Image via WikipediaCommunities that grow larger and larger have chiefs with more and more power.
Is this a good thing ?
Yes and no.
Yes : The bigger the community the more time and resources it has to do things small communities cannot. Example from 10,000 years ago : agriculture, war, book-keeping … So these big communities absorb the smaller ones and grow bigger.
No : a community can suffer from its own size. Example : Angkor Vat, a city so big that the logistics of that time were not sufficient enough to provide food for the thousends of inhabitants. Result : hunger, sickness, dead of the city. Other example : The chinese empire, once the leading scientific community that grew so big and still had only one king so that there was no room any more for diversity. Result : status quo and Europe with dozens of little states and a lot of diversity took over.

And where are we now ? Power of one growing economic network. If one stock market goes down all the rest follows. Where is the diversity ? gone ! Perhaps a little pessimistic, but status quo, disaster etc. are already looking around the corner.

Image via WikipediaSince I am in a top-10 list mood, here is a list of top-10 lists on evolution :

Top 10 Useless Limbs (and Other Vestigial Organs)

myths about evolution

Scientific Facts Proving Charles Darwin’s
Theory of Evolution is Wrong, False and Impossible

Why Anti-Evolutionists are WRONG

Reasons Evolution is Wrong

lifes greatest inventions

Reasons To Accept Evolution And Other Godless Scientific Findings

As I have a more or less scientific background, I fear this list has become more something about the religion-evolution debate.
I never say someone else is wrong. I just am allways convinced I am richt, till someone can change my mind. I also give them the opportunity. But be sure it is not easy to do it, unless you have straight scientific proof or at least a sound argumentation !
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As top-10 lists have something attrictive, I did a research on top-10 lists on knowledge management.

Here they com in random order :

KM project failure

Knowledge management myths

Knowledge management books

Nuggets of knowledge

Knowledge articles

Tips on KM strategies

Ways IT managers can support knowledge transfer

20 top-ten lists in e-learning

Practices in knowledge management

Knowledge management in the call center : top-10 buzzwords

Jens Hjerrild Poders’ favourite Knowledge Podcasts and Audiobooks

Best presentations ever

Knowledge management : top 10 tips

Knowledge management : top 10 books

Changing economics of knowledge – a top 10 trend

Feel free to suggest additional ones, I will add them to the page.

Image by Twit2art via FlickrCute experiment by Doug Henshen showing that a web2.0 guru (Dan Keldsen) promoting twitter (“I’d rather that you use Twitter“) in reality responds via e-mail.
Is e-mail still not beaten ?

Shifting technology, say from simple Web1.0 websites to Web2.0 blogs, social computing etc. is sometimes a hurdle for people.
But technology evolution is already a long time on its way. I suppose the first time some proto-human took a rock to crack a bone in order to get to the marrow its friends must have been terrified by the force of the blow !
This humorous video shows the transition from the scroll to the book, with the help of the helpdesk …

Interesting discussion on LinkedIn about our e-information and the corresponding privacy concerns.
Are we loosing our privacy ?

First a bit of history.

i)For ages people lived in small tribes, villages. Privacy ? zero, nada, rien, absolutely none. The only people with privacy where the ones that were expelled from their community or who chose themselves to live totally isolated. Later on we also had some farmers who lived with their familly somewhat isolated from the rest.
ii) then came the large cities, where people could – paradoxically – hide in the crowds. The bigger the city, the fewer people you know and hence the more privacy.
iii) and then came the google age where you can find anything on anyone on the www. Back to zero privacy ? Only people who choose to live “isolated”, i.e. keep away from the internet can keep everything private.

Interesting in the discussion is the remark of Hugo Vázquez Caramés who defines as privacy a state of equilibrium between the amount others know of you and the amount you know of the others. “The “problem” of privacy, exists when someone has more knowledge than others.”

I should add my own opinion. Your privacy level does not merely depend on how much they know about you, but on two factors:

1. how much information they have about you
2. the privacy level of that information : zero if you don’t mind, a lot if you do not want somebody to know it

And indeed, you could add a third factor : the privacy level of the other one versus you, which can indeed be a diminishing factor.

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Image via WikipediaApparently a little country, somewhere in Europe, was the womb of internet.
Even twice !

Perhaps a lot of people know that a Belgian, together with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, developed the World Wide Web somewhere on 25 december 1991.

Apparently, the idea was much, very much older and came in 1934 (before computer the era) from another belgian : Paul Otlet, who had the idea of “a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which is french for “network” — or arguably, “web.”

What is this about Belgium ? They are famous for their over 500 varieties of beer (according to belgians, Heineken is dishwater) with “West-Vleteren” as the best beer of the world and “The Kulminator” as the best beer cafe of the world according to the late Michael Jackson, they drink the best french wines (and leave the minor ones for the french), they invented french (???) fries (with mayonnaise), they have one of the best “cuisines” in the world, they work very few hours per week but in these few houre are more productive than the rest of the world, they had Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin to take care of the Williams sisters, they won four Nobel Prizes, had some of the most famous painters lik Brueghel, Rubens and Magritte, they invented the saxophone (Adolphe Sax) and the Smurfs (Peyo), they invented the belgian andives, they had Jean-Marie Pfaff and Eddy Merckx, and a lot of other world-famous sportsman and -women.

Belgium has only 10 million inhabitants but if you ask a belgian which is the best country to live in: no doubt about it : Belgium !

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Image via WikipediaGreat apes think ahead. Apes can plan for their future needs just as we humans can – by using self-control and imagining future events. OK, they still are apes (chimpanzees, orangutans) and much less intelligent than (most) humans. (however in a particular test apes outsmarted japanese college students)

But what if some rich guy decides that he wants to buy a brain implant for his pet chimpanzee that doubles or triples or … its intelligence ? What if the chimp becomes as smart as an average man ? Would it still been treated as an animal ? An animal reading the newspaper, sending e-mails, … It is not yet possible, but some experiments are heading in that direction.

I saw the same problem in a science-fiction film where a robot worked his lifefime to become acknowledged as a man. Yes, it is SF, but is it not our not so far away future also ?

Image via WikipediaLet me begin with a real-life story.

A friend of mine once told me of a visit to a couple who had a newborn child. Proudly they showed him the first baby-book with pictures of mum, dad, first babypicture, weight etc. There was also a page about blood groups : blood groop of mammy, blood group of daddy, blood group of baby. At that point my friend (a biologist) managed to show no obvious reaction, but it was clear that the three blood groups formed an impossible combination! The beloved woman had been “playing elsewere”.

WHY ?

A lot is written about love and finding the best partner. But as we know, love is just a chemical means of establishing and maintaining a relationship long enough to have one or more children together.
What are the underlying mechanisms, evolutionary advantages, survival-of-the-fittest reasons for a woman to select their partner ?

In a recent scientific study on barn swallows it was shown that changing just the red color of their feathers not only had an impact on the behaviour of the other swallows, but also on their own testosterone levels. Meaning that the looks are important, not only in humans.
Another important factor seems to be body odor (another article)

I looked for some articles about partner selection. There is a lot of crap but this one is interesting about the female mate selection in the darwinian way of looking at it.

Before going further looking at what characteristics of man are important to women in a maximise-reproduction meaning, there is one very important thing that is allways forgotten in any article I read : a woman has to make TWO choices in partner selection:

1. choose the best partner as to optimise the genetical blueprint of her childeren
2. choose the best partner to help her raise her childeren up to adulthood

And what is very important : these two partners do not have to be the same person !
Indeed, it is much more easy for a woman to get a man to be the biological father of her child (a one night stand is sufficient) than to get him into years of commitment to raise this child. Apparently 25% of women cheat on their jusband !

Let us look at the first choice : optimisation of the genetical blueprint, which is the easy one. What are the characteristics ? Healthy, tall (but not exaggerated), athletic, intelligent, sociable. In short : the popular guy of the neighbourhood. Since this popular guy has plenty of choice, it depends on her own “characteristics” whether she can get him or not. If not, she has to aim a bit lower on the popularity hierarchy. Anyway, she has to aim at the best she can get.

Now the second choice : finding a partner to raise her children. Characteristics : 1)faithful, loving dedicated etc.. and 2) having the means (as much as possible) of providing all that is necessary for her children. Ideal type : a stupid rich guy who she can dominate.

It all seems simple but it is not.

All sorts of combinations between the desired characteristics are possible and she has to pick the best combination, either in one or two partners.
Ideally : the popular guy who is at the same time rich and faithful to her.
Other solutions : a not so faithful rich guy who leaves her with plenty of money after the divorce.
I am sure you can come up yourself with all sorts of possible solutions and find some real life examples.
Do not hesitate to put them in a comment.

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Nowadays it is common sense that the bulk of blogs is worthless. Either people say it, write it down, put an application on the internet to calculate the value of a blog, or call their own blog “another worthless blog”.

So, what is wrong about blogging ? Look at paper : How much worthless stuff do people write in their diaries, in letters, in newspapers?
Blogs are just the technology, like paper.

So it’s the same ? NO !

blogs and wikis offer advantages paper could never offer :

• a search possibility
• a subscription possibility
• a comment possibility

And I suppose this list is non-exhaustive.

Image via WikipediaIs there more sex in the city than in a small village ?
When there is only one person, he cannot talk to anyone, this is pretty obvious.
When there are two persons they only have one another to talk to : there is only one connection between them.
With three persons, there are three connections. Each person has two others to talk to. With four persons, there are six connetions, with five persons there are ten connections and so on. I becomes more and more complicated. If we assume that the number of “sex occurences” is positively related to the number of encounters (“connections”) between people it is tempting to conclude that in a big city with so much people there must be plenty opportunity to have a sexual rendez-vous.
Paradoxically this is not the case!
Long ago I learnt from a scientific paper that the larger the population of the city you live in, the fewer people you know with whom you could have a more intimate relationship. In fact it is much more easy to find a suitable partner in a small village than in a big town.

So there must be some communication-preventing mechanisms that become stronger when the number of people encountered grows. Why ? Because in big cities it is impossible to know all of them and so they become more of at threat, so consequently you behave more defensively ?

I know when I was a kid, I knew about each and every person in my village. Nobody was a threat to me, because I knew them and there was a huge social control. Consequently when I grew older I knew a lot of girls …

When you have two distinct sets of patterns that are somehow correlated, data mining is the technique to find a way to translate the information of one set into the other.
If one of the sets of patters is brainwaves, recorded by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and the other set is either pictures or nouns, it seems to be possible to ‘see’ what we are thinking of.
In one study at Carnegie Mellon University Tom Mitchell and Marcel Just developed a sophisticated computational model that can predict the brain activation patterns associated with concrete nouns.
In another another study Kendrick Kay at the University of California, Berkeley, was able to tell with a fairly good accuracy wich picture the person was looking at, just by analysing fMRI patterns.
As you know all devices only get better and smaller. Watch out for the day that portable fMRI registration and analysation devices will exist, portable mindreaders (PMR’s for the friends), working from a distance.
You will better have to control what you are thinking …

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You know, they say a man thinks about sex every 5 minutes or so. I heard all sorts of figures but I think their correctness does not matter much. Sex is important for man.
After a bit googling, I foud :

• for the thrill? Or the sex?
• testosterone, they want more, the thrill, like the power
• lots of reasons

The article under the first link mentioned that biologists think it is for spreading their genes. If you accept Darwinian selection, this is the only logical explanation, all the rest is the consequence of this first one.
There are a few advantages for a man to cheat :

• having more children, so spreading his genetic material
• it costs not much, because these ‘bastard’ children do not live with him (all these unmarried mothers) so he does not have to work for them

Naturally this means that these bastard children have a lower chance of survival to adulthood, because he is not there to take care of them.

Cheating also has risk for a man :

• getting infected with nasty diseases
• clash between the ‘other’ woman and his own wife, ruining his family and lowering the chance of survival to adutlhood of his ‘legal’ children
• getting beaten up/killed by the man of the ‘other’ woman (unless she is single, then it is the father who’s the danger)

It seems that a man is a creature willing to take risks, otherwise they would not cheat that much, but actually it is simply the case that put in terms of darwinian survival of the fittest the advantages overweigh the risks.

So why do not all man cheat ? Some are perhaps more risk-averse?

We all know that google regcognizes images based on de text that comes along with the image.
Now, data mining did the trick again. Not a new data mining trick, since “even relatively simple algorithms are able to perform fairly well in identifying images this way”, says Antonio Torralba, assistant professor in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. With as few as 600 megabytes of data his algorithm is able to recognize 12.9 million images from the Internet. The image database and software to enable searches of the database, are being made publicly available on the web.
The trick is finding very short codes for images.
Here you can watch the explanation.

Why not ?
Scientists produce the first smell map.
It is a standard data mining procedure. Take all the characteristics and produce a Self-Organizing Map (Kohonen).
They did it with the 1.600 chemical characteristics of 250 odorants and calculated their place on the map in the meantime finding that only 40 characteristics were enough to determine the correct place.
Conclusion : smells are not independent categories, but there is structure in it.
Perhaps a new idea for “Chanel 5” : “Chanel 5-dm” (data mined) ?

Image via WikipediaAfter for males, now the DNA of a female has been deciphered. Marjolein Kriek was chosen, not only because she works in the DNA-field but also because Francis Crick is no longer among us and her name seemed a good phonetic subsitute : in dutch the pronounciation is (almost) exactly the same as Crick.

Because a woman has a large X-chromosome in stead of the man’s small y-chromosome it is more work to sequence a woman.

Perhaps in the future we will not have to clone ourselves, we will just upload our DNA-structure (that we received yesterday as an e-mail attachment from the hospital after a routine visit) to a web-based enterprise and they will send us a reminder when we can come to collect our clone … ?

By the way, I learnt that “Kriek” is also a famous type of belgian beer …

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Image via WikipediaMy wife and I deliberately chose a particular number of children we wanted to have. But in this post I am not writing about family planning. I am writing about the more ‘animal’ side of our procreation strategy. You know, animals do have procreation strategies, although they are not really planning the size of their families. Their whole behaviour is optimized as to follow their procreation strategy to get as many fertile offspring as possible.
So with human intelligence, is this all gone ? Or do these procreation strategies still influence what we do ?
I am talking survival of the fittest here, darwinism. Maximizing the number of healthy children.
How can we do this ? By :

1. playing on numbers : maximizing the number of children we ‘make’
2. playing on quality : maximizing the quality of the children
3. playing on both

The point is : this does not mean the same for men and women.
In playing the numbers, females are much more limited than men. To have one baby it takes her nine months and than she has to raise it too. (The very rich ones can leave this latter part for a great deal to others). In our modern society it is hard to raise, say, 20 children and give them every possibility for education etc.
Some centuries ago, (and even now in some parts of the world) numbers were (are) a lot more important, due to high child mortality. So females play a lot on quality. More on this in a next post : female partner choice.
Men have more quantity options : they can (and many do) have children outside their own family (whithout the knowledge of their wife). He can play on quality as well : 1) choosing the “best possible” partner (what does this mean ?) as his wife, and 2)taking care as good as he can for his children in his family.

Image via WikipediaTo me it is pretty clear that men and women are indeed different. Do not take this the wrong way : I say nothing about value. Different does not mean that one gender is worth more than the other. Just that there are differences :

• physical differences : this is obvious, since millions of xxx websites earn money based on this difference. Females are different from males . . . especially every twenty-eight days. Women are built to give birth to children and feed them, men are on the average stronger to do … what ?
• psychological differences (= behavioral differences). This is less obvious. In all the fuss about equality of genders some say that there are no behavioral differences. Well, although the statistical mean may be very different, I suppose there is a large overlap between man and women in their behavior. Some women are simply stronger than some man and more fit to do heavy work, whereas some man are more talented in raising children than some women. So I’d say, let every person do what he or she does best or wants to do. But still, I am convinced that on the average there really are differences in behaviour between the two genders.
  It is said that men come from Mars and women from Venus, meaning that men tend to sit back and think to solve problems, while women have to talk about it. If you never read the book : do so, it explains a lot about marriage problems and how to handle your partner to come to a better understanding.
• brain differences : New neuro-scanning techniques have shown that men and women actually use different parts of the brain when we process information and think about things (the article)

But the one single most important difference I want to write about in my posts is the difference in procreative strategy. On the internet it is hard to find any information whatsoever on this topic. The only I found is the post of Daniel Pouzzner which gives a lot of information on the gender difference. However the difference I mean is not as such in his text.
Here it is : Given the fact that a women can have at most about 30 (thirty) children in her lifetime, a man can do a lot better. Mathematically a healty man, starting at his fifteenth birthday can easily fertilize a few women every week. If he keeps this up till he’s 65 years old, he could have 52 weeks times 50 years times 2 women = 5200 children. If we compare this to the 30 children of a woman it is logical that men’s reproductive strategy can be very different from women’s.
The result of these different reproductive strategies is : different behaviour, and consequently : problems in marriages.
In subsequent posts I plan to discuss some of these topics.

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Here is a new category I want to post on. Something that has to do with day to day things of life which have an underlying reason you never find in books or on internet texts. What is the driving force behind the things men and women do, why do they behave differently etc. Here some examples of questions I want to write about :

What is the biggest difference between men and women ?
why do men cheat ?
why do women cheat ?
why do men have a midlife crisis ?
why do women care for their gandchildren ?
which one is the stronger gender ?
Who does she love most : husband or children ?
How do women select their mate ?
Are men and women different species ?
and more …

The fact is that I find a lot of explications, but I have my own, completely different, but so fundamental that it explains a lot. I know there will be a lot to argue over, but a healthy discussion is what I like.

Image via WikipediaSince I studied biology I thought that there was no difference between animals an men, that humankind is only one of the many animal species.
Apparently, according to a scientist at Harvard university, there are 4 cognition differences between us and the animals :

1. ability to combine and recombine different types of information and knowledge in order to gain new understanding
2. apply the same “rule” or solution to one problem to a different and new situation
3. create and easily understand symbolic representations of computation and sensory input
4. detach modes of thought from raw sensory and perceptual input

OK, he is probably right in that most animals cannot do these things.

But I think if you look further there are a lot of characteristics of humans that are different from all the other animal species, just like each and any animal species has a lot of characteristics, different from all the others. How else could it be a different species ?
I think that those harvard scientist, Marc Hauser, seeks confirmation for the fact that his own species is the best one, so he looks at differences in what humans are good in and other animals do not.
But perhaps he should also look at some negative human characteristics that cannot be found in the other animal species. A few examples : world war I, word war II …, burning people alive, torturing …
The psychologic ability to commit these things, without going nuts seems very specific to humans too.

Enjoyed this post ? Then you might be interested in the following :
– human intelligence = human rights ?
– Are men and women different ?

                                     

In physorg.com I read that : voracious swarming ants that apparently arrived in Texas aboard a cargo ship are invading homes and yards across the Houston area, shorting out electrical boxes and messing up computers..
Perhaps an idea for the USA military to use their robotic ants once they are up and running ? Like the crazy rasberry ants, they can shut down electricity and computers of the enemy.

The original article

crazy rasberry ants

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Image via WikipediaIn one of my earliest posts I mentioned the famous award-winning book by Douglas Hofstadter : Gödel, Esher, Bach, an eternal golden braid which I read half a life ago with great pleasure, although it is not easy stuff.
Now MIT has a online course about the contents of this book. For anyone interested : Gödel, Esher, Bach : a mental space odyssey.

After I started using WOAS at my workplace several weeks ago, today I showed it to my colleague. She was enthousiastic.
We decided to use both the same wiki. Although WOAS is a personal wiki, not meant to be used by more than one person, I’ll try it, because sit in front of one another, so it could not be too hard to avoid updating it at the same time.

To be continued…

Did you like this post ? Then you might be interested in the following :
Wiki on a stick
Wiki on a stick (2)
Wiki on a stick (4)
Seven wiki-adoption techniques

                                     

Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory says that is is possible that other life forms, even intelligent ones, exist in the universe (article on physorg).
Great, but what about Jesus who came to rescue humanity ? Did he the same for all our extraterrestrial brothers and sisters ? And did he then became some green creature, in stead of a man ? Or was he one of the little green creatures in disguise, visiting the earth ?
This extraterrestrial religion problem is vastly discussed in ‘the Intelligent Universe‘ by James Gardner.
Interesting stuff for someone who does not believe in god(s), perhaps shocking for others ?

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It is now several weeks since I began using Wiki on a stick at my workplace. It is very easy to use and since I use a lot of links to existing documents and fileserver directories, it grows but slowly and remains very small (about 300K).
Since our enterprise still does not use any social software it is the only 2.0 software I have at work. Which of course is a contradictio in terminis because a personal wiki is per definition not “social”.

Next week I will take it a step further : I will demonstrate it to my collegue and try to get her use it also. Either her own wiki or, and better, the same one. OK, it is not multy-user, but since we have our desks in front of eachother it cannot be to hard to get one personal wiki working for both of us.

to be continued …