Thomas L. Friedman wrote an excellent post over here at the NY Times pleading with the climate folks to go on offense with a simple 50 page grade six english report on the state of the world. It’s awesome. Read it. I agree with all of it and particularly getting rid of the phrase “global warming” because idiots then say “well it was warm today here in Arizona so Al Gore is OBVIOUSLY a lying idiot.”(sigh)

Key quotes are below:

What’s real? In my view, the climate-science community should convene its top experts — from places like NASA, America’s national laboratories, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, the California Institute of Technology and the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre — and produce a simple 50-page report. They could call it “What We Know,” summarizing everything we already know about climate change in language that a sixth grader could understand, with unimpeachable peer-reviewed footnotes.

At the same time, they should add a summary of all the errors and wild exaggerations made by the climate skeptics — and where they get their funding. It is time the climate scientists stopped just playing defense. The physicist Joseph Romm, a leading climate writer, is posting on his Web site, climateprogress.org, his own listing of the best scientific papers on every aspect of climate change for anyone who wants a quick summary now.

Here are the points I like to stress:

1) Avoid the term “global warming.” I prefer the term “global weirding,” because that is what actually happens as global temperatures rise and the climate changes. The weather gets weird. The hots are expected to get hotter, the wets wetter, the dries drier and the most violent storms more numerous.

The fact that it has snowed like crazy in Washington — while it has rained at the Winter Olympics in Canada, while Australia is having a record 13-year drought — is right in line with what every major study on climate change predicts: The weather will get weird; some areas will get more precipitation than ever; others will become drier than ever.

2) Historically, we know that the climate has warmed and cooled slowly, going from Ice Ages to warming periods, driven, in part, by changes in the earth’s orbit and hence the amount of sunlight different parts of the earth get. What the current debate is about is whether humans — by emitting so much carbon and thickening the greenhouse-gas blanket around the earth so that it traps more heat — are now rapidly exacerbating nature’s natural warming cycles to a degree that could lead to dangerous disruptions.

3) Those who favor taking action are saying: “Because the warming that humans are doing is irreversible and potentially catastrophic, let’s buy some insurance — by investing in renewable energy, energy efficiency and mass transit — because this insurance will also actually make us richer and more secure.” We will import less oil, invent and export more clean-tech products, send fewer dollars overseas to buy oil and, most importantly, diminish the dollars that are sustaining the worst petro-dictators in the world who indirectly fund terrorists and the schools that nurture them.

4) Even if climate change proves less catastrophic than some fear, in a world that is forecast to grow from 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion people between now and 2050, more and more of whom will live like Americans, demand for renewable energy and clean water is going to soar. It is obviously going to be the next great global industry.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Global Weirding Is Here – NYTimes.com.

Well, I’m psyched to find out that Stephen Wolfram (head of Wolfram Research) has publicly announced WolframAlpha, a “computational knowledge engine” that can interpret your questions, go find the answers and then tell you the answer (or answers) to your question. This could potentially be a huge leap forward towards the realization of those science fiction characters. I can’t wait to see how well it works and to begin using and playing with it.

Thanks to Dave McClure for the link to this page by Nova Spivack.

[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]

Cops and Robbers Las Vegas Style, with Jeff Jonas, chief scientist of the IBM Entity Analytic Solutions group

• has some very interesting ideas on “the database of intentions concept”
• founded SRD in 1983
• worked with the gaming business and the MIT Team
• sold to IBM Jan 2005
• Now chief scientist at IBM analytics

Rather than using the notes I had typed, I’m going to repost Jeff’s excellent summary from his blog:

I was invited to speak at the Web 2.0 Summit last week in San Francisco. Believe it or not I actually presented 41 charts in less than 10 minutes. This kind of general session presentation was called a Show Me/High Order Bits. That’s right, the essence of my life’s work in just 10 minutes … the thrill! [Note: The formal title was: "Cops and Robbers Las Vegas Style."]

If you did not make this most amazing summit with a most amazing cast of attendees or were there and missed my auctioneer-inspired delivery, here are the key points I covered:

0. I first showed a picture of a fire breather from my last New Year’s eve party – but that is not important right now.

1. I showed a surveillance video of a casino scam involving a corrupt dealer – resulting in a $250,000 loss in 15 minutes. If the dealer had the same address in the payroll system as the “high roller” had in the loyalty club and comp systems (free rooms, meals, etc.) … who would know?

2. I introduced the concept of “Corporate Amnesia.” This occurs when one part of the organization makes a decision which very clearly did not account for other key data sitting elsewhere in the enterprise e.g., your marketing department is mailing offers to a person currently in jail for stealing from you!

3. “Perception Isolation” is the leading cause of Corporate Amnesia. Think of each operational system as a distinct enterprise perception. Notably, each perception is isolated from the others.

4. Enterprise intelligence requires persistent context. There is no way to get smart if perceptions are not integrated. When perceptions are integrated and stored in a database … this is persistent context. Think of this like a brain. You need a brain to be smart … duh!

5. I gave a simple demonstration of how context can be constructed and persisted and how this enables the enterprise discovery that otherwise would be missed (more corporate amnesia).

6. Then treat data as a query. And thus I introduced a 1st principle for enterprise intelligence: If you do not process every new piece of key data (perception) first like a query … then you will not know if it matters … until someone asks.

7. Treating data like a query beats periodically boiling the ocean when attempting to achieve real time intelligence.

8. Then, also treat queries as data. This means if one wishes to have a query persist, it must be persisted in the same data space as the data itself. Which leads to the 2nd principle for enterprise intelligence: Treat queries like data to avoid having to ask every question every day.

9. While constructing context (real time receipt of perceptions from across the different operational systems) this happens to be the most
ideal time for this librarian function to exhibit enterprise awareness. Which leads to the 3rd principle for enterprise intelligence: Enterprise intelligence is computationally most efficient when performed at the moment the observation is perceived.

10. This is the world I sometimes refer to as “Perpetual Analytics.” A world where the “data finds the data … and the relevance finds the user.”

11. And this stuff really works … and at scale. In fact, in a benchmark center this was found to scale to over 3 billion historical observations while handling the real-time ingestion of more than 2,000 perceptions a second.

12. This has privacy consequences. For example: (a) What perceptions can or should be placed into context (in one brain)?; (b) What if
perceptions are contextualized for one mission, then re-purposed later for another?; (c) What if someone steals the brain?; and (d) What if the librarian is corrupt?

13. I worry about these things. And I spend about 40% of my time thinking about the privacy and civil liberties consequences of such systems. Which prompted one of my more recent inventions: a new class of technology I call “Analytics in the Anonymized Data Space.” Basically, instead of transferring perceptions from the various senses (an organization’s operational systems) that are human readable … the perceptions are anonymized first before being handed to the librarian for contextualization in the brain. The Reader’s Digest explanation of anonymization is basically this: if you take a pig and a grinder and make a sausage, even if I give you the sausage and the grinder you are not going to be able to make a pig. The cool thing about this new technology is that the librarian can still construct and persist context and discover relevance without actually handling human meaningful data.

14. So I summarized with the main think towards enterprise intelligence — (a) Without persistent context … you have no brain; (b) Treat data and queries with equal rights to improve awareness; (c) More intelligence is possible when thinking based on streaming perceptions;
and (d) And from a privacy perspective: More or less perceptions, that is the question (there is an important policy discussion that needs to take place about just how many – more versus less – perceptions should be permitted to be put in the brain).

15. While this approach to enterprise intelligence was born in Las Vegas … today it plays a role in national security, financial services, health care, etc. And much of the focus of my current activity is towards using this technology to deliver new threat and fraud intelligence solutions in these and other areas.

To my shock at this point I had completed 36 charts and still had 1.5 minutes left. As I thought this was in fact a possibility, I quickly moved into what I called the bonus section!

Bonus Picture 1. I showed a picture of a chimpanzee with the words “99.4 percent human.” The point being: If a .6% difference matters this much … no wonder traditional information systems lack so much intelligence! Net net, in intelligence systems very tiny little increments of accuracy make the entire difference between being dumb and smart.

Bonus Picture 2. And it may go without saying, that in such systems as this … the more observations one has the better the context. In fact, many times new observations will contain the evidence to improve or fix earlier contextualizations.

Bonus Picture 3. And this brings us to the crucial concept of “Sequence Neutrality.” Meaning despite the order of the observations (records A, B, C received in that order versus arriving in the order C, B, A) the end state is the same. If you cannot process information with sequence neutrality then you get “data drift” – meaning you hold contradictory content which must be reconciled eventually or accuracy erodes. This is a common reason data warehouses must be reloaded. Almost no systems possess this sequence neutrality property. Notably, it is virtually essential at scale because it eventually becomes impossible to tear very large databases down to reload them every week, month, or quarter.

Closing thought. After working on designing sequence neutrality into my technologies, I have discovered there are some cases where a new
record (perception) will necessitate so much recontextualization, it cannot be done in real time. Drats! That means the system must either be periodically reloaded or alternatively go offline into a maintenance mode (i.e., deep sleep) to remedy the situation. But alas, that is why
humans sleep too – deep recontexualization that could not be handled on the fly. Our dreams are the byproduct of this necessary re-shuffling. Or so I have concluded!

This post is now the shortest read about my enterprise intelligence information theory.

I plan on blogging about “why perception isolation is the leading cause of corporate amnesia” very soon

[What were my key take-aways from this talk? That Jonas is addressing the issue we see in our company and in every company I have ever looked at where there are many disconnected and different systems that "perceive" the environment, partners, customers, and developers and no central "brain" making sense of all of the perceptions and reconciling them. This is more than a data warehouse. This is a sophisticated system in the middle that pulls in all inputs, puts them together in context, and then matches new inbound data against that entire context before deciding what to do about it and how important it is. This is not single-sign on. Or globally unique identities. Or data warehousing. Or record merging. It is a more holistic and comprehensive view of the enterprise where the premise is: The enterprise should treat me (the customer/partner/developer/supplier) in one consistent way all the time." I'm looking forward to spending some more time with Jonas to understand how these principles might be brought to bear in a real enterprise today.]

[And by the way Jeff, your compression of ten years into ten minutes (no...8 1/2 minutes!) proved my Theory of Constraint which states that "constraints are a key driver of both creativity and clarity and so should be welcomed to any project." This has seemed to be true no matter where I have been or what project I have worked on. It applies equally well to startups too - it seems that the less cash and resources they have, the more focused, creative, and disciplined they are.]

The presentation started with an overview of the successes from 2005. Next, Geoff Hansen presented an IT Outlook for 2006. This was followed by the Ready to Rocket 25 for 2006 and the “Ones to watch” – 40 emerging companies that might graduate to the full “Ready to Rocket” Top 25 in 2007. Along with those lists, Price-Waterhouse Coopers presented an overview of the M&A and IPO activity across North America for 2005, and Bill Koty, a professor from UBC presented a brief overview of a newly released Premier’s Technology Council report titled “Ahead of the Future” which gives a series of scenarios and predictions for B.C.’s technology economy development from 2005-2020. The summary notes are below along with some of my opinion at the bottom.

NASA should be in BC – we launched a lot of rockets last year.

Some interesting notes came from this session:

• 2005 was a breakthrough year on the Rocketbuilders list.
• These companies were successful because they had a laser focus on a niche market.
• Key highlights of the 2005 list include:
• PureEdge Solutions Inc. (Victoria, BC) was acquired by IBM
• Over 45% of the 2005 Ready to Rocket companies received new investments
• 100% of the 2005 Ready to Rocket companies exceeded 30% revenue growth
• Over 60% of 2005 Ready to Rocket companies exceeded 100% revenue growth
• Over 35% of 2005 Ready to Rocket companies exceeded 200% revenue growth

2006 – the rise of the phoenix

Here were some of the highlights of the predictions for the year ahead;

• general projections seem to predicting that companies will increase their IT spending 5-6% across the board this year
• SMB spending is double that and includes factoring in old hardware replacement cycles for hardware purchased before the collapse.
• there is a trend away from cost-cutting measures and back to the value creation side in terms of prioritizing projects.
• Key Themes that have been identified for 2006:
• Choice: give the user what they want, where they want, in the form they want (Tivo, xFM)
• Make it easy: make it simple to learn and use
• Safe & Secure: ensure that they can store their data safely and people will trust you with that data
• Search is king: there is a lot of work to do here
• Microsoft Office enablement: now that Microsoft has opened up the APIs, companies are succeeding by building things that integrate into Microsoft Office, even more than they were before.
• Storage is still hot: Networked attached storage companies (for example) are growing at up to 300%/yr
• Make it portable: give people the ability to stay mobile: Blackberries, iPods, xFM
• Ensure compliance: people are going to spend 30% of their IT budgets on compliance

For more information on the 2006 IT Outlook, contact Geoff Hansen at Rocketbuilders at 866-824-8785 or at gchansen@rocketbuilders.com.

Ready to Rocket 25 2006 list

Some interesting notes came from this session:

• For the 2006 list, the selection team had great difficulty keeping it DOWN to 25, which meant that the Ones to Watch list expanded to 40 companies.
• There were so many interesting technologies coming up that Rocketbuilders considered launching an “Interesting Concepts” category…but didn’t
• Success factors. The Top 25 shared some key success factors:
• they were heavily verticalized (we had 5 Financial service companies and 4 Healthcare companies on the list.)
• they were well-funded to grow
• Some of these companies are approaching $5 – 10M in revenues – a point at which they become a LOT more interesting as acquisition targets.

Here is the direct link to the Ready to Rocket 25 List. But they are here for review as well:

The Ones to Watch

This list was presented but the final list will not be out until January 13th, 2006.

Lane construction finally complete – traffic now moving slowly towards IPO exit lane

In this 2005 review of M&A and IPO activity across North America presented by Randy Garg of Price-Waterhouse Coopers , there were quite a few interesting tidbits:

• The IPO market has finally been resurrected.
• $100B of private equity was present in 2005.
• Private equity funds are becoming more active in M&A (25% of $100B or 25B) which is a new development.
• Local companies are going public…but not necessarily on the TSX. Some have gone to London or to the USA. This is a new development.
• Debt and subordinated debt as financial instruments have started to appear and this is a new development which is being enabled by the fact that newer companies have (gasp) revenues that can support the debt and are more financially solid and lendable from a cash-flow perspective.
• Public companies are going private again in order to lower their costs, and simplify their operations because the costs of compliance are huge (up to 30% of IT spending per above notes, not to mention other back-office charges.)
• Rule of Thumb: if you’re looking to get acquired, make sure that you have audited financials
• BC and Canadian companies are now on the U.S. radar but our prices have gone up and our currency has gone up, leaving us as less of a bargain than before.
• The major M&A deals are still predominantly cross-border – U.S. companies buying Canadian ones or vice versa. There was very little activity in Canada between Canadian entities.
• M&A is still a revenue purchase decision for companies. They are buying revenues, not necessarily technologies. Once a company crosses the revenue barrier, there are a LOT more suitors.
• $5M seems to be a baseline deal size.
• 2006 is poised to be the best year yet for M&A activity!
• There is a ton of money out there – $100B raised in the U.S. in the Private equity markets in 2005
• therefore money is not the problem
• finding good deals and good teams are the problem
• M&A is still the preferred route of exit when compared to IPO, but IPOs are now back as options.

I’d like a micro fuel-cell powered proteomics machine for gene therapy web research

William Koty of UBC presented some of the findings from the Premier’s Technology Council report on Emerging Technologies titled “Ahead of the Future”. It evaluated 39 emerging technologies, boiled those down to a short-short-list of 12 Emerging technologies and then presented two almost contradictory charts – one from the academics and one from the industry advisory board.  It was long on research methodology and somewhat short on conclusions.

I am hoping that they will do a follow-on or that it will feed into a larger discussion where they do indeed flesh out the scenarios that they discuss very tentatively in the report.

At the end of the day, what did they really say?

If I had to summarize the session, I would say it like this:

• The tech industry is ramping up again. A lot of people had that gut sense but the numbers now prove it.
• We are building some really kick-ass companies here in B.C.
• Those companies are growing again.
• M&A activity will be at an all time high in 2006 and the IPO markets are opening up again as exit routes.

“Your playing small doesn’t serve the world”

We build good companies here that are very capital efficient and that are still attractively priced for acquisition. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It brings money into the economy, it gives local entrepreneurs access to global acquisitors’ systems and training and talent, and spawns more entrepreneurial ventures. A year or two ago, one of the local entrepreneurs hosted a VEF event titled something like: “Why acquisitions are gutting B.C.’s economy.” The resulting talk though had every one of the entrepreneurs on the panel saying that their acquisition was a good thing and that in fact it had had a net positive benefit across the board on a bunch of different things. I remember the host lamenting at the end that he should have talked to the panel BEFORE naming the talk.

Another key point was that we are finally starting to grow our companies again to a decent size We need to keep thinking bigger. Even the statement that they are growing to a decent size is deceiving since we are referring to companies approaching $10M/yr in revenues, which is laughable in the U.S. But it’s a starting point. If you are an entrepreneur, don’t say, “We’re going to dominate the lower mainland”, say “We’re going to dominate the western world” or the whole world for that matter.

I am always reminded of the quote that was incorrectly attributed to Nelson Mandela but which was actually written by Marianne Williamson in her 1992 book, “Return to Love”:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of god – your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of god that is within us. It is not in just some of us. It is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

B.C. entrepreneurs would do well to think about that and learn from it. Our playing small doesn’t serve the world. So get out there, think big, and serve the world.

Thanks to the good people at Rocketbuilders for the invitation and for all the hard work in putting this together!

Now, I have heard of using neural networks connected to wings or to legs and then letting them learn how to walk or fly. But I have never heard of using live brain material to achieve the same thing.

It brings to mind (no pun intended) articles I have read on teaching the body to “feel” fake limbs as well as on retraining sexual stimulation (teaching quadriplegics to attain orgasm through touch stimulation of their head for example rather than their genitalia), many of which point to the somewhat universal nature of neurons and their ability to remap to different inputs and outputs by simply retraining them purposefully.

The fascinating thing for me about this work is:

• the brain works without a heart (or so it appears unless I read the article incorrectly) which makes me ask, what is feeding it? Also, it’s interesting to me that all you need is the core material and then it just works – it does what it is supposed to do, which is receive inputs, establish communication channels, and drive outputs.

• it is a true bionic hybrid, similar to the guy who sent email via his thoughts recently.

Matt asked me what I thought of the ethics of this work. I don’t think there are any ethical problems with designing and building hybrid bionic creatures to understand the cognitive systems and signalling networks.

Although I do admit that the idea of fleshy brain material being inside this device did give me pause for a moment for some reason that I still can’t articulate.

UPDATE: This Wired article discusses research at Andrew Schwartz’s neurobiology lab at the University of Pittsburgh that allowed them to train a monkey to learn how to use a robotic arm simply by sending it brain signals, in essence, re-mapping some small subset of neurons to the inputs and outputs of this robotic arm. The monkey could then use the arm to feed itself. Once again, this seems to point to the brain as being quickly able to adapt to new limbs, new motor skills, and new sensations or at least the sensation of sensation.

It appears that when faced with a decision between a short-term emotional reward and longer-term logical reward, two different parts of the brain are involved.

This brings to mind (no pun intended), Marvin Minsky’s work on the “Society of Mind” where he posits that the entire brain is simply a bunch of independent processes which vote collectively on outcomes.

I wonder if this is how the Sim game programmers are doing it?

Now for the bad news. The sun in our solar system is expanding and it is expected that it will eventually absorb Mercury, Venus, and Earth, causing life here to only last for another half billion years. I am pretty sure that the last life forms left will be single-celled bacterium, cockroaches, and spammers. So the window of opportunity for life to develop here and then migrate throughout the rest of the solar system and Universe is about a billion years. Given that we didn’t invent space travel until the first half billion were over, that window is now a half billion to get off the planet and out into the Universe. Given that we only have another half a billion years, shouldn’t we all just get along, enjoy the sunset while it’s that far away, and figure out how to get the hell off this planet? Of course, while we’re here, we should do as much mountain biking, trail-running, paddling, travelling and exploring as we can.

By the time the Earth has hit 8 billion years, long after we are gone, the oceans will have vaporised and at the 12 billion year mark, Earth will have folded entirely into the sun. If the planet is going to be gone, does that mean I think that we should use up the precious natural resources pollute our biosphere while we are here? Of course not, that would be asinine and short-sighted. But then again, humans are not the best at extending their time-scales, nor at empathizing enough with future generations. Although that does seem to be changing in some small but important ways with the spread of the sustainable development movement. I may be a bit of an odd realist/pragmatist in the sustainability movement in that I’m not sure I believe in the implicit value of resources, plants, and animals on earth for their own sake. If they’re all going to be gone anyway, that seems moot. But since these things took tens and hundreds of millions of years to develop, I do believe that we should learn from them (biology), design things based on them (biomimicry and nanotechnology), be efficient in our use of them so that we do not mortgage our children’s future (sustainability), and learn how to build efficient systems so that we can spread out into the universe and live in harsher, resource constrained regions as we do so.