IdeaFestival

In the animal kingdom, intelligence comes at a cost

Does the ability to learn come at a cost to health? According to Carl Zimmer at Science Times, that's the conclusion from research showing that for some animals, being smart doesn't equate with living longer. The big idea, as one biologist in the story suggests, is this:

Dr. Kawecki suspects that each species evolves until it reaches an equilibrium between the costs and benefits of learning. His experiments demonstrate that flies [which he has trained to associate some foods with nourishment and some with predators!] have the genetic potential to become significantly smarter in the wild. But only under his lab conditions does evolution actually move in that direction. In nature, any improvement in learning would cost too much.

That cost is measured in other ways as well. Using the example of human infants, which come into the world in an obvious state of helplessness, another researcher put it this way:

'We use computers with memory that’s almost free, but biological information is costly,' Dr. Dukas said. He added that the costs Dr. Kawecki documented were not smart animals’ only penalties. 'It means you start out in life being inexperienced,' Dr. Dukas said.

"Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn’t Better" is well worth a few moments of your time.

Wayne

"I, Gamer"

In a brief post at Terra Nova, Ren Reynolds wonders what the societal impact will be of a generation of game players that self-identify as "gamers." Without providing any answers - are there any now? - I just thought it was an interesting question, as was the title of his blog post.

Wayne

Information age: what happens to the "cognitive surplus?"

Making the rounds in support of his new book, Here Comes Everybody, digital media theorist Clay Shirky has been asking some provocative questions lately - for example, is there a cognitive surplus waiting to be tapped? 

Put another way - and I think this is a Shirky formulation from several years ago and a question for which I certainly have no answers - what happens to society when everything knowable can be known? He elaborates on these and other issues in the video above.

Wayne

Measuring innovation takes faith-based failure

Freakonomics recently asked several individuals to provide their take on on innovation - as in, how can a company measure innovation? On Friday, it published a number of their responses.

I was intrigued by one suggestion in particular.

Using the example of the digital camera, one contributor suggested that since truly innovative products are often worse at a launch than competing products, perhaps the key metric is failure. The key then is to fail fast, recognize and embrace risk taking - to fail forward, some failures align with the company vision and some do not - and to identify where new ideas originate. Are they coming from all levels of the organization?

Since truly innovative outcomes aren't generally known until well after the fact, that made some sense. But succeeding at failure during the interim takes another key attribute, faith.

Wayne

What are the digital literacies?

Initial results from one of the largest ethnographic studies of kids in their native, digital environment are now available. Could the cheap availability of media be creating a new generation of creatives?

Sure, kids have long been attracted to extracurricular activities like dance or sports. But researchers say digital media is bringing up a new generation who are creators of media rather than just passive consumers of it. Within these digital environments among peers, kids who create and evaluate media are deriving a sense of competence, autonomy, self-determination and connectedness, researchers say.

The case studies discussed last Wednesday are part of a $50 million long-range MacArthur Foundation initiative, the digital media and learning project, to study whether - and how - digital media might be changing kids. Full results will be available later in the year.

More on the results of this study can be found on C|NET.

Wayne

Missed opportunities: venture capitalist lists "anti-portfolio"

How many successful companies were initially turned away by venture capitalists who at the time couldn't quite see the business case? Displaying good humor about its mistakes, Bessemer Venture Partners lists its "anti-portfolio," companies like Apple and Google on which it took a pass.   

Hat tip: Freakonomics blog

Wayne

Curry Stone global Design Prize makes IdeaFestival home

The Curry Stone Foundation, which funds activities to support healthy communities and public health, has announced the establishment of the Curry Stone Design Prize for “…exceptional emerging designers with extraordinary design projects or ideas that contribute positively to living circumstances for broad sections of global humanity.... Public health is best achieved when all people have access to shelter, health care, clean air, clean water, clean food, education and live in a time of peace," according to a news release accompanying news of the financial gift to the University of Kentucky.

This $100,000 design prize will be presented annually at the IdeaFestival beginning this year.

Developed in partnership with the University of Kentucky, College of Design, the prize is being supported through the foundation established by UK alumnus Clifford Curry and his wife H. Delight Stone of Oregon. 

IF is excited about the establishment of the Curry Stone Prize and the opportunity it presents to greatly expand the design content of the festival, which has hosted such design luminaries as Cameron Sinclair and Adriaan Gueze. More here.

Kris

Design elasticity and less stuff

I enjoy creative descriptions of how the mind copes with change, recently writing, for example, about the  opposable business mind. And even more recently, I've linked a couple of times to an installation called Design and the Elastic Mind at the Museum of Modern Art.

If you believe that designers are merely glorified decorators, Paola Antonelli would like a moment of your time to challenge that assumption. In a recent SEED essay, she argues that design and designers, for example, play a large role in simply making change manageable:

Adaptability is an ancestral distinction of human intelligence, but today's instant variations in rhythm call for something stronger: elasticity. The by-product of adaptability and acceleration, elasticity means being able to negotiate change and innovation without letting them interfere excessively with one's own rhythms and goals. It means being able to embrace progress, understanding how to make it our own. One of design's most fundamental tasks is to help people deal with change (my emphasis, above).

She further links elasticity to the need to bring the monuments produced by scientific discovery to a human scale, and how science and design are engaged in unprecedented cooperation.

If you're at all interested in how modern fast-paced and beery-eyed change can be made more understandable - and how it is being made more understandable - I encourage you to read the essay.

Much to my delight, Antonelli also suggests that coping-with-change can play a role in a kind of conservation:

[E]ven as technology offers us more and more options, many agree that we in fact require fewer—not more—objects in our lives.

Here, here. That's a design challenge I can embrace.

Wayne

I'll be 15 minutes late

How late will you really be? According to Freakonomics, if you like Farecast, which predicts whether fares to certain cities will go up or down, you might also like Delaycast, which, applying some deft math, will predict how late you are likely to arrive.

Wayne

Wild Cards and Black Swans: How to get the future right and the past wrong

The Long Now Foundation held a couple of public lectures recently on how we get the future right and the past wrong.

LIFT blogger and digital archaeologist Nicolas Nova points out Paul Saffo's January Long Now presentation on being a better futurist.

What makes forecasting hard, according to Saffo, isn't predicting the outcome, but accurately mapping the edges of what might happen. Since change is linear - we can't take one event and extrapolate into the future - what might happen must sometimes be imagined. Saffo:

Science fiction is brilliant at this, and often predictive, because it plants idea bombs in teenagers which they make real 15 years later.

The Long Now Foundation links to a helpful Harvard Business Review piece authored by Saffo that describes "six rules for effective forecasting." An executive summary of that article is here.

Financial analyst Nassim Taleb, who will be at the IdeaFestival in September, followed Saffo in February and discussed "retrocasting" - essentially, how we get the future wrong by misjudging the past. "Black Swans", those history making events that sail into the present, Taleb explained, are often "wrongly retro-predicted. We pretend we know why the big event happened, and so entrench our inability to deal with the next world-changing improbable event." I liked this thought:

We compute probability from the success of the survivors instead of paying attention to what didn't happen, but might have.

There are two places whence random things occur, according to Taleb. They are "Mediocristan," which is a realm of random events dominated by the average, and "Extremistan," where spectacular successes and the long tail dominate. Taleb:

You can say there will be a few monsters and lots of midgets and the world will be changed by the monsters, and that’s all you can say.

According to the blog entry for the event, Benoit Mandelbrot convinced Taleb that energy powers Mediocristan, while the main dynamic of Extremistan involves the uncertainty of information. Anything social, anything that involves the brilliance and bane of language, anything you might read on IFblog, hails from Extremistan.

Audio, video and blog entries from the Saffo and Taleb Long Now seminars may be found here.

Thanks Nicolas for the pointer!

Wayne

Nassim Taleb, Paul Saffo