The Wisdom of Crowds

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cover of mass market edition by Anchor
Author	James Surowiecki
Language	English
Publisher	Doubleday; Anchor
Publication date	2004
Publication place	United States
Pages	336
ISBN	978-0-385-50386-0
OCLC	61254310
Dewey Decimal	303.3/8 22
LC Class	JC328.2 .S87 2005

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. The book presents numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument, and touches on several fields, primarily economics and psychology.

The opening anecdote relates Francis Galton's surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when the median of their individual guesses was taken (the median was closer to the ox's true butchered weight than the estimates of most crowd members.)

The book relates to diverse collections of independently deciding individuals, rather than crowd psychology as traditionally understood. Its central thesis, that a diverse collection of independently deciding individuals is likely to make certain types of decisions and predictions better than individuals or even experts, draws many parallels with statistical sampling; however, there is little overt discussion of statistics in the book.

Its title is an allusion to Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, published in 1841.

Types of crowd wisdom

Surowiecki breaks down the advantages he sees in disorganized decisions into three main types, which he classifies as

Cognition

Thinking and information processing, such as market judgment, which he argues can be much faster, more reliable, and less subject to political forces than the deliberations of experts or expert committees.

Coordination

Coordination of behavior includes optimizing the utilization of a popular bar and not colliding in moving traffic flows. The book is replete with examples from experimental economics, but this section relies more on naturally occurring experiments such as pedestrians optimizing the pavement flow or the extent of crowding in popular restaurants. He examines how common understanding within a culture allows remarkably accurate judgments about specific reactions of other members of the culture.

Cooperation

How groups of people can form networks of trust without a central system controlling their behavior or directly enforcing their compliance. This section is especially pro free market.

Four elements required to form a wise crowd

Not all crowds (groups) are wise. Consider, for example, mobs or crazed investors in a stock market bubble. According to Surowiecki, these key criteria separate wise crowds from irrational ones:

Criteria	Description
Diversity of opinion	Each person should have private information even if it is just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts. (Chapter 2)
Independence	People's opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them. (Chapter 3)
Decentralization	People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge. (Chapter 4)
Aggregation	Some mechanism exists for turning private judgements into a collective decision. (Chapter 5)

Based on Surowiecki's book, Oinas-Kukkonen captures the wisdom of crowds approach with the following eight conjectures:

1. It is possible to describe how people in a group think as a whole.
2. In some cases, groups are remarkably intelligent and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.
3. The three conditions for a group to be intelligent are diversity, independence, and decentralization.
4. The best decisions are a product of disagreement and contest.
5. Too much communication can make the group as a whole less intelligent.
6. Information aggregation functionality is needed.
7. The right information needs to be delivered to the right people in the right place, at the right time, and in the right way.
8. There is no need to chase the expert.

Failures of crowd intelligence

Surowiecki studies situations (such as rational bubbles) in which the crowd produces very bad judgment, and argues that in these types of situations their cognition or cooperation failed because (in one way or another) the members of the crowd were too conscious of the opinions of others and began to emulate each other and conform rather than think differently. Although he gives experimental details of crowds collectively swayed by a persuasive speaker, he says that the main reason that groups of people intellectually conform is that the system for making decisions has a systemic flaw.

Causes and detailed case histories of such failures include:

Extreme	Description
Homogeneity	Surowiecki stresses the need for diversity within a crowd to ensure enough variance in approach, thought process, and private information.
Centralization	The 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, which he blames on a hierarchical NASA management bureaucracy that was totally closed to the wisdom of low-level engineers.
Division	The United States Intelligence Community, the 9/11 Commission Report claims, failed to prevent the 11 September 2001 attacks partly because information held by one subdivision was not accessible by another. Surowiecki's argument is that crowds (of intelligence analysts in this case) work best when they choose for themselves what to work on and what information they need. (He cites the SARS-virus isolation as an example in which the free flow of data enabled laboratories around the world to coordinate research without a central point of control.) The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA have created a Wikipedia-style information sharing network called Intellipedia that will help the free flow of information to prevent such failures again.
Imitation	Where choices are visible and made in sequence, an "information cascade" can form in which only the first few decision makers gain anything by contemplating the choices available: once past decisions have become sufficiently informative, it pays for later decision makers to simply copy those around them. This can lead to fragile social outcomes.
Emotionality	Emotional factors, such as a feeling of belonging, can lead to peer pressure, herd instinct, and in extreme cases collective hysteria.

Connection

At the 2005 O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference Surowiecki presented a session entitled Independent Individuals and Wise Crowds, or Is It Possible to Be Too Connected?

The question for all of us is, how can you have interaction without information cascades, without losing the independence that's such a key factor in group intelligence?

He recommends:

• Keep your ties loose.
• Keep yourself exposed to as many diverse sources of information as possible.
• Make groups that range across hierarchies.

Tim O'Reilly and others also discuss the success of Google, wikis, blogging, and Web 2.0 in the context of the wisdom of crowds.

Applications

Surowiecki is a strong advocate of the benefits of decision markets and regrets the failure of DARPA's controversial Policy Analysis Market to get off the ground. He points to the success of public and internal corporate markets as evidence that a collection of people with varying points of view but the same motivation (to make a good guess) can produce an accurate aggregate prediction. According to Surowiecki, the aggregate predictions have been shown to be more reliable than the output of any think tank. He advocates extensions of the existing futures markets even into areas such as terrorist activity and prediction markets within companies.

To illustrate this thesis, he says that his publisher can publish a more compelling output by relying on individual authors under one-off contracts bringing book ideas to them. In this way, they are able to tap into the wisdom of a much larger crowd than would be possible with an in-house writing team.

Will Hutton has argued that Surowiecki's analysis applies to value judgments as well as factual issues, with crowd decisions that "emerge of our own aggregated free will [being] astonishingly... decent". He concludes that "There's no better case for pluralism, diversity and democracy, along with a genuinely independent press."

Applications of the wisdom-of-crowds effect exist in three general categories: Prediction markets, Delphi methods, and extensions of the traditional opinion poll.

Prediction markets

Main article: Prediction market

The most common application is the prediction market, a speculative or betting market created to make verifiable predictions. Surowiecki discusses the success of prediction markets. Similar to Delphi methods but unlike opinion polls, prediction (information) markets ask questions like, "Who do you think will win the election?" and predict outcomes rather well. Answers to the question, "Who will you vote for?" are not as predictive.

Assets are cash values tied to specific outcomes (e.g., Candidate X will win the election) or parameters (e.g., Next quarter's revenue). The current market prices are interpreted as predictions of the probability of the event or the expected value of the parameter. Betfair is the world's biggest prediction exchange, with around $28 billion traded in 2007. NewsFutures is an international prediction market that generates consensus probabilities for news events. Intrade.com, which operated a person to person prediction market based in Dublin Ireland achieved very high media attention in 2012 related to the US Presidential Elections, with more than 1.5 million search references to Intrade and Intrade data. Several companies now offer enterprise class prediction marketplaces to predict project completion dates, sales, or the market potential for new ideas. A number of Web-based quasi-prediction marketplace companies have sprung up to offer predictions primarily on sporting events and stock markets but also on other topics. The principle of the prediction market is also used in project management software to let team members predict a project's "real" deadline and budget.

Delphi methods

Main article: Delphi method

The Delphi method is a systematic, interactive forecasting method which relies on a panel of independent experts. The carefully selected experts answer questionnaires in two or more rounds. After each round, a facilitator provides an anonymous summary of the experts' forecasts from the previous round as well as the reasons they provided for their judgments. Thus, participants are encouraged to revise their earlier answers in light of the replies of other members of the group. It is believed that during this process the range of the answers will decrease and the group will converge towards the "correct" answer. Many of the consensus forecasts have proven to be more accurate than forecasts made by individuals.

Human Swarming

Designed as an optimized method for unleashing the wisdom of crowds, this approach implements real-time feedback loops around synchronous groups of users with the goal of achieving more accurate insights from fewer numbers of users. Human Swarming (sometimes referred to as Social Swarming) is modeled after biological processes in birds, fish, and insects, and is enabled among networked users by using mediating software such as the UNU collective intelligence platform. As published by Rosenberg (2015), such real-time control systems enable groups of human participants to behave as a unified collective intelligence. When logged into the UNU platform, for example, groups of distributed users can collectively answer questions, generate ideas, and make predictions as a singular emergent entity. Early testing shows that human swarms can out-predict individuals across a variety of real-world projections.

In popular culture

Hugo-winning writer John Brunner's 1975 science fiction novel The Shockwave Rider includes an elaborate planet-wide information futures and betting pool called "Delphi" based on the Delphi method.

Illusionist Derren Brown claimed to use the 'Wisdom of Crowds' concept to explain how he correctly predicted the UK National Lottery results in September 2009. His explanation was met with criticism on-line, by people who argued that the concept was misapplied. The methodology employed was too flawed; the sample of people could not have been totally objective and free in thought, because they were gathered multiple times and socialised with each other too much; a condition Surowiecki tells us is corrosive to pure independence and the diversity of mind required (Surowiecki 2004:38). Groups thus fall into groupthink where they increasingly make decisions based on influence of each other and are thus less accurate. However, other commentators have suggested that, given the entertainment nature of the show, Brown's misapplication of the theory may have been a deliberate smokescreen to conceal his true method.

This was also shown in the television series East of Eden where a social network of roughly 10,000 individuals came up with ideas to stop missiles in a very short span of time.

Wisdom of Crowds would have a significant influence on the naming of the crowdsourcing creative company Tongal, which is an anagram for Galton, the last name of the social-scientist highlighted in the introduction to Surowiecki's book. Francis Galton recognized the ability of a crowd's median weight-guesses for oxen to exceed the accuracy of experts.

Criticism

In his book Embracing the Wide Sky, Daniel Tammet finds fault with this notion. Tammet points out the potential for problems in systems which have poorly defined means of pooling knowledge: Subject matter experts can be overruled and even wrongly punished by less knowledgeable persons in crowd sourced systems, citing a case of this on Wikipedia. Furthermore, Tammet mentions the assessment of the accuracy of Wikipedia as described in a study mentioned in Nature in 2005, outlining several flaws in the study's methodology which included that the study made no distinction between minor errors and large errors.

Tammet also cites the Kasparov versus the World, an online competition that pitted the brainpower of tens of thousands of online chess players choosing moves in a match against Garry Kasparov, which was won by Kasparov, not the "crowd". Although Kasparov did say, "It is the greatest game in the history of chess. The sheer number of ideas, the complexity, and the contribution it has made to chess make it the most important game ever played."

In his book You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier argues that crowd wisdom is best suited for problems that involve optimization, but ill-suited for problems that require creativity or innovation. In the online article Digital Maoism, Lanier argues that the collective is more likely to be smart only when

1. it is not defining its own questions,

2. the goodness of an answer can be evaluated by a simple result (such as a single numeric value), and

3. the information system which informs the collective is filtered by a quality control mechanism that relies on individuals to a high degree.

Lanier argues that only under those circumstances can a collective be smarter than a person. If any of these conditions are broken, the collective becomes unreliable or worse.

Iain Couzin, a professor in Princeton's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Albert Kao, his student, in a 2014 article in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, argue that "the conventional view of the wisdom of crowds may not be informative in complex and realistic environments, and that being in small groups can maximize decision accuracy across many contexts." By "small groups," Couzin and Kao mean fewer than a dozen people. They conclude and say that “the decisions of very large groups may be highly accurate when the information used is independently sampled, but they are particularly susceptible to the negative effects of correlated information, even when only a minority of the group uses such information.”

Intelligence amplification

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_amplification 

Intelligence amplification (IA), also known as augmented intelligence or cognitive augmentation, refers to the use of information technology to enhance human cognitive capabilities, such as reasoning, learning, problem-solving, and decision-making, rather than replacing human intelligence with autonomous artificial systems. The idea was first proposed in the 1950s and 1960s by cybernetics and early computer pioneers.

IA is sometimes contrasted with AI (artificial intelligence), that is, the project of building a human-like intelligence in the form of an autonomous technological system such as a computer or robot. AI has encountered many fundamental obstacles, practical as well as theoretical, which for IA seem moot, as it needs technology merely as an extra support for an autonomous intelligence that has already proven to function. Moreover, IA has a long history of success, since all forms of information technology, from the abacus to writing to the Internet, have been developed basically to extend the information processing capabilities of the human mind (see extended mind and distributed cognition).

Major contributions

William Ross Ashby: Intelligence Amplification

The term intelligence amplification (IA) has enjoyed a wide currency since William Ross Ashby wrote of "amplifying intelligence" in his Introduction to Cybernetics (1956). Related ideas were explicitly proposed as an alternative to Artificial Intelligence by Hao Wang from the early days of automatic theorem provers.

... "problem solving" is largely, perhaps entirely, a matter of appropriate selection. Take, for instance, any popular book of problems and puzzles. Almost every one can be reduced to the form: out of a certain set, indicate one element. ... It is, in fact, difficult to think of a problem, either playful or serious, that does not ultimately require an appropriate selection as necessary and sufficient for its solution.

It is also clear that many of the tests used for measuring "intelligence" are scored essentially according to the candidate's power of appropriate selection. ... Thus it is not impossible that what is commonly referred to as "intellectual power" may be equivalent to "power of appropriate selection". Indeed, if a talking Black Box were to show high power of appropriate selection in such matters—so that, when given difficult problems it persistently gave correct answers—we could hardly deny that it was showing the 'behavioral' equivalent of "high intelligence".

If this is so, and as we know that power of selection can be amplified, it seems to follow that intellectual power, like physical power, can be amplified. Let no one say that it cannot be done, for the gene-patterns do it every time they form a brain that grows up to be something better than the gene-pattern could have specified in detail. What is new is that we can now do it synthetically, consciously, deliberately.

— W. Ross Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics, Chapman and Hall, London, UK, 1956. Reprinted, Methuen and Company, London, UK, 1964.

J. C. R. Licklider: Man-Computer Symbiosis

"Man-Computer Symbiosis" is a key speculative paper published in 1960 by psychologist/computer scientist J.C.R. Licklider, which envisions that mutually-interdependent, "living together", tightly-coupled human brains and computing machines would prove to complement each other's strengths to a high degree:

Man-computer symbiosis is a subclass of man-machine systems. There are many man-machine systems. At present, however, there are no man-computer symbioses. The purposes of this paper are to present the concept and, hopefully, to foster the development of man-computer symbiosis by analyzing some problems of interaction between men and computing machines, calling attention to applicable principles of man-machine engineering, and pointing out a few questions to which research answers are needed. The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.

— J. C. R. Licklider, "Man-Computer Symbiosis", IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, vol. HFE-1, 4-11, March 1960.

In Licklider's vision, many of the pure artificial intelligence systems envisioned at the time by over-optimistic researchers would prove unnecessary. (This paper is also seen by some historians as marking the genesis of ideas about computer networks which later blossomed into the Internet).

Douglas Engelbart: Augmenting Human Intellect

Licklider's research was similar in spirit to his DARPA contemporary and protégé Douglas Engelbart. Both men’s work helped expand the utility of computers beyond mere computational machines by conceiving and demonstrating them as a primary interface for humans to process and manipulate information.

Engelbart reasoned that the state of our current technology controls our ability to manipulate information, and that fact in turn will control our ability to develop new, improved technologies. He thus set himself to the revolutionary task of developing computer-based technologies for manipulating information directly, and also to improve individual and group processes for knowledge-work. Engelbart's philosophy and research agenda is most clearly and directly expressed in the 1962 research report: Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework The concept of network augmented intelligence is attributed to Engelbart based on this pioneering work.

Increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems.

Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insolvable. And by complex situations we include the professional problems of diplomats, executives, social scientists, life scientists, physical scientists, attorneys, designers--whether the problem situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty years.

We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human feel for a situation usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.

— Douglas Engelbart, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, Summary Report AFOSR-3233, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, CA, October 1962.

In the same research report he addresses the term "Intelligence Amplification" as coined by Ashby, and reflects on how his proposed research relates.

Engelbart subsequently implemented these concepts in his Augmented Human Intellect Research Center at SRI International, developing essentially an intelligence amplifying system of tools (NLS) and co-evolving organizational methods, in full operational use by the mid-1960s within the lab. As intended, his R&D team experienced increasing degrees of intelligence amplification, as both rigorous users and rapid-prototype developers of the system. For a sampling of research results, see their 1968 Mother of All Demos.

Later contributions

Howard Rheingold worked at Xerox PARC in the 1980s and was introduced to both Bob Taylor and Douglas Engelbart; Rheingold wrote about "mind amplifiers" in his 1985 book, Tools for Thought. Andrews Samraj mentioned in "Skin-Close Computing and Wearable Technology" 2021, about Human augmentation by two varieties of cyborgs, namely, Hard cyborgs and Soft cyborgs. A humanoid walking machine is an example of the soft cyborg and a pace-maker is an example for augmenting human as a hard cyborg.

Arnav Kapur working at MIT wrote about human-AI coalescence: how AI can be integrated into human condition as part of "human self": as a tertiary layer to the human brain to augment human cognition. He demonstrates this using a peripheral nerve-computer interface, AlterEgo, which enables a human user to silently and internally converse with a personal AI.

In 2014 the technology of Artificial Swarm Intelligence was developed to amplify the intelligence of networked human groups using AI algorithms modeled on biological swarms. The technology enables small teams to make predictions, estimations and medical diagnoses at accuracy levels that significantly exceed natural human intelligence.

Shan Carter and Michael Nielsen introduce the concept of artificial intelligence augmentation (AIA): the use of AI systems to help develop new methods for intelligence augmentation. They contrast cognitive outsourcing (AI as an oracle, able to solve some large class of problems with better-than-human performance) with cognitive transformation (changing the operations and representations we use to think). A calculator is an example of the former; a spreadsheet of the latter.

Ron Fulbright describes human cognitive augmentation in human/cog ensembles involving humans working in collaborative partnership with cognitive systems (called cogs). By working together, human/cog ensembles achieve results superior to those obtained by the humans working alone or the cognitive systems working alone. The human component of the ensemble is therefore cognitively augmented. The degree of augmentation depends on the proportion of the total amount of cognition done by the human and that done by the cog. Six Levels of Cognitive Augmentation have been identified:

Levels of Human Cognitive Augmentation

• 

In science fiction

Augmented intelligence has been a repeating theme in science fiction. A positive view of brain implants used to communicate with a computer as a form of augmented intelligence is seen in Algis Budrys 1976 novel Michaelmas. Fear that the technology will be misused by the government and military is an early theme. In the 1981 BBC serial The Nightmare Man the pilot of a high-tech mini submarine is linked to his craft via a brain implant but becomes a savage killer after ripping out the implant.

Perhaps the most well known writer exploring themes of intelligence augmentation is William Gibson, in work such as his 1981 story "Johnny Mnemonic", in which the title character has computer-augmented memory, and his 1984 novel Neuromancer, in which computer hackers interface through brain-computer interfaces to computer systems. Vernor Vinge, as discussed earlier, looked at intelligence augmentation as a possible route to the technological singularity, a theme which also appears in his fiction.

Flowers for Algernon is an early example of augmented intelligence in science fiction literature. First published as a short story in 1959, the plot concerns an intellectually disabled man who undergoes an experiment to increase his intelligence to genius levels. His rise and fall is detailed in his journal entries, which become more sophisticated as his intelligence increases.

Interplanetary Internet

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The speed of light, illustrated here by a beam of light traveling from Earth to the Moon in 1.26 seconds, would limit the speed at which messages would be able to travel in the interplanetary Internet. Due to the vast distances involved, much longer delays may be incurred than in the terrestrial Internet.

Simplified Interplanetary Internet overview, Mars to Earth communication

The interplanetary Internet is a conceived computer network in space, consisting of a set of network nodes that can communicate with each other. These nodes are the planet's orbiters and landers, and the Earth ground stations. For example, the orbiters collect the scientific data from the Curiosity rover on Mars through near-Mars communication links, transmit the data to Earth through direct links from the Mars orbiters to the Earth ground stations via the NASA Deep Space Network, and finally the data routed through Earth's internal internet.

Interplanetary communication is greatly delayed by interplanetary distances, as data transmission can only go as fast as the speed of light, so a new set of protocols and technologies that are tolerant to large delays and errors are required. The interplanetary Internet has been envisioned as a store and forward network of internets that is often disconnected, has a wireless backbone fraught with error-prone links and delays ranging from tens of minutes to even hours, even when there is a connection.

As of 2024 agencies and companies working towards bringing the network to fruition include NASA, ESA, SpaceX and Blue Origin.

Challenges and reasons

In the core implementation of Interplanetary Internet, satellites orbiting a planet communicate to other planet's satellites. Simultaneously, these planets revolve around the Sun with long distances, and thus many challenges face the communications. The reasons and the resultant challenges are:

1. The motion and long distances between planets: The interplanetary communication is greatly delayed due to the interplanetary distances and the motion of the planets. The delay is variable and long, ranging from a couple of minutes (Earth-to-Mars), to a couple of hours (Pluto-to-Earth), depending on their relative positions. The interplanetary communication also suspends due to the solar conjunction, when the sun's radiation hinders the direct communication between the planets. As such, the communication characterizes lossy links and intermittent link connectivity.
2. Low embeddable payload: Satellites can only carry a small payload, which poses challenges to the power, mass, size, and cost for communication hardware design. An asymmetric bandwidth would be the result of this limitation. This asymmetry reaches ratios up to 1000:1 as downlink:uplink bandwidth portion.
3. Absence of fixed infrastructure: The graph of participating nodes in a specific planet-to-planet communication keeps changing over time, due to the constant motion. The routes of the planet-to-planet communication are planned and scheduled rather than being opportunistic.

The Interplanetary Internet design must address these challenges to operate successfully and achieve good communication with other planets. It also must use the few available resources efficiently in the system.

Development

Space communication technology has steadily evolved from expensive, one-of-a-kind point-to-point architectures, to the re-use of technology on successive missions, to the development of standard protocols agreed upon by space agencies of many countries. This last phase has gone on since 1982 through the efforts of the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS),^[10] a body composed of the major space agencies of the world. It has 11 member agencies, 32 observer agencies, and over 119 industrial associates.

The evolution of space data system standards has gone on in parallel with the evolution of the Internet, with conceptual cross-pollination where fruitful, but largely as a separate evolution. Since the late 1990s, familiar Internet protocols and CCSDS space link protocols have integrated and converged in several ways; for example, the successful FTP file transfer to Earth-orbiting STRV 1B on January 2, 1996, which ran FTP over the CCSDS IPv4-like Space Communications Protocol Specifications (SCPS) protocols. Internet Protocol use without CCSDS has taken place on spacecraft, e.g., demonstrations on the UoSAT-12 satellite, and operationally on the Disaster Monitoring Constellation. Having reached the era where networking and IP on board spacecraft have been shown to be feasible and reliable, a forward-looking study of the bigger picture was the next phase.

ICANN meeting, Los Angeles, USA, 2007. The marquee pays a humorous homage to the Ed Wood film Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), and the operating system Plan 9 from Bell Labs, while namedropping Internet pioneer Vint Cerf using a spoof of a then-current film Surf's Up (2007).

The Interplanetary Internet study at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was started by a team of scientists at JPL led by internet pioneer Vinton Cerf and the late Adrian Hooke. Cerf was appointed as a distinguished visiting scientist at JPL in 1998, while Hooke was one of the founders and directors of CCSDS.

While IP-like SCPS protocols are feasible for short hops, such as ground station to orbiter, rover to lander, lander to orbiter, probe to flyby, and so on, delay-tolerant networking is needed to get information from one region of the Solar System to another. It becomes apparent that the concept of a region is a natural architectural factoring of the Interplanetary Internet.

A region is an area where the characteristics of communication are the same. Region characteristics include communications, security, the maintenance of resources, perhaps ownership, and other factors. The Interplanetary Internet is a "network of regional internets".

What is needed then, is a standard way to achieve end-to-end communication through multiple regions in a disconnected, variable-delay environment using a generalized suite of protocols. Examples of regions might include the terrestrial Internet as a region, a region on the surface of the Moon or Mars, or a ground-to-orbit region.

The recognition of this requirement led to the concept of a "bundle" as a high-level way to address the generalized Store-and-Forward problem. Bundles are an area of new protocol development in the upper layers of the OSI model, above the Transport Layer with the goal of addressing the issue of bundling store-and-forward information so that it can reliably traverse radically dissimilar environments constituting a "network of regional internets".

Delay-tolerant networking (DTN) was designed to enable standardized communications over long distances and through time delays. At its core is the Bundle Protocol (BP), which is similar to the Internet Protocol, or IP, that serves as the heart of the Internet here on Earth. The big difference between the regular Internet Protocol (IP) and the Bundle Protocol is that IP assumes a seamless end-to-end data path, while BP is built to account for errors and disconnections — glitches that commonly plague deep-space communications.

Bundle Service Layering, implemented as the Bundling protocol suite for delay-tolerant networking, will provide general-purpose delay-tolerant protocol services in support of a range of applications: custody transfer, segmentation and reassembly, end-to-end reliability, end-to-end security, and end-to-end routing among them. The Bundle Protocol was first tested in space on the UK-DMC satellite in 2008.

The Deep Impact mission

An example of one of these end-to-end applications flown on a space mission is the CCSDS File Delivery Protocol (CFDP), used on the Deep Impact comet mission. CFDP is an international standard for automatic, reliable file transfer in both directions. CFDP should not be confused with Coherent File Distribution Protocol, which has the same acronym and is an IETF-documented experimental protocol for rapidly deploying files to multiple targets in a highly networked environment.

In addition to reliably copying a file from one entity (such as a spacecraft or ground station) to another entity, CFDP has the capability to reliably transmit arbitrarily small messages defined by the user, in the metadata accompanying the file, and to reliably transmit commands relating to file system management that are to be executed automatically on the remote end-point entity (such as a spacecraft) upon successful reception of a file.

Protocol

The Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) packet telemetry standard defines the protocol used for the transmission of spacecraft instrument data over the deep-space channel. Under this standard, an image or other data sent from a spacecraft instrument is transmitted using one or more packets.

CCSDS packet definition

A packet is a block of data with length that can vary between successive packets, ranging from 7 to 65,542 bytes, including the packet header.

• Packetized data is transmitted via frames, which are fixed-length data blocks. The size of a frame, including frame header and control information, can range up to 2048 bytes.
• Packet sizes are fixed during the development phase.

Because packet lengths are variable but frame lengths are fixed, packet boundaries usually do not coincide with frame boundaries.

Telecom processing notes

Data in a frame is typically protected from channel errors by error-correcting codes.

• Even when the channel errors exceed the correction capability of the error-correcting code, the presence of errors is nearly always detected by the error-correcting code or by a separate error-detecting code.
• Frames for which uncorrectable errors are detected are marked as undecodable and typically are deleted.

Handling data loss

Deleted undecodable whole frames are the principal type of data loss that affects compressed data sets. In general, there would be little to gain from attempting to use compressed data from a frame marked as undecodable.

• When errors are present in a frame, the bits of the subband pixels are already decoded before the first bit error will remain intact, but all subsequent decoded bits in the segment usually will be completely corrupted; a single bit error is often just as disruptive as many bit errors.
• Furthermore, compressed data usually are protected by powerful, long-blocklength error-correcting codes, which are the types of codes most likely to yield substantial fractions of bit errors throughout those frames that are undecodable.

Thus, frames with detected errors would be essentially unusable even if they were not deleted by the frame processor.

This data loss can be compensated for with the following mechanisms.

• If an erroneous frame escapes detection, the decompressor will blindly use the frame data as if they were reliable, whereas in the case of detected erroneous frames, the decompressor can base its reconstruction on incomplete, but not misleading, data.
• However, it is extremely rare for an erroneous frame to go undetected.
• For frames coded by the CCSDS Reed–Solomon code, fewer than 1 in 40,000 erroneous frames can escape detection.
• All frames not employing the Reed–Solomon code use a cyclic redundancy check (CRC) error-detecting code, which has an undetected frame-error rate of less than 1 in 32,000.

Implementation

The InterPlanetary Internet Special Interest Group of the Internet Society has worked on defining protocols and standards that would make the IPN possible. The Delay-Tolerant Networking Research Group (DTNRG) is the primary group researching Delay-tolerant networking (DTN). Additional research efforts focus on various uses of the new technology.

The canceled Mars Telecommunications Orbiter had been planned to establish an Interplanetary Internet link between Earth and Mars, in order to support other Mars missions. Rather than using RF, it would have used optical communications using laser beams for their higher data rates. "Lasercom sends information using beams of light and optical elements, such as telescopes and optical amplifiers, rather than RF signals, amplifiers, and antennas"

NASA JPL tested the DTN protocol with their Deep Impact Networking (DINET) experiment on board the Deep Impact/EPOXI spacecraft in October, 2008.

In May 2009, DTN was deployed to a payload on board the ISS. NASA and BioServe Space Technologies, a research group at the University of Colorado, have been continuously testing DTN on two Commercial Generic Bioprocessing Apparatus (CGBA) payloads. CGBA-4 and CGBA-5 serve as computational and communications platforms which are remotely controlled from BioServe's Payload Operations Control Center (POCC) in Boulder, CO. In October 2012 ISS Station commander Sunita Williams remotely operated Mocup (Meteron Operations and Communications Prototype), a "cat-sized" Lego Mindstorms robot fitted with a BeagleBoard computer and webcam, located in the European Space Operations Centre in Germany in an experiment using DTN. These initial experiments provide insight into future missions where DTN will enable the extension of networks into deep space to explore other planets and solar system points of interest. Seen as necessary for space exploration, DTN enables timeliness of data return from operating assets which results in reduced risk and cost, increased crew safety, and improved operational awareness and science return for NASA and additional space agencies.

DTN has several major arenas of application, in addition to the Interplanetary Internet, which include sensor networks, military and tactical communications, disaster recovery, hostile environments, mobile devices and remote outposts. As an example of a remote outpost, imagine an isolated Arctic village, or a faraway island, with electricity, one or more computers, but no communication connectivity. With the addition of a simple wireless hotspot in the village, plus DTN-enabled devices on, say, dog sleds or fishing boats, a resident would be able to check their e-mail or click on a Wikipedia article, and have their requests forwarded to the nearest networked location on the sled's or boat's next visit, and get the replies on its return.

Earth orbit

Earth orbit is sufficiently nearby that conventional protocols can be used. For example, the International Space Station has been connected to the regular terrestrial Internet since January 22, 2010 when the first unassisted tweet was posted. However, the space station also serves as a useful platform to develop, experiment, and implement systems that make up the interplanetary Internet. NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have used an experimental version of the interplanetary Internet to control an educational rover, placed at the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, from the International Space Station. The experiment used the DTN protocol to demonstrate technology that one day could enable Internet-like communications that can support habitats or infrastructure on another planet.

Encyclopedia Galactica

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_Galactica

Encyclopedia Galactica is the name of a number of fictional or hypothetical encyclopedias containing all the knowledge accumulated by a galaxy-spanning civilization, most notably in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. The concept of a "future encyclopedia" has become "something iconic among many lovers of the science fiction", and has been reused by numerous other writers.

Asimov's Encyclopedia Galactica

Encyclopedia Galactica first appeared in Isaac Asimov's short story "Foundation" (Astounding Science Fiction, May 1942) (although it did not originally use that name, being referred to as the Encyclopedia until the later publication of the fix-up Foundation (1951)). Asimov's Encyclopedia Galactica was a compendium of all knowledge then available in the Galactic Empire, intended to preserve that knowledge in a remote region of the galaxy in the event of a foreseen galactic catastrophe. The Encyclopedia is later revealed to be an element in an act of misdirection, with its real purpose being to concentrate a group of knowledgeable scientists on a remote, resource-poor planet named Terminus, with the long-term aim of revitalizing the technologically stagnant and scientifically dormant empire. Originally published in a physical medium, it later becomes computerized and subject to continual change.

Asimov used the Encyclopedia Galactica as a literary device throughout his Foundation series, beginning many of the book sections or chapters with a short extract from the Encyclopedia as epigraphs, discussing a key character or event in the story. This provides the reader with a hazy idea of what is to come.

Theodore Wein considers the Encyclopedia Galactica as possibly inspired by a reference in H. G. Wells's The Shape of Things to Come (1933). The future world envisioned by Wells includes an "Encyclopaedic organization which centres upon Barcelona, with seventeen million active workers" and which is tasked with creating "the Fundamental Knowledge System which accumulates, sorts, keeps in order and renders available everything that is known". As pointed out by Wein, this Wells book was at its best-known and most influential in the late 1930s – coinciding with "the period of incubation" when the young Asimov became interested in science fiction, reading a lot of it and starting to formulate his own ideas.

Patricio Manns analyzed the Encyclopedia Galactica as a paratextual element of Asimov's work, intended to contextualize the action, to bring the trilogy closer to the historical novel and to inform the reader about a possible palimpsestic reading.

Later instances in fiction

Various authors in addition to Isaac Asimov have invoked the Encyclopedia Galactica. According to the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, the first to use the term was Frank Holby in his short story "The Strange Case of the Missing Hero" in the July 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, which features Sebastian Lelong, editor of the Encyclopedia Galactica. An Encyclopedia Galactica was a common fixture in previous incarnations of the Legion of Super-Heroes comic books, and has appeared in the Star Wars expanded universe and Superman comics set in the future.

The Encyclopedia Galactica is mentioned as a collection of all the knowledge of a galactic Empire in the 1989 science fiction short story "The Originist" by American novelist Orson Scott Card, which is set in Asimov's "Foundation" Universe. Robert A. Heinlein mentioned the Encyclopedia in chapter three of To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987): "... the computer that led the Lunar Revolution on time line three, code 'Neil Armstrong.' Let's skip the details; it's all in Encyclopedia Galacta (sic) and other books." In Arthur C. Clarke's and Gentry Lee's novel Rama II (1989), Nicole des Jardins says to Richard Wakefield, "Just think, the sum of everything all human beings know or have ever known might be nothing more than an infinitesimal fraction of the Encyclopedia Galactica." Encyclopedia Galactica is also mentioned by Charlie Sheen's character in The Arrival (1996), and by Jodie Foster's character in Contact (1997).

In the comic science fiction series by Douglas Adams, the Galactica is frequently contrasted with the apparently more popular Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.

First, it is slightly cheaper; and second, it has the words "DON'T PANIC" inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.

— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

The Orion's Arm worldbuilding project uses a fictional database called the Encyclopaedia Galactica as its primary framing device, each page presenting itself as an individual article of the Encyclopaedia and focusing on a specific aspect of the Orion's Arm universe.

Other uses

A series of five video documentaries produced by York Films of England and distributed by Encyclopædia Britannica (Australia) in 1993 were collectively titled Encyclopædia Galactica; episode titles were "The Inner Solar System", "The Outer Solar System", "Star Trekking", "Discovery", and "Astronomy and the Stars".^[12] Other entities associated with the production of the video series were Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation, The Learning Channel (retitled Amazing Space), The Discovery Channel Europe, S4C Wales, System TV France and Yleisradio Finland.

An Encyclopedia Galactica: from the Fleet Library aboard the Battlestar Galactica was published in 1978. Aimed at a juvenile audience, it was a tie-in to the Battlestar Galactica television series being broadcast at the time.

The term has been used in non-fictional contexts as well. One example is its use by Carl Sagan in his 1980 book Cosmos, and the 12th episode of his documentary of the same name, to refer to a text where hypothetical extraterrestrial civilizations could store all of their information and knowledge.

Chief executive officer

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_executive_officer

A group of Fortune 500 CEOs in 2015

A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of a company or a nonprofit organization.

CEOs find roles in various organizations, including public and private corporations, nonprofit organizations, and even some government organizations (notably state-owned enterprises). The governor and CEO of a corporation or company typically report to the board of directors and are charged with maximizing the value of the business, which may include maximizing the profitability, market share, revenue, or another financial metric. In the nonprofit and government sector, CEOs typically aim at achieving outcomes related to the organization's mission, usually provided by legislation. CEOs are also frequently assigned the role of the main manager of the organization and the highest-ranking officer in the C-suite.

Origins

The term "chief executive officer" is attested as early as 1782, when an ordinance of the Congress of the Confederation of the United States of America used the term to refer to governors and other leaders of the executive branches of each of the Thirteen Colonies. In draft additions to the Oxford English Dictionary published online in 2011, the Dictionary says that the use of "CEO" as an acronym for a chief executive officer originated in Australia, with the first attestation being in 1914. The first American usage cited is from 1972.

Responsibilities

The responsibilities of an organization's CEO are set by the organization's board of directors or other authority, depending on the organization's structure. They can be far-reaching or quite limited, and are typically enshrined in a formal delegation of authority regarding business administration. Typically, responsibilities include being an active decision-maker on business strategy and other key policy issues, as well as leader, manager, and executor roles. The communicator role can involve speaking to the press and the public, as well as to the organization's management and employees. The decision-making role entails making high-level decisions regarding policy and strategy. The CEO is responsible for implementing the goals, targets, and strategic objectives as determined by the board of directors.

As an executive officer of the company, the CEO reports the status of the business to the board of directors, motivates employees, and drives change within the organization. As a manager, the CEO presides over the organization's day-to-day operations. The CEO is the person who is ultimately accountable for a company's business decisions, including those in operations, marketing, business development, finance, human resources, etc. The CEO of a political party is often entrusted with fundraising, particularly for election campaigns.

The use of the CEO title may be used by for-profit companies or non-profit or charitable organisations, such as the Wikimedia Foundation.

International use

In some countries, there is a dual board system with two separate boards, one executive board for the day-to-day business and one supervisory board for control purposes (selected by the shareholders). In these countries, the CEO presides over the executive board and the chairperson presides over the supervisory board, and these two roles will always be held by different people. This ensures a distinction between management by the executive board and governance by the supervisory board. This allows for clear lines of authority. The aim is to prevent a conflict of interest and too much power being concentrated in the hands of one person.

In the United States, the board of directors (elected by the shareholders) is often equivalent to the supervisory board, while the executive board may often be known as the executive committee (the division/subsidiary heads and C-level officers that report directly to the CEO).

In the United States, and in business, the executive officers are usually the top officers of a corporation, the chief executive officer (CEO) being the best-known type. The definition varies; for instance, the California Corporate Disclosure Act defines "executive officers" as the five most highly compensated officers not also sitting on the board of directors. In the case of a sole proprietorship, an executive officer is the sole proprietor. In the case of a partnership, an executive officer is a managing partner, senior partner, or administrative partner. In the case of a limited liability company, an executive officer is any member, manager, or officer.

Related positions

Main article: Corporate title

Depending on the organization, a CEO may have several subordinate executives to help run the day-to-day administration of the company, each of whom has specific functional responsibilities referred to as senior executives, executive officers, or corporate officers. Subordinate executives are given different titles in different organizations, but one common category of subordinate executive, if the CEO is also the president, is the vice president (VP). An organization may have more than one vice president, each tasked with a different area of responsibility (e.g., VP of finance, VP of human resources). Examples of subordinate executive officers who typically report to the CEO include the chief operating officer (COO), chief financial officer (CFO), chief strategy officer (CSO), chief marketing officer (CMO), and chief business officer (CBO). The public relations-focused position of chief reputation officer is sometimes included as one such subordinate executive officer, but, as suggested by Anthony Johndrow, CEO of Reputation Economy Advisors, it can also be seen as "simply another way to add emphasis to the role of a modern-day CEO – where they are both the external face of, and the driving force behind, an organization culture".

United States

Brad D. Smith, CEO of Intuit from 2008 to 2018

In the US, the term "chief executive officer" is used primarily in business, whereas the term "executive director" is used primarily in the not-for-profit sector. These terms are generally mutually exclusive and refer to distinct legal duties and responsibilities. The CEO is the highest-ranking executive in a company, making corporate decisions, managing operations, allocating resources, and serving as the main point of communication between the board of directors and the company.

United Kingdom

In the UK, chief executive and chief executive officer are used in local government, where their position in law is described as the "head of paid service", and in business and in the charitable sector. As of 2013, the use of the term director for senior charity staff is deprecated to avoid confusion with the legal duties and responsibilities associated with being a charity director or trustee, which are normally non-executive (unpaid) roles. The term managing director is often used in lieu of chief executive officer.

Celebrity CEOs

Business publicists since the days of Edward Bernays (1891–1995) and his client John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) and even more successfully the corporate publicists for Henry Ford, promoted the concept of the "celebrity CEO". Business journalists have often adopted this approach, which assumes that the corporate achievements, especially in the arena of manufacturing, are produced by uniquely talented individuals, especially the "heroic CEO". In effect, journalists celebrate a CEO who takes distinctive strategic actions. The model is the celebrity in entertainment, sports, and politics – compare the "great man theory". Guthey et al. argues that "...these individuals are not self-made, but rather are created by a process of widespread media exposure to the point that their actions, personalities, and even private lives function symbolically to represent significant dynamics and tensions prevalent in the contemporary business atmosphere". Journalism thereby exaggerates the importance of the CEO and tends to neglect harder-to-describe broader corporate factors. There is little attention to the intricately organized technical bureaucracy that actually does the work. Hubris sets in when the CEO internalizes the celebrity and becomes excessively self-confident in making complex decisions. There may be an emphasis on the sort of decisions that attract the celebrity journalists.

Research published in 2009 by Ulrike Malmendier and Geoffrey Tate indicates that "firms with award-winning CEOs subsequently underperform, in terms both of stock and of operating performance".

Criticism

CEO selection and performance evaluation

CEOs and senior executives are governed by the board of directors. The proper selection and evaluation of the CEO and the executive team is critical to the company’s performance. Yet there is no established standard framework to evaluate and govern the CEO performance. Aside from Sarbanes Oxley Act legal standard to govern the financial reporting of public companies and hold the CEO & CFO accountable, there are no industry standards to test the CEO competency and actions or to help align the performance of the executive team with the shareholders' interest and performance expectations. One initiative proposes a standardized questionnaire used in annual CEO reviews and senior executive recruitment. These questionnaires help guide CEO strategy and assure the shareholders that the company and its executive team are on the right track. According to the Executive Institute, the top 10 questions every board must ask its CEO, include the following:

• Are we in the right business/market segment(s)? What are the growth areas to invest in and loss areas to divest?
• What are the emerging PESTEL (Political, Economic, Societal, Technological, Environmental & Legal) risks and opportunities
• What market data supports our strategy?
• What are our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOTs)?
• What are we doing to address each one of the SWOTs?
• What are our core competencies? How we can leverage them better?
• What are the operational or execution risks, and how do you manage them?
• What are our key performance indicators (KPIs) and targets that help us measure our performance?
• How do you plan to achieve those targets and in what timeframe?
• How can we build a sustainable competitive advantage?

Every CEO and C-level executive must be able to provide specific answers to the preceding questions, readily and clearly. Additionally, these questions can also be used as a framework for evaluating potential candidates for the succession planning and selection process.

Executive compensation

Main article: Executive compensation § Controversy

Executive compensation has been a source of criticism following a dramatic rise in pay relative to the average worker's wage. For example, the relative pay was 20-to-1 in 1965 in the US, but had risen to 376-to-1 by 2000. The relative pay differs around the world, and, in some smaller countries, is still around 20-to-1. Observers differ as to whether the rise is due to competition for talent or due to lack of control by compensation committees. In recent years, investors have demanded more say over executive pay.

Diversity

Main article: Gender diversity § In the boardroom

Lack of diversity amongst chief executives has also been a source of criticism. In 2018, 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs were women. In 2023 the number rose to 10.4% of for Women CEO's of Fortune 500 companies. The reasons for this are explained or justified in various ways, and may include biological sex differences, male and female differences in Big Five personality traits and temperament, sex differences in psychology and interests, maternity and career breaks, hypergamy, phallogocentrism, the existence of old boy networks, tradition, and the lack of female role models in that regard, countries have passed laws mandating boardroom gender quotas. In 2023 Rockefeller Foundation awarded a grant to Korn Ferry to research strategies and then action a plan to help more women to become CEO's.

Toxic executives

See also: Toxic leader

There are contentious claims that a significant number of CEOs have psychopathic tendencies, often characterized by power-seeking behavior and dominance. These individuals can often conceal their ruthlessness and antisocial behavior behind a facade of charm and eloquence. Traits such as courage and risk-taking, generally considered desirable, are often found alongside these psychopathic tendencies.

Tara Swart, a neuroscientist at MIT Sloan School of Management, has suggested that individuals with psychopathic traits thrive in chaotic environments and are aware that others do not. As a result, they may intentionally create chaos in the workplace. This perspective is explored in the book Snakes in Suits, co-authored by Robert D. Hare.

However, Scott Lilienfeld has argued that the attention given to psychopathy in the workplace by both the media and scholars has far exceeded the available scientific evidence. Emilia Bunea, writing in Psychology Today, has linked psychopathic traits in managers to workplace bullying, employee dissatisfaction, and turnover intentions. Despite this, Bunea cautions that excessive worry about supposed psychopathic managers could discourage individuals from pursuing careers in corporations and deter employees from addressing issues with difficult bosses.

Controversies

There have been several notable controversies involving famous CEOs. Some of the most prominent controversies were a result of the MeToo Movement including Harvey Weinstein and the Weinstein Company, Steve Wynn and Wynn Resorts Ltd., and Leslie Moonves & CBS.

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, Inc. and SpaceX, has been the subject of several controversies. In 2018, Musk tweeted "[a]m considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured" in the middle of a trading day and a few weeks later, Tesla announced it would go private. The SEC investigated Musk shortly after his tweet and charged him with securities fraud. Musk settled the controversy and stepped down as chair of Tesla's board but remained the company's CEO. Musk and Tesla both paid a $20 million penalty to be distributed among harmed investors.