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.

Singapore's future robot armies?

SpaceDaily.com reports that engineers in Singapore are working on robots that can cooperate on the battlefield, exhibiting "swarming" behavior:

Learning from bees and ants, researchers at DSO National Laboratories (DSO) are figuring out how they can send a swarm of robots to the battlefield.

Starting with teaching two or three unmanned vehicles to work together, they are scaling up their work on artificial intelligence (AI) software to send a large group of robots towards the enemy.

Dr How Khee Yin, 44, head of the Centre for Decision Support at DSO, envisions the day when dozens of robots could be sent into harm's way 'in a swarm'.

He said: 'We're learning from bees and ants. How they work as a team. It's very much a growing area of research.'

The Web and open source intelligence

While reading Joi Ito's blog this morning, I came across example of the utility of the Web as an aggregator of observation and expertise. He had passed on a call from the Information Clearing House (Google gives this URL, but it wasn't responding this morning):

Can any of our Scottish readers verify the following report:

Since Saturday, people in the Highlands of Scotland have been witnessing large movements of US warplanes overhead. Experienced observers say the large numbers are reminiscent of those that preceded the bombing of Iraq in 1998 and military strikes against Libya in the 1980's, as well as the first Gulf War.

It is thought that the planes have flown on a route over the North Pole to bases in Europe and the Mediterranean. The size and scale of the movement suggests that the US may be preparing to strike against a country in the Middle East in the next week to ten days.... If you have information in relation to the above, please email me....

Leave aside the question of whether there's any truth to these reports, or what they mean. If you live near a military base, you can tell that things are starting to happen-- people you see in your normal life disappear, convoys start appearing on the roads-- but you have little sense of how your local observations fit into a bigger picture.

This kind of information-gathering has been a standard part of intelligence work for years. What's interesting is that this group is using the Web to do a bottom-up version of it.

eSTAR 2

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about eSTAR, a new system that uses software agents to coordinate astronomical observations and identify unusual phenomena. Today Wired News published an article on eSTAR.

Are friends electric?*

(*With apologies to Gary Numan.)

NTT researchers recently presented their ElectAura-Net technology, which uses humans' natural electrical fields (those things that mystics and New Agers think of as auras) to move information. They explain how it works in a SIGGRAPH publication:

ElectAura-Net is a novel indoor broadband networking and positioning system. A wireless(-like) communication is enabled by electric-fields (electric aura) emanated from the human body and the floor. The result: the world's first broadband (10Mbps) intrabody communication. ElectAura-Net also provides indoor positioning, which is urgently needed for "ubiquitous" communication.

ElectAura-Net provides both broadband wireless(-like) networks and a meter-accuracy positioning system for indoor use. It is a kind of "intrabody communication" system that uses electric fields as transmission media, and the human body and floor as an Ethernet cable. In this system, a "communication-cell" (carpet size) can be shrunk down to one meter or less, and simultaneous access by many users can be realized. Ordinary intrabody communication systems cannot achieve long-distance communication between components such as body-worn devices and the floor. ElectAura-Net provides extra-high-sensitivity and high-speed capability.

This is an extension of the Personal Area Network (PAN) research done at MIT in the 1990s by Tom Zimmerman (the subject of his 1995 MA thesis), and later picked up at IBM. That technology exploited the fact that the

natural salinity of the human body makes it an excellent conductor of electrical current. PAN technology takes advantage of this conductivity by creating an external electric field that passes an incredibly tiny current through the body, over which data is carried.

The current used is one-billionth of an amp (one nanoamp), which is lower than the natural currents already in the body. In fact, the electrical field created by running a comb through hair is more than 1,000 times greater than that being used by PAN technology.

The difference here is that this new technology isn't aimed at linking people together, but at connecting people (and all their devices) to a network, and using that same technology to sense people's locations.

The NTT technology sounds like it's a long way from hitting the streets, but the notion of using our bodies-- and touch-- as a way to share information is one that I find kind of breathtaking: wonderful in its simplicity, deep in its conceptual potential.

We already have a pretty good protocol for sharing information via PDAs: I can beam something to another person with a PDA, but they have to accept it before it gets stored on their device. Sharing a picture, or a message, or a piece of music with someone by holding their hand-- or touching their shoulder, or tapping them on the arm-- is at once both high-tech and intimate. If it adopted some features of the PDA method-- that a file has to be actively accepted by the recipient, or it's discarded-- this method would also provide a means of sharing information that was as transparent as handing someone a Polaroid or business card: you'd know who it was coming from, you'd have to choose to accept it, and the transaction would take place within the context of a social exchange.

Imagine, for example, that you're at a wedding. At the reception, you take a lot of pictures, as does everyone else. The bride and groom have a great time, the guests have a great time; and at the end of the evening, one of the things you do for the happy couple-- the course of shaking hands with him or hugging her-- is share those pictures with them. Or, you and your teenage friends are at an amusement park, and you have a passerby take a group picture with your camera. After getting the camera back, you'd cue up the picture, then hand a copy of the picture to each one of your friends. Information-sharing turns into a genuinely social activity. Pushing bits becomes an exercise in gift-giving. Data becomes a social artifact.

It would be the ultimate example of social navigation, of an information technology that drew upon existing methods and media for digital communication. This interpretation runs completely opposite to an IBM article from a few years ago that declared that described Zimmerman's work as showing "how a touch can also be used to communicate unemotional digital information." Today, what seems interesting is how the PAN could place the communication of digital information in an emotional and social context.

Finally, it would be an exemplar of a trend we're actively exploring at the Institute: how the growth of ubiquitous or pervasive technologies promises to remove computers and communications technologies as obstacles to social interaction.

Other sources:

• Eric Smalley, "Body network gains speed," Technology Research News (October 2003).
  
• "A Truly Organic Network," Wired News (December 15, 1997).
  
• "Personal Area Network enables intrabody communication," Design News (1998).
  
• Bruce Schechter, "The Body Electric," Think Research (1997).
  

[via Smart Mobs]

Agents, grids, and astronomy

One of the pleasures of being an historian of science - turned - futurist is that my past and present lives often meet in unexpected ways. This recently happened with the announcement of the eSTAR project, an effort that uses grid computing and intelligent agents to identify and track unexpected astronomical events. As a news release explained,

"Intelligent Agent" computer programs are roaming the Internet and watching the skies. It may sound like science fiction, but these programs, using Grid computing technology, will help astronomers detect some of the most dramatic events in the universe, such as massive supernova explosions....

Dr. Alasdair Allan, on the eSTAR team at the University of Exeter, said "The universe currently does things faster than we can respond to them. To study the most rapid and violent events in the universe, we need to be able to follow them quickly."

As well as supernova explosions, many other astronomical events happen suddenly and unpredictably. These include the detection of near-Earth asteroids as they move across the sky, rapid changes in the swirling gases being swallowed by black holes, and the subtle changes in the brightness of stars which may indicate planets in orbit around them.

The Intelligent Agent programs communicate with telescopes and each other using technology designed for the Grid - the "next generation Internet". They make observations with the telescopes, which they can analyse and immediately follow up with further observations, without the need for human intervention.

Prof. Tim Naylor, who led the eSTAR team and is also at the University of Exeter, said "We're creating a network of telescopes which can respond automatically to objects of great astronomical importance."

eSTAR currently is only running on one telescope, the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope, located on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, but the hope is to be able to connect a number of telescopes to eSTAR in the next few years. They're even considering "a Java based interface which could run on the user's mobile phone" that would "provide up to the minute information for an astronomer who is out of the office, but still wants to monitor their observations."

This is only the latest chapter in astronomy's long history of dealing with information overload. The Babylonians, who performed what are probably the first systematic, quantitative observations of celestial events, generated thousands of tablets of data; ever since, astronomers have often had too much information at their disposal.

One strategy has been to pursue what we would describe as collaborative, open-source work. In the nineteenth century, the discipline's agenda was crowded with international projects to create star catalogs, standards for photometric and spectroscopic research, and to attack important problems.

Likewise, astronomy has long been a distributed science-- that is, the data-collection and analysis have taken place in a variety of places. Astronomers would farm out photographs or spectrographs to former students for analysis. Young scientists at schools that didn't have research facilities got access to data and the chance to remain scientifically productive, while observatories got to ease some of their backlogs of data. Astronomers weren't the only ones who did this. For example, T. H. Morgan's laboratory, which was renowned for its research on the genetics of Drosophila melanogaster (fruit flies), was the center of a large network that shared strains of flies and experimental data with high-school teachers and professors at small colleges. (There's a brilliant book on this network called Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life, written by Robert Kohler.) Arguably, though, the portability of astronomical data-- tables of star positions, photographs, and spectrographs-- made it easier for them to distribute their research.

A third strategy was to create what essentially little factories for analyzing data. The growth in the nineteenth century of factory-like systems for analyzing masses of data. The Greenwich Observatory under George Airy was famous for the methodical, disciplined way it handled its celestial mechanics data; likewise the Harvard College Observatory under Edward Pickering built a staff (nicknamed "Pickering's harem" because it consisted entirely of women) to analyze its spectroscopic data. (It was in places like this that the term "computers" came to be used-- but not for machines, for people.)

So the digitization of astronomical research in the twentieth century-- the replacement of photographic plates with CCDs and digital cameras, the replacement of atlases and tables with computer files, and the emergence of radio astronomy-- didn't so much upset the discipline, as made it possible for them to adapt or update traditional ways of working. Astronomers had been sharing data and organizing long-distance collaborations for a long time; the Internet made it easier to do that work. Automated systems for detecting anomalies or taking measurements had also been around for decades, and computers allowed astronomers to increase the volume of data they could analyze this way. In a curious way, computers and networks appealed to both the open source and factory traditions in astronomy. (In a sense, observatories were merely exchanging one kind of "computer" for another, though of course the reality was quite a bit more complex.)

There are two new things here, though.

First is the emphasis on pace. Older distributed, collaborative systems in astronomical research were mainly designed to deal with backlogs of data, while eSTAR's purpose is to respond to quickly-moving events. There is a tradition within astronomy of collective action around unique events like solar eclipses or Transits of Venus, but even those are often known in advance. The aim here, as Allen put it, is to observe the "most rapid and violent events in the universe"-- and the unexpected.

Second, eSTAR invests a degree of intelligence and decision-making power in the network itself. As Allen told the BBC,

"What is so important here is that we have developed an intelligent observing system.... It thinks and reacts for itself, deciding whether something it has discovered is interesting enough to need more observations. If more observations are needed, it just goes ahead and gets them."

One final, broader observation. eSTAR is a great example of how a technological system can be innovative not because it contains a large amount of completely new technology, but because it combines existing technologies in new ways. eSTAR's tremendous potential depends on the fact that it creatively recombines a heterogeneous assortment of existing technologies. It uses existing telescopes, computer networks, even cell phones; the agents and telescopes communicate using RTML (remote Telescope Markup Language, an XML dialect). It treats the Internet and global telescope networks as a gigantic commons, the kind that Lawrence Lessig discusses in The Future of Ideas; and it won't work without a system that recognizes how deeply innovative technologies and services are indebted to their predecessors.

Grid Computing for Astronomers [Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]
Grid technology helps astronomers keep pace with the Universe [EurekAlert]
Smart software watches the skies [BBC]
Robert Kohler, Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life (University of Chicago Press, 1994) [Amazon link]

Cyborg monkeys and post-humans

For the last several years, Duke neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis and his research group have been working on creating a closed-loop brain-machine interface between primates (specifically macaques) and a robotic arm. This work has gotten a lot of press recently, with the announcement that the monkeys involved in the research had learned not only to operate their robot arms, but to use them independently of their real arms. This is highly significant for a couple reasons.

First, and most obviously, this suggests the possibility of eventually giving people who've been paralyzed the means to move about and interact with the world (using, say, an exoskeleton like the one described in William Gibson's short story "The Winter Market"). This is still some time off, but this most recent development suggests that people-- or their brains-- could learn to operate such technologies.

As I mentioned, this research has been going on for several years, but as Wired News reported, the real breakthrough came when

changes in the way the monkey's brain cells worked suggested the brain was physically adjusting to the device.... "The monkey suddenly realized that she didn't need to move her arm at all," Nicolelis said.... "Her arm muscles went completely quiet, she kept the arm at her side and she controlled the robot arm using only her brain and visual feedback."

In other words, the monkey learned to treat the robot arm as just another part of her body.

As for the possibility of applying the technology to humans,

"We hope the brain will learn to adapt to the devices and incorporate them as if they were the patient's own limbs," Nicolelis said.... "There is certainly a great deal of science and engineering to be done to develop this technology and to create systems that can be used safely in humans.... However, the results so far lead us to believe that these brain-machine interfaces hold enormous promise for restoring function to paralyzed people."

The New York Times reports that "he hoped to begin human trials in the next two years at the newly formed Natal International Neuroscience Institute in Brazil." (Dr. Nicolelis is Brazilian, but I wonder if this is also a way to avoid some of the difficulties of managing human subjects research in the United States. This is not to suggest anything untoward in the research, but to recognize the complexities of doing any kind of research on people here in the U.S.)

This discovery also has some broader implications for understanding the way the mind works, and the way it works with-- and helps construct or sense of-- our bodies. Several of us at the Institute have been quite impressed with Andy Clark's recent book Natural Born Cyborgs, and its arguments regarding the deep relationships that develop between people and technologies. Briefly, it argues that humans have a tremendous innate capacity to develop complex, transformative relationships with technologies-- relationships that extend beyond dependence based on mere convenience. We are all cyborgs, and that's what makes us human. (A fuller summary of the book's thesis is available here.)

One of the foundations for his argument rests in neuroscience and psychology, and depends on establishing that our brains have a considerable degree of flexibility in both making sense of the world at large, and incorporating new devices into our picture of our selves. As I wrote,

[W]hile we have stable senses of the world around us, and believe that our bodies have clear boundaries that separate "us" from that world, the truth is more complex. The information we gather about the world is opportunistic, and pretty much created on the fly. For example, we retain far less visual information about our surroundings than we expect; our focus is pretty narrowly confined most of the time, and if we need to check on something at the periphery of our vision, we refresh that information (look over for an instant), rather than try to recall it.

Further, you can pretty radically alter the ways we perceive the world, and our brains eventually can readjust. There are famous experiments in which people are made to wear glasses that turn the world upside-down; after a couple weeks, something switches in the brain, and the wearers stop noticing the effect. What's particularly interesting about this is that experiments with manipulating vision show that people can adapt to new systems-- but not if they don't act them out.

The Nicolelis group's work, it seems to me, provides spot-on confirmation that Clark's model of mind-body interaction, and his notion of a mind-body-scaffolding relationship, is a strong one. I've e-mailed Clark asking what he thinks of this work, and hope to have a response shortly.

Finally, the publisher is significant. The article [warning: this is a large file; a summary is also available] that describes this work is coming out in a journal called Public Library of Science. The PLoS Web site explains its mission:

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.

The internet and electronic publishing enable the creation of public libraries of science containing the full text and data of any published research article, available free of charge to anyone, anywhere in the world.

Immediate unrestricted access to scientific ideas, methods, results, and conclusions will speed the progress of science and medicine, and will more directly bring the benefits of research to the public.

Anyone familiar with the astronomically high cost of scientific journals will appreciate how radical an idea this is, and how much it runs counter to current trends to limit electronic access to research. (For those who do not, I outline some of the significance of the Public Library of Science project in this blog entry, and the trends to restriction of access here and here.)

Distributed Library Project

One of the most powerful aspects of smart mob technologies-- things like peer-to-peer, social software, etc.-- is that they can turn what were private goods into public resources. The latest example of this is the Distributed Library Project. According to its Web site,

The Distributed Library Project is an experiment in sharing information and building community in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Unfortunately, the traditional library system doesn't do much to foster community. Patrons come and go, but there is very little opportunity to establish relationships with people or groups of people. In fact, if you try to talk with someone holding a book you like - you'll probably get shushed. The Distributed Library Project works in exactly the opposite way, where the very function of the library depends on interaction.

In a sense, this is the Napster model, but with atoms rather than bits. It pools resources; it encourages interaction; it is subject to Reed's Law scaling effects (e.g., the value of the network = 2^N, where N = number of users). An important additional factor is that users can review each other, as they do on eBay, creating public reputations that can serve as a foundation for trust-building within the network.

This basic model is one that could be extended to any number of different types of goods, where you have 1) private ownership of goods, 2) portability or the possibility of open access, 3) non-exclusive use (i.e., I'm not using the object all the time, or don't need to have access to it all the time-- something that John Thackara spun out in an interesting direction in his "Post-Spectacular City" piece), and 4) the means to review the performance/reliability of participants.

Where else could it reasonably be extended? I suspect it will work best with things that people are accustomed to loaning to friends, and are relatively cheap. Books are a great start, and movies and music also obvious early entrants. Then there are some kinds of objects that are traded in informal networks and markets, but which aren't loaned out for longer periods. There's an active informal trade in baby clothes among parents with children of similiar ages, but that tends to operate on a "permanent loan" model: I don't borrow a few sleepers from a friend, and return them the next week, but use them for months.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, cars would be relatively hard to loan out in this way. But you might be able to create a system that marries smart mob technology with ride-sharing networks, allowing users to maintain control of their vehicles.

It'll be interesting to see how these distributed sharing systems evolve, and what kinds of things get shared.

[via Smart Mobs]

Clay Shirky's "File-sharing Goes Social"

Clay Shirky has posted a great essay, "File-sharing Goes Social," on the coevolution of file-sharing systems and RIAA legal strategies to destroy them:

In hostile environments, organisms often adapt to become less energetic but harder to kill, and so it is now. With the RIAA's waves of legal attacks driving experimentation with decentralized file-sharing tools, file-sharing networks have progressively traded efficiency for resistance to legal attack.

The RIAA has slowly altered the environment so that relatively efficient systems like Napster were killed, opening up a niche for more decentralized systems like Gnutella and Kazaa. With their current campaign against Kazaa in full swing, we are about to see another shift in network design, one that will have file sharers adopting tools originally designed for secure collaboration in a corporate setting.

Napster's problem, of course, was that although Napster nodes acted as both client and server, the central database still gave the RIAA a single target. Seeing this, Gnutella and Kazaa shifted to a mesh of nodes that could each act as client, server, and router. These networks are self-assembling and self-reconfiguring with a minimum of bootstrapping, and decentralize even addresses and pointers to files.

The RIAA is now attacking these networks using a strategy that could be called Crush the Connectors. A number of recent books on networks, such as Gladwell's The Tipping Point, Barabasi's Linked, and Watts' Six Degrees, have noted that large, loosely connected networks derive their effectiveness from a small number of highly connected nodes, a pattern called a Small World network. As a result, random attacks, even massive ones, typically leave the network only modestly damaged.

The flipside is that attacks that specifically target the most connected nodes are disproportionately effective. The RIAA's Crush the Connectors strategy will work, not simply because highly publicized legal action will deter some users, but because the value of the system will decay badly if the RIAA succeeds in removing even a small number of the best-provisioned nodes.

However, it will not work as well as the RIAA wants, even ignoring the public relations fallout, for two reasons. The first is that combining client, server, and router in one piece of software is not the last move available to network designers -- there is still the firewall. And the second is simply the math of popular music -- there are more people than songs.

It's well worth reading in its entirety.

[thanks to Lyn Jeffery]

Plasma life?

The New Scientist reports on an experiment that suggests the possibility of gaseous life forms (insert political joke here):

Physicists have created blobs of gaseous plasma that can grow, replicate and communicate - fulfilling most of the traditional requirements for biological cells. Without inherited material they cannot be described as alive, but the researchers believe these curious spheres may offer a radical new explanation for how life began.

[via Arlington Institute newsletter]