What I Like about Making Maps: Visual Super Powers are Required No Better Time to Claim Our Superpowers I have always loved the world of superheroes and have passed untold hours amid the vivid art and fantastical story lines of my favorite comic books. Naturally, I’ve developed a lifelong fascination with superpowers, and in my work life, I wield the superpower of mapmaking to confront the true nemesis of organizations everywhere: complexity. In today’s world, it is increasingly difficult to attain the clarity needed for organizational decision-making. What is so special about maps? We call visual information mapping a “lite” methodology. We have found that single-page maps can be useful learning tools for complex scenarios such as installing new IT platforms, launching new products, or even explaining how missions get formed at National Geographic. What We’ve Learned by Making Maps ● Maps are tactile ● Maps are persistent ● Maps lead to outcomes Mapmaking Is Inherently a Collaborative, Risk-Reducing, Problem-Solving Process Maga's 2011 Strategy Placemat
Get Involved You Are the Evolution Happening Now! The Evolver Network is looking for people who realize that our current civilization threatens the continuity of life on our planet, and who feel inspired to build a beautiful and durable alternative. By joining with us, you become part of a global community collaborating to raise awareness of the dangers we face, and enact healthy solutions to these problems. The solutions are out there: All that is required is the collective will to discover and enact them. Click here to find your local Spore. What’s Involved in Starting a Spore? We are looking to spread Spores far and wide! Sporeganizing is for the most part a volunteer position, so setting up a Spore is really dependent on your own time and energy. You may want to have a look at the Facebook pages of some active spores to see what kinds of things they are doing: Evolver Baltimore Evolver Indianapolis Evolver Bay Area Evolver Asheville There are a few requirements of sporeganizers: Interns and Volunteers
University - The effective collective: Grouping could ensure animals find their way in a changing environment Posted January 31, 2013; 03:30 p.m. by Morgan Kelly, Office of Communications For social animals such as schooling fish, the loss of their numbers to human activity could eventually threaten entire populations, according to a finding that such animals rely heavily on grouping to effectively navigate their environment. Princeton University researchers report in the journal Science that collective intelligence is vital to certain animals' ability to evaluate and respond to their environment. These results should prompt a close examination of how endangered group or herd animals are preserved and managed, said senior researcher Iain Couzin, a Princeton professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. "Processes that increase group fragmentation or reduce population density may initially appear to have little influence, yet a further reduction in group size may suddenly and dramatically impact the capacity of a species to respond effectively to their environment," Couzin said. Back To Top
Spore Locations Find the Others Evolver Spores take place in more than 40 cities in the US and abroad. Click on your Spore in the list below to meet the community, find out about upcoming events, or get involved with the organizing team. If there is not a Spore in your area, email Spores@EvolverNetwork.org to start one up. Check out a list of previous event themes or upcoming ones. Calgary Ottawa Toronto Vancouver Victoria Devon Edinburgh London Vienna Yorkshire Sydney Wellington Asheville Atlanta Austin Baltimore Bloomington Boise Boston Boulder Buffalo Burlington, CT Chicago Columbia, MO Columbus Denver Flint Fort Collins Indianapolis Lansing, MI Lexington Long Beach Long Island Los Angeles Maimi New York North Bay Omaha Orlando Philadelphia Pittsburgh Portland, OR Puget Sound (Seattle) , WA Puna, Hawaii Rio Rancho Saint Louis Salt Lake City San Francisco/Bay Area Santa Fe Temecula Washington, DC Wilkes-Barre
Crowd Computing and The Synaptic Web A couple of days ago David Gelernter – a known Computer Science Visionary who famously survived an attack by the Unabomber – wrote a piece on Wired called ‘The End of the Web, Search, and Computer as We Know It’. In it, he summarized one of his predictions around the web moving from a static document oriented web to a network of streams. Nova Spivack, my Co-founder and CEO at Bottlenose, also wrote about this in more depth in his blog series about The Stream. I’ve been interested in the work of David Gelernter for quite some time and thought this might be a good time to revisit some of his previous predictions. In 1999 he wrote a piece on Edge called ‘The Second Coming – A Manifesto’. Crowd Computing 18. In order to make software and apps more intelligent, there is a vast amount of computation that needs to be done. Bottlenose Crowd Computing Layer New Metaphors 28. Not only is this true for the ‘file’ metaphor, it is even more true for the ‘page’ metaphor. The Synaptic Web 41.
Six Degrees - CNT 2013 at CSE, IITKgp The social networking sites like Facebook, Friendster and MySpace are essentially complex systems induced by friendship links. These networks are a rich source of personal information populated by the users. So one of the things which could be of interest is discovering clusters or communities within this network. Identifying these communities in social networks help us get insight into the system and helps us understand how network topology and function affect each other. According to me, there is no difference between them. We could say that clustering algorithms used generally work very well on data which is dense in nature. Let us say we use one of the good community detection algorithms for the network we are analyzing and we end up with a partition. It is basically a technique which combines partitions from different set of partitions available for the same network in order to have a single partition which exploits the information of different partitions. Example Results References
HRV Study in Saudi Arabia Produces Exciting Results Every cell in our bodies is bathed in an external and internal environment of fluctuating invisible magnetic forces that can affect virtually every cell and circuit in biological systems. Therefore, it should not be surprising that numerous physiological rhythms in humans and global collective behaviors are not only synchronized with solar and geomagnetic activity, but disruptions in these fields can create adverse effects on human health and behavior. That excerpt and another at the end of this article are from The Global Coherence Initiative: Creating a Coherent Planetary Standing Wave. That is a report published last year about the Global Coherence Initiative and the 2010 GCI Interconnectedness Study. Physiologically Based Study Produces ‘Profound’ Results "Now comes new data from a study conducted in Saudi Arabia in 2012 that mirrors and strongly supports findings from the Interconnectedness Study," says HeartMath Director of Research Dr. Saudi Arabian Women Participate in HRV Study
mmunism, welfare state – what's the next big idea? | George Monbiot Most of the world's people are decent, honest and kind. Most of those who dominate us are inveterate bastards. This is the conclusion I've reached after many years of journalism. Writing on Black Monday, as the British government's full-spectrum attack on the lives of the poor commences, the thought keeps returning to me. "With a most inhuman cruelty, they who have put out the people's eyes reproach them of their blindness." Two days later, benefit payments for the poorest will be cut in real terms. So the age-old question comes knocking: why does the decent majority allow itself to be governed by a brutal, antisocial minority? But I've come to believe that there's also something deeper at work: that most of the world's people live with the legacy of slavery. Any movement that seeks to challenge the power of the elite needs to ask itself what it takes to shake people out of this state. A century and more ago the idea was communism. I discussed land value taxation in a recent column.