“Memory augmentation software” – that caught my eye! A piece in Fortune, Oct. 17, 2011 at 70, describes Evernote, free software that lets a lawyer type notes, add scanned items, save web items, and record voice memos all in an easy-to-use application that helps sort and retrieve. I looked at…
An item in Bloomberg Bus. Week, Sept. 26, 2011 at 81, points out that there are two aspects of concentrating. “One is to get rid of extraneous thoughts, the other is to focus on the task at hand.” Fine, but how do you clear your mind of distractions? Recent research…
The Harvard Bus. Rev., Sept. 2011 at 75, discusses a way to deal with complexity through what the authors call triangulation – “using different methodologies, making different assumptions, collecting different data, or looking at the same data different ways.” To understand a complex situation it helps to triangulate from multiple…
Improvisation techniques applied to members of a brainstorming group have much value, judging from a sidebar in Rotman Mag., Fall 2011 at 18. For example, (1) identify a leader, someone who is empowered to keep an eye on the group and its dynamics. (2) Use “build on the ideas of…
For many managers, if a way of working gets the job done, who cares why? It makes no difference to them what the cause is, underlying explanations for the reliable outcome, the reasons behind decisions, tools, and management that brings the outcome about. This view is known as instrumentalism, and…
How easily people process what they perceive has a term in human factors research: load. There is “cognitive load,” meaning that when a dashboard, for example, takes a lot of thinking or remembering to make sense, it has high load. “Visual load” refers to what Prof. Edward Tufte would call…
From an article in the Harvard Bus. Rev., Sept. 2011 at 70, comes a three-part definition of complexity. “The first, multiplicity, refers to the number of potentially interacting elements. The second, interdependence, relates to how connected those elements are. The third, diversity, has to do with the degree of their…
“Scientific explanations are theories, assertions about what is out there and how it behaves.” Thus does David Deutsch, in The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World (Viking 2011) at 3, introduce the key concept of his magisterial book. Explanations come about because people conjecture them regarding objective reality.…
In response to my post last week about Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem (See my post of Sept. 5, 2011: no fair way to decide by voting.), my friend Michael Mills, head of the legal software firm Neota Logic, offered some additional comments. “True, there is no approach to decision-making that…
A branch of game theory known as social-choice theory studies institutions and methods of collective decision-making. Voting in elections, for example. Social-choice theory deepened enormously from the 1950’s on after Kenneth Arrow laid down five elementary axioms that any rule defining the preferences of a group should satisfy. To widespread…