Ergebnis für URL: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/PCPND98.html [1]Principia Cybernetica Web
PCP-news digest 1998-2000
The following is a digest of the content of the Principia Cybernetica Newsletter,
distributed every two months through the PCP-news mailing list.
____________________________________________________________________________
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 2]/chaos.html">http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be[2]/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
3]/PCP-Web.zip">http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be[3]/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 4]/PCP-book.html">http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be[4]/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]
[5]http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/gabora/
Inversely, PCP researcher Johan Bollen, whose new home page is at
[externallink.GIF] [6]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]
[7]http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1998/vol2/panel_discussion.html
Principia Cybernetica News - Nov/Dec 1998
GENERAL NEWS
The last two months have been relatively quiet because of the holidays, and a lot
of administrative work, such as preparing proposals for funding. Of these
proposals, it is worth mentioning a project on "Collective Knowledge Development:
elaboration of a theoretical model with applications on the World-Wide Web",
which will be submitted to the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research, and
a proposal to DARPA provisionally entitled "Conversations with inferential mental
models", a collaboration between the Washington-based firm, Cognitive
Technologies, and some PCP people in Brussels and Los Alamos, with partners in
Berkeley and the University of Tennessee. The first proposal wishes to
investigate collective intelligence in an evolutionary framework. The second one
responds to a call for proposals that asks for innovative visions of the future
of information technology. Our proposal applies cognitive science techniques
(semantic and connectionist networks) to support an intelligent interaction
between individuals, groups and the world-wide web, so as to build shared mental
models.
NEWS IN BRIEF
Alex Riegler, PCP assistant editor, has started up a new mailing list on radical
constructivism. If you would like to discuss the ideas of Pask, Maturana, Varela,
von Foerster, Kelly and others, you can subscribe to it by using the form at
http://www.univie.ac.at/cognition/constructivism/list.html
The other assistant editor, Johan Bollen, will be moving in February from
Brussels to join the PCP group in Los Alamos.
The newest issue 2:2 of the Journal of Memetics: Evolutionary Models of
Information Transmission, the most extensive one yet, has been published at
[externallink.GIF] [8]http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1998/vol2/
Robert Rosen, a systems theorist and theoretical biologist, whose ideas on
complexity, anticipatory systems, the definition of life and the modelling
relation have inspired many debates on PRNCYB-L, unfortunately has died on Dec.
31.
After a rather quiet period, as its list of subscribers grows, the global brain
mailing list is becoming more and more active. Its archive of messages can be
consulted at [externallink.GIF]
[9]http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/~majordom/gbrain/thread.html
Principia Cybernetica News - Jan/Feb 1999
NEWS IN BRIEF
The present newsletter has finally been officialized! It now has its proper web
page at 10]PCP-NEWS.html".>http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/[10]PCP-NEWS.html. It also has received an ISSN
number: 1374-2876.
Johan Bollen has moved from Brussels to Los Alamos. His new coordinates are:
E-mail: jbollen[at]lanl.gov, URL: [externallink.GIF]
[11]http://ivanhoe.lanl.gov/johan/
The grant money that was being used to pay Johan while he worked in Brussels will
now be used to support Alex Riegler, another PCP assistant editor, and Didier
Durlinger, who supports the computer network at CLEA.
CLEA has now become the main center where the interdisciplinary journal
"Foundations of Science" ( [externallink.GIF]
[12]http://www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/FOS/), published by Kluwer Academic, is prepared.
Editor-in-chief is CLEA's director Dirk Aerts, assistant editors are CLEA members
Liane Gabora and Jan Broeckaert. Although not officially associated with PCP,
this journals covers many of the same fundamental issues, and it is certainly
worth your consideration for publishing papers or special issues on PCP related
themes. PCP assistant editor Alex Riegler has already started to prepare a
special issue on constructivism.
Another, new, journal worth mentioning is "Entropy: An International and
Interdisciplinary Journal of Entropy and Information Studies". PCP editor Francis
Heylighen has joined its editorial board.
The two research proposals mentioned in the previous newsletter: "Collective
Knowledge Development: elaboration of a theoretical model with applications on
the World-Wide Web" and "Distributed Knowledge Structuring Systems" have been
submitted, respectively to the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research and
DARPA. The latter proposal is also being adapted to be submitted to the NSF. If
these proposals are accepted, they will create two or three new positions for
researchers at CLEA.
The mirror of PCP-Web at LANL is nearing completion, as is the web edition of
Ashby's "Introduction to Cybernetics" (it always takes much more time than
expected ;-). Some other cybernetics and systems books are being considered for
electronic publication on PCP-Web. Thus, we hope to create a real Principia
Cybernetica "library" on the web!
Principia Cybernetica News - March/April 1999
GENERAL NEWS
The last period has been quite busy for the PCP staff, with several papers to be
written and participation in several conferences, including the Humanity 3000
Seminar in Seattle and the workshop on "Closure: emergent organizations and their
dynamics" in Ghent [externallink.GIF]
[13]http://allserv.rug.ac.be/~gvdvyver/closure.html. In both places, PCP's ideas,
respectively on the "global brain" as a model for the future of evolution and on
the need to provide clear definitions of basic concepts on the web, were
positively received.
The possibility will be explored whether the Foundation for the Future
[externallink.GIF] [14]http://www.futurefoundation.com, which organized the
Humanity 3000 Seminar, would be willing to organize and sponsor a workshop with
invited specialists on the "global brain" idea. The Foundation shares PCP's
interest in the past and future evolution of the universe and humanity, but lacks
our conceptual framework inspired by cybernetics. (they compensate the lack of
theoretical underpinning by near boundless financial resources, though: the
Foundations plans to continue sponsoring conferences, research and other
activities for the next 1000 years!).
The PCP-Web server has been replaced by a machine that is about 4 times faster.
The improved speed should be especially noticeable during periods of high
activity and for text searches. Of course, this does not solve the bottleneck of
the network connection. This connection can be quite slow during the busy hours,
especially for connections to North and South America. To resolve this problem,
we have been setting up a mirror server at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in
New Mexico. Unfortunately, the recent creation of a firewall (to protect internal
information from outside abuse) around the lab has delayed the implementation.
The PCP editorial board is planning their yearly board meeting in Brussels in the
beginning of July. The main purpose is to reorganize the structure of PCP-web,
identify gaps, make a list of nodes to be written, and invite authors to write
these texts.
One of the research proposals we submitted about intelligent webs was rejected by
DARPA. Although he proposal was given top marks in technical and scientific merit
and in the capabilities of the proposing team, it was considered not to be
sufficiently closely connected to existing DARPA programs. A similar proposal is
now being submitted to the National Science Foundation's program on "Knowledge
and Distributed Intelligence". A preliminary evaluation of the proposal outline
was quite positive.
Principia Cybernetica News - May/June 1999
NEWS IN BRIEF
Alexander Riegler, editorial assistant of PCP, has received a three year grant
from the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research, to continue his PostDoc research
at the Brussels center of PCP.
Leor Grundlinger , an Israeli computer scientist, has visited the Brussels group,
and decided to stay there in order to make a PhD thesis, under the supervision of
Francis Heylighen. Although the precise theme of his research still must be
specified, Leor would like to study the analogies between transactions between
people in society and the communication between neurons in the brain. He is
particularly interested in economics, market mechanisms, collective behavior and
neurophysiology.
Johan Bollen, PCP editorial assistant on sabbatical in Los Alamos, has used the
server log of PCP web to determine a matrix of association strengths between
nodes by counting the numbers of users that have travelled from one node to
another. This is equivalent to a non-interactive simulation of our learning web
approach. This matrix can then be used for spreading activation to retrieve the
nodes most strongly associated with a particular query.
The project we submitted on "Collective Knowledge Development" has not been
retained for funding by the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (because of lack
of money, basically), but still remains in the running for funding by the
university.
In spite of many delays along the road, the new layout for PCP web and the mirror
server at Los Alamos are nearing completion.
The PCP editors, F. Heylighen, C. Joslyn and V. Turchin, will have their yearly
meeting in Brussels on July 9-16, to discuss the general management of the
project, and the specific organization and content of PCP web.
A new analysis of the server log has allowed us to create an updated "hit parade"
of the most popular documents on PCP-web:
15]HITPARAD.html">http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/[15]HITPARAD.html The results are not always what you
would expect, with some relatively minor pages that are deeply buried in the PCP
hierarchy getting an unexpectedly large number of hits. This is probably due to
links leading from popular servers directly into these pages (e.g. the PCP node
on "Infinity" is directly mentioned in the Yahoo subject index), and to the fact
that pages about popular keywords (e.g. "non-verbal communication" in our Web
dictionary) are returned frequently by search engines.
Generally speaking, PCP web is quite well represented in the external links on
other websites, as can be seen from the high "authority" or "PageRank" that PCP
pages get in the new Google search engine ( [externallink.GIF]
[16]http://www.google.com). Searching for typical PCP subjects (such as
cybernetics, memetics, global brain, or self-organization) on Google will produce
many more PCP pages in the top ranks than the same search on another search
engine. This means that PCP pages are considered to be authoritative by many
other websites (see 17]WEBCONAN.html">http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/[17]WEBCONAN.html for more details
on determining the "authority" of web pages).
PRINCIPIA CYBERNETICA ELECTRONIC LIBRARY
The most important result of the last period was the opening of PCP's electronic
library (http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/LIBRARY.html) with free books for downloading.
The library was announced by the electronic publication of two new texts, Ashby's
classic textbook "Introduction to Cybernetics" and Heylighen's analysis of the
cognitive foundations of physics, "Representation and Change".
This announcement was greeted with several enthusiastic reactions, and a flurry
of downloads from our server. The announcement will be further distributed on
different mailing lists and newsgroups. We hope that PCP has in this way
contributed to the wider publication of cybernetics ideas, and made it easier for
interested people to study this domain on their own. This is important especially
given the few institutions where cybernetics and systems courses can be taken at
present.
Subject: Principia Cybernetica Web has undergone a face-lift!
The long announced new layout for Principia Cybernetica Web has finally been
implemented, together with a number of other innovations that should make our web
more easy to use.
First, during their last meeting the PCP board of editors have agreed about a
reorganization in the hierarchical structure of the web, in order to make it more
transparent and coherent. This will be especially noticeable on the top level
(the home page: http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/), where two new high level categories
have been created, "Navigation" and "Reference Material", which group important
material that was otherwise scattered in many different places. This also implied
the creation of several new nodes (pages), some of which must still be completed.
Then, the visual appeance of the web was redesigned, using a table layout. It
includes a graphical header, with a new version of the logo and an incorporated
menu bar that gives access to the most useful functions (search, what's new,
etc.). There is also a new vertical side bar, which includes the author and date
fields, the parents (and more generally ancestors) and children of the present
page. The graphical metaphor uses arrows for moving up (parent, grand-parent,
great-grand parent), down (children), left (previous page) and right (next page).
We hope this will be more intuitively clear to the users than the old parent and
child fields at the top, respectively bottom of the page.
The annotations have been moved to the bottom of the side bar under the header
"Discussion", in order to emphasize that these pages are not refereed PCP nodes,
but a forum for various arguments and counterarguments from our readers. The
"annotate" function has been moved to its logical place below the list of
"Discussion" links, and is now called "Add Comment..".. The layout of the
annotations themselves must still be redone, again to emphasize the difference
between their discussion character and the more "authoritative" character of the
standard nodes.
The server software has been upgraded, which should lead to a two times faster
response and greater overall stability. Together with the replacement of the
hardware by a 4 times faster computer a few months ago, this should result in
much greater server capacity and shorter waiting times for users. However, the
main bottleneck is always the Internet connection, rather than the server
response, and therefore we have created a second server in a different location.
The menu bar includes a possibility to choose the server, either the original
server in Belgium (Europe: EU), or the new mirror server in New Mexico (US). The
mirror server is at present still experimental: it is not yet being updated
automatically, and some of the links are not yet working properly. But it is
expected that this mirror at Los Alamos National Laboratory will provide much
faster and more reliable access at least for users in the Americas.
You can of course bookmark this mirror for quick access, but we would ask you to
still use the old http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/ address for making links from your
own pages to PCP web, since this address is well-established on thousands of
other websites and search engines, and we would like to avoid confusion because
of people referring to Principia Cybernetica via two different addresses. We also
cannot as yet guarantee that the mirror will remain available as such.
The rewritten "Help" page, reachable via the menu bar, explains the basic new and
old functions.
Finally, some finetuning and updating has been done in several pages and
functions, such as the Table of Contents (reachable via the "Outline" option in
the menu) and the old Alphabetical Index
(18]ALPINDEX.html)".>http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/[18]ALPINDEX.html).
We would ask you to try out these various new functions, and tell us how you like
the new layout. We would be grateful for any comment, suggestion or criticism you
care to make. This may help us to further improve Principia Cybernetica Web, so
that it can maintain its status as most authoritative site in the broad domain of
cybernetics and systems, and attract a growing number of users to explore its
growing number of pages.
Principia Cybernetica News - July/August 1999
BOARD MEETING
The yearly meeting of the Principia Cybernetica Editorial Board (this time
without editorial assistant Johan Bollen) took place during the first week of
July in Brussels. The main activity was a reorganization of the hierarchical
structure of PCP web, and a final fine-tuning and approval of the new web layout.
This new structure and layout have been presented in detail in the previous
message distributed through this mailing list. We still welcome any comment or
criticism about the new appearance of PCP web, so that we can continue to improve
the website.
We also agreed that Principia Cybernetica would participate in the 2000 World
Congress on the Systems Sciences ( [externallink.GIF]
[19]http://www.isss.org/2000meet/2000anno.htm) organized by the ISSS in Toronto,
by organizing a session on "Distributed Knowledge Systems and Social Evolution".
The session will be chaired by Cliff Joslyn, but further practical details still
need to be discussed
We finally agreed to use the data gathered on the usage of PCP web to test out
some of the web learning algorithms that Johan Bollen is implementing in Los
Alamos. Because PCP web is well structured, it is easy to compare various
measures of how the web is organized (e.g. number of incoming and outgoing links
per page, length of text, depth in the hierarchy, duration since last update)
with the factual use of the web (e.g. how many times a particular page is
consulted, how long that page is read on average, which other pages are reached
from that page). This will allow us to test various algorithms to improve the web
structure, e.g. by adding a list of "relevant links" to each page which is
automatically generated on the basis of how users navigate through that page.
J
OURNAL OF MEMETICS
A number of members of editorial board of the Journal of Memetics, associated
with PCP, have met in Brussels on August 24. They decided to prepare a number of
special issues of the journal, headed by various guest editors, on topics such as
Agent -based models, Evolutionary models of the internet, cultural anthropology /
archeology, diffusion / epidemiology / contagion studies, and management.
Moreover, it was decided to edit the first real academic book on memetics, with
contributions from the most active authors and editors of the journal, and some
outside authorities, such as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins.
Principia Cybernetica News - Sept/Oct 1999
NEWS IN BRIEF
After all the effort that went into redesigning Principia Cybernetica Web during
summer, the last two months have been very quiet. Another reason for the lack of
activity is that we have started preparing some new research proposals on
self-organizing websites, to be submitted probably to the European Union (program
on Future and Emerging Technologies for the Information Society), and to the
Belgian Fund for Scientific Research. These proposal are intended to further
develop, implement and test various algorithms which we have developed for
websites to learn new linking patterns from the way they are used, to produce
personalized recommendations based on a user's interest profile, and to cluster
similar web pages.
We hope to have a demonstration version of these adaptive recommendations
available on PCP web in the near future. The basic idea is that the navigation
bar would not only list the parent and child nodes of a particular page, but also
offer a list of "suggested links" that the system has discovered by analysing the
way users have browsed the system. These suggested links represent pages that
have been used intensively by users that also used the present page, and that are
therefore assumed to be relevant to the present page.
In addition to these general recommendations attached to a particular page, the
system would also provide personal recommendations, based on the pages which a
user has consulted previously. Depending on which pages you visited earlier, and
how long you spent reading those pages, the system would calculate which other
pages you are likely to find interesting, and offer you these as a list of
suggestions. Johan Bollen in Los Alamos is already developing a program to
generate such recommendations, as part of the final work on his PhD thesis.
Principia Cybernetica News - Nov/Dec 1999
NEWS IN BRIEF
PCP editor Cliff Joslyn has been asked to lead the Knowledge Management Research
Project, a cooperative research and development agreement between Los Alamos
National Laboratory and the Xerox Corporation. This may help further the general
aims of Principia Cybernetica in the domain of distributed knowledge systems.
More info: [externallink.GIF] [20]http://www.c3.lanl.gov/~joslyn/xerox/
PCP editor Francis Heylighen, his graduate student Leor Grundlinger, and PCP
contributor Bruce Edmonds have started writing a proposal for the Future and
Emerging Technologies programme of the European Union. The idea is to demonstrate
the capacities of the algorithms we have developed for selforganizing websites,
which adapt their links and recommmendations to their users. We are still looking
for possible further European partners to participate in this proposal. More info
at: [externallink.GIF] [21]http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/~bruce/bsi/
A similar, but more limited, proposal has already been written and will be
submitted to the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders. The project will
be led by Francis Heylighen and Alex Riegler, together with two local colleagues
in Brussels.
THE PCP MIRROR
Principia Cybernetica's mirror site in Los Alamos, [externallink.GIF]
[22]http://pcp.lanl.gov, now seems to be working fine, after all bugs have been
ironed out by the diligent work of Cliff Joslyn and Francis Heylighen. In
principle, it should provide exactly the same information as the original site at
http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/, with maximum 24 hours delay (updates are made once a
day). The Los Alamos site should be much faster for users in the Americas
(especially people in Latin America often seem to have trouble getting through to
the original site in Belgium), and may also be faster for certain others.
Now that hardware and software have been upgraded, both sites should be quite
fast, but this of course depends on the connections between you and the site. If
your access seems slow, try out the other site by clicking either "US" or "EU" in
the menu bar above every PCP page. If you use Principia Cybernetica Web
regularly, it is worth bookmarking both sites, so that if one of them is
unreachable, for whatever reason, you can still consult the other one.
WARNING: although we encourage you to use and bookmark the Los Alamos mirror, we
would ask you when you make links to PCP pages on your own web pages to always
link to the original site: http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/ This will minimize
confusion, and will maintain PCP's high scores in various search engines. Since
search engines determine the importance of a page by the number of links that
point to it, dispersing links between different web addresses, even if they carry
the same content, will make it less likely that other people will find the page.
So please, always use the cleamc11 address for PCP in your links (you can add a
second link with the lanl address, if you wish)!
ACTIVITIES RELATED TO PCP
It is worth mentioning some recent initiatives by non-PCP people that may
interest the PCP public.
The New England Complex Systems Institute has created a mailing list on complex
systems. Since its creation a little over two months ago, it has been very
active, discussing many of the same topics that have been discussed on our PRNCYB
mailing list (and often by the same people), although the emphasis is less on
philosophy and somewhat more on the "hard" scientific modelling. More info about
the list, including its archives and how to subscribe can be found at
[externallink.GIF] [23]http://necsi.org/discuss/discuss.html
Gottfried Mayer-Kress, an old acquaintance of our little PCP community and a
member of the Global Brain Group, has started up a most useful service: the
Complexity Digest. This is a weekly "newsletter-like" publication which
summarizes interesting articles about issues related to complex systems, that
have appeared in various scientific journals and magazines, such as Nature,
Scientific American, Non-linearity etc., providing a link to the full article if
available. The complexity digest is available on the web: [externallink.GIF]
[24]http://www.comdig.org/ or via email. Let us all hope that Gottfried will find
sufficient time and support to continue this excellent initiative.
The "Revue Internationale de Systemique", the French systems science journal, has
changed name, publisher, and focus to become the "European Journal of Economic
and Social Systems". It aims to apply various concepts related to systems,
complexity, self-organization, evolution, autopoiesis, etc. to the understanding
of our present society and economy. More info at [externallink.GIF]
[25]http://www.edpsciences.com /docinfos/EJESS/
USER ANNOTATIONS
There has been an unusually large number of annotations made to Principia
Cybernetica Web made by various users during the past period. Perhaps the reason
is that after all the improvements on the layout, organization and server we made
during summer, which seemed to have created some bugs in the annotation
mechanism, the annotations are now working fine.
Moreover, thanks to the new layout (where annotations are now grouped in the side
bar under the header "discussion") and some additional explanation of what
annotations really are (see 26]MAKANNOT.html),">http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/[26]MAKANNOT.html), the use
of annotations seems to have become more transparent to new users. The result is
a flurry of often quite interesting and well-developed comments in various places
of our web.
News - Jan/Feb 2000
VARIOUS NEWS
In the last few months, several new candidates have applied to make a PhD with
PCP (mostly at the PCP office in Brussels, at the Center Leo Apostel, although
the Los Alamos office may also be involved). Tina Chatzara, a media theorist from
Greece, has already started doing research on the principles that underly the
design of effective complex information systems. We are still discussing
practical arrangements with a number of other candidates from the USA and Eastern
Europe.
Although the sudden popularity of PCP as a center for doing graduate studies
pleases us, we must note that our resources are limited, both in time for
supervising work, and in funding (no scholarships are available at the moment).
Therefore, candidates must understand that they will have to arrange most
practical support themselves, although we will of course help them with general
guidance.
Because of general demand, we have also created a web page listing study programs
in cybernetics, systems and complexity around the world
([27]http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/CSSTUDY.html). Since this list is far from
complete, we would ask you to send us the URLs of any additional programs you may
be aware of.
Allison DiazForte, a librarian from Australia, through volunteer effort, has
helped us to produce a PDF version of Valentin Turchin's 1977 book "The
Phenomenon of Science", a general introduction to the PCP philosophy. This makes
it easy to print out the book as a whole, instead of having to read it chapter by
chapter on the web. The PDF file is available at [externallink.GIF]
[28]http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/POS/TurPOS.pdf
The PCP editorial board has decided to introduce the new term of "evolutionary
cybernetics", as a general description of PCP's scientific approach. Evolutionary
cybernetics is a synthesis of the theories of self-organization and evolution, on
the one hand, and cybernetics and systems theory, on the other hand. Its aim is
to understand how organization and goal-directedness can emerge and evolve, in
nature, mind, society and technology. MSTT, the theory of MetaSystem Transitions,
is an essential part of evolutionary cybernetics. We have started to work on a
paper that will describe the concepts and principles of evolutionary cybernetics
in more detail. A page on it will soon be available on PCP web.
Because of a number of practical constraints, we are still not sure whether PCP
will be able to organize a discussion session at the World Congress on Systems
Science in Toronto ( [externallink.GIF]
[29]http://WWW.ISSS.org/2000meet/2000toc.htm), in July. If we organize such a
session, its aim will be to introduce evolutionary cybernetics to a broad
audience of systems researchers.
A new draft paper by Francis Heylighen, "The Global Superorganism: an
evolutionary-cybernetic model of the emerging network society", is now available
at [30]http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/Papers/Superorganism.pdf . This is an extensive
review paper about the notion of a global organism/global brain, including a
number of present and future developments in society and economy. All comments or
criticisms are welcome!
TEMPORARY SHUTDOWN OF PRNCYB-L
PRNCYB-L, the discussion list of the Principia Cybernetica Project
(http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/MAIL.html), has not been active for several months.
This mailing list was running on the computer system of SUNY Binghamton, where
our list administrator, Cliff Joslyn, worked several years ago when PCP was
started. When Cliff moved from Binghamton, first to NASA, then to Los Alamos, it
seemed that he would be able to continue managing the list at its original
location, so as to avoid disruption of our mailing system and list of
subscribers.
However, because of Cliff's increasingly distant relationship with the Binghamton
system, the list had intermittent interruptions and new subscribers were added
with often long delays. We have now found out that the SUNY Binghamton computer
system has completely stopped supporting LISTSERV mailing lists, and that
PRNCYB-L has therefore been shut down definitively, without us even receiving a
warning. We will try to set up a new PRNCYB-L mailing list as soon as possible on
a different computer system (probably the one of Los Alamos National Laboratory).
If you would like to subscribe to the new PRNCYB-L, please send in your
subscription form ([31]http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/PRNCSUB.html ) to the list
administrator, Cliff Joslyn . If you were subscribed to PRNCYB-L before, but did
not get any message recently announcing the temporary shutdown of the list, then
it may be that the subscription address we had for you was out of date. In that
case, please send your new address to Cliff.
News -Mar/Apr 2000
NEWS IN BRIEF
Because of the heavy burden on the most active PCP-people, there has been
relatively little activity in the last few months. The editors have continued to
discuss their new approach of "evolutionary cybernetics", and how to define it,
and are planning to write a collectively authored paper about it. They are also
considering to organize their yearly board meeting in Fall, in New Jersey. Editor
Cliff Joslyn will be the only one to represent PCP at the World Congress on
Systems Science in Toronto ( [externallink.GIF]
[32]http://WWW.ISSS.org/2000meet/2000toc.htm), in July.
Assistant Editor Johan Bollen is busy writing his PhD thesis on "Application of
Associative Network Models to Web Linking and Retrieval", and hopes to defend it
at the end of summer. Michael Brooks, a journalist from the "New Scientist"
weekly, has been interviewing several PCP people, and plans to write a big
feature article on our ideas for a global brain/intelligent web. In the meantime,
Johan has started to implement some of our algorithms to recommend web pages and
create new links according to the duration of user's visits. We hope to test
these out on Principia Cybernetica Web in the near future. If the results fulfill
our expectations, we plan to submit a paper about this approach to an important
jounal such as Science or Nature. This, together with an eventual "New Scientist"
feature, may produce a lot of publicity for our global brain ideas.
News - May/August 2000
As we have all been very busy during the summer months with conferences, travel
and other activities, we did not find the time to prepare a Newsletter in July.
The present Newsletter should therefore be seen as an extra long, "double issue",
covering both the May-June and July-August periods.
In July, Francis Heylighen and Jan Bernheim have presented their research on
progress ([33]http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/PROGRESS.html) and the measurement of
happiness at the International Society for Quality of Life Studies (ISQOLS)
Conference in Girona, Spain. The reactions were quite positive, and our general
feeling was that the QOL community has reached a level were simple empirical
measurements of things like life satisfaction and positive/negative feelings can
be used to build robust scientific models of the values and forces that drive
individual action and social development. The only things lacking is an
evolutionary-cybernetic mechanism to understand these developments, and that is
where our PCP approach comes in.
A rather spectacular example of the power of such models is the prediction by
Michael Hagerty, who was present at the conference, that Gore would win the US
presidential elections with 52% of the votes. This prediction is based on a
statistical analysis of the correlation between increases in QOL in a region and
voting for the incumbent party, see [externallink.GIF]
[34]http://www.gsm.ucdavis.edu/~mrhagert/Pres2000.html We're curious to see how
close to the mark this prediction will be. Together with our Dutch colleague,
Ruut Veenhoven, Hagerty has also shown that average happiness has increased over
the last two decades: [externallink.GIF]
[35]http://www.gsm.ucdavis.edu/~mrhagert/Papers/easterlinreply8.pdf
Francis Heylighen then participated in the Humanity 3000 Symposium of the
Foundation for the Future ( [externallink.GIF]
[36]http://www.futurefoundation.org/humanity3000/index.html), but was somewhat
disappointed since the discussions basically reiterated the ones at the Humanity
3000 workshop last year, except that the group was larger, so that there was less
time for participants to express their ideas. On the other hand, he used the
occasion to get acquainted with some leading thinkers working on themes close to
PCP, such as the memeticist Susan Blackmore, Gregory Stock, author of "Metaman",
and Christian de Duve, Nobel Prize winner and author of "Vital Dust", on the
origin and evolution of life.
THE PCP-DISCUSS MAILING LIST
For years the mailing list PRNCYB-L[ at ]BINGVMB.CC.BINGHAMTON.EDU was the
discussion list for the Principia Cybernetica Project. Unfortunately, the mailing
list server operating at Binghamton University (where list administrator Cliff
Joslyn originally started the list) was shut down last year without warning. It
took us a while, but in May we finally restarted the list, this time at Los
Alamos National Laboratory, the American office of PCP where Cliff now works.
To make things more intuitive, and to clarify the relation with the PCP-news list
through which this newsletter is distributed, we renamed the list from PRNCYB-L
to PCP-discuss. The address is pcp-discuss[ at ]lanl.gov, but note that this is a
closed list that you can only receive by submitting a request to the list
adminstrator. We encourage anyone interested to explore and join our discussions
on all aspects of evolutionary cybernetics. Please see
[37]http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/MAIL.html for details on how to join.
The list was restarted in May with the same people that had subscribed to the
original PRNCYB-L. Since then some ten new members have joined. The mailing list
has as yet not been as active as PRNCYB during its heyday, but that is not
surprising given the summer period, and a general phenomenon of "email tiredness"
that many people submerged in mail presently experience. As before, this
newsletter will include a list of topics discussed in the list during the past
period.
THE GLOBAL BRAIN IN THE MEDIA
Both Francis Heylighen and Cliff Joslyn were recently invited as guest lecturers
at the Summer Cyberforum series on Virtual Worlds and the Global Brain, organized
by Michael Heim of the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. The
meeting took place in a 3D virtual reality environment, accessible over the net.
This was a hard experience to describe, requiring a client-side VR browser in
which we assumed avatar appearances that allowed us to fly and move in the
virtual space, but what was otherwise basically a chatroom in which the different
participants present could talk about the subject of the Global Brain. You can
participate in these virtual meetings yourself by installing the free 3D browser,
see [externallink.GIF] [38]http://www.mheim.com/cyberforum/ The transcript of our
sessions can be found at [externallink.GIF]
[39]http://www.mheim.com/cyberforum/html/archive.html
A feature article on our work with the "Global Brain" has appeared in New
Scientist magazine, 24 June 2000, p. 22. It is based on extensive interviews with
PCP board members Heylighen, Bollen, and Joslyn, and our colleagues in the global
brain mailing list, Norman Johnson and Ben Goertzel. Although this paper has
created a lot of publicity for our work, the journalist, Michael Brooks, has made
it rather sensationalist, in addition to including a few factual errors. It
emphasizes the scary, "Big Brother"-like possibilities, while minimizing the
in-built protections against such abuse. For a somewhat more balanced view, read
the accompanying New Scientist editorial.
The article is available at: [externallink.GIF]
[40]http://www.newscientist.com/features/features_224417.html and the editorial
at: [externallink.GIF]
[41]http://www.newscientist.com/editorial/editorial.jsp?id=ns224444
As we anticipated in the previous newsletter, the publication of this article
seems to have suddenly aroused a flurry of interest in our work, resulting in
lots of email reactions and in further interviews with journalists in Belgium,
Holland, Chile and Canada. Having to answer the same questions again and again
(and then see the same misunderstandings crop up once more) has stimulated us to
finally prepare a "Global Brain FAQ". The as yet unfinished text is available at:
[42]http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/GBRAIFAQ.html Comments about questions and answers
are appreciated.
Francis Heylighen has written a long paper reviewing the concept of the "Global
Superorganism", an extension of the Global Brain concept to model the evolution
of society as a whole, and especially to understand its future development. The
paper will be submitted to the Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems.
Comments are invited to the draft text, available at
http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/Papers/Superorganism.pdf
PCP CONTRIBUTORS
On May 8, 2000, Alexander 'Sasha' Chislenko, a long-time contributor to the
Principia Cybernetica Project, unexpectedly died. A memorial page for Sasha has
been set-up on the web at [externallink.GIF] [43]http://www.piclab.com/sasha ,
where the people who have known him can post personal remembrances.
Joel de Rosnay, an associate of the Principia Cybernetica Project, has authored
several wide-ranging and well-written books touching on the concepts of systems
theory, evolution of complexity and the Global Brain. His most recent book, "The
Symbiotic Man: A New Understanding of the Organization of Life and a Vision of
the Future", has now been updated and translated into English. We would recommend
it to anybody interested in understanding complex systems and the future
evolution of society.
More info on the Amazon page: [externallink.GIF]
[44]http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0071357440/
John E. Stewart, an Australian theorist, has written a book, "Evolution's Arrow:
The direction of evolution and the future of humanity" (Chapman Press, Australia,
2000), in which he develops a view of evolution very close to the one of PCP. Its
main argument is that evolution progresses in the direction of cooperative
organisations of greater scale and evolvability, up to global society. It is
available at [externallink.GIF] [45]http://www4.tpg.com.au/users/jes999/
We are now discussing with John about the differences between his approach and
our theory of metasystem transitions, in the hope of coming to a better
understanding of both. The chief novelty of John's approach is his suggestion
that MST's may take place because of an agent taking control over a group for
purely selfish purposes, but then being turned by selective presssures into an
efficient "manager" that promotes synergy and cooperation between the members of
the group. This mechanism can be applied from the level of DNA taking control
over an autocatalytic cycle, up to human society with its kings and emperors. A
review by F. Heylighen of John's book together with some related books on
evolutionary transitions will appear in the journal "Complexity". The paper is
available at: [46]http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/Papers/Review_Complexity.pdf
On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean we have had extensive discussions with Bryan
Thompson, a researcher from Cognitive Technologies Inc. Bryan had previously been
the driving force behind two research proposals (to DARPA and NSF) about
collaborative cognition in which we participated. His way of thinking is very
close to ours, and it is likely we will collaborate more intensively in the
future. Bryan is exploring the creation of an interest group within the WWW
consortium, to discuss standards for a "cognitive web", and suggested to get some
kind of legal protection for our "global brain" label (although several others
have been using this label, for various activities and technologies, Bryan
suggested that we should register a "global brain initiative").
ASSOCIATIVE NETWORKS MODELS OF PCP WEB
Johan Bollen has now finished a draft of his PhD thesis on "Application of
Associative Network Models to Web Linking and Retrieval". Because of various
other duties, the PhD defense has had to be postponed and will normally take
place in a few months. The thesis includes a detailed analysis of the associative
structure of Principia Cybernetica Web, derived from the log of user requests to
our server. This is illustrated by a number of impressive graphs showing the
semantic connections between the most important nodes of our web, and a number of
experimental tests evaluating how easy it is to retrieve particular nodes given
particular requests or starting points.
You can try out Johan's "enhanced" search engine for PCP web at
[externallink.GIF] [47]http://bighorn.lanl.gov:8077/jserv-bin/SpreadAct_PCP_loop
It is based on "spreading activation": the engine first retrieves the PCP pages
that have the keywords you entered in its title, and then uses a matrix of
associations to retrieve additional pages that are associatively related to the
ones found first. The association matrix is still based on our old learning rules
applied to the web log, and is therefore likely to be less efficient than a
planned one based on our new algorithms that take into account duration of user
visits.
At present, Johan is measuring the quality of the recommendations (precision and
recall) by comparing the recommendations of the system with expert estimates of
the relevance of the recommendations for a number of typical queries. (The
experts, of course, are us, members and associates of the PCP board.) This will
allow him to fine-tune the parameters of the system.
WORK ON ONTOLOGIES AT LANL
Getting a decent link-type semantics and an ontology for PCP has been an
important goal for a while. Like most everything we proposed over ten years ago,
the community is moving quickly in our direction. In particular, the need for
ontology markup and exchange standards, coupled with loosely hierarchical
representations of semantic relations, is understood now more than ever. Cliff
Joslyn's Distributed Knowledge Systems and Modelling Team ( [externallink.GIF]
[48]http://www.c3.lanl.gov/~joslyn/KS_Team/) in Los Alamos is starting to pursue
this kind of activity. The goal is to develop a generic knowledge environment
which will allow communities to self-elicit and represent their ontological
knowledge structures.
Some of this has been prompted by some very recent advances in computational
linguistics. In particular, we're tracking the work begun by Steven Pinker, and
much more fully developed now within the linguistics community, towards the
identification of a small, canonical, generative set of semantic relations
related to each other in a loosely hierarchical multiple inheritance type
lattice. While these are proposed to represent the semantics of natural language
texts, we've hypothesized that they should also inform a sufficient set of link
types for ontological networks.
Among the other things we're examining are Sowa's conceptual graphs and Visual
Basic extensions to use Visio as a GUI platform. The other essential ingredient
is a sufficient, presumably XML-based, ontology exchange markup language for full
read-write compatibility. We're tracking the standards community moving in this
direction (e.g. The WWW Consortium, DOM, XSchema, RDF, etc.).
Cliff was recently invited to SRI International in Menlo Park, CA, to address a
loose consortium of Silicon Valley researchers and developers trying to develop a
Dynamic Knowledge Repository (DKR) within an Open Hypertext Standard (OHS). This
group is led by Doug Engelbart of SRI fame, and whose early work (invention of
the mouse and other essential elements of the present computer interface) we know
as being so important for us and everyone, and who is now with the Bootstrap
Institute [externallink.GIF] [49]http://www.bootstrap.org along with SRI. Cliff
found Engelbart to be a charming and insightful man, who is very appreciative of
everything PCP is trying to do.
Cliff's talk spanned a number of issues, including PCP (technology and form and
content,), Lab activities, and the ideas described above. You can look at the
overheads at [externallink.GIF]
[50]http://www.c3.lanl.gov/~joslyn/KS_Team/sri.pdf.
____________________________________________________________________________
[51]CopyrightŠ 2001 Principia Cybernetica - [52]Referencing this page
Author
F. [53]Heylighen,
Date
Apr 3, 2001 (modified)
Jun 1, 1998 (created)
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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 ;-)