/patternHunter [/ph]

Scientific American.com: "(T)he thoughts we deem unwelcome might resurface in dreams because the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain that is responsible for planning and mental control) is less active during REM sleep, thus diminishing the brain’s ability to keep them at bay."

CNN: "Electrodes implanted in the brains of Parkinson's disease patients transmitted signals that might someday be used to operate remote devices, the team at Duke University Medical Center reported."

Wired News: Congress Moves to Criminalize P2P: "In defending the Pirate Act, Hatch said the operators of P2P networks are running a conspiracy in which they lure children and young people with free music, movies and pornography. With these 'human shields,' the P2P companies are trying to ransom the entertainment industries into accepting their networks as a distribution channel and source of revenue. "

Wired News: "A desire for cheap labor is not the primary reason technology companies are turning to offshore workers, according to a new report by the American Electronics Association, the United States' largest high-tech trade association. The American school system, which AEA researchers charge is failing to provide strong science and math education to students, is largely to blame for lost jobs, according to the AeA's report."

Guide to Online Business Networks has posted a "resource guide useful in evaluating and tracking the various sites and software tools you can use to grow your network of business relationships."

CNN.com - Mar 15, 2004: "Scientists may have discovered the solar system's most distant object, more than 3 billion kilometers farther away from the sun than Pluto. NASA is set to make an official announcement later Monday U.S. time. The object -- about 10 billion kilometers from Earth -- has been given the provisional name of Sedna after the Inuit goddess of the sea."

Boing Boing: "Meanwhile, the feedback loop between science and science fiction continues to flow. It is, as we have seen, an elliptical loop, like the orbit of a comet. Science-fiction writers seize on new scientific findings and immediately leap to conclusions, in the form of stories. Then these stories dive into young minds and percolate there, shaping future scientists and giving them dreams, visions, plans."

Discovery Health: "A new study finds that kids' use of computer games and television watching within an hour of bedtime robs them of precious sleep. Poor sleep, as you might imagine, can lead to sleepiness in the daytime, poor concentration and poor learning."

Stephen VanDyke: "The Blog Epidemic Analyzer was also amusing and showed how attribution is underrated, but it too seemed sorely lacking cohesion, nor was it a very new topic. So I thought to myself: 'Hey this isn’t all that complicated, I should make a visual diagram to illustrate this'. And this infographic was born."

Life With Alacrity: "My anecdotal evidence generally seems to support the idea that group sizes will usually plateau at a number lower than 150 participants. This comes from 20 years of doing facilitation both on and offline, running several software companies, and running various forums at America Online. In particular, many online communities provide good evidence for Dunbar's Number actually being an upper limit (either due to reduced efficiency or due to increased dispersion)."

Duke News & Communications: "New studies suggest that humans might prefer to switch their brains to automatic pilot whenever possible to conserve their cogitating resources."

Here is the CNN article regarding recovery of Spalding Gray’s body.

And here is a piece by Spaldin's friend John Perry Barlow that refers to Timothy Leary:

Another time, we were together at a rave in San Francisco and when one of the kids there asked me who he was, I told her that he was Timothy Leary. Word spread fast. Spalding came over looking alarmed and said, "They think I'm Timothy Leary for some reason. What should I do?" "Don't disappoint them," I advised. And he didn't. He spent the rest of the night answering their questions with marvelously oblique answers that Tim would have loved.

On a lighter note, check out the slide show from this year’s TED conference. Click on the “Magic Moments” link under the Home option to see and hear an absolutely stunning improvisational music piece written and performed by 14-year old Jennifer Lin in response to five notes randomly chosen by Goldie Hawn. This brought tears to my manly eyes!

Bill French of MYST Technology Partners has been working on using blogs, rss and integration with information objects as a basis for building ad hoc networks that "connect people with question to people with answers." Beyond access to information (which may drive initial connections) the idea is to help people find one another to make more lasting, open connections.

One of the things I find lacking in many social networking services (Orkut, Tribe, LinkedIn, Spoke, etc.) is that the connection finding process is very manual. The value of these connections is also easily diluted by network whores who view these services as popularity contests.

Building networks through friend-of-a-friend connections is only one way of building relationships of trust. Another way is to establish reputation systems that can automate introductions between people with similar interests and reputations. Reputations are likely to emerge from people's relationship to information objects published by a specific person (and it doesn't have to be limited to "rate this object" types of interaction).

Effective reputation systems can turn random strangers into potentially interesting strangers.

For example, someone like Cory Doctorow may be annoyed by receiving invitations to YANS (yet another social networking services) from random strangers (and he was repeatedly said so in his writings). However, he probably would like an introduction from a stranger who is an established expert on DisneyWorld.

Similar to the way you can limit comments to read on Slashdot based on their rating, the idea would be to set a profile that will automatically introduce you to someone based on a shared interest and a minimum reputation rating. If both parties accept the introduction, then the connection is made. You might also want the option to "watch this person" (similar to "watch this auction item" at ebay) before making the stronger commitment to contact that person and invite him/her into your network.

Regardless of which methods are used to track reputations, they will likely need to have to go beyond FOAF rankings to include some measure(s) of quality regarding the information objects that a person publishes.

Knowledge-at-work: "The key to knowledge work IMO is community, where you share, create, critique, validate new connections with others. Arranging reflecting and organizing your personal beliefs, perceptions and values without sharing is NOT KM as I see things."

Ross Mayfield's Weblog: Make: "Sure, today its about hard core geeks messing with code. But the number of users as developers is increasing -- as consumers become participants in networks and collectively demand the right to self-organize when the market fails them. From the bottom-up, we are attempting to overcome the complexity we have created."

John Battelle's Searchblog: March 2.0 Column: "We tend to max out social networks at about 150 individuals (it has to do with group dynamics and how our brains are wired). Below that number, a group is small enough to operate on personal relationships rather than rules and hierarchy. This rings true for villages, military units, corporate divisions, and, I'd argue, communities of interest."

Atlanta Journal: "In a recent poll, a majority of Americans said the cellphone is the invention they most hate but can't live without, perfectly capturing our love-hate relationship with this ubiquitous chunklet of plastic that is changing society faster than we can hit redial.

"'Cellphones are a really profound technology,' says William Gibson, science fiction author ("Neuromancer") and futurist who coined the term "cyberspace.' 'I don't think we understand what it's done to us already,' he adds. 'I think that's the nature of emergent technologies — we don't understand them.'"

Meanwhile, according to this article in New Scientist, "SoundCover, developed by a Romania phone software company called Simeda, can add artificial traffic and road works to a call at the press of a button. It can mimic a thunderstorm, the dentists drill or even a circus during a call. Different backgrounds can also be assigned to different phone numbers so that they automatically kick in when a certain person calls. The software can even create the sound of another phone ringing to provide a handy excuse for cutting short a call."

Small Times: While some researchers are developing nanotechnology to create man/machine interfaces that could map the brain, help people with Parkinson's, treat mental illness and develop "prosthetic hands or legs that respond directly to a person's thought... Zack Lynch, executive director of the Neurosociety Institute... expects advances in biochips and brain imaging to lead to 'neuroceuticals,' nonaddictive therapies for improving human productivity and creativity by reducing stress, heightening our senses and sharpening our intellects."

Rob Cross | Asistant Professor: "Social network analysis (SNA) can provide an x-ray into the inner workings of an organization --- a powerful means of making invisible patterns of information flow and collaboration in strategically important groups visible... As people move higher within an organization their work begins to entail more administrative tasks that makes them both less accessible and less knowledgeable about the day-to-day work of their subordinates."

In the 1950's, Noam Chomsky described the Language Acquisition Device (LAD), an innate yet dormant predisposition for learning language that must be activated during a "critical period" (before the age of 12) by sufficient environmental to a specific language. This critical period correlates with Timothy Leary's description of the third (laryngeal-manual/symbolic) circuit of human evolution.

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar points out that language may have evolved to support the complexity of an extraordinary peer group size (around 150 people). Evolutionary psychologists further suggest that language may have developed from gossip in these large groups as a way to sort out the "cheaters" (who take but don't give) and the "suckers" (who give but don't take).

Our brains may also evolve in response to handling novel information. Biologist Paul Grobstein writes, "unpredictability in behavior is not the first thought that comes to mind when people hear the terms 'intelligence' or 'cognitive ability,' but variability may in fact be an important component of what we mean by those terms."

Given that language acquisition and brain development are so closely tied to novel, socially-directed environmental influences, it is easy to wonder what other innate potentials exist within our genetic code waiting to be triggered. Maybe an answer lies within our "junk DNA" which makes up more than 95% or our code.

It turns out that the sequence of "junk" (which, by definition, should be random) is "not random at all and has a striking resemblance with the structure of human language (ref. Flam, F. "Hints of a language in junk DNA", Science 266:1320, 1994, see quote below). Therefore, scientists now generally believe that this DNA must contain some kind of coded information." The code and its function is now believed to be directly involved in gene expression and transcription of proximal genes (Jaan Suurkula).

New Scientist: "A silicon microrobot just half the width of a human hair has begun to crawl around in a Los Angeles lab, using legs powered by the pulsing of living heart muscle. It is the first time muscle tissue has been used to propel a micromachine."