The last period has been quite busy for the PCP staff, with several papers
to be written and participation in several conferences, including the
Humanity 3000 Seminar in Seattle and the workshop on "Closure: emergent
organizations and their dynamics" in Ghent
<http://allserv.rug.ac.be/~gvdvyver/closure.html>. In both places, PCP's
ideas, respectively on the "global brain" as a model for the future of
evolution and on the need to provide clear definitions of basic concepts on
the web, were positively received.
The possibility will be explored whether the Foundation for the Future
<http://www.futurefoundation.com>, which organized the Humanity 3000
Seminar, would be willing to organize and sponsor a workshop with invited
specialists on the "global brain" idea. The Foundation shares PCP's
interest in the past and future evolution of the universe and humanity, but
lacks our conceptual framework inspired by cybernetics. (they compensate
the lack of theoretical underpinning by near boundless financial resources,
though: the Foundations plans to continue sponsoring conferences, research
and other activities for the next 1000 years!).
The PCP-Web server has been replaced by a machine that is about 4 times
faster. The improved speed should be especially noticeable during periods
of high activity and for text searches. Of course, this does not solve the
bottleneck of the network connection. This connection can be quite slow
during the busy hours, especially for connections to North and South
America. To resolve this problem, we have been setting up a mirror server
at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Unfortunately, the
recent creation of a firewall (to protect internal information from outside
abuse) around the lab has delayed the implementation.
The PCP editorial board is planning their yearly board meeting in Brussels
in the beginning of July. The main purpose is to reorganize the structure
of PCP-web, identify gaps, make a list of nodes to be written, and invite
authors to write these texts.
One of the research proposals we submitted about intelligent webs was
rejected by DARPA. Although he proposal was given top marks in technical
and scientific merit and in the capabilities of the proposing team, it was
considered not to be sufficiently closely connected to existing DARPA
programs. A similar proposal is now being submitted to the National Science
Foundation's program on "Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence". A
preliminary evaluation of the proposal outline was quite positive.
NEW PAPERS
Three new or updated papers by F. Heylighen are now available on PCP web:
1) Collective Intelligence and its Implementation on the Web: algorithms to
develop a collective mental map, to be published in: Computational and
Mathematical Theory of Organizations
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/CollectiveWebIntelligence.pdf
This is a revised version of the submitted paper that was put on the web
earlier, including some new ideas.
2) Advantages and limitations of formal expression, to be published in:
Foundations of Science 4(1), 1999.
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/Formality-FOS.pdf
This is an updated and extended version of an unpublished manuscript
entitled "Making thoughts explicit".
3) The Science of Self-Organization and Adaptivity, to be published in the
Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems.
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/EOLSS-Self-Organiz.pdf
This new paper is intended to provide a non-technical survey of the basic
concepts and principles underlying self-organization and adaptive systems.
It illustrates and defines ideas such as order from noise, bifurcation,
distributed control, attractors, robustness, far-from-equilibrium dynamics,
etc. Since it will normally go through another round of revision before it
is published, all criticisms and suggestions for improvement are most welcome.
WHAT'S NEW IN PCP WEB
The following nodes in Principia Cybernetica Web have undergone substantive
editing, or have been newly added during the months of March/April 1999.
All documents are available via http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/recent.html
* Apr 23, 1999: About Francis Heylighen (updated)
* Apr 23, 1999: Cybernetics and Systems Societies (links added)
* Apr 19, 1999: About Vladimir Red'ko (updated)
* Apr 2, 1999: Sites Related to Principia Cybernetica (updated)
* Mar 29, 1999: Collaborative Knowledge Development (updated)
* Mar 29, 1999: Bootstrapping Methods for Knowledge Structuring (completely
new text)
* Mar 26, 1999: Learning, "Brain-like" Webs (updated)
* Mar 24, 1999: Welcome to the Principia Cybernetica Web (updated)
* Mar 24, 1999: Collaborative Filtering (new!)
* Mar 24, 1999: Web Connectivity Analysis (new!)
* Mar 24, 1999: PCP Research on Intelligent Webs (new!)
* Mar 17, 1999: Doing PhD or PostDoc Research with Principia Cybernetica (new!)
DISCUSSIONS ON PRNCYB-L
The following topics were announced or discussed on the PRNCYB-L mailing
list (see http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/mail.html) during the months of March
and April. The full text of all original messages and replies is available
via the PRNCYB-L archive:
http://www.fmb.mmu.ac.uk/~bruce/PRNCYB-L/thread.html
There was a particularly in-depth discussion about the
similarity/difference between self-organization and evolution through
selection, with a side discussion growing out of it about determinism.
* ISSS paper is posted - Don Mikulecky
* Where to publish PRNCYB-related papers - Francis Heylighen
* [Fwd: sequel to Life Itself?] - Don Mikulecky
* Time - Gavin Ritz
* Paper for Comment: The Pragmatic Roots of Context - Bruce Edmonds
* Determinism - Mario Vaneechoutte
* 4th European Congress on Systems Science (fwd) - Francis Heylighen
* Searle's review of Kurzweil's "The age of spiritual machines" - Don
Mikulecky
* THE INFINITY: TRAGIC MISTAKE OF GREAT G.CANTOR. - Alexander Zenkin
* where is kinetic energy ? - henry cohen
* More thoughts on self-organization and evolution - Cliff Joslyn
* A subversive proposal for the selection of academic papers - Bruce Edmonds
* selection and choice vs bifurcation - Don Mikulecky
* Is all self-organisation evolutionary? - Bruce Edmonds
* ISSS Meeting Invitation (fwd) - Francis Heylighen
UNSUBSCRIBING
If you want to unsubscribe from this mailing list, use the form at
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/PCPNSUBS.html or send the following one line
message to the address Majordomo@listserv.vub.ac.be
unsubscribe pcp-news
_________________________________________________________________________
Francis Heylighen <fheyligh@vub.ac.be> -- Center "Leo Apostel"
Free University of Brussels, Krijgskundestr. 33, 1160 Brussels, Belgium
tel +32-2-6442677; fax +32-2-6440744; http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html