I had missed the connection with KC Claffy. I followed her work to
map the internet while I was at Sun and heard a brilliant presentation
she gave, I think at the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop a while back.
Very good stuff! Love to hear more about the project(s) especially
how you talked anyone into funding it! Very pioneering work.
The sfcomplex.org could use a talk on that sort of graph discovery and
rendering if you have the time for it.
-- Owen
On Feb 14, 2010, at 8:25 AM, Tom Vest wrote:
Thanks Stephen. I took no offense -- just wanted to announce my
presence on-list, and then to indulge in a little crotchetiness of
my own ;-)
That said, but you should be careful what you wish for.
I've already visited Santa Fe 3-4x now, the first few times to
attend Swarm-related conferences at SFI while I was in grad school
(c. 1995-1998).
Given the chance, I tend to find excuses to come!
Full disclosure: I no longer have any contractual relationship with
CAIDA. I was a fellow/advisor on economic and policy matter that
affect Internet protocol development, deployment, and usage from
2005~2007, and I continue to work with CAIDA Director/PI KC Claffy
less formally but fairly regularly ever since. In fact KC and I were
together on my last visit to Santa Fe in October 2007. We were
invited up to chat with some of the SFI research staff and fellows
who were interested in the possible uses of Internet topology and
flow time series measurements to explore/exemplify some broader
insights about self-organizing systems that they were working on. I
currently work as a consultant, mostly to the technical coordination
institutions that administer Internet protocol number resources
(i.e., the Regional Internet Registries, or RIRs).
I don't think that there was much follow-up between SFI and CAIDA
after that meeting, but then at that time my own research of
possible relevance was not yet particularly well developed.
That has changed in the interim, perhaps to the point that it would
merit a talk. I'll follow up with a few details off-list.
Regards all,
TV
http://www.caida.org/home/staff/tvest/
http://www.ripe.net/info/ncc/staff/science_grp.html
On Feb 13, 2010, at 11:58 PM, Stephen Guerin wrote:
Hello Tom,
Welcome to Friam! Don't mind the occasional squawk from the
ParrotFarm - the birds get crotchety if we forget to clean the
cages. :-)
Yes, you'll find fans of Brian Arthur-speak here. In particular, I
think his ideas of "Deep Craft" wrt innovation <http://tinyurl.com/yfud2p3
> emerging in some places and not others is interesting. I would
argue Northern New Mexico has a level of deep craft in simulation
and related topics like optimization and visualization that allows
practitioners to exchange ideas quickly with common vocabularies
(though one could argue about how deep it goes).
BTW, I enjoy the tools and visualizations coming out of Caida! If
you're out in Santa Fe, please consider giving a brownbag talk.
-Stephen
--- -. . ..-. .. ... .... - .-- --- ..-. .. ... ....
[email protected]
(m) 505.577.5828 (o) 505.995.0206
redfish.com _ sfcomplex.org _ simtable.com _ ambientpixel.com
On Feb 13, 2010, at 4:15 PM, Tom Vest wrote:
On Feb 13, 2010, at 3:43 PM, Douglas Roberts wrote:
Sheesh, what a bunch of academic phraseology!
• functional modularization
• combinatorial evolution
• both "top-down" as well as "bottom-up" initiative [...]
indispensable
IM(Not So)HO, America at large has been sufficiently dumbed down
by the brutal combination of a mediocre educational system, an
academic peer review system that rigidly refuses to think outside
the box, pay-for-play politics, fundamentalist christian &
christian wannabe religions, McDonalds lardburgers, and short-
sighted Wall Street quants that innovation is now solidly a thing
of the past, and will probably remain so for a very long time.
--Doug
Actually, we said approximately the same thing, or rather your
list included a small subset of the things I was trying to cover
with my academic phraseology.
No question that your phraseology is much more colorful! Not so
easy to model however.
I only chimed in (and subscribed) because I'm trying to model some
related problems in my own field.
I saw the terms "modeling" and "applied complexity" on the group
page -- but perhaps I misinterpreted the sense in which one or
more of those terms is being used...
In any case, please excuse the intrusion.
TV
On Sat, Feb 13, 2010 at 12:47 PM, Tom Vest <[email protected]> wrote:
On Feb 13, 2010, at 8:21 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
In a recent washingtonpost.com article named
"Erasing our innovation deficit" ( http://bit.ly/cG6vGW )
Eric Schmidt said
"We have been world leaders in [technological] innovation for
generations. It has driven our economy, employment growth and
our rising prosperity.
[..] We can no longer rely on the top-down approach of the 20th
century, when big investments in the military and NASA spun off
to the wider economy."
Do you agree? What kind of approach does the
USA need to return to old strength?
-J.
I'm surprised that none of the current/former SFIers on the list
have mentioned Brian Arthur's recent pitch for "combinatorial
evolution" as the engine of innovation.
As I read it, Brian's argument is that innovation is an
epiphenomenon arising from:
-- the functional modularization of many different kinds of
technologies*, plus
-- the standardization of "open" interfaces enabling those
functional components or modules to be combined in different
ways, plus
-- an environment that enables and incentivizes widespread
experimental combination of different technologies, e.g., by
occasionally rewarding those who come up with novel, useful
combinations.
*These could be of the "hard" or "soft" variety, e.g., chip
design or double-entry bookkeeping.
So, on this account it would seem that both "top-down" as well as
"bottom-up" initiative is indispensable.
Bottom-up activities are the proximate cause and primary engine
driving innovation.
However, the size of that engine (e.g., the share of the total
population capable of participating constrictively in the
combinatorial search) depends substantially on the existence,
scope, and openness/interoperability of those modules and the
standardized interfaces between them. Unfortunately, by their
very definition "standards" are a top-down phenomenon -- both
because they are never adopted with unanimous consent (but must
be appx. universally binding with a domain in order to work in
that domain), and because they must remain relatively stable over
time, which means that for everyone that comes along after the
moment of standardization, they may feel like an "unjust,"
arbitrary imposition.
In 2002, a quartet of prominent Internet standards developers
published a paper called "Tussle in Cyberspace" (link below),
which made a broadly similar argument about how the Internet has
evolved. However, while mechanisms that the Tussle authors
describe are broadly similar, the tone seems quite different, to
me at least. The earlier paper seemed to be (obliquely) engaging
a topical issues that was just emerging around that time -- i.e.,
the aspirations of some dominant Internet service providers to
subtly alter and/or partially vacate some of the standards that
make the Internet "open" and thus had fostered the Internet's
rapid growth up to that time (note: today the issue is most
commonly called "net neutrality"). In that context, the Tussle
paper seems to lean ever so slightly past the domain of
observation and Darwinian theory construction, in the general
direction of advocating the tussle process and the embrace of
whatever outcomes it yields, ala "social darwinism."
In any case, I think that any present US deficit in innovation
can probably be chalked up, at least in part, to the ongoing
progressive deviation from our most recent moment of optimal
balance between those "top down" and "bottom up" forces. Some of
the biggest recent winners in the innovation game -- i.e., those
who benefited most from the latest round of technical
standardization -- have started exert their own top-down
authority in ways that advance their own private interests, but
which collaterally degrade the environment for future/distributed
innovation...
(The question resonates for me because of the looming inflection
point in Internet protocol standards associated with the
depletion of the IPv4 address pool, which happens to be the stuff
of my day job)
My own 0.02, +/-
Tom Vest
"Tussle in Cyberspace: Defining Tomorrow’s Internet"
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/ana/Publications/PubPDFs/Tussle2002.pdf
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--
Doug Roberts
[email protected]
[email protected]
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
