[FRIAM] Fwd: Re: 9/15: Los Alamos' Next Big Idea Events

[Richard Lowenberg]

Piggy-backing on Steve's announcement about LAVA and friends'
dome presentations in Los Alamos this Saturday, the 15th, I'll add
that there will also be an afternoon (1:00-5:00) program on that day
at the Bradbury Museum, as part of The Next Big Idea and ISEA2012,
on the intersection of the "Arts and Sciences".

A 1:00-2:45 panel discussion and presentation will include Bill Gilbert 
of UNM,
showing his "Land Art" works at the Mesa Library, along with Laura 
Monroe and
Bob Greene of LANL, moderated by Bradbury Museum Director, Linda Deck, 
will be
followed from 3:00-5:00 by a panel and presentations by five artists 
participating
in the new SARC (Scientists/Artists Research Collaborations) 
initiative.   A number
of LANL researchers and other co-conspirators are expected to also 
participate.


If the confluence of the arts and sciences sparks your imagination, 
please come
and enjoy a day in Los Alamos, to share in the conversations and action 
agendas

for many 'next big ideas'.

I'll soon send another announcement to this list, on SARC panels and 
presentations
in Albuquerque, on the 20th, and in Santa Fe, on the 25th, as part of 
ISEA2012.


SARC:  http://nmsarc.wordpress.com

Richard


On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 4:55 PM, Steve Smith  wrote:

LAVA (Los Alamos Visualization Associates), with the help of several 
partners is demonstrating a number of dome-based demos at the Los Alamos 
Next Big Idea Festival in downtown Los Alamos this Saturday, September 
15 through most of the day.


Rotating Demos of the following content and systems will be presented:

Los Alamos Virtual Experience Tours: 4Pi Productions
180 degree content captured around the Los Alamos area and key 
locations around the world.

Spherical Stereoscopic Rendering:  Micoy Inc
180 degree stereoscopic ray traced rendering, both canned and 
real-time demonstrations.

Immersive Storytelling: IAIA (Institute of American Indian Arts)
Dome movies and content produced by the staff and students at the 
IAIA digital dome in Santa Fe.

DanceDome: URRL (Urban Research Reaction Laboratory)
2 Immersive Dome movies produced by Matt Wright and Janire Najera 
on Dance in Wales, UK.

Particle Systems and Interaction: DarklingX
An update of last years' demonstrations of "the Elementals" using 
Kinect for real time tracking and particle systems for real time 
rendering.


The demonstrations will be held in Micoy's 28' inflatable dome driven 
by Projection Design's F35 AS3D Projectors with a fisheye lens.  LAVA, 
along with various partners are prepared to develop and deliver 
hemispherical solutions to Immersive Visualization and multimedia 
presentation.


If there is enough interest from LANL folks we may be able to mount a 
followon demonstration of some of this work on Monday the 17th, please 
let me know ASAP if you are interested!


Please forward/share this announcement as widely as possible... I 
apologize for the late notice, I have been traveling in Europe with 
limited connection and time!


- Steve Smith



Richard Lowenberg
P. O. Box 8001,  Santa Fe, NM  87504
505-989-9110 off.; 505-603-5200 cell
--------

--
--
Richard Lowenberg
Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504
505-989-9110 / 505-603-5200 c.
RADLab www.radlab.com
--


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[FRIAM] Verizon Wireless & Privacy

[Richard Lowenberg]

For those interested in Verizon Wireless:

“In mid-October, Verizon Wireless changed its privacy policy
to allow the company to record customers' location data and
Web browsing history, combine it with other personal information
like age and gender, aggregate it with millions of other
customers' data, and sell it on an anonymous basis.
Verizon is the first mobile provider to publicly confirm that
it is actually selling information gleaned from its customers
directly to businesses.”

CNNMoney
http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/01/technology/verizon_att_sprint_tmobile_privacy/index.htm




--
Richard Lowenberg
1st-Mile Institute
Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504
505-989-9110 / 505-603-5200
 www.1st-mile.com
r...@1st-mile.com




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Re: [FRIAM] Help with memory

[Richard Lowenberg]

I recall reading the NYer article by Commoner at the time,
as the subject matter was of keen interest to me then, and continues  
to be.

FYI, a couple of other related seminal publications from those days:
The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen,
Harvard U. Press, 1971.
"Energy and Information", by Myron Tribus and Edward C. McIrvine,
Scientific American, Sept. 1971 (issue on Energy and Power).
I haven't checked to see if these are available online.
Richard


On Dec 23, 2010, at 12:21 PM, George Duncan wrote:


See

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1976/02/09/1976_02_09_038_TNY_CARDS_000316706

for the second article in the series,

found via Bing.

On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 10:41 AM, Nicholas  Thompson
 wrote:

Thanks, Everybody,



It Was Barry Commoner, in a three article series in the NY-er  
beginning Feb

2, 1976, called “Energy”.



And it does have a long and loving account of entropy.  I still  
haven’t been
able to read it because the archive system is hostile to ordinary  
mortals,
but I will let you all know if it is as good as I remember it  
being.  My
especial gratitude to Carl Tollander and John Kennison, who helped  
me look,

and to Renata Golden, who found it.



What threw me off the scent was that Commoner wrote a book, a few  
years
earlier on a closely related topic, that does not mention entropy  
once!




Nick







From: Nicholas Thompson [mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net]
Sent: Friday, December 17, 2010 9:24 PM
To: 'c...@plektyx.com'; 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity  
Coffee Group'

Subject: RE: [FRIAM] Help with memory



Carl and everybody,



The Wikipedia entry sure looked like it was going to have the  
reference, but

alas, it did not!



You are probably all prepared for one of the well-known terrors of  
old age,
that you forget stuff.  But another terror of old age you may not  
know about

– that you remember with great force and clarity things that never
happened.



So, everybody, despite Carl’s best efforts, the question remains  
open.  I
have put in calls to local nursing homes, but in the meantime could  
you put

your thinking caps on?



Thanks,



Nick



PS  What the dickens did Roger Rabbit have to do with street cars and
entropy?







From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com]  
On Behalf

Of Carl Tollander
Sent: Friday, December 17, 2010 8:28 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Help with memory



Google "Roger Rabbit", which sends you to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scandal  
Many

links.

On 12/17/10 8:03 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Many years ago, perhaps more than 40, I swear I read a series of  
articles,
later published as a book, that laid out the basic principles of  
entropy,
told the history (perhaps mythic) of how GM tore up the trolley  
lines in LA
to get its dirty busses to replace clean trolley cars, argued that  
we would
in the next 40 years transition to natural gas as the price of  
other fossil
fuels rose, etc., etc.  I think I read it in the New Yorker, and I  
have had
two candidates for who wrote it, both of which have turned out to  
be wrong:
Bradford Snell and Barry Commoner.  Does anybody else remember it?   
Is

anybody else on this list OLD enough to have read it?



I promise I have googled the hell out it to no avail.



Nick



Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

http://www.cusf.org











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--
George Duncan
georgeduncanart.com
(505) 983-6895
Represented by ViVO Contemporary
725 Canyon Road
Santa Fe, NM 87501

Life must be understood backwards; but... it must be lived forward.
Soren Kierkegaard


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Re: [FRIAM] WikiLeaks, US Gov't prohibition, Corporate Boycotts, etc.

[Richard Lowenberg]

The abundance of online discussions about WikiLeaks, has provoked me to 
recall a conversation I had with an individual at an 'Internetworking' 
meeting at the Carnegie Inst. in DC, in 1992.We met for the first 
time, and quickly shared our interest in 'information warfare'.   Though 
he could not tell me what he did for a living, it was clear that he was 
a civilian involved with military intelligence (DIA).   I mentioned 
recent past (Glasnost / Perestroika) conversations I'd had with other 
'intelligence' agents, including former Soviet officials.
Bob told me that US/UK and the USSR secrecy practices of the Cold War, 
had resulted in two to three generations of secrecy, deception and 
obfuscation, which had cumulatively permeated all sectors of the 
intelligence community; to the point that internally, agencies could no 
longer function effectively.   We were all lying to ourselves , as well 
as to our enemies.   A new strategy was determined by all.   We could no 
longer keep secrets from our enemies, so we would overwhelm them with 
'information overload'.   Too much raw and unprocessed (un-vetted) 
information would mire our enemies in confusion and uncertainty.   In a 
networked local-global society, this would also permeate throughout our 
own society; a top-down, best-practice for controlling large, diverse, 
contentious and 'well informed' populations; the unruly democratic mob.


A few months earlier (pre-web 1991), immediately following the brief 
Gulf War, through a source at the Pentagon, I received and then released 
video to ABC News of recent, secret 'friendly fire' incidents that 
occurred during that conflict.   It went viral.


I'll save my story for another time, about the redacted web-art 
project: www.nationalsecuritytesting.info

RL

---
Richard Lowenberg
P. O. Box 8001,  Santa Fe, NM  87504
505-989-9110 off.; 505-603-5200 cell
---
1st-Mile Institute, a program of Santa Fe Complex
New Mexico 'Broadband for All' Initiative
www.1st-mile.com  r...@1st-mile.com
---




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Re: [FRIAM] time, the brain, the self

[Richard Lowenberg]

Victoria's posting misses a primary consideration regarding life (us 
and all other) and time,
which we rarely consider.We are all resonant beings, from micro to 
macro scale.
We are entrained and tuned at the atomic, molecular, cellular and 
greater, to
the many radiative wavelengths and energetic forces that surround and 
involve us.
Our hearts beat at near-regular frequency; our brainwaves are tuned to 
very low,
dominant, Earth resonance frequencies.   We are a living timepiece, 
continually
in and out of sync, and in adjustment with our complex harmonically 
resonant ecosystem.
At the scale of life on this planet, we have learned through our senses 
and our tools,
to perceive and communicate time; by the sun, by the moon, by our 
walking pace,

by our breathing, by evermore complex and detailed universal tuning.
Life is just in time.
RL


On Fri, 3 Dec 2010 21:42:31 -0700, Victoria Hughes 
 wrote:


In pulling together a very short talk for the Notions of Time event 
tomorrow, I came across this section of text, from the introduction to a 
paper The experience of time: neural mechanisms and the interplay of 
emotion, cognition and embodiment [1] [2]by Marc Wittmann, PhD 
Psychology, UC San Diego. I've removed the citations for clarity. 
Thought some of the more philosophical among you might find it 
interesting, or at least worth a shot of good whiskey...


Throughout history, philosophers have been intrigued by the 
nature


of time and how we, as humans, experience its progression. The 
perception of time is part of human experience; it is essential for 
everyday behaviour and for the survival of the individual organism. Yet, 
and surprisingly enough, its neural basis is still unknown. Temporal 
intervals, lasting only seconds or spanning a lifetime, are judged 
according to their perceived duration—often regarded as painfully long 
or, the reverse, as lasting too short. Everyday decisions we make, as 
simple as either waiting for the elevator or taking the stairs, are 
based on the experienced passage of time and anticipated duration. The 
importance of our temporal experiences for daily living is strikingly 
documented in individual neurological cases where patients report of an 
accelerated progression of time and, consequently, have troubles in 
adequately interacting with the environment, i.e. driving a car. 
Although we doubtless have a time sense, our bodies are not equipped 
with a sensory organ for the passage of time in the same way that we 
have eyes and ears—and the respective sensory cortices—for detecting 
light and sound. Time, ultimately, is not a material object of the world 
for which we could have a unique receptor system. Nevertheless, we speak 
of the perception of time. When we talk about time (‘an event lasted 
long’, ‘time flew by’), we use linguistic structures that refer to 
motion events and to locations and measures in space; a further 
indication that time itself is not a property in the empirical world. 
Despite a growing body of knowledge on the psychology and on the neural 
basis of the experience of time, the riddle for philosophers and 
scientists alike is still unsolved: how does the mind (or, for that 
matter, the brain) create time? Martin Heidegger's paraphrase of St 
Augustine's famous quotation ‘In you, my spirit, I measure times; I 
measure myself, as I measure time’ reflects a theoretical 
approach—founded in western philosophical tradition—which states that 
time is a construction of the self. Perceived time, thereafter, 
represents the mental status of the beholder. In terms of a functional 
equation, one could state that time T is a function F of the self, where 
the self stands for all possible psychological (i.e. empirical and 
theoretical) properties of an individual who perceives time. Links: 
-- [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2685824/ [2] 
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2685824/



--
Richard Lowenberg
1st-Mile Institute
Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504
505-989-9110 / 505-603-5200
 www.1st-mile.com
r...@1st-mile.com



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[FRIAM] The Future of Cities - A conversation about global urbanization in the 21st century (fwd)

[Richard Lowenberg]

-- Forwarded message --
Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2008 14:29:19 -0600 (CST)
From: The Future of Cities - A conversation about global urbanization in
the 21st century <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

The Future of Cities - A conversation about global urbanization in the 21st 
century

///
Coolest Urban Viz Ever: Trulia Hindsight - Maps of Properties Through Time

Posted: 05 Mar 2008 04:10 PM CST
http://cities.iftf.net/node/100



Trulia Hindsight  ?? Maps of Properties Through Time :


Trulia Hindsight is an animated map of homes in the United States from Trulia. 
The animations use the year the properties were built to show the growth of 
streets, neighborhoods and cities over time.

http://hindsight.trulia.com/


Technorati Tags: land use, suburbanization







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[FRIAM] Maude Barlow: The Growing Battle for the Right to Water (fwd)

[Richard Lowenberg]

I mentioned this reference to Paul Paryski this morning, but mis-stated
Maude's last name.   Here you are, Paul.   I couldn't find your personal
email address.
Richard


Maude Barlow: The Growing Battle for the Right to Water
By Tara Lohan, AlterNet
Posted on February 14, 2008, Printed on February 19, 2008


 From Chile to the Philippines to South Africa to her home country of
Canada, Maude Barlow is one of a few people who truly understands the
scope of the world's water woes. Her newest book, Blue Covenant: The
Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water,
details her discoveries around the globe about our diminishing water
resources, the increasing privatization trend and the grassroots
groups that are fighting back against corporate theft, government
mismanagement and a changing climate.

If you want to know where the water is running low (including 36 U.S.
states), why we haven't been able to protect it and what we can do to
ensure everyone has the right to water, Barlow's book is an essential
read. It is part science, part policy and part impassioned call. And
the information in Blue Covenant couldn't come from a more reliable
source. Barlow is the national chairperson of the Council of Canadians
and co-founder of the Blue Planet Project, which is instrumental in
the international community in working for the right to water for all
people. She also authored Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop Corporate Theft
of the World's Water with Tony Clarke. And she's the recipient of the
Right Livelihood Award (known as the "Alternative Nobel") for her
global water justice work.

She took a moment to talk to AlterNet in between the Canadian and U.S.
legs of a book tour for Blue Covenant. (Barlow just kicked off her
U.S. tour; for a list of tour stops and dates, click here).

Tara Lohan: This year in the U.S. there has been a whole lot press
about the drought in Atlanta and the Southeast, and I think for a lot
of people in the U.S. it is the first they are hearing about drought,
but the crisis here in North America is really pretty extreme isn't it?

Maude Barlow: It really is, and it kind of surprises me when I hear
people, for instance in Atlanta say, "We didn't know it was coming." I
don't know how that could be possible, and I do have to say that I
blame our political leaders. I don't understand how they could not
have been reading what I've been reading and what anyone who is
watching this has been reading.

I remember attending a conference in Boise, Idaho, three years ago and
hearing a lot of scientists get up and say, "Read my lips, this isn't
a drought, this is permanent drying out." We are overpumping the
Ogallala, Lake Powell and Lake Meade. The back up systems are now
being depleted. This is by no means a drought ...

The thing that I'm trying to establish with the first chapter, which
is called "Where Has All the Water Gone," is that what we learned in
grade five about the hydrologic cycle being a closed, fixed cycle that
could never be interrupted and could never go anywhere, is not true.
They weren't lying to us, but they weren't aware of the human capacity
to destroy it, and the reality is that we've interrupted the
hydrologic cycle in many parts of the world and the American Southwest
is one of them.



Blue Planet Project


Water justice reports from World Water Week


Global Justice Movement





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[FRIAM] BIL & TED... no way... Yes way

[Richard Lowenberg]

Forwarded Message:

From: Tyler Emerson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

Friends,

Many of us know and love TED. It brings together an extraordinary
group each year. The catch for many of us, though, is the cost: $6,000.

So I'm helping organize BIL with some friends, a free unconference,
which will start March 1st and 2nd ? coinciding with TED's last day on
Saturday.

We hope BIL can be a perfect match to TED. We already have the thumbs
up from TED Curator Chris Anderson, who has been very supportive.

Here's the site: 

..and a great plug from Ethan Zuckerman, one of TED's bloggers: 


If you can attend, please add your name to the guest list. We're also
expecting quite a few TEDsters to attend, and some to speak.

I hope to see you in Monterey in a few weeks. Just give me a call
(650-353-6063) or Todd Huffman (562-537-1320) if you need anything.

Cheers!

Tyler

PS Props go to the affable and way-too-cool Huffman for this
brainchild. Oh, and please help spread the word!

--

BIL Conference (Free)
Sat-Sun March 1-2
www.bilconference.com

El Estero Park Complex
777 Pearl Street
Monterey, CA 93940

Logistics: http://bilconference.pbwiki.com/Venue

Presentations: http://bilconference.pbwiki.com/Schedule

Attendees: http://bilconference.pbwiki.com/Attendees

FAQ: http://bilconference.pbwiki.com/FAQ






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[FRIAM] Art+Science: Climate Clock

[Richard Lowenberg]

I thought that some of you might be interested in this call.
Possible Santa Fe Complex participation?
rl
---

San Jose Climate Clock
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Deadline:  May 9, 2008

The Climate Clock Global Initiative is seeking ideas from artist-led teams
to create a major artwork entitled Climate Clock, which will measure
changes in greenhouse gas levels, and be the first in a series of global
projects calling attention to climate change. Climate Clock will be an
instrument of long-term measurement and will collect data for 100 years.
The artwork will be located in downtown San Jose, California, Silicon
Valley's city center, and will be a collaboration between an artist-led
team composed of artists, international and Silicon Valley engineers and
other creative professionals who are working with climate measurement and
data visualization. It is anticipated that the budget for the construction
of Climate Clock will be between $5 and $15 million, depending upon the
scope of the final proposal.

For a PDF of the call, please visit
http://www.sanjoseculture.org/?pid=4500  and to apply, go to
www.callforentry.org , register a username and password, navigate to
"Apply to Calls", and search for "San Jose Climate Clock". The Climate
Clock Initiative is a collaboration between FUSE: cadre/montalvo artist
research residency initiative and the city of San Jose Public Art program
in cooperation with ZERO1.


--------
Richard Lowenberg
P.O.Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504
505-989-9110,  505-603-5200 cell
www.radlab.com

1st-Mile Institute
New Mexico Broadband Initiative
www.1st-mile.com






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[FRIAM] Is mathematical pattern the theory of everything?

[Richard Lowenberg]

Of interest to some.   rl


 From the New Scientist (there are important diagrams at the site-- 


Is mathematical pattern the theory of everything?
by Zeeya Merali

GARRETT LISI is an unlikely individual to be staking a claim for a
theory of everything. He has no university affiliation and spends most
of the year surfing in Hawaii. In winter, he heads to the mountains
near Lake Tahoe, California, to teach snowboarding. Until recently,
physics was not much more than a hobby.

That hasn't stopped some leading physicists sitting up and taking
notice after Lisi made his theory public on the physics pre-print
archive this week (www.arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770). By analysing the most
elegant and intricate pattern known to mathematics, Lisi has uncovered
a relationship underlying all the universe's particles and forces,
including gravity - or so he hopes. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter
Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada,
describes Lisi's work as "fabulous". "It is one of the most compelling
unification models I've seen in many, many years," he says.

That's some achievement, as physicists have been trying to find a
uniform framework for the fundamental forces and particles ever since
they developed the standard model more than 30 years ago. The standard
model successfully weaves together three of the four fundamental
forces of nature: the electromagnetic force; the strong force, which
binds quarks together in atomic nuclei; and the weak force, which
controls radioactive decay. The problem has been that gravity has so
far refused to join the party.

Most attempts to bring gravity into the picture have been based on
string theory, which proposes that particles are ultimately composed
of minuscule strings. Lisi has never been a fan of string theory and
says that it's because of pressure to step into line that he abandoned
academia after his PhD. "I've never been much of a follower, so I
walked off to search for my own theory," he says. Last year, he won a
research grant from the charitably funded Foundational Questions
Institute to pursue his ideas.

He had been tinkering with "weird" equations for years and getting
nowhere, but six months ago he stumbled on a research paper analysing
E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248
points. He noticed that some of the equations describing its structure
matched his own. "The moment this happened my brain exploded with the
implications and the beauty of the thing," says Lisi. "I thought:
'Holy crap, that's it!'"

What Lisi had realised was that if he could find a way to place the
various elementary particles and forces on E8's 248 points, it might
explain, for example, how the forces make particles decay, as seen in
particle accelerators.

Lisi is not the first person to associate particles with the points of
symmetric patterns. In the 1950s, Murray Gell-Mann and colleagues
correctly predicted the existence of the "omega-minus" particle after
mapping known particles onto the points of a symmetrical mathematical
structure called SU(3). This exposed a blank slot, where the new
particle fitted.

Before tackling the daunting E8, Lisi examined a smaller cousin, a
hexagonal pattern called G2, to see if it would explain how the strong
nuclear force works. According to the standard model, forces are
carried by particles: for example, the strong force is carried by
gluons. Every quark has a quantum property called its "colour charge"
- red, green or blue - which denotes how the quarks are affected by
gluons. Lisi labelled points on G2 with quarks and anti-quarks of each
colour, and with various gluons, and found that he could reproduce the
way that quarks are known to change colour when they interact with
gluons, using nothing more than high-school geometry (see Graphic).

Turning to the geometry of the next simplest pattern in the family,
Lisi found he was able to explain the interactions between neutrinos
and electrons by using the star-like F4. The standard model already
successfully describes the electroweak force, uniting the
electromagnetic and the weak forces. Lisi added gravity into the mix
by including two force-carrying particles called "e-phi" and "omega",
to the F4 diagram - creating a "gravi-electroweak" force.

[snip]




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Re: [FRIAM] [632 Advisory] wordcrafting

[Richard Lowenberg]

To quote Gregory Bateson:
"Towards an Ecology of Mind".
rl


On Thu, 8 Nov 2007, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

> David,
>
> This will bother me for the rest of the week!  Best answer I can come up
> with is "Liberal Arts".It is embodied in our colleges and universities
> as wholes, but no longer in any of its individuals.  Here is where St.
> Johns is the exception, where the quality you aspire to name, is supposed
> to be embodied in EACH member of that community, not just in the community
> as an aggregate.
>
> I will forward this to my son at St Johns and see if he has a comment or
> can send it to somebody who will.  Perhaps he will forward it to the
> faculty at large, although I am not sure that bulk email is something they
> do.
>
> Nick
>
>
> > [Original Message]
> > From: Prof David West <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> ; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > Date: 11/8/2007 9:56:00 AM
> > Subject: [632 Advisory] wordcrafting
> >
> > Gentlefolk,
> >
> > I need a word.
> >
> >
> > What would you call a discipline / degree / body of knowledge that
> > incorporated in a holistic and deeply integrated way the following:
> > art, humanities, anthropology, engineering, visualization, economics,
> > imagination, science, craft, computation, math, innovation, creativity,
> > entrepreneurship, business, change, transformation, transcendence, and
> > enlightenment?
> >
> > And, what would you call someone that had achieved mastery in that
> > discipline / degree / body of knowledge?
> >
> > Polymathics and Polymath come to mind, but Polymathics is incredibly
> > ugly as a word.
> >
> > Nexialism and Nexialist are terms used by A.E. van Vogt in 1950s
> > science-fiction novel titled Voyage of the Space Beagle (after the ship
> > used by Charles Darwin in his travels).
> >
> > Ideas??
> >
> > dave west
> >
> > ___
> > Advisory mailing list
> > [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > http://santafecomplex.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory_santafecomplex.org
>
>
>
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>


Richard Lowenberg
P.O.Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504
505-989-9110,  505-603-5200 cell
[EMAIL PROTECTED] www.radlab.com

New Mexico Broadband Initiative
www.1st-mile.com/newmexico

Senior Broadband Planner
Design Nine, Inc.
www.designnine.com
[EMAIL PROTECTED]





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[FRIAM] Collapse: Dance

[Richard Lowenberg]

Upcoming at UC Davis, in California, a dance work based on art-science
collaboration, including former local, Jim Crutchfield.

http://theatredance.ucdavis.edu/news/collapse.html

COLLAPSE (suddenly falling down) is a new work by Della Davidson, in
collaboration with geologists Louise Kellogg and Dawn Sumner, computer
scientists Michael Neff and Oliver Kreylos, and physicist Jim Crutchfield,
with text by Ed Gaible. From the collapse of the social order in Rwanda,
to the twin towers falling and the ice caps melting into the sea, we fear
the disintegration of the systems upon which we depend. Performed by
Sideshow Physical Theatre in a joint production with Mondavi Center, this
unique collaboration between artists and scientists uses
computer-generated images in an interactive environment to illustrate how
systems fail and patterns reorganize. The piece was commissioned by the
Mondavi Center as part of the Creativity Project, a year-long event that
celebrates the work and spirit of choreographer Merce Cunningham, who has
been in the forefront of using technological systems to explore
choreographic ideas. COLLAPSE runs October 25-28 and November 1-4, 2007 in
Mondavi Center Studio Theatre.



Richard Lowenberg
P.O.Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504
505-989-9110,  505-603-5200 cell
[EMAIL PROTECTED] www.radlab.com

New Mexico Broadband Initiative
www.1st-mile.com/newmexico





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Re: [FRIAM] Navajo Nation Councilman Leonard Tsosie Convenes Lambda Rail Meeting

[Richard Lowenberg]

>>So if Crownpoint can get hi-speed cnx, why not Santa Fe?
-tj

-- Forwarded message --
NAVAJO NATION TRIBAL COUNCIL MEDIA RELEASE  ---  FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
AUGUST 28, 2007

On August 15th, Council Delegate Leonard Tsosie Convened the 10th Internet
to the Hogans meeting featuring The National Lambda Rail Agreement between
the University of New Mexico and Navajo Technical College.<<


Tom,
Good question.   The devil is in the details.   Two points:
It is my understanding that the agreement has been signed, but
connectivity is not yet provided to Crownpoint.   It will be via
microwave, I'm told.

Also, I just completed a contracted report for Santa Fe County, providing
an assessment of options and a set of recommendations for bringing
LambdaRail and/or other 'open' fiber to the Business Park in the Community
College District (I-25 @ Hwy. 14), and other potential area community
connections.   In my assessment, I found out a lot about (current lack of
access to) NM LambdaRail and Wire New Mexico; Qwest and other fiber along
the BNSF rail line; potential deployment along new RailRunner construction
to Santa Fe; and total lack of conduit or fiber along I-25 (NM DOT right
of way).   I also costed out options to bring new 'open access' fiber from
Albuquerque to Santa Fe, as well as investment partner potential.   Lots
more in the works.

If there is interest, I'd be pleased to provide a summary discussion of
this and a State Broadband initiative that I'm waiting to hear back about,
at a WedTech in the near future, if interested or appropriate.

Richard

--------
Richard Lowenberg
P.O.Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504
505-989-9110,  505-603-5200 cell

New Mexico Broadband Initiative
www.1st-mile.com/newmexico





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[FRIAM] Magnetosphere

[Richard Lowenberg]

A creative Processing video/audio, FYI.

http://www.flight404.com/_videos/magnetosphere/index.html




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[FRIAM] YouTube for Science -SciVee

[Richard Lowenberg]

[From a posting on Slashdot]



Shipud writes "The National Science Foundation, Public Library of
Science and the San Diego Supercomputing Center have partnered to set
up what can best be described as a "YouTube for scientists", SciVee".
Scientists can upload their research papers, accompanied by a video
where they describe the work in the form of a short lecture,
accompanied by a presentation. The formulaic, technical style of
scientific writing, the heavy jargonization and the need for careful
elaboration often renders reading papers a laborious effort. SciVee's
creators hope that that the appeal of a video or audio explanation of
paper will make it easier for others to more quickly grasp the
concepts of a paper and make it more digestible both to colleagues
and to the general public."

















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Re: [FRIAM] Global Slum: Digital Narrative and the New Urbanism (fwd)

[Richard Lowenberg]

>>These guys are so down on scenario planning, they might enjoy
http://www.gbn.com, or Peter Schwartz's "The Art of the Long View" from
1991. Regardless of what you think of the technique, the notion that it is
only used in current military and security circles is not supportable.<<

Carl,
Not sure I understand your comment.  I do know that Peter and
others at GBN have long been advising, consulting and referred to by
groups within various branches of military and intelligence planning.
Peter was even the early author (when at SRI) of a screenplay that became
the basis for the feature film "War Games".   The limitations of
individual people, mind-sets, intentions, and vested-interests, among
numerous other factors, tend to affect the outcomes of Scenario Planning
or any other complex decision-making process, as is evident in the article
I forwarded.
Richard

--------
Richard Lowenberg
P.O.Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504
505-989-9110,  505-603-5200 cell
[EMAIL PROTECTED] www.radlab.com

New Mexico Broadband Initiative
www.1st-mile.com/newmexico





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[FRIAM] Global Slum: Digital Narrative and the New Urbanism (fwd)

[Richard Lowenberg]

Of interest to those on this list posting about 'cities', may be this,
from Paul Miller, aka DJ Spookie, to another list.  Excuse his narrow
formatting.
Also of possible interest is Anthony Townsend's (of the Institute for the
Future)  list and web site: http://cities.iftf.net
rl

-- Forwarded message --
Date: Sun, 5 Aug 2007 21:52:10 -0400
From: Paul D. Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [iDC] Global Slum: Digital Narrative and the New Urbanism

Hey people - this is a rather interesting article
I picked up a little while ago. I'm a big Mike
"City of Quartz" Davis fan, so hey... I just
thought it might provide some food for thought to
several of the threads going on the list. About
half the world's population will be in cities
within the next couple of decades, and the way
this drives alot of issues - immigration,
friction points like water, oil, and of course,
religion - into direct collision, is pretty
intriguing. The original term "ghetto" after all
comes from the venerable Venetian Republic. Look
what that started! The ghetto is a state of mind
I guess...

Paul


Baghdad 2025
 The Pentagon Solution to a Planet of Slums
 By Nick Turse




In our world, the Pentagon and the national
security bureaucracy have largely taken
possession of the future. In an exchange in 2002,
journalist Ron Suskind reported a senior adviser
to President Bush telling him:

 "that guys like me were 'in what we call the
reality-based community,' which he defined as
people who 'believe that solutions emerge from
your judicious study of discernible reality.' I
nodded and murmured something about enlightenment
principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's
not the way the world really works anymore,' he
continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act,
we create our own reality? We're history's actors
. . . and you, all of you, will be left to just
study what we do.'"

Slowly, step by step, the present White House has
found itself forced back into at least the
vicinity of the reality-based community. This
week we may, in fact, get to hear one of the last
of this President's great Iraqi fictions.

The same cannot be said of the Pentagon and the
Intelligence Community (IC). They have settled
into the future and taken it in hand in a
business-like, if somewhat lurid, way. It's the
Pentagon that, in 2004, was already producing
futuristic studies about a globally warmed world
from Hell; it's the Pentagon's blue-skies
research agency, DARPA, that regularly lets
scientists and other thinkers loose to dream
wildly about future possibilities (and then, of
course, to create war-fighting weaponry and other
equipment from those dreams). It's the National
Nuclear Security Administration that is hard at
work dreaming up the nature of our nuclear
arsenal in 2030.

Typical is the National Intelligence Council, a
"center of strategic thinking within the U.S.
Government, reporting to the Director of Central
Intelligence." In 2005, it was already expending
much effort to create fictional scenarios for
2010, 2015, and 2020. Someone I know recently
attended workshops the Council's long-range
assessment unit organized, trying to look at the
"threats after next" -- and this time they were
deep into the 2020s.

The future -- whether imagined as utopian or
dystopian -- was, not so long ago, the province
of dreamers, or actual writers of fiction, or
madmen and cranks, or reformers and journalists,
or even wanna-be war-fighters, but not so
regularly of actual war-fighters, or secretaries
of defense, or presidents. In our time, the
Pentagon and the IC have quite literally become
the fantasy-based community. And yet, strangely
enough, the urge of our top policy-makers (and
allied academics and scientists) to spend their
time in relatively distant futures has been
little explored or considered by others.

A couple of things can be said about this near
compulsion. First, it's largely confined to the
arts of war. There is no equivalent in our
government when it comes to health care or
education, retirement or housing. No well-funded
government think-tanks and lousy-with-loot
research organizations are ready to let anyone
loose dreaming about our planet's endangered
environment, for instance. The future -- the only
one our government seems truly to care about --
is most distinctly not good for you. It's a
totally weaponized, grimly dystopian health
hazard for the planet.

Of course, future fictions are notorious for
their wrong-headedness. All you have to do is
check out old utopian or dystopian fiction, if
you don't believe me. The scandal here is not
that, like most human beings, our soldiers and
spies are sure to be desperately wrong on most
aspects of their future fictions. The scandal is
that we're mortgaging our wealth and our futures,
whatever they may be, to their bloodcurdling,
self-interested, and often absurd fantasies.

After all, they're running a giant, massively
profitable business operation off 

[FRIAM] Eco-Art+Science Tech Help?

[Richard Lowenberg]

I am seeking creative-technical assistance on a series of eco-art-science
projects that I'm starting to work on.   I thought that this list might be
the place to ask.

I am beginning a new, long-term series of creative works which involve
environmental sensing, web mapping interaction and various sound or image
display.   I can learn as I go, but my programming abilities are limited,
and I'd very much like to work with others with shared interest in
creative approaches to complex eco-information understandings.

I have just received initial funding of a small project: "Ground Truth",
which will probably utilize ZigBee (SquidBee) wireless sensors, a Google
Earth mapping site for public interaction, and text-to-speech output.

There are many directions and applications for this project, and I expect
to be able to get funding and find regional installation opportunities
that address critical current eco-issues (water, climate change, etc.)

If anyone on this list is interested, or knows someone who may be
interested in technically helping, please be in touch with me personally.
Thanks.
Richard

--------
Richard Lowenberg
P.O.Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504
505-989-9110,  505-603-5200 cell
[EMAIL PROTECTED] www.radlab.com

New Mexico Broadband Initiative
www.1st-mile.com





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Re: [FRIAM] complex cormac

[Richard Lowenberg]

No less great; but McCarthy was awarded a Pulitzer for "The Road", not a
Nobel.

RL


On Wed, 25 Jul 2007, David Breecker wrote:

> I've always been at a bit of a loss to understand why novelist Cormac
> McCarthy is in residence at SFI (apart from the fact that he's
> brilliant and so are a lot of people there, and I'd certainly have
> him in residence in my office if I could); but reading his Nobel-
> winning post-apocalyptic "The Road" I came across two lines in as
> many pages that started to make it more clear:
>
> "The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the
> light and is gone."
>
> "Query: how does the never to be differ from what never was?"
>
> That's enough to make afternoon tea more interesting...
> db




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[FRIAM] A historical look at Fractals- funny

[Richard Lowenberg]

A fun video to explain, fractals and chaos theory.
Turn down the audio as there's a loud rocket boom just
at the beginning.

http://www.rocketboom.com/stories/rb_07_jun_12

rl






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[FRIAM] Delight in disorder

[Richard Lowenberg]

Now that the Web has made everything miscellaneous, as David
Weinberger argues in his new book, we're free to remix the world.

By Scott Rosenberg



May. 23, 2007 | The rise of the Web has dethroned authorities,
atomized our culture and set us loose in the resulting sea of
fragments. This familiar sky-is-falling argument regularly inspires
an anguished plea: We must restore order in the messy digital realm!
Won't someone organize this endless churning chaos? Can't we clean up
the Web?

David Weinberger says, nah. For one thing, such an effort would be
futile. More important, it misses a great opportunity technology has
opened before us -- a chance to transform how we think about, well,
everything.

Weinberger's new book, "Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the
New Digital Disorder," lays out the upside of digital technology's
impact on our ways of knowing. The book builds on ideas in
Weinberger's previous works -- "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" and "The
Cluetrain Manifesto" (which he co-authored) -- to present a key
insight into the nature of the Web world.

The argument goes like this: As long as knowledge was organized
physically, on paper, in books and card catalogs and such, we
remained stuck in the belief that there is "one right way" to define,
organize and think about any subject. Now we've moved information
into the infinitely mutable realm of digital data -- where anything
can point to anything else, space keeps expanding faster than we can
fill it, and we can reshuffle and re-sort at a keystroke.

In this world, the same thing can "be" in more than one place -- it
can, in fact, be in as many places as we want. That means we have a
chance to think more nimbly and flexibly -- to reorganize knowledge
from multiple perspectives to suit our changing needs. We're not
losing context; we're gaining contexts.

"Everything Is Miscellaneous" offers a hopeful, pragmatic vision of
how the benefits of moving from paper to bits will outweigh the
costs. It's also an approachable work of popular philosophy in
business-book drag. It covers timely topics like Wikipedia and
tagging and folksonomies; it also offers diverting takes on the Dewey
Decimal System, Linnaeus' species classification, the periodic table
of the elements, and the controversy over Pluto's membership in the
club of planets.

I recently talked with Weinberger at Salon's San Francisco office.

"Everything Is Miscellaneous" talks about three different "orders of
orders." It's very orderly, in that way. But by the time I reached
the end I'd forgotten what the first two orders were.

The first order is the organization of the things themselves: the
books on the bookshelves, the radishes in the ground -- physical
things arranged physically. It doesn't get much more basic and
primitive than that. Second order is the information about those
things, the metadata -- physically separated from it, and also
organized physically. Typically, that data is a great reduction of
the information in the first order: catalog cards that take a book
full of ideas and complexity and boil it down to what fits on a 3-
by-5 card. We do that because of physical limitations.

What you actually want is not just all of the information that's in
the book, but more than that, you want all the information about the
book. You want to know everybody who talked about it. You can't do
that in the second order -- the card catalog would be bigger than the
library. We've grown to accept that we need to reduce the amount of
information in order to make things findable.

Is that because we're locked into the assumption that the physical
order is the only order?

Yes, and it has been the best way of doing it. You have to make very
good decisions about which information to capture, and we've gotten
good at those decisions.

In the third order, the contents and the metadata are digital.
Because the digital space is unbounded, it's indefinite, it's so
cheap to add stuff, we can actually get what we wanted in the second
order, but we didn't know we wanted -- which is to have a superset of
information on the first order as a way of finding it.

One of the frequent reactions to "Everything Is Miscellaneous" is
what you might call "the second-order people strike back" -- the
argument that we need experts and authorities and the order they
impose on chaos.

People say, we really still need the expertise and the second-order
systems transposed into the digital realm -- these are very well
thought through taxonomies and taxonomic trees that you can browse
through, and they have advantages that you don't get in messy, Webby
systems. And unfortunately for the purposes of controversy, I agree
with that! You want to have everything. There are places where you
need the precision of a taxonomic tree -- you need defined terms, you
need very carefully constructed metadata that is a reduction of the
full set of information in 

[FRIAM] [iDC] Introducing: Real Costs & Oil Standard (fwd)

[Richard Lowenberg]

I found this of personal interest, and thought that some of you would find
it so, also.   Michael Mandiberg has been working at an important juncture
of the arts and sciences.   He sent this posting to Trebor Schotz' iDC
list.   Trebor recently spoke at the Santa Fe Art Institute, on Web 2.0
culture.
Richard

-- Forwarded message --
Date: Thu, 10 May 2007 22:41:48 -0400
From: Michael Mandiberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [iDC] Introducing: Real Costs & Oil Standard

Hello All,

Trebor Scholz has asked me to write a post introducing two recent
projects,"Oil Standard" (2006), "Real Costs" which I releasd a beta version
of last week.

"Real Costs" is a Firefox plug-in that inserts emissions data into travel
related e-commerce websites.  The first version adds CO2 emissions
information to airfare websites such as Orbitz.com  ,
United.com , Delta.com , etc.
Following versions will work with car directions, car rental, and shipping
websites. Think of it like the nutritional information labeling on the back
of food... except for emissions.

The objective of the "Real Costs" is to increase awareness of the
environmental impact of certain day to day choices in the life of the
Internet user. By presenting this environmental impact information in the
place where decisions are being made, it will hopefully create an impact on
the viewer, encourage a sense of individual agency, start ongoing
discussions, and provide a set of alternatives and immediate actions. In the
process the user/viewer might even be transformed from passive consumer to
engaged citizen.

Experience the project by installing the "Real Costs" plug-in into your
Firefox application; the plug-in is available at
http://TheRealCosts.com.
Currently, this plug-in pulls the origination and destination information
for each flight from the page, and then calculates and reinserts the CO2
produced. It compares the CO2 produced for that flight to making that trip
by bus or train, and to the average CO2 produced per capita for the average
US and world citizen. It is configured to work on the websites of the
largest North American air carriers (major global air carriers are currently
being added.) A list of these carriers and documentation of all scientific
calculations is available on the project Wiki ( http://therealcosts.com/wiki
).

"Real Costs" builds on many of my prior investigations into intersections
between conceptualism, Internet art, and activism. I make art that explores
the way the Internet shapes subjectivity and consumerism. I take common
genres including e-commerce, blogs and opinion poll sites and create
site-specific interventions into this digital vernacular to provoke a moment
of contemplation on the part of the viewer.  The key example here is the
"Oil Standard" ( http://transition.turbulence.org/Works/oilstandard/)
Firefox plug-in that converts all prices on a web page from U.S. Dollars
into the equivalent value in barrels of crude oil. When you load a web page,
the script seamlessly inserts converted prices into the page. As the cost of
oil fluctuates on the commodities exchange, prices rise and fall in
real-time causing the user to reflect on their relationship to the abstract
fluctuation of the price of oil reported on the news everyday.  "Oil
Standard" synthesized my interest in hactivism and net.art, sustainable
economics, and information design to create an art piece that opened up a
dialogue about oil, economics, and the environment.  It was used and
discussed by eco-techies, high school classes, progressive politicians, and
Internet artists. This project achieved the goal of making abstract
information legible so as to create dialogue about the important issues
surrounding how we use the earth's natural resources.

"Real Costs"  and "Oil Standard" very intentionally sit in the liminal
spaces between art and design, between hactivism and software development,
and between situationist intervention and green-tech tool making.  I have
situated this project in this position at the edge of art because it allows
me to present completely unexpected content in familiar forms.  The goal is
to seduce the viewer through what appears to be a comfortable and usual
situation and to create an experience of surprise and wonder.  I have done
this before, in "Shop Mandiberg", (
http://Mandiberg.com/shop)
where I buit an e-commerce site as a container for self-portraiture, and in
"Bush Poll," ( http://BushPoll.com ) where I made an
opinion poll of the other 153 George Bushes of the country. By making art
appear in everyday contexts the potential capacity for art to instigate
change is integrated into daily life.

I would contextualize this approach within a growing body of similar work.
I see this taking place in work like Angie Waller's http://myfrienemies.com/,
Ben Engebreth's http:

[FRIAM] [SALT] Consilience defeats miasma (Steven Johnson talk) (fwd)

[Richard Lowenberg]

Though the following posting does not deal with technical aspects of
complexity modelling, I thought it might be of interest to some on this
list.   This is the latest review of the monthly Bay Area talks.

-- Forwarded message --
Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 11:44:48 -0700
From: Stewart Brand <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [SALT] Consilience defeats miasma (Steven Johnson talk)

Steven Johnson began his long zoom survey with the "prior art" of Joyce's
Stephen Daedalus locating himself in himself, his neighborhood, Dublin, on
out to the universe.  The value of a long zoom is in identifying and
employing every scale between the very large and very small, noticing how
they change each other when held in the mind at the same time.
 Johnson's core story (and current book) concerned London in 1854, when it
was the largest city in the world and in history with 2.5 million people.
London famously stank.  Cess pools filled basements, slaughter houses were
anywhere, garbage piled up.

Medicine at the time held that disease was caused by "miasma," foul air,
noxious vapors.  "All smell is disease," declared a Doctor Chadwick.  The
authorities decided that the way to cure the frequent cholera epidemics in
London was to get rid of the bad odor--- pump the sewage into the Thames,
which people drank.  The cholera got worse.

Johnson's goal with his book, THE GHOST MAP, was to figure out why the wrong
theory of disease lingered so long, and what it took to correct it.  The
answer, he proposes, is in the perspective of the long zoom.
 The celebrated story goes that John Snow discovered the polluted-water
cause of cholera by drawing a "ghost map" of the cholera deaths concentrated
around the Broad Street pump in Soho.  What really happened is more
interesting.  Snow had been publishing his theory of water pollution causing
cholera for five years.  In August of 1854, a horrifying 10% of his
neighborhood in Soho perished from the disease.  Then he drew up the map,
drawing on public statistics provided by the city, and on the street savvy
of a popular vicar named Rev. Henry Whitehead.

The map confirmed his theory and persuaded the medical establishment and
city authorities.  In just 12 years, cholera was completely eradicated from
London.

In Johnson's view, one long zoom had displaced another.  The miasma theory
of cholera embraced a nested set of scales ranging, from large to
small:*cultural traditions - urban development - technology -
contemporary politics
- "great men" - human sensory system*.  Bad smell, bad people, bad disease.

With John Snow's map, a different long zoom took over:* cities - data
systems - neighborhood - humans - organs - microbes*.  The combination of
city density and open-source data about the epidemic made the ghost map
possible and persuasive.  Doctor Snow noticed that the bodily symptoms of
cholera looked like they were caused by something swallowed rather than
something inhaled.  The data had to be extremely strong to overcome the bias
of human sensory apparatus--- our alarm system of smell can detect minute
amounts of contagion, but we cannot see them.  It took a neighborhood map to
defeat what the nose thought it knew.

Johnson proposed that another word for the long zoom perspective is
"consilience"--- a fine old word, revived by Edward O. Wilson, that links
multiple disciplines and multiple levels into a whole body of knowledge with
extra benefits the separate disciplines lack.  Science and culture can blend
rigorously.  What is discovered in consilience is not just scales of
distance or time but nested systems.

Johnson moved on to contemporary popular culture, drawing on his research
for his brain book (EMERGENCE) and his book on video games and TV
(EVERYTHING BAD IS GOOD FOR YOU).  Back in the three-network days of
"Gilligan's Island," the guiding principle was "least objectionable
programming."  Now with DVDs and Tivo, the guideline is "most repeatable
programming"--- material that will reward you if you study it again and
again.  Thus a current hit TV series about a very different island, "Lost,"
has a whole horde of characters and purveys many-leveled complexities and
mysteries embracing* geography - economics - technology - sociology -
biology - ontology*.  Viewers are invited to wonder, among a great many
other things, whether the whole damn thing is a dream, and, if so, whose?

Our brain is wired with "seeking circuitry" and relishes exercising "the
regime of competence."  TV shows like "Lost" and video games like "World of
Warcraft" are addictive because they reward exploration.  Instead of
employing narrative arcs, they keep you in a state of being always
challenged but not quite overwhelmed as you ascend from skill level to skill
level.

We are learning to master complexity, to revel in long zooms like Google
Earth or the forthcoming Will Wright game, "Spore."  A few years ago,
Johnson was introducing his 7-year-old nephew to to Wright's early 

[FRIAM] HBR: Breakthrough Ideas for 2007

[Richard Lowenberg]

From the article by G. West. rl


11. Innovation and Growth: Size Matters *

Executives talk about their companies? ?DNA? and roles in ?business
ecosystems,? but the analogy to living organisms is more than
metaphorical. Like the mathematical laws governing how organisms?
metabolism, growth, evolution, and mortality depend on size, there
are rules that appear to govern the growth, performance, and even
decline of cities and other social organizations. Although we can?t
yet predict how specific cities or companies will evolve, we?ve found
general mathematical relationships between population size,
innovation, and wealth creation that may have important implications
for growth strategy in organizations.

In biology, different species are in many ways scaled versions of one
another. Bacteria, mice, elephants, sequoias, and blue whales may
look different, but most of their fundamental characteristics,
including energy and resource use, genome length, and life span,
follow simple mathematical rules. These take the form of so-called
power-law scaling relationships that determine how such
characteristics change with size. For example, metabolic rate
increases as the ? power of mass. Put simply, the scaling law says
that if an organism?s mass increases by a factor of 10,000 (four
orders of magnitude), its metabolic rate will increase by a factor of
only 1,000 (three orders of magnitude). This represents an enormous
economy of scale: the bigger the creature, the less energy per pound
it requires to stay alive. This increase of efficiency with size?
manifested by the scaling exponent ?, which we say is ?sublinear?
because it?s less than one?permeates biology. These ubiquitous
scaling laws have their origin in the universal properties of the
networks that sustain life, such as the cardiovascular and
respiratory systems.

Social organizations, like biological organisms, consume energy and
resources, depend on networks for the flow of information and
materials, and produce artifacts and waste. So it would not be
surprising if they obeyed scaling laws governing their growth and
evolution. Such laws would suggest that New York, Santa Fe, New
Delhi, and ancient Rome are scaled versions of one another in
fundamental ways?as, potentially, are Microsoft, Caterpillar, Tesco,
and Pan Am. To discover these scaling laws, Lu?s Bettencourt at Los
Alamos National Laboratory, Jos? Lobo at Arizona State University,
Dirk Helbing at TU Dresden, and I gathered data across many urban
systems in different countries and at different times, addressing a
wide range of characteristics including energy consumption, economic
activity, demographics, infrastructure, intellectual innovation,
employment of ?supercreative? people, and patterns of human behavior
such as crime rates and rates of disease spread.

We did indeed find that cities manifest power-law scaling similar to
the economy-of-scale relationships observed in biology: a doubling of
population requires less than a doubling of certain resources. The
material infrastructure that is analogous to biological transport
networks?gas stations, lengths of electrical cable, miles of road
surface?consistently exhibits sublinear scaling with population.

However, to our surprise, a new scaling phenomenon appeared when we
examined quantities that are essentially social in nature and have no
simple analogue in biology?those associated with innovation and
wealth creation. They include patent activity, number of
supercreative people, wages, and GDP. For such quantities the
exponent (the analogue of ? in metabolic rate) exceeds 1, clustering
around a common value of 1.2. Thus, a doubling of population is
accompanied by more than a doubling of creative and economic output.
We call this phenomenon ?superlinear? scaling: by almost any measure,
the larger a city?s population, the greater the innovation and wealth
creation per person.

By almost any measure, the larger a city?s population, the greater
the innovation and wealth creation per person.

Organismic growth, constrained by sublinear power-law scaling derived
from the dynamics of biological networks, ultimately ceases, with the
equations predicting what size organisms will reach. In contrast, our
equations predict that growth associated with superlinear scaling
processes observed in social organizations is theoretically
unbounded. This would seem to bode well for organizations.
Unfortunately, however, the equations also predict that in the
absence of continual major innovations, organizations will stop
growing and may even contract, leading to either stagnation or
ultimate collapse. Furthermore, to prevent this, the time between
innovations (the ?innovation cycle?) must decrease as the system grows.

Though our research has focused on cities, the social and structural
similarities between cities and firms suggest that our conclusions
extend to companies and industries. If so, the existence of
superlinear scaling that links size and creative out

[FRIAM] [SALT] Ignore confident forecasters (Philip Tetlock talk) (fwd)

[Richard Lowenberg]

Stewart Brand and the Long Now Foundation hold monthly invited talks.
Last evening's talk is summarized below.   Of some relevent interest to
this group.
Richard

-- Forwarded message --
Date: Sat, 27 Jan 2007 12:33:32 -0800
From: Stewart Brand <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [SALT] Ignore confident forecasters (Philip Tetlock talk)


"What is it about politics that makes people so dumb?"

 From his perspective as a pyschology researcher, Philip Tetlock
watched political advisors on the left and the right make bizarre
rationalizations about their wrong predictions at the time of the
rise of Gorbachev in the 1980s and the eventual collapse of the
Soviet Union.  (Liberals were sure that Reagan was a dangerous idiot;
conservatives were sure that the USSR was permanent.)  The whole
exercise struck Tetlock as what used to be called an
"outcome-irrelevant learning structure."  No feedback, no correction.

He observes the same thing is going on with expert opinion about the
Iraq War.  Instead of saying, "I evidently had the wrong theory," the
experts declare, "It almost went my way," or "It was the right
mistake to make under the circumstances," or "I'll be proved right
later," or "The evilness of the enemy is still the main event here."

Tetlock's summary:  "Partisans across the opinion spectrum are
vulnerable to occasional bouts of ideologically induced insanity."
He determined to figure out a way to keep score on expert political
forecasts, even though it is a notoriously subjective domain
(compared to, say, medical advice), and "there are no control groups
in history."

So Tetlock took advantage of getting tenure to start a long-term
research project now 18 years old to examine in detail the outcomes
of expert political forecasts about international affairs.  He
studied the aggregate accuracy of 284 experts making 28,000
forecasts, looking for pattern in their comparative success rates.
Most of the findings were negative--- conservatives did no better or
worse than liberals; optimists did no better or worse than
pessimists.  Only one pattern emerged consistently.

"How you think matters more than what you think."

It's a matter of judgement style, first expressed by the ancient
Greek warrior poet Archilochus: "The fox knows many things; the
hedgehog one great thing."  The idea was later expanded by essayist
Isaiah Berlin.  In Tetlock's interpretation, Hedgehogs have one grand
theory (Marxist, Libertarian, whatever) which they are happy to
extend into many domains, relishing its parsimony, and expressing
their views with great confidence.  Foxes, on the other hand are
skeptical about grand theories, diffident in their forecasts, and
ready to adjust their ideas based on actual events.

The aggregate success rate of Foxes is significantly greater, Tetlock
found, especially in short-term forecasts.  And Hedgehogs routinely
fare worse than Foxes, especially in long-term forecasts.  They even
fare worse than normal attention-paying dilletantes--- apparently
blinded by their extensive expertise and beautiful theory.
Furthermore, Foxes win not only in the accuracy of their predictions
but also the accuracy of the likelihood they assign to their
predictions--- in this they are closer to the admirable discipline of
weather forecasters.

The value of Hedgehogs is that they occasionally get right the
farthest-out predictions--- civil war in Yugoslavia, Saddam's
invasion of Kuwait, the collapse of the Internet Bubble.  But that
comes at the cost of a great many wrong far-out predictions--- Dow
36,000, global depression, nuclear attack by developing nations.

Hedgehogs annoy only their political opposition, while Foxes annoy
across the political spectrum, in part because the smartest Foxes
cherry-pick idea fragments from the whole array of Hedgehogs.

Bottom line...  The political expert who bores you with an cloud of
"howevers" is probably right about what's going to happen.  The
charismatic expert who exudes confidence and has a great story to
tell is probably wrong.

And to improve the quality of your own predictions, keep brutally
honest score.  Enjoy being wrong, admitting to it and learning from
it, as much as you enjoy being right.

--Stewart Brand


(Iraq footnote.  I asked Tetlock to opine on which experts were most
right about how things have gone in the Iraq War.  He said the most
accurate in this case were the regional experts, who opposed the
invasion, and what they are predicting now is a partition of Iraq
into Kurdish, Shia, and Sunni areas.)
-- 


Stewart Brand -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The Long Now Foundation - http://www.longnow.org
Seminars & downloads: http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/



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[FRIAM] Crowd Motion and Hajj

[Richard Lowenberg]

This may be of interest to some on this list.
Richard

-- Forwarded message --
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 11:50:56 -0500
From: Anthony Townsend <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: telecom-cities 
Subject: [ISO-8859-1] [telecom-cities] news @ nature.com?-?Crowd researc
=?ISO-8859-1?Q?hers_make_pilgrimage_safer=A0-=A0The_science_of_pedestrian_mo
t?= [ISO-8859-1] ion meets the annual Hajj in Mecca.


http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070115/full/070115-13.html



Published online: 19 January 2007; | doi:10.1038/news070115-13
Crowd researchers make pilgrimage safer
The science of pedestrian motion meets the annual Hajj in Mecca.

Philip Ball


Multiple entry points in the design of the future Jamarat bridge
should help to reduce crowding even further.

For more images and video, visit Helbing's website
The annual pilgrimage of Muslims to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, known as
the Hajj, has on occasion been marred by deaths from trampling in the
huge crowds that gather for the rituals. But scientists studying how
pedestrians move around think they have made such crowd disasters
much less likely.

In 2006, 362 people died in the crush that developed in the town of
Mina, where pilgrims gather to perform a ritual stoning of pillars
representing the devil as part of the Hajj. This year's ritual, which
happened in late December and early January, went off without
incident. Although there have been plenty of other accident-free
years, this time the reason owes more to sound planning than to luck,
says Dirk Helbing of the Dresden University of Technology in Germany.
Hebling and his coworkers used the science of crowd dynamics to
introduce a raft of new crowd-control measures.

"This Hajj, in contrast to many previous ones, was very safe, without
any panics or incidents, even though it was expected to be the most
critical ever and there were about 800,000 more pilgrims than the
expected 3 million," he says. "This great success was due to a
completely different organization of pilgrim flows."

Easing congestion

The activity in Mina, about four miles from Mecca, centres on the
ritual stoning of three pillars known as the jamarat, which draws
huge crowds. To ease congestion problems, the old pillars have been
replaced by larger, elliptical ones, and a building called the
Jamarat Bridge gives pilgrims two tiers of access to the jamarat. But
as the number of pilgrims has increased steadily over the years, even
these precautions have not prevented disasters.

Last year, after being consulted by the government on how to improve
crowd safety, Helbing and his colleagues were allowed to analyse
video recordings of the crowd at Mina. "The Saudis invested a lot of
money in putting up cameras to gather data," he says.

Helbing and his co-workers had previously analysed how people move
past each other in corridors or intersections, and how jams may occur
when many people try to exit quickly through a single door. These
effects, which can be mimicked in simple computer models where the
people are represented as moving particles that repel one another,
can account for how some tragedies happen when a crowd panics.

But their work on the 2006 Hajj showed a totally new type of
behaviour, Helbing and colleagues report in a paper on the arXiv
preprint server1.



Pilgrims directed along one-way routes can follow the flow, avoiding
dangerous crush points.
As the m?l?e thickened, first the throng stopped passing steadily
onto the bridge and instead moved in waves, so that individuals would
be repeatedly stopping and starting. But then, as the crowd became
even denser, it changed to another mode in which clumps of people
were jostled in all directions, apparently at random and against
their wish to move steadily towards the jamarat.

"Pilgrims were being pushed around," says Helbing. If they stumbled
and didn't get back on their feet quickly enough, they were trampled.
The movements look like those in a fluid when it becomes turbulent,
which hasn't been seen before in human motion.

Re-routed

Helbing says that there are warning signs for the development of this
type of behaviour. For a given point on the route, for example, the
average number of people passing per minute falls below a critical
threshold up to half an hour before turbulence sets in.

For the 2007 Hajj, Helbing consulted with the Saudi authorities to
plan a new route and schedule that pilgrims would be compelled to
follow, rather than meandering at will to the jamarat. "All 1.5
million registered pilgrims got a timetable and a route in order to
distribute them uniformly in space and time," says Helbing. In case
the more-than-a-million unregistered participants confounded this
plan, they also had the capacity to use real-time data from
surveillance cameras to alter the schedule, guided by their models of
crowd behaviour. That capacity wasn't needed this year, but the
scheme is in place for future.

"The science was very important," says Salim Al Bosta, a civil
engineer at the 

[FRIAM] Seymour Papert Gravely Injured in Motorbike Accident (fwd)

[Richard Lowenberg]

>From Andy Carvin:

Hi everyone,

I've just received the terrible news that education
technology pioneer Seymour Papert has been gravely
injured in an accident in Hanoi. He was attending a
conference there and was hit by a motorbike,
sustaining significant head trauma.

The boston globe has a story here:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/12/07/mit_figure_struck_injured_in_hanoi/

and I've blogged about it here:

http://www.andycarvin.com/archives/2006/12/prayers_for_seymour_papert.html

Seymour is one of the developers of constructionist
learning theory. He helped found MIT's artificial
intelligence lab, developed the LOGO programming
language and inspired both the Maine laptop initiative
and the $100 laptop.

Hopefully he will pull through, but he will need all
the thoughts and prayers we can muster.

andy



Andy Carvin
andycarvin at yahoo  com
www.andycarvin.com
www.pbs.org/learningnow




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Re: [FRIAM] Democracy and evolution

[Richard Lowenberg]

I'm usually a lurker here, rather than poster.
Glad to see Doug participating from afar.

I think we give all to easy lip service to complex subjects like
'democracy'; or 'sustainability'.

Democracy may be social ideal.   The reality in varying degrees around
the world is the process of 'democratization'.

Democracy: 'people power' requires a prior integrated process.
Demosophia: 'people wisdom'; also a complex and seemingly undervalued
process.

Richard Lowenberg



On Thu, 7 Dec 2006, Douglass Carmichael wrote:

> The problem with integrating all points of view is that it creates a single
> system, and then the only game in town is, who owns it? Democracy is
> actually furthered by incommensurability.
>
>
>
> The problem with corporations is, they are not organisms, but owned machines
> for creating profit, and the rules of that game seem to lead inexorably to
> concentrations of wealth and power ? tyranny. The democracy project is a
> project in a state of multiple tensions. Its relation to corporations,
> capitalism and markets is not well understood yet. Modeling of this would be
> terrific.
>
>
>
> It has been said that we have a business culture that knows how to create
> wealth, but not how to distribute it.
>
>
>
> Democracy I so far as it is based on the idea of the core identity of
> persons as being equal, is not in keeping with evolution. It may be that
> humans have the capacity, through democracy and the idea that ?all people
> are created equal? to opt out of evolution for more human purpose. Evolution
> as we know, leads to death and replacement of species. Maybe we don?t want
> to go there.
>
>
>
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf
> Of Mike Oliker
> Sent: Thursday, December 07, 2006 9:51 AM
> To: friam@redfish.com
> Subject: [FRIAM] Democracy and evolution
>
>
>
> The Genius of James Madison was to see that a large country with many
> factions would be freer from factionalism that a small country would be.
> The factions would cancel each other out.  Factionalism was the greatest
> threat to democracy that the founders saw.  Much the same applies to
> corporations and the marketplace -- we are saturated with islands of self
> interest, but have a system which has them cancel each other out -- except
> insofar as they mostly line up, i.e. except for the widely held positions.
> It's like filtering out all but the DC signal.
>
>
>
> Democracy as an evolutionary matter, once it is well established, is pretty
> good at allowing agreement to emerge from the cacophony of viewpoints.  It's
> rapid spread (from one to more than 100 democracies in two centuries)
> attests to it's evolutionary superiority.
>
>
>
> There has never been a time when those in power didn't believe in
> suppressing all other viewpoints.  It is the essence of all non-democracies.
> In democracies people always want to achieve that, but they they are
> structurally inhibited.  If they ever succeed, then they are no longer have
> a democracy.  "Democracy is Well Established" == "No One can Suppress all
> other Points of View"
>
>
>
> Mike Oliker
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> No virus found in this outgoing message.
> Checked by AVG Free Edition.
> Version: 7.5.432 / Virus Database: 268.15.14/578 - Release Date: 12/7/2006
> 1:27 AM
>
>


Richard Lowenberg
P.O.Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504
505-989-9110,  505-603-5200 cell
[EMAIL PROTECTED] www.radlab.com





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[FRIAM] FW: [CivicAccess-discuss] wired article - web2.0 saving democracy (fwd)

[Richard Lowenberg]

With regard to Web 2.0 applications.   rl

-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: November 8, 2006 8:39 PM
To: civicaccess discuss
Subject: [CivicAccess-discuss] wired article - web2.0 saving democracy


good article in wired about web 2.0 saving democracy.  obviously
hyperbole, but there's lots of fun stuff to get done.
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,72001-0.html

a quote from the article:

"Today, you can already access online data on which companies donate to
which political parties and candidates, and make some good guesses about
what they get in return. Opensecrets.org, run by the Center for
Responsive Politics, provides a startling amount of information on
campaign donations, members of Congress and special interest groups.
MAPLight.org provides a detailed service for tracing California state
legislation, including who supported and who killed various bills.

A new, publicly accessible government website mandated by the Federal
Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 will soon list the
federal government's grants and contracts, tracing exactly how tax money
is being spent.

Knowing how much money is spent for which programs, and where, is a
great start. Knowing what good, if any, spending that money accomplishes
would be even better. Web 2.0 technology can help citizens process and
understand political donations, government contracts and programs, and
performance metrics in all sorts of important and novel ways.

For example, tagging information about federal expenditures, unpaved
highways or toxic waste sites with GeoRSS would let citizens easily
cross-reference the data with other information, including campaign
donations. Data feeds that use Ajax, JSON and OpenGIS Web Map Service
can incorporate externally hosted geospatial capabilities into mashups
that weave data together into a single, multifeatured map.

These capabilities would make publicly accessible information publicly
comprehensible, for a multitude of uses and applications, incorporating
a variety of data.

Major internet players are beginning to understand the power of mapping
political data. This past Monday, Google announced that it would overlay
2006 campaign data from the Federal Election Commission and
Opensecrets.org on top of Google Earth. Users can see stars on the U.S.
map wherever there are races for congressional seats and state
governorships. Clicking on a star opens up a bubble with information
about races in that area."


via Robin http://rym.waglo.com/wordpress/2006/11/05/venture-democracy/

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