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A work colleague, of great height and formidible baldness, pointed me to a new, dynamic slideware app called Prezi.

While Prezi is interesting in itself for those of you condemned to give briefings and presentations, I was intrigued by one of their showcase demos on metaphors. A first rate, concise, presentation on metaphorical thinking  by Adam Somlai-Fischer; a strong cognitive bent, but very reachable for a general audience.

By the way, you should watch this presentation on “Autoplay” while listening to this:

Mixing Mind and Metaphor on Prezi

Interesting. I suggested something like this years ago.

….What the USG desperately needs is a national security equivalent to DARPA that can both engage in deep thinking and have the freedom to run pilot programs to enhance America’s strategic influence that can later be expanded by our traditional power bureaucracies. This would be far more than a just a federally funded think tank – RAND, Brookings, Hoover , Heritage, AEI, CATO, CFR, Carnegie, CSIS and others all do a fine job of policy analysis. They also give statesmen a productive place to hang their hat as an alternative to whoring themselves out as corporate or ideological lobbyists. Another one of those is not what the times require.

What I’m proposing is a lot closer to a cross between a soft-power version of the Institute for Advanced Studies and a clandestine service – one with the objective of developing innovative programs to maximize the influence of American values and promote “Connectivity ” in nations mired in the endemic, isolated, misery of the “Gap”. This is not what the USG normally does. The bias of State and Defense, State in particular, when dealing with foreign policy questions tend to be orientated toward day to day, tactical, crisis management….

Google appears to be trodding down that very path:

Google Grabs State Dept. Star Jared Cohen for Foreign Policy “Think/Do Tank”

Jared Cohen joined Google last week as the director of its newly created Google Ideas “think/do tank”-an entity whose objective is to dream up and try out ideas that address the challenges of counterterrorism, counterradicalism, and nonproliferation, as well as innovations for development and citizen empowerment. He has also landed a side gig as an adjunct fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, focusing on innovation, technology, and statecraft.

Google has now hired Cohen to set up Google Ideas, which will look for innovative approaches to some of the stickiest international issues of the day. Out of his New York office, Cohen will, he told Foreign Policy, seek to “[build] teams of stakeholders with different resources and perspectives to troubleshoot challenges.” As for why he decided to give this a shot in the private sector, rather than in the public sphere, to which these issues have traditionally belonged, Cohen says there are “things the private sector can do that the U.S. government can’t do.”

The big thing is the resources and the capabilities. There are not a couple hundred [computer] engineers in the State Department that can build things; that’s just not what government does. You don’t necessarily have some of the financial resources to put behind these things. It’s really hard to bring talented young people in; there are not a lot mechanisms to do it. [And] on some topics, it’s very sensitive for government to be the one doing this.

During the Cold War, DARPA was a great success, as government bureaucracies go, partly because secrecy freed it from the normal political and bean counting constraints. The other reason was that DARPA’s focus was primarily upon engineering types of problems. Technically difficult, innovative and exploratory problems to be certain, but generally not the sort of socially constructed or influenced “wicked problems“. Or “intractable ones” ( DARPA delved into technical problems that were, due to the technological level of that earlier era, also intractable, but that is still a different kettle of fish from socioeconomic, perceptually intractable, problems). It would seem that Google Ideas will be tackling the harder set of problems to solve.

Google Ideas is an entity to watch but all the observation will be detrimental to the accomplishment of it’s mission, as the nature of social wicked problems carry with them vested interests determined to defend the dysfunctional status quo from which they derive benefits. In some scenarios, with extreme violence. In others, with political pressure. There’s a reason these problems in the human realm go unsolved – sweet reason and pilot program rational incentives might not appeal to leaders of La Familia or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Google might also need a formidible Google PMC.

Hat tip to Larry Dunbar.

Artificial savants? Savant augmentation? The path to mentats?

Imagine the effects of  fine-tuning this crude stimulation with precision, then additionally doing “x”so as to amplify the remaining abilities, not simply suppress the contraindicative cognitive process.

Now imagine the potential effects of doing it on a systemic, societal, basis for a generation or two.

Hat tip to The Eide Neurolearning Blog.

Sugata Mitra desribes this as an example of a self-organizing system, but a more concrete way to look at it is using technology, collaborative grouping and small doses of emotional-social reinforcement to facilitate autotelicism in students. The key cognitive info is between a third to two-thirds of the way into the video:

The social component ( both student groups and the “granny cloud” of remote adult facilitators) is not a mere frill. Children, like adults, are not Vulcans The neuronal connections related to learning content information tend to be strengthened by emotional and contextual associations.

ADDENDUM:

More here from Stowe Boyd on the counterintuitive results of brain research about learning.

From FT.com:

Computers set for quantum leap

A new photonic chip that works on light rather than electricity has been built by an international research team, paving the way for the production of ultra-fast quantum computers with capabilities far beyond today’s devices.

Future quantum computers will, for example, be able to pull important information out of the biggest databases almost instantaneously. As the amount of electronic data stored worldwide grows exponentially, the technology will make it easier for people to search with precision for what they want.

An early application will be to investigate and design complex molecules, such as new drugs and other materials, that cannot be simulated with ordinary computers. More general consumer applications should follow.

I bet.

I’m no computer geek, but I know a bit about economics. Quantum computing represents a moment of comparative advantage for the nation(s) that pioneers it akin to Great Britain being first with the Industrial Revolution. The first use for the world’s first lab functional quantum computer is to apply it’s power in other fields where innovation is stymied by previously intractable math problems, thus permitting a burst of patentable breakthroughs or discoveries that lead to applied scientific and commercial uses. The second use of the quantum computer’s power will be put towards solving problems related to optimizing quantum computing itself, both in terms of refining the systems and assembling arrays.

Advantages of this nature tend to be self-reinforcing and synergistic. The state that accrues these downstream spillover benefits of quantum computing in rapid succession could potentially leapfrog over everyone else to a degree not seen in centuries.

Jeremy O’Brien, director of the UK’s Centre for Quantum Photonics, who led the project, said many people in the field had believed a functional quantum computer would not be a reality for at least 25 years.

“However, we can say with real confidence that, using our new technique, a quantum computer could, within five years, be performing calculations that are outside the capabilities of conventional computers,” he told the British Science Festival, as he presented the research

The upside of holding this kind of technological  advance back from the commercial domain in order to “lock in” comparative advantage until the nearest quantum computing rival has gotten close, but not yet reached, operational use, will be overwhelming.

Don’t you feel great that the corporatist Bush administration was indifferent to venture capital start-ups, explicitly hostile to basic science research and xenophobic toward top-notch H1-B and foreign grad student talent while the Obama administration is explicitly hostile to start-ups and enamored of pouring scarce billions into rustbelt legacy industries, outdated infrastructure projects and oligarchic Wall Street paper shufflers instead of the high tech and VC sectors?

A**holes.