Quotes About Networks

for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.

A metropolis shares one key characteristic with the Web: both environments are dense, liquid networks where information easily flows along multiple unpredictable paths. Those interconnections nurture great ideas, because most great ideas come into the world half-baked, more hunch than revelation. Genuine insights are hard to come by;

Diverse, horizontal social networks, in Ruef's analysis, were three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks. In groups united by shared values and long-term familiarity, conformity and convention tended to dampen any potential creative sparks.

Build a tangled bank.

a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.

Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.

When you think about ideas in their native state of neural networks, two key preconditions become clear. First, the sheer size of the network: you can't have an epiphany with only three neurons firing. The network needs to be densely populated.

It turns out that good ideas have certain signature patterns in the networks that make them. The creating brain behaves differently from the brain that is performing a repetitive task.

to make your mind more innovative, you have to place it inside environments that share that same network signature: networks of ideas or people that mimic the neural networks of a mind exploring the boundaries of the adjacent possible.

The combination of water's fluidity and solubility makes it marvelously adept at creating new networks of elements, as they churn through the ever-shifting medium, colliding with each other in unpredictable ways. At the same time, the strength of the hydrogen bonds means that new combinations with some stability to them—many of them anchored around carbon atoms—can endure and seek out additional connections in the soup.

With that increase in population came a crucial increase in the number of possible connections that could be formed within the group. Good ideas could more readily find their way into other brains and take root there. New forms of collaboration became possible.

high-density liquid networks make it easier for innovation to happen, but they also serve the essential function of storing those innovations. Before writing, before books, before Wikipedia, the liquid network of cities preserved the accumulated wisdom of human culture.

The challenge, of course, is how to create environments that foster these serendipitous connections, on all the appropriate scales: in the private space of your own mind; within larger institutions; and across the information networks of society itself.

Because they are fixed physical structures, most offices have a natural tendency to disrupt liquid networks of information. They themselves are, quite literally, made out of solids, and they often map out the conceptual solid of a formal org chart, with its neatly defined departments and hierarchies.

But standing in the atrium of Building 99, it's impossible not to think that this space was designed to conjure up a different kind of flow: the collective flow of energized minds forming liquid networks in their mixing spaces and situation rooms. Building 99—like Building 20 before it—is a space that sees information spillover as a feature, not a flaw. It is designed to leak. In this, it shares some core values with the liquid networks of dense cities.

The secret to organizational inspiration is to build information networks that allow hunches to persist and disperse and recombine. Instead of cloistering your hunches in brainstorm sessions or R&D labs, create an environment where brainstorming is something that is constantly running in the background, throughout the organization, a collective version of the 20-percent-time concept that proved so successful for Google and 3M.

The common denominator in all these problems is that the world is not a line of dominoes in which each event causes exactly one event and is caused by exactly one event. The world is a tissue of causes and effects that criss and cross in tangled patterns. The embarrassments for Hume's two theories of causation (conjunction and counterfactuals) can be diagrammed as a family of networks in which the lines fan in or out or loop around, as in the diagram on the following page.

the interesting thing about the slime mold is that it makes pretty good decisions.

In a country with an overabundance of food, no one should go hungry because of a lack of funds or technical and professional knowledge. We have the food, and we have the networks we now need to support the providers.

Through the topic of motivation, we begin to see the mental trilogy in action. A mind is not, as cognitive science has traditionally suggested, just a thinking device. It's an integrated system that includes, in the broadest possible terms, synaptic networks devoted to cognitive, emotional, and motivational functions. More important, it involves interactions between networks involved in different aspects of mental life.

The general view that prefrontal and parietal networks are required for conscious perceptual experiences is supported by studies of patients as they begin to recover from coma.157 They first transition to a vegetative state in which the brain stem and basal forebrain networks of arousal are functionally active, but the frontal and parietal networks are not. Although

Nations are becoming less relevant in a world where everyone and everything is interconnected. The connections that matter most are again becoming more personal.

The overall effect of the Kid Vid rules has been to force networks to prioritize less popular content. Some of this programming attracts reliable viewership among older children, but younger children largely aren't watching.

The private sector complains that some of the agencies set up to advise and assist them in protecting their networks, such as CESG, are good at gathering information, but reluctant to disseminate it. This culture of information hoarding has to be changed.