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Sunday, February 09, 2003 |
A collection of links and thoughts, somewhat comprising an essay on visions of my future works.
Recombinant growth refers to reassembling existing technologies into something novel, innovative, and ultimately greater than the sum of its parts. Recombinant growth needs to be activated at the user level. Tools and Services flexible and powerful enough to reassemble into new applications, without deep technical knowledge. Aggregation tools attach, understand, and use SOAP, xml-rpc, REST, HTML, ODBC, as well as accessing users own library of writings and multimedia. Publishing tools stitch these together into apps (using the eventually standard for web service coordation, or maybe this X#?), for personal use (traditional personalization like My Yahoo) and distribution, a domain currently limited to techies.
Recombinant growth sounds like engineered Emergence.
Spring Does this promise any of the above? I'm looking forward to testing it out. It seems to show Services wrapped in constraints, to guide the Tool to permit certain combinations of actions. Connections are made visually and through menus, at the user level.
I agree that HyperCard was way ahead ahead of its time, and still is in many aspects. No environment has put the power of programming into so many otherwise unprepared hands. I know little of Hypercard, would like to know more. From this description, the vision could be summed as "Hypercard for the Web". Put the power of the web into unprepared hands. How does hypercard do it? Can its model be updating for online, distributed apps?
That's a mini google zeitgeist timeline. Timeline is one of a fewgreat viewpoints on data. Tools should enable users to build their own zeitgeist timeline, by attaching references to dynamic web services and their own diaries. Or, how bout attaching a discussion, from egroups to weblogs to newspapers, stretched properly along a timeline, with referred with resources attached. Shift effortlessly to another viewpoint. Pieces of the timeline are made world writable, for others to build apon.
From XML-RPC to SOAP: A Migration Guide Well the Web Services stack grows and solidifies, hopefully in the next couple years. What about legacy? With a demonstration of shoehorning xml-rpc into soap, it's conceivable to build soap wrappers for other legacy protocols, like screen scraping, to fully utilise coordination protocols.
Well some conception is taking shape at least! [Brain Off]
1:26:50 PM 
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Got some flow on the Yahoo post, so I thought I'd follow up.
 For full disclosure, I am a former "Technical Yahoo!", working on personalization (My Yahoo) and later international engineering. Of course, I don't speak for Yahoo and hope I don't step beyond any confidences by writing about my thoughts and speculations.
I value my years there very highly, but left of my own accord to broaden my experiences. My recent work on aggregation and weblogging comes directly from the same motivation :: to enable regular users to build the web, for themselves and for sharing.
Don't have the impression that I think Yahoo is out of the running, far from it. Yahoo has the largest registered user base on the Web, perhaps the largest database in history(!). They've made a lot of adjustments over the past couple years, and are ready to grow again.
Key thing, they'll have to start moving again. With a big bang.
When the dust settles around rich clients, blogging/aggregation, digital Id, and a sweet spot application is devised, expect Yahoo to release something apon millions. That could mean good news for companies diving into the space, as Yahoo is well known to acquire into technologies. [Brain Off]
1:24:37 PM
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Sociology of the Mobile Phone.
The most general function of cell phones is to lessen the degree to which social relationships and social systems are anchored in space, and they increase the degree to which they are anchored in particular persons.
From the point of view of individual users, the cell phone provides opportunities:
- to enlarge the number of potential communication partners available at any specific place and moment
- to distance oneself from current collocal interaction fields by directing attention to remote partners
- to expand the peripheral layers of social relationships by cultivating weak ties to partners one is not ready to meet
- to shield oneself from new and unpredictable contacts by signaling unavailability and by maintaining more frequent interaction with familiar partners (e.g. friends and kin)
- to maintain contact with any other individuals (or organizations) irrespective of movement and changing spatial locations
- to combine divergent roles which would otherwise necessitate one's presence at different places at the same time
- to switch rapidly between highly different (and usually segregated) roles and situational contexts, so that there is more discretion as to how they should be separated or combined
- to take over “boundary roles” in any social system: e.g. in order to get information about the external environment or to participate in processes of external interaction and adaptation
- to fill empty waiting periods with vicarious remote interactions
- to reduce the reliance on one’s own inner judgment by asking others for advice
- to occupy highly diffuse roles which demand involvement at any hour of the day (e.g. care-giving functions etc.); or “standby” roles which demand permanent readiness (e.g. in emergencies)
- to live more "spontaneously": without strictly scheduled agendas, because meeting hours can easily be rearranged.
From the point of view of social systems the cell phone will:
- decrease the positive impact of spatial proximity on social interaction and integration
- increase the functional viability of very small groups and single individuals, because they have increased opportunities to mobilize additional resources from outside actors, or to include additional remote members on an ad hoc basis when needed
- ease the penetration of bilateral interpersonal microsystems into multilateral groupings, formalized social collectivities as well as public spheres.
- increase the capacity of organizations to fully integrate spatially remote and moving subunits and to relate to customers whose location is changing and not known
- increase the functional capacity of collectivities and organizations on the move: e.g. military or police units, ambulances, refugee groups etc.
- privilege collectivities constituted on the basis of particular members rather than particular places or territories (e.g. families and ethnic groupings rather than cities, parishes or schools)
- encourage emphasis on highly segregated bilateral relationships - while larger multilateral allegiances are losing ground
- facilitate swiftly constituted, ad hoc gatherings with highly variable composition, so that social system structures can be flexibly adapted to rapidly changing situational conditions
- facilitate the shift from rigidly programmed bureaucratic organizations to "adhocracies" where timetables and cooperation patterns are constantly reshaped
- lessen the need for central “communication hubs” within groups and organizations because each member can directly receive (and send out) his/her own calls
- minimize the “spill over” of communications to unintended third parties because messages can be precisely targeted to intended individual receivers
- increase intersystemic permeabilities, blendings and interpenetrations, while lowering the capacities to keep such contacts under centralized and regularized control.
[Smart Mobs]
1:10:48 PM
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Accepting the Coming Storm. Accepting the Coming Storm - (links via Donald Sensing) It's been a week of interesting rumblings out of Saudi Arabia, and one has to wonder if Saudi Royals and clerics are finally accepting the coming new reality. We start with the clerics, as reported in Arab News: “Western expatriates have... (607 words, 0 comments) 01:33 PM, February 09, 2003 [PhotoDude's Web Log]
Wow! Maybe the middle east has hope after all!
1:09:23 PM
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Street Sensation::Entire streetscapes showing over 2,500 shops, bars and restaurants in the liveliest areas of London great obsessiveness, nice photos, though of dubious value. why not tap into the street security cameras? similar project to seamless city - san francisco [Brain Off]
1:02:29 PM
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myway
Boy this looks familiar! It looks good. How did they get all the content, set up the personalization, out of no where?
Nice feature on myway :: import your yahoo bookmarks :) Glad I got that y! bookmarks export feature pushed out
And now I understand...
iWon.com picked up all excite's assets for just $10 million (down from 7.8 billion) iWon is myway.
My Excite was the major competitor to My Yahoo, back in the day. It was a personalization arms race. The sunrise/sunset/tides/moonrise modules were my favorite envy. But there are just so many small ui things on myway, borrowed from my yahoo, that we sweated over to create.
Well that's the way it goes. The no-ads idea should go far. I've moved on from Yahoo, so no matter. It's up to Yahoo to start the arms race again with some technical dazzling [Brain Off]
1:02:00 PM
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Mind bending science Update
[Brain Off]
12:49:13 PM
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Genghis Khan: most prolific man in history?. A recent study suggests Genghis Khan's direct patrilineal descendants today constitute ~8% of men in a large area of Asia (~0.5% of the world population). With 16 million living men carrying his Y-chromosome, Genghis Khan had about 800,000 times the reproductive success of the average man of his age. What was his secret? [kuro5hin.org]
6:34:27 AM
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The Ecology of Urban Habitats. From Mikel Maron's Brain Off blog:
"Contrary to expectations, urban landscapes are some of the most interesting ecologies. The variety of landscapes and microclimates (roads, parks, gardens, rail, canals, industries), the intense flow of exotic materials for commerce and gardening, and continual disturbance, all contribute towards many opportunities for nature. Due to such variety, cities are often more biologically diverse than the surrounding countryside. Nature is astoundingly creative, and keen to exploit subtle convoluted chance.Nature continues to happen, in more astounding forms, even within our most artificial environments. Some bizarre relations of humans and nature from The Ecology of Urban Habitats
- The overall result is that urbanized areas, despite a large reduction in the total vegetation cover, support a higher number of species than the surrounding countryside. [p. 11]
- .. tropical fauna and flora occurs in certain canals where water used to cool machinery is discharged. Thermal pollution of the River Don by the steel industry has enabled wild figs to colonize its banks, [p. 118]
- In fact all industry, as it gets tidied up, becomes less interesting for wildlife. The very features that allow a rich flora and fuana to survive - the squalor, rubbish, old buildings and machinery, derelict huts, rotting dumps, ineffiecient handling - are becoming unacceptable to management [p. 122]
- [Oxford ragwort] A native of Southern Italy, was cultivated in the Oxford Botanical Garden for over a hundred years before it eventually escaped (1794) and soon reported as plentiful on almost every wall in the town. About 1879 it reached the Great Western Railway system where the plumed seed engaged in a new form of dispersal, being carried along in the vortex of air behind express trains, or even inside them [p. 139]
- the reasons for caraway being limited to railway verges in Scotland ... caraway cake topped with fresh seeds was pocketed at post-funeral teas ... on the way home they tried to eat it, gave up and threw it out of the window [p. 142]
- A more subtle effect of dogs can be observed on the base of street trees against which they urinate. This area, known as the canine zone, carries a different epiphytic flora to the rest of the trunk. [p. 162]
- Starlings were successfully introduced into New York in 1890-91 as part of a project to establish in the States all the plants and animals mentioned by Shakespeare. [p. 171]
- .. [an] experiment took place in Germany during the Third Reich when exotics [foreign plants] became enemies of the state and for a short time naturalistic planting flourished ... [p. 184]"
Interesting. In urban areas there's greater diversity than in industrialized farm land, so nature has the opportunity for thriving better in many ways. Urban landscapes are aggregates of many individual choices, many small bets on different things. Varied constellations of new things being built, combined with old things decaying. Farm land is homogenized monopolistic monoculture. Maybe the worst crime against nature is not cities, but modern farming methods? [Ming the Mechanic]
6:29:26 AM
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Here Comes the Wireless Traffic Officer.
This is what envisions Lee Bruno in this article on how wireless technology is transforming our businesses and our lives.
In Seal Beach, California, Cisco's 3200 series Mobile Access Router sits in the trunk of a police vehicle. It allows the car to remain connected to IP networks, regardless of what types of wireless systems are delivering the signal. This "always-on" network allows police officers in the field to access several types of data and information such as IP-based video surveillance, photos from crime databases, and fingerprints obtained from other officers' scanners and from databases. With the wireless link, officers at the scene of a bank robbery, for example, can view live video surveillance footage from bank cameras to determine how to resolve the situation.
Cisco thinks that wireless technology can be beneficial not only to police officers, but also to everyone.
Two years ago, Cisco commissioned its own study examining the productivity gains of wireless in working environments. It studied 300 U.S.-based organizations with 100 or more employees that use wireless LANs. The study found that wireless LANs enabled employees to stay connected nearly two hours longer each day, which translated into a time savings of 70 minutes for the average user, thus increasing their productivity by as much as 22 percent. The study concluded that wireless LAN investment had an annual estimated return on investment per employee of $7,550.
Here is Bruno's conclusion.
There's no reason to believe circuit-switched phone networks will disappear anytime soon. However, wireless is going to become an ever-larger umbrella for delivering voice and data wherever you are -- even if that means your next speeding ticket will be delivered by a police car's wireless router.
Source: Lee Bruno, Red Herring, February 5, 2003 [Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]
6:25:42 AM
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Sturdy microbes. I think the world of microbial organisms is really fascinating. For example, there have been various discoveries of how amazingly sturdy microbes can be, and how they can survive in what we would consider the most inhospitable environments.Just recently, scientists discovered that there is plenty of life even deep below the ocean floor. They sampled 3.5 million year old crust 1000 feet below the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. There is an enormous pressure, and none of the normal energy sources that life depends on. But different microbes exist there. Another story here , about rock-eating microbes on the sea floor. It estimates that 10-30% of the Earth's bio-mass consists of microbes deep inside the crust.Bacteria also have amazing abilities to survive for a long time under extreme conditions in a suspended state.
On April 20, 1967, the unmanned lunar lander Surveyor 3 landed near Oceanus Procellarum on the surface of the moon. One of the things aboard was a television camera. Two-and-a-half years later, on November 20, 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan L. Bean recovered the camera. When NASA scientists examined it back on Earth they were surprised to find specimens of Streptococcus mitis that were still alive. Because of the precautions the astronauts had taken, NASA could be sure that the germs were inside the camera when it was retrieved, so they must have been there before the Surveyor 3 was launched. These bacteria had survived for 31 months in the vacuum of the moon's atmosphere. Perhaps NASA shouldn't have been surprised, because there are other bacteria that thrive under near-vacuum pressure on the earth today. Anyway, we now know that the vacuum of space is not a fatal problem for bacteria. Or, even more wild, 30 million year old bacteria have survived in amber:
Biologists Ral Cano and Monica Borucki had extracted bacterial spores from bees preserved in amber in Costa Rica. Amber is tree-sap that hardens and persists as a fossil. This amber had entrapped some bees and then hardened between 25 and 40 million years ago. Bacteria living in the bees' digestive tracts had recognized a problem and turned themselves into spores. When placed in a suitable culture, the spores came right back to life. Those last two are from Cosmic Ancestry, a very interesting site supporting the possibility that life on Earth has been seeded from space. Here's another recent article about that, suggesting that life probably exists now on Mars, under similar conditions as what we find in the Earth's crust, and that it is quite likely that the process here was seeded by microbes from Mars. [Ming the Mechanic]
6:24:02 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Mark Oeltjenbruns.
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