Tracing paths in woods nearby

Google EarthI’ve moved to a new neighborhood and there’s a forest nearby. Today, to get a better idea of all the trails, the dog and I wandered every trail we could find. I also has Sports Tracker on to see what a trace of the ramble might reveal.

The resolution of the GPS kept some paths that I walked over more than once from being overlaid, showing two parallel paths.

But, for me, it gives me an idea of all the paths I can walk there.

July 16th, 2008 | Category: General, Science | 2 comments

Swimming the sea of knowledge (the Concept Web?)

KnewcoI’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how to find, navigate, recombine, and contribute to … what’s out there, though mostly focused on science and the next generation of science ‘publishing’ (in quotes, since it’ll be quite different from traditional publishing, more back in the hands of the scientists like in the old days).

A friend pointed me to this cool site called WikiProfessional, where they have these cool info navigators. A quick perusal suggests that they focus on the ‘find’ and ‘navigate’, though I think they also have a wee bit of ‘contribute’ through the addition of semantics as you navigate and annotate.

There are a ton of collaborators working on this and I dug a bit deeper into the main one, Knewco, It was on their pages that I stumbled upon the image to the right, about the Knowlet, trademarked, but spot on representing what knowledge really is: a concept with a cloud of facts, co-occurring items, with a few predicted concepts thrown in.

I like.

UPDATE: And here’s a paper that goes into the details.

I like. A lot.

July 14th, 2008 | Category: Innovation, Science, Strategy | One comment

The Electric Knife Syndrome

2385188275 E3Cdf33A89I’m at the Mobile 2.0 conference in Barcelona. I was talking with Mark Kramer, and Bryan and Stepanie Rieger about the things we usually talk about. I had mentioned how I was at a conference where the enthusiasm for the ‘technology’ made folks forget to use simpler and better solutions. That led Mark to tell us about his stay in Albania where he saw someone using an electric knife to cut bread at a shop. There was no reason to use the electric knife, a regular knife would have sufficed. Mark suggested that it was using the ultimate tech to be cutting edge.

Another example of this came up later in the discussion. I then realized that we were discussing what could be called the ‘Electric Knife Syndrome‘, where the tech used is subtly inappropriate in relation to existing solutions. This is slightly different from Post-Optimal Objects, where the solution itself is useless. But I think the Electric Knife Syndrome occurs more frequently and we forget a simpler solution is available.

Image from tizzle

July 4th, 2008 | Category: Philosophy, Strategy | Leave a comment