] The world has known about the small-world phenomenon
] since sociologist Stanley Milgram's 1967 study found that
] it took, on average, six exchanges among acquaintances to
] get a letter from a random correspondent in Omaha,
] Nebraska to a Boston recipient identified only by a brief
] description.
] ...
] Columbia University researchers have filled in the blanks
] by carrying out a larger, more detailed experiment over
] the Internet. The results match many of the broad
] conclusions of Milgram's work, but show that Milgram's
] conclusion about the importance of hubs -- people who
] have many connections -- may be off, at least in regards
] to social networks.
]

It turns out that social networks do not behave like the scale-free networks exhibited by web page linking. There is a cost to participation in a social network. Folks with fewer connections were more likely to pass on the message.

Email updates six degrees theory TRN 082703

Ahoy maties! Make sure ye observe the fairest day! ARGH!

Talk Like A Pirate Day

] Inside the Movement for Posthuman Rights -- When the World
] Transhumanist Association met for a conference at Yale last
] month, they discussed the future rights of those who will be
] half-man, half-machine. Erik Baard looks at uploading
] consciousness, bio-Luddites, and that nagging question: Who
] are we?

Cogent discussion of the ethical issues involved.

The Village Voice: Features: Cyborg Liberation Front by Erik Baard

] But "the big feature of human-level intelligence is not
] what it does when it works but what it does when it's
] stuck," Minsky said. When faced with novelty, Minsky
] claims, human intelligence applies "reasoning by analogy"
] to make the most direct tap into the cognitive glue that
] fuses knowledge domains.

With Doug Lenat, Minsky proposes that common sense is the missing factor in developing human-level AI, and that reasoning by analogy is the essential element in common-sense reasoning.

EE Times - A veritable cognitive mind

] Richard Samson, author of the forthcoming book called
] “The Human Edge”, is convinced we are teetering on the
] precipice of an employment revolution for only the
] second time in modern history. According to Samson,
] where the industrial revolution provided the means to
] automate hard manual labour, the electronics revolution
] is threatening to replace human brain-power.

The author of this piece in Electronics News combines Samson's assertions with those of several other thinkers to consider a scenario for "an apocalyptic future" where humans become "cyborgs in an automated world." The article is not very compelling but Samson's book might be interesting.

Rise of the machines

] robots compete annually in two international
] search-and-rescue tournaments, measuring their progress
] in diabolically difficult arenas designed by the National
] Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
]
] With current technology, negotiating an unstructured
] rubble- and debris-filled environment is about the
] hardest thing there is for a robot to do. That
] researchers even attempt it shows how far robotics has
] come in recent years. That it always fails, and sometimes
] spectacularly, shows how far it still has to go.

It appears that sensors are a limiting factor. Each type of
sensor can be confused or disrupted by some aspect of the
environment.

Search-Rescue Robots Test Their Mettle in Tournaments (TechNews.com)

] Researchers invited to bid for time on one of the world's
] top five supercomputers ...
]
] A total of 4.5 million supercomputing processing hours
] and 100 trillion bytes of data storage space on the most
] powerful computer for unclassified research in the United
] States is now up for grabs.

Total wall-clock time multiplied by the number of processors used. The IBM SP RS/6000, named Seaborg, has 6,656 processors.

The Scientist :: Call for big ideas

] Moving Sensor Data onto the Internet
]
] A new XML encoding scheme may make it possible for you to
] remotely discover, access, and use real-time data
] obtained directly from Web-resident sensors, instruments,
] and imaging devices.
] ...
] Members of the Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC), including
] NASA, the National Imaging and Mapping Agency, and EPA,
] are developing a standard XML encoding scheme for
] metadata describing sensors, sensor platforms, sensor
] tasking interfaces, and sensor-derived data ...

Most interesting: SensorML aims to "archive fundamental properties and assumptions regarding sensor"

Sensors - April 2003 - A Sensor Model Language: Moving Sensor Data onto the Internet

] Terry Winograd is Professor of Computer Science at
] Stanford University, where he directs the program on
] human-computer interaction. His SHRDLU program done at
] the MIT AI Lab was one of the early explorations in
] natural language understanding by computers. His book
] with Fernando Flores, Understanding Computers and
] Cognition, critiques the underlying assumptions of AI and
] much of computer system design, introducing directions
] from phenomenology. He was a founder and national
] president of Computer Professionals for Responsibility,
] and is currently on sabbatical at Google, Inc.

ACM: Ubiquity - Talking with Terry Winograd

] Eric Bonabeau, Ph.D, a keynote speaker at the upcoming
] Emerging Technology conference, is a leader in the field
] of swarm intelligence and has focused on applying these
] concepts to real world problems such as factory
] scheduling and telecommunications routing.

Perhaps there is a potential convergence between swarm intelligence and genetic programming. What if one could evolve the components of the swarm to improve the overall capabilities of the whole?

OpenP2P.com: Swarm Intelligence: An Interview with Eric Bonabeau [Feb. 21, 2003]