IdeaFestival

Silence as catalyst

While sitting in my suddenly very quiet house on Tuesday after dark, I was stunned about how quiet quiet could be. No central heat. No clocks. No fish tank aerators. No family. They had decamped to a friend's house.

Aside from the occasional sound of a tree limbs snapping off rifle cracks across our farm fields, no other sound could be heard from our home. Ice storms will do that. But once I was able to get back online the following day - funny how things can suddenly become very important - I found myself reading and issue of the design magazine Interactions. This beginning passage from A History of Sound in Computing stood out:

John Cage is said to have once sat in an anechoic chamber for some time. Upon exiting, Cage remarked to the engineer on duty that after some time he was able to perceive two discreet sounds, one high pitched and one low. The engineer then explained that the high pitched sound was his nervous system and the low was his circulatory system. There is really no escaping sound.

Three nights and one Honda generator later, I realize that stumbling around in the dark those first few minutes was a real attention getter, and as a way of concentrating the mind toward light and heat, it worked wonders. Now it's Friday morning and the lights are still out. But the initial silence was catalyst, which got me to thinking.

In a time of winter lethargy, whether it happen in business or creative pursuits, I wonder if some entrepreneur might figure out how to offer the anechoic experience. Just so that nerve and heart are made audible again.

Wayne

Psychology of going long?

What is the psychology of transcending the here and now, of long term thinking? The Long Now references one study, conducted over decades, that takes a crack at that question.

Wayne

psychology

Next industrial revolution: Organization

Referencing a post by "edge economist" Umair Haque, Steve Levin says that the next industrial revolution could come, not from technology or capital, but from better organization. In developed economies it's not capital or information that's in short supply, but rather an efficient way of organizing it. Google, after all, transformed the advertising industry by putting relevant information at everyone's fingertips.

Good. But I like how Haque puts it on his blog.

The revolution needs revolutionaries. Today's investors, boardrooms and entrepreneurs are looking for value in all the wrong places. Facebook's game of musical chairs won't solve big economic problems - and neither will making token investments in greentech.

Where is the next industrial revolution crying out for revolutionaries? Simple: in industries dominated by clear, durable, structural barriers to efficiency and productivity.

The next industrial revolution begins here. What happens when we think of using new DNA to reorganize structurally inefficient industries? A blueprint for the next industrial revolution emerges. Here's what it looks like.

• Organize the world's hunger.
• Organize the world's energy.
• Organize the world's thirst.
• Organize the world's health.
• Organize the world's freedom.
• Organize the world's finance.
• Organize the world's education

Wayne

Citizen science

Guest columnist at the New York Times, Aaron Hirsh writes about the centralization of grand science like the search for the Higgs boson, in ever bigger projects. While the focus of the column is on whether a new kind of science, what he refers to as "citizen science," might flourish, in one interesting passage he also wonders aloud how Big Science might change the scientists:

It’s not only scientific instruments, but also the scientists themselves who are transformed by centralization. If the 19th century was an age of far-flung investigators alone in the wilderness or the book-lined study, the 21st century is, so far, an age of scientists as administrators. Many of the best-known scientists of our day are men and women exceptionally talented in herding the resources — human and otherwise — required to plan, construct and use big sophisticated facilities.

What is citizen science? Here's one of my favorites.

Wayne

citizen science

The naked brain

Say "brain" and you imagine gray folds of gelatinous matter, right? But using a new technique called diffusion spectrum imaging, scientists are able to image the tangled highway of nerves that carry the information in our heads. This brief animation of the results could be the coolest video of the brain you will ever see. Technology Review:

...radiologists are beginning to use the technology to map the brain prior to surgery, for example, to avoid important fiber tracts when removing a brain tumor. Wedeen and others are now using diffusion imaging to better understand the structures that underlie our ability to see, to speak, and to remember. Scientists also hope that the techniques will grant new insight into diseases linked to abnormal wiring, such as schizophrenia and autism.

Similar images of the brains of Macaque and Owl Monkeys are available here.

Wayne

Play is a lossy language

If spoken and written language developed many thousands of years ago in order to decode information, play is the 21st Century response to ubiquitous information. The former is logical, inductive and observational. The latter is inferential, lossy and experiential.

Wayne

games

Malcolm Gladwell: Just How Dishonest is Harvard?

In Louisville, last night's conversation between Dan Pink and Malcolm Gladwell about Outliers was enjoyable, and if you followed IF's tweets you got a flavor. I wanted to amplify a couple of their points this morning.

I was struck by Gladwell's populist language. Maybe it's his Canadian roots, but he genuinely recoils at the notion that meritorious behavior alone can account for success and took some delight in poking holes in our national mythology of individual achievement. His aim was true.

For instance, reeling off stats for a recent year of applicants to Harvard, many of of whom had perfect SAT and ACT scores, he went on to dismiss any attempt to distinguish one straight-A, community-volunteering university applicant from another. "It would be," he said "far more intellectually honest to put the names in a hat" and select the incoming class in that matter. Long story short: if a Harvard degree confers status and increases the likelihood of future success - and it does - let's not kid ourselves, after a certain level of work and due diligence, it's a crap shoot.

But still, one must be prepared. And because they are more likely to lead to persistence, which can account for the prepared, "enthusiasm and love" are the foundation of success. Saying that he had come back around to the idea that family really matters, Gladwell also made much of the internal drive that might lead one parent to make enormous sacrifices to get her daughter into an elite school. It was, in fact, a long line of achievement and similar twists in his family history that had led him to where he is today. No, he doesn't know the origin of that drive. And don't talk to him about genetic determinism.

Related, SEED published a skeptical take on the subject just recently, and the coauthor of The Superorganism, Bert Hölldobler, will surely have something to say about the subject at the next IdeaFestival. From biology to physics to cosmology, determinism is taking a beating these days.

In response to a questioner, Gladwell said his definition of success was "complex, autonomous and meaningful work that leads to recognition".

Dan Pink, whose appealing vision of a right-brain future might be summed up as the "meaning makers win," was a quick-witted accomplice and managed to gently needle Gladwell about his antagonism toward status.

On a personal note, I met some people at the Kentucky Center who had won free tickets to attend. Hey, I was just glad someone is paying attention to this space.

So be warned, the IdeaFestival will be giving more things away via the blog and twitter. Don't go anywhere.

Wayne

Curry Stone Design Prize finalists Wes Janz and Antonio Scarponi talk about humanitarian design

Filmed at the 2008 IdeaFestival, Curry Stone Design Prize finalists Wes Janz and Antonio Scarponi talk about the digital media and the public square, architecture and what the prize means to them.

The Curry Stone Design Prize awards $100,000 annually to the best in humanitarian design. The South African Architecture Firm MMA was named the 2008 winner for its ingenious, yet simple design for low-income housing for a Cape Town shantytown.

architecture, Curry Stone Design Prize

Mars methane: Why it's big news

Just an update on the significance of the Martian methane story from Open the Future:

While both geology and biology can produce methane on Earth, inorganic production of methane is generally associated with volcanic and tectonic activity, none of which has been witnessed on Mars (it's clear that Mars was once geologically active, but there's little or no evidence of current vulcanism). In addition, the three source areas each have very different geologies, further complicating the argument that the methane comes from geological activity. Finally, the 'serpentinization' process on Earth tends to plug up sources of methane. NASA's Lisa Pratt, one of the scientists delivering the press conference today, argues that while this isn't positive proof that the methane comes from biological activity, it does make the geological argument harder to sustain and makes the biological argument 'more plausible.'

We know that organic and heat-producing processes are active elsewhere in the solar system - enormous volcanoes on Io, carbon lakes on Titan, potentially hidden oceans on Europa and vents spewing water ice from Enceladus. Most have been observed at close range by robotic missions.

It would be hard to overestimate the impact that confirmation of life in any form would have for those of us on this floating blue sphere, and departing NASA administrator Mike Griffin recently said, in fact, that he believes unintelligent life will be discovered on another planet during his lifetime.

'I would be very surprised if we didn't find life elsewhere, and frankly I expect to live to see it,' Griffin said. 'I would be surprised to find that life never originated on Mars, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find dormant or quiescent life underground,' he added.

Wayne

The Spoken Web

While I occasionally use the text-to-speech and spoken instructions feature of my Macbook, it's definitely not an everyday thing. But one of the innovations predicted by the IBM, the voice-activated Web, could change all that. Think about it: accessing the world with a word.

Wayne