http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Sources-of-Innovation-tp4566136p4570441.html
Thanks Stephen. I took no offense -- just wanted to announce my presence on-list, and then to indulge in a little crotchetiness of my own ;-)
I've already visited Santa Fe 3-4x now, the first few times to attend Swarm-related conferences at SFI while I was in grad school (c. 1995-1998).
Full disclosure: I no longer have any contractual relationship with CAIDA. I was a fellow/advisor on economic and policy matter that affect Internet protocol development, deployment, and usage from 2005~2007, and I continue to work with CAIDA Director/PI KC Claffy less formally but fairly regularly ever since. In fact KC and I were together on my last visit to Santa Fe in October 2007. We were invited up to chat with some of the SFI research staff and fellows who were interested in the possible uses of Internet topology and flow time series measurements to explore/exemplify some broader insights about self-organizing systems that they were working on. I currently work as a consultant, mostly to the technical coordination institutions that administer Internet protocol number resources (i.e., the Regional Internet Registries, or RIRs).
I don't think that there was much follow-up between SFI and CAIDA after that meeting, but then at that time my own research of possible relevance was not yet particularly well developed.
That has changed in the interim, perhaps to the point that it would merit a talk. I'll follow up with a few details off-list.
> Hello Tom,
>
> Welcome to Friam! Don't mind the occasional squawk from the ParrotFarm - the birds get crotchety if we forget to clean the cages. :-)
>
> Yes, you'll find fans of Brian Arthur-speak here. In particular, I think his ideas of "Deep Craft" wrt innovation <
http://tinyurl.com/yfud2p3> emerging in some places and not others is interesting. I would argue Northern New Mexico has a level of deep craft in simulation and related topics like optimization and visualization that allows practitioners to exchange ideas quickly with common vocabularies (though one could argue about how deep it goes).
>
> BTW, I enjoy the tools and visualizations coming out of Caida! If you're out in Santa Fe, please consider giving a brownbag talk.
>
> -Stephen
>
>
> --- -. . ..-. .. ... .... - .-- --- ..-. .. ... ....
>
[hidden email]
> (m) 505.577.5828 (o) 505.995.0206
> redfish.com _ sfcomplex.org _ simtable.com _ ambientpixel.com
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Feb 13, 2010, at 4:15 PM, Tom Vest wrote:
>
>> On Feb 13, 2010, at 3:43 PM, Douglas Roberts wrote:
>>
>>> Sheesh, what a bunch of academic phraseology!
>>> • functional modularization
>>> • combinatorial evolution
>>> • both "top-down" as well as "bottom-up" initiative [...] indispensable
>>> IM(Not So)HO, America at large has been sufficiently dumbed down by the brutal combination of a mediocre educational system, an academic peer review system that rigidly refuses to think outside the box, pay-for-play politics, fundamentalist christian & christian wannabe religions, McDonalds lardburgers, and short-sighted Wall Street quants that innovation is now solidly a thing of the past, and will probably remain so for a very long time.
>>>
>>> --Doug
>>
>> Actually, we said approximately the same thing, or rather your list included a small subset of the things I was trying to cover with my academic phraseology.
>> No question that your phraseology is much more colorful! Not so easy to model however.
>>
>> I only chimed in (and subscribed) because I'm trying to model some related problems in my own field.
>> I saw the terms "modeling" and "applied complexity" on the group page -- but perhaps I misinterpreted the sense in which one or more of those terms is being used...
>>
>> In any case, please excuse the intrusion.
>>
>> TV
>>
>>
>>> On Sat, Feb 13, 2010 at 12:47 PM, Tom Vest <
[hidden email]> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Feb 13, 2010, at 8:21 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
>>>
>>>> In a recent washingtonpost.com article named
>>>> "Erasing our innovation deficit" (
http://bit.ly/cG6vGW )
>>>> Eric Schmidt said
>>>>
>>>> "We have been world leaders in [technological] innovation for generations. It has driven our economy, employment growth and our rising prosperity.
>>>> [..] We can no longer rely on the top-down approach of the 20th century, when big investments in the military and NASA spun off to the wider economy."
>>>>
>>>> Do you agree? What kind of approach does the
>>>> USA need to return to old strength?
>>>>
>>>> -J.
>>>
>>> I'm surprised that none of the current/former SFIers on the list have mentioned Brian Arthur's recent pitch for "combinatorial evolution" as the engine of innovation.
>>> As I read it, Brian's argument is that innovation is an epiphenomenon arising from:
>>>
>>> -- the functional modularization of many different kinds of technologies*, plus
>>> -- the standardization of "open" interfaces enabling those functional components or modules to be combined in different ways, plus
>>> -- an environment that enables and incentivizes widespread experimental combination of different technologies, e.g., by occasionally rewarding those who come up with novel, useful combinations.
>>>
>>> *These could be of the "hard" or "soft" variety, e.g., chip design or double-entry bookkeeping.
>>>
>>> So, on this account it would seem that both "top-down" as well as "bottom-up" initiative is indispensable.
>>> Bottom-up activities are the proximate cause and primary engine driving innovation.
>>> However, the size of that engine (e.g., the share of the total population capable of participating constrictively in the combinatorial search) depends substantially on the existence, scope, and openness/interoperability of those modules and the standardized interfaces between them. Unfortunately, by their very definition "standards" are a top-down phenomenon -- both because they are never adopted with unanimous consent (but must be appx. universally binding with a domain in order to work in that domain), and because they must remain relatively stable over time, which means that for everyone that comes along after the moment of standardization, they may feel like an "unjust," arbitrary imposition.
>>>
>>> In 2002, a quartet of prominent Internet standards developers published a paper called "Tussle in Cyberspace" (link below), which made a broadly similar argument about how the Internet has evolved. However, while mechanisms that the Tussle authors describe are broadly similar, the tone seems quite different, to me at least. The earlier paper seemed to be (obliquely) engaging a topical issues that was just emerging around that time -- i.e., the aspirations of some dominant Internet service providers to subtly alter and/or partially vacate some of the standards that make the Internet "open" and thus had fostered the Internet's rapid growth up to that time (note: today the issue is most commonly called "net neutrality"). In that context, the Tussle paper seems to lean ever so slightly past the domain of observation and Darwinian theory construction, in the general direction of advocating the tussle process and the embrace of whatever outcomes it yields, ala "social darwinism."
>>>
>>> In any case, I think that any present US deficit in innovation can probably be chalked up, at least in part, to the ongoing progressive deviation from our most recent moment of optimal balance between those "top down" and "bottom up" forces. Some of the biggest recent winners in the innovation game -- i.e., those who benefited most from the latest round of technical standardization -- have started exert their own top-down authority in ways that advance their own private interests, but which collaterally degrade the environment for future/distributed innovation...
>>>
>>> (The question resonates for me because of the looming inflection point in Internet protocol standards associated with the depletion of the IPv4 address pool, which happens to be the stuff of my day job)
>>>
>>> My own 0.02, +/-
>>>
>>> Tom Vest
>>>
>>> "Tussle in Cyberspace: Defining Tomorrow’s Internet"
>>>
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/ana/Publications/PubPDFs/Tussle2002.pdf>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ============================================================
>>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>>> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
http://www.friam.org>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Doug Roberts
>>>
[hidden email]
>>>
[hidden email]
>>> 505-455-7333 - Office
>>> 505-670-8195 - Cell
>>> ============================================================
>>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>>> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
http://www.friam.org>>
>>
>> ============================================================
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
http://www.friam.org>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
http://www.friam.orgMeets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College