NetDynam 2.0

Ran across a reference in a google alert to Grooveshark. It’s a portal for assembling playlists of songs and then making a widget on-the-fly to embed on a web page. I’ve used seeqPOD to accomplish the same in the past. I use podBean’s modest free set up to host my record, In Khorasan.

(June 4 – I put the podcast widget below the fold.)

The Grooveshark interface and procedural is much more capable than that of seeqPOD. With this greater complexity comes a bit of dodginess too. The home page is grotesque. Rebuild home page is offered as a toggle.

As for Grooveshark’s contribution to the slow rolling demise of the old line record business? It has its part to play. seeqPOD draws mp3 sources from around the net. I’m not sure, but it seems Grooveshark is storing or caching mp3s on their servers. If so, like Pandora, it’s likely headed for a court test sometime in the future.

The discrete nature of songs and their ubiquity lends itself to this kind of assembly. It would be neat to mash up text sources.
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I’m experimenting with a widget that embeds a Diigo rss for bookmarks. In turn, those bookmarks are part of a netdynam account created today. I’ll share the user info. The bookmarks are public.

The capability I am investigating is what is needed to support posting interesting content on the sidebar; content that doesn’t earn a full post in the eyes of the author. There are other alternatives too, because WordPress provides lots of widgetized capabilities via 3rd party widgets.

I chose Diigo for several reasons. I have been using it since before its beta test years ago. More to the point of capability, like most social bookmarking sets, Diigo allows one to annotate and tag links in real time, while one is at the target page of interest, and do this through a nicely implemented browser toolbar java script. Diigo’s implementation has always seemed very solid.

I’ve demoted the toy tag cloud temporarily and elevated the Diigo rss. I’ll probably try some other options.

I’ve been pondering a 3 column theme too. Not any particular one, but, sketching out how the structure of usability might benefit better defined clusters.

(Admins will receive the Diigo user info tomorrow.)

I noticed this site has a Lemke article on ‘downward causation’.

In cases where levels of organisation = levels of abstraction, there can’t be causation (up or down) between levels.

I once heard a (serious) talk discussing whether:
‘the atoms move the fan’ (upward) or ‘the fan moves the atoms’ (downward).

This is nonsensical because the fan and the atoms are not distinct entities that can act on each other. They are the same matter-energy occupying the same region of space-time, modelled at different levels of abstraction.

One reason we have this confusion is that the grammar realises composition the same way it realises accompaniment. eg

(1) a dog has legs
(composition: ‘dog’ and ‘legs’ at different levels of abstraction)

(2) a dog has fleas
(accompaniment: ‘dog’ and ‘fleas’ at same level of abstraction)

My last week in Helsinki, and I’m not ready to go. Spring is in full swing,  and everything looks different.  The temperatures are up in the mid-teens and there’s a warm earthy scent in the air. People are out  on the streets in droves, the sidewalk cafes are like vases full of multi-coloured flowers, the heads and arms of many persons chatting away and gesticulating in the sun. The day is long and the afternoons seem to go on forever. When we go indoors to have an evening meal, it is still sunny when we emerge, the crisp creamy afternoon light on the façade of the building still picking out every bump and colour when we come out  again an hour or so later. The horizon is still light even at 11.30pm—daylight saving has no real meaning here, except maybe to keep pace with the rest of Europe. The horizon with the night sky behind it reminds me of a Magritte painting.

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Some photos in and around E’s flat where we’ve stayed for the past 4 months…

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Below are some observations made about 2 months previously, just before the advent of the big slush here in Helsinki. In the intervening time I had intended to flesh them out, to write more, to add some photographic extras—but in fact other events intervened, events which distracted me from this purpose and lead me astray. A trip to Sweden, and two to the UK for starters.

Various social encounters also attracted me away from the computer, always in the back of my mind I would imagine coming home and settling down to write or post, but instead I’d collapse slightly exhausted in front of the tv, there to drop off to sleep. And so, small pieces of Helsinki e-critures were left to moulder waiting for their moment in the web-log sun while time as usual marched on.

What follows are pieces on three themes close to my heart: public transport, food, and toilet and bathing facilities. They appear in that order, but this is not to say anything about their relative importance in my life, nor is there any suggestion that these three thematic strands are in any way related.

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Extracting meaning and coherence from diverse streams of information on noisy channels is a challenge that has been examined in detail.

Heuer emphasizes both the value and the dangers of mental models, or mind-sets. In the book’s opening chapter, entitled “Thinking About Thinking,” he notes that:

[Analysts] construct their own version of “reality” on the basis of information provided by the senses, but this sensory input is mediated by complex mental processes that determine which information is attended to, how it is organized, and the meaning attributed to it. What people perceive, how readily they perceive it, and how they process this information after receiving it are all strongly influenced by past experience, education, cultural values, role requirements, and organizational norms, as well as by the specifics of the information received.

This process may be visualized as perceiving the world through a lens or screen that channels and focuses and thereby may distort the images that are seen.  To achieve the clearest possible image . . . analysts need more than information . . . They also need to understand the lenses through which this information passes. These lenses are known by many terms— mental models, mind-sets, biases, or analytic assumptions.

In essence, Heuer sees reliance on mental models to simplify and interpret reality as an unavoidable conceptual mechanism for intelligence analysts—often useful, but at times hazardous. What is required of analysts, in his view, is a commitment to challenge, refine, and challenge again their own working mental models, precisely because these steps are central to sound interpretation of complex and ambiguous issues.

This quote is from the introduction to the  book “Psychology of Intelligence Analysis” by Richards J. Heuer, Jr.,  available in it’s entirety from the CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence Library.

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