Possibly related to Guardian Science Weekly podcast: Do optimism and pessimism shape our destiny? | Science | guardian.co.uk on Huffduffer

The fifth chapter of the Turing Mock Interview series takes a look at the Golang technical interview. Watch the video to learn more about the probable questions that might appear in a Golang test and Interview, brush up on the core concepts before the D-Day and prepare well for your next Golang interview. Become a Turing software developer today. Take the Turing test now: http://turing.com/s/hV5i09 Find remote US software jobs: http://turing.com/s/pnTSUX Hire software developers of Silicon Valley caliber: http://turing.com/s/tcqCK8 Watch more Turing.com reviews: https://turing.com/MVWqQr To stay informed about the latest updates at Turing, follow us on: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/turingcom/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/turingcom Twitter: https://twitter.com/turingcom LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/turingcom/mycompany/ ... #MockInterview #Golang #GolangJobs #GolangMockInterview #TuringJobs #RemoteJobs #TuringDeveloper About Turing.com: Turing connects exceptionally talented software developers to remote engineering jobs at Silicon Valley and US-based companies. 200+ companies, including those backed by Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, and Bloomberg, have successfully hired Turing developers. - For over 1M software developers across... === Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NA35Cuo35k Downloaded by http://huffduff-video.snarfed.org/ on Thu Aug 11 13:49:08 2022 Available for 30 days after download

Learn about what a Turing complete programming language is and why it's more difficult to make a program Turing incomplete. Bitcoin is Turing incomplete whereas Ethereum is Turing complete. #TuringComplete #BitcoinEducation #EthereumEducation Chapters 0:00 The life of Allen Turing 0:48 Could you please explain in plain English what is meant by a computer program being or not being Turing complete 1:49 Important characteristics of Turing complete programs 2:29 Turing incomplete programs 3:18 Turing complete systems, while they can express any possible program and are very flexible, we never know if they are going to finish running COMMENT below and let us know what you think of the video. Post your follow-up questions there too! SUBSCRIBE to this YouTube channel and select the bell 🔔 for notifications: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJWCJCWOxBYSi5DhCieLOLQ?sub_confirmation=1 JOIN this YouTube channel to become a YouTube Community Member and access custom emoji and other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJWCJCWOxBYSi5DhCieLOLQ/join BECOME a Community Builder: https://patreon.com/aantonop LEARN from Andreas in one of his popular Workshops which will teach you practical crypto skills. There’s even a FREE Intro to Bitcoin & Open Blockchains to get you started. https://aantonop.io/takeaw... === Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vm8tneHM-x4 Downloaded by http://huffduff-video.snarfed.org/ on Sun Sep 26 07:50:03 2021 Available for 30 days after download

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Alan Turing (1912-1954) whose 1936 paper On Computable Numbers effectively founded computer science. Immediately recognised by his peers, his wider reputation has grown as our reliance on computers has grown. He was a leading figure at Bletchley Park in the Second World War, using his ideas for cracking enemy codes, work said to have shortened the war by two years and saved millions of lives. That vital work was still secret when Turing was convicted in 1952 for having a sexual relationship with another man for which he was given oestrogen for a year, or chemically castrated. Turing was to kill himself two years later. The immensity of his contribution to computing was recognised in the 1960s by the creation of the Turing Award, known as the Nobel of computer science, and he is to be the new face on the £50 note. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000ncmw

Der Mathematiker Alan Turing knackte die Enigma-Nachrichtenverschlüsselung der Nazis und war ein Wegbereiter der Informatik. Trotzdem fiel er in England in Ungnade. MP3: https://avdlswr-a.akamaihd https://nerdcore.de/2018/12/17/geniale-mathematiker-3-3-alan-turing-und-die-moeglichkeiten-der-maschinen/

Die Beschleunigung der digitalen Welt überfordert immer mehr Menschen. Das Leben erscheint unübersichtlicher und komplexer als jemals zuvor. Doch die Flucht in ein vermeintlich besseres Gestern hilft nicht weiter, so Dirk von Gehlen. Von Dirk von Gehlen Wäre es nicht viel zielführender, gar nicht mehr nach der einen einfachen Lösung zu suchen? Vielleicht sollten wir uns der eigenen Ratlosigkeit stellen und sie konstruktiv zu nutzen versuchen: Überforderungsbewältigungskompetenz wäre dann die zentrale zu entwickelnde Fähigkeit für eine komplexe Gegenwart. Das perfekte Symbol dafür ist ein Emoticon aus dem Internet: der schulterzuckende 'Shruggie', der sich aus Zeichen des japanischen Katakana-Alphabets zusammensetzt. Dirk von Gehlen entwickelt am Beispiel des 'Shruggie' die Grundzüge seiner Emoji-Philosophie als Ratgeber zur Ratlosigkeit für einen gelassenen Umgang mit dem Neuen. Dirk von Gehlen, geboren 1975, ist Journalist, Buchautor und Crowdfunding-Pionier. Er war Chefredakteur von jetzt.de und leitet heute bei der "Süddeutschen Zeitung" die Abteilung Social Media/Innovation. Auf digitale-notizen.de bloggt er über die Veränderungen der Medienlandschaft. Horst Seehofer weiß Bescheid. Zweifel sind dem CSU-Innenminister fremd. Er kennt sich aus. Denn: Horst Seehofer hat einen Masterplan. Der Begriff stammt aus dem Englischen und beschreibt das perfekte Vorgehen in einer komplizierten Situation: die eine richtige Antwort, der Königsweg, die optimale Lösung - das alles meint "Masterplan". Und Seehofer hat diesen Masterplan. Jedenfalls sagt er das. "Masterplan Migration" haben seine Kommunikationsleute die Ideen genannt, die der Innenminister Mitte Juni im Streit mit der Schwesterpartei präsentierte. In dem Krach, den er damit auslöste, ist ein Aspekt etwas untergegangen, der aber sehr hilfreich ist, um sich in der komplizierten Gegenwart zurecht zu finden: der Begriff Masterplan selber. Wer diesen Begriff wählt, will damit deutlich machen: "Ich weiß Bescheid, Zweifel sind mir fremd. Ich kenne mich aus." Es gibt Menschen, die sich genau diese Haltung von Politikerinnen und Politikern wünschen. Gerade in einer unübersichtlichen Zeit vermittelt ihnen das Masterplan-Auftreten ein Gefühl der Sicherheit, der Struktur und der Übersicht. Sie denken: "Man muss nur dem Masterplan folgen, dann verschwindet die Unübersichtlichkeit schon wieder." Und wenn die Dinge noch nicht so sind wie gewünscht, dann kann das nur daran liegen, dass der Masterplan nicht richtig umgesetzt wurde. So einfach ist das. An dieser Stelle möchte ich ein Schulterzucken einfügen, das Sie nicht hören können. Aber vielleicht kennen Sie das Symbol fürs Schulterzucken aus dem Internet. Ein kleines Emoticon, elf Zeichen aus dem japanischen Katakana-Alphabet. Zusammengesetzt zu einer fröhlichen kleinen Figur, die ratlos mit den Schultern zuckt: der Shruggie. Der Shruggie glaubt nicht, dass es so einfach ist. Denn wie auch beim Unionstheater diesen Sommer gehen die groß angekündigten Masterpläne meist nicht auf. Nicht selten gibt es für Probleme nämlich nicht die eine einfache Lösung, nicht den Masterplan. Vielleicht sollten wir stattdessen anerkennen, "dass häufig mehr Faktoren auf eine Situation einwirken, als wir kontrollieren können." So jedenfalls definiert der Soziologe Armin Nassehi Komplexität - und fordert: In einer komplexen Welt brauchen wir andere Fähigkeiten, eine neue Haltung. Wir müssen lernen, dass ein vermeintlich zupackendes Aufbauen mit den Händen bei der nächsten Drehung dazu führt, dass man mit dem Hinterteil Dinge wieder umwirft, die man sich vorher mühsam zusammengefügt hatte. Und dass sie umfallen, liegt keineswegs daran, dass man sich so ungeschickt angestellt hat. Es gibt schlicht Verbindungen und Zusammenhänge, die man vorher nicht bedacht hat und die dann kurz vor der Verkündung des Masterplans zu Tage treten. Wer dies auf weltpolitischer Ebene beobachten will, sollte sich mal die Brexit-Verhandlungen anschauen. Aus dem Masterplan "Nur raus aus der EU" ist ein komplexes Puzzlespiel geworden, von dem sich einige der Hauptprotagonisten schon genervt zurückgezogen haben. Vielleicht doch alles nicht so einfach. Auch hier denken Sie sich bitte das schulterzuckende Emoticon hinzu: Shruggie. Die Welt scheint nicht nur immer komplizierter zu werden, sie ist vor allem immer komplexer. Es bestehen Abhängigkeiten, die man vorab nicht erkennen kann. Es gibt Mehrdeutigkeiten, die einfache Lösungen unmöglich machen. Der Wissenschaftsautor und Kabarettist Vince Ebert stellt dazu sehr trocken fest: "Komplexe Systeme haben keinen Masterplan. Viele von uns sehen das als Nachteil. Doch in Wirklichkeit ist das toll." Wieder ein Schulterzucken. Aus voller Zustimmung. Wir glauben, dass es diese eine gute Lösung geben kann Denn wenn wir akzeptieren, dass es den einen Masterplan nicht gibt, kann das auch befreiend sein. Wir lösen uns dann von der gesellschaftlichen Sehnsucht nach der einfachen Antwort. Denn insgeheim glauben wir bei aller Mehrdeutigkeit dann immer noch zu gerne daran, dass es diese eine gute Lösung geben kann. Unabhängig von politischer Prägung und von gesellschaftlichem Thema kann man diese Masterplanisierung der Debatte in unzähligen Bereichen beobachten. Man erhebt seinen eigenen Ansatz zur einzigen Lösung. Es folgt: eine konfrontative Polarisierung und ein emotionaler Streit, der kaum zu einem Kompromiss führen kann. Ein Beispiel abseits der politisch instrumentalisierten Schicksale flüchtender Menschen gewünscht? Dann fragen Sie mal bei einem Grundschulelternabend, ob die Kinder Smartphones nutzen sollen. Zur Antwort bekommen Sie zunächst die Bestseller befeuerte Vollablehnung: "Macht uns alle dumm und abhängig." Und dann im Gegenzug die euphorische Technikumarmung, die Tablet-Koffer für jede Klasse fordert. Oder Sie fragen auf einer Schriftstellertagung, ob es nicht geschlechtergerechter wäre, künftig von Schriftstellerinnen und Schriftstellern zu sprechen - statt stets nur die männliche Form zu wählen. Auch hier werden Sie Emotionen von beiden Seiten zur Antwort erhalten, wenn auch mit völlig entgegengesetztem Inhalt. Der Niedergang der deutschen Sprache wird Ihnen von der einen Seite prognostiziert - und von der anderen werden Sie hören, dass die Unterdrückung der Frau durch das generische Maskulinum auch im 21. Jahrhundert zementiert wird. Beides schlimm, beides dringend, alles konfrontativ. Keine Sorge, ich werde Ihnen jetzt zu keiner der genannten Fragen die eine richtige Antwort vorgeben. Nicht mal ein weiches "Lösung liegt sicher irgendwo in der Mitte" werden Sie von mir hören. Denn ich befürchte etwas viel Schlimmeres: Vielleicht haben gar beide Seiten Recht, die sich da so polarisierend widersprechen Denn das ist das Quälende an der Komplexität: dass es viele Wege geben kann. Die Wissenschaft spricht von Ambiguität, was Mehrdeutigkeit heißt. Auch hier denken Sie sich nochmal einen schulterzuckenden Shruggie hinzu. Vielleicht müssen wir nicht nur akzeptieren, dass die Welt komplexer und unübersichtlicher geworden ist. Vielleicht müssen wir dabei auch lernen, die Mehrdeutigkeit in möglichen Antworten auszuhalten. Ambiguitätstoleranz nennt man das. Die Fähigkeit, nicht mehr verzweifelt nach dem Masterplan zu suchen - und nach dem beruhigendem Gefühl, Recht zu haben, das damit einhergeht. In der Sprache des Internets könnte man das schwierige Wort Ambiguitätstoleranz mit den schon zitierten Zeichen aus dem japanischen Katakana-Alphabet übersetzen: mit dem fröhlichen Schulterzucken des Shruggie. Emoticon hat das Zeug, eine Haltung für die komplexe digitale Gegenwart zu prägen Der Shruggie ist fröhlich und gelassen - aber niemals gleichgültig. Die Zeichen in der Mitte des Emoticons zeigen ein freundliches Lächeln. Der Shruggie ist nicht nur die Vermenschlichung von Schriftzeichen, er ist auch auf der Seite der Menschen. Keine Wahrheit ist ihm wertvoller als die Humanität. Niemals würde er für eine Überzeugung Gewalt oder Hass rechtfertigen. Er zuckt nicht mit den Schultern, wenn Menschen leiden. Er versucht dann, aktiv zu werden. Aber nicht nach dem einfachen Muster der Alternativlosigkeit, sondern mit dem steten Zweifel, dass auch das Gegenteil richtig sein könnte. Hätte es den Shruggie schon gegeben, als Karl Popper seine Theorie vom kritischen Rationalismus formulierte, Popper hätte das Emoticon vielleicht sogar aufs Cover drucken lassen. Ich habe Sie gebeten, sich den Shruggie hinzuzudenken, weil ich glaube, dass das Emoticon das Zeug dazu hat, eine Haltung für die komplexe digitale Gegenwart zu prägen. Nicht nur als Gegenentwurf für die Masterplan-Macher der Politik, sondern auch in zahlreichen anderen gesellschaftlichen Bereichen. In der Arbeitswelt, im Umgang mit den Herausforderungen der Digitalisierung und womöglich sehr grundsätzlich mit allem, was neu und fremd ist. Sascha Lobo hat die Shruggie‑Haltung sogar mal als die vielleicht erste Emoji-Philosophie beschrieben. Der Shruggie wagt einen Blick auf die Welt, der pluralistisch und offen ist. Und vor allem: digital. Das Emoticon ist Kind des Internets. Irgendjemand hat dort sogar mal geschrieben, der Shruggie drücke das Grundgefühl des digitalen Zeitalters aus, das Default-Internet-Feeling. Das Internet ist ein weltweites Netzwerk, das Länder-, Sprach- und Religionsgrenzen überwindet. Allein dass es das Internet gibt, kann man als Beweis dafür lesen, dass Rassismus und Ausgrenzung überholt sind. Wenn man so will, zeigt das Netzwerk der Netze, dass Brücken stärker sind als Mauern, dass Multi-Kulti wirksamer ist als Abschottung. Menschheitshistorisch ist das ein Geschenk - und eine Herausforderung. Denn diejenigen, die in Debatten im Web ihren Masterplan verbreiten wollen, nutzen die neuen Kommunikationsmöglichkeiten nicht selten, um Abgrenzung und Hass zu predigen. Der Shruggie als Kind des Netzes kann sie und uns daran erinnern, wie die Idee einer freien und toleranten Gesellschaft funktioniert - gerade im Internet. Das fröhliche Schulterzuc

[music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating] Jonathan Haidt: It’s as though these giant electromagnets got turned on in the ’60s, and they’ve been cranking up ever since, and anything that has the vaguest left-right charge gets pulled to one side. Everything gets purified. Psychologically, what we find empirically is that people who identify as conservative tend to like order and predictability, whereas people who identify as liberal, they like variety and diversity. I have one study where we have dots moving around on a screen. Conservatives like the images where the dots are moving around more in lockstep with each other. Liberals like it when it’s all chaotic and random. Krista Tippett, host: The surprising psychology behind morality — this is at the heart of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s research. “When it comes to moral judgments,” he says, “we think we are scientists discovering the truth, but actually we are lawyers arguing for positions we arrived at by other means.” In his acclaimed book, The Righteous Mind, he examined the conundrum behind good people divided by religion and politics. Jonathan Haidt explains “liberal” and “conservative” not narrowly or necessarily as political affiliations, but as personality types, ways of moving through the world. And his own self-described “conservative-hating, religion-hating, secular-liberal instincts” have been challenged by his own studies. I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. [music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating] Jonathan Haidt is professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. I interviewed him in 2014 at the invitation of a group called Encounter. It is interested in Jonathan Haidt’s research as it navigates an iconically entrenched, bitterly divisive moral conflict of our age, the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. We gathered before an intimate group at the Jewish Community Center of Manhattan. Ms. Tippett: It’s exciting to be talking about an important subject in an important place in a room surrounded by books. And actually, where I’d like to start is just with you, just a little bit about your background. And I’m curious, specifically, whether you would find traces or roots of not just your interest in morality, but in a sense, your passion for morality, in the religious or spiritual background of your childhood. Mr. Haidt: Well, my religious and spiritual background is sort of stereotypical for my generation — born in 1963 to parents who were first generation. All four of my grandparents were born in Russia and Poland, came to New York, worked in the garment industry, loved Roosevelt, union organizers. My parents moved, raised me in Scarsdale, New York. I was very assimilated — I have a strong sense of being Jewish as my culture, but not as, really, as a religion. As a kid who always loved science, and when I first read the bible in college, the Old Testament, I was horrified when I read the whole thing. And so I went through the phase that many young scientific types go through. I’m the sort of person who would have been a New Atheist if I hadn’t taken a very different turn in my own research. Ms. Tippett: So you studied philosophy in college, is that right? And then it seems to me that you made a move, a shift that our culture is actually making, which is that great questions, or this great inquiry about the human condition, which once was reserved for philosophers and theologians, has now moved onto frontiers where we are learning to understand our minds, and in understanding our minds, understanding ourselves in a whole new way. Mr. Haidt: That’s right. That’s what most excites me, is, I think we’re all interested in our origins. Everybody’s interested in origin stories: Where do we come from? Why are we this way? And when I first read, actually, Richard Dawkins, when I first read The Selfish Gene, and I began to learn about evolution, I felt, “Oh my God, it all makes so much sense. This is why we are the way we are.” And I remember when I was in London — in Westminster Abbey, I guess it was, wherever Darwin is buried, and in England, they have the graves right there in the church, and people walk over them. And I was like, “No! don’t walk on Darwin’s grave!” So I felt like — I felt as though studying the social sciences and evolution, I feel like we are really beginning to reconstruct our ancestor and origin story, and it’s very, very exciting. And I find it gives me a lot of compassion for us as a species, because a lot of people love to shake their heads and say, “Oh, my God, things are so terrible, and we’re such monsters.” But I have very, very low expectations. My standard is, we’re animals. We’re like chimpanzees that actually figured out how to get along amazingly well and not hurt each other, not hit each other. I mean it’s amazing how peaceful we are, actually. Ms. Tippett: I mean I just think — just what you just said, I feel like we are — we’re coming to a place where we can have a vocabulary of considering ourselves as a species, which is kind of a new evolutionary phase. And having said that, that you started thinking about these things seriously with Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, the field you are part of — which is new, which has developed in your lifetime, in our lifetime — is positive psychology, the study of human flourishing, which it takes off into new directions from there. Mr. Haidt: That’s right. So that would be, I guess — part of the story is, psychology has tended to be a very negative field, in that it’s especially focused on problems. Ms. Tippett: Pathologies and neurosis. Mr. Haidt: Pathologies, violence, drug addiction, racism, all those sorts of things. Those are, of course, extremely important to study. We’ve made a lot of progress on them. But in the 1990s, Martin Seligman, a psychologist at Penn, said, when he was president of the American Psychological Association, “Well, what about the positive side of life? Most people are doing pretty well. And when they go to the bookstore, all they have on offer are books by Deepak Chopra. So we should be having psychologists doing research on the positive side of life.” And I started doing research because I study morality and how it’s based on the emotions, so I’d been studying the emotions of disgust and anger and shame, and then I started to think, “Well, what’s the opposite of disgust?” And I started — what do you feel when you see somebody do something beautiful or uplifting? And it felt to me as though there’s such an emotion, but there wasn’t a word for it, at least not in the psychological language — I mean you can say “uplifted” or “touched” or “moved.” And I came across a wonderful passage in Thomas Jefferson. I’d just arrived at the University of Virginia, and he is the — he’s everywhere. I felt like I worked for the man. It was wonderful. But he describes why it’s so important to read good fiction: because of the effect that beautiful deeds, beautifully explained, can have on you. He said, “Does it not elevate his sentiments, does it not dilate the breast and elevate the sentiment” — a sort of a feeling of opening — “as much as any example in real history can furnish?” And he talked about how it makes us more open, and then new things are possible. Ms. Tippett: It seems like he almost had an intuition of what’s being learned in social psychology now, or that he had a wisdom. Mr. Haidt: Jefferson was a fantastic — Jefferson and Ben Franklin. We had a few founders who were great psychologists. Ms. Tippett: Yeah. So let’s just talk about your basic premises. So one of them, we kind of have had this illusion that we were primarily rational creatures. And your first premise would be that moral judgment is based mostly on intuitions, rather than conscious reasoning. I mean here is the one way you said this: “When it comes to moral judgments, we think we are scientists discovering the truth, but actually we are lawyers arguing for positions we arrived at by other means.” Mr. Haidt: Exactly. And if you don’t believe that about yourself, just note how true it is of everybody else. [laughter] And then think, they think that of you. Ms. Tippett: So a second premise is that there’s more to morality than harm and fairness. So explain what that means. Mr. Haidt: So in psychology, pretty much everybody who studies morality is politically liberal. Ms. Tippett: Really? Is that really true? Mr. Haidt: Yeah. Yeah. I have found one social psychologist who’s a conservative. He’s a friend of mine. I’ve not found another. And that’s a whole separate discussion about the terrible things that happen — I mean we’re talking about polarization here — what happens when the academy itself becomes polarized, so that all the liberals are in the academy, all the conservatives are in think tanks in Washington. Ms. Tippett: Right. Mr. Haidt: So it really interferes with our ability to think and to study. Ms. Tippett: But it makes for great cable television. Mr. Haidt: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. Ms. Tippett: It produces the talking heads. Mr. Haidt: Yeah, that’s right, and no progress. [laughter] So the field — so when I entered the field in 1987, it was dominated by people who were pretty far left. And so morality was basically defined as altruism. And it was especially altruism towards poor victims. So ideally, helping poor kids in Africa, that is the best thing you could possibly do. So all the research was about compassion and about fairness and justice, and that’s it. And when I took a course in cultural psychology from a wonderful anthropologist named Alan Fiske, and we read all these books about these ethnographies of morality in other cultures — and people care a lot about food and food taboos and menstruating women and the body and all these things that I had read 15 years before in the Old Testament. And I realized: Oh, my God, almost every culture on earth has this very broad conception

100 years ago this year, the man who first conceived of the computer age was born. His name was Alan Turing. He was also a math genius, a hero of World War II and he is widely considered to be the father of artificial intelligence. But the world wasn't kind to Alan Turing. In 1952, he was arrested and convicted under a British law that prohibited "acts of gross indecency between men, in public or private."

Chris: Aright, welcome to the latest edition of Jobs to be Done Radio, I’m Chris Spiek. As always, I’m joined by Ervin Fowlkes and Bob Moesta. Hey guys. Bob: Hey Chris, how are you. Ervin: Hey Chris. Chris: Today, we have another special guest, Alan Klement is joining us. He is an engineer, software developer, author, if I have that right, big writer, and came up with the concept of the Jobs Story, which has taken the Jobs to be Done world by storm, and is being used by a lot of people. Alan, great to have you. Alan: Great to be here, thank you. Chris: So, why don’t we dive in a little bit. Give us a little bit of background, tell us about yourself, and lead us into what you do and how you came to discover Jobs, and learn about it, and what you were using before. Alan: Great, absolutely. First off, let me just say that I am really thankful to you guys at Jobs- to-be-Done.org, and Clay Christensen, and everyone else in the community is really pushing the concept of Jobs-to-be-Done and popularizing it, because it’s really changed how I see entrepreneurship and product design, and marketing even. A real quick thanks, these guys keep going with it. I’d love to talk to you any way I can. Bob: Thanks. Chris: Yes, we’re definitely excited to have your help, so Ervin was just telling us before we clicked record here that you’re going to be doing some writing for us on the Jobs-to-be-Done.org blog, and I wanted to make sure that I mentioned that, because I know that everybody who listens to this podcast, most people also read the blog. I think that just knowing that is going to give people something to look forward to. We’re actively reaching out to look forward to people that are good writers and good communicators to add more fresh content for the blog for people to read, and you’re definitely one of them. So, that’s an exciting thing to look forward to. Bob: The thing is to think about how to collaborate on it. You don’t have to just write it by yourself, but if there’s things that you want to work on together, we can do that as well. We can coordinate to do that. Ervin: The only qualifications out there to be a writer for Jobs-to- be-Done.org blog is just, step up and say “Hey, I love the theory. I love what you guys are doing, and I just really want to participate in the community.” We really believe in open source innovation, and anyone in a company can make the choice to move their products forward, and we want to make sure we’re there to help that along inertia. Chris: I got to set the bar a little higher, sorry Ervin. I think the other qualification is that you definitely need to demonstrate a fairly deep understanding of the framework. The one thing that always makes our skin crawl is there are still groups of people out there saying, “The job of the TV is to entertain, and the job of the pen is to write,” and if you’re at that level that you need to do a little studying, and you need to do a little work before you start writing and spreading out the gospel, so to speak. Bob: Tools and techniques. Tools and techniques to help you get to that next level. That’s a big thing. We’re in the midst of doing it quite a bit, and it’s one of those things we still have a hard time sharing output that we do, but it’s the frameworks. To be honest, we’re almost, it’s hard to see. We don’t sense the water like a fish. The thing is, we do these frameworks, it’s all of a sudden, we need help, like what Alan did. Oh yes, the story. Doing things like the story, but never just formalize it. It’s awesome to have people like Alan out there who are helping us. Chris: Great. So, Alan: Sorry. Chris: Go ahead. Alan: I’m sorry, I sort of hijacked the question there. I wanted to say I appreciate, because it really has changed everything about how I approach that. Chris: Awesome. Alan: All right. Yes, so a quick about me is. I’ve been an engineer/hacker most of my life, and ever since probably twelve years old, I’ve been pumping out real programs for fun. I’ve always been some kind of entrepreneur in some way. I remember when I was really young, I was always trying to start little businesses, just make a little money on the side, and even today, I’m working with other engineers and other people, other business people here in New York City to develop products. I really use Jobs-to-be-Done, that philosophy, in every aspect, from market research, product discovery, customer development, and even product design, which is kind of what thinking has brough me here to this conversation with you guys. It was a lot of information out there. I remember David, last week on the show talked about how, “Yes, Clay Christensen said some really great stuff, but he kind of glossed over some of these other things. I agree. I think there’s one part in one of the Phoenix videos, Phoenix University videos, and Christensen says, “Oh, once you understand the job, then improving the product is relatively easy.” I’m like oh, I don’t know if it’s relatively easy. I think there’s a lot more there. Chris: Yes. The interesting part is the dimension on which you have to improve becomes clear, right? I think, and for me to paraphrase or try to reword Clay is absurd, but I think when you’ve been in the muck around, we have something here that, a lot of times we talk to people. We built a product, people are buying it, we’re not sure why they’re buying it, and we’re not sure what the next step to take is. You end up with this perspective of, we can make it smaller, we can make it bigger, we can make it lighter, we can make it heavier. That’s the milkshake story. Do I make it thicker, thinner, sweeter, more sour? What do I do with it? When you understand the job, it’s like, alright. Make it thicker, make the straw thicker. I have a direction at least. So, all the technology that goes into it still needs to happen, but at least you have direction, right? Alan: Absolutely. I think that’s definitely obviously what he was alluding to. However, I do think that we’re still talking about it on a higher level, but I think that you can, this happened to me, when I talk about Jobs-to-be-Done, on blogging or Twitter, what have you. I’ve had people contact me directly, and say, well how do I use this with my team? How do I translate this Jobs-to-be-Done philosophy to two designers, three engineers, and a product manager. How do I get those all to understand the same way, and how do we all talk about our product with the context of Jobs to be Done. Chris: Yes. Bob: What do you say? Alan: Good question. What I say is, honestly what I say is, I’m actually experimenting with myself quite a bit. As I look at it some more. I’ll let you know. Here’s what I can tell you right now, and this actually would help if I talk about a recent situation where I used the jobs to be done in a kind of, snuck it in on this last team I was working for. I wrote an article about this on Inside Intercom. Those are great guys, too, by the way. I wrote an article about designing features with Jobs stories, and actually took a real story, a real situation with a team I was working with about a month ago. What happened was we were designing this feature, or actually it was this product, and Joe, he gets up and he starts doing some wire frames, and he does a few wire frames on the board, and he point to one of them. He’s like, “Okay, this is the profile view for our brokers,” and I thought, “Okay,” and everyone around the table just nodded their head. I was looking around the room, and eyes weren’t lighting up. They were just nodding their heads, going along, and that’s when I said, “Okay, what’s the job of this profile view? What are some of the situations that are in the feature, that this product is resolving?” I talked a bit more with them about it, “What are some of the anxieties people are having that this is resolving?” Is there any kind of planning that we can draw of what people are doing before or during this that’s going to help us design this? Just when I start using the language, I never actually said “Jobs-be-Done” to them. I was just using some of the language of timelines, situations, anxieties, jobs, and I saw them actually using the same language without even me telling them, “Hey, guys, start calling them jobs,” they just start using it naturally. That’s one thing that I always suggest to people, to product teams. Start with the language. People can really grab on to language, because it’s like, “What’s the job here of the product?” They’re like, “Oh yes, what is the job of the product?” in situations. I think that’s a very helpful first step. Chris: Did that have an impact on the products? I’m imagining you’re sitting in the room, you’re looking at the profile view and you’re like, “It’s not gelling with me.” You introduce this language. Was there an impact to the way you guys started developing from that point on? Alan: Yes, there was. I would say that once they started really grabbing on to the idea of designing for situations, and thinking of the situations, and also once we started kind of identifying anxieties as problems, but also as how were solving those anxieties with our product. Once they got that, then I was free to write these kinds of, what I call job stories, for the team, for historical purposes. We weren’t using them day to day. It was more of a historical document, so to make sure everyone’s on the same page, and in case that someone forgets, or they’re like, “Oh yes, why was that there?” “Oh yes, because after interviewing customers, we found these situations, we found these anxieties,” and that’s why we’ve included these here to relieve those anxieties, and help them navigate the situation. Bob: One of the questions I get all the time is, “How is it different fromt personas, or use cases?” and, how does i

English mathematician Alan Turing gets turned into a Hollywood hero in The Imitation Game. And did you know Charles Mingus ... http://www.studio360.org/story/alan-turings-hollywood-epic-charles-mingus-cat-trainer/

Luc Beaudoin is the author of the Leanpub book Cognitive Productivity: The Art and Science of Using Knowledge to Become Profoundly Effective. Luc is President of CogZest and Adjunct Professor of Education at Simon Fraser University. At Simon Fraser, Luc is leading the Cognitive Productivity Research Project, investigating knowledge worker cognitive productivity. This interview was recorded on August 19, 2013. The full audio for the interview is here. You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or add the following podcast URL directly: http://leanpub.com/podcast.xml. Luc Beaudoin Len Epp: I’m here with Luc Beaudoin, President of CogZest and Adjunct Professor of Education at Simon Fraser University, based in British Columbia, Canada. Luc is currently running the Cognitive Productivity Research Project at Simon Fraser, investigating psychological questions regarding knowledge worker cognitive productivity. Luc has a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the University of Birmingham, where he conducted research on computer modelling of goal processing and motivation. Over the course of his career, Luc has held a number of positions in different fields. For example, he worked as a technical writer for Tundra Semiconductor, as a Senior Software Developer for Abatis Systems Corp., and he was Assistant Professor of Military Psychology and Leadership at the Royal Military College of Canada. Luc is the author of numerous scientific publications on a wide range of problems in cognitive science. One of his most recent publications is his Leanpub book, Cognitive Productivity: The Art and Science of Using Knowledge to Become Profoundly Effective. In this interview, we’re going to talk about Luc’s research interests and his book, and about his experiences using Leanpub. We’ll also talk about ways we can improve Leanpub for him, and for other scientific and academic authors. So, thank you Luc for being on the Lean Publishing Podcast. Luc Beaudoin: It’s my pleasure. E: Just to start out, can you tell me a little bit about how you first became interested in cognitive science? B: Whoah, we’re going back! 1980s. I was a psychology student, and my career path was to become a clinical psychologist, and I was taking a neuroscience course, and that had me broadening my horizons a little bit, as university does to students. I was very interested in neuroscience, with this course I was taking, and I worked in a neuroscience lab. We were studying the neural basis of motivation and reward. So that basically opened me up to all kinds of possibilities. I took a philosophy course, an epistemology course - it was a requirement at the University of Ottawa - and there I discovered cognitive science, and that really intrigued me. Cognitive science is basically the study of the human mind, and the reference model that we use for that, or the way of thinking that we use, is information processing. So it’s not that the human mind is a digital computer, but that it’s a device that could be understood as something that processes information. I thought that was very interesting. It’s also an approach to the human mind that recognizes that the human mind is too complicated to be studied just from one perspective. So there’s no one discipline that’s constitutive of cognitive science, that owns cognitive science. We often think of psychology as that which studies the human mind, but actually there are many contributing disciplines to this cognitive science thing. So there’s artificial intelligence, there’s philosophy, linguistics, and other disciplines. Neuroscience contributes as well. To make a long story short, I just fell in love with the idea. And there was a professor there, called Claude Lamontagne, who was just an amazing professor, and I was told “Luc, you have to take Professor Lamontagne’s course on perception”. I was going to take cognition, and I took perception in addition to that, so beyond the requirements I took that course, and I guess they knew that he and I would really hit it off. Which we did. He has a tendency to blow people’s minds, and that he did with mine. He basically convinced me that this was the way to understand the human mind, using information processing as a kind of metaphor. E: Speaking of the connection between cognitive science and psychology, you’ve mentioned online that your Ph.D. thesis and your honour thesis “diverged from empirical psychology approach to the issues you addressed in your theses, and you instead used a “designer approach”. Can you explain what you mean by a “designer approach”? B: The idea is that if we’re to understand the human mind with this approach, we have to, in a sense, reverse engineer it. So we think, what are the requirements that this system implements? Typically we don’t look at the entire human mind. Some of us do look at the big architecure of the human mind, but typically people focus on perception, or linguistic processing, and usually some very specific aspect thereof. But basically, we proceed as engineers would. First, understand what are the requirements of a system, and then we propose designs to satisfy those requirements. And then we move on beyond that to developing computer programs that implement those designs, and then we actually press the Run button - the Compile button and the Run button - and we find out, well, this doesn’t exactly do what I thought it would. Actually it doesn’t compile. Or, more typically, you don’t even get to the point of being able to write the program, because what this does is it exposes gaps in your understanding. But, you move along, and you do try to run these simulations, and then you can actually test your predictions in one way or another using your computer program. And then what you do is you study the relations between these different levels. So, by going through this whole process, you find out that you maybe didn’t understand the requirements properly, so you have to study that more in detail, your design wasn’t right. This is basically an engineering stance, which involves some reverse engineering to understanding the human mind. Coincidentally, I had taken a psychological assessment my first year of university, in psychology. They said, “Did you every consider being an engineer?” And I thought, what are you talking about? I’m in psychology! I want to do therapy and understand the mind! Then, later I realized that this person, this psychologist, was spot-on. But I just didn’t know it was possible to study the human mind using engineering methods. E: That’s fascinating. Is that still something that you carry on with, in your work for the Cognitive Productivity Research Project? B: Yes. If you read my book, you’ll see that I do delve into that. As a matter of fact, I think it’s generally useful for people to have a working model of themselves, and each other, and to think of the components of ourselves and what they do. It helps us understand all kinds of things. Our emotions, each other’s emotions, how people respond, etc. We kind of have to do this anyway. Whatever reference model we use, we have to think about ourselves, and our behaviour, and what implements it. But cognitive science gives us some new concepts to think about ourselves, and to think about each other. It’s a point I make in the book, that natural language has provided us with concepts and ways of thinking about psychology. That’s called “folk psychology” and it works very well, most of the time, but there’s all kinds of limiting cases. If you want to go beyond that, then you enter into the realm of cognitive science. E: Actually, I wanted to talk about your book later on, so I’ll ask you some questions about that specifically. When you talk about some people’s misperceptions about the impact that technology can have on the mind. But before we do that, can I ask you a little bit about what CogZest does, and the story of how you founded it? B: Sure. CogZest is an ambitious enterprise. The project actually started in 2002. It had a different name. I’ve switched domains many times, and you always bring some knowledge with you when you switch domains, but you also have to do a lot of learning. So as you mentioned, I started in psychology, then I was doing artificial intelligence, for my Ph.D. in Cognitive Science, and then I was teaching psychology at the military college, some courses that I hadn’t even taken myself, so I had to come up to speed quite quickly. That happens, that’s typical for a professor to do that. And then I worked as a technical writer, and all these different things. So I’d gone through this intense, very intense series of learning cycles, culiminating at Abatis, where I was the first employee. We set up this company, and we had very ambitious objectives for it, and we were all just learning lots of stuff. I was the person who probably had to learn the most, in the early days, because of my bakground being different. They wanted somebody who was more of a startup expert, but I had done a startup before, and proven I could work on different parts of the business. So I was actually the first, and I had to learn about internet protocol, and routers, and all these things. I had to basically absorb lots of specifications, IETF documents, Internet Engineering Task Force documents. For a lot of people, including myself, that was new stuff at the time, the RFCs. So I had to absorb this, as did other people, and it just occurred to me that the technology wasn’t really supporting us in the learning we had to do. We had these specs, and we’d print them out, so the printer was very very busy at Abatis, although the founders had ensured that we had the best technology. We had very fast computers, and we had the best monitors available, CRTs in those days. But still, we’d print out these documents, and we’d highlight them, and mark them up. So it occurred to me, as I was going through my learning process, at Abatis, that somehow, there’s so

Oxford DNB biography podcast: Alan Turing (1912-1954), pioneer of computing “In 1944 Turing knew his own concept of the universal machine; the speed and reliability of electronics; and the inefficiency of building new machines for new logical processes. These provided the principle, the means, and the motivation for the modern computer, a single machine capable of any programmed task. He was spurred by a fourth idea that the universal machine should be able to acquire the faculties of the brain. Turing was captivated by the potential of the computer he had conceived. His thought became strongly determinist and atheistic in character, holding that the computer would offer unlimited scope for practical progress towards embodying intelligence in an artificial form.” http://oupacademic.tumblr.com/post/74936894519/odnb-alan-turing

Alan Turing's mental leaps about machines and computers were some of the most innovative ideas of the 20th century. But ... http://www.radiolab.org/story/193037-turing-problem/

Share Festival 2012 | Open Your City 09th nov -- 6PM -- Regional Museum of Natural Science Alan Turing. Strange Oceans of Thought Bruce Sterling http://www.toshare.it/?p=5966⟨=en

The driving force behind modern computers, Alan Turing was born a hundred years ago. He launched the digital age, founded the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence, and helped the British win WWII by cracking the Nazi "Enigma" codes. He was persecuted by British authorities for the crime of being homosexual, and committed suicide at age 41. His life ended tragically, but his brilliance lives in the computers we use every day. We celebrate the Alan Turing Year.

The Legacy of Alan Turing, Part 2 -- Alan Turing, born June 23 1912, is famous for his key role in breaking German codes in World War 2. But for mathematicians, his great work was on the invention of the computer. In this second of two episodes devoted to Turing, the BBC’s Roland Pease follows the events following Turing’s design for the ACE machine at NPL, and the race against the Baby Computer in Manchester.

Legacy of Alan Turing, Part 1 -- Alan Turing, born June 23 1912, is famous for his key role in breaking German codes in World War 2. But for mathematicians, his great work was on the invention of the computer. In part 1 of this two part series Roland Pease follows the events leading up to Turing’s design for the ACE machine at NPL.

Shorts: The Turing Problem -- 100 years ago this year, the man who first conceived of the computer age was born. His name was Alan Turing. He was also a math genius, a hero of World War II and he is widely considered to be the father of artificial intelligence. But the world wasn't kind to Alan Turing. In 1952, he was arrested and convicted under a British law that prohibited "acts of gross indecency between men, in public or private."

MARK COLVIN: Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation this week released some figures on the success or otherwise of its experiment in paid online journalism, the project which has put the London Times and Sunday Times behind a paywall. It's being watched around the world by newspapers desperate at the double decline of their sales and advertising revenue. Papers like the Sydney Daily Telegraph, Melbourne Herald Sun, Brisbane Courier Mail and Adelaide Advertiser are expected to go behind a paywall next year. News announced with some fanfare that 100,000 people had paid for its Times and Sunday Times offering. But closer analysis showed that this was the figure for four months, and that in any case only about half those people had actually subscribed. In the opposite camp in London is The Guardian which has promised to stay free online. Its editor, Alan Rusbridger, is giving this year's Andrew Olle Media Lecture for the ABC on November 19th. I asked him first about the Times paywall experiment. ALAN RUSBRIDGER: It looks as though in return for forgoing well over 90 per cent of your circulation, endangering your advertising flow, you end up with 20,000 to 50,000 paying subscribers which leads to a revenue, on their own figures, of about two to five million. I mean all money is useful at this point but I don't see that as the transformative step that everyone is going to follow. MARK COLVIN: But I did read one article which said that that was all happening at a time when they'd just shed about 30,000 print copies. ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well that's the strange thing that no-one really foresaw coming. I mean I thought that if you switched off other, all other forms of getting The Times and Sunday Times digitally that the print sales would go up but it turns out that in fact The Times figures are sliding faster than anybody else in the quality market, which suggests to me that we overlook the degree to which the digital forms of our journalism act as a kind of sort of marketing device for the newspapers. And that if you put a gigantic wall around your content and disappear from the general chatter and conversation about your content then people forget to buy the paper as well. So it's a kind of double whammy. MARK COLVIN: I get the impression, looking at some of their journalists' twitter feeds, for example, that they're quite frustrated at not being part of the conversation, as you call it. ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well I think you would be frustrated. I mean most of us go to journalism to try and reach an audience and to have influence and to be read and if you're aware that people are reading all your rivals but not you in the digital space and I think probably it makes it slightly harder to get stories because people think well why would we give The Times stories when they're so invisible in a digital space? So I think in all kinds of terms it's a rather problematic model. MARK COLVIN: Now I've read you fairly recently saying that your online, your digital income, is actually increasing at quite an impressive rate. What's happening? ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well I think digital income is going to increase generally as advertisers realise the power of digital and realise that's where the readers are going. And I think that's not a controversial view. If you listen to Martin Sorrell who heads one of the world's biggest advertising agencies, he predicts a massive shift to digital advertising and so I think that's what's happening. So we're up well over 50 per cent year on year and last year we earned about £40 million from digital revenues. MARK COLVIN: I was just talking to an editor here in Sydney quite recently and I was talking about exactly this and he said yes but where are you going to get a replacement for the big amounts of money that you get for those full page ads, for cars or for department stores or whatever? ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Take a step back. The question is whether you believe that print is going to be that resilient. If you do then, you know, then I'm the last person to be saying that you should be bailing out of print but when you look at the, in Britain and American and most of Europe, you look at the slide in circulation, you just have to question the long-term survivability of print. MARK COLVIN: Do you think that you will be producing a Guardian in print in the year 2020 say? ALAN RUSBRIDGER: I've got no idea. I think the forces that are bearing down on the industry at the moment are so unpredictable and extraordinary it's sort of fruitless to speculate and in a sense I don't mind. It's beyond my control. It'll be in the hands of people who are going to invent the digital devices, it'll be in the decisions of readers and my overwhelming aim is just to keep on producing The Guardian in a form which will suit whatever technology people invent. MARK COLVIN: Okay but you say that we're in a sort of five or 10 year transition period. What is your model for getting through that transition? ALAN RUSBRIDGER: The model is to continue producing great journalism, to make it adaptable and sympathetic to whatever technology is there and whatever platform and to have a fantastic, commercial department who will then work out how to monetise it. We have reached a real fork in the road now where, on The Times' figures let's say their subscriber base is now somewhere in the region of 30,000 to 50,000, we can't really be sure, and this month The Guardian will declare a monthly readership of about 37 million. So they're two completely different ideas of size, scale and ambition. MARK COLVIN: And interactivity. Your paper just came top of a list of media organisations around the world in terms of interactivity. How important is that? ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well I think it's crucial. If you look at the organisations that are valued the most highly, in financial terms, and which are growing fastest they are the so-called Web 2.0 organisations, either the social media organisations like Facebook, like Twitter. I think it's impossible not to look at those organisations and that technology and say what is it about it that people find so compelling? And I don't think the answer's terribly hard. It's about the fact that people like creating. For 500 years since Gutenberg they couldn't create and now suddenly they have publishing tools on their own, and surprise, surprise they like creating and they like connecting with each other. So it seems to me pretty crucial that newspapers should wake up to that fact and invite people into the process of helping to create this news, this information system, instead of regarding them as passive, as a passive audience. MARK COLVIN: But your newspaper has been for a long time known, among other things, for wonderful writing. I can imagine that you had some people there who didn't really want their writing sullied or didn't really want to enter into a conversation. ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Yes, I mean, you know all cultural change is hard and of course we've had, you know, like any organisation, we've had resisters and we've had early adopters and everything in between. I think journalists have to ask themselves whether they really are the only figures of authority and whether they know more in all circumstances than their readers or whether we can adopt a more, slightly more humble approach and say well, we do know things and we do have certain skills but out there our readers probably know more than we do about certain things or are equally qualified to express views. And so we should create the platforms and the technology and the forums by which they can take part too and my experience is if you do that, you end up with something that is better than if we journalists just try to do it alone. MARK COLVIN: Well that brings onto Wikileaks which is an organisation which in many ways challenges the whole model of traditional journalism. You entered into a kind of alliance with them. What was the thinking process? ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well it was just a great story and it was a load of great information and one of our journalists read about the availability of this store of material, the fact that it was out there, and he went and talked to Wikileaks and said, instead of just dumping it on the web and it's such a vast database of information no-one will be able to make sense of it, why don't you work with some news organisations so that we can try and contextualise it, make it sense of it before doing so. And I think actually that worked really well both for Wikileaks, for us and for the general level of understanding of people trying to read it. MARK COLVIN: It did mean that you ended up being associated with an organisation that had named a lot of people who were then subsequently put in danger in Afghanistan. Was that a danger for you? ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well we did different things. Wikileaks had a different policy of what they were going to name and what they weren't. We were fairly tight in what we released and we redacted a lot of material, more than Wikileaks. But I think, I mean in the real world what was going to happen was that all that material was going to be released by Wikileaks anyway and I think the reason that the White House reacted in a fairly sober way, ie. didn't throw the toys out of the pram, was because they appreciated the fact that you'd got three very reputable news organisations who placed all this in context and they were able to say, look are these are field logs. What you're reading here is not history. It's not the truth. It's the raw data that's been released from the field. Some of this may be true; some of it may not be true. So this is how to read the data. And I think that helped contextualise what otherwise could have seemed overwhelming or alarming. MARK COLVIN: So for you Wikileaks, while it challenges traditional journalism, actually ended up validating it? ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Yes, I think it did validate us and I think that's really the point I

Podcast #030 - Ancient European and Middle Eastern Drug Use - An Interview with Alan Piper - Part 1 Send to Friends | Leave a Comment | Download | Permalink May 11, 2009 12:25 AM PDT itunes pic What evidence is there of Amanita muscaria mushroom and other drug use in Afghanistan? Did the Sufi employ psychoactive substances? What are the Moroccan goat men? Is there a possible link between intoxicating sacramental use of milk and Mohammed's landmark visionary experience through the seven heavens? How does the new evidence of prehistoric mushroom use in Europe affect current academic arguments against such use? Is there a link to the word 'marihuana' and the Chinese language? My guest is the British independent scholar Alan Piper - an expert on psychoactive substances in ancient religions. In this two part series we'll be discussing Zoroastrianism, Sufism, Amanita muscaria - the fly-agaric mushroom, intoxicating milk and meat, new evidence of prehistoric mushroom use in Europe, the origins of the word "marihuana," and much more. [Photo of Alan Piper and Prof. Carl A.P. Ruck at Cuenca, Spain, 2008] Alan Piper was born in 1953 and like many others of his generation encountered psychedelic culture in his teenage years. His father undertook psychloytic therapy in the 1950s and so Alan grew up with the likes of Aldous Huxley and Henri Michaux on the family bookshelves, which were a point of reference for him in his own encounters with the psychedelic experience. Again, like many others of his generation, he moved away from psychedelics and into an exploration of eastern religions and hermetic philosophies, looking for a context for his entheogenic experiences. Laid off from a macobiotic food company in the 1980s Alan took the opportunity to take a degree course in the History of Ideas, partly as an opportunity to put the new religious movements which emerged from the 1960s into a cultural context. As part of his study of religious, philosophical and scientific ideas his undergraduate studies involved the study of historical method, the discipline of 'doing history'. The second wave of psychedelia, rave culture and entheogenic neo-shamanism, hit around the time of his graduation. The writings of Terence McKenna renewed Alan's interest in the entheogens and their role in human cultures. A couple of his early papers on entheogenic topics brought Alan in touch with members the community of entheogenic scholarship and he has been lucky to have had the support and encouragement of other members of that community and to share his explorations with them. Alan has attempted to apply the methodological disciplines learned as an undergraduate to his study of the role of plant drugs in religious history of mankind. However, he recognises that there are many ways to make of sense of history some more objective and some more subjective. All attempts to 'do history' involve both reason and the imagination and our history is the product of an interplay between the dream and necessities of everyday reality. Alan has authored and co-authored the following papers: • Esoteric Cosmologies • The Mysterious Origins of the Word "Marihuana" • The Tree of Life and the Milk of the Goat Heidrun • Burāq depicted as Amanita muscaria in a Fifteenth Century Timurid Illuminated Manuscript