@T: ALWAYS THE TWAIN

This weekend I’m prepping for a code challenge so have put the mobile on silent, informed the BBC producer who wants to interview me about my election perspectives that I’m unavailable and dusted down some maths equations I haven’t looked at for a few years, including Fibonnaci sequences. 99% of solving anything technical involves focus, practice and cross-pollinated application with stochastic inspiration providing the other 1%, btw.

Whilst mentally limbering up for this code challenge — which is set by external parties and something that’s a brilliant move on their part, by the way — I kept thinking about the skill sets which make some founder-CEOs successful and others abject failures. It’s invariably easier for the media and consultants (who are, to a certain extent, backseat drivers) to write about how to do something and it’s different to be the person who actually DOES IT: originates, strategically plans, codes and implements an idea, a solution platform and its business model.

As someone with direct experience of dotcom doing and dotcom investing/consulting/observing from sidelines, I can appreciate the distinctions of the skill-sets involved.

My answer is: ideally the founder-CEO has all three capabilities and particular strength in corporate strategy. This is because Silicon Valley and its global equivalents are littered with dot bust casualties where the “super-stoked” engineers have shown ingenuity of code but abysmal corporate strategy has resulted in the layoffs of those engineers. Moreover, without strong corporate strategy and a distinctive value proposition………….those engineers end up coding in a vacuum rather than with synched purpose.

Moreover, when we examine people like Steve Jobs or Michael Bloomberg they were never the most brilliant coders in their companies (Alan Kay was in the case of Apple Inc.) but they were the ones with the strategic nous (character, vision, design, marketing and financing) to drive their companies towards market leadership and consistent innovation.

At various points to-date I’ve flexed my codability, creativity and corporate strategy skills at optimal levels. However, each of these experiences was mutually exclusive from the other. At university I applied Pascal, C++ and Minitab for maths and econometrics projects that correctly predicted market crashes. My creativity manifests itself in my web design, artworks, cooking, knitting, poetry, sense of humor and all manner of synergistic shortcuts I deploy to realize objectives. As for the corporate strategy side……..Well, we can’t be more at the coal face of this than having the words “Strategic Investments” and “Strategist” on our business card when we worked in CEO-Chairman’s Office of a Tier 1 bank.

360-2020 is arguably the first time I’ve leveraged all three skills at once: codability, creativity and corporate strategy. However, I would not put myself into the league of a Steve Jobs, a Michael Bloomberg or a Mark Zuckerberg. I don’t because they already have their I.T. visions realized whereas I am on the journey of realization with all of its challenges ahead……..

I find myself having to code it — despite not having any MIT / Imperial PhD Computer Science, Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence qualifications — for the simple fact that no one else has invented anything like 360-2020 before. Plus I realized that it’s not one of those solutions that I can simply draft a specification for and get a third party provider to code (in the same way that many websites get designed).

Since 360-2020 gets into the very DNA code of the Web and the nature of information itself, then I personally need to get into the DNA of code because if I don’t………….

Moving forward from Bayesian difference engines towards semiotic differentiation solutions will never happen in the way it should and could.

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

Regardless of whether this is in relation to codability, to creativity or to corporate strategy, to do well in any of these disciplines we have to hope that we have the appropriate information and a smart approach to that information. Otherwise we code systems that give us the wrong answers, paint messes that are no Picassos and implement strategies that result in excessive cashburn, unnecessary layoffs and even social bankruptcy in extreme examples.

So there it is. It’s a beautiful and sunny weekend during which I could be out shopping with friends and being glamorous.

Instead I’m running through equations like these during my prep:

It’s just as well I have a maths degree or it would all look like alien gobbledy-gook and I’d have no reference frames when it comes to actually converting a theoretical problem into actual object-oriented code.

Seriously LOOOOOOOOOOOONG weekend ahead for Twain brain — LOL.

Yesterday in the Times there was an article entitled, ‘Babies’ brains are more sophisticated than we ever believed’:

* http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article6793658.ece

Quite a few of the readers’ comments on the Times’s article are interesting, revealing and worth reading.

TWAIN’S VIEWS

Well, I’ve known how much brighter babies are than adults give them credit for ever since I was a baby myself, later when my younger brother was born and now when I see babies out and about. Yesterday, the whole of London seemed to bloom with babies since the sunshine brought out all their proud parents and their prams. Some were also in harnesses on their mothers’ backs or making their first attempts at walking. One little baby girl in a bright pink baby suit decided she couldn’t figure out which order her feet were supposed to go to make a step, so she plunged herself onto her derrière in protest — LOL. She’ll probably grow up to be a campaigner and do sit-ins. Another baby decided he wanted to show off his ability to put his big toes into his mouth. Cute.

Anyway, I didn’t need any Barbies / Sindys / teddy bears as a kid because I had a real live, kicking, screaming, gurgling, learning human (Twain) experiment, bundle of joy in our family in the shape of our youngest. There was enough of an age gap between us for me to actually treat him like a scientific study case rather than just go “Goo-goo-ga-ga, awwwwww,” over him!

I used to put him through his paces to test his mental, physical, audio-visual and emotional dexterity and consciousness. That started happening when he was 3 months old and my parents decided they could trust us to help him do his muscle strengthening exercises. This involved putting him on his back and gently stretching out his limbs, whilst counting to him in Mandarin with each movement and then holding up brightly colored objects to see whether he was:

(1.) able to follow the object around;

(2.) able to detect when an object had been swapped; and

(3.) able to anticipate whether we were going to put the object near his nose / his hands / us.

He was pretty good at all of these tests. His special talent was more audio than visual, though. Once he could walk the first thing he tried to do was switch the TV on for the sound. Maybe that explains his musical talents now.

Before he arrived though, I’d been experimental with kids younger than me when I was about 4. I babysat a neighbor’s little 2-year-old and earned HK$2 per day for my efforts. That baby, though, was definitely not as bright or inquisitive as my younger brother. She was quieter and more introspective.

With my own children — the ones that will make my mother a grandmother — I plan to record and document all my experiments with them. That’ll be fun!

T-MODEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS

So I was thinking about this whole issue of, “What’s consciousness and where is it,” my father’s coma situation and was also wondering whether the Internet’s version of the Global Brain might enable us to produce a proxy for our natural brain, the location of consciousness and this is what’s emerging as my model:

By medical definition, my father was considered to be “unconscious” which meant that the ECG (electrical conductivity graphs) couldn’t detect any discernible voltage that might indicate electrical activity in his brain. He also seemed to be unresponsive to instructions and actions from the nursing staff. Yet when I visited I got the distinctive impression that he was conscious so I set about doing my own experiments to test for his responsiveness — over and above whatever the ECGs and daily physical routines / procedures the hospital staff were doing.

I reasoned that, according to medical literature, we’ve identified certain areas in the brain which relate to cognisance (or recognition of faces / voices), communication and command/control over our physical limbs. Similarly, in the way in which the Net is forming we have ways of cognisance (via avatars and images), communication (text, images, IMs, emails etc) and a command/control function in the coding which paths all those IF mouse is clicked, XYZ happens or WHEN text is input, insert into database type commands which appear in Boolean, Javascript, AS3, Squeak and every other OOP (object-oriented program) which makes up what we call the World Wide Web or Net.

So I started to make the connections between all the literature (including business psychology models) I’d read since childhood, my own observations of how the brain works in situ (including young children and spending time with my grandparents as much as daily interactions with people @ work and @ play), my father’s situation and my work on the Net and this realization sparked:

* WE HAVEN’T DISCOVERED CONSCIOUSNESS YET BECAUSE WE’RE LOOKING IN THE WRONG PLACES AND WITH THE WRONG TOOLS! What if it’s not via ECGs and MRIs alone?

Then the challenge becomes, “Well what model or framework can we build to detect it and guide us to finding the right tools?”

Through the interactions with my father it became apparent that he had cognisance of who I was and also of Elvis and Pavarotti when I plugged in his music headset. His facial expressions would change subtly but perceptibly. There was also moistness which formed in his eyes and showed up on his lashes. He could sense and was moved by the music, that’s how I interpreted this moistness. I can imagine how frustrating it must have been for him: an intelligent and articulate person who was in a vegetative state.

To the hospital staff, he was a patient number. To us, he was ORGANIC: our fellow journeyer through Life’s ups and downs, evolving and mutating along the way. He was the one who — together with our mother — taught us how to walk, talk, read, write, laugh, cry, imagine, be and a billion other shared experiences (good and bad). Just as he had comforted us, washed our faces and held our hands when we were relatively young and dependent, so it was our turn to hold his hand, wash his face and do whatever we could to comfort him. The sensation of touch was another way for me to gauge his state of being.

Here too I got the sense that he was conscious and aware he wasn’t alone and that we were with him. He couldn’t grip my hand back but occasionally there was a pulsation on the tips and it would become warmer.

After a few days, it struck me that whilst he’d lost functional ability of his communication, command/control, collaboration and coherence faculties I didn’t (and still don’t) personally believe that he’d lost consciousness entirely — only the consciousness as currently defined by medical information and the tools available.

What’s irrefutable is that we haven’t definitively found consciousness or its location yet. If we had, I’d probably have read about it in The Lancet, New Scientist, Wired, Nature, Scientific American, British Medical Journal, Neurosurgery Quarterly etc. (i.e., any of the specialist medical publications listed here: http://www.medic8.com/Journals/All.htm).

So I started to think about, “What are the core elements of consciousness then — if the medical one is incomplete? Maybe once we find the core elements we might be able to narrow down the zones within the cortex where consciousness is triangulated.”

Culture, I thought, must be in there somewhere. Each of us is born into a particular culture and that DNA inherited from our parents must contribute to our consciousness, its course and its shaping in our histories, here and now and futures.

My father had a sense of his own culture because when I spoke with him in Chinese, again there were those subtle changes in his face. When the nurse(s) came to follow through with their procedures and addressed him in English I could see that his face was expressionless. If I read a passage to him from a book on plants, that expression was different from when I read a passage from a historical Chinese novel. When he was listening to Pavarotti there was a glow to his face which was different from if I played a Chinese female singer from the 1940s and 1950s.

Anyway, more recently whilst tracking developments on the Net and the building of “The Global Brain” I realized that culture is a core component here too. We talk about Semantics and yet the definition of semantics means different things to different people (around the world, across genders, traversing cultures and educational / professional reference points).

To Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C it means a set of ontologies to help us classify data objects. To me, it means those ontologies PLUS taking into account cultural and perceptual factors like subtle nuances, double entendres, potential lost in translations, the differences between male-female communication etc.

I think also of the coherence component. We can have ontologies which stand up in their own right and yet are not coherent in the whole. So, for example, the logic of their classification doesn’t synch with another’s. Paris in RDF form is a location, a proper noun and a fictional character from Homer’s Odysseus but, presently, if we went on the streets and asked people, “What does Paris mean to you?” the answer would not be “Capital city of France / Paris Hilton / Paris, Prince of Troy.” John / Jane Doe on the street is more likely to say:

* It means romance.

* It means the Eiffel Tower / Sacre Coeur / the Louvre / La Rive Gauche (the Left Bank) etc.

* It means Sartre / Voltaire / de Beauvoir etc.

* It means an eye line that’s different / compact / elegantly distinguishable from London, New York and Toyko: fewer skyscrapers, more central planning.

* It means expensive / chic / beautiful / etc.

So is this set of classifications coherent with the noun set? No, it’s not. That’s because the adjectives set hasn’t yet been accounted for in the W3C design (I’ve accounted for it, though, in my model and algorithms).

Within the coherence component we also have to think about the clustering approach and whether the Bayesian tree filter approach is the optimal model for clustering. I would argue not (but that’s another post and some more emails between me and the MIT Collaboratorium team).

Once we crack the coherence component, the next ones to focus on would be consideration and creativity. What tools can be developed to harness or enhance those?

Again, if we compare the Net’s potential Global Brain with the actual human brain we can see that according to my model, if we can establish the definitive components and where they reside (cognisance, communication, command / control, collaboration, coherence, creativity, consideration and culture) we may pinpoint the holistic manifestation of consciousness itself.

That’s something good and positive to work together towards…….