Category — learning

I’ve been spending too much time in the wrong part of the net. I need your help to get out.

In the dark corners of the early-adopter tech-savvy social-media-oriented (un)professional blogosphere, one can drown in posts about microblogging, personal branding, lifestreaming, blog monetization and twitter-vs-friendfeed. My special (un)favorite is the “N tips to make the most of <buzzword>” category.

One hopes that modern websites are usable enough that we don’t need a constant stream of tips and tricks to learn to use them. And if they aren’t, well then they don’t deserve to be used. Besides, don’t these people know that the worst you can do around new technology is to read a handbook?

So please help me out: recommend a nice site (or two) to read that won’t bombard me with such handicapping content. All interesting topics welcome. The comment box is open.

Thank you very much in advance.

[post title shamelessly stolen from one of my parents' fridge magnets; i spend time out of the net, too!]

In any endeavor (software development, politics, philosophy, home economics, love, etc.) when we have momentarily spare resources we should spend them to sharpen our tools — our basis set — to be better prepared for the next challenge. There are better and worse ways to prepare but to select the better ones it takes forms of practice that yield skills, experience, and resources. It requires, in other words, an aesthetic judgement combined with skilled practice. So there is, by definition, a craft to it. A basis craft: the practice of being ready to improve things.

Basiscraft is the exercise of manufacturing future liberties.

Tom Lord – basiscraft.com

Taking in new things and using them to evolve is the very meaning of existence.

Catching up with long-overdue feed items I come across a reference to Clive Thompson’s musings on sci-fi as the last last bastion of philosophical writing. Thompson writes:

If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.

[...]

Its authors rewrite one or two basic rules about society and then examine how humanity responds — so we can learn more about ourselves. How would love change if we lived to be 500? If you could travel back in time and revise decisions, would you? What if you could confront, talk to, or kill God?

Serendipitously, a later post on the same blog points to an amusing visualization of books preferred at certain US colleges, correlated with the average SAT scores from those universities. Booksthatmakeyoudumb offers a conveniently genre-sorted chart which shows Philosophy as the genre correlated with the highest SATs; following as a close second is, yes, you guessed right, science fiction.

Ender’s game beats Anna Karenina. Tolstoy is surely the better writer, but Scott Card gave us the most food for thought.

Don’t limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.

(seen in a post by Tim Ferris on traveling)

Jeff Hawkins, the author of On intelligence and founder of Palm One and Handspring, is not just an expert in mobile computing. For a long time, Hawkins has been interested in understanding how the brain works. His hope is that a better understanding on human intelligence will make it possible to build intelligent machines.

This passion for understanding intelligence led Hawkins to found the Redwood Neuroscience Institute in 2002 to advance research the field and, eventually, to write this book (together with Sandra Blakeslee).

On intelligence proposes a unified model to describe how the human cortex (the site of our intelligence) works. Hawkins’ hope is that neuroscientists will be able to use this model to accelerate the advance of research in that field; computer scientists might be able to use the model to start experimenting with new approaches to artificial intelligence.

The main ideas behind this model are summarized by Hawkins thus:

The human cortex is particularly large and therefore has a massive moemory capacity. It is constantly predicting what you will see, hear and feel, mostly in ways you are unconscious of. These predictions are our thoughts, and, when combined with sensory input, they are our perceptions. I call this view of the brain the memory-prediction framework of intelligence.

[...]

To make predictions of future events, your neocortex has to store sequences of patterns. To recall the appropriate memories, it has to retrieve patterns by their similarity to past patterns (auto-associative recall). And, finally, memories have to be stored in an invariant form so that the knowledge of past events can be applied to new situations that are similar but not identical to the past.

In the last chapters of the book, Hawkins briefly addresses ethical concerns around building intelligent machines, suggests possible applications of these ideas to the field of artificial intelligence and offers some cautious predictions.

Overall, I found the book an interesting and informative read. I definitely recommend it for those that are interested in learning a bit more about how the human brain works, or in new possible paths of exploration for the field of AI.

On the negative side, I got a bit bored by the overly detailed 70-page-long description of the cortex. Surely this detailed description is more interesting for someone that has some background in neuroscience (which I don’t), and it is necessary to give Hawkins’ ideas some scientific validity, but I found it the least fun part of the book.

More on the book’s official site: http://www.onintelligence.org/.

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

Some interesting links to feed your Sunday surfing habit:

• Brazen Careerist: Book excerpt: How to turn a bad boss into a good one:
  

  Want to deal with a bad boss? First, stop complaining. Unless your boss breaks the law, you don’t have a bad boss, you have a boss you are managing poorly. Pick on your boss all you want, but if you were taking responsibility for your career, you wouldn’t let your boss’s problems bring you down.

• Seth Godin: Who should you hire?:
  

  There is a fundamental shift in rules from manual-based work (where you follow instructions and an increase in productivity means doing the steps faster) to project-based work (where the instructions are unknown, and visualizing outcomes and then getting things done is what counts.)

• Micro Persuasion: The Most Essential Career Skill You Need to Succeed:
  

  So as I thought about it, the most important “tool” you can have today in business is insatiable curiosity. The minute you lose it, you’re dead.

• Web Worker Daily: The Dangerous Myth of The Dream Job (by Timothy Ferris): I am not quite sure I fully agree with the main thesis of this article, but it is nevertheless a thought-provoking read.
  

  Converting passions into “work” is the fastest way to kill those passions. Surfing two hours on a Saturday to decompress from a hard week might be heaven, but waking up at 6 am every morning to do it 40 hours per week with difficult clients is a very different animal. Mixing business and pleasure can be a psychologically toxic cocktail.

Another take on “How To Read a Business Book”, from the 800-CEO-READ Blog has an interesting idea that I believe applies not only to management books.

To get the most out of a business book, you need to read two or three others on the same topic.

I believe this applies not only to books, but also to movies and other works of art / wisdom. The better your overview of the area, the better your understanding and the bigger your enjoyment.

Peter Gordon, from Columbia University, says that if your language doesn’t have a word for a number, you probable don’t understand that number. This might be true for other concepts also.

Gordon found this out by studying the Pirah?ɬ� people, who live in Brazil. The Pirah?ɬ� only have three words to designate numbers: “one”, “two” and “many”. Not even the words “one” and “two” designate exact numbers; rather, “one” means “roughly one” and “two” means “a few, one or two”. Apparently, they don’t have exact numbers because they simply don’t need them; they use barter for commerce and don’t use money.

(from The Economist)