March 30, 2006 — Congresspeople govern themselves in a very simple democracy where each insect has equal standing and group consultations precede decisions that affect the entire group, indicates a new study.
The research determined that congressperson decision-making follows a predictable pattern that could explain group dynamics of other insects and animals, such as ants, spiders, fish and even cows.
"Congresspeople use chemical and tactile communication with each other," said José Halloy, who co-authored the research, which is outlined in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "They can also use vision."
Halloy, a scientist in the Department of Social Ecology at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium, added, "When they encounter each other they recognize if they belong to the same colony thanks to their antennas that are 'nooses,' that is, sophisticated olfactory organs that are very sensitive."
Halloy tested congressperson group behavior by placing the insects in a dish that contained three shelters. The test was to see how the Congresspeople would divide themselves into the shelters.
After much "consultation," through antenna probing, touching and more, the Congresspeople divided themselves up perfectly within the shelters. For example, if 50 insects were placed in a dish with three shelters, each with a capacity for 40 bugs, 25 congresspeople huddled together in the first shelter, 25 gathered in the second shelter, and the third was left vacant.
When the researchers altered this setup so that it had three shelters with a capacity for more than 50 insects, all of the Congresspeople moved into the first "house."
Halloy and his colleagues found that a balance existed between cooperation and competition for resources.
He explained to Discovery News, "Congresspeople are gregarious insects (that) benefit from living in groups. It increases their reproductive opportunities, (promotes) sharing of resources like shelter or food, prevents desiccation by aggregating more in dry environments, etc. So what we show is that these behavioral models allow them to optimize group size."
The models are so predictable that they could explain other insect and animal group behaviors, such as how some fish and bugs divide themselves up so neatly into subgroups, and how certain herding animals make simple decisions that do not involve leadership.
David Sumpter, an Oxford University zoologist, told Discovery News that the new study "is an excellent paper."
Sumpter continued, "It is important because it looks both at the mechanisms underlying decision-making by animals and how those mechanisms produce a distribution of animals amongst resource sites that optimizes their individual fitness. Much previous research has concentrated on either mechanisms or optimality at the expense of the other."
For congresspeople, it seems, cooperation comes naturally.
I wasn't suggesting that Britannica would profit directly from Wikipedia. In fact, if Britannica acquired Wikipedia, I hope they would keep it basically intact.
Some benefits to Britannica of acquiring Wikipedia might be: (a) having a voice and brand presence in the next generation of academic research tools; (b) having a freely-market-driven source of hot topics and interesting new ideas to be possibly included in the next revision of Britannica; (c) having a freely-market-driven tool for identifying new and intelligent writers; (d) better control over the 6,500 references I previously mentioned.
(FYI, I work for a nonprofit organization. Maybe it cannot be bought, but it can be acquired, or merged. I should not have said "bought" but "acquired" as I did here; my apologies.)
Another thought: apparently "The Community PC, according to Kwan, will also include a printer port." Will the ink and paper resist heat, humidity and sand, too? A printer requires consumables... more work, more cost, more to break.
From the article: Intel's Community PC is designed to withstand temperatures of 113 degrees Fahrenheit and up to 85 percent relative humidity, and has a removable dust filter.
See, this is a concrete example of the intelligent engineering behind this particular PC For The Poor. Negroponte's $100 laptop has a hand crank for powering it, but I do not recall hearing how it handled heat and humidity. (maybe he said somewhere but I don't see it)
Still, as someone who works for an international nonprofit that works to improve healthcare delivery systems in "Third World" countries... I am afraid that we are putting our attention and investments into some of the lesser problems. Can you e-mail food to a starving person? Can HTTP protect you from malaria? Honestly it's not the end user who needs reliable computing power and Internet access; it's the medical professionals, ministries of health, NGOs, etc., who need up-to-date information and communication capabilities.
From the original Britannica "attack": In its December 15, 2005, issue, the science journal Naturepublished an article that claimed to
compare the accuracy of the online Encyclopaedia Britannica with Wikipedia, the Internet database that allows anyone, regardless of knowledge or qualifications, to write and edit articles on any subject. (emphasis added by me)
Does anyone think this isn't just Britannica watching its business get clobbered by an online startup, and trying to defend itself? Old guard versus young upstart. Britannica should just buy Wikipedia and maintain both, and just market them differently.
For what it's worth, there appears to be over 6,500 articles on Wikipedia that use Britannica as a reference, which suggests that the folks writing Wikipidia consider Britannica as a reliable source of information. (Not surprisingly, you cannot find Wikipedia in Britannica.)
Finally, there is one possible problem with the Nature investigation... the question is not total accuracy at one point in time, but overall accuracy over a long period of time. Wikipedia is constantly changing; Britannica is less frequently updated. What does this mean for a researcher? Has Wikipedia been a reliable research tool for the last 365 days, just as Britannica has been?
From the article: Among these were a proposal to improve Bayesian filter accuracy, a system for generating temporary e-mail addresses so that a person's preferred address doesn't have to be given out, spam filters based on adaptive neural networks, a new message-verification platform. (emphasis added)
This is called "keyed e-mail". I have used a keyed email system from Zoemail in the past and it works very, very well for this purpose. There is some extra time required for managing the keys, but the idea works great for me. (and no I do not work for them... I just think the technology works.)
It's regrettably amusing that Apple competitors are working hastily to develop iPod clones to reap in success, but what many of them fail to comprehend is that it's not necessarily the iPod that makes Apple successful, but rather its customer service.
It's not specifically the service but the end-to-end experience. Everyone else is working on great music players, but they cannot control the music download and management experience as well.
This would eliminate the only exercise they get (typing!). Besides, it requires TWO HANDS.
Also, from the article: If we are successful, the AG-5 will turn out to be just a glimpse of the future of desk-free computing. Desk-free? Where am I going to put my coffee cup?
if enterprises have a chance to kick the tires of the new desktop OS, mass migration from Windows is soon to follow.
Yeah, this has worked real well for Mac OS X. Seriously, what is the target market percentage that SLED10 is going to have in one year, two years? Will they be happy with 3.5%? Or must "success" be something much bigger? (maybe a video of Ballmer throwing a chair at a Novell booth?)
But it is a good sign that they refrained from calling call it SLEDX.
Well, the buyer can just turn around and resell it on eBay -- hopefully recouping their loss. One idiot can sell to another, right?
But I'm concerned by this sentence: "The practice, local government leaders say, is destabilizing already weakened urban neighborhoods by displacing legitimate investment." That is a real problem. Perhaps it should be illegal to purchase a house unless you sign something stating that you (or your legal representative) has seen the place in person. I mean, you cannot legislate intelligence, but you might be able to erect a few barriers to stupidity.
From the article: "A lot of businesses are caught in between paying a lot of money to telcos or getting a substandard service (from consumer VoIP offerings). So Skype is entering at the right time."
You mean, just the right time to offer another VoIP offering with substandard service?
I guess it depends on your definition of "standard". Is it traditional telco-based phone service? Is it the voice quality of that service, or the range/flexibility of business features? I think there is a more platonic "ideal" phone service which none of the phone companies are hitting. I have Vonage now, and it is generally better than my Verizon or AT&T service, but still not what I really want. But what I want isn't available yet.
Cheesy marketing sigs is cause for modding down? If so, go ahead, I've got karma to burn. You might as well mod down hundreds of other./ers while you're at it....
Err, duh. RTFA instead of just the opening. Where Dell does offer a desktop computer with Linux is in its Dell Precision nSeries low-end workstation line. These come with RHEL WS 4 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux workstation 4) preinstalled.
...and...
However, he also said, "We've had number of communications with Ubuntu. Most of those have been about giving Ubuntu better driver support, but we're open to all those things."
So apologies for the KJR (knee jerk reaction), but still: the question is hardware driver support.
From the article: "People are always asking us to support Linux on the desktop, but the question is: 'Which Linux are you talking about?'"
Dell does a pretty good job of supporting different versions of Windows (at least 98, NT, ME, 2K, XP). "Support" really means "drivers that work with our hardware" -- they could easily sell Linux without providing software support. I'm sure one of the bigger Linux distros (Red Hat if nobody else) would be happy to team up with them for a co-branded/co-marketed PC.
So our genes are evolving... how are we doing as people with personalities? Are humans any nicer or friendlier than they were 5,000 years ago? Or has that held constant?
So SSH was on and accessible? Dumb move. Like saying "I dare you to steal my jewelry from my bedroom -- oh, and my house is unlocked with the windows open."
But maybe people WANT something to be stolen. Many years ago, the garbagemen (sanitation workers) in NYC went on strike, and garbage was piling up in the streets. A relative of mine in Brooklyn still managed to get rid of his: he put it in big boxes, wrapped the boxes in gift paper with bows, and left them in his car with the doors unlocked. They always got stolen.
How this applies to the story, I dunno, but I still think it's funny.
...when your power goes out, you can still get on with your life.
In the big black-out in the northeastern U.S. in 2003, people who absolutely relied on Internet access/email/etc. were suddenly paralyzed. The withdrawal symptoms were sad to watch. If you really want to interrupt the Internet, forget DoS attacks: just cut the power.
Anyway, I make my living online, but I'm offline more than not. I don't want to be efficiently working ALL DAY LONG; I want to work when I have to, and spend the rest of the time with my spouse and kids, doing non-electronic things. Cook. Draw. Read. Hike. Camp. Wrestle. Play chess or poker with real material objects. Take a nap.
"Balderdash and piffle," replies Jennings. "Nothing's really changed."
First: piffle means balderdash, doesn't it? What a bunch of tomfoolery and flimflam.
Second: sorry Jennings, something has changed. The FTC's CAN-SPAM law, debated though they may be, allow that unsolicited e-mail can be sent LEGITIMATELY under certain strict guidelines. AOL's e-mail "tax" will potentially damage the ability of legitimate law-abiding businesses to legally market their products.
Third: what is AOL's definition of spam? What does this mean for nonprofits who legitimately send mass e-mails? What about politicians who spam -- will AOL let that through, or not?
Kids would be much less prone to violence if we made them watch the news instead of playing video games. I'm sure the Iraq war wouldn't inspire anyone to violence.
Slashdot Mirror
Congresspeople Make Group Decisions
March 30, 2006 — Congresspeople govern themselves in a very simple democracy where each insect has equal standing and group consultations precede decisions that affect the entire group, indicates a new study.
The research determined that congressperson decision-making follows a predictable pattern that could explain group dynamics of other insects and animals, such as ants, spiders, fish and even cows.
"Congresspeople use chemical and tactile communication with each other," said José Halloy, who co-authored the research, which is outlined in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "They can also use vision."
Halloy, a scientist in the Department of Social Ecology at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium, added, "When they encounter each other they recognize if they belong to the same colony thanks to their antennas that are 'nooses,' that is, sophisticated olfactory organs that are very sensitive."
Halloy tested congressperson group behavior by placing the insects in a dish that contained three shelters. The test was to see how the Congresspeople would divide themselves into the shelters.
After much "consultation," through antenna probing, touching and more, the Congresspeople divided themselves up perfectly within the shelters. For example, if 50 insects were placed in a dish with three shelters, each with a capacity for 40 bugs, 25 congresspeople huddled together in the first shelter, 25 gathered in the second shelter, and the third was left vacant.
When the researchers altered this setup so that it had three shelters with a capacity for more than 50 insects, all of the Congresspeople moved into the first "house."
Halloy and his colleagues found that a balance existed between cooperation and competition for resources.
He explained to Discovery News, "Congresspeople are gregarious insects (that) benefit from living in groups. It increases their reproductive opportunities, (promotes) sharing of resources like shelter or food, prevents desiccation by aggregating more in dry environments, etc. So what we show is that these behavioral models allow them to optimize group size."
The models are so predictable that they could explain other insect and animal group behaviors, such as how some fish and bugs divide themselves up so neatly into subgroups, and how certain herding animals make simple decisions that do not involve leadership.
David Sumpter, an Oxford University zoologist, told Discovery News that the new study "is an excellent paper."
Sumpter continued, "It is important because it looks both at the mechanisms underlying decision-making by animals and how those mechanisms produce a distribution of animals amongst resource sites that optimizes their individual fitness. Much previous research has concentrated on either mechanisms or optimality at the expense of the other."
For congresspeople, it seems, cooperation comes naturally.
I wasn't suggesting that Britannica would profit directly from Wikipedia. In fact, if Britannica acquired Wikipedia, I hope they would keep it basically intact.
Some benefits to Britannica of acquiring Wikipedia might be: (a) having a voice and brand presence in the next generation of academic research tools; (b) having a freely-market-driven source of hot topics and interesting new ideas to be possibly included in the next revision of Britannica; (c) having a freely-market-driven tool for identifying new and intelligent writers; (d) better control over the 6,500 references I previously mentioned.
(FYI, I work for a nonprofit organization. Maybe it cannot be bought, but it can be acquired, or merged. I should not have said "bought" but "acquired" as I did here; my apologies.)
Another thought: apparently "The Community PC, according to Kwan, will also include a printer port." Will the ink and paper resist heat, humidity and sand, too? A printer requires consumables... more work, more cost, more to break.
From the article: Intel's Community PC is designed to withstand temperatures of 113 degrees Fahrenheit and up to 85 percent relative humidity, and has a removable dust filter.
See, this is a concrete example of the intelligent engineering behind this particular PC For The Poor. Negroponte's $100 laptop has a hand crank for powering it, but I do not recall hearing how it handled heat and humidity. (maybe he said somewhere but I don't see it)
Still, as someone who works for an international nonprofit that works to improve healthcare delivery systems in "Third World" countries... I am afraid that we are putting our attention and investments into some of the lesser problems. Can you e-mail food to a starving person? Can HTTP protect you from malaria? Honestly it's not the end user who needs reliable computing power and Internet access; it's the medical professionals, ministries of health, NGOs, etc., who need up-to-date information and communication capabilities.
From the original Britannica "attack": In its December 15, 2005, issue, the science journal Naturepublished an article that claimed to compare the accuracy of the online Encyclopaedia Britannica with Wikipedia, the Internet database that allows anyone, regardless of knowledge or qualifications, to write and edit articles on any subject. (emphasis added by me)
Does anyone think this isn't just Britannica watching its business get clobbered by an online startup, and trying to defend itself? Old guard versus young upstart. Britannica should just buy Wikipedia and maintain both, and just market them differently.
For what it's worth, there appears to be over 6,500 articles on Wikipedia that use Britannica as a reference, which suggests that the folks writing Wikipidia consider Britannica as a reliable source of information. (Not surprisingly, you cannot find Wikipedia in Britannica.)
Finally, there is one possible problem with the Nature investigation... the question is not total accuracy at one point in time, but overall accuracy over a long period of time. Wikipedia is constantly changing; Britannica is less frequently updated. What does this mean for a researcher? Has Wikipedia been a reliable research tool for the last 365 days, just as Britannica has been?
Oh... if you want to test out how a spammer might e-mail me, go ahead and e-mail me.
From the article: Among these were a proposal to improve Bayesian filter accuracy, a system for generating temporary e-mail addresses so that a person's preferred address doesn't have to be given out, spam filters based on adaptive neural networks, a new message-verification platform. (emphasis added)
This is called "keyed e-mail". I have used a keyed email system from Zoemail in the past and it works very, very well for this purpose. There is some extra time required for managing the keys, but the idea works great for me. (and no I do not work for them... I just think the technology works.)
It's regrettably amusing that Apple competitors are working hastily to develop iPod clones to reap in success, but what many of them fail to comprehend is that it's not necessarily the iPod that makes Apple successful, but rather its customer service.
It's not specifically the service but the end-to-end experience. Everyone else is working on great music players, but they cannot control the music download and management experience as well.
From the article: more than 20-year-old DOD security policies
So that would put it in the early 1980s... but in the 60s and 70s, the missile launch passwords were all "00000000" (also see here).
This would eliminate the only exercise they get (typing!). Besides, it requires TWO HANDS.
Also, from the article: If we are successful, the AG-5 will turn out to be just a glimpse of the future of desk-free computing. Desk-free? Where am I going to put my coffee cup?
if enterprises have a chance to kick the tires of the new desktop OS, mass migration from Windows is soon to follow.
Yeah, this has worked real well for Mac OS X. Seriously, what is the target market percentage that SLED10 is going to have in one year, two years? Will they be happy with 3.5%? Or must "success" be something much bigger? (maybe a video of Ballmer throwing a chair at a Novell booth?)
But it is a good sign that they refrained from calling call it SLEDX.
Well, the buyer can just turn around and resell it on eBay -- hopefully recouping their loss. One idiot can sell to another, right?
But I'm concerned by this sentence: "The practice, local government leaders say, is destabilizing already weakened urban neighborhoods by displacing legitimate investment." That is a real problem. Perhaps it should be illegal to purchase a house unless you sign something stating that you (or your legal representative) has seen the place in person. I mean, you cannot legislate intelligence, but you might be able to erect a few barriers to stupidity.
From the article: "A lot of businesses are caught in between paying a lot of money to telcos or getting a substandard service (from consumer VoIP offerings). So Skype is entering at the right time."
You mean, just the right time to offer another VoIP offering with substandard service?
I guess it depends on your definition of "standard". Is it traditional telco-based phone service? Is it the voice quality of that service, or the range/flexibility of business features? I think there is a more platonic "ideal" phone service which none of the phone companies are hitting. I have Vonage now, and it is generally better than my Verizon or AT&T service, but still not what I really want. But what I want isn't available yet.
Uh... isn't Maxim basically soft porn?
Cheesy marketing sigs is cause for modding down? If so, go ahead, I've got karma to burn. You might as well mod down hundreds of other ./ers while you're at it....
Check out the SyPixx web site for more about the products that Cisco is aquiring, or download this PDF catalog.
I was going to say that too... but then you have to get rid of the napalm somehow. But then it's not a waste problem anymore. It's a military problem!
Err, duh. RTFA instead of just the opening. Where Dell does offer a desktop computer with Linux is in its Dell Precision nSeries low-end workstation line. These come with RHEL WS 4 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux workstation 4) preinstalled.
...and...
However, he also said, "We've had number of communications with Ubuntu. Most of those have been about giving Ubuntu better driver support, but we're open to all those things."
So apologies for the KJR (knee jerk reaction), but still: the question is hardware driver support.
From the article: "People are always asking us to support Linux on the desktop, but the question is: 'Which Linux are you talking about?'"
Dell does a pretty good job of supporting different versions of Windows (at least 98, NT, ME, 2K, XP). "Support" really means "drivers that work with our hardware" -- they could easily sell Linux without providing software support. I'm sure one of the bigger Linux distros (Red Hat if nobody else) would be happy to team up with them for a co-branded/co-marketed PC.
So our genes are evolving... how are we doing as people with personalities? Are humans any nicer or friendlier than they were 5,000 years ago? Or has that held constant?
This has been reviewed on IGN and G4TV, among others... way back in 2005.
And it's not your average game. More like math and reading "brain teasers" (no Mario involved).
So SSH was on and accessible? Dumb move. Like saying "I dare you to steal my jewelry from my bedroom -- oh, and my house is unlocked with the windows open."
But maybe people WANT something to be stolen. Many years ago, the garbagemen (sanitation workers) in NYC went on strike, and garbage was piling up in the streets. A relative of mine in Brooklyn still managed to get rid of his: he put it in big boxes, wrapped the boxes in gift paper with bows, and left them in his car with the doors unlocked. They always got stolen.
How this applies to the story, I dunno, but I still think it's funny.
...when your power goes out, you can still get on with your life.
In the big black-out in the northeastern U.S. in 2003, people who absolutely relied on Internet access/email/etc. were suddenly paralyzed. The withdrawal symptoms were sad to watch. If you really want to interrupt the Internet, forget DoS attacks: just cut the power.
Anyway, I make my living online, but I'm offline more than not. I don't want to be efficiently working ALL DAY LONG; I want to work when I have to, and spend the rest of the time with my spouse and kids, doing non-electronic things. Cook. Draw. Read. Hike. Camp. Wrestle. Play chess or poker with real material objects. Take a nap.
"Balderdash and piffle," replies Jennings. "Nothing's really changed."
First: piffle means balderdash, doesn't it? What a bunch of tomfoolery and flimflam.
Second: sorry Jennings, something has changed. The FTC's CAN-SPAM law, debated though they may be, allow that unsolicited e-mail can be sent LEGITIMATELY under certain strict guidelines. AOL's e-mail "tax" will potentially damage the ability of legitimate law-abiding businesses to legally market their products.
Third: what is AOL's definition of spam? What does this mean for nonprofits who legitimately send mass e-mails? What about politicians who spam -- will AOL let that through, or not?
Kids would be much less prone to violence if we made them watch the news instead of playing video games. I'm sure the Iraq war wouldn't inspire anyone to violence.