First, the answer to yesterday’s prequel. I asked people to point out what six named people have in common, and why one was distinctively the odd one out. The six were Bohr, Curie, Einstein, Fermi, Nobel and Rutherford.

The common element was easy; I wanted more than “scientists”, what I was looking for was that they all had elements named after them. Most of you got that.

The odd man out was a bit harder. There were some facile choices: some of you pointed out, correctly, that all bar Nobel had won the Nobel Prize. Some indicated that Nobel was possibly the only chemist; some that Marie Curie was the only woman. The best answer I saw was that the elements themselves were all synthetic except for Curium, so that Curie would become the exception.

But it wasn’t the answer I was looking for. Perhaps I have to take even more care with setting the question…. composing unGoogleable questions continues to be a challenge. My understanding is that all that has ever been seen of Curium in natural state is at “trace” level and nothing more than that, and that the way Curium is obtained is by bombarding uranium or plutonium with neutrons in nuclear reactors. But technically all your answers are correct, and I will find better ways of framing the question.

I was looking for more. I wanted to lead people down the rabbit holes of “appearing on banknotes” (neither Fermi nor Nobel have done so) or “appearing on stamps” (they all have). And the real answer I wanted was this:

While they are all craters on the Moon, only Bohr is fully visible from Earth; the remainder are at best marginally visible, and more often than not deeply rooted in the far side.

So on to today’s question.

Marshall is to Allen as Hercules is to what?

I think I missed out last week’s question, my apologies. So here’s a simple teaser instead, while I work on the question for tomorrow.

Name the odd one out as well as what they have in common.

Niels Bohr. Pierre and Marie Curie. Albert Einstein. Enrico Fermi. Alfred Nobel. Ernest Rutherford.

Getting the odd one out correctly means nothing. You must answer both parts.

Ah the last time we saw you/you looked so much older

Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder

Leonard Cohen, Famous Blue Raincoat, 1971

 

 

It was an itsy-bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini

That she wore for the first time today

Brian Hyland, Itsy-Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini, 1960

 

Two songs from my childhood, both immensely memorable. One a novelty song that charted its way to the top, the other a haunting, lilting melody. Guess which one I had to learn to dance to at the age of 14? [I’ll have you know that dancing to Leonard Cohen is no laughing matter!].

So what are these songs doing in “a blog about information”?

Let me try and explain. Famous blue raincoat. [Incidentally, it was a Burberry]. Not blue famous raincoat. Itsy-bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini, not polka dot yellow itsy-bitsy teeny weeny bikini.

Why?

Because the other forms just don’t sound right, don’t feel right, there’s something you can’t quite put your finger on why, but they’re not right.

Because adjectives have an order, a hierarchy; an order that is tacitly understood, learnt and practised by native English speakers; an order that has to be explained explicitly to non-native speakers of the language.

An order that goes something like this:

Quantity. Opinion. Size. Age. Shape. Colour. Origin. Material. Purpose.

Visit this site to see how non-natives get to learn the order and hierarchy. You may also find it of interest to read these posts on the subject. Other languages appear to be less hierarchical when it comes to adjective placement and order. [If you’re interested, you can even take a look at Dalcurian adjectives :-)]

I had three reasons to write this post:

One, having known about this for some time, and having been reminded of it regularly more recently, I wanted to share it with you, in case you were as interested in it as I was. English is a wonderful, living, just-slightly-insane language.

Two, I think it’s a great example of tacit knowledge, something we need to understand better as we move forward with the web. We know it, but don’t know we know it. We use it, without knowing we’re using it.

Three, I think it’s a great example of how the web works, allowing me to write a post like this, linking to stuff that lets you dig into it if you choose to.

Incidentally, when people come and argue with me about apps and HTML5, I’ve tended to use just one word in reply.

Links.

According to the International Telecommunications Union, and as referred to in Wikipedia, this was the state of the Global Digital Divide in 2010.

Digital divides come in many forms: between continents, between countries, within countries; between age groups, between genders, between professions. There are even digital divides between companies and customers, particularly if the company’s inclined to imitate a dinosaur [In which case the company will suffer the same fate as the dinosaur].

When I worked in regulated industries, particularly in finance and telecoms, I had at least one regular source of joy. And it was in meetings when we were considering doing something new. I would count the minutes before someone asked, very well-meaningly “Have you considered the compliance implications?” At which point everyone nodded sagely and went back into staring serenely into their coffee, secure in the knowledge that very little “new” was going to happen.

It never took long. Most of the time, the question had been asked before the ten-minute marker.

Legacies come with costs.

While working at Dresdner Kleinwort, sometime in 1998, I was asked to pop over to Warsaw for a couple of days in order to assess the “Year 2000 readiness” of a number of Polish banks; they were considering flotations and my role was to perform part of the due diligence.

It was a very quick trip, validating what I’d already found out. None of them had done any real preparation for the Year 2000.

They didn’t need to. They were so late to the table that they’d leapfrogged the problem.

It was something that really resonated with me, because of what I’d seen in Calcutta time and time again, yesterday’s pioneers leave amazing legacies…. with amazing costs to follow. Younger, later participants don’t face the same brownfield challenges.

At LIFT in Geneva this year, David Rowan gave an excellent talk on why Start-up Entrepreneurs should move to Africa; afterwards, I had the chance to talk to him briefly over dinner, and what he said resonated as well. As a result, I started looking more closely into how “wired” Africa was becoming. Here’s the current intra-Africa optical fibre network, courtesy the UbuntuNet Alliance:

 

David also sent me off to check out what was happening undersea. Here’s what is projected to happen by 2014, from Steve Song’s excellent ManyPossibilities blog:

Africa has already gotten itself a good reputation for pragmatic progress particularly from a communications viewpoint, with “guerrilla innovation” around wireless and mesh; the mobile story is also very strong.

When I wax lyrical about the Dark Continent, some people respond by trying to move the argument to India and China, wanting desperately to show me that the digital divide is present there. It used to take me three years to get a landline in the India I left in 1980. Today, I can get a mobile phone there faster than I can get one in the UK, with less paperwork, and at lower comparable cost.

When I quote stories like that one, I get dismissive shrugs and suggestions that the technology in question is usually dated and second-rate. Which is why I smiled when I saw the recent Apple results, where it turned out that over 20% of Apple’s iPhone business was in …. China.

Carlota Perez, one of my favourite authors and economists, is someone you absolutely must read. Her Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital is one of the few books I have read cover to cover over a dozen times. [One day I shall write a post about those books]. At the Triple Helix Conference in memory of Chris Freeman at Stanford last year (slides here), she summarised one of the key ideas of her book as “The shift from financial mania and collapse to Golden Ages occurs when enabled by regulation and policies  to shape and widen markets”.

Sometimes when I see what happens in that murky space where incumbents and regulators act as haruspices over the entrails of mummified intellectual property regimes, I start thinking wistfully of a different world. One where regulation and policy enables Golden Ages to occur, unhampered by the acts of erstwhile market participants.

Maybe that different world is already there in the West. Eastman Kodak, with a commanding position in the world of film, and with over 1000 digital photo patents, went into bankruptcy earlier this year. Polaroid, who defined a whole new world of “instant” photography, has been going bankrupt regularly and repeatedly since 2001, and finally sold off some of its core patents earlier this month.

Patents. Stocks of knowledge, as John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison would probably call them, in the context of their seminal The Big Shift.

And while all that was going on, a small, young company whose apparent raison d’etre was to make digital photographs a la Kodak look like they were taken on Polaroids, got bought by Facebook for a cool billion dollars.

Instagram understood flows. Understood the importance of cloud, mobile, social and open.

All this makes me think.

Maybe I should be telling my children and grandchildren(to-be, in case anyone was wondering) Go South Young Man/Woman/Child.

Maybe Africa is it. Maybe Africa will leapfrog everyone else in welcoming a Carlota Perez Golden Age, with everyone connected and empowered with compute and storage and bandwidth affordably and effectively; maybe this will happen because they have no legacy to hold them back in this context, no haruspices, no mummified anythings. Maybe Africa will gain from the scale that India and China generate, and put that scale to work before anyone else.

Incidentally, this is not the first time I’ve raised this idea. Read Why It’s Over if you want a slightly different context.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Life is getting more and more delicious every day.

Today I learnt, via my Facebook feed, that “Apple’s Siri thinks the Nokia Lumia 900 is the best smartphone ever”

Okay, that got my attention. I read a little more, decided to look into some of the other posts, and found this:

 

 

So someone from Apple must have cottoned on to what’s happening. And made some changes. [Incidentally, there is a YouTube video of the original unchanged version here.]

Which made me wonder. Why did it even happen in the first place? How come Siri thought so?

So I looked lazily into Siri, trying to find out whatever I could about its information sources. How would Siri go about answering the question?

Which led me to this:

When I saw that something in my head went bing!

Hmmm.