Faster Wireless Networks: sending descriptions of data could be more efficient than sending the data itself, by Duncan Graham-Rowe at MIT Technology Review:

The role of computer networks would appear to be fairly straightforward: to ferry data from one point to another. But a novel wireless-network protocol developed for the U.S. military breaks with this tradition by sending not the data itself but rather a description of the data. In simulations, a network using the protocol was five times more efficient than a traditional network. Within the next year, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will test the protocol in field trials at Fort A. P. Hill in Virginia.

The protocol is part of a project to create a new generation of mobile ad-hoc networks - self-configuring networks of mobile wireless nodes - that will enable faster and more reliable tactical communications between military personnel and vehicles, says Greg Lauer, section head for advanced network systems at BAE Systems in Burlington, MA, which helped develop the protocol for DARPA.

But the project also demonstrates the potential of a new and exciting field called network coding, says Muriel Médard, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, who collaborated on the project with BAE Systems.

Read the rest of this fascinating article here.

I gave up reading Robert Scoble’s blog Scobleizer some time ago. Far be it from me to criticise the 31st most popular blog in the world, I just don’t go for Scoble’s frenetic techno-evangelism or the febrile adulation he elicits in some quarters. His name might not mean much to many regular readers of this blog but what he says matters to an awful lot of people. He has a knack of spotting technological trends, mainly due to his absolute immersion in new media and technology and, let’s face it, he’s ultra-bright and totally dedicated to his cause.

Alexander van Elsas wrote an excellent piece on mobile phone functionality in which he referenced a recent post by Scoble, Why Google News has no noise. Scoble’s thesis is that he is able to spot trends in news before the main web news carriers, Google News for mainstream news, and TechMeme for tech news, before either they or their readers can. The enabling media for Scoble’s prognostications are social aggregators like FriendFeed and microblogging services like Twitter. I won’t go into the details of exactly what these are but essentially they are services delivered direct to the device of your choice which provide frequent updates of what your friends and acquaintances are doing, thinking, writing, at all hours of the day. With a lot of people in your network these alerts can be relentless.

Scoble likes this, as do many others, because it provides him with a background of noise which allows him to discern patterns in the network of social interaction across these services. Scoble is a journalist by background and inclination and, arguably, he is a new sort of journalist through his work at Scobleizer, and ’swimming in the noise’ these services provide is food and drink to someone of his bent:

So, how come services like Twitter and FriendFeed have so much noise? Who likes the noise? Who likes the news?

I like the noise. Why? Because I can see patterns before anyone else. I saw the Chinese earthquake happening 45 minutes before Google News reported it. Why? Because I was watching the noise, not the news.

This is an important and valid point. Scoble is watching the new news ‘wires’ to get a jump on the bigger outlets but also to discern the patterning in the information coming from across the globe. This process is aided by aggregative nodes which filter reports of activities into streamlined summaries of many people’s information. Once such example is ‘bridge blogging‘ which enables one bilingual individual to aggregate locally-generated ‘news’ in one language and to disseminate it in another. Scoble likes to avoid these nodes wherever possible but they serve a purpose, as any blogger will tell you.

Noise, in Scoble’s sense, is noise with information value, very different from the engineering sense in which noise is data without meaning, without semantic content. Scoble’s noise, like noise in the information theoretical sense has redundancy. This redundancy is what provides Scoble with the ability to detect patterns in the streams of Twitters and FriendFeeds coming his way. As a good journalist, he knows that just because fifty people propagate a meme (a troublesome term, but I’ll let it slide for now) doesn’t make it true, but he can see the drift of global conversation and concerns.

I’ve been toying with ideas of data, information and redundancy recently. About whether the physical nature of the internet, and the ways in which it transmits and reproduces digital data as a matter of course, could in some way constitute force-multipliers in the global insurgency (another troublesome term, as David Betz wrote yesterday). Does the fact that, once created, data continues to flow through the internet, somehow act to the benefit of the insurgent or terrorist sophisticated in the use of new media? I don’t mean the relative ease with which anyone can set up a website, or post a video of an IED explosion in Iraq. I mean the unpredictable course data takes once ‘released’ into the digital wild and its subsequent recontextualisation as actionable and significant information.

I suspect that it could do, although I’m not convinced it is yet happening, except perhaps in the sense of the deliberate viral spread of propaganda of the deed acts through visual media. One critical point is how (and whether) data is being recovered from parts of the internet and used somehow as a weapon or tool in whichever campaign or operation the individual or group is involved. Reconstituted ‘information bombs’.

See also:
Mining the digital
Global Information Flows

Update:

Oops, shoulda checked Zen’s feed first: Social Media: The Benefits of Twitter. He reckons it’s a great little tool, and even mentions Robert Scoble to boot. Should I take the plunge? Is the fact that both he and I have written about this today a function of memetic correspondence, or sheer coincidence? I dunno, but read why Zen likes it here.

On Friday I was lucky enough to attend the 8th Social Study of ICT Workshop, ‘The Habitat of Information: Social and Organizational Consequences of Information Growth‘, organised by the Information Systems and Innovation Group at London School of Economics:

Information growth is a distinctive phenomenon of the late 20th and early 21st century. Large varieties of information are currently produced and circulated, in a rapidly increasing scale, across the various institutional domains of contemporary societies. Technical and administrative innovations have been expanding the interoperable platforms that make possible the development and diffusion of information within and across systems and organizations. At the same time, a range of devices from desktop computing to cell phones and digital cameras have been spreading across the population, making individuals and social groups important producers and consumers of information. A pivotal development has been the emergence, expansion and deepening involvement of the internet in social and economic life.

Taken together, these developments establish a new socio-economic environment in which information-based operations and services acquire crucial importance. This is clearly shown in the rapid ascent to economic dominance of internet-based companies that demonstrate superior data editing and information management strategies. New commercial possibilities steadily develop around the production, ordering and distribution of information, as data become interoperable across sources and older forms of information (e.g. image, text and sound) are brought to bear upon one another. But information growth has wider social implications as well. The involvement of information in every walk of life redefines the relationship between information and reality, and reshapes the social practices through which information is stored, retrieved, understood, disseminated and remembered. Increasingly, information mediates between humans and reality. In this context, the activities of ordering, making sense, evaluating, navigating and acting upon information step onto the centre-stage of contemporary life, impinging upon skill profiles and personal choices. They often do so under conditions in which the established boundaries between individuals and institutions are rendered shifting and negotiable.

I missed the keynote address by Albert Borgmann, Information Growth and the Texture of Reality [.pdf], but it was his attempt to help us understand the role ‘information plays in shaping the symmetry between the texture of reality and the integrity of humanity’. One of the themes of the conference was defined thus:

The hopeful beginnings and expectations [of television as a new era of thoughtfulness and cosmopolitanism] were thwarted by a seemingly incidental feature of television. It greatly reduced the labor of realizing information. When in the novel Moby Dick Captain Ahab is introduced, you get much on appearance and character. “His whole high, broad form seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould,” you are told . “There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance.” And much more. But even more is left out, and you have to draw on your experiences of forbidding and determined men to generate the fuzzy and powerful image that is the characteristic product of careful reading.

When you see the film, it’s Gregory Peck you see. Every feature of appearance is filled in, many a trait of character is lost. What you had to create actively as a reader you now receive passively as a viewer. You’re enthralled where once you were engaged. Information has become rich, but it’s no longer dear, neither expensive nor treasured. It’s easily available. To know the story of star-crossed lovers, you need not buy a book nor do you have to go to a theater. It’s delivered to the screen in your living room.

Borgmann goes on to describe the phenomenon of television thus:

the logic of the medium has conquered the earnestness of the messages. Glamour pervades the world of television, and reality is unable to match it .. Everything that’s actual is up against a superior possibility.

The advent of the personal computer changed all this:

In 1975 you could buy the Altair 8800 as a kit for $397. Assembling it gave you insight into the inner workings of the most advanced technology. Using it to rearrange your household gave you a sense of luminous order. Communicating with like-minded people and gathering information from near and far engendered a feeling of civic engagement and self-governance, the prospect of working from your home promised to empty the roads and clean up the atmosphere.

In 2008,

… the power and complexity of computers has reached the point where no engineer, not to mention the devout lay followers, is able any longer to understand a computer all the way down. At one level or another, structures recede into a black box whose functions are understood and whose structures are not. There is usually someone who can look into a particular box, but no one has a grasp of all the nested boxes, and many a software is fully understandable to no one …

Today our improbably powerful personal computers are impossibly easy to use. The price for that ease is the total opacity of the substructure of technological information.

But ‘is there a discernible shape to the culture of technology?’ Borgmann argues that there is, and this can be best explored through the ‘moral concept of commodification’, ‘the detachment of a thing or a practice from its texture of engagement with a time, a place, and a community … which uniformly vaporizes technological information and envelopes actual reality in a cloud of possibilities.’ But ‘[e]very such possibility is crowded in turn by further possibilities, and attention quickly wanders from one link to another. Possibility contains and degrades actuality.’

The commodities of information are suffused with the charm of magic and appear to realize the dream of the omnipotent genie that can be summoned from a lamp or a screen to answer any question and fulfil any desire. Technology is not magic, however. Every commodity rests on a machinery, and every instance of commodification is implemented by a process of mechanization. The experiential division and technical conjunction of commodity and machinery constitutes a pattern that is most impressively realized in technological devices such as the telephone or the personal computer. We can call this pattern the device paradigm. It has given the fabric of reality a universal and uniform texture and at the same time has divided it into a surface of abundant and diverse information commodities and a substructure of complex and concealed machineries.

…

The future growth of information will indulge our desire for commodities even more and make the comprehension of the underlying machinery yet more challenging. With the growing incompetence and incomprehension that we have to expect, we must wonder how technological societies can hope to survive if not prosper. It’s crucial to recognize that technology is sustained by a specific comprehension. All citizens of the advanced industrial countries have a thorough if implicit understanding of the device paradigm.

Borgmann sees the challenges of an information-heavy world as a moral problem:

The moral challenge is to recognize the threat to human integrity that is built into the texture of information technology—the commodity side that obviates competence and the machinery side that eludes comprehension. But meeting the challenge does not mean halting the growth of information or regimenting its technology. There are two parts to meeting the challenge. One is to deepen the common comprehension of information technology … The other part is the recognition that within the culture of technology there are focal points that are not technological and yet informed by technology. Certain occasions dissolve the device paradigm and reveal a region of engaging things and competent persons.

And the prescription?

Rather than letting the possibilities of information dissolve our actual engagements we must allow focal occasions to dissolve the fog of distraction. If we articulate the focal points in our lives, information will arrange itself appropriately. The texture of reality will then assume a new shape, a shape that is both luminous and well-ordered. Being well-ordered, it will engage our competence; being luminous it will enlarge our comprehension, and the texture entire will help us to invigorate our memory and integrity.

The second paper was presented by John Gantz, Chief Research Officer at International Data Corporation, ‘The Expanding Digital Universe: Impact on Information Management, the Role of IT, and the Organization‘. Gantz laid out the principal findings of the influential 2008 IDC report The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2011 [.pdf]. If Borgmann was laying out the philosophical framework for the discussion then Gantz was putting statistical flesh on the bones of digital information growth. The IDC report is dense with facts and figures and I’ll only pull out a few of the most important features:

• the digital universe in 2007 (281 exabytes or 281 billion gigabytes) was 10% bigger than anticipated prior to the study
• by 2011, the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006
• the amount of information created, captured or replicated exceeded available storage for the first time in 2007. Not all information created and transmitted gets stored, but by 2011 almost half of the digital universe will not have a permanent home
• some of the fastest-growing generators of digital information include: digital TV, surveillance cameras, internet access in emerging countries, sensor-based applications, datacentres supporting ‘cloud computing‘, and social networks
• consumers/individuals account for c.70% of information but business/enterprises have ‘responsibility/liability’ for c.85%
• unstructured information accounts for c.95% of the data generated
• information about individuals is growing faster than the information they create

There is much, much more in the report, along with research on the effects on business and other agencies. Gantz provided four pointers to the future:

1. organisational stress will reach critical levels soon
2. the distance between leading edge organisations and the average enterprise will lengthen
3. the importance of ‘real time’ information will increase
4. the corporate value of information is still little understood

There followed a panel presentation on management of information resources, which I won’t describe here. The afternoon session opened with a dense and brilliant presentation by Jannis Kallinikos of LSE, Living in Ephemeria: On the short-lived and Disposable Character of Information [.pdf]. Kallinikos is a well-known theorist and thinker on information and his 2006 book The Consequences of Information: Institutional Implications of Technological Change comes highly recommended, and informed much of his talk.

Kallinikos describes ‘Ephemeria’ is the ‘land of short events’ and his basic premise is that ‘computer-based information is becoming increasingly short-lived and ephemeral’. He admits that this sounds paradoxical ‘against the background of the durable and retrievable character of computer-based information’ but is argued by distinguishing between data and information thus:

Data are arrangements of standardized marks that serve the purpose of constructing records of activities, incidents and events’. These ’standardised marks, e.g. verbal, numerical or pictorial, are organized in semiotic and representation systems’ which can be stored and routinely rendered as information by ‘reinserting them to relevant contexts of social action’. Information on the other hand is an ‘ongoing accomplishment’, ‘the illumination of details or contingencies underlying the pursuits of social agents’, and cannot be stored’. Furthermore, ‘the recovery of data to information may not be straightforward’.

This all has direct repercussions for the digital environment in which we increasingly operate, as well as existential challenges for our lives generally. Also critical for analyses of the information environment are ‘the self-referential dynamics and self-propelling qualities of information growth’ and the ‘computational rendition of reality’. This is directly applicable to studies of current conflict, particularly globalised insurgency. I wrote a recent paper that suggested that the properties of data are crucial factors, force-multipliers in fact, in the likely persistence of globalised insurgency. After hearing this talk, I will have to revisit this thesis and distinguish better between data and information, and the underlying digital dynamics, although I think the argument still holds water.

Lev Manovich delivered a decent talk on How to Track Global Digital Culture [.pdf abstract]. I knew Manovich best as the brain behind Information Aesthetics, dedicated to visual representations of data at the macro-level, and his presentation focused on this element of the subject area.

The afternoon panel on ‘Information, Memory and Culture’ picked up on Borgmann and Kallinikos, with Elena Espósito talking about the relationship between memory and forgetting and Felix Stalder on constructing social temporality from data (best quote from Stalder: ‘time is merely metadata’). Of most interest was Mireille Hildebrandt, asking ‘what happens to legal certainty on the shifting sands of data?’ Law is both normative and decisive, constructing social reality rather than reacting to it. If law is linear, as she suggests, how does this relate to the non-linearity of conflict? I use this non-linear notion straight from Clausewitz (which Münzenberg wrote about recently) and it struck me that this dichotomy might be useful when examining why law and war constantly seem to be rubbing one another up the wrong way. This is particularly true in post-3GW warfare where traditional norms are often abandoned, exposing fractures, inconsistencies and inadequacies in the legal framework which circumscribes the conduct of ‘war’.

Short post this. Yesterday saw the demise of my laptop c/o Windows Update and I’m utterly locked out. A replacement machine has appeared but I’m still in the process of recovering a whole term of work …

IntelDump alerts us to a new report by the National Academy of Sciences, “Tracing information flow on a global scale using Internet chain-letter data”. This “breaks the popular misconception that information online is spread widely in very few steps. Instead … it flows narrow and deep, in hundreds of steps; revealing greater insights into how social networks serve as a communication medium. This has implications on how social networks are evaluated by intelligence analysts.”

IntelDump quotes from the study abstract:

The dissemination of information is a ubiquitous process in human social networks. It plays a fundamental role in settings that include the spread of technological innovations, word-of-mouth effects in marketing, the spread of news and opinion, collective problem-solving, and sampling methods for hidden populations. The basic models for studying such phenomena posit that information will diffuse from person to person in the style of an epidemic, expanding widely in a short number of steps according to “small-world” principles. However, despite recent studies in online domains, it has been difficult to obtain detailed traces of the dissemination of a single piece of news or information on a global scale to assess the predictions of these models. As such, it has remained an open question whether the spreading of information truly proceeds with a rapid, epidemic-style fan-out or whether it follows a potentially more complex structure. The difference between these possibilities has consequences not only for the models that are used to capture their essential properties but also potentially for the “life cycle” of a piece of information as it spreads through the global social network.

Here, we trace these types of large-scale information-spreading processes at a person-by-person level using methods to reconstruct the propagation of massively circulated Internet chain letters, and from these observations we propose a new set of principles for how such processes work. We focus in particular on two such chain letters, which exhibit tree-like patterns of dissemination that are quite similar to each other but are initially in conflict with the intuitive picture of how information spreads in these settings. Rather than expanding to many individuals in a few steps, the trees are very narrow and continue reaching people several hundred levels deep. We describe a mathematical model that produces trees with this characteristic structure, grounded fundamentally in the observations that social networks are highly clustered and that information can take widely varying amounts of time to traverse different edges in the network. The simple structure of the model, and the fact that it is based on earlier empirical studies of human response times, thus suggests a possible basis for this narrow and deeply reaching style of information transmission in the local dynamics of communication within highly clustered social networks.

Students of war from both the civilian and military fields have long been aware of the transformative power of computing on the conduct of armed conflict. In this respect it seems that we are ahead of many others in different fields. Over to Kevin Kelly:

Over the years I’ve had many opportunities to work with professionals from various fields. In every endeavor, computer technology is utterly transformative. But not every field gets this. Some scientists, licensed experts, and professionals are allergic to new technology.

I had an epiphany recently on why some varieties of professionals are more welcoming of disruptive technology than others. I realized the types of pros who are most eager to employ the latest technology are those fields which have already been Turing’d.

We have this long list of tasks and occupations that we humans believe only humans can do. Used to be things like using tools, language, painting, playing chess. Now, one by one they get Turing’d. A computer beats them. Does it better.

So far we’ve can check off arithmetic, spelling, flying planes, playing chess, wiring chips, scheduling tasks, welding, etc. All have been Turing’d.

Computer scientists are great to work with, because in general they are completely fearless. They were Turing’d long ago. They grok that many of the tasks they used to do can be done much better by computers. On the other hand, doctors as a rule are loathe to accept new technology because what they do is hard to delegate to computers. Ditto for a lot of biologists.

Once you are Turing’d it is much easier to believe other occupations which we humans used to do uniquely, can be done by computers. You tend to be open to disruptive technology in all parts of your life.

Have you been Turing’d?

Not that Kelly would ever suggest it the case but I think it would be a step too far to suggest that students of war have been Turing’d. Both the study of war and its prosecution are far from scientific, a fact recognised by Clausewitz in the early 18th century - ‘friction’ is inevitable and inescapable, regardless of the technologies we employ on the battlefield. Indeed, the very ’science’ of information systems includes the notion of ‘engineering noise’, disruptive static endogenous to the machines we use to eliminate friction. Engineering noise is not the only problem, as batteries and comms fail as often as human operators.

War is as complex as the inter-relationships between all the units of which it consists, and the study of it, whilst hopefully as empirical and rational as possible, can never be Turing’d. Computer simulations of historical battles or future scenarios are powerful tools indeed but the interpretation is human, and often misleading, biased or wilfully incorrect.

For war and its study to be Turing’d, would we have to relinquish command and control, or at least operational responsiblity, to non-human intelligences? Would it be desirable anyway?