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eannpatterson · 22 days
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Evolutionary model of knowledge management
Towards the end of last year, I wrote about the challenges in deploying digital technologies in holistic approaches to knowledge management in order to gain organizational value and competitive advantage [see ‘Opportunities lost in knowledge management using digital technology’ on October 25th, 2023].  Almost on the last working day of 2023, we had an article published in PLOS ONE (my first in…
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eannpatterson · 2 months
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Sleeping on the job
At the end of 2023, following my visit to IBM [see ‘Chirping while calculating probabilities‘ on November 22nd, 2023], I spent a significant amount of time trying to understand quantum computing and exploring its potential applications in my research.  It was really challenging because, as one article I read stated, quantum-mechanical phenomena appear to be weird and the mathematical tools used…
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eannpatterson · 3 months
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600th post and time for a change
Simplism is the ideology of simple answers for complex problems and it appears to be gaining popularity as high-level reading skills decline around the world.  People without high-level reading skills also tend to lack high-level thinking skills and their need for simplicity is met by simplism delivered from a range of sources, including politicians. However, complex problems by definition can be…
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eannpatterson · 3 months
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Happy Holidays!
Photo by Sarah Best wishes during the holiday season to all my readers.  I’m in digital detox over the Christmas and New Year holidays.  So no post today.  If you’re having withdrawal symptoms or want to know more about digital detox then read ‘Digital detox with a deep vacation‘ posted on August 10th, 2016.  Otherwise switch off and do something utterly absorbing, such as deep reading or…
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eannpatterson · 3 months
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Linear, recycling and circular economies
I photographed this infographic at Killerton Hall in Devon this summer at the entrance to an exhibition called ‘Thirsty for fashion – circular fashion, past and present‘ which was about how clothes have been altered and repurposed through the centuries.  I hear many references to the circular economy at the moment but I suspect many people do not really know the difference between a recycling and…
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eannpatterson · 4 months
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Virtual reality and economic injustice in a world with limits
It is sometimes suggested that materialism and greed are key drivers of our social and political system that largely refuses to acknowledge that we live in a world of limits.  However, Rowan Williams has proposed that we have a ‘culture that is resentful about material reality, hungry for anything and everything that distances us from the constraints of being a physical animal subject to temporal…
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eannpatterson · 4 months
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Machine learning weather forecasts and black swan events
A couple of weeks ago I read about Google’s new weather forecasting algorithm, GraphCast.  It takes a radical new approach to forecasting by using machine learning rather than modelling the weather using the laws of physics [see ‘Storm in a computer‘ on November 16th, 2022].  GraphCast uses a graph neural network that has been trained on 39 years (1979 -2017) of historical data from the European…
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eannpatterson · 4 months
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Empathy with the continuing background noise in society
Research has shown that skimming while reading in digital media reduces the inclination and perhaps ability to engage in higher level reading, while a lack of higher-level reading practice compromises the efficacy of skimming when reading. Higher-level reading implies critical and conscious reading, slow reading, non-strategic reading and long-form reading, according to Schuller-Zwierlein et al,…
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eannpatterson · 4 months
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Chirping while calculating probabilities
A couple of weeks ago, I visited the London headquarters of IBM in the UK and Ireland for discussions about possible areas of collaboration in research and education.  At the end of our meeting, we were taken to see some of their latest developments, one of which was their Quantum System One computer.  We had seen its casing, a shiny silver cylinder about half metre in diameter and a metre and…
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eannpatterson · 4 months
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Achievements, happiness and the passage of time
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about time as ‘a giant wheel rotating through cycles of creation and destruction leading, over aeons, to the birth and death of entire worlds’ [see ‘Aeonian cycles of creation and destruction’ on October 18th, 2023].  I had written previously about Aristotle’s view of time as the measurement of change and how Newton believed that time passes even when nothing…
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eannpatterson · 5 months
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Do you think that you have a miserable job?
Many years ago I attended the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina. There I was introduced to a series of books by Patrick Lencioni.  I use one of them, ‘The Five Dysfunctions of a Team‘, regularly as part of module that I teach on Science Leadership and Ethics which is in turn part of a Continuous Professional Development (CPD) programme [see ‘On being a leader‘ on…
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eannpatterson · 5 months
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Personale mappa mundi
I wrote a few weeks ago about appreciating a good infographic [see ‘Inconvenient data about electricity generation‘ on October 11th, 2023].  I realised recently that I had enjoyed another one vacation without appreciating it as an infographic.  During our vacation, we stopped for a few days in Hereford and visited the cathedral where they have a map of the world made around 1300, known as the…
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eannpatterson · 5 months
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Opportunities lost in knowledge management using digital technology
Regular readers of this blog will know that I occasionally feature publications from my research group.  The most recent was ‘Predicting release rates of hydrogen from stainless steel’ on September 13th, 2023 and before that ‘Label-free real-tracking of individual bacterium’ on January 25th 2023 and ‘A thermal emissions-based real-time monitoring system for in situ detection of cracks’ in ‘Seeing…
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eannpatterson · 5 months
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Aeonian cycles of creation and destruction
Many years ago I read Stephen Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time.  I remember being captivated by the idea that the universe might be oscillating between phases of expansion and contraction.  The current expansion from the Big Bang might have been preceded, and could be followed, by a contraction to a Big Bang or Crunch.  A contracting universe would be governed by a different set of laws of…
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eannpatterson · 6 months
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Inconvenient data about electricity generation
I like a good infographic and this one showing annual energy flows for a country  is one of my favourites [see ‘Energy blending’ on May 22nd 2013].  Some governments produce them annually.  The image shows the latest one for the UK [2021]. It makes interesting but perhaps depressing reading.  Transportation using fossil fuels accounts for 31% (41.6/134.1 million tonnes oil equivalent) of the UK…
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eannpatterson · 6 months
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Work, rest and play in Smallville
I am comfortable with the lack of certainty about us not being in a simulation [see ‘Are we in a simulation?‘ on September 28, 2022].  However, I know that some of you would prefer not to consider this possibility.  Unfortunately, recently published research has likely increased the probability that we are in a simulation because the researchers set up a simulation of a community of human-like…
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eannpatterson · 6 months
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Difficult or inconvenient data about electric vehicles
The embodied carbon (i.e. the greenhouse gas emissions produced by its manufacture and assembly) of a typical small (compact) battery electric vehicle (BEV) is about 14 tonnes CO2 compared to about 7 tonnes CO2 in a compact internal combustion engine vehicle (ICEV) [see brusselblog.co.uk for overview of estimates from several sources].  This is mainly a result of the embodied carbon in the…
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