Category Archives: Web 2.0

Large city, small town – human social networks are very similar but can carry very different information loads

Even in large cities, we build tightly-knit communities
[Via Boing Boing]

A study of group clustering–do your friends know each other?–shows that it does not change with city size. [via Flowing Data]

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towns.png

An average person in the small town (population – 4233) has 6 connections who have a 25% chance of knowing each other. In a large town (population – 564.657), the number of friends is 11 but the chance that they will know each other remains 25%.

This fits a lot of previous data – the majority of any community connect with one another to a very high degree. The difference between living in a large city or a small town lies in how big the network is, not in its shape.

And, it shows that the size of the network increases faster than the size of the community. Not only are there more people to connect to in a large city. People in a large city connect to more people than those in smaller groups.

But the chance that those people know each other remains about the same. That is, the structure of the social network does not change. No matter the size of the town or the size of the network, about 25% of the people will know each other.

city size.png

Interestingly, as the size of the town increases, the networks get larger, and people make contact with other people in the networks more often. So not only are the networks scaling ‘linearly’ but the total number of contacts increases super-linearly.

If we look at the total cumulative calls made, we see that more calls are made to more people in large towns than in small towns. 

cities.png

What they were then able to show in the paper is that because of the types of connections seen in bigger cities, information spreads much more rapidly here than in smaller communities.

In a world dealing with rapidly changing environments and increasingly more complex problems, the ability to move information around rapidly so as to create knowledge and wisdom becomes critical.

But it also shows that people in large cities are not isolated at all but maintain rich connections with others. We live in communities that are about as tightly knit in large cities as in smaller ones. They are just larger.

Fundraising for our #CrowdGrant project, Consider the Facts, is almost over

Asteroid crowd funding 001

Consider the Facts: moving people to deliberative thinking is an experiment in several ways. The project itself involves experimentation to examine a hypothesis.

But the process of raising money for research through crowdfunding is also an experiment. Can a group of people in the public sphere create, vet and support active scientific research? What is required to make that happen?

SpreadingScience has learned a lot and has some answers to those questions. One final one is whetehr we will reach our goal.

$25 would help a lot. Please help us answer that question.

Running a #CrowdGrant project, like Consider the Facts, can be hard work

Happy face 042

Consider the Facts is the most successful finalist in the #CrowdGrant Challenge sponsored by RocketHub and Popular Science so far. That did not just happen.

Crowdfunding projects usually succeed because they activate a community to action. Maybe it’s fans of a TV show. Or space enthusiasts who want to send up a satellite.

If that community is not already there, then it must be created. That takes some real time to figure out ways to get the word out. Comunities do not often spontaneously arise. It taks a lot fo work finding and nurturing those contacts.

People want to help but they also want to see how they might be helped. 

I’ve been planning basic research projects for some time, looking to create a community that will create, vet and support research projects independent of academia. What happens when people with good questions can get them answered?

So I had planned on doing something small, start with friends and family, and bootstrap myself to a community. Then this opportunity to work with Popular Science came along.

Now I can experiment to see if Popular Science’s Community might help help create this sort of a community faster.

We shall see.

Our #crowdgrant project is number 1. 14% of the way there. Will an asteroid save us all?

[iframe src=”http://www.rockethub.com/projects/28741-consider-the-facts-moving-people-to-deliberative-thinking/widgets/panel” allowtransparency=”true” frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no” width=”288″ height=”416]

I have been juggling a lot since the launch. Keeping all the social media on board can be tricky, especially since this project is an experiment.

Historically using stories—ones that engage rapid, rules of thumb thinking first and create a counterintuitive reaction—has been a way to teach people complex social lessons.

Can it be used to teach them complex scientific lessons? That is what Consider the Facts hopes to find out. To do that, we need some tools. That is why we need your help.

Consider the Facts wants to answer a basic question: Can using a modern, positive fable move people to utilize more of their slow deliberative thinking in order to engage complex problems?

Aesop’s fables, Christ’s parables and Kipling’s Just-So Stories all used the method of presenting complex ideas within a paradoxical story: “the tortoise is faster than the hare?”, “the Samaritan is good?” or “the alligator gave the elephant its trunk”?

“Really? Is that true? Let me think about that.”

All these stories make people stop using their rapid System 1 thinking (as discussed by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow) and utilize their System 2 as they reorient their rules of thumb to reintegrate a new view of the world surrounding them.

“I see, under some circumstances the hare could be slower than the tortoise. Good to know.” “We should not prejudge people because sometimes ‘bad’ people will do good things. Good to know.” “No way did the alligator pull the elephant’s nose and make it long. But I wonder how the trunk did form?”

In particular, the framing of Kipling’s stories actually invites deeper examination of scientific problems, not just social ones. It is this particular process that Consider the Facts will attempt to explore – can we move people to think deeply and slowly about science, not just social norms?

Scientists are trained to use slow thinking as a necessary part of their job. I cannot read any paper without dropping into System 2 thinking in order to deeply examine the data: “Do those numbers really add up?” “Does that figure actually show what the paper discusses?” “Do their procedures actually produce the results? Do the conclusions match what was described?”

System 1 thinking would read the abstract and come up with “Cancer is cured” or “Fats cause high cholesterol”. Sound familiar?

That is because most of our mainstream approaches that move information around use System 1 methods. That is why headlines are so important. Most people live in a System 1 world.

That makes sense.You had better know what to do instantly when confronted with a lion. Or wonder if that plant is good to eat. In a stable environment, System 1 thinking does a pretty good job of simulating the world. It’s good enough.

But in our complex, rapidly changing world, things are different. Our social environment is not stable. Changing technology destroys rules of thumb. System 1approaches are maladaptive, They lead people away from reality, they put people into Cargo Cult Worlds whose simulation of reality is so poor as to be dangerous.

Their rules of thumb no longer work. This results in the sort of  future shock described by Toffler. People can see that their rules of thumb do not seem to be working. Most, instead of dropping into System 2 and working things out, refuse to integrate any more information at all. They refuse to use System 2 in a way to move forward effectively.

Research shows that giving people more facts does not move them towards deliberative thinking. In truth, many people retreat even further into their Cargo Cult worlds, ignoring or rationalizing away any facts that contradict their rules of thumb. They will actually forget facts if those facts contradict their Cargo Cult World.

Shouting at them or lecturing them actually produces the opposite reaction from what is desired.

Perhaps telling them a story will. 

7 lessons for managing groups in the exponential economy learned from the elections

monster waveby Jeff Rowley Big Wave Surfer

How Team Obama’s tech efficiency left Romney IT in dust
[Via Ars Technica]

Despite running a campaign with about twice the money and twice the staff of Governor Mitt Romney’s presidential bid, President Barack Obama’s campaign under-spent Romney’s on IT products and services by $14.5 million, putting the money instead into building an internal tech team. Based on an Ars analysis of Federal Election Commission filings, the Obama campaign, all-inclusive, spent $9.3 million on technology services and consulting and under $2 million on internal technology-related payroll.

The bottom line is that the Obama campaign’s emphasis on people over capital and use of open-source tools to develop and operate its sophisticated cloud-based infrastructure ended up actually saving the campaign money. As Scott VanDenPlas, lead DevOps for Obama for America put it in an e-mail interview with Ars, “A lesson which we took to heart from 2008 [was that] operational efficiency is an enormous strategic advantage.”

The Romney campaign spent $23.6 million on outside technology services—most of it on outside “digital media” consulting and data management. It outsourced most of its basic IT operations, while the Obama campaign did the opposite—buying hardware and software licenses, and hiring its own IT department. Just how much emphasis the Obama campaign put on IT is demonstrated by the fact that the campaign’s most highly paid staff member was its CIO, Michael Slaby, with an annualized salary of about $130,000.

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Failures can be as important as successes in an exponential economy. A useful failure can inform more than some successes. The lower barriers that an exponential economy produces means that failure only presents short term costs that can be rapidly dealt with by longer term successes.

That is, a failure does not necessarily doom an effort, if that failure can be rapidly leveraged to get to success. If you wipe out, but learn from it, then when the next wave comes along, you’ll stay on top of it.

In an exponential economy, there is always another wave to successfully surf.

If, that is, the organization can understand how to manage and utilize the advantages that an exponential economy produces. Here are 7 points to consider.

Interestingly, the Obama campaign hired its IT people internally and used external infrastructure. The Romney campaign hired its IT people externally but created internal infrastructure. That seems to have made a big difference.

The Obama group attracted people interested in  a start-up environment that was also a short-term commitment – it would all be over the day after the election. Romney contracted with data consultants and such in organizations that would live on afterwards.

To one, the election was a one-shot attempt at success while for the others it was just one more notch in their consulting gun.

The former really seemed to attract a disrupter mentality much more, one who really liked finding ways around the limitations that were placed in their way, rather than a type that could just find billable hours.

“Campaigns are serious tests of your creativity and foresight,” VanDenPlas explained. “They are unpredictable, agile, and short—an 18 month, $1 billion, essentially disposable organization. Hackers can thrive in an environment like that, to a point where I’m not sure anyone else really can. Everything is over far too quickly to get boring.”

1) Hire the right type of employees. Do not hire doers when disruptors are needed. And vice versa.

Using Amazon Web Services, instead of building their own servers, allowed the Obama for America group to pay for just the amount of server space they needed, when they needed it. They could expand into servers in different regions of the US in order to reduce loads and latency. Romney had everything route to one location, which crashed.

2) Leverage the exponential economy for services and infrastructure. Better to be smart rather than perfect. Better to seek adaptability over control.

Obama for America put their money into people, not into hardware. They spent twice as much money as Romney but also had twice the staff. They actually underspent Romney on IT services and hardware.

This is what the exponential economy does  – the cost for things becomes cheaper. A smart organization puts the savings into people, which cannot be easily replaced by digital processes.

By finding the right people and paying them for being the right people, Obama for America produced over 200 apps in an 18 month period, using just about every Open Source approach that is around.

3) Use the savings from the exponential economy to pay for the best people, not for the cheapest. 

And they used their community for help:

The human factor in monitoring is huge. There are countless incidents where (OFA User Support Director) Brady Kriss notified us of pending problems derived from community help tickets.”

Romney’s group kept ORCA a secret  – such a secret that no one wants to claim they even worked on it – and did only small amounts of testing  before it was needed. They completely lost the advantage of having crowds to help perfect the apps.

Crowd feedback is important. Lots of testing and resilience is needed to create large numbers of solid apps. The fundraising segment, for example,  was “a multi-region, geolocated, three facility processor capable of a per second transaction count sufficiently high enough that we failed to be able to reach it in load testing. It could also operate if every other dependent service had failed, including its own database and every vendor.”

This complexity can only be reached after actual testing by users.

4) Get your products into the actual hands of actual people as soon as possible. They are best able to find problems.

Redundancy and adaptability go hand in hand. For example, the Obama crew created an app whose only job was to take ‘snaphots’ of the Obama for America website. If a server failed, and the site could no longer dynamically create web pages, the static ‘pictures’ could be used in the interim.

Or, more amazingly, they dealt with Hurricane Sandy, which had severe impacts with people using East Coast server farms, by replicating a complete and functional copy of their whole infrastructure on West Coast servers in 24 hours!

5) Use the benefits of the exponential economy to create resilient and redundant systems. If the price has dropped 5-fold, then you can build two systems and still save money.

The Obama campaign spent over $1 million hosting the website  that was accessible to the world. It gave a quarter of that to Amazon for hosting its own internally developed IT.

Romney’s campaign gave a single IT consulting company over $17 million  and another $16.6 million to another,  Obama for America spent $3.6 million on IT consulting to 36 different  companies.

The Innovator’s Dilemma describes how a $50,000 contract to a small group can produce much more focussed work and innovative solutions than even a $500,000 contract to a large group. They care about it more because it matters more to their bottom line.

6) Spread the work around. It is more likely to produce successful solutions than one big contract. It certainly can cost less.

And finally, 

“This is the difference,” VanDenPlas said, “between a well run professional machine and a gaggle of amateurs, posing in true Rumsfeldian fashion, who ‘don’t know what they don’t know.’ I would be shocked if such a chasm exists next cycle between the parties—these aren’t mistakes to be repeated if you want to do things like win elections.”

Because of the lower barriers to entry, and the rapidity by which successful processes can disseminate throughout society, everyone catches up quickly. You cannot expect that coming up with something first will provide much of a long term advantage.

The way to stay ahead is to have the right mixture of people cranking the DIKW cycle as fast as possible. As long as your organization can move that cycle faster and smarter than others, you will stay on top of the wave.

7)  Continuing rapid cycle development is crucial. Any advantage to accrues to disruptive innovators rapidly disappears, as others follow the path to success.

It is impossible to successfully ride every wave of change. But, creating and managing for the exponential economy can produce an organization scores well when the monster waves arrive.

Quiet spaces

solitideby ajari

Five Collaboration Tips from Introverts
[Via Greater Good]

In her new book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, attorney Susan Cain pits two starkly different work styles against each other. On one side, we have the pro-collaboration, open workspace plan camp. On the other, we have the solitude-is-good supporters clamoring to keep their offices. This debate on the best type of work style has important implications for workspace design and office environment. It also delves into fundamental questions about human nature. While we are social animals, drawn instinctively to work and cooperate with others, we are also territorial creatures who enjoy and guard our personal autonomy.

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It is important to realize that extraverts should not dominate collaborative processes and that introverts need their space. Classically, extraverts need to speak in order to think. Introverts need quiet and time in order to think.Either does very poorly if kept fully in the other’s environment.

Google starts destroying it core product – search

Google quietly removes + functionality from search
[Via Boing Boing]

It used to be that you could make Google include terms in search results by placing the + symbol before them in queries. Not any more! Writing for Wired, Andy Baio covers Google’s increasing willingness to muck around with your search queries and how to work around it. [Wired]

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It used to be that by adding the “+” forced that word to explicitly be on the page, not in some sort of meta part based on Google’s magic computers.

Now to do the same thing requires twice as much work – placing quotes around everything.

All so it can use the + symbol for Google+ like Twitter uses the hash (#).

The reason Google took over with search are many but one of the basic things was how it combined the words in the search. It allowed very simple control over a search, meaning that the often arcane commands many earlier search engines used became unnecessary.

But as time has gone on, they have meddled with this. I  often do searches where some of the words I use are not found on the page at all. It becomes a worthless search. Putting the “+” in front of a word helped make sure I would find it. Other’s have commented on this exact thing.

Now, to make it more convenient for their social service – which copies other services – they are harming their whole reason for existing.

Because it appears that the branding of “+”  for their social services is now more important than their core product. Companies fail when branding becomes such a core part of their business, especially when it overshadows core business units.

There are already beginning to appear competitors to Google search that may find a large niche here if Google continues to take it eyes off the prize.

I know I will be looking for a service that acts more like the original Google than this new bastard version.

The right balance of disruptors and stalwarts is needed

guard londonby Allan Henderson

People are biased against creative ideas, studies find
[Via Physorg]

The next time your great idea at work elicits silence or eye rolls, you might just pity those co-workers. Fresh research indicates they don’t even know what a creative idea looks like and that creativity, hailed as a positive change agent, actually makes people squirm.

“How is it that people say they want creativity but in reality often reject it?” said Jack Goncalo, ILR School assistant professor of organizational behavior and co-author of research to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science. The paper reports on two 2010 experiments at the University of Pennsylvania involving more than 200 people.

[More]

Stop Ignoring the Stalwart Worker
[Via HarvardBusiness.org]

There’s an unnoticed population of employees in business today. Strangely enough, they’re also the majority.

The diagram below illustrates the labels that organizations often use (knowingly or unknowingly) to classify their employees. The y-axis focuses on how a professional is measured on meeting the organizational performance criteria that fuel the business engine. The x-axis centers on how the professional fares on meeting the expectations of the human engine. In each of the four corners, we find the Stars, Sinners, Low Performers, and Saints. I’ll go into more detail on the four corners of the diagram in my next post, but for now, I want to bring to your attention those falling in the middle of the diagram — the Stalwarts.

DeLong grid 5-1.jpg

These solid citizens make up the majority of employees in most organizations. The odds are you may find yourself among the Stalwarts at some point in your career, no matter how high-revving your internal drive is. If so, you probably will find yourself questioning your significance.

That’s because, despite the number of Stalwarts in an organization, these good, solid citizens of the organization go largely unnoticed. Few leaders think about the motivation, inclusion, and explicit career management of the solid performers. One Fortune 500 leader said, “I thought that it couldn’t be true that so many workers are systematically ignored through no fault of their own (except for the fact that they may not be politically astute or they don’t draw attention to themselves). But the more I reflected on my own company, the more I realized that I spend all my time worrying about the high performers and assume that everything is OK with everyone else.”

These two things are connected. The stalwarts are what I call the doers – the middle of the bell curve that get things done but do not easily take to new ideas. Innovations are disruptive and these stalwarts hate disruption to their routines and processes.

It is hard to be stalwart – to making sure the important basic parts of an organization get accomplished –  if things are changing all the time. A stalwart is the slow moving but determined tortoise to the disruptive hare. In most cases, a company succeeds because its stalwarts make the ideas of the disruptors a reality.

But that does not mean they like it. As I mentioned, the stalwarts do not take to innovation rapidly. They need to be shown by someone they trust from the community – the thought leaders – that it is worthwhile to adopt a new technology or innovation.

A company of disruptors will not get anything done, because there are not enough stalwarts to realize the ideas. But a company of stalwarts will not be innovative, because there are not enough new ideas being presented.

Companies that are run by disruptors – usually many start-ups – do not understand that the stalwarts must be supported. And companies run by stalwarts – usually the more mature organizations –  do not understand that disruptors must be supported.

The two types often do a poor job communicating their needs. So the first article describes what happens with a company where the stalwarts are in charge – an organization resistant to new ideas.

And the second article discusses a problem when the disruptors tolally run things  – those that actually get things accomplished are ignored.

A truly successful, adaptive and resilient company knows how to support both types, has the right balance of each and has identified thought leaders respected by both groups.

These will be the 21st Century organizations that will succeed.

Computing on the Brink

What happens when the brightest technologists in the Puget Sound get together to talk, eat, drink and listen to each other?

Computing on the Brink will find out. RSVP.

Join us September 30 for Computing on the Brink – with a peak at Bio and Computing. Information exchange overlooking Elliott Bay.

Our area has a tremendous number of technologists working on a wide variety of projects involving computing. Meet them.

In both for-profit and non-profit settings they are exploring problems in  global health, personalized medicine, informatics and much more. Discuss their work.

Computing on the Brink will be an informal space for them to talk with peers and to hear presentations from this vast array of talent. Exchange knowledge.

Our invited guests will be Deepak Singh – Principal Product Manager, Amazon EC2 at Amazon Web Services , Sarah Killcoyne – Senior Software Engineer from the Institute of Systems Biology  and Jeff Paslay – President of Paslay Consulting.

Computing on the Brink will provide  a place where those who are working in the trenches can connect with others who are developing novel applications, running an Open Source project or perhaps supporting the information needs of others.They will be working at non-profit institutions or for-profit corporations. There might even be some interested laypeople in the mix.

The plan is to have an opportunity for networking with some good food and drink, along with a couple of short, informal (20 minute) presentations by exciting individuals from the region. These presentations will spark discussions on translating ideas into reality.

We will also discuss future topics.

EMC-Isilon has been kind enough to provide the space. Now we need you to provide the inspiration.

This should be an invigorating meeting in a wonderful location. If you would like to have some critical input, be sure to attend.

Hurry. Space is limited.

Computing on the Brink is part of the “… on the Brink” series presented by >SpreadingScience. These are events devoted to supporting the translation of exciting ideas into reality. SpreadingScience also hosts BioScience on the Brink – the next meeting is planned for October – and is in the planning stages for Emerging Science on the Brink.

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