IBM Think Conference Day 2

Creating a Bespoke Design Thinking Practice in Utilities with IBM Cloud Garage​

A major utilities customer has embarked on their own design thinking journey, but to meet their unique industry and internal requirements they needed help to support the scale and speed of their design thinking practice. These choose the IBM Cloud Garage as their design and collaboration partner to help define and scale their design practice and develop an approach to support it enterprise-wide. Learn how this collaboration has led to a successful design transformation for the customer.

IBM Research Science Slam: Predicting 5 Innovations to Help Change Our Lives in the Next 5 Years

Our mission at IBM is to help our clients change the way the world works. There’s no better example of that than IBM Research’s annual “5 in 5” technology predictions. Each year, we showcase some of the biggest breakthroughs coming out of IBM Research’s global labs –five technologies that we believe will fundamentally reshape business and society in the next five years. This innovation is informed by research taking place at IBM Labs, leading edge work with our clients, and trends we see in the tech/business landscape. Presented via a 'Science Slam' - our researchers will share their work and predictions through compelling, personal narratives that bring the technology out of the labs and into everyday life - in under five minutes each.

Video: Science Slam

Accelerating the Journey to AI

Organizations recognize data is what fuels digital transformation, and are looking for new ways to unlock the value of their data and accelerate their journey to AI. That is why 80% of them view AI as a strategic opportunity.  Yet, only 19% of organizations understand the data required for AI. Successful organizations apply a prescriptive approach to climbing the ladder to AI, based on a unified architecture that delivers everything they need for enterprise AI, on any cloud.  In this session, hear Chief Data Officers and Chief Innovation Officers share a behind-the-scenes look at their approach to managing the full lifecycle of AI, and the essential lessons learned on their journey to drive smarter decisions throughout the organizations.

Video: Accelerating the Journey to AI

Hybrid, Multicloud by Design. Accelerating the Enterprise Cloud Journey

Cloud is integral to virtually every enterprise digital transformation strategy. Yet less than 20% of workloads have moved to the cloud. Why? Put simply, complexity. Enterprises are struggling to modernize apps and workloads, and overcome persistent tech and data silos reinforced by vendor lock in. Agile enterprises can accommodate changing business requirements at speed. The right cloud foundation built on open standards frees workloads and data to run on the right cloud model, on or off premises, and across multiple clouds. It embraces tech and data from more sources to speed innovation. And when combined with unique industry, security and tech expertise, it can tailor the journey to cloud to your enterprise for better outcomes.

Hybrid Multicloud By Design

Transform Your Analytics with IBM Data Virtualization

Data virtualization allows customers to discover, query and control access to data across their enterprise in a scalable manner. IBM's new data virtualization technology is designed to query across data sources (IBM Db2 family, IBM Netezza, Oracle, Informix, SQL Server and many others), on-premises, on private cloud and public clouds and across geographies. The new technology provides a quantum leap in scalability over previous federation methods, with increased emphasis on governance and access control. Its primary goal is to enable central access across your data sources via a virtual data platform. This virtualization helps eliminate data silos, bringing the data closer to the business for actionable insights.

Transform Your Analytics

The Blueprint for Smart Businesses

How do you design your business for growth? Being "digital" at the edges is no longer enough. To succeed companies need to truly align the data they own towards purposeful innovation. This is the story of an insurance company who is now a risk management expert. Of a car manufacturer who found their competitive advantage in mobility. It is about an apparel retailer who is a fashion expert. But where do you start? Smarter businesses differentiate themselves from within. They have a culture of agile innovation that leverages AI and cloud on their journey to become a smart, secure and sustainable business. This is a new era for business - defined by incumbent disruptors - where companies who have a past, have the most promising future.

Video: Blueprint For Smart Buisnesses

What We've Built on IBM Quantum So Far​

Quantum computing offers theoretical speed-ups for many business applications. This includes creating new materials, calculating new markets and optimizing logistics. Accenture and IBM Research have come together in a first-of-a-kind partnership to demonstrate quantum computing’s applicability to today’s business challenges. Business application teams from over 15 different countries around the globe will be testing out their theories, by using IBM Q with the specific objective of showcasing the possibilities this new compute paradigm can bring.

Bioshock

 

 

Fun, interesting, compelling... at it's best art and at it's worst humor. Well worth a play through.

Set in an alternate history 1960, the game places the player in the role of a plane crash survivor named Jack, who must explore the underwater city of Rapture, and survive attacks by the mutated beings and mechanical drones that populate it. The game incorporates elements found in role-playing and survival games, and is described by the developers and Levine as a "spiritual successor" to their previous titles in the System Shock series.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioShock

Evolving From Aquatic Apes?

http://www.ted.com/talks/elaine_morgan_says_we_evolved_from_aquatic_apes.html

Interface

Great book and a very fun read. I think Stephenson co-wrote this book before Snow Crash. For sure before the horrendously long Cryptonomicon and it's sequels.

The story follows US Governor William Cozzano, who suffers a stroke just before he runs for President. A loose consortium of financial interests called "The Network" come together with the aid of a biotechnologist and a spin doctor to embed a biochip in Cozzano's head to recover from the stroke. This it does, but it also allows the Network to control and manipulate Cozzano into becoming the perfect candidate, and one that will work in the Network's best interests.

Very good read.

http://www.amazon.com/Interface-Neal-Stephenson/dp/0553383434

Douglas Adams Interview: Is there an Artificial God?

 

In honour of Douglas' memory, Biota.org presents the transcript of his speech at Digital Biota 2, held at Magdelene College Cambridge, in September 1998. I would like to thank Steve Grand for providing this to us. Douglas presented this ''off the cuff'' which only magnifies his true genius in our eyes. -- Bruce Damer

This was originally billed as a debate only because I was a bit anxious coming here. I didn't think I was going to have time to prepare anything and also, in a room full of such luminaries, I thought 'what could I, as an amateur, possibly have to say'? So I thought I would settle for a debate. But after having been here for a couple of days, I realised you're just a bunch of guys! It's been rife with ideas and I've had so many myself through talking with and listening to people that I'd thought what I'd do was stand up and have an argument and debate with myself. I'll talk for a while and hope sufficiently to provoke and inflame opinion that there'll be an outburst of chair- throwing at the end.

Before I embark on what I want to try and tackle, may I warn you that things may get a little bit lost from time to time, because there's a lot of stuff that's just come in from what we've been hearing today, so if I occasionally sort of go… I was telling somebody earlier today that I have a four-year-old daughter and was very, very interested watching her face when she was in her first 2 or 3 weeks of life and suddenly realising what nobody would have realised in previous ages - she was rebooting!

I just want to mention one thing, which is completely meaningless, but I am terribly proud of - I was born in Cambridge in 1952 and my initials are D N A!

http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/

Climate Change: A Guide For The Perplexed

 

Very illuminating and informative article...

 

Our planet's climate is anything but simple. All kinds of factors influence it, from massive events on the Sun to the growth of microscopic creatures in the oceans, and there are subtle interactions between many of these factors.

Yet despite all the complexities, a firm and ever-growing body of evidence points to a clear picture: the world is warming, this warming is due to human activity increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and if emissions continue unabated the warming will too, with increasingly serious consequences.

 

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn11462

Top 5 Brain Foods

1. Wild Salmon
2. Cacao Beans
3. Matcha (Tencha-grade green tea powder)
4. Acai berries & Blueberries
5. Coffee beans

http://www.brainready.com/blog/thetop5brainhealthfoods.html

Why Great Minds Can't Grasp Consciousness

Personally, I believe that consciousness is an emergent property of complex, ordered (yet chaotic) systems which are not necessarily biological in nature. It's just that biology has spawned complex ordered systems to deal with information.

[Gross] wondered whether scientists would ever be able to measure the onset consciousness in infants and speculated that consciousness might be similar to what physicists call a "phase transition," an abrupt and sudden large-scale transformation resulting from several microscopic changes. The emergence of superconductivity in certain metals when cooled below a critical temperature is an example of a phase transition.

In a recent email interview, Gross said he figures there are probably many different levels of consciousness, but he believes that language is a crucial factor distinguishing the human variety from that of animals.

Gross isn't the only physicist with ideas about consciousness.

This bit sounds promising:

According to Greenfield, the mind is made up of the physical connections between neurons. These connections evolve slowly and are influenced by our past experiences and therefore, everyone's brain is unique.

But whereas the mind is rooted in the physical connections between neurons, Greenfield believes that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, similar to the 'wetness' of water or the 'transparency' of glass, both of which are properties that are the result of -- that is, they emerge from -- the actions of individual molecules.

For Greenfield, a conscious experience occurs when a stimulus -- either external, like a sensation, or internal, like a thought or a memory -- triggers a chain reaction within the brain. Like in an earthquake, each conscious experience has an epicenter, and ripples from that epicenter travels across the brain, recruiting neurons as they go.

 

http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/050808_human_consciousness.html

Obesity Unrelated to Athletic Activity

Weird. A new study in the UK says there is no impact to exercise with childhood obesity. It suggests that genetics and diet are the prime factors.

"Those children who had little opportunity at school to undertake activity were bouncing around after school whereas those who'd had a lot of opportunity during the course of the school day settled down, and did relatively little," he said.

"The most important thing (was) if you added the in-school activity to the out-of-school activity, they were exactly the same."

That is not the only surprise. Professor Wilkin said children's activity levels had no bearing on their body mass index - their risk of obesity.

"Even looking over a period of years, because we repeat these measures year by year in these children, we have been unable to show any relationship between the physical activity that a child undertakes and his BMI."

If true, these findings cast serious doubts on the government's strategy to halt the increase in childhood obesity by the end of the decade, largely by encouraging physical activity.

Professor Wilkin said it was based on unproven prejudice - that today's children do not exercise as much as previous generations.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6442293.stm

Smallest Life Form Discovered

In a mine in California, scientists found the smallest bacteria so far discovered -- living in conditions as acidic as battery acid. Why this fascinates me is that one of the problems with the ALH84001 Martian meteorite with potential nanobacteria in the 20-100 nanometer range is that they were too small. The bacteria found in California were in the 200 nanometer range, only twice as big as the artifacts in ALH84001.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/12/23/MNGETN57UQ1.DTL

3 Million Year Old Hominid Child Found

The paleontologists who are announcing the discovery in the journal Nature said the 3.3 million-year-old fossils were of the earliest well-preserved child ever found in the human lineage. It was estimated to be about 3 years old at death, probably female and a member of the Australopithecus afarensis species, the same as Lucy?s.

An analysis of the skeleton revealed evidence of a species in transition, the scientists said in interviews today. The lower limbs supported earlier findings that afarensis walked upright, like modern humans. But gorilla-like arms and shoulders suggested that it possibly retained an ancestral ability to climb and swing through the trees.
?The child really confirms that afarensis was walking upright,? said Tim D. White, a paleoanthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley. ?It has the potential to answer old questions and raises some new ones? ? including their behavior in trees.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/20/science/21childcnd.html?hp&ex=1158811200&en=269f73ec99908815&ei=5094&partner=homepage

African Christians Object To Their Own Evidence

"We are objecting to the message that the fossil exhibits represent the scientific evidence of human evolution," said Bishop Boniface Adoyo, chairman of the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya, which claims to represents churches of 35 denominations with 9 million members. "They do not. Human evolution is still a theory and this cannot be called as evidence.?
What they're talking about is the Turkana Boy and a bunch of Leakey's other finds.
The situation has gotten ridiculous. More than ridiculous. Dangerous. Why do we allow this kind of stupendously stupid situation go on in the name of ?tolerance?? Why allow dogma to interfere with the rational investigation of our beginnings? And why is the religious right so afraid of science when instead they should have faith that it would prove them right, unless deep down they have something to fear?
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,71795-0.html?tw=rss.index

Change Or Die

"Behavior change happens mostly by speaking to peoples feelings," he says. "This is true even in organizations that are very focused on analysis and quantitative measurement, even among people who think of themselves as smart in an MBA sense. In highly successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see the problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thought."
Unfortunately, that kind of emotional persuasion isnt taught in business schools, and it doesnt come naturally to the technocrats who run things -- the engineers, scientists, lawyers, doctors, accountants, and managers who pride themselves on disciplined, analytical thinking. Theres compelling science behind the psychology of change -- it draws on discoveries from emerging fields such as cognitive science, linguistics, and neuroscience -- but its insights and techniques often seem paradoxical or irrational.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/94/open_change-or-die.html

GM Crops Created Superweed

Modified genes from crops in a GM crop trial have transferred into local wild plants, creating a form of herbicide-resistant "superweed", the Guardian can reveal.The cross-fertilisation between GM oilseed rape, a brassica, and a distantly related plant, charlock, had been discounted as virtually impossible by scientists with the environment department. It was found during a follow up to the governments three-year trials of GM crops which ended two years ago.The new form of charlock was growing among many others in a field which had been used to grow GM rape. When scientists treated it with lethal herbicide it showed no ill-effects.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/gmdebate/Story/0,,1535428,00.html

Brain Workout

It doesnt matter how brainy you are or how much education youve had - you can still improve and expand your mind. Boosting your mental faculties doesnt have to mean studying hard or becoming a reclusive book worm. There are lots of tricks, techniques and habits, as well as changes to your lifestyle, diet and behaviour that can help you flex your grey matter and get the best out of your brain cells. And here are 11 of them.
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg18625011.900

Final Cut

Interesting movie. The premise: you can be given an implant before birth that records your whole life. What would life be like knowing that others, after your death, would watch your whole life? What would that change? What would they make of your life?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364343/

Study Points To Sixth Sense

Following the Asian tsunami, scientists struggled to explain reports that primitive aboriginal tribesmen had somehow sensed the impending danger in time to join wild animals in a life-saving flight to higher ground. A new theory suggests that the anterior cingulate cortex, described by some scientists as part of the brains "oops" center, may actually function as an early warning system -- one that works at a subconscious level to help us recognize and avoid high-risk situations.
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/7036

Scientific American: The White House Bends Science To Its Will

The administration misrepresented the findings of the National Academy of Sciences and other experts on climate change. It meddled with the discussion of climate change in an Environmental Protection Agency report until the EPA eliminated that section. It suppressed another EPA study that showed that the administrations proposed Clear Skies Act would do less than current law to reduce air pollution and mercury contamination of fish. It even dropped independent scientists from advisory committees on lead poisoning and drug abuse in favor of ones with ties to industry.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=2&articleID=0001E02A-A14A-1084-983483414B7F0000

We Are In An Extintion Event

According to scientists, there have been five prior mass extinctions in the past 450 million years. The last was 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs and tens of thousands of species disappeared, likely as a result of a comet or large asteroid hitting the Earth. Theres no great mystery about the cause of the sixth extinction. Humans have dramatically altered the ecosystems of the Earth, says Stuart Pimm, a leading conservation biologist at Duke University.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,62735,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1

Why We Sleep

In a finding that backs up motherly advice to get a good nights sleep, scientists have found that peaceful slumber apparently restores memories that were lost during a hectic day.Its not just a matter of physical recharge. Researchers say sleep can rescue memories in a biological process of storing and consolidating them deep in the brains complex circuitry.The finding is one of several conclusions made in a pair of studies that appear in Thursdays issue of the journal Nature that look at how sleep affects the memory-recording processes, and perhaps safeguards them.
http://www.rednova.com/news/stories/2/2003/10/08/story006.html