Communal nesting bees Although mining bees are solitary, a handful of species in the UK often nest communally. Communal bees have a simple form of social structure: they share a nest, but individual females will build their own cells, lay eggs and provision their own offspring: they do not have the complex social organisation with workers and division of labour of honeybees. … If a high level of relatedness is not responsible for the evolution of communality, why do these bees nest communally? A potential benefit is improved nest defence. There are always bees going in or out, and in my own observations, a few bees often sit by the nest entrance (like as in the photo at the top), therefore opportunities for parasitism by cleptoparasites might be reduced. More: http://abugblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/communal-mining-bees.html via +Kyle Crider

The Peer to Peer Manifesto via +Michel Bauwens 13. The best guarantor of the spread of the peer to peer logic to the world of physical production is the distribution of everything, i.e. of the means of production in the hands of individuals and communities, so that they can engage in social cooperation. While the immaterial world will be characterized by a peer to peer logic of non-reciprocal generalized exchange, the peer-informed world of material exchange will be characterized by evolving forms of reciprocity and neutral exchange. More: http://snuproject.wordpress.com/2012/05/21/the-peer-to-peer-manifesto-the-emergence-of-p2p-civilization-and-political-economy/ ____________ This hits some of the right notes; others I disagree with or think don’t go far enough. Still, this is in the same spirit as the work I’ve been doing on #digitalpolitics and the #attentioneconomy , and it is definitely worth a share to get more people talking. The faster we can triangulate on the same basic insight, the easier it will be for all of us to work together. The Peer to Peer Manifesto: The Emergence of P2P Civilization and Political Economy Michel Bauwens Our current political economy is based on a fundamental mistake. It is based on the assumption that natural resources are unlimited, and that it is an endless sink. This false assu…

Abstract: In a “tipping” model, each node in a social network, representing an individual, adopts a behavior if a certain number of his incoming neighbors previously held that property. A key problem for viral marketers is to determine an initial “seed” set in a network such that if given a property then the entire network adopts the behavior. Here we introduce a method for quickly ?nding seed sets that scales to very large networks. Our approach ?nds a set of nodes that guarantees spreading to the entire network under the tipping model. After experimentally evaluating 31 real-world networks, we found that our approach often ?nds such sets that are several orders of magnitude smaller than the population size. Our approach also scales well – on a Friendster social network consisting of 5:6 million nodes and 28 million edges we found a seed sets in under 3:6 hours. We also ?nd that highly clustered local neighborhoods and dense network-wide community structure together suppress the ability of a trend to spread under the tipping model. __________ Translation: We can quickly find the key influencing nodes in a network and feed them data that will adjust the overall shape of the network to suit our specifications. Yowza. Bruno Gonçalves originally shared this post: Large Social Networks can be Targeted for Viral Marketing with Small Seed Sets. (arXiv:1205.4431v1 [cs.SI]) In a “tipping” model, each node in a social network, representing an individual, adopts a behavior if a certain number of his incoming neighbors previously held that property. A key problem for viral marketers is to determine an initial “seed” set in a network such that if given a property then the entire network adopts the behavior. Here we introduce a method for quickly finding seed sets that scales to very large networks. Our approach […]

The 20th century was the peak of the Industrial Age, and it culminates with the invention of the Internet. The mythical structure is that of the Titans, warring and fighting and love-making in order to give birth to the Gods that ultimately overthrow them. Industrialization is about ordering; when humanity is the one so ordered the result is #alienation . In this fabulous interview, Postman delivers the 20th century’s worries about the Digital Age as clearly and humbly as one can. The potential for radical alienation is, he thinks, the stakes of this Faustian bargain. What everyone in the 20th century missed was that the Digital Revolution isn’t just a continuation of the ordering of the Industrial Age. Instead, the Digital Age is about organization. Understanding how order and organization differ is the conceptual basis for the paradigm shift, but you don’t need to understand the concepts to see it’s implications. This paradigm shift is precisely why the paradigmatic structures of the digital age are the communities that Postman worries might not exist in the Digital World. In fact, such communities thrive in abundance, largely because we’ve worked out the ways for being co-present and assembling digitally. In 1995 those communities were still distant and hard to reach, but today billions of us are there, and it works. Postman expected that technological change breeds only order, and thereby alienation, and so his worries here are entirely appropriate. In fact, technological change can also breed organization, and organization is holistic and presents only solutions to the alienation of the Industrial Age. Our deeply human sociality won out over the imposed alienation, and for this reason the Digital Age is reworking the fundamental organizational structure we’ve inherited from the age of industry. Via +joe breskin Neil Postman on Cyberspace, 1995

I’ll be giving a talk for the Common Action Free School today and tomorrow at 6pm in The Coffeehouse in Uptown Normal. This is a free event, and everyone is welcome! Today’s talk is titled “Ants and Organization” Tomorrow will be “Organization and Consensus” You can see more, including links to resources and other learning materials at the link below! http://digitalinterface.blogspot.com/2012/05/ill-be-leading-series-of-discussions.html More about the Common Action Free school here: http://www.commonactionfreeschool.org/

A Vision of Students Today Arguing against +Mark Letteri‘s technocynicism in this thread: https://plus.google.com/u/0/110903754634045683249/posts/d18RPZdkLK1 brought up this wonderful +Michael Wesch video, part of his Youtube series on the experience of college students in the digital age. The video has surprisingly few hits, and apparently hasn’t gone around G+. If you want to know how the rising generation views the world they are about to enter, and the skills and habits they will bring to bear, have a look. “a few ideas …” (Visions of Students Today)

From the Organization lecture series from the Common Action Free School. Part Two

+Bruno Gonçalves and his colleagues have put together attention-based models looking at Twitter activity in the run up to the #americanidol decisions. They were able to predict the winner with a pretty high degree of confidence using an extremely simplified model of the Twitter activity. They posted the model to the arXiv a few days ago, and then updated with results from the big vote yesterday. Their updated paper is linked below. This is both a validation and benchmarking case for quantifying and modeling the #attentioneconomy . They conclude: ” We have shown that the open source data available on the web can be used to make educated guesses on the outcome of societal events. Speci?cally, we have shown that extremely simple measures quantifying the popularity of the American Idol participants on Twitter strongly correlate with their performances in terms of votes. A post-event analysis shows that the less voted competitors can be identi?ed with reasonable accuracy (Table II) looking at the Twitter data collected during the airing of the show and in the immediately following hours.” Bruno Gonçalves originally shared this post: Beating the news using Social Media: the case study of American Idol. (arXiv:1205.4467v2 [physics.soc-ph] UPDATED) We present a contribution to the debate on the predictability of social events using big data analytics. We focus on the elimination of contestants in the American Idol TV shows as an example of a well defined electoral phenomenon that each week draws millions of votes in the USA. We provide evidence that Twitter activity during the time span defined by the TV show airing and the voting period following it, correlates with the contestants ranking and allows the anticipation of the voting outc…

The Logic of Diversity The Complexity of a Controversial Concept By +Cosma Shalizi … The division of labor is, in part, an adaptation for handling complex problems, but only those which are complex in the straightforward sense of being very large. It relies on finding a way of decomposing the large problem into nearly-separate parts, so that it can be attacked through a strategy of divide-and-conquer, with different people specializing in conquering the various divisions. (This topic, and its relation to hierarchical structure, was explored by Herbert Simon in his classic Sciences of the Artificial.) Diversity, in the sense Page is talking about, is another way of adapting to complexity, and specifically to complex problems which are not decomposable into neat hierarchies. Put strategically, the idea is like this: Agents have only a limited capacity to represent, learn about, and predict their world, and so solve their problems. When the problem or environment is too complex for any one agent, then you should have many weak agents make partial, incomplete, overlapping representations. You’ll be better off by doing this, and then learning a way to combine them, than by trying to find a single, globally accurate representation, such as a single super-genius agent which can handle the problem all by itself. Collectively, the combined representations of the group of agents are equivalent to a single high-capacity representation. But nobody, individually, has anything like the complete picture; in fact, everybody’s individual picture is pretty much wrong, or at best drastically incomplete. Powerful, high-level capacities which emerge from the interplay of low-level components are a common feature of complex systems, but here as elsewhere, just having the components and letting them interact is not enough. The organization of the interactions is crucial. In the brain, for instance, this is the difference between […]

+dilan tory and +Steven Wagner raise some interesting questions regarding the complaint in the linked article. Any thoughts from the stream? Quoting dilan’s question below. “Dan, I thought you might be interested in the legal/conceptual issues here. Steve wonders what you think about the following: What counts as a database/what does intent mean in this context? As for myself, I’m just wondering how often someone in France has to search for “Jew” after a name to cause google’s algorithmic whizgizmos to suggest it as a prompt. And I want to know whether French people do this more than, say, Germans or Americans-is French pop culture becoming obsessively anti-semitic? I can’t help but find this menacing–I’m in the middle of reading the postwar correspondance between Jaspers and Hannah Arendt…” _____ One interesting thing to consider is that Google already shapes your search results according to personalized metrics. In other words, if my communities are heavily involved and influential in, say, antisemetic circles, that would tend to raise the number of antisemetic results I’d get in a search. Presumably, this is what I’d want, given my online communities. Consequently, laws like this seem like ways of restricting which communities one might engage with. This might seem like an acceptable result when dealing with so-called “hate-based” communities, but of course when state institutions have this kind of authority it tends to over step its bounds. More generally, I think a lot of issues with online censorship are traditionally understood in terms of “free speech”, and so issues like this become difficult because it isn’t exactly clear what speech is getting suppressed when you silence autocomplete results. I’d personally suggest that +Google (as an artificially intelligent computing agent, not the corporation) is having its speech suppressed, but since I don’t think Google yet has […]