Chris Teplovs

I wonder if Marlene ever used the term “ecosystem” when referring to knowledge building. It occurs to me that “ecosystem” is in fact the wrong term. Instead, it’s really a cybernetic system (i.e. one that is governed by feedback). I cannot stop thinking about the autopoeitic nature of Constructive Uses of Authoritative Sources and Real Ideas and Authentic Problems. As Maturana & Varela state:

“An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network.” (Maturana, Varela, 1973, p. 78)

“[…] the space defined by an autopoietic system is self-contained and cannot be described by using dimensions that define another space. When we refer to our interactions with a concrete autopoietic system, however, we project this system on the space of our manipulations and make a description of this projection.” (Maturana, Varela, 1973, p. 89)

But then again, maybe all of a knowledge building system is an autopoeitic system, and my focus on CUAS and RI/AP is merely a reflection of my familiarity with those two Principles.

Maturana, Humberto & Varela, Francisco ([1st edition 1973] 1980). Autopoiesis and Cognition: the Realization of the Living. Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky (Eds.), Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 42. Dordecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co. ISBN 90-277-1015-5 (hardback), ISBN 90-277-1016-3 (paper) —the main published reference on autopoiesis (From Wikipedia)

I’m trying an experiment: living with Google Mail, Google Calendar, and Google other stuff for a couple of weeks. I was inspired by Tim Bray’s recent bog entry on email clients. Of course while setting things up with GMail, I also got Google Calendar going (and of course got the GMail+Growl notifier). While over at Google, I found Google Notebook, which is tremendously helpful. Also while there I set up a Google Alert, which today delivered my first alert on Data Visualization.

In that alert I found a blog post on Data Visualization Gone Wrong, which was fun to read and reminded me of the Coda Hale’s rant against Google Analytics’ pie charts. The Gone Wrong posting led me to juiceanalytics, which is also helpful.

I spent some time last night getting things ready for being away from my office for a couple of weeks. In addition to ensuring that I had all the necessary reading material (well, at least the offline-only stuff), I wanted to ensure that I the necessary software at hand. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time getting things just right.

One of my ongoing dilemmas is the choice of editor: Emacs or TextMate? I was pleased to find Alan Schussman’s blog entry on exactly the same problem. It as nice to see someone else using R and LaTeX, amongst other things, for his thesis work.

While reading his blog, I came across Dataninja, which is a very useful resource.

So there it is: TextMate, LaTeX, and R, Tomcat, and Knowledge Forum will form the core suite of software tools I use for my thesis work.