User:Mike Johnson
The account of this former contributor was not re-activated after the server upgrade of March 2022.
About me
I have a B.A. in philosophy from St. Olaf College. My post-graduation experiences have ranged from day trading to working on a patent for audio equalization. Jack of all trades, with the usual subtext.
Interests
- Wikis. I'd love to write papers about the psychology behind wiki contributions, and wikis as evolutionary (survival-of-the-fittest-contribution) ecosystems. Perhaps someday.
- Future technological change (I find Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near" to be a very important, if somewhat naive, book- my review is here).
- Practicalities, ethics, and implications of human augmentation. I'm currently writing a paper with the tentative title, "A Framework for Understanding Intelligence Augmentation".
- Various aspects of biology including neurology, genetics, and evolution. I've a particular interest in research into gut flora.
I blog at http://moderndragons.blogspot.com/.
Citizendium
I'm a member of Citizendium's Executive Committee. Please let me know if you need a hand with something. I tend to do more things off-wiki than on-wiki.
I've written a decent bit about Citizendium, including:
- A lengthy blog post (written just after Citizendium's announcement);
- An article for the Wikipedia Signpost;
- A short introduction/opinion piece for CHiLLi.cc.
Requests for Collaboration
Practical:
- T-shirts. I think it's high time that CZ got some official swag. Thinking about using either Cafe Press or Spreadshirt.
Pie-in-the-sky:
- The formalization and automation of some sort of wiki "impact factor" Citizendium members could show to e.g., tenure committees. I don't know the best and most realistic way to do this. I was thinking one could use UCSC's Mediawiki trust metric, maybe paired with some sort of pagerank-esque ranking to weight work on prominent pages more heavily. Unfortunately it's probably one of those solutions that's easy to describe vaguely in words and difficult to implement.