Stigmergy

(The Information Systems Foundations: Constructing and Criticising Workshop at the ANU, 16-17 July 2004 + stigmergy)

The term "stigmergy" was originally proposed in 1959 by the French scientist, Pierre-Paul Grasse, in his study of social insects, and more specifically, while observing termite building behaviour (1959).

For example, ants exchange information by laying down pheromones on their way back to the nest when they have found food. In that way, they collectively develop a complex network of trails, connecting the nest in the most efficient way to the different food sources [= navigation].

Other eusocial creatures, such as termites, use pheromones to build their complex nests by following a simple decentralized rule set. Each insect scoops up a mudball or similar material from its environment, invests the ball with pheromones, and deposits it on the ground. Termites are attracted to their nestmates' pheromones and are therefore more likely to drop their own mudballs near their neighbours'. Over time, this leads to the construction of pillars, arches, tunnels and chambers [= construction].

Grasse defines stigmergy:

the coordination of tasks and the regulation of constructions does not depend directly on the workers, but on the constructions themselves. The worker does not direct his [sic] work, but is guided by it. It is to this special form of stimulation that we give the name Stigmergy (stigma, wound from a pointed object[, i.e. mark or sign]; ergon, work, product of labour = stimulating product of labor). (In [and tr.] Holland and Melhuish [1999] 2)

The term stigmergy describes the influence that information derived from the local environmental effects of the activities of previous individuals has on the current behaviour of individuals [= feedback "in action"].

Camazine et al. (2001) refer to stigmergy as the process of information gathering from work in progress – from the environmental effects of the work rather than directly from fellow workers. As they describe it, in continuing with the social insect analogy:

instead of coordination through direct communication among nestmates, each individual . . . adjust[s] its building behaviour to fit with that of its nestmates through the medium of the work in progress. (24)

Stigmergy is the way a system organises itself through the collective behaviour of individuals within its environment. As the individual moves through the environment, it gathers or emits information, or interacts with the environment, i.e. leaving traces, i.e. cues, in work or otherwise, that stimulate the work of other individuals, who do the same in turn. Over time, a pattern of construction emerges out of this coordinated action. [It is also known as swarm intelligence.] (The theory does not explain how or when construction ends or how errors made during construction are dealt with.)

Stigmergy can explain the transfer of information among individuals, when each individual needs to determine what to do and where a direct line of information from one individual to another individual does not exist; transfer instead occurs through

1. the stimulus of previous individuals’ information [sematectonic (A - T - ?): from sema (sign, token) and tecton (craftsman, builder) (Wilson 186)] and
2. construction activities embedded in the environment [stigmergic (A - T - A): acc. to Wilson, stigmergy is a subset of sematectonic behaviour].

Figure 9.3, "Stigmergy – information flow" summarises this process. Here the work previously accomplished by one or more individuals is imprinted in the environment as a cue/stimulus for other individuals.

Figure 9.3. Stigmergy – information flow.

Note that stigmergy is not restricted to eusocial creatures, or even to physical systems. On the internet there are many emergent phenomena that arise from users interacting only by modifying local parts of their shared virtual environment.

Such self-organised ucs intelligence or collaboration = deep thinking (generated unawares), like deep learning (delivered unawares). Can it be mobilised? Perhaps. It can perhaps be "fed back." The teacher activates the feedback process by "imprint[ing] . . . information via cues and/or stimulus" on the environment.

See Pierre-Paul Grasse, "La reconstruction du nid et les coordinations interindividuelles chez bellicositermes natalensis et cubitermes sp. La theorie de la stigmergie: essai d’interpretation du comportament des termites constructeurs," Insects Sociaux 6 (1959): 41-80.

E.O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975; Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000) 186.

Also: distributed cognition, extended mind, situated cognition.

The Honeymoon Killers

V1:
G – Bm – F#sus4 – GM7.F#7
G – Bm – F#sus4.F#7 (12/8)

Murder most foul in the kitchen:
you shot me down
when I was in for the kill,
with another drink in my hand
and a line on my lips.

“So who were you stalking outside?”
you said to my frown.
“Well, I was . . . she was a friend.”
“What were you doing with your hand?”
wiped the smile off my lips.

PC:
G5 – D/F# – A7sus4 – Bm –

Oh, bury me in the garden
cos I want to come up roses—
things are getting messy in the house
party as the shit flies.
But as we said all along,
we’re not Adam and Eve,
living for the sweet Hereafter.
We don’t want tears and laughter,
it’s sex and slaughter for the Honeymoon Killers.

C:
[chords as verse]

A lonely heart can kill like a suicide pill,
so suck it up and do what you will—
kiss her goodbye . . .

V2:

Oh, the lights are much too bright in here
under the grill,
as she roasts me slowly:
“Oh, it was just the vodka talking
when I gave her the lip.”

"Bury Me in the Garden": http://trad.appspot.com/song/Bury_Me_in_the_Garden: "Bury me in the garden, mother, mother. Bury me in the garden, mother, mother, mother dear. Bury me in the garden." "O, the moonlight shines so bright, way down in the garden ’neath the sycamore tree."

“In the Garden”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Garden_(song), http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/i/t/g/itgarden.htm

Writing in the Zone

The drama of the writing room

The writing teacher enables learners to explore the limits of their writing zone (cf. Vygotsky: zone of proximal development; scaffolding), perhaps to understand, perhaps to enlarge or deform it.

They should learn where their writing zone fits within - or rather, overlaps with - the institutional zone (IZ), or, speaking in terms of writing per se, how their idiom maps onto the institutional idiom (II).

An aside:

1. The writing teacher is not a mentor, i.e. who knows more, i.e. has access to distal knowledge beyond the proximal knowledge of the student [the hand-up or or hands-up model].
2. Instead they model an exploratory or open mode of being within the writing zone [the many hands make light work model].

The writing room becomes a place of drama (Gk "action, deed"), where everyone actively learns by enacting what they know, rather than a place of edification, where learners passively receive and rehearse knowledge from the teacher. This is in keeping with the principle of the distributed intelligence of the writing room, i.e. we're all in this together: teachers are learners; learners teach the teachers and each other; we all at once teach and learn.

Learning—and the writing of—Grammar B enables one to deform the Ii, as:

1. a "negative" (or privative) method: learning to do right by doing wrong, i.e. learning the rules of Ii by making conscious "errors" (un-errors) that make them explicit, a.k.a. erratology
2. a "critical" (or private) method: learning, through this process, to deform Ii, i.e. to find a space of freedom (a private or temporary autonomous zone) within the IZ, a.k.a. ?

Thus, they learn the rules of the Ii/IZ to be able to break or bend them in their own interests.

The writing teacher as guide

The writing teacher is like Stalker (Guide) in Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979), who works as a guide to bring people in and out of the Zone to the Room [the writing room as hypertopia], which is said to grant "the deepest, innermost" wishes [the desire of writers].

He guides a sceptical writer (Writer [radical learner]) and a credulous professor (Professor [conservative learner]) out of the city into the Zone, in which the residual effects of an unspecifed visitation or catastrophe have transformed an otherwise mundane rural area scattered with ruined buildings into an area where the normal laws of physics no longer apply [the unreal world of the IZ].

Once in the Zone, he tells them that they must do exactly as he says to survive the dangers that are all around them [the leap of faith into the chaotic hypertopia of the writing space]. No harm comes to any of the three men; there is a tension between disbelief of the need for his elaborate precautions, and the possibility that they are necessary. He alone knows the rules of the Zone, having learnt them from his mentor "Porcupine" and can sense the dangers around them.

As they journey, the characters share their reasons for wanting to visit the room: Writer wants inspiration [freedom]; Professor wants recognition [affirmation]. Interestingly, Stalker takes on faith the powers [enchantment] of the room (because he says he's never been in there, i.e. his job is just to lead) - and bemoans the loss of faith in society [the disenchantment of modernity].
(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(film and http://skywalking.com/wwwboard/messages/847.html.)

Stalker, Writer and Professor (and the fourth figure is Tarkovsky, a.k.a. Porcupine):

Zone of proximal development [зона ближайшего развития; ZPD]: the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help, i.e. "the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers" (Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes [Harvard UP, 1978] 86).


Image: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~rallrich/learn/zone.html

"ZPD": zone of personal and/or professional development

Scaffolding: a process through which a teacher or peer supports the student in his or her ZPD as necessary, and tapers off this support as it becomes unnecessary, much as a scaffold is removed from a building during construction, i.e. "Scaffolding refers to the way the adult guides the child's learning via focused questions and positive interactions" (Nancy Balaban, "Seeing the Child, Knowing the Person," in W. Ayers, To Become a Teacher (Teachers College Press, 1995) 52)

Porcupine: a.k.a. hedgehog, see Isaiah Berlin, "The Hedgehog and the Fox" (after Archilochus: πόλλ' οἶδ' ἀλώπηξ, ἐχῖνος δ'ἓν μέγα, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing"). Hedgehogs view the world through the lens of a single defining idea; foxes do not, drawing on a wide variety of experiences to understand the world. The Fox may be the black dog of Stalker. (See http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/rt/HF.pdf).

Three Kinds of Inference

Figure 1. Three Kinds of Inference

The terms “Fact,” “Rule,” “Case” are medieval nicknames for the propositions that would be called the “conclusion” (C), “major premiss” (MP) and “minor premiss” (mp) respectively, in the simplest form of deductive syllogism.

Thus, we have the following scheme:

1. Deduction takes a Case, a mp of the form X => Y,
matches it with a Rule, a MP of the form Y => Z,
then adverts to a Fact, a C of the form X => Z.

2. Induction takes a Case of the form X => Y,
matches it with a Fact of the form X => Z,
then adverts to a Rule of the form Y => Z.

3. Abduction takes a Fact of the form X => Z,
matches it with a Rule of the form Y => Z,
then adverts to a Case of the form X => Y.

Even more succinctly:

Table 2. Three Kinds of Inference


http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg06871.html

Scholar, author inspired decades of English literature students

NZ Herald (30 May 2009)
Bill Williams

Dr Terry Sturm, CBE, professor of English. Died aged 67.

Almost every student of English since 1980 at Auckland University would have felt Terry Sturm's influence during their studies.

He held a professorial chair at the university from 1980 until his retirement in 2005, and was an eminent critic and scholar of Australasian writing, especially New Zealand popular fiction.

He played a leading role in placing New Zealand literature at the centre of the academic curriculum.

He edited various standard literary reference works including two editions of The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English, and the drama section of the Oxford History of Australian Literature. His literary biography An Unsettled Spirit: The Life and Frontier Fiction of Edith Lyttleton was the product of 15 years of research in New Zealand, Australia and England.

In 2005, he edited a selection of Allen Curnow's verse written under his pseudonym Whim Wham.

Assisted by a Marsden Fund grant, Sturm spent the past few years researching and writing a definitive literary biography of Allen Curnow.

His work met a setback when the memory stick from his computer was stolen last August, taking a large part of the first draft with it. The biography, if published, will be the first full-length study of Curnow's work.

Terence Laurie Sturm was born in Auckland in 1941 and went to school in Henderson. He completed his MA at Auckland University before undertaking postgraduate work at Cambridge University and at the University of Leeds, where he received his PhD.

He lectured in English literature at Sydney University from 1967 and left in 1980 to take his chair at the University of Auckland.

Sturm was involved in literary arts administration for many years. He was on the NZ Literary Fund and the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council and in 1997 became first convener of the Humanities Panel of the Marsden Fund.

In 1990, he was made a CBE in recognition of his services to literature.

John Morrow, Dean of Auckland's Arts Faculty, said Sturm was deeply valued as a colleague and a friend.

He is survived by his wife Linda and sons Jonathan, Mark and Tim.

See also: "Literary scholar Prof. Terry Sturm dies" and "Biography last brave act by literary scholar"

Kavan’s place in NZ literary history (by Lawrence Jones)

Otago Daily Times (30 May 2009): Books 49, rev. of Anna Kavan, Anna Kavan's New Zealand, ed. and intro. Jennifer Sturm (Random House, 2009).

ANNA KAVAN is probably known in New Zealand, if at all, primarily for her rather unflattering portrait of the country in "New Zealand: Answer to an Inquiry," published in 1943 in Horizon. This book, the fruit of eight years of research by Jennifer Sturm, has attempted to change that situation, to bring about the recognition of "Kavan’s role in the literary history of New Zealand."

Sturm has done this by editing and publishing for the first time Kavan’s manuscript "Five Months Further or What I remember about NZ," together with a full biographical introduction, notes, an account of Kavan’s correspondence with Ian Hamilton (pacifist, conscientious objector and writer of the account of his imprisonment, Till Human Voices Wake Us), and an essay on her as a New Zealand writer. In addition, the Horizon essay is included as an appendix.

Sturm in her introduction and her other commentary attempts to set the record straight about Kavan, especially in her relationship to New Zealand. On the one hand, she is shown as a ‘‘troubled and emotionally abject woman’’—self-absorbed, addicted to heroin (and alcohol), dependent on men in a series of unhappy relationships, depressed and mentally unstable; on the other hand, Sturm from a feminist psychological perspective defends her against the masculinist criticism of such as Frank Sargeson and Denis Glover and presents her as the victim of bad parenting and male prejudice, one who if she could not find a secure home in this world could show herself in her writing to be ‘‘an astute and meticulous recorder of experience, a collector of images and illustrations’’.

Her experience in New Zealand in 1941-42 was ‘‘a Pacific interlude in a turbulent life’’ so that New Zealand ‘‘came to represent a respite and a haven, adding a little colour to an otherwise sombre literary palette’’. Thus there is a case to be made for her as a New Zealand writer, one who had ‘‘more of New Zealand in [her] writing’’ than can be found in the writing of Katherine Mansfield.

Sturm perhaps overstates the case of Kavan as a significant "New Zealand" writer (only a handful of her 20 published books deal with New Zealand), but she has in this book, as C.K. Stead states in the foreword, made available for readers "an essentially 'New Zealand' work, previously lost to us—a piece of recovered history."

Kavan’s manuscript, made up of 18 stories that form a slightly fictionalised autobiographical account of her stay at Torbay with Ian Hamilton and her wartime sea journey from New Zealand to England afterwards, is worth recovering. In her first story Kavan described her strategy as being not to fight history but to ‘‘simply submit and record what happens," and she does this with sensitivity and insight. She captures the feel of life in Torbay — the sea and sky and shore; the eccentric neighbours; the Maori man with "two faces," caught between his given Maori and his assumed Pakeha identities; the slow rhythm of communal life; the very different world of Sargeson and the North Shore intelligentsia.

She also captures the feel of the strange, dreamlike yet dangerous journey to England, the ship a self-contained, seemingly timeless world that left her "feeling unequal to facing life apart from [it], just as a person who has been ill a long time shrinks from living without the buffer of his disease."

Kavan’s account is an attractive piece of impressionistic observation of the self and the worlds which it passes through, not a major New Zealand text but a welcome one, while Sturm’s editorial material adds considerably to our knowledge of an interesting international writer.

Muscae Volitantes