Making invisible patterns , visible

Just a thought on Jobs and the 'nature' vs 'nurture' debate on what actually influences a person. Steve Jobs - the quintessential American Icon in the mold of Edison and Henry Ford was half - arab!! (genetically) This might come as quite a shock to all arab phobic folks - who in the post 9/11 era - have taken to viewing arabs has 'inherently' incapable beings. I am sure - he himself was shocked to find that out - and am sure that in some degree - contributed to him not wanting to do anything with the man who had 'abandoned' him and his biological mother . His foster parents , who adopted him - and 'nurtured' him, although humble, did a truly amazing job in making him feel that he was loved and 'specially chosen' - that contributed greatly to his self-esteem! So go figure! What's your take on 'nature' vs 'nurture'?

The other day I got to wondering - If we are evolved from apes , who essentially hang from trees- are we really built for running and jogging? (The thought was triggered in part because of a lower back pinched nerve - that I thought would be relieved by hanging to stretch the spine.) I got my answer on a NOVA show about our true ancestor - Homo Erectus and Turkana Boy that I happened to be watching last night. The Surprising answer is : Yes we are - built for running! In fact , this is what helped us survive! Here we were - as a species - not very fast (compared to antelopes and deer we wanted to hunt) - not possessing powerful claws or slashing teeth. And the stone axe -in reality just a handheld stone (iPhones of the era) wasn't really a good enough tool to throw and kill. So how were we successful at hunting? We had one advantage - the loss of body hair (hairless apes) and sweating , kept us cool at midday, when the rest of animal kingdom had to lie down and pant - to ke

I have been trying to understand the reasons why people abandoned other social networks like MySpace and Orkut(which was very popular in India and Brazil) in favor of Facebook .. when facebook burst on the scene. And if Facebook would fall prey to the same causal factors - and lose to Google+. My feeling is- probably not. Here are my reasons why: (Your comments welcome); a) On Social Sites - people go where their friends are b) High school and college students - are the heavy users of social sites c) People do not want YET another site to visit to stay in touch with friends ..it complicates their lives So then - why were Orkut and MySpace and Friendster ditched by the users? They had the initial advantage. My top 3 causes: 1) Obtrusive Ads - intruded upon the social interaction 2) Facebook using its university roots and pedigree -- was very appealing to the heavy users (High School- College students). Invitation only cachet made it desirable to join!. Initially- unless you

One way of taming information overload is data visualization. Here is a video from TED that illustrates this beautifully. It does make you "see" relationships that you did not before if you just read the news. Illustrates the concept of making the invisible visible beautifully. If you have trouble viewing the video, please click here. David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization | Video on TED.com

I have a hypothesis. All progress depends on making the the invisible visible. As humans it appears that we have to be able to "see" to be able to do something about it; So many people would easily support enivronmental conservation efforts if it was easy to "see" how dirty the air is in some places or "see" how forests are disappearing - with animated before and "now" views. People would not have to "imagine" so much. They would be able to "see" it. The same would be true of many "theories" that affect our lives or our future. Does cutting taxes spur growth ? This would not(should not) be a matter of ideology - but of science if there was a way it could be "shown" whether one was true or not. Communication would be so much more effective -- if we could "see" what the other person "sees". X-Rays and Catscans improved diagnosis and treatment. They made the "invisible" visible.

The other day I was revisiting some of the brainstorming exercises that were recommended for coming up with new products. Some recommended Idea joggers were: - What if we made it bigger? Smaller? Combined it with X, Made component X with material Y instead and so on. And then - I was struck how close this is to biological innovation (evolution). Where genes are mutated. The brainstorming was to mutate the core "genes" of the product. The "genes" being of course the key attributes about the product or service. e.g size, color,price etc. Now genetic programming has been around for a while with algorithms to mimic evolution and mutate genes and then evaluate them with fitness functions ie discard bad variations because they do not meet the 'fitness' or survivability test. So do you think that genetic programming ought to be in the management tool bag for innovation, along with the traditional "brainstorming". Actually- identifying the core "gene

Large Searchable Datasets about the world are being stored online- and the data flow is increasing to a flood. This includes web content (crawled , indexed, ranked by Google). Public records( by many organizations including LexisNexis). In addition people are dumping personal content - into the Cloud via emails and postings on Facebook , Twitter and other Social Sites and Forums. As new sensors and cameras are developed - even more data will be captured and stored. Now raw data by itself is sometimes hard to interpret and therefore it's usefulness is diminished -- But when it is tagged and annotated - it's like the raw stuff has been nicely packaged. The tagging makes it useful - because now it is searchable and linkable to the appropriate context. This is what Augmented Reality solutions are about. You point your iPhone camera at a scene and the GPS gives you the location, the accelerometer /compass gives you which way you are looking. Based on this -- information about the lo