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April 30, 2004
空白
也不完全是空白。
而不可说的，只有沉默。
Posted by Xiao at 04:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 17, 2004
The Calculus of Political Power
From one Orkut's community (self-organizing networks) you were introduced to this post by Mitch Ratcliffe.
Posted by Xiao at 11:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 14, 2004
Shifting of the power paradigm?
Capra wrote this in his 1996's book: "the web of life."
"Power, in the sense of domination over others, is excessive self-assertion. The social structure in which it is exerted most effectively is the hierarchy. Indeed, our political, military, and corporate structures are hierarchically ordered, with men generally occupying the upper levels and women the lower levels. Most of these men, and quite a few women, have come to see their position in the hierarchy as part of their identity, and thus the shift to a different system of values generates existential fear in them. "
"There is another kind of power - power as influence of others. The ideal structure for exerting this kind of power is not the hierarchy but the network...... The paradigm shift thus includes a shift in social organization from hierarchies to networks. "
The Net can be a fundamental force to challenge the view of life in society as a competitive struggle for existence, and to resists the "dominator system." Once again the word here is ---- "network."
Posted by Xiao at 10:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Maturana's two questions
"What takes place in the phenomenon of perception?"
"What is the organization of the living?"
Maturana presented his ideas in searching these two questions in the fall of 1968:
"The nervous system operates as a closed network of interactions, in which every change of the interactive relations between certain components always results in a change of the interactive relations of the same or of other components."
Maturana postulated that the nervous system is not only self-organizing but also continually self-referring, so that perception cannot be viewed as the representation of a external reality but must be understood as the continual creation of new relationships within the neural network: "The activities of nerve cells do not reflect an environment independent of the living organism and hence do not allow for the construction of an absolutely existing external world."
He then took the radical step of postulating that the process of circular organization itself - with or without a nervous system - is identical to the process of cognition:" Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with and without a nervous system."
"Living systems are organized in a closed causal circular process that allows for evolutionary change in the the way the circlarity is maintained, but not for the loss of the circularity itself."
Posted by Xiao at 10:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 12, 2004
Old man river
Francis recommended this reading last week:
"He don't plant 'tatos
Don't plant cotton
Them that plants them is soon forgotten
But old man river he just keep rolling along"
connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity, asignifying rupture, cartography and decalcomania......and more:
"The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its bank and picks up speed in the middle. "
Posted by Xiao at 07:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 08, 2004
剪影
地平线上，曼哈顿的轮廓渐渐清晰。一位归来者谨慎的凝视，和此刻在街道和楼群中高亢行动着的人们似乎毫不相干。而城市，只是一个在四月的晨光里波动的，脆弱单薄的剪影。
Posted by Xiao at 07:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 05, 2004
Murray on CAS
The following text is from "Complexity and Complex Adaptive Systems."
The common feature of all these process is that in each one a complex adaptive system acquires information about its environment and its own interaction with that environment, identifying regularities in that information, condensing those regularities into a kind of "schema" or model, and acting in the real world on the basis of that schema. In each case, there are various competing schema, and the results of the action in the real world feed back to influence the competition among these schema.
In the process of new information from the environment, the compressed schema unfolds to give prediction or behavior or both.
When the compression took place, regularities were abstracted from experience and compressed. The rest of experience, ascribable to change or to regularities too subtle to recognize, cannot be compressed and does not typically form part of the schema. When unfolding takes place, new material is adjoined, much of it again largely random, as "present data" or input from the real world.
Murray cited two examples of this process: one is biological evolution, the other is a scientific theory. At end of the article, he concludes:
Complex adaptive systems operate through the cycle of variable schemata, accidental circumstances, phenotypic consequences, and feedback of selection pressures to the competition among schemata. They explore a huge space of possibilities, with opening to higher level of complexity and to the generation of new types of complex adaptive systems.
Posted by Xiao at 05:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Fortune Cookie from the China Village on Solano Avenue
Posted by Xiao at 12:13 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 03, 2004
A Walk on Tilden
The bay is on one side and a reservoir is on the other. A circle of rocks is where you are, on the ridge of Tilden peaks.
Posted by Xiao at 09:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack