TED 2009: Reboot Sessions

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It was a curious start to TED with Juan Enriquez providing humour and provocation in equal measure.  The presentation was very engaging but also a little strange.  He started off with comments about the economic crisis and some interesting stats about mandatory government spending.  He appeared to be calling for smaller government but I’m not sure whether I picked this up correctly or not. Anyway, it would be interesting to see some similar stats for NZ.

Then he moved on to three big ‘reboot’ themes:

  • The first fully programmable cell
  • Bio parts – this was very freaky … scientists are growing human teeth in petri dishes as well as regrowing windpipes, ears, bladders and presumably all imaginable types of body parts.  It felt a little yuck to be honest.  I can see that if I lost an ear I’d like to grow a new one but it was all very sci fi!
  • Robotics – this was also scary.  The footage of the Boston Dynamics ‘Big Dog’ robot was both compelling and repulsive.  This robot really moves like a creature and it was shown in the clip as moving through snow in an extremely lifelike way.

This was a good segue into P.W. Singer’s talk about war and specifically about the use of robots for war.  He had lots of examples of the scary machines that are being built but was most interesting when he talked about the ethical isues:

  • Watching more but experiencing less
  • Losing the context, strategy and humanity

Most telling was the anecdote about drone pilots.  These guys fly drones in war zones from the U.S. – a bit like playing a video game.  So after an 8 hour day of war they drive home, join the family for dinner and help the kids with their homework.  Apparently their rates of PTSD are higher than for normal soldiers because of the psychological balancing of experiences that has to occur.

Thank goodness for Bill Gates who was the last speaker in the Reboot Sessions.  Bill is not the most engaging speaker but his messages are.  He talked about the work that his foundation is doing in health and in teaching and really only scatched the surfaced.  I could see his passion when he talked about these being interesting problems – especially interesting because they are currently unsolved and complex.  I thought Chris Anderson, the TED curator was a little strange in the Q & A with Bill afterwards, ‘joking’ about Microsoft bugs and asking about epitaphs but maybe they have a different off-screen relationship.

The takeaway from this talk was that while it might appear that by reducing disease in 3rd world countries this contributes to population growth what happens within a generation is that population growth drops as parents no longer need to have lots of kids so that they can be looked after in their old age.  Great information.

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EDRMS: How do we know what users want?

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I’ve been talking with several organisations recently about how they would know what it is that users want in systems to help them manage their information (be it EDRMS, ECM or SharePoint).

And you might recall that one of the trends from KM World is that of letting users decide – putting a smorgasbord of features and functionality in front of the user on the basis that only the strong (the things that users like) will survive.

At the same time, I’ve come across this interesting paragraph from Gary Klein’s book, Sources of Power.  Sources of Power is about how people in high pressure situations make quick and good decisions.  Yes, I know it doesn’t really apply to information management – I don’t get any urgent calls for taxonomy building – but there are some useful insights about mental models.

Anyway, one of the comments that Klein makes is: “In a marketing research project for a large company we studied how consumers imagined a product in action…Many consumers could not formulate a mental simulation to describe how some common products really worked…We should be careful in assuming that consumers know how products work.  Some were using the product inappropriately, getting unsatisfactory results, and blaming the product.”

Does that sound familiar?

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Top 100 Tools for Learning now out

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The Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies has released its top 100 tools for learning based on contributions from 223 individuals who each shared their top 10 tools for learning.  The full list is somewhat mindnumbing to read but if you click through to the tool categories display they usefully organise the tools and then identify the top tool, the top free tool and other tools in each category.  For example, under mindmapping tools they show Mindmanager as the top tool, FreeMind as the top free tool and MindMeister and Bubbl.us as other tools in the same category.

As is often the case with these things it is also interesting to see the tools that didn’t make it.  My current favourite, Evernote, is missing.  What about you?  Any of your favs not on the list?

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Wikis that work

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This month Computerworld profiles four organisations that are successfully using wikis to manage a range of tasks including technical training and project management.  It is helpful to see some successful models emerging and also to hear where organisations feel this approach is not serving them (see the comments).

We’re using a wiki successfully to hold, manage and build our methodology around a particular piece of work that we do.  This is giving us massive leverage in terms of how quickly (and cost-effectively) we can deliver this service to our customer.  It also has the effect of our virtual brains parallel processing and the output being recorded.  Thus it is combining, in one place, technical insights, business analysis insights, recordkeeping insights and strategic insights with all searchable in a variety of different ways that can combine each of these usefully. 

A key to success has been that the wiki is essentially where the work happens – that is, people aren’t doing something and then recording it separately in some unrelated system.  Instead the thinking, consulting and reviewing is all happening in the one place.

Hat tip: Bill Ives

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Confused by content, document, records management?

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CMS Watch has a cool ‘London Underground’ map of the major players and where they play.  Some of the vendors we’re used to seeing in NZ aren’t on here but it’s really interesting to see how CMS watch categorise the different products and how they show the relationships between the different functionality.

 

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Having problems sleeping?

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I recently posted this on a discussion forum.

Sleep is so important to me.  I know when I’m going to get sick (a cold or the flu) and it seems to always be related to a time when I’m particularly tired.

This has always been difficult because I used to be a 10 hour a night person.  I kept waiting to need less sleep as I got older. I tried ‘willpower’ forcing myself to get into a habit of 6-7 hours sleep and for me I just ended up getting progressively more and more tired.

I think, in the past couple of years, I’ve just about cracked it. We’re all physically different – this is what works for me and it’s a combination of things.

Sleeping environment
I have dark curtains, a really comfortable bed and bedding. I also always sleep alone. This might be unpalatable for a lot of people but in terms of deep sleep wow! what an improvement.

Regular sleeping pattern
A regular sleep pattern really helps. What I do is calculate back from the time I have to get up. So, it used to be that if I need to get up at 7 that meant going to bed at 9.

Related to this, I stopped waking up to an alarm (I still do this if I need to catch an early plane) but mostly I wake up when I wake up . It also helps to only occassionally vary this. So my weekend sleep habits are much the same as my weekday ones.

So, now in conjunction with the above here’s the one thing that has significantly reduced (by 1-2 hours) the amount of sleep I need per day and it’s completely counterintuitive.

For the past 18 months I have started seriously exercising. This is not just a walk or a short run but stuff that gets a sweat up 5-6 days a week. It doesn’t seem to matter what I’m doing – so it can be cardio based or strength based but it really makes a difference.

So now I’m on a 10-6 sleep routine (8 hours give or take) and feel really refreshed when I wake up.

This is based on those 8 hours being really good quality.

Here’s my last tip. Sometimes it’s hard to get good quality sleep despite creating a good sleep environment. For me this happens in two ways . Firstly I can be too excited about something and my brain doesn’t switch off. Secondly, I might be travelling and in a strange place sometimes including crossing time zones. I use hypnosis here.

About 6 months or so ago I bought Adam Eason’s deep sleep programme and it is fantastic. I couldn’t tell you at a detail level what happens in the sessions because I can’t remember. My experience is that Adam talks me gently into a trance, and then after about 20 minutes or so talks me out again at which point I turn off the iPod and go straight to sleep. Great stuff!

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The Beautiful Aim

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At the start of this year I wrote a post about the ’10,000 hours’ concept – the ballpark period of time that it takes to become an expert at something.  Now here’s an attempt to accelerate the process.

The Beautiful Aim is an experiment.  Imagine a 23 year old man who has not played soccer since he was 16 and who was an average player in his youth.  If he harbours dreams of playing in the premiership league is it too late for him?  Most of us would think certainly yes.

However, John Grinder (one of the co-founders of Neuro Linguistic Programming) has stepped up to try and prove us wrong.  And, at the same time, to demonstrate tangibly that NLP modelling can do what it is claimed to be able to do.  In modelling the skills, attitudes and beliefs of exemplars (people who already exhibit excellence) are identified and broken down so that they can be replicated by others.  This theorectically cuts down on the time it takes to learn a particular skill. 

Despite being a very late start at 23 already, Arton Belaci, the subject of The Beautiful Aim is attempting to make the premier league in just 12 months.  He will have a team of ‘head’ people, ‘body’ people and ‘football’ people.

I wouldn’t like to predict whether this project will be successful or not but I have signed up for the updates.  If these guys can pull it off then this will explode how we think about human potential.

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