McFilter: Thinking

More Thinking By Doing Needed

A friend one commented that some people think by doing, whilst others do by thinking. By that he meant that some people work through their problems in their head, thinking through all the options and possibilities before acting, whereas other people have to start playing with things in order to map out the problem-space and help them to understand what they think about the problem.

Both approaches have their merits, and I definitely fall into the "doing by thinking" camp. The problem with that method is that sometimes you don't have enough information to be able to reach any conclusions.

Of late, all the projects I'm involved with seem to be suffering from that problem, but I hadn't quite put my finger on it until I read Gordon's post about practising more of what he preaches.

I don't have any problem practising what I preach, my difficulty is practising things that I'm not confident to preach, and similarly talking about things when I don't have all the answers (or at least, a lot of the answers). Some of that is because I don't know enough about the subject (like marketing, or the hardware I'm hoping to finish before geeKyoto 2008), and some of it is because there aren't any hard and fast answers (marketing again, and the "best" business models for these projects).

So I need to let myself, and encourage myself to, think more by doing. This blog post is a start.

Tags: introspection thinking doing

A Taste of TED on DVD

Recently my mate Kieran has been helping me get my head round marketing as I try to get word out about tedium. I was trying to work out something I could do to say thanks, and as he's been reading The Paradox of Choice it occurred to me that I could share some of the TED talks with him (including the one by Barry Schwartz, the author of The Paradox of Choice).

Kieran isn't a geek by any stretch of the imagination, so I burned the talks onto a DVD so that he could watch them from the comfort of his sofa rather than having to sit in front of his computer. I think that's about the only problem with the presentations from TED.com - it's hard to watch something for twenty minutes if you've got all the distractions of the Internet.

The talks themselves are superb - interesting and insightful topics being talked about by passionate, clever, famous people. If you haven't seen any of the talks before then I heartily recommend having a poke round the TED website or downloading this TED Taster DVD.

That's right, now that I've put the DVD together, I might as well share it with the rest of the world. All the TED presentations are covered by a Creative Commons licence, which means that it's completely legal to copy them and give them to your friends and colleagues... even to random strangers on the Internet ;-)

There are six talks on the DVD. I picked ones that I enjoyed watching and that seem to be well thought of on the web:

1. Dan Gilbert asks "Why are we happy?"
2. Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce
3. Sir Ken Robinson say schools kill creativity
4. Hans Rosling shows the best stats you've ever seen
5. Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice
6. Gever Tulley on five dangerous things for kids

Obviously I can't share physical DVDs over the Internet, so you'll need a DVD burner if you want to make your own TED Taster DVD. And because the files are pretty big I can't just set things up so you click on a link and download it - you'll need to use BitTorrent, but (as well as saving some of my bandwidth costs) that will mean that it will download more quickly.

Despite the scare stories you might've heard, BitTorrent isn't hard to use. Lifehacker have a good beginner's guide to BitTorrent and Gordon McLean wrote an excellent starter guide for anyone using Windows.

Enough! Give Me The Files!

Okay, here are the torrent files you'll need to download the DVD. Choose the right one depending on where you live (well, really depending on whether your DVD player is NTSC or PAL). Each download is about 3.4 GB in size, so please be patient - it'll take a while to download, particularly at first when there aren't many copies around. And after it's finished downloading, please leave your BitTorrent client running for as long as you can to help share it with others.

• TED Taster DVD - PAL version. Use this one if you live in Europe or have a PAL DVD player
• TED Taster DVD - NTSC version. Use this one if you live in North America or have an NTSC DVD player

And if you just want to watch them on your computer, I've collected all the original files from TED.com and gathered them into the TED Taster mp4 torrent (704 MB).

Spread the Word

I know they aren't as easy to watch as your standard YouTube clip, but I think that the more people who get to see the TED talks the better. So, feel free to burn some extra DVDs and give them to your friends, or blog about the TED talks that you love the most, or point people here so they can download the DVD for themselves. Feel free to use the image above, and either link to this blog post or use http://www.mcqn.net/tedtaster (that's just a snappier URL that also points here).

Finally, thanks to Gordon McLean, Andrew Dixon, Adrian Sevitz and a collection of MeFites for their help in launching this crazy idea.

Tags: TED video DVD torrent

Which Vision Thing?

Once again I'm late to the party with my blogging. A week or two back, Paul Robinson posted an entry to his blog lamenting the state of the computer industry. I agree with a most of what he said: services like Facebook could be a really good way to keep in touch and engage with our friends, but have devolved into an endless parade of me-too, frothy, time-wasting games.

By the time I'm getting round to writing about it, things have already moved on. There have been a few responses to Paul's initial post; he's posted a summary of them; and thrown up an area of his website to discuss "The Vision Thing". On there they've even started to draft a manifesto.

All of which is highly commendable, but having read through it I'm left feeling a bit like a goth who's arrived late to a rave. Paul talks about wanting some meaning, and a vision that goes beyond building something "a bit like eBay but with a social graph". I don't see anything like that in the draft manifesto. "Down with IE6" is just froth in geek flavour. "Look after yourself" is just good advice, not something to fight for.

It's a very British manifesto: full of good intentions, but lacking ambition. Microsoft didn't set out to "make businesses lives a bit easier", they wanted "a computer on every desktop and in every home". We should be aiming for "renewable power generation on every home and every office" or "computer and Internet access for every single person in the UK" or...

I know that I'm doing no better than Paul in just writing this blog post. I don't have a solution. Yet. tedium is hardly going to revolutionize the world, but similarly it isn't just froth. It's also just the first step towards building something bigger. I don't have a full handle on my mission to change the world, but I'm beginning to grasp the strands that will weave together to produce it.

Tags: thevisionthing mission business tech

The North / South Divide?

Ian Forrester was at BarCamp Manchester the other week, and in his write-up wonders why he encountered some hostility to Southerners. I can't claim to speak for my fellow Northerners, but thought I'd offer my thoughts on the subject.

First off, I'm not sure that it's a North/South divide, but more of a The Provinces/London divide, and we're just being lazy ourselves by equating London with the South.

Serendipitously, Nick Robinson's latest blog post highlights the issue quite neatly. It's an article about celebrating Britishness, and the photo chosen depicts a Routemaster bus, black cab and the Houses of Parliament. I don't know what image I'd choose instead, but it shows the default London-centric view that's used as shorthand for English or British. We have black cabs in the North, but not Routemasters, and I was ten before I first saw the Houses of Parliament in person. And in the ten years after that I think I saw them again once.

Some of the tension is jealousy, as there's lots of interesting stuff going on in London, most of which is completely inaccessible. From Cambridge it's quite possible to head into London for Mobile Monday, or the London Geek Dinners, but any further away and it becomes a major mission.

London also seems to be the de facto location for any bigger event or conference. The argument being that there are a lot of people already there and the transport links are much better. Which they are, because the roads and railways are all skewed towards the capital. The North-West is at least lucky enough to have a couple of motorways that run across the country rather than towards London.

People in London don't want to travel to events, but expect the rest of the country to come to them. Obviously this is a broad generalisation (and can't be levelled at Ian because he travelled up to Manchester), but when Geoff organised the OurSocialWorld conference in Cambridge it was a struggle to get enough people to attend, and that's day trippable from London. What chance do events further afield have?

For people of my generation and older there's also the hangover from the 80s. This is my least rational reason, but watching huge chunks of the employment and prosperity of the region disappear with the death of heavy industry was painful. Whilst I don't think the government should have propped up industries that were no longer viable, the Thatcher government's "get on your bike" and move down South attitude, coupled with the in-your-face materialism of yuppies in the city didn't help.

Again, these are just my perceptions and thoughts, and I'm interested in hearing what other people - Northern, Southern, Scottish... whatever - think about the issue. I'm not sure I can articulate what I want people to do differently, if anything. Maybe just consider how easy it is (or isn't) for people to get to your event if you're aspiring for national reach. Or just to continue to support events that are being held outside London. I understand that if you live in London you aren't necessarily going to want to organise something miles away from home.

I'm trying to help make a difference by moving back to the North West this summer. So if anyone is looking to arrange something in the area and wants some help, please get in touch and I'll do what I can to assist.

Tags: Liverpool Manchester North South London events

Changing the World is Not Enough

It's strange sometimes how the world conspires to present a wealth of thought strands which I then fail miserably to weave into anything beautiful. At least this time I've got as far as writing something down about them, rather than just flail about in my mind before giving up.

A Sense of Purpose

Number 25 of Mike's 25 things to do before I die is "[c]reate something which people can remember me by". Tom Coates has been bemoaning the degeneration of commenting systems and writing a well thought-out piece about advertising. Jeremy Paxman has urged his fellow broadcasters to rise above the obsession with the bottom-line.

On a national, or even multi-national level, it feels as though capitalism and consumerism have won, and all that matters is how much money you can make with almost no regard for how you make it.

Yet individuals everywhere seem torn between an underlying need to feel a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning; but which is at odds with their day-to-day pressures to fit in and work with the world around them.

Facebook has an app called "My questions", which lets you pose questions for your friends to answer. I'd had to install it so I could answer the questions my friends were asking, but resisted its attempts to get me to ask a question. As a result it has defaulted to some random poser - "What is the one thing you always take with you?"

On Friday, given that a few people had taken the trouble to answer it, I decided that if people were going to the trouble of answering "my" question, it should at least be something worthwhile. I changed it to "How do you change the world?"

Today I've decided that that isn't a good enough question. Although it has a noble aim, and easily converts to a great slogan (as shown by Hugh in the Blue Monster "Change the world or go home" campaign) there is scope for misunderstanding.

Changing the world isn't enough we need to strive to improve it.

Improve the World, or Go Home

What a great idea. No-one's thought of that before... And that's the problem isn't it - How?

Tags: worldchanging purpose society

How Low Can You Go?

Jon Udell points to this mp3 of a thought-provoking speech given by Brian Schweitzer. Schweitzer is the charismatic, common-sense talking governor of Montana and in this talk he lays out his ideas on how to solve the problem of climate change.

Cleverly, he doesn't label it as such, and instead talks about removing America's dependence on foreign oil and about creating jobs and new businesses. His take is that in the short-term we can save 20% of our energy use through efficiency and conservation; 20% with renewables (interestingly, he points out that a new wind power plant in Montana is providing electicity at $38/megawatt, but a new coal power plant they've also built can only manage $41/megawatt); and a further 20% with bio-fuels.

That leaves a gap of 40%, which he argues could come from new, cleaner coal technologies. These aren't perfect, but his argument is that until the hydrogen economy arrives (or whatever the yet-to-be-invented solution is) we're going to be using some fossil fuels and the newer technologies already exist to strip the toxins from coal before it's burnt (so no mercury and such is released into the atmosphere) and they can capture the carbon-dioxide and sequester it in old oil-fields (it's ideal for helping extraction of oil, and the oil companies will gladly pay for it).

It sounds like a better short-term solution than the expansion of the nuclear program that's being promoted in this country.

The only change which has an immediate pay-off is reducing energy consumption. We need to make saving energy cool, and Brian Schweitzer's rallying cry is "How low can you go?"

The National Grid of The Future?

Jon Udell has posted up the mp3 from a conversation he had with Mike Frost about intelligent energy management. It's an interesting discussion about how Mike's company, Site Control, are building telemetry and control networks in businesses to let them monitor and control their electricity usage.

The main drive in take-up seems to be cost-savings through increased efficiency and control of the businesses energy usage, but as Jon notes, as you get finer-grained control over your electricity it opens up opportunities for the grid to manage usage. Rather than cut power to entire companies, or entire streets of houses, when there is a shortage the power companies can ask (possibly just through dynamic prices) users to scale back their usage. Which would you prefer - brownouts and power-cuts, or a heating system that ran a couple of degrees cooler every now and then?

Jon has written more about the energy web in the past and hit's one of the big problems head on when he says:

"It's crazy, when you think about it, that your phone bill is exquisitely itemized but your electicity bill is a single number"

I think if we had better ways of visualizing our energy usage, maybe even some of these more imaginative, almost ambient displays as detailed on Open Loop's Energy Projects links page or Open Loop's own Buried Light project, then it would reduce the amount of energy wasted needlessly and increase pressure on appliance manufacturers to improve their products.

The Rise of Awareness

I considered including this in my earlier post but couldn't find the right link between the two, so this gets its own entry.

Karen has posted an excellent post exhorting people to do what they can and providing some links to let you find out how (btw, I'm not the Adrian in the comments, that's Mr. Sevitz).

She'll hopefully be pleased to read that thanks to the Attenborough documentaries, we're upping our environmentally-friendliness beyond the home composting; cycling virtually all journeys under five or six miles; using panniers to reduce the number of plastic bags used; and growing some of our own vegetables. I'll post more about the extra things we're doing after they've kicked in properly.

Climate Chaos

Did anyone else watch the David Attenborough documentaries Are we changing planet earth? and Can we save planet earth? I wasn't expecting to learn too much from them, as I think I've got a pretty good awareness of the issues and some of the solutions, so I was shocked at the impact watching them had on me. They really brought home just how big an issue global warming is, and how important it is that we start to act now.

With the entire BBC Climate Chaos season and Al Gore's film, it feels like we're reaching a tipping-point of public opinion - but I suspect that I'm noticing these things because of my "green tendencies", and in fact most of the country (and the world) are largely unaware of the size of the problem facing us.

I think the BBC should make the documentaries freely available for download on its website. Surely it would be a masterpiece of public service "broadcasting", and a perfect way to promote the Creative Archive? Does anyone have David Attenborough's email address...?

Defending Against The Clones

Now I don't know enough about Sheffield to say whether these ideas and claims are realistic, but I think it's a superbly written manifesto and call-to-arms in the defence against the homogonisation of British towns and cities and the rise of "clone town Britain".

"Have the balls to run with a big idea."

Give Me A Future I Can Believe In

Over at the London Review of Books there's a rather interesting essay - The Destruction of the Public Sphere - about the political landscape of the UK.

I think Ross McKibbin, the author, is particularly insightful in his comments about the NHS and education - "Few ask why the educational and health systems seem now so subject to (failed) permanent revolution, given how stable their regimes were before the late 1970s. One answer is that ideological utopias can never be achieved precisely because they are utopian. The other is that the competitive market simply does not work in such systems."

It's rather depressing reading though, for there's no clear solution to re-connect the electorate with the politicians, and none of the major parties look they might be capable of sorting out the NHS or the education system, and make it somewhere where the actual people staffing the services don't have their enthusiasm and drive ground out of them with bureaucracy, league tables, and performance targets.

Maybe now it's time for some leaders who actually acknowledge that the world isn't perfect, and that it won't be possible to make it so. Then we can stop this futile pursuit of a world where nobody dies, no mistakes are made, and every child is a genius mathematician who can write better prose than Shakespear...

I Want To Praise You Like I Should

Good, evil and technology an essay by Scott Berkun.com

"In essence, he didn’t want to annoy me with praise. Annoy me with praise! Is there a more absurd phrase in the English language?

It made me think how many times I’d seen or read things that mattered to me and how rare it was I’d offered any praise in return."

Offer more praise. Now that might be a good resolution for the new year.

(Thanks go to Tom Smith for pointing out this essay.)

Open Rights Group Inaugural Event

As I said the other day, on Tuesday evening I headed down to London for the Open Rights Group (ORG) digital rights event.

It was an interesting evening. As the group is very new, it is still finding its direction, and choosing its battles; so as a result the meeting was a collection of concurrent group brainstorming sessions. I'm surprised there hasn't been more discussion of the event on peoples blogs, but maybe that will come when ORG wiki is in place and the notes from the meeting are collated there.

Rather than summarize and provide all the links to the speakers, some of the attendees, etc., I'll just point you at this write-up over on Preoccupations.

I still haven't worked out what I'll take from the meeting. These non-technical - political? moral? ethical? - computing issues are important. If nothing else, there'll probably be greater coverage of them in this blog.

Give Peace A Chance

Despite all the doom-and-gloom in the media, there are signs that the world isn't too bad a place after all: the number of armed conflicts has declined by more than 40% since 1992. The deadliest conflicts (those with 1000 or more battle-deaths) dropped by 80%.

TEDBlog: Huge story... largely ignored puts it well:

"The global media also, of course, largely ignored the report. Chances are this is the first you've heard of it. I'm getting more and more angry about this... the strange, unspoken, self-reinforcing alliance between media and public, which results in such a distorted world image being created. Drama, celebrity and parochialism inevitably trump insight, reason, and the global view."

Maybe if we could acknowledge the progress that's we're making, we could be more optimistic about what can be achieved; which would free us to attack the really big problems facing us.

Now This Could Be Handy

Learn About Procrastination and then get help overcoming it. I've definitely been using the "not in the right frame of mind" excuse recently.

The Paradox Of Progress

The Paradox of Progress by James Willis.

This book should be a set text for the induction course of new civil servants. It's also a rather good read for the rest of us. It drew me in and I had it finished in a few hours of non-stop reading, but if were widely read by those implementing our public services then maybe James Willis' Ministry of Leaving Well Alone would come to pass, and the UK would be a better place.

Starting with an analysis of some of the problems facing the powers that be, and the trouble with media-scale hype and an excess of specialism, the author moves on to present the case for generalism and to suggest some solutions; all presented in a very readable style, peppered with anecdotes from his life and his time as a GP.

You can read it all online for free, or buy it in book form for a tenner, signed by the author himself. Maybe we could set-up some sort of adopt-a-public-servant scheme, where we read it online and then our ten pounds is spent sending a copy to a chosen official...

Kill Your Inner Demon

"If you don't like the story your life has become — tell yourself a better one."

Can The Natural Enterprise Save The World?

I haven't read all these links yet, this post is partly so I don't lose what looks like some very interesting reading.

Richard MacManus links to this interesting article by Dave Pollard exhorting the creative types in knowledge management and IT to embrace entrepreneurship as a way to solve the world's problems. A rather bold claim, but it appeals to me as that's one of the long-term aims of my entrepreneurial venture.

From there, I found links to another of Dave's essays, A Prescription For Business Innovation: Creating Technologies That Solve Basic Human Needs, and also Natural Enterprise, the majority of his upcoming book in online form. I have a feeling this will make an interesting companion read to the next book on my reading pile, The Ecology of Commerce.

The Death Of The Best

In days of not so old, when most people didn't stray far from where they were born, everybody could be the best. At something. You are the best baker; I am the best mechanic; she is a farmer, as is he - he is the best farmer, but she is the best singer; your brother is the fastest runner; my cousin is the best climber.

Everyone could find their niche, and make it theirs.

Then we all moved to the global village. Now there are far more people than there are things to be best at. Now there's always someone better than you. At everything.