There is a considerable amount of internal competition in biology. By this I mean that internal to an organism, it can compete within its self to produce the best 'goods'. So for example some plants will abort the growth of fruit where it does not have enough seeds. One could see this as a form of internal-competition between possible fruits so that only the fittest has the resources to grow it to full term, is used.

When it is a real network...I have been using Actor Network Theory (aka ANT, not to be confused with ANTS, the very interesting p2p project) in my research (I'd recommend this and this if you are interested) and yet the 'networks' of ANT are not necessarily networks at all, but are networks in the other sense of the wo

One of the authors of the p2p paper I looked at in my last posting emailed me with an update of thier work worth sharing with you..

P2P algorithms can offer robustness and communication efficiency over more centralised GRID methods. So authors compared to p2p algorithms performance searching in large-scale and unreliable networks.

The BBC's new series, The History of the World in 100 Objects, is very cool.  It's especially good for somebody like me who has been studying the evolution of technology.  Well worth a listen - I will be very interested in the later programs to see if they will take on the issue of virtual object - such as software - still things that we have made - but now digital rather than physical...

Defining what a network is, is a huge topic.  It is one I engage with to some extent in my research and you can boil a network down to two components - links and nodes.  The beginnings and ends of the network is a more complex matter.  For example with the Internet, it is less one big network and more a series of networks united by common protocols.  (There is a good discussion of mapping networks using Actor-Network Theory in chapter 4 of Murdoch's book Post-Structuralist Geography.  But networks ar

I've been made aware of a new torrent indexing website, TorrentFactory.org - it's interesting as a development as it seems clear that the PirateBay is under severe threat this year - so the question arises; what will replace it?  I don't mean this question in the sense of what will replace it as the the bogey-man of copyright, I mean the question more in a technological sense; where next for torrent indexing.  I mean this beca

It is an oft quoted true-ism that the original of a film is the best and sequels often fail to capture the magic of the original. Examples like Blues Brothers :) then Blues Brothers 2000 :( or Matrix :) then Reloaded :( spring to mind. It is easy to think of films who's sequel/s was worse than the original and quite a challenge to think of films who sequel is equal or indeed better than the original.

The blog TorrentFreak has got a few interesting stories up both looking back at the last decade and also forward into 2010.  A couple of things caught my eye...

One was the article talking about ways that users in France may use to avoid the new '3 strikes' law;

I'm speaking at an event next week at the PM Studio in Bristol on Wed 16th at 4pm and the event is free!

Software Paleontology - Tomas Rawlings (Fluffy Logic & DCRC PhD Student)
Tomas is on a GWR PhD scholarship applying evolutionary theory to peer to peer networks. As part of this research Tomas has developed a unique methodology of ‘software paleontology’ comparing the change logs of P2P software versions to the fossil records of  biological evolution.