My friend and colleague, Adam Cheyer, from SRI, recently helped to advise and launch Change.org — a social network for nonprofit activism. It’s a great site for a great cause. It’s also a great example of a special-purpose social network — a useful social network.… Read More “Congratulations to Adam Cheyer and Change.org”
Read this fun article that lists and defines some of the key concepts that every post-singularity transhumanist meta-intellectual should know! (via Kurzweil)
I came across this interesting project that aims to stop online pedophiles by setting 100,000 online honeytraps. It calls for 100,000 volunteer adults to post online profiles in various services posing as minors. They then use these a bait and wait to be contacted by pedophiles.… Read More “Interesting Proposal for Stopping Online Pedophiles”
I am concerned by what I’m viewing in our national media lately. Viewed from outside (and also from within the USA), it would appear that our nation is obsessed with, and plagued by, an increasing spree of horrible crimes and abuses of human rights.… Read More “A Proposal to Make the Media (and Society) Better”
I was reading this article in Wired magazine about wikis, where the article itself is a wiki that the readers can contribute to — and an idea occurred to me. What if you could make an entire magazine that was in a fact a wiki?… Read More “Interesting Idea: Start a Magazine that is a Wiki”
This is a cool pair of images showing a striking similarity between the structure of neurons and that of our universe. I’ve often wondered whether the entire universe isn’t some kind of a mind or a brain in which we are like subatomic particles.
Grupthink is a service where anyone can create and participate in polls on various subjects. It’s similar to an idea I once had about polling the global mind in real-time (although their system does not show votes happening in real-time, presently).… Read More “Polling the Global Mind”
Check out The Broth — it’s a "global mosaic" in which you can move tiles around in real time with other people to create emergent artworks. It’s really cool to watch images grow and morph from the combined imagination of people around the Net.… Read More “Cool Collective Intelligence Group Drawing Game”
My father, Mayer Spivack, has written an interesting piece on managing thinking styles in organizations. He points out the difference between the thinking styles in early and later stage companies, and the challenge of managing and integrating these two aspects of the organization’s cognitive process.… Read More “Managing Different Thinking Styles in Organizations”
Today I read an interesting article in the New York Times about a company called Rite-Solutions which is using a home-grown stock market for ideas to catalyze bottom-up innovation across all levels of personnel in their organization. This is a way to very effectively harness and focus the collective creativity and energy in an organization around the best ideas that the organization generates.… Read More “Harnessing The Collective Mind”
The Edge has published mini-essays by 119 "big thinkers" on their "most dangerous ideas" — fun reading.
… Read More “Big Thinkers' Most Dangerous Ideas”The history of science is replete with discoveries
that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally
dangerous in their time; the Copernican and
Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious.
Great news! Radar Networks, the venture I’ve been building, has received its first round of outside funding from Vulcan Capital. We are heavily in stealth mode.
I’ve been thinking about different types of communities recently. Two forms of community that are often discussed are "communities of interest" where the members share a common set of interests (e.g. a community of people interested in Japanese culture), and "communities of practice" where the members share a common set of skills (e.g.… Read More “Communities of Purpose: The Third Type of Community”
This article provides an overview of the Global Consciousness Project at Princeton, which has found that the behavior of a network of specially shielded random number generators deviates from stasticial randomness prior to major world events. I have been following this project for several years and have made various suggestions for further experiments to test the system.… Read More “A Machine That Sees The Future?”
The New York Times has published a wonderful and fascinating set of mini-essays by leading scientists about their beliefs in the unknkown and unexplained — from consciousness, to God, to life on other worlds, and the existence of true love. There are some terrific thoughts in it — one of thoses rare articles that breaks through stereotypes and opens the door to new paradigms.… Read More “Scientists Discuss their Beliefs in the Unknown”
Media Mammon is a new stock market for memes. You can invest play money in words and phrases that are spreading through the media. May the best meme win! See also: A Physics of Ideas.
Great find from Rob Usey at Psydex Corporation: This article is a survey of the emerging field of “sociophysics” which attempts to apply statistical mechanics to predict human social behavior. It’s very cool stuff if you’re interested in social networks, memes, sociology and prediction science.… Read More “Great Article on Psychohistory and Sociophysics — Can We Predict Behavior?”
