The Soul Of The Ultimate Machine, NYTimes 
Excerpt: (…) Larry Smarr came to tell them
about what he calls "the emerging planetary supercomputer." The
Internet, he explained, is evolving into a single vast computer
fashioned out of billions of interconnected processors. (…)
"Will it become self-aware?"
To Dr. Smarr, the idea of a thinking machine that might
emerge spontaneously from billions of interconnected large and
small computers isn't harebrained at all. He said he was simply
extrapolating a series of significant trends that, to him, are
remarkably obvious.
It is a good sign that Larry Smarr has now discovered the
Global Brain as an emergent structure on the Internet, that we
would expect from what we know about complex adaptive systems.
Back in 1993 he pushed the NCSA Mosaic (later Netscape)
development that was a much more user friendly interface than the
original program.
In June 1994 I had a discussion with Larry Smarr (that
discussion is acknowledged in Messy
Futures and Global Brains ) where I told him about the
Global Brain ideas. At that time he was not very interested,
proving his special gift of being one step ahead of his time ...
but not more.
Maybe now he has somebody working on a Global Brain interface
(although he certainly would not use that term) as some sort of
"Next Generation Mosaic". Who knows, but someone probably will
make a lot of money off of it. Hopefully this time it will not be
Mr. Gates.
Screen Savers of the World Unite!, Science
Excerpt: "Recently, a new computing paradigm has
emerged: a worldwide distributed computing environment consisting
of thousands or even millions of heterogeneous processors,
frequently volunteered by private citizens across the globe. This
large number of processors dwarfs even the largest modern
supercomputers. In addition to the scientific possibilities
suggested by such enormous computing resources, the involvement of
hundreds of thousands of nonscientists in research opens the door
to new means of science education and outreach, in which the
public becomes an active participant."
Among the ongoing distributed Internet computing projects are
the seach for extra terrestrial life (SETI)
and the study of folding proteins http://foldingathome.stanford.edu
.
"Science and Politics - Melding Facts and Values", Sir Robert May Lecture
Excerpt: "I believe we need to do more to extend
such discussions across the range of 21st century science and
technology, so that we can outline international agreements on the
broader questions that are already upon us, and be ready for new
ones that will emerge as the century unfolds. The world's
population of 6 billion is set to almost double by 2050. Meeting
the needs of those people is a political problem, but one in which
science will have a major part to play. The challenge is to distil
from emotional and ethical arguments - arguments that come from
the heart - the values that will govern the choices we make. But
we still need scientific analysis - cold rationalism if you will -
to choose the tools that will best help us to meet our
objectives."
-
Excerpt: "Meanwhile, local and national
institutions need to become more responsive and, in many places,
much less corrupt. Such changes require the development of a
strong sense of community and responsibility at many levels, but
in a climate of political and economic freedom. How to achieve the
necessary balance between cooperation and competition is one of
the most difficult problems at every level. (…)
Coping on local, national, regional, and global levels with
technological advances, environmental and demographic issues,
social and economic problems, and questions of international
security, as well as the interactions among all of them, requires
a transition in the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge and
understanding. Only if there is a higher degree of comprehension,
among ordinary people as well as elite groups, of the complex
issues facing humanity is there any hope of achieving sustainable
quality. But most of the discussions of the new digital society
concentrate on the dissemination and storage of information, much
of it misinformation or badly organized information, rather than
on the difficult and still poorly rewarded work of converting that
so-called information into knowledge and understanding and even a
modicum of wisdom. We need competing entities that offer
reasonably accurate and relevant assessments of the meaning and
reliability of bodies of data. And here again we encounter the
pervasive need for a crude look at the whole."
- An
Enlarged Concept of
Sustainability,
Murray Gell-Mann Lecture, Annual Business Network
Members Meeting and Business Network and Trustees
Symposium , Simplicity and Complexity - A Global
Perspective , 11/3-4/00, Santa Fe, NM
Mastering The e-Business Environment, Darwin Magazine
Excerpt: Here's why you ought to regularly
convene a team to conduct something I call Internet reputation
management: Because, in addition to all the other things it does
so well, the Internet is an incredibly powerful tool for research.
Consumers and businesses investigate the manufacturers and
merchants they're buying from the way that ace reporters
investigate elected officials who spend their lunch hours at the
Motel 6 on the edge of town. They want to know who you are and
what your customers-and the experts-say about you. So they're
turning to trusted sources on the Internet.
Building Effective Customer Relationships, Darwin Magazine
"Your company will have to depend on ideaviruses -
ideas that spread, unchecked, through a population of like-minded
people - to succeed online."
Godin explains that companies like Microsoft are now using
marketing programs that act like viruses in that they propagate
though the personal network (like e-mail) of Internet users.
He then explains why he gave his book Unleashing the Ideavirus
http://www.ideavirus.com/ away for free as Internet download AND
in spite af that sold a large number of his $40 hardcover book
with the identical content:
"So, what's the moral? When more people knew about my idea,
more people wanted to buy the book-or hire me to give a speech, or
whatever. And the same thing is going to be true of your business,
whether you're Polaroid or Hotmail or General Motors. As our
culture gets more and more cluttered with new ideas and new
products, the winners are going to be the companies that are the
best at getting their stuff to spread."
That Crazy Patchwork Called Electricity Deregulation, Business Week
Deregulation of the electrical power industry worked well
in some states leading to a stable supply and decrease in rates.
In other states like California deregulation resulted in
brown-outs and rate hikes. As we reported in Complexity Digest
2000.43.2 http://www.comdig.de/ComDig00-43/#2 the power market in
California is not open to all interested electricity suppliers. On
the other hand power-generation companies that aren't utilities
("nonutilities") seem to play an increasing role in contributing
to a reliable power network:
"The wholesale-power market has spawned an entire industry
of power-generation companies that aren't utilities at all, just
suppliers to utilities. From 1998 to 1999, the capacity of
utilities to produce power actually declined by 6.9%, to 639,143
megawatts, according to the 1999 Electrical Power Annual Report by
the EIA. The growth in capacity came from nonutilities, whose
total output increased by 64%, to 146,846 megawatts. In 1999,
nonutilities generated 18.7% of the U.S. electricity supply, vs.
11.5% the year before."
Nonutilities are not a US invention: For instance co-generation
(combined heating/electrical plants) in Germany is producing
electrical power in the equivalent of several large nuclear power
plants.
A Primitive Enantiornithine Bird and the Origin of Feathers
Chinese paleontologists studying the fossil known as
Microraptor describe it as both the smallest and the most birdlike
dinosaur yet discovered. In this week's issue of Nature, they say
the crow-sized, feathered creature--whose fossilized tail once
formed part of a now-discredited "missing link" between birds and
dinosaurs known as Archaeoraptor--belongs to the dromaeosaurs,
dinosaurs that many paleontologists consider the closest
dinosaurian relatives of birds.Feathers likely evolved from
reptilian scales through a series of intermediate structures.
Zhang and Zhou (p. 1955)
describe the most primitive known enantiornithine bird,
Protopteryx, from early Cretaceous deposits in northern China.
Unlike other known avian fossils (including Archeopteryx), this
specimen exhibits feathers with visible intermediacy between
reptilian scales and true bird feathers. The specimen also
exhibits novel skeletal features clearly distinguishing early
birds from the theropod dinosaurs. The authors interpret their
finding as evidence for the aerodynamic function of early
feathers, rather than heat insulation. (1)
Chinese paleontologists studying the fossil known as
Microraptor describe it as both the smallest and the most birdlike
dinosaur yet discovered. In this week's issue of Nature, they say
the crow-sized, feathered creature--whose fossilized tail once
formed part of a now-discredited "missing link" between birds and
dinosaurs known as Archaeoraptor--belongs to the dromaeosaurs,
dinosaurs that many paleontologists consider the closest
dinosaurian relatives of birds. (2)
- A
Primitive Enantiornithine Bird And The Origin Of
Feathers, Fucheng Zhang
And Zhonghe Zhou, Science 2000 290:5498
p1955
- Tiny,
Feathered Dino Is Most Birdlike
Yet, Erik Stokstad,
Science 2000 290:5498 p1871
Taking the Measure of the Wildest Dance on Earth, Science/arXiv
"Exploiting the symmetry of randomness, three
mathematicians have revealed the geometric underpinnings of the
frenetic random dance called Brownian motion. The methods they
used seem likely to apply to other random processes, some as
familiar as the flow of water through a filter. The proof was
presented at the recent Current Developments in Mathematics 2000
conference sponsored by Harvard University and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology."(1)
"In a series of recent preprints, we have proven that with
probability one the Hausdorff dimension on the outer boundary of
planar Brownian motion is 4/3, confirming a conjecture by
Mandelbrot. It is also shown that the Hausdorff dimension of the
set of cut points is a.s. 3/4. The present paper is an expository
outline of the arguments involved in the proof of these and
related results. " (2)
- Taking
the Measure of the Wildest Dance on
Earth, Dana Mackenzie,
Science 2000 December 8; 290(5498): p.
1883-1884
- The
Dimension of the Planar Brownian Frontier is
4/3, Gregory F. Lawler,
Oded Schramm, Wendelin Werner, arXiv
math.PR/0010165
The Contribution of Noise to Contrast Invariance of Orientation Tuning in Cat Visual Cortex, Science
Excerpt: Neurons in the primary visual cortex,
the part of the brain responsible for processing incoming visual
signals, seem to have taken advantage of this effect, as Anderson
et al. show on page 1968
of this issue. They present new evidence that synaptic noise in
primary visual cortex neurons enables these cells to maintain
their encoding of the orientation of lines in an image at the same
quality, regardless of whether the image is seen at high or low
contrast (a phenomenon called contrast invariance of orientation
tuning)."
These results are a nice confirmation of our theoretical
results (Jung & Mayer-Kress, 1995) that predicted
that spatio-temporal stochastic resonance plays an important role
in vision. This is true not only for the phenomenon described by
Anderson et al. but also for the perception of movement in a high
noise environment. Standard stochastic resonance is applied only
to individual signals and does not take into account the spatial
coupling of the neurons.
"The mechanism of orientation selectivity in the primary
visual cortex that have been developed are still incomplete. The
observed invariance of orientation tuning for different stimulus
contrasts has been repeatedly pointed out as one of the unsolved
problems for the dominant so-called feedforward model of
information flow. Anderson et al. (p. 1968;
see the Perspective by Volgushev and Eysel) show that averaged
membrane potentials of nerve cell recordings, which contain
high-frequency stochastic components, do not provide a consistent
relation between these averages and the average spike probability
of a neuron's output. Instead, the high-frequency components
present in the recordings are of such amplitude and steepness that
they force the nerve cell to generate action potentials even if
the average level remains clearly subthreshold."
- The
Contribution Of Noise To Contrast Invariance Of
Orientation Tuning In Cat Visual
Cortex, Jeffrey S.
Anderson, Ilan Lampl, Deda C. Gillespie, David
Ferster, Science 2000 290: 1968
- Noise
Makes Sense In Neuronal
Computing, Maxim
Volgushev And Ulf T. Eysel, Science 2000 290:
1908-1909
- See also: Spatio-Temporal
Stochastic Resonance in Excitable
Media, P. Jung, G.
Mayer-Kress, Physical Review Letters, 74(11),
2130-2133, 13 March
"Smart" Flaps Could Improve Efficiency Of Supersonic Engines, Science Daily
Small flaps mounted in jet-engine inlet ducts may
allow supersonic aircraft to fly faster and farther at less cost,
say researchers at the University of Illinois. "When flying at
supersonic speeds, shock waves naturally occur in the engine
inlet," said Eric Loth, a UI professor of aeronautical and
astronautical engineering. "The shock waves disrupt the airflow,
creating considerable flow separation and significantly reducing
engine efficiency." To minimize this effect and prevent
boundary-layer flow separation, conventional supersonic engines
use a bleed system that removes air through holes in the inlet
wall and dumps it out the back. While this keeps the boundary
layer attached, it also wastes a fair portion of the ingested
airflow.
"Engine efficiency can be improved by covering the holes
with ‘smart’ flaps that bend under certain operating
conditions," said Loth, the project director of a three-year
development effort that includes researchers from the UI, NASA,
Boeing and the U.S. Air Force.
Flaps downstream of a shock will bend downward, sucking air
from the boundary layer into a cavity below, while flaps upstream
of a shock will bend upwards, injecting air from the cavity back
into the boundary layer, Loth said. "Recirculating the air not
only prevents flow separation, it also improves the engine’s
efficiency, since the air is no longer being thrown away."
Thousands of flaps would line an inlet. Resembling slips of
paper about one centimeter on a side, the flaps are being made
from shape-memory materials such as nitinol, an alloy of nickel
and titanium.
"Shape-memory alloys are materials that can
‘memorize’ a shape and return to it after repeated
thermo-mechanical cycling," said Scott White, a UI professor of
aeronautical and astronautical engineering. "We can design these
smart materials to ‘turn on’ and open up under specific
conditions of stress and temperature. Their stiffness – and
therefore the amount they deflect – can be controlled."
In a series of recent experiments, White characterized the
bending behavior of miniature flaps under dynamic loading
conditions. He and graduate student Sridhar Krishnan monitored the
static and dynamic properties of thin nitinol beams as they
deflected under various transformation temperatures.
"Such an analysis is critical to the next stage of our
project, where we want to place the flaps under active,
closed-loop control," said White, who presented the team’s
findings at the national meeting of the American Society of
Mechanical Engineers, held Nov. 5-10 in Orlando, Fla. "A system of
smart flaps coupled with a non-linear, adaptive-feedback control
system could continually adjust the material properties – and
therefore the position of the flaps – for optimum engine
performance."
Mitochondrial Genome Variation And The Origin Of Modern Humans, Nature
The analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) has been a
potent tool in our understanding of human evolution, owing to
characteristics such as high copy number, apparent lack of
recombination, high substitution rate and maternal mode of
inheritance. (…) Our mtDNA data, in comparison with those of
a parallel study of the Xq13.3 region in the same individuals,
provide a concurrent view on human evolution with respect to the
age of modern humans. (1)
The most thorough analysis yet of the divergence of
sequences in human mitochondrial DNA has been carried out. The
results support the view that modern humans originated in Africa.
(…)
Gyllensten and colleagues estimate that the divergence of
Africans and non-Africans occurred 52,000 ± 28,000 years ago,
shortly followed by a population expansion in non-Africans.
(…)
Other genetic markers indicate an exodus from Africa around
100,000 years ago, which would be more consistent with fossil and
archaeological evidence of modern humans outside Africa.
(2)
Archaeologists are still not sure when and where modern
humans first appeared. Some believe that Homo sapiens evolved
independently in several places around the globe. But research
revealed in this week's Nature1 lends support to the idea that we
appeared in one location in sub-Saharan Africa and spread from
there, replacing Neanderthals and other early humans as we
went.
(…) found evidence that we are all descended from a
single ancestral group that lived in Africa about 170,000 years
ago. (3)
- Mitochondrial
Genome Variation And The Origin Of Modern
Humans, M Ingman, H
Kaessmann, S Pääbo & U Gyllensten ,
Origin of the species , Nature,
12/7/00
- Human
Evolution: A Start For Population
Genomics, S. Blair
Hedges, NATURE 408, 652-653 (7 December
2000)
- Humans
Did Come Out Of Africa, Says
DNA, Nature Science
Update, 12/7/00
Direct Observation Of Molecular Cooperativity Near The Glass Transition, Nature
Excerpt: The increasingly sluggish response of a
supercooled liquid as it nears its glass transition (for example,
refrigerated honey) is prototypical of glassy dynamics found in
proteins, neural networks and superconductors. The notion that
molecules rearrange cooperatively has long been postulated to
explain diverging relaxation times and broadened (non-exponential)
response functions near the glass transition. (…). Here we
describe direct observations of molecular cooperativity near the
glass transition in polyvinylacetate (PVAc), using nanometre-scale
probing of dielectric fluctuations.
Complex Systems 2000 - Applied Complexity, Conference Report
The 5th International Complex Systems Conference
was held in Dunedin, from 18 to 21 November, attracting people
from around the world in a highly interdisciplinary meeting of
minds. Full papers are published in the proceedings "Applied
Complexity" available from Lynette
Mitchell (NZ$80). The papers cover a wide range of complexity
issues from the more theoretical aspects of mathematics and
physics, through the tools and methods of information science
(genetic algorithms, neural networks, artificial intelligence),
into the applied aspects of biodiversity management, agricultural
systems, recreational and economic systems and finally into social
and philosophical issues. Within this range, the conference
maintained a high degree of coherence through its commitment to
focus on the rules and patterns which can be found to behave in
similar ways across all these fields. The conference provided
tremendous inspiration, new ideas and new tools for all those
involved and was characterized by intense discussions and feedback
on ongoing research.
The New Zealand contingent was very active and is set to become
the nucleus for a growing development of complexity research in
New Zealand. The international participation at the conference
(including amongst others Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand,
UK, Ukraine, USA) was complemented by webcasting the keynote
speakers' addresses to the world via Complexity
Digest's site at www.comdig.org, where they will
remain available.
A workshop identified challenges for Complex Systems research,
coming up with a list that will be placed on the web for continued
discussion. Hopefully these challenges will be resolved one by one
in the coming century.
The meeting also embarked on the first steps to establish an
International Complex Systems Society (ICSS), for which a steering
committee was formed by: Roger Bowers, David Green, Stephan
Halloy, Xiadong Li, Russell Standish, Meryl Wastney, Peter
Whigham and Peter Wills. In the next few months a web page will
advertise the new society and invite participation from other
organisations and individuals around the world to improve
representation. The International Complex Systems Conference will
become the Society's biannual meeting and forum, and will
alternate between geographic regions to ensure greater spread and
representation. The Complex Systems 2002 meeting is planned to be
in Hokkaido, Japan.
Although the weather wasn't too kind, we enjoyed a wonderful
conference dinner at Glenfaloch Gardens after a scenic drive along
the Otago Peninsula crest.
Readers interested in reading more should visit the above sites
or contact any of the steering committee members if interested in
the ICSS.
-
A NAME=15>
In Complexity
Digest 2000.47.3 we reported about a recent article in
Nature by Michael Noad et al. on “Cultural Revolution
In Whale Songs”. Sine then we had some stimulating
e-mail discussions with the first author. We try to summarize the
essential points:
Noad:
(1) There were undoubtedly more than 2 whales from
western Australia - we heard 2 out of our sample of 82 but we
don't pretend to have recorded every whale in the population.
(2) I believe it is for attracting females but agree that
there is little direct evidence for this. I certainly think it
has some reproductive advantage for the individual.
(3) You say that songs are about 5 times longer than
humans remember - that's a chalk and cheese argument. Humpback
songs are so internally repetitive (all the phrases in a theme
are repetitions) that really there is probably far less to
remember in a humpback song than a three minute pop song.
Humpback songs are more akin to a chant or mantra and these, in
humans, can go on for hours.
ComDig:
In Salden, D. R., Herman, L. M., Yamaguchi, M., &
Sato, F. (1999). Multiple visits of individual humpback whales
(Megaptera novaeangliae) between the Hawaiian and Japanese
winter grounds, Canadian Journal of Zoology, 77, 504-508
They write that they saw the same whale as singer and a few
years later as escort. Could it be that they sing as teenagers
and when they grow up they mate?
Noad:
Without data, anything is possible. I would dispute
though that singing is some inferior technique, that only
male-male competition results in escorting of females. I don't
know of any data supporting that. Tyack (1981) showed that
escorting and singing were alternative roles of the same male.
ComDig:
But if your interpretation is right and females like
new songs, why are the males not more creative and continuously
invent new songs? I think that is how some songbirds do it
where you have a singing contest between males and where the
songs become more and more complex during the contest.
Noad:
I think they do try and be creative with the song but
are limited by not wanting to change to far beyond the 'normal'
song of the time for fear of being aberrant.
