The Random Schizoid

Ευρώπη

2011-12-14T09:43:00.002Z

Europa

Shouldn't they lock these idiots in the lunatics ward?

2011-12-07T08:27:00.002Z

how stupid can one get?

de ahí soy yo

2011-08-29T17:19:00.001+01:00

Chaotic wave

2011-07-29T17:27:00.002+01:00

this is it

2011-07-03T22:06:00.001+01:00

food for thought

2011-05-09T13:16:00.002+01:00

Radical plutocracy

2011-04-11T18:35:00.002+01:00

a voice

2008-11-17T21:22:00.003Z

last work

2008-10-14T18:31:00.001+01:00

Ocean

2008-07-12T19:17:00.001+01:00

self fulfilling prophecy

2008-06-06T15:24:00.003+01:00

Mr. Trichet could as well keep his mouth shut....

what kind of economics is this? he claims he's worried with inflationary pressures and thus "signals"!!!! (an extraordinary economic concept...) he might lift interests in order to lower prices ....thus....market reaction follows... dollar sinks oil jumps back after a steady fall .... Mr. Trichet and his speculation and hypothetical raise of interest produced the very reality him claims to be against and acting against......

the fucking world

2008-04-30T00:57:00.001+01:00

what a world we are in.......hedonism rules......

Free Tibet

2008-03-23T21:28:00.000Z

Espiritu

2008-03-11T15:53:00.001Z

Old time

2008-03-06T23:05:00.001Z

racism?!

2008-03-06T21:58:00.001Z

truly bewildering........ naming as a political/business reality creating?

being alive

2008-02-26T19:03:00.000Z

flabbergasting

2008-02-22T16:10:00.001Z

Well

2008-02-14T18:54:00.003Z

we will see in a short while....I bet...

Great googly moogly!

2008-02-08T18:19:00.000Z

GM Introduces New 2008 Line Of Layoffs

Corrosion

2008-02-03T21:06:00.002Z

Viaggio

2008-01-27T19:02:00.000Z

our heritage

2008-01-24T17:00:00.000Z

leave nothing behind leave nothing for those yet to come....

the speech

2008-01-23T11:47:00.000Z

say what?

2008-01-17T10:29:00.000Z

raising fund for who?

introducing

2008-01-11T20:44:00.001Z

that's it???

2008-01-10T14:58:00.000Z

genuine tears or Wal Mart tears....

the shortest ever...

2008-01-04T21:24:00.000Z

need nothing more

2007-12-31T11:20:00.000Z

miam

2007-12-29T18:10:00.000Z

sleeping with the enemy

2007-12-26T09:51:00.000Z

talk talk talk..... ...nothing like a good failure to downgrade arrogance and to get real....

Bush acknowledges existence of carbon dioxide

2007-12-21T23:03:00.000Z

the president's speech was widely hailed as a victory for advocates of empirically established scientific fact.

mounting evidence

2007-12-21T11:47:00.000Z

Gordon Brown is a fictional character....

Impressive

2007-12-18T17:58:00.001Z

secrets

2007-12-13T21:46:00.000Z

culture?

2007-12-09T23:27:00.000Z

maybe .... or then it is a matter for soul engineering....

everywhere

2007-12-04T09:49:00.001Z

the sons of Rousseau are fucked.....

tour

2007-11-30T20:54:00.001Z

back to work and back to ...

2007-11-26T16:41:00.000Z

returning petty cash .... ...and making laziness a bad thing.... .... the thing is that even politicians might have to get back to a day job....

cheating

2007-11-25T11:48:00.000Z

a way of life like any other.... now in tennis ....... competition sucks......

rainbow

2007-11-23T17:06:00.000Z

winter

2007-11-21T22:22:00.000Z

memory

2007-11-19T04:56:00.001Z

heads I win tails you lose ....big time...

2007-11-14T21:33:00.000Z

getting a backbone?....where?

great news

2007-11-13T09:59:00.000Z

A ground-breaking project which has had extraordinary success in helping hundreds of dyslexic children and others struggling to read and write at primary school

Rain

2007-11-11T17:44:00.001Z

Miracle

2007-11-11T14:34:00.000Z

Blue

2007-11-10T18:04:00.001Z

Familiar Strangeness

2007-11-08T23:02:00.000Z

the battle for a man's head...

2007-11-04T17:25:00.000Z

a bit scary and unethical......exploiting an old man...

must be a compulsion

2007-11-02T11:10:00.000Z

why is it that everyday of their lives these people wear something on the lapel? I have not been in England a single day that one was not "required" to have some flower or lace expressing simpathy or solidarity.... either with the threatened pinguins in Iceland or with the sexual exploitation of the red neck dodo... sometines I even asked people what were the things in the lapel for this time..... and some people look back at me embarressed....as if no one dared not using such stuff...it is so widespread it gets meaningless....

dont eat that yellow snow

2007-10-29T16:54:00.000Z

matrix

2007-10-27T14:57:00.001+01:00

Interesting

2007-10-24T09:44:00.002+01:00

Memories

2007-10-23T18:39:00.001+01:00

Guadiana

2007-10-17T14:25:00.001+01:00

when in doubt

2007-10-16T13:41:00.000+01:00

one can always choose the truth

CEO

2007-10-09T19:24:00.000+01:00

just do it....

In praise of

2007-10-08T22:45:00.001+01:00

philantropist extraordinaire

Gooody gooody

2007-10-08T21:35:00.001+01:00

"Rumsfeld's defiance defenitely paid off. If he had sold his Gilead stocks at inauguration, in January 2001, he would have received a mere $7.45 each. By keeping them through all the avian flu scares, all the bioterror hysteria and through own administration's decisions to invest heavily in the company, Rumsfeld ended up with a stock worth of $67.60 each when he left office - an 807% increase." pg 313

Tribute

2007-10-03T22:23:00.001+01:00

electroshocking

the man who wanted to erase a human being and replace her personality entirely....

everything

2007-08-29T09:55:00.000+01:00

is a good commercial opportunity?

the ultimate bullshit

2007-08-28T21:04:00.000+01:00

other people have the same fetish, but for prada shoes...both need a shrink urgently....

Cocooned

2007-08-28T20:04:00.000+01:00

Harajuku Girls

2007-05-08T21:48:00.000+01:00

Congrats Yahoo

2007-05-07T23:13:00.000+01:00

Money talks.

human affairs

2007-04-27T13:23:00.001+01:00

memory

2007-04-21T16:07:00.000+01:00

world

2007-04-19T15:02:00.000+01:00

Home Depot

2007-04-17T11:47:00.001+01:00

How is this poor man going to make it? unemployed and all...

existence

2007-04-17T11:46:00.000+01:00

Get zi fuckoutov here....

2007-04-16T21:06:00.001+01:00

time is now ...thus... memory is gone...

2007-04-16T21:01:00.000+01:00

in a world of "events" movement is made of bubbling episodes....there is no time...just one "event" after the other....thus there is no legacy ...thus there is no learning ...

Pavlovian Thoughts

2007-04-15T17:20:00.000+01:00

Good things of life

2007-04-09T16:57:00.000+01:00

Step in

2007-03-21T11:26:00.000Z

when entering a starbucks you're not just in for a coffee, in fact you might end up discussing the intricacies of the modern megalopolis, you are among people which are able to reflect and share deep thoughts…

apparently it is not a business of selling coffee but rather of selling a certain urban ambience and intellectual attitude….

it is a user friendly environment and a superficial experience...twenty minutes of look alike intellectual activity of stockbrokers allegedly concern with global warming and the migration of bears in Brazil….

Just yesterday

2007-03-16T12:26:00.000Z

this was the "download" of the famous IBM 305 RAMAC, the first computer with Hard Disk Drive (HDD)
the HDD weighted nearly one ton and possessed the extraordinary capacity of 5Mb!!!!

today

2006-12-30T12:22:00.000Z

we had an end to a conversation... a man was killed...hanged ...he is no longer able to say a word.... though in the past he was prone to stop others from conversing....

it makes no difference after all... someone else will say something....anything.... it could be that imbecil that as lead us into this mess...

A Fine Example

2006-11-20T15:29:00.000Z

…most of us, will live a very happy life using scarcely more than a few words… the ability to articulate some phrases, a capacity to pronounce some sentences is quite enough… it is a sufficing world …. and we reamain content...

A Sense of Control and the unbearable absence of "things"

2006-11-12T11:13:00.000Z

Maybe it is only human to try to measure these "things". We seem to be more comfortable with the illusion of control. After all if we can not pick up knowledge, reshape it, transport it, store it, retrieve it, add it, this opens a door to uncertainty. Apparently, human beings do not feel good about an uncertain future. Some one must be in control. We can not possibly be playing a game that has its rules emerging as we are playing the game itself…

What if what we perceive as organisations are simply temporary stabilisation (the word might even be institutionalisation) of themes, that is, habits, organising (making sense) the experience of being together that emerge in the process of human interaction in local situations in some living present?

Organisations, then, are iterative processes of communicative interaction, that is, repetitive patterns of human experience of being together in the living present (even though always haunted by the past as well as always hoping for a shiny future) , in which themes are continually reproduced and at the same time slightly transformed.

Small differences, variations in the reproduction of habits, will be amplified into new action with new meaning (new knowledge). This continual interaction between humans who are all forming intentions, choosing and acting in relation to each other as they go about their daily work together, both stabilises around coherent, repetitive patterns of communicative interaction, and at the same time these patterns are potentially transformed by those same interactions.

the "manufacturing, storage, transportation, utilisation" of Knowledge

2006-11-12T11:08:00.000Z

Management science, traditionally, treats routine and novelty as a logical continuum. Today’s business will be replaced by those activities that planning anticipates as necessary to attain a future fit. The drive for efficiency in current business and the need for effectiveness in future positioning are perceived as non-paradoxical goals and as solvable by resorting to the application of planning as the rational decision making process. ...the dellusion goes as far as:

Koontz et al. (1984) posit that creativity is the process that allows for a smooth transition between current and future fit. These authors assert that human creativity in management is the way this difficulty is overcome. The description of how this process allegedly works is truly bewildering (1984:471):

“ the creative process is seldom simple and linear. Instead, it can be thought of as overlapping and interacting phases consisting of (1) unconscious scanning, (2) intuition, (3) insight, and (4) logical formulation. The first phase (...) is difficult to explain as it is beyond consciousness. (...) the second phase connects unconscious with the conscious. (...) Insight (...) may be likened to the exclamation “Eureka!” (...) may last only for a few minutes and effective managers may benefit from having paper and pencil ready to make notes on their creative ideas.”

Instead of a paradoxical process of a communicational nature which is difficult (to say the least) to measure.... we rather talk about "things" even if our world becomes more anda more immaterial.... but for material "things" we have four centuries od science and scales and measurement devices ...

the never ending story

2006-11-12T11:05:00.000Z

....as the official patterns of talk protected by legitimate and formal streams of conversations seek to remove redundancy in action and in talk because it is inefficient in terms of day-to-day activities. At the same time, shadow streams of communication, both conscious and unconscious, enable the potential for engaging in redundant conversations with their possibility for generating misunderstanding, the pre-condition for the emergence of new patterns of meaning...and innovation arises.....

This process occurs among different people and in different locations. Since no purpose is detectable at the beginning of a particular conversational sequence from which an innovation emerges because such purpose itself emerges in conversation, anyone within an organisation might engage in this kind of talk. Speculation, imagination and fantasy might arise anywhere: from conferences people have attended, from magazines, from analogies drawn from other social settings, from social practices. As conversations progress some of the themes might recur. They become a pattern in such conversations. If this happens there then follows a period of intense negotiation of meaning. The outcome of these negotiations is that alternative explanations are increasingly ruled out. As new words become agreed upon, eventually some of the original contributors might withdraw as they disagree with what is stabilising.

The acceptance of the newly stabilised meaning might spread among groups or communities of practice. They acquire a new instrumental dimension. They are no longer just words, but instead they are part of a new pattern of conversation. They might be acted upon, in the sense that they might alter some material reality. If these new actions are supported by those who have the power to authorise the use of resources, openly or covertly, then experiments start. The results of these experiments will form the input to new redundant conversations. As new solutions emerge, there will be further questioning of novel experiments compared to the merits of old solutions that have become routine. If the outcome of experiments becomes a socially accepted "fact" then it will be incorporated in the legitimate pattern of talk in the current activities organisations engage in with the expectation of improving their viability. It is then that these activities become located in precise geographic settings, such as R&D. The process is, thus, self-organising since no one can control the course of conversations, no matter how powerful they are, although they might be able to terminate them. No one can control or shape the output since it is emergent. There is no individual hero at this stage.

However, this process, as it enters a more stable and ordered pattern of interaction tends to be reified and this "hides" the very nature of the process itself. Innovation, is in my view, the new meaning that is the emergent product of the dissipation occurring in conversations characterised by redundant diversity experienced as misunderstanding. The new meaning may be embodied in some new "thing" that is apparently detached from the messy process of its creation.

Furthermore, people tend to become detached from the emergent process of new meaning by their tendency to reconstruct past processes as coherent, logical and individually centred.

and so....

2006-11-12T08:51:00.000Z

I am suggesting that when conversations are characterised by some critical state of redundant diversity in which there is a critical potential for misunderstanding, words in their speaking have the potential for transformation into new patterns of meaning, thus of acting. Since the kind of conversations I am talking about are characterised by uncertainty and misunderstanding they raise anxiety in those participating.

Thus, if the conversation is to continue, there must be something that allows people to overcome this anxiety and avoid the collapse of the creative potential of misunderstanding into the regular pattern of talk in words already spoken. This, I suggest is curiosity and, most important, trust. Trusting those that engage in conversations that might reach a critical level of redundant diversity and its associated potential for misunderstanding, enables people to live with the anxiety arising in the frustrated expectations of finding rapid solutions and immediate support.

As part of their current tasks in organisations people are expected to perform some clearly defined sequence of actions during which their behaviour is bound by rules, culture or shared expectations. This is necessary for the efficient performance of daily tasks. This is the behaviour that is validated by the legitimate pattern of interactions in companies. It is derived from the "economic purpose" of each "organisation". However, while people are performing these actions, they also engage in redundantly diverse behaviour. This might arise in attempts to accommodate ambiguity, uncertainty and ill-defined outcomes of economic actions or in some current or prospective events that relate directly to the job in hand. Furthermore, people also engage in talk with their colleagues, friends, customers and other persons, about issues that do not relate to the organisation or its goals and procedures.

The dissipative process of meaning in practice

2006-11-09T22:07:00.000Z

I suggest that dissipation, in human settings such as "organisations", occurs in participating in ordinary, everyday conversations. For example, when we contact customers, the practical reason, the economic reason, might be to inform them of the current state of their accounts or to give them information about product specifications. However, this is usually not all we do. In addition we engage in talk characterised by redundancy from the point of view of economic value or business purpose.

Through these redundant communications, we acquire information about contextual variables, such as customer idiosyncrasies or customer intentions. We get information about competitors or about possible technological developments. This information however, is not purposefully sought. At the time, we do not know what to do with it. We did not intend to get it. We did not have any instrumental goal in mind while we were engaged in such ordinary conversations. It is not "knowledge being shared" since we do not use "it" to engage in some interaction. In fact, some times we simply regard it as a waste of precious time, or as politeness towards an unpleasant business acquaintance...

Most of the time, in ordinary conversations, we face some ambiguity and we sometimes have to probe for the meaning of the words pronounced by others. This happens because we engage in conversations using the pattern of talk that is pertinent to our own local interactions and life experiences. While others use different patterns of talk that have been developed in their own local interactions, as we together pattern our experiences of being together in the living present.

It is because each uses a pattern of talk referent to their own life experience that the potential for misunderstanding occurs. I suggest that what is being dissipated in conversation is this misunderstanding as people use their patterns of talk to negotiate the meaning of ambiguous, uncertain and ill-defined current or prospective events. Different patterns of talk interact to produce misunderstanding, that further interaction seeks to amplify as the misunderstanding is dissipated and the temporary stabilisation of new meaning, the dissipative "structure" of meaning, emerges. I want to argue that when the level and quality (potential for misunderstanding) of redundant diversity in a conversation reaches a critical point, usually because different patterns of talk are interacting with each, the potential arises for new patterns of meaning to emerge.

Dissipative processes in human interaction

2006-11-08T19:36:00.000Z

The word “dissipative” means dispersing, dispelling, breaking up, bringing to nothing, wasting or frittering away. It is synonymous with scattering, spreading, propagating, clearing away, spending and losing. The word “structure”, on the other hand means a supporting framework, or an organised whole consisting of essential parts.

It refers to the manner in which something is constructed. So, in putting these two words together, Prigogine is pointing to a form or pattern that is constructed through processes of propagation that are essentially dispersing, wasting or breaking up the very pattern they are constructing. Furthermore, he shows that such patterns emerge as a completely different patterns through a process of amplifying difference, so breaking down symmetry or order as an essential prerequisite for the emergence of the new. This is a process in which pattern emerges as continuity and transformation at the same time – the pattern is forming (transforming) and being formed (transformed) in interactive processes that are essentially ones of dispersing, breaking up and wasting.

The word “redundant” has similar connotations. It means superfluous and wasteful, that is, unnecessary duplication that is not required. However, what appears to be redundant may actually impart stability and robustness to a form. It is because the human brain duplicates many functions that it is robust in the sense that damage to one part can be compensated for by other parts. This is the same as the idea of loose coupling. Loosely coupled systems can continue to function when parts are damaged because no one part is absolutely essential, while tightly coupled systems cease to function when one part is damaged. I want to link the word “redundant” to the notion of diversity and fluctuations, which Prigogine shows to be essential to the emergence of new dissipative structures. What he is saying is that disorder, randomness and chaos, all normally thought to be wasteful or redundant are essential to the emergence of the new because new order emerges in the destruction of amplified diversity. One might say, therefore, that dissipative structures are characterised by “redundant diversity”.

This notion of redundant diversity provides an analogy for human experience. In human communicative interaction, I suggest, redundant diversity is experienced as misunderstanding. So, the analogy with human interaction could be understood as follows.

A dissipative structure in nature is really a process of construction, of continuously reproducing a particular pattern, through dissipating, that is propagating and dispersing energy or disorder (entropy). In other words, the process of construction is the dissipation of redundant diversity. By analogy, human interaction is continually reproducing patterns of understanding, that is, patterns of meaning. Patterns of meaning are being continually constructed in human interaction through a process of dissipating, that is, propagating and dispersing misunderstanding. I would define misunderstanding as the human experience of redundant diversity. In other words, human communicative interaction can be understood as a dissipative process in which what is being dissipated is redundant diversity understood as misunderstanding. At bifurcation points in human communicative interaction, redundant diversity experienced as misunderstanding arises as “fluctuations” in meanings that are amplified, as the symmetry of accepted meaning is broken up. It is in this process that the possibility for the emergence of new meaning arises. Human communicative interaction is fuelled by and serves to dissipate redundant diversity experienced as misunderstanding.

the structure

2006-09-05T10:51:00.000+01:00

Societies are not about structures, institutions, processes, systems. No longer. The very fabric of contemporary societies are “events”. Be those “scandals”, “cases” or everyday minor difficulties of “famous” people… Luhmann was wrong. So were people from complexity sciences…

It is a continuum of discontinuities. Apparently, these events are singularities in nature. They do not display any evidence of connection between them. It is a process of random series of single events without the possibility of stochastic relationship and of learning to occur within the process. In fact there is no “process”. It is more like a spontaneous bubbling. The “next event” simply takes its place in the social arena, replacing the last one, no legacy or memory is required or involved in this process. Thus, there is no time, only here and now and me…

Without these forms of life there is no life. No press, no politics, no politicians, no journalists, nothing…

It is only about being alive in some space and time and producing utterances about the last plastic surgery made to some boobs.. or about the benefits of Botox...

social agents are, mainly, football players and bimbos...

spoken words

2006-07-20T23:51:00.000+01:00

a place of observation and of participation