As an active participant in the Information / Communications Technology domain (ICT), this is perhaps one of the most influential videos I have seen in the last several years.  We are now, again (as with the emergence of the Internet), on the verge of a new great frontier in human ingenuity.

I’ve been tracking the progression of advents in bio-synthetic technology for a while now. Aside from this recent breakthrough in producing a bio-synthetic cell, there are also some significant developments happening in the overall scope of collective access and participation to the knowledge, technologies, and applications involved in this budding frontier.  Essentially, the bio-tech and neuro-tech domains are beginning to go open-source and non-centralized by a trend very similar to the way the software and internet industry has in the last 10 – 15 years.   The means of bio-engineering are now reaching a level of accessibility and automation that will allow for research, innovation, and applications to go well beyond the traditional scientific and corporate institutions–and into private laboratories, and even into the kitchens of people’s homes.

Can you imagine the potentials of 100,000s of independent, networked, and open-source scientists and technologists focusing on issues such as Cancer and HIV in their own homes in the same way that, say, Linux, Wikipedia, and FireFox have been developed?  This same kind of collective intelligence can also go towards innovations in bio-fuels and other green technologies.  And that’s just the very tip of the synthetic iceberg …

The implications are profound and staggering!

“Andrew Hessel reasons that Synthetic Biology will be the next big IT industry.  In his remarkable talk Andrew talks about the parallels between IT and biology.”

video link : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S23owdOuLjc

blog page link: http://blog.michaelgaio.com/2010/06/18/the-internet-of-living-things/

“We are attempting to operate our society on obsolete code. … Legacy sytems to legacies we don’t even remember.

…

How much of this is the bias of the medium, and how much is it the biases of the people who program our technology for us? And how do we know which is which?  How can we even tell them apart?  What I believe is that we won’t know until we understand how our technolgies work, and how our technolgies work on us.  I do believe that if you are not programmer, you are one of the programmed. It’s that simple.”

“We get text. … Instead of getting priests to read everything to us … we make our own words. We get the printing press. Instead of depending on a few scribes, now anyone can write. Now we get the computer, now anyone can program reality. Now that’s not what actually happened though.

…

We get the computer. Do we get a nation of programmers? No, we get a nation of bloggers. Now we have the great ability to write, but we don’t know how to program. We write in the box that Google gives us.

My issue is that at each stage, when we get a new medium, civilization seems to be one stage behind, one generation, one iteration behind the medium they are using.  And an elite, maybe a new elite, learns to actually use the thing.  … Programming is even bigger than the printing press.  It’s as big as text.  Text gave us Judaism. The printing press gave us Protestantism. What does this one give us?”

video link : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imV3pPIUy1k

blog page link: http://blog.michaelgaio.com/2010/04/07/program-or-be-programmed/

I’ve been developing this interactive, 3-dimensional model, and it was just recently accepted to be exhibited and presented at the Asian Consciousness Festival in Hong Kong this June.  You can see, interact, and read all about the model here:

www.cogspace.net

You can also download the entire abstract and descriptive paper here:

www.cogspace.net/docs/CogSpace.pdf

An excerpt from the abstract:

This model is an examination of consciousness through an interactive visual representation of the interdisciplinary knowledge domains of Cognitive Science and Consciousness Studies. As a visualization of the various scientific and academic approaches toward understanding mind and consciousness, a unified and comprehensive overview is achieved that orients our collective approach in the field of consciousness research as a whole.

The model is based on a 3-dimensional conceptual framework that assigns six (6) formally established primary knowledge domains of interdisciplinary Cognitive Science (namely: Psychology, Anthropology, Neuroscience, Computer Science, Philosophy, and Linguistics) to the geometric Cartesian coordinate system (x, y, z), and to a correlative color system (based on gradient scales of red, green, and blue), resulting in a semantic-color-space matrix for ontologically representational coordination of the topic contents. More specific knowledge areas are plotted within this axiomatic framework as sub-domains (such as Analytical Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Semantics, etc). The precise positions of subdomains are determined by metric averages derived by consensus survey of a diverse group of people, and is therefore also a representation of a collective perspective of consciousness research (not just the perspective of a single individual or isolated disciplinary field).

With this dynamic arrangement of organizational factors, the model renders a unique integral perspective and informative cartography of the “terrain”, and provides a “navigational instrument” for our explorative traversing across the frontier of consciousness research. By plotting each sub-domain in scope of the relative positions of all other domains, areas of knowledge and research concentration and lack of concentration (“unexplored regions”) become apparent. When referencing any particular disciplinary sub-domain within the manifold model, where it is at and what color it is can suggest something about it’s qualitative proximity to either more discrete and concrete or more continuous and abstract types of knowledge and research. For example, a sub-domain that is extremely neurobiological will be far less philosophical, and is placed on an extreme exterior boundary of the model (color saturation is more additive toward extreme hues). Inversely, a sub-domain that is a hybrid, somewhat balanced in interdisciplinary collaboration between linguistics and computer science, psychology and anthropology, and philosophy and neuroscience, is placed closer to the center of the model (color saturation is subtractive toward gray). The exterior of the model therefore represents the diverse areas of the more discrete and concrete–portrayed as the bright “rainbow” spectrum of colors. The interior of the model represents hybrid areas of the more continuous and abstract–portrayed figuratively and literally as the “gray area”. The closer a sub-domain is to the exact center, the closer it is to blending and fusing with an absolute, unified, and direct knowing and application of consciousness itself.

The overall result of the model is a “mind map” of the collective processes involving the differentiation and unification of interdisciplinary oppositions–the amalgamation of Interior and Exterior, Science and Art, Matter and Spirit, East and West–toward a realization of a coalescent whole.

A key element of this developing project is that the shape of the model is determined by a consensus formulation of the ontological constituents.  Among preparations and continuing development of this model, a survey will be made of a diverse group of people over the next few weeks.  In order to derive some “collective intelligence” in this formulation, some principles of “crowd wisdom” will be applied.  The more diverse the crowd, the better … so anyone can apply.  If you or someone you know is interested in participating in this survey, please contact me with the following information:

1. Name
2. Gender
3. Occupation
4. Education
5. Date of birth and age
6. Where you live
7. Any comments on why you want to be involved, or something special about yourself …

Within a week or so, the group will be selected, and the survey conducted.

Please forward this to anyone.

The CogSpace model will continue to evolve in various ways …

Thanks and happy cognitions!

I know … SO MANY SOCIAL NETWORKS … SO LITTLE TIME!  Isn’t FaceBook more than enough already!  Who has time to keep up with it all?  Plaxo keeps us all connected while also helping us save some time while doing so.

Here is a description of what Plaxo offers (from the website itself):

Plaxo keeps you in touch with people you care about.

When fellow Plaxo members you’re connected with move to a new home, change their cell phone number or change jobs, you’ll know… and your address book will be updated automatically.

So, if everyone gets on Plaxo, it can actually save time by keeping us all up-to-date on each other’s contact information.  We all know 100s even 1000s of people within our own networks, and most of those 100s and 1000s also know each other (this is the “plexus”).  How many times do we all get emails from somebody saying, “I just changed my phone number, please update your records”.  So then you might feel obligated to take a moment out of your busy day to open your address book, copy the new number over, etc.  Or how many times do you get an email from someone asking for your mailing address or fax number because they “lost it”, or even more–they ask if you just happen to have the information for someone you both may know.  This is not sustainable information management.  

As an alternative: what if everybody’s contact information updated itself everywhere automatically?  Plaxo aims to provide this for us with a service called “Pulse”.  Plaxo will also automatically make recommendations to you of people who you are already interacting with in email and/or other social networks … so, over time, it’s fairly straight forward to build up our shared social plexus.  I actually don’t use Plaxo much for general social interaction (I save that mostly for FaceBook).  Yet, it is good to be on Plaxo so that my social contact information is updated regularly.

It’s the 21st century.  We have the technology to move beyond the aggradation of trivial inconveniences that come with greater social connectivity–and get down to better uses of our time, energy, and attention!  Let’s focus less on establishing and maintaining connections, and more on the processes and qualities of being in connection!

Join the Plaxo plexus!

I also recommend that you download an extension toolbar that will keep your computer’s address book in sync with your Plaxo Pulse account.

See you on the Plaxo Pulse people plexus!

Palantir

Some crafty engineers over at FaceBook recently created the Palantir open-source computer application (named after one of the powerful “seeing stone” orbs in Lord of the Rings) that visualizes live activity on the FaceBook social network. See a video of the application here.

Lexicon

The FaceBook Lexicon is an application that presents key word usage on member’s post pages, with all types of options for comparative demographics. Below is a sample image from Lexicon that shows the number of keyword posts for “Obama” from June 6 – Nov 31, 2008.  Accordingly, the “Obama” posts peak around election day.  Although males show a slight majority of keyword “Obama” posts in this graph, I had also done a different comparative graph that shows females posting “Obama” nearly twice as much as males around election day.

People Power

Here is a report on FaceBook’s greatest energy source: people power.  Literally speaking, the amount of energy people use burning calories while interacting with the social network (more than 2 billion minutes per day) exceeds the amount of electricity used to power the computer server network.

All together and more, these advents of information technology are literally beginning to bring increasing definition and expression to the multitudinous aspects involving the living, breathing, thinking, seeing body, mind, and spirit of the global collective.

There are dozens (perhaps hundreds) of CMSs available out there.  Some of the more popular CMSs over the last several years have been: Drupal, Mambo, Joomla, and WordPress.  Ruby on Rails has also been gaining popularity with web developers, and though it has CMS capabilities, it is really gaining attention for other good reasons, such as it’s exquisite ease of use to programming developers.  Django is also a newly emerging web framework that includes CMS built with Perl (a more advanced programming language).  All of these above mentioned frameworks are open source and free.  Then there are also proprietary CMS frameworks available, such as Water and Contribute.

As a web enthusiast, I’ve been conducting on-going research in CMS options for a few years now.  I’ve tried Drupal, and found that it was very difficult to integrate good design into.  I’m using WordPress for a few different blogs (such as this blog), and it is a really good CMS for blogging, and I can see how it can even be extended as a framework for more general web site publication.  I’ve also successfully used Water for a few client projects because of it’s rapid development, and ease of use for the client.  Joomla is an off-shoot from Mambo (there was some contention with the founders of the Mambo open source project), and so Joomla is considered better than Mambo all around.  Yet I had not really considered Joomla too much until now.

I recently came across an article that represented the popularity of a few of these CMSs using Google Trends, and so I decided to do my own trends research:

It’s apparent how Mambo dropped off after Joomla emerged from Mambo.  WordPress has had a steady climb being used widely in the blogging community.  Perhaps Joomla has surpassed WordPress simply because Joomla is a more encompassing framework for websites in general (where WordPress is specialized for blogs).  In any case, both WordPress and Joomla are great open-source frameworks with huge communities behind them, providing a wide range of plug-ins, components, template themes, and other options for custom development and support.

Which to choose: WordPress or Joomla?  After discussing it a bit further with a developer friend, I’ve decided It really depends on what you want to accomplish.  Joomla is a bit grander in scope, includes community building components (for a community or social website), and may end up having more options as far as overall component-enabled functionality.  WordPress is geared mainly for blogs, and so is more streamlined and perhaps simpler to use, has loads of functional plug-ins, and yet can also be re-geared to represent a something beyond a blog, more like a typical website.

OpenSoundControl (OSC) is a protocol for communication among computers, sound synthesizers, and other multimedia devices that are optimized for modern networking technology. Bringing the benefits of modern networking technology to the world of electronic musical instruments, OSC’s advantages include interoperability, accuracy, flexibility, and enhanced organization and documentation.

OSC integrates within the set of other standard internet protocols.

Internet Protocol Mandala

 
It appears that OSC is intended to supersede MIDI in multiple aspects. For one, OSC uses standard ethernet cable to transfer more information, with more flexibility and control of the types of information, with much less latency (operating at broadband speeds). Since it uses TCP/IP Ethernet, various types of data can be transfered and synchronized between an assortment of devices and applications, and more—such transfers can happen over any network, local or non-local—including the internet. This could make for some very interesting and novel capabilities in group multimedia collaboration, and in multimedia interaction with internet data and APIs (such as real-time multimedia data interpretations of collective processes).

OSC is implemented with a wide arrangement of audio and multimedia creation software (such as CSound, Max/MSP, Quartz Composer, and Pure Data). There are also some interesting devices emerging that use the OSC protocol—such as the incredible multi-touch screen control interface, the Lemur, and an iPhone application.

The Lemur multi-touch screen control interface.

What is the extent of possibilities with this new technical protocol? Pierre Levy, in his principle work, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace, speaks of the necessity of some type of new collective language:

We are thus in the situation of a species whose members … have not yet achieved the state of collective intelligence of the culture for lack of an articulated language. How do you invent a language that no one has spoken, for which there are no records, no examples, and when we lack even an idea of what such a language might be?

My sense is that OSC is yet another key technical advent in the gradual crossing of the threshold into the realization of such a language, the awakening of collective consciousness, and the first coherent articulations of collective intelligence.    

Now we may begin to collectively utter the early instances of an “over-language“. Such a language will not be on the same level as English, Chinese, or French. This meta-language, as a universal language of consilience, will transcend and include all preceding cultural contexts, and synthesize the diversity of our human strands. It will extend from our established media and data bases, yet somehow also surpass rational associations to the semiotic. It will engage us directly with an authentic immediacy and novelty that mimics the impulse of evolution itself. It will orient us, reflect our comprehension of ourselves, our reality, and our purpose in a type of synaesthesic hyper-poetry that continuously describes the nexus where each individual traverses the multitudinous terrain of collective being. It will arch like a rainbow across the noosphere, sprouting spontaneously upon the fresh and tender tongue of the collective psyche in astonishing response to sensing ourselves as a symphonic orchestration in participation with cosmic evolution.

Global IP feedback visualization.

[ Originally published here: http://spacecollective.org/MichaelGaio/4263/MetaLanguage-Technique-OSC ]