.
Assisting small countries to develop localised utilities (water, power, communications etc.) in the same way that they also have localised food sources would allow relatively rapid improvement to those areas. At the same time the advances could be included in developed worlds as supplements to the existing infrastructure, with the aim of eventual replacement.

Decentralised or desalination

The Victorian government has instituted a plan to build an enormous desalination plant. The idea, of course, is to create enough fresh water to supply the state for the “foreseeable future” (a phrase that sets off alarm bells for anyone who pays attention to politics at any level – it generally means until the next election).
A desalination plant is a large facility which requires enormous amounts of power and which generates great amounts of heat and waste. And even in the best case the final product needs to be moved over long distances to where it is used.
Of course there is quite a backlash from many different groups. The locals don’t want it near where they live. Greens have a number of reasons to object from pollution to power use to environmental damage. Even economists are concerned about the cost of the plant and potential return on investment.
All these are good points but my major concern is along different lines. Basically this is simply not a good solution to the underlying problem.
Centralisation of production generally is a throwback to the industrial revolution. With today’s technology there are often better methods and in this specific case there are many. This is a theme that I will return to in other cases as well. Decentralisation of resource production is often the best, simplest solution to the sort of sustainability problems that we are facing as a culture.
In the case of water as a resource, there is more than enough fresh, clean water available exactly where it is needed. But we throw this away into the ocean and are now proposing to import it again over a long distance after an expensive and difficult re-processing.
Instead we should consider how to best utilise the rain which is generally available. At minimum water tanks could be installed in every household and to all major buildings. Re-cycling storm water (which would only need minor re-processing) as well would provide the majority of requirements. We may still need catchment areas for cultivation and supplementary supply, but new dams and especially the facilities such as desalination should generally be unnecessary.
Such a solution would be far superior in numerous ways. It would be more robust; failure at one site would have almost no impact across the rest. It would be more flexible; variations according to site needs would be easy to implement. It would be more extensible; updates and additions can easily be rolled out as needed (for instance adding a first flush system so that the water can be used for drinking as well. It would be more scalable; additional capacity can be added easily and specifically in locations where required. It would be more maintainable; although trained personnel (plumbers) would be required but not the sort of specialists necessary at a central plant. And, support costs would be dispersed to the individuals who benefit most taking significant load off the government.
Of course, there would not be a big new project run and owned by the government. It would not make the same sort of splash in the news. And there is no where need the same sort of control over the process.

Customer Service

There is a service station near us which has introduced a simple but marvellous boost to its customer service.
They have a bowl on the counter next to the register filled with 5 and 10 cent pieces. A sign on the bowl states that these are for customer use if they are just over a round dollar amount for their petrol. For instance, if you put $50 dollars in and drift slightly over so the charge is $50.05, you can take one of these coins to make up the difference.
Think about this for a second, for the cost of a few dollars in coins, the store has enormously enhanced the customer experience. They remove the need for their operators to provide large amounts of change or to eat into the till float. They implicitly recognise that the amount is trivial and that they are willing to waive – except that they cannot do it through the register. It is a tip that the manager cares about the customer’s convenience.
I am sure that there are people who abuse the system, there always are. But the bowl is right next to the till and couldn’t have more than about a hundred coins anyway – about $5.
Personally I am never likely to use this facility – if I am short I will use the controls on the pump to limit what I put in the car. However, I will preferentially use this service station simply because they have thought of this idea.

what's missing with weight loss

The way weight loss is sold, the basic principle, is that "calories in" must be less than "calories out".
The trouble is, for someone with a physics background, there is a step missing here - from a logical point of view. My main problem with it is: Calorie is not a measure of weight.
It is a measure of energy. Despite Einstein mass and energy are not equivalent - at least not at this scale. Hence the missing step in the logic.
Now I am quite aware that there MAY be a close dependency between the energy content of food and its weight. But skipping that point means that we are disregarding some of the consequences. Loss of body mass is related to the difference between the *weight* of input and the *weight* of the output.
If we assume that the weight of gas in and out is roughly equivalent (which is a big assumption but lets go with it) then the liquid and solid input needs to be less than the liquid and solid output. I have heard that the liquid part of this dominates the equation enormously - by far the biggest impact on day to day weight it the amount of water that passes through the body. However, this is transitory and any reasonable measure (NOT "Biggest Loser") does not consider day to day changes when looking at weight loss - week to week or month by month is much more useful.
So, if it is the actual quantity of food which matters what difference does that make to counting calories.
Well, you still want to take in the same nutrients. Your body still needs its fuel. If you want to this with less mass of food then you need to choose nutrient rich foods. Ones which have less empty calories and more of the key things that your body needs. Which, of course, brings us back to the point we started at - calories - but with a much better idea of why.