Jeff Jonas

My Broken Neck: A 20 Year Anniversary

TWENTY YEARS AGO TODAY … I broke my neck in a car accident which rendered me a complete quadriplegic for a short while. The only reason I am alive today, with relatively full functionality, is thanks to some stranger who saved my life and then disappeared without a trace.

On Leap Day 1988 in San Mateo, California I went on a BMW test drive. The salesman was driving. He was showing off the handing capabilities of the car on back roads. He lost control as we approached a turn which resulted in us plowing into a dirt embankment at what was estimated at 63 miles per hour. I was in the rear seat behind the driver – in a seatbelt, without an airbag.

While my seatbelt secured my body, my head continued to travel forward at 63 miles per hour. This resulted in a C2 spinal fracture (the same break that Superman’s Christopher Reeves experienced). I ended up sitting there in the car – each hand resting palm down on each leg, perfectly placed. Unable to hold my head up, I starred towards my lap fully aware we had crashed and to boot realized I was totally paralyzed and unable to breathe (as my hanging head blocked my wind pipe).

I had always wondered as a kid what would be the final minutes of thinking if you knew death was imminent. So there I sat staring at my hands slowly changing color from that of the living to that of the dead. And so it seemed this day would end my 23 years of Earthly habitation.

I do not know how many minutes I was forced to witness my slow death … more than a few minutes for sure and less than six for sure.

My door flies open, and only my door. An Asian man leans into the car and looks up into my face and says "Can you breathe?" I lip synch "No" … three times.  He says "Do you want me to lift your head?" So, I lip synch "Yes" once. He proceeds to hold my head up in a hyper-extended fashion with perfection … as if medically trained. Once my head is extended I find I can breath. Move? No. Breathe, yes!

He holds my head in position with his arms fully extended for nearly thirty minutes until the ambulances arrive (heads are heavy and the fact this person could maintain this position for so long is in itself a miracle). Had he tried to rest or settle my head to assist the others in the car I would, without a doubt, be dead or a quadriplegic today.

The paramedics step in and take possession of my head.

Then … poof this savior disappears! No sign of him.  No witnesses, no reference in the police report.  Nothing.

The doctors told my parents I would most likely be paralyzed for life. No one told me that though … and so, despite this prognosis ... I recovered.

And recover I did - over the next four or five months, although not fully. To this day, I suffer from a very rare condition called Brown-Sequard Syndrome. In short, the center of my spinal cord in the vicinity of the C2 vertebrae is now dead. As a result, the right side of my body has a very lower ability to sense hot, cold, and pain. And the nervous system on the left side of my body is hypersensitive and I have a noticeable degree of muscle atrophy on the left side as my brain does not talk to all of those muscles anymore.

Lucky? Yep.

Does such an accident reorient one to the value of life and priorities? True, although oddly this new think only lasted about six months!

What are my thoughts about death now? Every day since February 29th, 1988 has been an extra day.

Regrets? I only wish I could locate and thank the person who saved me. Maybe he wonders what came of my condition and if he had done the right thing. My parents, my children, my girlfriend, and I would like to convey our thanks.

Dear Mr. Stranger: Thank you.

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Algorithms At Dead-End: Cannot Squeeze Knowledge Out Of A Pixel

Have you ever heard the expression “climbing trees to get to the moon”?  This means that while one can make progress inching along (up a tree in this case) … if one stands back to look at the big picture … no matter how successful one is at climbing trees … it is quite obvious they are never going to get to the moon.

I have news … for those waiting for big breakthroughs in algorithms to better make sense of transactional data (e.g., to lower false positives/negatives), they are going to be waiting a long time (actually, it's worse, forever).

Using algorithms to analyze transactions is like analyzing a single pixel.  No matter how much computing power, time and sophistication of algorithms … determining if the “red pixel” is a fire versus a fire engine simply isn’t a precision activity.

Next generation, real-world aware systems are going to FIRST apply inbound transactions (i.e., pixels) to earlier observations in order to construct context (i.e., pictures).  Then, and only then, will algorithms be able to more accurately determine the relevance of new transactions.  There are no short cuts.

Assembling pixels into pictures is the story of Context Accumulation. 

But how do pixels get assembled into pictures?  There is only one way to accomplish this and that starts with “feature extraction” and I wrote a bit about this in my post called “Context: A Must-Have and Thoughts on Getting Some …”  Just to be clear, algorithms are, of course, required on pixels to perform “feature extraction” and there is room for extraordinary improvement in this area (e.g., see point #5 in the above blog post).

Persistent Context and Perpetual Analytics are the most significant hurdles necessary to deliver the next generation of intelligent systems.

AND FOR THE RECORD: Don’t expect Google’s search analytics to get much better as this technology is near the end of its road as well.  The reason being is; they are applying analytics to documents … which are really just context-less pixels.  Quantum leaps forward in search are going to come from context accumulation.

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Context: A Must-Have and Thoughts on Getting Some …

Accumulating Context: Now or Never

Sensing Importance: Now or Never

Enterprise Intelligence – My Presentation at the third Annual Web 2.0 Summit

Federated Discovery vs. Persistent Context – Enterprise Intelligence Requires the Later

Streaming Analytics vs. Perpetual Analytics (Advantages of Windowless Thinking)

Enterprise Intelligence: Conference Proceedings from TTI/Vanguard (December 2006)

Intelligent Organizations – Assembling Context and The Proof is in the Chimp!

It’s All About the Librarian! New Paradigms in Enterprise Discovery and Awareness

To Know Semantic Reconciliation is to Love Semantic Reconciliation

More Data is Better, Proceed With Caution

Virtual Reality: There Is No Place Like Home

Increasingly over the last year, I have been asked to share my thoughts about virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life and World of Warcraft).  After repeated provocation, I took a peek into these interactive 3D La-La-Lands to see what is up.  Here are a few of my core conclusions:

1.    Virtual realities will end up consuming the attention of a substantial number of humans and this will happen more quickly than most may think.
2.    Data synchronization between the real world and virtual worlds will increase the relevance of virtual worlds.
3.    Along with the eyeballs of transacting consumers will come increased corporate investment thus driving more relevance and more growth.
4.    Investors in virtual world physics re-engineering will possess a distinct advantage in virtual worlds.
5.    As with any tool, a very small percentage of the population will use virtual worlds for criminal activities.

Here are a few details related to these points.

Virtual reality: soon serving the masses.  As these alternate worlds become more immersive (i.e., ability to hold ones attention when in the virtual space) and accessible (think One Laptop Per Child), I think it is possible that a half billion people show up.  How soon?  In six to ten years – maybe faster.  Why?  Because there are a lot of people on Earth that would rather exist in a synthetic world as opposed to their real world.  Hmmm … shanty town, nagging spouse, or insurmountable odds versus a stimulating environment with near limitless potential to reinvent oneself.

Cross-reality synchronization.  Imagine taking heat sensors in a real-world data center and publishing these into a virtual space which is physically configured like the real data center.  The difference being that the immersed person can now physically visualize the temperature distribution in the data center.  This is already being done.  Then move something in the physical world and it moves in the virtual world at the same time, automatically.  I wouldn’t be surprised if this is already happening in some context, somewhere.  As well, the inverse: There is supposedly a fellow who has an island in Second Life with a surveillance mechanism implemented that sends him a real-world email or text message whenever someone steps foot onto his island.  Long story short, if one wants to look at something specific, if the real and virtual worlds are synchronized, it’s going to be cheaper, faster and will burn less carbon if one takes the virtual option.

Real economic growth in unreal worlds.  Have you heard about the real estate developer in Second Life that has made $1,000,000 (real) US dollars?  True.  Linden dollars, the monetary unit in Second Life, have their own currency exchange to US dollars called the LindeX – a currency market apparently moving millions of dollars a month between the virtual and real worlds.  Point being, if a billion people show up in virtual spaces, each on average spending only eleven cents ($0.11) a month – this amounts to a real growth market which will trigger further industry investment.  Consequently: more people arrive. 

Virtual world physics re-engineering.  Through serendipity, careful study, and/or experimentation it is possible to develop capabilities within virtual reality that other participants, or in some cases even the creator, cannot fathom.  The first such instance I heard of five or six years ago involved a player who figured out he could climb walls by mounting deactivated explosive devices on a wall.  Placing one above the other, the avatar cleverly scaled the wall.  He climbed so high that he moved beyond the rendered space … into a region of the game where all that was visible was texture-less grid lines.  In a more recent example, in Second Life an individual created a covert listening device the size of a single pixel -- then placed this pixel inside some object.  Later when the object was near a conversation, all communications were echoed to a third party unbeknownst to the victims.  Prior to this event many players in Second Life would not have considered this possible.  Game physics re-engineering is also happening in World of Warcraft (where it is called "Theorycraft").  In this virtual world, one expert explained it to me this way “[we are] unwrapping the mathematics and developing a perception of space and time in relation to the virtual world, that determines which combination of attacks or defenses have the greatest efficacy.”  This info is then shared with colleagues in password protected chat rooms.  Using this knowledge delivers extraordinary advantage, namely lethality per second optimizations, hence the importance of keeping this specialized knowledge to a privileged few as long as possible.  By the way, let’s not forget that we are re-engineering the physics here on Earth in a similar manner.  Heck, ten thousand years ago, who would have conceived of the possibility that spaceships could be devised to take man to the moon and back! 

Tools are tools.  Are virtual spaces dangerous?  Well, is a phone, the Internet and email dangerous?  Nope, not for the most part, in fact the opposite, as the social and economic values of these technologies far outweigh the consequences of misuse.  Sure bad actors will continue to use the best tools they can get their hands on too.  And with this behavior, as more bad actors show up … the folks paid to “protect” us will venture into these virtual spaces in an effort to detect and preempt.  Hence some of my quotes in this recent Washington Post story “Spies Battleground Turns Virtual.”

And finally, how will you know virtual worlds are starting to collide with your own real world?  Watch for this sign: someone wants to chat with you while showing you something and they explain the best way to do this efficiently is for you to “step in” [to the virtual world that is].

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Ghost in the Machine?