Articles are available on the following topics, among others:
* Commonspace: Beyond Virtual Community
* Balancing Mission and Money: Building Sustainable Electronic Networks for Civil Society

From the back cover of the book, _Commonspace_:

Commonspace is the collective mind of the Internet, a synergy built from the space between the bits and fuelled entirely by people power. As the Internet grows, commonspace is changing the way we live, think, play and do business. [The authors] provide a detailed cognitive map of the emerging virtual landscape, and a set of tools that will help readers draw on the power of the collective.

The Commons Group

Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson will present "Ten Tales for Technophiles" lecture on Thursday, Nov. 15. The presentation, co-sponsored by the Office on Public Understanding of Science and Smithsonian Associates, will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the National Academies' main building. The lecture is open to the public.

An Evening with Freeman Dyson

"As computing and communication capabilities have continued to increase, more and more activity is taking place at the edges of the network, typically in homes or on workers desktops. This trend has been demonstrated by the increasing popularity and usability of "peer-to-peer" systems such as Napster and Gnutella. Unfortunately, this popularity has quickly shown the limitations of these systems, particularly in terms of scale. Because the networks form in an ad-hoc manner, they typically make inefficient use of resources. We propose a mechanism, using only local knowledge, to improve the overall performance of peer-to-peer networks based on interests. Peers monitor which other peers frequently respond successfully to their requests for information. When a peer is discovered to frequently provide good results, the peer attempts to move closer to it in the network by creating a new connection with that peer. This leads to clusters of peers with similar interests, and in turn allows us to limit the depth of searches required to find good results. We have implemented our algorithm in the context of a distributed encyclopedia-style information sharing application which is built on top of the gnutella network. In our testing environment, we have shown the ability to greatly reduce the amount of communication resources required to find the desired articles in the encyclopedia."

Finding Good Peers in Peer-to-Peer Networks

This is a draft (10/26 2001) of Part I of The Emotion Machine by Marvin Minsky. Parts II through V have been made available since then, with Part V just coming online November 3.

_The Emotion Machine_ is an upcoming book. It was originally scheduled to be in stores by now, but there were obviously some delays. Here is a preview, anyway.

You will find Parts II through V online at

http://www.media.mit.edu:80/people/minsky/E2/eb2.html
http://www.media.mit.edu:80/people/minsky/E2/eb3.html
http://www.media.mit.edu:80/people/minsky/E2/eb4.html
http://www.media.mit.edu:80/people/minsky/E2/eb5.html

Marvin Minsky's _The Emotion Machine_

Modern science is accustomed to bigness. In five years, the world's most powerful particle accelerator will be in operation at the CERN physics laboratory outside Geneva. The $4 billion accelerator will give physicists the tools they need to search for scientific prizes like the elusive Higgs boson, a particle believed to be the origin of mass and weight in the universe. Scientists will collaborate remotely using the Grid Physics Network [...]"

Katie Hafner's article quotes Michael Schrage of the MIT Media Lab and refers to JCR Licklider from ARPA of yore, David Gerlernter of Yale, Ian Foster of U. Chicago, and others. They discuss the way that collaborative computing tools are changing the conduct of science and business across and around the world.

Machine-Made Links Change the Way Minds Can Work Together

The latest issue of the National Academy's quarterly publication is now online. Check out articles on the following range of topics:

Military; infotech, biotech, and food safety; climate change; science funding; energy policy; stem cell research; illicit arms trade; genomics; info-age economics; The Advanced Technology Program; US-Russian nuclear policy.

Issues in Science & Technology, Fall 2001

Keywords: Informal communication, videoconferencing, privacy

Linking Public Spaces: Technical and Social Issues [PDF]

Keywords: Social cyberspaces, social accounting, persistent conversations, discussions, behavioral indicators

Observed Behavior and Perceived Value of Authors in Usenet Newsgroups: Bridging the Gap

Keywords: Social cyberspace, information visualization, persistent conversation, treemap

Treemap Visualizations of Newsgroups

This paper examines the ideological and policy consensus that shaped computing research funded by the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) within the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). This historical case study of the period between Sputnik and the creation of the ARPANET shows how military, scientific, and academic values shaped the institutions and relations of a foundational period in the creation of the Internet.
The paper probes three areas: the ideology of the science policy consensus, the institutional philosophy of IPTO under J. C. R. Licklider, and the ways that this consensus and philosophy shaped IPTO research in the period leading to the creation of the ARPANET. By examining the intellectual, cultural, and institutional details of the consensus that governed IPTO research between 1957 and 1969, we can understand the ways that these values defined the range of possibilities for network computing.

Ideological and Policy Origins of the Internet, 1957-1969