What's New?
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What's New? |
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I am trying to expand my collection of web pages to include other topics, such as computer programming languages, operating systems, and politics , and will add such links occasionally -- so please check back here from time to time, to see what's new. I should have a "What's New" page, I guess, but for now I'll just add links to the new stuff here, where it will stay until linked in with existing text.
Here is what is new as of Saturday, January 9th, 1999:
A page about the Global Ideas Bank at the Institute for Social Inventions and the prizes they offer for the best new ideas.
Two ideas from Nicholas Albery, chairman of the Institute for Social Inventions and editor of "The Book of Visions" and "World's Best Ideas" and other ISI publications.
Here's what was new as of Sunday, Dec. 20th, 1998 --
An easier and less controversial matching problem, matching people for communication on the web or by e-mail, is described on a page I call " Net Net Baud Rate ", (a silly play on words). The material there is not actually very technical, despite the name.
For the sake of communicating with a correspondent who takes objection to my attempt to reduce the whole of human communication to "net baud rate", I am putting up here an essay on reductionism.
I've added a page about my educational background , to supplement the one on my academic interests posted earlier.
Here's what was new as of Friday, Dec. 4th, 1998 --
The Acronymic Language -- some more fundamental ideas about the ideal language project discussed elsewhere .
Corporations -- ideas about changes to corporate law to reduce the undue influence of large corporations by discouraging predatory behaviour (instead of rewarding it).
Academic Interests -- some of my educational background (the whitewashed version).
The Sailboat Metaphor -- a discussion of free will and determinism.
The Particle Accelerator Metaphor -- an alternative to the sailboat metaphor that emphasizes matching.
The Frontiers People-Matcher -- plans for implementing some of my combinatorial optimization ideas at the Frontiers online learning community.
Towards a Free Simulation of the World Economy -- I plan an incrementally-expandable simulation of the world economy to be made available to anyone who wants is under the GNU public license -- and I don't want to do it all myself, so please helpl.
Here's what was new as of Monday, Nov. 2nd, 1998 --
The Video Store example , an example of some of the methods that can be applied to provide people with useful suggestions.
Business Applications , which addresses more general business applications of these methods, including team formation by matching co-workers in a business and using carefully matched teams of co-workers to estimate important numbers such as project costs or even stock prices.
Crime and Punishment spells out why the future world I describe will have almost no crime, together with ideas for dealing with today's prisoners and the very few criminals which may exist in the future.
Here is what was new as of Monday, Oct. 26, 1998 --
The Social Technology Mailing List has just been started. Why not subscribe? It's free, easy to use, and will contain lots of news and new ideas.
The Social Technology Pavillion at Frontiers is a new forum for the expression of these ideas and related ones, giving you a chance to contribute your ideas about social technology, or to help make something happen. Whether interesed in social technology or not, you might enjoy visiting Frontiers , which is an online learning community with many interesting people and ideas, and which also has a suite at Club Connect , an avatar community for meeting new people online. What's an avatar community? Try it and see.
The Social Technology Page is a new title for the page formerly called "The Idea of Social Technology", and it contains new content as well, including the anchors for the above two links.
These pages were new as of Monday, Oct.19, 1998 --
The Role of Requirements Analysis in Social Technology
What is combinatorial optimization? What has it to do with jobs?
Power and Influence Structures
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.