[slideshare id=1031599&doc=980925-are-we-all-performance-ana-1234749862966045-1]
In 1998 I was invited to present at the Fourth World Congress of Notational Analysis in Porto, Portugal. I was in the process of clarifying my understanding of notational analysis at that time and was exploring some ideas in narrative structure stimulated by Donald Polkinghorne’s Narrative Knowing and Human Sciences and Elliot Eisner‘s approaches to educational research.
The talk in Porto gave me the opportunity to share and develop these ideas. I regret that I was unable to present in Portuguese at that time or now. My hope was that the presentation would stimulate discussion about a vision for performance analysis. I think that was overly ambitious for a conference in Porto where many of the attendees had come to learn about analysing specific aspects of performance in sport. I do think that the ideas I presented have direct relevance to discussions today about performance analysis and how analysis is constructed and shared with coaches and athletes.
The emergence of SlideShare and the potential to add Slidecasts has been prompting me to think about sharing these ideas with those interested in performance analysis in sport. Throughout my career I have tended to share my ideas with audiences other than those in peer review journals. SlideShare has created an opportunity for a public sharing of these ideas.
I have embedded the presentation here in this blog post directly from SlideShare. I created the audio for the Slidecast with Audacity and then used Internet Archive to store the MP3 file and create a url for the Slidecast.
The written proceedings of the Fourth World Congress were published in 2001 (Hughes, M.D. and Tavares, F. (eds.) Notational Analysis of Sport – IV, Cardiff: UWIC).
Performance Analysis Revisited 01
Wellbeing and Demographic Snapshots of Australia 2009
In the last week, two reports have provided some fascinating demographic information about Australia. An ABC news post drew attention to the most recent Australian Unity Wellbeing Index report developed in the Australian Centre on Quality of Life (ACQOL) by Bob Cummins. The Index has the aim of promoting greater public and political awareness of the social factors underpinning wellbeing, as well as enhancing scientific understanding of subjective wellbeing.
Results (Report 19.1) indicate that:
- The five Statistical Sub-Divisions (SSDs) with the highest levels of wellbeing are all characterised by being fairly remote regions of Australia. These are: Glenelg (VIC), Upper South East (SA), Kangaroo Island/Yorke (SA), Litchfield Shire (NT), Barkly/Lower Top End (NT)
- The five SSDs with the lowest levels of wellbeing are all charactrised as inner-city. These are: Fairfield-Liverpool (NSW), South Canberra (ACT), Inner Sydney (NSW), Greater Dandenong City (VIC), Campbelltown (NSW).
- Various demographic variables alone and in combination can explain 25-30% of the variation in wellbeing between SSDs. The strongest of these are wealth (positive), population density (negative), the percentage of homes where only English is spoken (positive) and the percentage of people not born in Australia (negative).
- The strongest demographic factor in terms of explaining variation between SSDs appears to be the percentage of people not born in Australia. However, the influence is minor where the proportion of New Australians remains below 40% of the total SSD population. The vast majority of SSDs contain less than 40% New Australians. However, the few SSDs that exceed this proportion have low average wellbeing.
- The domains of wellbeing that appear most sensitive to these influences are relationships and community connection.
- Wellbeing generally falls in cities with more than 40,000 inhabitants.
The foundation paper for the Index was published in 2003 (Google Scholar link to a PDF copy of the paper.)
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has released a Picture of the Nation. A post announcing its publication reports that the Picture “analyses information collected in the 2006 Census of Population and Housing. It incorporates information from previous censuses—in some instances going back as far as 1911. It presents stories about contemporary society and trends that affect the lives of Australian people. Drawing on the rich variety of topics covered by the census and looking across different geographic areas and population groups, this report showcases the many strengths of census data”.
Some key points abstracted by the ABS:
- Australians are living longer with the proportion of older Australians (aged 65 and over) increasing from 4% in 1901 to 13% in 2006.
- The proportion of children (aged under 15) declined from 35% in 1901 to 20% in 2006.
- Generation X and Y are the most highly qualified generation, with one in four having a Bachelor Degree or above in 2006.
- Between 2001 and 2006, Australia’s population increased by over one million people, with about half from overseas migration and half from natural increase.
- Young Australians continue to leave rural areas. Over a quarter of people leaving country inland areas in 2006 were aged 15-24. The loss of young people makes it difficult to sustain population levels in these areas.
CULTURAL DIVERSITY
- Almost half (44%) of all Australians were either born overseas or has at least one parent born overseas.
- About one-third of Australia’s Indigenous population are living in Major Cities.
- In 2006, Australia’s Greek and Croatian born population had the highest citizenship rates with 97% and 96% respectively. Japan born residents had the lowest citizenship rate with 15%.
- Over 200 languages were spoken in Australian homes in 2006. The most common non-English languages were Italian (1.8%), Greek (1.4%), Cantonese (1.3%), Arabic (1.3%) and Mandarin (1.2%).
LIVING ARRANGEMENTS
- The proportion of young couple families without children has remained constant over the last 20 years (14%). However fewer of these couples are getting married – 44% in 2006 compared with 75% in 1986.
- In 2006 two-thirds of all people living in group households were aged between 15 and 34 years.
- In 2006, one in 10 people in Australia were living alone, but half the population lived in a two parent family with children.
- In 2006, 24,000 children lived with their grandparents, with no parent in the family.
COMMUNITY
- In 2006, more women had volunteered than men and people born in Australia were more likely to volunteer than those born overseas (22% compared with 15%).
- In 2006, 1.3 million people provided unpaid care for another child, who was not their own. Two thirds of these were women.
- 4.4% of Australians needed daily assistance with core activities such as self-care, moving around or communicating, because of a long term health condition, a disability or old age.
EDUCATION
- One in four Australians attended an educational institution in 2006.
- There were 1.7 million primary school students and 1.3 million secondary school students in 2006: a 2% decline in the number of primary students and a 5% increase in the number of secondary students since 1996.
- The number of Indigenous students attending primary school increased by 17% to 72,000 between 1996 and 2006. Over the same period, the number of Indigenous secondary students increased by 46% to 40,000.
- The most common fields of study for people’s highest non-school qualification were Engineering and related technologies (21%) and Management and commerce (20%) of all people with non-school qualifications.
WORK
- Labour force participation for women increased from 48% to 58% between 1986 and 2006. Over the same period the participation rate for men fell from 75% to 72%.
- In 2006, more people worked very long hours than in 1986: 19% reported that they worked 49 hours or more per week, compared with 15% of all employed people in 1986.
- 8 out of 10 people travelled to work by motor car on Census day 2006.
ECONOMIC RESOURCES
- The family home is the main asset for many Australians: 70% of households owned their own home with or without a mortgage: a similar rate to the past 40 years.
- In 2006, more than two thirds (67%) of people who were employed full-time in higher skill level occupations (which included managers and professionals) had higher incomes.
HOUSING
- Between 1986 and 2006, the number of private dwellings in Australia increased by 45% (or 2.6 million dwellings), while the number of people living in private dwellings increased by substantially less at 28%.
- The median weekly rent for public housing was $90.
Both publications appeared (or were discussed) close to Australia Day. This year’s Australian of the Year, Mick Dodson, has stimulated a very open debate about when Australia Day should be celebrated and what the Day should be called.
Footnote: On 5 March 2009 Radio National held a fascinating discussion about Australian population growth. This is a link to a podcast of the discussions between Philip Adams, Mark O’Connor and Barney Foran. This is the trail for the program:
This month the Federal Government will be issuing its draft legislation on an emissions trading scheme. At the same time, our population is growing faster than Indonesia’s, faster than the Asia-Pacific region’s and three times as fast as the average OECD countries. But, is it possible to cut our greenhouse gas emissions without taking into account our future population?
Food for Thought 2.1
I had hoped to add to my Food for Thought 1.1 post last week but events overtook me! I was thinking that by the time I reached Adrian Hill‘s blog I would have written a Food for Thought 1.4 post. Instead I am at week two in the Rs.
In this week in review, Ruth Demitroff posted about Blip.fm, Chief Justice John Roberts and Barack Obama’s Inauguration Address. In her post on the Address, Ruth links to a new York Times article by Stanley Fish. Ruth draws attention to text as parataxis and I think this has implications for how we write in our blogs.
Rodd Lucier posted about the inauguration too (as did Pierfranco Ravotto with links to YouTube, Lee Kolbert on the first digital presidential portrait and Lani Hall). In other posts this week Rodd discussed: online identity (and offered advice about security, see too Kristina Hoeppner’s post); pendulum swings in education and included a Teacher 2.0 podcast (see Nellie Muller‘s post along these lines); and concluded the week with a post about Creative Commons.
Rhondda had a busy week of posts. Early in the week she reviewed the Icerocket search engine. In her next post (It’s not about the technology) she observes that “In the past 12 months I have found an amazing world on-line, that offers me so much for my own professional learning, making me a better teacher and I hope that some of my posts/links have assisted others as well”. She then posted about Worldometers (world statistics updated in real time) and day later abour reading options and DailyLit. Rhondda’s week concluded with her post about useful links. All this whilst preparing for a new school term in Melbourne, Australia.
Pat Parslow’s most recent post was a position paper (with Shirley Williams and Karsten Oster Lundqvist) on the future of social networking.
Nellie Deutsch has been incredibly busy with the Digifolios and Personal Learning Spaces Ning site. Most recently she was involved in a Wiziq discussion about online identity (recording available at the Ning site).
This week the LibraryTechNZ Source post provided an update on digital libraries and library innovations from around the world. In the post
Photograph Source
it is the smart and sensitive teacher, endlessly re-inventing her practice, noticing what works for individual kids, that makes the difference. Or the creative and flexible principal, willing to suspend the Big Expensive Program, guaranteed to yield (and I hate the way this word has been co-opted) results–in favor of something that meets the needs of real kids.
Milton Ramirez had a busy week of posts including teaching as an attractive and exciting career opportunity, the results of the PEW report, a discussion (inspired by a post by Doug Johnson) of the impact of books, blogs, articles and columns, three posts on Barack Obama, and a discussion of connectivism. Milton’s last post of the week introduced me to Sugar Labs. I hope to return to Sugar Labs soon!
Mike Gotta drew attention to a Web 0.0 paper from 1991 in his first post of the week. He followed this up with a discussion of the importance of Lotuspere 2009 and Lotus Connections and SharePoint.
Mike Bogle’s Techticker was a mine of information this week. He discussed free culture and Creative Commons and linked to Lawrence Lessig. (Melanie McBride posted about Lawrence Lesig this week too.) Mike’s post reports how he has created an audio archive of Lawrence’s four free culture presentations. Mike includes the workflow of how he did this.
… in the interests of transparency and respect for open source purists, I wanted to include the work flow process I used to ultimately produce the OGG version. I relied upon as much open source software as I could (as always), however there are two notable exceptions that I’d like to menition. Namely, the process was conducted on Windows XP and included the MP4 codec during the initial rip from YouTube.
(See Mike’s discussion of Open Source this week for his take on sharing.)
Mike’s second post of the week was a slow blog about the Digital Youth Project and includes a video blog about his thoughts. Mike observes that “the results (of the project) point to a dynamic and complex ecosystem of interaction amongst young people that I believe we would do well to consider in discussions on elearning and new media – and in particular the manner with which education should seek to foster engagement and lifelong learning amidst young people.” His final post of the week discusses TOTLOL and children’s digital literacy.
In addition to her post about Lawrence Lessig, Melanie McBride shared news of her presentation at Web Weekend in Vancouver in February. Her talk, “Magazines2.0: The Sharing Revolution,” will consider existing and emergent issues related to the publisher and reader of web2.0 publications.
Matthias Melcher considered connectivist taxonomy this week. His post addresses the visualisation of a taxonomy in a very interesting way and he draws upon his native German landscape to to help him. He concludes that “the concept cluster of learning network/ ecology/ space is too overburdened and deserves some dissection.”
Lisa Lane discussed videoconferencing this week. She reflected on a Business Week article to develop her own use of videoconferencing. Mike Bogle commented on Lisa’s post and shared this link. Lisa responded with a discussion of Seesmic and its potential. (It was interesting to read Kristina Hoeppner’s post on the lens-eye after reading Lisa and Mike’s exchange.)
Lee Kolbert’s post this week took a close look at the potential of Nibipedia for teachers and students. She considers some of the access issues that might occur with some of the content and one of the creators of Nibipedia, Troy Peterson responds to Lee’s observations. (Stephen Downes posted on Nibipedia too this week.)
Kristina Hoeppner posted three times this week. In her first post she discusses some of the issues raised by the availability of Userfly (a new online service which allows you to record a screencast of anybody who comes to your website) and the appearance of Tumbarumba. Her third post of the week reports the discovery of an apartment in Leipzig that was in an untouched condition from almost a decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
I was unable to access Konrad Glogowski‘s blog at the time of writing this summary.
Kevin Jones’ post this week reports on How Conferences Should Be Done and points to the Americorps Ning site.
I could not think of a better place to end my alphabet review this week with a visit to the busy week of Karyn Romeis and her learning journey. Her blog is “a catch-all for things that have caught my eye, links to helpful information and the odd soapbox moment”. Tuesday’s picture of the day was ‘Computer Hell‘ ( “Oh, for a techie to come and look over my shoulder and say, “Ah yes. I see what the problem is.” And then FIX it.”) (By Thursday the Articulate User Community had come to her rescue.) Karyn linked to Blurb in another of her posts and discussed the idea of publishing your own bespoke book.
There are 16 Js in my Nourishment list so I will draw breath here and hope that nature and workflow this week give me an opportunity to write Food for Thought 2.2. I am off to Sydney to celebrate our son‘s birthday. Somehow we have persuaded him that a trip to a Leonard Cohen concert is just what he needs!
Community
During the CCK08 course we spent a good deal of time talking about groups, networks, communities and collectives. Thereafter we discussed complexity, chaos and randomness. This week in Mongarlowe all these concepts merged in our community’s response to a bush fire.
A fire is burning in the Budawang Forest and yesterday our community was briefed by the NSW Rural Fire Brigade about the potential dangers of the fire breaking containment lines.
Source: ABC News
We are fortunate that Mongarlowe has its own Bush Fire Brigade. Many of our friends in the community are members of the Brigade and I have had my application to be a volunteer accepted.
Living in a caring community (real and virtual) is very important to me and this week’s events have reconfirmed the observation made by Karen Stephenson that:
Reciprocity is key to the power of networks, the alchemy of mutual give and take over time turning to a golden trust…
Amongst those in the line of the fire are Gail Nichols and Suzanne Bellamy.
The weather has changed today and the forecast is for a cooler two days. This provides an opportunity to develop more containment lines and gives us more time to clarify what is important in our lives.
Updates
29 January bulletin and ABC news report
Point of Departure: Food for Thought 1.1 (W to S)
I have been away enjoying the Australian summer but I have been thinking about this post for some time. Last year I posted a list of the sites that nourish my thinking about teaching, learning and educational technology. During 2009 I am going to write about these sites as a synthesis of themes and links. I hope to post once a week to capture something of a week’s news and discussions. It is my way of responding to and contributing to communities of practice that are growing by sharing (Kim Marshall, Beth Kanter and Richard Byrne are the most recent discoveries for me!).
This first post looks at blog posts published in the week beginning 11 January (back from my holidays then!). At present I am thinking that I will not include directly Ning and Wiki posts. Both are flourishing and I am working on this Ning site developed for IACSS09 and this wiki for a canoe slalom community in Australia. I have joined the Digifolios and Personal Learning Spaces Ning site developed by Cristina Costa.
I list the sites on the Nourishment page by a person’s first name and so for the first post in Food for Thought I am going to pick up on a post by Will Richardson before my start date on Why Blogging is Hard …Still (9 January). Will’s discussion on blogging concludes with this observation:
…I still feel every time I press “publish” is a good thing on balance, not something to avoid as much as to embrace as a path to a greater awareness of myself and of the world around me.
In the week in review Will has posted about his on-line reading habits and the strategies he is developing to change his on-line practices (12 January) (interesting to note Tony Karrer’s discussion of an information radar in this context). This post and the comments received give some excellent insights into reading possibilities. (Shortly after reading Will’s post I found Benjamin Stewart’s post about Storytelling and noted his observation that “I see my own online identity in a constant state of flux as I am constantly trying out new technologies that best serve my own learning and teaching practice”.) Will posted a short piece about a fascinating in-car conversation with his daughter (13 January). His last post of the week was a discussion about Web 2.0 (15 January) and he addressed some of the issues arising from Howard Gardner’s work (amongst others). Will comments that “Whether we think this new learning landscape online is a good thing or not, the reality is that it’s not going away, and that having the skills to make the most of the opportunities here are only going to become more and more important” and asks “But how do we make that happen for those who don’t find the entry point as easy as most of you reading this have found it?”
Wesley Fryer posted thirteen times last week. Amongst his posts were items about Photodropper (11 January), Gabcast and WordPress (12 January), CrowdSpring (12 January), Kaplan University’s video It’sTime for a New Kind of University (12 January), videoconferencing with Google Chat (13 January), the ISTEconnects Blog (15 January), and digital storytelling (15 January). After reading Wesley’s final post of the week (17 January) I wondered about the kind of conversation his ‘8 year old American Girl doll and movie fan’ would have with Will’s daughter. I think it would be a fascinating journey.
..vt posted this week about internet access in Africa (15 January) and shared news of plans to support rural access to internet opportunities.
Viplav Baxi continued his exploration of ideas arising from CCK08 with a discussion of Montessori and Connectivism. We can now add Viplav’s son to the car journey with the Richardsons and Fryers!
Meanwhile at the Cool Cat Teacher Blog, Vicki Davis posted about YouTube and sharing (12 January), Yuan.CC maps, Flyr and Woophy (13 January), Images4Education ” a space to share exciting digital possibilities to help learners develop 21st century multiliteracy skills through active learning”, the Future of Education community (Sharon Betts posted about this too), ScreenToaster (see Sarah Stewart’s post too), and the Global Education Collaborative (16 January), a link to Michelle Krill’s post on Image Choices, vFlat Classroom wiki, and Diigo (17 January).
Tony Karrer wrote this week about developments at the eLearning Learning Community and on the same day (13 January) discussed his approach to developing an information radar. Tony looked at networks and communities (14 January) and discusses social networks with a range of readings to extend the post. Tony’s final post of the week was a short item about his work with Beth Kanter on a nonprofit technology portal.
I missed Tomaz Lasic’s Gazump post in December, having written about George Oates I should have been more alert about employment status. (I thought some of the comments on Tomas’s post resonated with Steve Dembo‘s post earlier this month.) This week Tomaz’s posted about Memetics (10 January) and I tried not to get too distracted by following up his post link to Susan Blackmore.
It was a busy week at the O’Reilly Radar. The week started with a post by Tim O’Reilly (11 January) on Work on Stuff that Matters in which he discusses: working on something that matters to you more than money; creating more value than you capture; taking the long view. This post is followed up in some video interviews later in the week (15 January). Nat Torkington linked to Brooklyn Museum’s development of a socially networked museum membership. He links too to Doppir‘s personal annual report plans (16 January).
Terry Anderson posted twice this week. In his first post (15 January) he discusses name confusion on open, distance and e-learning and in the second guides readers through configuring Google Scholar (16 January).
Susan Sedro’s post this week introduced her readers to Motivator.
This week Sue Waters posted a second article about Flickr and explored possibilities for personal learning networks. She posted about global projects too and discussed Bringing us together and Around the World with 80 Schools. Sue’s Google Reader, Edubloggers, has a range of stories this week including news from Richard Byrne of developments at Google Earth (I noticed too this post about Google Maps by Scott Leslie and this post by Stephen Downes). In her Mobile Technology in TAFE blog, Sue has been revisiting the 31 Day Project (10 January) and links to the 31 Day Challenge wiki. She discussing emailing a new reader (13 January) and running a first time reader audit on your blog (17 January).
Stephen Downes is my primary link to educational technology, learning and much, much more. His OLDaily starts my day in Australia and has done so for many years (the metrics listed by Stephen here suggest a lot of people do the same). My weekly review will focus on Stephen’s Half an Hour blog. I post here Stephen’s welcome statement on Stephen’s Web:
I want and visualize and aspire toward a system of society and learning where each person is able to rise to his or her fullest potential without social or financial encumberance, where they may express themselves fully and without reservation through art, writing, athletics, invention, or even through their avocations or lifestyle.
Where they are able to form networks of meaningful and rewarding relationships with their peers, with people who share the same interests or hobbies, the same political or religious affiliations – or different interests or affiliations, as the case may be.
This to me is a society where knowledge and learning are public goods, freely created and shared, not hoarded or withheld in order to extract wealth or influence. This is what I aspire toward, this is what I work toward.
Stephen’s Seven Things You Don’t Know About Me was posted on 11 January. Item 5 on the list “I have my own discipline, or so I tell myself. It is that area where media, education, philosophy and computers intersect.”
Seth Godin‘s week was a full one! Amongst many of the posts this week were posts about: how to send a personal email (11 January); “If you write online, on a blog, on Twitter, on Squidoo, even in the comments section of a site, you are a published author” Don’t get sued (13 January); the end of newspapers “The magic of the web, the reason you should care about this even if you don’t care about the news, is that when the marginal cost of something is free and when the time to deliver it is zero, the economics become magical” (14 January); Twitter and Squidoo (15 January); online interactions (17 January); and a post on love … “The goal is to create a product that people love. If people love it, they’ll forgive a lot. They’ll talk about it. They’ll promote it. They’ll come back. They’ll be less price sensitive. They’ll bring their friends. They’ll work with you to make it better. If you can’t do that, though, perhaps you can make your service or product less annoying” (18 January).
Sharon Betts wrote about Speekaboos, No Child Left Behind, and Glogsters this week.
Sarah Stewart has had a hectic week preparing to leave New Zealand for a six-month stay in Queensland. Her posts included a discussion of evidence based medicine and Web 2.0 (13 January) in which she observes that:
it is vital that we integrate the principles of Web 2.0 into our practice so that evidence-based information is freely available to all, health practitioners and consumers. That we work together to share and collaborate, and find alternative ways of communicating and disseminating information to the traditional journals that are locked up, and only available to those who can afford to pay to read them.
Other posts include: working environments (13 January); designing a virtual birthing unit (14 January); using Facebook to network at a conference (16 January); ethical issues for health professionals who blog and Twitter (16 January); ePortfolios (16 January); and Doodle (17 January). Quite an output for someone with a sock dilemma!
This summary covers approximately one quarter of the blogs I monitor. I found writing this review fascinating. It makes explicit for me the kind of reading I do independent of feeds. I tried to avoid diverging from the W to S posts and realise that I have some issues to address identified in Lee Gomes’ Wall Street Journal post Why We’re Powerless to Resist Grazing on Endless Web Data which I found via Tony Karrer’s post about infovores linked to in his information radar post. Perhaps it is because I am a vegetarian I am so attracted to grazing!
Sprouting
I was sitting at my computer this morning checking emails and news when up popped a single Google Alert for CCK08. Today’s alert was for Malinka Ivanova‘s post on Microblogging in Education.
I thought her post was a great example of someone investing energy in support of a community of practice (around Plurk and Twitter). (Shortly after I posted this I received Stephen’s OLDaily with his link to Malinka and his follow up on Plurk.)
I noticed that Malinka had a Sprout at the start of her post and I followed her lead to Sprout. I am keen to explore tools that make sharing possible and I had not seen Sprout before (and missed news of the beta launch January 2008, Marshall Kirkpatrick’s review and Raj Boora’s post in February).
This is my first Sprout project (I could not embed it in WordPress but did post it at Posterous). I realise that I am a long way away from the potential uses I could make of SproutBuilder!
I thought I would share it here as a marker in my learning about mashing resources.
Postscript
After posting this I spent some time working on Sprout and followed up with registration for Plurk. Within a few minutes I had met Jo McLeay
The Human Condition and Moral Hazard
Last week I was working in the garden at Mongarlowe. It is a most wonderful place to think and reflect.
A story about Muhammad Ali started me off. I was fascinated with Angelo Dundee‘s relationship with Ali and the insight he brought to a young person who became one of the most memorable faces of the second half of the twentieth century. Simon Canning wrote of the program that:
In an age when we have grown accustomed to confected celebrity and beliefs of convenience, this documentary serves as a useful reminder of what a true celebrity and sportsman of substance really was all about.
I could not stop thinking about Angelo Dundee’s wisdom illustrated by the documentary and I felt very strongly that having someone in your corner, literally and metaphorically, is a very special relationship and a wonderful antidote to ‘confected celebrity’.
I managed every kind of fighter and I understood very quickly that every human being has his own approach to life. I didn’t try to change them. I just asked them to follow my advice inside and outside the ring, to be sure that they were 100% the day of the fight. I can proudly say that I became friend of every boxer I worked with.
What is fascinating is that Angelo Dundee was able to use this approach with a range of boxing champions over a long period of time.
Whilst thinking about the documentary I listened to a Radio National program, Counterpoint, featuring Kate Jennings and was introduced to ‘moral hazard’. She discussed two kinds of moral hazard. One is the subject of her novel and the other is that discussed in detail in Wikipedia. This latter moral hazard arises when “an individual or institution does not bear the full consequences of its actions, and therefore has a tendency to act less carefully than it otherwise would, leaving another party to bear some responsibility for the consequences of those actions.”
My pondering on her work was somewhat later than Guy Maddison in his post. In August last year he introduced his post thus:
What’s going on in the financial markets? It’s not just about liquidity and asset bubbles. We’ve long been conditioned to think the stock market is relatively safe because of all the reforms and regulations implemented since 1929. Sure, the market might go up or down hundreds of points in a day — but off a 13,000-plus Dow that’s nothing. Most people think a 1929 style crash couldn’t possibly happen now.
He concludes (after a synopsis of Kate Jenning’s novel):
Much of our securities trading now takes place under the totally unregulated umbrella of the hedge funds, which have been operating on a laissez faire frontier for a long time now. They should have learned — and been regulated — after LTCM in 1998, but that didn’t happen.
Now, nobody knows what’s going on behind their walls. There’s no way to know, with their very limited reporting requirements. The bottom could fall out tomorrow, and the damage would be done before anything could be done about it.
Back to Angelo who started me off thinking about the essence of a person that has insight and a real understanding of human behaviour. As the world financial crisis unfolded in the latter part of 2008 I wondered who was in whose corner and who defines risk and hazard.
In earlier blog posts I have linked to homelessness, fistula and the Merry Makers. What links these posts I believe is a human condition that could transform moral hazard into an ethical set of behaviours to underpin business practice.
I understand that such transformation requires dealing with ‘insatiability‘. It necessitates addressing the impetus to seek ‘confected celebrity” too!
I am off to the garden to work out some of these thoughts! I am wondering too about the concept of the Commons and the possibilities for a common wealth. I need to get started on Metcalfe’s Law too!
George
My last post on this blog was about George Oates and The Commons. I was very excited about what was being discussed in relation to national collections.
I was in the process of writing a post about moral hazard when I received Stephen Downes’ OLDaily with a link to Jeffrey Zeldman’s post about Yahoo laying off George Oates. This is George’s post about Not quite what I had in mind
I am not sure why I was so shocked about news of George’s firing. I think it has a great deal to do with my naive approach to life and my attraction to energetic vibrant people. Seb Chan’s post conveys some of my thoughts and Courtney Johnson‘s comment (on Seb’s post) shares the impact George’s work had.
I know I speak for the hundreds of attendees to the recent National Digital Forum in Auckland, NZ, as well my team members at the National Library when I say that we were all shocked and saddened to hear this news. As very recent members of The Commons, I know part of the attraction of the project – in addition to being able to share our collections with a passionate and curious community – was the generosity and genuine interest George showed towards collecting institutions, and the work she did to bring us together in a new way.
If a blog post can be a lament then this is a lament. I am not making a judgement about Yahoo’s decision. The decision makes it more important for me to finish my post on moral hazard started by accessing Kate Jennings‘ work and its juxtaposition with a technical definition:
Moral hazard is the prospect that a party insulated from risk may behave differently from the way it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk. Moral hazard arises because an individual or institution does not bear the full consequences of its actions, and therefore has a tendency to act less carefully than it otherwise would, leaving another party to bear some responsibility for the consequences of those actions.
Postcript
Some other posts about George:
Bobbie Johnson (11 December) Now Flickr is hit by Yahoo layoffs
Owen Thomas (12 December) Flickr layoffs could spell a photo finish
Scott Gilbertson (12 December) Yahoo Layoffs Continue
Seeking Alpha (16 December) Microsoft Would Do Well to Hire Yahoo’s latest Flickr Fire
Tyler Hellard (16 December)
Thomas Hawk (17 December) Former Flickr Designer George Oates on Getting Fired by Yahoo
A Flicker of Flickr at the National Library of Australia
This post started its journey with an email from Chris Gould (a member of staff at the NSIC, Canberra) to the AUSPIN listserv. It has developed into an expedition into tagging and accessibility.
Chris had attended a talk by George Oates (program manager for Flickr’s Commons project and former chief designer for Flickr) at the National Library of Australia (4 December 2008). This is Paul Hagon‘s listing of the talk:
Human Traffic, General Public
If there’s one thing about Web 2.0, it’s that we’re realising that there are actually people using the internet. It’s no longer about Human to Computer interaction, but rather Human to Human. The Commons on Flickr is an opportunity for Flickr members to participate in describing the world’s publicly held photography collections. The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world’s public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.
(See too Ruth Ellisons’ tweet, Maggie Fox’s friendfeed and this blog post)
This is a link to news of George’s presentation at the National Digital Forum in New Zealand (Forum Handbook). Louise posted this report of George’s talk in New Zealand.
Her report includes these points:
- We need to “lose control”, to put aside some of our traditional duties and way of doing things and ‘release’ your collections to the viewer. It’s okay to put a digital image or information on a platform like Flickr, with metadata which is incomplete, or which might be inaccurate. Time is limited, staffing is limited, money is limited, you can’t do everything, but your community (be it local or international) will do it for you.
- On online communities like Flickr viewers can correct the inaccuracies; they can contribute by adding tags, names, dates, locations, context, they can translate the information into another language, they can share it with a friend, they can add their own stories and their personal responses to an image, they can mix it and mash it up to create new works. In contributing they add value to your collections and broaden the collective knowledge of your community.
Courtney Johnson has provided more information about developments in New Zealand:
National Library NZ on The Commons (27 November) (News of going live at 5pm)
National Library NZ on The Commons’ photostream (Photographs uploaded 24 November)
George’s post Sweet suxteen! (Including Courtney’s video introduction) (27 November)
96 Hours on The Commons on Flickr (1 December)
“One of the nicest things to see is that the NZ Flickr community has been hard at working tagging, commenting, and sharing back.”
This Flickr post noted that “There are about 20 million unique tags on Flickr today. 20 million! They are the bread and butter of what makes our search work so beautifully. Simply by association, tags create emergent collections of words that reinforce meaning.”
Artichoke’s blog post gave a teacher’s view of George’s NZ talk.
Paul Hagon explores mashing Flickr and Google streetview on his personal website .
I found Catherine Styles’ (2008) staff paper for the National Archives of Australia Push for Pull The circuit of findability, use and enrichment whilst researching the post.
This is the link to George Oates’ photostream
Chris’s email that started this expedition concludes with this note:
Commons on Flickr – a report, some concepts and a FAQ – the first 3 months from the Powerhouse Museum
…In the first 4 weeks of the Commons we had more views of the photos than the same photos in the entirety of last year on our own website. It wasn’t as if we made the images on our own website all that hard to find – they were well indexed on our own site by Google, they were made available to the national federated image search/repository Picture Australia, and they also existed in our OPAC. Still, that was no match for Flickr…
The Commons was launched on 16 January 2008, with a pilot project in partnership with The Library of Congress. Events of the last year have provided a wonderful opportunity to consider how institutions deal with connective knowledge and the relative autonomy given to those who want to create and add metadata to enrich digital objects.
PS This is my Flickr photostream (not so much a stream, more a phototrickle!)
Using Learning Experiences to Improve Coaching Practice
Julian North has written a brief article for sports coach UK‘s journal Coaching Edge (Autumn 2008, page 30). In the article he reports preliminary evidence from the UK Coach Tracking Study (information from 1264 coaches) on how coaches use learning sources and experiences in their development.
This is the table Julian produced to summarise learning experiences and sources used by UK coaches:
Julian notes that:
…early results suggest coaches do not change their use of learning sources and experiences as they develop their coaching, Rather, they continue to use a balance of experiences, but receive different information and learning out of each at different times.
For a more detailed description of the research project see this presentation (Parallel Session 4, ICCE, Beijing 2007) by Julian North and Melina Timson-Katchis.
