Ontology of the sphere
January 28, 2009
Draft: New technologies make accessible complex algorithms for the transformation of images through spherical distortions.
Reflections off shiny convex surfaces, such as the pupils of our eyes, the Esherian sphere, vases, teapots, mirror the world in miniature and capture light and space with fascinating distortions.
Adobe Photoshop provides at least two options for creating these distortions by using the Filter tool > Distort > polar coordinates or
Filter tool > Distort > spherize.
For my teapot reflection series I prefer to work from real objects and their reflections.
For the labeling the Rocky Mountains skyline panoramas I have been simply pasting long collages of series of digital images taken at 180 to 360 degrees. The result is virtually impossible to share online. The resolution is always set too low and text as well as identifiable montane features become illegible. What was crystal clear on the PC through the zoom feature is completely loss in Web 2.0.
I have considered using polar coordinate distortions and/or spherize features.
This is a tip from someone who has been working with polarpans longer than I have
This is one section that I spherized using a rather convoluted process. I noted it below so I won’t forget but I am still working on it.
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| From SpherizeAndPolarCoordinates |
reflexive sphere
spherical models
polar coordinates
tips from pros:
http://www.3drender.com/light/PolarPan/index.htm
polar coordinates vs spherize
Adobe Photoshop > filter > distort > polar coordinates
Adobe Photoshop > filter > distort > spherize > 80% with inserted rectangular skyline
digitage/collage of skyline images ie a scroll which is about 1/3 to 1/4 of c. square image to
be spherized. Place inserted rectangle at c. centre not quite at top of a c. square
image size width: 100 cm, height: 65 cm resolution 100 pixel dimensions 28 m: width 3864
pixels by height: 2532 pixels
————————
1. original image to spherize: pixel dimensions 86.3m
width 120 cm height 50 cm resolution 180
2. place rectangle in new file 120 x 120
3. spherize with original rectangle in upper centre
4. experiment with degrees of spherization c. 85%
5. check for resolution
6. PC cannot spherize images that are too large
7. too much loss of resolution makes mountain ranges lose clarity and labels illegible
8. have to find juste milieu
6. clip to detail of spherized rectangular skyline scroll
Mount Blane and the Blade visible from Calgary
January 27, 2009
On clear days the Rockies are visible from the Crowfoot Library lookout and unique features of specific mountains make them easier to identify. Mount Blane (2993 m), the highest in the Opal Range is distinct because of the Blade, a gendarme or tower on the ridge to the right of Mount Blane’s summit.
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| From CrowfootLibraryLookout |
The map insert situates the Opal Range, which is a long range of peaks directly east of the Kananaskis River.
This map indicates distances between visible peaks and the Crowfoot Library lookout.
bivouac.com provides this information on the Opal Range:
“It is bounded on the N by Rocky Creek and on the E by Evan-Thomas Creek and the Little Elbow and Elbow Rivers. KeyPasses: Elbow Pass (2088m – border pass with Misty Range); Little Elbow Pass (2240m – border pass with Cornwall Group); Evan-Thomas Pass (2149m – border pass with Fisher Range) Includes: Includes Tombstone Mountain and ridge that extends to the N. Excludes the Wedge because it is separated from the Range by Rocky Creek and an Unnamed Creek. Terrain: A period that occurred during the Lewis Thrust called the Laramide Orogeny created the Opal Range. The steeply tilted strata are virtually the same in each peak, with softer layers sandwiched between harder layers. These softer layers have eroded, leaving the harder layers in place and forming the deep notches and gaps typical of the range. History: Named by George Dawson because he discovered small cavities lined with quartz and coated with what he thought were thin films of opal. However, it was not Opal but a chert with a similar appeareance composed of silica imbedded with various quartz impurities. Recorded first ascents of the peaks were not completed until the 1950’s and most of the peaks in the range are named for ship’s or people that were part of the Battle of Jutland in World War I. The W side of Mount Blane (13 km NE of Upper Kananaskis Lake). (44 km SW of Bragg Creek). (4 km SE of Mount Evan-
Thomas).”
Far from equilibrium: religion and science at the edge of chaos
January 25, 2009
Sometime prior to 1995, Pulitzer Prize winning author N. Scott Momaday, met with Kauffman and others in northern New Mexico to discuss fundamental issues facing humanity. It was here that Momaday argued that the central issue to be confronted was the reinvention of the sacred. He used as his example a recently returned Kiowa shield that had been stolen after the Civil War. Kauffman compared the human potential to recover a sense of worth through the “new sciences of complexity” to a recovery of a sense of the sacred (Kauffman 1995 AHU :4) that is not mystical but scientific.
Kauffman’s response to Momaday concerns for reinventing the sacred, was to argue for an intellectual revolution, an expanded intellectual base to face the challenges inherent in the emergence of a world civilization which will be a highly pluralistic global community governed by an evolved form of democracy. This new intellectual base with include a new way of seeing and thinking about “origins, evolution, the profound naturalness of life andn its myriad patterns of unfolding.” Kauffman’s reinvented sacred is based on the assumption that this highly pluralistic society will require the highest “natural form of governance.” He argued that the “laws of complexity” that he and his colleagues at the Sante Fe Institute have uncovered, suggest that democracy has evolved as perhaps the optimal mechanism to achieve the best attainable compromises among conflicting practical, political, and moral interests.” Further he argued that this evolved pluralistic democratic society is not just a human creation but is part of the “natural order of things.”
My questions here concern the imprecise morphing of concepts of the sacred with a sense of self-worth presumably based on intellectual solutions that will somehow overcome the global democratic deficit.
The democratic deficit (prior to Obama 2009-01) did not evolve due to an intellectual deficit regarding the benefits of pluralistic democracy. It declined because we lost trust in knowledge management in many fields including science and governance. The ontological certitude enjoyed by governing bodies at all levels in democratic systems in the 1950s was replaced by a growing scepticism that spread throughout all of our social institutions (Beck 1992 Risk Society). Has that been factored into the computer models? Kauffman’s colleague, physicist and computer scientist Roger Jones, who developed software program that used complexity theory to simulate the entire insurance industry, was as unprepared as everyone else with 911. He had to reconfigure his models. See Mackenzie (2002-02-01).
“Most biologists, heritors of the Darwinian tradition, suppose that the order of ontogeny is due to the grinding away of a molecular Rube Goldberg machine, slapped together piece by piece by evolution. I present a countering thesis: most of the beautiful order seen in ontogeny is spontaneous, a natural expression of stunning self-organization that abounds in very complex regulatory networks. We appear to have been profoundly wrong. Order, vast and generative, arises naturally (Kauffman AHU 1995: 25).”
Although Kauffman’s work at the Santa Fe Institute, prior to 1995, included building elaborate computer models simulating the emergence of life forms on earth, the formation of his own consulting firm seeded with $6 million in 1996-7 led him to reconfigure his computers to modelling complexity as per the requirements of contracts with the US defence and dozens of Fortune 500 companies. My questions therefore is for whom is he an apologist?
When he declares that the laws of the new sciences of complexity prove that the world of nature, and its constituent systems, has an inner scientific (not mystical or spiritual) force (vitality?) which endows it with a propensity for self-organized order which naturally will emerge from chaos, it is helpful perhaps to attempt to trace the evolutionary origins of his ideas and the practical as well as theoretical areas which have been the focus of his research.
“Before his arrival at SFI, Stuart Kauffman (1991) discussed what he called “antichaos”, which is very similar to the concept of self-organization (Prigogine and Stengers 1984). In his view, however, entering chaos is not necessarily the next step. Instead Kauffman contended that life occurs most abundantly at the “edge of chaos.” This is generally described as complexity (Kauffman 1995), where a system exists on this edge, turning back to its steady state following multiple adaptations. In other words, many systems may adapt to the new environmental demand but may expend so much energy in navigating chaos that they have no energy left for negotiating other adaptations or even minor perturbations. On the other hand, by maintaining itself on the edge of chaos, the system’s energy requirements are more reasonable, and at the same time the complexity generated there is sufficient to make “just good enough adaptations” (Sulis 1995). Therefore, chaos, or the edge of chaos, seems to be the necessary transition state with which a system must flirt in order to better adapt to the environment (Butz 1997:64).”
Kauffman and his colleagues created elaborate computer models to simulate the dynamics of complex systems such as cellular activity, urban ecologies, natural ecological systems, financial markets and simulation games. One wonders why none of these digital/virtual scenarios did not better prepare us for the credit chaos, the mortgage meltdown and the US financial crisis that is now orbiting the globe? Could it be that ethical concerns such as greed vs generosity, dishonesty vs honesty, are difficult to place in an algorithm?
1637 Descartes, R. (1637). “Discourse on the Method,” in J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murcoch, eds., The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, volume 1, 109-76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
1664 Descartes, R. (1664). “Treatise on Man,” in J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murcoch, eds., The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, volume 1, 799-108. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
1793 French Revolution keywords: emerging democracy,
1700s Jean Baptiste de Lamark (1744 – 1802) used the term vitalism to explain a species’ ability to adapt through evolution.
1815 Swedish chemist Johan Jakob Berzelius (1779-1848) proposed that organic compounds were produced under the influence of a vital force and so unlike chemical compounds were incapable of being prepared artificially. However, in 1828 German chemist Friedrich Wohler (1800-1882) synthesized the organic compound urea from the purely inorganic ammonium cyanate. vitalism,
1834 French physicist and mathematician, polymathematician, André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836), used the term cybernétique to denote the sciences of government in his classification system of human knowledge. Ampère one of the main discoverers of electromagnetism (thus ampere, a unit of measurement of electric current).
1820 Scots-born political philosopher, historian, psychologist, educational theorist, economist, and legal, political and penal reformer James Mill (1773–1836) was the collaborator and ally of Jeremy Bentham. Bentham’s theory of utilitariamism eclipsed the elder James Mill’s theories as did the writings of his eminent son John Stuart Mill. James Mill believed that man was a progressive being who required education in order to progress. His didactic, racist, biaised writing has been solidly critiqued since the early 19th century. His racist comments on the Hindu religion and India during the period of British expansionism, are the most well-known. adopted a form of utilitarian rationalism in his ”Essay on Government” (1820). “Experience,” says he, “if we look only at the outside of the facts, appears to be divided on this subject. Absolute monarchy, under Neros and Caligulas, under such men as the Emperors of Morocco and Sultans of turkey, is the scourge of human nature. On the other side, the people of Denmark, tired out with the oppression of an aristocracy, resolved that their king should be absolute; and, under their absolute monarch, are as well governed as any people in Europe.”deduced from first principles that a constitutional monarchy was not the highest natural form of governance. keywords: natural form of governance.
1821 Lord Byron wrote: “Matter is eternal always changing but reproduced and as far as we can comprehend Eternity Eternal and why not mind? Why should not the Mind act with and upon the Universe? as portions of it act upon and with the congregated dust called Mankind?” keyword vitalism,
1823 Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote in his essay entitled Mill on Government that, “Nothing is more amusing or instructive than to observe the manner in which people who think themselves wiser than all the rest of the world fall into snares which the simple good sense of their neighbours detects and avoids. It is one of the principal tenets of the Utilitarians that sentiment and eloquence serve only to impede the pursuit of truth. They therefore affect a quakerly plainness, or rather a cynical negligence and impurity, of style. The strongest arguments, when clothed in brilliant language, seem to them so much wordy nonsense. In the mean time they surrender their understandings, with a facility found in no other party, to the meanest and most abject sophisms, provided those sophisms come before them disguised with the externals of demonstration. They do not seem to know that logic has its illusions as well as rhetoric,—that a fallacy may lurk in a syllogism as well as in a metaphor. Mr. Mill is exactly the writer to please people of this description. His arguments are stated with the utmost affectation of precision; his divisions are awfully formal; and his style is generally as dry as that of Euclid’s Elements. Whether this be a merit, we must be permitted to doubt. Thus much is certain: that the ages in which the true principles of philosophy were least understood were those in which the ceremonial of logic was most strictly observed, and that the time from which we date the rapid progress of the experimental sciences was also the time at which a less exact and formal way of writing came into use.” [...] “The first chapter of [Mill's 1820] Essay relates to the ends of government. The conception on this subject, he tells us, which exists in the minds of most men is vague and undistinguishing. He first assumes, justly enough, that the end of government is “to increase to the utmost the pleasures, and diminish to the utmost the pains, which men derive from each other.” He then proceeds to show, with great form, that “the greatest possible happiness of society is attained by insuring to every man the greatest possible quantity of the produce of his labour.” To effect this is, in his opinion, the end of government. It is remarkable that Mr. Mill, with all his affected display of precision, has here given a description of the ends of government far less precise than that which is in the mouths of the vulgar. The first man with whom Mr. Mill may travel in a stage coach will tell him that government exists for the protection of the persons and property of men. But Mr. Mill seems to think that the preservation of property is the first and only object. It is true, doubtless, that many of the injuries which are offered to the persons of men proceed from a desire to possess their property. But the practice of vindictive assassination as it has existed in some parts of Europe—the practice of fighting wanton and sanguinary duels, like those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which bands of seconds risked their lives as well as the principals;—these practices, and many others which might be named, are evidently injurious to society; and we do not see how a government which tolerated them could be said “to diminish to the utmost the pains which men derive from each other.” “Therefore, according to Mr. Mill’s very correct assumption, such a government would not perfectly accomplish the end of its institution. Yet such a government might, as far as we can perceive, “insure to every man the greatest possible quantity of the produce of his labour.” Therefore such a government might, according to Mr. Mill’s subsequent doctrine, perfectly accomplish the end of its institution. The matter is not of much consequence, except as an instance of that slovenliness of thinking which is often concealed beneath a peculiar ostentation of logical neatness. Having determined the ends, Mr. Mill proceeds to consider the means. For the preservation of property some portion of the community must be intrusted with power. This is Government; and the question is, how are those to whom the necessary power is intrusted to be prevented from abusing it?”
1858 Louis Pasteur published his classic work “Mémoire sur la Fermentation Appelée Lactique” in which reported his empirical demonstration empirically that fermentation ” ‘life without air” only occurs when living cells are present; cells only carry out fermentation in the absence of oxygen, leading him to conclude that fermentation was a “vital action”. Vitalists like Pasteur appealed to demonstrations that living organisms originate from living organisms: there is no spontaneous generation. Pasteur showed that heated organic matter remained sterile unless contaminated but that, if contaminated, the previously heated material sustained life. This supported the conclusion that new life-forms only emerge from existing ones and provided additional evidence for the vitalist claim that living organisms are inherently different from non-living entities (Bechtel and Richardson 1998). vitalism,
1859 Darwin’s Origin of Species marked the beginning of an intellectual revolution that ultimately resulted in the establishment of the autonomy of biology (Mayr 2002).
1883-1885 German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) wrote ”Yea verily, I say unto you: A man must have Chaos yet within him To birth a dancing star. I say unto you: You have yet Chaos in you” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (sprach Zarathustra). Nietzsche wrote the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in only ten days in a period of social isolation in which he was plagued by suicidal thoughts (by 1889 he exhibited symptoms of insanity). Nietzsche created a fictional protagonist Zarathustra, based on the Persian prophet of Zoroastrianism, to mimic a biblical style. Although wrongly described as a spiritual odyssey, the trope of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is irony. It lies somewhere between philosophy and literature because of its poetic, ambiguous and paradoxical nature. Just as his protagonist taught that humans can become the transfigurer of own own consciousness and life through poetry, Nietzsche’s poem was his attempt to make sense of his own chaos. Through Zarathustra, he demonstrated how humans can excise and annihilate insidious unchallenged truth-claims accepted through a herd mentality by a radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth. Nietzsche opposed what was being done in the name of organized religions in the late 19th century particularly the threats and promises of eternal life as a reason to follow narrow religion dogmas. Humans exemplified by the Übermensch can endlessly affirm their own existence. He wrote about tragedy as an affirmation of life. He described the creative force that humans can claim from chaos, where pure creativity is born. Nietzsche seemed to be seeking a justification for abysmal eternally recurring suffering in the world without recourse to life after death. He sought responses to nihilism, fear of the abyss by expanding on human will power and human capacity to overcome fear.
1907 French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) wrote Creative Evolution. Bergson, one of the most famous and influential French philosophers of the late 19th century-early 20th century, introduced the concept of élan vital, (vital impetus or vital force) as a “hypothetical explanation for evolution and development of organisms, which Bergson linked closely with consciousness. It was the existence of this vital force, which made people at that time believe that they were not able to synthesize organic molecules. It was believed by others that this essence (élan vital) could be harvested and embedded into an inanimate substance and activated with electricity, perhaps taking literally another of Bergson’s metaphorical descriptions, the “current of life”. Although his international fame reached cult-like heights during his lifetime, his influence decreased notably after the second World War. While such French thinkers as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Lévinas explicitly acknowledged his influence on their thought, it is generally agreed that it was Gilles Deleuze’s 1966 Bergsonism that marked the reawakening of a wide and growing interest in Bergson’s work. Deleuze realized that Bergson’s most enduring contribution to philosophical thinking is his concept of multiplicity. Therefore, due to Deleuze’s realization, a kind of revitalization of Bergsonism has been going on since around 1990.” wiki vitalism
1914 Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch (1867–1941), eminent embryologist and a leading twentieth-century proponent of vitalism published The History and Theory of Vitalism., This is Driesch’s synoptic discussion of vitalism in which he explained the “life of an organism in terms of the presence of an entelechy, a substantial entity controlling organic processes (Bechtel and Richardson (1998).”
the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1874–1948) posited an élan vital to overcome the resistance of inert matter in the formation of living bodies.
1948 American theoretical and applied mathematician, Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) wrote, “Information is information not matter or energy” in his publication entitled Cybernetics (1948: 155). Wiener is considered to be the founder of cybernetics, “a field that formalizes the notion of feedback and has implications for engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, philosophy, and the organization of society.” (a wiki) Following WWII Wiener broke new ground in cybernetics, robotics, computer control, and automation. He was a strong advocate of automation to improve the standard of living, and to overcome economic underdevelopment (awiki).
1965 C.G. Hempel argued “that the fault with vitalism is not that it posits entities which cannot be observed, but that such explanations ‘render all statements about entelechies inaccessible to empirical test and thus devoid of empirical meaning’ because no methods of test, however indirect, are provided (1965: 257 cited in Bechtel and Richardson (1998).”
1966 French philosopher Gilles Deleuze published Bergsonism in which he revitalized Bergson’s concept of élan vital (1906) by using it to denote a substance in which the distinction between organic and inorganic matter is indiscernible, and the emergence of life undecidable. Unlike its usage in 19th century vitalist debates, élan vital is not a mystical, elusive force acting on brute matter.
1970 Conway developed his widely cited cellular automation called the Game of Life or Life. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves. The game made British mathematician John Horton Conway “instantly famous, but it also opened up a whole new field of mathematical research, the field of cellular automata … Because of Life’s analogies with the rise, fall and alterations of a society of living organisms, it belongs to a growing class of what are called ’simulation games’ (games that resemble real life processes) (Gardner 1970-10). “
1970s ”By the late 1970s some scientists truly believed that the `end of science’ was at hand. After all the major conceptual foundations had been laid earlier in the century: quantum mechanics and relativity in physics, Darwinism in biology. Particle physics was putting the finishing touches on the `standard theory’ which explained the structure of matter in terms of strange things called `quarks’ (Lancaster 1993).” Biologist May found odd population fluctuations in simple ecologies. Physicists Farmer and Crutchfield discovered extremely strange behaviour in simple pendulums. Their emerging discipline is now familiar to most with a passing interest in science as chaos theory (Lancaster 1993)” which is now part of a larger scientific discipline called complexity theory.
1973 Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela published “Autopoiesis and Cognition: the Realization of the Living” in which they introduced the term autopoiesis auto – αυτό (Gr.) for self- and poiesis – ποίησις (Gr.) for creation or production, to describe the fundamental dialectic between structure and function. This is the main published reference on the term autopoiesis. ”An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network (Maturana andVarela, 1980:78).” ”[T]he space defined by an autopoietic system is self-contained and cannot be described by using dimensions that define another space. When we refer to our interactions with a concrete autopoietic system, however, we project this system on the space of our manipulations and make a description of this projection (Maturana and Varela 1980:89).” The biological cell is an example of an autopoietic system while an automobile factory is an example of an allopoietic system. Living cells are composed of biochemical components are are organized into bounded structures which auto-produce the components which maintain the organized bounded structure that gives rise to these components. An allopoietic system uses components to generate an organized structure which is something other than itself.
1975 Holland, J. H. 1975 [1992]. Adaptation in Natural and Arti cial Systems. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Second edition.
1970s Christopher Langton, “a part-time bluegrass guitarist, part-time programmer, part-time college dropout, spent most of his time on the fringe of the college scene around Cambridge and Boston following the conceptual scent of vague ideas about adaptation and self-organisation through browsing through bookshops and taking the odd course. The scent eventually led Langton to invest in an Apple II and begin experimenting himself. Fascinated by the spidery, life-likeness of these “cellular automata” structures, Langton discovered the work of Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram had found that there were four possible types of cellular automata rules. Class I were “doomsday rules”: no matter what initial seed, all the cells would die within one or two time steps. Class II rules were marginally more interesting: any initial seed would quickly form into a set of static, pulsating blobs. Class III were the other extreme completely: the patterns they produced were so frenetic, there appeared to be no order or predictability. Class IV rules were the most unusual and strange: these rules did not produce static structures, or chaotic patterns. What was they produced were complicated structures that split, grew and mutated: “Game of Life” falls neatly into this category (Lancaster 1993).”
1982 “Physical science is a metaphor with which the scientist, like the poet, creates and extends meaning and value in the quest for understanding meaning and purpose… [T]he humanities are concerned with questions of existence, meaning, value and beauty – matters which all of us feel to be essential, integral, human. It is ironic and tragic that we have come to feel that physics is not deeply motivated by those same human issues (Jones 1982).” See also Polyani’s tacit knowledge in terms of discovery.
1982 Ernst Mayr in The Growth of Biological Thought, an acclaimed general introduction of the history of biology from early Greeks to the 20th century, claimed that vitalism “virtually leaves the realm of science by falling back on an unknown and presumably unknowable factor (1982: 52).”
1982 Chris Langton began a Ph.D. on the new subject, which he began calling “Artificial Life” at the University of Michigan? (Lancaster 1993). He coined the term.
1982 Mathematician B. B. Mandelbrot published The Fractal Geometry of Nature which revealed strange structures buried deep within simple equations.
1984 Prigogine, Ilya; Stengers, Isabelle. 1984. Order out of Chaos. Flamingo.
1984 Farmer, D.; To oli, T.; S. Wolfram, Eds. 1984. Cellular Automata: Proceedings of an Interdisciplinary Workshop. North Holland, Amsterdam.
1984-04 Santa Fe Institute, was founded in 1984 by George Cowan to develop the new scientific discipline, complexity theory, which looks at complex systems and their environments in much the same way as chaos theory. Scientists at SFI talked of experiencing “a new way of seeing the world”. SFI is interdisciplinary including economists, physicists, administrators, biologists, and mathematicians in research. They defined complexity as “a chaos of behaviors in which the components of the system never quite lock into place, yet never quite dissolve into turbulence either” (Waldrop, 1992, p. 293). Other founders (source?) include David Pines, Stirling Colgate, physicist Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Metropolis, Herb Anderson, Peter A. Carruthers, and Richard Slansky.
1984 In his article entitled “Universality and complexity in cellular automata” published in Physica D, Wolfram introduced a dynamical classi cation of cellular automata behavior closely allied to that of dynamical systems theory. He speculated that one of his four classes supports universal computation.”
1984 Wolfram, S. Ed. 1986. “Theory and Applications of Cellular Automata.” World Scienti c. Singapore.
19?? (Waldrop 1992), Chris Langton at the Santa Fe Institute, proposed the following interesting equation (demonstrated for cellular automata but likely to apply to other areas): chaos = order = chaos. The arrows in this equation are meant in the sense of phase transitions in the same way as ice can become water and then steam. A complexity phase was found to exist between order and chaos. Langton defined complexity as the line of balance, or transition point, between order and chaos, partaking of both (source).
1986 Stephen Wolfram began the Center for Complex Systems at the University of Illinois to develop the new scientific discipline, complexity theory, which looks at complex systems and their environments in much the same way as chaos theory. They defined complexity as “a chaos of behaviors in which the components of the system never quite lock into place, yet never quite dissolve into turbulence either” (Waldrop, 1992, p. 293)
1986 Craig Reynolds “made a computer model of coordinated animal motion such as bird flocks and fish schools. It was based on three dimensional computational geometry of the sort normally used in computer animation or computer aided design. I called the generic simulated flocking creatures boids. The basic flocking model consists of three simple steering behaviors which describe how an individual boid maneuvers based on the positions and velocities its nearby flockmates.” emergence, simulation,
1980s The birthplace of complexity theory is the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit think tank, where Kauffman joined forces in the mid-1980s with computer scientist John Holland, economist Brian Arthur, mathematician John Casti, and physicist Murray Gell-Mann. “It was an intellectual blowout,” Kauffman says. “It was staggeringly fun and exciting and ebullient. We were studying the science of complex adaptive systems, and none of us knew what we were talking about.”
1987 Christopher Langton (1949- ) is an American biologist and one of the founders of the field of artificial life. He coined the term in the late 1980s when he organized the first “International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems” (otherwise known as Artificial Life I) at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987. “Artificial Life studies man-made systems which exhibit behaviours characteristic of natural living systems”, wrote Langton, in the introduction to Artificial Life in 1987. Langton firmly believed that these patterns and processes of life, could somehow be “abstracted” from a `real’ biological system. Using a computer analogy: “life” is the “software”: the processes, the instructions that use whatever “hardware” is available: the mitochondria, cells or DNA. During this time Langton had discovered that others had smelt that crazy, elusive scent and their numbers were growing (Lancaster 1993).”
1989 Nicolis and Ilya Prigogine defined complexity as the ability of a system to adapt to its environments, “to switch between different modes of behavior as the environmental conditions are varied (1989:218) ”. Is Ilya Prigogine one of its founders of the theory of complex systems, or complexity theory that deals with the application of computers to evolution?
1990 Niklas Luhmann published his Essays on Self-Reference in which he adapted Maturana and Varela’s concept of autopoiesis to explain social systems.
1990 J. P. Crutch eld and K. Young. “Computation at the onset of chaos.” In W. H. Zurek, editor, Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information, pages 223-269. Addison-Wesley, Redwood City, CA. “onset of chaos”
1990 The phrase “edge of chaos” was coined by Christopher Langton. life at the edge of chaos???
1992 Waldrop, M MitchellComplexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. Viking Press.
Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos. Macmillan.
1992 Complexity theory was considered to be a new scientific discipline which investigates complex systems and their environments in much the same way as chaos theory. Complexity is “a chaos of behaviors in which the components of the system never quite lock into place, yet never quite dissolve into turbulence either” (Waldrop, 1992:293). “The tremendous amount of a system’s energy that is required to navigate chaos is an idea that scientists at the Santa Fe Institute have been pondering (Levy 1992; Waldrop 1992) cited in (Butz 1997:64).”
1993 ”The ideas of complexity theory seemed to many of these scientists to hold the promise of uniting two previously disparate trends in science: reductionism (the descendant of Newtonianism) and vitalism. Reductionism holds that a complete description of any science can be found by understanding the “bits” that make it up. Vitalism maintains that there is some “unanalysable” `elan vital’ or `life force’ which is responsible for the wonderful organisation in life (Lancaster 1993).”
1995 “Mathematical biologists (e.g., Eigen; Kauffman), studying evolution, generally have a different understanding of the origin of order compared to Mayr or Monod. Self-creation of essentially new, unpredictable and irreproducible characteristics cannot be modeled mathematically. Formal models of evolution are always essentialistic, in that they define a “space” of possible “biological states”, e.g., DNA sequences of a given length. Possible transitions between these states, mutations and recombinations during the replication of these sequences, mimic the dynamics of evolution. By means of a fitness function, relating each possible sequence to a fitness value, the survival of the fittest can be simulated. Evolution within such a model means to find the sequence or a set of sequences with maximal fitness values for a given situation. Mathematical models of evolution mimic essentialistic evolution, the unfolding of inherent potentials determined by the specific form of the fitness function. Today’s mathematical models of evolution are limited by the drastic simplifications necessary to keep the problem mathematically tractable. Nevertheless, even using highly simplified models helps to understand important aspects of evolution (Kauffman, 1995) and to address certain more simple subproblems theoretically (Eigen, 1993) as well as experimentally (Biebricher, et al., 1993; Biebricher and Luce, 1993) (Von Kitzing, Eberhard. 2001).” Eberhard von Kitzing obtained his masters degree in theoretical physics in the field of general relativity and his doctorate in biochemical evolution at the Max-Planck-Institut für Biophysikalische Chemie in Göttingen. He is currently researching molecular neuroscience at the Max-Planck-Institut für Medizinische Forschung in Heidelberg.
2002 “Defining structure and detecting the emergence of complexity in nature are inherently subjective, though essential, scientific activities. Despite the difficulties, these problems can be analysed in terms of how model-building observers infer from measurements the computational capabilities embedded in non-linear processes. An observer’s notion of what is ordered, what is random, and what is complex in its environment depends directly on its computational resources: the amount of raw measurement data, of memory, and of time available for estimation and inference. The discovery of structure in an environment depends more critically and subtly, though, on how those resources are organized. The descriptive power of the observer’s chosen (or implicit) computational model class, for example, can be an overwhelming determinant in finding regularity in data (Crutchfield 1994).” emergence, objectivity,
1995 ”Darwinism Evolving is a history of ideas about biological diversity and evolution, from Aristotle to the present day. The last part of the book is an account of some recent developments, and an attempt to forecast the future. Most of this review will be concerned with the final section, which seems to me mistaken. I must therefore start by saying that I found the historical part well informed, and full of valuable insights. The ideas discussed are fundamental, not only to biology, but also to our view of our relationship to the rest of the natural world. The last twenty years have seen an explosion of scholarship centered on Darwin, by historians and philosophers. The book is an admirable summary of, and addition to, that scholarship (Smith, John Maynard 1995-03-02).”
1995 Stuart A. Kauffman published At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity A in which he described a “major scientific revolution has begun, a new paradigm that rivals Darwin’s theory in importance. At its heart is the discovery of the order that lies deep within the most complex of systems, from the origin of life, to the workings of giant corporations, to the rise and fall of great civilizations. And more than anyone else, this revolution is the work of one man, Stuart Kauffman, a MacArthur Fellow and visionary pioneer of the new science of complexity. Kauffman brilliantly weaves together the excitement of intellectual discovery and a fertile mix of insights to give the general reader a fascinating look at this new science – and at the forces for order that lie at the edge of chaos.” In this book Kauffman cited Fisrt Nations author Scott Momaday, a Pulitzer Prize winner, “We must reinvent the sacred in the modern world”. Kauffman response was, ”I hold the hope that what some are calling the new sciences of complexity may help us find a new place in the universe, that through this new science, we may recover our sense of worth, our sense af the sacred”.
1996 CALResCo site on Complex Systems Research and Education, was launched to integrate interdisciplinary information about Complex Systems, too complex for Newtonian analysis and too simple for Statistical averaging. Complex Systems Research, using simulations and iterations, for example, explore the infinite space of possible systems in a way not previously feasible as computer resources became more powerful and more accessible.
1996 Stuart Kauffman switched from his focus on experiments to create new life to developing computer models to help executives make more money. He founded BiosGroup with funds of $6 million provided by Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. Even though complexity theories were challenged by many even Kauffman’s friend and mentor, evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith, who described computer modeling as “fact-free science.” There was a great interest in the monetization of Santa Fe Institute’s research on complexity theory. See Mackenzie (2002-02-01).
1997 Michael R. Bütz published his book entitled Chaos and Complexity: Implications for Psychological Theory and Practicein which he argued that there was an acceptable “scientific” explanation for the inherent complexity and richness of the human experience of change. He traced three decades (1967-1997) of studies to describe nonlinear dynamics (chaos theory, complexity theory). and explores the implications of chaos/complexity theories for psychology and the social sciences. He “describes the benefits psychology can glean from using ideas in chaos theory and applying them to psychology in general, individual psycho-therapy, couples therapy, and community psychology, and also considers possible directions for research and application.” See Amazon.com “There is a curious phenomenon among scientists today [1997] and others who often seem to use anthropomorphic terminology to describe how a system organizes itself. They often seem to emphasize how a type of collective communication transpiring across the system even in discussing chemical reactions, biological structures, soliton waves in rivers and oceans, physics, and even astrophysics (Gleick 1987; Maturana and Varela 1992; Prigogine and Stengers 1984; Sinnott 1966; Tonge 1974). It seems that these scientists may be harkening back to vitalism in philosophy or making a pitch for the strong form of the anthropic cosmological principle (Barrow, J. D. 1988; Barrow and Tipler 1986). In the current zeitgeist, this idea seems necessary to consider. The debate between those who believe in an elan vital or vital force and the Drieschs’ entelechy (Levy 1992:21) seems to be ongoing. Even prominent individuals working with artificial life (like Langton, … continue to wrestle with vitalism (Levy 1992:107). In actuality this is no small matter for scientists studying artificial life because, in essence, their theory is based on the idea of a bottom-up collective cellular activity. The obstacle of vitalism stands squarely in the path of demonstrating such a hypothesis. Although a solution is not posed here, one is encouraged to consider that self-organization simply can emerge from a “complex enough stew” and not be terribly efficient. Consequently, vitalism is a matter than both wet perspectivists and artificial perspectivists will have to confront at some time in the future. Noting how life can emerge from the collection of enough stuff and that it wants to happen, as Kauffman is quoted as stating – what does this have to say of cognition? Is the brain similar to some perbiotic stew, or is it more refined and rational? (Butz p.30).”
1997 Roger Jones began developing a software program called Insurance World, which uses complexity theory to simulate the entire industry. Jones is cofounder of the consulting and software-development firm Complexica Inc. Jones worked for 17 years as a physicist and computer scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Then he was invited to join a group of complexity theorists at the Sante Fe Institute, who build elaborate computer models to simulate the dynamics of complex systems as diverse as cities, rain forests, and the stock market. See Mackenzie (2002-02-01).
1999-01 John Casti and Roger Jones founded Complexica “to develop intellectual property through consulting relationships with corporate clients and to commercialize that intellectual property by creating spin-offs or partnerships that focused on targeted vertical markets. Complexica created three such relationships.”
2002 The mathematical development of theories underlying emergent behavior were introduced.
2002 Ernst Mayr, co-founder of the modern evolutionary synthesis and a critic of both vitalism and reductionism, , stated: “It would be ahistorical to ridicule vitalists. When one reads the writings of one of the leading vitalists like Driesch one is forced to agree with him that many of the basic problems of biology simply cannot be solved by a philosophy as that of Descartes, in which the organism is simply considered a machine…..The logic of the critique of the vitalists was impeccable. But all their efforts to find a scientific answer to all the so-called vitalistic phenomena were failures.… rejecting the philosophy of reductionism is not an attack on analysis. No complex system can be understood except through careful analysis. However the interactions of the components must be considered as much as the properties of the isolated components (Mayr 2002).” keywords: vitalism, vis vitalis (force, power, physical force, moral power; Lebenskraft (die): n. vitality, power, energy, strength, liveliness, vigor, power to live, life force, energy within a living being,
2003 NuTech Solutions Completes BiosGroup Acquisition. Stuart Kauffman and Robert MacDonald joined NuTech Solutions’ Board of Directors. By 2002 BiosGroup had already done more than 50 projects for Fortune 500 clients. ”BiosGroup is the world leader in applying the science of complexity and complex adaptive systems to the simulation, modeling, and solving of difficult problems for government organizations and Global 1000 corporations. BiosGroup has raised more than $20 million in venture capital financing from Ernst & Young, Procter & Gamble Company, and Ford Motor Company; and has build a client list of over 50 major corporations, including Air Liquide, Boeing, the Nasdaq stock market, Southwest Airlines, SAP, Société Générale, Texas Instruments, Unilever, and the United States Department of Defense. BiosGroup founder Dr. Stuart Kauffman, and BiosGroup Chairman Robert MacDonald, have also joined NuTech Solutions’ board of directors. A leading theorist in complexity science since the early 1980’s, Dr. Kauffman was a founding scientist of the Santa Fe Institute and a consultant to Los Alamos National Laboratory, where significant early work on “chaos theory” was conducted. Dr. Kauffman is also a MacArthur Fellow and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is also the author of several highly regarded books on complexity science, including ”At Home in the Universe” and “Investigations.” “The science of complexity and complex adaptive systems is having a positive impact on business and government. The combination of BiosGroup and NuTech Solutions will accelerate the commercialization of the science and will result in more products that use the science to solve problems facing decision makers,” said Stuart Kauffman (source).” BiosGroup “alone employs some 50 scientists, including researchers who once specialized in solar neutrinos, epileptic seizures, and remote sensing. See Mackenzie (2002-02-01).”
2004-12-31 John Casti and Roger Jones company Complexica merged with its daughter company, CommodiCast, Inc. CommodiCast is currently focusing on the Pharmaceutical and Finance verticals.
Citations
Who’s Who
Christopher Langton (1949- ) is an American biologist and one of the founders of the field of artificial life. He coined the term in the late 1980s when he organized the first “International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems” (otherwise known as Artificial Life I) at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987. In the 1970s Christopher Langton, “a part-time bluegrass guitarist, part-time programmer, part-time college dropout, spent most of his time on the fringe of the college scene around Cambridge and Boston following the conceptual scent of vague ideas about adaptation and self-organisation through browsing through bookshops and taking the odd course. The scent eventually led Langton to invest in an Apple II and begin experimenting himself. Fascinated by the spidery, life-likeness of these “cellular automata” structures, Langton discovered the work of Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram had found that there were four possible types of cellular automata rules. Class I were “doomsday rules”: no matter what initial seed, all the cells would die within one or two time steps. Class II rules were marginally more interesting: any initial seed would quickly form into a set of static, pulsating blobs. Class III were the other extreme completely: the patterns they produced were so frenetic, there appeared to be no order or predictability. Class IV rules were the most unusual and strange: these rules did not produce static structures, or chaotic patterns. What was they produced were complicated structures that split, grew and mutated: “Game of Life” falls neatly into this category (Lancaster 1993).”
Stuart Alan A. Kauffman (1939-) cyberneticist, wiki “is an American theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher concerning the origin of life on Earth. He is best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from self-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection, as well as for proposing the first models of Boolean networks.” Kauffman presently holds a joint appointment at the University of Calgary in Biological Sciences and in Physics and Astronomy, and is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Philosophy. He is also an iCORE (Informatics Research Circle of Excellence) [1] chair and the director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics. In 1996, Kauffman started BiosGroup, a Santa Fe, New Mexico-based for-profit company that employs complex systems methodology to attempt to solve business problems. BiosGroup was acquired by NuTech Solutions[2] in early 2003. As of 2003, Kauffman was a director of NuTech which is no longer doing business. Kauffman has been increasingly important in management theory. His NK model, and the idea of epistatic links, have been used to describe the way information is shared in a firm.” wiki
Santa Fe Institute, (SFI) a non-profit research institute dedicated to the study of complex system through the development of a new kind of scientific research community, that emphasizes multi-disciplinary collaboration in pursuit of understanding the common themes that arise in natural, artificial, and social systems.
Santa Fe Institute, under the Core Research, Adaptive Computation and External Faculty Programs, and by the University of California, Berkeley, under contract AFOSR 91-0293. Thanks to Doyne Farmer, Jim Hanson, Erica Jen, Chris Langton, Wentian Li, Cris Moore, and Norman Packard for many helpful discussions and suggestions concerning this project. Thanks also to Emily Dickinson and Terry Jones for technical advice.
Buckminster Fuller, a cyberneticist,
Niklas Luhmann, a cyberneticist
Humberto Maturana, a cyberneticist
Talcott Parsons, a cyberneticist
Francisco Varela, a cyberneticist,
Notes
Taxonomies
Faceted categories or faceted tagging:
Subject-based taxonomies:
Content-based taxonomies: Complex systems scientists
Behaviour-based taxonomies:
Folksonomy or ethnoclassification: my key words: far-from-equilibrium dynamics, far-from-equilibrium dynamics vs Darwinian natural selection, complex systems, self-organization, epistatic links, NK model,
Webliography and Bibliography
February, 2006.
Bechtel, William; Richardson, Robert C. 1998. “Vitalism.” In Craig, E. Ed. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge.
. CRC Press. Taylor & Francis.
Crutchfield, James P. 1994. “The Calculi of Emergence: Computation, Dynamics, and Induction.” “Special issue on the Proceedings of the Oji International Seminar: Complex Systems — from Complex Dynamics to Artificial Reality.” Physica D.
Dennett, Daniel C. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Back Bay Books.
Dennett, Daniel C. 1995. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Dennett, Daniel C. 2003. Freedom Evolves. New York: Penguin Books.
Gardner, Martin. October 1970-10. “Mathematical Games: The fantastic combinations of John Conway’s new solitaire game “Life”". Scientific American. 223: 120–123.
“Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch.” 2009-01-25. The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2008. Encyclopedia.com.
Driesch, H. 1914. The History and Theory of Vitalism. London: Macmillan.
Jones, Roger S. 1982. Physics as Metaphor. University of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis.
Hempel, C.G. 1965. “Studies in the Logic of Explanation”, in C.G. Hempel (ed.) Aspects of Scientific Explanation, and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science. New York: Free Press.
Kauffman, Stuart A. 1993. The Origins of Order, (p311,312). Review.
Kauffman, Stuart A. 1996-08-08. Self-replication: Even peptides do it. Nature 382.
Kauffman, Stuart A. 1995. At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. Oxford University Press.
Kauffman, Stuart A. Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion.
Lancaster, Alex. 1993. “Life at the Edge of Chaos.”
Physica D. 42.
Langton, ChristopherG. 1990. ”Computation at the edge of chaos: Phase transitions and emergent computation.” Physica D, 42:12{37, 1990.
Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos. Macmillan.
Niklas, Luhmann. 1990. Essays on Self-Reference. Columbia University Press.
Macaulay, Thomas Babington. 1823. [1829-03, 1823, 1860]. “Mill on Government.” Miscellaneous Writings. 1 in Macaulay, Thomas Babington. 1860. The Miscellaneous Writings of Lord Macaulay. 1. London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts.
Mandelbrot, B.B. 1982. The Fractal Geometry of Nature. W.H. Freeman and Company.
Maturana, Humberto R. ; Varela, Francisco. 1973 [1980. Autopoiesis and Cognition: the Realization of the Living. Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky (Eds.). Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 42. Dordecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co.
Maturana, Humberto R. ; Varela, Francisco. Tree of Knowledge.
Mayr, Ernst. 1982. The Growth of Biological Thought. Harvard, NY: Harvard University Press.
Mayr, Ernst. 2002. “The Walter Arndt Lecture: The Autonomy of Biology.”
Mill, James. 1820a – 1825. Government. First published in the Supplement to the 4th, 5th & 6th editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1816-1824) and reprinted in James Mill: Essays & Etc.
Mill, James. 1820b – 1825. Jurisprudence. First published in the Supplement to the 4th, 5th & 6th editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1816-1824) and reprinted in James Mill: Essays & Etc.
Pasteur, L. (1858) ‘Mémoire sur la Fermentation Appelée Lactique’, Annales de Chimie Ser., 52: 404–18; partially reprinted and translated as ‘Pasteur’s Memoir on Lactic Fermentation’, in J.B. Conant (ed.) Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science, Harvard, NY: Harvard University Press, 1970. (Pasteur’s classic work.)
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1883Thus Spake Zarathrustra.
Waldrop, M MitchellComplexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. Viking Press. 1992.
Wolfram, S. 1984. “Universality and complexity in cellular automata.” Physica D. 10:1-35.
Wolfram, S. Ed. 1986. “Theory and Applications of Cellular Automata.” World Scienti c. Singapore.
Von Kitzing, Eberhard. 2001. The Origin of Complex Order in Biology: `Abdu’l-Bahá’s concept of the originality of species
compared to concepts in modern biology. Evolution and Baha’i Belief. Kalimat Press: Los Angeles.
Behavior-Based Taxonomy (BBT)
January 20, 2009
Draft!! What kinds of semantic web tools can information architects use to make it easier for search engines to match specific queries with the most relevant information? Tools developed in Library Sciences (and now Information Studies) such as taxonomies, faceted classification and thesauri enhance search results. Information Studies with a focus on marketing do not attempt to help users link to the most relevant information in response to their queries as much as they want to advertise their products and services. A higher Google ranking means greater findability and more potential clients but cannot ever ensure robust truth claims or the most efficient research avenue on the subject under investigation. Behaviour-based taxonomy (BBT) architectures attempt to direct more traffic to their sites which could, if used unethically, simply translate into claiming more tags and categories than are justified.
Advances in technology make it easier for Information Architects to monitor traffic on sites and collect detailed statistics on queries and hits (page views, etc). Behaviour-based taxonomy (BBT) uses data on visitors/users/clients’ queries to revisit, redefine and refine taxonomies: categories, tags, metatags, etc. If I understand it correctly behaviour-based taxonomy (BBT) could be developed by reclassifying objects in different hierarchies within traditional subject and content-based taxonomies, using faceted categories effectively when classical taxonomy is not sufficient and being aware of other common terms that describe the object (thesauri).
Again if I am correctly understanding behaviour-based taxonomy it could also be a behaviour-based folksonomy, in which an ordinary blogger, like myself, could monitor wordpress dashboard data on visitors queries to develop categories and tags.
Faceted categories: Although the concept of the faceted categories system was first introduced by S.R. Ranganathan in 1933 in his publication Colon Classification, this simple but highly-efficient tool from the Library Sciences and Library and Information Studies (LIS), is proving to be highly effective in Web 2.0 applications such as del.icio.us social bookmarking and wordpress blogs. The popularity of facet categories has increased. Library and Information Studies S.R. Ranganathan faceted universal classification system used only five faceted categories (PMEST): Personality (the something in question, e.g. a person or event in a classification of history, or an animal in a classification of zoology), Matter (what something is made of), Energy (how something changes, is processed, evolves), Space (where something is), Time (when it happens). These have also become the classic who, what, how, where, when.
Dalhousie University’s School of Library and Information Studies professor Louise Spiteri’s article (1998-04) hosted on the Information Architecture Institute’s site, simplifies Ranganathan’s system and explained developments in the use of faceted categories through the establishment in 1952 of the British Classification Research Group (CRG) to expand on and modify Ranganathan’s facet analysis in response to the limitations of traditional enumerative classification systems when confronted with compound subjects. British Classification Research Group (CRG) studies facet analysis, relational operators and the theory of Integrative Levels (Spiteri 1995). Spiteri explored how the CRG’s bottom-up approach provided a useful alternative to the traditional top-down approach to classification. In the top-down approach predetermined areas of knowledge are broken down into their constituent elements. The bottom-up approach pieces together individual elements and then determines the areas of knowledge they form using the theory of integrative levels.
Faceted categories are based on emergent phenomena whose behaviour cannot be predicted from their constituent parts versus resultant phenomena whose behaviour can be predicted from their constituent parts.
Emergence has been used as a concept/metaphor in philosophy of the mind studies to illustrate why mechanistic calculations of brain architecture as used in cognitive science are inadequate. Michael Polanyi has found emergence to be a potent concept in the the study of knowledge itself helping to explain why we know what we know, how we build new ideas when our knowledge becomes tacit (Polanyi 1966). See Tennis “ (2004). Polanyi (1967: 4) explored processes inherent in connoisseurship/discovery of new models and theories versus Popper’s validation/refutation of theories and models in value-free scientific knowledge, and developed the concept of tacit knowledge, a pre-logical phase of knowing where ‘we can know more than we can tell (1967: 4)’ comprised of concepts, images and sensory information that help make sense of our experiences. Polanyi argued that the knowledge of approaching discovery or establishing authenticity is based on a highly personal (not objective) tacit knowledge where the knower senses that there is something valuable to be discovered and feels compelled or committed to investigating the hidden truth claim and relating evidence to an external reality (Polanyi 1967: 24-5). See Smith (2003).
A more recent faceted universal classification system called Bliss Bibliographic Classification (BC2), added and redefined the classical classification to include: thing/entity [who], kind, part, property, material, process [how], operation [how], patient, product, by-product, agent [who], space [where], time [when] (Broughton 2001:79).
(Broughton 2001) described how facted classifications continue to be “powerful tools for the management of vocabulary, characterised by a rigorous analytical approach to terms, and the clear identification of semantic and syntactic relationships and structures. The philosophy and function of BC2 are described, as is the process of building a knowledge structure on facet analytical principles. The range of related functions of such structures when employed as knowledge management tools (as classification, thesaurus, subject heading list, browsable index) is considered, as is the potential of facet analytical knowledge structures for the management of digital materials. Facet analysis is regarded as a powerful methodology for the creation of structures appropriate to specific retrieval requirements in a range of contexts, with emphasis on the problems of complex subject description and retrieval and multidimensionality.”
William Denton described (2007-02) “How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web” by choosing between these two systems.
Metadata in terms of content management and information architecture, refers to “information about objects” (documents, images, etc). The well-known Dublin Core specification for metadata includes 15 elements: Title, Creator, Subject, Description, Publisher, Contributor, Date, Type, Format, Identifier, Source, Language, Relation, Coverage and Rights. The DCMI Type Vocabulary “provides a general, cross-domain list of approved terms that may be used as values. They also provide a more comprehensive document: “DCMI Metadata Terms These are described in detail on their site. For example under subject:
Term Name: subject
URI: http://purl.org/dc/terms/subject
Label: Subject
Definition: The topic of the resource.
Comment: Typically, the subject will be represented using keywords, key phrases, or classification codes. Recommended best practice is to use a controlled vocabulary. To describe the spatial or temporal topic of the resource, use the Coverage element.
Type of Term: Property
Refines: http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/subject
Version: http://dublincore.org/usage/terms/history/#subjectT-001
Note: This term is intended to be used with non-literal values as defined in the DCMI Abstract Model (http://dublincore.org/documents/abstract-model/). As of December 2007, the DCMI Usage Board is seeking a way to express this intention with a formal range declaration.
Taxonomies:
- Subject-Based Taxonomies (SBT) : “Subject or “Domain” taxonomies attempt to completely describe all of the terms in a field, as well as the relationship between the terms. Typically these relationships are hierarchical, and they are the kind of taxonomies we use to classify knowledge – the kind of taxonomies your biology teacher would talk about. You need a real subject matter expert to create useful subject based taxonomy. And whatever you do, don’t hire two (or more) subject experts, because they will never agree on the taxonomy (Enterprise Search 2007-04-25) .”
Subject-based classification includes metadata properties or fields that directly describe objects by listing discrete subjects. - Content-Based Taxonomies (CBT): “Content based taxonomies are organized using existing content. Organization charts, computer directory/folder structures, or social tagging content is typically a ‘content based’ taxonomy. These taxonomies are often built by humans – you do it yourself when you decide what folders to use on your computer. But these can also be done automatically with tools many search and content management vendors sell (Enterprise Search 2007-04-25).”Guarino, Masolo and Vetere’s (1999-05) article described how the OntoSeek system adopts “a language of limited expressiveness for content representation and uses a large ontology based on WordNet for content matching. [S]tructured content representations coupled with linguistic ontologies can increase both recall and precision of content-based retrieval. They compared tf-idf results from a corpus of 100 documents for term ‘cancer’ obtained from Google (cancer, cell, 3. breast, 4. research, 5. treatment, 6. tumor, 7. information, 8. color, 9. patient, 10. health, 11. support, 12. news, 13. care, 14. wealth, 15. tomorrow, 16. entering, 17. writing, 18. loss, 19. dine, 20. mine, 21. dinner) and terms expanded using WordNet (1. cancer, 2. cell, 3. tumor, 4. patient, 5. document, 6. carcinoma, 7. lymphoma, 8. disease, 9. access, 10. treatment, 11. skin, 12. liver, 13. leukemia, 14. risk, 15. breast, 16. genetic,
17.tobacco, 18. thymoma, 19. malignant, 20. gene, 21. clinical [1]. - Behavior-Based Taxonomy (BBT): (Enterprise Search (2007-04-25)) argued that Behavior-Based Taxonomy (BBT) is more important than Subject-Based Taxonomies (SBT) or Content-Based Taxonomies (CBT). Behaviour-Based Taxonomy refers to the actual list of search terms that people actually use when they search a site which can be monitored through your site’s search logs every few months. They recommend that you aim to provide useful results for the top hundred queries on your site (Enterprise Search 2007-04-25) .
wordpress.com offers an amazing service to their bloggers by providing statistics on page views, etc. But they also list queries which has in some ways encouraged me to improve responses to the most frequent search enquiries. There are search analytic tools available, but we can monitor our own sites using slow world technologies as well.
tags: queries, Search Analytics, findability, search relevance, search engine optimization (SEO), taxonomy, taxonomies, hierarchies, taxonomy, ontology, semantic web, Data Management, Knowledge Management, Information Architects, information specialists, classification, bottom-up, top-down, hierarchies (arborescent or rhizomic), folksonomy, what is being done in the name of,
faceted tagging: taxonomy: hierarchies,
categories: taxonomies, Internet search engines,
Notes (Draft!!)
The British Classification Society (BCS)’s cross-disciplinary [5] membership includes anthropologists, archaeologists, astronomers, biologists, chemists, computer scientists, forensic scientists, geologists, information specialists, librarians, psychologists, soil scientists and statisticians who are concerned about principles and practice of classification.
Several subject-specific faceted classification systems such as the London Education Classification, the London Classification for Business Studies, and theClassification for Library and Information Science emerged through this initiative. Facet analysis has been applied not only to several classification systems, but has also been used in the design of information retrieval thesauri such as Thesaurofacet, DHSS-DATA Thesaurus and BSI Root Thesaurus, indexing systems such as BTI, CIFT, and GREMAS, and knowledge-based indexing systems such as MedIndex and SIMPR (Aitchison 1969, 1985;British Standards Institution 1988; Burton 1986; Gibb & Fleming 1991; Revie & Smart 1991; Stiles 1985; Travis1989, 1990)
Search engines:
Simpli “was an early search engine that offered disambiguation to search terms. A user could enter in a search term that was ambiguous (e.g., Java) and the search engine would return a list of alternatives (coffee, programming language, island in the South Seas). The technology was rooted in brain science and built by academics to model the way in which the mind stored and utilized language. The early technology was derived heavily from WordNet, which was invented by George A. Miller at Princeton University. George Miller was an advisory Board member to Simpli.” wiki
FAST In April 25, 2008 Microsoft acquired FAST Search & Transfer.
During the last five years, From 1967 until he died in 1972 renowned library scientist, Ranganathan, went through a period of prolific writing. It was at this time that he worked on Colon Classification and “proved that the design and development a scheme for classification is a life time activity (biography).”
3. Garshol’s (2004-10-26)” article focussed on the advantages of using topic maps to represent metadata and subject-based classification thereby re-using existing classifications and classification techniques with more precise descriptions, he also provided clear explanations of the role of faceted categories, subject-based classification and metadata.
1. wiki: The semantic lexicon WordNet groups English words into synsets, provides short definitions, and records the various semantic relations between these synonym sets thereby producing a more intuitive dictionary/thesaurus that is also capable of supporting automatic text analysis and artificial intelligence applications. Every synset contains a group of synonymous words or collocations (a collocation is a sequence of words that go together to form a specific meaning, such as “car pool”); different senses of a word are in different synsets. The meaning of the synsets is further clarified with short defining glosses (Definitions and/or example sentences). A typical example synset with gloss is: good, right, ripe — (most suitable or right for a particular purpose; “a good time to plant tomatoes”; “the right time to act”; “the time is ripe for great sociological changes”) Most synsets are connected to other synsets via a number of semantic relations.”
dog, domestic dog, Canis familiaris
=> canine, canid
=> carnivore
=> placental, placental mammal, eutherian, eutherian mammal
=> mammal
=> vertebrate, craniate
=> chordate
=> animal, animate being, beast, brute, creature, fauna
=> …
On the WordNet site they provide an online search. The query: “dog” gives these results:
S: (n) dog, domestic dog, Canis familiaris (a member of the genus Canis (probably descended from the common wolf) that has been domesticated by man since prehistoric times; occurs in many breeds) “the dog barked all night”
S: (n) frump, dog (a dull unattractive unpleasant girl or woman) “she got a reputation as a frump”; “she’s a real dog”
S: (n) dog (informal term for a man) “you lucky dog”
S: (n) cad, bounder, blackguard, dog, hound, heel (someone who is morally reprehensible) “you dirty dog”
S: (n) frank, frankfurter, hotdog, hot dog, dog, wiener, wienerwurst, weenie (a smooth-textured sausage of minced beef or pork usually smoked; often served on a bread roll)
S: (n) pawl, detent, click, dog (a hinged catch that fits into a notch of a ratchet to move a wheel forward or prevent it from moving backward)
S: (n) andiron, firedog, dog, dog-iron (metal supports for logs in a fireplace) “the andirons were too hot to touch”
Verb
S: (v) chase, chase after, trail, tail, tag, give chase, dog, go after, track (go after with the intent to catch) “The policeman chased the mugger down the alley”; “the dog chased the rabbit”
5. In his useful article Tennis (2004) described three paths of interdisciplinary work that shape the future of classification research: emergence, encyclopedism, and ecology.
Webliography and Bibliography
Broughton, Vanda. 2001. “Faceted classification as a basis for knowledge organization in a digital environment; the Bliss Bibliographic Classification as a model for vocabulary management and the creation of multi-dimensional knowledge structures.” The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 2001: 67-102.
Denton, William. 2007-02. “How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web.”
Guarino, Nicola; Masolo, Claudio; Vetere, Guido. 1999-05. “OntoSeek: Content-Based Access to the Web.” IEEE Intelligent Systems 14: 3:70-80.
Garshol, Lars Marius. 2004-10-26. “Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps!: Making sense of it all.” XML Europe 2004.
Garshol, Lars Marius. 2004. “Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps!: Making sense of it all.” Journal of Information Science. Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals. 30:4:378-39.
Garshol, Lars Marius. 2004-09. “Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps!: Making sense of it all.” interChange. 10:3:17-30.
Jones, Matthew; Alani, Harath. 2006-07-23. “Content-based Ontology Ranking.” 9th International Protege Conference. Stanford, California.
Kehoe, Miles. 2007-Q1. “Interpreting Your Search Activity Reports: What to look for as you review your reports.” New Idea Engineering Inc.4:1.
McIlwaine, I.; Broughton, Vanda. 2000. “The Classification Research Group: then and now.” Knowledge Organization. 27:4: 195-199.
Polanyi, Michael. 1966. Tacit Dimension. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. See Michael Polanyi and Tacit Dimension.
Ranganathan, S.R. 1933 [1987 7th ed]. Colon Classification. Madras: Madras Library Association.
Ranganathan, S.R. 1933 [2006]. Colon Classification. 6th Edition. Ess Ess Publications, Delhi, India.
Ranganathan, S.R. 1962. Elements of library classification. New York: Asia Publishing House.
Smith, Mark. K. (2003) “Michael Polanyi and tacit knowledge.” Encyclopedia of Informal Education.
Spiteri, Louise F. 1995-06. The Classification Research Group and the Theory of Integrative Levels. Katharine Sharp Review. 1:1-6.
Spiteri, Louise. 1998-04. “A Simplified Model for Facet Analysis.” Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science. 23:1-30.
Taylor, A. G. 1992. Introduction to Cataloging and Classification. 8th ed. Englewood, Colorado: Libraries Unlimited.
Tennis, Joseph T. 2004. “Three Spheres of Classification Research: Emergence, Encyclopedism, and Ecology.” In
Advances in Classification Research. vol. 13. (Medford, NJ: Information Today for the American Society for
Information Science and Technology).
HMS Victory
January 19, 2009
HMS Victory
Victory in a Fishbowl ocean.flynn.
In mid-January the Calgary sun shines on the kitchen table inviting me to play with light and reflections. I used separate images of the stern and starboard of HMS Victory from models, layered images of our fish, light effects, etc to enhance the original photo.
Visual complexity: Primary trope as a rhizome
January 18, 2009
In an article (2008-07) entitled “Web science: an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the Web” published in Association of Computing Machinery’s journal Communications Hendler, Shadbolt, Hall, Berners-Lee and Weitzner bemoaned the fact that the Web was under-researched and recommended a systems approach to enhance understanding of the Web itself and its continuing social impact, model the Web as a whole and improve engineering of the future Web (Hendler et al 2008-07).
Internet studies focus mainly on technological and monetization aspects. Even the semantic web is geared towards search engine optimization as a market tool.
This illustration, hosted on Flickr, was featured on the cover of the July 2008 edition of Association of Computing Machinery (ACM)’s Communications magazine. It accompanies the Hendler et al article (2008-07). Generative artist Marius Watz [1] uses programming languages to create graphics like these: Communications of the ACM 51.7 – Story spread & “Communications of the ACM 51.7 – Cover image”. Art direction was by Andrij Borys Associates.
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(Thank you to Watz for use of his images.)
Watz explained, “I don’t explicitly use the rhizome as a model, but many of my forms are based on emergent growth and the interaction between agents governed by simple rules. My interest tends towards the aesthetic rather than the academic, so I generally use whatever models produce interesting behavior.”
Watz’ images resonated with what I have been attempting to do with slow world technologies such as Adobe Photoshop where I combine layers of images of neurons, as a rhizomic metaphor, with constellations of nodes on the Internet placed manually. This process is really an attempt to represent an object that is static which is not the case with the Internet (or the brain’s neurons and synapses). In a sense I am attempting to visualize my own use of the Internet, particularly the emerging semantic web where we redefine older terms and invent new ones to describe what is being done in the name of the Internet in 2009. It is a form of cartography or decalcomania using the trope of the rhizome. Deleuze and Guattari (1987:12) remind us that “a rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model. It is a stranger to any idea of genetic axis or deep structure.”
Conversations on this ontology of knowledge management is being indexed under numerous categories, tags, ethnoclassifications, folksonomy, taxonomy . . .
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| From Dendrons1440×900.2008 |
My motivation for seeking out rhizomic metaphors comes from the work of French philosophers in the 1960s such as Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze who, through their politicized philosophy of difference, developed concepts of consciousness or mind and new forms of thought, writing, subjectivity that are useful for understanding the non-linear, open-ended space of the Internet.
Philosopher Gilles Deleuze and clinical psychoanalyst, Felix Guattari co-authored Anti-Oedipus (1972 [1983]) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980 [1987]). They proposed an “art of living” that embraces hypertextual and hypermedia processes.
Like Nick Lilly, “I hoped that the “primary tropes used by Deleuze and Guattari (the rhizome and tree: rhizomatic knowing/being and arborescent knowing/being) would provide me with a way of getting at key differences between a print-literate consciousness and a e-literate consciousness”. So in my own digitages I sought out images from life sciences as templates to create my own customized rhizomic cartography. They are intended as complex visualizations and are highly subjective. Because they are developed slowly as layers, they are in a way unending and constantly changing.
Arborescent knowing/being is represented in tree diagrams that are genealogical whereas rhizomes are anti-genealogical (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:21). “We should stop believing in trees, roots and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:15).”
“The tree comes to symbolize the distinction between subject and object, between signifier and signified, encompassing the whole of dualistic logic through its branching patterns, through its definitions of set pathways between root and branch (Clinton 2003).”
In A Thousand Plateaus (1980) Deleuze and Guattari challenged modern beliefs in hierarchy, identity, subjectivity and representation. and promoted principles of difference and multiplicity in theory, politics, and everyday life (Best and Kellner 1991).
However, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the virtual defies representation as a visual image and must be imagined as a field of dynamic forces. Even generative software-based visuals like those employed by Marius Watz [1] cannot visualize that which will not just be but is constantly becoming something else, as it the case of the Internet.
Deleuze and Guattari are concerned with complexity theory, scientific research into self-organizing material systems. In their early work they focused on a materialist study and intervention of self-organizing material systems – systems without hierarchies resulting in a de-centered rhizomic network which (Protevi 2001-11:2). called empirical geophilosophy. According to Protevi (2001-11:2) their empirical geo-philosophy has an explicit political dimension in which they examined hierarchical systems where one body is dominated or domesticated by another, stereotyped reactions are implanted, exploitative procedures developed and implemented and territories are formed. In contrast, Deleuze and Guattari summoned a new earth with new relationships to the creative potential of material systems to form de-territorialized de-centred rhizomic systems where free bodies are formed with multiple, shifting and increasingly intense internal and external connections.
Deleuze and Guattari’s distinguish between virtual and actual wherein the virtual is the threshold where behaviours change and the actual refers to constituted bodies with elementary particles with observable properties and (even predictable) traits, tendencies and patterns of behaviour (or aggregated results of simple behaviors) which can be consciously recognised and therefore represented. The virtual refers to potential transformations or transcendence of material systems and elude represented as their properties of bodies, entities, singularities evade conscious recognition. Virtual singularities are irreducible, self-differentiating entities whose properties are emergent not static (Deleuze and Guattari 1968, 196?). They shape shift with increasingly intense internal and external connections. While it sounds chaotic, it isn’t as the virtual realm has regional ontologies which provide its own taxonomy and systems of categorization.
Notes
1. Generative artist Marius Watz works with generative software-based visuals (therefore he is a generative artist). In an interview he described generative works as open systems that unlike machines or paintings, are not finished. “Generative works are ”open“ in the sense that the artist does not completely control the process, but allows other factors (whether randomness, external sensory output or user interaction) to affect the output. It is of course possible to create ”closed“ deterministic works, but most generative artists enjoy the aspect of giving up a certain amount of control (digitaltools).”
He is based in New York and Oslo, after 5 years in Berlin. “Generative art is an art practice where the artist creates a system, typically a piece of software, which is either used to create a work of art or constitutes a work of art in itself. Generative art describes a method or strategy, rather than a specific style or medium of work. The form of Generative Art that most people are aware of is software-based visual abstract art, with artists like C.E.B.Reas, Lia, Jared Tarbell etc. being the most visible exponents. This work is abstract, visually complex and non-representational. Typically, it will be purely digitally generated, with no ”natural“ origin” (digitaltools).”
2. Rhizome as a metaphor for the emergence system, the Internet:
“The rhizome is an anti-genealogy ( (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:11).
“[The rhizome] is a short-term memory, or antimemory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots. . . . the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:21).”
“A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb ‘to be,’ but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and . . . and . . . and.’ This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb ‘to be’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:25).”
“Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:7).”
“Principle of multiplicity. . . . Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose arborescent pseudomultiplicities for what they are. . . . A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:8).”
“Principle of asignifying rupture: against the oversignifying breaks separating structures or cutting across a single structure. A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:9).”
“Principle of cartography and decalcomania: a rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model. It is a stranger to any idea of genetic axis or deep structure (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:12).”
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| From Desktop |
Webliography and Bibliography
Watz, Marius. 2008-07. “Communications of the ACM 51.7.” Communications. Association of Computing Machinery: Advancing Computing as a Science and a Profession.
Best, Stephen; Kellner, Douglas. 1991. “Chapter 3: Deleuze and Guattari: Schizos, Nomads, Rhizomes.” Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. Columbia University.
Call, Lewis. 1998. “Hypertext and the Postmodern Pedagogy of the Enlightenment.” The Journal of the Association for History and Computing. 1:1.http://mcel.pacificu.edu/history/jahcI1/Call/hypertext.html
Clinton, Dan. 2003. Annotation: Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. “Rhizome,” in A Thousand Plateaus. Theories of Media. Winter 2003.
Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Felix. 1972 [1983]. Anti-Oedipus.
Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Felix. 1980. Mille Plateaux.
Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Felix. 1987. Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Guattari, Felix; Deleuze, Gilles. 1968 [1994]. Trans. Paul Patton. Difference and Repetition.New York: Columbia University Press. Review by Alex Scott.
Guattari, Felix; Deleuze, Gilles. 196? The Logic of Sense.
Hendler, James; Shadbolt, Nigel; Hall, Wendy; Berners-Lee, Tim; Weitzner, Daniel. 2008-07. “Web science: an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the Web.” Communications. Association of Computing Machinery: Advancing Computing as a Science and a Profession.
Protevi, John. 2001-11. The Geophilosophies of Deleuze and Guattari. Southeastern Division of the Association of American Geographers (SEDAAG).
Roderick, Ian. 1998. “Habitable Space.” Space and Culture.
Snow Banks, Slush or Taxes: Calgary’s Chinook Solution
January 17, 2009
Calgary enjoys some of the most delightful and unique wintry affects. The psychological benefits of the warm Chinook winds throughout the winter are immeasurable. But Calgarians seem to depend on this natural phenomenon to clear city streets of unwanted snow. Unfortunately this January the snowmen are still standing and mailmen cannot reach mailboxes, 311 was inundated with complaints about road conditions, Calgary Transit buses and tow trucks are still getting stuck in the snow in spite of balmy weather.
Even when main streets are cleared, side streets and sidewalks remain covered in compact, icy snow even days after the most recent snowfall.
At a pedestrian crossing in front of a seniors residence and nursing home I stopped to help a WWII veteran cut a path through a mound of hardened snow piled up by a snowplow that had cleared the main roads by pushing the snow – not onto the median – but roadside effectively blocking access to pedestrian crossings and Calgary transit bus stops. The senior citizen was doing a good job but I was concerned he would have a heart attack since the snow was heavy. (An hour later the area was cleaned by a small snowplow. Apparently if it was a Good Samaritan who used his own snow plow, he broke a municipal by-law).
From a bus stop across the street we watched anxiously as a seemingly confused and very tiny, elderly lady had cars screeching to a halt as she stepped unto the pedestrian crosswalk and then back onto the sidewalk. She didn’t press the button for the traffic lights and we thought she was trying to cross but didn’t know how. As the bus neared she stepped almost in front of it! Apparently she was trying to get on the bus there since she couldn’t manage the icy mounds in front of the regular bus stop.
Albertans are proud that theirs is the only Canadian province with no provincial sales tax. And Calgarian homeowners pay very low taxes compared to the rest of Canada. In 2008 while still affected by boom pricing, the median residential property assessment was $447,500 and the median residential property taxes for a home assessed at $447,500 was $1080.76. The 2007 average municipal tax and utility cost of 24 cities surveyed in Canada was $3,361 while the City of Calgary’s average municipal tax and utility cost ranks among the lowest at $3,129 (Calgary City Municipal Property Tax $945 = Average Utility Charges $2,184 = $3,129).
Economist Vander Ploeg (2002-09) compared sources of revenue sources for major cities in Canada and the United States. In 2000 83.4% of Calgary’s tax revenue ($682,546,000) came from property taxes which includes both residential and non-residential. Only 16% came from Business and Utility Taxes. Revenue sources for Canadian municipalities include property tax, user fees and intergovernmental transfers.
“The list of tax levers available to western Canada’s cities is limited to property taxes, utility franchise taxes, and a few small selective sales taxes (Vander Ploeg 2002-09:28).”
In contrast Denver’s total revenue growth increased from 1990 to 2002 by almost 60% (in per capita terms) compared to only 22% for Calgary. Denver has 13 sources of revenue and this enables the municipality to invest significantly more in the city’s capital infrastructure (Vander Ploeg 2002-09:28).
“To provide context, it is important to understand the financial challenges facing western Canada’s big cities. The problems revolve around four factors (Vander Ploeg 2002). First, population growth in Canada is increasingly focused in large metropolitan centres. Nowhere is this more relevant than in the West, which has three of Canada’s fastest growing big cities (Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary). Rapid population growth leads to increased demands for municipal services and places stress on local infrastructure. As shown in Figure 1, this phenomenon is shared not only by western Canadian cities, but many U.S. cities as well (Vander Ploeg 2002-09).”
“Most other cities, whether on the Canadian or American side of the border, typically record about 20% to 25% of their total budget from utility operations. (This group includes Calgary and Edmonton, both of which own large electrical utilities. However, these operations are separate companies that are not consolidated in the municipal budget. If they were, these two cities would have some of the highest utility revenue [4] (Vander Ploeg 2002-09:30).”
Notes:
1. Municipal property tax information is based on a 25 to 30 year old, single-detached, three-bedroom, bungalow with a main floor area of 111.5 Square meters (1,200 sq. ft.), having a double car garage and finished full basement, on a 557.4 square meters (6,000 sq. ft.) lot located in an average neighbourhood. Average utility charge information is based on the total utility charge for telephones, power, water, sewer, land drainage and garbage collection for the average single-detached house. Property tax shown excludes school taxes and is net of homeowner grants or credits. Source: The City of Edmonton Planning and Development Department 2007 Residential Property Taxes & Utility Charges Survey. 2007 rates
2. Provincial programmes for social services have been downloaded onto municipalities.
3. Arcand et al (2009) predict that Metropolitan Calgary’s GDP will increase 2.4% because of stronger construction which wieconomy will offset slower services activity.
4. The City of Edmonton proposed the transfer of the Gold Bar wastewater treatment plant (worth $750 million) from city ownership to city-owned Epcor Utilities for $75 million. The Raging Grammies protested at City Hall. “City officials say in addition to the $75 million, Edmonton will earn an extra $115 million in fees and dividends by 2018. It’s a similar deal offered when the drinking water system was placed under Epcor ownership.” (Cooper 2009-01-18). Edmonton Journal.
Webliography and Bibliography
Arcand, Alan; Armstrong, Maxim; Lefebvre, Mario; McIntyre, Jane; Sutherland, Greg; Weibe, Robin. 2009-01. “Calgary: Metropolitan Outlook 1, Winter 2009.” Conference Board of Canada.
Cooper, David. 2009-01-18. “Coalition protests Gold Bar wastewater treatment plant.” Edmonton Journal.
Pavlichev and Garson (2004) suggest e-government, a new form of governance – digital government where digital technologies are used as a transformative force.
City of Edmonton. 2008-10-06. “Proposed 2009 Budget Maintains Current Service Levels.”
Guttormson, Kim. 2009-01-16. “Even+trucks+getting+stuck+Calgary+slushy+side+streets.” Calgary Herald.
Huang, Jong. 2007:01. “City of Edmonton Annual 2006 Residential Property Taxes & Utility Charges Survey.” City of Edmonton Planning and Development. see also http://www.edalliance.ca/news/print.asp?newsID=63
Pavlichev, Alexei; Garson, G. David. 2004. Digital Government: Principles and Best Practices. Idea Group Inc (IGI).
Vander Ploeg, Casey G. 2002-09. “Big City Revenue Sources: A Canada-U.S. Comparison of Municipal Tax Tools and Revenue Levers.”
Experience a Galileo Moment
January 11, 2009
2009 is the International Year of Astronomy and the University of Calgary’s Physics department’sRothney Astrophysical Observatory open house event on Saturday, January 10, 2009, 8:00pm to 11:00pm, with astronomer Dr. Phil Langill. We’re going to be able to see Calgary winter night sky through the lens of powerful telescopes with the added benefit of the ideal dark sky quality at the observatory. Apparently even without the telescope the moon is clearly visible these days since it will be the biggest and closest full moon of 2009.
First Snow: Home Depot Coach Lights
January 9, 2009
First Snow: Home Depot Coach Lightsocean.flynn.
Displays of illuminated miniature Victorian villages are one of the cheery aspects of Canadian winters that I enjoy. Perhaps that’s why I was drawn to these lights for our walkway . . .
These coach lights came from Home Depot on 11320 Sarcee Trail NW Calgary. They have made our little corner feel so much safer. The Victorian coach light seems to shine brighter through fresh snow.
Every time we return home after dark . . .
When I turn on the lights at dusk . . .
Seeing them covered in snow . . .
Knowing we’re using ecology-friendly bulbs in them . . .
I am grateful . . .
Note: January is a great time to check out clearance specials at incredibly low prices at Calgary’s Beacon Hill Home Depot, 11320 Sarcee Trail NW, Calgary, AB T3R 0A1 (403) 374-3860 STORE HOURS: M-F 7AM-10PM, SAT 7AM-8PM, SUN 8AM-6PM
