Relevant History

World 66

Every traveller acquires a lot of weird, but useful, information about places they visit-- everything from what public places have clean bathrooms, to where to get good dim sum after midnight. It's a great example of private knowledge that could be quite useful if it is made public-- and is, in the form of helpful hints from friends and fellow travellers. I recently came across a site that tries to digitize the phenomenon: World66:

World66 is a collaborative project to create an open content travel guide. This means that virtually anyone can edit our articles.

Essentially, it's a travel wiki. I found it's a little uneven-- I created an "eating out" section for Philadelphia, a city with a lot of interesting restaurants, and incredibly, there are no restaurant or cafe listings for the San Francisco Bay Area-- but it's definitely the kind of project that will become more valuable as the number of contributors increases.

Now if I could only access it in real-space as well as real-time-- look up its Washington DC restaurant listings when I'm there, and hungry-- we'd really be getting somewhere.

[via Halavais]

[To the tune of George Harrison, "My Sweet Lord," from the album All Things Must Pass (Disc One).]

Profligacy, efficiency, and emergence

A couple weeks ago, as I was juggling books on symbiosis, Benkler's work on the open source movement, and a few other things, it struck me that one thing connecting all these different examples together was profligacy: the ability to burn through a lot of some kind of resource to advance. Species evolve by turning out gigantic numbers of individuals, most of whom die without passing on their genes. Peer-reviewed open source production systems can enlist very large numbers of people, with little regard to their long-term satisfaction or involvement in the project. Seti@Home and A-life projects can burn through processor cycles.

Turns out that Timothy Burke has been thinking along similar lines:

[T]here is an expectation deeply rooted in most modernist traditions that highly productive or useful systems achieve their productivity through some kind of optimality, some tight fit between purpose and result, in short, through efficiency.

My colleague Mark Kuperberg has perceptively observed that Adam Smith has to be seen as an early prophet of emergence—what could be a better example than his “bottom-up” view of the distributed actions of individuals leading to a structural imperative, the “invisible hand”—but as digested through the discipline of economics, Smith’s view was increasingly and to my mind necessarily parsed in terms of models requiring those agents to be tightly optimizing.

That’s what’s so interesting about both simulated and real-world examples of emergence: they create their useful results, their general systemic productivity, through excess, not efficiency. They’re not optimal, not at all, at least not in their actual workings. The optimality or efficiency, if such there is, comes in the relatively small amount of labor needed to set such systems in motion. Designing a system where there is a seamless fit between purpose, action and result is profoundly difficult and vastly more time-consuming than setting an overabundance of cheap, expendable agents loose on a problem. They may reach a desired end-state more slowly, less precisely, and more expensively in terms of overall energy expenditure than a tight system that does only that which it needs to do, but that excess doesn’t matter. They’re more robust to changing conditions if less adapted to the specificities of any given condition.

[To the tune of Led Zeppelin, "Misty Moutain Hop," from the album Box Set (Disc 2).]

Emergence as excuse?

Some thoughts on the overuse of the concept of emergence, at The Register and lago (and lago again).

[To the tune of The Doobie Brothers, "How Do the Fools Survive?," from the album Minute by Minute.]

Coase's typewriting monkeys

Reading Yochai Benkler's "Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm," an influential study of peer production systems (most famously the open source movement).

One point he makes is that peer production systems succeed when they do a good job of 1) breaking up a big job into lots of small parts, and 2) using scale-- a very large number of contributors-- to correct for defects, either by having proofreading/testing, or by statistical averaging of contributions.

It strikes me that one quality that peer production, evolving species, and many other cooperative systems share is the freedom to be profligate with some critical resource. With evolution, you're profligate with individuals. The larger its population and the more your random mutations, the faster a species will be able to adapt to changes in its environment. With computer systems that use evolutionary techniques to solve difficult problems (like the traveling salesman problem), you're profligate with processor cycles: you don't have to be particularly smart or elegant when you can let the system try out a billion different possibilities. With peer production, you're profligate with creativity: you have a lot of little tasks, and a lot of people, and so each task is bound to be taken up by someone. (And duplication is good, because contributors can double-check each other.)

As someone once said, monkeys sitting at typewriters would, if given enough time, randomly write the collected works of Shakespeare. This is true, but in Benkler is right, they'd get there a lot faster if they had an equal number of monkey proofreaders volunteering small bits of their time to look at a few lines of the typists' work.

[To the tune of David Bowie, "Outside," from the album Outside.]

Not a smart mob

From Recordnet:

Devices spread word of fights

Two student fights that erupted recently at a Manteca park and at Lincoln High School in Stockton nearly turned into riots when dozens of teenagers showed up to watch, apparently after students spread the word using their cellular phones.

Two 17-year-old Calla High School students were cited for fighting in public in the Oct. 8 incident, which began at Shasta Park and then shifted to Chadwick Park after residents saw the gathering crowd and called police, Manteca Police Department spokesman Rex Osborn said.

Police and school officials believe some students used their cell phones to notify friends in advance of the fight, but it's unclear if they phoned them on campus or after school.

"One of the kids (in the fight) called some of his friends and when the other student heard about it, he called some of his friends, and the next thing you know the whole thing blew up," said Manteca police Officer Shawn Cavin, who works at Calla and talked to the two teenagers after the fight.

I especially like the bit about the fight shifting venues. Aren't fights supposed to be more spontaneous?

Clearly I spent too much time in the library when I was in high school.

[via Smart Mobs]

I gotta get out more often

...and do some noderunning. I'd heard of warchalking a while ago, but this game-- where your team collects points by finding open WiFi access points in a certain period of time-- has eluded me somehow. They're doing it in New York, in London, and have been for at least a year.

Must flog my intern for holding out on me. Wait a minute, I don't have an intern.

The power of social networks

It's intended as a funny, cutting piece, but Gawker accidentally makes a point about the uses of social network practices in an article on Manhattan's marijuana delivery services:

Gawker: Hi, Smokey. Thanks for taking time to school me in the ways of modern pot-smoking. I just have a few questions. So: how'd you find your pot delivery service?
Smokey: Someone had to call and vouch for me to their service... I had to set up an "account" up from their phone.
Gawker: Oh wow. So you got screened.
Smokey: Yah.
Gawker: That's genius.... So getting a delivery pot dealer is kind of like getting a date on Friendster.

What amazing things they have in New York.... Fortunately, the interview goes back downhill from there, which is what you expect from Gawker.

Today on Future Now

Only one post today:
Cyborg monkeys and post-humans: On the implications of the Nicolelis research group's work to create a closed-loop brain-machine interface between primates and a robotic arm.
Had I succeeded in finding a copy of Matrix Reloaded tonight at Frys, I would have been blogging about the unbearable lightness of Keanu Reeve's being, rather than substantive stuff. But never fear, the MR category is still live....

Virus hunters

The New York Times (registration required) has a fascinating piece on virus fighters, and the ways they work. One of the most illuminating grafs:

combating a major virus quickly becomes a joint effort of all those involved in antivirus research, regardless of their competitive position.

"There's very fierce competition on the sales side, but on the technical side we share what we have," he said. "The cooperation and communication is very open among the small group who are doing deep research." Mr. Hypponen said that in the 1980's antivirus researchers felt they needed to guard their work for competitive reasons, but they quickly realized that secrecy caused disastrous delays. These days, the roughly 150 researchers around the world know that it is to everyone's advantage to share code samples and information.

This is a kind of social practice, or a mode of cooperation, that historians and sociologists have describes as a defining feature of Silicon Valley, too. AnnaLee Saxenian, in her classic Regional Advantage, talks about how engineers at competing companies would share equipment when they were having problems.

It was just a throwaway line, and it didn't sound like people would cooperate in this same way in the course of ordinary work-- roughing out specs, coding, etc.-- but that people were obliged to help each other under emergencies. The moral economy of the Valley's engineering culture set rules governing when people who normally would be competitors were obliged to compete. Once again , you have to cooperate with your competitors to survive.

For people trying to combat viruses and worms, every day is an emergency; so it sounds like they're in a permanent cooperative mode.

Amphilphilic smart dust

(Try saying that quickly five times.)

Roland Piquepaille caught word of a smart dust project at UC San Diego. Apparently they've created silicon chips that are amphiphilic-- i.e., they're attracted to water on one side, and repelled by it on the other-- and thus can detect and isolate oil or other impurities:

When added to water, the "dust" will align with the hydrophilic side facing the surface of the water and the hydrophobic side facing toward the air. If a drop of an oily substance is added to the water, the dust surrounds the drop with the hydrophobic side facing inward. In addition to this alignment, which will occur in the presence of any substance that is insoluble in water, a slight color change occurs in the hydrophobic mirror. The degree of this color change depends on the identity of the insoluble substance. The color change occurs as some of the oily liquid enters the tiny pores on the hydrophobic side of the silicon particle....

[T]he dual-sided particles have the additional benefit of being able to collect at a target and then self-assemble into a larger, more visible reflector that can be seen from a distance. "The collective signal from this aggregate of hundreds or thousands of tiny mirrors is much stronger and more easily detected than that from a single mirror," [graduate student Jamie Link] points out. "The tendency of these particles to clump together will therefore enable us to use this technology for remote sensing applications."

It sounds like an elegant little technology, though I'm not sure from the press release whether it's "smart dust" the way that Kris Pister's "smart dust" is smart: reactive, yes, but not using a little tiny computer. Still, it sounds cool.

There's another interesting thing here. There are have been groups influenced by biomimicry who've been working on harnessing amphiphilic molecules in self-assembly and drug delivery, but this is the first example I've heard of the phenomenon being reproduced in a technology.

[via Smart Mobs]