Some serious play ..... all links via MetaFilter.

Test your senses A 10 minute flash test. This is from the BBC - i did the test and was told quite politely that i am sense challenged :).  Still - some interesting quizzes and tests there if you want some mind-crunching fun !

The Dark Side of the Rainbow. The Synchronicity Archives includes the well known synchronization of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon with a viewing of The Wizard of Oz, as well as other entertaining combinations. Has anyone tried Led Zeppelin and Lord of the Rings ?

Everything About Everywhere. Nation Master An amazing resource that displays all sorts of comparative national statistics on practically everything, and with an option of selecting any region / list of countries you choose. It plugs itself as "The world's biggest general stat site" (which might or might not be true I don't know), and it has a wealth of data on economics, sports, population, geography and a dozen more categories. Some interesting statistics; Top 100 in Olympic medals per Capita. Top 100 Murders with firearms (per capita). Top 100 Military Expenditures as a percent of GDP . Top 100 Net migration rate .
A heaven for data freaks.

11:52:51 AM    comment []  trackback []

Singularity. What Happens When Technology Zooms Off the Chart? (pdf) Singularity is the subject of the Spring 2003 issue of Whole Earth magazine. [MetaFilter]

This is a fascinating area in its visioning of the future.  The author, Alex Steffen, raises some issues about and questions Moore's Law - what happens when technology zooms off the chart  - leans on Verner Vinge's stunning work, articulations and revelations on The Singularity and on the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence.  For the uninitiated, here's a very brief outline of the basic principles of Vinge's Singularity :

The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence. There are several means by which science may achieve this breakthrough (and this is another reason for having confidence that the event will occur):

• There may be developed computers that are "awake" and superhumanly intelligent. (To date, there has been much controversy as to whether we can create human equivalence in a machine. But if the answer is "yes, we can", then there is little doubt that beings more intelligent can be constructed shortly thereafter.)
• Large computer networks (and their associated users) may "wake up" as a superhumanly intelligent entity.
• Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.
• Biological science may provide means to improve natural human intellect.

Back to the article - the author makes a few interesting points :

- if it happens, the Vingean Singularity will be the most important event since our ancestors learned to dig grubs with twigs. But as the original concept ages, it seems to be springing leaks. 

- birthing sentient artificial intelligences may be helluva lot harder than first thought - the more we found out about the brain, the slipperier the concept of "mind" gets

- in his portrayal of Green Singularity Scenario - he says - what would happen if the world's poorest people had access to the best emerging technologies and were taught to innovate solutions to their problems? Would it be a global paradise or the progenitor of unimaginable social, economic, and cultural upheaval?  He talks of a village in Africa equipped with hi-speed satellite communications, a homegrown biotech lab, water microfilteration systems, cheaply produced vats of tailored bacteria that turn sewage into hydrogen to fuel vehicles and tools for instance.  He continues to say - Imagine what people of this village might accomplish if freed from constant and immediate threats of starvation, disease and oppression?  Then multiply by millions of villages, connect those villages together and accelerate rapidly.

Exciting stuff - can be hairy-scary too.  Wish there was some way to peek into the future and see the world our children and grand-children will inhabit !

11:25:33 AM    comment []  trackback []

A tale of real-life horror - Troubled Youth Gulag - Tranquility Bay .... [via What is The Message?]  "There are times when I read accounts of such extreme inhumanity and cruelty that I am stopped in thought and action. Today, reading these articles - The last resort (part one) and The last resort (part two) - from UK's Observer Guardian was one such time. It describes a behaviour modification camp to which wealthy Americans (primarily) send their troubled teens to be "rehabilitated." The conditions, as described, would do Josef Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung or Adolf Eichmann proud.

Most of the children are abducted, bound and forced aboard an aircraft to Jamaica. There, they are taught to submit. "Guards take them (if necessary by force) to a small bare room and make them (again by force if necessary) lie flat on their face, arms by their sides, on the tiled floor. Watched by a guard, they must remain lying face down, forbidden to speak or move a muscle except for 10 minutes every hour, when they may sit up and stretch before resuming the position. Modest meals are brought to them, and at night they sleep on the floor of the corridor outside under electric light and the gaze of a guard. At dawn they resume the position. This is known officially as being 'in OP' - Observation Placement - and more casually as 'lying on your face'. Every 24 hours, students in OP are reviewed by staff, and only sincere and unconditional contrition will earn their release. If they are unrepentant? 'Well, they get another 24 hours.' One boy told me he'd spent six months in OP."

Worse than the Observer article are the postings on a message board from some survivors. Inexplicably, the original message board is down. The Google cache version is here.  And I found transcripts of court proceedings in which three former inmates testify to the torture and inhuman conditions on behalf of one teen who is subsequently ordered released and returned to the U.S."

This is simply shocking.   Why would a parent hand over their child to such a program ? Is this it a reflection of complete anarchy and normlessness in 'civilised' society? 

A tale of potential real-life horror - Big Brother gets a Brain - the cameras are already in place. The computer code is being developed at a dozen or more major companies and universities. And the trial runs have already been planned.  Everything is set for a new Pentagon program to become perhaps the federal government's widest reaching, most invasive mechanism yet for keeping us all under watch. Not in the far-off, dystopian future. But here, and soon.

...... Right now, this may be a military program," added Lewis. "But when it gets up and running, there's going to be a huge temptation to apply it to policing at home"óto keep tabs on ordinary citizens, whether or not they've done something wrong."

Wonder whether this is what Truman felt in the Truman Show ! 

10:45:42 AM    comment []  trackback []

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."

- T.S. Eliot

Since i'm on a linking roll - here come some interesting reads on Creativity, Ideas and Innovation.

1.  Ubiquity: Why New Ideas are Both Disruptive and Necessary. Ubiquity: Why New Ideas are Both Disruptive and Necessary " Most people in organizations -- including the executive -- just want to maintain an equilibrium. They'd like to just keep going along doing tomorrow what they did yesterday. But then these Idea Practitioners come in and they disturb the equilibrium. I mean, if someone's telling you about a new idea... [elearningpost]

The concept feels just right - and i like the thought of Idea Practitioners - as opposed to 'consultants' - in nomenclature, role definitions and positioning. 

2. Again link via elearningpost - 'Happy Tales : The CEO as Storyteller - If you want to motivate your employees, tell them a story, but not just any story. A Harvard Business Review conversation with screenwriting coach Robert McKee.'

It talks about uniting an idea with an emotion and essentially, a story expresses how and why life changes - makes me think that we need some stories to show how corporate blogging can change lives in organisations !

3. The newest HBS Strategy & Innovation newsletter is out (at least in electronic form). [via Ideaflow].  Some cool articles in the trial version.

4. Here's a report on a study that says marriage tames creative genius and criminal tendencies - "CREATIVE genius and crime express themselves early in men but both are turned off almost like a tap if a man gets married and has children, a study says. Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, compiled a database of the biographies of 280 great scientists, noting their age at the time when they made their greatest work. The data remarkably concur with the brutal observation made by Albert Einstein, who wrote in 1942: "A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so....."  Do i detect a germ of truth here ?

10:22:26 AM    comment []  trackback []

So much to read - so little time to really absorb - and even less time to blog!  Some interesting links /stories /posts /reviews /analyses i have been studying over the last 10 days or so in the areas of corporate blogging, the merging of weblogging with tools like IM/forums/wikis etc to make them more 'conversational', and social networks :

On corporate blogging :

1. A "healthier" NY Times article on 'Blogs in the Workplace'. Thanks Allan, for the link (he's away at the Supernova conference - i am so envious !) and Stuart for his review on it. I like these thoughts expressed in the article :

But a growing number of businesses, government organizations and educational institutions are using Web logs to manage and improve the flow of information among employees. These blogs, not accessible to the public, typically allow many people to contribute entries that can be read by others in the organization.  It may be too soon to tell whether the corporate blog will emerge as a genuinely useful tool for business communications or simply another way for bores and blowhards to blather. But a growing circle of adopters, like Mr. Tang, swear by their blogs.

and :

"People are going to the blogs every day as a source for news," Mr. Jarvis said. But, he added, "I am disappointed in the tool," because the hoped-for exchange of ideas among departments has not spontaneously developed. "You need specific goals," Mr. Jarvis said.

On making blogs more conversational thru merging IM and forums and wikis with weblogging :

2. 'All the new kids on the blog - At tolerant Microsoft, some wonder when journals will
cross line' - thanks John, for the link.  Here's a nice comment - "The relatively informal nature of blogs can make them an effective way for companies to communicate, said Rebecca Blood, a San Francisco-based weblogger and author of "The Weblog Handbook." "It's not a press release, and it's not marketese," Blood explained in an interview. "It's someone talking about real things in a real voice."

3. Five Key Questions About Business Blogs. E-mail marketing outfit MarketingProfs.com has published an article on business blogging geared to the e-mail marketer. Little new here to those who are well-versed in the blogoshpere, but it is an interesting look into the minds of those who have, until now, relied on e-newsletters and other e-communications as their primary communications vehicles.

[...] Put it this way: scarcely 10 years ago you might have asked, ìWill email replace the phone, fax and postal mail as the preferred means of business communication?î Of course, we exclaim in hindsight. So might it go with blogs. [More...] - [via Terry Frazier of b.cognosco]

On the merging of weblogging with tools like IM/forums/wikis etc to make them more 'conversational'

1.  More on merging IM and Blogging. IM Planet has an article on merging IM with weblogging: "Given the popularity of instant messaging, we see it as a way to bring in a lot more people to blogging," said MindSay co-founder Adam Ostrow. "Most people have a friend who blogs but might not know how to do it. We think we can really open it up to a much larger audience. People like using instant messaging, it's very convenient ... and it's in more than 40 percent of American households. We see an opportunity to bring blogging more into the mainstream."

Recent entrants in the IM+weblogging world include BloggerBot, MindSay and Tipic. [Corante: Social Software]

Now this is interesting !  I have two friends with whom i chat with regularly on IM - one's in Calcutta and the other's in the middle-east.  Both of them are up on all the tools IM provides - yet the moment i mention blogging to them they withdraw saying they're not 'techies'.  I've been prodding them to try it - by telling them that i'm no techie either - that a weblog is just a space or playground that can encapsulate all the discussions we have on IM, the thoughts, views and links we so often exchange, the prototying of ideas that we play with - and that it can have a much wider audience.  One of them is trying it out - he's asked me not to 'reveal' his url yet - maybe next week !  He's quite excited about comments he gets :).  Aparna - you listening, girl?

2. Phil Wolff makes a prediction - (thanks Lilia for the link) : 

"The vendors who dominate messaging will shape blogging. AOL and Microsoft have fat clients, web clients, and chat clients. Watch them:

1. Bring blogging into their messaging family.
2. Absorb blogging user and group digital IDs into their identity mechanisms.
3. Offer faceted blogs (everyone sees just what they're intended to see and not what they don't want to see) using digital ID. You're not part of their ID world? No facets.
4. Push blogging into all their customer touch points (voice, SMS/iMode, handhelds, desktop software, etc.)
5. Fold blogging community servers (the Technoratis and Popdexes) into email and search servers.
6. Offer tools for good citizenship (i.e. censorship, filtering) via community servers.

3. Stuart points to some neat links on conversational blogging in his post - More Forums and Blogs , with an introductory para which says : I feel there's a ready interest in making blogs more conversational.  So I find it particularly frustrating when contributing to different forums and then finding myself exhausted and too tired to sum it up for my blog.  At that point I feel like I'm suffering all this information is being posted to separate places - different communities and my retrieval is difficult. He makes an appeal here - Enable other MT blogs so that when I leave a comment on their blog... it is automatically e-mailed to my blog when I check the right comment box and thus posted (title comment on VK's xxx entry) and saved in a category "comments on other blogs" with sub-categories by blog.  Then I can go commenting and feel I'm adding broader value at the same time.  It would generate more thoughtful comments, and enable me to share both more personally and broadly at the same time. It would also keep a record for me of comments I've made on other blogs.  Something sadly lacking today. 

On social/business networks and communities :

1. Marc invited me to Ringo - i joined it - i like the interface - it has a clean look-feel about it and a nice messaging system.  I'm not sure though how it would provide any real value to me that i cannot get from the connections i've made through blogging and through Ryze. 

2. Ryze is undergoing changes - i liked the FOAF adds earlier - though am a little confused why i should want to see 'selected' friends of friends and 'newest' friends of friends - now it has new privacy settings.  Way to go !  I just wonder what Adrian Scott's business model is - seeing how Indians are joinng the network, mostly free memberships !

3. I tried Sona Matchmaker too - its an out-and-out dating community - i signed up to test it a couple of weeks ago - and got a single friend to join there to test it with me - although its easy to put up a profile, its quite boring, a bit dead  ... nothing happens there ! Takes ages to load - and has a fairly tedious messaging system. 

9:40:53 AM    comment []  trackback []