South by Southwest Interactive gets underway today in Austin, Texas, and a broad swath of the technology community will be headed there to check out the bands, barbecue, and, oh yeah, the startups. Ever since Twitter had its breakout moment at the 2007 festival, SXSW has been considered a king-maker of sorts. Yet no startup has [...]
Judging bytrending topics on Twitter, I was not alone in reserving an iPad today as pre-orders began for the April 3 launch. The experience was un-Apple-like in the bugs I encountered. Ordering did not work at all on the Apple site in Google’s Chrome browser, but was possible with the odd error page in Internet Explorer. In Chrome, it [...]
As the FTC lays the groundwork for a possible challenge to Google’s purchase of AdMob, it is instructive to look at something else Google has already done to gain a strong foothold in the mobile ad business. Any advertiser that bids through the AdWords system gives Google complete authority over which devices its messages are seen [...]
In another validation of the suddenly hot collective buying trend, LivingSocial has landed $25m in Series B funding from a group of investors including US Venture Partners and Steve Case’s Revolution, LLC. But even with new money backing several similar companies, it is still unclear if the latest thing in e-commerce will last for long. LivingSocial [...]
Sony has every right to feel sore that Nintendo and Microsoft have stolen the limelight from it in adding motion-sensing to games. Sony had the EyeToy camera for sensing motion and putting players inside games on the PlayStation 2, long before Microsoft’s forthcoming Project Natal . Its six-axis controller has always had more motion capabilities than the [...]
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.
I woke up this morning with the thought, “I have to explain to non-Brit readers that “GUNK” is an ironic funny ha-ha acronym.”
In mereology, it’s the philosophical term for any whole whose parts all have further proper parts. In hair care, it’s a British colloquialism and denigration fired at teenagers when they put too much product on their hair which makes it look greasy, sticky or OTT. The product is referred to as “gunk”. It’s also a wordplay compound on “junk” and “goo”.
So now that I’ve used it as an acronym to cover Great Universal Neural Kinesis, we have to LOL — particularly since some of us believe humans have too much junk in our heads (from tennis scores to family memories to recipes), our brains are nothing but goo-ey matter, and yet that so-called “junk” and “goo” can be kinetically converted into the “gunk” of the mereological variety.
In other words, silo pieces of data can be and is naturally connected and cross-pollinated in our brains. Our own responsibility is to drive its frequency and velocity (direction and speed) so that we’re utilizing more than 10 percent of our brainpower and become more Enlightened.
Another thought I had as I awoke was, “No machine wakes up and is conscious of what they need to do to satisfy the curiosity and knowledge of another party when that other party may not even have provided input that they don’t know how ironic the word “gunk” is.”
This then led me to a stream of thoughts on whether Semantic technologies and their AI have progressed as much as we suppose and how much closer they are to consciousness than machines like Deep Blue which beat Kasparov in chess in 1997.
Now, over a decade ago, I worked with a leading authority on Neural Networks in an asset allocation company whose clients included the largest investment fund in the world. We developed 5 different smart AI systems to generate analysis that would enable us to apply human judgment and sense-making to decide where to put the money. The system was programmed to run overnight and first thing in the morning it generated results and printed tables of numbers out for us to discuss.
No machine I’m aware of activates itself in the morning and has either random, spontaneous or consideration towards others’ thoughts. Machines switch on and they churn through, according to a pre-set program and routine created by their developers. They don’t wake up and get any attacks of consciousness. This is how I know I’m human and not a cyborg or intelligent agent machine, even if it is a running joke with some of my friends. LOL.
Ten plus years on from those 5 AI machines I read about and experience the structures being implemented in the nascent Semantic Web, and I realize there are clues that some human contributors are not as consciously aware of how to connect or shape the nodes in semantic filtering or ontological classifications as we need. Yes, I mean something as simple as the LOD diagram:
It was a spore which did not follow Great Universal Neural Kinesis (GUNK) principles:
Of course, I mean gunk of the mereology definition and I genuinely do not mean to offend anyone involved in Linking Open Data. My objective is to highlight that with some GUNK we can help the velocity of the Global Brain. This is not and should not be an ego mission for anyone.
It’s about finding solutions to our universal problems: economic stability, educational provision, climate change, etc.
Part of human consciousness and the reason I reflect-refract within myself and my experiences as much as receiving reflection- refraction from others, is the consideration component. As I wrote late last night, at present machines connect and compute. They don’t consider. Consideration carries with it emotions towards others in our thinking as well as some form of catalysis between what we know and what we imagine.
In my case, the consideration that it wouldn’t be fair to non-Brit readers if there wasn’t some directed guidance on the word “gunk”. Additionally, for example, catalyzing what I know from the fields of organic chemistry with computing and imagining how debategraph would improve the LOD diagram.
So there it is…………..my GUNK first thing in the morning. LOL!
Ok now I have to go to this tech event and listen and learn some more about “The Cloud”. I hope it shapes up to be cumulus rather than cirrus or clogged up with fuzzy logic…………….ha ha.
Here’s an example of how serendipity and strange kinesis happens in Twain’s world. Tomorrow I’m going to a women’s tech event and these are some of the sessions I signed up for:
·Google’s MapReduce (distributed computing on large data sets on clusters of computers);
·How HP are dealing with Cloud Computing and the Law; and
·Financing your start-up
This was completely separate and several weeks prior to three events which happened today that I had no influence or control over:
(1.) Fish-head (aka Rick who’s a brilliant 3DMax-conversant marketer) sent me a link to Forbes.com’s special Artificial Intelligence report:
For those interested, here’s last year’s IEE Spectrum special on The Singularity, which is related as you’ll see later:
(2.)Wall Street & Technology, a site I used to track religiously — when I was a banker responsible for an investment portfolio that included consortia trading platforms, posted an article on IBM’s Websphere’s Cloud Computing and Low Latency Messaging Capabilities:
(3.)Terrestrial television showed a documentary, Another Perfect World, which explored several metaverses from Second Life to Eve to Lineage (US, Iceland and Korea-based, respectively). Now, for those who aren’t aware Second Life operates on a P2P framework and there are cluster servers involved here too. There are also all sorts of issues involved with bandwidth, i.e. world creations take up a lot of server space which makes the system slower than it should be and……..occasionally crash.
If we join the dots between items (3.) and (2.) we start to see that IBM’s architectural breakthrough will have a knock-on effect on the likes of Second Life and reducing bandwidth load.
It’s then related to item (1.) because a key motivation of Artificial Intelligence developments is to enable machines to simulate similar processes to the way human brain works. Those processes and their content are transmitted via nodes and connectors. The pursuit of AI (or “thinking machines”) is tied in with the creation of the Global Brain where each one of us can call up to the “Thinking Cloud” and get answers.
See what I mean by strange kinesis in my world? This is “Twaining”.
THE TURING TEST: TWAIN’S TAKE
Can machines think? This was the question posed by Alan Turing in 1950 and what the Turing test provides parameters for us to find out. Previously in my Global Brain knol, I’ve written about my encounters with Elbot, which came close (25%) but………..no cigar to passing the Turing test (30% threshold). Here’s a reminder of how my very first question flummoxed Elbot.
At point of site activation, Elbot asked me, “What mood are you in?” I typed in “indifferent”.
Elbot then asked, “What put you in this indifferent mood?”
I typed in “You.”
Elbot replied: “Fatal Error 42: Omission of Superfluous Input.”
Yes, this was funny but my question was also posed with a purpose.
A real-life person upon reading the text of me writing “You” would probably have become either self-conscious, defensive or displayed some form of ego, super-ego and identity. These complexes are as much a part of human consciousness as the sensations we experience during waking life, our dreams in our sleep and the mysteries within us which are as yet inexplicable like pre-cognition and genius.
A probable human response to my feigned indifference would have been another question like, “We just met and hardly know each other. What have I done to make you indifferent towards me?” or “*&^#%! Who do you think you are?! How dare you be indifferent to me! Do you know how lucky you are to be part of this Elbot experiment and how clever the maker is?!”
Instead, Elbot couldn’t compute and crashed.
For me, Elbot — although an improvement on previous attempts — is not conscious. It wasn’t aware of the context of my question. It wasn’t able to decipher it aurally for clues. It wasn’t able to see whether I was smiling or grimacing. It wasn’t able to pick up and smell any pheromones which would indicate my interest instead of my indifference. It wasn’t able to shake my hand and determine whether it was a firm grip (interested) or loose grip (indifferent), and so on.
When we consider the Turing test, it’s vital we remember that the stipulation is the machine and the human provide and are provided with TEXT-BASED content. There are no oral, aural or other sensory clues which are what helps make humans conscious and aware of ourselves relative to others and our environment(s).
In the Forbes’ article, Professor Kevin Warwick suggests that questions of a topical or local nature can help us better distinguish between whether the answer is from another human or a machine. For example, questions about the weather or what color the wall is painted. Then we can assess whether the machine’s answer is plausible and would be offered by a human.
This is all very well, but here’s my issue with the Turing test. It sets out to answer the question, “Can machines think?”
The more perspicuous answer we should seek is:
“CAN MACHINES MAKE SENSE?”
To date in IT development (including the Semantic Web), the definition of thinking machines or smart systems is predicated on their abilities to do the following:
·link (as in hyper-text)
·connect (as in social nets)
·compute / calculate (as in Deep Blue and Wolfram Alpha)
·choose (as in what to display at a specific time-geolocation)
·sort, filter and prioritize (as in eBay lists of items)
·rank (as in YouTube videos)
·re-direct (as in cookies in browsers)
·visually represent (as in Flickr on Google Maps)
·synch (as in iPhone with iTunes store and Apple Macbooks)
·stream (as in videos and IM channels)
Now, some of us would argue that all of those attributes are the same as thinking so if a machine can do those things then it must be as — or even more than — intelligent as a human.
Evidently, this isn’t the case yet; no machine has even passed the Turing test much less tests where a robot can make sense the way we do with touch, taste, sight, hearing and smelling abilities to complement our neural, moral, memory, humor and relativism ones. We’re several years from The Terminator and Skynet (aka “The Cloud”).
Personally, I don’t want machines to be able to simply think. I want them to be able to MAKE SENSE. If we look at ourselves as a species, 99 percent of us can think (some form of brain activity / electrical impulses) with less than 1 percent of us incapable of thought because of coma or brain damage. However, not all 99 percent of us are making sense. If we were there would be none of the following:
·wars, crimes and non-natural deaths;
·climate change dangers;
·global economic crisis; or
·any other man-made catastrophe which stops, sets back or sabotages human development, achievement and advancement.
Hmmmn, and it’s now really late and I have a looooooooooooong day ahead of me.
Twain brain starting to switch off for sleep now. I’ll return to this “GUNK” another day soon.
LOL. G’night.
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TURING: A CHILD TWAIN HERO
Alan Turing is undoubtedly a genius whilst I am being a Devil’s Advocate at worst and marginally bright at best. I have a lifelong admiration for Turing, actually. I first learnt about him and the Enigma machine when the Royal Society of Mathematics invited me along to their master classes for “gifted” children. One of our first exercises was to create our own code machine.
I’m no longer a “gifted” child. My (older, male) colleague at the bank who had a Harvard degree and Cambridge PhD in robotics wrote in my review that I was “prodigious”. One important thing I’ve learnt is that it’s not in the words others use about us that we discover who we are. It’s in the doing, the discovering and the democracy of collectively making sense that we realize it.
As my life path twists, turns, straightens and forks, this week’s inspirational people provide wonderful insights about the tapestry of Life, how to survive events which may be out of our hands and to emerge our own person.
(1.) Henry Allingham
On 19 June 2009, World War I veteran Henry Allingham became the world’s oldest man at the age of 113. He’s one of only two surviving British WWI veterans and is the last remaining founder member of the RAF (Royal Air Force). In interviews, although his eyesight is gone, he’s still as bright and lucid as someone a lot younger so we can hope that he’ll celebrate many more birthdays!
Now, if we examine his date of birth through Chinese eyes, 6 June 1896, we may see clues to this longevity. The number 6 is a homophone for the words “green”, “flourishing” and “fortunate”. There are three 6’s in his DOB which means that “as he grows, he will stay green and lucky”.If we add the numbers up in his year of birth 1 + 8 + 9 + 6 until we’re left with a single digit, we find that it too is the number……6. The number 9 here in the 96 is also significant because it, literally, can be interpreted as “always green” as in always young.
When I read in the papers that he attributes still being alive to: “cigarettes, whiskey and wild, wild women,” I LOL’ed. This is because it reminded me of my maternal grandfather who passed away last year, aged almost 90. My grandfather started smoking as a teenager, liked his Scotch and (before he met my grandmother) was never short of female attention — LOL. Like Henry Allingham he survived some major conflicts, including the Japanese invasion of China.
Henry Allingham and people of his generation are not only remarkable for being survivors, they’re inspirational for their sense of community and their courage. They’re also important reminders to us that war is futile — exactly as Siegfrid Sassoon wrote in Aftermath:
I hope Henry Allingham stays healthy and alive for many years to come so that he can tell us as he did before in a BBC report: “War’s stupid. Nobody wins. You might as well talk first, you have to talk last anyway.”
(2.)Fathers
Yesterday was Father’s Day and the media was filled with famous and ordinary people’s tributes to their fathers and what the responsibilities mean:
Now, I know that some people object to “special days” because they see it as simply another way for consumers to be exploited — paying extra for cards, gifts, flowers, etc. There is also the argument that we should be nice to our Dads 365, 24/7 and not only one day of the year.
I have to admit that I didn’t pay much attention to Father’s Day before since this is a Western construct and Chinese families have different ways to thank our Dads: usually being respectful 365, 24/7 and not undermining his authority. That and making sure the first bowl of rice served for dinner is handed to him — LOL.
Still, I do notice Father’s Day now because my father passed away two years ago and recently I was thinking that our grandchildren (my brothers and mine) will never be able to really know what a great Dad he wasor his mistakes in child-rearing. We would not be the people we are today without him and I don’t mean the genetics element alone. I mean the experiences, good and bad, which shaped us.
Of my parents, my father was the fun young-at-heart one whilst my mother has always been the serious, responsible, steadying anchor. He was the one who would — on a whim — decide we didn’t need to do homework and should be marching up some hill somewhere to find rabbit holes and wild daisies. There was also always ice cream, chocolates and gigantic bowls of noodles which my mother disapproved of because of health issues. He used to just laugh and win her around; that was his gift — charm and an easy-going nature.
One day my brother and I, being mischievous and inventive kids, decided to take apart a pair of his favorite shoes and use the leather tongue in our homemade catapult. He didn’t bat an eyelid or get angry. Instead, he decided that since we’d made the catapult anyway we should get some practice!
As an adult my father and I didn’t always see eye-to-eye, but this was okay and is normal: we don’t agree with everyone 100 percent of the time. It just matters that we’re there when we need each other’s support the most. I was the child who kept my Dad company the most when he was hospitalized, the one who held the family together and made funeral arrangements, and the one who fought for a proper admission and apology by the hospital that they’d made mistakes in his case. This mattered because it was about honoring my father.
If I had to list 3 things I’m most grateful for my Dad teaching me, they’d be:
·chess when I was about 5;
·how to do maths without a calculator; and
·to explore the world.
So in the off-chance his spirit can read this blog I’d like to say, “谢 谢，你。“
And to fathers the world-over, “Do yourself proud by being a good father. Your family will benefit from your consideration.”
Twain to-do
This week is devoted to tech and is going to be a bit of what the Brits call “mad” — not as in, literally, crazy but busy. I’m going to an all-day women in technology event which is being sponsored by the likes of Google, Microsoft, the BBC, HP, Bloomberg and Sky. Also this week I need to go and play with the Seagull framework to compare it with Ruby-on-Rails and PHP cakes.
Meanwhile, an update on Project ART: the business plan is now approved.
The three points I’m most glad have been accepted are:
(1.)Contributors will earn a share in the advertising revenues generated.
(2.)Allocation of 10% of net profits to charitable causes.
(3.)To leverage the most innovative technology solutions to achieve this vision.
What I’ve learnt over the years in business is that IT’S VITAL VISION AND VALUES ARE ALIGNED FROM THE START. This applies in dotcoms as much as in banks and chemical conglomerates: if decision-makers share similar principles about their purpose and objectives, how they want to treat and respect collaborators and where their brand values reside, then the chances of coherent and successful implementation will be higher than if those principles aren’t shared.
It simply makes for a more enjoyable and fruitful shared journey.
As for whether I know what I’m talking about and can do it, please read this from Web 1.0 days:
Anyone interested is free to “Google” the women I’m mentioned alongside. They’re pretty amazing Redwoods and then there is the wee sapling, me.
I tend to believe that no one knows it all or what the future holds. As long as we try our best, learn from mistakes, hear others out, take on board constructive feedback and remember we’re here to serve and be stewards, what we do has a funny way of working out.
