Meeting of the Mind

Analysis of “Facebook revolutions”

Somewhat off-topic, but lacking anywhere else to post it:

User-generated discontent: dissent and social media: presentation by Jack Bratich, faculty of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University.  Analysis of “Facebook revolutions” in terms of sovereign power vs. people power, and how social media are tools.

Online gamers crack AIDS enzyme puzzle

Publicized in Plugged In, a division of games.yahoo.com, (original paper in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology [ Crystal structure of a monomeric retroviral protease solved by protein folding game players by F. Khatib et al., 18 Sep. 2011 doi:10.1038/nsmb.2119 ]), the work is noteworthy for collaboration on several levels: biochemists (at the University of Washington) reaching outside not only their academic discipline (not uncommon) but outside scholarship to the gamer community; and the inherently cooperative nature of (most) gaming.

As we buzz around in the hive mind, do we care about whose stuff is whose?

A digital humanist is drawn *towards* increased citation behavior in online collaboration activities (Redefining collaboration through citation in HASTAC (which is worth a look in its own right), posted 12 April 2011). That might be against a new trend of just throwing oneself (up to a point) into the cloud; certainly stopping to trace attribution of every thought (title searching for intellectual property) would be burdensome.

Breakthrough myth crumbles away, revealing Blue Horizons

Col. Ted Hailes (U.S. Air Force, retired), at a presentation to the Arlington Technology Association [slides] on the Air Force Blue Horizons program, made a powerful statement:  the greatest impact on technological progress comes from the synergy of underlying disciplines, not prioritizing and defunding particular technologies.  In other words, advances are made by a lot of agents working together (intentionally or unintentionally), not attention-grabbing revolutionary Next Big Things.  Those do occur occasionally, but whether innovation is disruptive or not may depend on the scope of the analysis.

This is echoed in “Clive Thompson on The Breakthrough Myth,” an essay in the August 2001 Wired by Clive Thompson (who blogs at Collision Detection).  He credits Bill Buxton, “a pioneer in computer graphics who is now a principal researcher at Microsoft, with the “long nose theory” of innovation:  “Big ideas poke their noses into the world very slowly, easing gradually into view.”  Essentially, ideas that are good but insignificant can catch on, often in other domains, after a period of time.  Thus they have “surprising obviousness.”  In other words, upon the arrival of a novel idea or product, the evidence has been there.  To predict the future, Buxton recommends “prospecting and mining” fields of endeavor.  That word, “mining,” immediately suggests data mining, a technology only starting to be exploited–we see only the tip of the nose, so far.

The Blue Horizons model bears some resemblance to the decentralized structure of human brain processing:  there is some degree of localization, but scans of cognition representing the greatest human achievement show almost the whole cortex lighting up–a large neural network, which actually has high efficiency.

Wikify the Web (commercialized already)

Raising the question of how well the “marketplace of ideas” works when it follows actual commercialism, the concept of enhancing context (a valuable entity in the world of information, as pointed out by Susan Dumais as keynote speaker at the 2006 annual meeing of ASIST), there is now a call to wikify the Web, and a commercial startup, iGlue, to do just that.  It’s too new to have much to report yet.

The filter bubble: Collective building of knowledge meets “it depends on the crowd”

Of course CBOK is influenced by the collective, and there have been concerns about what “search engines” doing a lot more than impartial retrieval.  There is now a new wave of raising the issue, under the name of “the filter bubble“.

There is a new book (entitled The Filter Bubble) out about it.

A wise possibly-related comment about searching appeared on Slashdot:  “The lesson is that the existence of information and the ease with which it may be looked up are two different things. Dirt is just too easy to find, for the same reasons that gold is too hard: search engines’ evaluation of “importance” or “relevance” doesn’t always match any sane human’s.”