Automated group creation. Stewart Butterfield has a thoughtful post on his blog where he thinks out loud about group creation. In the first part he explains how one might obtain groups from stated one-to-one friendship relationships by finding cliques of friends in a friendship graph. But he says that this property doesn't reflect the structure of real groups, so it would probably not result in natural groups. Stewart follows up with more ideas that connect with our own thinking. I recommend reading the whole post. [group-forming: user blogs]
Cliques are fully connected subgraphs, i.e. subgroups where everyone knows everyone. Clique finding ought be useful for something, but it's not clear to me exactly what that would be.
Richard Feynman. "We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on." [Quotes of the Day] What do you think? [] links to this post 7:45:57 PM
New Political Compass. Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson were also giving separate speeches here at the Prophet's Conference. They're the authors of Cultural Creatives, and Paul invented the term based on his marketing research. Lately Paul has been talking and writing about a "new political compass", which comes out of a lot more surveys of many Americans. When I first read about it, I thought it was sort of boring, as it mainly is a conclusion that the left/right political spectrum doesn't cut it. But now I got the point much better. Most importantly, the study pinpoints specific characteristics of a group of people, which Paul puts as North on his political compass. He calls them New Progressives, says they're neither left nor right, but they're against big business and globalization, they're for the environment, for personal development. More willing to volunteer and take action than any other group, but nobody is noticing the group or speaking to them. In terms of politics and big media, that is. And the point is that if this group would recognize itself, it could be the most powerful force in U.S. politics. Or, rather, the breakthrough is not just that it might be a good thing, but Paul Ray shows that it IS the biggest force in U.S. politics, and it just doesn't know it yet. 45% of the people who vote. [Ming's Metalogue]
More on the death of PubScience....George S. Porter reflects on what we've lost in today's LIS News. "[T]he demise of PubScience constitutes a true loss for independent researchers, public libraries, K-12, community colleges, 4-year colleges, and others who do not have the wherewithal to provide unlimited access to Compendex, INSPEC, and other major subject databases. PubScience was a free utility, unbiased by marketing motives, to help bridge that gap." [FOS News]
