Group items tagged

Lively, for all its promise appears to be the shortest-lived entry thus far in launched commercial virtual environments. If you dumb something down far enough, very few people will actually want to use it. We're not ragging on Lively here. Instead, we're aiming to learn from its principles and performance. Let's introduce a new principle called necessary complexity.

A fantastic read to wake up your brain and help it see the trappings of false illusions and patterns around you. 

In this paper, we challenge the universality of three basic assumptions prevalent in organizational decision support and strategy: assumptions of order, of rational choice, and of intent. We describe the Cynefin framework, a sense-making device we have developed to help people make sense of the complexities made visible by the relaxation of these assumptions. The Cynefin framework is derived from several years of action research into the use of narrative and complexity theory in organizational knowledge exchange, decision-making, strategy, and policy-making. The framework is explained, its conceptual underpinnings are outlined, and its use in group sense-making and discourse is described. Finally, the consequences of relaxing the three basic assumptions, using the Cynefin framework as a mechanism, are considered.

Complexity grows as technology, environment and economy become more interconnected. Complex Reasoning considers how each element affects and is affected by others. Seed™ models your theories of how a change in one element of a system creates changes in other elements. It then simulates their dynamic behavior and communicates your learning.

Primarily, we want to create a new tool that uses the unique features of virtual environments to facilitate education, collaboration, and understanding. The output of many supercomputing applications - from astronomical simulations to medical models - is complex and often highly visual. Creating a persistent, standardized environment where these models can reside will make it easier to share and explore these data sets with other researchers. Also, for educators, ScienceSim will provide an interactive 3-D environment that can be used to explain complex concepts such as gravity [see video below] in a highly intuitive manner.

Primarily, we want to create a new tool that uses the unique features of virtual environments to facilitate education, collaboration, and understanding. The output of many supercomputing applications - from astronomical simulations to medical models - is complex and often highly visual. Creating a persistent, standardized environment where these models can reside will make it easier to share and explore these data sets with other researchers. Also, for educators, ScienceSim will provide an interactive 3-D environment that can be used to explain complex concepts such as gravity in a highly intuitive manner.

This is a brief sketch of the kind of upper ontology I envision to support an ontological treatment of semiotics, which in turn would support sign-based ontologies of complex systems.

Narrative techniques both provide a complementary form of what we will call pre-hypothesis research, but further that the use of narrative research techniques produces, through a single intervention, quantitative conclusions supported by narrative context, fragmented knowledge databases, and a mechanism for measuring impact and more complex issues such as mapping ideation cultures.

Snowden again... Looks like a fairly interesting book is on its way, as well...?

As we enter the brave new world of software-as-a-service and software-based-on-services (like mash-ups and composite applications), there is a burden that information technology departments must bear that often goes unacknowledged--operational complexity.

complex brains and sophisticated cognition have arisen multiple times in independent lineages of animals during the earth's evolutionary history.

"Snowden and Boone have formed a new perspective on leadership and decision making that's based on complexity science. The result is the Cynefin framework, which helps executives sort issues into five contexts."

Still my favorite Snowden article. Unfortunately not free, but try to Google the title...

'"A Science of Non-Classical Dynamics Based on the Progressive Evolution of the Larger Whole" In this paper, I am trying to lay out a new form of computation, which focuses on the harmony reached in a system. This type of computation in some way resembles certain recent results in chaos theory and complexity theory. However, the orientation of harmony-seeking computation is toward a kind of computation which finds harmonious configurations, and so helps to create things, above all, in real world situations: buildings, towns, agriculture, and ecology. I try to show that this way of thinking about computation is closer to intuition and personal feeling than the processes we typically describe as "computations." It is also more useful, potentially, in a great variety of tasks we face in building and taking care of the surface of the Earth, and quite different in character since it is value-oriented, not value-free. Examples are taken from art, architecture, biology, physics, astrophysics, drawing, crystallography, meteorology, dynamics of living systems, and ecology'

A sixty-six page think piece

"The debate within the Web community over the optimal means by which to organize information often pits formalized classications against distributed collaborative tagging systems. A number of questions remain unanswered, however, regarding the nature of collaborative tagging systems including whether coherent categorization schemes can emerge from unsupervised tagging by users. This paper uses data from the social bookmarking site del.icio.us to examine the dynamics of collaborative tagging systems. In particular, we examine whether the distribution of the frequency of use of tags for “popular” sites with a long history (many tags and many users) can be described by a power law distribution, often characteristic of what are considered complex systems. We produce a generative model of collaborative tagging in order to understand the basic dynamics behind tagging, including how a power law distribution of tags could arise. We empirically examine the tagging history of sites in order to determine how this distribution arises over time and to determine the patterns prior to a stable distribution. Lastly, by focusing on the high-frequency tags of a site where the distribution of tags is a stabilized power law, we show how tag co-occurrence networks for a sample domain of tags can be used to analyze the meaning of particular tags given their relationship to other tags."

The paper shows that the tags users choose are not chaotic, but rather quickly converge to a common descriptive set of tags that is almost unchanging over time. Perhaps once the tags have stabilized, coherent URI-based identification schemes could emerge?

Nice paper, thanks. Categories / tags / subjects / topics / issues ... that's what I'm working with right now. p.s. sure would be nice if the email notification included the source URL. I'm far more likely to download the PDF when I see something like www2007.org/paper635.pdf

Another superb VIDEO from Alain de Botton: Why Do We Have HR Departments? - http://ow.ly/5l9eH - #complexity #strategy - Dr John Ortner (storiedstrategy) http://twitter.com/storiedstrategy/status/82530603894980608

We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems, which are considered to be robust, self-organising and scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex, dynamic problems.

ECOSPACE pursues the vision that by 2012 every Professional in Europe is empowered for seamless, dynamic and creative collaboration across teams, organisations and communities through a personalised collaborative working environment. ECOSPACE contributes to this vision through 4 main objectives: * The definition of innovative work paradigms through the analysis of eProfessionals and their related organisation. * The design and development of an open standards, service-oriented architecture for complementary and alike systems. * A collaboration middleware and services to enable seamless and instant collaboration among knowledge workers in group forming networks, beyond organisational boundaries. * The creation of new tools that simplify the complexity of collaboration in dynamic work environments and which enable users for creative and knowledge intensive tasks.

Invariant study is fundamental to any scientific research, especially when the research domain is as complex as World Wide Web. Invariants are supposed to be constant within the specified research scope. By well understanding the invariants we may effectively improve the knowledge over many complicated issues. Therefore, it is unsurprisingly for us to see the discussion of invariant study in the new Web Science Research Initiative.