unitSphere

just in time activation

2012-01-21T17:04:00.000-08:00

According to Hurley et al., humor is likely an evolved reward for shifting the target of our idea-driven just-in-time spreading-activation (JITSA). If so, media-assisted solutions to the adaptation of institutional-cultures (ala Nagle) will likely have to take this into account.

mono-layer crisis?

2011-11-07T05:50:00.000-08:00

Is the national debate about suicide in South Korea, in spite of economic growth, a symptom of media-promoted single-layer thinking that greater emphasis on the value (and challenge) of niche-network layer-multiplicity might help out with?

data & models paired

2011-11-06T04:12:00.000-08:00

Are folks tempted in the quantitative sciences to present too much theory sans observation, reflected e.g. implicitly in this recent article? This counterpoint on poorly designed high school tests suggests a need for more robust content at the high school level as well.

One fix may be to introduce inverse (algorithm-selection) challenges in parallel with the usual forward (algorithmic-reasoning) challenges. In other words, give students data to measure and interpret while they are also learning the models used to predict what's going to happen, so they at least know there's a science of choosing (as well as of using) models in the subject at hand.

This would help close the loop on concreteness, and call into play complementary skills that deserve attention during the crucial period in which students are deciding their major. Our NanoScience Practicals course is example of a cross-disciplinary offering designed to explicitly confront students each week with new data, as well as with topic-specific concepts & models.

This is also consistent with recent requests in the biological sciences for the development of better principle-based as distinct from informal reasoning skills. The importance of principle-based tools for selecting models is perhaps even more obvious in life-science than in physical science areas.

amazing humans

2011-10-23T05:17:00.000-07:00

Prairie dog barks about foxes afoot may be a timely reflection of danger, but who would pretend that reality is a pale shadow of their bark?

exciting possibility

2011-09-18T04:49:00.000-07:00

Prokaryotic microbes are the ideologues of the cell-biology world, in that they express their amino-acid codes willy-nilly. The eukaryotic cells of multi-celled organisms, on the other hand, are cell-biology's experts at model-selection, having learned to inform the codes that they express to the traffic in their organism's bloodstream.

Microbes will survive long after our sun makes this planet inhospitable for metazoan life. However, without the chance to evolve... (i) intra-organism circulatory-systems, (ii) regulated gene-expression and hence (iii) multi-celled life as we know it, the story of planet Earth would (I think) be much less interesting.

Electronic-communication networks open up the possibility of intra-community idea-expression, i.e. the use of organization-internal ideastreams on the level of pairs, families, communities, & cultures as well as worldwide. Should we seize this opportunity to become experts at model-selection on the level of idea codes, or shall we follow the example of ideologues who will likely be here long after electronic ideastreams are gone?

bovine bents

2011-09-16T04:05:00.001-07:00

It's easy to imagine that large mammals capable of domestication, in context of their preference for a hierarchical social structure as discussed by Jared Diamond in his book Guns germs and steel (W. W. Norton, 1999), might be preoccupied with royalty (e.g. their selection as savior, or their behavior as distraction) even if that meant ignoring issues that were impacting tens, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of closer community members.

I'm sure glad we don't act like that...

the answer to...

2011-09-15T09:03:00.001-07:00

..."What's the most important question?" is often not "How do we answer the obvious?" but rather "In what terms can the problem be most simply addressed?".

In math, this is the challenge of finding the right variable. In science this is the inverse problem of selecting a model given observational data, as distinct from the forward problem of prediction with model in hand.

The forward problem is easier to do and to teach. Moreover ability to solve it has survival value, so it's no surprise that ideologues abound in all walks of life.

As a result we may spend too few neurons implementing (and developing) ways to choose our questions with care. According to Sharon McGrayne's The theory that would not die (Yale University Press, 2011) there is a whole science of model selection for making the most of limited data.

This science, namely Bayesian inference, has a spectacular track-record of practical problem-solving. There is also a long tradition of idealogue disinterest.

Even today methods for idea-selection in a given field oft fall through the cracks of higher ed, in spite of their relevance to everyday life. That's the way things work, so expect it & adapt e.g. with ways to compensate for this tendency.

quality of life tests

2011-09-07T08:45:00.000-07:00

News of the day tends to focus on one layer of organization at a time, whether it be e.g. public health, family life, the state of the economy, or cultural beliefs. When you are only thinking about one layer at at time, it's often easy to cartoonify things in terms e.g. of good guys and bad guys.

Life's quality of course involves simplification, but it also involves subsystem-correlations that look in and out from the physical boundaries of skin, family and culture. Folks who are greedy on one layer (e.g. in their job) may be acting prudently on another (e.g. for their family). Hence multi-layer thinking about community health is more likely to be about the balance between different (and sometimes competing) perspectives than it is about good versus bad.

How can we: (i) track what we can know about the health of all six of these correlation layers, and moreover (ii) use that information to optimize quality of life across the board? This might make for some fun (and constructive) regional competitions in the process.

ideastream science

2011-07-25T06:29:00.000-07:00

In addition to perturbing an individual's attention-focus (toward e.g. the buffering of correlations that look in/out from skin, family or culture), unscoped electronic-broadcasts (in any of various forms) can also affect the choice of concepts in terms of which one thinks. Folks unfamiliar with the power of concept-sets to leave blind spots in our awareness (as well as to manipulate neolithic-feelings) may be especially vulnerable to this effect.

Examples of "broadcasts willy-nilly" (i.e. communications to everyone regardless of their mandate) that often do this include:

xenophobic, fiscal, and/or territorial threat broadcasts,
health-risk warnings not accompanied by observational data,
cartoonifications of individual people as well as lifeform types, etc.

For this reason education in most fields should likely include an explicit discussion of tools for choosing one's concepts and models, as well as the more reliably covered model-based skills of e.g. informal reasoning and algorithmic implementation.

StL Beacon quote

2011-07-19T12:04:00.001-07:00

"Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations."
-- Joseph Pulitzer in The North American Review, May 1904

Of course, the means by which ideas travel may have changed a bit between then and now...

ideastream pH

2011-06-18T05:55:00.000-07:00

The bloodstream in multicelled animals facilitates asynchronous communication between cells and organ systems. Even though each end-user can put out, and read in, what it wants from the bloodstream there exist mechanisms to regulate total concentrations of things like hydrogen ions, salt, glucose, etc.

This suggests an interesting way that governments might regulate constructive use of electronic ideastreams without interfering with either consumer choice or freedom of expression. Look for more on possible specific strategies in this context, here, in the days ahead...

fact free reporting

2011-06-06T19:09:00.000-07:00

Does a dispute about topics (e.g. brain cancer caused by cellphones) become newsworthy just because a familiar name brings it up? Should competent news organizations respect the critical observer in each of their subscribers by referencing relevant observations (e.g. the decline in brain cancer as cell phones proliferate) when technical topics come up in a context whose primary value (for one party or another) may be to pull neolithic strings?

imagination

2011-04-19T07:19:00.001-07:00

Can you imagine living with a ton of air sitting on you,
in spacetime so curvy it's tough to jump higher than a meter,
among objects whose spin-rate must increase in steps,
with moving charges that contract enough to levitate,
while you move timeward at nearly the speed of light
relying on a hierarchy of hedges against uncertainty
to keep carbon in the sun-powered living crust on your planet
from returning to its early solar-system gaseous CO₂ form?
You may know someone who does...

meltdown math

2011-03-30T06:46:00.000-07:00

Does it help to say "the radiation was 1000 times normal" without saying where and for how long, or how it compares to everyday differences e.g. in visiting the mountains, taking a plane ride, or getting an X-ray?

radiation sources

In that context it might be useful to list here some numbers for various kinds of everyday exposure to ionizing radiation in terms of both exposure rate and of total dose, where one equivalent Joule (J) of absorbed energy per kilogram (kg) of target mass is also known as 1 Sievert (Sv) or 100 Röntgen equivalents for man (rem). We might start with total doses of different types of radiation for various events.

Table 1: Various ionizing radiation doses
Activity	Absorbed dose [μJ/kg]	Equivalent Dose [μSv]	Equivalent Dose [rem]
dental X-ray	10	10	0.001
foot/arm X-ray	10	10	0.001
cosmic rays for year		270	0.027
earth bkgd. for year		280	0.028
mammogram	3,000	3,000	0.3
airline crew for year		9,000	0.9
GI X-ray series	14,000	14,000	1.4
nuclear worker for year		20,000	2
poisoning effects		1,000,000	100

radioactive transport

This might be good place for notes on the expected reduction with distance of radiative dose, and of air-borne and water-borne contamination as well. They might help answer questions about how much you should worry about stuff happening down the road, and/or on the other side of the planet.
For instance, radiation from a localized specimen will fall off as one over distance squared (or faster if there are absorbers in the way). Thus if the dose rate is one rem/hour at 1 meter away, at 10 meters away it will be 0.01 rem/hour or less. That means that if the source of radioactivity stays put, distance between you and it will have a very powerful effect.

On the other hand, lateral transport of radioactive materials away from a point e.g. on the earth's surface may at best result in concentrations that fall off as one over distance. If the flow is not radially outward but unidirectional, the fall-off will be greater for those out of the flow path but less for those in that path. Thus if the outflow of radioactive stuff gives a 1% concentration a kilometer away from the source, the average concentration 10 kilometers away should be only down to 0.1%.

effects of radiation

Similarly the risks of ill-affect associated with the various types of exposure might be of interest to folks who want to decide for themselves what is useful information and what is not. Short of the somatic damage caused by very large (e.g. ≈ 1 equivalent J/kg) doses of radiation, radiation might e.g. increase one's chance to get cancer but by how much?

Estimates e.g. for the effect of 1-rem computer tomography (CT) scans might be something like 4 cases of cancer (developing after a decade or more) for every 10,000 scans. Thus the odds of getting cancer from a CT scan may be less than the odds of throwing 11 coins at once and finding that all of them have landed heads up, i.e. less than 1 in 2¹¹ = 2048 times. If you need the scan, that chance may be one you can afford to take but regardless it should probably be your call.

nuclear meltdowns

2011-03-15T23:29:00.000-07:00

Fission-energy is a form of ordered-energy from long-dead stars that's found in all atoms much heavier than Iron-58 and Nickel-62. The only way we know to release it is to exploit the neutron-mediated herd-behavior of certain big atoms like Uranium-235.

Fissioning releases that ordered-energy by breaking atoms almost randomly into two fragments with energies that correspond to heat at about 200MeV/(2k_B) ≈ 10¹²K. The resulting motion warms up the atom's surroundings, including any coolant being used to pull the heat out for use running an electric generator.

This is an abundant form of ordered-energy that doesn't create green-house gases. To the extent that we make it safe and sustainable, fission energy is an important part of our future.

One of the two fission fragments usually has an atomic weight between 75 and 105, the other an atomic weight between 150 and 130. One inconvenient truth is that these fragments have a mess of chemical & radioactive properties.

The other problem is that once you get a herd of such atoms to start fissioning, the process may be controlled only by aggressively cooling the herd. Otherwise it melts and allows the release of both heat and fragments to get out of hand.

This is not new, as meltdown of naturally-occurring reactions like this are present in the geological record. If you have ideas for designing reactors so that gravity helps melting to disperse the critical mass, this might come in handy for future reactor construction!

All told, we take our chances with all forms of ordered-energy both because: (a) we need it to survive and because (b) it is fun to waste. If one looks at the numbers, the ratio of benefit to both: (i) cost & (ii) risk for fission-energy is quite good in spite of our media's passion for sensationalizing it.

If it helps with the overall picture of regional land-use, therefore, folks who assume the risk of living near reactors should get a break. That's mainly because space nearby a reactor will most likely be fine, but might accidentally lose its property value and habitability for decades.

idea angiogenesis

2011-03-08T05:35:00.000-08:00

Archival limited-access joint-editing spaces can serve as the idea-code bloodstream for communities of all sorts, much as molecule-code bloodstreams serve internal communication between cells in many multicelled organisms. The internet and browsers for the most part already offer to much of the population access to such idea-streams, where and when they have been set up.

Once such joint-editing platforms are made available, however, developing the behavior patterns for access and sharing may take time. Can mechanisms for the development of molecule flow to and from biological cells via the circulatory system likewise provide inspiration there?

who's your daddy?

2011-01-22T12:52:00.001-08:00

One of the reasons that the rocky planets in solar systems with more O than C are made of silicates is that mainly O and Si are left after most of the carbon pairs up with oxygen to form CO₂.

Note that even trees on earth (not to mention animals) are made of carbon temporarily pulled from the gas phase onto a planetary surface.

This is how our atmosphere, thankfully, reacts with the planet and sunlight to form a living crust.

We get water and nutrients from mother earth, but the ground state for the carbon of which we're made is CO₂. It's a key part of where we came from, and it carries away the carbon weight that we (and organisms which prey on us) metabolize.

Civilization may produce many gases harmful to the environment that are mere pollutants. Carbon dioxide is not only that.

targeted clotting

2010-11-30T08:54:00.000-08:00

Our bodies generally do a pretty good job of sending molecules (like blood thickeners) where they are needed (like the site of a wound) and not where they aren't needed (like in our brain). Our body's circulatory system for molecules is like society's electronic ideastream.

For sustainable use of either molecules or ideas, explicit awareness of the multi-layer structure of our communities as well as the scope of a given communication is crucial.

Like chemical concentration differences from point to point in our bodies, gradients in social access to information are necessary. Intelligent packaging of communications is also important, so that the damage due to occasional spills is minimal. For example confusing countries & corporations with individuals is just as irresponsible, whether you do it as a reporter or as a supreme court justice.

Thus we're all responsible for what we say, what we repeat, and what we listen to. Let's set some better examples downstream...

pros & cons

2010-11-29T05:37:00.000-08:00

Theorem:

Moving toward the negative of anything embedded in a higher-dimensional space reduces the orthogonality (and hence dimensionality) of your path with respect to the postive of that same thing.

Corollary:

X and anti-X are in cahoots, even when they don't act like it.

baseball & innovation

2010-11-22T14:39:00.000-08:00

"Baseball professionals" might be seen as folks who love the game (in whatever field), and who may aspire to the discipline's hall of fame.

That said, experts in the game are often the last to see opportunities to adapt to new information and developments.

Can you think of any examples of this?

technical question

2010-11-15T11:42:00.000-08:00

More generally, what sub-system correlations have you been buffering of late?

layered self-concepts

2010-11-03T05:36:00.000-07:00

The cells of animals and plants in practice each maintain their own microbe, tissue & organism selves just as each of us maintain our own organism, family & culture selves.

One difference, of course, is that we each have unique organism, family & culture self-concepts that we can talk about to help us buffer correlations which look inward and outward from the boundaries of our self, our family & our culture.

What fraction of your time are you able to spend looking inward & outward from each?

Bayesian inference

2010-10-30T11:31:00.000-07:00

Modern approaches to making decisions about concepts, models and parameters based on partial information require that you make the underlying assumptions explicit. This is key, for example, to understanding where the ideal gas law, equipartition, and mass-action work well, and to figuring out what to do when they don't.

It might help folks put political broadcast and pedagogical strategies to better use as well. What kind of entries would you put into a table which outlines important assumptions that folks make everyday, as well as where those assumptions do and don't apply?

A sample table of this sort follows, to perhaps inspire your ideas:

Bayesian inference in political media
Concept	Assumption	Application Area
focus bandwidth on who's boss	leader choice solves problems	social hierarchy is a key for only select vertebrates
dollars spent is value lost	financial value is conserved	the household scale but not the national scale
treat unbelievers as inhuman	idea-pools always serve humans	may help only if unbelievers are few & can't hear
vote makes right	consensus is well-informed	only w/both incentives & time to update awareness
you're measured by your finances	all means to money are of value	this works in worlds w/o ways to prey on communities

e-culture possibilities

2010-10-19T09:00:00.000-07:00

Authentication-accessed archival joint-editing space may allow families, schools, and cities to craft digital-space content useful for future as well as for current generations.

This is important because there is a key role (if our planet is to sustain a large sentient population) for parallel competition between individuals, between gene pools, and between idea pools.

For example, to families an archival wiki cloud-database might be a place for:

family stories,
genealogy information,
recipes,
operating protocols,
links e.g. to other resources of interest to family members,
and what else?

Resources (and developing business models) able over the long haul to host and manage access to such collaboration spaces may be possible to develop with existing technology (like cell phones) already available across much of the planet.

position vs frequency

2010-10-15T03:33:00.000-07:00

I was heading west on highway 64 just past downtown St. Louis when ahead I saw a pickup truck pulling a trailer, veering a bit left then right then left as it traveled down the road. It was clear that the driver was aware of the problem, and figured that his job was to keep returning the truck to its own lane.

This logic, as simple and impeccable in intent as it was, was alas dead wrong because the driver's response-time fit beautifully with the resonant-frequency of the weave. Like someone kicking one's legs at exactly the right time to pump up the motion of a playground swing, the driver's logic loop repeatedly pumped energy into the weave, which got wilder and wilder until all of a sudden the truck and trailer spun out into a parked position across five lanes of traffic.

Likewise there's a danger when political communities run into problems whose natural response time is comparable to the election cycle. Like the truck driver who was focused only on position on the road and oblivious to the response time of the system, the community could easily pump energy into an instability by reacting naturally from one election to the next.

Can you think of places where this might be relevant today?

the joy of ideas

2010-10-14T06:34:00.001-07:00

For those motivated by passion, love for ideas (3) is an important complement to love for family (2) and love for self (1).

Non-byline contributions motivated by love for elements of the idea-world could be crucial, if our large human population is to move toward sustainability on this planet.

What ways do you see for beefing up such contributions?

Passion aside, others for good reason might struggle to do only things that bring in reward on a linear (e.g. economic) scale. They may have little or no time for non-byline contribution.

For these folks, how might such value-scales also serve to catalyze (i.e. to help encourage with only loan rather than expenditure of resources) time spent on: (1a) fitness, (1b) friends, (2a) family, (2b) home/work community, (3a) culture and (3b) profession?

layer multiplicity

2010-10-07T05:04:00.000-07:00

Niche-network layer multiplicity analysis sets up a unified context:

for recognizing the parallel importance of culture, family, & health,
for defining (i) poverty without reference to dollars, & (ii) community health across species,
for respecting the contribution to earth's complexity of every individual, microbe, & raindrop on the planet.

Of course, much work (across disciplines and perspectives) remains to be done in putting it to use effectively.

self-concept layering

2010-10-06T12:49:00.000-07:00

What social systems recognize the need for us to separately buffer our own idea-pool & gene-pool, as well as our organism, self-concepts?

Put another way, in what settings (delicate though they may be) is it NOT better to assume that everyone will be looking out for their own individual self-interest first?

politics & education

2010-09-21T07:20:00.000-07:00

Last night there was a discussion on NPR about the challenge of getting politicians in Africa to allocate resources to schools for children.

Suppose that citizens were routinely polled about the mix of their time spent on the 6 correlation-layers that look in/out from skin, family & culture.

If from these community inputs politicians were graded on what they do to increase niche-network layer-multiplicity and the size of the middle class (i.e. individuals able to direct their time toward things like culture and profession), this would create a numerical incentive for them to help educate kids as well as to minimize social-network disruptions. It might also provide a more robust and quantitative definition of poverty, reigning in deniers and at the same time explicitly valuing opportunity to interact with friends and family independent of participation in the monetary economy.

Without this, of course, politicians may do better for themselves and their family by figuring how to make the rich (including themselves) richer as the middle class shrinks. If we don't lessen the temptation, isn't this like putting the goldfish bowl in reach of the cat?

What do you think?

paradigm shifts

2010-08-24T14:54:00.000-07:00

Can you imagine...

...living with a ton of air sitting on you,
...in spacetime so curvy it's tough to jump higher than a meter,
...among objects whose spin-rate must increase in steps,
...which attract/repel enough to levitate from length-contraction,
...while you move timeward at the speed of light
...relying on a hierarchy of hedges against uncertainty?

Do you perhaps know someone who's actually been in this situation?

information upgrade

2010-08-18T02:13:00.000-07:00

Everyday uses for information prompt one to think of it as something like a string of characters which takes up space e.g. in a book or in a computer's memory. However these uses depend on context, since one person's information is another's meaningless gibberish. In fact the idea of information as a collection of isolated objects misses out on important physical aspects of the concept. As a result it has for instance distracted discussions of idea-evolution with questions about "particulate storage" in the brain, when the conversion of idea codes to digital storage is clearly taking place outside of our brains.

Even in its earliest communications-theory apps, information was an element of structure (like a string of characters delivered to the far end of a communications line) that was correlated with another element of structure (like the string of characters typed in to be sent at the near end of a communications line). This correlation value is delocalized i.e. dependent on the existence of structures at both ends of the comparison. Thus the information value of a map of the sky can be taken away by either destroying the map, or by randomizing the positions of stars in the heavens.

All quantitative applications of the information concept, like the "mutual information" described above, may be seen as special cases of a correlation measure known as KL-divergence. This is a kind of net surprisal, whose units are proportional to the logarithm of a multiplicity as for example in: #choices = 2^#bits.

A particular advantage of this definition (with roots in Bayesian inference) is that it works regardless of whether or not the elements of structure take the form of replicable code strings. In the language of the introductory note to Shannon and Weaver's 1948 book, this broadened definition can deal with more complex questions of correlation, meaning, truthfulness, and fidelity than the "Level A" problems associated with the communication of replicable codes.

Thus for example it applies to the evolution of complexity (like the accretion of planets in the solar nebula) before elements of correlation-storage associated with it "go digital" e.g. in the form of nucleic acid or ASCII strings. Moreover this definition works for quantum systems e.g. qubits, and "it has second law teeth". As a result for example acquired knowledge in general, and even a blank storage device on which to write, extracts a minimum price in thermodynamic availability.

digital sand tracks

2010-08-14T18:56:00.000-07:00

What fraction of us are still analog jellyfish of the idea world, and unlikely to leave fossilized tracks let alone bones in the digital sand?

Here "bones in the digital sand" might be entries which start out with your by-line, while "tracks in the digital sand" might be edits to something with a separate digital life even if these too are traceable to you through document histories, etc. Although literature publications are being converted from analog to digital, the universe of abiding fossils in the digital sand may downstream be found in many other places as well (at least until net neutrality disappears).

In a larger context, one might consider six types of legacy (analog or digital) for an individual metazoan. These include actual bones & footprints in the sense of (i) its physical self & (ii) objects that it shaped, bones & footprints in the gene-pool sand which correspond to (iii) its offspring & (iv) its impact on the success of other families in its community, and bones & footprints in the idea-pool sand which correspond to (v) its by-line contributions to culture & (vi) its spiritual and intellectual impact on those around.

nnlm tweet

2010-08-12T15:36:00.000-07:00

Community health (like information, complexity & dollar value) is conserved not like energy but like available work: Only with care...

balance vs. symmetry

2010-06-27T05:20:00.000-07:00

Social movements that systematically deny the importance of a balance between subsystem correlation layers associated with consensus (iv), belief (v), and observation (vi) generally become politically totalitarian. This is true of movements which elevate enterprise (iv) over the greater good (vi) and vice versa, as well as those which assume that religion (v) reigns supreme.

By compressing three independent "ways to wiggle" (degrees of freedom) down to a smaller number, they provide a structure for occupancy by organisms evolved in a neolithic setting that's degenerate in the same way that electron states around an atom might acquire energy degeneracy in the absence of a magnetic field.

attention-slice status-updates

2010-06-08T08:38:00.001-07:00

The "never-negative" quantity mutual information (a special case of KL-divergence, which also underpins measures of perceived rarity, available work, and species diversity) can be broken down across subsystem boundaries. This allows one to experimentally define constrained multiplicities for all sorts of layered complex systems.

This project examines the multiplicity of correlation-layers looking inward and outward with respect to three physical boundary types of special interest to (at least some) metazoans on earth, namely: skin, family and culture. In particular, average niche-network layer-multiplicity (NNLM) characterizes the breadth of niche-responsibility carried by individual organisms, while NNLM center-of-mass M_cm characterizes the correlation breadth of the community in which they live.

The foregoing can help define robust ad-hoc measures of community health with deep roots in the mathematical, physical, and biological sciences. Objectively monitoring the state of communities via these measures is a future challenge, to which input from individuals in those communities will likely be important. Individual attention-slice status-updates, using social media now accessible via mobile-communications across the globe, can help bring these multi-scale inputs on-line today.

physical economics

2010-05-10T12:45:00.001-07:00

Economics can be given solid roots in physical-science with a bit of help from modern-day information theory. This lets one assign objective (long-term exchangable) value to assets, thereby adding stability to markets otherwise based on media-manipulated confidence, computerized trading-algorithms, and e-trader typos.

For instance, in this context the objective physical-assets (as distinct from credit-assets) that humans offer to the layered niche-network that they comprise are their knowledge and their ability to do work.

Similar KL-divergence based yardsticks for the value of other physical assets (relative to ambient or expected) may be developed and applied:

to energy assets (like gasoline & food) in context of their available work (with or without considering their surprisal on other levels),
to mineral assets in terms of their utility and abundance,
to information assets (including species diversity) in terms of their accessibility as well as the time and effort needed to acquire them,
and what else?

In this same context money, "assigned property", and even some types of "assigned responsibility" may be in essence credit for prior work i.e. a different type of information in structure. Like all forms of subsystem correlation, the value of these things is also delocalized (i.e. removable on either side of the correlation) and by the second law unlikely (but still able) to grow by accident.

Translating the physical assets mentioned in paragraphs 2 and 3 above into (i) other physical assets, and (ii) into liquid and/or long-shelf-life credit assets, may be positive-sum (correlation enhancing) objectives. Finding ways to latch onto credit generated others with minimal constructive effort on your own part may be zero-sum or negative-sum instead.

hoop-hopping hoots

2010-04-29T15:10:00.000-07:00

We occasionally bring up the subject here of broadcasts that reduce others to code by pandering to our primate instincts for gratuitous cartoonification. Hoot hoot!

But of course, us primates didn't evolve with an internet that could mindlessly broadcast hoots willy nilly to play with the feelings of millions. Is this a potential concern?

Would a program of hoot-stamps help to let consumers know which, if any, hoops hoots have hopped through before they were broadcast? This might for instance help folks filter toots and tweets too according to their own niche, rather than being beset with broadcasts informed to their listener's species alone.

non-zero-sumness

2010-04-12T10:57:00.000-07:00

Robert Wright in his book Non-Zero discusses the relationship between "non-zero-sumness" and evolving organic & social correlations. Non-zero-sumness arises whenever mutual information (I_AB) is used to measure the correlation between two systems A and B. This is because uncertainty about the whole (S_AB) becomes less than the sum of uncertainties about individual parts (namely S_A+S_B), since I_AB = S_A+S_B-S_AB ≥ 0.

The practical bureaucratic need for categorization notwithstanding, putting others in their place via "in the box" cartoonification may remove the sense of collaborative perspective (e.g. over time) from the interaction between organisms. This could well threaten non-zero-sumness, negatively impact niche-network layer-multiplicity (NNLM), and eventually take its toll on life's future standing crop.

These insights also relate to the logos of evolution's direction. The natural and physical sciences on many levels confirm that complexity in the form of layered subsystem-correlations depends on a source of available work (or more generally on KL-divergence). Hence increasing complexity is not the inevitable destiny of any physical system. It's instead a delicate opportunity that might be enjoyed if and only if we: (a) work at it, and (b) are gifted with continued blessings from the world around.

cost/benefit change

2010-04-02T03:34:00.000-07:00

E-communications have preferentially increased the manipulative impact of, and funding for, non-local appeals to fear, anger & xenophobia.

There is multiplicative (i.e. runaway dI/dt ∝ I) potential here, particularly when such non-local appeals seize on this opportunity to warn you vociferously about other non-local appeals, as when the lawless rail against evil, bigots against totalitarians, etc.

Constructive local action (e.g. washing dishes, or developing locally-relevant resources not accessible to the open web) might be one way to minimize the number of your clock cycles wasted on long-distance cartoonification.

What are some other tools that might help us mitigate this corollary effect of rapid information flow?

food and fuel

2010-04-02T03:04:00.000-07:00

Decreases in locally-available free-energy/capita often result in loss of niche-network layer-multiplicity & genetic/memetic diversity.

Key elements to counter the impact of such reductions in the short term (likely to take place on a myriad of time scales), as well as the eventual global collapse likely in the long run, include:

targeted support of subsystem correlations on multiple scales of space, time, and organization,

constructive development of information resources in concert with collaborative action,

and what else?

modernized maxim

2010-04-02T03:00:00.000-07:00

There is no sustainably free lunch, i.e. all net surprisal extracts a cost in thermodynamic availability.

What's new here is that:

we've added sustainably, since in the short run free lunches can be obtained from time to time but not in a steady-state fashion,

thermodynamic availability (e.g. in bits) and net surprisal (KL-divergence) are used to restate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics in way which applies nicely to complex non-equilibrium systems,

and what else?

starsmoke droplets

2010-01-26T03:39:00.000-08:00

Tiny interstellar-onion spaceships were filled with unlayered sheets of fresh-baked carbon atoms & delivered to our corner of the Milky Way.

This tasty tweet refers to recent laboratory study of micron-sized starsmoke spheres whose carbon atoms were cooked up in red giant stars across the early galaxy, condensed in those cool star atmospheres, and delivered to earth by primitive meteorites to be extracted by cosmochemists at U. Chicago and studied in labs of the midwest.

Many of your carbon atoms also arrived here in spaceships like this. Recent developments suggest a role for supercooled liquid carbon droplets in their process of formation.

closing the loop

2010-01-25T14:19:00.000-08:00

Charity like first-aid can meet short-term needs, but strategic no-profit loans may be key to sustainability at home and abroad.

it's easy for cats

2010-01-25T14:14:00.000-08:00

Most metazoans buffer correlations directed in/out from skin and gene-pool boundaries. Worrying about idea-pool boundaries too is not easy, even for organisms as talented as us!

expensive sci-fi

2010-01-25T13:48:00.000-08:00

The "jump to lightspeed" might empty your gas tank quick, given that >40 Olympic pools of powder are needed to make a 45 slug relativistic.

survival symmetry

2010-01-25T13:46:00.000-08:00

Ice floats so that aqueous life on our planet survives freezing water, thanks to the quantum preference of H2O molecules for 4 neighbors.

scientific cool

2009-12-27T19:04:00.000-08:00

Is there objective value to the vernacular assertion that human communities are somehow "more cool" than communities of non-sentient metazoans, which are themselves somehow "spiffier" than communities of microbes alone? If so, a more scientific definition of the assertion's meaning might be needed for a start.

Imagine that "cool" in the vernacular applies to things that in some positive way show evidence of unexpectedness i.e. KL-divergence from ambient or correlation-surprisal in bits. These might include:

a blank or low-noise canvas (e.g. provided by that new carpet or that freshly painted fence),
smart engineering (e.g. found in that Mercedes-Benz or that new i-phone),
informed/evolved connections (e.g. discovered at a school reunion or in a new job),
and what else?

Other synonyms for cool which might be considered in this same context include:

keen, nifty, rad, amazing,
appealing, spiffy, neat,
just right, fashionable, in sync,
correlated, together, unflustered,
less random, chilly, heat sink,
and what else?

The simplest quantitative measure of coolness as unexpected harmony may be the surprisal of throwing N heads on the first toss of N coins. This is guess what: N bits! Other more familiar practical quantities that also show this quality of unexpectedness include:

available work e.g. in the form of food and gasoline,
the variety of species and number of niche-layers in a community,
and what else?

This might be a good place to expand futher on what these important quantities have in common.

multilevel public square

2009-11-22T04:40:00.000-08:00

Recent developments in the transmission of ideas between citizens have included things like the vote, the opinion poll, and more recently the blog. Through such tools, communities draw strength from the logical and perceptual tools of all members.

Regional task-focused wiki's, added to this sequence, can (possibly with local government support) help create multiscale versions of the public square by nurturing real-time (24-7) constructive internal-community discussion about topics of shared interest. Such discussion might for instance take the form of unofficial but jointly-edited:

event notes for the specific audience at hand,
task protocols e.g. for getting something done like:
- getting a tree removed,
- avoiding a speed trap,
- meeting occupancy requirements,
- and what else?
observation notebooks about processes of community interest like:
- traffic hazards,
- flooding,
- questionable activity,
- "brown tap water",
- and what else?
educational information on locally-specific matters e.g. like:
- selling electricity to the grid,
- getting certain plants to grow,
- and what else?
strategy discussions e.g. on making sure that a new electrical-transformer substation in the area is safe for residents,
and what else?

The big picture

2009-10-05T05:55:00.000-07:00

What if science not only took a tolerant view of belief systems, but saw them as an important part of the physical structure of communities. Indeed nature has been telling us for a long time that subsystem correlations are a key physical part of the world around.

For example science already recognizes the ordered energy that powers our vehicles, our appliances, and even ourselves. It also recognizes the mutual information associated with species diversity on our planet.

The next step may be recognition of layer-multiplicity in niche-networks as just one more ad hoc measure of subsystem correlations (i.e. net surprisal or KL-divergence with respect to ambient) that we'd like to nurture as best we can. Work that each of us is doing to support correlations looking inward/outward from the physical boundaries of skin, family & culture fit into this picture.

This is one way that science might provide us with a picture so big that all residents of our solar system could enjoy making it better, and more quantitative, over time.

Multiscale objectives

2009-09-16T05:03:00.000-07:00

In spite of our primate origins, prestige among apes is important but not the only meaningful goal in life.

Trick question

2009-09-07T04:07:00.000-07:00

Are polarizing questions more likely to: (a) be ill-posed and not bear repeating, or (b) show others to be much stupider than you?

Winning hearts & minds

2009-08-29T05:24:00.000-07:00

Sell democracy by showing not that it has bigger bombs but that it works better sustainably.

In this context niche-network layer-multiplicity might serve as a cross-disciplinary measure of how well democracy works.

Like available-work & species-diversity, NNLM is a measure of complexity defined by the standing crop of correlated-subsystems.

Seen this lately?

2009-08-07T14:06:00.001-07:00

Idea makes hay while bad guy catches glare! Where is this sometimes a problem?

Multiscale values

2009-08-03T09:06:00.000-07:00

What does your conscience do to balance the doctor, mentor, parent, community-leader, cultural-guardian & scholar-scientist inside you?

Puzzle solving or evolving?

2009-06-28T09:53:00.000-07:00

Is the fact that the beak of the New Zealand wry-billed plover slopes to the right, thereby helping the right eye quide the beak toward food under small river stones, related to the fact that right and left handed people respond more quickly to unexpected stimuli with their left hand?

This article suggests that the left brain in vertebrates supports solving behavior & in humans language. The right responds to the unexpected.

Which side do you rely on most?

Taste in questions?

2009-06-08T11:32:00.000-07:00

There are empirical reasons to think that the appeal of black-and-white answers to uncritically-chosen questions is especially difficult to resist for communities under stress. This may be why demagogues sometimes thrive in bad economic times.

Hence it's probably a good idea to beware of folks who enthusiastically criticize others by monoscale categorization or in true-false terms. That's because ill-chosen questions, with simple answers, are likely one path by which complex life on our planet will begin to fold up its tent.

A better bottom line

2009-05-31T05:59:00.000-07:00

Political folk are fond of "bad-mouthing" countries, groups & individuals who don't agree with them, with no respect for objectivity or balance. This is an element of human nature that on a crowded planet may work against temporary coexistence as well as long term sustainability.

An important repair for the bad effects of this tendency might be development of robust and objective tools for monitoring the impact of policy decisions and political strategies on community health. Niche-network layer-multiplicity is a tool based in the physical sciences which could work objectively, for now at least within communities of a single organism type, without regard for race, creed, species, or even solar system of origin. It can guide us away from Jerry Springer moments toward meaningful dialog (when that's what we want).

What will it take to develop it and put it to good use?

Relativity lesson

2009-05-30T10:55:00.001-07:00

Unguided reactions to media communcations might be damped by better conceptual framing i.e. informed rearrangement of our idea maze.

Consider the shift in questioning style mandated by the discovery that time's passage is frame-dependent. Since our old ways of thinking and talking often assume that time's passage is universal instead, they may cause more confusion than they are worth.

In that case, the cognitive dissonance can be lessened by reframing questions. For instance, unless you want the resulting arguments to sound like a free-for-all on the Jerry Springer Show...:

...don't ask: Is that particular clock fast or slow?
...instead ask: How does the proper-time elapsed on that clock compare to: (i) the clock's elapsed-time reading and (ii) the time elapsed in a map-frame of co-moving yardsticks and synchronized clocks?

This second two-part question is better because it respects the fact that time's passage is frame dependent, and separates questions of clock-calibration (i) from questions about frame-dependent differences in how fast it appears to tick (ii).

What are some comparable guidelines for making media communications more robust?

Constructive refocus

2009-05-22T08:22:00.000-07:00

Present day media likes to talk about problems with corruption by others. It's also fond of summarizing the numbers of people killed and injured. Both of these items relate to the structure of bonds in a community i.e. of layered niches of responsibility, but they make no attempt to capture the whole picture.

The multiplicity of niche types that look in and out from the skin, family and culture of each individual does attempt to capture the whole picture. When a disaster occurs or a wall is built between cities, what does that do the connections between people involved? How are these connections impacted by changes in governmental policy?

Although there are simpler ways to score social injury, progress bringing niche-network layer multiplicity in a community up near six can be a robust measure of accomplishment as well. Hence a news focus on this broader picture of social impact is probably worth working on, even if we have to work through a few pitfalls of biased representation along the way. Suggestions invited...

Integrative opportunity

2009-05-18T07:50:00.001-07:00

The challenge of making available to everyone all six of the niche types that look in/out-ward from skin, family and culture provides a rational basis for working together across regional-community, belief-system, and professional boundaries.

Name two groups who distrust one another, and this platform provides a context for them to work together. How can we make the most of it, and what are some illustrative examples that come to mind?

Flatlining complexity.

2009-05-17T07:04:00.000-07:00

Disrespect for perspectives informed to other levels of organization is an excellent way to lose those levels irreversibly. In fact slowing down this process may be a key challenge (not just for our species) during the second half of metazoan life on earth.

How might we help?

Are all roses roses?

2009-05-01T06:08:00.000-07:00

Call all spades spades, and black hearts (not expected and hence easily mistaken for spades in a typical deck) may get carte blanche.

Media economics

2009-04-23T07:38:00.000-07:00

What folks will pay for something like a home or a gold mine in light of the latest news-reports, and that something's thermodynamic net surprisal with respect to the physical ambient*, are two different things. How can we help one another not lose sight of the latter, as we adapt to the new-found mobility of cartoonifying news-reports across our planet?

* The technical term for this is Kullback-Leibler divergence.

Proactive spending

2009-02-01T17:21:00.000-08:00

Discussions about the economy lately have been interesting: We want to give money to people, banks, etc. in hopes that they'll spend it willy nilly rather than save it. Wait a minute. Didn't we get in this mess by spending what we haven't earned on what we don't need?

A more proactive approach might be to give folks better reasons to spend what they have, regardless of where they got it. Most people already know that there are good as well as bad reasons to shop for ipods, video games, automobiles, and new places to live rather than to keep one's money in the bank or under a mattress. Perhaps it's time to dust off some of those reasons.

For instance, most of the challenges that face us in the years ahead involve taking care of correlations between ourselves and the world around on as many as possible of six levels. Connection diversity can at once be a measure of community health and resilience, as well as of individual accomplishment and satisfaction.

Putting money in the bank or under the mattress does very little for connection diversity, especially in times of economic uncertainty. What does? The answer is strengthening correlations that look inward and outward from three physical boundaries: that of your skin, your family, and your culture. Correlations on all six of these levels face severe challenges in the days ahead, and that's what each of us may want to spend some of what we have on now.

How can we get the media engaged in helping us do this as smartly as possible?

Culpability?

2008-12-07T07:38:00.001-08:00

Why should lawmakers and taxpayers be angry at car companies, when lawmakers OK and taxpayers buy/drive guzzlers each time gas costs go down?

Positive thinking

2008-12-03T11:15:00.000-08:00

Count on management to be (i) ignorant, (ii) incompetent, and (iii) self-aggrandizing. That way you can look forward to pleasant surprises when you occasionally get less than three out of three.

Sustainable ed

2008-12-03T05:10:00.000-08:00

Teach for today's jobs too, and not only to yesterday's tests.

Undamped oscillation

2008-10-23T15:22:00.000-07:00

Someone I know was heading west on the interstate just past downtown when ahead they saw a pickup pulling a trailer, veering a bit left then right then left as it traveled down the road. It was clear that the driver was aware of the problem, and figured that his job was to keep returning the truck to its own lane. This logic, as simple and impeccable in intent as it was, was alas dead wrong because the driver's response-time fit beautifully with the resonant-frequency of the weave. Like someone kicking one's legs at exactly the right time to pump up the motion of a playground swing, the driver's logic loop repeatedly pumped energy into the weave, which got wilder and wilder until all of a sudden the truck and trailer spun out into a parked position across five lanes of traffic.

So what?

Think about the stock market. The news media reports where it's at every day if not every minute. Like the truck driver above, however, attention is not being focused on dynamics, like the system's resonant frequencies. A kid on a playground swing knows that you can make the oscillation bigger by kicking at the right point with the right frequency. The truck driver above found this can happen inadvertantly if you pay attention only to displacement.

If you don't want the oscillation to get bigger, you can either (i) not act, or (ii) act at a different frequency. Even better computer programs that paid attention to frequency amplitude and phase as well as displacement, or even more sophisticated dynamical models, might be programmed to actively damp oscillations. So could the newsmedia.

What might be some useful first steps to this end, so we don't spin out the truck just 'cause we and our computer programs are paying attention to the wrong thing?

Clue from the past

2008-09-27T07:57:00.000-07:00

In explaining their project 10¹⁰⁰, Google says that never in history have so many had so much information. This may have been true once before. Until nervous and circulatory systems came along, never had so many (cells) had access to so much molecular information.

Cells so blessed thankfully learned to inform their reactions with those molecules to processes going on: (a) in and outside their membranes, (b) in and outside of the tissues they grew up in, and (c) in and outside of the organism supported by those tissues. What if we too learned to cultivate the six community connection layers that look in/out with respect to those boundary types important to us i.e. our skin, our gene pool, and our idea pool?

In that case then, unlike cancer cells searching for oxygenated blood, we could confidently look beyond warnings (e.g. about money becoming tight) to a layer-multiplicity that counts YES ANSWERS to six bottom-line questions: Do you have chances to: (i) find food, shelter, medicine and education, (ii) cultivate long-term friendships, (iii) support family and raise children, (iv) help build residential and work-oriented communities, (v) choose a set of beliefs and interests by which to live, and (vi) develop and take pride in a profession? Good news: The number is above zero! It's also not 6 on average, so how can we bring it up?

If media outlets and surveys measured their balance by the extent to which they support developments on all six of these levels, if political accomplishment was gauged by quantitative impact on these chances for everyone, and if individuals considered their connections in all six areas together, there would be much less to be frightened or depressed about but also much more work to be done.

Code/excitation soup

2008-09-12T11:25:00.000-07:00

This week I've noticed two narratives that drop an important ball: They blur the distinction between: (i) excitations in the world around and (ii) the concepts that we use to communicate about those excitations.

The first one, no surprise, involves the current (perennial) focus on national politics. Here, with new intensity, candidates are being cartoonified as media monkeys while the opportunity to discuss data and concepts for dealing with the world around passes by. If questions like "Do you have the needed experience?" have no operational meaning, why on earth would people keep asking them while questions about our affect on the global pool of ideas go unasked?

The second, interestingly enough, arose with media discussions (in NPR's On Point) about the large hadron collider (LHC) coming on-line at CERN. It was fun to listen to some top physicists try to answer questions for the lay public, one element of disconnect being expressed in the query: Are the questions that will be answered mainly for physicists?

In this case I was reminded of the invisibility of "concepts as tools" in the way that theorists often talk. Let's translate this to a question that everyone understands: "How many extended spatial dimensions do you experience?" The answer, of course, is that three is an operationally-useful everyday answer to this question. The collider might help identify conditions under which different answers will be useful as well.

However, the question is normally posed by theorists not as "What answer is useful when?" but "How many ARE there?". It's almost as though they think that ideas shared by humans don't model the world, but instead constitute the world. Is that as bad as pretending that candidates are no more than their response to a journalist's ill-defined question?

Hoot Hoot

2008-09-12T11:03:00.000-07:00

Hooting may be a useful positive response to actions and remarks that, like those portrayed by David Attenborough and others in non-human primate communities, aspire to being informed to self, friends, family and community i.e. to correlations focused inward and outward from metazoan skin and molecular code pool. In fact, this response (and related ones) might be said to capture the spirit and scope of such actions and remarks.

Hoots may also help us distinguish these responses from those elicited by actions and remarks that aspire further to inform themselves to culture and profession i.e. to correlations focused inward and outward from one's idea pool boundaries. Might these instead, for instance, be associated with exclamations like Hallelujah and aHah? In what kinds of community is the spirit of these responses typically found?

Equity and health

2008-08-28T13:56:00.000-07:00

The recent WHO report about the impact of social inequities on individual health suggests that a human's abilities to pursue correlations directed inward and outward with respect to skin, family and culture are intertwined. Of course this is not a surprise, but they also make the case that the effects are dramatic.

They further argue that the first line of attack against this problem is not the hiring of more doctors, but the empowering of individuals. The good news there is that the former will take lots of money, but that a great deal may be accomplished in the latter regard with only the help of globally mobile ideas.

What's the best way to proceed from here? Some viral videos or catchy tunes? How about programs that consider the everyday citizen? Where are the latter already helping at home and abroad?

Organism centricity

2008-08-24T19:12:00.000-07:00

As organisms ourselves, it's natural for us to think that the world centers around the structure and survival of organisms. The structure of processes, and survival of codes, may seem incidental in this context. As a result the organism story might get more than its share of attention.

Codes that don't get their share of attention include idea codes. These can now find their way into hearts and minds across the globe, in less time than it takes to shake a stick. Of course we transmit them willy-nilly, but we discuss their role as agents much less.

Processes that don't get their share of attention include those of correlation building that each of us does in (a) developing friendships, (b) maintaining families, (c) supporting communities, (d) honoring beliefs, and (e) extending human awareness of the world around. The effect of disasters and policy changes on these things doesn't normally show up in the body count, but that doesn't make them any less important.

The greater good

2008-07-20T20:14:00.000-07:00

Fans of Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series, or A. E. van Vogt's "Voyage of the Space Beagle", may imagine that science will one day help us find the correct "equation of greater good" with which to guide policy decisions. Don't count on it.

If idea pools in cultural communities are like gene pools in communities of social animals, then "greater good equations" will compete with one another. In fact, they already do. Rather than being given or deduced, such equations evolve by selective replication just as nucleic acid strings evolve in complex multi-species communities (like a tide pool).

Although science can still offer sound insight into elements of the greater good, rather than dictating the equation it will be up to science to make its case for consideration by cultures across the globe. The good news is that this can have very positive results. The bad news is that some still see science as a (good or bad) replacement for culture, rather than as a natural complement.

Multiscale traditions

2008-07-20T05:17:00.000-07:00

Here's the technical question: What are some elements of existing culture that nurture awareness on multiple scales of space, time and organization, and how might we evolve them so that they do this better downstream? Let's start a list...

Idea-toriality

2008-07-13T11:48:00.000-07:00

How does claiming credit for an idea compare to territorial marking by wolves? How does it differ?

Does such marking affect your intuition about potential value? Does it prompt others to examine an idea more carefully? Is there any context where it also chases interlopers away?

Do wolves and/or people ever mistake this marking ritual for a goal in and of itself? If so, what real tasks at hand might they be distracted from as a result?

Lightly salted

2008-07-11T08:45:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure how to take the product label: "lightly salted". Is that good news, or bad news dressed up to look good? Compare to "only a touch of sweetness" and "rarely kills patients with no warning"...

Salsa mystery

2008-07-09T16:57:00.000-07:00

Many of the issues discussed in this blog relate to the tomato salmonella problem currently in the news. One of these, of course, is the delocalized nature of our food supply and the ignorance about where that tomato came from.

Perhaps a more important issue is our failure to put facts into media communications to help consumers take responsibility for their decisions. When the FDA is not sure about a cause, they should tell us the facts rather than pretend to protect us with vague and global pronouncements e.g. "distrust tomatoes". In other words, share data with consumers as though they are responsible decision makers (like which of how many salsa eaters got sick where), and then don't speculate but wait until you have more that's worthwhile to say.

Another key role for the media, after they first convey some specifics, is to discuss with consumers ways to make decisions in the face of quantitative as well as qualitative information. Earlier entries on bytes of risk, and everyday nanodecisions, touch on that area. Given that the avenues to inform consumers and voters are potentially broader than they used to be, we'll try to spend more time on that downstream.

Bubbling life away

2008-07-08T07:40:00.000-07:00

The idea that some folks are subhuman and thus fair game is a familiar runaway idea in this age of electronic communications. A more serious runaway idea in the short term may be that "corporations serve only a few shareholders".

Historically corporations in the developed world (on the bright side) have provided significant multiscale value in the form of secure jobs for employees, economic benefits to their regions, as well as a stream of innovative and reliable products to their customers. Alas under the guise of global competition, a new type of corporate management (not yet everywhere) has emerged that preys on such companies.

Hence the new "bubbles" are not in startups, but in companies with established value. This is because the management approach referred to above has a monoscale focus: Convert the multiscale value of established companies (in the form of the employee skill base, regional loyalty, and product reliability) into cash leaving value-free husks in their wake. Do any recent examples come to mind?

Just as multiscale thinking on the part of newsmedia, voters, politicians, and consumers is crucial to our collective long term future, so multiscale thinking on the part of stockholders (particularly the larger ones) may be crucial to many lives in the days ahead. Even if media of the past half decade overlooked the collective stupidity of feedback-amplified xenophobia, in the next can they nonetheless help us slow the continued loss of reputable businesses?

Ill-posed questions*

2008-07-07T16:32:00.000-07:00

The spoken word, like the expressed protein, is a means by which living things communicate. Sending a poorly-chosen enzyme through the body will get an organism in trouble, just as a poorly-chosen question (or statement) broadcast by the media will get a community in trouble.

Media representatives often pretend that poorly-chosen questions have well-defined answers, when in fact they deserve wiggly answers or no response at all. Flip-flop accusers who ask ill-informed questions are like molecule pushers who send enzymes for clotting into their customers' brain. Don't be shy about pointing it out when you see it happen.

* for some earlier more technical examples see "The well-posed problem" by E. T. Jaynes (Foundations of Physics 3, 1973, pages 477-493).

Modernizing content

2008-07-02T05:23:00.001-07:00

The least costly path from point A to B depends on where both A and B are located. Does this sound like a useful fact in this age of rising gas prices?

Now imagine that A is the set of concepts and skills initially in hand and that B is the set of skills needed to address current challenges. If either the starting tools (A) or the skills needed (B) change, the best path to gaining the latter may also change.

Does that mean that in a world where both A and B continuously change, educators might want to be always looking for new ways to bridge the gap? In order to overcome the inertia associated with a more familiar path, does it also mean that content modernizers had better specify for which values of A and B an alternate path is taylored?

Example: Students familiar with the meaning of bits and bytes in everyday life might benefit from introductions to probability that use powers of two so as to build on that familiarity, for instance by thinking of probability as 1/2^#bits. Does this mean that methods to teach use of probabilities today might be simplified with examples that 50 years ago would have made things worse and not better?

Similar opposites

2008-06-29T06:52:00.000-07:00

Math folk may tell you that exact opposites are often similar, especially when multiple dimensions are involved, since they differ by only a sign. For instance, taking the negative of an image does little to obscure the information it contains. Photographers who capture and store images on negatives will likely agree.

This is also true for idea codes: If someone says that you're exactly wrong, the implication is that you are asking the correct true-false questions but assigning the wrong answers. Taken literally this means that, except for a sign change, they see the world precisely as do you. This is one reason that those who see themselves as polar opposites often find themselves serving the same set of bad ideas.

Unfortunately our ideas about the world often differ from the world itself by a lot more than a change of sign. Thus for example when you hear talk about one person or idea being the exact opposite of another, your monoscale-thinking alarm should probably go off.

Acuity multiscale

2008-06-20T07:10:00.000-07:00

One statement in favor of awareness on more than one scale is this old adage: Think globally, act locally.

Objective balance?

2008-06-11T15:27:00.000-07:00

Wouldn't it be nice if folks with diverse perspectives could agree on integrative elements of an approach to regional policy, regardless of disagreements about how to weigh and accomplish those goals. What if this approach also: (i) puts the full range of issues on the table, (ii) outlines ways to objectively monitor progress toward those goals, (iii) helps explain past difficulties at coming to agreement, and (iv) has deep roots in more than one field of science and mathematics?

Layered-niche network models, that track correlations with respect to skin, family and culture, may be able to do all of these things. However, it will take critical input from all perspectives to put them to use. If you want to hear more, or better still to inform these approaches to your perspective, now is a good time to speak up.

Question etiquette

2008-06-03T09:47:00.000-07:00

Is it a good idea to answer any question asked by the media? My answer to this question is no, since the idea-set that underlies the question may not be well chosen.

The above question IS hopefully worth answering. Ideas now travel the globe in very short times. Those who reinforce bad idea-sets by obediently manning any side of a weak or ill-posed question both: (i) help the bad idea propagate and (ii) falsely legitimize un-informed pursuits by those lined up on both sides of the question.

Do people ever make this mistake? It seems to me that among others, "stereotypers" (who cartoonify folks and often champion single-scale causes) and "progressives" (who attempt in sometimes muddled ways to address challenges on more than one scale) both make the mistake frequently. The latter often do it thereby aiding the former with their xenophobic labels, while the former often do it thereby aiding stereotypers against whom they discriminate.

What are some examples of this? I'll offer two. According to linguist George Lakoff, progressives often take the wrong side of a bad issue (like whether to set a date in advance for withdrawal from some conflict or election) instead of attacking the poor choice of question while offering a better one. This may require standing up to mono-scale cartoonifiers (including media reps) who claim that arguing against a bad question is beating around the bush. Such reframing of bad questions had thus better be done clearly and succinctly.

Another example involves possible responses to non-government violence against citizens. The strongest narrative may not involve "wars against terror by an axis of evil", especially if such phrases help groups with no (or poor) track record at governance to act like governing adversaries either militarily, or in their ability to bring order to the lives of everyday folk. Instead it might be better, for example, to ridicule those making the neolithic claim that "it's OK to treat others as subhuman" and to demonstrate that we can better help sustain folks' lives on multiple levels than can they.

Monkey missions

2008-05-12T12:59:00.000-07:00

Depending on your point of view, you might think of the videogame Grand Theft Auto IV as EITHER a bad thing for kids OR as cutting-edge information technology. Regardless a comparison of "missions" in GTA4 to the primate activities illustrated by David Attenborough in the "Social Climbers" episode of BBC's Life of Mammals might convince you that the economic success of GTA relies on the creative placement of neolithic stereotypes (and projectile weapons) into a jungle rich in modern human structures and styles.

Before being hasty and turning up your nose up at such marketing strategies, you might want to consider the universal primate-appeal of other aspects of your behavior. From competitive social hierarchy, through family loyalties and play with friends, to the enthusiasm for a good meal, our communities are built on niche structures familiar from primate communities, as well as on commitment to loftier cultural and scientific goals.

One step toward moving beyond such strategies may be to recognize the legitimate basis for their appeal. That is, moving past our neolithic limitations may be helped by recognition that we have them to begin with.

Collaborative coding

2008-05-06T07:52:00.000-07:00

Wiki collaboratives are one of various new and important processes that are evolving as I write this, on the back of emerging technology for electronic communcation. To see what I mean, create a user ID on Wikipedia and add pages of interest to your watch list so you can monitor developments and discussion about them from day to day.

The evolution of these processes is exciting (and problematic) because they could help to organically regulate the expression of idea codes, much as metazoan cells regulate the expression of molecule codes, by informing them to processes operating on multiple scales. There is still a long way to go on this, however, and each spare neuron that we can offer counts!

Taking the bait

2008-04-13T08:06:00.000-07:00

One of those neolithic buttons, that globe-trotting ideas push, triggers xenophobia. Taking the bait means that, once pressed, the drumbeat that "subhumans threaten" competes for attention with sustainability issues like community health.

For instance "lose-lose" situations now unfolding in Africa suggest that taking the bait is a long-term recipe for state failure, through oscillatory cycles of indiscriminate response and reactions thereto. Jared Diamond points to older examples in his book "Collapse". Have you noticed other examples say in the past 100 years?

Unfortunately focus on community health is not a useful sound byte, since it involves multiple scales of time, space, and organization. Nonetheless avoiding the bogeyman button could help us do what we can to strengthen all communities involved.

Dollars and longevity are not the whole story. The most robust measure of progress (or its lack) may be niche-layer multiplicity i.e. the extent to which individuals in a community are able to: (i) stay fit, (ii) cultivate friendships, (iii) care for a family, (iv) function as a citizen, (v) participate in a culture, and (vi) contribute as observer to our understanding of the world around.

What fraction of your time have you managed to spend on each of these things in the last week? If your ability to do some of these things is starting to suffer, then perhaps you too will benefit from a collective effort to make these things possible for all. How can I help?

Monoscale thought

2008-04-10T07:01:00.000-07:00

James Fallows' November 2002 article in The Atlantic Monthly on Iraq as "The fifty-first state?" described the long-term commitment that later materialized. Institutions making sub-prime loans at this time were also selling long-term commitment while thinking on only one scale.

The arguments given at the time did little to inform resulting decisions to the consequences they would have in other places, at other times, and on other levels of organization. Considering more than one opinion in these cases may have helped.

Such examples might also say this about second opinions: If those who disagree with you look like cartoons, then you may be mistaking the world that you live in for a cartoon world. The real choices that we have are seldom so simple.

Reproducing codes

2008-04-07T07:59:00.002-07:00

Only since the middle of last century has it become apparent that life is intimately connected to the ability of codes to replicate. These codes are variously written in molecules (e.g. DNA and proteins), in memorized actions (e.g. tradition), in sounds (e.g. song and speech), on paper (e.g. text and images), and in digital media. Codes evolve through selective replication, and in that sense play a role which is complementary to that of organisms and cultures.

If the foregoing is true, then we might want to pay attention to the fact that new kinds of codes are easily replicated on the web. In addition to letters for making words, whose replication took a giant leap with invention of the printing press and libraries, and sounds whose replication took a giant leap with the invention of audio recording and radio, two dimensional videos with sound are now recorded and able to traverse the globe in seconds. Although this doesn't change organisms per se, it may change the nature of communities just as circulatory and nervous systems (YouTube for molecules?) changed how individual metazoans get by.

How does this changing picture of code replicability serve to modify the various narratives by which we live?

Neolithic habit

2008-04-04T15:20:00.000-07:00

An important ancestral use of language was probably the use of ideas to represent other humans. Do you know any folks who act as if the reduction of human beings to code was a perfect fait accompli?

Representing people with ideas is a useful, even necessary, approximation in today's immense global community. However the dangers of taking the equivalence, between a human and a category or stereotype, too literally are legion as well. What examples of this pop into your mind?

The fact that egregious examples of "human abuse via stereotype" seem to effectively employ radios, TV, and the internet may be telling us this: Ideas that can replicate by taking advantage of a neolithic trait will do so, whether it's in the interest of humans or not. If so we might want to figure out which fun-to-replicate ideas serve our collective interests, and which don't. How can we do that?

Missed perspective

2008-03-27T03:20:00.000-07:00

Diverse behaviors, from the kamikaze behavior of worker bees protecting the hive to the tradition of female praying mantids who dine on their mates, serve not individual survival but the ability of molecular codes (like DNA) to replicate. Now that idea codes can replicate electronically, we should keep an eye out for things that serve the interest of ideas but not the interest of individuals.

For example, consider the idea that we should treat certain folks as subhuman. If someone says that it's OK to treat you in this way, then you might either: (A) echo the idea by saying that folks should treat them as subhuman, or (B) downplay the idea as an ill-informed reaction that we must guard against given our neolithic heritage in this electronic age.

Note that in case A, by imitating those with the bad idea you serve the idea. Moreover, by ignoring the real shortcomings of the promoters (ie. that they offer no solutions) or by treating them as worthy adversaries, you might help distract from the real challenges that we face while lending credibility to those with the bad ideas.

In case B you might illustrate how those who promote the bad idea have no solutions to offer anyone, if indeed that's the case. This helps to put the bad idea and those who promote it in their place. It also puts the onus on you to offer balanced solutions, e.g. which tangibly support public health, individual freedom, family values, informed politics, cultural diversity, and scientific awareness.

Which of these two choices do you like best?

Scoping ideas

2008-03-16T18:41:00.000-07:00

Satellite radio, like national TV, is a platform for non-local content. Thus hidden behind its market attractiveness (and potentially high production values) is a capability for purveying spectacle only on a national scale.

Is this a benign fact, or does it bring with it fundamental changes in what folks spend their time thinking about, and the ways they might interact through communications?

Imagine cells in your body trying to respond in an informed way to the world around. They communicate with one another using a finite set of recognizable molecules.

Hence they represent objects in the world around in those terms: "If that's an adrenaline siren, we had better run to shelter quickly!" "Hello, serotonin, long time no see." "Did testosterone just walk in the door?"

So already it's clear that living things, when they communicate, necessarily reduce things in the world around to molecular (or idea) codes that only silhouette what they're intended to represent.

Now let's complicate things by creating new channels for distribution of those molecules. When you cut your finger, instead of keeping the blood-clotting enzyme released in the area of the wound, imagine that it's instantly made available by "molecule youtube" everywhere in your body. If that enzyme is not somehow tagged as "meant for the cut and not the brain", this could cause some trouble.

In other words, just as our bodies need molecules made for local distribution (e.g. within a cell or within an organ) and other molecules for distribution throughout the body, so do our minds need locally-tuned ideas as well as ideas marked-up for global distribution. If we don't label them accordingly and ask folks to respect the difference, in these days of rapid electronic communication we should not be surprised if locally-targeted broadcasts are having bad effects globally, and vice versa.

Can you think of any recent examples of this in the news?

Your nanodecisions

2008-02-28T05:08:00.000-08:00

If I thought my insurance provider was managing my risks, I'd be wrong. Every time I decide for or against: (i) eating an apple, (ii) walking through a cloud of smoke, (iii) putting my hand on a newly-encountered surface, (iv) taking a short-cut to work in my car, (v) clicking on a weblink, or perhaps even (vi) reading a book title, I am encountering new excitations and/or codes and therefore taking a physical risk. Hopefully, I'm also taking responsibility for the decision.

Is this a trivial fact that pertains only to me, or to you? Quite the contrary. Our communities are built on our individual ability to observe critically, and make these decisions in an informed way. They count on each of us as professional observers and decision makers, daily choosing a balanced trajectory along paths strewn with a million unavoidable risks.

As these risks become more complex and perhaps more challenging, it's crucial that we leverage our evolving abilities to communicate. In other words, this is an important question: How can we help one another think and communicate about our everyday choices, and how they relate to the risks we (and our communities) encounter on various scales of space, time, and organization?

Here a few ideas that sound good to me:

Budget some extra time for talking with folks who have different perspectives.
Learn about how the world is different to lifeforms on different size scales, like ants in the milliworld, microbes in the microworld, and viruses in the nanoworld.
Read about processes that affect our world on different time scales, like solar evolution on the billion year scale, geological change on the million year scale, climate change on the thousand year (and shorter) scale, resource depletion on the hundred year scale, carbon dioxide emission on the ten year scale, and information technology whose global impact changes annually.
Finally, discuss the impact of these processes on public health, the nature of friendships, family interactions, community participation, cultural involvement, and our understanding of the world around.

What other things might help?

How many levels?

2008-02-23T14:40:00.000-08:00

There's input that directs your attention, and then there's input that's useful on more than one level. Which do you find more satisfying?

For example, saying "The new kid in school talks funny" highlights separation between a newcomer to class and the kids you've known for a while. That's about all.

On the other hand, "Oscar said his uncle taught him to dive for pearls" if true is informed about the newcomer on more than one level. Specifically it tells us that he comes from a place that is different, but like us he has a name, a gender, an uncle, an ability to learn, and some cool technical knowledge to boot.

I bring this up, because there may be solid scientific reasons to prefer communications of the second kind over the first. For instance, baby plants and animals today depend on cells biased toward molecular communication of the second kind for their embryonic development.

Group balance?

2008-02-05T12:16:00.000-08:00

On this blog we've mentioned the challenge of getting our act together on six layers of organization: looking in/out from skin, family and culture. This isn't easy, at least not for me.

Giving myself the benefit of the doubt, I figure that by and large folks in any organization might come up a bit short. This shouldn't be a problem, as long as we move beyond individuals and focus on making behaviors of the group informed to all six levels instead.

The multiscale awareness discussed here is like political correctness. When folks are un-PC it's often entertaining and easy to empathize, even though it's disastrous when the behavior of institutions ignores due respect for facts, cultural and political diversity, or family and individual rights.

In this sense political correctness poses a similar challenge. Can we respect the innate tendency to speak our mind willy-nilly while ensuring that our institutions as a whole don't degenerate over time?

What does it take, and what situations can YOU list where we've managed to pull this off?

Media & leader-tales

2008-01-24T05:36:00.000-08:00

Early human communities didn't have writing, and the behavior of local leaders was an important and practical topic of everyday talk. Fast-forward to the 20^th century. Weekly local newspapers adapted this oral tradition to print, in small towns even as national TV arrived on the scene. It didn't take long for electronic media to pick up on our passion for leader-talk.

It's much cheaper to create one story of interest to 300 million people, than to create a million stories each written for only 300. No surprise then that the focus on local and non-politcal issues is eclipsed (especially during a quarter of every 4 year US national election cycle) by a focus on news about only one of the 300 million jobs that hold the nation together.

Like the world series, the national election is a shared cultural event. However in places struggling to counterbalance discontent (like Kenya most recently), such a national focus can have its downside.

Let's recap. Thanks to their layered structure, communities are immersed in unfolding stories about: (i) public health, (ii) the nature of interactions between individuals, (iii) the state of families, (iv) citizenship (including leadership) in corporate as well as governmental offices, (v) the evolution of culture (sports too) in its many forms, and (vi) reports on systematic study of the world we live in. Each of these stories has neighborhood, village, county, provincial, national and global takes.

If each of these 6 topics were covered on 5 levels (lumping national and global together), this would give each local venue 30 stories to capture audience with per week. For a nation of 300 million people this means national stories in 6 topic areas, a couple of hundred state-level stories on those topics , maybe 6000 county-level stories, more than 100,000 village-level stories, and over 2 million neighborhood stories i.e. say in total 2.6 million stories in these 6 topic areas per week: Lots of stuff to write that is of interest somewhere.

Those fewer national and global stories carry the weight of more interested listeners. With 5 levels to cover (is that too many?) then national stories deserve 20% of total production effort and coverage, with national politics a sixth of that if one allocates time also to national matters of public health, relationships, family, culture, and science. Compare this <4% of time warranted on citizenship at the federal level to what big media venues spend on only the alpha-wolf leadership part of that story e.g. on tales about the job of US president.

Thus time spent pursuing old-style leadership-talk at the national level decreases coverage for the other matters listed above. NBC's "Meet-The-Press" session with pundits, on the day after the Indian Ocean tsunami, stuck out like a sore thumb in this way. It keeps our eyes off the ball, even if we ignore the local stories that individual communities miss out on and the reporters not employed as a result.

When it comes to news, we get what we ask for. If there are better ways, no need to wait for big media. Internet and wireless communications open many new doors for making our information environment multiscale-smart. What can you and I do to help?

Beyond money?

2008-01-23T07:46:00.000-08:00

Money and markets mirror an organic component of the world around, namely ordered energy i.e. energy available to do work. How are they similar?

The first law of thermodynamics guarantees that you can't create ordered energy out of thin air. The second law says you have to spend "thermodynamic availability" to get it. In principle, that's how money works too i.e. somebody has to earn it.

That second law also says that ordered energy is easy to waste. For instance the heat in a cup of hot coffee gradually thermalizes to room temperature, just as does the work available from those ice cubes in your tea if you let it sit out on the table all day. Money's also easy to waste, even without inflation. The successful use of money and markets likely draws strength from these organic roots.

However, money is one-dimensional. It maps everything onto one scale. The communities we live in, by comparison, are multilevel structures like our bodies. Molecules build cells that build organs that build individuals that build families that build cultures.

The question then is this: After monoscale money, multiscale what? Are there idea sets as deeply reflected in nature as that of ordered energy, which can take our concept of earnings and even health beyond money's one dimension?

The answer is yes. They involve the emergence of order in nature on all levels. They have deep roots in cosmic evolution and the natural history of invention. And they are just getting off the ground. Hopefully, this is one place that you can find out more about them in the days ahead...

...to bits of evidence

2008-01-23T07:38:00.001-08:00

We talk bits and bytes when buying computers and video games, but few think of bits and bytes as tools of gambling theory. Actually that's where information units got their start in the 1940's. The statistical ideas behind them had been in use long before that.

If you enjoyed our earlier note about using bits and bytes to track everyday risks, then you might also be happy to hear that "there's not a bit of evidence" has literal meaning too. The bits of surprisal discussed earlier work best for unlikely occurrences. If you have a yes-no statement, however, subtracting the surprisal that it's true from the surprisal that it's false gives you the evidence (ebits) in its favor.

If the odds of a question being true are 2:1 = for:against, there is only 1 ebit of evidence in its favor since ebits obeys for/against=2^ebits. If the odds for:against = 4:1, then there are 2 ebits of evidence for it, while if for:against = 1:4 then there are 2 ebits of evidence against it.

The cool thing about ebits is this: Independent chunks of information simply add (or subtract) ebits from any case that you are trying to make. Thus ebits follow the common sense about levels of proof developed by folks with no background in statistics at all.

That's a good sign! So then what does "beyond a reasonable doubt" mean, in bits? For example, do you think the standard of proof in a civil court is more, or less, than 14 ebits in favor to make the case?

The uncool thing about ebits is that it provides no clue as to whether it makes sense to ask the "yes-no" question to which it's being applied.

From bytes of risk...

2008-01-23T07:37:00.000-08:00

See if you can identify the pattern here: If the odds are 50:50 that something bad won't happen, then that happening carries only one bit of surprisal. If the odds against are 3:1 (i.e. "three to one"), then the surprisal is two bits. Make sense yet? Odds against of 7:1 means surprisal is 3 bits, 15:1 against means 4 bits of surprisal, etc.

If you think you've got it now, suppose the odds against something bad happening are 255:1. How many bits of surprisal does that unlikely event carry?

Those of us into computers may have noticed that when the odds against are something:1, then something+1 = 2^#bits. Since 255+1 = 2⁸, the surprisal of such an unlikely event (same as the surprisal of throwing heads on eight coins at once with a single toss) is 8 bits or one byte. If you prefer probabilities over odds, then the probability of an unlikely event is just 1/2^#bits.

OK, so why am I bothering you with this? The reason is that everyday we all make decisions which weigh one tiny risk against another. Very few of us, however, are either taught to or interested in multiplying a set of ridiculously small probabilities every time we decide to eat an apple, cross the street, or (heaven forbid) smoke a cigarette.

But what if weighing our alternatives just involved adding a few numbers typically smaller than two dozen? This is about the surprisal in bits of winning the lottery with a single ticket. More folks could then easily make (and take responsibility for) informed decisions about the risk of unlikely events, and they could enjoy the unavoidable gambling involved in the process at the same time.

For example will you risk the 16 bit surprisal of getting a disease whose surprisal of doing you in is only 2 bits, or will you go for the vaccination whose surprisal of bad consequences is up at 22 bits instead? If you pick the first, you are living more dangerously than necessary (by 4 bits of surprisal) but you will also most likely gain some satisfaction from dodging the bullet. Either way, the decision was informed and it was yours.

If you like this approach, then how can we get media and product labelers to give us numbers about risk so that we can: (i) stop being scared by one broadcast after another and (ii) be more informed about the responsibilities that we shoulder?