I'm reading the Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, and have just got to the section on Politics. Pinker distinguishes between the Utopian Vision, which assumes man is perfectible on earth, if his environment can be improved, and the Tragic Vision, which assumes that Human Nature is complex, and you need to arrange society with this in mind.
This reminds me of a discussion David W and I had last year on the non-zero blog, where I said 'there are those who see in the seedier side of the web the darkness of their own souls, for we are all fallen creatures, and the line between good and evil runs through all our hearts.'
I see from Theodore Dalrymple's essay on Macbeth, which expresses the Tragic Vision clearly, that I was unconsciously quoting Solzhenitsyn, before I quoted Nietzsche & Wilde too.
If we are to construct new public selves online, and move to an Emergent Democracy, we need to keep both these visions in mind, and ensure that the frameworks we work within are suffused with the checks and balances that the Tragic Visionaries brought to the design of the US Constitution, tempering the Utopian view.
Friday 28 February 2003
Wednesday 26 February 2003
A real Universal Turing machine
David Weinberger is worried about the 'Universe as Computer ' idea, and confused by some metaphors, and wishes we'd stick to something comfortably obscure, like quantum mechanics.
David, I think what Kelly is getting at is quantum mechanics- Hydrogen bonds with Oxygen by finding the minimum energy state, thus solving a complex wavefunction equation with a single quantum resolution (join or not join). In effect all the probabilities are evaluated at once in the quantum superposition. Not sure what that has to do with Wolfram's thesis though.
Universe as Computer does explain determinism differently. Wolfram shows that complexity can emerge from very simple rules, in Cellular automata and many other interacting systems. However, although deterministic, they are not predictable. The only way to find out what comes next is to run the program.
He proposes a theory of computational equivalence, based on the Church-Turing thesis that any sufficiently advanced computer can simulate any other. He shows that he can make a Turing-complete computer from his simple cellular automaton with the emergent complexity, and thus it could perform any computation. Running a program will take the same amount of time (to within an order approximation - eg Order(n) Order (n2), or whatever).
Thus although the world is deterministic, following known physical laws, you can't find an analytic solution that gives the answer - there are no short cuts.
You just have to live it and see what happens next.
David, I think what Kelly is getting at is quantum mechanics- Hydrogen bonds with Oxygen by finding the minimum energy state, thus solving a complex wavefunction equation with a single quantum resolution (join or not join). In effect all the probabilities are evaluated at once in the quantum superposition. Not sure what that has to do with Wolfram's thesis though.
Universe as Computer does explain determinism differently. Wolfram shows that complexity can emerge from very simple rules, in Cellular automata and many other interacting systems. However, although deterministic, they are not predictable. The only way to find out what comes next is to run the program.
He proposes a theory of computational equivalence, based on the Church-Turing thesis that any sufficiently advanced computer can simulate any other. He shows that he can make a Turing-complete computer from his simple cellular automaton with the emergent complexity, and thus it could perform any computation. Running a program will take the same amount of time (to within an order approximation - eg Order(n) Order (n2), or whatever).
Thus although the world is deterministic, following known physical laws, you can't find an analytic solution that gives the answer - there are no short cuts.
You just have to live it and see what happens next.
Friday 21 February 2003
Trussed Computing for Office
Microsoft has decided that Office's ability to make documents unreadable unless you're running the same version is a feature, not a bug, and now require you to conenct to a server as well.
A user's computer must be able to access the Windows Server 2003 running RMS on first opening a document to authenticate the rights and decrypt the document. Otherwise, the document cannot be opened. In the future, Microsoft plans to offer an "offline" rights authentication mechanism, but not with this version of RMS.
Other issues affecting the portability of rights associated with documents could cause other problems. Nash claimed that RMS is "platform agnostic"--meaning it will work with any operating system--in that "Windows Rights Management supports industry standards." But for people to be able to access RMS-protected documents on, say, Mac OS X or Linux, the operating systems must use XrML (Extensible Rights Markup Language) in the same way Microsoft does. In that case, "there is the opportunity for interoperability of document interchange," Nash said. Otherwise, the document could not be opened on the non-Windows operating system.
The same restriction in one sense applies to other Windows users. "If you shared the document with another Windows user and that Windows user hadn't installed (RMS), that other Windows user couldn't open the document as well," Nash said.
This is exactly what James Grimmelman explains in detail won't work, and why.
A user's computer must be able to access the Windows Server 2003 running RMS on first opening a document to authenticate the rights and decrypt the document. Otherwise, the document cannot be opened. In the future, Microsoft plans to offer an "offline" rights authentication mechanism, but not with this version of RMS.
Other issues affecting the portability of rights associated with documents could cause other problems. Nash claimed that RMS is "platform agnostic"--meaning it will work with any operating system--in that "Windows Rights Management supports industry standards." But for people to be able to access RMS-protected documents on, say, Mac OS X or Linux, the operating systems must use XrML (Extensible Rights Markup Language) in the same way Microsoft does. In that case, "there is the opportunity for interoperability of document interchange," Nash said. Otherwise, the document could not be opened on the non-Windows operating system.
The same restriction in one sense applies to other Windows users. "If you shared the document with another Windows user and that Windows user hadn't installed (RMS), that other Windows user couldn't open the document as well," Nash said.
This is exactly what James Grimmelman explains in detail won't work, and why.
Google's unique insight into Blogging
The growth of weblogs has been a classic disruptive technology event, with adoption and traffic driven by individuals rather than corporations. Google has had a leading edge insight into this because of the objectivity of the PageRank algorithm in measuring the connectedness of the web. Weblogs are a powerful driver of the emergent ordering of websites that Google tracks - I was able to get my son's website to be the top result for both 'andrew marks' and 'funniest stories' on Google by mentioning it on my weblog and having it picked up by other webloggers who found it amusing.
The Weblogs and power laws paper I wrote makes clear how important the long tail of webloggers is to the number of links online - they have a census view of links at Google, and can see how big and important the tail really is, even though their business is showing others only the head.
Most other web traffic measurement sites are following pageviews, and not considering power law distributions, so they will show the high end bias I discussed in the power law paper.
The Weblogs and power laws paper I wrote makes clear how important the long tail of webloggers is to the number of links online - they have a census view of links at Google, and can see how big and important the tail really is, even though their business is showing others only the head.
Most other web traffic measurement sites are following pageviews, and not considering power law distributions, so they will show the high end bias I discussed in the power law paper.
Monday 17 February 2003
Googles origins hint about Blogger future?
Brad DeLong quotes Larry Page - a hint of what the Blogger purchase might bring?
Larry Page: "It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web--build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank.
"Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation..."
Larry Page: "It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web--build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank.
"Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation..."
Blog Power Laws revisited
I've done a detailed analysis of Power laws as applied to Weblogs, Newspapers and Movies.
The conclusions I come to are:
The conclusions I come to are:
- Weblog links do follow a power law
- This saturates less quickly than other media, due to low barriers to entry
- Therefore the many lightly linked weblogs outnumber the few heavily linked ones
Sunday 16 February 2003
Google buys blogger
Dan Gillmor breaks the news that Google has bought Pyra Labs, who run Blogger, and host this weblog. Sounds good to me, especially if it helps them get the updated version i was asking for a couple of posts below out sooner, better & more reliably.
Friday 14 February 2003
Power to the people
Can I just point out the irony that Dave Sifry's blogs are currently ranked at numbers 1 & 2 on 'Interesting Newcomers' and 4 & 5 on 'Interesting Recent Blogs'... no wonder he likes these new metrics.
One thing I haven't seen anyone mention is that in general power law relationships are subject to rapid flux. The field is sometimes known as 'catastrophe theory' for this reason - that upheavals follow a power law too.
More is made of this aspect in 'Ubiquity' than in 'Emergence', but they are two halves of the same phenomenon as far as I can see.
One thing I haven't seen anyone mention is that in general power law relationships are subject to rapid flux. The field is sometimes known as 'catastrophe theory' for this reason - that upheavals follow a power law too.
More is made of this aspect in 'Ubiquity' than in 'Emergence', but they are two halves of the same phenomenon as far as I can see.
Thursday 13 February 2003
Masterclass in indexing
Tim Oren (who just joined my blogroll) explains the difference between Bayesian networks and Latent Semantic Mapping, for the benefit of me, David Weinberger,and anyone else interested in these two approaches to email spam filtering and other interesting classification problems.
Woodstock win todays award for cluelessness
This isn't really worth the time to pick it to bits, but just in case anyone is tempted...
Woodstock�s Approach to Digital Audio File Borrowing and Lending
Patent-Pending Technology that Replicates Physical World
Woodstock Systems has developed a set of patent pending technologies to replicate the physical world digitally, across the Internet. The technologies allow one friend to authorize another friend to borrow music from their PC. When one borrows a music track, it is streamed, in real time, to their PC from the lending machine. During the lending process, a full copy of the digital audio file is never created; either on the borrowing device or the lending device. Only small temporary chunks are streamed as needed. The chunks are never fully assembled on the destination device.The chunks only reside in the RAM of the computers. They never are stored on the Hard Drive or in any form of semi-permanent or permanent cache.
All chunks are encrypted during the process, making it impossible to make an exact digital copy even if the chunks could be captured and reassembled at the borrowing device.
1) Hook up an audio cable. Press record.
2) Capture the audio at the driver level, and spool to a file
While you have the track borrowed, the lending machine designates the entire album on which the track belongs to as �borrowed�. The borrowed album is then virtually in possession of the borrower. All devices except the one borrowing device are restricted from rendering (playing) any track from this album. Even the owner�s PC where the full file resides cannot listen to the track while it is borrowed. This provides all the same controls and restrictions as in the real world when someone physically borrows a CD.
Why on earth would anyone install this ramshackle Rube Goldberg software when they could IM an MP3? Where's the incentive?
What happens when the connection goes down and suddenly you're locked out of your own songs because someone borrowed them? This makes Microsoft's notorious one-machine key WMA files look user-friendly.
A Secure User to User Network
We believe that the Woodstock approach creates a powerful mechanism enabling consumers to discover new music from their most trusted source, their friends.
As long as they don't want to listen to it together, and are both online simultaneously.
Additionally, unlike other P2P solutions, the Woodstock System�s audio file technology is structured as a true User to User network. Only users specifically authorized by the owner of the lending PC can access a lending PC. This is not an open P2P network where anyone around the globe can access your music tracks.This is a secure, private system in which there is no central database or central �nodes� where an index of music tracks can be found.
No-one can find anything. That's a feature?
Only users who have been specifically authorized to borrow tracks from a device can access and see the content or indexes of content on that device. Though the music is streamed in real time, this is different from Internet radio in that only one device can listen to an album at a time. It is a one-to-one streaming technique. One-to-many streaming is fully restricted. For the music industry, it creates a very powerful Digital form of Word of Mouth marketing while legally and ethically respecting the rights of the artists, labels and related copyright holders.
Word of mouth needs fan-out to have a chance of working at all. These restraints would kill it dead, assuming anyone was daft enough to install software that stops them playing the songs on their own machine in the first place.
Key Points:
One User at a Time: Only one device can listen to an album containing the audio track at anytime. If someone is borrowing a track, the album cannot be listened to on the device which lent the track, or any other device.
Hang on, you lock me out of the whole album now?
Intellectual Property Status
The technologies described are Patent Pending.
Good. I hope that stops anyone else doing something equally foolish.
Woodstock�s Approach to Digital Audio File Borrowing and Lending
Patent-Pending Technology that Replicates Physical World
Woodstock Systems has developed a set of patent pending technologies to replicate the physical world digitally, across the Internet. The technologies allow one friend to authorize another friend to borrow music from their PC. When one borrows a music track, it is streamed, in real time, to their PC from the lending machine. During the lending process, a full copy of the digital audio file is never created; either on the borrowing device or the lending device. Only small temporary chunks are streamed as needed. The chunks are never fully assembled on the destination device.The chunks only reside in the RAM of the computers. They never are stored on the Hard Drive or in any form of semi-permanent or permanent cache.
All chunks are encrypted during the process, making it impossible to make an exact digital copy even if the chunks could be captured and reassembled at the borrowing device.
1) Hook up an audio cable. Press record.
2) Capture the audio at the driver level, and spool to a file
While you have the track borrowed, the lending machine designates the entire album on which the track belongs to as �borrowed�. The borrowed album is then virtually in possession of the borrower. All devices except the one borrowing device are restricted from rendering (playing) any track from this album. Even the owner�s PC where the full file resides cannot listen to the track while it is borrowed. This provides all the same controls and restrictions as in the real world when someone physically borrows a CD.
Why on earth would anyone install this ramshackle Rube Goldberg software when they could IM an MP3? Where's the incentive?
What happens when the connection goes down and suddenly you're locked out of your own songs because someone borrowed them? This makes Microsoft's notorious one-machine key WMA files look user-friendly.
A Secure User to User Network
We believe that the Woodstock approach creates a powerful mechanism enabling consumers to discover new music from their most trusted source, their friends.
As long as they don't want to listen to it together, and are both online simultaneously.
Additionally, unlike other P2P solutions, the Woodstock System�s audio file technology is structured as a true User to User network. Only users specifically authorized by the owner of the lending PC can access a lending PC. This is not an open P2P network where anyone around the globe can access your music tracks.This is a secure, private system in which there is no central database or central �nodes� where an index of music tracks can be found.
No-one can find anything. That's a feature?
Only users who have been specifically authorized to borrow tracks from a device can access and see the content or indexes of content on that device. Though the music is streamed in real time, this is different from Internet radio in that only one device can listen to an album at a time. It is a one-to-one streaming technique. One-to-many streaming is fully restricted. For the music industry, it creates a very powerful Digital form of Word of Mouth marketing while legally and ethically respecting the rights of the artists, labels and related copyright holders.
Word of mouth needs fan-out to have a chance of working at all. These restraints would kill it dead, assuming anyone was daft enough to install software that stops them playing the songs on their own machine in the first place.
Key Points:
One User at a Time: Only one device can listen to an album containing the audio track at anytime. If someone is borrowing a track, the album cannot be listened to on the device which lent the track, or any other device.
Hang on, you lock me out of the whole album now?
Intellectual Property Status
The technologies described are Patent Pending.
Good. I hope that stops anyone else doing something equally foolish.
Wednesday 12 February 2003
Posted from NetNewswire Pro
NetNewsWire Pro 1.0 is now shipping
If you read weblogs on a Mac, you want this. Download it, and pay up if you like it (I did both).
(Due to a gap in the blogger API, I have to add the title afterwards in the browser. Hurry up with the new back ende, chaps).
If you read weblogs on a Mac, you want this. Download it, and pay up if you like it (I did both).
(Due to a gap in the blogger API, I have to add the title afterwards in the browser. Hurry up with the new back ende, chaps).
Sunday 9 February 2003
Small countries for rent
Boing Boing says The entire country of Lichtenstein is available for rent for parties, Bar Mitzvahs, and the like.
If the price is right, the prince will probably co-operate.
I once had the very odd experience of visting Astra's head office in Luxembourg - it felt just like a Bond villains lair. Astra is the company that operates the Geosynchronous satellites over Europe for BSkyB and others.
I flew into Luxembourg, and was driven out into the countryside. We went though manned security guards, then automatic security gates, and then parked in front of a nice old-looking country house. Inside, we were ushered into a Philippe Starck-style shiny glass and metal conference room, where we met the smooth european executives of the company.
Then they gave us the site tour. We went into a huge room with over 200 TV screens on the wall - this was the broadcast ops centre, showing the TV channels going to and from the satellites. In the next room there was a big screen showing satellite schematics, and orbital parmeters. They have 12 satellites in the same slot, all within a few hunderd yards of each other, and they have to manouver them so they stay pointed at all those dishes from this Mission Control centre. Finally, we went outside and saw the 12 hundred-foot high dishes that send the uplink streams.
I complimented our hosts on the place and its location. "Oh yes" said one "this is a nice castle - it used to belong to the Prince; he was born here".
Of course, if I wanted to rent a samll country, I'd pick Seborga
"The basic idea is that an entire, small country plays host to a conference with all the various possibilities at its disposal," said Roland Buechel, director of the state tourism agency in Liechtenstein, which covers an area of 60 square miles..."It is not envisioned to include the prince or government officials," Buechel said.
If the price is right, the prince will probably co-operate.
I once had the very odd experience of visting Astra's head office in Luxembourg - it felt just like a Bond villains lair. Astra is the company that operates the Geosynchronous satellites over Europe for BSkyB and others.
I flew into Luxembourg, and was driven out into the countryside. We went though manned security guards, then automatic security gates, and then parked in front of a nice old-looking country house. Inside, we were ushered into a Philippe Starck-style shiny glass and metal conference room, where we met the smooth european executives of the company.
Then they gave us the site tour. We went into a huge room with over 200 TV screens on the wall - this was the broadcast ops centre, showing the TV channels going to and from the satellites. In the next room there was a big screen showing satellite schematics, and orbital parmeters. They have 12 satellites in the same slot, all within a few hunderd yards of each other, and they have to manouver them so they stay pointed at all those dishes from this Mission Control centre. Finally, we went outside and saw the 12 hundred-foot high dishes that send the uplink streams.
I complimented our hosts on the place and its location. "Oh yes" said one "this is a nice castle - it used to belong to the Prince; he was born here".
Of course, if I wanted to rent a samll country, I'd pick Seborga
Thursday 6 February 2003
Copyright elucidated
Mark Nadel has written the most heavily footnoted paper I've seen, but it is a clear summary of the copyright arguments. If only he'd done it as HTML with links instead of PDF with per-page footnotes it would be the perfect resource.
Monday 3 February 2003
For Columbia's crew
I posted this elegaic performance of 'For a Dancer' before. I think it is appropriate.
A change of tide?
I notice that the immanent changes in how music generates cash is getting more and more coverage.
Janis Ian points out that the latest RIAA lawsuit threatens musicians more than ISPs; John Snyder writes a long piece in Salon reiterating (and linking to) many of the arguments from the last year, but with the aim of getting NARAS to counterbalance the RIAA.
Harvard Law have a great roundup of key papers and a good summary.
William Fisher's upcoming book again looks thorough, but judging by the introduction leans far too closely to the model of indirect payment via taxation of loosely-related goods and statistical sampling of 'watermarks', as Neil Netanel similarly proposes. This scheme will never be flexible enough to get much further down the Zipf distribution of media creation than the top fraction of a percent that the exisiting publishing model serves. Jonathan Peterson explains what 'amateur' really means.
(Oh, and Maf, I spelled 'immanent' right).
Janis Ian points out that the latest RIAA lawsuit threatens musicians more than ISPs; John Snyder writes a long piece in Salon reiterating (and linking to) many of the arguments from the last year, but with the aim of getting NARAS to counterbalance the RIAA.
Harvard Law have a great roundup of key papers and a good summary.
William Fisher's upcoming book again looks thorough, but judging by the introduction leans far too closely to the model of indirect payment via taxation of loosely-related goods and statistical sampling of 'watermarks', as Neil Netanel similarly proposes. This scheme will never be flexible enough to get much further down the Zipf distribution of media creation than the top fraction of a percent that the exisiting publishing model serves. Jonathan Peterson explains what 'amateur' really means.
(Oh, and Maf, I spelled 'immanent' right).
Corante - get RSS for your blogs
I've read and linked to several Corante blogs recently - Donna Wentworth, Chris Locke, Arnold Kling and now Jonathan Peterson and Dana Blankenhorn have joined in.
Together they make a great addition to anyone's blogroll, and a splendid source for news on the topics I'm interested in, and all the authors understand that this is an ongoing conversation, and take feedback criticism and even parody well.
However, Corante hasn't yet managed to generate RSS feeds for them all, so I have to remember to check them manually. This means I read them less often than I otherwise would - that's why they're in the 'weekly' rather than 'daily' section of my blogroll.
(I tidied up some others too. If I messed up your link, let me know).
Together they make a great addition to anyone's blogroll, and a splendid source for news on the topics I'm interested in, and all the authors understand that this is an ongoing conversation, and take feedback criticism and even parody well.
However, Corante hasn't yet managed to generate RSS feeds for them all, so I have to remember to check them manually. This means I read them less often than I otherwise would - that's why they're in the 'weekly' rather than 'daily' section of my blogroll.
(I tidied up some others too. If I messed up your link, let me know).