User:Mike Johnson

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.