IFTF's Future Now

21st century Social Science

a post at Mind Hacks summarizes an article in the New Yorker about terrorism and social networks - and also a nice summary on Mark Granovetter's weak ties theory as background.  The New Yorker article quotes an Australian Army captain David Kilcullen:

I saw extremely similar behavior and extremely similar problems in an Islamic insurgency in West Java and a Christian-separatist insurgency in East Timor.  After 9/11, when a lot of people were saying, ‘The problem is Islam,’ I was thinking, It’s something deeper than that. It’s about human social networks and the way that they operate.
...
What that told me about Jemaah Islamiya is that it’s not about theology. There are elements in human psychological and social makeup that drive what’s happening. The Islamic bit is secondary. This is human behavior in an Islamic setting. This is not ‘Islamic behavior.'

Since then Kilcullen has become a chief strategist for counterterrorism for the U.S. State Department.  He aims to reform the "War on Terror" in light of what we know about how the terrorist social networks recruit and gain sympathy.

Kilcullen speaks of the need to “disaggregate” insurgencies: finding ways to address local grievances in Pakistan’s tribal areas or along the Thai-Malay border so that they aren’t mapped onto the ambitions of the global jihad. Kilcullen writes, “Just as the Containment strategy was central to the Cold War, likewise a Disaggregation strategy would provide a unifying strategic conception for the war—something that has been lacking to date.”
...
By speaking of Saddam Hussein, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the Taliban, the Iranian government, Hezbollah, and Al Qaeda in terms of one big war, Administration officials and ideologues have made Osama bin Laden’s job much easier. “You don’t play to the enemy’s global information strategy of making it all one fight.”

The New Yorker article is long and worth the read.

 

US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud 1776-2006

A very interesting way to see the changes in rhetoric over time (you can move the slider around to see trends in word usage)

The above tag cloud shows the popularity, frequency, and trends in the usages of words within speeches, official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 - 2006 AD.The dataset consists of over 360 documents downloaded from Encyclopedia Britannica and ThisNation.com.

Link

Quote of the day

Easy to take out of context and misunderstand, though. From Chapter 1 of Kevin Kelly's New Rules for the New Economy:

The surest way to smartness is through massive dumbness.

Play "that explains why [insert name of celebrity / technology / company / rock band / political party / novel] is so successful" game now.

Technorati Tags: collective intelligence, emergence

Stimulating idea of the day

George Goodall, "Masons, Polynesians, and Bloggers: Applying Social Organization to Bibliographic Objectives"

[T]he production of meaning created by blogs is similar to how cathedrals were produced during the medieaval era. I see some disbelieving faces but I’m going to ask you to consider how cathedrals were actually built. Masons used no formal drawings, they had no formal training, and engineering rigour didn’t exist. It’s hard for many of us to understand how a structure like Aachen Cathedral could emerge without any documentation. So how did these incredible structures emerge?

The sociologist and historian of science and technology David Turnbull has studied the practices of the mediaeval masons and maintains that documents weren’t necessary for the construction of these magnificent edifices. There is prima facie support for this statement given that so many cathedrals remain standing and they were all built in an era when documentary practices were necessarily primitive given the lack of things like literacy, numeracy, and—frankly—paper for cheaply producing drawings.

Instead, Turbull (2000) maintains that what was required for building these cathedrals was a means of transmitting knowledge. Given the lack of what we would now recognize as formal communication mechanisms, the mediaeval masons relied on different processes. According to Turnbull, they used: talk, tradition, and templates. Basically, “talk” describes the process of talking through problems, “tradition” encompasses the intensive apprenticeship required by master masons, and “templates” refers to various geometric devices that enabled the masons to design and build without detailed knowledge of engineering principles. Templates served as a way of incorporating or “black boxing” the tacit skills of earlier generations of masons.

Technorati Tags: blogging, collective intelligence, emergence, folksonomy

Feeding time!

Imagine that you own a high-turnover, low-margin business (think fast food chain) and that over the past two years "waste has been cut in half and wait times at the drive-through have been reduced by 25 to 40 seconds per consumer."

This is one of the samples from a new quantiative/qualitative analysis solution covered in today's Washington Post, Vehicle-Profiling Technology Speeds Up Fast Food by Charles Sheehan, AP.

HyperActive Technologies of Pittsburgh has been doing field tests of its predictive analysis system compposed of "rooftop cameras that monitor traffic entering a restaurant's parking lot and drive-through."

It's not enough to know that your restaurant sells 120 burgers during the lunch hour on weekdays. Managers must know during which 20 minutes the kitchen will go into high gear during that hour, and it's always a shifting target, Currie [one of the test site managers] said.

The training is done at each site and currently takes one week (down from months... but a week seems the minimum sample size if you think about it).

Having worked fast food I can only imagine how much less exciting technologies like this will make the job. Ibid for retail.

Smart mobs on the highway?

This piece in The Economist points to a couple studies suggesting that adaptive cruise control, if widely deployed, could help deal with traffic jams:

Adaptive cruise control (ACC), as its name suggests, is a modified version of traditional cruise control. It employs radar to monitor the road ahead of a vehicle, automatically adjusting that vehicle's speed to maintain a safe distance from the one in front. This is safer than manual driving because it reduces the system's reaction time from nearly a second (human) to practically instantaneous (machine), thus helping to forestall shunts. But ACC may have a useful side-effect, arising from the fact that another effect of slow human reaction times is to produce traffic jams on apparently open roads.

It's an interesting example of how giving technologies (or organisms) a very small amount of intelligence can create some higher-order benefits and coordinated action.

If it works for cheetahs...

The New Scientist reports reports that computer scientists

Peter Bentley and Krzysztof Wloch have used genetic algorithms software that mimics evolution's drive for fitness to breed the best tuning configurations for racing cars....

Genetic algorithms mimic the principles of evolution to breed solutions to a problem. A population of potential solutions is tested for fitness and the best are cross-bred and mutated. The unfit members of the next generation are weeded out, simulating natural selection, leaving the fittest solutions to go on to breed....

Using the technique, they shaved a second off the best time achieved by an expert.... Unfortunately Bentley and Wloch did not have any real cars to hand, so instead they applied their algorithm to virtual cars in the PC game Formula One Challenge.

This lets players set 68 variables governing the car's performance, including factors such as rev limits, gear ratios, tyre pressures and suspension damping. They say there is no reason why the same principle could not be applied trackside at Formula 1 races.

"A debate between competing saviours of the world"; The Copenhagen Consensus

The Copenhagen Consensus begins next week, which has led to a recent spate of good coverage (mostly in European press).

The Financial Times had a piece this week by Alan Beattie, Too complex for simple solutions.

The project bills itself as a clear-eyed, scientific look at an area dominated by arbitrary choices and influenced by woolly emotion.

The Economist has been doing weekly pieces for over two months on the issues and some of the pre-discussions. Their first piece, another overview, can be found at A modest undertaking

You can find their complete list or articles in this Finance & Economics space.

Innovation is not chaotic

One of the articles from the BW special issue on American r&d repeated the oft-repeated belief that the American system of research thrives because it is "disorganized and "chaotic". While the article goes on to cite these as positive traits for the development of new ideas, and therefore innovation, the use of these words needs to be corrected.

Empirical research into the time of pre-ideas that comprise the earliest stage of innovation – the stage before the “idea” or the “team” exists – is still in its infancy. Existing research views the stage as an ad hoc period of indeterminate time, driven by intuition, and filled with ambiguity and uncertainty... primarily so that the researchers can then begin studying the later stages, wherein an idea, a team, an office, funding, and such formal matters are all existent. Studying this early period is clearly hard, so how about everyone just agree it is "chaotic" and move to the easier stuff?

We are now smart enough to move beyond the thinking inherent in viewing early innovation as chaotic. disorganized, ad hoc. Each of these terms brings with it issues of the unknown, or more precisely, unknowability. But this is far from the truth.

Research is a process of ideas and interactions co-evolving toward a possible innovation. It is a social process that begins with the introduction of a half-formed thought, leading to interactions around this thought, and ending with the possible self-organization of a team. And it is this recurring process (with lots of possible non-organization) that leads to the formalization of the innovation idea and team and the beginning of more traditional processes of innovation.

The process of early innovation - the time of idea and team formation - is emergent. It is a socio-ideational process rooted in complexity. And while emergent processes may look chaotic, they are anything buy.

Amateur scientists and Benkler's peer production

A while ago I posed the question of whether "historians of science made use of the literature on social networks and open exchange systems-- e.g., Woody Powell's work on networks, Yochai Benkler's studies of open source, etc.?" In the course of reading Benkler's "Coase's Penguin," a couple thoughts on the subject came to me.

Of course, the notion that nonscientists could contribute to scientific research projects is not new, and in the world of peer-to-peer systems, is definitely old news: just think of projects like SETI@Home, which send pieces of radio astronomy data to desktops for analysis. But with SETI@Home (and Stanford's protein folding project), the person doesn't really do anything other than contribute processor cycles: all the actual analysis is done by a piece of software that users download to their computers. What's more interesting is the question of whether peer-to-peer networks and other tools that facilitate "peer production" (to use Benkler's term) could help create a new role for amateurs as active contributors to science.