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.

Code Poets, Software Engineers

The following article by Jonathan Wise has been resonating online with the Software community. A lot that has been written applies to me and my colleagues everywhere. Our job titles are perhaps deliberately confusing enough to keep you guessing our 'real' work. The following excerpts highlight the best and easiest bits, but you can read the full article here to get the complete description.

• And believe it or not, I don't fix computers for a living.
• There's these organizations, some (not all) still stuck in the 70s and 80s, called “I.T. Departments” who's official purpose is to fix computers — but who's actual purpose is to attempt to prevent their users from doing anything dangerous (read: useful.)
• A software developer must be part writer and poet, part salesperson and public speaker, part artist and designer, and always equal parts logic and empathy.
• A piece of software starts, before any code is written, as an idea or as a problem to be solved.
  
• It is always tied to a human being — their job, their entertainment… their needs.
• Once you understand what you need to build, you still don't begin building it. Like an architect or a designer, you start with a sketch, and you create a design.
• Its not uncommon for the design process to take longer than the coding process.
• You put on a sales hat and you pitch what you've dreamt up… then wait with bated breath while they dissect your brain child.
• Software that can't be understood can't be used, so no matter how brilliant your design, if your interface isn't elegant and beautiful and intuitive, your project is a failure.
• To make something easy to use requires at least a basic understanding of human reactions, an awareness of cognitive norms.
• Only, unlike a salesperson selling someone else's product, you are selling your own work, and are inevitably emotionally-attached to it.
• Maybe its more like music ...
• ... the pieces are added up, each in itself a little work of art, they make, if programmed properly, a whole that is much more than a sum. Its is an intertwined, and constantly moving piece of art.
• ... next comes a Quality Assurance Engineer (or QA) who tries to break your code, question your decisions, and generally force you to do better than what you thought was your best.
• it takes a true artist, or at least an earnest student, to understand just how brilliant — or how wretched — the work behind it is.
• As a lead developer on a project, it falls to you to instill confidence, to speak articulately and passionately about the appropriateness and worth of your solution.
• ... user's are never really satisfied. So you think back to the design process, you remind them when they had a part in the decisions ...
• And you write and you teach. ... responsibility to educate people on the uses of our technology ...
• Then there's a party, a brief respite, where you celebrate your victory ... And you start again. ...
  
• ... you are only as good as your latest victory.
  

New way to resize images automatically

At the SIGGRAPH 2007 conference, in the session named Image Slicing and Stretching there has been a notable technology presented by two researchers from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL).

Called Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing, it's described as

Seam carving is a method for content-aware resizing that changes the size of an image according to its content. This paper shows applications to aspect-ratio change, image retargeting, and object removal.

Resizing images to make them fit in the required internet form factor without distorting its contents has always been a bit of a challenge. The demonstration of this tool, seems to make the work involved a lot easier and automated. The ability of a page to resize with the browser window is called liquidity. Here the images in the page also support that concept.

It also demonstrates the capability of locating areas of that are least important or have the 'least energy' and removing them without any noticeable distortions. However, there are limitations, especially where there are large composition elements such as faces and people that cannot be skewed without obvious effects.

To see these very interesting image transformation capabilities see the following video.



The two researchers, Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir have been promptly recruited by Adobe Systems Incorporated, who in-fact chaired the conference session. I fear this tool may also just get incorporated into Adobe's proprietary image manipulation software, instead of becoming available in the open source arena.

Meanwhile, traditionalists moan the manipulations possible in digital images and note that it undermines the integrity of photographs and the art of photography.

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

Nurturing Brains

The world is changing (once again). The hangovers of the colonial age and the unequal distribution of knowledge and industry is being corrected, ironically through unbridled capitalism.

It has been over 60 years since the end of the Second World War, and other nations have had time to wake up and smell the money. The realization that money rather than military force is the way to gain prestige and influence, in today's world, has motivated many nations to happily jump into the free-trade market. The Asians are now playing the West at their own game.

Multinational corporations don't have any patriotic allegiances themselves, so they invest wherever they can get greater returns. However, people staffing these corporations are human, and feel the need to express human concerns.

Now the world's wealthiest man, Bill Gates, having retired from active duty at his firm, has time to think along these lines. He has just published an article in The Washington Post - 'How to Keep America Competitive'. He starts with the latest term for research and development - 'innovation' - and all the factors that are not helping it. US primary education in science not producing world level competitors, immigration not being as friendly as possible to higher skilled candidates, retention of skilled workforce not working.

From the rest of the world's perspective, though US is currently the center of innovation, this is not expected to be the future model. Knowledge has no borders these days, and world-class scientific facilities are being developed all over the world. With the lowering of the cost of communications, geographic location is not such a big deal. The world is becoming more open and providing greater opportunities of experience and economic advancement everywhere. The US does not quite have the pull that it used to. Many international US graduates prefer to try out opportunities back home.

It is also a pattern that those who tend to become complacent in their position are sometimes surprised by those who are fiercely and desperately fighting to find their place in the world. Immigrants, by their very definition are pioneers - they have left their known world behind to seek out new territories. They come with a lot of optimism, plans and expectations. They will work much harder to achieve their aims. The pain of leaving their native lands and people has to be compensated for attaining substantial material and economic profit.

After the Second World War, the Unites States acquired a priceless knowledge advantage, from Germans and other European immigrants. People like Wernher von Braun, creator of the Nazi V2-rockets (which bombed London), who should have been tried for war crimes, were instead given amnesty and quietly inducted into US research programs, where he went on to design space rockets for NASA. Albert Einstein fled Europe to live and teach for the remainder of his life in US. Other scientist immigrants of this time also include Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Felix Bloch, Emilio Segre and Eugene Wigner. In fact, Americans rarely won Nobel Prizes before 1950.

With all eyes on the money, the value and quality of human beings is regularly underestimated. It's good to see a refocus on this topic.