intelligence's Xanga

Wednesday, March 17, 2004

Wed, 17 Mar 2004 21:56:39 GMT

Attention Subscribers!

While it has been great to be a Xanga Premium member, we will be migrating our blog to patternHunter.

Thanks to the folks at Xanga who helped get this blog rolling a year ago!

- Sean Kearney

Tuesday, August 19, 2003

Tue, 19 Aug 2003 20:11:34 GMT

Catching Up with Wired

"(M)aking music is fundamentally a social phenomenon that actually creates a physical coupling between otherwise separate neurosystems." - Howard Rheingold (in the January 2003 issue of Wired Magazine)
"You can't look at humanity separate from machines. We're so intertwined we're almost the same species, and the difference is getting smaller." - Sims creator Wil Wright (in the November 2002 issue of Wired Magazine)
"We are now at a juncture that organic life has been moving toward for a long time. I think natural selection was likely to create an intelligent, self-conscious, morally rich species capable of reflective choice. And cultural evolution was very likely to get us where we are today, which is on the verge of global social organization, but still at a point where we have the possibility of blowing the whole thing up or ushering in an era of peace and order. Which of these routes we take as a species depends on the degree to which we're able to cast aside some of the egocentric moral biases that were built into us by biological evolution. The intimations of higher purpose are optional. - Robert Wright (in the December 2002 issue of Wired Magazine)
"When engineering types speak highly of some science fiction writer, usually it's not because that person predicted the future. Rather, it's because he or she put together some disparate ideas into a coherent vision that could be used as a road map by the people who are actually deploying such a technology." - Neil Stephenson (in the September 2003 issue of Wired Magazine)

Tuesday, August 19, 2003

Tue, 19 Aug 2003 12:41:47 GMT

Your Friends May Be The Next Big Thing

While most business leaders seem to be preaching "the future is dead," Robert Hof's "The Quest for the Next Big Thing" article in Business Week paints a more optimistic picture:

By the time I sit down to write, it feels like the tech industry is finally starting to turn around -- and that maybe what I discovered has a chance to produce something big. Indeed, the journey itself made me realize things weren't as dead as they seemed.

Futurist Howard Rheingold agrees and adds, "The killer apps of tomorrow will not be hardware or software, but social practices." Even the scientific community is realizing the power of scientitst-citizen collaboration to drive successful adoption of new innovations.

And yet, as described in this article on validation of the "six degrees" phenomenon published in Nature: "(E)ven if global social networks can be searched quite easily, a searcher may not exploit this asset unless he realizes the strength of his connectedness and has sufficient motive to make the effort."

Kenneth Chang reports in his New York Times article:

24,613 e-mail chains that were started, a mere 384, or fewer than 2 percent, reached their targets. The successful chains arrived quickly, requiring only four steps to get there. The rest foundered when someone in the middle did not forward the e-mail (and, of those who did not forward a message) less than 1 percent replied that they could not think of anyone to send the e-mail message to, suggesting that most simply did not want to be bothered.

Chang also noted that successful participants tended to send messages to "weak links," casual aquaintaces based on geographical area or vocation, while they avoided forwarding messages to well-connected social hubs who, despite their abundance of connections, were likely to drop the messages, potentially seeing them "as drips in a daily deluge of spam."

Dr. Duncan J. Watts, the senior author of Columbia's Small World Experiement paper, sums up the practical value: "You can ask a friend of a friend for a favor, but that's about it."

Monday, August 11, 2003

Mon, 11 Aug 2003 17:46:19 GMT

So Much For Any Lessons from Who Moved My Cheese?

This recent article in Discover Magazine suggests that thousands of laboratory trials my be drawing conclusions from insane mice.

Saturday, August 09, 2003

Sat, 09 Aug 2003 20:48:03 GMT

The Ray Kurzweil Reader

Inventor and author Ray Kurzweil has recently published a free e-book called The Ray Kurzweil Reader (pdf), "a collection of essays... on virtual reality, artificial intelligence, radical life extension, conscious machines, the promise and peril of technology, and other aspects of our future world."

Saturday, August 09, 2003

Sat, 09 Aug 2003 20:44:55 GMT

This Is Your Brain On Babies Researchers at University College London are studying infant thinking skills using a "harmless 'hair-net' of sensors which measured electrical activity in the brain."

"Whatever the exact neural basis of the effects we have observed, our finding that increased 'gamma-band' activity is associated with the representation of hidden objects will inform fundamental issues about how infants process their visual world."

I Of course, every Marvel comics fan knows that even higher levels of gamma turn babies into little Hulks.

Saturday, August 09, 2003

Sat, 09 Aug 2003 20:44:36 GMT

Following the Data Trails

This article on spontaneously forming groups is really interesting. If you read William Gibson's Idoru you will see some amazing parallels (another reason why I get more ideas from Gibson's fiction than from most business books).

I especially like the part where social network mapping is treated as a work of art and al queda is compared to an IBM project team.

"The relevant data, in terms of his current employment, was that he was an intuitive fisher of patterns of information: of the sort of signature a particular individual inadvertently created in the net as he or she went about the mundane yet endlessly multiplex business of life in a digital society." - William Gibson, Idoru

Saturday, August 09, 2003

Sat, 09 Aug 2003 20:43:46 GMT

"Cool Seeding"

Nokia's new Gizmodo game phone needs some "people who won't mind getting paid to play the N-Gage in public at their, "campus, local events, around town and all of the places you love to hang out."

Monday, July 28, 2003

Mon, 28 Jul 2003 00:30:06 GMT

What Do Schools and Panels Have In Common?

Here are some truly amazing articles by John Taylor Gatto about the tyranny of government-forced schooling and a cool article by David Weinberger about why panels suck.

Sunday, July 27, 2003

Sun, 27 Jul 2003 23:54:51 GMT

Distributed Everything?

Some consultants and business gurus are touting the power of "distributed decision making" and "distributed intelligence" to deal with the limitations of top-down management practices.

In this article on "democratic capitalism" for Strategy+Business magazine, Art Kleiner suggests that companies use distributed equity and "ownership eduction" to encourage people to "learn the ins and outs of ownership... (to) have a far more personal realtionship with capatalism that would also be a prevalent source of dignity and participation in the economy."

Klein also quotes author and lawyer Jeff Gates who asks:

What would it mean to managers personally to create a vibrant center where people learn what is is to be fully human, where they make decisions to restore the natural environment, where they watch everyone becoming better off -- psychologically, ecologically and financially?