Where do good ideas come from? Not as we like to think, with a sudden flash of genius, says writer Steven Johnson. He tellsOliver Burkeman that collaboration is key
Steven Johnson . . .'Good ideas are built out of a collection of existing parts.' Photograph: Peter Matthews for the Guardian
Let's start with the invention of air conditioning. This is only one of approximately a zillion topics addressed by the science writer Steven Johnson during the course of lunch at an Italian restaurant in downtown Manhattan; some of the others include Darwinian evolution, the creation of YouTube, the curiously perfect population density of the Park Slope neighbourhood of Brooklyn, the French Revolution, the London cholera epidemic of 1854, the first computer, The Wire, and why 9/11 wasn't prevented. But air conditioning provides a useful way to introduce Johnson's current overarching obsession – the mysterious question of where good ideas come from – because it encapsulates how we generally like to think about inventors and inventions. One night in 1902, an ambitious young American engineer named Willis Carrier was waiting for a train, watching fog roll in across the platform, when he had a sudden flash of insight: he could exploit the principle of fog to cool buildings. He patented the idea, protected it fiercely, put his new invention into production, and made a fortune. In 2007, the still-surviving Carrier Corporation generated sales worth $15bn. As eureka moments go, even Archimedes might have had to concede that Carrier's was impressive.
Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
by Steven Johnson
For Johnson, though, what's really interesting about that story is how unusual it is: although the eureka moment is such a cliche, big new ideas almost never get born like that. "It's weird," says Johnson, ignoring his carpaccio of beef, and launching into an engaging quasi-lecture that effortlessly expands to dominate most of the rest of the meal, "but innovation is one of those cases where the defining image, all the rhetoric and all the assumptions about how it happens, turn out to be completely backward. It's very, very rare to find cases where somebody on their own, working alone, in a moment of sudden clarity has a great breakthrough that changes the world. And yet there seems to be this bizarre desire to tell the story that way."
Johnson's new book, Where Good Ideas Come From, is an attempt to sketch out a radically different theory, which is in keeping with his personal policy of upending received wisdom in as all-encompassing a fashion as possible: one of his most popular works to date was entitled Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. His latest book should further entrench his position in today's army of commercially successful, male, fortysomething writers of sweeping, occasionally grandiose ideas books (commander-in-chief, Malcolm Gladwell; high-ranking generals, Clay Shirky and the authors of Freakonomics). Except that, if anything, it's even more audacious, since in principle he seeks to explain the origin of all their ideas, too. Oh, and the origin of life. And some other things.
At the core of his alternative history is the notion of the "adjacent possible", one of those ideas that seems, at first, like common sense, then gradually reveals itself as an entirely new way of looking at almost everything. Coined by the biologist Stuart Kauffman, it refers to the fact that at any given time – in science and technology, but perhaps also in culture and politics – only certain kinds of next steps are feasible. "The history of cultural progress," Johnson writes, "is, almost without exception, a story of one door leading to another door, exploring the palace one room at a time."
Think of playing chess: at any point in the game, several ingenious moves may be possible, but countless others won't be. Likewise with inventions: the printing press was only possible – and perhaps only thinkable – once moveable type, paper and ink all existed. YouTube, when it was launched in 2005, was a brilliant idea; had it been launched in 1995, before broadband and cheap video cameras were widespread, it would have been a terrible one. Or take culture: to 1950s viewers, Johnson argues, complex TV shows such as Lost or The Wire would have been borderline incomprehensible, like some kind of avant-garde art, because certain ways of engaging with the medium hadn't yet been learned. And all this applies, too, to the most basic innovation: life itself. At some point, back in the primordial soup, a bunch of fatty acids gave rise to a cell membrane, which made possible the simplest organisms, and so on. What those acids couldn't do was spontaneously form into a fish, or a mouse: it wasn't part of their adjacent possible.
If this seems completely obvious, consider, Johnson says, how it explains the otherwise spooky phenomenon of the "multiple" – the way certain inventions or discoveries occur in several places simultaneously, apparently by chance. Sun-spots were discovered in 1611 by four different scientists in four different countries; electrical batteries were invented twice, separately, one year apart. (Similar things happened in the earliest days of the steam engine and telephone.) People have tried to explain this using vague terms such as the "zeitgeist", or of certain ideas just being "in the air". But there's a simpler possibility, which is that the innovation in question had simply become part of the adjacent possible. Good ideas, as Johnson puts it, "are built out of a collection of existing parts", both literally and metaphorically speaking. Take the isolation of oxygen as a component of air, which was another multiple. It couldn't have happened before the invention of ultra-sensitive weighing scales. But it also couldn't have happened before the birth of the idea that air is something, rather than nothing, and that it might be made up of gases.
What all this means, in practical terms, is that the best way to encourage (or to have) new ideas isn't to fetishise the "spark of genius", to retreat to a mountain cabin in order to "be creative", or to blabber interminably about "blue-sky", "out-of-the-box" thinking. Rather, it's to expand the range of your possible next moves – the perimeter of your potential – by exposing yourself to as much serendipity, as much argument and conversation, as many rival and related ideas as possible; to borrow, to repurpose, to recombine. This is one way of explaining the creativity generated by cities, by Europe's 17th-century coffee-houses, and by theinternet. Good ideas happen in networks; in one rather brain-bending sense, you could even say that "good ideas are networks". Or as Johnson also puts it: "Chance favours the connected mind."
Another surprising truth about big ideas: even when they seem to be individual flashes of genius, they don't happen in a flash – though the people who have them often subsequently claim that they did. Charles Darwin always said that the theory of natural selection occurred to him on 28 September 1838 while he was reading Thomas Malthus's essay on population; suddenly, the mechanism of evolution seemed blindingly straightforward. ("How incredibly stupid not to think of that," Darwin's great supporter Thomas Huxley was supposed to have said on first hearing the news.) Yet Darwin's own notebooks reveal that the theory was forming clearly in his mind more than a year beforehand: it wasn't a flash of insight, but what Johnson calls a "slow hunch". And on the morning after his alleged eureka moment, was Darwin feverishly contemplating the implications of his breakthrough? Nope: he busied himself with some largely unconnected ruminations on the sexual curiosity of primates.
Johnson, who lives with his wife Alexa Robinson and their three sons in Brooklyn, has written seven well-received books and launched three notable web startups, including the pioneering web magazine Feed, gives around 50 lectures a year, and writes plenty of high-profile opinion columns, all of which he has accomplished by the not-exactly-ancient age of 42. (While we're on the topic, he also has an enormous 1.4 million followers on Twitter, far in excess of superstars from Kanye West to Sarah Palin to Hugo Chávez to the Dalai Lama.)
I'm not sure whether it heightens or quells that feeling to learn that part of his secret isn't soul-destroying workaholism, or amphetamines, but rather working methods that directly echo his arguments about creativity. For many years he has collected thousands of short quotes, along with his own writing, in a computer program called DevonThink, which uses artificial intelligence to identify connections between them. "I can put a quote in and ask it to show me things that are related to this – which is literally a way of exploring the adjacent possible," he says. "Half the time it'll suggest something completely irrelevant, but amid that noise there's always some crazy little new connection that I hadn't thought of."
Unlikely connections are a characteristic of Johnson's business ventures, too: the hyperlocal news site Outside.in grew from thinking about neighbourhoods as networks because of their role in The Ghost Map, his book about the spread and eventual defeat of London's 19th-century cholera epidemic. This was eventually traced to a baby's nappy that contaminated a well on Broad Street – not the most auspicious beginning, you might think, for a site full of restaurant recommendations and reviews of yoga classes. But such is the power of serendipity.
A certain kind of businessperson, I suspect, will buy Where Good Ideas Come From in order to learn to how to come up with a killer business idea, bring it to market, and clean up financially. They may find themselves slightly alarmed, therefore, by a sequence of striking graphics in which Johnson demonstrates that the vast majority of major innovations since 1800 have come from outside the free market – from universities and other environments where profit wasn't the overwhelming motivation. The urge to hoard, protect and directly profit from good ideas can work against the sharing-and-recombining ethos that the adjacent possible demands. And it's often the case that those who do attain vast wealth have done so by finding ways to exploit the creativity of the non-market world. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is so rich today only because Tim Berners-Lee developed the web as a non-profit venture. (And a non-profit venture, incidentally, that had no eureka moment either. Johnson quotes Berners-Lee as saying that interviewers are always frustrated when he admits he never experienced one.)
There's a sense, of course, in which this way of looking at the world is itself a "multiple": Johnson's argument has plenty in common with Gladwell's Outliers, and with books by Shirky and others on the power of amateur creativity, harnessed by the web. But Johnson distances himself from the most extreme version of that view, which is that individual gifts count for nothing – that every blog-commenter has as much of a contribution to make as every Booker winner, or that the "hive mind" is always in the right. It's not that creative individuals don't matter; it's that connectedness makes us more creative.
Politically speaking, none of this is rightwing in any traditional sense: it's a rejection of America's cherished belief in the primacy of individualism and free markets. But the focus on grassroots connectedness isn't really left-wing, either, "if leftwing means you're enamoured of large state interventions in society". A philosophy of innovation that rejected both of those "might be called anarchism", Johnson says, then looks slightly surprised at himself. "Hu
Sensors, sensor fusion, algorithm all fit together into this Adjacent possible that Steven Johnson writes about
& helped form the name of this blog. Some are focused on slots for the S1, but if you take this S Johnson quote,
Rather, it's to expand the range of your possible next moves – the perimeter of your potential – by exposing yourself to as much serendipity, as much argument and conversation, as many rival and related ideas as possible; to borrow, to repurpose, to recombine.
And look at the move from S1 to S2 they have done exactly as Steven Johnson would suggest to them-the S2 is the result of the S1.........
exposing QUIK to as much serendipity, as much argument and conversation, as many rival and related ideas as possible; to borrow, to repurpose, to recombine.
Friday, September 12, 2014
Something that I did not know...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjrgF3-Octk
Samsung Gear 2 IR blaster (WatchON Remote)
Why did I look?
That Roth slide says S2 + IRdA; smartwatch........so I looked around
Now the Gear 2 uses an ARM M4 MCU for the sensor fusion, and it must have the Lattice IRdA FPGA.....
The Gear 3? Yup that's one I will track along with.
According to a new report from ABI, the indoor location market is “now accelerating into the mainstream.”
The research behemoths say that new contracts and deployments of indoor location systems are being announced on an almost daily basis.
“The arrival of iBeacons has caught the imagination, but the reality is there are many more location technologies available, all of which have unique benefits,” the report summary reads.
“Many companies have focused on one technology or vertical, but it’s clear that both the opportunity and competition is much greater,” says senior analyst Patrick Connolly. “The industry needs to consider the whole ecosystem and which technologies are best suited to each application and vertical.”
These findings, which are part of ABI Research’s Location Technologies Market Research, are available online now from ABI.
If you dummy it down it's no good so its 10 axis, the more complex the algo the better the result. !0 axis is more compute intense and the MCU will burn the juice here. It's something that the S2 is going to shine at. Good thing the S2 is 12 axis. I look for a catalog item for indoor location.
Why its one application solution that is vitally important, and if you can't to it in house, and many cannot, then get it for your smartphones somewhere soon.
Thursday, September 11, 2014
just for fun
cc snips
1.One of these engagements is for a wearable product that will be introduced by a top ten smartphone supplier during Q1. This is a particularly exciting design win. This customer has high brand recognition and all of the algorithms used in this design were developed by QuickLogic.
2.This migration strategy is also enabling a Japanese OEM to use our sensor hub design in an innovative, wearable product. They initially started the design using our S1 and are scheduled to enter production during Q4 using our S2 platform.
Roth had
A smartwatch with IRDA
A wearable with LED status.
Who besides Samsung has IRDA on their platforms currently that makes watches?
LG for one and HTC
LG already has smartwatches on the market.They are top 10 HTC is NOT.
The Taiwanese smartphone maker is still working on a smartwatch and plans to release it in early 2015, according to people familiar with the matter. There had been reports that HTC had scrapped its plans because it felt it couldn't compete in the burgeoning category.
One of the generational enhancements we made on the ArcticLink 3 S2 was to increase the sensor data buffer memory by 800%. To wit, the logical question of the lay person might be “so what does that do for me?” That’s a great question: the Sensor Data Buffer Memory allows the ArcticLink 3 S2 ultra-low power sensor hub to store aggregated data. The data can be a variety of things; in the example I’ll use in the rest of this blog, I’ll reference the storage of step count data.
Before we go too far, let’s talk step counts:
A lot of us have fitness bands. While these devices are useful not only for motivation (“gotta get that step count to 10,000 to meet my goal” is a common user refrain), they also provide some basic fitness data. Basic, though, is the key word. Simply counting the number of steps provides a basic assessment of someone’s on-going fitness level; i.e., person A takes 1.5X the number of steps as person B, which leads you to believe that person A probably has a better fitness level. Now, that’s all well and good, but what if person A’s steps consist of leisurely strolling, whereas person B is running everywhere? Perhaps the fitness assessment might change?
More Accurate Fitness…
The trick to a more accurate fitness assessment is differentiating those steps, and classifying them more accurately. The AL3 S2 can be enabled with a QuickLogic-developed Enhanced Pedometer algorithm, which will differentiate between walking, jogging, and running steps taken, and report out the number for each. Obviously this can provide a much more accurate fitness assessment to the wearer.
+ cc snip
all of the algorithms used in this design were developed by QuickLogic.
my vote is that they use the enhanced pedometer algo in a fitness band, it one of the top 10 names in smartphones, so its not a fitbit etc.
I went through this list..quickly
Samsung na
Nok na
Apple na
Chinese ZTE, Hauwei, Lenovo, Coolpad na
that leaves 2 names...LG ans Sony.
This is just for fun, but I go with Sony. 10 ten Brand well known, they have been into bands a LOOONG time.
And, if you are wondering, we do have QuickLogic-developed Standard Pedometer which does count steps, with no differentiation between contexts.
Getting back to the Sensor Data Buffer Memory…
I mentioned the 800% increase in memory. In keeping with the step count example, the memory allows us to store a certain number of counts of steps based on time. That time scale is adjustable; most wearables today have either a 15 minute or 1 hour time scale, meaning the number of steps taken is reported out in 15 minutes or 1 hour intervals.
Lets tie that memory to real-world examples…
Lets say an OEM is developing a fitness band where they want to implement our Enhanced Pedometer. They are interested in long battery life, as is everyone. Rather than the band constantly pinging a smartphone over Bluetooth to report activity, they want the sensor hub to be able to store the step counts, differentiated by walking/jogging/running. For the AL3 S2, it’s no problem. If the time scale is every 15 minutes (the most advanced devices today provide this), the AL3 S2 is going to be able to store more than 7 days of step count data — and that includes separate counts for the different walk/jog/run contexts.
Same use case, but with standard pedometer? More than 21 days of memory. If we want to store data in a shorter time scale; lets say, every 10 minutes with Enhanced Pedometer? Still more than 4.5 days of memory.
Bottom line: the increase in sensor data buffer memory leads directly to an ability to store days (even weeks!) worth of fitness data, and can lead to longer battery life of a device because data is able to be stored locally instead of sent via battery-draining Bluetooth. And, when the Enhanced Pedometer is used, the ArcticLink 3 S2 can enable devices that provide a much more accurate fitness report, coupled with longer battery life.
- See more at: http://blog.quicklogic.com/arcticlink-3-s2/sdbm/#sthash.3D44UMFj.dpuf
The availability of low power sensors and sensor hubs is starting to enable a whole new generation of smartphone, tablet and wearable applications focused on user experience. Knowing your environment will allow the phone to adapt the UI, for example, moving Google Maps onto the home screen when you are in a car, or moving the Kindle app onto the home screen when you board a train. Similarly, your music player might reorder playlists depending on your environment. Knowing your activity also helps to refine the user experience. For example, if you are walking with your phone in your pocket you might prefer a higher ringer volume than if you are sitting in your home or office.
Obviously the user experience will only be enhanced if the system correctly determines the user’s environment and activity. It would be frustrating if your phone adapted the home screen for ‘in car’ when in fact you were having breakfast. Since this is a new area there are no common definitions, let alone standards, yet. Some contexts, like ‘in car’ are easy to say but hard to define – should the phone recognize that I’m ‘in car’ the minute I sit down on the seat, or when the engine starts, or when I actually start driving? If history is any guide there will be a bumpy initial period when users have to deal with different interpretations of what each context means, and then a consensus will emerge and get codified into a set of measurable standards.
It is tempting to think that standards could be put in place first, but unlike the technical aspects of sensors, like power and noise, these standards relate to people’s experience. And that means many user trials, under a variety of conditions to understand what feels natural. So there will be a flaring of ideas deployed in a variety of products that will result in an understanding of what works and what doesn’t, followed by losing ideas falling out and a focus on refining the survivors, and of course a new burst of creativity in some new area.
What do you think? Should user experience standards be formalized or remain informal? Should they be driven by manufacturers or standards bodies or some other entities? Which ones?
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According to a new report from ABI, the indoor location market is “now accelerating into the mainstream.”
Sep. 9, 2014 @ 10:39 am Leave a comment
