I am reading this book after 72 years ago: I was reading the chapter of Erwin Schroedinger’s book, What is life?, where he asserts that for mind, it is always now. Mind is one, he says, singulare tantum. If I say, his take on Mind and its independence from time is on a par with (what is attributed to) Emma Noether’s formulation of energy conservation, then it implies that mind is like that abstract quantity (in the words of Richard Feynman), 'energy', and time is simply (one of its infinite) symmetry: change mind in anyway respective to time, and you will end up finding the same mind! It is amazing to see such thinking from both Noether and Schroedinger, that in my view are meaningfully correlated. This is not me who is talking about mind, this is Erwin Schroedinger, his name goes to the foundation of quantum mechanics.  

The hidden mathematical object in the model of project management:

Project Management is a relatively new and young profession with an evolving body of knowledge. I have been involved with project management, mostly major projects, since 1995. The nexus of processes and phases in the development of these projects has preoccupied my mind for a long time. I used to see these meaningful relations as interesting patterns, then as modalities of systems engineering until I learned a little bit about the mathematical concepts in matrix algebra and eventually late Ron Atkin's ideas drove the subject home: the consensus model of the project management has an 'incidence structure'! This means there is a logical relationship with mathematical groundings between Processes  and Knowledge Areas of the PMI normative book. Alternatively (and with a bit of abstraction), there is a map between knowing well a subject area and performing equally well that area. Philosophically minded readers can see this as a direct hint a the mutually inclusive, self-referential incidence structure showing how spatial domain of the knowledge and its temporal process of fulfillment are linked.  

That would be fine to think of this practice in an alternate algebraic process but does it have any value and utility for the actual practice of this profession? I think it does with far ranging consequences. 

Alireza

100 years since Ferdinand Saussure's major work in structural basis of our language. While thinking through the link between algebraic geometry and theory of signs, I met the foundational views of late Joseph Goguen's Algebraic Semiosis. I am still reading through his work, but the proposal for those curious about the algebra rules of systems theory of signs, semiotic, is thrilling.

We need to think and act about our end products, labeled as useless, the junk!

256 years since our much talked about industrial revolution, the same period to date also is found out after the facts to be an extremely rapid rise of global pollution, at all scales through impacts of technology and tools unheard of in our record history. Reign in Global Pollution using the latest we have from management, technology and stored knowledge farms. How to do it? The simplest is to start from homes. Quantify aggregated streams of trash production. Identify paths of reuse. Estimate loss to production industry. Understand the long term guarantee for profit vs. accelerated unforeseen effects of pollution of water, air, soil, habitats and growth of cities, etc. The knowledge gained from projection of our best data, models, and measurements and predictions should be used to act as brakes or of the similar order of multi wedges to add awareness to a vast global system that relies on the resources: Nature and its inhabitants. Bring responsible-accountable AI bots into the products and programs to align with the growing intelligence manufactured and forecasted to emerge.  

This is my partial pitch to MIT Solve...

I will follow up by connecting the dots, and relate this proposal to our second law of thermodynamics, if we care about the work done over a closed loop of energy/heat exchange with at least one reservoir, morally, the waste burden on the prime source of all of our energies, food to fuel, our planet, has to be factored in. Do we care?  

Naturally occurring super conductors would imply super conductivity at natural temperature, better said, ambient (dry bulb) temperature, something possible or non sense? How could we ever rule out the possibility? What makes me to make this assertion?

Indeed, I know a little bit of Raymond Chiao's works in his efforts at a transducer for gravitational waves into super conductivity, a very profound thought of an experiment, in fact is is conceptually speaking, a simplicial construct, meaning, an object that (if meeting all algebraic definitions of a simplex) showing facets/faces also edges, to us, that also would harbor, correlations among field theoretic aspects of physics, come to think of super conductivity, a quantum mechanical phenomenon, best described in collective behavior physics, ie highly correlated systems (like Cooper pairs in  BCS theory of super conductivity) to be at all have direct relevance to a classical field theory like (Albert Einstein's) General Relativity, GR for short here. It will be an astounding finding, in my analysis, a non expert in both fields but purely inquisitive in the field, how a quantum fluid condensate like Cooper pairs (the phononic waves that carry heat, roughly speaking in a conductor) would be linked (phenomenologically speaking) to gravitational field physics.

A

What do you think of a project life cycle...? Well, whatever you think, you'd better check your idea against the global reference of project management maturity model, sec 2.4. It starts from point A and ends at B and runs along a series of phases until it is closed. Where is the cycle in that definition? Isn't a cycle a closed loop? I have objected to this idea that does imply a closure and means a serial process, there is no end meeting its start. Evidently this is a naive reading of the definition of life cycle or closure. The 18 months of the closeout phase of a project is not that fresh starting date, 18 months ago, project, people, and their collective memories have advanced a lot in the space of learning, doing differently better next time and of course, their ground where they built their project is moving all the time in spacetime, we say, we do not care about these things, that would be fine. But still we need to say what we really mean, why not say instead project life series? My point is with Ed Deming's plan-do-check-act (or plan-do-study-act) and the geometrical basis of the life cycle that is not talked about nor communicated. I have a conjecture that life cycle must be closed otherwise you could walk into the next project with more gaps and holes in your understanding, there are methods and processes to close this complete phase, even missed on the reference guide of project management. Geometrically you can say that Euler characteristic or (PM BOK model of project) life cycle is one, 1! I have explained my reasoning in my path finder paper.

The idea of a simplex

Simplicial: from or of simplex, a simple shape like a triangle; a triangle, a connected three-sides, is an example of 2-simplex, that is how we learned to draw a triangle on a piece of paper. From three vertices, we can create at most a triangle, a 2-simplex. In three dimensions, we can trace with four vertices, a tetrahedron, also called a 3-simplex. In four dimensions, we will have a 4-simplex, think of a 3-simplex with one vertex located in a dimension of time. Our idea of spacetime, a mathematical structure of four dimensions, three dimensions of space, and a fourth one for time can also be similar to a 4-simplex. Of course this is an approximation. There a lot of technicalities involved for example when you make a statement like: spacetime is a 4-simplex! If you could really prove that consistent across physics and mathematics, then you have done a lot. Here, I am interested in the relational aspects of simplexes (or simplices) extended to higher dimensions. By higher dimension, I am not necessarily talking about hyper space or a super space, your typical Excel table of M rows by N columns is already a multi-dimensional space. Ron Atkin was a British mathematician who explored this kind of thinking and wrote about them. I will talk about his work and my ideas on this blog. I think he was way ahead of his time! Strangely, he is not well known outside of his immediate community.

In my engineering and project management career of ~ 23 years, I have met a lot of people from different disciplines and crafts, construction managers are my favorite, they have their hands into the real thing, putting into the ground what engineers (working in offices) think they built and of course they did but all in virtual realm and on a paper. A construction manager, the good ones, will enjoy putting together a properly designed and integrated system, they see things in action, the time sequence of how a plant is built up from bare ground up to the top of the finished system. It’s quite amazing. There is a gap in culture, knowledge, and approach between the construction and engineering community. One of the effective ways of tightening this gap or make a bridge across this discipline chasm is to engage construction team early in design phase. We call this constructability reviews.