Category Archives: Contributors

Open Platforms and the Anti-Fragile Library

Leave a reply

Antifragile collections

Wilkin profiles are a concept explained by Dan Cohen in 2012. Named after John Wilkin, a ‘Wilkin Profile’ essentially shows how unique a library’s collection is compared to any given group of libraries.

A library with lots of titles that are only held by a few other libraries in the set will have a ‘left leaning profile’. A library with mostly titles also held by many other libraries will have a ‘right leaning profile’. A library that has a few unique titles and a few popular ones but mostly an average sort of collection will have a ’rounded profile’.

If we took the Taleb ‘barbell’ approach to collection management, the Wilkin Profile would look like a left-leaning barbell. This is something we have started doing with our hardcopy reference collection at my library service. In public libraries a hardcopy non-lending reference collection is really used for two things – quick reference where it is easier and/or faster to use hardcopy than online e.g. language dictionaries, thesauri and questions with complex or obscure answers that can’t be easily answered with freely available online information which manufacturer does that silver mark belong to? what will the tide line be at this location in two weeks? When was this local building constructed?.

via Open Platforms and the Anti-Fragile Library.
HatTip to Dave Lull

​GMO labeling effort in Colorado scores win in state Supreme Court — RT USA

Leave a reply

Nassim Taleb, professor of risk engineering at New York University and author of best-sellers ‘The Black Swan’ and ‘Fooled by Randomness,’ recently said that GMOs have a very real ability to cause “an irreversible termination of life at some scale, which could be the planet.” Taleb’s thesis basically stems from the fact that GMOs come from laboratory alterations rather than natural processes, and that humans cannot understand that with each modified seed, the potential for “total ecocide” increases.

“There is no comparison between the [bottom-up] tinkering of selective breeding and the top-down engineering of taking a gene from an organism and putting it into another,” Taleb and colleagues say in a draft of their research.

“The planet took about close to zero risks of ecocide in trillions of variations over 3 billion years, otherwise we would not have been here.”

via ​GMO labeling effort in Colorado scores win in state Supreme Court — RT USA.

Daniel Kahneman – BBC – Start the Week

Leave a reply

Daniel Kahneman, Henry Marsh, Michael Ignatieff and Lisa Appignanesi – 17th March 2014Mon,
Duration:42 mins
Tom Sutcliffe discusses how we make decisions with the Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Moral choices in politics can be a complicated business, according to the academic and former politician Michael Ignatieff, who explores whether the age of international intervention is over. Doctors work under the oath ‘do no harm’, but the neurosurgeon Henry Marsh says the decision whether to operate on a brain is rarely that simple. High emotion can cloud your judgement and the writer Lisa Appignanesi looks back at sensational crimes of passion to ask how far the perpetrators were responsible for their actions.

Download 20MB

via BBC – Podcasts and Downloads – Start the Week.

Nassim Taleb Blasts Bitcoin Newsweek Article – Business Insider

Leave a reply

In the wake of California resident Dorian Nakamoto’s denial that he invented Bitcoin, some have voiced concerns about his exposure to possibly undue media scrutiny.

Add Nassim Taleb to that list.

In a new series of Tweets, Taleb, the best-selling author of books about how he thinks markets and society work, goes after Newsweek reporter Leah McGrath Goodman, the author of the piece alleging Nakamoto invented the digital currency; and journalism in general, using his signature lexicon about probability and skin in the game.

via Nassim Taleb Blasts Bitcoin Newsweek Article – Business Insider.

HEACH: Antifragile – a review or two, sort of

Leave a reply

Antifragile – Things That Gain from Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb ISBN 9780141038223

While I was reading this book – during the days around Christmas 2013 – a major storm ravaged northern and western Europe. At one point my wife asked “What is that book about, anyway” and the perfect illustration of my answer presented itself in all newspapers the next morning: hundreds of thousands of households in Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands, Germany, France and The United Kingdom were without electricity. How much easier could you want for an example to explain the concept of a fragile system? Some systems are so much optimalised that they work smoothly in the normal situation in Taleb’s vocabulary ‘mediocristan’, but as soon as an event of certain impact unexpectedly, or dismissed as not probable manifests itself, the vulnerable system collapses as a house of cards. The system is fragile and breaks, often with catastrophic consequences.

via HEACH: Antifragile – a review or two, sort of.
HatTip to Dave Lull