Traffic flow, 'jamitons' and trucks

Posted on December 9, 2010 by Leona

…I like the word jamiton*… this idea of a traffic jam “particle”… a component of a deceleration wave travelling backwards through traffic from something concrete (like an unseen accident up the road) or some less tangible thing (a coincidental set of interactions between different drivers and conditions of the road)… all the way down the row of cars. There’s quite a few writeups about the phenomenon.

Researchers have discovered that pileups (or rather, holdups) can spring from nothingness; a rapid magnification of a glitch in an otherwise smooth and fairly homogenous flow of cars-as-particles. But since modelling traffic as a fluid is so common, it’s surprising to see how little is said about the granularity of that fluid. Continue reading →

A sufficiently large cubicle farm induces selective routing stupidity

Posted on May 27, 2010 by Leona

Here’s how it works:

The organizing principle of cube farms is to place people with related tasks in close proximity to each other. At human scales, this will make the inhabitants of approximately 3 to 5 cubes in any direction (restricted to the horizontal plane) relevant to the average cube-dweller, who will then internalise the most efficient routing to reach these neighbours. In this way the actual cubicle numbers, not to mention how they relate to the floorplan, will not need to be memorized. If this ‘cube neighbourhood’ syncs nicely with daily tasks, an even greater efficiency can be achieved: it will no longer be necessary to know who anyone else is, or what they do, outside of the cube-neighbourhood. Continue reading →

The zen of complexity

Posted on May 23, 2010 by Leona

A lot of systems theoretic disciplines have seemed wholly useless because we took them as a set of tools with which we could rule over nature. Now I’m wondering if the insights from these sciences are just revelations FROM nature to teach us about our very tiny place in the grand scheme of things…

If so, the intended lesson of humility still does not sink in. Instead of assuming a godlike viewpoint, fawning over our pretty visualisations of dense networks spewed out by expensive color plotters, perhaps we should be trying to understand the place of each tiny pinprick… the world of each dimensionless point, ripe as it is with possibility and potential, yet seeming to signify nothing by itself.

We are the tiny dots on the printout.
The accretion of our petty actions may induce seismic discontinuities, phase shifts and yes, even the throbbing dullness of inconsequence. Continue reading →

On consensing…

Posted on February 7, 2010 by Leona

[updated 2011-10-20].
We live in a much faster-paced world today than our ancestors did, and we have to make decisions very quickly (something that, as it turns out, I really, really suck at… but less of that, and more about what I intended to write about in the first place).

We like to reduce decision-making to the equivalent of answering a multiple-choice questionnaire. Take ordering fastfood, or the way our voting systems work, for example (pick one: candidate A, B or C, etc). This has, as intended, taken out lots of hassle from choices we must make everyday. Continue reading →

Complex accounting is routing strategy. It's here to stay.

Posted on December 18, 2009 by Leona

multinet [updated : 2009-12-19]

The only thing that’s interesting about the copenhagen climate summit is the strategies that nations employ to wriggle out of real and tangible cuts in emissions.

The interconnectedness of environmental and other systems on our planet has made us turn, naturally, to network theory for gaining useful insights. This is becoming more so with regard to how we manage the environment.

The first weapon drawn from the network theory arsenal is almost always economic theory… which – I feel – is just a narrower, more specialised type of network theory. Economics seems to be a set of stripped down routing games that focus on monetarily-quantifiable payoffs.

Continue reading →

Not so fast, little internet…

Posted on October 22, 2009 by Leona

netlinks Imagine that the ever-densifying network of devices that we know and love as the internet becomes sentient. Ish. Or aware or whatever:

Dangling upside down via an umbilicus to its humbler origins, and having its ass spanked by Lady The Phenomenon of Emergence herself, will the quasi-conscious intelligence that gulps down it’s first breath be a babbling baby spurting meaningingless, screeching white noise, or will it be a grown thing, whose first words will be more like ‘I am Zod. All must bow before me!!” ? Continue reading →

Power Laws and Life

Posted on March 21, 2008 by Leona

Network theory. Power law distributions. I won’t digress into explanations (for that try going here briefly then come back).

Now let’s talk about life. What does the power law say about life? It says that life isn’t fair.

How, you might ask, can a class of polynomial equations possibly have anything to say about the Master Plan in which we’re all enmeshed?

Well I think it says that, on the whole, the rich will always get richer and the poor are just **** out of luck. On the whole.

But there’s ways round these things, if you ask Mother Nature nicely… Continue reading →

Visualisation of large datasets

Posted on January 18, 2008 by Leona

Go to http://visualcomplexity.com and check out a rather interesting collection of images based on large / hierarchical data sets. Pretty neat, huh?

None of us can hold thousands of variables in our heads and not get confused. So, with some creative imagery, we can tackle monstrous datasets by offloading some of the information processing to visual centers in the brain, allowing us to grasp the overall structure of the system we’re looking at.

A lot of the ‘radial’ looking graphs are done by mapping hierarchical tree-format data to the unit hyperbolic disc. It is one of my favourite visualisation methods because it lends itself to more user-friendly methods of browsing data – panning zooming and scanning.

With obvious uses in GIS-related (mapping and earth sciences) and biological sciences (think genomics) , visualisation of complex datasets has taken off in lots of other fields – the VC site lists “knowledge networks” as it’s biggest category!