Monday, 28 December 2015
Update
As is obvious to the casual visitor, no blog posts have been added for over 4 years which reflects the fact that this blog has fallen into disuse. I am no longer interested in Penny Powers' eCademy (the site is long since down together with the service; it is a bit embarrassing that I was every convinced by it but at least I never spent any money on it despite (or perhaps because of) the high-pressure sales techniques they used). I no longer work for Triarchy Press although I maintain an interest in their publications and wellbeing.
Saturday, 8 January 2011
About Matthew
Today has been dominated by social media work and I've updated my profile, so this gives a flavour of what I'm about.
Taking the IMA test via eCademy, I came out as High Blue. I think there's a lot of truth in that. I'm generally perceived as warm and supportive, and I prefer personal contacts to large groups. I'm not very assertive and I can be very patient. I like helping people and find it a challenge to prioritize my own needs (though like all of us I can be selfish at times).
I find Kate Hopkinson's Landscape of the Mind profiles more detailed and illuminating. Kate has developed this work over more than 20 years as the core of her consultancy business. We expect to publish a book about her work at Triarchy Press by the end of this year. In this landscape, our preferences for exercising different inner skills are of most interest. My profile reveals an unusually strong preference for divergent thinking, which means I like to challenge existing conventions and ways of doing things as well as being comfortable with taking different viewpoints on an issue or organization. In common with other high divergers, I find it challenging to work in an organization that has very fixed ways of doing things, as many companies and institutions do. Conversely, organizations frequently don't know how to make best use of our divergent skills. Given the global challenges that look starker every day, we need as much fresh, creative thinking in our organizations as we can get, so we intend to use Landscape of the Mind to support that as far as we can.
My primary job at Triarchy is making contacts with new and existing authors, encouraging them to write for us and helping them develop their writing. This is very warming and rewarding work, and in the course of it I get to work with many different people. We specialize in writing that helps us understand and implement organizational and social transformation: Systems Thinking, Design Thinking, Cultural Theory, Complexity Theory. We like to work closely with people and organizations who do this work such as the International Futures Forum, the Ackoff Virtual Inquiry Center group and the LSE Complexity Group.
All that said, I spend much of my time engaged with digital technology. I trained in logic and the mathematics of computation and my PhD is in Mathematical Logic. Two years of post-doctoral work followed at the Laboratory for the Foundations of Computer Science at Edinburgh University. Then I lectured for 12 years in the Theory of Computation, Software Engineering and Logic at Sheffield University and worked with Michael Mendler to develop a new brand of modal logic. I taught A-level and GCSE-level Mathematics for a while as a private tutor and I've been an associate lecturer with the Open University for the last 6 years, currently teaching Mathematical methods and models.
Now I'm developing a Drupal website for Triarchy and I'm in charge of producing e-books. This has meant learning how to create and edit epub and mobi content and how to sell e-books on Amazon and through other outlets.
Other current interests are programming in Mathematica, mathematics, particularly geometry (see an animation created with Mathematica that illustrates my work in geometry; the coordinates have been calculated symbolically so they are exact), permaculture (we've begun by planting an orchard in a Fibonacci pattern on our land at Thornleigh Saddle), music (I'm fond of Bach, Beethoven, Alkan, Arvo Pärt, Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble, Julian Marshall and singing with Glorious Chorus), 5 rhythms, especially with Jo Hardy, the poetry of the Sufis Hafiz, Rumi and friends...
Taking the IMA test via eCademy, I came out as High Blue. I think there's a lot of truth in that. I'm generally perceived as warm and supportive, and I prefer personal contacts to large groups. I'm not very assertive and I can be very patient. I like helping people and find it a challenge to prioritize my own needs (though like all of us I can be selfish at times).
I find Kate Hopkinson's Landscape of the Mind profiles more detailed and illuminating. Kate has developed this work over more than 20 years as the core of her consultancy business. We expect to publish a book about her work at Triarchy Press by the end of this year. In this landscape, our preferences for exercising different inner skills are of most interest. My profile reveals an unusually strong preference for divergent thinking, which means I like to challenge existing conventions and ways of doing things as well as being comfortable with taking different viewpoints on an issue or organization. In common with other high divergers, I find it challenging to work in an organization that has very fixed ways of doing things, as many companies and institutions do. Conversely, organizations frequently don't know how to make best use of our divergent skills. Given the global challenges that look starker every day, we need as much fresh, creative thinking in our organizations as we can get, so we intend to use Landscape of the Mind to support that as far as we can.
My primary job at Triarchy is making contacts with new and existing authors, encouraging them to write for us and helping them develop their writing. This is very warming and rewarding work, and in the course of it I get to work with many different people. We specialize in writing that helps us understand and implement organizational and social transformation: Systems Thinking, Design Thinking, Cultural Theory, Complexity Theory. We like to work closely with people and organizations who do this work such as the International Futures Forum, the Ackoff Virtual Inquiry Center group and the LSE Complexity Group.
All that said, I spend much of my time engaged with digital technology. I trained in logic and the mathematics of computation and my PhD is in Mathematical Logic. Two years of post-doctoral work followed at the Laboratory for the Foundations of Computer Science at Edinburgh University. Then I lectured for 12 years in the Theory of Computation, Software Engineering and Logic at Sheffield University and worked with Michael Mendler to develop a new brand of modal logic. I taught A-level and GCSE-level Mathematics for a while as a private tutor and I've been an associate lecturer with the Open University for the last 6 years, currently teaching Mathematical methods and models.
Now I'm developing a Drupal website for Triarchy and I'm in charge of producing e-books. This has meant learning how to create and edit epub and mobi content and how to sell e-books on Amazon and through other outlets.
Other current interests are programming in Mathematica, mathematics, particularly geometry (see an animation created with Mathematica that illustrates my work in geometry; the coordinates have been calculated symbolically so they are exact), permaculture (we've begun by planting an orchard in a Fibonacci pattern on our land at Thornleigh Saddle), music (I'm fond of Bach, Beethoven, Alkan, Arvo Pärt, Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble, Julian Marshall and singing with Glorious Chorus), 5 rhythms, especially with Jo Hardy, the poetry of the Sufis Hafiz, Rumi and friends...
Drupal and ScribeFire
I'm building a new Drupal website for our company, Triarchy Press Ltd. One of the key features is that it will allow all Triarchy editors to create content for their books directly on the website. Drupal is a great web platform, but it does have some deficiencies. The main problem from a user's point of view, which I've verified by testing a prototype with all the staff here, is that it is easy to lose your work by navigating away from the page on which you are writing. For example, if you are new to Drupal and you've just spent an hour composing a book description (not previously noticing the "Save" or "Save and continue" buttons way down the page) and then you go to the page preview, it's an obvious move to click the back button to continue editing. Ooops! All that work is irretrievably gone, without any warnings (Drupal could take a hint from Wordpress here; if there's a quick fix, or a way of warning users as with Wordpress, I'd love to know it).
I've only just discovered the ScribeFire tool which can be used as an html composer for our new website as well as a blogging tool. Notes can be saved whether workiing online or offline. It could also be very useful for writing on iContact which doesn't have the cleanest or easiest interface for composing mailshots.
It's a really useful tool. Thanks, Penny Power of eCademy, for introducing us to it.
I've only just discovered the ScribeFire tool which can be used as an html composer for our new website as well as a blogging tool. Notes can be saved whether workiing online or offline. It could also be very useful for writing on iContact which doesn't have the cleanest or easiest interface for composing mailshots.
It's a really useful tool. Thanks, Penny Power of eCademy, for introducing us to it.
Sunday, 17 October 2010
Ah, missed my March deadline for my annual blog in 2010...
Displacement activity #4 this evening...
Life is just too full to blog...
Life is just too full to blog...
Saturday, 7 March 2009
Time to get blogging again
Encouraged by the example of my friend and colleague in the publishing business, Andrew Carey, I've kick-started a blog I began a year ago today.
I'm currently reading John Searle's fascinating and very accessible book The Construction of Social Reality. Like many of the books I've read since joining my late father's publishing business, it came off the shelves of his study in his home near the coast of Dorset, England. Searle is the first philosopher I've come across who embraces common sense as well as using his mental powers to delve deep below the surface of common wisdom. He takes the elements of life (thoughts, feelings, bodies, relationships, social facts and events, parties and so on) as given rather than trying to explain them away as many other Western philosophers seem to me to do.
In this book, Searle investigates the nature of institutional facts such as partnerships and personal possessions: their logical structure and the way they are constructed. To do this, he looks at the basic and very general formulation X counts as Y in C where X is a token of some kind, Y is the status of the token and C is the context within which X has the status Y. Examples are these deeds count as ownership of a home in 21st Century England and this piece of paper (e.g. a £1 note) counted as money in 20th Century Scotland. One of his most interesting conclusions is that institutional facts are essentially linguistic, so that institutions like marriage and money are only possible in a world with language. Even in cases where institutional facts do not seem to need language (for example, a boundary line separating two territories) he argues persuasively that they are inherently linguistic (in this case, the line is a symbol denoting the boundary in a similar way to how the English word "boundary" denotes the same object).
I am not quite sure yet what fascinates me so much about this work apart from the way it is simultaneously readable (almost: entertaining) and very general. It makes me think differently about Cultural Theory, for one thing. The five solidarities of cultural theory give rise to five very different flavours of institutional facts. What social status means to the egalitarian is very different to what it means to the hierarchist. Searle concentrates on hierarchical facts (such as the fact of Barack Obama being President of the United States) but I think his approach applies equally well to the other flavours.
For another, it reminds me of the ideas we were playing with when I worked on developing an unusual form of modality within mathematical logic with Michael Mendler (it is called Lax Logic). It was developed to represent rigorously the idea of truth within context.
I hope to clarify my take on this book later. In any case, I recommend it highly to anyone with an interest in philosophy as a powerful antidote to any feeling that Western philosophy is dry, boring and irrelevant to everyday life.
I'm currently reading John Searle's fascinating and very accessible book The Construction of Social Reality. Like many of the books I've read since joining my late father's publishing business, it came off the shelves of his study in his home near the coast of Dorset, England. Searle is the first philosopher I've come across who embraces common sense as well as using his mental powers to delve deep below the surface of common wisdom. He takes the elements of life (thoughts, feelings, bodies, relationships, social facts and events, parties and so on) as given rather than trying to explain them away as many other Western philosophers seem to me to do.
In this book, Searle investigates the nature of institutional facts such as partnerships and personal possessions: their logical structure and the way they are constructed. To do this, he looks at the basic and very general formulation X counts as Y in C where X is a token of some kind, Y is the status of the token and C is the context within which X has the status Y. Examples are these deeds count as ownership of a home in 21st Century England and this piece of paper (e.g. a £1 note) counted as money in 20th Century Scotland. One of his most interesting conclusions is that institutional facts are essentially linguistic, so that institutions like marriage and money are only possible in a world with language. Even in cases where institutional facts do not seem to need language (for example, a boundary line separating two territories) he argues persuasively that they are inherently linguistic (in this case, the line is a symbol denoting the boundary in a similar way to how the English word "boundary" denotes the same object).
I am not quite sure yet what fascinates me so much about this work apart from the way it is simultaneously readable (almost: entertaining) and very general. It makes me think differently about Cultural Theory, for one thing. The five solidarities of cultural theory give rise to five very different flavours of institutional facts. What social status means to the egalitarian is very different to what it means to the hierarchist. Searle concentrates on hierarchical facts (such as the fact of Barack Obama being President of the United States) but I think his approach applies equally well to the other flavours.
For another, it reminds me of the ideas we were playing with when I worked on developing an unusual form of modality within mathematical logic with Michael Mendler (it is called Lax Logic). It was developed to represent rigorously the idea of truth within context.
I hope to clarify my take on this book later. In any case, I recommend it highly to anyone with an interest in philosophy as a powerful antidote to any feeling that Western philosophy is dry, boring and irrelevant to everyday life.
Saturday, 8 March 2008
Fairflowers blog (first post)
This is a new blog and about my fifth attempt to enter the blogosphere. Currently I work with a small publishing company called Triarchy Press Limited. We are based in Axminster, Devon, UK and it is a brilliant place to work. I'm following my late father's initiative in setting up the company in 2005; it needed me after his sudden death last December. Characteristically, he refused to accept the usual sluggish pace of publishing that gave rise to his first book (Creative Compartments) and set up the company to publish his latest (and, sadly, last) book (The Three Ways of Getting Things Done).
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