Endless Knots

Who's that again?

This one almost slipped past but I haven't been able to stop thinking about it, which makes even more sense when I tell you what it is. Jonah Lehrer had a great piece in last Sunday's Boston Globe, "What's that name?", which makes clear how the brain retrieves information that you know is there but just can't find. Happens all the time, right, where you know you know someone's name but can only retrieve the first letter. Now I understand why I put myself through the rigors of the alphabet - starts with a B, Ba, Be.... Reason is that the brain stores information in different places according to unlikely associative patterns. Read the article. Jonah does a much better job than I can quickly do here.

(PS: I'm suffering blog-guilt of major proportions. Just realized I haven't blogged since Tues. Forty lashes with a wet post!)

Medical researchers to play nice in Boston

Kay Lazar's piece in this morning's Boston Globe is another worth the click: "Harvard medical researchers to pool work." For access to hundreds of millions in NIH grants over the next five years, the mano a mano among Harvard Medical School affiliated hospitals also will have to give sway to a new martial art: cooperation. Grant criteria mandate that fierce competitors work together on specific projects, forming always-on "communities of practice"  that cross organizational boundaries. The purpose of the arrangement is to "shorten the time it takes to turn discovery into treatment." Harvard Medical School hands out the allowances. NB: The grants represent only a portion of NIH research dollars available to the institutions but still it's a great start in putting our best medical minds together here in Boston:

There will be matchmakers to introduce scientists who have never met because they have been hunkered in their isolated research labs. A massive, centralized database will give Harvard's researchers instant access to one another's work.

..."There has always been a disincentive to collaborate," said Dr. Lee Nadler, codirector of Harvard's new Clinical and Translational Science Center, which will link researchers and allocate Harvard's grant money..

"If we succeed in doing what we are trying to do, then it will become far easier for studies that relate to specific diseases to be carried out for the maximum benefit of patients," he said. "We also will be training people to carry out this type of collaborative research in the future."

Last year, Johns Hopkins University was awarded one of the new grants from NIH in an earlier round of funding, and leaders there have since found collaboration to be a strong learning experience.

 

What disease is a cousin of yours?

Fascinating article in today's NY Times, "Redefining disease, genes and all," with a chart called "Mapping the human diseaseome" that looks a lot like OrgScope, which I've posted about here, here, and here (search "OrgScope" on right for full listing).

Gene research is causing medicine to reclassify. Turns out that seemingly unrelated diseases share some number of genes. Definitely worth reading and definitely worth playing with the map in which Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, author of Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else, has had a hand. The map assigns a color to each disease and a size to its "wafer," indicating how many genes that disease contains. Then it draws lines to other diseases that share genes with it. Implications are far-reaching and possibly even paradigm changing for how we treat disease. From the article:

Duchenne muscular dystrophy may not seem to have much in common with heart attacks. One is a rare inherited disease that primarily strikes boys. The other is a common cause of death in both men and women. To Atul J. Butte, they are surprisingly similar.

Dr. Butte, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford, is among a growing band of researchers trying to redefine how diseases are classified — by looking not at their symptoms or physiological measurements, but at their genetic underpinnings. It turns out that a similar set of genes is active in boys with Duchenne and adults who have heart attacks.

Returning to Copenhagen

Photo from A.R.T. site (thanks)

Except for listening to the same music obsessively - I fear I've posted about my fixation on a certain Sting song and how that led to my meeting him - I'm not given to watching the same movie over and over or returning to the theatre to see a play again.

Last night, my hubby and I returned to Copenhagen, Michael Frayn's masterpiece. As per my previous post on this play at Boston's A.R.T., I was again astonished at the depth of this work. We also had much better seats this time, center, six rows up, and I mean center. Absolutely perfect for engagement with the actors without feeling as if they're looking at you personally (disturbing) yet close enough to detect the small nuances of their performances.

The play is very intellectual with its many references to physics and very moral with its central dilemma. Did out of the heads of these two men - Nils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg - the whole of existence rest, as Margrethe Bohr says near the end of the play? Bohr advised the physicists at Los Alamos who successfully, if that word can be used in regard to the atom bomb, created this horrific weapon; Heisenberg tried and failed with the Germans.

As I've covered the play once before, and Patti Anklam has extended one core concept of the play - Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle - to the domain of social networks, I'll leave it here for now except to say this: Karen MacDonald's performance in the second act last night was astonishing. There's a moment when she erupts at Heisenberg, calling him to account for his complicity and his narcissism, that is so chilling that I can still feel it writing this. The play only runs for one more week. Go.

PS: I still want Margrethe's dress. This picture doesn't do it justice; the drape in the back, women readers is just gorgeous. And the peek-toe shoes aren't bad either.

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn

Tivoli Garden, Copenhagen, 3 June 2005, ducks talking to Danes

Copenhagen, the play by Michael Frayn, got a long Louise Kennedy review in today's Boston Globe. I've been waiting since we saw it this past Wednesday.

A.R.T. in Cambridge, Mass., which is staging the play until Feb 3, is a stunning space - you walk in on the stage floor, seating stadium style on sides, and "in front," the many tiers that face the set. In this case, being seated on the side seemed an advantage. The play requires thinking from many perspectives and having to watch from an oblique vantage is conceptually fitting.

"The set:" Three large oval light tracks arced at odd angles to one another circle the ceiling. "Electrons" whip around at various intervals, flick on at different times during the performance. Mirrors along the back wall are the stage design; the set comprises three chairs that the characters move around the stage. That's it.

Characters: Three - 1. Niels Bohr (Will LeBow), the Danish physicist who proposed "complementarity," the principle that says, in essence, you can't have black without white - in physics, his theory is connected with waves and particles - one can't exist without the other; 2. Margrethe Bohr (Karen MacDonald), wife of same, mother of six sons (one of whose deaths provides a refrain in the play), typist of manuscripts, and  the character who translates physics into English - and humanity - on the stage; and 3. Werner Heisenberg (John Kuntz), the German physicist whose name precedes "uncertainty principle," meaning that once you start studying something, your intervention so changes what you're studying that it's not the same thing as when you started.

Plot: In 1941, Heisenberg arrives in Copenhagen for a meeting with Bohr. "Why did you come to Copenhagen?" Margrethe repeats this line many times in the play. It's the central question that allows the characters to reflect on their lives (when the play opens they're all dead; everything is a flashback), explore physics, argue about collaborating with the Nazis, hint at the nuclear bomb projects underway in both Germany and the US, mourn, walk away, come back, and love one another - even as they all have different memories of how those discussions transpired.

The characters play their parts in relationship to one another and comment to the audience, the work of narration passing among them as they discuss ethics, science, families, politics, the Nazis, love, skiing, Norway, walking, babies, anti-semitism, Einstein, drowning, each with its complement, each uncertain.

Powerful, powerful. Complementarity has been a big topic in our house since hubby Jeff used it as one of two core principles (the other was level structure) underlying "human systems theory" in his dissertation. Thus, the play picked up a lot of threads we've talked about.

I kept wishing I had the script in my lap as the ideas are heady, worth thinking about at a slower pace. An editor friend whom we went with said she wished she could have had at the script - would have removed a third of the lines she said. I can understand this. The sheer complexity of the material might be easier to comprehend if the acts were shorter. In one sense, it's a really long lecture about the most abstract of ideas.

Last point, bloggers: Those involved are keeping a blog about the production. "Heisenberg" (who signs his posts "johnny kuntz") is posting about his part, what it's like to rehearse, and such, very interesting. And today, Nick Peterson (thanks for inviting us, Nick) posts an email they received from Heisenberg's son Jochen Heisenberg, professor of physics at the University of New Hampshire (Jeff's alma mater), who apparently attended the same performance we did:

Thank you indeed for the wonderful experience of seeing this different Copenhagen€ performance. As you know, we have been guests at a number of performances since the NY opening in 2000, and I have had the burdensome opportunity to become a participant in those symposia that dealt with the controversy arising out of this play.

What was so refreshing this time was the fact that the play was allowed to be a drama on many levels and that the one-dimensional, contentious aspects did not dominate the many-layered personal story.

Make that 445! collaborators

Last week I posted a phenomenal statistic regarding the largest number of authors to submit a joint article to Science: 350. I stand corrected. Today's issue of Science makes it clear: The Pierre Auger Collaboration of 445** scientists collectively penned Correlation of the Highest-Energy Cosmic Rays with Extragalactic Objects. I'm certain I would be floored by the findings (if only I could understand them) but I am astonished at what it must have taken just to get the first sentence agreed to. Another item for my "I've got to find out more about this" list.

**Thanks to Barbara Jasny, who just sent the article with this detail.

Building trust in virtual teams--a survey from Jordan

Frequent readers know that one of our purposes here is to help students conduct research on virtual teams, collaboration, and networks (and maybe something else if it seems relevant or appealing). One such inquiry came from Ernest Kutuk at the University of Zagreb in Croatia, studying trust in virtual teams. Thus, let me say again: students, feel free to email me with your projects and if they fit these broad criteria, you're in.

Just a few hours ago, we received our first such request from a student at the Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST), on the same topic as the Croatian request.

Mohamad Alsharo is studying for his master's degree in computer science, majoring in project management. As part of this work, he's doing a survey on trust in virtual teams, thus his contacting us. Here's Mohamad's note. I encourage everyone to fill out the survey. And, Mohamad, be sure to report back on your results so I can post those too:

My master's thesis is something new in Jordan. No one here has ever worked on virtual teams so this may open a new scope for our students. In my thesis, I'm trying to come up with a model for building trust among virtual teams members. I've been working on this topic for almost 18 months now and have put my results into a survey that I am distributing to both virtual teams researchers and practitioners to see if they agree or disagree my conclusion.

For this reason I have divided my survey into three parts. The first is for Researchers, the second is for Team Leaders, and the third is for Team Members. I hope you can help me in my research and I'm ready for any questions or suggestions from you.

My survey links are:
Researchers: http://www.my3q.com/home2/185/msharo83/Academic.phtml
Team Leaders: http://www.my3q.com/home2/185/msharo83/leaders.phtml
Team Members: http://www.my3q.com/home2/185/msharo83/members.phtml

Thank you again and I'm looking forward to hearing from you,

Mohamad Alsharo

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.

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.

 

Breast Cancer 3-Day

In a few minutes, I leave to drive my niece, Amanda Lipnack, to the start of the Breast Cancer 3-Day, a 60-mile walk through eastern Massachusetts, to raise money for research and awareness about breast cancer. The walk takes place on different weekends in different locations around the country, beginning with this one here in New England. You can join me in making a donation here. Principal beneficiary of the walk: "Eighty-five percent of the net proceeds from the Breast Cancer 3-Day benefits Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the world’s largest and most progressive grassroots network fighting to end breast cancer." I'm very proud of Amanda - and hoping she won't be too hot as it's sweltering, even at 5 am.

After dropping Amanda off: There were hundreds and hundreds of cars, all politely following instructions, leaving off thousands of walkers. As I drove away, I thought of the women I know who've had breast cancer--three very close to me who died (my grandmother, Rae, my aunt, Frances, and my high-school roommate Robin) and my friends who were treated and doing fine (PH, JB, and MDS)--and then I thought of the thousands of women (and some men) whose families and friends were walking for them. These walks and rides and swims are powerful networks of support, love, and concern--and very good engines for raising funds for research. I hope everyone reading makes a donation now, while it's fresh in your mind.

Bono's Africa, Part II

Wait, there's more. A bit stunned that I'm flogging Vanity Fair's July '07 issue again, I read on and have to relay this: There are also worthy reads on Jeffrey Sach's approach to economic development in Uganda, the effective use of anti-retrovirals, and a music festival in the Sahara, snapshots of 20-some inspiring leaders a la Mandela and the Ivory Coast Soccer Team, and ... because it is, in the end, Vanity Fair, Tina Brown on Princess Diana's "love that got away."

Bono edits Africa, July '07 Vanity Fair

I was going to wait to blog this great primer on Africa until I finished the whole issue but that would be selfish.

Oprah's on the cover whispering to George Clooney: “The children of mothers who have a primary education are 40 percent more likely to reach the age of five.”

Annie Leibovitz’s photo essay of celebs having “a conversation about Africa” is superb: Don Cheadle to Barack Obama to Muhammad Ali to Queen Rania of Jordan to Bono to Condoleeza Rice to George Bush to Desmond Tutu to Brad Pitt to … Madonna…Warren Buffet to the Gates to Oprah…and finally back to Don Cheadle. I’d like to see these photos in person; slide show is here.

There’s a short essay on science (we’re all out of Africa), “Generation Kenya,” on the confusions of a young nation, by Bingyavanga Wainana, writer-in-residence at Union College in upstate New York, Sebastian Junger (A Perfect Storm, etc) on oil, China, and Darfur, and “The Continental Shelf,” a superb roundup on Africa’s premier writers by Elissa Schappell and Rob Spillman. Among the superstars is Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who just won the Orange Prize for Half of a Yellow Sun.

Zoetropers remember her: she workshopped there too.

Bucky Fuller: July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983

Twenty four years ago today, Bucky Fuller died, 36 hours before his wife, Anne, passed away. Bucky had a heart attack while Anne was in a coma and neither ever had to suffer knowing of the other's death. I took this photo of the marker on their graves at Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 23 of this year, the birthday of Bucky's great-aunt, Margaret Fuller, about whom I will write much here in the time to come.

Geodesic-dome man, dozens of books, marathon speaking jags, perpetual travel, nearly blind, a penguin's gait, inventor of a thousand things conceptual and manual. "Grandfather of the Future" in John Denver's "What One Man Can Do."

Bucky had dinner at our house on February 10, 1977. On his lap in this picture is The Boston Globe folded to a feature story, "Bucky Fuller Has His Day." I wrote it.  Buckminster Fuller Institute has a great online archive of his  work. And we remain greatly honored that Bucky wrote the Foreword to our second book, The Networking Book.  Click the link, then choose Foreword and you're all set to read his prophetic words.