Monday, December 26, 2005

Ok, 2nd Quote of the day The world is too complex to be condensed into a list of rules. David Kadavy Eight Life Hacks for Health, Wealth, and Happiness I've noticed in my short existence that I tend to do many things differently from most people. Some of those things probably work just as well, whereas others make me wonder "why doesn't everyone do this?" Here are eight things that may make you feel like you're cheating the system, too (in no particular order):... 8. Don't Make Lists of Rules - or Follow Them (They All End This Way) -      Such things are only made by bloggers hoping to get lots of del.icio.us bookmarks.      The world is too complex to be condensed into a list of rules. How do you cheat the system? [kadavy.net] 12:59:05 PM    comment []

Quote of the Day Don't let fear of failure hold you back; if we are not failing we are not trying anything innovative. James Torio What Is A Blog? New Media Culture 101 James Torio has recently taken on the challenge to write about blogs and media phenomenon they represent: blogs are social change tools, business venues, support and development instruments, wonderful marketing channels, gateways to innovative learner-centered education and peer-review journals for.... ...What bloggers have yet failed to achieve in full, is having been able to clearly communicate and explain the power that these tools offer to the non-technical person. The immense opportunity yet untapped by our many brothers and sisters who while having a sharp mind and desire to have an impact by communicating to others their ideas are still stuck in sending emails to their network of contacts.... Learning - Educational Technologies :: Robin Good's Latest News] Communication as we know it is rapidly changing. We have an abundance of tools and we have only begun to figure out their potential. Communication is no longer about sending messages but opening up a dialogue and providing content that people will want to share with others. People are using media on their terms; when they want it, how they want it and what they want to do with it. It is time to join the conversation. Failure is never quite as freighting as regret.... I stumbled upon this the other night and can't shake it out of me mind. Failure is trying to achieve something but failing short, or not getting the desired results. You learn and grow from failure, I think somewhere along the line somebody gave failure a negative connotation it doesn[base ']t deserve. I remember years ago watching an interview on TV with Michael Jordon; there he was sitting on the bleachers in what looked like a high school gym, sitting around him were high school basketball players. The man conducting the interview said to Jordan, "You are undoubtedly the greatest basketball player who ever lived, how does it feel to fail and not make it as a professional baseball player?" As I lay there on my couch I began to sit up, I suddenly had that nervous feeling in my stomach as I wait in anticipation to hear what Jordan is going to say. In a calm, warm voice he said, "I tried the best that I could, and that is all I can do." That statement has been burned in my brain for years; it's about trying your best! Regret on the other hand, well that is freighting; regret is not thinking things through, not trying hard enough, knowing you could have done things differently, giving up. We learn from failure, regret eats at us because somewhere inside of us we know we should have tried harder or could have made smatter decisions. Don't let fear of failure hold you back; if we are not failing we are not trying anything innovative. Failure is never quite as freighting as regret.... [everyhuman] aka James Torio 12:44:47 PM    comment []

From the Cancer Blog A novel idea, (note the sarcasm) Filed under: Prevention, Adult Onset, Lifestyle, Prevention As hard as it seems to do in the winter when we wanted to be curled up with a good book, or a movie, walking an hour a day has widespread benefits. Getting out and pushing through the snow, or leaves, or grass, or pounding the concrete is a great preventative to cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. In fact from what I read a reduce chance of  20-50% in some cases. I say do it with someone you love, get the kids out with you, or an older parent, even a grandparent if possible, maybe steal some time away with your spouse and use it as some quality time for the two of you. Basically it just needs to be done, it is an easy, affordable, and for some enjoyable way to get the excersise they need to live a happy healthy life. In fact I feel compelled to do it myself.  Be back in an hour. [The Cancer Blog] 12:25:06 PM    comment []

There are abstract shifts that it would be good to have a sense of. We must travel the horizonatl path of knowledge as well as the vertical. The Probabilistic Age  Q: Why are people so uncomfortable with Wikipedia? And Google? And, well, that whole blog thing? A: Because these systems operate on the alien logic of probabilistic statistics, which sacrifices perfection at the microscale for optimization at the macroscale. Q: Huh? A: Exactly.... [good read if you're into the details]     Is Wikipedia "authoritative"? Well, no. But what really is? Britannica is reviewed by a smaller group of reviewers with higher academic degrees on average. There are, to be sure, fewer (if any) total clunkers or fabrications than in Wikipedia. But it's not infallible either; indeed, it's a lot more flawed that we usually give it credit for.     Britannica's biggest errors are of omission, not commission. It's shallow in some categories and out of date in many others. And then there are the millions of entries that it simply doesn't--and can't, given its editorial process--have. But Wikipedia can scale to include those and many more. Today Wikipedia offers 860,000 articles in English - compared with Britannica's 80,000 and Encarta's 4,500. Tomorrow the gap will be far larger.     The good thing about probabilistic systems is that they benefit from the wisdom of the crowd and as a result can scale nicely both in breadth and depth. But because they do this by sacrificing absolute certainty on the microscale, you need to take any single result with a grain of salt. As Zephoria puts it in this smart post, Wikipedia "should be the first source of information, not the last. It should be a site for information exploration, not the definitive source of facts."     The same is true for blogs, no single one of which is authoritative. As I put it in this post, "blogs are a Long Tail, and it is always a mistake to generalize about the quality or nature of content in the Long Tail--it is, by definition, variable and diverse." But collectively they are proving more than an equal to mainstream media. You just need to read more than one of them before making up your own mind.     Likewise for Google, which seems both omniscient and inscrutable. It makes connections that you or I might not, because they emerge naturally from math on a scale we can't comprehend. Google is arguably the first company to be born with the alien intelligence of the Web's large-N statistics hard-wired into its DNA. That's why it's so successful, and so seemingly unstoppable.     Paul Graham puts it beautifully: "The Web naturally has a certain grain, and Google is aligned with it.  That's why their success seems so effortless.  They're sailing with the wind, instead of sitting becalmed praying for a business model, like the print media, or trying to tack upwind by suing their customers, like Microsoft and the record labels. Google doesn't try to force things to happen their way.  They try to figure out what's going to happen, and arrange to be standing there when it does." The Web is the ultimate marketplace of ideas, governed by the laws of big numbers. That grain Graham sees is the weave of statistical mechanics, the only logic that such really large systems understand. Perhaps someday we will, too. [Update: Nicholas Carr, who seems to have inherited the Clifford Stoll chair of reliable techno-skepticism, has a clever and well-written response here.] [The Long Tail] I won't steal Reynolds thunder in the quote below, you really want to go read the whole entry. And note it was written two and a half years ago. Horizontal Knowledge By Glenn Harlan Reynolds Tech Central Station 06/04/03 People used to be ignorant. It was hard to learn things. You had to go to libraries, look things up, perhaps sit and wait while a book was fetched from storage, or recalled from another user, or borrowed from a different library. What knowledge there was spent most of its time on a shelf. Guinness became a publishing sensation by cashing in on that ignorance. Bar patrons got into so many hard-to-settle arguments about what was biggest, or fastest, or oldest that Guinness responded with The Guinness Book of World Records, bringing a small quantity of authoritative knowledge to bear in a handy form. Things are different today. I'm writing this in a bar right now, and I have most of human knowledge at my fingertips. Okay, it's not really a bar. It's a campus pizza place, albeit one with 27 kinds of beer on tap, a nice patio and - most importantly - a free 802.11b "Wi-Fi" wireless Internet hookup. With that, and Google, there's not much that I can't find out.... 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. The problem few predicted is that many that have the resources (live in this connected world he describes) do not choose to learn what it might do for them. Unfortunately, in the US, that's 22% of the adult population who have little if any experience with the "Internet" let alone the tools and solutions built on top of it. Most of them are over the age of 60, are of an age that really needs to know how this changes everything for them - health care, investment, communication with family, friends, social support services.... And I got to this via Knowledge : Horizontal & Vertical I read somewhere that vertical knowledge is quickly assimilated; horizontal knowledge takes a lifetime of dedication. Glenn Harlan Reynolds writes on a very interesting area : horizontal knowledge. He compares the old method of learning things by means like going to libraries and most of the time the knowledge there was spent most of its time on a shelf. He points out that Guinness became a.... [Sadagopan's weblog on Emerging Technologies,Thoughts, Ideas,Trends and Cyberworld] Also a recommended item from a recommended blogger 10:56:20 AM    comment []

Nanotech math Mathematicians solve old problem that may have new applications December 25, 2005 A twisted soap bubble with a handle? If you find that hard to visualize, it's understandable. Experts had thought for more than 200 years that such a structure was not even mathematically possible. But no longer. ..."A minimal surface is formed when the pressure on both sides of a surface is the same," Weber explained. "'For example, when you dip a bent coat hanger into soapy water, the soap bubble that forms on the hanger is a minimal surface." These soap bubbles can have various shapes, depending on the shape of the coat hanger, but in every case the bubble is trying to minimize surface tension, he said. This happens when the bubble has the smallest possible surface area. At every point, a minimal surface is either flat or shaped like a saddle or a potato chip. Minimal surfaces are proving to be important at the molecular level. "Minimal surfaces actually occur in nature at the nanoscale as interfaces between certain substances," Weber said. An example is some copolymers that are plastics used to make new kinds of fabrics. When these copolymers are mixed, there are interfaces between them that are minimal surfaces. Knowing what these interfaces look like can help in determining what the chemical properties of the mixture will be.... 8:28:11 AM    comment []

This just considered briefly a link today to if-else The trick, of course, is getting the "if" right. Complete. 8:12:29 AM    comment []

This just in We're going from reading to writing the genetic code Writing Genetic Code Slashdot Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Sunday December 25, @11:28PM from the working-with-soylent-green dept.   An anonymous reader writes "The Globe and Mail is reporting on another group of researchers delving into the field of 'synthetic biology.' The project stemming from the efforts of two biology labs in British Columbia and Maryland is attempting to create the first synthetic life form. From the article: 'The project is being spearheaded by U.S. scientist Craig Venter, who gained fame in his former job as head of Celera Genomics, which completed a privately-owned map of the human genome in 2000. Dr. Venter, 59, has since shifted his focus from determining the chemical sequences that encode life to trying to design and build it: "We're going from reading to writing the genetic code," he said in an interview.'" This is certainly not the first group to venture into this territory. 7:56:32 AM    comment []

What put the 2 in Web 2.0? A good starting point to dive into "the new web" is Experience Attributes: Crucial DNA of Web 2.0 by Brandon Schauer December 1, 2005 The industry has spent a lot of time defining Web 2.0 and mapping its DNA. But as we attempt to emulate the fast-growth success of the Web 2.0 darlings, we need to zero in on the parts of the DNA that actually create this noteworthy new value.... 7:51:34 AM    comment []

Fire this up, then try to find relevance The reality is: We have more tools than even the digitally competent can use. The digitally challenged won't know what is possible. Or use it if they do. Or use it well if they do. The learning curve out slopes the needed communication toward a solution. There is a flood of research¹ and resource There are more emerging tools for ad hoc and "light-footed" enterprises (profit or non) [for the "Social Software Landscape"] So what is the point of one more voice about the next couple decades? The Rand book's Overview (pdf) opens with a quote: The art of prophecy is very difficult - especially with respect to the future. Mark Twain   The book's overview mentions the major long term trends: At the outset of this 21st century, policymakers confront a number of profound developments, in their societies and in the natural world, whose significance is certain to increase over the next several decades. Some can be seen as dangers, some as opportunities, and some as both. One of the most important of these developments is demographic in nature. The proportion of the elderly in the populations of many industrial countries and some emerging markets will rise sharply, in some cases even as total population shrinks. Aging populations will become a growing burden for these countries and possibly for the world economy as well.... Another long-term challenge is climate change.... Other structural issues, already emergent, will continue to transform the world economy and the economies of individual countries in coming decades. The forces of globalization will continue to intensify, reshaping economies, promoting the movement of capital and labor as well as of goods, and influencing public policy while limiting its options. Rapid technological change[~]in biogenetics, information and communications, the science of new materials, cognitive science, and many other areas[~]will stimulate productivity growth, recast whole industries, and further spur globalization. All of these developments have one thing in common: although in each case the details of what will happen remain highly uncertain, few would question that the effects will be of considerable importance. Distractions & Tryst With Attention from Sadagopan's Weblog on Emerging Technologies, Trends,Thoughts, Ideas & Cyberworld Organization expert David Allen, author of the classic Getting Things Done , points out, technology "has sped up our need to refocus, recalibrate, and reprioritize rapidly and not lose lots of details in the process." This is giving us attention deficit disorder! Solution amy lay in the term "life hacking"? meaning coming up with ways to reclaim your time. Danny O'Brien,set about studying their secrets. O'Brien allowed himself to be interrupted from his job as an activism coordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation long enough to share his favorite strategies: Check E-mail hourly. "There's almost no E-mail that must be answered within 5 minutes." Track time. To stay on track while looking things up online, O'Brien wrote "Webelodeon," a program that "bugs you every few minutes to ask whether you should really still be surfing the Web." Use simple apps . Instead of investing time and money in an elaborate personal organizational system, keep contact info for your clan in a single word processing file. (Re)consider paper. Some of the best computer programmers keep stacks of index cards (known in techie circles as the hipster's PDA) for phone numbers and to figure out a program's structure. Think little. Don't try to become a "superhero of organization." So, maybe the point it to bring "Life Hacking" out of the digital and into the lives of those exiled citizens (often self-exiled, but exiled none-the-less). Guide them to resources on how to life hack and use these new skills for shaping their life's future the future of those they care about (I prefer "shaping" to "improving" - we get transfixed with dilemma when we attempt to "improve") ¹ Shaping the Next One Hundred Years: New Methods for Quantitative, Long-Term Policy Analysis, Rand Corp publication, ISBN: 0-8330-3275-5 By: Robert Lempert, Steven W. Popper, Steven C. Bankes "A sophisticated reader ought to view with great skepticism the prospect of answering questions about the long-term future. The checkered history of predicting the future-from the famous declarations that humans would never fly to the Limits to Growth study to claims about the 'New Economy' - has dissuaded policymakers from considering the effects of their decisions more than a few months or years ahead. However, today's choices will significantly influence the course of the twenty-first century. New analytic methods, enabled by modern computers, may transform our ability to reason systematically about the long term. This report reviews traditional methods of grappling with the morrow, from narratives to scenario analysis, which fail to address the multiplicity of plausible long-term futures. The authors demonstrate a quantitative approach to long-term policy analysis (LTPA). Robust decision methods enable decisionmakers to examine a vast range of plausible futures and design near-term, often adaptive, strategies to be robust across them. Reframing the question 'What will the long-term future bring?' as 'How can we choose actions today that will be consistent with our long-term interests?' these methods provide powerful analytic support to humans' innate capacity for 'what-if-ing.' Choosing the challenge of sustainable development as an example, the authors discuss how these methods may be applied to real-world LTPA and a wide range of other challenges of decisionmaking under conditions of deep uncertainty." 7:25:11 AM    comment []

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