Knowledge Matters™

Today is Hogmanay, which is a Scottish word for the last day of the year. It heralds the start of the New Year and the end of the silly season – thank goodness! Tonight I will celebrate the coming of 2008 with friends and family, and I will play my bagpipes. Of course I will play Auld Lang Syne at midnight, and no doubt Amazing Grace at some other time in the course of the night. I intensely dislike both tunes along with Scotland the Brave, The Scottish Soldier, and The Flower of Scotland. I could add a few more but you get my drift.

Why do I dislike these tunes? Probably because I have played them several thousand times in my lifetime, and almost certainly because I have heard them several thousand times played or sung badly! I continue to play these tunes only because the ignorant masses don’t know anything else and it’s all they want to hear. I play them because it gives me a chance to introduce listeners to some of the better music, and indeed the great music.

This line of thought got me thinking about knowledge management. ...

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Professor Robin Dunbar has researched the size and structure of human social networks. This research, combined with his work on primates, provides some interesting insights into our cognitive cache (to use a machine metaphor). To generalise his work seemingly we have circles of about 5, 15, 35, 80 and 150 people, which correspond to our family, our close friends, our colleagues and acquaintances, our club and business affiliations, and finally our village or neighbourhood. (For more information on these network circles review the papers on Dunbar’s website ). Now this work has implications for all sorts of business initiatives, including event management.

Take for example conferences. I suggest the ideal conference size is between 35 and 80 people if one wants to network and learn. We have all been to conferences of 150 or more people where we feel lost and tend to revert to our known social contacts rather than mix. Recent commentary on the actKM list suggests actKM 2007 was the best conference ever. Perhaps this was in part because the conference was attended by less than 50 people and allowed intimate interaction? My own experience at ACKMIDS 2005, PACIS 2007 and ICKCC 2007 would seem to confirm this view. I enjoyed ACKMIDS because it was focussed and small. PACIS 2007 and ICKCC 2007 were valuable but far more impersonal. Further because of their size I was unable to network effectively and unable to attend some of the presentations because they were held concurrently. ...

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I have played bagpipes since I was a teenager, and over the years have collected many music books. Before the advent of computers books were difficult to source and buy. Now they are easy to find, but the quality of the music has in many cases declined because it is computer generated. Computers of course produce mathematically precise but soulless music. Just listen to my tune Black Pat (Pádraig Dhub) , which I have recorded using a computer, to see what I mean. The computer cannot capture the nuances I intended – it plays it exactly as written.

Bagpipe music notation as we know it today stems from about 1830, with Angus Mackay’s early attempts to record music in the Western style on a stave from the oral tradition, otherwise known as canntaireachd . Piping has always had an oral tradition because of the need to memorise the music. Pipers used to chant or sing the tune, but today this has largely been superseded with written music. It is sad to see the decline of canntaireachd, or even ‘bastard canntaireachd’ which I learnt, because it captured the nuances of how the tune was meant to sound. While staff notation makes the music available to the masses, it also loses something in the translation. I hear young players who are technically brilliant but musically inept, because they play precisely and mechanically, but in so doing fail to ‘feel’ the music. ...

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Wee Willie's Jig . This is the first tune I ever wrote. I have played it in many competitions over the years, and have won on a number of occasions. Wee Willie is Bill Corcoran. Bill taught me the bagpipes and gave me a love of the Irish style of slow airs and jigs. You can listen to the tune here .

A harmony for Wee Willie's Jig . This piece is a harmony for Wee Willie's Jig. It sounds dreadful by itself! You can listen to the tune here .

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Major Peta Durant-Law, RAANC . I wrote this march to commemorate the occasion of Captain Peta Durant-Law's promotion to field rank on Friday the 20th of November 1998. Peta of course is my wife and today is a Lieutenant Colonel in the Royal Australian Army Nursing Corps . You can listen to the tune here .

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