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Tony Smith
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Bogota, Colombia is growing "like a pancake," as Rodrigo Nino, real-estate pioneer, says in the video below. Like other cities around the world, as the population quickly expands, Bogota is expanding outward.
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@DavidBrin1 tweeted this today and have to agree that it is worth revisiting from a couple of years ago: "Rapid shifts are the hallmark of climate change, epileptic seizures, financial crises, and fishery collapses. Deep mathematical principles tie these events together."
Crowdsourcing is usually mindless -- parcelling out microtasks to many people, each of whom contribute a bit of work or perception (often for a few cents). What about combining crowdsourcing and collective intelligence (where each contributor adds a piece of the puzzle, with contributions aggregated and perhaps filtered)? -- Howard "Personal assistants such as Apple's Siri may be useful, but they are still far from matching the smarts and conversational skills of a real person. Researchers at the University of Rochester have demonstrated a new, potentially better approach that creates a smart artificial chat partner from fleeting contributions from many crowdsourced workers." Another step on the path to the Plurality where the best of both/all worlds co-operate for better ends than can be envisaged from any Singular perspective. -- TS
Via Howard Rheingold
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A glow worm shines on the dismal (non-)science. "(A) detailed bottom-up model of the housing market shows the bubble in a new light. Unlike conventional top-down models, which show gentle self-correction, (this) ‘agent-based model’ showed the bubble bursting and markets crashing. (It) modelled various policy responses to the housing bubble using real data. Conventional wisdom has been that sustained low interest rates following the 2000 dot-com crash were the primary cause of the housing bubble. But in the model raising the interest rates did not prevent a bubble forming, but tighter regulation of banks almost completely eradicated it. This suggests better ways to frame economic policy in relation to the housing market. But, in coming years, similar work will undoubtedly highlight ways to improve policy in other areas."
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The 2011 Culture@Large session grappled with the pressing importance of the nonhuman for the work of anthropologists. The featured speaker, Dorion Sagan, is an independent scholar and a fascinating thinker, who has written and co-authored a range of books, two of which were written with his mother, biologist Lynn Margulis, a professor at the University of Massachusetts. Sagan’s talk, “The Human is More Than Human: Interspecies Communities and the New ‘Facts of Life’,” was then followed by discussant commentary from Myra Hird, Stefan Helmreich, Kim TallBear, and Agustin Fuentes.
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Chaos Theory is the study of fascinating yet deterministic systems, whereas complex systems are not deterministic. [Not necessarily. -Ed.] At first blush, if we were to contrast the words chaotic and complex as used in every day language, we might ...
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I've just noticed that Prof Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute replied to my letter (full version here) on the New Scientist's Limits To Growth article. I'm quite chuffed about this - Prof Bar-Yam is a big ...
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Network science is a powerful paradigm to better understand the complex systems encountered in many different disciplines such as physics, sociology, biology and computer science. One of the most relevant features of ...
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In class we learned about self organization in biological systems. One example given in class was about the flocking behavior of starlings, birds that fly in flocks of 1000+. Last weekend I was in the archipelago when I saw this ...
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A study of the world's largest subway networks shows they share a number of mathematical features, irrespective of their age or location. (Here is an interesting article about the mathematical similarities of complex subway systems!
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A flock of red-winged blackbirds forms and re-forms over California's Sacramento Valley. Photo: Lukas Felzmann The first thing to hit Iain Couzin when
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Recently released video of Long Now Foundation session introduced and moderated by Stuart Brandt and presented by Tim O'Reilly who discusses how evolving technology has disrupted society, and has given birth to the global mind. Aside from some minor colouration by our too common white collar triumphalist perspective which continues to overrate map rather than territory, @timoreilly really hits the important points and adds deeper historic context as to why the purported Singularity will be much more a Plurality, save from the enhanced hazard of eggs all in one basket. Definitely worth the 1 hour 35 minute viewing time, plus a good chunk of reflection beyond that.
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"Communities, nations, sectors, industries and more are dealing with greater levels of complexity and diversity of participation. This complexity and diversity, and current collective lack of ability to deal with it, is in many cases around the world creating conflict, dis-ease and holding ‘systems’ back from reaching their potential. "These systems require support in being able to come together, find mutual understanding, and move forward in a graceful and effective way. Systems diplomacy helps address these challenges and move systems forward." For once, this is not an attempt to expand the tyranny of paid jobs (for the boys) into territory that requires real life experience and is thus better served by the ageing in voluntary capacities where we can remain answerable only to our own best intentions. In reality, just another blog post, but one which strikes more than one chord.
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Been saying for quite a while that the KT extinctions were a double whammy. The linked (and paywalled) article provides supporting technical data from a long sought site spanning the Deccan Traps volcanism and the Yucatan impact, a target eventually found on an island off the Antarctic Peninsula. A simplified interpretation is provided by New Scientist: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22137-two-separate-extinctions-brought-end-to-dinosaur-era.html This underlines the message from broader study of emergence/systems/complecity that the level of resillience of the likes of the late Cretateous planetary ecosystem is only seriously vulnerable to an unlikely coincidence of challenges. But this should also serve a warning that the current and prospective level of human impact on natural systems, despite our efforts to retain token populations and habitats that are obviously endangered, might not stand something else going wrong. It may have even stronger lessons for the fragile global economy trapped in its delusory winner-take-all tide of neoliberal commentariat domination that fantasises its own permanence based on 20-30 years of intermittent triumphalism.
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End the Prison-Industrial Complex, Now!CounterPunchThe prison industrial complex is a moral and political crime. It is a class crime. It is also a microcosm of the broader systems of capitalist domination, exploitation and control.
Some nice examples of stigmergic collaboration in eusocial organisms. Humans are not cells in a superorganism, but we can apply stigmergic collaboration to collective intelligence involving populations of intelligent humans (Wikipedia, for example) -- Howard "The algorithms based on collective intelligence have some “interesting” properties: decentralization
parallelism
flexibility, adaptability
“robustness” (failures)
auto-organization
These algorithms are inspired by the nature. Here are some examples of collective intelligence which can be observed in the nature:"
Via Howard Rheingold
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CoSMoS 2012 : 5th Complex Systems Modelling and Simulation Workshop.
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Nowadays, it is viewed as a source of concepts for enabling the trans-disciplinary exploration of complex organizations in the networked economy and society, and for explaining the dynamics of networked systems at different levels of description...
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While chaos may stimulate creativity and innovation, order is needed to coordinate human action to create synergy effects, more efficiency, and common goods such as our transportation infrastructures, universities, schools, and ...
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Amazon.com: Innovation Networks: New Approaches in Modelling and Analyzing (Understanding Complex Systems) (9783540922667): Andreas Pyka, Andrea Scharnhorst: Books (Innovation Networks: New Approaches in Modelling and Analyzing (Understanding Complex...
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