In his later years, David Bohm developed the technique of Dialogue, in which equal status and "free space" were the most important prerequisites. He believed that if carried out on a sufficiently wide scale, these Dialogues could help overcome fragmentation in society. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm (more)

David Joseph Bohm (December 20, 1917 - October 27, 1992) was an American quantum physicist. (Quantum Physics) (more)

Simon Buckingham Shum discusses his suite of Sense Making tools: Compendium, CoHere, and others. This work is the core of the Hypermedia Discourse research programme, investigating the reading, writing and contesting of ideas as hypermedia networks grounded in discourse schemes. We are striving for cognitively and computationally tractable conceptual structures: fluid enough to serve as augmentations to group working memory, yet structured enough to support long term memory. Such networks can be (i) mapped by multiple analysts to visualize and interrogate the claims and arguments in a literature, and (ii) mapped in real time to manage a team’s information sources, competing interpretations, arguments and decisions, particularly in time- pressured scenarios where harnessing Collective Intelligence is a priority. Given the current geo-political and environmental context, the growth in distributed Team Work, and the need for multidisciplinary approaches to Wicked problems, there has never been a greater need for sensemaking tools to help diverse Stakeholders build common ground (Coalition). [Abstract from HyperMedia Discourse (Dialogue): Contesting Networks of Ideas and Arguments] (more)

Argumentation Visualization, aka Argument Mapping (more)

jointly credited, with Isaac Newton, with invention of differential Calculus. (more)

The Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential is the result of an ambitious effort, since 1972, to collect and present information on the (13K+) problems with which humanity perceives itself to be confronted (see overview Description and Commentaries). It aims to clarify the challenges such problems represent to concepts, values and development strategies. The Encyclopedia encourages the discovery of a new conceptual dynamic for understanding and action, sufficiently complex to encompass the factions, conflicts and paradigms by which people are separated - both from each other and from a promising future. http://www.uia.org/encyclopedia/volall.php (more)

Alex Wright on Paul Otlet. In 1934, years before Vannevar Bush dreamed of the Memex, decades before Ted Nelson coined the term HyperText, Paul Otlet envisioned a new kind of scholar's workstation: a moving desk shaped like a wheel, powered by a network of hinged spokes beneath a series of moving surfaces. The machine would let users search, read and write their way through a vast mechanical database stored on millions of 3x5 Index Card-s. This new research environment would do more than just let users retrieve documents; it would also let them annotate the relationships between one another, "the connections each (document) has with all other (documents), forming from them what might be called the Universal Book." (Intertwingularity) Taking the Dewey Decimal System as his starting point, Otlet began developing what came to be known as the Universal Decimal Classification, now widely recognized as the first - and one of the only - full implementations of a faceted classification system... Otlet biographer Boyd Rayward describes the Traite as "perhaps the first systematic, modern discussion of general problems of organising information." With the faceted philosophy of the UDC as backdrop, the Traite posited a universal "law of organization" declaring that no document could be properly understood by itself, but that its meaning becomes clarified through its influence on other documents, and vice versa. (more)

HyperText thinker from 1934! 2003-11-19-PaulOtlet; (2014-05-22) Secret History Of Hypertext

Steve Jobs phrase for the potential of the personal computer for augmenting human intellect. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good. But, then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts. And that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds. (more)

NLS, or the "oN-Line System", was a revolutionary computer collaborationware system developed in the 1960s. Designed by Douglas Engelbart and implemented by researchers at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), the NLS system was the first to employ the practical use of hypertext links, the mouse, raster-scan video monitors, information organized by relevance, screen windowing, presentation programs, and other modern computing concepts. It was funded by ARPA (the predecessor to Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), NASA, and the U.S. Air Force. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLS_(computer_system) (more)

Western Digital external Hard Drive - we have 2 for our iMac (one for big media files, other for BackUp). (more)

Facebook built the perfect ChatBot but can’t give it to you yet. Facebook’s assistant, named M, is the smartest of the bunch. (more)

ChatBot platform

Building a Chatbot: analysis & limitations of modern platforms - Tryolabs Blog (more)

Social Capital guru; Communitarian? https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty/robert-d-putnam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam (more)

It has been argued by Libertarians that responsibilities are a personal matter, that individuals are to judge which responsibilities they accept as theirs. As we see it, responsibilities are anchored in community. Reflecting the diverse moral voices of their citizens, responsive communities define what is expected of people; they educate their members to accept these values; and they praise them when they do and frown upon them when they do not. Although the ultimate foundation of morality may be commitments of individual conscience, it is communities that help introduce and sustain these commitments. Hence the urgent need for communities to articulate the responsibilities they expect their members to discharge, especially in times, such as our own, in which the understanding of these responsibilities has weakened and their reach has grown unclear. http://www.gwu.edu/~ccps/platformtext.html (more)

Learned helplessness is behavior exhibited by a subject after enduring repeated aversive stimuli beyond their control. It was initially thought to be caused from the subject's acceptance of their powerlessness: discontinuing attempts to escape or avoid the aversive stimulus, even when such alternatives are unambiguously presented. Upon exhibiting such behavior, the subject was said to have acquired learned helplessness.[1][2] Over the past few decades, neuroscience has provided insight into learned helplessness and shown that the original theory actually had it backwards: the brain's default state is to assume that control is not present, and the presence of "helpfulness" is what is actually learned.[3] In humans, learned helplessness is related to the concept of self-efficacy (agency); the individual's belief in their innate ability to achieve goals. Learned helplessness theory is the view that clinical depression and related mental illnesses may result from such real or perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation.[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness (more)

Bruce Sterling makes his last Viridian Design post. (more)

Reputation Management data model - analog to Social Graph (more)

Entrepreneur - EduFire then others (more)