philosophy

Again another great TED talk. Barry Schwartz talks about the need for practical wisdom. Bureaucracy and its rules make tend to oppress practical wisdom. Practical wisdom is knowing when to break the rules.

In the journal nature a commentary was published on December 7th this year that took a different perspective on the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by healthy persons. While in the past it was mainly regarded as disuse, as doping, the perspective taken by authors from universities in the USA and the UK is that cognitive enhancement can be beneficial to the individual and even society. They argue that "we should welcome new methods of improving our brain function", if three ethical concerns are taken into account:

If you are interested in the philosophical foundation of ontology work, the site "Ontology. A Resource Guide for Philosophers" is a very good starting point. On it Raul Corazzon has collected many resources about this topic ranging from the ancient Greek and non-western philosophers up to this time.

Very thought inspiring talk by philosopher and scientist Dan Dennett about what our consciousness tells us what is real and what is our consciousness. In his talk he also details some remarkable experiments. It might be argued that it is not just consciousness that tricks us, but consciousness in connection with perception that does the trick.

It is probably not a new experience, but many projects trying to centralize organizations with the aim of more coordination and the realization of synergy effects have resulted apparently for each member of the organization in an increase of "red tape" (more paper, more external control, ...), while the promised effects are not so prominent. In a very interesting blog post Ricardo Alonso et al. summarize research results that seem to point towards an opposite strategy if coordination is paramount:

After reading David Muir's blog entry "Education: product or process" that was triggered by George Siemens' blog "How things change...", I felt quickly that education must be a process. But I never had really thought about it. My main argument is that a product would be well defined and finished at some time. I am looking at education as something always ongoing. So it does not meet the criteria of a product.