You know 2....?

Planet Earth

2008-03-23T21:42:00.005+01:00

Acquired the 5 DVD box. Saw it presented in a shop on a Panasonic 150 inch (!!) plasma TV (80.000 Euro...). On our modest TV at home it is still visually gobsmacking, although admittedly, the storyline is not really educating. Generates lots of discussion in the household nevertheless!

Born on a blue day

2008-03-11T19:10:00.003+01:00

Reading this at the moment: Daniel Tammet's Born on a Blue Day, fascinating, somebody who can actually tell about how he thinks and, indeed what extraordinary ways to reason he has.

Away for the week, again

2008-03-09T19:03:00.004+01:00

Mon March 10: Deventer-Schiphol-Newcastle-Cleator (434.7 miles, as the crow flies, so add another 100+ miles for the distance actually travelled)
Tue/Fri: Cleator-Sellafield v.v.
Fri March 14: Sellafield-Newcastle-Schiphol-Deventer

Skybrary

2008-03-08T14:34:00.003+01:00

At ATC2008 in Amsterdam, www.skybrary.aero will be presented by EUROCONTROL. The result of the effort of many (including a little bit of mine), this wiki-based site promises to provide a significant contribution to the sharing of aviation safety knowledge.

Dyslexia and spelling checkers

2007-05-25T13:54:00.000+02:00

FOUR YORE I's ONLY
I have a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye cannot sea
When eye strike a quay to right a word
I weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait away
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two late
And eye can put the error rite
Its rarely, rarely grate
I've run this poem threw it
I'm shore your pleased two noIts letter perfect in it's weigh
MY CHEQUER TOLLED ME SEW!

(Sauce unknown)

One the family members has been diagnosed with dyslexia. I started to look for some material and found this on several sites dedicated to dyslexia (starting with a site of the West Cumbria Dyslexia Association, a pure coincidence). I certainly do recognise the phonetic approach...

Dyirbal

2007-05-21T23:46:00.000+02:00

George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things booktitle was based on this language. Fascinating. Lakoff's work (including Metaphors We Live By) was pretty cool in my AI days, but there was no Wikipedia article on the Dyirbal language back then!

Wiki

2007-05-16T17:02:00.000+02:00

We're currently involved in setting up a wiki for aviation safety knowledge. We're using the mediawiki platform for this. Look and feel, content structure and content will change over time, but isn't that what it is all about? Thusfar, it has proven to be relatively hassle free. In the meantime, I learn a lot about aviation safety, in particular the Air Traffic Management part of it. Also, I'm really looking forward to seeing this wiki develop a community of contributors around it, resulting in high quality knowledge in this interesting field.

Project Retrospectives

2007-05-15T22:09:00.000+02:00

I was rereading this book on Project Retrospectives on the train today and found it (again) quite useful, despite the software development context that the author puts project retrospectives in. For all knowledge management professionals who seek some alternatives exercises in their lessons learning workshops.

FlightMemory - Where your memories fly!

2007-04-13T21:41:00.000+02:00

Nice one. May be somebody should do a TrafficJamMemory (where did I spend all that time in my car?) or StandinLineMemory (where did I have to wait so long?) or WaitingforaTrainMemory or BadFirstNightinaHotelMemory?

FlightMemory - Where your memories fly!

The map is not the territory

2006-11-24T20:21:00.000+01:00

In a recent discussion about NLP (remember that? wasn't that a thing big back in the nineties, although I've noticed it is still quite something in sales and customer contact ('agent', arghh) training) I had recently, I became aware of the similarities with expertise mapping that was popular in the eighties, but now is back again as one of the solutions to capture knowledge of scarce (and often ageing) experts in organisations. Mapping expertise is basically about trying to understand the models that an expert is using to solve problems. These models may be as varied as for example maps of people that can be contacted to provide help, logical structures such as cause-effect links to help refine the problem or decision trees to actually solve the problem itself.

An expertise mapper is like a neurolinguistic programmer, who stops his work after the 'modelling phase', without the ambition to reprogram...

Of course, the map is never the territory (to quote somebody who is also quoted a lot in the NLP world), but we must assume that experts have developed better maps than us normal earthlings, so the effort may be worthwhile.

Knowledge auditing from a risk perspective

2006-11-20T21:07:00.000+01:00

Many clients ask us to help undertake knowledge audits (with a focus on critical analysis of the organisation's knowledge portfolio) or knowledge management audits, with a focus on analysing knowledge management processes). In any case, I have learned that a risk-based approach helps to better appreciate an organisation's dependencies on its knowledge assets (either human or artefacts). Asking questions such as: 'what will happen to us if we leave things as is in this particular knowledge area?', 'what are the costs if our experts in this knowledge area leave our organisation?'

You might think that such a risk-based approach results in overly 'protective' knowledge management strategies and implementations, focusing on more capture and securing of knowledge assets.

However, processes of knowledge generation and renewal to create new business opportunities could be seen as equally important from a risk perspective: not paying attention to opportunities is a risk as well!

Therefore, auditing activities should preferably analyse risks and opportunities relating to current levels of knowledge quality, knowledge capture and knowledge sharing in key knowledge areas.

Risks may vary as much as opportunities may differ: on the negative side you may find that your main experts become overburdened, that the speed of acquiring new competences is too slow, that lessons learned are not captured so that costly mistakes are repeated. On the positive side, you may discover that you hold some important IP that could be exploited in a new context and you may conclude that if you would link up some teams in your organisation, time-to-delivery could improve substantially.

Once you get a handle on risks and opportunities such as these, your knowledge management action plan has found its foundation and you can start to set goals for each of your key knowledge areas.

Big red thing

2006-11-18T21:13:00.000+01:00

Flying back from Zagreb via Munich on wednesday evening last week, I was looking out of the window of the aircraft and noticed a big red object shining in the dark. It took me some time to realise it was the Allianz Arena, radiating that there was a Bayern Munchen home game going on while we passed it in the sky. Beautiful sight and amazing architecture!

Why Zagreb? I was addressing an audience there in friendly Croatia....this time I delivered a talk on implementing learning cycles in business processes.

Back on the blog, addressing the world ;-)

2006-11-05T16:57:00.000+01:00

After a long period of absence, a sign of life. After a month's holiday in France in August, returned to business and immediately got flooded in all sorts of projects (as usual). Work took me as far as Bangkok, where I worked with a group of very friendly and hospitable Thai, delivering a course in knowledge auditing and knowledge mapping. Some action pics were taken during a public seminar over there on Oct 20, small me on stage in the distance..:

New to the game

2006-07-02T22:05:00.000+02:00

Just created a quick collage with some pictures I took yesterday in Amsterdam. As you can see, I'm new to the game of digital photography (I have had a digital camera for years, but didn't really use it that much). Now we have four in the house, causing a ripple effect: we need new computers, new screens, photo editing software, battery chargers, more disk storage and possibly a new TV....

Categories: photos

Flickr as a content migration tool?

2006-06-29T19:05:00.000+02:00

Hmmm, I was wondering whether you could use Flickr to temporarily store a photo set (with tags per photo) and then later download the entire set with the metadata still intact and linked to the photos. I initially thought that was impossible.....

It would be good to have the easy tagging facilities of Flickr to process a set of photos by tagging them and then download them with the new metadata attached to each photo and then migrate the content to a content management system.

Apparently tools such as FlickrDown or FlickrExplorer should give you the missing link: download the photos and get the Flickr tags linked to the photos stored in e.g. iptc/exif fields, but I haven't tried that yet. So, no verdict yet.

Categories: photos, categorisation

QQUIP visualiser now live

2006-06-29T08:28:00.000+02:00

A nice project I helped materialise has now resulted in a website with a fine visualiser front-end. Interested? Check the QQUIP Website.

Categories: visualisation, KM, categorisation

Back to the future

2006-06-29T08:06:00.000+02:00

My colleague (to the far left here) undug this little picture of our visit to XEROX Parc (now simply PARC) in Palo Alto, probably 8 years ago.

I'm to the right, still very young...

What hasn't changed though, is our common interest in fun projects and extraordinary concepts and technologies.

Categories: AI, photos

ZOOMMMMM

2006-05-24T19:23:00.000+02:00

Cool zooming in on this face!

Categories: Photos, Visualisation

Thames Path Run

2006-05-21T21:13:00.000+02:00

In London, for business. Near London Bridge. Running gear in the bag, allowing me to finally run part of the southern Thames Path. Starting at London Bridge up to Greenland Pier and back, a really interesting route. First past London City Hall:

then passing Tower Bridge through Butler's Wharf:

and on to Rotherhithe, passing the Engine House of the Brunels (father and son), serving during the construction of the first Thames tunnel (a fantastic story by itself):

Continuing along the Thames, on a path that has multiple sections like this:

You'll pass nice pubs like this (the Angel in Rotherhithe):

You'll progress in the direction of Greenland Pier and you'll have a nice view across the river overlooking Canary Wharf:

On the way back a glorious view of Tower Bridge in the evening sunshine....

(I didn't make the pics, I just ran....)

Categories: Running, London

It could get worse

2006-04-23T21:57:00.000+02:00

Extreme driving lessons in Saigon. Great spotter's place for Honda Club affectionados, though.

Categories: distributed, intelligence, traffic

A pledge for distributed intelligence

2006-04-21T22:08:00.000+02:00

If you watch this episode of India Driving then you'll be certainly convinced that distributed intelligence is a good way to solve a complex problem!

Categories: AI, intelligence, distributed, control

Repertory grid

2006-04-14T17:24:00.000+02:00

The Centre for Person-Computer Studies provides a free copy of a basic repgrid tool that you can use to elicit expert classification knowledge. Download the tool and use the 'elicit grid' script to guide you through a typical bottom-up knowledge acquisition session.

Categories: KM, knowledge-acquisition

Big, bigger, biggest?

2006-04-02T18:13:00.000+02:00

I was wondering: what is the biggest online community in the world, let's say defined as having the largest number of registered users on a given day in a year? Big Boards gives some insight, but having read an article about Bebo, the numbers given by Big Boards are dwindled by the membership numbers of these social networking places: Bebo should have around 22 million registered users, MyPlaces.com is said to have 50 million user names on record. South Koreans flock together in CyWorld in their millions. Couldn't find a definite answer though. Another question would be: who has the largest number of person data on (electronic?) record? The Chinese post office?

Any 'official' rankings out there?

Categories: km, communities

Knowledge recycling

2006-03-29T19:28:00.000+02:00

This week is becoming a somewhat melancholic trip down competency lane, as I'm reminded, triggered by several client requests, to work I undertook 8 to 12 years ago. I rediscovered (trawling server archives and even floppy disks) my own work in teaching interaction design, knowledge modelling (working with sound engineers and speech therapists as case material, quite eclectic) and group facilitation. One of my favourite subjects in the course I taught on interaction design were the Gestalt principles, well explained by this text (the picture in this post is a teaser).

Seeing all my slides and other teaching material, there's lots that can easily be reused, and I'm sure it will be! More later.

Categories: education, KM

Scenario thinking for schools

2006-03-26T21:28:00.000+02:00

ISP Wijzer, a Dutch advisory service for schools seeking support for their internet provision recently organised a scenario thinking session, to which yours truly contributed. Report found here, including a podcast (all in Dutch).

Categories: Scenariothinking, Education

Learning in and from projects

2006-03-22T08:21:00.000+01:00

In a session yesterday evening with a group of senior project managers , I presented a project learning framework that addresses learning as an indivual, as a team and as an organisation as a whole and we discussed a number of processes (e.g. the corporate learning cycle driving the construction of a corporate memory) and methods (such as AARs) to facilitate and connect learning at these 3 levels. However, despite all structures, processes, methods (that certainly help!): true learning begins with being open and inquisitive as an individual and involves a certain kind of risk taking. Stepping out of your own comfort zone into those areas were you can't entirely rely on routine is a prerequisite for learning as individuals and teams. But there's more: being explicit about what you hope to learn before you start to explore unknown territory (and that requires you know what you don't know!) and accept feedback from yourself and your team are just as important.

Learning from projects as an organisation requires an environment that allows for variation (well, euphism for tolerating mistakes...), that captures key learning points from single teams, that propagates new knowledge faster than simply moving people around and above all: a strategic learning agenda.

Being able to answer the questions: which projects will deliver us new knowledge that is crucial to us? how must we share that knowledge? with whom? will help an organisation to use its projects not only as deliverable generators but as key nowledge sources as well.

At the programme management level is it even more important to be serious about learning, since programmes are by definition areas outside the comfort zone of an organisation.....

Categories: LL, KM, learning

100 Lessons Learned for Project Managers

2006-03-19T17:48:00.000+01:00

NASA - 100 Lessons Learned for Project Managers. Nice list. Wonder how this crosschecks against e.g. PMI's OPM3 best practices or for that matter, OGC's best practice briefing on causes for project failure.

Categories: LL, KM

Tiltshifting

2006-03-17T18:54:00.000+01:00

If you want reality to look like a miniature mock up, you can use tiltshifting photography (by using a special lens, or by postprocessing in Photoshop). The results are looking like it was when you were lying on the floor watching your train set as a small boy....some nice tiltshifting examples are here

Categories: tiltshift, photos

Automagical tagging

2006-03-17T18:10:00.000+01:00

I'm trying to get some sort of categorisation to work with the blogger platform. Following the instructions as we speak....the result is here:

Categories: categorisation, blog, tagging

Pool tricks

2006-03-16T22:55:00.000+01:00

Other Jackass type of videos galore at Break.com.

Categories: videos

ShotCodes to access latest knowledge?

2006-03-15T23:25:00.000+01:00

ShotCodes, a kind of barcode that you can stick on anything (e.g. machines, billboards, doors, books, etc, etc). If you take a picture of a shotcode with your mobile phone, you're connected to the URL that is represented by the code (so you don't have to remember/type the URL..), provided of course that your mobile has internet access. This might be an adequate access mechanism to the latest knowledge related to e.g. troubleshooting a particular piece of equipment somewhere in a plant, to look at the latest discussions related to the book you're reading on the train, to access content that relates to the museum room you're in, etc, etc.

Something to follow, this Dutch innovation (although I found the registration procedure at their site a bit like the 'free for period x, but you'll never know after that and its your responsibility to keep track of changes in the contract' that you see with subscriptions to magazines, credit cards and all the other stuff you forget about once you have it...

Location-Based Content in Schools...

2006-03-11T00:35:00.000+01:00

I'm currently reviewing a couple of papers for a mobile learning conference: the general promise of mobile learning is to enable ubiquitous and flexible access to content, fellow students and teachers, allowing a myriad of learning scenarios to materialise. Of course, we can use laptops, PDAs or smartphones to make it work
(and that happens a lot), add Wi-Fi and hey presto!

Location-based services can add yet some more spice to the mobile learning experience (the famous museum scenario, that has numerous incarnations, is one example), but who would have thought about the use of a location enabled Wi-Fi infrastructure?

Yes, Newbury Networks helps teachers to cope with unwanted chatting during class and to ensure pupils to turn up. Their nifty location enabled wifi networks help in:

-Providing students and faculty campus-wide secure Wi-Fi / Wireless LANs to enhance learning and mobility.
-Stopping email, instant messaging, file-sharing and uncontrolled Internet access in classrooms to eliminate distractions and cheating opportunities.
-Providing classrooms and lecture halls limited (URL-specific) internet access that's course-work relevant and available only in a classroom and at specified class-times to enhance class-room attendance.
-Pushing content to a student's laptop, including class notes and assignments, only when a student is present in class to require class presence.
-Controlling and optimizing the performance, coverage and capacity of your total network, for example tracking and stopping illicit MP3 downloads.
-Taking advantage of location-based monitoring and tracking features to enhance campus-wide e911 services and security.

I wonder, does this only work when you have a nice campus out in the woods, with no competing Wi-Fi networks around, like in inner cities?

Categories: e-learning, education

Thinkmap

2006-03-10T09:11:00.000+01:00

Thinkmap visualization software. We're currently working on a project integrating the thinkmap software in a website to visualise relationships in a knowledge base. Really nice look-and-feel (see the demos on their site). The website we're building will be public in a couple of weeks, so stay tuned to check the results!

Should (e-)learning be fun?

2006-03-07T19:42:00.000+01:00

Sure, you heard it before: 'that course was pretty boring, it didn't engage me at all'. Or using an expression of a client: 'it didn't speak to us'. Similar comments are heard about e-learning. 'It's just a page-turner' (isn't that normally a positive comment about a book?). 'The e-forum is empty, it just doesn't work'. Roger Schank, big guy, big ideas, on his crusade to change training design (basically: don't tell,focus on doing), gives us guidance: he argues that a lot of training (and most e-learning) doesn't engage, because it doesn't appeal to the learner's fascination, exhilaration, confusion, anticipation, curiosity, determination, emotional identification, excitement and arousal. So what to do? Schank refers us to the film making industry for tips and presents storytelling as a tool to break the mould of what he calls the LIBITI problem (Learn it because I thought it!). If you define fun to be a state that your engaged in something and are not aware anymore of your environment and are not thinking about doing anything else, then yes, learning should be fun.

But: didn't that hold for the exams you took? May be they were fun in hindsight...

visualcomplexity.com?

2006-03-06T23:38:00.000+01:00

visualcomplexity.com is a misnomer (shouldn't viz reduce complexity?) for a collection of visual representations of a.o.t. knowledge networks. (Got to this when trying to trace back the origins of 'information architect': 'web-people' say that this is a person who ensures usability, findability and maintainability of the content on a website, whereas corporate information people would probably argue that information architects model the corporate information that should be held by an organisation, preferably in an IT architecture, that may or may not be web-based, so a somewhat broader scope). Visual representations of, yes, knowledge should in my view, essentially convey meaningful relationships to its users (so I think: an information architect that makes a difference is an information architect that can create representations that convey meaningful relationships in a usable, maintainable and findable manner...). This site presents a broad collection of attempts of some 'information architects' to do so.

Dot Oh

2006-03-04T11:36:00.000+01:00

Globalization 3.0 (Friedman in his the World is Flat), Web 2.0, what's this stuff with dubbing phenomena with software version numbers? It can be quite useful though in conversation: "You're so 1.0...." "Which version of the company are you with?" "I'm still in 1.0, but I'm upgrading." "Our group is already 4.0, so you better be quick to stay compatible with the rest of us." Or the sales rep to the client: "Sorry, that contract is not supported anymore, we used to do that when we were 2.0." Or the civil servant to the citizen: "when we were government 1.0, you were entitled to that, but since we're 3.0, I'm afraid we don't have that feature...".

To give version numbers to a set of behavioural patterns in organisations would perhaps help change managers to keep track who needs 'upgrading' and would give employees a sense of their current alignment with reality in the rat race...

Urban Tapestries

2006-03-01T14:30:00.000+01:00

I recently got interested in 'geo-annotation', may be something to do with my love for maps. There's GoogleMaps (maps with annotations) and stuff like mappr (photos mapped on a map), but what I really find interesting is a project that has been going on for a while called Urban Tapestries, "an experimental software platform for knowledge mapping and sharing – public authoring. It combines mobile and internet technologies with geographic information systems to allow people to build relationships between places and to associate stories, information, pictures, sounds and videos with them [....] creating opportunities for an "anthropology of ourselves" – adopting and adapting new and emerging technologies for creating and sharing everyday knowledge and experience; building up organic, collective memories that trace and embellish different kinds of relationships across places, time and communities."

Quite a mouthful, but the idea is that you can geotag a place based on your actual presence at that location, telling your story about that location, perhaps upload a picture, thus building a rich 'tapestry' of personal stories related to locations. Once you have a critical mass of content, you can imagine all kinds of 'trails' through the content and online 'public' support at a particular location.

You can approach this by doing stuff like My Childhood in Googlemaps but it is not as neat as Urban Tapestries, because the direct authoring from the location is missing.

The future of the media

2006-02-25T01:18:00.000+01:00

EPIC 2014: food for thought. Will we spiral away in an everybody publishes everything, without any editorial formula or ethics? Or will we see complete liberation of information and ultimate personalisation? EPIC 2014 shows a possible future world that you may or may not like....

Business rules and rule-based systems

2006-02-21T23:33:00.000+01:00

Business rules are quite popular these days, certainly the declarative specification of these things in computer programs in the shape of 'natural language' (yes, cool tools exist nowadays), so that core corporate decision logic (part of the corporate memory, so to say) is not hidden, but inspectable, maintainable and reusable. Hold on, say that again? What did we try to do back in the 80s (and some even earlier): try to build rule-based systems, using algorithms that I almost forgot, but I was quickly refreshed by the AI depot

Crossing borders

2006-02-20T21:16:00.000+01:00

We know the world is full of interfaces: between people, organisations, cultures, countries, systems. Sometimes smooth and seemless, sometimes disjointed, full of noise, without a signal. But there are elegant ways to connect two worlds: I really like this image how Macau and mainland China connect their road systems (left hand drive and right hand drive!).

Lessons about lessons learning

2006-02-20T10:49:00.000+01:00

Already back in 2002, the American watchdog on government, GAO, published a neatly structured review of a lessons learned programme teaching us that such programmes at least should:

Provide guidance when and how to apply lessons available

Have a clear procedure for validation whether implementation of lessons is successfull

Provide an easy-to-use ICT infrastructure, that allows for intuitive search

Should I be competitive?

2006-02-18T21:42:00.000+01:00

Will I get better in my next half marathon race, end of March? Time to beat is 1:34: I'm hoping to get close to 1:32. But, sometimes I'm tiring myself with the goal-setting that I do. With my 40 years, who cares about my time anyway? Inspired by Running over forty: I do! I don't want to live 'medical', but I know my self esteem gets a boost when I'm just a wee bit faster than the average guy in my age group. So, I train 3-4 times/week (taken up spinning recently, good fun), alternating swimming with running to protect the joints a bit, try to eat healthy and the good thing is, if you're doing long runs, you get to sightsee, think and exercise at the same time!

NASA and its unwritten rules

2006-02-18T17:42:00.000+01:00

The NASA Watch: Culture Archives confirm that career management in a knowledge-based organisation needs good commandment of the unwritten rules (this unwritten rules thing got famous back in 1994, with Scott-Morgan's booklet on corporate culture). How are you learning the rules of your corporate game? NASA just puts them on a couple of slides in an online training....

Intelliseek's BlogPulse

2006-02-17T17:58:00.000+01:00

Intelliseek's BlogPulse is interesting. Try checking the 'pulse' of the weblogsphere (what's hot and what's not), by doing trend searches using different words (please note that there seems to be no smart stemming algorithm or something, the terms you enter are matched exactly). I tried 'knowledge management', 'innovation management' and 'innovation', with a time frame of 6 months. Knowledge management seems to be a non-item, innovation management next to nothing, although innovation gets some attention. But, since blogpulse says it has identified over 22 million blogs and has indexed over 600K post in the last 24hours, even a percentage of 0.10% could represent quite a few postings for things that we wouldn't normally regard conversation material for everyday life...

Analysing your own social network

2006-02-17T11:16:00.000+01:00

This sample report gives you a flavour how one could deploy SNA techniques to focus on an individual within a given network and to provide guidance for this indivual how to best use this network.

The picture shows another interesting example: a computer generated social network diagram based on IRC chat communication analysis, see http://www.jibble.org/piespy/

Dynamic Visualization of Social Networks

2006-02-16T22:18:00.000+01:00

Dynamic Visualization of Social Networks. When you look at the stuff that Rob Cross is presenting on social network analysis (he calls it ONA, organisational network analysis), you think, hey, that's interesting, may be I could map knowledge networks and figure out any anomalies/interesting patterns. But: how? Many Social Network Analysis resources on the web show you the end result (i.e. a nice graphic of a network), but what sort of input is required to generate these graphs? The Netvis tutorial sheds some light on this matter.

InAxis | Museum voor Overbodig Beleid

2006-02-16T16:48:00.000+01:00

InAxis Museum voor Overbodig Beleid. Deze mensen doen toch goede dingen voor Nederland...ga zo door!

Browse Happy

2006-02-16T16:37:00.000+01:00

Browse Happy. Misschien toch overstappen?

Persona's voor succesvolle sites

2006-02-16T16:30:00.000+01:00

Persona's voor succesvolle sites. Een prima aanpak, uitgewerkt voorbeeld.

Eindelijk een handig tooltje

2006-02-16T16:13:00.000+01:00

Eindelijk een handig tooltje om direct vanuit Word te kunnen publiceren. Het resultaat zien jullie hierbij! Kun je hier krijgen…

2006-02-16T16:06:00.000+01:00

Hello from iknow2

Theories you forgot about, but might want to revisit as somebody making statements about what learning is all about all time?

2004-04-03T17:46:00.000+02:00

All those theories you learned at University years ago, but, if you're honest, forgot about. The Theories are a good resource to freshen up your memory!