When I was younger I would get strep throat at least once a year and since my tonsils are already pretty large, my throat would get close to closing up all the way.
Its been probably 7 years since the last time I can remember having strep throat until the other day when I was in Chicago for some IBM Workflow Web Content Management training and on day 2 my body just fell apart. I was sweating, my muscules acked like the flu, I was extremely tired, terrible headaches and fever. It wasn’t good at all but I did make it through most of the final class.
Now a few days later I’ve called in sick to work and even though I know things are just pilling up (fast), I can’t do anything but lay in bed for 18 hours out of the day.
Jodi made me go to the doctor and he confirmed I had strep throat. They were also nice enough to give me a shot in my butt that (according to the nurse), has made some men cry. I didn’t cry but my knuckles hurt from squeezing so hard from the pain. It was either that or take pills for 10 days and with having such a hard time with swollowing, I decided to just get it over with.
So right now I’m up for probably another 15-20 minutes before I go back to bed again. It sucks and I can’t wait to get healthy again.
posted on March 30, 2006| 7:06 PM EST
Notes taken by someone sitting next to me during a session at SXSW 2006, I asked if they could send me their notes because they were better than mine.
Speaker: James Surowiecki - New Yorker columnist
Eugenics founder story that’s in book. Francis Galton at fair in England. People were asked to guess the weight of the ox after it was slaughtered and dressed. Big crowd - some experts (butchers), most not experts. Galton took all guesses and applied statistical analysis. Turned out that crowds guess was right on target.
Under the right circumstances, groups of people can be remarkably intelligent - smarter than the smartest person in the group individually.
Who wants to be a millionaire: call a friend (pre-determined 5 experts) gets question right 2/3s of the time, crowd gets it right 91% of the time
Google’s page algorithm would be an internet example - leveraging collective intelligence to return search results. HP started its own internal stock market to forecast which printers/products would sell. Let people buy shares at lunchtime. Google does this also - guess how many subscribers will gmail have by ______ date?
Race tracks and stock market are other examples of collective performing better than the experts.
How does this work? Aggregates judgments of people who all have some knowledge or intuition
Key is under the right conditions.
- need a way to aggregate people’s judgments, and has to be genuine bottom up decision making
- cognitive diversity - diverse crowds are far more wise than non-diverse; expands range of info crowd has access to; group has wider range of potential solutions to draw on which allows them to make better decisions (higher IQ group is less successful than a group with a lower IQ but higher level of diversity); our society is heavily invested in the idea of experts and leaders - experts and leaders are relevant but you shouldn’t rely on them solely when making judgments; experts do not generally have a good grasp of their own biases, blind spots and weaknesses - solution is to cast a wide net to solve problems; diversity also helps get around problem of group-think (devil’s advocates are very important to wise group - if someone is articulating the other position, you’ll think harder about your solution); don’t want same person to always be devil’s advocate though, it needs to rotate and arise from people’s genuine opinions
- independence - you want people to make judgments based on their own knowledge, intuition and opinions; we place too much of a premium on consensus; it leads to watered down decisions; want people to think for themselves and tap into the individuality or your group won’t be wise; independence is hard because 1. humans are by nature imitative; this is because imitation works most of the time; imitation if problematic in a group because it prevents tapping into individual knowledge; 2. most of us are concerned about our reputations; we want to appear credible so we do what our peers are doing; it is better to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally; being unconventional is hard
The net is a perfect medium for satisfying the “right conditions”. The knowledge we’re looking for or the info we want is often in places we would not think to look. We also overestimate our ability to figure out who experts are. The reality is that we don’t.
The net is also a tool that breaks down independence. It makes it easy to get locked into relatively small worlds (good for working on projects together or creating a small community). From the perspective of collective intelligence, this is a problem. You pay attention only to those things that are familiar. The randomized sources of info and voices is important if you want to tap into the wisdom. Keep your ties weak rather than strong.
Story of USS Scorpion - sub lost at sea but spot Navy group came up with based on scenarios they thought scorpion might have run in to.
Q&A
Psychological focus group research: They are asking people in their research what they think and what they think other people would say. This can be good but it can also be dangerous. You have to be able to filter appropriately. Within focus groups, group leaders have to be very careful not to dictate what the direction of the decision should be and not talk too much as that can effect the comments/decisions of the focus group.
Does wisdom of crowds apply to creative endeavors? No - wisdom of crowds needs a right answer in some sense and people need to agree on the problem that they are trying to solve; these two are difficult with art; its difficult to say that there is a right answer to what makes one piece of art better than another piece.
Collective intelligence models could be useful in solving crimes; juries are a little more difficult because the demand for unanimity makes it difficult right from the start.
Market research could benefit from collective intelligence - don’t ask individual what “Would you buy this?” buy but ask them “Do you think other people would buy this?” Use it like Hollywood market forecasters predict who will win an Oscar
Wrapped up with thought that we live in a strange time. We are seeing the possibilities of collective intelligence and emergence (some ideas behind Web 2.0 are attempt to harness them) At the same time, we seem to need and trust “leaders” and experts This collective intelligence model that allows info to filter from the bottom up makes us suspicious of that info (diffuses its power as info) because we don’t trust info that doesn’t come from experts
Not sure what solution is or if we’ll even be able to solve it but it’s an interesting problem to work on and one with lots of potential to change society
posted on March 19, 2006| 6:16 PM EST
Folksonomy is a lot of things but I’m going to focus on the popular tagging aspect of it. The problem I have with tagging is that it’s not clear on how I can/should use it. Thinking deeper into the problem i’ve realized my problem is wanting to tag things in 2 different ways and the current model of tagging doesn’t support this.
The first way is for myself or coming up with my own classification for the world of information I sift through. This is extremely useful for faster recall and in even smaller levels, individual sites that I want to come back to often (think bookmarks).
The second way of tagging is for the better of the community. Using the same classification the rest of the world is using to describe certain pieces of information for better community recall. This isn’t taxonomy just yet because you’re not forced to define something in a certain way. The best example I can think of to describe community tagging is “a measure of re-affirming tags that have already been defined to information or adding tags for the benefit of clarity for the community as a whole”.
For me, I might only need one or two tags and I’ll know to always go to one or two of those tags to find the information I want. Whereas using community tagging, you need to think how others may look for the same information and providing a clear/relevant tag(s) to the data being defined.
The Beyond Folksonomies: Knitting Tag Clouds for Grandma panel I left earlier today made me feel a bit better about what I’ve been struggling with. They didn’t have any answers to the problem but openly clarified there is a problem and that we need to figure it out.
I wasn’t quite sure people or the community knew that and hearing them say so reassured dramatic thought being done by many on the issue.
Two things I haven’t thought about (brought up in the panel) was the value of tagging on media (music, video, etc…) and the value of context.
For media, let’s take video - video is extremely hard to search through so tagging becomes quite valuable in letting users know what information is within said video.
For content, don’t avoid it by only using tags, let content provide the context to the tag. I’ll write about this part a bit later.
So - those are my initial thoughts on tagging, folksonomy, tagsplotion, whatever you want to call it.
posted on March 12, 2006| 5:33 PM EST
Well, we made it to Austin, Texas last night and got to our rooms at a pretty good time (around 5pm). After settling in we had a chance to run around the town a bit and break our minds away from all the things that are going on at work.
7dots (now with a new logo) was the topic of the night for about an hour. Rich is getting started on the new design and we hope to have that done in a few days.
In the mean time, we’re all catching up with things we’ve been trying to do at home but just never had time. I read through all 288(ish) feeds that were sitting in my RSS reader and started back in my book The Art of Projecet Management, which I hope to get pretty far into this week. I’d like to even write some working models on how we can use what I’m learning at TIG, time willing.
So things are off to a good start - let the week begin.
posted on March 10, 2006| 1:46 PM EST
In order to keep the world looking at new and exciting websites - I’m happy to announce the newly designed and developed JP’s Coffee website.
You can sign up for a monthly newsletter, read how they got started and if you ever decided to get the same thing at JP’s because you didn’t have time to read the full menu - You’re now able to spend all the time you want in front of the menu; Picking out a drink or snack that’s just right.
What’s probably the coolest part of the site is how we’re sucked all their photos from Flickr into a full gallery. You can even upload your own photos if you have a Flickr account.
So check out the site and let me know what you think. Yea, I know the “Shop” section isn’t done yet - should be live in a month.
posted on March 5, 2006| 9:52 PM EST
