self organizing systems

refering to a recent "what is the word for…" discussion, you can once again use the vote feature at Plasma Studii ( http://plasmastudii.org ). i took it off because the NYU server handles it strangly (usually PHP is just HTML to them?) school servers are often set up so students can't mess them up too much.


it's the "emergent system" method of self-organization, what folks may have meant, but oddly the vocab never came up. perhaps i'm misunderstanding the question, but seems extremely straightforward. a voting system (can often be implimented on-line) that brings more relavent samples to prominence, while demoted samples sink to obscurity.

Steven Johnson has a great book on it. Applies the concept to Deborah Gordon's observations of ants (among other things). The Pattern on the Stone by Hillis is pretty good too. The idea makes a "top down", hierarchy of command, single decision makers look archaic. but too few folks (both the creators of these systems nor their audiences) really know enough to use it most effectively. usually, the biggest problem is that too few folks vote when they can.

so it's really most effective for things like rating the user reviews at amazon where you get millions of potential voters who are eager to have some effect on the millions they know will come.


i've found, in most cases, voting alone as the thing to rank by, just isn't all that helpful. if you get well over (# of options squared) votes/day is great, but few actually get nearly that many. less is not just less accurate, it doesn't indicate anything at all. factoring in time spent per page, while extremely tricky, is a much better indicator.

judsoN


ps - if anyone has trouble with the site, let me know. there's really no good way of testing these scripts for ever server configuration. but since i have gotten votes from all over, it works for most.