Sunday, August 29, 2004

 
A Multitude of Signs

San Antonio Current: Multimedia message by M. Solis
Current: Can you elaborate on the concepts of Rhythm Cinema and Rhythm Space?
Spooky: "To me, every time you even look at a building or see roads of a city from above, those are different kinds of visual patterns and rhythms. What I'm doing as a DJ, writer, and artist is thinking about life in our era as kind of exploring all the interrelated patterns that hold the fabric of the everyday world together. A building is a pattern. You can look at the points of structure, like a window, a corridor, a chamber; those are done with certain patterns. If you look at a skyscraper, if you look at a church, all of these are structures, but to me they are also beats. They're rhythms that are holding together a structure.
A DJ set of rhythms and patterns is the same thing as a building. It really doesn't have that much of a difference except for the material. Music is invisible. It's made of software, code. It's made of people playing in a unit. Buildings are made of steel and concrete. I just draw a bridge between the two. It's an urban funk culture.
That's why I feel like the era of the 21st century is all about information overload. That's where I get this idea of Rhythm Cinema because if you're doing multimedia from every direction and how the mind makes sense of that, it's putting it in patterns, putting it in structure."

Rhythm Science by Paul D. Miller [via datacloud]
The conceptual artist Paul Miller, also known as Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid, delivers a manifesto for rhythm science -- the creation of art from the flow of patterns in sound and culture, "the changing same." Taking the Dj's mix as template, he describes how the artist, navigating the innumerable ways to arrange the mix of cultural ideas and objects that bombard us, uses technology and art to create something new and expressive and endlessly variable. Technology provides the method and model; information on the web, like the elements of a mix, doesn't stay in one place. And technology is the medium, bridging the artist's consciousness and the outside world. Miller constructed his Dj Spooky persona ("spooky" from the eerie sounds of hip-hop, techno, ambient, and the other music that he plays) as a conceptual art project, but then came to see it as the opportunity for "coding a generative syntax for new languages of creativity." For example: "Start with the inspiration of George Herriman's Krazy Kat comic strip. Make a track invoking his absurd landscapes ... What do tons and tons of air pressure moving in the atmosphere sound like? Make music that acts as a metaphor for that kind of immersion or density." Or, for an online "remix" of two works by Marcel Duchamp: "I took a lot of his material written on music and flipped it into a DJ mix of his visual material -- with him rhyming!" Tracing the genealogy of rhythm science, Miller cites sources and influences as varied as Ralph Waldo Emerson ("all minds quote"), Grandmaster Flash, W. E. B Dubois, James Joyce, and Eminem. "The story unfolds while the fragments coalesce," he writes.

James Boyle: The Apple of forbidden knowledge
"The Digital Millennium Copyright Act and equivalent laws worldwide were supposed to allow copyright owners to protect their content with state-backed digital fences that it would be illegal to cut. They were not supposed to make interoperability illegal, still less to give device manufacturers a monopoly over tied products, but that is exactly how they are being used. Manufacturers of printers are claiming that generic ink cartridges violate the DMCA. Makers of garage door openers portray generic replacements as "pirates" of their copyrighted codes. [...]
About 20 years ago, a stylish technology company with a clearly superior hardware and software system had to choose whether to make its hardware platform open, and sell more of its superior software, or whether to make it closed, and tie the two tightly together. It chose closed. Its name: Apple. Its market share, now? About 5 per cent. Of course, back then competition was legal. One wishes that the new generation of copyright laws made it clearer that it still is."

CODE : EDGE 42
George Dyson & John Brockman: A Dialogue
JB: Let's go back to ENIAC.
DYSON: OK. So you've got one computer alone that can be very powerful, but when they're in communication they become more powerful. It's the same way that a colony of cells with no nervous system at all can become a starfish or a sponge or something like that just simply by chemical communication.
JB: By communication you're talking about a network such as the Internet?
DYSON: Yes, but you have to have all sorts of other communication to make an organism happen: chemical, hormonal, mechanical. We are still immersed in the metaphor of fifty years ago, the computer as brain, the brain as electrical network, etc. The metaphor we haven't quite got to yet will come from molecular biology, when we start to see the digital universe less as an electrical switching network or giant computer and more as an environment swimming with different levels of code. How these increasingly complex one-dimensional strings of code actually do things, interacting with each other and with the three-dimensional world we live in, has more in common with the code-string and protein-folding world of molecular biology, where molecules interact with each other -- and do things -- by means of templates, rather than by reference to some fault-intolerant system of numerical address.
JB: There is no Internet -- there is only a process. When you stop a process to name it, it becomes dead. What we think of as the Internet is only a measure of its effect.
DYSON: Look at it from the point of view of the code itself, not the end user sitting at a terminal, which is either a synapse to some other coded process, or the means to some formalizable end. In ancient (computer) times code would run, be executed, and be terminated, that was the end of it. On the Internet code can keep moving around; it may escape termination by the local CPU, and when it arrives at a terminal, that doesn't mean it stops ...

The screen-age: Our brains in our laptops - CNN, 2 August 2004
Christine Boese: "My consciousness isn't just split between gray matter and a hard drive or two. Now part of it lives on the Internet and seems to stay there all the time. While I may feel a bit diffuse, mostly I observe changes in what McLuhan called our "sense ratios," like a goldfish changing from one kind of aquarium to another. We adapt. We gain some things, lose others. [...]
College students are the leading edge in adapting to this new goldfish bowl, these new multi-tasking sense ratios. Some of us will hold on to the old ways by our fingernails, afraid of losing a coherent self. Others will plunge into the new collective nerve center, our various selves loosely joined ..."

From Homer to Hip-Hop
Jeet Heer: Drawing on the work of the classicist Eric Havelock, Ong notes that "Plato's entire epistemology was unwittingly a programmed rejection of the old oral, mobile, warm, personally interactive lifeworld of oral culture (represented by the poets, whom he would not allow into his Republic). ... The Platonic ideas are voiceless, immobile, devoid of all warmth, not interactive but isolated, not part of the human lifeworld at all but utterly above and beyond it."

The Guardian - The BBC wizardry set to make waves
Owen Gibson: "The finest technology wizards at the BBC have been working for almost two years on a gizmo called the interactive Media Player (or iMP) that will allow licence-fee payers to watch BBC programmes at a time and place of their choosing. [...]
Central to iMP is the BBC's "anytime, anyplace, anywhere" philosophy. The idea being that you can download shows to a portable device -- be it a mobile phone, laptop computer or one of the so-called "video iPods" starting to emerge. The notion of thousands of people sitting on the train catching up on their previous night's viewing may seem fanciful -- until you look around and notice how many people are already fiddling with their mobiles, watching DVDs on their laptop or listening to their iPod on the way to work ..."

BBC News Online: The digital home takes shape
Darren Waters: Imagine a home in which films and TV programmes can be played on any screen in the house without wires trailing across floors; a home in which smart video recorders copy your favourite shows without being pre-programmed, to playback whenever you wish.
Imagine downloading your favourite movies and TV programmes from the internet in DVD quality, and watching them not on your PC screen but on TV in the comfort of your living room.
Imagine all your families' music stored on one device, but available wherever there are speakers in the house.
You can imagine it, or you could simply live it now - at a price.
Home entertainment devices such as a Sky Plus box, a Windows Media Center PC, an iPod with Airport Express and a wireless network do almost all of the above, but they are expensive gadgets which appeal primarily to the technically-minded.
But in the coming 12 months the market will be hit with a flurry of devices which will make all of the above possible for mainstream audiences.

In a Wireless World, Hearing Is Believing - The Washington Post
Rob Pegoraro: The appeal of a wireless media receiver -- a box plugged into your stereo to play the music saved on your computer -- got a simple demonstration after I recently moved. I had dozens of boxes to open and unpack and needed a soundtrack for the work, but all the CDs were still imprisoned in cardboard.
Fortunately, I had already set up the stereo, the computers and the WiFi access point. All I had to do was plug in two media receivers that I'd been testing, Apple's AirPort Express and Slim Devices' Squeezebox ...

Streaming media: A case for open standards
"With established streaming video standards and low distribution costs, virtually anyone can now become a "TV station" and deliver audio and video of a quality that rivals that of conventional television broadcasters." Rich Mavrogeanes

A digital revolution - The Miami Herald - 28 August 2004
Beatrice E. Garcia: HP sees a technology revolution revolving around digital content and the various devices now used to manage music, photos, and video converging into one. For consumers, this means easy-to-use devices that could eventually be very affordable as competition brings prices down. "HP is determined to lead that revolution," Carly Fiorina said. [...]
The other big HP news is that it will begin selling its own version of the Apple iPod and its new computers will come with Apple's iTunes Music jukebox and music store software preloaded. [...]
HP showed a prototype of a new device, the DJammer, that's being designed for club disc jockeys. HP brought in Gavin O'Connor, known as "DJGAWK1" when he spins, to show it off ... The wireless device allows a DJ "to interact with the music from anywhere in the club," says O'Connor, who can scratch and change the tempo and pitch of the music he's playing from anywhere in the club. "It has a large 'wow' factor."
With PC penetration at a peak, Michael McGuire, research director for Gartner Group in San Jose, Calif., says computer manufacturers have to evolve.
They need to develop products that will help people acquire and manage digital content. The next wave in the digital revolution is this "race into the living room," McGuire said ...

New Scientist: iTunes wireless music streaming cracked
Will Knight reports: Apple's wireless streaming technology for iTunes has been cracked to allow it to support non-Apple software platforms.
Norwegian computer programmer Jon Johansen has released a program called JustePort that defeats the encryption used on Apple's Airport Express [...]
Airport Express is a small base station that wirelessly connects a computer to the internet or to a local network. It also has an audio socket that can be used to link a computer to a conventional stereo or pair of speakers. This allows music stored digitally to be played remotely. Until now, however, this feature has only been compatible with Apple computers and an add-on for Apple's iTunes audio software called AirTunes.
Encryption algorithms ...

When iPod is the DJ : Tunes, a Hard Drive and (Just Maybe) a Brain
Rachel Dodes: "Mr. Ng said that the technology behind the Shuffle function has remained the same since the first-generation iPod. He declined to reveal the algorithm used to generate randomness on Shuffle, but said the only reason that an iPod might seem to know a listener's preferences is that the listener, after all, chose the music in the first place."

posted by Andrew 8/29/2004 08:08:00 PM

Monday, August 09, 2004

 
Migrating the folk process

DrunkenBlog: Convergence Kills [via Joe Katzman & Sven-S. Porst]
"[...] It's a sad truth, but yes, the iPod is going to go away. Everyone knows it; they just don't know when. This isn't dismissing the fact that it's shot out of the gates on a wildly successful run and become to MP3 players what Kleenex is to tissues, but it's eventually going to start losing share in one form or another.
[...] That's why they're so freaked out about what RealNetworks is doing, even though it'd sell iPods. At the end of the day it's not going to be about who is selling what end-play device, it's going to be about who is sitting in the middle. And Apple wants to be that benevolent dictator, parsing DRM-protected content to whatever device you're using at the time. It's also why the deal with Motorola is so significant; Apple can live without you buying an iPod, but if you're going to be buying DRM-protected content, Apple damn sure wants it to be through them.
[...] they're creating a new light-DRM platform that is riding on top of everyone else's platform. iMacs, Windows, mobile phones, everything. Google is also creating a platform riding on the backs of other platforms... except its based around becoming the access point for all things internet. Apple wants that, but for DRM content."

Vipin V. Nair: Harmony sparks dissent
"Every time we buy a CD, do we really worry about whether it will work on our music systems? We don't. Globally-accepted standards in digital storage of music CDs and DVDs make sure that regardless of the make of our music systems, they will work.
But those who buy music from the Internet don't enjoy such peace of mind yet, since each service provider has his own choice of audio compression format that runs only on a particular music device. So a user is, in a way, tied down to a particular online music store.
Take the instance of iPod, the most popular portable music device from Apple Computers. It plays only songs downloaded from the company's online music store iTunes. Apple uses a format called Advance Audio Coding (AAC), fortified by its Fairplay digital rights management (DRM) system, to encrypt songs in the iTunes store.
Now, a new software announced by RealNetworks seeks to do away with the incompatibilities that exist in the world of digital music. RealNetworks claimed recently that its Harmony Technology is the world's 'first DRM translation system' that enables users to play music purchased from anywhere on more than 70 devices, including Apple's iPod.
[...] Apple, the most successful company in the digital music business so far, has sold four million iPods and over 100 million tracks from iTunes. The company recently entered into a deal with mobile phone maker, Motorola to make iTunes compatible with Motorola handsets."

Society for the Study of Social Problems - 29.2 Review: Karen N. Werner
Question: What do eyeglasses, reproductive technologies, art forgeries, mimeographs, mannequins, parrots, sex dolls, Siamese twins, wax museums, Doublemint gum advertisements, carpel tunnel syndrome, and camouflage have in common?
Answer: According to Hillel Schwartz, they are all clues to understanding "the culture of the copy," a culture thick with doubling, mimicry, repetition, and simulation.

Real Life Rock Top 10 by Greil Marcus - City Pages - 30 June 2004
4) and 5), PJ Harvey, Uh Huh Her (Island) and Nick Catucci, "Carnal Fission" (Village Voice, June 9)
Harvey rubs, scrapes, drags chairs around the room; sometimes it feels as if her music comes from her guitar applying pressure to her skin rather than her fingers applying pressure to her guitar strings. Each album seems to gravitate toward the point where a certain state of mind and body will flare up into a single image--which will then burn out and disappear, leaving you incapable of remembering what the image was, only that you glimpsed it. Here, you're on the way with the pulse of "Shame," only the second song; you can feel the destination has been reached with the next, "Who the Fuck?" which combines a Lenny Kravitz beat with an extremist, primitivist Sheryl Crow vocal -- an affinity that lets you hear Harvey listening to Crow, lets you hear Harvey hearing something in Crow's voice nobody else hears, maybe including Crow herself.
That's the problem with artists: They know things other people don't. They feel compelled to say what those things are, and to conceal the strangeness and alienation of the act. If there is an "I" in their work, it ceases to refer back to the person writing, painting, singing; the person whose name is on the work has momentarily replaced herself with a made-up person who can say or do anything. This is what makes such a person an artist, and it's why critics who try to reduce an artist's work to her life are cretins. Thus we have Nick Catucci in the Village Voice, assuring his readers that Uh Huh Her is "a break-up album"--"as all save her last have been," he adds, in case you think there might be something out there that doesn't fit into a thimble. Forget that situations everyone goes through might go through Harvey differently than they do through you or me; don't worry that there might be anything here that isn't immediately obvious; after all, Catucci says, she's "an easy read" and "she's got a one-track mind." "We know she's been fucking and fighting, probably in equal measures, and maybe in the same moments." You can almost smell him, can't you?
6) and 7), Patti Smith, "Radio Baghdad," from Trampin' (Columbia) and Michael Kamber, photo accompanying Edward Wong's "Deputy Foreign Minister Is Fatally Shot in Baghdad" (New York Times, June 13)
Smith has been selling death for years -- but now mere husband, brother, friends, and poet comrades take a backseat to a whole city, a whole civilization: civilization itself! That's what was destroyed when the U.S. took Iraq. For Smith it's a chance to gas up the piety boilers, and remind us that we (or, rather, "they," which is us, but not her, unless we accept her vision, in which case we can be her, gazing with sadness and disgust at those who remain "they") destroyed a perfect city, the center of the world, where once walked "the great Caliph." How does it sound? Silly. The Aloha-Elvis wall hanging you could see in the background of Kamber's photo--captioned "American soldiers searched a suspected stronghold of the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to Moktada al-Sadr"--was infinitely more interesting. Why doesn't Smith write a song about what Elvis was doing there: about a "we" that even she might not be able to make into a "they," unless the "they" included Iraqis, too?

TVTechnology - Net Soup: Love and Theft by Frank Beacham (08.06.03)
"[...] The organized commercial recording industry -- enabled by cheap, salable recording media -- has existed for less than 100 years. Before that people sang and performed for each other. Folk singer Pete Seeger has called the oral tradition of constantly learning and revising songs "the folk process." The constant variations of songs were passed from artist to artist and finally refined to versions that lived on through the ages. Today, lawyers call that copyright infringement.
Seeger's "folk process" is a bigger threat to the music industry than Internet freeloaders seeking a song. In fact, perhaps more than any other media, the Internet's sharing capability has brought a return to this oral tradition of trading and revising words and music. Thus, we witness the harsh fight by large corporations to retain control of the sale and distribution of their recordings.
Those who appreciate Bob Dylan's work flash a knowing smile when confronted with the Wall Street Journal's revelations. "Bob Dylan often walks a fine line between plagiarism and allusion, and therein lies his genius," wrote Geoff McMaster in a recent article on Dylan's work.
In fact, said Dr. Stephen Scobie, a Dylan biographer and former University of Alberta professor, noted that another song on Love and Theft -- titled High Water (for Charley Patton) -- included more than a dozen quotations from sources as varied as English Nursery Rhymes, African-American Blues, an obscure 1950s pop song, and even Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. In some instances, whole lines and even couplets are lifted verbatim from the source.
"Dylan takes the whole idea of love and theft very seriously," said Scobie. "He loves the stuff, but also unashamedly steals it. At what point does allusion become quotation or become theft?"
Don't confuse Dylan's art with a historian's work, warned Jon Pareles, a music critic for the New York Times. "Mr. Dylan was not purporting to present original research on the culture of yakuza, the Japanese gangsters. Nor was he setting unbroken stretches of the (Saga) book to music... He was simply doing what he has always done: writing songs that are information collages. Allusions and memories, fragments of dialogue and nuggets of tradition have always been part of Mr. Dylan's songs, all stitched together like crazy quilts."
Sometimes Dylan cites his sources, wrote Pareles, but more often he does not. The music critic groups Dylan with performers such as Woody Guthrie and the Carter Family, who "thought of themselves as part of a folk process, dipping into a shared cultural heritage in ways that speak to the moment."
Pareles muses that the hoopla over Dylan's use of Dr. Saga's book is "a symptom of a growing misunderstanding about culture's ownership and evolution, a misunderstanding that has accelerated as humanity's oral tradition migrates to the Internet. Ideas aren't meant to be carved in stone and left inviolate; they're meant to stimulate the next idea and the next."
Not so, argue America's major media companies, who fear a day when they won't be able to profit from music, movies and even digital television programming. Thus, the conflict between digital information technology -- where the shared cultural heritage becomes more accessible -- and the media company gatekeepers who want to place roadblocks in the way of open access.
WHAT'S FAIR?
At stake in this dispute is the right of "fair use," a legal doctrine that allows limited use of copyrighted material without payment. Also in jeopardy is "public domain," the period after copyright expiration when works can be freely copied and distributed. Both are essential components to artistic freedom.
"The absolutely original artist is an extremely rare and possibly imaginary creature, living in some isolated habitat where no previous works or traditions have left any impression," wrote Pareles. "Like virtually every artist, Mr. Dylan carries on a continuing conversation with the past. He's reacting to all that culture and history offer, not pretending they don't exist. Admiration and iconoclasm, argument and extension, emulation and mockery -- that's how individual artists and the arts themselves evolve."
Personally, I hope to ask Sony's Howard Stringer to expound a little more on the differences between Internet "thieves" and Love and Theft. If that day comes, we'll report back to you."

Plagiarism in Dylan, or a Cultural Collage?
The New York Times - 12 July 2003
Jon Pareles: "An alert Bob Dylan fan was reading Dr. Junichi Saga's "Confessions of a Yakuza" (Kodansha America, 1991) when some familiar phrases jumped out at him. There were a dozen sentences similar to lines from songs on Mr. Dylan's 2001 album, " 'Love and Theft,' " particularly one called "Floater (Too Much to Ask)."
In the book a father is described as being "like a feudal lord," a phrase Mr. Dylan uses. A character in the book says, "I'm not as cool or forgiving as I might have sounded"; Mr. Dylan sings, "I'm not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound." Mr. Dylan has neither confirmed nor denied reading the book or drawing on it; he could not be reached for comment, a Columbia Records spokeswoman said.
The Wall Street Journal reported the probable borrowings ... as front-page news. After recent uproars over historians and journalists who used other researchers' material without attribution, could it be that the great songwriter was now exposed as one more plagiarist?
Not exactly. Mr. Dylan was not purporting to present original research on the culture of yakuza, the Japanese gangsters. Nor was he setting unbroken stretches of the book to music. The 16 verses of "Floater" include plenty of material that is not in "Confessions of a Yakuza," although the song's subtitle and its last line -- "Tears or not, it's too much to ask" -- do directly echo the book. Unlike Led Zeppelin, which thinly disguised Howlin' Wolf's "Killing Floor" as "The Lemon Song" and took credit for writing it, Mr. Dylan wasn't singing anyone else's song as his own.
He was simply doing what he has always done: writing songs that are information collages. Allusions and memories, fragments of dialogue and nuggets of tradition have always been part of Mr. Dylan's songs, all stitched together like crazy quilts.
Sometimes Mr. Dylan cites his sources, as he did in "High Water (for Charley Patton)" from the " 'Love and Theft' " album. But more often he does not. While die-hard fans happily footnote the songs, more casual listeners pick up the atmosphere, sensing that an archaic turn of phrase or a vaguely familiar line may well come from somewhere else. His lyrics are like magpies' nests, full of shiny fragments from parts unknown.
Mr. Dylan's music does the same thing, drawing on the blues, Appalachian songs, Tin Pan Alley, rockabilly, gospel, ragtime and more. "Blowin' in the Wind," his breakthrough song, took its melody from an antislavery spiritual, "No More Auction Block," just as Woody Guthrie had drawn on tunes recorded by the Carter Family. They thought of themselves as part of a folk process, dipping into a shared cultural heritage in ways that speak to the moment.
The hoopla over " 'Love and Theft' " and "Confessions of a Yakuza" is a symptom of a growing misunderstanding about culture's ownership and evolution, a misunderstanding that has accelerated as humanity's oral tradition migrates to the Internet. Ideas aren't meant to be carved in stone and left inviolate; they're meant to stimulate the next idea and the next.
Because information is now copied and transferred more quickly than ever, a panicky reaction has set in among corporations and some artists who fear a time when they won't be able to make a profit selling their information (in the form of music, images, movies, computer software). As the Internet puts a huge shared cultural heritage within reach, they want to collect fees or block access. Amazingly enough, some musicians want to prevent people from casually listening to their music, much less building new tunes on it.
Companies with large copyright holdings are also hoping to whittle away the safe harbor in copyright law called fair use, which allows limited and ambiguously defined amounts of imitation for education, criticism, parody and other purposes. The companies also want to prevent copyrighted works from entering the public domain, where they can be freely copied and distributed. The Supreme Court recently ruled, in Eldred v. Ashcroft, that individual copyrights could extend for 70 years after the life of the creator, or in the case of a corporation, for 95 years. As a result, Mickey Mouse will be kept out of the public domain -- that shared cultural heritage -- until 2024.
The absolutely original artist is an extremely rare and possibly imaginary creature, living in some isolated habitat where no previous works or traditions have left any impression. Like virtually every artist, Mr. Dylan carries on a continuing conversation with the past. He's reacting to all that culture and history offer, not pretending they don't exist. Admiration and iconoclasm, argument and extension, emulation and mockery -- that's how individual artists and the arts themselves evolve. It's a process that is neatly summed up in Mr. Dylan's album title " 'Love and Theft,' " which itself is a quotation from a book on minstrelsy by Eric Lott.
Hip-hop, ever in the vanguard, ran into problems in the mid-1980's when the technique of sampling -- copying and adapting a riff, a beat and sometimes a hook or a whole chorus to build a new track -- was challenged by copyright holders demanding payment even for snippets. Although sampling was just a technological extension of the age-old process of learning through imitation, producers who use samples now pay up instead of trying to set precedents for fair use.
That might be a good idea; a song that recycles a whole melody (like Puff Daddy's productions) calls for different treatment than a song that borrows a few notes from a horn section, and courts are not the best place for aesthetic distinctions. But in practice, it means fewer samples per track, and it can make complex assemblages prohibitively expensive. Mixes heard only in clubs and bootleg recordings are now the outlets for untrammeled sampling experiments. Yet, samples have extended and revived careers for many musicians when listeners went looking for the sources.
Mr. Dylan has apparently sampled "Confessions of a Yakuza," remixing lines from the book into his own fractured tales of romance and mortality on " 'Love and Theft.' " The result, as in many collages and sampled tracks, is a new work that in no way affects the integrity of the existing one and that only draws attention to it.
Dr. Saga has no need to keep his book isolated. He told The Associated Press that he was ecstatic to have inspired such a well-known songwriter. And as news of the Dylan connection surfaced, sales of "Confessions of a Yakuza" jumped ...
Of course, Dr. Saga can't be too possessive about the writing. The book is an oral history, told to him by the yakuza gangster of the title. It's another story that has drifted into humanity's oral tradition. Mr. Dylan's complete lyrics are freely available at www.bobdylan.com. As for the song, if someone asks Mr. Dylan for sampling rights, it would be only fair to grant them."

Interview with Chuck D & Hank Shocklee of Public Enemy by Kembrew McLeod
Stay Free!: What are the origins of sampling in hip-hop?
Chuck D: Sampling basically comes from the fact that rap music is not music. It's rap over music. So vocals were used over records in the very beginning stages of hip-hop in the 70s to the early '80s. In the late 1980s, rappers were recording over live bands who were basically emulating the sounds off of the records. Eventually, you had synthesizers and samplers, which would take sounds that would then get arranged or looped, so rappers can still do their thing over it. The arrangement of sounds taken from recordings came around 1984 to 1989.
[...]
Stay Free!: How did the Bomb Squad [Public Enemy's production team, led by Shocklee] use samplers and other recording technologies to put together the tracks on It Takes a Nation of Millions.
Hank Shocklee: The first thing we would do is the beat, the skeleton of the track. The beat would actually have bits and pieces of samples already in it, but it would only be rhythm sections. Chuck would start writing and trying different ideas to see what worked. Once he got an idea, we would look at it and see where the track was going. Then we would just start adding on whatever it needed, depending on the lyrics. I kind of architected the whole idea. The sound has a look to me, and Public Enemy was all about having a sound that had its own distinct vision. We didn't want to use anything we considered traditional R&B stuff -- bass lines and melodies and chord structures and things of that nature.
[...]
Chuck D: Corporations found that hip-hop music was viable. It sold albums, which was the bread and butter of corporations. Since the corporations owned all the sounds, their lawyers began to search out people who illegally infringed upon their records. All the rap artists were on the big six record companies, so you might have some lawyers from Sony looking at some lawyers from BMG and some lawyers from BMG saying, "Your artist is doing this," so it was a tit for tat that usually made money for the lawyers, garnering money for the company. Very little went to the original artist or the publishing company.
[...]
Stay Free!: As you probably know, some music fans are now sampling and mashing together two or more songs and trading the results online. There's one track by Evolution Control Committee that uses a Herb Alpert instrumental as the backing track for your "By the Time I Get to Arizona." It sounds like you're rapping over a Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass song. How do you feel about other people remixing your tracks without permission?
Chuck D: I think my feelings are obvious. I think it's great.

AlterNet: Protest Music by Annalee Newitz (7 July 2004)
"By waging a war of litigation on file sharers and copyright infringers, the Recording Industry Association of America has unwittingly created a new kind of protest art. Mash-ups -- digitally knitted-together compositions made up of two or more popular songs -- are anti-authoritarian folk music for a generation whose "establishment" is represented by corporate intellectual-property owners.
[...] Often called "bastard pop" or simply "bootlegs," mash-ups are as easy to perform as a rip-off of a Bob Dylan tune. Cheap audio software allows anyone with a half-decent computer to convert the act of copyright infringement into something undeniably gorgeous and amusing by turns. Australian masher Dsico - who has been repeatedly threatened with legal action for his work - traces the style back to modernist art: "Much as Duchamp once drew a mustache on a copy of the Mona Lisa, bastard pop artists deface mainstream pop music." New York University professor and copyright reformer Siva Vaidhyanathan calls the movement a combination of innovation and infringement, adding, "Some of the greatest innovators of the past 100 years were accused of being infringers."
The very structure of the music itself is a direct response to the conditions under which it's made: lovingly assembled from pop sifted down off P2P networks, a Dsico creation like "Compton Magic" (NWA vs. Olivia Newton-John) seems to echo the mixed-up, black-market cacophony of an eDonkey addict's music collection.
Dodging lawyers' cease and desist orders, mash-up DJs often change their names and move their music from host to host in order to keep serving it up. But they soldier on, sharing tips and litigation horror stories on Brit mash-up site Get Your Bootleg On (gybo.proboards4.com) partly in the hope that one day their efforts will change copyright law. "I would love to see a form of copyright where as long as money isn't changing hands, everything is up for grabs," San Francisco mash-up DJ Adrian says.
Grey Tuesday, a recent mash-up protest organized by anti-RIAA group Downhill Battle, inspired more than 100,000 people to download copies of DJ Danger Mouse's dubiously legal bastard pop creation The Grey Album (a mash of the Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album). "There's a public interest served by making this album available," protest organizer Holmes Wilson argues. "If people can't hear works that the copyright regime suppresses, they can't make an informed decision about what these laws should be."
More interesting than Wilson's considered stance are the sometimes-fantastical copyright theories of the DJs, promoters and activists who make up the bootleg community. Without a legal background in how copyright works, mashers feel free to develop a whole range of ideas about why their music is legal or illegal. For example, Adrian told me that as long as he plays mashed-up ASCAP music in an ASCAP-licensed venue, it's OK.
Unfortunately, it's not: Mash-ups are derivative works (a big I.P.-law no-no). Adrian also argued that since he's crediting the artists he mashes and giving away his mixes for free, he isn't hurting anyone. This theory wouldn't hold up in court, but it's far more commonsensical than current I.P. law.
Mash-ups also spawn social mixing that mimics the genre's political agenda: At a recent mash-up event in San Francisco, famous underground hackers mingled with locally known drag queens and wide-eyed indie rockers. And many bootlegs are explicitly designed to create mixes that cross racial or sexual identity lines -- thus, a mash-up might combine a Village People song with something by Public Enemy. A kind of political hopefulness or idealism seems to animate many of these mixes.
As a masher on GYBO recently posted, "Everything is illegal." Under an I.P. regime where artists feel like nothing goes, it seems that everything could. The infringement generation aims to mash up copyright law in pursuit of better music. But it also has a chance to challenge social divisions more profound than the distinctions between hip-hop, rock and electroclash."

Neuronal Resonance Fields, Aoidoi, and Sign Processes

"We must reconstruct, not abandon, an ideal of authenticity in our lives. Whatever we come up with, authenticity can no longer be rooted in singularity, in what the Greeks called the idion, or private person. That would be, in our culture of the copy, idiocy ... The impostors, "evil" twins, puppets, "apes," tricksters, fakes and plagiarists ... may be agents provocateurs to a more coherent, less derelict sense of ourselves. They may call us away from the despair of uniqueness towards more companionate lives."
Hillel Schwartz - The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 1996, page 17)

Sony Walkman - Music to whose ears?
"The social pleasure of sharing music was terminated when people clamped plugs in their ears and tuned into a selfish sound. Music in the Walkman era ceased to connect us one to another. It promoted autism and isolation, with consequences yet untold."
Norman Lebrecht

Building Brandwidth in an Internet Economy
"She walked right up to me and got within my comfort field," Crandall stammered. "I was taken aback. She pulled out the earbuds on her iPod and indicated the jack with her eyes."
Warily unplugging his own earbuds, Crandall gingerly plugged them into the woman's iPod, and was greeted by a rush of techno.
"We listened for about 30 seconds," Crandall said. "No words were exchanged. We nodded and walked off."

The Shortwave And the Calling (3 August 2004 - The Washington Post)
David Segal: "In a cluttered home office in the World's End section of London, Akin Fernandez is trolling the dial of his newly acquired shortwave radio. It's December 1992 and it's late at night, when the city is quiet and the mad-scientist squawks of international broadcasts have an otherworldly tone. Fernandez, the owner and sole employee of an indie music label, is about to trip across a mystery that will take over his life.
Shortwave signals are bouncing, as they always do, around the globe, caroming off a layer of the atmosphere a few hundred miles above the Earth and into antennas all over the world. Fernandez can hear news from Egypt and weather reports from China. But his browsing stops when he tunes in something startling: the mechanized voice of a man, reading out numbers.
No context, no comment, no station identification. Nothing but numbers, over and over, for minutes on end. Then the signals disappear, as if somebody pulled the plug in the studio. And it's not just one station. The more he listens, the more number monologues he hears. [...]
What's with the numbers?
Answering that question, it turns out, would take Fernandez years, and it left him nearly penniless, at least for a while. It also brought him a horde of admirers on another continent, eventually earned him a credit in a Tom Cruise movie and sparked a legal battle with the acclaimed band Wilco.
Fernandez would study numbers stations largely because he couldn't stop even if he tried -- which is to say, he fell into the grip of an obsession. But along the way, by both accident and design, he discovered amid all that static the raw material for a point he likes to make, with characteristic zeal, about the future of rock-and-roll."

New Perspectives Quarterly - Summer 2004 - Neural Darwinism
Gerald Edelman: "The most important thing to understand is that the brain is "context bound." It is not a logical system like a computer that processes only programmed information; it does not produce preordained outcomes like a clock. Rather it is a selectional system that, through pattern recognition, puts things together in always novel ways. It is this selectional repertoire in the brain that makes each individual unique, that accounts for the ability to create poetry and music, that accounts for all the differences that arise from the same biological apparatus -- the body and the brain. There is no singular mapping to create the mind; there is, rather, an unforetold plurality of possibilities. In a logical system, novelty and unforeseen variation are often considered to be noise. In a selectional system such diversity actually provides the opportunity for favorable selection.
Here, Darwin and his effort to explain variance within biological populations through natural selection provided the key idea. In considering the brain, we are talking about a population of hundreds of billions of cells that far exceeds the number of stars in the sky. The number of possible connections these cells can make exceeds the number of particles in the universe."

The Guardian: Nicholas Lezard reviews 'Falling' by Garret Soden
"The path of virtue, said Thomas Browne at the beginning of his Christian Morals, is not only narrow: it's "funambulatory", a tightrope over an abyss. [...]
There are primatologists and anthropologists who suggest that it was a very strongly vested interest in not falling that led to our development of consciousness."

The Poetics of Gardens
Charles W. Moore, William J. Mitchell, & William Turnbull, Jr.
"A garden path can become the thread of a plot, connecting moments and incidents into a narrative. The narrative structure might be a simple chain of events with a beginning, middle, and end. It might be embellished with diversions, digressions, and picaresque twists, be accompanied by parallel ways (subplots), or deceptively fork into blind alleys like the alternative scenarios explored in a detective novel."

Randolph Jordan - The Echopeople: Reflections on the concept of echolocation in Gerry: Part 1
"They struggle to remember what they have done, to retrace their steps within the space of their minds, to create a coherent space out of the multitude of environments the desert has engulfed them with ..."

The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map

"One wonders whether there will come a breaking point where, as eventually they must, the trails within dissolve to waving grass and the crossroad signs lie twisted and askew on rotting posts. Where, then, will the wanderer turn?"
Loren Eiseley - The Mind as Nature (Harper & Row, 1962, page 32)

Finnegans Wake - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The book begins with the fall of Finnegan, a hod carrier, from a scaffold. At his wake, in keeping with the song "Finnegan's Wake," a fight breaks out, whiskey splashes on Finnegan's corpse, and he rises up again alive. Note how the simple removal of the song's apostrophe emphasizes and universalizes the theme of awakening: At Finnegan's wake, Finnegans wake. (Not only is the "wake" simultaneously Finnegan's funeral and his birth, the beginning of the dream in which he is paradoxically awakened, it is also the turbulence left by his absence, the expanding ripples and rhythm in the wake of his vessel.)
Continuing past the original song, Joyce has Finnegan put back down again ("Now be aisy, good Mr Finnimore, sir. And take your laysure like a god on pension and don't be walking abroad"). Someone else is sailing in to take over the story: Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, whose initials HCE ("Here Comes Everybody") lend themselves to phrase after phrase throughout the book.
HCE is a foreigner who has taken a native Irish wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle (whose initials ALP as well are found in phrase after phrase), and they settle down to run ..."

posted by Andrew 8/09/2004 08:08:00 AM

Saturday, July 31, 2004

 
Recursive, Wide, and Loopy 2

MSNBC - How humans got the gift of gab by Kathleen Wren
"[...] The fact that a virtually infinite number of phrases can be nested inside one another gives human language an open-endedness, allowing us to express new ideas. In a commentary that accompanies the Science study, psychologist David Premack has proposed that the flexibility of human grammar may be a central aspect of human intelligence.
Whatever it is about the brain that allows such linguistic flexibility may also be key to the human imagination, according to Premack. Unlike other animals, which specialize in various skills, humans are supremely adaptable, able to learn new tasks and develop new technologies.
"Human intelligence and evolution are the only flexible processes on Earth capable of producing endless solutions to the problems confronted by living creatures," Premack writes."

Keep Talking: That's what makes us human
David Premack (Science 2004 303:318) makes several points including:
[...]
2) The grammar or syntax of human language is certainly unique. Like an onion or Russian doll, it is recursive: One instance of an item is embedded in another instance of the same item. Recursion makes it possible for the words in a sentence to be widely separated and yet dependent on one another. "If-then" is a classic example. In the sentence "If Jack does not turn up the thermostat in his house this winter, then Madge and I are not coming over," "if" and "then" are dependent on each other even though they are separated by a variable number of words. Are animals capable of such recursion? Fitch and Hauser have reported that tamarin monkeys are not capable of recursion. Although the monkeys learned a nonrecursive grammar, they failed to learn a grammar that is recursive. Humans readily learn both.
[...]
5) What are the factors that distinguish human intelligence? A major distinctive feature of human intelligence is flexibility. Animals, by contrast, are specialists. Bees are adept at sending messages through their dances, beavers at building dams, the nuthatch at remembering the location of thousands of caches of acorns it has buried. But each of these species is imprisoned by its adaptation; none can duplicate the achievement of the other. The nuthatch cannot build dams; bees do not have an uncanny memory for hidden caches of food; beavers cannot send messages. Humans, by contrast, could duplicate all these achievements and endlessly more. Why? Is recursive language the key to human flexibility?
6) Human intelligence and evolution are the only flexible processes on Earth capable of producing endless solutions to the problems confronted by living creatures. Did evolution, in producing human intelligence, outstrip itself? ...

Monkeys Deaf to Complex Communication, Study Says
Stefan Lovgren for National Geographic News (22 January 2004)
"[...] Fitch ... stresses that there is no one "magic bullet" that gives us language. "I don't believe that such magic bullets exist," he said. "Language is a complex mosaic including many important abilities, and any attempt to reduce it to just one will be simplistic and unsatisfactory."
Humble Factors
In his article, Premack suggests that other reasons, apart from an animal's inability to understand complex grammar, explain why they have not evolved languages. He says recursive language, which is one way to achieve more complex phrase structure, is not the key factor to consider.
"There has been too much tendency to think that because animals don't have recursion they don't have language," Premack said. "But the reason why they don't have non-recursive language or any other language is because they lack a whole bunch of simpler things."
He says one reason that animals don't have language is because they don't have voluntary control of sensory-motor systems, specifically voice and face, which are essential for speech and sign.
Another reason, he says, is that animals don't teach the way humans do.
"Although human mothers do not teach children grammar, they definitely teach them words," said Premack. "Humans are the only species that teach. Evolution, being endlessly clever, might produce words that don't require teaching, but until it does, it is not clear how any species other than humans could evolve language."
Animals are also not as flexible as humans. While bees may be able to send messages through dance, humans have dozens of ways of sending messages.
Imitation may be yet another factor. While many species can copy a role model's choice of object or location, they can't copy the motor action. This second-level of imitation, Premack maintains, is needed for the evolution of language." "Recursive language is very powerful and it enables us to talk in the fancy way we do," he said. "But suppose we only had non-recursive language. You could still ask questions, use descriptions, and make requests, only it would not be half as wonderful as the system we have."

Interview with Ursula Goodenough by Jill Neimark
Neimark: If you look at the evolutionary ladder, where do you think the sense of meaning begins? Do organisms other than humans have it?
Goodenough: All life has a kind of seamlessness. All creatures have to be aware of their environment, and there has been an evolution of the capacities needed for detecting increasingly complex stimuli. I have no problem calling this "meaning," since all creatures pick out meaningful facets of their environment. For the first creatures, these facets were physical and mediated by receptor proteins. Sperm and eggs find each other by protein shapes; photosynthetic bacteria find light by protein shapes. The impetus to figure out what's going on is still very much programmed into our highly complex brains.
Neimark: How does meaning in humans differ qualitatively from the rest of life on Earth?
Goodenough: My sense is that in developed human minds, the notion of meaning has expanded beyond what's immediately out there. We're constantly trying to figure out what caused something. That's true of all sorts of brain-based organisms, but perhaps the difference in humans is that if we can't see an obvious cause, we postulate. If you're lying in bed and hear a noise outside, you might imagine it's a burglar or perhaps Prince Charming. The point is, we form hypotheses and draw up scenarios for what that stimulus might mean.
I think this whole need to understand cause expanded early in humans -- we see it in cave paintings. If you are spending time with children, you see that they do this quite early: "What made me, Mommy and Daddy?" "What made Mommy and Daddy?"... That recursive kind of seeking causal explanations for things is part of us.

Manohla Dargis: 'Before Sunrise' sequel makes love worth believing in
"In a sense, "Before Sunset" is a movie about how we create selves just by talking. But it's also, as Jesse suggests at one point, about how we become prisoners of time."

Justice + Beauty = Sublime
Atlantic Unbound - 13 July 2004 -- The acclaimed poet Alice Fulton talks about Cascade Experiment, her new collection of poems, and why art must aim to be "fair" -- in both senses of the word [...]
Sarah Cohen: What exactly is a cascade experiment, and why did you choose the phrase as a title for the selected poems?
Alice Fulton: In science, a cascade experiment is a sort of domino effect, a trip wire, where one small catalyst causes an event and then that event causes the next event, and so forth. Each event changes the next one, so it becomes an avalanche of cause and effect. I called the book Cascade Experiment because when I looked back at the poems, I saw that I couldn't have predicted where each would lead, or the way one book would lead to another. "Cascade Experiment" was originally the title of one of the poems, now called "Shy One," and the idea comes up in another poem with the line "one touch and worlds take place." In general, I always look for a book title that I find inherently interesting. I like book titles that don't give everything away, that won't be understood down to the ground. That mystery is at the bottom of poetry: it's a recursive process that has no end.

Attention acts as visual glue

Speech is special
"Redundancy is implicitly built into language structure ...
Social habits which enable one to distribute the interpretative workload redundantly across many communication channels at once, and embed small completed chunks of sentences within other chunks, lessen the communicative demands placed on short-term memory and articulatory skill.
Conversations today are inevitably embedded in rather ritualized markers for greetings, turn-taking, demonstrating assent or dissent, and indicating objects. It seems reasonable that such language rituals would have been far more prominent during the early phases of brain-language co-evolution, not due to any greater innate predisposition but in response to intense social selection on communicative habits."
Terrence Deacon - The Symbolic Species: The co-evolution of language and the human brain (Penguin, 1998, pages 363-364)

Fractovia and Recursion (Self-engulfing: Recursive)

Rules about rules
"At Oxford in the 1970s, the experimental psychologist Jerome Bruner videotaped toddlers learning to speak. He was struck by the game-like quality of their verbal interactions with adults. The rules of language seemed to him like the rules of tennis or any other game. So far from relying on special brain wiring, language was, he thought, a by-product of flexible intelligence and especially of a general aptitude for making rules -- exhibited also in children at play.
'They very quickly get into the realm of pretend, where they're making real rules and real conventions about fictional things and fictional characters,' Bruner said in 1976. 'They soon make rules about rules themselves -- how to make rules -- which is after all what culture is about. How we do things with words, how we invent appropriate conventional behaviour. And isn't it clever of Nature to have arranged that play, like most other important things in life, doesn't work unless there's some fun to it?'
Those who favoured brains pre-adapted to language could of course assert that rules of games and make-believe are by-products of language skills, rather than the other way around. Chomsky's own view of language evolution was more open-minded than those wanting hard-wired grammar. He did not even insist on natural selection favouring language. It could be a by-product of big brains favoured by evolution for other reasons -- which need not be incompatible with Bruner's fun-loving brains.
In the decades that followed, there was no answer to the chicken-and-egg question of which came first, general cleverness or language. Chomskyan grammar itself evolved into an increasingly abstract system for judging sentences, with less and less connection with real life in a polyglot world. Without abandoning the quest for universal principles, some mainstream linguists therefore went back to Chomsky's starting point. They looked in detail at many real languages, searching for clues to mental and social mechanisms of grammar in the many differences between them, as well as the similarities stressed by Chomsky."
Nigel Calder - Magic Universe: The Oxford Guide to Modern Science
(Oxford University Press, 2003, pages 343-344)

Blog of Collective Intelligence: Emergent learning is figuring itself out
Jay Cross: "Emergent learning implies adaptation to the environment, timeliness, flexibility and space for co-creation. It is the future. We haven't figured it out yet. Or, from the perspective of complexity science, it hasn't figured itself out yet."

Out walking the dogma...
[...] Even if you can explain away the problems of mind-body dualism and the object/subject distinction, even if you can explain away the falsification paradigm and the "fact" that nothing scientific is ever proven to be true (we can only falsify or provide support), empiricism is still shackled with single variable, unidirectional causation. We do not have an adequate scientific model that allows for multiple and/or bidirectional/recursive causation that does not resort to statistics. And as soon as we resort to statistics, we lose the ability to describe with precision the behavior of specific individuals, since statistics is based on populations.
If you're still unconvinced of the fallibility of hard science, take a look at its bleeding edge -- Occam's Razor. If two theories explain a phenomenon equally well, then the simpler of the two is the true explanation.
Now, that's what I call the pinnacle of objectivity.
When it gets down to brass tacks, the most powerful ideas of the hard sciences are not clockwork, mechanistic descriptions of directly perceived empirical phenomena -- the most powerful ideas of science are metaphors.
So, I have no problem believing that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Sometimes, that is.
Bob

Recursion [from encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com]
Recursion is a way of specifying a process by means of itself. More precisely (and to dispel the appearance of circularity in the definition), "complicated" instances of the process are defined in terms of "simpler" instances, and the "simplest" instances are given explicitly.
Recursion in language
Mathematical linguist Noam Chomsky produced evidence that unlimited extension of a language such as English is possible only by the recursive device of embedding sentences in sentences.
[...] Niels K. Jerne, the 1984 Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine and Physiology, used Chomsky's transformational-generative grammar model to explain the human immune system, equating "components of a generative grammar ... with various features of protein structures." The title of Jerne's Stockholm Nobel lecture was The Generative Grammar of the Immune System.
Here is another, perhaps simpler way to understand recursive processes:
1. Are we done yet? If so, return the results. Without such a termination condition a recursion would go on forever.
2. If not, simplify the problem, solve those simpler problem(s), and assemble the results into a solution for the original problem. Then return that solution.
A more humorous illustration goes: "In order to understand recursion, one must first understand recursion." Or perhaps more accurate is the following due to Andrew Plotkin: "If you already know what recursion is, just remember the answer. Otherwise, find someone who is standing closer to Douglas Hofstadter than you are; then ask him or her what recursion is."

"Mind is a pattern perceived by a mind. This is perhaps circular, but it is neither vicious nor paradoxical." Douglas Hofstadter

Metamanda's Weblog: Prelude... Ant Fugue -- Douglas Hofstadter
"Fugues have that interesting property, that each of their voices is a piece of music in itself; and thus a fugue might be thought of as a collection of several distinct pieces of music, all based on one single theme, and all played simultaneously. And it is up to the listener ... to decide whether it should be perceived as a unit, or as a collection of independent parts, all of which harmonize."
Douglas Hofstadter - Prelude... Ant Fugue

Swarm-semiotics: The swarming body by Jesper Hoffmeyer
"[...] From nest building in termites to the dreams and fantasies which imprison human intelligence is a long jump, and I personally don't believe that intelligence can ever be modelled at all in a disembodied medium. It is tempting, nevertheless, to think of intelligence as a swarm-phenomenon, because this would bring us away from the ever returning homunculus problem: that there seems to be nobody - no homunculus - inside our brain who does the thinking, there just is no central processor to control the activities of the mind.
My point is that the swarm in which intelligence manifests itself is exactly that entity we call the body. Biologically speaking, the body can be understood as a swarm of cells and tissues which, unlike the swarms of bees or ants, stick relatively firmly together. However, the swarm of cells constituting a human body is a very different kind of swarm from that of the social insects. The body swarm is not built on ten thousand nearly identical units such as a bee society. Rather it should be seen as a swarm of swarms, i.e., a huge swarm of more or less overlapping swarms of very different kinds. And the minor swarms again are swarm-entities, so that we get a hierarchy of swarms. At all levels these swarms are engaged in distributed problem solving based on an infinitely complicated web of semetic interaction patterns which in the end can only be explained through reference to the actual history of the body system, evolution."

It's a jungle in there
"The mind [is] a network of distinct modules... The brain is much more like an ecosystem than a list of stable personality traits ..."
Steven Johnson - Mind Wide Open (Allen Lane, 2004, page 29)

The Baldwin Effect: A Bibliography

Look Who's Talking
"I remember a conversation with cultural anthropologist Edward T. Hall, who pointed out to me that the most significant, the most critical inventions of man were not those ever considered to be inventions, but those that appeared to be innate and natural."
John Brockman

Early Voices: The Leap to Language by Nicholas Wade
(The New York Times - 15 July 2003)
"[...] Language, as linguists see it, is more than input and output, the heard word and the spoken. It's not even dependent on speech, since its output can be entirely in gestures, as in American Sign Language. The essence of language is words and syntax, each generated by a combinatorial system in the brain.
If there were a single sound for each word, vocabulary would be limited to the number of sounds, probably fewer than 1,000, that could be distinguished from one another. But by generating combinations of arbitrary sound units, a copious number of distinguishable sounds becomes available. Even the average high school student has a vocabulary of 60,000 words.
The other combinatorial system is syntax, the hierarchical ordering of words in a sentence to govern their meaning.
Chimpanzees do not seem to possess either of these systems. They can learn a certain number of symbols, up to 400 or so, and will string them together, but rarely in a way that suggests any notion of syntax. This is not because of any poverty of thought. Their conceptual world seems to overlap to some extent with that of people: they can recognize other individuals in their community and keep track of who is dominant to whom. But they lack the system for encoding these thoughts in language.
[...]
Ending the Silence
Linguists Return to Ideas of Origins
[...] Having posited in the early 1970's that the ability to learn the rules of grammar is innate, a proposition fiercely contested by other linguists, Dr. Chomsky might be expected to have shown keen interest in how that innateness evolved. But he has said very little on the subject, a silence that others have interpreted as disdain.
As Dr. Jackendoff, the president of the Linguistic Society of America, writes: "Opponents of Universal Grammar argue that there couldn't be such a thing as Universal Grammar because there is no evolutionary route to arrive at it. Chomsky, in reply, has tended to deny the value of evolutionary argumentation."
But Dr. Chomsky has recently taken a keen interest in the work by Dr. Hauser and his colleague Dr. W. Tecumseh Fitch on communication in animals. [In 2002] the three wrote an article in Science putting forward a set of propositions about the way that language evolved. Based on experimental work by Dr. Hauser and Dr. Fitch, they argue that sound perception and production can be seen in other animals, though they may have been tweaked a little in hominids.
A central element in language is what linguists call recursion, the mind's ability to bud one phrase off another into the syntax of an elaborate sentence. Though recursion is not seen in animals, it could have developed, the authors say, from some other brain system, like the one animals use for navigation.
Constructing a sentence, and going from A to Z through a series of landmarks, could involve a similar series of neural computations. If by some mutation a spare navigation module developed in the brain, it would have been free to take on other functions, like the generation of syntax. "If that piece got integrated with the rest of the cognitive machinery, you are done, you get music, morality, language," Dr. Hauser said.
The researchers contend that many components of the language faculty exist in other animals and evolved for other reasons, and that it was only in humans that they all were linked. This idea suggests that animals may have more to teach about language than many researchers believe, but it also sounds like a criticism of evolutionary psychologists like Dr. Pinker and Dr. Dunbar, who seek to explain language as a faculty forced into being by specifics of the human lifestyle.
Dr. Chomsky rejects the notion that he has discouraged study of the evolution of language, saying his views on the subject have been widely misinterpreted.
"I have never expressed the slightest objection to work on the evolution of language," he said in an e-mail message. He outlined his views briefly in lectures 25 years ago but left the subject hanging, he said, because not enough was understood. He still believes that it is easy to make up all sorts of situations to explain the evolution of language but hard to determine which ones, if any, make sense.
But because of the importance he attaches to the subject, he returned to it recently in the article with Dr. Hauser and Dr. Fitch. By combining work on speech perception and speech production with a study of the recursive procedure that links them, "the speculations can be turned into a substantive research program," Dr. Chomsky said.
Others see Dr. Chomsky's long silence on evolution as more consequential than he does. "The fact is that Chomsky has had, and continues to have, an outsize influence in linguistics," Dr. Pinker said in an e-mail message. Calling Dr. Chomsky both "undeniably, a brilliant thinker" and "a brilliant debating tactician, who can twist anything to his advantage," Dr. Pinker noted that Dr. Chomsky "has rabid devotees, who hang on his every footnote, and sworn enemies, who say black whenever he says white."
"That doesn't leave much space," Dr. Pinker went on, "for linguists who accept some of his ideas (language as a mental, combinatorial, complex, partly innate system) but not others, like his hostility to evolution or any other explanation of language in terms of its function."
Biologists and linguists have long inhabited different worlds, with linguists taking little interest in evolution, the guiding theory of all biology. But the faculty for language, along with the evidence of how it evolved, is written somewhere in the now decoded human genome, waiting for biologists and linguists to identify the genetic program that generates words and syntax."

Early hominid ears primed for speech: New Scientist - 22 June 2004
"Early humans evolved the anatomy needed to hear each other talk at least 350,000 years ago. This suggests rudimentary form[s] of speech developed early on in our evolution.
The conclusion comes from studies of fossilised skulls discovered in the mountains of Spain. A team of Spanish and US researchers used CT scans to measure the bones and spaces in the outer and middle ears of five specimens ..."

Stone Age Ear for Speech: Ancient finds sound off on roots of language: Science News Online - 26 June 2004
"Using digital enhancements of skull fragments from five prehistoric individuals dating to more than 350,000 years ago, anthropologists argue that these human ancestors probably had hearing similar to that of people today.
Since the ears of social mammals are typically designed to perceive sounds made by fellow species members, the humanlike hearing of these ancient folk probably was accompanied by speech, contend Ignacio Martínez of the University of Alcalá in Spain, and his colleagues ..."
Bruce Bower

Hearing babies babble with hands: BBC News - 14 July 2004
"[...] Most babies make a babbling 'ba, ba, ba' sound at around seven months.
Some scientists say this is merely a motor activity driven largely by the baby's emerging control over the movement of their mouth and jaw.
Others believe it is an attempt to mimic human speech and reflects the baby's innate sensitivity to the rhythm of language.
Dr [Laura-Ann] Petitto has argued that deaf babies who are exposed to sign language learn to babble using their hands in the same way that hearing babies learn to vocally babble with their mouths.
Her latest research ... shows hearing babies exposed to sign language also begin to babble with their hands. [...]
The findings would not be possible unless all babies were born with a sensitivity to specific rhythmic patterns at the heart of human language and the capacity to use them, she said."

New Scientist: Babies babble in sign language too - 15 July 2004
Alison Motluk: "Babies exposed to sign language babble with their hands, even if they are not deaf. The finding supports the idea that human infants have an innate sensitivity to the rhythm of language and engage it however they can, the researchers who made the discovery claim.
Everyone accepts that babies babble as a way to acquire language, but researchers are polarised about its role. One camp says that children learn to adjust the opening and closing of their mouths to make vowels and consonants by mimicking adults, but the sounds are initially without meaning.
The other side argues that babbling is more than just random noise-making. Much of it, they contend, consists of phonetic-syllabic units - the rudimentary forms of language.
Laura-Ann Petitto at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, a leader in this camp, has argued that deaf babies who are exposed to sign language learn to babble using their hands the way hearing babies do with their mouths. [...]
Pattern recognition
Sign-exposed babies produced two distinct types of rhythmic hand activity, a low-frequency type at 1 hertz and a high-frequency one at 2.5 hertz. The speech-exposed babies had only high-frequency moves. There was a "unique rhythmic signature of natural language" to the low-frequency movements. "What is really genetically passed on," Petitto says, "is a sensitivity to patterns."
But Peter MacNeilage, of the University of Texas at Austin, is not persuaded. "She makes a blanket statement that there is an exact correspondence between the structures of speech and sign," he says. "But there is no accepted evidence for this view at the level of phonological structure or in the form of a rhythm common to speech and sign."
Journal reference Cognition (vol 93, p 43)

Kalevi Kull: A sign is not alive -- a text is [pdf]
(Sign Systems Studies 30.1, 2002)
"Since semiosis is not an action of just one sign, since semiosis involves always a multitude of signs, it is a textual process like translation is."

Notes on 'Aramis' by Bruno Latour
"In the translation model, there is no transportation without transformation."
Bruno Latour - Aramis or The Love of Technology, translated by Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard UP 1996, page 119)

Cybernetic Explanation
"The idea that communication is the creation of redun­dancy or patterning can be applied to the simplest engineer­ing examples. Let us consider an observer who is watching A send a message to B. The purpose of the transaction (from the point of view of A and B) is to create in B's mes­sage pad a sequence of letters identical with the sequence which formerly occurred in A's pad. But from the point of view of the observer this is the creation of redundancy. If he has seen what A had on his pad, he will not get any new information about the message itself from inspecting B's pad.
Evidently, the nature of "meaning," pattern, redundancy, information and the like, depends upon where we sit. In the usual engineers' discussion of a message sent from A to B, it is customary to omit the observer and to say that B received information from A which was measurable in terms of the number of letters transmitted, reduced by such re­dundancy in the text as might have permitted B to do some guessing. But in a wider universe, i.e., that defined by the point of view of the observer, this no longer appears as a "transmission" of information but rather as a spreading of redundancy. The activities of A and B have combined to make the universe of the observer more predictable, more ordered, and more redundant. We may say that the rules of the "game" played by A and B explain (as "restraints") what would otherwise be a puzzling and improbable coin­cidence in the observer's universe, namely the conformity be­tween what is written on the two message pads.
To guess, in essence, is to face a cut or slash in the sequence of items and to predict across that slash what items might be on the other side."
Gregory Bateson: Steps to an Ecology of Mind (University of Chicago Press, 2000, pages 412-413)

posted by Andrew 7/31/2004 08:08:00 PM

Saturday, July 17, 2004

 
Recursive, Wide, and Loopy

Puzzled monkeys reveal key language step by Gaia Vince
"The key cognitive step that allowed humans to become the only animals using language may have been identified, scientists say.
A new study on monkeys found that while they are able to understand basic rules about word patterns, they are not able to follow more complex rules that underpin the crucial next stage of language structure. For example, the monkeys could master simple word structures, analogous to realising that "the" and "a" are always followed by another word. But they were unable to grasp phrase patterns analogous to "if... then..." constructions. This grammatical step, upon which all human languages depend, may be "the critical bottleneck of cognition that we had to go through in order to develop and use language", says Harvard University's Marc Hauser, who carried out the study with fellow psychologist Tecumseh Fitch, at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.  "Perhaps the constraint on the evolution of language was a rule problem," Hauser told New Scientist.
Fitch and Hauser carried out two aural tests on cotton-top tamarin monkeys in which sequences of one-syllable words were called out by human voices.
In the first test, random words were called out in a strictly alternating pattern of male followed by female voices. The monkeys responded to breaks in the male-female rule, by looking at the loudspeaker. This showed that they were able to recognise the simple rule.
In the next test, the grammatical rule dictated that the male voice could call out one, two or three words, as long as the female voice did the same. This type of slightly more complex pattern is called recursive, as it involves a rule within a rule.
This time, the monkeys were unable to recognise any breaks in the pattern. But twelve human volunteers given the same test had no such difficulty, although most were unable to explain what the rule actually was.
"Recursive ability is uniquely human and affects more than just our language, but most of our behaviour," says renowned primate language expert David Premack, who wrote an article accompanying the study published in Science. "For example, in a classroom we often see child A watch child B watch child C watch the teacher. But in chimps, we see chimp A watch its mother, chimp B watch its mother, chimp C watch its mother..."
Human flexibility
Premack argues that although recursive ability is not absolutely necessary for language -- non-recursive sentences are possible -- being unable to master recursion may have been a stumbling block that prevented monkeys from developing language.
"Monkeys are also not physically capable of speech, they are unable to properly copy actions and they cannot teach -- all of which are skills required for language," he told New Scientist.
Mastery of the underlying rule of recursion is the key to human flexibility, Premack believes, allowing humans to think in the abstract, use metaphors and comprehend concepts such as time. It probably arose as the brain evolved into a more complex organ, but is not located in a single brain region.
However, it is not known whether modern humans are born with the ability to recognise recursive language patterns. More research into recursive ability in humans and their close relatives chimpanzees needs to be carried out, Hauser says."
Journal reference: Science (vol 303, p 377)

Google Search: define:recursive

Self-Processing: 'It would from many a blunder free us'
"With video we can know the difference between how we intend to come across and how we actually do come across. What we put out, what is taken by the tape, is an imitation of our intended image; it is our monkey. A video system enables us to get the monkey off our backs, where we can't see him, out onto the tape, where we can see him. That is the precise way in which we've been making a monkey of ourselves. The monkey has been able to get away with his business because he operates on the other side of the inside/outside barrier. The moebius tape strip snips the barrier between inside/outside. It offers us one continuous (sur)face with nothing to hide. We have the option of taking in our monkey and teaching him our business or letting him go on with his.
Taking in your own outside with video means more than just tripping around the moebius strip in private. One can pass through the barrier of the skin, pass through the pseudo-self to explore the entirety of one's cybernet -- i.e., the nexus of informational processes one is a part of.
[...] In fact, we live in multiple loops. [...]
The cybernetic extension of ourselves possible with video-tape does not mean a reinforcement of the ordinarily understood "self." Total touch with ones's cybernet precludes the capitalism of identity ...
Master Charge does not make you master of anything but involves you in an expensive economy of credit information processed by computer, your checking account, TV ads ... and busy telephones. The Master Charge card exploits the illusion of unilateral control over life the West has suffered with. "I am the Captain of my Soul; I am the Master of my Fate." We have yet to understand there is no master self. They are now putting photos on charge cards when they should be mapping the credit system the card involves you in. Video users are prone to the same illusion. It is easy to be zooming in on "self" to the exclusion of environmental or social systems.
Doing feedback for others, one comes to realize the necessity of taping and replaying context. I had the opportunity to do a kind of video meditation ..."
Paul Ryan - Cybernetics of the Sacred (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1974, pages 30-31)

Michael Ventura - The World Is No Longer the World
"[...] In an interview with The New York Times, [Robert W. Taylor] was asked how the new broadband technologies would impact daily life. He answered: "You'll be able to wear -- an unobtrusive device that will record in full color and sound everything that you see or point your head at, or, depending on how many of them you have, everything that's around you. And share it. Every waking and sleeping moment in your life will be recorded. And you will be able to store and retrieve it and do what you will with it." (He added, almost as an afterthought, "there are obvious implications for privacy that will have to be worked through.") "How will that change the world?" the interviewer quickly asked. "I don't know," Taylor said, "but it will."
Every waking and sleeping moment -- but of course after only one day of life-recording, you would fall hopelessly behind your ability to manage and manipulate your material. There would not be enough waking moments on the following day for viewing the entire record of the first day -- though one could no doubt fast-forward. Still, much of the second day would be images of the person viewing the previous day's images -- mirrors facing mirrors. That's one possibility. Or, instead of letters, you could e-mail hours of your life as you'd lived it -- probably as you're living it! Or two people who'd spent the day (or night) together could run both records simultaneously on a split screen. Or maybe you'd set up a Web site on which, every day, you'd run your life of the previous day (or again, Web site it live!) -- instant replay might become a kind of learning aid to one's sense of identity, proof that you exist in a world that no longer entirely believes in any reality that can't be contained on a screen. Western civilization has already and thoroughly defined "life" as "self-consciousness," "I think therefore I am," but this technology would create an environment in which the recorded consciousness of a life would be defined strictly in terms of what could be seen and heard ..."

Interconnected: two things i've been ... (27 June 2004)
"Visual processing seems to me to have two main tasks. One is to assemble a world that is easily abstracted ... the other ... is to throw information away.
[...] We can learn lessons about how to throw away information. The two perceptual jobs are combined, of course.
[...] Intelligence is distributed over the environment because we throw information away. On the long scale (light from above), and the short scale (you know the time, but you haven't looked at your watch yet). Artificial objects, created interfaces that don't obey distance, or object-hood, or texture: they're either confusing, or, if used right, remarkably useful illusions (television)."
Matt Webb

BBC News: How memories build during sleep

"What to do with too much information is the great riddle of our time."
Theodore Zeldin - An Intimate History of Humanity (Minerva, 1995, page 18)

Brain Candy by Floyd Skloot
[...] Early in the book [An Alchemy of Mind], examining how the brain adapts as we learn new information, [Diane] Ackerman says, "We arrive in this world clothed in the loose fabric of a self, which then tailors itself to the world it finds." Later, talking about emotions, she says, "Our ideas may behave, but our emotions are still Pleistocene ..."

The Scotsman - Critique - Whole worlds in his hands
"We are a species of pattern finders. Evolution made us so."
Tom Adair

Thomas Dixon - From Passions to Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
"Today there is a thriving 'emotions industry' to which philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists are contributing. Yet until two centuries ago 'the emotions' did not exist. In this path-breaking study Thomas Dixon shows how, during the nineteenth century, the emotions came into being as a distinct psychological category, replacing existing categories such as appetites, passions, sentiments and affections. By examining medieval and eighteenth-century theological psychologies and placing Charles Darwin and William James within a broader and more complex nineteenth-century setting, Thomas Dixon argues that this domination by one single descriptive category is not healthy. Overinclusivity of 'the emotions' hampers attempts to argue with any subtlety about the enormous range of mental states and stances of which humans are capable."

The Posthuman Touch: N. Katherine Hayles reviewed by Erik Davis
"[...] Though she recognizes the techno-transcendentalist nightmares tucked inside the computational universe ("a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories"), Hayles is open to a future populated with increasingly brainy machines. Refreshingly, Hayles also suggests that the art of embodiment could be well served by some lessons of evolutionary psychology, which many pomo science types write off as an evil blasphemy. In a word, Hayles is willing to give up some of that much-vaunted human control. "The very illusion of control bespeaks a fundamental ignorance about the nature of the emergent process through which consciousness, the organism, and the environment are constituted." So how do we live with creative intelligence and awakened senses in a groundless world beyond our control?"

Interview with Russell Hoban [from Stride Magazine no. 26, 1986]

Rupert Loydell: You often use the theme of something living behind our eyes. Is that something you actually believe or just a literary device?

Russell Hoban: "No, I actually feel it. It is more than a matter of belief -- it just feels that way to me, as if we are inhabited by something that lives with us."

Rupert Loydell: Does that tie in with your interest in shamanism?

Russell Hoban: "I suppose so, in that shamanism is a mode of opening the self, opening the conscience, to forces that we can't ordinarily perceive in ordinary ways. In my writing I am always trying to be more open to things that don't come to our minds in ordinary states, and the way I do it is just by tuning in obsessively to ideas that come to me, by working late at night, by staying with things until I am very tired, and until this stiffness of the mind breaks down and loosens up, and thoughts come in that wouldn't come."

Running Backward Into The Future - Part One
"Marshall McLuhan made the point that the structure of any medium became the content of subsequent media. Thus the gift storytelling gave to writing was the content of the stories. The fact that the cadenced, nuanced, recursive and patterned structure of told stories was lost to the written text was only noticed much later.
Julian Jaynes made the same point with regard to the metaphors used by a culture to articulate the nature of human consciousness; the "landscape" of mind reflecting the topography and technology of each era." Richard Shand

EDGE 3rd Culture: Marc Hauser: Animal Minds
"For the past few years I have been using the theoretical tools from evolutionary biology to ask questions about the design of animal minds. I'm particularly interested in taking the approach that some people have had within evolutionary psychology, and saying look, this whole notion of the environment for evolutionary adaptedness which people have pegged as being associated with the hunter-gatherer period in the Pleistocene, may be true for some aspects of the human mind, but are probably wrong as a date for many other aspects. If we think about how organisms navigate through space, recognize what is an object, enumerate objects in their environment -- those are aspects that are probably shared across a wide variety of animals. Rather than saying that the human mind evolved and was shaped during the Pleistocene, it's more appropriate to ask what things happened in the Pleistocene that would have created a particular signature to the human mind that doesn't exist in other animals."

Are we still evolving? by Gabrielle Walker [from Prospect Magazine July 2004]
[...] "What's special about human beings is that we learn from one another," says Svante Pääbo, a geneticist from the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig. "When we invent something new like cars, we don't wait for evolution to make us better drivers or learn how to cross the street. We have driving schools and we teach our children to look both ways before crossing."

Slashdot: That's Sir Tim to You
Free was key, says Lee comments GillBates0
"In this day and age of superfluous patents [slashdot.org] and frivolous lawsuits [slashdot.org], Sir Tim Berners-Lee [w3.org] gently reminds us of the importance of free and selfless contribution [cnn.com] for the betterment of humanity. Speaking at the ceremony for winning the Millennium Technology Prize [technologyawards.org] (as reported earlier on Slashdot [slashdot.org]), he said that he would never have succeeded if he'd tried to charge money for his inventions. The prize committee agreed, citing the importance of Berners-Lee's decision never to commercialize or patent his contributions to the Internet technologies he had developed, and recognizing his revolutionary contribution to humanity's ability to communicate."

Interview with Tim Berners-Lee
Simon Winchester: It has been argued that the rapid developing of search techniques on the internet has made conducting research, particularly for school pupils, too easy. Do you think that school children are, perhaps, becoming too reliant on computers?
Tim Berners-Lee: Research isn't about finding lots of information - it is about understanding it: finding the relationships between concepts. The fact that you can get information more rapidly may help with speed, but when your task is to arrange this information in such a way that it personally makes sense to you, then the computer is a very useful tool. I don't know how reliant on computers you all are at Emanuel. Do you all have laptops and wireless networking? I think we should all be careful to spend as much time using the other parts of your brain as you do using a computer. Take a break and do a little calligraphy to let your thoughts settle. Keep a musical instrument within reach of your computer at home. [...]
Simon Winchester: Do you see the internet and the book in competition with each other? Especially in regard to young people?
Tim Berners-Lee: I do see the internet and TV in competition with each other, and I hope the internet will become such a fun, creative thing that it takes time away from the numbing effect of television. I don't think it will replace the book. First of all, the novel is a fundamentally important genre of communication whether you read it on paper or screen. Secondly, it will be a long time before a computer peripheral can compete with the warm feel of a wedge of paper, which can be taken and read anywhere, and within which each word has a physical position.

The Walter J. Ong Project
"Ong's work is often presented alongside the postmodern and deconstruction theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Hélène Cixous, and others. His own work in orality and literacy shows deconstruction to be unnecessary: if you consider language to be fundamentally spoken, as language originally is, it does not consist of signs, but of events. Sound, including the spoken word, is an event. It takes time. The concept of "sign," by contrast, derives primarily not from the world of events, but from the world of vision. A sign can be physically carried around, an event cannot: it simply happens. Words are events."

Sky News -- WWW.TIM.GETS.GONG.UK
"Born in East Sheen, south-west London, in 1955, [Sir Tim Berners-Lee] was the eldest child of two mathematicians renowned within the computer industry for their work on Britain's first commercial computer, the Ferranti Mark I.
He studied at the Emanuel School in Wandsworth and later read physics at the Queen's College, Oxford, where he was banned from using the university's computer after being caught hacking.
Sir Tim later built his own computer, using an old TV set, a Motorola microprocessor and a soldering iron."

XMLMania.com - Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the World Wide Web, Knighted by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II
"[...] While working in 1980 as a consultant software engineer at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, Sir Timothy wrote his own private program for storing information using the kind of random associations the brain makes. The "Enquire" program, which was never published, formed the conceptual basis for his future development of the Web.
Subsequently he proposed a global hypertext project at CERN in 1989, and by December 1990, the program "WorldWideWeb" became the first successful demonstration of Web clients and servers working over the Internet. All of his code was made available free on the Internet at large in the summer of 1991.
A London native, Sir Timothy graduated with a degree in physics from Queen's College at Oxford University, England in 1976. While there he built his first computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television."

Review: Mind Wide Open by Steven Johnson
"Neuroscientists now view the brain as an orchestra made up of "dozens of players". Forget the idea of the brain as a unitary supercomputer and think instead of an assemblage of different modules and chemicals (or "molecules of emotion"), each specialised for a different task. They are not always easy bedfellows." P.D. Smith

Brain cells become more discriminating when they work together
"Team work is just as important in your brain as it is on the playing field: A new study published online on April 19 [2004] by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports that groups of brain cells can substantially improve their ability to discriminate between different orientations of simple visual patterns by synchronizing their electrical activity.
The paper, "Cooperative synchronized assemblies enhance orientation discrimination," by Vanderbilt professor of biomedical engineering A. B. Bonds with graduate students Jason Samonds and Heather A. Brown and research associate John D. Allison provides some of the first solid evidence that the exact timing of the tiny electrical spikes produced by neurons plays an important role in brain functioning. Since the discovery of alpha waves in 1929, experts have known that neurons in different parts of the brain periodically coordinate their activity with their neighbors. Despite a variety of theories, however, scientists have not been able to determine whether this "neuronal synchrony" has a functional role or if it is just a by-product of the brain's electrical activity ..."

Evolution of the yeast protein interaction network
Hong Qin, Henry H. S. Lu, Wei B. Wu and Wen-Hsiung Li (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 28 October 2003; 100 (22): 12820–12824)
"[...] A key question in the evolution of biological complexity is, how have integrated biological systems evolved? Darwinists proposed natural selection as the driving force of evolution. However, the striking similarities between biological and nonbiological complexities have led to the argument that a set of universal (or ahistorical) rules account for the formation of all complexities. The yeast protein interaction network is an example of a complex biological system and contributes to the complexity at the cellular level. By analyzing the growth pattern and reconstructing the evolutionary path of the yeast protein interaction network, we can address whether or not network growth is contingent on evolutionary history, which is the key disagreement between the Darwinian view and the universality view.
[...] The key disagreement between the Darwinian view and the universality view on the evolution of biological complexity is the role of historical contingency. Undoubtedly, efforts to search for universal rules benefit our understanding on biological complexity. However, by using the yeast protein interaction network as an example, we observed a correlation between network evolution and the universal tree of life. This observation strongly argues that network evolution is not ahistorical, but is, in essence, a string of historical events."

Delays, connection topology, and synchronization of coupled chaotic maps
Fatihcan M. Atay, Jürgen Jost and Andreas Wende (Physical Review Letters 9 April 2004)
Abstract: "We consider networks of coupled maps where the connections between units involve time delays. We show that, similar to the undelayed case, the synchronization of the network depends on the connection topology, characterized by the spectrum of the graph Laplacian. Consequently, scale-free and random networks are capable of synchronizing despite the delayed flow of information, whereas regular networks with nearest-neighbor connections and their small-world variants generally exhibit poor synchronization. On the other hand, connection delays can actually be conducive to synchronization, so that it is possible for the delayed system to synchronize where the undelayed system does not. Furthermore, the delays determine the synchronized dynamics, leading to the emergence of a wide range of new collective behavior which the individual units are incapable of producing in isolation."

Bruce Bower: Grannies give gift of longer lives

The Limits of Knowledge
"Laplace, Leibniz, Descartes, and Kant popularized the idea of the universe as a vast machine. The cosmos was likened to a watch, composed of many parts interacting in predictable ways. Implicit in this analogy was the possibility of predicting all phenomena. The perfect knowledge of Laplace's cosmic intelligence might be a fiction, but it could be approximated as closely as desired.
Today the most common reaction to Laplace's idea, among people who have some feel for modern physics, is to cite quantum uncertainty as its downfall. In the early twentieth century, physicists discovered that nature is nondeterministic at the subatomic scale. Chance enters into any description of quanta, and all attempts to exorcise it have failed. Since there is no way of predicting the behaviour of an electron with certainty, there is no way of predicting the fate of the universe.
The quantum objection is valid, but it is not the most fundamental one. In 1929, two years after Heisenberg formulated the principle of quantum uncertainty, Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard discovered a far more general limitation on empirical knowledge. Szilard's limitations would apply even in a world not subject to quantum uncertainty. In a sense, they go beyond physics and derive instead from the logical premise of observation. For twenty years, Szilard's work was ignored or misunderstood. Then in the late 1940s and early 1950s it became appreciated as a forerunner of the information theory devised by Claude Shannon, John von Neumann, and Warren Weaver.
Information theory shows that Laplace's perfect knowledge is a mirage that will forever recede into the distance. Science is empirical. It is based solely on observations. But observation is a two-edged sword. Information theory claims that every observation obscures at least as much information as it reveals. No observation makes an information profit. Therefore, no amount of observation will ever reveal everything -- or even take us closer to knowing everything.
Complementing this austere side of information theory is insight into how physical laws generate phenomena. Physicists have increasing reason to suppose that the phenomena of the world, from galaxies to human life, are dictated more by the fundamental laws of physics than by some special initial state of the world. In terms of Einstein's riddle, this suggests that God had little meaningful choice once the laws of physics were selected. Information theory is particularly useful in explaining the complexity of the world."
The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge by William Poundstone (Paperback edition: Oxford University Press, 1987, pages 21-22)

"Consider any day saved on which you have danced at least once." Fried Nietzsche

'Nature via Nurture' It's Genetic, Sometimes
Michael Ruse: I wonder if many today would really disagree with Ridley's basic claim in "Nature via Nurture" that essentially the nature-versus-nurture, biology-versus-culture, genes-versus-environment dichotomy has broken down and truly is less than useful to invoke. Organisms, and this applies especially to human organisms, are complex systems produced by genes, but very much molded by the experiences they encounter and situations to which they have to respond. "Genes are the mechanisms of experience," in the author's words.

Messages: How do animals communicate?
"[...] If you look at the history of work in animal communication, the greatest strides have been made in species that have specialized vocalizations, like bird song, where people have focused on the songs of a bird, even though birds have many other vocalizations. This is a specialized vocalization, it has dedicated neuro-circuitry, and it has a very specific function -- to attract mates and to guard territories. Because of that specialization, people have been able to quantify the mechanisms and the functions and make a lot of progress in understanding what the birds are talking about.
So the cotton-top tamarin in many ways is very bird-like. They are mainly monogamous. They pair bond for life. In part because of their social organization they have vocalization that's like bird song. There's a long call they give to maintain contact with other individuals, which is also used in inter-territorial interactions."
Marc Hauser

Essays on Recursion, Difference, Dialectics, Maps and Territories in Celebration of Gregory Bateson's centennial - SEED Editorial
"[...] Bateson stated in more than one text that his ideas were attuned to an epistemological monism, at first a notion of organicism, but after Bateson's embrace of cybernetics in the mid-1940s, an epistemology built around information and the fundamental ideas of cybernetics. These had circularity as their central concern, though as Bateson pointed out, circularity did not mean a precise circle in which events repeat themselves in the same circular path. All living forms reproduce and in doing so re-enter the domain of their forebears. These are recursive events, but in the case of species reproduction, they never step into the precise spot in the same stream twice-over. The arrow of time intervenes. A truly circular path would preclude emergence of new forms, and other forms of change or adaptation which are characteristic sequences of evolution. The passing of time always inflects recursion in human events, and human events must also, in the long run, share this formal characteristic of recursion in biological events. Bateson believed, contra Vico, there was no historical circularity which rolls human history along from barbarism to civilization and then returns human society to its starting point of barbarism once more. In between there is an enormous amount of information continually undergoing contextual change, but there are also fundamental premises, constraints to human understanding that endure, a structure of fundamental premises or 'verities' that give both form to, but permit freedom in, the variety of recursive events.
Thus Bateson indicated that a characteristic form or topology that captures the recursiveness of both biological form and human cultural and historical experience, is that of a spiral, a circularity that rotates in time. Nevertheless, the spiral was always a metaphor, rather than an operational framework in Bateson's epistemology. Instead, Bateson approached recursiveness in terms of the oscillations in heterarchical ordering. The idea of heterarchical (multi-level) order was first developed by the well known cyberneticist, Warren McCulloch. McCulloch suggested in his classic paper on the topology of human nervous nets (McCulloch, 1965: 40-45) that the topology of recursion in nervous nets not only differs between long-term memory and short-term memory but that within the overall recursiveness of neural nets are multiple hierarchies occurring among the synapses of the nervous system connected in recursive reverberation."

Gregory Bateson Centennial: Multiple Versions of the World
Saturday, November 20, 2004 (9:00 AM - 5:00 PM)
University of California at Berkeley, Lawrence Hall of Science
Confirmed Speakers include: Mary Catherine Bateson, Carol Wilder, Peter Harries-Jones, Terrence Deacon, Tyler Volk, Charles Hampden-Turner, Jesper Hoffmeyer & Jay Ogilvy

The Social Brain Conferences: Biology of conflicts and cooperation
Barcelona - July 17-20, 2004

News From Below: We've Been Expecting You
"Not often will we have such an opportunity as this one: to convene so many who've been inspired by Bateson and his illuminating insights into "the pattern which connects." Multiple Versions of the World promises to be a breakthrough conference." Jay Ogilvy

A little fruitful pandemonium (The Austin Chronicle 20 February 2004)
Michael Ventura: There's little grace or dignity in "Kid Auto Races in Venice," but it is six minutes and 10 seconds of weird prophetic poetry -- and mayhem. Later Chaplin had varying memories of how he created the Tramp's costume, trying on things at random in the costume room, but he concluded each version like this, as spoken to Chaplin biographer Robert Payne: "Even then I realized I would have to spend the rest of my life finding more about the creature. For me he was fixed, complete, the moment I looked in the mirror and saw him for the first time, yet even now I don't know all the things there are to be known about him." Chaplin always talked of the Tramp that way: from a distance and with respect. Even with awe, as when he told Payne: "There is death in him, and he is bringing life -- more life. That is his only excuse, his only purpose. That is why people recognized him everywhere. They wanted the ghosts to come and bring them life. It's very strange, isn't it? ... You see, the clown is so close to death that only a knife-edge separates him from it, and sometimes he goes over the border, but he always returns again. So in a way he is spirit -- not real. ... We know he cannot die, and that's the best thing about him. I created him, but I am not him, and yet sometimes our paths cross."

John Seely Brown interviewed by Seth Kahan (10 February 2003)
Seth: It sounds like each side is sifting through the other's "roots," exploring the periphery.
JSB: Yeah, it is an exploration -- each center is in the other's periphery, but it is also a clashing. I call it, the creative collision of craft. That collision taking place in a fabric of trust can go -- as we were saying with storytelling -- huge distances.

Robert W. Taylor's 2004 Draper Prize Acceptance Remarks
"Once upon a time and for many centuries, beginning with the first computer, the abacus, the purpose of computers was to solve arithmetic problems. With electricity, they could solve them faster, and the advent of the integrated circuit made them even faster, more reliable, and a lot cheaper. But they were still only arithmetic engines. Then a remarkable transformation occurred.
Xerox opened its Palo Alto Research Center in 1970, and it grew over time to about 300 people. Today, PARC is known for its innovative computer science research of the 1970s, but computer science was only a small part of its research investment. Most of it went into physics, materials science, and optics. But a few dozen computerists at PARC redefined the nature and purpose of computing, and their research put PARC on the map. The 2004 Draper Prize honors this research.
The four individuals named in this year's prize formed the cadre of that extraordinary group, which today reads like a "Who's Who" in computer science. In the last half of the 1960s, they were graduate students at a handful of universities, where, with support from ARPA, they built the first experimental interactive computer systems. From these, they gained insights into interactive computing that were not available to others. In the 1970s, when they were recruited to PARC, they shared a dream -- that computer systems could be completely redesigned and that this redesign could enable personal interactions with text, pictures, and networking for millions of individuals. The dream promised to encourage creative potential and new forms of communication. The value of connecting people and their interests could dwarf the value of computing only for arithmetic."

A General Theory of Rubbish: Moore Enlightenment


posted by Andrew 7/17/2004 08:08:00 AM

Saturday, June 19, 2004

 
Stigmergy & Systems Science

After Gutenberg » Knowledge Ecosystem Persistence
J.C.Winnie: "I see that Jay Cross, citing George Por, poses an interesting question: How does a community's knowledge ecosystem persist?"

Countercultural Studies: Edward Sanders' 1968: A History in Verse
Alan Gilbert writes: "[...] 1968: A History in Verse is the product of what Sanders has spent over twenty years articulating as an "investigative poetry" (1976) and "a multi-decade research project" (1994). His book Chekhov, a life of the famous Russian writer in verse, is another recent example (1995); currently, Sanders is rumored to be working on a three volume verse history of the United States. This poetic approach to research and historiography involves saturating oneself in a particular topic through the extensive researching and cataloging of information related to it. One method Sanders recommends is the compilation of "data clusters" -- strips of information which can be shuffled around until an ideal configuration is created (1994: 244). 1968 is written this way, as separate strophes present accumulating details until data clusters are formed ..."

Michael Ventura + Michael Ventura + Michael Ventura

Ventura: The psyche is a city like New York or Rome or Calcutta; you'd need a Dante or a Breughel to picture it. It's like having all the TV channels on at once and feeding into each other, late night film noir and afternoon cartoons speaking each other's lines, while epic events like revolutions have the feel of family feuds. It's an inner world that reminds me of something Henry Adams wrote after he had contemplated the gargoyles and saints of Europe's cathedrals for perhaps longer than was good for him, a sentence at the end of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: "Truth, indeed, may not exist; science avers it to be only a relation; but what men took for truth stares one everywhere in the eye and begs for sympathy."

A Monster in Repose by Michael Ventura (The Austin Chronicle 3 May 2002)
"When we rhapsodize about the classic European cathedrals we speak mostly of their architecture and their marvelous stained glass. We tend to consider the gargoyles separately, parenthetically -- as though these monsters were merely, somehow, decorative. They are not. They are a part of religion, a part of humanity, even a part of God. You come to be redeemed, but it's possible you'll be devoured.
[...] The cathedral builders were modest and honest. Modest, in that they did not affix their names to the greatest structures of their civilization. Honest, in what they admitted in their building: You cannot have religion without monsters.
Walk into a church, holding your child by the hand ... whatever the doctrine, monsters are crawling upon the walls. They are a part of God -- so warned the cathedral sculptors. You may not see them perched at the top of the cathedral, but they see you."

A Hundred Years of Shadows by Michael Ventura (The Austin Chronicle 7 March 2003)
"[...] Not long before his death in 1910, the writer of War and Peace and Anna Karenina saw his first film. He was about 80 years old, a relic of another era, but he got the movies. He told a journalist: "You will see that this little clicking contraption with the revolving handle [the motion-picture camera of that day] will make a revolution in our life -- in the life of writers. It is a direct attack on the old methods of literary art. We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and the cold machine. A new form of writing will be necessary. I have thought of that and I can feel what is coming. But I rather like it. This swift change of scene, this blending of emotion and experience -- it is much better than the heavy, long-drawn-out kind of writing to which we are accustomed. It is closer to life. In life, too, changes and transitions flash by before our eyes, and emotions of the soul are like a hurricane. The cinema has divined the mystery of motion. And that is greatness."
[...] Maxim Gorky, saw his first films in 1896: the simple, short, beautifully shot demonstration-movies of the Lumière brothers, who had perfected the motion picture camera the year before. (The first moving pictures on celluloid were taken on the streets of London by William Friese-Greene in 1889.) Gorky captures how strange, enchanting, and utterly disorienting were the first experiences of people watching a screen:
"Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows ..."
[...] Gorky and Tolstoy, in their different ways, understood instantly the same thing: The motion picture, the Kingdom of Shadows, would transform consciousness. We would forget where we are, even who we are, and "strange imaginings" would "invade" us. Tolstoy saw cinema as a powerful entity in its own right, so powerful that it would not adapt to us: "We will have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen." "Entire cities," Gorky said, would be "cast into eternal sleep." We would become sleepwalkers, dreaming with eyes wide shut. The traditional, practical, and down-to-earth, would almost cease to count. Our appearance, our ambitions, our lovemaking, the very timbre of our voices (regional accents are dying out in America), would be dominated by what was manifested on the screen's Kingdom of Shadows. We would reflexively compare ourselves to ... fantasy. Dream life would become our concrete goal. "The pursuit of happiness" would come to mean: I want to live like a movie. (Which isn't exactly what Jefferson had in mind.)
I think of a haunting sentence Josef von Sternberg said late in his life, years after he directed his last film: "I believe the cinema was here from the beginning of the world."
Something there is, hidden in Nature from the beginning, that wants to transform waking life into dream, even into nightmare. Through the motion picture this Merlinesque force would be given a terrific, irresistible power.
The last shot of "The Great Train Robbery" is the same as the first: The cowboy draws his pistol and shoots us ..."

MSNBC - Moore defends incendiary film
Moore: "It [Fahrenheit 9/11] definitely has a point of view, that's absolutely correct. But I'm not a member of the Democratic Party. If you know anything about me, anybody who's followed me, I'm the anti-Democrat. I have railed against the Democrats for a long time. They have been a weak-kneed, wimpy party that hasn't stood up to the Republicans. They let the working people down across this country. I rallied against Clinton when he was in office. I didn't vote for him in '96. I didn't vote for Gore in 2000. This is not a partisan issue with me ..."

Mae-Wan Ho: The Organic Revolution in Science
[...] The universe of organisms
"In the aftermath of quantum theory, English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead declared that physics has to be entirely rewritten in terms of a general theory of the organism. On account of quantum superposition, non-local entanglement, and the mutual entanglement of the observer and observed, Newtonian mechanics is indeed merely a flat projection of organic reality. Inert objects with simple, definite locations in space and time do not exist. Instead, all nature is alive with process and happenings. The totality of all that happens is a pattern of flows and influences, now diverging from one locus, now converging towards another in such a way that "each volume of space, or each lapse of time includes in its essence aspects of all volumes of space, or of all lapses of time."
In Whitehead's organic universe, everything is an organism, from elementary particles such as photons and electrons to human beings and galaxies. An organism senses its environment as a whole because it is itself a coherent whole. More than that, it is a field of coherent activities, which draws on its experience of other organisms to make itself whole.
Think of each organism as an entity that is not really confined within the solid body we see, which just happens to be where its wave-function is most 'dense'. Instead, invisible quantum waves are spreading out from each one of us and permeating into all other organisms. At the same time, each of us has the waves of every other organism entangled within our own make-up. The realization and maintenance of self and other are completely intertwined."

ISSS (Toronto 2000) Roundtable: What are the principles of systems science?
Tom Mandel explores the Principle of Relationship:
[...]
As Ervin Laszlo writes in his latest book, "space does not separate us, it joins us."
[...]
Complexity in a system is a matter of viewpoint. Again a new perspective is at work, just as important is simplicity. Indeed, complexity is relative -- complementary to simplicity. Stewart and Cohen propose a development that goes like so -- from simplicity to complexity to simplexity to complicity (note the spelling). Picture the evolution of an embryo. The process of differentiation/integration develops from simple to complex and back to simple, but now part of something else acting complex.
Murray Gell-Mann, co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute has created a new science he calls Plectics, the study of the simple and complex. Systems do not necessarily unite. In most cases the interaction is integration. Compare epoxy with concrete. Epoxy unifies parts A and B. Concrete integrates parts A and B. [...]
But most interesting of all is the possibility that there is a general scheme which nature has been working with. If nature operates according to a single principle, then this principle would be interpenetrative. It is likely that nature "began" as a simple act, the simplest action, and has reiterated that same principle up till now. We would therefore be able to find it in all aspects of reality.
Bertalanffy thinks so, enough to quote Nicholas of Cusa citing the coincidentia oppositorum, but Bertalanffy wonders if this is an artifact of our "languageing" or [whether it] does in fact have a metaphysical reality. Salk thinks so, he says, "In order to understand anything we must have a sense of the fundamental connections which form the backdrop of all experience."

Edge: The Emergent Self
"Autopoiesis attempts to define the uniqueness of the emergence that produces life in its fundamental cellular form. It's specific to the cellular level. There's a circular or network process that engenders a paradox: a self-organizing network of biochemical reactions produces molecules, which do something specific and unique: they create a boundary, a membrane, which constrains the network that has produced the constituents of the membrane. This is a logical bootstrap, a loop: a network produces entities that create a boundary, which constrains the network that produced the boundary. This bootstrap is precisely what's unique about cells. A self-distinguishing entity exists when the bootstrap is completed. This entity has produced its own boundary. It doesn't require an external agent to notice it, or to say, "I'm here." It is, by itself, a self-distinction. It bootstraps itself out of a soup of chemistry and physics.
The idea arose, also at that time, that the local rules of autopoiesis might be simulated with cellular automata. At that time, few people had ever heard of cellular automata, an esoteric idea I picked up from John von Neumann -- one that would be made popular by the artificial-life people. Cellular automata are simple units that receive inputs from immediate neighbors and communicate their internal state to the same immediate neighbors.
In order to deal with the circular nature of the autopoiesis idea, I developed some bits of mathematics of self-reference, in an attempt to make sense out of the bootstrap -- the entity that produces its own boundary. The mathematics of self-reference involves creating formalisms to reflect the strange situation in which something produces A, which produces B, which produces A. That was 1974. Today, many colleagues call such ideas part of complexity theory.
The more recent wave of work in complexity illuminates my bootstrap idea, in that it's a nice way of talking about this funny, screwy logic where the snake bites its own tail and you can't discern a beginning. Forget the idea of a black box with inputs and outputs. Think in terms of loops. My early work on self-reference and autopoiesis followed from ideas developed by cyberneticists such as Warren McCulloch and Norbert Wiener, who were the first scientists to think in those terms. But early cybernetics is essentially concerned with feedback circuits, and the early cyberneticists fell short of recognizing the importance of circularity in the constitution of an identity. Their loops are still inside an input/output box. In several contemporary complex systems, the inputs and outputs are completely dependent on interactions within the system, and their richness comes from their internal connectedness. Give up the boxes, and work with the entire loopiness of the thing. For instance, it's impossible to build a nervous system that has very clear inputs and outputs.
The next area of significant work involves applying the logic of the emergent properties of circular structures to look at the nervous system. The consequence is a radical change in the received view of the brain. The nervous system is not an information-processing system, because, by definition, information-processing systems need clear inputs. The nervous system has internal, or operational, closure. The key question is how, on the basis of its ongoing internal dynamics, the brain configures or constitutes relevance from otherwise nonmeaningful interactions. You can see why I'm not really interested in the classical artificial-intelligence and information-processing metaphors of brain studies. The brain can't be understood as a computer, in any interesting sense, and I part company with the people who think that the brain does rely on symbolic representation."
Francisco Varela

Soft Systems Methodology: Its Origins and Use in Librarianship
"Von Bertalanffy, Vickers, and Checkland all view human organizations as open, hierarchical systems, similar to those found in the life sciences. They assume the validity of the doctrine of emergence; that as systems grow more complex, properties emerge which cannot be explained in terms of simpler forms. To paraphrase Vickers, people in a crowd may behave like raindrops, but raindrops never behave like people. They are process oriented, in their approaches, and may involve several iterations of investigative processes."
Christopher Brown-Syed

Economist.com: Geography and the net (9 August 2001)
"Brewster Kahle unlocks the cellar door of a wooden building in San Francisco's Presidio Park. He steps inside, turns on the fluorescent lights to reveal a solid black wall of humming computers, and throws out his arm theatrically. "This", he says, "is the web." It is a seductive idea, but the web isn't really housed in a single San Francisco basement. Mr Kahle's racks of computers merely store archived copies of many of its pages which Alexa, his company, analyses to spot trends in usage. The real Internet, in contrast, is widely perceived as being everywhere, yet nowhere in particular. It is often likened to a cloud.
This perception has prompted much talk of the Internet's ability to cross borders, break down barriers and destroy distance. On the face of it, the Internet appears to make geography obsolete. But the reality is rather more complicated.
[...] To see just how little the Internet resembles a cloud, it is worth taking a look at where the Internet actually is. The answer, in short, is in cities. This is partly a historical accident, says Anthony Townsend, an urban planner at the Taub Urban Research Centre at New York University. He points out that the Internet's fibre-optic cables often piggyback on old infrastructure where a right-of-way has already been established: they are laid alongside railways and roads, or inside sewers. (Engineers installing fibre-optic cables in a New York building recently unearthed a set of pneumatic tubes, along which telegrams and mail used to be sent in the 19th century.) Building the Internet on top of existing infrastructure in this way merely reinforces real-world geography. Just as cities are often railway and shipping hubs, they are also the logical places to put network hubs and servers, the powerful computers that store and distribute data.
[...]
The signs are that the storage of information is going to become even more physically concentrated.
[...]
Mr Townsend notes that cities are, in a sense, vast information storage and retrieval systems, in which different districts and neighbourhoods are organised by activity or social group. A mobile Internet device, he suggests, will thus become a convenient way to probe local information and services."

MSNBC - Making the Ultimate Map by Steven Levy (Newsweek 7 June 2004)
When digital geography teams up with wireless technology and the Web, the world takes on some new dimensions ...
"Digital mapping is about to change our world by documenting the real world, then integrating that information into our computers, phones and lifestyles. Roll over, Mason and Dixon: spurred by space photography, global satellite positioning, mobile phones, search engines and new ways of marking information for the World Wide Web, the ancient art of cartography is now on the cutting edge."

deconstructor: The Ecology of Texts
"I've been thinking about books today, what they are and aren't, how my relationship to them is changing, etc. Two things sparked my imagination: a post by Jason Kottke contrasting the reading experiences of books vs. the web [Using the Memex (kottke.org)], and some interesting new tidbits I came across today about ... Jorge Luis Borges ...
In contrast with Jason's view of books as essentially discrete units ("self-contained"), here's a quotation from what is for me the definitive work on the nature of discourse in all its forms, especially books: The Archaeology of Knowledge, by Michel Foucault:
"The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network..."
[...]
On a related note, difficult-to-classify artist (designer/typographer/musician/performer) Elliott Peter Earls of The Apollo Program has described what he does as "replacing narrative coherence with referential density." For me the phrase referential density holds an abundance of meaning, and goes a long way towards describing the things about life that are most interesting."

The Miseducation of a Designer - Ali Madad et al

"The printed sheet overcomes space and time. The printed sheet, the infinity of the book, has to be overcome." El Lissitzky - The Electro-Library (1923)

A brief history of feedback control - by F.L. Lewis
System Theory:
"It is within the study of systems that feedback control theory has its place in the organization of human knowledge. Thus, the concept of a system as a dynamical entity with definite "inputs" and "outputs" joining it to other systems and to the environment was a key prerequisite for the further development of automatic control theory. The history of system theory requires an entire study on its own, but a brief sketch follows.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the work of A. Smith in economics [The Wealth of Nations, 1776], the discoveries of C.R. Darwin [On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, 1859], and other developments in politics, sociology, and elsewhere were having a great impact on the human consciousness. The study of Natural Philosophy was an outgrowth of the work of the Greek and Arab philosophers, and contributions were made by Nicholas of Cusa (1463), Leibniz, and others. The developments of the nineteenth century, flavored by the Industrial Revolution and an expanding sense of awareness in global geopolitics and in astronomy had a profound influence on this Natural Philosophy, causing it to change its personality.
By the early 1900's A.N. Whitehead [1925], with his philosophy of "organic mechanism", L. von Bertalanffy [1938], with his hierarchical principles of organization, and others had begun to speak of a "general system theory". In this context, the evolution of control theory could proceed."

headmap: magical associations can inhibit if they lack flexibility
"If it is desirable that an environment evoke rich, vivid images, it is also desirable that these images be communicable and adaptable to changing practical needs, and that there can develop new groupings, new meanings, new poetry. The objective might be an imageable environment which is at the same time open-ended."
Kevin Lynch - The Image of the City (MIT Press, 1960, page 139)

The Violets: "A Cosmological Reading of a Cosmology"
"Alfred North Whitehead has an established and central position in the history of American poetry, and the American poet who has made the most profound use of Whitehead's thought is Charles Olson." Robin Blaser

Robert Creeley - Preface to 'Charles Olson' by Tom Clark
"One time at Black Mountain he [Charles Olson] said to me, "I need a college to think with," meaning, I understood, that he wanted the multiplicity of instance, all particular and active, not the discrete or isolating possibilities of a chosen few. "Come into the world," he said, "Take a big bite." It was poetry that could move with the necessary syntax and speed, to 'be here' coincident with recognition, a locating act. Just as Pound's Cantos proved a first time record of human thought so sustained for almost half a century, Olson then moved the art to an exceptional capacity for thinking itself. Given Olson's 'methodology,' a favorite term, poetry had no longer a simply literary or cultural practice. It became, rather, a primary activity and resource for what can be called "historical geography," as Duncan McNaughton notes, adding then with significant emphasis taken from Olson's characteristic friend, the geographer, Carl Sauer, that "nothing whatever is outside the consideration of historical geography."
How needs one say it? A tracking of the earth in time? A place? Olson loved John Smith's curious phrase, "History is the memory of time." Equally he prized the sense of history which he got from Herodotus as against the abstracting Thucydides ..."

in situ: Lived Space in Architecture and Cinema by Juhani Pallasmaa
"Lived space resembles the structures of dream and the unconscious, organized independently of the boundaries of physical space and time. Lived space is always a combination of external space and inner mental space, actuality and mental projection. In experiencing lived space, memory and dream, fear and desire, value and meaning, fuse with the actual perception. Lived space is space that is inseparably integrated with the subject's concurrent life situation. We do not live separately in material and mental worlds; these experiential dimensions are fully intertwined. Neither do we live in an objective world. We live in mental worlds, in which the experienced, remembered and imagined, as well as the past, present and future are inseparably intermixed. 'Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?,' Italo Calvino asks, and continues: 'Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.'"

Jacques Lacan: "The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning."

Lewis Mumford: "In the city, time becomes visible."

"In the world of Charles Darwin, evolution was particulate; it contained and traced the history of fins, claws, wings, and teeth. The Darwinian circle was immersed in the study of the response of the individual organism to its environment, and the selective impact of the environment upon its creatures. By contrast, just as biological evolution had brought the magic of the endlessly new in organic form, so the evolving brain, through speech, had literally created a superorganic structure unimaginable until its emergence.
Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin's contemporary, perceived that with the emergence of the human brain, man had, to a previously inconceivable degree, passed out of the domain of the particulate evolution of biological organs and had entered upon what we may call history."
Loren Eiseley - The Invisible Pyramid (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1971, pages 18-19)

The Nature of Time by Humberto Maturana

"Evolution and design, the course of nature and man's intervention in it, are notions that seem to clash in the dualistic view taken by Western thought. Human action is usually set off against all other movement in the universe. Or if it is recognized as an expression of life at large, the latter is viewed by conventional Western science as a specific, rare, and, in the end, futile process which pushes uphill against the broad stream washing downhill toward increasing randomness and entropy. In such a dualistic view, human life finds its meaning in the margin left between the attitudes of Promethean rebellion and devout fatalism.
Recent breakthroughs in physical science, in particular in the field of nonequilibrium thermodynamics, point the way toward overcoming the duality of older models.
[...] Physical systems, human systems, mind systems ... mutate toward new dynamic regimes whenever they become stifled by the debris of past entropy production."
Erich Jantsch - Design for Evolution: Self-Organization and Planning in the Life of Human Systems (George Braziller, 1975, pages xvi-xvii)

Usability News - Excerpt: Toward a Critical Practice in Design
Malcolm McCullough: "Good design is felt to be communicative. Arguments for design as a liberal art assert that it is principally a communication discipline. Arguments for the importance of artifacts assert that much of this communication is tacit. Cultural expression uses genres and their formal types as a means, not an end. Content is participatory; it is something you do, or perceive, and not simply information you receive."

BookBlog: Topic is a pheromone [vide Ants and Jane Jacobs]
Adina Levin: "Topics serve as pheromones -- people are drawn together by the "smell" of a common interest. It takes an entirely different set of skills to shape those interests into shared meanings, to weave the individuals into a group, to build those shared interests into shared artifacts and actions."

Howard S. Becker - Studying the New Media
"[...] The "impact" approach improperly treats the public as an inert mass which doesn't do anything on its own, but rather just reacts to what is presented to it by powerful (usually commercial) organizations and the representatives of dominant social strata. In some ways, this is a very old theoretical position. The studies of the effects of movies treated moviegoers as passive receptacles who, bombarded by the movies' bad messages, would use them as models for their own lives and thus come to a bad end. The position got a theoretical boost from the Frankfurt School, which developed the image of the mass society, whose puppet members reacted to what the rulers of the society gave them, material which supported and justified the ruling social and political regime.
The image of an inert, passive mass audience is a gross empirical error."

Susan Stepney reviews Stewart & Cohen's 'Figments of Reality'
"This extremely well-written book lucidly weaves together themes of self-organising complexity, co-evolution, cultural capital, and an explanation style that takes into account external 'complicity' as well as internal 'reductionist' ideas. It develops some of the authors' earlier ideas, in particular in The Collapse of Chaos. Stewart and Cohen take the view that in order to explain (human) intelligence, we need to understand its co-evolution with culture.
Evolution is explained using the mathematical idea of phase spaces, here the 'phase spaces of the possible'. Evolution progresses in directions constrained by its phase space, much as the behaviour of a dynamical system evolves in accordance with its phase space. The crucial ingredient, though, is that the phase space is determined by the existing system, and as the system evolves, so does the phase space. So the rules of the game change as evolution progresses. Some evolutionary changes make small 'private' changes to the phase space; the more interesting ones make qualitative, 'public' changes, opening up whole new regions of possibility not available before. For example, early bacteria produced a toxic by-product, oxygen; the new oxygen-rich atmosphere allowed whole new kinds of organisms to evolve. But the most interesting change in the rules of the game from our human perspective was the ability to pass on 'cultural capital' to the next generation, so that each new generation does not have to start from scratch: yolk in eggs, a nest as a protected environment, learning survival tricks from the troupe, and, eventually, being able to tap in to all of the 'extelligence' of human culture."

Stuart A. Umpleby - The Cybernetics of Conceptual Systems - July 8, 1994
"The cybernetics of conceptual systems would be compatible with a "second order game theory," which would go beyond developing strategies to win a struggle with groups composed as they are and instead seek to persuade people to change their conceptualization of the game itself. The meta-game is to change conceptions of the game. The assumption would be that the purposes, motivations, and conceptions of both "allies" and "opponents" can change."

Wired 4.07: From Bauhaus to Koolhaas - July 1996
Heron: Where do you see the future of architecture going?
Koolhaas: With globalization, we all have more or less the same future, but Asia and Africa feel much more new. I've been doing research in China recently, investigating cities that emerge suddenly, in eight years or so, seemingly out of nothing. These places are much more vigorous and representative of the future. There, building something new is a daily pleasure and a daily occurence.
Heron: You're doing a big project in China now, aren't you?
Koolhaas: Yes. Its working title is City of Exacerbated Differences. It is in the Pearl River Delta. It's not a single city but a region inhabited by a cluster of very diverse cities such as Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Guangdong, Zhuhai, and Macau. Together, they may represent a new model of the megalopolis in the sense that their coexistence, their functioning, their legitimacy is determined by their extreme mutual difference.

If in a continuous city a traveler
Rod McLaren: Quotes from and a couple of notes on Calvino's 'Hermit in Paris', in the autobiographic collection of the same name:
"Occasionally I decide spontaneously to set totally imaginary stories in New York, a city in which I have lived only a few months in my life: who knows why, perhaps because New York is the simplest city, at least for me, the epitome of a city, a kind of prototype of a city, as far as its topography, its visual appearance, its society is concerned. Whereas Paris has huge depth, so much behind it, so many meanings."
Paris (and perhaps other old-European cities?) as a sedimentary accretion of so many literary references that it's hard to write anything new without feeling the heavy burden of (literary) history. On the other hand, New York as a template, a machine for generating city-stories (remember that Umberto Eco picked the NYC phone directory as his book on Desert Island Discs for exactly this reason: he could use the list of names as a computer for generating all possible stories)....

Lacan's Baltimore Lecture
"[...] Many people talk nowadays about messages everywhere, inside the organism a hormone is a message, a beam of light to obtain teleguidance to a plane or from a satellite is a message, and so on; but the message in language is absolutely different. The message, our message, in all cases comes from the Other by which I understand "from the place of the Other."
[...] If thought is a natural process, then the unconscious is without difficulty. But the unconscious has nothing to do with instinct or primitive knowledge or preparation of thought in some underground. It is a thinking with words, with thoughts that escape your vigilance, your state of watchfulness. The question of vigilance is important. It is as if a demon plays a game with your watchfulness."

Invisible Cities: Final Exchange of Marco and the Khan - Italo Calvino
The Great Khan's atlas contains also the maps of the promised lands visited in thought but not yet discovered or founded: New Atlantis, Utopia, the City of the Sun, Oceana, Tamoé, New Harmony, New Lanark, Icaria.
Kublai asked Marco: "You, who go about exploring and who see signs, can tell me toward which of these futures the favoring winds are driving us."
"For these ports I could not draw a route on the map or set a date for the landing. At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape, a glint of lights in the fog, the dialogue of two passersby meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them. If I tell you that the city toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop. Perhaps while we speak, it is rising, scattered, within the confines of your empire; you can hunt for it, but only in the way I have said."
Already the Great Khan was leafing through his atlas, over the maps of the cities that menace in nightmares and maledictions: Enoch, Babylon, Yahooland, Butua, Brave New World.
He said: "It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us."
And Polo said: "The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

Emergent Ontologies: A lecture by Gregory Ulmer (August 2000)
I'm going to begin again with Walter Benjamin, from 'One-Way Street'.
"Fools lament the decay of criticism, for its day is long past. Criticism is a matter of correct distancing, it was at home in a world where perspectives and prospects counted, and where it was still possible to take a standpoint. Now things press too closely on human society. The innocent eye has become a lie, perhaps the naive mode of expression, sheer incompetence. Today, the most real, the mercantile gaze into the heart of things is the advertisement. It abolishes the space where contemplation moved and all but hits us between the eyes, with things such as a car growing to gigantic proportion, careening at us out of a film screen. Just as the film does not present furniture and facades in completed forms for critical inspection, its insistent jerky nearness alone being sensational, the genuine advertisement hurtles things at us with the tempo of a good film. What in the end makes advertisement so superior to criticism is not what the moving red neon sign says, but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt."
So we need to work with the fiery pool.

John Banville - Bloomsday, Bloody Bloomsday
"[...] Joyce liked to boast that "Ulysses" was so detailed a portrait of Dublin that if the city were to be destroyed -- an eventuality that in his darker moments of Hibernophobia he would probably have welcomed -- it could be rebuilt brick by brick, using his book as a model. In his essay "The Precession of Simulacra," the French savant Jean Baudrillard recalls the story by Jorge Luis Borges in which the Empire's cartographers spend years drawing up a map so detailed that when it is done it covers exactly the territory of the Empire, and imperial decline is plotted by the fraying of the map until only a few shreds remain. If we were to revive the fable today in our media-dominated world, Baudrillard suggests, the map would have engendered the Empire [...]
Dublin, even well into the 1960's, when I came to live there, was in many respects still the city that Joyce had known and that he celebrated with maniacal exactitude in "Ulysses." All now is changed. True, most of the streets and many of the buildings through which Joyce's characters circulate on their way to eternity are still in existence, but the heart of the place is a transplant from Silicon Valley by way of the poppy fields of Afghanistan: Ireland is the world's largest exporter of computer software, and its capital city is a serious importer of the hardest of hard drugs. Where now is the "real" Dublin?"

Howard S. Becker - Calvino as Urbanologist
"The city of Fedora, for instance, preserves its multiple possible futures as tiny crystal globes in a museum. This reminds us that every city will do something with its possible futures."

BBC News Magazine: What the Victorians can teach us about city life
"[...] In his new book Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City, historian Tristram Hunt ... celebrates the architects, sewer-constructors and local politicians who transformed Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, Bradford and Glasgow into "Venices of the north" in the 19th Century. Indeed, he thinks these Victorian characters can teach us a thing or two about civic pride, city life and intellectual creativity.
[...] Hunt doesn't only pay tribute to the architects who left permanent marks on our cityscapes, but also to the unsung developers of the Victorian age. He hails engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette, who developed a scheme to build an underground network linking together London's 1,000 miles of street-level sewers.
Bazalgette's sewage system took 12 years to complete and it totally transformed London, doing a great deal to combat the spread of disease and allowing Londoners to breathe easier. In 1861, The Observer described it as "the most extensive and wonderful work of modern times".
As Hunt says, developing and building sewers may not be as glamorous as erecting a Gothic-style cathedral, but cities cannot function well without an efficient waste disposal system."
Brendan O'Neill

Big Brother's global controversy - BBC News 18 June 2004
Caroline Westbrook reports: The French equivalent of Big Brother, known as Loft Story, landed in hot water after protestors against the show besieged the location three times in one week and tried to invade the studio. Police had to use tear gas to repel the activists, who complained that "trash TV turns people into idiots".

Book Review: E-topia
"Since new technological systems are complex social constructions, we must understand our emerging options, choose our ends carefully, and build well. Our job is to design the future we want, not to predict its predetermined path."
William J. Mitchell

[City of Bits] 3.7. Brains / Artificial Intelligence
"Long ago the urban theorist Kevin Lynch pointed out the fundamental relationship between human cognition and urban form -- the importance of the learned mental maps that knowledgeable locals carry about inside their skulls. These mental maps, together with the landmarks and edges that provide orientation within the urban fabric, are what make a city seem familiar and comprehensible. But for us artificially intelligent cyborgs, the ability to navigate through the streets and gain access to a city's resources isn't all in our heads. Increasingly, we rely on our electronic extensions -- smart vehicles and hand-held devices, together with the invisible landmarks provided by electronic positioning systems -- to orient us in the urban fabric, to capture and process knowledge of our surroundings, and to get us to where we want to go."

How to recapture cities' civic pride [via cityofsound]
"[Dr Tristram Hunt] ... said the early 19th century industrial revolution sucked millions from the countryside into cities, shattered the human bonds of rural life and caused intolerable squalor. Unpaved streets ran with sewage, rickets and deficiency diseases were rife. The life chances of a slum dweller in early Victorian Glasgow or Liverpool were the lowest since the Black Death. But the cities also forced through religious tolerance, a wider franchise, and repeal of the corn laws. Gradually their nonconformist business elites improved public health and evolved traditions of voluntary activity, local pride and artistic patronage.
The amazing Victorian Gothic of Manchester town hall and magnificent buildings elsewhere celebrated a modern renaissance city state. Later, cities also bred the spirit of municipal socialism, which ran gas, water and electricity more cheaply than private companies ..."
John Ezard

Largest Prime Number discovered - BBC News 7 June 2004
Dr David Whitehouse: "A scientist has used his computer to find the largest prime number found so far -- written out, it would stretch for 25 kilometres. Primes are important to encryption and could lead to uncrackable codes. The new figure, identified by Josh Findley, contains 7,235,733 digits, and would take someone the best part of six weeks to write out longhand. Mr Findley was taking part in a mass computer project known as the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (Gimps).
Mr Findley used his home computer and free software as part of an international grid of 240,000 networked computers."

Man who cracked computer engima - The Scotsman 8 June 2004
Andrew Hodges: "Turing was fascinated by the concept of creating a mathematical machine to represent thought processes, and it was the "Turing Machine" which became the foundation of the modern theories of computer science. He also envisaged a "Universal Turing Machine" - one machine for all possible tasks - which embodied the essential principle of the computer.
Turing's originality lay in seeing the relevance of mathematical logic to a problem originally seen as one of physics. He made a bridge between thought and action, which crossed conventional boundaries."

Primes, the zeta function and 'Li'
A webpage by Matthew Watkins dedicated to the 'Li-ness' of the distribution of primes, and of the (intimately related) Riemann zeta function.

Greatest maths problem 'solved' - BBC News 10 June 2004
Dr David Whitehouse: "A mathematician at Purdue University in the US claims to have proved the Riemann Hypothesis - called the greatest unsolved problem in maths. The hypothesis concerns prime numbers and has stumped the world's mathematicians for more than 150 years.
Now, Professor Louis De Branges de Bourcia has posted a 23-page paper on the internet detailing his attempt at a proof."

Groups, Graphs, and Erdös Numbers - Ivars Peterson
"In general, mathematical research is a remarkably social process. Colleagues meet constantly to compare notes, discuss problems, look for hints, and work on proofs together. The abundance of conferences, symposia, workshops, colloquia, seminars, and other gatherings devoted to mathematical topics attests to a strong desire for interaction. Electronic communication speeds and facilitates such interaction worldwide.
Perhaps more than any other mathematician in modern times, Paul Erdös (1913–1996) epitomized the strength and breadth of mathematical collaboration. Because he had no permanent home and no particular job, Erdös simply traveled from one mathematical center to another, sometimes seeking new collaborators and sometimes continuing a work in progress. His well-being was the collective responsibility of mathematicians throughout the world.
At the time of his death of a heart attack in 1996, Erdös had more than 1,500 published papers to his credit. His interests were mainly in number theory and combinatorics, though they ranged into topology and other areas of mathematics. He was fascinated by relationships among numbers, and numbers served as raw materials for many of his conjectures, questions, and proofs.
What's astonishing, however, is the extent to which Erdös worked with other mathematicians to produce joint papers. Collaboration on such a scale had never been seen before in mathematics, and it has now entered the folklore of the mathematical community.
Of course, there's a characteristically mathematical way to describe this webbiness -- a quantity called the Erdös number."

Paulos reviews Paul Erdös, John Nash books
"Schechter and Hoffman ably describe a number of Erdös' theorems and ideas but, given his wandering lifestyle and his eclectic mathematical interests, the notions of random graphs and phase transitions might be deemed typical. Imagine a country with thousands of isolated cities and a crazy highway commissioner who picks a pair of cities at random and connects them with a road and then picks another pair at random and builds another road. He repeats this procedure and after a while small clusters of cities form that are interconnected. The size of these clusters grows slowly until the number of roads approaches half the number of cities. Suddenly, with the addition of a few more roads, the isolated clusters become interconnected and coalesce to form an immense cluster that includes almost all the cities. The abrupt way this interconnectedness comes about is an instance of a phase transition. It also hints at another of Erdös' preoccupations, Ramsey theory, one of whose primary lessons is that order of some sort is almost inevitable in large structures."

Ramsey theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ramsey theory, named for Frank P. Ramsey, is a branch of mathematics that studies the conditions under which order must appear. Problems in Ramsey theory typically ask a question of the form: how many elements of some structure must there be to guarantee that a particular property will hold? An oft-quoted slogan for the subject is "complete disorder is impossible".

Ramsey Theory -- from MathWorld
"The mathematical study of combinatorial objects in which a certain degree of order must occur as the scale of the object becomes large. Ramsey theory is named after Frank Plumpton Ramsey, who did seminal work in this area before his untimely death at age 26 in 1930. The theory was subsequently developed extensively by Erdös." Eric W. Weisstein

Ramsey Theory
"The idea underlying Ramsey theory is that complete disorder is an impossibility. The appearance of disorder is really a matter of scale. In general, Ramsey theorists seek the smallest "universe" that's guaranteed to contain a certain object." Paul Hoffman

Modelling Selforganization and Innovation Processes in Networks
Abstract: "In this paper we develop a theory to describe innovation processes in a network of interacting units. We introduce a stochastic picture that allows for the clarification of the role of fluctuations for the survival of innovations in such a non-linear system. We refer to the theory of complex networks and introduce the notion of sensitive networks. Sensitive networks are networks in which the introduction or the removal of a node/vertex dramatically changes the dynamic structure of the system. As an application we consider interaction networks of firms and technologies and describe technological innovation as a specific dynamic process. Random graph theory, percolation, master equation formalism and the theory of birth and death processes are the mathematical instruments used in this paper."
Ingrid Hartmann-Sonntag, Andrea Scharnhorst, & Werner Ebeling

Graph theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Graph theory is the branch of mathematics that examines the properties of graphs.
Informally, a graph is a set of objects called vertices (or nodes) connected by links called edges (or arcs). Typically, a graph is depicted as a set of dots (i.e., vertices) connected by lines (i.e., edges).
[...] Structures that can be represented as graphs are ubiquitous, and many problems of practical interest can be formulated as questions about certain graphs. Various networks are conveniently described by means of graphs. For example, the link structure of Wikipedia could be represented by a directed graph: the vertices are the articles in Wikipedia and there's a directed edge from article A to article B if and only if A contains a link to B. Directed graphs are also used to represent finite state machines. The development of algorithms to handle graphs is therefore of major interest in computer science. [...]

"Determinism, like the Queen of England, reigns - but does not govern." Michael Berry

Study of proteins offers insights into organization of biological networks
Research into the many-sided interactions of proteins in yeast cells is revealing that such networks may have something in common with other kinds of systems, from the World Wide Web to the country's electric-power grid.
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute investigators report that "hub" proteins – highly connected proteins that bind to many other proteins in the cell – can be divided into two general groups: "party" hubs, which interact with most of their partner proteins all at once, and "date" hubs, which bind to their partners at different times or locations.
[...] Analyzing data generated by gene-chip technology, investigators found that some hubs are active at the same time as their partners – like bulbs in a flashing sign – while others are active at different times – like bulbs blinking on a Christmas tree. They dubbed the first group "party" hubs and the second group "date" hubs.
When party hubs were taken out of the mix, there was very little effect on the number of protein connections within the cell. When date hubs were removed, however, connection length rose sharply, meaning it takes more "hops" to move between nodes.

Connections: Decyphering the Grammar of Mind, Music and Math
"Gradually over repeated hearings, without the use of a dictionary or any reference to the world outside, music shows how it is to be understood. The listener begins to hear patterns, repeated motifs and changes in meter and realizes that something is happening, that sounds have punctuation, that phrases are being manipulated, transformed and recombined.
Gradually, the listener gains a form of knowledge without ever referring to anything outside the music. Sounds create their own context. They begin to make sense. Similar processes with varying richness and power take place in all forms of music, which is why it is much easier to understand another culture's music than another culture's language.
Nothing else is quite like this self-contained, self-teaching world. Music may be the ultimate self-revealing code; it can be comprehended in a locked room. This is one reason that connections with mathematics are so profound. Though math requires reference to the world, it too proceeds by noting similarities and variations in patterns, in contemplating the structure of abstract systems, in finding the ways its elements are manipulated, connected and transformed. Mathematics is done the way music is understood."
Edward Rothstein

New Scientist: AI and A-Life: There's an ant in my phone...
Would you let ants run the digital superhighways of the future? Even if they were smart little programs and getting smarter all the time? Mark Ward wonders ...

Kevin Kelly - The algorithmic genius of ants
"A group of researchers in Milan, Italy, have come up with a few new varieties of evolution and learning. Their methods fill a few holes in Ackley's proposed "space of all possible types of computation." Because they were inspired by the collective behavior of ant colonies, the Milan group call their searches "Ant Algorithms."
Ants have distributed parallel systems all figured out. Ants are the history of social organization and the future of computers. A colony may contain a million workers and hundreds of queens, and the entire mass of them can build a city while only dimly aware of one another. Ants can swarm over a field and find the choicest food in it as if the swarm were a large compound eye. They weave vegetation together in coordinated parallel rows, and collectively keep their nest at a steady temperature, although not a single ant has ever lived who knows how to regulate temperature."

Collective Intelligence in Social Insects
Introduction & Self-Organisation
"It wasn't so long ago that the waggledance of the honey bee, the nest-building of the social wasp, and the construction of the termite mound were considered a somewhat magical aspect of nature. How could these seemingly uncommunicative, certainly very simple creatures be responsible for such epic feats of organisation and creativity? Over the last fifty years biologists have unravelled many of the mysteries surrounding social insects, and the last decade has seen an explosion of research in fields variously referred to as Collective Intelligence, Swarm Intelligence and emergent behaviour. Even more recently the swarm paradigm has been applied to a broader range of studies, opening up new ways of thinking about theoretical biology, economics and philosophy. It turns out that not only might we, as multi-cellular organisms, be composed of swarms, but so could our societies, economies and perhaps even our minds. In this essay I will outline three of the most promising areas of social insect-inspired AI: ant-based search algorithms, Particle Swarm Optimisation and swarm robotics, and hopefully provide an insight into how these studies have grown out of a small niche of A-life research into an all-encompassing new way of thinking."
David Gordon

Google + Blogger = Stigmergy
Matt Webb: Imagine, searching at Google, and then:
* this trail is highly followed
* do you only want to see what people suggest, or where people went?
* here's a worn track in the interweb. Follow the Google Pixie!
* this trail is uncommon, but made by someone we see (by your weblog) that you value
Or, more succinctly, stigmergy.

"It is possible to arrange a series of nodes to form a related structure. They can be linked together by close juxtaposition or by allowing them to be intervisible [...]
They may be put in some common relation to a path or edge, joined by a short linking element, or related by an echo of some characteristic from one to the other."
Kevin Lynch - The Image of the City (MIT Press, 1960, page 103)

Stigmergy
"We have already seen the usefulness of what Grassé calls "stigmergy" for the solution of a general type of complex problem by a not-so-complex organism, the Argentine ant. But these ants don't live to solve problems (unlike the numerous robotic and computational ants designed in their image), they solve problems to live -- so what happens after the problem, when the food source is depleted? The articulated path is no longer a solution, but an initial condition; the autocatalytic mechanism no longer a bridge, but a prison. Once again, the answer lies between the ants, in the pheromone-ground. When the food disappears, the ants will not emit pheromone and, over time, the pheromone already on the ground will evaporate, leaving them free to explore.
Stigmergy, in this instance, operates as a kind of distributed memory within the landscape, capable of both remembering and forgetting. It suggests that we should not only speak of the ants in isolation (as individuals) or the colony in abstract (as a group of individuals), but instead, of the ant-pheromone pheromone-ground, as a peculiar kind of organism."

Definitions of stigmergy
Istvan Karsai: "Grassé coined the term stigmergy (previous work directs and triggers new building actions) to describe a mechanism of decentralized pathways of information flow in social insects. In general, all kinds of multi-agent groups require coordination for their effort and it seems that stigmergy is a very powerful means to coordinate activity over great spans of time and space in a wide variety of systems. In a situation in which many individuals contribute to a collective effort, such as building a nest, stimuli provided by the emerging structure itself can provide a rich source of information ..."

The Ants are Blogging
Ross Mayfield: "Perhaps each blog post is a possible path (a meme)."

posted by Andrew 6/19/2004 06:14:00 PM

Thursday, June 03, 2004

 
Emergent Internet Operating System

Subject: Emergent Internet Operating System
Clay Shirky: "We never got too far discussing the idea of an emergent Internet Operating System, but there are kinds of thoughts you can have with that frame of reference you can't have in a reductionist framework of assuming that operating systems are merely what runs individual machines. (You could also think of this as an "internet platform", following Winer's "The internet is a platform without a platform vendor" idea.)
Someone said, roughly, "applications don't run across groups of computers, they run on individual computers, while communicating with one another using protocols." Now this is perfectly true, but at a cost of obscuring some important effects. The phrases "Neurons do the chemical work of the brain within their individual cell walls, and communicate with one another using ions" or "Ants do the work of the colony, while communicating with one another using pheromones" are also true in exactly the same way, but whatever the neurons are doing, they are not thinking, and whatever life cycle the ants have, it is not the life cycle of a colony.
The world is rife with membrane+communication channel systems, including games (bridge players communicating with cards) to markets (businesses have all sorts of membranes, from confidentiality agreements to NAT, but use much narrower channels -- vendor contracts, firewalls, NASDAQ -- to interface with the outside world) and so on.
If you want to think systemically, about the mind as opposed to neurons, say, or about the behavior of colonies as opposed to the behavior of ants, you have to take both the membrane-enclosed entities (the classic operating system) and the communication channels (the protocols) as a whole. At that point, some of the behaviors of the system look like the behavior of the individual elements (thoughts, like stimuli, come and go; colonies, like ants, are born, age, and die), but only if you are willing to accept a certain amount of metaphorical translation."

On the Trail of the Memex by Dennis G. Jerz
"Hypertext as mediated by the Web browser has not proved to embody the qualities of the ideal post-structural text longed for by literary theorists such as George Landow; neither has the World Wide Web fulfilled the document-association function of the memex, the hypothetical research tool Vannevar Bush described in his 1945 essay, As We May Think. Bush's memex was not merely a form of photo-mechanical hypertext, but also a means for the full-scale transfer of complex collaborative thought processes, as encoded by individual researchers via their own personal document association schemas. While weblogs, the most influential textual genre truly native to the World Wide Web, do facilitate the exchange of information across the Internet, that information must be carefully filtered in order to be useful. Google's February 2003 purchase of the popular weblogging platform Blogger signals a shift towards content production that may create a conflict of interest; nevertheless, Google's proven ability to mine the data encoded in annotated trails of linked documents may create the synergy necessary to fulfill Vannevar Bush's vision."

Memex construction nearing completion? - McGee's Musings
Jim McGee: "What Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, weblogs, and now Google are all demonstrating is that the boundaries between organizations and disciplines are arbitrary. It's the connections and the trails that matter. It's just taken a lot longer to build it than we would have liked. With a bit of luck we'll find out that we've managed to build it in time."

O'Reilly Network: The Emergent Internet Operating System - 19 August 2001

"In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."
Eric Hoffer

Netvironments : GooBlogger Condensate

"It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web -- build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank.
Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation..."
Larry Page

Don Park's Daily Habit - 23 February 2003
"Bloggers are ants. Blogspace is a massive ant colony. Like ants, bloggers roam the Web in search of information (food) and lay articles and links (pheromone trails) for other bloggers (ants) to follow."

OpenP2P.com: Swarm Intelligence: An Interview with Eric Bonabeau
EB: Human beings suffer from a "centralized mindset"; they would like to assign the coordination of activities to a central command. But the way social insects form highways and other amazing structures such as bridges, chains, nests (by the way, African fungus-growing termites have invented air conditioning) and can perform complex tasks (nest building, defense, cleaning, brood care, foraging, etc) is very different: they self-organize through direct and indirect interactions.
In social insects, errors and randomness are not "bugs"; rather, they contribute very strongly to their success by enabling them to discover and explore in addition to exploiting. Self-organization feeds itself upon errors to provide the colony with flexibility (the colony can adapt to a changing environment) and robustness (even when one or more individuals fail, the group can still perform its tasks).
With self-organization, the behavior of the group is often unpredictable, emerging from the collective interactions of all of the individuals. The simple rules by which individuals interact can generate complex group behavior. Indeed, the emergence of such collective behavior out of simple rules is one the great lessons of swarm intelligence."

O'Reilly Network: Inventing the Future - 9 April 2002 [via cityofsound]
"[...] While entrepreneurs mired in the previous generation of computing built massive server farms to host downloadable music archives, Shawn Fanning, a young student who'd grown up in the age of the Internet, asked himself, "Why do I need to have all the songs in one place? My friends already have them. All I need is a way for them to point to each other." When everyone is connected, all that needs to be centralized is the knowledge of who has what."
Tim O'Reilly

Tech Talk: Constructing the Memex: Emergic.org [April-May-June 2003]
In a vast-active-lucid-intelligent-systematic-essay Rajesh Jain explores the question: "Do we wait for Google to construct the Memex? Or, can we – lots of us – build it in an emergent fashion?"

Salon.com Technology: Steven Johnson on the Blogbrain - 10 May 2002
"The true revolution promised by the rise of bloggerdom is not about journalism. It's about information management. The bloggers have the potential to do something far more original than offer up packaged opinions on the news of the day; they can actually help organize the Web in ways tailored to your minute-by-minute needs. Often dismissed as self-obsessed "vanity sites," the bloggers actually have an important collective role to play on the Web. But they're not challengers to the throne of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. They're challengers to the throne of Google."

Steven Johnson: Google's Memory Upgrade - Slate Magazine - 6 March 2003
"Bush imagined the Memex as a machine of connected documents that from one angle looks a great deal like the modern, Web-enabled computer. But in one crucial respect, Bush's vision differed from today's Web: He placed great importance on the trails created as the user moved through information space, assuming that a record of those trails would be of great use in amplifying the signal of human memory. In many ways, our networked computers have wildly exceeded Bush's vision, but our trail-recording tools are still woefully undernourished."

The Unconscious is Structured Like a City: Freud, Lacan, and the Project of the Human Sciences - by Peter Caws

"It is beginning to look, given the evidence from deep ocean vents, as if the old cybernetic claim -- that combinatorial possibilities in energy-rich environments lead necessarily to the emergence of ordered structures -- was right. If these structures include transcription mechanisms they may be self-reproducing, and there you are: life.
Where it goes from there will involve some variant on a basic natural-selection scenario -- proliferation, competition, elimination -- and on what Buckminster Fuller used to call the "critical path," the series of chances that mean the difference between survival and extinction as much for organisms as for ideas."
Peter Caws speaking at the first public symposium on ALH 84001
[As cited by Michael Ray Taylor in Dark Life: Martian Nanobacteria, Rock-Eating Cave Bugs, and Other Extreme Organisms of Inner Earth and Outer Space (Bloomsbury, 2000, page 132)]

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (Scribner, September 2001)
Steven Johnson: "Histories of intellectual development - the origin and spread of new ideas - usually come in two types of packages: either the "great man" theory, where a single genius has a eureka moment in the lab or the library and the world is immediately transformed; or the "paradigm shift" theory, where the occupants of the halls of science awake to find an entirely new floor has been built on top of them, and within a few years, everyone is working out of the new offices. Both theories are inadequate: the great-man story ignores the distributed, communal effort that goes into any important intellectual advance, and the paradigm-shift model has a hard time explaining how the new floor actually gets built. I suspect Mitch Resnick's slime mold simulation may be a better metaphor for the way idea revolutions come about: think of those slime mold cells as investigators in the field; think of those trails as a kind of institutional memory. With only a few minds exploring a given problem, the cells remain disconnected, meandering across the screen as isolated units, each pursuing its own desultory course. With pheromone trails that evaporate quickly, the cells leave no trace of their progress - like an essay published in a journal that sits unread on a library shelf for years. But plug more minds into the system and give their work a longer, more durable trail - by publishing their ideas in best-selling books, or founding research centers to explore those ideas - and before long the system arrives at a phase transition: isolated hunches and private obsessions coalesce into a new way of looking at the world, shared by thousands of individuals."

Wladawksy-Berger Unplugged: 'The Net will transform everything' - 15 May 2002
Wladawksy-Berger: "Grid computing is extending the Internet to be able to become a computing platform. Let me explain. The Internet is a great network with TCP/IP supporting all kinds of network accesses. It's a great communications mechanism with e-mail and instant messaging, and of course with the Worldwide Web, it's a fantastic repository of content.
We now want to take it to the next level in which applications can be distributed all over the Internet, and they can access all the resources that they need, and of course are allowed to access with the proper security even though they are distributed over the Internet. To have such distributed applications you need a set of protocols that everybody can use. That's what the grid community has been building, and that is what the grid computing is about."

Neo-Confucian Critique of Western Values
Don Baker writes: "The universe Thomas Aquinas conceived in Latin consisted of autonomous islands of being, enriched by attributes of appearance and function affixed to those separate substances. In contrast, a network of interrelated events constituted the Neo-Confucian cosmos. As in the modern process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), an object in Neo-Confucianism was interpreted as a focus for activity rather than as a nodule of being. Neo-Confucians identified an entity by those patterns which determined that entity's relationships with other entities. In other words, a Neo-Confucian entity was defined by how it fit into and interacted with its environment. In contrast, Thomistic philosophers formulated definitions based on those static characteristics which distinguished entities from the other entities around them. Thomistics preferred to define an entity by separating it from its environment. This Thomistic conception of substance as independent existence was almost incomprehensible to eighteenth-century Koreans who saw the entire universe as one vast interrelated organism."

The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge by Jean-François Lyotard (1979)
"A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before. Young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, a person is always located at "nodal points" of specific communication circuits, however tiny these may be. Or better: one is always located at a post through which various kinds of messages pass. No one, not even the least privileged among us, is ever entirely powerless over the messages ..."

Mitch Kapor's Weblog: Korea and the Political Promise of the Net - 19 April 2004
"In December 2002, the Uri party used the Net to go around Korea's traditional political structures and elect Roh Moo-hyun President. Korea's national politics have traditionally been regionally based. However, using the Net, the Uri put together a new political coalition based not on geography, but age, bringing together those under 30. Paradoxically, the Uri also used the Net to involve citizens at local face to face meetings.
The Net was used to begin to break the overwhelming political influence of Korea's giant corporate conglomerates, the chaebols, who funded (both legally and illegitimately) much of Korea's politics. The Uri use the Net to help fund their campaign with tens of thousands of small contributions.
Just as importantly, the Net allowed the Uri to go around Korea's established status quo political media. One Net news organization, Ohmynews, is helping redefine journalism. Founded only four years ago, the online news service can gets as many as 20 million hits a day in a country of 40 million. While Ohmynews has 40 full time employees, it uses over 23,000 "citizen reporters," and editorial policy is voted on by their readership."

Alan Dix: The Ecology of Information

"For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday." Ludwig Wittgenstein

Smooth Spaces and Rough-Edged Places: The Hidden History of Place
Ed Casey: "The difference between space and place is one of the best-kept secrets in philosophy. Above all in modern philosophy, where the very distinction came to be questioned and then discredited: one way of understanding modernity, as I shall suggest later on, is by its very neglect of this distinction. The ancient world, however, knew otherwise -- knew better. Indeed, the pre-modern and the post-modern join forces in a common recognition of the importance of place as something essentially other than space, something one cannot afford to ignore in its very difference from space.
[...]
It is my view that, contra Koyré, the advent of the infinity of space was to begin with (and perhaps most enduringly) the creation of the late Neoplatonic period of Hellenistic philosophy. The idea of such infinity was available ever since Philoponus espoused a truly "cosmical extension." In this light, later and more celebrated thinkers such as Giordano Bruno and Nicolas of Cusa only pursued the idea to its bitter end -- for instance, in the extreme notion that there is not just infinite space but an infinite number of worlds in such space. This latter was an idea for which Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600, suggesting that the seventeenth century opened with the effort to suppress infinite space. Leading thinkers of this century continued to dispute such space, especially insofar as it entailed the void, concerning which Locke and Newton were supportive, and Descartes and Leibniz virulently opposed: their very variance on this issue exhibiting the uncertain destiny of infinite space during the century.
[...]
If space and place are both utterly relational, a sheer order of co-existing points, then they will not retain any of the inherent properties ascribed to place by ancient and early modern philosophers: properties of encompassing, holding, sustaining, gathering, situating ("situation" in Leibniz does not situate at all; it merely positions in a nexus of relations). So as not to incriminate Leibniz unduly, let me simply say that he brought to its logical term the full implications of the stranglehold of simple location in which so many of his immediate predecessors were also ensnared. As Whitehead himself points out, the direct result of simple location in philosophy as in physics is the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. For our purposes, this means a loss of the concrete particularity of place as well as the abstract absoluteness of infinite space -- and the dissolution of both in the emptiness of sites."

French Theory and Criticism: 1968 and After
"Serres argues that communication is determined by chance and is not, strictly speaking, a reversible process. Meaning is determined by the unpredictable interruption of non-meaning, parasitic intrusions that ultimately become nodal points for new signifying systems." Herman Rapaport

Catastrophe, Chaos, Complexity, Theory
"Must we choose between Wilden's scientific modernism and Deleuze and Guattari's poetic postmodernism? We think not. Depending upon the task at hand, one might like to make use of either of these tools, or perhaps even both of them at the same time, leaving the contradictions in place and not attempting any sort of 'synthesis' that would 'reconcile' them and drain each of its particularity. We see complexity theory, then, as being both modern and postmodern, and would like to see this contradictory position not only maintained, but pushed to its limits, where it might slide over into a chaotic regime and give rise to forms not yet imagined."
Richard Day & Guy Letts

American Scientist Online - Putting Genes in Perspective
David W. Pfennig: "An unfortunate outgrowth of the modern revolution in genetics is the widespread belief that the genes of an individual organism determine its appearance, physiology and behavior. The genome does not, of course, completely determine how an organism is constructed: The environment is an essential partner. Nowhere is this point more clearly illustrated than by the principle of developmental plasticity -- the tendency for genetically identical organisms to differ in response to various environmental stimuli, or for individuals to vary over time as the result of changing conditions in their surroundings. For example, in many reptile species, incubation temperature determines gender. Likewise, certain insects develop wings only if they live in crowded conditions (and hence are likely to run out of adequate food). Indeed, environmentally mediated developmental flexibility is so ubiquitous that it can be regarded as a universal property of living things."

Rethinking Genetic Determinism by Paul H. Silverman
With only 30,000 genes, what is it that makes humans human?
"[...] Mary Jane West-Eberhard explored the potential of combinatorial evolution in a recent, stunningly comprehensive book, Developmental Plasticity and Evolution. She summarizes how a combination of exon-shuffling and protein-domain rearrangements can result in the evolution and selection of new patterns without the need for de novo components such as mutations. And she notes that Keese and Gibbs have postulated that a mere 7,000 exons can account for all known proteins."

Mae-Wan Ho: Thinking again of life's miracle
"The organic whole is an ideal democracy of distributed control. It does not work in terms of a hierarchy of controller versus the controlled, but by intercommunication."

The emergence of form by replication - Velarde, Nekorkin, Kazantsev, and Ross
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA - Vol. 94, pp. 5024-5027, May 1997
[Abstract] "It is shown with a simple mathematical model that if a system exhibits a given form (a spatial structure) and is put in contact with another system of the same type but in a state of spatial disorder, then under certain conditions their mutual interaction as they evolve in time allows replication of form in the disordered system with a controllable degree of faithfulness."

Source Code
"I did avoid the Internet, but only until the advent of the Web turned it into such a magnificent opportunity to waste time that I could no longer resist. Today I probably spend as much time there as I do anywhere, although the really peculiar thing about me, demographically, is that I probably watch less than twelve hours of television in a given year, and have watched that little since age fifteen. (An individual who watches no television is still a scarcer beast than one who doesn't have an email address.) I have no idea how that happened. It wasn't a decision." William Gibson

Macroscopic and Microscopic Processes of Evolution of Evolutionary Processes

"The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." William Gibson

GooOS, the Google Operating System : kottke.org : 6 April 2004
"[Google] have this huge map of the Web and are aware of how people move around in the virtual space it represents. They have the perfect place to store this map (one of the world's largest computers that's all but incapable of crashing). And they are clever at reading this map. Google knows what people write about, what they search for, what they shop for, they know who wants to advertise and how effective those advertisements are, and they're about to know how we communicate with friends and loved ones. What can they do with all that? Just about anything that collection of Ph.Ds can dream up.
Tim O'Reilly has talked about various bits from the Web morphing into "the emergent Internet operating system"; the small pieces loosely joining, if you will. Google seems to be heading there already, all by themselves. By building and then joining a bunch of the small pieces by themselves, Google can take full advantage of the economies of scale and avoid the difficulties of interop.
[...] Who needs Windows when anyone can have free unlimited access to the world's fastest computer running the smartest operating system? Mobile devices don't need big, bloated OSes...they'll be perfect platforms for accessing the GooOS."
Jason Kottke

Topix.net Weblog: The Secret Source of Google's Power
"Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.
While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.
This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system?"
Rich Skrenta

Richard Hackathorn: The Link is the Thing - Part 1
"In many physical and social systems, the important characteristic is that it is composed of a loosely coupled network of interacting autonomous elements. It is not a homogeneous mass. The whole system behaves quite differently than that of the individual elements."

Tim O'Reilly - The Software Paradigm Shift
"I really believe we are moving to a very, very different computing paradigm where applications actually live on the network. I mean, where exactly does Google live? It lives obviously on Google's bank of servers, but it also lives in a PC-based application. So we're really starting to see what Dave Stutz famously called "software above the level of a single device" and "software above the level of a single operating system." You have people throwing around words like "pervasive computing" and the like."

Emergic.org: Gmail and the Internet OS [17 April 2004]
Rajesh Jain says: Tim O'Reilly puts Google's Gmail in a wider context:
"Gmail is fascinating to me as a watershed event in the evolution of the internet. In a brilliant Copernican stroke, gmail turns everything on its head, rejecting the personal computer as the center of the computing universe, instead recognizing that applications revolve around the network as the planets revolve around the Sun. But Google and gmail go even further, making the network itself disappear into the universal virtual computer, the internet as operating system.
[...] Until I heard about gmail, I was convinced that the future "internet operating system" would have the same characteristics as Linux and the Internet. That is, it would be a network-oriented operating system, consisting of what David Weinberger calls "small pieces loosely joined" (or more recently and more cogently, a "world of ends"). I saw this as an alternative to operating systems that work on the "one ring to rule them all principle" -- a monolithic architecture where the application space is inextricably linked with the operating system control layers. But gmail, in some sense, shows us that once storage and bandwidth become cheap enough, a more tightly coupled, centralized architecture is a real alternative, even on the internet. (I have to confess that was one of the wake up calls to me in Rich Skrenta's piece, linked to above.)
But in the end, I believe that the world we're building is too complex for tight coupling to be the dominant paradigm. It will be a long time, if ever, before any one company is in control of enough programs and enough devices and enough data to start dictating to consumers and competitors what innovations will be allowed. We're entering a period of renewed competition and innovation in the computer industy, a period that will utterly transform the technology world we know today.
I love Dave Stutz's phrase, "software above the level of a single device." We're used to thinking of software as something that runs on the machine in front of us, its complex dance hidden by the blank metal and plastic of the hardware that houses it. But now, computers are everywhere, and each dance has many partners, a whirling exchange of data that will be made visible when and where we want it. It's not the machine or even the software that matters, it's the information and services that travel over the hardware and software "wires." Gmail's introduction of large amounts of free online storage for application data is an important next step in freeing us from the shackles of the desktop.
This isn't to say that there aren't important issues raised by the internet paradigm shift. The big question to me isn't privacy, or control over software APIs, it's who will own the data. What's critical is that gmail makes a commitment to data migration capabilities, so the service isn't a one way door to the future. I want to be able to switch to alternate providers if the competition makes a better offer. The critical enabler is going to be the ability to extract my data and connections so that I can work with them on multiple devices, for example, syncing my laptop or phone with my gmail account rather than having to work only in a tethered fashion. I understand why gmail doesn't offer this feature now, but it's going to be essential in the long term."
Tim O'Reilly

John Battelle's Searchblog: The Database of Intentions [via Google Blogoscoped]
"The Database of Intentions is simply this: The aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result. It lives in many places, but three or four places in particular hold a massive amount of this data (ie MSN, Google, and Yahoo). This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind - a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, supoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends. Such a beast has never before existed in the history of culture, but is almost guaranteed to grow exponentially from this day forward. This artifact can tell us extraordinary things about who we are and what we want as a culture. And it has the potential to be abused in equally extraordinary fashion."
John Battelle (co-founder of Wired and author of upcoming book "The Search: Business and Culture in the Age of Google" (Penguin/Putnam/Portfolio 2004)

John Battelle's Searchblog: The Web As Platform

"The confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work." Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations

Henri Bergson: Creative Evolution: Chapter 2: The Divergent Directions of the Evolution of Life -- Torpor, Intelligence, Instinct
"The instrument constructed intelligently ... reacts on the nature of the being that constructs it; for in calling on him to exercise a new function, it confers on him, so to speak, a richer organization, being an artificial organ by which the natural organism is extended. For every need that it satisfies, it creates a new need; and so, instead of closing, like instinct, the round of action within which the animal tends to move automatically, it lays open to activity an unlimited field into which it is driven further and further, and made more and more free."

Jim Bassett's Weblog - Tuesday 12 March 2002
"[...] What exactly do you do on the internet? Just why is it so great? I mean for someone who doesn't already think so. It's a hard question to answer.
Here's my first try:
It's not so much that I want the net in order to accomplish some particular activity. Instead, having net access is a way of being. A way of doing things in the real world. And it boils down to this: I used to put off learning. I'd come to some problem and think, "you know, I really should figure this out some day." But I usually wouldn't do it. And once I put off learning something, I usually have to wait for it to come back up as a problem before I think to figure it out again. But with net access the answer is always just a google away. And I really do it. All my "I wonder...." moments are now swiftly met by a "hold on...." click, click, google, click, "...right, here it is."
And the benefit is not so much in finding all this information. It's more in my changing expectations. I expect to be able to find the answer to almost anything, right away, by myself. This is tremendously empowering. Just knowing that I have access to almost all knowledge changes everything about me. It makes me better. More curious. More independent.
But I still have no answer to my friend's question. I don't so much "do" stuff on the net (well, not counting my programming time.) I do things in the real world, and the net is there to back me up. The net is there to let me be my own expert. Even at things I don't know much about. I can't wait until I'm wirelessly connected all the time. My guess is that as this happens the question of "what do you do on the internet?" will make less and less sense. Like asking "what do you do in your long term memory?" Well, nothing, but you use it all the time. And you certainly couldn't get along without it."

Cognitive Complexity vs. Connectivity: efficiency analyses of hypertext networks
"Hypertext networks are in many ways highly similar to human long term memory, structurally as well as functionally. Both hypertext networks and human long term memory store information by coding its meaning in a distributed network of relations between semantic sub-components. Both are used and browsed for retrieval in similar ways. The results from psychological research concerning the relationship between the complexity of stored items and the speed with which they are recovered from human long term memory, might aid in understanding why certain hypertext networks perform better than others."
Johan Bollen

IMA Annual Program: Probability and Statistics in Complex Systems: Genomics, Networks, and Financial Engineering, September 2003 - June 2004

Metaphoric Shift: From causal chain to relational net
"This shift, from "chain" to "net" as working metaphor is, it seems, part of the general shift of figure going on in Western thought and science. Vico in the Scienza Nuova is already rejecting, as a basis for his thinking about history, not merely the familiar "blind concourse of atoms" but also, in his own phrase, the "deaf chain of causes and effects," his metaphor pointing up a lack of necessary organic qualities in such figures. In 1803 the phrase, "the kindling net," is used in Erasmus Darwin's poem, The Temple of Nature, to express the spread of organic life over the globe. Carlyle, in his essay "On History," 1830, says, "Alas for our 'chains,' or chainlets, of 'causes and effects,' which we so assiduously track through certain handbreadths of years and square miles, when the whole is a broad, deep Immensity, and each atom is 'chained' and complected with all!" Once again it is Dr. Needham, in Vol. II [reviewed here] of Science and Civilisation in China (see particularly Section 13, pp. 280 ff.) who draws attention to what is happening in the figurative thinking of Western science, and the contribution that can be made by the characteristic thought-patterns of Chinese science: "A number of modern students ... have named the kind of thinking with which we have here to do, 'coordinative thinking' or 'associative thinking.' This intuitive-associative system has its own causality and its own logic. It is not either superstition or primitive superstition [sic] but a characteristic thought-form of its own.... In coordinative thinking, conceptions are not subsumed under one another, but placed side by side in a pattern, and things influence one another not by acts of mechanical causation but by a kind of 'inductance' ... The key-word in Chinese thought is Order, and above all Pattern (and if I may whisper it for the first time, Organism) ... Things ... were thus parts in existential dependence upon the whole world-organism. And they reacted upon one another not so much by mechanical impulsion or causation as by a kind of mysterious resonance" (Pp. 280-81. Italics in the original). After connecting this type of thinking, in differing ways, with Blake, Lévy-Bruhl, and Whitehead whom he considers the supreme example of it in the West so far, and after introducing the great metaphor of the dance for this moving pattern of relations, Dr. Needham sums up in one sentence: "In such a system causality is reticular and hierarchically fluctuating, not particulate and singly catenarian." Out of which corruscation of Latinity let us extricate our metaphors, for reticulum is a net and catena a chain. That the net, now become a key figure, is to be thought of in terms of organic and not mechanical structure is brought out a little later: "The characteristic Chinese concept of causality in the world of Nature was something like that which the comparative physiologist has to form when he studies the nerve-net of coelenterates, or what has been called the 'endocrine orchestra' of mammals. In these phenomena it is not very easy to find out which element is taking the lead at any given time. The image of an orchestra evokes that of a 'conductor' but we still have no idea what the 'conductor' of the synergistic operations of the endocrine glands in the higher vertebrates may be. Moreover, it is now becoming probable that the higher nervous centres of mammals and man himself constitute a kind of reticular continuum or 'nerve-net' much more flexible in nature than the traditional conceptions of telephone wires and exchanges visualised. At one time one gland or nerve-centre may take the highest place in a hierarchy of causes and effects, at another time another, hence the phrase 'hierarchically fluctuating'. All this is quite a different mode of thought from the simple 'particulate' or 'billiard-ball' view of causality" (p. 289)."
Elizabeth Sewell - The Human Metaphor (University of Notre Dame Press, 1964, pages 121-122)

Wired 3.06: A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain

"And you were successful, Mr. Laney?" Yamazaki asked. "You found the ... nodal points?"

posted by Andrew 6/03/2004 05:21:00 PM

Monday, May 17, 2004

 
In Search of the Mother of All Networks

Motifs distinguish networks by Kimberly Patch (Technology Research News)
"There are many types of networks in the world -- computer webs like the Internet, connections among components in electronics, relationships among friends and acquaintances, transportation grids, food relationships among animals, connections among neurons, and interactions among genes.
Scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and [Cold] Spring Harbor Laboratory have shown that it is possible to categorize networks by looking at certain recurring circuits, or motifs, within the networks. "The motifs are small, local, wiring patterns that occur throughout the network," said Uri Alon, a senior scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science."

Susan Stepney reviews Stuart A. Kauffman
"[...] Macready and Wolpert's "no-free-lunch" theorem tells us that there is no one search algorithm better than any other when its performance is averaged over all search landscapes. Random search is as good as any other on average. So how come the search algorithms evolution uses just happen to be ones that work well on the evolutionary fitness landscape? Coincidence? No. The creatures and the fitness landscapes co-construct each other ..."

Prolegomenon to a General Biology [vide Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences]

"If the day should ever come that we understand how life emerges from a dance of lifeless chemicals, or how consciousness arises from billions of unconscious neurons, that understanding will surely rest on a deep theory of complex networks."
Steven Strogatz - Sync : The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order
(Penguin, 2004, page 232)

Stuart A. Kauffman - Working for a Living
"There is a chance that there are general laws. I've thought about four of them. One of them says that autonomous agents have to live the most complex game that they can. The second has to do with the construction of ecosystems. The third has to do with Per Bak's self-organized criticality in ecosystems. And the fourth concerns the idea of the adjacent possible."

Investigations by Stuart A. Kauffman [via Alamut]
A reader from Rockville, MD USA writes: "Investigations" marks a new phase in Stuart Kauffman's seminal work on self-organization and complexity. In this fascinating extension of his theoretical approach to the generation of order in the universe, he focuses on the idea of the autonomous agent, which forms the basis for a new and more precise definition of the living organism. The autonomous agent, according to Kauffman, is an organization of matter that extracts works from its environment in order to maintain its structural and functional integrity over time. An autonomous agent is one that does work on its own behalf. Kauffman goes into considerable physical detail to show how this is not only possible but inevitable. Because of the intimate relation between work and self-maintenance in this schema, Kauffman speaks of organisms as exemplifying a fourth law of thermodynamics that allows for increasing organizational complexity in the midst of a universe whose entropy is constantly increasing.
The fourth law explains how the diversity of the biosphere continues to increase through an exploration of "the adjacent possible," the realm of alternative organizations reachable through single mutations. In this view, the proliferation of life forms is not so much the result of chance as it is of a working out of the natural tendency of existing entities to self-organize into structures of greater and greater complexity.

Smart Mobs: MeshForum - A conference on networks
Network is a term with increasing use today. It covers historical meanings such as "network news", more recent meanings [such as] "terrorist networks", and popular meanings such as "business networking" or "networking for a job". In more formal terms, Networks are interconnected nodes, the study of networks is the study of these systems, generally over time. It covers the mapping and identification of the system of interconnected elements, the study of how this interaction occurs or can occur (i.e. the links and "using" them). It also covers how such systems change over time and what 'shapes' are formed, as well as what other properties can be discovered (such as not just that "a path exists" but studying how paths are found and "used").
For MeshForum, networks mean many things.

Gary Singh reviews Uncanny Networks
Joel Slayton, director of the CADRE Laboratory for New Media at San Jose State University, wrote the forward for Uncanny Networks. "Silicon Valley doesn't sit in the world autonomously by itself," he warns. "The Internet has created a distributed consciousness throughout the world, resulting in people working and thinking about technology in many different ways. And we often aren't conscious of the fact that there are other ways of looking at the issues surrounding networked culture and the emergence of new media. Geert Lovink has been traveling the world, interviewing new media artists and artists working with networked technology and getting their viewpoints. It's important to hear what he has to say."

The Erasure of Technology in Cultural Critique
"Technological exteriority cannot be bracketed off and posed as a question. In particular, it cannot be bracketed off from the human being as a creature that invents itself within technics (Stiegler, 1998: 134, and for Stiegler, as for Derrida, language is a form of technics). Technology infiltrates agency, it interferes with the way in which we formulate the question – and not just in Haraway's sense of the polymorphic, semi-permeable cyborg. This is not a metaphor for subject-constitution, or more precisely, this is not a choice. These machines have always been here, they are always there ..."
Belinda Barnet - Fibreculture Journal Issue 1

deconstructor: Ambient Information Environments
"There is an ever-widening interface between computation and the physical environment, and this company [Ambient Devices] seems to be one of the few which is working intelligently on the question of how to adapt the incredible power of computation to the ways in which humans really think and perceive, while at the same time making technology more humane and enjoyable.
[...] When was the last time your news was calm and glanceable??"

Marcel Duchamp's 'The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes' (1912) and the Invisible World of Electrons - An essay by Linda Dalryple Henderson
" ... as for the swift nudes, they were the trails which crisscross the painting ..."

Raymond Spencer Rodgers - Man in the Telesphere (1971)
"Probably for some years the authenticity of this startling document - and Rodgers' 1951 teenage vision that computers would "shrink, and link, and help us think" - was doubted."

Kevin Kelly -- Out of Control - Chapter 2: Hive Mind (1994)
"For many years Mark Thompson, a beekeeper local to my area, had the bizarre urge to build a Live-In Hive -- an active bee home you could visit by inserting your head into it. He was working in a yard once when a beehive spewed a swarm of bees "like a flow of black lava, dissolving, then taking wing." The black cloud coalesced into a 20-foot-round black halo of 30,000 bees that hovered, UFO-like, six feet off the ground, exactly at eye level. The flickering insect halo began to drift slowly away, keeping a constant six feet above the earth. It was a Live-In Hive dream come true.
Mark didn't waver. Dropping his tools he slipped into the swarm, his bare head now in the eye of a bee hurricane. He trotted in sync across the yard as the swarm eased away. Wearing a bee halo, Mark hopped over one fence, then another. He was now running to keep up with the thundering animal in whose belly his head floated. They all crossed the road and hurried down an open field, and then he jumped another fence. He was tiring. The bees weren't; they picked up speed. The swarm-bearing man glided down a hill into a marsh. The two of them now resembled a superstitious swamp devil, humming, hovering, and plowing through the miasma. Mark churned wildly through the muck trying to keep up. Then, on some signal, the bees accelerated. They unhaloed Mark and left him standing there wet, "in panting, joyful amazement." Maintaining an eye-level altitude, the swarm floated across the landscape until it vanished, like a spirit unleashed, into a somber pine woods across the highway.
"Where is 'this spirit of the hive'...where does it reside?" asks the author Maurice Maeterlinck ..."

The computer: from the mundane to the mondial (1971)
"... the term "universal machine" can be visualized in yet another sense. We can visualize the linkage of computer systems on a global basis, so that stored data and specific operations can be dialed-up throughout the universal system. The universal system would thus be composed of computers and telecommunication links. Such a system is not feasible given the present political structure of world society. It would be strongly rejected as communications "colonialism", given the present location and control of the most important equipment (including data banks). But we already have one relatively "universal" system with telephonic intercontinental direct dialing. Other "universal" systems include those of cooperating international airlines. The barriers to more rapid universalization are political and economic, rather than technical (19b)"
Raymond Spencer Rodgers

19b. In the preface to The Computerized Society (Prentice-Hall, 1970), James Martin and Adrian Norman say "we may someday talk not about separate computers, but rather a vast organism interconnected by telecommunications links." Later (p. 68) they talk of a "catalogue of remote systems" which "will grow, multiply, and interlink. A countrywide, and probably a worldwide, network of computers that can be dialed up on the existing telecommunications will be available to us before many years have passed."

Definition of Internet - wordIQ Dictionary
Internet : n. The mother of all networks. First incarnated beginning in 1969 as the ARPANET, a U.S. Department of Defense research testbed. Though it has been widely believed that the goal was to develop a network architecture for military command-and-control that could survive disruptions up to and including nuclear war, this is a myth; in fact, ARPANET was conceived from the start as a way to get most economical use out of then-scarce large-computer resources. As originally imagined, ARPANET's major use would have been to support what is now called remote login and more sophisticated forms of distributed computing ...

Out of Control: Stimuli for a swarm-being
"The sum of fifty thousand bees is a being whose intelligence cannot be inferred by studying the individual insect. The swarm is a distributed organism whose existence in both space and time outreaches the individual member, and which can find new solutions to new problems."
Dagfinn Fjelddalen

The Image - Conflict Research Consortium summary
"The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society (1956) will be of interest to those seeking to understand how individual worldviews are created and changed, and how such worldviews affect behavior. This work is divided into eleven chapters. In Chapter One [Kenneth Ewart] Boulding introduces the concept of the image. Image refers to one's subjective knowledge of the world, one's worldview, one's sense of being located in space and time, and in a web of human relations and emotions. Two propositions follow. First, a person's behavior depends on their image of the world. Second, the meaning of a message is the change which it produces in the image. There are three sorts of effect a message may have. The image may remain unaffected. The message may be simply added onto the image. The image may undergo revolutionary change and reorganization."

City Grids and the Imageability of Software Architectures : Tesugen
"In his book, [Kevin] Lynch refers to subways as detached from the city. Subways are invisible. They cannot "be related to the rest of the environment except where they come up for air," as Lynch writes. Later he points out that people often use subway stations, even when going by car, as "nodes," to determine where they are."

Visualicity – on urban visibility and invisibility [PDF; via Space and Culture]
"Cities are an example of phenomena too extensive in scale to be empirically visible to the human eye in one glance, yet are taken for granted by virtue of our faith that the totality of the urban can be glimpsed from a part." Rob Shields

A Golden Hive
"Affirmation of life-AND-death turns out to be one in the Elegies.... It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, "invisibly," inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible. The Elegies show us at this work, the work of the continual conversion of the beloved visible and tangible world into the invisible vibrations and agitation of our own nature...." Rainer Maria Rilke - in a letter about his Duino Elegies

The Swarmbots Are Coming - Slashdot
FlyingOrca comments: "I've sometimes wondered whether ants, with their chemical communication systems, might not in effect form a single distributed organism, with its neurotransmitters on the outside."

Usman Haque: Invisible topographies from (receiver 9)
Usman Haque writes: [...] While we have been concerned about the health effects of electromagnetic radiation (from power lines or mobile phone handsets), these waves often exist as natural phenomena in the form of radio waves emanating from distant stars, gamma rays coming from elements here on earth or even electrical waves from inside our own skulls. Humans have only recently begun contributing to the cacophony with their pagers, medical devices, television broadcasts and mobile phones. This abundant invisible territory, a topography that is altered in shape and intensity by both natural and human-constructed landscapes, has been called "hertzian space" by industrial design theorist Anthony Dunne. He has observed that hertzian space is often ignored by designers saying, in Hertzian Tales, that the "material responses to immaterial electromagnetic fields can lead to new aesthetic possibilities for architecture."

Chaos seems to aid learning by Kimberly Patch (Technology Research News)
"Although it's clear that the cerebellum is the part of the human brain involved in coordinating movements in ways that allow people to learn skills like riding a bike, there are mysteries about how the learning process works.
Researchers from Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology (CREST) in Japan have built a computer simulation of the inferior olive, a portion of the brain that probably relays errors in movement to the cerebellum. It has been difficult to explain the mechanics of this relationship because inferior olive cells that connect to the cerebellum fire slowly, and this does not fit well with the common hypothesis that high-fidelity error signals are needed for efficient learning.
The researchers got the idea for the simulation after initial research showed that if neurons were electrically coupled, or linked, a certain type of chaotic signal could emerge. The researchers' simulation shows that moderate electrical coupling between nerve cells in the inferior olive could produce a type of chaotic firing that effectively recodes the high-frequency information into slower signals by imparting information within the rhythm rather than just the frequency of nerve firing. "The chaotic firing was more robust than we expected," said Nicholas Schweighofer, a researcher at Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology. The model shows that "chaos can be useful in the brain," he said.
In addition to allowing researchers to better understand the mechanics of the brain, the researchers' theory of chaotic resonance could speed electronic communications and improve robotics. "In communications, our work [could] maximize the information transmitted in networks," he said. "In robotics, chaos could be used to explore the environment to optimize learning," he said."

How Ants Find Food - Mute SourceForge
"Many species of ants communicate with their nest-mates using chemical scents known as pheromones. Pheromones can be used in many ways by ants and other animals (including humans), but we are most interested in how ants use pheromones to direct each other through their environment -- this particular task is closely related to the problem of directing the flow of information through a network."

Searching for Loren Eiseley

"I read a while back that a scientific experiment set up by botanists in New Hampshire has found that certain trees give off pheromones, airborne hormones that are carried on the wind like alarm signals when dangers to the trees' health or survival are close at hand. Bodies of scientists are beginning to support the possibility of a level of environmental awareness being transmitted between living organisms. From tree to tree of a like kind, for example, in a forest."
Carol Drinkwater - The Olive Season (Abacus, 2003, page 302)

Wired 12.02: Living Machines
Technology and biology are converging fast. The result will transform everything from engineering to art - and redefine life as we know it.

Christopher Meyer - The New Facts of Life
Scientific advances point to a startling conclusion: The nonliving world is very much alive.
Meyer: "The Internet could allow sensors to interact in emergent ways, forming an autonomic nervous system for the physical world. An early version is taking root in Los Angeles, where sensors at intersections identify approaching buses and ask a central computer whether they're on time. Late buses get the green light; the system gives crossing traffic extra time in subsequent cycles. The result: 25 percent improvement in transit times without creating congestion."

The Man from the Sunflower Forest: A Loren Eiseley Reader
"I am the unfolding worm, and mud fish, the weird tree of Igdrasil shaping itself endlessly out of darkness toward the light. [...] It is in the brain that this world opens."
Loren Eiseley - The Firmament of Time (Victor Gollancz, 1961, pages 168-169)

Yellowstone virus startles scientists with ancient lineage
"A virus found in Yellowstone National Park thermal pools has a structure so ancient that scientists think it sits near the root of the universal tree of life, according to a study published May 3 [2004] in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The discovery has diverse potential, including aiding the search for life on other planets as well as harnessing useful viral products for medicine and industry.
Scientists George Rice and Mark Young of Montana State University found the virus living among organisms called Archaea (archae means ancient) in Yellowstone's Midway Geyser Basin. Archaea is one of three major domains, or types, of life. The others are bacteria and eukarya, which includes plants, animals and humans.
Many archaea are thermophiles, meaning they thrive in hot, acidic conditions like those in Yellowstone Park and the world's other geothermal areas. And like most living things, archaea have viruses that infect them."
Annette Trinity-Stevens

Venus may have bugs, say scientists [BBC News 26 September 2002]
"Scientists in the United States say clouds high in the atmosphere of the planet Venus contain chemicals that may suggest the presence of life.
Space probes have never found any sign of life on Venus, which has an extremely hot surface and an atmosphere that contains a mixture of poisonous chemicals. But Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Louis Irwin, from the University of Texas, say the Venusian atmosphere is "relatively hospitable" and may be home to large numbers of bacteria."

Molecular rings could shelter Venus bugs - New Scientist 03 May 04
Hazel Muir reports: Many probes visited [Venus] in the 1960s and 1970s, but there was no search for life. "At that time, we didn't know about terrestrial life in extreme environments, in hot springs or deep beneath the crust of the Earth," says Schulze-Makuch. "Now that we do, it's time to design missions to look for life in the clouds of Venus."

Methane on Mars could signal life [BBC News 29 March 2004]
"Methane has been found in the Martian atmosphere which scientists say could be a sign that life exists today on Mars. It was detected by telescopes on Earth and has recently been confirmed by instruments onboard the European Space Agency's orbiting Mars Express craft.
Methane lives for a short time in the Martian atmosphere so it must be being constantly replenished. There are two possible sources: either active volcanoes, none of which have been found yet on Mars, or microbes." Dr David Whitehouse

Early life thrived in lava flows - Paul Rincon [BBC News 22 April 2004]
"Geologists have discovered microscopic burrows where some of Earth's earliest lifeforms bored their way into volcanic glass 3.5 billion years ago. The tubes, from rocks in South Africa's Barberton Greenstone Belt, retain traces of organic carbon left behind by the microorganisms, the authors say."

Hydrocarbon bubbles discovered in meteorite - New Scientist 17 December 2002
Will Knight: "Hollow hydrocarbon bubbles a few microns in diameter have been discovered in a meteorite that crashed into a frozen lake in Canada in 2000. The simple organic structures could have provided a sheltered environment for the development of the first primitive organisms, suggests Michael Zolensky, at NASA's Johnson Space Center. He used an electron microscope to discover the globules, which are a few microns in diameter. "These are ready-made homes," he told New Scientist. [...]
It is the first time that such bubbles have been found on a meteorite, but laboratory experiments designed to simulate conditions in space have produced similar structures. "Some ideas for the evolution of life require a kind of membrane to hold together all the chemicals that you want a cell to use," says Iain Gilmour, of the UK's Open University. "If you have some sort of globular structure, you've got the start of a potential cell structure." Other researchers have suggested that tiny cavities in minerals could have provided the containers from which the first cellular life emerged."

James Brody reviews Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order by Steven Strogatz [Human Nature Review 2003 Volume 3: 494-496]
"It is probable that natural selection for genes was originally guided by the extraordinary power of network rules, themselves a vital, little appreciated part of our original environment of evolutionary adaptation, one more subtle, pervasive and persuasive than mother's milk or a predator's teeth."

Listening to the internet reveals best connections - New Scientist 27 November 2002
Anil Ananthaswamy: "The reliability and strength of internet connections can be assessed by listening to the sounds they make, according to Chris Chafe, a cellist and director of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University in California.
[...] To check the quality of an internet connection, engineers "ping" a data packet to a remote computer, which bounces it back like an echo. This reveals the latency of the connection, or how long it takes for a round trip, and the variation of this over time is known as the jitter. But pinging cannot reveal the detailed subsecond behaviour of the jitter, and this is the timescale that is important in interactive applications like telemedicine.
Chafe wondered if variations in jitter could be converted into a musical form. A musician can easily hear small changes in the tuning of a guitar string, so Chafe decided to model internet connections as guitar strings - twanging them to reveal subtle characteristics missed by pinging.
[...] But simulating a guitar string would not be suitable for a two-dimensional network like that described by the Grid. Instead, says Chafe, you would need to simulate a stretched membrane, such as a drum skin."

Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby - Teleproxemics (1994)
"Proxemics is a term used to describe the study of the social uses of space.
Most verbal communication in the physical world is supported by levels of informal social uses of space operating at almost subliminal levels. Space and distance are used to define and negotiate the interface between private and public, particularly during the moments leading up to contact. This sense of distance is not only visual but also acoustic, thermal and olfactory, and forms a sensory envelope of kinaesthetic sensitivity that varies from person to person and culture to culture. Architecture and furniture design have always allowed this human sensitivity to the social use of space to find material and spatial expression in its output. We are interested in exploring the possibilities of linking this to telecommunications."

Proxemic Theory of Edward T. Hall
"As is true with gravity, Edward T. Hall believes that "the influence of two bodies on each other is inversely proportional not only to the square of the distance but possibly even the cube of the distance between them." Although it's pure speculation, he postulates a mutual chemical impact when our thermal spheres overlap. This would mean that there are times when we're directly wired to another person's emotions, our feelings changing in sync to match his or her mood."

Cognitive Bias + Noncompositionality

"Love is metaphysical gravity." R. Buckminster Fuller

Hertzian Waves + Hertzian microclimates and softspace

Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby - Tuneable Cities (1998)
"Whereas 'cyberspace' is a metaphor that spatialises what happens in computers distributed around the world, hertzian space is actual and physical even though our senses detect only a tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Images of footprints of satellite TV transmissions in relation to the surface of the earth, and computer models showing cellular phone propagation in relation to urban environments, reveal that hertzian space is not isotropic but has an 'electroclimate' defined by wavelength, frequency and field strength. Interaction with the natural and artificial landscape creates a hybrid landscape of shadows, reflections, and hot points."

Lines and Waves Exhibit - IEEE History Center
"[...] we have strong reason to conclude that light itself -- including radiant heat, and other radiations if any -- is an electromagnetic disturbance in the form of waves propagated through the electromagnetic field according to electromagnetic laws."
James Clerk Maxwell - Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field (1864)

"Anthony Dunne's Hertzian Tales is about designing ways of knowing the electromagnetic environment we exist within, and establishing a poetic interaction with it through purposeful and critical designs which help establish a cultural awareness of electromagnetism."
Brian Thomas Carroll

Kodwo Eshun reviews The Art Of The Accident
"New forces demand scaling concept manufacture, hence Spuybroek's motor geometry, Perella's hypersurfaces, Jenks' waveforms, Lynn's animate form and UCLA-based Marcos Novak's term transArchitecture -- all are exploring the computer design process that is drastically altering "time and space" into "process and field." From Karl S Chu, whose digital design Sphere of Virtuality convolutes an hourglass into interwrapping cones of "demiurgic space" to Dunne and Raby's exploration of the "invisible tunable city" of Hertzian space, there's an overwhelming sense of liquidity here. The parameters of dimensionality are in flux and the acoustic, virtual, hybrid, generative, evolutionary and intelligent spaces presented multiply this state of novelty by modelling it."

Karl S Chu - The Turing Dimension
"If the world is the infinite effect of an infinite cause, there are, in all likelihood, no binary strings that can encapsulate the hidden logic of the infinite cause in its entirety. The drama of the incomplete thus haunts the infinite extensibility of the tragic effect induced by the Turing Dimension, which, in turn, maps and haunts the infinite expanse of the Universal Turing Surface ingrained with holes and vortices amidst an infozoic (self-organizing systems) ecology teeming with artificial life forms. These holes and vortices are interruptions or caesurae due to intractable problems derived from the incompleteness and undecidability of certain propositions concerning the logic and limits of computation."

Tom Vanderbilt - Walker in the Wireless City [PDF]
"Bryant Park is an example of what the geographer Kevin Lynch, in his classic 1960 book "The Image of the City," called a node. Nodes, as he defined them, "may be primary junctions, places of a break in transportation, a crossing or convergence of paths, moments of shift from one structure to another." They help give "legibility" to the city, help us to orient ourselves. Node is also a word synonymous with hot spot -- a junction of Wi-Fi signals -- and the electronic nodes are turning up in the same parks, airports and public gathering places that Mr. Lynch considered physical nodes."

Interview with Jane Jacobs: Cities and Web Economies [via Matt Webb]
"You know, I think we are misled by universities and other formal intellectual places into thinking that there are actually separate fields of knowledge. And most people know that there aren't. But they are always getting victimized somehow by the idea that there are. And they are delighted when in some respectable way it becomes clear that there are not separate fields of knowledge, that they link up."

Cognition
"Organisms in environmental linkage comprise hypercognitive symmetries -- and this means they are as unified as they are discrete, cognitively and physically. We might liken this to a form of co-ignition, where proximity and relationship generate new and ever-more complexly connective embodiments of Life. The 'embodiments' are as much alive in the environment as they are in any local participants, which means the environment of any living world becomes a cognitive organism comprised of the assembly of its constituents and their relational and sentient activity. Environment and organism are transunified, and comprise a complete and inseperable entity in every possible case."

Pattern cognition and propagation, morphology, and the cultural memory system
Andreas Goppold: "For prokaryotic organisms, like bacteria, the genetic and individual memory are the same, since these organisms can exchange their genetic material freely, and thus one cell can "learn" from the experiences of another cell through the exchange of genetic material. (Margulis 1991: 199-206). The vigorous genetic interconnection of bacteria can even be called a true planetary-wide distributed organism, a natural organic world wide web ..."

Math Forum: Leonard Euler and the Bridges of Konigsberg
"Topology is one of the newest branches of mathematics. A simple way to describe topology is as a 'rubber sheet geometry' - topologists study those properties of shapes that remain the same when the shapes are stretched or compressed. The 'Euler number' of a 'network' ... is an example of a property that does not change when the network is stretched or compressed.
The foundations of topology are often not part of high school math curricula, and thus for many it sounds strange and intimidating. However, there are some readily graspable ideas at the base of topology that are interesting, fun, and highly applicable to all sorts of situations. One of these areas is the topology of networks, first developed by Leonard Euler in 1735. His work in this field was inspired by the following problem: The Seven Bridges of Konigsberg ..."

All the world's a net
"We are surrounded by networks: social, sexual and professional. Ecosystems are networks, and even our bodies -- and the pathogens that lay us low -- are kept alive by networks of chemicals. [Albert-László] Barabási and others have found that many of these networks have the same architecture as the Web. They grow in much the same way and have the same strengths and weaknesses: understand one and you start to understand them all."

posted by Andrew 5/17/2004 05:08:00 PM