In this issue:

"Twelve Flowers", by Katinka Matson, with an introduction By Kevin Kelly

A set of exquisitely detailed, photorealistic, colorful images of flowers. It's about the technique.

"Beyond Computation: A Talk with Rodney Brooks" (With RealVideo)

Preview: Maybe there's something beyond computation in the sense that we don't understand and we can't describe what's going on inside living systems using computation only. When we build computational models of living systems -- such as a self-evolving system or an artificial immunology system -- they're not as robust or rich as real living systems. Maybe we're missing something, but what could that something be?

"A Mutual, Joint-Stock World In All Meridians", by James O'Donnell

Edge 102: 'New technology = New perceptions'

A TextArc is a visual represention of a text -- the entire text (twice!) on a single page. Some funny combination of an index, concordance, and summary, it uses the viewer's eye to help uncover meaning.

I recommend that you try the Alice in Wonderland example. Follow the White Rabbit!

TextArc | An Alternate Way To View Text

The Blogger Effect is what happens when the arbiters of relevance in the "attention economy" shift toward a bottom-up structure.

Steven Johnson, founder and former editor of Feed Magazine, on blogs. Should Johnson be told about MemeStreams, immediately, if not sooner?

Use the blog, Luke | Salon.com

None of them, though, can prove it.

This is an amazing story of con artistry ... You'd like to think people with so much discretionary income to invest would be willing to spend a few bucks on a knowledgable technical consultant. It wouldn't be expensive -- your average undergraduate EE student should have seen right through this guy's charade. Or you could just ask your friendly neighborhood lineman/plant engineer, who would tell you that POTS lines are digitized at the CO (or sooner) and couldn't possibly support DVD-quality streaming video.

Is it a 'magic box' or a high-tech hoax?

Abstract: This thesis addresses the problem of providing trusted individuals with confidential information about other individuals, in particular, granting access to databases of personal records using the World-Wide Web. It proposes an access rights management system for distributed databases which aims to create and implement organisation structures based on the wishes of the owners and of demands of the users of the databases. The dissertation describes how current software components could be used to implement this system; it re-examines the theory of collective choice to develop mechanisms for generating hierarchies of authorities; it analyses organisational processes for stability and develops a means of measuring the similarity of their hierarchies.

Trust Brokerage Systems for the Internet

IBM: "Size is the answer. We've got the technology and the people. We've got to get an economy of scale. Merging these businesses will give us the size we're looking for."

Say goodbye to your "IBM"-branded disk drives. A couple of years ago, PC Magazine predicted that within five years, market pressure would force mergers that result in a single global manufacturer of hard disk drives. This is one more (small) step in that direction.

IBM, Hitachi Combine Disk Businesses

Abstract: A recommendation system tracks past purchases of a group of users to make product recommendations to individual members of the group. In this paper we present a notion of competitive recommendation systems, building on recent theoretical work on this subject. We reduce the problem of achieving competitiveness to a problem in matrix reconstruction. We then present a matrix reconstruction scheme that is competitive: it requires a small overhead in the number of users and products to be sampled, delivering in the process a net utility that closely approximates the best possible with full knowledge of all user-product preferences.

_Competitive Recommendation Systems_ [PS]

Models and Concepts of Life and Intelligence
On Our Nonexistence as Entities: The Social Organism
Thinking Is Social
The Particle Swarm and Collective Intelligence
Statistics for Swarmers

If you're interested in more information, a Google search on the phrase "swarm intelligence" turns up a number of research papers.

_Swarm Intelligence _

Abstract: Recommender systems learn about user preferences over time, automatically finding things of similar interest. This reduces the burden of creating explicit queries. Recommender systems do, however, suffer from cold-start problems where no initial information is available early on upon which to base recommendations. Semantic knowledge structures, such as ontologies, can provide valuable domain knowledge and user information. However, acquiring such knowledge and keeping it up to date is not a trivial task and user interests are particularly difficult to acquire and maintain. This paper investigates the synergy between a web-based research paper recommender system and an ontology containing information automatically extracted from departmental databases available on the web. The ontology is used to address the recommender systems cold-start problem. The recommender system addresses the ontology's interest-acquisition problem. An empirical evaluation of this approach is conducted and the performance of the integrated systems measured.

Exploiting Synergy Between Ontologies and Recommender Systems [PDF]

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Communications of the ACM
Volume 45, Issue 4 (April 2002)

Excerpts from the TOC:

Teaching the Nintendo generation to program
Hijacking the web
Anonymity on the Internet: why the price may be too high
Social Translucence
visualizing online conversations
Tools for navigating large social cyberspaces
Audience-specific online community design

Social networks such as communities are sustained by social capital, and the need for social capital is evident ... Communications tools build and strengthen social capital, and technology professionals must develop a comprehensive strategy in order to enhance and improve the effectiveness of such media. They must focus on developing inexpensive hardware, software, and infrastructure that is available to anyone regardless of social strata, income, and educational level. The challenges inherent in doing this include creating highly accessible technologies and making sure that the software supports online social interaction. Community leaders and moderators must also contribute if trust -- the foundation of any social network -- is to be engendered. A key component of generating trust is developing a system that can measure community members' presence and past interactions. Justifying the creation of online communities requires a wide-ranging solution for determining their development costs and advantages, while insight into social interactions and the concept of technology as a mediator will aid in their development. A successful online community must be built upon existing technology that can increase its power and be universally available.

Supporting community and building social capital