Ergebnis für URL: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/PCPND96.html [1]Principia Cybernetica Web
PCP-news digest 1996-98
The following is a digest of the main news sent every two month as part of the
[2]newsletter to the [3]PCP-news mailing list, chronologically ordered.
____________________________________________________________________________
News - May/June 1996
The last two months have been relatively quiet on the front of new nodes or email
discussions. On the other hand, there has been an important meeting of the
Principia Cybernetica editorial board in Washington DC, accompanied by some
seminars, discussions and a "cybernetics party" (see [externallink.GIF]
[4]http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~joslyn/96summer.html for a program of the events).
The most important result of the meeting was a new consensual definition of the
central concept of "control" together with a number of related concepts. A draft
node has already been put on the Web (see below), but it will be elaborated with
many more details and related nodes in the coming two It may be of interest to
note that a new mailing list, j-memetics, has been created, which is to some
degree a "spin-off" of PRNCYB-L. Its aim is to discuss the creation of a
peer-reviewed, electronic journal devoted to memetics or "evolutionary models of
information transmission". For more info, contact hanss[at]sepa.tudelft.nl
(Hans-Cees Speel) or b.edmonds [ at ] mmu.ac.uk (Bruce
News- July/August
Last August, a new study group, associated with PCP, has been started, to discuss
the emergence of a "global brain" out of the computer network, which would
function as a nervous system for the human "superorganism". Participation is
limited to people who have been doing active research and published books or
papers on this subject. Present members are: Peter Russell, Gottfried
Mayer-Kress, Gregory Stock, Lee Chen, Johan Bollen, Ben Goertzel, Joel de Rosnay,
Valentin Turchin and Francis Heylighen. For more info, see
http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/suporgli.html or contact Francis
News- Sept/Oct 1996
A first part of the new results, reached during the PCP board meeting in June, on
the definition of control have now been incorporated into PCP Web
(http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/control.html). Moreover, our programs for
self-organizing hypertext and retrieval of words through spreading activation can
now be permanently consulted on the web, via a new node devoted to our research
on learning, "brain-like" webs (5]learnweb.html)".>http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/[5]learnweb.html). The
PCP editor Cliff Joslyn has moved from Goddard Space Center, NASA, to the Los
Alamos National Laboratory. His new address is:
* Mail Stop B265
* Los Alamos National Laboratory
* Los Alamos, NM 87545 USA
* joslyn[ at ]lanl.gov
* http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~joslyn
The groups associated with PCP have also been quite active. The people involved
with the electronic "Journal of Memetics" have reached consensus on an
introductory text describing the aims of the journal, a general editorial policy,
a managing editor (Hans-Cees Speel, hanss[ at ]sepa.tudelft.nl), and the
constitution of an advisory board (presently Daniel Dennett, Aaron Lynch, David
Hull and Gary Cziko). At the moment, they are looking for authors wishing to
contribute to the first issue, which is scheduled for 1997. If you are interested
to write a paper or take part in the reviewing process, please contact Hans-Cees
Speel.
The "Global Brain" group (see http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/gbrain-l.html) has
started its discussions on superorganisms and networks playing the role of
nervous systems. Thanks again to Bruce Edmonds (who already created the PRNCYB-L
archive, and the Journal of Memetics list and web site), an archive of the
discussions can now be consulted at [externallink.GIF]
[6]http://www.fmb.mmu.ac.uk:80/~majordom/gbrain/
News- Nov/Dec 1996
We are happy to announce that Joel de Rosnay is joining PCP as a new "associate"
(see http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/masthead.html). Joel is a systems theorist,
futurologist, molecular biologist and prolific writer of popular science books on
topics related to the cybernetic world view. He is presently Director of Strategy
of the Cite des Sciences et de l'Industrie at La Villette (Paris, France). His
book "The Macroscope", a systemic view of the world as whole, will soon be made
available on the Web with the support of PCP. Joel is in particular interested in
the "cybernetic organism" formed by global society and its "planetary brain"
emerging out of the computer networks. His home page, with interviews and
excerpts from his work can be found at [externallink.GIF]
[7]http://www.cite-sciences.fr/derosnay/e-index.html
The people involved with the electronic "Journal of Memetics", associated with
PCP, have set up their (still experimental) web site for the publication of
memetics related articles. The first papers should be published in the next few
months.
News- Jan/Feb 1997
The most important development was the publication on PCP Web of a complete book
on the system's approach, "The Macroscope", by PCP associate Joel de Rosnay.
News- March-April 1997
After the very successful Web publication of Joel de Rosnay's book "The
Macroscope" (which has drawn many positive responses), we are preparing a Web
version of another difficult-to-find classic book on cybernetics and systems
thinking: "The Phenomenon of Science. A cybernetic approach to human evolution"
by PCP editor Valentin Turchin. The book should be available on PCP Web in the
coming weeks.
We are preparing the annual meeting of the Principia Cybernetica Editorial Board
(F. Heylighen, C. Joslyn, V. Turchin and J. Bollen) in Brussels. It is likely to
take place during the last week of June, and to include a visit to Paris for
discussions with PCP associate Joel de Rosnay. It might also be accompanied by a
seminar on Metasystem Transition Theory at the Free University of Brussels.
The "Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission",
associated with PCP, is ready to go on-line with its first issue. After peer
review, four papers and a book review have been accepted for publication. Once
the website has been thoroughly tested, its URL will be announced through this
and other mailing lists. Richard Dawkins has agreed to join the Journal's
advisory board.
News- July/August 1997
As could be expected, there was not much activity during the summer months. As
announced earlier, the PCP office has moved to a different building within the
Free University of Brussels, and is now housed together with the associated
Center Leo Apostel. New phone, fax, mail etc. addresses are listed on PCP's
masthead (8]MASTHEAD.html)".>http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/[8]MASTHEAD.html). The move of the project's
web server to the new physical location, which is connected to the network by a
microwave antenna, went surprisingly smoothly. An increase in the number of
system crashes after the move seems now to have been solved by updating the
network software.
ASSOCIATED GROUPS
The opening up of the mailing list of the Global Brain Group to selected
non-members has produced a lot of additional discussions. About a dozen new
subscribers with diverse backgrounds have joined the list. The archive of
messages can be consulted at [externallink.GIF]
[9]http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/~majordom/gbrain/
During a stay in Jan's summer house in the (French) Provence, Jan [10]Bernheim
and Francis Heylighen have further developed their ideas for a study group that
would focus on an evolutionary analysis of social progress. It starts from the
observation that practically all indicators for average quality of life (wealth,
life expectancy, level of education, equality, democracy, literacy, IQ, life
satisfaction, ...) have undergone a spectacular increase during the last half
century. ( see 11]/Groups/Progress.html)".>http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be[11]/Groups/Progress.html). This
undeniable progress for humanity as a whole stands in sharp contrast with the
prevailing pessimism of many commentators or the relativism of the
postmodernists. The main aim of the group is to analyse these trends critically,
and to explain them on the basis of evolutionary principles. This may lead to
practical and ethical guidelines for future developments.
This group would be associated with PCP, in a way similar to the "Global Brain
Group". This means that the group works on a more specific subject within the
larger evolutionary-systemic world view which PCP is developing, thus providing a
more specialised focus, while including both PCP members and others. People
interested in participating in this study group may contact Francis Heylighen .
News- May/June 1997
BOARD MEETING
In the period June 20-30, the annual meeting of the Principia Cybernetica
Editorial Board (F. Heylighen, C. Joslyn, V. Turchin and J. Bollen) took place in
Brussels. It included a visit to Paris for discussions with PCP associate Joel de
Rosnay, and a meeting at the Center Leo Apostel of the Free University of
Brussels. The discussions centered on a whole range of issues concerning the
organization of the project and its philosophical content. The general state of
the project, its web server and associated groups were reviewed.
Some of the practical issues discussed were the editing of nodes by editors at a
distance (e.g. using Netscape Gold), and the conversion of LaTeX formatted texts
(including a number of PCP papers by Turchin and Joslyn) to HTML. It was decided
to try to program a simple converter in Perl, rather than install one of the
cumbersome conversion packages that already exist. It was also decided to develop
an animated version of the PCP logo, which would illustrate the process of
metasystem transition as an infinite recurrence. More advanced interface issues
for the organization of Principia Cybernetica Web were discussed, such as the use
of frames or Java applets, but no concrete decisions were as yet taken.
At the content level, we focused on the central node about Metasystem Transition
Theory, rewriting its text and reorganizing its child nodes. In particular, we
decided to add a new "methodology" node. We further discussed different topics,
including ethics, the global brain and the idea of progress. Cliff Joslyn
proposed a new representation for the central concept of "control", thus
extending the one developed at last year's board meeting in Washington DC.
We further discussed a number of recent developments in intelligent computer
networking, such as the use of ontologies, semantic webs, link types in
hypertext, groupware, multidimensional clustering to develop higher level
concepts, graphical representations of complex web structures, agents, and
spreading activation. All these technologies are potentially useful to make PCP
web more intelligent and user-friendly. Moreover, they are likely to be included
in one of the different research proposals being prepared by PCP members and
others at the Los Alamos National Research Laboratory, the "Global Brain" study
group, and the Free University of Brussels. It was concluded that we need to get
a good grasp of the present "state of the art" for these technologies. This will
help us to clarify, integrate and strenghten the different proposals.
The meeting with a number of researchers of the Center Leo Apostel (CLEA, see
http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/) replaced a planned seminar on Metasystem Transition
Theory (MSTT), which was cancelled for practical reasons. The discussion
confronted PCP's MSTT with CLEA's research project on transitions between layers
of reality. The parallels between both approaches were clear, and it was decided
to try and integrate the "control levels" of MSTT and CLEA's "reality layers".
This would entail an extension of the known sequence of metasystem transitions
down to the level of quantum mechanics, according to the formula: classical
mechanics = control (constrained variation) of quantum non-locality. Thus, the
hypothesized MST would reduce the infinite dimensional Hilbert space of quantum
phenomena to the three dimensional Euclidean space of classical mechanics.
The meeting with Joel de Rosnay at the "Cite des Sciences" in Paris focused
mainly on the development of the "Global Brain" theme. de Rosnay suggested to
organize a conference on the subject, and to arrange funding for research through
various institutions with which he has good contacts. He told us that Microsoft
chairman Bill Gates, with whom he is acquainted, expressed particular interest in
PCP. We agreed that if de Rosnay does not find a publisher for the English
translation of his 1995 book "L'homme symbiotique" (Symbiotic Man), we would
publish it on PCP web, like we did with his 1975 book "The Macroscope". de Rosnay
said he would send us a representation of his own "spiral" model of transitions
to higher level of complexity, for inclusion in PCP web.
ASSOCIATED GROUPS
In the last week of May, the "Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of
Information Transmission", associated with PCP, went on-line with its first issue
( [externallink.GIF] [12]http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/). The website is
getting more and more popular, and the associated mailing list for memetics
discussions has become very active, with 500 messages in its first 5 weeks (see
the archive at [externallink.GIF]
[13]http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/~majordom/memetics/). However, there are not as yet
many new proposals for papers, and authors are still solicited to submit
manuscripts.
The "Global Brain" study group has decided to open up its mailing list to
selected subscribers ( see 14]gbrain-l.html">http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/[14]gbrain-l.html ). The
reason is that the founding members were too busy and their number was too small
to sustain active discussions. However, since the global brain topic is bound to
attract many mudheads and crackpots, while we wish to keep the intellectual level
and signal-to-noise ratio of the discussion high, we agreed about a selection
procedure on the basis of the submissions of prospective new members.
News- Sept/Oct 1997
Alex Riegler, an Austrian cognitive scientist, has applied for a postdoctoral
visiting fellowship at the Brussels office of PCP. If the application is accepted
by the funding agency, he will start to work here on Feb. 1 for a period of one
year (and possibly longer). Alex has been doing research on cognitive
constructivism and the systems theory of evolution, applied to the design of
autonomous agents. For further details and publications about this quite
interesting work, see his home page: http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/~riegler/
Valentin Turchin's book "The Phenomenon of Science" has finally been completely
scanned in. (the work was delayed because An Vranckx, who was working on the
scanning, has been abroad for several months). Once the text has been converted
to HTML and integrated with all the figures, the book will be made available on
PCP web. We hope to make the official announcement within the next few days.
The study group on "Progress" associated with PCP has had its first informal
meeting in Brussels, just before a seminar on "Understanding Happiness" by Ruut
Veenhoven, a Dutch sociologist who has done extensive research on the social,
economic and psychological factors involved in life-satisfaction. (see his World
Database of Happiness: [externallink.GIF]
[15]http://www.eur.nl/fsw/soc/happiness.html) Veenhoven himself was enthusiastic
to join the group and to collaborate on a joint research proposal. It was agreed
to start preparing an edited book, in which different contributors would discuss
the different aspects and mechanisms of global progress, such as economic growth,
increase in life expectancy, raise in education level and IQ, and improvement in
the overall the quality of life. The book is planned to be ready by the year the
2000. Veenhoven suggested the title "The Optimistic Manifesto", but this is of
course still open for discussion.
News- Nov/Dec 1997
VARIOUS ACTIVITIES
In spite of the intervening holidays, November and December were quite busy
months for the PCP team. PCP editor Val Turchin's book "The Phenomenon of
Science" was finally published on the web, and attracted quite some interest.
Two meetings were announced, a "Symposium on Memetics"
(16]MEMETSY.html)">http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/[16]MEMETSY.html) chaired by PCP editor F. Heylighen
and PRNCYB member Mario Vaneechoutte, and a Special Session on "Semiotics of
Autonomous Information Systems" ( [externallink.GIF]
[17]http://www.c3.lanl.gov/~joslyn/ISAS98/) chaired by PCP editor Cliff Joslyn
and PCP associate Luis Rocha. Though the meetings concern different topics, they
fall in about the same period, respectively August and September 1998. The first
is organized by the "Journal of Memetics" associated with PCP and is part of the
15th Int. Congress on Cybernetics, the second is part of the 1998 Conference on
Intelligent Systems and Semiotics.
Although not officially associated with PCP, it is worth mentioning the creation
of the new "Journal of Complex Systems" ( [externallink.GIF]
[18]http://www.santafe.edu/~bonabeau/), edited by our friend Eric Bonabeau from
the Santa Fe Institute. The general subject is close to PCP themes, and PCP
editor Cliff Joslyn is member of its editorial board.
It has now been confirmed that Alex Riegler, an Austrian cognitive scientist,
will come to work at the Brussels PCP office in February. Although his
application to the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research was not accepted, he
managed to get money for a year's stay from the Austrian National Bank.
The study group on "Progress", associated with PCP has submitted a research
project entitled "Progress in global quality of life and its indicators: an
interdisciplinary approach" for funding. The aim is to analyse a host of
statistical data in order to study in how far the on-going development and
modernization of society is associated with increase in happiness, and thus to
test the evolutionary theory underlying PCP in the domain most relevant to our
present situation. If the project is accepted, this will add another researcher
to the PCP team in Brussels, and provide us with some more money. The promoters
of the project are Francis Heylighen, Jan Bernheim, Ruut Veenhoven and Robert
Scott Gassler.
THE PRINCIPIA CYBERNETICA WEB
The last part of 1997 was quite unlucky for PCP's technical infrastructure.
First, the PRNCYB-L mailing list in Binghamton, NY, broke down for several weeks.
Then, the PRNCYB-L archive in Manchester, UK, suffered a disk crash, so that
several messages got lost. Finally, on Dec. 5, the main PCP web server in
Brussels, Belgium, had a hard disk crash, caused by an electricity cut-off.
Because of poor backing-up procedures (which will be remedied soon), the most
recent copy of the material we had was 6 months old, so that lots of files were
missing.
Happily, a call for help to this mailing list produced a deluge of reactions from
people who had kept copies of PCP files. Two of them even had used a web robot to
gather a complete copy of PCP web, which was not more than two weeks old. This
allowed us to restore all lost files, though the robot produced a number of small
formatting changes, which had to be undone. Because of that, you may still find a
few errors in URL's in different PCP nodes. Please let us know if you find one,
so that we can correct everything.
Thanks again to all those who offered their help. Because of you, PCP web could
be restored with a minimum of delay. Your massive response showed how PCP has
gathered a wide audience of people actively interested in our project. This group
continues to grow, as shown by the 3 to 4 new subscribers this mailing list gains
every week (while very few people ever unsubscribe), and by the many email
reactions we receive.
It seems that the number of people actively interested grows more quickly than
the number of hits on our server (at present inching towards 8000/day). This is
probably caused by the massive increase in servers and web pages on the net,
which compete for the attention of a more slowly increasing number of web
surfers. The result is that the new users PCP web attracts will be lower in
number, but higher in their interest for the specific PCP themes. When PCP web
was created, there were only some 200 servers in existence, and practically every
server was interesting for those exploring the new medium. Nowadays there is such
an overkill in available information, that only those really motivated to study
cybernetic philosophy are likely to discover, and do the effort to explore, PCP
web.
News- Jan/Feb 1998
After the busy activities at the end of 1997, the beginning of 1998 was
relatively quiet. Alex Riegler has started to work at the Brussels PCP office at
the end of January. He has joined the project as an editorial assistant. The new
address of his home page is http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/riegler/ He has also
submitted a research project on "Evolutionary Complexification of Knowledge
Systems". If this application is accepted, he will get a 3 year postdoc research
contract to work with us.
Contributions for two PCP co-organized sessions are being collected. (see
http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/act.html) If you consider submitting an abstract to the
symposium on memetics (19]MEMETSY.html),">http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/[19]MEMETSY.html), let me remind
you that the deadline for submission is March 10, that is, next week. (the
deadline for the session on Semiotics of Autonomous Information Systems has
already passed).
Some of you may remember the symposium on "The Evolution of Complexity",
organized by PCP in 1995 in Brussels (see
20]EINMAGSY.html)".>http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/[20]EINMAGSY.html). The most important papers presented
at this symposium, plus a few other selected papers, have been bundled into a
book. This volume (the "violet book" in the 8 volume series Proceedings of the
interdisciplinary conference "Einstein meets Magritte", see
http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/publications.html) has finally been typeset, and proofs
have been sent for correction to the authors. This means that in a few months, it
should be available from the publisher, Kluwer Academic.
Since we regularly get questions about the existence of study programs in the
domain of cybernetics and systems, it seems worth noting the organization of the
5th European School of Systems Science, in Neuchatel, Switzerland, Sept. 7-11,
1998 (see [externallink.GIF] [21]http://www.unine.ch/CIESYS/ECOLE.html), although
this is independent of PCP.
News- March/April 1998
The editorial board of the Principia Cybernetica Project has been preparing its
annual board meeting, which will take place this year in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
around August 10-20. This meeting will take place together with an informal,
invited workshop involving, in addition to the PCP board, some people from the
Santa Fe Institute, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the New Mexico State
University. The topic is "Emergent Semantic and Computational Processes in
Distributed Information Systems" (see [externallink.GIF]
[22]http://www.c3.lanl.gov/~joslyn/pcp/workshop98.html). This ties in with our
work on self-organizing networks and the global brain.
The Brussels PCP group has received an extensive visit by Mark Bickhard, a
cognitive scientist/philosopher/psychologist from Lehigh University, where he has
been working with the recently deceased Donald T. Campbell, a PCP associate.
Bickhard has developed a philosophy very close to the one we call "Metasystem
Transition Theory". Starting from a process ontology, Bickhard develops the theme
of variation and selection and emergent organization at the different levels of
reality, from quantum fields, via crystals, to living organisms and knowledge,
with a specific emphasis on persons. His "interactivist" theory of representation
is very close to our view of knowledge based on models, where correspondence is
replaced by construction, constrained by selection on the basis of predictions.
Bickhard is likely to join the project as an "associate". More info about his
work is available at his home page: [externallink.GIF]
[23]http://www.lehigh.edu/~mhb0/mhb0.html
The full program of the symposium on memetics, organized by PCP and the Journal
of Memetics, including the abstracts of all accepted contributions is now
available on the web: 24]MEMETSY.html".>http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/[24]MEMETSY.html. Some 23
contributions have been selected for presentation.
News - May/June 1998
Our plans for the annual board meeting of PCP in Santa Fe, New Mexico, have
become more concrete. Johan Bollen, Alex Riegler, Cliff Joslyn and Francis
Heylighen will meet during the period August 1 to 20, and will be joined by
Valentin Turchin from August 9. The accompanying workshop on "Emergent Semantic
and Computational Processes in Distributed Information Systems" (see
[externallink.GIF] [25]http://www.c3.lanl.gov/~joslyn/pcp/workshop98.html) on
August 10-11 is now taking concrete shape, with most abstracts available on the
web. This workshop wil hopefully be the start for a fruitful collaboration
between PCP and the "Symbiotic Intelligence Project" ( [externallink.GIF]
[26]http://ishi.lanl.gov/symintel.html), which groups researchers from Los Alamos
National Laboratory and Santa Fe Institute. The subject would be the application
of self-organizing systems to support collective intelligence on the web.
The Brussels PCP group has received another extensive visit, this time by Liane
Gabora, an artificial life/memetics researcher from UCLA, and member of the
editorial board of the Journal of Memetics. There is a good chance that she will
join us to do research at the Center "Leo Apostel" (CLEA) on the emergence of
culture during evolution. Liane has developed an "autocatalytic" model for the
emergence of culture or thought, inspired by Stuart Kauffman's work on the origin
of life and sparse distributed memory models of cognition. This fits in both with
PCP's theory of metasystem transitions, and CLEA's project on "transitions
between hard and soft layers of reality". More info on her work can be found at
27]/seminars/Gabora.txt">http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be[27]/seminars/Gabora.txt . A recent paper is available
at [externallink.GIF]
[28]http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1997/vol1/gabora_l.html
Most papers to be presented at the symposium on memetics, organized by PCP and
the Journal of Memetics, are now available on the web:
http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/MEMETSY.html. The symposium will take place for two and
a half days, from August 26 (afternoon) to August 28. The latest issue (June) of
the Journal of Memetics has been published at
[29]http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1998/vol2/index.html
The project on progress in global quality of life which we submitted was
unfortunately not accepted by the funding agency. Neither was Alex Riegler's
application for a 3 year Postdoc research contract at CLEA. We'll have to try
again next year, or find alternative sources of funding. Johan Bollen has carried
out extensive psychological experiments, in collaboration with people from the
Catholic University of Leuven, to test the basic assumptions that underly our
"learning web" methodology (30]LEARNWEB.html)".>http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/[30]LEARNWEB.html). At
first sights, the results seem positive, but the data need much further
processing.
After a year of relatively low level activity, the discussions on our PRNCYB-L
mailing list have become very intensive again. Especially the topics of
"non-physical experience", "mind and body", "reductionism, holism and complexity"
and "will and free will" have produced dozens of messages each. John J. Kineman
is presently exploring the possibility to create a two-way gateway between the
PRNCYB-L emailing list, and a HyperNews discussion system on the web, that could
be used also by non-PRNCYB subscribers. HyperNews was originally developed by
another PRNCYB member, Daniel LaLiberte. You can try out a first prototype at
[externallink.GIF] [31]http://HyperNews.ngdc.noaa.gov/HyperNews/get/ecosci/1.html
News - July/August 1998
BOARD MEETING IN NEW MEXICO
PCP has had had a successfull annual meeting of the editorial board in Santa Fe,
New Mexico, in which outstanding issues were discussed, and contacts were made
with different researchers working in New Mexico.
The meeting was organized together with a workshop on "Emergent Semantic and
Computational Processes in Distributed Information Systems" at the Los Alamos
National Laboratory (LANL), in which all PCP visitors and local residents
participated, together with a number of researchers from LANL, the Santa Fe
Institute (SFI), and New Mexico State University (NMSU). The workshop was well
attended and aroused quite some interest and discussion about the newly emerging
domain of self-organization and complexity models applied to information
networks, such as the web.
Texts of the contributions are being collected, and will be gradually made
available on the workshop's website ( [externallink.GIF]
[32]http://www.c3.lanl.gov/~joslyn/pcp/workshop98.html). Afterwards, workshop
proceedings will be published, most likely as a LANL internal report at first,
and as a book or special issue of a journal in a second stage. This second stage
is likely to propose a selection of the most relevant papers, rewritten to take
into account the other contributions, together with some newly invited papers
from people who did not attend the workshop but who are experts in the domain.
In addition, the PCP group had several interesting discussions with researchers
working in the New Mexico area, including Norman Johnson, the driving force
behing the LANL "Symbiotic Intelligence Project" ( [externallink.GIF]
[33]http://ishi.lanl.gov/symintel.html), John Casti from SFI, who was interested
to publish a report of the workshop in the journal "Complexity" which he edits,
Eric Bonabeau, another SFI resident and editor of "Complex Systems", who is a
world authority on the collective intelligence exhibited by insect societies, and
Liane Gabora, a memetics researcher affiliated to UCLA.
Liane confirmed that she has accepted our invitation to come to work in Brussels
on a two year research contract, starting on Oct. 1. This will allow her to
finish her PhD and continue her research on the emergence of culture, while
collaborating with the Brussels PCP group at the Center "Leo Apostel". Inversely,
a possibility was discussed for Johan Bollen from the Brussels group to come and
work at LANL for a one year period, in order to collaborate more closely with
Luis Rocha and Cliff Joslyn, the representatives of PCP in New Mexico. Other
possibilities for collaboration were discussed with Bonabeau and Johnson,
although no concrete decisions have been made as yet.
Because of these different side-activities, together with the not-to-be missed
opportunities for sight-seeing and hiking in the spectacular New Mexico
surroundings, we had perhaps not as much time for the board meeting itself as we
had hoped. In particular, we did not manage to have in-depth discussions on
fundamental theoretical issues, although we did discuss some interesting
implications of the emergence of collective intelligence in animal and human
societies for developing a more detailed model of large scale metasystem
transitions. On the other hand, the meeting concluded with a long list of
concrete plans for the further development of the project organization in
general, and PCP web in particular. These objectives are summarized below.
On the organizational level, it was decided to create an American office for the
project ("PCP West"), to complement the present European office in Brussels. This
permanent PCP presence at LANL has been made possible by the recent promotion of
PCP editor Cliff Joslyn to a tenured "staff" position at the Los Alamos lab. The
PCP editorial assistants, Johan Bollen and Alex Riegler, were formally 'promoted'
to "assistant editors". We also reiterated our aim to more closely involve the
different "associates" of the project in the writing of nodes, and suggested some
names of new people to invite as associates or authors of nodes. Finally, we
decided to renew contacts with the International Society for Systems Science,
which through Bela A. Banathy expressed their interest to collaborate with PCP.
PLANS FOR PCP-WEB
During the meeting we received a final confirmation from Mick Ashby, grandson of
the famous cybernetician W. Ross Ashby, that he had received permission from the
publishers of his grandfather's classic book, "Introduction to Cybernetics", to
publish the book in an electronic version on PCP Web. Since this will be the
third "out of print" book which we republish on the Web, we decided to create a
special "library" section on PCP web, with electronic versions of important
books. The Ashby book will be scanned in during the coming weeks and converted to
PDF and HTML for easy printing and browsing.
Moreover, we decided to produce an easy-to-print "book" version of all PCP nodes,
so that people don't need to browse between the hundreds of nodes, but can read a
more or less complete version of PCP web on paper. A more ambitious aim, which
may not be realized soon, is to provide PCP web users with a "shopping basket",
in which they can gather a list of only those nodes ("pages") they are interested
in, and then receive all these nodes at once in an easy-to-print file format,
without the navigational formatting (menu bar, child nodes, etc.) that is only
useful for web browsing.
PCP web itself is scheduled for a major overhaul, to improve both its
organization and its appearance, so that it would become more easy to browse and
to edit. Structurally, the idea is to clearly distinguish all database fields
(author, date, title, content, etc.) within the HTML code, by introducing new
tags such as Name. These should if possible comply with the newly emerging XML
standard, which proposes and open-ended extension to HTML. In particular, a new
field will be created for the "synopsys" (summary or definition) of a node. This
new representation will make it much easier to reorganize and edit the whole of
the web. "Modularizing" the separate entries that make up a node should also make
it easier to change the layout of PCP-web.
We have been experimenting with a number of new layouts, which should be both
esthetically pleasing and help the user to navigate more efficiently. We would be
curious to hear your reactions and suggestions with respect to these different
options. Some trial layouts can be seen at the subsequent URLs
http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/layout/Default1.html, ..., Default12.html. Apart from
purely esthetical issues such as color schemes, icons and logos, the main issue
is whether we should put the navigational structure of parent ("up") and child
("down") nodes in a vertical side bar (e.g
http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/layout/Default7.html), or in a horizontal box at the
bottom of the page (e.g. http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/layout/Default12.html). Please
let us know which features or layouts you prefer.
For PCP web as a whole, it was decided to create, together with the New Mexico
office, a New Mexico mirror of the main Brussels server, so as to facilitate
access from America and provide a permanently available backup in case of server
problems. Moreover, if a NSF proposal submitted by the LANL group and a group at
NMSU would be accepted, money would become available to create a "collaborative
knowledge space", at NMSU. This would contain an experimental version of PCP Web,
the SFI web and perhaps others, so as to allow experiments with different
algorithms for web self-organization or information retrieval, as they were
developed by Luis Rocha, Johan Bollen and other PCP contributors. It was also
decided to try and reserve some alternative domain names for the PCP server(s),
in particular: pcp.vub.ac.be, pcp.lanl.gov and cybernetica.org (pcp.org, pcp.com
and pcp.net are already taken by organizations that have nothing to do with
Principia Cybernetica).
MEMETICS SYMPOSIUM IN NAMUR
The Brussels PCP people had hardly recovered from the jetlag of the journey back
to Europe, or we had to go to the 3-yearly Cybernetics congress in Namur,
Belgium, for the first ever symposium on Memetics. The symposium was organized
and chaired by Mario Vaneechoutte and myself. It was quite successful, with
attendance ranging between 15 and 40 people during the two and a half days. The
discussions after each talk were particularly animated, showing that memetics has
developed into a topic that receives a lot of interest, especially among young
researchers. The average age of the contributors was quite low (most of them did
not have a PhD yet), and about a generation younger than the age of the attendant
to other symposia. The congress president, Jean Ramaekers, told me that he was
very happy with this "rejuvenation" of a congress that has taken place without
interruption since 1956.
By the way, Jean Ramaekers and me also discussed the possibility to create a
Belgian association for cybernetics and systems science. This informal
association, for which WOSC president Robert Vallee suggested the name "Systemica
Belgica", would be used as a communication channel between researchers in
Belgium, to inform each other about cybernetics related activities, such as
seminars, conferences, projects, etc. If you work in or around Belgium and would
be interested to participate, please send me a message with your address, domain
of interest and suggestions about the organization.
From the scheduled symposium program
([34]http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/MEMETSY.html), only 3 contributors did not make
it: Liane Gabora, who had apologized because she was too busy preparing her long
term visit to Belgium, Thomas Quinn and Koen Bruynseels. On the other hand, a guy
whose name I don't remember (?Rosdeitcher?) presented an improvised, but
entertaining talk in which he sketched his own "conversion" from being a follower
of Ayn Rand's "objectivist" philosophy to becoming an advocate of the
memetic/cybernetic paradigm.
From the other, scheduled talks, I particularly appreciated my co-chair Mario
Vaneechoutte's speculations on the origin of life as a model for memetics,
Michael Best's simulation of cultural vs. genetic evolution, Szabolcs Szamado's
analysis of fundamental memetic replication processes, John Evers' application of
memetics to explain altruism and Paul Marsden's review of research on "social
contagion" as an existing body of empirical data that cries out for a memetic
reinterpretation. The talk by my PCP collaborator Johan Bollen about our learning
web algorithms also generated a very positive response, although I am of course
not in an objective position to judge about its quality (;-). Practically all
papers should by now be available on the web via the above symposium URL. They
will be published by the end of this year as part of the congress proceedings.
The symposium was concluded with a lively panel discussion, chaired by Gary Boyd,
in which the absent panel member Gabora was replaced by Paul Marsden, and a short
brain storming session with all remaining participants to generate a list of
suggestions for us to advance the field of memetics. One of the concrete
decisions was to steer the Journal of Memetics more in the direction of the
system of commentary used by "Behavioral and Brain Sciences". This requires us
setting up a list of commentators.
News - Sep/Oct 1998
GENERAL NEWS
After the board meeting in August, the last two months have basically been used
to start implementing the many activities planned during that meeting.
We are still working on an extensive overhaul of the layout of PCP-web. This has
been facilitated by the creation of a layout template approach, where the
placeholders for items such as "author", "date", "title", are automatically
replaced by the appropriate fields in the database that holds all PCP documents.
Thus, we only need to edit the single template file in order to change the layout
of the hundreds of PCP pages all at once. As announced previously, the database
fields have also been separated more clearly in the HTML documents, using
fieldtext tags. A new "synopsys" field has been created to hold a 1 sentence
summary of the document (see 35]/chaos.html">http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be[35]/chaos.html for an
example).
Several proposed layouts have been circulating, including some proposed by
subscribers to this mailing list. Most usefully, Katie Lucas suggested to include
a complete hierarchical pathname on each web page, e.g.
Home : Metasystem Transition Theory : Epistemology : Evolutionary Epistemology
This should alleviate the feeling of "lost in hyperspace" which many people
experience when browsing through such a large and complex site as PCP Web. If you
see immediately how the present page fits into the overall hierarchy, you will
find other pages more easily. It is our intention to integrate this hierarchical
path, which lists the documents that are"above" the present document in the
hierarchy, with the present list of "child nodes", the documents that are "below"
the present document. With a better graphical layout, we hope to convey this
hierarchical up-down structure more intuitively than by the present list of
"parent" and "child" nodes.
Since many people have asked us whether they can download the PCP-web as a whole,
we now have provided a zip-compressed version of all the main documents. It can
be downloaded as a single file, and then be uncompressed to produce a local
version of PCP web on your hard disk. The file is available at
36]/PCP-Web.zip">http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be[36]/PCP-Web.zip
Getting this single file is much to be preferred to the presently ever more
frequent procedure of using a robot to download the whole site page by page. This
procedure results in a heavy load on the server, slowing down its response to
other users. This is particularly true when the robot activates all kinds of cgi
scripts, that are used e.g. for annotations or search, but that don't produce any
new information. So, please, stop using robots to suck in the whole site! (or at
least program them to be polite, that is, collect files slowly and ignore files
that end in ".cgi" or ".acgi").
We have also produced an experimental HTML file which contains the main documents
as a single *printable* document, rather than a collection of hundreds of
cross-linked pages. This is meant for users who would like to have a printout of
all the basic material, so that they can read at leisure. This "book-like"
version of PCP-web is available at 37]/PCP-book.html">http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be[37]/PCP-book.html
NEWS IN BRIEF
The first steps have been taken to create a mirror of PCP web on the Los Alamos
site.
Ashby's book "Introduction to Cybernetics" has been completely scanned in. We
just need to finish some formatting details (tables, formulas, etc.) and then
will make the book available as a single PDF file on the web. We plan to stick as
closely as possible to the original layout of the book.
As announced in the previous newsletter, Liane Gabora, a memetics researcher, has
joined the PCP team at the Center "Leo Apostel" in Brussels. Her newly created
home page can be consulted at [externallink.GIF]
[38]http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/gabora/
Inversely, PCP researcher Johan Bollen, whose new home page is at
[externallink.GIF] [39]http://pespmc2.vub.ac.be/, is preparing to move from
Brussels to join the PCP group in Los Alamos.
A summary of the panel discussion which concluded the Memetics Symposium,
co-organized by PCP, is now available at [externallink.GIF]
[40]http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1998/vol2/panel_discussion.html
____________________________________________________________________________
[41]CopyrightŠ 2000 Principia Cybernetica - [42]Referencing this page
Author
F. [43]Heylighen,
Date
Mar 1, 2000
[44]Home
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References
1. LYNXIMGMAP:http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/PCPND96.html#PCP-header
2. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/PCPNEWS.html
3. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MAIL.html
4. http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~joslyn/96summer.html
5. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/LEARNWEB.html
6. http://www.fmb.mmu.ac.uk/~majordom/gbrain/
7. http://www.cite-sciences.fr/derosnay/e-index.html
8. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MASTHEAD.html
9. http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/~majordom/gbrain/
10. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/BERNHEIM.html
11. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Groups/Progress.html
12. http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/
13. http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/~majordom/memetics/
14. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/GBRAIN-L.html
15. http://www.eur.nl/fsw/soc/happiness.html
16. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MEMETSY.html
17. http://www.c3.lanl.gov/~joslyn/ISAS98/
18. http://www.santafe.edu/~bonabeau/
19. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MEMETSY.html
20. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/EINMAGSY.html
21. http://www.unine.ch/CIESYS/ECOLE.html
22. http://www.c3.lanl.gov/~joslyn/pcp/workshop98.html
23. http://www.lehigh.edu/~mhb0/mhb0.html
24. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MEMETSY.html
25. http://www.c3.lanl.gov/~joslyn/pcp/workshop98.html
26. http://ishi.lanl.gov/symintel.html
27. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/CLEA/seminars/Gabora.txt
28. http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1997/vol1/gabora_l.html
29. http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1998/vol2/index.html
30. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/LEARNWEB.html
31. http://HyperNews.ngdc.noaa.gov/HyperNews/get/ecosci/1.html
32. http://www.c3.lanl.gov/~joslyn/pcp/workshop98.html
33. http://ishi.lanl.gov/symintel.html
34. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MEMETSY.html
35. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/chaos.html
36. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/PCP-Web.zip
37. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/PCP-book.html
38. http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/gabora/
39. http://pespmc2.vub.ac.be/
40. http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1998/vol2/panel_discussion.html
41. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/COPYR.html
42. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/REFERPCP.html
43. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
44. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/DEFAULT.html
45. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/INTRO.html
46. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HISTORY.html
47. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/PCPNDIGE.html
48. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/PCPND98.html
49. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/CONTEXT.html
50. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MAKANNOT.html
51. http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/hypercard.acgi$annotform?
[USEMAP]
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/PCPND96.html#PCP-header
1. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/DEFAULT.html
2. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HOWWEB.html
3. http://pcp.lanl.gov/PCPND96.html
4. http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/PCPND96.html
5. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SERVER.html
6. http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/hypercard.acgi$randomlink?searchstring=.html
7. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/RECENT.html
8. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/TOC.html#PCPND96
9. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SEARCH.html
Usage: http://www.kk-software.de/kklynxview/get/URL
e.g. http://www.kk-software.de/kklynxview/get/http://www.kk-software.de
Errormessages are in German, sorry ;-)