Endless Knots

The Strange Beauty of Virtual Teams

A bit of self-referential reporting here: Milestone Group has published its quarterly journal, wherein lies our "invited article," The Strange Beauty of Virtual Teams. Click and enjoy.

For any writers interested in how something like this comes about, here's the backstory. Shortly after joining Facebook in September of this year, I received a "friend" request from Mark Zawacki, founder and managing partner of Milestone Group. Turned out that Mark had read The TeamNet Factor, our 1993 book, as a result of his having worked at Index Systems, a consulting company where we'd done some work. Once he found me on Facebook, he asked if we'd like to contribute to his journal. Took a look and quickly agreed. This issue, for example, has an interview with our friend Nova Spivack of Radar Networks; an opinion piece by Eric Benhamou, now a venture capitalist and chairman of 3Com, where he was CEO; and an editorial by Milestone's Bill Burk with the intriguing title of Why Nine Men Can't Make a Baby in a Month.

Thanks, Mark, and to Jim Conley, blogger at On Brookline, who edits the journal.

Pen computers, digital ink, and the new paper notebooks

Stew Sutton, the Aerospace Corporation fellow who gave the presentation about Second Life that I blogged yesterday, has posted a comment so interesting that I'm making it a post of its own. Thanks, Stew!

 

Jessica, I enjoyed your replay of the material shared last week. Perhaps you should lose your notes more often if it produces such a good result. :-)

I am compelled to share what we did not get around to talking about last week that will have a profound impact on note taking. The "pen computer" is now coming of age. This is a wonderful device that works in combination with special paper (with a barely visible micro-dot pattern). The pen records the authors strokes on the paper and the traditional “ink” is put down on the paper just like with a regular (non-computer) pen. The combination is absolutely amazing. This technology is being licensed around the world by the inventing company Anoto (http://www.anoto.com/). The U.S. licensees are several.

 

Within the U.S., a couple of the digital pen providers that I found to be interesting are focused at two ends of the market. Leapfrog offers a product called the “Fly Fusion™” Pentop Computer (http://www.flyworld.com/whatis/index.html) aimed at the Junior High to High School market. I’ve had one for a month or so and my younger daughter (5th grade) really enjoys it. She is taking “digital notes” and often uses the built-in algebra programs to help he “check her homework answers.” Dad verified that it was a post-solve check. I have also been testing this technology and have several experiments in process.

At the college / business end of the market, there is a very interesting product being offered by a company called Livescribe (http://www.livescribe.com/platform/index.html). They are planning to start shipping their products in early 2008. Both Livescribe and Leapfrog are using the same base technology but their products are tuned for different applications.

The most compelling application (for us Knowledge Management types) is the idea of going back to paper for real knowledge capture. Our tools constrain the way we think and the manner in which we record our thoughts, ideas, and notes. Nothing is as unconstrained as a blank sheet of paper. And where structure is important, you can have “forms” that are printed on the paper to “coordinate” your note taking.

So Jessica, if you had one of these last week, your notes would have been posted directly to this blog from your paper notebook. See the example from the Livescribe sight to get a peek at the new face of blogging from “remote locations”… http://www.livescribe.com/sneakpeek/clip3.html

-Stew Sutton

"A writer's best friend..."

Photo taken in Whitcoul's Bookshop, Auckland, NZ, 17 Feb 2007

I've gone on a bit here about the joys of Zoetrope for writers. Rachael King, author of The Sound of Butterflies, has a level-headed post, A writer's best friend and worst enemy, about what this online community has meant to her. First stop I made after arriving in New Zealand earlier this year was Whitcoul's Bookshop. Though the chains have made their way to NZ, small bookstores and local chains, like Whitcoul's, are everywhere. It was there that I spotted Rachael's new book, well displayed with an article and, author's dream, face out on the shelf.

Note to historians: Rachael's father was Michael King, the astounding historian who wrote the definitive work, The Penguin History of New Zealand.

You: Price tag, $300

My fellow bloggers will appreciate this problem: much to blog about, little time to blog. So it is that a compelling presentation by Stew Sutton of The Aerospace Corporation at the Knowledge Leadership Forum week before last has not gotten its due. As I've said before, one of the unnoticed benefits of being a speaker is hearing other speakers (viz. Robin Gerber), as I did at the Brookings Leadership Lab in September. Rarely does one (meaning this one) have the time but because the Knowledge Leadership Forum took place within quick driving distance, it was possible to hang out.

Stew was the person who really introduced me to Second Life, the online virtual world where people create digital versions of themselves (or of the beings they wish they were). I wrote a bit about IBM's guidelines for Second Life a few months back. In truth, I first learned about Second Life only 18 months ago from that serial tracker of new things digital, John Seely Brown, who calls himself Chief of Confusion. Like a couple of million other people, I logged in after talking to Stew. If you're there, you're unlikely to find me teleporting around but should you be curious, search for Pesha Linden. I chose the name Pesha for reasons known to my family and a few close friends; the name Linden was available on a list and I went right for it: my last name, original spelling Lipniak, means "linden tree" (or white wood, depending on whom you ask) in Ukrainian.

Of course, now that I have time to write this post, I can't find my notes from Stew's great presentation. He showed us all the cool things that his company, possibly the very first company to use Second Life, to support collaboration. Freed from the physics of our little planet, things fly and float and pulse and disappear in the Aerospace collaboratorium (they don't call it that but it deserves such a grand term). Astrophysicists can stand in the spray of rockets; they can invent new ways for rockets to spray. Very, very cool and apologies to Stew for the poor reportage (my early editors would be upset with me).

Here's the one fact I remember: you can have an avatar, meaning a digital version of yourself, made these days for $300. I mean something that looks like you. $300. Three bills for the virtual you.

Now that's collaboration

Barbara Jasny, Supervisory Senior editor for Science, the weekly publication of AAAS, was the lead-off evening speaker last night at the 7th International Conference on Complex Systems. In the audience were scores of scientists hoping to score at Science, among the more than 1 million readers.

I took some notes that I hope you'll find interesting: Science was founded by none other than Thomas Edison in 1880 (prompting one audience member to ask why they don't publish more in the engineering sciences--"we'd like to," Jasny said; ratio of pieces published--60:40, physical:biological sciences). They receive 230 manuscripts EVERY WEEK, which go out to a board of 100 reviewers. Of these, 70% go back to the authors within two weeks (aka rejected); of the remaining 30%, 10% are published.

Once you pass the first hurdle, you're handed off to the pool of 27 editors, all PhDs or MDs, many with post-doc degrees. Guess I won't be applying for a job there, though, transparently, I could write or call any of them as all their emails and telephone numbers are published. Your work sees the light of print if: it's your best; it will have major impact; it's a solution to a long-standing problem; and/or others will be interested.

Over time, published material has changed quite a lot. What was interesting research 15 years ago is wildly different today. Example cited was that Science once published the sequence of a newly-identified gene,  then the genome, and more recently the genome as a tool and the genome as a network.  (The network pictures of the genome looked remarkably like the networks we map in organizations.) Recent years have seen an absolute explosion in data, Jasny said, which has led to the journal tending to publish shorter articles with massive databases available online. Generally speaking, you don't get published if you won't make your data publicly available.

Jasny noted another major shift: the authorship of papers has evolved in the past 25 years. Where once a few chemists would team up, now bylines include people from a number of disciplines working on different aspects of a problem, then reporting their results together. Meanwhile, new fields are evolving, like neuroeconomics, microtubule dynamics, biomolecules in nanotechnology, geomicrobiology, and, music to the ears of those at the conference, systems approaches. Likewise, scientists are tackling more complex problems that fall under the rubric of "syndemics," like AIDS, which, in addition to the base science, requires study of gender discrimination, public fear, poverty, and government policy.

"And now we're seeing larger and larger collaborations," she said. One astronomy paper may take the world's record for number of authors: 350!

And lest you think they're all just abstruse scientists with no sense of fun, consider their newest feature by "The Gonzo Scientist," John Bohannon. His current project? He's living in a spacesuit for a month and reporting how it feels.

It's so complex

Rare confluence of the complexity gods this week in Boston as The New England Complex Systems Institute sponsors the annual International Conference on Complex Systems 2007. Aesthetics, biology, social systems, engineering, biology, and, of course, networks all get their due over the next week. Catch us on Network Day, Friday, Nov 2, which begins with Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus receiving the Herbert Simon Award. Simon wrote the seminal article, The Architecture of Complexity, in 1962.

Reply to this post and/or email me if you're attending: jessica dot lipnack at netage.

Red Sox rule in NZ

It’s time for this picture. For the Red Sox fans, moi with Jay, my son-in-law, in Milford Sound, New Zealand, Feb 23, 2007, long before we knew that the Sox could turn their scores into those resembling (American) football games.

Energy-conscious computing

Some years ago, we were in a joint venture with the dearly departed Digital Equipment Corporation. The purpose was to build a regional "computer conferencing" system, called, yes, New England Commons, that would then link to the other regional computer conferencing systems, notably, Metanet in Washington, DC., Unison, a similar system in Denver, and, in the Bay Area, you guessed it, The Well. Some day, the business plan read, all of these regional systems would meld into one national system allowing people all over the country to talk to one another online. Name of the parent company: Internetwork Communications. We called it Internet and the year was 1985.

Why were there regional systems in those days? Because the cost of connection--via dial-up--was prohibitive way back then...as in $25/hour. That's right, $25 per hour, or, if you worked a package, $22.50. (Now go complain about your montly cable-modem or DSL fee..)

For those unfamiliar with the term, a computer conferencing system was the ancestor of bulletin boards, discussion forums, and even the much-tossed-about term-du-jour, wikis.

Point of all this is that in order to install the hardware for this enterprise, we had to build a room outfitted with its own power system, air conditioning, raised floor and what I recall as a zillion other things we had to become quickly expert in. Transporting "the computer" (a VAX 11/780 plus racks and racks for the modems) to our second-floor office in Waltham, Mass., required hiring a crane. And as soon as it was operational, our power bill went through the third-floor roof.

I've been sensitive to the power needs of computing ever since and go to some effort, i.e. crawl around the floor turning off power strips, to reduce the drain on electricity when my machine is off (this in my home office).

All of which leads to a good post today that goes a bit deeper into what server farms and the like require in major operations centers, like hospitals. CareGroup's CIO "geekdoctor" John Halamka, a low-carbon-footprint kinda guy, sheds some light, so to speak, on the tradeoffs that he and his folks think about when adding MIPS. They've even hired a full-time power engineer:

Power consumption and heat is increasing to the point that data centers cannot sustain the number of servers that the real estate can accommodate. The solution is to deploy servers much more strategically. We’ve started a new “Kill-a-watt” program and are now balancing our efforts between supply and demand. We are more conservative about adding dedicated servers for every new application, challenging vendor requirements when dedicated servers are requested, examining the efficiency of power supplies, and performing energy efficiency checks on the mechanical/electrical systems supporting the data center.

"This little machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender"

Photo by Karl Rabe/The Poughkeepsie Journal, December 5, 2004

My friend Jane rarely makes prescriptions but when we talked last week she gave me an Rx: Go see the Pete Seeger movie, this after I described the time we recently spent with the Dalai Lama. Now, to my knowledge, the Dalai Lama doesn't play the bango and Pete Seeger doesn't wear saffron robes but having seen Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, I understand the connection. Jane's preface to the advice was this:  clear light comes through both men, the power of conviction.

Documentaries of this sort can easily slip into paeans, genuflections to the great. This one doesn't. First, there's the music, the songs so familiar that they evoke sensations like those of your favorite childhood meal or, pushover that I am, tears. Next, there's the example of a person who believes in a way of being in the world and pursues it, not by stepping on people but by simply continuing. And there's the honesty: his wife of forty-million years, Toshi, says: "If only Pete had been chasing women rather then causes,  I could have left him." Anyone with a purpose-driven spouse understands.

Politcally persecuted (HUAC came after Seeger; he was blacklisted; and his career was ruined more than once), Seeger just kept singing. This post's title, "This little machine surrounds hate and forces it surrender," is lettered on Seeger's bango and explains what five strings and a big heart can do.

Children have been his greatest audience, a truth I must have absorbed without realizing it. I wrote a scene into a novel where Seeger gives a concert at the summer camp attended by the main character. (Truthfully, I've never heard him in person.)

Watching the film, an image kept recurring: To hire a bus and drive around to the houses of all my friends, load them in, and circle back to the theatre to watch this together. How old-fashioned when I can simply post here, have you click on the trailer and at least get a flavor. Don't miss this film--and don't be surprised if I show up at your door.

Personal note: Just as the singing was to begin at Carolyn Goodman's memorial service, her son David said that Pete Seeger had been planning to attend but was not feeling up to it. I never inquired what the problem was so I cannot report whether he is truly ailing or only had a cold but, at 88, this man has the strength of ten or a hundred.

Buddha, tonight, in Cambridge

It's no secret to my readers that I admire the writing of Roland Merullo (a dozen posts here, scan for his name) and so tonight I will be among those listening to his reading from Breakfast with Buddha, which I first blogged here: Porter Square Books, 25 White Street, Cambridge, Mass, 7 PM.

Finished it last night.

Few writers have the range with language that Roland does. Or with emotion. Or with the contemplative life. This book is funny, one of the acceptable ways, so far as this reader is concerned, to grapple with matters of deep spiritual consequence. If you're one of the hundreds of millions (possibly billions as we're up to, what, 6.7 billion hum beans at this point) who has meditated, done yoga, thought about the meaning of life, hungered for something deeper, read a book about how to be happy, or gone to a lecture about Buddhism/Christianity/Judaism/Jainism or whateverism, you want to read this book. Cheerfully, laugh-out-loud funnily, and poignantly, Roland takes his main character, Otto Ringling, from loving family-man and NY publisher to the edge of enlightenment with a cross-country journey that stops for sausage, bowling, and slot machines.

Otto's love for his wife and family are enough to make this book worth the read--few fathers in literature are so bold in their pronouncements--but when you include his very light but profound understanding of human nature and the meaning of existence, you have a treasure. And, oh, his uninvited passenger is a spiritual master, a Rinpoche in robes.

Write on, Roland. I can't wait for the next one.