Michael Nielsen’s “Reinventing Discovery” is hopeful and energetic. The book illuminates how technology (read: the Internet) is changing the way we make scientific discoveries. It’s exciting stuff, but there are some real barriers to adopting this new way of working.
I recently took Stewart Brand’s advice and started limiting my news consumption to a handful of science blogs. Science reporting is much more uplifting than its mainstream cousin. No gossip. No disasters. No rumours of impending economic doom. Just discoveries: Genuinely new stuff that we didn’t know before. While there’s a lot to absorb, my first thought was “How can we get more?”
I was first introduced to the concept of design patterns when working as a software developer. Design patterns, or simply ‘patterns’, are used to describe common solutions to common problems. Collections of patterns are called pattern languages.
I like to think that I’ve always been a somewhat curious person, but through my participation in Leadership Calgary in 2009, I was challenged to take it up a notch, to broaden my focus and deepen my analysis. I was surprised by how enjoyable exploring new ideas could be. Like the child who frustratingly asks “…but why?” to every explanation his parent tries to offer, I discovered a bottomless well of questions—an unending line of inquiry.
Enthusiasm has grown, in recent years, for a movement that is best summed up by the term ‘Gamification’. At its best, gamification seeks to make the world a better place by making life more engaging, more fun and more rewarding. At its worst, it is a cynical papering over of harsh realities with shallow game mechanics.
I must confess that I have always had a bit of a pessimistic streak running through most of my worldview. The world was in trouble, and getting worse. Now, thanks to the appropriately titled work by Matt Ridley, I have started thinking that maybe things won’t turn out so bad, after all.
A thought experiment: imagine a world in the not-too-distant future where technology has advanced to the point where basic human needs for food, clothing and shelter are being met by autonomous computer-controlled systems. Setting aside dystopian visions of a human race enslaved by machines, let us instead assume that this situation is working pretty well for everyone.
The rioting in London seems like a fitting backdrop for reviewing a book about societal inequality, although the timing of my review, and their riots, is purely coincidental. In “The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better” we are exposed to a compelling stream of data and analysis that aims to show that whether you care about health, or crime, or education, or social mobility, (or…), you should be caring about social and economic inequality.
Calgary’s mayor recently put out a call looking for ‘Big Ideas’ in the realm of poverty reduction. Not really wanting to limit myself to ‘Big’ I have set my sights on ‘Crazy’, which means that these likely will (and probably should) be dismissed out of hand.
Right now, you and I are being watched. Google Analytics is recording every visit to this blog, including yours. Google has also read this posting, and all my other postings, adding them to the great big blog in the skyclouds. You and I, by our simple clicks, have generated a small trove of data that will need to be analyzed by algorithms processing millions and billions of similar interactions. The clever people designing these algorithms are the subject of Stephen Baker’s book “The Numerati”.
