We would proudly like to announce the public release of the inaugural issue of The Four Peaks Review, the official journal of the Four Peaks community. The initial limited release was announced at the 2011 MCDM Screen Summit, and now that the site has completed some templating and architecture adjustments, we would like to invite everyone to take some time and to explore the work done in the journal, which is really extraordinary.

You can read the current issue here.

We also hope that students, alumni and faculty will consider submissions for future issues. The Four Peaks Review will be published twice a year, in June and December. We are currently accepting submissions and inquiries for the December issue, which will contain a special theme section focusing on institutions being altered fundamentally by the rapid changes in the digital and social media ecosystem.

Writing in 2006 as the president of a then unnamed NGO and Australia’s “most infamous former hacker,” Julian Assange noted that “foresight requires trustworthy information about the current state of the world, cognitive ability to draw predictive inferences and economic stability to give them a meaningful home… secrecy, malfeasance and unequal access have eaten into the first requirement of foresight (‘truth and lots of it’).”

He then noted that “foresight can produce outcomes that leave all major interests groups better off. Likewise the lack of it, or doing the dumb thing, can harm almost everyone. Computer scientists have long had a great phrase for the dependency of foresight on trustworthy information; ‘garbage in, garbage out.”

That phrase would recur in Assange’s writings later that year. On December 6^th, he published on his personal website an essay on state conspiracies in which he wrote “Since a conspiracy is a type of cognitive device that acts on information acquired from its environment, distorting or restricting these inputs means acts based on them are likely to be misplaced. Programmers call this effect garbage in, garbage out. Usually the effect runs the other way; it is conspiracy that is the agent of deception and information restriction. In the US, the programmer’s aphorism is sometimes called ‘the Fox News effect.’”

Wherever on the political spectrum Assange situates his more anarchist tendencies, his reference to Fox News is confusing. On the one hand, he is obviously linking Fox News’ rather tendentious relationship to political reality to pejorative terms like distortion and disinformation.

On the other hand, there must be something about the functional consequences of this practice that appealed to Assange, because he goes on to adopt the same language to describe positively a potential set of responses to state conspiracy:

To deal with powerful conspiratorial actions we must think ahead and attack the process that leads to them since the actions themselves can not be dealt with. We can deceive or blind a conspiracy by distorting or restricting the information available to it. We can reduce total conspiratorial power via unstructured attacks on links or through throttling and separating. A conspiracy sufficiently engaged in this manner is no longer able to comprehend its environment and plan robust action.”

Read more…

In case you missed it, May 31 was the first “Quit Facebook Day,” a day in which people committed to deleting – not just deactivating – their Facebook accounts. We’re talking about permanent deletion, a decision to forever forego the #1 social networking platform. By the time Quit Facebook Day finally arrived, over 30,000 people had made the pledge, though this number falls short of the average number of Facebook accounts started each day. So we’re not talking about a substantial incision into the Facebook population. Nonetheless, we shouldn’t dismiss the number so quickly, because the mere existence of Quit Facebook Day indicates a growing dissatisfaction with Facebook as the main social networking platform. And while this will make many guffaw, I’m going to go ahead and mark this year as the beginning of the end of Facebook. Read more…

September 22nd saw the arrival of Halo 3: ODST, a game that builds on the story of Halo 3 in new and interesting ways.  Unlike the first three games in the franchise, Halo 3: ODST does not feature Master Chief as its main protagonist.  That cybernetically enhanced super soldier instead gives way to “The Rookie”, a silent new recruit to the ranks of the Orbital Drop Shock Troopers, those folks who literally drop into the fight from ships in planetary orbit.  They’re “the best of the best,” of course, but they lack the accoutrements that Halo players are used to using – they have no damage-absorbing and renewable shield, they cannot dual wield weapons, and they cannot run as fast or jump as far.  If they take damage they’ll need to find a health pack in order to heal.  In other words, the ODST soldiers are more mundane than good ol’ Master Chief, more normal.

In the world of video games, especially in the worlds depicted in first person shooters like Halo, normal is actually pretty exceptional. Read more…