emergence

Last week we read the introduction and chapter 1 in the Steven Johnson book "Emergence." basically, emergence is higher level rules or orders being created through low-lever rules through behavior and interactions. The best example he gave of emergence was an ant colony. The ants all have their specific jobs, most notably protecting the “queen,” they do without any other ant directing them and all of those ants doing those jobs creates an extremely efficient community that is created from the bottom-up.

A more human related example of emergence can be seen in software and on the internet with sites like wikipedia. Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, making it a bottom-up program. Another good example that we worked with in class are the recommendations at amazon.com. When you create an account and start adding different products to your wish-list such as books, dvds, or music, amazon makes connections with other products they think you would like and make recommendations. I was pretty surprised how good it was with recommendations for myself. I also like that if something you don’t like shows, up you can remove it and amazon remember that continue to factor that choice in for future recommendations.

dreamweaver workshop

i decided to go to a dreamweaver workshop for class. we basically went through how to make a webpage, make links, put in pictures, upload to mywebspace, and use the css in dreamweaver. overall it was pretty much the same as what we did in class. the only thing i wasn't really familiar with going into the class was how to use css. i would say that part was really the only useful portion of the workshop as far as learning something new. already being familiar with dreamweaver going into the class made it boring at times but it was still good practice to go over all of the basics again so hopefully the process continues to get less time consuming.

non-place

i ride the great metro buses pretty much every day so i figured that would be a good non-place for me to observe. i've always felt a little weird standing around with a bunch of people waiting for a bus. pretty much everyone keeps to themselves. yesterday the people there were listening to ipods and reading books. there are occasiosionaly people who talk to each other but that seems to be very rare. i've always thought to at least learn the names of the people i see at the bus stop over and over but that rarely happens because people always seem so serious with a 'don't bother me while i wait for my bus' look on their face. i feel like when you actually get on a bus people get even more protective of their personal bubble even though you are closer together. it's basically an unwritten rule to fill up each individual row and every other seat first before people will sit directly next to each other. i've had people come sit right next to me when there are still other seats wide open and have thought to myself 'why are you sitting here, don't you know anything about buses?' so it seems that even though bus stops and buses are very public places, there is very little interaction between the people who spend parts of their day there.