5.1.1 Linking supply and demand
Access to safe, clean and sustainable energy supplies is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity during the twenty-first century. This unit will survey the world’s present energy systems and their sustainability problems, together with some of the possible solutions to those problems and how these might emerge in practice.
4.20 Technologies and explicit knowledge continued In the future we will see the fusion of statistical analyses of documents, agents, ontologies, metadata and informal annotation/discussion. Ontological tagging with metadata would allow authors to express their own deep understanding of the domain which may draw on knowledge that is not in the text of documents. This would allow experts to set a document in context in the light of developments since the document was written, or to encode relationships between documents that show important con
4.16.1 Ontologies + the Web = the Semantic Web Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has defined a vision of the Web's evolution into the Semantic Web:
The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. The first steps in weaving the Semantic Web into the structure of the existing Web are already under way. 4.13.1 Standards and classification ICTs depend on myriad standards in order to provide interconnectivity. If this was a computer science course, you would be learning about standard network protocols which enable computers to communicate with each other or with other devices, whether over the internet or from your computer to a network printer. Standards enable us to send email and browse websites without worrying about the underlying mechanisms (until they fail, forcing us to focus on the tool instead of our work). 4.4.2 Mapping across multiple communities of practice In introducing the core concepts, we highlighted the perspective that ‘what counts’ as valuable knowledge is unavoidably shaped by the communities of practice to which the ‘publisher’ and ‘consumer’ belong. One makes situated judgements regarding the relevance of a new piece of information for oneself and others, and how to store or share it appropriately. One geographical metaphor conjured up by this perspective is that of ‘islands’ of local coheren 4.2.1 Mapping who knows what continued One knowledge management initiative involves HP educators. Bruce Karney is a member of the infrastructure team for the Corporate Education organisation, part of HP's Personnel function. Karney estimates that there are more than 2,000 educators or trainers 4.1.1 Mapping who knows what One of the most widespread ways to represent what you know is to represent who knows what. This avoids the complications of codifying or storing the knowledge in great detail – you simply map the relevant people to a high-level taxonomy, leaving them to give contextualised answers when asked. Initiatives to provide corporate ‘yellow pages’ which map an organisation by what people know rather than by where they work, or alphabetically, have been reported to be extremely popular and 4.1 Technologies and meta-knowledge Meta-knowledge is knowledge about knowledge; for example, ‘I know that I know my age’. Meta-knowledge is crucial for managing our own learning and knowledge. For instance, I need to be able to recognise that I am lacking information before I will go and seek it out. Not surprisingly, meta-knowledge is also crucial to organisational knowledge management. How can an organisation coordinate its activities or learn from the experiences of its members if it has no idea of wha 3.6.1 When we just want to forget (‘we're only human’) Group memory systems might be counterproductive if they damage morale or prevent a team from moving on after a failure. Studies of software teams show that many commercial projects are cancelled before completion. This generates an intense pressure to work as hard as possible (so that maintaining group memory falls by the wayside) and, understandably, in many cultures if a project is regarded as a failure everyone wants to forget it as quickly as possible rather than analyse it for lessons le 3.5.1 Planning a group memory system: a framework Nothing can be stored in a computer-supported organisational memory unless it is encoded in some form. Who is going to invest the effort to encode information within an organisation? Creating a dedicated team of information librarians and knowledge managers is certainly one route, perhaps necessary for long-term maintenance of a large repository, just as librarians are needed to manage traditional libraries. But such a team cannot be experts in all aspects of the organisation's activiti 3.2 Organisational memory systems Without a memory, humans are paralysed in the present moment, unable to reflect on lessons learned or to anticipate the future. You will notice that the heading given to the framework in Figure 3 is corporate memory. The whole dynamic system of people and technologies is conceived as constituting an organisation-wide resource that will enable it to become a more intelligent, learning organism, to pursue the anthropomorphic metaphor. The organisational memory challenge goes beyond tradi 2.3 Codification and formalisation Much of the knowledge management literature argues the importance of making tacit knowledge explicit, and then codified. For instance, an explicit goal when auditing intellectual capital is to identify human capital as one of the key assets that give an organisation its true value. Some organisations are realising that a large quantity of their ‘assets’ leave the office for home each evening, perhaps never to return, and as a consequence want to capture these in a less vulnerable for 1.2 Pressing questions In the late 1990s, when this unit was first prepared, if you surveyed the field of knowledge management technology you were assailed by technology vendors offering Knowledge Management Solutions. As we write in 2005 , an internet search on ‘knowledge management ICT’ will still return thousands of hits, but the ‘knowledge’ buzzword has faded in potency, the hype bandwagon has trundled on, and vendors now market the same products under business process banners which reflect gr 3.4 Characterisation and sexual stereotyping In attempting to characterise their sitters, 19th-century commercial photographers did not intend or attempt any serious psychoanalytical exploration of individual character such as we perceive it today in our post-Freudian world. They sought instead to stereotype by age and sex within a narrow range of positive virtues, which had previously been approved, within the conventions of painting: modesty, simplicity and chastity for women; dignity, strength and nobility for men. Introduction Culture is just one perspective that can help us to understand more about a business. 'Business culture' is not just about how others see a business, but also about how the individuals within an organisation understand it. In this unit we explore how the concept of culture developed from research into differences between cultures at a national level. It is possible to see, or ‘feel’, that one business is different from another, and that this involves more than just how it presents it Nidy-Gridy Environment Keynote Panel: The Golden Age — A Look at the Original Roots of Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive 4.4 Are there alternatives to medication? Another response to bereavement has been to suggest that the bereaved person should go through some form of bereavement counselling. Cruse Bereavement Care is the largest bereavement counselling organisation in the UK. There are contrasting opinions about the effectiveness of bereavement counselling (also called grief counselling). For many years it had been thought that there was no evidence for the effectiveness of grief counselling, and there was even an opinion that substantial numb 4.2 Using antidepressants for grief In addition to tranquilisers, antidepressant medication may be considered when a person approaches a doctor for help following bereavement. Prescribing doctors may feel under pressure to ‘do something’ to help the person who presents to them. Neither party may be aware of other options that may be effective in helping in these potentially difficult situations. Indeed, local support groups, psychotherapy, counselling and other possible alternatives may not be readily available.
Box 4.2 Knowledge sharing at Hewlett-Packard
Normally we find things using landmark navigation. When you move to a new place, it may take you awhile to explore the new streets and buildings, but eventually you recognize enough landmarks and remember where they are in relation to each other. However, another accurate method for locating places and things is using grids and coordinates. In this activity, students will come up with their own system of a grid and coordinates for their classroom and understand why it is important to have one co
Through numerous lessons and hands-on activities, students are introduced to the concept of an environment and the interactions within it. As they learn about natural and manmade environments, and renewable and non-renewable natural resources, they see how people use our natural resources and the many environmental issues in our world today. Students learn about solid waste and disposal, and its effects on our environment. They learn the importance of the concepts of reduce, reuse, recycle and c
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Moderator: Steven Pinker, Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University
* Emilio Bizzi, MIT Institute Professor; Founding Member, McGovern Institute for Brain Research
* Sydney Brenner, Senior Distinguished Fellow, Crick-Jacobs Center, Salk Institute
for Biological Studies
* Noam Chomsky, MIT Institute Professor, Emeritus; Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
* Marvin Minsky, Professor of
