The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, […]

Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science has been taking up valuable bookshelf space in our place for the past 2 or more years. For some reason I’ve never been able to get beyond the first chapter, which is a bit baffling since I’m interested in what he’s saying, and I have enough background […]

A quick postscript to my last blog entry. The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) has set up a blog that follows the Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District trial over the teaching of Intelligent Design. Here you can look at transcripts of all the expert witness testimony, including Steve Fuller’s testimony in […]

From the Guardian Unlimited
A British academic told a US federal court yesterday that the theory of intelligent design is a scientific rather than a religious concept that should be taught to children in American schools.
Steve Fuller, a professor of sociology at the University of Warwick, said that the theory - which maintains that life on […]

In my spare time I’m been working on a population model for the Spot Tailed Quoll. If you don’t know what a quoll is, and want to find out, you could google it, or you could watch this video I took recently at Healesville Sanctuary. (The video is a 3.2Mb download, and you’ll need […]

Many people are baffled when I tell them I’m a researcher in IT, but I’m not a programmer. They ask: What does it mean to research “information systems”? Why is that important?
My usual response is to point out one of the many examples of failed IT projects, and claim that our research is aimed at […]

Continuing the recent series of brief blogs on knowledge work, I’ve been reading the excellent book Managing Knowledge Work, by Newell, Robertson. Scarbrough and Swan, and browsing the accompanying website, and I have a few thoughts…
This is probably the best introductory text on the issues surrounding knowledge work and knowledge management that I’ve read so […]

Even thought I previously announced that my blog experiment has failed, it seems that I’m getting back into it. Of course, making connections, being read, and getting feedback has helped enourmously, which is why I must thank Jack Vinson for giving me a shout-out.
A bit of wandering through the archives of Jack’s blog led me […]

One way to answer the question “Who is a knowledge worker?” is to make lists. List the occupations that are knowledge workers, and those that aren’t. This is at least one way to start sorting out our intuitions about knowledge workers.
Rather than just start out on my own, I’ll begin with a quote from James […]

Now back to some KM research …
I’ve recently been pondering the question of precisely what we mean by the terms “knowledge-work” and “knowledge-worker”. These terms are used fairly broadly by many people in many disciplines, and there seems to be an assumption that they are common-sense terms, and we all know what they refer […]