It's a weird paradox. Despite management's obsession with hard numbers, many organisations are a fact-free zone, swirling with untested assumptions. Horrifying sums of money are committed on superstition or whim. Thus, fact-based management is really triple-distilled common sense. It's hard. It requires judgment, practice, help, humanity and wisdom. It needs scepticism and experimentation. It needs reasoned optimism and learning, and, as F Scott Fitzgerald put it, the ability to function while holding two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time.

Bosses in love with claptrap and blinded by ideologies

They call it hyperthymestic syndrome.

"Here's a woman who has very strong memories, but she has very strong memories of things for which I have no memory at all," McGaugh says.

That became particularly clear one day when he asked her out of the blue if she knew who Bing Crosby was.

"I wasn't sure she would know, because she's 40 and wasn't of the Bing Crosby era," he says.

But she did.

"Do you know where he died?" McGaugh asked.

"Oh yes, he died on a golf course in Spain," she answered, and provided the day of the week and the date when the crooner died.

Woman With Perfect Memory Baffles Scientists

When you pay attention to something (and when you ignore something), data is created. This "attention data" is a valuable resource that reflects your interests, your activities and your values, and it serves as a proxy for your attention.

Our Mission

1. Empower people to exert greater control over their "attention data," i.e. any records reflecting what they have paid attention to and what they have ignored. We accomplish this by promoting the principles of user control, by distributing our Attention Recorder, and by supporting the development of other appropriate tools, standards and practices.

2. Educate people about the value of their attention and the importance of attention data.

3. Build a community of individuals and organizations that will guarantee users' rights to own, move, and exchange their attention data, in a transparent environment that gives users the freedom to decide how their data will be used.

AttentionTrust.org

Be known wherever you go

Create an Opinity profile, your online self-portrait. Put whatever information you want in your profile. Using your profile, you can lower barriers, gain instant respect, become better known.

Buy with confidence, sell with ease

If you're trying to sell something through online classifieds, you can show people your history as a seller, no matter where it comes from.

Make better choices, get better dates

If you're using an online dating service, you can present yourself as you want to be seen, and you can ask others to show you more about themselves.

Blog your profile and profile your blog

Increase your blog readership. You can show your recent blog articles on your Opinity profile page to encourage people to look at your blog. And you can put your Opinity signature on your blog so that people can find out more about you.

Founded in 2002, Opinity is the first online personal reputation services company. Based in San Jose, California, the company's management team has 40 years of combined experience in high technology. Wongyu Ted Cho, chief executive officer, and Doyon Kim, chief product officer, founded successful Internet start-ups Dialpad Communications and Serome Technology, growing large-scale web services from inception to acquisition.

Opinity

This wiki supports a community of Individuals and Organizations volunteering time and resources to achieve a common mission:

To establish external governance, organization and oversight, which the Identity Gang and Berkman are uniquely equipped to provide for the ongoing conversation about what is needed for a user-centric identity metasystem that supports the whole marketplace, especially individual users.

Identity Gang - The Identity Gang

Hans Stuck races a race prepared M3 around Nurburgring.

Hans Stuck at the 'ring - Google Video

Our most important, and sometimes most severe, judges are our subordinates. That is a fact I discovered early in my military career. It is, unfortunately, a lesson Donald Rumsfeld seems incapable of learning.

A Top-Down Review for the Pentagon - New York Times

Mr. Bush has refused to hold himself or any of his top political appointees accountable for those catastrophic errors. Indeed, he has promoted many of them. And this is not an isolated problem. It's just one example, among many, of how this president's men run no risk of being blamed for anything that happens, no matter how egregious.

The Joy of Being Blameless - New York Times

Filled with harpsichord music and Freudian passions, "Puzzlehead" reveals the selfishness of creation with style, originality and the understanding that even a tin man can have a heart.

Puzzlehead - Review - Movies - New York Times

What are the consequences of young men discovering that even if they do less, they have more options? And what messages are we sending young women that they must, nearly 25 years after the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, be even more accomplished than men to gain admission to the nation's top colleges? These are questions that admissions officers like me grapple with.

To All the Girls I've Rejected - New York Times