IdeaFestival

Innovation Insider to The Economist: iPod This!

Innovation Insider offers an alternative to the "Big Mac" purchasing power parity index published by The Economist and gets in a dig against Old World conspicuous presumption.

A two-fer. Now that's my kind of blog post.

The "purchasing power parity index" is what a basket of goods (or in this case, a to-go bag) might cost in different parts of the world. It measures the relative value of national currencies against each other. And as it turns out, China's yuan may be undervalued using that measurement. Important, but let's not get sidetracked. Instead of the Big Mac, Innovation Insider suggests using the iPod, which is a rather backhanded offer of help. 

Wayne

Technorati tags: snark, iPod, Innovation Insider,

Infants demonstrate abstraction skill

Science blog reports research that demonstrates an ability among infants to use numbers between senses to match groups of people with the number of voices heard.

[Researchers] Jordan and Brannon presented seven-month-old infants with the voices of two or three women saying, 'Look.' At the same time, they showed the babies two video images: one with two women saying the word and the other with three women doing so. The researchers found that the babies spent significantly more time looking at the video image that matched the number of women talking. From that, the researchers concluded that the infants were transferring their perception of number across two different senses, sight and sound--which suggested, in turn, that babies have a truly abstract sense of numerical concepts.

Wayne

Technorati tags: abstraction, perception, cognition

I hate (love) meetings!

Be honest. How do you view business meetings? Science blog reports research that says your attitude is shaped in part by where you fall on the "accomplishment striving" personality scale.

One of the surprising findings was that people actually view meetings more positively than they will admit publicly.

Wayne

Emotional thinking: a childlike intelligence

Ethan Zuckerman said he was going to blog TED2006, but 19,000 words?! See his blog, my heart's in accra, for the whole list of posts. I'll just point out one -- Dance, Sir Ken Robinson, dance! resonates with me as the father of two just starting school.

Saying "Robinson’s goal is to help us recognize the intelligence children actually have and help them make something of it:"

Robinson tells us that the young woman [who would later become a famous ballerina] these days, would likely be diagnosed as having ADHD, as she didn’t concentrate in her classes. Taken to see an educational specialist, the psychologist was smart enough to leave the room, turn on the radio, and let the young girl dance. He told her parents, “Jilien isn’t sick - she’s a dancer”. She went on to a dance school, joined the Royal Ballet and has choreographed most of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musicals. Nowadays, we would give her medication and tell her to calm down.

The goal is not simply to "educate children from the waist up," but to help them make the most of their intellectual gifts, whether it be in arts, humanities or sciences, by honing their creative abilities as well.

Sir Ken Robinson is the author of what looks to be an interesting book on creativity, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative (I have not read it), that is critical of current educational methods. It sounds very much like a thoroughly interesting book called Sparks of Genius that I mentioned last fall. Among other things, Sparks of Genius argues that creative thinking is "pre-verbal, intuitive and emotional."

Wayne

Technorati tags: Ethan Zuckerman, TED2006, dance, creativity, innovation, genius

"Thriving" at TED2006

Well speaking of "many, many hands at the wheel!" I no sooner finish that last post and turn to my feeds when I find Ethan Zuckerman, who is blogging TED2006, describing futurist Nat Irvin as a "thriver:"

The thrivers are defined by this philosophical shift from “survival to thrival”. It’s a move from seeing oneself as victims of history and oppression to a belief that you’re a shaper of the future, not someone shaped by the past.

Read Ethan's post for more. Having recently discovered my heart's in accra, I must say it's a keeper.

Wayne

Technorati tag: TED2006, Ethan Zuckerman

The New Immaterialism

CPH127 links to a design article on the shift in value between what we experience from service and what we own and experience through objects, which got me to thinking about stuff. If modernism's  totem was materialism -- what we could create, direct and control -- surely postmodernism's founding principle is immaterialism.

Software companies talk at length about software as a service, an experience where people meet information in a vast digital commons, not personal libraries. Adobe, for example, which makes Flash and Acrobat is driving to develop what it calls "the engagement platform," a visual, graphical software client accessible from any screen, anywhere. This Wharton School of Business interview with Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen is rich with detail about that company plans to thrive in an experience economy.

Marketers have gotten the message. We don't use things; we experience things. Uber-marketer Seth Godin talks about relationships as the antidote to chronic consumerist dissatisfaction. I think he's got a point. Happy angry people are pretty rare.   

Some psychotherapists now talk about integrating ways of knowing that reject the expert/client formula and its implied empiricism in favor of something nearer to co-discovery. In this view, people aren't previously whole goods who need repair, but just the opposite. We are relational, sense-making beings needing myth and narrative to be whole. If the high water mark of the modern era saw Nietzsche announce the death of God, then some post-moderns see a little less self -- and a little more other -- as likewise emblematic of an age to come.

There are many examples -- Richard Florida's Creative Class depends not on individual genius, but on interaction. Architects discuss new urbanism, which, not to put too fine a point on it, is another way of saying front porch.

We're thoroughly disabused of the modernist notion that we can create a future built on a materialist foundation, whose experts hand down knowledge. Indeed, much of the history of second half of the last century was spent in rebellion to that idea. "Question authority," anyone? Even science has turned against us. It produces quantum truths at home in our heads but inaccessible to our fingertips. Sub-atomic nature is complex and paradoxical, not mechanical and linear.

Having passed through the rough initial stages of the postmodern era, what's next? What ideas will dominate?

I see a (re)emerging emphasis on relationship. As I said yesterday, the theme is on prominent display TED2006. And in contrast to the penultimate modernist narrative -- history-as-science, this new immaterialism makes people the subject, not the predicate, of history. Thankfully, many, many more hands will be at the wheel.

Wayne

Technorati tags: modernism, postmodernism, materialism, Seth Godin, Richard Florida, New Urbanism

TED2006 on design and knowing

Thoughts reading Bruno Giussani's running commentary on TED2006:

Bruno points out that a number speakers have three minute slots to address the audience. I think it's a really nice touch.

One such speaker, Roger Mandle, who heads the Rhode Island School of Design, takes the opportunity to tie design to "consilience," the idea that the world, awash with near-permanent information, is headed toward unified knowledge. I'd be interested in how others relate this to Ray Kurzweil's notion of "singularity." The epistemological dimensions are staggering. Here's hoping knowledge leads to understanding.

Bruno on Mandle on design:

[It, design,] is the human activity that creates objects, occasions and environments that extend value and meaning through the processes and the content of the arts and sciences. It also enables tangible outcomes of human aspirations that are practical and ethical significant in both their production and their use.

Speaking of knowing, TED2006 also boldly put Michael Shermer, who edits Skeptic, Rick Warren, whose book, "The purpose-driven life" has sold more than 30 million copies and Dan Dennett, philosopher, atheist and thinker on the nature of consciousness, back to back to back. I'll let Bruno describe it, but I really like Warren's quote: "Questions of meaning are not religious issues, they're human issues."

Questions of meaning, relational issues and human sense-making, like design thinking, are a growing concern. I applaud TED2006 for being forthright about it. I'm finishing up an entry about same that I'll post soon.

See Lunch over IP for more on the conference. Great, great stuff.

Wayne

Technorati tag: TED2006

TED2006 underway

For those of you interested, Bruno Giussani has a running commentary on TED, including Flickr photos of the event. He has a number of entries already, but I particularly enjoyed Small Miracles, which has a life sciences focus, and "History's arrow" for its macro-themes.

Read Lunch over IP, his blog, for more. Thanks for sharing, Mr. Giussani.

Wayne

[update:] Ethan Zuckerman at my heart's in accra is also attending and blogging the event.

Life, liberty, data

“Power, before it comes from arms or wealth, emanates from ideas.” Foreign Affairs November/December, 2005

Ideas have consequences. Sometimes they seduces gradually, often, and to great effect, by dividing our brains from our hearts. And sometimes, seeking a more direct route, they wreck the heart simply to get our attention.

Ethan Zuckerman adds some detail to the scrutiny U.S. Internet firms are getting over their business practices in China. He believes that the Internet will likely splinter into multiple Internets as some governments seek ways to cordon off unwelcome ideas, an outcome that is drawing closer to reality following the unsatisfying conclusion of the UN World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis last fall.

The Washington Post also ran a story on one Chinese journalist's victory for information freedom, "The Click that Broke a Government's Grip" (free registration required), which demonstrates that ideas can wriggle through the tiniest openings.

A little closer to home, C|NET News.com provides this summary of a remarkable exchange between Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) and representatives of Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft during a recent House of Representatives hearing. There is certainly no shortage of bombast in Congress, but as C|NET points out, the connection between ideas and personal freedom is no abstraction to the Congressman, who used highly personal language when talking to the company representatives. Rep. Lantos, born in Budapest, is the only current member of Congress who is also a survivor of the Holocaust.

Wayne

Fast Company's 50 idealists

Fast Company is out with its "Fast 50," fifty people the magazine believes will change our lives over the next 10 years. The article will be available in about a month for non-subscribers, but for the here and now, these entries caught my eye:

• The "Logician," Lynn Fritz, who made a bundle growing (and selling for a couple hundred million) a global logistics firm. He's turned his expertise of getting things from here to there into the Fritz Institute, dedicated to launching a "logistical revolution in humanitarian relief," complete with its own metrics, academic programs and a loose network of professionals able to respond to crises.
• "Chairvoyant," Patricia Urquiola, a furniture designer. She had this very effective definition of design v. art when asked about the matter: "If you want to express only your own vision, then you must do art, and not design." Not that she would know, artful design works pretty well for her. One of her production chairs will be displayed at the Museum of Modern Art.
• "Psychotechnician," Hunter Hoffman, who is a cognitive psychologist at the University of Washington. Hoffman has developed virtual reality games that brains scans show reduce pain signals by 50 percent in burn patients undergoing the excruciating daily cleaning of wounds.
• "Flockmeister," Jonathan Bock. Described as a "flack with a soul patch," Bock's Grace Hill Media has aggressively pitched the multi-plex to the large (and largely ignored) religious demographic.

Wayne