@T: ALWAYS THE TWAIN

Although this is a somewhat philosophical, epistemological post 360-2020 is DEFINITELY AIMED AT COMMERCIAL MARKET rather than as an exercise in theory. In the big bank I was designated a “revenue generator” which is something that happens to less than 1% of employees. We’re the ones who have direct impact on balance sheets, P+L and cashflows; in my case because of the Strategic Investments portfolio. Other people who get designated “revenue generator” are the rainmakers and dealflow corporate financiers who are often mentioned in the media. I am definitely someone who believes in and delivers on for-profit models, albeit I also believe there’s a way to do reciprocity of reward towards the user community and wider society than current for-profit capitalistic models allow.

Now I think it’s helpful for commercially-oriented entrepreneurs and innovators to have a depth and width of context and intelligence about why they’re doing what they are, how their experiences inform their approach and route to market, and also it simply means that they’re not building their ventures in myopic isolation but with an awareness of multiple dynamics. This is why I’m sharing in this post.

David Price, the brilliant co-founder of debategraph (which is a wiki for open collaboration and does decision beading on a superior quality basis), recently flagged me about Gregory Bateson (the Cambridge-educated cyberneticist and semiotician’s) definition of information as: “a difference which makes a difference“. Thanks to David I’m now newly introduced to Bateson’s attempts to oppose scientists who tried to ‘reduce’ everything to mere matter. His life’s work was dedicated to re-introducing ‘Mind’ back into the scientific equations as postulated in his seminal books Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Mind & Nature. He also wrote Number is Different from Quantity.

Completely separately from any prior exposure to Bateson I’ve found all sorts of issues involved with the way we classify, reduce and treat information in the social sciences, in the natural sciences and importantly……in the machines which govern our online lives. This has arisen from:

* an increasing awareness that a wide range of online tools are non-optimal at best and primitive at worse (5 star ratings being a case in point);

* reading Professor Vedral of Oxford University definition of information as “Once you have a probability that something might happen, then you can define information. And it’s the same information in physics, in thermodynamics, in economics,” (more on this later); and

* my personal realization about how human subjectivity (desires, motivations, perceptions, tastes, morals, emotions, wit, etc.) have been removed from the great economic equations of Smith, Nash, Black-Scholes, Mundell-Fleming and more.

What happens is that in the text assumptions, there are some qualifier references such as how “humans are rational, there is access to equal and perfect information and the market is stochastic / asymmetric.” However, in the functional equations themselves the humanistic moral-emotional dimensions of our nature are simply not captured or explicated. This is because to-date natural and social scientists alike have not been able to quantify what are qualitative elements (human subjectivity and irrationality, over time). So our machines — which are run on deterministic and probabilistic models — can only provide at most a 50% insight into who we are, what motivates and drives us, what we like to buy, how we imagine and aspire our lives, our relationships and our societies to work and be, etc.

This is part of what I define as the “Probability Paradox of Non-Quantifiable Value.” Gregory Bateson wrote:

Numbers are the product of counting. Quantities are the product of measurement. This means that numbers can conceivably be accurate because there is a discontinuity between each integer and the next. Between two and three there is a jump. In the case of quantity there is no such jump, and because jump is missing in the world of quantity it is impossible for any quantity to be exact. You can have exactly three tomatoes. You can never have exactly three gallons of water. Always quantity is approximate.

I’d go further and say that frequency, which underpins most search algorithms, is a product of counting the number of times a link or data object is referenced across the Web and that quantity as a product of measurement is insufficient. After all, is it possible on social networks to size up or measure our respect / affection / tolerance / humor / taste preferences etc. for either another person we’re connected to or for the content that streams in real-time in our interest feeds?

No, it is not. This is because there are vital elements missing from the information that’s being processed by the machines in the first place.

TWAIN’S DEFINITION OF INFORMATION

Information is a consciousness of quantity and quality that enables differentiation and contextualization over time.

WE ARE ON A QUANTUM ADVENTURE WITH 360-2020

This post provides some insights on my life journey towards 360-2020, the way my knowhow and skills have been shaped by my Chinese heritage and Western experiences and why I decided to tackle the 5-fold challenges of:

(1.) replacing the 5-star rating system which is known to skew and be loaded at the extremes of 1 and 5;

(2.) coding a missing sequence of the Semantic Web stack;

(3.) inventing some recommendation algorithms that are neither exclusively deterministic nor probabilistic dependent;

(4.) dealing with the issue of asymmetric and imperfect information which is making our economic models less optimal and efficient than they should be (and which are the source of the global financial crisis); and

(5.) shoot for Mars and try to be a quantum bridge between Babbage’s difference engine and passing Turing’s test for machine intelligence.

Isn’t this overly ambitious? No, not if pragmatism and experiential insights means that you can identify that the main underlying issues are persistent and overlap, and that we need to target the crux of the problem rather than the peripherals and that we need a whole new set of solution tools. It’s like this: if someone didn’t invent the scales, we would never be able to measure weight with the ruler and mass (m) in Newton’s laws of motions and Einstein’s E=mC(squared) would not exist. We would also be unable to dimensionalize objects and discover something called density as in BMI.

So the existing online tools for measurement and quantification could be likened to being rulers but not scales or spectroscopes or NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance). People are prospecting for digital gold armed with tools which are not the equivalent of heat & motion sensors or material detectors.

Okay, so we’re going to approach digital prospecting differently……….360-2020 is designed as a one-stop, super-smart differentiation solution (quant and qualitative) to solve some important issues that reflect the current limitations of the Web and indeed the way we treat information in machines and economic models. There will be machine learning and the application of code (Actionscript, AJAX, JSON, SVGML, PHP, PERL, Seagull, Ruby-on-Rails, smalltalk, natural language, semantics, games and more) like it has never been configured before.

It’s never been more obvious to me that we seriously need to re-think what information is going into our algorithms and how that information is being processed than when I read the interview with Professor Vedral, a quantum physicist from Oxford University, who believes: “When you strip out all the unnecessary baggage, at the core is the concept of probability………Once you have a probability that something might happen, then you can define information. And it’s the same information in physics, in thermodynamics, in economics.”

His interview can be read here:

* http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/mar/07/vlatko-vedral-interview-aleks-krotoski

It made me think that what’s happening in our bank risk management systems, recommendation systems, search algorithms etc. is that we’ve reduced all information to series of binary 0s and 1s so that they conform with probability calculations and that none of our humanistic emotional-moral-conscious and qualifying information are being adequately or explicitly captured. This is why the existing algorithms are inherently flawed; they’re not allowing for any subjectivity or human ambiguity, only pure logic to process 0s and 1s.

Gregory Bateson — if he had lived in the WWW era (alas he passed away in 1980) — would probably take objection to this continued reduction of everything into mere matter and the ignoring of the “mind” (to which I’d add chemical emotion) in the algorithmic and scientific constructs that form the basis of computational mathematics.

Not to mention the fact that, as I noted elsewhere, thermodynamics and physics are phenomenon of NATURAL LAW and OBJECTIVE scientific reductionism is supposed to be applied to arrive at the ultimate proofs of concept whilst economics is a MAN-MADE MARKET. That’s why economics is called a SOCIAL SCIENCE because there is a subjectivity involved in all market transactions; that subjectivity arising from emotion, ego and evocation by advertising.

Comparing the information in those three disciplines, on a par, as if information is equivalent and commutative (or in simple terms, all of them are apples rather than some are apples and others are animals) breaches some core principles of scientific analysis and mathematical discipline. Opinion then becomes fact without empirical rigor, soundness or coherency. Ergo, for an Oxford don like Professor Vedral to say, “And it’s the same information in physics, in thermodynamics, in economics,” and not make that delineation between NATURAL SCIENCE and SOCIAL SCIENCE and thereby inadvertently abjugate the contributions of human emotions and ego to a man-made creation that is economics is another reason someone like me (a regular person, not a Professor) needs to highlight it on the Web and try to build 360-2020 precisely so that those missing humanistic elements ARE captured A PRIORI to machine processing and in a format that is understandable to the machines.

Our human brains and language skills can contextualize but certainly the machines (the natural language, the AI, the semantic bots) can’t, and yet paradoxically these are the very tools indexing, browsing, crawling etc. our information online, categorizing it all and serving it back to us as “This is the prioritized list of links you should click.”

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That’s the astounding situation !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So already the flawed machines and their ignorant, unconscious, sub-optimal and incomplete codes are controlling us via the quality of information flowing towards us from search algorithms and recommendation systems — we, the conscious organic moral species are not receiving the quality of information that will enable us to become more intelligent or more capable of making sense because…………the machines can’t make sense!!!

Interestingly, when I was in Madrid last year a Spanish-Russian astrophysicist with over 40 years experience said I was a “breathe of fresh air” to even have the audacity to imagine and approach 360-2020 in the way I am — given the dogmatic orthodoxy that now affects quantum physics and scientific methodologies generally . He was also a great sanity-check when he pointed out that we  have difficulty defining ‘time” without using the words “duration”, “period” or “elapse” and yet there are a whole raft of function calculations of the form F(t) and the use of time either in some integral or differential as an a prior assumption. In fact, he observed we haven’t even written the definitive proof for time and yet we use it in all our mathematical assumptions and decision outcome calculations!

This takes us to another paradox as it relates to decision engines……..If like with time, we can’t define or differentiate information beyond either a priori deterministic assumption that it exists, absolute -1 / 0/+1 quantities, probability of proximity or topic clustering and we can’t define how to capture the QUALITATIVE elements or which qualifiers to capture, then how can we determine that our decisions are properly differentiated, contextualized, coherent and make sense?

HOPE IS ON THE HORIZON: 360-2020

At the weekend one of my best friends, 兔, called me from New York. She’s a VP at a bank and works with technology every day. She’s essentially responsible for the smooth functioning of the electronic servers that process financial trades, troubleshoots system bugs and architects operational solutions. Anyway, I updated her on where I am with 360-2020 — she’s one of the rare people who’s actually played with the UI and the ratings tools — and she says that it’s “granular and captures the underlying motivations of why someone is looking for something online and what their tastes are”.

Another American friend recently wrote, “You always choose your words with optical precision,” which is wonderfully supportive, even though he wasn’t speaking specifically about 360-2020. It made me smile, pause a while and realize how appropriate it is that I trademarked my solution set 360-2020®. This is because we should not only assess a situation with 360-degree perspective we should also try to see it with 20/20 clarity of vision, informed by our ever-evolving subjective tastes and perceptions.

Moreover, there’s no point being able to see 360 degrees if we can’t identify or define what it is we’re looking for and at in the first place! For example, if “Aga” is not in our lexicon then we’re going to have no idea it’s a type of cooker (and the machine learning algorithms are going to struggle to id it too). My mother would definitely struggle to identify one – LOL. Conversely, she can tell you what a “电饭锅” is and you’d have no idea if you didn’t know any Chinese or didn’t cook rice with it; it’s a rice cooker. Furthermore, the Aga operates with gas whilst the rice cooker is electronic, has more confined heat distribution and the Aga requires more space in your kitchen. With my Chinese hat on, I can also say that purely from the pictographic form “电饭锅” we know it’s electronic, it’s concerned with cooked rice rather than raw rice which is 米 and that this is a pot-machine made of metal. Meanwhile, the word “Aga” tells us almost nothing directly. Yes, there may be implicit associative connotations for those who own an Aga like “English country kitchen, Elizabeth David, homemade bread, etc” but in the word itself there are no axiomatic clues. By comparison, in Chinese characters, we get all sorts of explicit information in the radical compositions like what material something is made of, whether it’s associated with fire / water / wood / earth / air / speech / people / motion / one of the senses etc, its function and sometimes even its color.

Now………these are actually DIFFERENTIATION OBJECTS in our brains rather than decision points or binomial difference or even structured semantic data objects. There is no -1 or +1 between the Aga and the rice cooker and the summation of them algebraically doesn’t result in -1 / 0 / +1. There is also no semantic classification of them purely on a noun basis. Actually, there is a differentiation between their functions, power sources, material composition, heat distribution, space capacity, appeal and the foodstuffs being cooked which……….

SHOULD NOT AND CANNOT BE SIMULATED ON A SOCIAL GRAPH PLOTTING THE LINEAR REGRESSION RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE AGA AND THE RICE COOKER.

It’s somewhat silly to do this since it doesn’t matter and is of negligible qualitative value what probability it is that the Aga and the rice cooker is similar. We’re actually seeking to define their parameters of differentiation not the probability of their similarity. See what I mean? Ask the right questions and we get closer to finding the right answers.

Now extend that from the Aga and the rice cooker to John and Jane, social networks of interesting content and recommendation systems…….We soon realize where the flaws and limitations in existing algorithms are…………Yes and I include existing machine learning that directs questions of a “who, what, when, where, why” nature. They’re a move in the right direction but still not differentiating enough.

I know this because these are examples of how how I did differentiation metrics back in 2004 (and indeed before then):

Plus I worked in a hedge fund where we had over 5 models (neural nets, adaptive lag, linear regression, natural language etc.) so I have some sense of what information is inputted into various algorithms and how in today’s landscape of sentiment, decision and semantic engines (Google, Bing, Twitrratr, Facebook, Hunch, Nielsen Buzzmetrics et al)……..

EXISTING METRICS ARE NOT DIFFERENTIATING, THEY ARE DIFFERENCING.

DIFFERENTIATION: HOW CRITICAL IT IS FOR CHINESE BAMBINI

My mother says I could speak my first word when I was 6 months old. Readers need to be aware that it’s critically important for the Chinese baby to differentiate between multiple tones that can be applied to the vowels and these tones sound like notes of the musical scale. It’s not the same as when an English-speaking child pronounces “cut” instead of “cat” or “cot”, btw. Neither is it the same as when a French-speaking child can’t distinguish between the a in “chat” (cat) and “château” (castle).

In Chinese, the word “ma” (mother , 妈) completely changes both its meaning and the pictogram depending on the tone that’s applied to the “a” (acute, grave, bas, etc.). For those with an international keyboard, change the setting to ITABC and type out “ma” and we get these 17 options:

• 吗， 妈， 马， 嘛， 麻， 骂， 抹， 码， 玛， 蚂， 蚂， 摩， 唛， 杩, 嬷， 犸， 蟆

Only one of them is mother (妈). Amongst the other “ma” are a rhetorical inflexion at the end of a sentence to convert it into a question; a horse; dense (as in material); to grasp a handful (of something like sand); a character compound which makes up the word “careless, messy and lacking attention” and other meanings. So if the Chinese baby can’t differentiate — not merely tell the difference — then they can’t decide whether to call their mothers correctly with the right tone on the a or call their mothers “horses (马)”.

ERGO =⇒ WE NEED TO BE ABLE TO DIFFERENTIATE………BEFORE WE CAN DECIDE.

Now the fact is that currently a lot of so-called decision engines are not able to properly differentiate. Sure, they can count the difference between the frequency of a link or data object being embedded in the html and the probability of their proximity. Even with the semantic web stack, these so-called decision engines or recommendation systems can only — at the most — contextually classify the data object as either a person, a GPS co-ordinate, a company or a topic and cluster them. Unlike with Chinese, they wouldn’t be able to differentiate that that data object person designation is female.

Remember that character for mother, 妈? Well… ….The left radical is the character for “female, woman”, the right radical is the character for “horse” — yes, English punning and wordplay could derive the term “brood mare” from this Chinese construction for “mother”. It may be  interesting to note that the word for safety and peace is 安 which has the female character, 女,  under the radical for roof, 宀. So under our mothers’ protection we are safe and have sanctuary; that’s how poetic and rich with meaning the Chinese language is. Not for the Chinese any connotations of woman as the source of original sin à la that femme fatale, Eve.  The Chinese’s axiomatic references to women (or female) are all positive and involve harmony, prosperity and goodness. In fact the character for “good” is 好 which has the female, 女, radical on the left and the radical for 子 on the right. 子 means “son / daughter / child; person; ancient title for a learned or virtuous person; seed; egg; the first of the 12 Earthly branches).

Importantly, it becomes clear that Chinese babies who grow up to be polyglot technologists deal with semantics on whole other scales and dimensions.

Amalgamate this necessary early linguistic differentiation of my Chinese heritage with these experiences:

• My father taught me about AND/OR/NOT (-1, 0, 1) gates in electronics and how to play chess by the time I was 5; years later, I was the first person to beat the chess game built in Cobalt, originally architected by the likes of Alan Kay;

• My mother taught me card games more complex than Poker before I could even count, read or write English (it was my third language, btw).

• At school, I was Captain of sports so super-developed my spatial reasoning and sense of how different players fit into a cohesive game strategy;

• As a teen, I was invited to maths master classes for *gifted children* where we learnt about Turing’s Enigma machine, the engineering of the great domes and N-dimensional topography (*I don’t consider myself “gifted” or “prodigious” as other people have labelled me on occasion. I am simply consistently curious about how things work and willing to learn more, including from my own mistakes);

• I can navigate 5+ languages;

• I gained work experience at SmithKline Beecham when I was 16 and a year later was working in flavors development at what is now IFF where I returned during school breaks. Aged 19 I was responsible for developing new drinks which are now in superstores everywhere;

• Elected to Student Council and Academic Board at university.

• Published articles on complex financial instruments aged 22.

• M+A dotcom aged 24.

• Promoted into CEO-Chairman’s Office of Tier 1 bank to specialize in strategic investments (technology) and corporate strategy in my mid-20s, within a year of joining the bank with no prior banking experience. Board observer on over 20 tech companies globally.

These experiences and knowhow mean that I leverage, contextualize and differentiate complex, stochastic and multi-disciplinary information differently from most norms. If a person knows where the synchs are and how to adapt tools from one discipline to unlock the answers for another discipline, it becomes possible to hybridize solutions or to at least catalyze their discovery.

Hence the sparking of 360-2020.

Do I believe it’s possible to train a machine to differentiate the way a human can naturally? YES. It’s unlikely to be an exact replication of our brains but we should bear in mind that there are variations from one brain to another’s ability to differentiate in the first place. Would someone who wasn’t Chinese be able to differentiate between the various “ma”? Would I be able to differentiate between the Russian character for mother from horse? See so we need to accept that variation exists and machine simulation will never exactly match the way our brains operate naturally.

Still, there are codes and frameworks that we can invent and apply to make the machines smarter and more capable of capturing and processing qualitative and not only quantitative input — to, essentially, contextualize beyond the binary 0s and 1s and data objects.

To construct………DIFFERENTIATION OBJECTS THAT CARRY QUANTITATIVE-QUALITATIVE-TIME ELEMENTS EXPLICITLY.

Now this requires collective imagination, cross-pollination, pragmatism, tenacity and audacity; evolving the existing economic-mathematical-computational models which are either predicated on deterministic or probabilistic methodologies; and *magic* collaborative code hands.

Ah and in case readers wonder whether I have any clue about the maths behind search algorithms, recommendation systems and translation software…………….. At university I got 99% in my Probability & Statistics exam, a 1st in my Linear Methods and Operational Research exams, a 1st for my Econometrics paper on the South-East Asian “tiger economies” and I did a fair amount of statistical programming. Given these insights on how information is sliced, diced and presented, let’s quote Mark Twain’s attribution to the C19th British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli:

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Never has this been truer than during the global financial crisis. Without exception, the forecasting and risk management systems are predicated on probability models — remember, I worked in finance so I have a grasp of this. If they’re so smart why did the crisis happen and how is it possible the global bailout is US$ trillions not billions, according to an report from OECD Insights that was tweeted? Moreover, if probability is the solution to calculating all our human transactions and engagements then let’s ask three simple questions:

(1.) Why can’t probability calculate who we fall in love with or why we love some people like our parents but not others?

(2.) Why can’t probability pinpoint our morals, consciousness and emotional evolution over time that drives our quantitative purchases?

(3.) Why can’t probability explain altruism, philanthropy, religion, humor or humanity?

So these are examples of what I termed the “Probability Paradox of Non-Quantifiable Value” in a previous post. It’s not a trivial challenge to construct new algorithms that will train machines to differentiate qualitative attributes rather than to do standard decision tree binomials of quantities or difference of the frequency of incidences — as currently happens in recommendation systems and search engines.

My good friend GC says I am “a deep thinker and a perfectionist” and 360-2020 is the emerging distillation of that deep thinking: a differentiation solution. Incidentally, we’ll be constructing a seriously differentiated business model with symbiotic board structures for investors, management and the user community whilst we’re @T it.

:*).

360-2020 TAKES ON TURING

Yes and I will bet a can of Coke that the realization of 360-2020 will also crack the Turing Test. By now readers know that in 1950 Turing posed the question, “Can machines think?” whilst I believe the more interesting question is “Can machines make sense?”

In my reasoning from another post I wrote:

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)

· semantic structuring (as in Powerset, True Knowledge, Adaptive Blue)

· recommend (as in LinkedIn, Amazon, Friendfeed and socnets)

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 (including Elbot whom I had fun+games with) 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 consciousness. 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.

Now we need to ask the question, “How do humans make sense?” It’s not by calculating differences between 0s and 1s or traveling down probability decision trees or topic clustering alone. It’s by differentiating with our language, cultural influences, emotions, morals, values, perceptions, humor, sensory intake and more.

Our consciousness.

Remember the Twain definition of information: Information is a consciousness of quantity and quality that enables differentiation and contextualization over time.

So 360-2020 may prove to be the quantum leap between Babbage’s difference engine and Turing’s test for machine intelligence.

Imagine that………………..Twain is………………………:*)

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DEBATEGRAPH

They’re constantly doing interesting and innovative things to make sense of information in a collaborative way, so if readers haven’t checked it out here are some examples of important issues they’re tackling at debategraph.

At surface level (commercial monetization), 360-2020 is designed to replace 5 star systems and recommendation/sentiment engines. At deeper levels it will contribute to the context of a Web OS like so:

On a Web economy basis, it will change the way we classify and process information away from pure deterministic and probabilistic algorithms predicated on binary quantities to quant-QUALITATIVE differentiation objects that capture human subjectivity (emotions, perceptions, humor, senses, tastes, etc.), Ergo, rather than continue with existing paradigms about either:

(1.) rational humans ===> deterministic behaviors (à la Adam Smith);

(2.) stochastic events + rational humans ===> probabilistic behaviors (à la Pascal-Huygens); or

(3.) stochastic events + self-interested humans ===> bargaining behaviors (à la Nash’s theory and Black-Scholes models of risk tradeoffs)

We are on a quest to model: STOCHASTIC EVENTS * SUBJECTIVE HUMANS. This paradigm is going to underpin 360-2020 and its algorithms. The matrix notation * is intentional. We are not excluding the application of probability, group sets or relational proximity from the 360-2020 model.

We’re simply going to approach the capture of human subjectivity in an interesting way which is not currently offered by sentiment engines or the semantic web stack. Additionally, there has been a legacy assumption that linking html or clustering data objects or “tying it all together” enables or is a reflection of discern and content differentiation. It is not.

There’s clearly a layer of quality control which has been missing from the Web to date. Quality control which is not about reputation or trust metrics. Quality control which is about the very semantic nature of words and labels themselves. Previously, I wrote about this realization I experienced:

“There’s a key sequence missing in the DNA of the Web, even with all this open data, natural language, AI and semantic structuring. A piece of code that is as vital to the Web’s intelligence as proteins are to amino acids to the proper functioning of neurotransmitters.”

360-2020 is designed as THAT piece of code, that missing gene of smarts.

TWAINING IT

Rudyard Kipling wrote The Ballad of East and West:

When I meet people for the first time, there are two comments they typically make:

(1.) As in Mark? And do you want me to be your Tom Sawyer?

(2.) Never the twain shall meet.

Well, it’s not going to happen overnight but over a lifetime it could be that the TWAIN WILL MEET WHEN 360-2020 IS FULLY REALIZED. Ah and “Twain” is the Anglicized derivation of my Chinese name 艳 which, rather than meaning that when one concept / person / culture meets another it doesn’t add up to two and there is no common ground, 艳 actually means “abundance”.

My parents have great gasps of semantics and senses of humor — LOL.

So the day after Ada Lovelace Day something remarkable happened. 360-2020 as been offered access to its first GBP1 million of angel financing. This on the basis of an initial functional mock-up of how it works for brands and the lead investor being aware of previous platforms I’ve been involved with.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day which was a day organized by Suw Charman-Anderson (former Executive Director of the Open Rights Group), to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. It’s well worth clicking on the image above and gaining some insights into the life, times and mathematical genius of Ada Lovelace who was the daughter of Lord Byron and also the key to the success of Charles Babbage’s difference engine which laid the foundations for the first computer. Ada Lovelace is credited for being the world’s first computer programmer.

That’s right: X chromosomes marked and hit the code spot first!

So 168 years after her translations in 1842 from French into English of Menabrea‘s Notions sur la machine analytique de Charles Babbage, who are the female technologists who’ve picked up the baton from Ada Lovelace? Some of them are listed here in a TechCrunch article from 2009 and Computer Weekly in 2010:

* http://eu.techcrunch.com/2009/03/24/ada-lovelace-day-celebrating-women-in-tech/

* http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/witsend/2010/03/a-few-great-posts-for-ada-lovelace-day.html

For me, three women currently coding are inspirations (in no particular order):

* Dame Wendy Hall (University of Southampton and long-time collaborator with Sir Tim Berners-Lee)

* Adele E. Goldberg (founder of Neometron and the American computer scientist who developed the smalltalk language with Alan Kay)

* Caitlin Kelleher (who created Storytelling Alice for her PhD dissertation at Carnegie Mellon. This was a revolutionary step in applying programming, game principles and visualization to empower 8-15 year olds to be able to code.)

The most interesting question is whether any woman will be responsible for coding and developing a DIFFERENTIATION ENGINE as a serious update to Babbage’s difference engine. In certain respects, today’s search algorithms and risk management systems are predicated on calculating differences, determinism and probabilities. Even with natural language, artificial intelligence and semantic stack advances it still can’t be said that a DIFFERENTIATION ENGINE has been perfected.

Ada Lovelace wrote in her notes:

Again, [the Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine . . . Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.

I’ve written previously that the 360-2020 engine is dependent not only on quantitative numbers but also on qualifying objects. This is mostly because I have some sense that the Bernoulli numbers, group sets, Bayesian statistics, chaos-Black-Scholes risk, Nash equilibrium integrals etc. that form the existing engines (calculating machines) which drive search, bank risk management and online transactions and recommendations are not differentiation engines. They’re still difference engines.

Now it would be quite something if in 2012, 170 years after Ada Lovelace wrote her notes and the first computer program, a woman could invent and launch a DIFFERENTIATION ENGINE that marries academic theories with commercial realities………..

Let’s hope she’s out there somewhere, :*).

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Ah and extremely early on in my creation of 360-2020 I  incorporated musical scales and sound as features. This was not because of Ada Lovelace’s comments (although this is an interesting coincidence), but mainly because I’m Chinese and our language has tones which sound similar to the music scale. In other words, Chinese is a lyrical language.

I also thought about musical notation and the five senses because of the piano my father bought me when I was 8, my flute, my guitar and my recorder. When you start learning how to play an instrument you get heightened insights into how each sense affects your perception, emotion towards and performance of music. Ah, and of course, there was ‘Wong Fei Hong’, ‘The Journey West’, ‘The Sound of Music’, ‘Easter Parade’, ‘West Side Story’ and other musicals (including Bollywood oneswhich I loved watching endlessly as a child. Plus my parents were constantly either humming or singing Chinese songs, aka their early version of karaoke (or as I called it “canary olde”). All of the music exposure I had long before I learnt about Ada Lovelace.

It’s funny how the learning we’re exposed to during our formative years informs us decades later……..

Historically, most threads on blogs have observed rigid time-stamp processes. A comment is published according to when it was made rather than directly beneath a related comment or topic in time sequence. Attempts have been made to change this in real-time chat with Google Wave:

However. as my fellow testers (whose rights to privacy and anonymity I’m respecting, hence the cutout of their names and comments) would attest: IN-LINE COMMENTING IN THIS WAY DOESN’T WORK. It’s almost impossible to track each bead of contribution. This also makes it difficult for collaboration purposes.

So is the topic clustering, time-stamping practices of other social network’s IM features any better? Well, here are Facebook and Ning’s:

They don’t follow topic clustering at all. They’re pure time-stamp order mechanisms.

The next question is then, “How easy is it to code an IM like Facebook’s or Ning’s?” The answer is, “VERY. There are Open Source examples of them out there.’

But I’m not remotely interested in doing yet another time-stamping / topic clustering IM like Google Wave, Facebook or Ning’s. Mostly because that would be akin to carving a square wheel when we already have some sense that what we need is a round wheel.

So I guess that since the round wheel IM functionality doesn’t exist, someone may have to invent something………

As a social media user who’s experienced UI in all manner of shapes, forms and functionality over the years my observation would be that there’s yet to be developed the utopian UI for smart collaboration or even regular sharing. On blank white pieces of paper, we can all draw reasonable diagrams about how the utopian UI should look like and what it should do but, code-side, several challenges rear their heads.

These are:

(1.) scaleability;

(2.) server load capacity;

(3.) security;

(4.) synchronous access; and

(5.) seamless integration (aka straight through processing, STP)

For non-technical readers, synchronous is what Twitter does: real-time feeds. STP is what preoccupies technologists of institutional trading platforms. A trade bid / offer / execution occurs and there are legal requirements to fulfill those obligations and account for them within a certain timeframe, so the entire information-transaction-payment loop has to be seamless.

That’s another advantage of my experiences with trading platforms; gaining some insights into the blueprints of system integrations that work and can bulk process from those which are buggy and have bottlenecks.

Let’s comment, though, specifically on front-end UI.

Much has been written about UI aesthetics over the years but what matters most is that it needs to be functional, dynamic and flexible. Obviously, a UI should be visually engaging but if there’s no option to customize features in the way a user prefers then the UI designer hasn’t really taken into consideration user navigation, imo. There’s actually an entire science that’s been built up around the positioning of certain features like log-in, advertising banners and user interaction panels which can make or break how quickly a site attracts advertising and is monetizable.

I recall suggesting (even “showing and telling” via diagrams) all sorts of neat and dynamic navigation tips to one particular SemWeb play in the hope of catalyzing monetization — only to have their UI designers completely ignore my reasonable user requests and helpful strategic tips. Instead they persisted with non-dynamic, uninspiring, rigid page structures that took eons to load and increased user frustration.

To add insult to their myopic disrespect towards users generally, they also claimed I knew nothing about UI design; in fact they defamed me all over the Internet. That was somewhat funny since the e-Intelligence service in the big bank was designed and coded according to my specifications and I still have the original strategy proposals on how I wanted the UI to look and feel, and importantly WORK.

This was critical since (as well as being the creator of the e-Intelligence service) I was its Editor and its strategic navigator, and I needed my publishing dashboard to be user-friendly and to be able to track traffic metrics. So there we have it, I was blogging, publishing, tweeting and collaborating in Web 1.0 a full decade before today’s social media tools.

Anyway, that SemWeb play example of UI designers and developers basically being difficult and unhelpful towards users is the reason I dusted down my code skills and created this UI:

This is only the initial iteration but already it’s clear that flexibility is key. Users can customize, drag, drop, populate, interact and share their content with others to their hearts’ content. They can also close panels of advertising if they don’t want to be bothered by it and, at a later date, will be able to launch what will be a smart collaboration sphere via a navigator.

At the moment, I won’t disclose how the smart collaboration sphere is going to work. Suffice to say that it will be super-cool and super-smart.

INCIDENTALLY, THAT SEMWEB PLAY IS NO MORE (DISTRESSED FIRESALE APPARENTLY); NOT A SURPRISE GIVEN THAT THEIR UI DESIGN WASN’T USER-FRIENDLY, THEY WERE UNABLE TO ATTRACT REVENUE, DIDN’T KNOW THEIR TARGET AUDIENCE WELL AND LOST THE RESPECT OF THEIR CORE USERS.

Meanwhile, I’ve been busy with my own ventures. What I learnt from that SemWeb experience which was upsetting as a user was this:

* DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME GIVING ARROGANT, MYOPIC AND UNGRATEFUL PLATFORMS YOUR VALUABLE AND HELPFUL FEEDBACK WHEN YOU CAN ALLOCATE THAT TIME TO CODING A PLATFORM MUCH SMARTER AND MORE MONETIZABLE THAN THEY CAN EVEN IMAGINE.

* FORTY THIEVES LOST OUT AGAINST ONE OF ALI BABA’S SLAVE GIRLS (so forty heads are not necessarily better than one good, smart, female one — lol).

Ok and this weekend I have to figure out additional dimensions of the art fund-of-fund in Project Art. Yes, in addition to being able to write the business plan, code the UI and analytical engine, raise financing, implement rollout etc for a dotcom……….I can also structure investment partnership agreements, write with both hands simultaneously and wear fantastic fuschia colored heels!

LOL.

This weekend is something of an odd one for my family. The 11th was the 3rd anniversary of my father’s passing and tomorrow is ‘Mother’s Day’; my mother’s being taken out to a lovely lunch and then to the movies. Obviously, this is all giving me some pause for thought about the influence of our parents on who we are, our values and what we’re capable of. I remember all the times my father would explain natural phenomena and engines to me even before I could walk and my mother — whilst she wanted me also to be a young lady — never batted an eye when I wanted to be able to do “boys” things (like climb trees, catch dragonflies and build models: lego and now computer ones).

Yet she trained me to be happy in the kitchen too as much as in my career. Below are the yummy peanut-sesame snowballs we made this morning. Yes, even though I’m now an adult I am the child (LOL) who helps my mother texturize the dough and is there to LISTEN & LEARN from her wisdoms. Readers can search the Web to their hearts’ content but they’re unlikely to find snowballs as delicious as my mother’s because she has “magic hands”.

This concept of “magic hands” is important. For example, everyone can have exactly the same recipe sheet and yet someone’s snowball will turn out to be tastier and more presentable than all the others. This is purely the skill, expertise and experience of the person who’s handling the dough. My mother is someone who takes great pride in her productions and strives towards excellence. She can take what is a standard recipe and transform it into food magic simply because she’s thorough, considers how all the ingredients work together and applies the lessons that she’s learned from previous attempts to make something even better……..until it’s a complete “HIT THE BALL OUT OF THE PARK” success.

In a sense, the cooking scenario is the same as start-ups. The recipe is all there, yet it depends in whose hands the dough is entrusted (the CEO and management team and their savoir-faire) whether or not goodies are properly baked, thrown into the bin or raw and cause upset stomaches.

LOL, that’s a Twain metaphor for something quite profound probably.

Once this blog post has been read it will become clear how seriously I’ve thought about the implications of 360-2020 for the Web and evolving global business models as well as how the code actually works.

This is a pivotal week and here are a handful of reasons why:

(1.) Yesterday I had several serendipitous “Eureka! Badda-Bing!” moments about what I call the “Probability Paradox of Non-Qualifiable Value” (more later).

(2.) Today TEDTalks released the video above by Tim Berners-Lee on what has happened since he made his call for Open Data last year. It’s an absolute must-watch for its inspiration.

(3.) Today is also International Women’s Day and next year will be its centennial anniversary (and I’m asking myself what contributions women are making not only to society, like when Kathryn Bigelow becomes the first-ever female recipient of the Best Director Oscar, but also to the Web — specifically in coding it, contextualizing it, providing perspectives and content to it, and founding the companies that could become a Google / Facebook / Twitter).

(4.) It is the 3rd anniversary of my father’s passing (and I’m taking stock of the progress made since I wrote that Google knol, http://knol.google.com/k/the-global-brain-the-semantic-web-the-singularity-and-360-2020-consciousness-to, which was inspired by some insights into consciousness when my father lost his).

(5.) Some of the next stages of 360-2020 financing will move forward.

360-2020 AS A SMART GENE AND MISSING CODE OF THE WEB’S DNA

Everybody and their cat has wanted to either build a social / collaboration network like Facebook, a real-time newsfeed like Twitter or to develop an iPhone application during the last few years — everyone except me. This is because I created and ran something called “e-Intelligence” inside a big bank. To all intents and purposes that was an internal social network with publishing, content sharing and real-time instant messaging capabilities. All of the Global Heads of business were on that social network as were the most junior of analysts and support staff.

Ergo, in Web 2.0 instead of social networks of and in themselves I’ve been much more interested in semantic, haptic, visualization and sentiment analysis technologies.

My conclusion from delving into these was this: “There’s a key sequence missing in the DNA of the Web, even with all this open data, natural language, AI and semantic structuring. A piece of code that is as vital to the Web’s intelligence as proteins are to amino acids to the proper functioning of neurotransmitters.”

Quite a thought, hmmn?

So what to do with this insight? Well, firstly conduct a SWOT analysis, identify / synergize potential solutions, architect and code that missing sequence, brand it 360-2020 and develop a business plan around it all.

THE PROBABILITY PARADOX OF NON-QUALIFIABLE DATA

Now let’s connect this missing piece of 360-2020 DNA to computational mathematics, quantum physics, macroeconomics and the way search engines, recommendation systems, sentiment analysis and risk management solutions in banks work.

Yesterday I was walking past a metro station when I saw a stack of free newspapers, so I picked up a copy. It was a supplement to the Observer on Sunday. I thought, “Wow, that’s odd!” since it was the first time I’ve ever seen any Sunday supplement being distributed for free. Now I have an admission to make: I’ve read the Observer on Sunday less than a handful of times to-date. I don’t buy it. I don’t surf the online version either.

Anyway, flicking through I happened on the ‘My Bright Idea’ column with Professor Vlatko Vedral, a quantum physicist at Oxford and in Singapore:

• http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/mar/07/vlatko-vedral-interview-aleks-krotoski

Here’s another admission: this was the first time I became aware of this column.

The print version I read originally shows Professor Vedral with an equation written on his hand:

I = log (1/p)

This intrigued me. There was no definition provided about what “I” and “p” represent but I soon reasoned that “I must be “\information” and “p is particle” from what he said in the text. It helps to be a maths graduate sometimes, :*).

Now if we assume that p is essentially the number of particles where p ≠ 1, then (as an example) in a network like the Web where there is 1 particle or computer node, we get:

I = log (1/1) = 0

If p=2, then I = -0.301029996

If p=3, then I = -0.477121255

If p=1,000,000, then I = -6

So what does this mean?

Well, if we assume Professor Vedral’s equation is valid, then the more number of particles there are the quantitative value of the Information decreases. In other words, as it relates to the computing nodes of the Web, the more the number of nodes, the lesser the value of the information.

Hmmmn……..is this not contrary to the network effect theory as well as the fact that more nodes means a multiplication of information rather than a reduction? Well, it could be argued that we’ve seen a proliferation of computer nodes (whether as servers, as PCs, as mobile devices like the iPhone, as social networks, as search engines) and the value of all the information churning out from these sources has exponentially decreased simply because………THERE’S TOO MUCH OF IT AND NO WAY TO CONTEXTUALIZE IT!

Next let’s tie this in with what I’m calling the “Probability Paradox of Non-Qualifiable Value” or “Does 95% probability of an event happening or a piece of information being related to another piece of information tell us anything about whether the information is spot-on, reliable or relevant?” For those unfamiliar with mathematics that equation, I = log (1/p), can be related to the Poisson distribution theory and an explanation can be studied here:

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PoissonDistribution.html

Interestingly, the journalist asked an important question: “How can you explain the emergence of free will, of faith, of any subjective construct if information defined in your theory is binary, a yes or a no?”

Professor Vedral makes an important concession that, “I just don’t think anyone yet knows how to approach it.”

“So what?” readers may all ask. “What does quantum physics have to do with the Web?”

My answer is this: Voilà, the Probability Paradox of Non-Qualifiable Value. Therein lies the reason the search engines and sentiment engines, whilst they can index a lot of information, have no way of contextualizing any of it beyond absolute determinants (+1, 0, -1, noun tags, the probability of that tag being associated with that tag to make recommendations based on percentage of overlap).

Therein is also the reason the search engines accumulate more and more data points from our emails, our tweets, our social network threads etc. via scraping or extraction cookies because the fact about systems based on Bayes and probability sets is that the larger the data set the greater the confidence that the spread of the information variability is low, i.e. more accurate and relevant.

However, as is being shown time and time again………search engines are flawed and don’t surface 100% PRECISELY we’re really looking for, only a probability that this is what it calculates what it infers we’re looking for.

Even with the current approach to semantic structuring in the Semantic Web Stack this is the case.

Yes, it’s great there is deterministic and probabilistic mathematics — a marriage between Newtonian mechanics and Pascalian randomness (Blaise Pascal, btw) — but……..WHERE IS THE CRICK-WATSON GENETICISM (and more)???!!! WHERE IS SOMETHING LIKE THE 360-2020 DNA SEQUENCE???!!!

It’s no wonder search engines (including semantic ones), sentiment engines and information they extract is non-optimal. It’s no wonder they can’t capture ambiguity or subjectivity when the probabilistic algorithms behind them are reliant on -1 / 0 / +1 quantities.

Anyway, Professor Vedral’s supposition in the article — whilst interesting and there’s no doubting his qualifications — is open to question, in order to derive some answers instead of some more questions. He argues that information is a necessary precursor to particles, which are a priori to atoms. I use the term “precursor” deliberately because then the information would be iterated and be put into a recursive loop until it somehow transformed into a particle.

Yet Newton’s first law of motion (also known as “law of inertia”) states: “Every object will remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless compelled to change its state by the action of an external force.”
 Ergo if Newton holds true, then that information quantity postulated by Professor Vedral would simply traverse in a loop or stay stationary and NOT transform into a particle unless……….it’s impacted by other information.

Likewise, on the Web, information (of and in itself) is a quantity with no velocity or value until some force brings another piece of information to the party. A-HA! But………………….how can that information be QUALIFIED to determine whether a particle can be made with it???!!!

When a search engine, recommendation engine or sentiment engine surfaces a quantitative list of links that are PROBABILITY INDEXED, where are the tools to qualify that information to determine whether a particle can be made from it?

The answer is this: They don’t exist yet because the computational mathematics doesn’t yet exist. The computational mathematics doesn’t yet exist because few have had the imagination to source — even invent —- alternatives to Bayes, natural language and chaos theory to the problem of ambiguity and non-probabilistic inheritance capture.

I’m already on that journey, though, if it helps.
 That’s what the 360-2020 DNA is aiming towards.

Professor Vedral also says, “When you strip out all the unnecessary baggage, at the core is the concept of probability………Once you have a probability that something might happen, then you can define information. And it’s the same information in physics, in thermodynamics, in economics.”

Actually, it’s not the same “information” in economics at all. Information in economics is derived from subjectivity. The quantitative information may be all there: price, location where it’s being sold, comparative saving relative to a competitor, volume of units sold, time period on which item is on sale. However, it’s the QUALITATIVE information that drives all that quantitative information. Just as in Newton the quantitative information, of and in itself, is not a particle (a whole) until it’s acted upon by the qualitative information. The qualitative information includes subjective inputs like our emotional state, our price consciousness, our concepts of loyalty, our susceptibility to advertising, etc.

So………if the search engines, recommendation systems and sentiment engines like Twitter’s continue along their quantitative loops………………….The quantitative value of the information online will only decrease exponentially as will the economic benefits derived by us!

This exponential decrease would completely undo the Singularity theory whereby the conflagration of information increase and processing power increase (derived from nanofication of circuit board surface relative to processing capacity and the contingent Moore’s Law) SHOULD lead to conscious machines that can then map and slingshot information around to solve major mathematical problems like, “How much renewable energy do we need to produce to enable us to colonize Mars and how much will it cost us? Is it worth it?”

Worth takes me onto the second point of “Eureka / Badda-Bing!”…………..

DIGITAL MAOISM: JARON LANIER

Now, since I read that article on Professor Vedral in print version whilst I was on my weekend out+about, once I was online I decided to search for it. I input the search terms “my bright idea Aleks Krotoski numbers” and this link came up top of the page:

• http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/feb/21/my-bright-idea-jaron-lanier

Again, I thought, “Wow, that’s odd!” since the title of the Vedral article in print version was something like ‘Think about the numbers,’ whereas the word “numbers” only appears in the last paragraph of the Lanier article online.

Anyway, I read through it for the first time.

In it he explains what he means by “digital Maoism,” whereby user content generation is done for no compensation and he publicizes his book, You are not a gadget! This made me LOL because I’ve been arguing the case against Chris Anderson’s “theory of free” — in particular any school of thought on the Web economy which is detrimental for the contributors (prosumers / produsers / whichever term people like to use)………………I believe that online contributors of content should be rewarded for that contribution.

All before I read about Jaron Lanier!!!

Yet another admission: I have heard and/or read of Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly who are mentioned in that ‘My Bright Idea’ piece, but never Jaron Lanier.

It’s doubly funny because that “universal micro-payment system” is precisely what is being included in the 360-2020 model. Importantly, as a solution it tackles the question of information on the Web not merely as quantitative “Yes/No” type probabilistic objects, but as qualitative captors for ambiguity and subjectivity.

Even though I’m a maths graduate, I know that maths provides a language to solve QUANTITATIVE scenarios but not necessarily QUALITATIVE ones. That’s why I re-mapped my imagination, applied the cultural influences of my intelligence and synergized a handful of tools from somewhere other than mathematics.

When mathematicians / theoretical physicists / economists argue that mathematics is the natural language that unlocks the answers and the be-all-end-all to the Universe, my reply is this, 
“SO HOW CAN MATHEMATICS VALUE LOVE? Do you go around telling your parents, “The probability that I love you is 88%? 12% of me doesn’t love you because you grounded me when I was a teenager about once every month — or with an annual probability of just over 8%….”

LOL, of course we don’t!!! We are………….people not robots or calculators or as Charles Babbage, the inventor of the computer, would call us “difference machines”!!!

LOOPING IT BACK TO INFORMATION & ECONOMICS

Next I want to inject my information and loop it back into Professor Vedral’s piece of information and impact that (to potentially create a particle). The journalist also wrote, 
“The 39-year-old, originally from Belgrade, passionately believes units of information – not particles – are the building blocks of humanity and everything that surrounds us.

Information, he maintains, is what came before everything else. It is akin to God.

:

I do believe one day that we will be able to explain complicated phenomena such as love, for example. I just don’t think anyone yet knows how to approach it. But quantum mechanics does bring all kinds of shades of grey between the binary digits.”

A few comments on this:

(1.) It’s not the shades of gray we need. It’s full color — that’s inbuilt into 360-2020 too.

(2.) Information cannot precede everything else since without consciousness, serendipity, imagination and culture (specifically language), we wouldn’t be able to do this:

a. be aware of “information’s” potential existence;

b. be in the right place, right time, right (curious) emotional state to discover it;

c. accept the possibility of its existence; and

d. know to label it as “information”.

(3.) Information cannot be the building block of humanity. Information has no ability to emote, evoke or empathize. Humanity includes all three and more.

Now I chose the word “potential” instead of “possible” existence for a specific reason. Earlier, Professor Vardal said, “the key concept behind information is probability.” Well, here’s the thing: “probability” relates to a quantitative tool with no capture of the qualitative. Meanwhile “potential” relates to a tool that can measure quantitative and qualitative values.

Ergo, the way to capture complicated phenomena like love or what people mean and feel on the Web — or the consciousness with which they relate to a piece of information and then decide to collaborate to either create a particle (a whole) or to spend time / money / intelligence / effort is…………………..

CONTINGENT ON POTENTIAL AND NOT PROBABILITY ALONE!

Moreover, as Lanier would (probably) agree with me: POTENTIAL IS PAYABLE since……so is electricity and this is how, economically, I can incorporate micro-payments into the 360-2020 business model and make the business case for it! There, that’s something for all coders and contributors to the Web to carefully contemplate.

LOL.

LESS IMPERFECT INFORMATION => MORE MARKET EFFICIENCY

Professor Vedral also proposed that, “When you strip out all the unnecessary baggage, at the core is the concept of probability………Once you have a probability that something might happen, then you can define information. And it’s the same information in physics, in thermodynamics, in economics.”

There are intrinsic risks in this position.

I’ve already explained that the absolute belief in and application of probability is the root of the flaws in search engines, recommendation systems, sentiment engines etc. Now let me provide this fact: the risk management systems in the banks are predominantly based on probability mathematics. These have obviously contributed to the global financial crisis.

It’s not simply about bankers’ greed or the market and regulatory reforms, it’s actually about bankers trading products based on poor quality information and governments architecting reforms based on sub-standard information.

It’s about people designing risk management models based on poor quality information. Sure, they have quantities of it to calculate probabilities of mortgage default but whilst it’s possible to input economic figures into a system, it’s almost impossible to quantify what the fear of default or bank collapse feels like (and “fear” is a subjective factor which is a potential qualifier).

Also, if information is treated as being all the same then the numbers generated as outcome products are probability QUANTITIES and NOT QUALIFIERS. In other words, 99% of something happening or a score of 90/100 still provides us with no qualitative information on WHY that information is valid or where it is applicable.

This is an important distinction which seems to have been lost. A probability is a quantity not a quality. Strategic decisions based purely on quantitative information in the absence of qualifiers (contextual, non-numeric resources) ===> global financial crisis.

Information which is precise and appropriate in thermodynamics and physics is not at all the same or equivalent to the information in economics. We can transform:

=> Thomas Jefferson’s “All men are created equal”

=> 

George Orwell’s addendum: “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others,”

=> Twain: “NOT ALL INFORMATION IS EQUAL AND SOME INFORMATION HAS SUBJECTIVE QUALITIES BUT (AS YET) NON-QUANTIFIABLE VALUE.”

I write “(as yet)” even though I have figured out a methodology to potentially synch what were two separate mathematical paradigms.

GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS & WHY SEARCH NEEDS TO BE SMARTER

According to this tweet from OECD Insights in January 2010, global governments have committed US$11.4 TRILLION (and counting) in the form of bank bailouts, fiscal measures like quantitative easing and more :

• http://twitter.com/OECD/status/7943404301

Meanwhile, Business Insider quotes US$23.7 TRILLION:

• http://www.businessinsider.com/total-bailout–237-trillion-2009-7

Now here’s a curiosity for us all.

Both Twitter and Business Insider are gaining reputations for being at the cutting-edge of technology and real-time dissemination of information not previously available; providing us with insights from within non-democratic countries and explaining how technology companies make their money, respectively.

Yet this is also a clear example of the Web and search’s current limitations.

Even though I’m reasonably adept at searching I would challenge everyone to try and qualify that tweet and that BI link by finding the original source materials that provide those figures. The fact is they’re difficult – if not impossible – to find. So what exactly is happening with search engines and our ability to crosscheck information before it becomes accepted as fact in the era of the Web?

Also, let’s ask ourselves this, “Where are the balances and checks so that a tweet is subject to the same standards of journalism and editorialism as established media? Standards which mean that inaccurate or misrepresentative reporting may lead to legal action?”

Next let’s multiply out from that small example of a tweet that can’t be crosschecked with all the inaccurate, unverifiable, incomplete, poorly logged, poorly tagged, absolute nonsense or unconnected information out there — online, within banking systems, within search engines……..

It’s easy to then see that we live in a world of imperfect and incomplete information that is not only being spread via printed books but now propagated a million-fold via the Web. This is all before we even get to whether that information is contextual and coherent, btw.

Why does this matter?

ADAM SMITH & THE WEB

Well, one of Adam Smith’s key assumptions in his General Theory of Equilibrium is that there is “complete information”. This is why it’s so funny (bewildering even) for the monetarists to argue that Adam Smith provides the answer to dealing with the financial crisis. In other words, we redress the balance of the debts owed by the banks by printing more money.

Here’s the thing: if the Bank of England / the FED etc. have INCOMPLETE INFORMATION then monetarist policy does not result in equilibrium because the basic assumptions are all awry!

Ok, so that’s the first insight from the global crisis and people much cleverer than me like John Nash (who won a Nobel Prize in economics for it) have mathematically proven that Adam Smith’s assumptions of perfect and complete information are wrong, and that asymmetric information is the actuality (asymmetric meaning imperfect, btw).

The next insight then is about the Web. I’ve noted before that none of the world’s great economists (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, JM Keynes, Mundell-Fleming, John Nash himself) were born or lived during the era of the Web. This means that applying their tools to what is a crisis facilitated and accelerated by Web technology is frankly MYOPIC on the part of the governments, central banks etc.

What’s even more surprising is that they all gathered at Davos and the G20 meetings and not a single panel addressed examining how the Web and technology need to be improved to prevent a re-occurrence of the Credit Crunch.

The Web contributed in three ways:

(1.) Viral spread of incomplete (and sometimes inaccurate) information about mortgage products over banking systems beyond borders.

(2.) Real-time straight through processing, which means huge volumes of money are transferred in nanoseconds of a click.

(3.) It facilitated borderless transactions so toxic assets which were the problem of one bank in one country were moved and deposited to another bank in another country.

THE FUTURE OF US, THE INFORMATION AND THE WEB

At the moment there seems to be different battles between different interested parties on how the Web should work (privacy, the Cloud, pay-to-play-walls, etc.). Personally, I believe that it really should not be a situation of “them against us”:

• government control versus freedom of people

• oldies, Luddites and killjoys versus the tech-savvy, young and curious

• Google and other tech oligopolies versus the SME and entrepreneurial

• the book educated versus the online learners

• the capitalists against the communists against the fascists against the technologists

It should be about US AGAINST IMPERFECT, INCOMPLETE AND UNRELIABLE INFORMATION. Us against ignorance and myopia, if you will.

It’s not the systems we need to over concern ourselves with (those we can change — whether via a democratic vote / boycott of that company / etc), it’s the information content and the QUALITY and CONTEXT of it online that we need to tackle.

It is up to us to move the Web towards better quality information, to be the balances and checks of that information responsibly and collectively, and to apply that information collaboratively in ways which make us all more intelligent and capable and contribute to solving problems.

There are serious common challenges: global poverty, eradication of diseases, educational equivalence for more not less people, climate evolution, etc.
However, we cannot solve these challenges if imperfect information exists and persists.

Imperfect information leads to imperfect buying, trading and loss of competitiveness resulting in imperfect markets and cycles of economic disasters. Economic disasters mean that we end up not having the budgets to take care of our loved ones, wider communities or the planet.

As an adult and as a woman, I want to be at the forefront of developing and coding those tools that enable better quality of information, reduce spam/marketing nonsense and that put the controls of and rewards from that information back into our hands. I happen to like advertising because it can encourage creative genius, commonality and aspirations. These are all positives for human development.

However, search engines are propagating the imperfect information in the way they rank the importance and relevance of that information, so much so that Google is now subject to legal action in the EU

• http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/02/three-antitrust-complaints-lodged-against-google-in-europe

• http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/100226-144308

As it is, I like Google in the way I like every other search engine. I have no issues with the search companies. I do, though, have issues with the computational mathematics and some of the unimaginative and unilateral business models underpinning them.

There are alternatives and potentials for real innovation out there. Alternatives where there may even be reciprocity of rewards towards users. Admittedly, some of that computational mathematics doesn’t exist yet but it’s already imagined so……………just like Da Vinci didn’t live to see a helicopter being built, this doesn’t mean that smarter alternatives to existing search engines and their business models aren’t possible or that they can’t be built.

If I manage to get 360-2020 incubated successfully, then as of 2012………USERS and not only the companies are going to earn money for providing better quality information. That’s right: USERS ARE GOING TO BE REWARDED FOR MAKING THE WEB A HIGHER QUALITY SPACE. That should disrupt the Web and economic models in a good way and….

POSSIBLY PREVENT MY KIDS’ GENERATION FROM ANOTHER GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS ARISING FROM IMPERFECT, INCOMPLETE AND INCOHERENT INFORMATION.

“Do no evil?”

How about “Be champions of the good?”

WOMEN & THE WEB

Admittedly I’ve never identified with the Germaine Greer feminists of the world. However, it will definitely help when more women get involved in the hard coding of the LANGUAGE and structure of the Web because, otherwise, the Web will never become fully socialized, realized, contextualized or make sense. If Al Gore and others liken the Web to a “Global Brain” then think carefully about how our young brains became aware of language, context, communication, ambiguity, etc. and were shaped and socialized.

Yes……. WOMEN: our mothers, our teachers, our female friends — as much as by our fathers and other male role models. What’s interesting about the over-reliance on deterministic and probabilistic models is that it reflects the way men think, link and risk assess information. It’s not the way women approach information. Our is a much more organic, fluid and relational approach.

Somehow, we need to synergize the female X chromosomes with the male Y combinator ones and that genetic hybrid is what can make the Web’s information contextualized as well as coherent.

360-2020 will literally be that missing code sequence in the Web’s DNA that makes it and us smarter.

E=MC2 ===> E = C*I*S

Enlightenment = consciousness * information * synergy

where * is the matrix cross-product of supporting variables, so in the case of synergy this would include location, time, emotional state, context.

Yes, once 360-2020 is all finalized I’ll potentially write a paper on its journey of discovery and explain with some nice double integrals from mathematics cross-pollinated with cool tools from other contributing disciplines.

If 360-2020 is successful with cracking this problem this will contribute to:

* AI passing the Turing Test;

* Nash’s Equilibrium being dimensionalized with emotion constituents;

* proving how culture and intelligence are transmitted in DNA and how this applies in inheritance within programming code; and more….

Maybe even enough to earn a Nobel Prize in Economics for Science for a team or two…………

Certainly it’s a commercial idea like no other out there, it’s realizable and I know how.

Interested parties typically want to know the competitive opportunities for a business so instead of writing 1,000 words, here’s a picture for 360-2020:

This is the only strategy slide I’ll be sharing on @T and it’s a snapshot in time.

A business plan, financials, IP filed and a demo are all progressing. The numbers focus on the US$450+ billion annual global expenditure in online advertising, the smart tools are designed to quality filter and contextualize content and the marketing model focuses on how to service diverse cultural groups. Since I’m Chinese and speak several languages, 360-2020 has cultural perspective seeded into its systems DNA.

Additionally, one-click capture is what 360-2020 will aim for.

Now, I’ve analyzed enough case studies in business school, gained insights into dotcoms from direct experience and blogs, and even incubated-financed some techco’s to know that for startups there are usually 3 schools of practice:

(1.) Plan nothing on the basis of “Build it and they will come.”

===> sell to Google / MS / etc.

(2.) Plan everything but fall apart in execution and marketing.

===> hope seasoned angels will nurture it.

(3.) Parallel project manage the coding and the writing of the business plan, but both end up out of synch.

===> liquidate and learn nothing.

There are issues with each of the three practices, even before we take into account that the tech sector is unpredictable and no one can predict anything accurately 100%.

In the first instance, there’s a big old graveyard of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 ventures that were built in haphazard higgledy-piggledy ways, attracted millions of traffic hits (mostly ramped by spambots), didn’t have any plans for monetization and burned through VC cash like Vesuvius hit Pompeii (scorching the earth and making it nigh impossible for subsequent start-ups to attract money).

In the second, SMART EXECUTION AND MARKETING DO MATTER. We can all pick out the Apples from the others that do professionally dumb things such as disrespect their beta community by launching with marketing videos like “We organize that s***” and then fail to deliver on those very organizational tools — despite core users’ support, collaborative troubleshooting and continuous patience. It’s no surprise that companies like these shoot themselves in the foot and through the head and sabotage their own market opportunities.

[As a Libran, I can use diplomatic euphemisms as florally as the next person but DUMB is an appropriate word when a Marketing Manager uses the word "s***" to describe a community’s carefully collected and considered information treasures.

That s-word and that approach to the community will have NO PLACE in anything I'm involved with.

^{360-2020 will endeavor to engage quality people and collaborate with strategic partners who understand and respect its community, their needs and are committed to working together conducively towards better, smarter, symbiotic solutions.]}

In the third case, what happens in parallel project management is that the executives and the tech team may be parallel but they’re on different levels where strategic direction, navigation, execution, communication and consideration for each other’s efforts are concerned. Hence they end up at the wrong destinations.

NO ORACLE, SIMPLY AN EXPLORER

I don’t have the definitive “Do this and strike digital gold” answers because:

(1.) I’m human and therefore as fallible as anyone else.

(2.) No single company has THE killer answers (and any who claim to are snake oil salesmen).

(3.) That company would own the universe and no company owns the universe.

(4.) There’s no room for discovery, fun and learning from mistakes if those definitives already exist.

(5.) I’m only at the start of a journey and I can only share my analogy of the Twain approach as I tackle 360-2020.

It’s like a……..FRENCH BRAID.

In other words, we treat the business plan, the coding and the parties involved (target audience, strategic partnerships, investors, etc.) as synergistic strands of the whole. We progress them not in parallel but with re-iterative integration wherein each contributes to the development of the others synergistically and synchronistically. Yes, it means whoever’s hand(s) are doing the braiding — i.e. the team of VISIONARY LEADER-DRIVER-EXECUTORS — need to be reasonable, smart, dynamic, collaborative and operationally pragmatic to appreciate how each strand fits in with the other strands.

It also clearly involves male-female-X-Y combinatory organic synthesis wherein input-output are aligned.

This philosophy of synching strands may prove to be productive; we shall see in the long-term if this is so.

WHY CREATE 360-2020?

Well, the simple reason is that in addition to gaining 360 perspectives it’s also important to have 20/20 clarity of vision and coherence of connected information. The challenge and fun is to build and aspire towards this.

The more complex reason is that it is a necessary evolution to the bigger economic challenges.

Here are some facts about whether we have 20/20 clarity online at present: 5-star ratings, recommendation engines and institutional ratings mechanisms (e.g., S&P/Moodys credit, bank reputation, Interbrand’s analysis) are flawed at worst and non-smart at best. We know this because if they were smart, reliable, insightful and contextual these events would not be true:

* global financial crisis

o the credit agencies rated the toxic mortgage assets from AAA to ABB which made them seem more financially sound than they actually were. In fact, some of the products were…….sludge at best (and slag at the bottom of the oil distillation process at the worst).

* consumers buying items that rate a 3 and 4 rather than items that rate 5

o quality, price, human perceptions and aspirations are not captured in 5-star rating systems so whilst a 3 may seem to mean “average” it may also mean “affordable” and “non-niche”.

* Virgin, Newscorp and Hutchison Whampoa not appearing in the Top 100 of Interbrand’s survey whereas Zara does.

o those three diversified conglomerates have a lot more established marketing presence and revenue streams than Zara.

Therefore, social graphs and quantitative surveys like the ones below are constantly churning in my head whilst 360-2020 gestates and is built.

I believe online content can be filtered and connected in a much smarter way to reduce the noise, spam and nonsense for us all so that we have more time to genuinely collaborate, enjoy ourselves and collectively innovate………….

So building 360-2020 is one way to “walk the talk”.

START SMALL & SCALE SPHERICALLY

There is a plan in place for each of the 3 levels of the 360-2020 tools. The entry-level will have over a dozen classifications compared with the 5 classifications in 5-star rating systems and the 2 in -1/+1.

Over time, the number of classifications in 360-2020 will be increased within a realistic rollout.

CONVERSATIONS WITH CEOS & CONCERNS ABOUT IP PROTECTION

Whilst I’m keen to propagate 360-2020 as a concept and to source people who can collaborate in its realization, I’m also aware that some of them may try to appropriate (read STEAL) my methodology and innovations. This is a risk for all entrepreneurs and inventors and I am by no means the first or last person to happen upon these situations.

That’s why it’s advisable to have some helpful conversations with IP lawyers, be mindful of what you disclose as the inventor and FILE IP AS APPROPRIATE.

Without breaching any confidentiality let me share what the CEO of a financial platform said when I met him for an informal chat recently about what I’m doing with 360-2020:

It’s not an easy problem to solve. There are so many variables and dimensions involved. Plus there would be a bias in the sample population — especially since there’s research to say that only 1 percent of online users ever even bother to rate content with 5 star ratings in the first place, so how would you get people to use 360-2020? You’d need it to be on a site with millions of users………

I’m not a programmer so I don’t know what you’d need to you’d solve it. The person you should talk to is [name of X, a US high-end programmer].

This was broadly my reply:

I can program and I have a sense of the maths behind it and, well, actually [Mathematical Formula 1 which I studied at university and won’t disclose] and [Mathematical Framework 2 which I’ve applied in a challenging project before and won’t disclose] metrics can be applied to deal with the variability and confidence issues so even if it is an initially biased population sample, we can account for it and normalize the tool to extrapolate.

As for market potential, it could plug into something like Amazon or eBay recommendations as readily as just on someone’s personal blog. It just replaces where the 5-star bar sits now.

Plus it would actually have less bias than existing 5-star rating systems since that provides almost no qualitative or benchmarking information around the 2, 3 and 4 ratings — only the extremes of 1 and 5 — so that’s an area of ambiguity which, historically, has led to people buying goods or hedging a market with incomplete information, on the assumption that 1 is a “don’t trade/buy” and 5 is a “go ahead, trade/buy”.

Now, we can either stick with the status quo where all of the known ratings systems and the emerging Semantic Web Stack’s classifications have limitations and are not providing us with the context that we really need. Ergo, we can all continue to be frustrated by our and the machines’ inability to connect the dots and make sense of silo information — which invariably results in scenarios like a global financial crisis because people are trading, investing and transacting based on incomplete information (3 out of 6 perspectives on a Rubik’s cube) or it results in scenarios where companies are inferring our consumption behavior and end up either over-stocking or under-selling……….

OR………

We can approach it with the 360-2020 methodology, which approaches information contextualization differently — along DNA mechanisms rather than a Rubik cube’s rigidity. Yes, the computational mathematics involved is substantial — some of it will have to be invented anew — but it’s feasible and there are already components of it published. It’s just a matter of having the imagination and execution to synergize that.”

A week later and I’m still being a pragmatic optimist that that CEO will respect that 360-2020 is a proprietary solution and is covered by IP.

Moreover, only someone with my career insights, skills and knowhow would even originate and then attempt to executive such a solution! That’s not complacency, myopia, narcissism, delusion or bravura on my part. It is what it is……….

360-2020 = TWAIN

I did get 99% in my Probability + Statistics exams and the highest mark in my university class for my Econometrics project on Tiger economies, so…………………………….I have some sense of where and how to source the computational mathematics and the AJAX / PERL / PHP / SVGML / Flash AS4 / JSON / jScript / Pascal / Fortran / LISP / Squeak / Semantic Web Stack components etc. to solve and synch what is a non-trivial model and code challenge.

That and the fact that I can code means that 360-2020 is shaping up progressively. Importantly, I’m factoring in the need for the business model, reward reciprocity between company-consumer, neuroscience and other core components to fit into the whole so — in all seriousness — I am a critical component in 360-2020’s realization and potential success.

Now, returning to the relevance of what I’m trying to do wrt. the bigger economic challenges…………

BETTER INFORMATION => BETTER MARKETS

Now, without going into too much Adam Smith, what I realized whilst working in consumer-side companies and in banking is that the basic assumptions of capital markets and information about consumers are somewhat awry. This may partially explain why various global financial crisis happen.

The prime assumption being that there is so-called “perfect information” which we all have equal access to and choice over. The second one is that humans are “rational and make objective decisions” — so, for example, we don’t borrow mortgages we know we have no realistic chances of meeting the payments for. The third is that exchange between two parties happens following long distance and lengthy time negotiations.

Actually this is true:

* Market information is non-optimal.

* Humans are complex and make decisions based on ambiguous information, subjectivity and their emotions, which includes the emotions elicited by risk-return serotonin.

* Trading can happen instantaneously. We have been in real-time straight through processing for well over a decade. We swipe a credit card or press a button for “Buy” and the money is taken from our account immediately, it’s not like when there was a 7-day clearance for a check.

Anyway, I can either perpetuate the “market is perfect”-“Earth is flat”-”humans+machines-are-destined-to-stay-suboptimally-smart” stance or I can say:

ADAM SMITH WAS NOT AROUND WHEN THE WEB WAS INVENTED, SO NONE OF HIS THEORIES OR MODELS COULD POSSIBLY CAPTURE THAT THIS TECHNOLOGY WE CALL WWW CONTRIBUTED TO THE SPREADING OF IMPERFECT INFORMATION ABOUT THE US MORTAGE SECTOR BEYOND BORDERS AND TRADING JURISDICTIONS. MOREOVER, THE INTERDEPENDENCY OF NATIONAL ECONOMIES OVER THE SAME TOXIC ASSETS IS A PHENOMENON SMITH’S THEORIES COULD NOT POSSIBLY ACCOUNT FOR SINCE IN HIS DAYS THERE WAS NO WTO, GATT, NAFTA, EU ETC.

HE COULD ALSO NOT POSSIBLY HAVE PROJECTED HOW TECHNOLOGY WOULD FACILITATE THE VELOCITY AT WHICH MORTGAGE PRODUCTS WERE TRADED AND INFECTED THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL SYSTEM.

So…………………yes, as much as I respect Adam Smith as the godfather of capitalism, it is worth examining some of his core tenets to reflect the changes that the Web has brought.

Importantly, to contribute to the position that “We need tools to improve information quality” and “Humans+machines-can-become-smarter!” Since machines can only be as smart as their human inventors, we may have to “think-out-of-the-box”, “from left field”, “throw curve balls”, apply our imagination, cross-pollinate some concepts and innovate some tools to deal with……….

THE IMPERFECT INFORMATION SCENARIO

Now, when I look at the Web it’s obvious that there are all types of occurrences of imperfect information and this is manifested in everything from Google’s PageRanks algorithms to 5-star rating systems with their two extremes and through to recommendation threads where we have to plough through hundreds of non-consequential comments to get to any gold nuggets.

Then when I reflect on my experiences with semantic technologies and conversations I’ve engaged in with leading thinkers and practitioners on the issue of topic clustering rather than time stamping, this keeps distilling in my brain:

IMPERFECT INFORMATION PERSISTS because we haven’t yet built the tools that coalesce, contextualize and make sense of that information in a way which is coherent and inheritable in a way that’s also parseable and has dimension and extensibility.

A way that mimics the way DNA operates, actually. Hmmm……

Here’s a reminder of how the Linking Open Data group drew their own connections and then how I redrafted it as a DNA-esque model:

See? Even before any coding is involved, I visualize and architect the way objects and structures are related and interact in a different way from how some others see the same space.

So I have some choices:

(1.) Sit back and say, “Let’s hope that some brainiac guys from Harvard / MIT / Stanford / Imperial / Cambridge / Apple / Google / MS / FB / W3C figure it out before I die………..

So that my kids aren’t forced to use the same non-smart, imperfect information which means their generation will also cause another global financial crisis on the scales of 1939 and 2007” and corporate ignorance about their own consumer base and how to service culturally-diverse consumers persists; or

(2.) Go on vacation, catch a tan and enjoy long lunches.

(3.) Invent the solution for my generation and my kids’ generation.

They say that innovation is “borne out of necessity” so………..there it is and here we are.

360-2020 IS SO SIMPLE EVEN MY MOTHER GETS IT!

Given that my mother is a tech novice, the fact she says 360-2020 makes sense and is easy to use (from what I’ve shown her) is reassuring. Of course like that CEO she’s also said, “It’s not an easy problem to solve”.

“Yes, but when 360-2020 is fully realized, then imperfect information online will be reduced and whole new forms of computational mathematics and economic modeling that can marry with neuro-biochemical mechanisms will be invented!”

Surely that’s worth committing Twain knowhow and a lifetime to.

THE COMPUTATIONAL CHALLENGE + CAVEMEN

Well, when the tools don’t exist it’s our challenge, our imagination, our pragmatism, our collaboration and our journey to build them.

Otherwise we simply wouldn’t leave the caves!

Caves can offer us warmth, but the sun outside offers that, light, photosynthesis, Vitamin D and a whole world of opportunities and Enlightenment beyond the cave!!!

To close this blog post, below is a funny spoof video on how cavemen learnt to trade, followed by a link to a scene from ‘A Beautiful Mind’ in which Nash’s equilibrium is explicated with Adam Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’ to provide more clarity on HOW and WHY people make trading decisions and tackle Prisoner’s Dilemma-type issues.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7Z_UnshDlY

In a sense, we’re prisoners of the Web and its current limitations. There are three doors and here’s what’s behind them:

(1.) More of the same structure and Bayesian approaches to information ranking.

(2.) The same structure with information tagging (e.g., semantics) and scalar clustering and ranking (e.g., 5-stars) that don’t enable us to QUALIFY the context or meaning from the content — merely to quantify frequency of occurrence.

(3.) A revolution of structuring, contextualizing, quanti-qualifying and coalescing information that makes sense and coherence.

Since humans are intelligent and have life choices, I choose to build 360-2020 as a key for Door (3). Even though I’m not in the league of thinkers of the stature of Smith, Nash and other greats I’m hopeful that some people of that stature and those smarts will guide and support me along this journey.