Technology Trends

There are few places outside South Korea where you can today access and transmit data at 100 megabits per second. Now, the Lightwave Architectures for the processing of Broadband Electronic Signals (LABELS) EU-funded project intends to bring data to European homes at speeds of 1 gigabit per second (Gbps). In this article, IST Results writes that Spanish researchers have developed prototypes of optical Internet Protocol (IP) routers. In preliminary tests, which were using the existing fiber-optic infrastructure, they’ve already reached transfer rates of 20 Gbps with these IP routers and hope to reach 40 Gbps soon. If all goes well, this technology will be in your homes within five years.

Here is why the LABELS project was initiated.

“Consumers are soon going to want data streams of 100 megabits per second in their homes and eventually 1 gigabit per second,” says José Capmany, a researcher at Valencia Technical University in Spain and the coordinator of the IST programme-funded project. “There are two ways to do this: lay more cable, which involves public works and is expensive and disruptive, or create technologies that allow existing cable to be used to its utmost potential, which is what we are doing.”

LABELS is developing two key optoelectronic technologies to expand the capacity and speed of fixed-line communications using fibre-optic cables and to improve the processing of radio frequency (RF) signals in wireless networks. Both techniques overcome bottlenecks in the flow of data and, though still in the experimental stage, are proving their potential to vastly improve data flow right along the chain.

Let’s focus only here on the first technology.

In the case of fibre-optic networks, the LABELS project is developing a groundbreaking technique to transmit data faster while using fewer resources. The system is expected to play a role in a future generation of optical Internet Protocol (IP) routers, as opposed to the electronic ones in use today. The major advantage of using light wave architectures for processing is that they can send and receive data over multiple wavelengths as opposed to the single bandwidth that electronic systems are confined to, allowing the full potential of optical networks to be utilised.

The LABELS technique relies on subcarrier multiplexing and label swapping in packet data transfer, allowing nodes at different stages along the network to change the wavelength at which the data is being carried. It is considerably more flexible than existing Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) techniques which, though increasing data transfer speeds, lock signals to specific wavelengths.

And is this multiplexing technique really working and why?

“Existing WDM systems work like a telephone call: you first have to make a connection and then the information is transmitted, which is fine if it is being used for a long duration of time. It is not optimally suited to sending data over the Internet in packets, however, which is precisely what has made IP so successful and which is what we are applying in the optical domain,” Capmany says.

Preliminary tests of the LABELS system, which will be fully evaluated later this year in Valencia, have surpassed even the project’s own goals regarding data transfer rates. “We set out to achieve a rate of 10 Gbps but we saw that we could actually reach 20 Gbps with the current system,” the coordinator notes. “With further development that could even be expanded to 40 Gbps and beyond.”

Still, you’ll have to wait until 2010 before watching a movie with a transfer rate of one gigabit per second.

Finally, if you want more information, here is a link to a page which contains links to several publications about this project.

Source: IST Results, August 3, 2005

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Internet
  
  
• Networking
  
  
• Optics
  
  
• Technology
  
  
• Wireless
  

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The Human markup language (HumanML) is a new specification developed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) — and also our new acronym for this week. One of its goals is to improve human-to-human, human-to-machine and machine-to-machine communications. This long article from DM Review, which covers business intelligence and data mining, says that this new markup language can be the basis for tools helping us mining massive volumes of textual and multimedia content. In fact, HumanML wants to represent human characteristics (cultural, physical, psychological, etc.) in such a formal way it can be delivered as machine readable subtext via the use of extensible markup language (XML). Read more…

Here is a short introduction to HumanML.

This article is intended to expound upon a vision for how HumanML may play a role in doing so and how it may be applied in the government and private sectors to improve overall collaboration. Focusing on what functional niches HumanML may fill, this article will hopefully provide context of vision for those already steeped in advancing IT state of the art and are already well versed in the underlying foundations, upon which HumanML is being constructed.

Before going further, let me warn you about its — somewhat — marketing tone.

HumanML is focused precisely on facilitating the key human abilities needed to deal with the challenges brought on by the times - to share, collaborate and relate. As an open standard, HumanML is aimed at helping to sort through mountains of textual and multi-media material by providing for inclusion of human related contextual clues such as the authors’ and publishers’ intent in the form of standardized document markup. Providing a standardized means to convey and establish contextual meaning is intended to allow authors a chance to rise above the chaos described below and permit researchers more opportunity to timely pull valuable nuggets of information and knowledge out of that same chaos.

According to the author, both governmental and non-governmental areas can benefit from HumanML. In the first sector, this new HumanML specification could ease interoperability across agencies and departments at all levels of government.

And for the industry, HumanML could be a basis for helping people to locate the specific information and knowledge they are looking for — especially on the Net.

By providing a standardized means to convey and establish contextual meaning, the use of HumanML would provide authors a chance to rise above the noise floor in the chaos of the Internet. At the same time, such use would offer researchers richer means to separate the wheat from the chaff to find the valuable nuggets of information and knowledge they need.

Finally, here is the last paragraph of the article.

By enriching communication, employment of HumanML would aid understanding even across intra-cultural lingo and multi-media context barriers while, at the same time, permitting deep interoperable access to the material for knowledge mining and other forms of automated services.

Isn’t ironic that the author uses the word ‘lingo’?

Source: Jay Peltz, for DM Direct Newsletter, July 29, 2005

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And remember that comments are no longer accepted here. If you want to tell me something about this post, please go to the bottom right of this page and send me an e-mail.

A large team of oceanographers is again exploring ‘Lost City,’ an hydrothermal vent field located in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, which was discovered in 2000 and named like this because of the myth of Atlantis. But this time, the oceanographers are not on a ship. Most of them are in a room at the University of Washington in Seattle. And according to this article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, they’re using high-speed Internet connections to control robotic vehicles exploring the deep Atlantic Ocean thousands of miles away. Thanks to satellites, the remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) Argus and Hercules can transmit videos back to Seattle in real time. After analysis, the scientists can move the ROVs to specific areas of interest without having their feet wet. Read more…

Before going further, let’s look at some images.

The diagram below shows “how video and data will be transmitted between the NOAA ship Ronald H. Brown, via satellite and Internet2, to the Inner Space Center at URI, the University of Washington, and other participating sites” (Credit: Todd Viola, Phil Scheuer, Immersion Presents).

Here is a link to a larger version of this diagram.

The photo below shows the Hercules submarine vehicle approaching “a ghostly, white, carbonate spire in the Lost City Hydrothermal Field, about 2500 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean” (Credit: IFE, URI-IAO, UW, Lost City science party, and NOAA).

And on this one, you can see a beautiful 3 ft high, actively venting carbonate structure resembling a snow-covered Christmas tree” (Credit: IFE, URI-IAO, UW, Lost City science party, and NOAA).

You’ll find tons of other pictures in this photo gallery available from the Lost City section of the Jason Foundation for Education web site. But be prepared to spend quite a time: they have amassed lots of interesting stuff on this site.

Now, let’s read the introduction of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer article.

Think of it as the Mars Rover but at the bottom of the ocean, remotely exploring our own planet’s most alien landscape for scientists back at mission control.

“This is how the science is going to be done,” said Deborah Kelley, a University of Washington oceanographer.

In 2000, Kelley was part of the expedition which discovered a huge collection of limestone towers in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and some of these hydrothermal vent towers were hundreds of feet high.

Five years ago, the expedition used a manned vehicle. But in 2005, the scientists are in Seattle, operating unmanned vehicles 2,500 miles away in real time.

Yesterday, Kelley and her colleagues were in Seattle and also “virtually” back at the Lost City to demonstrate how robotics and information technology can transform deep-ocean exploration. What once required dangerous and time-limited manned exploits can now be done by remote control on a ship deck or in an office thousands of miles away.

This news release from the University of Washington gives additional details.

Only four scientists are with University of Rhode Island oceanographer Bob Ballard aboard the Ronald H. Brown, a research vessel operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the expedition’s major sponsor. The other 21 are with University of Washington oceanographer Deborah Kelley in a classroom on the UW campus that has been outfitted so scientists can direct sampling efforts and can be in constant contact with pilots and navigators on the Brown.

“Having most of the members of an oceanographic science party on land has never been tried. The approach will provide an opportunity for a much larger number of researchers to explore the oceans,” Kelley says.

If you still have some time to spare to know more about this expedition, please visit The Lost City 2005, a site maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOOA).

Sources: Tom Paulson, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 29, 2005; and various web sites

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Because she is concerned about the emerging usage of Internet in cars, Dr. Meirav Taieb-Maimon, from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, has designed a new search engine that leaves your hands free. In this article, Discovery News writes that the system is using voice-recognition software, a microphone and speakers. The software itself is composed of three elements, two speech recognition components from Microsoft and a custom piece of software called ‘Maestro.’ When a driver says something such as ‘nearest gas station,’ Maestro converts speech to text, builds a search query and sends it to a search engine. It then converts back the results to spoken instructions for the driver. More research needs to be done to know if the system is safe for driving. If it proves to be safe, a ‘Maestro’ might be the Web driver in your next car. Read more…

First, how does the system work?

Let’s say a person wants to find a restaurant in Manhattan that has gotten good reviews. First, she would first dictate her query by saying, “Restaurants New York City.”

Maestro triggers the speech recognition software to convert the speech to text and then delivers it to a so-called “query builder,” which puts the request in language a search engine such as Google can understand.

The query builder returns the query to Maestro, which then delivers it to a search engine. When the results come back, Maestro sends them to the text to speech component for the driver to hear.

The image above and its accompanying legend come from this article from Allison Kaplan Sommer published by Israel21c.

So when will we have a ‘Maestro’ driving the Web for us?

Taieb-Maimon would like to see more safety tests conducted before such a system finds it’s way into automobiles.

Currently, she is preparing a study that will compare driver distraction while using the Maestro system to how much a driver is preoccupied while not using the voice-activated search function to how much they are distracted while conversing with another passenger.

As Taieb-Maimon said to Israel21c, the use of Internet in cars is “inevitable,” so it’s better to design a safe system for surfing while driving.

“With more and more people now working out of the office and trying to be productive as they travel, these kinds of systems are being developed and used. People want to use their driving time to work,” she told Israel21c.

As even hands-free cell phones are forbidden to use in many areas around the world, I wonder what is the future for a hands-free search engine. Would you use such a system?

Sources: Tracy Staedter, Discovery News, June 30, 2005; Allison Kaplan Sommer, Israel21c, May 29, 2005

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• Human Computer Interface
  
  
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• Transportation
  
  
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According to BusinessWeek in “Meet Your Organ Match Online,” about 88,000 people in the U.S. are waiting for living organs and expecting a transplant. But more than 60,000 patients will die before a liver or a kidney becomes available. Enter MatchingDonors.com, a non-profit corporation run by volunteers who take no salaries. If you’re a potential donor, you tell them that you’re ready to give an organ (not sell, it’s illegal!). If you’re a patient, you register for $295 per month — 100% of the money paid for patient memberships is applied to running the site. Then you have access to the full list of potential donors — 1,943 today — and you look for what you need. Read more…

Let’s first look at the current situation as summarized by BusinessWeek.

The vast majority of organ transplants, from donors both living and dead, are managed by the federally sponsored United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS). UNOS allocates organs according to medical urgency, time spent on the waiting list, and the proximity of the patient to the available organ.

But there aren’t nearly enough available organs. There are currently some 88,000 people in need of an organ listed with UNOS, and the network says that only 4,373 transplants were performed in the U.S. between January and May 6 of this year. It’s estimated that 17 people die every day while waiting for transplants.

MatchingDonors.com wants to improve this situation by matching patients and potential donors. How does this process work?

Once a patient and potential donor find each other, the patient’s transplant coordinator schedules both a medical and psychiatric evaluation of the person seeking to give up a piece of his or her body. “We met with some resistance from some hospitals at the beginning but not so much any more,” says MatchingDonors founder and medical director Dr. Jeremiah Lowney. “After all, we’re doing a good thing here.”

BusinessWeek adds that only seven patients received transplants since last October. But this matching service is still very young.

And not everyone in the medical world likes this idea of searching for an organ on the Web and some hospitals and medical schools have ethical concerns.

To explore the issue, Harvard Medical School is set to hold a public forum on May 12 titled “Soliciting organs over the Internet,” bringing together Lowney with several medical ethicists and transplant surgeons. But given the very poor odds of finding an organ donor the traditional way, ethical concerns may hold little sway with desperate patients.

I don’t know about you, but I think that MatchingDonors.com has an excellent idea. Please tell me if you agree or not.

Sources: Catherine Arnst, BusinessWeek Online, May 12, 2005; and various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Internet
  


• Medicine
  


• Social Networks
  

Today, if you want to know what’s going on in the world, you can watch TV, read your newspaper or use Internet to browse news sites. But imagine a day when you just have to enter a few words on your computer, such as “Olympic Games,” push a button, and be able to read an automatic — and accurate — summary of what appears in major sources about this specific subject. This is the goal of a project which started at the University of Michigan and is explained by Technology Research News in “Summarizer ranks sentences.” This new multi-document summarization technique, named LexRank, searches similarities among sentences and rates them via a concept of ‘prestige score’ analogous to the one used by Google’s PageRank. “In a sense, sentences vote for each other just by virtue of being similar to each other,” said one of the researchers. This algorithm may also be applied to automatic translation and question answering in a year or two. Read more…

Let’s start with a description of the project.

Researchers from the University of Michigan have developed a multi-document summarization technique that compares sentences and has the effect of sentences voting for the most important among them. The method, dubbed LexRank, combines the content-sorting concepts of prestige and lexical similarity to find the most important sentences in a group of documents on the same subject.

Algorithms that use prestige to sort information have been around since the ’90s. It is possible to find the most prestigious, or popular member of a network by analyzing the relationships among network members. In a social network, for example, the most prestigious individual can be identified by analyzing the social relations among all pairs of members of the group.

Now, let’s look in more details at how the LexRank algorithm uses similarities among sentences.

The researchers’ lexical centrality algorithm compares the lexical similarity of sentences. “Lexical similarity can be thought of as a measure of the word overlap between two sentences,” said Gunes Erkan [, one of the researchers.] “For example, ‘Bush went to China’ and ‘George Bush visited China’ are fairly similar in a lexical way [but] ‘Bush visited China’ and ‘Blair is the prime minister of the United Kingdom’ have no overlap at all,” he said.

The researchers’ system considers a sentence important if it is similar to many other sentences and if those other sentences are themselves important. “In a sense, sentences vote for each other just by virtue of being similar to each other,” said Dragomir Radev [, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.] “The sentences with the highest scores… are considered to contain the gist of the document and are presented as the multi-document summary,” he said.

This algorithm is already used for a Web-based news summarization site, NewsInEssence. Please note that this is an experimentation and that the site is not always on. If you cannot access it from the previous link, try this one.

LexRank could have some other usages.

The researchers are also looking for other uses of the lexical centrality algorithm. Possibilities include automatic translation and question answering, said Radev. The method could potentially find sentences that are likeliest to contain the answer to a given natural language question, or, in the biomedical domain, sentences that are most likely to contain important facts like particular protein interactions, said Radev.

The research work was presented in July 2004 during the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2004) conference held in Barcelona, Spain. Please check the EMNLP 2004 Proceedings if you’re inetrested in the subject.

And for more information, here are links to two technical documents about LexRank, “LexPageRank: Prestige in Multi-Document Text Summarization” (PDF format, 7 pages, 84 KB) and “LexRank: Graph-based Lexical Centrality as Salience in Text Summarization” (PDF format, 23 pages, 272 KB).

Will LexRank become one day as popular as PageRank is today? We’ll know it in a year or two.

Sources: Kimberly Patch, Technology Research News, April 20/27, 2005; and various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Databases
  


• Google
  


• Internet
  


• Search
  


• Software
  

This week, I just noticed three highly controversial new services on the Web. In “If the world was run like eBay,” BBC News Magazine reports about an eBay-like lending and borrowing exchange in the U.K. And according to Wired News in “England’s EBay for Sex,” there is another British website where you can offer your sexual expertise, becoming in fact a part-time prostitute. Of course, you also can buy the services of such a part-time sex worker. But the most outrageous service of the week is described by the San Francisco Chronicle in “Point, click and shoot.” From your computer, you can visualize animals living in a Texas ranch and kill them with a click of your mouse, using what the site calls “computer-assisted remote hunting.” Are these services dangerous, illegal, and should they be shut down? Read more about them and send me your comments…

Let’s start with the BBC News Magazine report about the eBay-style banking website.

This week saw the latest twist on what’s come to be known as the “eBay model” with the launch of Zopa — an online loans service that works in a similar way. Anyone with some spare cash can offer it up for a loan, through Zopa. Lenders set their own interest rates and can choose which borrowers to lend to, based on their credit rating.

Borrowers, meanwhile, can pick a rate that’s right for them and because Zopa is simply assisting the transaction, not lending its own assets, it claims to take a smaller cut (1% of the amount borrowed) than a bank. Safeguards are built in to help prevent lenders being fleeced and the whole outfit is sanctioned by the FSA — Britain’s financial services watchdog.

I’m not sure that the safeguards set up by Zopa — and well-detailed on their site — will be enough to lure away fraud.

Meanwhile, Wired News tells us about how “a new British website is helping people to become part-time prostitutes.”

Britain’s AdultWork website is plugging into the growing niche industry of sex-work dilettantes, people who spend a few hours a week in front of a camera, or in bed with a client, to augment their income — or maybe even just because they like it.

Of course, sex-related websites are not new, but this new one has a single activity: “AdultWork is an online clearinghouse for sex work.”

At present it has almost 3,000 members offering services, and several times that number buying or browsing. In addition to sex, the services on offer include webcam peep shows, homemade movies, phone sex and sex by cell-phone SMS. The site launched in late 2003 but had little immediate impact. It’s taken just under two years to rise to prominence.

Users must create a free account to browse the services offered. Users can rate the services they’ve tried, or even offer their own services. Like eBay, AdultWork takes a cut of all transactions, which are processed through the web bank Nochex.

And Wired News explains how “adultery has gone professional.”

Katie’s one of them. Katie describes herself as a BBW — a “big, beautiful woman.” A 45-year-old homemaker living in London, Katie has been working as a prostitute through AdultWork for three months.

Katie said her husband thinks she works a few hours a week for part-time employment agencies and spends the rest of the time looking after their 10-year-old daughter. Instead she makes daytime visits to clients’ homes for sex.

“I have a husband, and sex outside of my marriage is fun,” she said. “He doesn’t know what I do, but I’m very careful STD-wise and really only do it once or twice a month. It’s not much different from having an affair.”

Depending on your point of view, this kind of service can be “immoral” or even illegal. Will it be shut down or be a big success? Time will tell.

Now, with the help of the San Francisco Chronicle, let’s look at how computer users can shoot animals living in Texas from their homes. Here are the opening paragraphs.

On a Texas ranch, exotic sheep and antelope roam about, offering paying hunters an opportunity to bag some big game.

But when the prey wanders into view, the gun can be fired by someone half a world away with the simple click of a computer mouse.

A new Web phenomenon called computer-assisted remote hunting has so outraged one California lawmaker that she has introduced legislation to ban it.

Here is how the Live-Shot service works.

A Web camera is mounted in one area of the range, and both the camera and the gun can be manipulated remotely by computer. [John Lockwood, creator of the site,] said someone on the ground controls when the safety is off the gun to make sure there are no accidents and that the gun is not fired at an animal that is not eligible to be killed.

Luckily for the animals of the ranch, this new service has not been too successful — yet.

[Lockwood] said only one animal has been killed through the Web site so far — a wild boar during a hunt requested by a German television station. He has another hunt set up for early April, with a man who is a quadriplegic and can move only his face muscles.

“This guy was an avid hunter before his accident,” Lockwood said. “He can’t go out and hunt. People like him deserve as much right to hunt as anyone else.”

Right. But is this hunting or killing?

The San Francisco Chronicle also tells us about the costs.

Participants buy a monthly membership for $14. 95 and then sign up for 20-minute shoot sessions for $5.95 at the target range. Participating in a hunt to kill animals costs more and requires a Texas hunting license, which is also available on the Internet.

Lending or borrowing money on Internet, why not? Just measure your risks. Selling your body for sex has been done for ages, so again, why not over the Internet?

But killing animals using your computer should be stopped. If you live in the U.S., you should send a letter to your Congress(wo)man and ask her/him to introduce legislation to shut down this service.

Sources: Jonathan Duffy, BBC News Magazine, March 10, 2005; Jason Walsh, Wired News, March 7, 2005; Lynda Gledhill, San Francisco Chronicle, March 10, 2005; and various websites

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• Ecommerce
  


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• Web Sites
  

I’ve read several very interesting stories about social networking recently. In “From Contact to Contract” (neat title), Employee Management writes that many entrepreneurs and even professional recruiters are using services such as LinkedIn, Ryze.com, Spoke.com, or one of the two other dozen social networking sites to fill professional positions, even executive ones. Of course, human resources consulting firms are still also relying on more traditional tools, like their ‘real’ social networks. But in “‘Social Web’ Has Far To Go, But Much Promise,” the American Reporter is more skeptical about the usability of these social networking sites, saying that they are making contacts more difficult instead of easier. And Stowe Boyd, from Corante, concurs, by unlinking from social networking applications he subscribed to in a recent past (links to part 1 and to part 2). So what do you think about these applications? Have you ever used one? And if yes, have you seen some benefits? Read more before answering these questions…

Let’s start with the positive side, as reported by Employee Management.

“These tools take networking to the next level,” says Gerry Crispin, principal of CareerXroads, a human resources consulting firm in Kendall Park, N.J., and president of the New Jersey Metro Employment Management Association, a Society for Human Resource Management chapter. “These [sites] are no more than advanced databases that are extremely user-friendly.”

May be they are user-friendly, but are they efficient?

While the sites can be user-friendly, return-on-investment can vary. Social networking sites are best for finding passive candidates and for filling positions that are too specialized to be filled via traditional methods, users say.

Although LinkedIn boasts 1.2 million members, Crispin says fewer than 5 percent of corporate recruiters use social networking sites. The reason, he says, is partly because the sites are relatively new — most having started in the past three years — but also because it is easier to rely on traditional, familiar methods.

But recruiters are still experimenting new methods.

“The best recruiters I know say, ‘I use it some. I find people on LinkedIn, then I Google them and contact them myself,’” says Don Steiny, president of The Institute for Social Network Analysis of the Economy, a California-based nonprofit that studies social networking applications. “The best recruiters I know are fearless, and they’re just going to call them up.”

This long article also tells us about the dark side of social networking sites: sharing information.

“I don’t mind sharing that information with friends, but if it’s coming from a business computer, who else has access and how are they using it?” says says Susanne Wetzel, a computer science professor at The Stevens Institute for Technology in Hoboken, N.J., who specializes in computer security. “Too much of our information is floating around out there, and technology is becoming more and more sophisticated.”

Andy Oram, for the American Reporter looks less to privacy and more to ineffiencies.

I expect most members of online social networks are as inactive as I am, having tried them out and been unimpressed. For one thing, these networks are technologically rudimentary. They rely heavily on email, which is a reasonable place for a new medium to begin because it’s universal among Internet users. But how primitive email appears next to other ways of communicating! [...] Eventually, to really take off, social networks should provide alternatives to email rather than relying on it.

Second, the current offerings of social networks are imitations of things already available on the Internet: newsgroup, searches, and chat. There’s nothing here you can’t get elsewhere. The draw is not what you do on the social network, but whom you have a chance of doing it with.

This leads to the third major problem I’ve found with social networks: they make contacts more difficult instead of easier. Yes, broadcasting to friends of friends is trivially easy, so much so that I’ve tried to avoid checking my account because there’s so many irrelevant messages (often in languages I can’t read). But if I want to target someone for a specific purpose, I find it much easier to use a search engine or a private network of informal contacts than to go through the slow and unreliable process provided by the social network.

So Andy Oram is not very positive. But what do you think of Stowe Boyd, which writes in Corante that he’s totally giving up with these social networking sites? Here are some short quotes about his motivations.

I have participated in the various public social networks only passively — responding to others requests to connect, and occasionally passing along a request to connect to some contact.

I have wound up getting dozens of requests each month in the various networks by people more than two degrees away trying to reach people more than two degrees away, where I have little social capital involved, and I uniformally have been turning down those requests. In essence, these are a form of spam.

And as Boyd says, it’s not always easy to exit such a network.

I am annoyed that the SNAs [Social Networking Applications] don’t provide opt out at every juncture: please don’t involve me in requests like this, please don’t allow this person to contact me. please don’t contact me ever. The services vary widely in this regard. I was able to drop out of LinkedIn within a 24 hour period, although it does require sending a message to customer support.

I know, I’m asking you to read lots of interesting thoughts. But please do it before answering the above questions about the interest of social networking sites.

Are you using them or planning to dump them? Have they been useful for you? Have you ever fill a very long form asking for your interests? Finally, do you think these sites should be more user-friendly? Please post your comments below.

Sources: Lisa Daniel, for Employee Management, Winter 2005, Vol. 10, No. 1; Andy Oram, The American Reporter, Vol. 11, No. 2,588, February 23, 2005; Stowe Boyd, Corante, February 24 and February 28, 2005

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• Economy
  
  
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• IT
  
  
• Networking
  
  
• Social Networks
  

Many complex networks, from the Internet to proteins interacting with other ones in a cell, or from actors having played together to Romanesque broccoli, have “a common architecture with snowflakes and trees.” And even more surprisingly, Science News reports that “these networks all display similar patterns, whether viewed from up close or far away.” In fact, all these networks are scale-free networks. Like the airline system, they contain hubs — nodes with a very high number of links. In such networks, the distribution of node linkages follows a power law in that most nodes have just a few connections and some have a tremendous number of links. In that sense, the system has no “scale.” The fact that these complex networks can show such a fractal pattern has important implications for a host of applications, from drug development to Internet security. Read more…

Here are some short excerpts from the Science News article.

In recent years, researchers have found that a surprising range of networks has a common structure: a few major hubs with many connections and many minor nodes with only a few connections. In the World Wide Web, for instance, tens of thousands of sites link to a few popular Web sites, such as Google and Yahoo, while there are often just a few links to an individual’s home page.

The researchers note that they discovered this wide-ranging characteristic by figuring out how to “zoom out” and look at networks from farther and farther away. They started by using computer analysis to cover each network with non-overlapping boxes, each of which contained a cluster of nodes separated by less than a specified number of links. Next, the investigators essentially blurred their vision, paying attention to how the boxes — rather than the individual nodes — were connected.

Here are two examples of representations of complex networks.

The Internet is a scale-free network in that some sites have a seemingly unlimited number of connections to other sites. This map, made on February 6, 2003, traces the shortest routes from a test Web site to about 100,000 others, using like colors for similar Web addresses. (Image credit: Internet Mapping Project of Lumeta Corporation; Legend credit: Scientific American)

And this map of interacting proteins in yeast highlights the discovery that highly linked, or hub, proteins tend to be crucial for a cell’s survival. Red denotes essential proteins (their removal will cause the cell to die). Orange represents proteins of some importance (their removal will slow cell growth). Green and yellow represent proteins of lesser or unknown significance, respectively. (Credit for image and legend: Scientific American).

Now, where can lead this discovery of this fractal property of complex networks?

Understanding the architecture of complex networks is important, for example, for protecting the World Wide Web from hacker attacks and for designing drugs with few side effects, says Albert-László Barabási, a physicist who studies networks at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. However, the contribution of the new finding to those advances isn’t yet clear, he says.

“They’ve found something new here, but we don’t know yet whether it is a Rosetta stone that will let us translate the mysteries of networks into something we understand,” says Steven Strogatz, a mathematician at Cornell University.

For more information, Barabási has published many articles on these complex networks. The images above come from an article he wrote with Eric Bonabeau, Chairman and Chief Scientific Officer of Icosystem, a consulting firm based in Cambridge, Mass., and published by Scientific American in its May 2003 issue, “Scale-Free Networks.”

Here is a link to the abstract which states that “scientists have recently discovered that various complex systems have an underlying architecture governed by shared organizing principles. This insight has important implications for a host of applications, from drug development to Internet security.”

And here is a link to the full paper if you have more time (PDF format, 10 pages, 9.34 MB).

And Strogatz, mentioned above, wrote “Romanesque networks” for Nature which was published on January 27, 2005. In this article, Strogatz explores the exquisitely symmetrical properties of the Romanesque broccoli, which he called a “fractal vegetable.”

Sources: Erica Klarreich, Science News, Vol. 167, No. 5, Page 68, January 29, 2005; and various other websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Internet
  
  
• Networking
  
  
• Security
  
  
• Social Networks
  

Las Vegas, like many other major cities, sees more and more traffic jams. In order to better manage the traffic, it decided to try wireless technology, and more specifically, mesh networking. And it turns out that the pilot program will help not only police officers, but also people living in the city. In Viva Mesh Vegas, a long article from IEEE Spectrum, you’ll discover many details about the three-tier resilient mesh network architecture used in this program. The pilot test covers 5 square kilometers for a cost of about $170,000. If Las Vegas decides to expand it to the whole city, it will cost about $6 million. Read more…

First, what are the key benefits of mesh networking?

Mesh networks promise several key advantages over traditional wireless solutions, such as Wi-Fi or cellphones. Benefits include higher speeds, less susceptibility to radio interference, and greater resistance to network congestion. These networks also offer better coverage, the ability to prioritize different types of users, geolocation capabilities, tighter security, faster deployment, and a degree of immunity to catastrophic network failures.

This particular mesh network has been built by a small company named Cheetah Wireless Technologies, Inc. (CWTI).

Below is a diagram of a typical mesh network with its three-tier architecture. This diagram comes from Las Vegas meshes its network, published in October 2004 by Communications News.

Below is another diagram showing the CWTI implementation for this program in Las Vegas. This diagram comes from this page on CWTI site about MeshNetworks, Inc., MEA (Mesh Enabled Architecture). Please note that MeshNetworks has recently bought by Motorola.

Here are some more details about this specific implementation.

Within the Las Vegas MeshNetworks system, the average transmission speed ranges from 500 kilobits per second to 1.5 Mb/s, with bursts of up to 6 Mb/s possible. The backbone of the network is made up of 33 or so shoe-box-size gray boxes attached to traffic-light poles high above the streets, known as wireless routers.

And these routers are connected to the Internet via three Intelligent Access Point (IAP).

In Las Vegas’s case, this is a T-1 line for each of three IAPs that links them to Cheetah’s servers at a secure facility. An IAP takes about a day to install, assuming the T-1 is already in place. Besides providing Internet connectivity, the servers also verify whether a piece of hardware, such as a laptop card or wireless router, should be assimilated into the network, keeping interlopers out.

A decision to deploy the technology throughout the whole city — or about 150 square kilometers — should be taken soon. But even if Las Vegas is one of the capitals of gambling, it wants to save money. So CWTI had to be creative, not only technologically, but also financially.

Cheetah’s typical proposition is for the municipality to give the company the right to attach its equipment to city-owned light poles and establish Wi-Fi hotspots around the city. These hotspots act as bridges that allow users with regular Wi-Fi cards to access the mesh network, and they let Cheetah tap into the consumer market — a typical Wi-Fi laptop card, of which millions have already been sold, costs about $80, while a mesh card is more like $800.

With the city’s help in promoting the service, Cheetah would charge users between $20 and $40 per month to access fixed Wi-Fi hotspots. Commercial users who want to access the mesh network directly so as to be able to roam the entire coverage area seamlessly will be charged about $60 to $80 per month. Revenues are shared between the city and Cheetah, with a portion of the city’s cut set aside to pay for the municipality’s use of the mesh network.

Sources: Stephen Cass, IEEE Spectrum, January 2005; Communications News, October 2004; and various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Internet
  
  
• Networking
  
  
• Wireless
  

I’ve been a strong advocate of the social bookmarking service named del.icio.us since it started (check here for an example). And almost every single day, a new tool appears and enhances the use of this service. This new one, DURL, written by Robin Millette, lets you type an URL and see if some other people already “delicious’ed it.” And this is very efficient because it leads you to people who not only bookmarked the URL, but also assigned to it some pertinent keywords or tags, giving you new and fresh ideas. Services like Bloglines or Technorati among others certainly can return hundreds of links, so they are good for ‘popularity contests.’ But for building social communities and introducing you to sources you wouldn’t have thought of, they don’t compare to del.icio.us. Read more for lots of examples…

As I’m not sure if I convinced you, let’s start with a real blog, Smart Mobs.

If I feed the URL http://www.smartmobs.com/ to Bloglines by submitting the search string “http://www.bloglines.com/citations?url=http://www.smartmobs.com/&submit=Search,” I receive 3358 unsorted results.

If I do the same with Technorati, I find 1,614 links from 1,234 sources, sorted by date.

In both cases, this produces a number of references which is hard to browse. Why a particular site has quoted Smart Mobs? It’s not obvious to find an answer.

So, it’s time to use DURL, which returns a more manageable number of 45 results from del.icio.us.

Let’s check for example the tag “Social Software.”

In a summary, with only two clicks, I found a gold mine. Do you know another service which is that efficient?

Now, let’s return to the previous page and check the link to the “community” tag.

The more I use del.icio.us, the more I like it. This doesn’t mean I’m not using Bloglines or Technorati, but I’m using them for ‘exhaustivity,’ not for ‘discovery.’

[And here is an additional note for Robin Millette, the author of DURL. In fact, you can do the same search on del.icio.us by adding the string "http://del.icio.us/url?url=" (without the quotes) before the URL you want to see if it has been delicioused. But it might be too geeky for some of you.]

Source: Robin Millette, December 20, 2004; and various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Internet
  
  
• Smart Mobs
  
  
• Social Networks
  
  
• Software
  
  
• Web Services
  
  
• Web Sites
  

Many of you already know and use del.icio.us, this free social software web service for sharing web bookmarks launched a few months ago by Joshua Schachter. Here is a quick reminder of what del.icio.us is about. It allows you to bookmark a web page you find interesting, to organize these pages by categories, using tags of your choice, and to share your discoveries with other curious minds. But you can do much more. When Jon Udell, currently with InfoWorld, published a series of articles about del.icio.us on his blog, this gave me an idea: categorize all the entries posted on my blog in the last thirty months. Instead of using a search engine to check if or when I already wrote about something, I’m now using my del.icio.us archive and I click on a tag. Remarkably fast and useful! And you, how are you using this service? Have you discovered other tricks easing your online life? Please post your comments below. And many thanks to Joshua Schachter. Read more…

Before going further, here are the two first paragraphs from the what del.icio.us is about page.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others.

Once you’ve registered for the service, you add a simple bookmarklet to your browser (see below). When you find a web page you’d like to add to your list, you simply select the del.icio.us bookmarklet, and you’ll be prompted for a information about the page. You can add descriptive terms to group similar links together, modify the title of the page, and add extended notes for yourself or for others.

You also can read the description made by Wikipedia.

With such a description, I subscribed to the service in its first days of existence and I found it very useful. But when Jon Udell published several entries on his blog, I thought that del.icio.us could be used in other ways.

Here are the links to Jon Udell’s entries about the service.

• Information routing (August 16, 2004)
  
  
• Collaborative knowledge gardening (August 30, 2004)
  
  
• Information routing, redux (September 1, 2004)
  
  
• Next-generation infoware (September 9, 2004)
  

After reading these Udell’s entries, I’m sure you’ll agree with him that you can use del.icio.us for other purposes than social bookmarking.

Here is what I did. I read all the entries I posted on my blog since March 31, 2002, in chronological order, and I assigned a category to all these stories. Now, I have a full archive of all my posts.

Before del.icio.us, if I wanted to know if I already wrote about a specific subject, I used PicoSearch or Google. But a search by word is not always efficient. Now, I open my del.icio.us archive and I click on a tag.

For example, I can click on the “Nanotechnology” tag and I’m immediately carried to this page which contains the links to all the entries I put in this specific category.

And because I introduced all my entries in chronological order, del.icio.us displays them in a reverse chronological one, the most recent stories being the first shown.

There is even an additional benefit for me, who uses the Radio UserLand software to publish my blog. If I want to publish a story on both the main page and in a specific category, I need to have the story duplicated. With this usage of del.icio.us, I can enjoy the categorization of stories without doubling the disk space I’m using.

If you read this post, I’m sure you already understood that I highly recommend the del.icio.us web service. And I really want to say a big “Thank you” to Joshua Schachter.

Now, what about you? Have you found other creative or innovative ways to use del.icio.us? Please post your comments below.

Sources: Roland Piquepaille, November 8, 2004; del.icio.us website and various other ones

Previous entries related to this story can be found in these del.icio.us categories.

• Internet
  


• Social Networks
  


• Software
  


• Web Services
  


• Web Sites