All posts by Paul Raven

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Search is the drug

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searching for fulfillmentDo you find yourself compulsively searching for things on the internet even when you don’t really need to know them? Do you get caught in the infamous Wikipedia rabbithole, popping over there to look up a musician’s name only to find yourself two hours later scrolling through a lengthy treatise on the socio-political history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire?

I know I do… and Professor Kent Berridge reckons he knows why. Apparently the parts of our brain that are wired for seeking are separate to those wired to respond pleasurably to finding; the latter provokes the production of opioids, but the urge to search is more like the perpetually unfulfilling loop of amphetamine craving.

For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs. Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing.

The juice that fuels the seeking system is the neurotransmitter dopamine. The dopamine circuits “promote states of eagerness and directed purpose,” Panksepp writes. It’s a state humans love to be in. So good does it feel that we seek out activities, or substances, that keep this system aroused—cocaine and amphetamines, drugs of stimulation, are particularly effective at stirring it.

Ever find yourself sitting down at the computer just for a second to find out what other movie you saw that actress in, only to look up and realize the search has led to an hour of Googling? Thank dopamine. Our internal sense of time is believed to be controlled by the dopamine system. People with hyperactivity disorder have a shortage of dopamine in their brains, which a recent study suggests may be at the root of the problem. For them even small stretches of time seem to drag. An article by Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic last year, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” speculates that our constant Internet scrolling is remodeling our brains to make it nearly impossible for us to give sustained attention to a long piece of writing. Like the lab rats, we keep hitting “enter” to get our next fix.

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That study has implications for drug addiction and other compulsive behaviors. Berridge has proposed that in some addictions the brain becomes sensitized to the wanting cycle of a particular reward. So addicts become obsessively driven to seek the reward, even as the reward itself becomes progressively less rewarding once obtained. “The dopamine system does not have satiety built into it,” Berridge explains. “And under certain conditions it can lead us to irrational wants, excessive wants we’d be better off without.” So we find ourselves letting one Google search lead to another, while often feeling the information is not vital and knowing we should stop. “As long as you sit there, the consumption renews the appetite,” he explains.

At least I now know why I was up until 2am this morning… but hey, I could have stopped any time I chose to, man. [via MetaFilter]

But perhaps framing the urge to search as a purely mechanistic behaviour isn’t entirely fair… because it has its benefits, especially for those of us whose work revolves around the uncovering of new knowledge. Here’s Lisa Gold – researcher to Neal Stephenson, among others – extolling the virtues of browsing, which she defines as being different to searching in both focus and utility:

Browsing and searching are different– browsing is about the journey, searching is about the destination. Searching is focused on finding specific information quickly and often leads to tunnel-vision, which can prevent you from recognizing useful sources that don’t match your preconceived ideas and assumptions. Browsing is about slowing down, opening your eyes, feeding your curiosity, and allowing yourself the opportunity to make discoveries.

I believe it’s important to set aside time to browse on a regular basis– not just on the web, but in the physical world as well. Spend time exploring different bookstores (both new and used), visit libraries and museums, and search out unusual places you’ve never visited. Take a different route, walk around neighborhoods you don’t live in, look for hidden treasures.

Amen to that!

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The Google PageRank algorithm and extinction analysis

cod fishMost of us are familiar with the concept of the ecosystem – the idea that all living things are interconnected with (and interdependent on) one another and the environment they live in. Can you think of something beyond nature that behaves like an ecosystem?

If you answered “the internet”, then give yourself a cookie –  you had the same thought as a gang of biologists and ecologists who’ve just published a paper examining ways to use a computational algorithm – much like the one used by Google for calculating the search engine ranking of webpages – to determine which endangered species are most at risk, and which are most crucial to the survival of others.

In simple terms, PageRank rates the importance of websites and ranks them in a list compared to other websites. Sites with a higher ranking are those that are linked to more often by other sites and therefore have a greater number of connections.

Adapting this approach to ordering the web of connections within an ecosystem allows species to be ranked in importance by virtue of how many other species are linked to them.

One example of species that depend on each other are the overfished Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) and other smaller animals that descend from it in the North Atlantic food chain. Because the predator has been depleted, species including smaller pelagic fish and northern snow crabs have boomed and are themselves depleting populations of phytoplankton and zooplankton.

It’s an innovative and useful tool, though other researchers are keen to underline its shortcomings:

Fraser Torpy, microbial ecologist and statistician from the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, said the study is “very useful adjunct to our ability to determine what makes a species important in terms of its position in its ecological community”.

However, he cautions that the method may only work for simple food webs. “Whilst [this is] an innovative and genuinely useful novel technique for endangered species assessment, it must be remembered that the true complexity of real ecosystems cannot be overestimated.”

With the caveat that I’m no ecologist (nor, for that matter, a search algorithm expert), it occurs to me that as limited a method of modelling ecosystems this algorithm may be, its demonstrated ability to scale to the vast numbers of the web’s uncounted pages means it probably has the potential to outperform any other analytical method currently available. And as extinction rates increase in response to climate change and human intervention, maintaining the ecosystem that supports our own civilisation demands every tool we can get our hands on, regardless of how far short from perfect they might fall. [image by Hello, I am Bruce]

To what degree will computational algorithms be able to assist our understanding of natural systems? Where will their usefulness end… or will we eventually be able to reduce every system to equations, no matter how complex, once we have the necessary processing and memory resources available?

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Profitable post-web publishing: is patronage the answer?

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OK, it may be a little cruel to ask you to do the thinking on a Monday morning (especially as you Statesiders are probably still recovering from Labour Day weekend), but I think it’s high time this one was thrown open to the floor – and by “this one” I mean, of course, the perennial question of how to make fiction publishing a viable business in the internet age.

The trouble is, there’s no shortage of potential business models to choose from. For example, Tor.com is ad-supported, but has the advantage of being associated with a strong publishing brand in its chosen genre; meanwhile, Strange Horizons is a not-for-profit that relies on donations, but even they’ve found it tough to bring in the necessary funds without the welcome publicity and assistance of notables such as John Scalzi. Both of those are purely web-based publications; print brings its own logistical and economic difficulties to the proceedings, as the decline of the “Big Three” and the shuttering of many smaller magazines demonstrates all too clearly.

I’m increasingly coming to believe that visibility is half of the battle, which is why I was intrigued by Cory Doctorow’s latest Locus column, in which – after demolishing many of the standard objection raised against the methodologies of his own success as a novelist – he mentions his “With A Little Help” project, which intends to investigate whether public donations are sufficient to support the writing and publication of a novel, and what degree of work is needed to equal the promotional support of a traditional publisher for such a project.

The results will be interesting regardless, but Doctorow has the advantage of a ready-made audience – one that he has worked hard to build rather than simply blundered into, I might add. But the question remains more open for lesser-known authors… and for fiction magazines, be they dead-tree or digital. The Scalzi/Strange Horizons avalanche shows that people will donate to support short fiction publishing online, but how much of that generosity is due to SH being a not-for-profit organisation? How much is due to them paying professional fees for their stories? How many of the Scalzi donors will donate again if they’re not encouraged by Scalzi or a similar figure?

Only time will answer those questions. But what is becoming obvious is that patronage is crucial to supporting niche publishing – be it direct financial patronage from readers, or the patronage of a vocally supportive figurehead (the patronage of publicity, if you will), or the patronage of an animal further up the publishing foodchain. Underpinning all these is the need to cultivate a supportive audience – turning a percentage of your free readers into donors or buyers, in other words.

What should be equally obvious is that I don’t know how to do it – which is why I think Doctorow’s experiment will be fascinating to watch, as well as projects like Robin Sloan’s New Liberal Arts essay anthology (and his subsequent ongoing novella project), World of Warcraft: the Magazine and a whole raft of wild ideas currently sculling their way out of the boondocks of the independent music scene.

But hey – you guys are readers, right? So, tell me: leaving aside dead-tree or digital books bought in the traditional manner, where do you pay to read fiction, if anywhere? What does it take to get you to pay, and what amount seems reasonable to you for what you’re getting – if anything?

Do you object to advertising on the sites where you read fiction, or are they acceptable so long as you’re not paying for the privilege of seeing them? Would you pay a small premium for an ad-free version of a webzine, or are the mechanics of a paywall off-putting enough to keep you away from a publication you might otherwise click through to regularly?

Yeah, lots of questions, and they’ve all been asked before… but I don’t think I’ve ever collected them all in one post here at Futurismic, and I’d be interested to read your answers – not just for the benefit of this here site, but for the nascent industry of web fiction publishing as a whole. And if there are business models I’ve missed out that you’ve either seen in operation or heard proposed elsewhere, please pipe up and let us know about ’em!

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The imminent future of contextual advertising

Virtual worlds of all stripes are becoming the next gold-rush frontier for an increasingly beleaguered advertising industry, with lots of research being expended on finding the best way to gets brands in front of the captivated gaze of the average computer gamer.

Trouble is, it’s not quite as simple as cutting a product placement deal and hoping for the best. Ars Technica reports on one research paper that claims the important things to do are to not interrupt the game, and to make sure the brand “fits”:

When ads were placed into Sony’s WipeOut HD they played within the game’s loading screen, and artificially inflated the time it took to get into a game. The ads were quickly pulled, but it’s a powerful object lesson: don’t mess with the game itself. Any company that bought time in such a slot could easily do damage to their brand instead of spreading awareness.

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The most important aspect of ads that follow the rules of fitting into the game world and not interrupting the flow is placement, which the study calls the “key element,” explaining “why some advertisements do not get much attention or are not remembered, even though they are constantly present in the field of view.” Brand awareness does not matter, it was found, so even a popular brand can’t overcome poor placement.

There is always a risk when advertising within a game. “If the advertising is presented at the wrong time or place, it just does not catch the player’s attention in the best case. In the worst case the player might even develop a disliking for the advertised brand,” the study showed. Of course, to find the optimal placement found in the study, you’ll have to buy the results, which will run you €800.

Meanwhile, The Guardian mentions another report which suggests (rather shakily, from the look of it) that brand recall is enhanced by violent game content:

The team based at the University of Luxembourg created a simple driving game named AdRacer in which players needed to drive over targets to gain points, while adverts were displayed unobtrusively on roadside billboards. In one version of the game, the targets were just symbols, in another, players had to run over pedestrians to increase their scores. Apparently, “Those who played a violent version of the game […] demonstrated significantly better recall of advertised brands than those who played the regular version.”

The problem is, although the violence seems to trigger something in the mechanism of human memory – it’s not always good news for the advertiser; the connotations can be rather destructive, negatively impacting the gamer’s opinion of the brand.

Why mention the crude commercial nastiness of marketing on a near-future science fiction blog? Well, even I can think up a passable plot for a story from the above two articles, for a start…

But we’ve also been talking about augmented reality a fair bit of late, and the metaverse is a perennial here as well – and both of those conceptual spaces can – and will – be colonised by marketing in exactly the same way that the physical surfaces of the “real” world already have been.

Forewarned is forearmed, as the saying goes… and as Jan Chipchase points out, if you already find regular ads to be ugly, annoying and intrusive – be they on the internet or on a wall – the future of contextual advertising isn’t going to be pretty at all.

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Compressed-air-punk, chemical-punk: non-silicon computing

Computers are made from slices of etched and doped silicon, right? Well, yeah, most of ’em are – but you can use other substances or mechanisms as a processing substrate, too. While the mechanical clockwork computer remains a fascinating and romantic anachronism in the steampunk style, how about an 8-bit microprocessor that runs on nothing other than air itself?

The complicated nest of channels and valves made by Minsoung Rhee and Mark Burns at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, processes binary signals by sucking air out of tubes to represent a 0, or letting it back in to represent a 1.

A chain of such 1s and 0s flows through the processor’s channels, with pneumatic valves controlling the flow of the signals between channels.

Each pneumatic valve is operated by changing the air pressure in a small chamber below the air channel, separated from the circuit by a flexible impermeable membrane. When the lower chamber is filled with air the membrane pushes upwards and closes the valve, preventing the binary signal flowing across one of the processor’s junctions.

Sucking out the air from the chamber reopens the valve by forcing the membrane downwards, letting the signal move across the junction.

Mechanical computing isn’t your only alternative, either – you can also move into the world of chemical computing. You know the “hot ice” stuff you get in those chemical hand-warmer packets? Well, not content with having already made a computer from a slime mold, one Andrew Adamatzky has been using sodium acetate as a processing substrate, with some degree of success [via SlashDot]:

The basic idea is to exploit the travelling wavefront of crystallisation to perform calculations […] So the speed of the wavefront as it moves through a Petri dish and the way it interacts with other wavefronts effectively performs computations.

Adamatzky inputs data by triggering nucleation at multiple points in parallel by immersing aluminium wires powdered with sodium acetate into a supersaturated solution in a Petri dish. He “processes” the wavefronts using blobs of silicone to steer them around the dishes and has used the technique to create AND and OR gates.

The results of a computation are determined by recording the movement of the wavefronts and analysing the edges of the resulting crystal structures.

So there’s two more potential ways of building computers that could survive the radiation levels of outer space – though whether they’d ever scale up to a useful level of power-to-size remains to be seen. I wonder what else we might use to fuel our ever-expanding hunger for processor cycles?