Matt, who has the most original About Me entry of all time on his blog, is getting upset about email volumes and issuing dire prognostications about its future. Patrick in a typically thoughtful post picks up on the theme, extends it and issues a clarion cry to let ephemeral communications be ephemera. He also references my long standing argument that organisations need to institute a detoxification programme for the plague of email addiction that has arisen over the last decade.

Now while I think we have a problem, I also think there is a slight danger here of going over the top and getting confused by numbers. Matt provides some useful ones, estimating that 35 trillion emails, of which 40% will be spam will be sent this year. Add in three trillion texts he says, and it makes blogs and wikis seem somewhat puny. Well I am not so sure about that, but that is for Part II, for the moment let us set the context of this conversation.

A cramped four hour flight from Sao Paulo to Santiago, realising that the camera battery was flat as we crossed the Andes on a clear day is not conduce to thought. Add to that five hours of frustration in failing to find a comfortable spot to wait for checkin to open for the flight to Auckland in an airport terminal without air conditioning and no power sockets ,and I have a perfect excuse for migrane. However after checkin I discovered a Starbucks (with a city mug) and then the Lan Chile lounge turned out to have free internet, excellent sushi and delightful Sauvignon Blanc. I am on my third glass and as a result my mood is thus restored to the point where I feel able to complete part II of yesterday's blog responding to the ranting and ruminations of Messrs. Moore and Lamb on the subject of email.

One of the most delightful experiences I know, after a long flight is to be lucky enough to arrive in Auckland Airport with a domestic transfer. The 12 minute walk between the terminals early in the morning is a delight. It's not too hot, the wind is refreshing and, wonderfully the air is full of oxygen.

I love visiting New Zealand (and Australia) but there is one major frustration - internet charges. Last night I finally found a wireless signal, by propping the Powerbook on the corner of the sink next to the door in my Apartment Hotel. Great things Apartment Hotels by the way, for the same price as a hotel room you get a kitchen and laundry which makes life a lot easier. Back to the subject; there were no payment options when I opened my Browser, so I phoned reception. After three attempts I was given an option $6 for an hour or $25 for a day. Other hotels here in Wellington sometimes cost more as they put a 50Mb limit, and charge per megabyte thereafter. In the US, most of the UK and increasingly Europe internet access is a part of the basic plumbing, its like water and electricity, part of the room charge. This must be a huge profit for the hotels, and when wireless is a weak signal or they don't have capacity on their servers it is a disgrace The other day I was told the reason for slow internet access was that they had 170 rooms and too many people were using it ......

For other visitors to Wellington, don't pay the hotel charge. Cafenet give you a good deal, you buy megabytes cheaply, and they are there for as long as you need them. I am still using some I bought two years ago. Not only that all their hotspots are in cafes, and Wellington has the greatest cafe culture I know so you get a double benefit.

Thanks to Ian McNairn (one of the good guys in IBM), via my superwall on Facebook for this excellent clip on bubbles, technology hype and the potential of human systems to well, self-destruct.

I have always opposed the death penalty seeing no evidence that it defers and much evidence that it dehumanises all involved. One of Tom Hank's better films was Dead Man Walking, and there have been others on the subject. The rituals around the process are degrading and inhuman but I had not realised, until I read this BBC report that in Japan the victim is not told the date of execution until just before they are taken the Gallows, and their relatives are told after the event. New depths ....

I am returning to the Wikipedia. In a previous post I expressed some concerns about vandalism and self promotion. I didn't express this directly at the time, but underlying my concern was a feeling that the methods and management practices that work during a period of rapid initial growth, may not work during a period of stabilisation. Now that the Wikipedia is so useful, it can too easily be used and its serious editors abused. One of the simplest changes would be to remove the right for complete anonymity. In my experience to date nearly all the malicious, or infantile vandalism comes from editors who are only identified by their IP addresses. Not only that I am pretty sure that some anonymous postings to the KM article have been disguised self-promotion.

Yesterday's big news in Rugby was the reappointment of Graham Henry as coach of the All Blacks, for two years interestingly not four. Now Henry was originally forced to resign by Wales after presiding over the worst loss in Welsh history to the Irish. I remember it well, as I was there and it was my young son's first attendance at a six nations game which made it worse. After an initial period of success, including a first defeat of the Springboks, a famous defeat of the English (that try from Scott Gibbs) and ten games without a defeat things started to go wrong. My view is that when Henry is coaching you don't get picked unless you play his way. That approach (in particular pods) was making Wales very predictable, and he was also ignoring, and stifling natural talent. Wales is not a "big" nation so we cannot play in the same way as the English who aim to bore people to death through possession, or the crash ball penetration of much All Blacks play. In other words Henry did not adapt, he had a model, in worked initially, then it failed.

My podcast with Jon Husband on social computing continues to have a high take up, including six commentaries from Luis Suarez which start here and conclude here. Luis is also a Mac convert who works for IBM and his reflections on sitting in a room of Thinkpads is entertaining and educational. Reading the various links while working on the next release of SenseMaker™ (due in the new year with a Facebook application amongst other good things) got me thinking about some of the differences and similarities between social computing in general, and in an enterprise environment.

A great letter to Therapy Today from Janet Low on the issues associated with blind adoption of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in the UK which was the subject my earlier post Animal Farm. For those not on up on the plot we are seeing an attempt to create a single approach to therapy which focuses on solving problems by making people happy rather than by understanding what the problem is in the first place. The arguments seem to be ideological and economic rather than based in any real professional discourse. It is even more worrying with the use of computers to replace therapists, and linked initiatives to teach people to set up happiness lessons in school. This is Big Brother magnified, a Brave New World (to mix my literary metaphors) in which contentment is instituted by Government fiat to remove problems by creating a compliant population.

I recently recorded a podcast about the Cynefin framework for Narrative Labs in South Africa. It outlines the model, but largely talks about the complex domain and strategies for dealing with complex issues and problems. You can find it along with the slides here and learn how a former meteorologist, an enigmatic maven and a former narrative therapist have formed a new and interesting company that I look forward to working with. Sonja (the meterorologist) has long held the training franchise for Cognitive Edge in Africa and is a former colleague of mine in IBM. AIden and Raymond were never part of Big Blue, but despite, or possible because of that are great guys, good conversationalists and not afraid to have an argument, which is high praise.

Czarniawska (1997) attributes the phrase homo narrans to Fisher (1984). Niles (1999) offers a more elaborate working of the idea that humans are fundamentally shaped by and shape the narrative structures of their existence. We know that the ability to pass knowledge between humans through story was, and still is a distinguishing feature of human evolution. No longer dependent on genetic change and imitation of parents, abstract knowledge and practical wisdom could be distributed, mutated and blended to speed learning and adaption. Narrative remains the principle mechanism of learning and knowledge transfer within an organisation. Accordingly it is not surprising that this paper advocates that peoples narratives should be captured and interpreted as a form of research and learning in knowledge management and elsewhere. If we are homo sapiens, in part because we are homo narrans then the study of our multi-faceted and fractal narratives should lead to insight and sense-making capability. Of course we are more than that; stretching my mind back to schoolboy latin, we could also talk about homo fabrilis, homo facetus or maybe homo ridiculus to reflect our toolmaking as well as our multi-aspected uses of humour.

Extract from a paper I am just completing

A nice satire here on the creationist museum
Did you know that Unicorns appear nine times in the King James version of the bible, but have been removed from the Revised Standard?

Now we know for certain that KM is the latter stages of its life cycle: You can buy all you need to know here for $250 and I gather from contacts you get some ginzu knives thrown in. Next up the all in one intellectual capital exercise machine; use it for an hour every morning and your body will have a knowledge sharing culture.
Hat tip to Bruce Richards on the Skimleaders listserv for finding this.

Depressing news yesterday in the paper - that modern day Swift, Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's. I reproduce his announcement below, which shows his active sense of humour.

Goggle are expanding into the Wikipedia space (sort of). Now my gut feel is that they won't succeed, they are going down the authored content approach by named experts. First mover advantage, and the wisdom (not to mention the righteous indignation) of crowds will probably win out. However, Google already tune their algorithms to remove what they consider promotional use or gaming; there is considerable advantage after all to being on the first page of a search. I am sure that even if Wikipedia is ranked one for a subject query they would not massage the calculations to put their own knol first, but they might promote it .....

Why is it that I keep thinking back to the dangers of monopoly every time I read an article about Google? The wall of the barn still has Do good by users written on it, but not so long ago unless it is in China was added by the Google equivalent of Squealer . Any day now we may find a Google Executive sprawling beside their blog in the early hours of the morning, I quote from chapter 8 of Animal Farm

At the foot of the end wall of the big barn, where the Seven Commandments were written, there lay a ladder broken in two pieces. Squealer, temporarily stunned, was sprawling beside it, and near at hand there lay a lantern, a paint-brush, and an overturned pot of white paint.

I have always enjoyed Robert Paterson's blog, but he has elevated his status to new heights with this appreciation of the greatest national anthem in the world.

Patrick Lambe is cute, I turn out to be a demented kitty on a fridge raid and Kim varies between pop-eyed and pathetic. Well serve her right for running our sites through the LOLinator. On a more serious note I still think Kim is over worried about surveillance cameras and misses the point. No of course they can't (or at least they are very unlikely to) prevent a specific act of terrorism. However after the event they allow for extremely effective detection and the ability to trace networks and prevent other acts. OK if you live north of Sydney, or even in Sydney its over the top. However in London we have faced threats for many decades now, and have been lucky to escape with only a few major outrages. Having someone taking photographs of me as I walk around the streets really does not worry me - why should it?

Driving (or rather being driven) up to Leeds this evening I was asked about different adoption rates for new ideas. I responded that one of the major problems in the US and the UK is the anti-intellectualism of a majority of management. They don't want to handle a concept, and have an proclivity to simple easy to understand solutions. All these despite dealing with high levels of uncertainty and situations where tradition simplistic recipe book approaches have failed. In Asia if I use a word which is unfamiliar they ask me to explain it, in the UK they dismiss it as jargon. If you speak to French, Italian or Spanish managers they have all studied philosophy at school. At my son's school the worst insult is swot. We seem to be breeding for ignorance rather than for innovation.

Matthew Hodgson has been pandering to my ego of late, and has now put me on a list to identify eight things about me that most people would not know. I was asked for five a year ago more or less to the day so this must be some new Yuletide tradition for the blogosphere. In summary the original five were:

• My achievement in being expelled (briefly) from every educational establishment I have attended
• Never having filled in a timesheet in seven years employment in IBM
• Being the only person in history to avoid participation in all seven annual cross country runs at my secondary school
• The appraisal which criticised me for being too focused on profit, not on creativity & innovation
• My belief that anyone making any noise while attending a performance of Wagner should be garroted.

Dr Paul Thomas of DNA Wales and Director of the Welsh Research Unit for Governance & Leadership has a great signoff quote from John Milton, with a neat bit of editing to avoid 17th Century sexism:

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, and many opinions; for opinion in good [wo]men is but knowledge in the making

If something matters, it is worth arguing about; consensus is for the ordinary and inconsequential things of life. Of course it does need good [wo]men if argument is not to degenerate into bitter polemic. Exploring ideas, supporting a position you do not necessarily believe in to test an argument, taking a contrary view for the sake of argument are all mechanisms by which human knowledge can advance. I remember from my own childhood that the dinner table was a constant source of debate on a broad range of positions. If we (the family) were not sure of you, then we were polite. If we liked you, then we argued with you. It was a great environment to grow up in and one too sadly missed in the over facilitated, over homogenised world in which honest disagreement seems to be outlawed and all opinions considered of equal value.

The next guest blogger, my Lacanian friend Julia Evans is lined up from the 6th January. During the Christmas period I intend to stay blogging, an indication of serious addiction! The needs of the Turkey (to be put in the bottom oven of the AGA at 0300) even had a Christmas Day blog last year a pattern which is likely to be repeated.

The guest blog slot is also open. Now I plan an experiment - if anyone wants to say something, send me (snowden@cognitive-edge.com) the text (pictures etc also fine) and I will happily post it. Call it an open forum, or a Town Hall meeting or whatever you like. If no one wants to say anything that's fine and understandable. However the facility is there and I am sure we can think up some sort of prize for the best blog. Anonymous is OK, satirical fine, opinion ideal, humour always welcome.

One of the newer science blogs, Neuroanthropology has an interesting post which shows the sort of imagination you need to be a researcher in this field. The salient quote, highly appropriate for the holiday season is:

A half-hour argument with your lover can also slow your body’s ability to heal by at least a day. In couples who regularly argue, that healing time is doubled again

How do they know this, well read on ....

We had the obligatory family outing to see The Golden Compass last weekend. I was nervous going into it, a similar feeling to the first of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. A series of books that I had read and enjoyed; would the cinematic version betray the original? It was also more important than the other blockbuster, namely the Harry Potter films. Much as I enjoy Harry, Pullman is to Rowling as Milton is to Ayers (that is a bit harsh, but you get my point).

Some time ago Nick Carr, who for me writes one of the most intelligent technology blogs, made an offer to apply for a free advance reading copy of his new book The Big Switch. I am not sure what the criterial for success was but I am pleased to say that I made the cut. I skimmed it quickly when it arrived and intend to settle in to read it in more detail over the holiday period so take it for granted that I recommend it.

I thought I would start what will be a series of blogs with his final paragraph:

I would love to know how otherwise intelligent people can argue as follows: all methods are subject to bias of some type, therefore all methods are equally valid. Another one I don't get is: If a model is considered useful by a group of people in a workshop then whether it is valid or not is a matter of ideology and of no consequence. I ask these two questions because I am encountering them in a debate at the moment.

I had to change my passport over the Christmas break. I handed in the various forms to the local post office on the 19th December and the brand new document arrived today, the 27th which is pretty impressive service - less than three working days given Christmas. Seeing the old one, a faithful companion, battered and abused, stained with beer in Auckland, gilt lettering on the front cover worn to the point of illegibility, brought back memories. It now has its wings clipped to prevent reuse and I will miss it.

I got it just after I left IBM just over three years ago and despite getting the maximum number of pages it is so full of visas and customs stamps that there is no capacity for 2008. The pages with their stamps and stickers tell the story of three frantic years of activity and travel getting Cognitive Edge established.

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