Earl Mardle's Journal - February 25th 2003

You are viewing

rlmrdl's journal
Log in Create a LiveJournal Account Learn more

Explore LJ: Life Entertainment Music Culture News & Politics Technology

Earl Mardle's Journal
Tuesday, February 25th, 2003

Date:	2003-02-25 00:29
Subject:	Complexity Theory and Co-opetition at 190 MPH - Finally a Use for NASCAR
Security:	Public

Its not often FirstMonday goes into macho stuff like speedway, but this is an interesting piece.

In aerodynamically intense stock-car races like the Daytona 500, the drivers form into multi-car draft lines to gain extra speed. A driver who does not enter a draft line (slipstream) will lose. Once in a line, a driver must attract a drafting partner in order to break out and try to get further ahead. Thus the effort to win leads to ever-shifting patterns of cooperation and competition among rivals. This provides a curious laboratory for several social science theories: (1) complexity theory, since the racers self-organize into structures that oscillate between order and chaos; (2) social network analysis, since draft lines are line networks whose organization depends on a driver's social capital as well as his human capital; and (3) game theory, since racers face a "prisoner's dilemma" in seeking drafting partners who will not defect and leave them stranded. Perhaps draft lines and related "bump and run" tactics amount to a little-recognized dynamic of everyday life, including in structures evolving on the Internet.

I also found this section very interesting. We talk about the signs of things emerging, but not often the signs of things fading away.

Why now? Scott Huler's A Little Bit Sideways: One Week Inside a NASCAR Winston Cup Race Team points to a deeper, cultural reason, as long-time race promoter and track owner H. A. "Humpy" Wheeler, himself struck by NASCAR's awesome growth, speculates that stock-car racing is arousing nation- wide enthusiasm now for the same reason that baseball did likewise decades ago: nostalgia for a passing era. Baseball - a slow, serene game played with a wooden bat, a cloth ball, and cowhide mitts on a broad, grassy field - surged in popularity just when the industrial revolution was taking hold, leaving masses of urban workers and shopkeepers yearning for the pastoral peace and quiet of the fabled agricultural age. They could relive this for a day by attending a baseball game. By extension, no wonder stock-car racing - a fast, furious sport contended on a paved roadway with snarling, smelly machines operated by hand - is surging in popularity at the very time the computerized information revolution is transforming our society from top to bottom. Stock-car racing expresses the industrial age more than does any big sport in America. Even NASCAR's efforts to present itself as a sport built around god-fearing, family-oriented drivers who bring their own wives and kids to the track plays into this. Go to a Winston Cup race and get away from all the new revolutions wracking America.

Sometimes, perhaps often, the apotheosis is the precursor of its disappearance. Very often political ends are foreshadowed by ever more desperately violent attempts to enforce a dying status quo. It happened in China as Mao's revolution was dying, it happened in Romania and in Yugoslavia. As we approach another paroxysm of violence, we must ask what is going to emerge from the smoke and fog, but also, what is fading into them.

1 comment | post a comment

Date:	2003-02-25 17:13
Subject:	Coming Down Out of the Trees
Security:	Public

I'm having an email discussion with a colleague who is a programmer and we are gnawing away at the problem of how we get at information which we know is there in documents but which the technology can't "see" because it is not structured in a way that is accessible to computers. Big news, OK. More from the marshes.
I had suggested Ben Hammersley's Blog was on topic.

I assume you're talking about the transparent tools. People have been screaming out for tools that are easy to use and don't get in the way of them doing whatever it is they want to do.

But it's really hard. The outliner example I gave before is a good instance of this. Trees are a natural way of storing information *for a computer* so we write these tools that let you arrange you ideas in a tree and expect people to somehow munge their thought processes to match. You said in one of your posts that techies write all these tools and then wave to the users to come on over from across a river that they're not interested in crossing. Too right.

Its interesting because I deal a bit with my wife's colleagues, all graduates and teachers at Uni of Syd. Not only do they not get any appropriate help in using the tools, they are thrown an email client, an Office kit, a browser and told to get on with it, so on top of a system that doesn't think like them, they invent their own ways of doing things, all slightly different, all based on the printed output and not even able to use the tools they have at hand for the things that CAN be useful.

I've tried about three times to use Enfish because I think it is thinking along the right lines, but each time found that it falls down somewhere, latest was that it no longer supported Eudora so my emails were invisible to it.

But this idea of being able to blog from your mobile phone makes me want to cringe. If the man on the Clapham bus has something to say, I'd appreciate it if he took at least a little bit of time to compose his thoughts before I spend my time reading them instead of blurting out the first thing that comes into his head. The minute proportion of cases where this might actually be useful (e.g. the first report of Google's purchase of Pyra was done by somebody Blogging at the press conference) will be far outweighed by the torrent of crap we will be subjected to. Information for information's sake is worse than useless since it drowns out the good stuff.

Sadly, taking some time to compose thoughts (for publication) its not a skill possessed by most people so the delay wont make any difference to the quality, although it might just reduce the quantity a bit. I suppose we are in this the victims of Moore's law which, by driving down the cost of processing/storage/transfer to trivial levels, has made the explosion possible.

I think it is a transitional phase and that much of what is being proposed will have a little flash and vanish The real benefits will be a couple of iterations down the track. Look at home videos, they are sold as "you, the next Steven Spielberg" but most of them wind up dead under the bed and unused after the first flush as people realise that making decent film is bloody hard.

Which is why I keep harping on that the net is not a media thing, it just looks a bit like it.

On the other hand I also think there is something very interesting about social filtering and reputation systems. If, instead of looking at information from the inside out, trying to define it into existence in a meaningful way, we look at it from the outside in and enable users of it to attach, either unconsciously or deliberately, some kind of encrustation that tells other users who used this information, how many of them, where, when and how did they find it etc. we might begin to make some headway. Knowledge is a socially constructed thing which is why I'm keen on Blogs, because they are the potential building blocks for a socially constructed view of the information they handle.

I don't have to read all the crap in the net to find stuff that interests me, I only have to read some of it. And by doing that, and saving some of it and linking to it and sharing it and having others share their insights with me and accreting a cosmos of shared perspectives, a filtering and validation system is constructed that benefits all its participants.

And yes, that will tend to a closed loop of self reinforcing prejudices, which is not new, but those communities that remain open to a flow of new, uncomfortable ideas will adapt and survive better than those that don't, situation normal except that the possible spread of participants is so much broader using this technology than we could ever have contemplated without it.

None of which helps you I'm sure, but I have this naive faith that if enough of us keep talking about this stuff in enough places, one day some clever person will sit bolt upright in the night and shout Eureka.

Advertisement