🎓 Doc Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@qoto.org

@FailForward @freemo @unamanic Yes. I've been looking forward to this since April.
It's only been a week, but it feels like a month, and yet I am giddy with excitement and laughing rather than wanting the experience to end. In short, watching Twitter die makes me feel like I'm a child again!

#introduction Hello! I am an Associate Professor in Management and Project Management. I am interested in #complexsystems #systemsthinking #complexadaptivesystems #sensemaking #criticalrealism #qualitativeresearch #methodology and #management #projectmanagement #entrepreneurship #noise #decisionmaking #conflictresolution #negotiation I have two book chapters with #springer numerous others with #igi a tutorial on #netbeans #java and a tutorial on #contentanalysis in a research methodology book. I teach Principles of Management, Project Management, Contemporary Issues in Management, Managing Complex Projects, Applied Research Methods, Qualitative Techniques, and Critical Review of Literature.

@freemo I’m here because of, I was never very active on Twitter but I can’t continue to be the source of this fool’s ad revenue. https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/04/elon-musk-twitter-layoffs/amp/

#introduction I’m a Prof at the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging (CCNi), UofG, Scotland, studying human memory. My lab uses a range of tools, including behaviour, EEG/MEG, fMRI and intracranial (single unit + LFP) EEG recordings, trying to understand how the human brain reconstructs past experiences from memory, and how our memories change over time and when we repeatedly remember something.

Interesting fact of the day: The same effect that cuased light in a prism to split up into different colors is what ultimately caused the first transatlantic telegraphic wire in 1858 to fail.

Morse code is transmitted as on-off signals, effectively square waves. Square waves are in fact made up of many different frequencies. Like in a prism different frequencies move at different speeds through a wire. Therefore as the on-off pulses traveled through the transatlantic telegraph wire the signal spread out like it does in a prism and ultimately the pulses would overlap and be indistinguishable.

The effect was so extreme that it took a message of only 98 words (the first message sent) over 67 minutes to send one way and a whopping 16 hours to confirm the message.

Whitehouse, a doctor with little mathematical understanding, thought he could solve the problem by increasing voltage, which we now know was a futile effort. He increased the voltage to the point he managed to short out the cable entirely and made it useless. However Lord Kelvin had already warned of the problem as was ignored and he came up with the law of squares to describe the problem which later was refined to give us the telegraphers equation. The telegraphers equation is still used today to model feedlines in radio transmitters and receivers.

#Science #STEM #Physics #History @Science #QOTOJournal

One of the nicest things about Mastodon so far is having a very scientific and academia focused feed where I can discover and follow those working in fields where I don't have a background.

It is wonderful for seeing the diversity of research and being inspired by the works of others.

Hey - this place seems interesting. Hope that the distributed nature can keep up with the near-certain influx of new users - like me.

I am trying to work out the strengths and weaknesses of messaging platforms from fully decentralized to federated to centralized. I am only a user on Mastodon/activitypub and IRC, but I have in the past hosted usenet and currently host:

smtp (email)
XMPP
Matrix
SSB (Secure ScuttleButt)
SIP (fully decentralized)

The impressive feature of twitter and it's totalitarian centralized ilk is that a single id can have millions of followers - and know that. SSB supports unlimited secure (signed) broadcasting, but there is no mechanism for knowing how many followers there are. Of course, TV was in the same boat, and you could get an estimate by polling. BBC broadcasts on SSB.

Counting followers is essential for monetizing content via advertising and sponsors in a decentralized manner - i.e. not subject to cancellation at a whim by a global centralized platform.

Matrix seems ideal for many of the purposes people use Teams or Substack or Slack. Private conversations e2e encrypted, logging with controlled retention (HIPPA compliant), voice and video calls, voice and video conferencing, media. But performance of small personal servers drops with number of participants in a room - I don't think it can support a million followers.

XMPP has inconsistent state for multiple devices, and is terrible at group chats. I do use it a backup for matrix and for voice/video calls. Open XMPP clients supporting VOIP and IPv6 are easier to find than SIP clients. (And SIP is even worse at state for multiple devices.)

Usenet has no authentication (not worth tacking on GPG header schemes).

Email is not designed to be "instant" (as in IM), but can be coaxed into resembling that by clients such as DeltaChat.

Ok, so now I should make a feature matrix (which includes Matrix), but have I missed any open and federated/decentralized protocols? Any other features? Current feature list:

broadcast (million+ followers)
follower count
p2p voice/video
e2e encryption
authentication
federated
decentralized (or federated that can be practically fully decentralized, like SMTP)

Did I miss any?