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One can see Manovich’s argument becoming true in the development of database technology the 20th century. The first commercially available computer databases were organized hierarchically. If you wanted to get to a particular piece of information, you went to the overarching category and made a series of choices as…
What we know about the past—and who has access to such knowledge—has changed dramatically with each such change. The changes run far deeper than the mere proliferation of data points. As written records of large estates held in monasteries in France achieved legal and social dominance, the role of women as the tellers…
Lifeloggers capture every instant of their existence for their own reference. XP stars live, love, and die with passionate abandon so everyone can enjoy it on demand. Habitats depend on constantly updated operational and environmental data as well as troops of transhuman observers to function seamlessly and provide…
The RDoC research framework can be considered as a matrix whose rows correspond to specified dimensions of function; these are explicitly termed “Constructs,” i.e., a concept summarizing data about a specified functional dimension of behavior (and implementing genes and circuits) that is subject to continual…
Both technological sensors and enhanced biological senses come equipped with databases of scanned “signatures” that make it easier to identify whatever the user is sensing (in the case of bioware, these databases are stored and accessed via the character’s mesh inserts). For example, infrared sensors feature databases…
in these parageometric s[kins] which are all and n[e]i[ther] body- mod, ap[per]al, hyperspective [m]ult[is]pec[t]ral movie, trans- ontic simverse and non-self-m[ode]ling l{i}fe-[for]m, once-state friends and l[over]s now flaunting (fo[re)ign] and queer[star]k these hybrid murges of con.crete noetics and commpack’d…
In the earliest days of research, memory was thought to be populated with socalled engrams, memory traces that were localized in specific parts of the brain. To locate one such engram—for the memory of a maze—psychologist Karl Lashley taught rats to run through a labyrinth. He then cut out various parts of their brain…
The messages that DNA molecules contain are all but eternal when seen against the time scale of individual lifetimes. The lifetimes of DNA messages (give or take a few mutations) are measured in units ranging from millions of years to hundreds of millions of years; or, in other words, ranging from 10,000 individual…
It is odd to think that there is a word for something which, strictly speaking, does not exist, namely, 'rest'. We distinguish between living and dead matter; between moving bodies and bodies at rest. This is a primitive point of view. What seems dead, a stone or the proverbial 'door-nail', say, is actually forever in…
Even if there had been no Dataset, even if Johanna Olsndot had not come from the stars, she would still be the most fascinating creature in the world: a pack-equivalent mind in a single body. You could walk right up to her, you could touch her, without the least confusion. It was frightening at first, but all of them…
Certainly the atoms did not post themselves purposefully in due order by an act of intelligence, nor did they stipulate what movements each should perform. [58] As they have been rushing everlastingly throughout all space in their myriads, undergoing a myriad changes under the disturbing impact of collisions, they…
Common sense … has the very curious property of being more correct retrospectively than prospectively. It seems to me that one of the principal criteria to be applied to successful science is that its results are almost always obvious retrospectively; unfortunately, they seldom are prospectively. Common sense provides…
This kind of data is hard to come by, but thanks to almighty Stackoverflow ands their wise decision (thanks Joel), to make this data publicly available we can mine this data to our collective benefit. With a simple bash script to download the data, a small Java program to extract the stats and Google Docs to make the…
In a more evolutionardy appropriate infant-caretaker scheme, the infant is a social partner, part of a dyad. Both mother and infant are interested in being in equilibrium, that is, in a stable and contented state. This goal is adiieved by mutual regulation, by reciprocity, and by keep¬ ing tabs on each other. This…
When the first single-celled organisms appeared on Earth, more than 3 billion years ago, they fed upon carbohydrates—sugars—dissolved in the sea. The sugars had their origin in chance chemical reactions. Life, however, multiplied exponentially; one cell made two, two made four, four made eight, and so on. Self…
Each individual's genome, in any one generation, will be a sample from the species database. Different species will have different databases because of their different ancestral worlds. The database in the gene pool of camels will encode information about deserts and how to survive in them. The DNA in mole gene pools…
TODO: Make this Link an Embedded Video
The Internet shows me more and more about those who participate in it, but I worry lest I forget that not everything or everyone in the world has a home on the Internet. Missing are those who cannot read or write, who have no access to a computer, or who chose to remain disconnected. There is a danger of coming to…
IR is the focus for an arms race between algorithms to extract information from repositories as those repositories get larger and more complex, and users' demands get harder to satisfy (either in terms of response time or complexity of query). One obvious issue with respect to IR over the Web is that the Web has no QA…