March 28, 2012

I WOKE UP THIS MORNING TO FIND THAT THE…

I woke up this morning to find that the robot video I shared last night has been +1’d or shared over 100 times in total, easily the most successful post that has appeared in my stream. Totally awesome, and a great opportunity to watch Ripples at work. https://plus.google.com/ripple/details?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D6b4ZZQkcNEo&context=z13edndznrbkfxkcf23oynlafpmds3ac1 If you haven’t been obsessing over Ripples already, the data analysis it offers is amazing! It even offers a timeline so you can see exactly how these memes spread across the G+ network. Does anyone have a favorite Ripples graph for fast spreading content? The KONY 2012 videos are an obvious choice. There were two videos that went around, one on YouTube and one on Vimeo: https://plus.google.com/ripple/details?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DY4MnpzG5Sqc https://plus.google.com/ripple/details?url=http%3A%2F%2Fvimeo.com%2F37119711 Notice that in both cases, the videos seem to spread much more by people sharing the video uniquely, instead of just resharing the posts of others. Pretty impressive for a video that spread so quickly! Notice also that in order to get reshared, you don’t have to be the first to publish the content, or even close the first. You just need a strong network of followers: notice the Shepard Fairey circle for the Vimeo video is pretty late to the game, but still commands a fairly large circle. Any other interesting Ripple graphs? Google+ Ripples youtube.com – Sand Flea is an 11-lb robot with one trick up its sleeve: Normally it drives like an RC car, but when it needs to it can jump 30 feet into the air. … The ripple diagram shows this post…
March 28, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM MALTE UBL

Malte Ubl originally shared this post: #meme #alanturing
March 28, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM JONATHAN LANGDALE

Jonathan Langdale originally shared this post: Complexity & Chaos, order through fluctuation “…how is choice made? There’s always pure chance, especially in physical systems. And there may also be outside influences. In social systems, these may be human intentions as well. So, at a bifurcation point, a small random fluctuation in the state or structure of a system is magnified and made permanent.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Prigogine “Self-Organization is the process where a structure of pattern appears in a system without a central authority or external element imposing it through planning.” This might be something I listen to when I go to sleep, I’ll keep it my watch later list. >But the dude that made the playlist put it out of order, which kinda sucks. I’m probably going to be too lazy to make my own. < +Jon Lawhead ordered this into a playlist: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0F3AAFB03A09E5D0 >http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD205992E2126AF83&feature=plcp (over 2hr long, out of order)< This part 9 is 7m long and pretty interesting. .
March 28, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM LOUIS GRAY

Louis Gray originally shared this post: Nearly every day, I see Google’s self-driving cars on the perimeter of our Mountain View campus. I haven’t yet set foot in one. But a man named Steve Mahan got to drive one. See his experience in this video and see why this innovation is special.
March 27, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM MICHAEL WU

Michael Wu originally shared this post: Did you know that Klout Doesn’t Really Measure Influence http://mashable.com/2012/03/23/klout-influence/ Klout Doesn’t Really Measure Influence [STUDY] A study about digital influence says Klout and other social media measurement tools don’t define how users influence their networks.
March 27, 2012

BOSTON DYNAMICS HAS ANOTHER AWESOME ROBOT…

Boston Dynamics has another awesome robot video on YouTube! “Sand Flea is an 11-lb robot with one trick up its sleeve: Normally it drives like an RC car, but when it needs to it can jump 30 feet into the air. An onboard stabilization system keeps it oriented during flight to improve the view from the video uplink and to control landings. Current development of Sand Flea is funded by the The US Army’s Rapid Equipping Force. For more information visit www.BostonDynamics.com.” http://youtu.be/6b4ZZQkcNEo Their collection of bots gets more impressive by the day. Other Boston Dynamics videos below: BigDog Overview (Updated March 2010) PETMAN Prototype DARPA Cheetah Sets Speed Record for Legged Robots Thanks for the tip +Kirk Fisher!
March 27, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM DONNA MURDOCH

Donna Murdoch originally shared this post: This slideshare is worth a look – lots of things we’ve already heard from the +NMC and Horizon Reports but still really well done. The End of Teaching As We Know It. | Edudemic Topics: adoption, edtech, facebook, future, slideshare, teaching, upgrades · Tweet · Tweet. What is the future of teaching? What about education in general? Many schools and universities around the wo…
March 27, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM KIMBERLY HAYWORTH

“So this was back when the only “computers” were people doing math by hand. It was also back when machines were single-function. “Reprogramming” required a screwdriver. To think the kinds of thoughts Turing was thinking, you had to be either a genius or a psychic.” Kimberly Hayworth originally shared this post: Radiolab Podcast Articles – The Turing Problem 100 years ago this year, the man who first conceived of the computer age was born. His name was Alan Turing. He was also a math genius, a hero of World War II and he is widely considered to be the fat…
March 27, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM MATT UEBEL

“”Using this form of cell-to-cell communication, colonies of billions or trillions of bacteria can literally reach a consensus on actions that impact people,” Onuchic explained. “Bacteria that previously existed harmlessly on the skin, for instance, may exchange chemical signals and reach a consensus that their numbers are large enough to start an infection. Likewise, bacteria may decide to band together into communities called biofilms that make numerous chronic diseases difficult to treat — urinary tract infections, for instance, cystic fibrosis and endocarditis.”” The article also mentions “quorum-sensing peptides”. A quick check online reveals the following: http://www.lib.ku.ac.th/html2/dmdocuments/QUORUM%20SENSING%20IN%20BACTERIA.pdf “Quorum sensing is the regulation of gene expression in response to ?uctuations in cell-population density. Quorum sensing bacteria produce and release chemical signal molecules called autoinducers that increase in concentration as a function of cell density. The detection of a minimal threshold stimulatory concentration of an autoinducer leads to an alteration in gene expression.” It occurs to me that this is a good check on the use of the term “biologically-inspired models”. The appeal of the term seems to drop out, given that our biological models themselves are described in terms familiar from social structures at higher levels of organization. Note: I was involved in debates over quorum at every Occupy I participated in. I hate quorum. Matt Uebel originally shared this post: Bacteria use chat to play the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ game in deciding their fate When faced with life-or-death situations, bacteria ? and maybe even human cells ? use an extremely sophisticated version of “game theory” to consider their options and decide upon the best course of action, scientists reported here today. In a presentation at the 243rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS) they said microbes “play” a version of the classic “Prisoner’s Dilemma” game.
March 27, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM MILOS JANATA

#consensus #selforganization MILOS JANATA originally shared this post: Would you behave similar to the person in the video? Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within groups of people. It is the mode of thinking that happens when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative ideas or viewpoints. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink
March 27, 2012

“A PREFERENTIAL ATTACHMENT PROCESS IS AN…

“A preferential attachment process is an urn process in which additional balls are added continuously to the system and are distributed among the urns as an increasing function of the number of balls the urns already have. In the most commonly studied examples, the number of urns also increases continuously, although this is not a necessary condition for preferential attachment and examples have been studied with constant or even decreasing numbers of urns.” Welp, guess I found the model I was looking for. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment Preferential attachment – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia A preferential attachment process is any of a class of processes in which some quantity, typically some form of wealth or credit, is distributed among a number of individuals or objects according to h…
March 27, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM POST-SAPIENS, LES ÊTRES…

Lots of really good links in the post discussing Digital Economies. Post-Sapiens, les êtres technologiques originally shared this post: When Open Innovation leads to Collective Intelligence | Desinfoxica As far as we consider the Open Innovation and Collective Intelligence correlation, there is a common supposition that Collective Intelligence assumption culminates into Open Innovation initiatives, un…
June 23, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM JON LAWHEAD

Jon Lawhead originally shared this post: This is a curated list of online talks about complex systems and complexity theory. Talks Online talks related to complex systems
June 23, 2012

TURING’S STATUE IN MANCHESTER LOOKS QUITE…

Turing’s statue in Manchester looks quite happy today! #turing #turing100 via http://boingboing.net/2012/06/23/turing-and-pride-in-manchester.html
June 23, 2012

THE ATTENTION ECONOMY PRIMER

This guide introduces newbies to some basic lectures and resources on the attention economy. Far from being comprehensive, this guide focuses on recent, cutting edge contributions to this great conversation, sorted into rough categories for ease of use. I hope that this primer sketches a picture of the social, political, and economic stakes of perhaps the most radical restructuring of social organization that humanity has ever dared to undertake, and of the science that has made it possible. Background As the Wikipedia page notes, Herbert Simon first suggested attention management as a method for dealing with information abundance in the 1970’s, as part of his research program into complexity and cybernetic organization. “The Attention Economy” secured its place in mainstream business and marketing jargon after Davenport and Beck’s 2001 book by the same name. Since then, attention management has played a central role in the basic principles of web and game design, and is fundamental to social media management and internet advertising. Overviews have been written to keep people on track, like this 2007 overview from ReadWriteWeb or this 2011 link repository at On the Spiral. Such overviews tend to treat the attention economy (and it is always the attention economy, never an attention economy) as a mix of business strategy and design philosophy. The complexity sciences have matured a great deal since Simon’s pioneering work. We are in a better position today to model, predict, visualize, and indeed manipulate the dynamics of complex systems than we were even a decade ago. These technological advances come on the heels of incredible progress in mathematics and computer science, a paradigm which has come to be called “Big Data” by the media and has attracted significant government and research interest. This paradigm has broad application, from modeling the dynamics of climate change […]
June 23, 2012

FREE SPEECH FOR COMPUTERS? BY TIM WU “PROTECTING…

Free Speech for Computers? by Tim Wu “Protecting a computer’s “speech” is only indirectly related to the purposes of the First Amendment, which is intended to protect actual humans against the evil of state censorship. The First Amendment has wandered far from its purposes when it is recruited to protect commercial automatons from regulatory scrutiny. … “The line can be easily drawn: as a general rule, nonhuman or automated choices should not be granted the full protection of the First Amendment, and often should not be considered “speech” at all. (Where a human does make a specific choice about specific content, the question is different.) “Defenders of Google’s position have argued that since humans programmed the computers that are “speaking,” the computers have speech rights as if by digital inheritance. But the fact that a programmer has the First Amendment right to program pretty much anything he likes doesn’t mean his creation is thereby endowed with his constitutional rights. Doctor Frankenstein’s monster could walk and talk, but that didn’t qualify him to vote in the doctor’s place.” More: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/20/opinion/free-speech-for-computers.html?_r=4 Doctorow’s counterpoint: http://boingboing.net/2012/06/22/counterpoint-algorithms-are-n.html #freespeech #robots #robotrights #digitalvalues _______________________________ This is one of those articles that we’ll look back on in 50 years as a sign of just how backwards and horrible we once were. The lack of foresight is simply astounding. Mr. Wu is simply mistaken if he thinks that the line between human choice and automation can be “easily drawn”, since every human choice is also an automated choice. We are just complex biological machines; we are robots made of lots of smaller robots. The idea that there are simple, categorical distinctions to be drawn here is little more than a fairy tale. Appealing to such fictions in the name of denying an entity their potential rights is simply irresponsible […]
June 23, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM DEEN ABIOLA

In my recent #attentioneconomy primer, I included a long selection from +Bruce Sterling‘s novel The Caraytids, which describes a community called the Acquis that organizes entirely by monitoring attention through the use of an immersive augmented reality headset called the “sensorweb”. The whole novel is wonderful, but the discussion of attention camps is particularly insightful. Despite the excitement about these glasses I’ve seen and heard very little to suggest that people understand how they will ultimately be used. To that end, I’m quoting an extended but important passage below. ________ When they had docked at Mljet in their slow-boat refugee barges, they’d been given their spex and their ID tags. As proper high-tech pioneers, they soon found themselves humbly chopping the weeds in the bold Adriatic sun. The women did this because of the architecture of participation. They worked like furies. As the camp women scoured the hills, their spex on their kerchiefed heads, their tools in their newly blistered hands, the spex recorded whatever they saw, and exactly how they went about their work. Their labor was direct and simple: basically, they were gardening. Middle-aged women had always tended to excel at gardening. The sensorweb identified and labeled every plant the women saw through their spex. So, day by day, and weed by weed, these women were learning botany. The system coaxed them, flashing imagery on the insides of their spex. Anyone who wore camp spex and paid close attention would become an expert. The world before their eyeballs brimmed over with helpful tags and hot spots and footnotes. As the women labored, glory mounted over their heads. The camp users who learned fastest and worked hardest achieved the most glory. “Glory” was the primary Acquis virtue. Glory never seemed like a compelling reason to work hard-not when you […]
June 24, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM KOEN DE PAUS

Koen De Paus originally shared this post: Geoffrey West on cities as organisms Rajini’s recent post about the transportation network of the leaf reminded me of this mindblowing talk from Geoffrey West that draws parallels between organisms, cities and corporations. Truly stunning connections that are bound to spark a massive electrical storm in your grey matter… Seriously, this one is worth watching twice! If you have the time you might even want to check out his 2 hour long talk; http://fora.tv/2011/07/25/Why_Cities_Grow_Corporations_Die_and_Life_Gets_Faster – This is one of those talks that really changed my view of the world when I first stumbled across it. +Rajini Rao‘s post on beauty and utility in a Leaf; https://plus.google.com/114601143134471609087/posts/ZNr6X4ChjTh #ScienceSunday | +ScienceSunday
June 24, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM MICHAEL CHUI

“Working for Internet” is about the most compressed statement for the #attentioneconomy that I can think of. Hint: check my profile. The recent story of the bus lady who raised half a million dollars after her harassment video on YouTube is in some sense another success story of Internet employment, though getting yelled at by kids isn’t exactly a reliable vocation. +Matt Uebel recently posted an article discussing Planetary Resource’s launch of a Kickstarter campaign to fund their multibillion dollar asteroid mining mission. I left the following comment in his thread, which somehow seems appropriate here: “Billionaires are literally asking the internet for money. If there is any doubt that the internet is the most powerful human organization on the planet, this should lay it to rest.”? https://plus.google.com/u/0/105329245585862825504/posts/HCjEwZxLMS7 Michael Chui originally shared this post: I work for The Internet now I have an interesting problem: How do I shoehorn “hired by The Internet for a full year to work on Free Software” into my resume? Yes, the git-annex Kickstarter went well. 🙂 I had asked for enough to…
June 24, 2012

HUMAN NATURE AND TECHNOLOGY CENTER FOR TALENTED…

Human Nature and Technology Center for Talented Youth Princeton, NJ Today starts a three week intensive summer course I’ll be teaching for the Center for Talented Youth at the Princeton site. I’ll be teaching in Fine Hall, home of the Princeton mathematics department. I’m very excited! The course will be taught to 15 gifted high school students, and it will be intense: seven hours a day, five days a week, for the next three weeks straight. This gives us the time to give a comprehensive treatment of the philosophy of technology, starting with Plato and Aristotle and working our way through figures as diverse as Marx, Heidegger, and Turing before reaching contemporary thinkers like Shirky, Latour, and Sterling. The students will be busy the whole time with reading and writing assignments, debates and research projects, and a whole host of other activities. Its a whirlwind ride; I’ve been teaching the course for the last seven years, and it gets better every year. Although the student’s won’t be on line directly, the class will have some online presence. You can see the tentative syllabus here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RyJF_a3bdsRD5myaso9Eo47r9byaT_xpz_RHdAhswFI/edit You can follow us on Twitter @htecb: https://twitter.com/#!/htecb Our first research project, starting tomorrow afternoon, will be a collaborative Prezi on the top technology stories from the last year. You can see the Prezi skeleton here, and it will come alive tomorrow: http://prezi.com/y3vpyrtne590/technology-in-2012/ This list was put together on G+ a week ago from this thread: https://plus.google.com/u/0/117828903900236363024/posts/8cDYQ5DBbCt If you have any questions or are interested in further updates on the progress of the course, just let me know! #cty #human #humannature #technology #htec #htecb #education #princeton #adventuretime
June 24, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM CELESTE MASON

Celeste Mason originally shared this post: Just too nifty
June 25, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM KYLE CRIDER

“About 2.5 million years ago, humans first used tools to make other tools then to make tools assembled from different parts to make a unit with particular qualities, such as wooden spears with stone spearheads (ca. 200,000-300,000 years ago.) The bow and arrow and other complementary tool sets made it possible for prehistoric humans to greatly increase the flexibility of their reactions. “There are many basic complementary tool sets: needle and thread, fishing rod and line, hammer and chisel. The bow and arrow are a particularly complex example. The reconstruction of the technique shows that no less than ten different tools are needed to manufacture a simple bow and arrows with foreshafts. It takes 22 raw materials and three semi-finished goods (binding materials, multi-component glue) and five production phases to make a bow, and further steps to make the arrows to go with it. The study was able to show a high level of complexity in the use of tools at an early stage in the history of homo sapiens.” Full article: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=CAJ From the abstract: “We show that, when isolated, neither the production of a simple bow, nor that of a stone-tipped arrow, can be reasonably interpreted to indicate tool behaviour that is cognitively more complex than the composite artefacts produced by Neanderthals or archaic modern Homo. On the other hand, as soon as a bow-and-arrow set is used as an effective group of tools, a novel cognitive development is expressed in technological symbiosis, i.e. the ability to conceptualize a set of separate, yet inter-dependent tools. Such complementary tool sets are able to unleash new properties of a tool, inconceivable without the active, simultaneous manipulation of another tool. Consequently, flexibility regarding decision-making and taking action is amplified.” +Adam See Kyle Crider originally shared this post: Complex thinking behind the […]
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