concise history of social media...,

Via: Online Schools

the limits of social media

Shareable | Blogs have been a twitter about Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article last week slamming those who believe social media can revolutionize activism. The article compares the high risk activism of the civil rights movement with Twitter’s role in the Iranian elections concluding that, “the revolution will not be tweeted.”

First of all, taking aim at those who are love drunk for social media is like shooting fish in a barrel. Secondly, it’s no revelation that a tweet is less effective than putting your life on the line for a cause.

Moreover, Gladwell gets the role of the online activism wrong. As someone who worked with professional online activists on a daily basis for two years while at Care2.com, I can tell you that none of my clients believed online activism had much value by itself. It was always part of a larger strategy and, as Mashable pointed out, serves a very specific role in activism – it offers citizens a no risk first step on the path to higher risk engagement. But this is no reinvention as Mashable argues. It’s mostly optimization.

From my perspective as publisher of Shareable, Gladwell's article and the resulting hubbub misses the larger points:

1.) activism by itself can’t achieve its stated aims no matter what medium is used. A new social order requires a new economy.

2.) social media is primarily creative – its true power is not as a tool for resistance but as a coordinating medium for an emerging peer-economy which promises to obsolete state capitalism.

The reason I co-founded Shareable is that having been a lobbyist and a capitalist, and now a nonprofit activist, I’ve come to believe that activism by itself is no match for state capitalism. I remember vividly the time ten years ago when I naively asked a peer at the FCC, who I interfaced with as a representative of a large telecom trade association, where the FCC got their market research. They said, “from you.” I was shocked. The FCC didn’t do their own research. They relied mainly on industry for that. Of course the public could way in too, but the presence of public interest advocacy seemed minimal. We, on the other hand, never missed a beat. The association membership was unified and funded our lobbying efforts well.

This story points to a systemic issue - activists face a classic collective action problem that has no resolution: the nonprofit sector is composed of many entities with many agendas; the corporate sector is composed of a smaller number of vastly more powerful entities with only one agenda – profit. This means that it’s significantly easier for corporations to act collectively and achieve their goals than it is for nonprofits. This is partly why corporations have become so powerful.

Bottom line, the nonprofit sector is structurally fucked and social media doesn’t change this one byte, because after all it’s available to both sides in the game. The failure of the COP15 climate negotiations is a good example of activism’s limits. And then there’s this brave letter from Bill McKibben admitting that the environmental movement is failing to get action on climate change. This is despite having public opinion on its side and a legion of activist across the globe. Fist tap Dale.

open biology's quest to explode data

The Scientist | A “science commons” at the data-intensive layer will encourage scholarly collaboration and communication—and spur drug discovery.

Robert Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet and the founder of 3Com, observed that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system. This is known as Metcalfe’s Law, and it goes a long way toward explaining why we can create and realize so much value from the Web. As more users get online, the network gets more valuable, spurring more users to get online, and so on.

Getting Metcalfe’s Law to operate for data is a long-held goal of science. Indeed, the Web was created to share data—physics data—by making it easier to link, find, download, and browse information on disparate computers. But we don’t have the functionality of the consumer Web for biological data. And we’re not getting network effects for data in the spaces that would most dramatically affect our lives—in the study of human disease.

There are a lot of reasons for this. Studying human disease is complex and almost incomprehensibly expensive. And recent studies from inside the pharmaceutical industry itself draw on 60 years of data to show us that drug discovery is essentially a random process. It’s hard to force network effects onto this world.

That’s because it’s difficult to start an “open” biology process from scratch. The cost of entry is still in the tens of millions of dollars to develop a meaningful corpus of data sets one can legally share and analytic tools one can legally place under open source licenses. Even then you’d have to find incentives to get scientists to share their new data, their models of disease, their software tools—when they’re not rewarded for doing so. It is a tall hill to climb.

microcosmic mafia wars

The Scientist | When searching for an appropriate description of the mammalian immune system, the vast majority of scientists settle on the metaphor of a war. It’s a battle scene, with the foot soldiers of the immune system (e.g., killer T cells) battling the bacterial or viral particles in an open field (the host’s body). Painting a picture in such strong terms is a good way to attract attention (and funding), and in many ways, it is a good fit—one paper I stumbled on as a graduate student that elegantly modeled the conflict generated nearly identical equations to those used in traditional models of warfare, which predict that military losses are proportional to the size of enemy forces.

Over the last several years, however, scientists have begun to realize that the molecular interactions between a pathogen and its host are quite a bit more complex than simple open field battle, where the power of one’s army is measured by bodies alone. The immune system is a multifaceted defense system, and pathogens have evolved numerous molecular strategies to evade its wrath, including methods that resemble more the devious tactics of organized crime than those of traditional warfare, such as setting up fronts to conduct covert operations, going undercover to infiltrate the opposing gang, and terrifying the enemy into admitting defeat (or committing Seppuku).

In the late 1990s, the discovery of pathogenicity islands—large regions of bacterial and viral genomes unique to pathogenic species—led researchers to recognize that many pathogens were involved in some complex racketeering, says immunologist and microbiologist Igor Brodsky of Yale University. Encoding specialized systems to inject virulence proteins into cells, pathogens are able to manipulate cellular processes in the host for their own benefit, such as initiating immune cell death and blocking a continued immune response.

This prompted the field to start identifying specific virulence factors important for a particular pathogen—either by mining databases for genes that might be behind those factors, knocking them out, and observing the effects on the pathogen’s ability to infect its host, or doing random mutagenesis. Once scientists identified some factors important for virulence, “then the question was what were these genes or proteins doing,” Brodsky says.

collective intelligence?

world wide mind @ Yahoo! Video

MIT Spectrum | Can collective intelligence save the planet? “It’s the only hope we have,” says Prof. Thomas Malone, adding that “no one really knows whether we’ll succeed.”

Malone — who is “basically an optimist” and believes that in the end, we will probably make choices that will, in fact, save the Earth — is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and is director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.

He launched the Center in 2006 in part to learn how to harness the collective intelligence of the planet to help solve the world’s biggest problems — climate change, poverty, terrorism, healthcare, or crime — problems too big to be solved by any one expert or group. While, he says, groups like countries, companies, armies, and families have used various forms of collective intelligence for centuries to solve problems, the goal of the Center is to combine pooled human brainpower with new information technologies “to solve problems in ways that would never have been thinkable before.”

Google, Wikipedia, Linux, and YouTube already are using pooled brainpower to bring forth new solutions, he says. Consider Google. Millions create websites linked to each other; the information is harvested by Google algorithms, so when you type in a question, the answers are amazingly intelligent. Or take Wikipedia, where thousands across the globe create a huge, high-quality intellectual project with almost no centralized control. To best use these systems, he says, we need to better understand them. That’s a main goal of the Center, where the big question is: How can people and computers be connected so that collectively they act more intelligently than any person, group, or computer has ever done before?

One of their main projects is the Climate Collaboratorium, which harnesses the collective intelligence of thousands across the world to develop plans for what we can do about global climate change. Most recently, more than 2,000 users have visited the site, with 350 registered users, who have contributed 22 finalized plans with another 35 in progress. Users of the site include: the general public; world-class experts; moderators, who help organize and manage the input; and national and international policymakers.

Malone says: “We believe that for this site to realize its potential it should have at least thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people involved. Of course, we don’t know if this will happen, but we think it’s an experiment worth doing.”

resistance IS futile....,

Video - Ant adventures.

The Scientist | In the absence of mating flights by airborne queens, how do Argentine ants form a new society -- one with a different clannish identity? The book posits for the first time an intriguing new hypothesis: that they don't. This would mean that the Argentine ants that made their way to California are simply an extension of the ant society from whence they came and that there are no truly new colonies.

When the expanding mass of ants bud off a new nest, all its members can mix freely with residents of the nests from whence they came, even if separated by continents. The only way for another colony to appear is for a fragment of a different colony, complete with queens and workers, to arrive at that spot, probably brought on another boat or in a car. Before humans introduced these reliable means of transportation, Argentine ants could only make such long-distant moves by rafting on floating debris in Argentine rivers. This early method of "jump dispersal" yielded the intricate patchwork of colonies that exist in Argentina, but until recently confined the species there.

Argentine ants worldwide therefore identify with limited number of colonies that continue indefinitely and are strongly inbred. Each of the California supercolonies for example must have originated from a different colony in Argentina, with its own social identity. Each is able to associate only with the populations it spins off and with its mother colony and not with members of other supercolonies.

It is reasonable, then, to think of California's four supercolonies as nothing less than the very same societies that invaded the state starting 100 years back. Whereas most ant colonies go through a lifecycle similar to that of an organism -- being born when a queen rears her first brood and dying when the queen dies -- the Argentine ant societies have achieved a kind of immortality.

What's more, a supercolony's ability to span space and time forces scientists to reconsider our concept of individuality. Like the protagonist of Gogol's story "The Nose," we don't expect our body parts to wander off. But because Argentine ants move freely within each supercolony and produce offspring that identify with the colony they came from, they spread a nationality. Leapfrogging here and there, each society recreates itself in fragments. New Zealand contains a supercolony now known to be identical to Very Large Colony in California. No surprise: since Very Large Colony controls the port cities from north (Richmond, Oakland, San Francisco) to south (Long Beach, Los Angeles, and San Diego), its ants would have easily hitched a ride to New Zealand on any of a number of ships.

Supercolonies confound our notions about societies, populations and species like nothing else. An Argentine ant society is separated socially and reproductively from all other Argentine ants by an intolerance of outsiders. Their patriotism is so absolute that males are almost always killed if they enter the territory of the next supercolony. That differs from people, whose cultures, albeit often violent toward each other, have a history of interbreeding that unifies our species. Since there's almost no reproduction between supercolonies, each society effectively exists in isolation, as genetically separate as lions are from tigers.

In a very real sense, then, each Argentine ant supercolony is its own species. If the ideas in Adventures Among Ants are correct, this is a previously overlooked means of fashioning a species.

what are they trying to signal?

Video - Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking Aliens

Guardian | "Extremophiles" are species that can survive in places that would quickly kill humans and other "normal" life-forms. These single-celled creatures have been found in boiling hot vents of water thrusting through the ocean floor, or at temperatures well below the freezing point of water. The front ends of some creatures that live near deep-sea vents are 200C warmer than their back ends.

"In our naive and parochial way, we have named these things extremophiles, which shows prejudice – we're normal, everything else is extreme," says Ian Stewart, a mathematician at Warwick University and author of What Does A Martian Look Like? "From the point of view of a creature that lives in boiling water, we're extreme because we live in much milder temperatures. We're at least as extreme compared to them as they are compared to us."

On Earth, life exists in water and on land but, on a giant gas planet, for example, it might exist high in the atmosphere, trapping nutrients from the air swirling around it. And given that aliens may be so out of our experience, guessing motives and intentions if they ever got in touch seems beyond the realm's even of Hawking's mind.

Paul Davies, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University and chair of Seti's post-detection taskforce, argues that alien brains, with their different architecture, would interpret information very differently from ours. What we think of as beautiful or friendly might come across as violent to them, or vice versa. "Lots of people think that because they would be so wise and knowledgeable, they would be peaceful," adds Stewart. "I don't think you can assume that. I don't think you can put human views on to them; that's a dangerous way of thinking. Aliens are alien. If they exist at all, we cannot assume they're like us."

Answers to some of these conundrums will begin to emerge in the next few decades. The researchers at the forefront of the work are astrobiologists, working in an area that has steadily marched in from the fringes of science thanks to the improvements in technology available to explore space.

beyond the farthest reach of the sun's power

Video - Abundant Life in and around Hydrothermal Vents

In the eyes of many Christians, the darwinian revolution left nature purposeless, at least on paper. Darwinians, faced with a personal Creator as the only conceivable source of purpose, hastened to agree. But physical purpose is more subtle than that. From the thermodynamic vantag point, purpose has a physical aspect. It is no more uniform than memory, which manifests itself in bodies, genetically, and brains, neuronally - and even in machines - magnetically. And like memory, purpose - with its orientation toward the future - has a thermodynamic genesis.

Life is thermodynamic. A continuous whirlpool downstream of Niagara Falls has a name; "Whirlpool". We give names to things like species and hurricanes, that keep their identities - at least for a time. The formation of stable identities aids the thermodynamic process of gradient reduction. The highly heritable members of a species, like other cyclical and complex thermodynamic agents, provide stable vehicles of degradation. The cycling selves of life survive in order to reduce the energetic and material gradients that keep them going, they covet and tap into these gradients to survive long enough to reproduce. As natural selection filters out the many to preserve the remaining few, those few ever more efficiently use environmental energy to "purposefully" reduce their gradients. The key point is that living and nonliving "selves" come into being to reduce gradients naturally. The reproducing self of biology is a higher order cycle whose antecedents can be inferred from the cycles of the nonliving world. Nucleotide replication and cell reproduction do not emerge from nowhere. They are born in an energetic universe from thermodynamic tendencies inherent in nature.

the driving force II

Video - Excerpt from Chronos.

Acceleration of change sweeps us away. One week recently, I passed a yellowed, run-down, student-infested house on the main street of town while bicycling to the campus as usual. A week afterward the view past the house across to the neighboring schoolyard was splendid. For the first time in living memory, it was unobstructed.

Mountains framed the distant backdrop. The house was gone. No sign that any house hade ever been there remained, except newly raked soil in the footprint of a simple ground plan. Such dramtic changes in our immediate surroundings are commonplace. Burger King, Toys "R" Us, Wendys, McDonalds, and bank branches sprout in our cities and towns. Mom-andpop shops, wheat fields, and old oaks disappear like coins dropped into the sand. Native Americans thrive if they form gambling liasons, graduate students receive stipends when they change from studying the habits of beavers inside their lodges to the search for genes in the human genome.

1. Why do the forces of change always seem to prevail over the quiet and uneventful habits of the past?
2. Why does the evolution of life seem to accelerate as we move into the present and out toward the future?
3. Is evolution just random change?
   
4. Does the evolutionary process itself, the origin and diversification of life from common ancestors, seem to be directed?

When we ask evolutionary biologists and other scientists if the evolution of life is going in some direction, they adamantly deny it. But our everyday experience suggests that our social environment grows more complex. Our natural green and watery environment seems to shrink to be locally augmented with metallic solids. Neon lights, traffic signals, and other aspects of urbanization replace woodlands and open streams at an ever-increasing rate of change. People crowd out foxes and antelope, pigeons and sparrows replace orioles and woodpeckers. Digital tools supplant simple mechanical devices at alarming speeds. Evolution of life does seem to have a direction. Life's peculiarities and human technologies do seem to expand at an accelerating rate of change as we come from the past toward the present. Darwin's Dilemma Acquiring Genomes Lynn Margulis.