science and witchcraft

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The spread of germs is the price we pay for the spread of ideas.” —Nicholas Christakis

1990s Hackers: “I’m building a free operating system to run the internet”.
2020s Hackers: “I’m building a casino to sell memes to gullible people for fake money by incinerating the planet”.
—@SMDiehl

“It’s easy to do great things within a great culture; the real trailblazers do great things within toxic cultures.” —@white_owly

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human engagement counters misinformation

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A recent study conducted by Facebook suggests that when it comes to vaccine doubts and misinformation, “a small group appears to play a big role in pushing the skepticism”.

Some of the early findings are notable: Just 10 out of the 638 population segments contained 50 percent of all vaccine hesitancy content on the platform. And in the population segment with the most vaccine hesitancy, just 111 users contributed half of all vaccine hesitant content. —WaPo 2021-03-14

Small groups of people can have influence beyond their numbers. For example when a committed minority in society rises above 25% there can be a tipping point. However it only takes 10% if those people have an unshakeable belief in their cause. Meanwhile, inside an organization, there is usually a small group of people — 3% — who can influence up to 85% its members. Find out more at — 25-10-3.

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platforms and the precariat

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Is it possible to be a musician today and earn a middle class income?

The music industry is fundamentally broken up into three separate arms: recorded music, music licensing and live music. Where recorded music — physical album sales — was once the bread-and-butter for musicians, first the advent of piracy platforms like Napster, and then the gradual shift to streaming services like Spotify, Amazon and Apple Music made that framework unsustainable.

“In order for me to earn a minimum wage, an annual minimum wage of $30,000, I need to gain six million streams at the average royalty rate of half a cent per listen,” [musician] Sainas said. “That’s unattainable.” —CBC 2021-03-11

In 2005, the oft-quoted business guru, Seth Godin suggested that the long tail would provide for middle class entrepreneurs and musicians.

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ordinary creativity

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Karen Caldwell calls personal knowledge mastery — ordinary creativity (3.5 minute video). I think this is a great analogy as PKM is something that anyone can practice and improve. Karen asks what does ordinary creativity mean for you as a “social learner, digital author, prosumer, digital audience, and consumer”. She identifies ways to present information such as dual coding theory.

Dual-coding theory postulates that both visual and verbal information is used to represent information . Visual and verbal information are processed differently and along distinct channels in the human mind, creating separate representations for information processed in each channel. The mental codes corresponding these representations are used to organize incoming information that can be acted upon, stored, and retrieved for subsequent use. Both visual and verbal codes can be used when recalling information. —Psychology Wiki

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prisoners of our own device

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“We simply ask that you be innovative without mistakes while working as a team to achieve individual performance goals.” —@DocOnDev

“Here’s a helpful logic tree to decide if work should be paid or unpaid:
Is work performed?
Yes – Paid
No – Unpaid
Hope that helps.” —@Adam_Karpiak

@WeLearnedToday — “Students only learn when they have a good relationship with a teacher. Stronger relationship = more learning.”
@hjarche (me) — So having one bad teacher for a whole year in elementary school can be devastating to a child. That child is basically in prison.
@CMWRawcliffe — “Yup. I’d say a teacher in my son’s first year at school affected his confidence in his learning for the next 9 years. His personality changed in his first term. I queried that and was told ‘boys find school hard’ by the person keeping him prisoner. Horrid.”

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horses for courses

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The phrase comes, of course, from horse racing. Some horses are good at boggy ground, some prefer the going to be firm underfoot. Put the right horse on the right track, and they will prevail. This neat rhyme proved to be so popular around racetracks that it took on a life of its own, with the first recorded use being in 1898, and even by then it was fairly well established. —BBC America

The statistician George Box said that — essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful — I have to say that some very useful models have helped me in my work. The 70:20:10 model is a useful model I have used for many projects. 

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nature favours large social groups that network their information

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Knowing how to get the answers you need is more important than storing those answers in your head, especially with the shorter lifespan of knowledge these days. What you find when you look something up is probably current. What you already know is more and more likely to be out of date.

A vital meta-learning skill: how to find the answer you need, online or off.

—Jay Cross (2006)

Knowledge is evolving faster than can be codified in formal systems and is depreciating in value over time. One of the ways to deal with this knowledge explosion is to use what we have — our humanity. We have developed as social animals and our brains are wired to deal with social relationships. By combining technology with our brainpower, we can figure things out. We are naturally creative and curious.

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trust emerges over time

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Imagine a research-intensive organization where scientists should be sharing what they learn, and the official company policy is to share information and expertise among public and private partners. However, the company is ‘downsizing’ and layoffs are based on performance reviews. If one scientist helps a peer develop a patented product, and as a result the peer gets a better annual review, then the former may end up losing their job during the next round of layoffs. This was the situation I found myself in a decade ago.

Sharing knowledge was not a good personal strategy in this work environment even though it was official policy and was the focus of our project. We could not achieve our project objectives because systemic barriers pitted workers against each other in order to remain employed.

In this case, financial rewards for patents impeded learning, and in the end halted any knowledge sharing. In complex systems, the solutions are never simple, but our only hope is learning how to learn better and faster — individually, in teams, as an enterprise, and as a society. If we want to promote learning through knowledge sharing we should first look at what is blocking it.

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fishing through the noise

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

Historical Note: On 19 February 2004, states of emergency were declared in Atlantic Canada after a prolonged blizzard, later named White Juan, dumped as much as 100 centimetres of snow. Many roads were impassable, blocked with snow drifts of up to 4 metres. On that same day, 17 years ago, I started this blog.

“If you give someone a fish they’ll eat for a day. But if you teach someone to conduct workshops on how hungry people can practice self-care then you dodge the question of why people are hungry while also cutting the fish budget and the savings can be passed on to the shareholders.” —@n_hold

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Working Smarter Field Guide

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Working Smarter with Personal Knowledge Mastery

The Working Smarter with PKM Field Guide is also available as a PDF.

CC-BY-NC-SA

More information about the PKM Online Workshop

This field guide supports the Working Smarter @ Citi program.

The Changing Nature of Human Work

For the past several centuries we have used human labour to do what machines cannot. First the machines caught up with us and surpassed humans with their brute force. Now they are surpassing us with their brute intelligence. There is not much more need for machine-like human work which is routine, standardized, or brute. But certain long-term skills can help us connect with our fellow humans in order to learn and innovate — curiosity, sensemaking, cooperation, and novel thinking.

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