Neurosphere

So this company is doing customer research in the form of data mining. Except consumer research has never been very scientific, useful more in yes/no situations (President Bush – Yes or No?). Amazon and others have a leg up in recording actual mass market purchasing behavior. But the research here is polling bloggers whose goal is pushing their opinions out there in the first place – a deep well of individual thoughts and beliefs – a step closer to tracking the attitude of the Neurosphere itself?

”Umbria is a marketing intelligence company that analyzes and distills the opinions and perceptions of the online world – from more than 20 million blogs, message boards, opinion sites and other public forums – into actionable market insights about companies, products, people and issues.”

http://www.umbrialistens.com/home

Tip of the NeuroHat to my homeys at the Boulder Daily Camera

It is unfashionable in the U.S. to support government funding in network development, but this looks to me like the kind of support that created ARPAnet, the forerunner of the Internet, 40 years ago.

“Today marked the completion of a major conference organized by the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project, which is coordinated by CERN1 and co-funded by the European Commission, where a number of key results were reported on the road to achieving a global Grid infrastructure for science. It was announced at the conference that the EGEE infrastructure, which spans over 150 sites in Europe, the Americas and Asia, had surpassed 2 million computing jobs, or the equivalent of over 1000 years of processing on a single PC. The EGEE infrastructure, which is linked by Europe’s GEANT high-speed communications network, as well as similar networks for scientific research around the world, spans across 40 countries. Only 18 months after the launch of the EGEE project, well over 1000 users around the globe are using the EGEE infrastructure to accelerate their computing tasks, which cover some six scientific domains and some 20 major applications, ranging from particle physics to drug discovery for combating malaria.”

http://info.web.cern.ch/Press/PressReleases/Releases2005/PR13.05E.html

The California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology has the mission statement I’ve been waiting for. But it’s actual research programs seem more like the study of the application of next generation telecomm and information technology to fields like medicine and transportation. Where’s the study of societal, cultural, spiritual impacts of technology? It’s a sure thing Cisco and Verizon ain’t funding that.

“Calit2 focuses its work in the context of telecommunications and information technology as related to the evolving Internet. The Internet is profoundly changing society and is likely to have impacts beyond what can be imagined today. Therefore, it is increasingly critical to conduct research to understand how it will affect our personal lives, laws, and economic leadership. That is Calit2’s exciting charge. The understanding that arises from this research will help us manage the massive change that lies ahead.”

http://www.calit2.net/research/index.php

A primo example of wholeness through digitization.

“Biodiversity is found around the world – there are micro-organisms between granules of rock 3 km below the Earth’s surface, rootless plants in the Atacama Desert, thousands of species of beetles in a single rainforest tree. However, biodiversity is not distributed evenly across the face of the planet. An estimated 75% of all species are found in the developing world. Information about biodiversity (natural history collections, library materials, databases) likewise is not distributed evenly around the globe. Three-quarters or more of data about biodiversity are stored in the developed world. However, most of the data that may be needed can’t be transferred because either they are not digitised, or capacity to handle digital information is lacking, or both. Facilitating digitisation and global dissemination of primary biodiversity data, so that people from all countries can benefit from the use of the information, is the mission of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).”

http://www.gbif.org/

An old Washington Post story, about bird watchers forming an extremely large, and intriguingly active, virtual community, inspiring references to Teilhard.

“Suppose the Earth is all one big single living organism, with all the elements of it — from the people to the birds — connected like cells in a body. Suppose the goal of evolution is to link up individual human minds, bringing an explosion of intelligence and even global consciousness to this mammoth being…That’s not the earth-moving part, however. The earth-moving part — literally — is that, as a result, a movement is spontaneously emerging that alters the physical nature of the planet so as to make it more amenable to the birds that are indicator species of global environmental health. Some of this is as simple as town-house owners deciding to plant lobelia in their back yards because these flowers please hummingbirds.”

“This is just an example where the Web is mediating a collective thought process that has feedback effects. It is affecting the distribution of the species,” says Robert Wright, author of “The Moral Animal.” It is reminiscent, Wright says, of Teilhard’s idea that technology would connect minds into a “brain for the biosphere as the human species consciously assumes stewardship of the planet.” It explains, he says, why “serious people take Teilhard seriously.”

http://www.changemakers.net/library/temp/wpost050901.cfm

This weblog recently has been somewhat heavy on the technology tracking and light on more explicit attention to the development of a Neurosphere. Here are some sites that pay direct or indirect attention to the phenomenon.

–Blog of Collective Intelligence

“CI means many things to many people. Here, it refers to the capacity of human communities to evolve towards higher order complexity and integration through collaboration and innovation. This blog wants to be an embodiment of what it is about.”

http://www.community-intelligence.com/blogs/public/

This one from a guy who was a formative influence on my thinking as the Neurosphere book took shape.

–Smart Mobs

“Website and Weblog about Topics and Issues discussed in the book?Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution? by Howard Rheingold

http://www.smartmobs.com/index.html

This one is not so active as in the past, but several papers herein take a rigorous intellectual approach to whether collective consciousness is a metaphor or a something more than that.

–Global Brain Group

“The Global Brain Group has been created to discuss the emergence of a global brain out of the computer network, which would function as a nervous system for the human superorganism. It promotes all theoretical and experimental work that may contribute to the elaboration of global brain theory, including the practical implementation of global brain-like computer systems, and the diffusion of global brain ideas towards a wider public, e.g. by the organization of conferences or publication of books on the subject.”

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/GBRAIN-L.html