About a month ago, I posted a blog on “Technical Deconstruction.” I described this as a technique to break down aggregate data to distinguish between its contributing parts: these parts might contain unique characteristics compared to the aggregate.  For instance, I suggested that it can be helpful to break down data by workday - that is to say, maintaining separate data for each day of the week.  I said that the data could be further deconstructed perhaps by time period and employee: the…

I recall somebody mentioning that the former definition for insanity is doing an action repeatedly while expecting different results.  Among the interests that I have in organizations is how at times many organizations make the same mistakes; or how sometimes the same mistake might be made by a particular organization repetitively.  So it is fascinating indeed when an airline facing an ice storm encounters much the same complaints from customers after a similar storm the previous year.  I…

Canada will soon be passing legislation to allow for physician-assisted suicide.  Sometime over the course of debate between our Parliament and Senate, I found what at the time seemed like a peculiar pattern of woodchips in the back of my pick-up.  It was such an interesting image, I thought I would share it here.  On closer inspection, I discovered that in fact I was looking at hundreds of tiny flower shafts and seeds.…

In recent blogs, I have been distinguishing between quantitative data and narrative data. I believe that I separated the two forms relatively well. Although I originally focused on the differences in data in order to give narrative "its own space," actually there can be a symbiotic relationship between the two types of data. In my last blog, I said that quantitative data can be incorporated into narrative data. In my submission today, I will be discussing how the narrative can be used to…

In this blog, I will be discussing the use of attribution models in relation to codified narrative. For this purpose, I will be referring to the plots of two films: the 1974 horror classic “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”; and a 2014 dark comedy called “Tusk.” I have my own codification system called BERLIN: this is short for “Behavioural Event Reconstruction Linguistic Interface for Narratives.” An attribution model supports the inference of meaning from data. Imagine a student one day going…

I recently noticed a proliferation of websites from organizations in my area openly offering to investigate ghosts. I thought it would be interesting to share my peculiar data-oriented slant on the subject. It is possible to approach the issue of ghosts from different perspectives. I have been taught to accept the…

I tend to examine the different roles played by data. For instance, when I work on computer code, I often ask myself what the presence of data is meant to accomplish. Sometimes the analysis is not at all straightforward or simple. In society and organizations, people exist and persist in the records as data. The data survives even as employees come and go. I therefore consider it important to regard the data and its environment as a system in itself, something that has a life all of its own.…