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"The truth of the matter is that the blogosphere is largely a closed loop. The ability of individuals, particularly those dedicated to amateur blogging (out of principle or out of practicality), to penetrate the larger conversation is quite small. As Yglesias laments, the capture of the blogosphere by the media and think tank apparatus means that there are now a whole host of gatekeepers who rigorously police the online discussion and determine which voices are heard. It's hard to think of anyone who has come up in prominence the last few years who was not quickly co-opted into the service of a large media or political entity. "
"In a world of increasing demands for biodiversity information, participatory biodiversity assessment and monitoring is becoming more significant. Whilst other books have focused on methods, or links to conservation or development, this book is written particularly for policy makers and planners. Introductory chapters analyze the challenges of the approach, the global legislation context, and the significance of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Specially commissioned case studies provide evidence from 17 countries, by 50 authors with expertise in both biological and social sciences. Ranging from community conservation projects in developing countries to amateur birdwatching in the UK, they describe the context, objectives, stakeholders and processes, and reflect on the success of outcomes. Rather than advocating any particular approach, the book takes a constructively critical look at the motives, experiences and outcomes of such approaches, with cross-cutting lessons to inform planning and interpretation of future participatory projects and their contribution to policy objectives."
in list: Books Noted
Author of "The first cuckoo in winter: British phenology recording, credibility and meaning"
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The key insight is that a single strong heuristic will do worse than a collective of individually weak but diverse heuristics. The problems are too hard for any one heuristic to solve perfectly, but the diverse heuristics can, so to speak, cover each others' weaknesses and help each other out when they get stuck; a single strong heuristic can't. A collection of diverse strong heuristics would be even better, but the strong heuristics for a problem tend to be similar to each other, so a group of them lacks diversity. In problem solving and prediction, diversity is exactly as important as individual ability.
A minimum inventory/maximum diversity system is a kit of modular parts and rules of assembly that gives you maximal design bang for your design-component buck. It’s a system that achieves a wide variety of effects from a small variety of parts.
Hogan has read stories from all round the world, stories created before the age of European expansion and colonialism, and he has found universals in world-wide recurrences of three story themes.
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But don't think this is just about automated recommender systems, like the ones that Amazon and Netflix use. The recommender "system" could be anything that tends to build on its own popularity, including word of mouth. A couple of weeks ago someone pointed me to this video of Madin, a six-year-old soccer prodigy from Algeria, and the next day my son, who moves in very different online circles to me, was watching the same one. I know who Jim Cramer is even though we don't get CNBC in Canada because everyone is talking about him and helping his disembodied head to shoot down Jon Stewart. More people watched Tina Fey being Sarah Palin online than on Saturday Night Live, and Fey is now famous in countries where no one watches the TV show. Clay Shirky writes an essay and I get five different links to it in my Google Reader feed in one morning. Our online experiences are heavily correlated, and we end up with monopoly populism.A "niche", remember, is a protected and hidden recess or cranny, not just another row in a big database. Ecological niches need protection from the surrounding harsh environment if they are to thrive. Simply putting lots of music into a single online iTunes store is no recipe for a broad, niche-friendly culture.
Here are my key elements of a diverse system -- Diversity, Redundancy, Decentralization, Collaboration, Transparency, Openness, Fail Gracefully, Flexibility, Foresight
Online communities have become become a crucial ingredient of e-business. Supporting open social networks builds strong brands and provides lasting value to the consumer. One function of the community is to recommend new products and services. Open social networks tend to be resilient, adaptive, and broad, but simplistic recommender systems can be 'gamed' by members seeking to promote certain products or services. We argue that the gaming is not the failure of the open social network, but rather of the function used by the recommender. To increase the quality and resilience of recommender systems, and provide the user with genuine and novel discoveries, we have to foster diversity, instead of closing down the social networks. Fortunately, software increases the broadcast capacity of each individual, making dense open social networks possible. Numerically, we show that dense social networks encourage diversity. In business terms, dense social networks support a long tail.
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