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key concepts
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Philosophy
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Wikipedia
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Technological determinism
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or=Wikimedia y=2007 r=20070112 22:36 UTC
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Technological determinism has been summarized as 'The belief in technology as a key governing force in society ...' (Merritt Roe Smith), '... the belief that social progress is driven by technological innovation, which in turn follows an "inevitable" course.' (Michael L. Smith), 'The idea that technological development determines social change ...' (Bruce Bimber), '... the belief that technical forces determine social and cultural changes.' (Thomas P. Hughes); '... a three-word logical proposition: "Technology determines history"' (Rosalind Williams)
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Teleonomy
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or=Wikimedia y=2007 r=20070112 22:36 UTC
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Teleonomy is the apparent 'end' or 'purpose' of processes, such as those in history or biology. The more well known word, teleology, is similar but may connote that an end is intended and/or striven for by a conscious agent, such as a God.
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Economics
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Wikipedia
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Path dependence
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or=Wikimedia y=2007 r=20070112 22:36 UTC
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... institutions are self reinforcing ...
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Consider as an example the technological development of videocassette recorders (VCRs) for home use. It is argued that management errors and minor design choices by Sony led to its Betamax format being defeated in market competition by VHS in the 1980s. Two mechanisms can explain why the small but early lead gained by VHS became larger over time. The first is the bandwagon effect of VCR manufacturers in favor of the VHS format in the U.S. and Europe, who switched because they expected VHS to win the standards battle. The second was a network effect: videocassette rental stores observed that more people had VHS players and stocked up on VHS tapes; this in turn led other people to buy VHS players, and so on until there was complete vendor lock-in to VHS. An alternative explanation, of course, is that VHS was better adapted to market demands (in particular to the demand for longer cassettes for recording sports games) and that path dependence had little or nothing to do with its success.
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In economic development, it is said (initially by Paul David in 1985) that a standard which is first-to-market can become entrenched (like the QWERTY layout in typewriters still used in computer keyboards). He called this "path dependence", and argued that inferior standards can persist simply because of the legacy they have built up. The case against QWERTY has been criticized (e.g. by The Fable of the Keys), but standards are clearly very important in modern economies, and the significance of path dependence in determining how they form is the subject of economic debate.
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Bandwagon effect
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or=Wikimedia y=2007 r=20070112 22:36 UTC
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The bandwagon effect is the observation that people often do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. The effect is often pejoratively referred to as herding instinct, particularly as applied to adolescents. Without examining the merits of the particular thing, people tend to "follow the crowd".
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Network effect
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or=Wikimedia y=2007 r=20070112 22:36 UTC
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A network effect is a characteristic that causes a good or service to have a value to a potential customer which depends on the number of other customers who own the good or are users of the service.
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First mover advantage
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or=Wikimedia y=2007 r=20070112 22:36 UTC
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First-mover advantage is the advantage gained by the initial occupant of a market segment. This advantage may stem from the fact that the first entrant can gain control of resources that followers may not be able to match.
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Switching costs
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or=Wikimedia y=2007 r=20070112 22:36 UTC
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Switching barriers or switching costs are terms used in microeconomics, strategic management, and marketing to describe any impediment to a customer's changing of suppliers.
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Preferential attachment
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or=Wikimedia y=2007 r=20070307 12:38 UTC
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In preferential attachment, new nodes are added to the network one by one. Each new node attaches itself (creates a link) to one of the existing nodes with a certain probability. This probability is biased, however, in the sense that it is proportional to the number of links that the existing node already has. Therefore, heavily linked nodes ("hubs") tend to quickly accumulate even more links, while nodes with only a few links are unlikely to be chosen as the destination for a new link. It is as if the new nodes have a "preference" to attach themselves to the already heavily linked nodes.
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Intuitively, this can be understood if we think in terms of social networks connecting people. Here a link from A to B means that person A "knows" or "is acquainted with" person B. Heavily linked nodes represent well-known people with lots of relations. When a newcomer enters the community, s/he is more like to become acquainted with one of those more visible people rather than with a relative unknown. Similarly, on the web new pages link preferentially to hubs, i.e. very well-known sites such as Google or Wikipedia, rather than to pages that hardly anyone knows. If someone select a new page to link to by randomly choosing an existing link, the probability to get to a particular page would be equal to its degree. This explains the preferential attachment probability rule.
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Preferential attachment is an example of a positive feedback cycle where initially random variations (one node initially having more links or having started accumulating links earlier than another) are automatically reinforced, thus greatly magnifying differences. This is also sometimes called the Matthew effect, "the rich get richer", and in chemistry autocatalysis.
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Externality
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or=Wikimedia y=2007 r=20070112 22:36 UTC
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In economics, an externality is a side effect from one activity which has consequences for another activity but is not reflected in market prices. Externalities can be either positive, when an external benefit is generated, or negative, when an external cost is generated from a market transaction.
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Elasticity_(economics)
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or=Wikimedia y=2007 r=20070112 22:36 UTC
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In economics, elasticity is the ratio of the incremental percentage change in one variable with respect to an incremental percentage change in another variable.... The greater the extent to which demand falls as price rises, the greater is the price elasticity of demand. However, there may be some goods that consumers require, cannot consume less of, and cannot find substitutes for even if prices rise (for example, certain prescription drugs). For such goods, the price elasticity of demand might be considered inelastic.
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Collectivities
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The words "mob" (L. mobile vulgas = excitable crowd )and "mobile" share the same Latin root.
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Mark Granovetter
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Threshold models of collective behavior
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y=1978 j=American Journal of Sociology v=83 m=May pp=1420-1443 r=20050902
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An explanation of seemingly paradoxical outcomes (e.g. riots) of similar groups. Preferences interact and aggregate non-linearly when heterogeneous and independent; his model assumes binary decisions based on the observation of others. It includes the influence of friends, the role of norms, entrance, exit, and movement between subgroups and improves upon game theory (which tends to reduce situations to two simultaneous players) and correlation studies
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1422 a threshold is "the proportion of the group he would have to see joined before he would do so"; a radical has a low threshold; instigators act when no one else would
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1424 once an instigator acts you may create a "bandwagon" or "domino effect"
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1441 Such "paradoxes" may occur far more than we realize, since we observe many outcomes and tend to assume that the preferences generating them are consistent with rather than opposed or unrelated to them.
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1442 By explaining paradoxical outcomes as the result of aggregation processes, threshold models take the "strangeness" often associated with collective behavior out of the heads of actors and put it into the dynamics of situations. Such models may be useful in small-group settings as well as those with large numbers of actors. Their greatest promise lies in analysis of situations where many actors behave in ways contingent on one another, where there are few institutionalized precedents and little pre-existing structure.
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Wikipedia
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Prisoner's dilemma
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or=Wikimedia y=2007 r=20070319 14:55 UTC
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A / B
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Prisoner B Stays Silent
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Prisoner B Betrays
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Prisoner A Stays Silent
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0.5 / 0.5
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10/ 0
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Prisoner A Betrays
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0 / 10
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2 / 2
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emergence
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Wikipedia
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Emergence
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or=Wikimedia y=2007 r=20070319 14:54 UTC
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Emergent Properties
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An emergent behaviour or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviours as a collective. If emergence happens over disparate size scales, then the reason is usually a causal relation across different scales. In other words there is often a form of top-down feedback in systems with emergent properties. These are two of the major reasons why emergent behaviour occurs: intricate causal relations across different scales and feedback. The property itself is often unpredictable and unprecedented, and may represent a new level of the system's evolution. The complex behaviour or properties are not a property of any single such entity, nor can they easily be predicted or deduced from behaviour in the lower-level entities: they are irreducible. No physical property of an individual molecule of air would lead one to think that a large collection of them will transmit sound. The shape and behaviour of a flock of birds or shoal of fish are also good examples.
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Steven Johnson
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Introduction
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p=Scribner bt=Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software y=2001 r=20060324
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What features do all these systems share? In the simplest terms, they solve problems by drawing on masses of relatively stupid elements, rather than a single, intelligent "executive branch." They are bottom-up systems, not top-down. They get their smarts from below. In a more technical language, they are complex adaptive systems that display emergent behavior. In these systems, agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies one scale above them: ants create colonies; urbanites create neighborhoods; simple pattern-recognition software learns how to recommend new books. The movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication is what we call emergence.
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Emergent complexity without adaptation is like the intricate crystals formed by a snowflake: it's a beautiful pattern, but it has no function. The forms of emergent behavior that we'll examine in this book show the distinctive quality of growing smarter over time, and of responding to the specific and changing needs of their environment. In that sense, most of the systems we'll look at are more dynamic than our adaptive billiards table: they rarely settle in on a single, frozen shape; they form patterns in time as well as space.