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David McGavock

How the brain creates the 'buzz' that helps ideas spread - 1 views

medicalxpress.com/...2013-07-brain-ideas.html

mindamp buzz sharing curation learning culture

shared by David McGavock on 08 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • UCLA psychologists have taken a significant step toward answering these questions, identifying for the first time the brain regions associated with the successful spread of ideas, often called "buzz."
  • "Our study suggests that people are regularly attuned to how the things they're seeing will be useful and interesting, not just to themselves but to other people,"
  • We always seem to be on the lookout for who else will find this helpful, amusing or interesting, and our brain data are showing evidence of that.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The study findings are published in the online edition of the journal Psychological Science, with print publication to follow later this summer.
  • "Now we have mapped the brain regions associated with ideas that are likely to be contagious and are associated with being a good 'idea salesperson.' In the future, we would like to be able to use these brain maps to forecast what ideas are likely to be successful and who is likely to be effective at spreading them."
  • the interns who were especially good at persuading the producers showed significantly more activation in a brain region known as the temporoparietal junction, or TPJ, at the time they were first exposed to the pilot ideas they would later recommend.
  • We found that increased activity in the TPJ was associated with an increased ability to convince others to get on board with their favorite ideas.
  • Thinking about what appeals to others may be even more important."
  • The TPJ, located on the outer surface of the brain, is part of what is known as the brain's "mentalizing network," which is involved in thinking about what other people think and feel.
  • David McGavock on 08 Jul 13
     
    Interesting findings. The emphasis here is on identifying activity of the brain that indicates a person's effectiveness with passing on (sharing) information. While that is notable, it would be great to know what activity indicates that the information has merit in and of itself. We have plenty of buzz in our world. What we need are authoritative sources.
David McGavock

Jason Silva's Captivating Videos Deliver a Dose of 'Techno-Optimism' | Underwire | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...1

augmentation techno-optimism Jason Silva tools solution

shared by David McGavock on 14 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • video maker and self-described “philosophical performer” Jason Silva has a much more optimistic (and logically sound) mode of thinking about the future and all the technologically awesome possibilities it has to offer.
  • As technology has advanced, it acts as a buffer that shrinks the lag time between what we dream about and what we can create and substantiate in the world.”
  • Techno-optimism is a belief in the power of technology to extend our sphere of possibilities, and ultimately a belief that technology helps us solve and transcend problems, limitations and obstacles.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • we should decide that we need to make better tools to solve the problems caused by the initial tools
  • The world’s best IT is the alphabet
  • it can be used to compose Shakespearean sonnets
  • But you can also use the alphabet to compose hate speech
  • I’m interested in inspiring people to see the ways in which it has extended our possibilities for the better
  • we’re in need of a new narrative. I see my place as somebody who wants to help craft that narrative.
  • I begin by deciding on a specific idea I want to ecstatically explore
  • the videos are noncommercial, they are meant to be seen as mashups.
  • we map out the vibe and the “feeling” we want. We discuss examples, certain placement and “moments” I want to create, and then she sits on it, gets inspired, interprets and plugs it in. Then we discuss and exchange until we’re happy with it.
  • David McGavock on 14 Jun 14
     
    Interview in Wired magazine describing an optimistic view of technology, used for good not evil.
David McGavock

Jeffrey Johnson | Haiti: CrisisMapping the Earthquake - 0 views

itc.conversationsnetwork.org/...detail4613.html

haiti Cooperation crisis mapping augmentation tools

shared by David McGavock on 15 May 11 - No Cached
  • After the earthquake in Haiti, a community of crisis mappers immediately began crowdsourcing open street maps in a way that has changed disaster response forever.  Using an open source stack and simple collaboration tools to combine and annotate image sets, usable maps were quickly put in the hands of rescue workers, allowing a rapid response that saved lives. 
  • And, is it repeatable in the future?  Johnson challenges the audience to consider ways that collaborative, volunteer efforts can be sustained.  It takes a passionate crowd to make crowdsourcing work, and the key to fostering that passion is relationships.
  • David McGavock on 15 May 11
     
    After the earthquake in Haiti, a community of crisis mappers immediately began crowdsourcing open street maps in a way that has changed disaster response forever. Using an open source stack and simple collaboration tools to combine and annotate image sets, usable maps were quickly put in the hands of rescue workers, allowing a rapid response that saved lives.
Donal O' Mahony

Maria Popova: In a new world of informational abundance, content curation is a new kind of authorship » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism - 1 views

www.niemanlab.org/...on-is-a-new-kind-of-authorship

twitter journalism twitter literacy thinking tools

shared by Donal O' Mahony on 17 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Donal O' Mahony on 17 Jun 11
     
    Is Twitter speech or text or both or neither?
B.L. Ochman

21st Century Bricoleurs v2 part one | DMLcentral - 1 views

dmlcentral.net/4777

future learning digital DMLcentral thinking tools

shared by B.L. Ochman on 06 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Donal O' Mahony on 07 Sep 11
     
    Thanks for this - very inteeresting - I like this :- a computer is an instrument whse music is composed of ideas..................
B.L. Ochman

DMLcentral - 1 views

dmlcentral.net

future learning digital media learning culture

shared by B.L. Ochman on 06 Sep 11 - Cached
  • B.L. Ochman on 06 Sep 11
     
    collective of researchers, practitioners, policy shifters, working together to reimagine learning and education for the digital age.
David McGavock

…My heart's in Accra » CHI keynote: Desperately Seeking Serendipity - 1 views

www.ethanzuckerman.com/...esperately-seeking-serendipity

filter bubble diversity bias cosmopolitan global local

shared by David McGavock on 07 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Cities embody political decisions make by their designers.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Sounds like program or be programmed to me
  • It’s much harder to get the architects behind Facebook or Foursquare articulate the behaviors they’re trying to enable and the political assumptions that underly those decisions.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Again - Programmers!
  • An urban planner who wants to make changes to a city’s structure is held in check by a matrix of forces: a desire to preserve history, the needs and interests of businesses and residents in existing communities, the costs associated with executing new projects. Progress is slow,
  • ...49 more annotations...
  • For those planning the future of Facebook, it’s hard to study what’s succeeded and failed for MySpace, in part because an exodus of users to Facebook is gradually turning MySpace into a ghost town.
  • If we learn from real-world cities instead of abandoned digital ones, what lessons might we take?
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Conclusions
  • The Jacobs/Moses debate suggests we need to be cautious of architectures that offer convenience and charge isolation as a price of admission. This is the concern Eli Pariser articulates in his (excellent) new book, “The Filter Bubble“.
  • He worries that between Google’s personalized search and the algorithmic decisions Facebook makes in displaying news from our friends, our online experience is an increasingly isolated one,
  • They’re cars, rather than public transit or busy sidewalks.
  • A map of Vancouver overlaid with my friends’ recommendations is one thing; one that recommends restaurants based on paid advertisements and doesn’t reveal this practice is another entirely.
  • The map I want is the one that lets me shuffle not just through my friends’ preferences but through annotations from different groups: first time visitors to the city; long-time Vancouverites; foodies; visitors from Japan, Korea or China.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      A diverse sampling of taste
  • People’s actions inscribe their intentions onto a city.
  • Online spaces are often so anxious to show me how my friends are using a space that they obscure how other audiences are using it.
  • It’s possible to find out what’s popular on Facebook to an audience broader than that of your friends.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Something Google+ should consider
  • One of the reasons curation is such a helpful strategy for wandering is that it reveals community maxima. It can be helpful to know that Times Square is the most popular tourist destination in New York if only so we can avoid it.
  • knowing where Haitian taxi cab drivers go for goat soup is often useful data on where the best Haitian food is to be found.
  • If you want to explore beyond the places your friends think are the most enjoyable, or those the general public thinks are enjoyable, you need to seek out curators who are sufficiently far from you in cultural terms and who’ve annotated their cities in their own ways.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      key to breaking the filter bubbles
  • Geocaching is its own peculiar form of community annotation, where the immediate goal is leaving your signature on someone else’s logbook, but the deeper goal is encouraging you to explore in a way you otherwise wouldn’t.
  • SF0, founded by a trio of Chicagoans transplanted to San Francisco, was designed to encourage players to discover things they’d never seen or done in the city, in a way that encouraged independence and exploration.
  • Combining the insights we may find from studying the organization of cities with the ability to reshuffle and sort digitally may let us think about designing online spaces for serendipity in different and powerful ways.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Conclusion?
  • - How do we design physical spaces to encourage serendipity? - What lessons about serendipity in physical spaces can we bring into the virtual realm? - How can we annotate the physical world, digitally, in ways that expand our encounters with the world, rather than limiting them?
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Questions over conclusion
  • We hope that cities are serendipity engines. By putting a diverse set of people and things together in a confined place, we increase the chances that we’re going to stumble onto the unexpected. It’s worth asking the question: do cities actually work this way?
  • Most of us are fairly predictable
  • We hope for random encounter with a diverse citizenry to build a web of weak ties that increases our sense of involvement in the community, as Bob Putnam suggested in Bowling Alone. And we worry that we may instead isolate and cocoon ourselves when faced with a situation where we feel like outsiders, as Putnam’s recent research suggests.
  • “Census data can describe the segregation of my block, but how about telling me how segregated my life is? Location data points in that direction.
  • Nathan Eagle, who has worked with Sandy Pentland at MIT’s Media Lab on the idea of “reality mining”, digesting huge sets of data like mobile phone records, estimates that he can predict the location of “low-entropy individuals” with 90-95% accuracy based on this type of data
  • We all filter the places we live into the places where we’re regulars and the ones we avoid, the parts of town where we feel familiar and where we feel foreign. We do this based on where we live, where we work, and who we like to spend time with.
  • I’m less concerned about left-right polarization in the US, and more concerned about us/them polarization around the world
  • through the design of the systems we use and our behavior with those systems, I see reasons to worry that our use of the internet may be less cosmopolitan and more isolated that we would hope.
  • There were – and are – reasons to distrust curators, but there’s a critical aspect of their work I believe we need to preserve as we move towards new models for organizing news.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      interesting view of curation
  • Countries that have more than 40 million or more internet users generally have a very strong bias towards local sources – the mean is roughly 95%/5%, which makes Americans look (slightly) cosmopolitan in comparison.
  • US broadcast media focuses much more on entertainment stories than on international news.)
  • What’s striking to me about this preference data is that there’s so little effort required to access international news sources like BBC, the Times of India or the Mail and Guardian – they’re one click away and don’t require crossing a language barrier – and how strong the “local” bias for national news sources appears to be.
  • on January 12th, I published “What if Tunisia had a revolution, but nobody watched?“… and I got a lot of phone calls when Ben Ali fled the country two days later.
  • The revolution in Tunisia caught intelligence and diplomatic services around the world flat-footed. It didn’t have to – there was a wealth of information being published on Tunisian Facebook pages
  • I’m forced to admit that there’s no way I would have known about the revolution brewing if I didn’t have close Tunisian friends.
  • I’m less interested in the ways in which we limit our paths through cities than in how we constrain what we do and don’t encounter online.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      key point
  • On the other hand, curators invariably have biases
  • We need mechanisms to ensure that search gets complemented with serendipity.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Point we have been discussing. Filter bubbles
  • Facebook offers a different answer to the question, “What do I need to know?” – “You need to know what your friends and your friends of friends already know that you do not.”
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Facebook world = ummm....
  • there’s a decent chance that their collective intelligence has some blind spots
  • The problem, of course, is that if your friends don’t know about a revolution in Tunisia or a great new Vietnamese restaurant, you may not know either.
  • It’s worth asking whether that bubble is able to provide us with the serendipity we hope for from the web.
  • Serendipity, at first glance, looks like the positive side of unintended consequences, the happy accident. But that’s not what the term meant, at least originally.
  • The word was coined by Horace Walpole, an 18th century British aristocrat,
  • A Google search turns up 11 million pages with the term, including restaurants, movies and gift shops named “serendipity”, but very few on unexpected discovery through sagacity.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Serendipity vs. Sagacity
  • he refers to a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, in which the titular characters were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”
  • Louis Pasteur observed, “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.”
  • In “The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity”, he and Barber explore discovery in a General Electric laboratory under the leadership of Willis Whitney, who encouraged a work environment that focused as much on fun as it did on discovery.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Sounds like Google. Tinkering, time to play, time to work.
  • If we want to create online spaces to encourage serendipity, we might start by learning from cities.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Moving to the point of online learning
  • Our loss, I believe, is that we’ve lost sight of the idea that we could prepare ourselves for serendipity, both personally and structurally.
  • vibrancy comes from the ongoing chance encounter between people using a neighborhood for different purposes, encountering one another as their paths intersect and cross.
  • The neighborhoods Jacobs celebrates are certainly not the most efficient in terms of an individual’s ability to move quickly and independently. Vibrancy and efficiency may not be diametrically opposed, but it’s likely that the forces are in tension.
Charles van der Haegen

TEDx Duke Talk is Posted! « Learning Matters! Tony O'Driscoll - 2 views

wadatripp.wordpress.com/...tedx-duke-talk-is-posted

education scenarios children future learning jerk technology O'Driscoll

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 21 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 21 Jun 11
     
    Here is the talk I gave at TEDx Duke " Preparing Your Children for a World you can Barely Imagine." Some of the images are a bit pixelated but you can get a copy of the slides in my previous post.
  • Charles van der Haegen on 21 Jun 11
     
    I viewed this presentation again... Love it so much... Wanted to share my admiration and joy with you... It's all about how we can manage Jerk with MindAmp.
David McGavock

How Technology Evolves | Digital Tonto - 0 views

www.digitaltonto.com/...how-technology-evolves

christensen heidegger kelly memes paradignms dawkins technology relationship

shared by David McGavock on 25 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Perhaps what we fear most about technology is ourselves.  For better or worse, technology’s evolution and our own are inseparable.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 25 Jun 11
       
      I think this is spot on. Technology tempts us, pulls us to go one way or the other. We are concerned about it taking control of us, isolating us from other things and relationships we value, corrupting us. To eat the apple or not, that is the questions.
  • the work of Diamond, Jacobs and Florida all have in common is that they describe technology very much like Heidegger – as an uncovering.   However, they all argue, quite rightly, that the work of uncovering technological principles requires an environment conducive to creativity; including prosperity, leisure time and opportunities for a diversity of ideas to mix.
  • What Does Technology Want? So is technology more worthy of our admiration or our fear?  Kevin Kelly, in his book What Technology Wants, argues for both.  He describes a neverending chain of solutions to problems that create still newer problems.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Technology, therefore, is somewhat dependent on precursors. What you start out with will help to determine what you end up with.
  • Sometimes it’s hard to tell if technology is something to love or to fear. Are computers making us smarter or dumbing us down? Are genetically modified foods a miracle or a menace? What’s really scary is how little control we have over it.
  • Whatever we might think or feel, technology will progress and we need to decide for ourselves how we will interact with it. Yet before we can do that, we need to understand how it evolves into being.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 25 Jun 11
       
      This is an important purpose for the Mindamp group. While the name sounds like a call for amplifying our minds, much of our talk is about managing our minds; understanding (and using) tools to understand the evolution of the tools.
David McGavock

Multitasking, social media and distraction: Research review Journalist's Resource: Research for Reporting, from Harvard Shorenstein Center - 0 views

journalistsresource.org/...raction-what-does-research-say

multitasking research Infotention learning culture

shared by David McGavock on 24 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • researchers have tried to assess how humans are coping in this highly connected environment and how “chronic multitasking” may diminish our capacity to function effectively.
  • Clifford Nass, notes that scholarship has remained firm in the overall assessment: “The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. They’re basically terrible at all sorts of cognitive tasks, including multitasking.”
  • Below are more than a dozen representative studies in these areas:
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The researchers conclude that the experiments “suggest that heavy media multitaskers are distracted by the multiple streams of media they are consuming, or, alternatively, that those who infrequently multitask are more effective at volitionally allocating their attention in the face of distractions.”
  • Members of the ‘Net Generation’ reported more multitasking than members of ‘Generation X,’ who reported more multitasking than members of the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation. The choices of which tasks to combine for multitasking were highly correlated across generations, as were difficulty ratings of specific multitasking combinations.
  • same time, these experts predicted that the impact of networked living on today’s young will drive them to thirst for instant gratification, settle for quick choices, and lack patience
  • The educational implications include allowing students short ‘technology breaks’ to reduce distractions and teaching students metacognitive strategies regarding when interruptions negatively impact learning.”
  • survey about the future of the Internet, technology experts and stakeholders were fairly evenly split as to whether the younger generation’s always-on connection to people and information will turn out to be a net positive or a net negative by 2020.
  • said many of the young people growing up hyperconnected to each other and the mobile Web and counting on the Internet as their external brain will be nimble, quick-acting multitaskers who will do well in key respects.
  • similar mental limitations in the types of tasks that can be multitasked.
  • The data suggest that “using Facebook and texting while doing schoolwork were negatively predictive of overall GPA.” However, “emailing, talking on the phone, and using IM were not related to overall GPA.”
  • Regression analyses revealed that increased media multitasking was associated with higher depression and social anxiety symptoms, even after controlling for overall media use and the personality traits of neuroticism and extraversion.
  • David McGavock on 24 Jul 14
     
    Clifford Nass, notes that scholarship has remained firm in the overall assessment: "The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. They're basically terrible at all sorts of cognitive tasks, including multitasking." - See more at: http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/social-media/multitasking-social-media-distraction-what-does-research-say#sthash.I21dv2wV.dpuf
David McGavock

The Myth Of AI | Edge.org - 1 views

edge.org/...the-myth-of-ai

augmentation neuroscience myth Jaron Lanier

shared by David McGavock on 17 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • what I'm proposing is that if AI was a real thing, then it probably would be less of a threat to us than it is as a fake thing.
  • it adds a layer of religious thinking to what otherwise should be a technical field.
  • we can talk about pattern classification.
  • ...38 more annotations...
  • But when you add to it this religious narrative that's a version of the Frankenstein myth, where you say well, but these things are all leading to a creation of life, and this life will be superior to us and will be dangerous
  • I'm going to go through a couple of layers of how the mythology does harm.
  • this overall atmosphere of accepting the algorithms as doing a lot more than they do. In the case of Netflix, the recommendation engine is serving to distract you from the fact that there's not much choice anyway.
  • If a program tells you, well, this is how things are, this is who you are, this is what you like, or this is what you should do, we have a tendency to accept that.
  • our economy has shifted to what I call a surveillance economy, but let's say an economy where algorithms guide people a lot, we have this very odd situation where you have these algorithms that rely on big data in order to figure out who you should date, who you should sleep with, what music you should listen to, what books you should read, and on and on and on
  • people often accept that
  • all this overpromising that AIs will be about to do this or that. It might be to become fully autonomous driving vehicles instead of only partially autonomous, or it might be being able to fully have a conversation as opposed to only having a useful part of a conversation to help you interface with the device.
  • other cases where the recommendation engine is not serving that function, because there is a lot of choice, and yet there's still no evidence that the recommendations are particularly good.
  • there's no way to tell where the border is between measurement and manipulation in these systems.
  • if the preponderance of those people have grown up in the system and are responding to whatever choices it gave them, there's not enough new data coming into it for even the most ideal or intelligent recommendation engine to do anything meaningful.
  • it simply turns into a system that measures which manipulations work, as opposed to which ones don't work, which is very different from a virginal and empirically careful system that's trying to tell what recommendations would work had it not intervened
  • What's not clear is where the boundary is.
  • If you ask: is a recommendation engine like Amazon more manipulative, or more of a legitimate measurement device? There's no way to know.
  • we don't know to what degree they're measurement versus manipulation.
  • If people are deciding what books to read based on a momentum within the recommendation engine that isn't going back to a virgin population, that hasn't been manipulated, then the whole thing is spun out of control and doesn't mean anything anymore
  • not so much a rise of evil as a rise of nonsense.
  • because of the mythology about AI, the services are presented as though they are these mystical, magical personas. IBM makes a dramatic case that they've created this entity that they call different things at different times—Deep Blue and so forth.
  • Cortana or a Siri
  • This pattern—of AI only working when there's what we call big data, but then using big data in order to not pay large numbers of people who are contributing—is a rising trend in our civilization, which is totally non-sustainable
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 17 Nov 14
       
      Key relationship between automation of tasks, downsides, and expectation for AI
  • If you talk about AI as a set of techniques, as a field of study in mathematics or engineering, it brings benefits. If we talk about AI as a mythology of creating a post-human species, it creates a series of problems that I've just gone over, which include acceptance of bad user interfaces, where you can't tell if you're being manipulated or not, and everything is ambiguous.
  • It creates incompetence, because you don't know whether recommendations are coming from anything real or just self-fulfilling prophecies from a manipulative system that spun off on its own, and economic negativity, because you're gradually pulling formal economic benefits away from the people who supply the data that makes the scheme work.
  • I'm going to give you two scenarios.
  • let's suppose somebody comes up with a way to 3-D print a little assassination drone that can go buzz around and kill somebody. Let's suppose that these are cheap to make.
  • Having said all that, let's address directly this problem of whether AI is going to destroy civilization and people, and take over the planet and everything.
  • some disaffected teenagers, or terrorists, or whoever start making a bunch of them, and they go out and start killing people randomly
  • This idea that some lab somewhere is making these autonomous algorithms that can take over the world is a way of avoiding the profoundly uncomfortable political problem, which is that if there's some actuator that can do harm, we have to figure out some way that people don't do harm with it.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 17 Nov 14
       
      Another key - focus on the actuator, not the agent that exploits it.
  • the part that causes the problem is the actuator. It's the interface to physicality
  • not so much whether it's a bunch of teenagers or terrorists behind it or some AI
  • The sad fact is that, as a society, we have to do something to not have little killer drones proliferate.
  • What we don't have to worry about is the AI algorithm running them, because that's speculative.
  • another one where there's so-called artificial intelligence, some kind of big data scheme, that's doing exactly the same thing, that is self-directed and taking over 3-D printers, and sending these things off to kill people.
  • There's a whole other problem area that has to do with neuroscience, where if we pretend we understand things before we do, we do damage to science,
  • You have to be able to accept what your ignorances are in order to do good science. To reject your own ignorance just casts you into a silly state where you're a lesser scientist.
  • To my mind, the mythology around AI is a re-creation of some of the traditional ideas about religion, but applied to the technical world.
  • The notion of this particular threshold—which is sometimes called the singularity, or super-intelligence, or all sorts of different terms in different periods—is similar to divinity.
  • In the history of organized religion, it's often been the case that people have been disempowered precisely to serve what were perceived to be the needs of some deity or another, where in fact what they were doing was supporting an elite class that was the priesthood for that deity.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 17 Nov 14
       
      Technical priesthood.
  • If AI means this mythology of this new creature we're creating, then it's just a stupid mess that's confusing everybody, and harming the future of the economy. If what we're talking about is a set of algorithms and actuators that we can improve and apply in useful ways, then I'm very interested, and I'm very much a participant in the community that's improving those things.
  • A lot of people in the religious world are just great, and I respect and like them. That goes hand-in-hand with my feeling that some of the mythology in big religion still leads us into trouble that we impose on ourselves and don't need.
  • David McGavock on 17 Nov 14
     
    "The idea that computers are people has a long and storied history. It goes back to the very origins of computers, and even from before. There's always been a question about whether a program is something alive or not since it intrinsically has some kind of autonomy at the very least, or it wouldn't be a program. There has been a domineering subculture-that's been the most wealthy, prolific, and influential subculture in the technical world-that for a long time has not only promoted the idea that there's an equivalence between algorithms and life, and certain algorithms and people, but a historical determinism that we're inevitably making computers that will be smarter and better than us and will take over from us."
David McGavock

Tip for Getting More Organized: Don't - Michael Schrage - Harvard Business Review - 1 views

blogs.hbr.org/...tip-for-getting-more-organized

augmentation affordance thinking tools harvard business tip Infotention

shared by David McGavock on 29 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • When it comes to investing time, thought and effort into productively organizing oneself, less is more. In fact, not only is less more, research suggests it may be faster, better and cheaper.
  • IBM researchers observed that email users who “searched” rather than set up files and folders for their correspondence typically found what they were looking for faster and with fewer errors. Time and overhead associated with creating and managing email folders were, effectively, a waste.
  • The personal productivity issue knowledge workers and effective executives need to ponder is whether habits of efficiency that once improved performance have decayed into mindless ruts that delay or undermine desired outcomes.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Ongoing improvement in email/document/desktop and cloud-centric search frees them from legacy information management behaviors like filing.
  • what would really prove more personally productive — folders that sort 15% faster? Or key phrase search capabilities that were 20% better?
  • They’re “organizing” for flexibility, adaptiveness and immediate response. More accurately, their technologies exist to give them greater speed and flexibility. Their personal organizational ethos reflects a Toyota Production System “just-in-time” attitude.
  • nstead of better tools for better organizing, people want their organization done for them. Organizing is wasteful; getting its benefits is productivity.
  • They want what I’ve described earlier as “promptware” — a cue and intervention that creates measurable value in the moment, rather than promised efficiencies in the future.
  • We’ll likely get more done better if we give less time and thought to organization and greater reflection and care to desired outcomes. Our job today and tomorrow isn’t to organize ourselves better; it’s to get the right technologies that respond to our personal productivity needs. It’s not that we’re becoming too dependent on our technologies to organize us; it’s that we haven’t become dependent enough.
  • David McGavock on 29 Jun 14
     
    Suggests that we use just-in-time features built into our smart devices rather than take time to manually organize files and folders.
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