I had a part in it–made it connect, you could say–but just a small part.  It’s a true tale that spans an arc from Word War II Italy through pre-handover Hong Kong, via Shantou in mainland China and across to Colorado, USA.

I met Big Al in Hong Kong, when he was lecturing on systems analysis here at a time when I was giving talks across South East Asia.  You know those ‘before you go home’ questionnaires? Everyone who attended his courses gave him exceptional ratings.  Back in the USA, he lived in Colorado Springs, in a house with books layered two deep everywhere–even on the stairs–but for much of the time he traveled the world lecturing.

Al was tall, well-built with a wiry, gray-haired crew-cut and the bearing of a retired US Marine who kept in good shape.  If you didn’t know him, you’d assume he was a career military man but in reality, he was a Buddhist and conscientious objector.  This didn’t mean that he was a coward or non-patriot.  He had been in the thick of the Second World War fighting, as the Allies fought their way up the boot of Italy, taking it back from the Fascist forces.   The Allies–British/Canadian and American armies initially–had landed on Italy’s shores more than a year before, and the mountainous terrain provided good defensive positions for well-prepared Italian and Nazi troops. The fighting was tough and costly in lives.

Although Al would not carry a gun he did essential life-saving work as an ambulance driver, work that he could square with his beliefs.

He told me he did some …uh… “non-essential” work as well, scrounging for his unit and for locals in need.  On one occasion he was ferrying an illicit crate of scotch in his ambulance and had to pass through an army guard post.  He was called into the Duty Officer’s room and told that they were going to have to search the ambulance.  He pulled a bottle of scotch from his greatcoat pocket, slammed it on the desk and said “Sir! I’ll bet you a bottle of Scotch you’re going to search my ambulance!”  “You’re wrong, soldier, you lose your bet” came the reply as an arm swept the bottle into a drawer.  “On your way.”

I remembered the story for years.  Big Al came to Asia on lecture tours from time to time, and in between, we kept in touch by mail.

From Hong Kong, I went on occasional trips into mainland China as the country opened up, and one of them was an Easter trip to Shantou (Swatow) where my wife and I stayed in a hotel.  It had some odd features: For example, it was the only time I’ve seen live chicks in a hotel lobby, chirping away in a large tray–maybe intended as a way of making Westerner visitors feel they were celebrating Easter.

The hotel had a bookshop.  This sold mainly Chinese books, naturally, but I did find a shelf with five second-hand English books on it.  I browsed (didn’t take long), and one volume caught my eye so I bought it–it turned out to be the pivot that made this into an amazing tale.  The book, War in Val D’Orcia, was written by a Marchesa (wife of a Marquis) who had been looking after a band of orphaned children in Tuscany, Italy during World War II.  This group, inevitably, increased in size as the fighting went on.  The Marchesa d’Origo was English/American it seems, but had married an Italian aristocrat before the war, and lived on an estate with vineyards and and a great house that, from the description in the book, was something like a château in France.

Reading the first few pages immediately brought Big Al’s tales of war-torn Italy to mind, so I read on.

As the Nazi forces were pushed north (the Italians had signed an  armistice long before), the front line approached the area.  The Marchesa thought about retreating troops passing through and finding the massive estate cellars, and the effects that drunken, nearly defeated soldiers would surely have on the estate and villages round about.  So she organized a working party to brick up and camouflage the finest wine, and then had everyone set about smashing the remaining bottles until the cellar floors were running red.

Then she gathered the orphans in her charge, from the very young to older children, and set out on an incredible and dangerous cross-country trek over miles of open country under heavy shelling.  She eventually got them to a mountain village where she felt they would be safe.   The Marchesa wrote this book in the 1950s from her diaries.

It was a good story and I enjoyed it all the more because of the small connection I felt with it through Big Al and his experiences of the time in the same area.  When I got back to Hong Kong, I sent the book to Al, saying that I thought he would be interested as he had been nearby.

Was he just! It turned out he had met the Marchesa and knew some of the story, but not the whole, and had heard it from her lips.

He had organized some food for the people in the area and heard from her tales of her exploits as a refugee-organizer, fending off the nastier type of Nazi soldier, and generally acting as the noblesse oblige supporter of the surrounding peasantry – it was all very feudal.

And this wasn’t just the nostalgic wishful thinking of good ‘ol Al.  It would have been easy for him to spin a tale, and say “Oh, yeah! I met her! Wonderful woman.”  But no, after a long search for the papers he sent me five pages from his diary of the period, pages with numbers in the hundreds, typed on a battered old manual typewriter with clogged letters. It described his meeting with her and the tales she told him, all of which tallied exactly with the latter half of her book.  In 1950 he had typed up this retrospective diary from letters he’d written home at the time.

This was Al’s response to me:

And this is an extract of his diary where he recounts meeting the Marchesa.  To fix the starting point precisely, “Wed. 2″ referred to here is August 2nd 1944 :

• Amgot: Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories
• Goums, according to Wiktionary: “In North Africa, a squadron of the French army made up of native soldiers.”  They fought well but behaved so badly that after a victory parade in Siena, they were “sent home”.
• “Marchesa d’Origi” should be “Marchesa d’Origo”, I think.

And how did that very old copy of the book (it looked like a 1950s volume) find its way to a hotel in China?  That would be another interesting tale to tell.

I’ll never forget Al or his anecdotes of wartime, and especially this extraordinary arc of space and time, spanning more than 50 years and two-thirds of the way round the planet.

Roy

If you enjoyed this tale, please share with a tweet or link.  Thanks!

(There’s another off-topic post – again a tale with a small personal connection – about the saving of Bolivian folk music.)

The pages above are from the bundle Big Al sent me. If you’re interested in more about the day-to-day life of American servicemen in wartime Italy, written as it happened, here are all five sheets.  To see the whole 300-or-so pages would be fascinating.

]]> http://www.topicscape.com/blog/2013/02/01/a-tale-of-china-america-and-war-time-italy/feed/ 0 http://www.topicscape.com/blog/2013/01/03/topicscape-windows-8-good/ http://www.topicscape.com/blog/2013/01/03/topicscape-windows-8-good/#comments Thu, 03 Jan 2013 07:00:00 +0000 Roy http://www.topicscape.com/blog/?p=1917 We have now tested Topicscape Pro, Lite, SE and Topicgrazer on a desktop computer with Windows 8 installed, and are pleased to announce that all are compatible.  They run in the desktop environment, not the “Modern interface” (formerly known as “Metro”).

Seeing Adapter Type “Microsoft Basic Display Adapter”?

If, after installing Win8 and any version of Topicsape on an older PC, the ‘Scape looks something like this…

Old hardware not recognized by Windows 8

…check if Control Panel > Display > Screen Resolution > Advanced Settings > Adapter, shows: Adapter Type: Microsoft Basic Display Adapter.  If it does, Windows 8 does not recognize your graphics adapter, and you may need a new one, but there are other steps you can try first.  More about what to try later.

One of our test machines had an old NVIDIA graphics card that had worked well with Topicscape on Windows XP and 7, but under Windows 8 showed a ’Scape with bad 3D effects, similar to the one above.

Windows 8 found and identified the graphics card we were using, but it would only allow the “Microsoft Basic Display Adapter” to be installed.  It even prevented NVIDIA’s own driver installer from recognizing that an NVIDIA chipset was present.

The problem may have been some limitation of the graphics card, the motherboard (which wasn’t a very recent model), or some requirement of Windows 8 in combination with the hardware – we never found out.  We bought a new graphics adapter and then everything went smoothly.

If you have this problem,  before buying new hardware, do try all the steps summarized in my post here.  Others have solved non-recognition problems with only setting changes – they just didn’t work for our combination of hardware and Windows 8.

Observations on Windows 8

We can’t say we like Windows 8 on a desktop PC – starting up in “Metro” and dumping users into “Metro” from the desktop interface unexpectedly sometimes. We found that Start8 from Stardock made it more bearable, as it allows the PC to go straight to the desktop environment.  You might find some of these suggestions useful – we did:
◦ Make Windows 8 look like Windows 7
◦ Windows 8 basics: Tips, tricks, and cures
◦ Keyboard shortcuts

Roy

Oh yes! … This chimes in so well with my thoughts.

I’ve used mind maps and concept maps for well over 30 years and wouldn’t be without them. If my thoughts are wavering, or I’m just starting a project, or learning a new topic, I  find them an invaluable technique for getting my thoughts in order, but rarely have I got value out of someone else’s.

For me, the principal value in mind and concept mapping is the process.  YMMV!
Mind maps can be very useful when someone publishes links to resources in a well-designed, logically-constructed example; There’s a MindManager map here that serves as an illustration.I can think of some exceptions though:

• They can be useful to others in a group, when used as the focus of a discussion or problem-solving session, or better, when built during the discussion, or a presentation guide, provided the map maker presents, explains and uses the map structure to guide the presentation;
• For beginners, looking at maps that more experienced users have made can help them on the path to making their own maps.

My old Twitter pal Dr. George Huba, (@DrHubaEvaluator follow him – he’s hot!)  chipped in “NOT if the person making them is using mind maps as a medium for conveying IDEAS not just pretty outline.”

But I find the layer of abstraction too great and the detail too little. I make the comparison with trying to understand what a human body is while looking at a wired-up pathology lab skeleton.

@karimbrohi says he routinely uses mindmaps but it’s the act of creation that leads to understanding.  He says he finds mindmaps of others hard to interpret and is not sure they’re best way to present collated information.

There are many mind map libraries (click the image to see a consolidated list at mind-mapping.org) and for some, particularly new users, these may be useful, but the process, the act of making, is where most of the value is for me.

This is an important topic, so chip in with your ideas – please!  When the discussion is over, I’l consolidate it into an article on the mind mapping wiki.

Roy

I have a charmingly antique mobile phone – an iPhone 3G – not even a 3GS.  It .. has .. been .. getting .. slower .. and .. slower.  When iOS 4 came along I cursed the deep slowdown, but Apple worked on that and it did get better for a while.

But since then the  performance has continued to tumble.  Sometimes, simple actions were taking several seconds to complete. Even typing was very slow in some apps.

The answer turns out to be the number of apps in the phone.  After a period of gritting my teeth, and ruthlessly deleting every app that I didn’t absolutely need and use, the performance is now much better.

Worth a try if you have this problem and are waiting for the iPhone 5 to appear.

Roy

But I have some dozens of mapping programs of one sort or another, some I use regularly and many I’ve installed, tried and dropped, but kept the installer.

So what happens now?  I see endless ads for two mind mapping packages.  Everywhere.  I mean everywhere. Both are boring ads – the one with an expansive orange background and dull stereotyped map is especially so – and it’s not even a mind mapper really.

We’ve heard about the filter bubble the surrounds us in search, but not so much about the ads bubble.

Ads are OK generally, just so long as they’re interesting and don’t keep moving and flickering, or flood me with sound as I open the page.  I’d rather not have to pay for web services and if this is the price, so be it.

But what I’d like is a “don’t show me this again” service for ads.  You know?  Those panels that pop up when you first start using a piece of software.  ”Are you sure you want to delete this” – that sort of thing.  Ads could have a little checkbox to say “OK, noted, now drop that message in future”.

That’s what I’d like for ads.

I’m dreaming, I know … so how about “don’t show me this again for 7 days”?  Then, who knows, I might even see an ad that interests me.

Roy

This the top part of what we saw when we  put the front page of topicscape.com into WebSummarizer:

This is a useful way of taking in a new web page, and now appears as a link at the front of my bookmark bar.  Give it a try – it’s free.

Roy

My first reaction was “Great quote”; my next was to tweet “I’ll use it as my motto”.

But then I started thinking it through.

The first sentence can be right sometimes – often even – but it is incomplete.  To start with, it depends on how the words are used.

Genuine questions (not leading ones) don’t tell us what to think.  Expressions of personal concern or doubt, don’t either.  But the killer that shows the gap up best is that there are many uses of words that do tell us how to think: Written explanations of critical thinking, for example; descriptions of fallacy in argument; advice on decision-making; or a judge’s summing up for the jury all tell us how to think, not what to think.

“Pictures tell you how to think” then – how about that?  They certainly can – often.  Look at Exploratree – that must be one of the best visual approaches on the web to telling children how to think, and it’s one I’ve blogged about before.

But pictures can go the other way as well.  Data visualizations can present slanted interpretations that try to tell us what to think.  Here’s a case in point from A study of infographics:

Much as visual thinking is embedded in my work and play and while the quote sounds neat, that needs the application of a little critical thinking.

Roy

This is not hard to do, but a user question made us realize that we don’t have a lot of detail in the wiki, so we have now added a new article.

Roy

The files won’t be imported to Topicscape at that stage.  Instead you’ll see a summary report telling you if files with the same names are already in that Topicscape.  And you can press a “Show report” button to see the detail and decide what will be done, file by file.

For each file, the report shows the size in bytes, colors the size or date in red if they are different (in other words are potentially different versions), points out if the duplicate in that Topicscape is actually a missing occurrence file, and shows which topic it is in.  Then it allows you to control what to do next, one by one (replace, delete the external one or bring it in anyway).

This is really useful if you are tidying up multiple copies of different versions of documents that should already be in a Topicscape.

Roy

That is what Henry Lewkowicz of Context Discovery has set out to do, and he tells me he is 90% done (the English articles).  Here is one – a mind maps and context analysis of the wikipedia article on “Negotiation”:

You can see the map above in an interactive Flash rendering.  These summaries can be downloaded as RTF text or as mind maps in MindManager format.  Here’s a page showing the context analysis for Negotiation.

You can browse through the archive of pages done so far here.

Henry is looking into making this a public service and would like to form a group devoted to building libraries of topics and processes as a resource for mind mappers and learners.

There is another Wikipedia mapping services, and that makes an interesting comparison.  Though the map shows more breakdown, clicking on nodes for detail just takes the reader through to the appropriate section in the WikiPedia article, instead of giving the textual analysis right on the map, as Context Discovery does.

Here is WikiMindMap on Negotiation, and an image for comparison (click for a full-sized version):

The Context Discovery desktop software is not just about Wikipedia – it can analyse and map text generally.

Roy

Roy Grubb on Twitter