Author Archives: Stuart G. Hall

About Stuart G. Hall

Making a positive difference one day at a time. #London #Leicester

Swedish Embassy on Second Life

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I caught the news that some bright spark was setting up a virtual Swedish Embassy on Second Life. Will this mean virtual Swedish inspired on-the-street drug testing? I only ask having once had the dubious pleasure of being interviewed by a very self-righteous Swedish journalist on this subject (when in the employ of Release, the UK national drugs charity).

PS: Just 17 days to the start of the Chinese new year!

Emergent thoughts for the day

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  • The concept of emergence might be more useful than that of coincidence in explaining the world.


  • Self-adaptive systems work in a top-down manner. They evaluate their own global behavior and change it when the evaluation indicates that they are not accomplishing what they were intended to do, or when better functionality or performance is possible.


  • Self-organizing systems work bottom-up. They are composed of a large number of components that interact locally according to simple rules. The global behavior of the system emerges from these local interactions, and it is difficult to deduce properties of the global system by studying only the local properties of its parts.