Photo retouching — with programs such as Photoshop, or the open source clone Gimpshop version of the GNU Image Manipulation Program — can be used to doctor images (sometimes obviously, and sometimes inobviously). I’m more of a programmer than a graphics artists, so I usually just do a quick cropping, resizing and sharpening of my JPEG photographs using Irfanview. This means that the proportions within the image remain the same.
Download Squad pointed out a “next gen image resizing method”, linking to a prior news item about a 4-1/2 minute Youtube video where Shai Avidan demonstrates “Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing”, for a recent SIGGRAPH conference. It’s fun to watch the video, because it alters images in a way similar to the way human beings do: it keeps the key content (e.g. people) in natural proportion, while removing out some of the uninteresting (or “dead space”) content (e.g. sky).
A colleague pointed out an article in the New York Times, “At I.B.M., a Vacation Anytime, or Maybe None“, by Ken Belson (online on August 31, 2007, subscription maybe required). The article starts with the lead:
It’s every worker’s dream: take as much vacation time as you want, on short notice, and don’t worry about your boss calling you on it. Cut out early, make it a long weekend, string two weeks together — as you like. No need to call in sick on a Friday so you can disappear for a fishing trip. Just go; nobody’s keeping track.
That is essentially what goes on at I.B.M., one of the cornerstones of corporate America, where each of the 355,000 workers is entitled to three or more weeks of vacation. The company does not keep track of who takes how much time or when, does not dole out choice vacation times by seniority and does not let people carry days off from year to year.
Instead, for the past few years, employees at all levels have made informal arrangements with their direct supervisors, guided mainly by their ability to get their work done on time. Many people post their vacation plans on electronic calendars that colleagues can view online, and they leave word about how they can be reached in a pinch.
In the weekend Globe & Mail Focus section, Tralee Pearce wrote an article titled “Adolescence is obsolete” (subscription required, unfortunately). It outlines a new book The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen by a former editor of Psychology Today, Robert Epstein. (As an alternative, there’s lots of links to articles, essays and even video on adolescence on the drrobertepstein site).
Pearce writes that Epstein:
…. challenges this drive to postpone the rights and obligations of adulthood. He suggests that we have lost track of what it means to be an adult – and underestimate just want it takes to become one.
The short version — 140 questions! — of the Epstein-Dumas Test of Adultness is available online at howadultareyou.com . (I haven’t taken this test, because I’m arrogant enough to actually believe that I approach a half-century in age, I am an adult!)
Much of the challenge of getting an organization to move forward is in establishing a collective understanding of what the joint future might be. I’ve been intrigued by the idea of system envisioning since I participated in some OOPSLA workshops in the late 1990s. Ralph Hodgson provided me with permission to repost a workshop summary where many of the ideas first came alive for me.
The idea of vision certainly isn’t new for businesses. My concern is that many visions never materialize, and lots of effort and resources get wasted. Two factors that contribute toward success are:
Reported by: Charles E. Matthews and Ralph Hodgson
Workshop Organizers: Ralph Hodgson, Tom Bridge, Charles E. Matthews, Robert Coyne, Bruce Anderson, Deborah Leishman, Doug McDavid, Carl Ballard
Editorial note by David Ing: This report is republished on coevolving.com with the permission of Ralph Hodgson received 2006/02/16. The original article is not available online, but the reference is provided as http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/346852.346964 Some addresses at the end of the article have been corrected.
Overview
Systems are conceived out of an understanding and conceptualizing of a problem space. System Envisioning is about how we create possibilities for what a system might and should do and seeks to answer:
- How do we formulate and choose among alternative concepts of a system?
- What considerations affect the trade-offs and the interrelationships between requirements, specification, and design?
- How are these aspects of system development affected by the political, social, and cultural issues within an organization?
Motivations
This workshop was motivated by an interest in sharing experiences on the relationships between problem domain understanding and creative thinking on formulating systems concepts. We were interested in how different types of thinking and action are involved in developing the conceptual architecture of a system. Particularly, we were concerned with requirements elicitation and generation, organizational design, systems thinking, holonics and cybernetics, object thinking, creativity and imagineering, metaphorical exploration, synectics and analogical reasoning, human communications and dialog-based interaction.
Goals and Objectives
We wanted to identify motivational interests and to share experiences on how system envisioning has happened and can happen in system development projects – including experiences related to the effectiveness of tools used within the specification and development process.… Read more (in a new tab)
I’m privileged to be able to travel to conferences — literally around the world — to see and talk with speakers who have done research on some areas in management that I find interesting, or who have written a book or some articles.
Since 1998, I’ve been posted digests — personal notes, taken in real time during the meeting — on the Systemic Business web site, and on the ISSS web site. We’ve recently migrated the latter web site to a more modern architecture (Drupal), but sadly, the Systemic Business web site was static content and a chore to maintain.
Since I’ve had some catch-up time at home, I’m now happy to announce the Coevolving Innovations digests. Working down the backlog, I’ve posted four digests:
