Offering multiple perspectives from many fields of human inquiry that may move all of us toward a more integrated understanding of who we are as conscious beings.
An interesting talk from the Santa Fe Institute on how understanding large-scale networks (the speaker, Mark Newman, works primarily with social networks) can help us understand complex systems.
Networks are useful as compact mathematical representations of all sorts of systems. SFI External Professor Mark Newman asks what the large-scale mathematical structures of networks can tell us. Mathematical measures of network properties such as degree (a measure of average connectivity) and transitivity (a measure of second-order connectivity) are simple, often-used ways of understanding network structure at a local level. Newman is interested in larger-scale structures of networks with thousands or millions of nodes. He reviews statistical techniques that offer such large-scale insights, as well as potential predictive capabilities. His presentation took place during SFI's 2014 Science Board Symposium in Santa Fe.
Millennials are on track to be the most educated, the most connected, and the most wired generation, with a bent for entrepreneurship and service. Evidence shows that Millennials may represent the tipping point generation in America, whose preferences and priorities are setting the direction for public and private life over the decades ahead. They are, by far, the most diverse generation in American history, with non-whites comprising about 40 percent. Austin, Texas has become a hub for Millennials and millennial entrepreneurs; the city's open and collaborative business climate has turned it into a unique entrepreneurship incubator.
Join National Journal and The Atlantic for the second in a series of town hall events as we go to the heart of Austin to examine the opportunities, inclinations and impact of this giant influential generation. This exciting event will focus on how Millennials are using entrepreneurship to build a pathway to success, and will feature insights from Millennials, government officials, educators, entrepreneurs, and more.
Margo Dover oversees Skillpoint Alliance’s direction and mission as its Executive Director. Margo came to this position after a lengthy career holding leadership positions at nonprofit and for-profit companies.
Jae Kim is Founder and Owner of Chi'Lantro BBQ.
Representative Trey Martinez Fischer, a member of an emerging group of Latino leaders in the United States, has built his career as a no-nonsense, down-to-business Democrat. Currently serving his seventh term representing District 116 in San Antonio, he was recently named one of the 10 Best Legislators of 2013 by Texas Monthly Magazine, who described him as a “soldier prepared to do battle but ready to make peace.” The Houston Chronicle and the San Francisco Chronicle named him one of the “20 Latino political rising stars of 2012,” placing him among those under 55 “who just might change the face of American politics over the next two decades.” In 2010, Campaigns and Elections Magazine named him a “Texas Influencer” and one of the Top-50 Democrats in the state. The New York Times has dubbed him a “heavy hitter” whose “loyalty to San Antonio remains steadfast.”
Bob Metcalfe is Professor of Innovation and Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise in The University of Texas at Austin’s Cockrell School of Engineering.
Jason Seats is the Managing Director of Techstars in Austin. Jason was most recently the Managing Director of the Techstars Cloud program. Prior to joining Techstars, Jason was a founder of Slicehost, an early cloud computing hosting company. In 2008 Slicehost was acquired by Rackspace and became the core for the initial Cloud Servers product. Jason continued on at Rackspace until 2010 as VP of software development for Rackspace Cloud, managing the cloud engineering teams. Jason has a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Parks College of Engineering, Aviation and Technology at Saint Louis University.
Michele Skelding is the Senior Vice President of Global Technology Strategies for the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce where she leads the development and execution of the organization’s vision for Central Texas as a top global region for technology innovation, company formation and expansion, in addition to increasing top access to private equity and venture capital. In this role, Michele cultivates emerging and strategic technology growth that identifies next generation technology and innovation trends, as well as facilitating the vital creation and interconnection of the Austin region’s burgeoning entrepreneurial ecosystem for company inception and growth acceleration.
Wendy Spencer began her duties as the Chief Executive Officer of the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) on April 9, 2012, shortly after her nomination was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate. She has a proven track record of nearly 30 years in volunteer management and administration, and she is the first CEO to come to CNCS directly from the field of national service.
From Bookforum's Omnivore blog, this collection of links is from the end of 2013. Among the topics here are technology, social constructs, social networks, digital democracy, and how Google and Amazon own the world (sort of).
What is it like to work at Amazon? Carole Cadwalladr lands a job in one of its giant warehouses and discovers the human cost of our lust for consumer goods.
Deborah Friedell reviewsThe Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone.
Secularizing the tech debate: Geoff Shullenberger reviewsWho Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier and To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov.
Adam Fisher on Google’s road map to global domination: In the battle for digital dominance, victory depends on being the first to map every last place on the globe — it’s as hard as it sounds.
Hacking society: Tom Slee on three books that look at the current state of play in the interconnected world.
“Unplugging” from the Internet isn’t about restoring the self so much as it about stifling the desire for autonomy that technology can inspire.
Here are 5 of the more interesting research presentations at the recent annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, as determined by the editors of Scientific American. Access PDFs of the abstracts from this year's meeting or download them to your e-reader or mobile device.
My Brain Made Me Pull the Trigger - Neuroscience has entered the courtroom in a big way, despite what academic experts believe about the use of brain scans at trial
Creativity, Madness and Drugs - Would we have Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven" today if the tormented author had taken lithium to suppress his bipolar illness?
Back in the 1970s, futurism was all the rage. But looking forward is becoming a thing of the past. According to Douglas Rushkoff, “presentism” is the new ethos of a society that’s always on, in real time, updating live. Guided by neither history nor long term goals, we navigate a sea of media that blend the past and future into a mash-up of instantaneous experience.
Rushkoff shows how this trend is both disorienting and exhilarating. Without linear narrative we get both the humiliations of reality TV and the associative brilliance of The Simpsons. With no time for long term investing, we invent dangerously compressed derivatives yet also revive sustainable local businesses. In politics, presentism drives both the Tea Party and the Occupy movement.
In many ways, this was the goal of digital technology—outsourcing our memory was supposed to free us up to focus on the present. But we are in danger of squandering this cognitive surplus on trivia. Rushkoff shows how we can instead ground ourselves in the reality of the present tense.
Douglas Rushkoff has been an authority on the intersection of technology and culture since before the word “google” was anything more than baby talk. He predicted the coming centrality of the Internet (CYBERIA, 1992 – a book initially canceled by a publisher who feared the net would be over by the time it came out); he coined the terms “viral media” (MEDIA VIRUS, 1994) and “social currency” (Upside Magazine, 1996); he forecasted the collapse of the dotcom bubble (SXSW, 1997) and the most recent recession in a 2004 column that later became his book, LIFE INC; he even inspired today’s code literacy movement (PROGRAM OR BE PROGRAMMED, 2010). He is the author of a total of twelve bestsellers (translated to over thirty languages), the host of three award-winning documentaries, an award-winning educator and frequent media commentator.
From Edge, this is an interesting talk by Albert-lászló Barabási on thinking in terms of networks. Some of the questions he has been asking and seeks to answer here are:
[W]hat does it mean to be part of the network?
[W]hat does it mean to think in terms of the network?
What does it mean to take advantage of this connectedness and to understand that?
[H]ow do you describe mathematically the connectedness?
How do you get data to describe that?
What does this really mean for us?
Some of the implications of this research might be alarming for some. I have no problem with collected data and trying to understand how, when, and why people interact, but I have concerns about what might happen to that data - who is going to use it, and how is it going to be used?
You can listen to the audio link below, watch the embedded video, or read the transcript (the first paragraphs of which are included, but you'll need to follow the title link to read the whole thing).
A Conversation with Albert-lászló Barabási [9.24.12] One question that fascinated me in the last two years is, can we ever use data to control systems? Could we go as far as, not only describe and quantify and mathematically formulate and perhaps predict the behavior of a system, but could you use this knowledge to be able to control a complex system, to control a social system, to control an economic system?
ALBERT-LÁSZLÓ BARABÁSI is a Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University, where he directs the Center for Complex Network Research, and holds appointments in the Departments of Physics, Computer Science and Biology, as well as in the Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women Hospital, and is a member of the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
We always lived in a connected world, except we were not so much aware of it. We were aware of it down the line, that we're not independent from our environment, that we're not independent of the people around us. We are not independent of the many economic and other forces. But for decades we never perceived connectedness as being quantifiable, as being something that we can describe, that we can measure, that we have ways of quantifying the process. That has changed drastically in the last decade, at many, many different levels.
It has changed partly because we started to be aware of it partly because there were a lot of technological advances that forced us to think about connectedness. We had Worldwide Web, which was all about the links connecting information. We had the Internet, which was all about connecting devices. We had wireless technologies coming our way. Eventually, we had Google, we had Facebook. Slowly, the term 'network connectedness' really became part of our life so much so that now the word 'networks' is used much more often than evolution or quantum mechanics. It's really run over it, and now that's the buzzword.
The question is, what does it mean to be part of the network, or what does it mean to think in terms of the network? What does it mean to take advantage of this connectedness and to understand that? In the last decade, what I kept thinking about is how do you describe mathematically the connectedness? How do you get data to describe that? What does this really mean for us?
This had several stages, obviously. The first stage for us was to think networks, only networks down the line. That was about a decade ago, we witnessed the birth of network science. I could say a couple of geniuses came along and did it, but really it was the data that made it possible. Suddenly we started to discover that lots of data that's out there, that we're collecting thanks to the Internet and other technological advances, allowed us to look at connectedness and to measure it and to map it out.
Once you had data, you could build theories. Once you had theories, you have predictive power, you could test that and then the whole thing fitted itself. It suddenly very actively emerged as a field that we now call network science. Going beyond networks, going beyond connectedness, we realized we started to know not only whom you connect to and whom you see and where are your links (the economical, personal, social or whatever they are) but we started to see also the timing of your activities. What do you do with those links? When do you interact?
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