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Distributed ledgers have primarily claimed to supplant the need for Bitcoin's mining process by introducing trust requirements among participants. These ledgers also promise users the immutability of Bitcoin without the need for expensive mining operations.

the technology powering distributed ledgers predates blockchains by well over 20 years.

Proponents of distributed ledgers argue that they can displace centralized providers such as SWIFT,

by moving money faster

There’s no doubt that blockchain technology will facilitate disruptive innovations in finance

But a world of private ledgers sounds eerily similar to a range of “private Internets.”

Blockchain technology is useful not because it offers efficiency in a world of message-passing but because it uses a complex process to settle value between untrusted parties.

But distributed ledgers do not offer users the ability to easily convert their tokens and messages into fungible units of value. Nor do distributed ledgers escrow value between parties that don't trust each other.

If a ledger is not a public resource, it will have the pressures incumbent to existing settlement systems plus the overhead of maintaining a shared database among competitors. What efficiency will remain thereafter remains dubious.

Permissioned Blockchains

their institutional users will probably find it expedient to hash their private-chain transactions and use those hashes to create bitcoin addresses and then send tiny fractions of a bitcoin to them to register their data at a location that cannot be hacked or changed.

In other words, all private ledger/blockchains will lead to Bitcoin's Rome, driven there by its low cost and high public accountability.

s. Euclidean space

metric space

topological space

Physical space is the extension surrounding a point

My presentation of a general theory of living systems will employ two sorts of spaces in which they may exist, physical or geographical space and conceptual or abstracted spaces

Physical or geographical space

Euclidean space

distance

moving

maximum speed

objects moving in such space cannot pass through one another

friction

The characteristics and constraints of physical space affect the action of all concrete systems, living and nonliving.

information can flow worldwide almost instantly

Physical space is a common space

Most people learn that physical space exists, which is not true of many spaces

They can give the location of objects in it

Conceptual or abstracted spaces

Peck order

Social class space

Social distance

Political distance

life space

semantic space

Sociometric space

A space of time costs of various modes of transportation

space of frequency of trade relations among nations.

A space of frequency of intermarriage among ethnic groups.

These conceptual and abstracted spaces do not have the same characteristics and are not subject to the same constraints as physical space

Social and some biological scientists find conceptual or abstracted spaces useful because they recognize that physical space is not a major determinant of certain processes in the living systems they study

interpersonal relations

one cannot measure comparable processes at different levels of systems, to confirm or disconfirm cross-level hypotheses, unless one can measure different levels of systems or dimensions in the same spaces or in different spaces with known transformations among them

It must be possible, moreover, to make such measurements precisely enough to demonstrate whether or not there is a formal identity across levels

fundamental "fourth dimension" of the physical space-time continuum

is the particular instant at which a structure exists or a process occurs

or the measured or measurable period over which a structure endures or a process continues.

durations

speeds

rates

accelerations

irreversible unidirectionality of time

thermodynamics

negentropy

"time's arrow."

Matter and energy

Matter is anything which has mass (m) and occupies physical space.

Energy (E) is defined in physics as the ability to do work.

kinetic energy

potential energy

rest mass energy

Mass and energy are equivalent

Living systems need specific types of matter-energy in adequate amounts

Energy for the processes of living systems is derived from the breakdown of molecules

Any change of state of matter-energy or its movement over space, from one point to another, I shall call action.

It is one form of process.

information (H)

Transmission of Information

Meaning is the significance of information to a system which processes it: it constitutes a change in that system's processes elicited by the information, often resulting from associations made to it on previous experience with it

Information is a simpler concept: the degrees of freedom that exist in a given situation to choose among signals, symbols, messages, or patterns to be transmitted.

The set of all these possible categories (the alphabet) is called the ensemble or repertoire

.) The unit is the binary digit, or bit of information

. The amount of information is measured as the logarithm to the base 2 of the number of alternate patterns

Signals convey information to the receiving system only if they do not duplicate information already in the receiver. As Gabor says:

[The information of a message can] be defined as the 'minimum number of binary decisions which enable the receiver to construct the message, on the basis of the data already available to him.'

meaning cannot be precisely measured

Information is the negative of uncertainty.

information is the amount of formal patterning or complexity in any system.

The term marker was used by von Neumann to refer to those observable bundles, units, or changes of matter-energy whose patterning bears or conveys the informational symbols from the ensemble or repertoire.

If a marker can assume n different states of which only one is present at any given time, it can represent at most log2n bits of information. The marker may be static, as in a book or in a computer's memory

Communication of almost every sort requires that the marker move in space, from the transmitting system to the receiving system, and this movement follows the same physical laws as the movement of any other sort of matter-energy. The advance of communication technology over the years has been in the direction of decreasing the matter-energy costs of storing and transmitting the markers which bear information.

There are, therefore, important practical matter-energy constraints upon the information processing of all living systems exerted by the nature of the matter-energy which composes their markers.

organization is based upon the interrelations among parts.

If two parts are interrelated either quantitatively or qualitatively, knowledge of the state of one must yield some information about the state of the other. Information measures can demonstrate when such relationships exist

The disorder, disorganization, lack of patterning, or randomness of organization of a system is known as its entropy (S)

the statistical measure for the negative of entropy is the same as that for information

entropy becomes a measure of the probability

Increase of entropy was thus interpreted as the passage of a system from less probable to more probable states.

according to the second law, a system tends to increase in entropy over time, it must tend to decrease in negentropy or information.

therefore no principle of the conservation of information

The total information can be decreased in any system without increasing it elsewhere

but it cannot be increased without decreasing it elsewhere

. Making one or more copies of a given informational pattern does not increase information overall, though it may increase the information in the system which receives the copied information.

transforms information into negative entropy

smallest possible amount of energy used in observing one bit of information

calculations of the amount of information accumulated by living systems throughout growth.

the concept of Prigogine that in an open system (that is one in which both matter and energy can be exchanged with the environment) the rate of entropy production within the system, which is always positive, is minimized when the system is in a steady state.

in systems with internal feedbacks, internal entropy production is not always minimized when the system is in a stationary state. In other words, feedback couplings between the system parameters may cause marked changes in the rate of development of entropy. Thus it may be concluded that the "information flow" which is essential for this feedback markedly alters energy utilization and the rate of development of entropy, at least in some such special cases which involve feedback control. While the explanation of this is not clear, it suggests an important relationship between information and entropy

amount of energy actually required to transmit the information in the channel is a minute part of the total energy in the system, the "housekeeping energy" being by far the largest part of it

In recent years systems theorists have been fascinated by the new ways to study and measure information flows, but matter-energy flows are equally important. Systems theory is more than information theory, since it must also deal with energetics - such matters as

the flow of raw materials through societies

Only a minute fraction of the energy used by most living systems is employed for information processing

I have noted above that the movement of matter-energy over space, action, is one form of process. Another form of process is information processing or communication, which is the change of information from one state to another or its movement from one point to another over space

Communications, while being processed, are often shifted from one matter-energy state to another, from one sort of marker to another

transformations go on in living systems

One basic reason why communication is of fundamental importance is that informational patterns can be processed over space and the local matter-energy at the receiving point can be organized to conform to, or comply with, this information

the delivery of "flowers by telegraph."

Matter-energy and information always flow together

Information is always borne on a marker

. Conversely there is no regular movement in a system unless there is a difference in potential between two points, which is negative entropy or information

If the receiver responds primarily to the material or energic aspect, I shall call it, for brevity, a matter-energy transmission; if the response is primarily to the information, I shall call it an information transmission

Moreover, just as living systems must have specific forms of matter-energy, so they must have specific patterns of information

example

example

develop normally

have appropriate information inputs in infancy

pairs of antonyms

one member of which is associated with the concept of information (H)

the other member of which is associated with its negative, entropy (S)

System

A system is a set of interacting units with relationships among them

.The word "set" implies that the units have some common properties. These common properties are essential if the units are to interact or have relationships. The state of each unit is constrained by, conditioned by, or dependent on the state of other units. The units are coupled. Moreover, there is at least one measure of the sum of its units which is larger than the sum of that measure of its units.

Conceptual system

Units

terms

Relationships

a set of pairs of units, each pair being ordered in a similar way

expressed by words

or by logical or mathematical symbols

operations

The conceptual systems of science

observer

selects

particular sets to study

Variable

Each member of such a set becomes a variable of the observer's conceptual system

conceptual system may be loose or precise, simple or elaborate

Indicator

an instrument or technique used to measure fluctuations of variables in concrete systems

Function

a correspondence between two variables, x and y, such that for each value of x there is a definite value of y, and no two y's have the same x, and this correspondence is: determined by some rule

Any function is a simple conceptual system

Parameter

An independent variable through functions of which other functions may be expressed

The state of a conceptual system

the set of values on some scale, numerical or otherwise, which its variables have at a given instant

Formal identity

variables

varies comparably to a variable in another system

If these comparable variations are so similar that they can be expressed by the same function, a formal identity exists between the two systems

Relationships between conceptual and other sorts of systems

Science advances as the formal identity or isomorphism increases between a theoretical conceptual system and objective findings about concrete or abstracted systems

A conceptual system may be purely logical or mathematical, or its terms and relationships may be intended to have some sort of formal identity or isomorphism with units and relationships empirically determinable by some operation carried out by an observer

Concrete system

a nonrandom accumulation of matter-energy, in a region in physical space-time, which is organized into interacting interrelated subsystems or components.

Units

are also concrete systems

Relationships

spatial

temporal

spatiotemporal

causal

Both units and relationships in concrete systems are empirically determinable by some operation carried out by an observer

patterns of relationships or processes

The observer of a concrete system

distinguishes a concrete system from unorganized entities in its environment by the following criteria

physical proximity of its units

similarity of its units

common fate of its units

distinct or recognizable patterning of its units.

Their boundaries are discovered by empirical operations available to the general scientific community rather than set conceptually by a single observer

Variable of a concrete system

Any property of a unit or relationship within a system which can be recognized by an observer

which can potentially change over time, and whose change can potentially be measured by specific operations, is a variable of a concrete system

Examples

number of its subsystems or components, its size, its rate of movement in space, its rate of growth, the number of bits of information it can process per second, or the intensity of a sound to which it responds

A variable is intrasystemic

not to be confused with intersystemic variations which may be observed among individual systems, types, or levels.

The state of a concrete system

its structure

represented by the set of values on some scale which its variables have at that instant

Open system

Most concrete systems have boundaries which are at least partially permeable, permitting sizable magnitudes of at least certain sorts of matter-energy or information transmissions to pass them. Such a system is an open system. In open systems entropy may increase, remain in steady state, or decrease.

Closed system

impermeable boundaries through which no matter-energy or information transmissions of any sort can occur is a closed system

special case

No actual concrete system is completely closed

In closed systems, entropy generally increases, exceptions being when certain reversible processes are carried on which do not increase it. It can never decrease.

Nonliving system

the general case of concrete systems, of which living systems are a very special case. Nonliving systems need not have the same critical subsystems as living systems, though they often have some of them

Living system

a special subset of the set of all possible concrete systems

They all have the following characteristics:

open systems

inputs

throughputs

outputs

of various sorts of matter-energy and information.

maintain a steady state of negentropy even though entropic changes occur in them as they do everywhere else

by taking in inputs

higher in complexity or organization or negentropy

than their outputs

The difference permits them to restore their own energy and repair breakdowns in their own organized structure.

In living systems many substances are produced as well as broken down

To do this such systems must be open and have continual inputs of matter-energy and information

entropy will always increase in walled-off living systems

They have more than a certain minimum degree of complexity

They either contain genetic material composed of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)

or have a charter

blueprint

program

of their structure and process from the moment of their origin

may also include nonliving components.

They have a decider, the essential critical sub-system which controls the entire system, causing its subsystems and components to interact. Without such interaction under decider control there is no system.

other specific critical sub-systems or they have symbiotic or parasitic relationships with other living or nonliving systems

Their subsystems are integrated together to form actively self-regulating, developing, unitary systems with purposes and goals

They can exist only in a certain environment

change in their environment

produces stresses

Totipotential system

capable of carrying out all critical subsystem processes necessary for life is totipotential

Partipotential system

does not itself carry out all critical subsystem processes is partipotential

A partipotential system must interact with other systems that can carry out the processes which it does not, or it will not survive

parasitic

symbiotic

Fully functioning system

when it

Partially functioning system

it must do its own deciding, or it is not a system

Abstracted system

Units

relationships abstracted or selected by an observer in the light of his interests, theoretical viewpoint, or philosophical bias.

Some relationships may be empirically determinable by some operation carried out by the observer, but others are not, being only his concepts

Relationships

The relationships mentioned above are observed to inhere and interact in concrete, usually living, systems

these concrete systems are the relationships of abstracted systems.

The verbal usages of theoretical statements concerning abstracted systems are often the reverse of those concerning concrete systems

An abstracted system differs from an abstraction, which is a concept

representing a class of phenomena all of which are considered to have some similar "class characteristic." The members of such a class are not thought to interact or be interrelated, as are the relationships in an abstracted system

Abstracted systems are much more common in social science theory than in natural science.

are oriented toward relationships rather than toward the concrete systems

spatial arrangements are not usually emphasized

their physical limits often do not coincide spatially with the boundaries of any concrete system, although they may.

important difference between the physical and biological hierarchies, on the one hand, and social hierarchies, on the other

Most physical and biological hierarchies are described in spatial terms

we propose to identify social hierarchies not by observing who lives close to whom but by observing who interacts with whom

intensity of interaction

in most biological and physical systems relatively intense interaction implies relative spatial propinquity

To the extent that interactions are channeled through specialized communications and transportation systems, spatial propinquity becomes less determinative of structure.

PARSONS

the unit of a partial social system is a role and not the individual.

culture

cumulative body of knowledge of the past, contained in memories and assumptions of people who express this knowledge in definite ways

The social system is the actual habitual network of communication between people.

RUESCH

A social system is a behavioral system

It is an organized set of behaviors of persons interacting with each other: a pattern of roles.

The roles are the units of a social system

On the other hand, the society is an aggregate of social subsystems, and as a limiting case it is that social system which comprises all the roles of all the individuals who participate.

What Ruesch calls the social system is something concrete in space-time, observable and presumably measurable by techniques like those of natural science

To Parsons the system is abstracted from this, being the set of relationships which are the form of organization. To him the important units are classes of input-output relationships of subsystems rather than the subsystems themselves

system is a system of relationship in action, it is neither a physical organism nor an object of physical perception

evolution

differentiation

growth

from earlier and simpler forms and functions

capacities for specializations and gradients

[action] is not concerned with the internal structure of processes of the organism, but is concerned with the organism as a unit in a set of relationships and the other terms of that relationship, which he calls situation

Abstracted versus concrete systems

One fundamental distinction between abstracted and concrete systems is that the boundaries of abstracted systems may at times be conceptually established at regions which cut through the units and relationships in the physical space occupied by concrete systems, but the boundaries of these latter systems are always set at regions which include within them all the units and internal relationships of each system

A science of abstracted systems certainly is possible and under some conditions may be useful.

If the diverse fields of science are to be unified, it would be helpful if all disciplines were oriented either to concrete or to abstracted systems.

It is of paramount importance for scientists to distinguish clearly between them

you will want the custom menu to be displayed as soon as the Spreadsheet is opened. To do this,include an onOpen function in your script

array of objects

An array is a collection of elements that works something like a Spreadsheet. Each element in an array can be identified by its location in the array, called an index point.

Arrays

are zero-based

Arrays are a convenient way to store and manipulate data within a computer program or script.

Each menu item is placed inside curly braces, and this syntax defines each name-function name pair as an object.

After the definition of the menu entries comes the definition of the menu itself:

Here's generalized code for creating menu items and a menu.

The following code pops up a message box when a user selects a menu item on the new menu:

the generalized code

Anchor the message by positioning against a leader

Offbeat humor and great comedic timing keeps the viewer engaged in this video

You can perform the following tasks from the Script Editor.

pening, deleting, renaming, and saving scripts

Cutting, copying, and pasting text

Find and replace

Setting a time zone

scripts with time-based triggers

Running functions

Viewing log messages

revision history

write pseudocode first

When you're planning a script

narrative version of what the script needs to do.

A particular script is associated with one and only one Google Spreadsheet.

If you make a copy of the Spreadsheet, the script is also copied.

A particular Spreadsheet can have multiple scripts associated with it.

use the onOpen event handler in more than one script associated with a particular Spreadsheet, all scripts begin to execute when you open the Spreadsheet and the order in which the scripts are executed is indeterminate.

event handler is a function executed when a particular event takes place.

see Running Scripts in Response to an Event.

A script cannot currently call or create another script and cannot call functions in another script.

If you want to store the results of a function, you must copy them into a spreadsheet cell.

You can trigger Apps Script events from links that are embedded in a Google Site. For information about how to do this, see Using Apps Scrip in Your Ssite.

You can insert a script into a Site as a gadget.

you must grant permission for the script to run as a service.

You also designate whether only you can invoke the service or whether all members of your domain can invoke the service.

you can assign functions within the script any arbitrary name.

The instructions in a function must be enclosed within curly braces.

event handler

when a spreadsheet is opened,

when a script is installed

when a spreadsheet is edited

at times you choose

menu item

Using a drawing or button embedded in a Spreadsheet

Using a custom function that is referenced as a Spreadsheet function

Clicking the Run button

object-oriented programming languages

Google Apps Script uses the JavaScript language.

Operations

are performed using the objects and methods described in the API documentation.

An API provides pre-packaged code for standard tasks you need to accomplish in scripts or programs.

API includes objects that you use to accomplish tasks such as sending email, creating calendar entries

A method describes the behavior of an object and is a function attached to an object.

MailApp

use to create and send email

To send email, you invoke the sendEmail method and provide values for the method arguments.

Google Apps Script can access or retrieve data in different formats in different ways.

A custom function

is called directly from a cell in a Spreadsheet using the syntax =myFunctionName()

they cannot set values outside the cells

have some restrictions not shared by other functions

cannot send email

cannot operate on a Google Site

cannot perform any operations that require user authorization

cannot perform any operations that require knowledge of who the user

onInstall function

onOpen function

Other functions run when you run them manually or when they are triggered by clicking

Custom functions and formulas in the spreadsheet execute any time the entire Spreadsheet is evaluated or when the data changes in the function or formula's cell.

share the Spreadsheet

publish the script to the Script Gallery

spreadsheet template

the color coding for that line will not be correct

A script with incorrect syntax or other errors does not run.

The Script Editor includes a debugger.

view the current state of variables and objects created by a script while that script runs.

step through the code line by line as it executes or set breakpoints

The debugger does not work with custom functions, onEdit functions, event triggers, or scripts running as a service.

use the debugger to find errors in scripts that are syntactically correct but still do not function correctly.

Functions ending in an underscore (_), for example, internalStuff_(), are treated differently from other functions. You do not see these function in the Run field in the Script Editor and they do not appear in the Script Manager in the Spreadsheet. You can use the underscore to indicate that users should not attempt to run the function and the function is available only to other functions.

gospel of individualism, small government, and market fundamentalism

innovation is the new selfishness

mastery of public relations

making it seem as if the language of economics was, in fact, the only reasonable way to talk about the subject

memes are for losers; the real money is in epistemes.

“Open source software” was also the first major rebranding exercise overseen by Team O’Reill

It’s easy to forget this today, but there was no such idea as open source software before 1998; the concept’s seeming contemporary coherence is the result of clever manipulation and marketing.

ideological cleavage between two groups

Richard Stallman

Free Software Foundation, preoccupied with ensuring that users had rights with respect to their computer programs. Those rights weren’t many—users should be able to run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to redistribute copies of it, and to release their improved version (if there was one) to the public

“free software.”

association with “freedom” rather than “free beer”

copyleft

profound critique of the role that patent law had come to play in stifling innovation and creativity.

Plenty of developers contributed to “free software” projects for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. Some, like Linus Torvalds, the Finnish creator of the much-celebrated Linux operating system, did so for fun; some because they wanted to build more convenient software; some because they wanted to learn new and much-demanded skills.

Stallman’s rights-talk, however, risked alienating the corporate types

he was trying to launch a radical social movement, not a complacent business association

By early 1998 several business-minded members of the free software community were ready to split from Stallman, so they masterminded a coup, formed their own advocacy outlet—the Open Source Initiative—and brought in O’Reilly to help them rebrand.

“open source”

The label “open source” may have been new, but the ideas behind it had been in the air for some time.

In those early days, the messaging around open source occasionally bordered on propaganda

This budding movement prided itself on not wanting to talk about the ends it was pursuing; except for improving efficiency and decreasing costs, those were left very much undefined.