LunchTalk: Alan Burdick: "Why Time Flies" (at Google)

Alan Burdick is a staff writer and former senior editor at The New Yorker. His most recent book, "Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation," was published in January by Simon & Schuster.

“In his lucid, thoughtful, and beautifully written inquiry about time — what is it, really? Did we invent it, or does it invent us? - Burdick offers nothing less than a new way of reconsidering what it means to be human.” (Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life and The People in the Trees)

Lunch Talk: From Terrestrial Field Science to Deep-Space Human Exploration

Dr. Darlene Lim is a geobiologist and an expert in the development of concepts for human scientific exploration. She has spent over two decades leading field research around the world, including the Arctic, the Antarctic, and various underwater environments (where she has spent many hours piloting submersibles as a scientist and explorer). Darlene is also Founder of the Haven House Family Shelter "STEM Explorers' Speakers Series", which brings NASA and academic researchers to homeless children in the Bay Area.



tags: lunchtalk, science, biology, time, communications

Invention of the Day: Anaesthesia.

October 16, 1846 is the official birthday of anaesthesia, the art of preventing a surgery patient from feeling pain. On that day, surgeon Dr. Warren publicly demonstrated a painless tumor removal at the operating theater of the Massachusetts General Hospital. To anaesthetise the patient, Dr. Warren used the method invented by dentist William T.G. Morton. Under the invention, the patient was rendered unconscious by inhaling ether, an organic compound known to people since the 8th century, but never used in medicine before. The invention of practical anaesthesia (along with methods to prevent wound infection) created the world of modern surgery. The 1846 invention was a breakthrough that allowed people to control one of the basic biological experiences - pain.

Morton's US Patent 4,848 on the medical use of ether was never enforced due to public outcry.

Lab Notebook: Steve Jobs and the sense of an innovation opportunity

In "Conceptual Spaces: The Geometry of Thought" Peter Gardenfors writes:

The spatial dimensions height, width, and depth as well as brightness are perceived by the visual sensory system, pitch by the auditory system, temperature by thermal sensors and weight, finally, by the kinaesthetic sensors.
... however, there is also a wealth of quality dimensions that are of an abstract non-sensory character. (Section 1.3.)

Somehow — probably because I believe innovation creates new domains and dimensions — my mind associates the phrase above with John Markoff's remark about Steve Jobs that he seemed to have a keen sense for big innovation opportunities. Maybe it was something like synesthesia, an ability to sense multiple dimensions where most of people perceive it as one.

Lab Notebook: Google Glass and 360-degree vision

Google Glass (or a similar connected, hands-off presentation device) should make a big difference in situations that require body-eye coordination and [related] learning of psycho-motor skills. For example, if I wear sensory clothing that talks to the device I should be able to see myself from any angle. The device might also provide an 3- or 4-D image of the desired position and help me adjust my posture closer to the ideal. Boys and girls would learn easily how to keep their backs straight and walk like models! :) Should also help the elderly to be aware of the need to exercise and improve their motor skills.
Eventually, it will become indispensable in sports, wellness, and all other applications requiring spatial dexterity, including surgical procedures.

In general, great innovations create new space and time (either real or virtual). The Google Glass (GG) project has a chance to do just that. In system terms (see Scalable Innovation, Chapter 2),

GG - Tool
sensor network - Source
reference db - Source
(wireless) communications  - Distribution
application - Control
brain - Control
encoded position info - Packaged Payload

tags: invention, space, time, problem, solution, innovation, pattern, system

Quote of the Day: A Network of Times.

...your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time.  -- Jorge Luis Borges.

This quote would be a good epigraph for a separate chapter on the difference between calendar time and innovation time. In the Scalable Innovation book and Reverse Brainstorming sessions we talk about this important concept very briefly.

tags: quote, time, innovation

Day and Night: Twitter vs Facebook.

VBeat shows an offsetting time pattern for Facebook and Twitter. It is consistent with often stated Zuckerberg's intent to keep Facebook fun-oriented rather than work-oriented.

Twitter marketers should definitely include a link in their tweet. “We saw 86 percent higher engagement for tweets with links,” Ciarallo told VentureBeat. This is another difference vis-a-vis Facebook, where links can be counterproductive.

And while some might think that 140 characters is already pretty short, another thing that Buddy Media found is that even shorter tweets were the most successful.
“Tweets that contain less than 100 characters have 17 percent higher engagement,” said Ciarallo. “What they’re doing is leaving room for others to add their own thoughts and comments in a retweet.”

 tags:  payload, aboutness, storage, 10x, time, facebook, twitter, attention

Why Zynga is like milk chocolate.

Zynga's product strategy is almost indistinguishable from the way chocolate producers are working to seduce consumers into buying sweets.

(Nov 30, 2011. WSJ) - "We want to get more Godiva into people's mouths more often," said Lauri Kien Kotcher, chief marketing officer for Godiva and senior vice president of global brand development. "It's all about chocolate snacks, little chocolate treats. …When those things come, you just keep eating."

LaTanya Tinsley, a Raleigh, N.C., master's student, usually has a few squares of milk chocolate for her afternoon snack.
Ms. Tinsley used to buy a chocolate bar about once a month when visiting the Godiva store a half-hour from her home. "Now I can go to the grocery store that's five minutes away and it's in the candy aisle," she said. "I bought two bars day before yesterday."

If over-consumption of sugar and fat creates an obese body, then over-consumption of Zynga-style gamelets should lead to a porky brain. 

tags: gaming, 10x, control, time, business, model, brain

How to Invent: Reverse Brainstorming (part 4). Problem selection.

The second half of Reverse Brainstorming is Problem Selection.  By the end of the session, we have to select problems that are worth solving, i.e. the problems that are worth our investment of time, money, and effort. Everything else (like 95%) is noise.

Here's a couple of diagrams illustrating the outcome of the session:

As you can see, numbered problems from the list created during the first part are first assigned Value and Timing, then sorted accordingly. Since the Value dimension invokes many questions from participants, I'll have to explain it in a separate post.

On the other hand, Timing is understood intuitively. Nevertheless, it is still important to make sure everybody has the same frame of reference. For some people, like a startup product organization, short-term means six months; for others, like a nanotech research group, short-term means six years. To avoid confusion, both short-(ST) and long-term (LT) terms have to be defined before problem evaluation, e.g. ST = 1year, LT = 5years.

One important consideration to keep in mind, though. You, as the session moderator, have to have a more sophisticated understanding of timing because when it comes to invention most simple intuitive notions, even the familiar ones like timing, tend to be wrong.

Let me explain. Time measured in calendar years reflects periods of rotation of the Earth around the Sun: 1 year - one rotation, 5 years - five rotations. Unless your group is dealing with agricultural products or services, which depend on Sun patterns, the Earth's rotation has almost no connection with invention and innovation. I say almost, because we do have major purchasing seasons, e.g. Christmas, Chinese New Year, Back to School, etc. Nevertheless, real timing has nothing to do with the rotation of the Earth. Rather, orthogonal to our everyday thinking, innovation timing has to do with technology or business constraints. That is, short-term means we are working inside a set of constraints, while long-term means we've managed to break through at least some of them.

If you have time during the session, it might be a good idea to convey to the group the concept of timing as constraint-related, rather than calendar-related. Often, it gets people thinking outside of the box their intuitive mindset and leads to a better understanding of Value and problems that prevent us from getting to it.

tags: reverse brainstorming,  reverse brainstorm, book, course, stanford, constraints, time, high value.

Previous posts on Reverse Brainstorming Howto:
1. How to Invent: Reverse Brainstorming.
2. It may look like this.
3. Concept Diagram: Reverse vs Traditional Brainstorming

In the domain of science publications transition to electronic documents causes "twitterization" of research media:

The move to online science appears to represent one more step on the path initiated by the much earlier shift from the contextualized monograph [books]... to the modern research article.

As 21st-century scientists and scholars use online searching and hyperlinking to frame and publish their arguments more efficiently, they weave them into a more focused—and more narrow—past and present.

Science 18 July 2008:
Vol. 321. no. 5887, pp. 395 - 399
DOI: 10.1126/science.1150473

It's quite possible that proliferation of e-book devices will benefit magazines more than books. Shorter chapters/articles are easier to jump in and out on the go; embedded audio and video clips are better suited for the "show, not tell" style of presentation; more recent events mentioned in the text are more fresh in the mind and psychologically close to connect for the reader. To summarize, attention spans are getting shorter, authors and publishers will have to find ways to feed readers with small easily digestible info-chunks.

tags: information, payload, system, time, internet, digital,  media

Neuroscientists are figuring out how brain handles time and how our experiences are being recorded in memory:

there is not a single "film roll" in the brain, but many separate streams, each recording a separate piece of information. What's more, this way of dealing with incoming information may not apply solely to motion perception. Other brain processes, such as object or sound recognition, might also be processed as discrete packets.

To investigate, VanRullen examined another neural function, called near-threshold luminance detection. He exposed his subjects to flashes of light barely bright enough to see, and found that the likelihood of them noticing the light depended on the phase of another wave in the front of the brain, which rises and falls about 7 times per second. It turned out that subjects were more likely to detect the flash when the wave was near its trough, and miss it when the wave was near its peak.

In everyday life we measure time by comparing our processes to standard processes, such rotation of the Earth around the Sun. It looks like the brain has its own set of standard internal processes that determine the pace of cognition. Here's an interesting experiment that induces accelerated thinking:

Luke Jones at the University of Manchester, UK, decided to test the subjects' rate of mental processing during the experience. After exposing them to the clicks, he measured how quickly they could accomplish three different tasks: basic arithmetic, memorising words or hitting a specific key on a computer keyboard.

The results, to be published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, showed that the clicks accelerated the subjects' performance in all three tasks by 10 to 20 per cent. It was as if the drumbeat of their brain's internal slave galley had sped up - compelling each neuron to row faster. White noise had no such effect. "Information processing in the brain is running in subjective time," says Weardon. "If you speed up people's subjective time, they really do seem to have more time to process things."

This would make a good iPhone/Android app!


tags: time, payload, process, control, brain, mind

Dilemma of the Day: picking a crushed nut on a busy road

From the NS review of Crow Planet:

A Japanese study of urban crows found that the birds dropped hard-shelled nuts in the road at traffic intersections for cars to roll over and crack. When the traffic was heavy, the crows waited for the walk signal before grabbing their snacks from the street. How can you not admire that?

A fascinating, yet simple approach to show that under certain circumstances time can flow in both directions, forward and backward:

I show that entropy in a system can both increase and decrease (as time reversal
dictates), but that all entropy-decreasing transformations cannot leave any trace of their having happened. Since no information on them exists, this is indistinguishable from the situation in which such transformations do not happen at all: ‘‘The past exists only insofar as it is recorded in the present’’ [11]. Then the second law is forcefully valid: the only physical evolutions we see in our past, and which can then be studied, are those where entropy has not decreased.

DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.103.080401

Lorenzo Maccone, 2009. Quantum Solution to the Arrow-of-Time Dilemma. PRL 103, 080401 (2009).

A 10,000X change

The pattern of progress in genome sequencing looks like Moore's law on steroids:

Aug. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Helicos Biosciences Corp.’s gene- sequencing machine mapped the genome of a Stanford University professor, who developed the technology, for less than $50,000 using the labor of just three people, researchers reported.
The cost has dropped from about $300 million required to decode a full human genome during the early stages of gene- mapping, when multiple computers and machines were needed plus the labor of more than 250 scientists and technicians

Add to it the ability to turn on an off specific gene expressions and you get a possibility of human evolution within one generation.

Can you imagine a world in which people mutate faster than viruses?

In his Nobel Prize Lecture economist Gary S. Becker remarks:

Different constraints are decisive for different situations, but the most fundamental constraint is limited time. Economic and medical
progress have greatly increased length of life, but not the physical flow of time itself, which always restricts everyone to twenty-four hours per day. So while goods and services have expanded enormously in rich countries, the total time available to consume has not.

The more stuff we consume, the less time we've got to enjoy it.

Clock-less synchronization

A couple of artistic illustrations of synchronization without a clock: