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The Year In IdeasThe Year In IdeasThe Year In Ideas 12/13/2003 12:45 PM popo writes "The New York Times Magazine has a review of the year's most original and interesting ideas. They include "The Tornado in a Can" ("A contained ... This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)The Year In IdeasGrok Headline matches for The Year In IdeasNYT BEST
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 If t
his
list of the 67 most important new ideas of 2003 is at all
accurate,
we have great cause for alarm. It's largely a list of derivative
solutions in search of problems. Has the world really become this
unimaginative? And is this really the best that the world's largest
and
most esteemed newspaper could come up with in a year that produced
more
new intellectual property, more new critical problems, and more new
tools for problem solving than ever before? I'd prefer to believe that the authors of this list just weren't looking in the right places. Their list has Social Networks on it, though the writers don't seem to realize what they're about or their true potential. But the list doesn't mention the World of Ends, the Power Law, Offshoring, or the Tipping Point, certainly among the most important new ideas of the year. During January, I'll be reviewing what I think were the most important ideas of the year, in 5 parts:
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« Hung between the squeaky piggies and nylon chew bones were an altogether different kind of squeaky chew bone. I wondered if they were beef flavoured and if they were a hot item with women who want to have their dog chew on them in front of an annoying boyfriend as a way to run them off. :) »
Another product of a bad idea: the new Fi zz Lime Cider. It tastes like someone poured cider into your G&T. There's a reason why it's the "World's first lime cider".
 Some more 'fun with numbers' today. A while ago I mentioned IdeaChampions' When & Where Do You Get Your Best Ideas? survey. If you haven't taken the survey already, you can still do so. But before you click to post your answers, write them down. Then you can use this article to create your Personal Creativity Profile, as I've done above. The Profile will tell you:
What's more, the last three of these six creativity sources are unusual to me, and not effective for most others, so if I'm in a group creativity setting I should be cautious about suggesting others take breaks or listen to music. I should be sensitive to the fact that happiness is an essential precondition to creativity for most people, though it isn't for me, and also that most others will be more creative if they take a walk, read books, talk with friends, or spend time thinking just before bed, even though those techniques don't work particularly well for me. There are some other interesting differences between my creative places and times, and those of most others. I find flying and commuting very stimulating -- perhaps it's the movement, and the fact that my commutes are off-rush-hour and hence fast-paced and relaxing. I find television stimulates my thinking more than it does for most others, but that's probably because of what I watch -- documentaries, mysteries, in-depth investigative reports and foreign programming. And the least effective three sources for me -- internet surfing, vacationing and exercising, are all fairly intense, focused activities for me, that don't leave many 'cycles of brainpower' for creative thinking, though I can appreciate that others who find these activities more recreational could also find them more creatively stimulating. Next I asked myself how I could find more time and space for the creative activities that work best for me. To answer this I added another column to the spreadsheet, and entered for each of the 36 activities the amount of time each week I currently spent on each. I again used a scale of 1-5 for this:
 What this second chart reveals is what, ideally speaking, you should try to spend more time doing (the activities at the top of the chart, which you've rated as a source of great ideas, but which you spend relatively little time doing) and what you should try to spend less time doing (the activities at the bottom of the chart). In my case, I should 'get out more' -- spend more time brainstorming with others and just moving around, and less time in front of the computer. I also need to use creative thinking techniques more often. My 'catch-all' #36 'other source' answer was spending time in the hot tub, which I suppose must somehow work for me the way showers work for others. What is it about being in the water that gets us thinking creatively? No wonder dolphins are such imaginative creatures! Though to my surprise, others' top 'write-in' answer for question #36 was 'on the toilet', so perhaps we should see whether porcelain has some mysterious power to spark ideation. While others spend their time in airport lounges, airplanes and traffic either bored or fuming, I find these activities 'transport' me and get me thinking very creatively. Because it's dangerous to write while driving, I've learned to use mnemonic devices to capture and remember ideas that occur to me until I can safely write them down (works in the shower, too). If I could find a dictating machine that worked with my voice-recognition software I'd probably use it instead -- maybe even write a whole paper or blog post simply thinking out loud while I drive. It's quite possible, though, that since much of my travel is early-morning, it's actually that time of day that's responsible for the flurry of ideas, rather than the movement. Though since I'm a night-owl, usually miserable in the morning, I'm not sure that my body clock, or the ones around me, could handle it if I tried early-to-bed, early-to-rise. It hurts just thinking about it. What works for you, and why? Are there times and places and techniques that aren't on this list at all that seem to surface great ideas for you? In what ways does your ideal environment for idea generation differ from mine, and from the other survey respondents'? And are there ways you could be spending your time a little differently to allow your right brain to get some more exercise? * How I normalized the 'average' answers to the survey: First of all, I double-counted the '5' scores, the proportion of people who found each time or place a 'sure-fire' source of great ideas, because I think that's just as important as 'average' score. Then, because when you average scores you get most of them clustered around the 3 average, I 'stretched' the results so that the top-scoring source (brainstorming) received a normalized score of 5 and the lowest-scoring source (being sad or depressed) received a normalized score of 2. Finally, I rounded the results to the nearest 0.5. The results then more closely map, in standard deviation and distribution of results, an individual's scoring. Here are the normalized scores in order for the 36 questions (for copying and pasting into your own spreadsheet): 4.0 4.0 3.0 3.5 3.5 4.0 3.0 4.5 3.0 3.5 4.5 4.0 5.0 3.0 3.0 3.5 4.0 3.0 2.5 2.5 3.5 3.0 3.0 4.5 4.0 4.0 2.0 3.0 3.5 4.0 4.5 4.0 4.5 5.0 3.5 4.0 |
 The Idea:
A summary of the importance of conversation as a catalyst of cultural
evolution, the seven purposes of conversation, some 'cultural
anthropology' on how conversations 'operate' today, and a first stab
at
some rules or principles we could learn and adopt to produce better,
more effective and productive conversations.In my article Seeing the Big Picture (Building a Bigger Frame) I argued for the need for more expansive thinking to encompass, understand and build on different points of view, rather than reinforcing and polarizing those points of view through parochial and antagonistic argument. One of the crucial tools we use to exercise and expand our thinking is conversation, and it occurred to me that if we want to learn to think in ways that transcend the old, learning to converse in ways that transcend the old might be a good place to start. Humberto Maturana has said: Human existence takes place in
the relational space of conversation. This means that, even though
from
a biological perspective we are Homo Sapiens, our way of living - that
is to say, our human condition - takes place in our form of relating
to
each other and the world we bring forth in our daily living through
conversation.
If you're like me, you've engaged in your share of eavesdropping in public places -- restaurants, bars, elevators, cocktail parties, subway trains. What is disturbing is not that the subject matter and arguments are usually inane (though they are), but that the syntax, the flow, and the composition of the conversational threads are so awkward, sloppy, selfish and extravagant. It's been said that conversation is like a dance: It requires some grace, some courtesy to avoid stepping on your partners' toes, and agreement on who (at any point) is leading and who is following. Perhaps this is why conversations that involve three or more people at once are often so clumsy, more like a sequence of two-person conversations one after the other with (to strain the dance analogy) different people constantly butting in, usually before the song in progress has properly ended. Recently I read a wonderful quote that went something like this: Are you listening or just waiting your turn to talk? Sound like someone you know? A recent article< /a> by Australian Open Space practitioner Alan Stewart suggests five purposes for conversation: learning, reassurance, building trust, "working out what is important" and entertainment. Here's (I think) a more complete list from one of my 2003 posts:
In his article Stewart says: From circles of elders around
ancient campfires to the conversations in the cafés and salons
that
spawned the French Revolution, people have always gathered for real
conversation about questions that matter. In those times and places
where innovation is born other simple conditions are also present. In
addition to pursuit of a question that really matters and commitment
to
creating the space and time to explore it, it is crucial that mutual
listening and a spirit of discovery infuse the conversations. A
certain
type of "magic" appears—the magic of a new collective
intelligence
arising from the individual minds present in the conversation. The
wisdom needed to address the concerns of any group is already "in the
middle of the circle" waiting to be tapped. These webs of
conversations
and the action commitments that naturally arise from them can serve as
the energy generator, the amplifier, the core unit of change force for
co-evolving the future in any
system.
He quotes Konrad Lorenz' on the hazards of conversation: "Said is not heard; heard is not understood; understood is not agreed to; agreed to is not carried out". This is a more concise way of laying out the enormous intellectual and emotional challenge entailed in conversation that I described in my That's Not What I Meant article . Here is a recap of my amateur observations about conversations from that post:
 I'm coming to believe that good conversation, like good collaboration, is a skill, and, just as a lot of practice dancing badly does not make you a better dancer, just talking a lot does not necessarily make you a better conversationalist (in fact I suspect it may make you worse at it, by entrenching bad habits). If it's a skill it should be possible to learn it and teach it. And, while the seven 'purposes' of conversations bulleted in red above might require somewhat different skills, I suspect that there is a basic conversational 'skill set' that is common to all purposes. The following list of 'rules' or 'principles' or 'elements' of good conversation constitute my first attempt at identifying what we would need to learn, and teach, to be better conversationalists. Unfortunately, it seems likely that the quality of the conversation will inevitably be at the level of the poorest conversationalist, just as the performance of a dancing couple will reflect the least-accomplished partner. This list is the result of thinking out loud, and I'm sure it is far from complete. Please join the conversation!
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Jonas has another thing to say.....
Supernova and the recently announced Web 2.0 conference are throwbacks to the priorities of old conferences, of the eighties and nineties: sponsors, speakers, panels, audience.
Execs from high tech companies pay sponsorship fees, not disclosed, and guarantee that the content is paid advertising and that nothing real is said on stage. If you don’t pay the sponsorship fee, you don’t get a speaking slot. If you offend a sponsor, you don’t get invited back.
I agree with Dave and Marc. Conferences like these are more or less paid-for sales events, highly priced ones at that. Speaker selection and attendee lists reflect this trend, as well. We have at our hands what can be simply described as a traveling circus of speakers, echoing a number of messages which have been carefully selected and tailored to support the barely buried ulterior motives of sponsors and organizers.
This is less so an issue with the speakers. Most of which are genuine and looking to spread not a sales message but to educate and entertain.
I disagree with Dave on the next part:
The organization of the conferences, with speakers and panels, guarantees that the audience falls asleep or is frustrated, waiting to make their point until they get to ask questions at the end of the session.
Not so, I say. Conferences do their best to deliver a lively and inductive message. Supernova, Web 2.0, and others, make generous use of the traveling circus, add promises about financial gain or new discoveries and developments, and keep attendees on their toes.
This is, where the true problem lies. The infusion of new material, different speakers, or dissenting opinions is dangerous to the ideas of events with an agenda. A controlled message requires controlled ideas. The circus, by means of exposure, has since created celebrities of their own makings, another benefit to the organizers – big names draw big bucks, and big recognition for the advertised services.
[a preponderance of evidence - What Willis Wuz' Talkin' 'Bout]With every WWDC, Apple announces more and more cool stuff for
developers that make writing apps ever easier.
So that makes me wonder about the process of deciding what apps to
develop. Assuming you have a ton of good ideas for apps, there are two
basic ways to approach the decision:
1. Pick one that should be easy to implement because Apple has already
given you most of what you need.
2. Pick one that should be difficult to implement because you have to
invent a bunch of stuff from scratch.
For instance... when NetNewsWire 1.0 shipped, there was no WebKit for
displaying HTML. There was an XML parser, but there was no
object-oriented, easy-to-use Cocoa XML parser. The Cocoa bindings
technology didn’t exist. HTTP networking was poorly supported.
The XML-RPC support (for weblog editing) was so crashy at the time
that I had to write my own XML-RPC client.
(When I was a boy, we used to have walk ten miles through the snow
before we could retain an object. If we wanted to use
autorelease we had to go without lunch.)
You can’t draw a conclusion from one example, but I’ll
give it a try anyway. The conclusion might be that #2—pick
something difficult to implement—is the better choice.
I say that because it gives you a chance to be first at something, to
do something new. If it’s a good idea and you’ve done a
good job, your chances of success are good.
On the other hand, you could probably do three easy apps in the time
it takes to do one difficult app. So there’s definitely that to
consider.
However, while I can’t talk about most of what happens at WWDC,
I can tell you it’s utterly predictable that, in six months or
less, there will be 15 apps that do X, 20 that do Y, and 30 that do
Z—just because X, Y, and Z have been made so darn easy to do.
But those aren’t apps, they’re statistics.
The Eight Biggest Tech Flops Ever: I haven't even heard of half of these: Data Play? Magic Cap? Go?
WebTV: A type of internet appliance that used a TV, instead of a monitor, to display web pages. Initially popular with the tech-averse when it shipped in 1996, Microsoft would buy the company for $425 million a year later. But when sales stalled at around a million users, someone woke up and realized that low-resolution TVs are lousy at displaying emails and web pages. Microsoft has since renamed WebTV MSN TV, but it's not any better. If you're reading this on a WebTV - or an MSN TV -- I'm sorry for calling your kid ugly, but get yourself a real computer. You'll like it a whole lot better.
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Paddling Out
to Catch the Enterprise Wave
"From the shore, they look like tiny dots slowly making their way out past the breakers. They're the software vendors positioning themselves to catch the Enterprise RSS wave. My, that's a lot of tiny dots...." [MoonWatcher]
RSS was big in 2004, but next year is going to be something else. It's killing me that I can't say more, but I know of two major library vendors that will make big announcements about RSS in 2005. It's going to be a fun year!Chinese New Year - 2002 is Year of the
Horse
Chinese New Year - 2002 is Year of the
Horse 01/22/2004 10:20 AM
¨§ § ¨§ § .. Chinese New Year - 2002 is the Year of the Horse .. Welcome to 4700 .. Monkey .. 4700chinapage.com/newyear.html
track this site | 5 linksNine Crazy Ideas in Science
Nine Crazy Ideas in Science 12/02/2003 12:27 AM
Slashdot Dec 1 2003 6:52PM ETUpdate: SMART Ideas 4.1
Update: SMART Ideas 4.1 05/06/2004 10:07 AM
SMART Ideas is a cross platform concept-mapping program with multi-level diagrams, links and file attachments, multiple views, integration with the SMART Board interactive whiteboard, and more.Book giving ideas
Book giving ideas 12/19/2004 03:21 PM
Not from me this time, though if I read more new books I would recommend some too you. This one comes from the New York Times: 100 Notable Books of the Year. This year the [New York Times] Book Review has selected 100 Notable Books from those reviewed since the Holiday Books issue of Dec. 7, 2003. Sadly I've only read one on the entire list, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan, the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America, which was great. 2004 has been my most pathetic year for reading. I used to read the number of books I've read this year in a week back in the day. Hopefully 2005 will be different.Boston Ideas bl0g
Boston Ideas bl0g 06/08/2004 03:31 PM
Scott Kirsner is blogging the Boston Ideas conference. (I blogged it yesterday, at the same url.) Music, stem cells, the brain, biological computers......Mac Founders Push for New Ideas
Mac Founders Push for New Ideas 01/06/2004 05:42 AM
The crew that put together the first Mac is celebrating its 20th birthday, but some are disappointed over the apparent lack of innovation in personal computers. By Daniel Terdiman.Mac Founders Push For New Ideas
Mac Founders Push For New Ideas 01/06/2004 10:45 AM
The crew that put together the first Mac is celebrating its 20th birthday, but some are disappointed over the apparent lack of innovation in personal computers. By Daniel Terdiman (Wired News via MyAppleMenu)Wild & Crazy CPU Ideas
Wild & Crazy CPU Ideas 07/09/2004 08:14 PM
Well, nobody could call this anything but far-fetched, but it makes for good late-Friday relief: Paul Murphy thinks Apple should switch over to SPARC processors. Hey, Iβm down with that, think of the employee discounts.New Political Protest Ideas
New Political Protest Ideas 06/14/2004 12:57 PM
Signal Orange has an idea to protest the Republican National Convention. Sounds a lot more effect than some other plans going around.Adobe Ideas Conference
Adobe Ideas Conference 04/04/2005 01:01 PMI'm at the Adobe Ideas conference today, so posting may be a little slow. Or non-existant because this is the first conference I've been to in, oh, 4 years that doesn't have wifi available to the attendees (I had to retreat to Bryant Park for lunch to soak up some free wireless). For all the talk about connectivity during the keynote, there isn't much evidence of it so far. :(
Anyway, Adobe announced Creative Suite 2 today, as rumored. One feature that got the crowd oohing and aahing was the Vanishing Point tool in Photoshop. It lets you map the perspective out on an image and then place text, images, etc in the proper perspective on that map. Perhaps some more later when I get to a connection again.
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