Centralization / decentralization movement and Brexit

While I was working on developing information systems for large companies several years ago, I was aware of a recurrent reorganization movement that was frequent in these enterprises. Sometimes, the organization was decentralized, meaning that branches or foreign or product units were largely independent from Headquarters; but then a re-organization occurred, with headquarters integrating the distributed units and dictating policies that everybody must follow. A few years later the units, possibly residing in several parts of the country, would complain that these policies were affecting sales, for instance, because Headquarters was not aware or sufficiently sensitive of local needs. Then a new reorganization occurred returning to the distributed organization, which a few years later was again reorganized to save supplier costs for instance, and so on...

Alessandro Baricco: simplificación y conocimiento de la realidad

¿Que relación puede tener un mapa del metro, un poema de Dante, y Emmanuell Kant? Bueno, puede arguirse que Kant tiene que ver con todo; pero ¿con un mapa del metro?. En una reciente conferencia en el Tecnológico de Monterrey, México, el escritor italiano Alessandro Baricco estableció esa curiosa conexión... 

El deseo de año nuevo que funciona

Cada año se nos olvida que si seguimos siendo como somos, obtendremos los mismos resultados que hemos obtenido hasta ahora. Eso pasa con nuestros "deseos de año nuevo" - sin crecer, sin desarrollarnos más, pretendemos que ¡ahora si! logremos lo que deseamos. Y no importa qué tantas personas nos deseen "que se cumplan todos tus deseos" como si eso bastara para que se cumplieran...

Así pues, este año te deseo "crecer para hacer crecer", pues únicos entre los seres vivos, nuestro desarrollo y el que logremos apoyar en los demás no tiene límites. En este año que comienza puedes decidir crecer...

Power to the programmers! is it ok?

Have you noticed how your behavior is influenced by computer code written by programmers hired by technology companies? They write the code that sometimes requires you to identify yourself with a credit card; also the code that allowed the U.S. government to spy citizens; and the code that makes it difficult to identify who is the real sender of an email message and so on. As well as the code that dictates different behaviors among users of different apps.

As more of our life is intermixed with the internet, more power is assumed by unelected programmers. Is that ok? See my review at Amazon of Lawrence Lessig's "Code 2.0" book.

Surfaces and Essences by Hofstadter & Sanders - a summary/review

In this accelerated life when available time gets ever squeezed, I had never read huge books like Tolstoi’s War and Peace… until I encountered Hofstadter & Sanders “Surfaces and essences”, a 500+ page book which may some day be considered a literary masterpiece like Hofstadter’s Pulitzer-prize-winning book, “Godel, Escher, Bach”.   I have always been captivated by Hofstadter’s thinking depth, and clear and witty writing style; qualities rarely found together in academic researchers. See my review at Amazon.

(Acknowledgement: editorial improvement of the review by Joana Kennington of More English) 

Homeland Earth 3 - The Earth in crisis

This is the fourth essay of a series on the book “Homeland Earth” by Edgar Morin, and part of a larger series on The predicament -and hope- of mankind. Better read in order.

Are there problems of problems? meta problems? problems of "the second order"? Yes there are, and the third chapter of Homeland Earth is dedicated to exploring some of those: widespread, deep and sometimes invisible problems that need to be solved before or at the same time that other problems are solved.

Homeland Earth 2 - Citizens of the Earth

(for those navigating straight here… this is the fourth essay on a series dealing with The Predicament and Hope of Mankind)

In this second chapter of the book, Edgar Morin follows the development of Science as it discovers the origin and development of the Cosmos, the Earth, the biosphere and finally Us humans. Then he calls for a universal recognition of the anthropological unity of all human beings, whatever diverse their culture or development.