/:b
--On Fri, 18 Jul 1997, Morgan Garwood wrote:
> behavioral topologies ? probability surfaces on the social landscape ? > Imagine a further development of this technique, which could model and > track the dissemination of ideas, or the adoption of innovations, > throughout a culture, nation, or world. > Some studies were done, I believe, on the rapidity with which a good > joke could progress by word of mouth... it could be assigned a speed of > travel, almost like a physical thing. > Now ideas, other than the most local and personal, can saturate the world > so quickly that we don't need to consider dissemination rates; this is > speaking of the more concrete type of idea. Attitudes and universalizing > perspectives might be another matter altogether, and these could be mapped > across human space. > These might be compared and contrasted to show zones of high opportunity > for the acceptance of an idea or the lack of it. It might be possible to > discern that an idea "x", if promoted in Australia first, might have a > higher probability of going global and becoming an operational concept on a > global scale, than if it were promoted in Italy, or its acceptance might be > more rapid and have less resistance.... > Profiling gets rather eerie, because one can place a cluster of traits > into a neural net program, and in some cases have a good expectation of > what someone is likely to do in the future, although they haven't done an > instance of it yet. > An A > >