Efficiency in evolution?

As a fan of the subtle, yet incredibly powerful workings of the evolutionary process, I was interest to read the latest on the dog v. cat evolution in terms of who is the better hunter and how they evolved to be.  Cats are apparently better hunters but less efficient at it is the upshot, humans even better a running after prey (okay, who does this?  unless of course you are talking about some long lost tribe in the Amazon or Saturday night at the singles bar...)  Nonetheless, you can find the interesting info on this at MSNBC of all places.

I think its pretty ironic that humans are most efficient for running after prey but most likely to sit in front of the big screen TV with a bag of Doritos in their hand.  Puts a whole new meaning on the seven deadly wastes (or should that be waster?)

I am considering that this research indicates that evolution and therefore problem solving techniques such as the evolutionary process, support the notion of "useful inefficiency" as the winning condition.  Perhaps stealth and its effectiveness easily makes up for the inefficiency of the cats hunting biomechanics.  Pretty much another example of systems engineering where if you look at the behavior of one of the components of the system, you could draw an incorrect conclusion unless you look at the total system in operation.

Post Falls, from the restaurant

Post Falls, Idaho

Blackwell colleague a important meeting

Factoid Tracing? Huh?

The cogitation or noodle for the day is something I like to call Factoid Tracing. This is the most interesting phenom of the wide open web where you can traverse topics creating your own threads of factoids (small bite-sized facts) of related information based on your own context (what I know, what seems appealing, etc). Much like a directed random walk, if that is not an oxymoron, in a subject area trying to create a picture of understanding or at least one of connectedness in topics.

My experiment is using Google notebook for this purpose. So the experiment looks like this:

1. Pick a book
2. Find a concept, word, etc that you don't understand but have some interest in
3. Google the concept
4. Walk, cross walk or hyperlink around capturing the most relevant snippet of information on the page or ideally the most complex topic you don't know
5. Post that in your Google notebook, it couldn't be easy
6. See what you come up with and see if it makes any sense to someone who has no interest in the topic

For example, here is my public notebook on a weird topic from my complexity studies

http://www.google.com/notebook/public/15710041006556846397/BDQ9jIgoQ7OWC5bQj?hl=en



Guess the topic or comment on the validity of this Factoid Tracing ;-)

Bookbar Experiment Part 2

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Sunset in the way out west taken from the mower

Ffiona

Complex Thought for the Day

Great new book, "Thinking in Complexity" by Klaus Mainzer (Springer Complexity Series). Perhaps I should say it is new to me, the fifth edition having been published in 2007. Its sort of a compendium (not sure I am using that appropriately, but seems to work) of complexity topics for all the sciences.

Today the quote from it that suits my research is "In complex systems, the behavior of a single element is often completely unknown and therefore considered to be a random process. In this case, it is not necessary to distinguish between chance that occurs because of some hidden order that may exist and chance that is the result of blind lawlessness." -
(Klaus Mainzer. "Thinking in Complexity - The Computational Dynamics of Matter, Mind and Mankind." Springer: Complexity Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2007.p. 200-201.)...Just Love the use of the phrase, "blind lawlessness".

Driving to work exhibits all the behaviors of a complex system and the probability (or "chance" as Mainzer mentions) of understanding any one driver's behavior is zero and clearly that behavior could be some outcome of real thinking (okay, sure) or more likely the result of blind lawlessness, particularly during commute hours on highway 26, 217 or I-5, all roads I directly experience twice a day, everyday.

BTW why do many of us love Springer books? Because when you buy one it usually weighs way more than you think it should compared to others, they don't skim on paper quality and you feel you should mount it on the wall with its own special museum downlighting system because its THAT expensive...I actually refuse to eat my lunch around it (that's somethin' special)

Further thoughts on slime molds

Slime Mold example

SO that didn't work

Well, the bookbar experiment was a miserable failure and I have run out of patience on it at this point. (This might be a lie, not sure). I know I should be able to drop that in there.

Experiments in BookBar

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If Slime Mold can do, why can't we?

Still looking at complexity theory, particularly as it relates to software and software projects. Apparently many of the early thoughts on emergence of complex behaviors comes from the study of slime mold. I am not very well versed in slime mold but apparently a slime mold "individual" and its clan are able to separate and join with each other based on environmental conditions without much cognitive ability (or any for that matter). To me, that suggests that it is perhaps the human brain that prevents teams of engineers to effectively collaborate on solving problems efficiently, given slime mold can spontaneously form collaborative groups but it takes tremendous energy and a big stick to form a coordinated human team.

If you want a good reference on this, check out Steven Johnson's text titled, Emergence - The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software, Scribner, New York. ISBN: 0-684-868875-X. Its worth reading the first chapter at least and ideally the whole book.

Thought for the day

Reading some work on Complex systems and complexity theory in general today. I am still considering why simple things get so complicated especially in software, aha, emergence is apparently the newly evolving answer. In tooling around in investigation mode, I have found the "authoritative" version of Wikipedia or an attempt to be one, called Scholarpedia.org. Looks interesting although limited in coverage but growing as far as I can tell.

If the length of or number of syllables in the words are any measure, then this site clearly beats its closest rival. For example, the article entitled Complex Systems http://www.schloarpedia.org/article/Complex_systems has some killer sentences in it. One of my favorites is "The very origin of irreversibility is related to the intrinsic complexity of the dynamics of the atoms constituting a macroscopic system under the effect of their mutual interactions" (revision 37312). At first read, it is a bit tough, okay maybe at second and third read but after awhile it makes sense although some of the article reads more like it is written by a reasonably good english as a second language speaker.

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Content Subscription Fraud - is it on the rise?

As more valuable (and not so valuable) is digitized, is there an increasing financial risk to content creators and owners from subscription fraud? Articles like the one below although old might be the beginning of a new media issue, not just the current telecommunications industry issue. Traditionally telecommunications providers have lost millions annually to subscription fraud where fraudsters are using stolen identities to gain access to services.

Subscriptions and subscription packages are susceptible to the same fraudulent credential problem and as more information brokers are involved, they too could be a source of revenue loss to the content owners.


Friday July 21, 2006, 7:26 AM

Seven Leading Publishers Sue on Subscription Fraud Conspiracy

Seven leading scientific, technical and medical publishers -- American Chemical Society, American Institute of Physics, Blackwell Publishing, Inc., Elsevier, Inc., Taylor & Francis (a subsidiary of Informa Plc.), Springer Science and Business Media LLC (part of Springer Science + Business Media Group), and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. and Wiley-Liss, Inc. (subsidiaries of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) -- today announced they have filed suit against Commax Worldwide, a California-based subscription agency, its subsidiary Commax Technologies, Inc., and nine individuals including the president of Commax Technologies, Henry Chen. The publishers allege that the defendants are engaged in a massive scheme of subscription fraud.
The principal defendant, Commax Worldwide, operates a subscription agency serving libraries and other institutions by acting as an intermediary in handling their subscriptions to scholarly journals. Its customers are primarily in Taiwan and elsewhere in East Asia. As an agency, it is obligated to identify the subscriptions it orders as institutional subscriptions bearing the normal institutional price. The publishers' complaint, however, accuses Commax of obtaining subscriptions to plaintiffs' scientific, technical, and medical journals at deeply discounted individual subscriber rates under false pretenses, and reselling them to institutional clients at the institutional rate. The individual defendants, including Henry Chen, participated in this by subscribing to journals, often using false names and addresses, and turning over the journals upon receipt to Commax. The publishers estimate their damages from this conspiracy in the millions of dollars over the last few years.

From http://sg.biz.yahoo.com/060720/16/428ar.html

Dreary Day

Its pretty dreary both the weather and the schedule for the day, so today I will consider fraud and fraud analysis
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Its a been awhile...

Finally, through the many email accounts (current count is now 8), web hosts, domains, blogs, collaborative portals, blogs, wikis, I have found my own blog. Apparently, this was initiated last year in some out of body experience, but nonetheless here it is, so I should do someting with it.

I just spent about three weeks having a geeky, yet fantastic time with DSpace, an open source digital asset management system from MIT and HP and many, many others. Looks like a good community, very responseful and helpful.

Running on ubuntu, my first experience with this variant of Linux and with the able support of about a million people, I was finally able to bring up the 1.5 new version and submit some content. Pretty nice and it really just feels good to build out something like that from a set of source files.