Spotting (Draft)

Spotting

Isolated fires started ahead of the main fire by sparks, embers or other ignited material...

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I- I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference

Robert Frost The Road Not Taken

Sustainability

Communities

Technologies

Performance

... a dilemma in which multiple individuals acting independently and solely and rationally consulting their own self-interest will ultimately destroy a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long term interest for this to happen.

Tragedy of the Commons

Benefaction

Altruism

Prediction

Projection

Forecaster

Futurist

Altruism ... our moral obligation to serve others and place their interests above our own.

First Thesis

We know a great deal. And we know not only many details of doubtful intellectual interest, but also things which are of considerable practical significance and, what is even more important, which provide us with deep theoretical insight, and with a surprising understanding of the world.

Second Thesis

Our ignorance is sobering and boundless. . . With each step forward, with each problem which we solve, we not only discover new and unsolved problems, but we also discover that where we believed that we were standing on firm and safe ground, all things are, in truth, insecure and in a state of flux.

So, we have data in clumps—in collections that are curated and hosted by libraries, publishers, and others; what we need are the runners that connect those clumps, and what we'll discover when we have them is that data doesn't move between clumps very successfully. That's a problem that nobody is really dealing with

Microcontent

Social Format

Users possess a new degree of agency in constructing their engagement with resources and other users so that it is easy to form and interact with social and technological networks.

Produser

Wikipedia (31 October 2009) has 3,080,049 articles, and 18,420,169 pages in total.

There have been 343,586,517 edits.

There are 866,624 uploaded files.

There are 10,872,490 registered users,including 1,691 administrators.

Intercultural dialogue, as a governmental project, must always struggle against the likelihood of failure because most people do not tend spontaneously to communicate across lines of difference.

The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don’t pan out.

You need to be really pigheaded. Iterate. Change things. Experiment. Try again. After all, it’s only failure if you give up.

My love of music was seriously impaired by this trap that I'd built for myself, which was that for compositional purposes I'd invent tunings. I'd tune to the numbers in a date, I'd tune to a piece of music that I liked on the radio, I'd tune to birdsongs and the landscape I was sitting in... all of which is great for composition, but terrible for performance. I'd work out these wonderful fresh harmonic movements, only it was a pain in the butt to perform and I felt like I was always out of tune. You kill the neck on a guitar in no time at all from changing the tension all the time.

Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent (cooperates with the other), the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act?

Prisoner’s Dilemma

Two players may each cooperate with or betray the other player.

The only concern of each individual player is maximizing his or her own payoff, without any concern for the other player's payoff.

Rational choice leads the two players to both play defect, even though each player's individual reward would be greater if they both played cooperatively.

In the classic form of this game, cooperating is strictly dominated by defecting, so that the only possible equilibrium for the game is for all players to defect. No matter what the other player does, one player will always gain a greater payoff by playing defect. Since in any situation playing defect is more beneficial than cooperating, all rational players will play defect, all things being equal.

In the iterated prisoner's dilemma, the game is played repeatedly. Thus each player has an opportunity to punish the other player for previous non-cooperative play.

Zero Sum

Non Zero Sum

Social Traps

The more complex societies get and the more complex the networks of interdependence within and beyond community and national borders get, the more people are forced in their own interests to find non-zero-sum solutions. That is, win–win solutions instead of win–lose solutions.... Because we find as our interdependence increases that, on the whole, we do better when other people do better as well — so we have to find ways that we can all win, we have to accommodate each other....

(Bill Clinton, 2000)

email is based on open standards, and it's the lowest common denominator for Internet communication. Any communication system that wishes to supplant email will need to offer both openness and ubiquity, and nothing available today comes even close.

SourcesFlickr

Monga Tree http://www.flickr.com/photos/ozjulian/3307584961/sizes/o/

Perth Skyline http://www.flickr.com/photos/robinhutton/39456503/

Melbourne http://www.flickr.com/photos/robinhutton/39456503/sizes/l/

Sydney http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevgibbo/323501973/sizes/l/

Spiral Staircase http://www.flickr.com/photos/procsilas/71222778/sizes/l/

Scaffolding http://www.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/2201791390/

Synchronised Jumping http://www.flickr.com/photos/elvire-r/2451784799/sizes/o/

Leaf http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcgraths/3597037843/sizes/l/

Dandelion http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcgraths/2664830874/sizes/l/in/set-72157600641178544/

Vault http://www.flickr.com/photos/goetter/960831783/sizes/o/

Balance Beam http://www.flickr.com/photos/goetter/2083820550/sizes/o/in/set-72157594181227561/

Car in the Hand http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimmyharris/3858368342/

Underwater swim http://www.flickr.com/photos/jayhem/3601351382/sizes/l/

Russian Padlocks http://www.flickr.com/photos/akras/2382415876/sizes/l/

Flickr

Port Arthur 01 http://www.flickr.com/photos/clydestreet/3186347007/in/set-72157612423328758/

Port Arthur 02 http://www.flickr.com/photos/clydestreet/3187173540/in/set-72157612423328758/

Port Arthur 03 http://www.flickr.com/photos/clydestreet/3186340169/in/set-72157612423328758/

Football Player http://www.flickr.com/photos/vramak/3499502280/sizes/o/

Bird’s Nest Reflections http://www.flickr.com/photos/cmaccubbin/2846650238/sizes/l/

Inside the Bird’s Nest http://www.flickr.com/photos/cmaccubbin/2812880376/sizes/l/in/set-72157606953902842/

Balancing on Water http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimmyharris/3858405124/sizes/l/

Shoes on the Wire http://www.flickr.com/photos/lachlanhardy/83702051/sizes/o/

Sydney Cricket Ground http://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryofnsw/3063964989/sizes/o/

First Female Olympians http://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryofnsw/3446629550/

Dawn Fraser and Ilsa Konrads http://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryofnsw/3383583260/in/set-72157615860623268/

Clovelly Lantern Walkers http://www.flickr.com/photos/350org/4038873501/

Web Links

Russian Sky Jumping http://englishrussia.com/?p=1522

Street Parkour http://www.streetparkour.com/

GRB 090423 http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/314167main_GRONDafterglow_annotated_HI.jpg

Tragedy of the Commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Journey http://keithlyons.wordpress.com/2008/11/19/cck08-what-a-journey/

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About

Microsoft Founders’ Photograph http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2809/1096/1600/microsoft_founders.jpg

Joni Mitchell http://jonimitchell.com/Library/view.cfm?id=238

Prisoner’s Dilemma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma

Zero Sum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum

Social Traps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Traps

Peggy Hora http://www.thinkers.sa.gov.au/home.html

References

Ang, I. and Pothen, N. (2009). Between Promise and Practice: Web 2.0, Intercultural Dialogue and Digital Scholarship. Fibreculture, Issue 14. Link.

Charman-Anderson, S. (2008). The importance of pig-headedness. Strange Attractor.

Engst, A. (2009). Why Email Remains the King of Internet Communications. TidBits, 29 October. Link.

Popper, K. (1976). The Logic of the Social Sciences.

Unsworth, J. (2009). Clumps and Runners. Third Bamboo Workshop, Tucson, Arizona, January.

Unsworth, J. (1997). Documenting the Reinvention of Text: The Importance of Failure. The Journal of Electronic Publishing, 3, 2, December.