Archive for August, 2005

After lunch (waaaay over my head) (not the food, the conversation), I went to hear what O'Reilly is up to in terms of new book publishing techniques.

Rael Dornfest did a very zippy demo of Aardvark (not available online), which is a combination of a wiki and a blog for authors and publishers that exports to formats for publishing.  You can write your book in the right format, with everything beautifully tagged, and your readers can read it chapter by chapter.  The point is that everything is becoming atomized online, so let's publish in an atomized way as well.  Very interesting.

1.  Howard Rheingold is working hard on pulling together information about collaboration and cooperation across many disciplines.  He's been teaching a course at Stanford, and wants to do a book. 

2.  Jonathan Aquino talks about yubnub.  He says it's a command line operating system.  Yubnub makes it possible to save web sequences (sequences of web pages) as an arbitrary word.  Then you can run these sequences (either by going to yubnub or by using a yubnub plugin).  So, for example, people have created commands to find a pizza place in a particular locality, using Google local. Or commands to find scholarly papers, using Google scholar.  Yubnub harnesses the power of traditional command line syntax for the web. 

Someone suggests that he find a way to allow web services to be invoked in the command line.  Someone else says that it might make more sense for yubnub to be the library, and to have all the commands run at the client. Someone builds a new command that invokes split-screen web search results (from Yahoo! and Google) during the session.

3.  I dropped into O'Reilly's Web 2.0 meme mapping.  He's having the crowd list what's different about the new web.  People are talking about cost-effective scalability, collective intelligence, components, data ownership remixing, addressable data, differences in how products are built.  It's a lively discussion.

4.  Scott Gray (ex-LearningLab) has a couple of things to talk about.  (I'm sure he has many things to talk about — he's irrepressible and superlative by nature.)  First, he wants to tell us about what he thinks is the BEST TECHNOLOGY EVER. 

What is it?  It's using spectrum that we have trouble generating (terahertz gap spectrum, between microwave and infra red) that can bounce through materials safely and tell us what's inside.  He's telling us that organic materials resonate at these frequencies.  So you can point a reader (a tricorder) at yourself and see whether you have cancer, or a virus, or you can point at a road and see whether there's a bomb buried there.  The detector technology for this spectrum is very advanced, but it's expensive and difficult (right now) to generate the waves.  There's a company that is working hard on this, and Scott thinks there's a huge future here.

He notes that Star Trek gave us the communicator, and Get Smart the slamming doors — this will be a Star Trek device that we'll carry around.

Then he switches gears and talks about online education.  He's into training people how to program by putting a lot of effort into technology (so they have a live terminal view of their environment) and not that much into teachers.  Teachers can be coaches, answering queued-up questions.  Students can be exploring, education can be cheap, and it can all be constructive.  No simulations, no self-grading, and lots of interaction between teacher and student.  No one-sided lectures (he got some reaction here from people who pointed out that we got interested in his first topic because he told us about the Star Trek link; context and scaffolding helps).  He's working hard on how to  educate asynchronously.

It's an enormous group.  98% build things, invent things, do things.  Then there are a few of us who just write things.  David Weinberger captured the sense of the introductions here.  I'll try to blog sessions tomorrow – but it's likely to be hard due to all the activity.

So far, I've had some great talks about 3D printers (in 20 years, we'll all have printers in our homes, like dishwashers, that will print out new cellphones, new stuff we need), online identity formation, opening a university in a virtual world, and aggregating event data from all over the world.  What I'm interested in finding out is how realistic new forms of online connection are, and hearing  about great new things.

I tried to persuade a couple of people to come with me to put up my new tent, but everyone was busy or out of town.  So I went to Washington Square by myself to practice with my tent.

But “by myself” doesn't really work in Washington Square.  I surveyed the territory when I got there, and there was:

+ a full theatrical production

+ a large crowd watching (and imitating) a dancer

+ an amazing bass player

plus, of course, the chess players, the bench-sitters, the hot dog people, the playing fountain, and all kinds of other things going on.  I was not by myself.

I found a patch of lawn and started to take the tent parts out of their bag.  I found the directions–good news! I was moving pretty slowly.  I had figured out which was the bottom part of the tent (the part with the tent floor) and which was the top part of the tent, and I had started trying to figure out the poles, when a friendly woman in a hiking shirt (“Women Trek the Himalayas”) came bounding up to me. 

“Going camping?” she said.

Well, thank goodness she showed up.  She showed me how to clip the poles into the clippy-things and manage the moment when the tent transforms from a heap into A TENT. 

A couple of other people stood around with their hands on their hips, watching.  One guy said, “I thought you were a hippy.”  No, I was just practicing.  With the help of my new Himalayan-trek friend, I figured out the tent-fly-thingie and admired my creation. 

Then I began to take the tent down.  The I-thought-you-were-a-hippy guy told me about a book he had just read by a venture capitalist who retired and traveled around the world for three years with a tent.  He told me about some rich people he had known who seemed to camp out all the time.  He told me he was from Florida.  Meanwhile, I just kept taking the tent apart. When I was done, he said, “Have a good time.  It's good to camp.”  

We said goodbye and I walked back across the park.   

Reuters reports that scientists are suggesting the re-wilding of America.  Large animals, elephants, lions, cheetahs, you name it.  Bring on the Late Pleistocene losers!

Speaking of large animals, Verizon has posted this ad.  (The system isn't compatible with Macs.)

Nuvio has filed an appeal [pdf] from the FCC's E911 order directed at “interconnected VoIP” services.  I'm glad that someone is taking on the E911 order, and Nuvio has done a good job.  Their argument:  “It's a good idea to implement E911, but we can't possibly do this in four months–no one can. The wireless industry has been working on this for years and years, and they're still not finished.  But you're forcing us to cut off our customers if we don't comply on this unreasonable schedule.”  A more internet-minded approach may animate attacks by others on the E911 order — after all, getting away from the legacy physical infrastructure now used for E911 might lead to services that were much more flexible and information-rich.  But Nuvio has started us off on the “it's impossible” front.

In June 2005, the FCC issued an order mandating that, within four months, a particular category of online voice services (which it called “interconnected VoIP”) supply “enhanced 911” (or “E911”) capabilities to their customers. The E911 Order, in a nutshell, requires “interconnected VoIP” providers to deliver their customers' 911 calls to a “local” emergency operator, and to provide that operator with the callback number and location information of the customer. (The ability to provide location information and a callback number is the difference between ordinary 911 services and “enhanced” 911 services.)

There were many many problems with the FCC's E911 Order.  The E911 Order did not set rates or otherwise control what the essential facility provider—the incumbent local telephone company, access to whose lines would be needed for such emergency services to function—could do to hold up a VoIP provider seeking access to the special emergency communications equipment whose use the E911 Order mandated.  The FCC said it would not shield “interconnected VoIP” providers from liability under state laws for mistakes occurring in connection with provision of emergency services.  (Telephony providers, both wired and wireless, do have such liability protections by statute.)  Not surprisingly, the E911 Order moves a social policy designed for telephony directly into the internet context, with very few efforts at customization.

Mandating that VoIP providers make available E911 services to consumers within four months was impossible (or nearly impossible) to do for most of the entities that make such voice services available, for several reasons.   The existing 911 infrastructure in the US (which is connected to but largely separate from the traditional phone network) is extremely antiquated, to the point where even wireless companies have had great difficulty implementing 911. The 911 network has not fundamentally changed since the 1970s. The E911 Order gives “interconnected VoIP” providers no new rights that will help them comply, and does not obligate local telephone companies to allow them to connect. VoIP service providers have no right to access emergency call centers, and most of these centers are owned by local telephone companies.   And the complexities of nomadic VoIP services (usable from any net connection anywhere in the world, using any area code, over any form of transport) make connection to the legacy E911 system difficult.

The complexities associated with requiring voice services running over the internet to provide E911 are mind-boggling.  To be sure, the FCC has issued this requirement only with respect to services that (1) enable real-time, two-way voice communications; (2) require a broadband connection from the user’s location; (3) require Internet Protocol-compatible equipment (a PC); and  (4) permit users generally to receive calls that originate on the traditional telephone network and to make calls to the traditional telephone network.   So a voice application that only sent data to the traditional telephone network, but did not receive data (was not itself accessed through a telephone number) would not be subject to this rule.  (At least for the moment – the FCC has said it will examine whether the scope of this mandate should broaden, and it is very likely that a broader category of online voice services will soon be subject to this rule.)  

But a free voice service that makes it possible for users to “call” traditional telephone numbers and receive “calls” from the network must find ways to get “location” and “callback” information to a “local” emergency center through a centrally-located and customized piece of hardware—the selective router.

The requirement of emergency services for online “voice” services fits perfectly with the telephony mindset.  From the very beginning of the history of telephony in the US, the essence of telephone service has been that it makes emergency help available from a central source.  Telephones are there to watch over us in our sleep.  Telephones are vigilant, centrally-controlled, located in an identifiable terrestrial place, and set up with services that the telephone company believes (or the government believes) are good ideas.  Those who are steeped in telephony strongly believe that any communications service offered to the public must provide access to emergency officials and that technological developments must not be allowed to avoid this regulatory requirement.

Even if it's impossible to comply.  Even if you end up with a service that doesn't work as well as a more technologically-sophisticated service would. 

[I've posted a draft paper about this here.]

If this is true, help is on the way.  BPL, wifi, all open, all available, with plenty of bright colors.

I can go back to being optimistic.

You can make public actors accountable just by reporting on what they've said.  If there's too much going on, collaborate on taking the notes. 

But notes alone may produce too much text for anyone to handle efficiently.  What if there were ways for groups to collaborate on creating visualizations of the notes, and a graphical language that was commonly used to share the output?  Like a radar screen — “this issue is big and coming towards us, click through to read the details.”  Or “These are outlying issues.”  Some kind of graphical outliner that would actually add water/meaning rather than taking it away.

If only someone would throw a lot of money at graphical groupware.

Nearly a decade ago, Congress closed its Office of Technology Assessment.  The president of the Federation of American Scientists, a former OTA employee, called the closing the “equivalent of a self-inflicted lobotomy.”  Between 1974 and 1995 OTA produced 750 thorough reports about a wealth of scientific and technical studies.

Since then, the Congressional Research Service (thanks, CDT!) has been providing Congress with quick summaries of issues, but CRS doesn't have the deep technical expertise that OTA did, or the resources to do sustained studies.  The National Academies have the time and the resources, but they take too long and they have too many constituents to serve. 

In re-writing the Telecom Act and jumping into having the FCC regulate the internet, it would be good to have a neutral, expert, bipartisan group advising Congress about the consequences of their actions.  As a UPI story noted last year:

The real-world practicality of having members of Congress figure [technology policy] out by making phone calls is questionable. Even if everyone could find the time to sit down with experts on spectrum interference — or virology or computer systems or other complicated topics — would they realistically be able to sort through all the conflicting information on all the topics Congress covers to find what is needed to make fast decisions? Not likely.

The OTA's job was not to make policy recommendations.  Instead, they tried to advise Congress about the implications of various paths.  Congress is not doing very well on other scientific and technical fronts, and some advice might be useful.

On the other hand, the communications industry spent $1.1 billion between 1998 and 2004 to lobby Congress and the FCC, so I'm sure everyone is well informed.

In honor of EFF's 15th anniversary, EFF ran a blog contest — and the winners have been announced.  Take a look at the entries:

Most Inspirational

IO Error, In Defense of Freedom: “As I said in an Independence Day posting a few weeks ago, the fight for liberty is not only conducted by the armed forces, it is conducted every day by ordinary citizens like you and me. We cannot protect freedom by curtailing it. Enemies of freedom, both foreign and domestic, threaten us every day, and we must be prepared to stand up to anyone who would take away the liberty which has made this country unique among nations.”

Most Humorous

Memoirs of a Guardian Vampire, Fair use … what use is it? (Harry Potter Woke Up Goth): “'Moribund is the core of my consciousness. Half-Heartedly I crawl through the strange forest until insecurities strip me of my fears. Suicide, Suicide, Suicide. Thou art my obsession.'

Thus were the thoughts that greeted Harry Potter as he woke that morning.”

Best Overall

The ramblings of Laura Crossett, The Medium is Not the Message: “As I read news reports now, five years later, about bloggers getting in trouble for their writing, I'm reminded of that moment in the basement of Jessup and of the inability, or unwillingness, of the woman at the end of the hall to see electronic communication as equal to oral communication. The attempts to say that bloggers don't have the same rights as journalists stem, in part, from a belief that electronic print is not equal to hard copy print. ”

Congratulations to the winners and all of the participants.

Today and tomorrow:  Cardozo is host to the 5th annual Intellectual Property Scholars' Conference.  Justin Hughes put an enormous amount of work into this.  Free (and well-attended).