Aug 21, 2011
IBM have announced the development of a cognitive computing chip. This new technology is designed to transcend the current limitations of supercomputers, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, more closely replicating complex brain function. For what, I don’t know.
I was surprised that the news created quite a stir in me until I reflected on my own simple being. After all, I am primitive psycho-neuro-physical mechanism given to emotional outbursts and flights of fancy, not the stuff that tomorrows IBMers will be made of, or personal computers for that matter.
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Aug 13, 2011
I have been tracking the recent London riots with some interest. Having spent the first half of my life in London, keeping up with the comings and goings there seems like the right thing to do.
Particularly under circumstances such as these, when old haunts are seen being blitzed again, I take leisurely strolls down memory lane preferring my own sentimental journey to the path of degradation which has led to the present day blighting of Blighty.
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Jul 23, 2011
Is the social web a thing of the past?
Like a good book you can’t put down, here is a tube in the same category: Elevation Partners Director and Co-Founder Roger McNamee presenting at The Paley Center For Media.
Roger McNamee shares a number of compelling arguments that invite us to think about the social web not in terms of where we think we are, but in terms of where irresistible change is taking us.
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Jul 13, 2011
Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts. Every waking moment—and even in our dreams—we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion, and cognition toward states of consciousness that we value.
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Jul 10, 2011
The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is the idea that all possible alternate histories of the universe actually exist. At every point in time, the universe splits into a multitude of existences in which every possible outcome of each quantum process actually happens.
So in this universe you are sitting in front of your computer reading this story, in another you are reading a different story, in yet another you are about to be run over by a truck. In many, you don’t exist at all.
This implies that there are an infinite number of universes, or at least a very large number of them.
That’s weird but it is a small price to pay, say quantum physicists, for the sanity the many worlds interpretation brings to the otherwise crazy notion of quantum mechanics. The reason many physicists love the many worlds idea is that it explains away all the strange paradoxes of quantum mechanics.
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Jun 2, 2011
The Future of the Social Web
Jeremiah Owyang posits on the development for the future of the social web…
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May 19, 2011
A situation in which abundant unused reserves of all kinds of resources (including all intermediate products) exist may occasionally prevail in the depths of a depression. But it is certainly not a normal position on which a theory claiming general applicability could be based.
Yet it is some such world as this which is treated in Mr. Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, which in recent years has created so much stir and confusion among economists and even the wider public. Although the technocrats, and other believers in the unbounded productive capacity of our economic system, do not yet appear to have realized it, what he has given us is really that economics of abundance for which they have been clamoring so long.
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Feb 27, 2011
Two years ago, I found myself taking a crash course on influence, advocacy and online behavior. We had taken in a family in need and leveraged the web, specifically Twitter, Paypal, a blog, and most importantly, our real social network, to raise nearly seventeen thousand dollars for the family.The velocity of the effort — nearly twelve thousand dollars was raised in less than twenty four hours — was amazing and made me realize that the old model of a few people controlling information and distribution is giving way to a new, highly distributed, individually empowering system that leverages social media. In this case, I had enough influence and trust with my core network to create a ripple effect that spread to other networks, which were transformed into advocates for the family. This is the new, emerging model of influence.
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