James Drogan

Here is an entry from this blog made in April 2005.

This lead editorial from the April 21 issue of the New York Times lays out what America's congressional representatives (who seem to be becoming more inept as time goes by) and citizens (who seem to be becoming less understanding of the world as time goes by) need to pay attention to.

Understanding the current situation and the implications of proposed actions is not difficult, but it does take some time and thought.  America ought, at the very least, be able to expect this from Congress.  But what do we get?  Prediction of the apocalypse, the fanning of fear,  and that others are to blame.  Where is Franklin Roosevelt or Andrew Shepard when we need them?

Can't we get above the partisan interests?

I've found myself getting increasingly involved in AI, not the technical side, but the bahaviorial aspects and what they may portend.  AI is an essential component of my graduate course in information management, I have participated in the Maritime Conversations with the Faculty on the subject, and have been invited to address undergraduate and graduate classes on its relationship to cyber security.

AI: Questions represents some of my current thinking.

Here is a timely post by one of my favorites, Irving Wladawsky-Berger.

"Research by our colleagues at the McKinsey Global Institute suggests that, across industries, there is already the potential to automate more than 30 percent of the tasks that make up 60 percent of today’s jobs."

Berruti, F., Chandratre, G., & Rab, Z. (2018, October). The New Frontier: Agile Automation at Scale. Retrieved October 8, 2018, from https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/the-new-frontier-agile-automation-at-scale

From Stratfor 9-11-2018

With an eye on every corner of the world, our global forecast for the final quarter of 2018 shows little respite for careworn countries, trade agreements under strain, trouble ahead in emerging markets, little progress in resolving conflicts and broad shifts in alliances.

I'm reminded of the phrase, "The world turned upside down."

Understanding the context from which an issue emerges is perhaps the single most important task on the way to resolution. 

I have a deep interest in, amongst other things, supply chains.  When exploring these I often use a graphic I call the Context of Interest.

This morning, one of my favorite sources of insight into systems, John Hagel, brings me Navigating From the Industrial Age to the Contextual Age.  It integrates with and adds to my thinking.

I recommend it to your attention.

"The technology side, the tool system, has inappropriately been driving the whole. What has to be established is a balanced coevolution between both parts. How do we establish an environment that yields this coevolution? Well, that's where the bootstrapping in a laboratory comes in. I said I wanted to do what I knew it was going to be like in our future. So we had to be more conscious of the candidates for change in both the tool and the human systems.

...

Both the Journal System and the Shared-Screen Telephone option demonstrated how computers could be used to support “collaborative dialogue.” From Engelbart’s perspective, the most important feature of networking was bringing together human resources—knowledge, skill, creativity, intelligence, and drive. In the early 1970s, he envisioned a future in which collaborative human communication was built on a foundation of computer networks."

Barnes, S. B. (1997). Douglas Carl Engelbart: Developing the Underlying Concepts for Contemporary Computing. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 19(3), 16-26.

Interestingly, at about the same time Southwestern Bell was developing a commercial system -- Service Order Retrieval and Distrbution --  exhibiting many of the characteristics of Engelbart's work.  I served on the design, development, and implementation team and was responsible for the file design.   Ref: Drogan, J. (1970). File Design for an Online Service Order Entry System (Technical Information Exchange No. ZZ77- 0017) (p. 18). White Plains NY: IBM Corporation.)

"I think journals are trying hard to make papers perfect on publication, especially given the replication crisis in social sciences, and the number of prominent economics papers that have fallen apart under scrutiny. There is a vision that it should not be "published" unless it's "right" so that anything "published" is reliably true. I think we need to give up on that hope! Publication is the start of a conversation [emphasis added]. Most papers are forgettable. The ones that matter will have others tear them apart. Yes, papers should be not full of obvious problems, but the 70% or more of weight that is what about this and what about that is probably not that useful."

https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2018/07/shorter-papers.html

"As Rebecca West wisely observed: 'Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each
other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves.'"

Krystal, A. (2018). The Improbable Friendship That Shaped a Generation of Literary Scholarship. The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Here is a provocative article by Sabine Hossenfelder appearing on Aeon on July 11.  The openi ng paragraph is:

Who doesn’t like a pretty idea? Physicists certainly do. In the foundations of physics, it has become accepted practice to prefer hypotheses that are aesthetically pleasing. Physicists believe that their motivations don’t matter because hypotheses, after all, must be tested. But most of their beautiful ideas are hard or impossible to test. And whenever an experiment comes back empty-handed, physicists can amend their theories to accommodate the null results.

As I read it I began to wonder whether this preoccupation with a "pretty idea" expands to other disciplines such as economics, technology, supply chains, international business, geopolitical relationships to name a few.

In 2003 I wrote an introduction to Forces, and intended book that never materialized, that has as its first sentence, "The world is a messy place."

The world has become messier and I wonder whether the shortcomings of thinking descibed by Hossenfelder have contributed to the messiness in fields other than physics.