This is a suggestion for a "complex systems" on-line experiment, made today by JHB Deane at Surrey.
This suggestion applies ONLY to one-to-one communications, involving no lists or copies...
When you get email from your friends, or posts on Facebook etc., what proportion of them do you need to acknowledge with a reply in order to keep your friends from dumping you? Jonathan calls this the "D coefficient" and suggests that for himself, for email, it is about 0.3. That is, he finds people will keep him on their emailing list if he responds to about one in every 3 communications.
He suggests that this is empirical science, and that it needs a very large number of people to participate in taking the data in order to establish a "global D coefficient" and a range for this number.
For myself, I find that people are happier if I apply a higher D coefficient than 0.3, and that on Facebook, my D coefficient is nearer 0.1 (I dump "friends" if I get less than one response every 10 communications).
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
GSA meeting, San Francisco, Nov 2007
Gerontological Society of America meeting 2007.
Christina's factotum-administrator person decided to avoid the on-line information for the Hilton Hotel in San Francisco, and discovered the main direct line, in to the bookings manageress in the hotel. The end result is that all five of the Reading contingent are booked in for all the days of the conference, that is, the nights of 15 16 17 18 and 19th November 2007.
You may be interested to hear that the lady manageress at the Hilton reports that she had had all kinds of irate people from around the planet phoning her up to complain about the website. Partly the problem was with the parochial conference organisers. No-one had thought that any attendees would need to come in early to overcome jet lag. And they had put an upper limit of 4 bodies per booking. And also, the website was broken and reporting there to be no space when actually there is plenty.
It also transpires that for many people, dealing with the Hilton was so much too difficult, that they have instead transferred to other hotels in the vicinity. This further reduces the pressure on the conference space.
Christina's factotum-administrator person decided to avoid the on-line information for the Hilton Hotel in San Francisco, and discovered the main direct line, in to the bookings manageress in the hotel. The end result is that all five of the Reading contingent are booked in for all the days of the conference, that is, the nights of 15 16 17 18 and 19th November 2007.
You may be interested to hear that the lady manageress at the Hilton reports that she had had all kinds of irate people from around the planet phoning her up to complain about the website. Partly the problem was with the parochial conference organisers. No-one had thought that any attendees would need to come in early to overcome jet lag. And they had put an upper limit of 4 bodies per booking. And also, the website was broken and reporting there to be no space when actually there is plenty.
It also transpires that for many people, dealing with the Hilton was so much too difficult, that they have instead transferred to other hotels in the vicinity. This further reduces the pressure on the conference space.
Monday, October 15, 2007
A clergyman on chaos and complexity
John Habgood, when Archbishop of York, wrote a book "Faith and Uncertainty" with the following passage in it.
..in the world of nature, it may be that the rules of organisation are comparatively simple, if only we knew what they were. We see them operating in living organisms every time a set of genes gives rise to the enormously complex finished product......
...built into the way things are, there are not only vast possibilities for freedom and creativity, but also certain inherent rules and structures which channel this creativity away from relapsing into chaos, and towards greater complexity and order."
He has been reading books on complex adaptive systems, and for more information we could subscribe to Complexity Digest once a week comdig.org
It is nice seeing a clergyman taking, perhaps, a modern view towards biology. There seems to be hope for us all, pace Richard Dawkins.
"Complexity emerges at the interface between order and chaos," is one modern way of putting this insight.
reference ISBN 0-232-52227-8 Darton, Longman and Todd, 1997
..in the world of nature, it may be that the rules of organisation are comparatively simple, if only we knew what they were. We see them operating in living organisms every time a set of genes gives rise to the enormously complex finished product......
...built into the way things are, there are not only vast possibilities for freedom and creativity, but also certain inherent rules and structures which channel this creativity away from relapsing into chaos, and towards greater complexity and order."
He has been reading books on complex adaptive systems, and for more information we could subscribe to Complexity Digest once a week comdig.org
It is nice seeing a clergyman taking, perhaps, a modern view towards biology. There seems to be hope for us all, pace Richard Dawkins.
"Complexity emerges at the interface between order and chaos," is one modern way of putting this insight.
reference ISBN 0-232-52227-8 Darton, Longman and Todd, 1997
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