Author: JP

….because sometimes they do matter.

I’ve been fascinated by what people share, when they share it and how they share it for some time now. And for even longer, I’ve been thinking about why we share what we share. [Those of you who’re interested may want to read some of my earlier posts. Why We Share: A sideways look at privacy and Musing About Sharing And Privacy are two that come immediately to mind.

Take this post. The trigger for my writing it was StumbleUpon (I’m a fan!), who wrote to me saying they thought I’d like a particular set of sites. One of which I loved. Because it contained illustrations like the two below:

 

You guessed it. Someone has spent time taking the world map and reassembling it in order to depict the twelve signs of the Chinese Zodiac. He’s a graphic artist called Kentaro Nagai, you can see the entire work, entitled Twelve Animals: Piece Together for Peace, here.

I loved it. And thought I should share it with you. Because somewhere out there there may be one person whose day becomes brighter by reading this. Because somewhere out there there may be one person inspired to do something about something as a result.

That’s what matters. We’re human beings, social animals who look to each other for friendship, support, camaraderie, motivation, inspiration, whatever.

When I started writing blogs I had some very deep-seated views about what I shared, when and why. When I started on Facebook I had some similarly deep-seated views about the whys and wherefores. By the time I started using Twitter around five years ago, I’d figured out how little I knew about all this, my views were no longer as well-formed or as deep-seated as when I began.

Take Twitter. When I started tweeting, I said to myself “Share only when you have a clear idea how it would be valuable to someone. Even if occasionally that someone is you.” As I learnt more about the phenomenon, those views changed.

Now, I tell myself, “Share as long as you know it will not cause someone else harm”. It was arrogant of me to presume I would know how something would be valuable to someone else, and to filter everything else out.  I realised that the “do no harm” filter was a better one to use. Is it perfect? Certainly not. I rely on your feedback to tell me when I do harm. I will make mistakes. But this way it is more likely that through the organic process of people reading posts like this one, someone somewhere who needed to read this gets to read this.

Life is about abundances and scarcities. For most of my life I’ve seen stuff like bad news and negativity and criticism and cynicism regularly in abundance, and things like good news and encouragement and building people up and saying well done and smiling and making someone happy, all in scarcity.

For some reason, it appeared that what we term as mainstream media tended to focus on the negative, apparently because it “sells”. I can never figure out why. Time we inverted that. And maybe it’s happening.

I find social media in general much more upbeat, more focused on the positive, more willing to thank, to encourage, to support, to enthuse, to motivate. I don’t have a rose-coloured spectacle view of the web, about social networks or about social media: I am acutely aware of how dark a place it can be, how evil cyberbullying can be, how truth can be twisted, how people can subvert the web to nefarious purpose.

But still, overall, I find the web to be an uplifting place where people can and do support each other. It’s something they put in the water. And it’s one of the reasons I share what I share.

Why do you share what you share? Let me know, I’m interested. Fascinated.

I love being human. And I love human beings.

I’m constantly amazed by human ingenuity. How our brains appear to work. How we construct mental models of things. How we observe, imitate, learn. How we repeat that cycle to augment learning. How, once we learn something, we show the capability to extend that learning in new ways. How we share what we do, how we use feedback loops from the people around us to adjust, to improve, to refine.

To learn.

I read somewhere that human children spend the most dependent on their parents and guardians, when compared to the offspring of other creatures. Dependent for food, for clothing, for shelter, even for mobility. Apparently we do this for a reason. To observe; to imitate where possible; to build mental models.

To learn.

Watching. Copying. Trying it out. Failing. Trying it out again. And again.

Learning.

• Learning takes place when you’re given the opportunity to observe how something “works”.
• Learning takes place when you’re given access to the raw materials used to “make” something.
• Learning takes place when you’re given the tools to mix those raw materials up in ways no one else has done before.
• Learning takes place when you’re given the opportunity to share that output with others, and to receive feedback from them.
• Learning takes place by watching, copying, making, sharing, listening, changing, watching, copying….

I spend a lot of time thinking about food. Planning meals. Getting the ingredients. Cooking the meals. Eating. Sharing what I’ve cooked, literally as well as figuratively. Listening to feedback. Adjusting, refining, sometimes even abandoning it altogether, starting again from scratch.

Cooking is one of the ways I learn. I watch programmes (usually on YouTube or similar); read recipes (usually online, like when I want to make dobin mushi); root around for special ingredients (usually online, like when I want to find out where to obtain good matsutake); cook and share that process, using tools like Instagram and epicurious.

All this is possible because generations of human beings have shared what they have observed and learned. I’ve been able to learn from them, to observe how something is done, to try it out, to hear from others how well I’m doing, to adjust and learn.

All this is possible because I have access to the raw materials, the tools, the market, feedback loops.

Last week I was reading about a few modern cooking “inventions”. Someone who really liked the taste, texture, look and feel of chocolate brownies that came from the edge of the pan designed a pan that made only brownies with edges:

Someone else liked their cereal crunchy, and didn’t like what happened when you added milk to a bowl of cereal: only the first few spoonsful were crunchy, the rest ran to sog. So they invented this:

Which was designed to do this:

 

 

Human beings have been doing this forever. I like growing a beard every now and then, and wish I had easy access to something like this: a moustache-cup for drinking:

It’s not just about food either. There’s always someone coming up with a new way of doing something, or new things that help you do something. Take a look at this:

There have been few barriers to cooking, other than the natural laws of demand and supply. Of course people have tried to subvert that law in the usual ways: creating monopolies, controlling supply by hoarding, cartelising prices, that sort of thing. But by and large the world of cooking has been open to innovation. And our lives have been enriched as a result.

This hasn’t been true in the world of manufacturing: access to raw materials, designs, tools to manufacture, has been somewhat less than democratic. But that’s changing, with opensource hardware and software and patterns and specifications. Multipurpose materials like this will soon be freely available:

 

The freedom to model something physical will soon be connected with the freedom to make copies of that something, which is what 3D printers are about:

The raw materials will improve in their versatility and durability; prices will drop; access will become universal. The same will happen to 3D printers. We’re heading for a time when you can “fax” over a physical object from one place to another, even an object you designed for the first time. Especially objects you designed for the first time.

This is not just about stuff for gadget freaks and people who like messing about in labs. Human beings make things for one of four reasons:

• to learn
• to enjoy
• to solve a problem
• because they can

So this sort of invention and innovation takes place everywhere, at work and at home, in the West and in the East. Let’s look at what’s happening at work. Most of you know I work at Salesforce.com. Here’s an example of what can be done when human beings have access to open platforms and tools and data:

A couple of salesforce.com engineers, frustrated with the times when printers are out of paper, or when paper stocks run out, built a simple tool, using open components, to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. Others in the company used the same tools to try and solve problems to do with green buildings and energy consumption:

These are just two examples of what incredible things can be done when human beings have access to the right materials and tools.

This ingenuity is seen in the physical world, in the design and manufacture of objects. It is seen in the world where physical and digital integrate, as in the “internet of things”.

And of course it is seen in the digital world, where the internet is the ultimate copy machine.

Give people the raw material of open data. Give them the tools of the internet. And hey presto you have “inventions” like this:

Someone thought it would be good if you could find out when your garbage was to be collected. And so they did something about it. Someone else thought it would be good to build tools for handling open data:

It’s not just about solving problems and reducing human latency or saving energy or being efficient. It’s not just about the sustenance and pleasure of preparing, cooking and consuming food. It’s deeper than that, this streak of ingenuity is in all parts of our human culture.

Watch this video: A MIDI fretboard on an iPhone.

 

Humans have been observing, imitating, sharing, learning, refining and making stuff forever. Cooking. Making. Creating. Thinking.

Without Shakespeare sharing Romeo and Juliet with us, there would be no West Side Story. Without Shaw sharing Pygmalion with us, there would be no My Fair Lady. Without Joyce Kilmer sharing Trees with us, we wouldn’t have been able to enjoy Ogden Nash‘s parody,  The Song Of The Open Road:

Without the internet, without the Web, without Wikipedia, without Google, I would not have been able to write this post.

Without YouTube I would not have been able to share the ingenuity of some of my colleagues.

Without Tim O’Reilly’s gigaOm interview on why he’s fighting SOPA, I would not have been catalysed into writing this post.

The intellectual property rights environment needs fixing for sure. But SOPA and PIPA are not the solution.

Human ingenuity is a precious thing. We need that ingenuity to solve the problems we face, problems that cannot be solved by the paradigms that created them. We need that ingenuity to be unleashed to observe what’s happening without censorship. We need that ingenuity to have access to the data and the tools related to the problems; we need that ingenuity to be able to share the learning, to learn, to adjust, to learn again.

We need this in all walks of life, in the office and at home, in private and in public, at work and at play, alone and together.

We need this to move us forward in education, in healthcare, in government. We need this to solve problems with climate change, disease control, nutrition, poverty.

We need this in our art and in our culture.

We need this.

 

 

 

 

Thanks for all your comments and tweets re my earlier post. Some of you solved the “unGoogleAble” question. Others commented on what they’d been doing with the Prime Numbers in Arithmetical Progression question. And a number of you engaged in conversation with me across a variety of platforms. It helps me think. And learn. For which I’m grateful. I hope it’s been of some use to some of you. I want to touch upon a few of the answers and comments, to see if that helps me articulate where I was going more effectively.

 

First, Nicole Simon’s question. Why would an UnGoogleAble cricket question teach her anything? And if it didn’t, was she a bad student as a result? Or was I a bad teacher? I promised to get back to Nicole when wrapping up this stage of the conversation. I was trying to establish a framework for constructing a decent question in our post-Google world, and suggesting three things:

• it shouldn’t be easy to find via Google
• it should teach the answerer something
• it should be fun

To explain this, I chose two exemplar areas, cricket statistics and prime numbers, each esoteric in its own way, each valuable only to the passionate amateur, particularly one already interested in the mysteries of cricket or primes. For my sins I am a member of both those sets. There was another reason I chose those particular areas. In both cases there was a lot of data on the web, available to the public while remaining not easily GoogleAble. “Open” data. I wanted to find a way of demonstrating what could happen when open data meets the curiosity of the passionate amateur. The cricket question would have been pretty much impossible without access to the data; the prime numbers in series question would have continued its regal and exclusive status of being made available only to those students talented enough to participate in mathematical “olympiads”. Open data has a wonderful democratising effect, accentuating and embellishing the level-playing-fieldness of the internet. Combined with passion and perseverance and patience, the possibilities are boundless, as human beings unleash their creativity in using the tools of the age to work on freely accessible data to test conjectures, solve problems, build new products and services. So Nicole, my answer to you is that I failed. I could not get good enough examples, generic enough examples, to make the post work by itself.  I needed the previous post to try and catalyse some of the examples via the comments and answers given, as you will see. I hope as a result you can take something of value away from this post.

 

Which then brings me to my second point, the comments/answers given by Obiwan Kenobi and Daen de Leon; Obiwan gave me the perfect example of someone who took my question and then worked the example out in detail, and then proceeded to share the workings with everyone else. The answer was not important. It was the sharing of how he got there, which you can see in his comment. He created a query on Cricinfo Statsguru that required no programming knowledge, just an ability to select filters and sort criteria and views; he then proceeded to copy-paste the output to his tool of choice, then came up with the answer. I’m not quite sure why he needed the copy-paste step, all I did was to inspect the same query output, the same 206 lines over 2 pages, looking for duplicates in the right-hand-most column, managing to avoid a couple of red herrings along the way. Obiwan’s example is useful in helping set out what is needed for open data to be valuable. One, people need to know what’s out there: Obiwan knew of the existence of Cricinfo Statsguru, and we may soon need specialised open data directories. [Yes, someone can write an “app” for that, but please please in HTML5 rather than as a captive device app!]. Two, people need simple tools to manipulate that data, and the ability to learn how to use those tools: Obiwan knew how to use the filters in the Statsguru query builder. And three, Obiwan needed the stimulus of my question to be bothered to do it in the first place: new classes of teacher will emerge to provide such access, training, stimulus. While Daen didn’t give us a blow-by-blow account of how he solved the prime number problem, he did two important things: one, he shared a big clue, that he could work out the constant interval using just the limit and the number of terms. That in turn would allow other readers to consider the role of the interval in the answer, while still allowing for some personal discovery as to how to use that information. But the most important thing that Daen did was to share something else   …. “I’m proud to say I figured out the interval….”.

 

Daen was doing something really important there, sharing with us the joy he felt when he discovered why something must be true. That’s my third point. The joy of discovery as part of the road to mastery. Kathy Sierra, one of the earliest commenters on my earlier post, is someone I have a lot of time and respect for; to me, what Daen did is the fundamental reason why all the current superficial attempts at “gamification” will fail. All achievements involve learning. The joy of learning is in achieving mastery. In knowledge work, that mastery begins when you have a little light-bulb go off in your head and you say “aha” or “eureka” or “gadzooks”…… because you know why something is true. When a process is standardised, stable and easily repeatable, knowing how may have been enough. Today, many processes are what my friend Sig calls “barely repeatable”, so exception handling becomes the norm, an unsustainable position. So now it’s no longer enough to know how, you need to know why as well. Gamers know something about nonlinear worlds, about patterns rather than processes, about the value of knowing why and not just how, about working in a peer network and using that peer base to select teams and tasks and tools. Gamers have a lot to teach us at work. “Gamification” will remain lipstick on a pig until the designers have the revelation, the road-to-Damascus moment of understanding the joy of mastery. That’s what people like Kathy are trying to get the world to understand, and the world needs to listen.

 

So what am I saying? It is in the knowledge of the Why that the foundation of the How is laid. The What is just an instance of the How. [Yes, there’s a Who’s on First gag somewhere there: What doesn’t Matter. What matters is How. How Doesn’t Matter if you don’t know Why…..] It used to be said that the person who knows how will always find work….working for the person who asks (and learns) why. We are fast approaching a world where all the Whats are commoditised. Open. Easily accessible. Published “content” may be seen to be a “what”. And if you’re in the business of making money off content, then you’re going to do everything in your power to protect your business, which means resisting the commoditisation of the what. That’s what most publishing industries face, a commoditisation of the very thing they made their money on, the “what”. The “how” continues to be valuable, so there’s a market for the tools that publish the content, that simplify access, that help massage and manipulate and mutate that content. The “why” is even more valuable, particularly because it is often scarce, tacit, hard to share. But that’s changing.

Which is why I write posts like this one.

Here’s what’s trending on Twitter right now:

And here are the top stories on Google News:

Here’s what the BBC News site has at top billing:

I tried to even the field. So the twitter trends were set to “Global”, I finally overrode Google’s very irritating attempts to point me towards google.co.uk rather than google.com, and I left the BBC News homepage untouched.

Zero connection between Twitter and Google, even though technically soccer stories made in on to both. One story in common between Google and BBC News.

Just something to bear in mind. There’s a lot we need to think about, in terms of filtering and censorship and filter bubbles; a lot to think about in terms of the impact of the locations of publisher and of subscriber; a lot to think about in terms of publisher-level algorithmic representation of trends, and subscriber-level selection of preferences.

What are your experiences? How does your area and environment compare?

 

A few days ago, I set a cricket question for my twitter followers. To be precise, I set a question for those among my followers who were interested in cricket, interested enough to try and answer the question.

The question was simple: Herschelle Gibbs holds the record. Vinod Kambli was the previous holder. What is the record?

I will come to the answer later. Before that I want to spend a little time on the question.

I set it that way for many reasons.

…………………………………………

First, just Googling it should not work. This is important. Why?

I like to think of the process of answering questions as  a voyage of discovery,  a journey of learning. Today, the first port of call in almost any such journey is the internet. You can choose the particular type of vessel you want to use on the journey (Google, Dogpile, Mamma, Facebook, Twitter, Quora, WolframAlpha, Copernic, Bing, Mahalo, Phone-A-Friend, Ask-The-Audience or whatever else catches your fancy). [Incidentally, feel free to add any question-answering tools you use and wish to share with others, just comment below and I will summarise comments in a follow-up post as needed. Also incidentally, does Bing really (and recursively) stand for But It’s Not Google?]

The journey, the voyage, is more important than the vessel.

And the discovery, the learning, is more important than the journey. It’s the whole point of the journey.

…………………………………………..

Which brings me to the second point of any question: Answering the question should teach you something; at the very least, it should reinforce some prior learning. Let me give you an example.

Some years before finishing school, we were given an intriguing maths question to solve. We were told that there was one, and only one, ten-term arithmetical progression (or “AP”) of prime numbers between unity and 3000.  And we were asked to find it. [Yes, I have written about this before, some years ago. But please humour me, I want to take you somewhere else this time].

I must have been 14 or so. And I was enthralled by the question. Not because I found the question itself interesting, but because I was really enjoying myself trying to figure out how to get to the answer. And why I would get to the answer.

How. And why. Not what.

[I won’t spoil it for the first-time reader, I’m not going to give you the answer here. If you want to know, then please ping me via twitter, details on sidebar here,  or comment below or even “inbox me on facebook” (the way my youngest daughter’s generation describe emailing).]

…………………….

The third point, as important as the first two, is that answering the question should be fun. Again, an example from my teens in Calcutta. One of my friends had heard about a competition, I think he said it was in Punch, where you were given a “traditional” trivia answer and asked to formulate a non-traditional question. The example given was: A: Dr Livingstone, I presume. Alternative Q: What is your full name, Dr Presume?. [If I remember right, the winning entry in that competition was: A: Crick. Alternative Q: What is the sound made by a Japanese camera?]

The process of answering a question should be a voyage of discovery, a journey during which you learn something, and one where you enjoy yourself in the process.

As a result of answering the question, you should be able to answer most, if not all, questions belonging to that class of question. You know that cliched saying “I may not know the answer to the question, but I know a man who does”? There’s some value, some truth, in what it implies. It’s probably better expressed in the saying “It is better to teach a man to fish than to give a man a fish”. Passing on learning is far more valuable than passing on a short-term, “single-use” answer.

Knowing how to get to an answer is often more important than knowing the answer. And knowing why is the foundation for remembering the how.

This principle colours the way I view much of education. There must have been a time when people used slide rules incessantly in classes involving numerate subjects. By the time I was at school, they were already passing out of favour. In similar vein, my generation had to carry our own “log table” and “trig table” books, but I think we were the last “batch” at school to engage so closely with logarithmic and trigonometric tables. The generation after me learnt to use scientific calculators in anger.

And the generations of today know their way around the web. Or should do. [Provided, of course, they have access to the web, something I regard as a fundamental right of the 21st century, given the incredibly positive impact it can make on education, health and welfare].

…………………….

Learning by watching and copying has been the way of the world for aeons. Sometimes I’m surprised by the way that gets forgotten in some spheres of education. There’s too much focus on the answer, the “what”, and not enough on the process and the rationale, the how and why. If a student can answer a question correctly by surreptitiously peeking at someone else’s work, then it’s a poor question. If a student can answer a question correctly by simply engaging with Google and entering a “raw” search term, then it’s a poor question. If a student can answer a question correctly by simply looking up Wikipedia, then it’s a poor question.

Google and Wikipedia are tools. Like slide rules and log tables and scientific calculators. Or even abaci.

Knowing how to use the tool properly is important. If the tool is designed to provide enjoyment as well, even better. Concentrating on the answer provided by the tool is all quite wrong.

……………….

If you’ve read this far, then you’re probably someone who is sympathethic to my way of thinking. So humour me a little longer.

When I asked the unGoogleable question in Twitter, an old friend and colleague, Dominic Sayers, tweeted the following:

So now I have to come up with another unGoogleable cricket question.

Here goes:

On a cricket scorecard, an asterisk is used to denote the captain, and a “dagger” to denote the wicketkeeper. Since the dawn of Test cricket, with thousands of matches played, there have only been 26 “asterisk-daggers”, players who, simultaneously, kept wicket and captained the team.

26. Over thousands of Tests.

During this time, there have only been five instances where a Test has involved a “double asterisk-dagger“, where a wicketkeeper-captain has faced a wicketkeeper-captain.

These instances involved only five specific asterisk-daggers: one three times, three twice, and one just once. Name the wicketkeeper-captain who has faced a wicketkeeper-captain in a Test match just once and once only in his career.