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A Sourcebook for the Worldwide Discovery of a Creative Organic Universe
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II. Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Actual Factual Knowledge

C. Earth Learns: Interactive Person/Planet, Self-Organizing, Daily Collaboratiions

Baker, Stephen. Google and the Wisdom of Clouds. Business Week. December 24, 2007. Making money is a side effect of this socially responsible company which wants to vastly increase the computer power and utility accessible to any user. ‘Cloud’ is their term for great numbers of interlinked, low cost servers, which can crunch much more data than a single PC. See also later BW articles by Steve Hamm: "Cloud Computing" for April 24, 2008, and "How Cloud Computing is Changing the World" by Rachael King on August 4, 2008. But one wonders when, by what imagination, it will take to realize the correct metaphor is actually ‘brain.’

Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo. Network Theory – the Emergence of the Creative Enterprise. Science. 308/639, 2005. A commentary on a detailed study in the same issue (Roger Guimera, et al. 697-702) finds that science has now moved from lone investigators (Newton, Darwin) to international consortiums involving a great many researchers. Their dynamic interrelation can then be modeled by the same principles that occur from protein webs to the Internet. What is going on, I add, seems an historic shift and ascent to a worldwide cognitive capacity beginning to attain its own knowledge. Such an integral evolutionary transition promises to join many contributions and fields into a salutary discovery, which is the working basis of this website.

Traditionally, the achievements of individuals such as Darwin and Einstein have dominated the public’s image of science, yet today some of the most groundbreaking work is collaborative in nature. (639) Indeed, the size of collaborative teams is increasing, turning the scientific enterprise into a densely interconnected network whose evolution is driven by simple universal laws. (640) By demonstrating that the Web, the cell, or society is driven by similar organizing principles, network theory offers a successful conceptual framework to approach the structure of many complex systems. (641)

Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo. The Architecture of Complexity: The Structure and the Dynamics of Networks, from the Web to the Cell. Grossman, Robert, et al, eds. Proceedings of the Eleventh SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. Boston: ACM Press, 2005. A typical example of the many professional meetings each year on every continent as part of intense efforts to develop the full capacity of a global cerebral realm. Physicist Barabasi again notes the deep affinities amongst all realms of an awakening natural genesis.

Networks with complex topology describe systems as diverse as the cell, the World Wide Web or the society. The emergence of most networks is driven by self-organizing processes that are governed by simple but generic laws. The analysis of the cellular network of various organisms shows that cells and complex man-made networks, such as the Internet…and many social and collaboration networks share the same large-scale topology. (3)

Barlow, Horace. The Nested Network of Brains and Minds. Gregory Bock and Jamie Goode, eds. The Limits of Reductionism in Biology. New York: Wiley, 1998. A complex systems view reveals similarities between cognitive architecture and human societies.

Bentley, Alexander and Herbert Maschner. Avalanche of Ideas. Bentley, Alexander and Herbert Maschner, eds. Complex Systems and Archaeology. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003. A preamble contends that while most scale-free network studies look for spatial patterns, an important temporal factor can also be observed. An application is then made to cultural concepts or ideas, which are seen to spread by the same self-similar, branching fractal growth as branching rivers or neural networks.

Bentley, R. Alexander, and Michael O’Brien. Cultural Evolutionary Tipping Points in the Storage and Transmission of Information. Frontiers in Psychology. December, 2012. University of Bristol, UK, and University of Missouri anthropologists move from archaeologist Gordon Childe’s 1950s civilizational scale and Malcolm Gladwell’s popular societal transitions to view an episodic rise, repository, and consolidation of collective human knowledge capacity and its effective avail. An increasing rate of shared communication and conveyance is a significant aspect.

Human culture has evolved through a series of major tipping points in information storage and communication. The first was the appearance of language, which enabled communication between brains and allowed humans to specialize in what they do and to participate in complex mating games. The second was information storage outside the brain, most obviously expressed in the “Upper Paleolithic Revolution” – the sudden proliferation of cave art, personal adornment, and ritual in Europe some 35,000–45,000 years ago. More recently, this storage has taken the form of writing, mass media, and now the Internet, which is arguably overwhelming humans’ ability to discern relevant information. The third tipping point was the appearance of technology capable of accumulating and manipulating vast amounts of information outside humans, thus removing them as bottlenecks to a seemingly self-perpetuating process of knowledge explosion. Important components of any discussion of cultural evolutionary tipping points are tempo and mode, given that the rate of change, as well as the kind of change, in information storage and transmission has not been constant over the previous million years. (Abstract)

Berman, Fran, et al, eds. Grid Computing – Making the Global Infrastructure a Reality. Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2003. A large volume on the many aspects of an enveloping worldwide computer network as if a planetary nervous system. By this novel capacity, an immense flow of information coming from many areas such as bioinformatics, earth systems, climate, astronomy can handled, organized and made accessible to everyone. A typical paper in this regard is “The Data Deluge: an e-Science Perspective.” by Tony Hey and Anne Trefethen.

Berners-Lee, Tim. Weaving the Web. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999. The inventor of the Internet finds it to express a fractal self-similarity as exponentially growing networks take on the emergent properties of a global brain.

Berners-Lee, Tim and Lalana Kagal. The Fractal Nature of the Semantic Web. AI Magazine. Fall, 2008. MIT computer scientists (Berners-Lee is the founder of the worldwide web) contend that since the rest of natural and indeed social reality exemplifies a nested, recurrent, self-similarity, so also should the global Internet. Indeed it already can be seen to be so structured to a good extent. The endeavor to design and facilitate better operating ontologies should then further embrace this effective, organic geometry.

The semantic web is a set of standards for knowledge representation and exchange that is aimed at providing interoperability across applications and organizations. We believe that the gathering success of this technology is not derived from the particular choice of syntax or of logic. Its main contribution is in recognizing and supporting the fractal patterns of scalable web systems. (29) In this article we discuss why fractal patterns are an appropriate model for web systems and how semantic web technologies can be used to design scalable and interoperable systems. (29) The inherent fractal nature of language and culture in human societies leads us to expect the semantic web to demonstrate the self-similar patterns of fractals. (29)

Human society is made up of a fractal tangle of overlapping communities and cultures. We expect the same fractal patterns to appear in scalable web systems within which information will be composed of terms from different ontologies – global, community specific, and local. (34)

Bernstein, Abraham, et al. Programming the Global Brain. Communications of the ACM. 55/5, 2012. Abe Bernstein, Informatics, University of Zurich, along with Mark Klein and Thomas Malone, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, proceed to engage this enveloping reality. But do paradigms of a moribund cosmos and aimless evolution allow, sanction, a full, necessary appreciation of a further major transition to such a planetary personage? If truly a worldwide bilateral cerebral faculty, apparently learning on its/her/his own, it is indeed imperative to think through, get on with, how to reciprocally dialogue and avail.

New ways of combining networked humans and computers—whether they are called collective intelligence, social computing, or various other terms—are already important and likely to become truly transformative in domains from education and industry to government and the arts. As the scale, scope, and connectivity of these human-computer networks increase, we believe it will become increasingly useful to view all the people and computers on our planet as constituting a kind of “global brain.” (41)

We have attempted to identify, in this short article, some of the key challenges, opportunities, and strategies involved in programming the emerging global brain. Learning to do this well is, perhaps, even more urgent than many people realize. Our world is faced with both existential threats of unprecedented seriousness (such as the environment) and huge opportunities (such as for scientific and social progress). We believe that our ability to face the threats and opportunities of the coming century will be profoundly affected by how well, and soon, we can master the art of programming our planet’s emerging global brain. (43)

Bettencourt, Luis. The Rules of Information Aggregation and Emergence of Collective Intelligent Behavior. Topics in Cognitive Science. 1/4, 2009. The LANL and SFI systems theorist quantifies in terms of composite communications how human groups appear to take on an organism-like guise, as if a further social evolutionary stage. Search for several more papers by the author that continue to embellish a nascent societal and urban vitality.

Information is a peculiar quantity. Unlike matter and energy, which are conserved by the laws of physics, the aggregation of knowledge from many sources can in fact produce more information (synergy) or less (redundancy) than the sum of its parts. This feature can endow groups with problem-solving strategies that are superior to those possible among noninteracting individuals and, in turn, may provide a selection drive toward collective cooperation and coordination. (Abstract, 598)

Borner, Katy, et al. Studying the Emerging Global Brain: Analyzing and Visualizing the Impact of Co-Authorship Teams. Complexity. 10/4, 2005. This project complements the work of Barabasi, et al (2005, this section) whereby increasingly large collaborations seem to take on the guise of a planetary cerebral and cognitive faculty. The occasion of a collective knowledge, as if an earth that learns at the verge of its own discovery, is quite implied.

Work dating back to the ancient Greeks argues that humanity can be seen as a complex social system or super-organism. In this perspective, people are viewed as analogous to nerve cells that are interconnected by communication channels, collectively forming a "global brain." By adopting this philosophy one is led to believe - hope, given the nearly constant human cognitive abilities - that there is a general trend toward the formation of a more global knowledge production and consumption dynamics exploiting the integration of social systems in concert with technological and biological systems. (57)

A visualization of the growth of the weighted co-author network, and the results obtained from the statistical analysis indicate a drift toward a more cooperative, global collaboration process as the main drive in the production of scientific knowledge. (57) The analysis of this particular dataset confirms our hypothesis that a global brain comprised of larger highly successful co-authorship teams is developing. (58)

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