Rainbow Positioning System

Following request for comment, new ideas may invoke defensiveness in some, delightful evaluation in others, and possibly incomprehension requiring eventual rediscovery in yet others. Media is emergent though not yet autonomous. It still takes conscious people to make meaning of change, or to consider relevance and consequence. Automated research may eventually yield familiar forms of presentations, but automated reality may seem comparatively upside-down if information density increases by miniaturization. This would be a new context for adaptation. Perhaps philosophy can reinforce and extend the scale of tech and scope of cultural dependencies, if it can survive inquiry. Predicting business requires betting on future value.

Recent bookmarks. Futurict promotes a sustainability clearinghouse. Academia.edu has a topic researcher directory. NASA astrobiology site. Japan plans a lunar robot. Acquia discusses cloud webservice hosting architecture in video. Amsterdam’s Usabilla supports website testing. Spirent offers cloud testing. Pogoplug adds USB cloud storage. Layar hosts an augmented reality marketplace. Textie.me does ipad messsaging. Dailyplaces produces location-based microblogging. Google living stories is now on wordpress.

Book reviews include:

Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information, Vlatko Vedral, 2010. The news is that a symmetrical pair of processes, the second law of thermodynamics and derived meaning, are enough to generate reality. This bootstraps the existence of information which outweighs matter and energy, while the universe moves to maximize entropy and disorder, and we embody natural laws. That provides a source of ideas which the scientific method, or its analogs in other disciplines, turns into rules of nature. Quantum physics reveals meaning and the other side of the story of creation. The author synthesizes a coherent framework for quantum information science. Landauer’s principle that information is physical, where entropy is proportional to surface area, inspires a combination with Shannon’s information as inverse probability, Boltzmann’s constant, and qubits, to yield randomness at small scales and determinism at large. Twelve chapters explore perspectives of biology, thermodynamics, economics, computer science, sociology, philosophy and quantum physics. Each chapter mixes explanation, observation, anecdotes and humor, and is followed by a summary of the key points. Applications include cryptography, teleportation, climate, diet, segregation and gambling. Literature sources include Popper, Smolin, and Singh. Compare publications by Seth Lloyd, George Johnson, Michael Nielsen and Isaac Chuang, Amir Aczel or Raymond Kurzweil. The challenge is to integrate gravity to quantum physics.

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, Stewart Brand, 2009 This book ambitiously attempts to capture trends in the areas of climate change, urbanization and biotech. There is a lot of data and requirements for much more. It is wordy and tries to wrap a scientific narrative.around things that hold promise for solving issues. The author is optimistic that new tech will provide alternatives and that human nature will shed romanticism for pragmatism. This is a unique datapoint along the scales that, for other authors, would produce do it yourself instructions, computation engines, cognitive advances, nanomanufacturing, human genetic engineering, martial law, or extinction.. It is rather a wholesome approach that prescribes sober effort to get hard data, especially needed about oceans, so that a feasible bearing can be selected from among these currents amid changing forecasts. Readers are treated to statistics about the “city planet” or unlimited growth and economics which include cell phones, electricity, squatters and crime. Nuclear power has become a commodity at the same time as weapons foreshadow the high cost of failure. The upside of genetically modified crops and foods, microbes, metagenomics, and biofuels is examined. Big nations will figure out solutions and curb their toxic tendencies. The author’s roots in the whole earth catalog revisit conservationism, native American Indians, and the oratory of Jerry Brown. This is an anthropocene age demanding new ethics and politics. There is a lot to criticize and be cautious about, which is also the point since the folklore arguments have become outmoded. The resolve is biased and it makes demands of near-future generations which may have local dissenters. The human eye can discriminate shades the most for the color green so that label may not automatically be a consensus builder. As far as the presentation, the layout could stand some alterations, e.g. to add graphics, swap the multi-page bullets for conciseness, and highlight conclusions amid the alternating pluses and minuses. The author was an originator of notions of planetary consciousness who still knows the players so this may be a brief breath of fresh air for those bogged down by confusing terminology and contradictory innovations.

The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi, 2009 The author presents a very detailed rendering of a near-term survivalist future where the biological clock has been conquered and greed drives society. The genre has been termed biopunk and also has touches of steampunk. A corrupt centralized Thai government controls the population. Corporate foodstuffs are genetically modified and licensed, and plague terrorists maintain scarcity levels for demand and prices. Scientists create synthetic animals and people as slaves. The characters are representative of the major functions of each of the sectors who try their best to succeed, and are combined in various ways to heighten the drama. They see each other through blinders that support their own egotistic biases. The author builds up elaborate structures and then destroys them, naturally, in personal spats, and in battle. A belief in reincarnation rationalizes the sacrifices. The story is told in third person omniscient perspective and, at emotionally intense times, has brief first person thoughts in italics. Each of the fifty chapters is a type of cliff-hanger. The cover art is representative of many of the characteristic elements including the big four-tusked megadonts and their mahouts, dirigibles, and green methane lamps. Some of the characters are from previous short stories. The title New Person combines DNA refinement, extraordinary training, robotic obedience, the resignation of a prisoner, jittery movements for identification, and perfect skin with pores too tiny to cool temperature enough. Others are used as soldiers in Vietnam. This is a cynical world where each potential improvement seems to engender constraints that neutralize or outweigh it. Blade Runner had replicants, but they were used off-world and did not survive long. The biology is more normal than Mieville. Brands’ nonfiction Whole Earth has symmetrical biotech, urbanization and climate though it is more optimistic. A setting in America may have had less mysticism, or in India more divergence of best and worst conditions. The earth does not turn into Mars or Venus here, but it does not seem able to return to any recognized conservationist stage either.

The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing’s Historic Paper On Computability and the Turing Machine, Charles Petzold, 2008. Discusses what can happen when a mathematician attempts to design hardware, actually a mechanical process of proof, yielding a universal virtual machine using notions of finite state and storage, and beginning the field of computer science. This is a tour through mathematical history and a demonstration of how thoughts can be clarified, though details of the existential origins in time of national crisis may be hidden. The subject, one of the most often-cited papers of the century, e.g. impressing Claude Shannon during a meeting prior to his publication about information theory, had ideas which non-mathematicians also sought to understand for potential uses, and which continue to inspire approaches to logical problem-solving. The book author’s style is conversational as if second person directly to the reader. The contents of the original are presented intact with background, biography and blanks filled in enough to translate it to English for the casual reader. There is an extensive bibliography around the scientist and topic.

IntAllegiance

Projections for the realworld include some primary climate change scenarios (pdf), a series by Damon Vrabel looking at societal economic controls, and the growth of ecommerce in China. Inter-socnet streams may be easier using XAuth and activity can be visualized using OpenGraph and Postrank. Realtime animated video rendering software reportedly improves realism. 3D adds mobile, and hardcopy from IBM nano, Sculpteo, and D-Shape. Speakeasy measures bandwidth. There were about 53 bookmarks since previous post. Added Technology topic to wiki. Book reviews include:

The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Popper, 1959. This is a classic in the histories of philosophy and science. The author translated from German to English. Cosmology is the study of humanity’s place in the world. Growth of knowledge is significant. Scientific knowledge is key indicator. Logic, or the method of progress, is the topic. Universal theory is the goal. Finding universal problems is the approach. It is interesting to see the science and common sense of that time questioned, e.g. to surmise that theories are not verifiable, and that probability is not falsifiable. The author makes observations about Bernoulli, Bohr, Kant, Hume, Wittgenstein, Einstein and Heisenberg. The second English edition was published in 2002. It had two parts, logic and experience, ten chapters, eighty-five sections, and nineteen appendices. There are eight main points about induction, psychologism, deductive testing, demarcation, experience, falsifiability, empirical basis, and objectivity versus conviction. The writing style is clear and uses elements of verbal rhetoric for pleasant effect rather than a dry classic style of proof, which is among the subjects of scepticism. A philosopher faces a “heap of ruins” and uses language to find genuine problems in an exercise of critical thinking. The social aspect is important. The title is similar to Kuhn 1962 and it has been observed that it anticipated the scientific framework or paradigm. There was a debate between them in 1965 and the theories have been compared. Modern fields which were outside of the scope at the time include at least brain science, computation, visualization and automation.

Curing Analytic Pathologies, Cooper, 2005. This brief addressed the system tilts early in the new millenium decade. There were layers of pathology involving individuals, groups or agencies, and community or society. Various types of errors, bias and illusions are shown. Analytic support is needed for warning, policy and military operations. The intelligence phase-space includes domains and accounts, products and services, and sources. Problems involved a series of strategic intelligence failures, interrelated causes, a collection paradigm for “denied areas”, analytic methods from the cold war, intelligence not being as self-correcting as science, and a craft culture and guild structure relying on an unsustainable apprenticeship model. Solutions were to apply cognitive science, use new approaches in collection, analysis, processing and dissemination, diagnose root cause “inside the boxes”, add more perspectives and validation methods, DNI leadership assurance to cover each agency across the community, and an institutionalized lessons-learned process. The Pathologies Map and the Layers diagram on p59-60 illustrate how “networks act like ‘regulatory pathways’ for intelligence’ to distort reference frames and produce wrong answers. Other sources discuss Collective Intelligence.

Tetraktys, Juels, 2009. The search for truth includes ways to keep secrets hidden and, when this is threatened by a Pythagorean cult, doctoral apprentice Ambrose Jerusalem is recruited by the government. This is a different adventure from illicit deals or religious confrontation, but it could happen. The hero is a classically educated computer scientist and son of an archaeologist. Elements may be reminiscent of Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, Benson’s Bond in Facts of Death, and movies like The Recruit or Indiana Jones. The Greek history is well researched. There are four parts, appropriate for the title, containing ten chapters each. The settings are in places such as Boston, Italy and Greece. The perspective is third person omniscient, mostly dialogue, and some flashbacks. It is an initial novel and some parts seemed pasted on rather than smoothly integrated, but there were convincing emotional sequences, such as the protagonist’s confusion about what his parents wanted him to become, or an hilarious dance scene. It refers to realworld incidents, e.g. zodiac killer, and tradecraft such as applied numerology for decryption. The author seems to take fiction writing seriously and his technical expertise suggests that there are probably more plots in store.

WWW:Watch, Sawyer, 2010. National securities have hit the panic button after the discovery of the Exponential virus. Is this the birth of immortality or the threat of annihilation? What are the rules of consciousness involving multiple species such as animals, humans or aliens? How many casualties will truth demand? A vision of this scenario is presented in a style which consistently juxtaposes two or more perspectives so that the reader can vicariously experience what the ambiguities are like for a myriad couple of dozen characters including the mirrored protagonists Webmind in the first person and Caitlin in the thought-revealing third, she with a cyborg-like eyepod and it with an empathic form of total information awareness. This is the second part of a trilogy so it extends the original story while not being completely conclusive. The author, who also writes for TV, has proposed a well-researched technothriller about the early days of cyberwar. He looks at messaging, reading, movie watching, data visualization, innovation, games, mobility, privacy, censorship, crime and emotion from a novel vantage point. Clips of mostly Star Trek and other references are used to reinterpret the scifi themes. Humans have been used to being the teachers in the past, but this situation challenges their known solutions (assuming cloud engines like wolframalpha prevent cheating for the time being). This artistic story invites deeper appreciation.

Test Distance

Popular media is awash in sci-fi. Summer is an optimistic season. The final year of the decade is seen as a pivotal manifestation of change in approaches to issues. Human history is treated as a runaway which various groups are scrambling to deal with in order to define and position themselves for whatever is ahead. Depending upon perspective, one may simultaneously be experiencing growth on the order of multiples of previous levels of experience, as well as a disconcerting collapse of structures which had previously been relied upon for responsibility. In a time series, this can be portrayed as a changing of the guard, or alternatively considered as transition from nationalist vertical to globalized flat, or other domains may see length of time shift to height of relevance, or orthogonal rotation of moments, and so on. The next decade may attempt to maintain part of this through economics. Optimistically, an inclusive balance sustains the good, realistically society continues to cater to a market of might, and pragmatically, correlations of ideas across previous boundaries connect various people in unexpected ways.

Titles from the reading list were Hibbs 2009 and Pezzè 2008 on software testing, Singer 2009 on military robotics, Wolf 2008 on VLSI design, and Aezel 2001 on quantum physics.

Image generated using GIMP 2.6.6 on original compass logo darkening background, filtering map/fractal trace, and uploaded as twitter background image.

Webia Potencia

The digital consciousness is responding to a recent flu outbreak for which a vaccine is not yet available. This is putting global data handling and analysis systems to the test. An accurate dashboard was not yet obvious. Expect EMR improvements (in records and responder). Also see links from pandemic.

Evernote public folder allows a type of blog entry, though did not yet insert graphics, or have direct post from Windows Live Writer and Zemanta. Topic included Noë which may be relevant to testing worldware. User profile was not shown so appended contact to title. Site updates sent to friendfeed and facebook. Link added to blogs on wordpress and blogger.

This week’s reading list included Sankar 2009 on Enterprise Web 2.0, Melik 2007 about flatworld project management, Polikoff 2005 discussing capability cases, Hamilton 2004 NUnit.

Image: from HealthMap

“Innovate Like Edison”, Gelb and Caldicott, 2007, 300pp, discusses a framework to describe the inventor’s overall approach to problem-solving for consumer and business products and services. There are some extensions that could be made given a web component, e.g. less necessity of geographic proximity and more analytics. The book supports the practices of experimentation and journaling which are useful in test environments. The market is what drives innovation according to Edison. It is what led to his ideas, notebooks and drawings, lectures and founding of the journal Science. He excelled in experimentation, persistence and learning and pioneered methods of collaboration and teaching. This book captures some of the energetic style of this well-known American inventor of the 20th century phonograph, light bulb and motion picture projector among over a thousand patents. The book discusses his biography, contemporaries, society and creative influences including Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln. He formulated a core culture that could be used across industry business models which included brand name, manufacturing, marketing, open communication, geographic proximity, and leader networks.

Reviewed Nanoconvergence, William Sims Bainbridge, 2007. Video from 2006.

Convergence of nano, bio, IT and cognitive (NBIC) sciences leads to human transcendence. The history, state-of-the-art, luminaries, and grand challenges of each field are discussed. Nanotech is immediately a multiplier and eventually a unifier. Social science may be more popular going forward than computer science was over the past half century. Imagines how convergence might occur and what its effects would be, e.g. on government. A challenge is that a lack of scientific evidence results in a false unity of ideas. A convergence cube is proposed to connect conservation, indecision, configuration, interaction, variation, evolution, information and cognition. Nanotech began with NASA space manufacturing research, so book looks forward to future space systems. Other applications such as personality transfer modules are also illustrated. It shows what individuals can do to get expertise and contribute research, suggests R&D for scientists and engineers, and defines the factors of a social movement. Author’s link.

The personality archives seem to have different assumptions than research which finds genetic components, e.g. in results from identical twins versus fraternal ones. Another direction of study might be along the lines of synthetic personalities created by using reasonable results from the population of all possible element settings. These personalities can be combined with eachother using different relation models, e.g. competition, cooperation, curative, constraint or other capacities, to form teams or groups. How these evolve over time might indicate new factors.

You Are Here

Some further consideration of surfaces.

Edges and corners are where these meet. There are studies of topological problems that effectively yield to solutions where these occur, e.g. paths or interconnects, & power laws.

The players in the semantic world themselves form surfaces, e.g. humans, information, devices, and environment (H/I/D/E). Each of these classes can be combined using one or more instances. The user can also be seen as a consequence of these systems, e.g. follow single-user, multi-user, trusted-user, remote-user, profile, social-network, & proxy developments. The connections between surfaces might include the exhange files, schema, interfaces, protocols, & controls. Testers find their way through the seams identifying anomalies & occasionally reporting neat tricks or workarounds. Failures ironically lead to improvements in the systems. Users also enact this role, possibly involuntarily. Affinity groups of individuals & organizations usually form from members with common interests & complementary strengths. The Semantic Web may eventually be such a user.

An interesting paradox seems to arise when one considers that it would be Web Science that would be considered responsible for disproving the existence of the Semantic Web.

We can assume that the web exists since the source of this is a blog post. Characterizing the exact identity remains difficult since the contents are often replaced and only a tiny fraction are searchable, the servers vary, the domain names change, entire new continents of users are being added. However, the fact remains testable, and almost always leads to a positive conclusion.

The term “the semantic web” may be interpreted by some as an oxymoron since, without the users, the system would be meaningless. The contents would continuously be reified until all of the rules and logic have been exhausted, then the information is as perfect as it gets and the game is over. This can be extended by plugging in sensors to the physics of the environment so that additional data is added, assuming there are some ontology generation mechanisms for the system to throw new theories at itself. It either probably continues to find out how they fail or it agrees on the ultimate truth. In the former case, it did not fulfill its function, therefore it has not achieved the label & in the latter case, it is again deterministic which seems to be a contradiction in terms. External users might displace it to several locations in the universe in order to increase confidence in the result or vice-versa. If users are not involved, it can forego the etymology & other human factors which would seem to simplify the problem. Of course, it could then also then pick a different name, other than semantic web & declare itself triumphant, e.g. the beginning of The Engine.

Web science may or may not be reflexive. It may be considered a science of the web, i.e. concerning it but not contained by it. It may be able to comprehend formalizable theories.

It is likely up to the SW creators to define what will become the classic tests, as Turing had previously done for his computer design. Incidentally, the term “test” did not appear in one of the proposals:
http://www.nowpublishers.com/getpdf.aspx?doi=1800000001&product=WEB

An RDF version of this argument might be a longer. It might be solvable within the context of particular domains as special cases. Having to deal with the media, wikis & blogs that can add a mass of data to counter perceived biases might make the general solution an ongoing effort. They have various measures of reliability for web-generated-content.

(BTW, an additional factor for the Trusted Menu might involve nutrition as the news about demographics, health & quality of food-processing emphasizes.)