Monomorphic

A characteristic of a naive approach to the digital world is the tendency to record and store everything. JustBecauseWeCan. Every photo, every e-mail, every song, every web site ever visited, every acquaintance who ever added you as a friend on some social network, every message you ever received. Somebody, probably an author, termed this the “database complex”, I think. A projection of a certain greedy tendency to gather and collect things. This does have certain benefits when coupled with a good search function. Every now and then I find myself having to use some information that only exists in an e-mail that I received 6 months ago or so.

A more advanced approach is selective forgetfulness. Humans cannot go on with their lives if they do not forget memories and experiences that are irrelevant and useless. They become unable to set and act on new targets. I think  that a slightly less naive digital life would contain a measure of deletion. Deletion of files, old e-mails that have probably become useless, “friends” on social networks who are mere acquaintances or even less, and so on. Taking away the old makes space for the new. It can be especially powerful to see the number of files in your home directory reduced from 50 to 5. A lot of confusion and ambivalence is immediately removed.

Part of taking the next step step deeper into the digital age should be deciding, each for themselves, what one’s personal thresholds and principles of deletion are. What should be deleted, when and why? In our brains it has been managed by evolution for us. Now we must manage it by ourselves.

The architecture of the Internet is fundamentally decentralized, a fact that continues to impress to this day. The breadth and depth of the sea of applications and uses we have made of it, and its resilience, impress perhaps all the more, because many of our experiences from everyday life tell us that some of the strongest things in society are singular and centralized — huge companies and governments, for instance. I’m actually not an expert on internet architecture, but my understanding is that the only thing that is fixed in it is the DNS system, which relies on some top level hardcoded IP addresses and coordination.

But even though the Internet is built on a decentralized architecture, it also supports applications/services that are highly centralized in their architecture and in their intended use. Google and Facebook are two very famous such applications. On the other extreme are applications that might be called P2P, including notorious file sharing systems such as Bittorrent, and also simple email (which was designed for decentralized use but is becoming heavily centralized with services like Gmail).

In recent days there’s been much discussion about Facebook’s role, particularly since it has been taking more and more liberties with the vast amounts of data about it users that it holds, scaling back the notions of privacy and integrity as they see fit. Many people are calling for decentralized alternatives to Facebook to rear their heads, and I suppose people have been calling for decentralized search engines as well for some time.

Much seems to be at stake here. What’s the future direction of the internet? A few giants holding all the data, monopolising certain functions, or a distributed network of peers, creating functionality together? The debate is ideologically charged and could be mapped into a big government/small government discussion, although I think it would be fruitless to do so. What is certain is that radically different applications can be created using the centralized/decentralized models and that it is rarely a case of merely “porting” an app from one architecture to another, the way you port an application from C to Java. On an abstract level, the two models could serve as substrates for the same functionalities (such as social network services), but the concrete implementations would have very different characteristics.

Do we create centralized applications because our legal systems, property rights systems, and so on, have not evolved at the same pace as our infrastructure, so that our tendencies, habits and ideals from a brick-and-mortar world are preserved in the world of fiber and switches, appearing ever more outdated?

In Sweden this debate has been especially pronounced recently with companies like Flattr being firmly on the side of decentralized models. Flattr is trying to be a universal donation system for content on the internet, and the vision behind it is a large number of decentralized creators of “content” (which are themselves consumers).

I’m not sure which model will win in the long run. I prefer to think that both models have a role to play and that they can coexist nicely. But lately it seems as if the centralized model has had a bit too much momentum. Let’s dig deeper into the decentralizing potential of the internet!

The web browser, it is safe to say, has gone from humble origins to being the single most widely used piece of desktop software (based on my own usage, but I don’t think I’m untypical). This development continues today. The battles being fought and the tactical decisions being made here reach a very large audience and have a big impact.

When exactly did the web browser make the transition from being a hypertext viewer to an application platform? This transition seems in retrospect to have been a very fluid affair. Forms with buttons, combo boxes and lists were supported very early. Javascript came in not too long after. When the XmlHttpRequest was introduced it wasn’t long until AJAX took off, paving the way for today’s “rich” web browser applications.

A couple of years ago I had a personal project ongoing for some time. I had decided that web browsers weren’t designed for the kind of tasks they were being made to do (displaying applications), and I wanted to make a new kind of application platform for delivering applications over the web. Today I’m convinced that this would never have succeeded. Even if I had gotten the technology right (which I don’t think I was ever close to), I would have had no way of achieving mass adoption. Incremental developments of the web browser have, however, placed a new kind of application platform in the hands of the masses. Today the cutting edge seems to be browsers like Google’s Chrome, aggressively optimised for application delivery. But some new vegetables have been added to the browser soup.

Google’s GWT web toolkit has been available for some time. This framework makes it easier to develop AJAX applications. Some hardcore AJAX developers may consider it immature, but these frameworks are going to be increasingly popular since they bridge the differences between browsers very smoothly, I think. What’s interesting is that the same company is developing GWT and Chrome though. The two sides of the browser-application equation have a common creator. This helps both: GWT can become more popular if Chrome is a popular browser, and Chrome can become more popular if GWT is a popular framework. Google can make and has made GWT apps run very fast with the Chrome browser (I tested this personally with some things I’ve been hacking on). The sky is the limit here; they can easily add special native features in the browser that GWT alone can hook into.

Microsoft have something a little bit similar with their Silverlight, which while not playing quite the same role, has a co-beneficial relationship with Internet Explorer.

Everyone’s favorite browser, Firefox, recently passed 1 billion downloads. Firefox doesn’t really have a web development kit of their own as I understand it. It just tries to implement the standards well. Which is fair and good, but it demotes FF from the league of agenda setters to people who play catch up, in some sense. Though, it must be said, the rich variety of plugins available for FF might go a long way to remedy this.

All this, and I haven’t even touched on Google’s recent foray into the OS market with “Chrome OS”…

I use the tool Evernote on my iPhone and my desktop computers. It’s pretty nice. You can upload “notes” such as PDFs or images from your desk or from the phone, and the software makes them all searchable and syncs all data between all the different places where you use it. It OCRs photos, so if you take a photo of text, that text will be searchable. It can also show on a map where notes added from the phone were taken.

But this seems to be the icing on the cake: Pixily can scan your paper documents for you, supposedly even handwritten notes. (If they can do my handwriting, and I’m not sure they can, then they can surely decipher absolutely anything, even lost alphabets.) Apparently you send them all your stuff in boxes or envelopes, and they will OCR it into your Evernote account so it all becomes searchable. I would definitely do this if it were cheap, but I suspect shipping to and from Japan is too expensive for me to do this in bulk.

We’ve now had just over a decade of truly mainstream access to and use of the internet. I think I personally took my first stumbling steps on the web around 1995-1996. At the time, it was a limited phenomenon, rife with poor design. It was hard to see what was eventually going to come out of that. And even today, it’s hard to see what today’s internet will eventually evolve into.

If it wasn’t clear before, the events of the past week have made it clear that the internet is a valuable tool for democracy. When everybody can broadcast to everybody else, as opposed to just a select few broadcasting, it’s difficult to control the information flow. Repressing select bits of information becomes hard – the repression just results in the information getting more attention. In the aftermath of Iran’s elections, it seems one of the most important communication channels for protesters was Twitter.  The situation is being likened to Tiananmen square. Together with everybody else, I could follow #IranElection as the events unfolded. It went to the point where the US State Department asked Twitter to delay upgrades in order to keep the service operative, supposedly because of Twitter’s importance in Iran.

I don’t know enough about the candidates to take sides in Iran, but I think one of our fundamental principles should be that nobody should seek to rule by repressing communication. Today, the Internet is a free communications device that anyone can use. How long will it stay this way? When legislators seek to clamp down on the Internet’s uncontrolled nature and regulate it for one reason or another, we should protest. Unrestricted mass communication for everyone is too important an invention to give up.

For those who read Swedish, Rasmus Fleischer has written a brilliant post on the events from a philosophical-historical perspective.

I enjoy experimenting with new software  just to see what people come up with. There’s just so much unknown software to discover. I suspect most people find something they like and then stick with it until it doesn’t work anymore, but there’s something to be said for proactively replacing your software and searching for better things. Here are some things I’ve taken a liking to recently.

New iPhone OS: Apple released version 3.0 a few days ago. It’s been all positive so far. I get spotlight search for the phone, the keyboard feels more responsive, it finally has copy and paste, Youtube appears to have higher quality, and a slew of other features. (Also MMS which I don’t really need in Japan).

GWT: I started playing with the Google Web Toolkit just for fun. For those who don’t know, it’s an API for developing AJAX based web applications using pure Java, which is then compiled to client side Javascript and a Java servlet. It turns out I can be extremely productive with it – I found that it lets me develop fairly advanced web applications using my existing skills. There’s a very high reward/effort ratio that makes me excited. It feels like I don’t need to learn Ruby on Rails properly when I have GWT given that I’m very comfortable developing in Java.. but we’ll see.

Fluid.app: A web browser enhancement for the Mac that allows you to create separate “applications” from web sites you visit often. This means they will show up in the task bar and application switcher, have their own icon, and occupy less screen space. It sounds simple, but it’s a revelation. (And if you’re like me, you tend to have 15+ tabs open in your web browsers constantly, which is a poor way of managing windows).

Chandler: Like many others, I found out about this little calendar and note manager by reading Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming in Code , which chronicled the misfortunes of an open source startup project. It went 1.0 last year after many years of development. The impression you get from the book is that the developers had a lot of bad luck despite setting out with the right ambitions. This is now an old debate, but the tool is actually usable today – I’ve been using it every day to manage myself for 3 months. Aside from slight bugs, it feels very smart sometimes, thanks to its unique user interface and features.

I previously commented on Wolfram Alpha and PowerSet. Fisheye Perspective now brings my attention to another “answer engine” as they are called these days: True Knowledge. You have to sign up for an account in order to test it, which I have yet to do, but one feature that’s immediately appealing is that users can add and edit content. This was apparently one of the main design principles. But is this then just an alternative to Wikipedia? Not necessarily, as it also has an inference system (it can deduce facts from other facts). And it has an API for programmatic access. I can think of many interesting uses for an online user-edited inference-enabled knowledge base, if they can get the details right. These things are still in their infancy (I hope, since I want them to be better).

Computers are connected to people, and to the physical world, through input/output devices. These are not just keyboards, mice, monitors, printers etc, but also various sensors, e.g. temperature, light, movement sensors and video cameras, and output devices like industrial control systems or robots. Every day, we increase the extent of what computers can observe, and what they can affect.

Computers are also more connected to each other, thanks to the internet. So now, by virtue of being connected to computers, physical objects are becoming indirectly connected to each other more and more. One of the consequences of this is that physical objects can manipulate other physical objects in different ways, even when they are far away or otherwise unrelated to the sending object. In other words, the internet is converging with the physical world. This is sometimes called the internet of things.

An example: The Nabaztag is a rabbit like internet connected object that has many novel ways of interacting with its environment. However, it’s an artificial object created for this purpose – the real changes are when conventional objects around us become connected unexpectedly. The Economist has an article about what happens when cars become connected. Quote from the article:

“We can stop looking at a car as one system,” says Rahul Mangharam, an engineer at the University of Pennsylvania, “and look at it as a node in a network.”

In preparing for the future, it would be prudent to anticipate a world where things are interconnected even more strongly today. I can think of several problems and opportunities that would arise in such a world:

• Safety, ownership and security become much more important. Today buildings and property are protected by locks and physical barriers. What happens when the weakest link in a security chain is a bit switch in computer memory? (We already have this in many situations today, but those systems tend to be less connected. The pressure to be more connected will turn those bit switches into greater risks.)
• Privacy and anonymity on one hand, versus openness and identification on the other, will acquire even more importance. I expect we will have the ability to control in great detail what information we want to reveal about ourselves and our objects, and to whom and what. For instance, there are experiments with software to accumulate footage from many different CCTV cameras and reconstruct a realistic three-dimensional model of physical reality. There are as many exciting applications as there are dangerous ones (from a surveillance state perspective).
• Completely unrelated objects might be linked to each other in interesting ways by their owners. I might set up a Rubik’s cube so that entering a particular combination on its faces makes my computer decrypt a hidden file (maybe this isn’t very good from a security perspective). The color and intensities of highway streetlights might change dynamically depending on where the cars are. Depending on whether my friends did something interesting today (found out by observing, for instance, their twitter feeds), I might want the speed dial numbers to appear in a different order on my phone. (The system could also try to figure out which friends I might be likely to contact based on my own actions).

But these are all trivial examples.

A related, but different (as I understand it) topic is being researched by Neil Gershenfeld at the MIT Media Lab. They call it “bringing the programmability of the digital world to the physical world”. This seems focussed on creating programmability without conventional computer equipment. If brought to fruition, it might have some consequences in common with increased connectivity.

Indubitably, these questions will enter mainstream politics increasingly in this century. Ideally, the necessary debates will be informed ones, and held early rather than at the last minute when faced with crises.

Image by Great Beyond. Some rights reserved (CC).

Recently, while reading about methods for manipulating RDF, I discovered the search engine PowerSet. More recently, Wolfram Research’s Wolfram Alpha launched. There’s been no shortage of new search engines in the past year or so – Cuil is one that was much publicized but ended up remarkably useless – but these two still impress me.

PowerSet impresses me because of its interface – I can easily see what a particular match is about without leaving the list of search results. Speeding up the typical use cases like this is very important for usability.

Wolfram Alpha impresses me because of the quality of the results. Maybe I’m in the minority thinking this – the press seems to have been giving it mostly negative reviews. Clearly WA is not intended as a Google replacement, but perhaps it was described as being one at some point. Today, being available to the public, it’s something different. It lets me look at data, mostly of the quantitative sort, and make all sorts of semi-interactive charts and comparisons. Here are some searches I liked: earthquakes in Japan, 1 cup of coffee, Tokyo to Osaka. I especially like the interactive earthquake graph.

WA is not without its problems though. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what kind of queries you can make. I found the above mostly by experimentation. If they exposed more details about their data model and what they knew about each kind of object, maybe this would be easier. Right now I’m wondering why I can do a query like “largest cities” but not “largest cities in mexico”, for instance. I suppose this is mainly a question of maturity both on behalf of the system and of its users, though.

Search engines like PowerSet and WA are indicative of a broader trend towards semantics in computing and internet usage. While the semantic web isn’t here yet in the sense that we don’t have a semantic web browser or a unified way of querying the internet, clearly services that are based very heavily on semantic models are becoming mainstream. More on the impact of this in a future post.

I just found out about BioCaster, a tool made by people at my institute. It tracks news in real time and lets you view the spread of diseases geographically.

I’ve seen similar services before (related to swine flu, etc), but this one lets you break down the data by disease and even by symptoms.

Asahi Shinbun mentions it in an article (Japanese).