Author: JP

Five-a-day mental habits

Andy Gibson of School Of Everything (disclosure: I’m an investor and board member) pinged me via this post. I was asked to list five things I do to keep myself mentally well (which I do below), to link to the Mindapples site (which I just did) and to invite, publicly,  five others to do the same (which I will do at the end of this post).

1. I go for a 30 min walk daily, varying my route as much as possible. Before I set off, I try and gauge how many steps I will need to reach my destination. This involves visualising the route, breaking it down into estimable chunks and then rounding it off. Then I try and keep count of the steps while thinking about other things. At the end of the walk I learn something about my estimation capacity, as also my ability to do foreground and background tasks in parallel.

2. Every night I will read for at least two hours, online and offline. Often it is more, but the minimum is two hours. At any given time I tend to be reading a number of books, sometimes as much as ten. Some I would I have just started, some would be nearing their finish. When I read at night, I try and switch between books a couple of times, just to learn about keeping switching costs low.

3. In the morning, on my way to work, I write down the things I want to get done regardless of other calls on my time. Then at the end of the day I look at the list, see how I’ve done and then throw it away. I never look at the list in between. The idea is to establish priorities very clearly in my head, priorities that will stand against the vagaries of the day. I have always been bemused by how people tell me about the importance of fixed and variable costs and keeping them in balance, and then they proceed to fill their day up weeks in advance. Don’t understand. So I keep a lot of white space in my day, the challenge is to make sure that I get the fixed things done while adapting to what comes in. And that’s all in the mind.

4. Before I go to sleep I spend a little time counting Fibonacci sheep. This is where the sheep go 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21…… or a variant. The idea is to set a goal, to reach a term between 20 and 30. I like the way it stretches me, to remember something while throwing something out. To make sure I don’t land up memorising the answers, I change term 1 and make it 4 or 97 or something like that.

5. Throughout the day, intermittently, I give myself tasks of things to recall and then promptly change tack, move to something else. The idea is to get my brain to have some sort of offline agent, doing information retrieval work for me while I do something else. When I was young, I regularly experienced the weird feeling of trying to recall something, failing to recall it quickly, and then finding it came back to me much later, when I wasn’t trying. Now I try and train that facility, asking my brain to do something for later delivery.

Weird stuff? Told you I was confused. Let me know what you think. In the meantime, I’m going to tag Kevin Marks, Kathy Sierra, David Weinberger, Steven Johnson and Clay Shirky. And use Twitter to let them know I tagged them. How else would you do it?

BTW, if any of you want to get in touch with me, I tweet as @jobsworth.

Musing about Twitter and crises and participation

For many people, the recent and tragic Mumbai terrorist attacks had one unintended consequence: the coming of age of Twitter. As the FT put it, Twitter Turns Serious With Messages of Life and Death.

There’s a lot of good coverage out there in the blogosphere: Dan Gillmor, who first got me interested in the concept of “citizen media” sometime in 2002, makes two critical points about the difference between social media and MSM in his post Wikipedia as Vital Breaking News Source: one, the significantly higher frequency of updates in social media and two, the incredible richness of context provided via the the technique of linking. I guess Dan is the doyen of citizen media, he now runs the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Incidentally, if you’re interested in the space where social media touches journalism, you could learn a lot just by visiting Dan’s Center For Citizen Media blog. His blogroll, headlined Citizen Media Types, is an excellent place to extend your knowledge; I read many of those people regularly.

One of them is Amy Gahran, who touches on a very important subject, responsible tweeting, in her blog Contentious.com. Rumours. You should read her piece “Tracking a Rumour: Indian Government, Twitter and Common Sense”. She also links to Mayank Dhingra’s Social Media: Handle With Care piece, also worth reading. What they have to say reinforces Journalism 101 tenets: the criticality of source verification; the importance of objectivity; avoidance of hatred-inducing subjects; the need for brevity.

Mindy McAdams, in her blog Teaching Online Journalism, covers some useful topics in Twitter, Mumbai and 10 facts about Journalism Now. Of particular importance is the role of the mobile phone, specifically the class of device that can cover both cellular as well as wireless. Her latest post, Breaking News Online: A short History and Timeline, is also worth reading, as is the Are These The Biggest Moments in Journalism-Blogging History post from the Online Journalism blog which she refers to.

Dina Mehta has been covering the events from an ethnographer’s perspective, combining her sociology and anthropology disciplines, and is well worth reading as well, both on Twitter as well as in the blogosphere. Whatever information I received first hand, I tended to filter it through the lens of reading Dina’s tweets. It helped.

We’ve also seen a bunch of tools get refined and improved during the Mumbai crisis: examples are:  Tweet Grid (which I found incredibly useful, the ability to receive topic-specific Twitter update feeds); Cover It Live also got some traction over the last few days. Even Blog Talk Radio, something I really like, got in on the act with SAJA HQ.

I’ve been through a few crises in my time, with different scales and personal impacts. What I’ve noticed is the following:

  • Crises attract rubberneckers, people who come along to watch, people who want to know what’s going on. Crowds form.
  • Because of this, crises attract extremists of various hues and styles. Politicians are the most common, nationalists and fundamentalists are not far behind. Sometimes all three merge into one person, a truly ugly phenomenon.
  • Rumour dominates. There’s a lot of Chinese Whispering going on, as the crowds grow and the extremists exploit.
  • All this comes in the way of three groups of people desperately trying to do their jobs: the security services, the emergency services and the media.

And in the midst of all this we have the people really involved, the victims of the crisis. Fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. Human beings.

The stories are about them. Not about politics or nationalism or fundamentalism. Not about tools and techniques.

And that’s why the use of social media in crisis management intrigues me, excites me. We’re able to join hands and actually do things for the people involved, leaving aside the three-ring circus going on.

What kind of things? Here’s a list of some of the things I witnessed in Twitter these past days:

  • People used Twitter to find other people, loved ones, relatives, friends, acquaintances. They provided status updates to others who needed that information. Person to person communications. Hospital lists. Sadly, even lists of those that perished. A classic crowdsource-able activity, reducing the workload on emergency services personnel. Most of the time, the tool used was a mobile phone with a camera.
  • People used Twitter to raise awareness of the need for resources. Blood. Food. Money. Shelter.
  • Twitter became a go-to-place for important telephone numbers, particularly for overseas contact numbers.
  • Twitter also performed one other critical function: the democratic nature of the beast meant that the voices of extremists and rumour-mongerers was drowned out.

The two-way participative nature of social media, coupled with the always-on affordable ubiquity of the tools used, changes the game. This is not about news and journalism. It’s about participation. Someone in Buenos Aires or Budapest or Birmingham or Butte can actually help someone in Mumbai, by carrying out searches, quashing rumours, pointing to information sources, helping put people in touch with each other.

Sometimes I think about all this as a giant virtual switchboard manned by volunteers, willing and able to help. We should be thinking about how we can improve all this. How we can set up this virtual switchboard effectively. How we can help quash rumours. How we can take the load off the security and emergency services people.

How we can best help the people most affected. Using a variety of tools at our disposal. Including my favourite one: prayer.

incidentally, if you’re interested in following my tweets, I’m known there as @jobsworth or

http://twitter.com/jobsworth

When capillaries become arteries

It takes a tragedy to bring other messages home. My thoughts and prayers are with those who lost their loved ones in Mumbai, as also those whose family or friends were injured.

This is what the news looks like on Twitter, using Tweet Grid:

Hundreds, possibly thousands, of reporters. Many tweeting live. Many with original material. Many retweeting (RT-ing) others’ tweets, passing the news on at incredible speed. Sharing news of loved ones’ safety. Broadcasting contact numbers, cries for help, requests for resources ranging from contact information to blood. All at a speed that nothing else can match.

This, as Allen Searls once described it, is the World Live Web. A writable web.

As opposed to this:

It’s barely changed in the last hour or so. It’s glacial in comparison with the antlike fury of twitter. BTW, while writing this post, which took me a few minutes, there have been 339 updates to twitter related to #mumbai.

This site is an example of how the blogosphere responds to such a crisis:

You can see what it looks like now here. The speed of response of the tools we now have is quite amazing.

Christmas comes early

I was delighted to learn that Processing 1.0 shipped last night. What is it? To quote from their web site:

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

Processing is free to download and available for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Please help to release the next version!

Processing is an open project initiated by Ben Fry and Casey Reas. It evolved from ideas explored in the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab.

I first came across Processing about a year ago, and was quite excited about it given the price points of the software it was displacing. We need more tools like this, tools solving generic problems efficiently, elegantly and effortlessly. The only way we’re going to have more tools like this is if we as a community adopt them, adapt them, support them, enrich them. To get an idea of what can be done with Processing, take a look here: www.openprocessing.org.

Radiohead and REM have used Processing to create some of the animation they’ve used in their videos; mags like SEED and Nature have used the suite to create info graphics; Nike and Budweiser commercials have featured Processing output; hundreds of schools across the US use the software in a variety of ways. So go ahead, have some fun with it, learn to use it, contribute to it.

I’m looking forward to playing with the tools over the Christmas break, there is so much I can learn from this.

And, keeping the Christmas theme intact, here’s a still from Galactic Christmas:

Of strange women and grandfather clocks

I do strange things sometimes. I guess you know that by now. This evening, for example. My eldest daughter’s out at a church meeting; my son’s listening to the music I listened to when I was his age; my youngest is asleep, having done her homework; and my wife’s settled down to watch something she recorded, something I wasn’t particularly interested in. It happens sometimes; we’ve been married over 24 years, long enough to be able to enjoy companionable silences. It’s a good feeling.

I felt whimsical, wanting to do something different, something that I hadn’t done for a while. So, for the last half an hour or so, I’ve been reading the poems of Ogden Nash.

He’s one of my favourite poets, I have everything he’s ever written, I even have a book signed by him. There I was, quietly reading, and I realised that a reasonable proportion of my readers may not have had the sheer joy of being exposed to Ogden Nashery. Which brings me to how I got started with Mr Nash.

I must have been twelve or so. I was visiting some of my neighbours, the Merchants; I think his initials were TB; they lived three floors down from me, in flat 4, opposite what was to become the Kapoors’ flat. The Merchants had the most wonderful collection of Scarlet Pimpernel and Saint and E Phillips Oppenheim books, (in hardback, with the original jackets, mostly in yellow, I think they were published by Hodder), and a pretty good set of early PG Wodehouses as well. TB, a delightfully friendly man, had invited me to come over and borrow whatever I wanted, he’d seen me wandering around looking somewhat bored. So I did, and when let into his Aladdin’s cave, couldn’t help but scan all the titles of all the books they had, a habit I have had to really work on. And stuck there, in the middle of everything else, was this book. The Golden Trashery of Ogden Nashery. Which was really a book called The Face is Familiar, but lovingly rebound by hand.

Now I’d been brought up in a house with many books, brought up on a rich diet of reading. I’d read enough by then to understand and appreciate not just good writing, but more specifically writers who created words as they went along, neologists without borders. Shakespeare was probably the most prolific I’d come across by then in that respect. I’d done my time with Carroll and Lear and Wodehouse as well, so I was aware of what could be done in comic poetry.

But nothing, nothing really prepared me for what was to come from Nash. He had no rules, he thought it was nawmill to make normal rhyme with sawmill. He had that glint in his eye, the spark that let him describe a lift as “ris[ing] with groans and sighs, like a duchess for the waltz“. Word endings were but grist to his mill, tortured and mutated beyond belief, as sniffle was cheerfully paired with chiffle, and snuffle was awfully paired with uffle.

Only Nash could make SHRDLU QWERTYOP into a question, and then answer it with Why SHRDNTLU QWERTYOP?

I have many favourite Nash poems, both short and long. Here are a few short ones:

Looking at those poems, you may get the impression that Nash was always comical, always on the threshold of genius and madness. That’s not really true. I remember being very moved by this poem when I was about 15:

My thanks to the copyright-holders, Linell Nash Smith and Isabel Nash Eberstadt. Their ancestor gave me untold uncountable hours of pleasure, and continues to do so. In a world where so much is grey and normal and uniform, Ogden Nash stood out. Thank you Ogden Nash.

By the way, there is an excellent Nash blog. It is only fitting that it should be called Blogden Nash.

So go on, make someone’s day. Introduce them to Ogden Nash. And pardon me while I pass my declining years saluting strange women and grandfather clocks.