Author Archives: spesaeterna

Solomon’s lament

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And there we stood and watched the world go by
Silent and still, under the morning sky
Under the sun where all things naked pass
And vie to last against the hour glass.
Across the ages, and the lands, across the lives
of men.
But nothing new we saw in future, present, past
No more than passing shadows, struggling to last
We stood and watched and saw the seasons turn and change
And love and hate and toil from age to age
And longing deep and sighing end to end
And wisdom, slow to arrive, slower to thrive, and tardy to the mend
Of little comfort and giving to despair.
The traveller sighed and slowly turned from there
He took my hand, and led me down again
The mountain slope.
And at its foot we parted and each went on his way
“Everything dies” he cried, the last I heard him say.

What I’ve learned from social networking

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Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
  1. Privacy is a fluid concept.
  2. Writing about your latest toilet experience will generate more interest than writing pretty much anything else. Except maybe someone else’s toilet experience.
  3. Spam lives on – now in even more languages!
  4. The same people that always fell for “Forward this email to everyone you know!” scams are the same people falling for the “share this with everyone you know!” scams. And Farmville.
  5. Extroverts love social networking because it feeds their life force.
  6. Introverts like social networking because it protects their life force.
  7. Have you heard of “letters”? I think it’s what they’d send with carrier pigeons.
  8. If you “Like” someone’s comment on FaceBook, you will receive notifications on every comment thereafter until the day you die. This is cause for war.
  9. Social networking has given us a tool to achieve things we wouldn’t have thought possible ten years ago. Like…
  10. …um…
  11. …sharing photos! Oh… wait….
  12. …poking! Uh…
  13. …well, there was a reason why we hadn’t thought them possible ten years ago.
  14. Just because something crosses a neural synapse in your brain every 0.5 nanoseconds, it doesn’t mean you have to tweet it.
  15. How many times did you check your FaceBook account since you started reading this list?
  16. Social networking is changing the world faster than ADD on Twitter. But it’s not too late yet.

Smart Swarm

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Some quotes from Perter Miller’s Smart Swarm.  A very interesting book, and highly recommended:

…a large number of individuals without supervision can accomplish difficult tasks by following simple rules when they meet and interact.- p.262

…groups can reliably make good decisions in a timely fashion as long as they seek a diversity of knowledge and perspectives, encourage a friendly competition of ideas, and narrow their choices through a mechanism like voting. – p. 263

…even small contributions to a shared project can create something useful and impressive when large numbers of individuals build upon one another’s efforts. – p.263

…without direction from a single leader, members of a group can coordinate their behavior with amazing precision simply by paying close attention to their nearest neighbors […] but it can also tempt us to follow the crowd uncritically… – pp.263-4

To vastly oversimplify our dilemma, we’re torn between belonging to a community and maximizing our personal welfare. – p.265

And some outlines from the text:

Swarms in nature have taught us two lessons:

  1. By working together in smart groups, we too can lessen the impact of uncertainty, complexity, and change. – p.267
  2. As members of smart groups, we don’t have to surrender our individuality. In nature, good decision-making comes from competition as much as compromise, from disagreement as much as from consensus. – p.268

Natural mechanisms of interactions between individuals (p.267):

  1. Reliance on local knowledge (maintain diversity of information)
  2. Simple rules of thumb (minimise computational needs)
  3. Repeated interactions between group members (amplify faint but important signals and speed up decision-making)
  4. Use of quorum thresholds (improve accuracy of of decisions)
  5. A healthy dose of randomness in individual behavior (prevent getting stuck in problem-solving ruts).
Related Articles

Networks

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Visualization of the various routes through a ...

Image via Wikipedia

The broader lesson… is that it doesn’t make much sense to discuss properties of network structures – such as small-world or scale-free types – without also discussing what it is you want to do on them. Different types of networks are better at different types of problems. Depending on the challenges an organization might be facing, for example, greater connectivity among workers or departments might be a good thing or a bad thing. Some organizations function best as a loose collection of tribes, each with its own specialists and experts, while others work better if they involve more collaboration. Tribal networks make it easier to differentiate one group from another, while greater connectivity makes it easier for an organization to reach consensus.

Peter Miller, Smart Swarm, p. 149.

It’s a fascinating book, pulling examples from animal swarms (ants, bees, termites, birds etc) and describing how they apply to our world’s dazzling array of networks (social, information, communication etc.). Then again, I’m an INTJ, so I love stuff like this. Patterns and networks and flowcharts – oh my!

What I find particularly fascinating is the distinction between small-world (think village) and scale-free networks (think Internet) that Miller makes. Not something that’d readily come to mind.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

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Rarely has poetry given me pause. This is one of those times.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias (1818)