Collaborative Knowledge Distribution and Problem Solving Networks
The modern world is faced with some truly astronomical problems, having to do with the environment, the distribution of resources among its residents, and of course the ability our species has developed for self-destruction. Fortunately, we are also equipped with some unbelievably powerful tools. Cloud computing and social media are still blooming technological industries whose full potentials are as yet no where near being realized. Lets go over what there is though.
The PageRank algorithm itself is a great example of math being used behind the scenes to everyone's great benefit. This brilliant application of Markov Chains was one of the most recent great leaps towards human beings attaining the ability to make decisions based on the collective knowledge of our entire species. One could almost call it the best thing since written language (Note Baidu is about the same age, those Chinese, and who knows what else is out there). Google of course didn't stop there though. Google Drive, Doc, Calendar, and of course Gmail (obviously they didn't invent email but it needs to be mentioned, might as well be here), are all services that revolutionize our workflow, letting us with people from miles away (we might as well throw Google Hangouts in here, though yes Skype came first), and access our documents anywhere with an internet connection. Google's search is still probably the most influential however, connecting people with information, people, and businesses they would otherwise never know about, enjoy, or make use of.
#KnowledgeDistribution
Wikipedia
Next up comes the online encyclopedia of everything ever that anyone has ever talked about, or so it attempts to be. It seems to do a pretty wonderful job of it though, and the partnership between Google and Wikipedia is one of the few things that gives me hope for the future of humankind. Wikipedia is the current paradigm for crowd sourced knowledge aggregation. The way the encyclopedia is interconnected with links supports the way psychologists believe knowledge is structured in the human mind (Not brain, mind. We are talking about behavioral data here). A main point of support from the realm of psychology has to do purely with motivation. People tend to start digging around on Wikipedia out of real interest. Studies of attention tend to show that as we might expect, people are better able to recall information if they were genuinely interested in what they were reading in the first place. This comes back to Google, and especially to the Google-Wikipedia alliance. For the readers at home - never stop Googling things when they interest you, never tell yourself you are wasting time on Wikipedia. I'm not entirely sure there really is such a thing.
Reddit
#KnowledgeDistribution
#KnowledgeRepresentation
After discussing that enormous body of information that is simply there for the reading, we should probably discuss the one that lives and breathes. Well, one of the digital ones that is. Up-voting, down-voting, link karma, and comment karma are all ideas that fill me with heady thoughts of distributed cognition. We will have to come back to this after we discuss logical structures and the current under-use of the idea of isomorphism in social media.
#KnowledgeDistribution
Facebook and Twitter
While we are on the topic of social media, lets talk about the sites everyone actually uses, or that most people use. This is how a lot of people, if not the majority of my generation at least, get their news. I personally think that it is much more efficient than televised news at least. Newspapers do tend to have more investigative reporting and less cat videos, but even these are more systematically biased than the aggregation of the things everyone you know personally finds important. The Facebook activist can be seen as a lazy bystander sitting at his or her computer instead of standing in a street protest somewhere, but is that really necessary? The first point of activism is almost always to spread awareness about something that may be wrong with our society, or about something that could be improved upon. This we can do through Facebook and Twitter, and it really can be meaningful. That isn't to mention the ease with which petitions can be created and signed over the internet. I have yet to discuss Twitter specifically, but don't worry. It'll come again up soon.
#KnowledgeDistribution
HashTagging
This phenomenon is actually very mathematical to me. It conveys a very simple, widely interpretable "is related to" relationship between some concept or media object and the label of some other concept or media object. These links can be treated as edges in a graph where the concepts (network files; the Graphs) and objects (text, links, images, video, applications) are vertices.
#KnowledgeRepresentation
#Ok,enoughhashtagging.
Wolfram
The world's first large attempt at a computational knowledge engine that I know of, WolframAlpha is impressive, and Mathematica is so useful for so many things. I don't understand why they don't work with Wikipedia, but whatever. Their natural language programming project will be useful as well. It is young, and seems to have a lot of potential. They already have libraries of code to deal with different types of social network data. While we are talking about problem solving networks though,
Yahoo Answers and Cha-Cha
From every text book physics problem to relationship advice, these human powered question answering services answer a lot of questions. They are also faster than Wolfram's buggy free version at giving you useful information, especially from a phone. The idea of forums in general, and this goes back to Reddit, is incredibly powerful and still underutilized in the political domain. Domain experts have valuable, targeted information to offer in response to reasonably well formed linguistic queries, and once some questions have been answered once, that answer can be easily reused. The challenge is to store them in a sensible way so that they may be retrieved when necessary. These types of systems could be incorporated with knowledge computation systems like the ones Wolfram is working on to great effect. It may even become reasonable to approach larger complex problems from this direction. However, new was to structure information and represent knowledge might be helpful.
Mind and Concept Mapping
Mind maps are more and more frequently being used by professionals to structure their thought process and workflow, and to create demonstrations and present information. Concept mapping on the other hand seems to interest more psychologists and linguists.
CMAPS and IHMC
Researchers at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition head a large collaborative online concept mapping project, and are connected with the engineering of the Semantic Web, as it is called. They do other interesting things too, like teaching robots to make use of spoken natural language (http://www.ihmc.us/Research/human_machine.php), and using our understanding of human cognition to most advantageously integrate human interaction into complex automated decision-making processes (http://www.ihmc.us/Research/knowledge_discovery.php). The CMaps interface comes along with great features, like the ability for multiple users to simultaneously edit a concept map, and a built in similarity test with several options that compares any two concept maps.
XMind, FreeMind, MindMeister, etc.
The mind mapping game seems to always have been more about creating visual displays of information that they were about attempting to encode complex contextual information in way that can be retrieved by natural language queries. The structures that can be made in CMaps can also be made in programs like XMind, and I think that these mind mapping companies have done a good job of making the interface flexible and pretty.
The 3rdMind
When I originally had this idea I had never heard of mind mapping software or CMaps, or the semantic web. What it amounts to though is combination of those and a lot of the ideas I have already been describing, with one added little feature. The ability to send messages between any two nodes. An object-oriented database would be formed that could be populated through crowd-sourced knowledge, pulled right from Yahoo Answers and Wikipedia themselves, preferably. Users would be nodes themselves, or indexed by nodes anyway. This approach would allow for personal knowledge databases to be compiled and accessed by others.
Local Solutions
One truth that I think new technologies could exploit, is that local problems often have local answers that can be addressed locally but informed by large, complex data that regards systems more or less holistically, on different levels one could say. Systems for rewarding and making use of people with good ideas could be more prevalent than they are now on a casual level. This is getting unfocused though, and I think I will pick up here sometime later.
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