Off Course-On Target

Snowflakes Effect Hits Financial Models: Snowflakes funding Snowflakes

The evidence that the Snowflake Effect of mass personalization is continuing to build at an exponential rate continues to show up just about everywhere I look. One dimension of the Snowflake Effect that has not received a lot of discussion yet is the financial side if the story; how will the mind boggling numbers of personalized solutions needed every day be funded?  What are the new financial and business models going to be in a Snowflake Effected world?  If as I believe more and more of us are going to become designers and producers and creators by making our own “stuff”, and especially if others are asking us to make and share some for them, how will we pay for this?   Well, why not apply the Snowflake Effect to funding itself?

Microtizing Finance, Credit & Loans

In fact this the Snowflake Effect has already hit funding models already and we are seeing more and more examples and growth of these wild new models.  One of the hallmarks of the Snowflake Effect is breaking things down into very small components whether that be each of us as unique individuals or each unique moment in time or small parts that can be reused and reassembled into infinite numbers of unique new assemblies Lego block style.  This same “microtization” trend is increasingly taking hold of financial models and enabling each of us 7 billion plus snowflakes to not only become designers, creators and producers, we are also becoming financers and funders. 

One example you have likely heard of and many of you are already participating in is that of microloans, microfinance and microcredit.  Essentially this is where once snowflake can loan small amounts of money to another snowflake or individual cause.  As is often the case this is not a new idea or invention but what is new is the scale and reach of these models.  Back in 2006 Kevin Kelly posted this good overview of “Micro-Loans Online” which he introduced by saying:

This year the father of micro-finance and founder of the Grameen Bank won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in inventing and promoting micro-loans in the developing world. A micro-loan is as little as a few hundred dollars invested into a one-person business with minimal qualifications. That tiny borrowed amount can launch a vegetable stand, repair shop, or bicycle taxi -- a living in other words. As each micro-loan is repaid (and most are), the effects of that small goodness are amplified and leveraged by being loaned out and invested again and again. Micro-loans are the world's only perpetual motion machines.

Snowflake Effect Hits in Financial Models in Developed Regions

Most of these micro loans and micro financing have been focused on dealing with poverty and developing regions and they continue to escalate in both numbers and positive effects.  Somewhat newer and greatly increasing the scope of this Snowflaking of financing is their application to the financing of individuals and small businesses in developed regions and markets.  One of the more noteworthy examples is Kickstarter  which has the tag line of “A new way to Fund & Follow Creativity” and bills itself as being “The world’s largest funding platform for creative projects”.  The model is essentially the same where anyone can pledge any amount, typically one to one hundred dollars, towards a specific project that someone has proposed on the site.  As they point out this is not about lending or investing as each project creator maintains complete control and ownership of their work.  Those who pledge money are also protected because no money changes hands unless the project reaches its funding goal within a set time.

You can check out the Kickstarter web site and Kickstarter blog for more information and examples of the enormous range of ideas, products and services being developed which include everything from software applications to games to art to books to home hardware.

How well is this working?  Well Kickstarter recently had a record setting day with two projects exceeding $1M each in pledges and $1.6M being pledged in 24 hours.  All this from individual snowflakes like you and me.  In fact they had quite the day as they also saw New York’s city council endorse the site as a way to highlight community projects that need funding

It was also noteworthy to me how different the two projects were that exceeded the $1M in pledges.  The TechCrunch review of this eventful day highlighted this nicely:

Often Kickstarter is thought of as a venue for people with very limited means but a good idea to execute that idea. The Elevate Dock is a good example of this.

But Double Fine is an established game studio with office space, employees, and many products under its belt? Why should it go to Kickstarter? Well, Tim Schafer explains that in the video, at least for this project: no publisher would go near a point and click adventure game, but they knew at least some people wanted it. Reasonable enough.

The question, really, is why we even question it. If people want to make something, and people want to fund it, why shouldn’t it be on Kickstarter? The easy stuff — cool accessories or small devices that need a little capital to get started — are just the first wave. Why not pothole repair on a neighbourhood street? Why not a new coffee shop? Why not a feature film? Some of these have been tried, no doubt, and perhaps failed — but the principle is sound:

If you want to make it, and others want you to make it, this is a way for you to connect.

Why not indeed!!  What if the impossible isn’t?

Snowflake Effects on Learning

As you can see then, the Snowflake Effect of mass personalization continues its exponential growth and influence on almost all aspects of our world.  For those of us who look at the world from the perspective of learning, my ongoing question and fascination is with how the needs for each of us as individuals and as societies are changing and being changed by the Snowflake Effect.  The personalization of learning itself such that each learning moment is more successfully and deeply personalized is happening at an equally exponential rate with more examples of this showing up every day.  However an even larger and multiplying effect is the need for a whole new set of skills, knowledge and competencies each of us snowflakes are going to require to survive and thrive in the rapidly evolving new snowflaked world we are creating and will live and learn in.

I fully realize that this all continues to sound unimaginably large and impossible.  And yet as the examples of financial models I’ve highlighted above show, we are surrounded daily by more and more examples of how the impossible isn’t.  The oxymoron of typical Snowflake Effect models that are infinitely scalable AND sustainable turns out to be true!  Or as Kevin Kelly put it; “Micro-loans are the world's only perpetual motion machines.” 

Add enough snowflakes together with these kinds of models and you have a perpetuating avalanche of invention, discovery, creativity, production and happiness.

Living & Learning in a World of Exponential Change

NOTE: The following is the third excerpt from the small contribution I was proud to have made to the “Learning Perspectives 2010” collection put out by The Masie Center in memory and commemoration of Jonathan Kays.  (see previous postings for details)

I run into more and more examples every day of how much our world is one predominated by exponential change and how inexperienced and incompetent we are of working with exponential rates.  Hence my brief post below and my recommendation that we all put a focus on this “new math” of exponentials so that we are able to take full advantage of what continues to be the premature arrival of the future.

If you are interested in more background on exponential change and some of my longer standing perspectives on them, you may enjoy this previous podcast (2007) as well as some examples I’ve highlighted in the past such as this one on “The Encyclopedia of Life” and this one on the effects of exponential change on expertise.

Enjoy and please add your comments or create your own postings with your reactions!

- Wayne

 

Living & Learning in a World of Exponential Change

We have little experience or logical models to help us deal with and understand exponential change. While we have long been familiar with examples like compound interest (and we know how to do the math), when we are confronted with new instances of exponential change, our reaction is one of disbelief. For example, if you fold a piece of paper, you double its thickness and therefore each fold increases its thickness exponentially. So take an ordinary sheet of paper and fold it in half. Then fold that piece of paper in half again and then in half again. After about seven folds, the paper is about the thickness of a notebook and you are soon physically unable to fold it any further, but mathematically, if you were able to do so, you'd find out that after about ten more folds, you would get something about the height of your house. Ten more folds after that, you'd get to the outer limits of the atmosphere. Sixty folds after that, you'd be at the diameter of the solar system. You can see how this kind of progression is something that we just aren't very good at estimating.

Cable and satellite TV enabled two channels to grow into ten, ten into one hundred, and one hundred into thousands. While that was a very steep rate of change, it felt more like a linear rate of change as we had more and more choices of what to watch. With some of the more recent changes, like the introduction of VCRs, recordable DVDs, PVRs (Personal Video Recorders like TiVo), YouTube and TV via the Internet such as Apple TV and Google TV, the increasing abundance hit its tipping point. Today, we have what is effectively an infinite number of channels and choices of what to watch.

Does the concept of a “TV channel” seem almost irrelevant when you can watch almost any show at any time in any place? What you have today might be thought of as a set of personal channels that have just what you - and only you - want to watch. The tipping point of television or video abundance obviates the whole concept of a channel. This is typical and only one example of the way in which the Snowflake Effect is causing such fundamental changes.

Lastly, consider that revolutionary change is very far reaching. Mass production not only affected manufacturing: it has indelibly altered and predominated our entire society by changing such diverse aspects as government, education, housing, clothing, medicine, styles and design. We can and do expect the Snowflake Effect changes to be even more pervasive and profound

It is increasingly critical to acknowledge the need for not just diversity and abundance, but also uniqueness. The needs of every person are different every day as they face new and often unexpected situations: and not just people in rooms with desks and computers, but those on trains, in the fields, on job sites, in cars (under cars!). This applies to everyone, everywhere, every day.

In my estimation the ability to work well with exponential rates of change is one of the top skills of our age and the centuries ahead.  This shift has already happened and will itself continue at exponential rates so we need to increase our learning and our skills in this area at a matching rate.  I’ll post more examples of both what these exponential changes are and how we can all (me too!) acquire such new skills.

Related articles

• YouTube May Imitate TV, Channels and All (technologizer.com)
• Vocabulary-Exponential Functions (tutoringtowardssuccess.wordpress.com)

Here’s a Good Idea:

Several in fact; check out the two videos below from Steven Johnson, consider reading his new book “Where Good Ideas Come From: the Natural History of Innovation” and see if these help you generate more good ideas of your own.

I also love these RSA video animations like the first one below which are intriguingly from the Royal Society for the encouragement of Art and are an extremely effective way of presenting ideas and concepts.  If you’ve not seen one before I think you’ll enjoy not only the topic but the presentation style itself and you’ll find lots of them available on YouTube and elsewhere if you start searching.

But my real purpose of this post was to bring your attention to this provocative pursuit of the challenging question “Where do good ideas come from?” and a book which Steven Johnson has recently released after his five years of his pursuit from an environmental (our surroundings) perspective.  The presentation and the book provide the patterns he has gleaned from his research and observations. 

I particularly liked his his notion of “creating spaces where ideas can mingle, swap and create new forms”.  And as a real serendipity and Lego block kind of guy I was particularly drawn to Steven’s thoughts on good how good ideas are formed by the collision of smaller hunches and the cognitive catalyst of serendipitously stumbling over some rich bit of new information.  He notes that what we’ve been seeing, over the past six to eight hundred years, is the historic rise in connectivity to reach out to other people and borrow their ideas and hunches and let them collide with ours and create something much bigger than the sum of these hunches themselves.

Check out these videos below and see if they don’t provide some great cognitive collisions with some of your hunches and ignite some great new ideas that you can share with the rest of us and keep this cycle ever growing and widening.

 

Most Likely to Succeed? Is it possible to predict & hire great teachers?

Most Likely to Succeed

How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job?

by Malcolm Gladwell December 15, 2008

I really enjoy Malcolm Gladwell's writing and more so his curiosity and how he "thinks different".  I try to read as many of his columns as I can as they find a sweet spot for me of being long enough to explore a topic in some depth and let him tell a good story, yet be short enough that I can read them in one sitting along with the many other articles and posts I'm reading each day.

This New Yorker article focuses on the very tricky art of hiring practices, especially for teachers and exposes a lot of common myths about hiring and spotting of true talent for a given job or task.

You'll need to make it through his initial telling of the challenge in American football he refers to as "the quarterback problem" before you will get to his comparison and coverage of the importance and challenge of how to choose good to great teachers.  However it is well worth your time and I highly recommend reading the full article and see what you think and take away.

 Effective teachers have a gift for noticing—
 what one researcher calls “withitness.”

via www.newyorker.com             Read more

At the risk of spoiling the story for you, Malcolm makes that point that effective hiring practice for complex and critical roles such as teachers takes years and requires observation of the results achieved over this time.  This would suggest an apprenticeship type model and a radical shift from the way we currently recruit, reward and retain great teachers.  To be effective we need to treat each teacher as a unique individual and hire at this same level of uniqueness; one at a time.

Many would therefore probably place this into the "impossible" category but as you can likely guess I'll add it to my "What if the impossible isn't?" list.  And indeed Malcolm goes on to describe at least one example, financial planners, where this is both possible and being practiced.  For me this is yet another example of why we need to treat each situation, each job and each person as a unique individual.  Hence I see this, no doubt through my frosted glasses, as another excellent example of why The Snowflake Effect is so important and how it is affecting almost everything in our world.

Here are some of Malcolm's points which really got my attention:

"with enough data, it is possible to identify who the very good teachers are and who the very poor teachers are. What’s more—and this is the finding that has galvanized the educational world—the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast."

"Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects.""After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. But there’s a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like.""Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications—as much as they appear related to teaching prowess—turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans."

"The equivalent of that approach, in the N.F.L., would be for a team to give up trying to figure out who the “best” college quarterback is, and, instead, try out three or four “good” candidates.
 In teaching, the implications are even more profound. They suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs to start the equivalent of Ed Deutschlander’s training camp. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated."

"What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?"

I hope you will take the time to not only ready this article but to reflect upon it and contribute your reactions and ideas.  Is it possible to hire and retain great teachers?  Is it possible to raise the quality of teaching staff overall?  Would this "apprenticeship" type of model work for the teaching profession?

I think my favorite quote from Malcolm's article is:

"A prediction, in a field where prediction is not possible, is no more than a prejudice."

Nanoscale: Robot Arm Places Atoms and Molecules With 100% Accuracy | h+ Magazine

Developments such as this are of interest and value for seeing trends & directions relative to WITII? (What if the impossible isn't?).  While I would  not pretend for a moment to understand any of the details of DNA level work, what I do see is how advances in nanotechnology are continuing at an every increasing pace and penetrating new levels of scale.  The quote below summed it up nicely for me:

"The advances in DNA nanotechnology keep coming, and many observers are wondering if this will be the path that leads us to the next Industrial Revolution. Only time — and many more experiments — will tell."

Nanoscale: Robot Arm Places Atoms and Molecules With 100% Accuracy

Written By: Michael Anissimov

Date Published: January 12, 2010

Until the mid-1990s, the term "nanotechnology" referred to the goal of creating vast arrays of nanoscale assemblers to fabricate useful human-scale products from scratch in an entirely automated process and with atomic precision. Since then, the word has come to mean anything from stain-resistant pants to branches of conventional chemistry — generally anything involving nanoscale objects. But the dream of a new Industrial Revolution based on nanoscale manufacturing has not died, as demonstrated most vividly by the work of NYU professor of chemistry Dr. Nadrian Seeman.

Schematics (a) and Atomic Force Micrographs (b) of the Origami Arrays and Capture Molecules. Panel i of (a) illustrates the origami array containing slots for the cassettes and a notch to enable recognition of orientation; the slots and notches are visible in the AFM in (b). Panels ii show the cassettes in place; the color coding in (a) used throughout the schematics is green for the PX state and violet for the JX2 state; the presence of the cassettes is evident in the AFM image in (b). Panels iii illustrate the PX-PX state which captures a triangle pointing towards the notch in the schematic (a) and in the AFM image (b). Panels iv illustrate the PX-JX2 state (a), containing a triangle that points away from the notch, which is evident in the AFM image (b). Panels v illustrate the JX2- PX state which captures a diamond-shaped molecule (a); its shape is visible in the AFM image (b). Panels vi show the linear molecule captured by the JX2-JX2 state, both schematically (a) and in the AFM image (b).

via hplusmagazine.com

Infinitely Scalable Teaching = Limitless Learning

In order for the Snowflake Effect of mass customization and personalization to succeed when applied to learning, teaching and teachers will need need to scale exponentially.  Imagined within our historical and current definitions and assumptions this would be deemed impossible.  However I’ve had some recent experiences that have convinced me that both teaching and teachers can indeed scale exponentially and I am finding more and more examples of this all around.  Here are some examples of both as I continue on my quest of the question of “What if the impossible isn’t?”

Last year while my sailboat was safely moored in El Salvador, I went ashore for a month to increase my Spanish language skills from a level of zero to a larger positive number and to learn more of the cultures and geography of the surrounding countries. I went to three places—Antigua, tiny San Marcos La Laguna on gorgeous Lake Atitlán in Guatemala, and Suchitoto in El Salvador—and in each location, I enrolled in a “language school” where I spent five to six hours a day Monday to Friday for four weeks, engaged in a on-on-one conversation with a Spanish language teacher. I learned A LOT!  Not only a lot of Spanish, but also a lot about each area, country, culture, the people, and especially about learning. 

Language Learning Dating Services?

I’ve often explained that I think it would be better to call these language schools “language dating services” because what they do is find a good match between two people—not for romantic purposes, but for learning as a teacher and a student. It is VERY effective! Similar to dating services, it is up to each pair to decide how they will structure the teaching/learning relationship so that it is just right for both people in terms of pace, level, goals, focus, etc. In my case, I was most interested in being conversant in Spanish so that in everyday situations I could understand others and express myself aurally. I also wanted to have some ability to read and write Spanish. As a result, I did the same thing with each of my three very different teachers, we had an extended conversation for 5-6 hours each day. 

These were true conversations. They were unplanned and spontaneous with all the serendipity of any great conversation where the conversation wonderfully wanders along unexpected paths as you discover different areas of mutual interest. In my case, this included such things as conversations about the mutual interest in music, particularly what makes for “good music”, understanding the roles of technology in the day and life of average citizens in the different cities, and sharing our mutual love for great food and wine.

Note: I’m using the learning of a new language as the subject here but this same approach works well for just about any application I can think of. 

One of the biggest and best things I came away with was a new sense of how personalized learning AND teaching can scale exponentially and  how my notion of a future society of “Tearners” (Teacher + Learner = Tearner)—where each and every one of us are both teachers and learners—is both possible and already happening. If you’d like to read more about my experiences and thoughts on this form of language learning, please read these postings on my Learnativity blog:

• Learning Spanish, culture, geography and SO much more!
• Adios Antigua; Hola San Marcos le Laguna!

Do It Yourself (DIY) Learning via “Tearners”

One of the essential elements for enabling this kind of limitless learning and teaching is to enable and empower an “expert”—anyone who is significantly better than you are in some domain of interest—to be an effective teacher, often without even knowing they are doing so. Rethinking expertise in this way enables us to tap into the skills and knowledge that others have, which in most cases they are not even aware of. 

In the case of language learning for example, anyone who is a native speaker of a language you want to learn, including and perhaps especially children, can teach you what they don’t even know they know. The trick is in finding interesting, fun, and effective ways to do so. And as you’ll see in the following examples, and as was the case with one of my teachers, they don’t even need to know how to speak your language!

In my search for resources to assist with this type of limitless learning, I have found several good ones, including the book “Language Acquisition Made Practical” by Thomas and Elizabeth Brewster. Kevin Kelly featured this book in one of his “Cool Tools”  postings and you can read this concise review for an overview of the book and its methods. I particularly like Kevin’s typically insightful observation:

“Like realizing that you don't need a degree in anything to build your own house, learning that you can become fluent in another language without a course or classroom is deliciously radical.”

The following is an excerpt from this book and it will give you a better idea of how this works in language learning:

Production of Modifiers

Kino says a sentence with modifiers. You repeat the basic sentence without modifiers.

Kino: "The blue jug with the pretty flowers is on the high wooden shelf."
You: "The jug is on the shelf."

Then reverse roles -- he says a simple sentence and you embellish it.

Kino: "This is a book."
You: "This is a good book about the people of this country."
Kino: "This is a candle."
You: "This is a red candle."

Look around you. You can talk about virtually any object, then restate it with modifiers.

Word/Thing Association Game

By using these sentence patterns you can get extra drill on new vocabulary while talking with people. You can touch an object and ask "What is this?" They may answer, "This is Kefala." You can then touch a similar object and ask "Is this Kefala?" and they will answer positively or negatively.
If you are talking with children, this can become quite a game and give you lots of practice with new words. Children will often catch on, and participate with you in the game. First, you can ask the questions while they answer. Then you can trade roles and let them ask the questions while you try to answer. If you enter into the spirit of the game, everybody can have fun while you practice vocabulary.

 

As is often the case, this type of learning is not a new idea or method and as the authors point out this method was used by missionaries trying to learn other languages without the aid of any formal resources, such as books, curricula, classrooms, or teachers. I’m sure you can see how this method enables a form of limitless learning and why I’m so excited about  it. As you try it out and reflect upon it, I think you will also soon be able to apply most of the same techniques to many other subjects. I’ve used it for example to learn how to do wood carving and how to do whitewater kayaking.

Consider learning by doing and try using this both ways—as the learner the next time you need to learn something or as the teacher when you see a teachable moment to help someone benefit from your expertise.

I’d very much appreciate hearing back from you about your experience.

-- Wayne

How is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? – The Edge Annual Question – 2010

Read any newspaper or magazine and you will notice the many flavors of the one big question that everyone is asking today. Or you can just stay on the page and read recent editions of Edge ...

Playwright Richard Foreman asks about the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". Is it a new self? Are we becoming Pancake People — spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

Technology analyst Nicholas Carr wrote the most notable of many magazine and newspaper pieces asking "Is Google Making Us Stupid". Has the use of the Web made it impossible for us to read long pieces of writing?

Social software guru Clay Shirky notes that people are reading more than ever but the return of reading has not brought about the return of the cultural icons we'd been emptily praising all these years. "What's so great about War and Peace?, he wonders. Having lost its actual centrality some time ago, the literary world is now losing its normative hold on culture as well. Is the enormity of the historical shift away from literary culture now finally becoming clear?

Science historian George Dyson asks "what if the cost of machines that think is people who don't?" He wonders "will books end up back where they started, locked away in monasteries and read by a select few?".

Web 2.0 pioneer Tim O'Reilly, ponders if ideas themselves are the ultimate social software. Do they evolve via the conversations we have with each other, the artifacts we create, and the stories we tell to explain them?

Frank Schirrmacher, Feuilleton Editor and Co-Publisher of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has noticed that we are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. Are we turning into a new species —informavores? — he asks.

W. Daniel Hillis goes a step further by asking if the Internet will, in the long run, arrive at a much richer infrastructure, in which ideas can potentially evolve outside of human minds? In other words, can we change the way the Internet thinks?

What do you think?

---

The Edge Annual Question — 2010

HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK?

---

John Brockman
Editor & Publisher

via www.edge.org

If the Edge World Question Center is new to you, give yourself the gift of reading some truly thought provoking ideas you’ll find there.  The name and basis of the Edge Foundation, which started in 1988, is:

To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.

BBC Radio described The Edge (back in 2005) as "Fantastically stimulating ... It's like the crack cocaine of the thinking world.... Once you start, you can't stop thinking about that question."  My experience matches this and these questions are definitely cognitive crack for me!  so consider yourself warned:

The Edge World Question Center is SERIOUSLY ADDICTIVE!

I'm increasingly intrigued and delighted by the apparent resurgence of the Q&A (Question & Answer) format.  I've long been struck by the observation that great questions are more powerful than great answers, though I certainly want and need both.  You'll find plenty of both here in The Edge and with this most recent question of "How is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?"

My friend Erik Duval, who’s recent Tweet prompted me to read more of these answers, liked Harold Rheingold's answer of "Attention is the Fundamental Literacy" and his recollection of many of the thoughts from Doug Englebart such as:

From the beginning, Engelbart emphasized that the hardware and software created at his Stanford Research Institute laboratory, from the mouse to the hyperlink to the word processor, were part of a system that included "humans, language, artifacts, methodology and training." Long before the Web came along, Engelbart was frustrated that so much progress had been made in the capabilities of the artifacts, but so little study had been devoted to advancing the language, methodology and training — the literacies that necessarily accompany the technical capabilities.

and the need we all have for fundamental skills such as;

Crap detection — Hemingway's name for what digital librarians call credibility assessment — is another essential literacy. If all schoolchildren could learn one skill before they go online for the first time, I think it should be the ability to find the answer to any question and the skills necessary to determine whether the answer is accurate or not.

Some of the one’s I’ve read, an ongoing process, which stood out to me included:

Kevin Kelly's answer "AN INTERMEDIA WITH 2 BILLION SCREENS PEERING INTO IT"

Uncertainty is a kind of liquidity. I think my thinking has become more liquid. It is less fixed, as text in a book might be, and more fluid, as say text in Wikipedia might be. My opinions shift more. My interests rise and fall more quickly. I am less interested in Truth, with a capital T, and more interested in truths, plural. I feel the subjective has an important role in assembling the objective from many data points. The incremental plodding progress of imperfect science seems the only way to know anything.

And Kevin's observation that:

Rather than begin a question or hunch by ruminating aimlessly in my mind, nourished only by my ignorance, I start doing things. I immediately, instantly go.

I go looking, searching, asking, questioning, reacting to data, leaping in, constructing notes, bookmarks, a trail, a start of making something mine. I don't wait. Don't have to wait. I act on ideas first now instead of thinking on them.   For some folks, this is the worst of the Net — the loss of contemplation. Others feel that all this frothy activity is simply stupid busy work, or spinning of wheels, or illusionary action. I think to myself, compared to what?

Steward Brand's answer "One's Guild":

I couldn't function without them, and I suspect the same is true for nearly all effective people. By "them" I mean my closest intellectual collaborators. They are the major players in my social extended mind. How I think is shaped to a large degree by how they think.

Our association is looser than a team but closer than a cohort, and it's not a club or a workgroup or an elite. I'll call it a guild. Everyone in my guild runs their own operation, and none of us report to each other. All we do is keep close track of what each other is thinking and doing. Often we collaborate directly, but most of the time we don't. Everyone in my guild has their own guild---each of theirs largely different from mine. I'm probably not considered a member of some of them.

And Brian Eno noticing in his answer “The Authentic has Replaced the Reproducible” that:

I notice that everything the Net displaces reappears somewhere else in a modified form. For example, musicians used to tour to promote their records, but, since records stopped making much money due to illegal downloads, they now make records to promote their tours.

I notice that, as the Net provides free or cheap versions of things, 'the authentic experience' — the singular experience enjoyed without mediation — becomes more valuable. I notice that more attention is given by creators to the aspects of their work that can't be duplicated. The 'authentic' has replaced the reproducible.

I notice that almost all of us haven't thought about the chaos that would ensue if the Net collapsed.

I notice that my daily life has been changed more by my mobile phone than by the Internet.

As for my answer to this question of “How is the internet changing the way you think?”, if I had to condense it down to a single phrase or title, I’d say I wander more, I ponder more, I wonder more.

I don’t find that the net is changing the WAY I think, that is still as wonderfully weirdly Wayne as ever, however it is absolutely changing the quantity of WHAT I'm thinking about, and hopefully some of the quality. While there are many dimensions to this increased quantity of thinking, most specifically and powerfully for me, is that the internet supercharges my curiosity and exponentially increases my serendipity factor; the probability that I’m going unexpectedly discover and create completely new (to me) ideas, ways of thinking and perspectives. And this increase is exponential because as I pursue these serendipitous discoveries they lead me to more things I become serendipitously curious about and pursue.

I embrace this change.  I purposefully let myself go.  I wander more, both literally with my sailing around the world, which the internet has significantly enabled, and I figuratively wander more as I pursue these new questions and paths.   I wonder more in that I'm continuously led to ask new questions, to wonder "What if?" and "Why not" and I ponder more as I reflect more deeply on possible answers to these questions.  For me then, this is simply an exponentially increased form of learning, a way of living and I love it!

How is the internet changing the way I think? I wander more, I ponder more, I wonder more.

What’s YOUR answer?  How is the internet changing the way YOU think?

Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up

Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up | Magazine

• By Jonah Lehrer      December 21, 2009  | 10:00 am  | Wired Jan 2010

Dunbar came away from his in vivo studies with an unsettling insight: Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.) “The scientists had these elaborate theories about what was supposed to happen,” Dunbar says. “But the results kept contradicting their theories. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn’t make sense.” Perhaps they hoped to see a specific protein but it wasn’t there. Or maybe their DNA sample showed the presence of an aberrant gene. The details always changed, but the story remained the same: The scientists were looking for X, but they found Y.  via www.wired.com

Erik Duval and I have long shared a fascination and frustration with the notion of learning from failure and particularly the lack of learning from failure, even outright refusal to do so.  I was therefore delighted to find this story and IMHO the excellent observations made by Jonah Lehrer about the nature of failure in science.  And how can you not love an article and writer who includes a quote from both Richard Feynman and Bob Dylan?!

I think Lehrer's comments and observations apply to most of us and life in general and I've found myself thinking more and more about this since first reading this article last month.  

I need to get better at following through on posting things soooner than later and so this has sat as one of more than hundred (no I'm not kidding) open tabs in my browsers waiting for me to post.  Thankfully Dan Pink provided the kick I needed to get this one posted when he took note of this same article and was apparently similarly struck by it and his noting of this as one of his 3 Articles Worth Reading.  (thanks Dan!)

I strongly encourage you to read Lehrer's article as I think it truly thought and action provoking.  Read for example such notes as:

• Belief, in other words, is a kind of blindness.
• If humans — scientists included — are apt to cling to their beliefs, why is science so successful? How do our theories ever change? How do we learn to reinterpret a failure so we can see the answer?
•  “These weren’t sloppy people,” Dunbar says. “They were working in some of the finest labs in the world. But experiments rarely tell us what we think they’re going to tell us. That’s the dirty secret of science.”
• The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail — it’s that most failures are ignored.

And consider closely his suggestions on 

 

How to Learn 
From Failure

Too often, we assume that a failed experiment is a wasted effort. But not all anomalies are useless. Here’s how to make the most of them. —J.L.

1Check Your Assumptions

Ask yourself why this result feels like a failure. What theory does it contradict? Maybe the hypothesis failed, not the experiment.

2Seek Out the Ignorant

Talk to people who are unfamiliar with your experiment. Explaining your work in simple terms may help you see it in a new light.

3Encourage Diversity

If everyone working on a problem speaks the same language, then everyone has the same set of assumptions.

4Beware of Failure-Blindness

It’s normal to filter out information that contradicts our preconceptions. The only way to avoid that bias is to be aware of it.

 

These seem to match extremely well with my experiences and observations and include why the overly hyped attention on so called "social media" has some great promise by adding in this cast to making steps 2 and 3 above very easy and effective.

Hope you enjoy and get as much out of this as I continue to do.

School of What if the Impossible Isn't?

Singularity University

Ted Greenwald is Tweeting from SU (http://twitter.com/tedgreenwald) using the hashtag #singularityu. Photos courtesy of Singularity University.

via www.wired.com

See this article for a great set of things to add to my "What if the Impossible Isn't?" list. You may also enjoy, as I did, reading more about the recently started Singularity University and this blogging account by one recent attendee.

BigThink Indeed!

This interview on BigThink.com with Nicholas Negroponte about the ongoing One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project is well worth the click and the time for you to watch, and perhaps most interesting of all, there are several other topics there worth watching.

I found it to be very open and authentic as Negroponte answered the following questions:

• How did One Laptop Per Child get started?
• How did you design a laptop specially tailored to children’s needs?
• Do you worry about the laptops growing rapidly obsolete?
• What evidence is there that One Laptop Per Child is working?
• How can teachers and students make the most out of a new laptop?
• How do you respond to critics who say, “Students should read books, not play with computers?”
• What will be the equivalent of the “Negroponte switch” in the next 20 years?
• What are the most radical technologies forthcoming from the MIT Media Lab?
• Should people “unplug” more to avoid media oversaturation?
• Following the battle between newspapers and Google, will walls between media increase?
• Which of the projects in your career has been the most difficult?

In the interview Negroponte provides some very reasoned and fascinating commentary about how he judges success for OLPC with examples such as truancy rates dropping to zero in many places (from up to 30% previously) and stories of how kids with an OLPC are teaching their parents to read and write.

Negroponte also makes some very revealing comments and tell some interesting stories about the reactions and effects on teachers where the OLPCs are in place.  He notes five consistent comments they get from the teachers involved:

1. Discipline problems go down in the classroom.
2. They've never loved teaching so much.
3. They've never had parents so deeply involved with school.
4. Not only does truancy drop to zero, but the energy level in the classroom is just undeniably different.
5. They just get swamped by emails with questions from the kids.

Negroponte also discusses things like the “Negroponte Switch” where he predicted about 20 years ago:

“…that most of the information that you got through the ground, through wires and physically, would in fact come through the air, and most of the things we got through the air, like television, would come through the ground.”

You can also hear about his more recent thoughts on how he believes that the next big change will be at the “space between biology and silicone”.  Negroponte discusses some of the most recent work going on at MIT and his thoughts on “unplugging” and how he sees life now as more of an omelet!

The interview video runs almost 30 minutes but I strongly encourage you to watch more than just the beginning or read through the transcript. For me, much of the best was at the end where he talks very openly about the projects in his life which have been the most difficult.

I also liked the way BigThink.com put together this interview where the questions appear as just text on the screen for a few seconds and then all the rest of the video is simply a head and shoulders shot of Nicholas with an all-white background.  They nicely provided a full text version of the interview accessible with one click, which then scrolls down below the video. It’s very handy for people like me with limited bandwidth and for those who want to grab relevant  bits of the interview.

See some of my other postings on OLPC, such as the recent one on “How the OLPC version 3 Predicts the Future of PCs” and an older one  “Opportunities in our Laps?”

Both Nicholas and OLPC are worth watching in 2010.

-- Wayne