вторник, 10 сентября 2013 г.
пятница, 25 января 2013 г.
Toward A New View of Law and Society: Complexity And Power In The Legal System
Contrary to its aim of promoting justice and equality before the law, in practice the American legal system increasingly favors moneyed and politically influential groups. The capture of Congress by campaign donors and lobbyists, accelerated by the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United, is one prominent example, but this power dynamic is ubiquitous in political and legal institutions. This favoritism for the powerful can be best understood as deeply intertwined with, and even an inevitable result of, increasing complexity in legal institutions.
Corruption is a dynamic process. There is a symbiotic relationship between the legal system and powerful, regulated interests, which mutually benefit as they grow more complex and all-encompassing. The symbiosis between law and power is fractal in nature and can be found at all levels of hierarchy in the legal system.
First, laws enable new, partially unprestatable, strategy spaces for actors within the system. Creative actors seek adjacent-possible actions within the prevailing legal environment to achieve their desired ends. Naturally, these innovations produce unanticipated behaviors.
The unintended consequences are addressed through the creation of new laws, that again create partially unprestatable strategy spaces which are predictably further manipulated by powerful interests. This can create closed loops of mutually reinforcing laws and actions that is the basis of power structures.
Ironically, this self-defeating cycle ensures both the defeat of lawmaker's intentions and empowerment of the lawmakers. When regulated entities creatively evade the intent of legislation, it should represent a failure on the part of lawmakers. Instead, it empowers them to draft even more laws to remedy the defects of the old ones.
For example, drug prohibition laws empower police to intervene in drug trafficking networks. Increasing police intervention, however, raises the risk of selling drugs and consequently the price. This attracts more drug dealers and entices them to sell even more drugs. Even worse, prohibition spurs the development of new, dangerous compounds that evade existing laws, as well as more potent, concentrated forms of existing drugs for easier concealment and transport. These new societal problems alarm the community and inspire the passage of even harsher laws.
Police authority (and power derived from it) and prisons flourish with the drug trade in a mutually dependent relationship. As Milton Friedman once quipped, "If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true."
Second, the positive feedback loop between regulator and regulated re-enforces itself at a systemic level as vast networks of laws generate increasing legal complexity. This emergent complexity creates its own partially unprestatable strategy spaces that benefit knowledgeable, repeat actors over their less sophisticated counterparts.
During litigation, for example, parties with deep pockets exploit various laws to bury their opponents in discovery and file flurries of pre-trial motions to force dismissal of the suit or a favorable settlement. Large corporations also often prefer complex regulatory schemes because they shut out potential competitors by raising the barriers to entry. While small farmers struggle to comply with extensive FDA, EPA and USDA regulations, for example, large agribusinesses hire armies of attorneys to navigate these regulations. Due to its increasing complexity, legal regulation often empowers the very same entities that it intends to disempower.
Third, this co-evolution of law and action does far more than produce partially unprestatable and, hence, exploitable strategy spaces for regulated entities. Crucially, it enables moneyed interests to influence the substance of laws, their implementation or positions of power within the legal system. The establishment of government institutions in order to regulate economic activity, for example, creates the opportunity for corporate interests to infiltrate regulatory bodies and thus "capture" these institutions.
This capture may be overt and intentional, or arise naturally from the incestuous relationship created by the "revolving door" between industry and regulatory bodies. Either way, a cursory examination of American administrative agencies, regulatory bodies and even presidential cabinets and Congress shows that both Democratic and Republican administrations have been thoroughly infiltrated by industry-sympathetic technocrats. Perhaps this corruption is a feature, not a bug. Money loves power and self-reinforcing loops of legal regulation and their enabled strategy spaces concentrate both.
This model of the evolution of law as a co-evolutionary process challenges the prevailing view that policy makers can control legal outcomes. The idea that we can control assumes that our actions are both knowable beforehand by those seeking legal control and also cause whatever outcomes are produced. But the legal system exists in an unbounded state space where the possibilities enabled by legal institutions cannot be predicted ahead of time.
Laws that were created for specific reasons can be used for myriad other purposes based on unprestatable societal changes, which then influence the directionality of the laws in richly cross-connected and self-reinforcing feedback loops. As the legal system expands its diversity, specialization and redundancy, increased complexity benefits groups best able to exploit its burgeoning ecological niches.
The language of cause and effect must be replaced with enablement of partially unprestatable strategy spaces that jointly form self-reinforcing power structures.
The use of law to regulate social behavior can radically alter the power structures embedded within society. We should carefully consider the possibility that, as the legal system covers a greater breadth of human conduct, the laws serve as adjacent-possible niches for the benefit of the powerful and to the detriment of the powerless.
Caryn Devins is a third year, Law Review member of the Duke Law School
Почему до сих пор вялотекущая война за передел мира не переходит в глобальную фазу?
Я уже писал, что война за передел мира уже идёт. Вялотекущая. Пока в фазе серии локальных войн колониального типа. Но война мировая, с уже почти мировым охватом. На двух континентах.
Если кто помнит историю, то Вторая Мировая война тоже началась не в Европе. А с вторжения Италии в Абиссинию. (Кажется, в 1936 году?) И вторжение Японии в Китай в 1937году.
Почему война до сих пор не перешла в глобальный ядерный конфликт?
Ну, во первых, из-за страха перед ядерным оружием и неприемлемым ущербом от ответного удара. Пока не существует средств гарантированно уничтожить средства ответного удара или парировать ответный удар средствами ПРО-ПВО. США усиленно создают средства уничтожения вражеского оружия ответного удара и средства ПРО. Но средствам обезоруживания мешают быть эффективными российские расстояния. Гарантировано поразить наши межконтинентальные ракеты (прежде, чем оно взлетит), оружием, запущенным с любой точки Земли пока не возможно. А ядерное оружие в космосе пока не размещено, насколько известно. И ПРО пока не совершенна. И средства её преодоления пока превышают возможности ПРО.
А во вторых, и это самое главное, пока не создана предвоенная геополитическая конфигурация.
В геополитике самая устойчивая конфигурация – треугольник сил. Когда существуют три стороны потенциального конфликта. Каждая может начать войну с каждой, но в случае начала войны выигрывает та сторона из трёх, которая не воюет. Или вступит в войну последней.
А вот когда третья сторона конфликта исчезает, сливаясь с одной из сторон, или разваливаясь из-за внутреннего конфликта, тогда геополитическая конфигурация становится неустойчивой. Выигрывает та сторона из двух, которая первая подготовится и нанесёт удар.
Вторая Мировая война перешла в глобальную фазу тогда, когда одна две силы из трёх слились в одну.
Сейчас тоже имеется три стороны:
1) НАТО и примкнувшие к ней по договору взаимопомощи между третьими странами, не входящими в НАТО и США (сателлиты типа Японии или Кореи).
2) Китай.
3) И Россия с её мощным ядерным потенциалом, доставшимся ей от СССР. Который вполне может нажатием одной кнопки уничтожить США.
Когда останется две стороны конфликта из трёх, глобальная война станет неизбежной.
Две из них могут остаться в двух случаях: или стороны заключат союз, или одна из сторон развалится.
Кто первый из двух оставшихся сторон подготовится, тот и жахнет. Внезапно. Предлог найдётся.
Примечание: Меня в своё время учили, что такое внезапность в современной ядерной войне.
Стратегической внезапности достигнуть не удастся. Все (Элиты. Не народ.) будут знать, что война начнётся. Борьба в предвоенный период будет вестись ради тактической внезапности. Если кому то из потенциальных противников покажется, что враг готовится, он тут же начнёт мобилизацию. В современных условиях мобилизационные мероприятия означают не только и не столько призыв резервистов, но прежде всего рассредоточение населения из городов по сёлам, рассредоточение арсеналов, самолётов, ракет,кораблей, воинских контингентов и вообще всего. А также приведение оружия в боеспособное состояние.
Кто первый закончит эти мероприятия, тот и нажмёт кнопку. Вот это и будет тактической внезапностью, которая даст стратегический перевес. Победит тот, кто сохранит больший людской, промышленный и военный потенциал после обмена ядерными ударами.
Сейчас военные союзы не закреплены. И даже не формируются. Многоугольник пока не превратился в «двухугольник». И Китай, и Россия, и США не закрыли себе возможность военного союза с любым из двух других сил. Сейчас идёт между ними идёт стратегическое маневрирование с целью максимально ослабить каждого игрока(именно в связи с этим США и проводит политику развала России) и лишить его стимула заключать союз с чужой стороной. И при этом как можно больше отшелушить у каждой из сторон её союзников. Реальных и потенциальных. При этом все три державы активно наращивают свой стратегический потенциал с целью разрушить треугольник путём достижения абсолютного военного превосходства одной из сторон. Впрочем, вряд ли достижимого.
При этом и Китай, и США, и Россия оставляют себе открытой дверь для заключения союза с любой стороной треугольника.
Пока сохраняется такое положение, геополитический расклад не изменится. Глобальной войны не будет. Борьба за передел мира будет вестись путём локальных конфликтов, цветных революций и государственных переворотов с возможным последующим вторжением одной из сил в страну, охваченную хаосом, с целью утирания слезинки ребёнка с помощью крылатых воинов добра.
Что мы и наблюдаем.
И в современных условиях России выгодно, чтобы геополитический треугольник сохранялся как можно дольше. Выгодно убедительно пугать каждую из сторон возможностью заключения союза с другой стороной, не заключая этого самого союза ни с кем из сторон.
Пока, вроде, так и действуют.
А там время покажет, куда кривая выведет.
четверг, 10 января 2013 г.
Sci-Finance: The Great Cybernetic Experiment, Part 2
Before you start to think this all sounds too far-fetched, let’s connect some of these concepts back to one of the most famous descriptions of the market: a beauty contest.
The Keynesian beauty contest is the view that much of investment is driven by expectations about what other investors think, rather than expectations about the fundamental profitability of a particular investment. John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the 20th century, believed that investment is volatile because investment is determined by the herd-like “animal spirits” of investors. Keynes observed that investment strategies resembled a contest in a London newspaper of his day that featured pictures of a hundred or so young women. The winner of the contest was the newspaper reader who submitted a list of the top five women that most clearly matched the consensus of all other contest entries. A naïve strategy for an entrant would be to rely on his or her own concepts of beauty to establish rankings. Consequently, each contest entrant would try to second guess the other entrants’ reactions, and then sophisticated entrants would attempt to second guess the other entrants’ second guessing. And so on. Instead of judging the beauty of people, substitute alternative investments. Each potential entrant (investor) now ignores fundamental value (i.e., expected profitability based on expected revenues and costs), instead trying to predict “what the market will do.” [eg, news, charts, etc.] The results are (a) that investment is extremely volatile because fundamental value becomes irrelevant, and (b) that the most successful investors are either lucky or masters at understanding mob psychology
Sci-Finance: The Great Cybernetic Experiment, Part 2
Peak Prosperity: Daily Digest 1/5
Sci-Finance: The Great Cybernetic Experiment
Sci-Finance: The Great Cybernetic Experiment (adam)
Right off the bat, the first thing we should recognize is the following: big banking and finance have fully merged with cutting edge math, science, and technology—the very reason those “who yield more power than any potentate in the history of the world” are getting their PhDs from MIT and not your typical business school.
Related:
Complexity and the Emergent Market
Pandora's Black Box
A.I.: The New God of Economics, Banking, and Finance
Peak Prosperity: Daily Digest 12/29
четверг, 20 декабря 2012 г.
UNDERSTANDING IS A POOR SUBSTITUTE FOR CONVEXITY (ANTIFRAGILITY)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The point we will be making here is that logically, neither trial and error nor "chance" and serendipity can be behind the gains in technology and empirical science attributed to them. By definition chance cannot lead to long term gains (it would no longer be chance); trial and error cannot be unconditionally effective: errors cause planes to crash, buildings to collapse, and knowledge to regress.
NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB, essayist and former mathematical trader, is Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at NYU’s Polytechnic Institute. He is the author the international bestseller The Black Swan and the recently published Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. (US: Random House; UK: Penguin Press)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Edge Bio
UNDERSTANDING IS A POOR SUBSTITUTE FOR CONVEXITY (ANTIFRAGILITY)
Something central, very central, is missing in historical accounts of scientific and technological discovery. The discourse and controversies focus on the role of luck as opposed to teleological programs (from telos, "aim"), that is, ones that rely on pre-set direction from formal science. This is a faux-debate: luck cannot lead to formal research policies; one cannot systematize, formalize, and program randomness. The driver is neither luck nor direction, but must be in the asymmetry (or convexity) of payoffs, a simple mathematical property that has lied hidden from the discourse, and the understanding of which can lead to precise research principles and protocols.
MISSING THE ASYMMETRY
The luck versus knowledge story is as follows. Ironically, we have vastly more evidence for results linked to luck than to those coming from the teleological, outside physics—even after discounting for the sensationalism. In some opaque and nonlinear fields, like medicine or engineering, the teleological exceptions are in the minority, such as a small number of designer drugs. This makes us live in the contradiction that we largely got here to where we are thanks to undirected chance, but we build research programs going forward based on direction and narratives. And, what is worse, we are fully conscious of the inconsistency.
The point we will be making here is that logically, neither trial and error nor "chance" and serendipity can be behind the gains in technology and empirical science attributed to them. By definition chance cannot lead to long term gains (it would no longer be chance); trial and error cannot be unconditionally effective: errors cause planes to crash, buildings to collapse, and knowledge to regress.
The beneficial properties have to reside in the type of exposure, that is, the payoff function and not in the "luck" part: there needs to be a significant asymmetry between the gains (as they need to be large) and the errors (small or harmless), and it is from such asymmetry that luck and trial and error can produce results. The general mathematical property of this asymmetry is convexity (which is explained in Figure 1); functions with larger gains than losses are nonlinear-convex and resemble financial options. Critically, convex payoffs benefit from uncertainty and disorder. The nonlinear properties of the payoff function, that is, convexity, allow us to formulate rational and rigorous research policies, and ones that allow the harvesting of randomness.
Figure 1- More Gain than Pain from a Random Event. The performance curves outward, hence looks "convex". Anywhere where such asymmetry prevails, we can call it convex, otherwise we are in a concave position. The implication is that you are harmed much less by an error (or a variation) than you can benefit from it, you would welcome uncertainty in the long run.
OPAQUE SYSTEMS AND OPTIONALITY
Further, it is in complex systems, ones in which we have little visibility of the chains of cause-consequences, that tinkering, bricolage, or similar variations of trial and error have been shown to vastly outperform the teleological—it is nature's modus operandi. But tinkering needs to be convex; it is imperative. Take the most opaque of all, cooking, which relies entirely on the heuristics of trial and error, as it has not been possible for us to design a dish directly from chemical equations or reverse-engineer a taste from nutritional labels. We take hummus, add an ingredient, say a spice, taste to see if there is an improvement from the complex interaction, and retain if we like the addition or discard the rest. Critically we have the option, not the obligation to keep the result, which allows us to retain the upper bound and be unaffected by adverse outcomes.
This "optionality" is what is behind the convexity of research outcomes. An option allows its user to get more upside than downside as he can select among the results what fits him and forget about the rest (he has the option, not the obligation). Hence our understanding of optionality can be extended to research programs — this discussion is motivated by the fact that the author spent most of his adult life as an option trader. If we translate François Jacob's idea into these terms, evolution is a convex function of stressors and errors —genetic mutations come at no cost and are retained only if they are an improvement. So are the ancestral heuristics and rules of thumbs embedded in society; formed like recipes by continuously taking the upper-bound of "what works". But unlike nature where choices are made in an automatic way via survival, human optionality requires the exercise of rational choice to ratchet up to something better than what precedes it —and, alas, humans have mental biases and cultural hindrances that nature doesn't have. Optionality frees us from the straightjacket of direction, predictions, plans, and narratives. (To use a metaphor from information theory, if you are going to a vacation resort offering you more options, you can predict your activities by asking a smaller number of questions ahead of time.)
While getting a better recipe for hummus will not change the world, some results offer abnormally large benefits from discovery; consider penicillin or chemotherapy or potential clean technologies and similar high impact events ("Black Swans"). The discovery of the first antimicrobial drugs came at the heel of hundreds of systematic (convex) trials in the 1920s by such people as Domagk whose research program consisted in trying out dyes without much understanding of the biological process behind the results. And unlike an explicit financial option for which the buyer pays a fee to a seller, hence tend to trade in a way to prevent undue profits, benefits from research are not zero-sum.
THINGS LOVE UNCERTAINTY
What allows us to map a research funding and investment methodology is a collection of mathematical properties that we have known heuristically since at least the 1700s and explicitly since around 1900 (with the results of Johan Jensen and Louis Bachelier). These properties identify the inevitability of gains from convexity and the counterintuitive benefit of uncertainty ii iii. Let us call the "convexity bias" the difference between the results of trial and error in which gains and harm are equal (linear), and one in which gains and harm are asymmetric ( to repeat, a convex payoff function). The central and useful properties are that a) The more convex the payoff function, expressed in difference between potential benefits and harm, the larger the bias. b) The more volatile the environment, the larger the bias. This last property is missed as humans have a propensity to hate uncertainty.
Antifragile is the name this author gave (for lack of a better one) to the broad class of phenomena endowed with such a convexity bias, as they gain from the "disorder cluster", namely volatility, uncertainty, disturbances, randomness, and stressors. The antifragile is the exact opposite of the fragile which can be defined as hating disorder. A coffee cup is fragile because it wants tranquility and a low volatility environment, the antifragile wants the opposite: high volatility increases its welfare. This latter attribute, gaining from uncertainty, favors optionality over the teleological in an opaque system, as it can be shown that the teleological is hurt under increased uncertainty. The point can be made clear with the following. When you inject uncertainty and errors into airplane ride (the fragile or concave case) the result is worsened, as errors invariably lead to plane delays and increased costs —not counting a potential plane crash. The same with bank portfolios and fragile constructs. But it you inject uncertainty into a convex exposure such as some types of research, the result improves, since uncertainty increases the upside but not the downside. This differential maps the way. The convexity bias, unlike serendipity et al., can be defined, formalized, identified, even on the occasion measured scientifically, and can lead to a formal policy of decision making under uncertainty, and classify strategies based on their ex ante predicted efficiency and projected success, as we will do next with the following 7 rules.
Figure 2 The Antifragility Edge (Convexity Bias). A random simulation shows the difference between a) the process with convex trial and error (antifragile) b) a process of pure knowledge devoid of convex tinkering (knowledge based), c) the process of nonconvex trial and error; where errors are equal in harm and gains (pure chance). As we can see there are domains in which rational and convex tinkering dwarfs the effect of pure knowledge iv.
SEVEN RULES OF ANTIFRAGILITY (CONVEXITY) IN RESEARCH
Next I outline the rules. In parentheses are fancier words that link the idea to option theory.
1) Convexity is easier to attain than knowledge (in the technical jargon, the "long-gamma" property): As we saw in Figure 2, under some level of uncertainty, we benefit more from improving the payoff function than from knowledge about what exactly we are looking for. Convexity can be increased by lowering costs per unit of trial (to improve the downside).
2) A "1/N" strategy is almost always best with convex strategies (the dispersion property): following point (1) and reducing the costs per attempt, compensate by multiplying the number of trials and allocating 1/N of the potential investment across N investments, and make N as large as possible. This allows us to minimize the probability of missing rather than maximize profits should one have a win, as the latter teleological strategy lowers the probability of a win. A large exposure to a single trial has lower expected return than a portfolio of small trials.
Further, research payoffs have "fat tails", with results in the "tails" of the distribution dominating the properties; the bulk of the gains come from the rare event, "Black Swan": 1 in 1000 trials can lead to 50% of the total contributions—similar to size of companies (50% of capitalization often comes from 1 in 1000 companies), bestsellers (think Harry Potter), or wealth. And critically we don't know the winner ahead of time.
Figure 3-Fat Tails: Small Probability, High Impact Payoffs: The horizontal line can be the payoff over time, or cross-sectional over many simultaneous trials.
3) Serial optionality (the cliquet property). A rigid business plan gets one locked into a preset invariant policy, like a highway without exits —hence devoid of optionality. One needs the ability to change opportunistically and "reset" the option for a new option, by ratcheting up, and getting locked up in a higher state. To translate into practical terms, plans need to 1) stay flexible with frequent ways out, and, counter to intuition 2) be very short term, in order to properly capture the long term. Mathematically, five sequential one-year options are vastly more valuable than a single five-year option.
This explains why matters such as strategic planning have never born fruit in empirical reality: planning has a side effect to restrict optionality. It also explains why top-down centralized decisions tend to fail.
4) Nonnarrative Research (the optionality property). Technologists in California "harvesting Black Swans" tend to invest with agents rather than plans and narratives that look good on paper, and agents who know how to use the option by opportunistically switching and ratcheting up —typically people try six or seven technological ventures before getting to destination. Note the failure in "strategic planning" to compete with convexity.
5) Theory is born from (convex) practice more often than the reverse (the nonteleological property). Textbooks tend to show technology flowing from science, when it is more often the opposite case, dubbed the "lecturing birds on how to fly" effect v vi. In such developments as the industrial revolution (and more generally outside linear domains such as physics), there is very little historical evidence for the contribution of fundamental research compared to that of tinkering by hobbyists. vii Figure 2 shows, more technically how in a random process characterized by "skills" and "luck", and some opacity, antifragility —the convexity bias— can be shown to severely outperform "skills". And convexity is missed in histories of technologies, replaced with ex post narratives.
6) Premium for simplicity (the less-is-more property). It took at least five millennia between the invention of the wheel and the innovation of putting wheels under suitcases. It is sometimes the simplest technologies that are ignored. In practice there is no premium for complexification; in academia there is. Looking for rationalizations, narratives and theories invites for complexity. In an opaque operation to figure out ex ante what knowledge is required to navigate is impossible.
7) Better cataloguing of negative results (the via negativa property). Optionality works by negative information, reducing the space of what we do by knowledge of what does not work. For that we need to pay for negative results.
Some of the critics of these ideas —over the past two decades— have been countering that this proposal resembles buying "lottery tickets". Lottery tickets are patently overpriced, reflecting the "long shot bias" by which agents, according to economists, overpay for long odds. This comparison, it turns out is fallacious, as the effect of the long shot bias is limited to artificial setups: lotteries are sterilized randomness, constructed and sold by humans, and have a known upper bound. This author calls such a problem the "ludic fallacy". Research has explosive payoffs, with unknown upper bound —a "free option", literally. And we have evidence (from the performance of banks) that in the real world, betting against long shots does not pay, which makes research a form of reverse-bankingviii .
i Jacob, F. , 1977, Evolution and tinkering. Science, 196(4295):1161–1166.
ii Bachelier, L. ,1900, Theorie de la spéculation, Gauthiers Villard.
iii Jensen, J.L.W.V., 1906, “Sur les fonctions convexes et les inégalités entre les valeurs moyennes.” Acta Mathematica 30.
iv Take F[x] = Max[x,0], where x is the outcome of trial and error and F is the payoff. ∫ F(x) p(x) dx ≥ F(∫ x p(x)) , by Jensen's inequality. The difference between the two sides is the convexity bias, which increases with uncertainty.
v Taleb, N., and Douady, R., 2013, "Mathematical Definition and Mapping of (Anti)Fragility",f.. Quantitative Finance
vi Mokyr, Joel, 2002, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
vii Kealey, T., 1996, The Economic Laws of Scientific Research. London: Macmillan.
viii Briys, E., Nock,R. ,& Magdalou, B., 2012, Convexity and Conflation Biases as Bregman Divergences: A note on Taleb's Antifragile.
http://www.edge.org/
Death by Algorithm: West Point Code Shows Which Terrorists Should Disappear First
An infamous 1998 al-Qaida press conference, featuring Osama bin Laden (center). Photo: AP
Paulo Shakarian has an algorithm that might one day help dismantle al-Qaida — or at least one of its lesser affiliates. It’s an algorithm that identifies which people in a terror network really matter, like the mid-level players, who connect smaller cells with the larger militant group. Remove those people, either by drone or by capture, and it concentrates power and authority in the hands of one man. Remove that man, and you’ve broken the organization.
The U.S. military and intelligence communities like to congratulate themselves whenever they’ve taken out a terrorist leader, whether it’s Osama bin Laden or Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, the bloodthirsty chief of al-Qaida in Iraq. Shakarian, a professor at West Point’s Network Science Center who served two tours as an intelligence officer in Iraq, saw first-hand just how quickly those militant networks regrew new heads when the old ones were chopped off. It became one of the inspirations for him and his colleagues at West Point to craft an algorithm that could truly target a terror group’s weak points.
“I remember these special forces guys used to brag about how great they were at targeting leaders. And I thought, ‘Oh yeah, targeting leaders of a decentralized organization. Real helpful,’” Shakarian tells Danger Room. Zarqawi’s group, for instance, only grew more lethal after his death. “So I thought: Maybe we shouldn’t be so interested in individual leaders, but in how whole organizations regenerate their leadership.”
These days, American counterterror policy is even more reliant on taking out individual militants. How exactly those individuals are picked for drone elimination is the matter of intense debate and speculation. The White House reportedly maintains a “matrix” of the most dangerous militants. Social-network analysis — the science of determining the connections between people — almost certainly plays a role where those militants appear on that matrix.
It’s clearly an imperfect process. Hundreds of civilians have been killed in the drone strikes, along with thousands of militants. And while the core of al-Qaida is clearly weakened, Obama administration officials will only talk in the vaguest terms about when the war against the terror group might some day come to an end.
In a paper to be presented later this month before the Academy of Science and Engineering’s International Conference on Social Informatics, Shakarian and his West Point colleagues argue for a new way of using social-network analysis to target militants. Forget going after the leader of an extremist group, they say. At least right away.
“If you arrest that guy, the number of connections everyone else has becomes more similar. They all become leaders. You force that terror group to become more decentralized. You might be making it harder to defeat these organizations,” Shakarian says.
This chart shows how West Point’s “GREEDY_FRAGILE” algorithm renders a network brittle by removing relatively few nodes.
The second illustration depicts a terror network, as the algorithm centralizes it — and makes it easier to break. Photos: West Point
Instead, counterterrorists should work to remove militant lieutenants in such a way that terror leaders actually become morecentral to their organizations. That’s because a more centralized network is a more fragile one. And a fragile network can ultimately be smashed, once and for all.
The West Point team — which includes professors Devon Callahan, Jeff Nielsen, and Tony Johnson – wrote up a simple (less than 30-line) algorithm in Python they named GREEDY_FRAGILE. It looks for nodes that can be taken out to “maximize network-wide centrality” — concentrate connectivity in the terror leader, in other words. The professors tested GREEDY_FRAGILE against five data sets. the first is the social network of the al-Qaida members involved in the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Dar es Salaam; the other four are derived from real-world terror groups, but anonymized for academic use.
“In each of the five real-world terrorist networks that we examined, removal of only 12% of nodes can increase the network-wide centrality between 17% and 45%,” the West Point authors note in their paper. In other words, taking out just a few mid-level players make the whole organization much, much more fragile.
Interestingly, GREEDY_FRAGILE works even when the exact shape of the network is unknown — or when certain nodes can’t be targeted, for political or intelligence reasons. In other words, it takes into account some real-world complications that counterterrorists might face.
Now, this is just a lab experiment. No actual terrorists were harmed in the writing of this paper. The algorithm only looks at “degree” centrality — the number of ties a node has. It doesn’t examine metrics like network “closeness,” which finds the shortest possible path between two nodes. Nor does it take into account the different roles played by different nodes — financier, propagandist, bomb-maker. That’s why the work is funded by the Army Research Office, which handles the service’s most basic R&D efforts.
What’s more, the authors stress that their network-breaking techniques might not be a good fit for every counterterror plan. “It may be desirable to keep certain terrorist or insurgent leaders in place to restrain certain, more radical elements of their organization,” they write.
In fact, the authors strongly hint that they’re not necessarily on board with the Obama administration’s kill-don’t-capture approach to handling terror networks.
“We would like to note that the targeting of individuals in a terrorist or insurgent network does not necessarily mean to that they should be killed,” Shakarian and his colleagues write. “In fact, for ‘shaping operations’ as the ones described in this paper, the killing of certain individuals in the network may be counter-productive. This is due to the fact that the capture of individuals who are likely emergent leaders may provide further intelligence on the organization in question.”
That sort of intelligence may suddenly be at a premium again. From the Pentagon chief on down, the U.S. is increasingly worried about al-Qaida’s spread into unfamiliar regions like Mali and its association with new, shadowy militant groups in Libya. GREEDY_FRAGILE, if it works like Shakarian hopes, might show the counterterrorists which militants to target — and which so-called leaders to leave alone. For now.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/12/paulos-alogrithm/
Big Brother 101
Instant Expert:
By some counts, government snoops are sifting through data from a billion or more phone calls and online messages daily. What might they be looking for?
- WHO: The National Security Agency and other intelligence groups
- WHAT: Processing and connecting data from phone calls, e-mails, online postings and financial transactions
- HOW: Using social-network analysis (the study of how people interact) and data-mining techniques (such as pattern-recognition algorithms) first used for artificial intelligence and consumer marketing
- WHY: To help uncover the structure of potential terrorist groups-far too secretive and dispersed to locate with traditional detection techniques-and decode their intentions
Continue http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2006-08/big-brother-101
суббота, 6 октября 2012 г.
Experiments illuminate how order arises in the cosmos
Plasmas stream from the top and bottom to form large-scale electromagnetic fields.
(Phys.org)—One of the unsolved mysteries of contemporary science is how highly organized structures can emerge from the random motion of particles. This applies to many situations ranging from astrophysical objects that extend over millions of light years to the birth of life on Earth.
The surprising discovery of self-organized electromagnetic fields in counter-streaming ionized gases (also known as plasmas) will give scientists a new way to explore how order emerges from chaos in the cosmos. This breakthrough finding was published online in the journal Nature Physics on September 30.
"We've created a model for exploring how electromagnetic fields help organize ionized gas or plasma in astrophysical settings, such as in the plasma flows that emerge from young stars," said lead author Nathan Kugland, a postdoctoral researcher in the High Energy Density Science Group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). "These fields help shape the flows, and likely play a supporting role alongside gravity in the formation of solar systems, which can eventually lead to the creation of planets like the Earth."
"This observation was completely unexpected, since the plasmas move so quickly that they should freely stream past each other," explained Hye-Sook Park, team leader and staff physicist at LLNL. Park added that "laser-driven plasma experiments can study the microphysics of plasma interaction and structure formation under controlled conditions."
Studying astrophysics with laboratory experiments can help answer questions about astrophysical objects that are far beyond the reach of direct measurements. This research is being carried out as part of a large international collaboration, Astrophysical Collisionless Shock Experiments with Lasers (ACSEL), led by LLNL, Princeton University, Osaka University and Oxford University, with many other universities participating.
More information: "Self-organized Electromagnetic Field Structures in Laser-Produced Counter-Streaming Plasmas" Nature, Sept. 30, 2012 www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys2434.html
пятница, 30 марта 2012 г.
Энтропию заставили помогать в настройке музыкальных инструментов
 | Отличие настройки (красным) от стандартной (зеленый). Иллюстрация автора исследования |
Энтропию заставили помогать в настройке музыкальных инструментов
Еще в начале прошлого века было обнаружено, что электронная настройка не пригодна для таких сложных инструментов, как, например, пианино - даже если каждая нота настроена точно, инструмент все равно звучит как расстроенный. В 1938 году в журнале Journal of the Acoustical Society of America появилась статья, в которой диссонанс объяснялся отсутствием созвучия обертонов различных нот.
При настройке пианино настройщики избавляются от этого дефекта вручную, подтягивая или опуская звучание некоторых нот. В рамках новой работы Хинрихсен предложил метод математического расчета натяжек. Этот расчет производится следующим образом - исходя из некоторых формул, пианино настраивается и для его спектра вычисляется энтропия Шеннона - величина, которая характеризует информационную непредсказуемость системы.
Затем в настройку по определенной методологии вносятся некоторые случайные возмущения. Для полученного спектра считается энтропия. Если она не больше прежнего значения, то изменения принимаются. В противном случае пианино возвращается к предыдущему звучанию. Работа останавливается после того, как несколько раз подряд случайными возмущениями энтропию уменьшить не удается.
Используя свой метод, Хинрихсен получил настройку, которая очень похожа на правильную настройку пианино. По словам самого исследователя, его метод может пригодиться для создания электронных систем настройки. В частности, его случайный поиск может использоваться как дополнение к уже существующим системам, анализирующим обертона в звучании отдельно взятого инструмента.
Ссылки по теме
- Ученые призвали к самостоятельной эвакуации во время пожара – Lenta.ru, 27.03.2012
Ученые призвали к самостоятельной эвакуации во время пожара
 | Зависимость скорости выхода от количества людей и их стремления следовать за толпой. Иллюстрация авторов исследования |
Ученые призвали к самостоятельной эвакуации во время пожара
В рамках работы ученые моделировали поведение группы людей, покидающих некий коридор через пару выходов. Они полагали, что их виртуальные подопытные находятся в условиях низкой видимости. В подобных условиях оказываются люди, например, покидающие задымленный зал во время пожара.
Исследователи прогоняли модель с разным количеством людей (от 100 до 10 тысяч), меняя параметр, который определял склонность отдельного человека следовать за толпой. При нулевом значении параметра ученые получали множество точек, находящихся в режиме случайного блуждания, в то время как при положительных значениях люди объединялись в достаточно большие группы.
Анализ динамики позволил ученым установить, что в случае, когда люди объединяются в группы, средняя скорость, с которой они покидают коридор, снижается. По словам исследователей, это происходит из-за заторов, возникающих у выходов. При этом ученые говорят, что их метод, вполне вероятно, не учитывает некоторые эффекты - например, разногласия внутри образовавшихся групп и разногласия между разными группами.
Подобные работы по моделированию поведения толпы в настоящее время являются довольно популярной сферой деятельности для многих ученых. Например, в 2009 году в Physical Review E появилась работа японских физиков, которые придумали эффективный способ эвакуации. Как оказалось, процесс идет лучше, если с одной стороны от двери находится препятствие.
Ссылки по теме
- Физики придумали самый эффективный способ выгонять людей – Lenta.ru, 25.08.2009
- Эконофизики предсказали дату падения китайского рынка – Lenta.ru, 24.08.2009
- Математики рассчитали последствия нападения зомби – Lenta.ru, 18.08.2009
- Ученые создали математическую модель революций – Lenta.ru, 14.07.2009
- Ученый составил карту распространения финансового кризиса – Lenta.ru, 14.01.2009
http://lenta.ru/news/2012/03/27/crowd/
понедельник, 13 февраля 2012 г.
The Collapse of Chaos или чудеса самоорганизации
(Это не я - это все знаменитая французская кухня!)
Тут наложилось съесть какие-то фрикадельки с пюре, так вот, эти фрикадельки - не знаю как по-французски они называются, размером с маленький мандарин - будучи вчера вечером пережеванными и за ночь переваренными, сегодня утром, на выходе, вполне сохранили свою первоначальную форму, цвет, и я даже подозреваю, что и свой оригинальный вкус...
Часть 1-я: Жажда отклика, или Зачем люди идут в социальные сети
  | Жажда отклика, или Зачем люди идут в социальные сети Что приводит людей в социальные сети? Неустранимая и неутолимая вампирская жажда ответа. Человек нуждается в реакции окружающих, поэтому медиа будущего станут платформой, предоставляющей сервисы отклика. А газеты умрут. С этим ничего не поделаешь, считает эксперт Андрей Мирошниченко. Читайте интервью, которое он дал участникам Сообщества E-xecutive.ru.Далее |
Часть 2-я: Рантье XXI века: владельцы облаков
 | Рантье XXI века: владельцы облаков Знаете ли вы, в скольких базах данных собрана информация о вас? Что известно о пользователях интернет-компаниям? Почему эти сведения хранятся в «облаках», кому они могут быть предложены и с какой целью? Чей это актив? Читайте вторую часть интервью медиаэксперта Андрея Мирошниченко E-xecutive.ru.Далее |
воскресенье, 5 февраля 2012 г.
On The Inadequacy Of The Empiricist Tradition In Western Philosophy
I find myself beginning to realize that the philosophy that I studied, from Descartes to Hume to Kant to Russell to logical positivism and the early Wittgenstein, and perhaps the late Wittgenstein of the Investigations, is seriously inadequate.
It starts with Descartes who conceived of his task to be a lone mind who would doubt all that could be doubted to find that which could not be doubted about what that single mind can know about the world. The emphasis is on "knowing."
Then we come to Hume of the Scottish Enlightenment, essaying to understand "Human Understanding." How can we know the world? By sense impressions, welded together in "bundles," in which the "self," or "I," itself disappears as just a bundle of perceptions: roughly, "all I am aware of is a jumble of sequential awareness," I am aware of no 'I'."
Kant seeks the conditions of knowing in the inner conditions of the mind, categories of perception such as space and time. He considers the phenomenal world we can know and behind it the noumenal world we can never know.
Russell brings us sense data such as "red here" and the tone, "A flat now," then sense data statements, "For Kauffman, 'red here' is true," and hopes that his recently developed predicate calculus working on sense data statements will allow philosophers to build a maximally reliable way of knowing the world, constructed out of sense data statements linked by logic, including quantifiers such as "there exists" and "for all."
To early Wittgenstein's famous "Tractatus": "The world is the collection of true facts" about that world.
On to logical positivism: "Only those statements (about the world) are meaningful which are empirically verifiable," which, ironically drove Western philosophy, yet whose founding statement just noted is not itself empirically verifiable.
The "empiricist tradition" sought and seeks to elucidate how we know the world.
What is wrong?
In the beginning, 5 billion years ago, no life existed on the forming planet. Either life started here or arrived from elsewhere. Let's assume the former. As a concrete working hypothesis let's take collectively autocatalytic sets of polymers like peptide sets, RNA sets, or DNA sets, all realized experimentally, in some bounding membrane like a liposome. For example Gonen Ashkenazi has a 9 peptide (small protein) collectively autocatalytic set reproducing happily in his Ben Gurion University lab.
So what?
So existing as a self reproducing system in a universe that is non-ergodic, (not repeating) above the level of atoms, where most complex things will never exist, is the first condition of life. "Knowing" is not yet a condition.
But that protocell typically lived in an environment with toxic and food molecules. By hook or crook, say by semipermiable membranes, the protocell "discriminated" poison from food and admitted only the latter, thanks to natural selection on evolving protocells.
We now have the rudiments of agency and knowing. The protocell evolved to do something, i.e., discriminate and admit food and block poison. This discrimination required rudimentary "knowing" and hence "semantics", without invoking consciousness.
What the empiricist tradition entirely misses is living existence and agency. Without the existence of the protocell, there is no evolutionary point in knowing. Without agency there is no use in knowing. Suppose, per contra, that the protocell could discriminate poison from food, but could not selectively block the first and admit the second. It would fail natural selection's harsh sieve.
Without being and doing, no knowing could have emerged in evolution. The empiricist tradition misses this central issue, thus is deeply inadequate.
In summary of this first point: Without being and agency, knowing is both pointless and would not arise in evolution.
Not only do we not know what will happen, we often do not even know what can happen.
But the empiricist tradition runs into a still deeper problem. In past posts I have discussed Darwinian preadaptations, where we cannot prestate their emergence in evolution. This has led my colleagues, senior mathematician, Giuseppe Longo, his post doctoral fellow, Mael Montevil, both of the Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, and myself to submit a paper also posted on ArXiv, entitled, "No entailing laws, but enablement in the evolution of the biosphere."
This article is radical. It claims that no law entails the evolution of the biosophere. The grounds for this include the fact that we cannot prestate the ever newly emerging relevant variables in evolution that selection reveals, therefore the very phase space of evolution changes in ways we cannot know beforehand, so we can write no laws of motion for the evolving biosphere, nor, lacking knowledge of the boundary conditions, could we integrate those laws of motion even were to to have them.
These deep issues mean that often not only do we not know what will happen, as when we flip a fair coin 10,000 times and do not know how many heads will come up, but here know all the possible outcomes, so can construct a probability measure. In evolution we do not even know what can emerge in the Adjacent Possible of the becoming of evolution, so can construct no probability measure for we do not know the sample space of all the possibilities, thus not only do we not know what will happen, we do not even know what can happen.
The empiricist tradition is ignorant of this profound limitation to knowledge "beforehand" as the biosphere "becomes."
Even pragmatism, which seeks to unify knowing and doing, falls prey to this last issue: We often do not even know what can happen. Pragmatism takes no account of this feature of our living world.
Hume famously argued that one cannot deduce "ought" from "is." This is the naturalistic fallacy. But Hume is thinking only of a knowing subject, firmly in the empiricist tradition started by Descartes. Hume ignores agency.
I wrote an entire book, Investigations, attempting to define agency. My try: "A molecular autonomous agent is a self-reproducing system able to do at least one work cycle."
A bacterium swimming up a glucose gradient for food is an agent, reproduces and the rotating flagella is just one of the work cycles the bacterium does. All living cells fulfill the above definition.
But once there is agency, ought enters the universe. If the bacterium is to successfully get food, it "ought" to e.g., swim up the sugar gradient. Without attributing consciousness, one cannot have "actings" without "doing them wisely or poorly," hence ought.
In short, the empiricist tradition, in ignoring agency, wishes to block us from "ought," when we cannot have doing without "ought." The root of the issue is "doing" versus merely "happening," a topic in a near future post.
We need to rethink many problems in philosophy to take account of the issues above.
13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR
Comments
Vlad Piaskovskiy (0nothing1) wrote:
1
Stuart wrote:
"Without attributing consciousness, one cannot have "actings" without "doing them wisely or poorly," hence ought."
It seems to me that this phrase is very doubtful. Permissible to say - and I like it! - That living systems possess the innate knowing what for them is good and bad; but this is not consciousness yet. Consciousness - is something more; consciousness involves conflict.
vendredi 3 février 2012 12:40:52
Recommend (0)
Report abuse
Vlad Piaskovskiy (0nothing1) wrote:
2
And this conflict seems to be something more than just a competition between two (or more) concurrent stimuli: in this case, at first glance, there is no need for a particularly complex organization. I think it is the conflict between the immediate response to stimulus (what Stuart called knowing) and the reaction that takes into account the developments in the long run - long run adaptation ("in the long run," of course, is relative, if we're talking about the first, primitive consciousness). Ie the basis of the second trend is the ability to forecast and modeling of the world (note also that consciousness is not reducible to win of the second trend, but to their parity).
But it does mean that the long term prognosis can supress immediate response to a stimulus that Stuart called knowing - ie, this trend is against life itself (as the embodiment of creativity and diversity)!
vendredi 3 février 2012 12:40:20
Recommend (0)
Report abuse
Vlad Piaskovskiy (0nothing1) wrote:
3.
Life without death would destroy itself - if the death is sudden to disappear, it would be a disaster, and we ourselves would have to be urgently re-invent it! Stuart, you say yourself that the world exists because everything has its constraints, then what constrains your creativity and diversity?
Stuart wrote:
"If our religions from the Axial Age 2500 years ago or so, were sufficient, then what say we to the fact that in WWI, German and British soldiers in trenches 150 meters apart prayed to the SAME GOD OF LOVE. 2000 years after Christ taught us to love, we kill."
Stuart, do not you think that this is a sign that your theory does not account for something, and except for of creativity and diversity god includes the force that constrains them (negates)?
vendredi 3 février 2012 12:39:33
Recommend (0)
Vlad Piaskovskiy (0nothing1) wrote:
1
I want to dwell on what might mean knowing, which, according to Stuart, is an inherent property of all living things. Here was an excellent article:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2010/03/the_evolution_of_symbolic_lang.html
In a nutshell the essence:
"Most organisms communicate, but humans are unique in communicating via symbolic language. This entails relationships between signifiers (e.g. words) and what's signified (e.g. objects or ideas), where what's special is the construction of a system of relationships among the signifiers themselves, generating a seemingly unlimited web of associations, organized by semantic regularities and constraints, retrieved in narrative form, and enabled by complex memory systems.
Humans are thus a symbolic species: symbols have literally changed the kind of biological organism we are."
there was another article on this topic:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2010/03/the_iself_and_our_symbolic_spe.html
samedi 4 février 2012 11:45:02
Recommend (0)
Report abuse
Vlad Piaskovskiy (0nothing1) wrote:
2
So, this view seems to be not true. And Homo sapiens is just the only one capable through awareness (understanding) to de-symbolize perception of the world. Another thing, thanks to the development of speech, only humans have symbols that got autonomy to such an extent that separated from the objects which signify and have themselves become objects.
Think about it: how a primitive organism can know what he should eat? It apparently does not see plants, as we see them, it sees food. All its perception consists of such features: food, a partner for mating, the danger, and so on. It is sort of mosaic pattern, and the more perfect the nervous system, the more completely the perception - mosaic is becoming finer, and the picture of the world becomes more adequate.
samedi 4 février 2012 11:43:41
Recommend (0)
Report abuse
Vlad Piaskovskiy (0nothing1) wrote:
3
The thinking by symbols is typical for some psychiatric patients, and such a condition means a return to a more primitive, archaic form of perception. Interestingly, on the one hand, understanding means the destruction of old infantile features: instead of "grass" we begin to distinguish between different types of plants, and eventually realize that every single plant is unique. On the other hand, we are also creating new, "scientific" features, which more accurately reflect the reality (eg, species, etc.) and these new features have the property that the theory destroying facts - Newton's laws are a good example. I want to say that from this point of view understanding does not imply any new information, but just we have the kind of information transformation.
samedi 4 février 2012 11:42:57
Recommend (0)
Report abuse
Vlad Piaskovskiy (0nothing1) wrote:
4
It is also interesting that symbols, according to Jung, is the content of our collective unconscious, then what in this case means "collective"? If this is, in particular, the same as Alva has in mind when he says:
"Mind is not inside us; it is rather, the dynamic activity of the whole, embodied, environmentally situated human being."
than "the redness of red" is really all the same for all of us. On the other hand, if we assume that individual thinking is our internal speech, it arose as a result of communication. I do not know what that means, it's just my speculation ...
samedi 4 février 2012 11:42:21
Recommend (0)
среда, 18 января 2012 г.
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION? - Richard Dawkins
Redundancy Reduction and Pattern Recognition
Deep, elegant, beautiful? Part of what makes a theory elegant is its power to explain much while assuming little. Here, Darwin's natural selection wins hands down. The ratio of the huge amount that it explains (everything about life: its complexity, diversity and illusion of crafted design) divided by the little that it needs to postulate (non-random survival of randomly varying genes through geological time) is gigantic. Never in the field of human comprehension were so many facts explained by assuming so few. Elegant then, and deep—its depths hidden from everybody until as late as the nineteenth century. On the other hand, for some tastes natural selection is too destructive, too wasteful, too cruel to count as beautiful. In any case, coming late to the party as ever, I can count on somebody else choosing Darwin. I'll take his great grandson instead, and come back to Darwin at the end.
Horace Barlow FRS is the youngest grandchild of Sir Horace Darwin, Charles Darwin's youngest child. Now a very active ninety, Barlow is a member of a distinguished lineage of Cambridge neurobiologists. I want to talk about an idea that he published in two papers in 1961, on redundancy reduction and pattern recognition. It is an idea whose ramifications and significance have inspired me throughout my career.
The folklore of neurobiology includes a mythical 'grandmother neurone', which fires only when a very particular image, the face of Jerry Lettvin's grandmother, falls on the retina (Lettvin was a distinguished American neurobiologist who, like Barlow, worked on the frog retina). The point is that Lettvin's grandmother is only one of countless images that a brain is capable of recognising. If there were a specific neurone for everything we can recognise—not just Lettvin's grandmother but lots of other faces, objects, letters of the alphabet, flowers, each one seen from many angles and distances, we would have a combinatorial explosion. If sensory recognition worked on the 'grandmother principle', the number of specific recognition neurones for all possible combinations of nerve impulses would exceed the number of atoms in the universe. Independently, the American psychologist Fred Attneave had calculated that the volume of the brain would have to be measured in cubic light years. Barlow and Attneave independently proposed redundancy reduction as the answer.
Claude Shannon, inventor of Information Theory, coined 'redundancy' as a kind of inverse of information. In English, 'q' is always followed by 'u', so the 'u' can be omitted without loss of information. It is redundant. Wherever redundancy occurs in a message (which is wherever there is nonrandomness), the message can be more economically recoded without loss of information (although with some loss in capacity to correct errors). Barlow suggested that, at every stage in sensory pathways, there are mechanisms tuned to eliminate massive redundancy.
The world at time t is not greatly different from the world at time t-1. Therefore it is not necessary for sensory systems continuously to report the state of the world. They need only signal changes, leaving the brain to assume that everything not reported remains the same. Sensory adaptation is a well-known feature of sensory systems, which does precisely as Barlow prescribed. If a neurone is signalling temperature, for example, the rate of firing is not, as one might naively suppose, proportional to the temperature. Instead, firing rate increases only when there is a change in temperature. It then dies away to a low resting frequency. The same is true of neurones signalling brightness, loudness, pressure and so on. Sensory adaptation achieves huge economies by exploiting the non-randomness in temporal sequence of states of the world.
What sensory adaptation achieves in the temporal domain, the well-established phenomenon of lateral inhibition does in the spatial domain. If a scene in the world falls on a pixellated screen, such as the back of a digital camera or the retina of an eye, most pixels see the same as their immediate neighbours. The exceptions are those pixels which lie on edges, boundaries. If every retinal cell faithfully reported its light value to the brain, the brain would be bombarded with a massively redundant message. Huge economies can be achieved if most of the impulses reaching the brain come from pixel cells lying along edges in the scene. The brain then assumes uniformity in the spaces between edges.
As Barlow pointed out, this is exactly what lateral inhibition achieves. In the frog retina, for example, every ganglion cell sends signals to the brain, reporting on the light intensity in its particular location on the surface of the retina. But it simultaneously sends inhibitory signals to its immediate neighbours. This means that the only ganglion cells to send strong signals to the brain are those that lie on an edge. Ganglion cells lying in uniform fields of colour (the majority) send few if any impulses to the brain because they, unlike cells on edges, are inhibited by all their neighbours. The spatial redundancy in the signal is eliminated.
The Barlow analysis can be extended to most of what is now known about sensory neurobiology, including Hubel and Wiesel's famous horizontal and vertical line detector neurones in cats (straight lines are redundant, reconstructable from their ends), and in the movement ('bug') detectors in the frog retina, discovered by the same Jerry Lettvin and his colleagues. Movement represents a non-redundant change in the frog's world. But even movement is redundant if it persists in the same direction at the same speed. Sure enough, Lettvin and colleagues discovered a 'strangeness' neurone in their frogs, which fires only when a moving object does something unexpected, such as speeding up, slowing down, or changing direction. The strangeness neurone is tuned to filter out redundancy of a very high order.
Barlow pointed out that a survey of the sensory filters of a given animal could, in theory, give us a read-out of the redundancies present in the animal's world. They would constitute a kind of description of the statistical properties of that world. Which reminds me, I said I'd return to Darwin. In Unweaving the Rainbow, I suggested that the gene pool of a species is a 'Genetic Book of the Dead', a coded description of the ancestral worlds in which the genes of the species have survived through geological time. Natural selection is an averaging computer, detecting redundancies—repeat patterns—in successive worlds (successive through millions of generations) in which the species has survived (averaged over all members of the sexually reproducing species). Could we take what Barlow did for neurones in sensory systems, and do a parallel analysis for genes in naturally selected gene pools? Now that would be deep, elegant and beautiful.
http://www.edge.org/response-detail/2825/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanationсреда, 11 января 2012 г.
Is The Possible Ontologically Real?
I adduce four lines of evidence for a radical claim: Perhaps the "possible" is ontologically real and the world consists of two realms, "Possibles" and "Actuals."
Empedocles, in ancient Greece, claimed that what was real in the universe was what was Actual. Aristotle flirted with "potentia." Alfred North Whitehead in Process and Reality proposed that Possibles gave rise to Actuals which in turn gave rise to Possibles: P -> A -> P -> A. Few take Whitehead's proposal seriously. Yet maybe he is right.
Read Moreпонедельник, 29 августа 2011 г.
Вслед за Ливией «управляемый хаос» грозит России
Стратегия расчленения России вступила в горячую фазу, предостерегает армянский политик
«Варшавская Декларация (Варшавская декларация Евросоюза по случаю Европейского дня памяти жертв тоталитарных режимов, которую приняли 23 августа в Варшаве министры юстиции стран ЕС. – Прим. KM.RU) создает благодатную почву для демонтажа таких организаций, как СНГ, ШОС, ЕврАзЭС, Таможенный союз России, Казахстана и Белоруссии и, конечно, Военно-политический союз Организации Договора о коллективной безопасности». С таким предостережением выступил глава армянской партии «Национальное единение», председатель правления общественной организации «Северная перспектива» Арташес Гегамян.
Ведь не секрет, пишет он в материале, который публикует ИА REGNUM, что цементирующей основой духовной близости народов государств – членов СНГ является чувство родства и кровной причастности к поколению, которое ценой колоссальных жертв и лишений сумело спасти Европу от коричневой чумы фашизма. Грядущие же за ним поколения воспитывались в духе сынов и внуков победителей единой страны – спасительницы Старого континента. А вот реализация Варшавской Декларации приведет к тому, что души детей и внуков более чем 600 000 армян – участников Великой Отечественной войны, половина которых не вернулась с фронта, будут в смятении.
Не секрет, продолжает Арташес Гегамян, что уже более 20 лет их мозги промывают якобы идеями «демократии» и «либерализма», а на самом деле меняют их психологию, которая унаследована ими от их отцов и дедов, психологию народа – победителя фашизма. Более того, стремятся навязать молодому поколению синдром покаяния, психологию оправдывающегося поколения за то, что, как это записано в Варшавской Декларации, «Европа страдала под властью тоталитарных режимов (читай, СССР. – А.Г.), независимо от того, был ли это коммунизм, национальный социализм...».
В случае с Республикой Армения расчет прост, поясняет политик. Армянский народ, по логике инициаторов Варшавской Декларации, который испытал ужасы геноцида в Османской империи в 1915-1923 гг. и который в годы Второй мировой войны в составе СССР опять-таки ценой колоссальных жертв добился победы, оказывается, должен покаяться за то, что «Европа страдала под властью тоталитарных режимов», а наши родители и мы не только не бунтовали против этого режима, но своим посильным и честным трудом приумножили мощь и богатство страны, нашей великой Родины.
Это – не ностальгия по советским временам и тем более по маразматическим и бездарным лидерам СССР конца 1980-х гг., специально оговаривается армянский политик. Это – всего лишь осмысление того факта, что уже в современных условиях ведется крайне продуманная системная работа по навязыванию России, как справедливо отметил Модест Колеров в своей вышеуказанной статье, «Нюрнберга против России» (так было озаглавлено интервью главного редактора ИА REGNUM, опубликованное на днях информагентством, на которое ссылается Арташес Гегамян. – Прим. KM.RU). При этом остальным странам СНГ уготована роль холуев – разоблачителей преступлений тоталитаризма.
Существует ли связь, задается далее политик вопросом, между принятой 23 августа с. г. Варшавской Декларацией с событиями, которые имеют место быть в Ливии и Сирии? Какие последствия Декларация может иметь для постсоветских государств, охваченных программой ЕС «Восточное партнерство», в которой задействованы Украина, Белоруссия, Молдавия, Грузия, Азербайджан и Армения?
Чтобы понять подлинную суть происходящего в Ливии и Сирии, он приводит выдержки из интервью Пола Крейга Робертса, бывшего заместителя министра финансов в администрации Рональда Рейгана, которое тот дал телекомпании Press TV. Арташес Гегамян напоминает, что Пола Крейга Робертса сам Рейган называл «настоящим отцом рейганомики». Итак, в вышеуказанном интервью Пол Крейг Робертс заявляет: «Мы хотим свергнуть Каддафи в Ливии и Асада в Сирии, потому что хотим выгнать Китай и Россию из Средиземноморья». Дальше – больше. «Какой наш интерес в протестах в Сирии?», – задает вопрос Пол Крейг Робертс и отвечает на него так: «За протестами стоят американцы. Мы заинтересованы в этом, потому что у русских есть военно-морская база, которая обеспечивает им присутствие в Средиземном море. Так что, вы видите, Вашингтон вмешался в Ливии и прилагает все больше усилий для вмешательства в Сирии, потому что мы хотим избавиться от русских и китайцев».
Судя по сообщениям самых разных источников, режим Каддафи обречен, отмечает Арташес Гегамян. Удастся ли Национальному переходному совету (НПС) сохранить единую Ливию и не дать распасться на три государства в соответствии с границами исторически существовавших областей: Триполитанию на северо-западе, Киренаику на северо-востоке и Феццан (Феззан) – на юге, покажет время. Установится ли мир на земле Ливии, которая по своей площади (1 759 540 кв. км, из них 90% занимают пустыни) является четвертой страной в Африке и 17-й в мире? Это – тема для отдельного анализа, пишет автор.
Бесспорно одно, подчеркивает он, что после последних событий в Ливии основное внимание мировых центров силы будет сосредоточено на Сирии. В случае дальнейшей эскалации напряженности в Сирии неизбежно вовлечение во внутренний конфликт этой страны соседней с ней Турции, хотя бы под предлогом приостановления надвигающейся «гуманитарной катастрофы», связанной с массовым пересечением беженцами сирийско-турецкой границы. Определенная роль будет отведена и курдскому населению, и не только Сирии, но и Ирана, и Турции. Естественно, эта роль предполагается быть дестабилизирующей. И все это будет происходить в приграничных с Арменией государствах Турции, Иране, а также в Сирии, в которой вот уже около 100 лет проживает более чем 200-тысячная армянская диаспора. Не приходится сомневаться в том, что «политика управляемого хаоса», которая успешно реализуется под фирменным названием «арабская весна», может быть распространена как на Армению, так и на Азербайджан, предостерегает Арташес Гегамян.
Если же при этом, пишет он далее, не без участия внешних сил будет одновременная дестабилизация ситуации в Армении и Азербайджане, то это приведет к созданию положения «управляемого хаоса» и взорвет ситуацию в Южном Кавказе. А там на очереди, глядишь, уже центральноазиатские государства – члены СНГ. И, следуя логике последних событий в Северной Африке, такая политика мировых центров силы будет реализовываться при одновременных попытках дестабилизировать обстановку в самой России. Россия в союзе с ослабленными государствами – членами ОДКБ будет иметь все меньше и меньше возможностей противостоять действиям западных стратегов, которые устанавливают «новый мировой порядок», основанный на «управляемом хаосе».
К достижению этой же задачи, скорее всего, нацелена Варшавская Декларация от 23 августа 2011 года. С одной стороны, заложенные в Декларации положения в случае их реализации неизбежно будут разрыхлять основы единства российского общества. С другой стороны, через программу «Восточного партнерства» авторы Варшавской Декларации будут вовлекать партнеров России по ОДКБ (Армения, Белоруссия) и СНГ (Азербайджан, Украина, Молдавия) в работу по сбору материалов, обличающих «преступную деятельность тоталитарного СССР». В то же самое время соответствующая пропагандистская машина на этом фоне развяжет очередной виток информационной войны, преследующей цель нагнетания антироссийских, русофобских настроений. Это, в свою очередь, по принципу сообщающихся сосудов, незамедлительно перекинется в саму Россию. Ведь не секрет, что сегодня в РФ проживают и обеспечивают не только свое, но и существование своих родственников в СНГ многомиллионные армянская, азербайджанская, грузинская, молдавская, таджикская диаспоры.
Можно привести и другие веские аргументы, подтверждающие факт проведения целенаправленной и эшелонированной работы по размыванию основ государственности России и его союзников по ОДКБ, однако думается, что вышеизложенное позволяет сделать вывод: стратегия расчленения России уже вступила в горячую фазу, заключает Арташес Гегамян.
Темы: Территориальные и финансовые претензии к России со стороны республик бывшего СССР, Отношения России с республиками бывшего СССР, Геополитическая стратегия Запада в отношении республик б.СССР
Источник: KMnews