In the context of biological brains it seems that perception of complex structures
is achieved by the simultaneous rhythmic activation of a large cell assemblies
(see e.g. [1], [4], [5]). On a global
scale one could argue that scientific conferences play a similar role of establishing
new insights into complex problems within the scientific community. On a different
time-scale one could argue that this form of synchronization also happens through
scientific publications. Hyper-media on the Internet provide a very important bridge
between these established forms of scientific operation overcoming some of the
short-comings of both traditional methods (see [33],[32]).
The role of the Internet will be especially
important for the collaboration with researchers from developing countries, where
handicaps both in terms of speedy availability of scientific journals as well as regular
participation at international conferences can be severe. In a tele-conferencing
experiment we created a Mosaic document [32]
that was
transferred to the conference site prior to the presentation. The talk was
given by telephone with visuals presented by a local operator displaying the Mosaic
pages that were referred to by the speaker.
This mixed mode of presentation provides
a degrees of realtime interactivity at much lower communication demands than broadcast
tele-conferencing together with an picture quality of the visuals that is much higher
than that of slow scan TV. The World Hunger Program is now using this method regularly
for their work