InsightNG

The world today is filled with information. This proliferation makes it quite overwhelming to make good sense of "big data" that is continuously flowing in from a variety of new sources. In the past, the way to get things done was to keep data close, using small teams to sift through it. But now, people are used to having information at their fingertips. They're accustomed to sifting through it and coming up with new solutions, getting insights in unexpected ways.

Somewhere around the early 1990s, MRIs-the technique of magnetic resonance imaging-tiptoed out of the pall of cancer wards into the sunnier campuses of universities, and forged a melange among the departments of psychology, neuroscience, management and economics. The result of this academic straddle is a literary niche called pop neuroscience, into which science writer Jonah Lehrer's newest offering, Imagine: How Creativity Works, neatly slots itself.

Online insights are as liquid as currency, their velocity of circulation - incredible. Insights are no plaything, forming and acting upon them effects industry structures at the core. Their mere utterance gels prior assumptions and triggers a succession of indirect and direct mimicry. Why? People are genuinely curious and suffer from time pressure to be accurate and objective. Which has resulted in an insights market and industry that rewards accuracy over ingenuity. Insights by nature are descriptive and reflective - retrospective of lived experiences. Insights are the past. They have been separated from life. To exist as unpredictable patterns the may or may not fully characterize the "real world" or persist as perceived. The list of problems and challenges organizations and consultancies face in managing and applying insight continue to grow. This list is by no means definitive but intends to describe what we have been seeing around us lately.

People who have already sifted through online information to make sense of a subject can help strangers facing similar tasks without ever directly communicating with them, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft Research have demonstrated. This process of distributed sensemaking, they say, could save time and result in a better understanding of the information needed for whatever goal users might have, whether it is planning a vacation, gathering information about a serious disease or trying to decide what product to buy.

Semantic technologies are fundamentally about knowledge representation, not data transfer. The current concept of linked data attempts to place these burdens mostly on the way data is published. While apparently "simpler" than earlier versions of the semantic Web (since linked data de-emphasizes shared vocabularies and nuanced associations), linked data places onerous burdens on how publishers express their data. Though many in the advocacy community point to the "billions" of RDF triples expressed as a success, actual consumers of linked data are rare. I know of no meaningful application or example where the consumption of linked data is an essential component. However, there are a few areas of success in linked data. DBpedia, Freebase (now owned by Google), and GeoNames have been notable in providing identifiers (URIs) for common concepts, things, entities and places. There has also been success in the biomedical community with linked data.

What makes the cartoon light bulb of creativity go off over someone's head? What is the catalyst for groundbreaking inventions and innovative breakthroughs? In his illuminating new book, the journalist Jonah Lehrer explicates some now-classic case studies.

AMHERST, Mass. - As computer scientists this year celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the mathematical genius Alan Turing, who set out the basis for digital computing in the 1930s to anticipate the electronic age, they still quest after a machine as adaptable and intelligent as the human brain. Now, computer scientist Hava Siegelmann of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, an expert in neural networks, has taken Turing's work to its next logical step. She is translating her 1993 discovery of what she has dubbed "Super-Turing" computation into an adaptable computational system that learns and evolves, using input from the environment in a way much more like our brains do than classic Turing-type computers. She and her post-doctoral research colleague Jeremie Cabessa report on the advance in the current issue of Neural Computation. "This model is inspired by the brain," she says. "It is a mathematical formulation of the brain's neural networks with their adaptive abilities." The authors show that when the model is installed in an environment offering constant sensory stimuli like the real world, and when all stimulus-response pairs are considered over the machine's lifetime, the Super Turing model yields an exponentially greater repertoire of behaviors than the classical computer or Turing model. They demonstrate that the Super-Turing model is superior for human-like tasks and learning.

In its purest sense, "invention" can be defined as the creation of a product or introduction of a process for the first time. "Innovation," on the other hand, occurs if someone improves on or makes a significant contribution to an existing product, process or service. Consider the microprocessor. Someone invented the microprocessor. But by itself, the microprocessor was nothing more than another piece on the circuit board. It's what was done with that piece -- the hundreds of thousands of products, processes and services that evolved from the invention of the microprocessor -- that required innovation.

As the fundamental flow of energy through the marketplace transforms from 'push' to 'pull,' organizations will need to become more active and participative social networkers.  New opportunities will show up first on the myriad of non-structured, social media sites that cater to people who want to collaborate to solve problems, start trends, influence the masses and build support.

Results. Statistically significant findings suggest that millennial generation Web searchers proceed erratically through an information search process, make only a limited attempt to evaluate the quality or validity of information gathered, and may perform some level of 'backfilling' or adding sources to a research project before final submission of the work.

In business, everyone keeps confusing information with knowledge. They're different. Even the dictionary says so: Information: Facts provided or learned about something or someone. Knowledge: Information and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject. Information is ones and zeros. It's raw data, or a list of facts. It's instructions on filling out a business license, or the instructions Google provides when you sign up for Adwords. The obvious stuff. You can often acquire information for free: Go to the Associated Press for raw, un-analyzed news. Or read a 'how to' on building your own car. Knowledge is something else entirely. It's what you get when you combine information with _analysis_ and _experience_. Knowledge is information distilled down to actions. It can and should cost you money, or time, or something else. If you want real analysis of the news you just grabbed from the Associated Press, for example, you might go to the New York Times and pay (at least after 10 views). To learn AdWords tricks that can actually help you profit, you'll buy a book, pay for a seminar or hire a consultant.

There's no doubting the cloud invasion. But the research firm Gartner believes the personal cloud will replace the PC as the center of our digital lives sooner than you might think: 2014. "Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices," Steve Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement on Monday. "Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life."

You know how our social graphs are creeping into every aspect of our web lives, from search results to coupons? Well, get ready for something a lot more personal, a lot more targeted and, perhaps, a lot more creepy. Much as social graphs are maps of our social media connections that follow us across the web, interest graphs are maps of our interests. Some companies want them to follow us across the web, too, meaning that wherever we go, there we are. There'll be no more need to search through news sites for the stories we want, or shopping sites for the products we want, because the site will know as soon as we hit its system who we are and what we like. Whether you're fascinated or appalled by the idea of interest graphs, here's a taste of how they might work.

Why is it that between 25 and 50 per cent of people report feeling overwhelmed or burned out at work? It's not just the number of hours we're working, but also the fact that we spend too many continuous hours juggling too many things at the same time. What we've lost, above all, are stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Technology has blurred them beyond recognition. Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our digital devices, ever insistent and intrusive. It's like an itch we can't resist scratching, even though scratching invariably makes it worse. Tell the truth: Do you answer email during conference calls (and sometimes even during calls with one other person)? Do you bring your laptop to meetings and then pretend you're taking notes while you surf the net? Do you eat lunch at your desk? Do you make calls while you're driving, and even send the occasional text, even though you know you shouldn't? The biggest cost - assuming you don't crash - is to your productivity. In part, that's a simple consequence of splitting your attention, so that you're partially engaged in multiple activities but rarely fully engaged in any one. In part, it's because when you switch away from a primary task to do something else, you're increasing the time it takes to finish that task by an average of 25 per cent.

Brand stories are no longer limited to blobs of text on "About Us" pages. Social media has given brands a platform to relay their story in multiple ways and to various audiences. At a recent South By Southwest Interactive Festival Panel, Becky Johns, CC Chapman, Charlie Wollborg and Karl Gude, spoke to educate the audience on how to build a visual storyboard that benefits their brands; in essence, how to not just tell a story, but how to tell a good story. Here are several tips to communicate your story and connect with your audience using photos, videos and design.

Design thinking is basically "a way of approaching a challenge" - it is not a radical new methodology. Design Thinking encapsulates prototyping, convergent and divergent thinking, customer research, and is a holistic approach to management and leadership. It enlivens the gift of curiosity along with the power of observation. It takes data and places it in a given point of time.

One of the most magical things about the Internet is that it's a whimsical rabbit hole of discovery - we start somewhere familiar and click our way to a wonderland of curiosity and fascination we never knew existed. What makes this contagion of semi-serendipity possible is an intricate ecosystem of "link love" - a via-chain of attribution that allows us to discover new sources through those we already know and trust. 

With the current pace of change, organizations will have to be prepared for the unexpected. They will have to provide flexible access to people and information resources to serve unanticipated information needs whenever and wherever they occur. However, traditional intranets fail today's knowledge workers in this respect.

I was invited to speak with Professor Arun Sundararajan's "Networks, Crowds and Markets" class on the topic of "Trust and the Sharing Economy." The discussion focused on current trust indicators on collaborative consumption platforms and potential ideas for solving the trust issue currently present.