pumping meaning through the network

As long as books have been written about Data Processing and Information Science, those books begin with making a distinction between Data and Information.

Take the popuplar Joe Celko in one of the first pages of his 1999 Data And Databases, Concepts In Practice:

Information is what you get when you distill data. A collection of raw facts does not help
anyone to make a decision until it is reduced to a higher-level abstraction.

Now, this conception seems to me heavily biased by the practice of Management Information systems and Data Warehouses, where the distillation process is indeed of prime importance. But as I have been working in the context of Health Informatics and the Electronic Patient Record (EPR) a very different focus is in order.

In the EPR, data about patients is stored and used by actors with different roles in the healthcare process. Phycians of different specialties, nurses, administrative personel etc. The ideal (one of several) is that the patient data can be shared by this community, in order that each of them gets a more complete picture of the patient.

The problem here is that data entered by x as having some meaning to person x, will be retrieved by y and can have a very different meaning to y. This because of the different contexts of the actors, their different cognitive backgrounds etc. This is actually OK as long as the different meaning y attaches to the data is not a misinterpretation of the data.

Unfortunately such misinterpretations happen. The question is: can the EPR be designed and implemented in a way that makes it more robust against misinterpretations of the data stored in it?

Clearly, something can be done. If someone is recording the patient history and has two fields
Diabetes (yes / no) and Startdate (date), it would be wise to make absolutely clear in the record structure of the EPR that the fields belong together and that the date doesn't belong to Stopped Smoking (yes/no).

This is all common sense, but can easily be forgotten with the nice GUI´s one can construct these days. It´s a matter of minutes to give actor x a form with the said fields on them. And putting the Diabetes and Date field together or even putting a box around them, makes their relation to each other immediately clear to actor x. But this relation can get lost in the database and someone constructing a nice form for actor y has to know about their relation in order to reconstruct not only an apparently meaningful but also a correct form.

In what is perhaps a somewhat overstated metaphore, we see that the meaningfull ´living´ information of actor x gets ´burried´ in the database as ´death´ data and has to be ´resurrected´ to meaningfull ´living´ information again for actor y.

I think you will see by now that this is a different viewpoint on the data - information duality than that of Joe Celko. I'd like to call this the problem of Pumping Meaning Through The Network.

carnal knowledge

When thinking about Knowledge most of us think about books with difficult theories in them. And - with some justification - sociologists and philosophers ask us if that knowledge has actualy anything to do with the world. They talk about knowledge as being a social construction.

But then again I think at least our bodies have knowledge about the world in a very realist sense. We know how to survive in the world, not in the sense of fighting wars, but in the sense of eating and breathing. Our bodies know what to do with the stuff that enters it from day 1 of our existence, it is able to metabolize it and let us live.

Our bodies know a lot more. Our visual system is build to recognize straight lines etc. Our braines. Let's not even begin to speak about the way they are well adapted to this world.

It is evolutionary knowledge our bodies have. Those who didn't have it are no longer alive...

A book about knowledge and evolution that I quite like is Henry Plotkin - Darwin Machines and the nature of knowledge.

law of horizontal planes

Fully known as the Fundamental Topological Law Of Horizontal Planes For Domestic Spaces.
It states:
Any well defined horizontal plane in a domestic space can and will be completely covered by two and / or three dimensional objects.
I'm sure you will have noticed this in your own domestic space, or the ones of other people you have visited.
It is one of those obvious but hard to prove fundamental laws. A bit like the one for hairy persons, stating that they always have at least one naked spot where the hairs are parting.

So, can you provide either a proof or a counter example?

internationalization of the proletariat

The next fifty to hundred years will see the true internationalization of the proletariat.
At least in the objective sense, hopefully in the subjective sense.

Due to the forces of neoliberalist globalization the position of workers around the globe will tend to a low average. In the end this will be destructive even to capitalism itself, as the infrastructure (educated and healthy people, roads, telecom etc) will detoriate. But capitalism will not be able to do anything about it, as the cooperation needed for this is far beyond the logic of short term survival in competetive markets.

OK, I admit my indebtedness to John Gray - False Dawn (Delussions of Global Capitalism)
So where's the actor that will put an end to this?

metabolism for ALife

Played around a bit with Artificial Life software some time ago. Animals grazing fields and ants developing their sight.

The essence of it being like this:
A gene codes for the 'eye', with a parameter coding the distance the ant can see. The genetic algorithm creates new ants of which some can better survive than others, because they have the right 'sensitivity' to the (simulated) environment.

A few questions about this:
- What is sensitivity. It seems to require the 'physics' of the environment to be the same as that of the sense organ.
- No new senses can develop in this way, they are not encoded in the gene.
- Somehow this relates to 'embodiment'. Senses develop in a body because the body itself is sensitive to its environment that has the same physics as the body. The distinction between a body per sé and a specialized sense organ is a relative one.
- How is it that the body has the same physics and thus sensitivity? Because it is made out of the environment by a process called metabolism.

So, basically ALifers should attend more to eating and shitting.