Towards a New Theory of Social Mind

It's clear that collective minds can be better than single minds, but its clear to me this only really worse when they start to behave like committes or like mobs - so
this is when social structures break down (alienation) - so is this once you get above Dunbar's magic number 150? Does technology help people do group-mind thinking with larger groups ? I think it does (the IETF spent 10 years working well (til 1990:-)
before it went pear-shaped and became less than any of its parts (not just less than the sum of its parts)

if we don't solve this problem, then the human race is doomed to fail (to fail to solve climate change, population, or any other world scale problem)

we are human stumble-bums who' lurch from one random mix to another, and occasionally, some cascading idea leads to herding behind some new thing (enlightenment - good; fascism - bad)

Alien's will land and find our remains and say "could do better"....

why havn't we seen aliens?

because they look at our group mind and say "how dumb is that"....

the future of the interweb is dark, dark, dark

just read this note about who publishes what on bittorrent portals and why

much like a lot of the dark underbelly of the internet, its a bit of a sordid mess...

if it isn't fake content by copyright protectionista, it's likely to be
self-advertising by big sites or porn or malware perveyors....

http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.2327

privacy, the cloud, and what really matters

I attended the Ethics and the Cloud workshop at the Royal Society yesterday, sponsored by the EPSRC under the digital economy programme,

was on twitter under #cloudmatters

anyhow, I was thinkin about privacy and psychology and wondering why people are so negative about some times of monitoring

1. monitoring car speed
i) we have averaging speed cameras (viz M1 right now)
ii) tomtom log speed/location over 3G from cars - why not put this data in a black box for analysis in the event of an accident too (instead of waiting for someone to subpoena tomtom's wenb service for the data) - liability would then be much easier to find evidence for
iii) if you run a phone with GPS (android, iphone etc) and latitude, then surely the data on google's service is also exactly such evidence anyhow? Could we ask to see how fast our MPs drive under an FOI? :-)

2. monitoring health
i) Tesco's keep our buying data as part of clubcard stuff for optimsising their profit and our basket - if this info went to our GP they might use it to warn us about our diet
ii) Nokia has sports phones that log heartbeat etc when you run/cycle (and upload to serice with map) - this too could go to GP as part of evidence based mediciine and prenvetive healthcare
iii) a micropayment system being used for bar bills (e.g. freedom phone style) could be used to interact with 1/ to tell you not to drive and 2/ to tell you to lay off the booze

why would people mind this?

answers on a postcard :-)

[The question above is rhetorical]

bell heads v. Internet: energy systems, transport and communications

So we kind of won the war between Bell-Heads of the phone companies and the Net-Heads of the Internet in the communications area - indeed, now we made peace and we are very happy to work with each other on better inter-domain routing, delay bounds, congestion exposure, traffic engineering etc etc etc

Meanwhile, Frank Kelly spent time at the UK's Department for Transport as chief scientific advisor. More recently, David Mackay is acting as same role for the Department of Energy and Climate Change

Why is this interesting (in the context of the Net)?

Well, this week, I am attending the Energy Systems week at the Newton Institute in Cambridge and the talks have fallen in to the same pattern of three sides of the picture that we saw in the net, and transport: Energy is dominated by a shall number of energy producers and grid companies (mostly private nowadays). THe move to local generation
(i.e. "user contributed" energy) and the move to using prices as "signals" to users to see if that will alter their (consumer and producer) behaviour have been things we've seen in the net (p2p content versis Content Distribution services, congestion charging and congestion explosure as well as Inter-domain policy routing/peering policies), and in Transport (congestion charging, toll v public good roads).

Glen Vinnicombe gave a great talk about why distributed control with local rules for interaction is sufficient to organise a globally stable system. Alas, it was clear from many responses that the industry (i.e. people that have outrageously expensive systems invested in command & control - 100M pounds software for running LP and IP solutions for optimisation was one quoted figure!!!), have no understanding of why we might need to move to this decentralised world.

What we really need is a subtle political move that shifts the ground under their feet, as was done in the Transport case (allowing local decisions to innovate for example so that people could introduce smart pricing, smart control independent of the business dominated by near monopolies). This move needs to happen soon for energy - it is not at all clear how to lay out a vision and road-map for this that could engage the incumbents - in the case of the internet, we just ignored them (as Americans say, we did an "end run" on their game:).

Putting in constraints (simple things like Kirchhoff's laws is trivial compared to the complexity that is the Internet. I was amused that people think the electricity system is harder than a global packet switched system with over 100,000 providers. (Other things like the fact that we have different kinds of packets (VOIP/Video v. Data), the fact that intra-domain TE runs on timescales faster than spot markets (as do CDNs, who buy electricity dynamically and spin up/down disk farms and whole city datacenters already based on current supply cost/reliability, and buy wind farms) seems to have slipped the attention of some of the old school....

Anyhow, thanks are due to the Newton Institute event organizers for bringing together a set of people to make this clear.

Some brief other notes-

Some of the economics people were still citing Chicago school work on pricing and perfect markets - having heard of Cascading failures in grids, you'd think they'd have heard of Cascades and herding in trading behaviour and move on a bit to worry about whether you can actually treat users (and providers) as selfish rational players and rely on this for stability alone - the last 2 years recession (toxic debt and trust failure epidemics) ought to have been another small clue.

Thatcher mentioned as a contribution - its true the pool idea was cool, but society was a loser compared to some more balanced (nuanced) inclusion of welfare as well.

Glen's demo of the lego robot segway was absolutely brilliant:-)

Dinosaurs are not extinct

Andy Hopper is right - Computing for the Future of the Planet actually has something serious to offer here.

There was some interesting discussion later in the week on large scale microgeneration and stability, but there still seems to be a misunderstanding of the sorts of scale (millions of providers) and the types of business relationships between them (P2P, customer provider, laissez-fair etc) - BGP has many lessons here potentialyl of use

there was some discussion of the unpredictability of weather (for wind & solar) - in fact systems are self-similar and the same math used for rapid estimation of the H parameter for a self-similar arrival process (lots of papers on fractional guassian random/brown noise etc etc) could easily be used to provide input to an "admission process" of local generation to the grid, or whetehr to diffuse the generated power locally (e.g. into bufffers in the form of electric cars parked in a neighbourhood, or to spin up disk farms for a decentralised local cache for the InterWeb).

I've always said that the Internet is a predictor for where other utilities might end up (given its scope, scale, low operating costs, competitive nature, and flexibilty to a wide varieity of ever evolving business models)

simple smart grid idea - turning down power consumption via missing NAT state:)

If you're home is not currently represented by NAT state, then surely all your internet kit should be OFF :-)

An ethical question about live user internet research

we're running a complicated experiment to see how people react to information about
their social group and their locale during an epidemic if you give them live information about who (and potentially where) there is some level of infection - this had to go through an ethics committee because it involves health.

now the next phase (or a next phase) involves running an enhanced version of the programme which no longer logs whether a person has a disease, but instead, emulates a set of diseases and a set of values for parameters for Susceptibility, Infectiousness and Recovery, and (still telling the user - but now its a game) tries to see if people will alter their behaviour (i.e. where they go; who they meet) depending on the severity etc - the idea of the latter experiment is that we can run live experiments with hypothetical values for the disease vector and SIR values - the reason we can't just run this on trace data is that there are feedback loops between the disease and the social network dynamics, so whether a given virtual epidemic collapses, stays endemic, or goes pandemic (or some other mode) will be highly dependent on actual users' behavioural dynamics (and might include other facets of behaviour like peer pressure etc)...

Anyhow, the question is this: do we still need formal Ethical approval for this latter experiment?

Internet Addressing - making a hash of it several times

Dear Sir, Lord, Reverend, Almighty Internet,

I've been wondering how you should be addressed.

The powers that be (wise old men) say we should have 128 bits of stuff
allocated either geographically or topologically, or organisationally (provider centric)

I say we should declare IPv6 Bloomsday and have three hash functions and addresses should be allocated with fields set from all three types, by doin a cryptohash of the ID of a node (sim or mac) ...

So the new type of address is the bitwise inclusive OR of the results of all three hash functions:
Hg(id) v Ht(id) v Ho(id)

The properties of this are neat - a router can decide to apply a match on any one of the three hashes, so if a node moves, we can see whether geo, topo, or provider based routing will cope with the migration best - we can also NAT or re-assign permanentally for a node, any 2 of the hashes, and still get a match - provided we dont change all three (or the id)...

This ought to work fairly well, since most nodes execute Levy flights over the net (returning to the nest at end of day, trip, vacation)....

Jaron Lanier & The Internet & Grumpy Old Geezers saying it isn't what it used to be

they are all wrong - the internet is still wonderful - here's some random stuff just loked at in the last 10 days:

retro eastern european album covers

awesome time lapse photo work

last day in einstein's office

pattern recognition?

Logorama

pigeon detective

seriously pixilated universe

and there's loads more where that came from

zero cycle future

civilization can be counted as starting with the invention of the wheel (not fire - fire was discovered)

but most civilizations made do with four wheel devices for millennia

(sounds off stage left of animal farm):
Now, the civilized thing is to go on two wheels.

but the segay has made the unicycle almost practical

so what is the next step for the wheel world? clearly, no cycles - zero wheels - is the logical next step

roll on the nadabike, I say

of course, it will still be known as a bike, just like people still talk about records or phones in some places....

Compelling Application of Multicast Building Rss (or twitter) Internet Distributions of Great Expectations....CAMBRIDGE

so twitter - funny app, eh? odd stuff - why would anyone wanna use it, eh?
stalking, really - that's what its really all about.

On the other hand, the s/w "architecture" for twitter sucks bigtime - its kind of like, someone looked at SMS and went, hey, texting is so cool - lets rebuild an accidentally useful thing that is only good on mobile phones before the iPhone because there wasnt a proper keyboard and screen, and lets build it for the internet, eh?
how cool is that, like, er, not?

well anyhow, so noone relies on twitter really - its a 140 byte payload, with a 1-to-many service model, and no especial casual ordering between tweets from different sources. so it is ideally suoted to UDP/IP multicast - scales really nicely from a server perspective - 1 sender with a million followers - indeed, who needs servers - stephen fry could tweet to a billion people direct from his iPhone (assuming the 3G IP service did native multicast...) - indeed, some cellular networks implement broadcast services (for radio and tv channels in Korea and Japan for example) so one could even use the ethernet hack of mapping ip multicast groups to broadcast subnets locally, and get receiver efficiencies as well as sender side scaling improvements from O(n) to O(1)....how about that eh?

reflex

interesting discussion with david evans just now about
how you learn a reflex

started with me saying how hard I find it to make a pot of coffee correctly
until I've had a coffee

he then said how the physio people at addenbrooks had made much of the fact
that it is so hard to figure out how you "learn a reflex"

this bootstrapping problem is made all the weirder
when you ask people about "simple" things like
learning to ride a bike
learning to do vibrato on violin/guitar
learning to programme
add your experience here...

there's the skills/technique thing which is incremental and easy to see
then there's some transformative/phase shift somehow (dodgy bogo-science metaphor there) in the brain - would be wonderful to do functional MRI on someone
learning to stop falling off a bike
and see if this is so!

almost steampunk come true - making broken ipod useful via antiques

so i have an old ipod nano which has a broken stereo out head socket and
thought about throwing it away

but then i realize i also have a device in my car which is one of the 21st centuries most awesome hacks - it is so baroque as to be worthy of a song or something out of some
bruce sterling/william gibson/neal stephenson 10 page eulogy or even a threnody

which is to say i have one of those gizmos for 10 quid which
plugs into a cigarette lighter to charge, and then has an FM transmitter
and then you dock your pod-u-like into it
using the awesomely apple-uber-scart-like moron designed docking socket thing
and lo, your ipod tunes arrive on your car speakers
via your FM car radio
and electronics replenish the power in the i-pod
via the gadget for setting fire to cancer-stick

how weird is that?

turning broken ipods into useful sources of soothing sounds
by means of multiple obsolete tech!!!!

what's not to like?

I'm so Bored of the Future Internet

today I am going to BIS to talk about the Future Internet
this is Yet Another Initiative which is the
Future Internet Strategy Board of the UK.

The Internet has a great future behind it, of course. However,
my thesis is that the
Future Internet is about as relevant as
Anthropogenic Global Warming
It is not necessary to invoke all the hype and hysteria - it
is both necessary and sufficient to talk about
sustainable energy (c.f. David Mackay)
and
good technical communications research, develeopment, deployment and operations -
What we really don't need is yet more climatologists
(or ethnographers studying internet governance) - we do need some solid engineering
to address a number of problems the Internet has - but this is happening and wouldn't stop happening if the entire Future Internet flagship was kidnapped by aliens.

we don't need no government agency doing top down dictats about what to do when -
it won't work and it will be a massive waste of time, energy and other resources - i.e.
like AGW, it will be a load of hot air:)

my slides are linked off my home page in the usual way...

There are a number of deeper lessons from the Internet architecture which might prove useful in other domains, and in my talk I give examples of these (applying the Postel and End-to-end principles to transport, energy, government information/servies)

telco-mpare.the.research.com

{AT|B|D|F|I|T}telco-mpare-the-research
i.e. what are thre relative merits of
AT&T research
BT Research
Deutsche Telekom (t-labs)
France Telecom research (actually telecom paris tech:)
telecom italia
telefonica

ask me in a pub:)

did you know vint cerf is...

vint cerf...only 3 years older than Patti Smith

now reading Just Kids about her life with Robert Mapplethorpe, who took that iconic pic for the cover of Horses....awesome - a true 20th century (and 21st) Rimbaud....

Jesuit 2.0

I'm trying to reason about religion

doh - time to acquire
jesuit 2.0
and see how it stacks up
against
islam 1.7

I don't know, but maybe it was the roses

the internet: the death of distance and the price is poverty

the internet is sposed to bring the death of distance

but on the internet, content is king
and content is zipfian

so popular content is, in all liklihood
from far away

yet content is about somethign real - a band, a play, a beach, a cause

yet if the band don't play near you, the play is in a foreign tongue, the beach is washed by tides from a different ocean, and the cause is not yours to wonder why
then it impoverishes you - it does not enrichen.

the internet is going to be the greatest cause of poverty since
the church burned people for translating and printing the bible

Free Plot Device - what if #2701?

what if
humans were the only creatures in the world
unable to timetravel,
and the fact is that
every other creature
on earth,
and in other worlds
can travel, freely, not just
like Billy Pilgrim,
unstuck in time,
or the time traveller's wife's husband
but just like you and I
can travel in space - forwards, back, up, down, left, right

so this is the answer to Fermi's paradox:- we havn't met the aliens
because we were always
too late
or
too early

wouldn't that be sad

why is government so slow...?

this is the age of the interweb, but government (and its cloud) move like a geriatric patient with arthritis - there don't seem to be any parties (or peope in their associated think tanks) who realize what the problem with having a time constant that is geological is when faced with novel problems like religios fundamentalism revivals, climate warning (or not), and a population suffering from post traumatic stress due to the pace of technology change (telephone to internet to web to myspace to facebook/buzz on an iphone; walk to horse, to car, to electric car; illiteracy to newspapers to books to ebooks; certain death to antibiotics to vaccination and immunisation to diet and lifestyle control; the church and the king to the aristos, to the middle classes to the working classes being educated; etc etc)

all the systems of government are still modelled as if there was no sigificant difference in any of these areas since before the industrial revolution (roughly).

its pathetic - and don't talk to be about socialism:)

The story that won't go away

so I think there's a new dynamic (social opinion dynamic) in the 21st century

basically, we will never get consensus ever again on anything - viral stories that are wrong will remain with us - there's a process at work where it starts up a gain
(even if to say - "ah, if htis story is false, how come it wont go away") - so even now we have the finding
about the MMR doctor that he was not only wrong but also unethical.

Nevermind - but the story will go around and around - lik viruses in the ecosstem, and software viruses in the Interweb, this one just wont die.

THe only thing we can do is to automate the process of objecting to it (just like we automate virus protection systems in computers) - we need an agency that detects such bogus stories (liek the board of jewish deputies, only more scientific) and have it issue an autogenerated article (slightly different each time to combat polymorphic lies)

Not only does the graph in the article by the BBC linked above show the CAUSE of measles by reduced MMR protectionin the population, they failed to show that the incidnece of autism increased before the introduction of MMR, and went on going up after the reduction in uptake in MMR, statistically confirming that MMR is
a) not a cause of autism, and
b) this doctor has caused unnecessary misery blindness and death by his thoughtless, careless and immoral behaviour.

new surreality TV show pitch

Goth Factor:- this is a competition like X factor, only people have to behave like dead rock starts but crossed with their seperated-at-birht character from Twighlight (or Near Dark:)

Think Glee meets Shaun of the Dead - you thought those were pork scratchings? :-)

the programme opening music will show the evolution of michael jackson over is lifetime, backwards, proving that he was in fact a vampire, but living in a reversed temporal frame of reference - the hints are there (not just obvious ones like Thriller, but subversive references to his were-rat sister in the themesong Ben)

The programme will have innocent x-factor (pop idol) type people up against actual zombie/vampire/were-guitarists, who, when they win, eat the losers.

I guarantee it will be huge.

tough on childen, tough on the causes of children - my predictions for 2010

In 2010, it will be far too late for children to stay up and disappoint their parents. From now on, children will have to stay in bed for the next 7990 years. This will not disappoint them. And it will give their parents a chance.

risk and complex systems

yesterday I was in the Judge Business School whch is the only place in Cambridge that everyone sounds preppy (or like they went to british public school) - there was this workshop on complex systems and catastrophes - not bad...the building reminds me
of the library in the film of Umberto Eco's

T h e N a m e o f t h e R o w s
h
e
N
a
m
e
o
f
t
h
e
c
o
l
u
m
n

Ionic, or ironic? I don't know.

Anyhow, I decided the difference between complicated and complex
was best expressed By Donald Rumsfeld -
complicated is
known unknowns
but
complex is
unknown unknowns

easy, right?

4D printer - Maxwell's Angels....

so we've all heard about 3D printers, and pretty naff they are too - and soon we'll have 3D fax machines (poor man's matter transporter)

but what about a 4D printer?

This would basically extrude reality - it could be a nascent universe in a box, with an output being a stream of space time continuum - the settings (God's Dials?) would be quite complicated....perhaps the implementation would entail use of Maxwell's Angels (a bit like his demons, only without sense-of-humour failure).

alien consciousness (machine intelligence or extraterrestrial)

so reading What Have You Changed Your Mind About?: Today's Leading Minds Rethink
Everything
by John Brockman , Brian Eno (Introduction)
Amazon Reference
I was struck by the similarity of arguments about alien and artificial intelligence - how do we know something is conscious? how can we make something conscious? what is society but the combination of the theory of other and a model of self?

meanwhile, perhaps Drake's famous equation, promoted by Carl Sagan, and dismissed by some because of lack of detection of any
other is because once you reach singularity, you become
dark matter, and society is simply dark energy.

there's a theory for you to munch on.

sci fi game on google sky map

would be neat to play a sort of
plan your sci fi plot game using google skymap o na bunch of smart phones -

basic model would be to take plot of any classic space opera SF book or film, and tag the journeys in it (most space opera is basically an adventure trail, challenge, journey -) on the skymap visiting relevant planets or stars and see who can get it most right....

3 masters 3

so in my life i've been lucky to meet
3 masters of trinity college cambridge

interestingly (imho)
one was afraid of women
one was afraid of men
one was afraid of god
as far as i could tell
but i'm not telling who or which

horizon is getting weaker

not a good recent edition of horizon - here's an idea for a decent edition

get ben goldacre (or someone similar)
to do something on
what is medical science?

what constitutes evidence and what constitutes grounds for
accepting a theory (or rejecting it)
and what constitutes waffle -

could start with historical perspective - e.g.
John Snow et al...and give some
homeopathic and placebo lessons
and explain
statistical significance
and risk, properly....

remember, the stuff those folks did has contributed more to human happiness/quality of life than just about anything else except the invention of the electric guitar and the football.

can 3D printers print 3D printers

and can they print robots that can turn off 3D printers?
and if not, why not?

cf. those of you familiar with Philip K. Dick's dystopic visions of consumer society will recognize the rogue post-war autofac meme, here

oribtals & flat earth and the ecliptic

you know i never could understand how people worked out all the orbit stuff when I was a kid - it was coz noone ever told me that all the orbits were in the same plane! - if you think of the planets goin round in arbitray planes, like hurts your brain....meanwhile so does xkcd
http://xkcd.com/658/

the day the internet stood still

this has it just about right

Tricycle design

i was lookin at the design of a bike made
simply of 3 circles
front wheel, backwheel and seaterwheel
connected in a triangle by their axes...


O
/ \
O - O

tryin to realise this in materials... ...

dan brown - the lost clue?

so there's a bit in the lost s symbol when a super hacker
is trying to find the source of a document that a distributed search engine has uncovered magically, but is phoned up by the CIA mid hacking to be asked what he is doing...oh yeah, some super hacker, eh...

meanwhile, the writing "style" (for want of a better word) still reminds me of a small child or puppy that wants to go "wee wee" - it's all breathless urgency, but for no obvious reason whatsoever - the hacks (every chapter starts with a jump forward in time, then has to go back and explain how we got there, then ends with a cliff hanger) reminds me of early TV batman episodes (don't even mention Dr Who:)

THe occasional complete misuse of words is astounding (don't his editors do anything for their vast profit/income he generates...

nevertheless, it was a fun 33 minutes read.

CS meets news control and CS meets germs and immune systems

1. wonders how easy a provenance tracker for news would be to hack up (hint hint = plagiarism detector + rss feed merger) - this'd automate flat earth news reporting - maybe google news could run it as an aggregator:)

it would be nice to see a threaded source of news, and see when the BBC, Fox, CNN, Guardian, Times of India are "reporting" things that are actually just press releases from Number 10 Downing St or Company X's publicity department....

2. your immune system can cope with a certain number of different viruses and a certain number of different immune responses - has anyone done cryptanalysis to figure out
why? for example, immunising you against a new thing can make you less immune to another thing - this sounds like wherever the T cells store their signatures has a finite heap or stack size

the former would be good for sanity, the latter for general well being:)

end of amateur internet era, what a sad loss

bye bye geocities and xkcd today has it spot on...

v8

talk yesterday about optimsiing runtime for javascript vm in chrome
by the chrome add-on man:)

i was confused at first as v8 is a nice multi-vegetable drink we have at home a lot
and its also one of the signs on the back of the Rover 3500 they trashed on top gear recently, and both these associations were probably not along the lines the speaker intended....

on the other hand, he obviously hadn't read about making oCaml networking apps go fast:)

collision avoidance for cell phone walkers (and cyclists (and drivers))

here's the thing - you're walking along and suddenly someone crashes into you - normally, humans use eye contact to avoid this, but nwoadays all humans are only eyeballing their smart phone screen so the obvious thing to do is to give the phone
the awareness its about to hit someone and have it beep (faster and faster as you get closer - like the parking radar systems on fancy cars and airplane collision warning systems do)

this could be made very ergomomic with camera phones in that as you get quite close, your phoen could show you some eyes and have them look the way you should go (the other persons' phones having made sure they do the same so you don't all go the same way in that collison avoidance dance you sometimes see) _ actually another verison would be one that shows you the person you are about to walk in to is a friend and maybe you should say hi rather than texting/emailing them:)

this could extend for cyclists so they no longer need to look where they ride
and drivers too in cars and buses...

then eventually the phones could just do the driving for you

and we could all just stay at home...

privacy, the internet, and asymmetric warfare

A recent paper on Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization, by
Paul Ohm (colorado school of law...)
and a recent report on net legislationby the All Party Parliamentary Communications Group of the UK government, both conclude that there are interesting times ahead when it comes to personal privacy, and both seem to say that "database state" and "database capitalism" are bad ideas. Essentially, the ability to do "joins" on unrelated databases, whether they are anonymized well or not, allows accurate pinpointing on individuals to a very very fine level of detail.

Solutions invlve
1) only gathering data for fit purpose for specific use by specific users and anonymizing it
and (AND, not or)
2) strictly controlling the flow of such data in any way, means or form.
AND
3/ deleting it for ever when you are done (forgetting things is not an evolutionary error - it is a vital part of staying sane for individuals and probably should be wired into the networked society too - c.f. losing freinds on facebook in a friendly way!)

The problem is that Brin's proposal (we all watch each other, so we lose privacy, but so do the watchers), doesn't work when you have assymetric power (large organisation v. small individual), whereas controlling the flow of data might just work if it is legislated and penalties are good. Note that this does not stop useful things like evidence based medicine, because we have shared goals - but it does stop the use of correlation (think, signal processing, minimum entropy information theory etc) between completely unrelated databases.

For me, this makes a lot of sense human behavioural terms. We all present ourselves differently to different people at different times (we "lie" all the time) - this is essential for society to work well - unifying all views flies in the face of good social flexibility - so the government and the advertisers wet dream of combining information about belief, health, education, employment, finance, for every individual is completely and utterly misguided and actually extremely dangerous.

We already have a stressed out society because of speed of change (c.f. John Brunner's excellent shockwave rider). Complete transparency would be (as has also been speculated in various Sci Fi books) like reading everyones mind all the time - we'd hate everyone. it would be a disaster. I doubt we'd survive in fact.

hard-to-lose money idea

so we could use the fact that now it is possible to have N or S magnets on their own to create a type of money you would find hard to lose -

your money could be South and your money North (other way round woud be bad, since your money would "head south" which would not be good) - then money would stop falling out of your pocket so easily

we could call this (pause for a comic beat)...

Monopoly Money

...

swiss army locksmithereens

a lot of inventions are really just bi-sociation - one simple exmaple is
wouldn't it be nice if your mobile phone was a camera, or your phone was a laptop, or your phone was a razo

now, lost your car keys, your front door keys, your bike lock keys, your phone keypad unlock keys? solution: the swiss army lock smithereen.

journalists dont get it

some dweeb at the bweeb complained about watching a footie match avaialble only on the interweb, on their 12" display instead of on their 40" plasa tv - doh, why didn't they plug the PC into the TV? all 3 TVs in my house have at least 1 simple way to plug in a mac or a pc....and they're mostly cheaper LCD things....

really we should stop referring to what people produce in newspapers, radio and other broadcast media as "news" - these guys are the "olds".

comment is content free

so i am not one that subscribes to the idea that the internet is full of sound and fury signifying nothing, but it is interesting how cultures online vary from site to site and time to time , in terms of restraint or thoughtfulness of user contributed content - today's astoundingly stupid stuff includes both youtube commentary

this time: appalingly ignorant comments about the nature and history of the song Helter Skelter, and a fairly hardcore punk/goth version by Siouxie & the accurately named Banshees, apparently a "hippy song" according to some pundits...hmm - i wonder what Charles Manson would do to them; and the BBC's Have Your Say, comments on the significance (or otherwise) of the 2nd Irish referendum on the EU's Lisbon Treaty- case in point, where the most recommended comment at the time of typing this isn't even grammatically correct.

astonishing.

enunciation/earcorns

so when i was a yoof, we used to go around wearin ex RAF greatcoats wot we bought from the army and navy shop on hampstead road - this was before punk (and i wasnt yet a post-punk hippy) and we used to go to the Roundhouse and see bands like Magma and Amon Duul and henry cow, or occasionaly famous people like the stones or thin lizzy or whatever

but we woz conufsed as many of us didn;t kno that it was a "greatcoat" - peopel thought maybe it was a Grey Coat...

a bit like
common-or-garden, which some people seem to pronounce common-all-garden

or maybe you can fink of other fings wot we got wrong, i'd appreeshiate u dropin me a line...

maybe you went to the music machine or the electrik ballroom to see madness/speshuls/selector too...

or remember the first gong gig in camden and the global village trucking company, or even Osibisa

zipf v. ohm

"remember, son", zipf junior was to remember his
father's dying words
"with great power
comes a heavy tale"

with apologies to xkcd

Time for Carbon Neutral Conferences (and Standards)?

SOme conferences like Infocom and some standards events like the IETF attract a thousand people who fly around the world - a typical academic trying to get promoted might go to 4 or 5 a year just to find out what's going on (just look at the travel budget on any typical research proposal if you don't believe this). So someone working on internet standards and trying to publish papers might do 7-10 inter-continental flights per year.

According to Professor David MacKay's fine book, on sustainable energy, without hot air, (and he is now Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, which is a very good thing)
a single intercontinental flight is about equivalent to 1 year's worth of communting 30 miles per day by car. So these academics (mea culpa) are basically contributing about 10 fairly heavy commuters' worth of Carbon emmissions.

We've been nattering about using the Internet to collaborate for a long time, and tried all sorts of tools (now we have even more with twitter, wiki, blogs, social nets, skype with video and shared white boards). Why don't we bight the bullet and
replace some big conference event with a virtual event and make it work by necessity?
People whinge about it, but the alternative is to plant a lot of trees every time you go to Sigcomm, Infocom, IETF, IEEE 802.foo, etc etc....which would be ok, but expensive, whereas we're supposed to be the technologists, so why don't we set an example.

We could use EDAS (erm...) and annotate every author, TPC member, conference registree, with a C02 measure....that'd be a way to name and shame em....

google become critical infrastructure, and government buys them:)

so gmail failed (again) yesterday - and some other google services - I am not complaining as they do a fine job compared with some other companies.
but someone was walkin by my office from their outfit and said
"please don't say we're critical infrastructure"

well, i don't think they understand - it isn't up to them - if you build something and it becomes indispensable, it simple becomes critical infrastructure
de facto. it isn't on a whim of a provider- irrespective of what their contract says or they think - its what a0 the public/users think and, b) what governments say.

and before people think governments have no power, lets just point out the UK gov just bought 175 billion worth of worthles banks last year, so buying google if necessary steps are needed to protect national resources, is entirely reasonable - actually, I wonder if Obama had thought of this as an alternative bailout strategy - instead of
supporting a bunch of useless morons on wall stret and in detroit (car companies) he could have used the 1 trillion dollars to buy a bunch of solar power and hi-tech companies and maybe a few oil companies then let the banks go broke.
1. cancel everyones debts in the banks
2. use dividends on new worth while stock to pay interest of people who saved money in the now defunct banks
3. spin out a few new banks based on this new principle - first
google bank of america...a gift oriented bank, which instead of paying interest to, you give away your privacy and see a lot of adverts...

you know it would work....any objects must surely be exactly the same only worse for bailing out banks...for example people who think
"The Man" owning something outs a "chill" on innovation and success of business...well that is a very American disease, and perhaps the Chinese wont care (!!) but in any case, if it is true, it is even worse that the Man now owns banks and car manufacturers who were already broken, and maybe an arms length investment of taxpayers money in things like high tech would have changed things around about this attitude...

end2end and neutrality principles

the end2end principle is simplest described
as the right to receive any well formed IP packet
no matter what it contains

net neutrality refines and extends this principle to say
that it shouldn't matter
where it came from.

many victims of unsolicited stuff, end users and ISPs alike,
might retort:
"be careful what you wish for"

more molecules in a cup of water than cups in the ocean

only there are less notes in a good tune than there are good tunes in the world...

why is that, pray?

liquid bomb effectiveness

previously I "pooh poohed" the idea that you could do in a plane with but the beeb got some explosive expert to try it with fairly
convincing results - while a modern wide body plane would probably survive this, a lot of passengers might not, and there's always a probability they hit some vital controls in some unforeseen way....so it looks like the whole painful thing of not carrying drinks through security in airports was not totally bogus after all....oh well...

Gambling with only 1 throw of dice...on the Earth's Future

The BBC reports that one could engineer to save the planet

while many of the proposals make some sense (e.g. mirrors in space) in basic physics terms, what they totally fail to capture is the risk. We really don't know what happens if we block a significant amount of the spectrum/sunlight hitting the earth's upper atmpsphere, while continuing to fill the biosphere with too much CO2 and other stuff

what we do kow is that homeostasis works in Very Large Systems whereas messing with basic parameters/operating points might change a whole set of sub-systems stability and is completely reaching in the dark - scientists (especially scientists, not engineers) making these proposals are wholly dishonest and irresponsible to claim these are "stopgaps" until we figure out how to re-stabilize our own behaviour (switch to sustainable culture) since the timescales to understand the impact of massive geo-engineering projects are precisely the same as the timescales to fix the fundamentals in our societies. Frankly, I am dismayed to see the re-emergence of 1950s style naive optimism in the Men in White Coats.

sigcomm 2009

there's loads of nice info on their website (tweets and photos) but I have to say tghe restaurants of barcelona didn't disappoint.

weirdly, I bumped into Machalis Faloutsos in the airport as I left and he arrived...flying back to greece from spain, goin over thw gulf of corinth it occurred to me that Greece contains a miniature model of the mediterranean sea inside itself as well as being inside the med itself - so no wonder they were so wiley, living in a recursive geography.

really bizarrely, the people in front of me inline at the gate had bags with "National Pornographic" labels on - this was especially surreal as Aegian Air played sleezy 1970s jazz music as we boarded the plane...

watching some partioculalry dumb movies, I realise that the quality of a film is inversly proportional toi the number of filler (stock footage) shots of builds, cars pulling up, driving away, people looking uo,m tracking shots over hawaii surf etc....so maybe Eno should make some Ambient films for airports?

download 800 songs= lose 4 limbs

the US courts are about to award sony et al
more money in damages against a
file sharer than the british army gives in compensation support to a soldier who loses all his limbs

rough justice?

no, completely stupid and inappropriate - who values the songs like this? - the model is like each person is responsible for the loss of sales (which precedes the whole filesharing technology) due to the incompetence and lethargy of the A&R side of the popular music industry.

talk about immoral.

A release citrix note dropped through a hole in the spacetime continuum

with Xensoul , you can clone you personality in your Xenbrain (TM) up to 64 times - a popular application is to enact shakespeare plays and have your own virtualised personality act out the different parts in perfect isolation, enabling surprise and engagement, whilst enlisting at least one of your virtual selves as a cyber-audience in your head. with Xenbrain (TM) Speedup running at 2^24, you can complete a single shakespeare play (even Hamlet) in the time it takes to blink - with the new 64bit brain, you can complete all the 42 plays (including disputed ones discovered in the vatican in 2043) with several variations, in less time that it takes to make a really hot cup of tea.

Xen and the art of Shakespear in the Head
is available for download from any major respectable neuralware stockist.

the internet of tings

i'm from london, where we drop our aitches (except we then restore them in inappropriate other places, like
"H'Im sick of your bloody effin and blin, you 'orrible oik, 'urrican 'iggins"

so in london, during the olympics (3 years off now) we will have an Hinternet of Tings

you will be able to actuate traffic lights with your smart phone, and to actually pause live
games....with a single click on android's slimey new touch interface - not the image - the actual game (the players wil lreceive a powerful electric shock if they try to play on:)

Things you never learned from your mother's knee

GSM (Global System for Mobile communications: originally from Groupe Spécial Mobile)
MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3,Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) was formed by the ISO
SCART (from Syndicat des Constructeurs d'Appareils Radiorécepteurs et Téléviseurs
Video Graphics Array (VGA)
DIN connector by the Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN)
LG pronouncedd "Lucky"

how many other widely used product names or trademarks in every day life use have weird origins that owe nothing whatsover to marketting dweebs?

Econometrics and early computing

this comic is truly comedic

glastoblog 2009

so the glastonbury festival of the contemporary performing arts for 2009 was really quite good- but contrast with previous years ,where headline acts were dull and obscure bands from nowhere were good, this time around, headliners were all pretty godo and some of the obscurities should stay so (imho - of course with 11 stages and other venues, and only seeing 1 at a time, i surely couldn't speak for the whole shebang)

some pix

what did I see (hear)?
In order
Mr Hudson & the librarians - excellent (fine sunger with very sharp lyrics)
John smith - awesome guitar player - version of Winter was staggering
Regina Spektor - pretending to be animals in NY zoo as a kid, was amazing! very Tori Amos
NERD - excellent , except when the plug got pulled due to them running over (coz of late start:(
Fleet Foxes - stand out performance - truly gladstock! and then they all hung at the back of
Fairport convention - superb cover of sandy denny song and some serious mad dancing!
Lily allen - even better than last time - her voice is really pretty good!
The specials - turned up drums and bass, and did that ghostown song justice rightously
neil young - what can i say - cinnamon girl and day in the life were just stellar

VV brown - suprtb
warsaw village band - scarily good poolish dervish folk
bombay bicycle club - disappointing (bad mix didnt help tho
spinal tap - did what it says on the box.
jamie cullum - cover of MJ song was very very well done
CSN - missed coz we were watchign Paulo Nutini who was sick (as in good)
maximo park (dont like kasabian:) were extreemly amusing and fun
baaba maal was beautiful - senegal came to south west england
The Boss- now I am not a springsteen fan, but this was some band - very strong...

woke up and it was sunday morning with the quo and tony christie - someone should put them out of their misery:-)

Amadou & Mariam - mali came to south west england - very charming!
Bon Iver - superb - very spooky too...
Imelda may - absolutely stonking set from a brill singer - had the roof blown away
i'd not have been surprised

madness - good (not quite up to the specials for me ) but everyone was skanking so must have hit the right buttons...

blur - graham coxson seemed to be crying but that was probably the other 200,000 people...simply awesome...

oh, a bunch of stuff in chai wallah's was really great (jamie woon, gentleman's dub club etc)....so I spose there was some good indie things

emily the great (in queen's head, not the other set) was ok...sharp * observant I guess...

?can you imagine a worse death than that?

i was reading some grisly literature recently (actually have been for a few years) about torture and mayhem...and that's just on the croquet pitch

anyhow, i set to, trying to imagine a worse death....and, unfortunately, now, have succeeded several times...

do not ask...

short book proposal

first line:

The day that I died had started in such an ordinary way.

last line:

And so we all repaired to the gazebo to break our fast once again.

more bbc bogus p2p reportage

bbc report repeats the canard that file sharing is "lost revenue" - right now there's a recession -do they really believe people would spend the money they suggest in this report ? what a bunch of morons. we already spent it all bailing out the banks

Bad Science does a straightforward analysis of some more basic flaws in the original report from UCL:(

time for a google maps of UK MP's expensies

why not draw the UK with constituencies and colour them the traditional party colours and then draw a column as high as the MPs expenses (could compare with the council tax rate and number of kids below poverty line)
oh, no wait someone has done (half of) it already - viz
hayes map by distance
reported in the guradian online

the beeb has a very good graph of distribution of income with where MPs are with expenses or not (top 9 or 5%)

millenium trilogy part trois (stieg larsson)

so as i have he attention span of a popup ad,
i decided i couldn't wait til october for the english tranlsation of the swedish masterpiece by stieg larsson about the intrepid Mieke and Lisbeth, and
bought the french translation of part 3

typical phraes

il francer ses sourcils,
hausser les epaules,
hocher la tete, et dit
"desole"

what a language
frowns, shrugs, nods, "sorry"
[apols, cannot say what the original swedish said as I don't have a copy:)

mid-flight crisis phobia

i hate flying
but it is a tiny bit comforting to know that so do a lot of people

after years of sitting in airports seeing people nattering on their mobile phones up to the last possible moment (and after in many cases) it is clear to me that most people have a built in fear of imminent mortality destructive testing...

this is added to by the number of people in UK airports who go up to those fancy fast car lotteries - it is clear no-one in their right mind would buy a 20 quid lottery ticket for a car they could never really drive - but many people in air ports behave like
men in the middle age (male meno-pausal) crisis who need to test their testosterone (when, by the way, do we get issued with proper osterone that has passed all the tests?:)


ayeee - human frailty, thy name is frequent traveller

a touch of class finally...sort of ...comes to "internet experts"

off your face, booked

two kinds of mutable things

so the cool thing about the interweb is that stuff is mutable - if i dont like what I wrote (or somone else wrote) it can be changed

the bad thing about twitter, fb updates, and rss is that it isn't mutable - i can't get it to shut up and go away

journalism, security and mexicans

so in a discussion (you can guess where easily) last night, we wondered about new definitions for a
Mexican Wave (stay away from US - we're all ok)

Mexican Hat (keeping the infected at arms length)

Mexican standoff (sneeze at me & I sneeze at you)

etc etc - ah, Tequila Mockingbird, you may say...

meanwhile, why do the media (sorry, Ben Goldacre, you are right again as is Nick Davies
always cite security companies when reporting items about cyber-security threats eh?

do you really expect a security company to be moderate when discussing this? they have products (and shares) to sell....

it'd be like asking Big Pharma their opinion on Pandemics... ...

(c.f. Davies comments on the Millenium Bug)

more biased sampling of sources about botnets....

The Internet has a Great Future Behind it

I'm sitting here in Brussels listening to talks about the EU FIRE projects.
While there's lots of useful work going on, I am having a very hard time finding a
possible Future Internet in any of it.

The idea that is common and cool as a research experiment is the notion of a Living Lab.
The idea that's probably least useful is the Public Private Partnership as a vehicle to fund such a thing.

oh well.

A simple model of tussel spaces

if you have apolyadic op
x op y
such that there is also an inverse op, po
such that op aggregates, and po de-aggregates
a resource (where a resource can be an identifier space such as names
or a transmission resource such as links or a processor resource etc etc)
then obviously op and po aren't information hiding in some sense, but they may be land grabs

when are they land grabs? when the ag-op or de-ag-op stat mux, or
(essentially) do anything that is sub-linear (superlinear in the de-agg op case)
then there is an economic advantage going on (scaling, in internet terms)
so then you have a tussel...

qed

truly, the internet was for sharing moustache pictures

taches of distincion

they all look gay

truly, this is what the internet was invented for...

http://www.juliensauctions.com/auctions/2009/michael-jackson/catalog-list.html

making botnets out of voip pieces

I seem to recall saying something about this a few years back - now slashdot links to a
story about abuse of skype and google voice tech to do bad things...

anathematica

so thinking about neal stephenson's last tome, Anathem, it is a paeon to
science - the point of the story (spoiler alert:) Is that
the best people to communicate with aliens are scientists
because the "language" of science is (quite literally) universal (actually, it is meta-universal) so even if aliens show up from (several) parallel Universes
then we (scientists, or "avout" steeped in "theorics") can communicate with them - indeed, the aliens have a helpful clue (much as voyager does) which is they have a diagram of the geometric proof of Pythagoras (of coruse, neither they nor the folks
on the planet (arbre) call it Pythagoras) on the outside of their "ship"

one discussion about meta-theory centers on whether the metaverse is ordered (DAG) or random, and whether there is some "higher" versus "lower" plane; another discussion is about Hemn (quantum state) spaces....another is about cross breeding plants to grow a simulation of a part of history....still another is about time

most religions are given fairly short shrift in the book (though not all) and of course there are (as in snow crash) some cool dudes who do marshal arts quite well...

digital signatures in a mixed reality world

so here's an idea (this is because increasingly I am asked for PDFs of references to include a signature - this is annoying since I have to print out a PDF, sign it, scan i in then email the resulting (larger therefore network and storage wasteful, as well as waste of paperful) file.

so if printers had a robot arm on them, this could be used for 3 things

1. I could have a remote control for it, so I send them the plain reference, but then SIGN it remotely using a haptic interface at my end - this has the added benefit that they witness the signature re as well as me

2. if I decie (too late) that I've sent something to the printer that is private, but I wont get too the physical device's outtray soon enough, I could tell the robot arm to
take the printout up and tear it up

3. if someone is printing way too much stuff ahead of me, I could tell the robot arm to beath them soundly about the ears as a lesson.

figures of squeech

as lazy as a simile

as slippery as a metaphor

as onomatopoeic as a thump

as lyrical as a lyre

A telecom Engineer explaisn the credit crunch

1. black swan events are just rare events in a heavy tailed self similar arrival process - using large deviation theory from admission control algorithms is fine for explaining this.

2. instability and cascades happen when you don't implement feedback controls and damping (regulation, in old steam engine terms)

employing both of these would be necessary and sufficient for non divergent, stable, non cascading markets.

people that don't get this should be fired.

putting out the fire...

with gasoline

FIRE is a "me too" european programme to do next gen internet infrastructure

time for a rant - putting out the FIRE with GASOLINE...

Generally
Architectures are
Simple-minded
Obsession.
Let the
Internet
Nonetheless
Evolve.

I cannot see ANY work going on in Fire that's actually delivering something real, relevant or not just redundent.

now I know the internet will never die...IP over social nets

my facebook account now has an IP router cpu -see

http://apps.facebook.com/ipoverfb/

Router operator: Jon A Crowcroft
Loopback0 address: 2001:db8:face:b00c::2bb1:7b2a/128
Friend interfaces: 1
Connection proposals from friends: 0
Your router does not have a default route yet... So, you cannot send traffic to the real IPv6 Internet. Please connect to more friends and wait until RIPng has converged.
Incoming packets waiting for your actions: 0
Last CPU run:
FIB size: 1
RIB size: 1
Received packets: 0
Forwarded packets: 0
Transmitted packets: 0
Dropped packets: 0
Received SIP messages: 0
New SIP messages: 0
Enabled debugging: The wizard mode allows you to change these settingsenable all debugging
Your Neighbors
You have no configured interfaces, please go to the 'Configure' tab.
Your Friends' Routers
Name Last CPU run Packets waiting Packets forwarded/
Received/Transmitted FIB Size Loopback address
Scott Brim 2009-02-27 13:36:21 3 329/356/189 445 2001:db8:face:b00c::6207:3daf
Richard Gold 2009-02-27 13:23:34 0 18/10/14 4 2001:db8:face:b00c::28ca:2112
Kenjiro Cho 2009-02-27 13:13:58 0 2/27/57 446 2001:db8:face:b00c::3c0e:7b4e
Manish Lad 2009-02-27 13:11:40 0 0/8/7 4 2001:db8:face:b00c::1ec0:e865
Tristan Henderson 2009-02-27 13:01:44 14 0/3/2 3 2001:db8:face:b00c::7:d45b
Simon Leinen 2009-02-27 11:30:13 8 49/698/454 442 2001:db8:face:b00c::28ef:7c60
Tom Vest 2009-02-27 08:54:07 60 199/708/428 445 2001:db8:face:b00c::25bb:b4bf
Geoff Huston 2009-02-27 07:14:10 4 0/1/1 446 2001:db8:face:b00c::2790:17e6
Bob Hinden 2009-02-26 19:53:34 10 0/33/24 442 2001:db8:face:b00c::222e:129d
Harald Tveit Alvestrand 2009-02-26 15:30:10 18 0/62/47 442 2001:db8:face:b00c::21e9:5a5d
Fred Baker 2009-02-25 16:45:29 260 0/212/146 423 2001:db8:face:b00c::2828:266e
Mark Townsley 2009-02-25 09:20:31 183 0/143/56 394 2001:db8:face:b00c::20f1:6bb9
David Oran 2009-02-24 17:55:57 108 0/11/11 356 2001:db8:face:b00c::2354:62f8
Ping Pan 1 0/0/0 1 2001:db8:face:b00c::235e:3cc4
Jari Arkko 14 0/0/0 1 2001:db8:face:b00c::29de:3483
Christian Huitema 6 0/0/0 1 2001:db8:face:b00c::2798:f96
David Meyer 0 0/0/0 1 2001:db8:face:b00c::29a5:a855
Lixia Zhang 0 0/0/0 1 2001:db8:face:b00c::2ba3:b64c
Christian Vogt 2 0/0/0 1 2001:db8:face:b00c::3fdd:8414
Scott Bradner 0 0/0/0 1 2001:db8:face:b00c::0:1db4
Ricardo V. Oliveira 0 0/0/0 1 2001:db8:face:b00c::26:5194

cloud computing clarified

after a vigorous discussion at a retreat in the castle yesterday, experts from Xensource (now Citrix) were able to help me understand what Cloud Computing is all about.

Basically, high up in the earth's atmosphere, there are these grey or white amorphous blobs of droplets of water and ice - there are officially ten types of these objects,in the now classic Hamblyn scale, ranging from Linux Nimbus, through Windows 7 Stratus and on to OSX Cumulus and finally down to TinyOS Pryoumulus. Some of these condense on
small intel ice particles, while others appear to be dropets of pure AMD.

The presence of very small particles of silicon in these droplets was made possible by the UC Berkeley research into so-called "smart" "dust", and followon work in Scotland on "speckled" "computing". Originally, it had been envisaged that these arrays would be used for weather prediction - indeed, one large storm grid was run for a while to detect or predict the weather, but then it became clear that self-fulfilling prophesy was the way to go, and the systems were used to control and pre-set ratehr than predict Internet weather.

However, early cloud computing was confusing and difficult to programme - much like the weather, it had a mind of its own, and was prone to chaotic, and even catastrophic
outcomes.

So then along came virtualisation. Now instead of a vast array of different clouds, we can now report that every cloud is controlled via its silver lining.

The wisdom of the Cloud is now commonplace. The layered architecture, with
clouds at ground level providing isolation through fog, while cloud 9 at the highest level presents an ecstatic API to the user, is complete. Many users are no longer at sea when the use the Cloud to access Ocean store services.

The Wisdon of the Clouds

aside from the wonderful novel, cloud atlas, we
have to put up with the latest internet fad in
cloud computing

but enough about xen - now
how to compare two competely different network architectures?

think about these:

1. internet & telephone
2. road and rail
3. food chain, family tree
4. social network, circulatory system

what is common and what would be a category error to try to compare?

a) user perception/mental model

1 - computers transfer information around v. humans communicate with each other
2. I can drive my car from a to b v. i get to sit and read a newspaper
going from a to b
3. a eats b eats c v. a begat b begat c
4. I know she thinks he hates her v. blood gets oxygen to let ADP/ATP
changes work so muscles can do things

b) economics
1. anyone can put any information application anywhere and everyone
else can use it - k*n^2 scale in income v.
I can call you or you call me....
2. road infrastructure is there, everyone has own vehicle v.
track and rolling stock are both infrastructures.
3. you need constant supply of food, so there has to be breeding as
well as good chain v. you convert O2 to CO2 so you need plants to do
CO2 -> O2 ,or we are in trouble - i.e. mutual dependency
4. If I know who relates to who and context, I can advertise right
good and services to them

c) technology
1. smart network + dumb edge, v. dumb network + smart edge
2. expensive wasteful car v. efficient rail, + user choose when to go,
but not control journey time, v. operator chooses when to go and
control journey time
3. biosphere v.
4. facebook and internet v. arteries and veins & heart

d) complexity
1. need moores law for end systems to keep going,
v. telephone service becomes marginal profit business
2. if oil and safety cost too high, individual car ownership bad idea
whereas if cheap, rail isnot worth infrastructure costs
3. food chain is exponential complexity, family tree is just
logarithmic
4 social net structures follow power law - so does artierial system

e) application/intended use
1. phones were origianlly thought to be useful for music (less
interference than radio) whereas internet was originally intended for
command and control and distributed community for US army.
2. road were for armiens to invade places - rail for industrial
revolution working class to go on vacation.
3. predators and prey...
4 advertising

proving the existence of google^H^H^H God

maxwell's demon sits at the entrance to heaven and asks you if you have free will or not

if you do, you go to hell - if not, heaven

if this is not true, there is no good. if it is true, there is no argghhhH!!!!!

lily allen admits...

...she doesn't "get" the rolling stones - all I can say is that the 72 live version of
Love in Vain sends shivers down my thing - Mick Taylor slide + keef and mick vocal/guitar is awesome

but really the meisterwerk is Exile on Main St.....definitive R'n'B

Tips on the Digital Economy...

1. there's no money in it:)
2. keep your fingers off!
3. I'm done.

et in arcadia, placet

went to a talk at wolfson about publishers views on the academic world of stuff in the digital era -

basic premise is that:

past/once upon a time, a publisher was the venture capitalist of gutenberg

then/now (recently) they turned into the bankers of the journal/monograph era

future/where they'd like to be is the tax inspector of metadata...

sort of...

bra xkcd ket

toay's toon poses a problem for which the solution stands out:

linux, :-( bsd :-)
or
osx ;)

game over.

william gibson continuity error

In all tomorrow's parties
gibson refers to Rei Toei
as post human at one point.

here is your starter for ten:
why is this the wrong term for an Idoru?

special relationship

milliband(pede) and clinton (unhilarious) renewed the special relationship between the U[K|S] today = yippee - we are still in "special needs" and we can follow the US into war, be their european aircraft carrier, missile launch site, and supporter in all things
financially reckless.

I am so proud - it is so consistent with rolling over and letting foreign companies ship their exploited workforces here to work underpaid, underprotected AND displace local workers.

Just WTF is going on with people these days? have they no spine? how did we end up in this craphole?

civil rights, finance, services, just which policy (and mechanism) did anyone actually vote for (n.b. I have never voted for either major party in England since 1976 - although I voted in every election -)

stand up and be counted, you moron thatcherites and new labourites.

cambridge heresies

Ross Anderson has witten a piece for the Times Higher about
the disruptive value inate in thehistory of cambridge
I think its quite right

warrentless wiretaps continue unabated in US

so much for obama's "civil rights" agenda (see whitehouse.gov for published list of stuff) - he did of course say before he was elected he support this, but you'd hope now he had access to more information he might realize it is bogus

oh well.....absolute power corrupts absolutely, as they say....


I hope you can read this fine, oh NSA..

DTN

Im fairly certain I first heard about this from Vint Cerf over dinner in Palo Alto (possibly in the fine Il Fornaio, on Cowper in Palo Alto) over a fine meal
the evening before he got the SIGCOMM award in
Stanford, late august 1996.

I remember writing on the tablecloth with him
about the RTT variance between earth and mars...

heathrow expansionist BS

so the government wants to approve expansion of heathrow so as not to lose jobs/business to frankfurt/paris....the claim is heathrow is already losing due to the other airports having 4 runways

the real reason heathrow is losing is because it is so bloody baldy laid out and security is such a pain in the backside that ANYONE who travels from/to/through london will do their damnest to avoid London Hearthrow if they possibly can. This is really simple - heathrow is TOO geographically big and distributed already - it takes too long and cost STUPID amounts of money to get to heathrow (even the so called "heathrow express", the worlds MOST expensive railway route per mike, kands you up at Paddington, which is not exactly well connected when you see how bloody unreliable the circle line is.

No, expanding Heathrow is EXACTLY the wrong thing to do at the wrong time for the wrong reason in the wrong place.

Networking the UK with TGVs - now THAT would be worth doing (and would employ a bunch of people for the next coupld of years) - to be honest, in Cambridge, I could use BIrmingham internatinal airport more easily than Heathrow, if the trains were better:)

Hi-tech mid-life crisis in Nice...

so i just flew into Nice - comin in over the Med in bright sunshine is (like
flyin in to San Fran over the bay) one of my favourite arrivels, with a really nice drive along the coast to near Antibes, Snow-Capped Alpes Maritimes on the horizon....

very pleasant - reminded me I need to revisit childhood traumas and also look into seriosu disorganisation of the senses asap:)

xmas tv computing lecture website - fun for all the family...

Royal Inst. Xmas Lectures of 2008 were all about computing science - the web site has a lot of nice interaction tricks which should be 2nd nature to every primary school kid by the end of the recession:)

Reverse Engineering is like Physics

Its often been remarked that debugging is like science. But reverse engineering is even more like science. So when people measure the internet (e.g. Rocketfuel) to figure out how the topology and capacity have evolved , they are reverse engineering (and in the process, try to infer mechanisms that explain, and don't just describe the phenomenon) - similar work on measuring P2P, and IPTV and skype (the great Blackhat paper on dismantling skype) are all very good.

So next: facebook - lets dismantle that and replace it with something better shall we?

better = something where I get good default security and properties on objects I "own" flow properly/. Where I can pick up and move my entire facebook account to some other OSN, and can insist (provably) that they do not retain any of my data. better is something where one doesn't just write yet another faceboo app that spams everyone, but can modify the internals (e.g. to build a completely decentralised mobile ad hoc version of facebook) - a bit like haggle deconstructed google..

3 more internet ideas

after lastminuite.com, what about

lastminute.com - nanotech grey goo stories

lastminuet.com - fine music for arty assisted suicides

lastmenus.com - take out for deathrow

lastfirst.com - fundamentalist christian blog

innovation, provenance, nationalism and competition

recent debates on bail outs (banks, car companies, etc) has revealed an interesting mix of incomprehension and incredulity in the global eco-system we now inhabit.

lotsa people object to the US bailing out ford, chrylser and GM coz it is unfair competition by the US - on the other hand this sort of assumes a level playing field in the world - there isn't one because of lots and lots of reasons - choosing a few

1. initial conditions - different countries started with more or less advantage (lets mention the US stealing British IPR on becoming independent, basing the workforce on slavery, and government subsidy of research - all also true of the EU, the Arab states and China and India

2. appropriation of natural resources

3. economies of scale (e.g. internal market size)

Other examples will occur (supporters and detractors of Boeing and Airbus continually claim the other side started with massive government subsidy - this could apply all the way from grants to colelges to train aerospace students, up to government "buy or fly national only" policy...

and then there's the internet .. .. ... :)

netheads are also foodies...

so i met up with a random set of people in NY yesterday pre-infocom TPC meeting, and we went to a fine bar and then a very interesting Ethiopian restaurant

It has been my general experience (since 1988) that people in the comms area are really not stereotypically geek at all at least when it comes to food and drink - we definitely have interesting (and not necessarily just expensive) taste:)

From where does authority vest in a post-Internet era?

Reading Ben Goldacre's excellent Bad Science book&column, and reading Robert Peston's exemplary explanation of recent economic trends, and (just hot off the press) the latest judgment reversal by the the IWF, one could be confused about where real authority lies and from where it vests.

I think the problem is that the Internet (and before it, mass media like daily (tabloid) newspapers, radio and TV, while democratizing those previously elite owned systems, also removes the metadata that gives the information its authority.

Goldacre lambasts folks like "nutritionists" for having bogus qualifications (from non "accreddited" organisations) and for citing research that is not "properly" peer reviewed.

Let me say that we came very close in Cambridge University recently to not bothering to have our computer Science degrees accredited by the IEE (IET) and BCS because their processess were so annoying. Let me say that I have been on about 5 programme committees and 3 journal editor duties a year for 20 years and I frequently see papers published which are "peer reviewed" and do not disclose all the information necessary to verify, validate or reproduce (or, more scientifically correctly speaking, to falsify potentially) the results.... ....

so this has all gotten worse because of the Internet, the Web, Google, and Wikipedia etc

The authority possessed previously by Banks, Governments, Medical Science, the Church, partly vested in Big Buildings - impressive looking temples (go look at the bank of england or houses of parliament or guy's hospital - all look like ancient greek theophilists dreams:), all go to make the little guy (or even the middle man - trader, investor, sick patient or supplicant) to trust that the organisation the building stands for wont vanish or fall down ("fly by night").

Now this has all gone - sub prime and fine mortgages, good and bad shares, medical information and nutritionist marketting/misinformation, and random religions (flying spaghetti monsters and the scientologists) are all on a level playing field in the Flat Earth Infosphere...

How could we fix this? what could we add (and I am not just talking about syntactic sugar like the so-called semantic web) information that would lend support to people's discernment (learning and retaining) ? what would go to show that some item was the result of discipline and investment of real effort, rather than (like this blog itself) just a fad/fashion/press release?

I don't know, but we sure need it for all our wealth, health and sanity... ... ...

loss of meaning in RL

today they are taking down signs everywhere
because everyone has an iPhone with google maps
and every car has a satnav

only the libraries still
have real maps of the real world

so when I virus the GPS and Internet
how will people find their way
to the libraries, eh?

answer that one on a postcard...

zen koan for the day

in a small world
fishbowl
does a goldfish
remember saying
"go ahead,
make my day"
to the lone
shark?

tivo on the radio - oh and finding lost remote controls

so why are there no cheap time shifting radio/ipods? it'd be great to tune in to some live radio show but then pause etc etc...??? eh? simple s/w extension to....

oh, and why don't remotes have in them radios so I can call them from a central gadget (e.g. my cell phone) and make them ring ? like i can with a dect phone?