People have changed the world ever since they figured out how to bash on things with sharpened rocks. This book covers the evolution of our tools over the eons, from the simple tools of our ancient ancestors to the sophistication of our scientific technique today. The bulk of the book is a fascinating tour of surprising revelations and connections between technological, political and sociological changes.

Management by Baseball takes on the topic of cronyism (hiring your friends and family) in Cronyism From Tropicana Field To Harvard Yard : The Wharton/Harvard MBA-run company I worked for didn't fail because Wharton and Harvard are bad business schools. It failed first because the graduates they hired they hired because...

It turns out that I was over my quota on my webhost and my last blog build failed to create the main index file, though it seems to have created the RSS feeds. We are back in business now....

I was pleasantly surprised today to hear a knowledge management paper presented. The research group of Antonis Kokossis at the U of Surrey has been involved in the h-TechSight project through an EU grant. The basic idea for h-TechSight seems to be that they want to enable organizations to monitor the...

In case it isn't obvious, in a post on making good corporate intranets, Gerry McGovern tells us that senior management engagement is critical. The intranet gets serious: Part 1 The surest sign that an intranet will fail happens when senior management is disengaged. It's easy to get senior managers to make...

I am in San Francisco for the annual AIChE meeting, seeing my old buddies in the chemical engineering world. As such, I am not going to be doing a lot of blogging, I suspect. For fun, check out the Onion article on Mom Finds Out About Blog, and the Blogger.com official...

Well, today was the "exit meeting" at my firm, where they give us the spiel about what to expect as we are "separated" from the company. My official last day is Friday, but they have my laptop and they have my ID badge, so I am outta there! We shall see...

Lee Lefeever has a nice article on a familiar topic for those that have been in the "internet" world for a while. The discussion has morphed from listserv vs. the Usenet to web-based forums, and now we can add the idea of weblogs. The issues remain the same. What does the group want?

At a party last night, I met Todd, a young high math teacher from Chicago's Nicholas Senn High School. Along with high school algebra, he is teaching a two-year program on The History of Knowledge in the Chicago Public Schools' International Baccalaureate program (pdf). This is an advanced academic program, but...

I figured I should update my site design a bit. I've added an about page and moved a few things around. Why? I am leaving my current employement soon (in a week). In preparation for that, I have spammed my friends and colleagues with a link to this site. Any other...