Introduction

[Kerry Hanson]

Hello!

My name is Kerry Hanson and I'm with Texas Instruments in Dallas.  I'm a new
swarm beta tester who just came on board with the latest release.  I've been
interested in the general field of complex systems since I studied 1/f noise
in graduate school 20 years ago but my interest in the Institute really
started with Waldrop's and Levy's books.  

My degrees are in electrical engineering and my current assignment is Global
Information Infrastructure strategic planner for the company.  My interest
in swarm is to model some of the interesting discontinuities that are
occurring in Internet applications.  We can see the coming discontinuities;
it would be nice to be able to predict a few consequences.  

My initial interest in swarm started a couple of years ago when I noticed
that in complex adaptive systems, completely opposing strategies can be both
successful. A few years ago I was a director of engineering for the company
and as I put together R&D development teams I noticed two different
strategies that both seemed to be equally successful.  One strategy was to
give to the team the resources that they said they wanted to meet the goals.
A second strategy was to intentionally underfund a technology development
activity on the basis of "anything that doesn't kill it will make it
stronger."  There as a U of Michigan study a few years ago that suggested
this strategy will result in a more aggressive, successful organization.
Both strategies are successful sometimes and unsuccessful at other times.
It would be nice to be able to know which approach will be most successful
at the time the team is formed.  I've been doing back-of-the-envelope
simulations but swarm should be able to add some structure.  

More recently I was a AAAS Fellow in the White House Office of Science and
Technology Policy and I ran across the same issue as we were developing
policy on intellectual policy rights for software and the biosciences.  The
pharmaceutical and semiconductor industries are very similar in that they
are both highly competitive, have strong growth and large capital investment
requirements.  However, they have completely opposing strategies in patent
licensing.  In pharmaceuticals, a product is a patent and the patent is
never cross licensed.  In semiconductors, a product is multiple patents and
the patents are always cross licensed.  The issue we had in software and
biosciences is, which model is more accurate for these other industries?  We
never did resolve the issue but we got the Vice President to talking
knowledgeably about piles of sand so I would rate that as a modest success. 

I've just installed swarm on a linux system.  The good news is that
everything seems to have installed correctly; the bad news is that the demo
simulations all stop with a segmentation fault.  I suspect the error is in
my modifications to the libtclobjc makefile but if any of you have any
suggestions, I'm more than happy to hear them.  I'm trying to come up to
speed as fast as time allows and I'm looking forward to working with you all.

Kerry