(Warning: Techno-babble ahead. I’ll keep it limited to the first paragraph and translate it at the end.)
The other day I stumbled across this InfoWorldarticle that points to two possible informational cascades in the IT world. First, it touches on the “PHP doesn’t scale” meme. I’ve seen this point argued ad nauseam in many places, [...]
Stephen Downes’ mention of my article on informational cascades (thanks for the plug, Stephen) led me to his post in the trdev discussion group. He writes:
In network theory, ‘groupthink’ is an instance of what is known as a cascade phenomenon. A cascade occurs (all other things being equal) when the propogation of a property (an [...]
If you liked my article on informational cascades then you will probably want to read Cass Sunstein’s Why Societies Need Dissent. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago, writes in detail about the impact of informational cascades on democratic dialogue, the rulings of panels of judges, and other critical areas related to civil [...]
My new article just came out in eLearn. It started out wanting to be about “emergent learning” but, once I realized that I still have no idea what emergent learning actually is, I removed all references to it in the article. At any rate, I feel pretty good about the piece.
The question will arise whether [...]
I was thinking some more last night about Stephen Johnson’s new position that there are separate types of clustering and adaptive emergence as I was reading Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s book Linked (which I am enjoying immensely, by the way; more on that in a later post). I suddenly had a flash of intuition that what Johnson [...]
