Hertzel's Emerging Tech Thoughts

"Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many..."

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 09:18:28 +0200

“Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.”

- Legendary neurologist Oliver Sacks on memory, plagiarism, and the necessary forgettings of creativity (via explore-blog)

"Freestylers enter a “flow” state, which researchers described as a “complete immersion in creative..."

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 16:31:46 +0200

“

Freestylers enter a “flow” state, which researchers described as a “complete immersion in creative activity, typified by focused self-motivation, positive emotional valence and loss of self-consciousness.” Their creative gate is wide open.

“It’s the absence of attention,” said [researchers]. “When the attention system is partially offline, you can just let things fly and let things come without critiquing, monitoring or judging them.” “It’s almost like you’re able to think faster. … You’re able to incorporate multiple perspectives without thinking about it.”

”

- Neuroscientists study freestyle rap to better understand how creativity works, with findings echoing the principles of this 1939 “technique for producing ideas” (via explore-blog)

This talk was given by Steve Jobs on June 15th, 1983 at the...

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 07:27:24 +0200

This talk was given by Steve Jobs on June 15th, 1983 at the International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA). Digitized by Marcel Brown.
http://lifelibertytech.com
http://marcelbrown.com

I Only Hear What I Want to Hear And So Do You

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 11:30:05 +0300

I Only Hear What I Want to Hear And So Do You :

Research showsthat if people learn to articulate not only their own viewpoints but also opinions that oppose their own, confirmation bias is less likely to occur. Communication campaigns, therefore, need to activate dialogue that includes all sides of the argument.

Information and awareness raising is not sufficient to change behavior. Such campaigns are likely to fall on deaf ears, or on ears that will only hear what they want to hear. If, however, a dialogue about the campaign message can be initiated, information is likely to be processed more carefully and possibly more successfully.

"We need to think about using the web for storytelling in a way that encourages long-term attention..."

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 09:00:00 +0300

“We need to think about using the web for storytelling in a way that encourages long-term attention as a means for developing a relationship with people and issues that are important to us, and that does so in a way that embraces the positive dynamics of video gameplay and TV narrative without sacrificing the pleasures of the slow.”

-
llingProctor, J 2012, “The case for the slow internet,” in media res: a media commons project, accessed from .

This 100 percent correlates with what I have been thinking about at the moment. It’s this word of deliberation, which I think ties so forcefully to affect.

(via hannahbrasier)

DemocracySpot: Scaling-up Deliberation to the National Level

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 08:53:00 +0300

DemocracySpot: Scaling-up Deliberation to the National Level:

This paper takes issue with the question of scaling up deliberation in connection to that of enlarged participation. Its aim is to argue that deliberation can be feasible and effective in wide participatory experiments, and therefore it can scale up to the national level and affect public…

braddzjk: Dialogues: An Argument Rhetoric and Reader (3rd Edition)

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 08:51:00 +0300

braddzjk: Dialogues: An Argument Rhetoric and Reader (3rd Edition):

braddzjk31:

Dialogues: An Argument Rhetoric and Reader (3rd Edition)
The new title, Dialogues: An Argument Rhetoric and Reader, 3/e (formerly Crossfire), represents argument not as a battle to be won but as a process of dialogue and deliberation among people with diverse values and perspectives. The Third…

"The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking...."

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 14:45:21 +0300

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”

- Steve Jobs (via yaron)

Can NoSQL help us in processing Linked Data?

Tue, 03 May 2011 14:37:16 +0300

This is an announcement and call for feedback. Over the past couple of days I’ve compiled a short review article where I look into NoSQL solutions and to what extent they can be used to process Linked Data.

I’d like to extend and refine this article, but this only works if you share your experiences and let me know what I’m missing out and where I’m maybe totally wrong?

Information Overload Paradox: Just because there’s more information available, doesn’t mean one can consume more.

Sun, 01 May 2011 15:12:00 +0300

The Information Overload Paradox

Put yourself in the shoes of a consumer right now. Just for a second. Imagine that it’s the 1950s. You consume as much content as you can. You likely frequent your local library. Perhaps you listen to the radio and watch the nightly news. Maybe you also subscribe to, and read the entire, daily newspaper. Maybe your household receives a few magazines every month. That’s about it. There really isn’t a big difference between the information you know is available and the information you can consume.

Now, fast forward to the late 1990′s. You live in a 200-channel television universe, there are multiple daily metropolitan newspapers, and the worldwide web is exploding. Suddenly, there is far more content created than you can consume. Today, I’ve been told, there are an average of 17 new webpages published every second. I can’t consume every single one.

So, what do I think has happened? I can certainly consume more content than I could two decades ago, but no matter how much content is available, I can’t consume much more. And relative to the sheer volume of content available to me, I’m actually consuming a smaller percentage every day.

The Race to Curate

Now, put on your Marketer Hat or your Content Creator Hat again and take a look at the Information Overload chart above. The green line represents the consumer’s ability to consume more content. Yes, it’s gone up – but only ever-so-slightly.

Now look at the blue line (the information available). It’s sky-rocketing and shows no signs of slowing down. The consumer stands no chance of consuming much more of that wonderful content you’re creating than they could yesterday or they will tomorrow.

That means we need to define our roles in this ever-growing world of content creation. In my opinion, this is why we see a huge interest in content curation over content creation. It represents the desire of the consumer to filter out the noise and get straight to relevant, high-quality content, given the limitations on their ability to consume.

via Chart of the Week: The Information Overload Paradox

Microsoft Probase enables machines to understand human behavior and human communication

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 17:55:00 +0300

Probase is an ongoing project that focuses on knowledge acquisition and knowledge serving. The primary goal is to enable machines to understand human behavior and human communication. It’s powered by a new graph database called Trinity, which is also a Microsoft Research project.

Compared with other knowledgebases, Probase is unique in two aspects. First, Probase has an extremely large concept/category space (2.7 million categories). As these concepts are automatically acquired from web pages authored by millions of users, it is probably true that they cover most concepts in our mental world (about worldly facts). Second, data in Probase, as knowledge in our mind, is not black or white. Probase quantifies the uncertainty. These serve as the priors and likelihoods that become the foundations of probabilistic reasoning in Probase. With this probabilistic Probase, we build several interesting applications, such as topic search, web table search and document understanding

Knowledge in Probase

But Probase is much more than a traditional ontology/taxonomy, which can be seen in three dimensions: the concept dimension,the data dimension, and the relationship dimension.

Concept Dimension

Probase is extremely rich in concepts. The core taxonomy alone contains about 2.7 million concepts. Probase has a much larger concept space than existing open domain taxonomies.

Data Dimension

Probase has a large data space. As an example,Cyc contains about two dozen painters, while Probase has close to 1,000 of them ordered by their popularity. Furthermore, we regard external data, such as the Web, Freebase, DBPedia, dictionaries and encyclopedias,IMDB, Amazon, etc., as evidences that can add to or modify the claims and beliefs in Probase. This means Probase is able to integrate information of varied quality from heterogeneous data sources.

Relationship Dimension

Probase also has a large relationship space. The most important relationships are the isA relationship (e.g. a painter is anartist), the part-whole relationship (e.g., engine is part of a car), and the similarity relationship (e.g., emerging markets, as a concept, is closely related to newly industrialized countries).

via Microsoft Research

20 Content Strategy Rules to Live By

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 15:39:00 +0300

Information architects, web developers, UX designers and content writers may have different perspectives about content strategy. But, we all share a common passion for its importance. As content creators, we believe that content strategy is essential to the creation of any successful website from the onset of planning. Here are 20 lessons we learned from some of the industry’s leading experts on how content strategy plays a critical role in content marketing today:

Writing text online is no longer “just copywriting”. (@Halvorson)
Let’s reclaim the internet so when we type something in we get satisfying results. (@Halvorson)
Imagine if part of your strategy was to help your customers find what they are looking for. (@scottabel)
We deliver the wrong info to the wrong people in the wrong format. (@scottabel)
Content isn’t a phase in web development or redesign, it’s ongoing. Reverse how it is now. Design is a phase. (@jeffmacintyre)
Content strategy is a menu to order from – audit, plan, build, grow. (@jeffmacintyre)
Any content that you put on your website is a content promise to your customers in some way. (@juntajoe)
Create something remarkable. If your content isn’t the very best, why should your customers engage or share your brand story? (@juntajoe)
Traditional media is not at the heart of social media. It’s about one thing…content. (@Robert_Rose)
Fans/followers do not matter if you have no objectives set for them. (@Robert_Rose)
There is no semantic web without content and data. (@rlovinger)
Content strategy will make or break your process. (@karenmcgane & @eaton)
We don’t plan time to create and edit content. We treat it like a black box. (@karenmcgane & @eaton)
Is content missing in your project diagram? Most project outlines DO NOT include content. (@karenmcgane)
Good content isn’t magic. It takes planning and time. (@karenmcgane & @eaton)
Don’t shovel the old content into the new shiny site. (@mbloomstein)
Your deliverables will be that much richer with content strategy. (@mbloomstein)
Content strategy can help designers communicate – in less time and with less money and effort. (@mbloomstein)
Upfront content strategy actually preserves time and money for design. (@mbloomstein)
How can you budget by page count if you don’t know how many pages it will take to express the main points, capture a user’s profile, or complete interactions (@mbloomstein)

via Content Conversations

Visualization: Japan/Fukushima nuclear power plant Japan is...

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 11:08:40 +0200

Visualization: Japan/Fukushima nuclear power plant

Japan is racing to gain control of the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plan. Where does the most detailed data come from? Updated daily

via guardian.co.uk

"The age of augmented humanity, a time when computers remember things for us, when they save us from..."

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 17:53:00 +0200

“The age of augmented humanity, a time when computers remember things for us, when they save us from getting lost, lonely, or bored, and when “you really do have all the world’s information at your fingertips in any language”, finally fulfilling Bill Gates’ famous 1990 forecast. This future, Schmidt says, will soon be accessible to everyone who can afford a smartphone, one billion people now, and as many as four billion by 2020, in his view.”

- Google CEO Eric Schmidt says the company has adopted a “mobile first” strategy. And indeed, many Googlers seem to think of mobile devices and the cameras, microphones, touchscreens, and sensors they carry as extensions of our own awareness. “We like to say a phone has eyes, ears, skin, and a sense of location,” says Katie Watson, head of Google’s communications team for mobile technologies. “It’s always with you in your pocket or purse. It’s next to you when you’re sleeping. We really want to leverage that.”

This is no small vision, no tactical marketing ploy—it’s becoming a key part of Google’s picture of the future. In a speech last September at the IFA consumer electronics fair in Berlin, Schmidt talked about “the age of augmented humanity,” a time when computers remember things for us, when they save us from getting lost, lonely, or bored, and when “you really do have all the world’s information at your fingertips in any language”—finally fulfilling Bill Gates’ famous 1990 forecast. This future, Schmidt says, will soon be accessible to everyone who can afford a smartphone—one billion people now, and as many as four billion by 2020, in his view.

It’s not that phones themselves are all that powerful, at least compared to laptop or desktop machines. But more and more of them are backed up by broadband networks that, in turn, connect to massively distributed computing clouds (some of which, of course, are operated by Google). “It’s like having a supercomputer in your pocket,” Schmidt said in Berlin. “When we do voice translation, when we do picture identification, all [the smartphone] does is send a request to the supercomputers that then do all the work.”

And the key thing about those supercomputers—though Schmidt alluded to it only briefly—is that they’re stuffed with data, petabytes of data about what humans say and write and where they go and what they like. This data is drawn from the real world, generated by the same people who use all of Google’s services. And the company’s agility when it comes to collecting, storing, and analyzing it is perhaps its greatest but least appreciated capability.

The power of this data was the one consistent theme in a series of interviews I conducted in late 2010 with Google research directors in the fundamental areas of speech recognition, machine translation, and computer vision. It turns out that many of the problems that have stymied researchers in cognitive science and artificial intelligence for decades—understanding the rules behind grammar, for instance, or building models of perception in the visual cortex—give way before great volumes of data, which can simply be mined for statistical connections.

Inside Google’s Age of Augmented Humanity | Xconomy

Fantastic READ LIST for lean startup management practices

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 20:14:00 +0200

Lean Startup Concepts

Steve Blank’s Four Steps to the Epiphany details Blank’s customer development process. This MUST READ book lays the foundation for lean startup principles, Blank’s blog amplifies the ideas in his book, e.g., why you need to get out of the building to interview users, attributes of a scalable startup, the definition of a business model, and why startups should track progress with hypothesis validation, not traditional accounting metrics.

Eric Ries explains lean startup principles in a series of MUST READ blog posts, topics include the minimum viable product concept, when to release your first product, the use of Toyota-style “five whys” the value of split test experiments, how to manage a business model transition, a case study of continuous deployment, macro vs. micro testing in lean startups,and the merits of continuous deployment.

Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz on product-market fit.

Design firm slicedbread on when continuous feature/fix releases are good and bad for users.

Aardvark co-founder Max Ventilla on user-driven design.

Business Model Analysis

Presentation by David Skok of Matrix Partners on the SaaS business model plus related post.

Steve Carpenter’s TechCrunch teardown of generic web business models and key metrics for each.

Product Management

Marty Cagan of Silicon Valley Product Group’s Inspired is a comprehensive guide to the product manager role, a MUST READ book, the SVPG blog extends the book’s insights.

All product managers should be familiar with Geoffrey Moore’s classic books Crossing the Chasm (a MUST READ) and Inside the Tornado

Customer Conversion Funnel Analysis/Optimization

Avinash Kaushik, analytics evangelist for Google, is the author of the Occam’s Razor blog and Web Analytics 2.0, a MUST READ book that provides comprehensive and practical guide to analytics.

Viral marketing analytics, including viral coefficients, explained by David Skok of Matrix Partners in one of several MUST READ posts, which also include customer acquisition funnel optimization, the need to balance average customer acquisition cost with lifetime value of a customer, and metric-driven business model analysis.

Startup metrics discussed in this MUST READ presentation by serial entrepreneur and angel investor Dave McClure, in which he describes his “AARRR” framework: acquisition, activation, retention, referral, revenue.

B2B Selling

David Skok of Matrix Partners on building a sales and marketing machine, a MUST READ post, Skok on how sales complexity impacts customer acquisition cost and how to mitigate its impact.

MUST READ Harvard Business Review article by Mark Leslie and Charles Holloway on the sales learning curve.

Public Relations

Mark Hendrickson, co-founder of Worldly Developments (and former TechCrunch blogger) on how to pitch a tech blogger.

Brant Cooper makes the case that startups should not hire a PR agency.

TechCrunch post on PR impact of SXSW launches of Twitter and Foursquare.

Business Development

Charlie O’Donnell of First Round Capital describes business development challenges for startups.

Alex Iskold, founder of AdaptiveBlue, describes how biz dev is evolving in parallel with the APIs of platform-based businesses, Shaival Shah on how to substitute an API for bus dev.

Angel investor/Hunch CEO Chris Dixon on how startups should think about incumbents.

Recruiting/Organizational Issues

Michael Woloszynowicz on finding a technical co-founder.

Miriam Naficy, founder of Minted.com on how to hire a startup CTO.

Angel investor/Hunch CEO Chris Dixon summarizes ideas from software guru Joel Spolsky about how to hire programmers.

Eric Ries on why startups should not have departments, sources of engineering-marketing friction, and the right amount of process for a startup.

Investor/serial entrepreneur Furqan Nazeeri on what functions startups can outsource, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures on outsourcing and offshoring Vivek Wadhwa on the pros and cons of outsourcing product development.

More Books and Tools

Do More Faster, edited by Brad Feld and David Cohen, compiles advice across a range of topics from TechStars entrepreneurs and mentors.

Founders at Work, by Y Combinator’s Jessica Livingston, collects her interviews with two dozen founders relating their lessons learned.

Tom Hulme at IDEO has compiled and crowd-sourced a list of tools for tech startups, organized by function and company life cycle stage, a similar list compiled by Shyam Subramanyam, another list from Jaret Manuel and Tom Eisenman list of free software tools for lean startups.

Related articles

Hugely important skill in the next decades: take data, understand it, process it, extract value, visualize it, communicate it

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 15:43:30 +0200

Hal Varian Google’s chief economist says executives in wired organizations need a sharper understanding of how technology empowers innovation.

I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s? The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it. I think statisticians are part of it, but it’s just a part. You also want to be able to visualize the data, communicate the data, and utilize it effectively. But I do think those skills—of being able to access, understand, and communicate the insights you get from data analysis—are going to be extremely important. Managers need to be able to access and understand the data themselves. You always have this problem of being surrounded by “yes men” and people who want to predigest everything for you. In the old organization, you had to have this whole army of people digesting information to be able to feed it to the decision maker at the top. But that’s not the way it works anymore: the information can be available across the ranks, to everyone in the organization. And what you need to ensure is that people have access to the data they need to make their day-to-day decisions. And this can be done much more easily than it could be done in the past. And it really empowers the knowledge workers to work more effectively.

Living with Complexity: Please don’t try to clean up my desk

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 17:40:00 +0200

Living with Complexity: by Donald A. Norman

Messy desks by organized people. Some people’s desks reflect the complexity of their lives. But to the person who owns the desk, everything is in its place, there is order and structure. Photograph of Al Gore.by Steve Pyke. © Steve Pyke/Contour by Getty Images.

The person in figure sits unperturbed by the apparent chaos of his desk. How does he cope with all that complexity? I’ve never spoken with the person in the picture, Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States and winner of the Nobel Prize for his work on the environment; but I have talked with and studied other people with similar-looking desks, and they explain that there is order and structure to the apparent complexity. It’s easy to test: if I ask them for something, they know just where to go, and the item is retrieved oftentimes much faster than from someone who keeps a neat and orderly workplace. The major problem these people face is that others are continually trying to help them, and their biggest fear is that one day they will return to their office and discover someone has cleaned up all the piles and put things into their “proper” places. Do that, and the underlying order is lost: “Please don’t try to clean up my desk,” they beg, “because if you do, it will make it impossible for me to find anything.”

How do people cope with such apparent disorder? The answer lies in the phrase “underlying structure.” My desk looks chaotic and incomprehensible to anyone who is unaware of the reasoning behind the many disparate piles. Once the structure is revealed and understood, the complexity fades away. So it is with our technology.

“Why is our technology so complex?” people continually ask me. “Why can’t things be simple?” Why? Because life is complex. The airplane cockpit is not complex because the engineers and designers took some perverse pleasure in making it that way. No: it is complex because all that stuff is required to control the plane safely, navigate the airline routes with accuracy, keep to the schedule while making the flight comfortable for the passengers, and be able to cope with whatever mishap might occur en route. I distinguish between complexity and complicated. I use the word “complexity” to describe a state of the world. The word “complicated” describes a state of mind. The dictionary definition for “complexity” suggests things with many intricate and interrelated parts, which is just how I use the term. The definition for “complicated” includes as a secondary meaning “confusing,” which is what I am concerned with in my definition of that word. I use the word “complex” to describe the state of the world, the tasks we do, and the tools we use to deal with them. I use the word “complicated” or “confused” to describe the psychological state of a person in attempting to understand, use, or interact with something in the world. Princeton University’s WordNet program makes this point by suggesting that “complicated” means “puzzling complexity.” Complexity is part of the world, but it shouldn’t be puzzling: we can accept it if we believe that this is the way things must be. Just as the owner of a cluttered desk sees order in its structure, we will see order and reason in complexity once we come to understand the underlying principles. But when that complexity is random and arbitrary, then we have reason to be annoyed.

Modern technology can be complex, but complexity by itself is neither good nor bad: it is confusion that is bad. Forget the complaints against complexity; instead, complain about confusion. We should complain about anything that makes us feel helpless, powerless in the face of mysterious forces that take away control and understanding.

My challenge is to explore the nature of complexity, to relish its depth, richness, and beauty at the same time that I fight against unnecessary complications, the arbitrary, capricious nature of much of our technology. Bad design has no excuse. Good design can help tame the complexity, not by making things less complex—for the complexity is required—but by managing the complexity.

The keys to coping with complexity are to be found in two aspects of understanding:

First is the design of the thing itself that determines its understandability. Does it have an underlying logic, a foundation that, once mastered, makes everything fall into place?
Second is our own set of abilities and skills: Have we taken the time and effort to understand and master the structure?

Understandability and understanding: two critical keys to mastery.

The major issue is understanding: things we understand are no longer complicated, no longer confusing. The airplane cockpit looks complex but is understandable. It reflects the required complexity of a highly technological device, the modern commercial jet aircraft, tamed through three things: intelligent organization, excellent modularization and structure, and the training of the pilot.

"The goal of any CMS should be to gather enough information to present the content on any platform,..."

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 21:33:03 +0200

“The goal of any CMS should be to gather enough information to present the content on any platform, in any presentation, at any time. WPT’s capture content with the primary purpose of publishing web pages. (Daniel Jacobson)”

- We’re in the information business

caterpillarcowboy: ilovecharts: Daily unique visitors of...

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 12:25:00 +0200

caterpillarcowboy:

ilovecharts:

Daily unique visitors of popular sites. Not quite there yet, but compared to the others, Tumblr is almost parabolic. Some tumblrites might not see that as good news though.

-toptumbles

Go team!

No! This is #badmath. Let’s do it this way: Tumblr grows from 1M to 6M, and Facebook grows from 100M to 300M. What Tumblr did in 1 year, Facebook basically does in a day.

I can’t believe this has almost a 1000 notes. (H/T to Mike Hudack for also noticing this.)

How It Works: Information analytics explained though simple...

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 12:13:00 +0200

How It Works: Information analytics explained though simple narration and illustrations.

This is a great overview of information analytics for the non-technical community.

How It Works: Analytics (via IBMSocialMedia)