Author: Douglas Galbi

worlds without decay and congestion

Digital objects typically persist just as long as the virtual world around them. Digital space can double every year or two with advances in digital hardware. Creative users acting in a virtual world can make it a lonely place:

More and more empty houses and castles and the like are lovingly constructed as monuments that few will ever see, and each becomes another wall between users, diluting their presence more and more.

… even if people do manage to find each other, the unbounded complexity of user-created data puts a low ceiling on the number of people who can get together, and thus limits the social dynamics that can emerge.

The upshot is that worlds that depend on user-created content a) suffer from progressively worse dilution of the user population; and b) limit the number of people who can get together when they do find each other. This is not a strong recipe for building effective, long-lasting community. [Terra Nova]

That’s much different from the real world:

The importance of geography is also evident across 8,000 years of history in the area now called Japan. The most densely settled regions in the Jomon period (6,000 to 300 BCE) were also the most densely settled regions in 1998. Consider as well the effects of U.S. bombing of Japan in World War II. The nuclear bomb that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima, Japan’s eighth largest city, killed 80,000 persons (20.8% of the city’s population) and destroyed two-thirds of the built up area of the city. Kyoto, Japan’s fifth largest city, was not bombed at all because of its cultural significance. The nuclear destruction of Hiroshima did not have an enduring effect on its attractiveness as a place to live. By 1975, the ratio of Hiroshima’ population to Kyoto’s was about the same as it was before the bombing. The relative attractiveness of places to persons is a remarkably stable aspect of life. [Galbi, 2002; source references there]

In the real world, place is a powerful structure organizing long-lasting communities. Moreover, renewing and preserving the built environment is a central concern in civic life.

building demolition

While digital spaces organize digital objects in Euclidean neighborhoods (e.g. 184 W. 64’th St, NY), the web organizes digital objects in link neighborhoods. Link neighborhoods are much more flexible and dynamic than Euclidean neighborhoods. Link neighborhoods can evolve as communities of contemporary interest. Search engines can generate new link neighborhoods with regard for activity (modification date) and popularity (page rank or other ranking systems). Digital space, in contrast, is much more cheaply abandoned than re-organized.

Virtual worlds that encourage participants to create digital objects in a Euclidean digital space need to develop better ways to decay built objects and re-organizing space, or they will become lonely places.

CSC Invitational bicycle races

Scoping other major media, purple motes offers a special report on the 10’th Annual CSC Invitational bicycle races. The racing took place on a tight one kilometer course right here in the middle of Arlington, Virginia. Mark McCormack, former USPRO National Champion and 2006 CSC Invitational Winner, described the race:

It’s savagely hard. You have to close the gaps, you have to have the right positioning, it is incredibly technically challenging with all the turns and there is always wind that blows you over between turn 2 and 3. [CSC Press]

It’s NASCAR with no pollution and a lot more muscle.

In the elite amateur men’s race, former Lanterne Rouge rider and crowd favorite Todd Hipp (Battley Harley-Davidson) took third. A former Marine Corp swimmer who pulled boats onto the enemy’s shore, Hipp has switched tactics on land. He looks to his Harley teammates to pull him close to the line, and then he launches a ferocious sprint to get there first. But today, Hipp didn’t have the legs, and had to settle for third.

In the women’s pro race, Laura Van Gilder (Cheerwine) won to become the only three-time CSC winner. Van Gilder got away early with Rebecca Larson (Aaron’s Corporate Furnishings). The pair left the field in the distance for the rest of the rest. On the final lap:

Larson [refused] to come around Van Gilder despite slowing to a crawl. With no other choice save a trackstand, Van Gilder led out the sprint just after the final corner. Larson drew nearly even with just meters to the line, but didn’t have the extra punch to topple the two-time CSC Invitational champion. [VeloNews]

Congratulations to Van Gilder. Some of the guys I ride with also refuse to come around.

The CSC Invitational included for the first time the U.S. Handcycling Criterium Championship. Seth Arseneau, a former U.S. army soldier, finished first. His teammate, Oscar “Oz” Sanchez, a former Marine, finished third. The guys are fantastic athletes who give cycle racing another whole dimension. A great addition to the CSC Invitational.

In the men’s pro race, Rashaan Bahati sprinted for the win at the end of the hot, fast, 100 km distance. Bahati was looking spent in the middle of the race. His teammate, Kayle LeoGrande, was coming off a tactical mistake that may have cost him a win earlier this May. On his blog, Bahati described his moves on the final lap:

Crossing the finish line with one lap to go, I had made up in my mind what I was going to do and I did it. Going into the second to last turn, we have a straightaway of about 200m and when I got there I started my sprint. Moved from 10th to 4th with Kayle 2 guys back. I went through the second to last corner so fast I think other riders stopped and looked to see if I would crash or not.

I’m in to the last turn and I’m 4th wheel…I’m thinking…well if Kayle is here, we could get 1st and 2nd. I started to sprint and I quickly moved into 2nd position right behind Ivan Stevic of (Toyota) who beat me in stage 3 of Tri-Peaks Stage race. 150m to go and I pop out to close the deal and my first 4-5 pedal strokes I came neck and neck with Ivan and from that point on, I knew I had it. LeoGrande finished 8th giving us 2 guys in the top ten. Not bad for a new team.

A brilliant performance by Bahati, Leogrande, and the Rock Racing team.

Thanks to all the participants and organizers for bringing the best of cycling to Arlington this past Saturday. For more exciting cycling action, head to the Crystal City Classic on June 16. Or come out and ride with the Lanterne Rouge.

Bob Hope Poem: vaudeville to radio, television, and movies

Hope, Leslie, later called Bob, was the fifth of seven children in an impoverished family. Arriving in Ohio at age five from across the Atlantic, Bob danced, sang, busked, and boxed. He rose on the vaudeville circuit from six-a-day shows to the two-a-day big-time. At age twenty-eight in 1931, he played New York’s Palace Theatre.

That was just about when the vaudeville business died from radio and talkies.

What would America be without vaudeville? Just minstrelsy, circuses, freakshows, and crude saloon fare. Vaudeville brought together Italian and German, Irish and Jew, woman and man. Vaudeville made the American public. Vaudeville performances were a public trust.

There was no more money in the vaudeville business.

Bob began to come up in Broadway musicals. Roberta (1932), Say When (1934), Ziegfeld Follies (1936), Red Hot and Blue (1936). Playing Huckleberry he met and soon married Dolores, who separated from him at his death. He achieved major success on the stage.

There was more money in the movie business.

Bob first sang his trademark song, Thanks for the Memory, in his first major film, The Big Broadcast of 1938, which would now be called The Big Broadcast III. Then Bob found success and Lamour in Road to Singapore, Road to Zanzibar, Road to Morocco, Road to Utopia, Road to Rio, Road to Bali.

Film series, like poetry, witness to the Hollywood business maxim that no one knows anything.

Bob diversified in radio. Hope first came to radio in 1933 in the brilliant NBC executive Bertha Brainard’s The Fleischmann Yeast Hour. In 1937, Bob came up with a twenty-six week radio contract for NBC’s Woodbury Soap Show. Then, from the spring of recovery in the late 1930s to the wave of prosperity in the 1950s, Bob Hope led the highly successful weekly series, The Pepsodent Radio Show.

Bob Hope advertising Pepsodent
Television killed the radio stars.

Bob had doubts about television’s commercial potential. He thought a television series wouldn’t work. Or maybe the price wasn’t right. His business plan for television was specials. His first special, broadcast on NBC in 1950, cost more to produce than any other show to that time. His second special appeared six weeks later. Within the next year he produced another five specials. From 1954 until 1972, a ninety-minute Bob Hope Christmas Special broadcasted every year. From 1958 to 1975, Bob Hope hosted the Oscar Awards broadcast every year. Hope made more than 270 television specials.

The most rewarding business is acting in the public interest.

Bob valued public service. From a visit in 1941 to the Army Air Force Field in Riverside, California (parts broadcast on Bob’s Pepsodent Radio Show), to a visit in late 1990 to U.S. soldiers preparing to fight in the Gulf War (parts broadcast on NBC), Bob voyaged around the globe to entertain U.S. solders. He also entertained every U.S. president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush and golfed with most of them, too.

For more than fifty years, Hope was a major money-maker supporting the public service of the fourth estate. In these deeply troubling times for traditional media, industry leaders might nostalgically recall Hope.

One foot, two feet
Can you count to five?
Class, pay attention!
The final’s this Friday!

“Tomorrow at the latest I’ll start working on a great book
In which my century will appear as it really was.”

hope bobs eternal

don't just think, do something

Brains operate using perception-action cycles. Good programmers know that a key to fast code is a good data structure. Sensory inputs are like a data structure for the brain. Using your body and physical implements, you can shape the sensory data structure that your brain uses. Moving around to get a good look is thinking on your feet. Tinkering is thinking with your hands. If you just use your head to think, you’re mentally handicapped.

Tetris game play provides a good case study of how the brain and hands work together. Careful study of play indicates that players rotate the falling blocks more frequently than is plausible for a linear cognitive program of play.[1] Study also indicates that using keystrokes, a player can rotate a falling block about ten times as fast as a person can mentally rotate such a block.[2] In figuring out where to direct a block, players use keystrokes to rotate blocks at least in part because doing so is more cost effective than performing such actions on representations within one’s head.

Trade-offs between external sense and cognitive effort also occurs in choices between different sensory forms of media. The rapid shift of “soap operas” from radio to television suggests that adding visual stream to the programming lowered the cost of making sense of it. More generally, the cost of making sense of presence falls with richer sensory inputs.

Playing Tetris and making sense of presence both involve perception-action cycles. In Tetris, the player rotates blocks to create new sensory inputs so that higher level cognitive processes can more efficiently plan trajectories for placing blocks. In sense of presence, attunement to another occurs as a good created through the social evolution of human nature. This attunement can occur at different cognitives levels, from awareness of twittering of another to a face-to-face, heart-to-heart talk with a best friend. At each level, attunement is associated with characteristic patterns of action such as textual response or eye-tracking.

Perception-action cycles are built into human biology from the lowest to the highest levels of cognitive complexity. As a cognitive scientist explained:

At all levels of the central nervous system, the processing of sensory-guided sequential actions flows from posterior (sensory) to anterior (motor) structures, with feedback at every level. Thus, at cortical levels, information flows in a circular fashion through a series of hierarchically organized areas and connections that constitute the perception-action cycle. Automatic and well-rehearsed actions in response to simple stimuli are integrated at low levels of the cycle, in sensory areas of the posterior (perceptual) hierarchy and in motor areas of the frontal (executive) hierarchy. More complex behavior, guided by more complex and temporally remote stimuli, requires integration at higher cortical levels of both perceptual and executive hierarchies, namely areas of higher sensory association and prefrontal cortex.[3]

Interactivity, which new Internet services emphasize, is deeply embedded in human biology.

*  *  *  *  *

Notes:

[1] David Kirsh and Paul Maglio (1994), “On distinguishing epistemic from pragmatic actions,” Cognitive Science 18, pp. 15-20.

[2] Id. p. 24.

[3] Joaquín M. Fuster (2004), “Upper processing stages of the perception-action cycle,” TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 8, no. 4 (April) p. 144. Note that id. Figure 2 describes the general structure of Kirsh and Maglio (1994), p. 39, Figure 16. For additional description of the perception-action cycle, see Paul Baxter’s Memoirs of a Postgrad.

COB-11: education is the key to success

This month’s Carnival of the Bureaucrats highlights the bright future for U.S. bureaucracy. The Council of Graduate Schools’ Advisory Committee on Graduate Education and American Competitiveness has just released a 30-page report entitled Graduate Education: The Backbone of American Competitiveness and Innovation. The Executive Summary begins with it:

It is tempting to be complacent about the future of American competitiveness. … But as our world flattens, we face new and growing competition. We can no longer take for granted America’s continued leadership in innovation and competitiveness.

I see some evidence supporting that view. Being a graduate student is a socio-intellectual position that fosters backbone, independence, and innovation. Even more important, however, is developing the flexible, goal-oriented skills of bureaucratic reasoning. A Committee member highlighted the relationship of these skills to graduate education:

“Interdisciplinary research preparation and education are central to future competitiveness, because knowledge creation and innovation frequently occur at the interface of disciplines,” says the CGS report (p18). In such a world, the ability to analyze and solve problems, even ones you never saw before is particularly important, as is the ability to quickly bring to market new products, services and integrated solutions of all kinds. This kind of talent is more important than ever, given the increasingly complex, fast changing, competitive world we live in. These are the kinds of skills that require solid preparation as well as a certain degree of maturity, and that therefore are difficult to acquire in college. This is what graduate education and advanced degrees are all about.

The Committee’s recommendations are consistent with developing these skills:

  • Develop a highly skilled workforce by fostering collaboration among leaders in higher education, business and government
  • Expand participation of underrepresented groups in all fields, especially those essential to America’s competitiveness and national security
  • Create a vision for all US students that portrays careers in the STEM fields as engaging, compelling, transparent and remunerative
  • Attract and retain the best and brightest students from around the world
  • Enhance the quality of graduate education through ongoing evaluation and research

These are exactly the type of recommendations that emerge from a committee of well-educated bureaucrats.

The Council of Graduate Schools’ Advisory Committee on Graduate Education and American Competitiveness consisted of 14 eminent leaders — five presidents, one chancellor, two chairmen, two vice-presidents, five deans, one vice-provost, and a CEO. That’s just short of the 18 member, 20 title lineup of the National Academies’ Committee on Maximizing the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering. The latter recently produced a bureaucratically superb 364-page report. The greater scope of the former work may compensate for its lower author-titles to report-pages ratio.

The Carnival of the Bureaucrats joins the Council of Graduate Schools’ Advisory Committee on Graduate Education and American Competitiveness in congratulating Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two Ph.D. program drop-outs, for their success with Google.

Steven Silvers at Scatterbox uncovers a directive to the U.S. news media. It begins by complimenting major news organizations for referring to the head of the FDA as a “czar,” and then it directs:

Please remember that any director of a large government entity should be referred to as the Subject-matter Czar, even if that official displays no similarity to any of the pre-revolution Russian emperors. This will help Americans understand news about their government. And that is why we are here.

I would like to petition for reconsideration of this directive. Instead of “czar,” a director of a large government entity should be referred to as “Servant of the Servants of the Public,” e.g. “FDA Names Food Safety Servant of the Servants of the Public.” Unfortunately, a procedure for petitioning for reconsideration of news coverage does not seem to exist.

At the Engaging Brand Blog, Anna Farmery offers ideas for widgets. One relates to the important bureaucratic activity of attending meetings:

Whether Widget – that allows me to put a meeting name in and see the purpose to see if it is worth attending

Such a widget is unlikely to be useful for dedicated bureaucrats. For dedicated bureaucrats, all meetings are worth attending.

At A VC, Fred Wilson reports on an important new communications development:

We are now in the world of conversation. We are talking to ourselves.

Bureaucrats have been talking to themselves for a long time. The rest of the world, including venture capitalists, apparently is now catching up with standard bureaucratic practices.

The University of Wisconsin Oshkosh offers its students a Common Intellectual Experience. This includes assigning students to read the book Mercury 13. The Common Intellectual Experience offers insightful guidance about that text:

[It] tells the story of 13 female pilots who fought to become part of the nation’s space program from its very inception. Their tale is uplifting, a narrative of their dedication, and sacrifice in their attempt to aid their nation in the space race against the Soviets and experience the thrill of space flight personally. These women, among the most accomplished female pilots in the world at the time, went through many of the same excruciating and challenging tests experienced by NASA’s original seven astronauts. That all passed all tests, often with scores exceeding those achieved by the males selected to fly, carried absolutely no weight with an entrenched bureaucracy. (Excerpts from a review of The Mercury 13 in Publisher’s Weekly, written by Michael Zimmerman, former Dean of the College of Letters and Science at University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.)

With deep regret, the Carnival of the Bureaucrats acknowledges that an entrenched bureaucracy can produce nonsense.

Phil for Humanity suggests that the size of U.S. currency should be differentiated to make life easier for persons with different visual capabilities. The size of U.S. currency notes was probably decided without a notice-and-comment administrative procedure. The shortcomings of short-cutting bureaucracy are readily apparent to the blind; they should be to everyone.

Zenofeller highlights the merits of renaming as an instrument of governance. Naming certainly is worthy of careful study. Zenofeller offers a simple policy rule, with supporting arguments:

Is there a problem? Find it a new name. So what if people will think you’re idiots? First of all, they already do. Second of all, you actually are. Third of all, you just work there.

That third point appears to be inconsistent with evidence about bureaucrats. A bureaucrat loves her organization and submerges her whole life into it.

That’s all for this month’s Carnival of the Bureaucrats. Submit your blog article to the next edition using our Carnival submission form. Submissions should conform to the Carnival regulations. Past posts and future hosts can be found on the Carnival index page.

the Internet brain

There is no Chief Executive Officer neuron in a brain. In brains, the most general decision-making processes (top of the executive hierarchy) and the broadest and most abstract representations (top of the perceptual hierarchy) are physically instantiated in the broadest networks of neurons. That’s rather different from the structure of a company in which the Chief Executive Officer is considered to be the highest decision-maker and the best representative of the company.

Joaquín Fuster, a leading neuroscientist, described this contrast:

The cortical structure and dynamics of the executive hierarchy, like those of the perceptual hierarchy, differ radically from the structure of social hierarchies. In social hierarchies, such as those of industrial and military organizations, representation — like power — is concentrated at the top; in cortical hierarchies, it is distributed at the top. Because both perceptual and executive hierarchies are formed largely by divergent connections, representations at the top are much more broadly based, in neural terms, than those at the bottom….[1]

The Neurocritic provides conceptual and anatomical diagrams from one of Fuster’s earlier papers.

Note that this difference involves neither an absence of hierarchy nor a contrast between bottom-up and top-down control. The brain’s executive and perceptual hierarchies are built upon anatomical gradients of memory formation:

Because the three gradients of memory formation — phylogeny, ontogeny, and connectivity — largely coincide temporally and spatially, we can trace them by focusing on any one of them, such as the ontogenetic gradient, as portrayed by the myelogenetic map of the cortex. The numeration of the map refers to the order of myelination of the various cortical areas in perinatal periods.[2]

Moreover, both top-down and bottom-up control are important aspects of brain functioning, each with somewhat different communications technologies.

The Internet is like a global brain. That global brain, like the one in your head, includes hierarchies and forms of top-down control. At the same time, the most general decisions about the goals of the Internet are a product of the relations of many active participants. Relations among persons, not one corporate person, represents what the Internet is.

Notes:

[1] Joaquín Fuster (2006), “The cognit: A network model of cortical representation,” International Journal of Psychophysiology 60, p. 130.

[2] Id. p. 127, reference to figure omitted.

Bike To Work Day

If you’re driving to work and see a cyclist, smile because that’s one less car clogging up the road in front of you. A bicycle on the road means less pollution in the air you breath, less damage to your environment, and lower health care costs that your taxes support.

Hitting a cyclist can cause scratches and dents to your car. And death to the cyclist. You really don’t want to do that. The more cyclists on the road, the happier you should be. So even if you don’t ride a bike, support local cycling organizations like the Washington Area Bicyclist Association and celebrate Bike To Work Day!

The hard-working staff of citizen reporters at purple motes brings you complete news coverage of this year’s Bike To Work Day action at the Rosslyn pit stop. Get informed about the good news on the road to work.


[if you don’t see the video, try here]