MishMash

The Museum of Unworkable Devices

Donald Simanek has put together a Museum of Unworkable Devices, describing an astonishing number of attempts to create a perpetual motion machine. He even points out that many patents have been granted for pertpetual motion machines, right up to 1979 in the USA. The latest UK patent listed is 1860, but since the list was compiled in 1861 this is no grounds for jublilation.

Birdsong

I’ve just finished reading Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong
— the first novel I’ve read in a good long while (despite having
about 200 unread novels sitting on my shelves). I managed to resist
the temptation to just sit and read until it was finished, which is
what I often do when I get into a book, but it is a compelling read
nonetheless.

Faulks manages to evoke a feeling of the horror of the trenches, and of how far humans can pushed, which it is tempting to describe as real, although to do so would obviously be absurd. Any book which really achieved this would surely not sell very well.

BBC Bristol web site features CLAN

The BBC’s Bristol web site has an article
about the CLAN community
wireless project written by the CLAN’s Ed Mitchell.

Clay Shirky: Permanet, Nearlynet, and Wireless Data

OK, I’ve read it now. The line of argument sounds to me rather similar to those made by advocates of eXtreme Programming about the cost of change. Up front design, they say, doesn’t pay, because the cost of getting it wrong is high, and you just don’t know what is needed. Do as little as possible, get it into the customer’s hands, and see what they think. Iterate.

In a similar way, Shirky is advocating the progressive improvement and interconnection of “nearlynets” (ugh), ever evolving towards “permanet”.

Yet another instance of the design-vs-evolution debate?

Alvin Toffler

I just followed a Slashdot link to a new Clay Shirky article, and was distracted (to the extent that I still haven’t read the article) by the Alvin Toffler quote at the top of the page:

“The future always comes too fast and in the wrong order.”

A quick google makes it clear that I need to add this guy to my reading list (I’ll get there sometime in the 2050s, perhaps). One brief biography says:

In Powershift, the final book of the trilogy which begins with Future Shock and The Third Wave, the Tofflers focuses on the power struggles to come — in business, in politics, and in global affairs — as a new “system of wealth creation” clashes with today’s vested power blocs. In its central thesis, the Tofflers propose that power is shifting from its traditional basis in violence and wealth toward a new dependence on knowledge, and especially “knowledge about knowledge.” This shift in the nature of power, the Tofflers suggest, is about to touch off tremendous upheavals in existing power relationships as individuals, companies and countries scramble for control of the new knowledge resources.

This has some resonance with discussions mentioned previously (but still not summarised) regarding endostructure and exostructure. Another set of connections made.

• The oft-mentioned “knowledge economy”.
• The tendency for those with too much invested in the old way to
  try to use “violence and wealth” to block those who have learned to
  harness knowledge, for example by trying to enforce silly patents,
  allowing profit without innovation.
• The importance to the powers that be of the six
  lessons taught in schools.
• Knowledge-about-knowledge (and learning about learning) as the
  ultimate transferrable skill (and the opposite of those six
  lessons).
• My alarm at the notion of exporting “encapsulated knowledge” to
  “consumers of knowledge” in the developing world, which is surely an
  even more insidiously dependence reinforcing activity than the export
  of material goods.

Register: Sony and Fujitsu have humanoid robots on sale

The Register has
articles on humanoid robots from Sony and
Fujitsu. About
the Fujitsu they
say, “We’re not entirely sure what buyers will do with the thing.”

Economist: Hotspots and fries

Ed Mitchell points out an
article
in the Economist about
McDonald’s providing an hour of free WiFi access with every meal at a
handful of restaurants. Ed comments:

Although I get the idea of big corporates using their geographic spread to develop another revenue stream, there is something about 802.11 access that fits in more with coffee shops more than babylon burger bars. Or maybe that’s just me. *sigh*

No it’s not just you, Ed. My first response was that, since the only time I would eat from/at McDonalds (or similar) is when I’m really in a hurry, unless its reading my email that I’m really in a hurry to do, I wouldn’t be too taken by this. OTOH, if I did need to check my email (and had an appropriate device with me) then I might be tempted to buy a meal because they offer the wifi connection. So maybe it does make sense.

Which makes me think … it hadn’t occurred to me before to wonder what impact the spread of wireless access will have on internet cafes, especially when handheld progress moves from the same-huge-price, twice-the-features model to the getting-progressively-cheaper model, which has to happen eventually. If you can get email/web access from your phone/pda/laptop more or less anywhere, what purpose does an internet cafe have?

Then there’s wifi access in pubs. Pubs encouraging people to use laptops is likely to encourage me to go elsewhere. I generally go to pubs to socialise not to work. I find that the alcohol inhibits my productivity apart from anything else. Lots of people “hot-desking” round about doesn’t lend itself to an atmosphere of social relaxation.

Which leaves coffee shops, and I guess they just have to work out whether people using wireless internet access buy more or less coffee. Round the University the coffee shops are often rammed, and providing facilities which encourage people to spend more time over the coffees they buy probably doesn’t make great business sense. I suppose they could turn it off at peak times.

Of course the distinction between cafes and pubs is a very British thing, so on mainland Europe the analysis might look different. It is also based on the assumption that the only (or main) application of WiFi connectivity will be to sit and browse the web or read and write email — in short to do what we do when connected to wired networks, but in more places. There’s a chicken and egg problem of needing to get enough hot spots (or, better, hot regions) out there before the new applications start to emerge.

Update: Fixed up some formatting problems.

BON Web Site

Kim Waldén has set up a web site about
the BON method, as supported by EiffelStudio and
used in my
thesis.

THES: Protecting free networks from telecomms firms

The Times Higher Education Supplement has a story [subscription required] about “picopeering”, a legal framework for the sustainable development of free networks, designed to prevent predatory moves by telecommunications carriers and equipment producers.

The picopeering agreement is very small, and intended it seems as a framework or base-level agreement. I assume that most networks would publish such an agreement as a unilateral declaration, rather than trying to establish peering agreements with individual networks. There is a picopeer mailing list, and it is noteworthy that there has been a recent discussion of WIANA. This reflects my own alarm at the centralised control model of wiana. Community networks are inherently distributed, and in the long run it is surely essential to make sure that the management and maintenance an interconnected “network of community networks” (an internet) does not require a central authority which could hinder development. Such hindrance may come from the desire to protect profits (just as the current telecomms industry refuses to move with the times and instead protects its profits through legal, political, and monopolistic/cartel methods) but it might just as well be unintentional, purely the result of inertia.

One set of comments on a draft of the agreement raises some very important issues for free (libre) networking, in particular the need to establish critical mass such that the telecomms companies who provide “backhaul” (connection to the Internet backbone) take us seriously. This needs to happen as soon as possible, before the telecomms companies manage to further entrench their legal and monopoly-based immunity to competition and the provision of any real value to customers.

The organisation wire.less.dk appears to be a company but has a strong interest in ICT for development, and is doing work on building autonomous wireless network nodes for deployment in “adverse” environments, and are running projects in Ghana, Zanzibar, Peru, and Nicaragua.

They are also involved with Informal, a UK based “research and implementation group for collaborative research with a focus on social development and technology”, again with an interest in ICT for development. Informal, with Amazonia.org have a project running looking at approaches to getting wireless antennae above the rainforest canopy.

Amazonia.org is an organisation that is involved with biodiversity research and sustainable development in the Amazonia rainforest. A key part of this work is the ability to collect and distribute data around the region of the rainforest where the project operates.

Wireless networking is the prefered method of building this infrastructure due to low cost and high performance. However there are physical problems with installing radio networks in the rainforest, mainly caused by the height of the canopy which is 70m or more. It is not practical to build 70m masts so a strategy for getting line of site antennas above the canopy is required.

Register: Digital document preservation conference

The Public Records Office is
running a conference on
digital preservation [The
Register].

Will they look at the commercial/political issues of documents being stored in deliberately obfuscated formats with Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) controls, thus frustrating any attempt at preservation in the interests of short term profit?

If documents in digital form are stored in open standard formats, then it is likely that the necessary viewing or conversion software will be available for much longer than for an obsolete proprietary format. DRM provides potentially more insidious capabilities for document suppliers to time-limit the viewability of documents.

In short, the issue of data integrity — tape or disk reliability — is technical, but the issue of ensuring that the reliably stored documents remain readable is largely political.