August 08, 2004
Internet Time Blog on Books
This is a compilation of MT blog entries from the BOOKS category.
April 11, 2004
wider than the sky
In late March, I commented on a review of Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman's new book, wider than the sky, the phenomenal gift of consciousness. The review got me fired up. "The brain is not a logically structured organ; these processes of connection resemble the processes of metaphor more than those of logic." That's my kind of science.
I ordered a copy from Amazon. "Highly readable," wrote Oliver Sachs on the back cover. "A good roadmap for the lay reader," said Francis Crick. 
said Amazon. I could hardly wait.
The first learnings:
The human brain is the most complicated material object in the known universe. It weighs about three pounds. If the cortex were unfolded (it's gnarly), it would be the size of a table napkin. It contains 30 billion neurons and a billion synapses (connections).
There is one simple principle that governs how the brain works: it evolved; that is, it was not designed.
One of the most basic processes in higher brains is the ability to carry out perceptual categorization -- to "make sense" of the world.
Memory is the capacity to repeat or suppress a specific mental or physical act. It arises as a result of changes in synaptic efficacy (or synaptic strength) in circuits of neuronal groups. After such changes have occurred, they tend to favor the recruitment of certain of these circuits to yield re-enactment. (In other words, memories are not stored; they're made fresh every time.)
One extraordinary phenomenal feature of conscious experience is that normally it is all of a piece--it is unitary. Any experienced conscious moment simultaneously includes sensory intput, consequences of motor activity, imagery, emotions, fleeting memories, bodily sensations, and a peripheral fringe. In any ordinary circumstances it does not consist of "just this pencil with which I am writing," nor can I reduce it to that. Yet, at the same time, one unitary scene flows and transforms itself into another complex but also unitary scene.
The term quale referes to the particular experience of some property. (Plural of quale is qualia.) The experience of a conscious scene as unitary suggests the view that all conscious experiences are qualia. In this view, the separation of qualia into single, narrow feelings such as red, warm, and so forth, while thinkable and verbally describable, does not constitute a full recognition of the discriminations involved.
Degeneracy is the ability of structurally different elements of a system to perform the same function or yield the same output.
This degeneracy business confused me later on, when the sledding got heavy. For me, degenerate brings up images of grubby guys in the alley drinking sterno. In fact, at this point, I began to experience a phenomenon that I hadn't felt in several years. My eyes were scanning the pages but nothing was sticking in my head. I'd finish a page and have no idea what Edelman was talking about. Some sentences were so laden with five-syllable words that I simply gave up.
Edelman himself acknowledges that understanding his topic is not a slam-dunk.
Okay, if you say so. Let's go on.
Lost?
I must have been out of the room when God passed out whichever collection of multiple intelligences is required to decipher this stuff.
Following a thirty-one page glossary and four pages of bibliographic references, the author concludes thusly:
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/biblio.html
The exploding list of references speaks to the conclusion that the understanding of consciousness has a promising scientific future.
I arose from my bath. (That's where I do a lot of my reading.) I was frustrated.
- Was it recognizing that in some areas, no matter how hard I concentrate, I'm just not equipped to receive the message? No, that's a lesson I learned long ago.
- Was it because I'd paid 16 cents a page and jumped over half of them because they would have made about as much sense to me had they been written in Sanskrit? No, that's not it. You take chances. Sometimes they don't work out.
- Was it disappointment in discovering that while Edelman has great scientific chops, he wasn't in the room when God handed out the good writing genes? Maybe a little.
When I reflect on it now, the philosophy of Don Norman cheers me on. My main takeaway from The Design of Everyday Things was that when something screws up, it's not necessarily your fault. You walk into the glass panel instead of the door next to it, that's the designer's fault, not yours. Edelman may have tried, but he didn't produce a book for the layman. wider than the sky is not a pop book like Robert Ornstein's The Psychology of Consciousness. (Most of Ornstein's readers probably got the message even though they were high as kites when reading.)
April 02, 2004
Self competition?
Someone explain this to me.
I just went to Amazon to buy a friend a book. Amazon was asking $19.25 for the hardcover edition, not bad since I'd paid $27 when the book came out. However, next to the Amazon price were the words "42 used & new from $5.99." I ended up buying a new copy of the book from a dealer in Jersey for $9.75.
Is Amazon raking enough commission back from the merchant I used to justify forgoing its take on a direct sale? Or is this to keep people who sell discount books from nibbling into Amazon's market share?
January 25, 2004
The Moment of Chaos: Warning
I just finished reading The Moment of Complexity by Mark C. Taylor. I picked up a few memes and some interesting tidbits. However, if I had it to do over again, I wouldn't. Do yourself a favor and read my thoughts before wading into this tome's 275 pages:
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four
Fourth Moment of Complexity
When we left off at our previous moment of complexity, the author finally stopped dropping big names on campus (e.g. Derrida, Hegel, Heidegger, Kant) and got around to defining complex adaptive systems.
evolving complexity
My suspicions were aroused when the author launches into a ten-page review of Gödel, Escher, Bach. (A leftover from another project? A paper from a grad student?) Using the word "ant" as a transition, we're suddenly reading John Holland's observation that the economy, our central nervous systems, ecologies, immune systmes, the development of multicellular organisms, and the processes of evolutionary genetics are all adaptive nonlinear networks at heart. Murray Gell-Mann throws in culture and computer programs.
The instability of complex systems makes you consider them over time. Stuart Kauffman critiques Darwin, noting that organisms resemble Rube Goldberg machines. Kauffman's hot; without self-organization, he notes, evolution would not be possible. If you thought Holland covered a lot of territory, be aware that Kauffman's vision covers not only science but also society, politics, metaphysics, and religion. Kauffman is convinced that the emergence of order is spontaneous but not accidental. We're inevitably headed for a single, global culture wherein people, tech, economics, and knowledge all blend together all over the planet.
screening information
What does it mean if the electricity in our heads conforms to the rules of complex adaptive systems? The author doesn't ask that directly. Instead, he writes several pages worthy of Castaneda's brujo after a double-dose of peyote:
Wow. That's one hell of a paragraph. I read it three times. Web without a weaver. Nothing new under the sun. Reproducing, not producing. Nobody will re-engineer this one. Unless they look at it as denial of responsibility. Or taking on a new religion which submerges the individual. Or Mark smoking something.
Gotta love this one:
Oh, God. Kill me before I write again!
The title of Kevin Kelly's great bio book springs to mind: Out of Control.
Gell-Mann writes of cultural DNA, "borrowing a term from Hazel Henderson." Plate-o-shrimp. I'd never heard of Hazel Henderson until June of last year. She said that the economists who control the political side nationally pay attention to only four factors — unemployment, deficits, inflation, and interest rates. But the world is more complex than that. The economists are linear and therefore can’t grok complex systems. A “Post-Cartesian Scientific Worldview” sees interconnectedness, redistribution (recycling), heterarchy (webs), complimentarity (both/and), etc. Bingo! Later in the day I thanked Hazel for cluing me in to why I'd always thought economics was a crock.
Daniel Dennett takes memes seriously. He figures they can reprogram with operating system of the brain. Memes and genes are in a coevolutionary, coadaptive relationship. Ray Kurtzweil goes further: our human software will replace our bodily hardware.
the currency of education
Uh-oh. In this chapter, the author hops on the dot-com era eLearning bandwagon. He says "education is a commodity that is distributable through telematic technologies." He repeats lines from Merrill Lynch's gushy The Book of Knowledge.
The founder of Knowledge Universe was telling academic institutions "We are going to eat your lunch." (A couple of years after this, Milken had bailed, closing the doors of almost all of his educational acquisitions except Leap Frog, which has become such a big winner it has more than covered Milken's losses in the rest of his Universe.)
Bankrolled by investment banker Herbert Allen, the author founds Global Educaiton Network. His faculty critics just aren't seeing the big picture. "The most important legacy we can leave the next generation is the hope that creative change is still possible."
>hr>
This final chapter has next to nothing to do with what comes before. It's as if Mark needed another forty pages to fulfilll his book contract, so he excised parts of his business plan for GEN and his diary from that time, and just slapped them onto the end of the manuscript.
Now the "book without an author" theme which I found capivating the first time through seems an apologia, a rationalization for starting a book but not finishing it.
Mark C. Taylor's webiste at WIlliams
The website of the Global Education Network has a screenshot, an 800 number, and the words "Our website is undergoing maintenance.
We apologize for the inconvenience."
January 23, 2004
A Third Moment of Complexity
critical emergence
The "critics" that are critical here are structuralists, deconstructionists, and worse. They argue over meaning but always make the same point, namely that, "systems and structures inevitably totalize by excluding difference and repressing otherness."
Uber-structuralist Lévi-Strauss looks at language as if phonemes and morphemes are like protons and neutrons, enabling one to construct a periodic table of the language. "I have always aimed at drawing up an inventory of mental patterns, to reduce apparently arbitary data to some kind of order." So...the world is simple, we just have yet to discover the code.
Along comes Foucault. (I'm glad I graduated from college before this crew began to publish.) Structure? Patterns? Thinking? All of this is context-specfic. Do the cultural archeology and you find that language, perception, and practice are all constructed.
Derrida, Kirkegaard, Hegel, Freud, Baudrillard. Regarding "The End of Production," Baudrillard wrote, "The first shockwave of this transition from produtction to pure and simple reproduction took place in May '68. They struck the universities first, and the faculty of human sciences first of all, becuase that was where it became most evident (even without a clear "political" consciousness) that we were no longer productive, only reprductive (and that lecturers, science and culture were themselves only relays in the general reproduction of the system.)"
Yawn. May '68. Productivity on campus. Hmmm. The month before, I started attending the eight-week Army Office Basic Course at Ft. Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. My roommate and I drank beer and watched reruns of "Combat" for homework. (We'd swagger into class the next day, mouthing the World War II solider talk Vic Morrow used in the foxhole.) Then we'd play 'Nam Arty' for gunnery practice. You played Nam Arty by lying on your back behind the sofa with a handful of darts. You'd lob the darts over the side, trying to hit the target pinned to the back of the closet door across the room. The other player, your spotter, gave feedback with which to correct your aim. My roommate and I both graduated with Top Honors and Expert Marksman status. Who cares about non-production on campus? We were preparting to fight a war. Ha, ha, ha, ha.
strange loops
René Magritte, Derrida, Isaac Newton, Schiller, Hegel, and Heidegger. Remember the story about the guy who visits prison. One prisoner says "35," and the cell block rocks with laughter. Another con says "84," again followed by gales of laughter. Puzzled, the newcomer asks what's up. He is told that since everyone's heard all the jokes, they numbered them to save time. The visitor shouts "23." Total silence. Nothing. Why happened? he asked. Why aren't they laughing? "It's all in how you tell it," he was told. To which I reply "Descartes!" "Kant!" "Humberto Maturana!" I'm not laughing over this chapter.
"Descartes set in motion developments that eventually led to 'the will to master,' which has resulted in twentieth-century techno-science. Just as sociolcultural constructivism leads to a form of subjective idealism that negates objectivity by consuming the natural world, so the will to mastery issues in a 'subjective egoism,' which is ultimately destructive. " Ho, ho, ho. Those professors can really tell 'em, can't they?
noise in formation
You must understand the relationship of information to complexity and vice-versa in order to appreciate the importance of the emerging network culture. If you'd read Claude Shannon, you can skip this chapter.
emerging complexity
The task of making meaning out of randomness is what self-organization is all about, wrote Henri Atlan in his inexplicably untranslated L'organisation biologique et la thé de l'information (1972).
Defining complexity is complex. Besiders, humanity always lusts for simplicity. Newton was more metaphysician than physicist. He wrote more religious treatises than science works. One God, one way things happen.
Herbert Simon said complexity came from a large number of parts that interact in a nonsimple way.
Complex systems are different from complicated systems. A snowflake is complicated but it comes from simple rules. It doesn't change form until it melts. Nor is a complex system chaotic; chaos is the lack of all order, because the internal parts are not connected.
The characteristics are complex systems are:
- Many parts, connected in multiple ways
- Diverse components interacting both serially and in parallel
- Spontaneously self-organizing
- Can't be reverse-engineered
- Interaction of parts changes the whole
- Open, adaptive, evolving
- Emergence occurs far from equilibrium, on the edge of chaos
Large systems with many components evolve to a critical state way out of equilibrium. One more snowflake may precipitate the avalanche.
"32!" Oh wait, I meant to quote the author, saying, "A few lines later, he concludes the novel with a 'Chorous Logico-Philosophicus' which parodies Wittgenstein while suggesting the point of the tale the authors have spun:
Emergent complexity
Bear us aloft!
Don't you love it when professors talk dirty?
Complex behavior comes from the interplay of organisms, not from the action of any single organism.
For hundreds of years, we've been praying in Newton's church. Complexity is a new system of beliefs. It's impossible to build faith in complexity by singing from the Newtonian hymnal. Hence, to become polytheistic and embrace both new and old, the complexity liturgy must be repeated until it penetrates our resistances. So, one more time:
Jay's Ruminations
Today Bob Horn told me he's being awarded a lifetime achievement award from ISPI. He described some of his current work on "messy problems" for the likes of NASA. Since I was in the midst of my complexity readings, I said that the ISPI I had known treated every situation as a closed system. Bob's acceptance speech may address instructional design solutions to messy problems. This I'd love to see.
Reading through page after page of philosophical horsefeathers, I ask "Am I getting anything out of this?" Enough to make it worthwhile continuing, I guess. I've got about a hundred pages to go. Several evenings of speed reading and page-turning with a yellow marker in hand. That's bedtime stuff.
Earlier today I started reading Dave Snowden's papers on JIT KM. He draws heavily on complexity but makes it useful rather than a vocabulary and postmodern Euro-vocabulary test. My take on Snowden's work will pop up in other posts here.
You might compare the definition of complexity here with the one in It's Alive.
Bear with me through this trying journey. My gut tells me the complexity paradigm is vital to our understanding of the world. It also suggests immediate practical applications. Don't let my thinking out loud drive you away! This is a short journey through the abyss of academia.
"Maxwell's equations, Schrödinger's equation, and Hamiltonian mechanics can each be expressed in a few lines. The ideas that form the foundation of our worldview are also very simple indeed: The world is lawful, and the same basic laws hold everywhere. Everything is simple, neat, and expressible in terms of everyday mathematics, either partial or ordinary differential equations. Everything is simple and neat, except, of course, the world. Every place we look outside the physics classroom we see a world of amazing complexity. The world contains many examples of complex ecologies at all levels: huge mountain ranges, the delicate ridge on the surface of a sand dune, the salt spray coming off a wave, the interdependencies of financial markets, and the true ecologies formed by living things. Each situation is highly organized and distinctive, with biological systems forming a limiting case of exceptional complexity. So why, if the laws are so simple, is the world so complicated?"
Simple Lessons from Complexity written by Nigel Goldenfeld and Leo P. Kadanoff in Science (vol. 284, 2 April 1999:
January 17, 2004
Books Update
Sellout!
The first printing of Lance Dublin's and my book, Implementing eLearning, has sold out.
Don't worry. It's at the printer now. New stock will be ready in ten days.
Lance and I are still offering a free Implementation Action Planning Template to anyone who requests it.
I just updated my Books page. It's dangerous work. (I simply must get a copy of this one. )
You're more likely to find what I'm reading now here.
January 14, 2004
The Moment of Complexity
Yesterday I stopped by Avenue Books in the Elmwood, another independent bookseller unable to withstand the Borders/Barnes beast, and found a book I hadn't heard of, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture by Mark C. Taylor. Wow!
I'm only up to page 28, but my head is already swimming. Taylor is a master synthesizer. He grabbed my attention from word one:
What distringuises the moment of complexity is not change as such but rather the acceleration of the rate of change. Everything moves faster and faster until speed becomes an end in itself.
Taylor's introduction rapidly brings up Derrida, Duchamp, Warhol, Mies van der Rohe, Robert Venturi, Frank Gehry, Foucault, Kant, Hegel, Claude Shannon, Norbert Weiner, John Holland, Stuart Kauffman, Murray Gell-Mann, Chuck CLose, Stephen Jay Gould, and Daniel Dennett. It's going to be quite a trick to meld these characters into a coherent story.
A back-of-the-book blurb by William Mitchell, Dean of MIT's School of Architecture and author of the delightful City of Bits, says "Somewhere inside Mark Taylor's head, worlds collide; Kant and Hegel run smack-bank into cyberspace. The result is an incandescent asteroid show of ideas."
Has anyone else here read this tome? Please leave a comment telling me what you think.
January 05, 2004
Inevitable Surprises & Scenario Learning
Inevitable Surprises by Peter Schwartz
Hang on tight, for we're all going on a roller coaster ride. Science? Politics? Culture? It's all going to change so much you won't recognize it. The gusher of new information doubles in volume every year. Networks reach out to one another, connecting at an ever more furious rate, to the point of merging disciplines. Biotech, nanotech, and the human cognome are fusing. It's all codes and nodes. Our cycles have higher ups and lower downs, and both are relentlessly coming on faster and faster. Amid this turbulence, lots of us are looking for stable ground.
Peter Schartz, a fellow resident of the People's Republic of Berkeley (we live atop the same earthquake fault), offers an enlightened view of how we ought to think about this.
Historically, upheaval is not a new condition. To be sure, there have been some relatively surprise-free centuries in human history; life for most people in medieval Europe was much the same as it had been for their parents. But since the scientific discoveries of
the seventeenth century, complexity and turbulence in the world at large have been facts of life, looming larger and larger in people’s concerns until today there is hardly anyone unaffected by them.
At the same time most of us still feel emotionally that things should be stable and certain; that once we’re over the next hump of crisis, life will naturally return to tranquil normalcy. And there are things we don’t want to see strapped into a roller coaster: Our country’s security. Our companies and jobs. Our retirement accounts.
Is there a better way to live with this tension than just to hang on for the roller-coaster ride and react to every new surprise thrust at you? Yes, there is. There are still certainties—still facts and factors that we can rely on and even take for granted. There are many things we can rely on, but three of them are most critical to keep in mind in any turbulent environment.
- First: There will be more surprises.
- Second: We will be able to deal with them.
- Third: We can anticipate many of them. In fact, we can make some pretty good assumptions about how most of them will play out.
We can’t know the consequences in advance, or how they will affect us, but we know many of the surprises to come. Even the most devastating surprises—like terrorist attacks and economic collapses—are often predictable because they have their roots in the driving forces at work today.
In the coming decades we face many more inevitable surprises: major discontinuities in the economic, political, and social spheres of our world, each one changing the “rules of the game” as it is played today. If anything, there will be more, not fewer, surprises in the future, and they will all be interconnected. Together, they will lead us into a world, ten to fifteen years hence, that is fundamentally different from the one we know today. Understanding these inevitable surprises in our future is critical for the decisions we have to make today—whether we are captains of industry, leaders of nations, or simply individuals who care about the future of our families and communities. We may not be able to prevent catastrophe (although sometimes we can), but we can certainly increase our ability to respond, and our ability to see opportunities that we would otherwise miss.
Next, Schwartz echoes Eamonn Kelly, the current CEO of GBN, the firm Schwartz co-founded. This is not the time to stick one's head in the sand. Denial and defensiveness skirt the problem and leave us totally unprepared to deal with the inevitable surprises. As Darwin wrote, it's not the fittest of the species that survives, it's the most adaptable.
Personally, that's why I'm putting energy into nurturing the Edinburgh Scenarios. They may be a little out of alignment, but it's better to ask the question than to act like a know-it-all.
Unfortunately, this strategy also tends to produce poor results. You are making one of the riskiest moves of all: to do nothing in the face of uncertainty.
How about heading over to the scenario planning exercise on the Learning Circuits blog?
January 03, 2004
What's Next?
What's Next? is a compendium of thoughts from fifty illustrious members of the Global Business Network. Their thoughts dwell on the world ten years from now, the same timeframe as the Edinburgh Scenarios.
If you're not familiar with GBN, just reading the membership list will be a treat. Where else are you going to find the likes of William Gibson, Laurie Anderson, Jaron Lanier, Eric Drexler, Doug Engelbart, Stewart Brand, Danny Hillis, Bill Joy, Michael Porter, Clay Shirky, and Michael Murphy in one place?
GBN’s president Eamonn Kelly sets up the interviews by making a convincing argument that complex times call for deeper understanding to underpin our decision-making. "This in turn, is key to gaining adaptive advantage: the ability to anticipate and sense change, and the capacity to respond quickly and coherently."
Everywhere I turn recently, I find myself tripping over complex adaptive systems. Business flows, everything is connected, we don't see the whole picture, surprises are on the way. I'm tempering my view several months back that the "science of complexity" is simply another way of saying "You don't get it." Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah-nyah.
The "new terrain" posited by What's Next? is composed of these categories, which also organize the chapters of the book:
- People
- Cutures & Socities
- Values & Belief Systems
- Civilzation & Infrastructure Environment & Sustainability
- Technology
- Science
- Economics & Finance
- Geopolitics & Governance
Constructed largely of 500-word quotes from GBN members, What's Next? is perfect bathroom reading. Unless I succomb to diarrhea, I won't finish reading it until mid-month.
December 28, 2003
Business Process Change, 2
This is a continuation of my notes from Paul Harmon's Business Process Change.
Paul walks us through the notational schemes for modeling organizations, processes (where the top swimlane is always reserved for the customer), and activities. Why the differences? Because each is at a different level of detail, paralleling the Rummler-Brache model. (An excellent summary of the model appears on page 160.)
Harmon thinks that managers of the future should be as fluent with business processing modeling tools as today's managers are with spreadsheets and organization charts. Work gets done in processes. Managers are responsible to see that work gets done in the processes they manage. This involves planning processes and managing processes. Planning involves setting goals and expectations, estalishing plans and budget, providing resources and staff, and implementation. Controling has to do with monitoring the process, reinforcing success, diagnosing deviations, and taking necessary conrrective actions. Process measure derive from general measures of customer satisfaction with the outputs of a process. From these measures, we work backward to measure how each department might contribute to customer satisfaction.
Six Sigma has evolved into a systematic approach to process improvement.
Business Process Reengineering earned a bad reputation when people came to view it as a heartless tool for Chainsaw Al's, a euphemism for downsizing. The activity itself, drawing an ideal process on a blank sheet of peper is still a worthwhile thing to do. It's called for in major reorganizations, simplifying how things are accomplished, eliminating non-value-adds, and closing gaps and disconnects. Paul suggests a "business process redesign pattern" for each of these.
Paul credits Tom Davenport's Mission Critical: Realizng the Promise of Enterprise Systems with helping popularize packaged software apps for improving and integrating systems. SAP, PeopleSoft, and Oracle refer to their apps as "best processes," although by definition, there are average processes. When I read Davenport's book, I missed the point, thinking this was the way you'd want to do things no matter what; I didn't appreciate that any of this was new.
Installing ERP apps is backwards compared to the blank-sheet-of-paper idealism described earlier. You start with a solution and then modify your processes to accommodate the software. ERP software is not that simple to change; if you expect to make major changes, perhaps you shouldn't be considering ERP in the first place.
Chapter 13 gives a history of software development that I am not going to go into, save to say that these days lots of development is driven by models rather than coders.
Important development framework for enterprise software architecture was written by IBM's John Zachman in 1987. (See here.
I found this a very enlightening book, although I'll admit to leafing through the last 1/3 rather rapidly. No matter. This one will be on my reference shelf.
December 13, 2003
Thinking about Books
Books
Disclosure: I am a bibliophile. No, make that book addict. My house is filled with overflowing bookcases. Books are my friends. I never leave home without one.
Nontheless, I am beginning to wonder if the nonfiction book isn't becoming an anachronism. The world flows; books are still.
- Books end but new insights never stop coming.
- Books freeze the content but there's always room for improvement.
- Books don't take advantage of feedback; they assume the author got it right the first time.
- Giving the author sole authority runs counter to the belief that "All of us are smarter than one of us."
A couple of weeks ago, I completed writing a 100-page document on the metrics of corporate learning. It's a file. I labeled it an "eBook." My promotional copy says, "I pulled together my thoughts on measuring results, added some how-to material, stole items from past white papers, listed the best sources I know, and packed 30,000 witty words into an eBook, named Metrics."
At least one in five buyers sends me a snail mail address so I can send them the book. How can I get the point across? I sense we need a new term for "living book." I never intend to print this book. Several reasons why:
- My topic is open-ended, so anything I write is but a draft for a better version. The reader who buys the current version receives the next as part of the deal.
- Readers will make the book more useful, by asking questions, providing examples, and questioning my logic.
- Updating prolongs shelf life.
- Commitment to future versions provides an avenue for forming relationships with readers over time.
- My work will increase in value over time.
- Uncertainty engages the mind. A few typos improve retention.
- In time, improved versions will lower the relative value of pirated and stolen copies.
Interested in how to measure the results of corporate learning? Buy Metrics. Since I bear no printing and shipping costs, I can sell it for $25.
Gutenberg
In 1970, Uta and I lived in a high-rise apartment building in Wiesbaden, across the Rhine from Mainz. Naturally, we toured the Gutenberg print shop and museum.
The concepts of moveable type and the printing press bring automation to mind. Seeing a Gutenberg Bible up close brings you back to the reality that medieval times were manual. Printing was but an intermediate step in preparing a bible. Next came the artwork. Color was applied to "illuminations" by hand. Books were revered as art objects. Furthermore, you weren't about to stuff one of these tomes into your pocket to read on the plane. (Paperbacks were not invented until four decades later.)
Gutenberg Bible, print run of 183 copies, 1452-55
The Internet Archive Bookmobile
Contrast this with the Internet Archive Bookmobile. The bookmobile is "a mobile digital library capable of downloading public domain books from the Internet via satellite and printing them anytime, anywhere, for anyone." These bookmobiles are traversing India and parts of Africa. They can download, print, and package any of 25,000 titles for "a buck a book."
Brewster and his son on tour with the bookmobile.
What is a book, anyway?
For most of us, book conjures up an image of a physical thing. The dictionary's first definition reads
- 1 a : a set of written sheets of skin or paper or tablets of wood or ivory b : a set of written, printed, or blank sheets bound together into a volume c : a long written or printed literary composition d : a major division of a treatise or literary work
The Columbia Encyclopedia notes that the physical aspects needn't be books' defining characteristic:
- the very definition of a book as a collection of sheets of paper has also been challenged, as books recorded on audio tape and CD-ROM have become increasingly common and electronic books (small computers designed to display pages of books on their screens) have been introduced.
What should we call a book o' bits?
November 28, 2003
Books for ID Team
A reader asks:
- Hi Jay,
I'm looking for a mix of books for my ID team, which comprises junior learning designers and more senior folk such as myself. I'm interested in the learning design/learning model side rather than the technical side. Currently, I'm not too interested in books dealing with companies implementing e-learning strategy (I have some of these already). To give you some ideas, I'm already considering:
- New e-learning approaches (ish) - for me to learn more
Sims and the future of e-learning - Clark Aldrich
Digital game based learning - Marc Prensky
More standard texts for junior staff
E-learning and the science of instruction - Ruth Clark
Michael Allen's guide to e-learning
(n.b. especially the CD of sample programs)
You've made some excellent choices right off the bat. I like all of these.
I probably wouldn't turn to books since the web has such good stuff, e.g. Boxes and Arrows, eLearningPost, old LineZine articles, Big Dog for background, First Monday, MIT Future of Learning Group, Learning Circuits, George Siemens, CIO, HBR, the Learning FAQs, Stephen Downes' pointers, and my own Internet Time. Links to most of these are on my eLearning Jump page. The web is currently the only place to read and/or order information about Workflow Learning.
Of course, it's presumptuous of me to recommend books for people whose background and job responsibilties I know not, so I'll simply list books that have introduced useful frameworks and ideas into my thinking.
- The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
Blur by Stan Davis and Chris Meyer
Future Perfect by Stan Davis
The Future of Knowledge by Verna Allee
The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
Things That Make Us Smart by Don Norman
Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie
The Springboard by Stephen Denning
Don't Shoot the Dog! by Karen Pryor
Serious Play by Michael Schrage
Visual Language by Robert Horn
Information Architecture by Louis Rosenfeld & Peter Morville
The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper
Emotional Intelligence or anything related by Daniel Goleman
Education and Ecstacy by George Leonard
Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich
Designing World-Class Learning or something similar by Roger Schank
What Every Manager Should Know About Training by Robert Mager
Living on the Fault Line by Geoff Moore
Performance Consulting: Moving Beyond Training
by Dana Gaines Robinson, James C. Robinson
What Mangement Is by Joan Magretta and Nan Stone
The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization by Thomas A. Stewart
Intellectual Capital by Thomas A. Stewart
No Significant Difference by Thomas L. Russell
Information Anxiety by Richard Saul Wurman
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte
Mindfulness by Elizabeth Langer
Mindful Learning by Elizabeth Langer
The Cluetrain Manifesto by Chris Locke, David Weinberger et alia
any three by Peter Drucker
The Leadership Challenge by Jim Kouzes
Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug
Architect for Learning: Using the Internet as an Efffective Educational Environment by Philip J. Palin and Kari Sanhaas
I believe in wringing the ideas out of books. After I jotted down this list, mainly by touring my bookcases, I realized that I've talked or corresponded with more than half of these authors. Not that we're pals. Simply exchanging a few sentences with someone seems to plant their lessons more firmly in my head.
I also highlight books with yellow markers (I prefer the lemon-scented ones) and make marginal notes as I read along. Soon after finishing a book, I generally write a synopsis of what I want to retain. (You'll find reviews of most of the books on the list at www.internettime.com ).
Most designers would probably better spend their time learning about the business they are in than finetuning their design skills through reading. For many years, I worked with financial services training. I read American Banker every day. I read Mayer's books on banking. I read every page of the Bank Analyst's Handbook. I read banking magazines. I talked with bankers about their concerns. The greatest designers in the world won't have credibility, or understanding, if they don't know the territory.
What books have you found essential?
November 11, 2003
Simulations and the Future of Learning
Clark Aldrich has written a personal story about developing a new genre of leadership development program. He takes you along for the ride as he becomes disenchanted with eLearning, quits a prestige job to find a better way, surmounts numerous hurdles, and ends up with Virtual Leader, a product you can buy today. Unlike most books on learning, Clark's is well written and witty; it's fun to read.
"What would the world be like if eLearning truly worked?" If eLearning could bestow understanding and the ability to control things, the training organization would be more important than the lawyers. I'd be bragging about last night's learning experience.
Of course, eLearning has not lived up to its potential. It's mainly virtual classrooms and online workbooks. The lessons have been degraded to the lowest common denominators of bandwidth, packaging standards, and generality. eLearning is sometimes no more than the pre-reading in a "blended" solution.
There is an exception: the learning of people who must perform. Life or death. Soldiers, pilots, nuclear power plant workers, and Wall Street traders. They learn from simulation.
Clark posits three forms of content: linear (most of what we're exposed to), cyclical (hitting balls on the driving range), and open-ended (with multiple paths and outcomes).
He recounts the early days of eLearning from his perspective as the chief analyst in that space at Gartner. Vendors visit with dog-and-pony shows, some tripping themselves up irrevocably in the first ten minutes. Hundreds of companies and not one that was sufficiently compelling to inspire him. Or others. eLearning is to learning as fast food is to nutrition. It's all linear. It's crap.
Next Clark quits his secure, prestigious job at Gartner to create exemplary eLearning, the best-of-breed that the eLearning vendors never showed him. He?s out to build a 'concept car' that will guide the industry.
His chapter on "The Myth of Subject-Matter Experts" skewers leadership gurus mercilessly. They don't have the three forms of content. They don't have very deep models. They have anecdotes. They want a fortune to have their grad students cook something up. At a leisurely pace. If you're thinking about taking content from nationally-known authorities, read this chapter first.
After months of research, reflection, blind alleys, and enough tid-bits to cover the walls with Post-It Notes, Clark and his mates arrived at a model of leadership that had the ring of truth. Leadership is "Getting a group of people to complete the right work." This is great stuff.
I should know. Six years ago, my firm's EVP told me our clients needed a program on leadership. Could I come up with a model that could be the foundation of a workshop? Something compelling. (Worldwide, a million bankers had participated in our workshops. We considered ourselves the crème de la crème of bank training.)
I jumped on the project with gusto, reading Bennis, Kouzes, von Klausewitz, Peters, Drucker, my former professor John Kotter, and dozens of others. Eventually I boiled leadership down to a model of leadership and management accompanied by a page of bullet points.
I appreciate Clark's model and methods because they are so much better than what I came up with. Clark would call my results "linear," the ultimate slur. Clark's model is good enough to become a Harvard Business Review Classic.
About a third of the way in, the book totally changes direction. Clark takes us into the nitty-gritty of constructing the Virtual Leader simulation. We learn about principles of simulation, set design, character creation, animation, speech generation, control of movement, and magically making the cast autonomous, like Pinocchio turning into a real boy and wandering out of Gepetto's workshop. Some of this was fascinating but other parts of it read like Popular Science. The story from the first third of the book had turned into a how-to talk. This section was well crafted but it wasn't what I wanted to learn.
The final third addresses what happened when they flipped the on-switch, the futility of grades, why there aren't more simulations, and < a href="http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/">what's wrong with schooling.
Summary: Almost all training is linear. The world is open-ended. This is why almost all training fails. Simulations are open-ended. They are expensive but they work. Simulations are the way of the future.
Many readers will enjoy this book: there's a lot of substance. But I don't expect many people will enjoy it thoroughly. You see, it's more like three books bound in a single cover. Even though it's pricey ($50 at Amazon), I'd buy the book for the first third alone. Only a fool would try to create a sim without reading the center section. Were I either buying or marketing simulations, I'd read the whole tome but the last third would ring my chimes the loudest.
Thanks for letting us ride shotgun, Clark.
September 02, 2003
Leonardo's Laptop II
Finished reading Leonardo’s Laptop and appended a few quotes to yesterday’s post. Is this a great line or what?
The old business was about making a profit; the new business is about making a profit.
The morning’s email contained a note from a woman in the UK who had read Ian’s and my The DNA of eLearning and was interested in obtaining a copy of Beyond eLearning, from which it was excerpted. She came to internettime.com but all she could find was “a directory listing.” Uh-oh. I thought my minimalist menu design was lucid; she found it inscrutable.
So this morning I designed a Site Map of sorts and revamped my 404 error page.
Later in the day I dropped by Cody’s Books and Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue. It’s great to live in a town with a great university, for it guarantees good bookstores and great coffee.
Rather than buy books today, I jotted down names of a few books I want to read. As a member of four local libraries, I figured I’d see if I could simply borrow these:
* The Art of Happiness at Work by the Dalai Lama
* The Order of Nature by Christopher Alexander
* Lies and the Liar… by Al Franken
* The Resilience Factor by Andrew Shatte & Karen Reivich
* Good Business by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
What else? Oh, yeah, I installed the Textism plug-in for Movable Type, so you should see the difference between — and —-. These should be “curly quotes.” Dean Allen, the Textism inventor, seems a nice guy. Brad Choate, who wrote the Textism plug-in for Movable Type is an MT wizard.
Brad’s site led me to Matt Haughey’s great article on converting an entire site to MT. There goes another long weekend.
September 01, 2003
Leonardo's Laptop
I’m reading Leonardo’s Laptop by Ben Shneiderman. Ben was a fellow keynoter at the I-KNOW Conference in Graz earlier this year.
The big message is “Computing today is about what computers can do; the new computing will be about what people can do.”
Leonardo da Vinci excelled in science and art, as he detailed in the notebooks he always carried. Today he’d carry a tablet computer of some sort. The book looks at computing in learning, business, healthcare, and government, always asking What would Leonardo do?
The old computing was about mastering technology. Remember when people talked about how big their hard drives were or the clock speed of their processor chips? The new computing is about getting people together. We’ve gone from formulating database queries to participating in communities of practice. Teachers no longer teach; they guide. Sales people don’t sell; they form relationships. Shneiderman says “This Copernican shift is bringing concerns about users from the periphery to the center. The emerging focus is on what users want to do in their lives.”
I agree that “The new computing is about collaboration and empowerment—individually, organizationally, and societally,” but it’s also the way the world is starting to work. The computing is a reflection of the users rather than some new invention.
Great line: “The shift in attention is from AI to UI.” From artificial intelligence to user interface. The UI is “you” and “I.” The desired outcome is not a HAL 9000 that replaces man; it’s more like the old Outer Limits punchline: “To serve man.”
Shneiderman posits a universal creative process:
| Collect | Relate | Create | Donate |
Then he sets up four tiers of relationships
| Self | Family and friends | Colleagues | Citizens |
He puts these into a grid: an activites and relationships table (ART). Seeing how the cells play out in learning, business, government, and medicine fill most of the rest of the text.
| Collect | Relate | Create | Donate | |
| Self | ||||
| Family and friends | ||||
| Colleagues | ||||
| Citizens | ||||
“Memorizing dates for Napolenon’s rule, names of the U.S. presidents, or rivers of Africa is less relevant in an age of ubiguqitous information. The new education accenturates critical thinking, analytical strategies, and working with people. This goals are tied to improving communication skills and creative problem solving.”
“The case for active learning was boldly stated in 1971 by the Canadian educator Wilard Wees in his aptly titled book Nobody Can Teach Anybody Anything:
bq.Whatever knowledge children gain they creat themselves;
whatever character they develop they create themselves.
“I’ve come to see that the sound of learning is not my voice lecturing but the buzz of team discussions during a collaborative exercise.”
“Asking a good question is one of the golden keys to learning. Educational psychologists talk about meta-cognitive skills: the capacity of students to reflect on what they know and what they don’t know.”
The old business was about making a profit; the new business is about making a profit.
August 26, 2003
The Future of Knowledge
The Future of Knowledge: Increasing Prosperity through Value Networks
by Verna Allee
"Why are you reading something called The Future of Knoweldge?" asked my wife. "You are supposed to be on vacation, remember?" I replied that I was thoroughly enjoying myself, and indeed I was.
Verna's concepts around knowledge and the way I think about learning are completely in sync, but Verna has pushed the envelope further than I have, expanding the arena to include sustaining the earth.
These are my notes. Most are direct quotes from the book although a few of my own thoughts are scrambled in, and sometimes I've shortened or rearranged the original. I encourage you to buy the book; at $20, it's cheap.
"There is really only one management question: What do we need to pay attention to in order to be successful?" Similarly, there is only one individual question: What do I need to pay attention to in order to be successful?
Awareness of how we create our shared social reality is the most important aspect of business life we will need to learn for a successful future. (So say Nonaka, Senge, Varela, de Geus, and others)
- Businesses are evolving into the patterns of living systems. The meta-level learning that we are all engaged in is learning to work with network principles. Decision making and knowledge creation are not rational processes, but social processes.
- Now it is as important for managers to work as deliberately to improve the quality of knowledge and learning as it is to improve the quality of products and services. Indeed, in this economy they are often one and the same.
- Networks are the natural pattern of organization in living systems. They are the pattern of social systems and the natural pattern of business relationships as well.
- Our present accounting methods were developed during the Renaissance, and most of our management practices come from bureaucratic and military models that have dominated management practice for decades. These vestiges of the old order are obsolete.
- Decisions are moving from corporate headquarters out to individual business units. Business units in turn are distributing power and decision making to self-managed teams and profit centers. Workers who used to be tucked snug inside corporate walls are roaming the roads and working from home. The action is at the edges.
| Early industrial | Industrial Age | Knowledge Era | |
| Management focus | Plan, organize, control | Vision, values, empowerment | Emergence, integrity, relationships |
| Structured around | Functions | Processes | Systems |
| Social structure | Individual tasks | Work & project teams | Communities |
| Strategic resource | Raw materials | Financial capital | Knowledge & intangibles |
| Worldview | Descartes, Newton, mechanical | Ford, Taylor, efficient, engineering | Complexity, systems theory, living systems. |
When something is truly complex, all the parts work together in such a way that the whole cannot be divided without losing its integrity--and the parts also lose their integrity when separated from the whole. When you cut a cow in half you don't get two cows. You get a mess.
Every conversation is an experiment in knowledge creation/testing ideas, trying out words and concepts, continuously creating and re-creating our experience of life itself. As people move beyond routine processes into more complex challenges, they rely heavily on their colleagues and friends as thinking partners.
Verna's value mapping process:
- Intangibles: Human capital, external capital, structural capital; Values
- Exchange analysis, impact analysis, value creation analysis
- Holistic model puts people back in.
With too much structure organizations can't move. With too little, they disintegrate or fly apart. Companies that have learned to keep that edge--that fine balance between tight and loose?are at their most alive, creative, and adaptable. Systems adapt best if they are only partly connected.
A business school professor once instructed me, tongue in cheek, that "Everything comes in three's." Usually, this holds true. The first columns below are Verna's. I added Bloom and my shorthand for Bloom.
| Org'n focus | Learning tools | Networks | timeframe | individual | Bloom |
| Operational | eLearning, newsfeeds, search | technology | Immediate | Hands | Psycho-motor |
| Tactical | Community, stories, collaboration | knowledge | Soon | Head | Cognitive |
| Strategic | Scenarios, system maps, dialog | value | Future | Heart | Affective |
Check out Verna's site. And you thought "bookkeeping" was the only word with three double-letters in a row, didn't you? www.vern aa ll ee .com
August 02, 2003
Authenic Happiness (again)
Skip this posting if you've heard me rant about it before, but authentic happiness is so important it bears repeating. If you aren't authentically happy, you can and should do something about it. I did, and it makes me happy to share it with you.
The happiness I'm talking about is not the momentary rush of physical pleasure. Nor is it the product of drugs or sex or ecstatic religion. Rather, it's the satisfaction of doing what's right for you and for the world. That's what life's for.
Marty Seligman is a rare psychologist. He recognized that studying misfits and the mentally deranged wasn't going to explain much about staying mentally healthy. For that, you should study healthy people. From this insight, he founded the Positive Psychology movement. The story's in his book, along with the steps for achieving authentic happiness.
To be satisfied that you're doing the right thing, you have to know yourself. Most of us need some help with that. Seligman's free website offers 15 mercifully short questionnaires about your feelings and strengths. It also scores them.
For me, the VIA Signature Strengths Questionnaire had the most impact. This instrument confirmed things I already knew. I'm creative, original, curious about the world, and love to learn. What I didn't realize how extreme I was -- my scores on these items were among the highest ever recorded. (Remember, these are self-assessments, not objective measures.) I decided then and there that if those were so solidly my signature strengths, I had to live a life that let me express myself creatively, poke around finding things out, and feed my need to learn. No more bureaucracy for me.
Maybe you won't experience the marvellous awakening that I did, but then again, maybe you will. There's little to lose. Go to Seligman's site and click the shortcut to the Signature Strengths Questionnaire in the top left corner.
While I'm one of Marty Seligman's biggest fans, I do disagree with his prescription for clinical depression, described in a previous book, Learned Optmism. He makes a case for overcoming "learned helplessness" with logic and a bit of reprogramming.
I've been close enough to depression to know that talk and logic are not always enough. Sometimes severe depression is the result of bad chemistry in the brain. Talk alone doesn't work for people like William Styron or Mike Wallace. They take Zoloft every day to restore the serotonin balance in their brains.
It's a pity that Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, Audrey Hepburn, Eugene O'Neill, Cole Porter, Spencer Tracy, and Judy Garland fought the debilitation of depression before medicine had come up with a cure. Needless, awful suffering. A sure-fire marker for depression is contemplating suicide. If you've considered suicide, even just toying with the idea, get to your doctor right away.
Hey, get happy, will you? :-)
July 30, 2003
July 27, 2003
It's Alive
It's Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business by Christopher Meyer & Stan Davis.
I'm a third of the way into this book and want to record a few ideas to plant them in my head before continuing on.
If you can figure out how adaptation is embedded in biological systems, and then broaden this knowledge into a theory of general evolution, you can effectively apply the theory to many complex systems--including business.
How would a business measure successful adaptation? In biology, the metric is "fitness," measured as the relative ability of an organism to breed successfully in a given environment.
Code is code. 
Create, connect, evolve.
Just as physics has core principles, so do adaptive systems. The basics involve:
- Agents. atoms, software, people, the DMUs
- Self-organization. autonomous order.
- Recombination. don't start from scratch; have sex instead
- Selective pressure. Fitness is judged by the environment.
- Adaptation. for better performance
- Co-evolution. When the frog evolves a sticky tongue, flies get Teflon feet. Competition and other players define the game
- Emergence. mix self-organization, recombination, selection, and co-evolution and you get an ecology--or an economy.
This is bottom up. The ecology arises from the atoms up. The past fifty years have shown conclusively that distributed decision-making does a better job of satisfying demand than a centralized approach. Nonetheless, many of our businesses retain a suprisingly "Soviet" management style, using approaches developed in an assembly-line era that have more in common with a top-down mentality than with a bottom-up one.
"The molecular world is completely outside the normal common-sense range of thinking," says Alan Kay. It is this molecular sense that, over the next decade, will become our common understanding.
The connected economy is accelerating change, raising the bar for survival, and requiring a higher degree of adaptivenss from all of us. In particular, business needs to develop a new mental toolbox based on adaptive principles and an evolving economic and social environment. As stated recently in the journal Sicence, "Our quest to capture the system level laws governing cell biology in fact represents a search for the deeper patterns common to complex systems and networks in general."
Simulation is becoming a new scientific instrument, a "macroscope" allowing us to see the structure that dtermines the behavior of human-scale systems the way the microscope began to reveal the cell.
All forms of evolution arise from the interaction of independent agents follwoing a few simple rules. See "Boids". It's not a predictable world of command-and-control but, rather, a world of constant surprise and volatility, created by the interactions among low-level rules, acting form the bottom up. Translating sex into silicon, genetic algorithms allow us to redefine our objectives, replacing narrow individual "efficiency" with a boader concept of population "robustness"--the ability to cope with a volatile environment.
Often human programmers don't understand why a solution works, only that it does. Whether in vitro, in silico, or in vivo, what matters is what emerges, not the underlying mechanisms that got you there.
The remainder of the book promises to deal with adaptive management. I'm looking forward to it.
Stan Davis has a thing for matrixes. He was once a fan of the matrix organization. His prior books have wonderful 3 x 4 tables that make things so clear. I love these, because I can glance at the matrix and have all the ideas behind it come flooding back. Guess what? We're going to look at some matrixes. (I hate the plural matrices.)
First of all, to everything there is a season. Note the scale on this graph: 250 years. The industrial era is history.
Today the life cycle of the information age has just peaked. It's all downhill from here. Over the next ten years, the molecular age will hit its growth phase.
Chris and Stan find a pattern in the lifecycles of economies.
They take the technology adoption cycle to a higher plane. Here's the tech version, describing both markets and the culture required to thrive in each.
Learn by Search & Replace. Make these substitutions...
- Visionaries = Scientists
Pragmatists = Technologists
Control = Business
Collaboration = Organization
...and you get a predictive model. Wow.
Finally, here's what you can do about all this.
June 26, 2003
Designer, Food, Book
John Heskett's Toothpicks & Logos, Design in Everyday Life, is a beautiful book. The title, displayed in tasteful violet on a flat black cover, conjures up memories of Don Norman's classic Design of Everyday Things. The cover quotes Terence Conran saying "the best book I have read about the design process." Riffing through the pages, the paper feels good and the wide leading of the type gives a clean, engaging look. Photos of design icons such as the Aeron chair, the map of the Underground, and the FedEx logo adorn the inner pages. It's a pity that a delicious package holds so little substance on its pages. Inside is a dull, academic tract.
I highlight text as I read. In the opening pages, I marked this sentence:
In contrast, Anthony Bourdai's
A Cook's Tour : Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines is a great read. This guy is a gonzo gourmet. Like Hunter Thompson, he's so out of control that it puts you on edge. He thinks nothing of eating a few birds' heads or fugu or some snakes, often crouching with the peasants in the marketplace to do so. All in all, a delightful book. Not recommended for the squeamish.
February 24, 2003
eLearning by Doing
Designing World-Class E-Learning : How IBM, GE, Harvard Business School, And Columbia University Are Succeeding At E-Learning
by Roger C. Schank
Roger's a provocateur. He's brash. But if more designers took the approach he advocates, people would learn a lot more.
A chapter toward the end of the book, "Let FREEDOM Ring: Seven Criteria for Assessing the Effectiveness of an e-Learning Course," is really about assessing the design of a course. Outcomes define effectiveness, not course characteristics. I'm skeptical of packaging learning as courses. Nonetheless, the FREEDOM mnemonic is catchy, and I like the design philosophy behind it.
- F is for Failure. A good course must enable failures that surprise the student. (Or at least don't meet student expectations.)
R is for Reasoning. A good course encourages practice in reasoning. (That's application.)
E is for Emotionality. A good course must incite an emotional response in the student. (Use people to stoke the emotional level if it's not inherent in the content.)
E is also for Exploration. A good course promotes exploration and enables inquiry.
D is for Doing. A good course encourages practice in doing.
O is for Observation. A good course allows students to see things for themselves. (Roger cares primarily about memorability. If you've visited the Center for Visual Learning here, you know I'd throw in understanding, simplification, speed, and a bunch of other things.)
M is for Motivation. A good course supplies it. (This would be Relevance but FREEDOR is simply not that catchy.)
For the uninitiated, Roger's philosophy in a nutshell:
- The primary problem in corporate training is the same problem you have in any educational system: the idea that if you tell somebody something, they know it. It's a very sexy and appealing idea ? it's just wrong.
Stand-up training has never worked very well, and corporations are beginning to see that. So along comes the computer, and they think maybe it'll be cheaper. Yes, it might be cheaper, but that's not what's interesting about computers. What's interesting is that you can build something that looks and feels like the real thing. Instead of telling someone to fly a plane and hoping they can do it, you can have them actually practice flying a plane.
From Inside Technology Training, January 2000
February 12, 2003
Stephen Wolfram
This evening I took BART into San Francisco to hear Dr. Stephen Wolfram talk about the ideas in his A New Way of Science. I’m about ½” into the book and have found it a relatively easy read for a science book but not that relevant to my interests. The most engaging aspect is Wolfram’s audacious stance, that the rest of the scientific world has been barking up the wrong tree since the Renaissance, if not earlier, and he’s seen what’s been there in plain sight, that everyone else overlooked, and it forces a revision of virtually every scientific discipline from physics to economics.
Wolfram’s doing a whistle stop tour to promote the book and to lay the foundation for his new science. Tonight he spoke at the Herbst Theater across Van Ness Avenue from San Francisco City Hall.
If you haven’t heard Wolfram’s story, check the Wired articlefrom June 2002. If memory serves (I read the Wired piece when it came out), Wolfram arrived at Oxford in his early teens, attended one day of first-year classes and decided he’d had enough of that. Next day, he attended second-year classes and found that below him, too. He stopped attending class. When exams came around, young Stephen scored top in his class. Graduated with a PhD in theoretical physics from Cal Tech at the age of 20. Bright kid. You might also check Michael Malone's piece on Wolfram in Forbes ASAP, God, Stephen Wolfram, and Everything Else, which was the first time I'd heard of the guy.
A discussion with Stephen Wolfram
Stephen was making inquiries about cosmology, how structures evolve in our universe, and was surprised to find that particle physics had remarkably little to say about nature. We were using human constructs (Newton’s Laws, Kepler) to interpret nature. That got him started on computer programs.
Were you to look into the world of programs, what would you say these programs really do? It’s like exploring a new part of the world, with new flora and fauna. You start with simple things, you expect to get simple results. In fact, you find that you get very complex behavior.
Here’s his favorite, rule 30:
Click for larger version.
This is really complicated. There’s no easy way to describe it. Statistical methods would tell you a line from the top down would be completely random. And this is the result of a few very simple starting rules.
Stephen looked at cellular automata for a number of years. These are simple little programs built of rules like “when you find a white square, change it to a black square unless there’s black square above it.” He realized that there’s a much larger world of possible programs out there.
One of Wolfram’s rules is that if you really need a better tool, you’d better make it yourself. This is where Mathematica came from. Having developed the tool, he returned to his initial field of inquiry. In 1991, when Mathematica came out, he just sort of “pointed it out there.” He discovered that what he’d found in cellular automata had much broader implications. He looked at physics, biology, chemistry, and so on. He found something wrong with most of these basic areas. What he’d believed simply wasn’t true.
What’s the simple rule that governs the growth of a snowflake? He discovered an explanation. Same for explaining fluid turbulence. Is there some explanation that doesn’t call for outside intervention? Yes. Rule 30 gets you there. Things may look random but they will reliably come out the same again and again. The randomness is built-in, not added on.
Simple rules can lead to extremely complex and random behavior. Add a color and things don’t change. A new rule doesn’t make things more complicated. It’s already as complicated as it ever may be.
Wolfram, speaking rapidly with an Oxford accent, is wearing light gray Nikes, a pink shirt, black chinos and a dark brown tweed jacket. Very much at ease.
If one wants to find complex things in the world, biology is a good place to look. It seems as if natural selection must have been at work over the course of geological time. You assume it took a lot a time to develop complicated things. In reality, human engineers work on things in areas where they better be able to foresee the result. Nature is not under this sort of constraint. Nature’s not just Darwinism.
Take mollusk shells. Something quite similar to the Rule 30 diagram appears on a shell Stephen pulls out of his pocket.
Charles Darwin? There’s come to be a belief that Natural Selection is sort of an all-compelling force. But this is not really where all the complex stuff comes from. Darwin’s belief was more limited and correct than what his interpreters have passed along. One of the most important roles of natural selection is to simplify, not to make things more complex.
We all know about the fundamental unifying theory of physics. Laughter in the audience. (“I learned about it when I was a kid,” says Wolfram).
For instance, space. We usually think of space as background. But if you really want to understand space, you’ve got to look at it as something by itself. (Missed a couple of sentences here.) The collective effect of these things sort of reflect what we feel about things like space and time. (Huh? Those must have been important sentences; this makes no sense.)
If one believes the rule for the universe is really simple, it changes the way you look at the universe. If you start by asking, rule by rule, “Is this a rule for the universe?”, you usually find, “No, this is not a rule for the universe.” The universe has had a long time to go through its calculations.
Determinism? If I think, “I’m choosing to be yellow or black,” but in reality the model is dictating it… There are these issues outside of the realm of science. The concept of mathematical irreducibility, as with the predictability of the behavior of robots, doesn’t really constrain the eventual results. Remember, a few simple rules can generate randomness. Logic is but one of many modalities.
Implications for technology? If you are trying to do mechanical things, you get a tool, e.g. a hammer to pound in nails. But in the realm of intellect, the computer can go after it. It’s odd that this has had little impact on the foundations of natural science. Making a universal computer, millions of gates and lots of work in Silicon Valley, you might think this takes an amazing amount of effort. Actually, it may not be so tough. A molecule might implement these rules. That’s one direction.
Stephen sees himself producing new ways of making things. These are fundamental new elements you could use in growing new morphologies.
Stephen just spent 10 years (and 100 mouse-miles) writing the book. The guy’s into measuring things. He knows that a 40,000 keystroke-day is a good day, a 10,000 keystroke-day hasn’t been very productive.
There isn’t a “Journal of Big Ideas” where one publishes these rather rare happenings. Hence, he squirreled away for ten years to produce his book. It was probably the biggest project he’ll ever do.
The first thing Stephen is doing is recovering. Next will come building more tools. He needs them for studying other fundamental questions.
This has been sort of a one-person operation this far. How do you grow a science? He’s building a community. Lots of enthusiasm. 15,000 inbound email messages. Stephen would like to architect the new science.
Q&A. Math is simple. The axioms take but two pages in his book. The axioms are simple but the explanations are lengthy.
In the early nineteenth century, the belief was that any math issue could be shown to be true or false. Godel disproved this. His stating point was “This statement cannot be proved.”
I tried to ask a question but couldn’t get the attention of the people carrying the remote microphones in the auditorium. (I was sitting in seat A-1, the closest box seat to the stage, apparently undesirable but great as far as I was concerned.)
Had I the opportunity, I intended to ask Dr. Wolfram’s thoughts on today’s news that 96% of the universe is “dark matter.” Tough to identify those laws of the universe if most of it is invisible.
90 minutes after things kicked off, the audience applauded and Wolfram disappeared from sight.
So, is Wolfram a genius or a very confused individual? Probably the former although only a few results of his findings generalize to my work.
1. Simple things can have complex outcomes.
2. Random can arise without outside intervention.
3. Human concepts make scientific explanations overly complex.
Maybe I’ll wake up with new insights in the morning. Perhaps playing with Wolfram’s software will clear things up. Or maybe you’ve got this figured out. If so, please make a comment below. Thanks.
Ray Kurzweil's not convinced:
- Some of the phenomena in nature (e.g., clouds, coastlines) are explained by repetitive simple processes such as cellular automata and fractals, but intelligent patterns (e.g., the human brain) require an evolutionary process (or, alternatively the reverse-engineering of the results of such a process). Intelligence is the inspired product of evolution, and is also, in my view, the most powerful "force" in the world, ultimately transcending the powers of mindless natural forces.
In summary, Wolfram's sweeping and ambitious treatise paints a compelling but ultimately overstated and incomplete picture. Wolfram joins a growing community of voices that believe that patterns of information, rather than matter and energy, represent the more fundamental building blocks of reality. Wol