Left-Handed & Right-Brained

My father, who was an artist and creative inventor, was left-handed like Leonardo da Vinci. They were both right-brained. I'm not sure what it all means, but I thought you might like to know.

Development Success Using A Search Engine

Development success using a search engine is unlikely to happen unless you know the right questions to pose to the search engine. These insights come from experience in many technical fields and probably some trial and error experimentation to define the research approach.

Search Engines

Search engines generally do not think the way humans think when humans are looking for additional information. Search engines use key words and not associations of search term words with other words. You are more like the Semantic Web in that you can instantly make associations in your mind by any set of associations that present themselves: different people you know, places you know about, people and places, etc. In technical research you can fix in your memory observed situations and observed outcomes. You can relate what you are doing to what other people have published about the same research topic. I call this process associative inference. It allows us to think about any combination of things we have in memory compared to new information flowing into our memory. Continuing our earlier analogy, if you never had a dog, and it didn’t have fleas, or thought about this relationship much, your associative retrieval of dog and fleas would be weak or even forgetful. But if you have a dog and it has been plagued by flea problems, the association between dog and fleas in your mind would be very high.

Creativity

Creativity is using our imagination to do something such as solving a problem or constructing a work of art without a complete set of instructions or recipe. We are using the imagination to make an appealing or useful whole from a set of components that would not appear to be adequate for the job.

Imagination

Imagination certainly is the starting point for creative processes. It gets us beyond the here and now. We see beyond mere recollections or associations. We are constructing a mental picture or vision without complete data or information. We are moving the mind’s eye to another point in space or time. In the process of invention, we are moving the mind’s eye to where the problem is.

Collective Intelligence via the Knowosphere

A fundamental mechanism of human intelligence is combining data you know about with related data that you don’t know about. This is collective intelligence, and it goes back to the cavemen who sat around the campfire and shared ideas about which spear head worked best on the hunt. With the advent of Internet forums, wikis, affinity groups, blogospheres and so on we are into collective intelligence with a vengeance.
In its most general form, it is determining the consensus of many minds to find a response to a complex challenge. For example, collective intelligence could be used to find solutions for many problems engendered by climate change. In the climate model, there are thousands of variables, incomplete and often incorrect information, and many observers of various parts of this complex system. The total intelligence is what I call the knowosphere and from your point of view combines your mind with the computer clouds and with your wiki as shown in this illustration.

There are of course many examples in history of collective intelligence that has gone wrong, but there are also plenty of examples that could be cited to show the amazing accuracy possible with collective intelligence. A recent example is the design of the innovative Boeing 787 Dreamliner.
The problem in this new paradise of knowledge development and potential creativity is that most of the easy challenges have been solved. Now we can work faster, with much larger data bases, but on almost insurmountably large problems. Successful creation of major inventions requires as much as a lifetime’s pursuit of relevant knowledge, full use of the Web, experimenting with possible solutions in a hands-on laboratory, informally tossing ideas around with real people in one place, and a lot of solitary thinking. That’s why there will always be room for the Edisons and the Leonardos.