Thoughts on Entropy, Voltage and Learning

Introduction

Some people think that there are patterns in existence that can be re-used between various disciplines like Physics, Religion and Business. This article explores the similarity of thought between several domains and tries to see how understanding in one area can help understanding in other areas.

Entropy in Physics

In physics, the concept of Entropy can have the following meanings: the degree of chaos, or disorder, in a system; or the amount of useable energy in a system. All physical systems tend towards states of least order, or maximum chaos. That is why eggs break, but can never spontaneously un-break, and why when a glass of water spills, it runs into a flat puddle and does not sit on the floor in a glass-shaped globule.

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Nancy Kline presented Coaching in a Thinking Environment

Not having heard of, or listened to, Nancy Kline before, I approached the prospect of this one hour lecture with two things in mind – firstly to try to understand the context and content of her worldview, and how it fitted in with mine, and secondly to critically evaluate the new knowledge in terms of my current knowledge set, with a view to either expanding the latter, or marginalizing the former.

It seems Ms Kline has developed a framework for leadership called The Thinking Environment (it seems to have little TM signs next to it, kind of implying that it has been bottled as a product of sorts). The basic observation of this framework is “The quality of everything people do depends on the quality of the thinking that they do first�. This leads to a question (once again, as per the framework), “How do we help each other think for themselves, with rigour, imagination and courage?�

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“Can You Trust the Internet?”

A thought-provoking piece was presented by analyst Tony Rattey on Monday 13 March 2006 on SAFM, on the topic of “Can you truct the Internet?” I have some extension that I would like to offer.
Regarding search engine manipulation, I think that it is important to note that not all search engines operate in the same way. Some, such as Yahoo! operate on the basis of simple text search and the word counts. Others, such as Google, work by referring to the number of references to a page in order to determine its relative importance, amongst all other pages that have similar word counts. The question therefore, is whether the search engine manipulation is based on creating fictitious references to pages based on existing pages so that they seem to be unique pointers to the sites that are being targeted for better ratings. This method could be effective if this was the end of the line. However, the way these reverse-reference algorithms work is to not only count the number of references back to a particular page, but to also rank the importance of the page that points to the target site in question. So how are the importance of these pages determined? In the same way as the importance of the end pages. Therefore, if the pages are spuriously created, and in order for them to be unique such that the algorithm does not see them as copies, and thereby ignore them, these spurious pages would themselves have to have many other pages pointing to them. The effort to construct such a chain of references with sufficient weight (bearing in mind that it is essentially an exponential tree) to influence a search engine outcomes is massive, even using automated methods. This is not too say that it is impossible, but difficult. The above practice is known as GoogleBombing.
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