The cappuccino conquests is a research program about the spread of Italian coffee, particularly espresso drinks, in the last 50 years.
Cognitive Daily asks, "How come my stats class wasn't this exciting?" This one has been making the rounds, but in case you haven't seen it and need some laughs.
One of the longest-lived topics in knowledge management is expertise location, from the early days of electronic yellow pages to the fun of today. What follows are my thoughts and some synthesis from recent articles on the topic.
In case you have been wondering what the video-sharing service, YouTube, is about, this should give you the idea.
Kent Greenes writes "Learning fast to stay relevant in a flat world." It's a nice, brief description of the Lessons Learned process as practiced by the Army and as described in Learning to Fly. I also like the link Kent makes to the importance of learning and reflection.
Do policies ever get in the way of improving a system? David Anderson writes about this in Superstition and Boiling Frogs.
The classic problem of knowledge management is that most knowledge is tacit / implicit, but KM Systems want us to get things written out and "into the system." But getting things into the open has value in itself.
Eric Tsui asked me to pass this research opportunity along. If you are in the region - or want to be - have a look at this opportunity to advance your education in KM with an Industrial and Systems Engineering perspective.
The New Scientist Breaking News provides this one: "Drinking coffee makes you more open-minded." The research shows that caffeeine makes people more likely to change their mind when presented with contrary arguments.
"Change" is difficult (for people being told to change) because they have no idea what the change means for them and their work. Give people a clear target and a reason for reaching it, and you will be amazed at the changes that simply happen in order to align to that target.
Rich McCue provides an interesting paper, "Research in a Digital World - or - Personal Knowledge Management for Researchers." This could almost be summarized as "pay attention to your toolbox."