Interactively Storytelling

A rough and 1st draft of a short paper outlining a possible web publishing system for online community narrative and world building.

link to pdf: Interactively Storytelling

imblog rss feeds

quick note: I implemented some rss feeds over at my site. Any suggestions for a better rss reader? It's also completely possible to use standard MT tags to grab info about recent posts locally to our server, but not outside feeds.

'who needs musicians when computers can think like bees?'

so asks a Discover Magazine article by the usual suspect, mr. Stephen Johnson. the article lives here. as johnson notes, making computers autonomously compose music has always been a big thing in computer music. a quick check at the 2003 international computer music conference's papers and demos yields a hefty number of these keywords: detection, pattern extraction, algorithmic approaches to composing, etc. etc. the real big thing now is computer improvisation. the guy from the article, Tim Blackwell (sound clips on this page) is having bots improvise with other bots. others, including my thesis advisor at brown (_Todd Winkler). this is a hard problem, and has been researched heavily. I think that Blackwell's got the right idea here, though. Music and sound creation via a whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts system is natural I think. music is so essentially modular to begin with. this is an area where I'm going. the key, and something I think blackwell is ignoring, is adequately placing the composer in this emergent space. they need to be something more than someone who initializes variables.

random connectors

demonstration of granovetter's theory on the strength of weak ties. nodes are added, and similar nodes--nodes within a small radius of one another when each is created--are linked. however, each node also has a 1/12 probability of becoming a connector node. connector nodes not only are part of the smaller local networks, but also branch out to other nodes outside of the given neighborhood radius. comparing the diameter of the network with the presence of these connectors versus the simplier local networks yields drastically lower numbers for the connector network. in gladwell's terms, these are your paul revere's or your baltimore pimps. they dramatically lower the average degrees of separation for the network, and therefore facilitate any type of epidemics. to do: assign random 'infectious-ness' vars to nodes. allow user to infect network with pieces of sound or text, and see how the information spreads through the network.

simplistic smallworld networks

diffusion-limited aggregation

aristocratic network using simple rules; start with one node (0,0). Another node wanders in, and if it is close to (10 pixels) or hitting another node, then it sticks in place. Due to time and processing restraints, the process here is only repeated 300 times and on a small (200X200) stage. The results (more so if you do this over a few hundred thousand times) yield amazingly complex forms, as the nodes self-organize. as the process continues, nodes begin to form into branched arms which act as filters. as a result, new nodes tend to stick to these outside branches, rather than wander deeper into the cluster.

check out an animation of the process.

new motorola w/ flash 5 player

From Pete's Eats:

The new Motorola A920 will include the flash 5 player. and there is a competition for the development of flash, symbian and java games / applications.
more info here

good news for flash developers, I think. It seems like a no-brainer to have flash on all phones/platforms, but this is only the first step towards that happening.

small worlds

a current project at columbia is testing the six degrees of separaton phenomenon / hypothesis. Most current versions of network theory suggest that Milgram's inital hypothesis, while being amazingly accurate and correct in the majority of cases, probably cannot be applied to the entire world, although it seems as though 10 links may do it. That's what this study is testing -- trying to find an average number of links between random people. Duncan Watts, who co-authored a definitive small-worlds theory while at Cornell, is leading the research. The results should be interesting, and I encourage everyone to try it out.

You login, and are immediately given a target contact, who you try and reach through a series of emails, each email hypothetically getting 'closer' to the target. My target is Mary Bowen, a Welder who lives in Tenn. I forwarded the message to tripp, because he lived in the east. Although since Mary lived in Michigan for a while, I realize now I should have sent it to my friend who grew up in Ann Arbor. This is much like the original experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram. Milgram sent out letters to randomly chosen people in Kansas and Nebraska, asking them to forward the letter to a stockbroker friend of his who was living in Boston. He did not give them the address. To forward the letter, he asked them to send the letter to someone who would be, like in the Watts experiment, closer, either socially or geographically, to the stockbroker. Milgram found that most of the letters reached his friend in six mailings or less -- hence the term 'six degrees of separation.'

http://smallworld.columbia.edu/

current reading list

books:

Buchanan, Mark, Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks New York: W.W. Norton, 2002.
reviews at amazon

Gladwell, Malcolm, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference Boston: Little, Brown, 2000.
reviews at amazon

Kelly, Kevin, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World. Cambridge: Perseus Books, 1994.
reviews at amazon

Stanley Milgram (edited by John Sabini and Maury Silver). The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments. Second Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992.

articles:

Granovetter, M. (1973), "The Strength of Weak Ties," American Journal of Sociology, 78 (6): 1360-1380.

Barabási, Albert-László, Albert, Réka, "Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks," Science, 15 October (286): 509-512.

Watts, Duncan J., Strogatz, Stephen H., "Collective Dynamics of Small World Networks," Nature, 4 June (393): 440-442.