Monday, September 27, 2004

Get things done

Found on 43 folders

"For myself, I’ve discovered that most of the items are just in the wrong place, or, if you prefer, in the wrong time or context. It can be instructive to pull each straggler out of line and try to figure out whether he really belongs someplace else. Here’s my usual suspects, ordered by how often each is the culprit behind my unintentional slack."

  • It is not a single, atomic activity - This is the biggest one for me, by far. Maybe 80% of the time, a small project is masquerading as a single TODO. Acknowledging the multiple steps and identifying the logical next action usually does the trick for me. Change: move to “Projects” and generate true next action

  • It is not a physical action - “Think about proposal for Bob” seems like a next action because it’s tied to a commitment I’ve made, but imagine how much easier this would go as “Draft five or six ideas for Bob’s proposal.” Now I’m writing instead of just staring at a wall thinking about the notion of proposals. Change: Reword it as a physical activity, preferably yielding a physical artifact or new next action.

  • It is not really the very next action I need to take - I can frequently find at least one action that needs to take place before the one I have on the list. Bear with me here, but even “Return library books” can linger for weeks and months if you first need to find the one missing book that mentally keeps you from proceeding. This is a thorny one, since a legitimate future action can seem like the next action, even when it really is not. Change: walk backwards through your steps until you can derive the true next physical action.

  • It is not something I’ve actually committed to - “Learn Regular Expressions” is something I’m really interested in, but, in addition to actually being a potential Project (not a next action), it’s not something about which I have a stake in the ground. Until I’m ready to make it part of my immediate actions, it’s just guilt-inducing cruft. Change: move to “Someday/Maybe/On-Hold” or “@Tech”

  • It is poorly defined or just badly worded - This is a catch-all for stragglers that may be addressed by many of the fixes above, but I draw it out separately here for a good reason: changing the way you define or word something also changes the way you think about it. Try always beginning your next actions with a physical verb. “Email,” “Call,” “Google,” “Recode,” “Visit,” and “Buy” all encompass physical actions, and often context. Change: try re-phrasing your next action as a specific contextual activity

  • It is nothing I can act on now - This is usually the result of lazy or infrequent reviews. If an item on your list is something that has a dependency with another person or just takes time until follow-up, get it out of there. Alternatively, rephrase it as your physical followup that you want to perform as soon as possible (“Call Jean to check progress on perl script”). Change: move to “Waiting On” or reshape it as a true next action for yourself

  • I have no idea what this means - The downside of the Hipster PDA is that you end up scribbling lots of nonsense in dark bars. If you have mystery meat items floating around your list, move them to a parking lot until your memory gets jogged or give yourself a next action to call someone who might help you decipher what it means. Change: move to “Someday/Maybe/On-Hold” until you can remember what it means, or generate a followup next action.

Thursday, September 23, 2004

Looksmart to acquire FURL

Tomorrow Looksmart will be making an official announcement that Furl has been acquired.

LookSmart is a provider of Web search and research-quality articles search. Furl will remain free.

BTW, Furl will officially allocating 5 gigabytes (GB) of storage for each individual member's public archive.

Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Where do you want to live today?

Here, by the wharft?

Or here, by the mountain?


What you could see outside your windows? Flat panel technology is quickly becoming bigger, better, and more affordable, which will allow for all sorts of fun ways to transport your domicile to wherever tickles your fancy.

The Virtual Windows above consist of eight 15" LCD panels connected via custom-built cables to two nVidia Quadro PCI video cards, each with four DVI outputs. The LCD backlight inverters are driven by their own power supply (sitting on top of the PC) and the panels get their 3.3v power from the PC's ATX power supply. The total desktop resolution is 3072x2048. A small Visual Basic app cycles pre-cut images every 15 minutes and Windows manages the arrangement.

Sunday, September 12, 2004

Information Retrieval : Finding a needle in a haystack

Information retrieval (IR) is the science and practice of trying to show people the document they would want to see next, if they had total knowledge and hindsight.

One way to grasp the wide scope of IR field is to dig into the "needle in a haystack" metaphor. Here's Matthew Koll's "Finding a needle in a haystack" metaphor for it.

Searching is like finding a needle in a haystack, but not all searches are the same.
  • a known needle in a known haystack;

  • a known needle in an unknown haystack;

  • an unknown needle in an unknown haystack;

  • any needle in a haystack;

  • the sharpest needle in a haystack;

  • most of the sharpest needles in a haystack;

  • all the needles in a haystack;

  • affirmation of no needles in the haystack;

  • thinks like needles in any haystack;

  • let me know whenever a new needle shows up;

  • where are the haystacks?;

  • needles, haystacks – whatever.


I may add, as a matter of fact (because it does happend a lot) "wrong query for a needle in a haystack, and finding something anyway". That's is what is called serendipity...
(Via Olivier Ertzscheid)

Knowledge Discovery, Capture and Creation

Knowledge Discovery, Capture and Creation by Linda C. Smith.

This article outlines the range of techniques being used to support knowledge discovery. Here's a summary:

Meta-analysis is a statistical procedure for integrating results of independent studies that are combinable, often to gain greater confidence in the outcome of investigations such as randomized clinical trials in medicine.

Bibliometrics is the application of mathematics and statistical methods to various forms of publications. (citation analysis, Citation counts patterns linkages

Co-citation analysis considers joint citation of earlier works and has been used to discover the intellectual structure of science and scholarship by clustering and mapping.

Visualization is an important aid in knowledge discovery.

Co-word analysis is based on the co-occurrence frequency of pairs of words or phrases in texts. It has been used to discover linkages among subjects in a research field and thus to trace the development of science.

Text mining offers possibilities for creating knowledge out of the massive amounts of unstructured information available on the Internet and corporate intranets (This approach uses techniques from data mining, machine learning, information retrieval, natural language understanding, case-based reasoning, statistics and knowledge management to help people gain new insights from large quantities of text).

Information extraction involves more focused processing of text through lexical preprocessing, parsing and semantic analysis, and discourse interpretation. (The task is to extract information about a pre-specified set of entities, relations or events from natural language texts, such as extracting details of events from news stories).

Data mining or knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) involves manipulation of data from structured databases.

Data warehouses help set the stage for data mining. They involve selection, assembly and structuring of data from disparate sources. This may require data cleaning to check for errors or missing data.

Knowledge acquisition including interviewing, protocol analysis (asking the person to talk aloud while performing a task), questionnaires and surveys, and observation and simulation.

Knowledge capture, finding ways to make tacit knowledge explicit (e.g., documenting best practices) or creating expert directories to foster knowledge sharing through human-human collaboration.

(as matter of fact, Corporate KM is likewise concerned with both points above).

Friday, September 03, 2004

QuiEst

QuiEst means WhoIs in French.

I maid up this (key) word because as a matter of fact, we, French speaking people, do have to crawl down many screens to find French content. For genuine French words, it is not a problem, but with personal name - popular in both English and French sphere - it becomes hard to retreive French pages about such "shared personality".

"QuiEst" is a tag. I'm having hard time finding quick bio on people I met, I read or have been reading about. Google's "Define:" does list only english definition. I need French ones. Here comes the power of "QuiEst".

As an example, by writing a French post about, let say, John Lennon, titled "QuiEst John Lennon", it should now pop up in the first search engine return page (SERP) if you google it. For this very example, we might have, after a while, a whole bunch of such "QuiEst" posts. Thanks to Google's power, the best ranked will stay in the first screen anyway.

Lucas already tried this. Google him with QuiEst Lucas Gonze. You should find his comment about my initiative.

It is what I call a (useful) meme or a (friendly) Google bomb. It is part "wikipedia collaboration spirit", part decentralized Google's "Define:" feature.

Every language can do it, as long as the tag word doesn't exist in another language. In fact any combinaison of letters can be used. A meaningful one seems better to create a meme-like effect and become a decentralized standard using remote power from Google...