Category: Sociological, psychological notes

Who controls the Watsons…?

First, a picture for your viewing delight:
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[Seems chaotic, yet navigable]

Who controls the Watsons in your pocket, once they arrive ..?
Anoher one triggered by Clive Thompson’s Smarter Than You Think: When not if Watson has morphed into a Software Defined Anything something small enough to fit on your mobile, just about everyone will use it in cyborg / centaur ways to augment oneself. This will require adaptation of the way one goes around in the world, and …
may create a dependence on the Machine, possibly a big one for those that had gained the most by this new ways.

But

  • Where will the database sit that hold all the info to be brute-force searched, in breath and depth ..?
    If it is local, then how are the inputs screened; are they, and by whom ..? Who would know anything about the stuff you/they miss out on ..? Homophilia (groupthink/narrowingmindedness) and its grave dangers.
    If it is somewhere remote, the control issues loom even larger. Yes, capacity-wise this may work much better. But the Central Scrutinizer (eternal thanks) may … will be the blue pills all around solultion …!
  • Even if primarily stored locally, who will have access to the images stored remotely for ‘backup purposes’ ..? Due to the enormous dependence that the PocketWatsons will create, backups are ‘more essential’ than ever, and by their nature must be kept at some distance. What a TLA wet dream would it be to lay their hands on yours…!

That’s only two questions that popped up already. There will be many more. And the answers …
Who will provide those, who will pick the best ones, who will decide what’s best ..!?

To Be Continued.

The age-old question of transcendence

First, a picture of course:
??????????
[“Mehh, why not just put a concrete slab over the canal..?”; Calatrava at Hoofddorp]

After finishing reading (partially as in ‘studying’) Smarter Than You Think (again), I saw this little piece on transcendence … taking it from another angle. Unsure how to marry the two perspectives…

Does ES equal PR ..?

In Clive Thompson’s Smarter Than You Think. near the end there’s a reminder:

In 1996, writer and electronic activist John Perry Barlow proclaimed “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Addressing old-school governments – “you weary giants of flesh and steel” – he proclaimed “You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” As it turns out, nothing of the sort was true.

Now, this raised a question:

How is – or isn’t – Edward Snowdon, or Julian Assange for that matter, not Paul Revere ..?

How is “The regulars are coming!” not just bringing out info that in itself was true and factual, and quite innocent, if it weren’t for its implications for the ruled, by oppressors that were exactly that by overarching secrecy of their operations ..? If you’re doing nothing wrong, then you have nothing to hide works for sousveillance as well.

Paul Revere certainly did it. Calling them Regulars instead of plainly Redcoats as to subvert their attempts to execute him outright as a rebel just for using such indicative langauge, means he understood to neutralise his langauge to that of the oppressor, to expose the latter for all in the know.
So, when Assange and later Snowdon just outed the very documents, not accusations based on them but as extreme summaries, these were minor offences if, not when, the conclusions from those plain flat documents would have been normal legitimate business. The ‘crime’ was created only by the overreactions. The regulars are coming. So what ..?

But for the careless reader, it may not have been clear enough: I really do seek arguments back and forth re this question: How does ES equal PR, or not ..? Your thoughts please [And TLAs listening/reading in: I’m serious about weighing arguments pro and contra…]

And here’s a picture because you waited so patiently for the end…:
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[Exposed modernity, sedate oldness; ON]

Wired / Tired / Expired, April 2014 edition

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[A night at the opera, Valencia style not Marx brothers]

So, here’s the April edition of my Wired / Tired / Expired jargon watch overviews:

WIRED TIRED EXPIRED
Ensemble modeling Descriptive
–
Diagnostic
–
Predictive
–
Prescriptive		 Big Data!
Sort-of scenario modelling (two l’s is the right way). Like the what-ifs in Lotus 1-2-3 of old. Principles still haven’t changed. Already this goes into the Mehhhh category Oh yes. Bee drone.
Curation of content Fedoras H… H… Hip… …eards
just can’t get it out of my throat
Because of this:
Het is Coffee Company beleid dat je met je macbook in de etalage aan je filmscript werkt, anders krijg je geen soja-moccha-latté-decaf. — René van Meurs (@renevanm) February 20, 2014

and similar early indicators that the new wave of content curation, i.e., When in Search For a Better Life, start Writing a Blog, Columns, Articles, Movie Scripts…		 Because of this. Have a look around; you’ll also notice how many #fails you see and how few, desperately few, actual right-wearers. And in the mean time, this (Do click to see it!) has also surfaced…
I’ll leave it here.		 Yes you read it right in:
This Font Is Made From Beard – http://t.co/FxxPH6M3Td — Gizmodo Australia (@GizmodoAU) February 19, 2014
Old and new: I see them bureacratising. I hatin’. Because reasons.
Procurement Compliance HR
Where the new company bottleneck is. By going for the steepest price cuts suppliers can afford that department will squeeze out any and all business partnership that you carefully crafted with your suppliers. Well actually, in the medium run, can’t afford hence they’ll deliver junk then go broke and you have tons of problems again. Procurement saved some x%, you lose some yy% of quality. Bottom line: Big losses all around.
And don’t come around that Procurement wants to be a business partner as well, sitting around the table with you. They will block any giveaway that you negotiate with for fear of death they’ll lose their ability to fetch fat bonuses for, again, squeezing out every last drop – of blood from your suppliers. That’s their job.
And while they’re sitting around the table, they demonstrate to have no clue about the content anyway, but will try to mask that by uttering something stupid (giving them away) on a misinterpretation of something they misheard, leading to question marks all around the table on how to even react.		 Bureacracy defined. Luckily, waning. “We do all your function profiles!” – “Except for the content; you’ll need to supply that yourself. And we’ll turn down whatever you as the content expert want in there, as it doesn’t fit the categories that we have from some external party that doesn’t understand the least of our core business and that are outdated by a decade but we don’t care as these are the officially sanctioned categories as established by some government agency many decades ago.”
“We do all the selection process!” – “Except the actual selection, you’ll have to do that all yourself and we will fault you on not following one of the most obscure and unproven Don’ts.”
“We do all the performance appraisal work!” – “Except the performance appraisals, which you’ll have to do yourself. See previous remark re missing the one obscure nono. And, by the way, however excellent your staff despite the HR department, you must grade everyone Average; we cannot afford otherwise [i.e., otherwise the grading will prove to be a heap of local nepotism].”
Whatever BYOD / Cloud CObIT
The Great Giving Up of Trying to manage Org IT.
Where no-one controls much of anything anymore. It’s about the Data, Stupid! Yes I know, I know even better than you think; it’s not about the data, it’s about the value captured in that information that has data as its carrier. For the time being; value expires in all sorts of wyas. it’s about capturing the value before that. It’s about data-centric security (i.e., fully-transparent data-atomic encryption). If only we could put the right tools in the right places…		 Ouch! Our systems management is exploding!
We need to keep ou faces up as if we are in the lead of this all. We aren’t at all.		 We really need totalitarian control over all IT.
As if that was possible ever, as if not all attempts to implement ITIL, v2, v3 etc.etc. did fail. Jammed between smashing actual productivity under tons of paperwork, and actually doing something, doing firefighting and a full diplomacy circus.

OK, any suggestions for next month’s edition ..?

Pontefract on dreaming

Oh how I do <heart> Dan Pontefract’s post on dreaming.
First, as you expected, a picture:
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[How short do real creative ideas blossom]

Or, maybe go further and strengthen some, most often even virtually absent, actual praxis of rewarding the dreamer. For bringing the ideas that the future your organisation needs. Continuing along the trodden path will, for certain, as you know, bring about your downfall. Your downfall, as progressively, you will be less and less able to run away before the blame buck stops at your desk.

Which leaves the question: How to rate the performance of dreamers? As their dreams have varying, varying future values. What value to attach to ‘avoid extinction’..?

To be continued.

Ni Dieu ni maître …?

On the non-existence of ‘governance’.

Suddenly, I realised the full truth of Mitzberg’s dismissal of ‘governance’, since the traditional management would fit the bill perfectly but it has devolved to nothing more than a numb sort of administrative-clerk role (if you’ve read it and don’t understand, re-read it until you do).

Because, ‘governance’ isn’t anything. That what is assigned the ‘governance’ label, is nothing, literally and figuratively, and in all other ways nothing, more than plain good old management. Those who need models to do that, proof ex ante to will fail at their job.

Some of you may have heard me whisper, say, yell, over the past decades, that ‘governors’ are just a bunch of calcified obese that got stuck in their place and for mortal fear of being found out, they’ll mumblebluff their way through anything, anything, thrown at them. Zero, really zero, control over actual affairs, zero understanding of how shop-floor level work (the horror!) keeps the whole house of cards afloat, zero understanding of the treacherous nature of the false prophets deployed as ‘managers’. A few, a precious few white crows… the masses of them (all), just black. Inert.
If all ‘governors’ would disappear at once, wouldn’t society’s productivity shoot up through the roof ..? Wouldn’t actual managers step in and do the little bit of steering that’s required? Wouldn’t they disregard any of the ‘managers’ that (would) panic around, pushing them back into clerkdom ..?
Sigh.

One can dream, can’t one ..?

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[Which one is it ..?]

Top-down fantasies

And so, the emperor was shown to wear no clothes…
One couldn’t even blame PCI too much; their standards (meaning: as in uniform things, not the flags one can rally behind) actually do include pointers to deeper (and common-sense) actual infosec control implementation. But not throughout…

… nor systematically. As written before, and in many other posts on this site: The Information Security “Management” (quod non) “System” (quod non) was trusted because upward reporting on its efficacy showed ‘satisfactory’ or better – without realising that its was just deafening and wholesale bureaucratia’s babbling.
If you believe in compliance reporting and similar fairy tales, you’ll believe anything. How much misery must be heaped on all that can’t help it, and all that might have, before the fear of independent thought is restored in particular where it’s needed…? We may get philosophical here. And/or practical. Or whatever. It’ll takes a book(s) to describe it clearly enough for the unconvincable to be convinced or at least to get them out of blocking positions. They truly are the Maginot line of organisatia.

And a picture to close off for now:
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[Still somewhat light, though sturdy; Enschedé]

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord