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Tag Archives: economics
Reinventing the Sacred by Stuart Kauffman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I have been interested in the work of Stuart Kauffman since I first read about him 10 years ago. I have read his other book “At Home in the Universe” and so wanted to read this one. I find Kauffman very difficult to read, but worth the effort. This time I took notes as I was reading, which helped a great deal. Part of the reason I find him so interesting is that his books are, for me, a view into a mind on the edge of discovering something significant. I’m not sure Kauffman will actually discover whatever it is he is closing in on, but he’s barking up the right tree and its fascinating to watch him wrestle with his problems.
Posted in Complexity, Reviews
Tagged book review, economics, emergence, evolution, networks, outlier, prediction
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Online Banking with Quicken for Mac. Why I don’t give a damn about free checking.
One day towards the end of 2000 my wife finally lost her financial patience with me. As she threw a pile of bills and receipts at me she screamed “That’s it! I’m never doing the accounts or paying the bills again. You never collect receipts, you never write a memo in the checkbook, and your work expenses are impossible to understand!” She then stormed out of the room. I was in no doubt that she meant it and she has remained free of the household accounting burden ever since. I unfortunately have not. It is true that until that day I had never balanced a checkbook in my life and habitually threw bank balances in the trash without even opening them – another contributing factor to my wife’s rant. In fact the only time I ever knew my bank balance was when the ATM refused to dispense cash. So it was with great trepidation that I began my fiscally responsible life. I figured that as I had designed and built large financial software systems I ought to be able to use a small one. So after some research I selected Quicken as they had a large share of the market and had a version for Mac.
Ontology Review 2: The International System of Units (SI). US Resistance to Adoption of the Metric System
The International System of Units (SI) [72 page pdf Brochure] is maintained by the Bureau International des Poids et Measures at it’s headquarters in Sevres near Paris, France. The Metric System as it is often known has a long history; supposedly invented in 1670 by Gabriel Mouton, a French clergyman, It was adopted by France in 1795 and by the United States in 1866. The system gained international status with the signing of The Convention of the Meter in Paris on 20th May 1875. The U.S. was one of the original seventeen signatory nations and is the only industrialized nation that still does not use the system.
Posted in Globalization, System Design
Tagged adoption, economics, failure, ontology, review, success
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Using a Balanced Scorecard to align Enterprise Architecture and System Architecture with Corporate Strategy and Business Strategy
The Balance Scorecard Approach
The concept of a balanced scorecard was developed by Dr. Robert S. Kaplan of the Harvard Business School, and Dr. David P. Norton, and is explain in their book Translating Strategy into Action. The Balanced Scorecard. The basic idea is that the, vision and strategy of an organization can be expressed as a set of goals and their associated objectives, measures, target values and initiatives. I covered defining goals and objectives for system design in a previous article. The Balanced Scorecard approach extends the scope of goals and objectives to the entire enterprise. Originally this approach was suggested as a business-measurement system but it has evolved into a business-management system. By continually measuring progress toward the objectives, the execution of a strategy can be monitored, corrections can be made, risks can be reduced, and the chances of success increased.
Comparing National Economies and Corporations – Just how bad was Enron ?
Obviously it can’t be done! It’s like comparing apples and oranges. Corporate revenue and Gross National Income GNI don’t measure the same thing. Double counting is the least of your problems. But plotting them on the same graph is interesting! It gives you a very approximate graph of financial influence for Nations and Corporations. The most recent freely available data is for 2001. So I merged the data from the World Bank and the Fortune Global 100 and then plotted it. And what did I find. Wow, the Enron debacle has to be the largest crime ever! Check this out…
