Human race will 'split into two different species'

"The human race will one day split into two separate species, an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures, according to a top scientist." /Daily Mail/

Rotating Tasks for Retaining Talent

"One reason for organizational paralysis is that it's easy to believe that if your tasks go away, your job goes away...

"As soon as management starts conflating people with tasks, they've guaranteed that the organization is going to get stuck. Probably soon. A better plan: rotate your people and continually reward and promote and challenge them. Make a big deal when someone makes the case for shutting down her task. Make it really clear through your actions that tasks come and go, but good people stay." /seth godin/

Short Sentences Spread Faster

"Steven Johnson has done some interesting (but not surprising) research on the complexity of the work of a few writers. Basically, short, simple sentences not only sell more books, but spread ideas farther and faster.' /seth godin/

More on Prediction Markets and "The Wisdom of Crowds"

"It should not be surprising to hear that a great many people, when told of how prediction markets work, will claim that they can never produce meaningful results. After all, the market price, and therefore the prediction, comes solely from random people on the internet who decide to take a wild guess at who is likely to win... Certainly the opinion of an expert -- who has studied all the polls, and understands statistics and the math of the electoral college -- would produce a much more accurate prediction than just the average of the opinions of lots of John Q. Public's. And yet, that isn't the case. Prediction markets turn out to be remarkably accurate, typically more accurate than any individual expert can predict, as non-intuitive as it may seem." /karmatics.com/

Alturistic Contributors to Wikipedia

"One of the questions about commons-based peer production of public goods like Wikipedia is whether the “altruistic” contributors who aren’t regular enough to depend on their reputation provide contributions of sufficiently high quality. This recent study seems to confirm that they do." /SmartMobs/

Army's unmanned aerial drone kills for the first time

Report on the Army's first robot kill: "The US Army's MQ-5B/C Hunter unmanned aerial vehicle made its first kill in Iraq this month, reports Defense Tech. (The CIA and Air Force's drones have been killing for years, but this is a first for the army.)" /boingboing/

Cory Doctorow on How to be a Better Blogger

There Is No Coming Singularity?

While technologist Ray Kurzweil describes the Law of Accelerating Returns and an inevitable technological singularity, Gwynne Dyer, a highly sarcastic London-based independent journalist, claims that the rate of change in the industrial world may actually be slowing:

We do not live in an era of major change, neither in the
technologies that shape our environment nor in the social values that shape
our lives...

[Computers are] precisely the technology that William Gibson
fixed on as the basis for his dystopian futures, but despite all the hype
the 'IT revolution' really isn't enough to redefine the way we live. We
inhabit a period that has seen no more by way of fundamental technological
change, and considerably less intellectual and social upheaval, than the
latter half of the 18th century. /gwennedyer.net/

Internet Cafe Squatting in Japan

"A new underclass of Japanese is living in 24-hour Intenet cafes across the country, using private booths to eat and sleep in after a long day in a low-paying job. A survey by the health and welfare ministry indentified 5,400 “Net cafe refugees,” although critics say that figure underestimates the scale of the problem." /telegraph.co.uk/

Space-Based Internet

"Cisco will provide the software for an on-board router in a space project it is conducting for the U.S. Department of Defense. The Internet routing in space (IRIS) project 'allows direct IP routing over satellite,' said Intelsat General Vice President Don Brown in a statement, 'eliminating the need for routing via a ground-based teleport, thereby dramatically increasing the efficiency and flexibility of the satellite communications link.' Like ARPANET, 'IRIS is to the future of satellite-based communications what ARPANET was to the creation of the Internet in the 1960s,' he added. ARPANET was the military’s predecessor to the current Internet.

"The project may lead to a completely space-based Internet. Internet traffic between satellites or space vehicles is currently routed through a remote terminal on Earth. IRIS will allow space-to-space Internet traffic to avoid traveling back to Earth, unless it needs to be finally delivered here. It’s possible the project could lead to a faster global IP network, since traffic could travel in space and only come back for delivery." /mobile-tech-today/

Credit Cards in Second Life

"A Digital Hub-based company that supplies debit cards for corporate customers and shopping centres is in the process of creating a debit card specifically for users of Second Life." /Silicon Republic/

Companies with Strong Connections Create More Patents?

"Corey Phelps, an assistant professor of management and organization at the UW Business School, and Melissa Schilling, an associate professor at NYU, “analyzed the innovative performance of 1,106 companies in 11 different industries over a six-year period. They examined the pattern or structure of strategic alliance relationships among companies in each industry. They found that how firms are connected to one another influences the number of patented inventions they obtained. Those that secured more patents were classified by Phelps and Schilling as being more creative.”

According to the researchers, “companies reap greater benefits when they are part of a network that exhibits a high degree of clustering and only a few degrees of separation, both of which are characteristic of a small world network.” /zdnet.com/

Future Worspace = No Space?

"IBM says it saves $100 million a year in real estate costs because it doesn't need the offices... In the future, more companies with scattered work forces and clients may do what the marketing firm Crayon is doing: making its headquarters in cyberspace." /abcnews.com/

China Bans Unauthorized Reincarnation

"In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission." /newswek.com/

iPods Banned in Michigan Schools?

"Michigan used to make the question easy for schools. Up until 2004, all electronic devices were banned. But in 2004, the state left it up to districts to decide... Cheating is one of the major reasons cited in a letter the district sent to parents of summer-school students, and it is an area of increasing concern." /USA Today/

So, exactly what kind of cheating can you do with an electronic device such as a cell phone or an iPod?

The kind that can be scored electronically [multiple choice, fill in the blank, true / false, etc.] which is exactly the kind of answer that any reasonably competent adult would use Wikipedia or other internet sources to find. Emphasizing memorization rather than understanding may be one of the reasons why U.S. high school seniors ranked near the bottom in math and science, reflecting what educators call a crisis in American education.

Sorry for the lack of recent posts...

I have been working on Node for the past few weeks, posting chapter summaries and related goodies regarding William Gibson's forthcoming novel Spook Country. Please feel free to check it out.

The Ebb and Flow of Social Networking

"Like a roving band of wildebeest, it seems communities arrive en masse, graze for a while, and move on to pastures anew. The current crop of Web 2.0 sites seem to have amplified this trend - there are more and more sites cropping up with a community angle, so now people hungry for social interaction on the web have a near boundless choice for their communal appetites." /wisdump.com/

Bill Gates predicted the Singularity 20 years ago?

Check out some really interesting predictions published 20 years ago in Omni magazine, including this one from Bill Gates :"(I)n the next 20 years you won't be able to extrapolate the rate of progress from any previous pattern or curve because the new chips, these local intelligences that can process information, will cause a warp in what it's possible to do. The leap will be unique. I can't think of any equivalent phenomenon in history." /seattlepi.com/

"Justifying" Timothy Leary

A reader asked me to justify the legacy of Timothy Leary and his right to be one of the first person whose remains were launched into space. While I have little desire to justify much of anything (much less the life of someone whom I never met), I thought I would respond with a few thoughts.

From my limited perspective, Dr. Timothy Leary was a flawed human being who made some mistakes including his overconfidence that everyone taking psychedelic drugs would reap the same benefits that he did (Leary did not experiment with these drugs until he was 40 years old).

Much of Leary's positive legacy includes his work with the Kaiser group on interpersonal diagnosis of personality and the foundations for what would later become group therapy. The Leary Grid is still popular today and was even used as a psychometric to evaluate Leary's own "escape risk" from prison (Leary's answers suggested that he was docile, obedient, and appropriate for a minimum security prison from which he later escaped).

While most remembered for the slogan "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out," Leary's most consistent theme was "Think for Yourself and Question Authority." Even his pioneering work in the 1950's that later brought him to Harvard was about empowering the individual to better utilize feedback and adjust one's own course (in contrast to the authoritarian stance of "mental health" practitioners that continues to prevail today).

That doesn't mean that Leary advocated irresponsibility or wrecklessness. Prior to the controversy surrounding psychedelics (LSD was legal when Leary and others began their research at Harvard in the early 1960s), Leary lobbied for regulation and licensing of drug use often comparing psychedelics to other forms of powerful energy such as automobiles.

Leary's intense charisma and growing influence among young people did not go unnoticed by a government struggling to maintain "order" and "control" of a generation who was collectively questioning the consequences of blind obedience, patriotism and war.

No doubt that many of Leary's behaviors contributed to his ultimate legacy of being a wild-eyed guru whose influence (whether intended or not) may have contributed to pain in many people's lives. As Leary suggested about drugs, all forms of energy are likely to have both positive and negative consequences. The more powerful the energy, the more intense the consequences.

Speaking for myself, Leary's legacy provide hope and inspiration for much of the work that I do today. It is through that legacy that I first learned of the role of enthusiasm and optimism in making a better future, the role that environmental factors seem to play in shaping human behavior, personality and potential, and the opportunities for continued growth through responsible exploration of new technologies. I know that my life is much richer for these experiences and, hopefully, the work I do as a result is, in some small way, following in that legacy.

William Gibson on the Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition movies

William Gibson responds to rumors of the Neuromancer movie: "I'll be willing to entertain the idea that Neuromancer is really "headed for the big screen" when I'm watching it being shot

"As the old saying goes, I'll believe it when I see it.

"I *do* believe, though, that Peter Weir will not be going forward with Pattern Recognition. That is one utterly solid little factoid of film news, alas." /William Gibson's blog/

Three-Arm Stelarc Now Has Three Ears!

Performance artist and three-arm cyborg Stelarc "found a medical doctor willing to implant a cell-cultivated ear beneath the skin on the artist's forearm... (who) is apparently planning to go through a few more surgeries to give it more definition... (including implanting) a mic inside the ear that will connect to a bluetooth transmitter, so the ear can broadcast audio from the internet wirelessly." /boingboing.net/

Creating New Senses

"We humans get just the five. But why? Can our senses be modified? Expanded? Given the right prosthetics, could we feel electromagnetic fields or hear ultrasound? The answers to these questions, according to researchers at a handful of labs around the world, appear to be yes...

"So here's the solution: Figure out how to change the sensory data you want — the electromagnetic fields, the ultrasound, the infrared — into something that the human brain is already wired to accept, like touch or sight. The brain, it turns out, is dramatically more flexible than anyone previously thought, as if we had unused sensory ports just waiting for the right plug-ins. Now it's time to build them." /wired.com/

Neuromancer on Fast Track to Big Screen

As Spook Country prepares for an August 2007 release, William Gibson's genre-creating debut novel "Neuromancer, is being brought to the big screen by indie producer Peter Hoffman. The project will get a $70 million budget with Joseph Kahn currently set to direct." /firstshowing.net/

Twitter = internet crack

Lev Grossman writes that Titter is "like the cocaine of blogging or e-mail but refined into crack. Internet addiction is an old story, but we're on the tipping point of a new kind of problem that might more broadly be called an addiction to data, in all its many and splendiferous forms." /Time/

Teemu Arina on the Future of Learning

Robin Good recently posted a series of fascinating short film clips on YouTube of interviews with Finnish Teemu Arina about the Future of Learning.

Teemu's blog on networked learning, knowledge and collaboration is also worth a look.

How Many Open Source Devotees Does It Take to Screw a Newbie?

Bruce Eisner's excellent post on the frustrations of customizing server-side Open Source software inspired the following rant:

I feel your pain, Bruce.

I love the spirit of Open Source almost as much as I hate the execution. As a Linux user and Ruby / PHP "weekend code warrior" for several years, I don't go to the user groups any more looking for the future. Most of the people I meet in those groups or discussion forums are full of people who long for the days when only geeks could use computers.

Sure, Apache is incredibly stable. So is my TI30 calculator. And please don't try to tell me why using vi to shellscript a bad blackjack game is good for my character.

I cringe now when I read about Mambo, Drupal, and similar web applications as leading the way for a post-Microsoft world. While I have had issues with Microsoft (as any user facing a blue screen will), using hatred of one company as the primary driving force for developing an alternative seems to be short-sighted and depressing.

As I can already feel the flames heat up, Microsoft's Expression Web product is the best tool out there today for building standards-compliant, server-driven web applications in my opinion. A step in the right direction, it also has a long way to go before non-programmers can build something useful without contemplating suicide or murder (or both).

My guess is that the future of Open Source will soon be in better hands when a million or more kids in "developing" (read poor) nations like Rwanda, India, and Uruguay build ad hoc wireless networks between their One Hundred Dollar laptops. I hope they will want to talk with us (and maybe develop server-side tools that I would risk putting in front of my children).

Simulating the Brain

"A network of artificial nerves is growing in a Swiss supercomputer -- meant to simulate a natural brain, cell-for-cell. The researchers at work on "Blue Brain" promise new insights into the sources of human consciousness.

"The machine is beautiful as it wakes up -- nerve cells flicker on the screen in soft pastel tones, electrical charges flash through a maze of synapses. The brain, just after being switched on, seems a little sleepy, but gentle bursts of current bring it fully to life.

"This unprecedented piece of hardware consists of about 10,000 computer chips that act like real nerve cells. To simulate a natural brain, part of the cerebral cortex of young rats was painstakingly replicated in the computer, cell by cell, together with the branched tree-like structure of the synapses." /spiegel.de/

MultiTasking Bad in MultiWays

"'Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes,' said David E. Meyer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan. 'Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.'

The human brain, with its hundred billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections, is a cognitive powerhouse in many ways. 'But a core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two things at once,' said René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University." /New York Times/

Augmented Cognition

"The Department of Defense's "Augmented Cognition" video is supposed to represent a plausible scenario for a human-computer interface that uses EEG and other technologies to figure out what to feed to operators, allowing teams to do fast analysis of giant amounts of data." /boingboing/

Here's the video (caution: the movie is 93MB!): /Augmented Cognition International Society/

Bionic Arm Soon to be Reality

Inventor Dean Kamen's announcement at this year's TED conference left people in shock and tears: "he explains that a 'very senior' official in the Defense Department came to him last year. We have 1,600 kids who have come back from Iraq and Afghanistan without an arm, this official said, and right now we’re giving them a hook, the same technology we’ve used since the Civil War. Then the official told Kamen he wanted him to do the seeming impossible: Build a device so that these amputees can pick up a raisin or a grape and put it in their mouths without crushing it. And build it so that they can detect the difference between the two -- between the raisin and the grape -- by touch.

"Kamen’s team built a prosthetic device (and he showed) a 30-second video of the arm in action: A wounded veteran uses its 'fingers' to grab a water bottle and drink from it; to scratch his nose; to pick up a pen with his thumb and index finger; and to pick up a piece of paper, rotate it toward his face, and read it.

"Kamen visited Walter Reed Army Medical Center while the device was being built. One soldier, he says, told him he was one of the lucky ones, because he lost only his left arm. He still had his good arm, he said. Then he pushed himself back from the table. He had no legs.

"Pretty soon, though, he’ll have two arms." /wired.com/

Will Wright's Quest to Compress Time and Amplify Imagination

Will Wright, toy maker: "Spore, he says, will be 'a philosophic toy,' and like any toy, it will be 'an amplifier for the player’s imagination.' By playing through the life cycle of a player-created species, Wright hopes to change the way the player experiences time. 'It’s almost like the way a telescope or microscope recalibrates our eyesight,' he says. In the same way, a computer simulation can “recalibrate our instincts,' by illuminating the long-term effects of actions that take decades or even millions of years to play out. 'We can take a lot of long-term dynamics and press them into short-term experiences.'" /wired.com/

Cyberspace ala Sony?

"In (William) Gibson's 1996 novel, Idoru, large portions of the book takes place in personal cyberspaces. A primary character, Chia, spends almost all of her time listening to music in her virtual room as an avatar. Sound familiar? It should, because it's exactly the roadmap Phil Harrison lined up for the PlayStation Home." /dailytech.com/

Gibson himself says "It wasn't the vision I had."

"Chia and her buds build their treehouses in corporate ghost sites. That's the difference. Interstitial. Gotta be interstitial. Call me when you get it worked out. I'll be on eBay." /william gibson's blog/

Small World of Your Brain

"Inspired by the same mathematics behind "six degrees of Kevin Bacon," neuroscientists are creating models of how the human brain work. In this "small world" architecture of the brain, clusters of cells link to their nearest neighbors with some neurons connecting to distant clusters. It's the same phenomenon that social networking pioneer Duncan Watts of NYU and Steven Strogatz of Cornell previously showed emerges in the electric-power grid, relationships between professional actors, and the brain cells of worms. According to Strogatz and Watts, this kind of small world structure boosts the power and efficiency of the system. Often, the networks behave chaotically. " /boingboing/

William Gibson's Pattern Recognition on BBC

William Gibson's fantastic novel Pattern Recognition is now an amazing radio play on BBC 7. Definitely worth checking out while it is in progress and available free through the BBC Listen Again service.

Spore and the Lesson of What Sticks

One of the most difficult lessons to learn in life about how most of what we learn has a limited shelf-life: Alex Hutchinson on his work with Will Wright and the team creating Spore: "Games usually succeed by saying once you learn something, it sticks. You stick with this piece of information...we're going to add more information to that," said Hutchinson. "Whereas we're saying, 'Yeah 50 percent of what you learned sticks; the other 50 you don't need to worry about [as you progress].'" /gamespot/

Personal Possessions as Tarot Cards?

"William Gibson being quoted saying that he likes to read his personal possessions - one imagines, as if they were runes or tarot cards. He likes to empty everything out of his wallet and arrange them in different patterns around him so as to create new meanings and learn new things about himself - so that the objects take on the role of telling different variations on stories about the same man." /MinkTails/

Less Tube for YouTubers

"According to Harris Interactive, (o)f the frequent YouTube users, 66 percent claim they are sacrificing other activities when on YouTube, including other websites (36 percent), time spent watching TV (32 percent), email and other online social networking (20 percent), work/homework (19 percent), playing video games (15 percent), watching DVDs (12 percent) and even spending time with friends and family in person (12 percent)." /worldscreen.com/

New interviews

I was recently interviewed about collaborative technologies by SearchSMB and the New York Times. The article for SearchSMB came out last week and the NYT one should be out shortly.

No Software Unscathed

Clay Shirky: "No software, however perfect, survives first contact with the users unscathed, and given the unparalleled opportunities with web-based services to observe user behavior — individually and in bulk, in the moment and over time — the period after launch increases specificity enormously, after which it continues to rise, albeit at a less torrid pace." /many2many/

Second Life Round Up

Politics
"Sweden is to become the first country to establish diplomatic representation in the virtual reality world of Second Life, officials said on Friday.

“We are planning to establish a Swedish embassy in Second Life primarily as an information portal for Sweden,” Swedish Institute (SI) director Olle Wästberg told AFP... While there were individuals in Second Life calling themselves the “Canadian Ambassador” and “The United States Embassy to Second Life”, the Swedish initiative would however be the first officially sanctioned embassy in Second Life." /radiowood.com/


Business and Marketing
"More than 65 companies have already launched their Second Life presence, turning out to be more interested into Second Life than actual users... The virtual world currently has a total of 2,965,539 residents, but only 1,037,804 of these have logged-in in the last 60 days. When writing this article, only 25,845 of them are online this minute."

"Nissan (is) offering Second Life residents free test drives of the virtual copies of their real life models...

Free items that duplicate the real products might be a good start, allowing the residents to have a full demo of the product before buying it in the real world, as Nissan is doing, but even more towards enriching the user experience by adding new functionality (such as) Nike giving you running shoes that increase your gamespeed. Or Sears giving you a free internal decorator... Or universities offering in-game courses on how to improve your gameplay. For example Harward offering a free course on making money in the game, and then hoping to enroll these students later on. The opportunities seem quite endless." /ssdiary.marketingstudies.net/


Entertainment
"Lynn Hershman Leeson's Strange Culture was simultaneously premiering live at Sundance (in a dark, somewhat institutional room dubbed the Microcinema) and in an invite-only screening at a theater on Second Life... I just figured it would be a cool movie and a cool scene, and it was." /wired.com/


Marriage Counseling
"Arianna Huffington, blog mistress of the Huffington Post, revealed her opinions on blogging, the 2008 presidential race, covering her midriff and Second Life as marriage therapy: 'A lot of people who want to explore different possibilities, they can now do it in Second Life instead of, say, leaving their wife — fulfilling some other fantasy. Why not experiment? I think Second Life will save marriages.'" /wired.com/


The Moon?
The International Spaceflight Museum for hosted a Q&A event about the "missing moonlanding tapes," which ran in Wired Magazine's January issue. /flickr.com/


The Truth about SecondLife?
Clay Shirky: "I predict that Second Life will remain a niche application, which is to say an application that will be of considerable interest to a small percentage of the people who try it. Such niches can be profitable (an argument I made in the Meganiche article), but they won’t, by definition, appeal to a broad cross-section of users.

"The logic behind this belief is simple: most people who try Second Life don’t like it." /many2many/

Continuous Partial Attention

"continuous partial attention n. A state in which most of one's attention is on a primary task, but where one is also monitoring several background tasks just in case something more important or interesting comes up." /wordspy/

Linda Stone who coined the term, distinguishes CP from multi-tasking: "When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. We're often doing things that are automatic, that require very little cognitive processing... (whereas CPA is motivated by the desire) to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter." /WikiHome/

"CPA stems from our desire, Stone says, to be 'a live node on the network'... The message is that the balance has tilted way too far toward distraction, creating a sense of constant crisis. 'We're not ever in a place where we can make a commitment to anything... Constantly being accessible makes you inaccessible.'" /newsweek/

How to be Cory Doctorow

"I sat next to Cory Doctorow at a conference today. It was like playing basketball next to Michael Jordan. Cory was looking at more than 30 screens a minute. He was bouncing from his mail to his calendar to a travel site and then back. His fingers were a blur as he processed inbound mail, visiting more than a dozen sites in the amount of time it took for my neck to cramp up. I'm very fast, but Cory is in a different league entirely. Rereading this, I can see I'm not doing it justice. I wish I had a video...

"This was never a skill before. I mean, maybe if you were an air traffic controller, but for most of us, most of the time, this data overload skill and the ability to make snap judgments is not taught or rewarded." /seth godin/