Comments on: Computerized Crowd Behavior

By: Hitherto Shalt Thou Go And No Further - Pop Occulture

Hitherto Shalt Thou Go And No Further - Pop Occulture — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 00:24:27 +0000

[...] Although, to be totally honest: you were nothing to them all along. The Empire sees you only as bits and bytes in one great program run for it’s own benefit and amusement. [...]

By: SubstanceM

SubstanceM — Wed, 24 May 2006 02:40:40 +0000

Delayed echoes prevent crowds from synchronizing in chanting and clapping:
http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns?id=dn9158&print=true
(see also: entrainment)

Upon reading the article - didn’t it seem like they weren’t exactly ready to implement? I mean, the feedback needs to be as loud as the chant, it requires “special hardware” - sounds like a project that won’t get off the ground as yet…anyway the point being that people are thinking in these ways to curb mass behaviour is interesting.

By: prnsqlr

prnsqlr — Tue, 23 May 2006 21:43:33 +0000

Delayed echoes prevent crowds from synchronizing in chanting and clapping:
http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns?id=dn9158&print=true
(see also: entrainment)

By: The Novelty Killer - Pop Occulture

The Novelty Killer - Pop Occulture — Tue, 23 May 2006 05:59:32 +0000

[...] When I catch glimpses of the sheer immensity of tracking, surveillance and predictive technologies that are out there, my mind starts to move into increasingly peculiar spaces - which may in fact be the actual covert goal of such technologies. [...]

By: Relative State

Relative State — Tue, 23 May 2006 05:45:53 +0000

What is it that causes people to feel empowered or disempowered by technological advances? I honestly don’t feel threatened by this sort of thing. Maybe it’s because I’m a computer scientist so social-network data mining and simulations are things I know I could implement myself, but other people just have to watch ‘them’ do whatever. (I can and have carried out social-network data mining projects in my spare time—for instance, PageRank over LiveJournal, where I gathered data on 4 million users over the course of three weeks and then analyzed it.)

Some of this is actually pretty close to my area of research, which is attack-resistant trust metrics—basically taking data on an individual level (”A trusts B”) and turning it into a numerical “trustworthiness” value for each node in some way that makes it difficult to artificially manipulate the rankings. Google’s PageRank is the most well-known example; internet search just wouldn’t be the same without it.