The Conceptual Age?

Revenge of the Right Brain

I started reading the wired magazine article titled Revenge of the Right Brain and it all made quite a bit of sense. I'm not so sure about the division of Left and Right brain, its all subjective in my mind but the fact is the examples Daniel gives are pretty crediable. I will quote the Asia example.

Few issues today spark more controversy than outsourcing. Those squadrons of white-collar workers in India, the Philippines, and China are scaring the bejesus out of software jockeys across North America and Europe. According to Forrester Research, 1 in 9 jobs in the US information technology industry will move overseas by 2010. And it's not just tech work. Visit India's office parks and you'll see chartered accountants preparing American tax returns, lawyers researching American lawsuits, and radiologists reading CAT scans for US hospitals.

The reality behind the alarm is this: Outsourcing to Asia is overhyped in the short term, but underhyped in the long term. We're not all going to lose our jobs tomorrow. (The total number of jobs lost to offshoring so far represents less than 1 percent of the US labor force.) But as the cost of communicating with the other side of the globe falls essentially to zero, as India becomes (by 2010) the country with the most English speakers in the world, and as developing nations continue to mint millions of extremely capable knowledge workers, the professional lives of people in the West will change dramatically. If number crunching, chart reading, and code writing can be done for a lot less overseas and delivered to clients instantly via fiber-optic cable, that's where the work will go.

But these gusts of comparative advantage are blowing away only certain kinds of white-collar jobs – those that can be reduced to a set of rules, routines, and instructions. That's why narrow left-brain work such as basic computer coding, accounting, legal research, and financial analysis is migrating across the oceans. But that's also why plenty of opportunities remain for people and companies doing less routine work – programmers who can design entire systems, accountants who serve as life planners, and bankers expert less in the intricacies of Excel than in the art of the deal. Now that foreigners can do left-brain work cheaper, we in the US must do right-brain work better.

Last century, machines proved they could replace human muscle. This century, technologies are proving they can outperform human left brains – they can execute sequential, reductive, computational work better, faster, and more accurately than even those with the highest IQs. (Just ask chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.)

And while reading the article I started thinking about a conversation I had the other day with a Imperial software engineering student and Stefan Magdalinski who wrote http://theyworkforyou.com (which I love and use everyday to see what my MP is up to). Anyhow this student was talking about the fact that he optimised some code to use the smallest amount of memory needed for the application he was building. Stefan kept interupting and pointing out that he was unemployable. The only place where such skills are important is on the SIM card of phones. Everything else has tons of memory, hard drive space and processing power. So why bother? The details are not important anymore as such. I added a section of talk around web2.0, webservices and how open API's allow you to delegate processing to 3rd parties. Why build a TV listings system when you could use someone elses? By the way the event I was actually at Openknowledge forum was great. It also illustrates the fact that we are moving from a information age to a conceptual age. On the Tube home the guys behind Public Whip and Stefan talked about the fact all the information was now available to them and the public its where we go from here. From information to conceptual? Maybe? Back to the article for another quote.

Even computer programmers may feel the pinch. “In the old days,” legendary computer scientist Vernor Vinge has said, “anybody with even routine skills could get a job as a programmer. That isn't true anymore. The routine functions are increasingly being turned over to machines.” The result: As the scut work gets offloaded, engineers will have to master different aptitudes, relying more on creativity than competence.

Any job that can be reduced to a set of rules is at risk. If a $500-a-month accountant in India doesn't swipe your accounting job, TurboTax will. Now that computers can emulate left-hemisphere skills, we'll have to rely ever more on our right hemispheres.

And in the change over – comes people like me. My background is from design not programming but tools like xml, webservices, etc make creating applications for the web a conceptual challenge rather than a programatic one. If I want to add internal search to my site I would just download Lucene and the rest would be just details which I could pay someone else to do or work it out over time with the huge resource of the web at hand. Anyhow Daniel leaves the article with good reminder of the main points.

Want to get ahead today? Forget what your parents told you. Instead, do something foreigners can't do cheaper. Something computers can't do faster. And something that fills one of the nonmaterial, transcendent desires of an abundant age. In other words, go right, young man and woman, go right.

Ok I spoke to Miles today on IM and actually he makes some very good points about the outlook and underline issues of this article. I had to share it with everyone as it makes you think about the article in a different way.

[17:12:02] miles> I see you're posting that racist left/right brain crap on your blog
[17:12:37] myself> well i dont really believe it myself which i thought I'd made clear, but maybe not. but you know your going to have to explain now
[17:14:29] miles> You seemed ambivalent about the biology (which is just wrong – left/right brain is a biological fact), but offered no comment on the suggestion that asians could only do left-brain logical work, whilst creative work was still the province of the white man. As we see creativity as having higher value than logical work, this is tantamount to a racist statement, it seems to me
[17:15:17] myself> not really thought about it that way, but yes i do see what you mean now
[17:19:00] miles> Seems like the worst kind of racism – like social darwinism. The left/right is to do with the way the brain is organised physically. This has lead to a load of NLP-style babble about how some people are more left or right brained (little proof of this, though some evidence there is a gender split), from this, people have jumped to left or right brained cultures (no evidence of this at all), and it is frequently suggested that asian cultures are left-brained. That's why there's no such thing as Indian, Chinese or Japanese art. Which means I didn't visit the Asian Art Museum here in San Francisco, because it can't possibly exist.
[17:22:12] miles> Most of the left/right culture thinking comes from a failure to appreciate economics. I think
[17:22:28] myself> how do you mean?
[17:23:12] miles> It is relatively easy for western companies to sell into developing markets in Asia because western goods are seen as desirable simply because they come from the west – asian consumers like the cachet value of them. On the other hand, outside of niche handicrafts products or henna or what have you, western consumers tend to view asian products with suspicion, except for established brands like Sony or Toyota
[17:24:34] miles> Who would buy an Indra Enterprises MP3 player?
[17:24:42] myself> no one, in the west at least
[17:25:45] miles> When Asian businesses research the western market and produce products that the west wants to buy, they are accused of being un-innovative, because they ape already successful western products (eg Toyata didn't invent the SUV, American car companies did, but Toyota built a better SUV, and now dominate the market)
[17:26:13] myself> now thats very true
[17:27:35] miles> In fact, Asian businesses are not being un-innovative, they are simply doing market research – identifying what sells, and making it better and cheaper. This has nothing to do with innovation, it's to do with business. It's like claiming Chinese instructions on a western-made product for sale in China are not innovative because the Chinese already invented Chinese
[17:28:08] myself> /images/emoticons/happy.gif
[17:29:10] miles> Asian businesses need to take this strategy because they are at a disadvantage in western markets – only as they grow, and increase their capitalisation, and develop their overseas offices will they have the awareness of western markets to be able to set trends.
[17:29:37] miles> So, for example, Sony is now able to be a global trend-setter because of its size and reach
[17:30:01] myself> true
[17:31:03] miles> Indra Enterprises is going to have to follow trends – or hire western product designers – for some time. It might well not choose to do the latter, because of the high cash risk of launching a product in a developed market – the advertising budget needed might be actually more than Indra Enterprises's.

And in short, Miles is right. I need to say I'm never a believer of the classification of humans and personality types. I believe there are enough conridictions to make the whole classification useless. However, there is this underline theme that western markets will be right brain thinkers and the eastern markets are left. And I'm sorry but yes that sounds like racism to me too. I'm sure Daniel isnt a racist (sure Miles thinks the same) but this division is fundimentally wrong.
I remember in the 1800's that it was widely accepted that different people see colours differently. So a bunch of Camridge prof's went to islands near Australia headed by William Rivers to prove that Blacks could see more colours than Europeans which at the time would mean they had the same colour depth as animals, which of course would prove to the racist of the time that there was a difference between Blacks and Whites. So anyhow William Rivers done many colour tests on the natives of the islands and came to the conclusion that actually most people see things in mostly the same way. And then to his credit, he started many movements when he came back to england to tell the world of his findings. Even thought european colour theory at the time was proven wrong.

Is the left brain right brain theorys any different from european colour theory from the 1800's?

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Demon finally upgrade to 1meg and 2meg options

Demon Internet Access Home Office 1000

I was talking to Ben on instant messenger tonight and he sent me a link to the Demon 1meg and 2meg broadband services. I couldnt believe it. Just at the point when I was considering getting NTL cable 750k on top of my Demon ADSL Ben comes along and saves the day. Will miss having 2 xboxes but damm I cant believe Demon never informed there customers of the new 5 pound upgrade for double the speed. However the upload is still only 250k (usually get up to 300k with demon). I will happly pay 30 pounds a month for 1 meg but not 78 pounds a month for 2meg! Come on Demon sort it out! Thanks Ben….

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cubicgarden burning


feedburner

So many people read my blog through RSS and I would like to offer a more reliable way of reading cubicgarden. So I've enabled a feedburner feed which should be more reliable than accessing the site directly. I have enabled a couple of nice options to the feed which includes my del.icio.us bookmarks. However dont expect any of the other tacky feedburner options on cubicgarden any time soon. I mean come on who wants a reader counter on there blog? Anyhow, I may add flickr pictures too but I'm not using it enough at this very moment. Even though someone keeps suggesting I should do so. And he's kinda of right, I got 3g, a powerful camera phone and a mobilogging enabled blog. Hummm we shall see…

Oh yeah and while talking about cubicgarden.com, I need to apoligize for the server being down over the week. I had huge electrical problems and they should all be fixed now. I'm also upgrading bits and pieces of the server software and hopefully optimising its general operation. There may also be an long time waiting upgrade to my broadband coming which will make things much faster. Oh one last thing, I know theres been issues with serving up the actual html pages of cubicgarden recently, I have removed the stylesheet switcher for now cleaned a couple of things up. But you shouldnt get any more problems, if you do delete all cookies from adrenalin-online.demon.co.uk. Then try again… At some point I'm hoping to really clean up the html pages and make them truely xhtml 1.1 valid (currently its all there except I got paragraph's and blockquotes inside of elements which do not allow it).

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RSS Syndication for a Worldwide Audience

So I finally got around to checking my email tonight and jumped for joy when I read one from XTECH.

Dear Ian,

Congratulations! Your submission “RSS Syndication for a Worldwide Audience” was selected for presentation at XTECH 2005 taking place at the RAI Centre, Amsterdam, 25-27 May. Your presentation is currently scheduled for Wednesday, 25 May.

— Snip —

Thank you for your submission. We look forward to seeing you in Amsterdam .

— Snip —

This is great news for BBC World Service New media and the BBC as a whole. I would like to say a big thanks to everyone who has supported me so far, including Sarah and even Joel. I think this will be a great place to discuss the need to look beyond Latin based languages for RSS syndication, and explain the issues which come with internationalised RSS and in turn international RSS adoption. This is indeed the year of RSS! on a side point its great to see a very useful wiki for the event too. I have already setup myself up and

I forgot to say that the Keynotes for the conference which was announced a few weeks ago are some of the most cutting edge and smartest people in the industry at this moment.
Paula Le Dieu, Co-Director, Creative Archive, BBC
Jean Paoli, Senior Director of XML Architecture, Microsoft
Mike Shaver, Mozilla Foundation and Oracle
Look forward to seeing you all there…

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perplexcity

perplexcity

Recieved a email this morning from the ARG perplex city, which I actually thought ended sometime last year.

My name is Sente, and I am the Master of the Perplex City Academy.

On January 16th 2004, an object of immeasurable value was stolen from
our city. You kindly answered my plea to assist in its recovery. Over
many, many months, we at the Academy have been assembling information
to help you in this task.

Today, we break our silence. There is still so much to share with you,
but for now this fragment must suffice.

http://www.perplexcity.com/video.html

I will be in contact again soon.

Stay alert.

Sente

Of course it would be wrong of me to not link to the Project Syzygy aka Perplex City forum on unfiction. Which is the place to go for information on Alternative Reality gaming generally.

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Chess and the thought of machines

Just recently I've downloaded a excellent freeware chess game on to my ipaq. It supports not only 5 different modes of difficulty but arranged games, playlistings for undoing moves, multiplayer and also a internet engine play. The last one hooks the ipaq up to a central server farm where you can play that instead of the local engine. Only for the hardcore chess player! The best I've been able to do is draw with the local machine on level 1, but I've only been playing for the last few days and havent played chess like this for ages. Anyhow, another thing I came across which is related is Thinking Machine 4, which looks like a Flash Chess game but turns into something alot more. Not only does the machine play you, but it shows influence and the moves the computer is thinking about playing! Its in the usual flash style very pretty but also quite amazing to see while playing.

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Last lot of Copyright and Fravia lectures uploaded

By:non-commercialshare-alike

I have finally! Yep at long last! put the copyright vs community part1 video and audio with David Carr from March 2004 and The first Fravia lecture – Learning to transform questions into effective queries from 2003 on Archive.org under a creative commons licence. These go with the copyright vs community videos and audio versions I added a while ago.

2003: Learning to transform questions into effective queries
2004: the internet and the law videos
2004: the internet and the law audio

If you've missed any of the lectures there all in my public archive bookmarks, so theres no excuse for missing them now. I know all the students at the college have been asking me for the 2003 Fravia lecture for years now, it marks a highpoint of Ravensbourne College history for sure, its just a shame I captured them into Windows media format (yes I threw up too!). I'm looking into reversing them back into mpeg2 or mpeg4 formats. This once again serves as a very good time to remind myself to change the cubicgarden.com/copyright site once again.

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xbmc script highlights

The guy behind What's up with Xbox media center has done a great piece about the python script interface for xbox media centre. Anyway I thought I'd point out the post, as this guy does a great job reporting on xbmc. Keep it up and it reminds me again I need to do some serious screen shots of the latest cvs build of xbmc. Project Mayhem II's new skin is so beautiful running on my widescreen TV. Would love to see it at 720p.

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social networking and data mining

Audioscrobbler sent me a email today to notify me that Tim had selected myself as a friend of his for audioscrobbling. Yes this is correct information but I had not really looked into the friends option of audioscrobbler. And it made me think about the whole friend of a friend dynamic and why should I fill out foaf information for each silo webservice like flickr, audioscobbler, amazon and del.icio.us?

Someone once say asking for someone to be your friend was not a good way of doing things in the social networking space. It doesnt lend its self to the offline world either. I would kinda of agree but no one has really come up with an alternative. I know FOAF allows you to just add people without asking them first which can be kinda of cheeky but seems more reasonable to me. I mean I could say someone is just a contact, friend or family member if I like, that someone may say I'm there worst enemy or good friend in return. I dont really care if you see what I mean. In my scope there a contact while in there scope i'm a good friend. Where things get complex is when you try to build meaning out of these abstracts. A machine could come along and say well no human's going to add enemy's to there FOAF profile so it must be a friend? Or it could do some serious analysis on the terms used between us and decide to not link us because its not sure what the relationship is. And honestly that wouldnt be such a bad thing.

In Microsoft Wallop, I have a link to a couple of people who simply commented on my blog posts, nothing more. But Wallop adds those people as friends? Now I understand the reason for this, as these people have contacted me so they must be friends of somekind right? But what if they simply wrote comments to wind me up or slag me off? Then I would be pissed off to know there now friends! However this is hard work for the machine to work out whats positive and whats negative, so I guess it relys on me to manually delete or remove them? Which I guess is fair…

But lets move out of the usual social networking applications like wallop, friendster, etc. And think about all those other social applications. And when I say that I mean from email to instant messenger to blogs to flickr. Thunderbird which I use for my email at home, has a nice feature called collected addresses. The idea is that anything I reply to will be added to the collected addresses and never end up in the junk box. Makes sense I would say but not flawless, for example if I reply to a automated email when I join a forum or something, its added to collected addresses. But say I remove myself from the list 2 days later, well the address is still in my collected addresses. Once again i could remove it myself, but I'm human and I forget to do such things. I think there is some projects going on in the closed and opensource worlds regarding machine intellengance which keeps a record of what you do and what you reply to etc but across your whole desktop. Even though it fills me with a little terror, i'm sure there will be secure and privicy assured versions which you can control. I'm envisioning something like zonealarm which tracks what I do with people on my instant messeger list. For example during work time I will ignore most people because I'm working. Wouldnt it be nice if this application could block certain people from sending me links during this time? Then unblock them when i'm less busy. And thats only the start…

When I usually reply to peoples blogs aka leave a comment, its because I think I have something which could move the entry along or general yep totally agreement and alternativly i disagree comment. If this application could tell the difference (hey it could simply ask me, like Zone alarm does) It could track the name of the owner of the blog and effect the way I deal with instant messeges, emails and other requests. For example writing a positive comment on scott's blog should automaticly add his email to the collected addresses in thunderbird, put his blog into a browser zone which allows for popups and flash useage (I'm using Flashblock which I adore), automaticly allow his skype and im addresses to contact me without authorisation. Obviously these should be manually overrideable and you should beable to change levels of trust as such. Another example where this would work. I use Tesco.com for my food shopping. They have this bizarre system where popups are used to display goods with all the label information which is useful. They also send confirmation emails when there going to send the food and what there going to send. Now I think its not crazy to say if I trust the email from tesco.com then I trust the popups too. And if you move this into the mobile world for a minute. Then it wouldnt be too much to say I also trust tesco.com to send text messages to me and call me. Yep text/sms spam is becoming a problem in europe.

Back to the first thought, Tesco may not be my friend but theres a certain level of trust I allow for when dealing with them. I know Tesco mine my foods list every month and they then profile me and send certain discounts and offers to tempt me to buy more. Fine, but I dont want Asda (Wallmart) to do the same! In the same way you can block people on im and disallow cookies on certain sites I want to see the same happening across my interfaces I use. If I'm ignoring someones emails, it might right to say I would like to ignore there calls and texts. This may mean there not a foaf and that I dont want anything to do with them ever? who knows, were only human and I certainly change my mind all the time. But if I do, I should not have to unblock im's, unblock text's and phone calls on all my phones and change the email filter.

So back to Tim a second. When Tim adds me to his del.icio.us, his flickr, his email, his im. I honeslty dont want to keep authorising him. He's a good guy and likewise he shouldnt need to authorise myself when he's already added me as a friend in audioscobbler. Does Flickr trust audioscobbler enough to allow friends on that to be friends on flickr without the usual authorise this person? No, or not at the moment. Maybe that will change in the future? (Because I added a picture from Pmtorrone to the top of this post mean he's trusted or not? And exactly how much trustworthness will he have? Now thats a question not worth thinking about at this stage)
I swear to you theres a serious link with Attention.xml, FOAF and all of what I'm talking about – but alas its late and I cant think of it right now. There are too many questions and not enough answers in this post!

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