Internet Changes Everything: November 2003 Archives

November 30, 2003

Common Look and Feel for the Internet

Welcome to the Web site for Common Look and Feel. The Web site has been developed to assist federal government departments and agencies with the implementation of the Treasury Board Common Look and Feel (CLF) Standards. With the implementation of CLF Standards across Government of Canada Internet Web sites, Canadians will be able to distinguish federal programs and services from others and successfully navigate from one federal site to another to find the information they need.

Common Look and Feel for the Internet

About Common Look and Feel (CLF)
Background on how and why the Common Look and Feel initiative was undertaken, Purpose, Audience, Application, CLF Implementation date.

Common Look and Feel Self-Assessment Guide
The CLF Self-Assessment Guide has been developed by the Treasury Board Secretariat for departments and agencies to determine the compliance level of their Internet Web sites with the Common Look and Feel Standards.

Government of Canada Internet Guide
The Internet Guide supports the Government of Canada's Government On-line (GOL) initiative by giving you a resource to help you put your services and information on-line.

Internet Advisory Committee (IAC) - Internet Forum
The Treasury Board Senior Advisory Committee Information Management Sub-Committee (TBSAC) approved a government-wide Internet strategy in March 1995. This strategy established the interdepartmental Internet Advisory Committee. In the fall of 1995, a "Forum Web site" started to support the Internet Advisory Committee and its working groups.

DRAFT - Common Look and Feel (CLF) Standards and Guidelines for Intranets, Extranets and Other Electronic Networks
In June 2001 Treasury Board Secretariat, under the auspices of the Internet Advisory Committee, organized an interdepartmental Working Group tasked with developing recommendations for CLF Standards and Guidelines for implementation on institutional intranets, extranets and other electronic networks. These recommendations, modeled on standards and guidelines for the Internet, are presented in this document.

For further information about Common Look and Feel for the Internet please contact us at clf-upe@tbs-sct.gc.ca.

November 30, 2003 at 07:56 PM in Business Models | Permalink | TrackBack (116) | Top of page | Blog Home

November 29, 2003

Yahoo! News - Holidays Seen Bringing More Online Sales

Nov 28, 6:46 PM ETAdd Technology - Reuters Internet Report to My Yahoo!

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Moms and dads sick of refereeing fights through toy store aisles after Friday's official start of holiday shopping are likely to punch up purchases online, sending Web sales for the season sharply higher.

"It's a good year for a change," said Patrick Gates, senior vice president of e-commerce at America Online, a division of Time Warner Inc (NYSE:TWX - news). "This year looks very, very encouraging."

The day after Thanksgiving is known as Black Friday because it once marked the day when retailers got out of the red.

Daniel Sullivan, president and CEO of FedEx Corp.'s (NYSE:FDX - news) ground shipment division, told Reuters Television he expects sales and shipments from e-commerce and consumer electronics items, such as pricey plasma televisions, to give the business a boost this season.

"We're seeing more high-value areas than we've seen in other years," he said, adding he expected revenues and volume from residential customer shipments to grow by "solid double digits."

Indeed, Forrester Research estimated online sales between Thanksgiving and Christmas to soar 42 percent over last year to $12.2 billion.

Separately, Jupiter Research found 40 percent of people it polled in a survey said they planned to do some of their shopping on the Internet this year, up 18 percent from a year ago.

First-time online shoppers were lured by heavy discounting in past years, only to leave in droves over shoddy customer service. But now online retailers are touting easier-to-use product comparison tools, said Gates, who spoke with Reuters Television.

In fact, improved comparison tools run by Ask Jeeves Inc (Nasdaq:ASKJ - news) and CNET Networks Inc., combined with perennial incentives like free shipping and the ability to find gifts in stores located near your home, are helping to bring shoppers back online.

Gates said the Web's benefits are likely to spill over to traditional retailers as customers window-shop online before heading out to join the long lines at cash registers.

Such tools are likely to help AOL's own retail sales growth to rise in line with industry estimates of 25 to 42 percent in the fourth quarter.

November 29, 2003 at 09:41 PM in Online Marketing | Permalink | TrackBack (2) | Top of page | Blog Home

Forrester Brief - 2005: Europe's Online Display Ads Top Euro 1 Billion

Internet advertising is going is the opposite of what we all think, or is it! Accordig to all the latest research, and this Forrester brief is consistent with the thought, people are in fact clicking online banner ad's, and they are answering spam emails.

Two factors cited by Forrester:
- Broadband increases consumption
- Media fragmentation reduces the impact of other channels

I buy the factors and how they influence internet usage in many ways, but I am in denial about the online advertising piece. It must be one of those percentage plays ... thinking about the two factors above .... despite all the complaints we are notcing online ad's, and given we are online more (broadband) we are noticing them even more relative to TV & newspaper.

Bottom line, we can't argue with the facts, so it'll be interesting to see how online ad's play out.

November 29, 2003 at 08:00 PM in Online Marketing | Permalink | TrackBack (84) | Top of page | Blog Home

TheStar.com - Bill Gates beats back bugs

Microsoft fights back, and will embed virus software within Windows for Longhorn. Since first announcing Trustworty Computing in 2001, the association with Computer Associates is vrey significant, and doesn't bode well for McAfee and Symantec.

TYLER HAMILTON
TECHNOLOGY REPORTER

When the Blaster and SoBig viruses hit the Internet in August, they infected millions of Microsoft-based home and business computers, bogged down corporate networks and caused billions of dollars in direct and indirect damages.

It was another payday for security-software firms, which have typically benefited over the years from highly publicized Internet attacks that exploit new-found vulnerabilities in Microsoft software.

Not surprisingly, the Blaster and SoBig scares boosted sales of anti-virus products from industry leaders such as Symantec Corp. and Network Associates Inc. Knee-jerk investors, excited by dire predictions of more frequent and destructive cyber attacks, bid up these companies' shares in the weeks that followed.

But the party was short-lived. Investors were given notice Nov. 18 that the security-software industry was anything but a secure bet. On this day, software titan Microsoft Corp. announced a seemingly innocuous partnership with Computer Associates International Inc. that, as part of a one-year deal, would put free anti-virus software into the hands of millions of consumers.

"Make no mistake, this free security product offering is a tectonic shift in thinking," wrote D.K. Matai, executive chairman of British-based computer-security consultancy Mi2g, in a report titled "The day the computer software industry changed."

Matai and other analysts read between the lines. They recognized the Microsoft-CA partnership as a one-year delay of the inevitable.

It is now widely believed that Microsoft has plans to integrate anti-virus software directly into its next-generation Windows operating system, dubbed Longhorn. The move is expected to virtually annihilate competing retail products and further extend the giant's monopoly into specific areas of computer security, perhaps including anti-spam software.

"Once the anti-virus feature is available as part of the Microsoft platform, a lot of the consumer market will go away," said Laura Koetzle, senior analyst with Forrester Research, a technology consultancy in Cambridge, Mass.

It may seem like the makings of another antitrust battle, but good or bad, the general consensus is that Microsoft has no choice.

Two years earlier, a number of gutsy hacker attacks and high-profile viruses such as Code Red and Nimda called into question whether the security of Microsoft's operating systems and applications could be trusted. The problem was exacerbated when Microsoft's own internal corporate network had been the target of a successful cyber attack.

Eager to avoid more damage to its brand, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates released an employee memo Jan. 15, 2001, titled "Trustworthy Computing." In it, he announced that security had become a top priority for the company at every level, "from the way we develop software, to our support efforts, to our operational and business practices."

Despite this initiative, the public-relations crisis Gates was hoping to silence has since amplified. Software is getting more complex, not simpler, and as more consumers and corporations conduct online transactions over high-speed links, they expose themselves to greater risk.

In September, a report from Symantec concluded the global epidemic of Internet viruses is intensifying dramatically, resulting in "overloads to network hardware, crippling networking traffic and seriously preventing both individuals and businesses from using the Internet."

It's a view supported by rival Network Associates. "This is a part of life now," said Parveen Jain, president of the company's network security technologies unit. "We've got to live with it because it's a criminal activity that's going to continue."

Microsoft, whose Windows operating system has a near-monopoly grip on the market, has been and continues to be the biggest sitting duck for hackers and virus writers. Not a week goes by without at least one new security flaw being discovered in Windows or some other Microsoft application, requiring each time that a software "patch" be issued to repair flawed computer code.

But as Microsoft and its customers increasingly realize, simply issuing a patch won't eliminate the problem. Even if 90 per cent of all computers are regularly updated with patches, the 10 per cent that remain vulnerable can become infected and dangerous.

Once infiltrated, these computers can launch denial-of-service attacks on Web sites or become automated distributors of spam, ultimately flooding the Internet with digital garbage that can also cripple corporate networks. In this sense, everybody feels the impact of a virus outbreak — even those who take necessary measures to protect their own computers.

"Every moment a network is down a company loses money," said Jain. "The network is for revenue generation now, rather than just information transportation."

Bell Sympatico, Canada's largest Internet service provider, discovered first-hand what happens when a small number of people neglect to download the latest security patch or update their anti-virus software, assuming they even have it.

In mid-October, half of the estimated 10 million e-mail messages that moved each day through Sympatico's network were identified as spam. Of all legitimate messages, about 5 per cent were found to have malicious viruses attached.

In one instance, a virus was turning the computers of some Sympatico customers into spam machines. The resulting flood of unsolicited e-mail pumping through the ISP's network was causing e-mail delays for all Sympatico customers, forcing the company to take action by identifying infected machine and putting accounts in quarantine.

Bell has begun offering some of its customers a free one-year trial of anti-virus software to help combat the problem. Rival Telus Corp. has offered free anti-virus protection to its high-speed Internet customers since August, and recently began offering anti-spam software at no charge.

"Absolutely, there is cost associated with this," said Charlotte Burke, senior vice-president of consumer Internet services at Bell.

Corporate networks can be affected the same way. According to Mi2g, viruses and other malicious attacks against Microsoft systems in August and September alone caused $64.5 billion (U.S.) worth of damages worldwide, including lost productivity, the cost of upgrading software and hardware to prevent future outbreaks and recovery costs.

It is this measurable cost being incurred by Microsoft customers that could force real change in the industry. Last month, Microsoft cited security fears as a reason why some of its corporate and government customers were hesitant to commit themselves to long-term software contracts, contributing to a surprising $768 million (U.S.) shortfall in unearned revenues.

November 29, 2003 at 10:39 AM in Microsoft, Virus | Permalink | TrackBack (65) | Top of page | Blog Home

Yahoo! News - Australia Struggles to Outlaw Junk Emails

Australia cracks down on spam creators.

Thu Nov 27,11:09 PM ET

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Senders of electronic junk mail known as spam are unlikely to face multi-million-dollar fines in Australia after opposition parties watered down legislation in the Senate on Friday.

The measures passed by parliament's upper house, where the government is in a minority, included amendments by the main opposition and minor parties that allow firms to send emails to anyone they think might be interested in their products.

"This is a giant loophole that unscrupulous spammers could not have designed better themselves," Communications Minister Daryl Williams said in a statement.

The government had wanted the legislation, to be enforced by the Australian Communications Authority, to ban the sending of all commercial emails without the prior consent of end-users, unless there was an existing business relationship.

Williams said the government would reject the amendments when the legislation returned to the lower house and called on the opposition Labor and minor parties to pass the legislation in its original form.

The Senate did agree to fines of $724,000 for each day spam messages are sent by an individual or company. Spam accounts for roughly half all emails sent.

The Australian government has previously said the laws, drafted in consultation with the Internet industry, were not a "silver bullet" which would instantly stop the spam influx but was one effort to try to stop spam at the source.

In September, lawmakers in Britain and Italy banned the delivery of unwanted bulk emails, which politicians and business officials worry could become an increasingly costly nuisance for companies and individuals.

In Britain, convicted junk email senders face a $8,500 fine if found guilty in a magistrate's court, while the fine from a jury trial would be unlimited.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate approved a bill to outlaw spam, which would see senders face jail time and multi-million-dollar fines. The House of Representatives now needs to approve minor technical changes before sending it to the White House.

President Bush (news - web sites) is expected to sign it into law by the end of the year.

November 29, 2003 at 07:58 AM in Spam | Permalink | TrackBack (59) | Top of page | Blog Home

November 27, 2003

Internet Explorer to kill pop-ups in early 2004

Internet Explorer to stomp pop-ups | CNET News.com

About time for IE to do this. It will effectivley kill pop-ups as we know them, and force the advertisers into different types of advertising, using DHTML etc, but they are ok, and dont open those pesky extra windows.

By Stefanie Olsen
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Microsoft plans to add pop-up blocking features to Internet Explorer next year as part of its Service Pack 2 update for Windows XP, a move that would go far toward stamping out the Web advertisements.

Darin Linnman, a Microsoft spokesman, said that the company plans to add the pop-up blocking feature to an updated version of Explorer with Service Pack 2 (SP2) when it's released in the first half of next year. But one caveat, he said, is that Microsoft will be gathering customer feedback that will be weighed as part of the final decision to add the feature.

"I can confirm SP2 will include an update to IE that adds pop-up blocking," Linnman said.

By adding pop-up blocking tools to IE, Microsoft will belatedly join a host of other Web browser makers that let people avoid flashy pop-ups, or advertising windows that appear over or behind requested Web pages. Opera, Mozilla and Netscape--all of which have only a minor share of the total browser market--give users the option to seamlessly block intrusive advertising while surfing the Web. Because Microsoft dominates the browser market, it could greatly influence people's ability to remove the ads with ease.

"A lot of marketers may be mad at Microsoft (because of it), but it could go a long way to killing the pop-up problem. It's just an easier solution to turn it off in the browser" rather than to download anti-pop-up software, said Richard Smith, an Internet security consultant.

Internet service providers have also responded to a consumer outcry against pop-ups in recent years despite potential losses from advertising sales. EarthLink led a trend among ISPs to introduce anti-pop-up tools in 2002. AOL upped the ante last year by promising not to sell pop-ups to third parties, and it released technology to fend off the ads in AOL version 8.0 last October. Microsoft matched AOL's move in its own Internet access software. And just this September, Yahoo and SBC Communications updated their joint Internet access services to include a pop-up ad blocker.

Google has also given people tools to suppress pop-ups through its popular search toolbar.

The moves were the result of deep consumer loathing of pop-ups. About 88 percent of broadband users and 87 percent of dial-up users in North America find that pop-ups interfere with their Web surfing experience, according to Forrester Research. But only 15 percent of consumers have downloaded ad-blocking software. Having a tool in IE could make avoiding the ads simpler.

"It's a recognition that pop-ups are very disruptive to user experience--they're the most hated type of advertising," said Charlene Li, principal analyst for Forrester.

November 27, 2003 at 12:10 AM in Online Marketing | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

November 26, 2003

Nigeria to tackle internet fraud

BBC NEWS | Africa | Nigeria to tackle internet fraud

Don't hold your breathe for Nigeria to fix this problem, which I am sure we have all seen, in emails written pleading for help to free millions of dollars/ pounds from some poor defenseless/ widowed/ whatever Nigerian, pretending to write proper english in a style which went out with Dickens.

Turns out this is the 3rd/5th largest exchange earner for Nigerian Governement. Who says crime doesnt pay!!

November 26, 2003
BBC NEWS | Africa | Nigeria to tackle internet fraud
Nigeria is to launch an inquiry into internet fraud and will examine the existing laws covering the problem.
The "419" swindle - named after the penal code that outlaws it - will be targeted in particular.

In the scam, people overseas are promised a share of non-existent riches in return for details of their bank account - which is then emptied.

"The government will step up measures against these criminal activities," President Olusegun Obasanjo said.

Currency earner

He said the inquiry will also consider establishing a new agency to deal with the crime.

The 419 scam has been so successful in the past 20 years that experts say it is now the third to fifth largest foreign exchange earner in Nigeria.

But BBC world affairs correspondent Mark Doyle says the government is keen to stamp out the fraud as it is giving Nigeria a bad name.

The country's anti-fraud squad has arrested more than 200 people, including a federal lawmaker, since May for alleged involvement in computer fraud.

The alleged perpetrators of the biggest ever 419 swindle, a $180m fraud that brought down a Brazilian bank, are among those facing prosecution.

"I am convinced that your recommendations would assist government to design appropriate policies to block all the loopholes... and stamp out all forms of 419 from society," President Obasanjo said at the ceremony to launch the commission.

The committee, which is headed by President Obasanjo's security adviser, has two months to submit a report.

November 26, 2003 at 05:06 PM in Online crime | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

November 25, 2003

The Cluetrain Manifesto

Gonzo Marketing - The Cluetrain Manifesto

I finally located the online version of this outstanding book. The concepts in here are only just now starting to take hold, and it will be a long time before this really comes through. But his is the right answer. Just remember, "Markets are Conversations".

Story

Local copy Download file

November 25, 2003 at 06:47 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Another virus

The Sysbug Trojan poses as a misdirected email with photographic attachments.

Virus writers are getting good at making emails seem quite realistic and luring unsuspecting people into clicking things, and BOOM they've got you!!

Story

November 25, 2003 at 04:50 PM in Virus | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

November 24, 2003

BBC NEWS | Technology | Japan signals mobile future

Looking forward to Xmas in Tokyo and this article reminds of why I like it there. Technology is part of the culture, and the Japanese don't "appreciate" technology - they live it. When I was there last the FOMA phones were just coming on stream as the next level up from iMode. They run at 384 kbs download speed .... 1/2 the country can only wish for that on their PC, let alone their phone.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Japan signals mobile future

Japan leads the way in mobile phone innovation, as BBC ClickOnline's Richard Taylor reports from Tokyo, one of the most connected cities in the world.

If you want to gaze into the crystal ball for mobile technology, Tokyo is most definitely the place to come to.

In this city it seems like everyone is constantly on the move and a mobile phone has become an indispensable tool of everyday life.

It might help explain why most Tokyoites appear to be surgically attached to their mobiles.

The mobile culture is so deeply entrenched here that there are even charging stations where you can breathe life into a dying mobile phone battery.

This obsession may also help explain why Japan is at the leading edge of mobile developments.

Five years ago, while the rest of us were still struggling with voice calls, the Japanese were streaming ahead with data services like iMode.

Constant evolution

One of the first ever data services, iMode was developed by NTT DoCoMo, an enterprise which has become synonymous with innovation.

For the first time, phones could be used to do everything from checking the weather to playing video clips.

It proved wildly popular, and fuelled the drive towards the third generation of mobile services.

It is approaching two years since 3G became a reality in metropolitan Tokyo, and though take up has been modest all the networks now offer the hi-speed service to virtually the entire population.

"Of course we're hoping to be successful with our 3G offering," said Takumi Suzuki of NTT DoCoMo.

"Looking into the future we see ourselves developing richer and faster mobile communication tools to give mobile phones users a more pleasurable experience."

Even today the network operators are finding different ways of working the benefits of 3G into people's lives, such as video conferencing between a mobile caller and a laptop user.

With the high-speed networks delivering ever more services, the types of devices are constantly evolving.

At first, 3G phones were clunky and ran out of juice quickly. Today they are slimmer, lighter and sport respectable battery life.

Smile for the mobile

Cashing in on the Japanese passion for capturing that special moment, camera phones are now the order of the day.

Camera phones already popular in Japan
The quality has improved to such a degree that here you can take your photo and then go to a booth and get a reasonable quality print.

Camera phones are just beginning to make inroads elsewhere in the world, and industry insiders expect the trickle to become an explosion.

"The camera phone phenomenon that we see in Japan right now will be repeated throughout the world," said Matthew Nicholson of Japanese mobile firm Jphone.

"Just to give you an example, our parent company introduced a service called Vodafone Live, which has the picture messaging function, and they've already reached 1.5 million users within their operating countries.

"Sending and sharing pictures is a universal human trait so just making it easy for people to send pictures, and having handsets that take good pictures, that's really the key. We're only going to see that trend accelerate in the future."

Besides camera phones, development is continuing on other fronts. Games are becoming more sophisticated.

And if you are not tempted by any of those then, for the fashion-conscious there is the Wristomo.

The ultimate in street cool, this wristwatch phone is straight out of James Bond. It has e-mail, internet and synchronisation with your PC.

They sold out within hours when they were launched in Japan in July.

November 24, 2003 at 11:13 PM in Japan | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Survey: Complaints About E-Commerce Rising

Yahoo! News - Survey: Complaints About E-Commerce Rising:

"Two perennial top complaints -- those involving auto purchase and repair and home improvement projects."

This quote from undernoted article surprised me with the nature of complaints about ecommerce companies.

Yahoo! News - Survey: Complaints About E-Commerce Rising

Mon Nov 24, 2:25 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. consumer agencies are seeing more e-commerce complaints, as a growing number of people shop online, a consumer group said on Monday.

The survey by the Consumer Federation of America found an increase in the number of local consumer agencies that cited e-commerce or the Internet as a major complaint category in 2002, pushing it into one of the top 10 complaints.

"The variety of (e-commerce) complaints that are coming in are much more serious," Jean Ann Fox, CFA's consumer protection director told a news conference.

Two perennial top complaints -- those involving auto purchase and repair and home improvement projects -- were also up, possibly due to strong activity in those areas, the CFA said.

Nearly a fourth of 43 consumer agencies surveyed said the Internet and e-commerce were a top complaint category, according to the survey.

E-commerce has been expanding rapidly in recent years. U.S. government figures show online sales grew 27 percent between the third quarter of 2003 and the same period last year.

Stephen Hannan, administrator of the consumer affairs office in Howard County, Maryland, told reporters that his office has seen a rise in complaints against people selling over the Internet whom "we would normally call private citizens."

"This is going to be the refrain that we are going to hear from now on," Hannan said. "Internet has now given every citizen the ability to be a business ..."

In addition, consumer agencies are also seeing an increasing number of complaints about e-mail scams and purported business opportunities being peddled on the Internet.

"The Internet is the best avenue for any crook you could ever want," Hannan said.

November 24, 2003 at 09:55 PM in eCommerce | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Global confidence levels are very diverse

US, Australia, South Africa & India are the only countries where business is significantly confident. Interestingly those with least confidence in the US also have least confidence in themselves.

November 24, 2003 at 08:25 AM in World Affairs | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

November 23, 2003

Better living through RSS

Yahoo! Groups : berkman-thursday Messages : Message 108 of 109

RSS is'nt the greatest title, but this article is dead on, and we will see changes.

Yahoo! Groups : berkman-thursday Messages : Better Living through RSS

Subject: Better Living through RSS

Hi all,

I was trying to think of a way to express to other people what I saw
Dave demoing at last night's meeting, and I thought I'd share. I posted
this on my blog (the text there contains HTML links out to other stuff,
but I wanted to be sensitive to peoples' preference regarding plaintext
email in this context. You can see the post with links at:
http://www.cadence90.com/blogs/2003_11_01_nixon_archives.html#1069430655
85972685).

Speaking of Dave and Better Living through RSS, last night I attended
the Thursday night bloggers' meeting at the Berkman Center where Dave
demoed -- what should I call it? -- a new kind of architecture for a
blogging system, which would eventually enable users to view a blog not
just in its plain reverse-chron format but also hierarchically by topic,
and in a sort of wiki-like way, depending on the preferences of the
reader. Interestingly, each topic and subtopic also has its own unique
RSS feed, so you could subscribe, for example, to either "Baseball" or
"Baseball>Boston Red Sox" (although that's a bad example as I believe
Dave is a Mets fan). If you subscribed to "Baseball," you'd get the
underlying stuff about the Sox and any other teams that were lower on
the hierarchy. The hierarchy itself is separate from the actual data of
the posts, and if someone else liked your categorization scheme and
wanted to use it, they could if you wanted to publish an OPML file of
that hierarchy and put it in a public place.

In answering the question, "Why do it this way?" Dave gave an
interesting response -- the atomization of a blog into feeds would allow
users to merge the "my world" of their blog with content from the many
"their worlds" on the net. Such merged topical hierarchies could then
themselves be exported as an OPML file and a defacto statement of "this
is my point of view -- my information and other information from beyond
my domain that I think is important."

I really like the idea of giving new forms of representations to blog
data beyond simple reverse-chron or simple categories. I'd like to be
able to switch views of my blog from reverse-chron to "wiki-like" or
even a visual representation of the connections that I am building
between me and ideas and others' ideas. I'm thinking of it for myself,
but Dave makes a good point about why it is good for readers that are
new to a blog (I paraphrase here, so any errors are my own:

What would you do with a blog with 100 or 200 contributors on a subject
with tremendous data flow? How do you make that digestible to a reader
just coming into it in the middle?

Dave's idea is that supporting views other than reverse-chron gives new
participants entry points into the data rather than just throwing them
midstream into a conversation that has been going on for some time. As
an aside, Dave noted that he doesn't really like the idea of a "team
blog" with say 20 people contributing, and I infer from this that he
thinks that this is a sort of compromise because we don't have the
technology to allow readers to assemble "multiblogs" comprised of any
number of different voices on the fly. A point he made about this:

Think of it as building something for the next [event of September
11th's magnitude].

The idea being is that if enough people build and use in this direction,
you would have a better platform to see an event in real time as
thousands of people blog it, report on it, take photos of it -- and a
reader would be able to assemble this into a coherent mass for
themselves on the fly, and then save that hierarchy as a snapshot of the
state of that day, and allow that hierarchical "tree" to grow leaves and
change over time.

Oddly, what this all makes me think of is a remark by my old boss Harry
Tse on Chinese food (it's dinner time and I am pretty hungry. Maybe
that's why the food metaphors!). He noted that most Chinese food is
plated in such a way that knives aren't neccessary for the diner.
Western food, he said, involved a different division of labor between
the cook and the eater -- western cooks might put a steak on the plate,
but a Chinese cook would be more likely to slice the steak into
bite-size pieces easy to handle with chopsticks.

In a similar way, development of RSS is changing the division of labor
between the author of web content and the reader of web content. Right
now, the author is responsible for almost everything including the
visual layout of the page. In an RSS world, the reader has much more
control over how to display their information to themselves, slicing and
dicing incoming information from different sites, displaying it in ways
far beyond simple reverse-chron, and putting the visual "sauce" on it
that they like best.

Lisa W.

November 23, 2003 at 06:13 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Times Online - Leading article: Democracy v terror

Times Online - Newspaper Edition

Leading article: Democracy v terror

Many people in Britain and many more in Turkey are grieving this weekend over those murdered in Al-Qaeda-inspired attacks in Istanbul. Sadly, they will not be the last. Terrorism has become the grim spectre of our times. Britain is on high alert for suicide bombers — two Al-Qaeda cells are said to be planning an outrage here and the police have already foiled a gas attack on the London Underground. Washington has warned of a new threat, this time using cargo jets. In Iraq yesterday, 18 people were killed when suicide bombers blasted their cars into police stations, and disaster was only narrowly avoided when a plane landed in Baghdad after being hit by a surface-to-air missile. These are no longer distant acts of terror; people in the West fear where all this is leading and where the next bombs will strike.
There are two interpretations for this renewed surge of terrorism. Clare Short, the former international development secretary, claims that Britain and America are reaping what they sowed in Iraq. The war acted as a “recruiting sergeant” for Al-Qaeda because of the mishandling of the conflict by George Bush and Tony Blair, who she castigates for “bad leadership” and “terrible errors”. Many who marched in London last week to protest at the president ’s visit to London no doubt agree with her.

There is also a second interpretation: that the military action taken by Britain and America to overthrow Saddam Hussein is part of the wider war on terror and its state sponsors and is a solution to the problem, not its cause. The West responded to an attack on its soil, an attack that was a declaration of war. To have done nothing would have been interpreted as weakness and would have provoked yet more attacks. September 11 was planned under the presidency of Bill Clinton, who had shown little appetite to take on Saddam or even Al-Qaeda. The Taliban gave succour to Al-Qaeda and had to be overthrown. Saddam, too, was a regional threat and that in turn helped to create the instability on which terrorism thrives. Certainly we were misled about his weapons of mass destruction, but it was still right to overthow a tyrant who killed far more of his own people than any western alliance. Now the difficult process of installing a stable, democratic government has begun.

What hope can we find in this grim time? First, however much Al-Qaeda would like to strike at Britain, it is finding it tough. Why else attack soft targets in Muslim countries. There have been bombings in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Tunisia. Tragically, many more Muslims have died than westerners, although Al-Qaeda cares not a jot. We also know that as long as there are young fanatics prepared to strap explosives to their bodies or drive car bombs into buildings, the threat will remain.

We have to get used to a higher level of security and disruption in our daily lives than is desirable in a civilised society. A committee of MPs will this week criticise Britain’s readiness for a big terrorist attack and, in truth, you can never be prepared enough.

All this security must be underpinned by a political vision. That strategy was in part set out by Mr Bush on his visit to Britain. As he put it: “Democratic governments do not shelter terrorist camps or attack their peaceful neighbours; they honour the aspirations and dignity of their own people.” Too often in the past, and America and Britain have both been guilty of this, western governments have been prepared to support tyrants and despots while ignoring democratic rights.

Winning the war on terror, as the president argued, has to mean fostering the spread of democracy: “If the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation and anger and violence for export.” That means following the reformist road of countries like Morocco, Jordan and Qatar, not preserving autocracies such as Syria and Saudi Arabia, the region’s pivotal state. It means that anything less than a settled democracy in Iraq would be a failure. That is a strategy worth pursuing. The war on terror will not be won under this president or this prime minister. But it must be won.

November 23, 2003 at 09:59 AM in Politics | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

November 21, 2003

Did we really get it all wrong in software development, or .... "the reality of cats and apples"

Edge: WHY GORDIAN SOFTWARE HAS CONVINCED ME TO BELIEVE IN THE REALITY OF CATS AND APPLES

An extraordinary piece, which I don't recommend you attempt to read unless you are wide awake! There are a few themes, but one I liked is how it questions the directions taken at the origin of software development beginning with the efforts of my personal hero, Alan Turing (WW2 crytpography), as well as others with which I am less familiar. His hypothesis is that computers evolved following the devices we were originally familiar with, eg telephone, fax, which all worked by sending information down a "wire". By definition a wire can only handly so much activity, so automatically you need long wires, which means you are building in time to get across a long wire ... inefficiency.

On the other hand the human body is a (his words) "surface" and for example the retina picks up multiple light sources simultaneously across its surface. An eye in todays computer model would only receive one tiny light source. But the retina is able to perform multiple tasks simultaneously, and hence the efficiency gain is exponential. An eye in the computer model would mean you would have to spend hours looking at any one object just to establish what you were looking at.

He talks about the early software which was renowned for being efficiently programmed. However he notes such software was small so even within the "wire" paradigm it worked, and as Moores law progressed chip and hardware compensated for bloated and ineffecient woftware. When you get into large software and Windows would be such an example, efficency is lost and we must count on hardware speed to counter the built in inefficiency of the software.

mmmmm ... does this mean we have to start all over again? Where is that young student in his garage with the intelligence and ability to come up with Microsoft V2.0.

(JARON LANIER): There was a breathtaking moment at the birth of computer science and information theory in the mid-20th century when the whole field was small enough that it could be kept in one's head all at once. There also just happened to be an extraordinary generation of brilliant people who, in part because of the legacy of their importance to the military in World War II, were given a lot of latitude to play with these ideas. People like Shannon, Turing, von Neumann, Wiener, and a few others had an astonishing combination of breadth and depth that's humbling to us today-practically to the point of disorientation. It's almost inconceivable that people like Wiener and von Neumann could have written the books of philosophy that they did while at the same time achieving their technical heights. This is something that we can aspire to but will probably never achieve again.

What's even more humbling, and in a way terrifying, is that despite this stellar beginning and the amazing virtuosity of these people, something hasn't gone right. We clearly have proven that we know how to make faster and faster computers (as described by Moore's Law), but that isn't the whole story, alas. Software remains disappointing as we try to make it grow to match the capability of hardware.

If you look at trends in software, you see a macabre parody of Moore's Law. The expense of giant software projects, the rate at which they fall behind schedule as they expand, the rate at which large projects fail and must be abandoned, and the monetary losses due to unpredicted software problems are all increasing precipitously. Of all the things you can spend a lot of money on, the only things you expect to fail frequently are software and medicine. That's not a coincidence, since they are the two most complex technologies we try to make as a society. Still, the case of software seems somehow less forgivable, because intuitively it seems that as complicated as it's gotten lately, it still exists at a much lower order of tangledness than biology. Since we make it ourselves, we ought to be able to know how to engineer it so it doesn't get quite so confusing.

I've had a suspicion for a while that despite the astonishing success of the first generation of computer scientists like Shannon, Turing, von Neumann, and Wiener, somehow they didn't get a few important starting points quite right, and some things in the foundations of computer science are fundamentally askew. In a way I have no right to say this and it would be more appropriate to say it once I've actually got something to take its place, so let me just emphasize that this is speculative. But where might things have gone wrong?

The leaders of the first generation were influenced by the metaphor of the electrical communications devices that where in use in their lifetimes, all of which centered on the sending of signals down wires. This started, oddly enough, with predecessors of the fax machine, continuing in a much bigger way to the telegraph, which turned into the telephone, and then proceeded with devices that carry digital signals that were only machine readable. Similarly, radio and television signals were designed to be relayed to a single wire even if part of their passage was wireless. All of us are guided by our metaphors, and our metaphors are created by the world around us, so it's understandable that signals on wires would become the central metaphor of their day.

If you model information theory on signals going down a wire, you simplify your task in that you only have one point being measured or modified at a time at each end. It's easier to talk about a single point in some ways, and in particular it's easier to come up with mathematical techniques to perform analytic tricks. At the same time, though, you pay by adding complexity at another level, since the only way to give meaning to a single point value in space is time. You end up with information structures spread out over time, which leads to a particular set of ideas about coding schemes in which the sender and receiver have agreed on a temporal syntactical layer in advance.

If you go back to the original information theorists, everything was about wire communication. We see this, for example, in Shannon's work. The astonishing bridge that he created between information and thermodynamics was framed in terms of information on a wire between a sender and a receiver.

This might not have been the best starting point. It's certainly not a wrong starting point, since there's technically nothing incorrect about it, but it might not have been the most convenient or cognitively appropriate starting point for human beings who wished to go on to build things. The world as our nervous systems know it is not based on single point measurements, but on surfaces. Put another way, our environment has not necessarily agreed with our bodies in advance on temporal syntax. Our body is a surface that contacts the world on a surface. For instance, our retina sees multiple points of light at once.

We're so used to thinking about computers in the same light as was available at the inception of computer science that it's hard to imagine an alternative, but an alternative is available to us all the time in our own bodies. Indeed the branches of computer science that incorporated interactions with the physical world, such as robotics, probably wasted decades trying to pretend that reality could be treated as if it were housed in a syntax that could be conveniently encoded on a wire. Traditional robots converted the data from their sensors into a temporal stream of bits. Then the robot builders would attempt to find the algorithms that matched the inherent protocol of these bits. Progress was very, very slow. The latest better robots tend to come from people like Ron Fearing and his physiologist cohort Bob Full at Berkeley who describe their work as "biomimetic". They are building champion robots that in some cases could have been built decades ago were it not for the obsession with protocol-centric computer science. A biomimetic robot and its world meet on surfaces instead of at the end of a wire. Biomimetic robots even treat the pliability of their own building materials as an aspect of computation. That is, they are made internally of even more surfaces.

With temporal protocols, you can have only one of point of information that can be measured in a system at a time. You have to set up a temporal hierarchy in which the bit you measure at a particular time is meaningful based on "when" in a hierarchy of contexts you happen to occupy when you read the bit. You stretch information out in time and have past bits give context to future bits in order to create a coding scheme. This is the preferred style of classical information theory from the mid-twentieth century.

Note that this form of connection occurs not only between computers on the internet, but in a multitude of internal connections between parts of a program. When someone says a piece of software is "Object oriented", that means that the bits traveling on the many, many virtual wires inside the program are interpreted in a particular way. Roughly speaking, they are verb-like messages being sent to noun-like destinations, while the older idea was to send noun-like messages to verb-like destinations. But fundamentally the new and old ideas are similar in that they are simulations of vast tangles of telegraph wires.

The alternative, in which you have a lot of measurements available at one time on a surface, is called pattern classification. In pattern classification a bit is given meaning at least in part by other bits measured at the same time. Natural neural systems seem to be mostly pattern recognition oriented and computers as we know them are mostly temporal protocol adherence-oriented. The distinction between protocols and patterns is not absolute-one can in theory convert between them. But it's an important distinction in practice, because the conversion is often beyond us, either because we don't yet know the right math to use to accomplish it, or because it would take humongous hypothetical computers to the job.

In order to keep track of a protocol you have to devote huge memory and computational resources to representing the protocol rather than the stuff of ultimate interest. This kind of memory use is populated by software artifacts called data-structures, such as stacks, caches, hash tables, links and so on. They are the first objects in history to be purely syntactical.

As soon as you shift to less temporally-dependent patterns on surfaces, you enter into a different world that has its own tradeoffs and expenses. You're trying to be an ever better guesser instead of a perfect decoder. You probably start to try to guess ahead, to predict what you are about to see, in order to get more confident about your guesses. You might even start to apply the guessing method between parts of your own guessing process. You rely on feedback to improve your guesses, and in that there's a process that displays at least the rudiments of evolutionary self-improvement. Since the first generation of computer scientists liked to anthropomorphize computers (something I dislike), they used the word "memory" to describe their stacks and pointers, but neurological memory is probably more like the type of internal state I have just described for pattern-sensitive machines. Computational neuroscientists sometimes argue about how to decide when to call such internal state a "model" of the world, but whether it's a model or not, it's different than the characteristic uses of memory for protocol-driven software. Pattern-guessing memory use tends to generate different kinds of errors, which is what's most important to notice.

When you de-emphasize protocols and pay attention to patterns on surfaces, you enter into a world of approximation rather than perfection. With protocols you tend to be drawn into all-or-nothing high wire acts of perfect adherence in at least some aspects of your design. Pattern recognition, in contrast, assumes the constant minor presence of errors and doesn't mind them. My hypothesis is that this trade-off is what primarily leads to the quality I always like to call brittleness in existing computer software, which means that it breaks before it bends.

Of course we try to build some error-tolerance into computer systems. For instance, the "TCP" part of TCP/IP is the part that re-sends bits if there's evidence a bit might not have made it over the net correctly. That's a way of trying to protect one small aspect of a digital design from the thermal reality it's trying to resist. But that's only the easiest case, where the code is assumed to be perfect, so that it's easy to tell if a transmission was faulty. If you're worried that the code itself might also be faulty (and in large programs it always is), then error correction can lead to infinite regresses, which are the least welcome sort of error when it comes to developing information systems.

In the domain of multi-point surface sampling you have only a statistical predictability rather than an at least hypothetically perfect planability. I say "hypothetically", because for some reason computer scientists often seem unable to think about real computers as we observe them, rather than the ideal computers we wish we could observe. Evolution has shown us that approximate systems (living things, particularly those with nervous systems) can be coupled to feedback loops that improve their accuracy and reliability. They can become very good indeed. Wouldn't it be nicer to have a computer that's almost completely reliable almost all the time, as opposed to one that can be hypothetically perfectly accurate, in some hypothetical ideal world other than our own, but in reality is prone to sudden, unpredictable, and often catastrophic failure in actual use?

The reason we're stuck on temporal protocols is probably that information systems do meet our expectations when they are small. They only start to degrade as they grow. So everyone's learning experience is with protocol-centric information systems that function properly and meet their design ideals. This was especially true of the second generation of computer scientists, who for the first time could start to write more pithy programs, even though those programs were still small enough not to cause trouble. Ivan Sutherland, the father of computer graphics, wrote a program in the mid 1960s called "Sketchpad" all by himself as a student. In it he demonstrated the first graphics, continuous interactivity, visual programming, and on and on. Most computer scientists regard Sketchpad as the most influential program ever written. Every sensitive younger computer scientist mourns the passing of the days when such a thing was possible. By the 1970s, Seymour Papert had even small children creating little programs with graphical outputs in his computer language "LOGO". The operative word is "little." The moment programs grow beyond smallness, their brittleness becomes the most prominent feature, and software engineering becomes Sisyphean.

Computer scientists hate, hate thinking about the loss of idealness that comes with scale. But there it is. We've been able to tolerate the techniques developed at tiny scales to an extraordinary degree, given the costs, but at some future scale we'll be forced to re-think things. It's amazing how static the basic ideas of software have been since the period of late 1960s into the mid 1970s. We refuse to grow up, as it were. I must take a moment to rant about one thing. Rebellious young programmers today often devote their energies to recreating essentially old code (Unix components or Xerox PARC-style programs) in the context of the free software movement, and I don't dismiss that kind of idealism at all. But it isn't enough. An even more important kind of idealism is to question the nature of that very software, and in that regard the younger generations of computer scientists seem to me to be strangely complacent.

Given how brittle our real-world computer systems get when they get big, there's an immediate motivation to explore any alternative that might make them more reliable. I've suggested that we call the alternative approach to software that I've outlined above "Phenotropic." Pheno- refers to outward manifestations, as in phenotype. -Tropic originally meant "Turning," but has come to mean "Interaction." So Phenotropic means "The interaction of surfaces." It's not necessarily biomimetic, but who's to say, since we don't understand the brain yet. My colleague Christoph von der Marsburg, a neuroscientist of vision, has founded a movement called "Biological Computing" which exists mostly in Europe, and is more explicitly biomimetic, but is essentially similar to what some of us are calling "Phenotropics" here in the States.

There are two sides to Phenotropic investigation, one concerned with engineering and the other with scientific and philosophical explorations.

I suppose that the software engineering side of Phenotropics might seem less lofty or interesting, but software engineering is the empirical foundation of computer science. You should always resist the illusory temptations of a purely theoretical science, of course. Computer science is more vulnerable to these illusions than other kinds of science, since it has been constrained by layers of brittle legacy code that preserve old ideas at the expense of new ones.

My engineering concern is to try to think about how to build large systems out of modules that don't suffer as terribly from protocol breakdown as existing designs do. The goal is to have all of the components in the system connect to each other by recognizing and interpreting each other as patterns rather than as followers of a protocol that is vulnerable to catastrophic failures. One day I'd like to build large computers using pattern classification as the most fundamental binding principle, where the different modules of the computer are essentially looking at each other and recognizing states in each other, rather than adhering to codes in order to perfectly match up with each other. My fond hope, which remains to be tested, is that by building a system like this I can build bigger and more reliable programs than we know how to build otherwise. That's the picture from an engineering point of view.

In the last few years I've been looking for specific problems that might yield to a phenotropic approach. I've always been interested in surgical simulations. Two decades ago I collaborated with Dr. Joe Rosen, then of Stanford, now of Dartmouth, and Scott Fisher, then of NASA, now at USC, on the first surgical Virtual Reality simulation. It's been delightful to see surgical simulation improve over the years. It's gotten to the point where it can demonstrably improve outcomes. But the usual problems of large software plague it, as one might expect. We can't write a big enough program of any kind to write the big programs we need to for future surgical simulations.

One example of pattern recognition that I've found to be particularly inspiring came about via my colleague Christoph von der Marsburg, and some of his former students, especially Hartmut Neven. We all started to work together back when I was working with Tele-immersion and Internet2. I was interested in how to transfer the full three-dimensional facial features of someone from one city to another with low bandwidth in order to create the illusion (using fancy 3D displays) that the remote person was present in the same room. We used some visual pattern recognition techniques to derive points on a face, and tied these to a 3D avatar of the person on the other side. (An avatar is what a person looks like to others in Virtual Reality.) As luck would have it, a long time collaborator of mine named Young Harvil had been building fine quality avatar heads, so we could put this together fairly easily. It was super! You'd see this head that looked like a real person that also moved properly and conveyed expressions remarkably well. If you've seen the movie "Simone" you've seen a portrayal of a similar system.

Anyway, the face tracking software works really well. But how does it work?

You start with an image from a camera. Such an image is derived from the surface of a light-sensitive chip which makes a bunch of simultaneous adjacent measurements, just like a surface in a phenotropic system. The most common way to analyze this kind of surface information is to look at its spectrum. To do this, you make a virtual prism in software, using a mathematical technique first described two centuries ago by the great mathematician Fourier, and break the pattern into a virtual rainbow of spread-out subsignals of different colors or frequencies. But alas, that isn't enough to distinguish images. Even though a lot of images would break up into distinguishable rainbows because of the different distribution of colors present in them, you could easily be unlucky and have two different pictures that produced identical rainbows through a prism. So what to do?

You have to do something more to get at the layout of an image in space, and the techniques that seem to work best are based on "Wavelets," which evolved out of Dennis Gabor's work when he invented Holograms in the 1940s. Imagine that instead of one big prism breaking an image into a rainbow, you looked at the image through a wall of glass bricks, each of which was like a little blip of a prism. Well, there would be a lot of different sizes of glass bricks, even though they'd all have the same shape. What would happen is some of the individual features of the image, like the corner of your left eye, would line up with particular glass bricks of particular sizes. You make a list of these coincidences. You've now broken the image apart into pieces that capture some information about the spatial structure. It turns out that the human visual system does something a little like this, starting in the retina and most probably continuing in the brain.

But we're not done. How do you tell whether this list of glass bricks corresponds to a face? Well, of course what you do is build a collection of lists of bricks that you already know represent faces, or even faces of specific individuals, including how the features matching the bricks should be positioned relative to each other in space (so that you can rule out the possibility that the corner of your left eye could possibly occur at the end of your nose, for instance.) Once you have that collection, you can compare known glass brick breakdowns against new ones coming in from the camera and tell when you're looking at a face, or even a specific person's face.

This turns out to work pretty well. Remember when I mentioned that once you start to think Phenotropically, you might want to try to predict what the pattern you think you've recognized is about to look like, to test your hypothesis? That's another reason I wanted to apply this technique to controlling avatar heads. If you find facial features using the above technique and use the results to re-animate a face using an avatar head, you ought to get back something that looks like what the camera originally saw. Beyond that, you ought to be able to use the motion of the head and features to predict what's about to happen-not perfectly, but reasonably well-because each element of the body has a momentum just like a car. And like a car, what happens next is constrained not only by the momentum, but also by things you can know about mechanical properties of the objects involved. So a realistic enough avatar can serve as a tool for making predictions, and you can use the errors you discover in your predictions to tune details in your software. As long as you set things up efficiently, so that you can choose only the most important details to tune in this way, you might get a tool that improves itself automatically. This idea is one we're still testing; we should know more about it within a couple of years. If I wanted to treat computers anthropomorphically, like so many of my colleagues, I'd call this "artificial imagination."

Just as in the case of robotics, which I mentioned earlier, it's conceivable that workable techniques in machine vision could have appeared much earlier, but computer science was seduced by its protocol-centric culture into trying the wrong ideas again and again. It was hoped that a protocol existed out there in nature, and all you had to do was write the parser (an interpreter of typical hierarchical protocols) for it. There are famous stories of computer science graduate students in the 1960s being assigned projects of finding these magic parsers for things like natural language or vision. It was hoped that these would be quick single-person jobs, just like Sketchpad. Of course, the interpretation of reality turned out to require a completely different approach from the construction of small programs. The open question is what approach will work for large programs.

A fully phenotropic giant software architecture might consist of modules with user interfaces that can be operated either by other modules or by people. The modules would be small and simple enough that they could be reliably made using traditional techniques. A user interface for a module would remain invisible unless a person wanted to see it. When one module connects to another, it would use the same techniques a biomimetic robot would use to get around in the messy, unpredictable physical world. Yes, a lot of computer power would go into such internal interfaces, but whether that should be thought of as wasteful or not will depend on whether the improvement I hope to see really does appear when phenotropic software gets gigantic. This experiment will take some years to conduct.

Let's turn to some philosophical implications of these ideas. Just as computer science has been infatuated with the properties of tiny programs, so has philosophy been infatuated by the properties of early computer science.

Back in the 1980s I used to get quite concerned with mind-body debates. One of the things that really bothered me at that time was that it seemed to me that there was an observer problem in computer science. Who's to say that a computer is present? To a Martian, wouldn't a Macintosh look like a lava lamp? It's a thing that puts out heat and makes funny patterns, but without some cultural context, how do you even know it's a computer? If you say that a brain and a computer are in the same ontological category, who is recognizing either of them? Some people argue that computers display certain kinds of order and predictability (because of their protocol-centricity) and could therefore be detected. But the techniques for doing this wouldn't work on a human brain, because it doesn't operate by relying on protocols. So how could they work on an arbitrary or alien computer?

I pushed that question further and further. Some people might remember the "rain drops" argument. Sometimes it was a hailstorm, actually. The notion was to start with one of Daniel C. Dennett's thought experiments, where you replace all of your neurons one by one with software components until there are no neurons left to convert. At the end you have a computer program that has your whole brain recorded, and that's supposed to be the equivalent of you. Then, I proposed, why don't we just measure the trajectories of all of the rain drops in a rain storm, using some wonderful laser technology, and fill up a data base until we have as much data as it took to represent your brain. Then, conjure a gargantuan electronics shopping mall that has on hand every possible microprocessor up to some large number of gates. You start searching through them until you find all the chips that happen to accept the rain drop data as a legal running program of one sort or another. Then you go through all the chips which match up with the raindrop data as a program and look at the programs they run until you find one that just happens to be equivalent to the program that was derived from your brain. Have I made the raindrops conscious? That was my counter thought experiment. Both thought experiments relied on absurd excesses of scale. The chip store would be too large to fit in the universe and the brain would have taken a cosmologically long time to break down. The point I was trying to get across was that there's an epistemological problem.

Another way I approached the same question was to say, if consciousness were missing from the universe, how would things be different? A range of answers is possible. The first is that nothing would be different, because consciousness wasn't there in the first place. This would be Dan Dennett's response (at least at that time), since he would get rid of ontology entirely. The second answer is that the whole universe would disappear because it needed consciousness. That idea was characteristic of followers of some of John Archibald Wheeler's earlier work, who seemed to believe that consciousness plays a role in keeping things afloat by taking the role of the observer in certain quantum-scale interactions. Another answer would be that the consciousness-free universe would be similar but not identical, because people would get a little duller. That would be the approach of certain cognitive scientists, suggesting that consciousness plays a specific, but limited practical function in the brain.

And then there's another answer, which initially might sound like Dennett's: that if consciousness were not present, the trajectories of all particles would remain identical. Every measurement you could make in the universe would come out identically. However, there would be no "gross", or everyday objects. There would be neither apples nor houses, nor brains to perceive them. Neither would there be words or thoughts, though the electrons and chemical bonds that would otherwise comprise them would remain the just the same as before. There would only be the particles that make up everyday things, in exactly the same positions they would otherwise occupy. In other words, consciousness is an ontology that is overlaid on top of these particles. If there were no consciousness the universe would be perfectly described as being nothing but particles.

Here's an even clearer example of this point of view: There's no reason for the present moment to exist except for consciousness. Why bother with it? Why can we talk about a present moment? What does it mean? It's just a marker of this subjectivity, this overlaid ontology. Even though we can't specify the present moment very well, because of the spatial distribution of the brain, general relativity, and so on, the fact that we can refer to it even approximately is rather weird. It must mean the universe, or at least some part of it, like a person, is "doing something" in order to distinguish the present moment from other moments, by being conscious or embracing non-determinism in some fundamental way.

I went in that direction and became mystical about everyday objects. From this point of view, the extremes of scale are relatively pedestrian. Quantum mechanics is just a bunch of rules and values, while relativity and cosmology are just a big metric you live on, but the in-between zone is where things get weird. An apple is bizarre because there's no structure to make the apple be there; only the particles that comprise it should be present. Same for your brain. Where does the in-between, everyday scale come from? Why should it be possible to refer to it at all?

As pattern recognition has started to work, this comfortable mysticism has been challenged, though perhaps not fatally. An algorithm can now recognize an apple. One part of the universe (and it's not even a brain) can now respond to another part in terms of everyday gross objects like apples. Or is it only mystical me who can interpret the interaction in that light? Is it still possible to say that fundamental particles simply move in their courses and there wasn't necessarily an apple or a computer or a recognition event?

Of course, this question isn't easy to answer! Here's one way to think about it. Let's suppose we want to think of nature as an information system. The first question you'd ask is how it's wired together.

One answer is that all parts are consistently wired to each other, or uniformly influential to all others. I've noticed a lot of my friends and colleagues have a bias to want to think this way. For instance, Stephen Wolfram's little worlds have consistent bandwidths between their parts. A very different example comes from Seth Lloyd and his "ultimate laptop," in which he thought of various pieces of physicality (including even a black hole) as if they were fundamentally doing computation and asked how powerful these purported computers might be.

But let's go back to the example of the camera and the apple. Suppose poor old Shroedinger's Cat has survived all the quantum observation experiments but still has a taste for more brushes with death. We could oblige it by attaching the cat-killing box to our camera. So long as the camera can recognize an apple in front of it, the cat lives.

What's interesting is that what's keeping this cat alive is a small amount of bandwidth. It's not the total number photons hitting the camera that might have bounced off the apple, or only the photons making it through the lens, or the number that hit the light sensor, or even the number of bits of the resulting digitized image. Referring to the metaphor I used before, it's the number of glass bricks in the list that represents how an apple is recognized. We could be talking about a few hundred numbers, maybe less, depending on how well we represent the apple. So there's a dramatic reduction in bandwidth between the apple and the cat.

I always liked Bateson's definition of information: "A difference that makes a difference." It's because of that notion of information that we can talk about the number of bits in a computer in the way we usually do instead of the stupendously larger number of hypothetical measurements you could make of the material comprising the computer. It's also why we can talk about the small number of bits keeping the cat alive. Of course if you're a mystic when it comes to everyday-scale objects, you're still not convinced there ever was a cat or a computer.

But it might be harder for a mystic to dismiss the evolution of the cat. One of the problems with, say, Wolfram's little worlds is that all the pieces stay uniformly connected. In evolution as we have been able to understand it, the situation is different. You have multiple agents that remain somewhat distinct from one another long enough to adapt and compete with one another.

So if we want to think of nature as being made of computation, we ought to be able to think about how it could be divided into pieces that are somewhat causally isolated from one another. Since evolution has happened, it would seem our universe supports that sort of insulation.

How often is the "causal bandwidth" between things limited, and by how much? This is starting to sound a little like a phenotropic question!

One possibility is that when computer science matures, it's also going to be the physics of everyday-sized objects that influence each other via limited information flows. Of course, good old Newton might seem to have everyday-sized objects covered already, but not in the sense I'm proposing here. Every object in a Newtonian model enjoys consistent total bandwidth with every other object, to the dismay of people working on n-body problems. This is the famous kind of problem in which you try to predict the motions of a bunch of objects that are tugging on one another via gravity. It's a notoriously devilish problem, but from an information flow point of view all n of the bodies are part of one object, albeit a generally inscrutable one. They only become distinct (and more often predictable) when the bandwidth of causally relevant information flow between them is limited.

N-body problems usually concern gravity, in which everything is equally connected to everything, while the atoms in an everyday object are for the most part held together by chemistry. The causal connections between such objects is often limited. They meet at surfaces, rather than as wholes, and they have interior portions that are somewhat immune to influence.

There are a few basic ideas in physics that say something about how the universe is wired, and one of them is the Pauli exclusion principle, which demands that each fermion occupy a unique quantum niche. Fermions are the particles like electrons and protons that make up ordinary objects, and the Pauli rule forces them into structures.

Whenever you mention the Pauli principle to a good physicist, you'll see that person get a misty, introspective look and then say something like, Yes, this is the truly fundamental, under-appreciated idea in physics. If you put a fermion somewhere, another fermion might be automatically whisked out of the way. THAT one might even push another one out of its way. Fermions live in a chess-like world, in which each change causes new structures to appear. Out of these structures we get the solidity of things. And limitations on causal connection between those things.

A chemist reading my account of doubting whether everyday objects are anything other than the underlying particles might say, "The boundary of an everyday object is determined by the frontier of the region with the strong chemical bonds." I don't think that addresses the epistemological issue, but it does say something about information flow.

Software is frustratingly non-Fermionic, by the way. When you put some information in memory, whatever might have been there before doesn't automatically scoot out of the way. This sad state of affairs is what software engineers spend most of their time on. There is a hidden tedium going on inside your computer right now in which subroutines are carefully shuttling bit patterns around to simulate something like a Pauli principle so that the information retains its structure.

Pattern classification doesn't avoid this problem, but it does have a way to sneak partially around it. In classical protocol-based memory, you place syntax-governed bits into structures and then you have to search the structures to use the bits. If you're clever, you pre-search the structures like Google does to make things faster.

The memory structures created by biomimetic pattern classification, like the glass brick list that represents the apple, work a little differently. You keep on fine tuning this list with use, so that it has been influenced by its past but doesn't exhaustively record everything that's happened to it. So it just sits there and improves and doesn't require as much bit shuttling.

The Pauli principle has been joined quite recently by a haunting new idea about the fundamental bandwidth between things called "Holography," but this time the discovery came from studying cosmology and black holes instead of fundamental particles. Holography is an awkward name, since it is only metaphorically related to Gabor's holograms. The idea is that the two-dimensional surface area surrounding a portion of a universe limits the amount of causal information, or information that can possibly matter, that can be associated with the volume inside the surface. When an idea is about a limitation of a value, mathematicians call it a "bound", and "holography" is the name of the bound that would cover the ultimate quantum gravity version of the information surface bound we already know about for sure, which is called the Bekenstein Bound. In the last year an interesting variant has appeared called the Bousso Bound that seems to be even more general and spooky, but of course investigations of these bounds is limited by the state of quantum gravity theories (or maybe vice versa), so we have to wait to see how this will all play out.

Even though these new ideas are still young and in flux, when you bring them up with a smart quantum cosmologist these days, you'll see the same glassy-eyed reverence that used to be reserved for the Pauli principle. As with the Pauli principle, holography tells you what the information flow rules are for hooking up pieces of reality, and as with Pauli exclusion, holography places limits on what can happen that end up making what does happen more interesting.

These new bounds are initially quite disturbing. You'd think a volume would tell you how much information it could hold, and it's strange to get the answer instead from the area of the surface that surrounds it. (The amount of information is 1/4 the area in Planck units, by the way, which should sound familiar to people who have been following work on how to count entropy on the surfaces of black holes.) Everyone is spooked by what Holography means. It seems that a profoundly fundamental description of the cosmos might be in the terms of bandwidth-limiting surfaces.

It's delightful to see cosmology taking on a vaguely phenotropic quality, though there isn't any indication as yet that holography will be relevant to information science on non-cosmological scales.

What can we say, then, about the bandwidth between everyday objects? As in the case of the apple-recognizing camera that keeps the cat alive, there might be only a small number of bits of information flow that really matter, even though there might be an incalculably huge number of measurements that could be made of the objects that are involved in the interaction. A small variation in the temperature of a small portion of the surface of the apple will not matter, nor will a tiny spec of dirt on the lens of the camera, even though these would both be as important as any other measures of state in a fully-connected information system.

Stuart Kauffman had an interesting idea that I find moving. He suggests that we think of a minimal life form as being a combination of a Carnot cycle and self-replication. I don't know if I necessarily agree with it, but it's wonderful. The Carnot cycle originally concerned the sequence in which temperature and pressure were managed in a steam engine to cause repeated motion. One portion of the engine is devoted to the task of getting the process to repeat- and this might be called the regulatory element. If you like, you can discern the presence of analogs to the parts of a Carnot cycle in all kinds of structures, not just in steam engines. They can be found in cells, for instance. The Carnot cycle is the basic building block of useful mechanisms in our thermal universe, including in living organisms.

But here's what struck me. In my search to understand how to think about the bandwidths connecting everyday objects it occurred to me that if you thought of dividing the universe into Carnot cycles, you'd find the most causally important bandwidths in the couplings between some very specific places: the various regulatory elements. Even if two observers might dispute how to break things down into Carnot cycles, it would be harder to disagree about where these regulatory elements were.

Why would that matter? Say you want to build a model of a cell. Many people have built beautiful, big, complicated models of cells in computers. But which functional elements do you care about? Where do you draw the line between elements? What's your ontology? There's never been any real principle. It's always just done according to taste. And indeed, if you have different people look at the same problem and make models, they'll generally come up with somewhat divergent ontologies based on their varying application needs, their biases, the type of software they're working with, and what comes most easily to them. The notions I've been exploring here might provide at least one potential opening for thinking objectively about ontology in a physical system. Such an approach might someday yield a generalized way to summarize causal systems- and this would fit in nicely with a phenotropic engineering strategy for creating simulations.

It's this hope that has finally convinced me that I should perhaps start believing in everyday objects like cats and apples again.

November 21, 2003 at 10:08 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

President Bush - three pillars speech & relevance in a complex corporation

President Bush Arrives in England for Three Day State Visit

The "three pillars" speech could be relevant for business in large complex corporations.

Pillar 1: Institutions, eg NATO, UN.

Pillar 2: Periodic use of force when other means havn't produced results.

Pillar 3: Democracy & democratic values

So in a corporate sense, this might translate into:

1) Corporate strategy & belief in mega, centralised corporate groups/ projects.

2) Sometimes you have to go it alone and ignore other parts of the organisation.

3) Employee rights, feeling value, and engaged.

Story

November 21, 2003 at 08:44 PM in World Affairs | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

New Wireless joint venture

More good news on high speed internet/ wireless front. With the new JV between Microcell & Fido, not only is it a very simple technology to use, its going to make the market more competitive.

TheStar.com - Joint venture plans wireless network

TYLER HAMILTON
TECHNOLOGY REPORTER

Two underdogs of Canada's telecom sector announced a joint venture yesterday that plans to use broadband wireless services to gain a technological edge over Bell Canada and other deeper-pocketed rivals.

If all goes as planned, broadband wireless signals will deliver high-speed Internet, Internet-protocol-telephone and local-area-networking services to select Canadian communities in the first quarter of 2004, offering homes and small businesses an affordable alternative to established "wireline" products.

"It will provide competition and choice of services to all Canadians, including those in ... underserved markets," said John McLennan, vice-chairman and chief executive officer of Toronto-based Allstream Inc., one of three companies sharing equal ownership in the wireless venture.

The other two partners are Montreal-based Microcell Telecommunications Inc., provider of the Fido mobile-phone service, and NR Communications, a privately held U.S. investment firm headed by former Rogers Wireless Inc. executive Nick Kauser.

So-called fixed wireless broadband networks have been touted for years as an alternative lane on what was then called the information highway. But problems with the technology, such as "line-of-sight" signal disruptions from rain, snow and blowing trees, and high equipment costs led many Canadian and U.S. start-ups into bankruptcy.

Venture capitalists have since shied away from fixed wireless investments.

But a new generation of lower-cost wireless broadband technologies has emerged to solve past problems.

Here's how it works: A customer receives a modem-sized device, plugs it into a home or office computer and turns it on. Without needing to download software or configure the device, it instantly finds the closest radio tower in the neighbourhood and makes a wireless high-speed connection to Allstream's existing network. This bridges what's called the "last mile."

The service is portable. The device, even if it's plugged in, say, at a friend's house or a hotel, will detect the nearest tower, identify the user and sign him or her into his or her personal account.

The companies estimate their device will sell for less than $300 and could eventually be sold through retailers such as Future Shop or Radio Shack.

The device will double as a wireless-local-area network, using Wi-Fi (802.11b) technology to link various computers within a business or home. The gadget will also be capable of offering telephone service using voice over Internet protocol, or IP, software.

"The simplicity of this product is almost unheard of," said Kauser. "You plug into your computer and you're up and running. No software to download. No tricks. I think my grandmother could do it."

McLellan said radio towers will be deployed in communities — including "significant" metropolitan markets over the next few months — as demand for the wireless service increases.

Each partner brings something different to the table, contributing cash and assets totalling $135 million.

Microcell, through its ownership in Inukshuk Internet Inc., was awarded a substantial block of radio spectrum in early 2000 to deploy a cross-Canada high-speed wireless network. But the company ran into financial trouble and Inukshuk's business plan never got off the ground.

Pending regulatory approval, Microcell will contribute about two-thirds of its Inukshuk spectrum holdings to the new venture, said chief executive André Tremblay. The company will also provide access to Fido radio towers as the venture deploys its service across the country.

Allstream, formerly AT&T Canada Inc., will contribute $5 million during the initial test phase of the venture. As the operation enters the second phase in mid-2004, the company will add another $10 million in cash and $30 million worth of services, such as access to Allstream's national network and other facilities.

NR will supply network expertise and $5 million worth of technology and equipment in the first phase and another $40 million worth of equipment in the second phase.

Kauser, a wireless veteran and entrepreneur, said the new venture will initially focus on being a wholesaler of broadband wireless services, meaning other Internet service providers, such as AOL Canada, and telecommunications carriers, such as Sprint Canada, could decide to resell the service under their own brands to complement what was already offered.

Both Allstream and Microcell said they also plan to resell the service in underserved and metropolitan areas. It could even be used by Bell Canada or Telus to extend the reach of their networks.

"What's so lovely about this is they haven't decided to make it proprietary to the partners," said Iain Grant, managing director of Seaboard Group, a telecom consultancy in Montreal.

November 21, 2003 at 12:47 AM in Business Models, Wireless | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

November 19, 2003

Barclaycard trials pocket card authentication system

finextra news: Barclaycard trials pocket card authentication system

Barclaycard test a new pocket device designed to fit in a wallet which provides a second level of authentication for customers logging in. Its produced by Arcot TransFort 3-D Secure and adds a password layer on to Credit Card transactions online.

finextra news: Barclaycard trials pocket card authentication system

18 November 2003 - Barclaycard is conducting trials of a mobile chip card reader for PIN-based authentication of cardholders shopping online.

For the trials, Barclaycard customers will receive a disconnected chip reader device that can fit in a pocket or wallet. When prompted to authenticate, they insert their card into their portable reader and tap in their four-digit PIN. The reader and the card then generate a unique dynamic password that is typed into the prompted field on the screen.

The solution is designed around MasterCard’s specifications and uses the Arcot TransFort 3-D Secure payment authentication platform. Arcot anticipates the system may serve as the foundation for enhanced identity management services in the future providing stronger authentication to applications such as home banking, electronic bill payment and wire transfers.

Ian Spencer, head of fraud of Barclaycard, says: "Allowing for secure authentication, from wherever a user happens to be, breaks down critical barriers to e-commerce making the shopping experience both secure and convenient for consumers."

The initiative comes as UK banks look for solutions to the growing menace of card not present fraud, which is set to overtake card cloning as the biggest source of industry losses.

November 19, 2003 at 06:57 AM in Business Models | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

November 18, 2003

The Semantic Web 2

Scientific American: The Semantic Web

"Properly designed, the Semantic Web can assist the evolution of human knowledge as a whole."

This is a pretty powerful statement from Berners Lee, but since he invented the internet, we had better listen to him.

Scientific American: The Semantic Web: "A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities

By Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila

The entertainment system was belting out the Beatles' 'We Can Work It Out' when the phone rang. When Pete answered, his phone turned the sound down by sending a message to all the other local devices that had a volume control. His sister, Lucy, was on the line from the doctor's office: 'Mom needs to see a specialist and then has to have a series of physical therapy sessions. Biweekly or something. I'm going to have my agent set up the appointments.' Pete immediately agreed to share the chauffeuring.

At the doctor's office, Lucy instructed her Semantic Web agent through her handheld Web browser. The agent promptly retrieved information about Mom's prescribed treatment from the doctor's agent, looked up several lists of providers, and checked for the ones in-plan for Mom's insurance within a 20-mile radius of her home and with a rating of excellent or very good on trusted rating services. It then began trying to find a match between available appointment times (supplied by the agents of individual providers through their Web sites) and Pete's and Lucy's busy schedules. (The emphasized keywords indicate terms whose semantics, or meaning, were defined for the agent through the Semantic Web.)

In a few minutes the agent presented them with a plan. Pete didn't like it—University Hospital was all the way across town from Mom's place, and he'd be driving back in the middle of rush hour. He set his own agent to redo the search with stricter preferences about location and time. Lucy's agent, having complete trust in Pete's agent in the context of the present task, automatically assisted by supplying access certificates and shortcuts to the data it had already sorted through.

Almost instantly the new plan was presented: a much closer clinic and earlier times—but there were two warning notes. First, Pete would have to reschedule a couple of his less important appointments. He checked what they were—not a problem. The other was something about the insurance company's list failing to include this provider under physical therapists: "Service type and insurance plan status securely verified by other means," the agent reassured him. "(Details?)"

Lucy registered her assent at about the same moment Pete was muttering, "Spare me the details," and it was all set. (Of course, Pete couldn't resist the details and later that night had his agent explain how it had found that provider even though it wasn't on the proper list.)

Expressing Meaning
Pete and Lucy could use their agents to carry out all these tasks thanks not to the World Wide Web of today but rather the Semantic Web that it will evolve into tomorrow. Most of the Web's content today is designed for humans to read, not for computer programs to manipulate meaningfully. Computers can adeptly parse Web pages for layout and routine processing—here a header, there a link to another page—but in general, computers have no reliable way to process the semantics: this is the home page of the Hartman and Strauss Physio Clinic, this link goes to Dr. Hartman's curriculum vitae.
The Semantic Web will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users. Such an agent coming to the clinic's Web page will know not just that the page has keywords such as "treatment, medicine, physical, therapy" (as might be encoded today) but also that Dr. Hartman works at this clinic on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and that the script takes a date range in yyyy-mm-dd format and returns appointment times. And it will "know" all this without needing artificial intelligence on the scale of 2001's Hal or Star Wars's C-3PO. Instead these semantics were encoded into the Web page when the clinic's office manager (who never took Comp Sci 101) massaged it into shape using off-the-shelf software for writing Semantic Web pages along with resources listed on the Physical Therapy Association's site.

The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. The first steps in weaving the Semantic Web into the structure of the existing Web are already under way. In the near future, these developments will usher in significant new functionality as machines become much better able to process and "understand" the data that they merely display at present.

The essential property of the World Wide Web is its universality. The power of a hypertext link is that "anything can link to anything." Web technology, therefore, must not discriminate between the scribbled draft and the polished performance, between commercial and academic information, or among cultures, languages, media and so on. Information varies along many axes. One of these is the difference between information produced primarily for human consumption and that produced mainly for machines. At one end of the scale we have everything from the five-second TV commercial to poetry. At the other end we have databases, programs and sensor output. To date, the Web has developed most rapidly as a medium of documents for people rather than for data and information that can be processed automatically. The Semantic Web aims to make up for this.

Like the Internet, the Semantic Web will be as decentralized as possible. Such Web-like systems generate a lot of excitement at every level, from major corporation to individual user, and provide benefits that are hard or impossible to predict in advance. Decentralization requires compromises: the Web had to throw away the ideal of total consistency of all of its interconnections, ushering in the infamous message "Error 404: Not Found" but allowing unchecked exponential growth.

Knowledge Representation
For the semantic web to function, computers must have access to structured collections of information and sets of inference rules that they can use to conduct automated reasoning. Artificial-intelligence researchers have studied such systems since long before the Web was developed. Knowledge representation, as this technology is often called, is currently in a state comparable to that of hypertext before the advent of the Web: it is clearly a good idea, and some very nice demonstrations exist, but it has not yet changed the world. It contains the seeds of important applications, but to realize its full potential it must be linked into a single global system.

Traditional knowledge-representation systems typically have been centralized, requiring everyone to share exactly the same definition of common concepts such as "parent" or "vehicle." But central control is stifling, and increasing the size and scope of such a system rapidly becomes unmanageable.

Moreover, these systems usually carefully limit the questions that can be asked so that the computer can answer reliably— or answer at all. The problem is reminiscent of Gödel's theorem from mathematics: any system that is complex enough to be useful also encompasses unanswerable questions, much like sophisticated versions of the basic paradox "This sentence is false." To avoid such problems, traditional knowledge-representation systems generally each had their own narrow and idiosyncratic set of rules for making inferences about their data. For example, a genealogy system, acting on a database of family trees, might include the rule "a wife of an uncle is an aunt." Even if the data could be transferred from one system to another, the rules, existing in a completely different form, usually could not.

Semantic Web researchers, in contrast, accept that paradoxes and unanswerable questions are a price that must be paid to achieve versatility. We make the language for the rules as expressive as needed to allow the Web to reason as widely as desired. This philosophy is similar to that of the conventional Web: early in the Web's development, detractors pointed out that it could never be a well-organized library; without a central database and tree structure, one would never be sure of finding everything. They were right. But the expressive power of the system made vast amounts of information available, and search engines (which would have seemed quite impractical a decade ago) now produce remarkably complete indices of a lot of the material out there. The challenge of the Semantic Web, therefore, is to provide a language that expresses both data and rules for reasoning about the data and that allows rules from any existing knowledge-representation system to be exported onto the Web.

Adding logic to the Web—the means to use rules to make inferences, choose courses of action and answer questions—is the task before the Semantic Web community at the moment. A mixture of mathematical and engineering decisions complicate this task. The logic must be powerful enough to describe complex properties of objects but not so powerful that agents can be tricked by being asked to consider a paradox. Fortunately, a large majority of the information we want to express is along the lines of "a hex-head bolt is a type of machine bolt," which is readily written in existing languages with a little extra vocabulary.

Two important technologies for developing the Semantic Web are already in place: eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF). XML lets everyone create their own tags—hidden labels such as or that annotate Web pages or sections of text on a page. Scripts, or programs, can make use of these tags in sophisticated ways, but the script writer has to know what the page writer uses each tag for. In short, XML allows users to add arbitrary structure to their documents but says nothing about what the structures mean.

Meaning is expressed by RDF, which encodes it in sets of triples, each triple being rather like the subject, verb and object of an elementary sentence. These triples can be written using XML tags. In RDF, a document makes assertions that particular things (people, Web pages or whatever) have properties (such as "is a sister of," "is the author of") with certain values (another person, another Web page). This structure turns out to be a natural way to describe the vast majority of the data processed by machines. Subject and object are each identified by a Universal Resource Identifier (URI), just as used in a link on a Web page. (URLs, Uniform Resource Locators, are the most common type of URI.) The verbs are also identified by URIs, which enables anyone to define a new concept, a new verb, just by defining a URI for it somewhere on the Web.

Human language thrives when using the same term to mean somewhat different things, but automation does not. Imagine that I hire a clown messenger service to deliver balloons to my customers on their birthdays. Unfortunately, the service transfers the addresses from my database to its database, not knowing that the "addresses" in mine are where bills are sent and that many of them are post office boxes. My hired clowns end up entertaining a number of postal workers—not necessarily a bad thing but certainly not the intended effect. Using a different URI for each specific concept solves that problem. An address that is a mailing address can be distinguished from one that is a street address, and both can be distinguished from an address that is a speech.

The triples of RDF form webs of information about related things. Because RDF uses URIs to encode this information in a document, the URIs ensure that concepts are not just words in a document but are tied to a unique definition that everyone can find on the Web. For example, imagine that we have access to a variety of databases with information about people, including their addresses. If we want to find people living in a specific zip code, we need to know which fields in each database represent names and which represent zip codes. RDF can specify that "(field 5 in database A) (is a field of type) (zip code)," using URIs rather than phrases for each term.

Ontologies
Of course, this is not the end of the story, because two databases may use different identifiers for what is in fact the same concept, such as zip code. A program that wants to compare or combine information across the two databases has to know that these two terms are being used to mean the same thing. Ideally, the program must have a way to discover such common meanings for whatever databases it encounters.
A solution to this problem is provided by the third basic component of the Semantic Web, collections of information called ontologies. In philosophy, an ontology is a theory about the nature of existence, of what types of things exist; ontology as a discipline studies such theories. Artificial-intelligence and Web researchers have co-opted the term for their own jargon, and for them an ontology is a document or file that formally defines the relations among terms. The most typical kind of ontology for the Web has a taxonomy and a set of inference rules.

The taxonomy defines classes of objects and relations among them. For example, an address may be defined as a type of location, and city codes may be defined to apply only to locations, and so on. Classes, subclasses and relations among entities are a very powerful tool for Web use. We can express a large number of relations among entities by assigning properties to classes and allowing subclasses to inherit such properties. If city codes must be of type city and cities generally have Web sites, we can discuss the Web site associated with a city code even if no database links a city code directly to a Web site.

Inference rules in ontologies supply further power. An ontology may express the rule "If a city code is associated with a state code, and an address uses that city code, then that address has the associated state code." A program could then readily deduce, for instance, that a Cornell University address, being in Ithaca, must be in New York State, which is in the U.S., and therefore should be formatted to U.S. standards. The computer doesn't truly "understand" any of this information, but it can now manipulate the terms much more effectively in ways that are useful and meaningful to the human user.

With ontology pages on the Web, solutions to terminology (and other) problems begin to emerge. The meaning of terms or XML codes used on a Web page can be defined by pointers from the page to an ontology. Of course, the same problems as before now arise if I point to an ontology that defines addresses as containing a zip code and you point to one that uses postal code. This kind of confusion can be resolved if ontologies (or other Web services) provide equivalence relations: one or both of our ontologies may contain the information that my zip code is equivalent to your postal code.

Our scheme for sending in the clowns to entertain my customers is partially solved when the two databases point to different definitions of address. The program, using distinct URIs for different concepts of address, will not confuse them and in fact will need to discover that the concepts are related at all. The program could then use a service that takes a list of postal addresses (defined in the first ontology) and converts it into a list of physical addresses (the second ontology) by recognizing and removing post office boxes and other unsuitable addresses. The structure and semantics provided by ontologies make it easier for an entrepreneur to provide such a service and can make its use completely transparent.

Ontologies can enhance the functioning of the Web in many ways. They can be used in a simple fashion to improve the accuracy of Web searches—the search program can look for only those pages that refer to a precise concept instead of all the ones using ambiguous keywords. More advanced applications will use ontologies to relate the information on a page to the associated knowledge structures and inference rules. An example of a page marked up for such use is online at http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler. If you send your Web browser to that page, you will see the normal Web page entitled "Dr. James A. Hendler." As a human, you can readily find the link to a short biographical note and read there that Hendler received his Ph.D. from Brown University. A computer program trying to find such information, however, would have to be very complex to guess that this information might be in a biography and to understand the English language used there.

For computers, the page is linked to an ontology page that defines information about computer science departments. For instance, professors work at universities and they generally have doctorates. Further markup on the page (not displayed by the typical Web browser) uses the ontology's concepts to specify that Hendler received his Ph.D. from the entity described at the URI http://www. brown.edu — the Web page for Brown. Computers can also find that Hendler is a member of a particular research project, has a particular e-mail address, and so on. All that information is readily processed by a computer and could be used to answer queries (such as where Dr. Hendler received his degree) that currently would require a human to sift through the content of various pages turned up by a search engine.

In addition, this markup makes it much easier to develop programs that can tackle complicated questions whose answers do not reside on a single Web page. Suppose you wish to find the Ms. Cook you met at a trade conference last year. You don't remember her first name, but you remember that she worked for one of your clients and that her son was a student at your alma mater. An intelligent search program can sift through all the pages of people whose name is "Cook" (sidestepping all the pages relating to cooks, cooking, the Cook Islands and so forth), find the ones that mention working for a company that's on your list of clients and follow links to Web pages of their children to track down if any are in school at the right place.

Agents
The real power of the Semantic Web will be realized when people create many programs that collect Web content from diverse sources, process the information and exchange the results with other programs. The effectiveness of such software agents will increase exponentially as more machine-readable Web content and automated services (including other agents) become available. The Semantic Web promotes this synergy: even agents that were not expressly designed to work together can transfer data among themselves when the data come with semantics.
An important facet of agents' functioning will be the exchange of "proofs" written in the Semantic Web's unifying language (the language that expresses logical inferences made using rules and information such as those specified by ontologies). For example, suppose Ms. Cook's contact information has been located by an online service, and to your great surprise it places her in Johannesburg. Naturally, you want to check this, so your computer asks the service for a proof of its answer, which it promptly provides by translating its internal reasoning into the Semantic Web's unifying language. An inference engine in your computer readily verifies that this Ms. Cook indeed matches the one you were seeking, and it can show you the relevant Web pages if you still have doubts. Although they are still far from plumbing the depths of the Semantic Web's potential, some programs can already exchange proofs in this way, using the current preliminary versions of the unifying language.

Another vital feature will be digital signatures, which are encrypted blocks of data that computers and agents can use to verify that the attached information has been provided by a specific trusted source. You want to be quite sure that a statement sent to your accounting program that you owe money to an online retailer is not a forgery generated by the computer-savvy teenager next door. Agents should be skeptical of assertions that they read on the Semantic Web until they have checked the sources of information. (We wish more people would learn to do this on the Web as it is!)

Many automated Web-based services already exist without semantics, but other programs such as agents have no way to locate one that will perform a specific function. This process, called service discovery, can happen only when there is a common language to describe a service in a way that lets other agents "understand" both the function offered and how to take advantage of it. Services and agents can advertise their function by, for example, depositing such descriptions in directories analogous to the Yellow Pages.

Some low-level service-discovery schemes are currently available, such as Microsoft's Universal Plug and Play, which focuses on connecting different types of devices, and Sun Microsystems's Jini, which aims to connect services. These initiatives, however, attack the problem at a structural or syntactic level and rely heavily on standardization of a predetermined set of functionality descriptions. Standardization can only go so far, because we can't anticipate all possible future needs.

The Semantic Web, in contrast, is more flexible. The consumer and producer agents can reach a shared understanding by exchanging ontologies, which provide the vocabulary needed for discussion. Agents can even "bootstrap" new reasoning capabilities when they discover new ontologies. Semantics also makes it easier to take advantage of a service that only partially matches a request.

A typical process will involve the creation of a "value chain" in which subassemblies of information are passed from one agent to another, each one "adding value," to construct the final product requested by the end user. Make no mistake: to create complicated value chains automatically on demand, some agents will exploit artificial-intelligence technologies in addition to the Semantic Web. But the Semantic Web will provide the foundations and the framework to make such technologies more feasible.

Putting all these features together results in the abiliti