Top Trends Timeline 2010-50

An Australia/UK based futurist, Richard Watson of Nowandnext.com has, with some collaboration, drawn up a very complex timeline of trends for 2010 and going into the next 40 years.

Though a I enjoy visualization of concepts, this map is not that easy to discern at first glance. It takes a bit of time to spot the pattern, and further to absorb the content. The original full diagram is available here.

Like a Metro/Subway/Underground map, there are lines that trace a certain category or subject such as Healthcare & Medicine or Geopolitics through a minefield of trends, marked as dots/circles. The more important the trend the larger the circle, and is more likely to contain more intersecting lines. Starting from the centre region which corresponds to the 2010-15 period, there are outwardly radiating regions of time up to 2035-50. Perhaps it should be called a time-map.

Many of the trends such as speech-recognition, cloud-storage, and declining fertility are already here in some form, while others further out in the timeline still belong in the domain of science-fiction - DNA repair, invisibility cloaks, Animals suing humans.

Watson invites any comments or suggestions on his blog page here.

Job satisfaction depends on how you use your hands

Come to think about it, that I first thing I enjoyed about computers was the power that came with pressing so many buttons - it sort of makes sense. As we all become 'knowledge workers', our focus is shifting to our internal mental processes. We may seek the cure to our stress in alternate mental states, where instead it is probably just doing something physical that reconnects us with reality.

An article from a Ph.D. knowledge worker turned motorcycle mechanic:

High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

...

I once accidentally dropped a feeler gauge down into the crankcase of a Kawasaki Ninja that was practically brand new, while performing its first scheduled valve adjustment. I escaped a complete tear-down of the motor only through an operation that involved the use of a stethoscope, another pair of trusted hands and the sort of concentration we associate with a bomb squad. When finally I laid my fingers on that feeler gauge, I felt as if I had cheated death. I don’t remember ever feeling so alive as in the hours that followed.

More at
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

7x7 Session One, Seven Foundations – Our Reality 2008, Our Future 2028.

Tuesday, 22 July 2008

Intrigued by anything that claims to be inspired by TED talks, I bought the season tickets to see these 5 sessions. The short 7 minute presentations keep the audience engaged and the talks focussed. Presentation from Professor Hans Rosling playing on a LCD screen outside, a duet song by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rodgers - "Islands in the Stream" playing in the big screen inside, I took my seat.

The session was opened by Brian Sweeny, Chairman of Sweeny Vesty, a wellington based international consultancy. He started the 7x7 series along with Jan Bieringa as an ideas forum. Expressing the belief that every New Zealander needs a global edge to their work and dreams, his firm has been involved in work across 80 cities in 40 countries, with "many of the work delivered from Wellington". He advocated that New Zealand companies need to push themselves out into the world to become great. Noting the current tough economic scenario, he pointed to Toyota's market share which has been climbing even during downturns. Their lesson - the 5 Paradox Foundations - Move slowly and take big leaps, Grow steadily and remain paranoid, Be frugal and splurge, Be simple and complex, Set impossible goals and surprass them. Another roadmap referred to was 'FREDA' - Focus, Reinvention, Execution, Distribution, and Accountability. Brian hoped that thoughts and visions generated at this gathering would feed into the nation's political direction. You can also check nzedge.com

Rod Oram, international financial journalist, the chair and moderator at these series also had his 7 minute session. With plenty of humour and wit, he would carry the seminar series well. Going on the theme of 7, he talked about the 7 synergies. First, Reality - need to have a realistic self assessment of our capabilities and goals for succeeding. Opportunity - global economy and technological empowerment enabling small companies from New Zealand to have manage international concerns, leveraging our natural resources - forestry, tourism as well as filmmaking. Creativity - our size allows us to pioneer new business models, skills and relationships. Sustainability - Auckland may have 2.2 million people in 50 years, Pakehas may become a minority, we will need culture, community and business to work hand-in-hand. Commonality - of purpose, that we acknowledge each other's aspirations, but are able to find common ground for action. Leadership - New Zealanders prefer strong leadership, but we need distributed leadership in small groups. Finally, Belief - New Zealand can be a role model, bolder, strong, more certain of world contribution, and more successful. New Zealand can be the distinct attractive alternative. Only if we believe can we achieve.

He was follwed by Dr. David Skilling, CEO of the think-tank New Zealand Institute, who presented an economic analysis of current New Zealand and projected to 2030. Among the several graphs and numbers presented the overall theme was 'absence of change'. Among the OECD countries per-capita-income, we are currently 22 and are at the current rate are to remain so in 2030. However in that time the gap with Australia will increase from 30% to 60%, which can have a major impact. A Wellington Westpac stadium full of people leave for Australia every year, indefinitely or long term basis. However either too negative or positive attitudes don't help much. To make a real difference, the aspirations need to be better defined. There is a need to engage effectively with global economy or New Zealand is going to get run over.

In response came Brian Easton, and independent scholar and columnist. His presentation theme being markedly opposite - 'does material affluence boost well-being?'. Disagreeing with the theory that more products means one is better off, he also questioned the blind faith public has in economists. He gave examples of lack of correlation between well-being and material consumption - rich countries per capita income not relating to their happiness, in U.S. better to be married that have 100,000 dollars extra income. His summary - "don't worry about the economists, be happy".

Michael Field, columnist, author, expert in Pacific affairs, discussed that on his travel to Mumbai he encountered Indian civil servants who dismissed New Zealand due to its low population. Point was that New Zealand sees its much smaller Pacific neighbours in a similar vein. He proposed that perhaps there should be a union that takes away the 'small failing micro-states'. Information Technology and relaxed borders would help sustainability. Michael mentioned Tokelau and despite New Zealand attempts to have them go their own way, they prefer to be part of New Zealand. The arrival of "broadband internet, Bebo, and Sky TV" had "muted their drive of decolonization". He suggested that New Zealand should lead the way in establishing and facilitating a better Pacific union.

Professor Jacqueline Rowarth of Massey University came to talk about science research & development in New Zealand. For its size New Zealand has a good amount of research going on. Globally the demand for food is set to grow, but New Zealand does not have more land to farm. Thus farming techniques will need to become more sophisticated. However less graduates are electing to go into Agricultural Sciences and are moving to fields such as creative arts, which Jacqueline coined "the Peter Jackson effect". 26% of tertiary educated go overseas, many don't see a future in New Zealand. The science system in New Zealand needs reform, to be led more by creative 'investigator-led' research rather than 'output-driven research'. A 'Fast Forward' fund of $700 million has been created, under minister Jim Anderton and colleagues, for Science, Farms & Food. This is being matched by industry. It should help put New Zealand back in high-level research. Concluding, "If we liberate the thinkers, then we will have the recruitment that we need, and we'll have better science."

Dr. Morgan Williams, Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment started by talking about astronauts' epiphany. The inexpressible experience of externally observing and realizing the world as an isolated and closed system. He described humanity putting enormous pressure on the resources of the globe including oceans, soil, water. There are eco-system services which we depend on and take for granted, such as bees for pollinating. One solution mentioned was bio-mimcry - taking learning from nature and applying them in the creation of our systems. Such as vineyards in North Canterbury planting flowers around to lift the pollination rates. The education system has to catch up with learning for sustainability.

Savouring an enormous amount of information in a short time span is exhilarating, but takes time to digest. The rest of the seminar series looks promises increase the tempo.

200,000 books, one Geek with his computers

A very interesting New York Times article covers what is effectively a stupendous mockery of the process of creating a book. But books are produced nevertheless, and some people buy them.

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a particular chosen text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.  - Infinite monkey theorem, Wikipedia

Humans cannot deal with infinity, but we can use better assistants than monkeys to reduce the time it takes. In the Information age, Philip M. Parker, has put his name to 200,000 books setting records for being a prolific author. The catch to this inhuman behaviour is an array of assistant computers programmed to fetch information online on any particular topic and compile them into a book. He explains the process in the following video.



It's unnerving to think that this process can be extended to other media like games, audio and video as well. Effectively it establishes the precedent that a person is not required to compile content into human consumption media items like books or movies.

At the library end, I wonder what this implies for cataloguers. It doesn't make sense for humans to be organizing output that comes from machines. Do cataloguers they have to be human too, or can they just be machines instantly summarizing and deriving overviews from the content?

I found some of these books here on Amazon.

The New York Times article can be found here.

Printing Wikipedia

Everybody who has studied in school and university would have seen, touched and interacted with the print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. It consists of over 30 hard bound volumes of printed text, illustrations and images, probably as shown below.



What happened if we were to print out a copy of the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, in a similar format? For the August 2007 edition of the English language Wikipedia, the result is below



The creator of this images describes it as

Using volumes 25cm high and 5cm thick (some 400 pages), each page having two columns, each columns having 80 rows, and each row having 50 characters, ˜ 6MB per volume. As English Wikipedia has around 7.5GB of text (August 2007, length of wikitext counted by myself) ˜ 1250 volumes. Note that this is a conservative estimate, as it doesn't include images, tables etc. which take up more surface than the text which describes them.

Chemistry of the Internet

My colleague, Simon, passed on this website to our group today morning. A lot of frivolity, guffaws and laughter ensued.

It seems to be a chemists attempt to make sense of things on the internet, by following the model of the Periodic Table of Elements. A number of well-known (and not so well-known) online websites, services and software are organised in the table, represented as boxes. Columns stand for categories such as 'Search Engines', 'Internet Tools, 'Blogs', 'Operating Systems', and the row is used to mark the rankings of the website. Each box shows the Symbol, Sit URL
and Rank. By clicking on any of the boxes you're taken to the corresponding website.

I can be very addictive serendipitous experience. It took some effort to tear my attention away onto more 'pressing' matters.



The website can be found here.

Video Guides: Social Bookmarking

Here's another useful video from the Common Craft Show explaining another internet concept. This time it's 'social bookmarking'. Forget the 'social' for a while and think of bookmarking. Most of us bookmark our favorite sites using the browser menu, but this then keeps the bookmarks on just our local computer. If we were to go and work on some other computer, we would lose all that information. This is about saving your bookmarks on the internet so you can access them on any computer connected to the net. Very very useful to those who mostly frequent the internet using Cyber Cafes. The social part comes at a later stage, when you share your bookmarks with other people and access other people's bookmarks to gather more information.

I use del.icio.us, which is what this video is about, and my place of work has also launched into this sphere by having an account.

Video tutorial


Note that it is also possible to download add-on features to integrate this bookmarking service into your browser. Links to these are available below

Relevant Links

• del.icio.us website
• Firefox browser extension
• Internet Explorer 7 browser extension

Prof. Hans Rosling shows us the real world

I had the priviledge to meet Sweden's Professor Hans Rosling at GOVIS 2007: Innovation in ICT conference held here in Wellington. I attended his workshop Unveiling the beauty of statistics with animations. Prof. Rosling was described in the GOVIS conference pages as

Hans Rosling has spent two decades studying the links between poverty, agriculture and disease in remote rural areas across Africa. He-founded Gapminder together with his son and daughter-in-law to promote better use and understanding of statistics by converting international statistics into moving, interactive and enjoyable graphics.

In the workshop he further informed us that his software Trendalyzer has been acquired by Google (yes, the big monster that's eating up everything) and they will help further develop it. Its features will probably be included into Google Analytics as well. This will give the software a platform and resources for more development.

Prof. Rosling already has a very busy schedule, being invited to speak in front of most major international forums, including UN bodies, OECD etc. I think every world government and media outlet should hear him. In most conference sessions I like to take lots of notes in case I forget something, but at the GOVIS session I had to put my pen down as I knew I wouldn't forget this one. Not only was the presentation enormously informative, it was also very entertaining. The famous videos below are from the TED conferences.

February 2006 - Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen




March 2007 - Hans Rosling: New insights on poverty and life around the world



Prof. Hans Rosling at GOVIS 2007 in Wellington

Debate - Anarchy vs. Authority online

Seeing that history turns in cycles, I always wondered, that after the overall demise of extreme socialism in the form of communism, if the victorious individualistic driven world of capitalism would have to reckon with a new socialism ideology.

Here's a delicious online debate on the Wall Street Journal that a colleague kindly forwarded. Whenever there's a contentious topic at which we are seeking definition, it's useful to get the experts to have a duel to decide for us. The debaters are

• Andrew Keen, an outspoken critic of the new social direction of the internet - Web 2.0 and author of The Cult of the Amateur.


• and David Weinberger, philospher, technologist, professional speaker and author of Everything is Miscellaneous.

Keen kicks of the debate with:

[...] Mainstream media's traditional audience has become Web 2.0's empowered author. Web 2.0 transforms all of us -- from 90-year-old grandmothers to eight-year-old third graders -- into digital writers, music artists, movie makers and journalists. Web 2.0 is YouTube, the blogosphere, Wikipedia, MySpace or Facebook. Web 2.0 is YOU!
...
Yes, the people have finally spoken. And spoken. And spoken.
Now they won't shut up. The problem is that YOU! have forgotten how to listen, how to read, how to watch. Thus, the meteoric rise of Web 2.0's free citizen media is mirrored by the equally steep decline in paid mainstream media and the mass redundancies amongst journalists, editors, recording engineers, cameramen and talent agents. Newspapers and the music business are in structural crisis, Hollywood and the publishing business aren't far behind. We've lost truth and interest in the objectivity of mainstream media because of our self-infatuation with the subjectivity of our own messages. It's what, in "Cult of the Amateur," I call digital narcissism. A flattened media is a personalized, chaotic media without that the essential epistemological anchor of truth. The impartiality of the authoritative, accountable expert is replaced by murkiness of the anonymous amateur. When everyone claims to be an author, there can be no art, no reliable information, no audience.

Everything becomes miscellaneous. And miscellany is a euphemism for anarchy.

then, Weinberger responds with:

[...] We also agree that the Web is a problem. ... is that because anyone can contribute and because there are no centralized gatekeepers, there's too much stuff and too many voices, most of which any one person has no interest in. But, the Web is also the continuing struggle to deal with that problem. From the most basic tools of the early Internet, starting with UseNet discussion threads, through Wikipedia, and sites that enable users to tag online resources, the Web invents ways to pull together ideas and information, finding the connections and relationships that keep the "miscellaneous" from staying that way.
...
that raises one other myth that I think runs under your comments. You say "the intellectual authority able to help people understand the world is indeed endangered." Then you ask if I'm convinced that the Web benefits intellectuals. Yes, I am. And that's because, while some talent is indeed solitary, many types of talent prosper in connection with others. That is especially true for the development of ideas. Knowledge is generally not a game for one. It is and always has been a collaborative process. And it is a process, not as settled, sure, and knowable by authorities as it would be comforting to believe. ... Consider how much more we know about the world because we have bloggers everywhere. They may not be journalists, but they are sources, and sometimes they are witnesses in the best sense. We know and understand more because of these voices than we did when we had to rely on a single professional reporting live at 7.

And so on it goes. There are further links below to follow up, if you are interested.

Links:

• The complete debate on Wall Street Journal


• Previous Scio-sphere post on Everything is Miscellaneous


• Time Magazine 2006 Person of the Year Issue
  Article - Time's Person of the Year: You - by Lev Grossman

Evolving Language

Some time ago, I had a brief conversation with a colleague (who happens to be Canadian) on languages. He overheard me talking on the phone with an Indian friend in Hindi, combined with English shortcut phrases. Overcome with curiosity, he couldn't help asking me which language I was thinking in, while I was having this bilingual conversation. It was a good question for I couldn't tell.

Language is a carrier of the human consciousness, and like it, it's continually evolving. Divided by geography, our ancestors each evolved their own separate languages. Now due to the amplification of our transportation and communication abilities, the world is shrinking, languages and cultures are coming together.

English is the primary language in many countries, mostly the nations that arose after the dissipation of the British Empire. As it was the last great empire - 'on which the sun never sets', so English is the widest understood tongue today. In India, the favoured language of commerce and education is English. Another recent example is the Soviet Union - nations that now constitute the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) still largely support Russian. For example, on my visit to Armenia, I encountered Russian still to be the favoured language of business and government. The current adult generation was educated in Russian medium.

Language is affected by the manner in which it is used. Traditionally, it was used for discourse and expression of feelings, it could become very poetic and beautiful. However, when used for formal workflows - business, science, law, government etc. - it tends to become very fixed, industrial and inhuman. That's when we have to start memorizing book-loads of vocabulary.

Enter the digital age - English is the language of computer science. If you wanted to do computer programming, you have to do so in English. One of the reasons that India enjoys such an advantage in Information Technology. I had the very strange experience of learning BASIC computer language in Spain, in Spanish. That was another multi-lingual experience I didn't fully realise until later.

Language is evolving still, with the Internet it's become a medium as well as a technology itself. The rest can probably be explained by the video below, which has been circulating for some time in my work place, and being shown in an awful lot of presentations.

Everything is Miscellaneous - from David Weinberger

Humans have the capacity to handle the huge amounts of information, but as we get immersed in the digital information age, even that capacity is under strain. One of the main ways we organise our perception of concepts and objects around us is to categorise them, then set up hierarchies of those categories.

However, here is an interesting counter-point from David Weinberger. He's written a book - Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, which I may read 'eventually', but if you're pressed for time and rather see the video it is provided below.




Further Links

• The book on Amazon
  
• David's Blog
  

Video Guides: RSS and Wiki's

These were perhaps the first two technologies that set the concept of Web2.0 on fire. RSS is more or less, a way to provide a website's 'table of contents', so that you click on any of the headings and get taken to the corresponding 'chapter'. They allow ways to take the links to the content out of the original site's context into your own, at your convenience. Wikis are largely text-based centralized spaces where a communities can get together and share their interests.

However the point of this blog post is, now matter how I try to explain it, it is still incomprehensible to many people. So ... here are two video's that illustrate these concepts in a much more entertaining and engaging way. Enjoy!

RSS in Plain English



Wiki's in Plain English

Introduction to the Book

We all know when printing first started, but when was the first book compiled will always be a bit of a mystery with different civilizations staking their claim.



In India the tradition of passing detailed philosophical and spiritual knowledge from Guru to Shishya (student) was largely done through oral tradition. No doubt, the knowledge in question may have suffered distortion and amplification through such a medium, before the first written manuscripts were compiled and made into standard reference.

Following is a fun take on the 'introduction of a book' to European monks. It analogous to what it's like to introduce someone to new computer programs.

Librarians in the New World

Why use the library at all, with everything available for free on the internet and easily searchable? Wrong. Despite the formidable illusion, everything is not available on the internet. Consider the latest published journals and books, they are still under copyright and not available. Consider all the great works that haven't been converted to online media or e-books yet. Check whether the information you are getting from the net is reliable. Libraries enjoy the advantage of having authoritative information that you can quote on, and it's available for a very low membership cost, if not free. Yet all is not well in library world, librarians are wondering if they have a role in the future of information and knowledge services. An excellent article available here gives 33 reasons why librarians are still important. So, next time you visit a library, don't feel shy to consult a librarian about anything you need. Don't compare them to shop assistants trying to sell you something, they are just experts at finding the information you need.

Bringing knowledge back to life

I had referred in one of my previous blog entries to the loss of digital knowledge due to the fast changing computer landscape. A far more subtle loss is occurring in the written and printed archives, as editions of old texts lie decaying behind closed doors. Sometimes caring individuals invest their time and money in bringing fragments of these back to active life. Their are many such treasures in my own family hierlooms that are so delicate that they crumble at the merest touch. Stories like the following lend hope of their salvation.

Imaging technology restores 700-year-old sacred Hindu text from PhysOrg.com

Scientists who worked on the Archimedes Palimpsest are using modern imaging technologies to digitally restore a 700-year-old palm-leaf manuscript containing the essence of Hindu philosophy.

[...]