Here’s a strange thing that I’ve noticed: even when we’re talking about innovation, people like to be told what to do. Doesn’t this strike you as odd? The people that are the most interested in doing something new seem to like being told what to do, just like everyone else. I just revisited a great […]
I was originally going to title this post: Vampirenomics! This is because while we were in Italy, I went into several bookstores, just to check out what was there. A couple had superb business sections, but all of them had enormous vampire sections too. Some of them were translations of vampire books originally written in […]
I love the story of the development of the Graphical User Interface (GUI). It was developed by Xerox in their Palo Alto Research Center. They used it on their first commercial home PC, the Xerox Star, but that didn’t sell very well. While the history is a bit muddled, Apple definitely knew of the work, […]
Take a look at David Beckham’s goal against Greece that sent England to the 2002 World Cup Finals: If you ask famous athletes how they do things like that, they find it difficult to explain. How can you make a ball dip a meter while curving two? Who knows? Actually, there are some researchers that […]
Here’s a fairly radical idea: if the problem with economic development is that many poorly developed countries have poor institutions, maybe instead of trying to improve their institutions it makes more sense to move the people that live there to a place with better institutions. Let’s break that down a bit. There is a line […]
Today was one of those days when a lot of related ideas just seemed to keep popping up. It started when I read today’s post by George Siemens which discusses the difficulties of changing the educational system. I recommend reading the whole post, but here is part of his argument: I want to resist the […]
In yesterday’s post on Personal Aggregate, Filter & Connect Strategies, I didn’t have room for one key point: one of the key filters to use is your network. When he was in Brisbane last month, George Siemans gave a talk with an example that illustrated this perfectly. For the past couple of years, he has […]
A while back my PhD student Sam and I were talking, and he asked me about my RSS feed. His question was something along the lines of ‘what blogs would I have to read if I wanted to be able to make the connections that you do on your blog?’ As we talked, I realised […]
I ran across this on Paul Kedrosky’s blog – an article discussing international shipping as a complex network. It reminds me of some of the work I did in my PhD studying international trade as a complex network. Here is the diagram of shipping lanes and ports: It raises a few interesting points about networks: […]
Everyone knows that we’re living in a time of unprecedented access to information, right? Personally, I’m always a bit skeptical of these grand narratives. To see why, watch this short video showing the social networks of correspondence among 18th Century scientists: It’s great research that illustrates some important points: When we talk about ‘social networks’ […]
