sharpsBlog
vonnegut: the 3 types of specialist →
From a passage of Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard, the three types of specialists needed for the success of any revolution.
Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening teams with a peculiar membership goes to work on them….
![“Snake Oil? Scientific evidence for popular health supplements, showing tangible human health benefits when taken orally by an adult with a healthy diet” [informationisbeautiful.net]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/197660e3bf63d57e2ae9b1dee2508fdf/tumblr_mn4apecwnJ1ryys2ao1_500.png)
“Snake Oil? Scientific evidence for popular health supplements, showing tangible human health benefits when taken orally by an adult with a healthy diet” [informationisbeautiful.net]
NYC bike sharing program →
This is so awesome. Maybe this will serve as a model for the rest of the country. At least 10,000 people have signed up so far.
resist simplicity →
My generation has an alarming tendency toward what the novelist John le Carre refers to as “a militant simplicity.” This is the trap that your generation must avoid…Few ideas of genuine value can fit on a bumper sticker, or in a sound bite or blog post or even an opinion column. Some ideas really do need to be argued for thousands and thousands of words. To the extent that we find arguments of that length no longer interesting, we are already in [Ray] Bradbury’s world, the books merrily burning away, all in the cause of keeping ideas simple.
This, it seems to me, is the greatest challenge facing your generation. Yes, there is an economy that must be repaired; yes, there is an educational system that must be revitalized; yes, there are enemies abroad who must be defeated.
But none of these achievements will matter unless you also make war upon my generation’s celebration of the slogan and the applause line.
Simplicity is the enemy of serious thought, and serious thought is what this world desperately needs. And if we Americans find ourselves unable or unwilling to take the time to think deeply, then some wiser, more serious, more reflective culture will supersede ours. And our defeat will be entirely deserved.
bloomberg.com [05.09.2013]
legal architecture →
I think about driving Information Architecture into law. Information Architecture is a very recent discipline which has been teaching us some interesting stuff on the way information should be presented and organized. Information Architecture makes the complex simpler: Legal Architecture aims to do the very same with law.
For instance, information architects have been teaching us that nothing will go wrong if taxonomies lack consistency (if it’s more useful for retrieval), that folksonomies can be a good way to categorize things, that architectures need to be resilient and that content can be accessed in more than one way (through different paths). Another useful thing that information architects are teaching us is that architecture is created around users’ needs (through methods like the card sorting) and are not over-imposed by someone that thinks he knows what users are looking for. (For a hint on how Information Architecture works, the seminal book by Rosati e Resmini ‘Pervasive Information Architecture’ is just what you need).
Why don’t we apply Information Architecture to Law?
legalhalfhour.blogspot.co.uk [05.03.2013]
