Minding The Planet is Nova Spivack’s weblog on emerging technologies and trends. It focuses ways in which the Web is becoming more present, personalized and precise.
Nova Spivack is a technology futurist, entrepreneur, and angel investor, and a leading voice on search, collective intelligence and the Semantic Web. More...
by Nova Spivack, Minding the Planet, http://www.mindingtheplanet.net
This news article reports that the FBI is investigating a situation in which mobsters deliberately contaminated their drug money with a virus in order to deter in-house theft by members of their organization. Several years ago, during the days of collective paranoia following 9-11, I started thinking about how [...]
Here is a fascinating article about DARPA’s "high risk, high payoff" quest to develop an exotic new Hafnium bomb — a new kind of weapon that emits huge amounts of gamma rays from a very small package. This thing packs the bang of a conventional nuke in a package as small as a hand grenade [...]
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.
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This is quite interesting. It turns out that manufacturers of color laser printers are secretly encoding tracking numbers onto every inch of every printout. These microscopic codes enable printouts to be traced back to particular printers that printed them, and thus to whomever owns those devices. I’m surprised there hasn’t been more discussion of this.
Related [...]
Researchers at Cornell have come up with a clever new way to determine the sentiment expressed in textual data. Their method relies of separating objective statements from subjective statements, and then just measuring the subjective ones. This results in more accurate measures of sentiment.
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Change This, a project that helps to promote interesting new ideas so that they get noticed above the noise level of our culture has published my article on “A Physics of Ideas” as one of their featured Manifestos. They use an innovative PDF layout for easier reading, and they also provide a means for readers [...]
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. The article discusses recent progress towards Isaac Asimov’s vision for [...]
This posting is the FAQ and introduction for a new, improved, second-generation meme experiment that is designed to spread faster and more broadly than the first meme experiment. We call this kind of meme a “GoMeme” (pronounced Go-Meem), because it is a meme that is designed to Go. The actual GoMeme, which you can [...]
Matt Poepping has come up with an interesting idea for how to create a fully distributed searchable database on the Net. It’s a cool enough idea and approach that people should see his RFC and comment on it. He may be onto something important here.
Related Posts:New Version of My "Metaweb" Graph — The Future of [...]
This animated visualizer lets you enter a word (in the little search box on the bottom left) and then shows the word situated next to other words that are used with similar frequency in English. It’s cool — you can discover some interesting things. Read the about page for more on that. This system would [...]
by Nova Spivack, http://www.novaspivack.com
Original: July 8, 2004
Revised: February 5, 2005; February 28, 2010
(Permission to reprint or share this article is granted, with a citation to this Web Page: http://www.novaspivack.com/science/a-physics-of-ideas-measuring-the-physical-properties-of-memes)
This paper provides an overview of a new approach to measuring the physical properties of ideas as they move in real-time through information spaces and populations such [...]
Draft 1.1 for Review (integrates some fixes from readers)
Nova Spivack (www.mindingtheplanet.net)
INTRODUCTION
This article presents some thoughts about the future of intelligence on Earth. In particular, I discuss the similarities between the Internet and the brain, and how I believe the emerging Semantic Web will make this similarity even greater.
DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE
The Semantic Web enables the formal [...]
A new technique has been proposed that appears to be able to determine a shortlist of possible words that can occupy sections of declassified documents that have been “blacked out.” The attack makes use of some clever analytical tactics. Using this method the researchers were able to determine the identity of an intelligence agency in [...]
A new approach to computing called
Notes:
Many people have requested this graph and so I am posting my latest version of it. The Metaweb is the coming “intelligent Web” that is evolving from the convergence of the Web, Social Software and the Semantic Web. The Metaweb is starting to emerge as we shift from a Web focused on information to a [...]
It just occurred to me that distribution of primes looks VERY much like the output of a cellular automaton rule. This makes me wonder whether it might be possible to use a cellular automaton to generate prime numbers. If we can find the rule that generates the prime numbers, perhaps this rule has other important [...]
Wow. This is a very cool new project — controlling video games with a braincap.
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This diagram (click to see larger version) illustrates why I believe technology evolution is moving towards what I call the Metaweb. The Metaweb is emerging from the convergence of the Web, Social Software and the Semantic Web.
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This article discusses new research in how the brain makes buying decisions and other choices — what is now called “neuromarketing”. Neuromarketing researchers seek to discover, and influence, the neurological forces at work inside the mind of potential customers. According to the article, most decisions are made subconsciously and are not necessarily rational at all [...]
Biologists are now strapping tiny cameras to animals and insects to capture their daily lives — even onto bees!
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Huge news for the Semantic Web — the W3C has officially approved the RDF and OWL specs.
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Shannon Clark, a smart guy who is also the founder of Mesh Forum, a new conference devoted to understanding the power of networks in various domains sent me a cool link to the Namebase visualization of citations around my grandfather, Peter F. Drucker. Namebase is cool, try it out.
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At Sandia National Laboratories researchers are working on a new technology that helps managers read the minds of their employees. This is supposed to help the managers assign tasks more effectively, gain insight into their employees’ states of mind, and achieve higher human performance. Technologies of this nature are useful for creating what I call [...]
Josh Kirschenbaum has some interesting ideas about a different way to constructing a social network.
Instead of a LinkedIn (or any other system) style of listing everyone I know, and everyone who knows who I know- it shows a list of other nodes that I am strongly connected to. This strength is based on the quality [...]
Hello all, I have been thinking about the general problems of social networks on the Internet. It occurs to me that these issues are closely related to digital physics. For more on digital physics see the work of Ed Fredkin, Stephen Wolfram, Norman Margolus, Tomasso Toffoli, and other pioneers of the field of cellular automata. [...]
The Creativity Machine is a special application of neural networks based on the deliberate introduction of mathematical noise into the network. By adding noise after the network has been trained, the system is able to wander around slightly less rigidly, leading it to “free associate” and even to “dream” and “hallucinate.” Stephen Thaler [...]
Here is an interesting article on “Cognitive Overload” for those interesting in a more scholarly analysis of the subject. Nice work!
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It turns out the Cold War never ended — it just switched from humans vs. humans to humans vs. rabbits. And the frontlines of this new Great Game are in Belgium, where police just captured the latest in secret weaponry on the side of the humans: A new Rabbit Poaching Spy Car that could have [...]
CNN posted an article today about the potential risk of nanotechnology on the human brain. Basically some research shows that nano-scale particles such as industrial waste, or even components of nanotechnologies, can migrate through the human circulatory system and eventually lodge in the brain. This could cause harmful effects. But on the other hand, maybe [...]
Another interesting article from my father, Mayer Spivack, about his theory that there are two main modes of human cognition. One is linear and the other is associative. Our culture calls the linear mode “intelligent” and the non-linear mode “dyslexic” or “disabled.” But actually the non-linear mode is in fact another form of intelligence, with [...]