Thanks, Jim, for bringing this to my attention!
]]>Thanks, Jim, for bringing this to my attention!
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The Edge question this year is "How has the Internet changed the way you think?". The result is eminently readable - my favorite so far is George Dyson's answer, which is quoted here in its entirety: GEORGE DYSON
Science Historian; Author, Darwin Among the MachinesKAYAKS vs CANOES
In the North Pacific ocean, there were two approaches to boatbuilding. The Aleuts (and their kayak-building relatives) lived on barren, treeless islands and built their vessels by piecing together skeletal frameworks from fragments of beach-combed wood. The Tlingit (and their dugout canoe-building relatives) built their vessels by selecting entire trees out of the rainforest and removing wood until there was nothing left but a canoe.
The Aleut and the Tlingit achieved similar results — maximum boat / minimum material — by opposite means. The flood of information unleashed by the Internet has produced a similar cultural split. We used to be kayak builders, collecting all available fragments of information to assemble the framework that kept us afloat. Now, we have to learn to become dugout-canoe builders, discarding unneccessary information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within.
I was a hardened kayak builder, trained to collect every available stick. I resent having to learn the new skills. But those who don't will be left paddling logs, not canoes.
Short and sweet, in other words. Now, where did I leave that informational adze, what P. J. O'Rourke referred to as the "brief-but-insightful-summary" button?
]]>The first users of LinkedIn were, as far as I can tell, headhunters (at least the first users with 500+ contacts and premium subscriptions.) It makes sense - after all, having a large network of professionals in many companies is a requirement for a headhunter, and LinkedIn certainly makes it easy not only to manage the contacts and keep in touch with them, but also allows access to each individual contact's network. However, LinkedIn (and, of course, other services such as Facebook, Plaxo, etc.) offers its services to all, making connections visible and to a certain extent enabling anyone with a contact network and some patience to find people that might be candidates for a position.
I suspect that the evolution of the relationship between headhunters and LinkedIn is a bit like that of fixed-line telephone companies to cell phones: In the early days, they were welcomed because they extended the network and was an important source of additional traffic. Eventually, like a cuckoo's egg, the new technology replaced the old one. Cell phones have now begun to replace fixed lines. Will LinkedIn and similar professional networks replace headhunters?
If you ask the headhunters, you will hear that finding contacts is only a small part of their value proposition - what you really pay for is the ability to find the right candidate, of making sure that this person is both competent, motivated and available, and that this kind of activity cannot be outsourced or automated via some computer network. They will grudgingly acknowledge that LinkedIn can help find candidates for lower-level and middle-management, but that for the really important positions, you will need the network, judgment and evaluative processes of a headhunting company.
On the other hand, if you has HR departments charged with finding people, they will tell you that LinkedIn and to a certain extent Facebook is the greatest thing since sliced bread when it comes to finding people quickly, to vet candidates (sometimes discovering youthful indiscretions) and to establish relationships. I have heard people enthuse over not having to use headhunters anymore.
So, the incumbents see it as a low-quality irrelevance, the users see it as a useful and cheap replacement. To me, this sounds suspiciously like a disruption in the making, especially since, in the wake of the financial crisis, companies are looking to save money and the HR departments dearly would like to provide more value for less money, since they are often marginalized in the corporation.
I would like to find out if this is the case - and am therefore looking for a student or two who would like to do their Master's thesis on this topic, under my supervision. The research will be funded through the iAD Center for Research-based innovation. Ideally, I would want students who want to research this with a high degree of rigor (perhaps getting into network analysis tools) but I am also willing to talk to people who want to do it with more traditional research approaches - say, a combination of a questionnaire and interviews/case descriptions of how LinkedIn is used by headhunters, HR departments and candidates looking for new challenges.
So - if you are interested - please contact me via email at self@espen.com. Hope to hear from you!
]]>Normally when I teach technology strategy (GRA6821), a term paper is part of the course evaluation. The students typically write about some technology, a technology company, or somesuch, normally in groups of three or less.
This year, things will be a little different. I am part of a research project called A Knowledge-based Norway, where the idea is to investigate various industries in Norway in terms of their knowledge generation - and, by extension, their technology evolution. As a part of this project, we will write case studies on various companies, and that is precisely what the students will do. However, rather than having the students chose the companies themselves, we will provide a list of companies, allowing the students, in pairs, to choose a company to write about. We will, of course, entertain suggestions to which companies to have on this list. Here is a start:
Large IT service companies:
Innovative technology companies/research groups
Academic/research institutions
Software companies focused on the Norwegian or Nordic market
Large and important IT projects and IT users
Interesting startups/rapidly growing companies/interesting stuff
This list will grow as I get new ideas - suggestions are welcome! (And yes, perhaps there is an idea to have something about spectacular computer failures as well...)
]]>I am very much looking forward to an course that hope and think will be fun, interesting and useful both to take and teach. And until August 19th, I wish you all a very good summer!
]]>The central chapter, chapter 5, Landes lays out the ideal case on pages 217-218 - and quoting that is reason enough for a blog post (not to mention obligatory reading for anyone concerned with economic policy.):
Let us begin by delineating the ideal case, the society theoretically best suited to pursue material progress an general enrichment. Keep in mind that this is not necessarily a "better" or a "superior" society (words to be avoided), simply one fitter to produce goods and services. This ideal growth-and-development society would be one that
- Knew how to operate, manage, and build the instruments of production and to create, adapt and master new techniques on the technological frontier.
- Was able to impart this knowledge and know-how to the young, whether by formal education or apprenticeship training.
- Chose people for jobs by competence and relative merit; promoted and demoted on the basis of performance.
- Afforded opportunity to individual or collective enterprise; encouraged initiative, competition, and emulation.
- Allowed people to enjoy and employ the fruits of their labor and enterprise.
These standards imply corollaries: gender equality (thereby doubling the pool of talent); no discrimination on the basis of irrelevant criteria (race, sex, religion, etc.); also a preference for scientific (means-end) rationality over magic and superstition (irrationality).*
Such a society would also possess the kind of political and social institutions that favor the achievement of these larger goals; that would, for example,
- Secure rights of private property, the better to encourage saving and investment.
- Secure rights of personal liberty - secure them against both the abuse of tyranny and private disorder (crime and corruption).
- Enforce rights of contract, explicit and implicit.
- Provide stable government, not necessarily democratic, but itself governed by publicly known rules (a government of laws rather than men). If democratic, that is, based on periodic elections, the majority wins but does not violate the rights of the losers; while the losers accept their loss and look forward to another turn at the polls.
- Provide responsive government, one that will hear complaint and make redress.
- Provide honest government, such that economic actors are not moved to seek advantage and privilege inside or outside the marketplace. In economic jargon, there should be no rents to favor and position.
- Provide moderate, efficient, ungreedy government. The effect should be to hold taxes down, reduce the government's claim on the social surplus, and avoid privilege.
This ideal society would also be honest. Such honesty would be enforced by law, but ideally, the law would not be needed. People would believe that honesty is right (also that it pays) and would live and act accordingly.
More corollaries: this society would be marked by geographical and social mobility. People would move about as they sought opportunity, and would rise and fall as they made something or nothing of themselves. This society would value new against old, youth as against experience, change and risk as against safety. It would not be a society of equal shares, because talents are not equal; but it would tend to a more even distribution of income than is found with privilege and favor. It would have a relatively large middle class. This greater equality would show in more homogeneous dress and easier manners across class lines.
No society on earth has ever matched this ideal. […]
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*The tenacity of superstition in an age of science and rationalism may surprise at first, bur insofar as it aims at controlling fate, it beats fatalism. It is a resort of the hapless and incapable in the pursuit of good fortune and the avoidance of bad; also a psychological support for the insecure. Hence persistent recourse to horoscopic readings and fortune telling, even in our day. […]
Sorry, I couldn't resist including the footnote - direct language and linguistic surgical strikes abound - go get it! (And incidentally, the concluding paragraphs are highly quotable as well.)
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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer Heartbreaking and funny about nine year old (or so) Oscar, a precocious Upper East Side boy trying to find a secret of his father (who died in the 9/11 attack), interwoven with the history of his grandfather and grandmother, who survived the Dresden bombings.
Inventive and funny - I don't normally like books that try to be creative with typography and pictures to tell a story, but it works here. And Oscar is a hoot, vaguely related to the protagonist in The curious incident with the dog in nighttime, with his idiosyncratic messages "José!" and convoluted, yet strangely logical thinking. My favorite sentence: "More people are live today than ever lived. That means that if they all wanted to play Hamlet at once, there wouldn't be enough skulls."
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You will see brass bands of varying quality, women (and not a few men) wearing folk costumes, even more children carrying flags (upright in the morning, dragging along the pavement after lunch), and, should you go into Oslo or any medium-sized town, an increasing number of drunks (some of them still in folkloristic garb) towards dusk. Suffice is to say that "May 18" and "hangover" are synonyms in Norwegian, whether it is for the usual reason, or for lack of sleep and overexposure to plastic trumpets and sour, underage marching bands.
One excellent aspect, though: The almost complete absence of militaristic chest-beating - partly for tradition, partly for lack of chest. May 17th is a children's celebration, by and large.
Enough of this, I need to, quite literally, hoist the flag. Man, it is early in the morning...
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The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami On the back of this edition, there is a quote from a New York Times review: "Critics have variously likened him to Raymond Carver, Raymond Chandler, Arthur C. Clarke, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Pynchon -- a roster so ill assorted as to suggest that Murakami may in fact be an original."
I had to laugh at that, for I wanted to add another writher - Gabriel Garcia Marques, the originator of magical realism. Like Marques, Murakami's stories are long and disjointed, with many characters, inhabiting a world where magic is present but never referred to. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is long and rambling, the main theme being a young suburbanite's search for his wife (where he is aided or opposed by many characters, each with their own reality - or lack of it - to deal with.)
Sometimes the stories feel underdeveloped, and there is little attempt at closure, which at times can feel rather cloying (though not as bad as, say, Peter Høeg.) The overarching theme, if any, is the fight between good and bad, between "defilers" and "defiled", which is most visible in some of the stories, told in letters and found computer files, about soldiers in the little-known war between Japan and the Soviet Union before and at the end of WWII.
The saving grace of this book is the language, which can only be described as "poetic", and the individual stories, of which some are brilliant (such as the story of a group of Japanese soldiers trying to kill zoo animals and botching the job). I thought some of the evil characters - the protagonist's brother-in-law politician, a Soviet camp commander, a creepy and threatening mafia enforcer - were underdeveloped. All the characters seem rather distanced from what is happening around them, which gives the novel a dream-like mode, as if they are all narrators seeing the world through a video camera while adding their own commentary and interpretation.
It works, and the narrative moves along sufficiently to make this an enjoyable read - but once, methinks, is enough.
]]>Hanno and I did these videos against a bluescreen, with little preparation - we basically met, outlined a structure with some keywords (displayed on the little computer on the table in front of us, decided broadly on who should say what, and dove right into it. Most of the videos were shot twice, and then the very capable Lars Holand picked the least bad clips, added the background and logos, and generated the files in .mp4 and .flv. The lack of scripting was intentional - we did not want the videos to be too formal and stultifying, though the format itself might be. We also wanted to be a bit formal, to make sure we got our main points across. The results is a bit stiff, there are a few repetitions (we intro each clip, to make them more embeddable), but given that these were created also to be understandable for students whose first language isn't English, I think it kind of works. And it was fun to do, and not too much work.
Anyway, the videos are there, free for all to use - and hopefully, our students will watch them carefully, and the result will be better case teaching, more learning, and an even more enjoyable experience teaching.
]]>In this video from TED2010, Stephen Wolfram lays out (and his language and presentation had developed considerably since Alpha was launched a year ago) where Alpha fits as an exploration of a computable universe, enabling the experimental marriage of the precision of mathematics with the messiness of the real world.
This video is both radical and incremental: Radical in its bold statement that a thought experiment such as computable universes (see Neal Stephenson's In the beginning was...the command line, specifically the last chapter, for an entertaining explanation) actually could be generated and investigated is as radical as anything Wolfram has ever proposed. The idea of democratization of programming, on the other hand, is as old as COBOL - and I don't think Alpha or Mathematica is going to provide it - though it might go some way, particularly if Alpha gains some market share and the idea of computing things in real time rather than accessing stored computations takes hold.
Anyway - see the video, enjoy the spark of ideas you get from it - and try out Wolfram Alpha. My best candidate for the "insert brief insightful summary research" button I always have been looking for on my keyboard.
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My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Loyd Loyd gradually becomes a war correspondent, seemingly more for financial reasons - and to have a proper reason to be where he was - than because of an interest in a career. He turns out to be good at it, yet maintains his distance, and his heroin addiction. In the end you are left with painfully memorable descriptions of individual and mass tragedies - and you still don't know much about the person doing the reporting.
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The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves by W. Brian Arthur Arthur sets out to articulate a theory of technology, and to a certain extend succeeds, at least in articulating the importance of technology and the layered, self-referencing and self-creating nature of its evolution.
The two main concepts I took away were the layered nature of technology, consisting of these three points:
Secondly, Arthur lays out, in four separate chapters, the four different ways technology evolves, as summarized on page 163 (my italics added):
There is no single mechanism, instead there are four more or less separate ones. Innovation consists in novel solutions being arrived at in standard engineering - the thousands of small advancements and fixes that cumulate to move practice forward. It consists in radically novel technologies being brought into being by the process of invention. It consists in these novel technologies developing by changing their internal parts or adding to them in the process of structural deepening. And it consists in whole bodies of technology emerging, building out over time, and creatively transforming the industries that encounter them. Each of these types of innovation is important. And each is perfectly tangible. Innovation is not something mysterious. Certainly it is not a matter of vaguely invoking something called "creativity." Innovation is simply the accomplishing of the tasks of the economy by other means."
I liked the book for its ambition, view of technology as something that evolves, and clear-headed way of thinking about and expressing a beginning grand theory. The concepts are intuitive and beguiling, but I did miss references to - and attempts to build on, or differentiate itself from - other valuable concepts of technology, such as sustaining vs. disruptive, competence-enhancing vs. competence-destroying, architectural vs. procedural, and so on. There is a lot of research going on in this area - we are about to break up the formerly black and mysterious box called innovation and show that it really comes down to subcategories and the interplay of quite understandable drivers. Arthur's contribution here is significant - but it is, at least the way I read it, the way of the independent thinker who would have a lot more influence if some of the language and some of the categories were a bit closer to, or at least distinctively positioned in relation to, what others think and say.
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Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen