sent2null space

This article makes the case that brainstorming is an ineffective means of inspiring creativity or innovation. It is yet more evidence to support the dominant reasons behind my inventing the Action Oriented Workflow (AOW) paradigm. A quote from the article above confirms what drove my intuition: Claims about the success of brainstorming rest on easily tested assumptions. One assumption is that groups produce more ideas than individuals. Researchers in Minnesota tested this with scientists and advertising executives from the 3M Company. Half the subjects worked in groups of four. The other half worked alone, and then their results were randomly combined as if they had worked in a group, with duplicate ideas counted only once. In every case, four people working individually generated between 30 to 40 percent more ideas than four people working in a group. Their results were of a higher quality, too: independent judges assessed the work and found that the individuals produced better id...

So the other day a few Luddites opined in one of my Facebook threads that they felt that the upcoming drone revolution would not be practical in cities. This short video shows exactly why they are wrong: https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10150345232740313&fref=nf As a technologist who has built complex distributed system I had to chuckle at the doubts being described. People who don't work in technology have no clue of the large reduction of complexity and errors that attends having a good design. Consider the internet we are using...designed to ensure that our communications find their way to the desired destination...even with constant breaks in the communication channel across the internet...magic ? No, good design, expected packet loss and routing via  tcp/ip , udp at the low level through routers and switches and what seems like a hopeless problem is routinely done trillions of time per second across the whole globe. The video above demonstrates in a few second...

Prologue 2:13 am: {A dimly lit room in a dusty and crowded apartment complex, the hum of several computers and the buzz of a couple of desktop sequencers the only noise in the room besides the click and clack of typing...} Amir peers at the screen, his eyes strained from several hours of coding. Just a few hours earlier he had an epiphany regarding the right way to encode a genetic sequence that would allow the proper replication behavior to be triggered. He'd been working on this code for about a week and was hoping with the help of Allah that he could figure out the riddle. Turns out the problem was not as difficult as he first surmised, as builders of code often encounter when attacking a touch challenge. As a 21 year old he'd encountered quite a few challenges but he was still some what unsure of his abilities despite the fact that those around him believed with the help of God that he could succeed. He was working on this project for them, for his mother who at 47 s...

Update (Friday April 3, 2015) !! It turns out I wrote this article on the wrong information. Google it turns out is not to blame for the delay the authorizing bank is the source. For what ever reason they flagged the transaction for review (likely the fact that the investor was in Europe when she initiated the request) and that is why the fund transfer to her Google Wallet account and to mine has been delayed. I thus retract the bulk of the comments made below with the mistaken belief that the hold was an internal matter on Google's part. Still the fact that their customer service were unable to clearly specify the source of the block is a big issue that they should address the integrity of their system for review is not relevant as it was not their system that was the cause of this issue. I keep this article up only  as public record of the affair. So the month starts anew and with it I receive a transfer from my investor at least I am supposed to via Google wallet as init...

From this article : "But being on the way to becoming a new species isn’t the same thing as actually speciating. Actual speciation without isolation is quite rare, and even the Santa Cruz Island jays have not actually speciated, and may never even do so. But the implications for long-held evolutionary principles are intriguing. Darwin’s famous Galapagos finches certainly prove that isolation leads to speciation, but now it may be that isolation isn’t always necessary to get species to diverge." Two things, 1) The theory of evolution never states what the parameters of "separation" are, it simply demonstrated that strict spatial separations do lead isolated populations to local adaptations and eventually speciation over time. This is a separate thing however from saying that to have speciation one must have *strict spatial separation*. This is key because.... 2)There is one other way where by populations can become separated. What is it? Culturally. Th...

In a blog post from 2008 , I introduced the idea of incremental truth following that is the secret sauce behind why wikipedia works as a source of reliable information for many subjects despite having a generally unrestricted editing model for new articles by any possible authors. Over the years people have variably misunderstood the power of this mechanism and as time has gone by the relative approach to truth that has been clear to see with various types of politically or religiously focused topics is clear. For such articles wikipedia had found that "comment wars "would break out as clever but subjectively based arguments were used to change articles in subtle or gross ways producing articles that appeared to muddle down the historical or empirical facts to long paragraphs of highly conditional statements with little definite statements of veracity. Moreover these highly active articles were continuously subject to comment bombing of various types as vandals holding op...

In 2009 I mused in a Facebook post where a friend quipped if they were the only one who felt time was moving faster as they aged I responded.: "the more you know, the less there is to find out, the less there is to find out the slower you learn new things, imagine a unit of learning as perceived by you being constant as time goes by life surprises you less and what does happen is spaced out in your experience over longer periods of time, thus a given number of events (significant learning ones that bring new knowledge) is perceived to be spaced out as well and there you go, time contracting with age.  Just a theory. ;)" I later wrote a short blog article describing the theory but didn't further explore until now. Since then, I've gone on to perform personal research in dynamic cognition and have proposed a formal theory of generalized dynamic cognition based on an idea I was realizing at the time I called "salience modulation" , my refined answer...