confused of calcutta

It is with some sadness that I note the death of Byron Nelson earlier this week. Everything I heard and saw and read about him spoke of his immense gentleness and humility.
Born on a farm. Worked as a caddy while still a teenager. Worked as an accounts clerk. Thrown out of work during the Great [...]

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Ever since I read Leadership is an Art, maybe 20 years ago, I’ve had a lot of time for the management thoughts and writings of Max De Pree. That in turn led to a deeper interest in Herman Miller.
Max’s writings exemplified modern servant leadership to me, almost like a reinterpretation of New Testament teachings in [...]

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A few days ago I wrote a post about how I found Gyorgy Faludy’s Learn By Heart This Poem Of Mine. I’d been looking for the poem for a very long time, without knowing author, title or first line. Yet it happened. Because of the blogosphere.
Now I want to be able to do something else. [...]

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Just an experiment. Dave La Morte asks if we can find the Homer Price live action video he saw while at grammar school. Most of the “usual suspects” show everything that is Homer Price and VHS as “out of print”.
I have found something that may work, but I can’t tell because I’ve never seen any [...]

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After nearly ten years at Dresdner Kleinwort, I shall be leaving the bank at
the end of this week. It’s been a wonderful time: I’ve had the opportunity
to work with many truly talented people, been given the freedom to
experiment with real innovation in technology and its application,
experienced being part of a close and resilient culture [...]

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Here’s a story by Mark Frauenfelder showing how he found a set of books he was looking for via his blog. Once again it is a case of the conversational richness that a blog community represents, how natural-language amorphous requests and queries resolve themselves beautifully “given enough eyeballs”.
Of course I appreciate the skill, talent and [...]

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The British Library launched a new IP manifesto sometime Monday at a “fringe” event forming part of the annual Labour Party conference in the UK. You can also find further information on all this via this story on BBC News.
Here’s an extract from the IP manifesto:
As the Library prepares for legal deposit of digital
items [...]

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I guess my last post intrigued quite a few people, judging by the number and nature of the comments. In some ways we come back to the Nurture Versus Nature theme, and to the meaning of “expertise”. [An aside, I am still ploughing through The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, all 900 pages [...]

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Following my recent post about search, there were some very interesting comments. Some suggested the emergence of new tools that are better at helping us find what we are looking for, by providing richer context and colour to the information. Some suggested that as we get better at defining who we are and what we [...]

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It’s happened again.
Over twenty years ago, I heard a poem at a poetry reading in London. Loved the poem. But had no idea what it was called, what the first line was, who wrote it. You’ve probably been in rooms like the one I was in, all smoky and echo-ey and dim and  dingy, with [...]

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