Hyperpolitics and Memetics

Mark Pesce at the Personal Democracy Forum (June 2008), emphasises how "hyperconnectivity" through the Internet and other digital communication mechanisms today enables the distribution of ideas across a large group of individuals in a short span of time. He emphasises how the use of digital media (Facebook, Flickr, etc) allows the spread of ideas; according to him, "... whenever any one of us displays a new behavior in a hyperconnected context, that behavior is inherently transparent, visible and observed. If that behavior is successful, it is immediately copied by those who witnessed the behavior, then copied by those who witness that behavior, and those who witnessed that behavior, and so on. Very quickly, that behavior becomes part of the global behavioral kit. As its first-order emergent quality, hyperconnectivity produces ... unprecedented acceleration of the natural processes of observational learning, where each behavioral innovation is distributed globally and instantaneously" -- thereby leading to Hypermemisis. A very interesting article that discusses how children of Generation Next are becoming experts in mimesis -- the learning by immitation. He suggests that, "we are built to observe and reproduce the behaviors of our parents, our mentors and our peers. Our peers now number three and a half billion." An interesting and related idea has been propagating across the Internet for a while -- that of Memetics. According to the Wikipedia entry, "Memetics is a neo-Darwinian approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the meme. Starting from a metaphor used in the writings of Richard Dawkins, it has since turned into a new area of study, one that looks at the self-replicating units of culture. It has been proposed that just as memes are analogous to genes, memetics is analogous to genetics." Memetics therefore represents those ideas that have managed to survive and be passed on through the "minds" of individuals. A meme being either a unit of cultural information that can be copied, or an observable cultural artifact and behaviour -- describes those theories that dominate our thinking today. Perhaps, a more controversial question one can ask today is whether the Climate of Fear imposed through rising oil prices, climate change etc, is essentially a meme propagated by news media. A "cultural artifact" that has been picked up and replicated upteen times until it has become acceptable "reality". Surely, the Internet provides the best medium for propagating memes to the masses -- like dominant genes that exist within our population.

Liquid Publications

Elaine Morgan, in the New Statesman magazine demonstrates, using a very interesting example, how the Internet is changing scientific debate. According to her article Here Comes Everybody, "in the 1960s, Sir Alister Hardy (an Oxford Professor) suggested that several features distinguishing human beings from apes could be most readily explained if our earliest ancestors had inhabited a semi-aquatic environment, rather than having lived on the open plains, as was generally believed. At the time, Hardy's peers wrote him off as a crackpot. Now, 48 years later, there is strong support for the aquatic idea on the internet. Yet, on most university campuses, the Aquatic Ape hypothesis is still treated as belonging to the lunatic fringe and unworthy of debate. It is on the web that the debate - both for and against - rages, at sites such as Riverapes and Primitivism. The internet as a source of information is messy, chaotic and often misleading. But it is a godsend when academic practices have stiffened into inflexibility and university luminaries are regarded, in all intellectual disputes, as the final court of appeal." Interestingly, a similar idea is being propagated in a wonderful project called Liquid Publications -- where the authors (Fabio Casati, Fausto Giunchiglia and Maurizio Marchese from the University of Trento), indicate the need for "evolutionary, collaborative, and composable scientific" contributions. The authors stress the need for involving the wider community in judging the merit of research findings, through a "social network", rather than a small set of members from the academic community (often a limited programme committee), who may have pre-set views on what contributions they wish to accept. The authors of the Liquid Publication document indicate that there is a need for "... a radically different evaluation method for publications and for authors, based on the interest they generate in the community and on their innovative contributions ... (peer reviews can be used as a complement). The method also encourages early dissemination of innovative results." An interesting view is provided about the need to balance quality of a contribution vs. quick dissemination of new ideas. An accompanying article -- Publish and Perish -- explains some of the background to this thinking. There is certainly a need to make better use of Web technologies in disseminating ideas, and avoid the necessity to use standard academic peer-review as a basis for selection of ideas. However, more needs to be thought about how content on the Web can be scruitized for quality (whatever that may mean). Perhaps, publishers of journals and text books, and those who compile "impact factors" of research publications, also need to think more about how such "Liquid Publications" can be made more acceptable as channels of dissemination and are considered as "reputable" as other (more traditional) sources.

Super 30

In one of the world's most populated country, where education of children is given more emphasis than any other endeavour by parents, entering a prestigious University is the dream of many youngsters. The Indian Institute of Technology happens to be one such institution -- with over 300,000 students from across India competing for around 5,500 places each year (across all campuses). Selection is based on the highly competitive, science based, entrance exam. Super 30 is a specialist program led, rather interestingly, by a mathematics teacher (Anand Kumar) and a police inspector (Abhayanand) in the city of Patna, aiming to "... hunt for 30 meritorious talents from among the economically backward sections of the society and shape them for India's most prestigious institution -- IIT". Super30 searches for talent amongst the "brick kiln worker, rickshaw puller, landless farmer, roadside vendor and the likes", to bring opportunity to kids from these communities. Since its inception in 2003, Super30 has seen 94 successes out of 120 students who have come through its doors (a remarkable success by any standard). See the video by Tania Rodriguez on Super30, and a special two part programme (part of the "WITNESS" series) from Al-Jazeera TV. Chris Mitchell who produced the film for Al-Jazeera writes, "It really is a story of how people from the lowest caste in India can actually become millionaires and work in the global economy. I hope that people will see how a real effort, commitment, and hard work in extremely difficult circumstances, brings out amazing results." According to Dipak Mishra from the Time of India, "... The 'Super 30' heroes this year include Pranav Prince whose mother works as a tailor to support the family. There are also a nurse's son and an FCI godown watchman's son. Hard work + 'josh' = success, formulated Abhishek Kumar, another Super 30 star who is ranked 327th in the IIT-JEE this year." A remarkable tale of determination, ambition, and helping people help themselves.

Gartner's Emerging Trends Symposium

Gartner's Emerging Trends Symposium/ITxpo took place in April 2008, where, according the Communications of the ACM magazine, seven IT Grand Challenges were identified:

• Eliminate need to manually re-charge wireless devices
  
• Parallel programming applications that fully exploit multicore processors
  
• Non-tactile, natural computing interfaces
  
• Automated computer-to-human speech translation
  
• Reliable, long term digital storage
  
• Increase in programmer productivity (by 100%)
  
• Identify financial consequences of IT investments
  

It is really interesting to see this list, consisting of a collection of technology and business related outcomes. From the various Trip Reports from the expo, the one on Business Intelligence particularly caught my attention. According to the people surveyed in this area, 46% are now starting to make use of Google infrastructure or applications (such as Google Docs and Google Application Server). Also, "... major vendors are exploring the use of Cloud computing." Another interesting debate on "GreenIT" was led by Gartner analysts French Caldwell and Charles Smulders, who mentioned that " ... Green IT is a myth, and any efforts the IT industry takes to address climate change will have little impact." Hmmm ...

Making Trade Fair

I remember a few years ago when the Make Poverty History (MPH) campaign took hold of the UK. My work colleagues and friends were wearing wrist bands branded with the MPH logo, aiming to show their solidarity with this movement. However, I disagreed (and still do) with the general idea of MPH. With a growing world population, and limited resources, it is very unlikely that we can ever make poverty ``history". An alternative campaign that I would support would be to Make Trade Fair (MTF) -- rather than Make Poverty History. The MTF campaign has much more interesting and sustainable ideas -- which encourages people in developing countries to undertake trade with the developed work on more equitable basis. A case in point is the PhytoTrade Africa -- an organization promoting fair and environmentally sustainable trade. Recently, PhytoTrade has been promoting the import of fruit of the baobab tree from Africa into Europe. According to a recent BBC Report, "...the fruit, contained in a hard nut, has six times more vitamin C than oranges and twice as much calcium as milk. African people have eaten the fruit for thousands of years, but Europeans will consume its pulp as an ingredient in smoothies and cereal bars." PhytoTrade had been fighting an EU legislation to bring this fruit into Europe -- with an estimated market worth of over £500 million per year. An excellent example of how fair trade and a gap in the market can be used to support developing nations, and eventually help them eradicate poverty.

"Machinimation"

As computer games become more complex, developers of many of these games, such as Halo, Half-Life, Doom, Quake, The Sims, and Second Life, are providing tools to enable users to record the game they are playing. This has subsequently led to the new development of Machinima -- machine + animation -- which involves the recording and subsequent editing of game playing to make movies. The emergence of Machinima (which now has it's own Blog) is attributed to the fact that many gaming engines provide quite complex environments for movie making, reducing the need for specialist graphics software to generate movie sequences. Enthusiasts are now able to create short movies simply by recording and editing the games that they play on their video consoles -- using either tools directly built into the game (that enable a user to view their recorded game from multiple camera angles -- after the recording process), or third party tools that can work alongside specialist game engines. Rooster Teeth's Red vs. Blue provides one of the first series built on such animated productions. There is even now an Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences -- which now brings together enthusiasts in this genre in an annual festival. As an example, check out the 100 minute long War of the Servers (or the shorter 3 minute trailer) from Lit Fuse Films. Impressive stuff.

Skin-based Communication

According to Ident Technology -- "the skin is the largest organ of the human body. It is the physiological border between our body and the environment. Thereby it protects us from harmful influences from the outside. At the same time we receive feelings of heat and cold, but also tenderness or pain. So our skin has to fulfil a great variety of tasks." Ident Technology's Skinplex enables the human skin to be used as a mechanism for communication. Skinplex enables both the active transmission of information through (alongside) the skin and the passive identification of any changes in the electrical field produced by a human being. Essentially, a detector worn close to the skin can measure changes in an electric field, the field being induced via an oscillator worn along another part of the body -- and used as a transmission device. Japan's Red Tacton has been attempting to do the same. RedTacton have products that can transmit 10Mbps across the human skin! RedTacton has a brief explanation about how their product works. Fascinating!

Categorizing Clouds

Peter Laird from Oracle has written a wonderful blog to help navigate through the various concepts in cloud computing. Based on the current market offerings, he defines cloud computing as the "... virtualization of the data center, such that server machines are not thought of individually but as just a commodity in a greater collection of server machines." A visual representation of the different categories is also provided in his blog. Another really interesting talk in this space is from Alexis Richardson of CohesiveFT -- given at the Open Grid Forum in Barcelona (June 2008). Alexis talks about the Elastic Server from CohesiveFT, and provides a reference to John Will's Blog on "IT Management and Cloud" -- where a list of Cloud vendors currently providing commercial offerings can be found. Interesting to see that commercial vendors are starting to become more "Cloud active".

Cool Hunting

A fantastic Web site -- CoolHunting brings together news about art, design and creative technologies. The site features short stories about art installation and design houses across the world -- such as Plus Minus Zero -- the Japanese company co-founded by the master of minimal design Naoto Fukasawa. Wonderful archives and coverage.

"Tools for Armchair Activists"

London-based Troika combine art and design with new technologies to support mechanisms for communication. Check out their Guerilla Projection -- aimed at supporting message projections on street signs and other objects. Troika also recently participated at the inter_multi_trans_actions event held at Napier University in Edinburgh (June 2008), which brought together " ... a number of leading practitioners from the fields of art, architecture and design who each share a common desire to exploit the latest computing technologies in their creative practice".