Will we see a similar ad for computer scientists?

 

The ad's text says:

150 Extra Engineers

An IBM Electronic Calculator speeds through thousands of intricate computations so quickly that on many complex problems it’s like having 150 EXTRA Engineers.

Source: http://www.globalnerdy.com/2009/08/10/old-ibm-ad-150-extra-engineers/

tags: technology, innovation, business, computers,  evolution

½ + ½ > 1

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/311/5763/1005.full DOI: 10.1126/science.1121629

Due to mind's relatively slow background information analysis processes, splitting an invention or a problem-solving session into two parts may help you come up with a better solution.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not always advantageous to engage in thorough conscious deliberation before choosing. On the basis of recent insights into the characteristics of conscious and unconscious thought, we tested the hypothesis that simple choices (such as between different towels or different sets of oven mitts) indeed produce better results after conscious thought, but that choices in complex matters (such as between different houses or different cars) should be left to unconscious thought. Named the “deliberation-without-attention” hypothesis, it was confirmed in four studies on consumer choice, both in the laboratory as well as among actual shoppers, that purchases of complex products were viewed more favorably when decisions had been made in the absence of attentive deliberation.

Dijksterhuis et al., On Making the Right Choice. Science 311 (5763): 1005-1007.

This approach is especially helpful when running a reverse brainstorming session on the first day and a problem-solving session on the next.

tags: creativity, mind, brain, brainstorming, reverse brainstorm, research, psychology, efficiency

Three birds with one stone: the 105th anniversary of bottle recycling.

According to Feb 19, 2011 online issue of Berliner Zeitung, glass bottle recycling was invented and promoted by Carl Benz, of the Mercedes Benz fame, in the early 20th century. Concerned with broken glass that punctured car tires on the streets, the entrepreneur proposed to pay 2 phennings for a returned beer bottle. German beer manufacturers, who at the time began experiencing a shortage of empty containers, supported the idea, and the program became an almost overnight commercial success. As a result, car enthusiasts got into fewer accidents, beer enthusiasts got more money in their pockets, and beer producers got a cheap source of empty bottles. Win-win-win-... Eventually Carl Benz's invention served as a prototype for many other successful recycling programs: from paper, to metal, to plastic.

So, if somebody tells you "There's no such thing as a free lunch," it means he didn't spend enough time thinking about a creative solution.

tags: creativity, trade-off, problem, solution, invention, innovation, inertia, psychology

h/t http://neuraum.livejournal.com/787978.html

A paper on European Inventors and Patents

Paola Giuri, et. al. 2007. Inventors and invention processes in Europe: Results from the PatVal-EU survey. doi:10.1016/j.respol.2007.07.008

The paper summarizes results of a survey of 9017 inventions, including the demographics of inventors and economic value of patents.

I found two things very interesting: first, the extremely low level of women participation (around 3%); second, the high level of "internal use" of patents (up to 65% in mid-size companies). The concept of "internal use" of a patent is a contradiction in terms, because the patent gives its owner a right to exclude others from using the invention. In this case, others are people inside the company, which the company prevents from using the invention. My feeling is that companies just don't know what to do with the majority of their patents, therefore, they mask their confusion or lack of IP strategy with an absurd term "internal use."

Overall, the most optimistic estimate of useful patents is 13.4%

 tags: invention, patent, strategy, control, 10x, problem

e-mail must die - 2

Distribution of information in the form of document files is bound to create content security problems because every computer where the information is stored becomes a hacking target.

CNet reports on an ongoing industrial espionage investigation of another attack from China:

For years, companies in the oil and energy industry have been the victims of attempts to steal e-mail and other sensitive information from hackers believed to be in China, according to a new report from McAfee.

And the attack was at least partially successful, McAfee said: "Files of interest focused on operational oil and gas field production systems and financial documents related to field exploration and bidding that were later copied from the compromised hosts or via extranet servers. In some cases, the files were copied to and downloaded from company Web servers by the attackers.

tags: information, control, security, s-curve, payload, content, industry, system

Channeling free money

Another sign that virtual goods are becoming as important as real goods and services:

Visa has agreed to buy virtual goods company PlaySpan for $190 million in a big move into the market for digital goods.

PlaySpan enables game companies and video publishers to make money through the buying and selling of virtual goods. It’s a key part of the food chain in the free-to-play business model.

Also related, according to NYT, Apple wants to channel all in-application sales through its AppStore:

Apple is now saying the app makers must allow those purchases to happen within the app, not in a separate browser window, with Apple getting its standard 30 percent cut of the transaction. At the moment this applies only to e-book purchases.

tags: money, virtual, games, social, market, communications, 4q diagram, control

Creative lying

The New Scientist reports on a recent study connecting lying and increased brain activity:

Our brains are naturally better at telling the truth than lying, but repeated lying can overcome our tendency for veracity, making subsequent lying easier – and possibly undetectable.

Neuroimaging studies have shown that people's brains show considerably more activity when they are lying than when they are not, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, suggesting that lying requires extra cognitive control and inhibition of truth-telling. Lying also takes measurably longer than telling the truth.

Is it possible that good sci-fi and fantasy writers who necessarily have to lie to tell a good story overcome their natural truth-telling "deficiency"? This may also be true of inventors who usually get better at creating new ideas as they move from specific implementations to wider concepts.

On the other hand, consistent use of models, or abstract representations, helps reconcile imagination with the reality because a new idea my represent a "lie" in today's world, but be "truthful" in a future world defined by the model. For example, the Earth's rotation around the Sun is a "lie" in everyday experience, but "truth" in Copernicus' heliocentric planetary system. Reconciliation between these two systems of beliefs has taken over three hundred years, probably because we, the learners, are hardwired to tell "truth."

tags: dilemma, creativity, problem, trade-off, imagination, method, control

Bruno Verschuere, Adriaan Spruyt, Ewout H. Meijer, Henry Otgaar, The ease of lying, Consciousness and Cognition, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 18 November 2010, ISSN 1053-8100, DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2010.10.023.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6WD0-51H00F7-3/2/e1673fbd75cbe1453cb02777362fc265)

Good teaching and learning habits

Cognitive neuroscience research has discovered six processes that influence the establishment of long-term procedural and declarative memory. These processes are

1. repetition of the procedure or information,
2. excitation at the time of learning,
3. association of reward with the material to be learned,
4. eating carbohydrates before or during learning,
5. sufficient sleep after a learning session,
6. avoidance of drugs of abuse and alcohol

Source: Lynn Waterhouse. Multiple Intelligences, the Mozart Effect, and Emotional Intelligence: A Critical Review. EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGIST, 41(4), 207–225

There's an interesting dilemma hidden in points 1 and 2 that require both repetition and excitement during a learning session. Good teachers and good games solve it by keeping learners deeply engaged while repeating the same basic procedures. They also provide rewards (p.3), either through grades or points.

For comparison, the "Chinese mother" educational style described in a recent WSJ article focuses on repetition and reward.

tags: teaching, information, learning, control, psychology, education, games, dilemma

Turning bad ideas into great solutions

Scott Adams, the virtual father–and-mother of Dilbert, writes about an interesting creativity technique:

I spent some time working in the television industry, and I learned a technique that writers use. It's called "the bad version." When you feel that a plot solution exists, but you can't yet imagine it, you describe instead a bad version that has no purpose other than stimulating the other writers to imagine a better version.

For example, if your character is stuck on an island, the bad version of his escape might involve monkeys crafting a helicopter out of palm fronds and coconuts. That story idea is obviously bad, but it might stimulate you to think in terms of other engineering solutions, or other monkey-related solutions. The first step in thinking of an idea that will work is to stop fixating on ideas that won't. The bad version of an idea moves your mind to a new vantage point.

Essentially, the goal is to shift your thinking from a real-world implementation to the outcome you want to achieve by whatever means possible: flying monkeys, gnomes, magic wands, and etc. Maxwell's demons would also be great candidates for implementing a "bad version" that eventually leads to great solutions.

TRIZ has at least two tools to accomplish a similar goal: The Ideal Solution technique and The Gnomes method (often called the Smart Little People method - argh! what an ugly translation from the original Russian Метод Маленьких Человечков).



tags: ideality, creativity, imagination, psychology, triz, method,

Ultimate cloud computing

Wired writes about a new supercomputing intelligence device in the skies above Afghanistan:

It’ll be floating 20,000 feet above the warzone, aboard a giant spy blimp that watches and listens to everything for miles around.

The idea behind the Blue Devil is to have up to a dozen different sensors, all flying on the same airship and talking to each other constantly. The supercomputer will crunch the data, and automatically slew the sensors in the right direction: pointing a camera at, say, the guy yapping about an upcoming ambush.

The goal is to get that coordinated information down to ground troops in less than 15 seconds.

===

Besides military and law enforcement applications, can we use this technology for improving wireless data communications for mobile devices, e.g. during large public events? Probably, yes. Unlike drones, a blimp in the sky would work better as a local network hub than a communications satellite, just hang a bunch of antennas and solar panels on it. Even better, make the whole thing out of a solar power-generating fabric.

tags: cloud, computers, communications, military, privacy, video, mobile, dynamic, system, control, drones, energy

e-mail should die

In the age of social networking, e-mail has become a giant security hole. PC World reports:

George Bronk, 23, was arrested in late October after police found evidence that he'd hacked into more than 3,200 e-mail accounts. He used the same technique that Sarah Palin hacker David Kernell used to break into the former U.S. vice presidential candidate's Yahoo account: He scoured his victims' Facebook accounts for answers to the security questions used by Web-based e-mail services such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

Forget about pranksters and perverts. Now, that banks, brokerages, and other financial institutions switch from paper to electronic statements, hacking somebody's e-mail account is going to become an even more profitable enterprise.

tags: privacy, security, information, finance, control, payload, packaging, 10x

Connecting dots - 2

tags: creativity, education, apple

Wikipedia 3.0.

Turing (1950) argued that we would certainly regard a machine as intelligent if it could pass the following test: An experimenter sits in a room with two teletypes by which she conducts a “conversation” with two systems. One is a human, the other is a machine, but the experimenter is not told which is which. If, after asking many questions, she is likely to have much doubt about which is human and which is machine, we should, says Turing, concede intelligence to the machine. The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks. 2nd ed. MIT Press. p13.

Given a recent demonstration of IBM's Watson on Jeopardy, the only thing that's missing from machine intelligence is speech synthesis. It's sounds especially funny when the machine selects a question from the "Chicks dig me" category :)



tags:information, control, intelligence, tool, science, computers

Connecting dots ... with language

From a random neuroscience blog:

There is a study that was done with rats in a rectangular room with four white walls. They put some cheese in the corner and turned the mouse around a few times and dropping him into the white room. 50% of the time, the rat would go the wrong direction because he had no reference point to find which corner the cheese was in. So, they painted one of the walls blue, so now you would probably hypothesize that the rat would be dropped in the room and think “cheese is left of the blue wall.” Guess what. 50% of the time, the rat went the wrong direction! Researchers concluded that the rat was not able to link those two concepts - ‘left’ and ‘blue wall.’ He knew ‘left’ and knew ‘blue’ but could connect those two pieces of information.

Guess who else cannot connect that information— humans ages 1 - 6 years old. Liz Spelki puts it like this— a child’s brain begins as a bunch of islands. On one side of the brain you have an island “blue” and another on the other side of the brain the island “left” and somewhere in between these there exist ideas like “wall.” At around age 6, children are able to put together phrases in spatial language and think “left of the blue wall” which in turn connects those islands in the brain so the children can understand what “left of the blue wall!” means.

Connectivity in the brain is provided by white rather than gray matter; the white matter is the first to go when people develop Alzheimer's.

tags: brain, mind, invention, science, biology, creativity

"And in her eyes you see nothing"

A study in Science magazine (via Bloomberg) shows that women's tears contain a chemical component that reduces sexual arousal in men.

We found that merely sniffing negative-emotion–related odorless tears obtained from women donors, induced reductions in sexual appeal attributed by men to pictures of women’s faces. Moreover, after sniffing such tears, men experienced reduced self-rated sexual arousal, reduced physiological measures of arousal, and reduced levels of testosterone. Finally, functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed that sniffing women's tears selectively reduced activity in brain-substrates of sexual arousal in men.

The picture shows how men in the study were made to smell tears during experiments. You can see that under the circumstances it is impossible not to smell them, and I doubt that in today's life we can catch the smell from a socially acceptable distance between a man and a woman. All this makes me believe that tears started as a chemical signal but later evolved into a social (visual) signal.
In any case, the study offers an insight into brain's ability to morph a physical phenomena into a social one.

tags: detection, science, social, networking, signal, information, philosophy, biology


DOI: 10.1126/science.1198331

3D content and equipment for you

CNet reports on Nvidia's 3D website:

A quick glance at the site reveals some imagery that one might expect to appeal to the stereotypical gaming nerd who pays for premium graphics technology--photos of scantily clad women and stills from various video games. There also are plenty of landscape and other subjects with potentially broader appeal.

Also of interest:

Samsung and 3D specialist RealD announced a plan today to jointly develop a technology called RDZ that they say will mean brighter 3D TVs that work with 3D glasses used in RealD-equipped movie theaters.

Darn! I just threw away a pair of 3D glasses I got at the theater.

tags: content, information, entertainment, video, movie, source, tool, games

The future (one of many) of social networking

TechCrunch: Mark Suster of GRP Partners makes predictions about the future of “Social Networking." Gossip management is just one of them:

If you don’t manage what is said about you in social networks it could be detrimental.  Products such as Sprout Social and CoTweet are emerging to help businesses better track and communicate with their customers and leads.  Products like awe.sm (I’m an investor) will help you manage the efficacy of your social media marketing campaigns.

tags:

From China with patents.

NYT reports on China's ambitions in technological creativity:

In 2009, about 300,000 applications for utility patents were filed in China, roughly equal to its total of invention patents, which have been growing slightly faster than utility filings in recent years. But even if just half of China’s total filings in 2015 are for invention patents, the national plan calls for a huge leap, to one million, by 2015. By contrast, patent filings in the United States totaled slightly more than 480,000 in the 12 months ended in September, according to the patent office.

China’s patent surge has been evident for years. In October, Thomson Reuters issued a research report, forecasting that China would surpass the United States in patent filings in 2011. “It’s happening even faster than we expected,” said Bob Stembridge, an intellectual-property analyst at Thomson Reuters.

Here's a link to an English translation of the original Chinese Government's IP development strategy document.

It looks like they are going for quantity, which is not necessarily a bad idea during a period of rapid growth.

tags: patent, china, strategy, innovation, invention, growth

Making ideas accessible to brain

At TED, Tom Wujec of AutoDesk shows how to communicate ideas visually, relying on human brain's ability to pick out objects and make sense out of them.

So making images meaningful has three components. The first again, is making ideas clear by visualizing them. Secondly, making them interactive. And then thirdly, making them persistent.

Whiteboards are not interactive, they don't fit Tom's second requirement.
Today's touch screens are highly interactive, but they do not provide for persistent visualization.
Large, wall-to-wall, touch-screen graphics displays in combination with the right software will create an environment where idea communication and problem-solving is incredibly productive.

tags: interaction, tool, storage, problem, trade-off, video, creativity, information, psychology, brain

Living books

Here's how illustrations in books, especially on science, technology, and invention, should look like:


DaVinci prototype on Xbox Kinect from Razorfish - Emerging Experiences on Vimeo.

The technology is built using Microsoft Kinect. I wish my book had illustrations like that. Instead of telling about an invention I could just show how it works and the concepts behind it.

tags: information, dynamic, payload, interaction, creativity, education