The Goya piece below is terrifying, and the commentary is [...]]]> +Beth Harris and +Steven Zucker's conversations on art history for the +Khan Academy are really great. I'm especially enjoying their discussions of art during the French and Spanish revolutions, and I can't wait to hear what they have to say about 20th century!

The Goya piece below is terrifying, and the commentary is a great example of the whole expansive and entertaining video collection. I love the dynamic between the two scholars. Their enthusiasm for art is absolutely contagious.

I've been thinking about producing some educational content for my stream, with the goal of producing content for Khan. Watching these videos is both instructive and inspiring for my own projects.

More on Goya's Saturn here:

http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/goya-saturn-devouring-one-of-his-children
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Devouring_His_Son

Khan Academy's entire Art History Collection:

http://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-history/

Goya, Saturn Devouring One Of His Sons

James Wood originally shared this post:

Quasicrystals as sums of waves in the plane. This quasicrystal is full of emergent patterns, but it can be described in a simple way. Each frame of the animation is a summation of such waves at evenly-spaced rotations. The animation occurs as each wave moves forward. More [...]]]> TECHNICS ? originally shared this post:

Quasicrystals as sums of waves in the plane. This quasicrystal is full of emergent patterns, but it can be described in a simple way. Each frame of the animation is a summation of such waves at evenly-spaced rotations. The animation occurs as each wave moves forward.
More ? http://goo.gl/vyccv Quasicrystal ? http://goo.gl/uoHjI

Over the last few weeks we've seen an explosion of blog posts, videos, and journals publishing on this major developing paradigm shift in social organization. Of course, it is 2012 and networks are hardly new. Facebook's IPO already seems like old news; no one doubts the importance of networks. We've [...]]]> The Networked Paradigm
volume one

Over the last few weeks we've seen an explosion of blog posts, videos, and journals publishing on this major developing paradigm shift in social organization. Of course, it is 2012 and networks are hardly new. Facebook's IPO already seems like old news; no one doubts the importance of networks. We've been living on them and in them for decades.

What's changed is our understanding of how #networks behave. Our mathematics and computer science has made tremendous progress over the last few years. Our ability to visualize #bigdata in instructive and useful ways it in a golden age. Until now, the Internet has been mostly flopping along blindly, confident that we were doing good work but not entirely understanding how we were doing it. But over the last month or so our #science has grown strong. When our science is strong, we can be deliberate about how we use our tools.

+Bruno Gonçalves and his colleagues gave a vivid but somehow unsurprising demonstration of this power just this week. They predicted the winner of +American Idol by doing nothing more elaborate than counting tweets.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/117828903900236363024/posts/aSUDwAggmgz

This was almost a trivial exercise, but the authors are explicit that this is simply a demonstration of the potential of these techniques:

"On a more general basis, our results highlight that the aggregate preferences and behaviors of large numbers of people can nowadays be observed in real time, or even forecasted, through open source data freely available in the web. The task of keeping them private, even for a short time, has therefore become extremely hard (if not impossible), and this trend
is likely to become more and more evident in the future years."

Although the success of the prediction isn't itself surprising, the consequences of the result are not only surprising but fundamentally revolutionary for the way we organize ourselves. When our computer models can predict the results of a political election like they can predict a rising tide, it makes political theater seem less like a circus and more like a rain dance. We can do better. We must.

Criticizing the old order is easy. What matters is that we are starting to develop the sciences for describing, building, and maintaining genuinely novel forms of self-organized social economies. These networks are often hostile to both traditional markets and centralized governments, but nevertheless we are starting to see how they can be harnessed to do important social, political, and economic work.

We've been practicing with these networked forms of self-organization on the Internet for a few decades now, and we've become damn good at it. We've arrived in the Digital Age, and we are preparing to do tremendous things with it. It won't be easy.

Below are some links that will help. They range from suggestive to instructive to philosophical, and cover a scope from economics and political science to computational neuroscience and digital ethnography. That's a huge range of material. Get used to it.

To Understand is to Perceive Patterns
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105329245585862825504/posts/62MVJFPUHsr

The Power of Networks
https://plus.google.com/u/0/117828903900236363024/posts/VCfkxHHyK2o

Cognitive Democracy
https://plus.google.com/u/0/117828903900236363024/posts/HrUZDbSUza2

The Hybridization Movement
https://plus.google.com/u/0/117828903900236363024/posts/6wWEqeUdfhf

Digital Politics https://plus.google.com/u/0/117828903900236363024/posts/Pqa6X4EEwwT

This list taken from my comment in +Tim O'Reilly thread on #markets here:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/107033731246200681024/posts/1F5GggHTfgY

Reposted for G+ from: http://digitalinterface.blogspot.com/2012/05/networked-paradigm.html

Image taken from Weng et. al. (2012):
https://plus.google.com/u/0/117828903900236363024/posts/484P2wKMjei

If you appreciate this work, please participate!

Today it is clear that the independence of social value and commercial revenue creation is a myth. In reality, the vectors of social value and commercial revenue creation can reinforce and undermine each other. The social consequences of the recent financial crisis demonstrated with great clarity the danger of “negative externalities”—social [...]]]> The hybrid ideal

Today it is clear that the independence of social value and commercial revenue creation is a myth. In reality, the vectors of social value and commercial revenue creation can reinforce and undermine each other. The social consequences of the recent financial crisis demonstrated with great clarity the danger of “negative externalities”—social costs resulting from corporate profit-seeking activities. But in some cases, “positive externalities” may also exist. It is this possibility that integrated hybrid models seek to exploit.

When we talk to entrepreneurs and students about hybrid organizations, a common theme that emerges is what we call the “hybrid ideal.” This hypothetical organization is fully integrated—everything it does produces both social value and commercial revenue.4 This vision has at least two powerful features. In the hybrid ideal, managers do not face a choice between mission and profit, because these aims are integrated in the same strategy. More important, the integration of social and commercial value creation enables a virtuous cycle of profit and reinvestment in the social mission that builds large-scale solutions to social problems.
http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/in_search_of_the_hybrid_ideal

via +Gregory Esau
_______________

It is wonderful to see so many people waking up simultaneously to the same basic unified frameworks. People are catching on to it from so many diverse perspective it is very humbling.

The overlap and diversity of perspectives is interesting for many reasons. "The Hybrid Ideal", for instance, is a very clearly transhumanist value, but I imagine that the number of people involved in producing or sharing this content that explicitly recognize it as such is vanishingly small.

I personally get this content through the small-but-growing network of businessmen and entrepreneurship whose interesting organizational strategies have been filling my stream. This amuses me somewhat, because I'm an anarchist looking to seize the means of production, yet somehow we've become bedfellows in the transition.

Interesting times indeed.

Gideon Rosenblatt originally shared this post:

In Search of the Hybrid Ideal

The “hybrid ideal” – the hypothetical organization that is fully integrated—everything it does produces both social value and commercial revenue.

This piece, from the Stanford Social Innovation Review, is an excellent look at hybrid organizations. It provides some good introductory background and then concentrates on four main challenges to running these types of organizations:

* Legal Structure
* Financing
* Customers and Beneficiaries
* Organizational Culture and Talent Development

Those of you who know me, may also know that I spent 9 years of my life running precisely this type of organization – a mission-driven technology consulting shop. The challenges that this article outlines are bang-on.

This is a deep dive, and not for everyone, but if you are interested in understanding this burgeoning area, I highly recommend you read this all the way through.

"In Search of the Hybrid Ideal"
By Julie Battilana, Matthew Lee, John Walker, & Cheryl Dorsey

? http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/in_search_of_the_hybrid_ideal

#socialenterprise #mission #soulfulcompany #socialchange

For several years, roboticists have been working out ways to get a group of robots to perform synchronized activities as demonstrated most often in dance routines. It’s not just about trying to create humanoid machines that can better entertain us though, it’s about getting them to perform simple small scale [...]]]> Quorum sensing in robots

For several years, roboticists have been working out ways to get a group of robots to perform synchronized activities as demonstrated most often in dance routines. It’s not just about trying to create humanoid machines that can better entertain us though, it’s about getting them to perform simple small scale synchronized activities so that a means can be found to scale up such activities so that robots of the future can work together to autonomously accomplish certain goals that have been defined by their human masters. To that end, MIT researchers Patrick Bechon and Jean-Jacques Slotine have been studying ways to mimic so called quorum sensing, which some organisms use to figure out how many of their own kind are around, and then to perform actions based on it. The two have applied this principal to small dancing robots, to stunning effect. They have written a paper describing what they have learned and posted it on the preprint server arXiv.

More: http://phys.org/news/2012-05-mit-synchronize-group-robots-video.html
Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.2952

Matt Uebel originally shared this post:

Sweet :D

"An effect of the constant advances in technology is a complete restructuring of the way we think about the division of labor and citizens' roles in a future society. As our lives become ever more digitalized, we realize many real concerns–namely the fear that a handful of [...]]]> vis +James Wood. Pasting his comment below:

"An effect of the constant advances in technology is a complete restructuring of the way we think about the division of labor and citizens' roles in a future society. As our lives become ever more digitalized, we realize many real concerns–namely the fear that a handful of extremely wealthy and extremely powerful individuals will take over the world, leaving the rest of us to fight over the few "real" jobs remaining. However, in an #attentioneconomy , such disparity can not exist. First of all, the Internet in future forms can reach the point that it itself functions as an economy–one of attention and attenders. Imagine that machines have evolved to the point at which manual human labor is truly obsolete; they become in a way our "digital" infrastructure. then whatever frontier remains unconquered will become the platform for our human interaction (the Internet). This network will still be just as competitive as any free market system to date, only it will be wholly self-organized, meaning that the behavior of the network as a whole will be more or less equally influenced by each individual node. The main obstruction to this practically in the future is that in this vast digital infrastructure, you might ask, who controls that? Who owns it? Who makes sure it is functioning properly? If a few people do own it, then wouldn't the very phenomenon we are trying to avoid still happen in an attention economy (other-organized network)? The answer is that no one owns the infrastructure (or anything). The infrastructure will become advanced enough that it becomes essentially self-improving, self-organizing, self-replicating, etc. The technology will become intelligent, or I daresay, alive (oooh). It will become integrated into our very consciousness–it will become us, or rather extensions of us. We will become a digital species."

PBS NewsHour originally shared this post:

Paul Solman has been showcasing the future of technology from a recent conference run by a California think tank — things such as 3-D printing of prosthetic legs and iPhone heart tests. But the conference also resurfaced an age-old question about the future of human workers.

Where do you see technology going?

For the study, Kemp and Regier used data previously collected by anthropologists and linguists that specify kinship categories for 566 of the world's languages. Kemp and Regier used a computational analysis to explore why some patterns are found in the data set but others are not. In particular, they [...]]]> Linguistic categories are computationally optimal

For the study, Kemp and Regier used data previously collected by anthropologists and linguists that specify kinship categories for 566 of the world's languages. Kemp and Regier used a computational analysis to explore why some patterns are found in the data set but others are not. In particular, they tested the idea that the world's kinship systems achieve a trade-off between the two competing principles of simplicity and informativeness.

"The kinship systems that are used by languages lie along an optimal frontier, where systems achieve a near perfect trade-off between the competing factors of simplicity and usefulness," Kemp said. "English — with two terms to refer to grandparents — is more simple than Mandarin Chinese, but arguably a little less useful."

"Interestingly, very similar principles explain cross-language variation in color categories and spatial categories, as well as kinship categories," said Regier, associate professor of linguistics and cognitive science at Berkeley, and an author on the earlier work on color and space. "It's rewarding to see similar principles operating across such different domains."_______________

Language is a high-level cognitive and social phenomena that, when left to its own devices, tends to result in optimal solutions. You can literally throw a bunch of untrained infants into a social context where the adults speak a variety of different languages and don't fully understand each other, and if you let those kids play together they will tend to spontaneously form new, grammatically sophisticated language that unifies and remixes all the old languages in completely novel ways.

In contrast, artificially created and imposed languages (like Esperanto) almost never get picked up as a mother tongue, and children tend to do poorly with them.

I would suggest that other kinds of high-level cognitive phenomena (like, say, planning ahead, or distributing resources, or dividing labor) are also best left to the self-organized solutions derived by the people left to their own devices, instead of imposing an artificial organizational structure.

Betsy McCall originally shared this post:

Categories for kinship vary between languages

Different languages refer to family relationships in different ways. For example, English speakers use two terms — grandmother and grandfather — to refer to grandparents, while Mandarin Chinese uses…

CogSai originally shared this post:

Which are deadlier: sharks or horses? Find out now on the debut of +CogSai! Easy share link: http://bit.ly/cogsai1

Cognitive science is a combo of psych, AI, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthro, sociology, and lots more. CogSai includes short illustrated explanations, live interviews with researchers, [...]]]> Spreading good memes is good.

CogSai originally shared this post:

Which are deadlier: sharks or horses? Find out now on the debut of +CogSai! Easy share link: http://bit.ly/cogsai1

Cognitive science is a combo of psych, AI, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthro, sociology, and lots more. CogSai includes short illustrated explanations, live interviews with researchers, and group discussions.

Coming soon: LIVE interview with a scientist researching how analytical and heuristic thinking compete in the brain. Subscribe & follow to participate live! Go to cogsai.com/q to contribute your questions on this episode & suggestions for future episodes.

See you there. :-) – +Sai