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"David closes by returning to his original question: why were old knowledge systems so fragile? These systems assumed knowledge was bounded, settled, orderly and proceeded step by step. But that’s not what knowledge feels like in the age of the internet. It feels unbounded, overwhelming, unsettled, messy, linked and governed by our interests. And those properties are the properties of what it means to be human in the world.
“Networked knowledge may or may not be truer about the world, but is is truer about knowing… This crazy approach to knowledge feels familiar to us, because it’s how we tend to know.” He closes with an observation that’s both hopeful and unsettling: “What we have in common is a shared world about which we disagree, not a common knowledge we share and can collectively come to.”"
" Robert Kaplan’s book, The Coming Anarchy. In describing the world of the future Kaplan wrote this prescient quote.
We are entering a bifurcated world. Part of the globe is inhabited by Hegel’s and Fukuyama’s Last Man, healthy, well fed, and pampered by technology. The other, larger, part is inhabited by Hobbes’s First Man, condemned to a life that is “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”"
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So why else would a comment about the London Riots bring out such vitriol from the Right? I think because it points to the possibility that extremes of inequality are not costless to a society. In my last essay, I assumed that at least in the U.S. Aldous Huxley was right. We are living in a Brave New World where the power of 24/7 entertainment mixed with lots of drugs and alcohol will keep the poor fairly pacified. The London riots as well as our own examples of Flash Robs put the lie to that myth. I have no idea what the next 12 months of the Interregnum will bring, but I do think social unrest will continue to be a problem.
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Over time, I think one of the most damning lessons from the State cables will be evidence of the tolerance for bribery and looting that rots our foreign policy. Thus far, we’ve seen details of our allies’ oil bribery, our disinterest in doing anything about Hosni Mubarak’s or Muammar Qadaffi’s or the Saudis’ looting, We’ve also seen how our government apparently threw its investigation of rich tax cheats to get Switzerland to take three of our Gitmo detainees. Our government complains about the corruption of other countries. But as WikiLeaks makes clear, those complaints are mostly just for public show.
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So what to do? Today, Duncan Forbes at Swinburne University in Australia and Pavel Kroup at the University of Bonn in Germany put forward a novel solution. They outline the various characteristics that astronomers think about when classifying galaxies.
These include factors such as the presence of stars, so gas clouds can't be defined as galaxies; being gravitationally bound, so materials that has been stripped away by another galaxy wouldn't count; whether the system is stable or not; whether it hosts a good variety of different types of star, which excludes globular clusters which contain only similar stars; and whether it is held together by dark matter, which many galaxies seem to be.
There are other factors too, of course. (Although they do not include the presence of a black hole at the centre of a galaxy as a defining characteristic , which is odd given the growing interest in the link between galactic evolutoin and black holes.)
Forbes and Kroup go on to suggest that the best way to achieve consensus is to crowdsource the problem. In other works, they want to use the wisdom of the crowd to determine what factors are important what aren't.
There are three kinds of “bubbles” - a term often used loosely when asset prices rise a great deal and then fall sharply, without an obvious corresponding shift in “fundamentals“.
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- A short-run bubble. Think about 17th century Dutch Tulip Mania: spectacular, probably disruptive, but not a major reason for the decline of the Netherlands as a global power.
- A distorting bubble. In this case, the increase in asset prices contributes to a reallocation of resources across sectors. Think of the Dot-com Bubble: fortunes were made and lost, the collapse was scary to many, and – at the end of the day – you’ve built the Internet and some good companies.
- A political bubble. Here rising asset prices generate resources that can be fed into the political process, through bribes, building politicians’ careers, and lobbying of all kinds. Bubbles in Emerging Markets often generate resources that impact the political process, sometimes in good ways – but most often in bad ways, which eventually contribute to a collapse.
However, there are fewer and fewer biologists who practice traditional taxonomy, or the collection, description, naming and categorization of organisms through intense study of their physical attributes. In general, the field of taxonomy, or systematics as it is often called, has been leaning towards the molecular end of the spectrum since genetic technology matured in the late 1970s and 1980s, and traditional taxonomic skills have been dwindling as older taxonomic experts retire. Many taxonomists blend traditional methods, such as morphological and behavioral study, with modern molecular techniques, such as DNA sequencing, to fully characterize their pet taxa. But taxonomists like Cognato and Hulcr, who rely on fieldwork and morphological study as core aspects of their taxonomic work, appear to be slowly going extinct.
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ames Rodman, a botanist and former NSF program director who was instrumental in creating the PEET program in the mid-1990s, says that the disappearance of traditional taxonomy is only part of a larger problem. "More broadly speaking, organismal biology is dying out," Rodman says, now in semi-retirement as museum research associate at the University of Washington's Burke Museum. He says that colleagues tell him all the time that even in high schools, biology field trips are seldom, if ever, taken—a trend that ripples up through the university level as survey courses in entomology, mycology, and other organismal disciplines cease to exist. "We're no longer interested in knowing about the organisms of the world. That's the sadder tragedy."
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Quentin Wheeler, the Arizona State University entomologist who is also director of the newly-created International Institute for Species Exploration, says that he hopes to create a "cyber-infrastructure," including digital images and virtual networks, that will give researchers around the world access to all of the nearly 3 billion biological specimens currently housed at natural history museums. He says that if modern technologies and more funding are successfully combined with continued taxonomic work, taxonomists have a good chance of describing and naming 8 million new species in the next 50 years.
Folksonomies have emerged as a means to create order in a rapidly expanding information environment whose existing means to organize content have been strained. This paper examines folksonomies from an evolutionary perspective, viewing the changing conditions of the information environment as having given rise to organization adaptations in order to ensure information "survival" - remaining findable. This essay traces historical information organization mechanisms, the conditions that gave rise to folksonomies, and the scholarly response, review, and recommendations for the future of folksonomies.
the difference between hard and soft science is a matter of method, in particular what he refers to as “strong inference.”
in list: Philosophy Notes
The Game Ontology Project (GOP) is a framework for describing, analyzing and studying games. It is a hierarchy of concepts abstracted from an analysis of many specific games. GOP borrows concepts and methods from prototype theory as well as grounded theor
One of the things I talked about in the post was the need to better characterize Open Content. This post uses a couple of newer projects to clarify my thinking on the need for way to better describe projects.
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