Information Society – Page 31 – Public Intelligence Blog

Wow–Core Reference for Large Scale Information Access,

October 20, 2005

Peter Morville

Wow, wow, holy cow….I am rushing to finish up a book on Information Operations: All Information, All Languages, All the Time, and I am so very pleased to have gotten to this absolute gem of a book before closing out. Compared to the other 200 or so books I have reviewed–including such gems at ATTENTION, Real-Time, Early Warning, and so on, this is clearly a “top ten” read in the literature on information art & science.

Halfway through the book I was torn by a sense of anguish (the U.S. Intelligence Community and the beltway bandits that suck money out of the taxpayers pocket through them have no idea how to implement the ideas in this book) and joy (beyond Google, through Wikis and other collective intelligence endeavors facilitated by open source software, relevant findability is possible).

This is a truly gripping book that addresses what may be the most important challenge of this century in a compelling, easy to read, yet intellectually deep and elegant manner.

The author is a true guru who understands that in the age of a mega-information-explosion (not just in quantity, but in languages, mediums, and nuances) the creation of wealth is going to depend on information being useful, usable, desireable, findable, accessible, credible, and valuable (page 109).

Especially important in the first half of the book are the author's focus on Mooers (not to be confused with Moores) who said in 1959 that users will make do with what information they have when it becomes too inconvenient to go after better information. This is key. At the same time, he focuses on the difference between precision and recall, and provides devasting documentation of the failure of recall (1 in 5 at best) when systems scale up, as well as the diminuition of precision. Bottom line: all these beltway bandits planning exobyte and petabyte databases have absolutely no idea how to actually help the end-user find the needle in the haystack. This author does.

The book is without question “Ref A” for the content side of Information Operations. On page 61 I am just ripped out of my chair and on to my feet by the author's discussion of Marcia Bates and her focus on an integrated model of information seeking that integrates aesthetic, biological, historical, psychological, social, and “even” spiritual layers of understanding. This is bleeding edge good stuff, with nuances that secret intelligence world is not going to understand for years.

There is a solid discussion of geocoding and locationally aware devices, and I am very pleased to see the author recognize the work of four of my personal heroes, Stewart Brand, Bruce Sterling, Kevin Kelly, and Howard Rheingold.

Halfway through the book he discusses the capture of life experiences, and the real possibility that beyond today's information explosion might lie an exo-explosion of digital data coming from wired individuals feeding what they see and hear and feel into “the web”. The opportunities for psycho-social diagnosis and remediation, and cross-cultural communication, are just astounding.

The book wraps up with a great review of findability hacks, semantic tricks, and the trends to come in inspired and informed decisions. Like Tom Atlee, the author sees the day of collective intelligence enabled by the web, but I have to say, I thought I knew a lot, after reading this book I have the strongest feeling that my education has just begun.

This is one of those books that could help define an era. It is about as thoughtful, useful, and inspiring a book as I have read in the past several years. DECENT!

2005/10/202009/12/04

Review: Influence–Science and Practice (4th Edition) (Paperback)

5 Star, Information Operations, Information Society, Misinformation & Propaganda

US-Oriented, Excellent Starting Point, Six Key Methods,

October 20, 2005

Robert B. Cialdini

I disagree with the complaints about this being a repeat of earlier versions. “4th Edition” is quite clear. This is an updated easy to read version of a highly-regarded seminal work whose value has been proven over time.

While intended for students of psychology and for practitioners of the black art of marketing (selling over-priced unnecessary “stuff” to the unwitting), I regard this text as a very helpful reference for the new warriors, the practitoners of Information Operations and within that larger discipline, Strategic Communication & Public Diplomacy.

The six “principles” of influence, reciprocation, consistency, social proof (e.g. canned laughter), liking, authority, and scarcity, each receive their own chapter with annedotes and study questions.

Most interesting to me would be an international variation of this book, one that discussed the nuances of influence in other cultures, inclusive of family ties and prevalent sterotypes.

This book is applicable to business, evangelism, foreign affairs, defense, homeland security, and just about any field where interaction with humans is called for, and the mission demands the elicitation of collaborative behavior from others.

Good index, notes, and illustrations. Well-presented.

2005/09/252009/12/04

Review: The Singularity Is Near–When Humans Transcend Biology (Hardcover)

4 Star, Future, Information Society, Science & Politics of Science

Technically brilliant, culturally constrained,

September 25, 2005

Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil is unquestionably the most brilliant guru for the future of information technology, but Joel Garreau's book Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies — and What It Means to Be Human covers the same ground, with the same lack of soul, but more interesting and varied detail.

This is really four booklets in one: a booklet on the imminence of exponential growth within information technologies including genetics, nano-technology, and robotics; a booklet on the general directions and possibilities within each of these three areas; a booklet responding to critics of his past works; and lengthy notes. All four are exceptional in their detail, but somewhat dry.

I was disappointed to see no mention of Kevin Kelly's Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization and just one tiny reference to Stewart Brand (co-evolution) in a note. Howard Rheingold (virtual reality) and Tom Atlee (collective intelligence) go unmentioned. It is almost as if Kurzweil, who is surely familiar with these “populist” works, has a disdain for those who evaluate the socio-cultural implications of technology, rather than only its technical merits.

This is an important book, but it is by a nerd for nerds. [Sorry, but anyone who takes 250 vitamin supplements and has a schedule of both direct intravenous supplements and almost daily blood testing, is an obsessive nerd however worthy the cause.] It assumes that information technologies, growing exponentially, will solve world hunger, eliminate disease, replenish water, create renewable energy, and allow all of us to have the bodies we want, and to see and feel in our mates the bodies they want. All of this is said somewhat blandly, without the socio-cultural exploration or global evaluation that is characteristic of other works by reporters on the technology, rather than the technologists themselves.

The book is, in short, divorced from the humanities and the human condition, and devoid of any understanding of the pathos and pathology of immoral governments and corporations that will do anything they can to derail progress that is not profitable. It addresses, but with cursory concern, most of the fears voiced by various critics about run-away machines and lethal technologies that self-replicate in toxic manners to the detriment of their human creators.

The book is strongest in its detailed discussion of both computing power and draconian drops in needed energy for both computing and for manufacturing using new forms of computing. The charts are fun and helpful. The index is quite good.

I put the book down, after a pleasant afternoon of study, with several feelings.

First, that I should give Joel Garreau higher marks for making this interesting, and recommend that his book be bought at the same time as this one.

Second, that there is an interesting schism between the Kurzweil-Gates gang that believes they can rule the world with machines; and the Atlee-Wheatley gang that believes that collective **human** intelligence, with machines playing a facilitating but not a dominant role, is the desired outcome.

Third that there really are very promising technologies with considerable potential down the road, but that government is not being serious about stressing peaceful applications–the author is one of five advisors to the U.S. military on advanced technologies, and it distresses me that he supports a Defense Advanced Research Programs Agency (DARPA) that focuses on making war rather than peace–imagine if we applied the same resources to preventing war and creating wealth?

Fourth, information technologies are indeed going to change the balance of power among nations, states, and neighborhoods–on balance, based on his explicit cautions, I predict a real estate collapse in the over-priced major cities of the US, and a phenomenal rise of high-technology villages in Costa Rica and elsewhere.

The singularity may be near, as the author suggests, but between now and then tens of millions more will die. Technology in isolation is not enough–absent broad ethical context, it remains primarily a vehicle for nerds to develop and corporations to exploit. As I told an internal think session at Interval in the 1990's (“GOD, MAN, & INFORMATION:. COMMENTS TO INTERVAL IN-HOUSE”. Tuesday, 9 March 1993″ can use as a Yahoo search) until our technologies can change the lives of every man, woman, and child in the Third World, they are not truly transformative. This book hints at a future that may not be achieved, not for lack of technology, but for lack of good will.

EDIT of 24 Oct 05: Tonight I will review James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century His bottom line is that cheap oil underlies all of our surburban, high-rise, mega-agriculture, and car-based mobility, and that the end of cheap oil is going to have catastrophic effects on how we live, driving much of the country into poverty and dislocation, with the best lives being in those communities that learn to live with local agriculture and local power options. Definitely the opposite of what Kurzweil sees, and therefore recommended as a competing viewpoint.

EDIT of 12 Dec 07: ethics is something I have thought about a lot, and my first public article outside the intelligence community was entitled “E3i: Ethics, Ecology, Evolution, & Intelligence: An Alternative Paradigm for *National* Intelligence.” It must be something about engineers. Neither the author of this book, nor the Google Triumverate, seem to grasp the moral implications of technology run amuk without respect for ethics, privacy, copyright, humanity, etc. This is one reason I admire E. O. Wilson so much–the first of his works that I read, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, answered the question: “Why do the sciences need the humanities?” The second, The Future of Life, answered the question, “What is the cost and how do we save the planet?” Science had little to do with the latter. The two authors are poles apart.

2005/06/282009/12/04

Review: Radical Evolution–The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies — and What It Means to Be Human (Hardcover)

4 Star, Future, Information Society, Information Technology, Science & Politics of Science

Genetics, Robotics, Information, Nano–Lacks Humanity,

June 28, 2005

Joel Garreau

I've admired Joel Garreau ever since I read and reviewed his really insightful The Nine Nations of North America. I am glad to have bought and read this book, it is certainly worth reading, but it is somewhat unbalanced. However (this is an edit of the original review), now that I have read Ray Kurzweil's book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology a techno-geek rendition of the same technologies and their future, I have to give Garreau higher marks–while this book may lack soul, it does come closer to its titular objective than does Kurzweil's. Both are worth buying and reading together.

He focused on four technologies abbeviated as GRIN: Genetics, Robotics, Information, and Nano. Others have focused on the integration of Nano, Information, Bio-Technology and Cognitive Science (NIBC), and I would have been happier with this book if it focused more on the thinking side of the future rather than the bio-mechanical side.

The other area where I felt the book was disappointing was in its almost total acceptance at face value of all that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is doing to elevate soldier-humans, giving them super human strength, acute mental perception almost to the point of telepathy, and so on. I could not help but feel, over and over as I read this book, that if DARPA were to apply its considerable talents to waging peace and addressing poverty, disease, water scarcity, energy independence, and the urgent need for global education that does not require packing kids like rats into a stiffling anti-creative environment (and making them get up at 0600), that we would all be better off.

The author talks about the implications for human transformation in all of this, but missing from his schema is the moral dimension. This is closer to a comic book super-hero depiction than it is to a renaissance man's moral and cultural enlightenment, and that, in my view, is where this book falls short–it lacks soul.

I recommend that readers consider the books by Tom Atlee, The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All and Margaret Wheatley Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World as well as the book The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter to gain an alternative perspective on what it might mean to be human in the future, despite the over-whelming incursions of technology into our humanity.

2005/06/252009/12/04

Review: The Wealth of Knowledge–Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organisation (Hardcover)

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks)

One of three best books on creating value in the InfoAge,

June 25, 2005

Thomas A. Stewart

EDIT of 20 Dec 07 to add links.

Too many people will miss the core message of this book, which is about paying attention to truth and seeking out truth in the context of networks of trust, rather than about managing the process of internal knowledge.

When the author says “It's time to gather the grain and torch the chaff,” his book over-all tells me he is talking about brain-power and a culture of thinking (the grain) and counterproductive information technology and irrelevant financial audits (the chaff).

This is one of those rare books that is not easily summarized and really needs to be read in its entirely. A few items that jumped out at me:

1) Training is a priority and has both return on investment and retention of employee benefits that have been under-estimated.

2) All major organizations (he focused on business, I would certainly add government bureaucracies) have “legal underpinnings, ..systems of governance, ..management disciplines, ..accounting (that) are based on a model of the corporation that has become irrelevant.”

3) Although one reviewer objected to his comments on taxation, the author has a deeper point–the government is failing to steer the knowledge economy because it is still taxing as if we had an industrial economy–this has very severe negative effects.

4) As I read the author's discussion of four trends he credits to John Hagel of I2, it was clear that “intelligence” needs to be applied not only to single organizations, but to entire industries. In my view, this author is quite brilliant and needs to be carefully cultivated by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, all of the industry associations, and by governments. There are some extremely powerful “macro” opportunities here that his ideas could make very profitable for a group acting in the aggregate.

5) This is one book that should have had footnotes instead of end-notes, for while the author is careful to credit all ideas borrowed from others, it is difficult in the text to follow his thinking in isolation. One idea that is very pertinent to national intelligence and counterintelligence as well as corporate knowledge management is that of the reversal of the value chain–“first sell, then make,” i.e. stop pushing pre-conceived products out the door and get into the business of just enough, just in time knowledge or product creation that is precisely tailored to the real time needs of the client.

6) The author excells at blasting those corporations (and implicitly, major government bureaucracies such as the spy agencies that spend over $30 billion a year of taxpayer funds) that assume that if they only apply more dollars to the problem, they can solve any challenge. “Too often ‘dumb power' produces a higher-level stalemate.” One could add: and at greater cost!

7) The bottom line of this truly inspired and original book comes in the concluding chapters when the author very ably discusses how it is not knowledge per se that creates the value, but rather the leadership, the culture, and infrastructure (one infers a networked infrastructure, not a hard-wired bunker). These are the essential ingredients for fostering both knowledge creation and knowledge sharing, something neither the CIA nor the FBI understood at the management level in the years prior to 9-11.

Final note: I missed the pre-cursor to this book, Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations (1997) and just read it. I recommend both books, and in some ways, it is better to read this book first. I also recommend Robert Buckman's Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization, and the book, The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth as ideal companions to this path-finding work.

Recently published (2006 and on), see also, with reviews:
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)

2005/06/252009/12/04

Review: Intellectual Capital–The New Wealth of Organizations (Paperback)

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Information Society, Intelligence (Commercial)

Ref A for Buidling Value in the Information Age,

June 25, 2005

Thomas A. Stewart

I read the same author's The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization first, and then went back to get this earlier book (1998), and I actually feel that reading them in that order is better. This book has a lot of detail that is well served by the context that can be found in the later book.

For those who really wish to get a deep look at the future of building value in the age of distribution information in all languages, I recommend that both of Stewart's books be read in conjunction with the following three Nobel-level books: Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World Robert Buckman, Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization and Christensen & Raynor, The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business (Collins Business Essentials) My reviews of these books are both evaluative and summative, and could be helpful as short-cut, but they are no substitute for actually buying and reading the books.

The most important point in this book is that the value is no longer found in collecting just in case knowledge, but rather in connecting dots to dots, dots to people, and (the highest value) people to people. It's about connecting, not collecting. Based on this book I drew my own value triangle, VALUE appearing in the middle of the triangle, with Context being the lower left corer, Content being the lower right corner, and CONNECTION being the apex of the triangle–further refined as connecting customers, connecting contributing talents, and connecting sub-contracted sources, softwares, and services. No one is doing this today in the manner that meets the emerging needs of the marketplace.

Most interesting to me is the author's early emphasis on the Chief Financial Officer being the point of sale, not the CEO, the CTO, or the production divisions. Intellectual capital is a value-creation and profit-building exercise, and it needs to be presented as a financial campaign plan, not a technology plan, not a human resources plan, and not a sales and marketing plan.

Although the author focuses on intellectual property, and provides compelling anecdotes and links that suggest that any company in the knowledge business can increase its bottom line earnings by 20-40% if it does a better job of managing its intellectual property, I see two other emerging marketplaces in this book that the author may not have intended but certainly contributes insights to: managing shared access to external sources, to reduce the cost and increase the knowledge that companies can use to increase their competence in a global environment; and managing customer understanding and relationships in the aggregate–it is possible to take cross-selling to new heights if companies in different industries that are not competing with one another, will share customer information in new ways, thus leading to the invention of new3 offerings and new value.

A major point in this book that I believe everyone misses is that the management of intellectual property, or knowledge management, or external open source information acquisition and exploitation, is totally and utterly without value in the absence of a strategy. Collection or connecting is of the greatest value when it is done with strategic purpose, operational efficiency, and tactical effect.

There is a lot more in this book that will impact on my strategic business planning, and that I choose to not summarize here, but will instead end with three points the author makes that I consider to be important:

1) In the information age, only investments in knowledge building are really investments–traditional investments in capital goods are costs, not to be confused with investments intended to generate new value.

2) Knowledge value grows on a logarithmic scale, while goods value grows arithmetically.

3) In today's environment, careers are defined by personal skills and networking, not traditional jobs and corporate positions. The corollary of this is that individuals must self-manage their continuing education and skill acquisition, and any job that fails to provide for continuing upgrading of skills is not worth keeping.

I consider this a seminal reference.

2005/01/292009/12/04

Review: Civilization and Its Enemies–The Next Stage of History

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Future, History, Information Society

A Rare “Must Read for Liberal and Conservative Alike,

January 29, 2005

Lee Harris

Very few books cause me to question–even reverse–intellectual views that have been 52 years in the making. This book has done so. Although I have been uneasy for many years with America's loss of its warrior ethic and fit society, and the abdication by many Americans of their civic responsibility to understand foreign events and forces that threaten our way of life, this book for the first time in my somewhat extensive reading, has both crystallized the “fire alarm” nature of 9/11 in a unique manner, and caused me to hold the neo-conservative and unilateral militarists in somewhat greater regard. It even caused me to appreciate Zionism is a new light (while still despising corruption, lies, deception of allies, and inherent genocide–but still, a new look)–quite an accomplishment.

This is a difficult book to read–I recommend that it be read quickly, for flavor, rather than slowly, for trying to understand each sentence and each page could result in a loss of interest and quitting on the author before reaching the end. It's easier if you simply plug ahead and mark the high points–the book is full of gems of insight.

It is a very intelligent book, the *opposite* of the blind bible-thumping “there's only one book that matters” true believers that I am accustomed to hearing from, yet this book very elegantly complements the obsessive views of the bible-thumpers. This awesome book comes down to one question: what are you willing to die for? and one challenge: how many of you (us) are willing to die for anything at all?

The most important point that I drew out of this book was its legitimate and here-to-fore unarticulated criticism of intellectuals and liberals for having forgotten that their hard won liberties came at the cost of blood, and that utopian ideals are fantasies that distract one from the harsh truths of the real world. Others will focus on the author's more publicized point, that Al Qaeda is a ruthless enemy that hates us to the point of wanting to simply die while we die with it, and that is a useful point, but the two go together: we cannot be effective against our external enemy unless we also recognize our internal enemy, those mind-sets that prevent us from being effective in defending our values and our liberties.

There are three flaws or missing contexts in this book, and I mention them only to stress that while I hold this book in very high regard and am more accepting or tolerant of the neo-conservative viewpoint as a result, it is a partial view, nothing more. It does not address the corruption within our own society, where elected presidents, corporate CEOS, the churches, the New York Times, charities, and–today–the Boy Scouts–are all found to lack ethics and be frauds; it does not address the external diseconomies imposed by immoral capitalism; and it does not address the stark realities overseas that are going to wipe us out without any help from terrorists: the 59 plagues, the 18 genocides, the 32 failed states, the loss of potable water, etc.

In short, this author is absolutely world class on the fundamentals of recognizing that some people, you simply have to hunt down and kill. He does not address what I think of as “track two”: we need to stabilize & reconstruct the rest of the world so as to minimize the number of people we have to hunt down and kill.

He makes a good and excellent case for acting unilaterally, and for ignoring–even being dismissive of–the fraud of “sovereignty” that is represented by the United Nations and all these little “piss-ant” countries that are comprised of an elite that loots the country, and masses of impoverished, illiterate, “peasants” that represent potential hoards of human locusts carrying disease, crime, and instability wherever they migrate to….

He does not, however, satisfy me in addressing the lack of good faith among leaders who correctly choose to defend the nation with unilateral militarism, but also choose to lie to the public and betray the public trust by concocting false claims and by manipulating secret intelligence to their own ends.

On balance I find this book to be extremely important–one that liberals as well as conservative must read. It stresses the role of family as an antidote to gangs (something Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore champions constantly, and the Chinese generally have understood for centuries). The author also criticizes modern education for presenting “finished” or ideal concepts, and not providing the students with the life experience to learn the hard way that life is about compromise, trade-offs, partial satisfaction, etcetera. He ends by celebrating creative destruction and the value of commitment, including blind faith commitment when crunch time comes and one has to be obedient to the leaders we have trusted with our survival.

I value what this author has done. I take from this work three goals for the future:

1) We must reconstitute our society as a fit society with a warrior ethic and an inclination to study the outside world, not simply retreat into drugs/alcohol and sedative soap operas;

2) We must, as a society, agree that ruthlessness and the will to fight to the death matters, when faced by enemies that have no thought of compromise and have demonstrated by suicide that they are more than willing to do so themselves; and

3) We must–this is the part the author does not cover (see my lists for books that do)–formulate a grand strategy, a sustainable grand strategy, for addressing the 20 global problems that J.F. Rischard has identified, so as to prevent those problems from spawning more terrorists and sending our way more plagues, more illegal immigrants, more criminals.

This book is easily one of 25 books that I would recommend to every American and to most foreigners.

Category: Information Society

Review: Ambient Findability–What We Find Changes Who We Become (Paperback)