Future Trends in Computing
TRENDS 2016
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." - Popular Mechanics prediction, 1949
"Power electrons are the mother's milk of the information age and power distribution is a lot more fragile than we imagine," said Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future. Carry spare batteries."
2014 Government-built malware running out of control, F-Secure claims "Governments writing viruses: today we sort of take that for granted but 10 years ago that would have been science fiction," he told the public conference. "If someone had come to me ten years ago and told me that by 2014 it will be commonplace for democratic Western governments to write viruses and actively deploy them against other governments, even friendly governments, I would have thought it was a movie plot. But that's exactly where we are today."
The Unstoppable Exponential Growth In The State Of Surveillance For the people who don't care and mistakenly think since they've got nothing to hide they have nothing to be afraid of.
2013 Welcome to the cyberwar arms race, an arms race that will define the Internet in
the
21st century. Presidential Policy Directive 20, issued last October and released by Edward Snowden,
outlines
US cyberwar policy. Most of it isn't very interesting, but there are two paragraphs about "Offensive
Cyber Effect Operations," or OCEO, that are intriguing:
OECO can offer unique and unconventional capabilities to advance US national objectives around the world
with little or no warning to the adversary or target and with potential effects ranging from subtle to
severely damaging. The development and sustainment of OCEO capabilities, however, may require considerable
time and effort if access and tools for a specific target do not already exist.
The United States Government shall identify potential targets of national importance where OCEO can offer
a
favorable balance of effectiveness and risk as compared with other instruments of national power,
establish
and maintain OCEO capabilities integrated as appropriate with other US offensive capabilities, and execute
those capabilities in a manner consistent with the provisions of this directive.
These two paragraphs, and another paragraph about OCEO, are the only parts of the document classified
"top secret." And that's because what they're saying is very dangerous.Cyberattacks have the
potential to be both immediate and devastating.
First of all, calling it "war" as people have been doing is a misnomer.
"War" is a large scale, national effort to force another nation to bend to the political will
of
the first. The things that have been alleged do not rise to that level. Furthermore, a real
"war" would involve kinetic as well as cyber.
It skews the perception and public discourse to continue to call these actions "war" -- similar
to
using that word to refer to the "war" on drugs or the "war" on Christmas.
Surveillance: White House petition to pardon Snowden: 110,000
signatures
The Obama Administration has established a policy that it
doesn't
respond to petitions relating to "specific law enforcement matters." See first articulation,
in
the case of Sholom Rubashkin; the White House repeated the same language in response to petitions relating
to Casey Anthony and the Church of Scientology.
SKYbox Data From Above
What can you really learn from 500 miles above Earth? Quite a lot, it turns out. Already, our limited
commercial services for satellite imaging are providing crucial data to companies, scientists, and
governments. Their up-
to-the-minute snapshots of the planet will give us data
that could upend industries, transform economies—even
help predict the future.
1985 Welcome to the Information Age
A journey through Mankinds History. Post Industrial Age and by 1956 the information age begins.
By spring 2013, everyone on Earth will be able to watch the planet from the most unique vantage point ever built, the International Space Station.
2012 Predicting what
topics will trend on Twitter
A new algorithm predicts which Twitter topics will trend hours in advance and offers a new technique for
analyzing data that fluctuate over time.
2012 Google Presidential campaign Prediction
2012 3D printers -- In much the same way as the PC trashed the traditional world of computing
Industrial 3D printers can now be had for $15,000, and home versions for little more than $1,000 (or half
that in kit form). “In many ways, today's 3D printing community resembles the personal computing community
of the early 1990s,” says Michael Weinberg, a staff lawyer at Public Knowledge, an advocacy group in
Washington, DC. Because of a 3D printer's ability to make perfect replicas, they will probably try to
brand it a piracy machine. The next generation of Makerbot's 3D printer is out. $2,200. Review here:
http://blog.makezine.com
Video: http://blog.makezine.com/
2012 BIG DATA When scientists publish their research, they also make the underlying data available so the results can be verified by other scientists. It is “big data,” the vast sets of information gathered by researchers at companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft from patterns of cellphone calls, text messages and Internet clicks by millions of users around the world. Companies often refuse to make such information public, sometimes for competitive reasons and sometimes to protect customers' privacy. But to many scientists, the practice is an invitation to bad science, secrecy and even potential fraud. "we'll see a small group of scientists with access to private data repositories enjoy an unfair amount of attention in the community at the expense of equally talented researchers whose only flaw is the lack of right 'connections' to private data.”
2011 The Personal Computer Is Dead Power is fast shifting from end users and software developers to operating system vendors.
Digital Delivery and moving to the cloud, the concept of ownership will evaporate.
By 2010 the Time Teens Spend With Digital Will Be 80% [1]
Google, CIA Invest in Future of Web Monitoring Spies, Secrecy and Surveillance Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents both present and still-to-come. Its not the very first time Google has done business with Americas spy agencies. Both In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures have seats on Recorded Futures board.
Non Profit Internet Exchange Points
like
365 Main Originally, the companies that
owned the backbone of the Internet shared traffic. In recent years, however, the practice has increased to
the point where some researchers who study public peering points - peering the way global networks are put together believe
that
peering is changing the fundamental shape of the Internet, with serious consequences for its stability and
security. “The Internet as we know it is pretty
much vanishing, in the sense that much of the traffic is being routed through lots of new layers and
applications, much of it wireless. One petabyte is equivalent to one million gigabytes. A zettabyte is a
million petabytes. And a yottabyte is a thousand zettabytes. The company estimates that video will account
for 90 percent of all Internet traffic by 2013. Arbor's Internet Observatory Report concluded that
today
the majority of Internet traffic by volume flows directly between large content providers like Google and
consumer networks like Comcast. It also described what it referred to as the rise of so-called hyper
giants
— monstrous portals that have become the focal point for much of the network's traffic: “Out of the
40,000 routed end sites in the Internet, 30 large companies — 'hyper giants' like Limelight,
Facebook, Google, Microsoft and YouTube — now generate and consume a disproportionate 30 percent of all
Internet traffic,” the researchers noted.
Joseph Weizenbaum, computer
pioneer and critic, dies 2008
"Perhaps the computer, as well as many other of our machines and techniques, can yet be transformed,
following our own authentically revolutionary transformation, into instruments to enable us to live
harmoniously with nature and with one another. But one prerequisite will first have to be met: there must
be
another transformation of man. And it must be one that restores a balance between human knowledge, human
aspirations, and an appreciation of human dignity such that man may become worthy of living in
nature."
Trend: Computers remember everything forever.
We should shift the default when storing personal information back to where it has been for millennia,
from
remembering forever to forgetting over time. We have become a global society through mass, creative
collaboration when participation will be the key organising idea. People are now players not just
spectators, part of the action, not on the sidelines.
Ten Reasons You Will Not Recognize America in Ten Years
2016 - The Computer Age Arrives, civilization as we've known it is over. Now over 90% of the US population is online. Internet access crosses the 90 percent mark that is only achieved by truly ubiquitous technology, such as television and the home telephone.
Originally introduced in a 2002 paper called "The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution," in which the authors imply that the emergence of darknets is inevitable as long as content can be copied and there is sufficient interest in distribution.'If the government can check everything each citizen does, nobody can keep the government in check.' Use VPN
2004 In all, 1,286 internet experts looked at the future impact of the internet and assessed
predictions about how technology and society will unfold. The report about the survey results,
including a great many predictions and comments from participants:
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/145/report_display.asp
The survey results themselves can be found at:
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/Experts_future_survey_results.pdf
In addition, many of the predictions have been entered in an online database that we have created with
Elon
University. They will join the more than 4,000 predictions from the 1990-1995 era that are already entered
in the database.
http://www.elon.edu/predictions/.
Computer Grid Merger 2006
The Global Grid Forum
(GGF) and the Enterprise
GridAlliance (EGA) Merger "common interest in accelerating the pervasive adoption of grids
worldwide." The GGF founded in 1989, develops standards for grid technologies. Members include
many academic institutions as well as commercial interests. The EGA, created in 2004, is an organization
of
vendors working to facilitate the deployment of commercial applications in computing grids. The EGA
includes
such companies as EMC, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, HP, Intel,NEC, Network Appliance, Oracle, and Sun
Microsystems.
- Advanced Encryption Standard - Wireless Policy http://csrc.nist.gov/wireless/S04_DOD%20Wireless%20Requirements-th.pdf
- A Flash Mob supercomputer is hundreds or even thousands of computers connected together via a LAN working together as a single supercomputer. A Flash Mob computer, unlike an ordinary cluster, is temporary and organized on-the-fly for the purpose of working on a single problem.
- The future of email is to get your good ole' phone directory up to date again.
- Brain Scanning - the neuroscientists' use of fMRI, wrote in the March 2003
Nature Neuroscience: “Our analysis shows a steady expansion of
studies with evident social and policy implications, including studies of human cooperation and
competition,
brain differences in violent people and genetic influences on brain structure and function.” Complex
behaviors and emotions—such as fear, lying, decision making, self-monitoring, moral dilemmas, and
assessments of rewards and punishment—are all in play. So far, she suggests, society has given little
thought to how these technologies and their volatile payloads will be used. - a lie detector small enough
to
fit in the eyeglasses of law enforcement officers, developed by mathematician Amir Lieberman at Nemesysco
in
Zuran, Israel, for military, insurance claim and law enforcement use say it can tell whether a passenger
is
a terrorist by analyzing his answer to that simple question in real-time. The heart of Nemesysco's
security-oriented technology is a signal-processing engine that is said to use more than 8,000 algorithms
each time it analyzes an incoming voice waveform.
Also see - The Truth Detector and Thoughts
read' via brain scans
- Eliminate the use of student, staff and faculty SSNs wherever possible, because of identity theft which can lead to a egregious violation of student privacy."Many institutions are beginning to use institution-created unique ID numbers, but they are often only an alternative to using the SSN for many systems and forms.
- Can next-generation phone systems take the shape of decentralized, peer-to-peer file-sharing networks that run over the Net and eliminate phone-company middlemen? Skype is free and simple software that will enable you to make free calls anywhere in the world in minutes
- Anonymity could be replaced by Pseudonymity To preserve freedom Mr Lessig suggests it might become legal, for instance, to have credit cards for online transactions under different names, as long as these could still be traced to the individual owner. The challenge is to set the legal hurdles for online search warrants high enough so that governments cannot abuse their power. But at the same time to keep them low enough so that criminals can be found and stopped. In this respect, the online world should be no different from the real one.
- NSF Cyber Trust
Program Carl Landwehr, Program Director, (703) 292-8950, clandweh@nsf.gov
CyberTrust Program Deadlines for proposals are
available for fundamental research,
multi-disciplinary research and education and workforce development.
NSF Science Experts: Eugene Spafford, NSF Senior Advisor, (703) 292-8900,
espaffor@nsf.gov
- Enabling Grids for E-science in Europe, aims to build the largest international grid infrastructure to date, operating in more than 70 institutions throughout Europe, providing 24-hour grid service and a computing capacity comparable to 20,000 of today's most powerful personal computers. The other is a distributed supercomputing project, led by France's National Center for Scientific Research, that will connect seven supercomputers in Europe at optical network speeds, getting a leg up on the TeraGrid project in the United States, which aims to connect the nation's major supercomputer sites. The goal is to establish Europe as one of the most dynamic and creative environment in the world to deploy grid-enabled infrastructures. source 10/11/03 COSM
- By 2003 anyone still clinging to the idea that the Internet is a public enterprise should forget it. That was a romantic notion in the good old days before 1996, when everything seemed possible. With nothing but a computer, a modem and a phone line, the smallest fry could compete with the biggest corporate dragons by reaching millions of people at little cost. Information and entertainment could flow freely. Closed and oppressive societies would be opened. The order of the day also was to avoid turning the Net into a public utility, subject to the kinds of rules and regulations that govern telephones and electricity. The Internet's global reach was one major reason; who would have jurisdiction? Government involvement also would squelch innovation and growth, people feared.
- TERAPROT project by CEA, Gene-It SA & INFOBIOGEN Contains the results of the all-by-all comparison of 67 proteome sets.
- Human Resources (HR) department plays in enterprise security. Securing a business is not just a technological matter--choosing the right firewall and other measures. Technology must be backed by sound policies to govern usage and maintenance. HR is responsible for the implementation of those policies, and creating a security culture backed by employee awareness. HR is responsible for the management and control of staff, and acts as a conduit of communication between departments. HR must also ensure the company complies with the latest legislation. Make "security best practices" part of employee contracts and staff training. Establishing firm security policies with a cycle of self-assessment to enable businesses to adapt to changing security demands.
- Sandia team develops cognitive Machines that accurately infer user intent, remember experiences and allow users to call upon simulated experts. A new type of "smart" machine that could fundamentally change how people interact with computers is on the not-too-distant horizon at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories. Over the past five years a team led by Sandia cognitive psychologist Chris Forsythe has been developing cognitive machines that accurately infer user intent, remember experiences with users and allow users to call upon simulated experts to help them analyze situations and make decisions. Article and contact
- Robotic Replacement of Human Workers
- Open Government Information Awareness <http://opengov.media.mit.edu/>
The Open Government Information Awareness program is an effort to increase transparency in the United
States
government. As the US government increases its supervision of civilian lives, it is crucial to ensure
accountability. Since democracy requires an informed public, every effort must be made to give citizens
access to government information. The Open Government Information Awareness program builds a framework for
US citizens to construct and analyze the world's most comprehensive database on our government.
Citizens
will explore data, track events, find patterns, and build risk profiles, all in an effort to encourage
action. To empower citizens by providing a single, comprehensive, easy-to-use repository of information on
individuals, organizations, and corporations related to the government of the United States of America. To
allow citizens to submit intelligence about government-related issues, while maintaining their anonymity.
To
allow members of the government a chance to participate in the process.
- Cyber War, Cyber Terrorism
Terrorists, individual hackers and foreign governments exploit computer network vulnerabilities to disrupt
the infrastructure of a country, known as weapons of mass disruption. No country can match the US in terms
of conventional weapons so cyber-terrorism is the best way to do it. It's so cheap, don't need
soldiers and tanks, and it is so stealthy. They use information technology to control critical government
and private sector systems. Our enemy will attack the electric, water, and other critical infrastructure
grids stopping service for at least 6 months and cause billions in damages by breaking through the weak
and
or non existent security on the software being used by those responsible for these public companies. They
do
not spend the money on the needed security and as a consequence knowing leave the country infrastructure
defenseless. Congress has refused to vote to make this a regulation forcing them to do what they should,
basically because they don't use computers don't "get" technology only "get"
the
old fashioned idea of war and leave it to the "war guys" to deal with. Companies like Microsoft
who have billions in cash won't guarantee secure products - there are no lemon laws around for sloppy
programs so . . . we are doomed to see the catastrophe occur followed by the congress dog and pony shown
with their feigned surprise followed by the inevitably vote that finally regulates industry. MORE
- Computer Crime Research
Center - Statistics Cyberattacks with Offline Damage
This interstitial area where cyberspace meets the real world is a ripe area of attack. This problem is the
real-world equivalent of a distributed "denial of service" attack, in which the attacker gets
computers around the world to inundate a target machine with data, messages and other electronic detritus
that make it impossible for legitimate users to get through to it. Anyone can get a computer and bury
someone in junk. Google shows hundreds of thousands of Web pages from which anyone could request a
catalog,
but instead could have a program tell it to send someone a million catalogs. This attack could be
enormously
disruptive to the target, and could paralyze the local post office that has to deal with the onslaught. As
the report notes, the exploit could be used as a diversion to accompany a deadly terrorist act, like
mailing
an envelope containing anthrax spores. Some experts have talked about hypothetical, cyberattacks on
real-world facilities that are connected to the Internet, like the power grid and dams. Other automated
include automated orders for hundreds of maintenance requests, package pick-ups and service calls. -
- DRM technology and policy
There appear to be two extremes: the pro-copyright extremists and the anti-copyright
extremists. What will happen with DRM protected data in 100 years from now? Is this what the
Computer Grid Merger is actually for? Do they intend to control all data?
Don't you want future generations to be able to access then-historic documents? Otherwise all DRM
protected documents, movies and films will be lost forever when the DRM technology is replaced by
something
" better". Librarians can still read and copy centuries old books today. Material which is
copyrighted must enter the public domain when copyright expires. Material which is private must not. Right
now DRM systems are not distinguishing these cases in any meaningful way. Happy Birthday is copyrighted.
- Usage Log Data Management Working Group
The usage logs generated by web servers contain much data that is useful for site owners, but the current
default configurations can pose a threat to the privacy of individuals, and may also present a legal risk
to
corporations. Specifically, the IP addresses collected by web servers are becoming increasingly easy to
associate with the identity of particular individuals. For corporations, this means that they may violate
their own privacy policies by retaining portions of these logs. Left unmanaged, these logs can expose web
site owners to potential lawsuits and discovery requests, and erode what privacy is left to individuals.
But
today, no standard policy exists to manage the retention and eventual destruction of usage log data, and
no
tools exist to enforce such policies. The goal of this all-day working group meeting is to develop a policy that organizations
can
use to govern their retention of usage log data, and a specification for a utility that will delete,
hash,
or aggregate usage log data according to this policy. This meeting is intended for legal, technical,
policy, and business practitioners who are involved with the management of web usage log data, or web
usage
log tools. For further information, please contact Jeff Ubois (jeff@ubois.com) .
- Edsger Dijkstra quote on Computer Science
[From asilomar-news, noted by Robert
G.
Kennedy III in Hackers newsgroup,sent to RISKS by Ken Knowlton. PGN] Edsger W. Dijkstra, *Communications
of
the ACM*, Mar 2001, Vol. 44, No. 3
In academia, in industry, and in the commercial world, there is a widespread belief that computing science
as such has been all but completed and that, consequently, computing has matured from a theoretical topic
for the scientists to a practical issue for the engineers, the managers, and the entrepreneurs.
[...]
I would therefore like to posit that computing's central challenge, "How not to make a mess of
it," has not been met. On the contrary, most of our systems are much more complicated than can be
considered healthy, and are too messy and chaotic to be used in comfort and confidence. The average
customer
of the computing industry has been served so poorly that he expects his system to crash all the time, and
we
witness a massive worldwide distribution of bug-ridden software for which we should be deeply
ashamed.
For us scientists it is very tempting to blame the lack of education of the average engineer, the
shortsightedness of the managers, and the malice of the entrepreneurs for this sorry state of affairs, but
that won't do. You see, while we all know that unmastered complexity is at the root of the misery, we
do
not know what degree of simplicity can be obtained, nor to what extent the intrinsic complexity of the
whole
design has to show up in the interfaces. We simply do not know yet the limits of disentanglement. We do
not
know yet whether intrinsic intricacy can be distinguished from accidental intricacy.
To put it bluntly, we simply do not know yet what we should be talking about, ... The moral is that
whether
computing science is finished will primarily depend on our courage and our imagination.
- Move interaction with the computer from the hands to the mouth. The screen responds to
the human voice in every way. Voice commands are responsible for every operation, no hand movements are
necessary.
- Cyber security liability will involve insurance firms to help manage business risk. Insurers
will demand better security, perhaps spawning minimal security standards.
- Using Neural Networks To Beat Hackers: By combining the behavioral and computer sciences, D.C.-based startup Psynapse promises to lock out hackers before they can do any damage. Psynapse's Checkmate intrusion protection system conducts a real-time assessment of each visitor to a network, and if it sees behavior that indicates an attempted security breach, automatically terminates the intruder's access.
- TRACKING PEOPLE - the tech-art group 0100101110101101.org, started something like that with their VOBOS project. A combo of mobile phone/GPS sends the coordinates to a server. And the movement of the "kit" is traced on a map that can actually be very detailed (at a city/street level). http://0100101110101101.org/home/vopos/index.html
-"The human population does not double every 18 months, but its ability to use computers to keep track of us does. You can't encrypt your face." -- Phil Zimmermann; http://news.com.com/2100-1009-998728.html
- SMART MOBS - the nature of cooperation for good and not all smart mobs are going to be
benevolent. How is it that humans come together to do things collectively, and how do those enterprises
succeed and fail? That is an important aspect of how smart mobs can change the world, because people with
these devices linked together instantaneously worldwide will be able to act collectively or not act
collectively in new ways. the mobile communication device, and the Internet. Tens of millions of
individuals
will have computing power in their pockets, they will be linked together so that the aggregation of that
computing power and the communications capabilities of the individuals will be multiplied similar to the
way
the Internet multiplies the capabilities of individuals who were sitting in front of PCs. Peer-to-peer
sharing, for example, or peer-to-peer sharing of computing power as is done with SETI@home or
Distributed.net.
Examples:
-- groups of individuals voluntarily creating something collectively that's much more powerful than
what
they could do individually
-- a crowd that mobilized and succeeds in toppling a government, organized with the endless forwarding of
millions of text messages.
-- WTO protestors in Seattle, who used cell phones, PDAs, laptops, and the Internet to protest the meeting
of the WTO in 1999. Using these, they were able to outsmart the police. Source
http://www.thefeature.com/article.jsp?pageid=19666
-- Open Souce - great for collaboration between people who don't trust eash other
-- SWARMING example: Amber Alert system automatically post images of the child or suspect direct to the desktop. In addition, the application provides the capability of instantly printing out a poster featuring all the information about the missing child. You can download an actual application from the link below. Amber Alert Ticker The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), the Digital Information Network will now provide instant and automatic Amber Alerts issued anywhere in the country. These Amber Alerts can be automatically or manually issued by our clients to hundreds of thousands of desktops within seconds of the alerts being issued. Be instantly notified of an Amber Alert on their desktops - but also receive vital information about the missing child, pictures of the child or suspect and a detailed written description of the individual law enforcement agencies are looking for http://dltw.tv/r.asp?i=303DA210-7968-471b-A4AB-C2ECF8BEEECF&b=Mark_Toney
- NANOTECHNOLOGY
Nanotechnology Portal with basics news & information. Covering the Nanospace and reporting on
nanoscale
& future sciences such as Molecular Machine Systems, Nanomedicine, & BioMEMS.
- THE FUTURE IS
802.11 WIRELESS NETWORKS
WIRELESS PARK - sponsored by Intel Wireless computing available anytime
the
park is open Bryant Park now is a WiFi "Hot Spot", bringing the internet FREE to users of
laptops
and handheld devices with 802.11b Ethernet cards. NYC Wireless, a volunteer community group of computer
wizards, provided the expertise to make Bryant Park the first park in the world to offer 802.11b wireless
computing to its patrons for free. Go wireless and do work while enjoying the park. How-to guides to get
started are available at the park entrances.
COMMON-SENSE COMPUTING (AP/CNN.com 9 Jun 2002) http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/ptech/06/09/common.sense.computer.ap/index.html Computer scientists have been working with linguists, theologians, mathematicians and philosophers since 1984 in a project they hope will transform human existence -- teaching a computer common sense. The group has spent the last 18 years building the Cyc database, feeding it 1.4 million truths and generalities about daily life that they hope eventually will give computers supercharged reasoning abilities -- which could enable humans to work more efficiently, understand one another better, and even help predict the previously unforeseeable. This spring, Cyc's developer -- Cycorp Inc. -- created a Web link to enable the public to download Cyc's knowledge base and teach it a few things, too. Cycorp founder and president Doug Lenat says that if enough people log in to share their wisdom, Cyc could quickly become vastly more useful -- doing duty as an instant language translator, annotating e-mails to put them in better context for their recipients, or even offering humans advice from varying points of view. Inventor Ray Kurzweil thinks Lenat is taking the right approach toward educating Cyc, combining pattern recognition with a rule-based foundation. "We're not going to spoon-feed all of our knowledge one rule at a time. I do think we could take Cyc as the seed for a self-organizing system that would then learn on its own."
Photonic Networks
The idea of assembling a large number of smaller computers connected via a network (an idea which dates at
least back to 1970 with the DCS project at UC Irvine (I was PI) may in the long run be a much more
powerful
way to get large scale computing. The advent of all photonic networks and the increasing power of
micro-computers may make such dinosaurs out of conventional superccomputers.-- Dave Farber April 20, 2002
-
Interplanetary Internet (IPN)
The future of this next-generation Net revolves quite literally around Mars: Vint Cerf 56, recently joined
a
small team of engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to begin sketching out a wireless
communications network that would let all those space-based machines and - eventually - astronauts talk to
one another. He is using public and private missions aimed at Mars and other planets, the moon, asteroids,
and deep space.
- Bell Labs Says It Shatters Data Delivery Record 2002
Bell Labs, the research arm of Lucent Technologies Inc. said on Friday that it has doubled the distance
and
the speed at which data can be sent over long-haul telecommunications networks. The development will
eventually make it cheaper for telecommunications service providers to send more data on fiber optic
networks over longer distances. Bell Labs said that, in a demonstration, it sent a massive 2.56 terabits
of
data per second over a distance of 2,500 miles, the equivalent of sending the contents of 2,560,000 novels
every second across the United States. One terabit is a little over 1 trillion bits of data. The previous
record was 1.6 terabits per second over 1,250 miles, or half the distance. Bell Labs achieved the 2.56
terabit-per-second speed by sending 40 gigabits-per-second of data over each of 64 separate channels in
fiber optic cable, which uses light waves to carry data. It used dense wave division multiplexing, a
technology that allows service providers to push bigger chunks of data onto a single strand of optical
fiber. The capacity and distance improvement was made possible by use of a coding scheme called
differential
phase shift keying, which Bell Labs has developed for high-capacity communications. Lucent's current
long distance networking product, the LambdaExtreme, cannot support the higher data speeds but a
spokesperson said the Murray Hill, New Jersey based networking company will incorporate the improvements
into future products.
Trends in Language
Bandwidth and data storage
increases again and again, from kilobytes to megabytes to gigabytes. Language to describe these increasing
metrics are as follows:
A kilobyte is actually 1024 bytes.
1 Gigabyte is over one billion bytes (1,000,000,000)
1 Terabyte is over one trillion bytes (1,000,000,000,000).
1 Petabyte: over 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
1 Exabyte: over 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
1 Zettabyte: over 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
1 Yottabyte: over 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
In perspective:
From Roy William's website at CalTech's Center for Advanced Computing Research
|
1 Megabyte: One small novel OR one 3.5 inch floppy disk |
| 5 Megabytes: The complete works of Shakespeare OR 30 seconds of TV-quality video |
| 1 Gigabyte: A pickup truck filled with paper OR A symphony in high-fidelity sound OR A movie at TV quality |
| 2 Gigabytes: 20 meters of shelved books OR A stack of 9-track tapes |
|
20 Gigabytes: A good collection of the works of Beethoven |
| 1 Terabyte: All the X-ray films in a large technological hospital OR 50,000 trees made into paper and printed |
| 2 Terabytes: An academic research library |
| 10 Terabytes: The printed collection of the US Library of Congress |
| 1 Petabyte: 3 years of Earth Observing System satellite data (2001) |
| 2 Petabytes: All US academic research libraries |
| 200 Petabytes: All printed material |
| 5 Exabytes: All words ever spoken by human beings. |
- The Computer Museum History Center
Website
Established in 1996, Preserves and presents the artifacts and stories of the Information Age. It is home
to
one of the largest collections of computing artifacts in the world, a collection comprising over 3,000
artifacts, 2,000 films and videotapes, 5,000 historical photographs, 2,000 linear feet of books and other
cataloged documentation, and gigabytes of software.
The Distributed Knowledge Systems (DKS) project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New
Mexico Johan Bollen, Heylighen's former student built a Web server called the Principia Cybernetica
Web
that can continually rebuild the links between its pages to adapt them to users' needs. On the
Principia
Cybernetica Web, algorithms will reinforce popular links by displaying them prominently on the page, while
rarely used links will diminish and die. It's the first step on the road to the global brain. The Principia Cybernetica Web will
request
feedback on whether a particular Web page is interesting or relevant to its users, and asking advice on
the
relative merits of different pages.
Smart cookies identifies users and keeps records of each user's routes through the site. "transivity" When a user moves from A to B and then to C, it will infer that C is probably of some relevance to A, and create a direct link between them.
The Turing Test, Researchers ask human testers to guess if they are communicating with a machine
or
a person. If the tester can't tell the difference, the machine is deemed intelligent.
Norman
Johnson who leads the Symbiotic Intelligence Project at Los Alamos says we already rely on the vast and
incomprehensible mechanism that is society. Ask an ant how it finds food, and it won't be able to tell
you. Ask most people how their television works and they are unlikely to give you more than the basics. We
trust most organisations to deliver the things we want without understanding exactly how they do it, and
we
will be able to trust an intelligent Web in exactly the same way.
Johnson says: "We are finding successful Turing tests within a certain situation," "Take it
out of that situation and it fails miserably, but within the right context you can't tell the
difference." "Humans can act intelligently within many contexts," "But if you put all
those abilities into one person they probably wouldn't be able to function." "That's why
we have society: to mesh those intelligences together, creating a powerful sum." "Our premise is
that systems can be much more intelligent than individuals" "You can have a very diverse group
solving problems much better than an expert: that's why we have society and social
insects."
On average, uninformed individuals take 34 steps to escape the maze; the second, informed, generation
takes
an average of only 12. As the number of individuals in the collective increases, the solution gets better
and better. A worldwide network of people using interconnected computers should open up a kind of
"collective memory" to add on to our individual brain power. Eventually there will be little
distinction between people, computers and wires--everything combines to create one vast symbiotic
intelligence.