Links for a hot June day

“How come Wikipedia hasn’t turned into a giant glob of graffiti?” Some answers.

Online vendettas, Yelp style. And mob think gets personal.

Virtual currencies congealing?

The history of the corporation.

How good are you at rumor centrality?

“Skill must be culled from a string of mistakes. Lots of them.”

Kilgard speculates that the expanding cortical map is like a search committee. It’s generating a huge range of candidate solutions to a problem the brain has been tasked with, but doesn’t yet know how to solve. (How do I discriminate these tones? How do I get the ball in the basket? How do I solve that tricky calculus problem?) Once a good solution is found, the search committee is disbanded. Efficient changes that impart skill are retained, and the non-meaningful changes are winnowed away as the map shrinks.