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ADL Information Documents From my youth I have kept invitations, programmes, Agenda, Minutes, cuttings etc which help remind me of events past. Notes Not long after I joined Marconi Instruments (M.I.), the Managing Director walked up to me in a corridor, said "The next door neighbours of Dr. E. reported adversely on his behaviour at home" and walked quickly away again. Dr. E. was my predecessor in the appointment I held in M.I. It was after receiving a few such extraordinary communications that from mid-1962 onwards I made notes, mostly in my filofax, of such verbal inputs very shortly after they occurred. Non-verbal Communications I have a pretty good memory not only of words uttered but of the manner in which they are said. I have incorporated this additional information wherever possible. Veracity of Information I always advised my management students to put a question mark against every item of incoming information and to vary the size of the question mark according to reliability of source, its relevance, etc., etc. In most cases the size of the question mark can be infinitesimally small but in certain situations can be very large. Moreover the size of the question mark should be varied, up or down, in the light of later information or increased understanding. Diaries At Marconi Instruments, from 1962 onwards, I and/or my secretary kept appointments diaries containing details of expenses, travel etc. Occasionally in the private as distinct from work diaries I would record an event or conversation and set out my impression of what had occurred. By 1967 I was keeping a detailed private diary of events and encounters as they occurred as well as constructing diaries of the recent past from records and memory. Thus I have detailed commentative diaries or diary notes from 1960 to the present. For a few short periods I have kept notes of every communication (mail, telephone, in person etc) within minutes or at most hours of them occurring. Histories From the late 1960s to the early 1970s and from 1983 onwards I wrote accounts of various episodes which have been extremely valuable in writing the current papers. Discarding Documents As the flow of documents I wished to keep continued I had to adopt a constant volume approach - i.e. discard some old material to make room for new papers. Some of the discarded material should have been retained - some which seemed at the time to be unimportant would now be valuable. However I read every paper before discarding and in many cases I made notes so that the very act of discarding helped retain much of the material on paper or in the memory. There are other papers which I am not sure if I discarded or not - hence the description that they are at present untraced - they may be misfiled or filed differently to what I would expect. Correcting Disinformation Such is the disinformation that has been put out about me that I have gone out of my way to include details and documents which will convey the true story. Website Documents The bandwidth (ie KB) of documents reproduced in this website has been reduced by the most appropriate means in each case e.g. by cropping, reconstruction, reformatting, extraction and reducing quality to the minimum required for readability. In a few cases documents (such as those produced on photosensitive paper) have greatly deteriorated and have been processed to enhance their clarity. Only very minor editing has taken place (eg "Telephone" reduced to "Tel:" to reduce line length). Also, OCRd documents may contain only residual minor errors, such as a "1" replacing "l" and vice versa. Thus the reproduced documents accurately portray the originals. |
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