ThinkingShift

I have received a few emails from ThinkingShift readers asking me what I am currently reading - so I’m thinking about a regular post on the stuff I read. But to answer the question: I am currently reading a fabulous book by Eric Burns - Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism. Part of my ongoing love fest with history really. Burns is actually a journalist but has done a great job of writing an historical account about what can only be described as the wild, unruly west of nascent American journalism in the 1700s and 1800s.

There were no intellectual property or defamation laws back then so journalists could swipe slabs of text from incoming British newspapers and reprint. Or journalists (maybe more accurately described as muckrakers) could sling accusations and mud at such legendary figures at George Washington (first Prez of the US) and Alexander Hamilton (Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury). In fact, it’s suggested that Washington, after eight years as Prez, left office because his sanity was being worn down by the constant allegations that he had monarchical pretensions. From what I’ve read before about Washington, he was fairly tall and imposing but here’s what the Aurora had to say about this famous historical figure:

You seem to have entered life with a mind unadorned by extraordinary features or uncommon capacity. Equal to the common duties of private life, it emitted none of those sparks of genius, however irregular and inconstant, which mark the dawn of future eminence….Fortuitous circumstances yielded you in early life a small measure of military éclat, which arose chiefly from the barren talents of your predecessors in the Indian warfare. For some time after this you reposed in unambitious ease till the chances of a Revolution called you to the supreme command of the American army. An inoffensive neutrality had heretofore characterised your actions, and it was probably because you were in principle neither a Briton nor an American, a whig nor a tory, that you slid into this important station.

Phew…what a mauling! The Aurora was a Philadelphia newspaper (this city being the then-capital of the newly formed United States) and was printed by Benjamin Franklin’s grandson - Benjamin Franklin Bache. It was Republican in tone and was described as “filth” by contemporary critics. Washington (who I once read never uttered an expletive) commented on the Aurora and other newspapers of the time as a “malignant industry…persevering falsehoods” with which “I am assailed in order to weaken, if not destroy, the confidence of the Public”.

I’d love to go back in a time machine and check out the fur flying - Thomas Jefferson and Hamilton apparently hated each other’s guts. If you were for Jefferson you were a Republican; for Hamilton, you were a Federalist. And then there were the newspaper dudes who physically attacked each other on the street: Bache and Fenno (who published the Gazette of the United States) slugged it out for an hour or so before an audience of several thousand people in Philadelphia’s State House Yard. Apparently, everyone was at each other’s throats in those days. Can you imagine what the Aurora might say if it was around today and commenting on John Howard? Mmmm…..okay won’t go there!

People weren’t flush with money during the Revolutionary period, so papers were often handed on to family and friends, which was the only way information could really flow. They didn’t exactly have the Internet, radio or TV way back then, so the newspapers were the only information channel for political information or news about your city or town.

But you might wonder what on earth mouse pie has to do with all this? Well, what was also fascinating about this book was the contextual stuff: fashions of the time, physical descriptions of major historical figures and….a footnote that really piqued my interest. I’ve always wondered how people in that time period dealt with such regular horrors like smallpox and yellow fever. Of course, we live in a world where smallpox has been eradicated and a vaccine was found for yellow fever in the 1930s. But back then, a smallpox outbreak could wipe out a whole district or large slice of the population. So what remedies did they use to try and ward off infection? Well here’s a selection and let’s all take a moment to say thanks that we are not living in the 1700s or 1800s.

• if you were suffering from a toothache, your local dentist (well, actually doctor as modern dentistry wasn’t around then) would have rushed around helpfully locating a centipede for you. Said centipede would have a needle stuck into it and that needle would then be inserted into your gum.
• if you had a tumor, well basically I think you constantly prayed that you didn’t really have one, because here’s the cure - you or your doctor would dig up a corpse, cut off a hand and apply it to the tumor or area. The severed hand would remain in place “till the Patient feel the Damp sensibly strike into him”. I have no idea what “the Damp” is, but I would think the patient felt a whole lot of things - violent nausea from knowing you had the hand of a corpse strapped to you; socially ostricised because there’s no way anyone would want to come near you; probably in the divorce courts as your partner would be a little put off by sharing a bed with a corpse’s hand.
• should you have the misfortune to contract typhoid, your doctor would prescribe several cups of chimney soot mixed with water, sugar and cream - ditch your late night cocoa because I’m sure this concoction tasted good!
• and now to the mouse pie - and any mice reading this blog should run for their lives. If you suffered from bed-wetting, no problem. Your doctor would hunt down some mice, bake them up into a delicious mouse pie and serve up for dinner. The sight of a mouse tail sticking out from a pie would bring on bed-wetting if you ask me. And was the pie served with fries?

Regular ThinkingShift readers would know how I can suffer a touch of hysteria about privacy issues (wonder if a mouse pie is a cure for this?), so you won’t be surprised to find out I’m also reading:

• Trust and Crime in Information Societies by Robin Mansell and Brian S.Collins.
• Total Surveillance: Investigating the Big Brother world of e-spies, eavesdroppers and CCTV by John Parker.
• Understanding Knowledge as a Commons by Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom (just in case I overdose on books about privacy and surveillance).

Expect posts soon on what I discover from these books.

No doubt I’ll be in for some ridicule by confessing that I’ve never read a single Harry Potter book. I was chatting with some people last week - all adults and all devout Potter fans, preparing to line up outside their local bookstore, ready for the doors to burst forth and start selling the seventh book at 9.01am Sydney time Saturday July 21.

Of course, I haven’t been living on Mars. I’m aware of the Harry Potter phenomenon but somehow the thought of reading a book aimed mainly at kids and full of wizards on flying broomsticks and some dude with an odd shaped scar has never appealed to me. I often see adults on trains reading Harry Potter books; I have rarely seen children reading the books but maybe I’ve just not noticed.

As much as I know of the Harry Potter series, it seems to retell a tried and tested fantasy tale - battle of good against evil; young hero valiantly battling the forces of darkness; wizards and magic; mythical creatures; and an odd giant or two thrown in for good measure. So I’m not at all sure what the special appeal is but then I haven’t read the books. I’ve been told (rightly or wrongly) that the first book was a bit “light on” and that with each book JK Rowling’s writing style has become more sophisticated, the storyline more complex, and the tale has become darker.

Some of my friends had marked July 21st in their diaries months in advance so they wouldn’t miss out on the day of publication of Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows. One of them even camped out from 5.30am Saturday morning in winter’s icy cold so as to be first in the queue.

Four days before publication, I read about a Canadian chap, Byron Ng, who apparently ’stumbled onto’ a leaked copy of the seventh book, which had been posted onto the Internet. The publishers used GPS to track the trucks delivering the books to book stores and I read that alarms were secured to book crates. So with all the heavy security, you wonder how someone allegedly took photos of the book and released it onto the Internet days before publication. Someone, somewhere, whipped out a camera and took a photo of the 794-page book and ended up with 500 files. The photos made it very difficult for die-hard Potter fans to read - pages were askew, someone’s fingers appeared at the bottom of some of the photos, holding the book; and someone’s brown shoes appeared in photos.

Two days before publication, I decided to have a look at the so-called leaked copy of the book from the Bittorent file-sharing site, the Pirate Bay. Just in case you haven’t laid your hands on a copy yet, possible spoiler alert is ahead - SKIP THIS WHOLE PARAGRAPH. I noticed that there was an epilogue taking place nineteen years in the future and something about his scar not having pained Harry over the last nineteen years. Mentioning this to a friend, little did I anticipate the dramatic reaction - I had inadvertently (assuming the leaked copy to be a true copy) revealed that Harry doesn’t snuff it and that maybe he has three children who are later packed off to Hogwarts. And news from The International Herald Tribune has revealed that the leaked copy was indeed the genuine article. Actually, not knowing too much about the Harry Potter series, it seems that this is a fitting ending: neither Harry nor Voldemort snuff it; apparently Ron marries Hermione; Harry marries Ginny; and lots of characters snuff it. So maybe this leaves the door open for books on Harry’s offspring continuing the fight against darkness and evil? Young readers upset at the demise of any characters will have a crisis hotline number to ring for counselling according to The Guardian.

I read that a distressed guy in Canberra had to be rescued from a freezing lake because he’d taken the plunge in to retrieve the receipt for his pre-ordered copy of the book. And apparently 5,000 fans flocked to Waterstone’s bookstore in London to start queuing well before midnight and participate in a glittering launch event.

So I decided to check out what the fuss is all about and headed off with a friend to line up on Saturday morning at a local bookstore. 5,000 fans weren’t in evidence; maybe about 40. But I noted that the majority were adults, some dressed in black gowns and witches hats. When the doors opened, I was pleased to see there was no unseemly fracas and that people in the orderly queue proceeded to whip out a receipt, grab their book, get a photo taken and rush out the door. Quite a few headed off in the direction of a coffee shop, presumably to get cracking on reading the 700+ pages.

With friend’s copy in hand, I turned to the final pages (amidst threats of “tell me the ending and I’ll kill you”) and it seemed that the leaked ending I’d read a few days before was the same as the ending in my hands.

My friend rushed home to spend the entire day reading the book. I decided to read the first book in the series, but didn’t make it beyond page 2 (sorry, but I didn’t like it). I admit to feeling like a social outcast and cannot hold my own in a conversation about the characters and the plots. Okay, back to my book on Indian history :)-

And if you want to read a potter-ed version (sorry) of the final saga, check this out. It’s one person’s chapter-by-chapter description of the book (post-publication), her reactions to the demise of beloved characters, with way too much coffee drinking so she can stay up all night finishing the book and blogging about it. Basically, all I need do is read this and not bother wading through 700 or so pages!

Well, here’s an interesting way to look at humanity’s impact on the environment - if all humans disappeared off the planet, how would the world fare without us? This is a scenario that the current issue of Scientific American explores (subscription needed, but I’ll give you the gist of the article). Science writer, Alan Weisman, conducts a thought experiment in his book, The World Without Us, and looks at the sequence of events that would most likely occur in the years, decades and centuries following our demise.

Weisman doesn’t actually say what might cause humans to be snuffed out but he starts off by saying that infrastructure would begin to crumble immediately - without street maintenance, road crews and cleaners - highways and boulevards would crack and crumble. Over the decades, houses, office buildings and shopping malls would become dusty caverns but ordinary, everyday items made from stainless steel, like pots and pans, could last for millennia and common plastics could last for years before microbes evolved to consume them. The concrete jungles that are our cities would be reclaimed by verdant forest. Subways would be overrun by water - apparently the New York subway system requires 13 million gallons of water per day to be pumped out otherwise the subways would flood. Focusing on Manhattan, Weisman says that the waterways and rivers that used to form part of Manhattan have been channelled underground and it takes an extraordinary daily effort to hold off nature in her attempt to claim back land and waterways.

Should humans disappear, one of the first things that would happen is the power would go off without people to maintain grids, pumps and so on. The subways would flood; sewer systems would overflow; leaf litter, which is normally swept away by maintenance workers, would clog up drains. The rising rivers would cause the steel frames that hold up the subways and office buildings to corrode causing streets to collapse into the subway system and tall buildings to topple over, perhaps taking others with it. Into the cleared spaces, seeds from plants would blow in off the wind and take hold in the cracks, crevices and pavements. Powdered concrete from decaying buildings would provide lime - a less acidic environment for various species. A city would start to develop its own little ecosystem.

As part of his research, Weisman visited places that humans had abandoned or left to see how nature has evolved. One of these places was the primeval forest in Europe, on the border between Poland and Belarus. It was a game reserve set aside in the 1300s by a Lithuanian duke who later became king of Poland. A series of Polish kings and then Russian czars kept it as their own private hunting ground. There was very little human impact and after World War II it became a national park. Giant oaks and ash trees gently sway in the breeze; wolves howl at night; woodpeckers stuff pine cones into trees; and the last remaining wild herd of Bison bonasus, the native European buffalo, still roams. Weisman also visited the Korean demilitarised zone where a thriving wildlife reserve exists between two armies facing off each other and where wild cranes roost. He suggests that without humans North America would turn into a giant deer habitat; forests would re-establish themselves over the continent and, over time, large herbivores and predators would evolve. The chemicals we have introduced, specifically since the end of WWII, the pollutants and the damage we are currently doing to the environment may have longevity that we can’t yet predict.

It’s not all prophecies of doom and gloom. As Weisman points out, humans have created beautiful and expressive artefacts - sculptures; architecture; fine art; literature - and he asks wouldn’t it be sad for the Earth not to have humans?

The picture he paints of deserted, decaying cities reminds me of a film where many years later humans who survived whatever calamity visited the urban canyons that were once thriving cities. Wild winds whooshed through what were once busy streets and intersections; a lion appeared on the steps of a public building. I can’t recall the film but it sure gave me shivers. Would the world be better off without us?

Okay, I admit I haven’t read the book yet, just the Scientific American article - but I wonder if Weisman considers the hundreds of nuclear reactors out there. If they’re not maintained, wouldn’t they suffer a melt down and leach toxic waste into the atmosphere or soil and kill off life sans humanity?

Anyway, it’s an interesting thought experiment and you can watch a video of it here - but the scary looking dude in the video put me off a bit!

Well, here’s a book I probably shouldn’t have read. In fact, it was sitting in my To Read pile for many months as I cast a wary eye at it every now and then, knowing full well that if I succumbed, it would probably spark off feelings of despair about crises in society. It’s a study of crisis brought on by the many challenges facing industralised civilisation. Probably many of you have read this book - Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization. It was the subtitle that had me thinking this would be a depressing book about societal collapse and events that have shaken the world. But I’m glad I read it.

Contemporary society places blind faith in science and mankind’s knowledge to confront and solve increasingly complex problems - terrorist attacks, energy scarcity, environmental fragility - which tend to cascade as one problem or system after another weakens or is attacked. But our blind faith may be our downfall as we face what Homer-Dixon refers to as an array of tectonic stresses facing our civilisation and raising the risk of synchronous failure.

He identifies 5 tectonic stresses:

• population stress - growing gap between rich and poor; and the rapid growth of megacities in developing countries;
• energy stress - increasing scarcity of conventional oil resources;
• environmental stress - ongoing damage to land, loss of species and habitats, forests, fisheries and so on;
• climate stress - carbon emissions cooking up the atmosphere;
• economic stress - resulting from instabilities in the global economic system and ever-widening income gaps between rich and poor.

Most of these stresses originate in our troubled relationship with nature but are compounded by two multipliers:

• the rising speed of global connectivity, which wires up people, technologies and societies like never before;
• the escalating power of small groups to destroy things and people.

Stresses + multipliers = one heck of a lethal mixture that heightens the prospect of the outright collapse of the political, social and economic order in individual countries and globally ie synchronous failure. Homer-Dixon refers to the ancient Roman Empire, which drew its energy supplies, in the form of food, mainly from its conquered territories. Eventually, Imperial Rome required 8,800 square kilometres of agricultural land to grow enough wheat to feed itself. It needed enormous flows of high-quality energy to sustain itself and remain far from thermodynamic equilibrium. He argues that the resilience of a complex society is dependent on its input of high-quality energy, which it must aggressively seek out. But a society’s return on its investments to produce energy (or EROI) starts to decline when a society exhausts its energy supplies and has no new technology to find alternate sources of energy. This is what happened to Ancient Rome - it exhausted the croplands of the Empire and incoming tributes dwindled. The complexity of the centre could not be maintained and collapse occured under Draconian rule.

What has Rome to do with our contemporary society? Well, no brainer really. Our vital energy sources - oil, natural gas and so on - are depleting. They are more complex than Ancient Rome’s, which means, as Homer-Dixon says, that the unravelling of our society “..would make Rome’s decline pale by comparison“.

We might think that greater connectivity and speed can result in increased resilience but Homer-Dixon’s anecdote (about a near-miss traffic accident involving high speeds and lots of whizzing cars) wonderfully illustrated how one element’s failure in a system that is tightly interwoven can make the system less able to tolerate disturbances.

Homer-Dixon uses historical events, like the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and subsequent tragic fire, to show how a confluence of factors can result in cascading failure. The lesson here is that random networks with loosely connected nodes can better withstand onslaught, whereas scale-free networks like electrical grids (with many nodes linking into hubs) are more vulnerable.

Drawing on the work of ecologist, Crawford Holling, Homer-Dixon points out that there are natural cycles of growth, breakdown and renewal and the contemporary challenge is to find the middle ground between dangerous rigidity and catastrophic collapse. The catastrophe of collapse allows for the birth of something new - just as trees burned in a bushfire regenerate and adapt to a changed environment - so he believes our society (headed as it is for collapse) can regenerate into a simpler and more creative form.

How? When business has a vested interest in maintaining our love affair with fossil fuels; when Governments are slow to act on climate change; and when our hedonistic society keeps us focused on money, brand-names, botox and Hollywood celebrities? How do we achieve this upside to catastrophe? Aside from loosening the connectivity so that our socioeconomic system is less vulnerable to disturbance, Homer-Dixon suggests four actions:

• address the underlying tectonic stresses so that the risk of synchronous failure across geographic and societal boundaries is lowered;
• we need to cultivate a “prospective mind” to cope better with surprise. A prospective mind, in his terms, looks for ways to prevent or forestall negative outcomes through managing things and by imagining and implementing more radical and far-reaching solutions;
• boost the overall resilience of critical systems like our energy and food supply networks; and
• we need to prepare to turn breakdown to advantage when the proverbial hits the fan.

The ‘downside’ of the book for me was I didn’t gain a real sense of how we (individuals, Governments and society) could pursue these four actions but a re-read of the book should make things clearer. It’s quite a rare read: historical accounts are examined for similarities with contemporary society, through the lens of the new sciences.

A few weeks back, I finished reading Steven Johnson’s, The Ghost Map, the last chapters of which focused on contemporary developing countries and the so-called shadow or squatter cities - these are truly becoming megacities as Homer-Dixon alludes to. These ecosystems are facing the same issues as Ancient Rome: unstable growth; inadequate energy supplies (ie water); densely-packed populations. The five tectonic stresses exist in the hothouse environment of megacities.

Shortly after reading both these books, I started to notice articles on the rise of megacities and other issues Homer-Dixon touches on. Sychronicity? Perhaps. But more likely evidence that our socioeconomic system resembles Ancient Rome - teetering on the edge of collapse. Here are some links to articles I found that support Homer-Dixon’s thesis:

• May 23 2007: Transition Day: the day a major demographic shift occured and the world’s population became more urban than rural. By 2010, 51.3% of the world’s population will be urban, resulting in a tightly woven ecosystem of humanity;
• Between 2007 and 2050, one billion people will be forced from their homes in a “migration crisis” due to conflict, natural disasters, and more particularly by large-scale development projects;
• A European underclass of hardworking migrants are feeling increasingly marginalised. Homer-Dixon suggests that this underclass will be a source of increasing civil unrest and violence. We saw urban riots in France in 2005 led by immigrants living in the poorer suburbs of Paris and the UK has recently seen a protest by illegal migrants.
• The notion of the nation state being under threat by the rise of super or megacities - some of which are larger than industrialised countries and suck rural workers into their vortex;
• Although the world is getting richer, rapidly growing economies such as India and China are experiencing a widening gap between rich and poor, despite absolute poverty diminishing somewhat.

Back in the Jurassic Park days of youth, I was pretty obsessed with astronauts and space. It was a close call - did I want to be an astronaut or an archaeologist when I grew up? somehow, I ended up in information and knowledge management (after a long stint in law) - not sure of the connection between KM, astronauts and archaeology - probably has to do with the unknown: digging up artefacts from long lost cultures; flinging yourself off into black space inside a metal capsule to go where no person has gone before; surfacing the deep contextual knowledge of corporate employees (harder if you ask me than flinging yourself into space).

I’ve retained a life-long love for history/archaeology and anything to do with space. So each day I look forward to getting, via my RSS feeds, the NASA image of the day. I love the image accompanying this post (you can access larger version here), which came in the other day. It is a 1960 photograph that looks like a poster for some Hollywood movie about tough guys surviving in the desert. Well, not far off what the photo is all about actually. It shows the seven original Mercury astronauts participating in U.S. Air Force survival training exercises. Pictured from left to right are: L. Gordon Cooper, M. Scott Carpenter, John Glenn, Alan Shepard, Virgil I. “Guss” Grissom, Walter Schirra and Donald K. Slayton. Portions of their clothing have been fashioned from parachute material, and all have grown beards from their time in the wilderness. The purpose of their training was to prepare astronauts in the event of an emergency or faulty landing in a remote area. Love the look on Shepherd’s face (centre of photo).

John Glenn was the first American to orbit Earth and thirty-six years after his first space flight, he was a member of the crew of the space shuttle Discovery (mission STS-95). Glenn also entered politics and was Senator John Glenn of Ohio from 1974-1999. Shepherd was the only one of the seven Mercury astronauts to go to the Moon, he was the first American in space (1961) and I think was the only astronaut to play golf on Earth’s desolate satellite. Schirra died in May 2007 at the age of 84. Grissom was apparently told privately that he’d be the first man to walk on the Moon and unfortunately died in 1967 in the Apollo 1 fire at Cape Kennedy. Carpenter was the fourth American in space and the first to eat solid food in space.

Mmm…ever wonder how astronauts answered the call of nature? well, Prince Phillip (naturally) asked this profound question recently while on tour in the US. Apparently, it all has to do with air flow, which carries away waste products. This is one of NASA’s most frequently asked questions (my question would be: can I still apply lipgloss while floating around the cabin?!)

If you look at the image closely, you have to wonder what stuff these men were made of. Most had been pilots in WWII and seemed to have no fear about launching into space in ‘flying experiments’. Did they ever suspect they might not come back? Did they ever wonder whether the technology and early computers were advanced enough to bring them safely back to Earth? It combines adventure with suspense that’s for sure. Have a read of Deborah Cadbury’s great book, Space Race, to get a sense of the calibre of these early space voyagers and the political paranoia sparked by the superpower rivalries of the former USSR and the US, which led to a space race. Or check out Hansen’s First Man, the life of Neil Armstrong, the first man to step foot on the Moon in 1969.

These guys seem to be heroes of an era long gone. Maybe they were created by the turmoil of the mid-20th Century - WWII and the Cold War. Maybe we create a different sort of hero today. But I’m not sure what these heroes look like or where they are. Any suggestions?

Sweden has ABBA and Carl von Linne aka Carolus Linnaeus, the naturalist who can be considered the father of modern taxonomy. Perhaps, the Swedes should also consider adopting Patrick Lambe. May 23 was the 300th anniversary of Linnaeus’ birth in 1707 and Sweden’s illustrious son is remembered for establishing conventions for the naming of living organisms. We probably all remember from school biology classes the Linnaean system, which classified nature according to a hierarchy of kingdoms, classes, orders and so on.

Prior to Linnaeus coming long and giving order to things, cabinets of curiosity allowed gentlemen and scholars to expand their knowledge of the natural world. But usually the cabinets were displays of disorder - higgledly-piggledly arrangements of shells, stuffed animals, gems and other exotica - which really couldn’t be arranged according to a single scheme of order. In rushed Linnaeus to help simplify the task of classifying things and the branching ‘tree structure’ became synonymous with scientific taxonomy. Every former library student can recall lectures on classification where “from the general to the specific” or “from whole to part” was constantly muttered.

Since Linnaeus’ time, we have used taxonomies to organise knowledge. The humble shopping list helps us to arrange our thoughts about shopping items and usually groups related things; the visual representation of the human body, showing arteries and organs, is a system map or taxonomy representation; the organisational chart, showing the CEO at the top and branching out to cascading levels of management is a hierarchical tree structure. These examples are taxonomies in many forms and they help us organise and manage things in our daily lives; they bring order to chaos; they can help organisations find a shared vocabulary; and they can help us make sense of a knowledge domain.

When I was studying librarianship, I became fascinated by taxonomies. Friends and relatives took pity. If you mentioned the word “taxonomy”, people would look at you suspiciously - they couldn’t seem to decide whether you had a secretive job like some CIA agent or whether you were more like a taxidermist, stuffing birds for a display. Although the letter ‘x’ is in the word taxonomy, somehow taxonomies didn’t quite equate to that other word with an ‘x’ in it -sexy. Taxonomists were usually associated with some arcane branch of library science, working away in the dusty back rooms of libraries assigning books to obscure categories.

So when Thinkingshift old friend, Patrick Lambe, told me he was busy scribbling away in Ireland on a book about taxonomies, I had my doubts. And I don’t mean Patrick is old, just that I’ve known him for many years :)- You might be thinking that with Google and digitised information that we don’t need taxonomies because you might consider they’re more about rigidity than allowing for emergence or serendipity. This is where Patrick’s book, Organising Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organisational Effectiveness, allows us to understand that taxonomies are in fact deeply embedded in our digital world as, for example, folksonomies or social/democratic tagging and they allow for rich serendipidity, fossicking and foraging.

Patrick has brought sexy back to taxonomies! through a series of lively case studies (including the appalling Victoria Climbie incident) Patrick shows how taxonomies are used in the real world as decision-making frameworks; to help discover risk and opportunity; and to bring a shared vocabularly to an organisation. The very clear point to Patrick’s book is that taxonomies articulate knowledge and far from being the tree structures we perhaps associate with the concept, taxonomies are dynamic, fluid and ultimately can contribute to organisational effectiveness.

So Happy Birthday Linnaeus and congratulations to Patrick on the publication of his new book. And whilst it’s traditional to give people flowers on special occasions, to Patrick, ThinkingShift gives him a flower clock, fittingly invented by Carolus Linnaeus.

I’ve had a parent in the hospital for the last four weeks. During the first week, the doctor and specialist muttered dark words of doom and gloom. They often mentioned the Big C word (cancer). They sent my mother through a barrage of tests, usually with no explanation or follow-up. By the third week, the initial prophecies of darkness had changed to “looks like she has severe osteo-arthritis”. Now, the astute amongst us will immediately think ‘but hang on, there’s a world of difference between cancer and osteo-arthritis“. You bet! so I bailed up the specialist as he darted down the hospital corridor and asked him to “please explain”. He launched himself into a monologue peppered with fancy sounding medical terminology. He looked puzzled when I asked him to speak in plain English - perhaps he doesn’t realise that the world is not entirely populated with medicos! By week four, the general practitioner (who was at pains to announce that he greatly respected the specialist’s expertise) said that he did not agree with the specialist who was still hedging his bets and saying that it was 50/50 whether it was cancer or not. The general practitioner had taken the time to consult with radiographers about the millions of x-rays they’d taken and all concurred that it was severe osteo-arthritis.

I’m sure that many ThinkingShift readers have their own sorry tales of medical dramas to tell. And I’m equally sure that many of you will agree with me that doctors need to learn how to have a meaningful conversation with their patients and their families; that they need to learn how to get the patient to tell their story; that they should explain what they are doing and thinking.

So I’m thrilled to see that one doctor has seen the light and questioned whether doctors, especially when confronted with complex cases, think in ways that run the risk of error. And that the likelihood of error is reduced if (gasp!)….patients actively participate in their consultation and treatment. Dr Jerome Groopman, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, noticed that “something was profoundly wrong with the way (doctors and medical students at a teaching hospital) were learning to solve clinical puzzles and care for people“.

Here’s a scary statistic - around 15% of diagnoses are wrong. And Dr Groopman, after three years’ research, has come to the conclusion that medical errors are not technical but cognitive. Simply put, doctors sometimes experience an error in thinking. He has also noted that there is a phenomenon known as “diagnosis momentum”, which is the tendency for a diagnosis to gain certainty as it is passed from doctor to doctor. I witnessed this phenomenon myself - in the face of tests to the contrary, the general practitioner in charge of my mother was agreeing with the specialist for over three weeks until he noted something wasn’t right (clever man!). And then there is the old classic: confirmation bias - where the medical practitioner selectively chooses evidence to support his or her diagnosis or treatment decision, and casts aside evidence that suggests otherwise.

In his book, How Doctors Think, Dr Groopman recounts the story of Blanche Begaye who was suffering from a flu-like illness. She decided to scoff down lots of orange juice and take aspirin. Her symptoms worsened and, when she presented to the doctor, she was given the diagnosis of viral pneumonia. What she really had was aspirin poisoning, but because the doctor had recently seen several cases of pneumonia, he suffered an error in thinking. A more chilling example: a young woman who suffered from a plethora of ills was diagnosed as anorexic and bulemic - she was promptly placed on antidepressants and forced to stuff down 3,000 calories per day. Her real ailment? celiac disease, which affects the ability of the small intestine to absorb nutrients, ergo people lose weight and can present with similar symptoms to anorexics and bulemics. Part of the problem was that the young woman, in the face of stern doctors, came to believe the initial (wrong) diagnosis.

Groopman talks about how doctors must juggle seemingly contradictory bits of data simultaneously in the mind and that the expert juggler is the very experienced medical practitioner with an open mind. Although the expert might recognise a pattern seen many times before, he or she does not stubbornly cling to initial impressions when contradictory evidence pops up. Groopman also delves into a doctor’s emotional state or personal beliefs, which he suggests can have an affect on how the doctor thinks about or works with a patient. Doctors are also not trained to be good listeners or show curiosity for the human narrative.

Groopman’s book offers advice for sound decision-making and I particularly liked the one about giving doctors time and space to indulge in reflection rather than demanding shorter appointment times. As patients, we often expect instant knowledge to be delivered - what is my long-term prognosis? what treatment will I be having? But as a lawyer, I wouldn’t immediately give a client my legal opinion without first consulting opinions, precedents, prior legal cases etc. So perhaps this expectation of instant knowledge results in doctors being pressured and falling prey to faulty thinking.

Lawyers (at least in Australia) had to go through the whole process of Plain English language and drafting. We had to “unlearn” the legalese and engage with clients at their level; we had to learn to be less pompous and give consideration to how the client might be scared or worried. Doctors need to go through this same re-education process and, in the meantime, they need to get their hands on a copy of Groopman’s book. Or they could get hold of Atul Gawande’s book, Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science, which beautifully deconstructs the myth of medical infallibility.

I spent Easter reading Steven Johnson’s book, The Ghost Map, which is the historical account of how London’s densely-packed Soho District battled a virulent outbreak of cholera in 1854 that eventually destroyed 50,000 lives in England and Wales. It’s the story of two men with local knowledge - Dr John Snow and Rev Henry Whitehead - who pitted themselves against the medical fraternity of the time who steadfastly believed that disease was miasmic in nature (thought to be caught from the noxious atmosphere swirling around urban areas). Both men, particularly John Snow, are remembered for their discovery that cholera is a water-borne disease.

The Ghost Map illuminates an ecosystem - the urban city - and shows how the spread of a virus, the rise of an industrial city, detective work and scientific enquiry became intertwined. On August 28, 1854, working-class mother, Sarah Lewis, tossed a bucket of soiled water into a cesspool behind her squalid living quarters. Unknown to Sarah Lewis and the rest of London, her baby was infected with the Vibrio cholerae bacterium and the tossed water was contaminated and made its way into the Broad Street communal drinking well. The deadliest outbreak of cholera in London’s history was triggered.

The Broad Street water pump was the local coffeehouse of its time: people gathered from far and wide to drink the sparkling, refreshing water and the deadly, silent bacterium insinuated itself throughout the urban ecosystem via innocent human transmitters. Cholera is easily cured by ingesting large amounts of fluid and electrolytes, but this solution was unknown in a Victorian London seized with the fear of not knowing when or how cholera would strike. Maybe avian flu will become the new cholera epidemic of the 21st Century.

Dr John Snow, a celebrated anaesthesiologist, who had attended the birth of one of Queen Victoria’s children, took a bird’s eye view of the city and produced a map that showed the cholera outbreak occurred in clusters, following a distinctive pattern and a story. Snow was able to ultimately demonstrate that the Broad Street pump was responsible for the outbreak. You can check out his 1854 map here. Snow’s work and his mapping of the disease laid the foundations for epidemiology and the beginnings of modern sewage and water filtration systems.

Snow’s map was a vivid visualisation of death. Dots on the map plotted information about the location of deaths and the communal water pumps were marked with crosses. A distinct cluster of dots appeared around the Broad Street water pump, illuminating the pump as the source of contamination.

Edward Tufte talks about Snow’s map here; and this is a link to the John Snow website, which has lots of interesting resources, including a series of maps of 19th Century London.

What I particularly liked about The Ghost Map is the discussion about the contemporary developing countries and the so-called shadow or squatter cities. These ecosystems are facing the same issues Victorian London faced: unstable growth; inadequate water supplies and sanitation; densely-packed populations. Johnson states that by 2030, it is possible that a quarter of humanity will be squatters, illegally occupying land and living without appropriate civic infrastructure. These rising, dense city networks may provide ideal conditions for cholera or avian flu to run rampant throughout.

The perils of density now mean that we may need to fear a pandemic on a global, not just a local or city scale.

I’ve had a bit of fun over the last week with posts on ancient perfumes and Dino the Dinosaur, so time now for some serious reflection.

A number of synchronicites have happened over the last week or so, which have led me to reflect on critical thinking. Warning: this is a VERY LONG post, so if you’re not interested in thinking about critical thinking, don’t read any further :)-

I usually have a stack of 4 to 5 books I’m reading on the go. I had just polished off Th!nk by Michael LeGault when I realised I was also half way through Simon Blackburn’s book Think - synchronicity No 1, two books with the same title. LeGault’s Th!nk is a targeted critique of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. Its full title is Th!nk: Why Crucial Decisions Can’t Be Made in the Blink of an Eye. Blackburn’s book explores the central concerns of philosophy: what is knowledge; what is consciousness etc aka the Big Questions of Life that get us thinking (and a very fine philosopher he is too, I highly recommend the book).

Synchronicity No 2 occurred when a student in one of the University courses I teach asked me “what is critical thinking?”. And synchronicity No 3 was the result of a recent post I did on the evidence against global warming, where the NY Times linked to my post (in their Sphere Related Blogs & Articles section (thanks!) following an article outlining scientists’ concerns over Gore’s central arguments. In that post, I wanted to examine for myself what the evidence might be against global warming. I did this for my own purposes, to educate myself more on what I truly believe is going to be a dark time ahead - climate change, struggles over water, food shortages.

I’m a great fan of Al Gore. I think he’s done a tremendous job of raising the profile of an issue that needs to be critically and urgently explored. I was a tad concerned though that my post (intended as it was to simply explore the anti-climate change stance) might contribute, in whatever small way, to the argument against climate change. Let me make it clear: I firmly believe we are in the midst of a future climate crisis.

But these synchronicites conflated to the point that I’ve been thinking about critical thinking for the past week. This post is simply exploratory and will no doubt contain flawed thinking - but this is all a part of the critical thinking process.

I very much liked Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point; I can’t say I liked Blink, basically because I think it emphasised to the point of irritation the notion that our minds possess a subconscious ability to soak up large amounts of information and, through intuition, gut instinct etc, correctly size up a situation or solve a problem- without burdening the brain with analytical thinking. There are more serious attempts than Gladwell’s showing the power of intuition,with Gary Klein’s work coming immediately to mind. So I’m not about to dispute the contribution of expert intuition in the critical thinking process because I do believe that emotion and intuition have their part to play (albeit perhaps on the surface level).

But LeGault’s Th!nk raised some very interesting observations I’ve been pondering:

• perhaps there is a mythology that has sprung up over the last few years about the power of first impressions, which has led to more emphasis on snap judgements and fast decisions at the expense of formal thinking skills. Intuition, emotion and gut instinct have possibly been separated from the holistic and interwoven cognitive skills involved in thinking and reasoning; and they’ve become akin to popular New Age beliefs.
• we are bombarded daily by infoglut and the 24/7 pressures of contemporary life: snap judgements have become the norm.
• the rise of highly paid consultants and specialists points to us allowing these ‘experts’ to do the thinking for us.
• there has been a decline of logic and reasoning in today’s society, which seems to be more interested in the banality of reality TV.
• we prefer the easy and thought-free.
• the Age of Reason has become the Age of Intuition.

Have we indeed lost the art of critical thinking? Penn State lecturer, John Bardi, in a 2001 essay said: “Having been a college teacher for more than twenty-five years, I see much to celebrate in the current generation of students. However, if I limit my attention to the intellectual qualities I see displayed in my classes, then it seems students are getting worse every year with the current crop being the worst ever….many students today lack the critical thinking skills necessary for higher learning“. And LeGault lays the blame for the continuing deterioration of thinking ability squarely at the feet of the education system in the US.

What exactly is critical thinking and why worry about it? My own view is that it’s a form of knowledge generation - from facts and observations, critical thinkers, through mental activity and intellectual discipline, carefully analyse and evaluate information. This process involves reflecting on and examining evidence, observations, information, facts and propositions and arriving at the most reasonable, objective and justifiable position on an issue.

Critical thinking is responsible thinking. It is not based on a personal bias or a stubborn belief in a particular position. It is not intentionally setting out to find flaws or fault; nor is it about being skeptical, but it is about being a healthy skeptic. Critical thinking is free inquiry, which results in relevant and reliable knowledge about the world - that’s why I refer to it as a form of knowledge generation. After examining an issue from every angle, you arrive at an objective and rationale version of the truth or as close to the truth as possible. Critical thinking is the scientific method, applied by ordinary people to the ordinary world. And it involves sense-making and pattern recognition, but it also involves asking probing questions about the reliability of the pattern observed or the sense of a story told.

To be a responsible citizen of a democratic society implies that individuals will use critical thinking skills to play a deciding role in governance. To do this, citizens must be able to openly discuss, debate and critique issues and ideas in order to examine them critically. Critical thinking is therefore the foundation of democracy and contributes to the public discourse.

But it seems that critical thinking has become marginalised in a society that embraces the immediate; the disposable; the 30 second sound byte; the Hollywood celebrity; and the banal. We seem to have become a society that needs to be constantly entertained and distracted in the midst of a barren intellectual life. LeGault makes the interesting observation that we have become a society so accustomed to the most surreal rationalisations of behaviour or viewpoints being given instant credibility we have lost the ability to arrive at our own understanding of the truth. And so we accept egalitarian knowledge or the dumbed-down version or the lowest common denominator knowledge or the “whatever” - because then we all feel comfortable in a society that worships consensus-seeking.

I think we’ve all seen the gradual lowering of standards particularly for Universities that once required a very high entrance mark for courses like medicine or law. The result has perhaps been a culture of mediocrity, rather than one which aspires to excellence and critical thought.

LeGault suggests that political-correctness (PC) has a part to play in the sorry tale of the decline of critical thinking. Equating PC with the threat of legal action, he refers to it as the unspoken menace, the “Terror of our Time”, which sets out the rules for the ‘right’ and the ‘wrong’ way to think. The replacement of rigorous thought with behaviour modification.

There is no doubt that critical thinking is hard work and a life-long journey. Practise makes perfect and the skill of critical thinking is no exception - it requires practise. And if I were to practise what I’ve been talking about, then I should try to apply critical thinking to the notion of Critical Thinking.

Here’s my thoughts so far: it is not an either/or position we should be taking but a both/and. Critical thinking applies the scientific method (observation and description of phenomena; hypothesis to explain phenomena; test hypothesis; analyse results and draw conclusions re hypothesis being true, partially true or false). The scientific method is a modernist project; part of the modernist paradigm, with its rigour, formalism, reliance on inner logic, the importance of truth and abstract reasoning, linearity, order, a grand narrative etc.

Postmodernism - a critique of modernism - is an intellectual movement or set of ideas, which rejects modernity’s rigour and instead emphasises pastiche, parody, playfulness. Postmodernism is about self-consciousness and self-awareness, narcissism and nihilism, ambiguity, diversity, fragmentation, multiple narratives and truth that is fluid. Trust in the scientific method gives way to the notion that reality is a social construction or a story; and the individual is a boundaryless self in a boundaryless world. Knowledge is constructed in the minds of people; not discovered independently through scientific investigation.

In a condition in which individuals are divisible rather than indivisible, there is a search for identity or a sense of the self. Hence, I would suggest, books like Blink, which emphasise the inner self - gut instinct, emotional intelligence, intuition, sense-making - are attempting to reclaim (or rediscover) the subjective that Modernity ignored or suppressed.

The postmodern condition rejected the scientific method and therefore, to a large extent, rejected critical thinking and its reliance on rigour and formality. Critical thinking lost flavour. Rigour and formality do not sit well with our eclectic contemporary society, but as postmodernism embraces the both/and, Critical Thinking needs to embrace both the scientific/Modernist paradigm AND the postmodernist paradigm, which allows space for the importance of emotions.

So…I think maybe LeGault’s book, as good as it is, has forced itself into the either/or camp. Phew….I need a good lie down now :)-

I am still navigating my way through all this and my ideas will no doubt change; but I’ve found some good resources to help improve critical thinking. Here is a website that offers a Critical Thinking Curriculum; you can find Critical Thinking Mini-Lessons here; Tim van Gelder’s really good article on teaching critical thinking is here; for loads of resources go to LibraryThing.

I’ll continue my explorations in future posts - once I’ve done some more critical thinking!