Related Groups
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This page contains descriptions of all of the mailing lists, groups, or communities that live under the umbrella of SocialTechnology.ca :
This group is for discussion of Computer Assisted Social Activity, the use of recommender systems together with hi-tech graph theoretic combinatorial matching to improve or transform society by ensuring that each person can find a good job, good friends, and a truly compatible spouse. All of this is described on the new http://www.ComputerAssistedSocialActivity.ca website (too new? maybe -- it should be available soon, please stay tuned). The morpheme "pedia" after the acronym CASA in the group e-mail address is in memory of the late lamented Interpedia project, which though never born, may yet live again. See http://www.InterpediaSoftware.ca .
Some of CASA is described in casa.html and in dpwilson.html and even in http://www.CASocialActivity.Com which is the website associated with the CASAZoo , a home for wild, untamed, beasts banned from this Computer Assisted Social Activity group, CASApedia, and all other groups with the same moderator.
This was once a mailing list for communications amongst people with some interest in Computer Assisted Social Activity and especially the commercial venture described in the CASA Proposal at www.SocialTechnology.ca/casa.htm, and in helping to implement the contents of that proposal for an Internet-based enterprise through the website www.CASocialActivity.com -- in the narrow sense this mailing list was intended for the CASA or CASocialActivity.com management team.
From the beginning there was a lot bad behaviour of one group member and the moderator finally decided to banish him. But at the last moment he decided to create a new group from whom that pathetic individual would be banned, leaving the offender the choice of staying in this open old group or starting a group of his own.
This would keep the offending messages online for sociological study and perhaps lead to the creation of even more of such valuable specimens of early-21st century culture. In the light of this change, the name and e-mail address of the group has been changed to something more appropriate.
This mailing list is just what its name suggests, a place for posting requests that certain pieces of free software that you want but can't find on the net or web, be written for you -- and for everybody else, too. This page is intended for free open-source software, as is the (soon to be available) associated website, http://www.FreeSoftwareRequests.ca (domain registered, but not ready for access yet) -- but non-open-source is OK, too, and even non-free is OK, or almost OK, acceptable but discouraged. A close relative, a sister mailing list, is associated with http://www.GradStudentProjects.ca and can be joined by sending a blank e-mail to GradStudentProjects-subscribe@YahooGroups.com
-- and yet another sister group is associated with http://www.WhatSoftwareShouldBeLike.ca and is called SoftwareFantasies (No, not one of those sites. There are no provocative entertainment with programmers pictures anywhere on that site, and never will be). To join that group, send a blank e-mail to
SoftwareFantasies-subscribe@YahooGroups.com
-- of course the big free open-source development site (not one of mine, I'm sorry to say) is the revolutionary and highly successful http://www.SourceForge.net which is almost too successful, being always busy, making downloading often quite slow even if you have a high-speed cable modem connection as I do.
This group will discuss, organize, and inititate the Global Learning Games to be developed and played on the Internet and/or WorldWideWeb, with special attention to the needs of illiterate people who have only occasional access to a computer, but at the same time, with support for extremely sophisticated games for the world's elite. In all cases learning will be the goal, but this educational experience will be self-organizing with the help of hi-tech mechanisms such as data-mining, recommender systems, and combinatiorial optimization and graph theory. All non-profict, but see also GradStudentProjects:
GradStudentProjects.ca -- Academic and Real-World Access to the Global Pool of Grad-Student Researchers. GradStudentProjects.ca might be thought of as a SourceForge.Net for graduate level research projects.
GradStudentProjects.ca will maintain a database of projects that can be suggested by anyone, inside or outside of academia, and undertaken by any registered graduate student. It provides real-world (non-academic) idea-people with access to the global pool of grad-student researchers, students doing various reseach projects as part of their graduate school education.
The Interpedia was an idea ahead of its time. The subject of intense discussions in a high-volume mailing list from almost a decade ago, it included some great ideas such as the SoAP or Seal Of Approval mechanism that should be implemented -- it is badly needed on the web today. The implementation of the software side of the Interpedia is the goal of InterpediaSoftware.ca and this mailing list.
The Interpedia Project proposed an encyclopedia-like interface to the whole of the Internet, including not only pages of hypertext but all ongoing activities on the net, such as discussions on mailing lists and real time chat. InterpediaSoftware.ca will collect what little implementation work has already been done and either finish it or redesign it and start again.
Please follow the links on the InterpediaSoftware.ca home page at www.InterpediaSoftware.ca to the few Interpedia-related pages that exist elsewhere on the web, and watch this space for new developments. See also the newsgroup comp.infosystems.interpedia created years ago as a locus for Interpedia discussions.
This mailing list is mostly to support the development of free open-source Intepedia software, but will include discussions of software requirements that anyone can participate in, even if they are not programmers. It is also for the discussion of Interpedia theory and underlying mathematics, which will be discussed informally in English, with more formal or advanced mathematics taken elsewhere.
Wanted: Interpedia Mailing List archives from the old Interpedia mailing list of 1993 -- does anybody have the complete archives? Please contact Douglas P. Wilson at douglaspwilson@shaw.ca if you have any archived Interpedia messages at all, though of course we hope to someone has the complete collection.
Help make the McGuffin in a movie serve to highlight a political, social, or social technological cause, or meta-cause, instead of being just some arbitrary thing of no real significance. Find a McGuffin for your movie, or a movie to advertise your cause with a carefully chosen McGuffin.
A McGuffin is any object of desire or source of contention that serves as the nominal the basis for conflict in a story. The term was coined by the great director, Alfred Hitchcock at a 1939 Columbia University lecture.
A movie that tells a romantic tale, for example, may be about the relationship between two people, but that relationship is often developed or explored during their search for some object, artifact, or indeed some person or place. The McGuffin itself is of no real importance -- but maybe it should be!
A movie may be seen by millions of people, and as such it is a remarkable advertising media. Already placing products in movies, to be used or consumed by the stars, is big business.
An adevertiser's dream would be to get his product chosen as the McGuffin itself, for which he or she would have to pay dearly, if it was even possible. But commercial products make poor McGuffins.
So instead of making up nonsense McGuffins, perhaps they could be carefully chose to serve some worthy cause. And that is what MakeMcGuffinsMatter is for.
A mailing list for MemeticFlowers.ca, an organization and website for the creation and application of open-source software and HTML templates for use in setting up websites which will be attractive reproductive organs for memetic organisms. This mailing list will also be used for the discussion of Memetic Flowers so long as excessive discussion does not interfere with the actual software development work to be done. Flowers, of course, are the reproductive organs of angiosperm plants, and this word can be used by analogy to mean the reproductive organs of meme-complexes or memetic organisms. Memes, of course, are the information or software analogues of genes, as first described by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. This is the same analogy that exists between computer viruses and ordinary genetic viruses such as the AIDS or common cold viruses. We could surely find a less poetic and more accurate name for memetic flowers, but to do so would be to ignore the reproductive potential of catchy names.
The morphology and syntax of human languages seem to be rather arbitrary, and it is conventional linguistics dogma that they are indeed arbitrary. Is this correct? What about other language-like things -- what about music, for example. Is music a language? If so, is it arbritrary in some way? Arnold Schoenberg obviously thought so, but Leonard Bernstein argued that it isn't arbitrary, and much earlier so did Pythagoras.
What about mathematics? Much of it (far too much of it) seems very arbitrary, but people who do research into the foundations of mathematics, and especially category theorists, sometime argue that it is not. But what about mathematical notation? That must surely be arbitrary, don't you think. Most of it, anyway. Except for the actual keywords the languages use, both Scheme and Prolog don't seem very arbitrary, and apparently the theorem-prover-oriented language ML has nice mathematical properties that are provably correct.
Some library classification schemes like the Dewey Decimal System were quite non-arbitrary in initial conception, except for the fundamental choice of 10 basic topics. The Dewey Decimal System, as originally planned by Melvil Dewey was intended to be what we now call FRACTAL, since it is (or was) based on self-similarity. A new candidate for a non-arbitrary language, currently have under-construction,is a language composed ENTIRELY of acronyms. This new NonArbitraryLanguages mailing list will discuss all of this, share and compare research, and distribute free and open-source software tools for doing this research.
This group, from http://www.SocialTechnology.ca, is for the discussion, collaborative development, and free distribution of Social Technology, the technological or engineering counterpart to the the social sciences. It stresses "genuine solutions" to social problems, treating their underlying causes, not the symptoms -- no more band-aid solutions!
At least one university does make this important distinction, but most teach social technology in their social science departments. If you are creating a new university, or restructuring an existing one, please consider having social technology departments within your faculty of engineering.
A science asks and answers questions about "what" and "why", but technology is "the collection, study, invention and refinement of tools and techniques", and therefore asks and answers "how" questions and accumulates "how to" knowledge.
Any time we DO anything we make use of "how to" knowledge, and even science itself is an application of how-to knowledge -- the all-important "scientific method" is, of course, a method (or collection of methods) and the word 'method' is just a synonym for 'technique'.
Law, government, business, finance, research, development, education, and almost anything else that DOES something within and for human society is a collection of tools and techniques applied for social or societal purposes, and are thus social technology. But almost all of these social tools and techniques are "lo-tech".
The goal of SocialTechnology.ca is new, appropriate, "hi-tech" social technology. Like everything else that is hi-tech, this new social technology is ultimately based on something mathematical, although we try to avoid mathematical symbols and jargon in this mailing list and on our many webpages.
The best new social technology will be based on mathematical stuff: the use of collaborative filtering, graph theory and combinatorial optimization, group theory and topology.
"What Software Should Be Like", or SoftwareFantasies, is a group for the discussion of future software. It is a mailing list to accompany the WhatSoftwareShouldBeLike.ca website. It is a somewhat more specialized companion to the TechnologicalFantasies mailing list, and its www.TechnologicalFantasies.ca website. (This domain name has been registered, but the website will not appear until about May 4th, 2002). Most discussions will be from an Open Source perspective, but commercial software developers will be welcomed and future commercial software will also be discussed.
Technological Fantasies are fantasies or daydreams involving the use of technology, especially the creation of new technology, and might also be described as thoughts about unimplemented inventions. The TechnologicalFantasies.ca website with the aid of this Technological Fantasies Mailing List will collect such fantasies and try to communicate them to people who might do something useful with them, perhaps turning fantasy into reality.
If you have an interesting idea that involves a new or interesting use of technology, please mail it to this mailing list.
The underlying approach will be similar to the use of a database to collect and organize software development projects at the spectacularly successful SourceForge.net website and (if all goes well) at our own sister site GradStudentProjects.ca and its Graduate Student Projects Mailing List, which will do the same for graduate level research projects.
See the homepage at TechnologicalFantasies.html for an example of a technological fantasy, (involving fighting forest fires with wind-machine created and controlled firebreaks), presented in both of two normally alternative ways, once as a fictional short story, and once as a non-fictional proposal.
Below are access links to these important domains and their mailing lists. To read about these groups, click either on the webpage link or the listpage link. To subscribe to a mailing list (to join a group or community), click on the quick-subscribe-link, which should bring up your mailer, ready to send a message to that address. You do not need to fill out the message form, since a blank message is sufficient.
Copyright © 2002 Douglas P.Wilson
New: Social Technology through Diagrams
New: Social Techs novel online
The main Social Technology page.
Find Compatibles, the key page, with the real solution to all other problems explained
Technological Fantasies , a page about future technology
Social Tech a page about Social Technology, technology for social purposes. I think I was the first person to use this phrase on the Internet, quite a long time ago.
Roughly corresponding to these web pages are the following blogs:
Social Technology the main blog, hosted on this site, with posts imported from the following blogger.com blogs, which still exist and are useable.
Find Compatibles devoted to matching people with friends, lovers, jobs, places to live and so on, but doing so in ways that will actually work, using good math, good algorithms, good analysis.
Technological Fantasies devoted to future stuff, new ideas, things that might be invented or might happen, such as what is listed above and below.
Sex-Politics-Religion is a blog about these important topics, which I have been told should never be mentioned in polite conversation. Alright that advice does seem a bit dated, but many people are still told not to bring up these subjects around the dinner table.
I believe I was the first person on the Internet to use the phrase Social Technology -- years before the Web existed.
Those were the good old days, when the number of people using the net exceeed the amount of content on it, so that it was easy to start a discussion about such an upopular topic. Now things are different. There are so many web pages that the chances of anyone finding this page are low, even with good search engines like Google. Oh, well.
By Social Technology I mean the technology for organizing and maintaining human society. The example I had most firmly in mind is the subject of Find Compatibles, what I consider to be the key page, the one with the real solution to all other problems explained.
As I explained on my early mailing lists and later webpages, I find that social technology has hardly improved at all over the years. We still use representative democracy, exactly the same as it was used in the 18th century. By contrast, horse and buggy transporation has been replaced by automobiles and airplanes, enormous changes.
In the picture below you will see some 18th century technology, such as the ox-plow in the middle of the picture. How things have changed since then in agricultural technology. But we still use chance encounters, engagements and marriages to organize our home life and the raising of children.
I claim that great advances in social technology are not only possible but inevitable. I have written three novels about this, one preposterously long, 5000 pages, another merely very very long, 1500 pages. The third is short enough at 340 pages to be published some day. Maybe. The topic is still not interesting to most people. I will excerpt small parts of these novels on the web sometime, maybe even post the raw text for the larger two.
This site includes many pages dating from 1997 to 2008 which are quite out of date. They are included here partly to show the development of these ideas and partly to cover things the newer pages do not. There will be broken links where these pages referenced external sites. I've tried to fix up or maiintain all internal links, but some will probably have been missed. One may wish to look at an earlier version of this page, rather longer, and at an overview of most parts of what can be called a bigger project.
Type in this address to e-mail me. The image is interesting. See Status of Social Technology
Copyright © 2007, 2008, 2009, Douglas Pardoe Wilson
I have used a series of e-mail address over the years, each of which eventually became out of date because of a change of Internet services or became almost useless because of spam. Eventually I stuck with a Yahoo address, but my inbox still fills up with spam and their spam filter still removes messages I wanted to see. So I have switched to a new e-mail service. Web spiders should not be able to find it, since it is hidden in a jpeg picture. I have also made it difficult to reach me. The picture is not a clickable link. To send me e-mail you must want to do so badly enough to type this address in. That is a nuisance, for which I do apologize, but I just don't want a lot of mail from people who do not care about what I have to say.