In this excellent short piece, Michael Helfrich concisely and clearly sums up what swarming means: Highly Decentralized; Dynamic; Nonlinear and adaptive; Knowledge Creation at the Edge, with Consumption from the Center (although I'm not sure that there is always going to be a center). He points out that the factors at play are pretty much the same in business and in the military; I'd argue that research is on the same boat.
"the common theme is this notion of collaboration in pursuit of decision superiority through the facilitation of rapidly forming teams."
A must-read if you're interested in 21st century organizational dynamics.
News.Com: "The president of media giant News Corp warns that the Internet has become a 'moral-free zone,' with the medium's future threatened by pornography, spam and rampant piracy." [Scripting News]
This captures both the personal element that I think is so important, and the collaborative element. It also supports the storytelling metaphor which I am coming around to in a big way. [Curiouser and curiouser!]
This resonates well with the conversation I'm having with Lilia and Anders (here's Gurteen's take). Talk about synchronicity...
(By the way, I've had the opportunity to spend a litte time with Lessig, and despite Alex's inference from Lessig's OScon presentation, Lessig is far from humorless. He's witty while also fully engaged with the people around him. A delightful person to be in a room with.) [JOHO the Blog]
The article reports on dipole trapping for quantum information storage. "the team created an array of 80 dipole traps, each of which captured about 100 rubidium atoms, spaced 125 microns from one another. With sufficient cooling, Dr Birkl reckons, these traps could be made to hold on to just one atom each, thereby producing 80 individual qubits."
I'm not sure holding 80 qubits would be in the "interesting" range for computation, but it could be for teleportation or some other quantum communication task. But again, don't expect a working prototype for next year.
ISP bans RIAA. The ISP Information Wave Net has decided to ban all access to and from RIAA for its users. In a press release it said this among other things: Due to the nature of this matter and RIAA's previous history, we feel the RIAA will abuse software vulerabilities in a client's browser after the browser accesses its site, potentially allowing the RIAA to access and/or tamper with your data.
Yesterday I did several back and forths via email with Larry Lessig, we got to an interesting place. Late last night he posted a lengthy piece on his weblog. It's a bit snooty, but what the heck, we're big boys. It's good to see the professor use the medium. By the end of the piece we're in agreement. The most powerful tool we have is the vote. And while he's a newbie to weblogs, it's the most powerful way to route around the media monopoly owned by our common opponents. It's also the key to self-governance, don't overlook the power of representatives who take responsibility for communicating every day with the people who elect them. How could Lessig get this idea until he himself stopped delegating his weblog. I'm glad to see the professor roll up his sleeves and participate. For him, that's the first, and perhaps the biggest step. Now w'e're getting the real Lessig. Excellent. [Scripting News]
Here's a bit of the Lessig piece:
"You, or we, or someone has got to get this community to deliver a different kind of message. One that east coast coders can read; one that says: we won't let the freedom we (actually, you, certainly not me) built be regulated away.
How? Here's the simplest thing we could do: identify 2 luddite members of Congress -- one Republican and one Democrat. Organize and defeat them in November. If Congress saw bad ideas cost seats, they'd begin to do something about their bad ideas."
Good writing. Good writing is the basis for weblogging. Good books about how to write learn are On writing well and Style: toward clarity and grace. If you don't feel like reading books, this list might help as well:
Avoid alliteration.
Prepositions dangle awkwardly if you use them to end sentences with.
Avoid clichés and colloquialisms like the plague, or you will seem old hat.
Employ the vernacular, while eschewing arcane and obfuscatory verbiage.
Avoid ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
Take it easy with parenthetical remarks (however relevant), to avoid chopping up sentences (unnecessarily (we might add)).
To ever, however artfully, split an infinitive, marks you as grammatically challenged.
Skip the foreign words and phrases you know, n’est-ce pas?
Never generalize.
“I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
Comparisons can clog up writing as badly as alliterations and cliches.
Avoid redundancy and verbosity, or readers will think you are repeating yourself and using too many words as well besides.
We really get @*&%$**)!! when you use vulgarities.
Clear, specific writing beats vagueness, we suppose. Whatever.
Overstatement totally destroys any credibility you ever had forever.
Understatement can, at times, perhaps shade a point to the point of its fading away.
One word sentences? Eliminate.
Analogies work about as well as fur on a flounder.
“Is” just sits there. Pick verbs that do something.
Even if a mixed metaphor sings, you should derail it.
A great piece of analysis (scroll down to August 2).
"right now I (and most of my friends tell me the same) hardly set a specific (date, time, place) appointment with anybody anymore, as we trust our mobile phones to allow us to hook up at the last minute or so. [...] it's as if the granularity of the information required to move comfortably in a certain "domain" has changed, at least to a certain extent. i now feel comfortable knowing "just enough" to get around so to speak and rely on "pulling" data when i need it to fill-in the gaps.
i see it happening more and more even with books or documents too. we increasingly rely on the fact that the information we need will be accessible just when we need it wherever we are.
all of the above also links to what people like Peter Morville are saying about "The age of Findability". by now I know there's already more data out there than I'll ever need so I won't even try to gather and read it all.
i'll rely on the fact that I know it's "out there" and I can access it. what matters then is that I can find it.
if this is true the [title] sentence starts to really make sense. the main problem might not be anymore filtering the ever-increasing amount of data available out there into knowledge. the problem becomes managing all the complex interactions with that information and with the various devices that allow us to access that information."
Among other things, don't miss Preface: Why We Released this With the Gnu Free Documentation License and Scott's Radio FAQ and Becoming Part of the Blogging Community ("In my blogging experience, what I have found online is a level of community that hasn’t been seen since the late 1980s before the Internet became a piece of everyday life. A good analogy for the blogging community is the following: Blogging feels like a small rural town. The roads may not always be paved, sometimes the electricity goes on and off but the people are friendly and everyone is happy to help you."). Thanks a lot Scott! What do you think? [] links to this post 10:31:51 AM
Berkeley, the first city to ban Styrofoam and wood-fired pizza ovens, could become the first to enact Aristotle's ancient law of logic -- that every entity is equal to itself.
In a philosophical effort to come up with a city law that no one could ever break, conceptual artist Jonathon Keats wants Berkeley to legally acknowledge Aristotle's law, commonly expressed as A=A.
Here's an idea I've been thinking about for the use of liveTopics.
At the moment as author's we categorize our posts for our readers. If using default Radio by explicitly putting them into categories (or, by default, not doing so). With liveTopics I can add some granularity to that. But basically it doesn't have too much impact on my reader. It also doesn't give the reader much choice.
What I'd like to do is offer the reader is the chance to create their own categories and here's how I think it would work:
We add a "customise this site" button that pop's up a list of all the topics available on the site.
The reader can then group topics they are interested in together to create "virtual channels." These along with the default selection are bundled up into a cookie that is stored in the readers browser (with their permission).
The next time the reader visits the page they only get posts that match the selected "virtual channel." along with a drop-down to change channel and the customise button.
It is interesting, but in my view it would be even better if we could subscribe to a RSS feed for the shared categories we like. This is a generalization of KMPings. The following step would be to document and interlink the shared categories in a (shared) wiki.
There's an interesting thread on paying referees currently running on the The AmSci (a.k.a. September98) discussion list. [FOS News]
Manfredi M.A. La Manna writes: "In my view, paying referees for the prompt return of full reports is an essential part of a successful entry strategy in a market with enormous barriers to entry." He goes on to cite two interesting papers by economists that are concerned with the increase in the number of revisions a typical paper has to go through: The slowdown of the economics publishing process (pdf) and Evolving standards for academic publishing (pdf). Here's part of the abstract of the latter article:
"Papers are modeled as varying along two quality dimensions: q and r. The former represents the clarity and importance of a paper’s main ideas and the latter its craftsmanship and polish. Observed trends are regarded as increases in r-quality. A static equilibrium model in which an arbitrary social norm determines how q and r are weighted is developed and used to discuss comparative statics explanations for increases in r. The paper then analyzes a learning model in which referees (who have a biased view of the importance of their own work) try to learn the social norm from observing how their own papers are treated and the decisions editors make on papers they referee. The model predicts that social norms will gradually but steadily evolve to increasingly emphasize r-quality."
What I find interesting here is that the importance of ideas is being de-emphasized in the refereeing process - another triumph of form over function.
I had a post about PubSCIENCE a while back. Here's more on the issue.
In the August 16 Ex Libris, Marylaine Block makes the case for keeping PubSCIENCE and urges readers to write to the Department of Energy. Quoting her own letter to DOE: "In case you're unaware of it, the indexing industry has a track record of pricing products out of the reach of most small libraries and colleges, with prices jumping annually by hundreds, or even thousands of dollars...Your elimination of PubScience is a disservice not just to those libraries, but to science and knowledge itself, which builds on the ideas of those who've gone before. If you want invention to thrive in this country, you don't shove it into a high-priced enclave few can afford to enter. Furthermore, PubScience is just one juicy target for the indexing industry. If they can shut it down, don't you think their next profit opportunity will be shutting down the venerable MEDLINE and ERIC databases researchers have relied on for forty years, so they can force researchers to use expensive commercial indexes instead?" [FOS News]
More on licensing, closer to a decision. Okay I've just read the first document that is really convincing. It's by the guys behind Zope and discusses in detail their reasons for going open source. This is the first concrete business-plan backed reasoning I've come across and it makes for compelling reading. Just need to go check that Zope are still in business! Here are the important points: [Editor's note: this is only a selection, read the original for the rest]
...
Fostering a community creates an army of messengers, which is pretty effective marketing.
This is not the last innovation we'll make.
Open source makes the value of our ideas more apparent, thus the perceived value of the company is apparent.
The exit plan isn't about the golden eggs (the intellectual property) laid last year. It is about the golden goose and tomorrow's golden eggs. The shelf life of eggs these days is shrinking dramatically, and the value of an egg that no one knows about is tiny. Give the eggs away as a testament to the value of the goose and a prediction of eggs to come.
The community can work with us to dramatically increase the pace of innovation and responsiveness to new technical trends, such as XML and WebDAV.
We believe like hell in what we're doing. Others believe in us as well. We should follow our instincts.
One implication is that the direction of my company will be entirely towards VAR services & consulting. I shall be abandoning the idea of making money from software licenses (for my own software).
Entrenched Technology, from The Culture. The Culture is a vast, anarchist utopian society in a series of SF books by Iain M. Banks. But how plausible is a utopia driven by technology alone? An earlier version of this story appeared on Radio Free Tomorrow. [...] The interesting thing about the Culture is the way that Banks has attempted to create an idealised anarchist society. [kuro5hin.org]
