Where good ideas come from

(a book by Steven Johnson)

With this new book, Steven Johnson re-connects with his previous bestseller: "Everything Bad is Good for You" and the more recent: "The Invention of Air" which we liked so much, and posted about quite a bit here and there.

We also love the way Riverhead Books is sharing this ...amazing visualization.

Will they walk the talk?

We sure hope they do. These brief inputs (see clip) from the panel sound promising. They seem to be calling for a very different approach to knowledge, than the current institutionalized one, which continues to be reproduced via the usual channels. In Europe we need to walk the talk.

There seems to be an urgency to inform, revamp and disseminate quality stuff "bottom-up", fostering business and innovative learning communities. They underscore the need for quite a different "operating system" to approach knowledge as such, to prevent the historical protection of "status quo"... that we know so well.

Check their pledge: here is the transcript.

Maths without learning restrictions

John Mighton shares amazing ideas... on what kids actually do (when the system allows...)

www.jumpmath.org is dedicated to improving the teaching of mathematics in public schools.

Direct link to transcript Direct link to site.

Turning Cars and Computers into Art

Rocketboom interviews Zach Lieberman on his latest projects. (3:57min video)

Transcript:

-I'm here with Zack Lieverman and I don't know exactly what to call you... What would you title yourself as?

-Like nerd, artist, researcher, hacker, yeah... I don't know.

-Renaissance man of technology?

-I guess so maybe.

-So how did you get your start in the field that you're doing right now?

-I discovered this community on-line, especially through Flash, people writing code to animate, and I've always loved animation... And for me it was just really beautiful this idea that you could write some lines of could and you could see something move, and then you could make really elegant types of motion.

One thing that I'm involved with now is an open source project called open frameworks, which is the C++ toolkit so... I said before I'm sort of a nerd artist, I you know, re-write software, we do sort of low level hacking, and this is making a tool for other people to make stuff with.

-For each individual use you're creating a brand new kind of software...

-Yeah, every time we have a new problem, a magician comes and says I want to do augmented reality card trick and then it's like, OK, let's make new software, about, you know, how do we track a playing card... we have a new problem and we come up with software to solve it.

-So I saw a really cool video on ... I think that it uses the open frameworks software with a car...

-Yeah, the project was in Belgium, and it was an advertising company that has the Toyota account and then, once they had the idea of driving and making a type face they contacted me through that... they needed to use software kind of real time software, in order to track the car to get a good sense of what the outcome would be. They did some experiments here, with, kind of , imagining on paper what the movements would be like. The driver would then take those drawings and try to interpret it driving, he would drive slowly at first and then drive faster, cause some of the things are really... involved wipe outs ... I software outputed in image and then the software designers took that image traced it and cleaned it up a bit, and then made the font.

We were making an eye tracker for a disabled graffiti writer, named Tempt, and Tempt has "Lug...ris" disease, and we were making a tool to help him retro feel again with his eye... Ok let's hook this up...

We're actually tracking the pupil, so as the pupil moves around we're following it, so we're like using open frameworks... write some code in order to find it and fitting and ellipse through it. There is data coming from the camera, and then we have some illumination from this infrared LEDs, your eyes are very good input devices, not a very good output device, and when you actually start to hook it up to draw, it's a little bit tricky.

And so we have to do a lot of work to make it easy for ourselves, and also easy for Tempt, it's all Tempt can use to communicate

-I guess this takes a bit of a learning curve ...

-It's a little quirky right now...

-I just closed my eyes that's the weirdest thing...

-So if anyone wants to look into using your software, how do they do that?

-Sure, so they can join the main list, it's at frameworks.cc and then we have workshops and events all the time.

-Somebody could learn from the master..

-No no, we're all learning so that's the exciting...everybody is in it together and learning and growing and evolving together.

-Very cool, thank you very much, that is cool stuff.

Have a look at Funky Forest

On social networks and information

Social Networks as Information Filters

View more documents from Lee Bryant.

Presentation via @leebryant ... quote from the Headshift Blog: go there to read-learn more!

"The affordances of social web allow us to build a new relationship with each other and with information. New forms of media consumption and architecture of participation hold important implications for information management:" via #RebootBritain event ongoing flows on the web :)

Multiplicity of Re-cognition Evolving Systems

Wired brings this interview posted April 8, 2009. Tim O'Reilly founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media Inc. discusses much more than "the origins of Web2.0 and the rise of Twitter..." during his conversation with Fora.tv CEO Blaise Zerega on April 2, 2009 in San Francisco.

To cite some:

• We're moving into a more sensory-like evolution process involving humans and machines,... "starting to build hybrid human-computing machine as a sub-text of Web2.0".
• Companies that survived the previous crash: invited their customers (to contribute) to make the company better. (focus on Amazon.com)
• Google as a collective intel: the people point to a page and then Google elevates it... We are all contributing to Google every time we create web content. They are figuring their ad options in real time... measuring what people click on.

• There may be a revolution coming in business, when you see what Google does when it gets (new) information: Google has to adjust the algorithms all the time, so it's not about people taking in lots of data and making decisions but with figuring what's been mixed and changing algorithms.
• Imagine what happens when your supply chain is driven by sensors... voters ideas... we are starting to build autonomic systems, that respond automatically to stimuli...
• The vision of Web2.0 is learning to recognize things by accumulating content and analyzing it with new tools. Everything in Web2.0 was implicit in what Tim Berners-Lee originally designed.

• We are teaching machines to do recognition ... speech recognition, visual recognition.... we're are getting to that kind of augmented reality when our computers will have sensors that might be even be better than our own recognition senses. Google is developing "an ear" to recognize speech data and provide users what they are looking for utilizing their location and info they have on nearest places and data.
• Sub-systems that give you access to data bases in the cloud, constructed by human aggregated data: crowd sourced.

• It may not be about a single "new new thing" or that we might notice it right away... but he does highlight Twitter as a distinctive new thing: "it's brought real time to a new peak on the web".
• Modularity is one of the things we are learning from Twitter Vs a world with info delay, or a narrative that has to change altogether every time an element within changes. Revision controls for collaboration at scale must be improved.

• No need for a catalogue book on the Web... that book would be the World Wide Web.
• We don't wear name tags in everyday life to recognize people we've seen before. Our computers are getting best at recognizing context in order to perform better sensory induced recognition.
• It's not just about tools but about learning how to use tools better. We are changing our machines and they are changing us. We have always adapted to our artifacts. We use memory very differently in our different evolutionary stages. People thought only a couple hundred years ago that people who could read without moving their lips were... strange.