Watts, Charles J. The Cost of Production. Muskegon, MI: The Shaw-Walker Company, 1902. http://archive.org/details/costproduction01wattgoog.

Short book on managing manufacturing costs. Not too much of an advertisement for Shaw-Walker manufactured goods (files, file management, filing cabinets, etc.). Only 64 pages are the primary content and the balance (about half) are advertisements.

Given the publication date of 1902, this would have preceded the publication of System Magazine which began in 1903. This may have then been a prototype version of an early business magazine, but with a single author, no real editorial, and only one article.

Presumably it may also have served the marketing interests of Shaw-Walker as a marketing piece as well.

Tangentially, I'm a bit intrigued by the "Mr. Morse" mentioned on page 109 who is being touted as an in-house consultant for Shaw-Walker.... Is this the same Frank Morse who broke off to form the Browne-Morse Co.? (very likely)

see: see also: https://hypothes.is/a/Sp8s4sprEe24jitvkjkxzA for a snippet on Frank Morse.

https://www.loom.com/share/a05f636661cb41628b9cb7061bd749ae

Synopsis: Maggie Delano looks at some of the affordances supplied by Tana (compared to Roam Research) in terms of providing better block-based user interface for note type creation, search, and filtering.

These sorts of tools and programmable note implementations remind me of Beatrice Webb's idea of scientific note taking or using her note cards like a database to sort and search for data to analyze it and create new results and insight.

It would seem that many of these note taking tools like Roam and Tana are using blocks and sub blocks as a means of defining atomic notes or database-like data in a way in which sub-blocks are linked to or "filed underneath" their parent blocks. In reality it would seem that they're still using a broadly defined index card type system as used in the late 1800s/early 1900s to implement a set up that otherwise would be a traditional database in the Microsoft Excel or MySQL sort of fashion, the major difference being that the user interface is cognitively easier to understand for most people.

These allow people to take a form of structured textual notes to which might be attached other smaller data or meta data chunks that can be easily searched, sorted, and filtered to allow for quicker or easier use.

Ostensibly from a mathematical (or set theoretic and even topological) point of view there should be a variety of one-to-one and onto relationships (some might even extend these to "links") between these sorts of notes and database representations such that one should be able to implement their note taking system in Excel or MySQL and do all of these sorts of things.

Cascading Idea Sheets or Cascading Idea Relationships

One might analogize these sorts of note taking interfaces to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). While there is the perennial question about whether or not CSS is a programming language, if we presume that it is (and it is), then we can apply the same sorts of class, id, and inheritance structures to our notes and their meta data. Thus one could have an incredibly atomic word, phrase, or even number(s) which inherits a set of semantic relationships to those ideas which it sits below. These links and relationships then more clearly define and contextualize them with respect to other similar ideas that may be situated outside of or adjacent to them. Once one has done this then there is a variety of Boolean operations which might be applied to various similar sets and classes of ideas.

If one wanted to go an additional level of abstraction further, then one could apply the ideas of category theory to one's notes to generate new ideas and structures. This may allow using abstractions in one field of academic research to others much further afield.

The user interface then becomes the key differentiator when bringing these ideas to the masses. Developers and designers should be endeavoring to allow the power of complex searches, sorts, and filtering while minimizing the sorts of advanced search queries that an average person would be expected to execute for themselves while also allowing some reasonable flexibility in the sorts of ways that users might (most easily for them) add data and meta data to their ideas.

Jupyter programmable notebooks are of this sort, but do they have the same sort of hierarchical "card" type (or atomic note type) implementation?

Spinney, L. (2022, January 9). Are we witnessing the dawn of post-theory science? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/09/are-we-witnessing-the-dawn-of-post-theory-science

The simplification required to make models and study systems can be a useful tool, but one constantly needs to go back to the actual system to make sure that future predictions and work actually fit the real world system.

Too often social theorists make assumptions which aren't supported in real life and this can be a painfully dangerous practice, especially when those assumptions are built upon in ways that put those theories out on a proverbial creaking limb.

This idea is related to the bias that Charles Mathewes points out about how we treat writers as still living or as if they never lived. see: https://hypothes.is/a/VTU2lFvZEeyiJ2tN76i4sA

Schmid, P., & Lewandowsky, S. (n.d.). Tackling COVID disinformation with empathy and conversation. The Conversation. Retrieved December 15, 2021, from http://theconversation.com/tackling-covid-disinformation-with-empathy-and-conversation-173013

Caulfield, T. (2021, October 18). The Golden Age of Junk Science Is Killing Us. Men’s Health. https://www.menshealth.com/health/a37910261/how-junk-science-and-misinformation-hurt-us/

Pilditch, T. (2021). Why scientific evidence is no longer enough in public debate [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/98v2n

Nan, X., Wang, Y., & Thier, K. (2021). Health Misinformation. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/jt3ur

Alper, S. (2021). When Conspiracy Theories Make Sense: The Role of Social Inclusiveness. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/2umfe

Speelman, C., & McGann, M. (2020). Statements about the Pervasiveness of Behaviour Require Data about the Pervasiveness of Behaviour [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/bxzm4

van Rooij, I., & Baggio, G. (2020). Theory development requires an epistemological sea change [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/rnw9q

Fuhrer, J., & Cova, F. (2020). “Quick and dirty”: Intuitive cognitive style predicts trust in Didier Raoult and his hydroxychloroquine-based treatment against COVID-19. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ju62p

Morey, R. D. (2020, June 12). Power and precision. Medium. https://medium.com/@richarddmorey/power-and-precision-47f644ddea5e

Cavojova, V., Šrol, J., & Mikušková, E. B. (2020, April 15). Scientific reasoning as a predictor of health-related beliefs and behaviors in the time of COVID-19. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/tfy5q