The Majority Illusion in Social Networks
Social behaviors are often contagious, spreading through a population as individuals imitate the decisions and choices of others. A variety of global phenomena, from innovation adoption to the emergence of social norms and political movements, arise as a result of people following a simple local rule, such as copy what others are doing. However, individuals often lack global knowledge of the behaviors of others and must estimate them from the observations of their friends' behaviors. In some ...
notes Strategy of Predator Satiation
An effective strategy of predator satiation involves two adaptations. First, the synchrony of emergence or reproductions must be very precise, thus assuring that hte market is truly flooded, and only for a short time. Secondly, this flooding cannot occur very often, lest predators simply adjust their own life cycle to predictable times of superfluity. If bamboos flowered every year, seed eaters would track the cycle and present their own abundant young with the annual bounty. But if the perio... notesCicadas have evolved the strategy of mass-producing in such numbers that the predators cannot eat them all.
Conservation Tasks and Reason
Piaget had his own way of assessing brain maturation during this period, using his now-famous "conservation" tasks, try this one out on your tour-to-eight-year-old: fill two identical short, squat glasses with equal volumes of water, and ask your child, "Do the two glasses contain the same amount of water, or does one have more?" Now, pour all the water from one of these 'lasses into a tall, narrow glass, and ask your child the same question.
Four-year-olds almost invariably say that the ta...
1 A four-year-old cannot grasp the concept of conservation of mass, but an eight-year-old has no problem with it.
Emergence Through Emergencies
Very frequently I hear or read of my artifacts adjudged by critics as
being "failures," because I did not get them into mass-production and
"make money with them." Such money-making-as-criteria-of-success critics
do not realize that money-making was never my goal. I learned very early
and painfully that you have to decide at the outset whether you are
trying to make money or to make sense, as they are mutually exclusive. I
saw that nature has various categories of unique gestation lags betwee... notesBuckminster Fuller explains that many of his ideas haven't caught on, not because they aren't profitable, but because our lack of foresight hasn't yet created a sufficient emergency situation to prompt their adoption.
Natural Language Processing vs. Semantic Web
NLP works well statistically; the SW, in contrast, requires logic and doesn't yet make substantial use of statistics. Natural language is democratic, as expressed in the slogan 'meaning is use' (see Section 5.1 for more discussion of this). The equivalent in the SW of the words of natural language are logical terms, of which URIs are prominent. Thus we have an immediate disanalogy between NLP and the SW, which is that URIs, unlike words, have owners, and so can be regulated. That is not to sa... notesA short comparison of the difference between NLP and SW in terms of processing, algorithms, structure, and emergence. NLP is described as 'democratic', where the power of SW is that URIs 'have owners,' meaning they are a top-down construct. Perhaps this is the problem of the Semantic Web and why it may never catch on: the web favors emergent semantics and democratized development.
