Slingshot Opera

Here Is the updated proposal

2002-12-05T17:41:00.000-08:00

Electronic Culture Project Proposal

Background Context
In 2002, The BC liberal government passed legislation to dissolve the entity
formally known as Tech BC and have SFU take over the programs that were offered
there. Over the last few months the task of integrating three new departments
(IT, IA, M&T) into the SFU fold, has fostered a discourse around the role of
structure in academic institutions. Many ardently oppose the adoption of SFU’s
established structure, arguing that the universities current approach to
classifying academic departments serves little purpose outside of maintaining
formal hierarchies, and clear divisions of authority. This argument goes on to
point out that SFU’s structured, rigid approach to managing different knowledge
domains is indicative of a modernist approach to higher learning that is simply
no longer relevant to our contemporary social and cultural needs.

Problem Definition
what’s clear to those who champion change over convention is that advances in
today’s world require a convergence of knowledge across many disciplines. For
this reason, meaningful research and innovation cannot, and will not move
forward unless we make a concerted effort to promote and maintain collaborative
relationships and knowledge synergies. The critical bottle-necks of the
information age are no longer about transmission speed and processing power, but
rather the ineffective sharing of information and skills across multiple
knowledge disciplines.
Unfortunately, the bureaucrats, and academic politicians have become so caught
up in their fight to maintain power that they fail to see how their inability to
accept change could potentially contribute to the stifling of social and
cultural evolution.

Project Aim
The primary goal of this work is to address the issue of the importance of
embracing new approaches to learning so that social and cultural evolution can
be expedited in as efficient a manner as possible.

Proposed Solution
In a complex system, evolution is a process that cannot be stopped. Innovation
and changes will always take place. However, these innovations may not occur at
an optimal rate. In order to harness the full potential of Universities as
centers for innovation, we would like to implement an approach that will enable
people to take patterns of positive emergent behavior from these academic
institutions that could drive the next phase of evolutionary innovative changes.

Here is the model of our proposed solution

We envision the School of X as a connected node that exists within SFU. The
School of X will inherently act as an experimental ground whereby unfettered
innovation is allowed to take place within the structure of the University. This
unrestrained innovation will take place for a defined period of time. At the end
of each innovation period, we will take the time to reflect back and extract
patterns that had emerged. There will no doubt be positive as well as negative
emergent patterns. These patterns will be thoroughly analyzed and packaged in
the form of pattern language as blueprints that could be introduced into realms
outside of the School of X—SFU and eventually the society.

For the purpose of this assignment, we will be extracting patterns from our
experience at TechBC. The reasons why we chose TechBC is because we acknowledge
the fact that this University was able to experiment with new and innovative educational approaches within its 3 years of existence. Thus there
will be a lot of valuable patterns that could be extracted out of our 3 years
experience at this school.

Cheers, Dale

A model of our work

2002-12-05T17:28:00.000-08:00

Hey hey hey

As Laura has asked, we have articulated our project as a visual model. The key emphasis in this model is the notion of using pattern languages to distribute and share knowledge in an easy and effective manner. As you look at the model note that the square blocks are patterns, and that the blocks consolidate to create a language of patterns. Of importance here is the idea that individual patterns do not exist on their own. In reality a pattern is a component part of a network of patterns, and as patterns come together they coallesce to create even larger patterns, which can be thought of as languages. We have tried to articulate this in our model using squares. Hopefully that translates well. What we would like to explore is the idea that Pattern languages from different disciplines can come together to create a strong platform for knowledge sharing--both in the academic enviornment as well as society on the whole. The beauty of patterns is that they are constructed using simple and easy to understand language--an approach that is in keeping with the ideals of the third culture.

The second thing to note in this model is the manner in which we have situated the school of X at the forefront of a movement. This is meant to articulate the idea that universities are crucibles of innovation and that research in these intstitutions provides the impetus for social change and evolution on the whole. In the model we are attempting to visualize the importance of using pattern languages to expedite this process. If you look towards the top of the diagram you will notice that we have included a time scale--you''ll probably recoginze it from the models Laura linked to in the first week of mod three. Note that the points of signficnace on this time scale are getting closer togther. Also note that the edge of the collective circles (society, academics, sfu, school of X) are just about in line with a major step event on the time scale. This is our first attempt at representing the pending phase shift, and the fact that we feel the school of x will be a major player in bringing other player towards that shift. An important point to consdier here is the way that with model has indicated that a portion of society, as well as a portion of sfu, and academics is ahead of the school of X. The idea here is that the school of X is not the only important player in the move towards change.

Got to go for know more to come later

Dale

Yeah...what Jeremy Said

2002-12-05T16:48:00.000-08:00

In my research for the project I came across this fantastic qoute from Jeremy Rifkins book The Age of Access. Give it a read.... its does a great job articulating my current perspective.

"Hierarchical organizations work best in periods of steady and stable markets but are woefully inadequate in periods of flux. Their administrative procedures are far too rigid to adjust to rapid changes in market conditions.
Networks, on the other hand, are far more flexible and better suited to the volatile nature of the new global economy. Cooperation and team approaches to problem solving allow the partners to respond more quickly to changes in the external environment. While the players give up a degree of autonomy and sovereignty, the spontaneity and creativity that flow from network-based collaboration give them a collective edge in the new more demanding high-tech economy. Because networks involve complex channels of communications, diverse perspectives, parallel processing of information, continuous feedback, and reward thinking “outside the box”, the players are more likely to make new connections, generate new ideas, create new scenarios, and implement new action plans in what is becoming a hyper-commercial environment. Time Warner’s Walter Isaacson captured the significance of the shift in the capitalist organization when he observed that “the old establishment was a club, The new establishment is a network”.

Source = The age of Access, page 23.

A look at what I believe the X space should look like.

2002-12-05T16:45:00.000-08:00

X is the academic space of tomorrow. The primary purpose of this space is to expedite the networked infrastructure necessary for knowledge fusion. In this space there are no walls, and there are no top down committees. This space is completely fluid, and in being so it is able to support the movement back and forth along the “order-to-chaos” continuum. The X space has safe guards against beurocratic policy. The x space has a political structure that purposefully subverts power playing. In the x space, power is simply looked down upon. The x space publishes to the general public, as well as to it’s academic peers. The x space has no titles, no tenure, and no rigid classifications of any kind.

Proposal Framework

2002-12-05T16:34:00.000-08:00

Hi folks

Here is the first draft of our proposal that has since been adjusted, edited and changed.

In 2002, The BC liberal government passed legislation to dissolve the entity formally known as Tech BC and have SFU take over the programs that were offered there. Over the last few months the task of integrating three new departments (IT, IA, M&T) into the SFU fold, has fostered a discourse around the role of structure in academic institutions. Many ardently oppose the adoption of SFU’s established structure, arguing that the universities current approach to classifying academic departments serves little purpose outside of maintaining formal hierarchies, and clear divisions of authority. This argument goes on to point out that SFU’s structured, rigid approach to managing different knowledge domains is indicative of a modernist approach to higher learning that is simply no longer relevant to our contemporary social and cultural needs.
What’s clear to those who champion change over convention is that advances in today’s world require a convergence of knowledge across many disciplines. For this reason, meaningful research and innovation cannot, and will not move forward unless we make a concerted effort to promote and maintain collaborative relationships and knowledge synergies. The critical bottle-necks of the information age are no longer about transmission speed and processing power, but rather the ineffective sharing of information and skills across multiple knowledge disciplines.
Unfortunately, the bureaucrats, and academic politicians have become so caught up in their fight to maintain power that they fail to see how their inability to accept change could potentially contribute to the stifling of social and cultural evolution.
The primary goal of this work is to address that issue—that is, the importance of embracing new approaches to learning so that social and cultural evolution can be expedited in as efficient a manner as possible. This work aims to provide insight into the value and importance of side stepping convention at this critical point in history To achieve we plan on applying what some might call a literal adaptation of Marshall Macluhan’s famous statement “looking forward through the rear view mirror”
We plan to articulate our argument by forecasting the future in a compare and contrast type manner. To achieve this we will place our selves in the future, some (still to be defined) years from today, and report back on the current state of human experience. Our reports will compare and contrast two distinct perspectives. The first perspective will be based on the assumption that we have not embraced change well at this critical point in history, and that instead we have relied on established social, political, and cultural conventions to guide us as we evolve. Here we will make specific attempts to forecast what our experience might be like if we do not take proactive measures to improve knowledge sharing through out society. The second position will be in direct contrast to the first, and will essentially report back with the assumption being that we have embraced change that at this critical evolutionary juncture established convention has been forsaken in place of experimental thought and ideas.

Looking forward through the rear view mirror”.

2002-11-10T17:02:00.000-08:00

Here are some thoughts about my blog, blogging, and collaborative knowledge sharing at Tech BC/SFU.

Warning, some of these thoughts may not sit well with everyone. If you are the type of student who spends most of your time listening and less contributing you might want to click the back button. Then again, maybe you should stick around, so that my sentiments are at least reaching the audience I intended this for.

Anyrate, this reflecting back on my weblog over the last ten weeks, has really ended up being an exercise in what did and did not work for me in this course. What I realized is that this web loging is, on a lot of levels, NOT my preferred approach to knowledge sharing. Finding the time to sit down, collect my thoughts, and compose a piece of writing for other students to read has become an activity that is simply low on my priority list. Some might say that this is selfish, or that I need to manage my time better, and I certainly would agree; I think we all could follow that advice on some level—the time management advice, that is. The reality for me however, is that I don’t think my finding-the-time-to-blog issue is simply a matter of poor time management. I personally feel that time, as an experience, is a manifestation of our choices in life. A person’s lifestyle will dictate their experience, and, indeed, this is the case with my inability to find the time to sit in front of my computer and blog.

The time we have in our days is finite. 24 hours minus 8 for sleep, 2 hours for eating, etc etc. I could break this down more but I think we all understand the point—to many things to do, not enough time to do it in. So, with this being the reality, we find ourselves in a situation where we are forced to prioritize our day-to-day activities. Those activities that we value, for whatever reason, get priority over others. In short, our individual valuation process plays an extremely important role in the way in which we manage our time.

Anyways, lets get back to the issue of my blog being a hassle, and why. In reflecting back, it seems I didn’t make the time to create a more meaningful blog because I simply didn’t value that activity as a worthy use of my time. So the question becomes, why didn’t I value it? Well, one reason is, I had a hard time finding the motivation to contribute to a collective knowledge sharing process where less then thirty percent of the group seems to want to contribute or has anything meaningful to say. As brutal as that sounds, it is in fact the way I feel. I have sat through countless hours of critiques and online conferences where myself and a handful of other students are the only ones contributing anything of value to the process. This school is supposed to be about interdisciplinary knowledge sharing, collaboration, and teamwork, yet the majority of the group that I study with chooses to be silent during collaborative knowledge sessions—both in person, and online. Frankly, I’m totally fed up with it, and I have a great deal of trouble spending my valuable time contributing to a culture that makes that kind of behavior OK. I’ve been through close to four years of teamwork and sat through countless session of critiquing other students work. I’ve contributed hours of my personal time to other students education and my experience has been that 80% of those students take, and do not return the favor. In my mind, these students should either contribute or move on. Go get a job at Home Depot, or the video store, or what ever. This is the fourth year of an academic program based on collaboration, and yet we still spend our time babysitting a group of comatose sponges who sit at the back of the room, in their safe little groups and stare at the carpet. Now I realize that my contribution style is different, and that not everyone values the same approach. I’ll also be the first to admit that I’m bit of a loud mouth, and maybe I say too much sometimes, but at least I contribute.

Now some might be thinking, “but Dale, you just finished saying you haven’t been contributing”. Well, in fact I have been contributing, but I have been doing so only out of necessity, and on the whole that process has been a bit of a hassle. That said, I suppose the purpose of this rant is to explain how I feel so that I can then put it away and move forward. If we are going to look back and learn something from our actions we need to be able to figure out the problem, deal with it in whatever way we need to, and then come up with a solution so that it won’t happen again. For this reason, I am all for putting my two cents into defining what the so-called school of “X” might be in the future.

So anyways, yeah…writing about my ideas and thoughts in an open forum is just not something I’m interested in doing unless I feel the time spent doing so is worthwhile. Over the last three and a half years my experience has proven that this sort of activity at Tech BC/SFU does not work for me, and is not beneficial to my educational goals. The time I spend partaking in this kind of activity is simply better spent doing other things—chopping wood comes to mind. Now I know that this course is about examining and exploring electronic culture and that this entails the collective contribution to a common experience. I also realize that we live, and go to school in a multicultural environment and the reality is that we have a melting pot of values and cultural norms to negotiate as a result. Don’t get me wrong, I respect and understand the elements of our design problem here.

That said, I am not proposing to just throw up my hands and no longer contribute to the collaborative process we are applying in this course, or degree for that matter. In fact, I plan to actively participate in the coming module, but I will do so more as a designer trying to solve problems and less so as a writer discussing them. I personally think there are more efficient approaches to expediting the sharing of knowledge in our ever evolving networked environment. I appreciate the value of reading and writing; however, I also understand that our social experience is evolving in increasingly complex ways. The devices and technologies we will use in the future may not be conducive to these more traditional forms of communication. I intend to use this consideration as my research platform for the coming module, and plan to investigate more efficient platforms for collaborative knowledge sharing using a ten years down the road perspective.

Testing the powerlaw hypothesis

2002-11-02T14:07:00.000-08:00

Ok, so we've had some discussion around the nature of the internet and other networks, and we came up with this idea that when it comes to the web there are all kinds of power law distributions going on.

In the spirit of exploration (and getting the assigment done) I decided to use the google link tool to experiement with the Dr. Barabasi hypothesis that links on web pages will follow a power law distribution pattern, and that this pattern is in fact scale free. To this end, I decided to follow in the footsteps of my classmate and fellow powerlaw investigator/exposer, Hector Larious. Hector did a fantastic job outlining the a powerlaw experiment which focused on link patterns and News sites. In an effort to explore this phenomenon myself, and to also contribute Hectors work in some meaningful manner, I've decided to do a similar experiment but on a different scale. To achieve this difference in scale I chose to look at a more specialized topic set. Given that my blog is focused on design, and specifically experience design, I decided to experiment with 14 random links from my experience design favorites list. Again, I decided to do this using the google link tool. Below are the sites and their respective link values, as determined by the google tool. Below those values is a graphical representation which, indeed, indicates that a power law distribution exists. Unfortunately the scale diference I had would show up has not in fact done so. Interestingly, my data follows hectors quite closely, even though our site types where completely different.

The values

Adobe.com 118,000
Macromedia.com 46,000
Apple.com 14,300
Corel.com 7,520
Useit.com 6,790
AIGA.com 2,320
Puma.com 1840
Razorfish.com 1060
Sapient.com 1040
IIT 840
Nathan.com 782
Plumbdesign.com 488
Raremedium.com 444
Interaction-ivrea.it 384
Aiga-experience design 194
Electronicink.com 190

The graph

Cheers, Dale

The Eye Candy perspective

2002-10-28T14:49:00.000-08:00

In the spirit of the coming Carnival celebration (Halloween) I’ve decided that some serious candy handouts are in order. Eye candy, BABY. We’ve done a lot of talking about Internet topology lately, so I thought these fancy little candy coated numbers were relevant.

Check out the clusters on these baby’s …..WHEN you click the image to get the animation make sure you give it a bit of time to download onto your machine..

This graph visualization shows the topology of the core of the Internet from mid-January 2000. It reveals the peering relations and geographic locations of Autonomous Systems (ASes), which are a vital part of Internet infrastructure that represent large ISP networks for the complex routing of traffic flows. It was created by researchers at CAIDA as part of their skitter project.

This image is taken from one of three cyberspace visualization sequences in the William Gibson scripted film Johnny Mnemonic.

This map compares the geographic distribution of Internet routers (top) against the global distribution of population (bottom). It was produced by Soon-Hyung Yook, Hawoong Jeong, and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi at the University of Notre Dame as part of their research in the network structure of the Internet. For more information see their paper, Modeling the Internet's large scale topology

This map is a PDF of the core anatomy of a linux system. Extremely fantabulous, and very cool.

Finally, and very much in the Spirit of Halloween, comes this last piece of extra special eye candy. This dark and interesting film called Warriors of the Net is a must see perspective on the workings of the Internet. Here is what others had to say:

“The Internet is imagined, and made tangible, on the movie screen, as a dank and grimy place, reminiscent of industrial factories from the nineteenth century. Warriors of the Net is not the slick, clean-room cyberspace of solid state electronics and fibre-optics, but a dirty, mechanical otherworld of clanking machines of riveted steel, levers, armatures and elevators. This is perhaps a Victorian Internet [2]. As Elam told Map of the Month in a recent email interview, “ the way routers and firewalls work seems to me a lot like old time factories. Picking up something here, dropping it there. Nothing really new there, very mechanical. I had rough and mechanical and went from there, trying to add some of the popular aesthetics from the net culture ... the dark, moody space etc.”

Source:

Note the source for much of what I've posted here is the Atlas of Cyberspaces. Be sure to check it out for more wonderful candy coated Internet visualizations.

Happy Halloween

Understanding the scale free power law deal

2002-10-28T11:13:00.000-08:00

So, this week we learned about the power law characteristics of the Web. According to the experts, when it comes to the web there are all kinds of power law distributions going on. For instance there are many poorly connected sites, and only a few that are well connected. Also, when it comes to user patterns, the mass of users tend to flock to a few select sites, while the remaining sites tend to get ignored. These characteristics are in keeping with what is known as a power law, which in mathematical terms means that
“the probability of attaining a certain size x is inversely proportional to x to some power, whose numerical value is greater or equal to 1.”

The reason that power laws are interesting is that unlike the more familiar bell-shaped Gaussian distribution, a power law distribution has no 'typical' scale and is hence frequently called 'scale-free'. Hector does a nice job comparing the difference between a normal distribution and a power law distribution. Check out his nice work here.
We are all familiar with the bell curve and its use as a grades distribution map in academics. The apparent logic here is that in any sample of students there always seems to be a characteristic grade spread that represents the majority. So in a class of 30, the majority, say 20 students, will be average, while 5 might be above average and the other 5 below. When plotted out on a graph, this pattern represents a bell shape with the grade spread majority defining the peak of the bell. This bell peak with lows on each side is the nature of a Gaussian, or normal distribution. The difference between a power law and a Gaussian distribution is that in the power law graph there is no peak, the pattern simply starts high and then tappers off slowly (again take a look at Hectors two graphs to see this represented visually). Research has shown that this kind of distribution occurs frequently on the world-wide-web. For instance, if we dealt with a distribution of sites that had between one and 100 links, we would see that the number of sites that present with one link is the highest and that as we move towards sites with 100 links this representation simply shrinks. There is no standard value for the number of links on a site, we do not have a graph with a peak, many sites have few links, and few sites have many. To understand the notion of scale free, all we need to do is point out that this power law distribution occurs regardless of the scale we negotiate. For instance, if one were to look at the distribution of site sizes, for one arbitrary range, say between 10,000 and 20,000 pages, that distribution would look the same as that for a different range, say between 10 to 100 pages. In other words, zooming in or out in the scale at which one studies the web, one keeps obtaining the same result, i.e. an inverse power law in the probability of finding a given feature.

My Small world network Map

2002-10-26T16:12:00.001-07:00

In an effort to put knowledge into practice our assignment for the second week of Module two of electronic culture, was to create a diagram of a web based social network to which we are personally connected. Based on our working diagram, we were asked seek out and identify one distinct small network with in our chosen network.

The community:
The networked community I have chosen to highlight is the user experience design community—more specifically, user experience design sites that are linked to the AIGA. My involvement with this community is an outgrowth of my academic studies, my research, and previous professional employment.

My method
My approach for finding a small network with in this community was as follows:

Step One: Performed a Google search with the following parameters:
AIGA + “User Experience Design”

Step Two: Recorded all the results, by name, URL, the time it took to download, and the number of images on each site.

Step Three: Searched for sites that were blogs—found 7.

Step Four: Search all seven blogs to see if I could find links between them, as well as my own personal blogg.

Step Five: Created map of results.

The following map presents a small world network of blog sites that are user experience design related, and have some affiliation with the AIGA. The blog sites found via my Google search are orange ovals (these are hyperlinked). The other sites I found on that Google search are represented by the blank orange ovals. The hexagons (these are hyperlinked as well) on the map represent links from my blog site that are in some way related to small world topic.

Note: Almost all blog sites are linked to each other in less then six steps. Also of interest is the fact that my involvement to the community is one-dimensional. I found no links to my blog, only links from me to other sites.

See the map here

My Small world network Map

2002-10-26T16:12:00.000-07:00

Maverlous Networks collaborate part two

2002-10-25T00:52:00.000-07:00

Ok, so last post I was talking about this research paper I came across that discussed the similarities in features of collaborative networks--see the post below this if you need a refresher. What really intrigued me about this research paper was how the authors proposed to investigate artificial social collaboration networks, and the results they produced that supported the notion that some underlying rule set is contributing to the may networks evolve. Basically, the paper proposes to investigate the structure of artificial collaborative networks by analyzing the Marvel Universe collaboration network, where two Marvel comic book characters are considered linked if they jointly appear in the same Marvel comic book..

"The Marvel Universe network captures the social structure of this Marvel Universe, because most pairs of characters that have jointly appeared in the same comic book have fought shoulder to shoulder, or each other, or have had some other strong relationship, like family ties or kidnapping. Thus, it shares, in its artificial way, the true social nature of scientific collaboration networks, while the way it has grown has echoes of the Hollywood network, as writers, directors and producers create their characters and assign them to actors in a way that somewhat resembles the way Marvel writers make characters appear in comic books. Thus, besides any sentimental or cultural motive, this is where the main reason for studying the properties of the Marvel Universe lies: it is a purely artificial social network, whose nodes correspond to entities and whose links have been raised by a team of writers without any preconception for a period of forty years. "

The research paper analysis of the Marvel network is based on a set of database numbers that archives the collaboration numbers associated with the comic books over a forty year period—for example, the number of characters (6486), the number of books (12942), mean books per character (14.9), mean characters per book (7.47) so on and so forth. The research outlined in the paper goes into an in-depth statistical analysis that is understood when considered in the paper itself. The scope of this analysis is simply beyond the scope of this post so I wont go into particulars.

Instead, for the sake of brevity, I thought it best to simply skip right to the outcomes of the research. In order to get your head around the outcomes we do however, need to understand the way these outcomes are measured and expressed—to this end we need to understand a metric known as the cluster coefficient.

Lets first refresh the small world network paradigm. In most social networks, two nodes that are linked to a third one have a higher probability to be linked between them: two acquaintances of a given person probably know each other.

This small world effect can be measured using a (statistical value known as the) clustering coefficient. The clustering coefficient measures the fraction of the neighbors of node “V” that are linked.

Getting back to our comic book paper, lets first note that paper written to be in dialogue with other network research--research that looked at the characteristics of real social collaborative networks and how they related to random collaborative networks. In short, the relevant findings of this research, is that real life collaboration networks have a clustering coefficient roughly twice the one of their null random model.
Some normal collaborative networks and their cluster coefficients are:

Hollywood network (Kevin bacon style)- 0.199
Various Scientific networks – between .3 and .8

Moving right along, the Marvel research showed the following:

The Marvel Network (with 6486 nodes and 168 267 links)—0.012
A statistically determined null Random Network (with 6486 nodes and 168 267 links)—0.0066

What is interesting about this is that similar to the true social collaborative network, the artifical network had a clustering coefficient that was twice its null model.

So the insight is as follows.

The final structure of any actual collaboration network, be it real-life or artificial, differs from its null random collaboration network model roughly in the same way, and thus insight is that there is probably a common mechanism that produces them.

Cool eh.

Dale

The Marvel Paper

2002-10-25T00:48:00.000-07:00

You can find the Marvel Comic artificial network research paper discussed in the preivous and coming post at this link:

Marvel Research Paper

New considerations for Social networks

2002-10-22T22:36:00.000-07:00

So to pick up where we were last post, we were discussing the similarities between social networks and computer networks. This post I’d like to discuss similarities again but in a somewhat different manner. I’d like to discuss similarities between a particular type of social network known as the collaborative network. This seems relevant for a number of reasons. First, I think such a discussion is important given our current efforts in building an online collaboration platform. Second I find this notion of network collaboration compelling from an interaction design stand-point. Third, I found this really cool white paper that talks about some really cool characteristics associated with collaborative networks and I’d like to share that with as many readers as possible.

We spoke of a well-known collaborative network last post when we discussed Kevin bacon and the Hollywood actors network he is currently the poster boy for. Another common collaborative network we looked at in our readings was the Scientific collaboration network. “In such a network, nodes represent scientists and links denote the co-authorship of a scientific piece of work contained in some database.” One example we looked at was the network associated with Paul Erdos who was a Hungarian mathematician who published over 1500 papers with 492 coauthors, more than any other mathematician in history. A little poking around revealed that other scientific disciplines have been studied along this line as well. Researchers have looked at databases in neuroscience, high-energy physics, and biomedical sciences. So far the outcome of these investigations is that all of these social collaboration networks seem to exhibit patterns in keeping with the small world phenomenon. These insights have become the impetus for more investigation, and as more and more examples of small world patterns surface researchers are finding it hard not to ask certain questions. One such question that is being asked is as follows:

“Does this similarity in features (here they are referring to small world features in collaborative networks) represent some profound principle in human interaction? Or, on the contrary, does any large network with some collaboration between nodes present these characteristics?”

This particular quote comes from the white paper I mentioned in my opening paragraph, and if I haven’t intrigued you yet I’ll probably grab you soon enough. What’s even cooler about this white paper is the way in which they go about investigating a potential answer to their question. First they set up their ideas by distinguishing between different social network types. To this end the authors speak of the difference between a true social network and one that is forced or less natural.

“Newman argues that scientific collaboration networks are true social networks, since most pairs of scientists that have written a paper together are genuinely acquainted with one another. The social meaning of the Hollywood network is, in this sense, weaker, because it has been built up mainly through the decisions of cast directors, producers and agents, rather than voluntary collaboration of actors.”
I thought this was an interesting insight. If we want to discuss network collaboration in a social sense It’s certainly worthwhile establishing the boundaries and benchmarks. The falsity of the Hollywood collaboration network is something I hadn’t considered up until I read this paper. It’s certainly got me think though. I wonder what sort of social network we have in our meta blogg? Could we say it was a natural collaboration network? I mean, I would certainly consider everyone in our group an acquaintance, but I doubt whether I would be collaborating online like this if it wasn’t required by the course. This is an interesting consideration with regard to our task of designing our own network. Are we here collaborating in a natural sense, or is Laura just the director of some production that requires our input? I’m not going to answer this question cause I think it’s a bit dangerous. All the same I think its compelling and a possible seed for an interesting discourse.

Look for part B of this post coming soon.

The similarities between social and computer networks

2002-10-20T12:25:00.000-07:00

So, as part of this weeks exploration into small world networks and the concept of six degrees of separation, we’ve had the chance to look at different kinds of networks.

Social networks are valuable as a platform for discussing the characteristics of small world networks, and, as it turns out, network patterns in general. First a little background and history on the topic:

The concept of the "Small World Network" is related to the research of a somewhat controversial social scientist by the name of Stanley Milgram. In his research, Milgram hypothesized “that members of any large social network (in his case, the population of the United States) would be connected to each other through short chains of intermediate acquaintances.” His research showed that “average lengths of the resulting acquaintance chains was roughly six”, and, in doing so, he became the grandfather and originator of the pop culture phrase, “Six degrees of separation”.

How small is your world?
Click here and find out >>>> The Small world research project hosted by the Sociology department at Columbia University.

So, now that we got a general understanding of the history and terminology behind this topic, we can begin to talk about some of the interesting characteristics and contemporary research that is going on in the field. As mentioned above, the Social Network seems to be a popular platform for research in this area. One very well known small world network is the Hollywood actors network that has been popularized in recent years by the connectedness of Kevin Bacon. In fact lets use Kevin’s connectedness to reflect on and investigate some interesting characteristics and similarities of networks. Through this, we can begin to get our head around complex network related issues such as Internet topology, and more specifically, compelling questions such as, What does the Internet look like?

It's important to remember that Kevin’s unique network connectivity actually plays it self out with in a much larger networked order, which is the society we all live in. From a meta level, the society we live in is, in it self, a social network, and the Hollywood actors network we associate with Kevin is, in fact, a sub network that exists with in that. In the network sense, Kevin is therefore a hub/node, and the actors who collaborate with him are nodes that make up a cluster. This Hollywood actors network is a particular variety of a social network known as a collaborative network.

So, what makes Kevin so special, and why has he become so entrenched in the contemporary network scene? Well, the simple answer to the first question is that Kevin is simply an extremely versatile actor. Over the years he has proven his versatility by playing many different roles in many different films. This versatility has put him in collaborative situations with many different actors, and as a result, a sort of collaborative cluster has emerged around him. As a result, and in keeping with Milgram’s research findings, most actors can be linked to Kevin with in six collaborative degrees. Ok cool, but what does have to do with the contemporary network discourse? Well, for insight into that question lets visit an article that I came across while reading Hectors comments on what Ben had to say on the topic. An article printed in the Economist recently asked the question, What does the Internet look like? The following is a section taken from that article. Again, credit to Hector, Ben, and Slashdot,as the source for this.

Until 1999, the standard way of modeling the Internet was to use randomly generated graphs, in which routers were represented by points and the links between them by lines. But it turns out that such random graphs are a poor approximation because they miss two important features. The first is that links in the net are “preferentially attached”: a router that has many links to it is likely to attract still more links; one that does not, will not. The second is that the Internet has more clusters of connected points than random graphs do. These two properties give the Internet a topology that is scale-free—in other words, small bits of it, when suitably magnified, resemble the whole.

For the record, the features described above are based on the ideas and observations of a fella named Albert-Laslo Barabasi and his colleagues at the University of Notre Dame. Getting back to why this is interesting and related to Mr Bacon, if we look closely, we can actually see some parallels between the social networks, as discussed in the Kevin Bacon and Migram sense, and computer networks, as discussed through Barabasi' ideas. For instance, this idea of the well-linked router attracting more links is, on alot of levels, linked to and in keeping with the frequency in which Kevin Bacon gets work in Hollywood. Another compelling point of interest stems from the scale free element. Milgram’s work with meta level social networks exhibited six degrees of separation, and so does the Kevin bacon phenomenon which as we pointed out above is occurring on the sub network level of the larger meta network that Milgram worked with. So, here, much like the internet, we are seeing clusters of connected points on multiple levels, which is in keeping with the idea that small bits of a network when suitably magnified can resemble the whole. This may all seem rather uncompelling on the surface, but when we start to think about how we might deal with the issue of trying to model the Internet it's worthwhile. Moreover, and possibly more interesting, is the manner in which social patterns seem to be mirrored in our technological experience. Ok.....now I must play tennis.

More to come.

Some bootstrap thinking

2002-10-13T12:09:00.001-07:00

Bootstrapping addresses this idea that we can build complex outgrowths based on simple first steps. Once a portion of the goal is attained we can leverage that portion towards achieving the larger task. That portion can be a boot disk for a computer, or the foundation of a house. The key is that once the initial is in place it can be used as a tool to help achieve the larger task.
Instead of keeping all the thoughts at a high level, we introduce it below, and pull enhanced knowledge up from it. The bootstrap metaphor is interesting if we consider the position of the bootstrap to the arms. The arms that would be doing the pulling are symbolically at the top, while the boots are at the bottom. The arms could theoretically be “up” but that’s not enough. The whole body needs to be up to be truly “up”. In the spirit of the use-what-you-got-to-get-what-you-need axiom, the arms work with the boots to get what they need.

Mcluhan boots

2002-10-13T12:09:00.000-07:00

Macluhan suggests that Media extends our senses. Here is what I came up with in trying to figure this out. By using media we exercise our senses--since all media travels through to us by our senses. By exercising our senses we are able to build them, and make them more then what they were prior to our exercise. We might liken media to the sensory weights in our sensory gym. Hmmm… what does that make the message then? Is the message the weights, and the media something else, or vice versa? Wait, according to Mcluhan the medium is the message so in the end they are both weights. Here we go again…”looking forward through the rear view mirror.”

Lets look at an example. “Douglas Engelbart began to envision people sitting in front of cathode-ray-tube displays, "flying around" in an information space where they could formulate and portray their concepts in ways that could better harness sensory, perceptual and cognitive capabilities heretofore gone untapped.” This gets to the idea that macluhan spoke of—media extends our senses. In this instance the user is using the tools (radar screen) to think about things different. The tool mediates and expedites the growth of parts of the body. The body will adapt and will learn based on the environment it needs to work in. The media we work with focuses on and necessitates the use of our perceptual and cognitive capabilities. The media augments our intellect, and in doing puts us in a better position to learn better.

Bootstrapping, augmenting and feedback

2002-10-13T11:45:00.000-07:00

Last night I took the time to read a research paper by the Douglas Engelbart. I found the work outlined in this paper to be fascinating and quite enlightening.
In his research, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, Douglas Englebart discusses the human ability to deal with complex problems. In the simplest terms, he explains that humans are rarely able to deal with problems from a meta level, and that we generally need to break complex problems down into smaller tasks so that they can solve them.

"Although the size of the step a human being can take in comprehension, innovation, or execution is small in comparison to the over-all size of the step needed to solve a complex problem, human beings nevertheless do solve complex problems. It is the augmentation means that serve to break down a large problem in such a way that the human being can walk through it with his little steps, and it is the structure or organization of these little steps or actions that we discuss as process hierarchies."

Over the years we have utilized different tools to achieve this end. We have created tools that help us break problems down into small bits, as well as tools that help us consolidate small bits into a whole solution. Whether we are smudging pixels in Photoshop, or validating java in code warrior the computer has become the primary tool for this process in contemporary society. The exciting thing about our current position, is that we are getting to a stage where through the use of our computer we have bootstrapped our selves into a better position for learning. The computer has improved our abilities learn so much that we are in a much stronger position to improve our abilities to learn. This is evident in the networked space that we are partaking in at the moment. As Engelbart explains, the humans need to break complex problems down, we use tools to do so, and then use tools to consolidate solutions. The Internet is becoming a tool that allows us to do this quite well. Lets look at the top down as well as the bottom up. From the top down, the third culture distributes ideas complex ideas to the masses in simple language. Because these ideas are offered up in simple language more people are able to take these ideas and and attempt to get their heads around them. Once those people have their heads around the meta concept they can then begin to break that concept down into manageable chunks. For some, those manageable chunks might remain in the personal thought realm of the individual, others may choose to “workshop” them around a bit. For example, people might choose to contribute small thought offerings on the topic and ultimately do so using technologies such as bloggs. These thought offerings evolve and over time consolidate into new processes and ideas. These new knowledge chunks bubble up and influence other knowledge chunks. Over time new meta knowledge begins to surface from the bottom up. That new knowledge serves as a foundation for managing new problems and the process continues over and over again.

informed participation.

2002-10-05T16:51:00.000-07:00

Continuing on from where I left off.

Informed participation is less dangerous then the uniformed participation.

Is ignorance useful? Maybe at the lower level. We need guys to pick up the garbage. I prefer to word this another way however. Ditch the ignorance and focus on growth rather then friction. How about “specialization is useful”. Breading ignorance is like breading apathy—see below. Ignorance with a little knowledge can be dangerous. The better approach is to promote diversity and specialization while at the same time creating empowering communication channels for those who choose to participate. We need strong feedback mechanisims to ensure high level perspectives are shared through out the system. We need a metric that encourages informed participation.

The more you visit your neighbor the more in tune you are to their mind space. The more in touch you are with their mind space the more likely you will be able to speak to their experience. Once you can speak to their experience, and them to yours, you are in a position to collaborate. As pockets of collaboration build through out the system you get closer to a phase change.
So, in an effort to move the system toward a phase shift, bridges between Local knowledge (especially specialized knowledge) need to happen on a regular basis. From a design perspective, this means the system should require agents to participate in some form of random yet meaningful “street level” knowledge exchange. This knowledge exchange requirement should not be expedited from the top down, but rather worked into the participation model itself, so that it occurs from the bottom up.

Strategy #1 “and they told two friends”

There is some value in pushing random meaningful blogger content to neighbor’s via email. This “random” element speaks to the Johnson’s third principle, the “neighbours” element, the fifth. The success condition here is that the content remain meaningful. This notion of meaning is essential, in it’s absence the exchange experience degrades, and agents loose interest. Apathetic agents become one dimensional participants and the emergent system ultimately falls apart.

Strategy #2: “Watch your Language”
The third culture proved the value of distributing knowledge through simple language. Simple language sends a message that people are welcome to participate, and contribute. It also facilitates bridge building. Build enough bridges, and sooner or later people start crossing them. Enough people start crossing bridges and sooner or later you’re going to find you are participating in a phase change.

To be continued

Ignorance is ignorant

2002-10-04T17:47:00.000-07:00

Hector makes an interesting argument when he addresses the “unspoken assumption running through his (Johnson’s) text. That is, if ants are doing it so should we. No leaders. No specialists. No experts. No smart alecks!” I am in total agreement with Hector on necessity of being cautious with this assumption.

Consider this scenario: One day little Ant A, who is in charge of removing dead ants, gets curious about a tunnel that he passes by every day on his work route. On this particular day Little Ant A decides to wanders off down the tunnel which, as it turns out, is the Queen ants tunnel. Little Ant A stumbles across the queen and all her protecting ants and for a while observes what goes on in this part of the colony. After watching for a few hours little Ant A begins to see the significance of the Queens role, and decides that in the interest of the colony as a whole his time would be better spent protecting the queen. Little Ant A from that point forward spends all his time guarding the entrance to the queens tunnel. Over time dead ants begin to pile up on little Ant A’s route. These dead ants begin to clog the passageways of the connecting tunnel from the queen ants nest. Pretty soon the tunnel is so clogged that no ants can pass and as a result all of the new born ants get backed up and are unable to disperse into the colony to do their respective jobs. Pretty soon the other dead ant removers sense a problem and begin to try to clean up the mess on Little Ant A’s route. This pulls the dead ant removers away from their original routes, and in time dead ants begin to pile up in other areas of the colony as well. Pretty soon the colony is backed up in a number of sections. General movement grinds to a halt and the colony that was once an efficient well-oiled machine turns into a broken down graveyard.

Of course the likelihood of little Ant A making such a decision is low, but can we say the same for a garbage man in human society. I would argue definitely not. If we could count on people to be content with staying ignorant then Johnson’s ignorance is good concept might be a safe one for Humans to strive towards. However, the reality of our human situation is that though some humans are content to remain ignorant, there will always be some how are not. Because of this you simply cannot create self-managing human systems that operate 100% on bottom up emergent behavior. This is the reason for government, and some semblance of top down control. In the little Ant A instance, we saw a scenario where a system based on ignorance rapidly fell apart as soon as the ignorance position changed for one agent. Some might argue that the queen will simply produce a replacement for Little Ant A and in the end the only outgrowth of Little Ant A’s actions will be an extra guard standing at the entrance to the queens tunnel. But what if little Ant A told all of his buddies about his experience at the end of the queens tunnel, and convinced them all to join him at the entrance as well. What if all little Ant A’s friends told two friends who told two friends, etc, etc. Pretty soon the entire front of the Queens tunnel is so clogged with sentry ants that the new Ants who have been born to remove the backed up dead ants cant get out to do their jobs. For someone who can see the high level outcomes of Little Ant A’s actions, the problem is an easy on to fix. But for a system that has no top down mechanism in place this high level perspective is impossible to see.

I would argue that humans should never champion ignorance. We can see how dangerous a little knowledge can be when it is placed in the hands of an ignorant agent. Little Ant A had no way of seeing how his actions would affect the larger good of the colony.

Shifting gears a bit here. Given the nature of the internet, and the access to information that medium creates for society as a whole I fail to see how championing the ignorance position would be valuable characteristic to work into a human system. In fact I think the exact opposite approach is the only option we have. Given the information revolution we are experience at present, and the dangerous outcomes that can stem from combining information with ignorance, I feel we have to work at educating the masses. The “keep-the-masses-dumb approach is wrong and a recipe for disaster. This is why I feel the third culture approach to spreading knowledge is so important to the greater good of society. I think we need to have experts, and we need to have intellectuals, and we need to have people at the top working on big problems. We also need to put in place systems so that the agents at the lower levels can understand what is going on at these levels. We need to have complex scientific ideas explained in simple language so that the importance of low level activity is understood. We need to create a system of collaborative knowledge and collective thought where people feel they can contribute to the evolution of their social experience. This is why bloggs are such useful technology. Blogs help distribute knowledge, and they help inform on at all levels of society.

That’s all for know. I’ll have more soon though.

Cheers Dale

Tech BC, politics, and being minor

2002-09-26T23:19:00.000-07:00

The following discussion is a repost of an essay that I wrote last year. On a meta level, the essay speaks to the idea of what it means to be minor. The specific discussion is about the role Tech BC had in trying to change the face of contemporary education in BC and Canada, and the manner in which that attempt was recieved by those who held a stake in maintaining their old school ways. The politics of top down power are at the center of the discussion and for this reason I felt it was relevant to our current discusion. Hope you find it of interest.

Being Minor:

The students who came to tech BC did so for a lot of reasons, but for the most part because they were willing to take a chance on a new educational paradigm. That paradigm challenged many old school principles (the tenure system, the semester system, face to face classes, segregated learning spaces, etc) and in doing so threatened many of those who held stake in the maintenance of conventional policies and practices. In this manner, the very existence of Tech BC was a threat to other universities, and their institutional administrators and academics. In understanding this threat one can recognize how Tech BC truly epitomized what it meant to be minor. As Guattari would attest, it is in the presence of a minority that the potential for subversion begins to exist. For the rest of the universities in BC, and for that matter Canada, Tech BC was a cloud that sat on their border—a potential for rain, that seemed especially threatening in the company of a society embracing technological change.

Interestingly, understanding this dynamic is key to understanding the true politics behind the Liberals decision to close down Tech BC. One can only assume what goes on behind closed doors, but we can rest assured that the politics fueling the liberal mandate are far different then those that were fueling the New Democrat’s.
Politics is about power, and in our democratic society, power fluctuates between two very distinct classes—the dominant class and the subordinate class. The subordinate class is represented in politics from a socialist platform. In BC that socialist platform is exercised through the NPD. In direct opposition to the NDP is the liberal party. The Liberals values represent the other side of the political spectrum, and are essentially in keeping with the interests of the dominant class. BC’s political spectrum is, of course, far more colorful then this description suggests, but for the sake of this paper, the above explanation will suffice.
Getting back to our discussion, Tech BC was conceived by an NDP government and as a result, it’s ideals, values, and approaches to education were in keeping with the politics of the subordinate class—that is, when the university mandate was being developed the interests of the people took precedence over the interests of those in positions of power. These politics were made most evident by the government’s decision to not institute a tenure system at the university. The theory behind this decision was that that tenure promotes passivity, and passivity is antithetical to the core values of academia. This decision was very poorly received by other institutions, and it fostered all kinds of controversy. Universities across the country threatened to boycott the school arguing that the absence of tenure at Tech BC was an uncollegial slap in the face, and that it put in jeopardy the careers of academics who had devoted their entire lives to the pursuit of learning, knowledge, and research. Though this argument had much support among academics, it held little sway in the minds of the public, who saw their schools filled with aging professors who where increasingly out of touch with the changing society they lived in. In the end the NDP’s alliance with the people held strong and the university moved forward as an untenured institution.
With the shift in BC’s government came a shift in the politics. With the liberals back in office the political focus shifted back towards the interests of the dominant class. The new climate was an unfriendly one for Tech BC which was only in its third year of operation. Less then a year into the new administration Tech BC was shut down and it’s assets and programs where handed over to SFU. The Liberal government cited cost cutting as its reason for closing down Tech BC, however the reality of the situation is that Tech BC was shut down because it’s policies and values where set in place to promote new innovative approaches to academics—approaches that on a lot of levels where subversive to the dominant classes ability to maintain power. Tech BC was a threat to homogenization, attempts to marginalize it had not worked, there fore the next best choice was to simply shut it down.

The history and politics behind the relationship between Tech BC, and SFU makes the campus space at the top of Burnaby mountain particularly ripe for an intervention. Our proposal is in effect a memorial to being minor, and how Tech BC epitomized that ideal. To this end there is tremendous symbolism in the fact that the object makes its way on to the campus grounds by way of an offering from the students of Tech BC. The importance of the plaque denoting this at the base of the structure is key for it is there that the pieces true meaning comes to life. Over the next three years, the spirit of being minor will of course resonate through out SFU by way of the Tech BC students studying there. Over time, faculty and staff that were once at Tech BC will also find there way up the mountain, and they too will represent the memories and values of our school. The true memorial however, will resonate through the sites of a set of look out goggles permanently fixed on the cement stairs that articulate so well what it means to be major—an ideal that the space at SFU so eloquently articulates.

time to make some changes

2002-09-26T22:40:00.000-07:00

I can’t help but notice how inefficient we are as a species. It’s crazy how much of a role power plays in the manner in which we exists on this planet. We have been operating in unnatural ways for centuries. Thank god for technology, and thank god for the third culture. I mean it’s clear that our historical patterns are unsustainable. Lets recognize the complex system our society is and start working to adapt it to fix the problems our past ignorance has created on this planet.

how about a fourth culture

2002-09-26T22:38:00.000-07:00

I suppose the new electronic culture could be thought of as a fourth culture. Where as in the past only a small number of people did the serious thinking for everybody else, in present day the notion of who gets to do the serious thinking and how that thinking gets done is changing. As the previous sentence suggests, we can look at this change in two ways. First, the notion of who gets to do the serious thinking has clearly shifted over the last few decades. We discussed this in a previous post—this whole idea of a third culture made up of a group of intellectuals whose ideas are more in tune with what is really happening in our world, and thus whose audience is ever widening. This notion of the ever-widening audience is key for it speaks to the second part of the change described above. The number of people who have a taste for science’s new ideas is expanding and as a result, so to is the understanding and thought that’s going into these concepts. The result is that the so-called big questions in society are no longer relegated to the knowledge and minds that reside in the dusty attics of our so-called intellectual institutions. This empowering shift sets the stage for a more efficient and relevant synthesis of knowledge in society. We can think of this as knowledge that bubbles up as opposed to knowledge that trickles down.

Collective Brain power

2002-09-26T22:36:00.000-07:00

this ones a bit of rant, so bear with me. Its kind of a thinking outload post.

Collectively we have this tremendous amount of brain power, and technology has finally put us in a position to apply it in a positive way. I remember reading about distributed computing and thinking how simple yet incredibly smart the idea was. If we consider this idea from the human perspective we can start to see how problem of knowledge synthesizing might be dealt with. It may be utopic to think this, but think about how much farther ahead we would be if we all did the thinking about the big ideas instead of just a select few. This of course doesn’t mean that everyone has to be able to think on the level that Einstein did, but rather, if we think about the process as a complex adaptive system maybe some pretty crazy knowledge emergence isn’t such a far fetched idea. J. Doyne Farmer states that, “one of the biggest problems for society in general is synbthesizing knowledge. He also states that society is a very complex organism, and the need for increasing specialization has driven everyone to levels of specialization that have created enourmous information barriers. What if we tackled this problem of knowledge sysnethization a bit differently. There is no changing the specialization factor, but if we can get the specialists to collaborate efficiently and build knowledge from the bottom up we might be able to get some serious knowledge growth. What we need to do is take those specialization apply them in a system that is adaptive. We need to take the individual knowledge and apply it to todays big ideas and problems. We need to adapt our complex system in such a way that more efficient knowledge syntheization is the outgrowth.

Because of networked technologies

2002-09-26T22:30:00.000-07:00

Because of networked technologies such as bloggs, we can finally collaborate as thinkers. Couple this with an intellectual climate that tolerates divergent intellectual pursuits and we have a platform for synthesizing knowledge in a whole different way. There is certainly no denying the fact that society is a complex system, and there is also no denying that we are an increasingly intellectually specialized group. Access to information is no longer an issue. The third culture is making that information easier to assimilate into knowledge. We the people are getting smarter, and the mechanisms of controlling what we do with that knowledge are eroding rapidly. There is no doubt about it folks, we live in exciting times.

Things always seem to happen in three's

2002-09-25T18:28:00.000-07:00

So, given that the next few submissions will be related to the topic of "the third culture" I thought it might be useful to put together a short history and explanation of this idea. What I'm about to write here is really just a rejurgitation (sp) of other sources, but for me it helps clarify, and for that reason it's a useful endeavor.

On the simplest level, the Scientists grouped under the name of "third culture" are the set of thinkers who write and speak to the general public about their ideas through easy to read books, and periodicals as apposed to traditional academic journals. This approach of articulating ideas and knowledge in such a way that the general public can easily understand it, creates a shift in the accesibility and distribution of the intellectual discourse. The result is that the top down control over ideas and knowledge is finally beginning to weaken. This shift in the intellectual power dynamic comes at the hands of a group of scientists whose ideas tend to push the limits of whats academically acceptable, and thus academically publishable. As W.Daniel Hillis states, "Many of the scientists who write popular books do so because there are certain kinds of ideas that have absolutely no way of getting published within the scientific community." What we see here is that in essence, the scientific journals are knowledge gates, and if you play the game the way the higher ups want you to play, you get to pass through the gates and contribute to the accepted body of knowledge. If, however, you choose to play outside the box, or your ideas are, for what ever reason politcally incorrect, you can expect to get marginalized, and ignored by what Paul Davies likes to call "an intellectual mafia".

The intellectual Mafia
For centuries this group of strong-arming, knowledge controling, academics have been made up of classically trained literary thinkers who "while no one was looking, took to referring to themselves as 'the intellectuals,' as though there were no others." The outgrowth of this idea that intellectual activity, as a discipline, is limited to the arts and humanities, has led to the so called two cultures debate between the humanists, and the scientists. In an attempt to uphold the absurd notion that scientists are not intellectuals, the Literary crowd has officially kept to themselves. The "official" word out of the humanist camp is that "the literary crowd have historically done the serious thinking for everybody else, so lets not fool ourselves into thinking that the scientist have anything new to tell us. In fact since we all agree that science has nothing really important to say, lets not make the mistake of referring to them as intellectuals at all. While we are at it, lets not fool ourselves into thinking that these science geeks are cultured either. If they want to say their cultured thats fine, but their culture is different then our culture, sooooo....I guess were are going to have two cultures." The moral of the story is that the literary crowd publishes in their accepted journals, while the scientfic crowd publishes in their own, and if you can't play by these rules you are out of luck all together. Soooo, when we talk about the third culture, what we are essentially dealing with is a whole new crop of thinkers who, by virtue of their inability to fit in with the established two other cultures, have had to form their own. The important and exciting thing about this third culture, is that "there is no canon or accreditied list of acceptable ideas. The strength of the third culture is precisely that it can tolerate disagreement about which ideas are to be taken seriously. Unlike previous intellectual pursuits, the achievements of the third culture are not the marginal disputes of a quarrelsome mandarin class; they will affect the lives of everybody on the planet." In fact they already are, and thats what I plan on discussing in my next few posts. Hope you like em........

Ginger Cookies

2002-09-22T11:03:00.000-07:00

From grandma's fridge

3/4 cup of shortening
1 cup of super (white)
1 egg
4 tbsp molasses
2 cups of flour
1 tbsp salt, cinnamon, cloves, ginger
2 tbsp baking soda, baking powder

Mix well, roll into balls, roll in sugar, bake @ 350 degrees for 10 to 12 minutes

If you like ginger snaps do yourself a favor and make these.............

Complex systems in 5 concepts or less

2002-09-22T10:57:00.000-07:00

At present this thought you are reading on this screen is part of a Blog you have managed to find your way to. This Blog is called Slingshot Opera and it is the receptacle of other thoughts, posts, entries, and even links to other Blogs and websites on the Internet. I have created this blog as part of my participation in a course, which is part of a family of fourth year courses in interactive arts, which is a stream offered as an undergraduate degree major at SFU. As part of this course I have undertaken the task of learning RSS technology, and in doing so produced an RSS file, which I then posted to an RSS form which created an RSS link list, and then added that link list to a meta list, which in all probability was the very link list you used to get here. Running parallel to this, is a analogous set of activities undertaken by similar students who have each followed a somewhat similar set of steps to no doubt produce a somewhat similar blog with somewhat similar posts, as well as a somewhat similar RSS file that got posted to the very same RSS aggregator mentioned in the above sentence.

Aggregate:

Collected together from different sources and considered as a whole.

A total or whole made up of different parts from often disparate sources.

To come together or bring different things together into a total mass, or whole.

Question: Is the course platform, and the scenario described above, in keeping with what we know to be a complex adaptive system.

Let’s consider this first based on the Booch’s canonical model for the complex system.

Click here to refresh your memory on this model.

Is our system hierarchical? Certainly, it is “composed of interrelated subsystems that have in turn their own subsystems.” These subsystems can be considered the students blogs, which them selves are linked to other blogs. These subsystems can even be thought of as the posted thoughts with in the blog, which themselves are outgrowths of the knowledge, experience and interests of the publisher, which as entities themselves are manifestations of other subsystems, so on and so forth. This brings up the second characterstic of Booch’s model which is that, “the choice of what components in a system are primitive is relatively arbitrary and is largely up to the observer”. We can use this idea of the publishers knowledge, experience, and interests to flesh out some evidence for Booch’s third characteristic as well. Intra components in a system are generally liked stronger then inter components. We can find support for this if we contrast the knowledge, experience, and interests of blog publishers in our class to that of the contributing publishers that reside outside the realm of our course. Three years studying together under the same roof equates to some pretty strong intra component relationships.

Moving on to Booch’s fourth characteristic, it seems evident that our system has but a few different kinds of subsystems (bloggs, text, links, images, publishers, RSS files, etc etc) organized in various combinations.

Finally, our complex system is only a working system once it is built on already working smaller systems. So, here we see that we cannot build a larger system until each of our individual blogs, and RSS feeds are working. Indeed, as the last three weeks would suggest, this is the case.

It would seem that though our system may yet to have become fully complex it is certainly exhibiting some of the necessary behaviors of one.

The second half of this question is whether this system is adaptive. I’m still working on this, but it would seem that the fact that we are using it as a learning platform is certainly in keeping with adaptation. We are in essence adapting the system to our over arching needs which is to create personal knowledge by consolidating networked knowledge.

On a different level however, and this is me trying to think critically here, I think on needs to question how bottom up our system really is. Can we safely say that we would be where we are with out the direction of Laura? Would I have studied bloggs had I not been instructed to by the course material. Would I have posted my RSS feed to the form had I not be required to? This systems behavior is top down on a lot of levels. The blogging phenomenon on the whole is certainly bottom up. Maybe, in the effort to develop an adaptive complex system we need a little top down direction. Hmmmmm

More to come

It'll pass, It's just a phase

2002-09-21T23:45:00.000-07:00

I think its safe to say that our social system went through a phase change in the mid nineties. 1995 will be remembered as the year that the world wide web found its way into our homes and changed the way we live for ever. The internet was around for years prior to 95, but with out the appropriate vehicle it was unable to find it’s way into the common home. In 1995, the Internet was piggy backed into American homes by Intel’s advanced processors and Microsoft’s new “user friendly” operating system. Coupled together, the Internet and these technologies behaved in the same manner as a substrate would when added to a super saturated chemical solution—instant, and sudden phase change.

Complex systems in seven concepts or less

2002-09-21T22:52:00.000-07:00

In his book Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications, Grady Booch describes the canonical form of the complex system as a combination of seven concepts: the two different hierarchical structures he describes (class and object) together with the five attributes of a complex system. In considering how these ideas might hold up in my normal order of experience I applied this form to a system I was familiar with, post secondary education.

Using Booch’s hierarchy concepts as my point of departure, I came up with the following decomposition:

The “mark making” assignment I took in the fall of 1999, is a part of the SVR course which is part of the Tech One curriculum, which is part of Interactive arts stream, which is part of an undergraduate program, which is part of the degree offerings at Tech BC, which is part of the university program in BC, which is part of the educational mandate for BC, which is part of the educational mandate of Canada, which is part of the … This series speaks to what Booch describes as the “part of” hierarchy, or the object structure of the complex system. Booch points out that when decomposing a systems hierarchy it is essential to view it from more then one perspective. Lets take his advice and look at this system from the “is a”, or class structure perspective.

Here we can see that mark making is a first year university art assignment and that it is essentially in the same class as a first year university art assignment at Emily Carr, UBC, UNBC, UVIC, or SFU.

Beyond the hierarchy elements of the system, Booch's canonical form also speaks of the five attributes. One of those attributes is the idea that, "the choice of what components in a system are primitive is relatively arbitrary and is up to the observer." With this in mind we could choose to analyze the “is a” hierarchy from a different level. We could have taken our point of departure from the degree offering stage of the hierarchy, and in doing so we would have outlined that Interactive arts is a BSC degree, and thus in the same class as a chemistry degree at SFU, or a biology degree at UBC. Finally, this brings up another observation that Booch points out, and that is, that in a complex system, intracomponents are generally linked stronger then intercomponents. This certainly holds true when we consider the intracomponents of the Tech BC interactive arts degree as they compare to the intracomponents of the UBC chemistry degree.

Emergence and bloggs

2002-09-16T23:53:00.000-07:00

So I’ve been thinking about how this emergence stuff might apply to Bloggs and I thought I’d post some of my intitial thoughts. So supposing I come up with some different way of thinking about world hunger. I post this idea on my blog and it gets picked up using RSS and transmitted to other sites. Suddenly my idea has the potential to be read by a much larger audience. Lets just say one person who reads my idea decides to post a comment on it in their personal blog. Like the original comment, this comment gets picked up and distributed to many sites using RSS. This pattern continues until a full fledged discussion around world hunger ensues. In short order a single post has created a discussion which has the potential to grow and evolve. Who knows what the potential outgrowth of the original post might be. If nothing, the fact that many people are engaged in a discussion about hunger might create a shift in perspective and even lead to steps being taken to alleviate the part of the problem. This seems like a potential example of the link between emergence and the practice of blogging

Magic Little Happenings

2002-09-16T23:40:00.000-07:00

As slimy as the research behing it is, bottom up emergent behavior is actually a pretty sexy topic. Simply put, emergence is about small activities consolidated together to produce big behaviors and outcomes. These unexplained behaviors, that were for years thought to be the work of some high level organizing force, are turning out to be simple little magic happenings that occur on their own. At the route of these happenings are the low level actions of agents who, while acting independently towards a different end, are in fact, participating in higher ordered behaviors and outcomes that occur on a grander scale. That said, I’m going to get out there and see if I can find some examples of these magic little happenings--that is, higher order outcomes that stemmed from lower level actions.