TechYob

Ive previously riffed about one of the guys who invented Captchas - Dr Vohn Ahn.  One of my other favourite geniuses, Seth Godin, gives his take on how to commercialise it. 

Provide it as a free service, except instead of just random numbers place the highest paid advertiser.  Granted, you can already get it for free, but his take is original none the less.  I just love it how he puts this stuff out there. 

I recently bought Seths book Small is the New Big for a long time friend for his birthday.  Its the perfect ’thought of the day’ for people trying to bust out and make a difference.  Given my friend put me onto Unleashing the Idea Virus, it was the least I could do.  As Molly Meldrum would say, do yourself a favour and buy it. 

Every since reading Illusions by Richard Bach (of Jonathan Livingston Seagull fame) as a wide-eyed teenager I have always been intrigued by the concept that “Believing is seeing”.  It always seamed logical that what you believe is truth for you. 

The meaning of anything, by definition, is the meaning we give it. 

Therefore, is the Pollyanna Glad Game just a naive child’s folly, or does positive thinking impact actually have the power to shape our reality?     

We’ve known for a long time that Physics supports the view that time and space are not absolute concepts - rather they are inextricably tied to the observer.  Einstein proved that the length and time of an object or event is entirely dependant on your frame of reference.  

In recent times I was also fascinated to discover that computer scientists have also been using this concept of “seeing is believing” to construct new and powerful computational models of the human brain.  Jeff Hawkins, the founder of Palm Computing and Handspring has recently turned his attention to a new startup Numenta which is developing a new memory architecture for modeling the mammalian cortex.  In this excellent presentation caught on video at IBM’s Almaden research lab, he describes his Hierarchical Temporal Model (HTM) which uses a form of expectation maximisation to propagate beliefs between concept hierarchies.  That is to say, expectation is as much to do with perception as cause.  Many thanks to Bernhard Hengst from NICTA’s Machine Learning and Knowledge Acquisition lab for pointing out Jeff’s work to me.