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Colin Johnson’s blog


Archive for February, 2017

Professional Practice

Friday, February 17th, 2017

Is there such a thing as a set of skills that apply across all of the professions? When I first started to come across (still rather rare) university departments of “professional practice”, I was bemused. Professional practice in what? Is there really enough common to being a nurse, barrister, dentist, accountant, town planner, occupational therapist, etc. etc. to call all of their activities “professional practice”? These seem, at least initially, to consist almost entirely of a lot of profession-specific skills/knowledge/understanding.

But, over time, I’ve started to wonder. Perhaps we are at the stage with professional practice schools that we were at with business schools a few decades ago. There was certainly a cynicism at one point that “business” could be taught generically. What business? Is there really enough in common to running a bassoon factory, a chain of gyms, an online career consultancy, an au pair agency, etc. etc. to call all of their activities “business”? At one point, these would have been seen as needing radically different skill-sets, but over time we have started to realise that some common understanding of finance, accountancy, PR, marketing, project management, strategy, staff appraisal, etc. are useful in all areas of business, alongside a knowledge of the specific business domain.

Perhaps there is something to be gained by bringing together dental nurses, architects, and solicitors for part of their education, and having some common core of education in e.g. dealing with clients. Perhaps the idea of a generic professional practice school isn’t such a ludicrous idea after all.

The Bleakest Shop in Christendom?

Saturday, February 11th, 2017

A shop called “BARGAIN BOOZE” is pretty bleak, but at least you know what you are getting. To buy this shop, and decide to rebrand by covering up the word “Bargain” using parcel tape, and on another part of the sign tearing off the word “BARGAIN”, so that the shop is now simply called “BOOZE”, is distinctly more depressing. (This was in Sherwood; it has now all been refurbished!).

BOOZE

Contradiction in Law

Saturday, February 11th, 2017

Why aren’t more legal-regulatory systems in conflict? A typical legal decision involves a number of different legal, contractual, and regulatory systems, each of which consists of thousands of statements of law and precedents, that latter only fuzzily fitting the current situation, with little meta-law to describe how these different systems and statements interact. Why, therefore, is it very rarely, if at all, that court cases and other legal decisions end up with a throwing up of hands and the judgement-makers saying “this says this, this says this, they contradict, therefore we cannot come to a well-defined decision”. Somehow, we avoid this situation—decisions are come to fairly definitively, albeit sometimes controversially. I cannot imagine that people framing laws and regulations have a sufficiently wide knowledge of the entire system to enable them to add decisions without contradiction. Perhaps something else is happening; the “frames” (in the sense of the frame problem in AI) are sufficiently constrained and non-interacting that it is possible to make statements without running the risk of contradiction elsewhere.

If we could understand this, could we learn something useful about how to build complex software systems?