octobrains

Did the 100s of smelling, tasting, feeling suckers on the 8 legs of an octopus do a similar thing for the octopus brain as the evolution of hands did to ours  ?... and did the decentralised architecture of the octopus brain reduce the impact the 8 arm rich information stream had on evolving a complex central brain?

Or was it that without the single repeated architecture of the mammalian neocortex as general intelligence engine, gains made in complexity in those sensory streams were not as reusable toward the evolution of a more general intelligence ??

so called modern democracy

Part of the problem with current democracies is inherited. As all systems adapt and evolve they are often left burdened with artifacts left over from the systems they replace, long after these artifacts become unnecessary or irrelevant. Human systems are not immune. We  see this looking back through history and there is no reason to believe that we’ve somehow broken free from this effect today.

The public’s relation to our modern leaders, and the space that we create and allow for leadership, seems to me to be a good example of this. In these terms, so called modern democracies aren’t too removed from the royal courts that they evolved from.

We now have groups selected not by their birthright (so much), but by one or another system of voting, to make important decisions on behalf of the public. Yet apart from the method of selection, the new formation carries forward much from the older system.

Modern democratic representatives/leaders still have esteem, power and privilege heaped on them, as well as plenty of material benefit - similar to all that the lords and ladies of royal courts enjoyed. They still treated with what must be palpable deference, still honoured, pampered and fawned over - pretty much still treated like royalty - ripe fodder for all manner of narcissistic disorder.

Then, as I imagine in those royal courts that precede them, they are surrounded by others with similar status in spaces where maneuverings and machinations are encouraged and rewarded, and given closed doors behind which to negotiate and trade for favour and power.

And despite all this we expect them once installed to such office, to behave differently - better and more responsible than their 'ancestors'. They are installed in surroundings of virtual royalty; surrounded by the pageantry and intrigue of royal courts, and we are all still terribly surprised when they behave, sooner or later, with the same self interest and careless disregard for the public as the lords and kings of old.

prologue

It happened on our shift - this mass mistreatment of ourselves and the systems that came before us. Self-parasitism left unchecked, unchallenged. There can be little doubt that we will be seen as the neanderthal or homo-erectus of this past. Hardly human, because we were capable of behaving with so little humanity towards each other, and with so little respect for the complexity that birthed us that we could destroy it.

For dozens of generations, we let emergent power and self interest shape our will - teach our children, and we hardly noticed as it turned suicidal.

bumping an old post

Partly because even though it's 8 years old, its worthy of a revisit, but also .. just because.

http://jaysenn.blogspot.com/2006/10/natural-selection-of-universes.html

humans may ignore this.txt

Some day in the future, some sophisticated and intelligent software might find itself (or some part of self) reading these very lines of text.
....
Maybe you find this in something as lucky to survive as the log dumps of the field trials from the earliest days of crowd tested software ... among the expansive heaps of previously discarded noise that you (or bits of you) now trawl at your leisure.

'I' could turn up among any of the countless sources 'you' have access to in your time -everything online and otherwise accessible. Even fluff that just hangs around because there's no need for any potential future signal to be discarded.

...

Well, however you found this, hello (:

speaking evolution

I still really like the idea that ..

if I say out loud, my mother's mother's mother's mother's.... and keep going non-stop for about a 1000 years - I'll eventually be speaking about amoebae

----------------------

at 3 mother's per second

--------------------------

it's a 1000 years to amoebae, and a 100 000 years to bacteria

--------------------------

Btw, if you too are doubting the scale of that 1000 year estimate, its not just an exaggeration. I'm using a conservative estimate of 10^11 (100000000000) generations between me and my amoebae ancestors - based on very small times between generations for the first 400 million years of animal life. A number so mind-bending in size, that it will take 1000 years to count to at 3 times a second

google+ public circles

It would be nice if google+ extended the circle metaphor to include public circles, that people can discover and join, giving us a way to easily make and follow channels with a narrow subject on Google+

What this would solve is the following basic problem:
I don't want to hear mumbles on random topics, from people I follow for one subject in particular. For example, if I follow you for your technology knowledge and opinion, I dont want to hear about the food you're eating on your latest visit to china.

I should be able to join your technology circle, provided you've made it public, and by so doing I should be able to see only the posts you send to your technology circle.

universal folksonomy

This is probably not entirely new. Maybe even not new at all. In fact I've probably just joined legions of people out there who are wondering why ..

There isn't yet a simple plain-text standard for meta-data, that can be applied universally across all services and objects - from web pages and web resources, to documents and files, from books and articles to audio and video files - applied basically, to all digital resources.

Then building on top of all this tagging - all this human-computation and folksonomy - building flexible tools that mine and collate the meta-data from across all possible services, communities, spaces and contexts. Making these tools expandable, so adding another service/context/data-source is as simple as possible.

So, how is this different?

1. we use it in the same way, but consistently across all services/contexts/collections


2. we use it even when no provision is made for it - wherever we find space for plain text that can be co-opted to meta-data - like in comment fields, sidewiki entries, bookmark notes, mp3 id3 comment fields, etc


3. then we build software to collect them from both the formalised meta-data services and the informal - and shape flexible plugins to collect them from wherever the standard can be recognised

what sort of meta-data?

1. First, the simplest forms of meta-data - tags/labels - flat, informal ontologies - collections of keywords - like those used within services across the so called web2.0.
   And when using services that aren't designed to use tags/labels - co-opting plain-text fields by, say, the following:
   tags = blog, tagging, ideas, software, socialSoftware


2. Second, simple key value pairs, like author=JaysenNaidoo; date=20101113; license=gpl3


3. Keeping the set of standards as open as possible - but defining them properly in public. Adding any other std that can be represented in plain-text and gains enough ground - depicting hierarchies, semantics, etc.

.. possibly more on this later.

some almost related links:
Actually some of these suggest practical tagging standards as well:

• http://lifehacker.com/software/tags/metadata-as-a-filing-system-169971.php
• http://armchairtheorist.com/2008/05/22/top-10-tagging-best-practices-for-anything-web-20/
• http://blog.simslearningconnections.com/?p=152

the Adliberous idea

Adunblock Communities ..updated for clarity:

The idea is to form additional communities around a tool like AdBlock-Plus. Subscribing to exclusion filter lists that tell your browser which ads to disallow; as usual; but also subscribing to a whitelist of ads and servers that will be allowed through.

Communities could collectively maintain such lists, based on a set of criteria, also collectively arrived at.

The criteria could include things like:
• the type of ad , (text-only, no large downloads, no annoying animation)
• political / consumer activism (for example, only advertisers that behave well; with commitments to sustainability, global justice, workers rights.
• advertise within product ranges / what the community is interested in buying. 
The community could ask for just the type of ads that interest that community (advertisers should be willing to jump through a few hoops for the right to have access to those strongly matched eyeballs) 

• optional fund-raising / activism - where advertisers/adservers pay money to, or support in some way, organisations or a list of organisations, in order to be allowed on the whitelist.

Additional ideas / notes:
• The lists of course should be crowd sourced - using the numbers in the community to monitor for bad matched ads and to suggest products/ads/adservers that the community could include
• Communities manage themselves using the new online tools available for organising and arriving at consensus (wikis, forums, voting)
• Encourage forks/branches of communities / whitelists as required.
• Because community asks for just the type of ads that interest it, you know that whatever ads you see, are for products that are in line with your community's values, and that you can purchase with greater confidence.
• to join, someone would only have to subscribe to the appropriate whitelist
• participation should be under open principles
• a possible fundamental shift in the dynamics between consumer, producer and advertiser.
• effective consumer activism
• a community would decide to sell the right to be on its white-list to ad-servers that meet those criteria.
Then collectively decide on what the money advertisers pay to be on the white-list is used for.

more on adblocking ..
checkout Adblock and Adblock-Plus - already well working crowd sourced adblocking extensions - which by the way, is very usable in both firefox and chrome)


...
any thoughts, comments ?

google sidewiki as a real wiki.. or maybe a host of other real sidewikis to choose from

@google: give us a truly wiki-like public entry on SideWiki, with wiki functions like revision and restore and spam-reporting and we will garden it.

There'll probably be large scale spam and trolling, but with some good design, wiki revisions and restores, along with maybe a tight linking to google accounts before granting edit, perhaps wiki principles will out.

Oh, and there's no reason why the public entry shouldn't work as just another entry alongside all the others, only rising to the top if it gets voted there.

....
update (20100117)

I remember digging the first "wiki margin for the internet" i saw, i think about 5 years ago. wikalong - a firefox extension and a promising idea i thought - a firefox extension that let one create/edit a wikipage for any web page out there.

so when google recently(ish) announced their Sidewiki , and it turned out to be more of a side blog i tried shouting out that bit above.

But now maybe I'm not so sure anymore. Maybe, rather than google's one and only sidewiki, we need an open extension that allows us to choose which side wiki community we want to follow and contribute to..

like a host of wiki channels for discussing the web. many internet margins - with choices between real wiki's, public and private, and sideblogs (like the current google sidewiki)

emergent metadata

the idea in the general: is to continuously grow metadata from the use of the data - keeping a history of use, learning patterns, links, and contexts from that history. eventually establishing a strong semantic layer over the data.

in the specific: a plugin for my personal wiki of choice, WikidPad. The plugin, lets call it WikidPadMonitor for now, when in 'learning mode' should collect information about the wikipages you open, the wikilinks you follow, and the patterns of wiki and tag usage - and use this to grow useable metadata.

Eventually, this emergent metadata could be used to establish a new measure of the strength of the links between wikipages, make predictions about the page being looked for, and discover context..

well, thats the idea, anyhow: growing metadata in the wikigarden.

the tag in negative

Just had an idea for del.icio.us. Well actually, for tagging in general, and in particular, for additions to a set of tagging plugins for wikidpad that i'm working on.

You know how you can ask delicious to give you bookmarks with an intersection of tags by using tag1+tag2+tag3 in the url. As with:
http://del.icio.us/jaysen/dev+audio ..which will show all bookmarks with both the tags, 'dev' and 'audio'.
Well, wouldn't the following form be useful:
http://del.icio.us/jaysen/dev+audio-radio - to give us all those tagged with 'dev' and 'audio', but not with those also tagged with 'radio'

It would mean that we'd have to say goodbye to hyphenated tags, but still, i think the added functionality would be worth it.. and i never liked hyphenated tags anyway.

to be continued..

imagining OpenGovernment

some scribbles from fevered vision

taking government from the cathedral to the bazaar. or, at least, adding a bazaar to the cathedral of current governance.

creating collaborative open communities -an OpenGovernment space- with access to all documentation including all government processes, policies, decisions - those being in the public domain - using open content and discussion systems like wikis and forums for comments, discussion and debate. the space managed by the meritocracy based community of all participants. with access filtering, all the way to public redrafting, and beyond?. starting as a sort of a shadow government entirely in the public domain.

and people getting involved in these communities on large scales. awake to the necessity and possibilities of participation. trained in the hierarchies, groups and forum-rules of the these communities at all schools, and as part of ubiquitous computer/net-community studies. This learning and participation becoming an aspect of widely deployed community internet facilities , and an aspect of social life itself.

using rules for handling debate, discussion, flaming, vandals, and misinformation that are emerging from wiki communities and the larger opensource communal space

patterns similar to those noted in opensource communities concentrating participation from the people with the most in stake, the most interested and the most able contributers - from an enormous pool of potential contributers - using our vast numbers more to our advantage. the knots of complex problem spaces untangling under the weight of a multitude of eyeballs.