Shooting a long video to show how I’m applying AJAX, PHP, AS3 and SQL in my perception tool and where that will complement and advance Semantic Web frameworks. Plus the video covers some other cool Ajax for UI design.

Hopefully will post it on Saturday 1st August 2009.

This week the inspirational people really make us think about the creation, meaning and value of life.

(1.) Families with loved ones fighting in Afghanistan

Last week was an incredibly sad time for service personnel and their families. Eight British soldiers died. Army families are an inspiration because of their forbearance and commitment towards their countries. For most of us, including the politicians who have no experience of combat and whose children are not in the front line, we’re several layers abstracted from events but for army families the horrors of war and loss of loved ones are very stark and very real.

For anyone interested in keeping abreast of the situation in Afghanistan (political aspects as well as casualties, analysis and military approach), please visit these sites which includes the one to the Combined Joint Task Force:

* http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/10/july-2009-british-troop-deaths

* http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tag/afghanistan/

* http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/south_asia/afghanistan_pakistan/default.stm

* http://www.cjtf82.com/

* http://www.afghanconflictmonitor.org/2009/07/index.html

(2.) Lord Robert Winston

Lord Winston is Emeritus Professor of Fertility Studies at Imperial College, one of the world’s leading science institutions, and its first-ever Professor of Science and Society. He first sparked in my consciousness in the early 1990s when the IVF team he led at Hammersmith Hospital made pioneering breakthroughs in pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, which identifies defects in human embryos.

His official website is available here: http://www.robertwinston.org/

It may seem strange that child Twain was interested in such things, but at the time my mother had plans I’d become a doctor, my beloved grandmother had passed away from cancer when I was 11 and I wanted to know how the human body and mind worked. It is because of Lord Winston and other scientists of international renown like him that, through books/videos/DVDs of the Royal Institution lectures and television documentaries, kids like me became more educated about science, technology and how it can be harnessed to help society.

The BBC documentaries he’s been involved with have included the BAFTA-winning The Human Body, exploring child development in Child Of Our Time and The Story of God. Here’s a clip examining creativity and one examining religion and belief:

His latest book is Evolution Revolution, published by DK (Dorling Kindersley):

This weekend, he popped up in my consciousness again because of a Times interview in which he reflected on significant people in his life. He included his father and men who had been his intellectual inspirations as well as his patients.

· http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/article6648546.ece

Of his patients, he notes:

“It is easy to become too scientific about medicine, so my patients’ pain and anxiety have been crucial in helping me to deal with human problems. They have also helped me to listen more, which has made me a better surgeon and a better person.”

To me this once again highlights that machines can help us make diagnosis and interpret symptoms, but the emotional content and contextualization remains very much human-to-human. So in the case of the Semantic Web and the codes and KIR (knowledge image representation) to-date, we can TECHNICALLY tag concepts but we still have some way to go to extract what emotional meanings the content elicits in each of us.

It’s in the process of hearing, reflecting on the messages conveyed and then acting upon those messages in a constructive way that we become better people.

Ah, and the other reason Lord Winston is an inspiration is because he’s a………polymath. He’s a scientist, a musician and a politician, and someone interested in how the human mind works:

(3.) Tony Benn, MP

Tony Benn is a veteran Labor MP and the current President of the Stop the War coalition (http://www.stopwar.org.uk/). He is a socialist in words and in actions; he was a key politician in the creation of the Peerage Act of 1963, following the renouncement of his own hereditary title of Viscount Stansgate. His father was Secretary of State to India, which led to him meeting Gandhi when he was 6, and he himself served as Secretary of State for Industry during the Harold Wilson premiership.

Although his politics is not to the tastes of all, there was a ‘Words from the Wise’ article with him that made me stop and think:

· http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6648861.ece

Specifically, these two gems:

“Dare to be a Daniel/ Dare to stand alone/ Dare to have a purpose firm!/ Dare to make it known.” — from a hymn by Philip Bliss.

“Encouragement is the most important gift one individual can give to another…”

Anyone interested in Tony Benn and his politics can view him in interview action on YouTube here:

* http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tony+benn&search_type=&aq=f

Anyone who makes it their life’s work to represent the voices of the person in the street in the way Tony Benn has — against attempts to curtail his ability to do so, including from his own political party and the BBC — is simply something to admire and inspiring, regardless of whatever our own political affiliations.

Although, obviously, I can’t claim to have any of Benn’s fortitude of conviction and character, I suppose that the way I envisage the Semantic Web, the Global Brain and Web3.0: socially voiced co-creation is different from the orthodoxy that’s forming — wherein we risk AI and natural language and all the other tech tools we’re throwing at the situation to advance us no more forward than what’s happened over the last 40 years of since Turing’s tests for machine intelligence — and I do feel a need to “make it known”.

The concern is that semantics and increasing man-machine smartness becomes no more than more hype and marketing ploys towards more mass consumerism and calls upon our planet’s resources when, at its core, what we should GENUINELY be striving towards is the education/Enlightenment provision and solution-finding for the world’s challenges (over-production and wastage of resources, poverty, inequitable education provision, medical breakthroughs, etc.).

Maybe in what I’ve produced on the Semantic Web, the Global Brain and Web 3.0: socially-voiced co-creation I am applying Philip Bliss and channeling some of Benn’s words of wisdom……………….

This week I had a catch-up with one of my former managers — the brilliant, dynamic one — and, naturally, we covered a topic that’s dominated the media over the last 18 months: the global financial crisis. It’s interesting how our views are evolving, his as an insider in the thick of it and mine as a former insider now outsider who is, frankly, shocked at the scale of writedowns and losses incurred by once great institutions and benchmarks for corporate excellence.

We both agree that things remain tough in the global economy and for banks particularly. The finance raising environment remains slow and this has the knock-on effect of companies not being invested in, which isn’t good for the economy generally. The recruitment and employment sector is also suffering as a result.

Thankfully, he and his team are now involved in one of the world’s largest and most important transactions, one that will contribute to getting one particular country’s economy back up on its feet. Knowing that his team is involved is heartening. They’re simply THE BEST IN THE WORLD AT WHAT THEY DO and in complete contrast to the dolts who got us all into the mire with mortgage CDO risks. This isn’t merely loyalty — or some may say “subjective bias”; their strengths have been independently recognized in established banking journals and acknowledged by competing teams from other institutions.

From a personal experience level, I know that portfolios and projects led by him have a higher probability of success than failure.

His leadership means that his teams are, often, at the top of their specialism and skills range. They’re called upon to trouble-shoot the most complex challenges in the tightest of times, against what appear to be insurmountable obstacles and they manage to do it, seamlessly. They invariably bring with them vital technical knowhow about balance sheet restructuring, strategic nous and interpersonal panache. That’s his modus operandi and it becomes theirs.

So now they’re in there, clearing up the messes in various institutions that they had no part in creating.

Now, for months on end, bankers have all been tarred with the same brush: hubris, greed, ego, dodgy, money-grubbing and stupid. In fact, 99 percent of bankers are hard-working, intelligent, competent and committed to the wider community (including charities). It’s just unfortunate that 1 percent was allowed to spoil the barrel and bring economies to the brink. It’s even more unfortunate that measures and mandates were not in place to empower appropriate senior management to prevent ridiculous levels of risk-taking and leverage. Equally, it’s unfortunate the regulatory authorities and governments did not intervene sooner and with more directed focus.

Just as in the case of Tim Geithner, the US Treasury Secretary, Alistair Darling the British Chancellor has this week laid out a White Paper on financial sector reforms:

* http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/speech_chex_080709.htm

· http://www.silobreaker.com/proposal-for-stability-council-totally-underwhelming-16_2262444519687454754

· http://www.thirdsector.co.uk/Channels/Finance/login/919271/

· http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/tracycorrigan/5789173/White-Paper-marks-a-necessary-philosophical-shift—but-danger-lurks.html

· http://blogs.reuters.com/uknews/2009/07/08/financial-regulation-plan-white-paper-or-white-flag/

Here’s a personal observation and perhaps it’s a reflection on an area the government needs improving upon: communication and strategic think through. When we Google “Alistair Darling white paper” we don’t get any links to HM Treasury and the original drafts of the Chancellor’s speeches — not even by the third page of results (!). Nor do we even get any links to YouTube / Hulu / other video-sharing sites of those speeches. Moreover even when we Google with “Alistair Darling white paper HM Treasury” we don’t get the latest White Paper on the financial reforms. Instead, the top link leads us to some obscure 1999 paper on “Housing Policy Green Paper”.

Hmmn….weren’t we searching for a WHITE paper? How’s the government tagging its content for SEO?

If government places tackling financial reform as a top agenda item, then they should ensure the HM Treasury’s materials on the matter are at the top of all search engines and the public have ready access to direct source. Compare this with the American approach. Obama and Geithner’s speeches are linked to the whitehouse.gov site, barackobama.com or on YouTube / other video-sharing site.

As for the financial reforms on both sides of the Atlantic, it will be a challenge to make those reforms flexible, TARGETED and easy to implement. They should enable the brilliant and dynamic bankers to innovate and arrange the financing necessary to build homes, hospitals, schools, infrastructure, techco’s, etc. whilst also making it impossible for dodgy, incompetent bankers to operate.

I believe the transaction my former manager and his team is putting together will go some way in showing us what banking competence should look and be like. I hope they’re left to get on with it and sort it out rather than hindered by politicking and people who don’t know, technically, how to deal with balance sheet and structured instrument complexities.

Over recent times, my mother has asked the “What if…….?” question. What would have happened if I’d stayed under his leadership and in his team. Well, I’d now be part of the world’s #1 team in that specialism and my sleeves would be rolled up on the one of the most important transactions to tackle the global financial crisis. What an amazing experience that would be to have on a CV, at my age.

Then again……..I wouldn’t be contributing my wee bit to the Global Brain or constructs of the Semantic Web or presenting the case for “Web 3.0: socially-voiced co-creation”. I wouldn’t be getting excited about the possibilities of haptics, metaverses, mapping, knowledge representation, AI, natural language, source-binding, dynamic edits, P2P, the Cloud etc. etc. etc. to enable ordinary people to collaborate and cross-pollinate ideas and materials towards solution-finding.

I wouldn’t be playing with code to make it do what I believe it should do.

I’d be forensically dissecting a bank’s decimated balance sheet and going, “???!!! How did people let this happen?”

Technological innovation is where it’s @ and it may yet prove to be the tool which empowers us all to prevent future global financial crises. We shall see…………

In the same week that the media moguls are gathered in Sun Valley to attend boutique investment bank, Allen + Co’s, pow-pow over how to monetize social networks, get consumers to pay for content and make their investors happy, the political leaders are in Italy discussing the global economic crisis and climate change.

The two events may seem discrete and unconnected, but actually they can be “twained”. Here goes……..

Yesterday news reports said that G8 leaders had hailed a “historic” agreement on climate change policies to try and set new temperature and CO2 emission targets for 2050 (lowering by 2 degrees Celsius and halving, respectively). This follows on from 1990 agreements to cut CO2 emissions by 20 percent by 2020. Here’s the website of the July 2009 G8 summit being held in L’Aquila, Italy and hosted by the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi:

News coverage on the G8 is available here:

* http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/g8/

Below are some useful links on what the UN Environment Program, Oxfam, BBC forum bloggers, Open Democracy, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the All Africa network believes needs to be covered by the climate change agenda at the G8 summit:

· http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=593&ArticleID=6242&l=en

· http://www.oxfam.org/en/campaigns/g8-2009

· http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?forumID=6705&edition=1&ttl=20090709111737

· http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the-g8-and-climate-change-towards-copenhagen

· http://www.panda.org.za/?section=News_AboutUs&id=191

· http://allafrica.com/stories/200907070060.html

CLIMATE CHANGE: TWAINING SOCIAL NETWORKS TECHNOLOGY WITH PRODUCTION STREAMS AND CUTTING CO2 EMISSIONS

Several years ago, I posted a broad overview of my business case for “Web 3.0: socially-voiced co-creation” onto slideshare — an excellent site run by an excellent management team, btw. In its time it was ranked #1 if you searched for “Web 3.0”.

Now, I’m not going to be one of those people who allows the “Why should emerging economies agree to cuts when it’s the developed economies who’ve been responsible for polluting the world ever since the Industrial Revolution for the last two centuries?” argument distract me from what is a CLEAR CHALLENGE AND SOLUTION we all need to find. Nor am I going to argue, “Well, emerging economies like India and China are actually churning out more CO2 because their factories are manufacturing goods to fulfill the consumption demands of developed economies. It’s actually them that’s causing us to pollute in the first place. Factories built because developed country economies wanted to take advantage of the cheaper labor and wage costs abroad, etc. etc. etc.”

There are countless objections all sides can put forward to why developed and emerging economies shouldn’t do something about climate change but all of these objections are, frankly, fatuous and don’t move human progress forward (and I like moving human progress forward, :*)).

What also needs to be recognized is that what all governments have yet to do is to make COMPELLING BUSINESS ARGUMENTS for companies and consumers to tackle climate change. Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth documentary remains a philosophical call to our conscience rather than a pragmatic program towards change in action — not simply attitude — of consumer behavior.

What we need is the model I propose in ‘Web 3.0: socially-voiced co-creation’.

At the moment, social networks seem to be little more than online meeting points where consumer herds are channeled into topic pens for marketers to push more information at them and increase their consumption habits. They then buy more goods (often not what they genuinely need but for momentary consumer satiation or fad reasons), cause factories to churn out more CO2 and other noxious chemicals to pollute the environment and then waste electricity on the gadgets and goods they’ve bought but don’t really need. Disposal of these over-produced gadgets with their harmful substances (e.g., mercury in monitors, aluminum smelting, etc.) further causes complications to the ozone layer which still need to be researched and mitigated against. Admittedly, there are political lobby groups set up on the social networks — including climate change activists — but still this is not the optimal harnessing of consumer intelligence, influence or active collaboration on a wider and more effective scale than some educated niche activists providing information and awareness rather than instigating actions which affect bottom line results.

In short, the non-virtuous cycle of climate concerns goes around: we’re marketed into wanting, we buy to satisfy this want and then we worry about what kind of Earth our children and their children will inherit (deforestation, ocean pollution, out of control weather, airborne chemicals which damage their lungs, etc.).

Now let’s turn the social network model on its head and think about a monetization model at the same time.

Imagine if, instead of registered users being pushed marketing at or lobbied, they were engaged in the production process. Imagine if they were harnessed as a gigantic market research pool to ask them:

· what products they’d like to buy

· what price point they’d be prepared to pay for that item

· when they plan to complete purchase (within 1 week, 1 month, 1 quarter, half a year, end of year)

· which distribution outlet they’re more likely to buy it from (online, boutique, super-store)

· who else they would recommend the product to

instead of the current market research methods which try to extrapolate purchase intent from demographic information gathered (e.g., if you live in a household where income is US$100K and you are a white, male professional who reads the New Yorker, you’re likely to buy the Apple iPhone).

Then imagine if they were enabled with tools to collaborate in the design of products, with a percentage share in the net profits of any sold for a defined period of time. Next, imagine that this market research and product collaboration feeds directly into a sophisticated inventory system so that the company produces a level of goods which more accurately reflects and meets consumer demands — rather than the current way this works which is whereby companies have to make projections 3 to 5 CAGR years in advance, based on consumption behavior gathered in reports from the likes of Datamonitor etc. which are only comparatively small sample populations with all their inherent skews, extrapolation inaccuracies and time lags rather than social network sampling which is instantaneous, targeted and more representative of sizeable populations. The way it currently works also means that there is a lot of wastage in materials used to market to consumers (e.g., flyers, billboards, paper cut-outs at consumer electronic shows).

Finally, consider how this change in engaging the consumer further upstream in the production process will change CO2 emissions and move the climate change issue towards a positive solution.

Companies will actually gain insights into what consumers REALLY need and want. They can better manage their inventories to produce at levels needed rather than over-stock. In this way, factories won’t be over-producing and churning out excessive chemicals to further damage the environment. Plus companies will increase their communication effectiveness and production efficiencies, and reduce the wastage and costs incurred in over-stocking of materials, labor, electricity etc. needed to produce goods to meet consumer demands.

Governments can support companies which foster this form of positive consumer influence by giving them tax breaks, emission offsets and assistance with factories abroad where the goods will be manufactured.

Moreover, the consumer can be incentivized and will be rewarded for their participation in product design process. They will also end up getting products they want: what, when, where and how they want it.

Now, THAT is the COMPELLING BUSINESS ARGUMENT governments, companies and policy-makers need to explore and implement.

These “2 degrees Celsius and halving CO2 emissions here and there, developed versus emerging economies claims to be allowed to build factories and use electricity” etc. are too ephemeral and theoretical to companies and to consumers.

What we need to do is transform the awareness of climate change into ACTION at the bottom line level. We need to engage consumers further upstream in the production process and not simply downstream where they’re pushed more marketing to increase unnecessary consumption (and, inadvertently, CO2 emissions).

There, that’s my “twaining” of the paradigms between technology, business models and government policy on climate change.

Now we just need Google to choose my GREENSPOT proposal (an Android / mobile devices application to develop a global social network for green consumers) in their 2008/9 Project 10 to 100th competition so that we can realize this vision of companies and consumers contributing positive action where climate change, changing consumption behavior and better production levels is concerned!

* http://www.project10tothe100.com/

Yes, we do need the commitment of tech giants like Google to do it — purely because they have the global resources to reach out towards corporate and consumer audiences and encourage them to convert to new consumption and production frameworks.

Yes and the ‘Web 3.0: socially-voiced co-creation” model is consistent with the Global Brain and Web 3.0 (the Semantic Web) constructs. The objective of any Global Brain is for us to collectively collaborate to solve the world’s major challenges which includes climate change. The usefulness of a Semantic Web would be for machines to be able to understand us and each other when, for example, there’s an inventory order out of Paris and we can work out that means from the capital of France instead of the Hilton celebrity.

Tesla is right: think through before we do. At some point, the theories and the practices will twain — LOL.

Further to my suggestion on my ‘The Global Brain’ knol:

http://knol.google.com/k/twain/the-global-brain-the-semantic-web-the/31fjy9fjsu1×2/19

that the Linked Data community should consider tidying up their LOD diagram and cross-pollinating it with the debategraph visualization tools, David Price has produced this initial version (please click on the image and you’ll be directed to the debategraph site):

Anyone committed to the advancement of the Global Brain, the Semantic Web and collective sense-making, please visit the debategraph site and help to populate and sanity-check the above graphic.

In seriousness, the debategraph’s systematic and dynamic wiki is a step in the right direction compared with LOD’s current static messy spore:

Bravo to David Price!

* http://debategraph.org/flash/fv.aspx?r=18702&sc=small

and definitely the Semantic Technology 2009 organizers should consider inviting the debategraph team to their event (14-18 June 2009, San Jose, http://www.semantic-conference.com/) to swap notes and move collective sense-making and semantic discern forward!

Oh and you may all like to know that my ‘The Global Brain’ knol has just been awarded the “Top Viewed Knol Award” (my first) to add to its “Top Pick Knol” designation. I’m really proud of this because “Top Pick Knol” is given for knols of the highest quality and it’s good to know that its quantity dimension is doing well too!