Author: JP

Regular readers will know that I have a thing about education, and that my dream is to build a school from scratch as and when I have no role to play in traditional enterprise. A school that makes use of social software and Moore and Metcalfe and Gilder; that knows how to create value from “globalisation and disintermediation and the internet” (as Ken Ohmae said a few decades ago in The Borderless World); that works like an efficient charity, with 95% of the income being used for the purpose it was designed for (to teach and to learn) rather than “administration and management”.

I have been extremely impressed with what I have heard and seen about ARK, a meta-charity that treats all the funds it generates as investments with a measured social return and low administrative costs; I believe that something similar can be done in education. A model where we treat school funds as investments with a clearly defined social return (you can call it educational return if you wish) and have a clear basis for keeping administrative costs appreciably low. But I digress.

One of the reasons I have such a passion for education (I have many reasons, but this time I am concentrating on just one) is an out-and-out belief in nurture being more important than nature. I am not a fan of The Bell Curve or related works and ideas.

You can imagine my delight when I chanced across this article in the August issue of Scientific American. [And thank you, Scientific American, for not hiding it behind a DRM wall. And thank you for bothering to ask me, via a simple survey, whether I was a subscriber or not when I looked at it, and if so what I subscribed to. Do share your results when you have them, if only to prove that subscriber recommendations are an incredible marketing process, particularly when unhampered by DRM walls].

The article, headlined The Expert Mind and subtitled Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well, is well worth a read. It goes through why chess could be “the Drosophila of cognitive science” in terms of measurement, synthesis, scope for laboratory experimentation and repeatibility, ease of observation in natural environment, many things. I’m personally also very keen on the fact that it is cognitive and as language- and culture-independent as possible; there’s a lot of good stuff in it that relate to apperception and Gladwellian Blink, on stored-and-recallable knowledge rather than pure analytical power, even on memory and chunking theory.

There’s also some solid backing to the Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration argument, to the importance of perseverance, to the importance of an early and strong motivation.

But what did it for me was the coda to the article. I quote:

Instead of perpetually pondering the question “Why can’t Johnny read?” perhaps educators should ask “Why should there be anything in the world he can’t learn to do”.

For educator read manager or mentor or whoever. This is not just about schools. But it is about education.

Nurture.

OK, I’m going out on a limb here, but I’m passionate about cricket and therefore feel I must say what I feel.

I’m appalled at the playing of the race card in recent discussions and debates about the last England-Pakistan Test.

• Umpires can and do make bad decisions. They’re human, and often have to make the calls without any technological aid.
• Players can and do make bad decisions. They’re human, and sometimes their gamesmanship overwhelms their sporting instincts.

That’s cricket.

One of the finest things I can ever see in sport is to watch a batsman walk before an umpire gives him out, because he knows he’s out. I have seen this a number of times in Test cricket and every time I see it, my heart fills with glee.

Cricket is essentially a gentleman’s game, one of the last few remaining, and we must do whatever we can to retain that.

Sport and politics make unnatural bedfellows.

Darrell Hair had a right to do what he did. At worst he can be accused of a lack of courtesy, in not warning the Pakistan captain prior to taking his decision. This may have defused the situation. But it does not make Darrell Hair wrong, or a racist.
Inzaman had a right to do what he did. Just because we’ve never had a case of a Test Match being forfeited, we cannot criticise him for his action. [An aside: Have we had a batsman “timed out” in a Test Match yet? I can’t remember an occasion. Must check]. At worst he can be accused of a lack of care about the history and ethos of the game, given that it hasn’t happened before. This does not make Inzamam a bad cricketer all of a sudden.
We all learn from challenges to rules; sometimes the challenges are saddening, but the world learns from them. We learnt from the Bodyline tour;  the D’Oliviera incident; the Kerry Packer breakaways; the Ewan Chatfield incident; the Gatting-In-Your-Face-Shakoor-Rana sessions; and we will learn from this one as well. Rules for games like cricket are their own form of complex adaptive system, and will evolve. They will improve.

But not by making this a race incident. I support both the English and Indian cricket teams, watching them whenever and wherever I can. [Before you ask, just like the Scot at Twickenham, when it comes to India versus England, I fail the Tebbit Test gloriously].

I have been known to “watch” cricket on teletext, when a match is not transmitted live via radio or television. I love cricket. And I have felt hard done by as a spectator when umpiring decisions went against the team I supported. Darrell Hair was himself responsible for some of them, particularly in an Australia-India series some years ago. But on balance Mr Hair has been an exemplary umpire, even if I haven’t always agreed with his decisions, especially with my benefits of replays and comments and hindsight, and even some supporter bias.
But I never thought he called it wrong because of race.
Let’s keep it that way.

Just a thought.

Why is it that the spam I get is usually about sex (porn sites and performance enhancers), drugs (performance enhancers and weight loss) rock & roll (ringtones and downloads) and money (every get-rich-quick scheme possible, along with a few that defy belief)? 99% of the stuff that Akismet blocks for me (thank you Akismet) falls neatly into one of these categories. Is this true for everyone else out there? I’m waiting to see what emergent category comes along to break up this long-standing quartet.

I hear you say “Enough already!” to the A-list-blogger-as-gatekeeper debate; so no more on the subject.

What I’d like to do instead is open up debate on a question that kept bugging me throughout that debate:
If we believe in a Long Tail World, then why do we insist on looking at that Long Tail World through the eyes of a Hit Culture?

Discussions about ranking are in some form or shape related to a Hit Culture. Ever since search engines have been available, I have seen papers suggesting that Big-Gets-Bigger or Rich-Get-Richer. If you’re popular, then you get to the top of the rankings, which makes you even more popular. And so on and so forth.
That was the received wisdom. But something about it didn’t make sense to me. Soon after reading Cluetrain in 2000, I’d had the pleasure of meeting Chris Locke in Bangalore and again in London, and he was talking about communities that did “left-handed organic gardening” as being an intrinsic part of web communities and of the nascent blogosphere.
Around the same time, I started following Amy Jo Kim’s work on web communities, directly as a consequence of reading her book, Community Building On The Web. And she in turn influenced a lot of my thinking about how web communities work; I was particularly intrigued by her discussions on how subgroups emerge and why they should be encouraged to emerge. I quote from her site:

• If your goal is to build a robust, large-scale community, then fostering member-run subgroups should be an integral part of your community strategy. Whether they’re set up by the community staff, or created by the members themselves, these small groups are where people will form their deepest relationships and strongest loyalties. That’s why it’s crucial to understand how these groups evolve, and make sure that you cultivate a fertile environment within which they can take root and grow.

I took these member-created subgroups to be the same thing as Chris’s Organic Gardening sites; micromarkets with microconversations involving people who had a very specific narrow-focus interest binding them together.
By this time, I’d already become a fan of Steven Johnson’s after reading Interface Culture in 1997, so by the time Emergence came out, aided and abetted by Lazslo-Barabasi’s Linked and Bloom’s Global Brain (both, incidentally, referred to me by Gary Casey!), I was getting very comfortable with the idea that lots of little and specific and healthy markets were where the action was, and that all this represented the disaggregation of the Hit Culture.

You can see that I was ready for The Long Tail, especially since I’d also been exposed to power laws and Zipf curves a few decades earlier while at university.

Yet I kept seeing Hit Culture attitudes, particularly to do with search engines and ranking, and more recently in the A-list gatekeeper discussions. This intrigued me, and continues to intrigue me. [Which is why I do apparently strange things like look at Youtube’s Most Linked, Most Viewed, Most Discussed and Top Rated All-Time video lists, to see what’s happening. And for sure I see Long Tail and not Hit Culture.]

Bearing all this in mind, I was fascinated by an article in the New Scientist. Headlined Internet Search Engines Go on Trial, what was of particular interest to me was a study it cited, done by researchers at Indiana University. You can access elements of the study here.

I quote from the excerpt to the study, titled Topical Interests And The Mitigation Of Search Engine Bias:

Search engines have become key media for our scientific, economic, and social activities by enabling people to access information on the web despite its size and complexity. On the down side, search engines bias the traffic of users according to their page ranking strategies, and it has been argued that they create a vicious cycle that amplifies the dominance of established and already popular sites. This bias could lead to a dangerous monopoly of information. We show that, contrary to intuition, empirical data do not support this conclusion; popular sites receive far less traffic than predicted. We discuss a model that accurately predicts traffic data patterns by taking into consideration the topical interests of users and their searching behavior in addition to the way search engines rank pages. The heterogeneity of user interests explains the observed mitigation of search engines’ popularity bias.

Surprisingly, I could not sign up to a full subscription to PNAS online, there is a forced offline step and associated time delay. [Which gives me time to figure out whether I already have access as a result of some other academic/professional body.] So I cannot claim to have read the entire article. But I will, soon.

I am truly fascinated by this, because it allows me to get rid of one of those things that made me Confused.

And I genuinely believe that is how the blogosphere tends to work. Not hits, not ranking-linking-vicious-circles, but heterogeneous long-tail interested communities. Comments welcome.

A recent post of mine on group selection elicited a number of responses; some pointed me to the Beinhocker book, for which I’m immensely grateful. Others questioned the mere possibility of group selection making sense, challenging me on a number of fronts, ranging from the relationship (or more accurately the risk) of using biological evolution discussions in a social or economic context all the way through to discussions on Darwin and, more appropriate, Dawkins.

Exemplifying the serendipity that all such debates have, I found myself at the Darwin exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York a few days later, and had a great time there. Do see it if you get the chance. While I was there, I learnt that the single biggest event that influenced Darwin to write his theories on evolution was reading Malthus on population. A harbinger of consilience?

I quote from their web site, which summarises aspects of the exhibition:

• Darwin always read widely, on the lookout for new ideas. In late September 1838 he found himself reading—”for amusement,” he later recalled—the “Essay on Population” by political economist Reverend Thomas Malthus. In this essay, Malthus argued that human population could quickly outstrip the food supply: competition for food or space was a constant force keeping population in check.
• Darwin immediately saw how the idea could be applied to the natural world. More animals were born than could survive.

A harbinger of consilience?

Then, catching up on my reading after returning from vacation, I found this article in the New Scientist, sadly behind a DRM wall. Headlined The Selfish Gene That Learned To Cooperate, it deals with a gene called regA that helps certain unicellular algae survive in hostile environments, and at the same time helps cells in a related multicellular alga cooperate. Read what Kurt Kleiner has to say in the article, it’s worth it.

I quote from his article “At some point, a mutation seems to have occurred which turned the selfish gene into a cooperative one, and made it possible for V. carteri to develop specialised cells.” He also quotes a biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Gene Robinson says this : “The evolutionary roots of altruism have been functionally traced from a solitary species to a more social species”.

I think a lot of emergent and swarm behaviours have some element of altruism at their heart, or at the very least a communal rather than a purely selfish will to survive and thrive. But I claim to be no expert on this, just an interested amateur. Much of what I’d read in the Emotional Intelligence space also suggested similar ideas to me, so the Group Selection theory is probably deeper in me than I realised.