Source: here

Source: here

For the human condition, forgetting is at least as important as remembering – sometimes more so. Without it, we are all bound to lead the miserable life of A. R. Luria's patient Solomon Shereshevsky, who was crippled by his boundless, indelible memory, or his fictional counterpart, Jorge Luis Borges's Funes. No forgetting implies no generalisation, no real present time, no amelioration of trauma, and no weaving of meaningful life narratives …

Total recall may be beneficial for businesses and courts, clinics and insurance agencies, even possibly in settling occasional disputes with significant others, but rarely would it be deeply rewarding for the humble self.

Source: here

Information and knowledge are absolutely fundamental to what education is all about . . . and it would be impossible for the information revolution to unfold and not have transformative implications for how children can be educated and how schools and teachers can more productively do their jobs. .

Source: here

we're not so far away from what Archigram were examining in the 60's. Behaviour and information as the raw material to design cities with as much as steel, glass and concrete.

The city of the future increases its role as an actor in our lives, affecting our lives. This of course, is a recurrent theme in science-fiction and fantasy. In movies, it's hard to get past the paradigm-defining dystopic backdrop of the city in Bladerunner, or the fin-de-siècle late-capitalism cage of the nameless, anonymous, bounded city of the Matrix. Perhaps more resonant of the future described by Greenfield is the ever-changing stage-set of Alex Proyas' Dark City.

Source: here

remember the study of Dr. Robert Cialdini, in which he left three different messages at doorknobs to see if they had an effect on the energy usage of recipients:

1) Save energy to save the world
2) Save energy to save money
3) Save energy because your neighbours are doing it already

Only the third note seemed to have a significant impact on the behaviour of the people. These three notes could be translated in a business context as follows:

1) Contribute and share information to make our organization better
2) Contribute and share information to gain some sort of financial reward
3) Contribute and share information because your peers are doing it already

The trick I suppose is to make those peers visible.

From thinking to iterating
Last June, Alex Iskold wrote a piece about the new age of continual partial attention:

There will never be less information, there will always be more of it. Much more. The sooner we recognize it and prepare for this change, the easier it will be for us to embrace this brave new world. The age of Continuous Partial Attention has arrived and it is here to stay.

As Linda Stone defined CPA

“With [continuous partial attention], we feel most alive when we’re connected, plugged in and in the know. We constantly SCAN for opportunities – activities or people – in any given moment. With every opportunity we ask, “What can I gain here?”

Alex also noted that “these days we replace the deep thinking with rapid iteration.”

And he went on to say that this replacement “is not necessarily a bad thing!”

Fire Hydrants
In one famous experiment, the Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner and his student Molly Potter had people identify the object shown in a slide as it gradually came into focus. If viewers made an incorrect hypothesis early on, they tended to persist with it, and had trouble identifying the object even as it became sharp.

Thanks Mike

Moral? According to NNT, it’s this:

“The more information you give someone, the more hypotheses they will formulate along the way, and the worse off they’ll be. They see more random noise and mistake it for information.

The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory we are not likely to change our minds. So those who delay developing their theories are better off … Remember that we treat our ideas like possessions and it will be hard for us to part with them.

Remember that we are swayed by the sensational. Listening to the news on the radio every hour is far worse for you than reading a weekly magazine, because the longer interval allows information to be filtered a bit.”

NNT goes on to describe Paul Slovic’s experiment with bookmakers. First, he showed bookmakers 88 variables in past horse races and asked them to choose the most useful ones. Then he gave them the ten most useful variables and asked them to predict the outcome of races. Then he gave them ten more variables and asked them to predict again.

The increase in the information set did not lead to an increase in their accuracy; their confidence in their choices, on the other hand, went up markedly. Information proved to be toxic“

More is not always better
It’s probably a little simplistic to think that these research caveats apply to all information. They apply to situations where you have to predict or forecast. That said, the caveats do seem to imply various things:

1. The iterative mode in the table above isn’t wholly accurate. It can actually lead to more costly mistakes (through the overconfidence it affords). The partial information is a given for both deep thinking and iterative mode, the real difference is frequency of updates. And iterative mode actually hinders the imagining alternative possibilities. We tend to stick with our first possibility and then not be able to ditch it in favour of the fire hydrant.
2. The iterative mode assumes that the brain is an information processing machine. My guess is that this is idealised but wrong. The brain seems much more like a meaning making engine.

Anyway, as far as RSS readers go, I’m going to ditch some of my BBC news feeds , and (not that he does this) have a think about adopting/adapting Ton’s people oriented approach. And I’m going to renew my subscription to The Week

“Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson has announced a new Task Force, headed by Richard Allan, to take forward proposals in the Power of Information report.”

It does make a government api seem a long way off though. There’s a risk that a few banner community services get chosen and funded by the government at the expense of others, and I hope that’s avoided.