Dilemma of the Day

Robert J. Sternberg. Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized. 2003. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge. UK.

Concerning knowledge, on the one hand, one needs to know enough about a filed to move it forward. One cannot move beyond a field if one doesn't know where it is. On the other hand, knowledge about a field can result in a closed and entrenched pespective, confining a person to the way in which he or she has seen problems in the past. Thus, one needs to decide to use one's past knowledge, but also decide not to let the knowledge become a hindrance rather than help. ( page 108).

more Jeff Hawkins (p.78)

...the problem of undestanding how you cortex forms invariant representations remains one of the biggest mysteries in all of science. How difficult, you ask? So much so that no one, not even using the most powerful computers in the world, has been able to solve it.

Sounds like a really important problem. I need to find out more about it. 

Encarta is dead...

h/t Arstechnica:

"On October 31, 2009, MSN Encarta Web sites worldwide will be discontinued, with the exception of Encarta Japan, which will be discontinued on December 31, 2009. Additionally, Microsoft will cease to sell Microsoft Student and Encarta Premium software products worldwide by June 2009."

This is one of the few examples of a genuine business disruption, as defined by Clayton Christensen in The Innovator's Dilemma. Wikipedia, with 3 regular employees (including the secretary), killed the whole encyclopedia industry. Simply amazing.

Nature published a list of evolution gems to further disseminate evidence of natural selection. Reading the article, I found this beautiful quote:

Species evolve together, and in competition. Predators evolve ever deadlier weapons and skills to catch prey, which, as a result of Darwin’s canonical ‘struggle for existence’, become better at escaping them, and so the arms race continues. In 1973, evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen likened this to the Red Queen’s comment to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” The ‘Red Queen’ hypothesis of co-evolution was born.

This observation led me to the thought that innovation is even more wonderful than life in the Wonderland. To make a difference, i.e. to get somewhere with your invention, you must run at least 10 times as fast as the rest of the field. :)

On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins (p.75):

Thoughts and memories are associatively linked, and again, random thoughts never really occur. Inputs to the brain auto-associatively link to themselves, filling in the present, and auto-associatively link to what normally follows next. We call this chain of memories thought, and although its path is not detrministic, we are not fully in control of it either.

 Let's take this passage as a starting point and see how it might help us better understand human creativity.
To generate novel ideas, we have to create out sequence, i.e. random thoughts. If Hawkins is right, and they cannot occur randomly, we might decide to force the seemingly "impossible" randomness by inserting various trigger points, e.g. by emerging ourselves in randomness-rich environments. This approach could be the basis for spontaneous creativity, which many people experience when they come up with a new idea. De Bono's random word stimulation is a good example of a conscious effort directed at creating pseudo-random triggers.

Another approach, let's call it systematic creativity, would be to guide one's mind through a certain sequence of various perspectives that disrupt routine thought-memories. The goal would be to force the brain into thinking at different event scales (e.g. tiny, small, normal, big, large, huge, humongous), time intervals (e.g. instantaneous, quick, normal, long, ..., eternal), and etc. By breaking through the "normal" path of auto-associations into the direction of strange, but possible, associations, we can imagine and explore virtual environments rich in novel possibilities.

We know that inventions, especially the good ones, create new worlds. Therefore, a conscious, systematic effort to envision and play with dimensions of a possible world, should be very beneficial to creativity.

Reference: Jeff Hawkings with Sandra Blakeslee. On Intelligence. - 1st ed. Times Books. 2004. ISBN 0-8050-7456-2.

While preparing for the upcoming Principles of Invention class at Stanford CSP, by the way we still have one or two slots available, I found a positive psychology paper that places creativity within a wider framework of human virtues and character strengths. The whole set consists of 6 virtues and 24 character traits that are commonly endorsed across many cultures. In this post I decided to focus on a virtue that is most relevant to invention. Here's a snippet of the "Wisdom and Knowledge" category that includes creativity.

Table 1. Classification of 6 Virtues and 24 Character Strengths (Peterson & Seligman, 2004).

Virtue and Strength	Definition
Wisdom and knowledge	Cognitive strengths that entail the acquisition and use of knowledge
Creativity --	Thinking of novel and productive ways to do things
Curiosity --	Taking an interest in all of ongoing experience
Open-mindedness --	Thinking things through and examining them from all sides
Love of learning --	Mastering new skills, topics, and bodies of knowledge
Perspective --	Being able to provide wise counsel to others

Source: MEP Seligman, TA Steen, N Park, C Peterson. Positive psychology progress. American Psychologist, July-August, 2005.

Later this year I will create a map of the tools and methods I teach throughout the course and specific character strength they help develop.

Subodh Nayar, the COO of Powerline Telco, makes an excellent point about the impact of the so-called smart power meters (networked devices capable of monitoring and reporting power usage in real time):

Empowering consumers with actionable intelligence about their power will not be the outcome of the deployment of smart meters. Rather, it will be exactly what the utilities intend for it to be: a cost-effective way to implement real-time pricing, demand side management and distribution system monitoring.

In essence, his argument is that the data from smart meters is not granular enough for consumers to make informed decisions about electricity usage . We, consumers, can control our usage, and ultimately the electricity bill, by turning on and off specific electric appliances, e.g. TVs, washers, dryers, etc. A smart meter is only going to give us data about electricity consumption for the whole house, not a particular device. The data would still have to be processed further (how?) to help us figure out when and which device ought to be turned on or off to save money.
Remarkably, depending on the system scale, the usefulness of the same data is drastically different. While the electricity supplier can use it directly to make power generation and distribution decisions, the consumer is stuck with more information overload.
No wonder, Google wants a piece of the smart meter action. The greater information overload, the greater the need for data processing services.

==
Notes for the class:
1. A good exercise for the Magicians. The case shows how a change in the point of view (Climb-on-the-Roof Magician) allows us to identify problems in the super-system (power generation & distribution) vs the sub-system ( house & house appliances).
2. Five-element analysis (recursive up and down): House as a Tool in the super-system; Appliance as a Tool in the sub-system (House). The role of Control, both on super- and sub- system levels. The difference between data and information.
3. Assuming that smart meters are deployed on a mass scale (short-term), formulate detection and control problems on the sub-system (House) level. Propose solutions ( tech & business).

In 2006, Kim Popovits, President and COO of Genomic Health, Inc., gave a talk at Stanford, in which she, among other things, mentioned that out of a hundred women that were subjected to chemotherapy for breast cancer only four would get any benefit from the treatment (15 min). The problem was that nobody knew which four, so women would take their chances and ask doctors for chemo.
After several years of work, Popovits' company, using a standard(!) diagnostics tool, developed a genetic test to identify those whom the chemotherapy had the greatest chance to help.
Key insights from the talk:
- a good example of a solution to a detection problem (genetic test) that leads to a much improved control sub-system, and therefore to a high level of system efficiency; (see also my previous post).
- application of an existing solution to a new high value problem that emerged due to the rapid growth of the treatment system; leverage a large "idle" database of tissue samples and medical histories; (another example of storage as a sign of an impending major change in system evolution);
- importance of the team, i.e. complementarity of different skill sets;
- the need to focus on the market need;
- decision criterion: "choose what's good for the patient". on one hand, creates the greatest benefits for the person; on the other hand, proliferates expensive treatments that bankrupt the society as a whole (e.g. Medicare is projected to become insolvable within the next decade);
- emergence of highly personalized drug treatments.

Gerald M. Edelman, a 1972 Nobel laureate in Physiology/Medicine, in an interview with Istvan Hargittai:

Q: Have you tried to formulate a recipe for scientific discovery?
A: I'll tell you my theory of discovery by means of an anecdote. Beethoven's landlady says to him, "Beethoven, get out of my house. Your cat drinks my milk, you throw your laundry in the stairwell, and you pound on the piano all night, I can't sleep." And she laughs in response, "Ha-ha-ha-haaa" [the first strokes of the Fifth Symphony.] That's discovery, namely, contingency, accident, pattern, preconception, elaboration, and constantly playing back and forth against tradition of some kind; in Beethoven's case, it was Viennese classical music. In tracing a discovery there is an extraordinary complexity and diversity in the history, circumstance, cultural development, and technical skill. So to try to lay down any simple rule is not possible. (p 209).

It looks like there's no recipe for scientific discovery. On the other hand, if we start thinking about science as a system, in which discovery of a scientific discovery must be possible, we can take to the heart Edelman's words several pages below:

In terms of principle, selectional systems all have three constraints: (1) You must have a generator of diversity (G.O.D.). (2) You must have some mechanism for polling so that two domains which have no causal connection can sample each other with sufficient completeness. (3) You have to have some form of differentiated amplification, providing a selective advantage, for example, by producing enough antibodies of the right kind. (p 213).

What he is describing here is a system capable of solving detection problems, and then feeding the results of its work to a control mechanism that acts on the differences detected. Of course, in early stages of system development, diversity is not significant. But, as the system matures and diversity increases, the detection/control sub-system grows in importance because it provides for the greater efficiency of the top level system.
Success of Silicon Valley would be a great illustration to the interaction of the selectional principles. We have (1) a culture that encourage generation of diverse ideas; (2) various multi-stage talent detection mechanisms, e.g. startup funding and/or academic grant review processes; (3) a relatively large pool of VC money available for entrepreneurs.

References:

Candid Science: Conversations With Famous Biomedical Scientists
By Istvan Hargittai, Magdolna Hargittai
Published by Imperial College Press, 2006
ISBN 1860942881, 9781860942884
616 pages

SciAm notes the emerging need for maintaining mental agility:

Cognitive training is growing in popularity as baby boomers age. From 2005 to 2007 the U.S. brain fitness business increased from $100 million to $225 million, according to a report by SharpBrains, a market research company specializing in cognitive health. The growth was driven to a large extent by the success of Nintendo’s Brain Age [see my review of it and two other brain-training games in “Circuit Training”; Scientific American Mind, June/July 2006]. Research does confirm that regular brain exercise is beneficial to elderly people. ACTIVE, a nationwide clinical trial of 2,802 seniors that began in 1998, found that training in specific areas such as “processing speed” ­resulted in improvements that persisted at least
five years.

 My [futile?] hope is that people will not confuse basic brain health exercise tools, like puzzles and brainteasers, with problem-solving and creativity development methods...

Hacking the future

1. Hacking your genome.

2. Hacking the electrical Smart Grid.

3. Hacking the Treasury Plan.

4. Hacking the world.

Exponential times :)

Did You Know? from Amybeth on Vimeo.

The internet cloud is getting deeper in its functionality:

According to VMware, the VCenter Mobile Access tool will also allow system managers to migrate virtual machines from one virtual host to another, using their phones. The software was introduced on Friday on VMware's VMTN blog by Srinivas Krishnamurti, the director of product management for the company. In addition to its search-and-migration capabilities, VCMA could also be used to remotely execute recovery plans, access scheduled tasks, and respond to alarms and events.

Stanford Entrepreneurial Center podcasts

The next big thing: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2112

Description Description

Three Silicon Valley dealmakers - Tony Perkins, CEO of AlwaysOn; Tim Draper, Founder and Managing Director of Draper, Fisher Jurvetson; and Michael Moe, Founding Partner of ThinkEquity - discuss the evolutions in online media, the power of partnerships, and other next-generation opportunities for the global marketplace.

Dilemma/Tradeoff of the Day

In her talk at Stanford, Ryan Phelan of DNA Direct describes a growing gap between the today's science ability to analyze people's DNA and the health care system's lack of capacity to interpret/address the results for the people.
Based on her presentation, we can formulate an important modern medical tradeoff: on one hand, the doctor has to spend a lot of time with each patient to explain potential implications of a DNA test, and work out an appropriate treatment or a lifestyle change; on the other hand, the doctor cannot spend a lot of time with each patient, because it would further drive up the health care costs.
A lot of innovation must happen in this area to break through the trade-off and deliver high quality service at a very low (scalable) cost.

* Also, it is worth noting how a strong effort by the same person leads to drastically different results, when applied in different markets and time periods. For example, an equestrian gear catalog business failed due to a limited opportunity and a recession, while a medical information business grew dramatically with the market and expansion of the internet bubble.

Another technology battle, now between popular web browsers.

JavaScript, which lets developers create everything from basic Web site menus to online spreadsheet applications, was born in the mid-1990s when Microsoft's Internet Explorer challenged the incumbent browser, Netscape's Navigator. IE won that war, but now it faces its own challenge from the heir to the Navigator throne, Mozilla's Firefox, along with upstarts including Google's Chrome, Apple's Safari, and Opera.

I wonder, though, whether this whole issue is at all relevant in the world of mobile devices and twitter feeds. Internet browser is just a tool that allows people interact with content, which has multiple components, including javascript. Today, mobile devices are much more limited in bandwidth, battery power, and media processing capabilities than in javascript performance. Most likely, mobile websites, aka the-cloud, will target a completely different set of users, than today's browsers are fighiting for.

Nevertheless, this topic will make a good case study for a "Battle of Technologies" exercise.

I don't know why, but a genetic connection between a wild fox's or dog's tameness and floppiness of their ears, tickles my curiosity.

Many researchers have noted that beyond tameness, dogs appear to retain certain traits associated with juvenile wolves, especially behavioral traits such as whining, barking, and submissiveness. Russian geneticist Dmitry Belyaev focused on tamability as a guiding characteristic. His idea was not only that early humans would have selected the tamest animals to live with them, but also that selecting for a single trait could give rise to an entire set of changes in form, physiology, and behavior. Belyaev thus launched an experiment that would last longer than his life, seeking to test whether selecting for tameness would indeed produce a set of domesticated traits similar to those seen in dogs (Trut, 1999).

Belyaev chose the silver fox for his experiment; this species is related to the dog, but it is not domesticated. The initial foxes in Belyaev's experiment were not trained in any way, but simply tested for tameness at an early age. Starting at age one month, a human researcher would try to feed and pet the foxes, either alone or in the company of other foxes. The animals' responses varied from aggressive behaviors (such as biting), to indifference, to seeking interaction with the person more than with the other foxes. The tamest foxes were then selected for breeding the next generation, although fresh genes were supplied through continual outbreeding.

Belyaev and his colleagues did indeed create a population of foxes that differed in temperament and behavior from their wild cousins. The foxes changed physically as well, with alterations in coat color appearing as early as the eighth generation—typically a loss of pigment resulting in white patches. The foxes also developed floppy ears and curved tails, mirroring traits seen in dogs as well as other domesticated species (Figure 1).

An interesting tidbit on the new 3D movie technology:

Unlike the 3-D movies of past decades, where two separate projectors displayed images (one for each eye) and had to remain synchronized for the duration of the film, the latest 3-D systems use a single digital projector. They quickly alternate between images seen by the right and left eyes, which the brain marries into a three-dimensional picture. The process still requires glasses to pick up separate left and right eye images, but not the clunky red and green kinds popularized in the 1970s and 1980s with 3-D films. Today's 3-D eyewear looks more like sunglasses.

== using separation in time after separation in space. 

Trade-off of the Day

 From a New Scientist article on the psychology of money:

Numerous psychological studies have found a general trade-off between the pursuit of so-called extrinsic aspirations - such as wealth, but also fame and image - and intrinsic aspirations, such as building and maintaining strong personal relationships. People who report a focus on the former score low on indicators of mental health, and those strongly motivated by money are also more likely to find their marriage ending in divorce.

The money effect

According to Kathleen Vohs and colleagues, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis:

The researchers found that the volunteers who had been primed with the money-related words worked on the task for longer before asking for help. In a related experiment, people in the money-word group were also significantly less likely to help a fellow student who asked for assistance than were people in the group primed with non-money words (Science, vol 314, p 1154).

 These findings have interesting implications for the structure of invention workshops. To encourage cooperation, the first phase - problem space exploration - has to be done without mentioning any monetary consequences of the work. Then, the second phase - problem solving - has to be preceded by an evaluation session, which not only separates high quality problems from background noise, but also primes participants to apply their best effort.