May 2002 Archives

I've been trying to think of ways to test or experiment on creative networks in order to discover the optimum network topology to enhance creativity. So far I've borrowed two metaphors from technology to descibe creative networks: the network topology model (star, mesh, ring) and the internet business model (many to many, few to many, etc)

Is it poissible to use the conclusions of computer networking studies to help answer this question?

Share your thoughts in the Future of Creativity project area.

From Business Week:
An interview with Prchard Purcell, the privacy czar.

My job is dedicated to transferring control of information back to where I think it belongs -- in the hands of the individual. But that assumes they ever had control. That's not the case. In the offline world, for decades and decades, information has been gathered and shared and used completely outside of the control of the individual. So if I say, "Gee, I really want to turn control back to the individual," what's that going to mean in terms of how much work there is? And what's it going to mean in terms of a person's ability to do it?

From the Startup Journal:

The study of entrepreneurship is just starting to generate sufficient data to conclude that laid-off workers, also known as necessity entrepreneurs, don't, as a rule, start companies that employ a lot of people. That's the province of so-called opportunity entrepreneurs -- those who choose to start their own business out of a burning desire, not because they lost a job.

Robert Kagan has written an interesting analysis of why Americans and Europeans have such different attitudes to the use of force in foreign policy. Power and Weakness

His basic contention is that America and Europe have traded attitudes toward power since a century ago. Back then Europe wanted to exercise unilateral power over its empire, shipping, etc. while America wanted to work multilaterally through international law. The situation is now reversed because the relative power of America and Europe has flipped: America now has the military and economic power that Europe once commanded.

Jon Udell continues to produce thought provoking content on the nature of weblogs and online interaction. He wrote one of the best books I've read about online collaboration back in 1999: Practical Internet Groupware

His latest piece is an attempt to map some of the links between webloggers by examining the links they have posted from their aggregators. This analysis of social clusters is still in its infancy but it has tremendous promise. Steven Johnson wrote a piece for Salon on the same topic of making social networks visible, Use the Blog, Luke

To me the visiblity of social networks is the most amazing part of the internet. I'm more inclined to be an observer of social networks before joining. Without that initial social gladhanding it's that much harder to find networks of interest. The internet makes the cost of searching for these networks much lower.

As part of my forays into the blogosphere I've discovered and begun using some news aggergator programs. Radio Userland contains a default news aggregator that is incredibly easy to use and configure, just click on the XML banners at other radio sites and the feed is added to your list automatically.

On the Windows desktop I've discovered some interesting standalone applications. Jon Udell's radio weblog provided this list. I've downloaded most of them and am giving them all a try. So far I like NewzCrawler the best because it seems to work easily from behind the firewall at work. When I get the others working at home I'll be able to make more of a comparison.

The reason why this is a nightmare is simple information overload. I was having a hard enough time digesting my daily subscriptions to 15 or so email link collectors. Even worse is the automatic updating. No sooner do I navigate through one set of Radio links in an hour then the next set of links is auto downloaded and the sifting begins anew. There's never any way to catch up. I've encountered this problem before when I've halfhartedly tried to read busy usenet groups like rec.arts.sf.fandom. I keep on the straight and narrow for a month, make a random foray into the conversation and then withdraw out of exhaustion. I'm hoping this blog experiment will last longer.

The Future for Intelligent Simulation Models is an article from the Edge newslettre published by the MITRE organazation, a think tank that works on technology and the military.

The author, Gary Klein, outlines the history of agent based analysis and the object oriented based approaches that began to be adopted in the 1980s. The most recent developments are to add adaptive intelligence to the agents to allow them to change their strategies over time.

Adaptive Agent Simulation Modeling—Recently, MITRE has begun making these agents even smarter by providing them with methods that allow them to perceive the results of their actions and then to modify their behaviors to improve their performance in achieving their goal-state. They are now capable of learning to go beyond their initial programming. A widely accepted term for these agents hasn’t yet been coined. The term “intelligent agent” has sometimes been used, but it has also been used interchangeably with “autonomous agent”. For the purposes of this article, we will call these new classes “adaptive agents” to distinguish them from the others. This powerful new paradigm allows us to examine systematically how behaviors of adaptive individuals affect the evolution of the individuals and consequently of a society. If we simulate two societies with competing goals we can examine how they co-evolve. If we place adaptive agents on a simulated battlefield, then we have a simulated wargame where the parties are capable of adapting to their environment and to each other. This is how we developed the simulated cyberwargame described at the beginning of this article. Collaborative groups of these agents may form an organization, or (as in Minsky's The Society of Mind, 1988) a single mind of a decision maker.

The nod to Marvin Minsky coincides with my developing notions of connecting agents to human beings as an augmentation of our capabilities, not necessarily a replacement.

Knowledge@Wharton has an interesting summary article (Regulating the Information Railways? Antitrust Law in the High-Tech Era) on the problems of anti-trust law in the modern age. The author deftly summarizes the two big areas of current anti-trust action: Microsoft and the telephone/telecommunication system. He concludes that the telephone or 'last mile' system is more amenable to anti-trust action because the networks were developed by AT&T as part of a protected monopoly and thus, in some sense, belong to the public already. The problem is who will pay for the upgrades to these systems.

The Microsoft case is harder, not because MS isn't a monopoly, but because of the rapidity of technological change. The remedies for Microsoft's crimes are too-large, and too-late; the problem has already been superseded.

British prime minister Blair makes some important points on the value of science in this article from the Times.

The recent death of Stephen Jay Gould reminds me of how important it is to keep telling people about the value of science. Although I'm sympathetic to the critiques made by the critics of science, particularly the questions about power and discourse, I believe science has been a net gain for humanity. What we should all learn from science is the need to question our assumptions.

Derrick de Kerckhove is the director of the McLuhan program at the University of Toronto and has the following things to say in a recent interview.

TF: What will be the key societal impact of mobile telephony/Internet?

De Kerckhove: Acceleration. Mobile telephony and Internet is accelerating society in at least two ways: Vastly increasing the volume of human transactions, and reducing the time delay between transactions.
...
The difference between today’s accumulation of knowledge and connectivity and that of the Renaissance is qualitative as well as quantitative. While the printing press distributed knowledge in different places and different formats with comparatively slow access routes, the mobile Internet gives access to all of that information and infinitely more of it anywhere, anytime. Ever more efficient search engines are making that access not just merely pertinent but “hypertinent” which is the logic of the memory in our brains. Every time we think, we summon the most pertinent information available in our mind. Imagine having the same kind of access to the contents of everybody else’s mind at once. It’s quite literally mind-boggling.

The first paragraph states the obvious point that society is accelerating, although it dose enumerate two important dimensions to the acceleration: volume and delay.

The second paragraph is more interesting. I especially like the 'hypertinent' coining. This extension of our own memory to the global memory represented in search engines is the beginning of the creative extension that I predict will happen over the next several decades as our minds become intertwined with subagents (computer progams and interpersonal data connections). That term needs a better name but I haven't found it yet.

Technology Review also contains an interesting article on imitation and innovation.
Mimetic Management By Michael Schrage Schrage wrote Serious Play about using simulation in business. This article makes the crucial point that most companies want to imitate the leaders in their fields, not necessarily create their own methods. Particularly interesting for the promotion of innovations.

Technology Review has two interesting articles about the recent activities of Nathan Myhrvold, the former director of Microsoft Research. Myhrvold left MS two years ago to begin his own company basically to research whatever Nathan was interested in looking at. Ah, the pleasures being a multimillionaire with curiosity. The results/goals of this venture are described as the creation of an 'an invention factory.'

The second article is an interview transcript with Myhrvold Myhrvold's Exponential Economy where he mentions some very interesting topics on innovation.

Myhrvold says the following about symbolic science:

TR: What is a symbolic science?

NM: Something with deep abstractions described by lots of data. Vast amounts of data—and analyzing abstract data is one of the most important frontiers in biology and medicine. So understanding which of your genes have this, that and the other thing, or which things are being expressed in your body right now. What proteins are in over- or undersupply. Where is there a feedback control system that’s screwed up. We’re on the verge of figuring out that or a million other very complicated systems. A key tool in that’s computing. So bioinformatics, bioinformatics algorithms. Most of that stuff is at its complete infancy. One thing that’s amusing to me is that when I visited proteomics companies, you get people, although they use computers, they use them in completely boneheaded ways. So everybody has big SQL databases, big Oracle databases, under the faith that that’s a good thing to do, when it’s completely ill suited. The relational database was designed for tasks such as tracking stock room inventory or managing employee information; it was not designed for manipulating genomic base pairs and genetic information. So somebody needs to invent a bunch of stuff there. But more than that, biology and medicine are about reverse-engineering a very complicated machine. The detailed understanding of all the mechanisms and pathways by which things are regulated and controlled, the ways in which disease disrupts those regulations and how we can put them right, that’s all incredibly complicated. Well, that suggests all kinds of opportunity. What tools are missing? What are the analysis techniques that you need to do? There are a million things.

I particularly latched onto the idea of abstraction. One of my goals for my future of creativity project is to descibe the abstractions between the different levels on which creativity occurs. What will be the abstractions developed betweed communities and nations, between teams and communities? The transforming power of technology has been making these abstractions possible.

Myhrvold continues with a defense of basic science and research, both commercial and government sponsored.

TR: We have all this growth in technology, but you have been quite vocal in also pressing for more basic science. NM: Basic science is the fundamental well from which all this stuff is watered. Ironically, basic science is being given increasingly short shrift. DARPA [the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] funding for computer science is probably the single most successful government program in the history of governments—it led to this entire revolution in computing. Yet most Silicon Valley companies that are the beneficiary of that don’t invest in fundamental research. Then you get the ludicrous thing of people in Congress saying they want more relevant research. No, you should have less relevant research.

I’ve done extensive modeling of all of this. If you’re a company that lives hand to mouth, don’t do research, okay. You don’t need me to tell you that. If you’re a company that has steady cash flows, then you should work at whatever level you can afford. So if you’re a company that intends to be around 20 years from now, like a Microsoft, you are losing money if you don’t do research. It is an incredibly profitable investment only open to a limited club—the people who can afford to take a long-term view. And that’s an industrial research context. At the government level, you really should swing for the fences.

You could make a case that research funding really won the Cold War, because it was those economic things that stoked the economy. As soon as the Soviets went from being our enemies to being potentially our friends, [people said,] now let’s stop giving lots of money to science. Well, that doesn’t make any sense. Fundamental science has been the best investment the government’s ever made.

TR: A big mark against basic research in industry is that the firms who support it don’t always capture the benefit of it—Bell Labs with the transistor, Xerox with so much of modern computing.

NM: Whether you’re expanding overseas or you’re doing any business decision, you can find someone who screwed it up and caused lots of hurt to their company. It hasn’t stopped people from doing it.

So take Xerox as an example. The same era that they started PARC [the Palo Alto Research Center, birthplace of the graphical user interface, Ethernet and other elements of digital computing], they bought a company called Scientific Data Systems. They lost a billion dollars in 1970 dollars on that. More money than they’ve spent on PARC the entire time they’ve had PARC. Nobody gives them any shit for that anymore. Everyone says, oh, Xerox screwed up PARC. They didn’t screw up PARC. PARC invented the laser printer. That one invention alone paid for PARC many times over. Yet people give Xerox a black eye for this. Why? Because they think, “But they should have done more.” Well, if you do shoulda, woulda, coulda, you’re going to drive yourself crazy. The problem that Xerox had—the fundamental problem—is that Xerox didn’t understand computers. That’s why they lost the billion dollars in that other merger. That’s also why they couldn’t commercialize any of the other computer inventions.

So you add it up, investing in basic research makes huge sense for companies. But it makes even more sense for the government. By the way, I’d love to have the rest of the world join us, because research is the kind of thing that feeds on other research. The fundamental researcher in China that isn’t being funded today might be the one who if he was funded would find the cure to the disease I’ll get in 20 years.

Myhrvold's defense of PARC is particularly useful and highlights the point that innovation benefits everyone even, perhaps especially, when it does not have an immediate commercial application.

Thomas Fridman's recent column on the lack of political imagination displayed by Bush after the 9/11 attacks pinpoints the reason why I dislike American politics as a whole. There are no major elected officials who display any vision on terrorism or on foreign affairs in general. Domestically the situation is not much better - in fact it's worse because the deciding line for issues is money.

Here's the morning links:
A Bad, Sad Hollywood Ending! Business Week on the threat of Hollywood copy protection schemes to the foundations of open source.
Judge Skeptical of a Microsoft Remedy NYT on the potential state settlement against Microsoft.
The LawMeme Guide to Spider-Man and Star Wars Bootlegs LawMeme with a decent summary of the absurdities behind Hollywood desire to control the digital devices of the futur in order to control pirating. Digital or analog is not the issue, pirating will always occur. What Hollywood should be doing is trying to encourage consumers to purchase legitimate material - make CDs and DVDs reasonably cheap and consumers will come. Now do the same for 'broadband.' :)

There's still a ton more to say but that's what this whole system is supposed to be for.
Right.
Right.

So Todd wants to try his first test of the MT weblog system. I have high hopes for everything. So far the configuration has been a breeze. Now comes the part where I get to test out the entry system.

A paragraph where I skipped a line.
A single line.

Here should be an indented quotation.
One must have a mind of winter...

Aint it cool!!