Rare but spectacular

The recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan is reminder that natural disasters have a magnitude of their own, and irrespective of where they strike, there is not much we puny humans can do. All the technology one can deploy is, at best an early warning, at worst a dangerous sense of false security. At the end of it all, one can only hope the human cost of the disaster is minimized.

I am still hoping that things start to get better soon, especially for the tens of thousands that are without basic amenities in sub-zero conditions. But through it all, I cannot but help consider certain aspects about the general reaction to this disaster. It is difficult to be objective when human suffering is involved, but here is an attempt.

During the first couple days of the disaster I realized a certain detachment in me with regards to the earthquake and tsunami. As if the news did not really get through to me. It was not until I took pause at the details emanating from the various news reports did the full impact of the disaster sink in. I realized that I was, unconsciously, tuned out to disasters on the news. Like the boy who cried wolf, our media is obsessed with keeping us abreast of everything, as if it is critical for my survival. When every day and every headline is blared out at the highest volume, how can one distinguish between the latest antics of a movie star and a disaster that is impacting millions? When every news programs promises to "follow the latest developments" for me, it is increasingly difficult to determine what news I care about.

The markets, predictably reacted by falling. Both the Japanese markets and US markets moved in step with news emanating from the disaster zone. But for all the rationality of the markets there is a very little linkage between the actual economic impact of the disaster. The image on the right is an example of the (ir)rationality of the markets. The real question is not whether the market is rational, but the fact that this is yet another drum beat into the echo chamber of the daily news cycle. Yet another source of ominous calamitous predictions of impossibly dire consequences.

The third aspect, which is also the reason for the title of this post, is Nuclear power. Most news coverage has been (mis)using terms like meltdown and radiation exposure, because they sound great on the evening news. What this does is two things. Firstly it takes away from coverage of the real tragedy, thousands needing basic necessities along with the real rebuilding that needs to happen. Secondly it helps bring about suboptimal decision making for our future, due to the inherent bias we have to fear the rare but spectacular.

Power generation is a dangerous endeavor, be it wind, coal or nuclear. Even though wind generates less than one percent of world's power, it accounts for a fatality rate of 0.15 deaths per terawatt-hour. Compared to nuclear power which accounts for 15% of world's production and accounts for 0.0009 deaths per terawatt-hour. Coal, on the other hand, clocks in at 161 deaths per terawatt-hour. This is a similar bias as seen in the argument for lack of safety in air transportation.

As a commentator on Marketplace puts it...

... a 9-plus Richter scale earthquake and tsunami represent about as extreme an event as any nuclear reactor could ever face. If the danger from this shock is contained, nuclear will have passed its most extreme test. It's like the movie "Apollo 13" -- this is either nuclear's worst disaster or finest hour.

There is so much that we can understand, learn and admire from the people facing incredible difficulties in Japan. The best we can do is help in our own way. The worst is fall prey to the constant drumbeat of fear and let the rare-but-spectacular determine how we decide to live the biggest chunk of our rather mundane lives.

Update: An unbelievably awesome rant from TechCrunch, about the hysteria surrounding the nuclear "apocalypse".

Mental helpdesk number

Much has been written about our ability (or rather inability) to truly multitask. Arguments range from the increased overhead in task switching to our inability to focus fully on one more than one task at a time. Here is a new to the mix - bandwidth crunches in our mental router.

Apparently, the underlying phenomenon is well known. When we need to decide a couple of tasks in quick succession, there is a measurable delay if the second task starts too close to the first. In other words, tasks get processed in our brain, one after the other. This is called Psychological Refractory Period. Researchers have recently discovered that there is a part of our brain, that acts like a router, and when there is too much traffic, there can be a delay while the outstanding requests are cleared out. In other words, questions go to one location, setup as the first level helpdesk number. These are then processed and handed over to more specialized parts of the brain that can then complete the requested activity. Guess the old adage was correct:

One thing at a time,
And that done well,
Is a very good thing,
As many can tell

From an evolutionary point of view, this is such a sweet example of functional specialization in the brain. A simple architecture, but that is as scalable as possible. Rather than have each part of the brain understand everything, everything is done in specialized pockets, including the generalized functions that specialize in nothing more than pushing paper. Examples of this specialization abound, including this one that identifies the brain center that tracks time.

Back to the original point. Not only is multi-tasking unsustainable from a macro point of view, the brain processing itself is set up to be incompatible with doing more than one things at the same time. If you are talking and driving at the same time, the fact that your driving decisions are queued up awaiting the finalization of your retort to the angry spouse is not only scary, but a sure shot recipe for disaster.

Uncanny Valley

Hiroshi Ishiguro is an interesting man. He is a Japanese roboticist who works on trying to create extremely life-like humanoid robots. And in doing so, he is bravely testing the depths of the uncanny valley.

Which begs the question - what is the uncanny valley. This is an idea, proposed back in 1970, that states that the more realistic a robot is, the more empathetic a response it evokes in humans. At some point, when a robot begins strongly resembling a human, this empathy changes into sharp revulsion. The empathy returns as the robot becomes indistinguishably human. This is the reason why the kid in the movie Up looked cute and Jolie in Beowulf was creepy.

Which begs the question, why bother trying to leap over it? And that is where, I think, a lot of the promise of robotics seemed to have been frittered away. There seems to be an inordinate amount of effort spent to replicate the human anatomy, when it may not necessarily be the best suited for “robotification”. If form follows function, there are very few functions where the human form is best suited to perform optimally. The human form is built for versatility not optimum capability. For any specific action that needs to be performed, there probably is a non-human form better suited to act. Why them spend the time re-creating the “jack-of-all-trades” human form?

Then there is the human face - a really versatile communication mechanism - that Hiroshi Ishiguro wants to recreate as a robot. For that purpose, he created the Telenoid R1. Now the idea of this robot is to have an overgrown embryo in your hands, that would re-create the expressions of a person far away. In effect a telephone that displays the expressions of someone far away. But did you look at it? Is that something you want to hold in your hands while talking to a loved one? And what is wrong with a video call?

Coming back to the reason for the post, there are some valleys that need to be crossed. There are others that need to to stay put, so that they can act as a moat between robots and humans.

Condemned to browse

Slate magazine has an awesome science section. Found this article in the section. Now I finally understand why I love Stumbleupon so much, even though I do not always spend time with the results of the stumble.

Research, as quoted in the article, has identified two distinct types of stimulation centers in the body - one that deals with seeking/wanting and another that deals with liking.

Seeking or wanting is the dopamine-based ultimate mammalian motivational engine. It is what makes us want to get up, seek, be curious, forage, crave, expect etc. Scientists have found that this is distinct and different from the opoid system of experiencing pleasure and satisfaction. In other words, the seeking system stimulates us to hunt, and the pleasure center makes us happy after success.

In human beings, the stimulation of the seek is stronger than the pleasure of success. Which makes evolutionary sense. Any animal with the pleasure center stronger than the seeking center quickly dies out, though completely satisfied. Humans, along with many of our contemporary mammals love the stimulation of seeking more than the satiation of success.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I love to stumble so much. And you like to use Facebook, or twitter, or Google. Our evolutionary seek centers are driving us to distraction with the easily availability of the 'seek'.

Review: Enterprise 2.0

A little while ago, I was able to get my hands on a signed copy of Andrew Mcafee's Enterprise 2.0.

The book starts off talking about the key idea behind the 2.0 tag, introducing the power of "emergence" in social networking. It then goes on to introduce 2.0 technologies, illustrating their impact on businesses through four case studies. A couple of quick frameworks to think about social networking technologies are introduced next, along with the key benefits of the Enterprise 2.0 space.

Part two of the book takes a more pragmatic look, cautioning that most of the benefits will be available over a long haul. The book also covers some key failure scenarios, ending with a road map for businesses in the 2.0 world. The last chapter deals with the question of organizational behavior and its relationship to tools and technologies offered by Web 2.0

The book was an illuminating, sometimes thought-provoking and relatively light read, even though it felt like some of the pit falls were pooh poohed quite easily. Also, while the framework of tie-strength bull's eye was a useful way of articulating the need for 2.0 technologies, it didn't feel as involved with the actual plan for taking a business down the path to Enterprise 2.0. A couple things I felt strongly about:

Legal discovery risk - One of the precepts of the book is that moving from a channel of communication (e.g. email) to a platform (e.g. wiki) doesn't necessarily increase discovery risk related to litigation. The support? Andrew did not see any in the large number of businesses that have thus far implemented 2.0 technologies. Put this way, I am sure the argument seems shallow. Emails has been around for the good part of three decades, and only now have they really started to become the target of discovery requests and increasingly part of legal proceedings. Flippant emails form great news headlines, and even if the legal risk was zero, reputation damage would not be inconsequential. There is no reason to think a platform would fare any better.

Uncertainty - 2.0 emergence takes time. Social media presumes a flat user base, that is largely unconcerned with direction, that seemingly generates something awesome from thin air. There is too much uncertainty in that vision, uncertainty businesses do not like. Uncertainty of deliverable, time, order, ownership may work well when the stakes are lower. But when having a job is critical to taking care of the kids at home, it is too much to hope jobs stick around long enough for something awesome that may emerge out of uncoordinated actions. Again, I am sure that sounds extreme, but it does illustrate the oxymoron Enterprise 2.0.

At the end, the approach that the author lays out for a company to implement 2.0 technologies is tellingly similar to that of a pre-2.0 IT implementation. Identify problem and vision > don't expect dramatic wins > communicate > redesign processes > and measure. I believe, 2.0 technologies are answers to specific questions, as opposed to revolutionary tools just waiting to deliver multi-pronged increases in productivity. It seems more to be a case of 2.0 enabled Enterprise, than Enterprise 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0

Andrew McAfee, author of a new book called Enterprise 2.0, spoke at an internal conference today. Very energetic persona, with an interesting pitch. And on a side note, that allowed some of us to grab a signed copy of the book for further study.

The upshot of the pitch was that the same forces that caused the shift of the web from 1.0 to 2.0 are awaiting a shot at transforming corporate information management culture. Historically, the way to think about information management in a company has been built around the structured, hierarchical approaches. Moving to tools and processes of the 2.0 web, includes a culture shift of leaving the controlled process paradigm and instead accept a more free form style, that almost required faith that it will work. Some companies that have already moved to this culture have started reaping benefits. And companies that adopt these technologies and cultural tenets stand to gain a many-fold increase in productivity.

Reading the book is, therefore, next on the agenda.

Scientific denial

An interesting watch - for a variety of reasons. This is an issue that generally seems to be splitting a lot of educated people down the middle. While no one seems to deny the impact science has had on humans, few seem to want to trust science either.

Maybe it is all down the the definitions. As I grew up, my vision of a 'scientist' was someone in a lab, highly intelligent, educated and motivated, pursuing a topic with a single minded dedication. A scientist, I believed, did not have to deal with the worldly problems & pressures like the rest of us - as if they lived in a sterile environment, just like in their own experiments.

Unfortunately, this is seldom the case. Scientists, live in and share the same world as us. And there is no 'science' that stands alone, in unblemished purity. So when people attack science, or they think they are, they really are not. They are attacking a hybrid cabal of scientists, businessmen, government and media. The reason they are attacking this cabal, is because the cabal is advertising itself as 'science'. When we have scientifically proven face creams, that are more in-your-face than the lack of correlation between vaccines and autism - how can you really distinguish between the two.

I don't believe the intelligent disbeliever is directly questioning science as defined by the scientific method, but what is questionable is the cabal claiming indulgence in and of the scientific method. That is not to say there there will always be someone that will never believe, but instead want to take things to their illogical extreme conclusions. I guess they believe they are 'scientists' in their own right.

Science & Morality

Have always been a fan of the TED website, and their collection of talks. Having just heard one of their videos, I was browsing the site, trying to learn a bit more about them - turns out, they actually encourage embedding and discussing their videos. Cue, glint in eye. So, here we are.

Morality, in the sense discussed in the video below is the definition of right and wrong, irrespective of what people think. Sam Harris, argues that, on the contrary to what many people assume, science is capable of reaching such definite answers on its own, based on facts, and can therefore complete eliminate the need for a morality-based declarations. Well thought and presented of course - but for me the crux of the matter lay in the Q&A at the end. When asked to prove the immorality of the Burqa, Sam scientifically fell back to the answer the basically said - we may not have a rigorous proof now, but given the rate of our scientific progress, we will eventually get there.

In his answer, I believe, Sam was absolutely correct and negligent. Yes, science will eventually get there, but people need an answer now - on what is correct and what is not. People have all been created with consciousness, but a varying degree of intellect. Waiting for an intellect-appealing morality, that may eventually get here is a very bad survival skill. Instead, society taking advantage of the common denominator, appealed to human consciousness. Turns out, morality is a lot like having immortal parents. Even if you replace parents with Man with beard in sky, things work just as well. True, such a replacement has side-effects, a lot of side-effects, but at least it kept humanity going till science would eventually evolve to appeal to the most intellectually-challenged among us.