Category: meshforum

Dr. Eivind Almaas of Notre Dame

Scale free network model – networks continuously expand by addition of nodes, new nodes prefer to link to highly connected nodes. Examples – new web pages, airport links. Model is preferential attachment – you get a power law distribution. Exponent changes when nodes age, when there are costs associated with attachment. Think high school – people want to hang out with the popular people.

In biology – protein networks – nodes are proteins, links are physical interactions. Yeast interactions get power law distribution. Scale free type of network, high clustering. There are different local growth rules that give effective preferential attachment – even though proteins don’t express preference or have desires, etc.

Proteins with lots of neighbors have preferential attachments. You can look at chart and see older proteins gain more connections. Similar curves for (spelling) nematode worms and (spelling) drosophilla (fruit flies).

Metabolic networks, driven by enzymes, have similar power law/scale free distributions.

How does structure influence function? Flux balance analysis – very complex stuff…

The power laws come from the structure of the network – the metabolic network is scale free, and therefore the flux distribution is therefore scale free.

Analogies: larger the network, smaller the core, a collective network effect.

The next panel is Buzz with John.

Buzz tells the story about how he created Activewords. Discusses his trip to Russia, sending dispatches back to the US, and becoming ‘a rock star’ – ie. everyone knew who he was because people forwarded his emails.

Buzz mentions Anagram – a great plug-in for outlook!

He also talked about, and did his presentation in Mind Manager– also a great and useful piece of software for brainstorming and thoughts management.

Jamis discusses The concept that a constant stream of images, videos, etc will contribute to not the big-brother society but a society of millions of little brothers.

Camera phones, small video cameras, etc.

Irony break – Picture of Jamais taken as he was saying this at Flickr.

One implication – telemedicine – dermatologists could tell diagnosis of skin issues 94% of time via camera phone shots vs. in person. Politics – video groups captured images of problems in voting during Nov 2004 election. New group – the Blair Watch Project at the Guardian UK. Every politician now has to assume that they are on camera at all times – including when there are no actual ‘cameras’ present. Sousveillance – all of us watching the watchers. Similar – the Witness project. Abu Garib was the digital camera’s “Rodney King” moment – see, snap, send…media event. To quote Jamis almost verbatim: “Anyone anywhere with a digital camera and a net connection can alter course of a war or shape the policy of the largest country in the World.”

Deja View- Tivo for life- 30 second back storage of everything you see, in a camera.

Company predicting  10 Petabytes of memory drives by 2010. Put it all together…

What happens with Digital rights copyright and digital rights management when you can tape everything you see? Will they make your ‘memory archive’ not be able to record when you see copyright? Will there be lawsuits for ‘memory rights management’ litigating what you can ‘record and remember’?

 Personal memory assistance + tools for social networks = ability for friends to know what you’ve seen and done … ‘was it that restaurant that had the bug’? ‘is he the creep my sister dumped for cheating?’

Ed and Esther are up on stage talking about social networks. I honestly have been watching more than typing during this panel. Check meshforum.org to find a good link for their talk. Buzz is blogging the conference, for example.

Picture set at Flickr.