Posted on Fri 24 September 2010 in Rumination • Tagged with programming languages, semiotics
I am reading a fascinating new book by Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii, The Semiotics of Programming published this year by Cambridge University Press. In the book Tanaka-Ishii analyzes the semantics of programming languages from the perspective of Saussurian and Peircian semiotics, that is, as systems of signs. In so doing, Tanaka-Ishii not …
Posted on Tue 21 September 2010 in Rumination • Tagged with agent-based modeling, artificial life, evolution, flex and slop, information, netlogo
In many ways the field of artificial life has been quite successful, even if its faddish popularity has died off somewhat in the last few years. However, artificial life systems have had only limited success in clearly exhibiting the capacity for open-ended evolution—the capacity to sustain an indefinite increase …
Posted on Mon 13 September 2010 in Rumination • Tagged with intentionality, metaphysics, ontology
For lack of opportunity I do not get to read and learn all that I would want to, or might need to. And so, in all but a few private conversations, I have hesitated to voice some of my most visceral metaphysical intuitions. And yet …
Posted on Wed 08 September 2010 in Rumination • Tagged with creativity, intelligence, intentionality, play
In
an earlier blog
post
I ruminated on how creative adaptive intelligent behavior crucially
involves the ability to move in and out of what might be called
game-spaces, defined by particular rule-sets or assumptions. The ability
to step outside a formal system is critical to our being able to reflect …
Posted on Fri 03 September 2010 in Situation Theory • Tagged with information, information architecture, ritual
(published and featured at the Open Anthropology Cooperative 09/03/10)
In a series recent blog posts, here, here and here, I have explored John Perry and David Israel's notion of an information architecture given in their paper Information and Architecture (pdf). In particular I have been exploring their notions …
Posted on Thu 02 September 2010 in Situation Theory • Tagged with information, information architecture, programming languages
In my previous two posts, Architecture of Information, some notes and More on Combinative and Coincident Information Architectures, I introduced John Perry and David Israel's notion of information architectures. In this post I would like to explore how they can inform us about the semantics of some common programming language …
Posted on Fri 27 August 2010 in Situation Theory • Tagged with information, information architecture
In the interest of exploring Perry and Israel's information architectures further, I will elaborate upon my previous post on the topic, and give a more fine-grained account of some of their ideas.
Suppose that we take as signal the presence of smoke, and its indicated content that there is a …
Posted on Fri 06 August 2010 in Situation Theory • Tagged with information, information architecture
Notes on "Information and Architecture" by John Perry and David Israel
David Israel and John Perry build upon the idea of pure and incremental content (developed in previous work) to introduce their notion of an information system of signal structures, describing three general kinds of information architectures: coincident architectures, combinative …
Posted on Fri 06 August 2010 in Rumination • Tagged with Africa, culture, reflection
Recently I posted a link to a very interesting essay by Alan Fiske "Learning a culture the way informants do: observing, imitating, and..." (2000). The paper generated a fair amount of back and forth on whether or not members of any culture reflect on their own cultural practices in equal …
Posted on Fri 06 August 2010 in Rumination • Tagged with diffusion, information
Recently I read a paper co-authored by a number of social network social scientists on the dynamics of the news cycle as evidenced by a medium-grained examination of the diffusion and transformation of phrase variants across the web. The authors, Leskovec, Backstrom, and Kleinberg, have a supporting web site, http …