There is an interesting post from 2006 WWW conference on a semantic web application that detects Conflict of Interest (CoI) which seems to be related to my proposed Reputation, Attention and Trust model. The authors Boanerges Aleman-Meza et. al. used various semantic associations between reviewers and authors in a populated ontology to determine a degree of CoI. Looks like I'll have to get something published.

John Kennedy has put all his books out on the "Please take" table just outside my office. One interesting find included this: "Education, often touted as a cure for all ills, is apparently no cure for incompetence. Incompetence runs riot in the halls of education. One high-school graduate in three cannot read at normal fifth-grade level. It is now commonplace for colleges to be giving reading lessons to freshmen (first-years). In some colleges, twenty percent of freshmen cannot read well enough to understand their textbooks". From the forward in Peter, Laurence J. and Raymond Hull 1969 "The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong".

Tony Karrer has another interesting article on E-learning 2.0 (like Web 2.0). I've always operated with the principle that educational organisations move too slowly and to innovative you have to be prepared to do the nuts-and-bolts yourself. That's why I run my own server even though it means a lot of work.

Another article in ComputerWorld "IBM: Tapping Employee Brain Power" led to Tony Karrer's blog entry and Paul Coyne's comment.

From the ComputerWorld article "Armed with the freshly-minted corporate values, senior management charged business unit managers to find and close the gap between those values (three corporate values mentioned above this) and actual business practice. To help with that, IT rolled out in October 2004 a so-called jam - a worldwide brainstorming session that Truskowski describes as 'a blog on steriods'.".
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"A top-rated idea from the 2004 jam was a program in which employees can anonymously rate their bosses."
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"Another tool for harvesting ideas is the Technology Adoption Program, or TAP, an initiative aimed at the company's new goal of fostering innovation".

Just a record of Gartner's prediction that by 2010 the IT profession will be split into four main areas of expertise: technology infrastructure and services (network design and security will remain strong, while routine coding and programming will be offshored); information design and management (there will be a demand for professionals with linguistics, language, information design and knowledge-management skills), process design and management (involving standard operational processes for outsourcing vendors, competitive business processes for IT user companies, design of automation programs for software vendors, and IT skill essential to international compretitiveness), and relationships and sourcing management (requiring IT professionals to be skilled in negotiating with different agendas and cultures as they may serve as relationship managers between overseas service providers and domestic customers). Gartner 2005 quoted in ComputerWorld 2006-11-29.

Ever since I had to do an essay for an undergraduate subject in microeconomics I've been interested in "intellectual property". I found some articles by Roger Clarke on privacy and later Brian Martin on intellectual property. Another interesting writer is Philip Dorrel. Another interesting article is Labour of the Mind. Look at the Comments on this article.

On "Quote Unquote" (ABC RN Broadcast 2006-11-28 05:47) The Darling Buds of May "The purpose of poetry is to provide novelist and playwrights with titles" Peter Porter. For example, "The Darling Buds of May", "Blythe Spirit".

On My Music" (ABC RN Broadcast 2006-11-29 05:51) Steve Race said "All my life I've been hearing people say that A is the same tune is B and it seldom is. Hardly ever. Sometimes the rhythms are the same but not the notes. And even when the rhythms and the notes are but not the chords."