07 Mar Your Personal Bubble
There is time-space context within which we constantly move and place ourselves in the universe. Our constantly moving and evolving personal bubble is the starting point of understanding. Where are you at this very moment? Are you where you want to be? Where am I? Why am I here? Why isn’t the tide washing the […]
04 Aug Context of Knowing, Thinking and Believing
There may be an incontrovertible thing out there called “truth.” But it seems quite elusive to me. In Japanese it is very polite to append just about any declarative sentence, any assertion of knowledge with “to omoimasu” (と思います) meaning I think. By being less committal, we save the other people in the conversation from embarrassment because their […]
17 Mar Intro to Cybernetic Models
Are you my Motherboard? From Eliza to Watson, Jeeves, Siri and Alfred, people have been naming their computers. Some systems are named after their inventors – like Wolfram Alpha and its siblings. Who is JARVIS? Just Another Rather Very Intelligent System? These attempts have, in their own little ways, touched our lives. But we are still waiting on the cusp of an innovation that will […]
20 Aug Two Rights and a Village: Social Communication
To Win a Point When we communicate, we often use persuasive language and/or logic to win a point. This happens all the time in political campaigns. As an example, the conservative presidential campaign recently took umbrage when the liberal incumbent stated that successful entrepreneurs need a community of people to succeed. The conservatives felt that […]
14 Jul Understanding Subtext
If human interaction were simple and straightforward, computers would have been able to do a credible job of imitating it years ago. Examples of simple interaction machines, including the Rogerian Psycho-therapist named Eliza and the question answerer named Watson, show that computer algorithms can do pretty well at some interaction tasks. If all human interactions […]
30 Jun Gamification – The Future
Ain’t no Passin’ Thing… Were you one of the brilliant prognosticators that said that the mouse (pointing device) was a fad and would never catch on, or that iPads wouldn’t catch on, or that the world would max out at, say, five computers? Some may scoff at the value of gamification of computer software – but they must […]
