My own managerial bias is always toward identifying extraordinary individuals, encouraging their talents, and assigning them to tasks where creativity and expertise and intelligence can trump Business and Usual. That bias got some powerful reinforcement Thursday from an article in the Washington Post about Azyxxi, a digital medical records database designed, not by committee, but by two doctors with unusual backgrounds: Mark Smith (who began his career as a Ph.D. candidate in computer science) and Craig Feied (who, the article says, knows “25 programming languages”). Favorite pull quote:

It is noteworthy that Azyxxi did not come out of the hospital’s IT department, after the appointment of a task force, the drawing up of a detailed needs analysis and approval of a long-term capital budget. There was no request for proposals, no campaign to win “buy-in” from staff, nor was a dime allocated for training. The system was designed largely by two extraordinary doctors who were lured from George Washington University a decade ago with a mandate to fix an under-performing emergency room with nine-hour waits, dissatisfied patients and an unhappy staff.

Give me extraordinary people, every time. Process and projects are necessary, but they only get you in the door. Without unusual and gifted individuals, you’ll either expire at the threshold or find your way to the same dreary, largely ineffectual place all the other committees got to.

The one thing the article doesn’t tell us is who did the luring. Who was that visionary? I imagine she or he made someone unhappy along the way….

Just before the day falls off the cliff it’s been teetering on, Bryan Alexander pulls it all back from the edge a little, for a while, with Major Fun.

Now it can be a tow cable for you, too.

Last September, Lawrence Lessig delivered an address entitled “The Comedy of the Commons” as part of the SD Forum Distinguished Speakers Series. Yesterday I picked up the address on an IT Conversations podcast. Today I braved the snow (not much to brave early in the morning, actually, though it is getting slick now) and went in to the office for a bit, listening to Lessig on the way there and back. It’s a wonderful lecture on the difference between “rivalrous resources” that diminish when they’re shared and “non-rivalrous resources” that actually increase in value when they’re shared. Chief among the latter category are language and ideas. Lessig then goes on to talk about IP (intellectual property) in the age of the IP (Internet Protocol), and the result is a great primer in copyright law and corporate attacks on fair use. The lecture is at a fairly high (though not at all difficult) conceptual level. It’s also full of facts I either didn’t know or had forgotten about, especially the revisions to the copyright law in 1978. The Q&A period gets a little more down-and-dirty, though it’s a credit to the assembly that the occasion never gets too bash-y. (It’s all too easy to make oneself feel better among like-minded folks by reviling a common enemy, but unfortunately that kind of group hug doesn’t turn out very interesting or nuanced ideas, at least not in my experience.)

This kind of address is what I’m coming to love about podcasting, where the immediacy and energy of the speaking voice guides me through endlessly interesting content of all kinds. Great radio, great interviews, great music (did I mention the “Vinyl Podcast”?), and great lectures. I may have to start sleeping with a speaker under my pillow again, just the way I used to when I was a kid.

Ian Campbell’s blogged on a whole set of nifty ‘Net phenomena, beginning with the Numa Numa Dance that we discovered after I read the story in today’s New York Times. After Ian, Alice, and I had grooved mightily on the NND, Ian got inspired and put links to it, two Badger versions, the mighty Bananaphone, and a soccer irony into his blog. Get ’em while they’re hot!

(Thanks to Larisa Mount for tipping me to Bananaphone.)

Silly title (homage to Marshall Crenshaw) but another quickie podcast, this time of some guitar noodling that might become a pleasant enough theme for my long-aborning podcast on last Friday night’s Paradise Lost readathon. Coming soon to a podcatcher near you!

Bryan Alexander blogs about Flyguy, a wonderful Flash dream-game that I will not describe. Instead, I urge you to check it out for yourself. Then, if you’ve a mind, read what Bryan has to say about it, and if you’ve half a mind, read my comment in response.

Flyguy reminds me a little of “A Silly Noisy House,” an early multimedia CD-ROM by the Voyager Company that my family has always found very charming, piquant, and lovable. You’ll find a brief description of it in this Wired article from (gulp) 1994. Another website recalls “A Silly Noisy House” fondly and calls it “abandonware.” (CD-ROM as Velveteen Rabbit?) On his MIT website, Marvin Minsky talks about Voyager and his work with them on his “The Society of Mind” CD-ROM. He also gives SNH a mention.

Some folks complained that SNH was cute but a waste of time. All play, no education. My own position is that the best play is an education in wonder, and that lessons in wonder (or, you might say, lessons in expecting neat stuff) must always be part of the curriculum.

I have located more information on Peggy Weil, who developed A Silly Noisy House. I don’t have a definitive timeline for her, but it seems that in the late 90s she was working on a project called “The Blurring Test: Mr. Mind” for a company called “Web Lab”. (Is this company still a going concern?) As of last fall, she was an adjunct professor in the USC School of Cinema-Television, and she spoke on “First Person Media” at a conference in the Interactive Media Division. I wonder if Prof. Weil ever met Bob Keeshan. (Strange TV site here, but a good little piece on Captain Kangaroo, complete with lo-res clips.)

Two DTLT blogs merit immediate attention.

One is Jerry Slezak’s blog on a screencast about the Wikipedia article on “umlaut bands.” The Wikipedia article itself is fascinating (“rockdots”–who knew?), but Jon Udell’s screencast takes it to a whole ‘nother level and immediately triggers my devious faculty brain into imagining scads of wonderful assignments, projects, etc.

Another is Martha Burtis’s cris de coeur (I hope I spelled that right; French is not my forte) regarding information overload. Food for thought about, well, too much food for thought.

The BBC is reporting an effort by the Committee To Protect Bloggers to mobilize the “blogsphere” (or as some call it, the “blogosphere”) in support of two imprisoned Iranian bloggers. (The article calls them “cyber-dissidents.”) I’m wary of supporting a cause I know so little about, but when Amnesty International responds to the situation (they’re quoted in the BBC article) I do take it very seriously. Reuters is now reporting that one of the bloggers, an Iranian journalist named Arash Sigarchi, has today been sentenced to fourteen years in prison.

So a one-month old “Committee To Protect Bloggers” can, with one call to action, quickly get the attention not only of the international press but also of UN individuals concerned with Internet governance issues. Reading through the comments on the CTPB blog on this effort is itself an education. One commenter, if he’s for real, offers particularly nuanced advice about how to make this kind of protest most effective. His name–“vb”–leads to what appears to be a preliminary report by the Working Group on Internet Governance that will eventually be submitted to the World Summit on the Information Society. The report is dated February 21, 2005–i.e., yesterday.

I am awestruck by the speed and pervasiveness these things represent, and I wonder how any institution of higher education can afford not to offer students rich, focused opportunities to reflect on, and shape, these emerging technologies. I hope that the blogosphere is indeed a potent force for human rights, but whether or not that turns out to be the case, we owe it to our students to help them reflect on the phenomenon we’re witnessing.

That’s the title of a recent article in ComputerWorld magazine. My colleague Martha Burtis’s work on bots in education has helped me think about cognition and AI in some new ways, and this piece reinforces my sense that a breakthrough in these areas may arrive sooner than we think.

Favorite pull quote:

In any case, we probably wouldn’t want to make machines that are too much like humans, he [Robert Hecht-Nielsen] says, or we might end up with systems that are influenced by personal biases, just like many people are.

Instead, AI systems will handle tasks that humans aren’t particularly good at today, like dependably answering tedious customer questions with an endless supply of patience.

“AI will mean ennoblement for the customer,” says Hecht-Nielsen. “Someone will answer calls in a call center and spend as much time as the customer needs, and they will be polite and fun. It just won’t be a person.”

“Ennoblement”: a new concept in customer service. What’s not to like about that?