Chaos at Cambridge
You really ought to think, not in terms of “publication in 90 days” but “enabling real time collaboration globally”. The “90 days” was fine in the 1800’s, but today adding quarter year delays into global critical developments is like adding a mlll stone to a Formula 1 race car.
If authors are chasing after “likes” and “gold stars” and “prizes”, keep doing what you are doing. But if you want to see the future, then help groups “in place” as part of a global team, not an after thought using methods when pony express was fast.
Put the workplace online and open. Record all transactions and changes losslessly for fair allocation of blame and fame. Verify assumptions in real time. Encode with, and use, global open identifiers in real time and have the whole – work place, group, topic, project, namespace – open to all humans, all ages, in all human languages. If a child wants to comment, let them, record it carefully, and put it in permanent archive form. Maybe in a decade you will find they were prescient and voiced the key pathway to critical solutions and advances. If a global open group changes the pathway to allow faster than light travel, or creation of a new industry, or solves a long standing “brick wall”, then give those who contributed their due.
This paper is part of (“chaotic” “intermittency”) on the Internet now. Today that has about 342,000 entry points. It is an active topic, but it is creeping along at glacial pace because groups like Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Cambridge University Press are NOT using global open methods. They are “us first” and “If we help authors gain fame and fortune, we want a part” and “we don’t do science we just publish”.
It is not just a job. It is not just “when stuff comes in, we add our nuts and bolts, edits and flourishes”. If every person at Cambridge is not involved in the things you are encouraging, you are not putting your heart towards the subject, just “making money”.
I like the things you talk about. You are doing a “good job”. But it is not “great”. it is not “outstanding” and it is orders of magnitude less than what is already possible now.
site:cambridge.org shows 110 Million entry points. But every one has “it has to benefit Cambridge” attached.
I am trying to suggest a different approach where you put your effort to all 8.1 Billion humans, and not keep growing a monument. Can you even summarize “chaotic” on Cambridge.Org? I doubt it. That is 73,300 entry points (seen from the outside). You have posted the word in many places, so it is part of the fabric and complexion of your site. But it is like leaves of a book you have not written. It is more graffiti than knowledge. In the world (“chaotic”) with 235 Million entries and then in all its variants and languages and meanings and uses – has one meaning with myriad nuances.
Humans can only store a tiny bit of information in lossless retrievable form now. Chaos has a lot to do with the scattered and fragmented way print introduces variations. Print makes duplicated. The duplicates ramify and accrete. The copies age and become distorted. The information on the Internet becomes separated from its true sources. The people who want to work on things cannot find them because too many copies fragment the whole into too many false leads and incomplete fragments.
If you find and encourage and support “groups in place” or “global open communities”, “global open projects” then any of the 2 Billion first time learners can be involved. Do not block children or older people or unemployed, or “just starting out”, or “changing industries”, or “just trying to survive” – to impose a small tax that gets more expensive to maintain. If your staff “add value” to the whole system, then they will be able to “live lives with dignity and purpose”.
I can only give a glimmer of the vision of the world I have gathered just in the 26 years of the Internet Foundation. Since I happen to love noise in all its forms and often find the chaotic signals carry the most information – I chose that to mention.
There are “services” that can be paid for to reimburse costs of operations. But there are also “missions” and “responsibilities” that everyone ought to do. If the Internet is ONE system, not many with many owners and competing groups, then the monetized costs overall should drop. If things you are doing now that take 90 days can be done in real time as needed, then the pace of new discoveries that emerge into new industries also changes.
I know precisely what will happen if “memorize a profession” is no longer the basis of education, jobs, salaries and responsibilities.
( (“chaos” OR “chaotic”) (“intermittent” OR “intermittency”) ) has only 4.01 Million entries. It has a precise specification as a query and can have meaning globally – even if no more than to pre-compile its “meaning” on the Internet. It has a finite and identifiable community. And it has identifiable stakeholders, their stakes, dependencies and associations. If that whole is biased to the benefit of a few, relative to what it can do for the whole human and related species — that is part of a fair Internet portrait and digital twin of that topic, that node.
With global scale tools, global fair solutions are possible It is is not fair, it is not global.
Filed under (Chaos at Cambridge)
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
