It’s the 4th July again which means I’ll be contacting all my American friends to wish them a great time with their families. My friend in NYC, Josephine, has been sent a whole box of items and I’m going to call her later today to find out where she’s going to celebrate.
More generally, I’ve been thinking about what independence means and I came up with a little equation. Let me explain its elements:
·ownership — this means that as individuals we’re prepared to stand up and say, “This society / this business / this community / this item / these thoughts / these words / this contribution belongs to me. I’m conceiving it. I’m building it. I’m shaping it. I’m proud of what I’m doing and the direction it’s taking. Even the mistakes and learning from them, I own.”
·democracy — this means that collectively we respect the desire and rights of others to either share in our ownership or have their own ownership in a free and open way.
·responsibility — this means we’re aware that ownership also confers to us (as individuals and collectively) the need to do what we can so that the society / the business / the community etc. progresses in a way which fosters democracy.
So INDEPENDENCE = OWNERSHIP X DEMOCRACY X RESPONSIBILITY
I’m really pleased to announce that my little knol has been voted ‘Best Knol, June 2009″ by other key Knol authors. This is super-cool because the award is a form of quality benchmarking by users who are responsible for fostering the ethos and culture of Knol, and it’s also great to know that the content in the knol is helpful and appreciated. It beat the knol on ‘Twitter and Tweet from the Trenches’ — LOL!
In seriousness, hundreds of thousands of knols have been published — by highly regarded medical and academic experts as well as Joe / Jane Public with some life experiences to share — so to feature well enough in Google Knol’s metrics to be on those key users’ nomination radar and then to win it for June 2009 means something. The voters included those who’ve consistently been top viewed and top rated authors.
The Global Brain etc. is obviously a topic that matters to me. We’re at the extremely early stages of the conception and realization of it, and it’s important to recognize how far we still have to go in our journey ahead as well as the challenges we need to identify and figure out how to overcome.
I’m mindful that our intelligence, perspicacity and contextualization abilities evolve over time. For example, what and how I think and perceive now is more nuanced and reflective-refractive-re-engineered than as a child — although there are instances where I believe my thinking on certain topics was sharper aged 12-17 than they were at any other time to-date in my life.
‘The Global Brain’ knol is a continuous distillation and synapse between different discrete concepts that have fascinated me since childhood. I just decided to put it down in a written record so that this generation (and my children’s) will be able to trace developments of the Global Brain and its associations (the Semantic Web, Turing test, man-machine congruences as much as disconnect etc.) and challenge whether the various constructs are valid, cogent, consistent, democratic and also whether they’re including the appropriate elements which will result in us, collectively, solving the world’s major issues by harnessing man-machine hybrids.
It’s possible that my concepts, insights and vision of the Global Brain etc. are completely wrong. It may even be the case that I don’t complete the journey and my contributions don’t help crack it. Nevertheless, I am prepared to put it onto public record that in my early 30s — here and now and of sane mind, wholly uninfluenced / aided / abetted by drugs of any kind — this is how I was considering and perceiving the subject matter and doing my little Twaining of it.
My main hope is that the knol will help us move the GB’s realization towards a good direction and with good speed. Already, thanks to David Price’s efforts with the Debategraph interface, what I wrote about the Linking Open Data diagram means that the landscape of participants in the Semantic Web is being re-shaped and conceived anew. This is another of our small steps of progress.
The next re-shaping which is sorely needed will be the evolution from the Rubik cube form of the Semantic stack towards a series of protocols which are much more organic and more closely proxy how DNA and neuro-transmitters actually work.
Perception and problem-solving is not about systematic processing alone or even semantic categorization. It’s about synergizing sense-making with sensory emotions, imo.
As I mentioned in a previous post (thanks to a flag by Rick “fish-head”), Forbes.com released their special report on Artificial Intelligence in June:
One article comments about how computers are no more intelligent or semantically-capable of understanding what we mean even in searches than they were 40 years ago. This may be because some of our definitions to date about what thinking is has overly concentrated on the PROCESS of thinking which then affects the way we convert this into computer algorithms. Perhaps the way to approach creating smarter systems is to assess how smart people make sense of and synergize the inputs their senses are subject to and also how those smart people randomly apply humor / relativity / emotion perception / experience-based prioritization rather than risk-based prioritization, and more in the ecosystem of their brains to generate innovative and creative solutions which may appear “off-the-wall” / “avant garde” but end up as the orthodoxy.
A few years ago I did suggest to a well-known tech entrepreneur that what would be seriously interesting is if we could continuously MRI the brains of the top 1000 talents in the world (Nobel Prize / Academy Award / Turner Prize / Pulitzer Prize / etc. nominees) and discover patterns in their brain activity when working at their optimal and at their troughs. Then we might gain better insights into how to improve collective and connective intelligence.
Unfortunately, MRI scans at the moment tend to focus on those with medical conditions: typically, brain cancer, depression or trauma to the head. Instead of unhealthy brains alone we should also be tracking healthy brains operating at top functioning capability, imo.
Of course, the logistics of that study would be fairly challenging so it’s not surprising the tech entrepreneur and I didn’t take it any further than merely a random idea I had! Who knows, now with the development of the EmotivEPOC we may actually have some form of tracking human thoughts and electronically converting them:
There’s another interesting Twaining of discrete concepts: MRI scanning smart people to track their brain activity and a headset which is used in virtual reality games. Hmmn…..
The Global Brain…………collective work-in-progress…………Here’s to its future, :*).
Over the last week, global news items have been dominated by whatever medication Michael Jackson was / wasn’t taking which may have caused his tragic cardiac arrest. Some of the reports have been disturbing because they’ve raised issues of:
·drugs dependency;
·medical professionals possibly supplying and administering drugs to an individual which are inappropriate; and
·how drugs can counter-react in our bodies when wrongly mixed and cause health problems.
The reports have also flagged that his family seem not to have been kept in the loop about what medication he was / was not taking. Now this may seem unusual but, sometimes, our nearest and dearest don’t always tell us what medication they’re on because:
(1.)They don’t want us to worry unnecessarily; or
(2.)They want to hide their addiction / pain from us; or
(3.)They simply don’t think twice about it.
In my father’s case we knew he was taking insulin injections to manage his Type II diabetes, but were in the dark about other medication he was on and didn’t find out until he was hospitalized. Reason (1.) applied.
Anyway, onto other medical stories which are notable this last fortnight.
(1.) Schizophrenia: genetic links discovered
Stanford University’s Jianxin Shi, PhD, and Douglas Levinson, MD, have published a paper in Nature, the science journal, which reports on the molecular genetics of schizophrenia. Their findings seem to implicate a region of the human genome not previously suspected as a risk factor for schizophrenia. Their paper is one of three on the subject to be published in this week’s edition of Nature. The other two papers are on schizophrenia’s connection with bipolar disorder (Hreinn Stefansson et al) and the common variants conferring risk of schizophrenia (International Schizophrenia Consortium) , respectively:
For anyone interested in how schizophrenia looks under fMRI imaging of the brain by MIT scientists, please refer to the Medgadget’s site:
Now, according to the International Schizophrenia Consortium:
“Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder with a lifetime risk of about 1%, characterized by hallucinations, delusions and cognitive deficits, with heritability estimated at up to 80%.”
Some people — typically immature, ignorant and inconsiderate — may believe it’s funny / cool to label others as “schizophrenic”, “crazy”, “delusional” or “mentally ill” as a means of denigration when the other person is patently NOT any of those things. Moreover, some of the smartest people in the world have suffered from some form of schizophrenia or bi-polarity (also known as manic depression):
The YouTube compilation is made from Wikipedia and whilst Wikipedia is not 100 percent accurate or thoroughly sourced, it does provide us with a broad sample of people affected.
If anything, people with mental medical conditions deserve our understanding and our attempts to support them and enable them to function better with society and its challenges rather than to make them the butt of jokes and denigration. The less stigmatism and taboo there is about the medical condition, the more evolved we become as compassionate and aware humans, imo.
The “schizo” label was levied against me by the same person who commended me for my “phenomenal brainpower” — which actually only proves that the person who used it is inconsistent, immature and contradictory in his thinking and being. Also, I’m fairly certain that if I was “schizo”, the various corporate and child psychologists who put me through IQ and other psychometric tests over the decades would have spotted the signs already and referred me to a psychiatrist who would have prescribed me medication and sectioned me so that other people aren’t put at risk by my supposed madness or hysteria.
For the record, I’ve never ever been to see a psychiatrist or diagnosed as schizophrenic / bipolar or been sectioned and hospitalized under the Mental Health Act which (again) shows that the person who tried to label me as “schizo” is frankly……….spouting nonsense (yet again).
In any case, schizophrenia’s connection with manic depression is interesting because finding out more about how the brain works is a pet passion of mine. There’s a Western adage that “There’s a fine line between madness and genius” and manic depression seems to be a bridge somewhere in this.
What medical researchers are undertaking is no joke, serious business and will help drugs companies develop more fine-tuned medication to help schizophrenics and manic depressives manage their conditions, which is a good thing. We may reach a situation where they can harness the better aspects of their condition (extreme consciousness instead of paranoia, and creativity instead of destructiveness) to contribute positive things to society.
(2.) Vegetarians less likely to develop cancer
According to Cancer Research UK, in a study of more than 61,000 people (meat eaters and vegetarians) for over 12 years, vegetarians have a 12 percent less chance of developing cancers of the stomach, bladder and blood. In the sample group, 3,350 participants were diagnosed with cancer.
As readers know, I’ve turned vegetarian for this month and this decision was made before I read about the cancer link research. It was simply because at various moments over the last year I’d found myself eating a piece of meat and thinking, “Ugh!” which was a very surprising emotion for me to feel.
Added to this is the knowledge that my brother’s godfather is 94, healthy and he’s been vegetarian for several decades, so it can be a diet that’s sustainable over a long period of time.
I made my first mixed bean curry today with Thai spices and lemongrass and it was yummy.
(3.) Radioactive patch effectively treats skin cancer
In a pilot study by Dr. Priyanka Gupta at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi a phosphorus-32 skin patch may be an effective alternative to treat basal cell carcinoma instead of surgery. The findings were presented at the 56th Annual Meeting of the Society of Nuclear Medicine.
Skin cancer’s been on my mind recently because in London temperatures have soared to 30+ degrees Celsius (90+ Fahrenheit) this week. Whilst out and about I’ve seen badly sun-burnt people whose skin is either literally peeling off their shoulders or lobster-red and sore. This is astonishing since various TV programs do remind us to be careful in the sun and to apply protective lotions, but the advice seems to be being ignored by some people. If readers click on the image below, you’ll be directed to the Environmental Working Group’s 2009 guide to sunscreens (the image is from Essential Magazine and not a picture of my skin):
Personally, I’m really careful; I wear a Factor 50+ sunscreen, apply it generously and thoroughly, re-apply it every 3 hours AND I wear a hat to shade my head. Even though the Oriental’s olive skin is more resilient to the sun than fair-skinned Caucasian’s, it’s not worth taking risks where developing skin cancer is concerned.
Interestingly, it’s been commented that I have fairly good skin. One of the main reasons is probably that my precautions means there’s less sun damage to it. In the parks I’ve seen people apply vegetable oil and even margarine (to cultivate a tan) and this actually results in the sun burning the skin! Not advisable.
Vanity also plays into why some people are reluctant to apply sunscreen. It creates white streaks or patches where the lotion isn’t well- absorbed into the top layers of your skin. Plus some lotions can feel very gloopy, sticky and greasy.
I don’t mind white streaks / patches / greasy textures. It’s all still preferable than developing skin cancer!
Today an article in the Times covers the nascent disagreement between two well-known Internet and business theory intellectuals (Malcolm Gladwell and Chris Anderson) over whether content will be free:
Now, the difference between what theorists propound and what practitioners DO should always be noted. Obviously, the optimal form is to be possessed of the genius of Steve Jobs — which is seamlessly conceptual and pragmatic AND pays off. Unfortunately, few of us are lucky enough to be thus talented.
So whilst Anderson makes a stand for a future of free, reports indicate that Simon Cowell is in negotiations to earn US$144 million PER YEAR to continue with American Idol, which arguably has the biggest viewing audience (and advertisers’ dream) in the US.
In other words, established media channels are witnessing increasingly competitive payment for talent and their content contribution — whether this is Cowell, a film star like Tom Hanks, a director like Steven Spielberg, a singer like Mariah Carey, etc. — whilst Internet stars are supposed to be drones working for nothing except to please the Queen (owners of the platform) if Anderson’s theory becomes orthodoxy.
Hmmmn………..
Well, we already know that Newscorp has been examining models to start charging for online content:
Not forgetting attempts by YouTube, various IPTV platforms and socnets like Facebook to try and monetize their content properties.
We should also remember the famous quote attributed to the supermodel, Linda Evangelista, who said:
“I don’t get out of bed for less than $10000 a day.”
And how billionaires become billionaires and it’s not because they’re born in the free era.
This is personally pertinent and odd serendipity/synchronicity because recently a business contact valued my strategic abilities — business modeling, content and code work — at GBP1,000 per hour (no joke and no delusions), and then I read this just now in my star signs:
**********************
TUESDAY JUN 30, 2009
A stricter separation between your career and volunteer work is called for. You’ve given away one too many freebies, and it’s starting to affect your bank account. Generosity is not about sacrifices, Libra. If you drain your own resources, you won’t have a drop of charitable energy left to give the world. The same holds true when it comes to your creativity. While it’s fine (and advisable) for you to pursue your passions without reserve, you don’t do the starving artist routine very well. Having money in the bank keeps you balanced, which, in turn, gives you the right foundation to keep dreaming up all those brilliant works.
**********************
Now, I tend to take horoscopes with a healthy dose of skepticism of the type:
·So one in twelve people is going to be in the same situation as me; and
·It’s all just generalization and open to your own interpretation.
Still it did make me think — particularly after the experience of that SemWeb play where I gave a lot of goodwill, content, consideration and time. Plus the horoscope is right to say my sign doesn’t “do the starving artist routine very well”. My thinking’s now further compounded by reading about the Gladwell versus Anderson stand-off.
The more I think about free content online the less I think it’s democratizing and the more I believe it’s exploitative towards user-generator-content-collaborators and…………..Communist rather than capitalist. Capitalism may be flawed but, at least, market forces can determine the value of our content rather than fool us that all content is equal and all contributions are free.
It’s not, as I’ve discovered.
Moving forward, CEOs like that SemWeb play’s will need to pay me GBP1,000 per hour UPFRONT before I as much as write a single apostrophe on their site. Henceforth, there will also be no such practice as a “free lunch” or as a “favor to a friend”. Despite his insistence that we were friends, that CEO categorically is NOT my friend.
No friend of mine would waste my time or disrespect users’ content.
That’s the problem with free content. It’s treated as if it and its originators are of no real value. It makes any owners who are unscrupulous think that they can disrespect their users and abuse their content.
I’m glad I now have 100% ownership over my content so I can monetize it, especially now I see that Newscorp, Gladwell and Simon Cowell believe in paid content / talent models — LOL.
I just spotted something interesting on the Huffington Post blog site and am wondering whether anyone’s mentioned it to Arianna Huffington. Here’s how Bing is being promoted across the site:
You can see via the second link that although Bing is being banner advertised, the custom Google search feature is still very noticeably being used by HuffPost itself. We can ask what commercial agreement is in place between the various parties about non-compete issues……………
So as some readers are aware a SemWeb play, which is such a disappointment I won’t even namecheck them and give them free PR, deleted vital content of mine on some baseless — and frankly stupid — issues of theirs. This brought to the fore all the typical online concerns relating to:
* stewardship of users’ content and IP;
* trust between the online provider and the content generator;
* how people can misinterpret and misunderstand each other’s meanings and intent (semantic differences of perception), so how can we expect machines to understand humans; and
* whether various parties can overcome their egos and psychological constructs to genuinely collaborate towards the Global Brain.
Clearly, the CEO of the SemWeb play and I do not have the same vision for or insights on the Global Brain, rewarding content contributors or fostering constructive and democratic relationships. It’s just as well that my content is no longer subject to his team’s control, oppressive deletion or influence since he’s the person who spun a whole heap of garble about Semantic technology, Google not having any semantic capabilities in its search algorithms and customer care which have proven to be completely off-the-bullseye. After all, he and his team willfully closed their public feedback channels not once but at least THREE times despite my advice to the contrary.
Anyway, today I’m reminded of how justifiably annoyed I am at his deletions of my content.
As I mentioned last week I met a Google engineer who’s using MapReduce to populate large volume data onto a map. Now, I know for a fact that what we all need is an early detection system for build-ups of economic bubbles and I believe that something like MapReduce could potentially be an element of this system. Therefore, I was going to send her an 80+ page PDF of some economic statistics some clever guys had generated back in Sept/Oct 2008. Unfortunately, they’ve presented their findings in a static format and it would be really helpful if their data was actually in a timeline or MapReduce form.
So that’s my good intention: share this economic analysis with Ms. Google MapReduce and do my itsy-weensy bit to accelerate us reducing our risks of repeating the recent global economic crisis.
However, here’s where the chink in the sense chain appears: the SemWeb platform. I entrusted the link to and contextualization of that PDF to the SemWeb platform. I no longer have access to that content. This means that the sum effect is:
* the SemWeb platform wasted my time; instead of putting the link and contextualizing it with fellow contributors on their site I’d have been safer putting it into my Gmail or my own blog; and
* the SemWeb platform is (yet again) responsible for a delay in human progress and collaboration.
* the SemWeb platform and its team has increased ignorance, discontent, annoyance and the system’s stupidity rather than advanced Enlightenment.
Yes and I do hope that the upcoming Google Wave “blows them out of the water” because that’s what their inconsiderate actions and disrespect towards users have resulted in: disappointment and disloyalty.
Meanwhile I have to go rooting for this PDF again. This time I’m bookmarking it direct into my browser.
As a final taster of what I’m giving up for 31 days, I went to a cool South-East Asian restaurant called ‘Bambou’:
·Hanoi-style pork ribs in red wine vinegar
·Sichuan-spiced duck breast with tamarind and chilli
·Banana fritters with pistachio ice cream
Today for my last meat day for the month I’m going to make spicy chicken wings.
I’ve decided to go temporarily veggie because I discovered that during the summer our bodies need a lot more fluids whilst meat can make us feel “heavy” and retain water to process it, so I’m making July my month of meat-free detox as a health trial.
My mother says I won’t be able to do it and will probably only last two days before I give up, but I’m determined to complete my objectives. She says I won’t mostly because my family are such BIG meat eaters — especially seafood. Apart from the puffer fish (also known as “Fugu” in Japanese sushi and the second most poisonous vertebrate in the world, btw) and endangered species, we’ve eaten most types of seafood: cod, salmon, herring, haddock, eel, tilapia, pomfret, John Dory, plaice, sole, red snapper, catfish, monkfish, sardines, trout, shark’s fin, tuna, mullet, bream, brill, parrotfish, butterfish, halibut, scallops, crabs (lots of types), clams (lots of types), mussels, lobster, langoustines, sea urchins etc. On the meat side as well as conventional chicken, beef and pork we’ve tried venison, crocodile — my brother on vacation, ostrich, pheasant, rabbit and wild boar.
So this is the lifetime to-date of taste bud conditioning I’m trying to overcome for a month. It’s going to be…….tough.
My parents did use to make our own tofu; on Sunday mornings our kitchen was swamped by boxes my father had crafted from oak / beechwood / ash to set the tofu and my mother was whizzing away on the food processor to extract the milk from sacks of soya bean we’d bought. However, as much as we love tofu our kitchen was more likely to burst with flavors from home-made dishes like these [if you click on the images, you'll be directed to good recipe sites]:
MY FATHER’S SPECIALITIES
·beef and pineapple stir-fry (here’s my first attempt of this dish below)
·Pei Pa duck
·braised pork belly
·pan-fried tilapia with ginger and spring onions
·beef brisket ho fun soup
MY MOTHER’S SPECIALITIES
·spring rolls (the BEST IN THE WORLD! She makes batches of 200+ each time.)
·seafood noodle soup
·steamed sea bass in soy sauce and ginger
·Dai Bao
·char sui pork
This is only a tiny fraction of their repertoire and, natural bias aside, they are (was in my father’s case since he’s passed away) really good cooks. They made classic Cantonese dishes as well as added creative and experimental twists — like putting chestnuts to the spring rolls. We also had a sizeable garden where my father grew our own tomatoes, strawberries and raspberries in the greenhouse with potatoes, spring onions, lettuce, carrots, beans and radishes outside in the ground. That was where we were first introduced to…….slugs — YUCK!
This early experience is how I know it’s a lot more cost-effective to grow your own food and be able to cook it than to buy convenience foods. A bland, ready-made microwave oven mean can cost between GBP3 to GBP5 and for that (if you don’t have your own vegetable patch) you could go to a market at the weekend and pick up all the fresh ingredients you need to cook tasty meals for 3 days. All it takes is about 15 minutes to cook and the preparation time is therapeutic.
Cooking can also teach us great discipline — timing, combination of elements and distinctive appeal — which actually has applicability in creating businesses and brands too.
Anyway, I’m lucky my parents have passed on some culinary abilities to me. I’m going to use some of the flavors and spicing techniques they taught me to help make the vegetarian dishes more interesting and palatable. Yes and it’s fairly amazing that despite all this good meaty home cooking we kids haven’t turned out to be clinically obese! This is because there’s no such thing as butter, cheese or other saturated fats in our family cooking. Plus we don’t make many cakes or pastries and when we do we add only a 1/4 of the amount of eggs and sugar the recipe says.
Mostly we stayed a healthy shape, of course, because we were encouraged to be active and take part in extra-curricular sports and join teams (athletics, badminton, squash, tennis, basketball, swimming, netball, volleyball and cycling).
Yes and in an alternate universe if I wasn’t so into business, technology, films and “brain work” I’d like to have been a travel + food writer so I could indulge in my love for food and adventuring! LOL.
To date, I’ve only ever cried over the passing of family members — until I heard about Michael Jackson. From some place unknown I’ve sobbed for a few minutes every day since last Thursday. How strange is that? If someone like me who wouldn’t be considered an MJ fan and is more rational than emotional can be so upset, how must his children, family and fans be feeling? I just feel for them.
Sometimes, some people like MJ affect our souls and we don’t even know it until they’re not here anymore…………..
A billion and one official news sites and global citizen blogs are going to comment on his controversies and eccentricities, but this blog is not going to. This is not to deny his human flaws or mistakes which were notable (including dangling his baby son from a balcony which he later admitted he regretted) or to feign some form of rose-tinted nostalgia, but because I believe in three things:
(1.)celebrating and paying tribute to the genius of others
(2.)collective constructivism
(3.)respect for the deceased
I particularly know from the experience of my father’s death how vital that last one is. We had our issues and that’s normal in all relationships, but as our friends and family commented afterwards, “No child could have given their parent a better goodbye.” Months later, when my father’s spirit appeared in my dreams happy — the first time I’d ever had a dream about my father in my life — I knew he’d had a safe passage into the afterlife and reincarnation.
A safe passage is what I hope MJ will have too.
For me, the impact he had on my generation and future generations exceeds even the legacy of his music, his dancing and his phenomenal fusion of the arts. Amidst all the obituaries and recollections people seem to have forgotten an important contribution he made:
HUMANITARIANISM
In fact, he co-wrote the 1985 anthem We are the World to raise money for starving children in Africa following the news reports from Ethiopia. His charitable involvement numbered in excess of 30 organizations and included:
·American Cancer Society
·Cities and Schools Scholarship Fund
·Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation
·Juvenile Diabetes Foundation
·The Sickle Cell Research Foundation
The Guinness Book of World Records recognized his participation with an entry in 2000 for the celebrity who committed to the most number of charitable organizations. A comprehensive list of his work in this area is provided here:
Humanitarianism was a genuine core of him because US$ millions of profits from his sell-out shows, tours and performances were donated to charitable causes.
Moreover, if we listen to his last three albums we recognize that he became more and more enlightened about global social responsibility as he matured as an artist, and he tried to take us on that journey with him. For example, listen to the words of Man in the Mirror, Why You Wanna Trip on Me, Earth Song, Black and White:
Consider also the reports that he was working on a song about climate change shortly before he died so unexpectedly.
What we discover when we pay tribute to his musical genius is that it’s not necessarily through politicians and political processes that the values and hopes of our societies are reflected, determined and realized. It’s also given genuine voice and awareness by artists like Michael Jackson. Artists who don’t jump on bandwagons, show up at so-called “social awareness” concerts and fly in on carbon-spewing private jets or buy electric cars out of guilt complexes to counter those private jets.
Artists like Michael Jackson who try to communicate to us concepts of:
·what really matters in the world — please listen to Why You Wanna Trip on Me, What More can I Give, We Are Here to Change the World
·Mother Nature — please listen to Earth Song
·the futility of conflict — please listen to There Must be More to Life than This (unreleased duet with Freddie Mercury), They Don’t Care About Us
Yes and for moments when we feel down, we just put Billie Jean on and before we know it we’re dancing with a huge smile on our face.
Thank you, MJ.
(2.)Sir Roger Bannister
I read a ‘Whatever happened to……..’ interview in a magazine supplement at the weekend and it made me smile. Sir Roger Bannister recollected his achievements and noted that:
There was uncertainly in the medical profession whether a former prominent athlete could also be a serious doctor. So I had to be assiduous in my medical work…”
which reflects the fact that we need to EARN whatever rewards we get through hard work.
The type of person I admire the most is the one who is multi-talented and excels in different fields of endeavor. This is simply because it proves how amazingly agile and dynamic the human mind, body and spirit is — which is something to cheer with all our hearts.
Sir Roger Bannister, who’s now 80, was the first man to run the mile in less than 4 minutes. He achieved this feat on 6 May 1954. More recently, he became the first person to receive a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Neurology.
B-R-I-L-L-I-A-N-T!
(3.)Steve Jobs
Hurrah he’s returning to Apple after his health timeout!
I just found out a minute ago and am simply shocked at the news of his death. The first live concert I ever went to was his Dangerous tour. My friends and I queued early and managed to get quite close to the front. He was a unique and amazing musical talent and his millions of fans all over the world will miss him and his prodigious talents. It transcended all cultural barriers and his musical legacy will endure and continue to inspire others. Thank you for all the music, MJ.
Let’s also remember and celebrate his dancing genius:
Inspired by the most fantastic dancer, Fred Astaire:
Thank you for all these talents and go in peace, Michael. We are the world and our thoughts are for your children and family in this time of such sadness. As your songs say: never be afraid, you are not alone. You’re with the stars now, where dreams never end and strangers become friends.
Journey onwards safely with a smile and a song………..
Yesterday’s W-Tech event was designed to encourage women to pursue careers in technology and be successful in the sector. Workshop topics ranged from ‘Project Management’ to ‘Getting Your Research Project Funded’ to ‘How Smart Women Manage their Careers’. Speaking to some of the other attendees throughout the day, quite a few of them chose to attend the workshops on personal branding, political savvy and emotional intelligence. I selected ones where either the technology is at the bleeding edge or the speaker is someone I need to know to help my career — like Gary Bullard who presented the ‘Negotiate Your True Worth’ seminar. Previously he was President, BT Global Services and now he runs a company that supports talented female executives in advancing their careers and getting senior roles in big companies.
Anyway, these were the workshops I chose to sit in on and listen to:
·Funding Your Hi-Tech Start Up
·Cloud Computing and the Law
·Google’s MapReduce
·Interacting with Technology — MS Surface
·Negotiating Your True Worth
·Confidence + Credibility
·Closing session: Achieving in the Technology Profession (panel comprised senior female technology MDs from Goldman Sachs, Accenture, IBM, London 2012, Deloitte and P+G).
It was a really enjoyable and educational day and I managed to swap business cards with people who are incredibly inspirational.
MS Surface + Communicator
Also at yesterday’s event I got up close and personal with the Microsoft Surface product. At the moment, the product is retailing for GBP8000 in the UK for the consumer version and GBP10,000 for the developers’ version. The MS demonstrator showed us several programs that are available on the system:
·Finguistics — a foreign languages learning package
·Vitruview — a medical visualization package which allows doctors to show patients their medical conditions with 3D images which can be rotated, enlarged etc. Vitru is in reference to da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.
·Unified Office Communicator — a system that combines a motion-detection sensor with a 360 panoramic view web cam, voice-activated mobile services that allow users to access and update their emails, swap and collaborate on documents, and a P2P IM channel that can record conversations. The entire solution is designed to enable remote working and collaboration across different locations.
MS Communicator was what interested me the most. The demonstrator said the solution has been around for 3-4 years. This isn’t exactly right; it’s been at MS for about 3 years. However, its history stretches back to the late 1990s.
I know this because it was one of the incubations in my investment portfolio at the bank. It was developed in-house, rolled out as our internal communications tools, opened up as a consortia offering to the other Tier 1 banks to facilitate external communications and later successfully spun out. It preceded Skype and is technically more robust and secure because its original audience was the financial services sector where information security requirements are high. This was all before it became a consumer product at MS, via the acquisition of the company a few years ago. One of the original patent owners and I are still in touch.
GoogleMap Reduce
The audience was shown the results from a study by Matthew Gray and Dave Petrou. They’d written a software program that scanned through all of the books deposited in Google Books looking for any mentions of place names. The books included the Gutenberg collection and dated from 1600 to today. Using this data, they’d mapped the longitude and latitude of these places mentioned in books.The map results were displayed for 1600, 1700, 1800, 1900 and 2000. The Google representative observed how it started with a concentration of locations in Europe, which then migrated over to the States and spread gradually to Africa and Australasia. She commented that India didn’t seem to be mentioned much in the literature that had been scanned.
Well, there was a much more obvious missing contribution: China.
So I raised my hand and observed that perhaps the name tags in the search algorithms used show a bias towards Europe and America because they’re in English and use the alphabet. If the name tags picked up Chinese characters instead of English, for example, then the incidence and frequency of Chinese locations on the books map would be higher. I also noted that the search result differences between me searching with Chinese characters in Google.com is different from when I search in Google.cn and different again when I use Google Translation Services.
She said that my point is an extremely good one and would make an interesting project.
Then I said that this type of mapping is also relevant to Semantic Web developments and our increasing attempts to differentiate text-based words. I noted that every time the word “Paris” appears in a book it may not be in reference to the capital city of France but to Homer’s character in the Iliad, for example.
Later, when she referred to how the central character in Frankenstein moved from ingolstadt University to Geneva, I asked whether it may be possible in the future for MapReduce to have some type of time flex so that we can trace not only where locations that appear in books are, but also when the characters or the author(s) arrived there.
Later still, when she discussed loads and cluster processing I asked whether theoretically instead of mapping locations mentioned in books, MapReduce might be applied to mapping and predicting the incidence of economic bubbles and potential bursts. She said that she’d use linear regression to do that. I noted that with linear regression outliers would need to be removed and also there’s no dynamic longitude-latitude pinpointing.
Anyway, the take-away from the seminar she said that the points I raised would make very interesting code projects and I said I’d send her some links and materials to reports on the recent global economic crisis, which have numbers etc. that can be plugged into MapReduce.
Applying technology in a good way to monitor and prevent future global financial crisis and value destruction of US$ trillions that affect millions of households globally is something I believe in. If this tiny suggestion of mine to test MapReduce in this way and see what results it produces works, then that’s another step forward in the right direction.
Oh and here’s some interesting quotes from her presentation:
·If you have one server, it may stay up 3 years (1000 days);
·If you have 10,000 servers expect to lose 10 a day.
·With MapReduce, they lost 1600 of 1800 machines once, but the processing finished fine.
Here’s a Google Roundtable on MapReduce from YouTube:
London 2012
During the event we also got to see the first screening of London 2012’s new promotional video. It shows the integration of sports with local communities and the way Olympic venues are shaping up. The music track on the video is sung by Leona Lewis with Jimmy Page on the guitars, which was first performed at the close of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
How women can succeed in technology
The last seminar of the day focused on experiences and tips from a handful of senior women in technology about career progression and being mentored. Some of them were of the opinion that there is no pay or promotion differential between the sexes whilst others commented on the male culture they’d had to learn to deal with.
All of them paid tribute to their families as role models and highlighted the following as having played a part in their careers (in no particular order):
·authenticity
·knowing their business well
·prioritization
·calculated risks
·training
·growing into the role
·economic independence
·LUCK and serendipity
Later, I caught up with the MD of Goldman Sachs and we swapped notes on our experiences with male bosses and whether some of her fellow panelists’ horror stories about lost opportunities and pay differentials because of men have any validity. We both noted that we’d been extremely lucky and hadn’t experienced the discriminatory issues other women have.
I think she’s spot-on when she says it’s about our own attitudes, approaches and outlooks on our careers and male-female dynamics too.
My male manager at the bank could not do more to support my career or advance it:
·He approved financing for the best training I could possibly get.
·He publicly and privately credited me for the work I produced.
·He went to a Special Committee to present the case for my fast-track promotion.
·He recommended me into CEO-Chairman’s Office to contribute to and support the CEO’s corporate agenda.
·He remains one of my mentors now and acts as a sounding board for my ideas on strategy, banking and business.
There are some PHENOMENAL bosses out there — male and female. We just have to hope that luck and serendipity brings them across our paths and we have the opportunity to be guided by them and to follow their example.
On a final note, the event also enabled me to experience my first-ever coaching session, ‘Confidence and Credibility’. The coach reminded the audience of the importance of posture and that it can send signals to others of whether they can entrust their projects, pets and even children to that person. Then she showed us how we should stand.
All of a sudden she called out, “Up there I see a woman I’d gladly hand over my kids to right this second!”
Over two hundred pairs of eyes turned and looked right at me!
It’s just as well I don’t have too many complexes or I’d have turned bright red. The fact is I’ve always been self-assured, have a certain amount of kudos and am ready to take on responsibilities. Plus I went to dance lessons and played lots of sport as a kid, so standing up properly and being ready to compete and be a team player is something I’m trained in.
If the coach wants to entrust her kids to me, fine. I’d prefer to take care of my own, though — LOL.
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