I’ve been busy as usual. Firstly, I’ve created the favicon which is now inserted into each web browser so that the browser too is distinctively ALWAYS THE TWAIN (@T):

Tomorrow, I’m going to include a counter on the site to show how many visitors have arrived @ ALWAYS THE TWAIN.

On another practical side, in the search for a new mouse, I’ve ordered this one whilst I wait for my Christmas gift of a WACOM kit:

Today I spent most of my time getting to grips with Google Maps API again and wondering how to do a dynamic RSS feed with geocode into something like JACKSphere with Papervision3D and some Flex. Well………..I happened upon this brilliant desktop and website application:

* Flickrvision built by David Troy (who did twittervision)

There’s also a cool 3D version that makes use of Google Earth to showcase live dynamic updates of flickr photos posted all over the world, with their times and geocodes:

I have seen something similar by a German Flash developer a few years ago — albeit it was with news rather than Flickr photos and I’m sure someone will do a videoplayer version soon.

As well as working out how to code this (Adobe Edge and other Adobe tutorial sites do a tutorial on dynamic RSS and Papervision3D), there’s also localized drag+drop within AS3 that I’m investigating. The objective is to create an environment in which rss newsfeeds flying in and are also dockable at certain grid points. A bit tricky code-wise but……..hey……….life is for positive experimentation!

I’m simply happy to be focussing on my own interests rather than trying to make someone else’s vision work and wasting my time, IQ, goodwill and skills.

I feel extremely L-I-B-E-R-A-T-E-D!!!

GOOGLE KNOL

The ‘Global Brain’ posting is almost at 200 views in 3 days which is a LOT more than any single posting on a certain semantic service can dream of. Plus Knol has versioning. Plus there’s comment moderation. Plus a whole stack of Google goodies to make producing quality content fast, easy and user-friendly (such as the ability to insert YouTube videos, spreadsheets and other documents). 

Most importantly, I don’t get bothered by trolls / vampires / rats and I don’t have to defend Google Knol or do anything which isn’t my job. I also don’t have to feel angry or insulted by their marketing strategy or how I monetize my content because I can choose to earn through AdSense in and around my knols.

All-in-all, I can just be happy to produce and share quality knowhow and relevant links. This is what I’m about, so Knol is serving my needs quite nicely on that side for now. 

This is the card I made for our American friends on Maldives360:

On Thanksgiving Day I spoke with three of my favorite people in the world: one in London, one in Madrid and one in NYC. I also managed to touch base with a brilliant former colleague who is Director of IT at a Top 10 bank and the co-patent owner of a great P2P IM application, which his team developed and which preceded Skype (and frankly knocks its socks off). I’m hoping to work again with him one day soon — if I can raise enough financing and offer appropriate incentives to entice him away from his current role, ha ha. Watch this space, as they say!

Although the current climate is dire because of the global financial crisis and the Mumbai terrorist incident, speaking with people I care about definitely put life into perspective and helps to anchor me. It also made me reflect on relationships and why some work whilst others don’t.

Superficially, each one of them is different: nationalities, age, gender, religion etc. Each one of them is experiencing very unique and special journeys in life so far.

What all of them share is this: they bring out the best in me.

This doesn’t mean we always agree — we don’t; we have disagreements and then we resolve them. However, what marks them out is that our tolerance for each other’s foibles is timeless and boundless. These are people I can imagine and hope will be with me throughout my life and be part of the wider circle of guardians for my kids because they’d enrich them with some absolutely brilliant qualities and values: joie de vivre, practical sense, open-mindedness, compassion and a whole heap of intelligence.

It isn’t only on Thanksgiving Day we should remember to be thankful for our family and friends. It’s every second that they agree to accept us for who we are as we do them. 

This is a quick post to say my piece is now live. I’ve tidied up the article and also included an insight on my encounter with Elbot, the winner of the 2008 Loebner competition:

 
The Global Brain opening post also now incorporates an ingenius YouTube video that provides a modern take on the Turing test:

 
I am quite proud of my piece because it’s more comprehensive and has more perspective than the Wikipedia version:

* The Global Brain on Wikipedia

ENJOY!

OUR QUEST FOR ENLIGHTENMENT

INTRODUCTION

Firstly, thank you for your interest and I hope readers will contribute their own considered opinions and gut intuitions here intelligently, regardless of whether or not they agree with these postulations and the presentation of them. Secondly, I’m looking forward to our future interactions and building upon this model together. Thirdly, I have the flu whilst I write this so my own brain may not be optimally functioning!

Nevertheless, I promised a knowledge share and here it is.

This post is an initiating conversation in a continuum of “negotiations of intellect” (discourse) I’m engaging in with friends and detractors interested in the subject matter, as well as within myself. It’s a work-in-progress that will evolve with every substantive external influence, perceptual intake and distilled wisdom from the diverse contributors on KNOL that sanity-checks, dimensionalizes and synergizes it, over our lifetimes.

It is not intended to be the definitive or absolute end-game version, nor indeed the academic / geek version. It is the version of a young woman who appreciates the thinking of seasoned, male visions and accounts of what the Global Brain is and, yet, questions some of their central tenets and wonders whether other factors have either been overlooked or not even considered yet that would make the concept more holistic, pragmatic and realistically achievable.

I decided to make this posting today, 26 November 2008, on the day my father would have turned 65 (legal retirement age). Unfortunately, he passed away in March 2007 whilst in a coma. Throughout his life he was a true seeker of knowledge — as evidenced by his extensive book collection — and his coma once again brought to the fore for me the mystery of consciousness and whether intelligence resides exclusively as a control function of the brain or whether it permeates the whole body: intelligence as embodiment. I take faith from knowing with confidence my father was consciously aware of our presence and appreciated it, despite what the neurosurgeons’ professional opinions were. I collected mobile video evidence that proved wrong their medical position that he was “completely unresponsive” which subsequently resulted in an apology from the lead neurosurgeon in a coroner’s court, on record.

In addition to the direct experience of my father’s situation which made me re-evaluate what I know and is known about the brain, I’ve also had an interest in intelligence since a very young age; I wanted to understand why the adults said I was a “bright child, very conscious of what’s happening around her”. Being somewhat mischievous I wondered if this meant I was fluorescent and whether brightness excused me from having to eat an apple a day or to do my homework.

Contributing to this quest for pieces in the puzzle, at management school and throughout working life I’ve been exposed to most models of collective intelligence harnessing or “the networked effect of talent,” encompassing the entire spectrum from command and control to near-complete meritocratic autonomy. All such models are an attempt to find competitive edge solutions as well as means to catalyze innovation within (alas, often) bureaucratic confines, to increase collective productivity and reduce ignorance and inefficiencies.

It’s for this myriad of interconnected reasons I’m interested in the Global Brain: personal, parental and professional.

The realization of it would be revolutionary for Mankind and has serious implications.

THE GLOBAL BRAIN

THE GLOBAL BRAIN: A DEFINITION

There is no Oxford English dictionary definition for this conjunction of words. Within the microspheres of Silicon Valley and academia (notably neuroscience, experimental psychology and management sciences), it is generally accepted to be:

The “Global Brain” (GB) is a metaphor for this emerging, collectively intelligent network that is formed by the people of this planet together with the computers, knowledge bases, and communication links that connect them together. This network is an immensely complex, self-organizing system. It not only processes information, but increasingly can be seen to play the role of a brain: making decisions, solving problems, learning new connections, and discovering new ideas.

No individual, organization or computer is in control of this system: its knowledge and intelligence are distributed over all its components. They emerge from the collective interactions between all the human and machine subsystems. Such a system may be able to tackle current and emerging global problems that have eluded more traditional approaches.

Yet, at the same time it will create new technological and social challenges which are still difficult to imagine.

On the commercial side, trendwatching.com in 2007 referred to it as:

All of the world’s intelligence and experience, fully networked, incorporating not only the usual suspects like gurus, professors and scientists, but the experiences and skills of hundreds of millions of smart consumers as well. With the ’shortage of talent’ that every brand on every continent seems to fear in 2007, tapping into THE GLOBAL BRAIN seems a, well, no-brainer. This year, expect many corporations, small and big, to aggressively court the 1% of most creative and experienced individuals roaming the globe.

Amongst the more intellectually oriented, different people have proposed many different names for this concept of a cognitive system at the planetary level:

• hive-mind — Lion Kimbro, Wikipedia editor
• global mind — Howard Bloom
• mass mind  — Howard Bloom
• noosphere — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
• planetary brain — Joël de Rosnay
• social brain
• super-brain — Francis Heylighen
• World Brain — H.G. Wells

It has also been increasingly associated with and proxied to a global superorganism; equivalent terms proposed in this categorization have included:

• Cybion — Joël de Rosnay
• Metaman — Gregory Stock
• One Machine — Kevin Kelly
• super-being — Valentin Turchin
• social organism

THE GLOBAL BRAIN: A CONTEMPORARY CONTEXT

Contingent upon whichever scientist or science fiction author has been read and is considered a personal guru / hero / role model, the contemporary concept of the Global Brain is attributable to either H.G. Wells in 1938 or to Peter Russell in 1983. Numerologists may note how 38 and 83 are chiral (mirror) forms of each other. Other authors who will be highlighted in this section are Howard Bloom, Kevin Kelly and Mohanbir Sawhney whose professional origins stem from the record industry, technology journalism and management sciences, respectively.  

H.G. Wells (1866-1946) was a noted English author, futurist, essayist, historian, socialist, and teacher who wrote The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898). In 1938, at the age of 72, he published The World Brain in which he specifically proposed:

“We could build a real ‘World Encyclopedia’ with a true ‘planetary memory for all mankind’…

..”knitting all the intellectual workers of the world through a common interest.” 

As an associated point, as early as 1902 Wells had the germination of the Open Conspiracy in his writings and subsequently published the pamphlet in 1928. This Open Conspiracy would mobilize power and intelligence to create a new kind of social and political synthesis, a new world unity beyond the confines of the established political order, according to Wells.

His design for the Open Conspiracy was to create a new unity, a new organizational and social synthesis for the world; he regarded it as a necessity for “human society” to be rescued “from the net of tradition in which it is entangled and [reconstructed] upon planetary lines’(Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866). New York: Macmillan, p. 549).

Interestingly, the Open Source movement has gathered pace over the last five years with the advent of the creation of the Linux operating system, P2P file-sharing from the likes of Napster, Creative Commons licenses, the work done by the Electronic Frontiers Foundation and now Google’s OpenSocial tools, along with the OpenID principles. This strand too seems to have been influenced by the Wellsian vision of an open ‘World Encyclopedia / Brain’ available beyond nation states and the control of any particular party. Essentially, a free and open mind portal.

Half century on from Wells’The World Brain, the GB concept gained media exposure again with Peter Russell (1946 —), a British author and producer of award-winning films on consciousness, spirituality and business coaching, who was born in the year that Welles passed away. Russell studied mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge University before changing to experimental psychology, subsequently studied for a Ph.D. in the psychophysiology of meditation at Bristol University, gained a post-graduate degree in Computer Science and has worked with Tony Buzan to develop mind map tools. Buzan is the founder of the World Memory Championionships.

In his 1983 book, The Global Brain Awakens, Russell proposed a Global Brain that might emerge from a worldwide network of humans who were highly connected through communications. His arguments made the observation that throughout evolution qualitative transitions to a new level of organization have been observed to occur in several instances where a system attains approximately 10 billion (ten to the tenth power) units that are tightly but flexibly coupled. Examples include the number of atoms in a bio-molecule, the number of molecules in a cell, and the number of cells in the cortex of the human brain. Since the world population (1994: 5.7 billion at the time of Russell’s writing) was within an order of magnitude of ten to the tenth and growing, the threshold for a new level of organization, by his arguments, could be reached soon. Hence, Russell saw the network of interconnected humans forming a Global Brain.

Meanwhile, Howard Bloom the music industry veteran traces the origins of the Global Brain back to the original formation of the world in his seminal books, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From the Big Bang To the 21st Century, and The Lucifer Principle. In both books he explores the self-interest versus group interests paradigms and proposes a potential bridge that may enable the individual to contribute to the Global Brain on a team basis. He even mentions “global data sharing among bacteria” and explores the group mind principle on his Scientific Blogging site: 

In a lab dish, E. coli can do something neo-Darwinian theory says just cannot be. Neo-Darwinism is a late 20th century, mathematically buttressed evolutionary dogma that says all evolution comes from competition between individuals, and that cooperation is simply a byproduct of selfishness.

According to this view, all change in a genome-all change in a string of genes– is random. To survive, each genetic change has to give the selfish members of a species an edge. Yet when E. coli are given a food their metabolism can’t digest, salicin, they engineer their genome into a form that disables them. They take a big step backward. Why? So they can take their genome a step forward, re-jigger their metabolism, and turn the salicin from an obstacle in the path into a buffet.

According to neo-Darwinians, the giant step backward is impossible. How do E. coli pull it off? By using Group IQ.

A recent interview with Bloom by Jon Udell, one of Microsoft’s product evangelists, can be viewed below:

• http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3836.html

Now, no discussion about the Global Brain would be complete without also citing the work of Kevin Kelly, formerly founder and Editor of Wired magazine and a well-known blogger with his Technium series. Kelly’s argument centers on the One Machine concept:

I define the One Machine as the emerging super organism of computers. It is a megasupercomputer composed of billions of sub computers. The sub computers can compute individually on their own, and from most perspectives these units are distinct complete pieces of gear. But there is an emerging smartness in their collective that is smarter than any individual computer. We could say learning (or smartness) occurs at the level of the superorganism…

This megasupercomputer is the Cloud of all clouds, the largest possible inclusion of communicating chips. It is a vast machine of extraordinary dimensions. It is comprised of quadrillion chips, and consumes 5% of the planet’s electricity. It is not owned by any one corporation or nation (yet), nor is it really governed by humans at all. Several corporations run the larger sub clouds, and one of them, Google, dominates the user interface to the One Machine at the moment…

With that perspective a useful way to tackle the question of whether a planetary superorganism is emerging is to offer a gradient of four assertions.

There exists on this planet:

·       I    A manufactured superorganism

·       II   An autonomous superorganism

·       III  An autonomous smart superorganism

·       IV  An autonomous conscious superorganism

From the corporate perspective, another more recent book on the GB, The Global Brain: Your Roadmap for Innovating Faster and Smarter in a Networked World, is co-authored by Mohanbir Sawhney, who is the McCormick Tribune Professor of Technology, the Director of the Center for Research in Technology and Innovation and the Chairman of the Technology Industry Management Program at the Kellogg School of Management. Within this context, the GB concept refers to:

…a global network of scientists, independent inventors, academic researchers, customers, suppliers, as well as different types of innovation intermediaries who facilitate the innovation process (for example, idea scouts, innovation capitalist, etc.)…

The lead co-author, Satish Nambisan, who is Associate Professor of Innovation Management and Technology Strategy at the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, commented in an interview with Ideas Connection:

While The Global Brain is primarily focused on the for-profit world, I have received a lot of inquiries from non-profit organizations. Now much of my research is focused on social innovation and especially on collaborative social innovation. I think the opportunities for network-centric innovation is of a magnitude of one hundred times greater in social innovation than in for-profit innovation. Issues related to healthcare, environment, and energy —

 those are big issues which require cooperation among different sectors and different countries. Those are the places where we are going to see some radical network-centric innovation models emerging in the next decade or so.

As an adjunct it may also be informative to read Professor Eric von Hippel’s excellent and freely available book, Democratizing Innovation, which proposes a world in which each of our individual intelligence matters and can contribute to a more enlightened whole via active democratic participation. Professor von Hippel is Head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

So why is the Global Brain concept seeming to gather impetus (or at least a renaissance) across different sectors from anthropology to management science to bleeding edge Silicon Valley?

THE GLOBAL BRAIN: A RATIONALE

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, actually articulates the need for a Global Brain in the way he explains what, potentially, the Semantic Web can and should do:

At the moment, the Internet is a stack of document pages linked via html. Through the deployment of the Semantic Web stack and the standards being continuously developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), over time the data on these pages will become independently linked to each other into a form of social graph and semantic — or contextual — sense. This will build to a point where every data item is like a node in the neural architecture of the Web.

The ultimate purpose for a Global Brain would be to cross-pollinate ideas and frameworks, innovate and find solutions to the world’s major problems:

• democratic societies
• economic stability and sustainability
• universal free education
• cures for diseases and illness
• green compliance
• holistic human existence in symbiosis with the planet

During a W3C talk given in London on 3rd December 1997, entitled Realising the Full Potential of the Web, Berners-Lee predicted:

The Web will have a profound effect on the markets and the cultures around the world: intelligent agents will either stabilize or destabilize markets; the demise of distance will either homogenize or polarize cultures; the ability to access the Web will be either a great divider or a great equalizer; the path will either lead to jealousy and hatred or peace and understanding.

The technology we are creating may influence some of these choices, but mostly it will leave them to us. It may expose the questions in a starker form than before and force us to state clearly where we stand.

We are forming cells within a global brain and we are excited that we might start to think collectively. What becomes of us still hangs crucially on how we think individually.

Each semantic application techco in Silicon Valley is interpreting the potential of building the GB and harnessing knowledge differently — everything from Freebase’s attempts to create a semantic Wikipedia to True Knowledge’s and Powerset’s ambitions to deliver on a semantic search engine that understands the context of queries rather than the keyword statistical methodology supposedly deployed by Google.

[The fact is that Google uses a matrix of sophisticated technologies to deliver its search capabilities, but that’s the subject for another dedicated Knol post.]

To date, none of the semantic technologies I’m aware of are working exclusively towards resolving the world’s major problems. This is interesting because it shows that silo self-interest (competitively commercial) rather than global altruism may already be at play.

THE GLOBAL BRAIN: CURRENT LIMITATIONS

There are five key areas where improvements are necessary before the Global Brain can be achieved:

(1.)   technological tools which enable sense making. The qualification, quantification and tracking of arguments over time, memory recall specific to an event, the DNA of decision-making and a series of interconnected parties — and not simply taxonomies to correlate one keyword to another in a social semantic graph — are still to be developed and provided;

(2.)   resolution between the neo-Darwinism “individual selection” and the “group selection” framework. This is necessary to explain and justify why and how culturally diverse people would proactively contribute to the Global Brain — either of their own free will, peer pressure, survival of brain trust teams, via altruism or some interest which mixes individual and group interest considerations.

(3.)   The consciousness complex. Increasingly intelligent agents are being built — such as the first synthetic avatar, Edd, in Second Life or those that win the Loebner Prize 2008 because they appear to pass the Turing Test, as in the case of Elbot. Elbot is the brainchild of Kevin Warwick, Professor of Cybernetics at Reading University, and was developed by his team.

* Elbot article in Computer Weekly

(4.)   Inclusion and accounting for cultural contributions and differences. Gender, religion, age and other demographic criteria all affect our inherent being, how we think, navigate social situations and interact with others. If the Global Brain is being built by a particular demographic (male, middle class, middle-aged, Caucasian, tech geek, monoglot) then it is already pre-oriented and biased towards a non-global structure and has inadvertently codified exclusion in its model(s).

(5.)   Perceptual and humor frameworks. These affect interpretations of meaning and context. I’ve blogged about this previously and am currently developing a Media Perception Matrix in Javascript with some semantics which may provide further insights.

* GSOH + The Global Brain

It may be worthwhile to state here that the Global Brain limitations arise from several sources.

Firstly, studies on the brain are ongoing and as yet incomplete so any attempts to construct a global network of data neurons that function and free associate like the brain are bound to have missing pieces and synaptic connections; we can’t wholesale copy or do a “brain upload” of what we don’t fully know yet. Secondly, since the GB is a metaphor rather than a definition there remains a tremendous amount of ambiguity about its potential, purpose, direction, velocity and ultimate truth. Thirdly, healthy debates continue over some of the tests which may be applied to various constituents of the Global Brain (including how to define and measure intelligence — is it via IQ tests which are known to be culturally biased; how equivalent to human intelligence is the artificial intelligence being incorporated into networked algorithms; and home to effectively manage and co-ordinate productive participation, assuming the “collective humanity versus self interest” dichotomies are resolvable.

Let’s turn briefly to the element of Artificial Intelligence which supplements human intelligence in the GB construct and how machines are defined as “intelligent”or otherwise.

The Turing test was first explicated in Alan Turing’s 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Instead of posing the question, “Can machines think?” Turing devised an equivalent of the ‘Imitation Game’ for machines. In this scenario, a panel of judges assesses from printed text responses whether the responder is a human or a machine. If the machine fools a third of the panel then it is considered to have passed the Turing test. In the original ‘Imitation Game’ it was a party piece much like ‘Charades’ in which a single judge has to guess whether the responder is a man or a woman according to typed our replies they provide to a series of gender-neutral questions such as, “What is the color of your hair?”

Turing’s 1950 paper is being interpreted in different ways by Artificial Intelligence experts and designers. Its limitations have been duly noted and expanded upon with the creations of Eliza, a computer program designed by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966, which parodied a Rogerian therapist, and PARRY, developed by the psychiatrist Kenneth Colby, in 1972. The transcript of the interaction between Eliza (The Doctor) and Parry (The Patient) in 1973, linked over ARPANET makes for interesting reading:

* Eliza + Parry play at psychiatry

Regardless of its flaws, the Turing test remains the benchmark for assessing a machine’s ability to at least imitate the human process of thinking and proxy being intelligent. 

However, we have not yet reached the stage where a machine is conscious in the way humans are and the Turing test avoids opening up this avenue for discussion — and so shall we, for now.

THE GLOBAL BRAIN: A NEED TO TIME TRAVEL AND BE CROSS-CULTURAL

Moreover, it may be the case that the GB concept pre-dates every currently accepted literature since the majority of this literature focuses on Western paradigms and predominantly English-language sources. HG Wells, Teilhard de Chardin and now Kelly have become integrated into the Western meme for GB in the same way McDonalds has for hamburgers. Yet McDonalds did not invent the hamburger and nor did they originate the rearing of livestock to produce them.

Critically, there are resources in French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and the other major languages which have not yet been plumbed for their gold nuggets on the Global Brain and the possibility that, conceptually, it has existed since homosapiens first wandered this Earth and that, technologically, the frameworks that offer solutions may already be emerging from those sources. 

As a preliminary example, there is research from
NCKU VP Feng : Global Brain Movement: An Asia- Pacific Perspective

There is also analysis by Nathalie Villa, Assistant Professor of Computing, Université de Perpignan in France, who examined land records from 1260 to 1340 to establish what is, in her analysis, to be the world’s oldest social network and some attempt at a “group mind”:

* http://arxivblog.com/?p=413

 The concept of “group minds” can also be traced back to food webs in ancient society:

* http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0060102&ct=1

Additionally, the human propensity to merge thinking, develop “group minds”, physically collaborate with a unified mindset or to try to move towards one universal set of rules (global consciousness) for any particular society is a priori evidenced in:

(i.) physical structures like the Mayan temples;

(ii.) the founding of every major religion;

(iii.) the formation of laws — Plato’s republic, Corn laws in the UK, the American Constitution and more;

(iv.) the cessation of the Warring States in China and the creation of what Song Qi Huang, the First Emperor of China, as “one country under one sky” (and inherent in the characters the concept of “one mind, one dream”); and

(v.) the creation of both the Elizabethan and Victorian Empires via exploration and unification.

Therefore, we can note continuous historical attempts towards convergence, “one over everything and anything” principles and practices (one Head of State ruling over multiple territories) and a certain amount of challenges along the way (persecution, heresy, the Reformation). In the same manner there is an emergence of thought and will to create ONE UNIFIED GLOBAL BRAIN.

THE GLOBAL BRAIN: OPTIMAL AND FREE OR BOUNDED BY DEFICIENCIES?

According to Howard Bloom, during an interview in 1997 to discuss The Lucifer Principle, he refers to the analysis of Gerald Edelman and notes:

50% of the brain cells are killed off through apoptosis in the first year of life. Those which don’t match the challenges in the baby’s environment are the ones to go. It is the principle of “to him who hath it shall be given, from he who hath not even what he hath shall be taken away” at work.

Later in adulthood, studies have shown that at any time point a proportion of our brain is *dormant* (“under-exercised”may be preferable) whilst the other is machining away — depending on the task at hand. For example, if we’re reading Candide by Voltaire in French we access our left hemisphere and if we’re making a mathematical estimate we access our right lobes.

Academic research postulates we are using only 10% of our brain processing power and others contradict this postulation:

* http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=people-only-use-10-percent-of-brain.

In simple mathematical terms, if we are building these networks and machines based on applying (100 — N) % of our thinking abilities and only 10% of people actively engage on the networks / machines we’ve built…………………..

By the time we form the Global Brain will it be really optimal or will it actually be factorially less efficient than the brains of the most intelligent people in the world?

TO READ THE FULL POSTING WHICH WILL INCLUDE COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE AND THE SINGULARITY, PLEASE VISIT GOOGLE KNOL, as of 26 NOVEMBER 2008:

* The Global Brain on Google Knol

Thank you and I hope you enjoy reading about my journey of discovering more about the Global Brain!

This weekend I’ve put together a few more pages on the ALWAYS THE TWAIN (@T) site:

·      Credit Crunch 2008

·      3D movie wall

3D movie wall on Always the Twain (@T)

·      Script flip sample

·      CNN rss feed in with scroll

·      Babelgum IPTV

What the pages hint at are the types of dynamic interactivity that will be developed for the site over time (as well as the blog/comment/ IM publishing aspects).

Of these the most important feature is the RSS. I’d like to get to the situation where there’s a grid of RSS feeds and under each one we have the ability to comment / real-time chat as well as upload interesting videos.

Obviously………Google’s likely to beat everyone to providing this…………..but my little site is also my play pen for testing out bleeding edge toys like 3D DNA stranding with Papervision3D (coming soon — wait until you see this……it’s COOL with capital K) as well as interesting metaverse applications.

More immediately I’m now going to focus on writing the  Global Brain post for Google Knol.

If anyone’s wondering why I’m releasing it on 26 November 2008, it’s because my father would have turned 65 (retirement age) on that day. Sadly, he passed away last March but I believe he’s in a good place, so I feel like I should write about the Global Brain since he was very interested in knowledge.

Our parents do influence us, positively and negatively………..

This is how my cool Flash pre-loader and homepage now look. I hope you’ll agree the site’s taking shape reasonably:

Compass pre-loader to Always the Twain (@T)

Always the Twain (@T): homepage

The pre-loader is essentially a 100-frame swf with a customized compass complete with a color wheel and flared camera lens that I created with Adobe Photoshop. I used the circular cut out tool……….A LOT — lol.

Designing websites isn’t easy. However, it can be extremely helpful for exercising your own creativity and I’d definitely recommend it. For absolute beginners there’s a wealth of packages out there including:

·      Apple iLife

·      Frontpage

·      Dreamweaver

Plus there’s a plethora of free online literature on everything from html to CSS (to control layout and design/style) to how to set up an SQL database.

I used to hand-code the html until I discovered that with Adobe Flash you can save the file as html too and this auto-generates all the html you need. Nevertheless, it is helpful to know html yourself because you can go back in and edit where appropriate; knowing where tags and divs begin / end and how they affect the layout is useful.

It gets more complicated when you start including Javascript or C++ to make calls and functions to the server and databases — particularly when you have an online form, forum, blog or any information gathering text box (that you may want to publish or simply store in archives).

We won’t cover that………………..yet. It is possible to teach yourself Java and other OOPs (object-oriented programs) in 14 days.

For now, I’d like talk a wee bit about Flash CS3 and Papervision3D.

MY DESIGN TOOLS OF CHOICE

I’m autodidactic in Flash and have learnt it organically via direct application rather than theoretically; this has its advantages and disadvantages (more on this in another post). There are several good sources of information so I tend to go in search of code Enlightenment here:

·      The Flash Enabled Blog

·      Actionscript.org

·      Sepiroth

·      Kirupa.com

·      Papervision3D

My favorite Flash anything at the moment is obviously Papervision3D — which is what the brilliant Spanish team, Bestiario, leveraged to build the TEDtalks videosphere:

* AMAZING VISUALIZATION COMBINING PV3D WITH YOUTUBE VIDEOS

Already, I can develop a few 3D swfs:

·      3D film wall (link soon)

·      3D JACKSphere (link soon)

·      3D carousel (link soon)

What would be “too cool for school” would be if I learnt how to cross something like sourcebinder with MSNBC’s Spectra  product with some form of Quantum4D.

THEN that resultant application would be something close to….AMAZIN+.

The products in action can be seen in these YouTube videos:

The limitation with Flash used to be that Google didn’t have much capability to search for Flash content. However, hopefully, with its recent strategic alliance with Adobe this will change.

* Google collaboration with Adobe to make Flash content more searchable

OPTIMIZATION

Whenever I create an swf, the thing I always forget to do which I DEFINITELY SHOULD DO FROM THE OUTSET(!!!) is to optimize the images and to choose the right format (jpeg / gif / png / png-8 / png-24) so that the file size doesn’t become unmanageable.

Needless to say…………..I forgot and then had to go back into the FLAs and optimize the images with Photoshop. Some of them went from 120KB to 12KB — proving that optimization makes a world of difference!

THE BEGINNING OF AN ADVENTURE

I have a definite strategic vision of what I’d like to see the Always the Twain site become over time: a collaboration hub with cool tools.

There’s a much more immediate to-do: my MPM (Media Perception Matrix) tool which I’m coding in Javascript — with plans to pitch it to Google (seriously), so this site will build up over time rather than overnight.

Thanks for following its progress! Lots more still to do and to enjoy………………

:*)

This blog tells how a person quest led me to thinking about President-elect Obama’s prospective international agenda and how it can fit into Debategraph, a wiki debate visualization tool provided under Creative Commons.

(1.)         GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS, 16 September 2008:

(2.) INTERNATIONAL ISSUES, Iraq War opposition (2002 to election campaign):

(3.) CLIMATE CHANGE, 18 November 2008:

The domestic issues I’ll omit here but they are readily available at the Barack Obama site.

A JOURNEY BEGINS

Earlier this month I went in online search of a dear man called Giorgio Bertini, with whom I’d been swapping notes about the current financial crisis as well as much mirth. Giorgio, for the uninitiated, is the Chile-based Administrador for  “Conversaciones Locales” - Comunidad Agentes Locales de Desarrollo, and has previously worked for the UN. He’s very interested in fostering net communities to educate and to collaborate as well as to solve serious major world issues, and has a terrific joie de vivre (in addition to personal kindness).

Finding Giorgio led me to the Global Sense-Making (GSM) Ning and opened my online life up even more.

From this week until President-elect Obama’s inauguration on 20th January 2009, David Price, the creator of the GSM Ning and the co-founder of debategraph, is collaborating with the Independent newspaper online to produce some visual tools to stimulate participation in and interaction with.

The project’s objective is to model what should be on Obama’s agenda and can provisionally be viewed here:

* Obama’s potential agenda, the Independent online

My notes to David to contribute my US$0.02 to the process can be read via the link as well as in full below:

* Twain’s notes on David Price’s debategraph on Obama’s potential agenda

1^ST ITERATION OF THE DEBATEGRAPH

David,

This is a fantastic way to present visual data for the Independent readers online!

To my mind there are 5 main agenda items which President-elect Obama needs to focus on and I wonder whether the map can designate prioritization (e.g., each subsidiary electron is numbered)? The items are:

(1.) Cabinet Appointments:

 — Secretary of State (Bill Richardson cf. Hillary Clinton — which represents real change? International diplomatic experience vs international recognition. Dove versus hawk. Who has endorsed each potential candidate and what are the implications? Henry Kissinger has publicly come out in favor of Clinton)

— Treasury Secretary (potential candidates being speculated upon range from Larry Summers, formerly Principal of Harvard and Treasury Secretary during the Clinton Administration, to Paul Volcker, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve)

— Secretary of Defense (speculation is between present incumbent Bob Gates or Gen. Wesley Clarke)

(2.) Global financial crisis

— US$700 billion bailout (structure + implementation timetable)

— US specific regulatory reforms

— executive compensation oversight

— plans to acquire (or otherwise) toxic assets

— support for non-financial sector businesses affected

— support for homeowners

— international frameworks for financial stability

(3.) International policy, principally focused on:

— Iraq + Afghanistan issues

— Middle East Peace Roadmap

— Russian hegemony

— China + trade relations

— EU ties compared with “special relationship” with the UK

(4.) Domestic policy:

— Healthcare

— Education

— Green economy that can be exported as a business model in replacement of Wall St model

(5.) US reputation abroad:

— Guantanamo Bay

— Flights of rendition

— ‘Walk the Talk” and lead the way in a GREEN future

In addition to referring to direct source material from Obama’s campaign and the Independent’s digital assets, it may be worthwhile to cross-refer to these sites:

* Huffington Post — Politics

* RGE Monitor — Roubini

Professor Roubini of Stern University is widely credited in the US for predicting the current financial travails.

* Democrats Abroad

* Democratic Strategist

* The Brookings Institute

I hope this helps. Good luck!

RESPONDING TO GIORGIO BERTINI + MARK SZPAKOWSKI’s COMMENTS

Following on from what Giorgio and Mark wrote, I’d like to pick up on three points:

(1.) Green employment policy

(2.) Complexity of interconnectedness

(3.) Future modeling and tech tools

On the first point, previously I shared with Mark a report from the PERI Institute which covers in some detail how, potentially, 2 million new jobs in the green sector could be created within 2 years with a change in economic and labor policy:

* PERI — creating 2 million green jobs

My contention has always been that the green movement needs to move upstream from campaigning about recycling marketing materials and packaging to these areas:

* significant job creation in the sector, particularly in the MANUFACTURE of green technologies;

* consumer influence at the product design stage as a form of green quality control; and

* more appropriate inventory systems to meet GENUINE demand with supply and thereby reduce the surplus (that wastes electricity to produce, resources to refrigerate and / or house, etc.)

On the second point, I agree with Giorgio and Mark that the global system is much more complexly connected than current technology tools will actually allow us to model. The closest I’ve seen of any technology which offers us more insight into what can potentially be done is Quantum4D:

* Gallery of RDF and 4D nodal perspectives

* Banking sector stability

* The MetaBase

Nonetheless, even with Quantum4D there are limitations and I’ll cover this in my final point.

As an associated sub-strand to (2.), Mark’s insight on the STYLE of leadership (responsive, listening, and empathetic) is an important and — to my mind — a critical one. No one of a rational and democratic intelligence likes or wants a dictator, bully, megalomaniac or tyrant as a Head of State. We reject these types in our daily lives and they command almost negligible trust or respect as leaders of men.

In corporate life, this is also true. The narcissists and the egomaniacs (aka the hubris oriented) have proven to be the cause of long-term value destruction rather than value nurturing. By comparison, leaders who can combine strong technical skills (i.e., work their ways around a balance sheet and understand the appropriate drivers and levers to exercise in order to foster sustainable growth and profit generation) with nuanced EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE are often successful in both innovating and implementing 360-2020 win-win sustainable solutions.

I make the distinction between value nurturing as opposed to value creation because it would be relatively easy for President-elect Obama to seemingly create value but if it’s not nurtured, it won’t develop or become self-sustaining and strategic — merely tactical point-scoring.

On the final point, what technology should we be looking to build? Well, personally, I believe Alan Kay has absolutely led the way in this with the Squeak and Tweak languages (current iterations of smalltalk-80). In his writings, Alan often refers to how this OOP is an attempt to more closely proxy in computer language how the biochemical world works.

Why and how is it relevant to politics and policy-making?

Well, both are complex organic systems which are not bound by linear cause and effect impetus alone. In an ideal scenario, the technology tools would allow us to map a policy in the same way that we can map the pharmacology of a drug at a particular point and its subsequent effects throughout the body.

In the same way, we would then be able to track all the moving parts of a policy and how it permeates domestically and internationally — as well as how it interacts with other countries’ policies and changes form and shape as a result.

When we can model policy like biochemical reactions is when we’ll be able to capture the full complexity of international connectedness.

2^ND ITERATION OF THE DEBATEGRAPH

The Climate Change and Response to Financial Crisis spheres are shaping up really well.

If I may, a few minor edits and adds?

* Typo — there are two L’s in HiLLary Clinton. 

* The 4th person in the cornerstone being considered for Sec. of State is Chuck Hagel.

* Another person being considered for Treasury Secretary is Robert Rubin.

* Under Response tFC:

(i.) Identify and ring-fence off problem financial institutions.

(ii.) Compile and communicate information on companies not affected by the toxic assets — this is a more immediate measure that can help restore confidence. At the moment, people are selling “blind” otherwise solid stock due to lack of information from authorities.

(iii.) Implement timely bans on short-selling.

(iv.) It’s capital injection in exchange for stock rather than stock injection plan. Stock injection has a result of diluting earnings per share (EPS) which would cause further loss of confidence in the company.

(v.) Wrt Resolution Trust Corp, I think “apply the more effective measures learnt from the RTC” is better than wholesale re-creation of it. As far as I can recall from articles it wasn’t profitable and if US govt. is going to use US$700 billion of taxpayers’ money it needs to have a respectable ROI.

(vi.) Increase transparency of hedge funds and bring them under closer SEC/FSA etc regulation

(vii.) Re-work Basel II and international GAAP (accounting frameworks)

* Under Policy Measures on Climate Change:

(i.) Severe fines and other punishments for companies which violate green principles — ordinarily, I wouldn’t advocate the stick, but in the case of Climate Change and the urgency of the challenge it may be necessary.

(ii.) Develop an independent kitemark standard to award green companies — just like the Blue flag in the UK indicates which beach is clean, so there should be a universal Green Kite.

TECHNOLOGY + the INTERNET

This should also be added as a key sphere of President-elect Obama’s agenda. He is the first President to be elected by the deployment of Internet campaigning (his eponymous website, YouTube, Facebook and MySpace).

Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, has been discussing the role the Internet played in this election:

* Eric Schmidt on the Internet + Presidential Election 2008

There’s also material in the blogosphere and business technology sites on what an Obama presidency may mean for the sector.

I’m looking forward to the next iteration of the graph!

ADDING MORE DIMENSIONS TO THE DEBATE

hi David,

This debategraph’s becoming quite brilliant! Thanks for incorporating my suggestions.

A few more quick ones.

(1.) Triggers to the global financial crisis include:

* American banks sought better revenue streams with high-yielding, risky and complex securities (since yields on long-term US bonds had been depressed by heavy international demand).

* relaxed US monetary policies until 2004 (Fed rate, July 2003 — July 2004: 1%). As a comparison between Jan — July 2007 it was at 5.25%.

* crisis of confidence dislocated the money markets where ordinary investors are involved; they withdrew their savings (as in the case of Northern Rock and in the States forced the US govt to intervene with financial support to mutual funds).

Prior to this triggered contagion the confidence issue was purely institutional, so banks were reluctant to lend to each other. When it affected the money markets was when the crisis became acute.

(2.) In the Political Implications of the global financial crisis, one of the key debates is about the demise of exported American capitalism of the Wall Street variety:

* Death toll for American capitalism — Newsweek

(3.) In International Economy as well as facilitating the devaluation of the Yen, the Americans need to consider their policies re. the Chinese renminbi. There was a great article in capital.fr (in French about this; I’ll try to re-find it).

Meanwhile this YouTube video is informative:

* Chinese renmibi revaluation 

(4.) Under technology there are are two strands related to green issues:

(i.) tech co’s advancing energy efficiency through shared data centers — please see Green Grid roster of companies here:

* The Green Grid roster 

(ii.) Google itself has a made substantial investments and strategic moves into renewable technologies:

* Google’s Green Commitment 

* Google crunches the green numbers 

* Google and GE go green together 

(5.) Under International Policy, with the appointment of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State there’s some more material on what some of the topics may be:

* How will Hillary Clinton work with President-elect Obama as Secretary of State? 

WHY I’M INCLUDING MY NOTES ON “ALWAYS THE TWAIN”

I plan to use my blog as some type of time capsule for my shared thinking online……….

HOW THE DEBATEGRAPH’S PROGRESSING

It’s now available as an embed:

<iframe src=’http://debategraph.org/flash/fv.aspx?r=7714&d=2&i=1′ frameborder=’0′ width=’490′ height=’650′ scrolling=’no’></iframe>

ABOUT DEBATEGRAPH

Debategraph is a wiki visualization debate tool provided under Creative Commons. It was co-founded by David Price,  a Cambridge University graduate has worked in diverse roles with a wide range of organisations including: the BBC, the European Commission, the UK Prime Minister’

s Office, H. M. Treasury, and Virgin TV; and Peter Baldwin, a former Australian cabinet minister who has leveraged his programming experiences to develop the debategraph software.

Some of the debate topics covered so far include:

·      Can computers think?

·      Whose identity is it anyway?

·      Flash versus Ajax

·      Sport and Genetic Enhancement

·      To be or not to be? (a light-hearted take on Shakespeare)

What they’re attempting to do is interesting and I wish them success with it.

Yesterday something happened on the Global Sense-Making site that made me think again about senses of humor and whether we share or don’t share it with others and how this affects our insights, innovation, progress and plain old enjoyment of the Web. Then I thought wider about the social implications for the Global Brain.

Firstly, my own sense of humor encompasses this type of material (in no particular order):

(i.) Bringing Up Baby — directed by Howard Hawks and starring Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn

(ii.) Life of Brian — ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ by the Monty Python crew

* http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=jHPOzQzk9Qo

(iii.) Subprime crisis — John Bird & John Fortune on the Bremner, Bird & Fortune show, Channel 4

(iv) City Lights — Charlie Chaplin

* http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=zskO9O3hF78

(v.) Duck Soup — the Marx Brothers

(vi.) The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

·      http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml

(vii.) Cyrano de Bergerac — the Nose scene, starring Gerard Depardieu

(viii.) Pick a Star — the Harmonica Scene, Laurel + Hardy

·      http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=2FS8DBqiQWQ

(ix.) Mr Vampire — Chinese comedy horror movie starring Sammo Ho

·      http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=GStgl36V6ck

(x.) Chinese spoofs of Western pop songs — Smooth Criminal by Michael Jackson

There’s lots more; above are just some examples.

LULU LOLS A LOT!

I have a particular fondness for naturally smart comedy (especially mistaken identity / fish out of water / idiot savant) rather than the gross out or Punk’d type, and it can be in any language or from any culture. The LOLs and funny bones are exercised regardless of those.

One of my good friends calls me “crazy little Chinese chica” because when she calls I tend to take something straightforward she told me previously, mash it up with something I’ve observed about life’s tragic-ironies and then make her laugh with what is off-the-wall tangential yet connected humor that she gets and likes.

WHITHER THE WIT?

However, I appreciate that humor doesn’t necessarily translate — particularly if the other person:

(a.)          has a humor by-pass.

(b.)         doesn’t like you, full-stop.

(c.)         doesn’t share the same linguistic or experiential reference points.

(d.)         is not privy to your group’s history of “in-jokes”.

(e.)         is simply a t-r-o-l-l. [Shhh! Don’t say the word aloud or they show up --- LOL.]

LOST IN TRANSLATION

I remember once being in a cinema watching Infernal Affairs — which was subsequently remade into The Departed by Martin Scorcese, btw — and there is a really witty romantic scene in the psychiatrist’s office which was the culmination of the flirtation between the two leads and………..NO ONE laughed in the cinema except me.

Yup, I released my LOLs regardless into the darkness.

Why? Well, my mother tongue’s Cantonese, which is what the film was made in. I read the subtitles they provided for Westerners and there was definitely “lost in translation” at work, so by the time the comedy climax came…………..only I, the native speaker, picked up on the laughter cues all along the way. It’s subtle. It’s nuanced. It’s there.

We’re CONSCIOUS of it.

HUMOR AS A GLOBAL BRAIN SYNAPSE

So what does this have to do with the Global Brain?

Well, it seems no one’s really given humor much thought yet much less application. Technologists are still focusing on the issue of spirituality and conscious self-awareness of AI. In fact with a simple search on Google with the terms “global brain humor” there hardly elicits many entries! I counted less than a dozen relevant ones.

Following is a rare link which does includes some glimpses and I’m blogging about it because it’s also a great read on David Bohm’s theories of quantum mechanics — which is what the SemWeb and the Singularity brigade and the science fiction futurologists are all trying to simulate.

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t51235.html

The article says:

“You have many special mental faculties: humor, spirituality, eroticism, music, mathematics, aesthetics, nurturing, gossip and narration.”

My impression of the SemWeb and Global Brain movement to date is that they’re still adopting and refining the mathematical approach to semantic social graphs. They may say and spin they no longer use the statistical approach, to try and delineate their rankings algorithm from that of Google’s, but I’ll bet you a can of Coke the algorithm is still driven by mathematical concepts rather than humor, nurturing or narration.

To my mind, these are the key constituents of sense-making rather than the mathematical ones.

We do calculate the risks and probabilities involved when we make decisions but invariably if the narration, the nurturing (or positioning) and the humor is good this over-rides whatever mathematics we generate in our mind because we reason that, “Who knows? So the likelihood of failure is 60%. So I’m paying a premium of 10% over cost. So I can’t really afford it……..but I’m going to enjoy and have fun with it while it lasts!”

It’s the ego and the will acting in conjunction to opt for personal happiness, even momentary, in place of rational responsibility. Sometimes, it can save us from ourselves and the rigidity of society.

By no means am I saying that the mathematical element should be completely abstracted from the building of the Global Brain. I’m simply stating that the other N-dimensions also have to be taken into account. At the moment, thinking about the Global Brain is somewhat linear, uni-dimensional and disconnected from how our brains really work: the AI and neural nets branch of mathematics is being deployed to proxy consciousness, there’s taxonomies and semantics but no smart wit.

Humor is a major synapse that’s currently missing in the formulations of how to build the Global Brain. Humor actually plays its role in our ability to reflect upon the information we’re intaking from external sources and also internally how we perceive and deal with the folly of our own absurdities and idiosyncrasies as well as those of others.

This is another aspect which highlights how important perception is. What one party regards as “genius wit” is seen by another as “juvenile silliness”.

We should factor this into the Global Brain postulations, imo.

HUMOR AS A METAPHYSICAL CONSTITUENT

Dr Branko Bokun, a graduate of the Sorbonne’s sociology department, argues in his book, Humour Therapy, (published by Vita Books) that the brain is also a gland, and that its glandular activity can be manipulated by thoughts or ideas created by the brain’s mental activity.

He believes that humour therapy helps us to realise that both unhappiness and gloom are infectious.

‘That is why the pursuit of personal happiness only acquires a realistic meaning if it becomes the pursuit of other people’s happiness.’

Bokun proposes humor courses, to help restore our inborn disposition towards playfulness, joy of living, curiosity, exploration and flexibility. His suggestions include:

(i)            Develop a sense of self-ridicule, for instance by talking to oneself in the mirror;



(ii)          See amusing and happy films and plays, and read humorous books and magazines;




(iii)         Dedicate a corner of one’s home to toys, as the mere sight and feel of them lessen tension. Hang pictures of children and animals on the walls rather than staid or gloomy ancestors;




(iv)         Find a hobby, but change it the moment it is taken over-seriously. Preferably choose a hobby that cannot go against nature’s harmonies, such as sailing or gardening;



(v)          Have a pet and talk to it;




(vi)         See life through a haze of analogies to memorised jokes and anecdotes;



(vii)       Repeat three times every morning ‘I am not the centre of the universe’;

 and

(viii)      Remember the eleventh commandment ‘thou shalt not take thyself too seriously.’

These seem to be reasonable suggestions — although, if you get caught talking to yourself in the mirror…………someone may wrongly assume you’re being narcissistic rather than exercising your humor! LOL.

I like point (vi), though. Life is richer and funnier if you can quote analogies from a wide variety of sources spanning Shakespeare to ‘The Simpsons’ to Jackie Chan — yes, seriously; he’s a naturally hoots guy in Chinese and in English!

CONCLUSION: LOL LEADS TO ENLIGHTENMENT

I close this blog post with a quotation:

If we couldn’t laugh, we would all go insane. — Jimmy Buffett

Jon Stewart + Stephen Colbert (The Daily Show) in Rolling Stone

So….the Global Brain has the opportunity to LOL and make sense or……..go mad / cuckoo, short-circuit because it has no GSOH (or release values) and have a nervous breakdown.

LOOOOOOOOOL!

This is what I’ve been busy with today:

A preview of the homepage portal coming soon..........

The bubbles you can see is an Actionscript coded in Flash CS3 (AS3) which simulates Brownian motion. Against a black background the particles move in a balletic motion, collide with each other, momentarily conjoin before they spring apart and progress to interact with other globules. With this white setting they appear as free bubbles which glide across the page.

With respect to the avatars, these were created in Photoshop using the circular rainbow tool followed by the circle cutting tool. With the exception of the tiger, the skull and the Sony UX1 all the other photos were taken by me during my travels — well, I figured I should try to make use of my own assets! Ha ha. 

Tomorrow, I’m going to pool together a few Flash and Papervision3D samples I coded previously to use them to populate the pages indicated (brain, technology, books, business, art, food and travel). They’ll include:

* a custom built video gallery of the Pearl Awards 2007 where the guest of honor was HRH Prince of Wales (the organizer personally invited me; he’s now created a Chinese-European lifestyle site in conjunction with BSkyB and Shanghai Tang, a designer label)

* 3D film wall of Top 100 posters leading to the IMDB database

* Jacksphere of Jack D. Logan’s twines

* 3D flipbook of a film script

* fun puzzles, including a jigsaw based on the video library of Babelgum, an IPTV platform

At some point, I would also like to code a Flex time line like Google Finance’s:

* http://finance.google.com/finance?q=apple

Plus I’ll show you a Google Maps I’ve done of film locations. I wish there was a more straightforward way to send batch geo-codes and populate the map API more readily rather than one-at-a-time as it currently is. This is something I have raised previously with the Marketing Director of Google Maps when she was visiting from Switzerland. We’ll have to wait and see what happens there…….

Meanwhile I’ll be building up my little online time-space in between knitting Christmas pressies for my friends, writing the Google Knol entry on The Global Brain and planning where I’m going to spend New Year’s Eve (PARTY TIME!!!).

Following is an sanitized version of an exchange I had with a friend of mine about taxonomies in relation to Semantic representations. 

First, a Google Tech Talk on ‘Visual Perception with Deep Learning’ — 10 April 2008 :

————————————————————————————

I do appreciate the value of taxonomies. It’s the way most scientific classifications are arrived upon. For example, we have a periodic table structure which provides:

(i.) high-level overview of each of the seven groups of chemicals;

(ii) information about how many outer electrons are in each shell according to their membership of a particular group (this proxies parent-child identities); and

(iii.) how they could possibly connect and interact with another chemical from another group. 

I also came across this interesting article on the ‘10 Myths of Taxonomies’ which essentially highlights the risks involved in having to adopt someone else’s sets of taxonomies — particularly one in which we have no democratic voice or implementation:

* 10 Myths of Taxonomies — the Montague Review

IS THERE HOPE FOR HUMANS?

There seems to be this postulation amongst the Singularity brigade that

increased AI smartness ===> increased collective intelligence

The counter-argument would be…..

increased AI smartness ===> decreased collective human intelligence

(because they’ll have to think less)

AAAAARGH! QUICK! STOP THE GLOBAL BRAIN EXPRESS!

Personally, I don’t believe the proliferation of information pre-processed by AI necessarily makes each one of us SMARTER. It actually means the knowledge of how that AI was structured to pre-process the information is in the brains of a few select bleeding edge techies and everyone else is simply sheep-like or “dogs eat the dog food” like following whatever results are generated! (Incidentally, this is an anachronistic phrase from Microsoft circa 1988 still apparently being bandied around Silicon Valley — supposedly the cradle of avant garde progress, and let’s bear in mind we’re in 2008 and are supposed to be advancing humans not denigrating their intelligence or identities by ill-thought out associations).

It is possible we humans will erode our own capacity to perceive, to reason, to innovate and to communicate because some of us are too readily abdicating our responsibilities to do so to the machines!

However, we don’t have anything to really worry about because I’m going to share a simple truth…….

THE SINGULARITY IS A PIPE DREAM

The Singularity is unlikely to happen in the way the futurologists insist or according to their timescale of 2040. They all read far too much science fiction and need to more closely proxy terra firma.

Moreover, as evinced by my exclusion from a certain SemWeb some form of ideological eugenics and police state is going to apply to the Global Brain. Not everyone will be invited or have access to plug into it. As much as technologists bleat and spin on like autobots about open source and open house, Terms of Service and contracts (as well as undemocratic feudal warlord oppression of the serfs) will still apply as it has since land laws of C12th England.

TechCo SAYS it’s open this and open that, Google and wannabe minnows alike. However, notice how each tech platform imposes its (sometimes Draconian and contradictory) rules and evicts those whose opinions are different (or threatens to as per the unimaginative and inflexible mindset of the Administrator — please also see Kafka’s writings or Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’).

This is why the Global Brain is never going to be truly global, open or democratic. The controllers/owners can be dictators and the constituents are the conformists, not necessarily by choice or personal conviction but by consideration towards others which is not reflected in a similar equivalence of respect towards them.

Interestingly, it’s well-documented that it could be the unconventionals who “think out of the box” and may be touched by genius or madness, and create the quantum-level breakthroughs in thinking — please see Einstein, Dali, Dosteovsky, other artistic intellectuals and bipolarly brilliant but insane people (more often than not the world’s greatest comedians).

INTELLIGENCE: THE KIDS IN THE CLASSROOM + ONLINE

Let me make this observation. In a class of 30 kids who are 5 years-old they all have exactly the same access to the same stimulus, reading materials, toys, etc. Yet there will always be 1 kid who is knock out quicker and brighter than their peers.

In the same way, every teenager has the same access to the index of information on the Internet. Yet only 1% of those teenagers will actively go in search of the wealth of knowledge with the specific intent of increasing their own know how. 

Technologists and educators imagine that if kids get more tools this will make them smarter.

Not necessarily. It depends on their pre-existing mental orientation, character traits and emotional sense of reward about knowledge. Some of them assign 0 value to knowledge and +1 to Grand Theft Auto rankings. 

FUN+GAMES

Certain proponents of the Global Brain theories and the Singularity are probably breathing huge sighs of relief I’m nowhere near them to present obvious and prescient counter perspectives. They can postulate we’ll all have boosted collective IQs (by the osmosis of proximity to smarter AI) without my notes of pragmatic perspective. Oh and we haven’t factored in the ego element of consciousness and self-awareness yet either! 

Ack! Taxonomies is one thing. If the perception of the person doing the classification is not spot on or nuanced in the first place the mandolin ends up being related to a string instrument because it looks like violin (plus dyslexia or plain ignorance could be involved). 

It’s not the taxonomic tags that show Paris is either a city, a personality or a romantic aspiration which ultimately matters, imo. It’s actually what emotions it evokes and elicits in a person: nostalgia, disregard or longing which help each of us discern meaning from the world and intakes around us.

PERCEPTIONS MORE THAN TAXONOMIES

I’m leaving others to think out the taxonomies issue. The perception dimension has interested me more since childhood. In terms of semantics, graphing the connections that a grape is a fruit that we eat and make wine out of and grows on a vine is less interesting and challenging to me than trying to figure out WHY people like to eat grapes, to drink wine and designate all kinds of adjectives to it — sweet, succulent, tannin aftertaste, globulous, shriveled, meaty, aromatic, green, over-ripe etc. — which reveal their personalities, life aspirations and purchase decisions. 

It’s the perception dimension I’m coding a tool to capture…………………….