]> http://www.policyunplugged.net Collective intelligence, as characterized by Peter Russell (1983), Tom Atlee (1993), Howard Bloom (1995), Francis Heylighen (1995), Douglas Engelbart, Cliff Joslyn, Ron Dembo, Gottfried Mayer-Kress (2003) and other theorists, is an intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals, an intelligence that seemingly has a mind of its own. Collective intelligence appears in a wide variety of forms of consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans, and computers. The study of collective intelligence may properly be considered a subfield of sociology, of computer science, and of mass behavior--a field that studies collective behavior from the level of quarks to the level of bacterial, plant, animal, and human societies. Some figures like Tom Atlee prefer to focus on collective intelligence primarily in humans and actively work to upgrade what Howard Bloom calls "the group IQ". Atlee feels that collective intelligence can be encouraged "to overcome 'groupthink' and individual cognitive bias in order to allow a collective to cooperate on one process—while achieving enhanced intellectual performance." One CI pioneer, George Pór, defined the collective intelligence phenomenon as "the capacity of a human community to evolve toward higher order complexity thought, problem-solving and integration through collaboration and innovation. "[1] Tom Atlee and George Pór state that "collective intelligence also involves achieving a single focus of attention and standard of metrics which provide an appropriate threshold of action". Their approach is rooted in Scientific Community Metaphor.Text above is quoted from Wikipedia under the GNU Free Documentation License. en-UK http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotPolitics/~3/179170832/article.pl An anonymous reader writes "Michael Geist posts to his site about a study commissioned by the Canadian government intended to look into the buying habits of music fans. What the study found is that 'there is a positive correlation between peer-to-peer downloading and CD purchasing.' The report is entitled The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study For Industry Canada, and it was 'conducted collaboratively by two professors from the University of London, Industry Canada, and Decima Research, who surveyed over 2,000 Canadians on their music downloading and purchasing habits. The authors believe this is the first ever empirical study to employ representative microeconomic data.'"<p><a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/03/048256&from=rss">Read more of this story</a> at Slashdot.</p> <p><a href="http://rss.slashdot.org/~a/Slashdot/slashdotPolitics?a=ilpETX"><img src="http://rss.slashdot.org/~a/Slashdot/slashdotPolitics?i=ilpETX" border="0"></img></a></p><img src="http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotPolitics/~4/179170832" height="1" width="1"/> Sat, 03 Nov 2007 11:17:00 +0000 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/zdnet/social/~3/164168613/ The technology news "buzz tracker", Techmeme, has launched a new feature: the Leaderboard. A top 100 list of news sources -- blogs and "mainstream" media -- based on the percentage of headline space each one has occupied on Techmeme over the last thirty days.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/zdnet/social/~4/164168613" height="1" width="1"/> Tue, 02 Oct 2007 13:12:27 +0100