Steve Barth | Reflexions

Wolfram|Alpha Confuses Answers and Facts

Everybody's googley-eyed about the long-anticipated first-coming of Wolfram|Alpha, launched yesterday. Already, the system claims 10+ trillion of pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains. But can it cook?

Stephen Wolfram gives a very impressive demo. He should: he's both an acknowledged genius and simultaneously a guy who acts like he's pretending to be a genius. W|A stands as a milestone in The Quest for Computable Knowledge and is based on Wolfram's single-handed invention of A New Kind of Science (irrespective of previous work in chaos and complexity research).

A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over …. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic…

Why Buy the Cow?

At long last, Cisco Press has published Why Buy the Cow? How the On-Demand Revolution Powers the New Knowledge Economy and our book is now up on Amazon. Subrah Iyar, the co-founder of WebEx details the "rise of software as a service (SaaS), web collaboration, the changing role knowledge workers and the new opportunities web 2.0 technologies are creating." Read the introduction and first chapter online.

Unfortunately, you can't read the best chapter online, "The Tao of Disruption and Innovation," in which Dave Snowden and I muse about how technology innovation can also be disrupted itself —making the process tricky to predict or control. However, you can read most of it on Google book search here. (Why buy the cow, eh?)

Guest Blogging at Cognitive Edge

For the next two weeks, I will be guest blogging on Dave Snowden's Cognitive Edge website.

You Are Not in Control

Dave Snowden is all freaked out about how parasites can influence the behavior of their infected hosts—even humans and human cultures. According to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (nicely summarized by LiveScience on MSNBC) a unicellular organism “precisely alters fear.” Toxoplasma gondii causes rats to be attracted to—rather than fear—the smell of cats because T. gondii’s life cycle requires both animals. The rats get it by eating cat feces and the cats get it back by eating the rats. Changing the behavior of the rats presumably facilitates both transfers. It does not otherwise endanger their survival because it leaves their other instinctual fears alone.

Here’s the thing: up to 80% of humans are also infected by T. gondii at one point or other in their lives. There can be serious physiological consequences, but apparently psychological ones, too.

Complexity and Evolution

By the way, one of the parasitologists Carl Zimmer interviewed for Parasite Rex was Dr. Daniel R. Brooks a very cool biologist I met at Pedro Sotolongo’s complexity conference in Havana a few years ago. Dan is brilliant on ways in which evolutionary theory intersects with concepts in complexity, self-organization and information theories.

Workshop: Accelerating Decisions and Innovation

UPDATE: Unfortunately, this workshop has been cancelled. Stay tuned for future dates.

Richard Marrs and I will present a half-day workshop, "Accelerating Decisions and Innovation through Sense-Making" at the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals' 2007 International Annual Conference and Exhibition. The meeting will be in New York City April 30-May 3.

Supporting better, faster decision-making is a major imperative for CI practice. Organizations in many industries and markets face more dynamic and complex environments than ever before, driven by accelerated change, globalized competition, unexpected technologies, complicated sociopolitical influences and disruptive business models.

Innovation can be disrupted as well as disruptive

Today media and information networks are full of news and speculation about the discovery today of a terror plot to destroy airliners in flight. The reaction in the UK includes a ban on carrying laptops, digital players and mobile phones onto planes.

Dave Snowden and I are thinking about the ongoing evolution of on-demand applications such as WebEx and SalesForce.com. So while the ban may prove to be an overreaction, it serves to make a number of important points about the development of on-demand applications.

The Cappuccino Conquests

Coffee has always played a surprisingly complex role in the history of work, trade and social networking.

The Cappuccino Conquests is a fascinating study of the history of Italian coffee running through Sept. 2006 out of the University of Hertfordshire. Tracing this history from the invention in 1947 by Gaggia of a machine that produced “café crema” using piston-powered compression rather than mere steam, which led to coffee bar culture. The project offers a great case study of how technical and cultural innovation and diffusion cannot be easily untangled.

Along came a spider...(Things you should have been wondering about)

In the "Things you should have been wondering about" category, I found this interesting press release from The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Center for Scientific Research), a government-funded research organization, under the administrative authority of France's Ministry of Research.

"The extraordinary properties of spider's thread are like a blessing for researchers working on polymers. However, the amazing twisting properties it displays are still not very well understood. How can one explain the fact that a spider suspended by a thread remains completely motionless, instead of rotating like a climber does at the end of a rope? Researchers at the Laboratoire de physique des lasers (CNRS/University of Rennes) have described the exceptional properties of this material which still has some secrets to reveal. The results will be published in Nature on 30 March 2006."

The Metaphorical Universe

Mindful that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it's a duck, form this point on we'll adopt the position that since the universe registers and processes information like a quantum computer and is observationally indistinguishable from a quantum computer, then it is a quantum computer. --Seth Lloyd

I'm fascinated by How much do our metaphors shape our perceptions? And what responsibility do we then have to manage our metaphors to manage our perceptions?

There is a nice review/reflection by Margaret Wertheim of MIT Professor Seth Lloyd's 'Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos' (Knopf, March 2006) in today's LA Times Book Review section.

"Throughout history, humans have interpreted the world in terms of things they know. The ancient creator gods behaved like super-humans, coupling and breeding and giving birth to the cosmos, or fashioning its elements from familiar technologies such as weaving or molding clay. Modern scientific accounts also have drawn heavily on familiar contemporary tropes: In the 17th century, the universe was seen as a vast clockwork system. By the 19th, when the study of magnetic and electrical phenomena was hot, it was reconceived as a network of invisible force fields. At the dawn of the age of digital computers, scientists speculated that it was one of these machines," she muses.

"The street finds it's own uses for things"

I am looking for examples of William Gibson's dictum, "The street finds it's own uses for things." What happens when technologies get loose from their inventors? What turns good little inventions into runaways?

I came across a great example yesterday. "Machinima" uses video game engines to create virtual worlds that can be explored interactively or render to digital movies. Machinima has been used to create commercials and music videos, but what's best about it is that it gives average individuals access to the kinds of tools major studios use to make $100 million blockbusters.

One of the best examples of this emergent art form is "The Journey," an award-winning 8 minute short from Friedrich 'fiezi' Kirschner.

Tunneling Out

Found a fascinating Seattle Times magazine article from last November 28. "Life Interrupted" wonders about the "cognitive overload" of our highly efficient connected age.

"Technology helps connect us to friends and, on occasion, soul mates. It prevents phone tag. It sorts and recalls massive amounts of information, simplifies writing, and even aids those who want to mellow out by working from the boonies," writes Richard Seven.

Distracted by Danger Girl

Another productive afternoon totally wasted reading fascinating stuff on the Web. (We're drowning in knowledge, too.)

Always distracted by interesting misappropriations of theories of the immune system, I came across the interesting ideas and equally interesting life story of barmaid-turned-scientist Polly Matzinger and her revolutionary Danger Model, which is proving useful in fields far beyond medicine.

Open source marketing

An article in Sunday's New York Times magazine reports on "a growing number of marketers organizing veritable armies of hired 'trendsetters' or 'influencers' or 'street teams' to execute 'seeding programs,' 'viral marketing,' 'guerrilla marketing.'"

Novelist William Gibson predicted just such a trend in Pattern Recognition.

Everything I say is a lie

Ming the Mechanic spotted an interesting article in the September/October 2004 issue of Across the Board. "Questioning Authority" is an interview with David Livingstone Smith, director of the New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology.

Party School Bags another Nobel, Dude

This is getting a little embarrassing. My "party school" alma mater, UC Santa Barbara, just won another Nobel Prize--the second this year. I guess they're partyin' now!