Final Jeopardy (Or: What is Watson?)

A New York Times Magazine article by Clive Thompson was my introduction, as it were, to Watson -- IBM's Jeopardy!-playing computer. It was just the sort of curiosity right up my alley: where tech and pop culture intersect, a computer designed to compete against human beings in a trivia quiz show where all answers take the form of questions. And yet...weren't computers supposed to be good at that? Didn't computers have the advantage of near-limitless memory for the sort of information at the heart of such a competition? Wasn't victory for Watson a foregone conclusion?

Apparently, it's not that simple. And this is at the heart of Stephen Baker's book Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything.

The book offers a behind-the-scenes account of Watson's development, from the decision to undertake project Blue Jay (as Watson was initially known) as the spiritual successor to chess computer Deep Blue, to its televised contest against Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. But the book is more than a chronological record of how Watson came to be. It also provides valuable perspective on the technological, corporate, and socio-cultural challenges that had to be overcome for Watson to become a reality.

Baker deftly describes the technical details surrounding Watson's development, as well as the implications of successfully developing such a computer. Although examples of conversant computers abound in science fiction (think the Computer in Star Trek or Jarvis in the Iron Man films), such question-answer technology was, prior to Watson, rather rudimentary as science reality. In this regard, storing the data for Watson to parse (it has no connection to the Internet) in response to famously tricky Jeopardy clues would be the easy part. Scientists would also have to program it to dissect each clue, interpret figures of speech and obscure references, identify the most relevant answers, and most importantly play the game. Altogether? No mean feat.

Yet inasmuch as the technical details make Watson a noteworthy subject, Final Jeopardy is just as much about the negotiations that sometimes threatened to derail the project. Plenty of maneuvering took place to ensure that the project would get underway, beginning with the search for a project champion within IBM, which Big Blue would eventually find in David Ferucci, to the inevitable back-and-forth with network executives about how the eventual Jeopardy showdown would take place.

To his credit, Baker also discusses the lengthy debates that took place regarding what Watson should ultimately look like, an important consideration easy to take for granted. True, Watson was just a computer, but how it would be perceived by its fellow contestants and the public at large could play a large part in its success or failure. After all, the worst that could happen would be for Watson to best its opponents but come across as overly cold and lifeless. Who would be interested in technology like that, no matter how advanced?

As numerous headlines reported, Watson did ultimately get the better of its human opponents. In the end, the work of hundreds of scientists did overcome two people of above-average intelligence in a trivia contest. But as inferred from Final Jeopardy, this outcome is anything but a non-event, having much broader implications for the feats that computers will -- or already are, as the case may be -- capable of doing.

Presenting to Win

Reading Jerry Weissman's Presenting to Win, it struck me how much the landscape of modern presentations has changed over so short a time.

Weissman is, of course, one of the world's most influential presentation coaches, and it shows in this book. From the very beginning, where readers are succinctly reminded that presentations are different from documents, it's plain to see his influence on the works of Garr Reynolds, Nancy Duarte, and most anyone who makes a distinction between a presentation and a "slideument". At the same time, Weissman is able to abstract the essentials of effective presentation -- framing it in terms of "audience advocacy" and simplifying one's core messages, among other noteworthy ideas -- such that even those who take for granted the amount of preparation required for captivating presentations will find the book helpful. Hence, anyone who balks at the prospect of reading this pioneering addition to the presentation literature would be doing herself a disservice: Presenting to Win isn't dated; rather, it's a classic.

However, there is at least one area where the book does show its age: its visual aesthetic.

There are several slides in the book used as examples of poor slide design, thereafter made over to be much more effective tools of communication. Certainly, the resulting redesigns represent an improvement, if marginally. In this respect, Presenting to Win is a child of its time, written for an audience still making sense of how best to use PowerPoint and born well before the heyday of TED talks and more sophisticated presentation platforms like Keynote, Prezi or Sliderocket. And yet, really, the difference between the book's publication and these more recent developments is no more than just a few years.

Which brings me back to my original point. Indeed, with rapid changes afoot in the field of presentation it is fitting that we can rely on a classic contribution to the literature to help keep what is essential in perspective.

What You Learned in Business School?

Sometimes a book is good because it teaches you things you don't know; sometimes it's good because it conveys things you already know. Thus, I wanted to find out: which kind of book was 101 Things I Learned(TM) in Business School?

A little bit of both, I'd say.

Part of a series created by Matthew Frederick, this book by Michael Preis is an eclectic itemized collection of business concepts, jargon and quotes that anyone versed in the practice of business should be familiar with. For sure, it isn't a comprehensive collection -- no list of 101 things can hope to be -- nor a sufficiently technical one -- because to be effective, lists have to be concise (as this one is). Yet given these limitations, the book has obvious appeal because it is an accessible hodgepodge of intelligent things to know about what it means to run a business, all in one tidy little package.

In this regard, I'd say that 101 Things I Learned in Business School would be most appreciated by the soon-to-graduate-into-the-real-world rather than the seasoned businessperson. No doubt, there is good value to be had from the book as resource material in an office library, but it's the type of book that's likely to be glossed over by executives with plenty of experience.

I would suppose the same holds true for most of the other books that belong to the 101 Things I Learned(TM) series.