MONDAY

Light/no blogging continues into its second week, I'm sure I'll snap out of it in a matter of hours/days.  In the meantime, I'll be working and reading journalism yogi Andrew's use of animistic ancient methods to bring me the news of the week.  Also, I am reading -

Lu Hong and Scott E. Page, "Groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 101 (2004): 16385--16389 [PDF reprint]

Abstract: We introduce a general framework for modeling functionally diverse problem-solving agents. In this framework, problem-solving agents possess representations of problems and algorithms that they use to locate solutions. We use this framework to establish a result relevant to group composition. We find that when selecting a problem-solving team from a diverse population of intelligent agents, a team of randomly selected agents outperforms a team comprised of the best-performing agents. This result relies on the intuition that, as the initial pool of problem solvers becomes large, the best-performing agents necessarily become similar in the space of problem solvers. Their relatively greater ability is more than offset by their lack of problem-solving diversity.

- and related posts on Complex Cosma Shazili's blog concerning the collective use and evolution of concepts, many tips of the hat to some recent Mucks/Mysteries.  Life gets complicated sometimes, you know?