AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Goguen, Joseph. 1997. "A Social, Ethical Theory of Information." In Geoffrey C. Bowker, Les Gasser, Susan Leigh Star and William Turner (eds.). Social Science,
Technical Systems and Cooperative Work. Princeton, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates.
What is the proper notion of a whole? Uh-oh.
Realizing I have an instinctive sneer to all holism-talk. Picked that up at MIT of course. Yet I find myself attracted to it, eg here or with Christopher Alexander. Probably deserves a page of its own.
Distinction and Stability
Definitions are distinctions, so defining them is problematic
tool for managing queries and result sets (ie, the good parts of Afferent/Base/ontology tools)
Papers/concepts:
-- netarchy (v hierarchy, etc)
-- "The mathematical structure of life itself: Christopher Alexander" (essay idea).
-- "Recursion as the basis of morality" -- somehting along the Minsky MMM paper.
Misc brainfarts:
-- my own take on using infoviz in education -- you build YOUR OWN representation of
some knowledge space, link it with others. Note that this is currently getting trendy,
sort of (ethnoclassification?).
-- "Project idea: building a higher-level rep language over OWL-like stuff (that is,
something that can do at minimal nonmonotonic types of things like exceptions!). This
may get the benefit of standardization with the power of better languages."
-- LifePod. Give every child an ipod like device that records their
life as much as possible (ie, you could record gps and full audio.
The translate all the audio to text and make it searchable, then I
ould find out what the hell was up with Glenn Terry, if anything.
-- Idea for a website: "where do you rank?" -- you put in your income
and other data, and also (optionally) your ranking factors -- how
important income, assets, education, etc are to you -- and it shows
where you rank in the US, the world, your locale...
-- Random idea of the moment: playing with a spreadsheet with ben, tryingt
to find perfect numbers. Of course it should be lisp-programmable, but
aside from that, I thought it would be nice if you could simply format a
numerical field as a vertical line whose h-displacement was proportional
to its value (or swap h/v for rows; I was working with a column). This
seems simple and fairly Edward Tufte-ish.
It was OpenOffice so in theory I could go program this myself! Yeah right.
-- self-organizing online reading groups. People make lists of books
on their queues, then somehow (human initiative or even automatically)
groups are organized, maybe filtered by criteria (age/ed/whatever) or
clustered according to social network, and people can have a
collective read and discussion. autodidacts-association.com
Perhaps link this to all the open courseware that's appearing.
Alternate view: seminars. I want a group of people to discuss things
with.
Random idea for a paper: "Towards Empathetic Agents" -- but rather than claiming
to know how to build such things, discuss what the hell that would actually mean,
the ominous idea of social agents without empathy and its forecasting by SF writers
like Dick...oh I don't know. I was reading this paper "Are Agents an Answer or a Question" by
Joseph Goguen, sort of a shallow overview of agent issues, and was so inspired.
-- spreadsheet math (a bit of curriculum)
-- physical exercise videogame, sort of an update on the old Exploratorium installation,
with body tracking, but organized to get kids moving...
an old one
Idea for a website: build your own future.
Everyone gets to slide events around on a big timeline, build
up your own image of the future and compare it to others.
another old one
Company name of the day: Tactile Semantics
Well, not punchy enough, but something like that....
touch-know
feel-think
Like that.
OK, other idea: my usual personal knowledge organizer idea. Keep all
scraps of knowledge in a DB. Gather stuff from all over (Palm, etc).
User-definable XML schemas. Sharing with other people. Grow into a
network. Replicate PC world (start with personal empowerment, eventually
grow into a network).
Nobody does this! Dave Winer looks like he'd come close.--
Eclipse CVS revision visualization idea. Well, turns out Eclipse already has a feature for this,
but it could stand improving (in CVS View, do Show Annotation on a file). The display could
be better, code could be color-coded, etc.
Hm, see this: http://www.cenqua.com/fisheye/
Apr 2005
Idea of the moment: any modern computer should have automatic, essentially infinite,
versioned backups! Like CVS without the hassle. I can imagine an add-on that would
do this (and wasn't there one for the Mac years ago) but integrating with an OS is too
painful for me to contemplate doing it. Additional things you'd like: condensing to diffs
to keep more versions, not having all the versions be separate files (because that will
confuse other tools), labelling important versions, managing groups. While we're at it, how
about keeping track of all the various versions of a file that might popup on your machine
from such processes as mailing a file back and forth so it can be changed?
contemplating writing an essay on anarchism, structures of
cooperation, and open source...and why Symbolics was better but
couldn't last due to its dependence on the centralized state
(DARPA)...I admit it, Eric Raymond is right. Unix rules. I give up.
Of course, I could write such a thing but its not clear anybody would
care.
Idea of the moment: link geocache data to Google Maps. Surprised nobody has done that yet.
Jan 2005
Idea: at a meeting, everyone has laptops. There should be a screen on
the back of their laptop cover showing "stuff I want to share".
Everyone's plugged into the projector and can take it over according to some protocol.
Another idea (this was old, but seems to have disappeared): a pagewatcher
service.
Simple enough that there are many people doing it:
http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/monitor.htm
Idea for a web-site-section: QUESTIONS:
All these come together in Goguen’s algebraic semiotics, which uses category theory to formalize the notion of sign-system, serving as a principled approach to user interface design.
Burstall, R. & Goguen, J. (1997) Putting Theories Together to Make Specifications. Proceedings of the 5th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Cambridge, Massachusetts, pp. 1045-1058 (cited by Shrager in Biodeducta paper)