InsightNG

Mike Bergman presents an overview geared to laypersons for why semantic technologies make the best choice for knowledge applications

Our memories are wrong at least as often as they are right. At best, they are incomplete, though we might swear other wise. This affects countless aspects of our lives, and in many cases our memories - true or false - affect others' lives.

hough they're not specifically branded as such, services such as Apple's Siri , the Wolfram Alpha answer engine, and Google's new Knowledge Graph all use semantics under the hood. The Semantic Web is a movement that aims to add value and utility to online information by structuring data in a way that both computers and humans can understand. The goal: computer systems that can understand and infer meaning - for instance, a computer system that knows the difference between an "organ" that is a musical instrument, and an "organ" that lives inside your body.

To some people, gamification - the method of applying game mechanics and philosophy to nongaming applications in the real world - is a dirty word. Video games, after all, are more than just their mechanics: Some have elaborate narratives, fantastic musical soundtracks, and appealing graphics that all come together to create a seamless experience. When you strip a game down solely to its mechanics, it can seem cheap, soulless, and even exploitative when it comes to businesses and corporations using gamification for their own interests. But gamification isn't about creating games. It's about enhancing user engagement, something game developers know how to do. And as witnessed at this year's recent Gamification Summit held in San Francisco, game designers are clearly interested in helping this new industry with its growing pains.

We are swamped with data - even our movements are tracked by mobile networks, and stored. Our web tracks are everywhere and our purchasing habits both online and offline are fully traceable. Businesses and security agencies are swamped with data, and yet there is widespread dissatisfaction about query tools and data analytics. Ask the right questions and you will get the right answers. That's all well and good with SQL, but it has failed us. Knowledgebase tools have failed us too.

Game-Based Learning, and particularly serious games that teach content, are fast becoming utilized in the classroom. Frequent success stories are appearing, from Minecraft in the elementary classroom to games that teach civics. There is curriculum that pairs World of Warcraft with language arts standards, and many other variations where the gaming focus is on content. What about 21st century skills? Yes, games can be used to teach and assess 21st century skills! As the conversation in education reform moves forward, and educators are increasingly leveraging 21st century skills, we need to consider how to couple games with reform. Let's take a look at what many consider the top three 21st century skills and how games can teach and assess them.

Since the dawn of companies like Twitter, one question has baffled marketers: How do we demonstrate ROI in our social media strategy? For example, we know that Facebook "likes" don't equal sales. So what's the alternative? Enter the interest graph, which offers a new way to develop connections based on what people like, not who they know. The interest graph also gives marketers the chance to demonstrably generate revenue. Here's how other companies are experimenting in this space and the results.

Gamify Your Marketing Strategy and Reward Social Influencers" by Mara Lewis, Co-founder and CEO, Stopped.at Leveraging gamification principles as part of the user experience and value proposition magnifies the effects of recognition and subsequently, the engagement of all users, power or casual. These principles help to package and promote recognition across the site so users interact and respond to it more often and to a greater extent.

In the Double Freytag model of narrative decision-making, analysis-paralysis corresponds to getting stuck in the sense-making phase. Why does this happen? The problem has to do with the nature of the insight (or cheap trick) that triggers a gear shift from exploration to sense-making.  If it is an appreciative insight, it will help you make sense of what's going on in the situation without necessarily creating the focal point for action. But on the other hand, it is not a purely manipulative insight either (i.e., it is more than a mindless hack).  I covered appreciative versus manipulative knowledge in the last post.

The more we win, the more we want to play. Human beings are competitive animals, even when we claim not to be, and rare is the individual who doesn't take pleasure in winning. Gamblers understood this long before Bugsy Siegel broke ground in the Nevada desert. Both Las Vegas and the minds behind rewards and fidelity programs have spent decades capitalizing on the human need to win. The video game industry would vanish if it didn't continue to exploit our thirst for competition-and victory-with its aggressive approach to keeping games fresh, challenging, and in many cases, incredibly addictive. Along the same lines, social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn have employed "gamification" to engage their constituencies, keep them coming back for more, and perpetuate their business models with new users. As these tactics are proving to be invaluable in consumer-facing applications, companies are beginning to adopt gamification strategies for nongaming business activities like employee engagement, sales force motivation, and relationship building with partners. Far from being just another entry in the buzzword lexicon, gamification is changing the way companies do business.

The majority of business people know about the importance of critical thinking because they have an intuitive sense for it - they know it when they see it. What exactly constitutes critical thinking? What elements do we need to cultivate in order to develop our critical thinking abilities in business?

t is true that learning through "theory + doing + debriefing" changes behavior.  It works. It increases capacity.  And it also true that learning, if not used, goes away.

"Non-reading is not just the absence of reading. It is a genuine activity, one that consists of adopting a stance in relation to the immense tide of books that protects you from drowning. On that basis, it deserves to be defended and even taught." At first blush, a book titled How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (public library) sounds at once sacrilegious in its proposition and wildly meta-ironic. Then again, it gets to the heart of a painfully familiar literary bind - that book about a fascinating sliver of science, written by a breathlessly boring academic; the fetishized Ulysseses of the world, reluctantly half-read and promptly forgotten; the Gladwellian tome that could've been, should've been, and likely at some point was a magazine article. Must we read those from cover to cover in order to be complete, cultured individuals?

We are swamped with data - even our movements are tracked by mobile networks, and stored. Our web tracks are everywhere and our purchasing habits both online and offline are fully traceable. Businesses and security agencies are swamped with data, and yet there is widespread dissatisfaction about query tools and data analytics. Ask the right questions and you will get the right answers. That's all well and good with SQL, but it has failed us. Knowledgebase tools have failed us too.

Jonah Lehrer in his book "Imagine" introduced me to an interesting study by Beeman and Kounios. They showed, in brief, by using fMRI imaging and EEG measurements of brain activity, that we possess two different modes of problem solving: One dominated by the left half of the brain, and one dominated by the right half of the brain.

What is critical thinking? According to my favorite critical thinking text, it is disciplined thinking that is governed by clear intellectual standards. This involves identifying and analyzing arguments and truth claims, discovering and overcoming prejudices and biases, developing your own reasons and arguments in favor of what you believe, considering objections to your beliefs, and making rational choices about what to do based on your beliefs.

Artificial intelligence began with an ambitious research agenda: To endow machines with some of the traits we value most highly in ourselves-the faculty of reason, skill in solving problems, creativity, the capacity to learn from experience. Early results were promising. Computers were programmed to play checkers and chess, to prove theorems in geometry, to solve analogy puzzles from IQ tests, to recognize letters of the alphabet. Marvin Minsky, one of the pioneers, declared in 1961: "We are on the threshold of an era that will be strongly influenced, and quite possibly dominated, by intelligent problem-solving machines."

In any industry, the need to manage your brand's community is pressing. Companies have invested significant resources into building community on social networks, but as Facebook and other social media sites continue to block access to your user data, smart marketers and business leaders are realizing that the real value of social engagement is found on their own web properties and applications. Gamification offers a means of applying the benefits of social engagement directly to your properties. It is a proven business strategy that enables businesses to influence the behaviors of your entire community, and exceed your user-driven business objectives.

Businesses struggle with the idea of playing games at work - the term conjures up the idea of having fun without a purpose. But the practical application of gamification is disrupting that assumption and slowly changing the way businesses learn. In a nutshell, gamification is the concept of applying engaging elements of game theory to non-game applications. An example would be to create a game to learn something new for work: While a lecture session could potentially turn off employees and prevent learning, a game that teaches the same skills could lead to an interested employee that is eager to learn.

How you react to people and events can tell us a lot about the way you process information. The brain runs our lives. It processes and creates different emotions in us everyday. We have a choice of either letting it run its course or guiding it the way we want to run our lives. Our brain has 61 patterns that drive our behaviour. So here is a quiz that will provide you awareness and insights into how your brain processes any information.