"The general idea behind the Hydra narrative in a broad sense (not just what Taleb has said/will say in October) is that hydras eat all unknown unknowns (not just Taleb’s famous black swans) for lunch. I have heard at least three different versions of this proposition in the last year. The narrative inspires social system designs that feed on uncertainty rather than being destroyed by it. Geoffrey West’s ideas about superlinearity are the empirical part of an attempt to construct an existence proof showing that such systems are actually possible."

"This deck of 91 full-colour cards names what skilled facilitators and other participants do to make things work.  The content is more specific than values and less specific than tips and techniques, cutting across existing methodologies with a designer's eye to capture the patterns that repeat.  The deck can be used to plan sesssions, reflect on and debrief them, provide guidance, and share responsibility for making the process go well.  It has the potential to provide a common reference point for practitioners, and serve as a framework and learning tool for those studying the field. "

"In this paper we define what we call an affinity system, which is a set of individuals, each with a vector characterizing its preference for all other individuals in the set. The preference of a member can be given either by a ranking of all members or by a weighted vector that defines the degrees of its affinity to others. Affinity systems are useful for modeling social systems as well as general data sets, as social interactions are often determined by affinities among the members. We also define a natural notion of (potentially overlapping) communities in an affinity system, in which the members of a given community collectively prefer each other to anyone else outside the community. Thus these communities are "self-determined" or "self-certified" by the affinity system. We provide a tight polynomial bound on the number of self-determined communities as a function of the robustness of the community. Moreover, we present a polynomial-time algorithm for enumerating these communities, as well as a local algorithm with a strong stochastic performance guarantee that can find a community in time nearly linear in the of size the community.…"

"We analyze emotionally annotated massive data from IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and model the dialogues between its participants by assuming that the driving force for the discussion is the entropy growth of emotional probability distribution. This process is claimed to be correlated to the emergence of the power-law distribution of the discussion lengths observed in the dialogues. We perform numerical simulations based on the noticed phenomenon obtaining a good agreement with the real data. Finally, we propose a method to artificially prolong the duration of the discussion that relies on the entropy of emotional probability distribution."

We propose a nonlinear voter model to study the emergence of global consensus in opinion dynamics. In our model, agent $i$ agrees with one of binary opinions with the probability that is a power function of the number of agents holding this opinion among agent $i$ and its nearest neighbors, where an adjustable parameter $alpha$ controls the effect of herd behavior on consensus. We find that there exists an optimal value of $alpha$ leading to the fastest consensus for lattices, random graphs, small-world networks and scale-free networks. Qualitative insights are obtained by examining the spatiotemporal evolution of the opinion clusters.

"…Yet we should be wary of getting wrapped up in the practicality of it all. For that hardly explains the mythology, the fact that this or that feature of the landscape is a sacred place, that the Songlines were traced by culture heroes of animal nature. None of that is necessary for the merely practical end of accurate time-keeping, though it might be useful to have a story to give some content to the narrative stream. To measure a long stretch of time, and thus a long distance, one could simply count to some sufficiently high number while walking and singing at a steady pace. Counting to an arbitrarly high value, however, is a relatively recent human accomplishment, one not present in preliterate cultures. One could also use very long strings of nonsense syllables, but they are very difficult to memorize accurately, as thousands of undergraduates in decades of psychological experiments know all too well; such things simply don’t have much purchase in the human brain. So one sings the song of a culture hero’s journey, while tracing that journey oneself, and in the process, one becomes that hero. We are in the world Val Geist hypothesized, in which our ancestors imitated the calls of animals in order to manipulate animal behavior. In the process of imagining the wilderness though the persona of an animal one assimilates that wilderness to the categories and needs of human culture."

"Gullibility is the principal cause of bubbles. Investors and the general public get snared by a “beautiful illusion” and throw caution to the wind. Attempts to identify and control bubbles are complicated by the fact that the authorities who might naturally be expected to take action have often (especially in recent years) been among the most gullible, and were cheerleaders for the exuberant behavior. Hence what is needed is an objective measure of gullibility."

"This year, I’ve had another big load on my time: I’m writing my first book! Thus far it’s called Outsmart: The Future of Thought in the Age of Machines — a title possessed of such purple, sci-fi bombast that even though I wrote it myself, I still crack up every time I say it out loud. As you might imagine, coming from me, the book is a generally optimistic assessment of how digital tools are generating new ways for us to learn things, muse over them, and act on them. But the point is that it’s another time hog: Researching and writing a book has required such nose-to-the-grindstone work — to say nothing of nose-to-the-grindstone procrastination — that it has crowded out whatever time I might have had for blogging. Authors frequently describe the process of book-writing as similar to giving birth to a child, a metaphor I always found faintly icky; but, hey, maybe they were right. I’ve got three kids now, and no blog.

Yet as I’ve worked away on the book, I’ve increasingly begun to feel intellectually claustrophic. It’s hard to describe, but it’s like a cabin fever of the mind. The symptoms: I’ll get obsessed with a particular line of research, chewing away at it for days or weeks, only to realize it’s a) kind of half-baked or b) super interesting but not at all useful to my work. Or I’ll read a fascinating white paper, write a bunch of notes on it, but never crystallize a solid analysis.

I now think the problem is I’m not doing enough thinking in public."

'Uncertainty drives the search for and generation of creative ideas, but "uncertainty also makes us less able to recognize creativity, perhaps when we need it most," the researchers wrote. "Revealing the existence and nature of a bias against creativity can help explain why people might reject creative ideas and stifle scientific advancements, even in the face of strong intentions to the contrary. ... The field of creativity may need to shift its current focus from identifying how to generate more creative ideas to identify how to help innovative institutions recognize and accept creativity."'

"No wonder they shut down the internet. It's more powerful than guns. Smart mobs with online capabilities are defeating status quo organization ruled by hierarchy and unfamiliar with coordinating technologies. These mobile smart mobs can be built on the fly in a matter of hours or days and they will continue to get smarter. Reaction rates are getting much, much faster."

"[A]narchists resemble the American Founders, who saw the spirit of liberty as a necessary bulwark against concentrations of power, and were themselves partly embedded in international networks preaching revolution and social upheaval. In building a truly global economy, the great states have given anarchists the opportunity to rebuild their networks of sympathy and common political purpose across borders. Today’s anarchists want to change the world through distributed action rather than a pistol shot. It seems to be working out better."

"Search engines today present results that are often oblivious to abrupt shifts in intent. For example, the query `independence day' usually refers to a US holiday, but the intent of this query abruptly changed during the release of a major film by that name. … This paper shows that the signals a search engine receives can be used to both determine that a shift in intent has happened, as well as find a result that is now more relevant. We present a meta-algorithm that marries a classifier with a bandit algorithm to achieve regret that depends logarithmically on the number of query impressions, under certain assumptions. We provide strong evidence that this regret is close to the best achievable. Finally, via a series of experiments, we demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms prior approaches, particularly as the amount of intent-shifting traffic increases."

"…In this work, we give a short overview of traditional community roles. We adapt those models and apply them to virtual online communities. We suggest a community membership life cycle model describing roles a user can take during his membership in a community. Our model is systematic and generic; it can be adapted to concrete communities in the web. The knowledge of a community's life cycle allows influencing the group structure: Stage transitions can be supported or harmed, e.g. to strengthen the binding of a user to a site and keep communities alive."

"Since the collective beliefs are not given to modifica- tions within short timescales, the best approach for one opinion to win is to focus on getting as many as pos- sible inflexibles along its side. However this goal could demand to overstate the validity of some arguments to sustain and legitimate that opinion. In contrast, such a behavior could rise ethical questions.…"

"In addition to placing effective checks on the power of the captain, pirate government also provided harmony amongst the crewmembers. Harmony was essential to the business of piracy; pirates who got along with one another stood a better chance of success in their ventures. The author writes that, "Contrary to popular wisdom, pirate life was orderly and honest" (45). In order to maintain order and ensure honesty, pirates drew up "Codes," which outlined shipboard rules and regulations, and provided incentives to maximize individual effort. Each crew drew up its own constitution and ratified it by unanimous consent. …"

"…What Lind leaves out is that each of his time periods ends with a great upheaval in the nation that forces social changes. For instance, version 1.0 ends with the Civil War. Sometimes, the result is a more responsible capitalist model, as with version 4.0, which came after the Great Depression, and, according to Lind, was, for all intents and purposes, a time of responsible capitalism. Then, post-1960s and 1970s rights movements and the Vietnam War, the increasing drive towards globalization saw an abandonment of regulation, starting with President Carter, and a greed virus released on the financial markets that has led us to our current endtimes. Lind concludes, "Capitalism 6.0 will be just as American as its predecessors, but it will be better than what we have today. It could not possibly be worse."

"As Alexander repeatedly points out, you can’t consider a construction in isolation, you have to consider the construction in context. And the context for this bench is rather remarkable: you have rather steep hills covered with trees behind you and to your right, you have the Fort Mason buildings to your left, and in front of you you have a gorgeous view of the San Francisco Bay, with Alcatraz and Angel Island in the distance."

"The big change appears to be that those in school have become increasingly less attached to the labor market. The percentage of school enrollees aged between 16 and 24 who are also participating in the labor market was relatively stable between 1989 and 1998 at around 51 percent. However, labor market participation by those in school declined between 1999 and 2008 from 50 percent to 42 percent. In contrast, labor force participation by those aged between 16 and 24 not enrolled in school has declined only modestly—from 82 percent to 80 percent between 1989 and 2008."

"One of the most important concepts to understand in the coming years will be the power of digital ecosystems. On the surface it looks pretty obvious what they are and what they can be used for. But as I will show you in this essay, so much potential is still untapped."

WORTH TATTOOING: “The adult human being simply knows too many solutions for problems that no longer exist.”

'These developments suggest that the United States is spending huge amounts of money in ways that are actually making Americans less secure, not only against irregular insurgents, but also against smart countries building different sorts of militaries. And the problem goes well beyond weapons and other high-tech items. What’s missing most of all from the U.S. military’s arsenal is a deep understanding of networking, the loose but lively interconnection between people that creates and brings a new kind of collective intelligence, power, and purpose to bear — for good and ill…..”'

"Every user who participated in the meme is represented by a gray circle (Matt, whom first started the meme, is shown in yellow). Edges represents the person who most likely influenced the other to first participate."

"In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized-- connected "up" to Big Media but not across to each other. And now that authority is eroding. I will try to explain why.
It’s easily the most useful diagram I’ve found for understanding the practice of journalism in the United States, and the hidden politics of that practice. You can draw it by hand right now. Take a sheet of paper and make a big circle in the middle. In the center of that circle draw a smaller one to create a doughnut shape. Label the doughnut hole “sphere of consensus.” Call the middle region “sphere of legitimate debate,” and the outer region “sphere of deviance.”"

"On a distributed Scrum project, individual team members need to meet each other face to face. If the whole team cannot get together, one or two members from each team, at least, should spend time visiting team members in other cities. Think of them as ambassadors. I’ve found that the personal relationships established by ambassadors can be extremely valuable even long after the ambassador returns to native soil."

"Robonomics: If robots and digital systems can do everything, let them--but let human society skim value from the result. This becomes a technologically-driven version of the Basic Income Guarantee model, where citizens are given a basic above-poverty income guarantee and are free to explore education, entrepreneurship, or even a life of indolence. Or they can get one of the remaining human jobs, jobs that may pay much more than they do now in order to attract people who otherwise wouldn't want the work."

"I am interested in simple but robust computer vision and information visualization techniques that support interactive analysis of human behavior in multi-stream video. My advisor is Dr. Gregory Abowd."

"I study the building of bridges, wikis in organizations, and interventions with newly hired employees in order to understand how distributed work gets done and how social computing technologies are engaged in that work. I'm especially interested in learning that takes place when people work together. I aim to contribute new ways of thinking about distributed work, learning in collaboration, and the roles of social computing in both. "

Reminds me of deep problems at Distributed Proofreaders....

"A significant percentage of online content is now published and consumed via the mechanism of crowdsourcing. While any user can contribute to these forums, a disproportionately large percentage of the content is submitted by very active and devoted users, whose continuing participation is key to the sites' success. As we show, people's propensity to keep participating increases the more they contribute, suggesting motivating factors which increase over time. This paper demonstrates that submitters who stop receiving attention tend to stop contributing, while prolific contributors attract an ever increasing number of followers and their attention in a feedback loop. We demonstrate that this mechanism leads to the observed power law in the number of contributions per user and support our assertions by an analysis of hundreds of millions of contributions to top content sharing websites Digg.com and Youtube.com."

"Many of these smaller dealerships are family enterprises; three and even four generations old. Their longevity is a testament less to Detroit's products and more to their smart and sharp business practices. And now that some of their competitors are closing they may do even better. Let's consider what business leaders can learn from these small-town auto dealers."

"An early and prominent employee of Google, Georges Harik, recently made the assertion that pairs working together in startups are 20 times more productive than individuals working alone. The author has also personally experienced the boost of what is here termed pairwork in a university setting during the startup phase of several educational and interdisciplinary initiatives. The paper briefly explores pairwork in the history of technology and constructs both qualitative and little quantitative models of pairwork. The quantitative model under reasonable assumptions easily recovers Harik’s 20x boost. The paper also briefly examines the author’s recent experiences with pairwork in four interdisciplinary and educational initiatives."

"Building communities is vital today, whether it's to build a reliable support network, serve as a valuable source of new ideas, or provide a powerful marketing tool. In The Art of Community, you'll learn about the broad range of talents required to recruit, motivate, and manage community members. The book takes you through the stages of community, and covers topics ranging from software tools to conflict resolution skills. "

"But if an entire team walks, that’s much more like an addict’s “hitting bottom”. The consequences are going to be huge because any new team would have to learn the system from scratch. (Though I suppose management could delude themselves into thinking they have the project documentation to make that tractable.) And the departure of any series of employees [or, in the case of an addict, friends] is easy to rationalize: “he’s just a malcontent [no fun any more since he got married]”. But when *everyone* rejects you at once…"

"A couple of good thoughts about those unintended consequences we create out here on the social side of the internet. I think that many of us are putting ourselves online in a very open and honest way because we want to connect to people. I’m surprised how many people I’ve connected with online who describe themselves as introverts. Having some tools that allow people to connect, including those who find it difficult to connect in their analog lives, is a tremendous social good."

"A capable community applies the strengths (assets) of its members to improve the overall wellbeing of the community. It mobilizes community members and groups to begin an informed and purposeful journey from at-risk, to safe, and ultimately to thriving."

"Grad school was even worse. At that level, a self-selected bunch of failure avoiders competed for faculty approval in a pretty airless environment for years. By the end, it took an act of will just to put together a declarative sentence. The most damning insult in grad school was “naive,” which was typically applied to anyone who actually made some sort of positive claim. (“Naive realism” was the worst, since it implied the unforgivable sin of claiming to actually know something about something.) Self-doubt can be taught.

In grad school, too, I recall the faculty being perplexed as to why so many doctoral students seemed oddly hesitant and overly deferential during oral exams. At one panel of grad student papers, I recall noticing that every single grad student started her presentation with “this is a work in progress.” Translated, that means “please don't attack me.” These habits are learned...."

"The basic problems didn't appear until individual rap groups exhausted the virtues of consciousness-raising and decided they wanted to do some- thing more specific. At this point they usually floundered because most groups were unwilling to change their structure when they changed their task. Women had thoroughly accepted the idea of 'structurelessness' without realising the limitations of its uses. People would try to use the 'structureless' group and the informal conference for purposes for which they were unsuitable out of a blind belief that no other means could possibly be anything but oppressive."