Tom Munnecke’s Eclectica

If a bad apple can spoil the whole barrel, what are we doing to ourselves when we create “small worlds?” The likelihood of a bad apple appearing grows with the size of the barrell, and the dynamics of cascading allows the bad apple to propagate throughout the space. A kid in an apartment in the Philipines can unleash a computer virus which can infect the whole world, for example.

This has some really serious effects. As enlarge our scope of our connectivity, we find:

1. The probability of the bad apple appearing is greater. There are just more apples to be counted.
2. The damage they can do is greater. The larger the network, and the shorter the distance between edges, the more damage they can do.
3. The space becomes more attractive to the bad apples.
4. Problems compound. One bad apple’s effects can compound other problems. For example, the World Trade Center attacks compounded economic problems and global oil issues.

Thus we have an environment within which we can find a cascades of problems.

Two ways of addressing this come to mind:

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One of the delightful things about the Internet is how you can connect with people in new ways. This morning, I got an email from Labib Alfred Nassim from the UK who googled a paper I wrote with Heather Wood Ion 7 years ago for US Medicine Magazine, entitled “Creating an Epidemic of Health with the Internet,” and followups based on Jonas Salk’s maxim, “What we need to do is create an Epidemic of Health.”

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Advogato’s trust metricThe basic trust metric evaluates a set of peer certificates, resulting in a set of accounts accepted. These certificates are represented as a graph, with each account as a node, and each certificate as a directed edge. The goal of the trust metric is to accept as many valid accounts as possible, while also reducing the impact of attackers.

“We need to overcome the idea, so prevalent in both academic and bureaucratic circles, that the only work worth taking seriously is highly detailed research in a specialty. We need to celebrate the equally vital contribution of those who dare to take what I call ?a crude look at the whole.? Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann, in The Quark and the Jaguar, Adventures in the Simple and the Complex p. xiv.

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This is an image sent to me by Harold Koenig showing a medical illustration of a blood clotting cascade: I?ve been trying to figure out how to map my notions of ?cascade of uplift? into a diagram. It is just not the same. We need to have a much more powerful, dynamic, browser-based mechanism which shows linkages and time relationships:

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Kevin Burton

Great introduction to blogs from S?bastien Paquet of Universit? de Montr?al:
Personal knowledge publishing and its uses in research

“In recent years, the weblog phenomenon has continued its expansion, and the population of webloggers has become increasingly diverse. Growing numbers of professionals have started weblogging and use them “to reflect upon their work, to follow developments in the field, and to publish ideas” (Mortensen and Walker, 2002). Apart from software developers and web designers, the most well-represented professions in the “blogosphere” are information architects, journalists (starting in the fall of 2002, UC Berkeley is offering a journalism course on weblogging), librarians, lawyers, and education specialists. Knowledge management specialists, information technology consultants and researchers are also increasingly using the medium to engage in conversations about the problems they are trying to solve in their work.”

From webselforganization Gary Flake says:

“Despite the decentralized, unorganized, and heterogeneous nature of the web, where millions of individuals with different backgrounds, cultures, and goals operate independently, the study shows that the structure of the web self-organizes into communities of related information.”

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Email from “Bill”:
You mentioned, “I am convinced that the whole internet is on the cusp of a huge state-shift in how we connect.” What do you see are the top three areas that will make this shift? I have so many links tucked away that I don’t know what to do with them all. Need a better method of organizing them.

Let me give you an interesting quote:

“One of the great diseases of this age is the multitude of books that doth so overcharge the world that it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter that is every day hatched and brought into the world.” Barnaby Rich, writing in 1600 (Quoted from Will Durant’s “The Age of Reason Begins”, 1961)

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There is a lot of interest and hype with respect to blogs. For example, Carlson Analytics Profile and Seb’s Open Research and the quote: we suspect that the blog phenomenon is about to peak and that most will soon be stored in the part of cyberspace dedicated to hula hoops, pogo sticks and other fashions that reached their use-by date.”

I think that people are missing the point about this. Blogs are an opportunity for people to tell their own story. People can write what they want without intruding on other people’s attention. This taps a deeply rooted “intrinsic” need, and this is what will cause blogs to “cascade.”

At the Jan 2002 GivingSpace meeting in Washington, we were fortunate to have Usha Jha, Program Director from the Nepalese Women’s Empowerment Program. Sensing the irony of being in a room with mostly northern white males in Washington talking about the world’s problems, I asked her, “What could GivingSpace do for the women in the villages of Nepal?” She responded immediately, “Give them the opportunity to tell their stories of empowerment.” In other words, they wanted to give, and their stories were their gift.

Here is a sample “Elevator” from their web page:

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Within minutes of hearing David Coopperider speak of Johnathan Haidt’s paper on the emotion of elevation at the Images and Voices of Hope meeting in New York, I came up with the notion of “elevator links” to describe how to link positive things together. “Elevator Links” are stories of uplift and positive psychology which exhibit “build and broaden” characteristics… someone with positive emotions has a greater thought-action repertoire.

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