Thanks to Specific People ...

Ralph Hodgson has this amazing library of obscure and interesting books. More astounding, though, is how he manages to have in his briefcase just that obscure book I happen to need to read next: Vinoed's Sketches of Thought and Wenger and Lave's Situated Learning, among others. The interesting and obscure books you find in the References chapter probably came from Ralph's library.

Luke Hohmann tutored me about Karl Weick and Elliot Soloway, and Jim Highsmith, who taught me that "emergent behavior" is a characteristic of the rules and not just "lucky." Each spent a disproportionate amount of time influencing the sequencing of topics and accuracy of references, commenting on nearly every page.

Jason Yip beautifully skewered my first attempt to describe information dissemination as gas dispersion. He wrote, "Kim is passing information. Information is green gas. Kim is passing green gas..." Yikes! You can guess that those sentences changed!

Bo Leuf came up with the wonderful wordplay of argh-minutes (in lieu of erg-seconds) as the unit of measure for frustrating communications sessions. He also was kind enough to double-check some of my assertions. For example, he wrote to some Israelis to check my contention that in Israel, "politeness in conversation is considered more of an insult than a compliment." That produced an exciting e-mail exchange, which included (from Israelis): "Definitely wrong on this one, your author.… We always say hello and shake hands after not seeing for a few days.... I think your author is mistaking a very little tolerance for mistakes at work for a lack of politeness." Another wrote, "Regarding your being flamed. There is no way out of it, no matter what you say. According to me, Israelis would demand of you to have your own opinion and to stand behind it. And of course they have their own (at least one :-)." Benny Sadeh offered the word I finally used, "frankness."