Off Course-On Target

Serious Play: Are We Humans the Biggest Computer of All?

Would you be interested in a future where the pursuit of fun and enjoyment was one our our major roles in life because it leads to solving extraordinarily large and complex world problems? For example, what if all of us helped to digitize all the content contained in all the books in the world? Almost none of this content is currently available on the Web or in any digital form and as such, is largely inaccessible to most. And would you be interested in a world where the relationship between computers and humans is a very positive and symbiotic one? I know I would. 

I'd like to bring your attention to some of the ways in which this is already happening. Let's see if this excites you so much that you'd like to not only participate in some of these processes, but also start to use some of these models to help solve some of the problems you and your profession or areas of interest face.

In my previous posting "Moving aLOM", I mentioned some of the exciting, yet daunting, challenges of the future of metadata, such as how to create, in staggering volume, some of the more "subjective" metadata—things like the infinite characteristics that describe people, places, and things—where we humans are still the only source. This effort would include things like creating metadata for all the images and videos out there—still a largely unsolved problem—the absence of which not only makes them very hard to find, but also makes the Web and computers very inaccessible to the visually impaired, which, with age, might include a lot of us!

The Exciting Work of Luis von Ahn

Perhaps most notable in this area is a relatively young new professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Luis von Ahn, standing at right in this photo with his PhD advisor Manuel Blum. Luis has already completed some amazing work on what he refers to as "human computation" and how to put "wasted" human cycles to use in solving problems a computer cannot solve at this point in time, but humans can solve easily. Luis also picks up on a theme we have discussed here on Off Course - On Target in many other contexts—the power of the "network effect" achieved by connecting everything and every one together. Human computation is obviously focused on the latter, and Luis wants us to consider having all of our brains connected together as an extremely advanced large-scale distributive processing unit. Not to worry, no wires or direct connections to your head are required!

Before I go any further, and especially if you are more of a visual and auditory learner, let me recommend that you immediately watch this talk called "Human Computation" that Luis gave on July 26, 2006, about the power of human cycles. This 51-minute talk is part of the Google Video Text Talk series (also highly recommended), and while it is long by some current standards, I feel very comfortable recommending this to you, since I'm convinced you'll agree it was a VERY good use of your time (actually Luis' talk only runs 40 minutes, and is followed by about 10 minutes of a good Q&A session).

Another excellent reference for you, which contains more fascinating details and examples of von Ahn's work, can be found in Clive Thompson's article "For Certain Tasks, the Cortex Still Beats the CPU"  in the June 2007 edition of Wired magazine.

Games with a Purpose

But for those who don't have the time right now to look at these things more, here is a quick synthesis of what I find so exciting and interesting about the innovative use of our human "compute cycles", and the use of "fun and games" for very significant and "serious" results. What von Ahn likes to call "games with a purpose".

One of the most common and effective examples of this type of human computation is one of Luis' first applications, which is known as "Captcha". The name may be new to you, but I'm sure you're already a veteran Captcha expert! Captchas are those slightly difficult to make out words that you are asked to identify and type into a box when you are signing up for web sites. Captchas are used for responses online and in other situations where we want to prevent automated "bots" from generating unending amounts of "spam" or other undesirable exploitations of such online experiences. The problem is how to differentiate between a human response and a computer response, and Captchas are a simple solution to this problem, as well as a simple example of a problem that computers can't solve by themselves.

In itself, this doesn't sound like that interesting of a problem, although certainly it is an annoying one! However, part of what I would see as Luis' brilliance is in the more primary problems he is solving with this process.

In the case of Captcha, the real problem being solved pertains to my initial reference about the challenge of digitizing all the content of the world's printed matter, such as books. For more background on this digitizing and scanning challenge, you may want to refer to my previous posting from Jan 2007 "Books—the NEW old medium". Specifically, the problem is with all the words found in printed matter that scanning and conversion technology cannot make out, because the medium has a crease running through it, or it is partly missing, or other factors which make it impossible for the technology to recognize the words correctly.  Yet, show these words to almost any one of us and we can easily recognize the word.

So all those "fuzzy" words in Captchas are NOT just some random words that are blurred to fool a computer. Instead, these are the images of words which scanning technology has failed to recognize correctly! Luis refers to this specific application as ReCaptcha and you'll find much more information there, as well as instructions and free plugins for you to embed within your own sites, blogs, etc.

And that's just one side of why Luis von Ahn was awarded one of the MacArthur "Genius" awards and a Microsoft Research grant, for he has also managed to put these types of solutions into a game format that starts to look at solving these kinds of problems at a scale that is truly breathtaking! 

Solving World Problems or Playing Solitaire?

In his talks, Luis likes to use a very compelling metric of human-hours, and he often compares statistics on the the amount of human-hours that are "wasted", in his opinion, doing something like playing Solitaire on a computer. I too have always been amazed at the number of people I observe when walking down the aisles of an airplane, for example, who are hard at "work" playing Solitaire, but I had no idea just how much time is spent on this. According to the statistics that Luis uses, over 9 billion human-hours were expended playing Solitaire in 2003 alone! Better yet, he puts this into perspective by comparing this activity to such things as:

• The building of the New York City Empire State building, which consumed about 7 million human-hours, and thus equates to just 6.8 hours of collective Solitaire playing.
• Building the entire Panama Canal, which took 20 million human-hours and amounts to less than a day of collective solitaire playing!

Metadata for All Images?

Now imagine if we were able to put this kind of "human computation" to more effective use AND still do so within the format of games that people can enjoy doing themselves! One example is another one of Luis' creations, and one that has been running with staggering results for over three years called the ESP Game. As we've discussed many times, experiential "learning by doing" is often one of the best ways to learn about something new, so I'd encourage you to not only read about the ESP Game on that site, but to play it for awhile. (Caution: can be very addictive and time consuming!) When you do, you'll see how it puts two or more players (there is also a single player version) into a friendly competition by typing in descriptive words for a given photo (that metadata thing again), and they get points whenever they both type in the same word.

So what? While progress is being made in image recognition technology, this is still largely a problem that computers cannot do. And ask yourself, do YOU take the time to "tag" or create all the metadata for the photos and videos that YOU post, such as who and what is in the photo? Didn't think so. Yet by using this type of game format, the ESP Game has been running for over three years with no drop off in popularity and as of mid-2006, it was very fast, very cheap, and very accurate. If this were done as a popular online game site, it would be possible to label all the images on Google Image Search in just a few weeks! No surprise then that the ESP Game has already been licensed by Google in the form of the Google Image Labeler, and is used to improve the accuracy of the Google Image Search. We humans are relatively competitive animals and we like to do what we enjoy, so this approach appears to have a lot of promise.

Yes, but WHERE is that object in the photo?

Another problem that is even more challenging than identifying WHAT objects are in the image is identifying WHERE they are in the image. To do this, Luis has created another game called "PeekaBoom". The first player sees an image along with a word that describes an object within the image, and then clicks on the image where the named object is located. The second player sees only the object that the first player clicked on and types the word associated to that object. Once the second player guesses the correct word, the two players move on to the next image and switch roles. More details are explained in the video (you really should take the time to watch it!).

Human Computer Relations: Parasitic or Symbiotic?

Luis also notes how this transforms the current relationship between humans and computers from what he calls a parasitic relationship to a symbiotic one where:

"...humans solve some problems, computers solve others, and together we work to create a better world."

Sound far fetched? Well, in the less than two years that his limited experiment of the ESP Game has run, over 75,000 players have come up with over 15 million "agreements" (matched words). This rate would indicate that 5,000 players playing simultaneously could label all images on Google Images in about two months. Think about that...5,000 is NOT a very big number when you consider the numbers on many gaming sites. Therefore, it should be possible to label all the images on the Web in a few months. Again, I strongly recommend that you check out the video to get not only more details, but to see just how accurate, pragmatic, and promising this approach is. 

For example, it turns out that the results of a game such as PeekaBoom can in turn be used to help train computers to recognize objects and their location. Turns out that one of the reasons that computers are not yet very good at this type of object recognition and automated metadata generation is that there is very little data and examples to use to "train" the computers on how to do it. By capturing the results of all the human play in location identification of objects within images, this data can then be used to train computers to do the same thing"—allowing us move on to new challenges... and more fun.

Super Side Effects

I think you'll agree that this approach not only shows great promise in terms of solving some very large scale problems, but has some surprising and equally amazing "side effects", like how some people have used this to help them learn a language. This approach has spawned its own game called Babble, where two English-speaking players are shown a sentence in a foreign language that neither of them speak, and are presented with a list of possible meanings (in English) below each word. Players try to agree upon a set of English words that forms the most coherent sentence. The result is that this activity is surprisingly effective in translating foreign text into English without requiring anyone fluent in both languages. Think of the possibilities of this running at a larger scale!

Another "side effect" of this approach is how many players have noted that they end up finding other people who think very much like them, and thus they have a great sense of "intimacy" and closeness with their counterparts who play these games. Therefore, many  ask if they can find out who their anonymous competitors are to continue the conversation. At this point in time, all the game players are anonymous and no identities are revealed, but one could imagine this being used as a way to help discover other people "like you"—ones you'd want to meet and get to know better.

Common Sense Isn't that Common; yet!

And lastly from von Ahn's work, check out his new game Verbosity, which helps to generate what he calls "common sense facts" (again just more metadata really). One player is given a word and the other tries to guess what it is by completing fill-in-the-blank-type templates, such as "It is a type of ____" or "It contains ___".  The player who entered the original word can answer "true" or "false", but can't use the word itself. All this is very much like some party games that many of you have probably played, but the important difference here goes back to the original point of the summative network effect and how this can all be put to greater use. In the example that Luis shows in his presentation, the word "milk" would have some common sense facts such as;

• It is white
• It is a liquid
• It is often used to eat cereal
• It has lactose

Again, computers can not currently solve this kind of problem, and it is another an example of the need for massive amounts of metadata. Imagine if we started generating massive volumes of these "common sense facts" and they were readily available to all. 

More Competition = Less Carbon?

Lest you should think this is just a "one man show" from Luis von Ahn, I want to point out that there are many others who have been developing, adopting, and adapting similar models. For example, "Carbonrally: Carbon Challenge", which you can learn more about from the Nov. 20th, 2007 Webware post "Carbonrally: My carbon footprint's smaller than yours" by Martin LaMonica, is an application that is showing some great promise for improving the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions or the "carbon footprint" of individuals and organizations alike. Carbonrally adds the dimension of some fun and healthy competition to do better than others. As Martin describes it, Carbonrally is "tapping into people's tribal competitive spirit".

Whew!  That's quite an introduction to what I believe is both a powerful and profound pattern emerging—where the natural pursuit of fun, healthy competition, and challenges are combined into a game-based model that has already shown some of the ways we can solve large-scale present and future problems. It also creates a whole new relationship between us and technology. This model is not only interesting and fun, but it is a fascinating example of "user generated metadata", which I mentioned in my previous "Moving aLOM" posting.

Your Turn to Play!

Besides raising your awareness about "human computation" and the power of this approach, I also want to encourage all of us to put more time and energy into figuring out how we can inject more fun into work and other problem-solving situations. As you do so, I think you'll see an important job or task or problem  can be more fun if it's solved with some kind of game play, and where the solution remains very much a human one.

We can not, for now at least, expect computers to come up with such fun and game-based solutions by themselves! 

For starters, if you have websites or other applications where you have problems preventing spam or other misuses, consider taking advantage of some of the freely available plugins and nullities, such as those from the ReCaptcha site. Longer term though, please put some thought into which problems you could address with this model, and the ways you could do so by injecting the fun and challenge of a game-based approach into the more serious problems you need to solve...then share them with us here at Off Course - On Target.

I'm reminded of the great quote from Brian Suton-Smith who said:

"The opposite of play is not work; its depression!"

And I look forward to hearing all the innovative and creative ways you will come up with to solve problems—large and small—and replace depression with play. Have fun!

Musical Snowflakes Continue to Fall All Around Us

The world of music continues to be one of the richest sources of examples for the Snowflake Effect, where mass personalization, mass customization, mass contribution are all available to try.

The list of examples continues to grow exponentially.  A "Do It Yourself/ Build Your Own" model calls for a radical redesign, and this is what most products and services will need to adopt if they expect to survive in the future.

If you haven't tried using this aspect of mass personalization in the music services area, I'd recommend you check out the "Social Music Overview" page from TechCrunch for a list of options and a brief overview of each. Then, to best understand and evaluate the experience and the potential, you really need to try it yourself. 

See if you think that there is no turning back now. The genie is out of the bottle and there is no putting it back!  The vector of mass personalization and the Snowflake Effect is inevitable and will become the expectation that we have for most products and services, because we now know it is possible—a great thing from my perspective. But let me know your reactions and experiences as well.

Right now though, I'd like to bring a few of the newer developments and advancements from the world of music to your attention. 

Slacker isn't!

My first example is Slacker, and contrary to its name (in many cultures the word "slacker" refers to someone who does not try or work very hard), this site is a real winner. It's currently my top pick for the Snowflake Effect as its applied to music. 

You'll find a good overview of Slacker in this PC Mag review. On TechCrunch, you'll see that the founders of Slacker (each of whom is an online music veteran) have very big ambitions indeed.  In addition to their Web-based music service, which will compete with others such as Pandora, MOG, and Last.FM, Slacker is about to release (Dec 2007) a new portable player, which is reviewed here and is pictured on the left. This new portable player is WiFi-enabled, so you can have music streamed right to it, and synch it with your desktop and music collection. They have also announced a satellite car kit so you can have this music wherever you are. 

One notable addition over most other music personalization services is that the desktop version of Slacker (Windows only for now unfortunately) enables you to incorporate your own music library in the mix. What most impressed me, however, was the well designed interface that enables new degrees of personalization.  I'm referring to the overall human computer interface, not just the way it looks. 

Slacker is impressive and a significant improvement over other services. You can do as much or as little customization as you like quickly and easily. And no matter where you leave off in this customization, Slacker works to the maximum degree possible.

For example, my former favorite, Pandora, requires that you provide constant feedback by indicating that you like or don't like each song. If you stop providing this feedback, then it stops playing after an hour or two. This is all very understandable since it can't continue to improve without some additional input, so it knows if the music is continuing to be just right for you at just that time or not. However, most of us are unwilling or unable to constantly provide this feedback for every song while it is playing—at least not by the current norm of manually clicking a thumbs up or thumbs down button or a 1-5 star rating.  This method is too interruptive on a continuous basis. 

Slacker, in contrast to all the others I know, is set up to do the best it can with however much feedback you give it. Obviously the more you give, the more you get. However, that Slacker will continue to work very hard at playing music that is as personalized as possible to the information you've given it is a huge improvement.

I'm very big on the "discovery factor" of this kind of personalization, and this is another big plus of Slacker, which is why I'm using this as my current best example. As you use the Slacker interface to personalize the music, you are constantly exposed to more and more alternatives. Yet this does not overwhelm you with too much choice, because you can take it or leave it. Again, Slacker maximizes as much feedback as you've given it and keeps on playing great personalized music.  One particularly valuable new function is the ability for you to set the "discoverability" factor to any degree you like.  This is nicely summarized in the PC Mag review:

"To tweak your listening experience further, Slacker provides four ingenious fine-tuning options. Artist Discovery lets you control how much variety you'll get beyond the chosen artists (a lot, a little, or none at all), and Popularity determines whether you get "fringe" song selections, "hits," or something in between. The Favorites tool determines how often the selected station plays those songs you've tagged as favorites. Finally, there's Year, which narrows the selection to Classic, Older, Recent, or Current. (You can leave all these options set to Auto if you'd rather not get so specific.) Neither Last.fm nor Pandora offer anywhere near this kind of fine-tuning; the most you can do is vote yea or nay on the current song selection (which you can do in Slacker as well)."

Social.FM

Want more examples of the richness of the music world?  Check out the just released Social.fm, which is (as you might guess) a widget designed for  music sharing within social networks, such as FaceBook. Read the Nov. 12th Webware review "Social.fm rolls out fancy looking Facebook app, DIY widgets for everyone else" for a good overview of this new service. In addition to a nicely integrated FaceBook version, Social.fm has also announced that they are working on integrating better with with Google's OpenSocial initiative.  This is worth keeping an eye on IF and as OpenSocial creates a standard that enables interoperability for widgets across all applications and OS.  This is still a long way off and somewhat of a long shot, but it's very much worth rooting for and following up on.

Social.fm's announcement of Social.fm Mobile is also great example of convergence. This technology turns your smartphone into a music player for everything from your own music collection to digital radio and podcasts,

So, are you Off Course from your usual thinking, and where you are looking?  Most likely. But On Target? Even more likely!  Enjoy your experiential learning and I'll be back soon with more.

The Lego of Gadgets

How could I not like Rafe Neeleman's recent posting on Webware called "Bug Labs: The Lego of Gadgets"?!  Here's so many of my favorite themes all wrapped into one: Lego block modularity, mashups, gadgets and the whole DIY ethic (Do It Yourself). 

OK, I confess to having a severe gadget addiction that dates back to my early youth in an earlier era where it manifested as hot rods, restoring antique cars, woodworking, metalworking, sewing, and other pursuits. The DIY gene is very dominant in me (along with just being plain cheap). A friend and I were just discussing this idea this past weekend, when it worked out "cheaper" to go buy a new MIG welder and some other tools to build some custom stainless steel brackets that were going to cost too much to have made by a local shop:

DIY labor = less $$ + new toys tools

What's not to love about that formula?

If you have any similar tendencies, do take the time to check out the Bug Labs site. It appears to be the work of a very passionate group—my favorite kind of people! On their new web site, their stated inspiration is:

There are so many great gadget ideas that haven't been thought of yet. With BUG, we want to unlock and inspire the discovery and creation of as many of these devices as possible.

Right now, they have a "BUGbase" unit (image left) which is the size of an old tape cassette (remember those? If not ask your parents) and is (their site described it); "a small hackable Linux computer" that has the basic components you need for most devices such as a CPU, USB, LCD interface, battery, WiFi, etc.

 

Some of their initial add on hardware modules (image at right) include a GPS, digital camera/videocam, touch sensitive color LCD screen and an accelerometer/motion sensor—all of which snap together with the BUGbase, of course, and can be programmed with the open source software SDK.

They apparently have a full development environment called Eclipse which is also open source and according to Rafe's posting, "looks to be philosophically similar to the Bug hardware—that is, highly modular."

While Bug Labs is still pretty high up the geek/DIY echelon, I do hope that this is evidence of an evolution towards a more modular and interoperable level, enabling mashups for hardware, much as we are seeing on the software side with widgets and the like. 

 

Once again however widespread adoption will depend upon the emergence of standards, be they de facto or de jure that will make everyone's modules interoperate and "snap together". What would Lego blocks be without standard "pin" size?! 

On the good news side we are seeing how something like the relatively ubiquitous USB connector has sparked an explosion of devices that all work off this same standard (even with the slight hiccup of there now being two USB connectors—A and B). This ability to use the same cords to plug any USB compatible device into any USB port has been a huge improvement in the interoperability of hardware and the exchange of power and data between such devices as cell phones, cameras, GPS, scanners, printers, etc. Heck, some of them even span the great Windows/Mac divide! 

On the other hand, no one seems to have been able to come up with a standard DC power plug in!  Even within the same manufacturer, it seems like every new laptop I get, for example, has a slightly different size connector, which renders all my other "brick" converters useless and means almost none of us can share them when we are together. 

So here's hoping that efforts like Bug Labs can start to make some significant progress towards standards that matter! In the meantime, all you DIYers like me, have fun creating more mashups, and be sure to share some of your creations with all of us.

EOL and the power of MC2: Mass Contribution x Mass Customization

Some of my previous postings have focused on the need to dramatically increase the scale of our discovery of the unknown. I'm finding more examples all of the time that show a trend towards more mass participation and mass contribution by connecting everything and everyone together. The project we recently covered called the "Encyclopedia of Life" (EOL) is one such example.

But let's take a step back and try synthesizing this into something that give us direct and broader benefits.

As I noted my previous postings "New Perspectives: Looking Down and Under" and Third Wave, about the Open Ocean Initiative (OOI), EOL is not just another amazingly large scientific study with the resultant report and data. Instead, EOL is yet another great example of the pattern towards mass customization and mass contribution.

EOL will be using a mashup model by assembling lots of technology and data from many different sources into a single experience. This effort is not as flexible as I would like in terms of providing multiple experiences, and is much less "open" from a contribution standpoint than I would ultimately like, but it is still a huge step towards mass contribution compared to the historically typical static and closed research.

For the project, agents will collect all the information about a particular species from the Web and assemble it into a draft species page.Scientists will then review, edit, and authenticate the information. A species expert will sign each page.

This is a proven model, but is also one that will be challenged to meet their objective of exponentially increasing the volume and speed of cataloguing the worlds known species of life and even more so in discovering the unknown 90%.

But let's keep in mind that the context here is scientific data, and thus it lends itself much more to such scrutiny, accuracy, and expertise. Yet I can see that by truly opening this up to mass contribution by the global scientific community and providing a way to converge, connect and vet it all, then it is quite possible (I'd estimate probable) that this will create a tipping point and set off the chain reaction or network effect that can achieve the audacious goal of EOL, and do so in a fraction of the time.

However, the most exciting characteristic to me is the degree to which EOL is shining example of the trend towards mass personalization and the Snowflake Effect.  For example, when you're using EOL you can set up your level of expertise in a given context, you can post questions, photos and your own discoveries. After all, many of the currently known species have been discovered accidentally and by amateurs—a.k.a you and me!  Imagine the impact of adding millions or billions more "amateur explorers" to this process?!

Fail Forward Faster!!

There is, of course, the big question of how to do all this with a strong degree of accuracy and authenticity. Similar to the challenge that something like Wikipedia faces, when anyone can post or edit anything, how do we know if we can trust the information? This is a very important and major issue for all of us to pay attention to and to participate in evolving some effective solutions. While Wikipedia continues to have its share of growing pains, why would we expect anything less of disruptive innovations? Some of Wikipedia's recent decisions are of concern to me regarding some of the restrictions they are placing on postings and editing;however I empathize with the difficult decisions they wrestle with and applaud the fact that they are making decisions, good and bad,and thus learning from their experiences, so the can put ever forward. 

Let's be sure to keep in mind that this is all a grand experiment and a learning process, and we should expect "failures" and relish the learning that they provide. From my perspective there is no question that we are much better off with this trend towards a much more transparent process, mass contribution etc. as exemplified by the likes of Wikipedia, and I welcome the rapid growth of this pattern with such additional efforts as the Open Ocean Initiative and the Encyclopedia of Life. Check them out and see what you think.

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Frontiers in Service

Recently I was honored with an invitation from Jim Spohrer to attend and present at the Frontiers in Service Conference on Friday, Oct. 5th, 2007 in San Francisco. Jim is the Director of Services Research at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA, and he has been a longtime colleague and inspiration. Our connection dates back to his days at Apple Computer in the late 80's when he was a DEST (Distinguished Engineer, Scientist, and Technologist) and program manager of learning technology projects in Apple's Advanced Technology Group (ATG). Many thanks to Jim for this opportunity.

I met Jim back in the late 80's when he was leading the effort to create Apple's first online learning community and vision for anytime, anywhere e-learning and the Educational Object Exchange. Jim is also responsible for coming up with the whole idea behind WorldBoard.

The WorldBoard idea came to Jim one day in 1996 when he was out hiking and saw an interesting plant that he wanted to know more about. He started to imagine the benefits of combining a new viewing system built into his eye glasses with digital photography, GPS, and location information, and a way to leave information at that location for the next hiker who asked the same question he had asked (remember this was 1996!).  Eventually, he came to call this notion WorldBoard and there is now a whole group called the WorldBoard Forum working on this and related challenges. The site is very "click worthy"!

Back in 2000 when I was creating  "Into the Future: A vision paper" for the American Society of Technical Development ASTD and the US National Governor's Association (NGA), I used Jim's idea of the WorldBoard as an example of "augmented reality", whereas all that talk at the time was about virtual reality. Check out my paper for more details if you're interested. I can't believe it was "only" seven years ago!  

The Frontiers in Service Conference, which I mentioned at the start of this post, was founded in 1992 and is considered by many to be:

"'...the world's leading annual conference on service research. The conference has a very global nature, and generally draws attendees from 25 countries or more from around the world. It is sponsored annually by the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland.'

The Center for Excellence in Service (CES) is a nonprofit organization composed of individuals dedicated to service strategy and research. CES combines its unique perspective of customer point-of-view and an exploration of a variety of services (with a focus on information technology) in order to provide business leaders and academics with the latest knowledge in service research.  CES also implements practical business objectives into its academic research, and this dynamic creates a partnership between the business world and academia."

I was particularly attracted to the dual attributes of this event and organization: they represent an international R&D community and one focused on the future of services. Services is a big focus area of interest for me. I see a future where our current distinction between services and products will be blurred to the point of requiring a whole new vocabulary to describe the emerging new world where products are becoming more service-like and services are becoming more product-like. 

This same view is also discussed in some of my prior postings, such as New Perspectives: Third Wave, where I point out author Alvin Toffler's predictions from 40 years ago where he envisioned that we would see a  blurring of the distinction between a consumer or a producer and his coining of the word "pro-sumer" to describe this.

Similarly, I believe we are seeing more evidence of a parallel pattern of convergence between products and services. Furthermore, I expect we will see this materialize on a mass scale in MUCH less than the almost 40 years it took for the "pro-sumer" society to emerge. 

At the Frontiers in Service conference, I had the honor of being on stage with Dr. Michel Wedel (University of Maryland) and Dr. Sajeev Varki (University of South Florida, USA), two eminent experts in the areas of recommender systems.

In our session “Rating Recommendations: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly”, examples from the world of music predominated much of the discussion, since they provide so many tangible examples of what is already possible for mass personalization through feedback loops, metadata, and recommender systems, which address the tricky challenge of personalizing our listening experiences. Consider for a moment just how difficult and "fuzzy" this problem is to get some assistance with choosing "just the right" song at just the right time for just you and just your context at any given moment.

Given my affinity for mass personalization and what my co-conspirator Erik Duval and I refer to as the Snowflake Effect, you can imagine why I was delighted to be there.

The name Snowflake Effect refers to the fact that you are like a snowflake; there is no one else quite like you, and of course that also makes you just like every other snowflake!  But moreover so too is every situation, every project unique, so we're aiming for enabling each of us to have "just the right" people, content and "stuff" at just the right time in just the right context on just the right medium, etc,

In my presentation to this group (see slides below), I posed the question that if this observation of uniqueness has arguably always been the case and is SO obvious, then why do we live in a world that assumes the opposite?  If we look around us, almost very product and service has been designed for some relatively large number of people, a "target audience, customer or demographic" and a whole set of assumptions about how everyone in this group is the same! But the times they are a changing!

| View | Upload your own

I went on to suggest that it is now possible to have such mass personalization, that there are more and more examples showing up every day, and therefore there are more and more people who know this is possible and are demanding it. Such "market demand" is usually met. 

My additional point about what's new was the degree to which we are seeing what I call "MC3", the combined multiplier effect of:

Mass Customization x Mass Contribution x Mass Conversation = Mass Personalization

The R&D work , which Dr. Wedel and so many of the international researchers in the room are doing in this area, promises to accelerate this trend much further, much faster. 

I always relish any chance to get in front of people doing the really hard work of research and development, because it gives me the opportunity to suggest some new areas of research that some of them might pick up on. Such opportunities have just been too good to turn down and have proven extremely effective in the past. Perhaps being a bit overzealous, I couldn't resist providing this latest opportunity to be in front of such a prestigious and international group of R&D experts, so I put up the following list of key challenges I see facing both the service industry (the focus of this group) and mass personalization:

• Scalability:
  • Global personalization at a planetary scale
    • e.g. 6.6 billion people on the planet growing exponentially
  • Uniqueness is unique and infinitely so
    • n degrees of personalization per every person, place and thing
    • n radio “stations” per person
    • n-number play lists
• Sustainability:
  • Mass contribution models
• Transferability:
  • Portable Feedback and Attention data
  • Re-purposing from strange sources
  • Not “just” for content
    • Think about competencies; for example, “just the right” people
• Transparency:
  • Dynamic pattern recognition and speculative computing
  • Minimizing the direct explicit input required from individuals
• Metadata Matters:
  • Automated metadata generation
  • Attention metadata
  • Context acquisition
  • Inferred metadata and implicit metadata acquisition
    • e.g. the “missingness” that Dr. Wedel noted)
  • Mood metadata
  • Subjective vs. objective metadata
    • Genome projects (e.g. Pandora Music Genome Project

There's too much to cover in more detail in this posting (lucky you!), but I will use some of these items as fodder for future postings.

My thanks to Jim Spohrer, Ronald Rust, and the Center for Excellence in Service organization for this opportunity to learn about the many exciting R&D efforts underway and the chance to suggest some of the future work they might take on. Based on what I saw and heard at the conference, I'm more optimistic than ever that the dream of having the Snowflake Effect lead to mass personalization on a planetary scale is well on its way to becoming a reality!

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del.icio.us tags: Frontiers in Service, service, Jim Spohrer, Center of Excellence, Toffler, prosumer, pro-sumers, Future Shock, Third Wave, personalization, Snowflake Effect, Erik Duval, metadata

Technorati tags: Frontiers in Service, service, Jim Spohrer, Center of Excellence, Toffler, prosumer, pro-sumers, Future Shock, Third Wave, personalization, Snowflake Effect, Erik Duval, metadata

Don't Mean to Bug You, but .......

Jonas Salk, the man who developed the polio vaccine, once said "If all the insects on earth disappeared, within 50 years all life on earth would disappear. If all humans disappeared, within 50 years all species would flourish as never before." There would be some debate as to the precise figures and outcomes here but the point is well taken I think. No reason to despair either, but humble pie should probably be a regular part of our diet, and here's chance to gain some more IQ points from taking this new perspective.

The earth without people

If you're curious about a scenario of the earth without humanity, check out "Earth Without People, an essay by Alan Weisman in the February 6, 2007 issue of Discover magazine. Weisman describes some possible scenarios. His article includes the the chart shown here, which lays this out on a timeline. 

His essay concluded with the following:

"During that same span, every dam on Earth would silt up and spill over. Rivers would again carry nutrients seaward, where most life would be, as it was long before vertebrates crawled onto the shore. Eventually, that would happen again. The world would start over."

And one bit of good news to some is that if all humans were to disappear, so too would some other species that have become dependent upon us, most notably the cockroach!  But for all of you cheered by this thought, remember that it requires that we leave first! 

Recommended Reading:

For more on this perspective, as well as a good read, I'm recommending you consider reading Alan Weisman's book The World Without Us. To help you decide if it's worth your time see Starting Over, the recent review (Sept.2, 2007) by Jennifer Schuessler who describes Weisman's book as

"wherein he imagines what would happen if the earth’s most invasive species—ourselves—were suddenly and completely wiped out."

"When it comes to mass extinctions, one expert tells him, “the only real prediction you can make is that life will go on. And that it will be interesting. Weisman’s gripping fantasy will make most readers hope that at least some of us can stick around long enough to see how it all turns out."

Next up for your reading consideration and taking us back to insects, check out  Buzz: The Intimate Bond Between Humans and Insects. For some "decision support" with this one, read the excerpt and review in Discover called "Bzzzzzzz: Why insects are vital to human survival."

Bee-ware

Let's do another one of those "inverted thinking" flips we covered in my posting "New Perspectives: The Benefits of Looking Up!" Rather than consider our elimination, imagine what would happen if all the insects were to disappear?  According to Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson:

"If all insects were to suddenly vanish overnight, it’s likely humans would be endangered. All the plants that insects pollinate would disappear. All our detritus would pile up to colossal heights. Even the oceans would be affected. Nutrients would pour down off the increasingly denuded land into the sea, triggering massive algal blooms, which would exhaust the water of oxygen and threaten fish. And the impact on terrestrial ecosystems would be enormous."

“If insects were gone, you would break a large part of the terrestrial food chain. A number of birds would starve in no time at all. Those birds and other animals that depend on birds for food would disappear. Small mammals in the soil that depend, in part, on insects would disappear. It would be a catastrophic chain reaction around the world.”

Not to be confused with extinction which is the much more gradual decline, does it sound too far fetched that entire species could suddenly go missing? Well, as you may have read, this is exactly what has been happening in the past two years to the  honeybee. Millions of bees all over the world, representing in some areas over 70% of their population, have have been disappearing. They leave their hives, never to return nor to be found. In the USA, the wild honeybees have all but completely disappeared. This been labeled "Colony Collapse Disorder" (CCD) and remains an unsolved mystery.

BTW, don't be distracted by the erroneous reports that linked the disappearing bees to cell phone radiation!  However the research into this very serious problem of CCD may also be leading us to even greater understanding. For example it has been noted that just as industrial agriculture has created problems with pollution, antibiotic resistance, mad cow disease, etc., colony collapse disorder may be a result of a number of poor practices, including the fact that they've bred a superbee and most of the bees hauled around the country for pollination purposes are genetically identical, making them more susceptible to a bacterial or viral attack. On the plus side, InfoShop News has a related article "Organic Beekeepers Not Affected By Colony Collapse Disorder", which goes on to say:

“The problem with commercial operations is in pesticides used in hives to fumigate for varroa mites and antibiotics that are fed to the bees to prevent disease,” she said. “Hives are hauled long distances by truck, often several times during the growing season, to provide pollination services to industrial agriculture crops, which further stresses the colonies and exposes them to agricultural pesticides and GMOs (genetically modified organics).”

Even if the biology side of a world without bees is of less interest to you, consider the economic and human perspectives. In just the USA alone, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture has estimated that CCD has the potential to cause a $15 billion direct loss of crop production and $75 billion in indirect losses. CCD has caught the attention of Fortune magazine with three articles in the past few months including this quote from "As bees go missing, a $9.3B crisis lurks";

"We wouldn't starve if the mysterious disappearance of bees, dubbed colony collapse disorder, or CCD, decimated hives worldwide. For one thing, wheat, corn, and other grains don't depend on insect pollination. 

But in a honeybee-less world, almonds, blueberries, melons, cranberries, peaches, pumpkins, onions, squash, cucumbers, and scores of other fruits and vegetables would become as pricey as sumptuous old wine. Honeybees also pollinate alfalfa used to feed livestock, so meat and milk would get dearer as well. Ditto for farmed catfish, which are fed alfalfa too. 

And jars of honey, of course, would become golden heirlooms to pass along to the grandkids. (Used for millennia as a wound dressing, honey contains potent antimicrobial compounds that enable it to last for decades in sealed containers.)"

Bees for Pets?

Perhaps the insect world has its own version of outsourcing and offshoring?  As you may know, honeybee originated in Europe and are not native to North America. This bee has put undue pressure on the native bees, whose populations until recently were in decline. They're still sorting out why the native bees are making a comeback, but interestingly, native bees called Mason bees have been successfully used by some farmers for pollinating crops. As noted in this Wikipedia entry on Mason bees:

"Most mason bees live in holes and can be attracted by drilling short holes in a block of wood. They are excellent spring season pollinators and, since they have no honey to defend, will only sting if squeezed or stepped on. As such, they make excellent garden "pets", since they both pollinate the plants and are safe for children and pets."

Wait!  Don't Buzz Off Course Just Yet!

But enough of insects for now. You may be asking what this has all got to do with YOU? As usual, I'm leading you along a path and toward a target, however unexpected, convoluted, and latent. In the next few posts. I'll provide a few more varied examples which have common powerful and pervasive patterns lurking beneath which will help provide new perspectives and new models for all of us to use to solve today's complex problems with innovative solutions. If, as I hope, you've previously made some great discoveries here at Off Course - On Target, please follow me a bit further, and I promise to do my best to lead you to more great discoveries along the way, and make it all worth your precious time.

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Technorati tags: insects, bees, colony collapse disorder, CCD, perspectives, books, patterns, research, Jonas Salk, Alan Weisman, Earth Without Us

del.icio.us tags: insects, bees, colony collapse disorder, CCD, perspectives, books, patterns, research, Jonas Salk, Alan Weisman, Earth Without Us

New Perspectives: The Third Wave?

In my recent posts on New Perspectives: Looking Up! and Looking Down and Under, I reviewed a series of new initiatives and technologies ranging from several significant efforts to explore and document the great unknown of earth's oceans to the new capabilities of Goggle "Sky" and  the hidden flight simulator in Google Earth. I chose these examples, in part, to provide you with some new perspectives and because I agree with Allan Kay that:

"a new point of view is worth 80 IQ points."

I thought each of these provided some new perspectives and are very much worth your attention in and of themselves.

However, my primary purpose and point was that I think these examples offer evidence of powerful new meta patterns and trends—"meta' in the sense that I believe that they are operating at a very profound and pervasive level and are affecting more than we may realize.

What is fascinating to me about the marine projects, for example, is that they are being designed not only to provide a huge increase in the quantity and quality of marine data, but the measurement tools and technology they will use is being made accessible to everyone and available on a continuous basis. This is a major shift in approach that believe is a characteristic of the times we are living in.

In spite of all the hype that surrounds buzz words such as Web 2.0, what I see here is a much larger and more profound pattern towards openness and bi-directional functionality. To me, these examples represent the realization of what Alvin Toffler and his wife, Heidi. so presciently described as a "pro-sumer" society. Back in the 60's and 70's when Toffler first wrote about this idea in their best sellers of the time Future Shock and Third Wave, he predicted that we were moving from the industrial evolution which he characterized as the "second wave" ( the first wave was agrarian hunter/gatherer) towards a third wave where we would not be categorized either as producers OR consumers, but rather we would be both, simultaneously.

We've seen this pattern emerging with the evolution of Internet, and World Wide Web, and as related tools have become more "read/write" (consume/produce) and more mass contribution-oriented. Mass production and read only (consume) are becoming a thing of the past. 

But most of these tools are characterized by or limited to the technology world. Now we see this same pattern emerging in new and very different spheres—the marine and space examples we've just looked at, and the pattern becomes much clearer, much larger, and much more powerful. 

In the case these oceanic projects, they are creating an infrastructure of interconnected tools and technology that will be widely available to all who wish to use them. Not only will almost any of us have access to oceans of data (sorry, couldn't resist)—a huge gain in itself, these projects will also enable public and other scientists alike to take control of the tools themselves. Imagine YouTube filling up with high def video content uploaded in almost real time from these projects. Imagine controlling the cameras to make your own videos!.   

So what?  Well among other shifts, these patterns promise to cause increasing acceleration of the rate of change (part of Living in a World of Exponential Change) with some equally rapid and radical results. As Professor Oscar Schofield, a biological oceanographer at Rutgers University put it:

"the data gathered already had upended some of what he was taught in graduate school, from the way rivers flow into the ocean to the complexity of surface currents." and went on to say:

“When there’s a hurricane, when all the ships are running for cover, I’m flying my gliders into the hurricane,” using his office computer, Professor Schofield said. “Then I’m sitting at home drinking a beer watching the ocean respond to a hurricane.” 

“What’s great about oceanography is we’re still in the phase of just basic exploration. We’ve discovered things off one of the most populated coasts in the United States that we didn’t know yet. O.O.I. (Open Ocean Initiative) will take us one level beyond that, to where any scientist in the world will be able to explore any ocean.”

Now THAT is powerful change and a wave I plan on riding. More likely this meta-trend will affect all of us more along the lines of the way a rising tide raises all boats in the harbor. It is likely that we are all "rising" already, whether we know it or not.

Well, I hope you're feeling much "smarter" now with all these new perspectives and extra IQ points.  As a sailor, I'm obviously fascinated with the ocean, but I'm also trying to use these larger trends to get a bit "smarter" myself by looking at the world from new vantage points, such as Outer and Inner Space. 

Isn't it fascinating that the more we learn the more we understand how much more we don't know? "Curious for life" is a goal I hope you share too and that this little "drink of water" will motivate you to learn much more about the aquatic worlds all around us. Sea you soon!

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Technorati tags: oceans, patterns, trends, future, prosumer, Toffler, change, exponential change

del.icio.us tags: oceans, patterns, trends, future, prosumer, Toffler, change, exponential change

New Perspectives: The Benefits of Looking Up!

Alan Kay (sometimes referred to as the father of the PC, object oriented code, and much more) is credited with saying that "point of view is worth 80 IQ points". This is a catchy way of saying that consciously looking at problems and situations from multiple perspectives and constantly looking for new perspectives to solve problems is an extremely powerful technique and skill to develop.

I suspect that you have many examples in your own life, where you've come up with solutions or have been more creative in your problem solving using some version of this idea. This idea of helping others, as well as myself, to discover and utilize new perspectives is a strategy I use in most of my work, and is a primary goal for Off Course - On Target. So with this in mind, let's see if we can get a bit "smarter" by finding and using a few new perspectives.

Looking up

We humans have a natural tendency to look ahead and down much more than we look up.  It was always a successful strategy as a child playing hide and seek to climb up a tree or onto a top shelf in a closet. And anyone unfortunate enough to have spent time in a hospital bed or on a gurney knows how different the world looks from this perspective and how little attention is paid to ceilings! On the other hand I've noticed that dentists have taken notice and are putting things on the ceilings, such as paintings or televisions, for you to look at while you are reclining in the dentist's chair.

A very recent example of this new perspective of looking up is an exciting new feature in Google Earth called "Sky".  This simple,  but powerful new feature gives you the ability to choose a location on Earth and then turn the "camera" around to look up and see the sky. This amazing tool lets you see and explore stars, animations of the planets movement, zoom in on fabulous Hubble imagery and more. Here is a short video tour that shows Sky in action:

Based on my brief time with this new feature I see this as fun and functional.  How well did your school science courses help YOU understand the spatial relationships of the moon, earth, sun, and stars?  How well can you point out the different stars and constellations in the night sky to your children or others, explaining why they change depending on date and your location? Sky sure seems to help me a lot with this.

To continue with your experiential learning, something we are so fond of here at Off Course - On Target, I highly recommend that you download the newest version of Google Earth and take the Sky feature out for a spin. I think you too will find that it offers some serious fun and lots of learning as well.

And while you're up in the Sky, why not fly?

In some recent posts, I   emphasized the need to avoid what I've characterized as "flapping", that is, copying experts and models of the past, and instead have urged you to focus on the essential characteristics you are seeking to take off and fly.  So it struck me as a nice bit of serendipity to read of the recent discovery of a hidden flight simulator in Google Earth. These secret capabilities, referred to as "Easter eggs" are a favorite of some application developers.

Adding motion is a great way to gain a new perspective, so strap yourself into one of the two airplane options, an F16 Viper and the more manageable SR22 4 seater, and try flying your way over your home region or anyplace else in the world you'd like to see.

To access the hidden feature, open Google Earth and hit Command+Option+A (must be capital A) or Ctrl+Alt+A.  Here is a full list of the keyboard controls for the Google Earth flight simulator. Fasten your seatbelt low and tight and welcome aboard! 

BTW, as you are flying around see how much the realism that comes from flying over photographic images of the "real" earth and sea starts to address some of the limitations of your experiences with less accurate virtual worlds that we've also mentioned in previous discussions, such as in my posting Virtual Lift Off?

Stars to Sea

Another way to use new perspectives is to find ways to tie two or more of them together.  For example, how can the benefits of looking up at the stars, help us when we are down on earth looking out and around us?   

Well, consider sailors who venture out into the open ocean and how extremely dependent they become upon knowing their precise location.  This, of course, helps us just as much with navigation on land. Many of you have experienced the benefits (and aggravations) of onboard GPS and navigation systems installed in new cars you may own or rent.  While modern day technologies, such as GPS and electronic charting, look after navigation with unprecedented ease and extraordinary accuracy, you always want to have a backup or two or three when your life depends upon it! Therefore, the ancient method of celestial navigation is still used as a backup by most who sail the open oceans. 

As an aspiring global sailor myself, I'm busy learning as much as I can about this art and science of finding your way by the sun, moon, stars, and planets, and I'm acquiring skills with sextants and the like. You can just imagine how much Google's Sky makes me "smarter" by helping me to learn these new concepts and skills.  Besides, I just love the juxtaposition of setting my sextant, an 18th-century technology, down beside my oh-so-very 21st-century latest, greatest, high tech GPS system and digital charting screen. 

What examples do you have of using inverted thinking and new perspectives to help you learn more, and be more creative in your thinking and problem solving? Please share your examples through your comments here at Off Course - On Target or in your own postings and I'll continue to do the same.

Thanks!

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del.icio.us tags: Sky, perspectives, astonomy, sextant, navigation, stars, sailors, celestial, sailing

Technorati tags: Sky, perspectives, astonomy, sextant, navigation, stars, sailors, celestial, sailing