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Be Afraid

I've been waiting to link to my cover story on fear and the brain because Discover hasn't put up the full text version yet, but I'm leaving today for Monterey and the TED conference, so I figured I'd put the link now, and hopefully the full version will go live shortly. (The issue has been on the stands for almost a month.) This piece is the first of a three-part series on emotion and the brain -- the next two installments are on laugher and love. In a way, I think the series gets better with each installment; the other two are a bit more surprising, particularly if you've already read a little about the neuroscience of fear. But certainly the fear and anxiety topic is a timely one right now, and my piece talks quite a bit about how we can keep fear responses in check. (Incidentally, Newsweek last week ran an almost identical cover story on anxiety and the brain -- even the illustrations were nearly exact duplicates.)

I suppose it's appropriate that the the full Discover text isn't online, because I wanted to take the opportunity to make an entirely unbiased plug for going out and buying a copy of the whole magazine. This issue in particular has -- to my tastes at least -- a fantastic collection of stories (not counting my two pieces, of course.) There's a great piece on studies that look at the way real dogs respond to AIBO (written by ex-FEEDie Christine Kenneally); a piece on the deer population explosion, which I'm fascinated by; a profile of Sarah Baffler Hrdy, who may well be the most interesting figure in evolutionary psychology; and a few others that were really fun to read. If you haven't read the magazine lately, I highly recommend checking it out.

We are not ants!

In the past few weeks, Joi Ito has launched a fascinating online "happening" around the topic of "Emergent Democracy," looking at ways in which the information and social networks of the digital world could create new forms of participatory political systems. He's written up a superb overview of the topic, and you can browse a number of interesting followup discussions here and here.

Part of me is thrilled that Emergence has played a small role in triggering this whole discussion, but I'm also feeling a little guilty, since apparently quite a bit of time has been spent debating the seemingly obvious question of whether human beings are ants or not. (If you haven't read the book, ant colonies are used throughout as an example of self-organizing, bottom-up behavior.) Of course, it could be worse: we could be slime mold!

The objection revolves around the fact that humans are both more nuanced than ants in their assessments of the world and their decision-making capacity, and that they're capable of understanding the dynamics of the larger system in ways that ants cannot. As Adina Levin says, "The atoms of ant action are simple: pick up crumb, bring crumb to ant colony. The atoms of human action are more complicated: identify people and groups interested in opposing Total Information Act, encourage people to persuade local congressperson."

I think there's a lot of validity to the distinction, but I still think there's value in thinking about ants in this context. To me, when you're talking about emergent democracy in the online world, the equivalent of the ant is not the individual human, it's the software. The atoms of human action are indeed incredibly sophisticated ones, but the atoms of software that enables those actions to connect in new ways are much simpler. It's more like: "follow this link, connect this page to other pages that share links, look for patterns in the links." The decision-making process that leads one human to link to another person's page is indeed more complex than the instinctual actions of ants following pheromones, but the decision of the software to manipulate those links, and learn from them, is much more like the way ants behave ---- or at least it could be, if we choose to build it that way.

When fictional characters call

So yesterday afternoon, Slate published a fun piece I did for them on "immersive" games, in both the real and virtual worlds. These are what I call, with a nod to the old Peter Gabriel song, games without frontiers -- either taking place in public city centers, or across the web. In the piece, I talk about an unfolding online mystery called L3 that involves a series of fake sites, including one for a law firm called Landau, Luckman, and Lake, the home of a fictitious lawyer named Stephen Lake.

Imagine my surprise when the phone rings about an hour after the piece goes live, and the voice says: "This is Stephen Lake, from Landau, Luckman, and Lake." (Incidentally, our home number isn't listed in the phone book.) Turns out it's the creator of L3, who chooses to remain anonymous. It was a little spooky, to say the least, though the guy was perfectly friendly on the phone. He had one addition to the piece: he's not calling L3 a work of immersive media or pervase gaming; it's a "collective gaming experience." Sounds fine to me.

Bloogle

About ten months ago, I wrote this in Salon:

"The true revolution promised by the rise of bloggerdom is not about journalism. It's about information management. The bloggers... can actually help organize the Web in ways tailored to your minute-by-minute needs. Often dismissed as self-obsessed 'vanity sites,' the bloggers actually have an important collective role to play on the Web. But they're not challengers to the throne of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. They're challengers to the throne of Google."

Maybe Google was paying attention?

Here is New York, circa 2003

So this morning I'm doing my daily walk back from the Sheridan Square Starbucks, and as I pass the Christopher Street subway station, a dark, armored van pulls up in front of the subway entrance. I catch a set of initials subtly inscribed on the side of the vehicle: CDC. I do a visible double-take. CDC! Center For Disease Control! I walk past to the other side of the truck, and three uniformed men with badges climb out. My brain is instantly filled with about fifteen separate thoughts: If the smallpox is below ground in the subway, am I in danger standing right by the entrance? Can they treat Ebola if you go to the emergency room before you start showing symptoms? I knew I should have read Demon In The Freezer!

And then I notice the insignia on the other side of the van: Coin Devices Corporation. The guys who empty out the token machines.

Never mind.

The Swarm

My latest Discover column, on Tim Blackwell and Peter Bentley's brilliant "Swarm Music" project, which uses mathematical models of bee swarming behavior to create the loosely structure flow of improv music. Here's a taste:

"Blackwell thinks it may be most useful as a compositional tool, not as a replacement for the creative process. Just as the flight of a real-world bumblebee inspired Rimsky-Korsakov to write his now-ubiquitous melody, the flight of these virtual swarms may inspire a new generation of composers, creating passages of music that would then be shaped and refined into final renditions. The swarm doesn't write songs; it suggests new avenues to explore.

I find this idea enticing precisely because it swarms in the face of the preconception that computers are there to store our files and record our keystrokes and nothing more. Swarm music suggests that this virtual-stenographer role may be an artifact of computing's early days. Simple digital machines are good at capturing and storing information. Complex machines are good at generating new kinds of information and triggering new connections, even if that information must eventually be polished by humans. What they produce is more launching pad than archive. That's why I suspect the rough-edged quality of the swarm compositions may turn out to be, as they say, a feature -- not a bug."

Empower Law

I'm inclined to agree with Clay Shirky that the growing power law distribution of the blogging world -- which basically means that a certain inequality of attention is built into the system right now -- is Not Necessarily A Bad Thing, or at least that the current system, in Clay's words, is "mostly fair." But the most interesting thing to me about Clay's essay -- and the subsequent response -- is that the active participants in the power law system are having a conversation about the distribution and what it means, and whether they want their little ecosystem to look like that.

Most systems that display this kind of behavior 1) don't have component parts with that level of self-awareness, and 2) don't have the opportunity to change the dynamics of the system if they choose. We hear a lot about architecture being destiny in the digital world, but the fact is that architecture has never been more flexible, and there have never been so many connected smart people interested in flexing its joints for good causes. A few years ago, when I was writing in Emergence about the limitations of the one-way linking built into the Web, there were very few practical applications out there that attempted to remedy this flaw. Now the web is teeming with them (Trackbacks, various Google hacks, Blogdex.) To a certain extent, the increased feedback of two-way linking may have amplified the scale-free phenomena that Clay describes. But the key point is that the one-way architecture isn't necessarily our destiny anymore, partially because some very smart people started to think that two-way links would be better for the system as a whole, and they set out to add them to mix.

So the question that I'm wrestling with is this: let's say we decided that the existing power-law distribution isn't quite fair enough, or that there's some other justification for encouraging a more egalitarian spread (equality of results, and not just opportunity.) If we decided that this was our goal, how would we go about doing it? What architectural changes would fight against the power law trend, without doing it in a command-and-control kind of way? Clay's piece suggests that perhaps the distribution is inevitable, but I doubt it. Clearly, to get a more even spread, there has to be a mechanism that amplifies the signal of new arrivals, since the 80/20 split is usually the result of early arrivals getting a disproportionate share of subsequent links.

Just to start things off, here's one idea I had today, inspired by a fascinating conversation over coffee with Meg: keep separate tabs on blogroll links and pointing-to-a-specific-story links ("story links" for short.) Then create a public ranking of sites with a high ratio of incoming story links to incoming blogroll links. So when Dave Winer, who has 1504 blogs pointing to him right now according to Technorati, manages to get 100 people to point to a new entry, it's no big news. But when Joe Newcomer, who is only mentioned on five blogrolls, manages to write something that gets twenty links -- that's a front page story. The great and powerful Sifry, as you might expect, is already working on something like this at Technorati, though his criteria is a little different.

The beauty of the model is that it creates a kind of "hot prospects" index, highlighting blogs that are punching above their weight. Then all you have to do is persuade the A-list bloggers to run an RSS feed of the index in their sidebar. It wouldn't change Jason's charts overnight, but it would be a start.

Jacobs and Mumford go for a drive

Anyone who has read Emergence knows that I have a minor obsession with the feud between Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs that broke out after she published her Death and Life book in the early sixties. The other day I stumbled across this fantastic, amazingly wide-ranging interview that James Howard Kunstler (another big influence on me) conducted with Jacobs in 2000. She talks a little about her interactions with Mumford, who was the "Sky Line" architecture and urbanism columnist for the New Yorker for many years. I loved this little tidbit -- one of those stray personal details that changes your whole assessment of someone's work:

I had my doubts about him because we rode into the city together in a car. And I watched how he acted as soon as he began to get into the city. And he had been talking and all pleasant but as soon as he began to get into the city he got grim, withdrawn, and distressed. And it was just so clear that he just hated the city and hated being in it. And I was thinking, you know, this is the most interesting part.

The people have spoken.

Whoa. This today on Salon:

At the end of the first week of January, the Princeton Survey Research Associates polled more than 1,200 Americans on behalf of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain. They asked a very simple question: "To the best of your knowledge, how many of the September 11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens?"

Of those surveyed, only 17 percent knew the correct answer: that none of the hijackers were Iraqi. Forty-four percent of Americans believe that most or some of the hijackers were Iraqi; another 6 percent believe that one of the hijackers was a citizen of that most notorious node in the axis of evil. That leaves 33 percent who did not know enough to offer an answer.

Well, I guess the plan to roll out the new war product in the fall worked out pretty well -- they're certainly getting good brand recognition. Maybe they can pin Pearl Harbor on the Iraqis if they keep at it.

This story should be on the cover of every national newsweekly, with the headline: "People! Can we please just try to pay the slightest bit of attention?"

Columbia: The unanswered question

Here's what I want to know about the Columbia explosion. Maybe I've missed this somewhere, but it seems to me the really interesting question is this: if, ten days ago, they had determined beyond the shadow of a doubt that the debris impact had damaged the craft on launch, such that a return trip through the atmosphere was inevitably going to end in tragedy, what would NASA have done? I've seen a couple of reports that begin to pose that question, and always end with someone saying, "But there's sadly no way to repair the insulation tiles, so there was nothing we could have done."

But presumably, repairing the insulation tiles isn't the only potential option, right? I mean, I saw Apollo 13. If they were absolutely convinced that returning in the shuttle would be a death sentence, I can't believe NASA would have just said, "Folks, sorry about this. Enjoy your last few weeks." They've got other working shuttles, and a space station -- couldn't they have attempted some kind of rescue?

I'm sure this scenario has been explored somewhere online -- suggested reading is welcome...

Updated Feb. 5, 12:24 PM: Space.com has an FAQ that partially addresses rescue options. The space station was definitely out of reach, as a number of you have pointed out, but perhaps there was another possibility: "Could another shuttle have been sent up? Shuttle Atlantis might have been rushed into service, and if normal testing were skipped, it might have been in space in a week or so. The Columbia crew had enough supplies to last through Wednesday, Feb. 5 and might have been able to stretch those supplies a few more days."