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Grit; Sensemaking; Accountancy; Opportunity

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“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Isaac Newton It’s rare to find someone who possesses the right blend of skill, experience, education, talent, demeanor, and grit; not only to become deeply curious about a problem, but to also pursue that problem with sustained effort and ultimately succeed in solving that problem. The Wright brothers did not just get up one day and then decide to fly. It took Orville and Wilbur Wright four years of experimentation and testing to successfully achieve controllable sustained flight.  Their breakthrough was the invention of the notion of "wing warping" and putting that together with a three-axis control mechanism which allowed an aircraft pilot to achieve full aerodynamic control over aircraft roll, yaw, and pitch to effectively steer the aircraft and maintain equilibrium. That basic breakthrough enabled aviation to take off.  And that breakthrough, discovered by the Wright brothers and their Wright Flyer , ...
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MINI 2025

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I have updated the MINI Financial Reporting Scheme.  This is the NEW VERSION for 2025 . Changes which were made include: Deleting about 8 stray terms which software had missed (i.e. report elements existed, but they were not used in any presentation relations). Create a pre-closing trial balance (to do). Fix transactions to handle subclassifications correctly (to do). Possibly add the concept "Dividends" (to do). Possibly add "Current Portion of Long Term Debt" report line item (to do). Add reference implementation using The World Online (TWO) sample company that has 22,000 general journal entries. Improve the type-subtype relations. Revise data types to the newest version of each data type. Add dummy documentation and dummy authoritative references. Adjust the business events to leverage the DCA core events (in November, when the book comes out). Better sync with canonical accounting and audit working papers. New Chart of Accounts XBRL taxonomy . There are the curr...
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Building a Mindful Machine for Accountancy

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Burroughs build the first accounting machine  ( sales poster ) in about 1928. That has since been improved upon.  It is time for another improvement. To best understand the possibilities here, I would suggest reading the article  Using logic programming for theory representation and scientific inference . In another blog post I described the notion of what some people refer to as a "mindful machine". People use other terms to describe what I am talking about, but I like "mindful machine" which "smartens you up" and I am particularly interested in accountancy. By "accountancy" I mean accounting, reporting, auditing, and analysis; external compliance reporting, internal management and cost reporting, tax reporting, and special purpose reporting; for profit, not-for-profit, state and local government reporting, federal financial reporting.  Basically, the full meal deal. There is a big difference between a line cook and a chef.  Similar to how a ch...
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No Kludge

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As I explain in this prior blog post about complexity ; a kludge is an engineering/computer science term that defines what is best described as a workaround or quick-and-dirty solution that is typically clumsy, inelegant, inefficient, difficult to extend and hard to maintain; but it gets the job done. The nautical term for a kludge is jury rig. By contrast, elegance is beauty that shows unusual effectiveness, grace, and simplicity. Actions have consequences.  No action, inaction, is a type of action. While a new paradigm of accountancy is very likely inevitable;  Things like " starting at the end of the chain " and " semantic fragmentation " and the " integration hairball " that now exists were problems in the past and have resulted in many, too many, accountants being what amounts to " data janitors " and " transaction chasers "; they don't need to be problems going forward. But what modern accountancy will look like, while pretty ...
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Logica

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Logica is an open-source, declarative logic programming language based on Datalog which is designed for data manipulation and analysis. Logica is held out to be "modern logic programming". Logica was developed at Google as a successor to Yedalog .  Yedalog, also based on Datalog, aims to address perceived usability limitations of SQL. So, Logica and Yedalog both belong to the Datalog "family". Logic programming is a declarative programming paradigm based on formal logic where the program is written as a set of logical statements. Logic programming was developed in the 1960s. Prolog and Datalog are the most prominent examples of logic programming languages. LISP is another approach to logic programming. Answer Set Programming (ASP) is another approach to logic programming.  Datalog is the logic used by relational databases.  Datalog is a subset of first order logic that can safely be processed by computer based processes because it avoids logical paradoxes which...
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Mindful Machines

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The paper, Society of Minds: The Architecture of  Mindful Machines , proposes a new architectural paradigm for building what they call Mindful Machines. The paper says that the architecture addresses the core limitations of today's AI which include opacity, brittleness, and misalignment with human values. Fundamentally, the objective of Mindful Machines is to turn machines that compute into machines that comprehend. The paper provides this definition of a mind: “A mind is a coherent module with reasoning, memory, and self-regulation, unlike an agent, which may only perform tasks.”  Imagine a human and an artificial mind interacting within a single common ecosystem. That common ecosystem creates a shared conceptualization  and has  theories , knowledge, reasoning, governance (i.e. curation, checks and balances, scrutiny).  Knowledge is discernable because it is clearly specified. Knowledge is testable so that agreement can be confirmed.  Knowledge is extensi...
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Logical English Dialect for Accountancy

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Logical English (LE) is a controlled natural language which is written in English sentences and those sentences can be translated into logic programming languages such as Prolog , Datalog , or Answer Set Programming .  Note that logic programming can be effectively converted to other programming approaches . Now, imagine a dialect of Logical English specific to Accountancy.  Accountancy has it's on jargon.  Accounting is the language of business .  Basically, the Logical English Dialect for Accountancy would be (a) a more restricted set of Logical English and (b) supplemented with additional specific terms necessary to work effectively in the area of knowledge called accountancy.  This language and terminology is aligned with ISO/IEC Accounting and Economic Ontology , XBRL International's Open Information Model (OIM), OMG's Standard Business Report Model (SBRM), and my Seattle Method . All of this is coordinated and the atomic design methodology is used to ...
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