Learning about Solanaceae

Have you ever visited CultureSheet.org? if you haven’t, please do so. It’s worth it, seeing how a data-gathering encyclopaedic website gently morphs into a community and a social network. Fascinating. I wish them well.

They make a very important point early on: I quote from the site:

The core of the CultureSheet has become the glue that ties everything together: a taxonomic structure that serves as a framework for plant cultivation guidelines. Thanks to this structure we can reduce plant name typos to a bare minimum. Every plant enthusiast is encouraged to help in building a plant cultivation database which makes experience and know-how available.

“We can reduce plant name typos to a bare minimum”. Love it. Spending time getting taxonomies right is always worth it. Having spent a lot of time in capital markets, I was shocked by the sheer waste that goes on in that environment because the “statics” aren’t accurate. To my disbelief, when I left that space, I found the same thing happening wherever I went. Tons of waste because of errors in names, addresses, item descriptors, things that don’t change that often. There’s a whole ream of posts to be written about the mess of reference and low-volatility data. But not today.

Today I want to just mull over Solanaceae. As CultureSheet says:

The Solanaceae are a medium-sized family of flowering plants belonging to the Asterids 2). The family provides many products used by human beings for food, drugs and enjoyment. This includes edible species such as the potato, tomato, and eggplant (aubergine) and a host of minor fruit crops. Medicinal plants such as deadly nightshade, jimson weed, tobacco, and henbane are the sources of drugs such as atropine, hyoscine, nicotine and other alkaloids. Solanaceae species of horticultural importance include petunia, floripondio, velvet tongue, and butterfly flower. Species such as tomato, potato, tobacco, and petunia are important experimental organisms in genetics and molecular biology. The family is a group of plants that consists of trees, shrubs, and creepers.

If you go to the Natural History Museum site, under Uses of Solanaceae, you get the following:

  • Food -edible fruits and tubers such as the tomato, potato, aubergine/eggplant and chilli pepper;
  • Horticulture -common ornamental plants include Petunia, Schizanthus (commonly known as the butterfly flower), Salpiglossis (commonly known as painted or velvet tongue), Browallia and floripondio;
  • Medicinal, poisonous, or psychotropic effects -famed for their alkaloid content and used throughout history deadly nightshade, jimson weed, tobacco, henbane and belladonna are sources of drugs such as atropine, hyoscine, nicotine and other alkaloids;
  • Biological study –model experimental organisms such as tobacco, petunia, tomato and potato are used in examining fundamental biological questions in cell, molecular and genetic studies.

As the saying goes, they had me at chili pepper.

One family of plants. Covering potatoes, tomatoes, aubergines, chillies, tobacco, belladonna, mandrake root, jimson weed, deadly nightshade, henbane, atropine, nicotine. In use as edible foods, as ornamental plants, as poisons and hallucinogens, and as model experimental organisms.

One family of plants, growing as trees, bushes and shrubs and as creepers.

One family of plants, growing pretty much everywhere.

One family of plants whose classification has remained rock-steady while others have withered on the vines of modern taxonomy.

Worth investigating, wouldn’t you say?

So that’s what I’m doing. I want to understand more about this family of plants. If any of you knows something that will help me, please let me know. In the meantime I shall continue to dig into the Web, what a wonderful resource.

 

The Arab Spring of the West

As you’ve probably noticed by now,  the Arab Spring, the collective name for the protests in the Middle East and North Africa since 18 December last year, has captured the public’s imagination. If you want to remind yourself of the events that constitute the Arab Spring, you could do worse than try the Guardian’s excellent interactive timeline, a snapshot of which is shown below:

 

This post is not about the Arab Spring per se.There are many other places you can read about it, covered by many people who know far more about it than I do.

While all this has been going on, there’s been a second, much gentler conflagration amongst the digerati. The Blefuscudian question they’ve been trying to address is this: What role did social networks and social media in general play in the Arab Spring? The Big-Endians say Everything, the Little-Endians say Nothing, and while they continue to argue I am sure we will all live happily ever after. This post is not about them either.

What this post is about is a question that’s been troubling me for some time. And that is this: What is the Western equivalent of the Arab Spring? I’ve also been thinking of the natural follow-up question to it: When will it happen?

I may be completely wrong. [If I am, I’m sure you’ll tell me.]

But.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the Arab Spring of the West is already upon us. Why?

The original Arab Spring, the Arab Spring of the Arabs, was about disaffected people, mainly youth, giving vent to their feelings about injustice and inequality and unreasonable behaviour of the powers-that-be, by rising up and challenging the control structures around them.

I guess it’s natural for us to think that there won’t be a Western equivalent, there are no comparable conditions of injustice and inequality and unreasonable behaviour.

Perhaps there aren’t.

But then again, maybe there are.

Disaffected youth.

Giving vent to their feelings.

Feelings spurred by injustice and inequality and unreasonable behaviour.

Rising up to challenge the control structures around them.

Hmmm.

It gets me thinking.

The US State Department, Amazon, EveryDNS, Mastercard, Visa, Wikileaks, Assange, Manning…..

Sony, the PlayStation Network, not-Anonymous, Anonymous, hacking of PS3s, GeoHot…..

Super-injunctions, Justice Eady, Lord Chief Justice Judge (really, that’s his name), CTB, NEJ, LNS, JIH and for that matter CDE, FGH and LMN….and all that jazz

Hmmm.

Maybe that’s the way the Arab Spring will look in the West. As “traditional” control structures like superinjunctions and DMCA and CFAA are found to be unjust and unreasonable by disaffected youth. As they rise up and challenge the control structures. In the West.

I wonder.

Artificial scarcities tend to get met by artificial abundances. Over time, the artificial scarcities lose. No one, not even Qadhafi, can sustain being a Qadhafi forever.

A coda:  All this talk about scarcity and abundance reminded me of the old Shaw quote:

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”

 

 

On firehoses and filters: Part 1

Image above courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Online Catalog.

 

I’ve never been worried about information overload, tending to treat it as a problem of consumption rather than one of production or availability: you don’t have to listen to everything, read everything, watch everything. As a result, when, some years ago, I heard Clay Shirky describe it as “filter failure”, I found myself nodding vigorously (as us Indians are wont to do, occasionally sending confusing signals to onlookers and observers).

 

Filtering at the point of consumption rather than production. Photo courtesy The National Archives UK.

 

Ever since then, I’ve been spending time thinking about the hows and whys of filtering information, and have arrived “provisionally” at the following conclusions, my three laws of information filtering:

1. Where possible, avoid filtering “on the way in”; let the brain work out what is valuable and what is not.

2. Always filter “on the way out”: think hard about what you say or write for public consumption: why you share what you share.

3. If you must filter “on the way in”, then make sure the filter is at the edge, the consumer, the receiver, the subscriber, and not at the source or publisher.

 

What am I basing all this on? Let’s take each point in turn:

a. Not filtering at all on inputs

One of the primary justifications for even thinking about this came from my childhood and youth in India, surrounded by mothers and children and crowds and noise. Lots of mothers and children. Lots and lots of mothers and children, amidst lots and lots of crowds. And some serious noise as well. Which is why I was fascinated by the way mothers somehow managed to recognise the cry of their own children, and could remain singularly unperturbed, going placidly about their business amidst the noise and haste. This ability to ignore the cries of all the other babies while being watchful and responsive to one particular cry fascinated me. Years later, I experienced it as a parent, nowhere near as good at is as my wife was, but the capacity was there. And it made me marvel at how the brain evolves to do this.

Photo courtesy BBC

There are many other justifications. Over the years I’ve spent quite a lot of time reading Michael Polanyi, who originally introduced the “Rumsfeld” “unknown unknowns” concept to us (the things we know we know; the things we know we don’t know and the things we don’t know we don’t know). I was left with the view that I should absorb everything like a new sponge, letting my brain work out what is worth responding to, what should be stored for later action, what should be discarded. And, largely, it’s worked for me. Okay, so what? Why should my personal experience have any bearing on this? I agree. Which is why I would encourage you to read The Aha! Moment: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Insight, by Kounlos and Beeman. Or, if you prefer your reading a little bit less academic, try The Unleashed Mind: Why Creative People are Eccentric. In fact, as shown below, the cover of the latest issue of Scientific American MIND actually uses the phrase “An Unfiltered Mind” when promoting that particular article.

 

b. Filtering outputs

We live in a world where more and more people have the ability to publish what they think, feel or learn about, via web sites, blogs, microblogs and social networks. We live in a world where this “democratised” publishing has the ability to reach millions, perhaps billions. These are powerful abilities. And with those powerful abilities comes powerful responsibilities. Responsibilities related to truth and accuracy, responsibilities related to wisdom and sensitivity. Responsibilities related to curation and verification. None of this is new. Every day we fill forms in with caveats that state that what we say is true to the best of our knowledge and ability; every day, as decent human beings, we take care not to offend or handicap people because of their caste, creed, race, gender, age. Every day we take care to protect minors, to uphold the confidentiality of our families and friends and colleagues and employers and trading partners and customers. Sometimes, some of these things are enforced within contracts of employment. All of them, however, should come under the umbrella term “common decency”.

 

These principles have always been at the forefront of cyberspace, and were memorably and succintly put for WELL members as YOYOW, You Own Your Own Words. Every one of us does own our own words. Whatever the law says. It’s not about the law, it’s about human decency. We owe it to our fellow humans.

When we share, it’s worth thinking about why we share, something I wrote about here and here.

c. Filtering by subscriber, not by publisher

Most readers of this blog are used to having a relatively free press around them, despite superinjunctions and despite the actions taken to suppress Wikileaks. A relatively free press, with intrinsic weaknesses. Weaknesses brought about by largely narrow ownership of media properties, weaknesses exacerbated by proprietary anchors and frames, the biases that can corrupt publication, weaknesses underpinned by the inbuilt corruptibility of broadcast models. Nevertheless, a relatively free press.

The augmentation of mainstream media by the web in general, and by “social media” in particular, is often seen as the cause of information overload. With the predictable consequence that the world looks to the big web players to solve the problem.

Which they are keen to do.

Google, Facebook, Microsoft et al are all out there, trying to figure out the best way of giving you what you want. And implementing the filtering mechanisms to do this. Filtering mechanisms that operate at source.

There is a growing risk that you will only be presented with information that someone else thinks is what you want to see, read or hear. Accentuating your biases and prejudices. Increasing groupthink. Narrowing your frame of reference. If you want to know more about this, it is worth reading Eli Pariser’s book on The Filter Bubble. Not much of a reader? Then try this TED talk instead. Jonathan Zittrain, in The Future Of The Internet and How to Stop it, has already been warning us of this for a while.

Now Google, Microsoft, Facebook, all mean well. They want to help us. The filters-at-source are there to personalise service to us, to make things simple and convenient for us. The risks that Pariser and Zittrain speak of are, to an extent, unintended consequences of well-meaning design.

But there’s a darker side to it. Once you concentrate solely on the design of filterability at source, it is there to be used. By agencies and bodies of all sorts and descriptions, ranging from less-than-trustworthy companies to out-and-out malevolent governments. And everything in between.

We need to be very careful. Very very careful. Which is why I want to concentrate on subscriber-filters, not publisher-filters.

Otherwise, while we’re all so busy trying to prevent Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, we’re going to find ourselves bringing about Huxley’s Brave New World. And, as Huxley predicted, perhaps actually feeling good about it.

 

More to follow. Views in the meantime?

 

 

RIP Seve Ballesteros 1957-2011: Goodbye to a golfing genius

Talented people do things that others cannot do.

A genius, on the other hand, does things that others cannot even imagine.

Seve Ballesteros, who passed away early this morning, was a true genius, revelling in doing things that others believed couldn’t be done. Revelling. You couldn’t help but see just how much he enjoyed doing what he did; his enthusiasm and passion were of epidemic proportions, infecting all in any sort of proximity, even via television.

It wasn’t enough for him that he was the youngest to win the Open for over eight decades. It wasn’t enough for him to be the first (and second) European to win the Masters. It wasn’t enough for him to be part of the first European team to win the Ryder Cup on American soil.

Such records are there to be beaten. And they will be beaten. They’re not what defined Seve.

What defined Seve was his supreme talent and his effervescent personality, a combination that ensured he kept doing things others could not imagine, as in the examples below. Others drove cars in and out of car parks. Seve drove golf balls in and out of car parks. Others went down on their knees, enslaved by the game. He went down on his knees to show his mastery of the game. Others played for the tiger line. He moved the tiger line to places it had never been.

 

The car park golfer in action


 

On his knees, bringing the golfing world to its knees

 

 

Driving the 10th at the Belfry… because it was there to be done

 

 

I’m not much of a golfer. As they say, I stand too close to the ball. After I hit it.

Yet I love my golf, love playing it when I can, however badly. There’s something about the game that fascinates me, how each shot is as unique as a snow crystal; how each game is really three: you play the opponent, you play the course and conditions, and you play yourself.

Like most of you, I’ve watched Seve many times on TV and video; like some of you, I’ve had the privilege of watching him play “live” a few times. And I will never forget him.

Seve Ballesteros, you taught a world that it was possible to do things others could not imagine. As importantly, you taught a world how to do this while visibly enjoying yourself.

Your talent, your attitude, your enthusiasm, have been an inspiration to generations. We salute you.

More sniffing around Twitter, Chatter and pheromones

[Note: This is my third post in a series I’ve been writing on this topic; the two previous posts immediately precede this one]. What I want to do here is touch on a few subjects that came up in earlier posts, where I didn’t really have the time or space to express what I meant adequately. My intention in sharing all this is to give you as much depth as I can into my thoughts on the use of tools like Twitter and Chatter.

 

Connected versus channelled

Some of you may have noticed that, in previous posts,  I appear to make a big thing of wanting to place filters at the point of receipt rather than at the point of dissemination, at the “subscriber” level rather than at the “publisher” level. This is no random thought, it represents something I have believed in ever since I took up blogging: you will find it a recurrent theme in the kernel for this blog. There are a number of reasons for it, and I’m going to try and articulate them as succintly as I dare.

Michael Polanyi, in helping us understand what he meant by “tacit knowledge”, is reputed to have said something along the lines of “there are things we know we know, things we know we don’t know, things we don’t know we know and things we don’t know we don’t know”. That fourth bit, the things we don’t know we don’t know, has always intrigued me. As a result, I used to walk around telling myself: “filter on the way out, not on the way in. Let everything come in, you don’t know what you don’t know.” What I was trying to do was to minimise the building of anchors and frames that would constrain or corrupt what was allowed to enter my head, what Einstein called “common sense: the collection of prejudices collected by age eighteen“.

When I see words like “connected” and “channelled” they conjure up different meanings, heavily laden with my own prejudices, despite all my efforts to avoid such prejudices. “Channelled” suggests a one-way street, a broadcast model, a structure where I am a recipient of a signal with all the choices made by the sender of the signal. “Connected”, on the other hand, has a sense of being two-way, interactive, with some sort of parity or equality between the things that are connected.

There’s also something else, something darker, harder to put my finger on, evoking a deep sense of distrust. And it’s rooted in some modern variant of Say’s Law: Supply creates its own demand. What do I mean? Well, let’s take terrorism laws. Come, perform an experiment with me. Open a separate tab or window in your browser, bring up Google and enter the term “UK terror laws used to snoop”. Just look at what you get. Here’s a sample list of the things that local councils have used terror laws for checking whether:

  • nurseries were selling plants unlawfully
  • a child lived in a school catchment area
  • fishermen were gathering shellfish illegally
  • alcohol was being sold to under aged
  • benefit claims were fraudulent
  • people’s dog’s were fouling
  • people were littering
  • cows were meandering
  • calls were made to 900 number phone lines

It’s a much much longer list, with over 470 councils invoking the laws over 10,000 times in a nine year period. Why do they do this? Because they can.

Coming from a family of journalists, and having lived as an adult through the “Emergency” years in India, and having been on the receiving end of some of the power that such states wield, I’ve felt more strongly about such misuse than most.

With all this in mind, I want to remain connected, not channelled. I want to be able to choose what I can know about, learn about, be told about. I don’t want to block out what I don’t know. I don’t want the technology to have tools for censorship built in, which in effect is what happens when filters are designed into publishers. It is too easy to game the publisher end of the market, far harder to game the subscriber end.

So I try and avoid filtering at source. I have no problem with tags, with providing people the metadata that simplifies filtering at subscriber level. But the mechanisms for tagging at source should be designed in a way that they can’t become choke points used by the unprincipled.

 

Avoiding echo chambers, groupthink and herd behaviour

When social networks are used to share information upon which decisions may be made, you will always hear someone bring up the echo-chamber risk. After all, if you put a bunch of like-minded people together, you will get repeated assertions of the same thing. Or so the theory goes.

Wrong. Now this is not deep research, but anecdotally the results have been positive enough for me to want to assert this. Social networks bring together people who have a few common interests, rather than people who hold common views about those interests, or who replicate those interests. My twitter followers are not clones of me. Very few of them are into chillies and capsaicin in a big way; very few have the same “retarded hippie” tastes in music I do; very few are as crazy about cooking (and eating) as I am; very few are Indian and 53; very few go to church every Sunday. Some do. But not all.

Social networks create value because people in the networks come together, drawn by what they have in common, but creating value because of what they don’t have in common.

There have been a number of discussions recently about the “dangers” of direct democracy: how could we possibly run anything, manage anything, lead anything,  based on the statistically expressed will of the Great Unwashed?

Surely what will happen is that people will keep on asking for faster horses.

Perhaps.

Maybe.

But who are we to decide that everyone else is wrong?

The tools we have today allow for greater dissemination of information than we’ve ever had before. Attempts to control, suppress or subvert the free passage of information are becoming harder and harder to pull off, there’s a Wikileaks waiting to happen in every command-and-control centralised hierarchical set-up. These tools are becoming ubiquitous, affordable, effective, and the empowerment of the edge continues apace. Snap polls are no longer about random sampling, not when there’s a Facebook around. [Incidentally, don’t underestimate the value of having good polling mechanisms in systems like Twitter and Chatter].

Democratisation does not yield dummification. Except perhaps in the eyes of elitist experts.

 

Signals, not trails: improving our work lives

Some of the comments I’ve received, some of the references I’ve been pointed towards, have a tendency to veer towards a trail-like analogy for lifestreaming and workstreaming. This is possibly due to my use of the pheromone analogy. If that has happened I am sorry, that was not my intention. If anything, my use of the wikipedia article in the first post was an attempt to avoid just that, by showing that the pheromone classification went way beyond the concept of trail.

Since then, on a the-physics-is-different basis, I’ve tried to bring in the time dimension as well. The signals we share as we workstream are separable by time, and each “layer” of time does not in any way corrupt other layers, contiguous or not. And I feel the very existence of these signal histories helps us improve our work lives dramatically.

How?

In four ways.

Firstly, they give us institutional memory as to what happened, what was done. This allows us to break away from blame cultures, move towards an environment of “We have not failed, we have found ten thousand ways that do not work”…. but with a difference. By being able to record the conditions under which something did not work, we learn something about the conditions under which something will work. And we can form the equivalent of seed-banks under the icecaps of organisations, storing the seeds we need for conditions that do not exist today, but could exist at a future date.

Secondly, they give us the ability to trend behaviours and forecast with somewhat more accuracy than has been the case in the past, based on data rather than political connections. It used to be said that history will always be written from the perspective of the hunter until lions learn to speak. Well, lions can speak. Now. Histories are less likely to be corrupt if they are constructed by bringing together squadrons of disparate tweetstreams. This sort of crowdsourcing of information has been happening for some time now; I could not hide my glee when I learnt that 18th century ships’ captain’s logs were being used to conduct climate change research. [And thank you, everyone involved in the project, for making sure the output was not behind a paywall, that it was searchable and retrievable. How wonderful.

Thirdly (and this may be my most controversial point) I think they make our work more interesting. Humour me on this. One of the most depressing things about the Industrial Revolution, assembly-line thinking and division of labour was the way human beings were somewhat dehumanised as a result, becoming narrow specialists good at doing mind-numbingly boring things well. Five or six years ago, I had the pleasure of listening to John Seely Brown and John Hagel at a Supernova conference (thank you Kevin Werbach) talking about motorcycle factories in China and how collaboration took place because people weren’t working sequentially. And it got me thinking.

It got me thinking about the new generation, and how they seemed comfortable multi-tasking, how they were being accused of being ADHD as if ADHD was an epidemic [if you have not watched Sir Ken Robinson’s talk on changing education paradigms, stop everything you’re doing and watch this 11 minute video. Then watch the whole thing, the hour long version, link provided below the summary. Thank you RSA!]

It got me thinking about knowledge workers and the lumpiness of knowledge work, the implications for the generation of cognitive surplus in the enterprise.

And it got me to a point where I saw the possibility that division of labour was a thing of the past. That for the millenial knowledge worker in a social network with workstreaming, switching costs were tending to zero.

More to chew on. I’ll be back. Comment away.