Month: June 2007

Shai Carmi, a physicist at Israel’s Bar Ilan University says this is the most complete picture of the Internet available today

Previous maps of the internet show the topological structure, the connections between nodes, but “some nodes may not be as important as other nodes,” says Carmi.

Technology Review states this is the first study to look at how the Internet is organized in terms of function, as well as how it’s connected.

“The Internet has a core of 80 or so critical nodes surrounded by an outer shell of 5,000 sparsely connected, isolated nodes that are very much dependent upon this core. Separating the core from the outer shell are approximately 15,000 peer-connected and self-sufficient nodes.

“Take away the core, and an interesting thing happens: about 30 percent of the nodes from the outer shell become completely cut off. But the remaining 70 percent can continue communicating because the middle region has enough peer-connected nodes to bypass the core.

“With the core connected, any node is able to communicate with any other node within about four links. “If the core is removed, it takes about seven or eight links,” says Carmi. It’s a slower trip, but the data still gets there. Carmi believes we should take advantage of these alternate pathways to try to stop the core of the Internet from clogging up.” [pics here]

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In 1998, Cheswick and Burke posted The Internet Mapping Project. Wired has an article and the layout of the early web’s Scenic Route. In 2006, CIO used the 1998 map [full gif here, pdf here] to ask Who owns the Internet?

In 2003, New Scientist shows the Internet Map as traceroute nodes, the ‘Opte’ project by Barrett Lyon.

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How heavy is the Internet?
A “bit” is about 40,000 electrons stored in a capacitor on a chip. Multiply a bit by the total volume of information passing around the net, estimated at 40 petabytes, and voila: 0.2 millionths of an ounce.

Thoughts on Friday morning, 1837

    Inspiration,         the great incision in the soul bodie,    lingers like a wound in the side of the mind;         so much more when inspiration    converges near the limits of perceived reality.

    Will we ever come to see    That only courage grows tomorrow?

    Mind opens the gates of time    And flies the eagle's soar    Into the space beyond    limits of our agreed reality.

    Tenets of the past--    romantic, spiritual stewards of the weave--    spring up as markers,         (pray end up as understanding)    helping to divulge new identity    in a vast quanta of unique opportunity.

    There is the urge that will not be ceased:    To bring the forward back to the existing.    Reaching up to the heavens,    we bring insight to its test.

    Our science, our commerce, our effort,     merely to launch our timid rationality.

    Ah, the restraint of practical reason    coupled to the liberty    of a dignified mind:            an                                    infinite                                     wedge.

The waves come in again and again,
Come in from the sea to the shore.
The waves come in and retreat and then
Leave that part which retreats no more.

The waves come in on watery feet
With no two ever the same.
The waves come in, the earth to meet.
Then leave constant, untamed.

The waves sing out in watery voice
To earth and sky and cloud.
What message is’t to man they pose
Now gentle then now loud?

The waves come in to the land from the sea.
Their tops a’foaming and curled.
Their great voice repeats whisperingly
That each is a part of this world.

Oh, I propose to love the waves
As they have indeed loved me.
Waves bring the gift that each heart craves:
Peace is the gift of the sea.

Crowds are untrustworthy.

The larger parts of crowds may merely be attracted to the buzz, the novelty and, well, the crowd.

This post isn’t an argument against a green future, nor supports new scientific claims, but is a necessary post because we must move forward with caution and be wary of crowds.

Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, is going against the crowd and recent policies responding to global warming.

Klaus argues in the Financial Times that ambitious environmentalism is the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity. Strong words.

Is he to be grouped with other leaders on the fringe, such as South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki questioning the link between HIV and Aids? Or George W. Bush as he flames evil-doers?

Vaclav Klaus writes,
and answers a swarm of questions and comments,
that “global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem”.

He asserts that the issue “is more about social than natural sciences and more about man and his freedom” than about global temperature.

“As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.”

Ed Ring at EcoWorld stands behind Klaus and is incensed as millions of acres of forest are sacrificed for artificially profitable biofuels or when Washington spends billions on ethanol infrastructure that warps and damages related food, land and water systems – a net effect of more warming and less efficiency than using fossil fuels.

“As scientists and politicians catch up with independent minded skeptics like President Klaus, we will hopefully stop the anti-CO2 agenda, and return to things that matter, like eliminating truly noxious pollutants, reversing tropical deforestation, and continuing to develop clean and efficient fossil fuel while we eventually transition to nuclear and solar power.”

Medical and public health experts have long decried the use of antibiotics in animal feed, both to promote growth and to compensate for unsanitary conditions on industrial-scale farms, because it spurs the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that spread to humans via our food, air and water.

The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that 70% of all antibiotics used in the U.S., nearly 25 million pounds annually, are used as feed additives for chicken, pigs, and beef cattle.

Tyson Foods has decided to raise its fresh chickens without antibiotics. [AllAboutFeed.net]

A Johns Hopkins University study showed that the use of growth-promoting antibiotics in chicken feed slightly accelerated chicken growth, but that the benefit was offset by the cost of purchasing antibiotics, with the total cost rising by about one penny per chicken.

Seymour M. Hersh at The New Yorker: How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties. Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba knew his report would make him unpopular:

“If I lie, I lose. And, if I tell the truth, I lose.”

Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not. – Emily Nussbaum

Information Commissioner Richard Thomas, the chief official in charge of managing public information in Britain, has warned of the increasing risks associated with a 24/7 surveillance society. Thomas is concerned about the way people’s electronic records are being used as more institutions hold personal data. “The use of ‘unseen and uncontrolled’ surveillance is threatening to erode the public’s confidence in many of society’s institutions.” To the House of Lords Constitution Committee, he states,

“The state have fundamentally altered the way it relates to its citizens. Microphones that can eavesdrop on conversations in the street are the next step in the march towards a Big Brother society. Tiny cameras, hidden in lamp posts, will replace more obvious monitors.” [link]

Remembering Benjamin Franklin in Britain, the Commissioner repeats to Parliament,

“Those who lightly give up their liberties in the name of safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Informatization of Life
Surveillance & Society is a peer-reviewed transdisciplinary online journal examining changes in our culture such as monitoring smells with olfactory surveillance [pdf], open street Closed-Circuit Television [pdf], and somatic surveillance, ‘the increasingly invasive technological monitoring of and intervention into body functions. Psychological profiling is a type of surveillance that is rapidly advancing into the mind of individuals.

Friends, neighbors and strangers are increasingly becoming tracked as well as trackers. In this pdf, People Watching People, David Wood looks at the growing popularity of peeping and tracking in Japan and the growth of intimacy surveillance around the world.

Techdirt catches the school using a webcam system to take regular snapshots while students take tests.

Commercial mass surveillance [wiki]
BusinessWeek predicts that biometrics will become a healthy $4.7 billion industry in 2009, up from just $675 million in 2003, and video surveillance software will reach $642 million in sales from a mere $147 million in 2004.

Aikido Tracking
Kaila Colbin is exploring privacy at VortexDNA. Noticing few regulations, she asks, “Do you think it’s enough to have good intentions not to share user data?”

Her idea is the “Aikido approach” to privacy and surveillance:

“When someone comes at you with a great deal of energy, it is foolish to try to resist. The most effective response is to embrace the energy and move in the same direction.”

If there are few regulations,
if data can be incorrect or abused,
if surveillance is sloppy and poorly managed,
if governments and companies too easily make errors,
is it wise to protect ourselves by recording our own tracks?

What if your insurance company tracks every movement of your car?
What if your payment is based on where and when and how far you drive?

Aviva Insurance in Britain uses Trafficmaster’s dashboard GPS to automatically transmit an encrypted account of a car’s exact movements — road-by-road, mile-by-mile — in order to produce an itemized monthly bill. The rate can jump from a few pennies per mile to dollars per mile. Time and location is a good indication of accident risk.

Rush hour drivers are 50 percent more likely to have an accident.

Drivers on country roads are 10 times more likely to have an accident than on highways.

Serious accidents & fatalities are far more likely from midnight to five in the morning.

To save money, a student in Britain is no longer driving at night. “I pay half as much for insurance and think twice about using the car during times that are considered high risk for accidents. For the first month I’d drive to lectures when I got out of bed late, but looking at the bill convinced me to get up earlier and walk.” [story]

We’re walking stars…

a vast increase in freedom
of speech, of press, of assembly;

advantage,
mastery,
virtue.

But wait..!
What has happened?

‘…from the introduction of counter-factual beliefs that frustrated literalists helped found Conservapedia whose entry on Evolution is a farrago of anti-scientific nonsense, the relative advantages of expertise are in precipitous decline’.

Here in the morning when the day appears,
yesterday has taken so much to bring everything.

There’s Stumbling on Happiness; Fooled by Randomness; Freakonomics.

Johnnie Moore says The Halo Effect may be the best of the lot. It’s about “the staggering number of ways in which we delude ourselves about the world we live in.”

The Cult of Leadership

If you happen to be at the head of a successful company, you acquire a halo. So you get rated for having all sorts of great qualities. Whether you have them or not seems fairly immaterial. – Johnnie Moore

Amazon says, “This tart takedown of fashionable management theories is a refreshing antidote to the glut of simplistic books about achieving high performance.”

How has China become the world’s “factory floor”?

What causes China’s prices?

The ‘China Price Project’ tried to figure out what causes China’s low, low prices, the prices that have allowed it to capture “70% of the world’s market share for DVDs and toys, more than half for bikes, cameras, shoes, and telephones; and more than a third for air conditioners, color TVs, computer monitors, luggage, and microwave ovens.”

Their conclusions are that lower labor costs account for 39%, China’s clever practice of locating related factories near each other (which lowers shipping costs and makes it easier to coordinate) accounts for 16%, and the efficiencies permitted by the flood of investment into China account for 3%. As for more standard government policy issues, export subsidies account for 17%, undervalued currency for 11%, counterfeiting and piracy for 9%, lax environmental and safety standards for 5%.

Business Week says “The China Price” are the three scariest words in U.S. industry.

The study was published by Peter Navarro, a business professor at the University of California, Irvine. A review of his work deconstructing China says, “”What Al Gore does for climate change, Peter Navarro does for China.”

Rajesh Jain’s weblog Emergic points to Knowledge@Wharton with facts and figures about China’s urbanization over the last several years.

China has $1.2 trillion of foreign exchange reserves today. Back in 1978, 20% of the people lived in the communes. Everybody was equal, but equally poor. Today we are talking about some people who make a lot of money. Now, 43% of the people live in cities and within the next 20 years, I bet your bottom dollar that the number of people living in cities in China will be the greatest migration that the world has ever seen.

Urbanization will probably hit a figure of 80%. This is unheard of, in my mind. I’ll give you an example: When I first went to Shenzhen to work there in 1979, there were only 80,000 people in that city. Today it has 10 million people. That is the number of people who have migrated to the city in the past 20 years.

China’s economic growth was driven by the manufacturing industry. Of course, the country also has a really stable government; the Communist Party controls the whole nation, and sometimes there are some hiccups, but by and large things are really stable. The stable political environment combined with a free economy – as free as the government allows it to be – has made all these successes possible.

Surprise surprise, reports Andrew Cohen at CBS, the Republican National Platform contains the following language:

“The rule of law, the very foundation for a free society, has been under assault, not only by criminals from the ground up, but also from the top down.

“An administration that lives by evasion, coverup, stonewalling, and duplicity has given us a totally discredited Department of Justice. The credibility of those who now manage the nation’s top law enforcement agency is tragically eroded.”

The RNC promoted this position during the 2000 election.

Hasan Elahi, a Bangledesh-born American, was detained for hours by FBI agents at the Detroit airport. He could not prove his whereabouts.

Enduring nine polygraphs and searches of his residence and workplace – questioning that lasted six months – he became “so afraid he would be detained he started telling the FBI before he traveled anywhere”.

Later he developed another and more efficient method. Now his website, a streaming of his life, is the perfect alibi.

“OK, government, you want to watch me, come and watch me.”

He strapped a tracking bracelet to his ankle, hacked from his cellphone, that takes a picture and marks his GPS location. Everything he does is posted on his Web site. [story]

Elahi’s now defunct live tracking site http://elahi.rutgers.edu/ at Rutgers University where he teaches art, receives more than 160,000 hits per day. His novel life exhibit site is Tracking Transience.net.

Wired Magazine’s article is The Visible Man: An FBI Target Puts His Whole Life Online

The lifestreaming blog examines the “chronological aggregated view of your online activities” – the tools and issues of life logging. Lifestreaming Pros by Jeremy Wagstaff, Cons by Nicholas Carr, and Lifelogging with Gordon Bell is a solid introductory post.

Tim O’Reilly cites David Brin’s idea that “the proper response to the inevitable surveillance society is to embrace it, making sure that surveillance is evenly distributed, rather than just in the hands of a few.”

Stephen Ulph of the West Point Academy testified to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the Bush administration is waging its “war on terror” without really understanding the enemy and thereby strengthening the hand of Jihadists.

Ulph argued that Jihadists have painstakingly constructed, over decades, a serious, cogently argued, academically and ideologically coherent intellectual infrastructure to their ‘holy war’. He claimed that they are engaged in a massive re-education project, and they are going about this unopposed.

Ulph testified that the Jihadists are not waging war on physical infrastructure of the US. Their decades long planning is cultural and is designed against

1. the respect for personal privacy,
2. the open nature of society,
3. multiformity and diverse interests and other ethical and ideological orientations,
4. the active will to promote social cohesion,
5. trust and the harmonization of interests,
6. and the support of community-based organizations.

Ulph said that it is “simply unbelievable that we are now in our sixth year after the attacks on September 11th and still without a coherent map of the enemy, of their cause and their ideological methodology.”

A majority of the 500 most influential people in history came from a dysfunctional home.

Michael Clarkson is the author of five books on psychology and writes for the Toronto Star. He says the most powerful person in history may be the absent father.

Clarkson’s research shows that more than 300 major historical figures were orphans or rejected by their parents, including Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat, Mikhail Gorbachev, Gamal Nasser, Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, Queen Victoria, Golda Meier, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and the “father” of the United States, George Washington. Some 40 per cent of U.S. presidents lost a parent when they were young, four times the national average.

Paranoid Megalomaniac
Dr. Justin Frank, a prominent Washington psychoanalyst and author of Bush on the Couch, the younger Bush is a “paranoid megalomaniac,” partly because his father was emotionally and physically absent during his childhood, which “triggered feelings of both adoration and revenge in George W.”

Professor Robert Albert of Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., who studies high achievers, says “People go into politics, especially, to overcome loneliness and early deprivation of love.”

Q: How many Mormon governors does it take to change a light bulb?
A: It takes a Yale math whiz to point out another phony in politics.

Governor Romney, please at least use pretentious words correctly.

MR. BLITZER: Governor Romney, … [k]nowing everything you know right now, was it a mistake for us to invade Iraq?

MR. ROMNEY: Well, the question is kind of a non sequitur, if you will, and what I mean by that — or a null set.

Romney’s campaign strategy: sound smarter than you actually are…

Tony Blair repeatedly and unsuccessfully raised concerns with the White House over the lack of planning in the weeks leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Countering warnings from advisors, he said,

“Look, you know, I can’t do everything. That’s chiefly America’s responsibility, not ours”.

“The reasons for impeaching Bush and Cheney exceed by many multiples all the reasons for impeaching every president combined in US history. The reasons have been enumerated many times and do not need repeating. If members of Congress were faithful to their oaths of office to uphold the Constitution, Bush and Cheney would already have been impeached and convicted.” – Paul Craig Roberts

p.s. I think Roberts is extreme, but he’s part of a growing tribe of conservatives becoming honest with their convictions rather than merely loyal followers.

DailyKos has a fun post – excellent points, comments and illustrations – that repeats Roberts’ claim that “the US government is in the hands of dangerous psychopaths who are a disgrace to the human race and who should be arrested as war criminals and turned over the the Hague.”

Most of us are confused and uninformed about data privacy. The FBI is too.

An internal FBI audit has found the agency violated rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data on domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transaction, says Reuters. The audit only looked over 10 percent of the FBI’s national security investigations since 2002.

That’s one piece of the story. Another part may receive little attention although it may point to a larger problem of greater concern to most of us.

The vast majority of newly discovered violations were instances in which telephone companies and Internet providers gave agents phone and e-mail records the agents did not request.

Repeat:

Of the more than 1,000 violations uncovered by the new audit, about 700 involved the provision of information by phone companies and other communications firms that exceeded what the FBI’s National Security Letters had sought.

The audit found that agents were not intentionally holding unlawful data. They were not adequately trained and there are inadequate internal controls. But are there any training programs or management controls at ISP’s or phone companies?

Are there laws governing corporations that gather data about us? Are there oversight groups that can determine if personal data is being abused?

There’s a tremendous need for dialogue and clarity about personal data privacy, security of our data and the use and ownership of personal data.

On the one hand, I am not my clicks. I am a person protected by the law. While surfing, I make the presumption that our law must view my click trail as a form of free speech. On any street corner, I can ask questions, make statements and examine ideas without threat, thus I can search, write and journey the web without fear that this type of data is admissible as a legal threat against me.

Although there have been worrying legal cases for seeking or possessing unlawful items, even minor but wicked arrests for scavenging wireless, I\’ve seen no legal case brought solely on the basis of a click trail. It may be that a click trail could be used by authorities, but I don\’t see this more threatening than the current ability to interview neighbors or ask my mother.

On the other hand, my click stream is about me. The misuse of authority is only one possible abuse of my click stream. Will someone someday try to sell it? Would a new marketplace set a high or a low selling price? Can my click stream be used and misused by corporations, banks, insurance or, gosh, dating services? What would my mother think if she was given my surf habits? Could a vendor make sales adjustments based on instant data feeds? Will bot-sweeps be developed that apply psycho-social evaluations of people or neighborhoods?

Over centuries, we developed rules to define and protect our property. Now we need to expand how we define property in order to include our data, our property. We have a protected domain in our home or on the street with our hands in our pockets. Do we have similar protection for data about us? Can we say it belongs to us? And do we control what is ours?

Current rules are unclear. And our trust in current data managers is low.

There’s a requirement for very strong rules that restrain the use of data. We all need a type of ‘information sovereignty’. I think that mistrust is more healthy than ignoring the matter.

Reviewing the past 50 years of research, Scientific American studies teams:

…although society places a great value on teamwork, the way organizations make use of teams often runs against known evidence for what works —and even against common sense.

Jordi Canudas, a Barcelona artist, created ‘Share Hat’ worn by several wearers at once to represent how we multiply function when we integrate in social groups.

Bruce Schneier offers a rational summary of recent terror activity, pointing to an incompetent enemy and our inappropriate response.

Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot

The recently publicized terrorist plot to blow up John F. Kennedy International Airport, like so many of the terrorist plots over the past few years, is a study in alarmism and incompetence: on the part of the terrorists, our government and the press.

Terrorism is a real threat, and one that needs to be addressed by appropriate means. But allowing ourselves to be terrorized by wannabe terrorists and unrealistic plots — and worse, allowing our essential freedoms to be lost by using them as an excuse — is wrong.

Declaring that no terrorist can measure up to the errors of President Bush, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on YouTube introduces the beginning of the end of America, while also reminding us that “In times of fright, we have become only human”.

Seeking good feelings and greater understanding?
Why not try nirvana, the state of having extinguished suffering.
Or not.

Too much advice is ‘off the earth‘, as if the place to be is not here,

no where nearvana!

HA!

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The drunk falls from the cart but is not hurt.
You throw hesitation aside but look stupid.
To be truly uninhibited is a rare grace. – Tao

The absence of a ‘mirror Earth’ to act as a control group makes it extremely challenging to conduct reliable studies in climate science. – Jim Manzi

Since 2004, about a dozen accredited scientists and climatologists have managed a very busy website at RealClimate.org. There have been well over three million visitors. Posts are most often followed by 100s of comments!

There’s too much to learn!

Five hundred hydrogen fuel cell engineers and scientists from the laboratory side of General Motors have been transferred into the chain of command that produces cars.

Is this a tip about the future?

The VP of R&D at GM said hydrogen-powered fuel-cell vehicles could be on the road with regular drivers behind the wheel in a few test areas within five or six years. Although he’s not yet willing to say exactly when hydrogen vehicles will be mass produced, he said it should happen before 2020.

We’ll no longer know.

The Secret Service recently ended the practice of keeping logs of visitors to the president and the vice president. [link]