While MIT has an established record of excellence, warns Woodie Flowers in his address, it must “face the brutal facts.” The world has changed, and engineers can no longer follow the same path in education and training. He points to some recent studies that show MIT graduates don’t see much connection between their studies and the work they do in the world.

“Learning differential equations is training; learning to think using the insights from differential equations is education – they are profoundly different,” Flowers says. He recommends a new tack at MIT: a shift away from big classes where “we pretend students learn what we say,” to “active learning.” He suggests creating a Draper Labs of Learning. “Make choices—pick biology, electro-mechanical, energy, and get the best people on the planet involved,” Flowers continues. “Do world-class stuff to compete with movies.”

Establish more internships, and develop lifelong symbiotic connections with alumni. Enable students to “encounter structured ways to learn new things,” and give them opportunities to tackle big problems, especially in another part of the world. Focus on creativity and synthesis rather than analysis, says Flowers, and emphasize leadership and team participation. “We have an ethical obligation to focus on what we do with them to help them have a comparative advantage,” he concludes.

On a Liberal Education for the 21st Century

Nancy Kanwisher’s breakthrough scanning research reveals “a teeny part of an answer to the big question of what kinds of brains we have,” she says. Her work depends on functional MRI, a way of imaging people’s brains that detects areas of high neural activity. Kanwisher focuses on vision, to which almost 1/2 of the human cortex is dedicated. “Before fMRI, we knew almost nothing about how that part of the brain was organized,” says Kanwisher. In some of her earliest work, she put her subjects in the fMRI machine, showed them pictures of faces and objects and scanned their heads. She found an area that lit up exclusively in response to the faces. She has found other regions since then, “kind of mind-blowing, because nobody predicted them.” There’s brain circuitry devoted to places and spatial layouts, and another distinct region that responds selectively to body parts like feet, elbows and knees.

Kanwisher has shown that our “minds contain at least a small number of very specialized mechanisms to process very specific kinds of information.” There are lots of questions remaining, though, like determining which mental functions get “their own private piece of cortex and which don’t.” Fruits and vegetables for instance, don't seem to merit their own special brain area. Kanwisher would like to know how these mechanisms arise during development -- whether in response to genetic wiring or environmental stimuli -- and how they change during adulthood.

During exchanges with audience members, Kanwisher says she doesn’t believe that “every mental function of interest happens in one little bit of the brain, because the range of human experience is too broad and varied to fit each into its own little patch.” She dismisses as “baloney” assertions about fundamental cognitive differences between men and women. She also answers questions about scanning in animals, infants and children; evolutionary pressure of brain development; and the limitations of fMRI.

The Neurology of Vision

The Dunbar number is a measure of the cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom a person can maintain stable relationships. The concept has intrigued sociologists and anthropologists since it was first recognized as the correlation between brain capacity and group size in primates. In this talk, social software observer Christopher Allen discusses the interesting implications the Dunbar number theory has for the gathering of humans on line in the digital age.

The number of social groups a primate can track appears to be limited by the volume of the neocortex. This observation led British primatologist Robin Dunbar to suggest that there is a species-specific index of social group size, with humans falling about midway in the range. Since then, the concept of a biological basis for effective social group size has been taken up by pundits and business observers, most notably Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point. Popularization has obscured some subtleties which Allen engages in his exploration of internet communitiies and social software. He compares the factors favoring small, medium and large groupings, and the interplay between people and software on the web in the form of games, blogs, wikis and chat.

On line games such as Ultima On-line and World of Warcraft provide massive amounts of data for measuring the gathering and communication of humans for various purposes. Through social network analysis, Allen hypothesizes that different group sizes impact a group's behavior and their choice of processes and tools. Three nodal sizes emerge, each with pros and cons. Small groups form easily, but are in danger of group-think and echo chamber effects. Larger groups are noisier and require a lot of time and energy in order to maintain reputations and social trust.

Designers of social software have not always been aware of the Dunbar number, yet some tools have hit the sweet spot for intimate or large scale group formation. Allen closes with an interesting comparison of features seen in blogs, wikis and sites such as Slashdot, LiveJournal and MySpace.

Dunbar number

The discussion starts with approaches to innovating in established enterprises, touching on the various challenges involved: how to improve adoption especially when trying to reach different generations within an organization; dealing with shorter development cycles and increased complexity of information; and the importance of a company's business processes and the heterogeneity of the people in those processes.

The panelists provide examples about the impact of social software such as blogs and wikis, including changes in the so-called command and control attitude of top-down organizations. To deal with increasing pace of change and complexity, companies may define new strategies internally or choose to take advantage of firms offering intermediary services, either way giving up control and moving toward more collaborative processes.

Finding the right balance is a particular challenge often mentioned by Sanford, Polese and Park. The balances aimed at include those between leaders and followers in an organization, between using traditional communication channels and adopting social software, between maintaining control and opening up and letting go, or between protecting intellectual property rights and achieving faster adoption rates.

Innovation in Established Organizations

I guess one way of viewing Don Rumsfeld's speech to the American Legion yesterday is that it was nothing more than garden variety election-year political pandering. Iowa farmers want to hear you swear undying fealty to ethanol subsidies and WWII vets want to hear paeans to blood and guts. Usually, they both get what they want.

Kevin Drum on Rumsfeld

You can be sticky, or you can be the opposite of sticky.

Traffic to del.icio.us has more than doubled since Yahoo! acquired it in December 2005. According to Hitwise data from its sample of 10 million US Internet users, the market share of visits to del.icio.us was up 122% from January 2006 to July 2006. This is impressive growth, but social bookmarking has a ways to go before reaching the mainstream - in July del.icio.us ranked at number 6,793 among all sites in terms of visits.

The most interesting Hitwise data on del.icio.us is its demographic profile. For the four weeks ending August 5, 2006, 59% of visits to Del.icio.us were from males, and 41% of its visits were from those between the ages of 25-34. That's a very large skew towards a specific age group, and del.icio.us also has a large skew towards users with household incomes between $100k and $150k per year - 36% of its users fell into this income bracket, compared to 13% of the online online population.

So who are these 25-34 year olds with incomes greater than $100k per year, and why are they using del.icio.us? Claritas PRIZM NE segmentation of the site provides some clues. For a full explanation of the segmentation methodology, visit this post, or the Claritas site. What the chart below shows is that del.icio.us is highly skewed toward the social groups U1, "Urban Uptown," and S1, "Elite Suburbs." Members of these social groups have higher than average incomes and tend to be highly educated and are more likely to be early adopters of technology. My guess is that they've heard about del.icio.us through news media or through friends and are using it because it's 'the thing to do.' This is not quite the MySpace crowd that I expected to find - intead Del.icio.us users are a more sophisticated breed of web power user.

Del.icio.us Traffic More Than Doubled Since January

Ease of use remains a barrier to growth and success in IT even in today's business markets. And it is surely the major challenge for emerging markets such as smart phones, home media appliances, medical devices, and automotive interfaces.

Before we explore the future of HCI, it's important to review some key lessons from the past. Many core ideas in HCI trace back to Vannevar Bush's "memex" paper ("As We May Think," Atlantic Monthly, July 1945), J. C. R. Licklider's vision of networked IT as DARPA director in the 1960s, and Douglas Engelbart's amazing NLS (online system) demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco in December 1968. While acknowledging these pioneers, we're going to jump straight to the "modern era" of HCI, which led directly to popular computing. The incubator for this was, not surprisingly, Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center).

The Future of Human-Computer Interaction

Traveling through Newark, I grabbed a bottle of water after getting off the plane. The counter person (not a trained security agent, mind you), says, "you need to leave the cap here." This got my attention. It turns out that the policy at Newark (not other places I visited recently, just Newark) is that you can't buy a bottled water post-security and keep the cap.

It's a bring your own cap sort of situation I guess. (Are you allowed to bring your own cap?)

I will leave the analysis of the logic to you.

When bureaucracies become single minded

Social norms and the associated altruistic behaviours are decisive for the evolution of human cooperation and the maintenance of social order, and they affect family life, politics and economic interactions. However, as altruistic norm compliance and norm enforcement often emerge in the context of inter-group conflicts, they are likely to be shaped by parochialism—a preference for favouring the members of one's ethnic, racial or language group. We have conducted punishment experiments, which allow 'impartial' observers to punish norm violators, with indigenous groups in Papua New Guinea. Here we show that these experiments confirm the prediction of parochialism. We found that punishers protect ingroup victims—who suffer from a norm violation—much more than they do outgroup victims, regardless of the norm violator's group affiliation. Norm violators also expect that punishers will be lenient if the latter belong to their social group. As a consequence, norm violations occur more often if the punisher and the norm violator belong to the same group. Our results are puzzling for evolutionary multi-level selection theories based on selective group extinction as well as for theories of individual selection; they also indicate the need to explicitly examine the interactions between individuals stemming from different groups in evolutionary models.

Parochial altruism in humans: Nature

This book consists of humorous observations of the characteristics and behaviours of the creatures in your organizational Zoo. It provides some essential survival guidelines for the safari that is your career.

As you read, you will come to recognize the various Zoo creatures and learn how to deal with them. This book gives great insight for the inexperienced and provides a useful reinforcement reference for the more experienced among us who every day must manage the interactions between the creatures in our Zoos.

the Organizational Zoo - A Survival Guide to Workplace Behavior