On Searching

ongoing On Search, the Series: "This series of essays on the construction, deployment and use of search technology"

Countries Visited

create your own visited country map

The Great Game II + China's Wild West

China's Wild West - 99.09: "In the terrible desert and desolate massif of Xinjiang, the Beijing government faces a volatile mixture of ethnic groups, some of whom are hostile to all that is Chinese.

"In the Hexi Corridor, between the mountain ranges of China's arid, north-central Gansu Province, the Great Wall crumbles to an end. "

The New 'Great Game': "The Caspian region may be the next big gas station, but, as in the Middle East, there are already a lot of men running around throwing matches."

ShangHai Eye - Hu for oil: "while Premier Wen Jiabao rushes around the poultry farms of China, personally wringing the necks of thousands of flu-ridden birds, President Hu Jintao is presumably enjoying himself in the swankiest hotel in Libreville. But it's not all fun and games. Hu is in Africa, doing his bit to solve one of China's biggest problems. "

Peking Blogs

Living in China: "Living in China is a member of the Living on the Planet, a network of regional blogzines around the world. "

danwei: "Danwei.org is a frequently updated website about media and advertising in the People's Republic of China. It is maintained and edited by Jeremy Goldkorn."

The Peking Duck: "A peculiar hybrid of personal journal, dilettantish punditry, pseudo-philosophy and much more, from an Accidental Expat who has made his way from Hong Kong to Beijing and finally to Singapore for reasons that are still not entirely clear to him... "

Oil, Tibet and other bits explained ... Not Shanghai Eye

ShangHai Eye - Not Shanghai Eye: "Stuff for which Shanghai Eye is not responsible, which you may nevertheless enjoy looking at."

Review of the Cambridge Illustrated History of China

ShangHai Eye - China is too big even for a big book: "“THERE IS nothing inevitable about the results of China's confrontation with the West,” Professor Buckley Ebrey writes, “a whole concatenation of contingent events contributed to the outcome.” A sensible statement in a very sensibly written - and handsomely illustrated - history. "

Walt Whitman - Inspiration for Writing

Walt Whitman, Proud Music of the Sea Storm

Then I woke softly,
And pausing, questioning awhile the music of my dream,
And questioning all those reminiscences—the tempest on the sea,
And all the songs of sopranos and tenors,
And those rapt oriental dances, of religious fervor,
And the sweet varied instruments, and the diapason of organs,
And all the artless plaints of love, and grief and death,
I said to my silent, curious Soul, out of the bed of the slumber-chamber,
Come, for I have found the clew I sought so long,
Let us go forth refresh'd amid the day,
Cheerfully tallying life, walking the world, the real,
Nourish'd henceforth by our celestial dream.

And I said, moreover,
Haply, what thou hast heard, O Soul, was not the sound of winds,
Nor dream of stormy waves, nor sea-hawk’s flapping wings, nor harsh scream,
Nor vocalism of sun-bright Italy,
Nor German organ majestic—nor vast concourse of voices—nor layers of harmonies;
Nor strophes of husbands and wives—nor sound of marching soldiers,
Nor flutes, nor harps, nor the different bugle-calls of camps;
But, to a new rhythmus fitted for thee,
Poems, vaguely wafted in night air, uncaught, unwritten,
Which, let us go forth in the bold day, and write.

William Butler Yeats - Wikipedia

William Butler Yeats - Wikipedia: "Some critics claim that Yeats spanned the transition from the nineteenth century into twentieth-century modernism in poetry much as Pablo Picasso did in painting. Others question whether late Yeats really has much in common with modernists of the Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot variety. Modernists read the well-known poem The Second Coming as a dirge for the decline of European civilization in the mode of Eliot, but later critics have pointed out that this poem is an expression of Yeats' apocalyptic mystical theories, and thus the expression of a mind shaped by the 1890s. "

Joseph Brodsky: A Virgilian Hero, Doomed Never to Return Home

Joseph Brodsky: A Virgilian Hero, Doomed Never to Return Home: Poet Brodsky, whom I don't know yet, but who got a nobel prize:

… cities one won't see again. The sun
throws its gold at their frozen windows. But all the same
there is no entry, no proper sum.
There are always six bridges spanning the sluggish river.
There are places where lips touched lips for the first time ever,
or pen pressed paper with real fervor.
There are arcades, colonnades, iron idols that blur your lens.
There the streetcar's multitudes, jostling, dense,
speak in the tongue of a man who's departed thence."

Nobel e-Museum

Nobel e-Museum: "The Official Web Site of The Nobel Foundation

Derek Walcott Profile

The New Yorker: Derek Walcott: "Walcott and I walked to a little grove off the side of the main house. We sat at a table in the shade. The sea crashed against the rocks below us. Walcott began to speak of his marginal existence. "

Also, a useful and reasonable exhaustive (at least more than I can digest quickly) list of related sites.

Mountains of Public Health

Tracy Kidder interviewed on Paul Farmer: "You titled your book after the Haitian proverb 'D?y? m?n gen m?n,' meaning 'beyond mountains there are mountains.' Is this description of the Haitian landscape also symbolic of the obstacles that Paul Farmer and the Haitian people have faced, and continue to face?

Exactly. The proverb as I understand it means 'beyond mountains, more mountains.' But I looked at it harder and saw a verb in there: 'gen.' I think it's the verb 'there are,' or it could be 'one gains'?beyond mountains, one gains mountains. Haitians use the phrase in two different ways: to say that there's no end to obstacles, and also to say that there's no end to opportunities. "

Organizing Design

InfoDesign: Understanding by Design | Special on Louis Rosenfeld: "Information architects need to know something about each of these three areas to ensure their designs are balanced, regardless of whether they're designing content management processes, search interfaces, taxonomies, or anything else. Most of us already know a lot about one of these areas - for example, if you studied organizational behavior in college, you might be considered an expert in context. If that's the case, it might not be a bad idea to 'minor' in the other areas to achieve a more balanced perspective. So you might shore up your knowledge of content by reading up on topics relevant to content creation, like technical communication, journalism, or markup languages. Ditto users: read a book on human factors or ethnographic methods. "

Secure Thoughts

Schneier.com: "IDs and the illusion of security (San Francisco Chronicle, February 3, 2004
'Everywhere, it seems, someone is checking IDs. The ostensible reason is that ID checks make us all safer, but that's just not so. In most cases, identification has very little to do with security.' "

Esoteric links

all things cowboy Courtest of Bowers

Organizational Development and Project Management

: "The differences in project management success rates may be a result of the fact that some organizations do a better job of training their project managers. So they may be more skilled and knowledgeable in the project management discipline. But the way your organization deals with training is just one aspect of your overall organizational culture. A number of big-picture factors influence your ability to deliver projects successfully. Let's look at two of them: culture and structure."

Thinking Too Much

A Few Thoughts on Cognitive Overload

Hierarchies, trees, paradigms, and facets

How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web: "Kwasnick (1999) identifies four classificatory structures: hierarchies, trees, paradigms, and facets. When one of the first three works, use it. If some other organizing principle, such as a timeline or ordering by size, works, use it. The design of the classification must follow its purpose, and different things can be classified in different ways for different purposes, requiring different structures. If the others are insufficient, look to facets."

Kevin Kelly -- Cool Tools

Kevin Kelly -- Cool Tools: "Here are my recommendations for cool tools. I include books, gadgets, software, videos, maps, hardware, materials, websites or gear that are extraordinary, little-known, or reliably handy for an individual or small group. I depend on friends and readers to suggest things they actually use. Particularly welcomed are old items that you still dote on after years of use. "

Chatwin's Notebooks - Net obscuria

Moleskine notebooks - The History: "Moleskine is the legendary notebook that the European artists and intellectuals who made twentieth-century culture used: from Henri Matisse to the turn-of-the-century Parisian avant-garde, from Louis Férdinand Céline to Ernest Hemingway. Writer-traveler Bruce Chatwin picked up this tradition and made it famous."

3 Critical Competencies

E-Buzz 11/23-03 — In the Classroom: "When pressed to come up with a handful of competencies that might be important across industries and positions, McGrath cites three competencies in particular that she sees as frequent needs: managing paradox, building broad influence, and building perspective."

Clinton on Winning the Next US Election

TAP: Vol 14, Iss. 10. The Clinton Formula. Michael Tomasky.: "So that means that we're in every race. You start with 45 percent, you're in a race. I don't care what anybody says. So sometime between 1992 and 2000, for the first time -- probably in the last four years, for the first time since 1964 -- we were no longer at a cultural disadvantage in our base. So both parties go into this next election with a natural base of about 45 percent. So in 2004, this race will be about -- it goes back to your question about the Democrats' dilemma and our division. We have to improve our turnout to their level, as we did in '98 and 2000 but not in 2002. And then we have to win the votes among the other 10 percent. That's eminently doable.
But we've got to fight. And we gotta look like we're havin' a good time doing it. "

ICT, Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction

ICT, Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction: "Can ICTs fuel economic growth? Can ICTs help directly and significantly reduce poverty? Is there a conclusive evidence? Which specific projects or studies can provide a definitive answer? There are different opinions on this issue. "

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi - The origin of 6 degrees

"Frigyes Karinthy, the Hungarian writer, who in a 1929 short story conjectured that any two people on Earth could be connected by five handshakes.

(Albert-Laszlo Barabasi is in turn referencing a link here)

Needs of Core Foremost?

Art Kleiner's blog

Kleiner has just published Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege and Success

Excerpt from The Electronic Recruiting News - Daily News For Recruiting Professionals
"You've probably encountered Art Kleiner's work and just didn't know it. Often billed as the world's greatest living Ghost Writer, Art had a deep hand in Peter Senge's The Fifth
Discipline, Peter Schwartz's The Art of The Long View and a large number of others. He co-authored The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, The Dance of Change and Schools That Learn with Senge. Kleiner's own The Age of Heretics is a comprehensive view of the role of the counterculture in corporate history.

"These days, Art is making waves with a new organizational theory that is bound to be a conference room topic next year. The Core Group posits the intelligent argument that there is a simpler reason for the existence of organizations. They don't exist for profit or productivity, they exist to satisfy the needs of the ruling Core Group. Period. Either you're in, and being served or you're out and you're serving. Either you want to be or you don't."

Studying Networks

Wired Excerpt: Part chaos theory, part biology, part connect-the-dots, the science of emerging networks seems to account for almost everything from why flies swarm to how yoga got so trendy. The world’s inchoate phenomena, the theory goes, can be explained by finding underlying patterns. In recent months, the idea has jelled into a network all its own — finding its way into a pack of new books that uncover complex patterns lurking everywhere.

Interesting Ideas: The Great Library of Amazonia

"We have the tools to make all books available to everybody"

Insights: Use of Computer/Social Networking

Social networking systems promise ease and deliver irritability, by Jerry Michalski

From Ryze and LinkedIn to Tribe.net and Friendster, social-networking Web sites are all the rage. I count at least 18 active social-networking services today, plus several that have vanished or morphed (SixDegrees, for example, one of the earliest such services, is now being relaunched as an upscale-dating site.) They are sprouting so quickly they practically constitute a new Internet boomlet of non-revenue-generating startups.
To these offers you might add similar relationship-building and -mining software, such as dating services (Match.com, SocialNet); webs of trust (Advogato); reputation systems (Slashdot Karma, eBay Ratings); nifty experiments (Friend of a Friend project); and ways to mine all the above through analytic social-network, or 'X ray,' technology (Valdis Krebs's Inflow). "

Biomimicry

Biomimicry
A new science that studies nature's models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems.

Kitchen wisdom

"Kitchen Confidential" Chef's Taste for Chaos
"A restaurant kitchen usually operates in crisis mode, says chef Anthony Bourdain, author of a top-selling tell-all, Kitchen Confidential. In this interview from Harvard Business Review, Bourdain explains why—and what managers can take away from the kitchen."