Category: Journal ISSN 1078-1935

WHAT: Second Order Science

WHEN: Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2012, 5:30 – 8:00 p.m.
While Café Scientifique events are usually held on the first Tuesday of each month, please note that this event will take place on the second Tuesday due to the holiday.

WHERE: The Front Page restaurant, near Ballston Metro.
Located at 4201 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, VA 22203 on the ground floor of the National Science Foundation (NSF) building. Parking is available under the NSF building or at Ballston Common Mall.

WHO: Presented by Stuart Umpleby, Professor of Management, The George Washington University.

HOW: Please come early to order table service and socialize. Special half-price burgers start at 5:30 p.m. Presentation begins at 6:15 p.m. followed by Q&A. No science background required – only an interest! Café Scientifique is free and open to the public. Registration requested. Register online now.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: In the social sciences it is clear that theories affect the phenomenon being studied. Indeed, we create theories in the hope that they will be accepted, acted upon and the social system will perhaps function better. However, usually scientific research is based on the assumption that the theory does not affect the phenomenon. The result is a gap between our assumptions about social systems and the way we do research. Closing this gap is leading to new methods for both research and practice. Creating a second order science, which includes examining the effects of theories on phenomena, is presently impeded by logical difficulties involving self- reference. This problem can be solved by reinterpreting some parts of mathematics using ideas common in everyday life.

SUPPORT THIS CAFÉ: The Ballston Science and Technology Alliance, a nonprofit organization, is the sponsor of Café Scientifique Arlington. Since April 2006, the goal of Café Scientifique has been to make science more accessible and accountable by featuring speakers whose expertise spans the sciences and who can talk in plain English. Please go to www.arlingtonvirginiausa.com/bsta and contribute. Help keep Café Scientifique open and free to all!

See Also:

2012 Reflexivity = Integrity: Toward Earth/Life 4.0

 

A few weeks back I put my intention out to open a Beacon Collaboratory, or what I called in the blog post a “Superhero School.” As I look around me, I’m seeing a pattern of convergence towards these kinds of live/work/play spaces. As “living labs,” these spaces bring together elements of a tech incubator, an R&D facility, a hackerspace/fablab, a sustainability demonstration site, and it’s all tied to place – with the projects / prototypes / experiments being done there carried out and implemented in the local area, stimulating the economy, creating jobs, and building resilient communities throughout the area and the region.

I’ve been over to the dream property four times now, and each time I go it seems I have a clearer sense of how the whole thing could work.

I can see it as being an innovation hub and retreat center, wrapped in a creative learning culture. Just 90 minutes by train from NYC, a welcome change of scenery for Silicon Alley.

As ‘collaboratory’ is defined as a “center without walls,” it could be a second home to a lot of different change agent organizations. For instance, Hub could have a presence there, COMMON could launch some socially conscious enterprises there, Open Source Ecology might build some equipment there, and a hacker collective could run a bootcamp there. There could be programs for teaching kids to code, mentorships with high school students to guide them from idea incubation to entrepreneurship, and events around any number of topics, like arts and culture, technology, business, sustainability, or spirituality.

At any rate, I wanted to do a bit of a deep dive to find existing examples of these types of things around the world, and was pleasantly surprised to find hundreds.

Read full post.

SwiftRiver Throws a Lifeline to People Drowning in Information

There's a problem that constantly plagues us in this day of information overload, and that is the ability to sift the stream of incoming information into the bits that are valuable from those that aren't. It's a tough issue that we've been working on at Ushahidi for a while now. Our solution is called SwiftRiver.

SwiftRiver is a free and open-source intelligence platform that helps people curate and make sense of large amounts of information in a short amount of time. In practice, SwiftRiver enables the filtering and verification of real-time data from channels such as SMS, email, Twitter and RSS feeds. It's especially useful for organizations that need to sort their data by their unique expectations of authority and accuracy, as opposed to popularity. Such organizations include journalists, community based-groups, PR/marketing, emergency responders, election-monitoring groups, and more.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  This was one of many things the US Intelligence Community was told it needed (by the Advanced Information Processing and Analysis Steering Group (AIPASG).   N-GRAMS was a good start, but the various individuals in charge of the respective Directorates did not want to collaboration and were afraid of what they did not understand.  The $80 billion a year we waste on secret intelligence will be an excellent bill-payer when the US public finally elects a government that can combine intelligence with integrity.