Author Archives: Marco Barnig

Cybernetics

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Cybernetics is a transdisciplinary approach for exploring regulatory systems, their structures, constraints, and possibilities. Cybernetics is applicable when a system being analyzed is involved in a closed signaling loop and it is relevant to the study of mechanical, physical, biological, cognitive, and social systems. These concepts are studied by other fields such as engineering and biology, but in cybernetics these are abstracted from the context of the individual organism or device.

Cybernetics was defined in the mid 20th century, by Norbert Wiener as the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine. It grew out from Claude Shannon’s information theory, which was designed to optimize the transfer of information through communication channels.

Cybernetics is related to System Dynamics, an approach to understand the behaviour of complex systems over time, and to Teleology.

Cybernetics is sometimes used as a generic term, which serves as an umbrella for many systems-related scientific fields.

Metasystem Transition

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A metasystem transition is the emergence, through evolution, of a higher level of organization or control. The concept of metasystem transition was introduced by the cybernetician Valentin Turchin in his 1977 book The Phenomenon of Science, and developed among others by Francis Heylighen in the Principia Cybernetica Project.

The classical sequence of metasystem transitions in the history of animal evolution, from the origin of animate life to sapient culture, has been defined by Valentin Turchin  :

  1. Control of Position = Motion
  2. Control of Motion = Irritability
  3. Control of Irritability = Reflex
  4. Control of Reflex = Association
  5. Control of Association = Thought
  6. Control of Thought = Culture

Principia Mathematica and Principia Cybernetica

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Principia commonly refers to Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, a work in three books by Sir Isaac Newton, first published 5 July 1687. The Principia is considered as one of the most important works in the history of science.

The Principia Mathematica (PM) is a three-volume work on the foundations of mathematics, written by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell and published in 1910, 1912, and 1913. PM is an attempt to derive all mathematical truths from a well-defined set of axioms and inference rules in symbolic logic.

The Principia Cybernetica Project is an attempt by a group of researchers to build a complete and consistent system of philosophy. Principia Cybernetica tries to tackle age-old philosophical questions with the help of the most recent cybernetic theories and technologies. Principia Cybernetica Web is one of the oldest, best organized, and largest, fully connected hypertexts on the Net. It contains over 2000 web pages (nodes), numerous papers, and even complete books.

The Principia Cybernetica Project was conceived by Valentin Turchin. With the help of Cliff Joslyn and Francis Heylighen, the first public activities started in 1989. An FTP server went online in March 1993 at the Free University of Brussels , followed a few months later by an hypertext server, which turned out to be the first one in Belgium.

The specific goals for the Principia Cybernetica Project are :

  • Collaboration
  • Constructivity
  • Active
  • Semantic Representations and Analysis
  • Consensus
  • Multiple Representational Forms
  • Flexibility
  • Publication
  • Multi-Dimensionality

Moore’s Law and other eponymous laws

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Moore’s law is the observation that over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. The law is named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who described the trend in his paper Cramming more components onto integrated circuits,  published in the Electronics Magazine, Volume 38, Number 8, April 19, 1965. His prediction has proven to be very accurate, in part because the law is now used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development.

In 2005, Gordon Moore stated in an interview that the law cannot be sustained indefinitely, because transistors will reach the limits of miniaturization at atomic levels.

A list of more eponymous laws (named after a person) is provided at Wikipedia.

MIT CCI (Center for Collective Intelligence)

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Last update : August 6, 2013

The MIT CCI (Center for Collective Intelligence) brings together faculty from across MIT to conduct research on how new communications technologies, especially the Internet, are changing the way people work together. The goal of their research is to understand how to take advantage of the new possibilities offered by systems like Google, Wikipedia and Innocentive.

Their basic question is : How can people and computers be connected so that, collectively, they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before ?

The MIT CCI was launched on October 13, 2006. Thomas W. Malone, Director of the Center, stated during the official launch that time has come to make collective intelligence a topic of serious academic study. The MIT CCI does four types of research :

  1. collecting examples or case studies
  2. create new examples to advance the state of the art and to learn new design principles
  3. do systematic studies and experiments
  4. develop new theories to help tie all these things together

The hope of the MIT CCI is that in the long run the research work done will help to understand new and better ways to organize businesses, to conduct science, to run governments, and, perhaps most importantly, to help solve the problems we face as society and as a planet.

A list of research projects is shown hereafter :

 

Global Brain Metaphor

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Last update : August 6, 2013

Global Brain

Global Brain Project

The global brain is a metaphor for the worldwide intelligent network formed by all the individuals of this planet, together with the information and communication technologies that connect them into a self-organizing whole. Although the underlying ideas are much older, the term was coined in 1982 by Peter Russell in his book The Global Brain.

The first peer-refereed article on the subject was written by Gottfried Mayer-Kress and Cathleen Barczys in 1995. The first algorithms that could turn the world-wide web into a collectively intelligent network were proposed by Francis Heylighen and Johan Bollen in 1996. Francis Heylighen reviewed the history of the concept and its usage, he distinguished four perspectives  :

  • organicism
  • encyclopedism
  • emergentism
  • evolutionary cybernetics

These perspectives now appear to come together into a single conception.

Global Brain Group and Institute

In 1996, Francis Heylighen and Ben Goertzel founded the Global Brain Group, a discussion forum grouping most of the researchers that had been working on the subject to further investigate this phenomenon. The group organized the first international conference on the topic in 2001. In January 2012, the Global Brain Institute (GBI) was founded at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel to develop a mathematical theory of the brainlike propagation of information across the Internet. The GBI grew out of the Global Brain Group and the Evolution, Complexity and Cognition research group (ECCO).

The following list provides links to further informations about the global brain :

Social music-making applications

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Smule Products

A social music network, connecting users across the globe through music and enabling people to uniquely express themselves, has been created by Smule, a company founded in 2008 by Jeff Smith and Ge Wang.

The products of Smule for Apple iOS devices are :

In December 1, 2011, Smule acquired Khush, an intelligent music app developer and creator of popular apps, Songify and LaDiDa™.

On October 3, 2012, during an Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar at the Standford’s Entrepreneurship Corner, co-founders Ge Wang and Jeff Smith, shared how their passion for music and technology discovered its full voice in the founding of Smule, whose applications seek to liberate the musician in everyone. Wang emphasized how technology should enable human connection and reaction, and Smith shared insights on the mobile space and the importance of product focus.

See the video of this lecture, a Startup in Harmony.

Free Software and Open Source Software

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Free software is software that gives you the user the freedom to share, study and modify it. Free software has become the foundation of a learning society where we share our knowledge in a way that others can build upon and enjoy.

GNU logo

The free software movement was started in 1983 by computer scientist Richard M. Stallman, when he launched a project called GNU, which stands for “GNU is Not UNIX”, to provide a replacement for the UNIX operating system. Then in 1985, Stallman started the Free Software Foundation, a nonprofit organization with the mission of advocating and educating on behalf of computer users around the world.

In 1998, a part of the free software community splintered off and began campaigning in the name of open source. Nearly all open source software is free software. The two terms describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values.

Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.

Read the statement of Richard Stallman “Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software”.

Interactive Internet Map

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The Internet Map is an interactive, searchable, bubble-filled visualization of the Internet showing 350,000 websites, based on a traffic snapshot of the Internet from late 2011. It has been created by Ruslan Enikeev and went  public on July 24, 2012.

The Internet Map shows each website as a circle, sized according to levels of web traffic. The circle’s colour indicates the country to which it relates. User’s switching between websites forms links, and the stronger the link, the closer the websites tend to arrange themselves to each other. Clusters on the map are semantically charged, they join websites together according to their content.

Internet Map by Ruslan Enikeev

The mathematical model is based on the thesis A Numerical Optimization Approach
to General Graph Drawing, submitted in 1999 by Daniel Tunkelang at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. The engineering solution is based on the Fast N-Body Simulation with CUDA, described by Lars Nyland and Mark Harris from NVIDIA Corporation and by Jan Prins from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The technologies used  to present the Internet map are Google maps engine for the visual display, Microsoft’s .net technologies for web query processing and Amazon AWS  (S3, Cloudfront, Relational Database Services RDS and Elastic Beanstalk) for hosting and content delivery.

About 30 million picture tiles (256 x 256 pixels) are used to form the map. More than one million unique visitors saw the map during the first week after the project went online.

Internet Organizations

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Last update : July 25, 2013

There are different Internet Organizations that play a key role in the evolution of the Internet by developing recommendations, standards, and technology, deploying infrastructure and services, and addressing other major issues.

  • World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is  the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded by Tim Berners-Lee at MIT in 1994 and currently headed by him, the consortium is made up of member organizations which maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the world wide web.
  • The Internet Society (ISOC) is an international, non-profit organization founded in 1992 by Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn and Lyman Chapin to provide leadership in Internet related standards, education, and policy.
  • The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) is the committee charged with oversight of the technical and engineering development of the Internet by the ISOC. The body was originally created originally with the name Internet Configuration Control Board during 1979, it became the Internet Advisory Board during 1984 and then the Internet Activities Board during 1986. It finally became the Internet Architecture Board, under ISOC, during 1992.
  • The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is the entity that oversees global IP address allocation, autonomous system number allocation, root zone management in the Domain Name System (DNS), media types, and other Internet Protocol-related symbols and numbers. Starting in 1988, IANA was funded by the U.S. government; ten years later the IANA function was transferred to ICANN.
  • The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), is a nonprofit private organization created in 1998, that is responsible for the coordination of the global Internet’s systems of unique identifiers and, in particular, ensuring its stable and secure operation. This work includes coordination of the Internet Protocol address spaces (IPv4 and IPv6) and assignment of address blocks to regional Internet registries.
  • The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) develops and promotes Internet standards, cooperating closely with the W3C, ISO and IEC standards bodies and dealing in particular with standards of the Internet protocol suite. It is an open standards organization, with no formal membership or membership requirements. The first IETF meeting was in 1986.
  • The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) is a body composed of IETF chair and area directors. It provides the final technical review of Internet standards and is responsible for day-to-day management of the IETF.
  • The Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) promotes research of importance to the evolution of the Internet by creating focused, long-term research groups working on topics related to Internet protocols, applications, architecture and technology.
  • The International Electrotechnical Commission  (IEC) is a non-profit, non-governmental international standards organization that prepares and publishes International standards for all electrical, electronic and related technologies – collectively known as electrotechnology. The IEC held its inaugural meeting in 1906.
  • The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded in 1947, the organization promulgates worldwide proprietary, industrial, and commercial standards.
  • The Web Science Trust (WST) is a joint effort originally started between MIT and University of Southampton to bridge and formalize the social and technical aspects of the World Wide Web.
  • The World Wide Web Foundation (Web Foundation) is an organization dedicated to the improvement and availability of the World Wide Web. The formation of the organization was announced on September 14, 2008 by Tim Berners-Lee at the Newseum (interactive museum of news and journalism) in Washington.
  • The Web Performance Optimization Foundation (WPO Foundation) (is a non-profit for web performance, with the goal to help fund open source web performance projects and public research into web performance.