Some thoughts on/from the last 2 days.

1. The mix of people actually worked quite well,
but that was lucky - it would be
better to have more structure another time. When cool points came up,
we shoud facilitate them being captured, nailed down, aired...etc

2. Academics (professors) tend to profess -
they also tend to profess "their thing"
all the time without trying to listen to others
first and then re-structure their
thing to fit - this is worse with engineering minded folks
(the MIT gang) than with social/humanaties/user type folks -
hence interventions from Alan Blackwell
(despite or because of his strategy of being contrarian),
and especially from Aaron Sloman were most useful.
Surprisingly (in a very good way) John Doyle was awesomely good at this too,
as well as having presented the most thoughtful (along with Aaron) piece of the day.

3. Key take homes

Architecture is probably a badly wrong word, but we're probably stuck with it.
Constraints that Deconstrain are crucial - crucially, picking the right constraint
(e.g. IP, the narrow waist of the hourglass) was a constraint, which freed up
everything above and below...
It isn't clear whether evolution (natural selection, survival of fittest of multipledifferent species) is better or worse than intelligent design  - certainly bacteria
appear to use a mix in some sense, and networks (and other artefacts of
"architecting") appear to use a mix too...(there were _many_ precursors to the Internet Architecture - this is also true of
mobile phone tech,, operating systems (pre unix/OSX/Linux), utilities, etc)

Users are important - William Gibson didn't just say
"The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed";
He also said that "the street finds its use for tech":
so when mobile phones added SMS as an after thought, people started to do gifting
(emoticons etc) - twitter followed suit - and people (*users*) revised twitter
to add #tags, retweets, mentions - this is true of use of email for filesharing, and
use of OSNs for photos

Elephants in the room

-- We didn't ask any architects (in the Frank Lloyd Wright sense)
   Actually it's not clear to me that that would have helped (much)

-- We didn't say much about ethics- there's not really such a thing as an "ethically
neutral technology" -- many of the early internet technology inventors appeared to
have a strong societal gifting ethic -- so (in my experience) from 1980 til at least 2000, much of the work towards manking the internet work and deploying it, was done by
people for free or for little personal gain in wealth terms (ok, so a lot of social
capital accrued, although often with people who didn't really do the main work) - youfind a lot of the internet architects also do other stuff they don't speak much about
(e.g. community nets in their home towns) - Bruce Maggs at Akamia/Duke, runs free
community wireless access - Kevin Fall  and other folks at Berkeley deploy wireless
mesh nets in develping countries ....

-- Creeping asymmetry (in the sense of apps, power, centralisation, access links, ability
to server as well as be a client) - we mentioned the "evil" that is centralisation andp0wning of personal data by Online Social Network behemoths but this is just part and parcel of the post gift-era Internet - and the failure to maintain symmetry of powerbetween all Internet uses goes right down to the wire (asymetric capacity on uplink &downlink for ADSL and for 3G/4G, lack of always on, globally reachable IP addresses,all the way up to stunning operating systems on appliance-like tablets and smart
phones so they can't act as servers or routers, blocking of P2P apps by ISPs, and so
on and so on...)

4. Future workshop possible themes

A. I agree having some social scientists study folks like clark/doyle/wroclaski
"doing architecture" to some new stuff
(my 3 examples, for example) might yield
useful some methodology for
re-use in education (in computer science/engineering courses).

B. doing something on what Jane Q. Public "think" the net is,
and how they (re-)invent uses for it would be good

C. It'd be good to get some people from industry (perhaps industrial design)
engaged too..


Quotes of the day:-

- the Internet is a Giraffe built out of fish parts.

- biological (bacteria's) and computers operating systems - create a facade of diversity.

- deconstraining constraints is important
(see also, layering,
 generative architectures,
 a la Turing M/C, ]
and the "art of programming language design.

We're mainly bacteria, but we're impressed with all the rest.


Aaron Sloman:

Ptolemy versus aristotle:
Philosophies that are closing versus opning up
(bit like closed v. open questions)

Alan blackwell:
Relevance is the enemy

A Waste of Mind

I was watching someone on the train the other day using an iPad - swooshing here, scrolling there, zooming here - they spend the best part of 45 minutes engaged in _navigating between and amongst apps - they spent very little time actually reading or viewing a given piece of content, or engaged in anything that looked even couch-potato-ish, let alone worthwhile productive intellectually stimulating pastimes - i.e. they were marginalised in the sense of being pushed to the margin of the universe of ideas by the sexiness of the UI, rather than pulled in to the actual creative work as a consumer or producer (as John Naughton has pointed out in his excellent memex blog, the iPad is a consumer device par excellence anyhow, not really a producer device, but nevertheless this person wasn't even consuming much, except in t he sense of being stimulated pointlessly by the whiz-bang-gee-core-lummyness of the groovy graphics Apple had devized.

This, coupled with adverts taking more and more eyeball time/screen real-estate, and attention, seems to me to be doing the very opposite of Mark Weiser's vision for calm computing.

I bet if you measure people's productivity (or their time spent gainfully involved in a fine ebook or movie or game even) it is falling lower and lower, whilst the bits of the brain that deal with being over-stimulated are going into over-drive - I bet if you measure people's stress-levels using this junk, you'll find that they are getting worse and worse.
I bet we could do a whole lot better - when I look at someone using a kindle (no, I am not trying to sell you amazon's gadget, nor do I have shares, I'm just using it as an example), with its ultra-stripped down UI, concentrating screen real estate and interface on one and one task only, you'd find calm, productive use of time and lower stress.

I reckon, as I've said elsewhere, that Apple (and others - Android phones and tablets are no better, since the Googleplex is just another PARC wannabe just like Apple), are basically at the point of Decline and Fall.

I bet a really good cultural historian could look at giant empires like Apple, and point to Gibbons fine work (or if you prefer, Isaac Asimov's re-setting of it in the Foundation "trilogy"), and see exactly the analogous signs of fin-de-siecle setting in - the concentration on the superficial (interface rather than content) the use of Ryan Air style tricks to turn a profit (change the plug/cable, instead of innovate like Nokia doing cordless charging:), basically decay, and rot and bloat and basically, decadence (love that word - say it slowly:- de-cadence).

There, that's better....

dilemma on your mind

so i was reading these fine papers due to a colleague pointing me at them:
and decided we need to re-christen these
the acursed dilemma,
the re-cursed dilemma
and
a theory of mindlessness

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/05/16/1206569109.full.pdf

this essentially then reduces to the ultimate game - viz

http://homepage.univie.ac.at/karl.sigmund/UltimatumScience00.pdf

Narrative Ark

Today's idea for a SF novel, entitled,
The Narrative Ark.

A collection of loosely linked tales about pairs of characters - bound together by representing the full range of human stories, being sent either as an education for aliens in other star systems, or else actually as a social-dna pool to rebuild all of earth as the old terra firma has been destroyed/stolen/lost - the ark
inhabitants (passengers) don't know....

 e.g.

The Laughing Cow and the Crying Wolf
The Tragicat and the Comidog
The Good and Bad Cops
etc

things to avoid
i) moses jokes
ii) too much similarity to the very excellent
Not Wanted on the Voyage
iii) any notion of god

un-Science Fiction and Dr Who

When I was growing up, a friend of mine, Josh Griefer, lived up the road and I'd go round a lot to lose at chess (worse, Go) and here stories - his father, Lewis Griefer, was a well known TV scriptwriter who penned words for the Avengers, the Prisoner, and a few Dr Who episodes- in the 1970s, when I was at University (first), in Trinity College every Saturday religiously, we'd gather in the junior common room to watch this - back in those days, it was nearly as good as now.

So what about the science? well, we'd laugh, because it was all so gloriously wrong - none so daft as the Sonic Screwdriver.

However, I distinctly remmeber going round to the Griefers' around that time and Josh's dad quizzing us about how you could make such a device work, and then mischiveously grinning when we said "you couldn't", saying "excellent, so I can use that plot device then".

Lewis was a very smart and amusing guy (sadly missed) and I believe that my memory is if not accurate, definitely in spirit with his work.

Dr Who continues to be gloriously wrong frequently. I don't think the current producers and writers are doing this out of ignorance, but in a great tradition of un-science fiction.

[oh, Lewis often signed his scripts "Joshua Adam" after his two sons, if you're looking things up on imdb or the like]

BGP and canals

who'd have think it, but there's a policy routing mechanism on your everyday british canal syste - when a richer canal company joined a lower one, they'd put in a gratuitous lock, to control the flow of water - i.e. tier 1 to tier 2 would make sure that people would always benefit the tier-1 in terms of water supply

so you get these itty bitty 6 inch high lock gates every now and then

of course, now its all british waterways board, so its one VPN sort of:)

The Psychology of Computer Programmers - Guest Posting by Libby Enstrom

The Psychology of Computer Programmers

Computer programmers understand human behavior from a goal-oriented, task-driven perspective. They assume that people want to accomplish the same tasks more quickly and receive benefits and satisfaction from improving processes. In short, programmers use applied psychology to add incentives for consumers to use their products. However, the incentives are often based in reality, not in cyberspace.

Saving time is one important goal that new applications strive to accomplish for their users. In addition to time, there are other “currencies” that coders can tap into. One recently developed website, called: “Confusometer,” helps students provide direct feedback to lectures.

Created by a professor at the University of Toronto, Liam Kaufman, the confusometer allows students with Internet access to record whether they understand the topic or do not. Users simply navigate to the website, either by laptop or mobile device, and press the red button if they do not understand. Once the material sinks in, they press the green button. Consequently, students no longer need to raise their hands to engage, which adds a ton of value to large lectures where many students do not want to interrupt such a large group.

The back end of the web site is another front end, of sorts. The website automatically forms a metric in real time, which visually represents the level of intelligibility of the subject to the class. The website is called “Understoodit.com.” It has been implemented successfully in over three undergraduate courses at the University of Toronto. Students love it. Professors swear by it. Business intelligence software developers could learn a lot from this simple program.

Professor Kaufman’s design demonstrates a number of important facets of a quickly emerging field: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Firstly, technology has improved to the point of allowing non-professionals to devise their own programs. This trend is likely to steepen in the near future, and it importantly saves programmers a lot of homework. Instead of devising particular apps that will perform one range of tasks, developers are focusing on creating platforms that support modification to the platform itself. Facebook, for instance, supports social applications. Spotify, one app that is integrated with Facebook, nests its own applications on top of that. Given the increased ease of designing applications, it may not take long before business software enables employees to devise their own programs to save time, money, and work.

More general applications rely on principles that guide human interaction. Just as the colors green and red are used by “Understoodit.com” to tap into students’ preconceived notions of go and stop, Apple uses other, even more basic assumptions to help consumers interact with products.

Note-taking and mind-mapping are two areas that facilitate understanding and are sometimes combined. Essentially, these apps help users to visualize the relationships between facts, ideas, pictures and concepts. Users can input notes, then connect them, break them apart, and otherwise manipulate them to accurately represent their ideas in a graphical format. In the construction of these programs, Apple taps into the popularity of visual thinking, the penchant that most people have for thinking visually. By giving its users the ability to see their ideas represented in a graphical environment, the company essentially allows consumers to play to their own mental strength.

For more specific applications, such as Professor Kaufman’s, programmers would need to have direct experience with the goals, values, and processes of the people they aim to help. By developing platforms that support programming innovations, coders are essentially saving themselves a lot of homework and working to give users the tools they need to improve their own lives, in whatever “currency” they deem most valuable.

The Net Ends

Not the net at all - just a blatant plea for sponsorship for this ride we;re doing in just over a week's time:)
https://www.justgiving.com/JonAndTeam

ACE Talk by Brian Carpenter

Nice talk about Turing's ACE report today in the Wednesday seminar series - nice to reflect on the delta between the ACE and the Raspberry PI (700-fold speedup in 60 years, but also a reduction in development costs of about 1Million:) Was interesting to reflect on people being told "do not do X"....viz Maurice Wilkes told us not to try building the Turing Switch idea, and the EPSRC told Peter Kirstein to stop building the internet.... some of them are not wrong, sometimes....

Dice and Decideability

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

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/

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

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.

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!

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.

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

Slow Start and Congestion Control for a Snowbound day

I am supposed to be en route to paris via the normally excellent and affordable Eurostar train. As it happens there has been some quite awful weather including temperatues hitting -10C on the northen french bit of the route yesterday, so there were some speed restrictions and some problems with trackside kit etc etc - this is not unreasonable, except that it is probably one of the busiest weekends in the year.

I'm guessing that during a normal holiday day,
they haveabout 6 operational trains on london<->paris,
given there's about 1 train an hour and
its 2.5 hours + buffer/turnaround...

So yesterday, what we had here could be modelled as a massive TCP
congestion event (rather than packet loss, we got train loss)
with > 1/2 a windows worth of trains cancelled, plus a sudden increase in RTT.

So now today (correctly) the window is down to 1 train per RTT,
whichis 6 times less than normal, and slow start is happening,
so in about ln(6) (say 3) RTTs we'll be back up to speed -
so thats 18 hrs.

In that time, some of the latent demand will fade
(people like me probably cancel trip as we have no alernative,
or some people postpone (e.g. "cancel christmas" or "convert to Islam", since they seem to get less snow, or
perhaps find alternative...

If i was desperate, I'd use this old

Boat Train service, although the crossing might be pretty dreadful at this time of year.

There don't appear to be any flights from anywhere today, and practically none tomorrow either.

A New Internet Theory

As many of you know,
I have been striving to apply a number of more
scientific approaches to networking in general,
and the Internet specifically.

To this end, I ended up teaching the final year
undergrads this year
(who of course may not be as final as they think
given the impending part III option)
a whole bunch of underpinning theories, including
Information, Graph, Control, Queueing, and Optimisation

Now, these are all fine theories,
but they all have the twin massive disadvantages of:
1. being to hard to apply in any realistic scenario
2, being empirically falsifiable

What we need truly to model the Internet is a
simple, powerful, and incotrovertable Grand Unified Theory -
in Physics, they have such a theory and it is String.

So can we apply string theory to the Internet?

Yes, I think we can.

Firstly, obviosuly, the Internet looks a lot like string.
But (as physicists like doing) we can play cats cradle with the string.
Thus we can model the static and dyanmical evolution of the Internet
Lopology.

Closed Loops of string could be used to model packets.
Forwarding packets would be like "throwing someone a line".
Indeed, fowarding table entries, Link State Advertisement packets, AS
Path announcements, and packets themselves would all be elegantly
caputured using the same flixible little ring-like structure.

Elasticity ("how long is a piece of string" == QoS)
can finally be used to model traffic control and pricing
in a pleasingly coherent way.

String is a veryful thing in models.
Although Robust Operational Parameterized Estimators
are thicker, string is very quick to apply. And of course it
can offer a perfectly good model for multiplexing, as well as
giving straightforward explantory and predictive techniques for
understanding Kandinsky Network Operational Tantrums
which have resisted all previous analysis.

If nothing else,
when under persistent cyberattack,
the whole Internet unravels,
we can use the residue to help
wrap up christmas presents.

I shall be working on this over the break
and hope to bring convincing results
back from the brink in the new year.

The Terrible Internet Buffer Overrun Disaster of 2012

Jim Gettys was visiting here recently and we spent most of the day discussing the terrible Buffer Overrun Disaster of 2012 - Young folks probably wont remember this, but back in those days, we used to overprovision buffers everywhere, and I mean everywhere, even between a socket and a protocol wrench, a bolt and a spanner , and the nick and the stack. This meant TCPs all around the world would get all pumped up and full of themselves, which was ok when there were just those old internet creeks which you couldn't fit a paper boat down, but as soon as the floodgates opened on the old fiber to the hip, everything went pearshaped, and I mean without a paddle.

The congestive flu-like collapse of 1987 was as nothing to this - noone could get their mutter feeds, everyone was stalled on their 3HDIPTV Christmas participatory viewing of Avatar III, and the world economy tanked, again.

This was a classic xen-koan story - less is more - by simply introducing the deliberate-memory-leak virus in her TCP-Budapest, Magda (von) Kiss was able to "take out" all that unnecessary buffering at one swell foop. Later upgrades to the hardware recovered the now-wasted DRAM, and recycled it as Casino tokens in Vegas and Reno, closing the loop on a very, very old joke.

Homeopathetic Order Logic

HOL proposes some proof techniques based on the dysmal logic, but extending it to include

proof by dilution (e.g. the 7% solution)
proof by inflation (a universal technique)
proof by surprise (creep up on the proof and exclaim)
proof by diabolization (a fiendish geometric technique)
proof by familiarity ("our old friend...")
proof by indignation ("how can you not realize...")
proof by deformation (if we just twist this a bit here...)
proof by defamation (oh, your one of those people)
proof by descent
proof by geology (that's been known since the pre-cambrian era)

Other techniques are also on offer
for example Adenoid's theorem allows the use of a nerdy american accent, while Mellencamp's method entails loud hard rocking, an the Baker's theorem makes repeated use of the equivalence between 12 and thirteen, while La Mirror's method involves deep reflection. Monroe's doctrine is a died-in-the-wool surefire approach for even the dumbest of people. Finally Gillette's Razor can be employed to separate the sheep from the goats.


Recently I was reading Jorge Luis Borges Imaginary Beings, which refers to the 'Celestial Empire of benevolent Knowledge' in which animals are taxonomised thus:
(a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame,
(d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous,
(g) stray dogs,
(h) included in the present classification,
(i) frenzied, (j) innumerable,
(k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
(l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher,
(n) that from a long way off look like flies.

roll over linaeus
much better than Fire, Women and Dangerous Things

calm networking

so some people live event driven lives - the internet just makes this worse, and the fact that people have an order of magnitude more "friends" on facebook, than in Real Life, just means that the interrupt rate soars and attention span withers and noone gets anything done anymore - this is the True Cause of the recession, not stupid greedy bankers at all...

anyhow, so if we all revert to old (uucp style, for the older readers) connectivity and make delay tolerant use of the interweb, then noone can expect us to see an email (let alone answer it) until the next day - this would also allow perfect statistical multiplexing (and resource pooling) of the network - people are already timeshifting when they watch TV programs (via netflix/lovefilm, or via iPlayer in the UK) - so this is timeshifting when you deal with what USED to be asynchronous communication....

I think we could charge people more money for this apparently less reliable service... ... ...

maybe call it calmail or the retreat from realtime

Funding 4G deployment...

so there's a common thread in current stories in the regulatory, economic and technical community concerning the deployment of 4G very fast wireless/cellular data services).

It goes like this:

1.demand is growing exponentially

2.revenue only grows linearly with number of users

3. ergo, we can't afford to deploy 4G

there's a couple of things wrong with this argument.
1. cost of deployment doesn't necessarily grow exponentially with capacity - there are
a) aggregation factors; b) energy cost savings with newer kit; c) new tricks (cooperative relaying from multiple masts).

2. revenue does grow - lots of users pay a lot more for unlimited data service contracts on than they did for voice/txt message contracts and also for very limited 2.5G (GPRS/Edge) typical volume limited services - If 35M people in the UK were paying a typical unlimited data contract, of, currently around 30 pounds per month, that is 12billion pounds per year - that is quite enough to deploy LTE.

3. revenue from the other side of the net also grows (if more people download more video, youtube and the BBC etc have to buy more high speed services from fixed net providers - these are non trivial income streams

someone is telling porkie pies.

why the interweb in 201 has become pandora's box

almost literally- the legend was that when Pandora's box was opened, many things escaped but the lid was shut just in time to stop Hope getting out.

So as the Internet gives away all our privacy and lets people share TOo Much Information in ways that erode the weak social walled gardens that let different viewpoints coexist in some sort of vague harmony, governments start to put the lid on the one Hope, that the Internet might also let us know What is Really Going On and Have a Say in it instead of having our lives run and our intercourse mediated by creeps in suits.....as the East demands RIM give them access to all blackberry mail, and CHina blocks this that and everything, what Hope is left?

Answer's on a blog comment (we know where you live)

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
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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.