Endless Knots

The art of networks

If there was one persistent image that threaded through the presentations at the 7th International Conference on Complex Systems, it was the network. Whether the presenter was a biologist, physicist, mathematician, or some other specialist whose field I couldn't quite comprehend, he or she showed a graph of a network. Even Nicholas Christakis, the internist and social scientist, who presented the latest findings of the famous Framingham Heart Study, had network graphs illustrating where smokers in the study have ended up (on the periphery) and how obesity patterns observed different patterns (linked to norms rather than behaviors).

These are gorgeous images, these networks. Bill Ives, whose presentation on blogs at KM Cluster's Inside Social Networks two years ago was instrumental in my becoming a blogger, points to an astonishing collection of links to network images at Trust Art, including those at visualcomplexity. Serious major wow.

Bill's work on blogs deserves greater mention. I've had the chance to talk to Bill a number of times over the past two years. Each time I do, I learn something else about blogging. In our most recent conversation, he pointed out how important it is to use meaningful words when you link, meaning that it's better to call out Trust Art for its collection of links on "trust metrics" than it is to say that they're here. Why? Because the search engines can't do much with the word here but they will pick up on Trust Art or trust metrics.

Over time, Bill has developed a method for blogging with which he advises businesses. Following his approach, hits, that all-important measure, rise, making for happier bloggers. I admire Bill's work and have benefited greatly from his generous sharing of knowledge. His description of his Business Blog Coaching and Consulting Services is worth clicking through to.

Plumbing the depths of complexity

There are a lot of extraordinarily smart people and every now and then one (me) gets the chance to listen to them speak. Such was the case this week at the 7th International Conference on Complex Systems here in Boston. Though I couldn't attend the whole thing, I did have the opportunity to dip in for some very interesting presentations. And Jeff Stamps and I even got plenary time for our talk, Are Organizations Networks? (Contest: Guess what we think?)

I've already blogged Science Editor Barbara Jasny's inside look at publishing in this esteemed journal. Though I missed it, attendees, including my hubby, raved about Phil Zimbardo's flashy presentation on The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, his new book. Dr. Zimbardo explains the material he presented at the conference:

The Lucifer Effect tells, for the first time, the full story behind the Stanford Prison Experiment, a now-classic study I conducted in 1971. In that study, normal college students were randomly assigned to play the role of guard or inmate for two weeks in a simulated prison, yet the guards quickly became so brutal that the experiment had to be shut down after only six days.

Two presentations that I wandered into without knowing what I was doing turned out to be very interesting:  Raffaele Calabretta is a researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technologies of the Italian National Research Council...and a novelist. Dr. Calabretta's novel, The Movie of Emotions (Il Film Delle Emozioni) uses a variety of forms -- diary, files, a film script -- strung together as tidbits in which the main character struggles with his desire to be happy while exploring concepts of complexity. Tall-order writing, awaiting an American publisher, at which point I will be an early one to render an opinion on how successfully he has carried it off. Great idea in the spirit of experimental literature.

Later, in search of an outlet, I took a seat in the back of the room at a plenary session, where the guy at the front first got my attention because he looked a bit like someone I know then caused me to stop typing when I heard him say "tensegrity," key word of our beloved mentor, Bucky Fuller, and geodesic, and even Fuller. Dr. Don Ingber's talk, Principles of Bio-inspired Engineering, included his pulling out a tensegrity toy. He's got a whole lab at Boston's Children's Hospital where they study cell development and regulation that includes Bucky's principles, which is what he talked about (I think):

We introduced the concept that living cells stabilize their internal cytoskeleton, and control their shape and mechanics, using the architectural system first described by Buckminster Fuller known as "tensegrity."

This post is getting long and I haven't even tackled the remarks of the banquet speaker, Lt. Gen. Patrick Hughes (US Army, Retired), which provoked the taking of some six pages of notes. Big challenges ahead, folks, including environmental collapse, population explosion, and terrorism, and he put it to the complexity scientists at the meeting to get to work on them--fast. It was a soundless room until the questions began. I hope to have the time to relay what he said but, assuming I won't given the very near-term challenges I have (read deadlines), keep an eye out for the chance to hear him.

Pen computers, digital ink, and the new paper notebooks

Stew Sutton, the Aerospace Corporation fellow who gave the presentation about Second Life that I blogged yesterday, has posted a comment so interesting that I'm making it a post of its own. Thanks, Stew!

 

Jessica, I enjoyed your replay of the material shared last week. Perhaps you should lose your notes more often if it produces such a good result. :-)

I am compelled to share what we did not get around to talking about last week that will have a profound impact on note taking. The "pen computer" is now coming of age. This is a wonderful device that works in combination with special paper (with a barely visible micro-dot pattern). The pen records the authors strokes on the paper and the traditional “ink” is put down on the paper just like with a regular (non-computer) pen. The combination is absolutely amazing. This technology is being licensed around the world by the inventing company Anoto (http://www.anoto.com/). The U.S. licensees are several.

 

Within the U.S., a couple of the digital pen providers that I found to be interesting are focused at two ends of the market. Leapfrog offers a product called the “Fly Fusion™” Pentop Computer (http://www.flyworld.com/whatis/index.html) aimed at the Junior High to High School market. I’ve had one for a month or so and my younger daughter (5th grade) really enjoys it. She is taking “digital notes” and often uses the built-in algebra programs to help he “check her homework answers.” Dad verified that it was a post-solve check. I have also been testing this technology and have several experiments in process.

At the college / business end of the market, there is a very interesting product being offered by a company called Livescribe (http://www.livescribe.com/platform/index.html). They are planning to start shipping their products in early 2008. Both Livescribe and Leapfrog are using the same base technology but their products are tuned for different applications.

The most compelling application (for us Knowledge Management types) is the idea of going back to paper for real knowledge capture. Our tools constrain the way we think and the manner in which we record our thoughts, ideas, and notes. Nothing is as unconstrained as a blank sheet of paper. And where structure is important, you can have “forms” that are printed on the paper to “coordinate” your note taking.

So Jessica, if you had one of these last week, your notes would have been posted directly to this blog from your paper notebook. See the example from the Livescribe sight to get a peek at the new face of blogging from “remote locations”… http://www.livescribe.com/sneakpeek/clip3.html

-Stew Sutton

Now that's collaboration

Barbara Jasny, Supervisory Senior editor for Science, the weekly publication of AAAS, was the lead-off evening speaker last night at the 7th International Conference on Complex Systems. In the audience were scores of scientists hoping to score at Science, among the more than 1 million readers.

I took some notes that I hope you'll find interesting: Science was founded by none other than Thomas Edison in 1880 (prompting one audience member to ask why they don't publish more in the engineering sciences--"we'd like to," Jasny said; ratio of pieces published--60:40, physical:biological sciences). They receive 230 manuscripts EVERY WEEK, which go out to a board of 100 reviewers. Of these, 70% go back to the authors within two weeks (aka rejected); of the remaining 30%, 10% are published.

Once you pass the first hurdle, you're handed off to the pool of 27 editors, all PhDs or MDs, many with post-doc degrees. Guess I won't be applying for a job there, though, transparently, I could write or call any of them as all their emails and telephone numbers are published. Your work sees the light of print if: it's your best; it will have major impact; it's a solution to a long-standing problem; and/or others will be interested.

Over time, published material has changed quite a lot. What was interesting research 15 years ago is wildly different today. Example cited was that Science once published the sequence of a newly-identified gene,  then the genome, and more recently the genome as a tool and the genome as a network.  (The network pictures of the genome looked remarkably like the networks we map in organizations.) Recent years have seen an absolute explosion in data, Jasny said, which has led to the journal tending to publish shorter articles with massive databases available online. Generally speaking, you don't get published if you won't make your data publicly available.

Jasny noted another major shift: the authorship of papers has evolved in the past 25 years. Where once a few chemists would team up, now bylines include people from a number of disciplines working on different aspects of a problem, then reporting their results together. Meanwhile, new fields are evolving, like neuroeconomics, microtubule dynamics, biomolecules in nanotechnology, geomicrobiology, and, music to the ears of those at the conference, systems approaches. Likewise, scientists are tackling more complex problems that fall under the rubric of "syndemics," like AIDS, which, in addition to the base science, requires study of gender discrimination, public fear, poverty, and government policy.

"And now we're seeing larger and larger collaborations," she said. One astronomy paper may take the world's record for number of authors: 350!

And lest you think they're all just abstruse scientists with no sense of fun, consider their newest feature by "The Gonzo Scientist," John Bohannon. His current project? He's living in a spacesuit for a month and reporting how it feels.

It's so complex

Rare confluence of the complexity gods this week in Boston as The New England Complex Systems Institute sponsors the annual International Conference on Complex Systems 2007. Aesthetics, biology, social systems, engineering, biology, and, of course, networks all get their due over the next week. Catch us on Network Day, Friday, Nov 2, which begins with Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus receiving the Herbert Simon Award. Simon wrote the seminal article, The Architecture of Complexity, in 1962.

Reply to this post and/or email me if you're attending: jessica dot lipnack at netage.

The whole organization in a stadium

Is this scene familiar? You're new to an organization--as employee, partner, supplier, board member, chief executive, whatever, you're new. And you want to understand how things work. So the person you're talking to whips out an org chart, talks about the boxes, then picks up a pen and starts crossing boxes out, drawing  dotted lines, adding other boxes that are actually off the chart.

We wondered what would happen if you could "see" the whole organization at once: who works for whom, who reports "dotted-line," who belongs to what team, how the workflow itself progresses.

So we've written The Stadium Parable, wherein you, mythical CEO, invite your whole organization to a stadium to conduct an exercise whereby everyone draws all the lines of work connections (to see in web pages, click here). Possible? We think so.

"(We) will reduce number of layers from ... 11 to about 7"

The new CEO at BP is shaking things up, or perhaps better said, taking things out. CNNMoney.com quotes Tony Hayward in BP Shares sinks as CE0 warns on results:  "'There is massive duplication and lack of clarity of who does what,'" the [Financial Times] quoted Hayward as saying. "'We will reduce the number of organization units. (We) will reduce the number of layers from the workers up to the CEO from 11 to about seven.'"

Is that the right number, Mr. Hayward?  How do you know what the right number is? Using OrgScope, we found 11 levels at one of the energy giant's competitors--and its shares are not sinking.

How do you determine the right number of levels in an organization the size of BP, with in the neighborhood of 100K employees and perhaps 10x that number more in contractors? What number allows the chief executive and senior leaders to "spot weaknesses and areas for improvement," as one energy executive said to us.

The deeper question here is not about a target number of levels but about whether the structure optimizes strategy.

Predicting ethnic violence

Can we predict where ethnic and/or cultural violence will next break out? Our friend, Yaneer Bar-Yam, a complexity scientist and founder of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), is co-author of Global Pattern Formation and Ethic/Cultural Violence in the Sept 14, 2007, issue of Science, the pub of AAAS. The abstract of the article by Yaneer, May Lim, and Richard Metzler reads:

Violence arises at boundaries between regions that are not sufficiently well defined. We model cultural differentiation as a separation of groups whose members prefer similar neighbors, with a characteristic group size at which violence occurs. Application of this model to the area of the former Yygoslavia and to India accurately predicts the locations of reported conflict. This model also points to imposed mixing or boundary clarification as mechanisms for promoting peace.

And you can listen to Yaneer's Science podcast about the article here. Congrats to Yaneer!

NECSI is hosting the week-long International Conference on Complex Systems (Oct 28-Nov 2). We're among the keynoters for the special day on networks.