Bill Seitz has problems with his Thinking Space including "no structured data".

I wonder what this means?

Graham is thinking about free-will

I would have posted this to his blog comments, but it was too long :


At the moment, it seems to me that if you want to escape from determinism, you have to turn this question on it's head.

The question is *why* we believe that the universe is nothing but deterministic laws? Because we find things very like laws when we look for them.

Alternatively you can go the way of my (and Margaret Thatcher's!) favourite philosopher : Popper, summed up by his slogan "All Clocks are Clouds".


He points out that we certainly know of *some* apparently law-like things which really are stochastic abstractions on top of a lower level, more disordered reality ... for example, gas laws.

Why should we assume the universe is Newtonian, made of things like F=ma, rather than made of things like PV/T = constant?

This isn't chaos theory as usually understood (it's much older.) But you can see how understanding the way a massively disorderd substrate can support emergent order, fits right in with it.

Popper got very excited by quantum indeterminacy too, but you don't need the indeterminacy to be at the quantum level to make this kind of argument. It just has to be *somewhere* down at the bottom.

ThoughtStorms: WittgensteinVsShannon

Advice to a new wiki : Get rid of all TheUsualFrontPageRubbish. Tell us what you want your wiki to be about ;-)

eronj's wiki

Andrew Grumet : Have you hugged your AOLserver today?

via Dave Winer

Interesting discussion on Tribe.net : Social software intellectuals about the types of YASNS.

segusoLand looks an interesting innovative UI.

via Graham

Notice that synaesmedia.com is for sale!?

Hmm. Well, it's my fault I suppose. I decided to try and economise by trying to move it from Easily, but I thought the smart thing to do was wait for it to expire and then pick it up again by buying it through Hostway, maybe the next day. It's not that easily aren't a good service, I've been very happy with them. It's just that 30 quid seemed a lot of money for domain name parking at the time.

What I didn't realize was that there was a 60 day cooling off period, after my account with easily had expired, when the name wasn't available for buying. And the only way to force a transfer was to pay easily the 30 quid to renew the account.

So I waited, and, well, basically, I forgot. Now carpetbaggers have blagged my domain name.

The name itself, I'm not bothered about. I've got Synaesmedia.net which I was thinking of emphasizing anyway. And I'm kind of bored with the name "synaesmedia".

But there are a lot of links breaking now :-(

Zack Lynch looks into Participatory economics and asks what connection it could have with emergent democracy.

Brain Waves: Emergent Democracy, Participatory Economics and Social Software

via Ross Mayfield via Bill Seitz

A good interview with Microsoft's in-house sociologist.

Shows how Microsoft are data mining patterns of postings on Usenet and email to try to find useful information.

What are P * Models?

The p* family of models developed by Wasserman and Pattison (1996), Pattison and Wasserman (1999), and Robins, Pattison, and Wasserman (1999) are based on the pathbreaking Markov spatial interaction models for random graphs of Frank and Strauss (1986) and Strauss and Ikeda (1990). These models allow researchers to break free of the severe independence assumptions of earlier statistical models for social networks, permitting a very general dependence structure for the network quantities. Further, the p* formulation allows network measurements to be viewed in a standard response/explanatory variables setting in which the response variable is the log odds of the probability that a relational tie is present. The explanatory variables can be quite general, including network structural properties like the tendency towards mutuality or transitivity; nominal, discrete or continuous actor attributes, as well as the interactions between these elements.

p* Home Page

Excellent, there's now a Wiki tribe :

Tribe.net: The Wiki Way

HomePage housekeeping today ...

ThoughtStorms: HomePage

Interesting juxtaposition by Danah Boyd : apophenia: guilt & indebtedness: Nietzsche and Mauss

John Robb : The lesson of 9/11 - Iraq was not lost on bin Laden. If they can sucker the US into Saudi Arabia (there are a couple ways to do this that are very counter-intuitive), we will have truly lost.

John Robb's Weblog

Dare Obasanjo : XML is a lousy format for most of the things it is used for. The one benefit it has is that it is widely supported and a guaranteed way to interoperate in a cross-platform manner. By tampering with this the W3C is effectively diluting one of the few benefits of using XML.

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - XML 1.1: The W3C Gets It Wrong

via Dave Winer

Dave Winer : Microsoft culture, even though it's PFU, has always been open to other points of view. It's part of the genetic coding. You want to give us free ideas? Sure thing, says Billg's guys and gals.

Scripting News: 2/8/2004

John Robb : This points to a bigger problem. It was common to pick up a book in the eighties (and even earlier) and find smart writers pointing to the coming boom in information service jobs. I don't see that type of forward thinking today as information service jobs are under pressure. What's next? I don't buy into the idea that inward looking jobs (just selling to Americans) are the wave of the future. We need something we can sell to the rest of the world.

One inadvertant strategy (that may be in process) is that we plunge the world in chaos and sell them corporate mercenary services, weapons, and more.

John Robb's Weblog

Dave Winer : The Dean campaign taught us that you can't use the Internet to launch into a successful television campaign to win primaries. By raising money to run ads you play into the gatekeepers, who for obvious financial reasons, have a lot at stake in the money continuing to flow through their bank accounts. At some point he wouldn't need them. If Dean didn't get it, they did. So they proved that in 2004 at least, they still get a veto on who runs for President.

DaveNet : Howard Dean is not a soap bar

What Usability Tsars listen to when we're chillin'.

HCI Rap!

My friend Jason writes : And what's with the nooranch business? I assume this is nooranch as in noosphere, a ranch of ideas or something? Are you going to chase herds of majestic ideas across the pampas and corral them at night?

Well, that's about the size of it. And well put.

Jason also informs me how profitable his online poker playing is turning out to be, as he's won around $4000 since December.

It's an activity that is so crazy and unjustifiable and unhelpful to the world that there's a sick kind of beauty to it. Plus when the hourly rate is a lot better than what you make at your "real" job, you start to ask yourself scary questions.

Indeed. Clearly writing blogs and wikis is the wrong online game to be in.

Aparently there is Marxist Methodological Individualism

Maybe I should try solar webhosting

I've yet to find any good blogs about AI / ALife / Evolutionary Robotics etc. I wonder why?

Is it because

a) good AI / ALife / computational neuroscience researchers don't have the time / inclination to blog?

(Why not, damn you? To all my friends still in academia, why aren't you writing something about your research? How the hell am I supposed to know what's going on?)

b) AI / ALife are dead!

Anyway, I'll be watching Mechanical Spirit to see if it's any good. (And whether the author will get a clue about web-design)

BBC NEWS | Brazil falls in love with Linux

Infiltration of files seen as extensive says the Boston Globe.

Build your own cathedral! What are you waiting for?

Don Justo's Self-Built Cathedral: metaphoric learnings for contemporary alternative initiatives

ThoughtStorms:SelfBuiltCathedral

via Anthony Judge (who looks interesting, but daunting to come to terms with)


via Ming

If you plant a bomb in the shopping centre, it's no excuse to say that you didn't intend harm to anyone in particular, because you had no specific target in mind.

ThoughtStorms: TheBombInTheShoppingCentre

Graham : Both the UK and the US entertain the limbo area, in which we are being constantly exposed to hints and clues as to how we could be happy, but in a constant state of frustration and disappointment. ...

One plausible explanation for the outrage is that it took place in a nation that has been "educated" into thinking that sex is fine, so long as the actuality - the most natural and inoffensive parts - is to be constantly avoided.

eXmosis [contains mild violence and copious american stupidity]

This wiki spits out RDF metadata from simple wiki markup. The authors also have a paper.

Intriguing idea ...

via Bill Seitz

Rather than try to convince users to start "registering" for Google, why not piggyback on one of the most viral fads going around: a social network application? And, for added effect, make it an invite only system so that you feel special once you're invited.


Jeremy Zawodny's blog: Why Google needs Orkut

via TeledyN

Also ThoughtStorms:TheUserIsThePlatform

Human selfishness is the big question when doing alt.money simulations : do you build it in as an axiomatic assumption, and give the game to the right? Or do you leave it out as an axiomatic assumption, and risk people dismissing the work as irrelevant?

What I need is some uncontroversial, plausible, underlying behavioural axioms that can give rise to emergent selfishness in some circumstances, but not in others.

Hilan has a good intuition that it's to do with security : the more secure you feel about the future, the more generous you can afford to be, and the less you horde.

But I'm still working on a way of representing this.

OPTIMAES

No panic then! BBC NEWS | Earth 'shook off' ancient warming

Just takes about 150,000 years ...

I guess the guy's synaesthetic ...

Vaclav Halek - composer inspired by the plaintive cry...of the mushroom

via Experimental Music Tribe

And what, prey, business is it of ThoughtStorms, an entirely move-forward medium without pictures, to presume to understand and comment on 2D spatial design?

ThoughtStorms: SpaceVsInformationFlows

One of the advantages of having a lousy connection is that it reminds you that 200K of gratuitous graphics is the difference between a page that downloads and is actually useful, and a frustrating wait that ends in the browser timing out.

So I've now turned graphics off in my browser. It also prompts me to start reading Jakob Nielsen again ... ok, here we go.

Within narrowly defined niches, usability enhancements percolate quickly. Interesting as always.

But suddenly I encounter this reason for doing usability studies ...

You can patent usability innovations to keep the competition from stealing them. Most Web projects are managed by marketing departments that have no experience with the patent system. Websites, however, are inventions and should be protected when you invest in developing something new. Talk to people in your legal department. They might know of a patent attorney who doesn't bite.

BLEEAAAHHH!!!!!!!

Competitive Testing of Website Usability

ThoughtStorms: ACityIsNotATree

Darius Sokolov is on a roll making criticisms of OPTIMAES. As Darius is a real, LSE trained economist, this is a good perspective to have. I need some time to read and absorb his comments, but I think they'll lead somewhere useful.

Optimaes: EconomicCriticism

Lousy internet connection at the moment. Dial-up over an inexplicably noisy phone line.

Connection takes several tries to establish and drops after 5 - 10 minutes, so if you don't hear from me, that's probably the reason.

Just discovered a fantastic paper (via Richard Macmanus via Seb)

"The Information Architecture of Cities", by L. Andrew Coward and Nikos A. Salingaros, which discusses InformationArchitecture of cities ie. it thinks about cities as information processing systems. Can't recommend this highly enough.

My summary is on ThoughtStorms: TheCityAsInformationSystem or a slightly delinked version below :

---

City as Information Processing Architecture

It treats cities as information processing architecture.

Movements of people and goods are interpretted as information flows. But an information system is considered to be one which doesn't just move information around. It also processes it. Alternatives are evaluated and decisions are made. For example, humans make decisions about what work to do, what business to invest time and money in according to the information they are fed by the city.

Fractal Loading

Journeys accomplish a primary information exchange. But ideally (for C+S) journeys have secondary, serendipitous information exchange. For examples, a pedestrian on the way to work visits shops, sees adverts, buys a newspaper, encounters a friend and has a quick word, and may have a coffee observing the behaviour and dress of those around her. This multiplicity of dimensions of information they call FractalLoading.

The virtue of cities is this dense, fractal, multilayered information exchange. It makes cities generate economic wealth and culture. Urban city planners should try to optimize the fractal loading of information.

In contrast, traditionally city planners have tried to

• visually simplify the structure of the city
  
• design "plug and play" modules, abstracted from their context
  

in the name of simplifying and optimizing the obvious, primary information flows.

For example, cities are zoned into commercial, living and shopping districts. Joined by high-speed, but informationally 1-dimensional, long distance connections. Large roads are driven through previously complex and rich urban centres, destroying their informational ecology.

These practices are all traditionally criticised by Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, Stewart Brand etc. But this paper offers another explanation of the problem. They reduce FractalLoading and therefore information exchange efficiency.

Systems Theory

Drawing on the Systems Theories of Herb Simon the paper points out that all successful complex systems are organized into hierarchies of modules at different scales. (A fractal organization) But cities which are zoned break this pattern.

Hardware and Software Complexity

The authors make a distinction between software and hardware types of complexity :

• Software complexity arises where you have a few types of homogenous modules, and a large number of potential links or flows. The complexity is in the configuration of the links.
  

• "Hardware" complexity arises from a wider variety of heterogenous modules with fewer links.
  

Von Neuman and Recommendation Architectures

The authors make a second distinction between two kinds of succesful complex, information system.

• The "von Neuman" architecture of separated functional modules (eg. memory and processing) with fixed purposes and relationships
  

• A "Recommendation Architecture" where similar modules explore and compete. (Similar to competitive layers in a Neural Network, especially something like Adaptive Resonance Theory)
  

The first of these is closer to hardware complexity, the second, software complexity.

Chaotic and Homeostatic

A third distinction is made between two dynamic trends in systems :

• chaotic ie. the usual sensitive dependency on initial conditions
  

and

• and that trend where complex dynamics fall into a point or basin of attraction, converging from widely different starting points
  

Why Hierarchies

From Herb Simon, they argue that complex systems seek hierarchies for two reasons :

• to simplify the information required to describe and build the system
  

• to centralize knowledge of problems and the resources to deal with them. Knowledge of problems needs to be at a high level, but execution needs to be applied at the low, local level. Thus the two levels are forced into a relationship, whier the higher controls or guides the lower.
  

Thus the systems need to be hierarchies of modules.

Module boundaries

Modules are defined not as spatial regions as typically thought of as modules by urban planners. (What C+S call non-modules) But by information flows. A module is a network of information, who's boundary is best defined as the place where external communication is simplified, formalized or standardized ie. is an interface. Elements within the module are highly connected / dependent but modules themselves are weakly connected.

Plug and Play

Attempts to build "plug and play" modules abstracted from their context (eg. a business park) are flawed. They typically misunderstand the nature of modules as defined above. Often urban modules are defined as a spatial region, combining many identical elements eg. office block, business parks, residential districts. These are not real modules at all. Most people interact with elements of different types ie. people live in residential apartments, work in offices and socialize in bars.
Few people travel from house to house. And few companies buy from the company next door in the business park.

On the other hand, these modules are connected to the rest of the city through simplified interfaces eg. one road for the business park. The simplicity is based on the assumption that this spatial area is a module. But it needs to be used for the high bandwidth connections between the elements and the rest of their true modules elsewhere. The result, conjestion.

GYWO : I have mixed feelings about invading Iraq. I'm a little glad we did it, but I'm also relieved to know I wasn't an idiot FOR FEELING TOTALLY SAFE FROM SADDAM HUSSAIN for the past twenty years.

GYWO : page thirty-one

The Hutton report : Key points

Clay Shirky is blogging sceptically on YASNSs

Partly a reaction to the hype I suppose.

I still think I get good value from Tribe. The tribes (discussion groups) are good. Most of the people I encounter are interesting. But the killer app is that Tribe messaging is becoming like spam-free mail. I'm trying to migrate all my email connections to Tribe, simply because my mailbox is filled with messages from people I want to hear from, unlike my real email box.


Update : Geekbox likes the group forming.

via Seb Paquet

Ghost Universe by Phil Jones (2004)

Yes, thanks to the wonder of The Gimp you too can put
together a mini-art exhibition in 3 minutes of faffing time.

Lost Universe

(All images donated to Creative Commons so you can use 'em for your next CD cover etc.)

A Concise History of Union Busting at Borders

via Mark Dilley

Jill Walker Links and Power: The Political Economy of Linking on the Web

via Blog-errant