"In short, it's time for a resurrection of the crypto-anarchist / techno-libertarian / cypherpunk movement and it's associated values, activities and aesthetic. Those of us who care about these issues can't just lurk in the shadows and act like nothing is happening. It's time to start telling people about public-key encryption, hosting key-signing parties, developing new technologies for bypassing Internet censorship, developing tools for bypassing State and Corporation controlled messaging channels, and taking a stand for freedom."

"We investigate higher-order Voronoi diagrams in the city metric. This metric is induced by quickest paths in the L1 metric in the presence of an accelerating transportation network of axis-parallel line segments. …"

A community of agents is subject to a stream of messages, which are represented as points on a plane of issues. Messages are sent by media and by agents themselves. Messages from media shape the public opinion. They are unbiased, i.e. positive and negative opinions on a given issue appear with equal frequencies. In our previous work, the only criterion to receive a message by an agent is if the distance between this message and the ones received earlier does not exceed the given value of the tolerance parameter. Here we introduce a possibility to address a message to a given neighbour. We show that this option reduces the unanimity effect, what improves the collective performance.

"Last month Jane Bennett gave a talk at New York’s New School entitled “Powers of the Hoard: Artistry and Agency in a World of Vibrant Matter”. She was interested in the question of whether or not compulsive hoarders have a particular affinity for matter, specifically, the matter of/in the things they so assiduously collect. The purpose of this post is to ask a similar question about trumpet players and their mouthpieces. Some have only a few, while others have hundreds."

"Owen had neglected to notice that expectations also change through circumstance. As our communal conditions advance, we all tend to want to become the prophet, not merely the congregation. Once the problem of survival is solved, it’s no longer enough not to be starving or abused or overworked – we want personal satisfaction and self-direction. So, yes: some of the great names in business – the Lowell mills, Hershey’s, Cadbury’s, Lever Brothers, Google – applied dilute Owenism to great effect, but success makes employees become more individualist and ask for more of their reward in cash, while hard times make shareholders less generous, pointing out that plenty of people would take the job without the crêche, lecture series, or company brass band. Shifting expectation drives the carousel for another turn; we remain ambivalent about work, this thing we do through most of our waking lives, because we still don’t know what it is for."

"All this results in bacteria gambling all the time: some react to stimulus, some don't, some produce more proteins in response to it, some less. This leads to so called phenotypic heterogeneity, when otherwise (genetically) identical bacteria become very different in terms of their responses.

This could be a good thing and also could be a bad thing. Having a collection of different bugs instead of a clone army will provide certain versatility: some are ready for one conditions, and some are ready for others. For instance, some are ready to grow and divide right away and some are slower and more cautious. Both types of cells can be beneficial in different conditions: the active ones will drive the population growth, but will be sensitive to the antibiotic treatment, and the passive ones will wait until the treatment is over and then they will come to life. Sounds like a good strategy (and it has a name, this strategy - "bed hedging") and I guess it is exactly the reason why clone armies never caught on."

"Graham notes that funding, while easy to measure, isn't necessarily the best way to gauge the success of the program's startups. "Getting funded is not success. It's just something that makes success more likely." But if the standard measurement for success is value, and if value is measured by exits, then the 6 years of YC's existence isn't quite long enough to adequately assess this. Of the 300-plus startups, "just" 25 YC companies have been acquired, 5 of them for over $10 million, and Graham says that he's estimated the values of the rest of the companies based on these acquisition figures in order to gauge that the average value of companies Y Combinator has funded to be roughly $22 million.

But coming up with an adequate measurement for success isn't really the point, says Graham. "The real lesson here though is how long it takes to measure performance in this business. We're 6 years in, and we could easily be off by 3x in either direction. Startup outcomes are unpredictable, and the outcomes of their investors doubly so, because it's hard to say whether the big successes are repeatable, or if the investors just got lucky. Even 6 years in, all we can say is that the numbers look encouraging so far.""

"This page provides information on the use and implementation of novelty search, an evolutionary search method that takes the radical step of ignoring the objective of search and instead rewarding only behavioral novelty. This visual demonstration (requires modern browser, IE users may need to install a plugin) contrasts a search for novelty with a search for the objective."

"The prisoner's dilemma (PD) game is a simple model for understanding cooperative patterns in complex systems consisting of selfish individuals. Here, we study a PD game problem in scale-free networks containing hierarchically organized modules and controllable shortcuts connecting separated hubs. We find that cooperator clusters exhibit a percolation transition in the parameter space (p,b), where p is the occupation probability of shortcuts and b is the temptation payoff in the PD game. The cluster size distribution follows a power law at the transition point. Such a critical behavior, resulting from the combined effect of stochastic processes in the PD game and the heterogeneous structure of complex networks, illustrates the diversity of social relationships and the self-organization of cooperator communities in real-world systems."

These gossip methods are essentially identical to the dynamics in HFC, ALPS and Trivial Geography multi-population evolutionary algorithms.

"What’s striking about the contrast between the Texas story and Georgia’s debacle is that it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the issues that have dominated debates about banking reform. For example, many observers have blamed complex financial derivatives for the crisis. But Georgia banks blew themselves up with old-fashioned loans gone bad."

'“Most U.S. metro areas actually experienced more moderate increases in house prices than the nation between 2000 and 2006. In fact, 249 of the 383 metropolitan areas tracked by the Federal Housing Finance Agency saw price increases below the national rate of 8.1% during the boom”... Many of these areas, in turn, didn’t experience the resulting bust.…'

"The thesaurus might equate "disabled" with synonyms like "useless" and "mutilated," but ground-breaking runner Aimee Mullins is out to redefine the word. Defying these associations, she hows how adversity -- in her case, being born without shinbones -- actually opens the door for human potential."

"Keeping tabs on the thematic redundancy with which the United States government has marketed its calls for regime change over the years would appear to be a responsible activity for American citizens, given the fact that our nation has its imperial tentacles wrapped all over the planet. But I have never seen a "Remember Panama" sign at a protest, and, as I have confessed, until a few weeks ago, I would not have known what such a sign meant. Whenever Panama is discussed in the media, it is in order to advise Americans to go there and spoil their unspoiled beaches (hence, my initial interest in the country)."

"We used to gasp at the way the Soviet Union stuck opponents of the regime in asylums. But the USSR is not the only country in history that has had a hard time seeing its adversaries as rational. The present generation of Americans is made uncomfortable by the idea that their country might have enemies whose enmity is the result of something other than fanaticism or mental illness. Maj Hasan’s colleagues, the Economist writes, say he thought the war on terror was a war on Islam. According to what we think Islam is, he is wrong. But according to a fundamentalist idea of what Islam is, he is right. There is rationality in such enmity, even if that rationality is built on different assumptions."

"The key insight is that a single strong heuristic will do worse than a collective of individually weak but diverse heuristics. The problems are too hard for any one heuristic to solve perfectly, but the diverse heuristics can, so to speak, cover each others' weaknesses and help each other out when they get stuck; a single strong heuristic can't. A collection of diverse strong heuristics would be even better, but the strong heuristics for a problem tend to be similar to each other, so a group of them lacks diversity. In problem solving and prediction, diversity is exactly as important as individual ability."

"Judging by the teams creating and trying to sell this stuff, I’m surmising we may see bursts of *regional* augmented reality. Like Augmented Singaporean Reality, Augmented Korean Reality, Augmented Dutch Reality and Augmented Austrian Reality. The USA is going to specialize in the monetizable stuff, like fan movie tie-ins and augmented diaper ads."

"Overlooked in tax strategy is the huge tax advantages owning and self-managing real estate. I prefer residential real estate. You have write-offs and phantom depreciation galore (which can be deferred until death via 1031 and similar property exchange programs, or simple refinancing)."

via Valdis Krebs

"We see increased diversity everywhere in the technium. Manufactured species of underwater organisms such as 70-foot submarine parallel living organisms like a blue whale. Airplanes ape birds, so to speak. Our houses are but better nests. But the technium explores niches that the born never ventured into. We know of no organisms using radio waves, yet the technium has produced hundreds of varieties of radio communicating species. While moles have been digging up earth for millions of years, two-story tunnel digging contraptions are so much larger, faster, and less daunted by solid rock than anything born that we can truly say they occupy a new niche on Earth."

""These findings suggest that the hospice eligibility criteria of Medicare and other insurers requiring patients to give up cancer treatment contribute to racial disparities in hospice use," the authors wrote. "Moreover, these criteria do not select those patients with the greatest needs for hospice services," they added.

The basis for these disparities is likely related to both cultural differences and economic characteristics. The results from this study indicate that hospice access could be made fairer by using eligibility criteria that are more directly need-based. For example, the investigators suggested that eligibility might be determined by assessing needs for specific hospice services such as pain or symptom management."

"We see a progression from nectar feeding and licking or lapping at fruit juices to different kinds of piercing behaviors of fruits and then finally culminating in this skin piercing and blood-feeding," she said.

""According to one GOP lawmaker, some House Republicans are saying privately that they'd rather "let the markets crash" than sign on to a massive bailout.

"For the sake of the altar of the free market system, do you accept a Great Depression?" the member asked.""

"6: The argument for free trade comes from Ricardo's "comparative advantage" -- a clever textbook exercise, but irrelevant to the real world since it assumes constant costs. In reality, either you produce manufactured goods, in which your costs go down as you make more, or you sell off commodities, in which case your costs go up as you make more. With the former, it takes time for local industry to build up the advantage (requiring protectionism). With the latter, you end up like Mongolia, which opened up its animal husbandry market, swelling herd sizes, turning grass into permanent desert, and killing off the entire market. With no other exports, such a country is in big trouble. Ricardo was wrong: diversification, not specialization, is the way to develop -- and how every successful country has. Unfortunately, we've forced this broken system on most of the world....

"The tendency is worrying, because the implication of bestness and a one true way is closing your options for applying a portfolio of responses for a portfolio of needs – which is typically what any complex human systems intervention like knowledge management needs. Knowledge management is most of the time about juggling a number of interventions in a shifting ecology of needs. There are no simple recipes and there are no single best approaches."

"We're just making sure that men and women of integrity can never hold public office." and there you have it

on balance, I find it comforting that I cannot understand myself some days

I wish Google bothered to punctuate. We're scanning another copy, and will send it through Distributed Proofreaders soon, but in the meantime read the page scans from Google if you like....

On the magazine...

Musings on the economics of community colleges, and higher education in general

How many local languages and cants have come and gone, unremarked?

The threat to diversity. Again.