Content in Context

THE SEMANTIC SPHERE 1 Computation, Cognition and the Information Economy. (Translated By Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott) New advances in digital media offer unprecedented memory capacities, an om...

Via Pierre Levy

Virtually all talk of cognitive enhancement focuses exclusively on the enhancement of individual intelligence. But what about enhancing group intelligence?

Via Howard Rheingold

As the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Thomas P. Campbell thinks deeply about curating—not just selecting art objects, but placing them in a setting where the public can learn their stories.

Via Robin Good

Brains, it has recently been argued, are essentially prediction machines. They are bundles of cells that support perception and action by constantly attempting to match incoming sensory inputs with top-down expectations or predictions. This is achieved using a hierarchical generative model that aims to minimize prediction error within a bidirectional cascade of cortical processing. Such accounts offer a unifying model of perception and action, illuminate the functional role of attention, and may neatly capture the special contribution of cortical processing to adaptive success. This target article critically examines this “hierarchical prediction machine” approach, concluding that it offers the best clue yet to the shape of a unified science of mind and action.

 

Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science
Andy Clark

Behavioral and Brain Sciences / Volume 36 / Issue 03 / June 2013, pp 181-204

http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X12000477

Via Complexity Digest

Accuracy is fundamental to journalism, but it’s a challenge to verify information when it flows at digital warp speed from so many sources. This presentation

Via Robin Good

There’s a lot of background chatter lately about brand sponsored content being the death of journalism.
Via massimo facchinetti

With Google pulling the plug on popular apps like Google Reader and Google Alerts, Jim Berkowitz takes an objective look at several alternative applications that can help with your content curation.

Via Stefano Principato

The eye and brain: standard thinking is that these devices are both complex and functional. They are complex in the sense of having many different types of parts, and functional in the sense of having capacities that promote survival and reproduction. Standard thinking says that the evolution of complex functionality proceeds by the addition of new parts, and that this build-up of complexity is driven by selection, by the functional advantages of complex design. The standard thinking could be right, even in general. But alternatives have not been much discussed or investigated, and the possibility remains open that other routes may not only exist but may be the norm. Our purpose here is to introduce a new route to functional complexity, a route in which complexity starts high, rising perhaps on account of the spontaneous tendency for parts to differentiate. Then, driven by selection for effective and efficient function, complexity decreases over time. Eventually, the result is a system that is highly functional and retains considerable residual complexity, enough to impress us. We try to raise this alternative route to the level of plausibility as a general mechanism in evolution by describing two cases, one from a computational model and one from the history of life.

 

Complexity by Subtraction
Daniel W. McShea, Wim Hordijk

Evolutionary Biology
April 2013

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007%2Fs11692-013-9227-6

Via Complexity Digest

Social Media ROI: here's how to align some of your social media actions with your business goals and make it easier to determine your social media marketing ROI.

Via Kamal Bennani, Knowva Consulting

For centuries we're fussing about what the our optimal work time is in every day life. In today's article, we explore why focusing on energy not time is a smar

Via maryhruth

As the world becomes increasingly complex and interconnected, some of our biggest challenges have begun to seem intractable. What should we do about uncertainty in the financial markets? How can we predict energy supply and demand? How will climate change play out? How do we cope with rapid urbanization? Our traditional approaches to these problems are often qualitative and disjointed and lead to unintended consequences. To bring scientific rigor to the challenges of our time, we need to develop a deeper understanding of complexity itself.

Via Complexity Digest

Twitter network. Their teacher is School of Data “data wrangler” Michael Bauer, whose organization teaches journalists and non-profits basic data skills. At the recent International Journalism Festival, Bauer showed journalists how to analyze Twitter networksusing OpenRefine, Gephi, and the Twitter API.

 

Bauer's route into teaching hacks how to hack data was a circuitous one. He studied medicine and did postdoctoral research on the cardiovascular system, where he discovered his flair for data. Disillusioned with health care, Bauer dropped out to become an activist and hacker and eventually found his way to the School of Data. I asked him about the potential and pitfalls of data analysis for everyone.

Via Irina Radchenko

 Evolution
Researchers have long assumed that factors like competition, environmental change and competition for scarce resources stimulated evolutionary change in species. But computer science...
[[ This is a content summary only.

Via Spaceweaver