Being very Canadian I am prone to principled waffling and introspective self-doubt. This includes indecision regarding the true worth and value of the academic ventures I find myself pursuing.

Without being overly solipsistic (though this being a blog it’s difficult to avoid) I am gladdened when I come across something that reinforces my belief that I’m on the right path - at least of intellectual endeavour.

I follow the blog of a man named Nova Spivak, a man who’s career I envy - he is the founder of many different highly successful internet companies EarthWeb being his biggest/most famous. He is also a renowned expert in a field I hope to become an expert in as well - the semantic web, ontologies, collective intelligence and intelligent computing. While he throws his considerable mental capabilities at business I hope to tip my meagre offerings into the world of politics - particularly conflict situations.

Linking from his blog he pointed his readers to this book: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/097156616X/ossnet-20

While, of itself it is fascinating. It discusses the effects collective intelligence is having on decision making at different levels of society, however the true personal weight of this book exists in the list of contributors.

Two in particular stand out - first is the venerable and bitterly-missed Thomas Homer-Dixon whom up until this year was an esteemed professor and would have taught my all-important Introduction to Peace & Conflict class next year, had he not been poached by that upstart Balsillie and his ’sillie School of World Affairs in BackWaterloo (I’m not letting this go).

The other is the Rt. Hon. Paul Martin, whom whatever you might say about him held the highest station of achievement in this country and thus probably isn’t entirely without some grey matter. He is also a fellow St. Michaels College student, as is this author.

A great many things have made me very pleased with my choice in degrees and I’m very excited to start reading the heaps upon heaps of literature on the topic so-as to become thoroughly tiresome to the people around me.

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Jeff Bezos recently gave an interview to Business Week magazine, available here. In this interview he discusses the priority of innovation and the difficulty in justifying creativity to shareholders. This is an interesting discussion that really exposes the fundamental principles that underlie Amazon’s success.

Most people are familiar with the folkloric tale of Amazon’s start, Bezos wanted to start an online retail business and cast about looking for a commodity to sell - finally deciding on books as an easy to ship, cheap to store product. What isn’t discussed is the story of Amazon’s development, growth and pre-eminence as an e-commerce giant; arguably the reigning king of the e-commerce jungle.

I’ve always been a big believer about innovating and creating within constraints. The tired cliché of “think outside the box” has been so heavily molested as to be an invalid heuristic. The original intent was to ensure people didn’t create artificial boundaries to their creative processes - it has since been construed as the willful refusal to acknowledge ANY boundaries; which defeats the purpose of design.

Bezos recognizes the importance of rapid fire, micro-innovation - something Tom Kelly of IDEO has written about. Rather than exercise a huge project in a single pass - rapidly constructed prototypes of each “take” are tested and compared. They are then synthesized into a new generation of concept.

This is a Darwinian style development process that has reaped Amazon huge rewards while keeping the cost of and risk levels very low.

Amazon, however, broke the form of its small, accretive style of innovation when it released the Kindle - the electronic book reader. However, no matter the success of Kindle, Amazon has won the day in many respects.

Firstly, if Kindle works Amazon has now secured itself a (temporary) monopoly on an entire market since its the first mover.

Secondly, even when other companies move into the market Amazon can still make money because it’s still the largest distributor of the content available - it doesn’t face that innovators dilemma because it’s happily planted in between the customer and the competition no matter which path you take.

Thirdly, it has scared the crap out of publishers - a pretty staid lot. Amazon has lit a fire under their asses like no other by presenting them with a very harsh ultimatum - enter the new market or we’ll take money and creative talent from you by the truck load.

Fourthly, since Amazon is willing to act as a publisher and distributor of electronic books; traditional publishers will have to work doubly hard at doing their real (actually useful) jobs - securing talent, identifying consumer demand for content and getting books written.

So either nobody enters the market and Amazon monopolizes it, or Amazon faces competition from which it can profit. Amazon has also made competition out of people who have a poor track record of taking on real innovation - like Sony.

Sony has an eBook reader, in fact it is (was?) the market leader in that category. Sony has attempted to secure deals with publishers to distribute content but judging from the near impossibility in obtaining a device - no Sony I’ve been to has even the foggiest idea when Sony might release it in Canada.

With the Kindle, Amazon has not only positioned itself as an alternative publisher but as (potentially) the pre-eminent distributor of 2nd screen text based media. That sounds obscure but it really isn’t. As traditional media slowly exhales its death rattle, Amazon is already moving ahead to the next arena. Most people who read electronic text do so sitting at their laptops or computer screens - something that is rendered unpleasant by the limitations of screen technology.

The Kindle however, is as easy on the eyes as any novel but is provides the mechanism for instant distribution. This mechanism breathes new life into old, large volume formats. These are the last redoubt for traditional media enthusiasts and Amazon has eliminated it at a stroke; Amazon who rakes in billions of dollars from the sale of these very same stacks of dead tree.

This is game changing at its finest - Amazon has used its innovation risk management process chain to establish a system for content delivery. It has recognized that print and the reliance on physical distribution as the weakest point and eliminated it. It has done so in such a way that no one can move on this change in dynamic with improving Amazon’s circumstance.

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I understand the intuitive appeal of applying versioning to the web, it gives a name to a phenomenon that is otherwise pretty difficult to summate. How else can you articulate the combination of web-centric interaction, web-only business, AJAX behaviour and socially networked and distributed application systems succinctly? Web 2.0 - or “Web as Platform” is a fairly universal way of tokenizing the phenomenon we’re all basically aware of, even if we don’t understand it.

The issue with that kind of nomenclature is that it fails to recognize a number of aspects which are fundamentally important to how the phenomenon is taking shape. While less important in the 1.0 / 2.0 debate it’s especially true for the 3.0 discussions which are (already) beginning to crop up.

Web 2.0, as Tim O’Reilly defined it in his (seminal) paper on “What is Web 2.0,“  was the web as a central platform instead of extension. The paper  is certainly a landmark in the general consensus of what Web 2.0 promises and is just starting to deliver so I’ll use its definition, which is not without controversy when discussing Web 2.0. The fact that I need to disclaim this simply goes to show how confused everything remains.

Web 2.0 is esthetically represented via AJAX, which is the technical manifestation of the phenomenon. This is what many believe IS Web 2.0, Eric Schmidt being a big proponent of this techno-centric history. Most techno-centrists believe that although Web 2.0 manifests itself in a much broader sense than simply the standard of markup used and a particular javascript method (xmlhttprequest()), it was these enabling tools that allowed all the other facets to flourish - without it Web 2.0 could be at best described as web 1.5.

This is a seriously deficient explanation for a number reasons. The most obvious are that it’s anachronistic and implies a dependency that doesn’t exist. AJAX (asynchronous (use of) javascript and XML/XHTML) is not necessary to make a Web 2.0 app - just as elevators are a signifier of modern architecture a building without an elevator isn’t necessarily NOT modern. In fact Web 2.0-ness is a much fuzzier quality than use of AJAX, which rankles people with engineering or comp sci degrees whose jobs are absolutely dedicated to precision.

Web 2.0 is the view of the web not merely a means to some external end, but as an entire economy and society unto itself. Services, products and information can be commodities that are traded and purchased without any value chain leaving the internet. This is what separates companies like 37 Signals from Amazon and Microsoft, web 2.0 from web 1.0. William Gibson conceived this as cyberspace, an alternative reality that we perceive as equally viable to our lives as the real one.

Equating AJAX with Web 2.0 is an egregious example of post hoc ergo propter hoc (my Classicist sister would be proud!). Due to the sequence of events it’s intuitively appealing to infer causality - but there’s a huge difference between causality and facilitation.

AJAX lowered the barrier to entry with regards to interface. The web suddenly became just like desktop apps, sometimes even more usable. The tractability of what was feasible from a UI perspective exploded the ability to create new and significantly more meaningful interactions. Some believe that this fundamentally caused everything else - just as some theorists believe(d) the discovery of a large variety of pigmentation triggered the Renaissance painting. Unfortunately, they ignore the parallel activities that gave force to either Caravaggio or David Hansson (creator of Ruby on Rails).

Social networking, social distribution, and just as importantly the user created media explosion are huge part of the 2.0 impetus. Cheap digital cameras made sites like Flickr possible. $40 web cams, MiniDV and cheap broad band enabled YouTube. Frustration with pay-sites and paucity of good reference content enabled Jimmy Wales to bring Wikipedia from Nupedian obscurity to one of the most popular websites on earth.

Social networking was only made possible through the steady pervading of voyeurism, brought about through things like blogging and high-profile dot-com oddities giving people that lottery-ticket incentive of fame potential to get in.

The capability of being connected to the internet 24/7 - via wifi, cheap dial-up and mobile access gave us (for better or worse) things like Twitter.

Ruby as a language is older than Java - yet it is attributed with kicking off this Web 2.0 by way of Rails. The importance of Rails is not Prototype (the AJAX component of Ruby on Rails) it’s the fact that it rendered trivial Web 1.0 sites. Anybody with a decent book on RoR and a computer could recreate Amazon in an afternoon - so the standard for innovation was raised. Serious developers needed to step things up or get left behind.

The only rational conclusion that can be made with all these observations is that Web 2.0 wasn’t “triggered”, it was the simultaneous confluence of a great many other phenomena - some technical, many social.

Web 2.0 brought the web up to speed with our expectations of desktop computers - it finally caught up to 1994 with regards to interface, capabilities, portability etc.

There’s a big problem with versioning these things because it implies a sense of sequential progress that simply doesn’t exist - for that I think Tim O’Reilly needs to re-jig his thesis. For versioning systems in general there is an implied sequence to a version, not an implied chronology - which is really what we mean when we say 2.0.

3.0, according to yet another brilliant Timothy - this time Sir Berners-Lee, and many others is the semantic web. For web “historians” this is problematic - the semantic web is very nearly as old as the web itself. If HTTP and all it implies is the web, it could be arguable that semantic interchange of data predates the web as a technical goal.

The semantic web is an equally problematic definition for 3.0 because it’s difficult to square away with many other phenomena which are separate but otherwise bundled in. That is the “data cloud,” multi-device interchange, geographic awareness and ambient findability (as Peter Morville put it).

To describe in brief - the data cloud is the phenomenon of data no longer residing in a discrete resource. Your social networking information will be passed between the various applications that use it, rather than each network retaining its own data separate from the others. The Data Portability initiative is the highest profile organization pushing for this and its no coincidence it’s led by Tim Berners-Lee. In short in the data cloud, your data are everywhere and nowhere at once - much like the analogous electron probability cloud from which the data cloud gets its name.

Multi-device interchange is a pretty simple phenomenon with profound implications. No longer will the web be the domain of personal computers.  The smart phone will simply be “the phone,” normal “dumb” cellular phones have more or less gone the way of the dodo and the trend will push further and further toward computing mobility (rather than portability). Intel has been showing off its concepts for Mobile Internet Devices and these are just an obvious beginning. Amazon has shown us that even traditionally non-digital media are getting the boot with the wild-fire success of Kindle - an internet ready eBook. Laptop computers have overtaken the sales of desktops in North America and the size, range and power lifetime for devices is the primary drive of technological innovation (Moore’s law is less true now than it was 4 years ago).

Part and parcel with mobility is geographic awareness and geographic data. We’re seeing fledgling concepts for this in mobile devices with built in mapping technology and of course the still-flawed dashboard guidance consoles. Geo data will become more integrated into our experiences as we run up the learning curve. Digital cameras will “stamp” geo data onto photos (some do already). The Kindle will likely auto subscribe to local papers (just like switching to local radio stations). Trip and route planning will be more integrated into our mobile devices - including dynamic data like traffic, weather etc.

Another facet to this is ambient findability. This is arguably the coolest non-semantic aspect of the “3.0″ web. Just as Google is your resource for finding stuff on the web, and for most people is also the resource for finding locations (thanks to Google maps and GoogleEarth) it (or more agile competitors) will be your resource for finding “things” in the “real-world” or finding connections between real-world and web-sphere phenomena. This goes well beyond being a directory service like some really big yellow pages and becomes much more directed and personalized thanks to things like collective intelligence and the aforementioned multi-device interchange and geopraphic awareness.

Amazon helps you find a book on topic using a wide variety of data it has collected. Ambient findability will allow it to not only locate businesses or locations that fit in with what you’re looking for, it’ll connect your search and data with others and provide mechanisms for physical interaction. People on your friends list who will be at the same place will be alerted of your presence, car pools can be generated automatically without relying on the limitations of posted boards, the list of various services will go on and on as the web predominates as the method of information exchange - particularly asynchronous, fact-heavy information.

Personal possessions and products, thanks to RFID will become findable on the net. “Where did I put my sketchpad…? Oh well, I’ll just Google it.”

I might also note that the term is ambient findability not ambient searchability. Web 3.0 is probably the greatest threat to Google on the horizon because it deals pretty serious damage to search as the mechanism for discovery. I’ll save this topic for a different post, but suffice it to say either Google is cooking up non-search discovery technology (VERY likely) or is doing its best to keep 3.0 tech relegated to obscurity (also likely).

So, just as 2.0 isn’t a neat package of widgets neither is 3.0. In fact, 3.0 is much more problematic because it’s really two or three separate phenomena occurring at roughly the same time.

I for one think that the web is sufficiently large and complex to render sweeping generalizations or “trends” very difficult if not impossible to make without being entirely specious. It’s pretty difficult to make generalizations that apply to 60+% of the entire world without stretching things like taffy or simply uttering truisms.

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Cognitive Behaviour Therapy has been the domain of pyschological
treatment - particular for mood disorders and other pathologies. It
seeks to address the causes of many mental illnesses by targeting the
cognitive distortions sufferers apply to stimuli. The theory being that
many illnesses have a cognitive basis or at least component that can be
the subject of treatment and rehabilitation. Just as a weak muscle or a
disproportionately strong muscle can cause problems with your skeletal
system, the basic cognitive functions - especially habituated
behaviours can be seen root causes of poor affect.

Sufferers of depression, for example, tend to be primed for negative
responses to stimuli that trigger seemingly reflextive thoughts that
produce negative affect. “She didn’t call me, she must hate me. She
hates me because I’m ugly and stupid.” Is a simplified chain of
cognitive distortions. These occur in even more ambiguous/innocuous
circumstances, “That man sitting at the table in front of me at the
restaurant glanced at me over his shoulder - he must’ve overheard me
and dislike what he heard.”

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy seeks to address these problems by
coaching patients in ways of altering the behaviour through rational
internal debate - to contradict maladaptive and irrational thoughts as
soon as possible and provide counter-balancing explanations or
conclusions that are more adaptive and rational. The hope is that these
consciously applied explanations will become habituated if applied over
a period of time. It seeks, in essence to correct cognitive distortions
by retraining better heuristics.

The issue is, however, that cognitive distortions aren’t the domain
of the mentally ill - merely that their cognitive distortions have
become so severe that it inhibits normal functioning of their life or
produces problematic/inappropriate behaviours (anxiety for example).
Everyone has cognitive distortions, often very severe ones that simply
haven’t caused enough of a problem to be corrected.

What if, however, your decisions based on these distortions never
affected you directly but instead affected many other people? Then
you’d be even less likely to detect a problem with your cognition
because there’s no conditioning mechanism. This is the predicament for
high-level decision makers the world over - particularly politicians or
military leaders. Moreover, the difficulty in detecting cognitive
distortions (such as but not limited to bias) is compounded by the
indirect nature of stimulation - Generals and Presidents have other
people be their eyes and ears - so in their reporting a further
distortion occurs.

So, what is ludology? Put simply, it is the study of games -
particularly games for enjoyment. Games teach particular analytical
skills - chess gives you several concepts such as utilization of
limited options (you get to move a single piece in a very specific
way), go teaches effective orchestration and resource management. These
games have been played by generals eager to hone their strategic
abilities - but playing these games in and of themselves can introduce
certain cognitive biases - any general who leads a modern army as a
chess set is doomed. The semantics of the game do not match the
semantics of their true problem space.

What if it did? What if there were games particularly engineered to
expose and retrain particular cognitive distortions into more adaptive
systems? What if you could structure the game and its rules so that
distorted cognition was particularly maladative - specifically those
distortions likely to occur in decision makers? You could, in essence
create a game that taught cognitive behaviour therapy in a competitive,
dynamic arena.

This will require some clever abstract thinking on behalf of the
game designer - since simply reproducing real-life scenarios usually
produces non-applicable gaming scenarios (think of all the different
games based on war - Napoleon or Wellington would’ve guffawed at Risk,
Axis & Allies is nothing like the problems of the second world war.

Instead of comprehensive all encompassing simulations, the designs
would need to target particular cognitive skillsets that might be
particularly problematic amongst decision makers - such as
under-estimating the importants of HUM INT in situations of insurgent
warfare, the differences between mobilized constituencies and
broad-based support.

Clearly the primary users of these games would be students and young
professionals - but they could easily be implemented to bringing “old
guards” into the new mechanisms and providing valuable experimental
models for theories about decision making.

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I’ve been spending the last few months examining various opportunities at my disposal for student associations or projects. I wanted to join an initiative to which I could bring and use my various skills and abilities in a meaningful way. I also recognized my blind-luck in falling into my position with the IR Society and was wary to press my luck with any future organizations and thus subjected any option to rigorous scrutiny.

Each option became increasingly undesirable under analysis to the point where I found myself with a dearth of opportunities to get involved in existing projects.

I’m very conscious of the Not Invented Here mentality that pervades many fledgling initiatives but I genuinely believe this is both novel at UofT and a proven concept. My idea is to create a publication edited and (largely) written by UofT students in the vain of general interest but literate periodicals such as Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, New Yorker, the Walrus or Vanity Fair.

In contrast to the large majority of student publications this would not necessarily be strictly journalistic and instead would provide a space for a more in-depth exposition, it would also provide a space for general-interest geared academic discussions and other discussions for smart people who aren’t necessarily domain experts.

My hope would be to loosely mirror the academic structure - providing space of literature, scientific essays, political analysis, historical discussions etc.

To ensure a high-calibre of authorship I think the magazine should not be exclusively written by UofT students though their contributions will be weighted preferably.

Aside from a tentative title (The Oak & Beaver) and a basic format concept the details haven’t been settled and likely won’t be until I can find a group of interested parties.

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