So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits and the President Failed on Iraq
Greg Mitchell has found both comedy and tragedy in the shameless and near-universal complicity between the American press and the Bush Administration around the Iraq war and occupation. Mitchell’s amply documented account of the run-up to the invasion through the recent surge forms the basis of his new book, So Wro
The devil's in the detail
Dr Shai Vyakarnam, Director of the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning, says a new Business Mentoring Network launched by the coalition government should have been tested out first. He foresees operational difficulties ahead.
7 Summary Polymers are long chain molecules with properties dominated by their chain behaviour and the nature of their chemical make-up or constitution. The distinction between thermoplastics and thermosets has become rather blurred with the development of new materials for more demanding environments than previously. They include high performance polymers which are more resistant to high temperatures, possess greater moduli or strengths, and can be combined with additives to enhance their intrinsic pr
1.2.2 Thermoplastics and thermosets As already stated, polymers including rigid plastics were first developed in the last century from natural precursors. The sealing wax employed by the Victorians, for example, was usually based on the natural polymer shellac, an exudate of the Indian lac insect. Shellac is an early natural thermoplastic – defined as a material which softens and hardens reversibly on heating and cooling. In theory these reversible physical changes will take place without a corresponding change in the chemica
Floating and Sinking 1
Printable worksheet that works through a hands-on exploration of floating and sinking. Introduces the practice of recording ideas and observations.
Number Strips (1-20)
Number strips which teachers can photocopy, cut out and use with the pupils for number activities that involve addition or subtraction up to the number 20.
Number Strips (1-12)
Number strips which teachers can photocopy, cut out and use with pupils for number activities that involve addition or subtraction up to the number 12.
Learning outcomes After working through these materials you should be able to: describe and use a general classification of models; outline and discuss the process of systems modelling, where models are used as part of a systemic approach to a range of different situations; recognise that systems models may be used in different ways as part of a process for: improving understanding of a situation; identifying problems or formulating opportunities; supporting decision
Introduction Maps and plans, architects‗ and engineers‗ drawings, graphs and tables: all are models we use in everyday life. This unit will introduce you to the modelling process enabling you to recognise that systems models may be used in different ways as part of a process for: improving understanding of a situation; identifying problems or formulating opportunities and supporting decision making. This unit is from our archive and is an adapted extract from a course which is no longe
5.3 The rebound effect
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.
3.2 (2B): Developing a relational model of the Powerdown Show programme In this activity you will be challenged to reinterpret the following programme extracted from the Powerdown Show DVD: Energy Descent Pathways. The reason this programme was selected, from the many audio-visual programmes currently available online that tackle environmental and social issues, was because it presents an "ecotopian" approach to tackling the converging social, economic and environmental crises. Your challen
Stage 3: Relevant systems and root definitions The issues and key tasks extracted from the rich picture become the basis for defining what are called the ‘relevant systems’. For example, suppose the problem situation is a deteriorating performance in a call centre. One of the issues might be the (high) turnover of call centre operators. This might lead (depending on the point of view taken) to an idea of the call centre as an ‘employment-providing system’ or an ‘entertainment system’. There is no reason to restr
Acknowledgements Prepared for the Course Team by Simon Buckingham Shum Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence
Acknowledgements
The Big Bang and the Creation of Earth
This 1:17 long video does a short review of what happened to create the Big Bang and the events that followed. Good graphics and narration.
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
4.15.1 Ontologies We noted earlier that, in philosophy, an ontology refers fundamentally to ‘being’, or ‘what can be’. In the field of artificial intelligence the term ‘ontology’ has been appropriated to mean a ‘reusable terminological scheme’ or, if you prefer, a ‘conceptualisation’: a scheme for providing a rigorous description of the concepts, attributes and interrelationships deemed relevant to describe a particular aspect of the world. Its precision means that
4.8.1 Capturing meetings Internet meetings and broadcasts can be easily recorded and replayed because everything is mediated digitally: the text of emails, the audio stream and the slides used. However, face-to-face meetings are by far still the most common way to present and discuss issues in organisations, and the richness of personal presence makes them unlikely to disappear. How can face-to-face meetings be ‘captured’? Traditional written minutes provide a rough summary of points discussed, but provide o
3.4.1 Integrating memory systems into the flow of work There has been a substantial amount of research interest over the last decade in group/organisational memory systems. For example, software researchers have investigated the possibility of capturing design rationale, the key reasoning that underpins design decisions (Moran and Carroll, 1996). However, time and again projects have failed. A given information codification scheme encourages particular ways of thinking about information and the problem at hand: typically, information must
3.3.1 Metaphors for organisational memory systems
Section 2 argued for a model of knowledge deriving from the situated interpretation of abstract representations. There is an active process by which different interpretations may result from a given information source. This is in contrast to the popular notion that knowledge can be unproblematically encoded and digitally stored and accessed. Bannon and Kuutti (1996) argue that the term ‘organizational memory’ is widely used to mean a repository based on an implicit ‘mem
3.1 A knowledge management technology framework In the introduction to a book on knowledge management technologies, Borghoff and Pareschi (1998) described a framework for organisational memory that has been developed within Xerox to promote understanding of the roles and interplay between different technologies (Figure 4).
