Dice and Decideability,
or Just a Minute at the Institute for Advanced Studies
with apologies to Jane Austin
"It is a fact universally computed that a single man in possession
of a small fortune wheel, might not actually be in search of a
wife".
ALbert looked at Mrs Einstein over the breakfast table in the warm
Prince Town sunlight of late august with admiration.
"You're talking about Alan again aren't you my dear?" he asked her.
Alan Mathison Turing was the talk of the town, since he arrived
with his small travelling show in tow. Everyone had become addicted
to the game, where you had to discuss one of the 23 famous Hilbert
Challenges for 1 minute, without any hesitation (the halting problem),
repetition (the loop), or dangling pointers (relevance).
The Elephant in the Room was the undeniable fact that Alan had
already solved one of them, but had not had space on the limited
stone tablet that was all Cambridge University could afford him, to
write down the proof.
Mrs Einstein was pleased that Johnny von Neumann had finally
settled down and was getting on with that huge birdsnest of glowing
tubes that looked like it was going to make a great Christmas
Lights, or maybe decorate the Founders Hall for the Alumni Ball -
what fun that was, with old students and colleagues dressed to the
nines (often wearing leopard skin pillbox hats and accompanying
tails in satin). Even Albert usually brushed his hair for the
occasion, although Alan would probably make himself scarce. A few
thousand people was a lot to cater for, when counting Austrain
Pastries, but was a vanishingly small number when it came to
counting the number of ways that their gene's could combine, or
indeed, just the time it would take to fly to the stats in the
relativistically challenged Wright Brothers' phantastic new
machine.
What fun. All the fun of the fair. And with Alan's new infinite
wheel of fortune (or non-deterministic mill, as he rather strangely
called it), even if God didn't, Albert would be playing Dice once
more.
of course, all the best stories end after happily, ever tale recursive
music while you browse
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Saturday, January 14, 2012
The DNS is not a right. Oh yes It is. Oh no it isn't. Oh yes it is...
There has been a debate in the public recently about this. On the one
hand, the Interweb evangelist for the Houyhnhnms Corporation
has claimed that the DNS is not a right. On the other hand
Lord Waterloo of Sandwich has claimed that it is. On the other hand (if
you're a monkey like me) I claim this is just a bit more subtle than
either of these thinly disguised gentlemen admit.
Cory Doctorow of Boing-Boing fame has made a passionate plea
to comprehend the nature of arbitrary restrictions that various
agencies are trying to impose on General Computing, and, by extension,
on the end-to-end services of the Internet, in the name of Security or
DRM.
See this link for the video of his talk
http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-purp.html
at the Chaos Computer Convention at the end of 2011.
The core of his argument is that computers embody Turing machines,
which of course are, as Alan Turing pointed out, capable of arbitrary
computations. Placing extreme (e.g. remove any arbitrary recursion or iteration, or simply remove ability to re-programme) restrictions on these (reducing them to a mere
appliance capable of a single task) throws away their fundamental
value (adaptability/shared use). Anything less in restriction will
always be surmountable.
By analogy, the Internet is the most general form of communications
network one can envisage. The famous hour-glass model partly illustrates this. Previous attempts by vested interests (i.e. telcos) to control the vertical stack led to stovepipe monopolies with a tip of a pyramid. By contrast, the narrow waist of the hourglass allows arbitrary channels below, and an arbitrary inverted pyramid (a very wide divergence) of heterogeneous applications above.
Recently, various aberrations caused both by bad luck (lack of IPv4 address space) and bad design (lack of decent end system security) have appeared in the deployed internet. Because the core must still maintain some end-to-end services, workarounds for these aberrations (NATs, Firewalls, other broken-middle-boxes) always manage to appear. As (I believe) J. Noel Chiappa once said,
the Internet will route around damage.
So the only way that the Internet can be restricted as a right is to
make it a narrow pyramid structure rather than an hour glass - i.e.
remove the "Turing Complete" nature of the service.
Now, there are arguments for the agencies policing laws and carrying out intelligence services doing various things on the net to make sure that other human rights are not abused. However, these do not require the stunning of the Internet technology so that it can't provide an arbitrary range of technical communication activities. Such laws (and ethics) require those agencies to look at what people say (write) and do, in the same way they always have. And the require all of us as users to behave responsibly too.
So why have I titled this piece "The DNS is not a right". Well because
this is a reductio ad absurdum. It is well known that one of the most
extreme ways to route around damage is to run IP over DNS queries and
build a DNS server that de-capsulates the (Unicoded) IP packet from
the DNS Lookup and forwards it on native. To remove this capablity
would require an agency to own all the DNS servers in the world. Or to
remove the DNS itself.
To illustrate another aspect of the problem, lets think about
TCP-friendliness. TCP-friendliness is not a right. That is true -
you can send traffic in an uncontrolled way. However, pretty soon,
your ISP might disconnect you. or charge you a lot of money. Its not
that you can't send TCP-unfriendly traffic. Its just irresponsible.
And that's no joke.
You'll notice that I have not gone on to discuss different
notions of what a "right" is. There are some pretty important, but
subtle differences between what is considered a right in the
Bill of Rights that the US employs, versus other notions of Universal Human Rights such as those in the
UN declaration on same topic. US rights are operationally encoded
in the constitution, and crucially controlled by a set of checks and
balances. These are sufficient to understand that the same approach
can be taken to providing a TCP-friendly, Human Readably Named
Internet, that can embody the abstract notion of the Right to
communicate freely with whomsoever we wish on any subject they care to
hear about, in a concrete technology that is the communications
equivalent of a Turing Complete Difference Engine.
Reference
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
hand, the Interweb evangelist for the Houyhnhnms Corporation
has claimed that the DNS is not a right. On the other hand
Lord Waterloo of Sandwich has claimed that it is. On the other hand (if
you're a monkey like me) I claim this is just a bit more subtle than
either of these thinly disguised gentlemen admit.
Cory Doctorow of Boing-Boing fame has made a passionate plea
to comprehend the nature of arbitrary restrictions that various
agencies are trying to impose on General Computing, and, by extension,
on the end-to-end services of the Internet, in the name of Security or
DRM.
See this link for the video of his talk
http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-purp.html
at the Chaos Computer Convention at the end of 2011.
The core of his argument is that computers embody Turing machines,
which of course are, as Alan Turing pointed out, capable of arbitrary
computations. Placing extreme (e.g. remove any arbitrary recursion or iteration, or simply remove ability to re-programme) restrictions on these (reducing them to a mere
appliance capable of a single task) throws away their fundamental
value (adaptability/shared use). Anything less in restriction will
always be surmountable.
By analogy, the Internet is the most general form of communications
network one can envisage. The famous hour-glass model partly illustrates this. Previous attempts by vested interests (i.e. telcos) to control the vertical stack led to stovepipe monopolies with a tip of a pyramid. By contrast, the narrow waist of the hourglass allows arbitrary channels below, and an arbitrary inverted pyramid (a very wide divergence) of heterogeneous applications above.
Recently, various aberrations caused both by bad luck (lack of IPv4 address space) and bad design (lack of decent end system security) have appeared in the deployed internet. Because the core must still maintain some end-to-end services, workarounds for these aberrations (NATs, Firewalls, other broken-middle-boxes) always manage to appear. As (I believe) J. Noel Chiappa once said,
the Internet will route around damage.
So the only way that the Internet can be restricted as a right is to
make it a narrow pyramid structure rather than an hour glass - i.e.
remove the "Turing Complete" nature of the service.
Now, there are arguments for the agencies policing laws and carrying out intelligence services doing various things on the net to make sure that other human rights are not abused. However, these do not require the stunning of the Internet technology so that it can't provide an arbitrary range of technical communication activities. Such laws (and ethics) require those agencies to look at what people say (write) and do, in the same way they always have. And the require all of us as users to behave responsibly too.
So why have I titled this piece "The DNS is not a right". Well because
this is a reductio ad absurdum. It is well known that one of the most
extreme ways to route around damage is to run IP over DNS queries and
build a DNS server that de-capsulates the (Unicoded) IP packet from
the DNS Lookup and forwards it on native. To remove this capablity
would require an agency to own all the DNS servers in the world. Or to
remove the DNS itself.
To illustrate another aspect of the problem, lets think about
TCP-friendliness. TCP-friendliness is not a right. That is true -
you can send traffic in an uncontrolled way. However, pretty soon,
your ISP might disconnect you. or charge you a lot of money. Its not
that you can't send TCP-unfriendly traffic. Its just irresponsible.
And that's no joke.
You'll notice that I have not gone on to discuss different
notions of what a "right" is. There are some pretty important, but
subtle differences between what is considered a right in the
Bill of Rights that the US employs, versus other notions of Universal Human Rights such as those in the
UN declaration on same topic. US rights are operationally encoded
in the constitution, and crucially controlled by a set of checks and
balances. These are sufficient to understand that the same approach
can be taken to providing a TCP-friendly, Human Readably Named
Internet, that can embody the abstract notion of the Right to
communicate freely with whomsoever we wish on any subject they care to
hear about, in a concrete technology that is the communications
equivalent of a Turing Complete Difference Engine.
Reference
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
some SF MS found in a 3rd party cookie
1. Cache
boy from a primative tribe is playing in the woods and finds a
strange bulbous hand sized box which, when knobs are pushed, shows
funny poictures and sounds on the screen.....
after years of this, one day the battery falkls out (of the soloar
panel wears out) and the words "Psion 5a NC" fade for ever
the young man and his memories are now the sole remaining wireless web
Cache active on the planet
2. Stability
A tribe worship the route of all things, the ring that binds them,
the end to endless truth, but they get blackholed by a passing gibson
3. the end 2 end and hop by hop principles of go-betweens, young
lovers and their triangles
4.Connectivity
rashevskys number is the number of possible neural interconnects
in the human brain (permutations) - it is more than enough to number
al the atoms in the known universe and give their (floating in the
sky, point-less) position to the nearest heartbeat or caress, but not
both at the same time
Seven, 7, is the number of people it takes to reach across the human
population from any hermit to any recluse, mailman by rider, pony
express by next door neighbour
what have these two numbers in common except this story?
5. The Protocols of the Elders of ARPA, wearing Mitres, walking tall,
and Society of Blind CIDRs have written, on whatever it is that they
write it on up there, that
wot is writ is rot
wot is done is achieved
and what is recorded is restored
but never can the PCBs and TCP
be removed from the O-Zone
6. A Moo, is an ever changing world of the imaginmation, limited only
by your vocabulary and syntax ....
for many years, one moo sings louder and brighter than all others
and is a focus of strange attraction....one set of interactors become
the high priests of virtual personality fashion...
one day, the participants discover that in fact, they are all also
working in the day at the same chicken factory, canning mutant
salmonella (a safe, and highly nutritious form of something that used
to plague the poultry industry, until they reversed the role of
disease and foodstuff)....
7. statelessness is next to godliness
after e-mail, f-mail
f-mail is fumigated, and powered by certificates, but people develope
a yen for a new form of mail, c-mail. c-mail is clean, and uses only a
working set of 300 words, all harmless...
one day, the world is invaded by aliens, who have no trouble taking
over because noone can remember the word for
boy from a primative tribe is playing in the woods and finds a
strange bulbous hand sized box which, when knobs are pushed, shows
funny poictures and sounds on the screen.....
after years of this, one day the battery falkls out (of the soloar
panel wears out) and the words "Psion 5a NC" fade for ever
the young man and his memories are now the sole remaining wireless web
Cache active on the planet
2. Stability
A tribe worship the route of all things, the ring that binds them,
the end to endless truth, but they get blackholed by a passing gibson
3. the end 2 end and hop by hop principles of go-betweens, young
lovers and their triangles
4.Connectivity
rashevskys number is the number of possible neural interconnects
in the human brain (permutations) - it is more than enough to number
al the atoms in the known universe and give their (floating in the
sky, point-less) position to the nearest heartbeat or caress, but not
both at the same time
Seven, 7, is the number of people it takes to reach across the human
population from any hermit to any recluse, mailman by rider, pony
express by next door neighbour
what have these two numbers in common except this story?
5. The Protocols of the Elders of ARPA, wearing Mitres, walking tall,
and Society of Blind CIDRs have written, on whatever it is that they
write it on up there, that
wot is writ is rot
wot is done is achieved
and what is recorded is restored
but never can the PCBs and TCP
be removed from the O-Zone
6. A Moo, is an ever changing world of the imaginmation, limited only
by your vocabulary and syntax ....
for many years, one moo sings louder and brighter than all others
and is a focus of strange attraction....one set of interactors become
the high priests of virtual personality fashion...
one day, the participants discover that in fact, they are all also
working in the day at the same chicken factory, canning mutant
salmonella (a safe, and highly nutritious form of something that used
to plague the poultry industry, until they reversed the role of
disease and foodstuff)....
7. statelessness is next to godliness
after e-mail, f-mail
f-mail is fumigated, and powered by certificates, but people develope
a yen for a new form of mail, c-mail. c-mail is clean, and uses only a
working set of 300 words, all harmless...
one day, the world is invaded by aliens, who have no trouble taking
over because noone can remember the word for
Saturday, November 12, 2011
Cyverjaw - The Real Challenges
Yesterday I went to a fascinating event organised by the CSAP and students organisation, Conenctions - at http://dcsa.dar.cam.ac.uk/info/talks-lectures/connections/
In the talks, the speakers outlined their various views of the challenges - current mainstream dogma is split between the view that cyberwarfare takes place in a new dimension (not just land, sea or air), and the view that it is an additional aspect to the existing dimensions. This is real naval gazing (pun intended). For me, you need to consider the real, potential attacks, countermeasures, and whether you can even recognize cyberwar as such at all - so for example:...
You finally realized the fact that we are in the midst of World War III, and its a Cyberwar - the characteristic signature of a cyberwar is that you can't identify the assailant, and you probably wont get a chance to retaliate. So who bought down the government of iceland,force portugal, italty and gree to form governments of unity against the wish of the democratic peoples' majorities, imposed austerity...its budgets on half of the richest area of the world (the EU) causing unemployment to rise (hence wages to fall) at no risk to themselves? persons unknown in the IMF and the international globalized financial services community are running roughshod over sovereign states. This has all the hallmarks of warfare. so why aren't nation states fighting back? well, the Icelandic people did, but that's it. the Greeks tried, and failed. Not too big to fail: democracy. you know, communism fell before capitalism. Now we are all Chinese.
Some more thoughts:
1. you wake up tomorrow and your phone, radio, tv, internet dont work.
what are you going to do? what is your backup net? what is your reboot
plan? have you even tested how you would cold start everything safely.
2. what if the chinese already launched a cyberwar on Europe, and
bought down the Icelandic, Greek and Italian government by economic
market manipulation? how would you tell? who would you pin it on? how
would you retaliate (if at all)? Globalization trumps democracy, and allows a few small non-accountable agencies to override nation states' populations wishes.
3. the interconnectedness of everything (pace, douglas adams and dirk gently)
means that we live in ahypergrap$a(the hypernet, if you like) -
Once we had separate networks, now we have
information systems all connected to communications systems and to
banking systems. Now what if we connect them to things (sensors+
actuators) - for example, heating, lighting/ac systems are connected
to the net. energy systems are connected to the net. we have a
hypergraph where information and action flows over the system -we
understand how software and content update, and viruses flow over
the internet. we under stand how power flows from generators to
consumers via the grid. we understand how vehicles flow over
transport networks. Now link them. what do we understand? how
Frank Kelly's models of the internet interact with David Mackay's
models of the energy systems, interact with road systems and food
chains? I don't think so. this would represent several PhDs efforts
alone.
The body of network science (aka internet science, or web science) now is quite large and provides a tool chain from graph theory, diffusion/percolation/edpidemic/gossip processes, control theory, and other modelling, and a plethora of papers that show practical application of these models, not just to describe and understand processes in graphs (including games/markets/opinion dyanmics, graph growth/shrinkage) but also to design rules (e.g. agent behaviours) to achieve goals (viral marketting, distributed, reactive innoculation of software against malware, analysis of week spots, etc etc)...
We'd need economists and epidemiolgists in the loop too....
Some other thoughts from the meeting:
1. we should have a law requiring reporting of attachs similar to the notion of "Notifiable diseases" (highly infections, high mortailty)
2.We need a treaty that controls selling people weapons (e.g. population surveillance tools) but allows selling defensive measures (firewalls, IDS, and anonymizer technology like TOR).
3. We need treaties immediately that tell our allies, if they are attacked and turn off their external Internet, please don't turn off our defnses (e.g. Windows, Apple IOS, Cisco IOS, Linux, Blackberry and other software updates all run over CDNs rooted in the US - if the US was to disable external access (and it could easily do this at Internet Exchange Points), we'd cease to get bug fixes at the moment when we most need them - the UK (and anyone else, but thats there problem) should factor this in to the NATO (or the UK-US special relationship) immediately.
In the talks, the speakers outlined their various views of the challenges - current mainstream dogma is split between the view that cyberwarfare takes place in a new dimension (not just land, sea or air), and the view that it is an additional aspect to the existing dimensions. This is real naval gazing (pun intended). For me, you need to consider the real, potential attacks, countermeasures, and whether you can even recognize cyberwar as such at all - so for example:...
You finally realized the fact that we are in the midst of World War III, and its a Cyberwar - the characteristic signature of a cyberwar is that you can't identify the assailant, and you probably wont get a chance to retaliate. So who bought down the government of iceland,force portugal, italty and gree to form governments of unity against the wish of the democratic peoples' majorities, imposed austerity...its budgets on half of the richest area of the world (the EU) causing unemployment to rise (hence wages to fall) at no risk to themselves? persons unknown in the IMF and the international globalized financial services community are running roughshod over sovereign states. This has all the hallmarks of warfare. so why aren't nation states fighting back? well, the Icelandic people did, but that's it. the Greeks tried, and failed. Not too big to fail: democracy. you know, communism fell before capitalism. Now we are all Chinese.
Some more thoughts:
1. you wake up tomorrow and your phone, radio, tv, internet dont work.
what are you going to do? what is your backup net? what is your reboot
plan? have you even tested how you would cold start everything safely.
2. what if the chinese already launched a cyberwar on Europe, and
bought down the Icelandic, Greek and Italian government by economic
market manipulation? how would you tell? who would you pin it on? how
would you retaliate (if at all)? Globalization trumps democracy, and allows a few small non-accountable agencies to override nation states' populations wishes.
3. the interconnectedness of everything (pace, douglas adams and dirk gently)
means that we live in ahypergrap$a(the hypernet, if you like) -
Once we had separate networks, now we have
information systems all connected to communications systems and to
banking systems. Now what if we connect them to things (sensors+
actuators) - for example, heating, lighting/ac systems are connected
to the net. energy systems are connected to the net. we have a
hypergraph where information and action flows over the system -we
understand how software and content update, and viruses flow over
the internet. we under stand how power flows from generators to
consumers via the grid. we understand how vehicles flow over
transport networks. Now link them. what do we understand? how
Frank Kelly's models of the internet interact with David Mackay's
models of the energy systems, interact with road systems and food
chains? I don't think so. this would represent several PhDs efforts
alone.
The body of network science (aka internet science, or web science) now is quite large and provides a tool chain from graph theory, diffusion/percolation/edpidemic/gossip processes, control theory, and other modelling, and a plethora of papers that show practical application of these models, not just to describe and understand processes in graphs (including games/markets/opinion dyanmics, graph growth/shrinkage) but also to design rules (e.g. agent behaviours) to achieve goals (viral marketting, distributed, reactive innoculation of software against malware, analysis of week spots, etc etc)...
We'd need economists and epidemiolgists in the loop too....
Some other thoughts from the meeting:
1. we should have a law requiring reporting of attachs similar to the notion of "Notifiable diseases" (highly infections, high mortailty)
2.We need a treaty that controls selling people weapons (e.g. population surveillance tools) but allows selling defensive measures (firewalls, IDS, and anonymizer technology like TOR).
3. We need treaties immediately that tell our allies, if they are attacked and turn off their external Internet, please don't turn off our defnses (e.g. Windows, Apple IOS, Cisco IOS, Linux, Blackberry and other software updates all run over CDNs rooted in the US - if the US was to disable external access (and it could easily do this at Internet Exchange Points), we'd cease to get bug fixes at the moment when we most need them - the UK (and anyone else, but thats there problem) should factor this in to the NATO (or the UK-US special relationship) immediately.
Saturday, October 01, 2011
Attention Definict Social Disorder
We note that facebook (reported in recent F8 conf) are moving from "status" to "timeline" (presumably to better align with the mobile/twitter style user experience).
This means that even less will we be "blogging" (a la web log, a la old-school diary, in its ancient, worth, respectable and useful way of making our memories both more persistent and more personal), but we will be instead, merely living in the moment.
This is a diabolical imposition of global amnesia - just as the WWW obliterated all memories of "stuff" pre 1992 (until some heroic efforts by various archivists to scan/ocr/upload as much history as possible fixed that), this threatens to obfuscate everything from more than 3 minutes ago with a flood of social trivia.
It will be like collective alzheimers - imagine 500M people suddenly living like Memento!
This means that even less will we be "blogging" (a la web log, a la old-school diary, in its ancient, worth, respectable and useful way of making our memories both more persistent and more personal), but we will be instead, merely living in the moment.
This is a diabolical imposition of global amnesia - just as the WWW obliterated all memories of "stuff" pre 1992 (until some heroic efforts by various archivists to scan/ocr/upload as much history as possible fixed that), this threatens to obfuscate everything from more than 3 minutes ago with a flood of social trivia.
It will be like collective alzheimers - imagine 500M people suddenly living like Memento!
Tuesday, August 02, 2011
TSB KTN Future Internet Report
The Technology Strategy Board has a Knowledge Transfer Network in ICT and it has a Future Internet Strategy Group which published a little noticed report on the "Future Internet" in May 2011 - there's been a lot more meetings of the TSB and its new
TIC (Technology and Innovation Centers). It is a bit of a mystery why these are not one and the samew with the three Digital Economy Hubs created a couple of years back such as Horizon, since those have a lot of industry traction already, but there yo ugo - joined up government seems like another oxymoron for our times.
See articles here and the report itself for background.
For me the report fails to deliver 3 things one would hope for, even in a white paper format such as this.
1. There is no coherent list of challenges which the UK specifically has the knowledge and skill base and economic frameworks to deliver - the DE Hubs all have lists of comanies they work with or would like to - these come with lists of size of companies, profits, employees, etc - this is the sort of thing we'd need in an actual government policy document on future UK internet strategy.
2. there is a mix of level of detail (e.g. mixing up comments on needs for IPv6 with comments on capacity needs for HD video, with vague generalities like "Internet of People and Things" and "Machine2Machine" networking. These are completely different layers of ideas and have quite different constituencies - the IPv6 deployment is a totally different beast from the need of the BBC and Sky for Internet capacity fo HD video. and there is absolutely no notion of the problems of latency for M2M or estimation of the (almost certainly very low) capacity needs for the Internet of Things.
3. Crucially, though, there is no real attempt to make the future
a) Real
or
b) Personal
a) Making the Future Internet Real - lets look at what the UK is good at - we have:
i) good infrastructures for many things
ii) very good software businesses in games, entertainment (graphics, CGI, etc)
iii) very good software businesses in middleware and applications for cloud, web and mobile devices
iv) lots of bio medical and medical instrument outfits
These first three are distribtued over very very many tiny companies (cottage industry) - don't let that fool you - some people estimate as many as 500,000 people, earning a LOT of money (and a lot of UK GDP)
v) a few specialized and vital largeish companies in aerospace and in mictoprocessors (BAe Systems and ARM)
What we don't have is an innovative telecom sector (please do not mention BT or Vodafone here ever:)
We do have the very fine BBC (and their shrinking but excellent research wing....)
So if one was to do this properly, there'd be a brealdown by Sector and by Opportunity (and risk/strength/weakness, if you like SWOT analyses)
Sector:\Opportunity: Optimisation, Behaviour Change, Analogy, Replacement, Other
Transport x y z w q
Energy
Education
Health
Entertainment
Retail/wholesale
Defense a b c d e
etc
So for example, can we use a future internet to optimise transport (obviously, both in terms of efficiency and in terms of safety). Can we usea future internet as an alternative to transport - yes, obviously video conf, teleworking etc
Or can we change people's behaviour in energy use using the Internet - of course we can
Or can we alter a utility (e.g. the energy grid) by analogy with the Internet (yes, we could, if we think of microgeneration and a p2p network instead of a centralised energy production system with a distribution net). See Keshav's work on energy systems for example
b) Making it personal
The biggest problem facing all these wonderful synergies of convergence and removal of silos that everyone mentions in these TSB docs is the personal
Here the problems are many, but are beautifully covered by the Digital Economy hubs (see dot rural and
horizon just for example), dealing with
accessibility,
digital divide
privacy and personal footprints
Most of the challenges of convergence are (as was discussed by the Communications CMI project with MIT and Cambridge for 5 years) not purely technological - so in a) we've looked at the tech side and in b) the DE hubs are looking at the human interface to the tech, the context- the reasons why pie-in-the-skie ideas like Tony Blair's broken NHS cradle to grave centralised database for personal health records was doomed from day 1. But what could (in a Future Internet true decentralised philosophical, technical and human centered way) work properly to achieve a coherent and affordable and sustainable vision.
So, TSB, Marks out of 10? I'd say 3 for effort.
TIC (Technology and Innovation Centers). It is a bit of a mystery why these are not one and the samew with the three Digital Economy Hubs created a couple of years back such as Horizon, since those have a lot of industry traction already, but there yo ugo - joined up government seems like another oxymoron for our times.
See articles here and the report itself for background.
For me the report fails to deliver 3 things one would hope for, even in a white paper format such as this.
1. There is no coherent list of challenges which the UK specifically has the knowledge and skill base and economic frameworks to deliver - the DE Hubs all have lists of comanies they work with or would like to - these come with lists of size of companies, profits, employees, etc - this is the sort of thing we'd need in an actual government policy document on future UK internet strategy.
2. there is a mix of level of detail (e.g. mixing up comments on needs for IPv6 with comments on capacity needs for HD video, with vague generalities like "Internet of People and Things" and "Machine2Machine" networking. These are completely different layers of ideas and have quite different constituencies - the IPv6 deployment is a totally different beast from the need of the BBC and Sky for Internet capacity fo HD video. and there is absolutely no notion of the problems of latency for M2M or estimation of the (almost certainly very low) capacity needs for the Internet of Things.
3. Crucially, though, there is no real attempt to make the future
a) Real
or
b) Personal
a) Making the Future Internet Real - lets look at what the UK is good at - we have:
i) good infrastructures for many things
ii) very good software businesses in games, entertainment (graphics, CGI, etc)
iii) very good software businesses in middleware and applications for cloud, web and mobile devices
iv) lots of bio medical and medical instrument outfits
These first three are distribtued over very very many tiny companies (cottage industry) - don't let that fool you - some people estimate as many as 500,000 people, earning a LOT of money (and a lot of UK GDP)
v) a few specialized and vital largeish companies in aerospace and in mictoprocessors (BAe Systems and ARM)
What we don't have is an innovative telecom sector (please do not mention BT or Vodafone here ever:)
We do have the very fine BBC (and their shrinking but excellent research wing....)
So if one was to do this properly, there'd be a brealdown by Sector and by Opportunity (and risk/strength/weakness, if you like SWOT analyses)
Sector:\Opportunity: Optimisation, Behaviour Change, Analogy, Replacement, Other
Transport x y z w q
Energy
Education
Health
Entertainment
Retail/wholesale
Defense a b c d e
etc
So for example, can we use a future internet to optimise transport (obviously, both in terms of efficiency and in terms of safety). Can we usea future internet as an alternative to transport - yes, obviously video conf, teleworking etc
Or can we change people's behaviour in energy use using the Internet - of course we can
Or can we alter a utility (e.g. the energy grid) by analogy with the Internet (yes, we could, if we think of microgeneration and a p2p network instead of a centralised energy production system with a distribution net). See Keshav's work on energy systems for example
b) Making it personal
The biggest problem facing all these wonderful synergies of convergence and removal of silos that everyone mentions in these TSB docs is the personal
Here the problems are many, but are beautifully covered by the Digital Economy hubs (see dot rural and
horizon just for example), dealing with
accessibility,
digital divide
privacy and personal footprints
Most of the challenges of convergence are (as was discussed by the Communications CMI project with MIT and Cambridge for 5 years) not purely technological - so in a) we've looked at the tech side and in b) the DE hubs are looking at the human interface to the tech, the context- the reasons why pie-in-the-skie ideas like Tony Blair's broken NHS cradle to grave centralised database for personal health records was doomed from day 1. But what could (in a Future Internet true decentralised philosophical, technical and human centered way) work properly to achieve a coherent and affordable and sustainable vision.
So, TSB, Marks out of 10? I'd say 3 for effort.
Saturday, June 04, 2011
crowdsourcing the source of the german e-coli outbreak - and finding friends
So i am trying to find someone I knew in france in the 1970s who went by the unlikely first name of Bronte (aka bobo) and looked like this
meanwhile, the source (not spanish cucumbers) of the german awful E-Coli outbreak seems to defeat traditional CDC methods - html>here's a note on why crowdsourcing isn't quite as easy as you might think
for me, the telling point is the 8 day incuation - that means the trail of data you have to look through is huge - on the other hand perhaps looking at location of users' search terms on google might help (and see how many of these people do online shopping - out of 2000, a lot must come from households where one could get that data)
note: privacy is not an issue in a notifiable disease outbreak..in most countries
meanwhile, the source (not spanish cucumbers) of the german awful E-Coli outbreak seems to defeat traditional CDC methods - html>here's a note on why crowdsourcing isn't quite as easy as you might think
for me, the telling point is the 8 day incuation - that means the trail of data you have to look through is huge - on the other hand perhaps looking at location of users' search terms on google might help (and see how many of these people do online shopping - out of 2000, a lot must come from households where one could get that data)
note: privacy is not an issue in a notifiable disease outbreak..in most countries
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- misery me, there is a floccipaucinihilipilification (*) of chronsynclastic infundibuli in these parts and I must therefore refer you to frank zappa instead, and go home