How to help management snoop on staff blogs

A snippet from an article suggesting a way of snooping on staff blogs from the the AAAI Spring 2006 Symposia on Computational Approaches to Analysing Weblogs found by Mathemagenic:

The disconformance interpretation is regarded as an abductive reasoning, which is operationalized by information flow computations. Using a socio-cognitively motivated representation of shared knowledge, and applying an appropriate information flow inference mechanism from a normative perspective, a mechanism to automatically detect potentially non-confirming blog entries is detailed.

I reckon we are safe guys - I haven't yet met a manager who would understand a word of that - and that includes me!

Comments

[David Tebbutt]

"...non-confirming blog entries..."

Tsk - surely they mean "non-conforming blog entries"

If they'd written in English they wouldn't have made such an obvious mistake.

[Tom Coates]

What the crap is that about.

[Jon Husband]

the words non-confirming jumped out at me, as in parsing for any verbiage that did not support the co. flag or denigrated what management is on about .. but I'm naturally suspicious ;-)

[Jon Husband]

the rest is, well ...

[David Weinberger]

Abductive reasoning? It takes reason hostage?

"Put down the English language and back away slowly..."

[AKMA]

Your Honor, let the record show that postmodern theorists arent the only ones who sometimes write abominable prose.

[fp]

Sorry, AKMA. Perhaps I am "otherizing" postmodernists when I point this out, but it appears that Bruza and Song are, well -- (postmodernists), and that would be where they learned to talk like that. This article, "Aboutness from a commonsense perspective," from the 2000 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE 51(12):1090-1105 kind of nails down those credentials.

[Mark Federman]

I just did a quick check on "abductive" in my handy-dandy, Bookshelf 2000 dictionary. It gave me a synonym: "repellent," which just about describes the selection.

Although I shudder when I realize that I actually understand what it means (yeah, I'm more or less an academic, doing organization theory).

[Bob H]

It might be translatable, but does that mean we must....?

[Tim Duckett]

If you hadn't mentioned the Symposium, I'd have assumed you'd read that in Pseuds Corner....

[Lilia Efimova / Mathemagenic]

Guess I have to clarify: "confirming" came as a typo from me and, being not native speaker, I didn't see it. The original abstract says "conforming". The paper in question is at http://kmi.open.ac.uk/publications/pdf/SS0603SongD.pdf

[Euan Semple]

Thanks Lilia

[Lee Bryant]

I am reminded of the fact that every wise old academic I have met speaks clearly and simply as prose, in contrast to the majority who write to create complexity where none is needed ... like this.

Anyway ... companies monitoring divergent individuals? Nah. They don't do that, do they ? ;-)

[christianhauck]

methinks it's a tekkie paper and hence allowed to use jargon (which helps the experts to exchange ideas more efficiently, at the same time increases coherence by keeping outsiders out). It does not appear to be postmodernist (confessing: I agree with many of their ideas).

And, yes, managers don't need to understand it. They may get the watered-down, easy-to-swallow version, and then they just need to BELIEVE that this automatic big-brother text interpreter works.

What I'd like to have - as an author - is to have such a tool under my control. Like the spell-checker that automatically underlines typos.

Just imagine what kinds of games could be played ...

[Paul Youlten]

I think he is saying:

"All your blogs are belong to us"