Let's kill the 'one-size-fits all' book

Wealth provides options. This ought be true with information wealth, as well. Yet, people don't read anymore, due to the information overflow and the constant disruptions.

Curation certainly solves the information overflow, from an entertainment standpoint.

But, as Oscar Wilde observed in the 19th Century, "It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information."

One solution is to get off the Grid from time to time and contemplate in a Shinto Shrine.

The other solution, which would work for most people, would be to start redesigning the Container, i.e., the one-size-fits all Book, article, web page, that adapts content, based on your understanding.

After all, "Knowledge was power" back in the days….

The Curated Unprogram

If we ask Clay Shirky, he would say that, we coped up with industrialization with the help of Gin and we kept up with the accelerating pace of life, with 20 hours of Television viewing.

As some people fear, this continuous partial attention culture isn't going to drive us nuts and destroy our civilization. Instead, we would invent new art forms that would enrich our lives and keep us amused.

The curated Unprogram is one such Art form.

The Numa Numa guy is emblematic of the emergence of the Unprogram trend. The traditional 20-min shows are gradually displaced by interesting youtube clips shared in Facebook and Twitter.

Curation is being experimented in different angles, in the past year or so. Eventually, these two trends would merge in a happy medium, creating a new art form.

Rather than coping up with this information overload and fractured attention, we would celebrate it, with this Curated Unprogram.

But, we are not there yet. Television provides the looking-forward-to-ness and functions as a social object, ...in water cooler conversations. Appointment Television would not be supplanted just yet, if these two benefits are not offered by the new art form.

Normal is boring a.k.a the Age of the Weird

Dr. Seuss writes, "We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love."

Seth Godin's new book is a celebration of weirdness!

"During the age of mass (mass marketing, mass manufacturing, mass schooling, mass movements) the key was normal. Normal was important because you needed (were required) to fit into your slot. ...But what happens when mass disappears? When we can connect everyone, customize and optimize--then what happens to normal?"

Discovery (of music, books etc.,) has already pushed us from the bell curve, to clusters (of similarity). In this age of the weirdness, the true test of discovery technology is not just the ability to cluster related items, but in establishing the relationship between these clusters, as we don't stay put in our current weirdness forever.

The Language of Relevance.....

First-generation relevance attempts to transform the internet treasure chest/junkyard into a personalized DJ experience.

Pandora is emblematic of applying this personalized DJ model, to the long-tail of music streams.

Can this successful model be applied to other realms as well, like video, particularly Television? The answer is no. Not without evolving the interaction between the human and machine, into the next generation.

In the case of Relevance 1.0, the interaction between the human and the machine is pretty simplistic, you press buttons skip,like/unlike,share and the system could provide you hours of enjoyable music, which you can enjoy in solitude or as a background, while you are working.

TV is more about a myriad of other factors, than the precise content that you enjoy. The past and future plays a key role in your Television experience.

You have a certain looking-forward-to-ness of appointment television, which Tivos cannot fulfill. Your experience becomes complete, when you share excitedly about the show that you watched the previous night, during your water cooler conversations. Roku and Boxee, fulfills that need,only partially.

Evolving Relevance is not about adding buttons in the keyboard, i.e., from like to search. It is about emerging the user interaction, into a language....and I mean language in a generic sense and not from a programmable sense.

The Fourth R

Kevin Kelly writes thus: "Environments are invisible." That's Marshall McLuhan' overarching big idea. We are fundamentally, almost inherently, unable to see the largest thing in our lives -- our environment. This ocean of ideas, assumptions, expectations, constraints, drivers, beliefs, blinders, and influences that shape our lives and minds is hidden from us precisely because we are in it and of it. It takes a peculiar stance and foolishness to step outside it long enough to perceive it."

Apart from Reading,wRiting and aRithmetic, there is a fourth R that needs to be taught,to cope up with this abundance, it is Relevance. Just like how we are taught to Read and Write using a language, we need a language of Relevance. Otherwise, we would be dealing with the abundance by using filters, without fully benefiting from the profound richness.

Filters are a start, the sustained solution is to invent a language of Relevance.

Unlike the other 3 Rs, machines would partake with us, in such a language.

From Consumption to Understanding

Our mind is not a Blank Slate. We try to consume the presented information, by connecting with the already existing mental model(s) that we hold.

If we are successful in fitting the new information with the existing model, then we "got it".

If it doesn't make sense, we reject it and in essence, "we don't get it".

When we "get" a cluster of concepts, we construct our own inference chain. Sometimes, these inferences could be erroneous. Only Assessment could reveal such erroneous inferences, where we wind up 'refactoring' our models of understanding. This process repeats, until we reach a sufficient level of accuracy in our understanding.

All of this process, requires immersion, in the process of Learning.


Yet, we lazily blame the lack of comprehension on the consumer(of information)'s intellectual capacity. Books, even Kindle are stone-age tools, as they don't help us construct understanding efficiently.

We need brand new tools, relevant to this digital age.

... ScribbleBee is one.

Connected Intelligence "Preserver Apps"

Niall Ferguson says, "Here are 6 ‘killer apps’ that set the West apart from the rest: competition, the scientific revolution, property rights, modern medicine, the consumer society, the work ethic. "

Amen!

We have built "killer apps" which enable us to enjoy the level of taste and variety of food, that Louis the IVth had, with his 498 chefs, without having to employ a single chef via restaurants.

As I,Pencil instructed us, "The configuration of creative human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and
desire and in the absence of any human masterminding."


These "killer apps", enable us to drown in information, but has left us starving for knowledge.

In our pursuit of "the process intelligence", we have created a chasm between practice and process.

While last century was about "Killer Apps", this century has to be about "Preserver Apps". Otherwise, the dent that we created in the ecosystem in the process of our conquest, would destroy us eventually.

Connected Intelligence attempts to fix this: by having "Preserver Apps" that connect the Process Intelligence with the Practice, not merely people with other people and the technium.

While there are countless spheres to start connecting intelligence, we could start with Education 2.0 and Management 2.0.

With Connected Intelligence, Learning would be about understanding and not about merely hoarding facts and Management would be about amplifying talent and not merely aggregating talent.

Check out ScribbleBee and the MIX Lab Management Hack for a sneak preview on how these "Connected Intelligence" Apps would look like in the future.

Bicycle for Learning

Alvin Toffler wrote: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

Even if you do not enjoy reading dense papers, you could get by, most of the time, by watching YouTube videos, asking questions in Quora, following the right folks in Twitter and have interesting friends in Facebook.

But, if you were to do focused learning, there are tools that you search, gather and use, but there is no bicycle for learning

"I think one of the things that separates us from the high primates is that, we are tool builders. I read a study, that measured the efficiency of locomotion of various species on the Planet. The Condor uses the least energy to move a Kilometer. ...and humans came in with an unimpressive showing, with about third of the way, down the list. ....but the man on a bicycle blew the condor away, complete off the top of the charts...and that is what a computer is to me...a bicycle for our minds."

Such a Platform would construct a model of your understanding and adapt the content, based on your current state of comprehension.

Real-time fact-checking and the epidemic of Arrogance

These days, even the Dean of the School of Medicine, doesn't know a whole lot. Philip Baker had to copy portions of Dr. Atul Gawande's speech verbatim.

Dr.Baker didn't know a lot because he didn't anticipate that his students would catch him red-handed with a smart phone, while he was giving his speech. Duh!

While I am disinterested in the media sensation debate, my takeaway is this: 'In this decade, 'Real-time fact checking' is going to be disruptive, with the epidemic of Arrogance, within organizations."

Scott Berkun writes, "An arrogant person only feels smart if someone else feels stupid. Their sense of themselves depends on thinking less of someone else. They insist on correcting other people’s grammar or showing them their flaws, as it’s the only way they can feel an approximation of confidence."

While the benefits of this real-time 'fact checking' is obvious, its ugly side-effects is not at all obvious.

Consider this fictional conference call:

Asok: "I think my point is, Geography gave some, productive crops and animals, which enabled them to develop 3 forces of conquest: Guns, Germs and Computers."

Alice: "You are wrong. It is not Computers. It is Steel."

Asok: "What I meant was..."

Alice: "You are an idiot. Look at the Wikipedia article on the book."

Pointy Head: "Well done Alice. Asok, you are indeed an idiot."

Dilbert: "Asok is an idiot because, he didn't anticipate that you bozos, would not have heard of Jared Diamond, before googling the terms."

Connected Intelligence Operating System

Process Design and the Shared Space Project

"Practice always takes the path of least resistance", says John Seely Brown. "Process, on the other hand, tries to map the route".
Management needs to handle this conflict. Process steps add cost. Lack of process steps is not cheap either.

Few cities in Europe, are adopting the Shared Space Project. During 2008, in Ashford, Kent (U.K.), they replaced a section of former four lane ring road with two-way streets on which drivers, cyclists and pedestrians have equal priority. Unnecessary street furniture, road markings and traffic lights have been removed and the speed limit cut to 20 mph.

Between November 2008 and January 2011, there have been four road casualties, resulting from the six reported accidents.

This huge success of low accident rate, has given a boost to the Shared Space Project. I watched a YouTube Video, where a person narrated how difficult it is, for a pedestrian to cross the street now, as there are no traffic lights. Similarly, drivers need to be super-alert all the time. So, there ain't no free lunch.

It is high time, that Software Development Processes are designed with the same rigor as Engineering Design,

The goal of engineering design is to obviate failure….and what we define as failure, depends on the operating context.

When I meant Process, I didn't mean espoused process, but the actual process practiced by practitioners. You could be precise without resorting to high ceremony. You just need to design codes of invariance and agree upon. That's all.

Creativity and profound understanding... not merely skill or talent

Chris Dixon writes in his fascinating blog post MIT Is a national treasure, thus:

"Tom Pinckney... got his Bachelors and Master degrees from MIT.

He's the nicest, smartest, and most decent guy you'll ever meet. But my favorite thing about Tom is he never got a high school degree.

High school students today optimize their grades and SATs and after school activities. They speak French and Chinese, play piano and paint abstract art.
They dance around and play hockey and act like they help homeless people."

Sure, learning French and to play the piano among the million other "Mom/Dad Taxi" activities improves competitive capacity, as well as improves talents/skills of your child in multiple areas, but might not do much for creativity and profound understanding.

There is an outstanding creative problem-solving organization called Destination ImagiNation, apart from developing skills and talent, offers the most prestigious Da Vinci Award, to the team that demonstrates outstanding creativity ...not skill or talent.

...and we need an organization that facilitates deep understanding. (and the countdown begins)

P.S.: That is the picture of my daughter Samhita at the Massachusetts Destination ImagiNation Tournament 2011

Urgent Now, Repetitive Now, Bored Now,.... Understanding Now

Google breaks down current information usage in the mobile, into three categories, namely, a) Urgent Now, b) Repetitive Now and c) Bored Now.

As we deeply integrate mobile phones into our lives, a new category would erupt, i.e., "understand now".

Understanding is more than merely throwing some wikipedia links.

Researchers found that 8-month old Infants are capable of segmenting fluent speech, by computing statistical relationships between neighboring segments, that too, listening for just 2 minutes.

Fortunately, it is pre-language phase, that a teacher does not "tell" the kid, how to segment speech, of the n methods, we humans have discovered to be working efficiently.

Though we are not a blank slate, our learning systems don't factor that.

Also, the hardest part in facilitating understanding, is to provide, information content, at the right level of abstraction, that adapts based on the user's current understanding and current reaction.

When we hear an assertion, we react to it, by accepting or rejecting it as coherent to our current understanding. We could be intimidated by the terms used in the content. Or we could be totally confused.

The understanding process could be made efficient, if the content adapts, according to assessment of understanding as well as user reaction to content.

Otherwise, we would continue to rely on string of words and have no way of knowing, how deeply we understood something.

Last and most important, we need to invent a natural interface for users to scribble their reactions. No ackward menus or typing from the keyboard.

... and scribblebee.com could be the answer to such understanding.

A rose is a rose is a rose

Why is it warmer in summer than in winter? Sure you could google and tell me why. Yet Harvard Grads. had trouble correctly answering this question (without Google, of course)

When such is the state, where the competition is intense, average i.q. much higher, fees steep. Imagine asking the same question, in a less privileged school, where the barrier to entry is low.

The root cause is that, Google has not merely caused information overload, but has caused disruption in many fronts.

It first killed the adage, 'Knowledge is Power'.

Even if you worked for 30 years in a domain, someone passionate about the domain, can shake your foundation in a matter of months.

It then killed the myth of "hard work".

You could have worked on something all day long, every day, for the past year. Yet, someone passionate about your domain, can render your entire "hard work" obsolete, by re-factoring your entire model several times over, in just a matter of days.

Many scholars are predicting the demise of Formal Education, as we know it, now.

Lastly, "words are really going to be cheap", as in, it will lose its value, for communicating understanding. Words will always, be the first resort, to explain something, at a high level. But, after some level of detail, it is not effective in communicating understanding anymore.

Collective Intelligence and the Dunning Kruger Effect

"Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint." - Mark Twain

Our collective intelligence feat is astounding. No questions.

Yet with all its glorious benefits, we have lost something precious in the process. Our ignorance.

Yes, some 6000 days back, we didn't have the affordance to know an astounding range of things, so easily.

But, today there is no such limit to the topic that one could learn by skimming for a few short minutes. But, such skimming would miss the subtle.

...and we are collectively blissfully unaware of our incompetence. A Classic case of Dunning Kruger Effect.

Ignorance is good. Celebrate it. Otherwise, we would commit blunders similar to what Mark Twain refers to.