zenpundit.com

This is interesting. Age-old, conventional strategic wisdom is supported by social network mapping research involving 300,000 ppl:

‘The Friend of My Enemy Is My Enemy’: Virtual Universe Study Proves 80-Year-Old Theory on How Humans Interact

ScienceDaily (July 20, 2010) – A new study analysing interactions between players in a virtual universe game has for the first time provided large-scale evidence to prove an 80 year old psychological theory called Structural Balance Theory. The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that individuals tend to avoid stress-causing relationships when they develop a society, resulting in more stable social networks.

The study, carried out at Imperial College London, the Medical University of Vienna and the Santa Fe Institute, analyses relationships between 300,000 players in an online game called Pardus (http://www.pardus.at/). In this open-ended game, players act as spacecraft exploring a virtual universe, where they can make friends and enemies, and communicate, trade and fight with one another.

Structural Balance Theory is an 80 year old psychological theory that suggests some networks of relationships are more stable than others in a society. Specifically, the theory deals with positive and negative links between three individuals, where ‘the friend of my enemy is my enemy’ is more stable (and therefore more common) than ‘the friend of my friend is my enemy’.

….The authors found that in positive relationships, players are more likely to reciprocate actions and sentiments than in negative ones. For example, if player A declares player B to be their friend, player B is likely to do the same. If player A declares player B to be their enemy, however, player B is not likely to reciprocate.

The research also revealed strong interactions between different types of links, with some networks overlapping extensively, as players are likely to engage in similar interactions, and others tending to exclude each other. For example, friendship and communication networks overlap: as we would expect, friends tend to talk to each other. However, trade and hostility did not overlap at all, showing that enemies tend not to trade with one another.

Dr Renaud Lambiotte said: “This may seem like an obvious finding, as we would all prefer to communicate more with people we like. However, nobody has shown the evidence for this theory on such a large scale before.”

Read the rest here.

First, I wonder what Valdis Krebs thinks of this study?

Second, does this bear out on larger scale entities that cultivate primary loyalties?

“It is, I think, particularly in periods of acknowledged crisis that scientists have turned to philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field. Scientists have not generally needed or wanted to be philosophers”  

 – Thomas Kuhn

It used to be used as a joke, but a well established string theorist, Erik Verlinde,  is challenging the existence of gravity, calling it an “illusion” (no word as to whether he is willing to step out of a 95th floor window to test his hypothesis):

The New York Times (Dennis Overbye) – A Scientist Takes On Gravity

It’s hard to imagine a more fundamental and ubiquitous aspect of life on the Earth than gravity, from the moment you first took a step and fell on your diapered bottom to the slow terminal sagging of flesh and dreams.

But what if it’s all an illusion, a sort of cosmic frill, or a side effect of something else going on at deeper levels of reality?

So says Erik Verlinde, 48, a respected string theorist and professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, whose contention that gravity is indeed an illusion has caused a continuing ruckus among physicists, or at least among those who profess to understand it. Reversing the logic of 300 years of science, he argued in a recent paper, titled “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” that gravity is a consequence of the venerable laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases.

“For me gravity doesn’t exist,” said Dr. Verlinde, who was recently in the United States to explain himself. Not that he can’t fall down, but Dr. Verlinde is among a number of physicists who say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges,” the way stock markets emerge from the collective behavior of individual investors or that elasticity emerges from the mechanics of atoms.

Looking at gravity from this angle, they say, could shed light on some of the vexing cosmic issues of the day, like the dark energy, a kind of anti-gravity that seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe, or the dark matter that is supposedly needed to hold galaxies together.

….It goes something like this: your hair frizzles in the heat and humidity, because there are more ways for your hair to be curled than to be straight, and nature likes options. So it takes a force to pull hair straight and eliminate nature’s options. Forget curved space or the spooky attraction at a distance described by Isaac Newton‘s equations well enough to let us navigate the rings of Saturn, the force we call gravity is simply a byproduct of nature’s propensity to maximize disorder.

Some of the best physicists in the world say they don’t understand Dr. Verlinde’s paper, and many are outright skeptical. But some of those very same physicists say he has provided a fresh perspective on some of the deepest questions in science, namely why space, time and gravity exist at all – even if he has not yet answered them.

Dr. Verlinde goes into greater detail about his ideas on The Reference Frame, the blog of Czech string theory physicist Luboš Motl. It seems from the comment section that Dr. Motl  is not buying it at all and is politely saying that Verlinde’s hypothesis is complete nonsense ( or, conversely, if true, is so revolutionary that Verlinde upends not only everything we know about physics, but also logic). Here is another expert commentary. Here I cordially invite some of my scientist readers, Shane, Dr. Von and Cheryl to weigh in as well.

Nevertheless, what Verlinde is doing, challenging the unchallenged paradigm, is intellectually very useful.

Sir Isaac Newton who explained gravity’s action did not know what gravity was. We still don’t know what it is even though physicists today have a much wider perspective than did Newton, whose discoveries were the bedrock of not just modern science, but modernity itself. When concepts are accepted blindly we tend to stop thinking of them very deeply. Not everyone, Stephen Hawking has spent a great deal of time pondering gravity as did Albert Einstein in his later years when he groped hopelessly for a unified field theory. Richard Feynman too, was a deep thinker on gravity:

Most of us unfortunately, including most physicists, are not Einstein, Feynman or Hawking.

The difficulty with theoretical physics and questions as fundamental to the order of nature as gravity is that we may be limited in our ability to understand the universe conceptually by the physical, biological, structure of our brains and the scalar level and time frame we inhabit. It is very hard to mentally see outside that box. Our brains can only entertain so many variables or so much complexity at one time and our conceptual imagination is largely influenced by sense perceptions. Mathematics helps us get around our physical limitations as does the processing speed of supercomputers but these crutches themselves refer back to the preferred cognitive avenues of our physical brains.

In thinking about fundamental or overarching phenomena, it is useful to pause and consider that as primates, we may not have been optimized by evolution to easily discern the most significant mechanisms of the physical world when our hominid deep ancestors eluded the apex predators of the Paleolithic Age. With great probability, Verlinde is spectacularly wrong here but his paper, because he is is a credible scientist with an impressive record, is forcing a lot of very smart people to stop and reasses what they know to be true in order to defend it from his heresy – cough…excuse me – his hypothesis 🙂

In doing so, some of them may gain insights of importance that otherwise never might have occurred. Insights that may only be tangentially related to Verlinde’s original idea.

Dissent is the grain of sand that can yield a pearl.

This is good. Perfect for non-geeks who nevertheless need to know the ripple effects of coming down the pike:

The History of Information, by David Siegel from dsiegel on Vimeo.

Hat tip to Dave Davison.

I begin by stating I do not have the technical competence required to make an independent assessment here.

Recently, the NYT published an article quoting leading missile defense critic,  MIT Professor Ted Postol:

Review Cites Flaws in U.S. Antimissile Program

Mr. Obama’s announcement of his new antimissile plan in September was based on the Pentagon’s assessment that the SM-3, or Standard Missile 3, had intercepted 84 percent of incoming targets in tests. But a re-examination of results from 10 of those apparently successful tests by Theodore A. Postol and George N. Lewis, being published this month, finds only one or two successful intercepts – for a success rate of 10 to 20 percent.

Most of the approaching warheads, they say, would have been knocked off course but not destroyed. While that might work against a conventionally armed missile, it suggests that a nuclear warhead might still detonate. At issue is whether the SM-3 needs to strike and destroy the warhead of a missile – as the Pentagon says on its Web site.

“The system is highly fragile and brittle and will intercept warheads only by accident, if ever,” said Dr. Postol, a former Pentagon science adviser who forcefully criticized the performance of the Patriot antimissile system in the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

Naturally, the Pentagon disagreed with Dr. Postol, but their response was unusually blistering this time (and ignored by the Times):

Missile Defense Agency Responds to New York Times Article

….This sea-based interceptor missile is designed to intercept and destroy short to medium-range ballistic missiles using “hit to kill” technology, which means that the interceptor collides directly with the target missile or warhead, and destroys the target using only the force of the collision.  The allegation that target intercepts were reported as successful when they were not successful is wrong, and the data presented by the authors in the article is flawed, inaccurate and misleading.

In each successful intercept test the target missile was destroyed by the Aegis BMD/SM-3 system due to the extreme kinetic energy resulting from the “hit to kill” intercept.  In each instance, the mission objective of “hit to kill” of the unitary or separating target was achieved. 

Postol and Lewis apparently based their assessment on publicly released photos gleaned from a sensor mounted aboard the SM-3 and postulated what they perceived to be the interceptor’s impact point although they had no access to classified telemetry data showing the complete destruction of the target missiles, or subsequent sensor views of the intercept that were not publicly released so as not to reveal to potential adversaries exactly where the target missile was struck.

Actually, the publicly released videos, which can be seen at www.mda.mil/news/gallery_aegis.html, and from which the still photos were extracted, show infrared images from both interceptor and airborne sensors demonstrating the complete destruction of the target missiles.

All of the tests cited by the authors as “misses” were tests involving short-range unitary targets, when the warhead remains attached to the booster rocket.  These tests were correctly described by the Missile Defense Agency as successful intercepts, because they successfully intercepted the target.  Post-test analysis from collected telemetry showed that the interceptor’s kill vehicle impacted the target body or warhead within inches of the expected impact point that was calculated to maximize damage against a variety of warhead types.

….The authors of the SM-3 study cited only tests involving unitary targets, and chose not to cite the five successful intercepts in six attempts against separating targets, which, because of their increased speed and small size, pose a much more challenging target for the SM-3 than a much larger unitary target missile. They also did not mention the fact the system is successfully intercepting targets much smaller than probable threat missiles on a routine basis, and have attained test scores that many other Defense Department programs aspire to attain.

I mention all this because my amigo Shane Deichman, who like Postol, is a physicist and a former scientific adviser for the DoD (Postol for the Chief of Naval Operations, Deichman for JFCOM) and is currently working at the National Missile Defense Agency, felt that the rebuttal scored a direct hit on Postol’s claims about the system tests ( which might explain why it did not get cited by the NYT, though in fairness, the Times did quote the agency spokesman). I trust Shane’s judgment but I’m not able to expound on it, so he is cordially invited to add any comments here that he might wish that might further the reader’s (and my own) understanding.

Comments are, of course, open to all.

At Fast Company, Jamais Cascio unveiled a short bibliography for the general reader on Futurist thinking.

Futures Thinking: A Bibliography

As you probably picked up from earlier entries in the Futures Thinking series, foresight work is intensely information-based. If you’re going to make grounded projections of future possibilities, you have understand both what has led us to the point we’re at today, and what kinds of issues seem to be shaping up as emerging drivers. A few pieces to trigger some creative thoughts can help, too.

As I suggested in Futures Thinking: Scanning the World, a good deal of the reading you’ll be doing will be in the form of websites and journals. This isn’t surprising; part of the service provided by foresight workers is sensitivity to early warnings of big changes. It will be tempting to focus on science and technology materials, in part because there tends to be an overlap between people interested in futures work and people interested in new tech toys, and in part because the pace and pattern of change is easier to see in science and technology than it is in many other realms. It’s not necessarily more “objective,” but it’s perceived as less ambiguous.

That was the introduction, you can read the rest here. Now on to Cascio’s recommendations:

Practice

These two books are good resources for understanding methodologies of futures work. Schwartz co-founded Global Business Network, and Johansen is a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for the Future. (Disclosure: I’ve worked with Peter, and currently work with Bob.)

• Art of the Long View, Peter Schwartz
• Get There Early, Bob Johansen

History

Foresight is anticipatory history. These three books offer very different perspectives on how to think about the past — which, in turn, help to shape how we should think about the future. Polanyi is a classical theorist, looking at ideas and states; Zinn is a populist, looking at the lives of regular people; Diamond is an ecologist, looking at the intersection of culture and environment. I end up mixing these three approaches in my own work.

• The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi
• A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn
• Collapse, Jared Diamond

Analysis

Easily the largest section of my personal library, I could have made the list of Analysis books ten times longer. The ones I’ve picked here, however, offer for me a set of cogent insights into how we live with the tools we make. The ideal result from reading a book in this category should be an epiphany moment where you can see all sorts of links from the book’s ideas to other books/ideas you’ve encountered. All of these books gave me that kind of moment.

• Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs
• Everyware, Adam Greenfield
• Plan B, Lester Brown
• Radical Evolution, Joel Garreau
• Brave New War, John Robb
• No Logo, Naomi Klein

Inspiration

The highest compliment I can give a science fiction book is that it’s “plausibly surreal” — it manages to feel like a relentless extrapolation from today even as it overwhelms with unexpected consequences of that extrapolation. I’ve read each of these are books multiple times, and I still get a giddy feeling of discovery every time.

• Accelerando, Charlie Stross
• Transmetropolitan series, Warren Ellis & Darrick Roberts
• Holy Fire, Bruce Sterling
• The Bohr Maker, Linda Nagata
• Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge
• Red Mars/Green Mars/Blue Mars trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson

I am not familiar with all of these books. The Art of the Long View is considered to be a classic and I will give a very strong recommendation to Brave New War and Smart Mobs.

What would I add to this list?:

Practice:

Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision by Roberta Wohlstetter

The Next Two Hundred Years: A Scenario for America and the World by William Morle Brown and Herman Kahn

History:

From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present by Jacques Barzun

A History of Knowledge: Past, Present, and Future by Charles van Doren

Analysis:

Masks of the Universe: Changing Ideas on the Nature of the Cosmos by Edward Robert Harrison

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson

Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century by Alvin Toffler

I’m not a frequent enough consumer of science fiction to have noteworthy recommendations for “Inspiration”. There are obvious authors who come to mind – Asimov, Dick, Heinlein, Gibson, Clarke – but I’ll leave it to readers here to nominate titles in the comments section.