Preoccupations

Failure

I'm always fascinated by the way people talk about failure. Reminded by reading again James Dyson's famous remark, "Enjoy failure and learn from it. You can never learn from success." (at Dan Saffer's blog), here are some of my other favourite touchstone quotations/reference points on failure and its close relationship with learning, creativity and innovation. When we spend so much time training young people to jump through examiners' hoops, we ought to be very concerned about how we are also steering them away from taking risks — away from daring to fail, to be innovative and, yes, wrong. Effecting change in education that does something about this requires just as much visionary leadership and management as it does in business.

Failure is the rule rather than the exception, and every failure contains information. One of the most misleading lessons imparted by those who have reached their goal is that the ones who win are the ones who persevere. Not always. If you keep trying without learning why you failed, you'll probably fail again and again. Perseverance must be accompanied by the embrace of failure. Failure is what moves you forward. Listen to failure. Steve Wozniak

Tough task, to open a high-profile conference like Aula2006 (see this previous post for background) with a speech on "failure". But social software expert Clay Shirky dissected it carefully and out came an interesting insight: organizations that want to encourage innovation should focus on reducing the cost of failure rather than focusing on minimizing its likelihood, as most companies do today. LunchoverIP

"Getting good" at failure, however, doesn't mean creating anarchy out of organization. It means leaders -- not just on a podium at the annual meeting, but in the trenches, every day -- who create an environment safe for taking risks and who share stories of their own mistakes. It means bringing in outsiders unattached to a project's past. It means carving out time to reflect on failure, not just success. Perhaps most important, it means designing ways to measure performance that balance accountability with the freedom to make mistakes. People may fear failure, but they fear the consequences of it even more. "The performance culture really is in deep conflict with the learning culture," says Paul J. H. Schoemaker, CEO of consulting firm Decision Strategies International Inc. "It's an unusual executive who can balance these." BusinessWeek

Being setup for failure is to be setup for success. This week I plan to rejoice in my various failed trials and actions. I hope your week goes just as well for you too. John Maeda

Enlightened managers strive to be collaborative rather than controlling. Only through engaged conversations over time can managers create failure-tolerant work environments that invite innovation. This is not to say that a major achievement shouldn’t be applauded, or that repeated, avoidable mistakes should be tolerated. But astute managers mark the daily progress of small successes and failures with an evenhanded, open curiosity about the lessons learned and the next steps to take. Richard Farson

Dyson: There’s a famous Honda (NYSE:HMC) quote. I’ll get it slightly wrong, but in essence what it says is, “You’ve got to fail and then have the courage to overcome failure in order to succeed.” FastCompany.com

You once described the inventor's life as "one of failure." How so?
[Dyson:] I made 5,127 prototypes of my vacuum before I got it right. There were 5,126 failures. But I learned from each one. That's how I came up with a solution. So I don't mind failure. I've always thought that schoolchildren should be marked by the number of failures they've had. The child who tries strange things and experiences lots of failures to get there is probably more creative.

Not all failures lead to solutions, though. How do you fail constructively?
We're taught to do things the right way. But if you want to discover something that other people haven't, you need to do things the wrong way. Initiate a failure by doing something that's very silly, unthinkable, naughty, dangerous. Watching why that fails can take you on a completely different path. It's exciting, actually. To me, solving problems is a bit like a drug. You're on it, and you can't get off. I spent seven years on our washing machine [which has two drums, instead of one]. FastCompany.com

JP wrote something about failure recently and mentioned Esther Dyson's famous saying, 'Always make new mistakes'. (I have Esther Dyson's saying as a fridge magnet in both London and Wiltshire.) JP concluded:

Today, we are so enmeshed in blame cultures that organisations often get into Failure-Is-Not-An-Option syndrome. What happens in this syndrome is that people hide failure rather than prevent it, and over time that hiding culture gets deep into the organisation. This culminates in an even worse syndrome, The-Emperor’s-New-Clothes syndrome. Here, everyone knows that what they say is not true, yet no one does anything about it.

Without risk there is no learning. Without learning there is no life. We need to be careful about being too careful. 

Technorati tags: failure, innovation, imagination, learning, risk-taking

Fame and Glory

At the weekend, the Observer Music Monthly published a column about YouTube videos of pop stars throwing tantrums.

This is Elton saying he makes music, not films, whilst his team and the film people stand around and endure the paddy. (There's an Olbermann special on another Elton flare-up, here.) Then, also behaving badly: Grace Jones; yet another Liam Gallagher moment (apparently in February this year and, this time, in front of his five year-old); Preston (from Ordinary Boys) walking off Never Mind the Buzzcocks (Simon Amstell is merciless —€” who's behaving badly?); and Bjork — 'my motherly instincts took over'.

But in a different league altogether is The Bee Gees meet Clive Anderson (1996). I've heard about this on and off over the years, but this is the first time I've seen it — and to see is to be amazed by Barry Gibb's reaction to Anderson's wind-ups. The best moment is the one the Observer picked out:

Barry Gibb: 'We used to be called Les Tossers.'

Anderson: 'You'll always be Les Tossers to me.'

Some of this might come in useful when we get to discussing (in ICT) online-posting, privacy and forgetting. I'd want to work this in with danah's reflections on narcissism and "MySpace". Obviously this is germane:

One of the reasons that celebrities go batty is that fame feeds into their narcissism, further heightening their sense of self-worth as more and more people tell them that they're all that. They never see criticism, their narcissism is never called into check.

danah's focus, though, is designedly elsewhere:

What i do know is that MySpace provides a platform for people to seek attention. It does not inherently provide attention and this is why even if people wanted 90M viewers to their blog, they're likely to only get 6. MySpace may help some people feel the rush of attention, but it does not create the desire for attention. The desire for attention runs much deeper and has more to do with how we as a society value people than with what technology we provide them.

I am most certainly worried about the level of narcissism that exists today. I am worried by how we feed our children meritocratic myths and dreams of being anyone just so that current powers can maintain their supremacy at a direct cost to those who are supplying the dreams. I am worried that our "solutions" to the burst bubble are physically, psychologically, and culturally devastating, filled with hate and toxic waste. I am worried that Paris Hilton is a more meaningful role model to most American girls than Mother Theresa ever was. But i am not inherently worried about social network technology or video cameras or magazines. I'm worried by how society leverages different media to perpetuate disturbing ideals and pray on people's desire for freedom and attention. Eliminating MySpace will not stop the narcissistic crisis that we're facing; it will simply allow us to play ostrich as we continue to damage our children with unrealistic views of the world.

Once again, it's not the technology that's the problem, but as we "teach" the technology we can expect these social and ethical and psychological issues to make themselves known. Increasingly, I think the ICT teacher, and the teacher using ICT, is called upon (almost first and foremost) to be pastorally skilful. We haven't been focusing on this in ICT, instead looking nearly always at the technological skills. We need both, but I think the pastoral is going to prove crucial.

Technorati tags: narcissism, attention, celebrity, fame, MySpace, ICT, ICT skills, danah boyd

Cerebrotonic

No sooner do I post about Auden and include 'The Fall of Rome' ('Cerebrotonic Cato may / Extol the Ancient Disciplines'), than up pops 'cerebrotonic' in another blog post.

'Cerebrotonic' sounds like an Auden coinage, but isn't. Here's the OED:

A. adj. Designating or characteristic of a type of personality which is introverted, intellectual, and emotionally restrained, classified by Sheldon as being associated with an ECTOMORPHIC physique. B. n. One having this type of personality. So cerebrotonia (-tn), cerebrotonic personality or characteristics.

1937 A. HUXLEY Ends & Means xi. 165 Dr. William Sheldon, whose classification [of types of human beings] in terms of somatotonic, viscerotonic and cerebrotonic I shall use. Ibid. xii. 193 The cerebrotonic is not such a ‘good mixer’ as the viscerotonic. 1940 W. H. SHELDON Var. Human Physique 8 In the economy of the cerebrotonic individual the sensory and central nervous systems appear to play dominant roles. 1945 A. HUXLEY Let. 2 Apr. (1969) 517 There was just enough of the somatotonic in his..cerebrotonic make-up to make him regret his cerebrotonia. 1950 Themes & Var. i. 121 Too secretively the introvert, too inhibitedly cerebrotonic, to be willing to take the risk of ‘giving himself away’. 1951 AUDEN Nones (1952) 28 Cerebrotonic Cato may Extol the Ancient Disciplines. 1954 R. FULLER Fantasy & Fugue iv. 75 You..unfortunately incline to the cerebrotonic ectomorphyou worry too much, you're too good looking, and you can't abandon yourself happily to booze.

The other blog post? Momus' Celebrating diversity means measuring difference. Momus writes about William Sheldon:

I discovered his writings when I was 20, and trying to understand my own problems and potentialities better. Sheldon proposed what seems at first like a very simple way to measure body types. He isolates three basic components: fatness, muscularity and thinness, which he calls endomorphy, mesomorphy and ectomorphy. … "Ectomorphy means linearity, fragility, flatness of the chest, and delicacy throughout the body," he wrote. "We find a relatively scant development of both the visceral and the somatic structures. The ectomorph has long, slender, poorly muscled extremities with delicate pipe-stem bones, and he has, relative to his mass, the greatest surface area and therefore the greatest sensory exposure to the outside world. He is thus in one sense overly exposed and naked to the world." …

I'm a classic ectomorph, which means that by temperament I'm a cerebrotonic. In ectomorph-cerebrotonics, "the sensory-receptor properties are well developed. As a consequence however the central nervous system (CNS) is soon overloaded and rapidly tires. The cerebrotonic has the gift of concentrating his attention on the external world as well as on his internal world. His vigilance and autonomic reactivity make him behave in an inhibited and uncertain way: introverted behaviour. He has problems with expressing his feelings and with establishing social relationships, and can very well bear to be alone. The elementary strategies of coping with life are perception, reconnaissance and vigilance, cognition and anticipation, and a certain amount of privacy." …

Personally, I like people who structure the world boldly, especially if their structurations ring true. I don't take any structuration as holy writ, though -- I like to play with them, snap them together and pull them apart. But I also like it when structurations make for lovely poetry. The way Sheldon describes the ectomorph has a behaviourist beauty, a 1940s severity. He has "a relative predominance of skin and its appendages, which includes the nervous system; lean, fragile, delicate body; small delicate bones; droopy shoulders; small face, sharp nose, fine hair; relatively little body mass and relatively great surface area".

"The cerebrotonic may be literate or illiterate," says Sheldon, "may be trained or untrained in the conventional intellectual exercises of his milieu, may be an avid reader or may never read a book, may be a scholastic genius or may have failed in every sort of schooling. He may be a dreamer, a poet, philosopher, recluse, or builder of utopias and of abstract psychologies. He may be a schizoid personality, a religious fanatic, an ascetic, a patient martyr, or a contentious crusader. All these things depend upon the intermixture of other components, upon other variables in the symphony, and also upon the environmental pressures to which the personality has been exposed. The essential characteristic of the cerebrotonic is his acuteness of attention. The other two major functions, the direct visceral and the direct somatic functions, are subjugated, held in check, and rendered secondary. The cerebrotonic eats and exercises to attend."

I know next to nothing about Sheldon and need to go back to Momus and read it all again. John Fuller, in his W H Auden: A Commentary, says only this apropos 'The Fall of Rome' and 'cerebrotonic':

Stanza 4: Auden was inclined to prefer the endomorphic type to either the ectomorphic ('Cerebrotonic Cato') or the mesomorphic ('muscle-bound Marines'). The typology is from W H Sheldon.

Momus, quoting Sheldon on endomorphs and mesomorphs:

For comparison, in endomorphs "The body is rounded and exhibits a central concentration of mass. The trunk predominates over the limbs, the abdomen over the thorax, and the proximal segments of the limbs predominate over the distal segments. The bones are gracile and the muscle system is poorly developed. Muscle relief and bone projections are absent. The body displays a smoothness of contour owing to subcutaneous padding. The head is large and spherical, the face is wide with full cheeks. The neck is frequently short and forms in side view an obtuse angle with the chin. The shoulders are high and rounded. The trunk is relatively long and straight, the chest is wide at the base. The limbs are comparatively short and tapering with small hands and feet."

"When mesomorphy predominates, the body is sturdy, hard and firm. The bones are large and heavy, the muscles well-developed, massive and prominent. The heavily muscled thorax predominates over the abdomen. The proximal and distal segments of the limbs are evenly proportioned. The bones of the head are heavy. The face is large in relation to the cranial part of the head. Massive cheekbones and square jaws are the rule. The arms and legs are uniformly massive and muscular, strongly built knees, massive wrists."

Ah, classificatory schema: they have their own fascination …

Oh, and one other gem from Momus:

Interestingly, Sheldon met and befriended Aldous Huxley during a residence at a writers and artists' refuge at Dartington Hall in Devon, England. Huxley also recognized himself as an ectomorph and cerebrotonic, and saw it as a limitation …

(Have another look at the clip from the OED above. Wouldn't it be interesting if we could overlay the OED with transfers of social and intellectual relationships? … Hey OUP, open up the OED!) You'll have to click through to iMomus to hear what Huxley had to say.

Technorati tags: William Sheldon, Shedlon, Momus, iMomus, Auden, W H Auden

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: memory and film-making

I need to go out and buy the DVD of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I much enjoyed it when it came out and blogged about it twice, once with excerpts from Steve Johnson's Slate essay about it and once quoting from the NYT review of the film. The film's back on my screen again. Via Chris (del.icio.us link), today I came across the Buzz Image clip detailing some of their work on the film — and it's really impressive.

Last month, Mind Hacks had a piece on dream, memory and the film:

Seed Magazine has a video of a fascinating conversation between sleep scientist Robert Stickgold and film director Michel Gondry, director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Stickgold has reinvigorated sleep research by investigating the borderlands of consciousness with a series of novel experiments.

Favourite quote from the Stickgold/Gondry video clip: 'the reason why cuts work in movies is' (Stickgold) … 'because we dream' (Gondry)/'because we're all familiar with them' (Stickgold). 

From Mind Hacks, then, to the following: 

Gondry's new movie, The Science of Sleep, also explores the mind's outer reaches. …

Link to fantastic article on the cognitive science of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Also, from the last link:

Scientific American — Unmaking Memories: Interview with James McGaugh

Elizabeth F. Loftus

Now there's a whole bundle of stuff and possibilities for teaching …

Technorati tags: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, memory, mind, brain, neuroscience, CGI, CG, Mind Hacks

"bloody computer games … thin gruel indeed"

The quotation is from Michael Shayer, Professor of Applied Psychology at King's College, University of London, and appears in American Scientist's Smart as We Can Get?. To begin at the beginning:

Psychometricians have long been aware of a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—a widespread and long-standing tendency for scores on certain tests of intelligence to rise over time. … Ever since Flynn published his startling results, psychologists and educators have struggled to figure out whether people really are getting smarter and, if so, why. No clear answer has emerged. And now they have another curiosity to ponder: The tendency for intelligence scores to rise appears to have ended in some places. Indeed, it seems that some countries are experiencing a Flynn effect with a reversed sign.

'a Flynn effect with a reversed sign'. Or, at least, as some of the research from Scandinavia cited by American Scientist has shown, a plateau can be reached.

Back in January, the Guardian carried a lengthy piece about recent research conducted by Shayer:

New research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and conducted by Michael Shayer … concludes that 11- and 12-year-old children in year 7 are "now on average between two and three years behind where they were 15 years ago", in terms of cognitive and conceptual development.

"It's a staggering result," admits Shayer, whose findings will be published next year in the British Journal of Educational Psychology. "Before the project started, I rather expected to find that children had improved developmentally. This would have been in line with the Flynn effect on intelligence tests, which shows that children's IQ levels improve at such a steady rate that the norm of 100 has to be recalibrated every 15 years or so. But the figures just don't lie. We had a sample of over 10,000 children and the results have been checked, rechecked and peer reviewed."

I remember being stopped in my tracks when I read this article. I recommend reading it in full: it goes into some detail about Shayer's distinguished, lifelong contribution to educational research, the attendant debates and controversies.

And Shayer's most recent research, its methodology and conclusions, will be discussed widely and with passion once it is published. Anyone doubting the storm that will break then need only ponder this (Guardian):

Those likely to be particularly discomforted by Shayer's findings are people who swear by the validity of GCSE and Sats results. The idea that most children are achieving the government level 4 targets in maths and science at key stage 2 is clearly anomalous with Shayer's findings, as is the notion that secondary schools are now taking children who are two years behind developmentally and still getting them up to GCSE speed in just five years.

So how does Shayer explain this? "The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority obviously insists that standards haven't dropped," he says, "but this doesn't fit all the evidence. A-level maths and science teachers often report that their students don't know as much as they used to. And some parts of the GCSE science syllabus, such as density, have been dropped. Examiners may well be asking easier questions and marking more leniently. These things can happen unconsciously.

There is some evidence that the extra hour allocated to maths in primary schools under the numeracy initiative has had some impact on Sats scores, but there is greater evidence of teachers teaching to the tests. This means students can perform well in the tests without necessarily understanding the underlying concepts.

… I would suggest that the most likely reasons are the lack of experiential play in primary schools, and the growth of a video-game, TV culture. Both take away the kind of hands-on play that allows kids to experience how the world works in practice and to make informed judgements about abstract concepts."

American Scientist winds up, saying that 'Flynn himself is much less gloomy about what appears to be happening':

For one, he points out that the situation varies quite a bit from country to country. "All the evidence is that the IQ gains in America are still robust, " he says. And he notes that at the very time that scores were declining in the UK on the Piagetian tests that Shayer examined, British kids were making gains on a test called the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children or WISC. Flynn points out that results gathered with two versions of this test (WISC-III, introduced in 1991, and WISC-IV, in 2003) show the usual effect, a rise in raw scores over time. But he also notes that one subtest—on arithmetic reasoning—did show a decline.

Although Flynn cautions against generalizing the recent Danish and Norwegian experiences, he anticipates similar results will crop up elsewhere in the world. But he's not glum about it. Flynn is convinced that the cause of his eponymous effect has to do with changes in the environment that allow children more opportunity to exercise the kinds of skills probed in today's intelligence tests—changes like a shift to smaller family sizes, which allow parents more time to interact with each child, for example, or devotion of an ever-greater portion of kids' leisure time to abstract, mentally demanding games. He points out that in industrialized, middle-class countries (like those of Scandinavia) such influences must be reaching a point of saturation: "You can't really get the family much smaller than one or two kids." And the current craze for Sudoku puzzles not withstanding, as Flynn says, "eventually, people do want to relax."

Technorati tags: Shayer, Michael Shayer, Flynn, Flynn effect, psychometrics

Changing our minds

Café Scientifique tonight in Oxford. I can't get to this ... and it looks pretty interesting — Dr Martin Westwell (Deputy Director of the Institute for the Future of the Mind, Oxford University) on 'Bending minds - how technology can change who you are':

Martin will talk about the mind, the brain and how pills to make you smarter, pills to make you forget, electrodes inserted into the brain, and devices to let you control computers just by thinking are all technologies that are with us now or are just around the corner. How do these technologies and the new experiences they bring transform and bend the human mind? How are we going to harness the new technologies to maximise the potential of individuals without sacrificing that individuality? What roles do scientists play in deciding how they are to be implemented?

And the Institute for the Future of the Mind?

In the 21st Century, technology will exert unprecedented influence indirectly and directly upon the brain and the critical issue is not whether, but how, such new experiences will transform the human mind. The Institute for the Future of the Mind, is one of 10 research institutes in the new James Martin 21st Century School made possible by a $100M benefaction to Oxford University, with the aim of finding solutions to the biggest problems facing humanity and identifying the key opportunities of the 21st century.

I'm interested in the brief profile there of Dr Westwell: 'Martin’s particular interest is in the way that young people form their minds and the influences of technology on this process in the future'.

Meanwhile, Peter Brunner, an American scientist, can be seen here, demonstrating a BCI — a brain-computer interface.

Technorati tags: Institute for the Future of the Mind, Martin Westwell, Café Scientifique, mind, Peter Brunner, BCI

Calendaring & memory: a note

I wish Ed were coming to Reboot. It's your natural milieu, Ed.

Be that as it may, over a month ago Ed wrote:

Google have recently released their gmail-integrated calendar to a few of their favourite groupies, accompanied by the familiar cackle of gossip and hasty analysis around the web. To sum it up, they've gone for the square box, future-oriented, non-memorable, essentially organisational take on diaries, and dolled it with their signature ergonomic tact.

All of which is rather boring. The google calendar, and this it must be said seems to be typical of almost all efforts currently spluttering to life, doesn't aim to enhance the doing of life. It prefers to pat it, to make it a tad more efficient, to give it a gloss of homeliness.

But incompetent time management is the single snidest enemy to the coherence of a human life. Both the past and the future need to be managed. Goals need to be balanced, people remembered, golden moments preserved, repose bolstered. The fire of local effort needs to be extended so as not to go to waste, and the manifold strands of our different simultaneously enacted lives integrated. What we need is an online interface that has such intuitive mnemonic power that the psychological gap between going about one's daily life and actually being on a computer is dissolved. We don't require the computer to tell us that at 4.30pm tomorrow we're meeting Albert for a meeting, we require our pre-reflective cast-of-mind into what we are supposed to be doing today to be always already organized according to spatial schemas that can be constructed, nourished and elaborated through a computer. We want to be able to navigate our past and our future in the same breath …

We want to accumulate lives, we'd like our pasts to enter into the present, not standing aside like some kind of decorative but distant relic which we can call upon with effort, if at all, only to feel nostalgia or articulate a fact.

What we require, in sum, is a digital tool that goes parallel with the mind, not orthogonal to it. We don't want to jump out of the present to check what's doing in five minutes by recourse to a computer screen, we require the present to be already infused by the structure provided by what (could be) on the screen in such a way as to change that present. To give it flesh and options.

Diaries which merely prescribe are a green and flatulent shadow of the life-time tools that would merit the term 'notable'. A well-managed calendiary, structured according to the well-worn wayfulness of a virtual and extended network of memory palaces existing at once in mind and on screen, would allow the collection and projection of a life at once rich in detail and decisively select-ible. It would of course be fully integrated with text-message and movement records, as well as photogrpaphs, people-profiles from phone-cams and credit-card behaviour. (Downside: the fbi/ your mother getting hold of the password).

It would not only enable dynamic decision-making about what to do now, it would provide fascinating and mobilizable information about one's life; it would circumvent the loss of the useful past; it would clarify the present, sheltering it from the disruptions of urge-like 'i must do this-es' that can paralyze spontaneous action by crowding the moment unnecessarily; it would allow one to perceive structures normally too slow to be visible; it would change the feel of the world.

Which I linked with this from Chris Heathcote:

Google, like most others, is fixated on the grid. I don’t think the grid is completely wrong, but it forgets two things: lives don’t fit into 30 minute blocks, and humans are fine at dealing with small amounts of complexity. In fact, that’s the natural state.

Look at anyone’s paper diary and you’ll see a mosaic of signs and numbers, conflicts, and most of all, vagueness. Ishness. A day of a shopping list, two meetings, a few phone numbers, maybe one fixed appointment, an aide memoire, a doodle.

But still Outlook clones persist in the perfect rectangle. Start and end. No ishness. No possibilities. Anything remotely untimely is relegated to being a ‘day-long event’, and squished into a few lines at the top. This is the most important space, yet it’s treated as unfortunate clutter.

I’ve been boring anyone that would listen about this for well over a year now. I’m surprised none of the calendar start ups took the necessary risk and did something different with how events are stored and displayed.

*****

Memory Palaces. I think I should record here that back in 2003 Ed came in the top 10 of the world memory championships. The USA Memory Championships are closed to non-Americans, but in 2005 Ed took these tests in NY alongside the US competitors and wiped the floor with them. The story was covered by the brother of Jonathan Safran Foer, Joshua Foer, and you can read about it here. Earlier this year (2006), Joshua Foer won the USA Memory Championships. Guess who showed him how?

Technorati tags: calendars, Google, memory, Memory Championships, memory palaces

Mindmaps, mobility and … just doing it

Thanks to Scott for the tip off (and demo, a few weeks back) — MindManager from MindJet. It took two other nudges, though, before I found myself going off to find out more about this product.

Christian Lindholm blogged about going back to paper and mentioned MindManager:

Lately I have used MindManager X5 which is fantastic mindmaping application, Lifeblog solves many note taking problems as I make notes with the camera phone. A key problem is that my Transformer (Nokia N90) does not give me idle text input and does not allow for mind mapping, web clipping, nor sketching.

I have lots of unstructured data that comes my way, I need to record it and be able to tag it and find it later. I know this is a need lots of people have. I know there are hundreds of products created to fill this demand. If the PC could be a bit smaller, have longer batterylife and wake up in 2 sec. I would use it more for unstructured data collection. 

For my Retro solution I opted for the Moleskin Japanese NotePad in A6 which I modified by cutting out pages which I complemented with a thin notepad A6, where paper is thinner and some can be teared away. For input I acquired a Muji pen with multiple pens, it has black ink, red ink and a 0.5mm pencil. This allows me to make small mind maps with some highlight colour.

(I'm interested in following up the Muji pen — is it this one? The Moleskine: I'm already a devotee.)

Next, and last, I came across Lars Plougmann posting a brilliant MindManager mindmap of Tom Coates' Carson Workshop's The Future of Web Apps talk (click on the image below for a full size version; original Flickr link here; CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license):

In fact, I now find Lars has posted to Flickr all eight of his mindmaps of the day's talks, and he's written about MindManager itself here. There's an old PCMAG.COM review (of vn 5.1) here.

MindManager is described by MindJet as software that transforms 'brainstorming ideas, strategic thinking, and business information into blueprints for action, enabling teams and organizations to work faster, smarter, and with greater coordination. It extends core mapping functionality with a host of simple tools–collaboration, distribution, administration–making it easy for business professionals to quickly deliver bottom–line benefits enterprise–wide'. I am keen to get cracking with the program and the educational discount (c 70%) makes it not too hard to take the plunge.

So I've got hold of a copy and will take it for a spin shortly, followed by sustained use over the coming school holiday. If it lives up to its reputation, I expect to be seeking to use it with students next term.

Now I just need to work out which Tablet to buy — for all that 'unstructured data collection': the Lenovo ThinkPad X Series (the X41), or Motion Computing's LE1600/LS800 (LE1600 reviewed in PCMAG, the LS800 reviewed by Laptopmag). Bit by bit, it's becoming possible to be connected productively wherever I go, on and off campus, and … to get things done. But I, too, find that paper plays a vital role and I take my notebook and a pen with me as often as I can (or remember).

Technorati tags: GTD, Moleskine, Muji, MindManager, MindJet, brainstorming, thinking, mapping, unstructured data

Uncoordinated acts

Seth Godin writes about 'A great phrase coined by Glenn Reynolds': Horizontal Knowledge.

If we had started planning in 1993, we probably wouldn't have gotten here by now. The Web, Wi-Fi, and Google didn't develop and spread because somebody at the Bureau of Central Knowledge Planning planned them. They developed, in large part, from the uncoordinated activities of individuals. … We didn't need a thousand librarians with scanners, because we had a billion non-librarians with computers and divergent interests. … what lots of smart people, loosely coordinating their actions with each other, are capable of accomplishing. It's the power of horizontal, as opposed to vertical knowledge. … As the world grows more interconnected, more and more people have access to knowledge and coordination. Yet we continue to underestimate the revolutionary potential of this simple fact. Heck, we underestimate the revolutionary reality of it, in the form of things we already take for granted, like Wi-Fi and Google. But I'm not a wild-eyed visionary. As a result, I'm going to make a very conservative prediction: that the next ten years will see revolutions that make Wi-Fi and Google look tame, and that in short order we'll take those for granted, too. It's a safe bet. Glenn Reynolds

Seth Godin continues:

It's best understood by thinking about its opposite: Vertical Knowledge. The stuff you get from the boss or the MSM or the person at the front of the room. Whenever I go to a conference, I learn more from the people in the lobby. And the web is one big big lobby. … Planning implies vertical, top down thinking. And in many areas, it's backfiring.

There's a lot rolling around in my head that says this kind of thing, too, and in education I have never let go of that remark I read years ago, 'regimentation and education are incompatible'. Let things shoot, grow up and develop. Be very careful with, be very wary of the top down.

Mobile morphs: the future

James Katz (Professor of Communication and founder of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University; formerly the Head of the Social Science Research Unit at Bell Communications Research) in Receiver:

… the mobile phone is becoming miniature homunculi (sic) of the person. In a sense the mobile is becoming a natural part of one's physical and sociological sense of self. Physically, it is the standard access point to the larger world. But it is also becoming a portal to one's identity, self-knowledge and future. A big fear for many mobile phone users is the loss (or theft) of their mobile phone. "I would not know what to do without it" or "I'd die if I lost my mobile" are statements I've heard expressed during focus group discussions. While these statements are hyperbolic, they are far from meaningless: in a symbolic sense, loss of a mobile is a form of annihilation. The mobile phone is becoming part of the user’s brain, and its absence inflicts a form of social and psychological amnesia.

In closing, three concepts may be borne in mind when contemplating what future users will want in their phones. First, leading edge users will want their phones to have the most advanced styles as well as features. However, unless they are breakthrough technologies (such as mobile TV), functional improvements are not as critical as style considerations. Second, the traditional categories of tools - TV, phonographs, telephones and calendars - arose in an earlier era and were derived from separate technological streams. Increasingly, they are becoming jumbled within the delivery platforms as mobile communication technology advances. Hence it is important for designers not to make too many assumptions about the continuing separation of various current devices and services. Third, there is an increasing morphing between the electronic gadget and the human body. The barrier between communication technology and body, once quite distinct, is becoming less so. The trend will continue: many future users will want their communication machines to be one with their physical bodies and social selves.

This from Christian Lindholm: 'This is the new mobility: a device for voice which is wearable and a device for data which is pocketable'. The Nokia 770 is reviewed by Russell Beattie here, and via Russell this from Nokia: 'The industry is expecting 3 billion mobile subscribers by 2008, not 2010 as earlier predicted, according to mobile phone vendor Nokia' (source: inq7.net).

Oh and this from Charlie Schick, on an article in The International Herald Tribune, caught my eye:

This article rubbed me the wrong way. Mostly because it was about how folks (like the W3C) are trying to keep the PC-friendly Web separate from the Web as seen from a phone.

Yes, form factors have to be considered. But, let's stop stressing how we need to get the WHOLE Web onto a phone and start talking about what Web we need on a phone, what Web is relevant to phones.

The Paradigm Shift Rate

via antimega, Ray Kurzweil's PP presentation of his Emerging Technologies (2005) talk.

The Singularity is near — allegedly. Wikipedia article here.

Theology in high places

Joi Ito, way up high in the mountains of Utah:

I just finished chatting with reverend AKMA about my last post, trying to see if there was something similar to good theologians and open source leaders. We talked about the importance of humility and the risks of greed. (AKMA pointed out that he was by far the most humble person on the planet.) I noticed that my thoughts seem to be somewhat more spiritual than usual.

Then I remembered reading somewhere that there was a scientific study that showed that people were more likely to have spiritual experiences in high altitudes due to the lack of oxygen. They theorized that maybe a lot of enlightenment in the past occurred on mountains because of this. (A bit disconcerting to think that a lot of our theological thought comes from the asphyxiation of hermits.) But then I remembered another article I read somewhere that said that 20% of all scientific studies are wrong. Then AKMA reminded me that according to David Weinberger, 78% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

Now via Cameo Wood (commenting on the original post):

Why revelations have occurred on mountains? Linking mystical experiences and cognitive neuroscience

Shahar Arzy^{a, b, c}, Moshe Idel^d, Theodor Landis^b and Olaf Blanke^{a, b}

^aLaboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Brain-Mind Institute, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland
^bDepartment of Neurology, University Hospital, Geneva, Switzerland
^cDepartment of Neurology, Hadassah Hebrew University Hospital, Jerusalem, Israel
^dFaculty of Humanities, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

Received 26 March 2005;  accepted 21 April 2005.  Available online 28 July 2005.

Summary

The fundamental revelations to the founders of the three monotheistic religions, among many other revelation experiences, had occurred on a mountain. These three revelation experiences share many phenomenological components like feeling and hearing a presence, seeing a figure, seeing lights, and feeling of fear. In addition, similar experiences have been reported by non-mystic contemporary mountaineers. The similarities between these revelations on mountains and their appearance in contemporary mountaineers suggest that exposure to altitude might affect functional and neural mechanisms, thus facilitating the experience of a revelation. Different functions relying on brain areas such as the temporo-parietal junction and the prefrontal cortex have been suggested to be altered in altitude. Moreover, acute and chronic hypoxia significantly affect the temporo-parietal junction and the prefrontal cortex and both areas have also been linked to altered own body perceptions and mystical experiences. Prolonged stay at high altitudes, especially in social deprivation, may also lead to prefrontal lobe dysfunctions such as low resistance to stress and loss of inhibition. Based on these phenomenological, functional, and neural findings we suggest that exposure to altitudes might contribute to the induction of revelation experiences and might further our understanding of the mountain metaphor in religion.

Mystical and religious experiences are important not only to the mystic himself, but also to many followers, as it was indeed with respect to the leaders of the three monotheistic religions. Yet, concerning its subjective character, mystical experiences are almost never accessible to the scholars interested in examining them. The tools of cognitive neuroscience make it possible to approach religious and mystical experiences not only by the semantical analysis of texts, but also by approaching similar experiences in healthy subjects during prolonged stays at high altitude and/or in cognitive paradigms. Cognitive neurosciences, in turn, might profit from the research of mysticism in their endeavor to further our understanding of mechanisms of corporeal awareness and self consciousness. Science Direct

I must ask my theologian friends about this.

Pain, that cruel guest

I missed this last month: Robert McCrum, writing in The Observer, about 10 years of living with the aftermath of 'a devastating stroke (at 42) which left him paralysed down his left side. During his extended convalescence, he wrote a memoir. It was meant to close the door on his illness, but instead it opened another into a parallel world of other people's pain':

I have become a lightning conductor for a thunderstorm of physical calamity that is raging just over the horizon … my story is not unique. I am just a more visible representative of an army of sufferers across this country, and across the world. I have had letters from widows, orphans, hospital carers, parents. I try to answer these letters, but compared to the stories I'm hearing, my experience has been trifling - as more than one correspondent has pointed out. Sometimes, I feel ashamed to claim fellow citizenship with these sufferers, but there it is: they are writing to me and there's not a thing I can do about it. As well as looking through the eyes of someone who might have died, in these 10 years I have acquired a quite new view of the world. Of course, I recognise that people will want to communicate with those they feel are sympathetic to their plight, but now I have come to believe something different. It is this: that despite the stupendous journalism of feelings, there is still a vast unarticulated story out there that gets no publicity, a story of almost unendurable pain and desperation. Sure, I've been to hell and back, but these people are living in hell every day of their lives.

Oddly enough, the more everything is reported, analysed, expounded, categorised and explored in newspaper column after column, and the more people feel able to express whatever they think about virtually anything under the sun,the more deafening is the general silence that hangs over illness and ill health. There is a sea of horror lapping at the edges of the everyday world, and these messages in bottles are floating in on every tide. These are the messages from the world of pain, messages that describe the suffering of strangers.

From this, I have learned three things. First, that the world's frontline pain is the pain of Aids, cancer, heart disease and stroke (the big killers). Behind the line, there's the pain of despair, loneliness and loss. The aching void in the lives of the bereaved and the afflicted. Second, I now know that we are all, in some sense, in the doctor's waiting room. I used to be indifferent towards, and frightened of, illness. Now I recognise it as part of the human condition. Illness is OK. There's nothing wrong with infirmity. It's part of the way we are. In the famous words of Samuel Beckett's Worstward Ho: 'Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' Failing better is something every stroke sufferer knows about.

Finally, there's this recognition. Despite the extraordinary progress of medicine, despite all the safeguards we have built into the way we conduct our lives, we are still in the world of our ancestors, when life was characterised by the poets as a sparrow fluttering out of the storm into the brightly lit mead hall, circling through the laughter and the smoke for a moment, before disappearing once more into the dark. Sometimes, when I read these letters, I sense that dark just beyond the window. And I feel grateful to be still alive, in the warmth and the light of summer, out of the storm.

I remember Alphonse Daudet's La Doulou, translated by Julian Barnes in 2002 as In The Land of Pain, the history of his own terrible suffering with tabes dorsalis, a form of tertiary syphilis where the back, in effect, wastes away. I gave my copy away a couple of years ago, but I remember how the great Charcot prescribed the Seyre Suspension, the patient being suspended for several minutes at a time, sometimes just by the jaw. Daudet endured this treatment 13 times:

I am suspended in the air for four minutes, the last two solely by my jaw. Pain in the teeth. Then, as they let me down and unharness me, a terrible pain in my back and the nape of my neck, as if all the marrow was melting: it forces me to crouch down on all fours and then very slowly stand up again while — as it seems to me — the stretched marrow find its rightful place again.

Morphine as a relief:

Each injection stops the pain for three or four hours. Then comes "the wasps", the stinging and stabbing here, there and everywhere — followed by the Pain, that cruel guest.

Other fragments I recall from when I read and had a copy of the book — and have found again now, online:

Torture walking back from the baths via the Champs-Elysées.

I've passed the stage where illness brings any advantage or helps you understand things; also the stage where it sours your life, puts a harshness in your voice, makes every cogwheel shriek.

The hotel. The bell-board. The bath times. Solitude. Encroaching darkness.

My poor carcass is hollowed out, voided by anaemia. Pain echoes through it as a voice echoes in a house without furniture or curtains. There are days, long days, when the only part of me that's alive is my pain.

Finally, two things. First, this moment, as introduced by Julian Barnes himself in The Guardian:

His response, both personal and literary, to his condition was admirable. "Courage... means not scaring others," Larkin wrote. Numerous witnesses attest to Daudet's exemplary behaviour. His last secretary, André Ebner, remembered Daudet sitting with a friend one morning, eyes closed, barely able to speak, martyred by pain. The door-knob gently turned, but before Mme Daudet could enter, her husband was on his feet, the colour back in his cheeks, laughter in his eye, his voice filled with reassurance about his condition. When the door closed again Daudet collapsed back into his chair. "Suffering is nothing," he murmured. "It's all a matter of preventing those you love from suffering."

And then, this:

Daudet … recounted to Goncourt a dream he had once had, in which he was walking through a field of broom. All around him there was the soft background noise of seed-pods exploding. Our lives, he had concluded, amount to no more than this: just a quiet crackle of popping pods.

Words, words, words

Well …

hamletworks.org offers deep levels of information on Hamlet and related works for scholars, students, theater practitioners, and fans. The site, a continuing work in process, already allows users to

Compare early Hamlet editions from the First Quarto (Q1, 1603), Second Quarto (Q2, 1605), First Players' Quarto (Q6, 1676) and First Folio (F1, 1623)

Build a Shakespeare concordance

Survey textual notes in editions from Q2 to the present

Compare commentary notes from the eighteenth to the twentieth century by clicking on a line number

See Hamlet facsimiles

Explore Global essays on Hamlet around the world
and much more!

Via an essay by Gregory M Lamb, 'How the Web changes your reading habits', who comments:

When completed, the site will help visitors comb through several editions of the play, along with 300 years of commentaries by a slew of scholars. Readers can click to commentaries linked to each line of text in the nearly 3,500-line play. The idea is that some day, anyone wanting to study Hamlet will find nearly all the known scholarship brought together in a cohesive way that printed books cannot. Even that effort only scratches the surface of what's possible, some researchers say. Since people are still largely reading the way they always have, they ask, why not use technology to make reading itself more efficient?

Lamb reports on Dr. Chi, of the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California ('birthplace of technologies such as laser printing, Ethernet, the graphical user interface, and ubiquitous computing'), who is working on ScentHighlights: 

The reading experience online "should be better than on paper," Chi says. He's part of a group at PARC developing what it calls ScentHighlights, which uses artificial intelligence to go beyond highlighting your search words in a text. It also highlights whole sections of text it determines you should pay special attention to, as well as other words or phrases that it predicts you'll be interested in. "Techniques like ScentHighlights are offering the kind of reading that's above and beyond what paper can offer," Chi says. … the software could help students, academics, and business people quickly extract specific information from other written material. ScentHighlights gets its name from a theory that proposes that people forage for information much in the same way that animals forage in the wild. "Certain plants emit a scent in order to attract birds and bees to come to them," Chi says. ScentHighlights uncovers the "scent" that bits of information give off and attract readers to it.

Then there's BuddyBuzz, 'a project of a small group within the Stanford Persuasive Technology Laboratory, (which) flashes text to the viewer a word at a time. BuddyBuzz is based on a reading technique called RSVP (Rapid Serial Visual Presentation) that's been around since the 1970s, says Matt Markovich, editor in chief of BuddyBuzz (www.BuddyBuzz.org). Using it, people can learn to read with good comprehension up to 1,000 words per minute, Mr. Markovich says. … Users who sign up can download news from Reuters and CNET, a technology news website, and postings from several popular Internet bloggers. More content is on the way, Markovich says. Users can also feed their own texts into the website and have them sent to their mobile phone, or offer their content to other BuddyBuzz users.' My italics: something to try out for teaching.

Jyri Engeström at the James Martin Institute

Friday, 6 May: to the James Martin Institute, Oxford, to hear Jyri speaking about 'The Practice of Innovation: how new technology gets defined as sustaining or disruptive' (pdf flyer here).

Great morning on three counts. First and foremost, to see Jyri again and to catch up a little with his news. Then, his talk, which started with Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma: it is a common assumption that 'new technologies are inherently either sustaining or disruptive to the organisation'. But narratives can be seen to influence commercial decisions about innovation, with materials playing roles in the narratives that ventures tell about themselves. Working with an example of a venture drawn from a particular organisation, Jyri proposed that the 'venture's success in the internal competition for resources depended on its ability to make the materials speak for its potency — in the context of prescriptive frameworks which the management of the company mobilised to make resource allocation decisions.'

In this model, ethnography can have a key role to play in creating 'an alternate framework for conceptualising the relationship between the ventures and the main business' (quotations from seminar handout).

The discussion at the seminar seemed to me polarised between commentary from academic ethnographers and those with another kind of "pure" (!) interest — commerce. As an English teacher, the role of narrative in interpreting innovation struck a deep chord with me. My dime's worth: I think Jyri's pursuing something that's fundamental and important — I don't buy a hard-nosed response that dismisses this talk of narratives and wants instead to talk only a sparer language of organisational structures, etc. It is also true that how we tell a story matters and depends upon the audience — who are we talking to and why? An ethnographer working within, say, a school would have her/his work cut out (schools are commonly conservative) and would have to find excellent language and strategies to re-create the reigning institutional narrative(s). I've seen it done (by that strange incarnation of an ethnographer, the headmaster), but it's not easy.

The third thing that made th