Interconnected Mini Links

Keeping The Flat Clean- Living Space As User Interface

43 Folders

Life hacks. Brilliant. Microextelligence to the max.

http://merlin.blogs.com/43folders/2004/09/oh_yeahemthe_na.html -- 43 folders is the minimum you need to build a physical tickle system.

Adaptive Rooms, Virtual Collaboration, and Cognitive Workflow

By David Kirsh. Abstract: "This paper introduces the concept of Adaptive Rooms, which are virtual environments able to dynamically adapt to users' needs, including `physical' and cognitive workflow requirements, number of users, differing cognitive abilities and skills. Adaptive rooms are collections of virtual objects, many of them self-transforming objects, housed in an architecturally active room with information spaces and tools. An ontology of objects used in adaptive rooms is presented. Virtual entities are classified as passive, reactive, active, and information entities, and their sub-categories. Only active objects can be self-transforming. Adaptive Rooms are meant to combine the insights of ubiquitous computing -- that computerization should be everywhere, transparently incorporated -- with the insights of augmented reality -- that everyday objects can be digitally enhanced to carry more information about their use. To display the special potential of adaptive rooms, concrete examples are given to show how the demands of cognitive workflow can be reduced." So it ubicomp making extelligence addressible so we can talk about it? Semiotcratic. Good.

Distributed Cognition, Coordination and Environment Design

By David Kirsh. Abstract: "The type of principles which cognitive engineers need to design better work environments are principles which explain interactivity and distributed cognition: how human agents interact with themselves and others, their work spaces, and the resources and constraints that populate those spaces. A first step in developing these principles is to clarify the fundamental concepts of environment, coordination, and behavioural function. Using simple examples, I review changes the distributed perspective forces on these basic notions." Distributed cognitive was fashionable a while back, it seems to be making a comeback. Embeddedness in social networks is definitely important; people do come up with better ideas if they can pass them through their local network... but even that's the wrong metaphor, because distributed cognition says that ideas don't exist in individuals like that, necessarily. They're smeared out across the group, just like ideas in the head exist somehow in parallel, and only come together when reified into words. Linearised. Digested.

Complementary strategies- why we use our hands when we think

By David Kirsh. Lots of references to follow! Abstract: "A complementary strategy can be defined as any organizing activity which recruits external elements to reduce cognitive loads. Typical organizing activities include pointing, arranging the position and orientation of nearby objects, writing things down, manipulating counters, rulers or other artifacts that can encode the state of a process or simplify perception. To illustrate the idea of a complementary strategy, a simple experiment was performed in which subjects were asked to determine the dollar value of collections of coins. In the no-hands condition, subjects were not allowed to touch the coin images or to move their hands in any way. In the hands condition, they were allowed to use their hands and fingers however they liked. Significant improvements in time and number of errors were observed when S's used their hands over when they did not. To explain these facts, a brief account of some commonly observed complementary strategies is presented, and an account of their potential benefits to perception, memory and attention." Moment-by-moment extelligence.

Headmap quotes Bateson on saying intelligence can be external

with references... it's like extelligence.

Socially Situated Intelligence

conference, with papers online, sounds much like extelligence: "many important aspects of intelligence are grounded in intimate interactions with a physical environment" -- by 'intimate' I guess that's like re-entrant, highly interconnected, like the brain. Wow!

Bruce Edmond's homepage and papers

he did a conference on Socially Situated Intelligence - extelligence - and he writes about agent-based social simulation.

Jack Cohen- The Human Mind as an Emergent Phenomenon

"The Complicit Coevolution of Intelligence and Extelligence". Cohen was one of the guys who came up with the concept of extelligence. This is a great looking article about human evolution.

Terra Nova- The Value of Realism

On the object problem of simulation: "Decks of cards are assemblies too (one only has a deck when one has 52 cards). Bags, Christmas trees, and hat racks, it turns out, are not too hard to model and actually they have something in common -- they are all containers. [...] But the real messiness starts with liquids, gases, and plasmas. What happens when your avatar puts sugar in a bowl of water or dips an apple into honey? Even if we program the honey to get stuck on the apple and slowly drip off the apple, Richard notes that this will surely lead to a player wondering (at some juncture) why honey drips off kittens at the same rate it drips off apples." But why is this a problem? "It reveals how one of the goals of a contemporary virtual world designer is to struggle to replicate reality in a convincing way, presumably down to the nitty-gritty modeling of the adhesion and viscosity of honey on furred surfaces. Reuben Klamer certainly didn't stay up at nights wondering how to make the blue pegs and the pink pegs more accurate representations in the Game of Life." Naturally, because I'm reading Figments of Reality [on extelligence] at the moment, I'm thinking that all these affordances *can't* be modelled. The objects themselves (with behaviours) are the simplified model of a maximally complex universe.

Categorization of Affordances

"Gibson's (1972) ecological approach to perception is a radical departure from the conventional approach. It emphasizes the environmental information available in extended spatial and temporal pattern in optic arrays, for guiding the behaviors of animals, and for specifying ecological events." which slowly moved into "Affordances as Distributed Representations" (because what signifies them is not located solely in the object, but in the environment, and cognitive affordances too), and then on to a list of 7 types. Interesting!

Extelligence-esque pullquote from Warren Ellis' Bad Signal mailing list

"If you believe that your thoughts originate inside your brain -- do you also believe that television shows are made inside your television set?"

Figments of Reality- The Evolution of the Curious Mind

Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. This is the book in which extelligence is put forward. I'd like to get my hands on this.

Unintended Use- The 'Public Sphere' Designed by the Public

via hydesign

"Shaping a networked society is a design adventure. A public sphere in cyberspace will not emerge from technology itself. Rather, a public spheremust be designed. But design, in this case, is not only about the intentional design performed by professional and designated designers. To a large extent, the total cyberspace network, and even more so the part of it that can be seen as aÊ 'public sphere', is designed through use. This paper is about that form of design. One of the assumptions is that a public sphere has to be designed by the public, i.e., by the actual public that will inhabit the sphere." -- fully! And the way that public sphere is designed must be by extelligence.

The Extended Mind- by Andy Clark and David Chalmers

"Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?" -- on extelligence, recommended to me by Tom Stafford.

http://artsci.wustl.edu/~pnp/archive.php -- unfortunately the archive seems to be empty/broken now

http://interconnected.org/home/2003_09_28_archive.shtml#106509267970755022 -- my notes on the paper

Presence in CVEs as extelligence- virtuality and collectivity

it's the paper that makes the big step away from *reality* for presence (the VR school) and says we just need a good - noise-free - information channel. I'd argue for another step; noise in the real world (not being able to tell whether somebody really meant to turn their back on you) is something we use every day, in conflict resolution, etc. Very important, and we should make that step towards indeterminacy.

http://interconnected.org/home/2003_09_28_archive.shtml#106509543788774897 -- my notes on the paper

City of Sound- The Magic of Place

"In other words, the magic of Cambridge for me is bound up with the knowledge it has produced" -- which is like Feynmann looking at the flower and seeing it at all levels -- and then in the comments: "it's because of the accretion of knowledge and lived experience in online places that they feel like "spaces" to us. So Stewart's suspicion that the metaphor of space on the web isn't a poorly chosen, consciously created one, but really a by-product of our behavior in those online places. The more experience we have of them, and the more knowledge we pour into them, the more we are in fact creating spaces." -- which Anne Galloway calls 'ontogenesis'. It's an interesting pov: that extelligence creates space/place. I'd say that actually we need space/distance to enable extelligence which creates place; the creations of the first two are bound up into the same imperitive. Which bleeds into this abstract: "In this paper we examine the role of code (software) in the spatial formation of collective life. Taking the view that human life and coded technology are folded into one another, we theorise space as ontogenesis. Space, we posit, is constantly being bought into being through a process of transduction - the constant making anew of a domain in reiterative and transformative practices - as an incomplete solution to a relational problem." -- wow!

http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/2003_10_01_blogger_archives.php#106675089865111515 -- abstract

Extelligence in virtual environments, in chapter 1 of the Presence in VR book

"Within each local setting, such Ôcognitive actionsÕ as remembering and decision making are distributed not only among the artifacts (the menu, the arrangement of chairs and tables, the sign pointing to the restrooms) but among the rules (one pays before leaving the premises; sitting up at a table with strangers requires one to ask permission) and among people according to the division of labor" (pp. 17Ð18).

AIGA- ubicomp, supersenses and extelligence