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Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician and a computer scientist. Born in Kentucky in 1946, Rucker moved to Silicon Valley when he turned 40. Rucker has published twenty-five books, primarily science-fiction and popular science. He was an early cyberpunk and an editor at Mondo 2000. He often writes SF in a style is characterized as transreal. His most recent novels were Frek and the Elixir, a far-future epic about a boy's galactic quest to restore Earth's ecology and As Above So Below, a historical novel based on the life of the sixteenth century painter Peter Bruegel.  Rucker is a professor emeritus of computer science at San Jose State University, where he created a number of freeware programs relating to chaos, artificial life, cellular automata, higher dimensions, and computer games. He is presently working on The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, a nonfiction book about computers and the nature of reality. Rucker's website can be found at www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker or at www.rudyrucker.com.


Making Education Better

When the internet turned out to be better at reducing costs than increasing profits, a lot of bad ideas went away, but a lot of good ideas went away as well, or at least went dormant. One of these was making education better.

Here is a great interview with Roger Shank on the subject. Its worth remembering that even in the midst of the IPO silliness, there were people asking questions like "What exactly should the offerings of a university be? What should a course be? Should there be courses at all? How can we make education better?"

We should still be asking those questions.

posted by Clay Shirky at 10:45:22 AM | permalink


The Tyranny of Structurelessness

On the Old-School-Meets-Social-Software tip, Jo Freeman's marvellous essay from 1970, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" is a good antidote to the fear of structure in group endeavors. It was a critique of the design of groups in the women's movement, but is beautifully and broadly applicable to many arenas (including, near to my heart, the design of software meant to support group interaction.)

Says Freeman: "Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature coming together for any length of time, for any purpose, will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible, it may vary over time, it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed..."

This is just the tasting spoon sample, there's good stuff throughout.

posted by Clay Shirky at 7:23:17 PM | permalink


25 Theses of Pr0n Architecture

Yoz Grahame and Matt Jones were building a 'get - search - replace' web interface, and as a proof of concept came up with the ideal critique for that dorky "25 Theses about Info Architecture" thing.

Thesis #12: One goal of porn architecture is to shape porn into an environment that allows users to create, manage and share its very substance in a framework that provides semantic relevance.

posted by Clay Shirky at 7:49:57 AM | permalink


Social Rhetoric

Terrifically interesting post by Matt Webb about the possibility of developing a social rhetoric that would aid us in developing software for groups.

posted by Clay Shirky at 7:26:42 AM | permalink


Morning constitutional

Most successful online communities have a constitution of some sort, essentially a group-ratified agreement about 'how we do it around here'. Like Britain, however, most such constitutions are not written down.

For research into what works in social software, I am collecting a list of formal constitutional documents. In keeping with the great tradition of chaos in online social systems, everything here documents some crisis or period of prolonged difficulty. These documents are concrete wisdom about social software.

  • LambdaMOO Takes A New Direction, by the Wizards of LambdaMOO -- The wizards depart, and then return quite crankily
  • How Did the Moderation System Develop? from the slashdot FAQ. -- Gaming the system as the principle concern of system design
  • Our Replies to Our Critics from the Wikipedia FAQ -- Leverage for a core group to keep things on an even keel

    posted by Clay Shirky at 5:39:50 AM | permalink


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