March 05, 2004
January 24, 2004
Personal or professional?
Where does one draw the line between personal interests and professional interests?
The line between personal and professional gets blurry, particularly if you have a home office and if you live what Bill Gates used to call "the web lifestyle." My email inbox contains project updates, appeals for help, ads for credit counseling and penis enlargement, invitations to speak at conferences, and a note from Mom. I take photos of new products and of my dogs.
Perhaps a better question is "Where should one draw the line between personal and professional?" My time used to be something like this:
I didn't confuse hobbies and vacation with managing a software start-up or selling training programs to large banks.
Yesterday I finished assembling a website for capturing and sharing the history and romance of Berkeley's paths for the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association. A hobby, right? Until I used the same skillset to put together a blog for the Workflow Institute.
If I kept a timecard (perish the thought), I'd have to give most of my waking minutes multiple codes:
It's Saturday morning and I'm preparing a presentation for Tuesday's meeting of the eLearning Forum. That's personal and professional.
I don't have an answer yet. I'll toss it to my subconscious neurons to work on. My high degree of personal and professional activites works for me. I get to do what I like in either realm. This feels right, so long as one sphere doesn't limit the scope of the other:
Do others think this way? Is there a problem?
January 07, 2004
Personal World Clock
From Norway comes this great -- and useful -- example of personalization. I just selected the cities/time zones I'm working in most frequenty. timeanddate.com configured a Personal World Clock for me on the web. Instead of everyone's time zones, I immediately see the time zones that matter most to me.
Time zones & the current time in each.
The service is free.
Related info: Jay's Time Page
November 24, 2003
Time runs
The Race of the Time-Keepers, Elgin Ahead
Harper's Weekly, February 10 1872, Page 13
Note: A hundred and thirty-one years ago, time did not fly. It ran.
In other news, I just finished the first part of Zeldman's Designing with Web Standards.
I am going to take the plunge into compliant, semantic mark-up. If I do this right, you won't notice a thing except faster download of pages.
This feels like the right time to separate content and format for once and for all. I generate too many words to contemplate doing it later in life.
I used to do my HTML with Notepad. I've since done sites with HotDog, Fusion, HomeSite, ACEhtml, Cute HTML, and Dreamweaver 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and MX 2004. The most effective tech learning experience I've ever had was View/Source. See something I like? See how it's done. Do it. Marvellous. I'm afraid I'll be losing that with CSS stylesheets and so forth.
Today I had to look at some code from way back when. Geez. Line after line of superfluous cruft. So that nudged me into the revamping of all the content.
Of course, I'll consolidate and prune as I go along. If less is more, I don't have much of a site.
November 18, 2003
August 17, 2003
Thoughts on a lazy Sunday
Before snoozing off into dreamland, I read a chapter of Bill Bryson's entertaining history of science, A Short History of Nearly Everything, every evening.
This explains why, when reading a splendid review of Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps in today's New York Times, I was thoroughly familiar with the story of a French longitude-measuring team that went through hell on earth trying to take precise readings in the Andes. (Beset by disease, angry natives, forbidding terrain, and foul weather for seven years, the two lead explorers refused to speak with one another for most of the expedition.) Their project had been commissioned by French polymath Jules Henri Poincare.
Poincare was immersed in measurements and maps, which led him to observe, in 1904, that distance is fixed but time is not. Time is sort of free-floating except in relation to other times. The very next year, Albert Einstein, who had been reviewing patent applications for all sorts of clocks and synchronizers, applied took this "time is relative" meme to simultaneity, which led him to conclude that time is relative to the speed of light.
From a cognitive point of view, it's interesting that neither Poincare nor Einstein came up with their insights out of thin air. If your job involves maps or clocks, it's only natural that you'd hypothesize about distance or time.
The review describes some characteristics of time in terms we can all understand (unlike most of the scientific writing on the subject):
There are as many different times as there are cultures. Some reflect changes as natural as the seasons, as arbitrary as the week or as old as the year; others, like the times of narrative, change with the life of the mind. Still others were first imagined in the fertile final years of the 19th century -- like modern industry's time clocks and time studies and the railroads' convenient longitudinal time zones.
In this one sentence, the review captures the discovery and nature of Einstein's relativity:
Time would always be relative to that speed, whatever change you used to describe it. It is, Einstein said, ''what you measure with a clock,'' but anything that can count more or less equal increments of any change is a clock too, including the earth and the stars. Change is not what you measure with time; time is what you measure with changes.
Some people have asked me why I write about so many different things on this blog. Others simply ask why.
Amigos, recording and reflecting is one way I learn things and stick them in memory. You've heard that if you really want to learn something, try teacking it to someone else? Well, you're here, aren't you?
Thanks for helping me learn more about time. And whatever else pops up today.
July 29, 2003
Invest time, don't save it!
Googlize/Google Lies
I was trying to doublecheck the wording of an aphorism from Ernest Hemingway that I thought said "Never confuse activity with results." Google pointed me to Lou Gerstner instead, presumably because he mouthed the words more recently and IBM gets a lot more hits than a dead author. It pays to think of such things when querying Google.
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.
Wired
Gary Wolf, in the New York Times' review of Wired, a Romance:
Things happened quickly for Wired -- remember "Internet time"?
July 22, 2003
Follow-up: Writing the Next Chapter of eLearning
Here are some of the links I promised in today's webinar. Within 24 hours I'll post the presentation (with narration) as well. If you have questions, post them as a comment below and I'll answer them here.
There's information on blogs here, although I also recommend you simply poke around on this blog and visit some of the others I showed:
- elearningpost
- Learning Circuits
- Guardian Unlimited
- Jon Udell
- Jay's list of education blogs
- Bonus! Lilia was blogging the presentation live
Unlike many bloggers, I think it's okay to go back to add additional material. That's because I view blogs as nifty content management systems more than as diaries. For example, here's an excellent article on blogging from journalist/entrepreneur Jeff Jarvis.
Request your copy of the eLearning Implementation & Action Plan Template here.
The unexpurgated "director's cut" of Lance's and my book is here
Jay's notes on Living on the Faultline (core vs. context)
Thoughts on the nature of time
Jay's white paper on Informal Learning.
Information on Enterprise Application Integration and real-time learning is here and here.
My thoughts on the parallels between networking and learning first appeared here. This is a work in progress. If you'd like to be notified of new developments in this and the other topics I track, sign up here.
Sign up for:
June 15, 2003
May 13, 2003
Avoid default thinking
In late April, I lunched with a remarkable man, John D. Adams. His book, Thinking Today As If Tomorrow Mattered: The Rise of a Sustainable Consciousness, resonated with my thinking about people?s orientation to time and my belief that most people are after a quick fix rather than realizing a vision.
John?s work adds a dimension to the thinking of the Meta-Learning Lab. He reasons that we develop habits of thinking, a series of defaults that we are largely unaware of. He proposes that we consciously get out of autopilot mode, expand our comfort zones, and take control of keeping things in balance. This requires self-awareness and incremental change, both facilitated by asking appropriate questions.
Here's John's summary of people's orientation to time:
| Attention focus |
Time Orientation in Thinking |
|
| Operational |
Strategic |
|
| Outer/Reactive |
Focus: Immediate problem Function: Administration Liability: No big picture |
Focus: Anticipation Function Develop Strategy Liability: Overlook immediate |
| Inner/Creative |
Focus: New Approach Function: Innovation Liability: Duplicate effort |
Focus: What We Want Function: Define the Future Liability: No Reality Testing |
John proposes that versatility in consciousness is essential for on-going rapid individual learning and that the only sustainable consciousness is a learning consciousness.
I have plowed much of the same ground as John, but his crops bear more fruit. Having set up this framework, he shows how a person or organization can achieve a more balanced position. I'll come back to this in a later post.
New Normal?
BS from Fast Company's investment manager's puff piece on the New Normal (a euphemism for I get it and you don't.).
Old NormalInternet Time |
New NormalReal Time |
| Measured in days, weeks, and dog years (for the business cycle). Absolutely everything was accelerated, from hiring to going public. Eighteen months was the magic number for major undertakings, from startup to ship, from funding to IPO. The bumper sticker was, "Stop for lunch and you are lunch." Says McNamee: "It was a kind of hormonal reaction. There was so much urgency that every standard -- for due diligence, leadership, recruiting, and investment -- was relaxed." | "The New Normal," says McNamee, "is about real life -- and real time. Getting things right the first time is more important than getting things done quickly." That's the opposite of the late-'90s mantra, "Fail faster to succeed sooner." Everything -- whether it be building companies or hiring top talent -- takes longer in the New Normal. Even more important in the new time frame: Don't waste your own time. Dedicate it to what you truly enjoy doing. |
More thought-provoking article in the same issue: Christopher Meyer describes companies as living organisms. Don't be wigged out by death; it's only natural. All living things eventually die. Moving on beats hanging on through artificial life support. Join the kids as they grow up.
April 24, 2003
What would Carly do?
While sitting in the little tiled room right off my office, where I do a lot of my reading, I came upon a one-page article by Seth Godin in Fast Company.
After Godin’s recent rap on seeing a Purple Cow, I was about ready to give up on the guy. The cow thing is such a blatant rip-off of one of the few famous alumni of my prep school, Ogden Nash, who wrote:
- I’ve never seen a purple cow.
I never hope to see one.
But I can tell you this right now.
I’d rather see than be one.
Besides, if you’ve ever been to Lenk, in the Bernese Oberland of Switzerland, you’ve seen lots of purple cows. They are the symbol of Milka chocolate, whose milk comes from the cows of Lenk. But I digress.
This month Godin talks about hard work. He points out that neither Richard Branson nor Carly Fiorina work longer hours than you or I. They just pick the right balance of stuff to work on. You know, the challenges that others don’t find reasonable.
This is inspirational. We’ve got as much time to work with as they do!
I’d better start picking better challenges to work on.
April 21, 2003
April 09, 2003
Internet Time in the Times
The New York Times
Technology
Is There Life After Silicon Valley’s Fast Lane?
By JOHN MARKOFF
Others, like Mr. Bratcher were burned out by a corollary to the tyrannical Moore’s Law: a pace of business that Intel’s co-founder and chairman, Andrew S. Grove, referred to as “Internet time” in 1996, at the onset of the dot-com boom.
Not everyone in the valley is ready yet to call time out. Those who are still thriving have little time or patience for the new wave of reflection ? including Intel’s Mr. Grove. Asked by e-mail message whether he had new thoughts about the meaning of Internet time, Mr. Grove issued a terse reply: “I am too busy to contemplate this.”
November 04, 2002
Is Internet Time dead?
Wall Street Journal
Boomtown
by Lee Gomes
Here's an excuse in technology nostalgia: Remember Internet Time?
From its origins, circa 1994, the phrase became canonical during the late 1990s. It was used to describe the accelerated pace at which, in a Web-enabled world, all business was supposedly going to be conducted. Business plans, product cycles, big decisions -- everything would be zipping along at a fraction of their traditional rates.
This is your business brain on speed.
Internet Time, along with cousins like Web Time and Warp Speed, became handy phrases to throw into book titles and PowerPoint presentations as proof of savvy topicality. Into newspaper articles, too; The Wall Street Journal mentioned the idea four times in 1996 but 43 times in 2000.
This column, though, marks only the second time the phrase has been used by this newspaper all year. Internet Time's time was short indeed.
In fact, what with the current free fall in tech spending, Internet Time has been replaced by its evil twin: let's call it Slowth.
Faster product cycles? Why bother? No one is buying anything anyway; take all the time you need.
Like New Economy, the term Internet Time was used seriously by some people, mockingly by others. (Back then, you picked your friends by which camp they belonged to.)
People in the former category invariably mentioned it with a celebratory, even reverential, tone. It seems to have never occurred to them that companies were taking two years rather than six months to bring out a new product because that's how long it took to get the new product right.
One can't help but suspect that Internet Time was a convenient excuse for companies of the period to sell stuff not fully tested, if not downright shoddy.
Back then, though, who would dare complain? People would suspect you were operating with an Old Economy paradigm, a fatal accusation for any career circa 1997-1999.
In retrospect, Internet Time was actually an amalgam of several unrelated phenomenon. In a few cases, the simple existence of the Internet did, as billed, allow for faster products. If you are making software, for instance, your customers were suddenly able to download new versions as fast as you could put them on the Web.
But most of the time, Internet Time was something else. In the fight between Microsoft and Netscape, usually hailed as the ultimate Internet Time battle, it was the sudden emergence of a big market coming up for grabs that drove the frantic pace. There would have been the same sense of urgency had the pair been making the very first generation of patio furniture.
Mostly, Internet Time was just a euphemism for Bubble Time. Venture capitalists were approving business plans in a single breakfast meeting for the simple reason that they wanted to get in and get out before the roof fell in.
The phrase Internet Time is traditionally credited to Tom Paquin, one of the earliest employees of Netscape. As the story goes, Mr. Paquin, around the summer of 1994, was asking other Netscape employees how long they had been at the company -- and how long it felt they had been there.
A four-month tenure, people invariably said, seemed like a year, maybe two. "Ah," said Mr. Paquin, "Internet Time."
That's how the story usually gets told. But Mr. Paquin said last week there was more to it than that.
The phrase, he said, was initially something of an inside joke among Mr. Paquin and his buddies. (And it was used to describe time perception not, as in its current meaning, time compression.) "Then the marketing and PR people picked up on it," he said.
It may be hard to remember now, but back then, Netscape was at the very center of the technology world. It was, for one, going to put Microsoft out of business. Reporters, politicians, the whole world flocked through its doors, asking about its ways, its secrets.
"Internet Time," said Mr. Paquin, was something that Netscape marketers began offering as a window into the company and its new world. People ate it up.
It may have been one of the first instances of a tech company marketing a form of Internet Exceptionalism. That's the notion that the Internet is a wholly new place where none of the old rules apply. That idea, of course, became the central tenet of the subsequent Internet bubble, and eventually ended up costing a lot of people a lot of money.
Mr. Paquin still thinks that Internet Time is a meaningful notion in the confines of technology. But he says it's not, as boosters tried to claim, the new world order.
Says Mr. Paquin, "To say some guy in the chemical industry ought to be shipping new products every six months -- that's just crazy."
October 23, 2002
Butts in seats
An article by two academics, Moving Past Time as the Criteria: The Application of Capabilities-Based Educational Equivalency Units in Education, suggests that the "Carnegie unit," which equates college credits with hours spent in class with a qualified instructor is hopelessly out of date.
I couldn't agree more.
The Carnegie Foundation for Advancement in Teaching defined a college unit as 750 classroom hours back in 1909, long before the advent of the Internet, the computer, television, tape recorders, or the ballpoint pen. It's no surprise that simulations, distance learning, and online collaboration count for naught in the Carnegie scheme.
The researchers propose the Capabilities-Based Educational Equivalency (CBEE) unit as a replacement. The say the CBEE "offers an approach that is not time-dependent but is responsive to emerging technologies, supportive of systematic instructional design, and focused on the achievement of learners."
- CBEE units are supposedly based on educational outcome instead of duration. Looking for a way to make CBEE units consistent across courses and institutions, the researchers bring in Gagne's taxonomy of human capabilities.
For each course, CBEE units are determined from Course Objectives (Given appropriate resources, learners will be able to…). Type of Objective (Gagne type) and Instructional method (text, online reading, async chat, etc.)
Colleges face a huge problem. They have no way to recognize what students learn outside of class.
I don't think these authors have the answer. Outcomes are outcomes. How one reaches them or how Gagne would pigeonhole them is irrelevant.
On a practical level, implementing competency-based education would probably involve more voodoo than what colleges are saddled with now. If a student learns three times as much in a Princeton course as in a Podunk U. course, does she receive three times as many credits? If not, why not?
I've assessed experiential learning for college credit in university assessment centers; it's the intellectual equivalent of touring the sausage factory.
I won't say where, but I've also developed lists of competencies for accredited off-campus degree programs. Most of the time, we developed the course before writing the competencies. This is like Charlie Brown painting the target around the arrow he has shot into the wall.
And what would happen if to courses that rate no CBEE units? A story in the August 14, 2002, New York Times reported "One day in 1931, Hamilton Holt, president of Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., startled his colleagues at an academic conference when he declared that Yale and Columbia, which he had attended in his youth, 'taught me virtually nothing.' The reason, Mr. Holt explained, was that the lectures delivered by his teachers, as with those delivered by professors almost everywhere, were examples of 'probably the worst scheme ever devised for imparting knowledge.'"
Your comments on my perspective are welcome.
October 20, 2002
Time by Design
Time by Design makes watches and on-screen clocks that are intriguing but difficult to read.
Their site is a charming collection of quotes and observations about time.
October 18, 2002
October 07, 2002
Time Inflation
It shouldn't be a surprise, but it never fails to grab my attention: a one-hundred year-old menu listing steak for a dollars, scrambled eggs for a quarter, and beer for a dime.
The surprise comes from confusing the value of 1902 dollars with that of 2002 dollars. Thanks to the ravages of inflation, one 2002 dollar is worth one 1902 nickle. Expressed in today's values, the old menu's steak goes for $20, the eggs cost $5, and the beer is two bucks. No surprise there.
We live in a world that has sped up since 1902. A hundred years ago, my great grandfather might spend half an hour writing a letter and half an hour each way carrying it down to the Post Office to mail. These days I dash off an email in a matter of minutes. An hour is worth more to me, at least in business terms, because I can do more with it than in the past.
So, what's the time equivalent of the obsolete prices on my old menu? Is time really more precious now than it used to be?
At this point, all I have is questions.
Procrastination
Walking saves time. Huh? It's true. The Washington Post says so.
Okay, we admit we don't have good comebacks for any of those. But for the rest of the excuses -- the more common ones you're probably using and that keep you in the high-risk category for just about everything you don't want to happen to you -- we offer the following irresistible rebuttals.
1. I DON'T HAVE TIME
Yeah, right. Do the words "computer solitaire" ring a bell? Just how many "must-see" TV shows do you have on your list this season? How about all that Web surfing for . . . what were you looking for again?
Ah. We thought so.
The important thing to understand regarding walking and time is that, when properly done, walking is actually a time generator, giving back more time than it consumes. We know of nothing else in the universe with this incredible ability.
For starters, walking lets your brain do something else while your body is moving: talk, think, connive, dream, plan, negotiate, work through the budget numbers, relive a vacation, recite epic poetry. Walking is essentially mobile multitasking.
"After millions of years of evolution, we are programmed to think while we walk," says Ellen Vanderslice, president of America Walks, a national coalition of pedestrian advocacy groups. "Walking keeps you organized. It actually puts more time in your day."
(Walking is, however, not compatible with talking on the cell phone. We refuse to provide any cover for those people you see on hiker-biker trails, suburban streets and city crosswalks yakking into the digital tin can like some schizophrenic bond trader. In fact, if you see them, tell them we said to cut it out.)
Then there's the idea that walking time makes the rest of your time more productive. It clears your brain and makes it work better when it's devoted to work later on.
"Walking increases blood flow to your brain," says Wendy Bumgardner, walking guide for About.com and a reformed sofa spud. "Studies show clearer thinking in seniors who walk for exercise versus those who do not. I find that going for a walk, you usually, first, stop thinking about the problems at hand. After a while, you can take up those problems with a fresh perspective and can prioritize them better."
Ron Looper, president of the Chesapeake Bay Country Wanderers, measures the extra time walking provides differently, even cosmically, by looking at the dividends it pays on the back end of life.
"Time is all you have," he reasons, "and walking for exercise probably will help extend your amount of time on earth."
All of which is to say: You don't have time not to walk. Next excuse?
October 04, 2002
R.I.P, ASAP
The New York Times reports, Forbes ASAP, Magazine of New Market, Shuts Down
"There is no market for a dedicated new-economy publication," said Monie Begley, spokeswoman for Forbes.
In remarks in August, Steve Forbes, president and editor in chief, said that the company was responding to "a fall-off that hasn't been seen since the '30's."
Drat! Forbes ASAP was one of my favorite magazines. Its special one-topic issues were absolutely wonderful; I read them all cover-to-cover. The issue on Happiness featured articles from P.J. O'Rourke, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, George Plimpton, Noall Bushnell, Lance Armstrong, John Perry Barlow, Jesse Jackson, and Christie Hefner. For me, ASAP's special issues were the timeliness of a magazine combined with the quality of a damned good book.
It's ironic that the final issue deals with feedback, since feedback from the marketplace is what's closing ASAP down.
Welcome to Feedback Universe
Michael S. Malone, 10.07.02
Surrender to the self-correcting system.
It is emerging as the defining metaphor of our time. Like other great scientific phenomena discovered over the past two centuries--natural selection, genetics, relativity, nuclear fission, DNA, digital--feedback is about to burst out of the theoretical stage and into everyday life. "Feedback is what has been missing from science since Newton," says British scientist Steve Grand, who is trying to develop artificial life forms. "We thought it was a rare phenomenon--now it's hard to name anything in the universe that isn't feedback. Life itself turns out to be feedback."
We are starting to rethink science in light of feedback. It is at the heart of the most compelling new inventions. And now we are seeing the first signs that it is beginning to reorganize both corporations and national economies.
"We don't even have the words yet to describe this," says Grand. "We don't yet have the names. Before this is over, we're going to need a new mathematics, a new physics, and a new ontology of the world."
Welcome to Feedback Universe.
Any regular user of Amazon.com knows about fast feedback loops. They can be found in those ever-changing lists of "Other Items You Might Enjoy." Every Amazon purchase you make teaches that algorithm a little more about you. Other companies, such as credit card firms, supermarkets, and department stores (Wal-Mart, for example; see "The ASAP Feedback Four," page 25) are following suit, tracking your every purchase to build a profile of your buying habits.
Mix that information in a vast shared database with mountains of data coming in about you from millions of sensors scattered across the landscape in roads, cash registers, and video cameras, and it soon will be possible to construct a virtual image of you--your tastes, interests, patterns, and perhaps even dreams--that will be almost indistinguishable from the real thing. This will be the face of retail--and probably law, education, health care, and entertainment--in the 21st century.
That brings us to the most sensitive--and compelling--feedback system of all: the human brain....
The classic explanation goes like this: You prick your finger, which irritates the nerve endings at the site of the wound. These inflamed nerves fire off electrical signals, which travel up the larger nerve pathways to your brain, where they are decoded as pain. The brain, itself a bundle of nerves, responds by sending a message back down a nerve path to the muscles in the finger, ordering them to contract and pull the finger away.
It appears mechanically straightforward. But the clue that it might not be so direct comes from a simple but shocking fact: In many of those nerve pathways, there are at least as many nerves heading toward the senses as there are heading away from them toward the brain. This suggests a much tighter and faster feedback loop than anyone imagined.
So what's going on? Nobody's quite sure. But one strong possibility is that even as the senses are telling the brain what they are encountering, the brain is telling them what they should be experiencing.
Grand compares this to a virtual reality system. The world is so complex that the human brain cannot deal with it directly. So instead, based on the information flowing in from the senses, the brain constructs, in real time, a simplified and weighted view of the world, one that picks out the important things from this infinite field of data. It is this vision of reality that the brain sends back out to the senses. "Brains are really billions of feedback loops," he says.
Last night I attended a presentation at Silicon Valley World Internet Center that touched on "real-time analytics." This is a buzzword for immediate business feedback. Example: WalMart's systems notice an upswing in sales of flags on September 12, 2001, and automatically begins buying up the inventory of flag suppliers.
September 19, 2002
The New Rules
I should be focusing on finishing the presentation I will be delivering four days from now, but some ideas are nagging me to be expressed and I'm not that good at arguing my brain out of such notions.
Several recent memes are influencing the way I conceptualize my website and my professional direction.
The notion of object orientation has me pondering what size unit is appropriate for my newly designed website. Also, the separation of form and substance, thanks to stylesheets, is liberating. And using a search engine instead of a hierarchy or indexes adds flexibility, too. The title of David Weinberger's book about the web, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, describes the blueprint for the new internettime.com. In tmie, half the site will be Easter eggs one trips over accidentally.
Nothing is ever finished. I used to complete a page or a white paper or a chapter and figure that is was "done." No longer. There's always a new perspective. And, since everything seems to be connected to everything else, things are always in flux. This is just as well, since people (including your author) engage with unfinished works but are bored when everything is over. Hell, they may have something to add; hence the need for two-way authoring. I like the way Movable Type encourages me to come back to add on to items I'd posted a while back.
Time is accelerating and is more important than it used to be. When I mentioned this to a management consultant friend, he asked, "Do you have any proof of that?" My response was, "Can't you feel it?" For the last dozen years, I've been drawn to the study of time, without explanation, like the moth to the flame. (I can identify with the Richard Dreyfus character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind who was obsessed with Devil's Tower.)
This notion that relentless time is moving ahead is goading me to shift over to the new internettime.com before I normally would have. It is not finished. It's half-baked. But then, it never will be finished. And I have experiments I want to conduct on the web and cannot afford the time to keep two sites up to date.
Finally, I'm reconceptualizing the role of the site itself. At first, we positioned ourselves as an authority on eLearning. When we'd figure something out, we'd clean it up and present it on the site. The new role is inquirer. We invite people to look over our shoulder as we explore how the world works and how to make it better. The inquiry leads outside of our familiar domains but we have the courage (or is it chutzpah?) to boldly go out on that thin ice. Psychology? Cog-sci? Design? Socio-biology? The new science? Entropy? Chaos? No problem.
September 09, 2002
Human biological clocks
Times of our lives by Karen Wright, in the current Scientific American
Adrenaline and other stress hormones make the clock speed up, as do cocaine and meth. Parkinson's patients and dope-smokers have less available dopamine and experience slower time. States of deep concentration or extreme emotion may flood the system or bypass it altogether; in such cases, time may seem to stand still or not exist at all. Because an attentional spike initates the timing process, people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder might also have problems gauging the true length of intervals.
Circadian rhythms are something else again. "Confined to a petri dish under contassnt lighting, human cells still follow 24-hour cycles of gene activity, hormone secretion and energy procution. The cycles are hardwired and vary by only a few minutes a day!
Most animals have extreme changes throughout the year, for hibernation, molting, and the all-important procreation. We humans get seasonable affective disorder. Big deal.
How to Build a Time Machine
Another article by Paul Davies in the current issue of Scientific American.
Traveling into the past is rather trickier. Relativity theory allows it in certain spacetime configurations: a rotating universe, a rotating cylinder and, most famously, a wormhole -- a tunnel through space and time.
Time dillation occurs when two observers move relative to each other. Hence the twins paradox: the space-traveler twin returns to find a much older twin back on earth. This happens on airplanes, too, but a few nanoseconds here and there are easily overlooked.
Gravity also slows time. A clock in the attic runs faster than one on the ground. The amount is trivial close to Earth but must be factored in by the GPS system.
Davies proposes a time machine constructed of a couple of wormholes. Place one next to a neutron star -- that will slow down time a bit. Go in one place, come out somewhere else in space and in time. How are we going to do this? Quantum mechanics pops up. Sounds like voodoo to me.
From Instanteous to Eternal describes measures of time from one attosecond (a billlionth of a billionth of a second) to a billion years (how long it took the surface of the earth to cool.) The smallest unit of time is the Planck time, 10 to the -43 power.
September 08, 2002
Scientific American 9/2002
I've begun reading the Scientific American special issue on Time.
"From the fixed past to the tahgible present to the undecided future, it feels as though time flows inexorably on. But that is an illusion." So writes Paul Davies in That Mysterious Flow.
Nothing in known physics corresponds to the passage of time. Indeed physicists insist that time doesn't flow at all; it merely is.
Einstein famously wrote... "The past, present and future are only illusions, even if stubbon ones." Einstein's startling conclusion stems directly from his special theory of relativity, which denies any absolute, universal significance to the present moment. According to the theory, simultaneity is relative.
As to why our brains think time exists, Davies suggests that maybe it's due to the irreversible process of entropy. Things get messier over time; they never un-mess. New memories add to the brain's entropy. Maybe we experience this as the passage of time?
August 26, 2002
Scientific American's current issue is
Scientific American's current issue is about TIME.
"Punctuality comes from within, not from without," writes Harvard University historian David S. Landes in his book Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. "It is the mechanical clock that made possible, for better or worse, a civilization attentive to the passage of time, hence to productivity and performance."
A team from France and the Netherlands set a new speed record for subdividing the second, reporting last year that a laser strobe light had emitted pulses lasting 250 attoseconds--that's 250 billionths of a billionth of a second. The strobe may one day be fashioned into a camera that can track the movements of individual electrons. The modern era has also registered gains in assessing big intervals. Radiometric dating methods, measuring rods of "deep time," indicate how old the earth really is.
August 17, 2002
Doc posts a nice blow-up
Doc posts a nice blow-up of the different rates of change from the Long Now Foundation:
July 30, 2002
Bandwidth is time-dependent, so I'll
Bandwidth is time-dependent, so I'll put this handy table from JOHO here.
- Bluetooth is 10 times faster than a 56k modem
USB is 10 times faster than Bluetooth
802.11b is as fast as USB
10baseT is as fast as USB
100baseT is 10 times faster than 10baseT
FireWire is 4 times faster than 100baseT and 40 times faster than USB
Gigabit Ethernet is 10 times faster than 100baseT
July 10, 2002
From The Wealth of Knowledge
From The Wealth of Knowledge by Tom Stewart,
On a lakeside near Zurich, a city where Lenin plotted Bolshevist revolution, ur-capitalist Dean LeBaron, former fchaiman of Bastterymarch Financial Management, contrmplates the information revolution: "We financial analysts were brought up looking at charts whose x-asis represented time.You'd see trends. Time was a wave. In the new economy, I'm beginning to think time is a quantum. What comes next bears no relationship to what came before." That glorious abstract image becomes earthy as LeBaron explains: "It use to be that information oozed out into the makret. Now it's dumped out all at once."
My dinners with Pierre (et
My dinners with Pierre (et ses amis)
Last week in France, home of Bergson and Proust, I noted some differences between French and US notions of time.
- The French have not only minutes, but also "small minutes." This appears to be a euphemism for "it's really going to be longer than that." Petit pops up in other contexts, e.g. "Do you want a whisky?" "Maybe a small one." Thus, a petit minute is to a minute as "just a sec" is to a second. Different.
- For the most part, American meetings cut to the heart of the matter and Continental meetings start with social and philosophical foreplay. I suspect that the Americans assume the existance of "one best way" and see no need to open that bucket of worms when discussing business matters. The French are more philosophical and enjoy confirming the context before getting to the point. Also, the circular warm-up in France paves the way socially for deeper interaction -- if and when the point of the meeting is reached.
- In one day-long session to formulate strategy, for the first couple of hours, I felt like I was in slo-mo. My Dinner with Andre. And yet after lunch, we reached more agreements in a shorter time than I've ever experienced in American sessions. The lengthy warm-up built the foundation for rapid agreement. Overall, the Continental approach was more time-efficient. And in addition, we had time left over to discuss nuances over a pleasant dinner at a local brasserie.
- On the road, American drivers assume other drivers will obey the rules of the road. American highways are less ambiguous in defining what's proper and what's not. Driving in California, I can almost flip into auto-pilot, monitoring details with my peripheral vision and not paying much attention to the second-to-second interplay of the automobiles and trucks around me. In France, many streets were laid out for carriages and farm animals. Streets meet at oblique angles. Cars parked along residential streets leave but a single lane for traffic. When cars approach a chokepoint from opposite directions, it's not at all clear who has the right of way. Driving on auto-pilot in France would be suicidal. It's a much faster game, where one driver has to react to the moves of the others. I suspect French drivers have much quicker reflexes than their American counterparts because they have so much practice.
June 24, 2002
Steven Wright on timely subjects:
Steven Wright on timely subjects:
Ever notice how irons have a setting for PERMANENT press? I don't get it...
Four years ago..............no, it was yesterday.
I just bought a microwave fireplace... You can spend an evening in front of it in only eight minutes...
I went to a restaurant that serves "breakfast at any time". So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.
Today I met with a subliminal advertising executive for just a second.
My girlfriend asked me how long I was going to be gone on this tour. I said "the whole time".
"I put instant coffee in my microwave oven and almost went back in time."
June 13, 2002
Just in time strategy for
Just in time strategy for a turbulent world
Lowell L. Bryan
The McKinsey Quarterly, 2002 Number 2 Risk and resilience
"Kenneth, what is the frequency?"
Such traditional strategy formulation often pays lip service to the perspectives of the capital markets, to changing industry structures, and to the forces at work in the environment. But in reality, a "visionary" corporate strategy is often an internally driven reflection of what the company wants the world to look like.
But suppose we no longer believe that the future is foreseeable. What if defining and achieving an enduring competitive advantage is really just a conceit that must be abandoned? What if the outstanding fact of business, as John Maynard Keynes once described it, is the "extreme precariousness of the basis of knowledge"? What if it is no longer possible to block out the "noise" of the world’s messy reality in order to rationalize a plan to achieve predetermined outcomes?
As we've been wondering here at Internet Time Group, what if we can't count on the future?
Although the world is increasingly complex, confusing, and uncertain, serendipity doesn’t have to be more important than skill in the crafting and implementing of corporate strategy. Traditional deterministic approaches to strategy aren’t likely to be up to the task of helping companies negotiate these dangerous waters, but executives need not put the fate of their businesses entirely in the hands of chance. As the global environment continually changes and risk levels rise, a portfolio-of-initiatives approach holds out the opportunity for corporations to be as flexible and adaptive as the markets themselves.
That's the way I've been conceptualizing my business efforts for several years. For an individual, it means increasing the amount one learns in order to keep more options open.
June 12, 2002
'A New Kind of Science':
'A New Kind of Science': You Know That Space-Time Thing? Never Mind
Sunday NY Times Book Review
By GEORGE JOHNSON
From the very beginning of this meticulously constructed
manifesto, the reader is presented with a stunning proposal: all
the science we know will be demolished and reassembled. An
ancient error will be corrected, one so profoundly misguided
that it has led science down the wrong avenue, until it is
approaching a cul-de-sac. The mistake (as everyone who hated
calculus will be happy to hear) is trying to capture the
richness of the universe with mathematical equations --
Newton's, Maxwell's, Einstein's. All are based on an abstract,
perhaps dubious idea -- that time and space form a seamless
continuum. Whether dealing with an inch or a second, you can
chop it in half and the half in half, ad infinitum. Thus things
can be described with unlimited, infinitesimal precision.
Wolfram contends that this, the common wisdom, gets things
upside down: the algorithm is the pure, elemental expression of
nature; the equation is an artifice. That is because the
continuum is a fiction. Time doesn't flow, it ticks. Space is
not a surface but a grid. A world like this is best described
not by equations but by simple step-by-step procedures. By
computer programs.
May 27, 2002
"I think we agree, the
"I think we agree, the past is over."
Geroge W. Bush, on his meeting with John McCain,
Dallas Morning News, May 10, 2000
Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and
Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter
by Geoffrey Sonnabend
In his three volume work Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter, Geoffrey Sonnabend departed from all previous memory research with the premise that memory is an illusion. Forgetting, he believed, not remembering is the inevitable outcome of all experience. From this perspective,
"We, amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present, have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and the irretrieveability of its moments and events."
Sonnabend did not attempt to deny that the experience of memory existed. However, his entire body of work was predicated on the idea that what we experience as memories are in fact confabulations artificial constructions of our own design built around sterile particles of retained experience which we attempt to make live again by infusions of imagination - much as the blacks and whites of old photographs are enhanced by the addition of colors or tints in attempt to add life to a frozen moment.
Sonnabend believed that long term or "distant" memory was illusion, but similarly he questioned short term or "immediate" memory. On a number of occasions Sonnabend wrote, "there is only experience and its decay" by which he meant to suggest that what we typically call short term memory is, in fact, our experiencing the decay of an experience. Interestingly, however, Sonnabend employed the term true memory, to describe this process of decay which, he held, was, in actuality, not memory at all.
May 12, 2002
Seriousness is an accident of
Seriousness is an accident of time. It consists in putting too high a value on time. In eternity there is no time. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke. Herman Hesse (1877 - 1962)
Anywhere is walking distance, if you've got the time. Steven Wright
Use the Blog, Luke by
Use the Blog, Luke
by Steven Johnson in Salon
But both Blogdex and Bookwatch share a conceptual limitation with most individual blogs, a limitation that is hard-wired into the software used by the great majority of webloggers: They are organized around time.
Time is central to the philosophical DNA the blogs share with journalism: Both compulsively feature today's link, today's controversy, today's top books. This might seem like an obvious organizational principle, but it comes with great restrictions. Google, for instance, is largely oblivious to time: When you use Google, you're usually not looking for up-to-the-minute info, you're looking for authority and depth. (Try getting a useful stock quote directly from Google and you'll understand immediately.) Many of the bloggers that I follow comment on links that are time-sensitive on the scale of a year or two: Someone's rant on the latest XML spec revisions is just as relevant next week, though probably not nearly so relevant a decade from now. But because those links fall off the front door every few days, they effectively enter a de facto oblivion, where I have to hunt them down actively three weeks later when I'm looking around for useful assessments of XML. The beautiful thing about most information captured by the bloggers is that it has an extensive shelf life. The problem is that it's being featured on a rotating shelf.
But the bloggers needn't be anchored to the headline-news mentality. Think of them as less like a newspaper substitute and more a kind of guardian angel, hovering over your shoulder as you surf. (The Alexa software created by Brewster Kahle relied on a similar approach: He called it a "surf engine.") Punch up a URL and if Jason, or Andrew Sullivan, or Sopsy has an opinion about that page, you see their comments in a floating window alongside your main browser window. It's a simple enough trick: Sites like Blogdex are already tracking blog-borne references to different URLs. All your browser would have to do is send an additional request to a database of blogged URLs anytime you pulled up a page: If there's a match -- if one of the bloggers you're following has referenced the URL -- their comments get sent back to your machine and appear in the floating palette.
[interesting riff on collaborative filtering via blogs]
There are almost as many potential ways to manage that new flow of information as there are bloggers providing it. But to open up these new avenues, the bloggers are going to have to shed their dependence on the traditional journalistic models: Instead of going to today's blog the way you pick up today's paper, the bloggers should follow us around, providing context and commentary, supplementing our libraries and our memory. Many blogs out there possess the standards and intelligence of conventional journalism, but there are already too many of them to keep track of the way we subscribe to old-style magazines or habitually tune in to favorite TV networks. If the blogging population expands at the current rate, soon enough you'll be able to spend an entire day just reading the front doors of all your bookmarked blogs. Better to do away with the dependence on front doors, and let your favorite bloggers come to you.
Zeitgeist Explained... zeit·geist | Pronunciation:
Zeitgeist Explained...
zeit·geist | Pronunciation: 'tsIt-"gIst, 'zIt | Function: noun | Etymology: German, from Zeit (time) + Geist (spirit) | Date: 1884 | Meaning: the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era